Unsurprisingly, after 25 years of destruction to the humanities in the name of equity, and the ease with which identitarian requirements and interdicts of the academe have prevailed in the corporate world, many conservatives are now reconsidering their embrace of the so-called “free market”. The obvious question is: why did it take them this long? Did they really not see that the capitalism with which they so identified — even if they were pro-capitalist merely because they were anti-communist — was, as my mother once put it, “the bull in the china shop of human history”?

It is as if, somehow, conservatives imagined that the cultural worldview best expressed by T.S. Eliot in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” could long thrive in a capitalist culture. As if Eliot’s view, that the true significance of an artist’s work lies in the relationship between the artist and those who had come before, could be compatible with capitalism, an ideology that is by definition “presentist” and utterly disdainful of the past. Or, to put it another way, as if what Daniel Bell described as capitalism’s “radical individualism in economics, and [its] willingness to tear up all traditional social relations in the process” could somehow still leave room for traditionalism in culture.

For tradition is, at least in the long run, the cultural, and perhaps even the moral, opposite of innovation which is what the free market perpetually aspires to. To use the business school boilerplate, new technologies give rise to new industries, which in turn produce new goods and services. In the process, social relations are transformed. Even if it is correct to believe that capitalism, through what Joseph Schumpeter described as “creative destruction”, is the best economic system in history for creating prosperity, the price for that prosperity was always going to be high culture.

“The price for that prosperity was always going to be high culture.”

In his 1976 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell rejected Marx’s idea that culture was a reflection of the economy — that it was “integrally allied to it through the exchange process”. Instead, Bell argued that culture had become ever more autonomous. And yet the connection he made between the growth of discretionary income, and the advent of a cultural order that proudly proclaimed itself the adversary of the established social order, actually fits in better with Marx’s view than his own. Towards the end of his essay, Bell conceded that the breakup of the traditional bourgeois value system was, in fact, brought about by the bourgeois economic system — by the free market, to be precise.

But Bell doesn’t seem to have understood something quite crucial about the role of the arts. It is unquestionably the case that from the middle of the 19th century, despite a few dissenting voices such as Eliot’s, artists in the West saw their mission as the dissolution of the social status quo. With hindsight, however, it is clear that their more important role, in world historical terms, was to serve as a kind of inadvertent avant-garde of the free market: by systematically destroying the Protestant Ethic with all its moral and economic commitments to what Bell called “Malthusian prudence”. Bell’s language is elegiac. American capitalism, he wrote, “has lost its legitimacy, which was based on a moral system of reward, and the Protestant sanctification of work”. And, writing as he was in 1970, it is understandable that he thought that the replacement of Protestant moralism with hedonism, with a new “voluptuary system” of “social permissiveness and libertinism”, would be unsustainable.

And had it stopped there, perhaps Bell would have been right. Every social system needs some kind of moral warrant, and in 1970 it was anything but clear what that new moral warrant would be. Half a century later, though, we now know what it has been: wokeness, Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, LGTBQ+, and the rest. These doctrines have moralised the voluptuary system, disciplined the libertinism, and politicised the permissiveness. As for the cultural contradiction Bell warned of, that, too, has been settled — and in Carthaginian fashion, by condemning and repudiating the past as racist, which in practical terms means calling for the erasure of the high culture of the past. It could hardly be otherwise, since high culture in every society has always been the product of the rich and powerful, of kings, empires, princes, or plutocrats.

High culture became the only thing standing in the way of the free market, and now that too has been taken care of. Art can co-exist with Schlock, but it cannot indefinitely survive the onslaught of Kitsch — the only kind of culture the free market can really tolerate. And there we have the unimaginable combination of Schumpeter and Fanon. Yet, once imagined, obvious; perhaps, even, inevitable. Because, at least in the long run, it is impossible to have an economic system based on obsolescence and destruction (“creative” or otherwise) and a cultural system based on pious continuity. We have moved from the Grand Inquisitor to the Grand Therapist.

And so now only 8% of university students in the UK are enrolled in humanities subjects. The madness of wokeness and the barbarous inanities of “anti-racism” are well on their way to destroying high culture in the Anglosphere and, probably, in parts of Latin America and Western Europe as well. And this despite the Rightward turn, because most of the Right in the US, Canada, and Australia are no more committed to high culture than to the preservation of the environment. In Western Europe and Latin America, high culture has at least for a century not been a monopoly of the Left — from Borges to Houellebecq, a conservative tradition remains alive. By contrast, in the Anglosphere, once one gets past Chesterton, Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy, the cultural pickings are slim indeed.

Let us for once be honest: what is on offer in terms of contemporary culture on both sides of the woke/anti-woke battle line today is a penumbral shadow of the culture of the past. This is not to say that there aren’t any people of talent in both camps. But, if we are being rigorous, it is simply a fact to say that the greatest days of Western culture are behind it. There is nothing unusual in this. Cultures and civilisations are as mortal as human beings. The great Renaissance historian and politician Francesco Guicciardini said that a citizen must not mourn the decline of their city. All cities decline, he wrote. If there is anything to mourn it is that it has been one’s unhappy fate to be born when one’s city is in decline.

If there is a new culture waiting to be born, it will certainly not be born of wokeness, of neo-tribalist nostalgia, of notions of race that would have pleased the worst 20th-century race scientist. But nor will Western high culture ever ascend to the place it reached so gloriously in the period between the Renaissance and the middle of the 20th century. That race has run its course. And somewhere, deep down, everyone knows this. Given that, why in God’s name would one want to study a subject in the humanities? There are, of course, material reasons for the death of the humanities as well. One can be materialist here, but not too materialist; allegro ma non troppo, as it were. The old culture is dying, and what purports to be its successor has come into the world stillborn.

***

A version of this essay appears in David Rieff’s new book, Desire and Fate, published by Eris and out now.

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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/