WITH the death of Pope Francis, the global Left has lost its most articulate and thoughtful spokesman. I still go back to Laudato si’ from time to time, for a coherent view of the ways in which the ecological crisis, the crisis of consumer capitalism, and the crisis of mass migration are all interlinked.
Catholic social teaching inherited from Aristotle an approach that asks, what sort of animal are we, and what are the conditions of our flourishing? Christianity changed profoundly the answer to the question of what sort of animal we are, though, by adding an idea of human dignity and worth — derived from God — that was completely alien to Greek thought, and still remains unnatural and quite unsupported by scientific observation.
I am interested in forms of life and thought that will help to preserve as much as possible of civilisation through the climate crisis, the collapse of the American empire, and its replacement by warring states, the coming pandemics, and so on.
Part of the “and so on” will be the dissolution of higher education as we know it. This is partly driven, in the UK, by politics. Domestic student fees are pitched at a level that is too much for the individual and too little for the institutions. The universities have been encouraged, if not forced, by successive governments to depend on foreign-student fees — to the extent that there are now Chinese students at the University of Arts in London who are entirely dependent on Google translate for their interactions with the teachers; this racket is now threatened by a crackdown on immigration so that the finances of the system will quite soon collapse entirely.
Even in pure financial terms, degrees will be worth much less in a world in which AI is generally adapted. Most students now cannot imagine a world in which they don’t farm out their assignments to an AI; nor could they function in such a world. But the people who might employ them will have no need for intermediaries: they can prompt an AI themselves. They won’t need to pay underlings to do it, and they won’t.
So, we can look forward to a population of disappointed graduates who feel cheated out of the fruits of their education, both financial and cultural, even if they only notice the financial loss and manage to avoid the culture altogether.
In this world, all the older ideologies must dissolve, dependent as they were on real literacy. Book-learning will splinter; few people will have read enough for the books to enter into a conversation with each other in their minds. I don’t think that a vague and generalised decency is widely spread or deeply rooted enough to survive in such a climate.
WE HAVE already seen some prefigurements of this confusion. The journalist and polemicist Nick Cohen posted on Substack over the Easter weekend an elegy for the New Atheism, which — to be fair — noted with regret how some Muslims were hurt by the contempt with which they were treated by Christopher Hitchens. But the contempt and the cruelty were the point.
Sam Harris wrote “We are at war with Islam”, and justified torturing anyone we were prepared to bomb. When that movement mutated into wokery, it kept the class-based contempt for the opinions of the working class, especially in the US. The idea that religion was a crutch for weak minds was popular because it implied that the irreligious were stronger minded and generally superior.
The “woke” movement was a way to avoid looking at the real power relations in societies, those mediated by money, by inventing all kinds of oppressed identities that were open to rich people as well. The anti-woke movement is just as much about ignoring the poor and the huddled masses, but it is much more open about this.
The Nietzschean fantasies of the tech oligarchs, in which the elites remove to Mars and leave the rest of us die on a ruined planet, recast in a doom-laden key the “cosy catastrophes” of John Wyndham’s science fiction, in which decent British middle-class couples survive the collapse of civilisation and build a New Bedales in the ruins. I know that there are forms of Christian millenarianism that offer the same hope of surviving a universal catastrophe to the elect; despite this, I still believe that it is other, more realistic and disciplined forms of Christianity which can best recognise and even preserve humanity.
