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1
What follows is the story I believe will be told a hundred years from now as the essential history of these times. By "essential history" I mean a narrative which treats the great wars and slaughters of the period as marginal to the underlying epochal event that was occurring. That history begins with two revolutions, Russian and German, which rejected and replaced—or in the latter case attempted to replace—the rules system of European civilisation with a new rules system. It continues with the Second American Revolution which performed the same double action and whose replacement of the inherited rules system still holds sway today. I call it the Second American Revolution because Americans call their achievement of independence from England a revolution. But first, let me clarify three other terms I have just used: a civilisation, European civilisation, and a revolution.
A civilisation is essentially a grounded hierarchy of 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 military or natural disaster overwhelms it) because the community is motivated to keep reproducing itself by the sense, and therefore goodness, that it finds in the set of rules that forms its framework for life. These rules 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 a 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 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.
What, then, was European or western civilisation? Essentially it was a system of rules constructed in western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries AD by Latin, Germanic and Celtic Christians, and which later crossed the Atlantic and other seas and lasted into the twentieth century. Among its essential rules were the following:
The West is a Christian community 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 preference 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.
Finally, a revolution—as distinct from a mere coup d'état. It begins with a group of people who adhere to a new ideology which they believe contains the formula for a good and just life. These people, the revolutionaries, take possession of a nation's central government and by unconstitutional means increase its power. Using that augmented power, they preach their ideology, establish new rules derived from it, empower those who are likely to support the new rules, and disempower opponents. This process takes at least twenty years, maybe thirty or forty years.
Until the first half of the twentieth century there existed a tacit agreement of European nations, at home and overseas, that all political and military action must respect—or after a transgression re-assert—the essential rules of European civilisation. This tacit agreement applied also to revolutions: that is to say, the new rules which a revolution enduringly established must not breach the essential European framework of rules. In the early twentieth century the Irish revolution and the Italian Fascist revolution operated within this framework.
However, three revolutions, in three powerful countries, Russia, Germany and America, rejected the rules system of European civilisation. The revolutionaries, finding that European civilisation unjustly limited their power to create the good life they envisaged, made (or in the German case began to make) new rules of behaviour that justified their state, and certain individuals or all individuals, in doing things which European civilisation forbade.
Together, these revolutions repeated in the socio-ethical sphere something that had happened in the artistic realm between 1890 and the 1920s. Then a growing number of European artists had rejected the European rules for the arts and experimented with new forms. Retrospectively seen, those artists resembled the animals whose anomalous behaviour indicates and forecasts an approaching earthquake.
The German revolution, at an early stage, suffered military defeat. The Russian system, which operated in much of Europe for 70 years, has perished. From 1945 incipiently, and from the 1960s definitively, the American revolution established its post-European rules system in its own country and in Western Europe. Its rules system is still in force today and we in Ireland live under its sway.
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…
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 since then are clarified. In particular, light is thrown on an unintended result of that American revolution: the pervasive senselessness of western life that has been made bearable mainly by the constant increase of the power to buy things and do things.
The fact that the transformation of the United States between 1933 and the early 1970s has not 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 inherited constitution had not been overturned, but that the public business continued to be conducted within its framework, only better. In addition, in the American case, American exceptionalism was operative. According to this mythical way of seeing things, a second revolution was unthinkable because the American Constitution was an inherited act of revolutionary virtue that had broken with history, stood outside history, and was the condition of existence of the USA. As previously in the Roman case, so, too, in this case: history writing has been compliant with the revolutionaries. (A book published in 1935, E. T. Colton's Four Patterns of Revolution: Communist U.S.S.R., Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, New Deal America, has remained a curiosity of its time.) 1
1 For some earlier 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.
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 them. This process was part of, or derived from, the Second American Revolution. The rulers worked 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 a 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 incipiently "totalitarian", in the original and basic meaning of that word. 2
2. 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, a liberal-democratic exceptionalism derived from American 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 authoritarian states which did likewise.
When twelve New Deal measures were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, Roosevelt threatened to appoint extra judges who would approve them. Eventually, with the help of left-liberal judges appointed to fill vacancies, 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 necessitated by the war against Germany and Japan, defeated those two rivals for world supremacy. 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.
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 rule 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. All in all, their programme reflected active or latent impulses and desires, and the sense of right order, of a substantial number of people in the USA and Europe.
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 doctrines, conservative opposition prevented further practical progress. The breakthrough came, and the revolution entered its culminating phase, when in the 1960s and early 1970s the US government and manufacturing industry needed 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; paying the rising costs of war in Vietnam; and funding the social welfare programmes of the "War on Poverty". In the early 1970s computers and automation began to increase industrial productivity in excess of market demand. First government, then also manufacturing industry, perceived in the unfulfilled parts of the liberal agenda the means of increasing consumption.
From the 1960s, the American state began endorsing that agenda selectively through Supreme Court rulings, by legislation, and administratively. Under the liberal President, Lyndon Johnson, the revolution celebrated its carnival. The state's "soft" totalitarian quality increased greatly as it imposed new norms of virtuous thought, speech and behaviour on individuals and families, and on educators and employers. Prominent universities played a supporting role. 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.
Vigorous campus campaigns against the values and historical exponents of "western white civilisation" continued into the Nixon 70s. 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.
The emergence of this secular teaching authority 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 American exceptionalism, extended to include close allies with similar constitutions, excluded that anything characteristic of non-liberal-democratic states could be replicated in the US or in other liberal democracies. So a clash occurred between theory and reality: an informal equivalent of the teaching ‘Party' did in fact come into being in the US, and later spawned 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, speech 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, selectively, 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 saw opportunities for profit in 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 an adjunct to 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 contemporaries called "consumerism".
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 m ilitary technology, by its offshoots, supplied a never-ending array of new, empowering tools t o 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 and medical care.
Thus mass consumption, material and sexual, became, depending on how one saw it, either of two things. It was the modern equivalent of medieval mass labour in the fields. Or it was the enjoyment by the masses, with a good conscience, of sensual satisfactions such as had once been exclusive to princes, and of physical abilities much greater than those princes had possessed. One way or another, mass consumption, together with the instigation, nourishment and exploitation of it under both forms, constituted the main motor of the economy, society and the state.
Powerful as instigation was the Correctorate's promise that by thinking and 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, the West's consumerism of the late twentieth century was 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.
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. They were using the word liberals , not in the old British Liberal sense, but in that new small-l 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 mass media spearheaded the new rules; 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 multi-party parliaments and in society generally, the latter secured conformity mainly 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 or hounding, or effective silencing, to dissident groups and individuals in parliaments and in civil society, and to dissident writings and speeches.
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 and 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 ensured that Community directives 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, was that a collection of non-western rules, combined with some surviving western rules, became 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.
3
For a post-European rules system to enduringly replace that of European civilisation, it would need to make lasting sense to the great majority of westerners, as the European rules system had for many centuries so evidently done. In other words, it would need to be a new civilisation. The post-European collection of rules that by the 1990s had come to hold sway in the West did not constitute a new civilisation: it did not and could not make sense to the human collective it was presented to for adoption.
Thrown together by a late-European ideological sect and its supporting governments, to promote justice, virtue, consumption and power, its sponsors treated overall sense as superfluous. Leaving aside the chaos of its values, the absence of sense was immediately evident at the level of the rules. Indeed, by the simple fact that these did not present a grounded hierarchy covering all of life they could not make sense as a framework for living. For a start, they lacked 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.
Floating therefore unanchored, assembled piecemeal over several decades, the new rules comprised 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 predominated. They were 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 was indicated as between don't kill civilians with non - government-sponsored 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, present women as sex-objects or prevent them aborting offspring, or restrict what adults read, view, say, write or think; and don't, if a man, hit your wife or pursue a female in the office.
Leave aside the contradictions in that sample. Because the consumers did not have available a grounded exposition by the Correctorate of which of these incorrectnesses was gravely, less gravely or only somewhat incorrect, they had perforce to try to gauge this from the Correctorate's reactions or non-reactions to incorrectnesses as they occurred. And the teaching thus delivered was bafflingly dual. On the one hand, it was to the effect that all behaviours or thoughts forbidden by the Correctorate were, for a variety of variously grounded reasons, very grave. On the other hand, the same teaching indicated—read the contemporary newspapers—that the gravity of many incorrectnesses was greater, lesser or cancelled, depending on who committed them or why; or if there were victims, on which nation, creed, party or sex they belonged to. Inevitably, the conclusion drawn by the consumers was that all the Correctorate's don't rules were of more or less equal importance, and were 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 was special, note the particular array of unranked obligations that fell on them if their behaviour was to be correct. Widely broadcast do's of equal imperativeness exhorted 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 operated alongside the do's and don'ts were ‘virtual' in the sense that the positive rules they contained were so minimal as to leave caprice or desire substantially in command. In the Correctorate's teaching, virtual do-as-you-likes operated 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 , utterances about Catholics, Germans or other non-protected human species, and for relations with the supernatural on condition that they did not impinge on the body politic. A special do-as-you-like applied 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 had been subjected to strict and intelligibly grounded rules. The Correctorate's rule ran as follows: provided that minors and adults used their reproductive organs separately, that if more than one user was involved there was mutual consent, and that a condom was employed unless conception was intended, do as you like in private or, in public, to gratify a paying audience.
Reactions to the senselessness
It was not simply that this chaos of rules could be seen on examination not to make sense. It was also experienced as senselessness by those to whom its white western sponsors presented it as a life framework, namely, in the first instance, white westerners. For the most part, they experienced it as senselessness unreflectively, in that depth of their being where countless generations of human beings before them had trained them 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 their minds and hearts were seeking sense, sent distress pressing into their consciousness. To be precise, white westerners found that consciousness of the rules-to-live-by that were presented to them was accompanied by a pain of soul – a hunger for sense and a feeling of offence that it was not being provided. Nothing more natural, then, than that they should want, as individuals, to annul that pain and, collectively, feel little desire to reproduce that 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 them practised various methods of annulling the pain. Some of them, females more often than males, did 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 sought the desired annulment, recurrently, through a temporary or partial annihilation of consciousness. Recurrently, they did this through drunkenness or drugs 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, as we know well in Ireland, they increasingly opted for annihilating consciousness permanently; if female, often irresolutely and unsuccessfully, if male, usually with full resolution and success.
Monthly, from Afghanistan, Columbia, Mexico and other producing countries, tons of mood-altering and hallucinating drugs arrived to dull the West's pain. Used by some young people, but mainly by their more affluent elders—they were illegal and therefore dear to buy—these, along with alcohol and self-immersion for long periods in mind-numbing work, served when an acquired ability to ignore the pain proved insufficient.
To these manifold efforts of self-help were added two phenomena characteristic of the age: an unprecedented profusion of professionals of various ilk offering to cure or alleviate psychic distress, and massive production by the pharmaceutical industry of medicaments with a similar purpose. Those were the years in the history of Europe when women stopped singing as they went about their housework, and boys stopped whistling in the street.
Senselessness thwarting reproduction
When people encounter in their collective life a famine of sense, 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. In the latter decades of the twentieth century the fertility of white westerners fell increasingly beneath this. In the USA in the early 2000s the rate was 1.8 and the government forecast that white people would be a minority there by 2042. For the European Union the fertility rate was 1.5 (for Ireland 1.85), and several of the larger European countries were expecting sharp declines in population in the next twenty-five years.
The demographic situation of the white West repeated that of Russia in the latter decades of the Soviet Union. There, the utopian rule-changing in the first half of the twentieth century differed from the later western experiment only in that it was Marxist-Leninist. During those final Soviet years, while rampant vodka addiction was lowering Russian male life expectancy, Russians noted with dismay an increasing fall in their fertility rate in contrast to that of the Union's Asian republics. In the foreseeable future they would be a minority in the Union.
Perhaps the best known instance of senselessness producing a collective will not to reproduce is the so-called ‘primitive tribe' after the disruption of its rules system by Europeans had robbed its collective life of sense. (Significantly, by the early 2000s, among the ethnic groups in the USA, the only fertility rate lower than that of white people was that of the American "Indians".) For any human collective, small or large, it simply does not make sense to reproduce a collective life whose proffered framework for living fails to do that. What seems, rather, to make sense is a protracted collective suicide.
Innate in human beings as in other animals is an overriding imperative to reproduce the species. Consequently, in a framework for living presented to a human group, the key element in determining whether it makes sense to them or not is the cluster of rules relating to collective reproduction: that is, to the conception and birth of children and their cared-for raising to adulthood. If that cluster of rules seems to privilege the fulfilment of that imperative, as the relevant cluster most evidently did in European civilisation, the presented framework as a whole stands a good chance of making sense. But if that core of the rules system seems unfavourable to reproduction, as it does in the consumerist-liberal collection of rules, then, a priori, t he entire framework fails the test of sense.
The consumerist-liberal rule changes in this core area of the rules sufficed of themselves to launch the Great White Tribe into a protracted suicide. But the ideological outgrowths from those changes made the disheartening message clearer still. Out of the simple decriminalisation of homosexuality had grown an aggressive celebration of it; out of the decriminalisation of abortion, an imperious assertion that its legal availability was a necessary characteristic of a good society and that it was a good thing if a woman chose it; out of the opening to women of careers previously closed to them, had grown public celebration of any kind of female achievement or public service except that of good motherhood; and out of the ending of legal preferments and privileges for men had issued a downgrading of fathers. Add that the ending of social disapproval of sexual intercourse outside marriage had metamorphosed into the ubiquitous representation of sex as primarily a recreational activity, normally performed with a contraceptive.
Consumerism's ersatz sense
The system had an effective means of countering, if not the famine of sense, then the conscious impact of the hunger pain. As a result, most westerners most of the time managed to suppress consciousness of it. On top of the training they had inherited from the generations before them in assessing for sense the life presented to them, another skin-deep training was now superimposed. From tender years onwards, the consumerist economy, and the Correctorate's teaching, conditioned them to accept an ersatz sense in place of the real sense they craved for.
This substitute sense was provided, fundamentally, by the continuously increasing power to buy things and to do things which the consumerist economy supplied to individual consumers as well as to states and business firms. The persuasive force of this increasing power to buy and do was actualised for the consumers in two interlocked ways. Repeatedly it enabled them to acquire more, bigger or costlier things, and these included the powers of new tools that enabled them to do more things than they previously could. Among the many secondary powers thus conferred on consumers were the ability to pause a television programme while answering the phone, to use cellular phones for many things besides phoning, to fly through the air to a holiday resort and to live lives increasingly longer than those of their ancestors.
While such benefits, in the eyes of most people, gave material sense to the life on offer, a central message of the Correctorate's teaching furnished it, for some, with moral sense. This message, constantly repeated, told them that those who thought and lived in accordance with the Correctorate's rules lived a freer, more just and kinder life than the western generations that had preceded them and than all the other peoples that had inhabited, or that now inhabited, the planet.
The net result was that most consumers, most of the time, believed in the surface of their minds that this current life of westerners was a good life. "Stress", everyone recognised, stress of body and soul, regularly accompanied the living of it. But stress with recurrent depression, most westerners resignedly accepted, was an inevitable condition of living a life which despite all—despite even its moments of clear, shocking vision—was a good life.
As the new millennium arrived
As the new millennium arrived, that was the situation. For as long as the power to buy and do of governments and consumers kept increasing, and the teaching that this new western life was morally the best life ever, continued to have force for some, the West's post-European system would continue to function. Dating its launch from that first, momentous rule change of 1945, it still had some years to go before it would match the life span of its more conservatively post-western Soviet counterpart. That the American system could last as long as did its former antagonist seemed possible. That it could endure much longer was excluded by the extreme fragility of its life-support mechanism.
Inevitably, within a matter of years, there would be an end to the continuous increase of the power to buy and do, and with that the main source of the system's ersatz sense and social glue would vanish . Ipso facto, its vaunted moral superiority would become an irrelevant twaddle. Nothing would then remain to prevent the direct and continuous impact of its senselessness on the consciousness of westerners, nor to make the system's senseless and unloved life framework seem a good life. Bereft of its life-support mechanism, the chaos of its values and rules would translate into violent social chaos and disintegration.
Addendum a hundred years from now. What was inevitable happened. With that the final episode in the staggered and war-filled end of European civilisation concluded. That end had begun with the rejection and replacement of European civilisation by the Russian Revolution. The fact that this operation was soon followed by the Nazi German and American left-liberal rejections, and that the latter was democratically supported by millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic, indicated a shared conviction among twentieth-century Europeans, in Europe and overseas. It was a conviction that the civilisation which their ancestors had created, and which had enabled them to dominate and lead the world, had exhausted its usefulness and required replacement. The two replacements, Russian and American, which lasted through several generations failed because neither of them provided the only adequate substitute: a new civilisation. Instead, they offered constructions fashioned by the pursuit of unlimited power and perfect justice, which the peoples subconsciously found senseless. So it was that, in the historical succession of great civilisations, Europe's followed Rome's and ended.
