I'm only half way through it myself but would just like to strongly recommend reading Frank Furedi's book

Lots to agree with and lots worth replying to.

Furedi, interestingly, does not see market forces or the growth of professionalism as the chief villains in this sorry story. For him, the main factor is the politics of inclusion, which in his view belittles the capacities of the very people it purports to serve. It implies in its pessimistic way that excellence and popular participation are bound to be opposites

Our current cultural policies are therefore a cross between infantilisation and  psychotherapy: infantilisation to ensure that nothing is beyond the grasp of anyone, and psychotherapy to make everyone feel good about himself

Still only half way through. So far there hasn't been much on risk aversion etc unlike the somewhat obsessive focus in spiked.

What I like is his fierce attack on post-modernism and identification of it as the conformist and conservative/reactionary ideology of a moribund ruling class (though he is not entirely clear about that class perspective and does not use the term moribund, he does describe it as conformist and conservative/reactionary).

Also like the way he exposes a lot of "inclusive" dumbing down as expressing contempt for what people are actually capable of and encouraging them to be infantilised philistines.

However he certainly seems to be yearning for the bourgeois intelligentsia to step forward and play the leading role from a position of having given up hope that the working class can do so and that a revolutionary party of that class is the institution through which truth is advanced.

So far does not seem to be looking for truth to emerge from outside and against the established institutions at all, despite the blogosphere etc (though he is apparantly internet savvy).

Perhaps connected with revulsion against once having led a lemmingist sect (though in some respects apparantly still doing so).

Frank Furedi:

In the nineteenth century, the project of relativising knowledge was designed to shield tradition against the claims of universalism. Cultural relativism sought to protect religion and traditional morality and values against what was perceived as the threat posed by science, objective truth and universal values. According to opponents of the Enlightenment, different communities had a particular way of making sense of the world, and their values were the product of their own specific circumstances. It was claimed that each of these particular perspectives was of equal validity and provided far more insight into the ways of the world than the so-called abstract universalism of the Enlightenment.


Since the 1960s, cultural relativism has succeeded in becoming a powerful intellectual force. Disenchantment with the Enlightenment tradition has encouraged many thinkers and sections of the public to make sense of their lives through particularistic perspectives. The caricatured version of universalism upheld by the institutions of Western society proved to be no match to the powerful spirit of disenchantment that prevailed in the second half of the twentieth century. One consequence of this process was to put the authority of objective truth on the defensive - and thereby putting to question all truth claims.


Whereas in the past the most systematic critique of universalism was mounted by the right, today, by contrast, the cultural left is its most aggressive opponent. Since the late eighteenth century, concepts such as reason, progress and universalism have generally been associated with the left. But since the 1960s, the New Left has begun a systematic demolition of those values, by questioning the claims of reason, progress and universalism. The new philosophical posture was reflected in the political approach that acclaimed diversity and opposed universalistic values. Unlike the nineteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment, the New Left was not, in its origin, motivated by a conservative impulse to defend tradition. But because Western capitalism presented its values as universal, the New Left unthinkingly became opposed to it. The New Left not only rejected universalism in general, it adopted a particularistic world view linked to the politics of identity. Unconsciously, the New Left reaction to postwar Western capitalism internalised the methods and arguments of the conservative reaction to the Enlightenment.


During the 1960s, the left's love affair with relativism was hesitant and semi-conscious, but by the late 1970s, radical intellectuals and, more often, ex-radicals were speaking the language of Nietzsche. In a process aptly described by Alan Bloom as the 'Nietzscheanisation of the Left', the left, repelled by modernism, took a cultural turn towards particularism, heterogeneity and difference. It is worth recalling that the original methodological orientation towards difference began as the defence of aristocratic and ruling class privilege. Differences in moral and mental capacities were advanced to account for and legitimise the social hierarchy. By the mid-nineteenth century, this perspective attached itself to racial differences and helped to legitimise the notion that there was a global hierarchy of people. The cultural left did not set out, as the Social Darwinist did, to provide intellectual sustenance to racial superiority. But the conservative potential of the particularistic doctrine has crystallised into the cultural left's suspicion of cosmopolitan and global trends. As the rebellion against the rhetoric of universalism turned into a celebration of difference, the process of intellectual de-radicalisation became inescapable. The outcome has been the ascendancy of what is called postmodernism and its systematic repudiation of objective knowledge.
- Where have all the intellectuals gone? (pp. 60-62)

With Khrushchev's confession, the French Communist Party's support for colonial action in Algeria, and the left's impotence as the Fourth Republic imploded two years later, in 1958, a generation of intellectuals discerned either in Heidegger's writings or, more often, in their whispered dissemination, a critique of the modern world that made sense of the disorientation, encompassing not only the capitalist reality of their present, but the Communism that had once been their future. The problem that now loomed into view was not so much the irrationality of socialised production under conditions of private appropriation, but rationality itself. In the shorthand of Holocaust and Gulag, reason stood accused. Heidegger - as did Nietzsche, Freud, and to a less voguish extent, Weber - served as a touchstone for those groping beyond the old ideological perspectives in search of a critique that addressed modernity as a whole ....


The reason Allan Bloom saw 'Heidegger's teachings as the most powerful intellectual force of our times' lay in a similarly anti-rationalist turn on the American left during the 60s, or, as he puts it, its 'Nietzscheanisation.' Arguments about civil rights or relations of production were being outflanked by a new radicalism whose 'master lyricists were Nietzsche and Heidegger.' Where Marx felt old hat, too behoven to science, to 'truth' even, this new lexicon of 'commitment,' 'values,' and 'self-creation' seemed vital. Liberal capitalism was still under attack but now on the basis of its restrictive rationality. Rights themselves, universal and 'natural', became suspect. There was no truth, just a will to power. This was nihilism but nihilism American-style, indeed, 'nihilism without the abyss' as Bloom put it. Hence its smug counter-cultural form, where the absence of truth was taken as an opportunity for self-expression, the will-to-power fused with a woolly notion of tolerance. The left may have lost the economic battle, but, as an Americanised 'kulturkritik,' it won the culture wars. Bloom's diagnosis might be slightly overdone but it does hit upon the central shift. Where once the left opposed liberal capitalism on the basis that it wasn't rational enough, that its universality was undercut by particular economic interests, it now did so on the basis that it was too rational, that particularity was oppressed by universality.

Bill, Arthur, would this be the same Frank Furedi that you praise so much?

"Today’s terrorist networks simply lack the intellectual resources to offer any coherent alternative. And therefore they opportunistically draw on all sorts of resources. They’re just as likely to draw on some anti-consumerist manifesto or anything else that represents some kind of alternative to the onward march of a modern, technologically advanced society, as they are to draw from the Koran. So in a perverse kind of way, although they often have Islamic convictions, their worldview is fuelled by ideals that are much more to do with a backward-looking anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, anti-modernist imagination; an outlook that says: ‘Stop the world I want to get off.’

Some people refer to them as ‘Islamofascists’. I am against all this use of historically specific labels stripped out of their context, whether it’s totalitarianism or fascism. All of those things had a very clear meaning and arose in very specific circumstances. Using those tags for today’s terrorist networks is more like moral condemnations rather than an objective label, and therefore it just confuses things. There is the continuous attempt to associate what is a very specific phenomenon in the early twenty-first century with movements that were much more historically significant, such as fascism or communism. This collapses the specific features of what is going on today and turns everything into an ahistorical mess. "

You can read the whole interview here.

For a failed Trotskyite to get it so right and you guys to get it so wrong with your "Islamofascist" rants is a wonder.

Dalek