We are at war.

We are at war. We are at war with some very, very powerful currents in contemporary societies and culture.

I have attempted several times to write the piece that I am starting here. I am a little unclear, actually, about what it is I want to say because there are so many things that I want to try and put into words. I live, at the age of 64 years, a very comfortable life with no huge problems. I will admit that and I am very grateful for the life I have had, and continue to enjoy. But I see so many things going on these days that worry me very, very much. Not for me, but for the generations to come. I fear that the human species is on the verge of reverting to the mean of human existence, and that mean is, as Hobbes so famously put it, “… solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

For 99% of the history of our species life has been very, very harsh indeed. Even for those few who managed to enjoy a slightly better life, it was tough by the standards we have become accustomed to today. That is the mean of human existence, the norm if you like. For about 200 years our species has lifted itself well above that mean. Starting in England, spreading to Europe, slowly at first, the standard of living for homo sapiens got better, and better and better, and began to spread around the world.

At first it was not believed. There had been upturns and downturns throughout human history, and people expected this was just a good, long, upturn. They expected the downturn to come. But it didn’t. Life got better, eventually at an exponential rate.

Maybe the downturn is coming? And if it does, it is going to be truly awful.

What were the factors, in my opinion, that lifted humanity out of its harsh existence and sent us to the stars? I would argue for four things:

Liberty, Capitalism, Industrialisation and Science.

Each of these has a complex history and interact in multi faceted ways. To explore those histories and those ways would be interesting, but I am not going to do that here. Some people would include Democracy in that list, but I choose not to. The reason that I exclude Democracy is because the true explosion that gave us the Modern World was well under way before Democracy was a reality in the West. Democracy itself is an interesting and problematic concept and I may well come back to that at another time.

These four cornerstones of our modern luxurious life are under serious attack today. The attack comes from several directions, but it can all be summed up in one word – Ideology.

By ideology I mean a system of ideas that already knows all the answers and that just requires faith from its followers. Religion is the classic form of what I mean, the ideal type of ideology, but it can also be found in political, social and cultural belief systems.

The most dangerous and violent form of ideological belief that exists today is, I think, Islamic Fascism. This is both a real physical threat and an insidious acid eating away at Western culture from the inside. It is a poison to Enlightenment values and it must be stopped. I fear that it may be too late.

Then we have a whole cluster of related ideologies that go by the general label these days of Social Justice. This has many dimensions, from fourth wave feminism to Global Warmism to Eco Fascism. All of these, in their various ways, are undermining the same Enlightenment values that Islamism attacks. In that sense they are allies.

Liberty is under massive attack, as the range of things that we can do and say gets reduced and reduced, both by Social Justice Fascism and Islamic Fascism.

Capitalism is under attack as SJ Fascism undermines the liberty required for it to function and drains more and more resources away from the market and into an ever growing state.

Industrialisation has become a dirty word.

And even Science is under pressure, both from within and without. Within the scientific community the malign influence of politics linked to ideological agendas and funding has had a very distorting effect. And from without we have seen the denial of many scientific claims purely because they do not fit a specific ideological discourse.

This is a very brief description of what I think is happening. Various forms of ideological fascism are eating away at the foundations of our material and cultural way of life. If a crash comes, and we begin to revert to the mean of human existence, it will be nasty and brutish.

As I said, we are at war with totalitarian and fascistic ideologies. I hope that war can still be won, but I have my doubts.