Strange And Disturbing Times 2.0
I’VE BEEN RACKING my brains for an historical parallel to the strange and disturbing times we’re all passing through. Because these are strange and disturbing times. Beliefs and expectations once considered rock solid melt into air (to borrow Karl Marx’s magnificent phrase) and new beliefs and expectations, emerging with dizzying speed to replace the old ones, are promoted and defended with a frightening fanaticism. When was the last time human-beings went through such a period? More importantly, how did it end?
The first place to go looking for an historical parallel is, obviously, among the great revolutions of the modern era: the French, the Russian and the Chinese. Almost by definition, these were periods of tremendous turmoil during which a significant portion of the entire population was swept up and into a vast national movement demanding decisive and fundamental change.
In the first instance, these revolutionary movements were dedicated to the removal of present evils, and to the overthrow of the political and economic forces deemed responsible. Once achieved, however, the question of what should replace the old order swiftly undermined the people’s unanimity and, in circumstances of mounting horror, the Revolution began to devour its own children.
Tempting though it was to append the word “revolutionary” to the period we are living through, I felt obliged to reject it. After all, New Zealand is not being rocked by tremendous turmoil from below. Those on the receiving end of the policies responsible for homelessness, child poverty, precarious employment and crippling indebtedness are not rioting in the streets. Nor do we see political firebrands urging them on to storm New Zealand’s equivalent of the Bastille. (The local WINZ office, perhaps?) Though revolutions are, more often than not, led by “declassed” intellectuals, they are always and everywhere massive eruptions from the social depths. Intellectuals may lead revolutions (and, more often than not, bury them) but they are made by “the people”.
If we are not living through revolutionary times, then what sort of times are we living through? Is there another great historical era that bears comparison with our present period of intellectual and moral ferment? While finding an exact historic parallel is, obviously, an impossibility – no two periods of history are exactly alike – there is an era that rings more than a few bells: The Protestant Reformation.
Generally agreed to extend from 1517, the year in which Martin Luther protested (hence the term “Protestant”) the abuses of the Catholic Church; to 1648, the year in which the Treaty of Westphalia brought the catastrophic Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants to an end; the Reformation marked a crucial turning-point in the spiritual, political, social and economic history of Europe.
The medieval concept of “Christendom” – the united community of Christian believers presided over and guided by the Catholic Church – did not survive the Reformation. In the countries of North-Western Europe, where it triumphed, Protestantism ushered in the individualistic mindset which was to prove so crucial to the development of capitalism and the evolution of modernity.
What the intellectual stresses and strains of our own time have in common with the Reformation period is that they both originated in what might be called crises of confidence in the moral underpinnings of the established order. Intellectuals, almost all of them what would today be called “academics” (but who, in their own time, were concentrated in the institutions of the Church) were losing faith in the “official” version of the Christianity handed down from above, and began conceptualising a radically new, deeply personal, relationship with God, founded on scripture and unmediated by the spiritual agents of the Church.
It was Martin Luther, and the followers he inspired, who gave this radical movement coherent vernacular expression and, by using the “new technology” of the printing press, were able to communicate the new protestant doctrine to educated middle-class audiences across Europe with unprecedented speed.
If this was a revolution, then like the radical intellectual movements of our own time, it was a revolution of the mind. Incidental to the protestant reformulation of the spiritual, moral and political Christian narratives, were deeply personal religious insights and emotions. Experiences that were in no way subject to secular compromise. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, individuals conceptualised these powerful feelings as emanations of their “soul” – the survival of which overrode all other considerations. To save their souls, protestants were prepared to both endure – and inflict – persecution and martyrdom.
Today, these powerful emotional experiences and insights are said to constitute the individual’s “personal identity” – a concept which, like the soul, our twenty-first century metaphysical reformers will go to extreme lengths to preserve, protect and defend.
Moreover, and just like their protestant predecessors, these identarians are socially and institutionally positioned to ensure that their new “truths” are entrenched in the legal and institutional frameworks of the nation state. Racial and sexual identity issues encompass both the personal and the political. The salvation of the self and the salvation of society cannot be separated. Heresy and heretics are deemed intolerable. They must be silenced.
Unquestionably, the differences between the identarians of today and the protestants of 500 years ago vastly outnumber the similarities. Nevertheless, like our own time, it was a period of extraordinary intellectual stress and strain. At stake were ideas and expectations about which people were simply unwilling to compromise. How could they, when at stake was the very essence of what they believed themselves to be, and the creation of a world in which that essence could survive and thrive?
How did it end? Badly, I’m afraid. The wars that were sparked by the Protestant Reformation, and the inevitable “Counter-Reformation” of the Catholic Church, killed millions. The German territories, which supplied the principal battlegrounds for this vicious religious conflict, are estimated to have lost a third of their inhabitants. Ultimately, Protestants and Catholics agreed to differ. Strange and disturbing times seldom end any other way.
Superb article Chris. What the elites fail to realize is the poor are getting poorer and have less and less to lose each day. Their last chance of hope was when they voted for the charlatan in power now. She rewarded them by laughing in their faces and making them poorer whilst then buddying up to and enriching her new middleclass National supporters. The homeless numbers are growing substantially at the same time that the number of super rich asset owners are growing substantially. The wealth is being transferred uphill with no regard to the social hatred this is creating. Crime against others is increasing and will continue now that the social contract has been burnt and destroyed forever. There is no forgetting this period even if things somehow improved. The damage is done and the anger is forever!!!
I think the whole crazy woke thing represents a period of mass hysteria. So for me the best parallels are the witch hunts. This includes the various European ones, the Salem event in colonial America and the McCarthy witch hunts in the 1950’s.
The video explains the psychosis behind them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09maaUaRT4M
The woke revolution of greatest importance.
Why Do Leftists Celebrate White Decline?
https://www.unz.com/ghood/why-do-leftists-celebrate-white-decline/
The big concern is that the woke are very good at cancel culture, but don’t seem to have any interest in what replaces what they just canceled.
It hasn’t worked out well for who the purport to be helping so far, aka more homeless, more emergency housing tenants instead of housing tenants, more hospital waiting lists, more exploiter employers, lower wages (Covid stemmed their plan), replaced qualifications with participation trophies, replaced democracy with perfect demonstrators as deemed by BIPOC https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/06/school-strike-4-climate-auckland-disbands-for-being-racist-after-guidance-from-bipoc-community.html, replaced professional brain drain with gang numbers growing, I guess Malta selling visas here we come https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/malta-responsible-for-assassination-of-journalist-daphne-caruana-galizia-inquiry-finds/
“…but don’t seem to have any interest in what replaces what they just canceled”
This is true of all radicals. They note that life isn’t fair so seek to tear down the system without ever considering in any depth what to replace it with. Often they just want to be in charge.
Put this way Chris I’m glad I’m neither Protestant or Catholic, to this day influenced not by entrenched beliefs that have their precedent in history. Not that I know of at least. But like DNA we pick up attitudes from our kin, so who knows. And then there’s environmental influences. In a post-truth world, fuelled by the echo chambers of digital platforms, identity politics, wokeism, fake news and alternative facts, who can really get a grip on it all. Strange and disturbing times indeed.
Look further back, Chris. The collapse of the Roman Empire.
Military overreach. Gross inequity and an unjust society held together by force and propaganda, and a bit of fake religion) while resources declined and crops failed (deforestation). Infighting amongst the ‘elites’ and futile wars to maintain control and to attempt to maintain extraction of resources.
Bread and circuses.
Actually a lot more circus than bread in the modern case.
Okay, so we have an Old Left and a New Left.
Old Left – wants to destroy the global economy, kill millions of people (Mao / Stalin et al), and generally vandalise the world.
New Left – as per above but also added further “woke” crimes against humanity.
Impartial observers would have surmised that it was impossible for the New Left to be worse than the Old Left, but when the facts change, PSM changes his mind. The New Left might just have cracked it.
This article then says that these two groups could fight it out like Catholics and Protestants did back in the day (and so it goes on).
Mr Trotsky thinks best case scenario – the weirdo lefties agree to disagree.
PSM best case scenario – both groups are abducted by aliens, and never seen again.
Where are those pesky aliens when you need them?
History is great eh @ Chris, despite it being just one damn thing after another. Its biggest problem seems to be that whether it merely rhymes or repeats, even mirrors down to actual minutia, humans, and more specifically the political class don’t seem to be able to learn from it – not even when there’s an abundance of learnings in that space going forward.
The surprising thing to me (although it really shouldn’t be) is how those that one would have expected something better of,just seem to fall in line. Just yesterday, the rare appearance of the Far Foy gave me a reminder when as the platitudes and spin-speak rolled off his tongue, he resurrected TINA. Then there was an even bigger disappointment when I saw and heard Andrew Little’s utterings.
Strap yourself in lefties. It’s probably going to have to take another bout of a loss, or even a cobbled-together coalition of lesser evils (maybe Labour/Greens/MP) before Labour will ever get its shit together.
Pffffft! And with the mandate they earned with promises and the one trick pony that is a successful COVID19 incident under MMP.
I think it is more a direct cause and effect situation .
Do you not remember some years ago a Business Roundtable conference in Wellington deciding (for us!) that New Zealand should steer its development towards being the land of recreation and rest for the rest of the world and that NZ should have a population of 7 million?
I do , and I have noticed that our politicians – many of whom who were also at that conference – have without public mandate steered NZ this way.
Immigration was ridiculously “opened up”, we stopped training our own freely thereby pushing our own down to make a bottom impoverished layer that we had never had in NZ before.
New Zealand has become an experiment in social engineering – analyse the actors used to make TV advertising – and the middle class of the third world countries was attracted to partake of our public welfare systems – free health, education , pensions and superannuation .
Conservation stepped up – to do more to protect our native species to be sure we hold our unique flora and fauna – our wilderness is a big attraction for the elite of the world to rest and play here.
Without a doubt our politicians over the last 30 yrs have been irresponsible in failing to listen to and follow the wishes of NZers and have lead us into the poverty, social discontent and dismay many New Zealanders are expressing now. No more no less.
Its time to look for people who will properly listen and represent OUR wishes, people who can led us out of this mess. People who care about New Zealanders first.
A great comment, On Watch.
You need to have been commenting a lot more than you have. Good post. Keep it up, please.
Sounds like a NZFirst resurgence?
oh what a good comment: ‘we have stopped training our own freely’…therin lies the rub, from neurosurgeons to mechanics, restauranteurs, nurses, politicians et al, now all and sundry are engaged in fulfilling the requirements of bureaucracy and have no time to actually do jack.
There are obvious parallels between the post printing period and the arrival of social media – this allowed competing world views to emerge.
Then add to that the emergence or urban living and occupations apart from the feudal order – today the post industrial/union age and a huge population in wealthy retirement.
Then add to that existential crisis – global warming, pandemic, and supplanting of the certainty of the 21st C as the end of history with democratic victory in the Cold War within 20 years (the emergence of China as worlds largest economic and military power while the West is still in confrontation with Russia) and the USA now as divided as any nation on earth (between liberal democracy and kingdom come Christian dominionism with the GOP akin to Constainine choosing Christianity and the Cross as a way to save a dying Rome).
l0l !!!,… all Jesus ever said was to love our enemy’s as we love ourselves…as Uncle Hec once said,… ” they’re all going mad out there”… as he listened to the radio…
Why would there be any protests or revolution when we live like fricken kings.
The appalling price of shelter aside, things are the best they’ve ever been.
This sort of intellectual sensationalism imagines things that are just not there. It’s mental gymnastics of the hand wringing and navel gazing kind.
There are bigger fish to fry – fossil fuel dependence is the big one on the horizon
Not climate change – EROEI
Support local.
…” The appalling price of shelter aside, things are the best they’ve ever been”…
I dunno so much,… in 1967-8 we were reckoned as the 6th wealthiest nation on earth, behind only Denmark. By the time of John Key we were reckoned as behind Albania, and a little further on, estimated as being ”Mexicans with cell phones”, – ie : 32nd behind the OECD .
So much for neo liberalism and its promise of cheaper prices, competition and efficiency,… what was that all about with power outages recently and people not being able to afford to heat their homes again, mate?
Didn’t feel right in just giving Mr Bradbury a serve and leaving you out, Chris. Here’s a wee bit of humour Carrol O’Connor style. Its brilliant. Nothing disturbing about Archie Bunker ! Just nuts and bolts working class conservatism and kind of loveable to boot. Please enjoy.
All in the family Archie on Religion Vol.02
https://youtu.be/xJgFPJ5dSvc?t=3
Yet another beleaguered attack on identitarians as though they are the greatest threat to the world economic order, using a very laboured and vastly different historical parallel. About the only thing Mr Trotter gets right here is the role the protestant movement had on the development of modern capitalism.
When are all the vocal critics of this government going to wake up to the fact that even reformist governments cannot make the changes to the structures of corporate consumer capitalism that are necessary to make peoples’ lives easier to cope? Governments can only tinker round the edges of the social and economic problems, make cosmetic changes that have no chance of reversing the real inequalities, or they make them worse (as conservative governments do on a continued and regular basis). The real problem to analyse here is not the problem of the ‘woke’ (which is a complete and almost total distraction for some) but the entrenchment of neoliberal and associated ideologies that keep us in a state of a kind of continued present where nothing actually changes (except for the expanding bank accounts of the wealthy elites). The problem here is not one of various groups fighting for and asserting their right to be whatever identity, which in reality is just what liberalism’s ‘civil society’ has always promised. The problem is the diminishing purchasing power of the working and middle classes, the destruction of income, community and social cohesion through technology, the ongoing obliteration of the living environment, and yet most peoples’ blind acceptance of the powerful naturalising processes of the ideologies of capitalism.