The Sleepwalk of the West

When even the Telegraph gushes over a Marxist philosopher, you know he’s finally attained social utopia. Slavoj Zizek is everywhere, with his radical (or is it radically bemusing?) ideas. The end justifies the means; why have a messy proletarian revolution when book sales will get you there instead?

The tenet of liberalism is freedom of the individual; everyone should be free to “be themselves”. Appealing – from the individual’s viewpoint. But whether it’s necessarily a basis for living together is less clear. What if your “being yourself” prevents my “being myself”? If your cultural norms imply a curb on my cultural norms, what does liberalism offer to help resolve our conflict?

Q: Why does the Left like Communism, again? A: Because the stock market’s down. Joking apart, there’s also a selfish reason. The idea of Communism is so abstract now, so cleansed of reality, that it can be invoked at zero cost. It’s a faux-humble chat-up line with a double payoff: you get to look impeccably [...]

If you haven’t seen Avatar, it’s a half-a-billion-dollar adaptation of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, where Mr Meek gets to be Mr Hero, kill Baddies, and get Big Chief’s ethnically-optimised uber-daughter into the sack. All in his sleep. Apart from being more visually stunning than anything you’ve ever seen, it’s nothing new. Except, many [...]

Talking of Cannes festival winners – and the politics they embody – last year’s Entre les Murs (The Class) is another example of the agendas lurking in our culture, in this case French but more generally Western. The ideas behind the film are best illustrated by the perennial debate – or its paucity – over [...]

Allan Bloom traces the popular enthusiasm for criminality to the 19th century German philosophers. Culturally – according to him – the new appetite hits the mainstream with “Mack the Knife” from Brecht’s and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, in 1928 Weimar Germany. It was the first time the bourgeoisie could blithely – almost compulsively – sing [...]

Last week a friend and I chatted with two pleasant American women for about an hour, in a café. Afterwards he – an American himself – turned to me and, pointing to where one of the women had sat, asked if I realised who she was. I said no. He said: “Monica Lewinsky.” It wasn’t [...]

Witness – the autobiography of Whittaker Chambers’ – is the dramatic story of a Dostoevskian “lesser man” seeking redemption through suffering and rigorous moral integrity. It is a verbose but remarkable book, centering on his personal pendulum-swing from a tortured, austere, and passionately felt Communism – towards an equally tortured, austere, and passionately felt Christianity. [...]

Minorities get blamed for everything. They even get blamed for being themselves; for preferring their own culture. The criticism itself is made by those – claiming various degrees of indigenous status – who prefer their own culture, as perceived to have prevailed before the latter minorities threatened it. A third group has yet another preference, [...]

Imagine two people, each stood on the opposite banks of a river. Where then is the “average” of their positions? It’s midstream – the deep water. “Centrist” politics, as we know it today, treads water in such currents. So-called centrist governments are nothing of the sort. They are actually a remarkable co-existence of radically opposed [...]

Has there been a Marxist critique of dogs? Hopefully not. Any dog trainer will tell you that dogs are bourgeois wolves. Their wolf-nature remains, barely hidden below a reluctant concession to social norms, tenuously imposed by human authority. The hunter instinct, the killer bite, is still there. They chase anything that moves. Look at the [...]

Remarkable “morale images” have been published, taken by an English photographer after the war in 1918. The vast perspective-compensated tableaux required up to 30,000 newly returned US servicemen, each acting as a black – or white – dot. They are stunning, humbling photographs. And yet… isn’t there always the hint of something a little terrifying [...]

The separation of church and state sounds good to me. So does the end of all suffering, war, inequality … etcetera. Oh well. Back in reality, I’m not so optimistic. Unlike some of the atheist authors – whom otherwise I generally agree with – I don’t think a world without politically-impacting religion is worth talking [...]

Back from Morocco. Enjoyed every minute. Except … every repetition of the Islamic call to prayer. There was the sensation of a pervasive Orwellian machine, relentless propaganda blared into the minds of the people. The most effective (i.e. sustainable) tyranny is not imposed by violence, but by the perception that nothing exists outside the tyranny. [...]