A Triad of Isms, Old & New: Colonialism, ColonAIism & (the antidote?) Continuism
There is no higher and no lower right than the right to be let alone with your life. This ought rightfully to become the bedrock locus of the reconstruction of our civilisation.
1. Colonialism, Old & New — On The Logos Broadcast, with Fergus O’Rourke
Part 1: John Waters at 70
In this episode I discuss an early book of mine, Race of Angels, from three decades ago. This work, published in 1994, is ostensibly about U2, but really about Ireland and the warp and weave of its culture. In some respects, the book stands as a document in respect of something fundamental: the question as to whether a culture can restore itself to health after centuries of trauma, replicating its essences in new forms. In respect of its choice of central motif (U2) the book has clearly been derailed. Or perhaps not entirely, since the primary question may still be judged: was U2’s ‘Irishness’, in the beginning, essential rather than incidental to their evolution and success? The book’s core thesis was that Ireland’s history of colonisation might render Irish culture the source of invaluable antibodies in what then seemed the (somewhat) distant but unavoidable onset of newer forms of colonialism — corporate, technological, colonAIism, et cetera. How has that thesis endured? Might it still stand, despite U2’s defection to the dark side?
Fergus O’Rourke moderates:
The story of U2 has run alongside some of the most drastic technological and cultural changes that have ever taken place. Race of Angels explores the effects that some of these changes have had on how we interact with each other and with reality, with reference to the work of media theorists and philosophers such as Marshall McLuhan and Umberto Eco. Ireland’s experience of the postcolonial condition is something that John Waters also goes into, drawing substantially on the work of Frantz Fanon. With the benefit of thirty more years of hindsight and experience, in this interview John has a fresh opportunity to reflect on what these thinkers were saying.
The Logos Broadcast, Part II:
A more general look at the state of Ireland and the world, beginning with a discussion of Jordan Peterson’s recent emergence as a champion of religion (Christianity) as an essential element of the fabric of Western civilisation, and in particular his recent odd engagement in a ‘debate’ with ‘twenty atheists’, which didn’t go at all well.
2. Coffee and a Mike
Dark Forces at Work in the West
As a follier-upper to our recent three-hander with Matt Bracken, Mike Farris (Coffee and a Mike) invites me back for a one-on-one in which we discuss the undertows of our present situation — technocracy in the West, the Epstein files, President Trump’s contradictory messaging, the true meaning of imposed mass migration (‘vacant possession’ and what that term may mean here), CBDCs and the digital grid, and my recently-published book: The Abolition of Reality: A First Draft of the End of History.
3. Continuism — the Search for foundational self-protection.
A conversation about the missing link in human defences, between John Waters and David Fleming
David Fleming is an Irishman, based in the UK for the past thirty-five years, who has come up with the notion that resistance to tyranny, at least in the contemporary moment, may be missing some vital ingredient. He has identified a lacuna in the defences of humanity, a renewed need for foundational concepts, which are indivisible and unbreachable, which will protect our most fundamental needs and desires as human beings, and can be understood and applied by regular people and not become dependent on corrupt judges and the like to uphold them. His focus is on developing a principle leading to some kind of mechanism whereby an individual or collective would be enabled to continue living and behaving as he, she or it pleases, harming no one, but also remaining unmolested by power or its proxies. He calls this ‘continuism’, which is expanded on the eponymous website: www.continuism.org
In a certain acoustic, it may sound like David is seeking to reinvent the wheel, but I sense things otherwise. He has identified a lacuna in our thought processes that is actually not so much a space as a total absence. We have forgotten about the wood in our focussing on the trees. We lack some bedrock understanding that, if defined, might well prove proof against being breached, split or abridged.
In the recent life of civilisation, these issues appeared to become otiose by virtue of being tabulated and dealt with in constitutions, charters, conventions and declarations — until the spring of 2020, when they were wiped out with a wet rag, having been softened up for decades by judges spouting knowing nonsense about words not intending exactly what they seemed to mean, and no rights being ‘absolute’. It emerged — or so it seemed — that all these documents meant not just nothing, but less than nothing: they were pretences whose existence had lulled us into a false sense of security, and now it was too late to rescue them.
Suddenly, we could perceive a pattern of not separate or exterior tyrannies, but the human race as a whole militating against itself — complicit in its own erasure, as though obsessed with inventing systems which facilitated this endeavour. Suddenly, the works of Orwell and Huxley were transformed from warnings about the deeds of evil schemers to stories of the failure of the human race to protect itself from itself — perhaps from the inevitable consequences of its own suicidal ideation, rooted in unthinking.
From somewhere in the depths of human yearning, an instinct all too often emerged and found its rhetoric and boots whereby the few contrived to control the many. We have tended to think of this in terms of words like ‘government’, ‘rule’, ‘tyranny’, ‘totalitarianism’ — all forms of malignity, all pathologies. But perhaps the greatest pathology is the absence of a resolution that would make these ones impossible?
Without a philosophy, David Fleming suggests, we will lose, which is to say that these dark instincts from the depths of our species will eventually destroy us, an eventuality that becomes closer by virtue of the multiplication of means, motives and opportunities.
Even though David’s panacea is, as I point out in our conversation, as yet unfocussed — ‘elusive’ might be a better diagnosis — his mission is very clearly enunciated and obviously identifies and addresses a fundamental oversight. His initiative will, it is to be hoped, result in a longer, broader and deeper conversation about what, precisely, we are proposing as the alternative to digital tyranny.
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