Lost in history

I am not going to write yet again about the EU Referendum today, or at least not directly, but rather about some reflections prompted by an article that appeared in The Guardian today by John Harris which was about the referendum but with a particular take. Harris, who is an invariably interesting journalist by the way, argues that many inclined to vote to leave the EU are reacting to having had huge and rapid social changes “imposed on them”. They should not, therefore, be patronizingly dismissed as “irrational, unhinged and gullible”.

Whether or not this is a valid reason for voting to leave the EU is an open question, and as I say not what I want to discuss here. Rather, it seems to me that the sentiment Harris is reporting is a variant of something I discuss and criticise at length in the book (especially pp. 88-92): the idea of a world in rapid, perhaps unprecedented, change which makes mandatory constant organizational change. It is one of the many ways in which organizations and politics are both connected and harmonic, something which is becoming a regular theme of this blog.

What strikes me most is how unchanging these claims are, and how they are both meaningful and meaningless. Harris is talking about the period since Britain joined the EU, so the forty or so years since 1973. But in 1973, which I can just about remember (I was 8), similar sentiments were expressed, and very vociferously too. The past, it seemed, was not just another country but, in the past, we had been another country. The memories of war, Empire, social cohesion and civility may have been refracted through the lens of nostalgia but they had their counterpart in more objective analyses of relative economic decline, shifting centres of geo-political power and changing social norms.

It was common then to hear adults talking about how ‘the country has gone to the dogs’, that ‘we won the war but we lost the peace’ and, though I can’t recall hearing these exact words, that ‘I just want my country back’. Some of this, as with the present EU debate, was about immigration but, also as with the present EU debate, it was part of a more inchoate sense of unchosen changes. Indeed it’s worth remembering that this kind of sentiment was a big part of what lay*, a few years later, behind electoral support for Margaret Thatcher, including her remarks at the 1979 election campaign about British people feeling ‘swamped’ by immigration. And yet people now are wont to say that immigration ‘used to be ok’, even though their predecessors did not say anything like that at all.

So that sense of unchosen change isn’t new and perhaps this means that it is actually itself rather patronizing to uncritically accept it as an authentic, respectworthy sentiment. If anything it is just an unremarkable truism: 2016 is different to 1973, just as 1976 was different to 1933 in all kinds of ways, most of which were not ‘chosen’ and could not reasonably have been ‘asked’ about. Why would anyone expect otherwise? The issue seems to lie more in a sense that this change is going somewhere frightening or, perhaps most frightening of all, that it is going nowhere. It’s this fearful sense of being lost in history that I want to explore.

Fear of redundancy, fear of being left behind, fear of being judged unequal to the demands of change. That this fear is largely orchestrated through an invocation of hordes of Asians and Slavs – or, in more politically acceptable language, the challenge from the emerging economies of China, India and Eastern Europe; or the anodyne ‘global economic race’ – serves to underscore the perhaps not racist but certainly racialised tang of contemporary stories about Britishness. We may have no clear idea of what the future holds, but we are continually told that failure to change will mean that the future will occur elsewhere, in a faraway country of which we know little. There is therefore an easy translation from the ubiquitous experience of change in the workplace to a fear of foreign competition, and an easy translation from that to fear of foreigners in general and immigration and European integration in particular.

It is indeed quite remarkable that the bullishness about change in the organizational sphere has been so comprehensively unmatched in other areas. The most charitable interpretation of British involvement in the Iraq war is that it was animated by a desire to maintain the ‘special relationship’ and to influence US policy – a desire which was a continuation of British foreign policy since 1945 and which persists to the present day. New Labour’s attitude to the EU, initially relatively conciliatory, later became rather similar to that towards Old Labour: one of hectoring calls for modernization and change in the face of global competition. The Coalition government after 2010 was relatively muted on the EU because of the presence of pro-EU Liberal Democrats but the Conservative administration since 2015 is defined by degrees of hostility to the EU relations. (Interestingly, these two foreign policy areas are in conflict, since the US relation to the UK is refracted through the UK’s membership of the EU, as President Obama is beginning to make clear).

Back on the home front, immigration and asylum policies have also been animated by fear. There is no doubt that New Labour were more relaxed about multi-culturalism than was Thatcherism. And Cameron’s ‘Notting Hill’ conservatism has largely followed them in this, which in part explains the rise of UKIP (which was not just fed by the EU issue but the sense that Cameron is not a ‘real Conservative’ e.g. in terms of gay marriage legislation). Nevertheless, across all recent governments policy in these areas has been draconian and it is noteworthy that the case for tolerance has mainly been made in purely economic terms – the economic need for immigration – so that it is in effect inseparable from the mantra of change as an adjunct to global competitiveness. There is no real suggestion that immigration is related to either our past responsibilities as a colonial power or to our future possibilities as a cosmopolitan society. It’s just an economic presence, bereft of past or future.

It would be unfair to ascribe this culture of fear solely to the polity. It is also the case that any capacity to be positive about the future is limited by the rabidity of a press where it is not just the tabloids which are filled with blood-curdling stories of new causes for alarm. On Europe, immigration, asylum, crime, terrorism, paedophilia as well as health, climate change and, notoriously, house prices the media tell of a world to which a cringing fearfulness is a quite reasonable response. Yet it is not a fear of anything in particular, even if it attaches at moments to something specific. A combination of rolling news and limited attention spans means that each fear is registered, instantaneously forgotten and superseded by a new terror. What endures is not any specific anxiety but a generalised neurotic dread. But whilst fed by the media this climate has been able to flourish at least in part because it fills the vacuum created by the political failure to articulate any compelling future vision of ‘the good life’.

There is clearly a symmetry between the febrile atmosphere engendered by the daily kaleidoscope of media-fuelled panics and the managerialized politics and political managerialism in which ‘the only constant is change’. If we want an image of contemporary Britain it would be of a person running in terror away from an unseen yet omnipresent enemy, but running on a treadmill rather than a road. Standing at the side is a sadistic personal trainer in the form of politician, manager or journalist cajoling and bullying the runner to go faster, to redouble the effort to go nowhere on pain of being engulfed by the invisible demons which lie in wait for those who fail to keep up. The ‘global race’ has no finishing line. It is a journey with no beginning, no end and no purpose or meaning beyond its own self-fulfilling imperative to keep moving at any cost.

This is not, as is conventionally supposed, because we** are too wedded to the past but rather because we have too little sense of ourselves as located within the past-present-future continuum which more truly constitutes history. If, when I was a child, the problem was the weight of the past then for the coming generation it is the weightlessness of the future. When I was growing up, British identity was, unhappily and ultimately unsustainably, that of an old person stuck in the past with memories of a great empire, a heroic war, of glories lost. That is still discernible, but it is now much more akin to someone with Alzheimer’s disease. Anyone who, as I have, has had the misfortune of witnessing this condition will know that what makes it so devastating is not simply that the sufferer recollects so little of the past and is often over-attached to those distant fragments which are flickeringly remembered. It is also that there is no conception of the future, and the present is just a fear-filled moment of transitory but ever recurring change. 

*Surprisingly from a present-day perspective it also in part lay behind the decision to join what was then the EEC in 1973. I can remember my highly Conservative – and conservative – primary school headmistress inventing a song about a ‘beautiful dream’ as part of a celebratory pageant of this event. I played – and I hope this will amuse anyone reading this who knows me – one of the ‘gnomes of Zurich’, then a slang term for Swiss bankers. Whether these gnomes were depicted positively or negatively in the pageant I unfortunately can’t recall.

**By ‘we’ I mean ‘we British’ but similar things may well be true in other countries. I think this is so in France, which I know quite well, and probably in the US and elsewhere. Indeed something like what I have said here seems to apply to US and is expressed by Donald Trump when, as in his now notorious ‘ban all Muslims’ speech he cried plaintively about the need to work out “what the hell is going on?”. Obnoxious as it was, it did express this sense of ‘historical lostness’ that I am trying to explore, and Trump’s popularity is surely a consequence of that sense.

Paris

I don’t think that I need to provide a link to reports of the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris; no one can fail to be aware of them, and appalled by them. For me they have a personal resonance. My wife was born and spent most of her childhood in Paris, and we were married there. My mother-in-law watched Nazi troops marching into Paris in 1940 and saw them leave in 1945, having lived through the Occupation with false papers that disguised her Jewishness. Nowadays, I am a Visiting Professor at Université Paris-Dauphine and visit regularly; in fact I will be there next week. More specifically, my nephew was in a bar on Rue Caron when it was attacked by the gunmen last Friday. He was not hit, but his best friend was shot in the chest, and is still in intensive care, and that friend’s sister was shot in the arm. These were just ordinary twenty-somethings on a night out.

There is so much that could be said about this, and so much that already had been said, that it seems almost pointless to say more. I tend to be quite hawkish about the military and security responses that should be made, but I have no particular knowledge or insight to offer into that. What I do feel clear about is that the massive, predictable surge of responses saying that this shows the failures of multi-culturalism need to be challenged.

Let’s be absolutely clear: those who committed this atrocity are the most ferocious mono-culturalists imaginable. For them, there can and should be no integration and no variety: there is only one true way, derived from a cretinous reading of Islamic scripture. They are the exact mirror image of the ‘Christian Conservative’ Anders Breivik. By contrast, no-one ever shot or blew up another human being in the name of multi-culturalism or of pluralism.

So far as any strategic logic (as opposed to simple hatred) can be discerned in the attacks, it is to hope that it will provoke a punitive reaction against European Muslims so as to say, to some of them at least, that their punitive treatment demonstrates that Muslims cannot be part of the European Polity.

We ‘ordinary people’ can do very little, caught as we are in the cross-fire of two monocultural ideologies. Very little, but not nothing. We can, and should, continue to insist at every opportunity that multi-culturalism is not something to be denied or apologised for, but a cardinal value to be argued for and if necessary to die for.

We dishonour those killed and injured on an ordinary night out in Paris if we take from what they suffered an ideal of separation. Worse, if we do so we honour those who killed and injured them.

Murderous certainty

I can’t claim that there is much of connection between this post and the themes of my book, with which this blog is supposed to be concerned, but at the moment I can’t think of much else except the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. Like almost everyone else I am shocked and revolted by it. Above and beyond the shock and revulsion that would accompany any such event, what is particularly disgusting is that it was an attack on free expression, which is central to democracy and to a free society.

Over Christmas, I read Lamentation, the latest of C.J. Sansom’s excellent ‘Shardlake’ series, set in England under Henry VIII in a period of massive religious conflict. The book, which is soundly based in historical fact (Sansom started life as an historian), opens with a graphic account of the burning at the stake of Anne Askew for heresy. Prior to this she had been grotesquely tortured. I mention this because the vicious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants (and shades within these two camps) in Europe at this time seems to me to parallel those between Sunni and Shia Muslims and between radical Islamism and secular society at the present time. And it reminds us that the post-Enlightenment freedoms of which Charlie Hebdo can be seen to be an heir were won against a background every bit as bloody as today’s conflicts.

Those freedoms are, for sure, of a complex sort. We don’t allow untrammelled freedom of expression – for example in terms of hate speech or incitement to violence. Indeed, although I haven’t seen it remarked on in the media at all, Charlie Hebdo has an interesting history in this regard. It was re-named this way when it re-launched following its banning by the French State for satirising reactions to the death of former President Charles de Gaulle.

Inevitably, in the aftermath, there has been a mass of comment. Many have called for Muslims to condemn the attack, failing to recognize that just about every Muslim spokesperson has done so. Somehow, there is a sense that no matter how much the majority of peaceful and law-abiding Muslims may condemn, it is never enough to satisfy the demands.  In the context of Europe-wide anti-Muslim sentiment, such as the German Pinstripe movement, that is dangerous. It is also hypocritical.  When Anders Breivik massacred  77 people in Norway in 2011, calling himself a Christian and citing several mainstream journalists who had criticised ‘multi-culturalism’, there was no comparable call for every Christian or every opponent of multi-culturalism to make public statements of this sort. In fact much comment at the time was semi-apologist, saying that his actions, whilst reprehensible, showed the dangers of multi-culturalism.

The same voices are being heard now, suggesting that the Charlie Hebdo outrage is somehow linked to multi-culturalism. This rather neglects the fact that the killers and the radical Islamist ideology they represent is the most resolutely mono-culturalist that can be imagined. Like the dogmatists of Europe’s religious conflicts they insist that there is only one truth, one law, one way of behaving, one way of worshipping. To that end they have massacred not just cartoonists in Paris but schoolchildren in Pakistan, amongst many other abominations.

We need to see Breivik and his apologists and Islamist terrorists and their apologists as two sides of the same coin. Like those who burnt heretics they insist on one truth and one culture. They are filled with a murderous certainty. Now, more than ever, it is important to defend the virtues of plurality and tolerance; of relativism rather than absolutism. To counterpose certainty not with another certainty, but with doubt.  No one ever killed another person on the principle that ‘it depends how you look at things’ or 'there are two sides to every story'.

Whatever debates, comments and events follow the Charlie Hebdo massacre, it is important to remember its victims:

Stephane Charbonnier, 48

Jean Cabut, 68

Georges Wolinski, 80

Bernard Velhac, 58

Bernard Maris, 68

Phillipe Honore, 73

Mustapha Ourad

Elsa Cayat

Michel Renaud

Frederic Boisseau, 42

Ahmed Merabat

Franck Brinsolaro

Murdered in Paris, Wednesday January 7^th 2015.