The first thing to renounce is thus any notion of the global linear progress of humanity, whether formulated by Karl Marx, postulated by liberals like Francis Fukuyama (who declared the end of history) or dominated by Enlightenment dialectics. Marx’s overall vision of history is that of a linear succession of “progressive” modes of social development from primitive societies through the Asiatic mode of production, slavery, feudalism, capitalism to socialism and communism. Problems arise almost immediately with the historical dynamic Marx envisioned; to start with, the notion of an “Asiatic mode of production” is clearly problematic (it is an empty category into which Marx threw whatever didn’t fit his Eurocentric logic of history, and thus in itself a receptacle for squashed dead birds). As for socialism, Rosa Luxemburg’s claim that “the future will be socialism or barbarism” proved to be wrong also: what we got in Stalinism was a socialist barbarian, and the corpses are still being counted. As for liberalism, its state of crisis is obvious, so much so that even Fukuyama has renounced his notion of the end of history.

There should be no holds barred in the pursuit of squashed birds. Russia and China like to present themselves as partisans of a new multi-centric world order in which all ways of life will coexist as equal and in which Western colonial economic and ideological domination will finally be swept away. In this rhetoric we might see whole cages of squashed birds swept aside with the West, not only economic and political but also the flattening of feminism, gay rights and general human freedoms. A fairly recent example might be the debate that took place in the Ugandan parliament in February 2023 as the legislature contemplated a further toughening of the anti-gay law — where the most radical proponents demanded the death penalty, or at least life imprisonment, for those caught in the act. Anita Among, speaker of the parliament, stated: “You are either with us, or you’re with the Western world.” We live in an era of unholy alliances, collaborations and conjunctions of ideological forces which disrupt the standard binary of Left and Right. Feminist, gay and trans struggles are denounced as an instrument of Western ideological colonialism used to undermine African identity. If this type of thinking continues to be allowed to define the debate, the possibility of being a gay Ugandan, a feminist Ugandan, a trans Ugandan can be redefined out of existence; another casualty of a narrow definition of “progress”.

The miserable reality is that the promise of decolonisation can be co-opted as a screen for other processes, its liberatory potential caught in the vice-like grip of a too-rigid definition of what moving forward means. The people of numerous African countries, from Angola to Zimbabwe, exist under more or less corrupt social systems in which the gap between the “masters” and the poor majority — the gap in wealth, in power, in privileges and freedom — is arguably even wider than under colonial rule. “Decolonisation” in these circumstances can function almost as a metaphor for the emergence of new class-based hierarchies. While there are, of course, a myriad of arguments that one can advance against any suggestion that things were “better” under colonial rule, if we fail to recognise the potential for decolonial movements to be absorbed into problematic regimes, the new Right will do it for us (as they are already doing in the case of South Africa, bloviating about the inability of black people to run the country “properly”). Mao said: “Revolution is not a dinner party.” But what if the reality after the revolution is even less of a dinner party? This in no way implies that we should abandon progress — we should rather redefine it, and the first step towards doing so is to be able to acknowledge uncomfortable realities, even those which appear squalid and mangled, and especially those we find shameful and grievous. We need less squashed birds hidden in trunks while we applaud the false living bird distracting us from capitalist corruption and authoritarian power.

More from this author

Julian Assange is no fool

By Slavoj Zizek

The two articles Marx wrote on India in 1893 (“The British Rule in India” and “The Future Results of British Rule in India”), usually dismissed by postcolonial scholars as embarrassing cases of Marx’s “Eurocentrism”, are today more interesting than ever. Marx outlines, without restraint, the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism” of the British colonisation of India, right up to the systematic use of torture prohibited in the West but “outsourced” to Indians (really there is nothing new under the sun — these were the Guantanamos of 19th-century British India). All he adds is: “can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.” 

Despite the mention of “destiny”, one should not wholly dismiss the notion of the “unconscious tool of history” as naive teleology, an ends-justify-the-means fatalistic “trust into the Cunning of Reason which makes even the vilest crimes instruments of progress”. The point Marx is making is simply that the British colonisation of India created conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonisation itself. Today, of course, such a standpoint appears all too naive — now we know how the British colonisers destroyed local industries in India and provoked havoc with tens of millions dead. Of course, we would never say that the horrors of colonisation were worth the price of progressing towards some nebulous utopian future. A much more modest stance should be adopted: Great Britain’s actions in India were inexcusable and the direct outcome a devastating catastrophe; however, once this catastrophe happened it opened up a new path for India. That “however” is an uncomfortable adverb to dwell in, but it remains open to hope as neater historical narratives do not.

When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer delineate the contours of the emerging late-capitalist “administered world” (verwaltete Welt), they are presenting it as coinciding with barbarism, as the point at which civilisation itself returns to barbarism. A kind of negative telos of the whole progress of Enlightenment, as the Nietzschean kingdom of the Last Men: “One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” At the same time, Adorno and Horkheimer nevertheless warn against the more direct catastrophes (different forms of terror, etc.). The liberal-democratic society of Last Men is thus unimaginably awful, the only problem being that all other societies are worse, so that the choice appears as one between bad and worse (or a rock and a hard place). The ambiguity here is irreducible: on the one hand, the “administered world” is the final catastrophic outcome of the Enlightenment; on the other hand, the “normal” societal path is continually threatened by catastrophes, from war and terror to ecological disasters. We are required to battle these catastrophes while simultaneously bearing in mind that the ultimate catastrophe is the apparently “normal” structures and rhythms of the “administered world”. In other words, we are walking a kind of Moebius path: if we progress far enough on one side, we reach our starting point again. Does the same not hold for progressivism in general? After centuries in which visionaries of all stripes dreamed of what humanity might achieve together. The only indubitable “progressive” goal that humanity can pursue today, in view of ecological and other threats, is to simply survive.

The possibilities and pitfalls of technological and scientific advancement have been the stuff of centuries’ worth of dreaming about human progress, yet here too we find ourselves treading a viciously circular path. Free development, experimentation and research leads to Artificial Intelligence, which not only threatens to supplant the human mind but is intended specifically to overcome its limitations, to replicate humanity without its frailties. Leaving aside more abstract questions about what this would look like and mean should it be achieved, one does not have to look very far for the dead birds littering the path to “progress” like autumn leaves, from the astronomical energy costs burdening a burning planet to the people whose jobs will increasingly be done by AI. This is what blind commitment to an uncritically adopted idea of “progress” looks like; proponents of AI talk about the freedom it brings, but are vague on freedom from what, for who and what for. Freedom for humanity to dedicate itself to leisure, art or meditation? Or freedom for an oligarchy of technocrats from the slightest tethering to the social contract, in exchange for reducing humanity to a cog in the endless self-reproduction of AI?

This brings us to the relationship between progress and freedom. The axiom of modern philosophy is that progress is, at its most fundamental, progress in freedom. (This is how Hegel conceives the development of the entire history of humanity: in Oriental despotism only the despot is free; in antique slavery only the few are free; and with Christianity all are free.) However, problems with the definition of freedom explode here from the very beginning.

Within the Enlightenment tradition, there is true freedom only if all are equally free, while for conservative liberals equality limits freedom; then there is the opposition between individual freedom and collective freedom (freedom of a nation advocated by fascism). For socialists, freedom is actual only when its material and institutional conditions are present (free education and press, healthcare), while for liberal conservatives, such measures already limit the full freedom of individuals (recall how US Republicans opposed Obamacare, claiming that it will limit the freedom to choose your own doctor).

The issue is further complicated by the post-Sixties shift away from economic and political freedom to cultural freedom. Why, after the Sixties, have so many problems come to be perceived as problems of intolerance, not as problems of inequality, exploitation and injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation or political struggle? The immediate answer is the “culturalisation of politics”, in which political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality, economic exploitation and so forth are neutralised into “cultural” differences, different “ways of life”, which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, but merely “tolerated”. The cause of this culturalisation is the retreat or failure of direct political solutions, such as the welfare state. Tolerance is the post-political ersatz of these solutions: “the cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly constitutes a rejection of politics as a domain in which conflict can be productively articulated and addressed, a domain in which citizens can be transformed by their participation.”

The squashed dead bird here is politics itself. And this bird remains squashed even after the rise of the Rightist new populism.

How, then, should we orient ourselves in this mess? Our starting point should be that there is no such thing as progress in general. But true progress must aim at retroactively redeeming all the squashed birds of the past progresses — not redeeming them in reality, but redeeming the potentiality that was present in them.

***

A version of this essay appears in Slavoj Žižek’s latest book Against Progress, part of the new Žižek’s Essays series, published by Bloomsbury on 31 October.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on us. Crises can inspire people to do uncharacteristic things. Let me delicately point out that liberal values have never been deeply rooted in Ukraine, nor were its citizens known for their sense of fraternity and civic responsibility. Very few observers who knew Ukraine’s history could have predicted the surge of resistance that followed the Russian invasion. Vladimir Putin was not alone.

How long this feeling will last once the war is over is anyone’s guess. There are countless historical examples of wars changing the DNA of nations; take post-war Germany, for instance. But as we know from our personal relations, the camaraderie forged by a crisis tends to dissipate over time. There is a law of entropy in human relations, just as there is entropy in the physical world. There is even such a thing as moral entropy; one can only expect people to be good for so long.

But for now, the resistance of the Ukrainians and their sense of solidarity is an inspiration to the rest of us. Yet to some, it is more than an inspiration: it is teaching us a lesson. Already certain liberal intellectuals are using the Ukraine war to criticise our own liberal democracies. Why, they are asking, can’t we be more like Ukraine?

This is not a wise question, but it arises out of a genuine concern. The feeling is that we have lost a strong sense of civic purpose, that democratic norms are being openly flouted, and that there is a chilling indifference to the public good. Our countries look less like republics of citizens today than assemblies of consumers and web surfers glued to their screens. Meanwhile, a xenophobic nationalism is replacing a generous patriotism that once reflected optimism about the democratic prospect. And so, yes, why can’t we be more like Ukraine?

A good example of this line of question comes from David Brooks, one of the most sober political journalists in the United States. Last month, he wrote in the New York Times that: “The war in Ukraine is not only a military event; it’s an intellectual event. The Ukrainians are winning not only because of the superiority of their troops. They are winning because they are fighting for a superior idea.” For Brooks, that idea is liberal nationalism. He believes that Ukraine is teaching us that a feeling of national belonging need not contradict a commitment to individual liberty. On the contrary: liberalism can ennoble nationalism, teaching it to be generous. And an elevated nationalism can connect liberalism to our feelings of attachment to each other, and inspire us to fight for what we share. And so: let us all be liberal nationalists now.

This is an admirable wish. But it begs the following question: why are we not liberal nationalists now? Why is there so little concern for the public good in contemporary democracies? Why are we such indifferent citizens? Why has illiberal nationalism acquired such appeal?

Rather than try to answer these difficult questions, it is much easier simply to charge our leaders and fellow citizens with a failure of nerve in the face of threats to democracy. (Brooks was not doing this, but others are.) One could write an interesting little book about the role that the “failure of nerve” charge has played in modern politics. We usually associate it with the reactionary and militaristic Right. One of the ironies of the present conflict is that Vladimir Putin, who often weaponised this charge, is now the target of it. Because of his military failures, his courage has been thrown into question by the radical Russian Right he helped to create.

But the charge has also been used on the Left. Anyone familiar with the history of communist states and post-colonial revolutionary regimes will recognise the phrase “insufficient revolutionary zeal”, which was employed to explain regime failures or to purge troublesome public officials. Why have we not met the quota set by the five-year plan? A lack of revolutionary zeal. Why has the collectivisation of farms caused famine? A lack of revolutionary zeal. Behind the magical economic thinking of Marxism-Leninism was a theory of the will to power.

Suggested reading

The revenge of the technocrats

By John Gray

Defenders of liberal democracy developed the unfortunate habit of employing similar rhetoric during the Cold War. Looking back at the writings of the period, it is striking how often the terms faith and war appear. We must have faith in democratic principles! We must win the war of ideas! It is understandable that liberals began to speak this way. After all, communism was a messianic faith and communist intellectuals were not above using force to reach their ends.

But the only legitimate object of faith is a god, not an idea. And ideas are not weapons developed to serve armchair generals. Ideas serve our pursuit of truth through reflection and criticism; that is all they do. Ideologies, on the other hand, do inspire faith, and they can, and sometimes must, be employed in political conflicts. But there is no such thing as a “war of ideas”. The real power of ideas is their capacity to unmask ideologies, not propagate them. Those who look to Ukraine today to scold their own democracies seem on automatic pilot. They have genuine worries, which I share (and even wrote a book expressing them a few years ago). But I do not think that the sorry state of our democratic societies has much to do with a failure of nerve, or a loss of faith, or the lack of a unifying idea like liberal nationalism. The older I get, the more a materialist I have become. Not a materialist in the sense of Karl Marx, but in the sense of Alexis de Tocqueville.

In recent years, I have been spending a lot of time with Tocqueville, and I am struck by what a subtle and convincing materialist he was. His masterpiece, Democracy in America, does not begin with an invocation of democratic values and why we must fight for them. It begins with the geography of North America — the forests, the swamps, the mountains, the rushing rivers. In the face of the vast, unspoiled American landscape, the early settlers found themselves in a state of relative material equality. Nature was very big, and they were very small. They needed each other.

In Tocqueville’s view, this fact of equality was a necessary condition for establishing the principle of equality in American democracy; and that principle then inspired a passion for equality. In other words, live passions are rooted ultimately in material reality. Tocqueville did not believe, as Marx did, that political ideas just mirror a society’s material relations. But he knew that no political idea is convincing for long, or even relevant, if it is utterly detached from present social reality. This is a challenge to all utopian thinkers: they must imagine a new state of affairs that does not seem utterly divorced from present reality.

Suggested reading

Putin's war is just beginning

By Harald Malmgren

There is an important correlate to Tocqueville’s materialism: if political ideals that once captured people’s imaginations no longer do, our first instinct should be to ask what change in social conditions might be behind the change, making the old ideals less compelling than they once were. It should not be to adopt a prophetic pose and implore everyone to return to the true faith or embrace a new one. And so, if we are concerned, as we ought to be, about a lack of civic attachment, social solidarity, and respect for the common good in Western democracies, we must ask ourselves the following question: What has changed in the way we live now to erode our sense of democratic citizenship?

My own thinking about this question is not original. It seems to me that the ultimate source of democratic erosion is the fact that our societies have become more liquid and less solid, to adopt the terms of the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman’s use of the term “liquid” was an oblique reference to The Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels declared that under capitalism, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”.

Bauman pointed out that Marx and Engels took solidity to be a good thing. In this sense, they were conservatives. And their expectation was that once unstable capitalist societies were overthrown, a new, solid type of society under communism would emerge. Marx and Engels did not preach permanent revolution; they were not Maoists. For them, the whole point of engaging in socialist and Communist politics was (ideally) to restore solidity and establish certainty so that human beings could live healthily in line with their natures. Hence the importance of socialist values like solidarity, and policies like economic planning.

Today, the communist utopian dream is dead and capitalism remains in place. But its power to liquify human relations has massively increased. Capitalism in the wide sense — including modern science and technology — no longer just eats away at solid social institutions. It prevents new solid ones from even forming. This was Bauman’s most important insight.

We now live in a world where people have begun to anticipate that fewer of our institutions and norms will endure as they once did. They have factored this into their thinking and — even more importantly — into their feelings. We know that children of divorced parents have more trouble than most in developing solid relationships with others. Having lost a sense of certainty about the families they grew up in, they lack confidence that they can establish stable ones of their own. My sense is that this is now happening in society more generally. From the importance of biological sex to the dominant role of the family, fewer and fewer of the social institutions and norms that exist when someone is young will exist when they are old. If this trend continues, it is hard not to imagine that we are in store for a radical transformation of human consciousness and social life.

More from this author

When will my fellow liberals learn?

By Mark Lilla

Obvious examples of this liquidity abound. In the economic sphere, deregulation, “flexible” labour markets, privatisation, global finance and trade, and the dismantling of social protections have made workers’ lives and their communities more fragile. In the technological sphere, the unavoidable internet offers young people a vast menu of human possibilities, which has undermined the transmission of national and religious customs and values. It has also subjected all of us to psychological and moral viruses that ricochet around the globe instantaneously. In the medical field, rapid advances in research and treatment render today’s therapeutic wisdom obsolete tomorrow, leaving less-educated people confused and increasingly sceptical of the medical establishment. Finally, and most dramatically, we see the effects of liquidity in new ideologies of fluid psycho-sexual identities.

This is an historically unprecedented situation. The nature of human society has always been conservative. Its function has been to offer a stable environment in which individuals can develop psychologically and cooperate with each other; it also, crucially, has transmitted knowledge and norms to subsequent generations. The ideas and institutions of liberal democracy developed in societies that functioned in this conservative way. But our contemporary liquid societies do all this less well. They are becoming, so to speak, less social. Their energy is centrifugal, not centripetal.

What I have just put forward is just a thesis, and not an original one. But if it is even half right, we need to engage in much deeper thinking about liberal democracy and civic engagement than we are accustomed to. In an unstable environment where institutions and values have trouble getting rooted, just what does the term “common good” mean? Or solidarity? When the forces that determine human destinies are global and ever changing, what does democratic citizenship mean?

These are not intended to be rhetorical questions. They are, to my mind, the fundamental political questions of our time. We need answers to them before we can think clearly about much else. We cannot “fight” for liberal democracy if we don’t know what it is still capable of, given the societies we must now live in and the expectations and feelings we now have. Many people today are convinced that the greatest threat to liberal democracy is xenophobic nationalism, not liquification. They are concerned about ideologies that want to make our societies less open, less diverse, and less subject to dissent. I share this concern, at least in the short run: today’s self-declared illiberal nationalists are trouble and can cause a lot of damage.

Suggested reading

Covid was liberalism's endgame

By Matthew Crawford

What they cannot do, however, is change the laws of social physics. The so-called “national conservative” activists who gather in Budapest these days to hear the gospel of Christian integrism are children of liquid societies. Whatever their nostalgic fantasies about a world they’ve never known, and never existed in the form they imagine, their psychological outlook presumes liquidity, movement, independence. They are bees who were born outside a hive — like the rest of us. They are not built to live in even a hive as inviting to them as a fully “integrated” Catholic nation.

The fact is that today’s nationalists can never achieve their goals. History has erased the possibility of sustainable, homogeneous theological-political regimes. We should still be concerned about today’s far-Right nationalists and resist them politically. But that is because political movements that fail to achieve their ends are often more dangerous than movements that do.

What we all hope is that soon, very soon, Ukraine will be able to join the community of liberal democratic nations in full security. We also hope that the experience of war will establish enough trust among Ukrainians to allow democratic institutions to operate as they are intended to, with loyal opposition and respect for opposition.

But the truth is that even were these hopes realised, Ukraine would then find itself subject to all the centrifugal social, economic, and psychological forces other liberal democracies are contending with. Every regime faces them today, even Russia. It is worth remembering that in the early weeks of the war, few Russian citizens demonstrated against it, and almost no one demonstrated for it or rushed to enlist in the military. Instead, they rushed to IKEA to buy furniture in fear that the store would close for good.

An early version of this article was presented on October 14 at the 2022 Freedom Games conference organised by the Liberté Foundation in Łódź, Poland.

You didn’t really think the French Revolution was a force for good, did you? As if. All the great political woes of the modern era — Communism, Fascism, and its German bier and swastika variant, Nazism — have their tangled, bitter beginnings in the storming of the Bastille. The French Revolution was the taproot of Tyranny in our time. No French Revolution, no Marx, no Hitler. Voila!

More from this series

Imagine a world without the USA...

By James Kirkup

The French Revolution began in 1789 as an Enlightenment experiment. In 1793, however, the Jacobins, led by Robespierre, tried to turn France into a Rousseauian theme park — where the people were sans private possessions and sans self-interest, but were suborned to the state (“the general will”) — by destroying the rich. The Jacobins also wanted to export the ‘benedictions’ of Revolution via the barrel of a cannon. 

Sound familiar? Yes, it is the same millenarian collectivist philosophy of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama Bin Laden. The accompanying praxis was, and is, murder. Mass murder. As Robespierre so delightfully put it: “We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with them…Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.” Before 1793, Europe  was no stranger to violence, but not until the French Revolution was murder used systematically to erase a designated internal enemy from its existence. The Jacobin’s mass firing squads anticipated absolutely the Nazis’ Einsatzgruppen.

The Jacobins desired “Year One,” a cheerless utopia in which individual freedom was rescinded in the name of the commune, and where the people were dosed daily with propaganda to rid them of their vices — such as the desire to own a home of their own (“Property is theft!”), to possess freedom of thought or to enjoy a private life. The Jacobins and their descendant mini-mes, in their thirst and thrust for absolute power, have disavowed all ordinary amusements. Hence the purist, monkish public image cultivated by Robespierre, Hitler, Mao, et al.

It could have been so different. In June 1791 Louis XVI was about to flee Paris in a fast carriage; at the last moment, MarieAntoinette (and her voluminous baggage) insisted on accompanying him, rather than travelling separately. Uxorious to the nth degree, the king agreed. Consequently, they took the big and literal slow coach instead of the speedy light one — and were intercepted by revolutionaries a mere 25 miles from the safety of the Belgian border. The royal couple were then returned to Paris to be shortened by Madame Guillotine.

But in a parallel universe, there exist Les Annals Alternatives de la France and they tell of Europe’s avoidance of the nightmare of tyranny: the right, fast route taken. The relevant extract follows.

More from this author

France's African forever war

By John Lewis-Stempel

On the night of 20/21 June 1791 in the Tuileries Palace, Louis XVI  patted his powdered wig and said to the queen: “Don’t be daft, ma petite chou, one valise only! Vite!” Their light coach sped from Paris, to meet loyal soldiers, who escorted the royal family over the border into Belgium. The king, who was a realiste, understood there was only one power that could truly aid him. Thus he swallowed his pride and sailed across La Manche to perfidious Albion, where he was welcomed with wide arms and pawky eyes.

From Britain, Louis XVI sowed discord in France, and eventually reinvaded successfully in 1794. But there was a cost: to pay for his fomenting of counter-revolution he hocked Louisiana and other French properties to Britain. With France disengaged from North America, Britain  had the whip hand over the uppity colonials and won the War of 1812, controlling all of North America into the late 21st Century (latterly on a Canadian “member of Empire” model, rather than direct rule). Britain henceforth not only ruled the waves (having sequestered the French fleet): it ruled half of terra firma. 

Louis XVI reinstalled himself as a reforming monarch and the Revolution stalled, spluttered and died. Louis, a convinced Catholic, retained strong support from the powerful and fiercely anti-revolutionary Church, while his encouragement of legislative self-government separated the mass of revolutionaries from the Jacobin hardliners. Thus, he commanded majority support. However, bound to the Church as the new France was, it made stony ground for science, and France’s Industrial Revolution was henceforth a stuttering affair similar to that of its southern neighbour, Spain. (Britain, meanwhile, boomed.)

Suggested reading

What does it mean to be French?

By John Lichfield

The “proto-communists” of the Revolution did not disappear entirely: their creed was taken up by an obscure German PhD student called Karl Marx. However, he failed to find a following outside students in the newer universities and “polytechnics”. Moderate socialism, however, became a mass force, under the banner “Reform not Revolution!” Indeed, this became the mantra of the entire of Europe. “Ink not Blood!” was another popular slogan. 

The definitive termination of the revolutionary mindset in France itself came with Louis XVI’s exiling of “The 500″ (the principal leaders of the Revolution) to the island of  New Caledonia where, deprived of vin rouge and tobacco, the scarlet and the black, they withered and died. Louis’s political adroitness — the exile was torture which appeared to be clemency — was compared to that of Machiavelli’s Prince.

Inevitably, monarchist France, isolated and enfeebled militarily, produced no sturm und drang reaction in its Germanic neighbours, who failed to proceed beyond a loose federation of Ruritanians. (Essentially, there was nothing for them to unite against; as the saying goes, no grit, no oyster.) “Romanticism” achieved a certain following in Germanic coffee houses and bierkellers. But no more than that.

In a cause célèbre one such Romantic, Adolf Hitler, fell off his ladder in 1967 while daubing anti-Jewish slogans on the walls of the Reichstag. His 30-person strong National Socialist Party claimed he was pushed by agents of the Rothschild banking dynasty. The pathologist’s report determined that Herr Hitler had suffered an aneurism, which was accepted by the house painter’s lover, Bruno, 72.

Suggested reading

How Europe's Last Dictator survived

By Daniel Kalder

Curiously, despite its diminished standing in Europe, there were two spheres in which France led the continent post-Restoration, these being philosophy and music. With the planet dominated by three centuries of the British political model of safely safely pragmatism, French philosophes continually engaged with what 20th Century Parisian academic Jean-Paul Sartre termed “The Ennui of Anglicisation” in his book Critique de la raison Britannique. (In his suicide note Sartre declared “The British Way is So Boring I Revolt by Self-Murder”; a number of other philosophes imitated him, including the Marxist adherent Louis Althusser, who strangled himself with his wife’s stocking.)

To the disappointment — and contempt — of the philosophes, the people showed no inclination to either rise in rebellion or to self-annihilate. Latent hankerings for the excitement of revolution in This Most Boring of All Possible Worlds (see Jacques Derrida, Writing and Indifference, 1962) were ultimately diverted into “pop rock”, the ultimate Anglo-Saxon cultural victory. And so French entertainer Johnny Hallyday became the biggest-selling singer on the planet in the second half of the 20th century, after re-releasing all his songs in English.

What is especially troubling about this genre, though, is its disturbing use of morality. The initial act of savagery is there to provide a moral justification for the otherwise cruel and immoral things the protagonist goes on to do. And it justifies our Schadenfreude. Or, to put it another way: morality is dangerous. It can easily exist to exonerate great harm.

Which brings me, slightly obliquely, to Jeremy Kyle and his now cancelled TV show. I absolutely share in the moral condemnation of the programme: putting poor people on trial, holding them up to public ridicule, exposing their faults and family grievances, all for the titillation of a baying audience. The psychological damage the show did to contestants was long-ignored. And I choose the word ‘contestants’ deliberately – because not only was the show all about contestation, but also because it adopted the format of a game show, recycling private misery into the financial gold of light entertainment.

But the really terrible thing about the show is how it allowed itself a veneer of moral justification. It sought ‘the truth’ – hence its routine use of lie detectors. And under the pretext of this moral justification visited great harm upon those foolish enough to submit themselves to the cruelty of Kyle’s hectoring interrogations.

Further reading

Why is punishment so popular?

By Giles Fraser

Perhaps Jeremy Kyle saw himself as performing a public good. That by exposing the truth at the centre of a dysfunctional family he was bringing about some much-needed restitution. That he was the righter of wrongs. But as I said, morality can be dangerous. Here, it quickly became an alibi for bullying.

The relationship between truth and cruelty is a long and complicated one. In their brilliant little book, On Kindness, Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor chart the history of kindness from its Christian and pre-Christian roots, through a radical transformation at the end of the English Civil War, and especially through the massively influential work of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

“With Hobbes, selfishness and aggression were transformed from moral vices into psychological facts,” they explain.

Later with Adam Smith, selfishness was re-purposed as a moral good – a driver of the economy. By the end of the 18th century, apparently tough-minded truth-seekers understood human nature to be a form of enlightened self-interest. Kindness was just well-hidden egoism.

The historian David Wootton in his recent book on the Enlightenment has added further scholarly heft to this analysis, carefully charting the ways in which selfishness came to be justified as a basic truth of human nature. What we all really seek is Power, Pleasure and Profit, as the book’s title has it. From here on in, getting to the truth of human lives was always going to involve some kind of exposure, unmasking apparent virtues as little more than a nest of lies and self-interest. With Nietzsche, Marx and Freud – the so-called  “masters of suspicion” – human nature is again variously revealed as all about (will-to-) power, pleasure (sex) or (economic) profit.

Further reading

When did empathy become so dangerous?

By Gerard Degroot

So, by the beginning of the 19th century, as Phillips and Taylor put it:

“Kindness was steadily downgraded from a universal imperative to the prerogative of specific social constituencies: romantic poets, clergymen, charity-workers and above all women. By the end of the Victorian period, kindness had been largely feminized, ghetto-ized into a womanly sphere of feeling and behaviour where it has remained, with some notable exceptions, ever since.”

My beef with The Jeremy Kyle Show is not just with its swaggering machismo, but also – and not unconnected – with its total lack of kindness and human sympathy. It imagined working-class life as a Hobbsian war of all against all, a clash of grubby selfishnesses just waiting to be exposed by the fearless truth seeker. Kyle was never kind because kindness is a mug’s game, a sentimentalised simulacrum of benevolence that does nothing to uncover the grubby motives that are at the heart of human motivation.

And Kyle is hardly alone. With the advent of social media, we have experienced an epidemic of unkindness. The public sphere has come to be dominated by a digital swamp of Hobbesian contestation that presumes little good in our adversaries, forever seeking to expose the fundamental mischief that the other is up to.

Likewise, justified by the desire to expose, the political columnist is forever seeking to tell a grubby truth about opponents. According to a recent Nick Cohen column, for instance, The Brexit party candidate Claire Fox is “one of the most immoral people in public life”. I know her pretty well. She is clearly nothing of the sort. But Cohen just throws out this sort of nasty pseudo-exposure under the guise of a blanket assumption that he is exposing some hideous deceit. This is just flat out nastiness. As if kindness has no place in copy.

Why is the ascription of good motivations to people so often regarded as something credulous? When, for instance, do we ever seek to unmask people as being surprisingly good-natured?

I am delighted that The Jeremy Kyle Show has been axed. But there is something more to consider here than the demise of a popular daytime TV show. For so much of our public life has become dominated with Kyle-like presumptions.

Further reading

Whatever happened to TV's working-class heroes?

By Fiona Sturges

Philosophically, we have been led into a trap. On top of the basic necessities, what most of us want out of life is kindness and fellow feeling. Yet we sabotage our own desire for a kinder world because we have all been sold the idea that human beings are all at war with each other.

It is a theme that Adam Phillips regularly returns to in his writing. We all want a kinder world, but are often just too frightened by the demands that kindness makes upon us – the demand that we expose and acknowledge our need for, and dependency upon, other people. For by admitting that we have a lack that only other people are capable of meeting, we acknowledge a great vulnerability within ourselves.

We are so frightened by this vulnerability that we prefer to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Thus we make war on the very thing that could ever make is genuinely happy: the love and kindness of others and our need for it.

So perhaps ITV should be persuaded to develop the very opposite of The Jeremy Kyle Show. Not one in which people are exposed as nasty and selfish. But one where people who pretend to be hard and unconcerned are coaxed into admitting their own need for other people, their own love and kindness. Now that would be a show worth watching.

How Jeremy Kyle undersold humanity

Subscribe: