ARC error: why we should reject Peterson’s call to self-sacrifice Written by Colin Bower

[Nat Quinn]

Bliss, wrote Wordsworth, was it in that dawn to be alive.  It is similarly bliss to be alive in the time of the Trumpian cultural revolution that is sweeping through the sterile institutions of wokedom, returning us gratefully to an age of common sense and a state of reverence for the achievements of our forebears.

I don’t want to play a part in bursting that bubble of euphoria – which I also inhabit − but I am increasingly susceptible to an inchoate fear that all is not well in the brave new world of “free market capitalism”, the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, the promotion of “conservative values”, and − at the moral level − the claim now made with increasing frequency and intensity by Jordan Peterson, that we bear a burden of “sacrifice” for the well-being of society.

My particular point of departure in expressing these fears is the recently concluded conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) that took place in London, where speaker after speaker of illustrious reputation and provenance was accorded warmly grateful (alternatively sycophantic) rounds of applause for their espousal of the values I have referred to, not least of those in the appreciative ARC audience being our own Rob Hersov, whose forthright political and cultural contributions I welcome, in spite of his expression of unqualified support for the concerns expressed at the conference.

Judeo-Christianity

The first of these concerns centres on the now commonly expressed view that the achievements of freedom, tolerance and generosity that characterise Western civilisation can be attributed to the two-millennia influence of the Judeo-Christian religion, and it is a re-affirmation of our allegiance to that tradition that is now being recommended to us.

Notwithstanding my unquenchable love and regard for the King James Bible, my sense of spiritual serenity and upliftment conferred by exposure to the Anglican liturgy, my interest in and respect for the great myths of the Old Testament and my recognition of the benign influence on children enacting the Nativity, who rediscover by doing so the values of kindness and love, and despite the fact that I am not in the least bit offended by Trump’s claim that his life was saved by God, and even though I kneel in humility before the mystery of the creation, this invocation of “Judeo-Christian” values is retrogressive tripe.

Judaism did not introduce humanity to the “Golden Rule,” neither did Christianity introduce charity, as we know from the parable of the good Samaritan. In his book The Closing of the Western Mind, the scholar Charles Freman provides an extensively documented and scholarly account of the tragedy resulting from the destruction by Roman state-sponsored early Christian fascism of the 500-year Greek tradition of rationality and open enquiry, a fascism inspired as it was by Paul’s intellectually and culturally iconoclastic instruction, Perdam sapientiam sapientium (“We must destroy the wisdom of the wise”).

The invention of the unparalleled Western tradition of the Common Law, codified in the time of the Roman Republic, owes nothing to Christianity. Even though I have many Roman Catholic friends and family members who I both love and respect, I have no qualms in asserting that the Roman Catholic Church, which even today holds out and imposes upon its adherents indefensible doctrines which are an insult to human intelligence, such as the belief that the Pontiff is literally the representative of God on Earth, speaking in a voice that comes straight from God and which is accordingly infallible, with its perverted insistence on the virtue of celibacy, or its demand for absolute obedience, to say nothing of its unspeakable cruelty in the persecution of what it called “heresy”, and its Inquisition, is one of the most malign institutions ever to have besmirched the human race. Anti-Semitism was given birth by the Roman Catholic Church.

For well over 1,000 years from the First Council of Nicaea until Martin Luther pinned his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Wittenburg, Christianity doomed humanity in the Western world to ignorance and servility. And this is the tradition that the new mandarins of conservatism want us to admire?

And even after Luther, Christianity continued to impede the development of the free human spirit, and the sterile and suffocating influence of Anglicanism is endlessly attested by the great British novelists of the 19^th Century – George Eliot, Trollope, Thackeray and others.

By insisting on the Judeo-Christian tradition as the informing spirit of Western civilisation, we overlook the transformative sea change wrought on that civilisation by the Enlightenment, with its re-incarnation of the Greek spirit of open-minded rational enquiry free from the inhibition of revealed truth.

Our practice of freedom, inclusive of the freedoms of speech and conscience, our respect for individual sovereignty, and our reliance on the scientific method in medicine, engineering and cosmology were all born in the formulations of thinkers such as John Locke, Adam Smith, Tom Paine and John Stuart Mill, and it is their legacy we should honour as we overturn the new orthodoxies of social justice, equality of outcomes and statism.

Rather than a return to “Christian values,” we should return to the values of the Enlightenment that were so barbarously violated by the arrest of a woman silently praying on a pavement outside an abortion clinic in England.

“Free market capitalism”

While the word “capitalism” was not actually coined by Karl Marx, he took it up as an essential tool in his lexicon of destruction, and I don’t understand why we have any use for it today. I recommend that those campaigning for a better polity abandon it, particularly in the misleading mishmash formulation, “free market capitalism,” for what is capitalism anyway? Who is a capitalist, and who isn’t?  Anyone and everyone who trades in anything whatsoever (unless it is a criminal trade) is a capitalist. Anyone who produces anything for sale is a capitalist. Indeed, anyone who owns an asset of any kind and earns a return on the ownership of that asset, even a non-monetary return, is a capitalist.

Even those who call themselves socialists are capitalists, for their wealth is stolen from people who in the first place made it by trade. The production of goods and services for sale is neither more nor less than the exercise or expression of freedom, and whenever we use the word “capitalism” we can better use the word freedom.

Capitalism, as has been noted many times over, is not a system, and not being a system it is not in competition with socialism, which is a system, nor is it the “opposite” of socialism, for the opposite of socialism is freedom, and it is freedom that is at war with socialism, not capitalism.

 A speaker at the ARC, and a very poor one at that − Paul Marshall, a British hedge fund manager − told his audience that “free market capitalism” was born with the establishment of the East India Company in 1599, the world’s first joint stock company. This is not so. The joint stock company was undoubtedly a minor innovation to expedite trade and mitigate its risks, but it was not the invention of a belief system.

Trade has taken place since time immemorial; it has taken place under conditions of extreme risk, it has impoverished some and enriched others. It was expedited by Arab moguls, risk takers and entrepreneurs in entrepot ports that dotted the sea routes from west to east and vice versa for the last 3,000 years. I have coined my own description of the first human beings: homo tradiensis. Instead of straitjacketing ourselves with that ghastly phrase “free market capitalism” why don’t we just use the formulation “free trade”?

Marshall, as it happens, went on in his speech to designate what he called three mutant strains of “free market capitalism” – monopoly capitalism, crony capitalism and woke capitalism. This is a serious category error. The “mutancy” is not caused by some kind of systematic failure of big business or “market failure,” it is universally caused by the substitution by governments of trade or statutory law for common law and freely elected consumer preference.

When that happens the unholy alliance between state and business is born, and the phenomenon of “crony capitalism”, which Marshall wrongly identifies as “a mutant strain” of business, occurs. A belief in free markets is not a belief in the probity of business, it is a sense of confidence that under conditions of freedom there will always be risk takers competing to satisfy our consumption needs, and we need not trouble ourselves either by admiring or by deprecating business.

Conservative values

As someone who is happy to be labelled a Trumpian, I am offended when it is assumed that I must therefore be a “conservative.” Trump is not a conservative, nor am I, and I suggest that those who are leading the charge against both statism and wokism do their cause a disservice by publicly admiring “conservative values,” and assuming that their fellow travellers are uniformly conservative.

In doing so they create yet another artificial binary: “conservative vs liberal,” one similar to other misleading binaries, “capitalist vs socialists,” or “left wing and right wing,” the last of which gives rise to no recognisable difference of view or attitude.

I am a child of the rock revolution of the late 50s and 60s and I would betray my life’s adventure if I capitulated to the very norms and standards we rebelled against. I loved it when Paul McCartney scandalised royalty watchers by singing: “Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl, but she doesn’t have a lot to say. Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl, but she changes from day to day. I want to tell her that I love her a lot but I’ve got to get a belly full of wine. Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl, someday I’m going to make her mine.” So irreverent, so insouciant, so unimpressed by the demands of convention!

More to the point, a famous school principal at the ARC, Katherine Birbalsingh, told an admiring audience that in her north London multi-cultural school where “conservative” values are strictly adhered to, the pupils are obliged to sing the national anthem once a week, and are taught to love England.

Taught to love England?

Few people in the audience seemed to appreciate the irony of having the need to teach pupils to love their country. But in any case, this is an abysmal didactic principle. As a former some-time English teacher, I didn’t regard it as my task to require the pupils to love anything or anyone they were not disposed to.

Sacrifice

In his address, Jordan Peterson returned to a theme he has been addressing regularly of late. I am an unqualified admirer of Peterson, and have been since he took on the threat of serious judicial punishment by refusing to use mandated personal pronouns. I am happy to disclose that his comments and views are in most cases nothing short of inspirational for me.

But he has begun to lose me with his insistence on the notion of sacrifice as the foundational principle of a humane or merit-worthy society, and – at least among the ARC delegates − he does not seem to be alone in this insistence.

I recognise the nobility in sacrifice for a cause higher than your own self-interest. But – even though he qualifies his recommendation by framing it as “voluntary self-sacrifice” − Peterson comes very close to creating an obligation to sacrifice our self-interests in the interests of the community, or making a mandatory requirement of it, in the same way as Christianity has made charity a Christian obligation, thereby voiding it of its human value.

I draw on the insights and recommendations of literary authors as nominally different as William Blake and D H Lawrence − who would both have been appalled by Peterson’s suggestion – to distance myself from Peterson’s insistently held view, and to reject the imposition of such an obligation as the necessary building block of a better society.

Nobility does not necessarily lie in doing what you are expected to do rather than what you want and freely elect to do; I see absolutely no reason why I should love my neighbour, and I am certain that my destiny lies in doing my best according to my own lights.

To take two substantially different cases, neither Elon Musk nor John Lennon fulfilled themselves and delivered thereby in spades to the general good of humanity by making sacrifices of themselves, and there are endless such examples – think of Gaugin, who did not budge an inch to accommodate the needs of those around him, even those who helped him, but left a legacy of artwork that has the potential to transform lives for the better (as it were). I grew up in an era when it was common for parents to hold their children to account for the “sacrifices” they, the parents, had made for their children’s well-being and privileges. It was a practice rotten to the core.

I recognise nobility in the sacrifice Sydney Carton makes when he elects to go to the guillotine in place of an innocent man (in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities), and I know there are many occasions in life when self-sacrifice is indeed called for. But when self-sacrifice is regarded as having a functional value serving a social end, rather than being a spontaneous and personal action undertaken in love, it loses the quality of virtue.

We need to get it off the agenda for change.

 

source:ARC error: why we should reject Peterson’s call to self-sacrifice – Daily Friend

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