the British culture wars

One unexpected effect of the financial crisis is that it has brought the culture wars to Britain. The legacy of the 1960s hangs heavily over the US, with a mass theo-political movement dedicated to attacking and undoing it, which emerged almost as soon as the decade was over. But where the US has been divided over such fundamental questions as the moral rights of a foetus, we British have now joined in with some slightly less metaphysical questions, such as "have the baby boomers screwed up the pension system?"

Matthew Taylor has a blog post referring to some of recent contributions on this topic, and there is also a new book which develops the attack on my parents' generation from the position of a twenty-something. I look forward to Matthew's forthcoming Radio 4 program on the 1960s. There is something quite telling that, where Americans have spent decades committing acts of terrorism upon one another due to their polarised relationships to the 1960s, the British have only now started to argue about this due to impending downward mobility. We never really cared whether they were selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man, until now after Woolworths has been sunk by economic crisis.

At the risk of getting all 'meta' on this issue, what it typically misses (and this is also true of the American culture wars) is that the liberal middle class baby boomers successfully frame both sides of this argument: it's always presented as 'for or against personal freedoms'. In the US, conservatives now run with this even further, by framing religiosity and tacit racism in terms of individual freedoms. Surely a real critique of the 1960s would de-centre our assumptions about the decade, highlighting how few people ever won any personal freedoms, how few people speak the language of personal freedoms, how few people want them, and how politically weightless and inconsequential they are anyway. George Irvin has a point.

It's always values. Values, values, values. But if you insist on viewing the world in terms of 'values', you will be left with the polarity of psychoanalytic politics on the one hand ("should I let my daughter stay at her boyfriend's?") and theological militarism on the other ("is it still right for me to wage war in defiance of the United Nations, evidence and law?"). The word 'values' always leaves me with the impression that what purports to be a moral concept is in fact an aesthetic one, namely taste, or perhaps even an economic one, namely preference.

I wouldn't be the first to highlight the overlaps between neo-liberal economics and 1960s liberal emancipatory discourse, but consider this. For Milton Friedman, there was no philosophical difference between a moral commitment and a desire (i.e. between the normative and the aesthetic, or the psychoanalytic if you prefer). Both are things that spring arbitrarily from one's brain, and therefore my right to pursue some moral project such as 'justice' is no different from my right to pursue some other type of preference or taste, such as cocaine. But only the market can ensure that I am free to choose which of these I exert my energies upon. 'Values' are therefore what's left up to the individual to work through, select and pursue, after society has been appropriately reorganised by a set of invisible elites. This is neo-liberalism in a nutshell.

As I wrote of Mad Men, there are some important contributions to the de-centering of the sixties we need. It's a tragedy that Tony Judt has left us just as this debate is developing in his home country. Where else can we look? Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias is now out, which pointedly begins with a recollection of a Berkeley seminar of wide-eyed hippy draft-dodgers in the early 1970s, but then goes on to lay out the blueprint for a very different sort of leftist politics. Rather than obsess over values (which, as Thomas Frank and Boltanski & Chiapello have brilliantly demonstrated, is something that business leaders and gurus are also endlessly happy to join in with) Olin Wright's new project is focused on institutions, experiments, innovations, case studies and visible structures. It's quite close to the civic republican approach of Stuart White and others. I offered some further thoughts on how the left might move beyond the respective traps of moralism, nostalgia, utilitarianism and ideology. 

The boomers still want to have a debate about whether their values were right or not, whether they were  liberating or anti-social. Did sexual freedom unleash a new era of expression and female autonomy, or did it destroy the family? Did cultural hedonism overthrow the shackles of wartime austerity, or un-do the very basis for community? How about this, boomers: maybe it was neither. Maybe casual sex is neither life-affirming and liberating, nor immoral and self-destructive, maybe it's just casual. And maybe the bored 30-year-old smoking weed in front of an action movie is neither sticking it to the man, nor falling into the crevices of a broken society, but simply trying to forget about his boring job. Could it be that the real legacy of the boomers is neither anarchy nor utopia, but a sort of masturbatory tedium of people wondering which itch to scratch next? This is what Mark Fisher defines as neo-liberalism's "depressive hedonia... constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure."

We need more bridges out of the arbitrary moralistic language of values, and into the political-economic language of institutions, governance, ownership, consumption and work. Part of this involves recognising how those bridges have been strategically dismantled since the 1960s, such that advertising and managerialism generates a closed loop of economics and psychology (centred around the self, desire, incentives, dreams, identity, efficiency etc), which remains safely insulated from sociology (centred around inequality, power, government, authority etc). People who either praise or criticise the legacy of the 1960s, but only in terms of what it meant for the individual, have not found a critical position external to that of the boomers themselves.

The question that interests me, at this juncture, is how sustainable this 'for or against the 1960s' really is, or how much mileage there can be in this 'my values are better than yours' wordplay. At a certain distance from the nineteen bloody sixties, a less hysterical aestheticised version of the New Left might appear, which is interested in institution-building and the promotion of positive political-economic freedoms, via carefully designed structures and templates. This, for example, is where Olin Wright appears to have got to. I enjoy whinging about baby boomers as much as the next man, but lets not attack them in the same values-based, de-politicised language that they themselves invented.

Comments

[Paul Sagar]

Really good post, I just have one non consequential point; that as Tony Judt himself noted [somewhere in Reappraisals, can't remember exactly where] it was actually the period c.1968-75 that caused all the trouble, and thus talk of "the 1960s" is curiously historically ignorant - albeit extremely widespread and now standard shorthand - in this respect.

[Dick Pountain]

Excellent post, marvellous summary of the problem, which I prefer to think of as "crypto-moralism": an attitude that pretends to be transgressive of all taboos, but actually contaminates everything with judgements of taste. David Robins and I tackled this from a different angle in our book
"Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude" in 2000.

[Will Davies]

Thanks, both. I'll try to investigate these references. As far as Paul's point is concerned, clearly the key year in the US is that of Roe v Wade (1973).

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1333366645]

"The word 'values' always leaves me with the impression that what purports to be a moral concept is in fact an aesthetic one, namely taste, or perhaps even an economic one, namely preference."

Exactly. What's so depressing is that I find people are unable to escape this way of viewing both economics and politics...

[Chris Williams]

Good post. I have a 500-word review of Heath and Potter's _Rebel Sell_ which I did for Red Pepper knocking around - can I post it in the comments here?

[Will Davies]

Chris - by all means, post away

[Chris Williams]

Jospeh Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: why the culture can't be jammed (Capstone Chichester 2005) 351 pp.

review by Chris Williams

"Do you hate everybody in a suit?" Nicky Wire once asked the crowd, halfway through a Manic Street Preachers Gig. "Yes!" came the answering roar. "Well Nye Bevan wore a suit – and he founded the National Health Service" replied Wire.

Heath and Potter's book essentially reprises and expands this point. They trace the way that, beginning in the 1960s, a strain of 'leftist' thought arose which became a fully fledged counter-culture. Despite sharing the left's concern about many social issues, its response to these was inevitably to refrain from engaging with them, on the basis that the only possible solution was a total transformation of society. From there, it was only a short step to the abandonment of any politics save those of identity: only the personal was ever political, and 'mass society' was the enemy. Deviance in any form was seen as dissent, the exotic was uncritically embraced, and nobody noticed that 'rebellion against aesthetic and sartorial norms is not actually subversive'.

Many exponents of the counter-culture claimed that its message would have struck home had it not been continually co-opted by 'The Man'. But Heath and Potter turn this theory upside down. In a world where consumer spending is increasingly driven by desire to buy positional goods, and cool is the new status, the desire to be an individual and stand out from the (square) crowd is one of consumer capitalism's most powerful motors.

The main problem with Heath and Potter's work (other than their complete misreading of the film American Beauty) is that their welcome rejection of change through dressing like a clown is accompanied by a rejection of the possibility of any change at all beyond social democratic reformism applied to a fundamentally benign market. They have brought into the fallacy exposed by Paul Omerod: that because a perfect market would be efficient, therefore the closer we get to a perfect market, the greater the efficiency. They've also failed to notice that the 'cyberlibertarians' they despise are currently fighting effectively against a new resource-grab in the shape of digital intellectual property laws.

The correct riposte to the consumerist delusions of No Logo and Adbusters has yet to be written, but it's worth buying Rebel Sell anyway, to read lines like: 'countercultural rebels have functioned for decades as the 'shock troops' of mass tourism', 'the hippies didn't need to sell out in order to become yuppies. It's not 'the system' that co-opted their dissent, it's that they were never really dissenting', and my favourite: 'consumerism always seems to be a critique of what _other people buy_.'