THE THIRTEENTH HOUR

In the Unquiet Grave Cyril Connolly wrote "...we are in fact within sight of achieving a world neurosis, a world in which atrophy of the instincts, abuse of the intellect and perversion of the heart will obliterate our knowledge of the purpose of life: humanity will choke on its own bile". He decided that the decline of religious sensibility and practice had led to a sharper awareness of the faults of others without any corresponding increase in self knowledge or belief in the power of redemption. It was all pretty bleak stuff, much of it self-critical. Is his insight still relevant?

Since the Second World War, when Connolly wrote these words, the decline of belief in the sacramental and transcendental has coincided with the decline of  "rational" and secular belief systems such as Marxism and Communism. Paradoxically, these also contained their own rubric of revelation and redemption, based on class consciousness and historical determinism. Alas, worship at the altar of Marx and Mao was shown to be an even greater act of credulity than kneeling before Our Lady of Lourdes. 

Worse, the evidence of moral bankruptcy and practical oppression was everywhere, and despite the best efforts of die-hard apologists like Eric Hobsbawm and Jean Paul Sartre, most could see the writing was on the wall, long before it actually fell in Berlin. There was a short-lived attempt at its intellectual resuscitation with the Euro-Communist movement of the 'seventies, but this dumped only the language of violent revolutionary action: the "discourse" of class struggle was (unpersuasively) retained. Progressives however, were undeterred by their further failure to beguile the proletariat in whose name it was spread. Now they would simply replace it with new precepts aimed at the bourgeoisie. And as the working  industrial masses were proving to be far too indifferent about the realisation of the promised utopia, the new vector of revolution would be the education system. The curriculum would be based on Post Modernism, a juju which questioned the whole concept of human understanding, and which was cunningly disguised as an evolution of "liberal" and "liberation" thought.

In December 2021, University College London may be only the most recent academic institution to officially substitute Post Modernist alchemy and the hocus pocus of dogmas such as "Critical Race Theory" for scholarship, but the latest nonsense (UCL's "Liberating the Curriculum") has a long pedigree that stretches back more than half a century. "Wokery" and the demand of students (and staff) for "safe spaces" where their pre-conceptions and "personal truths" can be protected (and officially promulgated) is merely an offshoot of the Post Modernist guff that gripped European and especially American campuses from the early 'eighties. If progressives couldn't defeat the oppressive "structure" without the help of an obviously unwilling proletariat, they'd undermine it by subverting the language and all other means of arriving at objective truth instead. As Francis Wheen has so hilariously described, progressives became the "new demolition merchants of reality". Not even the standards of objectivity of the scientific method were safe. Luce Irigary, one of the high priestesses of Po-Mo, famously declared with a straight face that the world could only be seen through the lens of "phallo-centrism" by which Einstein's formulae (such as E=MC squared) could be observed , quite plainly, as "sexed equations". Genuine political activists, who at least made an effort to understand and empathise with real injustices rather than those the Post Modernists merely claimed to expose, were appalled. As one observed, the Po-Mo shibboleths were the some of the "least lovable fads to hit American campuses since drinking-till-you-barf".

The juggernaut was however unstoppable and given further energy in places like the UK in the 'nineties with the decision to turbo charge the growth of  tertiary education and to reframe the purpose of universities. Now theses institutions are all about the mass provision of generic attainment awards (the University of Stafford even offers a BA in Pantomime) rather than intellectual training per se. On the contrary, no longer is enlightenment the priority but rather the protection of students from anything that makes them "feel uncomfortable", and the liberal use of "trigger warnings" to highlight content likely to be "challenging". Post Modernism has fully captured the social sciences, and now the arts and humanities are in the firing line with moves to "de-colonise" the syllabus, minimise the contribution of "pale old men", re-write history and re-order the western literary canon according to an approved template. This is not just a dose of healthy revisionism or the welcome use of previously neglected sources and witness, but the wholesale upending of historiography and literature and their re-casting in an approved or "appropriate" mould. Historians have been used to this creeping barrage of foolishness for years and are, arguably, better equipped to deal with it. But it has come as a huge shock to the literary establishment, with even the venerable Sir Tom Stoppard and the likes of Rose Tremain worrying whether their imaginations are "correct" or not.

If the result of this growing culture of irrationality and censorship was no more than the "no-platforming" of public figures like Professor Jordan Peterson, the discomfort of Sir Tom, the on-line bile poured over the head of JK Rowling for daring to assert the objective truths about sex and gender or the demarche of Doctor Kathleen Stock, hounded out of Sussex University for some heretical utterance against the new canon of imbecility, it would still be deplorable. Some such as Toby Young of the Free Speech Union optimistically hope that it will all blow over as the succeeding generation rebels against the po-faced blarney of their elders.

Yet the clear and present danger is that those brought up within an education system which placed an incrementally higher value on the celebration of nonsense; promoted the belief that children were best placed to work out their own truths about the world; eliminated the elements of intelligent discrimination from the educational process, and asserted that teachers were merely facilitators rather than guides on the increasingly banal journey, are themselves now in charge of our government, official class and public institutions. Nor does it stop there - leaders in private enterprises and publicly quoted corporations increasingly bend over themselves to promote these new dogmas lest a failure to do so compromise the value of their brand or the sensibilities of their workforces. The rooting out of real injustice (as opposed to "perceived" injustice) has absolutely nothing to do with it. 

The alleviation of poverty, the improvement of access to justice, the protection of minors, the dignity of the elderly and the elimination of genuine social discrimination are no longer priorities for our public institutions. Now it is all about the assertion of micro-minority rights; the corruption of the law to eliminate "offensive" speech; the routine cancellation of democratically decided priorities by the nebula of the ECHR; the erection of impersonal yet sacred totems ("Our NHS"), and a culture of mandatory diversity. None of these are designed to promote our common humanity and solidarity but rather to emphasise imaginary differences, entrench immutable ones, bamboozle the credulous and stir up as much conflict as possible. After all, people get paid a lot of money for all those inclusivity "audits", diversity "protocols" (quotas), the monitoring of "micro-aggressions" in the college and workplace and the chasing down of "non-crime hate speech".

The Covid pandemic has provided a thorough demonstration of how the forces of irrationality have gripped the official class. In its response to the emergency, the government is "following the science", a comfy sounding rubric that has absolved it of much of the heavy practical and intellectual effort that is needed to deal with issues other than the narrowly medical ones. But the "science" that the government is following is not of the type demonstrated by say, Sir James Dyson as he painstakingly tries to improve his hoover, or of the Astronomer Royal as he considers the effects of black holes. No, the official class has placed its faith in "model-dependent realism" where hypothesis is treated as fact. Worse, in basing its response on assumptions rather than observed instances, the government appears to have cut loose from the scientific method altogether.

Is this claim preposterous ? Yet what is a rational person to make of the revelation by Professor Medley of the SAGE modelling committee that its work was used to justify policy decisions rather than the other way around? In other words, when the government decides restrictions of our liberty, it asks for a model that supports that particular policy approach. Is this why even the least- worst- case "scenarios" presented by the likes of Professor Neil Ferguson have been seen to be consistently exaggerated? What other policies can one think of that currently employ such a heavy dose of specious "reasoning"? Well, the response of the official class to climate change springs to mind, and like the response to Covid, it is going to cost a simply prodigious amount of money to "follow the science".

Naturally, anyone who questions these methodologies is branded a "denier", a heretic or someone hooked by some "conspiracy theory". But the state, and the way in which it operates, is now out of control. "Emergency" measures are enacted with minimal levels of democratic oversight or none at all. In spite of the vaccination program, we are are still ordered to "protect" the health service. Yet, in the past twelve months the NHS has added more bodies than the entire strength of the British Army. At 1.85m personnel it is beyond the abilities of even a genius to lead, and is rapidly bringing the practice of healthcare in the UK to a halt. The official class has taken extended leave on full pay and the Welsh government is now threatening those who chose or need to work away from home with £1,000 fines. The BBC has decided that its public service duty is to terrify everyone into an apoplexy of fear and neurosis. There is hardly now even a pretence of giving a measured view in all the hyperbole about the "tsunami of cases" and an NHS, still, "at breaking point". Statistics are routinely deployed in a mis-leading way  and medical experts are asked to comment on decisions that are more properly political in nature. To the average executive in the corporation, to whom the great unwashed are just like the extras in Mrs Brown's Boys rather than the rounded Leonard Basts portrayed by EM Forster, no amount of rubbish is enough. Meanwhile the core of government seems to think that its curtailment of the liberty of citizens does not apply to itself and officials and civil servants behave as if public service, for which they are richly rewarded, is somehow discretionary.

It is the thirteenth hour. A Venn diagram of the circumstances preceding the religious wars of the seventeenth century and the twilight years of the autocracy before the 1917 revolution in Russia would show an intersection that roughly corresponds to political, cultural and economic conditions today. Culturally, there is a narrow and unrepresentative elite which is determined to force citizens to accept novel (and mostly irrational) precepts as orthodoxy. Government now intrudes into every area of people's lives and we have been co-opted to serve needs of the state and the bloated official class rather than the other way around. Citizens are now merely the instruments of increasingly capricious government policy rather than beneficiaries. Yet these policies come with an increasingly heavy cost of failure. It is also a time of rapid economic and technological change from which a narrow cohort of winners have benefited egregiously but in which the state and its organs have signally failed to provide large sections of the population with either the means or  incentive to gain stakes that would ensure solidarity and a sense of shared endeavour. Covid seems not to have humbled the apparat at all; indeed it has emboldened those who argue for an even bigger role for the state. Folk have had enough.