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.

Veblen, Lasch, Debord: The 20th Century's Three Most Cogent Social Critics

Today is the first anniversary of the death of Nina Fishman, political historian, activist and a very dear friend of mine. Nina's personality and energy was a bonding force for a whole group of friends: through various campaigns, through numerous dinners at her home, Wigmore concerts and operas, and through the political Supper Club she inaugurated which continued successfully for over a decade. 

Nina loved politics, music, art, food and most of all people, which is to say that she was a humanist in the oldest and most generic sense of that term. That means, in short, she believed that despite the vast diversity of character and opinion, we have sufficient in common to be able to claim solidarity with all humans. Nina was not especially interested in that narrow and rather desiccated humanism that exists solely to combat religion and promote secularism (she was fairly relaxed about religion), nor was she much moved by a legalistic humanism that consists solely of identifying and defining human "rights". However she felt, as I do, with a great urgency that humanism in the current world is not merely moribund but actively under attack, and not just from religious fundamentalists but from many of those on the Left whose interest it should properly be to preserve it. That strain of Left theory which claims descent from Nietzsche and post-structuralist philosophy (Althusser, Derrida) declares itself to be anti-humanist, while certain strands of the libertarian Left go further into nihilistic Sadean misanthropy, conceived as somehow revolutionary. 

For a while we planned to write a paper together that would attempt to define a new style of humanism, purged of that Methodist earnestness whose musty odour permeates even the most secular of modern humanisms. And that was the only time Nina and I actually fell out. We were discussing the paper in the Lord Palmerston pub when I mentioned that I'd just read Adam Philips' "Darwins Worms" and was impressed by his prologue which lucidly expounded Freud's ideas about death, and in particular the central importance of the knowledge of its inevitability to human cultures. Nina exploded, vehemently denying the importance of fear of death and rejecting Freud and all his works, even the existence of an unconscious mind. Her humanism was founded on an older, more rationalistic and realist view of human nature, as espoused by Marx and by most socialists since. I could certainly sympathise with her distrust because Nina was born and raised in the USA in the 1950s, just when Freudianism was conquering liberal opinion and fuelling a newly-confident and intrusive advertising industry. Nevertheless, we never wrote that paper.

Freud, as commonly understood, undermined the notion of a common human nature by claiming that much of our behaviour is unconsciously determined and therefore beyond our control. I'm far from being an uncritical Freudian, but such objections as I have to psychoanalysis depend on facts and ideas that have emerged since Freud's time, and I believe there can be no going back before his insights (any more than economics could go back before Keynes or Marx). Freud himself was aware that his terminology – ego, id, libido, cathexis and so on – was a mythology, and he predicted that one day neurophysiology would advance to a point where such terms could be replaced by more scientific ones. We're almost at that day now, but research into affective neuroscience (the biochemical and neurological mechanism of emotions) suggests that the driving forces of our behaviour – our instincts, if you will – are more diverse than Freud could know, so that no theory based on only one or two conflicting instincts could be adequate.

I started researching my own paper on a new humanism, setting out from my favourite statement of faith, by Anton Chekhov: 

"My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom – freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves." 

 Chekhov claims a pair of negative human rights, the right not to be lied to and the right not to be brutalised, and the only positive right he proposes is to be allowed to flourish in the absence of those two evils, in the manner of classic liberalism. However Hegel and Marx showed us that human nature is socially and historically determined, and that therefore setting idealistic goals is not enough. You need to propose social institutions that might lead towards those goals. Nina believed, as I do, that the only form of social organisation that can ensure such rights is not liberalism but social democracy: a limited solidarity across class boundaries, without ultra-egalitarian illusions of total equality, and subject to constraint by electoral democracy. 

I tried to combine insights from modern affective neuroscience with key ideas from information and complexity theory, trying to shake out the idealist illusions inherited from German Romantic philosophy. I discovered the almost-ignored philosophical works of George Santayana, a trenchant critic of Romantic Egotism, who advocated a kind of post-humanism that fully recognises our natural limitations and unconscious motivations. I re-read Christopher Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism" (1974), a work more relevant today than when it was written – and marvelled at his prescience in predicting the rise of the cult of celebrity and the consequent erosion of community. Finally I rediscovered the work of Thorstein Veblen, that eccentric and radical economist who wrote "The Theory of the Leisure Class" and coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption". On mentioning him to Nina she brightly told me "Oh, my dad [the late Professor Les Fishman, Marxist economist] was very interested in Veblen, he contributed to a volume of essays on Veblen back in the 1950s". With the help of the indispensible Abebooks I located a lone copy of "Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal" (Cornell University 1958) and was astonished by the profundity of his ideas, briefly revisited by a few American Leftists in the 1950s and then dropped almost without trace. 

Veblen's theory, if you can penetrate his irritating style of delivery, is as quite as central to any analysis of modern consumer capitalism as is Lasch's Narcissism or Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle". It's a fundamentally anthropological and psychological theory of what he loosely called the "instincts" that underlie our economic behaviour. Veblen suggested that the invention of agriculture during the Stone Age 10,000 years ago precipitated not merely a division of labour between hunters and tillers, but lead gradually to a split in human nature itself into "predatory" and "workmanlike" instincts. He wasn't too concerned about the precise mechanism of this split and certainly didn't suggest that it was physical (like H.G. Wells' Morlocks and Eloi), nor genetically transmitted. Rather the division of labour lead to socio-economic hierarchy, to classes who lived without laboring on the surplus generated by others (as in Marx), which in turn stratified institutions including the institutions of child-rearing, which might provide a sufficient transmission route.

Hunters take what they want from nature through personal prowess and force: the "predatory instinct" becomes associated with superstition (luck) and ritual (propitiating the game spirits) thanks to the uncertainties of the hunt, hence also with sport and gambling and with pomp and pageantry (celebration of success). Eventually it becomes the mindset of aristocracies, monarchies and organised religions. Tillers on the other hand have to transform nature through toil in order to grow food crops, and they need to cooperate to do so. His "workmanlike" instinct therefore becomes associated not merely with routine tedious labour and cooperation rather than individual prowess, but with the observation of nature in order better to explain and hence exploit it – it eventually points toward medicine, engineering, industry and science. 

Veblen suggested that while this split runs between castes, classes and professions within each society (and to some extent between the genders too) it also runs within each individual psyche: both instincts are at work in all of us, with a different balance in different individuals, and they steer our decisions. He was careful not to moralise his "instincts" by branding one or the other good or bad, nor did he suggest that they're mutually exclusive. The predatory is also the playful, and hunters need craft in addition to prowess. In fact most human endeavours involve some degree of both behaviours, most obviously in the arts where some degree of craftsmanship is typically required for success, but where most artists are "predatory" in the sense that their living is uncertain and demands a constant "hunt" for patrons. Picasso and Jackson Pollock were as predatory as they were craftsmanlike. (Actually the movement away from craft values and toward conceptual art that’s typified the last 20 years could be seen as part of a larger, post-1960s movement back toward the predatory). But modern finance capital is the most obvious vector of the instinct of predation - banker/gamblers, on the prowl for profit.

Veblen never clearly discussed the relationship of these "instincts" to Freud's, neither did he bother to claim that they are of the same kind or depth. As with Freud, it's best to regard them as suggestive and fertile metaphors. From a neurophysiological viewpoint Veblen's instincts would constitute a different and orthogonal axis to Freud's life/death axis, and neither axis could be fundamental, both being complex composite effects of multiple emotion centres in the brain. What's more relevant to today's world is the economic result Veblen predicted these instincts would produce, which is where he departs drastically from Marx but looks rather closer to the bulls-eye. Veblen was a leading thinker of the Progressive Era in the USA, writing in 1899 at the time of Standard Oil, the Rockefellers and the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts. He predicted the eventual dominance of those wings of capitalism – finance (making money from money) and extractive industries like oil and coal – that are predatory in character. More pertinently still, he analysed the economics of display and ostentation that’s associated with wealth, celebrity and predation.

His concept of "conspicuous consumption" proposed a pricing mechanism wholly at odds with the notion of rational choice raised by Adam Smith and adopted almost unchanged by Marx. So-called "Veblen goods" consumed by the rich aren't priced as cheaply as possible but rather as expensively as possible to exclude the lower orders and act as signifiers of wealth. But Krug, Petrus, caviar, Patek Philippe, Rolls Royce don't merely signify the celebrity of their consumers, they actually confer it, and to make them cheaper would quite defeat their purpose. This style of pricing was confined to a more or less private elite for much of the 20th century, during which the mass-production culture pioneered by Henry Ford transformed the living standards of Western populations. However it returned in a big way in recent decades, during the economic bubbles spawned by the IT, media and financial industries. Think footballer's wives, Top Gear, the cult of Ferrari and Lamborghini.

The difference this time around is that, thanks largely to the confidence inculcated by three decades of de facto social democracy following WWII, a sizeable fraction of middle-class Western consumers now feel entitled to consume such Veblen goods too, and so our accommodating and inventive banking classes saw fit to provide them with endless credit with which to do so – in the process perhaps bankrupting the whole world economy. A Veblenian view of the contemporary world situation might counterpose these predatory innovators of finance – investment banks, hedge funds, private equity – to the workmanlike innovations of the technology sector – computers, internet and mobile communications. Or if you like, Goldman Sachs versus Google, AIG versus Apple. But of course in practice such protagonists need and collaborate with each other: the question is who gets the last say. Or viewed from a more global perspective, you might counterpose the predatory West, which manufactures less and less, to the workmanlike East which makes more and more (with a similar proviso about mutual interdependency).

It seems to me that Veblen's notion of the predatory is at least as rich as, and complementary to, Guy Debord's concept of the spectacular society and Christopher Lasch's narcissistic individualism. Debord's notion of The Spectacle was an extension of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, required by the vast expansion of the mass media and the coming of image as mass commodity. Published in Paris in 1967, his thesis, to condense it rather brutally, was that the worlds of capitalism and Soviet communism were converging toward similar systems in which advertising or propaganda colonize the very human imagination, producing an ahistorical world in which appearance dominates reality: everything authentic in human life is replaced by its representation so that citizens become spectators of their own lives, which are lived vicariously through a worship of celebrity and self-definition via brandnames. It wasn't a conspiracy theory, because although The Spectacle might serve the interests of capitalists and bureaucrats by absorbing dissent, they are as much mesmerised by it as everyone else.

Lasch's concept of narcissism overlaps in many ways with Debord's vision, though he was a more conservative figure than Debord. He believed that competitive individualism was once a strength of American society but that "in its decadence [it] has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self." Influenced by Freud, C. Wright Mills and Richard Hofstadter, Lasch saw changes in child-rearing practices during the 20th century as leading to the dominance of a new personality type, characterised by manipulative charm, pseudo-awareness of one's own condition, promiscuous pan-sexuality, fascination with oral sex, hypochondria, protective emotional shallowness, fear of dependence and commitment, inability to mourn, admiration for fame and celebrity and a dread of old age and death. The result is a proliferation of therapy and health movements that invade all aspects of life, along with a degradation of community and the healthy sort of sporting competition that he saw as a virtue. In Veblen's terms, Lasch was describing the gradual conquest of the predatory over the workmanlike instinct. Indeed all three men were talking about the same phenomenon - falling in love with our own images - but from different angles, the economic, the sociological and the psychological. They all recognised that our visual sense is coming to dominate all the others due to our all-pervasive mass media, so that in a curious way modern hi-tech society is succumbing to the age-old sin of idolatry.

However, as a critical method I believe that Veblen's theory has the advantage over the other two, because its twin poles render it capable of generating practical politics as well as social criticism. Puritanical campaigns against the consumption of commodities can gain little purchase either in the hedonistic West or the wannabe-hedonistic East, while refusal to participate in The Spectacle is a recipe for political impotence in the modern world, as Debord himself realised and acknowledged by dissolving the Situationist International in 1972. But a Veblenian analysis points toward concrete agitation in favour of an effective social democratic state that can regulate predatory financiers and maintain the necessary balance in favour of craft and public good, while also eschewing Chekhov's twin vices of violence and lies.

If this sounds reminiscent of the values of the non-revolutionary wing of the 1960s counter-culture, nothing could be further from the truth. It's becoming more and more clear that the counter-culture, with its promotion of hedonism, individualism and libertarianism was in practice a revolt against the bureaucratic social democracy of the post-war settlement, in both the USA and the UK. Its ultimate outcome, far from a proletarian revolution, was precisely the new "cool capitalism" that we've been living with for the last 30 years. If it was a revolution of sorts, it was against the tattered remains of the Protestant Work Ethic rather than against capitalism per se, easing the transition from a society based on making things to a society based on consuming things. Or in Veblen's terms, away from workmanship and toward predation. The orgiastic lifestyles of 1960s rock stars, massively enriched by burgeoning new electronic distribution channels, set the template for a get-rich-quick, spend-without-fear culture, soon to be amplified by the DotCom boom and the following property boom. (One fascinating irony is that the US libertarian Right, which gets so het up about the decline in traditional values wrought by the '60s "boomer" generation, is unable to accept that it's their beloved liberty that underlies this decline).

Veblen's theory also brightly illuminates that growing anti-humanism which so worried Nina. Current popular culture, along with certain strands of the far Left, has thrown in its lot with the predators rather the toilers. Graphic depiction of horror and violence has been a weapon of satire against the ruling classes since Goya and before, and when the Situationists lauded the works of De Sade and Lautreamont they were continuing a proud tradition of French anti-clericalism and épater les bourgeois – a romantic refusal of the complacency and prudence of 1950s affluent society. But their context was a continuing belief in the possibility of proletarian revolution. When that revolution failed to materialise, succeeding generations of sub-Situ and post-modernist social critics have been drawn deeper and deeper into the fantastic violence of those dark authors, and into a nihilistic rejection of capitalist society. Those masses who have failed to make the revolution are corrupted by commodity fetishism, addicted, zombified, yes let's say it, they are somewhat less than human.

The kitsch emotionalism of so much of current popular culture disgusts these critics to the extent that they recoil from empathy itself, retreating into wounded solipsism. Such a nihilistic anti-humanism can be sensed behind the novels of J.G. Ballard, James Ellroy, Michel Houellebecq, Tom McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis (several of whom I'll confess to having enjoyed) and scores of pierced post-punk pundits. It's equally visible in the evolution of ever-more explicit horror movies and computer games, often featuring zombies and vampires. George Romero, doyen of horror directors claims that he used zombies to "criticize real-world social ills – such as government ineptitude, bioengineering, slavery, greed and exploitation – while indulging our post-apocalyptic fantasies". But isn't it just as likely that young viewers actually see zombies as symbolising the brainwashed masses (of whom they're not themselves a part of course), or their parents' greedy generation, or even at a deeper level themselves as dangerous predators in the grip of uncontrollable lusts. Such nihilism has ramifications far beyond popular culture though: it's manifest in deadly form in those death cults of suicide bombing promoted by Islamist terror groups, which Ian Buruma has so ably analysed. Far from pointing to any kind of liberation, it points toward a new sort of fascism.

So what would a humanism that turns away from the predatory and favours life over death look like? It would have to rebuild solidarity between all those who are willing to reciprocate, regardless of race, class and religion. Applied to politics it would have to exploit such solidarity to tackle those urgent environmental threats that face the whole planet and therefore any prospects of continued human flourishing. However it couldn't do that by preaching any ascetic morality: on the contrary it should revel in the human craft that produces great art, music, food, wine, but with the intention of sharing such pleasures and educating about their existence, rather than flaunting them to exclude others and aggrandise one's own ego. For example it would resist the relentless degradation and emblandening influence of the fast food industry, in the manner of Italy's Slow Food movement.

It would refuse to employ lying as routine political practice (a vicious innovation from the Right since the 1970s that New Labour found itself unable to resist), and it would refuse to employ unilateral aggression even to achieve "progressive" ends (New Labour, Iraq) but confine itself to robust defence against international predators.

Very importantly, it would eschew the propagation of fear as a tool of social manipulation, a practice which has reached debilitating levels in recent decades. This vice is by no means confined to politicians, but on the contrary was pioneered by the advertising industry (think Domestos and germs), while in the computer industry it warrants its very own acronym, FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) - the stuff you spread about a competitor's product to slow them down until you can catch up.

It most certainly would be less bashful about regulating the worst excesses of predatory capitalism than either New Labour or the Obama administration, and it would support and subsidise employment in socially useful industries. It fact, applied to politics it would look a lot like the muscular social democracy advocated by James K. Galbraith in his 2008 book "The Predator State", which is the work that originally sent me scurrying back to re-read Thorstein Veblen. This quotation will give a flavour of its deeply unfashionable tone:

"You want higher wages. Raise them. You want more and better jobs. Create them. You want safer food, cleaner air, fewer carbon emissions. Pass laws and establish agencies to achieve this. Enforce the laws, staff the agencies, give them budgets and mandates… Politics may stand in the way, but economics does not. And there is nothing really to lose, except ‘free-market’ illusions."

We're much further from any such prospect today than at any time since 1997, when Blair and Brown had a mandate that might have allowed them to make a start on something of this sort. Unfortunately Blair was never any kind of social democrat and Brown never escaped the dark and depressive shadow of Thatcherism. It's a fair question whether such a vision is achievable at all, and perhaps the future is a slow descent into chaos, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth examining these ideas (universal suffrage must have once looked equally hopeless, but people carried on pursuing it anyway). Nina Fishman was too busy finishing her monumental biography of miners' leader Arthur Horner during the last year of her life to read Galbraith or Veblen (though she did read the first part of my manuscript and pronounced these ideas "useful", high praise from her). I bitterly regret that she is no longer among us to argue over these ideas, to stimulate and to organise in her inimitable way.

[Contribution towards a proposed festschrift for Nina Fishman (1946-2009)]

Cat Out Of Bag

Lord Young did us all a favour by telling a bald truth about the current economic situation in his recent comments to the Daily Telegraph, where he claimed:

 "For the vast majority of people in the country today they have never had it so good ever since this recession – this so-called recession – started, because anybody, most people with a mortgage who were paying a lot of money each month, suddenly started paying very little each month. That could make three, four, five, six hundred pounds a month difference, free of tax. That is why the retail sales have kept very good all the way through."

This revealing revamp of Harold Macmillan's famous boast of 1957 infuriated David Cameron because it punches a hole right through his stealth strategy. The brutal truth that Young let out of the bag is that this is now indeed two nations: those who have jobs and own their homes, versus those who rent, are in low paid jobs or are not employed. This glaring inequality is not, as so many on the Left persist in believing, merely the legacy of that "Thatcherism" for which Lord Young was once a spokesman, but more so of New Labour's "intense relaxation" about income inequality.

We're not a nation split exactly in half - perhaps 66% live in Lord Young's "never so good" part while 33% languish outside it. But although Young's statement may be true of the current situation, with historically low interest rates, that doesn't mean we've reached a sustainable prosperity, any more than we had under Gordon Brown's credit boom. Take a look at the statistics for home ownership throughout Europe and the picture is blood-curdling. The countries with higher ownership than the UK are Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Hungary and Romania, all countries in desperate straits and hardly models we'd wish to copy. The countries with lower ownership include Germany, Holland, Sweden and France, all of which are in far better shape than us in almost every way. So just how good do we have it?

Young has indeed let the predatory cat out of the bag - he also admitted that Osborne lied about the severity of the deficit to protect the pound. Under a disguise of social liberalism this is a goverment of economic predation, intent on rolling back state expenditure to further the interests of the 66% at the expense of the 33%. From a utilitarian point of view - and that's the vote winning point of view nowadays - that might be seen as a rational course, but I doubt the 33% will see it that way. There may be a lot more fire extinguishers thrown from a lot more roofs before this is over. 

The Enragés of the Right

Following a link from the Open Democracy website to a Roger Scruton article about "the political class" lead me to the American Spectator site, a truly fascinating expedition that I would never otherwise have made. Scruton's article started out fairly interesting, in a Weberian sort of way, but abruptly degenerated towards the end into a shameless pandering to the Tea Party public. But the really fascinating part was reading the comments, some of which verge on the deranged.

My first experience of America was in 1970, staying with friends on New York's upper west side, where they introduced me to two utterly crucial books - Norman Cohn's "The Pursuit of the Millenium" and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". Both books are more relevant today than when first published, but I fear that much today's audience is too dumbed-down to get much benefit from either. If you want empirical evidence that the paranoid style is now in the ascendant, the comments on American Spectator offer a mere nibble: there are thousands of websites with far stronger stuff, up to and including bomb-throwing fascism.

In a country where a principal health problem is obesity and where a significant slice of the world's energy reserves are consumed to drive air-conditioning, it's faintly surreal to read comments from citizens complaining that they are "unable to breath" because of the weight of Washington tyranny bearing down upon their backs. This hysterical exaggeration is of course metaphorical, but it's also suspiciously familiar. That's because it closely mirrors the overheated rhetoric of the Left in the 1960s, on which much of it is - consciously or not - based. It's both paranoid and millenarian, which makes reading those two books I mentioned more relevant than ever.

As I noted in a review of a compendium of neo-conservative essays a couple of years ago:

"The neocons are conspicuously more erudite and cosmopolitan than traditional right-wing thinkers and delight in head-to-head combat with liberal orthodoxies. [...] many of the essays share this same clarity, intensity and suave (even glib) assurance that was once a strength of writing from the Left, but has been notably absent from it in recent decades. These are not people out to conserve anything, but rather out to overthrow an existing order that they detest, only they've substituted the Declaration Of Independence for the Communist Manifesto. And as in older revolutionary tracts there's a certain reticence about real outcomes: jobs lost, people thrown off welfare or taken out by air-strikes. Beneath the muscular, hard-headed prose there lurks a thread of purest Idealism, and like all Idealisms it's destined to be brought low eventually by the diversity and perversity of human nature."

All I would change in that is perhaps to substitute Jacobins for Bolsheviks in that last comparison, which would then make Tea Partiers into the "sans-culottes", or perhaps the "taille-élastique-culottes", de nos jours.

Chile Leads the Way?

The successful rescue of the trapped Chilean miners generated a most extraordinarily rich set of messages: technical, political-economic, historical, ideological, symbolic and simply dramatic. No one who watched TV coverage of the first breakthrough of the pilot shaft or the emergence of the first rescued miner from the Phoenix capsule could fail to be moved by stoic calm of the trapped miners nor the joy of the waiting relatives. The technical message is not unlike that of the first moon landing, that our technology, when applied with sufficient dedication and resolve can overcome the most extreme hostile environments.

The political-economic message is profoundly appropriate to our current world situation, namely that there's still a vital role for the State and that market forces mustn't be allowed always to prevail. It surely must have been more cost-effective for the mine's owners not even to search for those trapped by the collapse and simply to pay compensation to their relatives, but to my knowledge this was never even considered (the rescue costs will probably bankrupt the company). Circumstances created a human solidarity that overrode all considerations of price, a reminder that's particularly poignant in Chile, which under General Pinochet became a testbed for heartless Chicago-school monetarism. That the miners survived those first horrible foodless, lightless 17 days, and then 50 days of anguished waiting for the drilling to complete is also a remarkable tribute to their discipline and solidarity, a nostalgic reminder for us in de-industrialised Britain.

But of course there has to be a downside, and that's the religious aspect. The BBC 24 reporters covering the events were almost salivating over miner Sepulveda's talk about "meeting God and the Devil" in the mine, tripping over themselves to inform us that the miners in this part of Chile are deeply pious - in other words, eager to drown out all those truly positive messages with a superstitious narrative of divine intervention and miracles. This sort of creepy BBC God-bothering seems to me to be on the increase recently, though I suspect its underlying rationale is merely opportunistic tabloid sensationalism rather than any concerted attack on the secular status of the corporation.

Even so it's hard for me to shake off a feeling that this heroic rescue might mark a turning point back toward social-democratic sanity, and emergence from  a dark epoch that was inaugurated also in Chile by the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende's government.