is this how you become a conservative?

As the old adage has it, if you're not a socialist in your youth then you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative in age then you have no brain. I'm 30, so perhaps I'm at the point where you flip.

Modernity, at least of the 20th century variety, tends to involve intractable clashes of values between one generation and the next. For most people born before 1930, the civil rights movement, feminism and the demand for personal freedoms would have looked morally outrageous and a threat to social peace. The conservative ascendancy in the US and the UK in the late 70s was a direct response to this, driven by a sense of urgency that society had lost its moral rudder or cultural limits. Many of those who missed the 60s could be portrayed - quite rightly - as racists or sexists by the younger generation, but the latter could themselves be portrayed - equally rightly - as selfish and amoral. It is, after all, these liberal-by-default (i.e. too interested in the property market to care about ethnicity one way or the other) hedonists who put their own cultural representatives in the White House and Downing Street during the 1990s.

Yesterday I was giving a talk on the egocentricity of the digital revolution (following all this stuff), and afterwards stood around chatting to some media lecturers, all seemingly left wing intellectuals. They were dolefully discussing how their students showed no interest in criticising brainless, celebrity-obsessed and pornographic magazines, deeming it to be purely a matter of choice what one reads, and whether a woman chooses to be photographed naked. One of these academics said that it is only around five years since every class contained at least one out-spoken feminist, but that these have either disappeared, or been silenced by a new majoritarian view that it is arrogant/pretentious to take up political positions in such a way.

Five years. The Blair government has coincided with an important generational-cultural shift, just as the Wilson government did 30 years earlier. If racism and sexism started to become unacceptable in the late 60s, thanks to a post-war generation that refused to accept them, then perhaps the defence of rights started to become unacceptable in the late 90s thanks to a post-Thatcher generation that refuses to accept it, on the basis that political rights arrogantly trump consumer rights.

Today the newspapers report that sexual harassment of teachers and pupils in schools  is widespread, and that girls are starting to accept sexist language as the norm. This is on top of the endless stream of stuff about anti-social behaviour, unruly kids, and hoodies playing R&B on buses. All of which raises the question - are they simply more liberated, less stuffy, more infused with the spirit of the 90s than I am? Have I simply dragged some value set from the distant past, which I want to see imposed upon this new social avant garde? My sense of frustration about this is doubtless no more morally sincere or keenly felt than that of the 60s conservatives, who despaired at what the kids were doing then. In each case, a moral gulf opens up, and politics struggles in vain to bridge it.

If history really is repeating itself, expect to see a 'conservative' backlash, whereby those born between 45-79 seize power and attempt to force some traditional values on the youth (more or less what we're already seeing, even from Ken Livingstone), followed by a bright new political dawn around 2020, in which a young fresh-faced  child of Thatcher marches down Downing Street in a hoodie, swigging from an alco-pop, and announcing in faux-cockney tones that he's a pretty straight guy who used to be into 50 Cent.

Comments

[jamie]

You never know, our future PM might be into Bloc Party

[Phil]

"As the old adage has it..."

Pish and tush to the old adage. I'm half as old again as you, and I'm still a pinko. I much prefer Brad DeLong's formulation, which starts from knowledge rather than calendar age:

"neoclassical economics is a very useful set of disciplinary tools for somebody whose instincts and intuitions are on the left. They sharpen your arguments and clarify your thought. By contrast, I think that most people whose instincts and intuitions are on the right find their arguments dulled and muddied by too much exposure to neoclassical economics"
<http://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/15/economics-and-ideology/#comment-179031>

See also this comment:
"I'm tempted to explain it like this: economics, in every flavour, tells us what *can* be done. If you also think that's the sum total of what *ought* to be done, you're in trouble. Social science draws the map; if you forget your compass, you're still lost."
<http://fairvotewatch.blogspot.com/2006/11/sextant-among-social-sciences.html>

As for your main point, I am not a Hegelian... oh all right then, I'm a *recovering* Hegelian... but I think there's more historical cunning at work than your academic friends allow. As little as thirty years ago, it was widely assumed that women's *only* roles were to be decorative and look after children; women who 'made it in a man's world' were freakish oddities. (When Thatcher became leader of the Tory Party, a popular slogan on the left was 'Ditch the Bitch'. Right on, brother.) If seventies feminists did a lot of shouting, they had a lot to shout about.

So it's true on one level that magazines like /Nuts/ and /FHM/ take us back forty years, to the days of /Titbits/ and /Reveille/ - and it's true that pornographic imagery is degrading, oppressively so when it's ubiquitous. But it's also true that some of the core feminist arguments have been won, or at least conceded. The very language in which these students defend those magazines reflects the radical liberalism of mainstream feminism, or of the mainstreaming of feminism: /why *shouldn't* a woman be a doctor, a bus-driver, an MP, an astronaut? why *shouldn't* a woman go where she likes and wear what she likes? why *shouldn't* a woman take her clothes off for the cameras?/

Feminism also meant a much harder set of arguments, having to do with dignity rather than freedom of action. These are questions of what's good for women as women - and, more importantly, who gets to decide. I'd say that the problem on this front isn't that the gains of women's liberation have been rolled back, so much as that they were never really made. "Women shouldn't have to look sexy all the time" is a fine liberal argument - it's a subset of the belief that nobody should *have to* do anything. "Women shouldn't be expected to look sexy" is another matter, and finds a lot of liberals on the other side of the fence - after all, why shouldn't people have expectations of one another, and why shouldn't people sometimes choose to comply with other people's expectations?

It's an argument which was never really won - and, I would argue, it's come back to bite us in the shape of the hijab debate. Twice over, in fact: advocates of hijab play a distorted and sexist version of the dignity argument ("why should a woman be expected to put herself on display?") while advocates of other people's right to wear hijab play an equally distorted version of liberalism ("why shouldn't a woman have the right to shield herself from prying eyes?"). Ugh.

So I think you can add to your list of prophecies that feminism will be back, but it won't be so liberal next time. And it'll probably be wearing a pinafore over jeans.

[Phil]

Ugh, missing URLs (I hate Typepad...)

Here's Brad:
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/15/economics-and-ideology/#comment-179031

And here's Donald on Brad:
http://fairvotewatch.blogspot.com/2006/11/sextant-among-social-sciences.html

[Will Davies]

Thanks Phil. This is a rather more sophisticated argument than mine. I guess I was simply reflecting on that surging, irrational desire I get to punch someone when kids are playing music on their mobile phones on buses, and the general sense of despair I feel when surrounded by adverts telling people they can do anything they want to do. It's more of a Philip Larkin thing I guess, but the good news is that, from the duffer's perspective, David Cameron looks as hideous as anyone else.

[Anon]

The students of the media lecturers you describe would seem to be taking their own arguments more seriously than they do. If women are free to wear whatever clothes they like, then they must also be free to wear as few clothes as they like.

You do not liberate someone by requiring her to obey your orders. Nor by forcing other people to deny her options.

Complaining that teachers are being bullied by their own students implicitly admits that discipline in schools has disintergrated, and that this is a bad thing. If the teachers cannot defend themselves, what do you think happens to the weaker students? There were right-of-centre predictions to that effect quite some time ago...

[Will Davies]

anon - Nobody said anything about forcing anyone else to do anything. You introduced the issue of coercion, not me.

As for discipline and the right-of-centre predictions you refer to, I can't work out what you're getting at. Maybe you've missed the point of my post, which was precisely to say that, ironically and sadly, clinging to any notion of what 'good behaviour' consists of from one generation to the next may involve one becoming a conservative in some way (at least, the effort to conserve certain norms is, by definition, conservative).

[dearieme]

"For most people born before 1930, the civil rights movement, feminism and the demand for personal freedoms would have looked morally outrageous and a threat to social peace." Evidence? My parents were born before then; I can remember them tut-tutting at the difficulty American blacks had in having their rights recognised. They were all for personal freedom - that's why they were keen anti-socialists. Feminism they did laugh at, but mainly because it was so obviously intellectually dud.