When we say “we” who are the “We” that we speak of? The recently deceased philosopher, Roger Scruton, cast the deepest question that besets modern society in this seemingly simple question that covers deep and complex truths.
The post-structuralist answer (one which rejects universal truths) to this question is: anything we decide it is. Of course, this self-referential definition has some obvious epistemological flaws but that doesn’t stop it being the policy directive of practically all western “Liberal Democracy”.
The astute reader might have noticed that the seemingly redundant word “Liberal” is actually a modifier, and that, in fact, when people say “Liberal Democracy” they don’t mean a representative government elected by the people, they mean a government elected by the people which represents liberal institutions.
The liberal institutions are the conceptual “We” in “Liberal Democracy” and “Liberal Democracy” is anything but democratic by the standard definition of the word. It is in actual fact a rule by an oligarchy who serve special interest lobbies. This is a thing that people who are not in the labyrinthine complex of the NGOs and global bureaucracies are increasingly sensing, and it is why they are turning in increasing numbers towards populism.
The interests of the ruling elites has very little in common with what opinion polls are telling us about are the desires of the people. Take immigration for example where over 70% of the Irish people think that immigration levels are too high. But for an even more brazen faced disregard of the will of the people recall the public consultation on the proposed hate speech bill.
Recall that when the government did their usual trick of holding a public consultation and 73% of the public responses were against the government’s proposals, the government then said that this did not represent public opinion.
“Liberal Democracy” is actually not mostly concerned with democracy, in the same way that “Social Justice” often has nothing in common with justice.
So what is it about breaking apart norms and redefining old terms that we are accustomed to?
One suspicion – and it is way more than a suspicion – is that these people believe that they will build something of their own vision from the rubble. Chairman Mao of the Chinese Communist party loved this idea (and counted the cost of human lives that would be consumed by it lightly) and he encouraged his revolutionary guard to destroy The Four Olds. These were ‘old ideas’, ‘old culture’, ‘old customs’, and ‘old habits’.
You can see how these four would be a problem for someone who wanted to build the world anew.
Irish poet, Caitlín Maude, wrote a poem about this reshaping of the world through deconstruction.
Treall
Tabhair dom casúr
Nó tua
Go mbrisfead is
Go millfead
An teach seo,
Go ndéanfad tairseach
Den fhardoras
‘Gus urláir de na ballaí,
Go dtiocfaidh scraith
Agus díon agus
Simléir anuas
Le neart mo chuid
Allais…
Sín chugam anois
Na cláir is na tairnní
Go dtógfad
An teach eile seo…
Ach, a dhia, táim tuirseach!”
As Béarla
“Give me a hammer
or a hatchet
that I may break
and destroy
this house,
that I may make a threshold
of the (top of the) door
and make floors from the walls,
that the thatch
and the roof and
the chimney may fall down
with the strength of my
sweat…
Now before me
the planks and the nails
to build
this new house…
But, God, I’m tired!”
A hammer to destroy this house and build anew. In this poem, she expresses her frustration at society and the things that bind and define the traditions and norms we live by. She wishes to break the binds and start anew while maintaining the old values as the basis of her new order. However, she recognises the impotence of this by claiming she is too tired to rebuild.
Some may interpret this exhaustion as (using lefty speak) an effect of systemic resistance to change which defeats the marginalised and reinforces oppression. But a far more realistic interpretation is that it reflects a lack of vision in the revolutionary fervour, for it is easy to destroy but very difficult to build.
For the record, I don’t believe that Maude was without vision, and in fact, there is a valid core in her frustration that the culture she holds dear was both repressed and neglected. Her frustration was at the loss of cultural values. The big question in surveying what is dysfunctional in our culture is; do we have the impulse to build towards a vision or the impulse only to tear it all apart.
Goethe’s great antagonist anti-hero, Mephistopheles, in Faust has the later vision: “I am the spirit that negates. And rightly so, for all that comes to be, deserves to perish wretchedly.” Interestingly Karl Marx claimed that that was the line in literature which most inspired him
Maude’s frustration against society grapples the probing philosophical query in Scruton’s question of who, or even what, is “We”? Who is society; and can the observer disassociate from the dysfunction of the world?
This is a post modern trope frequently used in postmodern poetry, so it’s worth examining how it is scrutinised. Two competing lenses of examination are: the victim/oppressor lens; and the tragic lens, as Thomas Sowell describes it.
The Victim/Oppressor lens proposes a state of existential nihilism; the solution of which is destructive progressivism. It proposes the destruction of what is, but proposes no vision of how the bright new world will be constructed. We are to assume that it will spring into being because the people with the desire to destroy the old have the right ideas for what a paradise should contain. This type of utopianism – he type espoused by such Marxist movements as Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the LBGTQAI2SMAP+ alphabet activists, and BLM – never produces a better world from the rubble. In fact all it produces is perpetual destruction. It is always the fault of an “enemy within,” that must be purged, that the utopian vision is never realised.
Patrick Pearse held a view that was more consistent with the Sowellian one. In his play, An Rí, his chief protagonist, the Abbot, declares “On the King the Eric? No, the people bear the cost of the sins of its princes.” He continues “this nation shall not be freed until it chooses for itself a righteous King.”
The Eric, by the way, is the wages of sin.
It’s a strident assertion. It might not be fair but history has proven its validity. The people cannot be passive observers in the construction of nation, they must construct the concept of “We”. Incidentally, Pearse equated nationalism with spiritualism.
The American writer and social philosopher, Rob Henderson, has also played with this observation (that the people bear the cost of the King’s Eric) and derived the term “luxury beliefs” for the modern liberal version of it. This is the observation that beliefs which give status to the rich at little cost to them, are then propagated to the poor as policies and practices at great social cost to the poor. Ideas such as open border approach to immigration; the insane anti-policing movement that became very fashionable amongst the elites during the George Floyd summer of rioting; the legalisation of drugs, etc. “On the people the Eric”.
T.S. Elliot, in The Wasteland, a poem whose meter is Postmodernist by design, criticises the atomisation effect of post-modernity. Man, insinuated into nihilism, scrabbles for meaning in the broken roots and rubble of the past. The poem jumps between scenes of banality which cover thinly the deep despair of disentangled humanity. Eliot hints that the despair of this world stems from the lack of a common understanding of “We” or “Us”.
The Wasteland’s post-structuralist application to meter makes it a poem seemingly stripped of cohesion. The anthitesis of that vision postulated by Scruton when he asked who are the “We.”
Of course the Postmodern corruption of “We” is “Community” a word that has been definition-swapped to mean a construct of humanity based on progressive ideas. It is the ambiguous and always amorphous globalist definition based on fluid culture, multiculturalism, and atomisation. In many ways it is Caitlín Maude’s house torn down and the floors made into walls.
In his essay on The Wasteland, Tyer Malone discusses the opening lines.
“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,”
“But who is the “us” that winter kept warm and whom summer surprised? And, more important, who is the speaker (or speakers?) of these opening lines? By the time we reach the end of the first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” we have encountered many disparate voices. Who are all these people? Where is this waste land they inhabit? What is this chaos of impressions we are privy to? Wherefore such madness?”
The Wasteland depicts the slavery of unfettered appetites. This has the veneer of passion, but without love that is deception. Take how Eliot changes the flow of the narrative at the end of his third section “The Fire Sermon”. The quickening tempo, and beautifully rapid meter, which describes the hopes of young uninitiated lovers, is shattered by a desultory realisation that only sensation was sought and not connection. This is the nihilism of the modern world which makes the sacred profane.
‘My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised a ‘new start.’
I made no comment. What should I resent?’
Is anything more dispiriting than this? Is this not reflective of the crisis that young girls are faced with today? It is a crisis of respect and value.
Eliot finishes his exegesis of modernity differently to Maude. While she surveys the wreckage of her house and says she is defeated with exhaustion, he surveys the dysfunction and ruin and pronounces the impulse that most frequently drives on this spirit of post-structuralism. ‘You want ruin, I will give you the satisfaction!’
Referencing Thomas Kyd’s play, The Spanish Tragedy; “Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe,” he says, channelling the play upon which the play within Hamlet is based. It is the spirit of hatred of existence and perpetual destruction.
We cannot construct a sense of “We” from this.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Lorcán Mac Mathúna