The shopping mall that is Van Diemens land

February 10th, 2009

The suburban dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.

Wrote J.G. Ballard in Kingdom Come, in fact Ballard’s novel is an excorciating critique of the tail-end of the consumer society.

Look around you Mr Pearson. We’re facing a new kind of man and woman – narrow eyed, passive, clutching their store cards. They believe anything that people like you care to tell them. They want to be tricked, they want to be deluded into buying the latest rubbish. They’ve been educated by TV commercials. They know that the only things with any value are those they can put in a carrier bag. This is a plague area, Mr Pearson. A plague called consumerism.”

You get the point. Curiously reading this caused me to seek out The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid

A gut reaction, to my own feelings in reading, Ballard’s words and those also of Phillip Blond, mentioned by Madeline Bunting yesterday.

The janissaries of the Ottoman empire were captured Christian boys trained to fight against their own people, which they did with singular ferocity. This interesting class of warrior is described during a business lunch to Changez, the young hero of Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, at a moment of crisis over his own identity. Born in Pakistan, educated at Princeton and currently the hottest new employee at a New York firm specialising in ruthless appraisals of ailing companies being targeted for takeover, Changez recognises himself in the description. “I was a modern-day janissary,” he observes, “a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine …”

The recognition completes a process of inward transformation that began when he realised he was half-gladdened by the World Trade Center attacks, and it now prompts him to sabotage his own high-flying career, to give up his pursuit of the beautiful, troubled Wasp princess Erica and go back to Lahore.

For me this is the backdrop to perhaps some of the biggest, and perhaps intractable problems of our current society. Loss of identity, belonging, and community – with all its subsequent fallout, coupled with a economic system failure, which is a symptom not the cause.

Bunting writes, in reference to Phillip Blond who has been taken to the Tory bosom (by some).

This is the kind of politics we should be watching very closely: not the Elysée or Westminster, but what is happening on the fringes of mainstream politics where new ideas and new people are emerging in response to the spectacular collapse of an economic model. In times of such disorientation – policies that were madness only months ago are now part of the consensus – there is a scrabbling around for fresh ideas and new faces. The anxiety and loss of self-confidence now gaining hold across the developed world is feeding disillusionment with those who have presided over the mess and fuels the need for leaders who can describe a vision to put things right. Barack Obama is likely to be only the first beneficiary of a political world in which the impossible becomes possible. Both for good and bad.

And why is that?

Phillip Blond labels himself a ‘red conservative‘, proposing a popular capitalism which respects traditional values, local communities and allows the ‘little man‘ to participate in the econonomy, as opposed to neoliberalism, socialism and communism. Blond considers that a true conservative should reject present-style capitalism because it has increasingly concentrated ownership to a few ‘oligarchs‘ and created a dispossessed group at the lower level of society, thus preventing many ordinary people from maintaining their own lives and communities. Blond argues the economic gap has widened during the last 30-40 years and the development is similar to that of the 19th century.

Blond is a prominent figure in the ‘radical orthodoxy‘ school of theology and a fervent critic of secular liberalism. He argues that liberalism is equivalent to moral relativism, and that liberal politics can therefore only be actualised through power. Against this, Blond proposes a radical rediscovery of core Christian values. In a number of articles in The International Herald Tribune and The First Post, he has demonstrated this by opposing abortion and secular tolerance of Islam.

One of the themes of my current thinking is that one of the reasons we are driving technology hard towards products and tools that amplify human talents for cooperation is because we desperately seek meaning and identity in a world that forces us to quest for identity and meaning. Social isolation can be as harmful to your health as smoking or a sedentary lifestyle. A large part of this effect is driven by the subjective sense of social isolation called loneliness. New research shows that human beings are simply far more intertwined and interdependent—physiologically as well as psychologically—than our cultural prejudices have allowed us to acknowledge. And I wonder, as a consequence we begin to be slowly but reluctantly radicalised.

George Monbiot has always interested me, yet I have found his particular strain of criticism more of a mouthful that was often comfortable. However, today, I feel his critique to be more bullseye, than fringe. In writing about taxation, Monbiot states,

Suddenly I see it as an imposition. Its purpose has reverted to that of the middle ages: subsidising the excesses of a parasitic class. A high proportion of the taxes I pay will be used to bail out companies which, as the Guardian’s current investigation shows, have used every imaginable ruse to avoid paying any themselves.

I think that for many people this is the final blow: the insult which seals their alienation from the political process. The small Welsh town where I live, many of whose inhabitants are among the very poor, was once a haven of progressive politics, built from nonconformist religious sects and a long tradition of social solidarity. People from these valleys were transported to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) for demanding the vote.

and warming to his theme, of broken politics

Consultations are rigged. Citizens’ juries are used to lend a sheen of retrospective legitimacy to decisions already taken. The Big Conversation turned into a lecture. LabourList, mercilessly satirised by Catherine Bennett in this week’s Observer, seeks to create a grassroots movement where no grassroots exist.

But I doubt that the government could revitalise politics, even if it had the best intentions. If the people of this country are to be mobilised, if new life is to be breathed into politics, we have to do it ourselves.

Richard Sennett, in his book The Craftsman argues that we want to,

recover something of the spirit of the Enlightenment on terms appropriate to our time. We want the shared ability for work to teach us how to govern ourselves and to connect to other citizens on common ground.

It is why I suggest Blond’s ideology is so profoundly affecting in these times. And the new generation of today, the millenials, are typically stereotyped with the characteristics of generation X. They are expected to have no ideology, to have no political engagement and not to come to action. But, 2008 has been the year, in which reality has overtaken the stereotype, at least on the political side of society, and in which the millenials have shown to truly be a new generation that does have civil inclination. So you have a ready population, and a refined ideology. In Consilience. The unity of knowledge by E.O. Wilson, he refers to Michel Foucault, who he describes as the great interpreter of political power in the history of ideas. Wilson quotes George Scialabba’s interpretation of Foucault,

“Foucault was grappling with the deepest, most intractable dilemma of modern identity… For those who believe that neither God nor natural law nor transcendent reason exists, and who recognise the varied and subtle ways in which material interest – power – has corrupted, even constituted, every previous morality, how is one to live, to what values can one hold fast?” This particular conversation, it seems to me, now holds centre stage… In the Reluctant Fundamentalist, it is revealed that the real fundamentalism at issue is that of US capitalism, specifically that practised by (the central character) Changez’s former employer, Underwood Samson, whose motto, as they do their pitiless bit for globalisation, is “Focus on the fundamentals”. The subverted expectation very efficiently forces one to reconsider one’s preconceptions about such words and their meanings, argues James Lasdun. And that again fuels Blonds particular trajectory of thinking, which becomes a debate about what type of society we want to live in.

The key to understanding Blond’s thinking is that he is reviving a long-neglected tradition of English radical conservatism that goes back to William Cobbett and John Ruskin and which last flourished before the second world war in the thinking of GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. If you are thinking that this kind of stuff can hardly be relevant to our current predicament, think again. From this tradition emerged a passionate attack on both the power of the state and the power of big business. Belloc’s argument in The Servile State was that both capitalism and socialism enslaved the masses to their dictates.

Blond picks up these strands of conservative communitarianism and links them to two current critiques. The first is an attack on his own party’s hallowed faith in Thatcherite economics: it’s bust, argues Blond, and led to a form of monopoly capitalism which enriched only a tiny oligarchy. The second is an attack on the managerial technocratic welfare state which has destroyed the mutualism of the working class – and here, he owes much to Ferdinand Mount’s thoughtful Mind the Gap. Third, he attacks liberalism for promoting atomised individualism and moral relativism.

Britain, with its 1000 year history, has known many violent struggles, I am not preaching violent struggle, I merely point out that we can be a belligerent lot, once we get the bit between our teeth. As J.G. Ballard points out

‘A plague area,’ I repeated. ‘Can I ask what the cure is? I take it you plan to fight back?’

‘Believe me yes. We’ll fight back. I can assure you we have already started…’

‘So you are going to riot then?’

‘A riot?’ She beckoned me to the staircase outside the canteen. ‘Mr Pearson, people don’t riot in Surrey. They’re far more polite, and far more dangerous…’

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