The Touchy-Feely Inferno

This essay was originally the final, epilogue, chapter of an unpublished book I wrote in 2009. On re-reading it today I was struck that 9 years haven't changed much….

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“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.” [Anton Chekhov]


The incontinent expression of emotion has become a new orthodoxy, not only in popular culture but even in politics. We’re regularly treated nowadays to advertisements that exploit neuroscientific jargon where once they stuck to plain chemistry – they now seek to boost our serotonin levels rather than merely applying lipid microcapsules to our hair. The staple diet of celebrity magazines and soap operas is the ostentatious display of “emotional honesty” and “vulnerability”, people are always now “there for each other”. Hugging is as revealing of the temper of our time as the distancing handshake was of a previous era.

This touchy-feely inferno spreads even into the realm of politics. Reports sponsored by the government tell of new “evidence-based” measures to improve our mental health (or “well being” as we now prefer to call it). Aspects of what used to be called character that we feel are not quite up to scratch are nowadays granted the status of full-blown syndromes – borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, attention deficit syndrome – and the government now feels responsible for treating them. More and more of what used merely to be vices have been promoted into addictions. The treatment most often prescribed is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), a respectable enough discipline when practiced by the qualified, but which sounds more like a stew of folk wisdom and new-age quackery at the seedier end of the spectrum, a work-out program for fragile egos.

Even the UK Labour Party, its dour Methodist origins thoroughly obliterated at last, has appointed a “happiness tsar” (a delightful oxymoron, smiley face meets the knout) who is to find out why we’re all so miserable despite the excellent governance we have been receiving. This tsar acknowledged that we’re all “consumed with status, with envy” and proposed to fix it by providing free CBT for all schoolchildren on the NHS. It’s too easy to mock such well-intentioned efforts, and also counter-productive for my main argument that a new and better founded materialism (an “evidence-based” one if you must) is urgently needed to discover and then restore the proper balance between the emotional and the rational in public policy.

One thing the happiness tsar certainly got right is that “there has been a catastrophic failure to develop a secular morality”. During a 20th century in which the role of churches (and mosques and synagogues etc) in public life steadily diminished, efforts to replace religious dogma with a rational prescription for good living mostly foundered on a central contradiction, that those who claim to know the best way to live suffer an almost irresistible urge to enforce it on others, while those who claim the freedom to live as they wish will eventually permit everything up to rape and cannibalism. This catastrophic weakness of secular moralities is precisely what Nietzsche predicted, that the collapse of mass religious faith would lead not to rational freedom but the void of nihilism. However his own prescription for handling the problem, the “superman”, so lacked practicality that it was fatally misinterpreted by 20th century racist ideologues.

Communism as it was practiced in the Soviet Union and China invented versions of secular morality so austere and rigorously rationalist that they inspired sadistic zealotry in the ruling cadre and sullenly passive resistance in the ruled, destroying civil society and more or less forcing authentic human life underground. Communism derived its original moral authority from Marx’s theories about social and economic injustice but the Russian Bolshevik party’s lethal decision to employ violence not in self-defence but to suppress political opponents completely forfeited this authority, eventually turning a majority of the population against it and guaranteeing the need to perpetuate a tyranny.
Italian Fascism and German Nazism on the contrary frankly exploited the popular emotions of love of country and hatred of strangers from the start and were secular only in name, in truth more like mystical cults of violence and strong leadership. Moral authority was not a necessary part of their appeal, and it’s in this sense only that they can be said to have been influenced by Nietzsche (who they were able to distort so badly only because he left so many crevices into which their ideological crowbars could be inserted).

The social democracies that flourished in Britain and Roosevelt’s USA during and after World War 2 performed far better and produced perhaps the most successful attempt at secular morality so far, a form of liberal utilitarianism in which the power of the state was employed to stabilise the economy, redistribute wealth in a modest way and regulate the more predatory aspects of market capitalism. That this morality was accepted by a majority of the population was largely due to the traumatic experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the shared experience of danger and hardship in World War II. De Waal’s model of spreading altruism might suggest that such hardship would actually diminish cooperation and altruism, but here’s a salutary reminder that in sophisticated modern societies the biological is more and more subordinated to the political. People on the allied side in WW2 pulled together despite the hardship because they detested the tyrannical behaviour of the enemy and could clearly imagine it applied to themselves and their loved ones in the case of defeat. In short, politics can and will defeat biology but only where the political classes are of sufficient ability, integrity and courage, and therein lies our modern problem.

The touchy-feely character type I alluded to above is the natural product of advanced consumer societies in which people are encouraged to look after themselves first and believe their own desires trump everything else (“because you’re worth it”). This retreat into egoism and narcissism represents a real regression from the wider social responsibility of the WW2 generation, and according to de Waal’s model such a retreat should happen in the face of scarcity, not overabundance. But what if there really is a scarcity in modern consumer societies that’s not material in the old sense but rather mental – which I’ve spent the whole of this book proving to be equally material. That scarcity is a dearth of economic and emotional security. Many of our traditional institutions – family, nation, church, work – have been so eroded over the last half century by rapid economic change that people can no longer expect to gain their sense of identity from a lifelong occupation. The period from 1945 to 1965 when I was growing up looks more and more like a Golden Age of full employment and economic security, at least for the working classes of the Western world.

However the social conformism and civility that it demanded provoked resistance from a younger generation who had no direct experience of wartime deprivation, and this social democratic morality crumbled under assault from a libertarian “countercultural revolt” of the late 1960s (in which I played my part), followed quickly by a resurgent neoliberal political economy spearheaded by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the early 1970s. Once in power in the UK and the USA, neoliberal activists deliberately set about reversing the distribution of wealth and explicitly promoting the greed, selfishness and egoism they knew lay reliably dormant within my post-war generation. Altruism versus hedonism proved to be no contest. The political Left has signally failed to prevent this erosion because it’s always been sceptical of the value of traditional institutions like the family and religion itself. Karl Marx saw them as incorrigibly on the side of reaction, as devices for maintaining economic inequality, which is certainly true but is not the only reason that such institutions persist.

The power of the institutions is more emotional than economic, it’s the glue that keeps both individual psyches and whole societies from falling apart. By providing such cohesion it’s true enough that they also preserve existing property relations, but in the 20th century it was advanced capitalism itself that became the foremost destroyer of traditional institutions, through its blind imperative to spread market values into every niche of life. Though the overall wealth of society has increased dramatically, and average living standards too in the developed countries, most people outside of a tiny plutocracy now live with greater levels of anxiety and insecurity than they did during those post-war years, thanks to the increased “mobility of labour” (read sackings and redundancies) and the predatory pricing of privatised services. We find ourselves in an impasse where both extremes of the political spectrum are intent on dissolving the social glue, without much idea about what to replace it with. It would appear that the wrecking ball is the only tool left in our social engineering toolkit: a politics that exploits emotion (fascism) and a politics shorn of emotion (communism) both proved to be equally dreadful in their consequences, and we’re still floundering to find the middle ground.

Parties ostensibly of the Left like New Labour barely dare even pay lip-service to social democracy nowadays, so deeply have they had to compromise with neoliberalism to get elected, and they no longer possess anything approaching a coherent secular public morality. A growing anarchy among the young and the poor is what panicked New Labour into appointing its happiness tsar, along with terrorism directly connected to the revival of religious fundamentalism that spreads like a fungus to fill the moral void. The culture of gang membership and revenge killings reminds us that Santayana’s barbarian tribes never went all that far away... While neurohistorical explanations are true at a certain level, it’s crucially important to clearly understand what that level is and to confine them to it as otherwise their effect is to depoliticise everything. The best-intentioned efforts of social engineers who want to improve our mental well being (or nurture the nation’s “mental capital” in the most telling phrase I’ve seen) can all too easily slip by imperceptible degrees into coercion. In the worst case social engineering serves to silence critics by invalidating their discourse as symptoms of mental unwellness, shades of Orwell’s Big Brother. The Soviet abuse of mental hospitals should teach us just as stark a lesson as the Gulag.

Although you might expect me to welcome the recent popularity of neurologically-aware self help books like Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, I’m afraid the news that prominent British politicians have been caught reading them makes me feel slightly queasy (which is of course nothing to do with raging jealousy over their huge sales...) I want to see a new more vigorous and humane materialism that can be objective about the subjective - even if we can’t ever completely separate reason from emotion, we need to learn how to identify emotional biases and handle them gracefully without just giving in to them. Exactly where to draw the line between persuasion and coercion, between social engineering and politics, is going to become a very urgent question in the near future in view of the highly unstable conditions that currently prevail in the world. Though it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to dispense with the need to use violence in self-defence, we could at least refrain from inflicting fear on our own side as an instrument of policy.

Big Money Rules

I've always been overly fond of irony, even though I also accept Rilke's sage advice in 'Letters To A Young Poet':

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of life. Used purely, it too is pure, and one needn't be ashamed of it; but if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless.
(Viareggio, April 5th, 1903)

I'm neither young nor a poet, and I'd never actually become ashamed of irony until now. The irony that finally proved too much for me is this - that fate of democracy may now depend upon the best efforts of the US intelligence agencies. They may now be the only institutions capable of arresting (for their own far-from-progressive interests of course) the process described in Diane Ravitch's NYRB article Big Money Rules.  It's a grim but a necessary read if you want to know what's really going on in the world.

Social Democracy Uber Alles

The outcry over the revoking of Uber's London licence shows that the service it provides is popular, and it's unquestionably a significant, innovative use of new technology to improve transport. On the other hand the outcry from drivers about lack of benefits and job security show that the application of technology is being used (not uncommonly) both to increase exploitation of the labour force and to flout legal regulation designed to protect labour and customers. The outcry of Black Cab drivers against Uber ignores the fact that people flocked to Uber not merely for convenience (though that is considerable) but because Black Cabs had priced themselves out of the market with the last big price hike.

Put all this together and it's clear that all the parties need to get together and find a workable solution, which is highly unlikely to happen because of the vastly different political atmospheres between UK and USA, and a general lack of adult leadership on both sides. I can imagine a system where Uber's technology is used, within a revised legal framework that brings in Black Cab drivers too. Uber would have to give up predatory pricing and recognise its employership, while Black Cab drivers would have to slacken their monopoly. And pigs would have to mount flying unicorns.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber and the rest have built a worldwide, highly effective infrastructure of the sort that socialists (especially Stafford Beer) used to dream about - but unsurprisingly, as private enterprises, they use it to generate mega-profits for their owners and to erode working conditions and pay for their workers. The challenge for social democrats - which few are thinking straight (or even talking) about - is to devise new reforms that will make this infrastructure work better for the public interest, without destroying it or crushing its ability to keep innovating.

Tax avoidance by the big tech companies is certainly a major issue, and getting them to pay anything at all would be a step forward, but punitive taxation is not a solution either. Similarly with ownership, old-style nationalisation is unimaginable, unaffordable and might in any case stifle innovation. As for regulation, we need to grasp in precisely what ways the new connectivity renders many older forms of regulation ineffective, and modify them to the new reality. In fact we need to rethink a whole complex of now-inseparable issues - benefits, universal basic income, employment rights, taxation, public v private provision.

Not convinced? Then remember for a moment all those billions of pounds from the public purse that have been wasted over the last 50 years on failed NHS and other public IT projects. Now try to imagine how technology like Amazon/Google/Facebook's would help the NHS with appointments, record keeping and sharing, even diagnosis...

No parties that I'm aware of on either side of the Atlantic are thinking seriously about these matters in sufficient depth and urgency. In the USA the sheer incompetence of the Democratic Party has put the Republicans in a position not only to erase what remains of New Deal social democracy, but also to salt the earth against any possibility of its regrowth. In the UK social democracy has fallen down the crack that runs down the middle of the Labour Party, between a Right that remains wedded to neoliberalism, and a Left often hobbled by nostalgia (not always conscious) for state socialism. Not until Jeremy Corbyn starts calling himself a social democrat rather than a socialist, can you be sure that the party has remembered the difference.

Collapse of the Left

The devastating setbacks recently suffered by the Left in the UK, USA, Turkey, Hungary and Poland (perhaps soon to be followed by more within the EU) have not yet lead to any satisfactory explanation of what is going wrong. They're still largely discussed in terms of Right v Left, but using partially outdated definitions of what these terms imply.

For the first half of the 20th century, the democratic Left was associated with socialised services, economic regulation, high wages and worker's rights,, while the Right espoused militarism, privatised services, free markets and low wages. The 1960s counterculture crucially changed the beliefs of the so called New Left in the direction of pacifism, minority rights and social libertarianism, and these positions have now merged into the mainstream Left to produce a bewildering range of different combinations and sects.

The Right still likes militarism, free markets, and individualism but has also adopted substantial parts of New Left libertarianism, to further complicate things. Apropos of which, this disturbing and highly unorthodox blog post by Dale Beran may come as a surprise if you're unfamiliar with the seamy end of the Internet: https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb#.kthc5781h

What's happened is that major changes in the economy - financialisation, falling profit rates, neoliberal fiscal policies - have reduced the Left's ability to deliver social democracy, and as a consequence the generation of the 1960s' counterculture, (that is, mine) substituted a new position based on anti-racism, LGBT rights, and much more - what's often called 'identity politics' but could equally be called 'minoritarianism' . Sometimes this switch is justified by reference to Gramsci's concept of hegemony, that is achieving power over culture and society in times when state power is unattainable. (In fact he still saw state-power as the ultimate goal)

An insightful article in the LRB by UCL's professor of Philosophy of Law, George Letsas (https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n06/george-letsas/brexit-and-the-constitution) shows a different way to see what's actually happened. He criticises the usual definition of that 'populism' which lead to Brexit and Trump's victory, namely that it means bowing to 'what the people want' and deploying rhetoric that appeals to their emotions. Instead he attacks this populism in politico-legal terms, as a 'deliberate attempt to bypass the normal channels of representative democracy'. That might sound like the same thing, but it isn't.

Rather than 'populism' this approach is better called 'majoritarianism'. It claims that the sole justification for political action is indeed 'what the people want', but more precisely, what they voted for in the last election or referendum. This conception of democracy is held by as many on the Left as on the Right (of those who adhere to democracy at all that is), but it doesn't correspond to the way UK democracy, or many others, actually work. Democratic political action was until recently always justified by a continual process of collaboration and conflict between the executive, legislature and electorate - the process we call 'checks and balances' - which, however imperfectly, protects at least some of the rights of the minorities within the majority.

This creeping majoritarianism in the wake of Brexit and Trump isn't yet the full-scale authoritarianism or fascism that some on the more excitable Left are claiming, but it is their precondition. It's also clear that the so-called Alt-Right is fully aware of the crucial role such checks-and-balances play in maintaining liberal forms of democracy, and they're rapidly achieving sufficient power to undo them all. And one reason that such majoritarianism is gaining popular support so rapidly is precisely the fact that the Left has more or less given itself over to minoritarianism.

Of course the mass media play an important role in encouraging majoritarianism, but they merely complete a vicious circle with the Left's increasingly extreme and vociferous minoritarianism. The still-mostly-silent majority believes that its interests are being sacrificed to those of a wide range of minorities, in a process that inexorably inflates rather than combats racism, sexism, xenophobia and the rest of the isms.

This almost universal misconception about the nature of representative democracy renders 'more democratic than thou' political arguments moot, as the rancour over Brexit so clearly demonstrates. Letsas doesn't claim that understanding it will solve the problems of the Left, far from it. Particularly among younger people, confusion caused by the New Right's espousal of libertarianism, 'anti-elitism' and anti-PC runs deep, and any policy solutions for the Left aren't at all obvious. Letsas does suggest that in the long-term one way out is a written constitution for the UK, something I've always believed to be less important than electoral reform, but I think he has convinced me.

Trump of Doom?

Thought for the day. The type of economy we call social democracy depended for its success on a willingness of the majority of the population to cooperate as well as compete with one another, giving up a portion of their income in taxes to be spent on various public goods like medicine, education and transport. If the population loses its willingness to make these reasonable sacrifices then it becomes impossible to maintain a social democracy.

The UK population was so willing for at least 30 years following WWII, to a large extent thanks to the experience of necessary cooperation among the generation who fought that war. But over the *last* 30+ years that willingness has been steadily eroded by many factors, including (but by no means confined to): greater individualism stemming from precisely the relative affluence and economic freedom that post-war social democracy conferred; successive economic crises (some related to oil, some to financial recklessness); industrial decline, outsourcing and austerity imposed by politicians in thrall to neoliberal economics; free market propaganda promulgated by politicians in thrall to neoliberal economists; mass migrations; international terrorism.

The UK Brexit referendum, US election of Donald Trump, and developments within many EU countries suggest that this willingness has now been lost by somewhere around a crucial 50% of my own "baby boomer" generation, and there's evidence of loss too among younger generations whose expectations have been drastically curtailed. But despite the nationalist rhetoric of "taking back control" from the Brexiteers, it seems more likely that what's actually happening is a withdrawal of people's engagement from the nation-state altogether, back to the individual family as unit of survival.

Perhaps the only way the willingness required for social democracy could ever be restored is in the event of some major catastrophe, on the order of magnitude of a world war, great depression or an abrupt climate deterioration, that forces people to relearn cooperation in order to survive. Recent governments in both Europe and USA have been just barely prudent and competent enough (tempering their neoliberal policies with judiciously-applied shots of Keynes during the emergencies) to avoid such a catastrophe. Such a catastrophe feels quite a lot closer following the inauguration of the impulsive President Trump, but a catastrophe it would remain - and to imagine otherwise would be grotesque.

What I've learned this week.

That insecure, narcissistic, retarded-adolescents who can barely distinguish between reality and computer games, are inventing and controlling technologies on which the future of civilisation may depend (Andrew O'Hagan's "The Satoshi Affair" in the LRB, 30th June). That a majority of working people are being written out of this future, robbed of dignity, security and jobs, and they're so furious that they'll lash out right and left at institutions they blame - like Parliament, the EU, and perhaps in November the USA. And that we lack any politicians who have clue what's going on, the nous or the backbone to handle it. It will take some time to digest these lessons.

To be absolutely honest, I did know all this already but, hell, I don't get too many opportunities to exercise my rhetoric nowadays...

Blimey, it could be Brexit!

It's a year since I wrote a new entry on this blog, and that isn't because I have nothing to say, merely that the world is getting crazier faster than I can focus on it. Now though, faced with an imminent EU referendum, it would be remiss not to say something. Boris, Gove and the other Brexiteers have the scent of victory in their nostrils, a scent wafting from a silent majority who don't share their real thoughts with pollsters. This scent is part xenophobia – the Brexiteers are convincing many people that leaving the EU would reduce immigration, which it won't – but also partly from their simmering rage against liberal media and cultural elites who have for several decades been fiddling while they were robbed of security, dignity, jobs. Unfortunately the Remain campaign relies on precisely those elites for advocates, which simply turns up the heat under the simmering pot.

So what of a "Left Case For Brexit"? There isn't one. Even if you sneakily share some of that majority resentment, accept the fact that victory for Brexit would leave you locked on this small island with neo-Poujadist governments permanently in power. Read Anthony Barnett's long but thoughtful analysis Blimey, it could be Brexit! Then vote Remain on June 23rd. Just do it.