A civilisation in denial?

Lives, livelihoods and our way of life (Part 1 of 2)

When asked what he thought about Western civilisation, Gandhi is supposed to have said it would be a good idea. Whether he actually said it or not, it was a good joke, playing on the ambiguity between the idea of civilisation as a particular achievement of the West and civilisation as a universal standard by which all nations or cultures might be judged and found wanting. The suggestion that Western nations like Great Britain might not be living up to their own civilisational standards was hardly original, but it was fair.

A century on, however, the joke is a fossil. The shock value is gone because the ambiguity has disintegrated. To the extent that civilisation is affirmed at all today, it is safely deracinated; democracy, human rights, the rules-based international order, that kind of thing. Anything specifically Western is morally suspect, and perhaps more so in the West itself than anywhere else. The whole complicated story of the classical inheritance, Christianity, the Enlightenment and modernity is overshadowed by slavery and colonialism. The moral standards by which those wrongs are condemned apparently fell from the sky into the internet a few years ago.

We continue to take for granted the rights, freedoms and relative prosperity bequeathed by our forebears. We even recommend them to those parts of the world lagging behind (but don’t say ‘behind’!). At the same time, we are reluctant to acknowledge that legacy for what it is: the outcome of centuries of struggle against natural limits, mediated by often intense social and political contestation, in particular places at particular times. Neither Marx’s account of class struggle nor Whiggish accounts of inexorable progress are fashionable today. And yet here we are: we must have got here somehow.

The civilisation that dominates the modern world does not belong to any particular nation or group of nations. And its highest standards are not unequivocally embodied by any either. But with or without quote marks, ‘Western civilisation’ does have a particular character that reflects its history. Nevertheless, the very individualism that is part of the Western inheritance makes it easy to imagine there is no particular way of life associated with modernity. We choose our own careers, family arrangements and leisure pursuits without thinking very much about the social arrangements that shape and constrain those choices. If we do think about them, we are inclined to focus on and lament the constraints, as if our natural condition were perfect freedom.

It might be argued that it’s only natural to take our way of life for granted; almost by definition, we inherit and reproduce ‘the way things are done’. While this might have been true historically, though, the modern world is quite different. We know things are done differently in other parts of the globe. We know our own world has changed dramatically in recent generations, let alone centuries. Knowledge of both those things is part of what it means to be Western, or ‘Westernised’. The question is whether we are willing to affirm that inheritance, and even defend it, or whether we can simply enjoy the benefits in the hope that neither affirmation nor defence is necessary.

In living memory, politicians would talk about defending our way of life from the Soviet Communist threat. More recently, some have spoken the same way about Islamism. But it is considered uncouth to do so. When the European Commission announced a new ‘vice president for protecting the European way of life’ in 2019, there was outrage from MEPs who saw it as a racist dog whistle, since the brief mostly concerned migration. Indeed, focusing on migrants as the threat does shift attention away from the question of what our way of life actually is, and why migrants should want to embrace it. Those are questions we must be willing to ask – and perhaps even answer – and not just when discussing immigration.  

Civilisation or survivalism

When Covid-19 began to spread across the globe in early 2020, the immediate concern was the threat to life. Before long, though, questions were also raised about our way of life. Lockdown meant many were unable to earn a living, while even those on furlough lost income. The long-term economic damage is still being felt. More than that, confined to our homes, and unable to take part in collective educational, cultural and sporting activities, our quality of life was massively diminished. When we did venture out, social distancing and masking undermined even the most basic forms of human interaction. We sacrificed a lot – willingly or otherwise – in the name of saving lives.

Perhaps most significantly, democratic states asserted unprecedented peacetime powers over their citizens. Professor Neil Ferguson, one of the leading scientific advisors to the UK government, famously revealed that early on that he and his colleagues did not believe they could ‘get away with’ a Chinese-style lockdown in a democracy like Britain until Italy did it. Surely it was not the sort of thing Western governments did, or that Western populations could be expected to accept. And yet, overwhelmingly, we did accept it.

The Chinese author Liu Cixin’s epic science-fiction trilogy The Three Body Problem features an alien civilisation called Trisolaris. Because its three suns interact in unpredictable ways, the planet of Trisolaris becomes uninhabitable for centuries at a time. So its inhabitants have evolved an ingenious strategy of dehydrating themselves so they can lie in dry storage during these periods and at least a remnant of the civilisation survives to start again when conditions are more amenable. The parallel with lockdown is obvious.

Of course, we were not threatened with annihilation and did not suspend our entire civilisation, but the analogy raises the question of how far we would and should be willing to go to save lives at the expense of our way of life. We do tolerate road deaths rather than ban cars. We’ve always accepted a certain number of deaths from flu without imposing social distancing. Was it simply that the numbers were higher with the new threat of Covid? Or did our willingness to accept lockdown reflect a diminished attachment to ‘the old normal’?

After all, some saw lockdown as an opportunity to rethink our way of life in a positive sense. To take a step back from the rat race. For some, working from home was an opportunity to reconnect with family and spend time on hobbies. Some read more, played neglected musical instruments, took up new languages. (Or intended to.) So far, so benign. More sinister was an almost unspoken realignment of the relationship between citizens and the state.

Certainly, the UK government came under intense pressure to lock down harder and faster and to issue more and more detailed rules. In some cases, neighbours reported one another for breaking these rules, or for interpreting them too liberally. The idea that, armed with general information and guidance, individuals and families might use their own discretion in deciding how much risk to take was anathema.

I was particularly struck when a journalist asked then Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove how long we could have for our daily exercise. Surely British government ministers do not dictate how long people can jog for? To be fair to Gove, he seemed to answer shruggingly: ‘I would have thought that for most people…’ But that was not how the question was meant, and it was certainly not how the answer was reported. The one-hour rule was widely taken as government diktat, despite having no legal basis.

With everyday life recast as a toxic threat, the state was charged with taking decisions out of our hands in the name of saving lives. That the safety promised by restricting exercise, requiring us to wear (any old) face coverings and insisting on weird choreography in supermarkets was probably illusory is a secondary matter. When the demand for state interference in the lives of citizens outstrips the supply, something significant is going on at a civilisational level that surely predates the pandemic.

In Part 2, I’ll consider what this undermining of the Western norm of personal responsibility might mean for two of the pillars of any civilisation: work and family life.