AS THE JOKE GOES, Britain has left the EU, when will it leave the US? Exiting the EU was more than retreating from the Pax Europaea, the post-war settlement of ‘let’s stop fighting and get on’. It was a slipping out the back door from European modernity, without a bye or toodle-pip.  François Hollande, in his 2022 book Bouleversements (Upheavals), argues the EU is a project of “reason and not of the heart”. Which is warm prose for creating sacred symbols out of modernity. A project which European modernes believe still requires completion, and is in danger now of being left undone.

Although Hollande advocates halting the march towards unfettered federalism he says “European construction continues as before”. This leaves European nation-states with nowhere to go. They are junior to the supra-national EU. Hence the future will be a gradual, and messy, slunk back to the only workable unit in political-economy, the independent nation-state. The value of heading back to this boundary marker, as led by Britain, is it further sees off nascent far-right populism.

For the nation-state is Europe’s great achievement, our inheritance, the place where religion was privatised, and difference not only made essential but welcome. It has been hiding in plain sight, unloved and written out of the curriculum, but remains the golden triumph of Europe’s brutal struggles.

Within its jurisdiction neighbourliness and shared citizenship transcend both old tribal boundaries and blind family loyalties. We are free to associate whatever our colour or creed, as we are neighbours and citizens. “I” require reason and forbearance to resolve differences with my neighbour as I cannot call on gang enmities. Together we form the “we”, bound by moral values, social customs, political institutions. To throw this wildly successful model away for the vague trans-nationalism of the Euro Mod is not just reckless but unthinking.

We in the UK are currently wondering just where are the coordinates of this new government. We know UK governments of late have a tendency to confusion: conservative on Monday, progressive come Tuesday. But both Conservative and Labour policy hearts tend to beat still with European modernity. A collective intellectual laziness. This goes to serve increased awareness that the UK populace has not seen a conservative government in over a generation. Thatcher, the economic liberal (indebtedness as wise and good), Blair-Brown likewise, but gilded with vague metro-moods. And the Cameron-Clegg coalition rolled-over the Blair-Brown government’s desire to knock the electorate off-balance by radiating selfsame turbo-confidence. And now the new Labour government has stolen Blair-Brown’s mantra: “Change is coming”. It is one thing to roll out a cliché, another to repeat it years later knowing just how empty it was then. The technocrat’s great weakness is unworldliness. If we are not ‘obedient to wider meaning, then we must accept the authority of local fashion’, to paraphrase W. H. Auden.

As shared actualities fragment, in our case the faltering post-war consensus between former warring nation-states, modern irony spreads in random forms. Epochal change, if it is indeed that, produces perverse effects, not least the hi-ironists of late-modernity. Irony here in the sense of negating what appears obvious. We the people crave good order, but if a normalcy is ending then figures emerge with “Der Geist der stets verneint”, the spirit that always denies, as in Goethe’s Mephistopheles.

And it is the nation-state that gives the most scope to the subjective self who seeks to negate dying orders, as well as exist outside of any march of history. Irony appears here also as hesitation in the face of anything cravenly unquestioned. In Britain the Great Hesitation was in the face of an unbelievable utopian Europe. The hard-won concept of the free self tends to creak at the prospect of universal ethics or a faux international “we”. Any international “we” is of course an abstraction of language, an unreality.

The change mantra offers a sensation of pace which is a kind of dopamine fix, but is equally an abstraction from the real sensations of daily living. Moving at speed towards faux change invites more clichés, as the faithful are those who ‘get on board’. The antidote is dealing with real things that bind ordinary people together inside their real encounter.

The value of modern irony (which challenges the whole, rather than Socratic irony which took cheery aim at the individual) is it has the potential to flip worldviews upside down. If a revived nation-state is an ironic negation of European modernity, where are its proponents? Genuine conservatives are by degrees an exiled diaspora hiding in The National Trust, the Church of England, and the legion of civic bodies that better represent loyalties to place, past, and the future. Genuine conservatism hesitatingly mutters: ‘Please stop, better do nothing for the time being’. It runs against the inner-drivebelt of European modernity which remains world-as-mechanism and not world-as-organism. World-as-mechanism chases down life down to destruction, and paints an ideal abstract of ‘man and woman’, which gives rise to modern ressentiment. Pursuing ideals is a contradiction in terms as life by necessity is without an ideal.

And in the meantime, our ex, America, is where a progressive landslide has not materialised. The majority of voters remain either conservative or moderate. Liberals have only just moved into the majority amongst Democrat voters. And America is so embattled as a monetary hegemon, with the Fed putting out economic forest fires, as well as the Republican Party being taken over by its members, appointing one of their own as leader, do they have any time for western leadership?

Underneath the return to the nation-state as the only sane model of government, is this tension between the social-conservatism of the voting public, and the metro-modernity of the unrooted political class who wander in a cosmopolitan haze far from ordinary existence. As such Brexit blew another whistle on modernity as a completable project. Hence, the UK’s Conservative Party has a dilemma. Should it appoint a genuine conservative leader who actually represents conservatives, which will see it in the wilderness for some time. The past is the future is not a vote winner.  Hence an ideological wasteland in UK politics, but undertowed by a residuum of Euro modernity.

As a result of Brexit the sun is setting on the EU, for in losing Britain it has lost its Anglo-Saxon trophy, and raison d’etre, which is to counter US hegemony, and to advance France’s Enlightenment vision of a modern Europe. Even though English and US law diverges, the US remains a conservative force, and at direct odds with the European project. Notions of harmony and unity under the English constitution sees English-modernity as a process of tradition constantly shaping ‘the new’, moulding it, making it continuous and stable. English-modernity is bound by its historical continuity. Where French-modernity is a huge effort to found a settled constitution on ill-defined modern progress. 15 constitutions since 1791 and still counting.

For change within a modern context is rooted in contingent spaces and their provisional qualities. The assumption is that forums fill their own vacuum. They do not. Modern public spheres are largely empty spaces and get filled quite quickly, not unlike resort sunbeds. What goes into the western forum always remains provisional. What reaches the modern English sunbed first is the utilitarian argument. It throws its towel down at dawn, but under this seeming pragmatism is a disguised ironic commitment to continuity. Tradition hides very effectively inside chop pragmatism.

And irony is the second casualty of modern rationalism. Irony understands the relationship between modernisation as a project and its effects on the creative life force of nation-states. For organisational leaders in the commercial sector, markets are carriers of modernity and tradition. Effective strategic leadership is alert to both forces and holds the space open. And is alert to how both work in terms of speed and change. The dance or art of the CEO as strategist is understanding how modern rationalism and irony influence notions of authority and leadership.

Authority has been found to be quite distinct from the increasingly contingent word ‘leadership’. Leadership, with sufficient revision, can again effect genuine long-term value-adding stability, but when misused, gradually diminishes authority.

Nature, in response, builds in tension between authority and leadership with unsurpassable majesty. We argue nature’s beauty stems from truth and love, and ugliness in the world finds its root in power and control. Life itself being a target for modern control mechanisms. The ancient argument is that the opposite of love is not hate, but power. Those that seek it gradually shrivel, and their organisation becomes an echo chamber for others to fix at a later stage. Those that do not seek power gain it. As do those who give power away. This presents the problem of vulnerability.

Now that is all well and lovely, as we know monsters do enact revolutions in their own country and manage to hold onto power for decades relatively untroubled. Of course everything around them rots. But here in the West we are prone to working in long evolved democratic spheres which invite extended engagement.  

Currently strategic leadership offers an ability to hold all the above in an adaptive tension. By all means react to new market signals, especially weak signals, but they are always carrying mixed messages which need evaluation. We can re-open dialogue around change and progress, and what they are in the post-industrial, late-modern, post-critical, post-theory, post-post landscape. Under modernity progress was forwards and upwards at speed, which has its inbuilt dilemmas.

T. S. Eliot’s vision in his 1922 poem The Waste Land pointed a finger at the solidified symbols of ‘industrial modern progress’ and reveals them as not progress but rather screen glitches in the eternal. Later in The Four Quartets he suggests it is a question of time confusion. If progress is always in the future, we are fundamentally forgetting progress itself, paradoxically, might be more a work of the past. That is, an instituting of values that leak their meaning throughout the organisation, effecting all behaviours, visible and invisible.

And a new UK government begs questions of not just international alignment but its ideological attachment to modern future, past and present. Turning from Europe to the US means a renewed relationship with both a low-modernity and a hidden conservatism. America invaded Britain after the war with televisual saturation. But America failed to export its conservatism as effectively. Both into Europe or Britain. The odd glimpse of European TV output, by contrast, seemed like something from a Proustian daydream. Renewing vows with the Pax Americana is made more interesting by the fact that western governments have let slip their grip on conservative politics, and its force for stability. Any defence of the eternal ‘western institution’ is being roughed up under monetisation. And the surge of right-wing popularism, with its national and nativist spirits.

Hollande offers that there is no European identity. He is not proposing total integration. But possibly not far off. The UK is still moving its emotional furniture from political integration as ‘the future’ into a surprise encounter with another Blairite progressive Labour government. Which will still largely be as metro-liberal as the outgoing metro-liberal Conservatives, who did little to foster meaningful development of the political ideological landscape. Both parties have fallen foul of technocratic utilitarian panic.

What actually is the ‘Change is coming!’ shtick? Continued modernisation via market liberalism, somewhat limply. It did not really know what it stood for. It did seem to be a code-phrase to say if we disrupt old-institutions through the market, something might happen that is better. But institutions are, despite their turmoil, holding something of a conservative line. Even if led by unworldly metro-liberal technocrats.

This means modernity remains a version of time that is unsustainable. The facing outwards toward a modern future was more importantly a turning away from facing each other. Conservatism (of any political shade) remains a turning towards each other’s face. At root, this is a face-to-face encounter with the ‘eyes and lips of the soul’, and the soul possesses its own natural order. If the “industrial revolution was, at bottom, an effort to substitute a technical order, an engineering conception of function and rationality for the haphazard ecological distributions of resources and climates”, against us adapting nature to our needs, then, as Daniel Bell argued, we are now in that position of being both “outside nature, and less and less with machinery and things”. Our modernity has pushed us past both nature and mechanisation, and into a clearing where we all stand and look at each other afresh, and go, ‘so?’, how do we recover a sustainable ordering of good society.

Bell is suggesting here that the celebrated industrial revolution might actually have been a rejection of a good technical order and even good engineering. A ripping up of good industrial progress itself for the sake of rapacious progress.

The strange mood and sensation of the now is, too few have the desire to complete the modern project. In Bell’s terms it is too random. As Oswald Spengler puts it: “Knowledge, for Kant, is mathematical knowledge. He deals with innate intuition-forms and categories of reason, but he never thinks of the wholly different mechanism by which historical impressions are apprehended.” Better known as we have been thinking inside the world-history box of limited time and space logics. The sweep of civilisations and its patterns reveals more. That is, a culture emerges in its power, and then is spread to the masses (civilianised). That is, our Western Civilisation is a twilight of Western Culture, not its perpetuation. A questionable conception, as with many conservative philosophers, they miss the depth of lifeforce within humans to convert the most inhospitable conditions into life itself.  

Nevertheless, the arc of the Enlightenment project has touched down to ground and we can say science, culture, art, politics, economics have all underperformed under a modernised Western Civilisation. The Right and Left are almost in agreement. This is no more visible than in the hotchpotch of variable architecture in Britain. The beautiful and ugly within our post-war built environment reveal the confusion of what time and progress is.

Social media mimics this confusion. It creates narrow slices of reality. Which paradoxically is restoring context. Viewers repeatedly land on enduring imagery as glimpses of what might be possible if formed inside a new and more helpful world-history. In the background behind a manic presenter fishing for hits is something disturbingly durable, such as an ancient monument leaking its timeless symbolic meaning. A Doric column with its the image of the pure present. It was easy for the architect and developer to destroy these symbols as they pointed to a world that was already changing and needed none of their expensive improvements.

This disjuncture between the timeless and the modern is outlined in Roland Barthes’ studium and punctum. Studium is the desire to make contextual sense of a photographic image, and punctum is your eye falling on something in that image that it is not supposed to. At the opera or stand-up comedy gig, we cannot help notice the audience member on their phone, or the cracked ceiling speaking its own resonant message of reality.

Modern rationalism could not calculate civic value, and we look to a revived nation-state as a means to recovering aesthetic judgement. The same type of judgement that knows what is right and wrong in architecture or music, and is formed from centuries of communal face-to-face participation.