Ethical cleansing and the new elites
Ethical cleansing and the new elites
Aiden Rankin
Keywords: History, Democracy, Politics
In 1995, the American writer and thinker Christopher Lasch's final work, The Revolt of the Elites, was posthumously published. An exhilarating blend of polemic and intellectual insight, this work is of at least as much relevance to Mr Blair's Brave New Britain - and indeed Brave New Europe - as it is to the Clintons' "politically correct" pornocracy. For it chronicles the degeneration of the reforming ideals embodied in liberalism and social democracy, and their mutation into a new, "professional" elitism more oppressive than old-fashioned reaction.
The Revolt of the Elites derives its title from an earlier work, The Revolt of the Masses, a polemic by Jose Ortega y Gasset published in 1929 which draws from the powerful current of European thought that I shall call Enlightenment-scepticism, for like the Euro-scepticism of our own time it questions the liberal assumptions of inevitable progress, moral relativism,equality rather than equity as a political goal, and the trend towards ever-larger institutions. Ortega's thesis is that the calamities of Western civilisation in the twentieth century can be attributed to the rise of mass culture and mass political participation. The Revolt of the Masses was written in reaction to a monstrous and irrational war with an almost equally irrational peace settlement, and to the breakdown of traditional attitudes to authority that had followed from these events. Like most conservative intellectuals of bourgeois lineage, Ortega romanticises the ancien rÅgimeand looks back longingly to times when a paternalistic oligarchy supposedly held sway. "Nobility", he tells us, "is defined by the demands it makes on us, not by rights." The demise of hereditary elites and the emergence of mass politics results inevitably in irrationalism, levelling-down the worship of celebrities and a mindless consumer culture, of which today's New Labour ethos is the logical outcome. Democracy has engendered mass man: self-control, semi-educated,conscious above all of his rights and "incapable of submitting to direction of any kind". Mass culture is secular and ahistorical, enshrines material possessions rather than human values, reveres callow youth over wise old age,worships the body rather than the mind and, perhaps worst of all, it generates a false assurance that "tomorrow the world will be still richer, ampler, more perfect, as if it enjoyed a spontaneous, inexhaustible power of increase".
Ortega, in other words, expresses with great force all the prejudices of the inter-war intelligentsia (I use the word prejudice in a positive sense, for prejudice, unlike bigotry, sharpens the critical faculties of ordinary people,helping them resist and subvert the "modernising" elites). He is a traditionalist obsessed with the ugliness of modernity, consigning the poor and the newly rich to oblivion while falling before the feet of an aristocracy that has already sold out. His lack of compassion for the unfortunate, and his complete lack of curiosity about or interest in working-class or peasant cultures, makes him less a true conservative and almost a forerunner of the Thatchers and Blairs of today. These gaps in his interests expose him as an irretrievably middle-class thinker whose horizons are little wider than those of Sunday Telegraph editorial writers today. Yet with its blend of insight,snobbery and keen observation of contemporary malaise, The Revolt of the Masses has a timeless quality and can be seen almost as a political companion to The Waste Land or The Hollow Men. In his attacks on consumerism, Ortega anticipates the concerns of the environmental movement half a century later. I wonder whether he would have recognised the hypocrisy of wealthy and well-funded green activists who jet set between the capitals of the world to preach against globalisation, or extol the rugged virtues of Ladakh while wintering in the Canaries. I fear he might not, for the aristocratic credentials of some prominent greens could mesmerise him, and besides,environmentalism is a preoccupation of the rich, not a priority for the poor. Ortega's thesis has a fundamental flaw, which Lasch surprisingly does not address. For it was the ruling cliques, and not the masses of Europe who caused the First World War and let so many ordinary lives be sacrificed in vain.
Faced with the Clintons' pornocracy, Lasch gives Ortega's argument a new,more potent twist. In the heartland of modern democratic consciousness and conspicuous consumption, it is not the masses - better defined as ordinary men and women - who are threatening civilised values, but an elite professional class who segregate themselves increasingly from mainstream society:
Simultaneously arrogant and insecure, the new elites ... regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension ... Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable and provincial, ill-informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends ... They are at once absurd or vaguely menacing - not because they want to overthrow the old order but precisely because their defence of it appears so deeply irrational.
For Middle Americans, we can substitute all ordinary Germans, French,Italians, Irish and "free-born Englishmen" who find themselves caught up in the European maelstrom. To Lasch, material abundance of the kind that Ortega eschewed has disguised the development of a "two-class" society in which an embattled working-class and a middle-class proletarianised by "flexibility" are subject increasingly to a transnational elite. Global in its perspective,cosmopolitan in taste, this new ruling caste is not bound by tiresome traditional obligations such as concern for the less privileged, who are no longer recognised as fellow-citizens:
The market in which the new elites operate is now international in scope. Their fortunes are tied to enterprises that operate national boundaries... Their loyalties - if that term is not itself anachronistic - are international rather than regional, national or local. They have more in common with their counterparts in Brussels and Hong Kong than with the masses of Americans not plugged into the network of global communications.
Patriotism is not "the last refuge of the scoundrel", if it ever was, but the last recourse of decent people trying to preserve civilised values against an elite that holds them in open contempt. Lasch is an old left thinker, which is why I took pleasure in reviewing his book for the New Left Review when it appeared in Britain. His analysis of global capitalism has ever more resonance four years on. Not only does it transcend Ortega's earlier, more simple thesis of the vulgar masses, but it also turns a founding principle of Marxism on its head. For it is now the bosses, not the workers, who have no country and who proclaim internationalism as a positive, "progressive" goal. The workers'international, in its various forms, has given way to a new plutocrats'international of giant corporations, financial cabals, "lending agencies" (which are really no more than transnational debt collectors), supra-national bodies(such as the European Commission) and the new missionaries of secular liberalism who disguise imperialist agenda as concern for human rights.
To the thoughtful observer, be he conservative or socialist by disposition,this should come as no shock. Today's "new economic liberalism", after all, is much more than an assault on the welfare state. It is, as Lasch has recognised,a systematic assault on more than a century of benign economic reform, a negation of the principles of mutual obligation, consent and the "social contract" between those who exercise and those who submit to authority. In the free-market utopia of the neo-liberals, the protective functions of the state are steadily reduced until only its repressive core is left intact, although the rise of private security firms and privatised prisons suggests that even state repression could soon be "contracted out" to corporations. Thus, the state returns to its mid-nineteenth century role as the unabashed protector of economic privilege, much as it was when Marx composed the Communist Manifestoexcept that the "contradictions" are more subtle and so more dangerous.
I have been thinking quite a lot about The Revolt of the Elitesrecently, for two reasons. The first was the recent decision by British Airways to restore the Union Flag to their craft and drop the ethnic kitsch tail fins introduced in Year Zero (1997) to celebrate the birth of a new multi-cultural Blairite Britain (I thought that Britain had always contained many cultures;perhaps my eyes and ears deceive me when I cross the Yorkshire-Lancashire border). Television clips showed Lady Thatcher pulling a handkerchief from her famous handbag and wrapping it carefully around the fins of a model aircraft. This event, at a British Airways display, brought the maximum embarrassment to the managerial bureaucrats. It was in that sense positive. Yet there is rich irony in this angry outburst by the murderess of Britain's manufacturing industries. It was clear that she was incapable of seeing any connection between the "multi-ethnic" tail fins and the sale of national assets to global interests, that the dethroning of the national flag was the logical outcome of neo-liberal economies. The bloody-mindedness, cruel stupidity and philistinism of the former Prime Minister's philosophy have already been well-documented. What is not stressed enough is that it has nothing to do with conservatism. This is why "Thatcherism" is the underlying economic credo of the New Labour administration. Whether he is trying to pass himself off as a war leader or promoting workforce for unemployed industrial workers, Mr Blair appears to be engaged in a seedy transvestite impersonation of La Dona de Hierro. Lenin once observed that communism equals socialism plus electrification. The Third Way, it seems, equals Thatcherism plus "political correctness". It is an agenda through which heartless free-market economics merge with an attack on national and local identities, a dismissal of the values of family and community which enable the individual to be more than a mere consumer, which protect him from exploitation and give him true individual freedom as opposed to vacuous"personal choice".
I recently had an interesting conversation with a man I met by chance on the Leeds-London train. This man remembered with approval the Attlee government and because he was not a member of the "Baby Boom" generation it was possible to discuss politics with him on reasonable terms. During the conversation, he displayed some of the best and the worst aspects of progressive thought. He disapproved of Thatcherite economics but remained extraordinarily optimistic about New Labour, he believed in old-style social justice and in giving greater power to local communities. Yet his belief in regionalism was founded on a dislike of national boundaries and support for a centralised European state. He hoped that the RDAs would evolve into regional assemblies and replace county councils, and that national assemblies would give way eventually to the European Parliament, national courts to European courts and national governments to the European Commission. I suggested to him that regionalism meant nothing if it did not express cultural roots, and that the very concept of "Yorkshire and Humberside" was an attack on genuine localism. Yorkshire, after all, is an historic region, Humberside an arbitrary line on a map drawn by bureaucrats. He replied that while he saw something in what I said, there was nothing any of us could do about it. "Europe" recognised the name "Yorkshire and Humberside" and so we had inevitably to live with it.
On such journeys from Yorkshire to London, and back again, I learn far more about real politics than I have ever done from lobbying MPs at Westminster. I am grateful to this refreshingly honest man for making it clear to me that regionalism is a confidence trick, that its purpose is not to devolve power within the nation but to centralise power in Europe, that its beneficiaries are not workers but employers, not local communities but large corporations. The RDA member combined his acceptance of this form of regional imperialism with a deterministic commitment to "progress and change". He saw benefits in the destruction of family life because it offered individuals greater choice. When I pointed out that foremost among such choices were child poverty and emotional disturbance, he conceded, but told me that such changes were inevitable and there was no use arguing against them. He did not genuinely believe that"alternative families" are as beneficial as real ones, or that homosexual couplings are equivalent to heterosexual marriages. Nor did he really believe that there could ever be such a thing as "Yorkshire and Humberside". But on all these questions, he was afraid to express his doubts. Fear and hand-wringing have, it seems, become the hallmarks of liberal humanism. A movement that once questioned superstition has become superstitious itself.
There is an intimate connection between global capitalism, with its imperative towards ever larger corporations and political structures, and the ethical cleansing that dismisses loyalty to flag or country as outmoded prejudice, the traditional family as "patriarchal" tyranny and love of local history as quaint obsession. For it is such unsophisticated affections that equip communities to resist the revolt of the elites. A new politics is badly needed. It should not be that of the "modernisers", but an alliance of authentic socialists and authentic conservatives. For the first oppose the privatisation of the economy and the second oppose the privatisation of morals.
