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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
When I started making notes in this journal, the subject of politics often loomed large in my thoughts. Today, it rarely troubles them. An election looms between two parties whose policies continue to converge dramatically. The number of people voting will remain low and extremist parties will continue to emerge (though unlikely to flourish they can often have a regrettable influence on the main parties). The pattern appear set and unlikely to change.
To some extent, the British political system increasingly reminds me, not of Europe or North America, but of the Far East. The current pattern seems to be towards protracted periods of government (not as long as that of the LDP in Japan, but with similar consequences) by increasinly technocratic and unaccountable administrations. The combination of free market capitalism and political authoritarianism in a country like Singapore seems a good parallel to a Britain of control orders, anti-social behaviour orders and curfews. A difference remains but it seems increasingly one of degree and not of kind. As John Gray put it a while ago:"In The Snake That Swallowed Its Tail, he argues that a highly individualistic type of liberalism - "the philosophy of the short term, of the speed-dating, cold-calling society" - has come to pervade political life in Britain. In the past, thinkers such as John Stuart Mill had a vision of liberal values in which altruism was prized. As Garnett sees it, Mill's "fleshed-out" liberalism was displaced in the Thatcher era by a "hollowed-out", Hobbesian philosophy in which self-interest is at the centre. Liberalism of this latter kind is ultimately self-undermining, he believes: it can end only by "swallowing its tail", at which point a reaction in favour of saner values will set in.
Thatcher believed that the British economy could be revolutionised, and that at the same time Britain's culture could remain unchanged - or revert to the norms of the 1950s. She never understood that the ideology of choice and innovation she promoted in the economy would inevitably spill over into other areas of life. She believed that unfettered choice would somehow be virtuous, and completely failed to foresee the anomic, crime-ridden society that has actually developed. Like other neoliberals, she seems to have imagined that freedom is the natural human condition - a view Thomas Hobbes scorned heartily, and rightly so.
If The Snake That Swallowed Its Tail has a positive message, it is "Back to Mill" - the embodiment of the fleshed-out liberal philosophy that has supposedly been abandoned over the past generation. No doubt Garnett is right in thinking that Mill's was a superior form of liberalism, but it is hard to see how it can be revived today. He tells us that it will return only "once Britain has been entirely hollowed out." However, to adapt a well-known adage of Adam Smith's, there is much hollowness in a nation - and in liberalism. Most likely Britain will drift on much as it does at present, a country where everyone believes in liberal values, yet no one knows what they are."Labels: Politics
posted by Richard 7:54 pm
