To Avoid Confusion

It's come to my attention, thanks to the wonder of Google, that there's another site called Caustic Comments out there on the interweb, and what's more it's a fundamentalist Protestant site connected with Dr Ian Paisley. Now I don't intend to change the name of my blog, but to avoid any confusion, mine is the one that's just as rude about Protestants as Catholics. No Popery (or potpourri)! John Knox was a numpty!

Koan for Cocker

A throw-away line of Jarvis Cocker's in a Guardian interview, "I would like to believe in an afterlife; it makes things more palatable. But I'm not banking on it" struck me as neatly encoding a fundamental linguistic/philosophical truth. Take Cocker's observation and replace the word "afterlife" with anything at all and the sentence retains its sense: 

I would like to believe in an orange bluebell.
I would like to believe in an effective mayor of London.
I would like to believe in intelligent life on another planet.
I would like to believe in a free market. 
I would like to believe in a Lib/Lab coalition.

We're all free to believe in any of these things, and we would all be wise not to "bank" (unfortunate word perhaps) on their existence. Precisely because there is no afterlife IT DOESN'T MATTER IN THE END, or to put it another way IT'S ALL MATTER IN THE END. 

Cool Rulers?

"The Blair government has embarked on a more radical program of reform of British institutions than many expected, but it is a program that seeks to cut out  dead wood from both the left and the right; welfare dependency as well as hereditary peers, entrenched anti-business attitudes as well as social exclusion. To the extent that the New Labour project involves demolishing the legacy of World War Two and the post-war consensus, Cool might seem to be an appropriate ‘branding’ for the party. Certainly the Tories appear to think so, and their choice of a new spin-doctor  suggests that the main priority for Tory strategists is not currently to produce vote-winning policies, but to rebrand  themselves as the ‘Naturally Cool Party’. This is not quite as daft as it sounds, since a Tory party with softened social policies might be able to attack New Labour from a libertarian direction - perhaps even by promising to legalise drugs, though we wish lots of luck to the person who first tries that out on the ladies of the Tory conference."

I wrote those words a over decade ago in "Cool Rules" (Reaktion Books, 2000), the book I wrote with the late David Robins. We'd decided to write the book because Tony Blair was at the height of his popularity and the media were full of banal drivel about Cool Britannia: we wanted to point out that on our understanding of the phenomenon of Cool, it was profoundly antithetical to Blair's (and indeed Old Labour's) deeply moralistic project. At that time, when the Tory party was still in the hands of frothing, thwarted Thatcherites, it felt quite daring to suggest that the party might one day outflank Labour on the libertarian wing, but it has come to pass - though not entirely voluntarily, and requiring the assistance of the Lib Dems. (And those ladies of the Tory conference still have to be faced...) This morning I watched Theresa May, the new Home Secretary, on TV news addressing the Police Federation's conference in Bournemouth, and waited in vain for the usual Law 'n Order rhetoric to come pouring out. On the contrary she sounded admirably reasonable and in many respects, yes, to the libertarian left of recent Labour Home Secretaries. 

We consulted many other writers and theorists when we were writing "Cool Rules", and one of those who most influenced our conclusions was Mark Lilla,  Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, New York, via an article in the New York Review of Books (14th May 1998) called "A Tale of Two Reactions". Lilla pointed out a curious state of affairs in the USA whereby the generation who grew up in the 1960s were turning out to be right-wing economically but socially liberal, a combination that American politics at that time was not really capable of dealing with. He posed this as:

"...a question for which neither Tocqueville, nor Marx, nor Weber has prepared us: What principle in the American creed has simultaneously made possible these seemingly contradictory revolutions? How have our notions of equality and individualism been transformed to support a morally lax yet economically successful capitalist society?"

We, obviously, proposed that the attitude we were calling Cool was that glue Lilla was looking for to stick these contradictory revolutions together. Now in the latest New York Review ( 27th May 2010) Lilla has revisited this problem, in a scintillating article called "The Tea Party Jacobins", in which he analyses the mentality of the new US populist Right. You really should try to read the whole of this article if possible, as it is the most lucid account I've found yet of the terrible danger facing Western democracies. He sees the Tea Party/Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck/Fox News axis as a symptom of a complete loss of trust in government in the USA, so profound that it threatens to render the country ungovernable (one only has to look across the Mexican border to see the worst case scenario):

"A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.
Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob."

The article is actually a review of five recent books on the US Right, including ones by Glenn Beck and Max Blumenthal. Lilla concludes thus:

"If either Beck or Blumenthal is right about the new populism, then it’s not worth taking seriously. My own view is that we need to take it even more seriously than they do; we need to see it as a manifestation of deeper social and even psychological changes that the country has undergone in the past half-century. Quite apart from the movement’s effect on the balance of party power, which should be short-lived, it has given us a new political type: the antipolitical Jacobin. The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers. [...]

Survey after survey confirms that trust in government is dissolving in all advanced democratic societies, and for the same reason: as voters have become more autonomous, less attracted to parties and familiar ideologies, it has become harder for political institutions to represent them collectively. This is not a peculiarity of the United States and no one party or scandal is to blame. Representative democracy is a tricky system; it must first give citizens voice as individuals, and then echo their collective voice back to them in policies they approve of. That is getting harder today because the mediating ideas and institutions we have traditionally relied on to make this work are collapsing."

 I share Lilla's sense of urgency about this problem, but I'm perhaps less anxious than he is because I've just witnessed a remarkably mature and dignified transfer of power in our own democratic system. We are not nearly so deep in the mire yet as the US, but who knows whether that will remain true after five years of serious austerity?

Left for Dead

I don't believe that the LibDem/Conservative coalition is a sham, and that Cameron will shortly cast off his mask and emerge as a blood-thirsty tyrant. The bad news is that even so, next week's package of emergency cuts will mark the final demise of the British Left.

We have just lived through a once in a lifetime opportunity for the Left, with neo-liberalism revealed as completely bankrupt, banks and "market forces" universally detested and a feeling in the air that structural change  was finally possible. Yet the Left has failed so comprehensively to grasp this opportunity that the Right's agenda of devastating cuts predominantly loaded onto the public sector has prevailed. Everyone talks as if the deficit is the only important problem, that immediate cuts are necessary. I feel desperately sorry for the BA cabin staff who are set to be the first victims. Any sort of halfway sensible Left could have told them that now is not the time for a showdown, but instead they've been allowed to wander like helpless children into Willy Wonka's elephant trap.

The reason for these failures is not hard to relate, New Labour's incapacitating infatuation with neo-liberal economics which persisted right up until the end and prevented them from saying or doing any of the things that might have effected change - like a Tobin Tax on finance, using its ownership of several huge banks as a battering ram, aggressively threatening the barrow-boys of the markets with default instead of rolling over to them.

Labour will elect a new leader, and he or she may or may not press more radical policies onto the party, but it's too late, because the British public will never forgive the party for flunking this one-off opportunity. As the welfare state is demolished in a gradual and utterly civilised manner over the next five or ten years, they will not be turning back to Labour.

Beckenstein

The most amusing episode of the post-election limbo days was that spat between Alistair Campbell and Adam Boulton of Sky News. Who'd have thought that I'd ever be rooting for Alistair Campbell to pick a fist fight... and win it. That Peter Capaldi would definitely have clocked him. The less amusing side of the affair is that it made me wonder whether Sky News is revving itself up to become a Fox News for the UK. 

Coalition looks like it might prevent the Tory Right from fulfilling its revenge fantasies, so it would be quite convenient for them to have a malign goblin chattering from the sidelines whenever any LibDem-tainted compromise comes before parliament.  I'm sure they're constructing a Glenn Beck replica somewhere in an attic, perhaps using stem cells from Norman Tebbit and Play Dough. Just need to wait for a thunderstorm... Igor, fetch the jump leads. 

The Vatican's Travails

I recently finished Henri Lefebvre's "Critique of Everyday Life", the 1991 Michel Trebitsch translation of which has just been republished in three paperback volumes by Verso. I'd been aware of this work's reputation since the '60s when it was a major influence on Guy Debord, but had never until now read it, and I was quite bowled over. Parts of it read badly now, as overly-pious Marxist rhetoric (it was first published in 1947) but there are other parts that display a brilliance unmatched by any current social critic. Most surprising of all is the lucid and poetic prose in which much of it's written, and nowhere more than in the odd essay that concludes Vol 1 called "Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside". In it Lefebvre describes his relationship to the Catholicism of his youth, provoked by a visit to a small country church. You really should read it all, but I'm quoting a few of the more powerful passages here as my modest contribution to the current debate over the behaviour of certain Catholic priests:

Should a sacrilege be committed (ah! the stories they tell in their pious conversations and their parish newspapers, of the host bleeding and speaking, of sudden deaths and unexpected conversions . . .), should a sacrilege be committed, the world might collapse into nothingness! The firmament, that solid vault which supports the stars, might crumble. Fearful angels would trump forth the end of Time. For if God does not accomplish all that He is perfectly capable of as cosmic Father, vain, vindictive Creator, Lord of heaven, Master of good and evil, Throne of glory built upon azure, gold and banknotes, it is because He is also the Son, controlling Himself, checking His Justice and His Wrath, and showing Himself to be equally and at one and the same time very good, very mild, very brotherly towards the little human families which crawl along in this vale of tears. [...]

How naïve people were to believe that they could get rid of you with a few sacrilegious protests. How holy men must have laughed at the ‘freethinkers’ (while pretending to be deeply shocked and making sure to retaliate at the earliest opportunity). Now I can see the fearful depths, the fearful reality of human alienation! O Holy Church, for centuries you have tapped and accumulated every illusion, every fiction, every vain hope, every frustration. You have garnered them in your houses like some precious harvest, and each generation, each era, each age of man adds something new to them. And now before my very eyes I see the terrors of human childhood, the worries of adolescence, the hopes and misgivings which greet adulthood, even the terrors and despair of old age, for it costs you nothing to say that the evening of the world is nigh and that Man is already old and will perish without realizing his potential!

There are men who withdraw slightly from life so as to control it, using skills amassed by over more than twenty centuries of experience. And precisely because they have sacrificed themselves to the utmost, these men appear to be sacred; many of them believe they are sacred, and perhaps in a sense some of them are indeed sacred. From the newborn babe’s first breath to the dying man’s last sigh they are there, ministering to questioning children, frightened virgins and tormented adolescents, to the anxieties of the destitute and even to the sufferings of the powerful; whenever man experiences a moment of weakness, there they are. For their old, ever-more-skilful tactics, for the ‘spiritual’ body of the Church, everything is grist to the mill - including doubts and heresies, and even attacks. [...]

You have served Roman emperors, feudal lords, absolute monarchs, a triumphant bourgeoisie. You were always on the side of the strongest (not without some craftily reticent manoeuvres to prove how independent and superior you were), but by appearing to stand up for the weak you ended up being the strongest of all. And now you have the gall to take up the cause of Man, promising to turn yesterday’s slave into tomorrow’s master! No. The trick is too obvious, and above all the task is too great. Until now the Holy Church has always been able to digest everything, but for the first time her mighty stomach may prove not strong enough. And she knows it. And she is afraid. [...]

Anyone who criticizes ‘Catholic dogmatism’ in the name of freethinking and independent individuality is being ridiculously naïve. This movement taps human weakness and helplessness; to be absolutely exact, it ‘capitalizes’ on them [...]

Past religion and past moral doctrines (which deep down are always religious) tell us what we must do (according to them) in an everyday life which seems all the more derelict, uncertain and humiliated for the fact that the life of the mind, of knowledge, of art, of the State, is getting more and more vast, more ‘elevated’ and more ritualized.

picture: dick_pountain on Flickr

Ghost in the Party Machine

I just read a thought-provoking review of Roman Polanski's "The Ghost" by Michael Wood in the LRB. Wood didn't think it was a  great movie, though he believes as I do that Polanski is a great director. What set me to thinking were two throwaway lines in his review: the first was that "Polanski has said that he is not interested in politics, and I believe him"; the second, about the movie's principal character Adam Lang (a Tony Blair figure) was that unlike everyone else he feels at home on the grim island because "he is a politician, he is indifferent to places: he brings himself along, so what more could he want?"

This triggered queries as to what politics means nowadays, and what it means not to be interested in it. Perhaps there are now three totally disjoint populations in the land:

1) those who are not interested in politics, which means in practice that they are only interested at worst in themselves, or at best in their families and friends too. Private citizens.
2) politicians who are only interested in themselves.
3) a smallish minority, including a very few politicians, who are interested in politics. This means that they cannot help but see the larger picture, beyond their own immediate family interests, and that they might even do or support things that are not in their own immediate interest. They risk attack by ordinary private citizens for being hopeless idealists or even fanatics.

I'm also in the middle of reviewing a book called "Cool Capitalism" by Jim McGuigan (Pluto Press), whose basic conclusion supports precisely this picture of modern life: we've entered a fourth, perhaps final, perhaps perpetual phase of capitalism in which the private life of consumption has expelled politics from everyday life and relegated it to a niche for professionals (who unfortunately can't be trusted).