Life as usual? Or radical epistemic shift?

Why do we now see everything in terms of an emotional minefield?

Jul 18, 2024

Well, this is a weird one: I find myself writing about stuff that, not long ago, I would never have imagined would be relevant or necessary. Stuff about the morality tales that underpin the operation and governance of the patchwork of human societies.

Then I realize that the reason I never previously imagined writing about this stuff was because, for all the goings-on that have been going on, the core story that underpinned our Western society remained pretty damn solid … until it didn’t.

Now, you may say that that last paragraph is flawed. And I would agree with you. I mean, Matthew Arnold wrote these lines way back in the middle of the nineteenth century:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.1

This dealt with the diminishing religious element of Western culture and, by that measure, I’m only about 175 years behind the curve. That said, I should perhaps make clear that I do not subscribe to any religion, but I do regard it as an important factor.

Then, half a century ago, Kenneth Clark, in his wonderful TV series, Civilisation: A Personal View, made the more general point that …

it is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.2

And coming much more up to date, Douglas Murray actually titled his 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe and opened it with this stark statement:

Europe is committing suicide.3

Nonetheless, for all the clarity and certainty of these various statements about the demise of the Judaeo-Christian-based society of the West, we could, for a long time, go on believing that our way of life was reasonably stable.

So, what happened?

Simple, really. Our foundation story was turned against us - ‘weaponized’ I suppose would be the mot du jour - and deployed with lashings of cynicism and disillusion to undermine our confidence.

The ugly, the bad, and the good

Over the course of its history, the Judaeo-Christian world has done wonderful things, not so wonderful things, and absolutely horrific things.

As far as I can make out, the same goes for every other human society on earth throughout the whole of our history. Indeed, it is such a consistent set of behaviours that one might say that the good-bad-ugly behaviour combo is part of the definition of any homo sapiens group performance.

Yet, at the moment, the modern Western world is often positioned in a way that can only mean it was, or is, uniquely awful.

Take slavery as an obvious topic to test this thesis. Yes, Western society engaged in the slave trade. So did nearly all other past communities. But Western societies - led by the British - banned it and devoted huge resources to put an end to it. So why is the West picked out for demonization?

It is particularly strange when one considers that, right now, there are an estimated 50 million slaves in the world. Today. According to the Walk Free Global Slavery Index, the Top Ten countries with the highest prevalence of modern slavery are: 1) North Korea, 2) Eritrea, 3) Mauritania, 4) Saudi Arabia, 5) Turkey, 6) Tajikistan, 7) United Arab Emirates, 8) Russia, 9) Afghanistan, 10) Kuwait.

Hmm …

Judge not lest …

A factor underpinning the current malaise of the West, it seems to me, is judgement … or, rather, lack of it.

At some point in the recent past, judgement was declared ‘Bad’, a decision supported by always asking the question, “Who are you to judge?”

Initially, this was positioned in the context of different cultures: “This, that or the other group do things differently. Who are you to judge?” But it soon transpired that it was one rule for Group A and another for Group B.

Some egregious examples of this relate to radical Islamism, including the hideous treatment of Sir Salman Rushdie … simply because of what he wrote in a book. But push-back from the Western perspective, which should have been loud, long and unequivocal, was muted because, “It’s a cultural thing. Who are you to judge?”.

And yet, one of the hard fought-for liberties that the West has long enjoyed is the freedom to criticize religion. Any religion. A religion is a set of ideas. Religion is not based on any immutable characteristics and can be critiqued as what it is - ideas. Sure, some people may not like what is said, but that is no reason to ban it. Those who don’t like what is said are perfectly at liberty to argue back.

It is, therefore, indefensible that, for example, in March 2021, a teacher from Batley Grammar School in the UK was forced into hiding after a religious studies class he gave led to protests from Muslim parents and to death threats. More than three years later he is, apparently, still in hiding.

Personally, I feel that one of the perversions, here, is the false application of an injunction from one of Christianity’s foundation texts, the Sermon on the Mount:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?4

This does not say, ‘Don’t judge’. Rather, it cautions that whatever basis for judgment you use will be applied back on you … which seems to me to be a perfectly fair arrangement.

… the therapeutic culture gets overwhelmed by the pain.

And all of this happens, it seems, within an astonishingly emotional milieu.

The trend to a therapy culture was identified early on by Frank Furedi. Indeed, his book Therapy Culture actually pre-dates the launch of the iPhone (itself a technology that single-handedly complicated the emotional landscape). The book’s introduction starts …

These days, we live in a culture that takes emotions very seriously. In fact it takes them so seriously that virtually every challenge or misfortune that confronts people is represented as a direct threat to their emotional well-being. Everyday disappointments - rejection, failure, being overlooked - are regarded as risks to our self-esteem. When people are described or describe themselves as vulnerable, the reference is usually to the state of their emotion. … The language of emotionalism pervades popular culture, the world of politics, the workplace, schools and universities and everyday life.5

Absolutely spot on.

This week alone, in the workplace category, I have been beset by a range of LinkedIn communications that variously encourage management to ‘show your vulnerability’, ‘be kind’ and, most vomit inducing of all to my mind, ‘be compassionate’.

Now, please, do not jump to the conclusion that I am in favour of unkindness or nastiness of any kind. But I am more in favour of honesty, openness and positivity than of gut-squirming displays of virtue.

Some of it, I think, has to be with definitions and the fact that I am a paid-up lexical pedant.

Take, for example, the word compassion. Compassion means responding to someone’s suffering and getting involved in some way to help relieve the suffering.

I have written previously about this and mentioned the Bible story of Ruth and Naomi, which was the example I was given as a child to clarify the term.

Naomi’s two sons die, leaving Naomi and her two daughters-in-law unprotected and isolated from their families. Naomi tells the young women that they are free to go back to their own families. Ruth recognizes that Naomi’s plan, to go back to her own homeland, is dangerous and therefore decides to stay with Naomi to help her achieve safe passage home.

So, that’s compassion … and I was taught that it comes with a very important caveat: DO NOT overdo the action bit. Why? Because there is the need to first ascertain whether or not that might disrespect the party who is suffering. The American historian Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) nailed this point beautifully:

A misplaced compassion degrades both the victims, who are reduced to objects of pity, and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow citizens than to hold them up to impersonal standards, attainment of which would entitle them to respect.6

Indeed, Lasch goes on to make the point that, in the 1990s, we had already reached a point where …

Standards, we are told, reflect the cultural hegemony of dead white European males. Compassion compels us to recognize the injustice of imposing them on everybody else.7

And he concludes that, when this is the thinking …

Compassion has become the human face of contempt.

Before leaving this topic I must just mention the consulting firm EY who produce an annual Empathy Report. Empathy is, of course, not the same as compassion, although people do, sometimes, seem to get the two terms muddled.

But EY, for whom, I promise, I have a great deal of respect, have a priceless headline in one of their current reports:

Authentic empathy: the key to your organization’s business success.

You’re ahead of me, aren’t you? ‘Authentic’ is redundant in this sentence because, quite simply, anything other than ‘authentic empathy’ is not empathy!

Can we please bring back some good old Western rationality?

A final comment from Frank Furedi:

A culture, which … is so troubled by the workings of the human emotion, is unlikely to display much confidence in the power of the self to cope with the trials of life. The manner in which emotions have been problematised implicitly raises questions about the ability of the individual to deal with disappointment, misfortune, adversity or even the challenge of everyday life.8

And back to the questions which head this piece …

Life as usual? Or radical epistemic shift?

I suggest that we are currently poised on a knife edge between those two states.

If we choose, we are probably still able to summon up our reserves of common sense and intestinal fortitude to re-configure ourselves as a cohesive, rational society. But it’s going to be a close run thing.

If we do not, I fear that our society will continue on the pathway to fragmentation and isolation until, at some point, a new narrative may pull things back together but potentially in a very different way.

In part, at least, I suppose, it’s a ‘local’ versus ‘global’ pitch.

I’m all for our using technology to help us advance but, personally, I’d like to keep the rich tapestry of ‘local’ variations rather than some unvarying ‘global’ glob.

Aargh! by David Pinder

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