Person-centred economics

 The word economy is etymologically related to the word Oeconomia in the Orthodox Church.  Oeconomia refers to the Church avoiding legalism out of love.  It is an allowance without compromising dogma.  Such an approach is very much in line with how Christ would school the Pharisees and Sadducees against their rigid legalism.  It seems strange then that this word should be related to the "dismal science" of economics, as Carlyle described it,  in the sense of theory about the wealth of nations.

What has happened to economics as a theory, all the way back to Adam Smith and Ricardo, was that it became about the generation of material wealth rather than the management of the household of the nation in which the person was placed at the centre.  In England and the rest of Great Britain industrialisation, free trade, division of labour did indeed lead to increasing wealth, but a diminished existence for many human beings.  While technology and wealth improved living standards in material terms, the spiritual life of the nation's families were much diminished.  

Theoretically the Marxist revolutions in the Russian and Chinese Empires were a reaction against capitalist industrialisation, but these countries' economies were only beginning down that road as they remained largely agrarian.  Marx's positivist dialectical materialism was proved false.  Nonetheless the Communist regimes were just as much about industrialisation and economic growth as capitalism.  

A crisis of capitalism occurred with the Wall Street crash in 1929  and the Great Depression of the thirties.  An alternative economics emerged with the so-called "Third Way", led in political terms by former Marxist Mussolini.  This was about freeing countries from the power of the banking sector and promoting the national interests rather than the interests of global capital.  With the rise of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust this alternative was seriously tarnished.  The Post-War Bretton Woods settlement saw the re-emergence of the power of the international banking sector, but tempered to allow a level of socialist mitigation of the full force of the market.  This system itself led to government debt causing inflation that soon seemed unsustainable,  A return to the economic orthodoxies of liberalism in the West re-emerged with President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher - paying off government debt, selling off state industries, free trade and de-regulated stock markets.

The neoliberal revolution led to a global economics, the strengthening of global corporations over sovereign nations, and open borders in terms of both trade and free movement of peoples.  An alternative form of liberal capitalism, aiming to ensure its long term survival emerged with the Clintons, Blair and the global institutions of the post war years and a newly invigorated World Economic Forum with the concept of stakeholder capitalism.  In domestic politics New Labour even adopted the name of the Fascists' economics - the Third Way,

Along with open borders, nudge manipulation, the political monitoring via ever-more sophisticated technology, a deep suspicion has emerged on the eclectic politics of the so-called Right, from libertarians to traditionalists.  This led to the election of Trump in the States and the vote by the UK to leave the European Union.  The vote from the people was for a more communitarian politics that protected national sovereignty, identity, culture and traditions.  In Britain the neoliberal Right has seized control of the meaning of Brexit as the UK becoming a Singapore of the West, with open borders, no national identity. and uprooting of community -  Britannia not a rescued maiden, but a whore open to all-comers.

In a sense we are no further on than we were with the Industrial Revolution and the end of the agrarian culture of our country.  There is a very simple reason for this - it is that economics for centuries has been centred on ideas other than the human person.  Economics has been about free trade, individualism, industrialisation, class conflict, economic growth; never has it considered the human person and his flourishing to be the key goal of economics.  Instead the person must be sacrificed for the cause of economic growth, whether in the free economy or the command economy.

Today as a result, we find people are replaced by artificial intelligence, economic demands cause brain drains in poor countries and the dilution and loss of cultural identity in first world countries through mass economic migration.  Everything follows the principle of economic growth, compound growth in fact.  As a result the person gets lost.

The person is not the same as an individual.  From the Latin for indivisible the individual is the unit of liberal economics and rational choice theory.  The person is by contrast relational and embedded and spiritual. Compound growth and open borders take no account of the meaning of what it is to be a person.  Industries disappear destabilising communities.  And most of all the all-pervasive focus on filthy lucre kills spirituality and rooted community.

 In 2016 both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, ironically capitalists through and through, seemed to touch on this.  Trump recognised that jobs flowing abroad and migrants flowing in was destabilising the identity of the nation necessary for the embeddedness of the human person.  Nigel Farage raised immigration frequently in the Brexit referendum because as he made clear identity is about more than economic growth.

Nonetheless, without the intellectual tradition you can only expect political leaders to go so far.  Yes Steve Bannon read Evola and Guenon, but there is a deeper and more Christian "Third Way".  It can be found in the writings of an economist like E F Schumacher, with his "Small is Beautiful" and " A Guide for the Perplexed" and even in the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII "Rerum Novarum" -1891.  It can also be found in the writings of G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who worked out the implications of the Papal encyclical.

Distributism was the theory and it was based around the idea of private ownership of small property, of a large enough size to ensure self reliance and independence.  Such an idea would terrify the banks and the capitalists of course, just as much as those socialists wanting to abolish private property and make everyone equal i.e. the same.

The point here is that, not being financed by big money, a good idea went to waste.  Distributism might not be the total answer, but the point was that it proposed making the human person, made in the image of God the centre of the economy, rather than growth, capital or even the proletariat.  

The idea did not fail because it was tried and failed, it was never tried, to misquote Chesterton himself.  The powerful banking interests in the West did not want such an idea to develop and had it ever reached Soviet Russia it would have been squashed.  That is because for all their superficial differences, Capitalism and Communism are creatures of the Enlightenment and they have forgotten that Man is made in the image of God and that Man not some other concept should be at the centre.

The Enlightenment itself was a project of vested interest.  Its hatred of the ancien regime was largely because the wealth on which the new thinkers lived was stolen from the Church during the Reformation.  There was a guilt that required them to destroy the ancien regime altogether and paint what had come before as benighted and savage.  Hence the name Enlightenment of course.

The core intellectual goal of the Enlightenment was to break Man down and disconnect him from his God.  Man became a unit for the liberal order that the Enlightenment led to.  For all its talk of the sanctity of the individual, he was an atomised thing and was to become the very victim of anomie that   Durkheim described.  When we lost our sense of the person as the image of God, we lost a sense of Man as relational, embedded with roots and looking up to the heavenly realm.  Without roots or telos men became mere workers, mere consumers, living under the enslavement not only of the boss or the bureaucrat, but his passions that the economic system fosters.

There is much talk of re-enchantment currently.  Hand in hand with that, if it succeeds, must come a new understanding of the economy as a person-centred system, not waylaid by other targets that diminish the human being who is a person and is made in the image of God.   

      

Burke versus Gramsci – the Great British Institution and the Conservative Dilemma

 Conservatives look to Edmund Burke as their great founding father.  Central to Burkean thought is the institution with its historical memory as a repository of the wisdom of the ancestors.  In terms of modern philosophy and the Burkean tradition one might also look to Alasdair MacIntyre in his account of institutions and nations acquiring a tradition of virtue and as a Burkean opponent of Burke’s dreaded sophists, economists and calculators .

If conservatism depends for its philosophy upon manmade institutions there is always the risk such institutions will prove fatally fallible and corruptible.  Such could well be the problem in today’s United Kingdom.  Unlike the United States with its revolutionary origins, there has not been such a strong suspicion of Government and institutions within the British Right, sometimes quite the opposite.  The Crown and the Church as Margaret Thatcher once outlined are of far greater import to a Tory than the economy.  This perspective, it should be remembered, was held by the Conservative Prime Minister now looked to as an exemplar by today’s sophists, calculators and economists – the libertarian and neoliberal Right.

Margaret Thatcher though experienced the problem of the dilemma I intend to outline at first-hand.  All the British institutions, the Church of England, the BBC and even the hierarchy of the Conservative Party were opposed to her.  This tension has only grown more stretched and extreme.  While the Conservative Party has moved culturally to the Left, it is still faced by a hostile hard Left in control of the institutions that it should naturally be at home with.

The Church of England is no longer the Conservative Party at prayer, as the saying had it.  The BBC is faced with calls to be defenestrated by conservatives not radicals, because of its cultural Marxism.  Even the Conservative Party itself, at least its high command, is now a proponent of the hard-left cultural agenda in terms of same-sex marriage, “diversity” and equality of outcome.

It seems as though the Gramsci agenda of the “long march through the institutions” as extreme Leftist German-activist Rudi Dutschke put it, has been emphatically achieved in Great Britain.  The universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, the BBC, the Church are all advocates of a hard-line cultural Marxist agenda dressed up in palatable phrases such as “diversity”, “equality”, “openness”.

So what does a Burkean conservative do when the institutions its whole philosophy seeks to conserve and be guided by have fallen into the hands of the Marxists?  One answer is the populist response, looking to the American Right as an example.  Here characters like Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks are notable champions for such an agenda.  Indeed, despite being placed upon the Right, their populist agenda sometimes puts them on the Left.  For example, whereas an earlier Eurosceptic like Enoch Powell was a keen defender of the House of Lords, as well as the Crown and the established Church, Farage and Banks are radical constitutional-reformers.

The other response is the classically liberal agenda, advocated by the sophists, calculators and economists that conservatives should instinctively distrust.  From this free-marketeer liberal perspective privatisation rather than conservation is the answer to the BBC’s political subversion.  The free market is not really a conservative response to dealing with preservation of the institution.  We are not talking about a nationalised industry, but a British institution which is a custodian of many great British traditions.  Would commercialisation and advertising culture really be a conservative answer?

One might contrast arch-liberal free-marketeer George Osborne with populist Nigel Farage as two contrasting answers to the Gramscian victory within British institutions from Oxbridge to the BBC.  To abolish our institutions though is surely not a conservative solution, whether it be BBC privatisation or Church disestablishment. 

The populism of Brexit might have unleashed patriotic forces against the Gramsci institutions, but populist nationalism is not inherently conservative, as any cursory knowledge of Nineteenth Century nationalism will tell us.

It is undoubtedly the case that while the Right and conservatism look to be in the ascendancy, the whole movement is riven by internal contradictions.  This new populism rightly unleashed against the EU has now turned on British institutions like the House of Lords (admittedly corrupted into a culturally Marxist institution by the likes of Blair, Cameron and Clegg).  It could just as easily turn upon the Monarchy and nationalism again would have reverted to its radical-Leftist Nineteenth-Century roots.

It has to be admitted that when the Marxists own and control what you are trying to defend it is difficult to know how to proceed.  The only answer I believe is not one for people looking for instant solutions.  Only a gradual return to the values of Tradition will rescue our institutions and our culture.  And this might have to be carried out in a radical and unconventional way, outside of the apparatus of British institutions.  It might mean home schooling of our children, to teach them traditional values outside of the Marxist-run education system.  It might mean leaving the Church of England as a Church of Laodicea for a more traditionalist denomination that might feel foreign at first, such as Eastern Orthodoxy.  It might mean stepping back from the rat-race of the neoliberal economy with more self-sufficiency and less consumption.  In short it might mean letting the light of conservative tradition shine before men as an example, rather than trying to fight for it and impose it through democratic elections and the party system.  From the small acorn and with Providential nurture we might see a large oak of conservative counter-culture grow that provides a genuine alternative to the anomie of cultural Marxism and its insipid shadow, neoliberalism.  Only with a cultural change, rather than election victories will conservatives see their institutions restored and again linked back to the Burkean wisdom of ancestors. 

CONSPIRACY TO SILENCE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS

Alex Jones of Infowars has been banned by the tech companies from most social media platforms.  Tommy Robinson, ( whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) the former leader of the EDL and a self-proclaimed campaigner for free speech and against Islamification of Britain (accused by many of simple agitation against Muslims), has been released from prison following his appeal heard before the Lord Chief Justice of England.

What both these political activists have in common is their repeated accusations that the establishment has a Left wing agenda.  These claims have landed them in very hot water.  Of course, it is possible to get bogged down in the legal argument about Tommy Robinson.  It is true that he is only released on bail and that he will have to face court again with regard to the contempt of court accusation.  Nonetheless it was found that his imprisonment was wrong and that the court acted in haste and disproportionately in sentencing him to a custodial sentence for contempt.

Many figures from Right and Left, including Nigel Farage, have suggested that Tommy Robinson went too far in broadcasting outside the court room where men (of Muslim background, which is significant to Tommy Robinson’s argument that the establishment turns a blind eye to Muslim crime) were being tried for the crime of grooming under-age indigenous girls for sex.  Tommy Robinson states he was careful only to read from a published BBC article still in the public domain on his live feed, but many have suggested he was jeopardising the prosecution of the accused.

Alex Jones is also a controversial figure, in particular with his comments on the Sandyhook massacre, for which the parents of the children murdered are suing him.  In his vociferous defence of the right to bear arms he suggested that the massacre might have been a hoax to support a campaign against guns.  Nonetheless, the social media platforms are relying on the vague concept of “hate speech” to remove him from their platforms. 

Of course it is important to understand the exact reasons why Alex Jones has been de-platformed and why Tommy Robinson was imprisoned, but looked at from a broader perspective it seems something very concerning is taking place.  It is something the public in general perceive, despite what they are told by the BBC or CNN – that because these men are on the Right they have been dealt with more harshly by the system.  In that sense what these two men say about the establishment, which might have looked like conspiracy theories before, is now looking more credible.

In the light of the over-reaction to Boris Johnson’s article in which he argued against banning the full-face-veil, yet is being attacked for Islamophobia for colourful comments, it seems a pattern is emerging.  The tension seems at first to be about free speech versus causing offence, but looked at more closely it is actually about protecting certain favoured groups from offence.  Whether it be transgender people, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, women or in this case Muslims, there is a special protection given to certain groups in accordance with a specific ideology that dominates the thinking of the Western universities from which our politicians and leaders emerge.  This is what many right-wing internet personalities describe as Cultural Marxism, by which the old Marxist analysis of the rich bourgeoisie having power over their victims the proletariat is replaced by a broader narrative of power and oppression.  Like the Marxists, these new ideologues do not look at people as individuals, but whether they belong to an oppressor or victim class.  For this reason there are no restrictions on causing offence to those in the oppressor class, which is why the general public is right to feel that there is one rule for them and another for us, so to speak.

This is a dangerous and destructive ideology that prevents integration and encourages feelings of resentment and entitlement.  Psychologically, as Dr. Jordan Peterson has made clear, one does far better in life if one takes responsibility for oneself, rather than sinks ever deeper into the resentment and disempowerment caused by such an ideology ( if you are a member of one of the groups classified as oppressed).  However, for the privileged elite who believe in this cultural-Marxist analysis, it has the great advantage of making them feel good and virtuous without the economic and other costs of a real Marxist revolution.

Yet, the recent events relating to Tommy Robinson and Alex Jones suggest this is slightly more sinister (and we do not have to agree with their conspiracy theories to be worried).  When you reduce your analysis of a society to a crude binary battle between oppressor and victim, in which all nuance, individual virtue and ideals are ignored, then that justifies the use of power against your political enemies, who are seen as the enemies of progress and by definition evil oppressors.

Therefore, we need to start to take seriously the possibility that due process and fairness will cease to matter to the powerful Cultural-Marxist Left because they are so sure they are on the side of right and progress.  For that reason, rules and laws may be used simply as tools to silence those perceived as reactionaries.

   

Because this ideology has solidified its view of who is in the oppressor and victim group, adherents are not able to comprehend the possibility that those who were once oppressors could be left behind.  This is why so little has been done about white working-class schoolboys falling behind in education.  It is also why the establishment cannot understand why someone like Tommy Robinson has achieved such a following.  Neither can they imagine that mass immigration could ever be negative on the poor, because any criticism of mass migration is an attack on a group classified as a victim group.

What all this means is that the apparent conspiracy theories advocated by Jones and Robinson are not necessarily crazy at all.  While their specific claims might be questionable, they have been shut down by the powerful.  It was their advocacy of such theories that led to their draconian treatment to a large extent.  They are right to suspect freedom of speech is being shut down, as evidenced by the hysterical reaction to Boris Johnson’s article on the niqab.  These are all consequences of the Manichean and simplistic yet sanctimonious belief-system dominant in our establishment.  Alex Jones and Tommy Robinson, whether you agree with them or not, are really victims of this new oxymoronic phenomenon of liberal totalitarianism. 

GLOBALISM TRUMPED?

After a long hiatus and many major political events having taken place I have decided to resume this 'blog.  This year is the centennial anniversary of both the end of the Great War and the regicide of the Tsar - two events that were to shape the next century in so many dreadful ways.  From the perspective of the English shires neither event brought much happiness.  The Great War drastically and tragically reduced the number of young men in the fields and was arguably the cause of the next cataclysm, the Second World War.  The Tsar's murder and the murder of the Empress, the Tsarevich and their daughters, made hard-line Socialism a real alternative that inspired some of the British Left's worst attacks on the English of the shires.

The Century went on to see rapid mechanisation of agriculture, the replacement of smallholders with agri-business, the mass shifting of women into the workplace, with all the implications for family, and a profound loss of confidence in faith and patriotism.  After the Second World War the move towards the abolition of the nation state by the powerful elite of Europe gathered momentum and became more formalised with the first steps towards a United Europe.  With National Socialism vanquished in the Second World War and International Socialism with the fall of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War, Fukuyama's End of History with the triumph of liberalism seemed to have been reached.  The secularist individual whose only guiding principle is choice has become the ubermensch, so contrary to the actual Nietzschean idea.

Yet this victory now seems hollow.  If the new liberal world can be seen as globalist and cosmopolitan, so that everyone is just an individual, not defined by culture, religion or nationality - a citizen of the world and therefore a citizen of nowhere to paraphrase the current (at the time of writing) Prime Minister - then human beings seem to be rebelling against this individualist, consumerist globalism.

And this rebellion is completely understandable, because we are more than consumers, more than individuals and life is about more than choice.  The effect on the English shires of this liberal globalism has been profound.  The high street has become a uniform entity from John o' Groats to Lands End.  Agricultural workers are cheaper migrant labour, and even more noticeably to most, retail and services have recruited from abroad, changing the fabric of small communities and the pressure to accommodate a massive influx of foreigners means the green and pleasant land young men went to die for a century ago is to be turned into housing.  Meanwhile a political class that has become absorbed into a globalist elite has no sensitivity or understanding of the impact of these issues, only able to think as it is, in terms of GDP and economic calculation.

Globalisation can certainly be said to have had a greater impact on the third-world economies, for better or worse.  Economic growth has certainly been achieved (and we cannot surely begrudge that) but at the expense of traditional lifestyles and has brought in the Western-liberal influence that cannot tolerate the traditional family structure and wants to pull women out of the family home into the workplace.

Yet in the West, from which the reductionist doctrines of individualism and globalism emerged, resistance too can be found.  The referendum in the UK in which the public chose by the highest ever turnout to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States were serious blows struck against a detached elite's vision of one globe of atomistic individuals.  Immigration has been the very real problem that has galvanised popular resistance; yet other issues, such as deindustrialisation and firms relocating to countries with cheaper labour on the economic side, and on the social, an aggressively liberal vision of human beings that places choice of lifestyle above any sense of a human telos in family, were also being rejected.

In reaction to the perceived effrontery of ordinary people rejecting the ideology of their betters, the elite has responded with ferocity to both Brexit and Trump.  At every turn the political/globalist establishment has attempted to subvert these two Anglo-Saxon rebellions.

Part of the tactic of the liberal elite has been to attempt to tarnish Brexit and Trump by association with the bogeyman caricature of Russia that its allies in the media have created.  Anyone in Britain must be unnerved by the prospect of Russian interference, given the recent appalling crime in Salisbury, where a British subject has now become a fatality; yet Russia is being portrayed as a bastion of reactionary conservatism by the elite in an attempt to discredit the valid cause of Anglo Saxon conservatism.  Russian politics is far more complicated than that and this caricature has been created by the elite for its own propaganda purposes.

What is the vision the Anglo Saxon people on either side of the Atlantic have voted for, which has so horrified the establishment?  It is no Corbynista socialism (our elite seems far more comfortable with Corbyn, than with President Trump or Nigel Farage interestingly!).  It is rather a more compassionate version of our own economic system.  Donald Trump with his emphasis on protection is not a Socialist revolutionary, but is a patriot.  He is proposing economic policies that protect domestic jobs.  He wants capitalism to serve people rather than people having to serve a capitalism with no roots in any country.  President Trump recognises that globalisation and mass-immigration are choices made by the elite and that they are not inevitable.

In just the same way Brexit was about restoring national control, in terms of democratic accountability for laws that we live by and an end to the right to freedom of movement of virtually a whole continent to our small island.  This is not revolutionary, it is the restoration of common-sense and a capitalist economy that enables people's lives to get better, rather than live at the whim of globalist companies.

This vision won the democratic battle, but now the battle continues in the corridors of power and in the media, which is compliant to and complicit in the globalist agenda.  Given Theresa May's decision to betray the public on Brexit and the continued attempts to undermine the Trump presidency, it is by no means clear whether two victories in two battles against globalism will ever translate into winning ultimate victory.