When I was still quite young and narcissistic enough to believe that the era in which I lived was the most troubled of them all, I happened to interview Harry Frankfurt, now 88 and still professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton. I asked the thinker, then enjoying unlikely best-seller status for his analysis of the phenomenon of “bullshit”, if he didn’t agree that our time was not the absolute worst.
Frankfurt did concede that there was now a greater volume of the thing he calls bullshit — distinct from a lie in that its producer has no relationship to the truth — but he wouldn’t go with me in my handcart to hell. “Every time is the worst,” he said. “Every time is also the best. The one thing about which I am certain is that this is the time in which I live, and I am doomed to write about that one.”
There is not much a cautious analytic philosopher like Frankfurt would say about natural human tendencies. But he might say that many of us are inclined to think like I did then: apocalyptically. Whether we think, per Fukuyama, that we have arrived at a perfected “end of history”, or we think we’ll be charred by global warming, nuclear war or the hand of god, we believe in conclusions. We often believe that things will stop changing.
Since the conversation with Frankfurt — one of many in which I have embarrassed myself by talking bullshit — I have made a conscious effort not to think that we are arriving or have arrived at a historical endpoint. History moves on, I tell myself, and so we can rarely say that it has settled at its worst or its best.
Lately, though, I find it hard to resist the temptation of End Times thinking. I wonder if I talked to Harry, he might not agree that some apocalyptic cracks are starting to show in the West.
[McCain’s frozen peace: why the media swooned for a Republican’s cliched US exceptionalism]
You know the headlines that might prompt a person to think this way: Brexit, Trump, the Pyrrhic victory of a banker in France whose promised maintenance of neoliberal policies is unlikely to do anything but fan the flames of a re-emerged fascism. It’s been more than five years since Greece was saddled with the biggest debt in history. This week marks the 10th anniversary of what is generally regarded as the onset of the global financial crisis. We’ve had a decade of “market corrections” that have produced a plague of political monsters, brutal austerity policies and wage stagnation. What we haven’t had, as we did following the crash of 1929 and the stagflation of the 1970s, is a significant change in economic thinking.
If, as Frankfurt says, we are obliged to address the period in which we exist, we have failed. During the Great Depression, the policy class looked at the cracks and elected to fill them with Keynesian prescriptions. When the worker-friendly regimes of the West began to eat away at profit by the early 1970s, neoliberal policies took their place, destabilising work for the many. Whatever particular loathing you may have for either school of thought, these were, at least, answers to crises of political economy.
And now, the overwhelming response to disaster is, historically speaking, bullshit. There are very few leaders or pundits who choose to address the time in which they live and are, you’d hope, doomed and obliged to think about. Without getting too apocalyptic about it, an economic regime change is sorely needed.
The cracks are visible. Political parties cannot contain their own divisions — just yesterday, we saw Abbott and Pyne have a cultural stoush and Lee Rhiannon and the Greens a genuine economic one. Buildings whose structural flaws are permitted by market-friendly politicians begin to fail.
This is not, as I learned, the end of the world. What it could be, if we tried, is the end of political bullshit — not a lie, but an obfuscation that bears no relation to the truth. What it could be is a beginning of a time that may not be the best, but will save us from the worst.
We’ll know that the world has changed, for the better, when the IMF and the World Bank start to work on getting nation states out of crippling debts rather than creating them.
The austerity measures of these two bodies are among the most damaging economically and socially, and will likely be the last pillars of neoliberal economics to fall.
I too hope that we are in a period which will be looked back on as the worst of times, because we stopped enacting policies that made the world worse than it already is.
That will never happen. These institutions were conceived as the instruments of global debt slavery. Financialised piracy is their sine qua non. They must be outright dismantled
“Without getting too apocalyptic about it, an economic regime change is sorely needed”
To what exactly? Authoritarian Marxism? What could possibly go wrong…
In other words, you ARE getting too apocalyptic about it. Is an economic regime change REALLY needed? Or do we just need to fix what is broken with the current model (warning: may require non-binary thinking).
The key failures of neoliberalism are about putting too much faith in inherently flawed market systems and a fanatical devotion to “deregulation”.
These flaws are becoming ever more evident, but a generation of leaders (and a lot of people who vote for them) have been indoctrinated to think markets will solve everything so the “solution” is to keep rolling back regulations, cutting wages, cutting taxes etc.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But this is equally applicable to those opposed to the current “economic regime” that simply resort to reactionary Marxist hyperbole in place of actual policy ideas (case in point: this and most other Razer articles).
We need centrism now more than ever. We need the focus to be on the hard work of RESTORING regulations, wages and taxes instead of half-baked plans to overthrow capitalism as we know it…
There is no point promising free uni degrees for jobs which won’t exist if the human race is inevitably moving into a “post-work” era. More debates about the best way to use redistribution/education/technology to care for, and give purpose to, those left behind need to be brought to the political centre.
ie: The market can’t solve everything…but neither can the government. Marxism isn’t a solution. That’s reality.
‘Centrism’ is nothing but a euphemism for corporate rule and a rhetorical device for marginalising opposition to it. Please tell me which centrist governments have not exploited slave labor on a massive scale and enabled genocide in order to enrich arms manufacturers and fossil fuel barons. Can you provide an example? Didn’t think so. The choice is now automated communism or full poverty and permanent war.
Oh the old checking under the beds Centrism, the lazy unintelligent corporatist model that was the precurser of the neoliberal model, why dont we just exhume and taxodermy Menzies, he would probably beat Trumble as preferred PM
At least Marx was an intellectual, and some would say, whose time has come
Isn’t “anti-capitalism pro-socialism” an example of binary thinking?
Did you even read the article? Helen called for a reformist reconfiguration of capitalism and here you are ranting about communism.
Yes, Draco. Along with me old mate Corbyn, I’m just trying to compromise and save their precious system. And this is the the thanks we get!
Daemon – Nice attempt at a bit of rabble-soothing there, there is nothing wrong that more of the same won’t fix, just trust the system.
I wasn’t aware of Frankfurt’s theory of bullshit per se but I have been gape mouthed for 20yrs+ at the propensity of most people to listen to utter garbage, which contradicted their daily experience of reality, without falling over laughing.
It is as if they prefer to believe phantasies rather than acknowledge the sunk cost of their life until the moment it turns to shit.
And then are willing to invest even more in proven stupidity.
Religion & gambling are obvious examples but neolib politics and ecological denialism are right of the leaders’ tails.