Liberal Elite Still Luring Us Towards the Abyss
January 31, 2019
We have so little time, but still the old guard wants to block any possible
path to salvation, writes Jonathan Cook.
By JonathanCook
Jonathan-Cook.net
A group of 30 respected intellectuals, writers and historians has published
a manifesto bewailing the imminent collapse of Europe and its supposed
Enlightenment values of liberalism and rationalism. The idea of Europe, they
warn, is falling apart before our eyes, as Britain prepares for Brexit and
populist and nationalist parties look poised to make sweeping gains in
elections across the continent.
The short manifesto has been published in the liberal elites European house
journals, newspapers such as the Guardian. We must now fight for the idea
of Europe or perish beneath the waves of populism, their document reads.
Failure means resentment, hatred and their cortege of sad passions will
surround and submerge us.
Unless the tide can be turned, elections across the European Union will be
the most calamitous that we have ever known: victory for the wreckers;
disgrace for those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante,
Goethe, and Comenius; disdain for intelligence and culture; explosions of
xenophobia and antisemitism; disaster.
Bernard-Henri Lévy. (Wikimedia)
Bernard-Henri Lévy. (Wikimedia)
The manifesto was penned by Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher and
devotee of Alexis de Tocqueville, a theorist of classical liberalism. Its
signatories include novelists Ian McEwan, Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie;
the historian Simon Shama; and Nobel prize laureates Svetlana Alexievitch,
Herta Müller, Orhan Pamuk and Elfriede Jelinek.
Though unnamed, their European political heroes appear to be Emmanuel Macron
of France, currently trying to crush the popular, anti-austerity protests of
the Yellow Vests, and German chancellor Angela Merkel, manning the
barricades for the liberal elite against a resurgence of the nationalist
right in Germany.
Let us set aside, on this occasion, the strange irony that several of the
manifestos signatories not least Henri-Levy himself have a well-known
passion for Israel, a state that has always rejected the universal
principles ostensibly embodied in liberal ideology and that instead openly
espouses the kind of ethnic nationalism that nearly tore Europe apart in two
world wars last century.
Instead let us focus on their claim that populism and nationalism are on
the verge of slaying Europes liberal democratic tradition and the values
held dearest by this distinguished group. Their hope presumably is that
their manifesto will serve as a wake-up call before things take an
irreversible turn for the worse.
Liberalisms Collapse
Yellow Vest protests in Toulouse, France, Dec. 2, 2018. (Photo by Alain
Pitton/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Yellow Vest protests in Toulouse, France, Dec. 2, 2018. (Photo by Alain
Pitton/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In one sense, their diagnosis is correct: Europe and the liberal tradition
are coming apart at the seams. But not because, as they strongly imply,
European politicians are pandering to the basest instincts of a mindless
rabble the ordinary people they have so little faith in. Rather, it is
because a long experiment in liberalism has finally run its course.
Liberalism has patently failed and failed catastrophically.
These intellectuals are standing, like the rest of us, on a precipice from
which we are about to jump or topple. But the abyss has not opened up, as
they suppose, because liberalism is being rejected. Rather, the abyss is the
inevitable outcome of this shrinking elites continuing promotion against
all rational evidence of liberalism as a solution to our current
predicament. It is the continuing transformation of a deeply flawed ideology
into a religion. It is idol worship of a value system hellbent on destroying
us.
Liberalism, like most ideologies, has an upside. Its respect for the
individual and his freedoms, its interest in nurturing human creativity, and
its promotion of universal values and human rights over tribal attachment
have had some positive consequences.
But liberal ideology has been very effective at hiding its dark side or
more accurately, at persuading us that this dark side is the consequence of
liberalisms abandonment rather than inherent to the liberals political
project.
The loss of traditional social bonds tribal, sectarian, geographic has
left people today more lonely, more isolated than was true of any previous
human society. We may pay lip service to universal values, but in our
atomized communities, we feel adrift, abandoned and angry.
Humanitarian Resource Grabs
The liberals professed concern for others welfare and their rights has, in
reality, provided cynical cover for a series of ever-more transparent
resource grabs. The parading of liberalisms humanitarian credentials has
entitled our elites to leave a trail of carnage and wreckage in their wake
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and soon, it seems, in Venezuela. We have
killed with our kindness and then stolen our victims inheritance.
Unfettered individual creativity may have fostered some great if
fetishized art, as well as rapid mechanical and technological
developments. But it has also encouraged unbridled competition in every
sphere of life, whether beneficial to humankind or not, and however wasteful
of resources.
(Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament on Flickr)
(Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament via Flickr)
At its worst, it has unleashed quite literally an arms race, one that
because of a mix of our unconstrained creativity, our godlessness and the
economic logic of the military-industrial complex culminated in the
development of nuclear weapons. We have now devised the most complete and
horrific ways imaginable to kill each other. We can commit genocide on a
global scale.
Meanwhile, the absolute prioritizing of the individual has sanctioned a
pathological self-absorption, a selfishness that has provided fertile ground
not only for capitalism, materialism and consumerism but for the fusing of
all of them into a turbo-charged neoliberalism. That has entitled a tiny
elite to amass and squirrel away most of the planets wealth out of reach of
the rest of humanity.
Worst of all, our rampant creativity, our self-regard and our
competitiveness have blinded us to all things bigger and smaller than
ourselves. We lack an emotional and spiritual connection to our planet, to
other animals, to future generations, to the chaotic harmony of our
universe. What we cannot understand or control, we ignore or mock.
And so, the liberal impulse has driven us to the brink of extinguishing our
species and possibly all life on our planet. Our drive to asset-strip, to
hoard resources for personal gain, to plunder natures riches without
respect to the consequences is so overwhelming, so compulsive that the
planet will have to find a way to rebalance itself. And if we carry on, that
new balance what we limply term climate change will necessitate that
we are stripped from the planet.
Dangerous Arrogance
One can plausibly argue that humans have been on this suicidal path for some
time. Competition, creativity, selfishness predate liberalism, after all.
But liberalism removed the last restraints, it crushed any opposing
sentiment as irrational, as uncivilized, as primitive.
Texas National Guard soldiers in Houston, Aug. 27, 2017, to aid residents
affected by Hurricane Harvey. (Texas Army National Guard photo)
Texas National Guard soldiers in Houston, Aug. 27, 2017, to aid residents
affected by Hurricane Harvey. (Texas Army National Guard photo)
Liberalism isnt the cause of our predicament. It is the nadir of a
dangerous arrogance we as a species have been indulging for too long, where
the individuals good trumps any collective good, defined in the widest
possible sense.
The liberal reveres his small, partial field of knowledge and expertise,
eclipsing ancient and future wisdoms, those rooted in natural cycles, the
seasons and a wonder at the ineffable and unknowable. The liberals
relentless and exclusive focus is on progress, growth, accumulation.
What is needed to save us is radical change. Not tinkering, not reform, but
an entirely new vision that removes the individual and his personal
gratification from the center of our social organization.
This is impossible to contemplate for the elites who think more liberalism,
not less, is the solution. Anyone departing from their prescriptions, anyone
who aspires to be more than a technocrat correcting minor defects in the
status quo, is presented as a menace. Despite the modesty of their
proposals, Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. and Bernie Sanders in the U.S. have
been reviled by a media, political and intellectual elite heavily invested
in blindly pursuing the path to self-destruction.
Status-quo Cheerleaders
As a result, we now have three clear political trends.
The first is the status-quo cheerleaders like the European writers of
liberalisms latest last? manifesto. With every utterance they prove how
irrelevant they have become, how incapable they are of supplying answers to
the question of where we must head next. They adamantly refuse both to look
inwards to see where liberalism went wrong and to look outwards to consider
how we might extricate ourselves.
Irresponsibly, these guardians of the status quo lump together the second
and third trends in the futile hope of preserving their grip on power. Both
trends are derided indiscriminately as populism, as the politics of envy,
the politics of the mob. These two fundamentally opposed, alternative trends
are treated as indistinguishable.
This will not save liberalism, but it will assist in promoting the much
worse of the two alternatives.
(Chris Le Boutillier via Pixaby)
(Chris Le Boutillier via Pixaby)
Those among the elites who understand that liberalism has had its day are
exploiting the old ideology of grab-it-for-yourself capitalism while
deflecting attention from their greed and the maintenance of their privilege
by sowing discord and insinuating dark threats.
The criticisms of the liberal elite made by the ethnic nationalists sound
persuasive because they are rooted in truths about liberalisms failure. But
as critics, they are disingenuous. They have no solutions apart from their
own personal advancement in the existing, failed, self-sabotaging system.
The new authoritarians are reverting to old, trusted models of xenophobic
nationalism, scapegoating others to shore up their own power. They are
ditching the ostentatious, conscience-salving sensitivities of the liberal
so that they can continue plundering with heady abandon. If the ship is
going down, then they will be gorging on the buffet till the waters reach
the dining-hall ceiling.
Where Hope Can Reside
The third trend is the only place where hope can reside. This trend what I
have previously ascribed to a group I call the dissenters understands
that radical new thinking is required. But given that this group is being
actively crushed by the old liberal elite and the new authoritarians, it has
little public and political space to explore its ideas, to experiment, to
collaborate, as it urgently needs to.
Social media provides a potentially vital platform to begin critiquing the
old, failed system, to raise awareness of what has gone wrong, to
contemplate and share radical new ideas, and to mobilize. But the liberals
and authoritarians understand this as threat to their own privilege and,
under a confected hysteria about fake news, are rapidly working to snuff
out even this small space.
We have so little time, but still the old guard wants to block any possible
path to salvation even as seas filled with plastic start to rise, as
insect populations disappear across the globe, and as the planet prepares to
cough us out like a lump of infected mucus.
We must not be hoodwinked by these posturing, manifesto-spouting liberals:
the philosophers, historians and writers the public relations wing of
our suicidal status quo. They did not warn us of the beast lying cradled in
our midst. They failed to see the danger looming, and their narcissism
blinds them still.
We should have no use for the guardians of the old, those who held our
hands, who shone a light along a path that has led to the brink of our own
extinction. We need to discard them, to close our ears to their siren song.
There are small voices struggling to be heard above the roar of the dying
liberal elites and the trumpeting of the new authoritarians. They need to be
listened to, to be helped to share and collaborate, to offer us their
visions of a different world. One where the individual is no longer king.
Where we learn some modesty and humility and how to love in our infinitely
small corner of the universe.
Jonathan Cook is a freelance journalist based in Nazareth. He blogs at
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/.
