The Four Rival Paradigms Shaping the Coming Age
Sometimes it is worth reversing perspective from our local concerns and attempting to think on the grandest scale possible. Past, present, future: all that. Everyone seems to want to engage in secular prophecy, in technocratic prediction. I shall do no such thing here. But there is something else to be done.
Prediction is usually mistaken. Instead, toss coins. Or, better, look backwards. Prediction is no better than a cultural or political equivalent of science fiction. And science fiction, as everyone knows, tells us only about ourselves: it is always dominated by the scientific knowledge and limitations of the present age: the valve-consciousness of H.G. Wells, the diode-consciousness of Star Trek and so on. In addition, science fiction studies technology, and, whatever technology is, and though it is important, it is not directive of human activity: it is only a service system of great consequence. All we can meaningfully do, I think, is consider, not what we anticipate of the future of our service systems, but what we know in the present of our master systems.
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The first paradigm is not China. It is totalitarian socialism, manifested in China and in other autocratic states, empires.
And, yes, it is coming, certainly to Europe, because we have unilaterally disarmed, militarily and intellectually.
A reaction to both disarmaments is in progress; a (world) war…..
It remains to be seen whether it will be mainly cold as at present, or hot.
If hot, Britain, through incompetent, pusillanimous and stupid political leadership is poorly placed to defend itself militarily or intellectually.
China has – for thousands of years – been governed by a caste of professional officials selected through a rigorous system of examination and it still is. That this caste nowadays claims to implement a special, Chinese variant of Marxism (not socialism, that’s something different¹) is just 20th century secular window dressing. ¹ Socialism is a German term and it refers to a diverse group of people forming societies – Sozietäten – for self-improvement of member of the working class, principally, through affordable education, in 19th century Germany and it originally didn’t have either a specific political ideology or any wider political goals at all. Just enable grown-ups to better their lot by learning what their parents couldn’t afford to let them learn – school education beyond elementary school was rather expensive in 19th century Germany – while they were still children. The socialists also formed political parties which eventually culminated in the SPD – the social-democratic party of Germany – which eventually adopted Marxism as its political ideology, at least rethoricially². ² Short genealogy of socialist parties in the Germany: In the beginning, there was the SPD. Due to its opposition to the monarchy, it got outlawed under Bismarck… Read more »
I agree.
China is just a form of totalitarianism.
As far as I can see (and you are free to disagree), there are only two paradigms: Christianity or totalitarianism.
Any further sub-division is just details.
As long as Christians are careful to anathematise the heresy of Dominianism.
I was thinking something similar… Aren’t there many past examples of totalitarian Christians? Come to think of it there seem to be so many varieties of Christianity that I find it hard to define.
Absolute monarchy, particularly when exercised as benevolent despotism, is very little different to totalitarian socialism. So ‘The Crown’ in Britain encapsulates the idea of the property of the kingdom as distinct from the person and personal property of the monarch. In totalitarian socialism, it is ‘the State which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity.’ In absolute monarchism, ‘L’etat, C’est moi’. The monarchy is the State and that State creates the nation; benevolent despotism (or just despotism) is totalitarian socialism. Marxism is simply a theory as to how best to achieve a socialist state. China has adapted the theory of Marxism, identifying itself as a “socialist market economy,” pursuing socialist aims with market mechanisms: “the essence of socialism lies in the delivery of socialist promises, not by the means it adopts … If the Communist Party adopts correct policies to effectively prevent wealth polarisation, the socialist nature of our country can be guaranteed” (Wu et al. Citation 1997). Totalitarian socialism in China derived from its system of absolute imperial rule, itself a form of totalitarian socialism, albeit with power devolved to regional government. ‘With deeply rooted institutional genes inherited from its imperial… Read more »
Absolutism is a system of government where the monarch is considered to be above the law. It has absolutely no relation to totalitarianism — state governed in some way based on an ideology which seek to permeate every area of life of the citizens of the state, and belongs to the era of dynastic states (ruled by members of a certain dynasty) which preceeded the notion of nation states by a couple of centuries.
“…whether a Million of Angels may not fit upon a Needle’s point.”
Even the Roman Empire was a totalitarian socialist construct…..
Facts are always inconvenient to the willfully ignorant.
Communism/Marxism is not mentioned
A totalitarian control of the populace
through the use of threat and fear, this is what unites China. Islam and the Woke
The biggest rally in UK history for freedom and Tommy Robinson, and you guys are playing Plato and Aristotle. Farage a no show of course.
Free speech? Oh but wait, Tommy was there, cannot be associated with that now. Heads up asses
I thought this ought to be worth an article as well. Certainly more so than “Dr Doshi’s” anti-European rants (which stylistically uncannily resemble the Russian Blow harder, blowhard! propaganda usually threatening to nuke all of the world unless Putin gets whatever he happens to want today).
“Organisers will today present Tony Blair with a list of 10 demands covering hunting, farming and the provision of local services. It calls for government legislation and action to be “rural-proofed” so that it does not inadvertently penalise countryside communities.
The demonstration was due to end at 6pm, but at 5pm as many as 40,000 campaigners were still queuing at Hyde Park Corner, the beginning of the Liberty march route. The alliance said 360,000 had already left the park or taken the Livelihood route which started at Blackfriars, converging in Parliament Square. They had travelled from around the country on 2,500 coaches and 31 specially chartered trains. The final tally of marchers was 407,791, the alliance said last night.’
23 Sept 2002
The difference being that the one you cite here was organised from start to finish (although the finish didn’t go as planned) whereas the one on Saturday had a high degree of spontaneity about it. The police were clearly not expecting such a turnout; in the main people were rallying to the flag, not to the organiser.
The crucial factor now is the ability of social media to effectively target everybody.
Liberty and livelihood…..
‘The Liberty and Livelihood march in London – the biggest rural protest the UK has ever seen.
In the early hours of Sunday, September 22, 2002, hundreds of thousands of farmers and other rural folk from across the UK advanced upon central London for the Liberty and Livelihood march.
Farm trucks and Land Rovers festooned with Liberty and Livelihood stickers wound their way down quiet country roads all over the country’
“It cannot achieve harmony, it must fall back on majorities”
If I understand you, James, this is not true. It is estimated that ‘woke’ has been foisted on us by between only 10-15% of the population. A majority voted for Brexit but a minority attempted to thwart that vote. Liberalism is anti- democratic since it seeks to impose its ideas on the majority through a liberal minority in elite positions in society. It’s why Starmer as a liberal will refuse to read the message of Saturday’s flag march because it represents the majority view.
Alexander uses the classic definition of liberalism which means a pluralistic society where political decisions are made by majority votes (of so-called representatives) which is based on the notion that people have all kinds of different opinions of anything and that what is true/ right/ good or false/ wrong/ bad usually can’t be decided. This includes that everybody accepts his own fallibility and limitedness of understanding: I may be really convinced that my opinons are right and yours are wrong, however, I accept that the opposite is also possible and that it’s really more likely that my opinion is part-right and part-wrong and yours as well and we both don’t know for certain which parts are right and which are wrong.
That’s something different than the contemporay US definition of “liberal” which means “not christian, Democrats-afiliated and not Republican” and the only thing these people are actually liberal about is different kinds of sexual practices and even this not really (they don’t particularly like heterosexuality) while they’re the most stubborn holier-than-thou dogmatists in any other respect.
James, you start by saying that prediction is impossible, which is true because we cannot know the future, but then you make ‘predictions’. Why? Sure, we all indulge in ‘whatifery’, what if I win the lottery tomorrow type of thinking. But I do think that most of us are realists, and after we have indulged in a bit of ‘Billy Liar’ thinking, we do get back to getting on with living. We can only know the past and the present, what was and what is, and I believe that we only have a tenuous grasp of the ‘what is’. The future, the ‘what will be’, can only be a suggestion, a hypothesis, a guess. Surely some predictions will turn out to be true, by pure good luck, but most will not. The most egregious today being the predictions of the climate doomsters; a rise 1.5 degrees C is going to destroy the planet? Really? Sea level rise is going to swamp coastal communities by the end of this century. At 15 cms per hundred years? I think not. Is it not the desire of people to have some view of the future, some certainty of what will be, that civilisations… Read more »
Egypt was very advanced in the past
I guess that’s one way to understand the world.
A simpler one, which I prefer, is individualism vs collectivism.
To me, the most advanced societies are those that go furthest in creating order through voluntary cooperation and with the least coercion. Basically, orderly freedom.
And it has been an observable fact that the extent to which each of those four models of society have achieved orderly freedom has varied over time.
So on the basis of my highest value, which is freedom, those.models don’t say much because the extent to which they embrace freedom has varied and will continue to vary over time.
Isn’t it odd that certain well-known leftists who constantly go on about Gaza never complain about the Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of the Uighur Muslims in Sinkiang.
Maybe because UK doesn’t provide support for the genocide there
I’ve just been teaching ecological succession, where one set of species alters conditions to make them more conducive to a different species. They don’t mean to do it, of course, but they do. Thus the spiky marram grass on the seaward dunes needs must grow and die, beginning the gradual accumulation of organic matter in the soil that will allow heathland plants to displace it.
Perhaps it is similar with culture: Christianity laid the foundations of liberalism, which has outcompeted it, at least in some western nations, to become dominant. However liberalism is also altering the culture and will in turn be outcompeted by something else – which will it be?
“Four rival paradigms – China, Islam, Christianity and Liberalism – are shaping the world in very different ways, says James Alexander. But which one will come out on top?”
While everyone is looking at these four paradigms, a fifth is sneaking up behind them all, quietly swarming in everywhere, buying up everything, worming their way into all the top posts, while issuing dire warnings about the others.
Who is that fifth? INDIA, and its former territory of PAKISTAN.
And the other “paradigms”? (What a strange word to use for them!)
What about Hinduism? Or Singapore-style communitarianism? Or Buddhism? Or Judaism?
The four “paradigms” in this article are a mish-mash of religions and political philosophies. They are not “master systems of thought” or “grand ideologies” at all, and they do not even represent all the political forces in our world.
To divide the world into categories, but use different types of categories within the same categorisation, is woolly thinking.
So we got a choice, between Number 1: what the (athiestic) state says goes … or else; Number 2: what the (theocratic) state says goes … or else; Number 4: anything goes … including or else; and Number 3: the forgiveness of sins and the cradle of Europe. What choice is that?
An interesting analysis, thanks for that. Its a wonder you can say this and remain in your post in Turkey