November 9, 2009
Children of the Fall
Most of the comment this week is going to be taken up by people reflecting on the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The vast majority of that will come from people who have experience of life in the eras both before and after the wall came down, and for obvious reasons.
So here’s something different. Here’s a reflection on the fall of the Berlin wall from the perspective of somebody who doesn’t remember it, because they were 3 years old in 1989.
My generation lives, for all intense and purposes, without ideology. This is not because Francis Fukuyama was right that the end of history has been achieved in the form of Western liberal democracy. The reasons that was a rather silly thing to say are well-rehearsed already (though I suspect Fukuyama always knew it was silly, and just spotted a quick buck).
There’s plenty of ideology knocking about in the world (as we all know from the daily death count in Afghanistan) but there’s not much of it here in Britain amongst the under 25s. It’s a platitude that political parties have seen declining membership for years now, and that apathy and disillusionment with politics has been steadily on the rise for a while. But it doesn’t follow that people of my generation are completely uninterested in politics per se. Most – I imagine – would tell you that Gordon Brown is a crap prime minister and needs to go. And most say the recession is a bad thing, and needs to be sorted out. Many – possibly most – will have other concerns: opposition to university tuition fees, the spectre of global warming, and so on.
The thing is though, whilst there remain political beliefs and issues that the young are still interested in, it’s very rare to find a young person who sees all these issues and beliefs (should they be interested in more than a couple) as unified by any under-lying and coherent worldview. Rather, issues and beliefs are presented and held as broadly freestanding political preferences, which may connect with other preferences in some respects, but are essentially self-sufficient. In short: politics without ideology.
And I include myself in that analysis. For what is my ideology? I don’t want to call myself a socialist, or even a social democrat, because I’m unsure of what those terms even mean or imply in 21st Century Britain. I tend to stick with “liberal egalitarian”, but that rests on an extremely technical understanding derived from esoteric political theory, much of which I’m actually pretty unsure about whether I find to be an adequate account of the political. Truth is, I spend half my life talking and thinking about politics, and yet struggle to identify where it is I take myself to stand.
I see this pattern reflected amongst the young of the political left especially; the right may have fewer problems here. Dispositional conservatives have always been “a-ideological”; in large measure, conservatism is precisely a disposition (against change) and explicitly not an ideology. As for those who self-identify markedly as “libertarian”, I tend to suspect that ascribing to a fairly far-out, enormously rigorous and counter-intuitive set of political principles is indicative of some underlying need for strong, worldview-defining set of beliefs which are not readily available elsewhere. And anyway, libertarians have always been a tiny minority, and still are.
Of course, this end of ideology may quite possibly be the inevitable consequence of the last 20 years. Part of the reason the left finds it so hard to self-identify is precisely because of the collapse of the systems of government that fell after the Berlin Wall. Communism and state socialism are utterly discredited now – and a damn good thing too, given how many graves lay east of Checkpoint Charlie. Yet in the vacuum of the collapse of organised socialism – and following the triangulated third way of Blair, Clinton and all those on the “left” that accepted a fundamentally market-orientated, right-wing conception of how the world is and should be – those who feel that there must be a better way to do things find themselves disoriented and directionless.
Mine is the generation which has never seen any other way than the centre-ground squabbling of post-Thatcher managerialism, and finds the grand ideas of the past discredited and implausible. We are left with nothing but vague fluff about “progress”, and a gut-feeling that there are no big ideas, there is no direction, and even if there was we’re all going to be underwater before the century’s out anyway.
The fall of the wall? Well, to a child of that fall, it means this: the historical demarcation point (arbitrary and inaccurate, as any fixed dividing point must be) between an age of grand ideas and worldviews which I have never known, and the world of free-standing political preferences, directionless political programmes, and suspicion that everything is pretty much in vain anyhow (so the lack of grand ideas is not only appropriate but probably justified).
Am I appealing to a golden age that never was? Almost certainly. But this week I received a special copy of Balliol College Record, recalling the period from 1968-75, when the Oxford College suddenly became radicalised by its student population in the general spirit of the age. Compare that to my time at the college, when the majority of my fellow students were more preoccupied with having the right to officially dress up in bow ties for dinner, go to formal balls wearing tuxedos, and be willing participants in a cheap stunt by The Sun newspaper which until my final year had been the target of a rather principled embargo for 3 decades. (Then again, I got the embargo re-instated so that’s 2-1 to me, Rupert).
Switching back to the macro level, I’ll finish with this. The general hegemony of market capitalism is a price worth paying for the end of communist dictatorship and the threat of assured mutual destruction. But it seems to me that it is certainly a price, and not simply a victory.
David Weber said,
November 9, 2009 at 2:07 pm
“We are left with nothing but vague fluff about “progress”, and a gut-feeling that there are no big ideas, there is no direction, and even if there was we’re all going to be underwater before the century’s out anyway.”
I think that if people worried less about ‘big ideas’ and ‘ideology’, and focused on the smaller ideas and worked upwards, a lot of this conflict would resolve itself. We all have ideologies in so far as we all have ways at looking at the world, even if we haven’t attempted to codify them, and big political transformation is borne out of a willingness to pursue what improvements are possible, and build movements for those that aren’t yet.
Grace said,
November 9, 2009 at 5:01 pm
“disoriented and directionless….left with nothing but vague fluff about “progress”, and a gut-feeling that there are no big ideas, there is no direction, and even if there was we’re all going to be underwater before the century’s out anyway.”
yes. this is *exactly* how i feel. so true what you say about libertarianism as well, i wish my beliefs (about both morality etc and economics!) fit together like that.
Peter said,
November 9, 2009 at 11:17 pm
I agree with the broad thrust of your post Paul, but not (part) of this bit:
“As for those who self-identify markedly as “libertarian”, I tend to suspect that ascribing to a fairly far-out, enormously rigorous and counter-intuitive set of political principles is indicative of some underlying need for strong, worldview-defining set of beliefs which are not readily available elsewhere. And anyway, libertarians have always been a tiny minority, and still are.”
- As a former libertarian, I actually think that the set of libertarian political principles is (at first glance at least) tremendously plausible. Stuff like the non-aggression principle and just wanting to be left alone really is very intuitive, I think. Where it falls down (imo) is not its set of political principles (I mean here that we don’t look at that principles and think “that’s crazy”) but rather the policy implications and consequences it has (ie. they’re horrific!). So we’re in reflective disequilibrium mainly due to the policies, not the principles.
Though of course I think the principles *when under close scrutiny* are not as intuitive as they might seem (eg. I think worries about private property and the initial appropriation threaten the non-aggression principle a lot).
As for you seeing yourself as ideologically adrift, isn’t the combination of “liberal egalitarian, feminist, democrat” able to count as a strong, world defining belief system, in a similar way to how “socialist” or “Marxist” in the past might work? As for me, I just had an epiphany when rereading Rawls and thought “this is fundamentally right”.
Paul Sagar said,
November 10, 2009 at 12:02 am
Peter,
probably a fair point/refinement regarding libertarian anatomy.
As for “liberal egalitarian/feminist/democrat” counting as a strong, world-definint belief system – well no, not really.
See OP for remarks re LibEgal
As for “feminist”, what sort of feminist? Lumping all feminism together is like saying “I do sport” and treating football as the same as polo and paragliding (crap analogy, but there you go). And anyway, i’ve not read nearly enough feminist literature to really know what I think about all the issues that are raised or brought into view. So no, having feminist thoughts does not add up to an ideological worldview.
As for “democrat”, what does that mean? A supporter of the institutional mechanism of representative election? An adherent to the values (allegedly) implicit in democratic societies? An adherent to the values (allegedly) implicit in democratic institutions? Whose democracy? Which democratisation?
Given the problems with all three, I doubt very much that they add-up to a political weltanschlung (sp).
But it’s more than my own personal intellectual confusions. Reflective people in all ages had those. But in decades past, I suspect they could put them to one side and strive in the group struggle to aim for a set of goals they believed, whilst imperfect, were worth realising, and which were broadly informed by cross-issue ideology.
What are the goals we strive for today? Why strive for them (if they exist?)
Obviously, when we get into the details of this stuff it’s incredibly complicated, a hall of mirrors. My analysis probably rests on a bunch of conceptual chimeras.
But it feels like I’m getting at something…
Paul Sagar said,
November 10, 2009 at 12:10 am
As for your love of Rawls, that may have as much to do with you working out that christianity wasn’t going to be compatible with your life of intellectual reflection as anything else, I think.
Rawls is the product of a specifically American society and politics. I enjoy a Theory of Justice, and it’s an impressive achievement, but ultimately it’s abstract rational reflection upon how American society would ideally be ordered in the mind of a white, male, educated liberal. Beyond that, I’m not sure it has all that much to offer. And I’m increasingly sceptical as to whether it will stand the test of time. It’s no Leviathan, Second Treatise or Democracy in America, that’s for sure.
Also, my tutor Richard Bourke made a very good point the other week: TofJ looks like something that could, curiously, only have been written in a nation which has forgotten its own violent history. The idea that, ultimately, we can all come together and leave some of our political commitments at the door so as to enter into a reasonable overlapping consensus in the original position (as it got fleshed-out in Political Liberalism) just looks a bit mad in the context of a nation which 150 years ago tore itself apart in what was the bloodiest, most destructive and horrible war the world ever saw before 1914. The Founding Fathers – see, e.g. the Federalist – were acutely aware of the problem of faction and diffidence. They were proved right to be worried about it. But America has forgotten that part of its history in favour of the founding myths of revolution.
Rawls is a product of that.
I’ll be intriguied to see if a British middle class white man can, over the coming years, continue to find his passions and politics so closely aligned with a highly culturally-context specific project. I know I’m increasingly finding it hard to – but then, I’ve never been a Rawls apostle (you seem more of that mould these days). Please, though, do try not to become one of those boring disciples that spend their entire lives debating the Theology of interpreting obscure bits of Rawls as thought it were all that had ever been written in political philosophy.