Civilisational States

In a recent Substack post calkledWe Are All Civilisational States, Aurelien has some interesting comments on the concept of a civilisational State.

Liberalism has always tended towards a kind of blank, managerial efficiency, bereft of any of the characteristics that make us human. It regards beliefs, loyalties, friendship, and social bonds of any kind as at best inefficient, preventing the smooth functioning of the market economy, and at worst as symbols of darkness and superstition, to be driven away by the pure light of reason… Such a society is actually already present in outline in the assumptions of the European Union. Religion, history, culture, language and belief divide people against each other, and so (it is argued) cause conflicts and even wars. Consequently, every effort must be made to extinguish national differences by discouraging the teaching and invocation of separate histories and cultures, except for warnings against their negative aspects, whilst promoting a tasteless, grey Brussels soup, largely distinguished by the ingredients that are missing. History, insofar as its existence is acknowledged, has gone from being a national story to a field of vicious debate and struggle where groups seek to impose their interpretations of history on each other, like family members fighting each other in front of a judge over inheritance rights.

Brussels today is, effectively, Nowhere: no history, no culture, no common heritage, and an ideology constructed entirely out of clichés, where difficult subjects are just not discussed. (Religion is considered a purely cultural artefact, and any criticism of practitioners of non-European religions for any reason is considered racism). History, in the form of buildings and monuments, is acceptable only insofar as it encourages the tourism industry or represents a business opportunity. Even the official language is artificial: a kind of simplified English, with a large influence from French legal vocabulary, often called Globisch.

“Free speech” used to be a Liberal principle, and in theory still is. Yet of course its origins lie in the struggle by Liberals to express themselves freely under absolutist or authoritarian regimes from the eighteenth century onward. Once they had achieved these freedoms, Liberals inevitably began to notice the inconveniences associated with free speech which they did not agree with. And because theirs was an ideology based essentially on a series of unsupported assertions about the world, free enquiry and rational questioning, ironically, were inimical to it. So it’s not surprising that support for freedom of expression has been falling sharply recently among people who identify as liberal.