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The Second American Revolution and the Sense Problem in the West(October 2008) [A sequel for Irish readers follows at the end] |
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This essay argues (1) that the West's socio-ethical system is a utopian experiment, emanating from the USA, based on post-European, left-liberal rules, and similar to the Soviet post-European experiment based on Marxist-Leninist rules; (2) that this system’s continuing existence depends on the constant increase of the power to buy and do things which it has been providing to states and consumers; and (3) that when that increase ceases it will dissolve into violent social chaos, leaving the task of building a lasting post-western civilisation, or civilisations, to a future generation. * As to method: when I investigate and narrate the development of the present age in the West, I try to exclude from my mind attachments, ideological views and moral judgments, either of my own or which are current in the age, and to deal only in historical facts. To help me in this, I do two things. First, I try to imagine how the history of this present age will be written a hundred or two hundred years from now. Second, I use as a guide to the true story my knowledge that the chief collective actors in this western age have been made up of ordinary human beings – the standard mix of human types - and that they have tended to think and act, partly in ways characteristic of the age, partly in ways that have precedents in past history. Consequently, I am disbelieving if I see that the prevalent story of the age contradicts that known reality in some respect or other, and I try to find out and tell the true story which that contradiction is hiding. So, for example, when I see that the prevalent story of this age shows the Americans and their close allies, collectively, as made up of extraordinary human beings, who, moreover, have not thought and acted in ways characteristic of the age or in ways that had precedents in past history, I am on the look-out for the true story that reintegrates them into humanity, into the thinking and acting modes of the age, and into the course of history. That is not the central concern of what follows, but an aspect of it which helps, I believe, to approximate its story to the overall reality of the age. 1 The contemporary West is built, not on Auschwitz and Treblinka to which we have said 'No', but on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to which we have said 'Yes'.
If we recognise that the Second American Revolution began in 1933, simultaneously with the German Revolution and during the latter phase of the Russian Revolution, many aspects of life in the West today are clarified. In particular, light is thrown on an unintended result of that American revolution: the pervasive senselessness that has been held in check only by the increasing money power. 1 The fact that the transformation of the United States between 1933 and the early 1970s has not generally been called a revolution takes nothing from the fact that it was indeed that. A similar failure of recognition occurred with regard to the long-drawn-out replacement of the republic by one-man rule in ancient Rome. A lthough it was in fact a revolution, it was not recognised as such, and called that, until Ronald Syme's book The Roman Revolution, published in 1939, made the term current. In both instances, the forces that effected the revolution wished to give the impression that the previous constitution had not been overturned, but that the public business continued to be conducted within the inherited framework, only better. In addition, in the American case, liberal-democratic exceptionalism, a secular Puritanism, was operative. It saw revolution as an outmoded method of political change, rendered unnecessary by liberal democracy and therefore out of the question in liberal-democratic America. And in this case, as previously in the Roman, the standard histories have been compliant with the revolutionaries - and at fault. (But I came across one study, by a contemporary, which was not: Ethan Theodore Colton's Four Patterns of Revolution: Communist U.S.S.R., Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, New Deal America, published 1935, republished 1970.) In the minds of their idealistic activists and in fact, those three twentieth-century revolutions, Russian, German and American, largely shared a common nature and purpose with previous revolutions in the history of Europe and Europe Overseas. Each of them took possession of a nation's central government and by unconstitutional action increased its power. Using that augmented power, they imposed a new order and a new worldview, while empowering those who were likely - by their nature or in response to their empowerment - to support the new order, and disempowering opponents, domestic or foreign. In one important aspect, however, these three revolutions differed from those that had preceded them and, indeed, from the Irish and Italian revolutions in the same century. They broke with the tacit common constitution of European nations which prescribed that political, including military, action must respect – or after a transgression re-assert - the essential ethical and customary rules of European (alias western) civilisation. Occasionally, a revolutionary power had contravened that normative framework or – as in the French Revolution - for a time proclaimed new rules. But never had a revolution invalidated the framework by enduringly establishing new rules in place of essential rules of European civilisation. The Russian and American revolutions did this, and it was evident that the German revolution would have done so had it survived. All three declared and implemented new rules of behaviour in place of essential European rules, including many which Christianity had long preached as God's rules. They thereby launched experimental systems of human living not previously attempted by Europeans at home or overseas. 1 The German and Russian systems, which for a short and a long period, respectively, operated in much of Europe, have perished. Only that resulting from the Second American Revolution – the system in which we now live in the West – remains. And because its post-western collection of rules to live by is the factor that has caused the current senselessness of western life, the revolution that produced that collection, the collection itself, and its effect on westerners call for scrutiny. 2 1. Between 1890 and the 1920s, a growing number of European artists had rejected the European rules for the arts and experimented with new forms. They had thus prefigured in the artistic field what these revolutionary rulers now did with regard to the European rules for human behaviour. Retrospectively seen, those artists resembled the animals whose anomalous behaviour indicates and forecasts an approaching earthquake. 2. For some further treatment of the matters arising here, see my 'The West's Campaign for Mastery of the World' in Irish Political Review, August 2003 and in my Cutting to the Point: Essays and Objections 1994-2003, Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2003. For the Second American Revolution, see also my The Postwestern Condition , London: Minerva Press, 1999, pp.30-35 and The Revision of European History , Belfast: Athol Books, 2003, pp. 92-7. What a civilisation is, essentially First, however, it is useful to recall what a civilisation is, and western civilisation in particular. A civilisation is essentially a grounded hierarchy of values and rules covering all of life and making sense, which a community's rulers and ruled subscribe to over a long period. 'Over a long period' (unless a catastrophe overwhelms it) because the community is motivated to keep reproducing itself by the sense, and therefore goodness, that it finds in its framework for life. The rules to which it subscribes cover all behaviour from the maintenance of the state and communication with the supernatural to international relations in peace and war and dealings among persons and between men and women. The rules derive hierarchically from the hierarchy of values. This dual hierarchy - representing the greater or lesser importance to the community of the elements so arranged - is 'grounded' in the sense that there are interconnected reasons, understood or intuited by the community, for the presence in it of those values and rules and for their order of ranking. Some of the rules are adjustable or replaceable as the centuries pass and circumstances and mentalities change. The essential rules are those whose continuous acceptance is necessary for the civilisation to remain itself. They form its defining core. Constructed in western Europe by Latin, Germanic and Celtic Christians, western civilisation had crossed the Atlantic and other seas and had lasted almost a thousand years. Among its essential rules were the following: The West is a Christian civilisation of Christian nations. Its divinity is the Christian God. Whether on religious grounds or for secular motives, national and international law generally subscribe to the Christian principles of interpersonal and international behaviour. Connection with the West's Roman-Greek-Judaic roots is maintained through the educational system and educated public discourse. An educated man knows Latin. Art is work which has a formal crafted beauty. Frugality and chastity are admirable virtues. Reason takes precedence over feeling and desire. Private property is protected by law. Massacre is grievously wrong and strictly forbidden. Sexual relations are legitimate only in the monogamous betrothal and marriage of man and woman. Homosexual relations are unnatural and abhorrent. Abortion is a heinous crime, pornography a degrading evil that must be denied circulation. Adults do not foist sexual awareness on children. A girl who bears a child without a committed father is a disgrace. Human nudity and bodily intimacies are not for public display, but nudity may be represented decorously in art. Men's work and women's work are different. Men have authority and legal precedence over women; they accord women social pre-eminence and physical protection. Age has authority over youth. Such were some of the essential rules which, in combination with others, made sense to our ancestors for nearly a thousand years. Western civilisation replaced by new collection of rules In a process that began at the end of World War II, the West's democratic rulers, led by those of the USA, rejected many of the essential rules of western civilisation and introduced new rules in place of the rejected ones. This process was part of, or derived from, the Second American Revolution, which began in 1933 and continued to the early 1970s. Its agents, in the USA and Western Europe, were democratic rulers working in collaboration with late arrivals on the western scene: the 'new' or 'left-' liberals. These utopian idealists (known in Ireland since the 1970s as 'the Dublin liberals') had a prehistory in American 'progressivism'. Under the name 'liberals' they first rose to prominence in the 1930s in the USA. Unlike their classical-liberal predecessors in Europe and the USA (in Ireland, the liberals who took their lead from Daniel O'Connell and who drafted our Constitutions after Independence) these fundamentalists wanted a powerful and active state – a 'Big State' as the slogan went - intervening to shape the lives of people for their good. The revolution gets under way President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with the support of the Democratic Party, brought the left-liberals to power. Elected in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, Roosevelt was convinced that their 'Big State' project was the best means of tackling its dire economic consequences. His New Deal programme, inspired in part by Mussolini's Italy and Stalin's Russia, transferred powers from the states to the federal government and extended the range of government action. Its immediate purpose was to liberate millions of citizens from unemployment and poverty, but it impinged on all spheres of American public life, including the arts. Its thrust, in short, in the public domain, was 'totalitarian', in the original and basic meaning of that word. 3 3. Its original meaning, which, like the word itself, emerged in Mussolini's Italy in the 1920s, was a state which - in contradistinction to the previous classical-liberal state – involved itself authoritatively, in tandem with a non-religious teaching authority, in all aspects of the citizens' lives. As the twentieth century progressed, this became a common characteristic of all western states. But again, as with regard to the Second American Revolution, liberal-democratic exceptionalism was operative: nothing characteristic of non-liberal-democratic states could be replicated in a liberal-democratic state. So liberal democracies, while engaging in the common 'totalitarian' practice alluded to, reserved the T-word for oppressive states which did likewise. When eleven New Deal measures were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, Roosevelt threatened to appoint extra judges who would do his bidding. Eventually, by means of legitimate new appointments, the Court was rendered compliant. Between 1937 and 1946, it reversed thirty-two of its earlier interpretations of the Constitution, extending back over a period of 150 years. In effect, therefore, the Supreme Court presented the revolutionary government with a new Constitution tailored to its needs. In 1940, in disregard of American precedent, Roosevelt was elected President for a third term. (Later, he would seek and win election for a fourth term, and like his German revolutionary counterpart, whose period in power coincided with his, die in office.) The Big State thus consolidated, and reinforced by emergency powers, made war on and defeated America's two main rivals, Germany and Japan. In respect of power directed outwards, it reached its apogee with the manufacture of the atomic bomb, the use of this weapon against two Japanese cities, and the subsequent official justification of the resulting massacres; in part immediate, but in greater part occurring subsequently as a result of radioactive radiation. This justification, besides establishing the American state as the first 'superpower', had several weighty implications, two of them retrospective. It legitimised all the deliberate massacres of civilians by American and British aerial bombing during World War II. From the reference in the American Declaration of Independence to 'the merciless Indian savages, whose known rules of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions' it withdrew the word 'savages'. With immediate effect, it licensed the American state, and by extension its British and French allies, to construct thousands of similar, but more powerful weapons of massacre. Finally, with direct bearing on the revolution in progress, it sent a signal to the fundamentalist liberals about the state they had worked to create; namely, that it was likely to approve those elements of their programme which rejected other core rules of western civilisation. The general aim of their programme - given the backing of a powerful, active state - was to bring about, by pedagogical, legislative, financial and scientific means, a perfect human condition. For that purpose, first, there must be an end to the tacit recognition of the Christian religion as America's 'national' religion, and to the consequent role of Christian morality as a determinant of behavioural rules. Second, categories of citizens who were legally or otherwise unequal must be raised or lowered to legal equality, so as to bring about a fraternity of individuals, equal in law and in their treatment by their fellows. Third, all citizens must have access to education and health services and be equipped with buying power. And finally, with due regard to the rights of others, the desires of individuals must be recognised as rights and realised as far as possible. Implicit in that programme were Black civil rights and radical feminism; normalisation of homosexuals and of unmarried mothers and their offspring; political and financial empowerment of young people; maximal facilitation of the physically deficient; invalidation of intrinsic personal authority such as that possessed by clergy, men, parents, teachers and the aged; ample social welfare; unshackling of sex and of pornography of all kinds; legalisation of abortion; and a blank cheque for science. Implicit, too, and duly advocated by the liberals, were a collection of consequent behavioural rules that ran counter to essential European rules, traditional in the USA, which they deemed oppressive or unjust. The culmination of the revolution Without invalidation of the West's core rules, the liberal programme had made some progress during the New Deal years and, even more, during the war years almost to their end. But the main work remained to be done. In the remaining Truman years, and through the 1950s, while the liberal party continued to preach its fundamentalist doctrines, conservative opposition prevented further practical progress. The breakthrough came, and the revolution entered its culminating phase, when, at the end of the 1950s and in the following decade, the US government and manufacturing industry needed urgently to increase consumption, with its dual yield of revenue and profit. The government, already spending heavily to wage the Cold War, was now faced with manufacturing scores of space satellites and thousands more of long-range missiles and nuclear warheads; putting a man on the moon; and paying the rising costs of war in Vietnam. Industries making consumer goods, having greatly raised their productivity by the use of automation and computers, were producing in excess of market demand. Government and manufacturing industry, jointly, perceived in the unfulfilled parts of the liberal agenda the means of greatly increasing consumption. From the 1960s the American state began endorsing that agenda selectively through Supreme Court rulings, by legislation, and administratively. The state's totalitarian quality, considerable in the public sphere, increased greatly as it imposed new norms of virtuous thought and behaviour on individuals and families, and on educators and employers. Prominent universities played a supporting role. In the Johnson years, 1963-9, under a liberal President, the revolution celebrated its carnival and launched a rocket against western civilisation into the Nixon 70s, where it exploded on the campuses. In the Partisan Review for Winter 1967, Susan Sontag, high-priestess of the American intelligentsia, set the tone for these historically decisive years with the following ringing phrases: If America is the culmination of the Western white civilisation, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilisation.... The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don't redeem what this particular civilisation has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of world history. The teachers of the post-western, liberal rules of correct behaviour came to function, collectively, as a sort of secular state church or informal, doctrinally paramount 'Party'. Henceforth, regardless of which political party was in government, this collective would retain its pre-eminent teaching status. Given the ending of tacit recognition of the Christian clergy as the supreme extra-Constitutional body teaching ethical rules to the state and the citizens, this was a logical development: a substitute ethical teaching body was called for. And indeed, its emergence brought the USA into line with the practice in other twentieth-century revolutionary states, such as Russia and Germany, where the Christian clergy had been replaced by a supreme Party that defined good and evil. But in accordance, once again, with the theory of liberal-democratic exceptionalism, the existence of such a secular moral teaching body in the US – even in an informal, non-card-carrying guise - was impossible. So another clash occurred between theory and reality: such an informal body did in fact come into being and wield great influence, and later spawn similar bodies in Western Europe. For convenience of the narrative it must have a name. And since its role had to do with defining correct thought and behaviour, to call it the liberal 'Correctorate' seems appropriate. The formation of this state-liberal system was a case of ambitious political power, and a new ideal vision of the good life, working together towards their distinct objectives. A phenomenon known to history, it operates like this. Rulers who wish to increase their power regardless of the rules, while continuing to rank as virtuous, find substantial common cause with innovative idealists who want society reshaped by new rules that empower people. The rulers increase their political power by enacting the idealists' new rules to their own advantage, while the idealists celebrate them as enlightened and virtuous rulers. The idealists end up powerful in a semblance of their envisioned life that has been tailored to suit the rulers' interests. (In this particular instance, the rulers' interests required, both among individuals and as between swathes of the citizen body, an inequality of living conditions, education and political influence as extreme as in Communist Russia, along with a capitalist inequality of financial power.) The construction of consumerism The principal preaching space allotted to the liberals was in the mass media, including films, which they came to dominate pedagogically. (An important secondary podium was the humanities faculties of the universities.) But their pedagogical dominance of the mass media was dependent on, and shared with, business big and small, inasmuch as these same media were the principal public space where business paid to advertise its goods-for-sale. The advertisers of goods-for-sale were, for business reasons, in substantial agreement with the social and ethical doctrines of the liberal reformers. On this account, and because their advertising campaigns, like the liberals' teaching, amounted to telling people how they should act, live and be – much of it, for example, had to do with personal body care - they de facto formed part of the state-licensed Correctorate. Thus a conjunction of all the interests involved made up that state-liberal system, with ethical, economic, technological and political dimensions, which we call 'consumerism'. It was a new word employed to designate the system of mass consumption, based on the socio-ethical principles of left-liberalism, which took shape in the 1960s. It worked this way. The hybrid Correctorate and its supporting legislation issued rulings and exhortations which promoted material and sexual consumption with a good conscience, rather than the previously inculcated virtuous restraint. Advancing science, and military technology by its offshoots, supplied a never-ending array of new, empowering tools to buy. Buying potential and activity were maximised through payments by the state to the poorer citizens, encouragement of all women and teenagers to earn money, incomes constantly rising, goods promotion by television and radio in every home, and the prolongation of active individual life by advances in medicine. Thus mass consumption, material and sexual, became the contemporary equivalent of medieval mass labour in the fields. Together with the instigation, nourishment and exploitation of it under both forms, it constituted the main motor of the economy, society and the state. Powerful as instigation was the Correctorate's promise that by thinking, consuming, and otherwise acting, in accordance with its exhortations, the legally equalised consumers would individually attain enlightenment and righteousness, ability to do more and more things ethically, lives ever more lasting, and the sensual satisfaction that was everyone's due. All in all, it was, and remains, the culminating realisation of the centuries-old drive by Europeans to acquire, collectively and individually, ever greater ethical power, in the sense of ability to do more things and bigger things, including things previously illicit, and be justified. 4 4. As a functioning system, consumerism provided the basis on which the American economic doctrine and practice called 'neoliberalism', with its attendant programme of 'globalisation', would subsequently - with some practical corrections - be built.. Consumerism spreads to Western Europe In London's Sunday Times, 21 October 1962, Maurice Wiggins wrote: 'Freedom of speech includes the temporarily unfashionable freedom to express a certain scepticism of liberal shibboleths.' 'Every little authoritarian these days pays lip-service to liberal ideals...' wrote Judith Pakenham in the London Spectator, 18 January 1963. The liberals they were talking about were clearly not the Liberals of earlier British history; they were using the word in the new American sense which was to become its normal usage in English-speaking countries. In the 1960s, pressure from the USA via London began the imposition of the new state-liberal system in America's West European satellites. The aim of the American rulers was to widen the area of maximal money yield and to counter, with a display of permissiveness and prosperity, the communist indoctrination of Eastern Europe. In each West European state, successively, elements of the increasingly well-financed mass media adopted and spearheaded the new ethical doctrines; a national correctorate took shape; the media as a whole conformed; and the rulers, in varying degrees, gave legal force to the new teachings and placed correctors at key points in the state administration. From the late 1960s onwards, in North America and Western Europe, the national liberal correctorates functioned much as the national communist parties in the Soviet satellites, except in one respect. Whereas the leading doctrinal role of the communist parties in the 'people's democracies' was constitutionally formalised, that of the liberal correctorates was exercised, with tacit state approval, extra-constitutionally, as a matter of fact. So while the former functioned as commanding authority in the respective multi-party parliaments and in society generally, the latter secured conformity partly through the actions of correctors installed in the state bureaucracy, partly by manipulating public opinion so as to influence the decisions of governments, political parties and other institutions. Through the mass media the correctorates allocated public honour, dishonour or effective silencing to significant groups in parliaments and in civil society, and to significant writings, speeches and individuals. As in the communist countries the word 'socialist' was made in the prevalent language to connote 'good', so, in the English-speaking countries, with 'liberal', in the language of citizens who ranked as right-thinking. Conversely, the negative connotation of the ideological terms 'right' and 'right-wing' in the communist East was reproduced in the prevalent discourse of the (left-) liberal West. Frequently in the 1960s, and to a degree in the 1970s, serious talk of 'revolution' had occurred in the political discourse of western radicals. Gradually, as a tacit signal that in the West, as in the East, a definitive revolution had already taken place, that word passed out of politics into commercial advertising, where it served in the promotion of new soap powders or face creams. In Europe the national correctorates also worked in collaboration with the liberal party in the central administration of the European Community. While these bureaucrats worked to ensure that Community directives and regulations conformed in relevant matters to liberal principles, the national correctorates lauded such measures and insisted on their meticulous implementation in the member states. Similar collaboration, within the Community and the subsequent Union, worked against any political party that deviated notably from liberal orthodoxy holding power in a national government. The net result, with regard to rules to live by, is that a collection of non-European rules, combined with some surviving European rules, has become the reigning and widely accepted system of do's, don'ts and do-as-you-likes of North America and much of Europe, Ireland centrally included. 2 There were whispered arguments between our parents while we watched TV - arguments about changing the rules, we gathered, that applied to all of us, the dads and moms as well as the kids...
A new civilisation can replace an older one on the same ground; history, again, shows instances of that. But this new collection of values and rules is not a case of that. It does not constitute a new civilisation because it lacks the sine qua non of a civilisation: it does not make sense to the human collective it is presented to and imposed on, thereby ensuring emotional attachment to it and durability. Thrown together to promote justice, virtue, consumption and power, its hybrid sponsors treated overall sense as superfluous. The result was inevitable. The collection constitutes, like its Soviet counterpart, a theoretical experiment not shaped by combined human instinct, reason and experience. The framework of a wealthy, senseless, state-liberal system, it is life-thwarting, and will, when the growing money force that holds it in being stops growing, prove disastrous. The absence of sense is immediately evident at the level of the rules. Indeed, by the simple fact that these do not present a grounded hierarchy covering all of life they cannot make sense as a framework for living. For a start, they lack a supreme value (lawgiver, virtue or venerated moral inheritance) from which subordinate values and their attendant rules might be derived in descending order of importance to cover all of life. Thus ipso facto the rules lack both the validating and the rational grounding which such derivation could provide. Floating therefore unanchored, assembled pell-mell over the past half-century, the new rules comprise qualitatively undifferentiated do's and don'ts for parts of life and virtual do-as-you-likes for other parts. Among the do's and don'ts, the latter predominate. They are taught much as if the things not to do when driving a car were to be imparted without distinguishing in order of importance between failing to glance regularly at the rear-view mirror, passing on the inside, driving on the wrong side of the road, and starting in second gear; that is to say, in a senseless manner, useless to the would-be driver. The new rules to live by Take a random array of don'ts as taught and administered by the Correctorate. No intelligible ranking of incorrectness is indicated as between don't kill civilians with non-aerial bombs, don't be fat or speak badly of Jews or urge that a law should reflect Christian morality; don't be smelly or invade another country without the authority of the United Nations or smoke in an enclosed public space or say that homosexuality is a perversion or 'deny the Holocaust'; don't torture prisoners, pollute a river, ban pornography, treat a woman as a sex-object, prevent her having an abortion or restrict what adults read, view, say, write or think; and don't, if a man, hit your wife or kiss an unwilling female in the office. Leave aside the contradictions in that sample. Because the consumers do not have available a grounded exposition by the Correctorate of which of these incorrectnesses is gravely, less gravely or only somewhat incorrect, they must perforce try to gauge this from the Correctorate's reactions or non-reactions to incorrectnesses as they occur. And the teaching thus delivered is bafflingly dual. On the one hand, it is to the effect that all behaviours or thoughts forbidden by the Correctorate are, for a variety of variously grounded reasons, very grave. On the other hand, the same teaching indicates – read the newspapers - that the gravity of many incorrectnesses is greater, lesser or cancelled, depending on who commits them and why; or if there are victims, on which nation, creed, party or sex they belong to. Inevitably, the conclusion drawn by the consumers is also dual. It is that all the Correctorate's don't rules are of more or less equal importance, and are in practice not really rules. Much the same would appear if we were to look at a bunch of the do's. In passing, for the plight of young mothers is special, note the particular array of unranked obligations that falls on them if their behaviour is to be correct. Widely broadcast do's of equal imperativeness exhort them to meticulous body care, paid employment, personal assertiveness, vigilant child-rearing in person or by delegation, diligent participation in the consumerist good life, and successfully orgasmic sexual intercourse. The virtual do-as-you-likes which operate alongside the do's and don'ts are 'virtual' in the sense that the positive rules they contain are so minimal as to leave caprice or desire substantially in command. They deal with areas of human behaviour which western civilisation, as other civilisations, subjected to comprehensive positive rules. In the Correctorate's teaching, virtual do-as-you-likes operate for art in all its forms, for official killing in righteous wars, as for dress, dancing, social manners, propriety of speech, modes of personal address, and relations with the supernatural insofar as these are not declared absurd. A special do-as-you-like applies to the behaviour of the state of Israel. In all human communities, for the most serious of reasons including collective survival, the use of the human reproductive organs has been subjected to strict and intelligibly grounded rules. Note, by contrast, the Correctorate's rule: provided that minors and adults use their reproductive organs separately, that if more than one user is involved there is mutual consent, and that a condom is employed unless conception is intended, do as you like in private or, in public, to gratify a paying audience. Reactions to the senselessness It is not simply that this chaos of rules can be seen on examination not to make sense as a framework for living. It is also experienced as senselessness by us white westerners who are required to live by it. For the most part, we experience it as senselessness unreflectively, in that depth of our being where countless generations of human beings before us have trained us by heredity to assess - in a combined act of reason, feeling and intuition - any presentation purporting to be a framework for life. And that encounter with senselessness, when our minds and hearts are seeking sense, sends distress, a pain of soul, pressing into our consciousness. To be precise, we white westerners find that consciousness of this life framework which we have been given for living in is accompanied by pain in our souls. Nothing more natural, then, than that we should want, as individuals, to annul that pain and, collectively, feel little desire to reproduce this white western life. Sensitive young people, on the threshold of life, are particularly attentive to the framework of rules presented to them. Little wonder then that many of these, over the past half-century, have found and practised various methods of annulling the pain. Some of them, females more often than males, do so by superficial self-injury with a sharp knife, in an effort to manage the pain by transferring it from soul to body. More commonly, male and female, they seek the desired annulment, recurrently, through annihilation of consciousness. Recurrently, for such periods as their work or study allows, they effect this through drugs or drunkenness or reckless sex, through motorised speed or disco dancing or mass raves or rock concerts; or, ubiquitously, by means of personal stereos or mobile phones plugging ears and removing minds. Or else, increasingly, as we have seen in Ireland during these last forty years, they opt for annihilating consciousness permanently; if female, often irresolutely and unsuccessfully, if male, usually with full resolution and success. But it is mainly for mature consumers - for recurrent or habitual suspensions of their ordinary consciousness - that tons of mood-altering and hallucinatory drugs from Afghanistan, Columbia and other producer countries reach the West monthly. These serve, along with alcohol and self-immersion in mind-numbing work for weeks or months on end, when the consumers' acquired ability to ignore the pain proves insufficient. And there is one method of annihilating consciousness which is practised exclusively by mature adults, usually men. So regularly does it occur that we have recognised it as a malady characteristic of our times and given it the specific name, rage . 'Unmotivated' it is often termed, but wrongly so. Senselessness thwarting reproduction When senselessness is apprehended in the shared collective life, motivation to reproduce that life flags. In order to maintain population stability, a society's women must bear an average of about 2.1 children per lifetime. The fer tility of white westerners now lies well beneath this. In the USA their rate is 1.8. According to the latest American government forecast, white people will be a minority there by 2042. The fertility rate for the European Union is 1.5 (for Ireland 1.85.) In several of the larger European countries sharp declines in population are expected in the next twenty-five years. The present demographic situation of the white West recalls two widely separated episodes. In the last phase of the western Roman Empire, when the rules of society were incoherently old-Roman and Christian – neither one nor the other integrally – the fertility and vigour of the Roman and romanised core declined. Only immigration, largely Germanic, kept the system functioning. Russia's utopian rule-changing in the first half of the last century differed from the later western experiment only in that it was Marxist-Leninist rather than left-liberal. In the latter decades of the Soviet Union before its collapse, Russians noted with dismay an increasing fall in their fertility rate, as opposed to that of the Union's Asian republics. In the foreseeable future they would be a minority in the Union. But perhaps the most common instance of senselessness producing a collective will not to reproduce has been the so-called 'primitive tribe' in the American and other continents after a disruptive intrusion by Europeans had robbed its collective life of sense. (Significantly, among the ethnic groups in the USA, the only fertility rate lower than that of white people is the Native American or 'Red Indian'.) For any human community, small or large, it simply does not make sense to reproduce a collective life whose proffered framework for living fails to do that. In our case, however – that of the white race in the West -. it is not a disruptive intrusion from outside that has presented us with a senseless framework. We have done that ourselves. Sothere is a protracted collective suicide in two acts: first, ourpresenting ourselves with an anti-human life, then our growing refusal to people it with more humanssuffering the offence that we endure. Consumerism's ersatz sense Most of the time, most westerners manage to ignore the pain. On top of the training they have inherited from the generations before them in assessing for sense the life presented to them, another skin-deep training has been superimposed. From tender years onwards, the consumerist economy, and its accompanying teaching, condition them to accept an ersatz sense in place of the real sense they crave for. This substitute sense has been provided, fundamentally, by the continuously increasing material power to buy things and to do things, which the consumerist economy supplies to individual consumers as well as to states and business firms. The persuasive force of this increasing power to buy and do is actualised for the consumers in two interlocked ways.. Repeatedly it enables them to acquire more, bigger or costlier things, and these things include the powers of new tools that enable them to do more things than they could previously. Among the many secondary powers thus conferred on consumers are the ability to pause a television programme while answering the phone, to use cellular phones for many things besides phoning, and to live lives increasingly longer than those of their ancestors. While such benefits, in the eyes of most people, give material sense to the life on offer, a central message of the Correctorate's teaching furnishes it, for some people, with moral sense. This message, constantly repeated, tells us that those who think and live in accordance with the Correctorate's rules live a freer, more just and kinder life than the western generations that preceded them and than all the other peoples that have inhabited or that now inhabit the planet. The net result is that most consumers, most of the time, believe in the surface of their minds that this present life of the western world is a good life. 'Stress', everyone recognises, stress of body and soul, regularly accompanies the living of this life. But stress with recurrent depression, most westerners resignedly accept, is an inevitable condition of living a life which despite all - despite even its moments of clear, shocking vision - is a good life. That is the situation. And it is likely that, for as long as the buying and doing power of governments and consumers continues to increase, and the teaching that this contemporary western life is morally the best life ever known continues to have force for some, the West's senseless post-European system will continue to function. Dating its launch from that first, momentous rule change of 1945, it has still a few years to go before it matches the life span of its more conservatively post-western Soviet counterpart. The life span of the American system is determined by the very transient nature of the two factors which, by supplying its ersatz sense, enable it to exist. Ultimately, for one reason or another, the continuous increase of the collective and individual power to buy and do - which provides both its main ersatz sense and its social glue - will cease. And its vaunted moral superiority over all previous or existing lives will become an irrelevant twaddle. Nothing will then remain to prevent direct and continuous impact of the system's senselessness on the consciousness of westerners, young and old, or to make that senseless and unloved life framework seem a good life. With no sense-making, loved set of rules to fall back on as a comforting matrix of order in the reduced material circumstances, the inevitable will happen. The chaos of the prevailing values and rules will be transformed into a violent social chaos without many precedents in history. All that idealism, that naïve and unanchored idealism, will go up in smoke! In conclusion The fact that this chaos looms as an inevitable outcome of the present condition of the West is the final light thrown on that condition by this recognition of the Second American Revolution and its context, and this tracing of its nature and outcome within the West. For historians the most valuable element of this exercise is likely to be the recognition of the revolution's context: the fact that it was one of three more or less simultaneous efforts by Europeans to found, in place of European civilisation, a rules system that would enable them to do more things and bigger things righteously, while eliminating inherited wrong practices and mindsets. Those three efforts viewed together, each of them supported by millions of people, indicate a strong conviction among twentieth-century Europeans, in Europe and overseas, that the civilisation which their ancestors created, and which enabled them to dominate and lead the world, had ended its usefulness - had had its day. Clearly, by believing that, they made it a fact: a fact for historians of the twentieth century to record, if they are doing their job right. The period since then, and continuing ahead of us beyond the collapse of the American liberal utopia, future historians will call 'transitional' and compare it to the transitional period between the civilisations of ancient Rome and Europe. Whether it will prove to be as long as that was or shorter, it will end in a new civilisation, or new civilisations, in the West. The plural is the more likely outcome: the United States, ever more involved with China and Japan, and domestically more Hispanic, is likely to pay little heed to Europe. Whether the new civilisation in Europe or in North America will be ethically as well as materially more empowering than was Europe's is an open question. But that civilisation in one form or another will return in the West is certain, The ineradicable human craving for sense in life will ensure that.
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