Aurelien: against recentism

Things Don't Always Get Better. Aurelien, Trying to Understand the World. Oct. 2, 2024.
And "Against Recentism," while we're at it.


When I was young, there was a general belief that the world had been getting better for a while, and would continue to do so.

This wasn’t an ideology, more of a commonplace, everyday assumption. It wasn’t forced on a sceptical population by the political power, as accounts of endless progress were forced on the population of the Soviet Union. It had little to do with visions of futuristic utopias held by scientists and intellectuals. Indeed, it was something that seemed so mundanely obvious as scarcely to be worth mentioning. When the Conservative Party leader Harold Macmillan claimed in a 1957 speech that “we have never had it so good,” he was expressing a widely, almost universally, held belief. Opponents might grumble about the decline in traditional social standards and the burgeoning problem of rebellious youth, but that was about it. Macmillan himself had made his political reputation as Housing Minister (how quaint the very idea seems now) keeping his promise to build one hundred thousand new houses a year, to replace war damage and the slums of the major cities. And this was what people saw and experienced.

It’s almost impossible now to understand the significance of the transformation in daily life that came over most of the western world between the middle of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth centuries. Again, it was mostly mundane, everyday things. If one of my distant ancestors—a farm labourer perhaps or a small shopkeeper—had been told in the 1850s or 1860s that century later their descendants would live in new houses with indoor toilets, electric lights and running water, that machines would be available to wash clothes and keep food fresh, that education and health care would be free, that infant mortality would be reduced radically as vaccinations and a healthier environment vanquished the terrors of smallpox, whooping cough and polio whose shadows still disturbed my childhood, that unemployment would be a thing of the past, that poverty had largely been conquered … well, they would have laughed and muttered about utopias, if indeed they even knew the word.

Security in many forms was largely taken for granted then, from well-lit public spaces to security of employment: there were often labour shortages, and trades unions were strong. Life was simpler all round: public utilities were government-run and existed to serve the public, and if you had an unresolved problem with the sewage you could write to your MP who would write to a Minister to try to get something done about it.

Now none of this—extraordinary as it now sounds—is really utopian, nor was it seen as such at the time. Governments were elected to get things done, to steer the economy so as to minimise unemployment, to provide the services and to develop the country. That was just their job. When Harold Wilson, the Labour Party leader, successfully campaigned against the Tories in the 1964 election, his main complaint was that the government had done too little of this, too slowly. (Nor was this mentality confined to Britain, by the way, the French still talk of the “thirty glorious years” after World War 2, when successive governments did much the same thing.)

So I have always thought that it is legitimate to look back at the past, and identify cases where things were better then than they are now, and could have developed very differently. The alternative view—everything is infinitely better in every way than it used to be—is so absurd that few people ever defend it in those terms. Rather, the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) whose ultimate origins lie in these Years of Plenty, dismisses their memory with accusations of excessive nostalgia, of overlooking the asserted horrors of the era, or indeed of outright reactionary politics (“I suppose you think that women should stay at home and do the housework!). Most of these people, in my experience, weren’t even alive in the 1960s and 1970s, and few of them can explain in what the superiority of the present moment consists, other than through IdiotPol rants. It is perhaps emblematic that, unlike Harold Wilson sixty years ago, when Keir Starmer took over as Prime Minister after fourteen years of Tory rule, all he could offer was gloom, doom and more of the same. (I am increasingly wondering what the point of Starmer actually is.)

Something very interesting and largely unnoticed has taken place in the last fifty years. Up until the nineteenth century, western populations were largely conservative in mentality. (And again, I’m talking about ordinary people here.) The world around them changed slowly, economic growth was scarcely noticeable, and in general ordinary people were concerned with hanging on to what they had. Most social unrest, even violent revolts, was essentially conservative: the restoration of traditional privileges, the abolition of hated new taxes, the dismissal of corrupt or incompetent servants of the monarch. Popular feeling was largely against social and economic change (understandably, in the case of the factory system and the clearance of the countryside) and for a return to a better past. The few genuinely revolutionary or millennial movements of the time are sufficiently unusual that historians write books about them.

Urbanisation, minimal education and the destruction of old social systems changed this to a degree: it was the common people of Paris not the intellectuals, who triggered the Revolution, after all. Equally, the common people of the countryside reacted in horror to the Revolution and some rose in rebellion against it. But slowly, the idea got around that there was actually the possibility of progress. Workers in a factory who clubbed together could form a Union to demand better pay and conditions. Pressure could be put on governments to enlarge the franchise, or improve the generally terrible working conditions of ordinary people. And governments in Europe actually did respond: the nineteenth century was the Age of Reform, as schools were opened, sanitation was introduced, cities were cleaned up, more of the population was given the vote, and ordinary individuals acquired more rights at work, among many other things.

All these changes were welcomed by, and some were inspired by, the Left. In 1970, I remember the Trades Union Congress celebrated its centenary by putting out an illustrated book of its struggles and achievements. Many of the latter have since been undone, and the TUC is no longer a political force. But at that time, and for some years afterwards, left-wing parties were assumed to have history on their side, and it was taken for granted that as time went by, the agenda of the Left would be implemented more and more. The prevailing tendency of the Left at the time was the Social Democratic one; a kind of gradualism which thought that countries could be moved slowly and by persuasion in the direction of a more and more socialist system, and that existing power structures would eventually come round to the idea. This was no doubt why the novelist Evelyn Waugh complained that the British Conservative Party in his lifetime had not put the clock back even five minutes. For much of the twentieth century, this leftward drift seemed to be at least an arguable hypothesis.

Thus, looking back to the past was seen as an essentially right-wing, reactionary activity. True, there were maverick socialists, from William Morris to George Orwell, who believed that some traditions were important, but most had their eyes firmly fixed on the future, as their opponents had them firmly fixed on the past. Inevitably, the same qualified optimism found its way into popular culture, with its stories of space exploration, flying cars and time travel. But the writers and readers (of whom I was one) were not reading them as prophecy: I doubt if more than a handful of people really believed that they would live to take holidays on the moon, but of course that was not the point. Stories of space exploration were the mythology and legends of the technological era, expressing its dreams and fears in symbolic form, and novels of space exploration were no more prophecies of the future than the Odyssey is a reliable guide to visiting the islands of the Aegean.

Some time in the 1980s, this started to change. Ironically, though, the new political forces that slowly came to dominate the scene in different countries did not offer a return to an imagined past, but rather the way to a better future, by a different route. No right-wing party actually promised mass unemployment and poverty, the destruction of social systems, the offshoring of industry and the decline of public services. Rather, they promised that people could keep everything they had, and that the “greater efficiency” of “the market” would give them more than any left-wing government could.

And this argument was successful to a degree. The Conservative victory in 1979 was largely due to the defection of part of the younger working class, seduced by the idea of becoming property owners, and so acquiring, they thought, their own money machine. At that stage, the inevitable problems—such as houses rapidly becoming unaffordable for young people—were warned about, but not taken seriously, in the general excitement about new and wonderful ways of running the economy. The results of this new policy were so catastrophic —unemployment doubled in a year, for example—that the Conservatives would have been thrown out of office had the Labour Party not thoughtfully saved the situation by first disintegrating into internal warfare, and then splitting into two competing factions. The result was an unbroken series of Conservative governments for eighteen years. Yet it was clear there was no master-plan at work: privatisation, for example, which went on to conquer the world, was originally just a quick fix to raise some money; only later was a theoretical justification erected around it. This illustrates rather well a point that will recur in this essay: the conceptual framework of the last two hundred years is of change and advancement, and the assumption is that new ideas are always better and more effective than old ones.

Here, of course, the boot moved to the other foot, and began to generate a momentum of its own. New governments in power looked around and saw that other countries were shrinking the state, selling public assets etc. and moved along with the tide. (Politics is far more a reflection of fashion than most people realise.) Conversely, resisting change (how many of you have heard some dimwit management consultant intone “there’s always resistance to change”?) is always negatively encoded, and people don’t like being called “old-fashioned” or even “reactionary.” Because no system is ever perfect, those advocating change of any kind always have a rhetorical advantage, since, after all, what they are suggesting might make things better. At least, there’s no definite proof that it won’t. By contrast, defending the status quo, let alone the status quo ante, is much more rhetorically difficult.

Yet it seems to me that this is logically absurd. Until perhaps the 1980s, the changes that the Left was proposing—-widening the electoral franchise, for example, or increasing free access to education and healthcare—came out of a clear egalitarian and progressive project.. Not everybody supported these ideas, of course, but the arguments were at least relatively clear. As you would expect from the fussy, fiddly, process- and detail-obsessed Liberal ideology, though, most of the changes of the last thirty or forty years have been Bright Ideas, untestable or at least untested in advance, and which have wreaked havoc generally.

In the circumstances, it is entirely reasonable for the Left to be reactionary, in the sense that it reacts negatively to proposals or measures that will make life worse for ordinary people. It is also reasonable for the Left to be conservative, in the sense that it wishes to conserve the gains that ordinary people made in most countries between the 1940s and the 1980s. For that matter, it is entirely reasonable for the Left to look back with affection to a time when life for ordinary people was easier, and it was assumed this would continue. Of course it is fair to argue that this curious state of affairs only arose because the Left abandoned the interests of ordinary people, but that’s a different subject.

If I may be permitted a personal example, I was fortunate enough to benefit, from ten years’ more full-time, free education than my parents did. For some of the time I was even paid to study. I thought, and I still think, that such a system should have been conserved. (Today, I probably would have finished my education at eighteen.) It’s not hard to react negatively against the grotesque shambles that university education has now become, and to look back with, yes, a degree of nostalgia, on a system that functioned much better. Yet the neoliberal Party which dominates politics in most western countries, has taken over and adopted the discourse of continuous change, and uses it to disarm and neuter its critics. I can’t help recalling, to strike a frequent note once more, that the Party in 1984 had abolished history, apart from a highly distorted cartoon like series of received ideas that enabled the present situation, and any variant, of it, to be presented always as superior to the past. Indeed, Winston Smith wonders sometimes if his own memories of better times in his youth may actually be imaginary. (I’ll return to this point later.)

The Party’s policy takes a number of forms, all based around the curious proposition that any resistance of any kind to Change is at best reactionary and right-wing, at worse proof of actual or incipient fascism. (Bizarre when you consider that fascism called for radical change, and indeed practised it when in power.) In true Liberal fashion we are advancing towards an ever-better future, even if this advance may not be evident to everyone, and most of all we are advancing forward from the darkness and intolerance of the past. Now there is very seldom any attempt by the Party to support this argument by facts or statistics. Whereas governments in the past would boast about building houses, motorways, train lines or nuclear power stations, and whereas the level of unemployment, the rate of inflation or the strength of one’s national currency were discussed endlessly in the media, today’s governments say little about any of these things. Figures for unemployment and inflation have been so heavily massaged and so much revised downwards for decades now that I don’t think even most western governments take them seriously any more. Insofar as there is a debate at all, it’s over which programmes impacting ordinary people it will be necessary to cut to satisfy those who believe, against all the evidence, that the economics of a country and the economics of a family are identical to each other.

Thus, looking back at any evidence of a better past is coded as coming from the “Right” or even the “extreme Right,” thus de-legitimising any complaint about the situation today. This is bizarre, but is perhaps a necessary consequences of the Party’s and PMC’s policy of draining all substance from politics, and turning it into a technical struggle for power. We no longer have genuine political struggles between traditional forces of Left and Right, we have struggles for power and occasional attempts to challenge orthodoxy. These challenges are dismissed by the Party as coming from the “extreme Right” or “the hard Right” or the “ultra Right” or some other tiresome formula, not because they do, or because those terms any longer have meaning, but because it is politically effective to use such insults, as it was once politically effective to dismiss ideas you didn’t like as “Communism.”

This has led PMC-adjacent pundits and journalists into hopeless confusion. If certain ideas, or even certain subjects, are labelled “extreme Right” etc. because they displease the Party, rather than because they are part of any coherent dogma, then manifestly it’s impossible to write anything sensible about politics and politicians, even if that were the intention. So the new government in France apparently represents a “lurch to the extreme Right”, because Barnier has said that the control of immigration needs to be improved. I’ve seen journalists earnestly trying to decide whether Sahra Wagenknecht and her party are of the Left (or even “extreme Left”) or actually of the “extreme Right,” because of the priorities she has set out. Such people are incapable of understanding that any party that addresses popular concerns will inevitably trip some of the artificial snares set up by the Party to trap “extreme Right” ideas.

In the end, of course, this policy is self-defeating, because it turns the legitimate concerns of ordinary people into ideological crimes. In the case of immigration, which has unfortunately become the touchstone for seeking out the “extreme Right,” the Party seeks to prevent even mention of the issue, except in the blandest and most happy-clappy sense. To wish to talk about the problems of immigration is to identify yourself as of the “extreme Right,” and to even to suggest that it perhaps deserves discussion is to “legitimise” the “extreme Right’s” positions.

This can’t go on, because it involves rejecting the lived experience of ordinary people as though it did not exist and doesn’t matter. Thus, a female student was raped and murdered outside the prestigious Université Dauphine in Paris a week ago: the presumed murderer, a Moroccan immigrant with previous convictions for rape, had been served with an official order to leave the country, but in the interim had been freed from custody by a judge. The media, which briefly covered the issue, was mainly worried that the (understandable) protests of female students at the University might be “instrumentalised by the extreme Right.” And here comes the wicked witch of the Green Party, Sabine Rousseau, to assure us in a tweet that it’s all right really, because if the individual had been sent back to Morocco, he would have murdered someone truly innocent, like a Moroccan woman.

As I say, it can’t go on. As a matter of practical politics, you cannot label perhaps three quarters of the population, estranged from the policies and practices of successive governments, as “extreme Right” or at best “playing the game of the extreme Right” and seriously hope to stay in power. Yet this is what a whole series of French politicians have done, for example. Macron has railed for years against the”recalcitrant Gauls” of the country he represents for not getting on board with his neoliberal plans, while Mélenchon has publicly dismissed all French people except immigrants and young progressives as, wait for it, “the extreme Right” and does not seek their votes. It’s a recipe for political suicide, and we see the results now in various countries, most recently in Austria. Indeed, the more opposition is provoked by the Party, the more the dreaded “extreme Right” actually grows in size, since it is an auto-creation of the Party itself.

But what is it makes politicians act in this way, and why do pundits and the media cheer them on? What’s wrong with a little continuity? What’s wrong with policies that benefit ordinary people? Indeed, what’s wrong with listening to their concerns?

We have to bear in mind that Liberalism is a teleological belief, with a strong eschatological component. That is to say it moves ever forward towards some future goal, when the righteous shall be saved and the evil-doers punished. Liberalism is, of course, a Christian heresy, where The Market has taken the place of the Grace of God which passeth all understanding. Thus, apparent contradictions and apparent negative effects will all be put right by the magical hand of The Market, given enough time. This, more than anything else, accounts for the violence and the moral fervour with which competing ideologies are denounced, and even of dialogue or debate itself. The problem, inevitably, is that Liberalism isn’t based on any coherent set of principles or beliefs, so instead, we have a series of competing and often mutually detesting groupuscules all seeking greater freedom and power for themselves, and trying to secure their share of funding and media attention.

Any party which aims at change will inevitably produce splinter-groups and radical fringes seeking faster change here, or more emphasis there. This happened in the 60s and 70s with Marxist groups: you may remember the joke about the Marxist party that claimed “there is no-one to the Left of us,” only for a splinter-group to claim the next day “there is now!” But in fact it applies to any group that seeks change, including groups of the (actual) extreme Right. By an almost mechanical process of escalation, groups form to demand a more radical stance, only to be eclipsed by others demanding a stance even more radical. Whatever change is brought about simply provokes the demand for more of it. There are, after all, grants and jobs and media coverage to ensure. Liberalism is like a bicycle: if you stop peddling in the direction of a more perfect society, you fall off.

And this is why the traditional Left (where I number myself) has such problems with the extreme neoliberal collection of lobby-groups that the traditional parties of the Left have somehow contorted themselves into. 

By definition, Socialism—the Left’s ideology—is about the collective. It’s about the community, the workplace, even the family and extended family, not the interests of the individual against other individuals. It’s not about “opportunity” except in the sense of removing artificial barriers, but about actually doing things and supplying communities with what they want and need. Yet the best that parties which were once of the “Left” have been able to do is to market themselves as being slightly less nasty than the opposition: a kinder, gentler form of neoliberal exploitation. The Left has always understood that in a good and fair society individuals flourish, but that no amount of individual flourishing will make a society good and fair.

It’s therefore instructive to go back to the 60s and 70s to see how governments (including some not even of the Left) handled difficult social issues, by moving from general principles to the particular case, rather than the other way round. Thus, most western governments introduced legislation to outlaw overt racial discrimination and to make it illegal for women to be paid less than men for the same job. This was not the doing of pressure groups, but the result of a consensus that a modern society could no longer permit these things to happen. Likewise, abortion was decriminalised in a number of countries in the same era, and again this was a collective social judgement, not the result of lobbying. In Britain the decision was largely uncontroversial (though some women’s groups continued to fight it into the 1970s) because it was accepted that, with modern contraception, and with modern medical technology, abortions would inevitably be few and safe. The same argument essentially applied to the decriminalisation of homosexuality, where it was felt that a modern society really should be more tolerant of minority sexual preferences.

What these and similar changes had in common was an approach based on consensus and a willingness to look at the facts and the evidence. Of course, no changes of this sort were without controversy, or the use of controversies for political advantage, but in no case either did the controversy last long. By contrast, because much of the Liberal agenda proceeds from a priori assumptions that often contradict each other but are nonetheless held to be self-evident, and because Liberalism knows no greater good than the perfect economic and social freedom of the individual, then debate, reflection and evaluation are excluded: indeed, they are dangerous, and could be used by the extreme Right. I see that some American universities are now openly against debate, which is understandable given that few of the IdiotPol priorities of our day would survive rational examination.

Thus the agenda of the Party, insofar as it has one, is essentially random and irrational, the product of the strength and funding of various competing lobby groups. 

It is scarcely surprising that the electorates of various countries are rebelling against governments who neglect their interests, but seek to enforce an incoherent and often contradictory agenda of continual normative change, without any argument other than power and the ability to demonise any opposition. Indeed, the “extreme Right” tactic has now reached the stage of self-parody and is, I believe, even starting to unravel. If one is not allowed to mention the issues that ordinary people think are important in their lives because the very mention of them “legitimates the extreme Right” or some such nonsense, if pronouncing the words “society” or “immigration” conjures up diabolical forces, as in the theatre no-one pronounces the name of Shakespeare’s “Scottish Play,” then in effect the political system has terminally lost touch with the very people it purports to represent. People are growing wearier and wearier of this tactic, as they find a greater and greater proportion of their lives subject to an omertà. It’s now clear that we have met Their Enemy, and Their Enemy turns out to be Us. That’s a thought.

The escalation effect I mentioned above has no “off” switch, so the various interest groups within the Party are obliged to offer more and more radical proposals to get attention and secure funding, and so increase their power and influence relative to other groups. (By definition, the interests of ordinary people cannot be taken into account.) In the longer term, of course, this system is hopelessly negative and destructive, which is why it will come apart. Imagine, if you will, a sweating Outer Party functionary—a blogger, or minor journalist or parliamentarian with a fragile majority—waking up one morning to find that a better-known figure has just tweeted that schools ought to be legally obliged to have at least one transexual teacher. How to respond? How much power does this person have? Who has declared themselves in favour? How are opponents being characterised? Can I get by without making a comment? Needless to say, the merits of the idea are not the point: the point is to safeguard yourself from criticism, or even from losing your job.

In effect, an entire discourse and system of thought has been hijacked here. For a long time, the Left saw itself making incremental achievements to improve the lives of ordinary people, so it was legitimate to suggest that more modern was better. This wasn’t a transcendental truth, but a pragmatic judgement. But over the last generation or so, the concept of “modern” has morphed, or been twisted into, just “recent.” So Modernism has become just Recentism, the reflexive deference to whatever has just emerged. Conversely, the refusal to defer to ideas and behaviour that are Recent is now dismissed as a sign of, you’ve guessed it, the “extreme Right.”

Just think for a moment. Are the political or philosophical ideas of today “modern” in any sense, or are they just Recent? Indeed where are the significant political thinkers and philosophers? To the extent that there are any, they don’t work for the Party. And what about Culture? Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, considered a key Modernist work, was premiered over a century ago. Olivier Messiaen died more than thirty years ago, and most of his famous compositions belong to the thirties and forties of the last century. How is recent orchestral and chamber music more “modern” than either? Has it developed at all? Arguably not, and indeed the really interesting new recordings today are of little-known works from the past or the recovery of more music from the Middle Ages up to the Baroque era, neither of which is Recent, but some of which is distinctly Modern. Come to that, western popular music is still feeding off the modernist developments of the sixties and early seventies. And in literature, well, Ulysses and The Waste Land were published a century ago, Céline and Virginia Woolf wrote in the interwar years, the Nouveau Roman and Oulipo belong essentially to the sixties. And there’s nothing more transient and unmemorable than a “contemporary” reworking of Shakespeare. A torrent of new art appears every year, and much of it wins prizes, but it’s a long time since it looked more “modern” than whatever emerged the preceding year, or even decade. It’s a pity, since genuine innovation and modernism would be welcome, but there we are.

In the circumstances, a reaction against endless Recentism seems entirely reasonable. Once we realise that neoliberalism has hijacked the historical leftist discourse of incremental progress to help de-legititmise its critics, then things become clearer. It is entirely reasonable also to look back and conclude that in the past things were done better. Unless you find mass unemployment and mass poverty attractive, unless free education and free healthcare are unappealing to you, unless you find alienation and social breakdown enticing, unless you believe that it was sensible to export manufacturing industry and to build an economy based on financial services and pizza delivery, then you are bound to accept, albeit grudgingly, that things were better organised fifty years ago than they are now. Indeed, the world then was probably more “modern” than ours is, for any value of “modern” that makes sense. And of course a world further developed along the same principles would be very different from the one we have.

PMC critics have tried various tactics. At the beginning it was the Promised Land of the Market. That was abandoned in favour of Inevitable and Irresistible Change, which was falsified by glancing at other countries going in the other direction. Now, the best they can do is to encode the sense of missing positive things from the past as the influence of (sigh) the “extreme Right.” The problem is that the Party has nothing tangible to offer in opposition. For a while all the talk was of a “more tolerant” society, but that didn’t work, and it’s recently been decided that tolerance is actually not a virtue at all. So apart from hand-waving and mumbling about norms and values, all the Party can do is to demonise the past. To listen to some people who were not alive then, you would imagine that in the sixties and seventies immigrants were periodically lynched in the street, homosexuals were locked up in special camps, and women were chained to the kitchen sink rather than being allowed self-fulfilment through working shifts at a supermarket checkout. But it’s not hard to conclude that a society where a return to the mass unemployment and poverty of the ‘thirties was considered unacceptable was actually a better society than the one we have today.

Ironically, there are a number of political forces that actually are being strengthened by all this nonsense. One, probably, is the actual extreme Right. The Party desperately wants to conjure this tendency into existence, but it won’t like the consequences. Try “fighting” the genuine extreme Right, and you’ll get badly hurt. The other is the traditional moderate Right, which in many countries was pronounced dead, but is showing signs of recovery. In France, for example, there’s a clear centre-Right majority in the country and in Parliament, and we are seeing the effects in the appointment of the Barnier government and in the choice of the traditionalist Bruno Retailleau as Interior Minister. The Catholic Church and the part of the Right that identifies with it has picked up support in recent years as well. Partly this was the law on homosexual marriage, which dynamised the Catholic Right in a way that hadn’t been seen in generations, and partly the increasing tolerance of Muslim religious interference in the secular state, which has made some highly-conservative Catholics reflect that two can play at that game.

I have thought for some time now that the genuine Left is standing in front of an open goal. All it has to do is kick the ball in. A Left that showed it was receptive to the concerns of ordinary people would be poised to sweep into power, but this would require a reconsideration of thirty years or more of anticipatory cringes. Parties of the Left were so befuddled by Recentist political ideas that they thought that their occasional victories were because they had adopted these ideas, not that the electorate had rejected the neoliberal policies that resulted from them. The predicament of Starmer in the UK is absolutely emblematic: elected as a result of widespread disgust with the Tories, his own party has no idea what to do other than imitate them while trying to look a little less nasty.

Demonising the concerns of ordinary people as being “extreme Right” cannot work in the longer term, and will simply increase populist feeling to the point where it becomes unmanageable. I have said before, and I repeat, that those who make populism of the Left impossible will make populism of the Right inevitable. I doubt one in a thousand of those currently finding the “extreme Right” under every stone have any idea what that would mean.