THE FOLLY OF SECULAR, IDEALISTIC, UTOPIAN GLOBALISM

David Martin Jones taught Political Science at the University of Queensland and War Studies at King’s College, London. His last book, HISTORY’S FOOLS: The Pursuit of Idealism and the Revenge of Politics, is a survey of international and domestic events in the last thirty years and their impact on politics, the media, and the academic world in the West. It is an eye-opening glimpse of the damaging effects of the progressive, liberal, idealist and utopian agenda. In the pursuit of social justice, equality and pacifism it has cancelled open discussion and captured governmental and non-governmental groups through radical, unrealistic programs and denial of human nature, religious convictions and the lessons of history and philosophy.

“The progressive world order that lay before us like a land of dreams, various, beautiful and new, mutated, after 2001, into a darkling plain, where an exhausted West struggled to contend with ignorant armies clashing by night.”

After 1989, a powerful consensus in the mainstream media, in business, finance, Western academia and government promoted a new liberal economic and political ideology. Its magical thinking was undone by the revival of nationalism, radical Islam and Marxism. The denial of the savagery of militant Islam and its migration to the West led the democracies to try to deal with it by a mixture of therapy and marriage guidance accepting the guilt of their colonialism and making a victim of the terrorists. They thought that all the world’s problems might be solved through uncoerced communication, arriving at mutually acceptable norms. Violence would then disappear from the world stage. Multiculturalism and appeasement became the Western response to violence. The word Islamophobia was helpful in censoring any criticism of Muslim culture which was regarded as a mainly peaceful religion. We were called upon to be tolerant to those who are intolerant in their literal interpretation of the Koran.

The increasing debt of the Western governments and their response to the Covid pandemic has weakened their national security. Citizens are entitled to the state providing them with peace and protection. The borderless world has undermined this social contract. The rise of China has upset regional freedom. The role of prudence in foreign affairs and the study of the past should inform Western foreign policy. The pursuit of social justice issues and equality to the detriment of freedom has resulted in the growth of unaccountable state bureaucracies.

In an Afterword Jones traces the decline in academic standards in universities and the replacement of true scholars with managerial administrators. The desire for winning large grant funding has resulted in lower entrance requirements and more students achieving degrees in subjects that offer little prospects of future employment. Funding from overseas governments of an authoritarian disposition or their state licensed bodies seek academic validation for political or religious practices not subject to open, critical or free inquiry. Identity recognition and diversity projects are preferred to hard sciences and the humanities. But there is a decreasing diversity of ideas. Classically, liberal, conservative and skeptical voices have been stifled. Conservatives make up a small minority of professors. He concludes: “The propensity of modern democratic governments in general to conceive education as an instrument for advancing egalitarian aims rather than promoting excellence further eroded academic independence and subjected the higher education sector to ‘the cruder kinds of interference by political or economic interests.’”