If we succumb to political correctness and group think, a reversal of Western decline is unlikely.

Before the era of political correctness, intellectuals with opposing political views still tried to learn from each other. Lionel Trilling for one quotes John Stuart Mill, who as a fierce opponent of Coleridge nevertheless urged his fellow liberals to study this powerful conservative mind (LT, The Liberal Imagination, 1940).

Lord, enlighten thou our enemies…; sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.

By contrast, what we are seeing today are liberals trying to stifle free speech with laws in Canada and elsewhere in the West just because they feel safe to suppress upsetting conservative or independent minds: Geert Wilders in Holland, Mark Steyn in the US, Thilo Sarazin and Hendrik Broder in Germany and Andrew Bolt in Australia to name just a few. Recently some of them were castigated for their opinions simply because the Norwegian madman Anders B Breivik had included fragments of their works in his copy-and-paste manifesto. The political correct brigade of journalists used the opportunity to reiterate their “hate speech” agenda as a means to silence cultural criticism and to maintain their media hegemony by all means. Hate speech in liberal understanding covers anything from sharp, acerbic, ironic to sarcastic language. Missing is only nihilist chat and cynicism which is the hallmark of liberals themselves. This is not a trivial matter for they can project considerable power towards law makers in order to limit free speech not only in Canada but also in Europe, but seemingly not in the US yet.

The hate speech agenda is certainly reminiscent of censure laws in 18^th century Europe or present day authoritarian countries like China or Russia, employed to retain cultural hegemony by the communist avant-garde of old. And for this matter we ought to remember that the China of Mao and the Russia of the Soviet Union have been the prime countries of praise with Western elites for the best part of at least 150 years. One important result of this is the seemingly inexorable success of political correctness in the West, which is becoming increasingly dangerous for constitutionally granted free speech. It clearly indicates that features of Stalinist intolerance have survived despite the fall of the Berlin Wall.

On a different note, some see the new hate speech laws as the continuation of the shift from enlightened rationalism to what we call provisionally post-modern biologism resulting in mind control as depicted in Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and in “1984”. With normative psychology on its way to the epitome of Western science it seems we are fast reaching the point where physical vices or even crimes are exonerated with leveling psychoanalytic or psychological concepts, rendering them more justifiable than exceptional verbal criticism or unconventional opinions. This is about to blur the classical distinction between tentative idea and irrevocable deed. For instance homosexuality is now protected by laws granting sexual self-determination or free body-expression such as the exhibitionist gay pride parades. This is a prime example of the politics of the body, promoted incessantly by advocates of identity politics, determined by assumptions of biological destiny, incessantly covered by the mainstream media whereas by contrast inflictions on free speech are often treated with indifference by them.

Under the spiritual challenge of Islam it seems the West retreats into a crude culture of the flesh anxiously protected by strictly regulated language use. This intolerant assault on personal freedom is epitomized by a series of triumphant victories of gay politics in the name of equality over the right to differ by the Catholic Church. This ascendancy of erotocratic elites, brilliantly depicted by Philip Rieff (The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 2006), is an stern affirmation of the prevailing power of political correctness. Nearly overlooked by mainstream media was the row in 2010 in England over child adoptions for gay couples. Homosexual radicals prevailed in the political arena and effectively stopped the Catholic child adoption services which had reneged to serve gay couples. This leaves orphans with poorer choices not to mention parenting. Many conflicts of this kind are smothered today with gay intolerance or even public outbursts of gay violence. Examples are brutal attacks in 2009 against Californians who naively polled in a constitutional proposition against gay marriage trusting in venerable American institutions. Their properties were demolished in what appeared to be a primitive gay mob driven by PC ideology. Or just Google the leaflets peppered with Nazi Stuermer vocabulary and circulated by the San Francisco gay campaign against Jewish and Muslim traditional circumcision. What we are seeing here is gay political correct “mind police” in action. It doesn’t bode well that even the Occupy Wall Street protesters have taken up the issue of circumcision as if the US did not have more serious problems right now. The question that emerges from here is: Who will be the next victims of gay intolerance and brutality? The excoriation of the Church might only be the beginning of the growing suppression of personal freedoms in realms such as religion, art, speech and opinion.

The triple powers of gender, race and class advocacy movements have taken over the 19^th century suppressive triumvirate of military, church and family, that Sigmund Freud attacked vigorously. Germany thanks to the cultural nemesis of the Nazis is today probably the most secular country in the West except Russia. You will find her First Lady, our President’s spouse, displaying here tattoo in public; you see an openly gay foreign minister marching on the red carpets of the world with his partner at the occasional state visit. And you might witness major German cities turned into fiefdoms of the gay community. Oddly enough however Islamist groups also won the odd struggle against freedom of speech suggesting there being a tacit coalition between gays and radical Muslim at work. However it is rather a Wahlverwandtschaft. There is no need for any conspiracy, for it just comes down to multiculturalism which delivers privileges to both groups. Today’s minorities and organized groups rather than individuals per se are the powers-that-be. And in addition radical Muslims and extremist gays share a knack for ostentatious pride and political dramatization surpassed only by a lack tolerance. Obviously the idiosyncrasies and irritabilities of homosexuals and Islamists are pretty much complementary. Occasional clashes about the odd circumcision notwithstanding, both are trying to put themselves at the epicenter of Western identity and together they might emerge as the arbiters of public opinion. Already both have become so powerful that it is increasingly dangerous to offend them. By contrast it is beyond me why on earth it can be that the one group that in living memory has been the sole and only target of genocide is again the prominent subject of real hatred and manifest discrimination: Jews living in the stronghold of PC culture which is Europe.

Historically speaking, post-modern unlimited body expression – just think of the ghastly global photo campaign with thousands of naked human beings recently posturing on the shores of the Dead Sea – appears to have replaced the Free Thinkers movement of early modernity. It suggests Western liberal elites are running out of ideas and are tumbling back into primitivism a la Rousseau. As a result lots of cliché types abound with personal looks corrected or conventionalized by plastic surgery, tattoos and piercing, in addition to exhortations of sexual abnormalities. The metamorphosis from the homosexual community to the “gay” via coming out has set “body talk” and biological identity as the default mode of cultural communication. Ever since the new body politics are degrading human dignity in a seemingly endless downward spiral. You need not look further than the international big brother format on TV. However this was somehow to be expected because progressive 18^th century Whiggism paved the way to vulgar materialism just as inexorably in the West as nihilist materialism in 19^th century Russia. And ever since the urban Western elites other than absorbing varieties of tedious Marxism remained “brain dead”, to use the phrase of the celebrated US dramatist David Mamet. This might explain why this side of new ideas progressives, meanwhile calling themselves liberals, came to resort to mind control under the name of political correctness. Once PC is in place the progressives don’t have to worry very much about new concepts. Contrary to the received wisdom, urban elites always knew that in the field of intellectual achievement they couldn’t really compete with conservative minds, which have done most of the hard thinking. Walter Benjamin among others and one of the most erudite of the great minds on the Left admitted that a majority of all the influential Western poets and thinkers of the last 200 years have been naturally inclined to conservatism. An early PC trick has been to use the political Right/Left divide to exploit the reservoir of ideas by claiming more than their just part for authoritarian rule. Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin did just this. It was followed up with ad hominem insults at times aimed at expunging inconvenient ideas by chastising their authors. We all remember Western liberals excoriating singled out politicians such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher or George W. Bush, reminiscent of politics of character assassinations of Soviet fame that remain the hallmark of an intolerant ideology. The ad hominem attack for a good reason had been out-ruled in classical discourse for it is the real thing in terms of “hate speech”.

Lionel Trilling

Now the present strategy of PC elites is their attack on the core institutions of free Western society: the military, the church and the family. Let’s just return to the pestering of the Catholic Church, which provides us with sort of a test for Western resilience if we trust that individual freedom is its linchpin. Surprisingly it was the liberal beacon Lionel Trilling, who stated that the death of individualism always starts with the rejection of religion or art. The late Trilling is of course the doyen of post WW II liberal thinking and he criticized fellow liberal writers who want to make us believe that art – always fond of mavericks and clumsy details – stands in the way of progress. Trilling dwells on this in an unfinished novel, posthumously published only in 2008 as The Journey Abandoned. His protagonist is Harold Outram, the “socially aware” liberal, who is keen to point out, that art is an obstacle to progress, in Marxist terms, just like religion “opium to the people”. Outram is full of praise for the “inartistic culture” of Soviet Russia, where group or social imagination as opposed to individual or moral imagination has been carried farthest:

Sooner or later we will understand that Russia is our future and our hope. And Russia has produced not one single notable work of art. Oh, don’t jump to what you think is the defense, don’t tell me that time will produce masterpieces. . . . In nearly twenty years, out of those millions of people, not one young man has forced his way forward with his creative talent. . . . And the fact is that Russia is right. Literature—art—it was a phase of man’s development and Russia is showing the way to the new phase. And you know as well as I do that the arts cannot survive. . . . Russia has perceived before any of us that the arts, about which we are so politically sentimental, are one of the great barriers in the way of human freedom and decency.

Note the recent abandonment of venerable conservative tenets by the German public intellectual Frank Schirrmacher and replacing it with an exoneration of the Left in the context of the financial crisis (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, issue 15.8.11). Having witnessed myself the cultural revolt of 1968 in Germany I remember very well, how the radical Left for more than a decade kept denouncing any form of art, not to mention religion, as useless. At the same time delegitimizing the Christian core family was a way of expunging the continuity of religion in Germany. Since then degraded to a patchwork, useful merely as an immigration hoax, the family is about to be succeeded by the group as the new paradigm of society. This is very likely to result in the decline of individual morals and speed up the ascendancy of group identities pushed forward by social networks that are vigorously enhancing group adherence. For instance in Germany already you come across weddings or birthday celebrations in hotels that are labeled “Group Newman” where it used to be “Family Newman”. Similarly for years now every global business has been scrambling to adopt the “group” label onto their name - not always for reasons of diversity of business.

All of this seems to suggest that not only group think but also organized gender or race networks are the new enablers or facilitators of careers in our new century rules by biological determinism. Remember the devastating effects of grade inflation in the West through affirmative action executed along the lines of group advocacy. The common feature of these groups is generally a victim identity, presented by unelected advocates of supposedly aggrieved and disadvantaged subjects or minorities. For this is often the best way to hide their unfettered will to power. At least that is how Trilling has put it, not referring to its originator Nietzsche, subtly describing it as the essence of post-war liberalism in America. However this feature persists in the West even after the fall of the communist empire and it might be understood as proper devolution of the hypocrisy of Soviet phony peace politics, hiding the worst of power politics.

Now some time ago Lionel Trilling has unearthed the mechanisms behind the surge of group and identity politics as the switch from moral imagination to social imagination (“The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, selected essays”) – a phenomenon he detected first in novels and literary criticism. His observation furnishes us with a perfect framework for understanding the ongoing cultural transfer of identity and loyalty away from the family onto peers and groups at large. Again think of the effects of social networking on the web. The template of this has been developed by Western academics for several decades at universities. It conjured up the modern framing of gender, race and ethnicity issues into the concepts of multiculturalism, feminism, black culture, along with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or any other identity politics. They all have in common a fairly materialistic if not biological approach as a cover for their uncompromising Nietzschean will to power. This could be studied in seminaries over several decades on most of Western faculties of the humanities.

That’s where the history of Soviet Russia as a model comes in again. For the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, thinking in a similar vein as Trilling, argued that a society deprived of art and religion such as Russia in the first half of the 19^th century is rife for social conformism. He went on to show, how British elites imitated that deprived and utterly politicized secular culture. An example for this is the British dramatists Tom Stoppard who was admittedly inspired by Russian dramatists and writers. Culturally deprived Russia thus seems to have inspired much of European progressive literature and theater. Berlin argued that Russia at the time, devoid of significant works of art, could all the more excel as avant-garde of dramatic social change - presenting itself as a progressive society which the West was called for to emulate. There have been even in my time thousands of fake artists in modern Western societies who instead of producing any art to speak of emulated the attitudes and bohemian life style, living “as if” they were artists justified only by their anti-authoritarian credentials. From these unproductive youth emerged the chattering social networks.

Nikolay Tschernyschewski

Interestingly it was Berlin's book that introduced the Russian philosopher and dramatist Wissarion G. Belinsky to playwright Tom Stoppard. The latter afterwards included Belinsky as one of the principal characters (along with Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin and Turgenev) in his trilogy of plays about Russian writers and activists: “The Coast of Utopia” of 2002. One spectacular example for Russian precursors in the anti-religious and art-averse mold of progressive elites is the bestselling Russian novel “What to do? (German: Was tun?). Published by Nikolai Gawrilowitsch Tschernyschewskij in 1863, the title immediately became a household name, so much so that Vladimir I. Lenin adopted it later for his eponym revolutionary manifesto of 1905. Tschernyschewskij was educated in a monastic seminary in Saratov, where he absorbed the philosophical writings of Belinsky and Herzen. He continued his studies at the University of Petersburg and finally became a teacher for literature in his hometown of Saratov. As an early convert from spiritualism to materialism he became very influential in the West and none less than the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs praised his revolutionary genius.

Isaiah Berlin assessed Tschernischewskij’s “What to do?” which to my knowledge has never been translated into English:

He was wildly erratic, and all his enthusiasm and seriousness and integrity do not make up for lapses of insight or intellectual power. He declared that Dante was not a poet; that Fennimore Cooper was the equal of Shakespeare; that Othello was the product of a barbarous age...

Berlin goes on:

Because he was naturally responsive to everything that was living and genuine, he transformed the concept of the critic's calling in his native country. The lasting effect of his work was in altering and altering crucially and irretrievably, the moral and social outlook of the leading younger writers and thinkers of his time. He altered the quality and the tone both of the experience and of the expression of so much Russian thought and feeling that his role as a dominant social influence overshadows his attainments as a literary critic.

Thus Tschernyschewskij created a new genre of the revolutionary novel and not surprisingly that anticipated the concept of political correctness, demonstrating the overwhelming power of context or social imagination over individual morals and personal independence of reasoning. It seems therefore wholly congenial to what extent modern professional academics of English departments all over the West have adopted group think and contextualism as the default mode of literary criticism. Context is the PC inculcator, smothering creativity, which perpetuates the barrenness of the progressive intellectual culture. The festering mainstream assumption is the supposedly inevitable submission of the individual to an advanced civil society. Equally overwhelming is the group think as liberal gold standard of reasoning. No doubt, “What to do?” paved the way for this conformism. It is also a piece of early socialist propaganda and comes across as an iconoclastic performance intended to demonize family loyalty, custom, patriotism, religion and certainly traditional sexual mores. The author is keen to convert the petit bourgeois into the New Homo Sovjeticus. Thus the author is molding collective features and types of the mass society and takes great pains to prove that his types are not above or superior to normal decent people. Part and parcel of this comprehensive, intolerant and closed-minded new Weltanschauung is the substitution of the family morals with the social imagination of groupthink.

As such, this kind of avant-garde differs famously from its revolutionary French predecessor in the 18^th century. For the French revolutionaries looked for heroes in antiquity as role models, Karl Marx has taught us in his “18^th Brumaire”. While the first anti-czarist revolutionaries of 1825 still followed the French in this, it was only in the 1860ies that the Russian social democrats took to the future rather than the past. “What to do” is framed as a secular revelation of this social utopia, depicting a bright Russia as an epicurean paradise. The novel was translated into French as early as 1875 and is believed to have inspired writers such as Victor Hugo and Emile Zola among many others. Now meanwhile the contagion of

Spurious type loyalty and groupthink, which kills not only individual creativity but also resilience and bravery, has eroded the cohesion of Western societies in a similar way as previously in Russia. As a result some are expecting the US will finally share the miserable Soviet failure in Afghanistan.

The question is: why are we still emulating a concept that has utterly failed in the Soviet Union and even in places replete with idealism like the Israeli kibbutzim? According to Hugh Trevor-Roper, 19^th century historical philosophy in the West returned to the 17^th century tenets of particularism, nationalism and trust in facts, against the universalism and airiness of the Enlightenment that was already spent by then. The initiators and advocates of this reversal were historians like Lord Acton, who was trained in Munich and the German historicists Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Barthold Georg Niebuhr. There are quite a few signs today, as historian Robert Kagan has argued, that the West might be turning back to the pre-WWI era that set of the first rush of globalization and got rid of ideologies like cosmopolitism and universalism. For the second half of the 19^th century was exactly the time when Russia deviated from the Western course and headed for extreme secularization on its course of international socialism. By than it had already succeeded in replacing France as revolutionary model and had gradually assumed the role of avant-garde as Isaiah Berlin has shown. In Russia more than anywhere else the energies of unrest and frustration poured into the political realm. It was left to Fyodor M. Dostojewski to come up with the slogan for this development: “If God is dead, everything is permitted or can happen”; Russian “aesthetic realism” was the answer as expressed cogently in Tschernychewskij’s new novel. Dostojewski’s phrase was certainly sort of precursor of the postmodern nihilism of 'anything goes'.

It seems after all that both systems of 20^th century totalitarianism contributed their share of nihilism to postmodernity, fascism through Nietzsche and socialism through Herzen, Belinsky, Tschernyschewskij and others. This is to say that Trilling and Berlin might have made significant contributions to the sources of Western decline that were not spotted by Leo Strauss and his disciple Allan Bloom. For the latter in his landmark study of 1987, “The Closing of the American Mind”, blamed racist groupthink of radical Nazi youth for the revival of nihilism in the cultural revolution of 1968. Interestingly even very recent allegedly conservative Russian criticism of Western modernity, such as Alexander Boot’s book of 2006 “How the West was Lost”, still employs obscurant typology and social imagination in its depiction of “Westman”, reminiscent of the ignoble stereotype of the white, Christian male.

This is just another indication that Right and Left as political labels have finally become conceits of social imagination meant to confuse sound moral judgment. As if to deny this, liberals specifically tend to use moral exclusion via defaming adversaries as a weapon to deal with unwelcome opinions and thus shortchange serious criticism with ad hominem attacks. The resulting demonization of public intellectuals of a conservative bent is a clear indication of the Left’s decline but not necessarily of the West’s as such. This confusion is just a mainstream fallacy, taking the Left for the rest. Surely the intellectual resources of the Left are spent, not least looking at their antediluvian notion of absolute evil and demonizing political adversaries with “hate speech” which is about to thwart the well spring of new ideas for the survival of Western society. The concept of hate speech is a projection of the biologistic mindset of urban elites today. By contrast, their more tolerant medieval predecessors, such as some Jewish philosophers, had established the notion that evil is always relative, rendering it as merely a lack of good will. From there followed the civilized generosity of granting any adversary, as Voltaire still did, the benefit of the doubt. We need to insist on this principle in order to win the struggle of ideas in the West.