The Politics of Exhaustion.

And the exhaustion of politics.

And it came to pass that, some decades ago now, I was sitting in the Cavern Club watching the Beatles perform.

Now, in case you’re wondering, this was not because my extraordinarily indulgent parents had allowed a small child to travel up to Liverpool alone. This Cavern Club was not in Liverpool, and not even in England. It was in Japan, more precisely in Roppongi, one of the major entertainment districts of Tokyo, and the band were a group of Japanese who probably weren’t even born when the Beatles were playing Liverpool.

But what was really striking—and why I remember that evening so many years later—was that the four young men were absolutely perfect: not just utterly faithful to every note and word played and sung, but faithful to every gesture, even to the hairstyles and the suits they wore. I can only imagine the hours they must have spent watching live performances, listening to records and endlessly practising. This wasn’t a covers band, or even a tribute band, but an actual recreation of the Beatles in hallucinatory detail.

If you have some acquaintance with Japanese culture and its obsessive attention to detail, this won’t surprise you: the idea of the literal and perfect re-creation of the past is very powerful. After all, Japan’s most famous Shinto shrine at Ise is torn down and reconstructed in identical detail every twenty years, prompting the fascinating philosophical question of whether it’s actually the “same” building at all. Likewise, in Kabuki Theatre, roles and even names are passed down the generations from father to son, to ensure that nothing ever changes.

This is one way of dealing with the past: preservation and recovery. It has its own logic and its own validity in all societies. An alternative is to look at the past as a source of inspiration to create something new. Here, I am going to discuss both of these tendencies, but also argue that modern western society actually does neither. In everything from politics to culture, the “past” is reduced to raw material, to be processed and exploited for political and financial gain. Often, this involves the wholesale rejection of the real past, or its constant rewriting to serve agendas of power. In such a situation, I suggest, the disavowal of the past, or its reduction to raw material for political and financial exploitation, actually prevents anything really new developing. Socially, politically and culturally, therefore, we are stuck in a groove, and can only go round endlessly in circles, desperately seeking new and more extreme variations.

In the end, this inevitably turns into caricature: in the West, we don’t have politics, we have a caricature of politics, a cooperative satire on politics played not by politicians but by actors playing politicians, full of self-referential irony and the cynical  and facile manipulation of symbols and slogans from the politics of the past, when words actually did mean something. All we have left now is the politics and culture of exhaustion. Nothing “means” anything any more, everything is endlessly recycled.

As I have suggested, there are two types of healthy relationships with the past. The first is preservation, rediscovery and recreation. Sometimes, this is on a large scale. For example, our knowledge of the culture of Ancient Egypt comes overwhelmingly from the work of European archeologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who rescued fragments of priceless treasures from rubbish dumps and from under metres of sand, and painstakingly restored them, and learned to read the languages of the inscriptions. What you see in the British Museum, for example, is literally a recreation of the originals, from the pieces that could be found. Likewise, practitioners of experimental archeology today attempt to settle questions about the past through practical experiments  with tools and materials of the time.

The same approach applies at a more intimate level also. For example, one of the great positive cultural developments  of my time has been the rediscovery and popularisation of the techniques and instruments of Early Music, and in many cases of the works themselves. These days, no-one would expect to hear the Brandenburg Concertos played by a modern orchestra, as was the case until the 1960s, or the St Matthew Passion with a full choir. Entire lost worlds of music have almost literally been excavated, often from manuscripts in museums. For example, thanks to the work of William Christie and Les Arts florissants you can now see the operas of Lully and Rameau, forgotten for centuries, as they were intended to be staged. Similarly, from the sixties onward, traditional music of all kinds was rediscovered and rescued from atrocities committed by school choirs and well-meaning classically-trained composers.

Et cetera. Within this approach, there also has to be a certain humility, and a practical recognition of LP Hartley’s famous dictum that “the past is another country: they do things differently there.” Many of our current cultural problems come from ignoring this warning, treating figures from the past as though they were our contemporaries, and presuming to sit in judgement on them, without considering, perhaps, that one day the future may sit in judgement on us. This failure of understanding—what is described as “presentism”—isn’t new, of course. We only have to think of King Lear being “corrected” in the eighteenth century, or the nineteenth centuries rewriting or censorship of Shakespeare to suit a more refined and morally developed era. But recently it does seem to have got out of control.

The second (and sometimes complementary) type of healthy relationship is a dialogue with the past, which serves variously as inspiration, point of reference and something to oppose. This is most obvious in the area of culture in its widest sense, where artists and thinkers both take from, and react to, the past, much as TS Eliot described in Tradition and the Individual Talent, and much as he exemplified in The Waste Land, which he was writing at about the same time. “Modern” cultural movements such as surrealism, Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy or atonal music can only be understood in terms of rebellion against the intellectual climate their practitioners grew up in. (And the fact that none of these movements can really be described as “modern” these days is interesting in itself.)

But it applies also to political theory and practice. Until recently, political movements had history, iconography, martyrs and the development of ideas. They had achievements they could look back on, controversies that still aroused strong feelings, internal struggles they would prefer to forget, and great figures and great villains, heroes and traitors. The mass political parties of the Left, in particular, had an iconography resembling that of organised religion. (I still remember the stained-glass windows of the Humboldt University in what had been East Berlin, thirty years ago, with scenes from the lives of Marx and Lenin.) But all major political parties had histories, inherited cultures and traditions. These days they have advertising agencies.

Organisations do the same: it’s not idly, for example, that the militaries of the world cultivate traditions, that the units and ships in them retain the same names over decades and generations, and that new recruits are taught the history and traditions of the unit they have joined. It’s striking, but not unexpected, that the Russian armed forces have brought back much of the iconography of the Red Army during the war in Ukraine.

So long as there is an interplay between the past and the present, societies and organisations retain the possibility of change, adaptation and development. Once the past is forgotten or suppressed, they tend to go into automatic mode, even towards decadence and caricature, no longer sure what they are doing or why. But we live in western societies that have fully assimilated the Liberal disdain for history and the past, and its exaltation of the immediate present. The problem is that Liberalism, with its ferocious individualism, and its love of rules, laws, norms and cost-effectiveness calculations, provides no intellectual or moral framework for collective social development, except in the form of ever more aggressive individualism somehow mediated by ever more detailed and comprehensive laws and rules. The only way to evaluate culture is how well it sells. The only measure of success in politics is power acquired.  And you cannot maintain a society on that basis, still less develop it. The result is that caricature has become  the normal means of expression because that is all people know how to do.

Maybe this was always inevitable. It’s never been very clear what Liberalism actually thinks life is for, or what objectives, if any, we should have apart from an increase in our personal wealth and power. “Freedom,” the great Liberal cry since the beginning, is recognised to be an empty slogan unless you have the practical means to enjoy it. And what do we do with our “freedom” anyway?  (It’s striking that almost all of the key cultural figures of the nineteenth century were what we would now call “reactionaries.” Some were Socialists,  but none of them were Liberals.)

For example, Year One of the French Revolution (1792 as we would call it) represented more than the abolition of the monarchy and the founding of the Republic, it represented a new beginning for the entire human race. The past of traditions, religion, history, culture and superstition was to be swept away, to be replaced by a shiny new world of rational decision-making. Laws would replace customs, science would replace superstitions, light would replace darkness. What is interesting is that, in the absence of any effective political opposition in Paris, the Liberals simply didn’t know when to stop. The metric system, of course is a thing of wonder, and the adoption of the Centigrade system became permanent. But by contrast, the decimal day (ten hours of one hundred minutes each of one hundred seconds) only lasted until 1800. This was to be the pattern for the future. Eventually, the old reasserted itself : the Garde Royale became the Republican Guard of today, and even now the President chairs the Council of Ministers on Wednesdays, just like Kings used to do.

What has changed in the last generation or so is the absence of counteracting pressures. In the past, political and social structures were much less homogeneous than they are now. But surely you say, diversity, inclusivity blah, blah? Yes, but there is diversity and diversity. Superficial diversity of gender and skin colour, for example, for all that its proponents expected great things of it, has simply made an increasingly monotone political class more superficially varied. In the past, different tendencies, even in the same political party, had somehow to be reconciled. There was a limit to how far a political party (or for that matter a social or cultural movement) could go, without encountering opposition. The average political party then was a mixture of social backgrounds, education, local origins and professions, as well as divergent views.  Today’s political parties are more like playgroups where the children compete to demand attention, but don’t fundamentally disagree with each other. So the “anti-racists” have their toys, the “anti-sexists” have their toys, the environmentalists, the transexualists and others have theirs. The result is that everybody shouts as loud as they can, but there is no reality-check, other than the competition to get attention, and put one over your rival.

Thus, parties degenerate into unstable coalitions of politicians saying different and often conflicting things. It’s a universal rule that all political and cultural movements eventually wind up as caricatures of themselves unless some outside force intervenes, and indeed that is what we now see. When that is combined with contempt for history (or even knowing anything about history) and Liberalism’s habit of a priori reasoning from arbitrary principles, then indeed caricature becomes the norm.

Whilst careerism has always been a feature of politics, in most countries it was mixed with principles of some kind. These may have been questionable (defence of established power, for example), or purely identitarian (representing ethnic or religious groups) but in many cases, they did also reflect a genuine orientation towards life and politics. Famously, the great British Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell was the son of a prosperous manufacturer, but was turned to Socialism by the poverty he saw around him in his youth. It was not uncommon for political careers to begin like this, or to be shaped by the pressures of outside events. In countries like France and Italy, these pressures could be quite powerful: from the street, from trades unions, from the forces of reaction, and others.

All that is now gone, of course. The evacuation of all meaning from politics has produced a tidy, sterile, Liberal profession of technocratic power-seeking, where debates are only over points of detail, and where politics is now entirely about individual power, and in many countries, wealth. So how do you make a career in a political world where the permissible range of opinions is so narrow? Even where there are occasional genuine differences between parties, these tend to be small and largely rhetorical, and within each party the permissible expressions of these differences will be tightly controlled.

Well, if you want to stand out from the rest of your playgroup, you have to make a noise, and if necessary demand new toys or break the existing ones. So it’s become a convention, well illustrated by the various election campaigns in progress now, that major issues are not discussed, but that parties belabour each other furiously over trivial ones. In other words, politics has become caricature, because caricature is safe. And since none of this really matters in the end, it doesn't matter how far into caricature you go. Especially in these days of social media, the way to make a career is by being noticed, which often means taking a position more intransigent and extreme than the next person. In a traditional democracy, this would be bad for your career, but in today’s political systems the electorate doesn’t count: what counts is your ability to distinguish yourself from your peers.

Because political parties are now cut off from any living tradition, like old-established family companies taken over by Private Equity, their representatives have no commonly-agreed norms and no starting-points for debates. Politics today has a disturbingly random element, therefore, as politicians seize on subjects they think might benefit them, often without knowing about, or caring to find out about, the issues involved. What matters is making more noise than your rival in the same party.

This is particularly the case when politicians are committed to moralising causes. Now of course moral causes have always been part of politics, and we would be worse off without the stern moral convictions that led to old age pensions, free education or attempts at the relief of unemployment and poverty. But today’s causes are moralising in the sense that they begin from a sense of moral superiority over the rest of us, and their proponents seek power over us, by instructing us what to do. No intelligent traditional politician would have done this, but today’s politicians present themselves as morally superior beings, lecturing us on the basis of punitive norms that do not need to be proved, or even supported by facts, because they are inherently true. For example, you may have had the experience of being accosted by a glassy-eyed militant vegan asking you things like “I suppose you think it’s all right to murder animals and then cut them up and eat the burnt bits?” The obvious answer (“humans have been doing that for tens of thousands of years,”) will be ignored, because it doesn’t compute. Or the militant feminist who complains about “pressure to have children” without realising that otherwise she would never have been born.

The abolition of the past and the ignorance of any wider contemporary context correspondingly reduces most politics these days to slogans and soundbites, stranded in an ontological vacuum. This virtually guarantees that serious issues are either ignored, or reduced to the same superficial level. If you could somehow prevent our current political and media classes from uttering either the phrase “Israel has a right to defend itself” or”we must support Ukraine,” their mouths, and probably their brains, would seize up.

Of all the insights in Orwell’s 1984, none is more significant than O’Briens insistence that “the Party has no ideology.” The only purpose of the Party, he insists, is power: greater, more perfect, more refined power for ever and ever. We tend to forget that 1984 is at bottom a satire, and that Orwell foresaw, with terrifying clarity, what a world with professional politicians purely motivated by power would actually look like. Ideology exists in the book, but only as a tool for exacting obedience. Whilst the Party is a parody or caricature of power-hungry non-ideological politics, it seems a lot less of a caricature today than it did when the book was published. One of the Party’s mottoes, of course, was “who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past controls the future.”  Orwell was inspired primarily by the rewriting of history under Stalin, but perhaps he would not have been surprised to see the same method applied in modern western states, where the rewriting and censorship of history has become a major activity of interest groups everywhere and a source of bitter conflict between them, as they seek power and influence through control of reality.

The post-modernist idea of history itself as entirely plastic and malleable according to ideological taste (which contains a grain of truth of course) has been embraced with glee by modern political activists. The Internet has also enabled entire counter-histories to circulate with much more effect than in the past. In recent years, for example, I’ve run into people with extremely rigid and decided contrary views about subjects (say the origins of NATO, or the construction of the British and French Empires in Africa), where, within the normal limits of academic dispute, the facts are known, and the documents and the memoirs and the controversies of the time have all been studied. Typically, though, they could not say where their heterodox views were based on: they got them from somebody who got them from somebody, who … The construction of entire systems of counter-knowledge is now extremely easy, and lends itself readily, of course, to attempts at political control.

It’s not an entirely new phenomenon but it does seem to have been massively facilitated by the Internet. In a ground-breaking book a decade or so ago, two American political scientists showed that much of what people thought they knew about subjects such as human trafficking or casualties in war, especially as regards numbers, was not exaggerated, or subject to dispute, but simply made up. In other words nobody could actually discover where the allegations and the alleged numbers had originally come from. However, in many cases, the use of these alleged “facts” made groups, institutions and governments more powerful than would have been the case otherwise. As Winston Smith reflected at his desk in the Ministry of Truth, there was nothing easier than just making stuff up, especially if you then had the power to impose it as truth. And our historical horizons seem to be getting shorter and shorter. Perhaps a decade after the Kosovo crisis of 1998-9, I recall reading an article by a NATO Ambassador of the day who remarked casually that the NATO bombing campaign was provoked by the expulsion of ethnic Albanians into Macedonia, whereas, as he or she would certainly have known at the time, the reverse was true. From what I can tell this is the “authorised” version of the affair today. But even more recently,  I’ve come across polemical articles on, say, the origins of the Syrian civil war, whose only source seems to have been other polemical articles, and whose basic contentions are undermined by media stories that the authors themselves must have read at the time.

But this isn’t just another complaint about disinformation and censorship. I’m much more interested in the consequences. In the novel, we finally realise that it is O’Brien, and not as he insists Winston Smith, who is insane. Indeed, the whole Inner Party, and perhaps the whole government of Airstrip One is insane. O’Brien’s  insistence that there is no such thing as objective knowledge, (did Orwell have a time machine, one wonders?) that past and future do not exist, that reality is created by the Party and that the stars, for example, could easily be pulled down from the sky, are not a sound basis for running a country, and dealing with real problems, let alone wars. (It’s hard to imagine a regime that actually behaved like the Party surviving very long.) They do, of course, point up the satirical intent of the novel, but they also represent the caricatural end-state of processes already underway in Orwell’s time, and very visible in ours. Indeed, they are in a sense the logical end-product of an ideology which rejects and destroys all history, culture and tradition, leaving nothing except random a priori assumptions in their place.

And indeed, whilst today’s politicians don’t resemble O’Brien that much (they don’t have his intelligence, for one thing) they do share his solipsistic belief that the world revolves around them and their Party, that they understand everything and that if you don’t understand why they are right and you are wrong, so much the worse for you. After all, the modern political world is full of “advisers” and “consultants”, whose main function is to reinforce the narrative, and tell the Party Leader they are right, even if that is clearly not the case.

So France today seems headed for a major political crisis because a greatly disliked President thought he could frighten the stupid electorate into voting for him as an alternative to “chaos.” Now he’s desperately protesting that the populist-sovereignist National Assembly is “at the gates of power,” to which the obvious and immediate response is: Who put them there? Nobody forced you to call an election, you cretin. But this is the action of a politician who’s not only relatively young and inexperienced, but has consciously distanced himself from all French tradition and culture, who doesn’t understand and doesn’t like the French people. Any hack politician from the 1950s could have told him that identifying the eleven million French people who voted for the RN and its allies as extremists and enemies of the people might actually not be a wise idea.

Likewise, could you imagine a more cynical exploitation of the past than taking the name of the Popular Front, the great reforming government of 1936-37 of the Radicals and Socialists with tacit support from the Communists, and sticking the label on the ramshackle, vaguely “leftist” New Popular Front, which is kept together only by fear and ambition? Could you imagine, even as satire, François Hollande, who won the Presidency in 2012, where the Socialists were more dominant than at any time in history, pissed it all away, didn’t dare to present himself for re-election and left the Socialist candidate in the 2022 elections with less than 2% of the vote, nonetheless deciding the situation was so serious that he must offer himself to the nation again as a parliamentary candidate, and clearly sees himself as a future Prime Minister? That sound you heard was Satire slamming the door in disgust.

Over in the UK, people are still scratching their heads trying to understand why Rishi Sunak has called this week’s General Election. But perhaps it’s only the latest in a long line of stupid, ignorant decisions dating from at least David Cameron’s half-thought-out clever idea to hold a Brexit referendum without considering the possible consequences. After all, he couldn’t possibly be wrong, could he? An uncultured, narcissistic and ignorant ruling class has stumbled from error to catastrophe with all the arrogance of Orwell’s Inner Party. And, whilst I don’t normally speak about the US, not a country I know well, the degree of sheer incompetence demonstrated by the Clinton/Biden/Obama clique in recent years beggars belief.

But unlike the situation in 1984, here, the real world gets a vote, and it doesn’t like what it sees. The solipsistic, a priori, ideological mindset of modern western politicians, clutching MBAs but ignorant of everything that actually matters, may be the end of us all.

Thus, in the absence of countervailing factors, and with no account taken of the past, everything tends towards caricature. I’ll circle back at the end to talk about culture as culture again, but there are some interesting examples in other areas. Take the Islamic State for example: yes, really. Seen in this context, the IS is actually a caricature of violent political Islam, drawing not only on the tradition of mindless barbarity of the GIA in Algeria, but on video games, comic books and hate-filled online forums. It split from Al Qaeda originally over its preference for immediate, violent indiscriminate action rather than strategic targeting, and its first leaders deliberately established a “brand” of insane cruelty and violence to attract recruits away from the more conservative AQ. Interviews with jihadists, especially converts, showed that few of them had much knowledge of Islam, or its history, or even much of an interest. They were drawn to the struggle by romantic notions of apocalyptic combat and extreme violence. In some cases, the dismissal of the past, of culture and the wider context is explicit. Boko Haram, the informal name given to violent jihadist groups from northern Nigeria, could plausibly be translated as “we don’t need no education,” reflecting their fondness for attacking schools (especially girls’ schools) and slaughtering teachers and pupils. Whilst it’s hard to generalise, a lot of such groups display apocalyptic suicidal tendencies, much more than any discernible religious belief. Islam to Boko Haram, if you like, is what Socialism is to the British Labour Party.

In the West, the pressures of competition for media attention and funding, the lack of interest in history and the wider context, and the lack of any common culture for debate, also push political and campaigning movements progressively towards caricature. In this they faithfully reflect the dynamics of the Marxist groups of the 1970s, their structural if not always their ideological models, who were fond of proclaiming “there is no-one to the Left of us.”(Followed, of course by a split and the reply ‘“there is now!”) In the Grievance Space, for example, one of the most difficult things to deal with is tolerance. What do you do when you have achieved the acceptance you say you seek? Do you just close down, and hand back your funding? What would you do with your life then? Well, if recent experience is any guide, you deliberately seek confrontation through overt provocation, in an attempt to create new enemies and thus new threats to be countered.

Occasionally, this progression is very clearly visible. For example, since 1999, a form of legal relationship short of marriage—the PaCS— has been available in France. During the fraught debate that preceded the law the main question was whether it should apply to same sex couples (as was eventually the case.) Traditionalists and the Church argued that this would inevitably lead to pressure for homosexual marriage. Nonsense, replied the homosexual lobby angrily. That was a stupid and slanderous suggestion worthy only of fascists. Within a few years, of course, pressure for homosexual marriage duly began, and only fascists could then be against it. I don’t think it’s necessary to accuse the militants of hypocrisy: they were simply driven by the dynamics of their own situation and by ferocious competition in the Grievance Space to be more radical. And now, of course, there is pressure for the recognition of polygamy, and for female couples unwilling to have relations with men to purchase a baby carried by another woman. These initiatives have provoked a lot of debate in various countries, but can never be resolved, because there are no common cultural or ethical starting points for the debate, and in a Liberal society, personal satisfaction is the only relevant criterion admitted. Caricature is nothing to be afraid of: indeed in a perfectly egoistic world, it cannot even exist.

Culture, of course is what pundits like to call a “contested” concept, which is to say that it can mean different things to different people. However, most cultures before the modern western one had sufficient cultural commonality that even people who disagreed violently with each other at least recognised what the argument was about. Protestants and Catholics clashed fiercely about issues of doctrine, but shared a common set of assumptions. Monarchists and Republicans fought each other, intellectually and practically, but could respond to each others’ arguments. The long and bitter struggle in France against the influence of the Church in politics was conducted with an agreed understanding of what was involved, and the democratic and secular side had a clear ideology and a clear sense of what it wanted (as did the Church.) Today, there is no country with a coherent ideology for dealing with Islamic fundamentalism, which itself is very clear about the political influence it is seeking.

This is symptomatic of a wider problem, of course. Liberalism dismisses history, society and culture as anachronisms, and implicitly assumes that all debates can be rationally concluded: thus the desperate search for facile “indicators” and “benchmarks.” Ethical problems are settled by close scrutiny of legal texts. Now, whilst I think the degree to which the entire world has been “globalised” is greatly exaggerated, and is a product of the airport-taxi-English-speaking-hotel-and -restaurant school of analysis, it is true that in the West, culture in all its manifestations has now lost contact with any specific historical or social context, and consists of little more than freely floating signifiers unattached to anything very much. And as Olivier Roy has recently pointed out, there is nothing “popular” about all this. Liberalism has tried to abolish High Culture, on the basis that it is “élitist,” but it has abolished Popular Culture as well, through the globalisation of the entertainment “industry”(does that word seem strange to you?). Mass culture, which is what we have today, is essentially garbage forced on western populations for profit: Orwell’s “prolefeed.”

And that mass culture is now an exhausted caricature of itself: repetitive, self-referential, cut off from all its original sources of inspiration, mechanically producing trivial variations. Popular music, which has been consuming itself for decades, now threatens to become entirely virtual and AI-dominated. Want the album that The Doors never recorded after LA Woman? Here we are, just for you. (Listen to Rick Beato on this.) Not that so-called High Culture is better placed: those who work in the theatre, for example, are so distant from any tradition, that they thrash around randomly trying to be “transgressive,” and “interrogating” texts, forgetting that their predecessors have been doing this for a century already. Men playing women’s parts? Well, Shakespeare did that. Women playing men’s parts? Ever seen a pantomime? How can you possibly produce something “new” when you don’t know and don’t care what has existed before? I remember a couple of years ago watching a performance of a Racine tragedy by a respected troupe. It was set in what seemed to be a a concrete factory, and the cast were all dressed in tracksuits. What’s the point? I found myself asking. What are you trying to say? I doubt the director had much idea.

Caricature is becoming the characteristic mode of our culture, and we do not realise the extent to which it is caricature, locked as we are in our little solipsistic boxes, busily pursuing our own satisfaction. Caricature is the natural end-state of the Liberal society of the last forty years, but it is accompanied by a species of narcissistic political autism that prevents us from seeing it, still less developing a common basis on which to think and debate. Liberalism has destroyed Universities and both High and Popular culture. It has given us Cultural Studies in place of Culture, and MBAs in place of learning. It has produced probably the stupidest ruling class in history. Would we be better off if they all had Classics degrees rather than MBAs? I don’t know; but then, could it make things any worse?