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From early in 2007 until the beginning of 2009 I was working on an essay that would sum up my developing understanding of the recent history and present situation of the western world. In 2007 I published an early version of it in Church and State (Cork) Nos. 92, 93, under the title ‘The Second American Revolution and the Sense Problem in the West.' My book published in 2009 by Athol Books, Ireland After the End of Western Civilisation, opens with a later version of it written in May 2008. But the version I regard as definitive was written later that year, and delivered as a paper to Cork University History Seminar in January 2009. That, with some minor additions, is the version I present below. Its principal difference from the earlier versions is that it relates the story of the West from the 1930s to these first years of the new millennium entirely in the past tense; that is, as I believe the history of these times will be written, more or less, when this present age is past.
Introduction
The prevalent understanding of the recent and contemporary history of the West contains three serious errors. In the first place, we have believed that some of the chief collective actors in this western age—specifically, the Americans and their close allies—have, because of the moral quality of their form of government, and of their intentions and behaviour, not been made up of the standard human mix. Furthermore, we have believed that these chief actors have not tended to act either in ways characteristic of the age, or in ways that have precedents in past history. Rather than leave these three implausible beliefs to future historians to correct, I have disbelieved them and, in their absence, taken a fresh look at the history of the West in the last eighty years.
As a result, I argue:
first, that the most important event in this period was the decision of the West's rulers, led by the USA, to replace the rules system of European civilisation with a new collection of rules;
second, that this paralleled similar actions earlier, led by Soviet Russia in eastern Europe and performed by the National Socialists in Germany;
third, that unlike European civilisation and all civilisations, the new framework for life that was presented to westerners did not make sense to them, thereby causing them intellectual offence, spiritual pain, and an increasing refusal to reproduce themselves;
fourth, that this senseless system was saved from breakdown into chaos only by the constant increase in the power to buy things and do things which it provided.
To understand how all this has indeed been the case, it is necessary to recognise the fact, context and nature of the Second American Revolution.
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 since then are clarified. In particular, light is thrown on an unintended result of that American revolution: the pervasive senselessness of western life that was made bearable only 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 revolution was unthinkable because the American Constitution was an inherited act of collective 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.)
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 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. No previous European revolution had enduringly established 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. Together they 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 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 live—remains. In order to have a clear view of what its departure from European civilisation amounted to, it is useful to recall what a civilisation is, and western civilisation in particular.1
1. 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
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 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.
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.
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. 2
2. When the word emerged in Mussolini's Italy in the 1920s, it denoted 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, those became common features of all western states. But American exceptionalism, extending its exceptional collective virtue to embrace allies with similar constitutions, denied with imperative effect that anything characteristic of non-liberal-democratic states could be replicated in liberal democracies. So while the liberal democracies engaged in ‘totalitarian' practice, they reserved the t- word for non-liberal-democratic states that 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, 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.
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 the active or latent impulses and desires, and the sense of right order, of a substantial number of people in the USA and Europe.
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, 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 computers and automation, 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 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 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.
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 another 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 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 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 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—the contemporary equivalent of medieval mass labour in the fields, or the enjoyment with a good conscience of sensual satisfactions such as had once been exclusive to princes, and physical abilities much greater than those princes had possessed. The upshot: together with the instigation, nourishment and exploitation of it under both forms, consumption 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, consumerism 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. 3
3. 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 be built..
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 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 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, 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-European rules, combined with some surviving European 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.
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…
Throughout the history of European civilisation many projects had been prepared by individuals, and many attempts made by groups, to replace the reigning system of rules. The first substantial attempt was that of the Cathars, in several parts of Europe, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The last notable efforts before the twentieth century were by the Jacobins during the French Revolution, and by the Parisian and other French Communards in 1871. It has been reckoned that in the course of the nineteenth century roughly four thousand individuals in Paris alone formulated projects for a fundamental reordering of how society operated, with quite a number of them managing to mobilise bands of followers.
The recurrent objective of such enterprises was a rules system which would, on the one hand, be more in accord with reality, and, on the other, better satisfy the needs, and realise the just impulses and desires, of human beings or of some section of them. By the twentieth century it had become evident that the only way to attempt this with any real hope of success was to acquire the power and resources, or at least the backing, of an existing large and powerful state. Better still, if, as in the case of the Christians in the Roman Empire and the left liberals in the USA, the lawful rulers of that state could be brought to realise that the proposed remaking of the rules would serve their interests.
However, for a post-European rules system to really replace that of European civilisation, it would need to make lasting sense to the great majority of westerners, as the European rules system had so effectively and 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. Its rules system constituted, like that of its Soviet counterpart, a theoretical experiment not shaped into sense by combined human instinct, reason and experience. The result was inevitable. Serving as the framework of a wealthy, senseless, state-liberal system, it was life-thwarting; and when the growing money force that held it in being stopped growing, it would prove disastrous.
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.
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 - 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 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 , and relations with the supernatural insofar as these were not declared absurd. 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 has 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.
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 to them. Nothing more natural, then, than that they should want, as individuals, to annul that pain and, collectively, have 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 annihilation of consciousness. Recurrently, 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 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 better-off elders—they were dear to buy—these, along with alcohol and self-immersion for long periods in mind-numbing work, served those elders 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 the West when women stopped singing as they went about their housework, and boys stopped whistling in the street.
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 second half of the century the fer tility 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 last 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.
But perhaps the best known instance of senselessness producing a collective will not to reproduce was the so-called ‘primitive tribe' after a disruptive intrusion 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 Red 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.
While the impulse of the Great White Tribe in this direction was driven by the general non-sense of the rules system, it was particularly driven by that crucial core of it that related directly to human reproduction. Or rather, more specifically, it was driven by the ideological outgrowths from the rule changes in that core .
Out of the simple decriminalisation of homosexuality had grown an aggressive celebration of it; out of the decriminalisation of abortion had grown an imperious assertion that its legal availability was an intrinsic 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; out of the ending of various legal preferments and privileges of men with respect to women had grown a downgrading of the role of men as fathers; and out of the ending of social condemnation of sexual intercourse outside marriage had grown a heroicisation of the single mother and the ubiquitous representation of sex as primarily a superlative recreational activity.
In combination these outgrowths of core rule changes affronted, subconsciously, the instinctual imperative drive of the White Tribe, as of all tribes and of the human species, towards self-reproduction and the careful rearing of children to adulthood. A public discourse and behaviour that seemed biased against that could not make sense to human beings.
Most of the time most westerners, in their workaday lives, managed to suppress consciousness of the hunger pain. 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 its accompanying 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 could previously. 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, 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, that was the situation. It seemed likely that, for as long as the buying and doing power of governments and consumers continued to increase, and the teaching that this new western life was morally the best life ever known continued to have force for some, the West's senseless 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.
Its necessarily finite duration was determined by the transient nature of the two factors which, by supplying its ersatz sense, enabled it to exist. Ultimately, for one reason or another, the continuous increase of the collective and individual power to buy and do—which provided both its main ersatz sense and its social glue—would cease. And ipso facto its vaunted moral superiority would become an irrelevant twaddle. Nothing would then remain to prevent direct and continuous impact of its senselessness on the consciousness of westerners, young and old, or to make the system's senseless and unloved life framework seem a good life. Inevitably then, with no respected set of rules to fall back on as a matrix of order in the reduced material circumstances, the chaos of the prevailing values and rules would explode into a violent social chaos with few precedents in history.
That was the situation in the first years of the new millennium and of necessity I cannot carry the story further. It remains only to say a word about its consequences for contemporary historians, and a word about the West's foreseeable future.
For contemporary historians the most fruitful element of this recognition of the Second American Revolution, its context and its effects, is likely to be the recognition of its context: the fact that it was one of three more or less simultaneous efforts by Europeans—Russians, Germans and Americans—to found, in place of European civilisation, another, more empowering rules system. Viewed together, those three efforts, supported by millions of people, indicated a strong conviction among twentieth-century Europeans, in Europe and overseas, that the civilisation which their ancestors had created, and which had 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.
With regard to other matters recounted here—the post-European socio-ethical experiment of American design; the emergence and empowerment of the Correctorate; the resulting sense famine; and how that was made bearable for a time—present-day historians of the West are faced with a choice. They can include these matters in their narrative, or, for the sake of a quiet life, leave it to a future generation of historians to do so.
As to the future course of events in the West, such is the human hunger for sense in life that it will inevitably lead to a new, post-European civilisation; or perhaps to two such civilisations, one on either side of the Atlantic. For us Europeans what will concern us—what should begin to concern us already now—is the post-European civilisation of our continent, or at least of that western part of it which has had a distinctive and coherent history and identity.
It is in the nature of civilisations that they require, for a start, a local, pioneering leadership that is both intellectual and practical. I have sketched elsewhere 4 how the tabula rasa that has replaced our inherited Irish culture makes Ireland an advantaged place to launch what, in present circumstances, would be the progressive movement par excellence . Once before, amid the shambles of Roman civilisation in the West, we Irish were in the forefront of founding its successor civilisation. Now amid the shards of our national culture, and the shambles of European civilisation, there is no more apt candidate for providing such founding leadership again. For a start, let a few of us consider the available resources, and imagine, and think.
4. ‘Ireland's Call' in Ireland After the End of Western Civilisation , Belfast: Athol Books, 2009, pp.27-29
