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I'm not going to try to reconcile these messages, because I don't think it's possible, and anyway it would be a a waste of effort.
Rather, I'm going to treat them both - and other things I'll discuss as well - as examples of the fundamental incoherence, narcissism and superficiality of thinking and expression which typifies today's Professional and Managerial Caste, (PMC) including,
Let's deal with that first, and then we'll get
back to Ukraine and some other places.
So King Abdullah II of Jordan's legitimacy, like that of his forty ancestors, is based on being the direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed and of course Islam has provided the ideology.
In more recent times, as Natural Rulers went increasingly out of fashion, ideology as properly understood replaced divine or customary sanction, not just as a sign of legitimacy, but as a common source of values, a point of reference and a guide to behavior for the ruling class as a whole.
Obvious examples include,
Of course, such ideologies are never entirely dominant, and rarely unchallenged.
They do not preclude factional disputes and even
outright conflict, and many of them eventually crumble and die. But
they do at least provide a reasonably coherent set of doctrines, and
a context for arguments about policy.
That's no longer the case, but neither has there been a blanket replacement with an organized ideology of extreme social and economic liberalism, even though that's part of it.
Rather, the current western ruling class, like the Party in 1984, has no ideology in the traditional sense.
Today's ruling class thinks of itself less as Ruling than as Managing, complete with its yellowing MBA textbooks.
Party leaders may publicly talk about "our values" in an attempt to justify their actions, but these pronouncements seldom go beyond banalities, and rarely reflect the traditions and ideologies of any particular party or movement.
Indeed, most parties of the Notional Left, for
example, are embarrassed about their past beliefs and actions, and
try to distance themselves from them as far as possible.
These rules and customs do not have to be coherent, but their enforcement is nonetheless ruthless and the penalty for deviation is expulsion:
Indeed, because the PMC has drifted so far away from the lives and concerns of ordinary people, all that matters is applause and Likes from within the community itself.
Politics has become aesthetics...:
They are not intended to be taken seriously.
Such a mental framework does not, and cannot, produce any consistency, but since it is essentially an internally-created framework, not depending at all on the outside world, this doesn't matter.
The result (as in the opening example) is not even Orwellian doublethink:
This depressing state of affairs has its origin in two processes.
One is the increasingly homogeneous nature of the current ruling class:
This is pretty much unprecedented in multi-party political systems, or even in oligarchies.
In nineteenth century Europe, for example, not only was politics split into competing class-based factions which could come into actual conflict, organized religion was still an actor, and there were bitter disputes about trade policy, the value or otherwise of colonies, social legislation, education, election suffrage and almost everything else you can think of.
These conflicts resulted very directly from the different backgrounds of the main actors:
...forming and breaking alliances of convenience depending on the subject.
The expansion of the franchise brought about new political parties, and parliamentarians with many different backgrounds. And the mass media of the time - essentially print - came in all shapes and sizes, and many of those who wrote for it were bright school-leavers who had learned what they knew by experience and hard work.
Even foreign correspondents had often lived in their region for many years. What we now think of as the All-Purpose Pundit Class scarcely existed.
Experts tended to be actual experts:
In turn, this galloping homogeneity was itself the product of changing educational patterns.
It's common to describe the expansion of university education from the 1980s as an increase in opportunity, but in reality it was often the opposite.
But numbers were important, and quite quickly these educational changes produced a significant narrowing in the origins of the political class and the PMC itself.
Those who had been to lesser universities aspired to nothing more than to ape those who had been to greater ones.
They socialized, intermarried and worked with and for each other, and shared the same vaguely-articulated sets of values and objectives, happily ignorant for the most part of how the world actually worked.
Their career prospects, social lives and even
potential romantic relationships accordingly depended on obedience
to complex and unwritten codes established by their immediate
predecessors.
It was too fragmented to have developed a guiding ideology, and it absorbed, rather than studied, a series of often-unrelated ideological commandments to which formal obeisance was necessary if you wanted to get on in life.
But unlike the stern religious and political
ideologies of the past, little of the pseudo-ideology of the PMC has
ever been synthesized and taught. Indeed, since it really amounts to
nothing much more than a kind of vague economic and social
Liberalism with special-interest interruptions, it really can't be.
(Liberalism was pretty incoherent itself at the best of times, after
all.)
And the traditional "countervailing powers" that in Liberal theory are supposed to counterbalance those in power just turn out to be more of the same people...!
(Standards in journalism have fallen precipitately in time with the growth of professionalizing Journalism Schools. It would be interesting know what the connection is, since there clearly is one.)
So if we could send a drone to spy on a PMC dinner party in a fashionable area of a major western city, we would see,
...all mixed together, all repeating the same things to each other.
A vision of hell in some respects...
It's a kind of nomenklatura, as practiced in the old Soviet Union, and within China today.
The key point is that this new class crosses and obscures the traditional separation of powers and functions of democratic politics.
Thus,
In turn, this results partly from the breakdown of traditional barriers between public service and private accumulation, and partly from the growth of PMC families, where Christmas lunch may put a judge, a Minister, a journalist, a civil rights lawyer, a wealthy banker and an international consultant next to each other, all related by kinship or marriage.
And the banker may once have been a Minister, the consultant may once have been a civil servant, the judge may have political ambitions.
(If you read the estimable Naked Capitalism site, you'll be familiar with the quite terrifying portraits of incestuous power and influence in Britain contributed by the supernaturally well-connected Colonel Smithers.)
This is why it's naive to talk about the media or think tanks being "instructed" to say this or that, about Ukraine, for example.
That's the way such people think anyway:
In many ways it's not a surprise.
The depoliticization of politics, which I've discussed many times, results in western political systems increasingly resembling those in, say, parts of West Africa, where politics is simply about access to predatory opportunities for power and enrichment, making use of ethnic power-blocs as ammunition.
A new President will replace not just judges and chiefs of the security forces, but the Director of the national TV and radio, and the head of the National Bank.
Ironically, the West is in many respects in advance of these African countries:
One major difference between the western PMC today and elites in the past is that, whereas in the past the ruling class tried above all to retain its dominance and resist change,
Now one of the reasons for this is the professional and financial interests of the PMC - if it's not broke, there's no money to be made in fixing it, or arguing about it in law courts, or writing scathing commentaries on it - but much of it also is to be found in the influence of the soggy version of social and economic Liberalism which occupies the space in the PMC mentality where you would normally expect to find an ideology.
This is really no more than an obsession with ever more personal freedom for those with the power and money to exercise it, and ever more coercion of those who oppose this ideology.
(The paradox that Liberalism requires a massive
coercive apparatus to enforce its ideology of freedom is one that
has been much noticed over recent generations.)
Essentially, the PMC consists of many uncomfortably coexisting factions whose collective interest is safeguarded by each accepting the objectives and priorities of the others, even at the risk of the kind of incoherence described above.
Thus, when one part of the PMC succeeds in forcing through some "change," then other parts, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, unthinkingly rally behind it.
An example would be homosexual marriage:
Much of the PMC is at best indifferent to the idea, but as something which is Recent and thus designated "modern," it has to be supported.
Conversely, anything not coded as "modern," especially if coded as "traditional," is automatically suspect and negative. In principle, culture not of the present ideological persuasion, religion, patriotism and outdated social structures are all bad, or at least doubtful.
Of course, whether some idea or practice is Recent is not a very good heuristic for deciding whether it's acceptable, but if that's the only heuristic you have (and it's all Liberalism has ever had) it's the one you are stuck with.
On the other hand, we're going to that performance of The Magic Flute, we are interested in Zen Buddhism, we cheer for our national football team and we have a retreat in the country where things are less stressful.
Do we contradict ourselves? Very well then, we
contradict ourselves. We contain multitudes and We are in control.
In its most organized form, this idea is called -
or was called anyway - Modernization Theory, and a vulgarized
version of it underpins the PMC's incoherent approach to the outside
world, including the crisis in Ukraine, as well as aspects of
domestic policy.
Conceived at both the micro-level of family and workplace, and at the macro level of societies and governments, and drawing on the insights of figures such as Marx, Durkheim and Weber, it saw societies evolving steadily towards a "modern" situation of liberal democracy, personal freedom and economic prosperity.
Although battered by experience, the theory held on, to be re-popularized, albeit in caricatured form, by Francis Fukuyama, that End of History man.
And if academic acceptance of the theory has long
since evaporated, at least in its crude form, it remains a powerful
influence on thinking in PMC circles, and underlies a great deal of
current western policy.
Those who did not were fighting against the tide of history, and even acting against the interests of their people and their country.
So in the 1960s every major western government set up a Development Ministry, and sent people out to Develop others. Development was believed to be inevitable, and necessarily in the direction already taken by the West, but it could still be given a helping hand.
There was no reason, for example, why Africa could not make the leap from a mainly agricultural society to a western-style industrialized one in a couple of generations, and the documents of the time painted a dazzling picture of the Africa of 2020 as scarcely distinguishable from Europe.
African nations were encouraged to move to producing cash crops for export, to generate funds for rapid industrialization.
At the same time, other rapid developments and urbanization were expected to lead to the rise of a western-style middle class and Liberal parliamentary democracy.
It should be added that the first generation of
African independence leaders were entirely committed to
Modernization Theory, and they set out to create states and
societies along western (and sometimes Soviet) models at top speed.
The reality is that Modernization Theory was hopelessly flawed as a concept, and failed repeatedly in execution. Yet like a lot of failed ideas, it led a ghost existence for some decades afterwards, and the corpse received a brief electroshock after the end of the Cold War.
In academia, of course, bad ideas never entirely die:
There was too much intellectual and political capital invested in Modernization Theory for it to be allowed to fade quietly away, and in any event, the West, in all its manifestations, was not prepared to accept that there were other routes to creating "modern" societies.
Moreover, as good Liberals, western thinkers prized correct ideas and beliefs above all:
The success of China in lifting its people out of poverty, for example, should never have happened according to Modernization Theory, or at least not in the way it did.
I've written at some length about Aid and Development issues elsewhere, and I won't repeat that here.
I just want to emphasize the degree to which not only the Aid agencies, but the westernized lobbies that access them, take a banalized form of Modernization Theory as their basic assumption.
This orientation comes from the very top, as recipient governments, in-between crowd-pleasing speeches about neo-imperialism, strive to imitate western governments in every way.
(The African Union, for example, is essentially
just a faint carbon copy of the EU, without the resources or the
capacity to do a similar job.)
It can be argued that this started with the Spanish and Portuguese missionaries in Latin America, but it received its real impetus from the rise of Liberalism, with its normative and progressive ideas, in the nineteenth century.
Once the idea that things could change and improve began to be accepted, then the obvious corollary was a duty to spread these potential benefits more widely to the less fortunate.
Unlike traditional Empires such as the Ottomans, which were by design static, and indeed violently repressed attempts at change, the short-lived European Empires in Africa and the Middle East were powerful agents of change, both deliberately and incidentally.
Deliberately, because the British and French abolished slavery and polygamy, established written legal codes and formal justice systems and introduced education and literacy. Incidentally, because western political and social ideas began to spread by osmosis, through translations of western books, diffusion of western films, and the effects of locals being educated in Europe or by Europeans.
Especially in the Middle East this produced profound social changes, in the social status of women, for example, as well as political developments (the Iraqi Communist Party was founded as early as 1934.)
By the time of the flowering of Modernization Theory, independent Arab nations were largely run by secular, progressive technocrats, religion was a fading force, modern political parties were being established, and Syria, for example, would clearly quite quickly come to resemble France.
Africa lagged a little, but was busy industrializing and developing modern state structures.
Of course these very developments contained the
seeds of their own destruction, but that wasn't appreciated at the
time, and its consequences still aren't really taken into account
today.
Urbanization, it was believed, would automatically produce a professional middle class which in turn would demand a modern and effective state and would form modern western-style political parties, free of religious or ethnic affiliation. Whilst this could happen, and did to a degree in countries like Syria and Lebanon, it soon turned out not to be automatic, or even probable.
The theory skipped over the generations, and sometimes centuries, of social and economic conflict in the West to replace extractive economies with productive ones, and the power of the aristocracy with the power of the middle class.
In too many countries, politics became - and often remains - just a struggle to attach oneself to an income stream, as was the case in the Europe of the eighteenth century.
And countries that did become aggressively modern - Singapore and South Korea come to mind - did so in their own way and with their own resources, ignoring Modernization Theory entirely.
More recently, the success of China has been an
inspiration to all those countries seeking a non-ideological route
to a better society, rather than just "modernization" in the banal
western sense.
This would have been manageable if western thinking had not been so teleological and normative.
But because we were right it followed that anyone who agreed with us was also right, and looking towards the future, and that their opponents were objectively wrong and could be disregarded or even opposed by the West. In many parts of the world, it soon became recognized that the way to power was to say the correct things to western governments and funders.
In turn, the West would recognize you as the voice of the future, and the champion of the (assumed) aspirations of the people to societies which were "modern" and western.
Because the process of Modernization was considered inevitable as well as desirable, entire categories of society, traditional social and government systems, traditional legal codes, religion, traditional social structures and much else could simply be disregarded, since they were clearly relics of the past.
This produced in many countries a westernized elite essentially dependent on foreign funding and foreign support for its survival. Yet that elite, often wealthy and privileged, frequently had little support in society as a whole, and was often actively resented.
So with monotonous regularity, the West has been "surprised" by some completely unexpected election result, and "reactionaries" and "extremists" have won elections, in spite of the assurances give by the "pro-western," English-speaking leaders always being invited to Embassies.
(Of course, if the wrong side won there must be a
conspiracy somewhere.)
The latter point is something that is completely impossible for the fragmented and facile PMC ideology to even imagine, but it's fundamental nonetheless.
The first time the West was slapped round the face with the wet fish of reality on this subject was the Iranian Revolution and the installation of the Islamic Republic in 1979.
By chance, I was looking at some studies of this episode recently, and it's fair to say that few subjects have both been as much studied as the western failure to anticipate Khomeini's regime, and yet few episodes had so little subsequent influence on western understanding and behavior.
Political Islam - whose origins, ironically can be traced to opposition to the liberalizing and modernizing influence of Britain and France in the Egypt of the 1920s - was pretty much unknown at the time.
This is not surprising, because in short, Political Islam says there is no need for "modernization," and indeed it's sinful, because everything you might need to run a society is in the Koran and the Hadiths.
This creates enormous problems for the PMC ideology.
On the one hand, this is an explicit assault on every last component of their diffuse world-view, yet on the other hand many of its exponents and practitioners come from countries that were once, if briefly, western possessions, and portray themselves, or can be portrayed, as somehow involved in an "anti-western" struggle.
The PMC deals with this contradiction, as with all others, by pretending it doesn't exist. Violent acts by Islamists are neatly wrapped up as "tragedies," and the real issue is not the dead but their potential "exploitation" by "the extreme Right."
Meanwhile, it's cool for some to parade around dressed as Hamas fighters, and to think that anyone launching missiles at American ships must have something to recommend them, surely?
And so the ironic result is that the enemies that
the West identifies and tries to overthrow are actually secular
regimes, such as those in Iraq, Syria and Libya, where there can be
no suspicion of targeting Islam.
Iraq rapidly coming to resemble the US itself, turned to pure tragedy with a subsequent civil war that was sickeningly violent even by US standards.
Often, foreigners were involved too. On one occasion, I arrived in Afghanistan just after the slaughter of a NGO team working on projects for women who had been ambushed and killed, together with their escort of ex-Gurkhas provided by a Private Military Company (hiss! boo!).
Quite what the women NGOists had proposed to do
for Afghan women that made them worthy of death I never discovered,
but in reality it could have been almost anything.
In 1998, the US Ambassador in Nairobi made herself unpopular with the State Department for asking for more security from suspected Al-Qaida attacks. Nothing was done, her fears were dismissed as exaggerated, and an attack beyond AQ's capabilities.
About 220 people died in a huge truck-bomb explosion, nearly all Kenyans, passers-by or workers in adjacent buildings. And of course the PMC refused point-blank to take reports of attacks being planned in Europe by the Islamic State, and even after the slaughter it tried to bury the incidents along with the victims.
After all, what's important is Likes, and what looks good. It mostly wasn't Our Children who died, and the important thing is to display to each other how virtuous and tolerant we all are.
Particularly sad was the response of the parent
of a victim of the 2015 massacres in Paris, who wrote a book
entitled You Will Not Have My Hatred. Very laudable, and a very pure
expression of western moral superiority. But the attackers don't
want your hate, they just want you dead.
We should be talking, they say, to find out what these people want.
That's easy:
Just ask the people of their own countries, who have been the principal victims.
For all that de-radicalization might work in certain contexts, these organizations, increasing in number and ferocity, cannot be negotiated with, and certainly cannot be brought round to our "modern" way of thinking.
Indeed, by a bitter irony, interviews with many young Europeans who left to fight in Syria show that it was precisely the "modern" society in which they lived that had driven them to terminal despair, and the desire to find a cause for which they could fight, and perhaps die.
Such organizations can only be destroyed, for all
that such ideas make the PMC spit out their Chai Tea Lattes with
indignation.
These causes include huge areas with low population density, ethnic divisions, widespread poverty and insecurity, weak and corrupt governments and ineffective security forces, to name just the first that come to mind.
OK, I said, I'll give you any reasonable amount of money.
Of course, the problems are insoluble, as any rational person would concede, and the reference to them is just the PMCs way of not doing anything, and continuing to make performative gestures to show how virtuous they are.
Meanwhile, people are dying.,,!
Of course, there are "extremists" and "nationalists" and "human rights violators" who must be removed from power first, but once,
...have been disposed of, all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.
Modernization Theory will triumph, and all of these states will be on their way to looking Just Like Us.
And when a state ostentatiously turns its back on Modernization Theory and decides to make its own way, and what is worse succeeds, then the hatred of the PMC knows no bounds.
Because the Russians are white, and few are Muslim, they are acceptable targets, and the PMC can indulge itself with an orgy of hatred, bigotry and prejudice in a way that it would be difficult to do against most other targets.
But the real target of all this hatred is not the Russians, who seem to be taking little notice.
The fact that much of this communication is actually by social media is almost too caricatural to be true.
But as far as I can see the Russians aren't having any of that.
They are not interested in negotiations at this stage, and from their point of view they are right not to be. This is not a problem with a negotiated solution, but one which can only be settled by a military victory.
When that happens, the PMC's corporate head will
explode...
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