Duty Calls, and Nobody Answers

Politics today is just about aesthetics.

It’s been a tough week for the media, suddenly having to cope with the consequences of death of Queen Elizabeth II. Interns sent scurrying away to look up things in Wikipedia came back with curious references to concepts like “duty” and “service,” which hadn’t been used for so long that spelling checkers on computers in newspaper offices choked on them.

It’s true that these are not concepts you often see mentioned these days, and, critically, they no longer form part of our everyday political discourse. “Service” is what’s done to your car, or provided by a wage-slave branded on the forehead by Uber or Amazon. “Duty” is what you have to pay on certain goods bought abroad coming back through the airport.

And yet virtually every important news source in the western world has felt obliged to somehow cover this dimension of Elizabeth II’s reign. After all, here is a woman who never expected to be Queen, who only came in line to the throne because her uncle Edward VIII, he of Nazi sympathies, was forced to abdicate, and yet who did the job that was handed to her for seventy years without a break. Given that her last two official tasks were accepting the surrender of Boris Johnson and asking Liz Truss to form a government, even an old republican like me feels obliged to respect that level of dedication to duty.

Ah yes, that. Last week, I talked about the (misnamed) military virtues: courage, teamwork, dedication, self-sacrifice and so forth, and wondered how we were going to, manage without them. The death of Elizabeth II opens up a neighbouring can of worms: can a society where the concepts of duty and service have completely disappeared expect to survive very long? How will our Political Class and Professional and Managerial Class for whom it’s All About Me cope in an age of multiplying and mutually reinforcing crises?

Now the first thing to do is to clear away a great deal of the political garbage that surrounds these concepts, which is all the more difficult because they have no place in Liberal political theory, and are therefore seldom discussed today. The morally autonomous, rationally interest-pursuing Liberal has no sense of duty to anyone. “Duty” exists only insofar as there is a written contact in which you have agreed to do something. But it is quite acceptable. not to do that something if you think that the detailed language of the contract can justify it, and if a request goes even slightly outside what you regard as the strict contract terms, you are at liberty to refuse it. Duty is a legal concept, subject to all the usual nuances and qualifications. Likewise Service is an act performed or received under contract, and limited to what is precisely defined.

Most of us don’t actually behave like this, of course, which is fortunate, or society would have collapsed a long time ago. In reality, society only continues at all because a lot of people, from doctors and teachers to policemen and social workers, continue to do what they do out of a sense of duty and a sense of service to some larger entity: society, community, the country, whatever.  What this amounts to in practice is doing things that you don’t necessarily want to do, because you feel you should, or because nobody else will, and doing them for the community rather than for yourself.

Put that way, it’s clear that duty and service are not right-wing nor reactionary concepts, as some would like to label them. Rather, the Monarchy in the UK, for all its imperfections, is best seen as one of the last holdouts of this kind of thinking, which was once close to universal. As we’ll see in a moment, there are some attitudes that cross traditional political divides, and this is one of them. For the record, duty and service have always been traditional virtues of the Left. Trades Unions began as voluntary associations for the general good. Like many others, George Orwell went to fight for the government forces in Spain, because he felt it was his duty, and the right thing to do. The old Communist Parties of Europe, especially those of France and Italy were run at ground level by highly-motivated unpaid volunteers, who gave up their free time to help others. In France up until the 1990s, for example, the Communist Party was a kind of parallel state, able to help you if the formal state couldn’t. I’ve met people who spent their Saturday mornings and several evenings every week knocking on doors in poorer areas asking if there were any problems with the local authority or the government that they needed help with.

Part of the conceptual problem in understanding such concepts as duty and service is that we have retained the traditional vocabulary of politics whilst the underlying patterns of power have changed very substantially. Since the time of the French Revolution, we have used “Left” to refer to those who wanted to move quickly towards a better and fairer society, and “Right” to define those who opposed such moves, or at least wanted to slow them down. Up until the 1980s, this made sense. Evelyn Waugh’s famous criticism of the Conservative Party, that it hadn’t put the clock back by even five minutes, is comprehensible in this context, as is the powerful link in those days between the Monarchy and the traditional Right, both as expressions of inherited privilege and for the perpetuation of traditional structures of power. “Duty” and “Service” were often used in that context. “Left” was associated with modern, therefore, and “Right” with “old.” Up until the 1980s, the Right, in most western countries, staged a slow retreat, and, as a result, “modern” (which is a value-judgement) became assimilated to “recent,” which is just a matter of time and date.

The forces of Liberalism, meanwhile, had been held in check in different countries for different reasons. In some cases it was the continued strength of the old power structures, of Monarchy, Church, Army and so forth. In other cases, and often simultaneously, it was fear of Communism and fear of Revolution that kept Liberalism in check. And finally, there were still mass political parties of the Left in most western countries, promoting ideas of social solidarity and service to the community.

Tentatively in the 1980s, and with much greater force and determination at the end of the Cold War, Liberal ideas and politicians began to dominate the political scene, and their enemies were as much on the traditional Right, as the traditional Left. This should not surprise us: the original opposition to Liberal ideas came precisely from those who saw that they would eventually undermine and destroy traditional society. On the other hand, Liberals in the nineteenth century saw the nascent Left as a threat because it represented a competitive path to remaking society, but on a collective, rather than individualist, basis: hence, the bloody repression of the Paris Commune in 1871, for example, which was carried out by Liberals, not by the Right.

Over the last generation, the Left has found itself trapped by its own rhetorical inheritance. By the 1990s, there had been a century of social and political advances, and it was simply taken for granted that what was “new” was necessarily better than what was “old.” The wholesale adoption of social-liberal vocabulary and thinking over the last decade meant that it was possible to present even selfish and divisive policies as somehow being “modern” and therefore in the tradition of the Left. Conversely, to oppose policies like, oh let’s say homosexual marriage for example, was to be “reactionary” in the traditional sense, and so unacceptable. Whatever in new is good, after all.

The subsequent end of mass political parties, especially of the Left, the takeover of the husks of those parties by Professional and Managerial Class career politicians, and the evacuation of politics from politics itself, had two important consequences. Firstly, and in order to have something to fight about, it promoted what are rather clumsily called “cultural” issues to the status of major political divisions between parties and tendencies, and their media hangers-on. Most people in most countries care only distantly about such issues. Secondly, and more seriously, whilst the political world was thus fighting battles over issues that ordinary people didn’t really care about, the concerns of ordinary people were excluded from the political agenda, and it was thought unnecessary to seek electoral support by recognising them. The vocabulary of what I call Recentism was wheeled out to justify life getting worse: the world is changing, we must adapt (actually “you” must adapt), globalisation, casualisation, Uberisation, what have you, are just part of the modern world and you have to accept them. Anything else is reactionary and nostalgic for the past. Much of the traditional Left, used to thinking in teleological terms, and to thinking that the future would be better than the past, went along with this.

As a result, there’s an enormous and flagrant gap between the actual structure of politics in terms of parties on one hand, and the wishes and concerns of ordinary people on the other. As I’ve suggested on several occasions, it’s a matter of the supply of politics no longer corresponding to the demand. And so it’s absolutely unsurprising that other parties arise, or reconfigure themselves, to meet this un-met demand. At least, it’s unsurprising to everyone except the PMC and their media parasites. As a result, traditional Left and traditional Right have been driven together conceptually, if not formally, in the face of common enemy.

Most people don’t actually believe in Recentism as a doctrine, and never did. What matters is their own lives, and how those lives are affected by change. They give their allegiance to parties that recognise that their concerns exist. The structure of this strange new kind of politics today is asymmetric, because parties of the traditional Left have managed to hang onto more political space than parties of the traditional Right. In part, this is because the discrediting of Marxist and radical socialist ideas after the fall of the Soviet Union tended to gravely weaken the more radical currents of the Left: even parties like Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise are loose coalitions barely held together by a telegenic leader. As a result, working class and lower-middle class voters in search of some recognition have increasingly moved towards parties of what the media loves to call the “extreme right” since those parties listen to their concerns and do not lecture and hector them, as parties of the Left tend to.

Left and right-wing issues have not disappeared, of course. The distribution of wealth and power in society, and the resulting treatment of its citizens, will be a political issue for ever and ever. The trouble is that dominant political parties in the West and their acolytes are not interested in debating such issues, since they are agreed on a kind of resource extraction politics which makes the rich steadily richer and the poor steadily poorer. So new subjects of division have to be found to motivate militants, raise funds and even, perhaps, win votes. Thus, many people must have been surprised a few years ago to discover that “more abortions” had become a left-wing cause. This would especially puzzle those who remembered the uncontroversial legal reforms in 1960s Britain that decriminalised abortion: it was not a party-political issue at all. It was similarly decriminalised in France a few years later under a right-wing government.

But neither are left and right-wing ideas in general simply about modernism versus reaction. As I’ve just suggested, it is entirely reasonable to look back to the past as a better world, and to be nostalgic for things that have disappeared. Outside the ranks of the PMC and the hopelessly intellectually crippled, for example, can anyone really fail to regret the end of full employment and the effective conquest of mass poverty? If you could have free universities back, wouldn’t you want that? Are you overjoyed by the decline of basic services and the state’s inability to provide the kind of security that was considered normal thirty years ago? In reality, a lot of genuine left-wing thought and action has been “conservative” in the sense that ordinary people have tried to protect things that are precious to them. The great miners’ strike of 1983/4 in the UK, which effectively broke the organised labour movement in the country, was essentially about the defence of traditional communities and ways of life, built around radical political traditions.

But the problem is that the Overton Window of politics is very largely set by the PMC: they are able to define the limits of what subjects acceptable political discussion can cover, and the de-politicising of politics has left mainstream political parties to argue just about lifestyle issues and abstract theoretical ideas. Theirs is the politics of the dilettante in every age: worrying about some far-off problem they cannot influence, rather than some tedious nearby problem that they can but which would require some effort. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to describe this tendency as Aesthetic Politics, or, if you prefer, the politics of feeling good. What matters is not what happens, but how you feel.

By “aesthetics” here, I mean simply the philosophy that arose in the late 18th Century, which held that the quality of cultural products was something that could not be rationally demonstrated: it was rather a matter of a developed “taste,” and an immediate emotional reaction. Limited to culture, this is a tenable argument, but the problem is that it has not been limited to culture. In every age, the wealthy and removed have tended to view many of the problems of society with a detached air, egotistically conscious only of those things which directly affected themselves or their interests. But today’s PMC, which enjoys security, deference and wealth on a scale from the appreciable to the simply unimaginable, is also serviced by a crowd of journalists, pundits and alleged thinkers, whose practical function is to make bad things disappear as far as possible. The result is a PMC which is ignorant of the realities of life, which has abandoned traditional politics and replaced them with an entirely theoretical, subjective and often emotional set of subjects to focus their internal struggles for power.

It’s possible to think, at least in theory, of historical parallels for in-grown groups: the medieval Church, the Byzantine Court, the Aristocracy of the eighteenth century … But then we realise immediately that all of those groups enjoyed a level of culture and intellectual debate that our own pitiful PMC (who probably think that The Sopranos represents some kind of peak of western culture) couldn’t even understand, far less emulate. And their ideas are correspondingly unsophisticated. Broadly speaking, ideas and practices are divided into Nice and Not Nice. As with aesthetic theory, rationality and the actual objective content of the subject, are less important than How I Feel about it. Since real-life impinges relatively little on the PMC, they have the luxury of viewing and evaluating everything through their own egos, approving what is Nice, and rejecting that which is Not Nice.

A traditional subject of aesthetic ideological analysis is immigration. For the PMC, this is a matter, not even of practical principles, but of purely abstract ones. Free movement of peoples is just such a Nice idea. By contrast opposition to free movement is a Not Nice idea, and the PMC and its hired fingers do everything they can to confine the debate to that abstract level. Actual experience is at a lower, more brutish level, and it’s Not Nice to refer to it. After all, how Nice it would be if everyone could live where they wanted to, and how Not Nice it is to oppose such a basic human freedom. Practical consequences are so tedious and boring.

Ironically, immigration control used to be a cause of parts of the Left. Forty years ago, George Marchais, the leader of the French Communist Party sounded the alarm by warning that the arrival of unchecked numbers of unskilled immigrants would enable ruthless employers to drive down wages and lower working conditions. He was furiously criticised for saying this, not because it was seriously argued that ruthless employers would not drive down wages etc. since it was obvious that they would, but because it was Not Nice to say such things. The fact that his predictions rapidly came true didn’t make any difference: not everything that is true is Nice. Unsurprisingly, immigrants who have been here for some time are starting to vote for anti-immigration parties themselves, as successive waves arrive, each more desperate and ready to work for less than the previous wave. But we don’t talk about that because it’s Not Nice.

It’s hard to argue that anyone outside the PMC has actually benefitted from the uncontrolled immigration since the 90s and after: certainly not the immigrants themselves. And one of the consequences has been the growth of extremist Islamic ideas, popularised by imams sent from Qatar and Turkey. The trials of co-conspirators in some of the terrible 2015 atrocities in Paris are now in progress, and it’s painful to watch the PMC aligned media tying itself in knots trying to avoid using the words “Islam” or “Islamists”, although the defendants swear by both. The argument, inasmuch as there is one, is that it would not be Nice to do that, because it was conceivable that unspecified non-Muslims might then decide to do unspecified harm to unspecified Muslims, and that would not be Nice. (The Muslim communities in France, of course, are the first victims of these people, and many of them came to France to escape the rigours of religious control.)

It could be argued that such issues, no matter how important to those involved, are actually secondary. But what about world-level events? Covid, for example? Well, there, you may remember the opposition of the PMC aligned media to mentioning that the disease had its immediate origin in China, and to closing frontiers. Well, closing frontiers is Not Nice, and mentioning where infections come from is Not Nice either, because it’s possible that unspecified non-Chinese may do unspecified harm to unspecified non-Chinese, as a result, and we can’t have that. It was only later, when Covid turned out to be a real, as opposed to just an aesthetic, problem, that ideas started grudgingly to change. And even then, the slogan was “vaccination”, because in the end after the novelty wears off, being confined at home is Not Nice.

If this all seems childish, and hopelessly detached from reality, well it is. But a PMC which is scarcely touched by the adverse consequences of real life, and can try to buy its way out of those it can’t avoid, is perhaps inevitably going to develop this foppish, irresponsible attitude of weary superiority to the tiresome real world: finally it’s all about Me, and How I Feel. But when issues of life and death are involved, this is surely unacceptable. At least in the case of Covid it was death in one’s own country, but wars are another matter. When wars are a long way away, the dilettante attitude of the PMC is to reconfigure actual events in ways that they find more aesthetically pleasing. This happened as early as the civil war in Bosnia, which could have ended in 1993 with the Vance-Owen Peace Plan, except for the opposition of the PMC and its media, which hated the plan because it put forward a solution that didn’t please them, even if it might well have worked, and that was Not Nice. Demands that the war should continue until “justice” had been done meant two more years of fighting and tens of thousands more deaths before a very similar peace plan was finally agreed. But at least the PMC could feel happy.

This has been a constant story ever since: the PMC wants an aesthetically pleasing account of conflicts in the world, and the job of its media is to bend and twist facts to produce it. But just as this approach stumbled over Covid, it’s going to hit a wall over the wider consequences of the war in Ukraine. Certain things are happening in that war which are Not Nice. The PMC view that things that don’t appear on TV aren’t actually happening, and can thus be disregarded, is being seriously challenged. There will be consequences - military, strategic, political and above all economic - which are Not Nice, and which for once cannot be escaped from. Nice things in the world will be much rarer. If the direct consequences of the energy crisis, the disruption in supply-chains and recurrent health crises are likely to affect the PMC proportionately less, they won’t escape them entirely.

Finally, of course, there’s the question of how we deal in practice with the wolf-pack of crises that is steadily approaching. Here, traditionally, concepts of Duty and Service have bulked large. You can fault the aristocracy and the ruling class of Europe in 1914 for many things, but not here, as the huge number of them that died in the trenches attests. But I have the horrible feeling that today, much of the PMC believes that it is us who owe a duty to them: we are their servants after all. We saw at the time of Covid that the PMC instinct is to belittle, then to run away, then to impose duties on others as far as they can. But there are some things that are both Not Nice, and unavoidable. We’re in a strange world indeed where the ideas and practices that might save us are the property of such a disparate set of groups. All that links the British Monarchy, parts of the traditional Right, parts of the modern radical Right and parts of the radical Left is opposition to the politics of aestheticism, and a vision that includes the interests of society as a whole. Is that going to be enough?