There is a word that keeps cropping up in our attempt to describe the moment we are living through: civilisation. Something isn’t right at a civilisational level. But what even is civilisation? What makes a civilisation great, lasting, robust, or advanced?
In Civilisation and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud identifies beauty, cleanliness, order, scientific and artistic achievement, the regulation of social relationships, the rule of law, and a control over the forces of nature as some of the main markers of civilisation. At first glance, this all sounds pretty desirable, and we may rush to lament the slow demise of many of these attributes in the civilisation that our discourse is most concerned with: Western civilisation. It is the West that now celebrates ugliness in art, architecture, fashion, and the human form. Simple beauty, it seems, is too obvious, too elitist, unfair, and lacks the cynical irony of postmodernism. Cleanliness and order are being lost to an increasingly multicultural, atomised, and low-trust society, where we simply take what we need in the short-term without considering its broader effects on social cohesion or community. There is also a feeling of stagnation, exhaustion, and apathy.
As Peter Thiel has been highlighting, scientific advancement is no longer progressing and hasn’t done so for the last 50 years. In the arts, there is a curious mix of extreme relativism and dogmatic censorship. Anything can be accepted as art while any art that challenges woke DEI shibboleths will never be accepted. Similarly, institutions like marriage and the family are increasingly failing and breaking down, while the relationship between the sexes and races is becoming more and more antagonistic and fraught. Meanwhile, the increased politicisation of the courts, the use of lawfare, lockdowns, and increasingly subjective legal frameworks like ‘hate speech’ laws—all leave us feeling like freedom and justice are slipping away. And, despite the efficiency we gain from smartphones and social media, we don’t seem to be happier. In fact, rates of depression and anxiety are soaring.
Freud’s original title for his essay was something approximating the English for ‘unhappiness’ in civilisation. Why, then, would civilisation make us unhappy? According to Freud, in order for the individual to participate in and benefit from all that civilisation has to offer, sexuality and aggression have to be sacrificed and repressed. Put simply, civilisation requires that there be things that we ought and ought not to do. Certain categories of behaviour are considered either unlawful, sinful, unacceptable, shameful, inappropriate, or inconsiderate. There are things that are considered uncivilised. Transgressions in thought, word, or deed would necessarily be accompanied, therefore, by feelings of guilt. For Freud, guilt was the biggest problem of civilisation and the cause of much misery, malaise, and anxiety. It is when the frustrations and expectations of civilisation become too much that people become sad and neurotic. Writing in the 1930s, Freud was emphasising the problem of guilt at a time when the full horrors of the 20th century—of Nazism, fascism, and communism—had not yet been fully realised. If we were guilty about our secret bad thoughts or aggressive urges, the 20th century showed us how truly destructive our aggression can be—and it was beyond our worst nightmares.
Godwin’s Law—“as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler increases”—doesn’t just describe the ease with which we reach for immature ad hominem. It identifies something much more profound: the guilt that Freud identified now finds its foundation in a horrifying origin story that is so apocalyptic in its proportions that it paralyses us and seems insurmountable. As historian Tom Holland put, we spent two thousand years basing our morality on what Jesus would do. Instead, we now ask what the Nazis would do, and then do the opposite. Good and evil are now defined in terms of their proximity to Hitler. Where does this leave the concept of civilisation? How could the country that produced Bach and Beethoven commit acts of such cruelty? How could a highly civilised Europe behave with such savagery? If you stare at civilisation long enough, does barbarism stare back?
Attempting to define civilisation in his 1969 documentary of the same name, Kenneth Clarke settles for “I know it when I see it.” A strange adage to opt for given that this was said not long after the U.S. supreme court justice, Potter Stewart, described the threshold for obscenity in relation to pornography in exactly the same way. Indeed, the relationship between civilisation and pornography is an interesting one. Very recently, a remote Amazonian tribe was given access to the Elon Musk funded internet provider, StarLink. It is estimated that there are between 100 to 200 uncontacted tribes globally, numbering up to 10,000 individuals who have never known civilisation as we know it, let alone its most advanced technological developments.
Interestingly, while the Amazonian tribe initially found internet access to be of benefit in calling for help or communicating with distant family members, it didn’t take long before young members of the tribe started sharing pornography in group chats, leading to a sudden rise in aggressive sexual behaviour in young males. In other words, Elon Musk, the current apex predator of Western civilisation, made a primitive society more uncivilised, not less so. It should be said that not long after this story was reported, the leader of the tribe took to Instagram to denounce the story as “fake news”—and in doing so ironically added, rather than detracted, from the sense that they had been corrupted by the ways of the West even more so than was reported.
It is this idea that the primitive nature of such tribes may be preferable to our own advanced civilisation that continually makes us doubt ourselves. Clarke describes the enemies of civilisation as being fear, boredom, and a loss of confidence, with an emphasis on the latter. We lose our confidence in confronting, for example, Islamism and sudden bursts of antisemitism from people who seemingly hate the West. In other words, the enemies of Western civilisation come from inside just as much as they do from outside. This is what makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish civilisation from savagery: elements of both lie intermingled in our midst.
If we were to hear of a remote tribe that ritualistically sacrificed some of its adolescents and attempted to stop them becoming adults by poisoning their bodies, and then mutilating their breasts and genitalia in the service of a magical belief that they could change sex, we’d call them irrational, mad savages. Yet, this is exactly what has happened in state-sanctioned medical facilities across the Anglosphere. The phenomenon of transgenderism and the medical malpractices that have ensued as a result serve to highlight how warped, confused, and perverse expressions of sexuality and aggression have become.
With regards to sexuality, we are professedly more liberated than ever. Access to pornography is immediate and the content extreme. Sexual kinks are normalised and celebrated. Alongside this we have the rise of new flags and labels for an ever-proliferating set of niche sexual ‘identities.’ Does this mean we are less repressed sexually? No. It turns out that our hyper-sexualised society is actually rather unsexy. As several surveys have shown, we are having less sex, and this is especially true amongst the younger generation. The commercialisation and politicisation of sex and ‘gender’ have accelerated at such a speed that for many it seems impossible to discern what a healthy and authentic sexual desire actually is and feels like. What are those people who exhibit their sexual fetishes at pride parades actually showing us? A comfortable, confident, and satisfying sexuality? Or the inevitable narcissism of a loveless and lonely individualism that attacks any genuinely meaningful attachments to others?
One of the many cognitive dissonances of woke progressivism is that it couples excessive sexual liberalism with excessive sexual puritanism. We are instructed to be understanding and inclusive of furries (people who dress up as animals for sexual pleasure) or even ‘minor-attracted people’ (paedophiles), yet according to the rules of #MeToo feminism, if a man placed an unwanted hand on a woman’s knee ten years ago, he should be cancelled and lose his job. This contradiction manifests itself in the clash between trans rights activism and radical feminism (or, as I prefer to call it, feminism). The trans rights activists argue for a rejection of all biological and sexual boundaries, and see no danger in this, while the feminists see danger everywhere.
This is very similar to the concept of anarcho-tyranny. Here, overt acts of aggression become more accepted, serious crimes go unchallenged, and criminals face few consequences (anarchy). At the same time, there is a zero-tolerance approach to small transgressions such as not wearing a COVID mask, or tweeting that a man cannot become a woman. According to the woke Left, we should try to rid the world of anything that could contain anything remotely aggressive. For example, statues should be taken down, paintings or novels should be given trigger warnings or banned entirely, and hate speech laws should be introduced to monitor what we say in the home. The countryside is racist, questions constitute an assault, and silence is violence. Yet in response to the genuine threat of sectarian violence and calls for the genocide of Jews, the state simply shrugs.
Within the area of sexuality, then, as with anarcho-tyranny, we have what I am dubbing porno-celibacy. In porno-celibacy, any sexual desire or behaviour is acceptable until someone’s subjective feelings say that it isn’t and it must be condemned. Warring claims of victimhood then ensue followed by competing definitions of inclusivity, identity, and reality. It’s not just that we don’t know where the boundaries are any more. It’s more that, untethered from any overarching moral framework, we don’t know what the boundaries are for, what would be their purpose? More broadly, Western civilisation no longer knows what levels of sexuality and aggression it is willing to tolerate, so currently the answer is simultaneously all of it and none of it. This doesn’t alleviate the guilt that Freud identified, it exacerbates it. No wonder we are unhappy, lonely, confused, and lacking in confidence.
Many commentators point to the many reasons Edward Gibbon gives for the fall of the Roman Empire, underscoring their alarming relevance to the present state of the West. However, we should remind ourselves that Rome didn’t collapse in a day and that its decline occurred over hundreds of years. One thing we do know is that in our current civilisation things can change very quickly. So, are we really witnessing the end of an empire or is our current empire just changing? It certainly seems like both a terrifying and exciting time to be alive. While many remain optimistic, it may be worth keeping in mind Freud’s warning: “a civilisation which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.”
