Social mood and moral judgements: good for Ron Paul

The four stages of social mood are rising, peak, falling and trough. During rising social mood, moral judgements are black and white. At peak social mood, everything is considered good. As social mood falls, there's a push towards amorality or non-judgement. At the bottom, people see evil everywhere.

All of this is taking place against the backdrop of cultural development. Depending on the degree of the wave, it will either be a micro effect or macro effect. If 2000 was the grand supercycle top, then the changing in morality that took place over the past 200+ years, which exploded in the 20th Century and accelerated in the 1960s and thereafter, was a rapid playing out of the move from black and white moral judgement all the way through amorality. We are starting to see the "evil everywhere" view of banks, and increasingly government. However, in other cases, there are smaller shifts in mood. For example, the general cultural opinion about an issue such as abortion may be permissive and generally in the category of non-judgemental, but during rising social mood we might see more hard lined opposition, such as in the early 1980s growth of the pro-life movement. Then, this issue fizzles out as a major fault-line during the peak social mood, but then turns towards non-judmental in the 2000s and we see the rising popularity of Ron Paul's plan. He wants to take jurisdiction away from federal courts and turn abortion law back over to the states, where they could choose to be more permissive or ban the procedure entirely. In general, the falling social mood is good for libertarian philosophy which seeks to remove government control over decision making. It isn't necessarily non-judegmental in and of itself: Dr. Paul would like to see a Constitutional amendment or change in the courts that would fully protect unborn life, but it is a philosophy that fits well with the times.

This post was sparked by the following article, which offers a look into potentially shifting mood in the art world: What David Hockney’s return tells us about the new mood in Britain. The sub-heading is: "The country is once more ready to make confident judgments about truth and beauty"

The first and most impressive of these is the magical collection of David Hockney’s landscapes at the Royal Academy. I do not know, and would not care to ask, which party Hockney votes for at general elections. But this much can be asserted with certainty: he is a conservative painter.

In a famous passage, the great philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote that “to be conservative… is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss”.

He contrasts this with a more popular artist:

Let us now turn to Damien Hirst, whose display of spot paintings opened at both of London’s Gagosian galleries last week. Just as Hockney is conservative, so Hirst fits in tidily with Michael Oakeshott’s definition of the progressive: “You will not be bound by unprofitable attachments to particular localities, pieties will be fleeting, loyalties evanescent; you may even be wise to try anything once in search of improvement.”

Hirst’s spot paintings are abstract and universal, lack humanity and have zero reference to time or place: his exhibition is being shown simultaneously at 11 galleries around the world. Skill is not required: no late nights at life class for Hirst, who gained an E grade at art A-level and scarcely knows how to draw. “There is no such thing as a good as opposed to a bad spot painting,” noted the Telegraph’s art critic Richard Dorment in a review last week. Hence the need for experts to explain to a baffled public why Hirst matters: the arts establishment love him so much because he gives them a priestly role.

In due course, however, I would guess that critics will question whether Hirst was an artist at all.

We have two competing judgements juxtaposed. On the one hand, the perfect encapsulation of non-judmentalism, on the other, a clear black-and-white statement.

The central distinction in Conservative philosophy is between two different kinds of knowledge: abstract and concrete. Britain is moving back towards a world with solid, enduring values in which, for the first time in many years, public figures can make confident judgments about truth, beauty and morality. It is a world in which David Hockney OM has an honoured place as the greatest artist of his age.