Now Cool really Rules - in Russia!

Back in 1999 when the late David Robins and I were writing Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude we reluctantly accepted that due to both space constraints and our intended popular audience, we wouldn't be offering an adequate definition of what sort of a thing "Cool" is. Instead, as the subtitle confirms, we confined ourselves to calling it an "attitude" - basically a collection of psychological characteristics - and suggested that we (and you) would recognise it when we saw it. We did go so far as to identify the major personality-forming components of this attitude, which we proposed are narcissism, hedonism and ironic detachment. In the last chapter of our book we discussed the geographical distribution and spread of the Cool phenomenon, and in particular we mentioned the prospect of the Cool attitude invading the ex-Soviet Union. After jokingly raising the question "Is Russia perhaps too cold (or too broke) to enjoy being Cool?" we went on to say:

        Cool even flourished as a dissident force under Soviet Communism, where western popular culture was prohibited and could only be seen via the black market; throughout Eastern Europe a Cool pose was recognised as a mark of passive resistance to communism. It is at least arguable that Cool helped eventually to bring down Communism, as it represents precisely those ‘decadent western values’ that the regime sought to exclude - the black market in Beatles albums and Levi jeans is what lost the hearts and minds of the whole post-war generation for Communism. In 1989 East German youths hoisted the MTV flag over the Berlin Wall as it was being pulled down. 

So is Cool destined to rule the world then? To ask that is the same as to ask whether consumer capitalism and parliamentary democracy are destined to rule the world, because if they do then Cool will surely follow."

Now fast forward to 2011. Two recently published articles have set me to thinking further about this question of what sort of thing Cool is, and also to realise that an actual Rule of Cool is coming about before our eyes, and in Russia of all places.

One of the most intelligent and stimulating political blogs around is OpenDemocracy, and one of its great strengths is its Russian section, oD Russia, which often contains articles that are penetrating and strikingly different in tone from the mainstream of UK commentary. (I remember in particular "Switch on, switch off: how law sustains the Russian system" by Kirill Rogov which details how Putin's regime, rather than merely flouting the law, has subverted and commercialised the law to maintain its own legitimacy). On 24th October 2011 oD Russia published a fascinating piece by the Russian artist Maxim Kantor called "Rise of the lumpen elite: is this really what we fought for?" in which he observes that:
     
          The first result of the policy of globalisation is the creation of an elite which belongs to no particular country and is dependent on no government or regime. It rises above history, culture and tradition. The lumpen proletariat represented danger from below, from the lower strata of society. The lumpen elite is isolated from society and is twice as dangerous. 

The lumpen upper class has come into being during the present crisis, which can be seen as a contemporary version of the classic 'collectivisation.' It bears all the hallmarks of the collectivisation of the 1930s. Both resulted in financial redistribution. Both involved the suppression of the the middle class, the very stratum that is the engine and culture medium of democracy. The rich have grown richer, the poor poorer, and common history and a common goal have ceased to exist. We keep on thinking we live in the same society as before. But we don't: the middle class has lost its rights and the ruling class has been lumpenized. The lumpenized class is the elite.

Around the same time the London Review of Books published a gripping article by Russian TV Producer Peter Pomerantsev called Putin's Rasputin. It's about one of president-to-be-again Vladimir Putin's most important eminences gris, the PR guru Vladislav Surkov, who is described as "the puppetmaster who privatised the Russian political system". Pomerantsev summarises Surkov's achievements so far thus:

         He is the man behind the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’, in which democratic institutions are maintained without any democratic freedoms, the man who has turned television into a kitsch Putin-worshipping propaganda machine and launched pro-Kremlin youth groups happy to compare themselves to the Hitler Youth, to beat up foreigners and opposition journalists, and burn ‘unpatriotic’ books on Red Square.

However Pomerantsev goes on to say:

       But this is only half the story. In his spare time Surkov writes essays on conceptual art and lyrics for rock groups. He’s an aficionado of gangsta rap: there’s a picture of Tupac on his desk, next to the picture of Putin. And he is the alleged author of a bestselling novel, Almost Zero. ‘Alleged’ because the novel was published (in 2009) under the pseudonym Natan Dubovitsky – Surkov’s wife is called Natalya Dubovitskaya. Officially Surkov is the author of the preface, where he denies being the author of the novel, then makes a point of contradicting himself: ‘The author of this novel is an unoriginal Hamlet-obsessed hack’; later, ‘this is the best book I have ever read.’ In interviews he has come close to admitting to being the author while always pulling back from a complete confession. Whether or not he actually wrote every word of it he has gone out of his way to associate himself with it.

and later on:

       In Soviet Russia you would have been forced to give up any notion of artistic freedom if you wanted a slice of the pie. In today’s Russia, if you’re talented and clever, you can have both. This makes for a unique fusion of primitive feudal poses and arch, postmodern irony. A property ad displayed all over central Moscow earlier this year captured the mood perfectly. Got up in the style of a Nazi poster, it showed two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan ‘Life Is Getting Better’. It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it’s not quite serious either. It’s sort of both. It’s saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we’re just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we’re making money playing it and won’t let anyone subvert its rules). A few months ago there was a huge ‘Putin party’ at Moscow’s most glamorous club. Strippers writhed around poles chanting: ‘I want you, prime minister.’ It’s the same logic. The sucking-up to the master is completely genuine, but as we’re all liberated 21st-century people who enjoy Coen brothers films, we’ll do our sucking up with an ironic grin while acknowledging that if we were ever to cross you we would quite quickly be dead... This is the world Surkov has created, a world of masks and poses, colourful but empty, with little at its core but power for power’s sake and the accumulation of vast wealth.

This account of Surkov's character and achievements chimes perfectly with our conception of ironic, apolitical Cool, and if I were to write a sequel to Cool Rules today it would have to take off from the present situation in Russia, where it appears that Cool finally has come to rule in the literal political sense. And if one accepts this then other examples - Berlusconi's "bunga bunga" parties, Sarkozy marrying Mick Jagger's ex - will crop up everywhere you look. What does this imply for defining the sort of a thing Cool is? Clearly a mere "attitude" will no longer do, unless we're also prepared to say that the Protestant Work Ethic "ruled" capitalist societies for the last 200+ years, which doesn't offer insight into anything much.

A more useful concept is that of a "justification". All human societies must continually justify themselves to their members, lest those members secede from the society to merely pursue their own selfish interests. I recently wrote a review for The Political Quarterly of Jim McGuigan's book "Cool Capitalism", which takes off from where we left things in Cool Rules and extends it into the domain of political economy. McGuigan's book offers a useful summary of recent developments in the sociology of labour, including the important work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello on justification. I don't have space here to fully explain Boltanski and Chiapello's ideas about "The New Spirit of Capitalism", but I will just offer this extract from my PQ review:

       The original spirit of capitalism as described by Max Weber was ascetic, entrepreneurial, politically liberal and organised by family dynasties, until this model fell into crisis during the first half of the 20th century under pressure from world war, economic crisis and socialism. It gradually gave way to what Boltanski and Chiapello call "organised capitalism" based on large corporations, strong trade unions and welfare benefits, a complex easily confused with social democracy (and still branded as such in neoliberal rhetoric). Its justificatory theme became security rather than moral probity, and it was this reformed capitalism that the '60s revolt undermined, the earlier laisser faire form surviving more in conservative fantasies than the real economy.

McGuigan then sketches the history of 'The Great Refusal', those oppositional art movements that rejected bourgeois mores, from the German Romantics through the French Realists, up to 20th-century Modernism, Dada and Surrealism. He traces the rise of the bohemian way of life, clearly distinguishing its romantic alienation from the social alienation described by Marx. Romantic refusal manifested itself in sexual liberty, unconventional personal appearance and a distaste for work, while on the aesthetic plane it created an ever-widening gulf between alienated elite taste and conformist popular taste. The 1960s witnessed the pinnacle of this romantic refusal with the French Marxists Henri Lefebvre and the Situationist International (major influences on the student revolt of May 1968) who called for revolution in everyday life and an end to alienated labour. But the 1960s also witnessed a revitalised advertising industry grasping that such extreme individualism, far from threatening capitalism, could be broken, harnessed and saddled to become its trusty steed – as analysed by Thomas Frank and dramatised in the excellent TV series 'Mad Men'. In place of political revolution arose a new cultural populism that ushered in the third epoch of "cool capitalism".

So in a nutshell, in answer to that question about what sort of a thing Cool is, I would now prefer to say that it's society's latest means of justifying itself to itself, which basically involves looking good, having fun and not getting entangled in uncool party politics (let the nerds deal with stuff like famines or global financial crises). The UK conservative media have not quite come out and accused Ed Milliband of being uncool, though they continually flirt with such an accusation. Let's hope that their jeers are on target, because it appears to me that the future of social democracy lies in combating rather than abetting the Rule of Cool, and that we'll need a non-ironic, Uncool Party with which to do that.

Tightening the Web

David Cameron has promised to “do whatever it takes to restore law and order and to rebuild our communities”, which may include a law to permit removal of face masks and plans to block access to social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry messaging. He said in Parliament:

    "Mr Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."

Facebook has already replied to Cameron by announcing that it has "already actively removed several 'credible threats of violence' related to the riots across England" but the major social networks are unlikely to comply fully until Cameron can introduce new legislation, which will expose him to widespread opposition on grounds of freedom of speech. At the time of the Wikileaks affair last year I wrote a PC Pro column predicting the imminence of such regulation, and I'm publishing an edited extract of its argument here, since I know that many of my political friends don't read that nerdy-but-excellent journal.

Adapted from the Idealog column in PC Pro issue 197 March 2011:

At the Web '10 conference in Paris this April, we heard European telecom companies demanding a levy on vendors of bandwidth-guzzling hardware and services like Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and Apple. These firms currently make mega-profits without contributing anything to the massive infrastructure upgrades needed to support the demand they create. Content providers at the conference responded "sure, as soon as you telcos start sharing your subscription revenues with us". It's shaping up to be an historic conflict of interest between giant industries, on a par with cattle versus sheep farmers or the pro and anti-Corn Law lobbies.

But of course there are more parties involved than just telcos versus web vendors. We users, for a start. Then there are the world's governments, and the content-providing media industries. In today's earnest debates about Whither The Webbed-Up Society, no two journalists seem to agree how many parties need to be considered, so I'll put in my own bid, which is five. 

My five categories of player are Users, Web Vendors, Governments, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Telecom Companies (Telcos), each of whose interests conflict with every other, thus connecting them in a "pentacle of conflict" so complex it defies easy predictions. The distinction is basically this: users own or create content and consume bandwidth; web vendors own storage (think Amazon servers and warehouses, Google datacenters) and consume bandwidth; telcos own wired and wireless fabrics and sell bandwidth; and poor old ISPs are the middle-men, brokering deals between the other four. 

Note that I lump in content providers, even huge ones like Murdoch's News International, among users, because they own no infrastructure and merely consume bandwidth. And they're already girded for war, for example in the various trademark law-suits against Google's AdWords. What will actually happen, as always in politics, depends on how these players team up against each other, and that's where it starts to look ominous. 

At exactly the same time as these arguments are surfacing, the Wikileaks affair has horrified all the world's governments and almost certainly tipped them over into seriously considering regulating the internet. Now it's one of the great clichés of net journalism that the net can't be regulated: it's self-organising, re-routes around obstacles etc, etc, blah, blah. However the fact is that governments can do more or less anything, up to and including dropping a hydrogen bomb on you (except where the Rule of Law has failed, where they can do nothing). For example they can impose taxes that completely alter the viability of business models, or else stringent licensing conditions, especially on vulnerable middle-men like the ISPs.

Before Wikileaks the US government saw a free Web as one more choice fruit in its basket of "goodies of democracy" to be flaunted in the face of authoritarian regimes like China. After Wikileaks, my bet is that there are plenty of folk in the US government who'd like to find out more about how China keeps the lid on. The EU is more concerned about monopolistic business practices and has a track record of wielding swingeing fines and taxes to adjust business models to its own moral perspective. 

All these factors point towards rapidly increasing pressure for effective regulation of the net over the next few years, and an end to the favourable conditions we presently enjoy where you can get most content for free if you know where to look, and can get free or non-volume-related net access too. The coming trade war could very well see telcos side with governments (they were after all best buddies for almost a century) against users and web vendors, extracting more money from both through some sort of two-tier Web that offers lots of bandwidth to good payers but a mere trickle to free riders. And ISPs are likely to get it in the neck from both sides, God help 'em. 

How VeryTaxing

photo: David Jones/PA from The Guardian Aug 11th

One grimly humorous moment in the London Riots was video footage by a journalist with a "well-bred" voice chasing along the street after a young girl who was carrying a huge flat-screen TV. Asked why she was doing it she said she was "taking back her taxes". Several people have accused her of hypocrisy since they're pretty sure she doesn't work or pay taxes. But of course in gang-speak "tax" means to steal:

URBAN DICTIONARY 

1. Tax
Verb. - To steal. Noun (Taxer) - Thief  "im going to tax that guys cash back in a sec" where'd you get that from "oh i just taxed it from some old lady"

She was quite literally carrying her taxes home. But the humour gets grimmer still once you recall that the US government has recently been reduced to impotence and near default by a group of Tea Party Republicans who actually share this young girl's attitude to tax - that it's simply theft. (Perhaps Sir Philip Green shares it too, though not in public). It seems the understanding that taxation is the price of civilisation is vanishing from all levels of society. A very modern form of barbarism, the proud result of the neo-liberal project to replace all social solidarity with market values.

David Robins and I caught a whiff of this attitude when we were writing Cool Rules back in 1999:

"Cool is an oppositional attitude, an expression of a belief that the mainstream mores of your society have no legitimacy and do not apply to you."

"Cool has a dangerously ambivalent attitude toward the rule of law and could accommodate to criminal neo-feudalism just as well as it does to consumer capitalism - the uncomfortable truth is that,compared to the excitements of the drug and gun culture, a prosperous, well-ordered society is boring . Fukuyama takes a rather Panglossian approach to such matters - so far as Cool is concerned history isn’t just over, it is the ultimate negative, something that is washed up, finished with, as in ‘Bang! You’re history’."

"Cool may once have been an expression of rebellion but it is surely not any longer. The real question is whether or not it can sustain the key elements, the rule of law and freedom of conscience, that make western democracy the least bad form of government ever invented. The picture is murky and contradictory: on the one hand Cool values personal freedom above all, it hates racism, it is egalitarian and hedonistic in temperament, on the other hand it is fascinated with violence, drugs and criminality, and mesmerised by the sight of naked power. "

More recently Will Davies, on his excellent Potlatch blog, has been developing the concept of the "criminal consumer", a type of individual whose presence is equally discomfiting to politicians of both Left and Right.  (Of course Proudhon was there long before all of us with his "Property is Theft!") 

The digital revolution has been eroding people's respect for property for several decades now because digital goods are weightless and stealing them might deprive their owner of revenue but not of the original article. However there's no indication that anyone has yet discovered a workable formula for living together in large groups without property, law and taxes. I fear the outcome will be a harsh authoritarian crackdown in which those who own much property privately hire the hardest and meanest to keep it out of the hands of the rest of us - dissatisfaction with the current police force (a public good as well as an instrument of control) is palpably spreading.  

POSTSCRIPT: The furore over David Starkey's supposedly "racist" remarks on Newsnight about white kids "becoming black" highlights a real problem for the Left. Starkey was quite correct in his analysis, which was cultural rather than racial. He deprecates gangsta culture, and quite rightly identifies it as a central factor in these riots. This is very inconvenient for liberals, and particularly for some Guardian writers, who have uncritically embraced this culture (which is perhaps the most important contemporary manifestation of the attitude we called Cool). 

Fashion Fascism and Malignant Self-esteem

An article on the John Galliano debacle in a recent New York Times sparked me off on a roundabout but productive train of thought. In this article, Professor Rhonda Garelick pointed out that Galliano's anti-semitic outburst was significant for far more than its racism, upon which the press has mostly concentrated (and for which he was sacked). Garelick notes that Galliano was behaving in perfect congruence with the profoundly anti-democratic aesthetic that underlies the fashion industry - an emphasis on bodily perfection, disgust with the common and ugly, extreme economic elitism  - and that the French fashion industry in particular collaborated enthusiastically with the Nazis during WWII. Here's a sample of her conclusions:

"Which brings us back to Mr. Galliano in the Paris bar. His was not a generic anti-Semitic tirade, but the self-conscious pronouncement of a world-class arbiter of taste (“I am John Galliano!”). Not only did he use ethnic slurs, he accused the woman of being unattractive and unfashionable, associating both with ethnicity, with being Jewish (which she happened not to be)... The link is clear: like a fascist demagogue of yore, he was declaring that she did not belong to the gilded group who wear the right boots, and from this Mr. Galliano slid effortlessly to a condemnation of her very flesh, and a wish for her death."

It was that phrase "arbiter of taste" that triggered the next link in my chain of associations. In the book Cool Rules that I wrote with my late friend David Robins, we devoted a whole early chapter to the "New Arbiters of Cool", that generation of young journalists who emerged from the punk scene of the late 1970s and who now by-and-large edit all the style and media sections of the UK and US press. It would be quite mad to accuse this whole generation of fashion fascism, especially since many of them embrace impeccably liberal and left-wing causes, but Garelick's article reminded me just to what degree a "mere" aesthetic can nullify rational political beliefs. The brutal fact is that this whole generation of style journalists is deeply in thrall to a Cool aesthetic, and the Cool aesthetic is deeply antagonistic to ugly, common, uncool social democracy.

While writing Cool Rules David and I agonised over how far to push this point, because it felt slightly nutty back then, and so we confined ourselves to pointing out Hitler's impeccable subcultural credentials (very distinctive haircut and trousers) and the attraction of extremely violent anti-heroes like the cast of Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas. On reflection I feel we perhaps downplayed it too far.

Now brace yourself for a very long jump in the argument. I've been watching Jamie's Dream School with horrified fascination over the last few weeks. I'll freely admit to a very unfashionable soft spot for Jamie Oliver, because though he studiously avoids overt politics (and may not even know it himself), he's a natural social democrat. He genuinely wants to induce his whole generation into eating better food, and as his school dinners project demonstrated he's prepared to lobby politicians and organise at the grass roots in a doomed attempt to achieve this. So it's depressingly inevitable that after only the briefest of flirtations the Arbiters of Cool would turn against Jamie in a big way, so that the mere mention of his name is enough to get you run out of Shoreditch on a rail.

Now with his Dream School project we see Jamie actually tackling the dragon in its den - he's taken it upon himself to rescue (Gladstone-style)  a bunch of schoolkids who have been rendered entirely uneducable by the prevailing youth culture of Cool, with sphincter-clenchingly awful results so far. Another topic over which David and I pulled our punches slightly in Cool Rules was the matter of self-esteem. Sociological orthodoxy has it that most of the troubles being experienced by the Yoof of Today are caused by low self-esteem, but David, who'd spent much of his adult life working with dissident youth, was of exactly the opposite opinion. He believed that the libertarian parenting practices of many of our own generation had had quite the opposite effect, instilling a malignant excess of self-esteem that verges on megalomania. The participants in Jamie's Dream School offer startling evidence for his thesis, and perhaps John Galliano had a touch of it too. Whatever, it doesn't bode too well for the future...

Humanism: An Exchange with Nina Fishman

In an earlier blog post, on the 1st anniversary of Nina Fishman’s death, I referred to a project that Nina and I conceived back in November 2002 to write a collaborative essay on the inadequacy of contemporary humanist defences against religious fundamentalism in the shadow of 9/11. In the end we never wrote the paper, but I’ve recently discovered, in an obscure folder on my hard disk, the notes that we exchanged at the start of the project. On reading them I was struck firstly by the remarkable quality of Nina’s contribution (which beautifully demonstrates her instinct for a historical approach to any problem), and secondly by regret that we didn’t persevere with the project and overcome our differences of approach. I’m therefore publishing both of our contributions here, starting with my notes: 

My First Try

If you believe George Bush, we are already engaged in a war that pits western values against an axis of evil forces led by the Islamic fundamentalists of Al Qaeda. Ignoring for the moment whether or not this is true, an immediate problem arises in defining what ‘western values’ actually are. Bush and Blair offer sound-bite-sized lists of ‘goods’ - democracy, the rule of law, freedom of conscience and of markets - but these do not easily cohere into an ideology that can be taught to children and, if necessary, would bolster a people’s will to defend them to the death.

Al Qaeda suffers from no such lack of focus – it is clear that it is fighting for the values of Salafi/Wahabite fundamentalist Islam, and equally clear that the enemy is the ‘Jewish-Crusader coalition’ that threatens those values. That they define their enemy using religious terminology is an instructive irony because the philosophy that comes closest describing the particular bundle of Western ‘goods’ is actually a wholly secular humanism. This essentially secular nature can be obscured, for example, by the loud proponents of Christian fundamentalism who are currently so influential on the US government, or by the European habit of calling social democracy ‘Christian Democracy’. However if we believe it’s necessary to defend, and even to spread, our common values, it’s crucial that we elaborate them in a more explicit form that stresses their secular nature.

This task could never be easy, but it’s made a hundredfold more difficult by the current state of popular and media culture which has taken a profoundly anti-humanist direction. Though the personal philosophy of most western consumers is still founded on a strong sense of individuality and personal sovereignty, this is beset on all sides by various contradictory anti-humanist critiques. For example:

• Free-Market fundamentalists stress the autonomous nature of markets, and that mere humans neither can (nor should fully) understand them or attempt to control them.

• Religious fundamentalists, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu or whatever, stress that humanity is sinful and cannot be redeemed in this world, only in the next.

• ‘Deep Green’ activists regard the human species as an aberrant one – a threat to the planet and to all the other species, whose activities must be severely curtailed (even eliminated in some of the most extreme versions).

• Post-modernist intellectuals stress the weakness and fallibility of humankind, the imperfection and unreliability of their communication, the darkness of their motives.

• Cyborg futurists stress the inadequate design of the human body and society and would like to replace its feeble bits with computers and bionic limbs, then fly us all off to colonise Mars.

It’s hard to deny that the Islamists are right to some extent when they identify weakness and decadence in western values - affluence has so diminished the struggle for everyday life in our countries that boredom and anxiety now figure larger than hunger and physical danger for many, perhaps most, people. This leaves them with vague feelings of dissatisfaction that they try to assuage by, for example, thrill-seeking through extreme sports, attempting to discover the sublime in Art, and pursuing various strains of self-improvement and ‘spirituality’ that remain purely personal and lack the force of a truly social ethic. Young people in particular feel this ethical emptiness and seek to fill it by taking up some critical stance – but typically it will be one based on those various anti-humanist positions summarized above.

What’s needed above all now is for someone to tell the secular humanist story with the same vigour and conviction that Al Qaeda tells the backward-looking story of Salafi Islam – with sufficient clarity that people when asked ‘what are you’ could without too much agonising reply ‘a humanist’.

What sort of Humanism?

Humanism is the philosophy that emphasises the importance, authority, powers and achievements of what we used to call the human race, but after Darwin we should call the human species. For the ancient Greeks it meant the study of society, politics and morals as opposed to logic, metaphysics and the cosmos; for the Renaissance it meant the sloughing off of medieval pietism to place humanity to the centre of interest (God remains prime creator but is no longer all-controlling); and since the scientific revolutions of the 19th century it has come to be applied to an atheist or agnostic, and more or less rationalist, philosophy that seeks to ground morality in the material world rather than divine authority. The British Humanist Association for example campaigns for the further secularisation of society and politics, and devises and promotes non-religious alternatives to the ceremonies of birth, adulthood, marriage and death.

This strain of humanism has to a large extent now been absorbed and overtaken by mainstream society and popular culture, but it has also proved to be inadequate in several important respects. Science is no longer held in such unequivocal respect as it was in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. The invention of nuclear weapons, environmental disasters, and a dawning of awareness that it can never totally eradicate diseases (cancer, AIDS, BSE/CJD) all sap any naïve belief in the inevitability of progress through science.

The growing knowledge that humans are not the wholly rational beings portrayed by Enlightenment thinkers, but are prey to hidden emotional and irrational forces has similarly sapped belief in the perfectibility of human nature through good nurture and education. The main defence mechanism that allows modern citizens to cope with these dark realizations is irony - always hovering close to its sibling cynicism - and such irony corrosively devours any wide-eyed homilies in favour of loving thy neighbour. It’s an enormous challenge, as Nietzsche first understood, to develop a humanism that can accept and transcend the knowledge of such limitations (and of course Nietzsche himself has been unfairly tainted by the misappropriation of his optimism for darker ends by the Nazis.)

Another problem for any traditional humanism is that it depends for much of its evidence on the achievements of classical ‘high culture’, whose appreciation was once widening but is now being stunted by a burgeoning but dumbing-down popular culture that’s continually being co-opted to serve market forces. Eminem puts more bums on seats than Shakespeare and that, for a market-fundamentalist, is the end of that. This leads to deep and crucial questions about elitism versus populism and propaganda versus entertainment that one can plausibly argue were, prior to September 11 2001, perhaps the most pressing that western society faced.

It’s possible to find fragments in the most unlikely places that point to what a new humanism might look like. Even a commercial Hollywood movie like the Coen brothers’ ‘Fargo’ can treat both dark and light sides of human society with a humour and wit that permits it to come down in favour of goodness without sounding preachy. Many writers too have found this tone of ‘non-illusioned humanism’: Isaac Babel, Joseph Roth, and supremely Chekhov, who uttered this little manifesto that is not a bad place to start from: "My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom: freedom from force and falseness in whatever form they express themselves”.

Dick Pountain – Wed 13th November 2002

Nina’s First Try

First Thoughts About Secular Humanism

1. Anthropologists concur in the view that groups of people (e.g. tribes) evolve their own moralities/self-images/worldviews. These are adapted to their environment (of course) and also to the particularities of homo sapiens.

2. We have neither the space or the expertise to investigate the variety of these. It is, however, probably worth noting that particular groups have perished because of not being able to adapt (for whatever reason) to exogenous or endogenous shocks. Exogenous: Europeans in the Americas with gunpowder and measles; endogenous: civil wars, feuds. It also worth noting that William H.McNeill observes that it is the ability of groups to recognise the need to and adapt to change which has conditioned their ability to survive.

3. The last epoch making change which peoples in Europe underwent was industrialisation beginning in second half of the 18th century and reaching its zenith ca. 1960, (if by zenith we mean the proportion of the population occupied in manufacturing). This change was epoch making because its necessities transformed the ways of life of the whole population (in a variety of ways). European peoples adapted to industrialisation by evolving and adapting institutions, moralities etc. Social democracy and Christian democracy were powerful means of adapting.

4. Western European Christianity (in contradistinction to the Byzantine orthodox Christianity and the middle east/north african variants), evolved from the 4th-5th century AD with a strong influence from Greco-Roman philosophy, (it is generally Augustine of Hippo, I think, who is credited with the innovation). This combination of Christianity/Greco-Roman philosophy is credited by historians (like Peter Gay and O'Neill) with providing the ground from which the Reformation and the Enlightenment then sprang. These two developments are important because they give rise to: a) the concept of the individual as a (N.B. not the) legitimate centre of consciousness; and b) the concept of reason as the principal determinant of judgement – of all kinds – scientific, aesthetic, political, moral. I think that one can take the development and dissemination of these two concepts as marking the boundaries between pre-modern and modern. (e.g. Kant's critiques of pure and applied reason; Locke's treatise on toleration; Luther's claims for the individual conscience).

5. There was a moment, no doubt, when philosophers and other intellectuals believed that reason would be sufficient glue to bind European peoples together. The early modern state (16th-17th century) was conceived as being of universal application. Early modern rulers and statecraft were hardly place-specific. Quite the contrary. They were part of the European-wide culture which had variants according to religion only. These variants (Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, etc.) can be viewed as non-qualitative, e.g. like the difference between social and Christian democracy.

6. However, the French Revolution showed that it was impossible to keep a European society together with merely the glue of reason. The evolution of modern national cultures begins with the revolutionary wars waged by France, and continued by Napoleon. As philosophers and intellectuals noted from 1789 onwards, it is the irrational elements of nationalism which make it so unpredictable and dangerous. Moreover, there was also a signficant element of nationalism in the American Revolution.

7. The essence of modern nationalism is its assertion that the particular Irish, Polish, French, Italian, Czech, English... way of seeing the world, doing things, justice system etc. is unique and qualitatively different than all others. Whilst in itself this assertion does not necessarily imply conflict with other nationalisms, it is often exclusive and therefore likely to precipitate conflict if not war at some time or other.

8. The events of 1933-45 had such a profound effect on western European societies that their nation-states have qualitatively diluted the nationalist components of their moralities/self-images/worldviews. It is likely that east central European societies will adopt the same course over the next half century.

9. Consequently, over the last half century, due to unforeseen circumstances, western European states have lost the two most potent sources of their moralities/self-images/worldviews – (a) the needs of an industrialised society for discipline, repetitive manual work, manual dexterity, minimum virtually universal levels of technical expertise, collective social organisation counterbalanced by habits of thrift, and respect for individual private property; and (b) the collective sense of unique nationhood with its particular cultural components (which, however, if empirically observed over western Europe as a whole were hardly unique or particular – being more or less evenly distributed). It is an historical accident, but poignant nonetheless, that the May Events in France in 1968 took place just as the national, industrialised conditions of European society were receding.

10. It is not surprising that western European societies have been beset by stress and strain. They have been faced with the need to adapt to qualitatively different and new conditions whose parameters are not yet clear. Nor is it yet clear whether western European societies will succeed in adapting.

11. It is relevant in this situation to re-assert the importance, indeed the centrality, of secular humanism for our morality/self-image/worldview. Though secular humanism certainly adapted well to the conditions of industrialised Europe and more or less co-existed with nationalism, its essential components emerged before either and do not depend upon them continuing.

12. Interestingly enough, the survival of secular humanism in western European societies today probably depends upon the ability of those philosophers/intellectuals/artists/politicians who are articulating it to make it more universal in its appeal. We need to be able to make it applicable to the large variety of societies, ethnicities, economies which exist today. This is not only because of global communications and economies, but also because of the increasing mobility of human beings and their own proclivity to move between states. In this sense, we are living in a world which is more similar to the western Europe of the early modern period, 16th- late 17th century.

13. Important new components of secular humanism need to be developed. This is because the conditions facing homo sapiens in the 21st century are, in the capitalist world, essentially different. These new components are: (a) the importance of situating individual sovereignty and sovereign will within a collective setting; and (b) the importance not merely of capital accumulation for future generations but also the prudent husbanding of natural resources for future generations; and (c) the need to construct a rational, prudent global state. These components are all contained within the earlier corpus of western European thought: (e.g. Kant's essay on perpetual peace). It is not a matter of invention, but rather of adaptation to change. And, of course, the biggest need of all: to adapt the successful modern state from nation to world. The first adaptation took place in the early modern period and then resulted in the nation-state (a concept entirely absent pre-1789).

14. At the individual, subjective level, the need to re-assert the individual's place in and responsibilities to the collective presents an interesting problem for consumerist cultures. In other cultures, e.g. rural Italy, southeast Asia etc., the difficulties are less severe.

15. I have not had time yet to address the problems of elite culture/elite formation and the relation between elite and the collective. I will tackle this next.

Nina Fishman – Sunday 10.11.02

Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen!

One of the more depressing trends of recent years has been the collapse of TV comedy, a field in which the UK once lead the world (think Monty Python, Blackadder, The Fast Show, Green Wing). It's not lack of volume but of quality and tone: ever since Little Britain the mental age of the comics has been following a roughly parabolic downward trajectory*. However rescue is at hand, and from the a unlikely direction - Horizon.

The much hyped episode What Is Reality? (shown on January 17th 2011) showed us a bunch of bleeding-edge particle physicists musing about what the universe really consists of, all of them in thrall to the now-over-familiar paradoxes generated by the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. We saw an Austrian gentleman with a magnificent beard perform the two-slit experiment yet again, and go into a swoon of confusion over "where is the photon now" that would have done credit to a three-card trickster in Oxford Street. It all got weirder and weirder, but in the phony way of those old Outer Limits programs of the '60s. Perhaps our 3D reality is actually a hologram pasted on the fence that surrounds the universe (I can't remember whether that was the one with the ponytail or not...) What Horizon really demonstrated wasn't so much the relationship between quantum theory and metaphysics as the relationship between TV commissioning editors and brainy men with ponytails. A million students in a million halls of residence passed the bong and gasped in awe.

Of course the highlight was another run through of the faintly ludicrous Many Worlds Hypothesis, in which every act of observation splits the universe so that both possibilities happen. This is the perfect physical underpinning for the spectacular consumer society: if you stare at the shirts in Ermenegildo Zegna's window, the universe splits into several worlds in each of which you're wearing a different one of them! Wow! There's another world in which the Coalition didn't win the election and isn't about to dismantle the National Health Service! Phew! The only problem is that our pathetic consciousness appears to remain stuck in just one of these worlds, though pharmacology has the potential to fix that once they legalise lysergic acid derivatives and tweak those molecules a bit.

I used to wonder when the physics community would finally dump the Copenhagen Interpretation and re-examine those wave models favoured by Einstein and Schrodinger. I now realise that can never happen because it would cut off their easy entrée into show business. 

* Peep Show is the exception that highlights the rule.