Some Thoughts on Contemporary Liberal Decadence

As I stated in a previous post on Christianity and liberalism, modern liberal excess is probably due to a combination of ideology and material factors such as economic affluence and global overpopulation.

Material affluence of course leads to the old “bread and circuses” problem that plagued the Roman Empire.

It also provides a means whereby the unproductive can gain power at the expense of the productive, creating a society of “too many chiefs and not enough Indians” - a problem recognised by early 20th century social scientists like Therstein Veblen.

However, modern industrialised countries have added a new twist on the affluence equals decadence relationship - credit driven consumption. The modern consumption economy is not just an ad hoc tool for distracting the masses and winning public favour, but a scientifically developed system that exploits human quirks and weaknesses for profit maximisation.

In contemporary society marketing executives know more about human nature than most university academics.

Global overpopulation reduces the value of labour and puts pressure on lightly populated countries to import labour instead of increasing productivity or shifting people into more productive roles. This is something that early liberals like Voltaire and David Ricardo openly acknowledged, but which most modern liberals ignore.

With most of the world overpopulated, and a small number of developed countries experiencing population aging, an increasing number of people in the West have an incentive to adopt a rentier lifestyle, and import a new working class to service their needs.

This makes the protestant of values of hard work and delayed gratification largley redundant.

Since the late 1960s, the 200-year alliance between enlightenment liberalism and scientific empiricism has also come unhinged as liberalism has exploited the material abundance created by science to promote utopian social goals and justify an increasingly self-serving state bureaucracy.

At the same time, secular humanists have ignored scientific findings that don’t support the egalitarian tenants of modern liberal politics.

The uneasy relationship between scientific empiricism and modern liberalism can be seen in the 150-year-old clash between Darwin and Marx, which has re-ignited in the last 12 years.

Advances in genetic science, evolutionary psychology and psychometrics are undermining many of the assumptions of 20th Century liberalism at the same time that liberals are criticising Christian conservatives for denying Darwinian evolution (on the later point see Steve Sailer's article here)

The liberal establishment has thus done a good job of using empirical science to attack its opponents while deflecting scientific attacks on its own world-view.

However, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the liberal establishment to deflect scientific criticism as new scientific findings are being confirmed from a number of different sources.

The Internet is also providing an a means by which controversial findings can be publicised without the risk of censorship

The increasing failure of late-liberal policies in education, welfare, immigration and law and order is also undermining the general public’s willingness to provide funding for the liberal state.

Despite increasing problems at the social level , and serious long-term economic worries, modern liberal societies still have a lot of accumulated wealth that has been built up over the preceding 200 years of industrialisation.

This largesse insures that the majority of the population still enjoys a high level of material affluence.

Hence in today's economic climate, conservative critics of modern liberalism come across like the boy who cried wolf in Aesop's fables.

Western states are unlikely to make a decision break with liberal excess until they are directly threatened with serious social and economic disruption.