The Land Surveyor

Religiosity in the UK over the festive season – Bishops wringing their hands

The Observer on the Sunday before Christmas carried articles in different parts of the paper by two British Anglican bishops which were both remarkable in different ways.

Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford started by giving a standard apologia of how religion was an anchor for cultural identity in a world of uprooted drift to anonymous urban living.  But his terms were remarkably downbeat, saying ambivalently of how “for good and ill, religious leaders still command communal loyalty in many parts of the world”, and how the growth of “spiritualism” in Europe is some kind of compensation for the decline of Christian faith.  He also talked of some sincere but, as he admitted, marginal pastor-led peace efforts in Palestine and Iraq as though these were some crumbs of recompense that religion was making for its central role in these and other conflicts. Harries seemed then to recommend religion as little more than offering solace, tranquillity and a spiritual dimension to life, lamely adding the proviso that Christianity also believes that “eternal wisdom…took shape in a particular human life,” Christianity as spiritualism-heavy so to speak.  Harries seems to want to celebrate the new salience of religion that is everywhere talked about now, but he is struggling with the fact that it is all happening in the wrong place.  Where he and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, want to see a Christian revival is in the liberal, socially tolerant democracies of western Europe, not in the middle east or the conservative areas of the United States.  But the closest they can come to finding a revival of this tolerant, liberal religion is new age spiritualism which, even they are forced to admit, is not really religion at all.

Elsewhere in the paper, Richard Holloway, the ex Bishop of Edinburgh, gave an interview on his latest book.  It is pretty clear that he has lost faith in anything like the revealed truth of the Christian message.  When he is asked why he does not come out as an atheist he responds: “I still think of myself as Christian, because I want to expand the envelope of Christianity to include people who no longer hold the thing as referring to a supernatural sphere, but who see it as essentially a great poetical, metaphorical narrative that tells us deep things about ourselves.”  Holloway reduces religion to the impulse towards charity which he sees in both Christianity and Islam, and to finding meaning “in the ways in which we relate to one another in the short time we have, without reference to eternity.”  His vision is essentially a humanist one, but which wishes to keep a link to the emotional and narrative power of religion, and particularly the narrow moral certainty of the injunction to be merciful.  The embodiment of the end point of this ex Anglican bishop’s journey of faith is a quote from a Russian philosopher, from which he takes the title of his latest book: “All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance.” 

What was striking to me about both the above articles was how lacking either of these bishops were in any kind of cultural or theological confidence in Christianity.  I know that both of these are members of the liberal wing of Anglicanism, but they are also amongst the most thoughtful exponents of attempts to defend Christianity to a contemporary, intellectually curious audience.  And just like Rowan Williams, they come across as terribly agonised, conscientious and well-meaning, but also as not at all persuasive in their defence of Christianity against the tide of secularism which has virtually submerged the Anglican church in England.

For me, the good take from this is that these hard-thinking Christians are lacking in such confidence.  The bad take, however, and it is one which any serious atheist knows well, is that the interesting conversations one has are always with intellectually curious Christians like these bishops, but these conversations are not the ones that matter in the current secular-religious culture war.  The Christians who are making cultural and political waves at the moment are the ones immune to the kind of reflection and doubt expressed by these bishops.  These reflections, however sincere and significant in terms of their assessment of what the Christian message can now stand for, will lie mustily in the archives of Episcopal libraries and the Observer and will make not a ripple on those Christians who now irrupt into our culture with increasing confidence.  My own lament, and many atheists will recognise it, is why these Bishops, whose doubts are so powerful and conclusive, cannot have the courage of their own consciences and make strong and forceful declarations of their apostasy.

Religiosity in the UK over the festive season – some Christmas Day TV

Hard on the heels of Bush’s re-election and the pervasive sense that religious America is on the march, I had mixed reactions to a series of religious irruptions into UK cultural life which I observed over the festive period.

Christmas Day itself on BBC1 saw an interesting progression through a devout and traditional midnight mass at a Roman catholic cathedral, a strongly religious broadcast by the Queen in mid afternoon, and then the irreverent Dawn French comedy, the Vicar of Dibley, in the evening.

The midnight mass was, as ever, a powerful reminder of the institutional and nostalgic attraction of religion.  All those carols, the choirboys piping the descant to the famous tunes, the cathedral, the sombre but reverent priests, the pews filled with an observant congregation, seemed to echo through the ages and to represent a kind of significant institutional authority and continuity in the UK’s cultural life.  The cosy symbolism of this religious ritual, with its suitably anodyne and goodwill-to-all-men sermonising, devoid of moralistic haranguing or proselytising zealotry, bolsters the lingering image held by a secularised nation of Christian religion as essentially a benign and warm part of our cultural heritage, and somewhat like the monarchy in being outdated and irrational but still somehow fulfilling an important sacral function in the self identity of the nation.

The following afternoon, on cue, we had the Queen’s Christmas Day broadcast, which she devoted entirely to the theme of the importance of religious values and the need for religious toleration.  Her message was a fine example of the “woolly Anglicanism” of a certain nostalgic, anglo-centric mindset.  The rituals and homely moralism of the Church of England are definitive for her of a certain idealised image of British society, and she indulges the quaint fantasy that the religions of Sikhs, Moslems, Hindus and other new immigrant groups are much the same thing as her own Anglicanism.  For her, the essential values of all religions boil down to “respect”, and, although she does not articulate this, to cultural conformity and docility within their communities.  Her idealisation of a modern multi-cultural Britain is where every community has its own religion-lite, inducing this conformity and docility but not lighting any fires of proselytising or theological confrontation (aka “fundamentalism”).  I particularly enjoyed the nicely symbolic coda to her message which showed a multi-ethnic choir of schoolchildren singing a blatantly Christian carol about a warm and loving Jesus.  Christianity was symbolised as itself being the most multi-culturally inclusive religion, and that behind the veil of the appeal to religious toleration was the idea that Christianity trumped other religions because it is less strongly identified with a specific cultural identity in the UK, and hence it can more effectively embrace all of these different ethnic identities.  In other words, toleration is fine as long as Anglicanism, with its capacity for incorporation and theological soft-soaping, is the dominant religion in the UK, which is the least you would expect from the Queen as the titular head of the Anglican church after all !

In the nature of television, these two traditional but markedly partisan presentations of religious practice were broadcast without any direct counter-presentation, but in the strange alchemy which is contemporary culture this counter-presentation did not wait long and was manifested in the form of the peak rating prime-time comedy of the evening, the Vicar of Dibley, which has become a Christmas broadcasting institution to rival the Queen’s own broadcast.  It ought to fall foul of any blasphemy laws that remain on the statute books, but its irreligiosity is served up in such a “loveable” way by bumbling characters, devoid of any edge or seriousness, that any outraged reaction would itself be seen by the British public as an example of poor taste and, worse, a sense if humour failure.  The local church is presented as the preserve of the retired or the unworldly, where sexual licence is the staple element of the comic narrative, without any condemnation, while religious themes when they are touched upon, which is rarely, are always done so with distinct irreverence.

I don’t want to be too portentous in analysing a sit-com, but I think the religious vacancy and irreverence at the heart of the Vicar of Dibley says something significant about the secular state of modern British culture and represents a powerful riposte to the midnight mass and the woolly pieties of the Queen.  The serious content of any religious message in the UK today elicits at first embarrassment and then simply refusal on behalf of most people.  But millions find amusement in the soft subversion of religiosity in the bumbling parish of Dibley, and the only thing that would shock them would be the suggestion that as a consequence of its evident blasphemousness it might somehow be considered offensive and under existing laws probably ought to be censored.

Political “clothes stealing” and a “fleet-in-being” theory of party politics

The UK Conservative Party leader, Michael Howard, complains that Tony Blair has stolen so many Conservative clothes that it has become virtually impossible for the Conservative Party to carve out a distinctive message on which to campaign in the 2005 election. 

Conservatives are trying to play up “tax bombshell” fears about New Labour’s spending plans and also to tap “little Englander” sensibilities with agitations against the EU and immigration.  But the political leverage of these issues, for now, is not large and they make a sorry compensation for the grand levers of political differentiation which sustained the Conservative Party in its long Thatcherite hegemony.  These levers comprised strong commitments to industrial competitiveness, restrained taxation, low inflation, tough policing and, most tellingly perhaps, robust atlanticism in foreign policy.  And as Michael Howard correctly complains, New Labour has stolen all of these clothes, leaving the Conservative Party with only a few threadbare rags which it can truly call its own.

The implications of this for the Conservative Party are not happy ones in the short term, but should, I think, be consoling in the longer term.  The Conservative strategy must be to remain as a “fleet-in-being” which acts as a constant threat to New Labour.  During the century of British naval hegemony, the “fleet-in-being” of first France and then Germany was never a one-to-one threat to British naval dominance, but simply by staying in port it committed Britain to deploy equal or superior forces in proximity to it, severely curtailing the freedom of deployment for the backbone of the British navy.  Similarly, Howard’s Conservatives cannot take on New Labour in open conflict and win, but they can tie it down and be ready to strike the moment it is weakened.

It is in this context that I don’t believe in a transformation of British politics whereby the Liberal Democrats emerge as the main opposition party to replace the Conservatives.  The Conservatives have strong underlying political appeal based on their commitments to the political levers alluded to above, and the tension in the Labour Party is always to move to the left with respect to these levers.  It is when a Labour leader can no longer discipline the Labour Party sufficiently for it to remain “conservative” on these levers that the Conservative fleet will emerge from Wilhelmshaven-on-Sea to assert a new era in party hegemony.  When this happens, the Liberal Democrats will be tussling with a weakened Labour Party for the left-liberal crumbs.

This analysis means of course that there is not much the Conservatives can actually do at the moment, other than keep themselves in a good condition to assert themselves when the ripe moment comes.  They need to preserve their integrity as a “natural” alternative government, and that means not polluting their brand with rash “tacks to the right” or dangerous flirtations with anti-EU nationalism.  And to this extent there is a danger for Conservatives that in this period of political wilderness the brighter centrist stars desert Party activity for more rewarding activities, leaving the Party in the hands of the Redwoods, and dare I say, the Howards, who, for all his recent transformation, still brands the Party as leaning towards its right wing.

However, the current success of the Howards and Redwoods partly reflects the poor likelihood of the Conservatives winning power in current circumstances.  The Party Membership have been self-indulgent in their choices, and with no real election winning prospects at hand, the Parliamentary Party and other shadowy string pullers have been too enervated to put up a fight. 

But I think Michael Howard is wrong in thinking that the question comes down to one of merely clothes stealing.  New Labour is riding an extremely fortunate wave whereby it is able to offer expanded social services and still keep headline taxation down.  This wave cannot continue, and Gordon Brown’s hubris is already being taunted by the latest public borrowing overshoots, suggesting some unpalatable choices will not be far away.  Similarly the Labour Party is deeply hostile to the atlanticist policy pursued by Blair, setting the scene for a potentially fatal rupture during Bush’s second term. 

New Labour have indeed stolen some Conservative Party clothes, and they feel they look very fine in them in this warm weather.  Come some winter storms though, and they may be discarding those blue raiments for something more comfortable and familiar, ready for Howard, or whoever might replace him, to pick them up, put them back on and raise that anchor in earnest.

Reaction to the US election – my positive and negative spin

My reaction to the US election was, like for many people, one of depression and deja-vu.  I had gone into election night with the foreboding familiar to any supporter of the England soccer team in a major tournament – having written off their chances after a lacklustre qualifying campaign, supporters’ spirits are lifted by a sudden finding of form in the first rounds, only to be dashed and deflated by the inevitable defeat in the latter stages of the knockout contest.  So yes, things were looking promising, but the polls were showing Bush with a slight lead and plenty could still go wrong, which of course it did, and by the time CNN was showing urban precincts in Florida swinging to Bush and tradesports.com veered from betting 70% for Kerry to win to 80% for Bush, I went to bed, awaking on Wednesday to find the bad dream was for real.

There is plenty to feel negative and depressed about this result, and I detail my principal negative thoughts further below, but there are things to feel more positive about as well, which I will explore first.

The positive spin

• The poisoned chalice and the pendulum effect.  One can take the view that the election did not represent any kind of secular shift in US politics.  The US electorate saw Bush as committed to “seeing the business through” in Iraq, the troops were strongly pro-Bush, and Kerry’s message on Iraq was opaque to say the least.  The Democrats were never going to comfortably “own” the Iraq war, something the electorate will have sensed, and a Kerry administration would have been hamstrung from the start by the problems of Iraq and the deficit.  As a friend commented, “some races you wish you could just sit out.”  The reasonable hope would be that in four years’ time there will be intense Bush and Republican fatigue and the Democrats will have a good chance of across the board electoral successes.

• Republican over-reach.  The combination of Bush trumpeting his mandate, the majorities in Congress, and the zeal of Republican true-believers in wishing to forge new realities ahead of any political consensus supporting them, could well lead to Republicans pushing a moral, tax-cutting and pre-emptive foreign policy agenda beyond the ability of even Karl Rove to stitch together an electoral coalition in support of it.

• Secular liberal trends.  One could characterise the victory of “moral” politics in the election as a kind of “last hurrah” for those conservatives still morally indignant about the sexual revolution.  The trend towards sexual liberalism was not started by government and will not easily be reversed by government.  The realities of a sexually liberated society do not stack up with the fearful prognostications of conservative moralists and hence there is a hollowness at the core or their politics.  There just is no widespread appetite in the US for going back to the 1950s and any electoral advantage from flirting with this idea might be exected to be short-lived.  The fact that conservatives are only successfully fighting gay marriage, rather than acceptance of gay sex for instance, shows how far they have already lost this battle.

• Bush support was not “whacko”.   It has been too easy for liberals to characterise the Bush administration as malevolent, incompetent and corrupt and for anyone who supports it to be somehow venal or stupid.  But in fact plenty of intelligent, down-to-earth and astute people supported Bush, and it was always a fatal weakness of much liberal rhetoric that this was simply not possible.  I first thought the election would go to Bush after the Republican National Convention, where a powerful display of moderate Republican support for Bush just gave the lie to the idea that Bush was an incompetent tool of crazy neo-cons.  Too many respectable and patriotic Americans were supporting him for this to ring true.  A lot of credit must go to Giuliani and McCain for standing square with Bush to bolster this image of solid, sensible support, but there were intelligent and moderate Bush supporters the country-over who would have provided powerful reassurance to less politically plugged-in voters that Bush was not the crazy danger he was being caricatured as.  Bush has, and needs to retain, the support of intelligent, moderate conservatives, and this will be some bar on how bad things can get for liberals.

• Hard-assed approach to global security.  It just may be the case that the aggressive, pre-emptive use of US military force is the best solution to the current crisis in the middle east, with its simmering threats to the security of Israel and to global oil supplies.  The case for this cannot be “proved”, but it is the essence of the neo-con idea that by the time a threat can be proved satisfactorily to the “reality based community” then it is too late.  This hard-assed neo-con approach is susceptible to self-deception, into becoming nothing more than blood-soaked neo-imperialism, but it could also in retrospect be seen to have been boldly pre-emptive.  We may never really get to know the truth of this, but the latter interpretation cannot simply be ruled out, and a willingness to believe in this was a cornerstone of Bush’s electoral support.

The negative spin

• Mendacity and nastiness of the Right.  Those of us who follow politics closely are acutely aware of the nature of much of the punditry and politicking of the Right during the election, something which I think the vast majority of the electorate were unaware of.  There is a positive spin in this to the extent that voters were not endorsing this mendacity and dirtiness because they were not conscious of it, but there is a negative spin in that there is a real threat to democracy from the way in which certain conservatives are prepared to play politics in order to gain power.   Bush and his leading supporters were not “straight-up” with the public about all of the reasons for the war in Iraq (the security power-play in the region has long term implications which are just not touched on in the mainstream public discourse), about the deficit (a deliberate “starving of the beast” to outflank any Democrat spending initiatives), the tax-cuts (portraying them as benefiting the middle class and small businesses), the gay marriage constitutional amendment (which had no chance of being enacted), to give just some examples.  The Swift Boat smear campaign, the naked partisanship from evangelical pulpits, the dangling of gay-baiting and anti-abortion red meat with no hope or intention of delivering on a back-to-the-1950s moral agenda, all leave a sour taste in the mouth about the mendacity of a Rovian conservative politics which was cheered to the rafters by plenty of commentators in the mainstream media and the blogosphere who should have known better.  Democrats have to stand for civility, forbearance and respect in political discourse, and for them to follow the Republicans down the Rovian path would be for them to lose their rasion d’etre.  But if Rove’s is the elixir for winning elections in the current US polity, then Democrats have plenty to be depressed and afraid about.

• Sense of being a politically exposed minority.  The Democrat coalition has long been seen as fragile, tacking together as it does urban liberals, socially conservative Hispanics and African Americans and parts of the white working class.  Perhaps the combination of security, moral values and Rovian tactics might be sufficient to sunder the Democrat coalition to the extent that it has no realistic chance of power without a major transformation of the political landscape.  Urban liberals would become a besieged minority in an America perhaps increasingly succumbing to a politics based on an appeal to patriotism and “religious values”, a kind of demagogic politics akin to Franco’s Spain or Peron’s Argentina.  And while one could expect liberal Republicans to balk at these comparisons, there are ample warnings from history to make them ponder their complicity in the fruits of Rovian politics.

• The transformative Republican gameplan.  In the 2004 election the Democrats were already significantly outflanked by having to take a patriotic position on an ugly neo-con war and a tax-raising, limited-spending position due to an ugly Republican deficit.  This outflanking could be seen as part of a deliberate Republican effort to transform the political landscape in a way which would make it hard for Democrats to win elections or, more significantly perhaps, to have much room for manoeuvre if they did win them.  With the more ample mandate and control over Congress that the Republicans now enjoy, it can only be a source of fear for Democrats what new projects will be undertaken to outflank them still further come the next elections. 

Conservative pragmatism – abortion as a case study

I want to set out here some thoughts on how changing attitudes to abortion can be interpreted by conservatives as either something to be accepted as resulting from political pragmatism (phronesis), or as something to be reversed as resulting from a liberal assault on traditional values.

Abortion shifted over the course of the 20th century from being a medically prohibited act which carried enormous social stigma to something which is now widely seen, up to a certain point in a pregnancy, as a woman’s right.

Judging from the way the right-to-life debate is framed today, one might be tempted to understand this change as resulting from a reduction in respect for the sanctity of life of the foetus, and hence the launch of the current culture-war to reinstate that respect. But it is not at all clear that the relaxation of abortion law resulted from an attack on the idea of foetal-sanctity in the late-mid 20th century. What there was though was a rapid dissolution of the series of prohibitions and taboos around pre-marital sex (especially directed at women), of which denial of abortion was merely one of the more stringent.

The change in attitudes to sex had many different and inter-related causes, including the invention of the pill, the mass unsupervised congregation of young adults in armed forces and universities, widening economic opportunities, feminism, a music-inspired rebellious youth culture, and also I would say a loss of authority by an “old order” whose values and practices were tainted by fascism and two cataclysmic world wars.

What might be a conservative interpretation of this process? On the one hand a conservative could pick up on the cultural value of “individualism”, which clearly became a motif of sexual liberation, and invoke a conservative, anti-liberal catechism to the effect that “individualism” has been given too much salience at the expense of, say, “the family” or “self-restraint”. The change in sexual attitudes could therefore be painted as the product of a programmatic liberal politics that was engaged on a rationalistic crusade to promote individualism without due care to the social fabric or respect for other cultural values. And similarly, the permission of abortion could be painted as an over-reaching liberal attempt to extend a politics of “individual rights” against the value of the “sanctity of life”.

The socio-historical record shows, however, a myriad of forces at work engendering these changes, forces which were not the result of agency at the political level with the intent of changing sexual attitudes, but rather developments which would appear to fall under the description of “spontaneous” or “organic” change. This points to a duality in the nature of conservative engagement under Cahoone’s thesis. On the one hand conservatives are to resist liberal progressive “dogmatism” which attempts to cut through the grain of so-called organic social processes, but on the other hand conservatives are also to be active participants in the pluralistic encounter which Cahoone is calling phronesis. Conservatives emphasise the value of what has endured, and consequently they must resist any change which seems to move too quickly or which might be portrayed as threatening certain goods, whether “the family”, “civil society”, “prosperity” or “patriotism,” and this is irrespective of whether the change originates in liberal rhetoric or in “spontaneous” cultural development.

And with sexual liberation one can clearly see themes of “excess”, “hedonism”, “licence”, “irresponsibility” and “threat to the family” which set conservative alarm bells ringing, and so as this social process develops conservatives jump into the breach to weigh in for cultural values that appear to be being threatened. And if phronesis is the process of applying practical reason, then this has to mean holding this rhetorical engagement to some kind of account. I would argue that today, at the beginning of the 21st century, the experience in the developed world has been that sexual liberation has not led to the debilitation of society that conservatives feared. Of course there have been large increases in divorce rates and in the number single parent families, but, and, surely this is the litmus test, most children are growing up well-adjusted and contemporary society is broadly prosperous, stable and at ease with itself.

So while one can sympathise with an initial conservative engagement against sexual liberation, one now looks to conservatives to make an accommodation with this development as their negative prognoses have not materialised. And more or less this is what one sees. Throughout western Europe conservative parties accept the reality of sexual liberation and no longer oppose divorce and abortion legislation, gay rights, and support for single parenthood, and this marks a significant change from where conservatives stood fifty years ago. This is phronesis in action.

But what then do we say about the strain of religious conservatism, which is particularly strong in the US, but also is present in Europe, particularly evidenced by catholic and evangelical protestant churches? This strain of conservatism wants to assert that divorce, abortion and homosexual acts, for example, are all definitive cultural “bads”. For this kind of conservative, old prohibitions on these are not to be seen merely as protections of civic goods like the “family” or “prosperity”, but as having an intrinsic status as values in themselves. Any lexicon of the “incommensurable goods” which make up the cultural whole will inevitably be contested, and it is surely part of the historical process that “goods” will drop in and out of this lexicon over time. Conservatives reject any kind of utilitarian or consequentialist calculus and want to retain purely deontological goods, but if conservatism is to embrace phronesis as a mechanism of social change, it has to accept that there will come a point at which a certain deontological norm might be rejected from the value lexicon. Not so long ago one “ought” to be a Christian, or a wife “ought” to obey her husband, and these were seen as intrinsic values in their own right, but now are no longer such.

The BBC showed last night a very moving news item about a campaign by disabled people to fight against the discriminatory abortion of disabled foetuses, centering on the pregnancy of a couple with cerebral palsy and the hostility they received for wanting to carry their child to term. Society regards it as completely normal and acceptable to terminate a physically impaired foetus, but all of the arguments made in favour of this normality ring hollow in the face of the obvious capabilities that disabled people have to enjoy fulfilling lives. Nonetheless, there is an incommensurability between love and compassion for a severely disabled child and a culture which idealises “normality” and “achievement”, and which idolises images of health and capability. There is a powerful incommensurability between a religious conservative’s respect for unborn life and the disrespect for individual freedom entailed by the kind of political intervention needed to force a woman to bring up a severely disabled child.

It is almost an axiom of conservatism that the empathy aroused by a particular case should not be allowed to sway “policy”, something conservatives demonstrate every day in their hardness towards criminals and the destitute at home and abroad. The empathy aroused by the harshness of abortion cannot be translated into making it a deontological “bad.” The balancing of “goods” which lies at the heart of conservatism cannot put an infinite weight on any one value, even on life itself. And while it seems disproportionate to weigh the life of an unborn child against the freedoms of a woman to pursue a career, or even just to enjoy an unencumbered youth, it is no less disproportionate than weighing the enjoyment of the cosmetic pleasures of a western consumer lifestyle against the legions of easily preventable deaths from poverty and disease the world-over.

And it is conservatism above all which wants to wall the garden of its privilege against the overwhelming ethical claims which are unleashed by a rhetoric of justice and proportionality.

Conservatism and "progress"

I’ve been enjoying reading Lawrence E Cahoone’s “Civil Society – The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics”, which I think is a very honest and thoughtful attempt to articulate a philosophy of contemporary conservatism. I plan to post a series of thoughts stimulated by his book.

A key problem for theorists of conservatism is the phenomenon of political and social “change”, given that the essence of conservatism seems to be about preserving the status quo and resisting a liberal reformist agenda. In response to this there are famous Burke and Disraeli quotes as to how a good conservative society needs to embrace change, and the favourite conservative trope for this is the organic or ecological metaphor – namely that of course change and adaptation are necessary, but these processes follow a natural and spontaneous path. While the metaphor appears an attractive one it suffers from the fact that its central idea is to deny a role for overt or “designing” political intervention, whereas in human societies it is precisely in the political realm that the enabling or legitimising of change takes place. How can one differentiate between political action which merely formalises “organic” developments and that which seeks to intervene premeditatedly “against the social grain” ?

Cahoone tries to rescue us from this paradox by positing that conservatism recognises that in any society there is an “incommensurability” between goods and that political action comprises an ongoing rebalancing between these goods based on continual practical learning. So, for example, the good of “self-autonomy” needs to be balanced against “civic order”, and one can see how this balance will shift with new technologies and even with new discoveries in social science (e.g. better understanding of the causes of criminal behaviour). Hence conservatism can be seen to be fluid and responsive and not hamstrung by the need to defend outdated practices. And Cahoone is robust in asserting that changes in social values, which may have evolved from a distinctively liberal and non-conservative political rhetoric, need to be accepted by conservatives as "de facto" part of the incommensurable set of social goods which politics sets out to balance.

A key element of Cahoone’s definition of conservatism is the demotion of politics. Pragmatic political action based on practical experience (phronesis) is to be seen as only a small part of what goes on in the civitas. Society is too complex and multi-faceted to be understood or articulated by the political sphere and the prime conservative opposition to liberalism is what it perceives as liberalism’s wish to use political action to “redress” and “reshape” aspects of society based on a rationalistic set of premises. It is the consistency-driven application of liberal principles, the prioritising of a value like “equality” or “liberty” above, say, the value of “cultural continuity” that Cahoone’s conservatism is most resolutely set against.

I’m not sure how easy it will be to distinguish between a politics of progress based on phronesis from one based on more programmatic liberal reforming zeal, but I think it is a nice attempt to articulate how conservative politics can embrace progressive change. And it also admits the reality of conflict in society, which some conservative theorists seem to ignore.

Incommensurability between goods means that value conflicts are part and parcel of the social world and Cahoone’s acceptance of this leads him to talk of conservatism’s intrinsic pluralism. However, what I am sure that conservatism wants to reject is the notion of anything like, say, class conflict. Class conflict implies the kind of struggle whereby the social order is only held in place by the ongoing strength of one class relative to another, but that should this strength reverse, then the outcome of the struggle would be a wholesale remoulding of the social order. The conservative emphasis on the authority of inherited practical experience and on the organic, ecological metaphor means it has to reject any notion of conflicts latent in society which could lead to wholesale transformation. So it is I think a key premise of Cahoone’s conservatism, and it reverberates for me with what I have heard many conservatives say, namely that politics should be anodyne. Politics should be about economic management, incremental rebalancing, but emphatically not about anything one might call a political movement. And of course what Cahoone does not address, though it is the elephant in the room for any conservative theorising, is privilege, and how the notion of an anodyne politics and an organic social metaphor plays above all to defence of privilege.

Respecting conservative interests

Everybody has conservative interests. In a world of inequality and in which the individual and his circle of intimates are fragile specks in the long durée of history and politics, everyone has an interest in the defence of their particular privileges and in a political calmness that provides order against the potentially climactic tides of history.

Based on their inherent conservative interests, the populations of modern democracies share strong conservative political impulses, hence Tony Blair´s rightwing New Labour party and the conservative nature of both the Democratic and Republican parties in the US. The basic list of these conservative impulses is obvious and barely needs enumerating: an attachment to property rights and to opportunities for private wealth creation, support for a strong economy, for relatively low taxation, for a strong state capable of behaving robustly in international affairs, an aversion to what one might call “government-knows-best social engineering”, and perhaps most importantly, the conservative impulse which wants to resist morally high-minded calls for ever greater social justice, either on a national or on a global level.

“Liberal” politics is distrusted, and very vehemently distrusted in some conservative circles, because the moral high-mindedness in which it frames its discourse is wide open to radical transformative agendas. And the one thing that conservatives know, their Berlin´s Hedgehog as it were, is that they don´t want things to change very much.

But importantly, there are also what we might call “social democratic” impulses too. In Europe especially, and you feel this tangibly in for example France, Spain, Germany and the UK as well, there is a strong attachment to the social democratic state, whereby education, healthcare and welfare are available to all, and that for all the inequalities that persist in these societies, some minimal “fairness” and redistribution is necessary and desirable.

However, I would maintain that part of the tension in the political circus that entertains us every day between liberalism and conservatism is an hypocrisy whereby social democratic affections are strongly felt and expressed, but that conservative interests remain paramount even in the minds of most self-professed liberals.

Conservatives as "guerilleros"

I want to say that any critique of conservatism should not be one that aims at its lack of consistency, at for example the blatant contradiction of its strong support for capitalism and its rhetoric of abhorrence at any “change” which might disturb communities and values (capitalism of course being the cause ne plus ultra when it comes to upsetting established social organisation).

Rather I want to say that conservatism is really a politics of attack, mockery and denigration of progressive politics per se, and that this is neither incoherent nor cynical.

It is a strategy born out of a belief that progressive politics contains an enormous capacity for unleashing volatile and unpredictable social change, and change based not on a sanguine appreciation of the benefits vs. the costs of launching such an effort, but on a moral high-mindedness, a wilfulness borne of its sense of its own virtuosity, and that it is very difficult to attack this progressive politics head-on, given the emotive appeal within political discourses of notions of justice, fairness etc. Hence, rather than engage directly with the progressive calls for greater social justice, conservatism acts to discredit progressivism on all sides, raising haunting spectres of social upheaval or conjuring nostalgic images of a god-fearing contented social order.

The key question for liberals is how to prosecute any kind of progressive agenda when the charge of Jacobinism against progressive rhetoric is, I believe, essentially a correct one. How far do progressives want to go, and what are the causes they will fight for and those they will surrender instead to a “gradualist” rhetoric of inertia?

Is Hollinghurst really a good literary writer?

I can't imagine I am alone in finding Alan Hollinghurst's prose style affected, but worse than that, as really dull. He writes like I would find myself writing if I was trying to give a ponderous literary-sounding sheen to some commonplace description or observation, and as such I actually find it almost laugh-out-loud embarassing. And to hear all the fine praises he gets, now in abundance after winning the UK's premier fiction Booker prize. Put to one side the snobby upper-class, high-art milieu he seems to find so intriguing (reminds me of Jeffrey Archer brand name inserts more than anything else), but I just think he doesn't stand one second's comparison with any of the really good writers of crackling prose.

The Guardian has helpfully printed an extract from his Booker prize wining novel, and as an illustration I'm going to set it side by side with some randomly chosen passages from Saul Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March" and Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrrections". Yes I know these are top of the pile books, but Hollinghurst has just won a major prize, and my point is not just that he is not as good, but that he is laughably not within a lifetime of getting close.

Here's Hollinghurst from "A Line of Beauty", chosen by the Guardian: (my marking in bold )

When the women had gone, he went back upstairs, but in the remorseless glare of the news, so that the flat looked even more tawdry and pretentious. He was puzzled to think he had spent so much time in it so happily and conceitedly. The pelmets and mirrors, the spotlights and blinds, seemed rich in criticism. It was what you did if you had millions but no particular taste: you made your private space like a swanky hotel; just as such hotels flattered their customers by being vulgar simulacra of lavish private homes. A year ago it had at least the glamour of newness.

Now it bore signs of occupation by a rich boy who had lost the knack of looking after himself. The piping on the sofa cushions was rubbed through where Wani had sprawled incessantly in front of the video. The crimson damask was blotted with his own and other boys' fluids. He wondered if Gemma had noticed as she sat there, making her inanely upsetting remarks. He wasn't letting her in here again, in her black boots. Nick felt furious with Wani for fucking up the cushions. The Georgian desk was marked with drink stains and razor etchings that even the optimistic Don Guest would have found it hard to disguise. 'That's beyond cosmetic repair, old boy,' Don would say. Nick fingered at the little abrasions and found himself gasping and whooping with grief ...

I mean the passage is full of cliches, lazy phrases and portentous but meaningless judgements . The conceit about hotel decor is an obvious and boring one, and even the idea about all the boys stains etc. on the fancy furniture is somehow just contrived and uninteresting. There's nothing to smile, chuckle, or sit upright for in any of it, but plenty to groan and wince at.

So for comparison, two masters, who would never use "inane", "tawdry" or "conceitedly" where some thick narrative description should be doing the work instead. And also you can feel a totally different verve compared to the winsome detached self-regard that pervades Hollinghurst's narrative voice.

Here's from Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March", fourth random passage I looked at, but pretty much anything would be great:

I took a room on the South Side, in a house on Blackstone Avenue, four flights up, three of mingy red carpet and one of thready wood, up in the clumsy dust, next door to the can. Here I wasn't far from the Nelson Home, and as it was Sunday morning when I set myself up and I had time, I went to visit Grandma Lausch. By now she was almost like everyone else in the joint, to my eyes having lost her distingusihing independence, weakened, mole-ish, needing to look around for her old-time qualities when she greeted me, as if she had laid them down, forgetting where. She didn't seem to recall what grievances she had against me either, and when we sat down together on a bench in the parlor, between some silent old people, asked me, "And how is - is 'jener', the idiot?" She had forgotten Georgie's name, and it horrified me; yes, it sent me for a loop until I remembered to think how small a part of her life compared with the whole span she had spent with us, and how many bayous and deadwaters there must be to the sides of an old varicose channel.

And here's Franzen from "The Corrections", randomly looking for a piece of description, this from pg 452:

Cindy had gone thick around the middle and looked, Denise thought, far worse than she had to. Her features were lost in foundation, rouge and lipstick. Her black silk pants were roomy at the hips and tight at the ankles. Brushing the cheeks and weathering the tear-gas attack ofCindy's perfume, Denise was surprised to detect bacterial breath.

Cindy's husband, Klaus, had yard-wide shoulders, narrow hips and a butt of fascinating tininess. The Muller-Kaltrau living room was furnished with baroque loveseats and Bierdemeier chairs in sociability-killing formations. Softcore Bougueraus or Bouguerau knockoffs hung on the walls, as did Klaus's Olympic bronze medal, mounted and framed beneath the largest chandelier.

Gary Younge on the US election in the Guardian

I don't want to make it a theme on this blog to react to horrors committed by columnists in the Guardian - it is my paper of choice after all - but this one today was a shocker:

Writing about the US election, Gary Younge sees the prospect of Bush getting re-elected and asks what should we think of the US electorate if this happens. He doesn't want to call them stupid (that's nice of him) but clearly he thinks there can be no good case for actually choosing Bush. So if he wins it must be down to - wait for it : "a lack of much of an electoral alternative", because Kerry also supported the war in the Senate, and he likens the choice between Bush and Kerry to that between Chirac and Le Pen in the last round of the French Presidential election.

I would just ask him why Kerry won the Democratic nomination ? It seems obvious that it was because he was seen as the candidate most likely to win the election, and that if a strident anti-war candidate like Dean had been chosen there was a strong fear that he wouldn't have had a chance of winning against Bush. And this was a political calculation based on a more comprehensive understanding of the US electorate than Gary Younge's.

How can a key commentator for the Guardian on these elections be so crass in his analysis, and only 4 weeks away from the election? Thank god for blogs so we can easily read sensible stuff !