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.

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.

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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.

To use the military expression, humanitarian aid has always been expeditionary. And if there were echoes of Western missionaries during the heyday of European colonialism, this was anything but a coincidence. Relief work tends to attract idealistic young people on the Left, but its origins lie partly in the imperial notions of “uplift” through missionary activity, and partly in the ambitions of the Red Cross movement to mitigate the most terrible effects of warfar

The would-be relief worker joined a non-governmental organisation such as Oxfam, Save the Children, or Medicins sans Frontières and would then be assigned – again, very much like a priest or a soldier – to a crisis zone. And, again like a 19^th-century European missionary or a soldier, the decision about where to deploy was made either by the NGO, or by rich donor governments, or within the framework of the United Nations and its development agencies, which themselves were largely controlled by these same governments – by anyone, in short, but the people in the places where the emergency was unfolding.

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That’s not to say that humanitarian aid is ‘imposed’ on those who benefit from it. If anything, it is usually the opposite: a human being in dire straits does not have the luxury of rejecting assistance because of its provenance. And institutionally, the NGOs could not operate without at least the consent of the governments in the affected areas.

But consent should not be confused with having had much of a say in how a decision to launch a humanitarian intervention was arrived at. As with economic development – also largely imposed from without by the World Bank and the IMF – it was taken for granted that governments in affected areas would cooperate. If they didn’t, it was assumed to mean, as it did in the case of the government of Sudan during the Darfur crisis, or the government of Sri Lanka during the Tamil Tiger insurgency, that the government in question was either responsible for or complicit with whatever dire situation had drawn the NGOs in in the first place.

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The aid agencies, however, did not believe they were the solution to the emergencies. Most relief workers felt that Sadako Ogata was speaking for them when, as High Commissioner of the UNHCR in the 1990s, she declared there were no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems. Nonetheless, when they were in the field most humanitarian NGOs claimed to be acting purely on the basis of the needs of populations affected by war, refugee emergencies, epidemics and natural disasters. They viewed themselves as politically neutral, their actions concerned only with alleviating the sufferings of their beneficiaries.

Those who engage in what, in less linguistically-sensitive times, was called charity claim to be impartial. Striving towards that goal is a way for individuals and organisations to ring-fence their activities from politics. An NGO that renounces the pretense of neutrality might be able to perform many of the technical tasks of a humanitarian agency such as medical aid, water and sanitation, but they would be considered a solidarity organisation, outside the UN-supervised system. That means operating with fewer resources, fewer protections and more restrictions on where they can work.

The vast majority of NGOs have never wanted to operate like that. But working within the system has its own frustrations. It is human nature to want to solve problems, not simply alleviate them. To insist that this is all that can reasonably be expected of them, as I did in my book on humanitarianism, A Bed for the Night, seems to many aid workers to be morally intolerable.

The problem is that there is scant evidence to suggest that humanitarian action can change the world. It is possible that the international human rights movement can do this. But despite the overlap between human rights work and humanitarian action, they are very different activities.

A human rights activist must be a rights absolutist; there is no room for compromise on basic principles. In contrast, the relief worker must resign themselves to making deals with warlords or dictators. Short of military intervention, they must shake hands with the devil if they want to achieve anything concrete.

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In my book, I described two acute threats to the humanitarian project. The first was this alliance with the human rights movement, which I argued would benefit human rights groups, since relief agencies would end up serving as their eyes and ears in places where humanitarians could go but human rights rapporteurs would never be permitted to enter; but would actually be detrimental to aid agencies, since it would endanger their ability to keep working.

The second was the co-optation of relief work by powerful governments because the prestige of humanitarian action was valuable as a moral justification for imperial ventures. The most grotesque example of this I know was George W. Bush justifying the continued American occupation of Afghanistan on the quasi-feminist rationale that the Taliban oppressed women. And shortly before the 2003 Iraq War, then US Secretary of State Colin Powell told an assembled group of representatives of American humanitarian organisations that they were a tremendous “force multiplier” for the US military.

I wrote the first version of A Bed for the Night in 2003. In the intervening 16 years, these two tendencies have come to largely define what is expected of aid agencies both by governments and activists, and how these agencies construe their own project. What has changed, though, is that the context in which relief groups work has grown far, far worse.

The “Global War on Terrorism” has meant that, much as relief workers might wish it otherwise, humanitarian aid is an integral part of the war effort. At the same time, the ideology of human rights has attracted the allegiance of the ‘best and the brightest’ within the relief world. Humanitarian action has always had a legitimacy problem: what gives an NGO in Barcelona or Geneva or New York the right to intervene in Chad or Yemen or Myanmar? The law-based claims of the human rights movement have seemed to offer a way forward.

The problem, though, is that across the globe human rights norms are in crisis. After having been in decline for more than half a century, the number and lethality of wars throughout the world is once more on the rise. And global warming will inevitably result in resource wars in the areas most badly affected by it. Welcome to the Anthropocene.

A world in which Russia, China, India, Brazil and the United States are ruled by authoritarian populists is not a world in which human rights are likely to flourish. Syria and Yemen have shown that the laws of war can be ignored at will, while Venezuela and Myanmar are emblems of the new freedom with which dictatorial regimes can create migration crises without anything being able to stop them.

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All of these developments have made the job of humanitarian relief organisations more difficult, but they have not changed its essential characteristics. It took a migration crisis closer to home to do that.

Much like the Rio Grande, which separates the United States from Mexico, the Mediterranean has long been a frontier between the Global North and the Global South. Given the size of the migratory crisis in the Mediterranean, it was inevitable that the relief agencies would become involved. But in doing so, the approach that had marked the humanitarian project since Biafra was unsustainable.

It’s one thing for a relief worker to go from London to Liberia and resist taking a political stance on the conflict there, claiming only to have come to alleviate its effects. But when the crisis is unfolding in the countries where the NGO workers come from, that stance is impossible to maintain.

Aid workers may claim that all they are doing in the Mediterranean, or on the Italian-French border, or in Calais, is helping migrants in need of assistance. But the reality is that in doing so, these aid workers are taking a political position vis-à-vis their own governments. The “neutrality” and “impartiality” to which relief groups could lay claim in the Global South makes neither moral nor operational sense now that the crisis has come home.

Not all relief groups are willing to admit this yet. But they will be forced to confront the fact that their actions are political. The anti-migrant politicians – Salvini, Orbán, Le Pen, etc – recognise the humanitarian agencies as their enemies, and they are right to do so. The challenge to relief groups is to decide how to respond effectively. And this can only happen if the humanitarian world finally abandons the pretence that its actions are not political. Aid agencies will be political actors like all the others. But the choice they face is politics or irrelevance.