Maxi@AllForProgress_
"The system doesn't work."
A cliché that has done something to very dimly light up about five decades of progressive decline in the institutional machinery of the West. In Britain alone, you could make the remark accurately of about three dozen different systems - the entrenched civil service, newly pledged to rebel against future governments it doesn't like; the planning system; defence procurement; our capitalist-command economy as a whole.
But if you want to really fix a system, rather than just moaning about it, you need to understand it.
And all systems begin with thought, the best and the worst. The ones that work are built on careful, high-calibre thinking. The ones that don't are built on muddled, incoherent thinking. There is often more thinking in a failed system than in a successful one.
So when we find ourselves staring at this marvellously orchestrated mesh of systems that are all perfectly dysfunctional, and all seemingly perfectly attuned to accentuate dysfunction in each other, we have to ask ourselves: what's the thinking behind all the mess?
If you ask that question about Britain as a whole, the answer, both ironically and - given Wes Streeting's parting waltz with the question of rejoining the EU - topically, actually takes you straight out of Blighty and over to the Continent.
For three centuries the dominant tradition in British thought has been empirical, 'thought measured carefully against reality'. Piecemeal. Inductive. Meritocratic. We are a people wary of of grand systems and elegant total theories. Bacon, Locke, Hume, Smith, Burke, Mill, Russell - for any British reader these names mark out the operating method of a civilisation that learned to think with its hands as well as its head. I've been exploring exactly this in my ongoing "What is British Culture?" Substack series.
Our tradition calls on us to observe, test, refine, discard what fails, and hand on what works to the next generation, slightly improved. The Common Law is built that way. So is Newtonian physics, Darwinian biology, the British surgeon's craft, the British engineer's workshop, every patient and stubborn act of construction to which this country has ever put its name.
The empirical disposition is what made the modern world habitable; and it is, at the root, a builder's disposition. It is the greatest thing we have ever exported and, by measure of the safety, prosperity, and room for flourishing genius it and it alone has produced, it is probably the greatest thing anyone has ever exported.
As close as we are to Europe in many ways, in this respect we are very different. Their tradition makes it clear. From Descartes through Hegel and Rousseau, on through Marx and at last into the postmodern wing of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, the Continental mind has preferred to build rationalist systems - diagrams of everything, often dreamt up by some clever bugger while he was sat in the bath - and then to flatten reality until it can be contained obediently inside them.
The Continental thinker writes the schema first, and the world is asked to fit. When the world fails to fit, the world is what is wrong. Sometimes, there is an attempt to fix the world appropriately, in the course of which the continent is usually upended and 10s of millions of people die.
The name for this operation in the seminar rooms changes every fifty or so years, but the operating system underneath is one machine. In the 1970s, when its French founders were still alive, the most recent (and, for our purposes, relevant) brand was known as deconstruction.
By the time it had crossed the Atlantic and been wired into the American academy, it had become what you would know as critical theory, then critical race theory, then post-colonialism, queer theory, gender theory, standpoint epistemology, intersectionality, decolonisation, whiteness studies, and at last - packaged for the mass consumer - 'woke', the creed of our presiding Metropolitan class.
The labels are interchangeable because the operation underneath is identical. You take any inherited truth - any moral norm, a legal principle, a scientific finding, a national history, even a category as workaday as "man" or "woman" - reframe it as the disguised expression of a power relation between an oppressor class and an oppressed one, discredit it by reference to that power, and then move on and do the same to the next one.
The output, after fifty years run at industrial scale through every institution that mattered, is a country in which no inherited claim is any longer permitted to stand on its own evidence, because every such claim has been re-read and delegitimised as somebody's tool of domination.
If you're looking for the reason - the real reason, the deepest-planted driving factor - behind Britain's past 30 Years of Hurt, you're now looking at it. Mired in post-imperial shame and philosophically vulnerable, we imported this ideology, and naturalised these ideas, wholesale, all across the British state over the past several decades.
Look, and you'll find it everywhere. A Bristol jury acquits the four protesters who tore down the statue of Edward Colston, after judicial directions permitting it to weigh the political symbolism of the act against the laws of criminal damage; a deconstruction of property law in plain view.
Lucy Connolly was sentenced to thirty-one months in prison for an angry tweet about the Southport killings, where privileged members of the governing class get lighter sentences for CSOs, a deconstruction of both the principle of rational justice and that of free speech, grouted together with old-fashioned in-group amoral familism.
An entire generation of paediatric medicine has founded its practice partially on the deconstructionist premise that biological sex is a discretionary fiction.
The canon which has formed the backbone of British cultural life, marginalised on pain of having been written by white men.
And these are far from the most cataclysmic manifestations of deconstructivist doctrine in our national life. The alpha and omega of the type, to me, is the rape gangs themselves. For two decades in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oldham, Halifax and a dozen other places, the empirical observation that working-class girls, many of them in council care, were being raped in industrial quantities by organised groups of British-Pakistani men was systematically suppressed by police officers, social workers, council officials and Labour politicians who had been trained to read the world through the rationalist lens of community cohesion.
The reality of the world contradicted the 'Big Idea', the all-important 'Big Idea'. And because the reality was so awful and the Big Idea much too nice, reality was denied, and every form of justice and restitution with it.
This is your world, deconstructed. Your children will be fed to it and sacrificed on its altar, if that is what it takes that it be preserved.
And we will not build ourselves back up in this country until we have, utterly and with great animus, divorced ourselves from this way of thinking that licks its lips at the sight of burning buildings and inclines all its hosts towards destruction.
Almost every country on Earth that enjoys serious modern prosperity, security, freedom, technological genius and cultural stability got there by adopting the British framework. The States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore. Modi's economic policy, under which the majority of Indians seem to believe their lives are improving year-on-year, is patterned on British classics. Hong Kong was a prime example too before its strangulation by the neighbouring bully that, you might note, runs on a Continental model of total rational planning-by-command.
Common law. Empirical science. Meritocratic civil service. Trial by jury. Open trade. Habeas corpus. Newton's method generalised across every domain of human enquiry. We invented all of it, and we shipped all of it.
In a moment of weakness we let a pathogen into our intellectual nervous system. It has wreaked havoc, as it was designed to. It has changed us. It is against our moderate British natures to presume self-abasing evil intent in others, particularly if they are educated, but the intent thus is unmistakable in the authors of those ways of thinking.
If it is time for a new system in Britain - and it undoubtedly is - then it is time for new thinking, as well.
