Slouching To Despotism
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits. - Alexis de Tocqueville
Part 1
Once upon a time
convergence theory was all the rage in academia, with modish thinkers like John
Kenneth Galbraith insisting that the bureaucratic regulation of capital and the
rise of the managerial expert would render the ideological conflicts of the
Cold War redundant. Like most clever people, he placed great faith in
technocrats and the Keynesian idyll of the post war period was to prove a
heyday for Comte’s engineers. By the seventies however markets and conviction
politics were back, and in 1989 the fall of the Berlin Wall settled the
ideological contest once and for all. Soviet style planners might (just) have
been able to produce guns and butter, but fibre optics and semiconductors
needed help from an invisible hand. The class war was over and the bourgeoisie
had won.
European
intellectuals, retreating ever further into their postmodern
bunkers, responded with surly misanthropy and with nothing serious being
added to the Marxist canon the scene was set for Francis Fukayama’s infamous
article 'The End of History'. Though Fukayama is sensitive to being labeled a
neo-conservative he does share the underlying Marxisant prejudices of these
renegade Trotskyites and nowhere is this more apparent than in his theory of
history which at times looks like historical materialism in free market drag.
In this counter-intuitive slant to Marx, socialist relations of production
constituted a fetter on productive forces which were forcing a new world into
being; the USA presenting the world with an image of its future.
In an age of small
and petty visions much ink has been spilt attacking Fukayama’s predictions, but
his notion that liberal democratic institutions were the essential adornments
of modernity has stood the test of time better than the Left’s faith in the
crisis of capitalism, as anyone surveying the Left’s response to the global
depression would have to admit. In the 30s both the Left and the Right embraced
the Plan, in 2013 most centre Left parties are resigned to the effective
dismantling of the welfare state and pious declarations of faith in ‘community’
(in the UK this has spawned Blue Labour a vacuous parody of small town niceness
elevated into a political creed). Whatever its origins the financial crisis has
become a crisis of social democracy. The market reigns supreme, and democracy
has no serious political adversary, but this is as much a weakness as a
strength.
Fukayama was always
acutely aware of this. When he padded out his essay into a book the title
expanded to the End of History and The Last Man, an extension which neatly hinted at the source
of his misgivings. The phrase is particularly associated with Nietzsche but it
is in Tocqueville’s masterpiece Democracy in America that this
base material makes its most dramatic entrance. These are ‘the innumerable
multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the
petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives’. The Last Men give
us democracy as the lowest common denominator, a default system born of a
desire for repose rather than the struggle for recognition that provided
democratic aspirations with their transient lustre.
For Marx as much
as for aristocratic thinkers like Tocqueville and Nietzsche, man’s historical
greatness stemmed from the obstacles he struggled to surmount, but what happens
when one runs out of challenges and the springs of action are progressively
unbent? The key problem for Tocqueville was the psychological effects of
equality. In uberdemocracies men were reluctant to have masters, but their refusal
to submit to the authority of notables or be guided by the petrified wisdom of
tradition delivered them to a more formidable tyrant. With each individual
forced back on his own inadequate stock of knowledge the result was an
increasingly slavish adherence to the anonymous despotism of public opinion.
The result was a crushing monotony of thought where base sentiments of envy and
resentment are sanctified by a mushy egalitarianism; the healthy ‘I’m as good
as you’ degenerating all too easily into the surly ‘you’re no better than me’.
These men without chests are as old as democracy, and history records the blood
sports they invented to sate their spite. In Athens the institution of
Ostracism offered them the chance to avenge themselves on men like Aristides
whose stature was an affront to their armour propre, and the
therapeutic worldview of contemporary Anglo-American society offers a thousand
one ways to dignify the rancour of the meek.
Auden saw it
clearly in 'For the Time Being', a poem which might have been written with the
grotesque Diana cult in mind.
Whole cosmogonies
will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics
written in private languages, the daubs of schoolchildren ranked above the
greatest masterpieces. Idealism will be replaced by Materialism. Life after
death will be an eternal dinner party where all the guests are 20 years old...
Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of
retribution will vanish... The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of
hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore,
the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with
animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Age, when the general, the
statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.
In the People’s
Princess, Auden’s consumptive whore made flesh, this mob had a torchbearer and
her emoting sense of victimhood is a conspicuous feature of what passes today
for a literary culture. Today the political is the personal and modern
biographies linger obsessively on the private faults which usually lie behind
great deeds, coupled with the none too subtle hint that such trade-offs are not
worth the psychic scars. Supposedly cutting edge, this is actually the languid
spirit of Bloomsbury; Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians provided
the template for this retreat into private absorption, just as surely as our
decadence provides the raw material, and we will not pay a cheaper price.
Part 2
They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health."We have discovered happiness,"--say the last men, and blink
What is the price
for this carnival of amusements – the descent of man. When there are no values
worth standing on – happiness becomes the ultimate democratic virtue and as a
consequence contemporary politics is little more than a footnote to Bentham’s
hedonistic calculus with all the authority of 21st century neuroscience thrown
in. This is the politics of nudge, with all the diminished expectations of
citizenship one might expect when one starts coining desperate oxymorons like
liberal paternalism to cover the void. In Britain we once had enough reserves
of irony to draw the line at such clunkingly Orwellian phrases, but now the
dissonance barely registers; all shades of the political spectrum beat a path
to charlatans like Thaler whose low-brow transatlantic pseudo-science has been
reproduced with even less literary elegance by our own Happiness Czar. Lord
Layard’s execrable book, Happiness, Lessons from a New Science, is
peppered with the kind of infantile colloquialisms that make you think a LOL is
beating its wings on every page. It is difficult to imagine he meant it
to be taken seriously but the low brow demeanor is perhaps as it should be; if
you are going to construct a political philosophy on the unrefined tastes of a
fourteen year old you may as well adopt the syntax.
Once upon a time
there used to be a thinking man’s antidote to this kind of thing and it stemmed
from a deep seated and eminently healthy instinct that men are more than
laboratory animals, and that it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than
a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool
satisfied. Bentham, the ultimate progenitor of the politics of Happiness, and
the object of Mill’s famous remark was unable to concede this point and of the
two he looks the more modern. The unwillingness to judge, after all is a
credo for 21st century progressives and Bentham’s refusal to
acknowledge any qualitative distinctions between pleasurable experiences chimes
well with this sensibility, whilst the modern world in any case has more
mind atrophying diversions to offer than Pushpin, with precious few Pushkins.
The effects in a society with a dwindling stock of moral capital were to be
infinitely worse, and Bentham’s philosophy anticipated the powerful modern
obsessions. If the ability to experience pleasure and pain were the weightiest
moral considerations no further leap of the imagination were necessary to grant
animals rights.
The other equally
sound inference to draw was that humans should be governed as if they were
cleverly designed automata. Bentham’s ideas, the green shoots of behaviouralist
psychology were particularly influential amongst penal reformers and in the
Indian civil service; utilitarianism is the characteristic false consciousness
of planners but it has always been a minority taste in healthy societies.
The hard edges to
this choice were dramatized by the philosopher Robert Nozick when he invited
his readers to choose between an unending stream of pleasurable sensations
guaranteed by the Pleasure Machine and the hard grind of an authentic
existence. For Nozick the question had only to be posed to be answered – most
of us would choose our better selves, and avoid the sedated euphoria of an
empty life, but it would not have been a dilemma if it did not hold some human
attraction. Making the right choice has always required what Orwell termed
‘moral effort’, and the dilemma explored in Nozick’s thought experiment has
been a staple of reflective thoughts since the Sophists at the very least. An
escape into sensory oblivion is a perennial temptation for the world weary, and
advances in nanotechnology and neuroscience are coming ever closer to conjuring
up the dream filled half-lifes depicted in the cult sci-fi film the Matrix
where individuals can opt to roam cyber space for eternity.
The catch with
this Faustian bargain has always been clear – even the basest elemental
appetite does not arise ex-nihilo – slaves for example
eventually lose the desire to be free, all of which highlights Lenin’s cardinal
Who-Whom question. Just who creates the ersatz synthetic pleasures bestowed on whom,
and what is the effect?
Here,
Orwell’s humorous parody of the mass culture he saw enveloping his
treasured England are more instructive than his cruder metaphor of a boot
stamping on a man’s face. In 1984 Winston Smith’s lover worked
in Prolesec, a subdivision of the Ministry of Truth dedicated to churning out
‘an unending stream of rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except
sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with
sex, and sentimental songs’ all designed to keep the proles in a state of
contented ignorance, and this enterprise was prescient enough to also indulge
the adolescent urge to shatter flimsy taboos. Pornosec, for example produces
booklets in sealed packets with titles such as ‘Spanking Stories’ or ‘One Night
in a Girls' School', ‘to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were
under the impression that they were buying something illegal."
A class
conspiracy? Perhaps. In the 21st century prolefeed is big bucks
but it is not made by proles and Orwell would no doubt have pondered the irony
of Big Brother – the hideous brainchild of Bazalgette an exemplar of the
kind of mental slumming so de rigeour amongst the New
Elites. A descendant of the architect of London’s sewage system he has
used his Eton education to undo his ancestors great service to society and pump
shit back into people’s houses (for the uninitiated Big brother is a reality TV
show marketed in the main at people who will have little grasp of the Orwellian
sleight of hand, where suitably half witted contestants and sadistic viewers.
The vote off is the chard – but needless to say there are no Aristides in the
house).
As in 1984 this
traffic is overwhelmingly one way1; the offspring of the liberal
middle classes are exposed to the products of mass culture but this is simply a
case of practical anthropology; as in the days of empire one does well to learn
the language of the conquered.
[1] One of the
most interesting observations from Charles Murray’s Coming Apart is
the revelation of how little TV the upper classes actually watch especially
when compared with their social inferiors. Huxley’s goggle
box is the opium of the poor.
No comments:
Post a Comment