The West: An Elephant On Stilts?

Is the progressive view of history a mirage propped up on vulnerable infrastructure?

There’s a scene in The Matrix Reloaded in which Councillor Hamann engages Neo in conversation and suggests that they take a walk down to the engineering level of the real world city, curiously named ‘‘Zion’’. Hamann explains to Neo that he enjoys walking in the bowels of the engineering district late of an evening because it reminds him of the raw mechanics which keep their rogue city functioning. It is here the air is purified and it is here that the water is processed, it is here that the electricity is generated.

Hamann, as man of authority and power within Zion, has to be conscious of the machines keeping the citizens alive in a way that the citizens themselves do not. Indeed, almost nobody even considers that the air they breathe is being ran through mechanical processes which can, and sometimes do, breakdown. Hamann somewhat ominously tells Neo that it is only when machines breakdown that people become conscious of them.

Similarly, we can think of a young lady enjoying caviar and champagne on the upper decks of the Titanic. She has the luxury of being entirely oblivious to the thought, skill and technical brilliance which went into keeping her ice-cream cold and her tea warm.

I have absolutely no idea how any of the technology I’m using to write this article works, non of it. Now, fair enough, I do tend to comedown on the ‘‘technophobe’’ side of things. I have no doubt that many readers could explain how the keyboard works or how Substack’s hosting works or the manner in which the content flows through the interwebs to and from Silicone Valley — if it even does that — but by and large this may as well be magic to me. I am not unlike the young lady on the Titanic who takes it as a given that she can order ice-cream while sitting in a giant metal tub floating (temporarily) on the Atlantic ocean.

There are many secrets and mysteries lying dormant on the cold and remote seabed of the Atlantic ocean. The Titanic is one, and as I learned recently, the internet cables connecting Europe to America are another. Though, when I say ‘‘learned’’ I think I was aware of it, I just hadn’t really thought about it very much because…who cares?

But then I did think about it. The reality we inhabit in the 21st Century is defined by the internet. Our economic systems, communications grids and supply lines are all built on the infrastructure of the interconnected world offered by the internet. It is perhaps the pinnacle of Faustian achievement, space has finally been collapsed entirely and been made irrelevant. The only problem is that this engineering miracle is bobbing about under water with crabs scuttling across it.

An older CNN article describes it thus:

“Before the cable-laying vessels go out they send out another specialized ship that maps the sea floor in the area when they want to go,” said TeleGeography’s Stronge. “They want to avoid areas where there’s a lot of undersea currents, certainly want to avoid volcanic areas, and avoid a lot of elevation change on the sea floor.”

Once the route is plotted and checked, and the shore connections are secure, huge cable laying ships begin passing out the equipment.’’

What they mean by ‘‘elevation change’’ is the uncomfortable reality that perhaps the most vital infrastructure of the Western world is hanging over the side of underwater cliffs, no doubt draped with seaweed and molluscs. This, along with the volcanoes(!) are somewhat problematic and need to be avoided. However, the Atlantic Ocean is not a flat sandy expanse, it has mountain ranges, gorges and deep valleys, across all of which the internet cables dangle precariously with our finances, friendships and information being transmitted within.

An actual internet cable under the Atlantic

It is not my intention here to speculate on what could go wrong, but to illustrate that we in the West are becoming increasingly conscious of the infrastructure upon which our reality is built. I use the word ‘‘reality’’ here intentionally because that is what I mean, rather than material comfort or wealth. Our reality, how we process and understand life, has largely been based an a priori assumption of technological innovation which became so all encompassing we forgot it even existed, or at least fell into a mode of taking it for granted.

As a boy I always felt that the Christmas lights added a sense of the sacred and magical to the living-room. Our mundane council house was, for a few weeks each year ‘‘enchanted’’ with tinsel and sparkling lights. Each year on New Year’s Day my mother would remove all of the decorations, returning life— my reality— to the drab norm. I was particularly despondent when I saw the once twinkling Christmas lights reduced to clumps of tangled grey wiring in shoe-boxes.

The lights have been twinkling for a very long time in the West but now we’re starting to notice that the tinsel is just string with plastic attached and that the snow comes out of a spray can.

This time last year I was only vaguely aware of what potassium nitrate was, now I do know what it is because it is in short supply and could very well lead to food shortages. The times of plenty largely relied on intensity farming using chemical compounds such as nitrogen, potash and phosphates. It isn’t just the Russia/Ukraine war which is interfering with the supply of these crucial materials, the ever present (and very often hidden) hand of the Climate Change Agenda is also at work.

It is not uncommon for Western dissidents to somewhat mockingly invoke the phrase ‘‘Bread and circuses’’ when describing what keeps the masses subdued. However, more often than not it is the circuses which are the focus of attention and not the bread. Which is to say, the academic, entertainment and media complex which drives ideology and not the foodstuffs and material conditions used to keep bellies full and riots and revolutions to a minimum.

The Roman ‘‘corn dole’’ was originally a temporary measure which ended up becoming a permanent feature of Roman life, for centuries. However that corn had to be imported primarily (but not exclusively) from Egypt. This, then, seems pretty straightforward — except those grain supplies had to cross the pirate infested waters of the Mediterranean. In order to prevent their precious food supplies falling into the hands of pirates the Romans had to maintain strategic dominance of the Mediterranean Sea. This required ships, and men to man the ships, those men had to be paid and their pay would have to be in money which was actually worth something.

The genius of the Roman Empire was that they managed to hold this vast and intricate system together for 700 years(!)

Implicit within a term such as ‘‘bread and circuses’’ is the understanding that a managerial elite will see to the affairs of state and that the masses should simply not concern themselves with pirates or inflation or a shortage of timber for the ship-yards or that the crops failed. The idea was to keep the public in a somewhat child-like state of innocence while responsibility was outsourced to others.

To return to my earlier analogy, the gentle glow of the Christmas tree lights occupied the public, not the cable extension and sockets.

Western dissidents have spent years pointing out the ideological flaws and injustices of the West. Its hypocrisy and double standards, its lies and its falsehoods and contradictions. In the last five years or so in particular we’ve witnessed a fraying of the fabric which binds the West together in an intellectual sense. Institutions were corrupt, science was corrupted, active policy was founded on falsehoods and it was all increasingly obvious. This then in turn resulted in mass-censorship which is itself a betrayal of a core Western, liberal value.

Western political life was seen as being bankrupt and merely a matter of might-makes-right and Machiavellian power-plays. Here too the machinery, the reality, was laid bare and the political class hardly even seemed to care, you can always just be censored anyway.

This disillusionment with the intolerably politicized and downright moronic mainstream of Western intellectual life is, in my view, now being mirrored in the material realm of infrastructure and supply-chains.

The circuses turned out to be freak-shows and now we’re noticing that the bread is turning into maggot protein blocks.

The (many) centres of power which sprawl across the Western world would prefer that you didn’t notice the elections being rigged or the persecution of heretical ideas or the nonsensical policies enacted in response to emergencies. And yet even the means by which these so-called ‘‘culture wars’’ can be conducted are now being revealed to us as just cables dangling over crevices under the Atlantic Ocean. The prole-feed which keeps us fat and lethargic is reliant on fertilizers supplied by countries we want to destroy and our energy supplies are in an even more precarious situation than the internet cables.

In a recent essay I asked the question ‘‘Can woke values survive without central heating?’’. Just a few months later and I’m asking myself what a civilization based entirely on materialism and consumption can ground itself in if the products and comfort end?

In his 1948 painting ‘‘The Elephants’’ Salvador Dali invites us to contemplate the fleeting nature and tenuousness of power. Upon first glance The Elephants seems typically nonsensical and surrealist. However, upon closer inspection something else is revealed to us. The elephants are a symbol of power and majesty, they appear almost to hover above the earth, defying gravity as indeed the obelisks (phallic symbolism) floating above their backs actually do. The question we’re asking ourselves subconsciously is, is this a snapshot frozen in time? or is this is a permanent state of affairs? The elephant on the right in the painting appears to be a little off-balance as if its about to face-plant into the ground.

Gazing into Dali’s painting it’s difficult not to look at those extraordinarily spindly, vulnerable legs propping up the elephants and not be once again reminded of those pipelines and internet cables which, let us be honest, they do resemble.

In our world elephants cannot walk on stilts, but, we are told, men can get pregnant. People form their entire identities and worldviews based upon algorithmic stimulation being carried through cables under the sea powered by electric power-grids controlled by people whom they want overthrown or killed.

Progress, the idea of progress as an end in and of itself, is here put into perspective. Dali’s elephants are a welcome and much needed antidote to the all pervasive mindset that progress, ideological and technological, is inevitable. To believe it is inevitable is to convince yourself that Dali’s painting is one of permanence and not a snapshot taken a second before the elephants crash into a heap on the ground.

The linear view of history which forms the core of the‘‘progressive’’ worldview is not just reliant on ideological factors, but on material infrastructure too. It depends on more stilts being used to bolster the bulk of an ever greater elephant. In a recent speech the geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan casually noted that Germany’s energy crisis was so chronic that ‘‘Germany will never be coming back’’. And it isn’t just Germans who will be sitting in the cold this winter, and it won’t be just this winter either.

The cyclical reality of history is dragging the progressive, linear view of history kicking and screaming into a downwards trajectory. This, on the one hand, is a very dangerous period because the progressive mind will look for ever more extreme and barbaric ways to defy the course of history, perhaps they’ll try a ‘‘Great Reset’’ or two to change course.

On the other hand, I’m not as worried about having the same living standards as my great grandmother as I am of living in a digital Gulag as a transhuman abomination eating Uncle Bill’s synthetic meat.

Fundamentally, the existential crisis brought about by the end of progress is for the progressive liberals to face, not reactionaries or nationalists or traditionalists.

It won’t be pretty, but it’s better to be on the ground than on the back of an elephant on stilts.