is Steve Hilton depressed?

Whatever we expected from this Coalition government, it was not Maoism. But a string of articles over the last few days has sought to portray the government as run by cultural revolutionaries, intent on unleashing waves of chaotic change across society. The BBC has its tongue in its cheek, but it's a shame to see journalists like Andrew Rawnsley and Steve Richards take so much of this at face value. As Nick Pearce says, surely the question of radicalism can only be answered once the change has taken place and the policies have actually been introduced. Cameron and Clegg's political trolleyology means that they appear to have forgotten how slowly social change occurs; maybe they've been experiencing envy at the sight of SWP hoodies smashing their way into the Treasury, and want to experience something of that same pointless head-rush.

The remarks that appear to have inspired this are Nick Boles's celebration of  'chaos', and Steve Hilton's demand that "Everything must have changed by 2015. Everything." Hilton can at least claim the Maoist credential of being unelected.

The Hilton quote is especially perplexing. I can't quite imagine Tony Blair having said this, certainly not in the early years of his government. Blair's claims that he 'always wished he'd gone further', with everything he did, were reflections made after his period of office. That aspect of Blairism is deeply problematic, but one can at least say in Blair's defence that he was comparing what did happen with what he'd like to have happened. It is a statement of regret, albeit one which smacks of frustrated megalomania.

Hilton's remark is made at the beginning of a period of office, by an unelected individual associated with a specific political leader (as opposed to a party) who has never won a General Election. If Blair was assessing something empirical and constitutionally legitimate (policies developed over 10 years, by a very successful political leader of a party that won two landslide elections), Hilton is simply screaming into the future about revolution that has no plausible benchmark of success. "Everything must have changed by 2015. Everything". What Hilton doesn't appreciate is that when one sets 'everything' as a goal, by comparison finite reality looks like nothing. This is bipolar, manic politics.

I recently read Alain Ehrenberg's The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, which is the best piece of contemporary sociology I've read in some time. Ehrenberg explains his thesis as follows:

Depression began its ascent [in the 1960s] when the disciplinary model for behaviours, the rules of authority and observance of taboos that gave social classes as well as both sexes a specific destiny, broke against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by enjoining us to be ourselves. These new norms brought with them a sense that the responsibility for our existence lies not only within us but also within the collective between-us. I try here to demonstrate that depression is the opposite of this paradigm. Depression presents itself as an illness of responsibility in which the dominant feeling is that of failure. The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself.

Where psychoanalysis was invented to tackle a specific problem of conflict within the self - guilt, shame, repression, neurosis - the defining malaise of post-68 culture is less of conflict, and more of deflation and performance anxiety. The post-68 individual has no external benchmark of what a good life should look like, because they've been enjoined to define this for themselves. The result is a paradoxical combination of narcissism and depression, whereby the individual projects an omnipotent ideal of who they truly are, but (like any ideal) one which their actions are never able to match. The result is an experience of collapse.

It's with this in mind that I pose the question: is Steve Hilton suffering from depressive narcissism? Tony Blair had measures that he set out to be judged by, largely oriented around public service reform, social liberalism and economic competitiveness. Yes, he projected a compulsive 'modernisation' ideal, but really this was just the Thatcherite commitment to making public life a bit more business-like. Labour's famous 'pledge card' looks quaint - and mentally contented - in comparison to these apparent Maoists. Hilton's comments smack of an unattainable ego ideal. How can everything possibly change?

Ehrenberg's book ends with the sad recognition that Prozac has prevented neo-liberal society from truly confronting its dominant pathology. Depression lacks any clear definition; it simply means the experience of inadequacy, or alternatively, anything that can be treated with anti-depressants. A psychoanalytic or political critique of contemporary neo-liberal narcissism would challenge the dominance of ego ideals over individuals and society, reject the Seb Coes, the endless testing of children and morality of Premiership footballers. Ironically, to do so might be in the best tradition of conservatism.

Comments

[Ian C]

Completely spot-on. Thanks for the book reference - I shall get this like a shot.
One factor to bear in mind that ever since the early 80s the Conservatives have been trading under a misleading brand name, as they are a neoliberal party allied to revolutionary global capital. Ditto for the Republicans. A list of what these parties have conserved since 1980 would be pretty short; a list of the features of traditional conservative values they have trashed or abandoned to the market would be long. Hilton is being a true neoliberal.
On all this, see also the work of the great late Christopher Lasch, a conservative-populist-social democratic-civic republican radical of a kind we need badly these days. Eg The Minimal Self and The Revolt of the Elites.

[Will Davies]

Ian - it's worth knowing that Ehrenberg's book is the concluding part of a trilogy, all dedicated to this question of how post-68 neo-liberal culture leads to an anxious individualism of self-improvement. My French is sadly not very good, but is meant to be good.

[Ian C]

Thanks Will. Luckily I speak French so will get the trilogy in the original. One of the reviews I just read of the book you mention is critical of the translation in parts.
I agree fully with your call for a critique of neoliberal narcissism. One source of such critique used to be the universities - but these are now the front line for aggressive management and performance ideologues, who have taken over the sector and need no egging on from the Coalition.
One issue that arises in relation to all this is that of socialisation. Eg the idea that many liberals have that it is good to raise children to be questioning of all received tradition, and especially religion, so that 'they can make their own minds up when they are older', as if this set of capacities is entirely separate from socialisation into an account of what a good life is like. The result I observe in many families and among students is a lot of people who are ignorant of the influences that have made the world they find themselves in and, as you say, have tendencies to narcissism and depression, and a pervasive sense of not wishing to 'join' any social institution that makes demands on them while at the same time feeling bereft of community and belonging.

[Will Davies]

Well, the critique of neo-liberalism doesn't necessarily have to go as far as communitarianism, if that's what you're suggesting. It's possible to commit to certain institutions (in a civic and Enlightenment sense), precisely because those institutions facilitate critical appraisals of traditions, norms and political structures. I would include the freedom to criticise religious teaching in that.

Of course the problem (perfectly summed up in Foucault's essay on Kant's essay on Enlightenment) is what happens when Enlightenment critique turns upon its own preconditions, for instance questioning the authority of critique or the existence of a 'public sphere'. This is what sociologists would refer to as postmodernity. But another way of observing it is in the lazy presupposition that every opinion, every critique, every taste is as good as any other. This is what consumer capitalism encourages (and indeed what Hayek and Friedman sought to promote as a safer alternative to socialism). I recommend Peter Wagner's Modernity as Experience and Interpretation for an exploration of how we can remain committed to modern critique, but also draw on its 'postmodern' self-critique. Ultimately, treading this line is a question of phronetic judgement, of an Aristotelian and political nature, not something that theory or political philosophy will prescribe for us.

[Ian C]

Thanks Will - agreed, and I also like Wagner's work.

I don't go all the way to communitarianism. I agree with self-critical approaches to Enlightenment and tradition that don't collapse into postmodernism - one reason I am an Anglican, a way of thinking and acting that (at its infrequent best) achieves the difficult feat of treading the line you refer to.

Happy Christmas and all the best for 2011.

[Rob]

Isn't Hilton's "everything" to do with expectations and assumptions rather than concrete policies? He's not saying that every single aspect of government behaviour must change, but that our perspective on it must change. If I tilt a picture by 90 degrees, "everything" has changed even though the picture itself hasn't been altered. If we start, in 2010, with certain beliefs about what the state is here to do, and by 2015 those beliefs have been challenged and possibly defeated, it is reasonable (within the margin of hyperbole, at least) to say that "everything" has changed even if, in practice, nothing much has changed at all. He doesn't have a 10-point pledge card because the points aren't nearly as interesting to him as what we think about the things that happen anyway.

The Conservatives have basically accepted that the state is going to stagnate - they've opted not to waste a good crisis, and have set about "starving the beast". They often point out that this isn't a big change, because it really just takes us back to the spending levels of 2006 - a sleight of hand, but one that also reveals a lack of ambition. They really just want to let things slide a bit, and the "everything" they want to change is that they want us not to care, or to see this as being a good thing. They want to break the belief in the power to bring about good outcomes by spending more money. The details just don't matter to Hilton, which is why he can only really capture what he wants by talking in absurdly "big picture" terms like "everything". Of course, in the long run, ideologies really do "change everything", which is, if anything, a rather more worrying thought.

[Dick Pountain]

http://dickpountain.blogspot.com/2010/12/veblen-lasch-debord-20th-centurys-three.html