Anglosphere RIP

Post-911, the idea of the “Anglosphere” gained some traction. The English speaking nations, the UK, US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, were held out as the last bulwarks of liberty in the world.

This idea has not aged well. In the Age of Covid, the Anglosphere is now the cutting edge of repression and fascism and active hostility to the ideals of individual freedom that were allegedly its hallmark.

Look at them.

Australia: entire states are locked down–hard–in response to single digit “case” numbers. People who protest are set upon by truncheon and club wielding police.

Canada: adopting a panoply of highly restrictive policies and restrictions on free speech.

New Zealand: locked down hard for months. And recently, the Skeletor-resembling PM instructed the proles that the government was the “sole source of truth.” Oh thank you so much Big Sister! Governments have been so so so omniscient in the past 20 months!

UK. Locked down until just recently. The “Freedom Day” (19 July) is a simulacrum of real freedom because numerous restrictions remain, and even that has freaked out the establishment, including most notably the Orwellian-named “SAGE.” Even though case numbers have declined since the lockdown was eased, SAGE is issuing dire warnings. No doubt because they have been wrong so often that they need to cover their sorry asses by keeping up the scare.

US. There are some bright spots, including Florida and Texas, but the “elite” is panting to reimpose mask mandates (to make us pant) and forced vaccination and lockdowns because Delta variant. Or something.

I’m not anti-vax. I’m vaccinated. But the externality argument is so abused. The costs and benefits of vaccination are almost completely internalized.

(Although ironically I bet dimes to donuts that Jim Carey and Jeff Daniels (a neighbor for several years) would love to mandate vaccines.)

Australia is particularly sad, and almost inexplicable to me. It used to be a bad ass, fuck-it-all kind of place. A similar ethos to Texas. But not now. Incredibly authoritarian, with a largely craven and submissive populace. Crocodile Dundee? Watching that is like Charlton Heston finding an almost completely buried Statue of Liberty. A relic of a dead era.

Continental Europe–the supposed antithesis of the Anglosphere–has actually demonstrated more of the spirit of liberty than any English-speaking country. Check out today’s protests in Paris.

Large crowd in Paris against the
*#HEALTHPASS*#PassSanitaire. #NoAuPassSanitaire pic.twitter.com/VnmVkX3Fa0

— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) July 24, 2021

A la Bastille! (And note that in Louis XVI fashion, Macron is doubling down. I hope the past is prophecy.)

No. The vaunted Anglosphere has proved to be ruled by authoritarians and populated by submissive and insanely risk averse cattle. It would be wrong to say that the ideal of freedom is dead. It is more accurate to say that the ideal of freedom is reviled, at least by the elites–and far too many of the non-elite have proved to be ovine in their submissiveness to their soi disant (but not really) betters.

Speaking of things that did not age well. This from a decade ago is a (sick) laugh:

I do not mean that English speakers act any less extravagantly than speakers of other tongues, but rather that English generally acts to tether thought to the empirical world. This is something Bishop Thomas Sprat dilated on in his History of the Royal Society (1667): “The general constitution of the minds of the English,” he wrote, embraces frankness and simplicity of diction, “the middle qualities, between the reserv’d subtle southern, and the rough unhewn Northern people.”

English, Bishop Sprat thought, is conspicuously the friend of empirical truth. It is also conspicuously the friend of liberty. 

If there is one thing that is conspicuous about the events of the past 19 months it is that for all of the strident commands to “follow the science!” public policy has been completely untethered from “the empirical world.” Instead, an arrogant priesthood has imposed a cultish, unscientific, evidence-free orthodoxy and branded as heresy any skepticism–even after the skeptics have been proved right time and again. Empirical reality is not just ignored–it is anathematized.

Perhaps you can explain the collapse of the Anglosphere to its infection by Continental ideas (Derrida, Foucault, etc.). But that is merely by way of a post mortem. The fact is that practically speaking, the Anglosphere is as dead as Hector. Perhaps “palimpsests of freedom” (to use Paul Johnson’s chapter title from Modern Times) still exist in the English speaking world, but they are under siege and definitely not in command. Enemies of freedom–the antitheses of traditional “English liberties”–are in the saddle and wielding the whip.