Pod People

Is the mediocracy concept just a catch-all for the things I dislike about modern society, as someone once suggested? Certainly not. (I shall elaborate in a future post.) And does the Mediocracy book have "an unfinished feel", as an otherwise complimentary reviewer on Amazon alleged? Possibly. It is an original theory, and in some ways I was still working through the ideas of it when I wrote the book. It may not be structured in terms of Proposition 1.2003, Corollary B4 etc, but not everything is suited to a Tractatus-style delivery. (Arguably nothing, not even philosophy, is suited to the style of the Tractatus, except perhaps modern pseudo-economics.)

Shame on the British intelligentsia for not giving the book a hearing, considering the miles of column space devoted to something as facile and predictable as The God Delusion.* Regardless of whether or not one is impressed by my mildly tongue-in-cheek theory, it might at least have been shown polite interest. Is it too satirical to be considered as bona fide cultural analysis? But plenty of books with the words s**t or c**p in the title receive serious literary attention these days.

Brickbats go in particular to the right-wing intelligentsia — what there is of it — in view of the fact that the book's critique of the dominant il-liberal ideology seems to put it in a right-wing pigeonhole as far as most people are concerned. Even if my book were (for the sake of argument) merely mediocre, there are plenty of mediocre books of the 'right-wing' variety which do get review space. Damian Thompson's Counterknowledge — which seemed to say precious little of substance that hadn't been said before — comes to mind.

Of course, the failure of the intellectual Right to take on board the work of figures outside the establishment is symptomatic of a larger malaise. The Right has lost the culture war, as a blog (now defunct) associated with the Dale blogocracy used to assert. This means the political Right has two credible options: (1) fight the cultural elite, as the Thatcherites did (this is likely to have only short term success at best, particularly by now, since the cultural elite can easily launch a successful counteroffensive for hearts and minds) or (2) be prepared to embrace ideological dissidents. The latter, after fifty years of 'liberal' hegemony, are likely to be socially positioned well away from the centres of cultural power. So it's not much good scratching around for support from the one or two established economics, philosophy or education professors who are still prepared to express scepticism about state intervention. That's a bit like looking for pop stars willing to openly back conservatism. You have to accept you are cultural outsiders and work with that — after all, the Left had to do it for several decades in the first half of the twentieth century. This, however, the Right seems unwilling to do.

The only other option, and the one currently being pursued, is the Pod People strategy:

“They ['Conservatism'] would replace the dominant species [socialism] by spawning emotionless replicas; the original bodies [Labour politicians] would then disintegrate into dust once the duplication process was completed.”

Even assuming this strategy could be successful, it is not very attractive to voters who have no great affection for the state. Unless there is some kind of reverse metamorphosis after the acquisition of power — which would make the Tories seem dishonest and untrustworthy — we are going to end up with a situation that is worse, not better. There will no longer be any anti-statist rhetoric, except perhaps from parties which currently take no more than 5% of the national vote and which are thoroughly marginalised by the mainstream media.

Note 1
As in the case of The Lord of the Rings, a lot of nonsense has been written about the supposed symbolism underlying the Invasion movie. LOTR is supposed to be about Christianity, Invasion about Cold War paranoia and/or McCarthyism. This has always struck me as false. Lead actor Kevin McCarthy agrees, saying in an interview on the DVD that no political allegory was intended. (Yes I know he is an actor, but even Hollywood stars were less dumbed down in the 50s.) Personally, I have always felt the movie to be a reflection on conformity, and on the way many people will adapt their views to fit with whatever will get them on most comfortably, even when their new views appear incompatible with what they previously professed to believe in.

Note 2
You may observe I am breaking a social taboo in daring to complain about being ignored. However, modesty is a privilege reserved for those with established careers. I would love to be able to exercise it, but regretfully cannot. To misquote Bette Davis: dissidence is not a place for sissies.

* I believe I am not the only one to have such sentiments.
** Still from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956) via InfiniteCoolness.com.

The meaning of mediocracy (part 4)

further to part 3

The key characteristics of culture in a mediocracy are grimness, boredom and dishonesty. Mediocracy’s high culture is depressing, vacuous and pretentious. Its popular culture is ugly, aggressive and degraded.

If cultural deterioration is acknowledged in a mediocracy, it is blamed on marketisation. The implication is that cultural products are somehow traded more than they used to be, which is specious. Culture has always been bought and sold, and would not get produced at all without someone to pay for it.

What is different about a mediocratic market for culture is that purchasing power is in the hands of the mass consumer and the state, rather than those of a small elite. The characteristics of the prevailing culture will therefore reflect the tastes of the mass, and the ideological preferences of the political class, rather than the tastes of the bourgeoisie. This point — that it is empowerment of the mass and of the collective which drives cultural change in a mediocracy — is ideologically unpalatable and therefore suppressed. It is more convenient to blame the market, especially as this can be used to justify intervention.

One way to think about culture in a mediocracy is to consider the mediocratic demand that everything should be determined collectively. It is clear that much of the cultural landscape society inherited was not the result of collective deliberations, but of individual decisions facilitated by unequal distributions of resources. In other words, from the collective’s point of view, our cultural progress was accidental and unintentional.

Once we move to a more egalitarian model, the question arises, what is it that the collective wants? One could postulate that it simply wants more of the cultural products it now takes for granted, and only needs to make up its mind how to get them. (Do we need to have markets? Must we allow inequality? How much inequality?) But mediocracy may be easier to understand if we adopt the hypothesis that the collective does not care particularly about culture, and is prepared to sacrifice it for the sake of the 'ethical' goal of re-subordinating the individual to society.

The meaning of mediocracy (part 3)

further to part 2

A mediocracy appears to be post-everything. Its citizens have seen it all and done it all. They know that everything is taped, that everything has been explained and reduced. There are no important mysteries left. There are no principles worth fighting for. All has been deconstructed and demystified.

This sense of total scepticism is however somewhat illusory. Mediocracy may appear to favour debunking, but it is a highly selective debunking. There are many things which the citizens of a mediocracy are not sceptical of, but dogmatically accept. They believe that science explains rather than merely predicts, and that it is the only thing that does; that state education is a good idea; that everyone is driven by sex; that less inequality is better than more; that redistribution is morally admirable; that belief in national superiority is bad.

On the other hand, there is a sense in which nothing is really important enough in a mediocracy to be taken seriously. Everything is flexible, contingent, subject to expediency. A moral injunction may seem unshakeable — e.g. one must never be rude about other races, or treat women like chattels — but one should not be surprised if blatant transgressions, in a suitable context, are tolerated with equanimity. It is all part of the mediocratic message: society is free to forbid or allow as arbitrarily as it pleases; the individual’s role is not to question but to obey.

The tolerance of double standards is crucial to mediocracy. Much of its ideology conflicts so blatantly with common sense that the mass cheerfully ignores it, or pays it no more than lip service. The fact that the mass does not take up the received wisdom with the ideal level of enthusiasm is accepted as unavoidable. Members of the intelligentsia, on the other hand, are required to (and do) take mediocratic ideology very seriously indeed. If they fail to, they are liable to find themselves ejected from their positions and their livelihoods threatened. This suggests that it is primarily the intelligentsia at whom the ideology is targeted.

The meaning of mediocracy

Recently Mencius Moldbug reviewed the Mediocracy book, and generated some interesting discussion. One issue raised concerned the question of what is meant by ‘mediocracy’? What is the common theme running through my criticisms of authoritarianism, jargonisation and postmodern vacuity? Is it the Orwellian one of redefining language? And what is the cure, if any, for mediocratic culture?

Big questions, and ones which I didn’t attempt to draw out in the book, because I wanted to keep it short and punchy. I shall try to answer some of them in future posts. Meanwhile, here is the first part of an unpublished section of the book which I thought at one point of using as an introduction. Further instalments to follow.

There is a new model of society. Let us call it mediocracy, as in: the rule of the mediocre, the triumph of style over substance.

In a mediocracy, real cultural progress is impossible because it requires conditions that are incompatible with a commitment to egalitarianism. There is no room for genuine cultural innovators, because one cannot permit any individual to think they are special. Nevertheless, mediocracy maintains a cultural elite, to validate its ersatz culture and to protect it from criticism.

A mediocracy lives off the cultural capital accumulated in the past, perpetually recycling the old products, though with increasing mockery. The illusion of cultural fitness is maintained by having institutions with the same names as the old ones (‘universities’, ‘philosophy’, ‘theatre’) and some resemblance to the originals.

Mediocracy is not concerned with the quality or content of culture, but it does care to some extent about appearances. It is not interested in having genuine art, or real education, but it wants to be able to say "we have art" and "there is lots of education". Its aim is to redefine existing activities to the point where it becomes impossible to complain that they no longer exist.

Mediocracy has two approaches to transforming culture. Dumbing down involves coarsening and trivialising output to the point where it becomes stupefying rather than enlightening. Sexing up involves wrapping up the trivial and vacuous in jargon and technique, in order to render it sufficiently opaque for its vacuity to be concealed. Often both qualities are combined, resulting in a low-grade product with a veneer of esoteric complexity.

The complete version of this article can be read here.

Today's reading: "rights"

What is a "right"? Are there natural rights? Are any rights inalienable? You can argue till the cows come home, with little likelihood of generating useful insights.

I think the concept is best seen as an instrument of conflict between competing sources of power. In particular, the meaning of 'rights' at a given time represents the ideological position at that time on the issue of state-versus-individual. When we had absolutism, talk was of the absolute rights of the state (monarch). As civil liberties developed during eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the language of 'rights' was increasingly used to express the idea that each individual has their own territory or area of sovereignty.

In the twentieth century, the concept swung back towards expressing the claims of the collective (in effect, the state) on individuals. In some cases, spurious terms such as 'Volk' or 'proletariat' were used to denote the collective.

We see this swing continuing today under Blairism, a philosophy which — for all the criticism directed at it by now from every corner — can readily be interpreted as an ideal expression of the prevailing Zeitgeist. The idea that the individual has a claim to be left alone by society (e.g. to smoke, or to eat supposedly unhealthy foods) has become, it appears, outmoded.



Other takes:
Stumbling & Mumbling: "Rights, if they are to be meaningful, are not merely something that governments grant to people through legislation. They have moral force ..."
Westminster Wisdom: "Often it strikes me that most who use the term and ferociously argue about it have different definitions of the word, right, but because no one defines that term, persist in thinking that they should agree and can't really work out why they do disagree."
Chris Dillow (commenting on WW): "What you say of rights is true of other categories - justice, liberty and efficiency. Incoherence afflicts almost all popular thinking about moral and political philosophy. ... MacIntyre said it was because we have inherited multiple, conflicting traditions - a sociological fact as much as a philosophical one."

Today's reading

... is on the subject of reductionism as applied to human beings. I.e. having a model of the individual as a somewhat deluded robot. (Question for the gifted* — which current television documentary series draws on this theme?)

from Mediocracy: Inversions and Deceptions in an Egalitarian Culture (p.100)



* The "gifted", according to a recent government definition, are the top ten per cent of the population.

Tory inspiration

Sometimes life can be quite baffling.

Using a lead provided by Shades of Grey, I have pieced together the following interesting timeline. It relates to the Orange incident from last August, which readers may recall. Although I was vaguely aware of the hoo-ha, I was on holiday, and not as in focus on the blogosphere as I am now, so didn’t gather the full details at the time.

I simply present the data and let readers make of it what they will.

March 06 – Simon Heffer, along with a number of other writers, is sent a sample of Mediocracy with an invitation to comment. He doesn’t reply. May 06 – On the recommendations of the book’s distributor and one of the book’s puffers, a colleague at Oxford Forum contacts Heffer at the Telegraph with a view to F.T. writing an article on the subject of the forthcoming book. She manages to speak to Heffer’s PA, who makes fobbing-off noises. early June 06 – Heffer is invited to the launch party for Mediocracy at the Oxford & Cambridge Club in London with Guest of Honour Frederick Forsyth. He doesn't reply. mid-June 06 – Review copies of the book are sent to British broadsheets and highbrow magazines, including the Telegraph and the Spectator. 4 July 06 – Mediocracy is published. The book is in part a “Devil’s Dictionary” of cultural terminology, focusing in particular on leftist-inspired distortion of words and concepts as employed in academia, politics and the arts. 26 July 06 – Heffer writes an article for the Telegraph in which he bemoans the need for someone to “write a book on the language of the Third Way, outlining the abuse of words (and with it the abuse of truth) that this administration has either implemented or condoned.” 2 August 06 – Claiming to be inspired by Heffer’s article, Tory supporter Inigo Wilson posts his “Lefty Lexicon” at ConservativeHome.com. Some of the entries are remarkably similar to those in Mediocracy. 17 August 06 – Inigo Wilson is suspended by his employer Orange. Not for lack of originality, but for the alleged “racism” of his definitions of “Islamophobia” and "Palestinian" (entries for which there are no parallels in Mediocracy).

Incidentally, neither the Telegraph nor the Spectator has reviewed the book, nor (as far as I'm aware) otherwise mentioned it. Ditto ConservativeHome.com, though at one stage last year a review was promised.

Surviving in a mediocracy (part 1)

This blog is an outgrowth of a book on contemporary culture entitled Mediocracy. Some have assumed the title signifies the standard right-wing complaint that “things ain’t what they used to be”. It’s more complicated than that. There’s a constellation of cultural phenomena which are linked, though the nature of the link isn’t obvious. Dumbing down is part of it, but also gobbledygook, as well as: obsession with appearance; aggressiveness as a behavioural norm; the idea that reality is socially constructed; the dismantling of civil liberties.

I speculated that there was a single connecting theme, associated particularly with ideologies such as Blairism but by no means confined to the Left. A kind of anti-individualism masquerading as egalitarian, and justifying itself by reference to notions of “democratisation” and “fairness”, though in fact no less elitist than rival philosophies. With a tendency to redefine cultural concepts, à la 1984, to suit ideological objectives. For want of a better word, I called the connecting theme “mediocracy”.

The full article can be read here.