Human nature changed in India on 25 June 1983. India won the Prudential World Cup in cricket that day at Lord’s. Kapil Dev’s team was the most unlikely and unfancied XI ever to claim cricket’s ultimate trophy, with only two players of world calibre in its side – the skipper himself and the opener Sunil Gavaskar, (who barely made a mark on limited-overs cricket and rarely got off the mark in the 1983 World Cup.(1)).

In the run-up to 25 June 2008, Indian media outlets whipped up a shrill frenzy around the silver jubilee of an event that many of them did not hesitate to compare with India winning independence from British colonial rule on 15 August 1947 (2).

I was ten when it all happened. In the small copper-mining town where I grew up, 200km from Calcutta, television was yet to arrive and radio signals were weak. Like others around me in Ghatsila, I heard the live commentary over a very scratchy broadcast, with the static merging with the roar of Indian supporters in Lord’s, making the whole experience a tad more dramatic than it perhaps was in reality. But much of the match details were lost.

So I eagerly waited for the next day’s copy of The Statesman. I still remember my shock at the size of the headline. The screaming header took up almost a quarter of the page in a paper renowned for its gravitas and sense of proportion. There was no other news on page one. The front page was the sports page, my ultimate fantasy back then.

Till that day, I was a football fan, as were my friends in school, my many cousins in Calcutta, and almost every other 10-year old boy I knew. From that day, the lives of sports fans in India changed, for better or for worse. All around me the bitter football rivalry between East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, rooted deep and woven tight into complex braids of family, community and sub-national histories of pre-independence Bengal, swiftly lost its primal edge, gathering in all divided the loyalties into one potent force of supporting one nation in one sport (3).

Why other Indian team sports – particularly football and hockey - lost out to cricket after that delirious summer of 1983 is the subject of a different enquiry. But the telling fact is that 25 June 1983 was a watershed in the history and sociology of sports fandom in India. Indian cricket, egged on by the full-throated, raucous chant of almost a billion fans, surged ahead, whose apt culmination (or nadir, depending on your perspective) was the Indian Premier League – IPL for short - an orgy of fast-forward cricket laced with Bollywood razzmatazz, draped with oomphy cheerleaders in skimpy outfits, making the show every marketing person’s wet dream.

Cut forward to the summer of 2008. For nearly two months, a cricket addict nation goes on a booze-addled, fast-food fuelled binge of cricket every evening where the ratings of all other television channels apart from the IPL broadcaster Sony Entertainment plummet to zilch. The inaugural edition of the IPL climaxes in a final so full of swinging fortunes that even the best of Bollywood scripts would not match up to it. (Ironically, a typical 20:20 match lasts a little over 3 hours, almost the same as the average Bollywood film.) The curtains come down on the greatest cricket spectacle on earth, leaving in its wake mountainous heaps of drama and controversies.

In one match, two of India’s most controversial cricketers clash – Harbhajan Singh slaps India team-mate but IPL rival Sreesanth in full view of the public and television cameras. The fast bowler, usually an all-teeth-and-nail personality on field, sobs like a little boy, a spectacle that once again summons a stock image from corny Bollywood films. Harbhajan apologises, but, perhaps unwittingly, falls back on the clichéd sentiment of popular Indian cinema saying his slapping was an act of admonition, and expression of an elder-brotherly concern of sorts for his junior!

In West Bengal, the Left Front, which has the enviable record of the longest-serving democratically elected Communist government anywhere in the world (31 years and running), suffers significant reverses in local elections. Though the results primarily indicate a backlash against the ruling combine’s well-intentioned but ill-timed acquisition of agricultural land for heavy industry, the Communist Party think-tank blames it partly on the IPL season! The party’s well-oiled election machinery of committed party cadres were stumped when faced with the choice of staying put at home and watching the cricket or stepping out of it to work the political cause.

The question of divided loyalties was, to my mind, one the most fascinating and intriguing aspect of Indian sports that the Indian Premier League in cricket threw up.

The media campaign in the lead up to IPL succeeded brilliantly in breeding a sense of city-based loyalty for the eight ‘franchisees’. Modelled loosely on the successful football leagues of Europe and elsewhere, the main inspiration was very much that of the English Premier League.

However, around the same time as these slick advertisements that massaged the instincts of city-based pride (and in final analysis, a sort of provincial identity) around cricket were being rolled out in the media, in Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay) a small-time right-wing politician Raj Thakeray unleashed his goons on the city streets to hit out indiscriminately at all ‘Bhaiyyas’.

‘Bhaiyya’ is a disparaging blanket term for people of North Indian provenance, but more specifically applies to labourers from the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar whose multitudes provide much of industrial India’s unskilled workforce in construction, manufacturing, trade, and drive most of Mumbai’s iconic cabs and auto-rickshaws. The violence spread from Mumbai to other towns of Maharashtra, creating a panicky exodus of migrant labour, plunging the booming construction business in the state into a real crisis.

There was no neat cause-effect relationship between the television commercials and the provincial violence. After all, it’s symptomatic of India’s lopsided economic success that these commercials actually spoke to the highly mobile, educated, urban middle-class and not the unwashed masses that prop up Indian cricket and make it the bandwagon that every soap, shampoo and cereal-making company wants to clamber on to.

It is the latter sort that Raj Thackeray’s party had in mind as its target audience when it raised the bogey of Marathi Manus, or Maratha Pride. The target of Marathi Manus was, ironically, also those most like its own demographic, the ones dwindling at the lowest rung of the economic ladder.

But the timing of Raj Thakeray’s campaign was uncanny and showed up the jagged fault-lines of India’s complex and fragile polity through a magnifying glass. The anti-North Indian riots in Maharashtra offered a keyhole peep at a sleeping monster that could set the country on fire if ever the heady cocktail of cricket and deep-rooted provincial identity was spiked or stirred.

If by appealing to provincial identity it was stoking baser emotions, IPL also transcended national identity in other ways, much in the same way EPL clubs do. It was a strange and sublime sight, therefore, to witness the Pakistani paceman, Shoaib Akhtar, turning out for the Kolkata Knight Riders, steaming in on their home ground, Eden Gardens, against Delhi Daredevils, shattering the stumps of their captain Virendra Sehwag and the capacity crowd of 110,000 erupting in volcanic joy.

Who would have ever imagined Eden Gardens screaming its lungs out for a Pakistani fast bowler going for the jugular of some of India’s premier batsmen? Eden’s raucous cheering for one of its bêtes noires signalled an apt closure for one of its darkest chapters.

In February 1999, Akhtar was involved in a controversial run-out of Sachin Tendulkar that swung the game and a closely-fought Test series in Pakistan’s favour. Akhtar had claimed Tendulkar with a peach of a yorker in the first innings, the master batsman’s only ‘golden duck’ in Test cricket. In the second, Tendulkar was shaping up well till he ran into Shoaib and out of luck. The replays inconclusively suggested that Akhtar may have shoulder-butted Tendulkar out of the crease to effect the dismissal, but Eden’s famously passionate and volatile crowd erupted into riots and the match had to be concluded after the stands were emptied of all spectators.

The fortune of cricket in India, perhaps unlike anywhere else in the cricketing world, is closely allied with its identity as a nation. In his recent book India After Gandhi: A History of the World’s Largest Democracy author Ramachandra Guha mentions five mainstays of the idea of modern India – the bureaucracy, the railways, Bollywood, cricket and the English language.

Guha, incidentally, is also one of India’s foremost cricket writers and his A Corner of a Foreign Field (2002, Picador) is one the most erudite and elegant treatment of the complex subject of India’s fascination with and eventual mastery of a British sport (4). Guha’s history of Indian cricket charts the chequered rise of the game’s popularity along difficult matrices of caste, religion and class in India and showcases the significant success of the Palwankar brothers, primarily Baloo, who used their cricketing skills to rise above the caste prejudices their ‘Dalit’ (untouchable) birth would have in store for them in early 20th century India (5).

Guha’s narrative expertly weaves in the communal roots of the game in late 19th and early 20th century India, where Parsi, Hindu, Muslim and European teams competed for glory, and shows how the resulting ethos mapped on to the way the game developed in the subcontinent. Guha’s perceptive writing deals candidly with the treatment Muslim cricketers received in independent India, including that of one of India’s most successful captains, Mohammed Azharuddin, whose career ended in the ignominy of being branded a ‘matchfixer’.

Azhar was one of my childhood idols. When the skinny lad from Hyderabad carelessly caressed his way to three consecutive centuries on Test debut against England in 1984, my cricketing consciousness was taking a definite shape. That was the first series I watched live start to finish, our copper-mining town having just bloomed on the television map of India at long last. I later witnessed his electrifying 80-ball century against South Africa in December 1996 in a hopelessly lost cause from close quarters at Eden Gardens. He spanked 5 murderous fours in an over off the eventual man-of-the-match Lance Klusener, three of which crashed into the billboards nearest to me. Azhar was what I wanted to be at 15 – a silken bat and the stickiest fingers on the field (6).

It was one of the nastiest shocks of my adult life when Azhar was convicted of match-fixing and effectively banned for life in 2000. However, it unsettles and bothers me that Ajay Jadeja, convicted of the same ‘crime’ and handed out a similar sentence, was somehow rehabilitated by the ‘system’ and now regularly holds forth on matters cricketing on primetime television. Is it because of his upper-class Hindu background and political patronage that Ajay prospers (7), while Azhar remains the persona non grata of India’s cricket establishment because he is a Muslim?, I often ask myself and find no convincing answers.

Just as I had no answer for the strange sporting affiliation of the Patel brothers I met in later life. Like most Indian students arriving in the UK for higher studies, cricket was uppermost in my mind when I enrolled for my PhD at Reading in 2001. Without much ado I advertised my limited cricketing skills on the university ‘market’ and was soon cementing my place on the reserve bench of the first XVI of the Reading University Alumni and Research Students’ Cricket Club.

And there I met the Patel brothers, second generation British Asians whose parents of Gujarati ethnicity had arrived in the UK from Africa in the 1960s. The Patel brothers were like every other player in the team in most respects save two. Both were genuinely talented cricketers who could or should have done better than play with an assorted bunch of adults with adolescent hangovers, whose enthusiasm for cricket far outstripped any real ability in the sport. And both were deeply and disturbingly anti-British in their support in every sport. I could make some sense of their full-throated support of India in cricket, but none at all of why they cheered for Austria in football and New Zealand in rugby. Why two Englishmen, who were ‘Indians’ only at several removes, flashed their ‘anyone but England’ credo as a talismanic badge of identity, giving a finger up to the infamous Tebbitt Test remains a Howzzatt to which no two umpires of sociology or history can ever concur.

Debanjan Chakrabarti, 35, works for the British Council in India, but mostly spends his working hours day-dreaming about playing cricket for India or any XI that would have him. The highlight of his long career is a brisk, run-a-ball 2 he scored at Eden Gardens in 2007, turning up for the British Council against the Calcutta Sports Journalists’ Club.

1) On Gavaskar’s one day batting, see Martin Williamson’s excellent piece on Cricinfo. http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/ci/content/story/281073.html It is a biased piece, but the point remains that Gavaskar’s one-day record does not complement his Test achievement.
2) From this inverted, cricket-tinged perspective of history, India’s Independence was the first and original Cricket Test Victory, a view endorsed by the Bollywood film Lagaan (2001),  a massive box office hit that blended the Indian nation’s twin fantasies of film and cricket and was nominated for the Oscars in the best foreign film category that year.
3) See also Soumya Bhattacharya’s animated account of the life-long effect of India’s World Cup triumph on the psyche of a young Calcutta boy in You Must Like Cricket?, listed below.
4) Sujit Mukherjee’s name crops up as the other leading writer on Indian cricket. However, I have not yet read any of his books, only had the good fortune of talking to him on the subject once in 1996. His full bibliography can be accessed at http://sujitmukherjee.net/common/cricket.html
5) Guha retraces the steps of the triumphant return of Baloo, fresh from his high exploits in England in 1911 for the All India team. The ‘Depressed Classes of Bombay’ had organised a felicitation for Baloo in which the welcome address was written and presented by Bhimrao Ambedkar, ‘the future draughtsman of the Indian Constitution’. (A Corner of a Foreign Field, p121)
6) Rohit Brijnath’s article for Cricinfo summarises my fascination for Azhar the cricketer and the man. http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/346898.html
7) Ajay Jadeja counts Prince Ranjit Sinhji as one of his ancestors and is married to Aditi Jaitley, the daughter of former Samata Party president Jaya Jaitley.

Recommended reading and viewing (in no particular order of preference)
Ranji, by Alan Ross, The Pavilion Library, 1988, London
You Must Like Cricket?, by Soumya Bhattacharya, Yellow Jersey Press, 2006, London. (A must-read for those who take their cricket more seriously than their lives, wives and other such distractions.)
A Corner of a Foreign Field, by Ramachandra Guha, Picador, 2002, London
A Season With Verona, by Tim Parks, Vintage, 2003, London. (Strictly speaking, this is not a cricket book. But this is by far the best book I have read on sports fandom and identity.)
Anyone But England: Cricket, Race and Class, by Mike Marquese, Two Heads Publishing, 1998, London
Sports Fans: The Psychology and Social Impact of Spectators, edited by Wann, Melnick, Russell and Pease, Routledge, 2001, New York.
Batting on the Bosphorus, by Angus Bell, Canongate, 2008, Edinburgh
Lagaan, directed by Ashutosh Gowarikar, 2001, India
Iqbal, directed by Nagesh Kukunoor, 2005, India

Truth today is no intellectually contested concept in any significant sense, and the idea of creating and fighting for Truth lies far from the public imagination. More broadly in society, any authoratative truth about how the world is or should be – as once came from religion or politics – seems banal or unnecessary, and fervency of belief is feared for where it might lead.

With Home Secretary Jacqui Smith proposing new measures this week to ban individuals from Britain who are ‘suspected of stirring up tensions’, including ‘anti-abortionists, animal rights extremists, neo-Nazis and extremist clerics’ (Alan Travis, Guardian), what’s taken to constitute strong beliefs today stands testament to a lack of political imagination. Indeed, whilst fighting for the truth used to set us free by showing us what the world was really like and illuminating the path to greater freedom, in the contemporary climate the absence of any living, definitive truth is celebrated, even heralded as a progressive development. The form of truth is now the topic of specialised academic dissection, and the theoretical discussion has become increasingly dislocated from public life and current affairs. A general mood of cynical consensus throughout society suggests truth can no longer change the world, and a suspicious attitude towards radical politics seems to say it’s about time to grow up and throw off what was always just another mind forg’d manacle from The Man.

But the resonance and importance of the idea of truth hasn’t been lost entirely; the concept still plays a role on a more subjective level: people will talk about ‘my truth’ or things ‘feeling true’ to them. Eureka moments still characterise human activity and relationships, whilst new religions and therapies claim to unlock ‘inner truths’.  Difference feminism and many post-colonial and gay identity groups buy into the notion that ‘we’ have a ‘special way of knowing’ or experiencing the world that makes ‘our truth’ different and important because of that difference. Whilst this relativisation of truth to distinct identity groups acknowledges the truth starts off being made by individuals depending on their beliefs, values and way of seeing the world, but the rise of identity politics this has served only to institutionalise and neuter such ideas.

But despite the absence of any progressive and authoritative truth about how society is or should be, there is a new absolutism that chimes with the apolitical times: science. From dealing with health to the way we deal with education, from thinking about climate change to being a better person, ‘evidence-based’ policies and thinking are fast gaining purchase. It seems that bereft of a shared and robust socio-political framework for understanding modern life, the cold impartialities and objectivity offered by science provide a common ground for engagement. The consensus concerning climate change and more importantly how we should deal with it, shows a startling repackaging of scientific objectivity as uncontestable truth.

The scientific method, championed by Enlightenment thinkers for its emancipatory potential, has always offered an epistemological model that cuts across boundaries of race, class and gender, trading on the idea that man can use his own understanding to make sense of the world as a rational, knowing subject. Kant’s challenge of throwing off our self-imposed immaturity and daring to know involved not just an assumption that individuals can understand the world on their own terms and remake it as they see fit, but that a society of such individuals is far superior. On this view, whilst science can play a role in uncovering reality to the better benefit of society, the rational method can be employed by all human beings. Such radical ideas provided the intellectual groundwork for the French Revolution of 1789, which aimed to overthrow the monarchic and political establishments of the time.

However, today this point about the scientific method has been turned on its head, instead being used to shut down debate by forcing consensus. Now,  ‘the science’ is billed as providing gold-seal legitimisation for decisions that affect all sectors of society and parts of life; taking cue from the results of rational scientific investigation rather than incorporating the interests and views of various groups is represented as forward-thinking. The idea that ‘the science’ can be trusted above the ideas and strategies of mere mortals is used effectively by politicians and advertisers. Slogans like, ‘and now for the science…’. could be equally used to persuade people to buy anti-wrinkle cream as recycle their plastic bottles. Because they’re worth it.

However, criticising evidence-based thinking isn’t necessarily to deny any useful or important role for ‘the evidence’ when it comes to understanding how the world works. Rather, it is to point out that what sort of thing counts as ‘the evidence’ is a decision to be made depending on what one is trying to prove in the first place. For instance, when it comes to education, test scores will only count as evidence that certain standards have been met once those standards have been decided upon by teachers. Far from dropping human judgement out of the equation, ‘evidence-based’ education policies cover over the fact that judgements have already been made about what matters. But when it comes to thinking about truth in relation to science, it is placing human beings at the centre of making the world as they see fit that is important. Rather than accepting the ‘natural order’ of society and a view of history as determined by divine forces, control over both is shifted into the domain of rational human agency.

Today however, the picture of life being determined by forces outside of our control seems to frame public discourse. Not just do the mystical forces of ‘the market’ mess us around – seen most starkly in both the political elite’s and economists’ astonishment at the credit crunch and how it happened, but ‘nature’ is again asserting her awesome power over human societies in the form of climate change. In response, a scientific approach to understanding and making sense of these phenomena makes sense, but the dominant approach seems to analyse only the natural systems at play – be it the ecosystem or the inner workings of the market – rather than taking a more fruitful scientific approach to the study of society, and people’s place in it, wholesale. Indeed, such is the aversion to talking about society in any depth and thinking progressively about the future, that following the credit crunch and recent crisis of capitalism, the elite’s agenda has been torn between solving the economic problem and saving the planet.

It is because of this that Truth has always concerned a lot more than scientific platitudes: all sorts of figures have laid claim to knowing the truth about the human condition and their societies, from novelists and journalists to campaigners and politicians. In fact, one of the most important things about putting forward new ideas and persuading others is that no particular credentials are necessary. Whilst truths can have a resonance at various points in history for those around them, ideas that have reached the status of truths are always open to fresh contestation and new interpretations. Far from history having the definitive say on truths; it is people that make history.

These considerations give rise to one particular and powerful consideration when it comes to Truth: that it has a normative pull. Being convinced that a particular idea or critical insight has the status of being or getting at the truth, people will act to make it real, or else to put something better in its place. The novelist and journalist George Orwell (1903-1950) provides a good example: whilst his work claimed to uncover unpalatable truths about his own time that might still have resonance today; his particular brand of socialism also inspires a contemporary reading public. Though this phenomenon doesn’t mean that Eric Blair had monopoly on the ideas he expressed, or that he was the first person historically to express them. A less-known book by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937), We, written in 1924 in Russia, carries an endorsement from Orwell in its most recent reprint by Vintage, and bears a striking similarity to 1984: such borrowing, rehashing, building on and reintrepretation - often across continents and throughout history - is often the way of intellectual culture.

Similarly, Jane Austen’s universally-acknowledged truth that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, has been convincing and inspiring people since it was written in 1813, yet new interpretations and variations of Pride and Prejudice aim to build on the historically-specific truth in terms of the social critique outlined in the novel, whilst refreshing it for the modern day in a bid to give the story new resonance. The radical Enlightenment poet William Blake who inspired revolutionary fervour in his day, today is reinterpreted as an eco-warrior by those who would claim to change the world in new ways. Whilst such phenomena raise interesting questions about authentic textual meanings and authorial ownership, when it comes to reforging a new truth for contemporary times, often seem to speak more of the present’s dislocated relationship with the past and the derth of new, authoritative ideas about the future that might give people enough confidence to do something about them.

Indeed, the intimate relationship between ideas and actions seems to explain a lot about the contemporary anti-intellectual climate. Much recent legislation has been concerned with banning books and narrowing down the limits of acceptable speech precisely because they might incite people to act. Not only does this constitute a pre-emptive measure that serves to shut down debate, but it speaks volumes about today’s fear of radical politics. ‘Radicalisation’ has been presented as a passive process imposed on unwilling victims incapable of making decisions for themselves; whilst ironically, the radicalism of 1968 is celebrated as an object of nostalgia. It seems that putting forward ideas is all very well so long as they don’t go about influencing anybody or trying to change anything.

The two main strands of thought associated with radicalism today are political Islam and the revolutionary green movement. Whilst both claim to diagnose unpalatable truths about contemporary society, touching on Western decadence and passive consumerism; and both suggest alternate ways of organising society – be it by implementing a Sharia state or going carbon-neutral – neither seem to offer robust enough critiques of contemporary society to have much persuasive force. Whilst political Islam has become exhaustively equated with ‘extremism’ following the awful events of 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings, and resulted in the ‘war’ against terror; the green movement has been taken up by the elite and many of its ideas adopted by Government. Whilst living in a Sharia state is rightly undesirable; does the misanthropic anti-growth sentiment that often seems at the heart of the green movement, and the coercive manner in which many of its ideas have been imposed on the rest of society, really seem much better? – When it comes to considering where both sets of ideas derive their authority, the first comes mostly from relgious scripture and the second from contemporary science. But any seriously living truth – in the sense that took hold during the Enlightenment period, or Paris, 1968 – must ultimately derive its authority from a persuaded public, that can take ownership of such ideas en masse.

Far from being an abstract philosophical concern, the difficult question of what a new truth might look like in the twenty-first century really boils down to how to go about successfully critiquing contemporary society and persuading people of new proposals for radical change.

Sarah Boyes is a freelance writer and Assistant Editor of Culture Wars, the online review

Smith strengthens rules on banning extremists, Alan Travis, Guardian, 28 October 2008

Hailed by some as one of the great liberating moments of history; condemned by others as the source of all modern evils –1968 has a contested legacy. Some see it as the beginning of a new era, others as the culmination of a series of political and social trends dating back to the Second World War. One thing however is clear: politics has changed a great deal in the forty years between now and then.

For some, the change is simply that young people ‘have lost the knack of protest’. But student politics has always fed off the broader political conflicts in society. The onset of the European student revolts of 1968 was closely linked with working-class unrest; in America, student mobilisation began with the civil rights movement and only later broadened out to opposition to the Vietnam War. Even in the Soviet Bloc, Jan Palach’s desperate gesture was preceded by Dubček’s attempt at reform.

The idea that we could and should change the world was the stuff of politics in the past, and students’ or workers’ radicalism expressed this in a radical form, calling for revolution or at least some kind of radical societal upheaval. Today that politics has lost its meaning, and all that’s left for so-called radicals is to call for a more extreme version of what ‘politics’ is about today. The form is still there, but the content has changed. So how has politics changed?

Politics is no longer something people do, but instead has become ‘an external world which people watch from outside: a world of political leaders, separate from that of the citizenry’ (Mair 2006: 44). The traditional empirical indicators of political involvement lend credence to this conclusion. The 1990s recorded the lowest ever turnout in any post-war decade in Western Europe; 11 out of 15 advanced Western democracies recorded their lowest ever decade averages in this period. The secular decline in voter turnout has been especially acute in the United Kingdom, but the 2001 elections in Italy, Norway, and the 2002 elections in Portugal, France and Ireland were also marked by all time low turnouts, as was the 2000 election in Spain.

Party membership also fell markedly between the 1980s and 2000, leading some theorists to argue that since the 1990s parties have been ‘haemorrhaging members’ (Mair and van Biezen 2001). Even amongst those who still choose to vote, traditional party allegiances have almost disappeared (Clarke and Stewart 1998; De Sio 2006). It hardly comes as a surprise then that participation in other activities such as party work, contacting politicians, and attending political meetings has also declined (Parry, Moyser et al. 1992; Dalton 2000). But what matters most here is not just the magnitude but the universality of the decline: ‘the similarity of trends for so many nations forces us to look beyond specific and idiosyncratic explanations… for public opinion trends to be so consistent across so many nations, something broader and deeper must be occurring’ (Dalton 2000: 29).

Mair (2006: 25) has argued that we are witnessing ‘the twin processes of popular and elite withdrawal from mass electoral politics’. The idea here is that the new political context, characterised by the absence of radically competing visions of how to organise society, causes political competition to diminish both substantively and in perceived importance. One of the most important aspects of this change in political context concerns the form and ideological content of political parties. Political competition declines substantively because the ideological differences between parties become smaller and smaller as both settle for the middle ground.

By moving to the centre, and divesting themselves of ideological content and the articulation and representation of socio-political interests, parties become more and more removed from social groups. This leads people to perceive electoral outcomes as having little or no impact on their daily lives in two ways. Firstly, because none of the parties or coalitions competing for power seem to represent their group-based interests, and secondly, given the narrow differences between party platforms, voters do not feel that the consequences of electoral outcomes will have much impact on their lives.

As parties which reflected specific interests in society, traditional mass parties were immersed in the complex networks of trade unions, churches, business associations, mutual societies and social clubs in civil society (Walsh, Jennings et al. 2004). They were rooted in society, and their electorates were relatively stable and easy to distinguish (Evans and Andersen 2004). While parties were usually understood to integrate and mobilise the citizenry (to articulate collective interests, translate them into public policy and organise the institutions of government), now they are seen as acting: ‘not as agents of the people but simply instead of them… They are professionals, entrenched in office and in party structures. Immersed in a distinct culture of their own, surrounded by other specialists and insulated from the ordinary realities of constituents’ lives, they live not just physically but also mentally “inside the beltway”’ (Pitkin 2004: 339).

Historically, it was taken for granted that political involvement would be higher when ‘issues of vital concern were presented’ (Boechel 1928: 517). This is true today as it was yesterday, if politicians do not present the electoral contest and political debates as things of essential importance to the future of society, people will not engage in politics. In other words, if there are no ‘issues of vital concern’ presented in the political sphere then it is reasonable that people should not care about the contest between different brands of PR or managerial styles and as a result rightly feel that the electoral outcome, and by extension, contemporary politics, is irrelevant to their lives.

Much has been made in the literature of young people’s disengagement from politics (Wilkinson and Mulgan 1995; Blais, Gidengil et al. 2004; Franklin 2004; Norris 2004). According to the Electoral Commission (2006) young people are the least likely age group to register to vote and only 37 percent voted in the last General Election. Interviews with young people have also revealed a profound cynicism about politics: politicians are perceived as sleazy and untrustworthy, parliament is seen as obscure and ritualistic, and political coverage is said to be incomprehensible and dull (Coughlan 2003). One author describes young people as ‘an age-group who are largely distinctive in their lack of interest in traditional politics’ (Park 1995) and others have said that for this generation ‘politics has become a dirty word’ (Wilkinson and Mulgan 1995).

What is most significant about political disengagement amongst young people today is that study after study shows how political allegiances and voting habits tend to carry on through life (Butler and Stokes 1974; Jennings and Niemi 1991; Plutzer 2002). While older generations were socialised in a highly political climate, the end of class politics and the historic defeat of the labour movement meant the loss of any kind of serious challenge to the system based on independent interests of any kind, so that young people today have been socialised into what is an apolitical climate - one no longer characterised by competing radical alternatives in terms of how to organise society.

Some theorists have however suggested that participation today, and especially young people’s, is being rechanneled through new forms of engagement associated with new social movements, consumer politics, lifestyle issues and the environment (Van Aelst and Walgrave 2001; Henn, Weinstein et al. 2002). This argument is often accompanied by a call to broaden the realm of the ‘political’ – anything, can be a political act, they say. In fact, the number of people involved in these sorts of movement is incredibly small, and rather than a universal rechanneling we find the usual suspects: white, highly educated, middle class people, acting as political omnivores. The same people who still vote are also the people who get involved in the ‘new politics’. In this sense, protest, like other forms of participation, has simply become another way of mobilising public opinion and influencing governmental agendas (Tilly 1975).

What’s more is that this sort of engagement is minimal: it is enough to show up at a yearly demo, or send Greenpeace a few pounds a month to be ‘involved’, while the professional activists, separate from the atomised ‘base’, do the ‘real’ (lobbying) work. This is qualitatively different from the levels of involvement associated with traditional mass parties or trade unions. But what is perhaps most significant in terms of how politics has changed is the content of these so-called ‘new causes’ – it is here that the real death of political, revolutionary, radicalism is most clearly expressed. Today’s ‘radicals’ aren’t calling for radical social upheaval, and thus they aren’t actually radical in the traditional sense of the word at all.

There is no attempt today to break out of the contemporary predicament, let alone to dream of a radically different kind of society. It is not that people have completely lost the desire to be politically involved – but if the goal of politics is to change the world, then we need to set the bar higher. Ideas such as the end of work that have historically been the mainstay of radical thought have almost completely evacuated the sphere of politics, never mind its student variant. We’re in a state of communal loss of what C Wright Mills called the sociological imagination - the process of linking individual experience with social institutions and one’s place in history. Instead, we are stuck in today’s vacuum – at odds with the idea that we could ever radically change the present state things.

While there is a risk in romanticising 1968, the contrast with today is stark. In 1970, four out of ten American students thought revolution (not Barack Obama’s vacuous ‘change’) was necessary. Compared to today, 1968 was an incredible mobilisation of young people kicking against the establishment of both left and right. International solidarity was strong – there was a sense that peoples were involved in their own struggles at home but were still part of a common war against the few lording over the many. Vietnam was the trigger, but soon protests spread around the world – through Asia and Europe there was a sense that people were in it together. Ten million workers went on strike in France, and all over the world the politicisation of vast numbers of people took place in a brief period of unrest. We can criticise the sell-out 1968ers all we want, and yes, they didn’t crystallise their aspirations in any kind of lasting institutions of their own; tell me what you like, but ultimately, the dream of another world was alive.

Nothing like that today. Forget the numbers, the countries, the violent character of the protests and revolts; it’s the content of politics that’s changed. Today’s ‘radicalism’ is ‘radical’ only insofar as it represents an extreme version of what is already in the mainstream. So the Iraq protests only came about when public opinion was already against the war. The environmental radicals want even more cutbacks on our consumption and living standards than the government already demands of us; let alone the obvious observation that it makes little sense to call a movement which espouses ideas already popular with all three main parties radical. When movements in the past called for revolution, governments did not say ‘What a fantastic idea, we’ll include it in our policy programme’ – but Make Poverty History was quickly espoused and co-opted by the government.

Today, politics is less about toppling governments and seizing power and more about holding politicians to account in implementing their own agendas, most obviously on climate change and the environment, but also lifestyle issues such as binge-whatever-ing. To that extent, politics has become a lobby game, not something which engages the people. In fact, the contemporary way of seeing things sheds some light on the problem. We talk about politics failing to engage the people as if politics had a force of its own. But politics is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their interests. In the past, it was the people who ‘engaged’ themselves. Today, politicians are desperate to connect with the public, but the people don’t care. We have moved a far way from a time when the political elites were so fearful of the masses that they wouldn’t even concede formal political rights such as universal suffrage without a good fight. Now they’re making it so easy we’ll soon be able to vote from our mobiles, a big new happy political X Factor.

Politicians today are worried that with decreasing political participation and less than half the British population turning out to vote, their legitimacy will crumble – and with good reason. They are trying to cover their own backs. But for us, participation in the political sphere makes little sense where there is no set of clearly articulated interests to be fought for and won. It makes sense for people not to participate in politics today as there are no ideals, no real meaningful choices. Forget the days of the Reds and the Blues, ‘politics’ today is about equivalently uninspiring shades of grey. (And grey isn’t this season’s new red either.) Even the so-called young rebels today don’t want to change the world, but just want to apply short-term patches here and there. In the past they wanted to transcend capitalism in its entirety; today they just want small changes to make the system more humane.

The future of Politics lies with us and our ability to rediscover our sociological imagination – to start thinking about what kind of world it is that we want to create and live in. For once, a bit of utopia wouldn’t be misplaced. Marx wrote that ‘people make history, but not in conditions of their own choosing’ – we may not be able to choose those conditions, but we must still choose to make history. Giving up on this task would be far a more serious problem than the low participation levels politicians worry about. We’d be surrendering that very thing which makes us human: our historic ability to improve our lot by moulding our own destiny.

Maria Grasso is Stipendiary Lecturer in Politics at St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford and she is completing her PhD on the decline of political involvement and activism in Western Europe at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Her research interests include political involvement, radicalism, civil liberties and the sociology of political action. She co-convenes the IoI Postgrad Forum and co-organises the IoI Current Affairs Forum.

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Any major issue in world affairs can lead to political reflection and even an appetite for change. Given the scale of the current financial crisis, it is not surprising that many people are beginning to ask awkward questions, scouring the business pages of newspapers, and trying to get a handle on contemporary capitalism. This is undoubtedly a healthy response, and perhaps even an opportunity for serious political debate. But in fact it is something of a paradox that we should come to discuss the fundamentals of our social system at a time of unprecedented disengagement from politics.

This raises the question of who ‘we’ are when we discuss these problems. No doubt scholars and other experts have light to shed on things, but are the rest of us mere spectators? Of course we have an interest in developments, as tax payers, consumers and workers, but how might these interests affect our perspective on the crisis, and do they have political consequences?

It would be a mistake to think the crisis will necessarily lead to more critical attitudes to capitalism, and a search for alternatives, as many left-wingers hope (1). In fact, it could just as easily lead to an entrenchment of the political fatalism which has become pervasive in recent years. Too many critics, whether in newspapers or in the pub, pin the blame on human greed rather than a system that might be changed, and most now talk in terms of restraining capitalism rather than transcending it. The global banking crisis has even been unhelpfully confused with rising personal debt and consumerism, as if individual laxity were the key to the problem (Lewis).

In order to develop a more incisive critique of contemporary society, it is necessary to consider not only the particular nuances of the financial economy, whether subprime mortgages or the derivatives market, but also the broader historical context, and the relationship between capitalism and wider social and political forces. This means going beyond moralistic critiques that focus on greed and materialism and simply call for restraint, as well as Manichean political accounts of the so-called ‘neoliberal’ domination of society (2).

Irrational or immoral?

Even those who evoke the older Marxist tradition of anti-capitalism by decrying the ‘irrationalism’ of the capitalist system are nonetheless quick to blame the greed of investment bankers when thing go awry. This implies that capitalism would work – be rational – if only its functionaries behaved properly. In the absence of an alternative, critics have convinced themselves there must be a right way, a moral way, to do capitalism. In fact, whatever the role of reckless investment bankers or spineless politicians in the current crisis, the point is that capitalism faces crises even when everyone behaves impeccably – a fact acknowledged even by the free-market Economist newspaper.

This is precisely because capitalism is irrational: it creates wealth for society at large only as a side-effect of producing profit for capitalists, those who own the means of production. And because wealth is only produced in the particular circumstances that produce profit for capitalists, capitalism cannot consistently and dependably work to the benefit of society as a whole. Moreover, faced with a crisis of whatever kind, a capitalist society lacks the means and institutions to look after the interests of the public without shoring up this system, however maleficent its functionaries have been.

Thus, while many object to our governments bailing out the ‘greedy’ investment bankers caught in the current banking crisis, modern capitalist societies simply can’t function without sophisticated financial institutions. There is no ‘Main Street’ without Wall Street, which is why the ‘real economy’ has already been affected and we face a full economic recession. Governments thus have little choice but to put the welfare of the financial system before the immediate interests of the tax payer.

For this reason, if the international political elite does get its act together and come up with an effective concerted solution to the current banking crisis, it could well mean more instability and less prosperity for most of us in the short to medium term. The point of the various bail-outs, and any further restructuring, is not to help the general public directly, but to save the system, because that is the only means society currently has to produce wealth and benefit us all in the longer term – although there are no guarantees about that.

This is the best capitalism has to offer, which is why it first occurred to radical critics to do away with the system altogether, rather than trying to find solutions within it. Indeed, one old slogan of the radical left was: ‘One solution – revolution’. When it comes to overcoming the fundamental irrationalism of capitalism, the slogan is still true – however unhelpful in today’s political context.

This is not to say that the current crisis is born inevitably of the failings of the capitalism, and will lead inexorably to its breakdown. The crisis began as a very particular one in the banking system, and while it is affecting the real economy, there are no signs of a more fundamental crisis of profitability. And as indicated above, the right kind of government intervention may well get the system back on track, not by correcting its moral failings, but by fixing the financial economy, and thus helping restore capitalism to all its irrational glory. The problem is that ‘the right kind of government intervention’ is not obvious: it is a difficult political problem in its own terms.

Capitalism and politics

Many observers have made the point that, historically, capitalism has shown itself to be a hugely resilient and adaptable system, suggesting it will work its way out of its current woes somehow. It’s certainly true that capitalism has changed dramatically in the past two centuries, adapting to changing circumstances – not least to the unforeseen problems thrown up by its own development. From the evolution of the stock market and the corporation to nationalisation and the welfare state, to more recent deregulation, capitalism has seemed to evolve remarkably successfully over time. The sophisticated financial instruments at the centre of the current crisis were themselves developed to enable capitalists to operate more efficiently and to manage risks in an increasingly flexible and fast-moving international economy. But the crisis is a reminder that capitalism does not in fact ‘evolve’ all by itself.

The banking crisis has already led to massive state intervention, and even more radical reorganisation is almost certainly required if the system is to recover successfully. Looking back, it is clear that this is nothing new. Historically, capitalism has always adapted through politics: imperialism, welfarism, nationalisation and indeed privatisation - none of these things happened simply through capitalists pursuing profits, which is the essence of capitalism as an economic system. Instead, capitalism’s adaptability and resilience has always been dependent on political intervention at crucial moments – whether or not individual capitalists welcomed it. For this reason, capitalism requires political leadership.

The political aspect of the current financial crisis has been generally neglected. But Phil Mullan has argued that it is the fearful and incoherent response of the political elite internationally that is turning a banking crisis into a broader economic downturn. In contrast to the political elites in those previous periods when capitalism has been reorganised, today’s elites lack the ideological coherence and indeed belief in their own system that is necessary to determine what needs to be done and to act with resolve. More practically, Frank Furedi makes the point that the depoliticisation of the economy in recent years has led to ‘the marginalisation of strategies that aim to harness economic forces towards political objectives’. This depoliticisation, which has generally been celebrated as a good thing – such as with New Labour’s granting independence to the Bank of England in 1997 – points to an even deeper problem underlying all this.

For much of the 20th century, the challenge of socialism and communism gave the capitalist elites something to cohere themselves against politically, spurred them into action – and offered ideas and institutions that could be co-opted when necessary (such as in welfarism). In contrast, today there is no organised opposition to capitalism to play this role or any other. The current political crisis is thus not reducible to a failure of character in the political class, but illustrates a more profound social impasse. The lack of an alternative to capitalism has transformed politics more generally into a matter of administration rather than principle, and narrowed the scope of politics to the detriment of any sense of political agency even within the parameters of capitalism. This is the root-cause of the recent popular disengagement from politics.

In this context, pointing out that capitalism is irrational – even dreaming up an alternative way of organising the economy – is not enough to constitute a real political alternative. This requires ideas, certainly, but also a coherent constituency for those ideas, a movement capable of acting on them. The constituency for Marxism in its various forms was the organised working class, which had the means and institutions to present a serious challenge to capitalism. Today those institutions are empty shells, and the working class has been notably absent from the debate about the crisis.

Instead, we talk about ‘the tax payer’ as the sucker who is having to bail out the banks. But tax payers don’t constitute a particular constituency – they comprise just about everyone (including investment bankers) and a plethora of competing interests and preoccupations. As such, ‘the tax payer’ has no particular political interests, and cannot be mobilised without an appeal to something else. In the current political context there is a dearth of means to differentiate tax payers into more coherent sections or interest groups, let alone a constituency for radical change. Tax payers may well vote out the British government at the next election, but if so they’ll do it by electing the avowedly pro-capitalist Conservatives, not the Socialist Workers Party. The old politics of class are no longer salient, and the current crisis has only confirmed this.

In the recent past, some thinkers tried to explain the demise of the working class in terms of structural changes in capitalism which had transformed the character of that class: the move from manufacturing to service industries, for example, or indeed the rise of the ‘post-material’ financial economy. Others suggested the working class had been ‘bought off’ in the 1980s: the newly wealthy Essex Man in Britain and the Reagan Democrats in the US had embraced the individualistic values of the Right. This prejudice is repeated in some of today’s discussions about consumerism, which depict the public as passive dupes of advertising and political spin.

But these accounts focus on relatively superficial factors and neglect the crucial political aspect of social class, and in particular the fact that the working class was politically defeated, perhaps most dramatically in Britain in the 1980s, but also more generally across the Western world in the final decades of the last century. Socialist ideas were widely discredited, and the collapse of the Soviet Union undermined the case not only for Stalinist Communism but any systemic alternative to capitalism.

This defeat is not merely an historical fact, but an implacable material reality with profound consequences for contemporary politics. It fundamentally transformed the character of the working class and of society as a whole. To ignore this and point to this or that strike somewhere or other as evidence of resurging class consciousness, as some left-wingers still do, is to engage in fanciful thinking rather than serious politics. The experience of defeat is important because it colours the political landscape today, not only on what remains of the radical left, but also more generally.

Capitalism in an age of low horizons

The rapid demise of radical alternatives effectively discredited the very idea that human beings can shape history, so that what first appeared a victory for liberal capitalism quickly gave way to the sense that this is simply the way things have to be. This disoriented the Western political elites, who were no longer charged with defending democracy and the free market from external and domestic threats, but simply with keeping the system ticking over, and dealing with all its unmistakable imperfections. The diminishment of political agency was the real cause of the ‘depoliticisation’ of the economy, and has made it difficult for governments to respond effectively to the current crisis even in technocratic terms.

More importantly, these developments altered the relationship between capitalism and the rest of us. Instead of being a system we could endorse or oppose politically, capitalism came to be seen as the natural order of things, whether we like it or not – something to be bemoaned, perhaps, but not transformed. An entire generation has now been brought up with dramatically limited political horizons, a fact reflected in widespread disengagement from politics. Not only is there no alternative political movement waiting to seize power when the ruling elite is seen to be failing, but there is barely even a public – a ‘we’ – to debate the matter in political terms.

This is the context in which the current discussion about capitalism has emerged. Crucially, this means that challenges to ‘the system’ have often taken on a misanthropic rather than political character. This is most apparent in environmentalist critiques, which target ‘excessive consumption’ and champion austerity for all, rather than representing the self-interest of the public in its various forms, as traditional political movements did. The danger is that rather than precipitating a re-engagement with politics, the current financial crisis and ensuing recession could reinforce a pervasive fatalism, or what I’ve discussed elsewhere as ‘cynical anti-capitalism’.

For all the limitations of the current period, however, we need not choose between passively accepting the status quo, and the self-sacrifice proposed by environmentalists, especially as these two positions have more in common than is generally acknowledged. Instead, we can try to articulate our own interests – not only economic, but also social and cultural – and explore how they intersect with the interests of others. Genuinely public discussion and argument – as opposed to expert commentary and academic debate –  is the beginning of any political challenge, and this is what is most obviously missing from the current situation. The atomisation of the public is not an inevitable consequence of capitalism in its current form, however, but the product of specific historical developments. While these cannot be ‘undone’, circumstances are subject to change.

Capitalism is not merely an economic system, but a form of society. And the current crisis is not merely an ‘economic’ problem. In order for the economy to be a meaningful political issue, though, there must first be a constituency for an alternative of some kind; failing that, it is simply out of our hands. Changing society means first of all changing politics, and that is something we as an emerging public can do.

Dolan Cummings works at the Institute of Ideas, where he edits Culture Wars, the online review. He is also a member of the campaigning Manifesto Club.

1) See for example some of the responses in a Guardian feature on anti-capitalists and the financial crisis, 17 September 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/sep/17/recession.labour

2) Current ‘anti-capitalist’ critiques range from the mainstream, ‘economic’ arguments, such as those made by Will Hutton, to more ‘political’ attacks on so-called neoliberalism (see my review, ‘You won’t fool the children of the revolution’.)

Cummings, Dolan, 2008. You won’t fool the children of the ‘revolution’, Culture Wars, 18 April

Cummings, Dolan, 2008. Cynical capitalism, cynical anti-capitalism, Culture Wars, 4 March

Economist, 2008. Capitalism at bay, The Economist, 28 October

Furedi, Frank, 2008. The state won’t be the saviour of the economy, spiked, 15 October

Hutton, Will, 2008. This terrifying moment is our one chance for a new world, Observer, 5 October

Lewis, Carol, 2008. The man who wants us all to stop and think about the way society is headed, The Times, 8 October

Mullan, Phil, 2008. It’s the politics, stupid, spiked, 25 September

Progress today is a dirty word. After the decisive defeat of the organised working class in the 1980s, belief in social progress has given way to increasingly gloomy prognostications about ‘our broken society’, with moral panics about gun and knife crime supplemented by warnings of an ‘obesity epidemic’ that will kill Britain’s children at a younger age than their own parents. Widespread suspicion of science means that despite continued technological advances, we fail to celebrate what is, objectively speaking, a golden age of medicine and science, greeting doctors’ ability to keep us alive and well for longer as creating a ‘pensions time-bomb’ and potentially revolutionary advances in gene technology as ‘Frankenstein’ meddling with nature. This essay briefly explores how this gloom has spread to the field of development economics, defends the material basis of progress and the right of developing countries to undergo development, and finally argues that material development offers the only way to avoid the environmental disasters we are constantly warned are just around the corner.

Spreading the Funk: Sustainable Development, Neo-Malthusianism

Bad enough at home, the profound funk afflicting Western societies is disastrous when afflicted on countries abroad. Nowhere is this plainer than in the rhetoric surrounding ‘sustainable development’, which warns of potential economic disaster unless ambitions for progress are reined in. ‘Sustainable development’ is a flabby, contested concept with many different interpretations, but broadly advocates shifting from growth-led strategies of economic development to encompass other goals like environmentalism and social considerations, like the promotion of ‘well-being’ or ‘happiness’ among the population, rather than the evils of consumerism (eg. Redclift & Hinton 2008). ‘Sustainable development’ has become the latest mantra of development economics and has been internalised by policy wonks throughout the international aid and development system. For developing countries dependent on Western aid and loans, it is now literally the only game in town.

Despite assertions that warnings about the environmental consequences of not adopting sustainable development reflect ‘The Science’, a supposedly monolithic consensus, sustainable development has become a mantra only in today’s climate of deep disillusionment about ‘progress’. The academics, politicians and businessmen of the so-called Club of Rome tried the same line in the 1970s, producing their aptly-titled report, Limits to Growth, but workers refused to rein in their ambitions for a better life; today, people meekly accept such assertions as objective truth (Meadows et al. 1972). The Malthusian belief that the planet cannot support its present or future population is an ahistorical myth, only given currency by the West’s contemporary anti-progressive funk. It is only believable when we jettison our historically well-founded belief in mankind’s potential to continue to solve problems, rather than merely create them.

Objectively speaking, the last century witnessed the remarkable capacity of human beings to transform, rather than merely submit to, their environment, and thus create real ‘progress’. Growth in food output overtook population growth in the 1950s and has steadily outstripped it, thanks to enhanced agricultural techniques and their diffusion via the ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Global population quadrupled, but global wealth quintupled (Richman 1995). While, especially in the capitalist world, gains were deeply uneven, this nonetheless created dramatic improvements in housing, sanitation and medical care for hundreds of millions of people, especially where the masses were politically well-organised. In fact, it was these conditions that allowed the population to explode: we didn’t start breeding like rabbits, we stopped dropping like flies, due to material improvements in our everyday lives.

Ignoring the Material Basis of Progress, Romanticising the Poor

Nevertheless, ‘sustainability’ is the dominant ethos in international development today. The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is often celebrated for embracing this ethos, having abandoned traditional Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measurements of economic development (which measures the wealth the country actually produces) in favour of a ‘Gross National Happiness’ (GNH) index. Since doing so, Bhutan has made some remarkable advances: primary school enrolment is up from 55% in 1990 to 84% in 2004, child mortality is down a third, and so on. But it would be a mistake to attribute this to policies associated with ‘GNH’. What social advances have occurred in Bhutan have only been possible because the country’s real wealth – its GDP – has increased 700% since 1980. How? Because rapid economic growth across the border in India has boosted demand for Bhutan’s predominant export, hydro-electricity, and the resultant industrialisation now contributes over 40% of Bhutan’s GDP. In fact, focusing on ‘GNH’ is an attempt to disguise how the fruits of economic growth still accrue to a distinct minority, with the masses remaining extremely poor and disempowered: 90% of the population remain employed in subsistence farming, 70% don’t have access to electricity and a third still lives on less than a dollar a day (CIA 2008).

The example of Bhutan tells us two important things about ‘progress’. The first is that GDP figures are, as sustainability experts suggest, inadequate as a measure of progress. It’s important not just how much an economy has grown, but how the resultant wealth is distributed and used, and who benefits. Moreover, progress is not simply reducible to material development, but must encompass social and ideological factors, too. The second, however, is that so-called ‘pro-poor’ development cannot occur without the basic economic growth that GDP measures. Like Bhutan, Africa is not poor because we measure poverty in GDP, but because Southern Africa has an economy the size of Belgium. This becomes all the more clear when we compare two different measures of development: GDP per head of the population versus the United Nations’ ‘Human Development Index’, which measures things like life expectancy, literacy and educational attainment to give a rough idea of ‘human development’, understood as access to healthcare, education, income and employment.

(CIA 2008b)

(UNDP 2007)

A quick glance reveals the close correlation between the two measures. If a place is poor in GDP terms, its people suffer from social and economic deprivation.

This should hardly be surprising, but the material basis of progress and human flourishing is worth re-emphasising when we consider some of the recent antics of those preaching ‘sustainability’, which seem aimed precisely at retarding that progress in favour of advancing environmentalist agendas:

• Green activists got €4bn worth of EU aid to third-world industries slashed in 2007 alone. They have sabotaged World Bank funding for infrastructure projects, like a hydro-electric dam in Gujarat province, India, which would have provided power for 5,000 villages, industries and sewage-treatment works, irrigation for crops and clean water for 35m people – all because, as one activist said, it would ‘change the path of the river, kill little creatures along its banks and uproot tribal people’ (Heartfield 2008: 73-4).

• Western development agencies have banned the use of DDT when 300m people suffer from malaria and up to 3m die from it each year. Abandoning the use of DDT allowed malaria infections to rise 600% in South Africa alone (Driessen, 2005).

• The UN Regional Wood Energy Development body promotes the burning of charcoal instead of kerosene when 5m young people die annually from diseases caused by indoor wood-smoke inhalation (Heartfield 2008: 73).

• Lower-yield organic farming is promoted at the expense of modernised agriculture when 840m people suffer from malnutrition.

• Guilt-ridden Westerners offset their carbon via charities that re-impose back-breaking drudgery on Third World peasants, by substituting water pumps operated by physical labour for those powered by diesel (O’Neill 2007).

• Western governments, via the 2008 Bali Accord, pledged to pay poor countries to plant trees instead of developing their economies.

At worst, these attempts to scale back the material progress that would lift people out of poverty are legitimised by ideological claims that poverty is preferable to development, or that normalise poverty as part of third-world ‘cultures’. Indigenist activists like Friends of People Close to Nature celebrate hunter-gatherers for their ‘non-exploitative relationship with the natural world’, whose ‘unique cultures’ need to be ‘preserved’ from ‘the ideologies of “progress” and “growth” and absorption in the global economy’. They want ‘to reverse the process of development’, suggesting tribal societies remind us ‘how we once lived in harmony with nature and how we might live again’ (Jones 2008). Ceri Dingle, director of the educational and film-making charity, WorldWrite, says a Swedish development minister told her Africans did not need running water because carrying water in jars on their heads was ‘part of their culture’.

None of this is part of anyone’s ‘culture’; it is simply a reflection of crippling poverty and under-development. While we in the West can agonise about what ‘progress’ means and whether it remains possible, people in under-developed countries are quite clear-minded about these issues: progress means significant improvement in material living standards and is an urgent priority. The one billion people who live in slums worldwide prefer this to backbreaking subsistence farming; their demands are for electricity, clean water, education, healthcare and decent jobs, not ‘traditional knowledge’.

Moreover, it is this absence of squeamishness, combined with all-important access to capital, that has lifted people out of poverty, not any of the ‘sustainable’ policies pushed by the West. China’s remarkable economic growth – its GDP has trebled in the last five years – has lifted 250m people out of poverty, accounting for all of global poverty reduction. In fact, without China, global poverty would have been worsening, despite the West’s much-hyped debt relief and the UN’s pathetically conservative Millennium Development Goals.

Southern Africa’s GDP actually decreased in the 1990s as its poverty forced it to accept Western policies. By contrast, Chinese investment in Africa has tripled to $30bn in the last five years, and Southern African GDP has doubled (Williams 2008: 90, 126). As is the nature of capitalist development, the gains will, as ever, be very uneven. But rather than wringing our hands, calling for ‘sustainability’ or a ‘reverse to the process of development’, we should celebrate that development is happening, interrogate the resultant inequalities and support social forces seeking progressive redistribution of wealth and power.

Afterword: Progress and Ecology

Today’s dominant reply to all of the above is that developing countries cannot aspire to living standards approaching those of the West without creating climate catastrophe: rising sea levels, hurricanes and other natural disasters. I want to end by arguing that material progress is in fact the only way to avoid such disasters.

From 2000-2004, the risk of being a victim of natural disaster in developing countries was 6%; in rich countries, it was 0.07%. Is this because these countries are more disaster-prone? No. Some countries are obviously located closer to geographical fault-lines, rivers and oceans, tumultuous weather patterns, and so on, than others. But the key thing is how we deal with these material conditions. The more developed the country, the more it can spend on defending its population from nature.

Clearly, this capacity does not mean this spending will occur: governments with contempt for the masses or those seized by the anti-progress funk identified above may well neglect their populations. The people of New Orleans paid the price for this during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but although media commentary viewed the latest ‘hurricane season’ as yet another instance of mankind’s subordination to nature, the vastly different impact of the hurricanes in the USA and impoverished states like Haiti symbolises the fact that Americans have overcome that subordination. The Netherlands is mostly below sea level, yet suffers less from flooding than Bangladesh because it can spend more on high-tech defence systems. The UK’s annual budget for flood and coastal defences is $1.2bn, nearly five times the total global aid budget for climate adaptation, at $225m (UNDP 2008: 189-90).

If climate change really is the looming catastrophe Greens say it is, we urgently need to engineer the technical shift required to create a post-carbon economy, and massively increase aid and technical assistance to less-developed countries. A very modest step in this direction would be the $50bn Climate Change Mitigation Facility proposed by the UN Development Programme, which would leverage investment to develop low-carbon technology, widen access to energy, buy out intellectual property rights and cascade technology to poor countries. One thing is certain: there is nothing ‘progressive’ about trying to hold developing countries back and thus leaving them to the tender mercies of Gaia.

Lee Jones is Rose Research Fellow in International Relations at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford.

CIA (2008a) CIA World Factbook: Bhutan. 
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/bt.html
CIA (2008b) CIA World Factbook: GDP (PPP) Per Capita.
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Driessen, P. (2005) Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death. New Delhi, Academic Foundation
Jones, L. (2008) ‘Is West-Papua Being Eco-Colonised?’, spiked
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4944/
Meadows, D. et al. (1972) The Limits to Growth: A Report For the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. London, Earth Island
O’Neill, B. (2007) ‘Is Carbon-Offsetting Just Eco-Enslavement?’, spiked
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3788
Redclift, M. & Hinton, E. (2008) Living Sustainably: Approaches for the Developed and Developing World. London, Policy Network. http://www.progressive-governance.net/publications/?id=2198
Richman, S. (1995) Testimony to US Congress on the International Population Stabilization and Reproductive Health Act.
http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-ps720.html
UNDP (2007) United Nations Development Report.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/UN_Human_Development_Report_2007_%282%29.svg
UNDP (2008) Human Development Report 2007/2008. Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World. New York, United Nations. http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2007-2008
Williams, A. (2008) The Enemies of Progress: Dangers of Sustainability. London, Imprint Academic

When it came back on air a few months ago, BBC1’s The Culture Show was advertised with the line, ‘we don’t know what it is, but it’s happening next’. The sentiment neatly sums up both a confusion and expectation about contemporary culture: it’s certainly out there and a spectacle to be seen, but who it belongs to and what that means is up for grabs. With the beginning of the Cultural Olympiad in September this year, the next four years will see a nationwide celebration ‘of culture’ with the aim of galvanising a sense of national identity and shared values to present to the world come 2012, but when the point is to celebrate diffuse world-views and bring people together, whose culture is it anyway?

The spectre of the mainstream
As Britain reaches the end of a decade of New Labour multiculturalist policies that have influenced everything from housing allocation to arts funding, some argue that cultural differences have become institutionalised and a sense of shared values and identity undermined. Critics argue that by supporting minority voices, the views and values of the majority of the British public – along with the Isles’ heritage - have got lost. Indeed, the spectre of the mainstream or majority has long haunted the discourse, an implied ‘rest of us’ against which the minorities have been defined. Mostly, this has been loosely associated with the native, predominantly white, Christian or secular, population – those with family histories based in the UK - with people of different ethnicity, religion and heritage being been held apart as minorities. Policies of positive discrimination and promoting diversity have ensured these minorities are prominent in culture life, this top-down reconstruction of the populace on grounds of ethnicity has been represented as creating a more ‘equal’ society. As a result, today it is often sections of the white middle classes who complain about being treated unfairly by the system. Indeed, in 2008, it appears that ‘multiculturalism’ has become the mainstream, and from many parts of society, calls for a new Britishness are becoming louder.

The issue of national identity obsesses the political elite and many other political groups besides, though any clear sense of political vision in their proposed policies is noticeable only in its absence. Indeed, the cultural reconstruction project begun by New Labour in 1997, with its aim to create a diverse and multicultural nation, has served to obscure from an underlying political and cultural consensus at the top, and general political exhaustion throughout society. Whilst thinking and arguing about ‘values’ could serve to kick-start a fuller-blooded political debate about the past, present and future of society, at best, what ‘British values’ are seen to be is vague: a dedication to civility and hard work, good sense of humour and strong spine. Blair’s attempt to repackage British heritage with the Cool Britannia of the nineties, with its kitsch pugs, red pillar post boxes and the Spice Girls, aimed to reforge a link with the best of the past, conjuring up images of the flag-waving (and flag-dress wearing) optimism and sense of purpose and pride that characterised the post Second World War period. Today, the project seems to have failed to permeate any deeper into the national consciousness. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown’s ‘moral compass’ and puritan work ethic have presented a core dedication to fairness and seriousness underpinning policy, though plans to turn August Bank Holiday into ‘national Britishness day’ sound similarly drab and uninspiring. In fact, any flag-waving sentiment today seems an embarrassment to the elite, with the Pomp and Circumstance of this year’s Proms, for instance, being decried by Culture Minister Margaret Hodge for not expressing ‘common’ or mainstream enough values to which all sections of society can subscribe.

But what this mainstream really is – or ever was – is far from clear. Historically, whilst it’s true most people living in the UK have indeed been white and either Christian or secular, there has far been consensus on values. The view that it’s immigration that changed things makes the mistake of assuming a direct link runs from a person’s race or religion to their way of seeing and navigating the world as mature adults, missing the fact it is a shared sense of ownership over culture and history that brings people together. With rivalry between honest, no nonsense and hard-working Northerners and their more sophisticated, educated and luxury-loving Southern counterparts; with bitter divisions between Catholics and Protestants and tension between the working and upper classes, an historically mainstream British culture that permeated all parts of society is difficult to discern. 

From culture clash to cynical consent
Indeed, today, ‘culture clashes’, or at least the appearance of them, have become commonplace. Debacles over displays of racially or religiously sensitive art, spats over dress-codes, or anger at what literature is available in primary schools are constantly discussed, and identity politics frequently frames the public debate. As much as there is a clear sense of what culture means today, it is dealt with and navigated in increasingly legalistic terms of minority ‘rights’ to do, say or make certain things. Otherwise, as the traditional distinction between private and public spheres has been eroded, ‘culture’ has become more explicitly equated with ‘lifestyle’, explicity encompassing everything from what paintings a person likes to look at to how they have sex. But the underlying problem seems not so much that a contestation of beliefs and values amongst vying groups has led to the lack of a shared sense of culture, but that in the absence of a more full-bodied contestation that might generate a strong sense of commonality, a more generally underconfident approach towards culture, public life and artworks especially has come to dominate the show. Far from the racist, religiously intolerant picture many suggest, most people seem to see expressions of religious difference and heritage as banal features of everyday life.

In this, the focus on minority identities has been seen especially in the arts, though here too the situation takes some unpicking. In a way, literature, music, plays dance and paintings have often been concerned with the human condition, reflecting, challenging and constructing notions of personhood, heritage and identity. An interest in Malayan music, Indian dance or Mongolian literature can come from a genuine desire to learn about and appreciate new artistic forms and ideas; and an impulse towards creating artworks that reflect or embody distinctive ideas. But there has been another trend too: modern art has become postmodern, and once the playfulness wears off begins to look deeply cynical. Established artists from Andy Warhol to Tracey Emin are greeted with a perverse attraction, attracting as much criticism for their consumerist undertones as admiration for their ironic comments on the state of modern society. A focus on authentic ‘other cultures’ in response can look like a pragmatic alternative given the lack of authority seen in cultural institutions across the board. 

In response, when it comes to thinking about culture and artworks, torn between a multiculturalist melange and celebration of cynicism, the problem seems not to be that we don’t know who artworks or culture belong to; more that we want nothing to do with the whole lot of them. Whilst the aim could be to understand different ways of seeing the world in a way that begins to have resonance for all, by setting cultural differences in stone, culture itself becomes neutered, banal or boring. Culture becomes an industry or simply something to passively consume, and such a dark attitude is reflected in the work of many leading cultural critics, who seem unable to find a way out. Others look to the past to find firm critical standards and the grounds to make firm value-judgements about the worth of artworks

Bigging up art can dumb down culture
The publication of the McMaster report – Suppporting Excellence in the Arts - From Measurement to Judgement – at the beginning of this year reflects such a move from the elite. The report argues for the creation of an ‘excellent culture’, or the best artworks available to all, with visits to public museums, art galleries and other arts institutions made available for everyone. But despite its laudable intentions, the report says little about what constitutes ‘excellence’ in the arts, instead assuming that the nation’s galleries and theatres are already full of the best stuff. In fact, especially given the lack of authority seen in cultural institutions across the board, many would argue this is far from the case. Indeed, baldly bigging up ‘art’ in this way threatens to dumb down culture.

What a piece of art – a public statue, painting in an art gallery or piece of site-specific theatre – means, depends on the role it plays for the people around it, on what it represents to them and how they respond to it, whether it makes sense to them. Individual judgements about artworks are made part and parcel inside of such a framework, and lean in part on what people know about the history of the genre and how they think more generally about art. Making an excellent culture must mean more than simply stipulating that artworks be excellent, and go further in supporting the mechanisations that allow artists and critics to develop, alongside educating children and publics about the history and meanings of artworks. Critical judgements about excellence that could begin to have universal application across cultures, aren’t fixed outside of a shared framework of understanding them, or in short, a shared culture.

The democratisation of diversity
Though at the same time as making artworks available to all sectors of society with a core dedication to diversity, demands for the arts to be ‘relevant’ to every individual have become explicit:

‘Artists, practitioners, organisations and funders must have diversity at the core of their work.  Out of the society in which we live today the greatest culture could grow, but this will only happen if the cultural sector is truly relevant to 21st century Britain and its audiences.’ - Sir Brian McMaster’s groundbreaking review, Supporting Excellence in the Arts - From Measurement to Judgement (January 2008)

But ‘diversity’ here has been repackaged over the last decade. Rather than framing things in terms of the shared heritage of groups or communities, now the idea is defined in terms of differentiation between individuals, couched in terms of age, race, sexuality, disability, and socio-economic background. Diversity is being democratised: not just reserved for ethnic minorities, but something available to everybody. Though, the salient ways of differentiating ourselves from one another and asserting ourselves as individuals come as given, and in terms of those things most difficult to change: nobody can be a different age (though lying is always an option), few feel they ‘choose’ their sexuality not least any disability, and socio-economic backgrounds are fixed by dint of birth. Who wants to make art on the basis of being a white, middle class 33-year old or on the grounds of being a 70-year old black working class lesbian with a speech impediment? On the face of it, the report seems to advocate embracing predefined and narrow social categories to define ourselves as individuals before being able to take an ownership over culture that is ‘relevant’ to us on that basis. More generously though, the underlying idea that culture comes from and is shared between individuals, and can be contributed to and owned regardless of age, race, disability or anything else, might constitute a progressive development when it comes to thinking about the arts.

Rather than worrying about how to make artworks relevant to audiences in order to protract a shared ownership of culture or create a new Britishness, it might be worth thinking more deeply about ‘excellence’ when in comes to the arts, and start by building up a critical culture around them that can begin to take artworks seriously on their own terms.

Sarah Boyes is a freelance writer and Assistant Editor of Culture Wars, the online review.

Supporting excellence in the arts - from measurement to judgement - Sir Brian McMaster, DCMS, January 2008

Cultural Olympiad - values and vision - Official homepage for London Olympics, 2012

Multiculturalism drives young Muslims to shun British values - mailonline, 29 January 2007

Roll back the state and mend society too  - Norman Blackwell, The Times, 8 September 2008

‘Get Involved in the Cultural Olympiad!!’ - Sarah Boyes, Culture Wars, 10 October 2008

What now for the M-word? - Munira Mirza, sp!ked, 10 May 2007

Leadership is a buzzword that seems to be used more frequently just when the quality it describes grows elusive. It is more often invoked as something missing than admired where it exists, while what people mean by a need for leadership varies in different contexts. Indeed, defining it is perhaps one way leaders actually lead. And the lack of definition about leadership is arguably a defining problem of our own time, most particularly in politics.

The perception that Prime Minister Gordon Brown is a weak leader, a ditherer, reflects a broader uncertainty in British society, the lack of a sense of purpose. Brown’s recurring and uninspiring efforts to celebrate ‘Britishness’ only highlight this problem. The partial recovery of Brown’s reputation when he acted more decisively than other national leaders in response to the banking crisis reflected a shift in priorities: suddenly leaders were required to be competent rather than inspiring. Given the crisis is far from over, however, and is arguably compounded by that broader lack of purpose, Brown is still likely to be judged and found wanting in terms of political vision.

Taken out of context, however, the idea of leadership can become anodyne and substanceless, a kind of one-size-fits-all ‘McLeadership’. This is common currency not just in politics, but in business, sport and even the arts, and is often discussed in very jarring ways – with frequent allusions to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and Machiavelli’s The Prince, as if leadership can be reduced to cunning strategies passed down from history. Of course, all these fields require people with the ability to communicate a vision and mobilise people to bring it about. Too often, though, ‘leadership’ refers not to anything substantial, but instead to a set of techniques that can be taught, or alternatively to supposedly in-born character traits – even a personality type.

Worse, banging on about ‘leadership’, and making grandstanding gestures to demonstrate it, is often a substitute for thinking about what really needs to be done, and how. The word itself has a suspicious whiff of management-speak about it, suggesting pretentious business people who insist with lofty banality that they’d rather be respected than liked. And we are right to be suspicious when the need for ‘strong leadership’ is invoked in defence of unpopular actions or policies.

The nineteenth century French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin is supposed to have said, on seeing a crowd marching through Paris, ‘There go my people. I must find out where they’re going so I can lead them’. This story was often cited by John F Kennedy among others, and is now established as a paradigm of bad leadership. We rightly disdain craven crowd-pleasers who simply tell us what they think we want to hear. But on the other hand, we have little respect, much less affection, for leaders who act without regard for what anyone else thinks or wants, ‘leading’ without taking anyone with them.

The case of Gordon Brown’s predecessor Tony Blair captures this ambivalence. For Blair and his supporters, his insistence on the need to invade Iraq, and his determined prosecution of the war, regardless of public opinion, was an example of strong leadership. As long as leadership is understood as a personality type involving a strong will, decisiveness and conviction, this is perfectly true. And for this reason, lots of people are very suspicious of the whole business of leadership. The spectre of authoritarianism is unavoidable: Hitler seemingly had all the character traits of a ‘strong leader’. Some argue the very concept of leadership is fundamentally undemocratic. Anarchists have always rejected the idea that we need political leaders, and the Greens have only recently succumbed to the idea, much to the chagrin of some supporters.

Both the fetishisation of strong leadership and the reaction against it stem from a one-sided focus on leaders as personalities, and neglect of the other side of the relationship. Leadership is a relationship, not merely a personal quality. Leading means convincing people to follow, to take part in something, whether it’s a small project or a grand cause. There are various ways of doing this, but genuine leadership involves winning people over so they are not merely following orders but participating as active subjects. In this sense, leadership is certainly not incompatible with democracy, but essential to it. Leaders are not a breed apart, but simply people with the imagination to see a possibility and the determination to make it happen. And ‘followers’ are not passive sheep or clone-like dupes, but simply those people who embrace the ideas of others and follow their lead. Most people probably find themselves in both positions at one time or another.

The key to this relationship is the idea itself, the vision communicated by leaders, whether it is their own or comes from someone else. It could be a business idea, an artistic production, or even a war of liberation. In any case, the nature of the ensuing relationship derives from that idea and how the leader plans to realise it – which preferably involves convincing people to make it their own – rather than resting in some abstract notion of ‘leadership’. It is surely the absence of big ideas in politics at the present time that has rendered leadership a rather sterile category. When politicians start talking about the need for leadership, rather than actually leading by setting out inspiring ideas, we know we are in trouble.

This is not to say leadership is an entirely intellectual business, that character and resolve are unimportant. Depending on the circumstances, they can be vital. Some leaders take responsibility for seeing through an existing set of ideas; others have to struggle to establish new ones. In either case, though, leaders need to have the courage of their convictions. This doesn’t mean leaders aren’t allowed to have doubts, but that they have to be willing to take risks. Leadership can mean walking purposefully and inspiring others to follow even when you’re perfectly aware you might be going in the wrong direction. Indeed, even if you are, firmness of resolve can be the difference between success and failure.

Nonetheless, just as people can reasonably differ about what is the right course of action, they can also differ on how to go about it, what is a reasonable risk to take, and so on. Julius Martov, a leader of the relatively conservative Menshevik faction during the Russian Revolution, was later described by Leon Trotsky as ‘the Hamlet of democratic socialism’, because of his particular reluctance to act decisively and lead the masses into radical action as the Bolsheviks did. Trotsky actually admired Martov, who was a highly intelligent political leader: the comparison was meant to indicate that like Shakespeare’s Danish prince, Martov’s greater virtues were rendered null by his fundamental flaw.

But whatever the man’s personal qualities, Menshevism was ultimately a political position based on a particular analysis of the situation, and a particular set of ideas about how to change things. Martov’s character meant he was well placed to represent it, just as Lenin’s made him a seemingly natural leader of the Bolsheviks. No doubt there were others on both sides who ended up on the ‘wrong’ side for their own temperaments, since there are many more important factors in politics than personality. But history often seems to find the right man or woman for a particular role. In any case, the truly important distinction was not between the cautiousness of Martov and the decisiveness of Lenin, but between the politics of the Mensheviks and those of the Bolsheviks. And what counted in the end was not the personal qualities of the leaders, but the political convictions of those who followed them.

The personal qualities required of leaders depend very much on the circumstances, and need not in fact have much to do with moral fibre. Great leaders are not necessarily good people, and how we judge people as leaders is not necessarily the same as how we should judge leaders as people. Shakespeare also gave us perhaps the opposite archetype to Hamlet in Macbeth, who acted decisively all right, but did so out of moral weakness rather than virtuous resolve. But while in Shakespeare’s characterisation, Macbeth is a villain, in historical terms, he might be seen as merely unlucky. Another Scottish king, Robert the Bruce, also murdered a rival in order to take the throne, but is now remembered as a heroic leader who helped forge the Scottish nation by defeating an English invasion. Perhaps if he’d lost at Bannockburn, his demons would have come back to haunt him and he’d be remembered as a villain too. But history gave him a cause, and he led his army to victory.

The cause is the thing, and no ‘leader’ can meaningfully lead without one. Even Barack Obama, who has apparently inspired great numbers of young Americans to take an interest in politics and social change, has so far failed to give a real lead in terms of spelling out what change means. If today’s political elites seem unimpressive, it has to do with this lack of political vision more than weak character, and this is not the failing of these people as individuals, but rather a reflection of the times we live in. These circumstances call for a particular kind of leadership, involving conviction and single-mindedness, certainly, but also imagination and the courage to think afresh. History cannot be relied on to give us the answers. What other possibilities exist in politics or any other field of human endeavour? It is the role of new leaders to see them where others don’t.

Dolan Cummings works at the Institute of Ideas, where he edits Culture Wars, the online review. He is also a member of the campaigning Manifesto Club.

Feeling words

Barack Obama’s therapeutic rhetoric has been striking in the final days of campaigning in the 2008 US presidential election: ‘In one week, we can come together as one nation, and one people, and once more choose our better history’. This difficult phrase – in what sense can we be said to choose our history, let alone choose it again? – is explained by his appeal to ‘our better angels’ (1). He means to say that we have not been true to ourselves for a while, we have strayed, erred, but now it is time to admit our mistakes and come home, to embrace in a national hug-it-out session.

His conception of a new politics is one of speaking loud and clear to the desire we all have for change, but at the same time redefining change to mean a process of emotional realignment to reality. Many commentators have noticed how the verb to change has been nominalised in this election campaign – we want change, any change will do, not we will change – which speaks to low expectations of course but it is also interesting that Obama here seems to present change as a process of return rather than progression: we must choose our better history, not our brighter future. This is indeed a new form of politics: it is even new compared to the ‘New Labour, New Britain’ rhetoric of Tony Blair, which at least asked us to choose between competing visions of the future. With Obama, we may have the first politician to offer us yesterday in place of tomorrow. We are going backwards not forwards.

Insider talking

The jargon of therapy also recently surfaced in British politics as Jack Straw shared his frustration with the idea that we should recognise the ‘criminogenic needs of offenders’:  he feared that such impenetrable jargon could become a ‘“barrier” between the public and experts’ (2). But it was quickly pointed out that his own Ministry of Justice is a serial jargon user. Earlier this year the Labour MP John Cruddas attacked the language of New Labour for being ‘too managerial and technocratic’, for not ‘emotionally’ connecting (3). Why is it that, if all these politicians want to get in touch with our emotions so badly, they keep talking jargonese?

Jargon is language that is normally the preserve of a small professional grouping: we talk of legal jargon or of thieves’ cant. It is language that has grown up as shorthand within a group to refer to things they do everyday (giving ‘injunctive relief’ say or ‘going upon the dub’) but which appears impenetrable or obscure to us. One characteristic of jargon is a much greater range of terms available to describe something for which, in everyday language, a much smaller vocabulary might suffice: it can be very precise and detailed at the expense of wider descriptive or explanatory power.

Knowledge of jargon can be an open sesame to exclusive clubs and equally can serve to bar their doors to the profane. It can make its users seem overly precise, geeky, and it can render them mysterious and deep. Within the group its use makes perfect sense and actually makes communication and understanding easier and straightforward. When teachers discussing pedagogic best practice talk of ‘learning outcomes’ this is convenient shorthand as opposed to saying every time ‘the things that the pupils should have taken on board by the end of the teaching session’. When, however, a corporate offsite facilitator tells the participants their ‘learning outcomes’, he is borrowing the mantle of the teaching profession to dress up group hugs and cod psychology as valuable life lessons learned.

We can see the appeal of such language to the modern politician. In a topsy-turvy world where New Labour one day is market this and market that and the next appears pretty old-fashioned astride the ever-so commanding heights of RBS-Northern Rock State Enterprises, one can understand the allure of a language that brings with it the cachet of insider knowledge. At least you might sound like you understand the world when you talk of ‘moderated teacher assessments’ and ‘stage not age’ learning: certainly preferable to saying that we politicians have so completely abandoned any pretension of being able to teach children anything that we are actually asking them to evaluate the teachers these days (4).

Doing the business

No surprise either that so much ‘ManagerSpeak’ has made its way into the discourse of contemporaneous politics. The vision thing has been around for a while now of course as have mission statements but it is striking how quickly ‘incentivise’ has shifted out from the narrow preserve of spurring on your sales force to its new exhortatory role in ‘nudge’ politics’ desire to get the best out of all of us (5).

It was precisely in the absence of the vision thing that politicians started to act more like managers and less like leaders. In that brief moment of post-Cold War free market euphoria there was no need for vision any more, only for technocratic tinkerers to keep the engines ticking. And when we found out that something called ‘globalisation’ was actually in charge and consequences could be unexpected, then there was no need for vision either: nothing little old us could do anyway except try and keep the ship steady. There is no alternative after all.

There being no alternative, there is not that much to talk about either. No real debate to be had with the consumers – sorry, the people – about how society should or might be: just open door management – sorry, transparent government – and freedom (of choice) underpinned by effective markets. Jargon takes on undue space and weight and begins to inform our everyday speech because it simply moves into the space once inhabited by debate between politicians and voters: it marks the eclipse of the democratic mandate by the language of the boardroom, the special advisory committee and the minister without portfolio.

Don’t argue

The language of modern politics is one half patronising soft sell (them to us) and one half hard necessities (for us): we have to buy it because that’s the way it is. Which explains why the people who get ahead in politics today are fresh out of marketing jobs, PR firms and think tanks rather than the school of democratic hard knocks. They teach it in university after all: the values and standards relativism of the postmodern turn has a lot to answer for in terms of the spread of jargon with its privileging of obscurantism over the unexamined assumptions of clarity. If we can never really say what we mean, then we can never really mean what we say: so why try and make it easy for you to understand in the first place? Better to draw attention to the difficulties of interpretation with my thickets of jargon. The contemptuous calculation is that you won’t understand me anyway.

A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal deconstructs the narrative of the decline of traditional debating societies in America from the early 1970s: for those who struggled to compete with the polished articulacy of the scions of the elite, playing fields were to be levelled by winning with ‘technicalities and sheer quantity of argumentation’. So emerged the postmodern debate where the ‘debate’ centres on the process of debate itself: ‘do you think that debate is multicultural?’ (6) Debate thus turned in on itself has lost its connection with oratory and the art of persuasion, with rhetoric. And so with its ability to touch and influence us. The stage-managed debates of New Labour or a gloves-on Biden versus Palin are a politics by the numbers in which Sarah’s painfully obvious struggle with her learned by rote phrases is the only honest thing about the whole setup.

Governance not government

Traditional conceptions of leadership and of government encompass ideas of driving, managing and directing the people and society. The concept of governance on the other hand speaks more to a notion of steering, a guiding hand, a supporting or enabling framework. Governance, more about the processes and controls of the system of government than government itself, is just the ticket to express the relationship of politician and the state to the people today. A focus on the process and the controls is a good strategy for avoiding blame and dodging responsibility: it serves to objectify ‘The Process’ as being out of our hands almost. The idea of governance reflects a view of subjectivity as being much diminished, in need of crutches. But also as needing to be controlled. For its own good. When something goes wrong the response is always that we need to put the appropriate governance in place. Global recession strikes: we need more regulation. More regulation to control our baser side: our much reviled greedy instincts and over consumption that have led to economic crisis.

Our leaders have certainly lost a great deal of confidence in their ability to describe, understand and shape the world, as Gordon Brown’s long hesitation before acting to bail out the banks demonstrated. Not only do contemporary elites suffer from a crisis of legitimacy – if they are not leading us towards some vision, just what are they there for? – but at the same time they lack a language in which they could give meaning to their own actions and to their place (and ours) in the world. Having rejected the Enlightenment view of our perfectible world, and with nothing much else on offer to replace it, passivity is the safest haven. Decisive action a rough road. And jargon the watchword.

Spin cycle

Politics is now increasingly imagined as a technical exercise of steering the best course between problems rather than setting out competing visions of how life should be lived, how society should and might be organised. In the absence of any such alternatives, and in the wake of the ‘defeat of ideology’, there is no challenge to the bureaucratic psychobabble that has filled the gap left by political oratory. So long as politicians are not held to account for their lack of vision, so long as we let their jargon go unchallenged, so too do we start to take their jargon on board. From social mobility to social exclusion, from mental capital to life skills, we all internalise some part of this new language. We have little choice if we want to communicate successfully with representatives of the state or, increasingly, in the work place.

This is of course partly due to the fact that the ideas of the movers and shakers find ready expression in the media. These ideas become a background to our lives and actually start to shape them. Jargon becomes a vernacular through which we understand the world and our place in it. Not due to any particular inherent strength in the ideas it expresses: on the contrary this ersatz language is relatively easy to see through and to expose. Not hard at all when the contempt of a Hillary Clinton for her audience is such that barefaced lies can be swept under the carpet with an ‘I misspoke’. And certainly there is a media mini-industry now that almost devotes itself to pointing out the latest or most obscure bit of jargon found in the mouths of politicians.

No, the problem is that the exercise of knocking down the jargon and exposing it only gets us so far. We still have to use jargon to get results – just try and ‘interface’ with your local council in language they don’t dub ‘appropriate’ – but now we do it in a knowing self-aware way, cynically dealing in a debased currency. We may get a kick at laughing at Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’ or Brown’s ‘progressive consensus’ but the end result is a deeper loss of faith in our elected leaders and, arguably, in ourselves. Our own sense of self is diminished to the extent that, mocking their jargon while simultaneously taking it on board, we put the spotlight on our own inability to understand the world: we mirror back their own sense of helplessness and passivity. The fallout is lack of belief in each other and our capacities. We really are in partnership. Or at least a destructive cycle of mutual dependency. We need some therapy, Barack says.

Towards A Rehabilitation of Rhetoric

Or maybe we need to give some consequence to our attacks on jargon. We need to construct a new framework for describing the world and we can only do that through the attempt to change it. Modern critics of jargon are too often like those philosophers who have hitherto only interpreted the world. Exposing the latest mystifications remains a cynical merry-go-round that we need to get off.

Real rhetoric is winning language, it is arguments marshalled, words deployed to win an argument and defeat an adversary. Rhetoric as we conceive of it today, however, is so often nothing but a lying stand-in, a promise that won’t be kept. Of course rhetoric has had a bad press since Socrates attacked the Sophists, merely the first in a long line of conservative thinkers who have feared the power of rational argument in the mouths of the people rather than the elites. But the process of arguing your point of view as forcefully and as convincingly as you can is essentially democratic. We need to become ideological again – we need to have ideas that can inspire others. And if we have ideas that can inspire others, that are worth fighting for, that can benefit us all, then we have a duty to convince others of their rightness. We should not be afraid to be rhetorical in the pursuit of winning them over.

Sometimes there is a feeling – so great has the retreat from ideology and grand narratives been – that it is almost ‘inappropriate’ to argue too hard in defence of one’s own vision of the truth. That it is somehow embarrassing to bring it out into the open. That rhetoric is a weapon of mass destruction backing my truth at the expense of yours. We are not children. We should have more faith in the ability of each of us to listen to arguments, to counter the rhetoric, to bring any overweening pretensions back to earth, in the end to make up our own minds. If we don’t use language to engage violently with reality and with bad ideas, then we will continue to be filled with the jargon and the cant of others to the detriment of us all. We need to constitute a new politics, a politics of free and engaged adults, and we need to argue as forcefully and as winningly as we can of its necessity, and what it might mean.

Angus Kennedy is the webmaster for the Battle of Ideas and Culture War websites. He writes for spiked-online and Culture Wars and is producing three sessions at this year’s Battle of Ideas: The Battle for the Reader; What is it to be Educated?; and Learning Jargonese.

(1) Tim Baldwin, Barack Obama tells voters ‘we can’t afford to let up for a second’, The Times, 28 October 2008

(2) Rosa Prince, Jack Straw driven nuts by his own jargon, Daily Telegraph, 27 October 2008

(3) Jason Beattie, Talking sense – Brown to told to ditch jargon or lose voters, Mirror, 6 May 2008

(4) Ed Balls, Oral Statement on National Curriculum Tests, 14 October 2008

(5) James Harkin, (2008), Big Ideas, London: Atlantic Books, p.54

(6) Mark Oppenheimer, For Argument’s Sake, Wall Street Journal, 17 October 2008

Cummings, Dolan (2008), ‘Speaking a foreign language’, Quest, No 100, pp74-76

Fairclough, Norman (2000), New Labour, New Language?, London: Routledge

Furedi, Frank (2008) The ‘credit crunch’ and the crisis of meaning, spiked, 6 October

Poole, Steven (2007), Unspeak™, London: Abacus

Oh, wasn’t adoption better than childbirth? More dramatic, more meaningful. Bitsy felt sorry for those poor women who had merely delivered.
(Anne Tyler, Digging to America)

Taking the rhetoric of the UK adoption industry at face value, one would think pretty much anybody, anywhere, anytime, can adopt a child. One adoption agency describes itself as having a ‘flexible approach to what makes a good adoptive family’. The Adoption Information Line explains that ‘married couples, unmarried couples, gay and lesbian couples, and individuals can all adopt a child’. According to the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF), ‘[p]eople from all ethnic origins and religions can adopt’.

However, putting aside the fact that it would be outrageous if they couldn’t, what BAAF don’t explain is that you cannot (as a general rule) adopt a child outside of your assigned religious or ethnic group. The National Minimum Standards for Adoption confirm this. They say that in order to secure and promote their welfare, adoption agencies must ensure that children are ‘matched with adopters who best meet their assessed needs’; and those assessed needs must reflect the child’s ‘ethnic origin, cultural background, religion and language’.

It would seem the social work establishment has embraced the conservatism that Patrick West describes in his excellent The Poverty of Multiculturalism. West shows how the political left have abandoned progressive Enlightenment values and have instead become ‘apologists for ethnic separateness … under the ostensible banner of respecting diversity’. They have, he says, ‘sought intellectual refuge in identity politics’, dividing humanity into groupings that are described ‘almost as quasi-biolgical entitites … akin to endangered species or threatened rainforests’, and that must be ‘cherished, respected and protected at all costs’.

In addition to the institutionalisation of multicultural thinking in adoption policy and practice, the themes of identity and ‘heritage’ are also apparent when it comes to the supposed therapeutic needs of formerly adopted adults (of whatever background). The Adoption and Children Act 2002, for instance, makes it easier for adopted adults to find out about and re-establish contact with their birth families. It also requires that as well as facilitating the adoption process - from assessment to adoptive placement - local authorities must establish adoption ‘support’ services.

Much is made of supporting the relationship between the adopted child and their birth family, in particular. It is often desirable for adopted children to retain, or for adopted adults to re-establish, contact with their ‘natural’ parents – whether out of respect to the birth family and their continued role in the child’s life, or with regards to continuity for the adopted child. However, the reforms also reflect the problematisation of the experience of adoption. Most adopted children will have been removed from their families and will have spent some time in the care system. That this can be traumatising is hardly controversial.

It would be wrong to dispute the legitimacy of anybody’s need for emotional support or counseling, but the stress on adopted adults’ psychological needs is not without its problems. There is a growing expectation that previously unremarkable transitional life events – from going to ‘big’ school to experiencing motherhood for the first time – will be impossible to cope with without help, and will probably affect the individual concerned for the rest of their lives. There is an assumption that people in general are increasingly vulnerable and in need of ‘support’. In this sense, the adoption reforms are a product of a wider ‘cultural’ problem – not in the ethnic or anthropological sense, but with regards our political culture and the ideas that it tends to generate.

Both this therapeutic orientation to the needs of adopted children and adults, and the divisive multicultural outlook that informs (to say the least) the selection criteria for adoptive carers, have acquired the status of orthodoxies today. Perversely, and ostensibly as a correction to both the emotional illiteracy and racism of the past, adoption has come to represent not so much the gaining of a new family for an ‘unwanted’ child, as the potential loss of an individual’s cultural heritage or their sense of self. In my view, whilst some individuals may benefit, this is likely to have implications. On the one hand, it affects the emotional stability of adopted children and adults; and on the other, it is already impacting on outcomes for minority children who are likely to spend longer periods in a care system out of want for want of an ‘appropriate’ carer.

But this irrational turn in adoption policy and practice is not peculiar to the UK. Digging to America, a novel by Anne Tyler, is a an acutely observed and touching story of ‘the arrival’ of adoptive children from Korea, and how their new families deal with the day-to-day challenges of raising them. It is also a biting satire on multiculturalism in the United States. Bitsy, one of the mothers-to-be, is insistent that the families keep in touch not so much out of their shared experience of awaiting their children in the airport lounge, as to ensure that the girls ‘maintain their cultural heritage’. She struggles to attend to what she imagines to be their cultural needs, insisting, for instance, that ordinary milk just won’t do – ‘soy is more culturally appropriate’, she says. Bitsy and her husband read their daughter authentic folk stories and - to the protestations of their eldest, Jin-Ho (or ‘Jo’) - insist on ‘dressing their daughters in something ethnic’ every now and then.

The irony is that it is all-American Bitsy who worries over such things, not Ziba, a second-generation Iranian-American, whose adoptive daughter is named, plain, American ‘Susan’. We learn that Ziba used to be in awe of Bitsy ‘before she fell all over herself apologising for her Americanness and her First Worldness’. She is rather embarassed to find herself ‘granted a kind of authority’ on account of her ‘exotic appearance’. Similarly, Ziba’s mother-in-law, Maryam, is irriateted by Bitsy and her proclivity for ‘manufactured traditions’.

But these ‘traditions’ are no less significant for that. Social workers in the UK, for instance, are expected to engage in ‘identity work’ with minority children. It is widely assumed that not to invent traditions is to risk damaging the child’s self-esteem, or strangely (given that its effect is to differentiate them from the wider community), to undermine their sense of belonging. While ‘life story’ work, something that social workers do with children in care, is important in as far as it is an attempt to counter the disruptions routinely endured by children in the care system; this suggests the question - why should the personal narrative imposed on minority children be any different? This essentialising of their ethnicity or ‘culture’ is as likely to induce the stigma that its privileging is supposed to avoid.

The confusion wrought on adoptive children and families by this cultural relativism – combined with that of the adoption experience itself – is explored insightfully by Tyler. The girls ‘go way back’ according to Bitsy. When Jin-Ho gets older her mother says that she and Susan might want to return to Korea, to trace their biological parents: ‘You could do it! We wouldn’t mind! We would support you and encourage you!’. But she hasn’t a notion of it. In From China with Love, Emily Buchanan – in a very personal account of her own experience of adopting a child from China – expresses similar concerns for her ‘foreign’ daughters. As a Western adoptive parent of a child from the East she is as keen as Bitsy to familiarise her adopted girls with their ‘roots’.

Both are trying to do what they believe to be in their child’s best interests. Both exhibit more than a little self-loathing as wealthy de-spiritualised Westerners; they want to make up for tearing children from their place of birth. But the notion they should have any attachment (from which to be ripped) to a place other than their place of ‘arrival’ makes no sense. What might be an interesting trip, and a place that might mean something to them in the future if they so choose, can only ever be an adopted heritage for them. Whilst they are children, to the extent that it has any meaning at all it is only in as far as the adoptive parent makes it so.

So, though the ‘matching’ process in the UK denies many the opportunity to adopt, and effectively on the grounds of ‘race’; it is also the case that, as Buchanan and the characters in Digging to America demonstrate, the grappling with the ‘cultural’ implications of the adoption process, are even more pronounced (if only because they are longer-lived) with a successful adoption. Either way, the retreat into cul-de-sacs - whether of the personal past of childhood, or the mythical past of ‘cultural’ heritage - is impacting on the political culture of adoption and with very real implications for all those involved. But the yearning for a sense of belonging assumed by the authorities on behalf of vulnerable adopted children and adults, is a political not a cultural problem. This can only be resolved in the here and now, and by establishing what people have in common with each other - what makes them ‘human’ - not what sets them apart.

Of course, none of this is to say that questions of heritage and culture are the only criteria used by adoption agencies when assessing carers and matching them (or rather: not) with children. On everything from smoking to smacking, it is the politics of behaviour and lifestyle as much as identity politics that impact on whether or not a potential adopter is ‘approved’. It is tempting to conclude that in the absence of a better idea of what makes a ‘good parent’ the authorities are employing the most arbitrary criteria to make the most important decisions. But this would be to forget the premise of the Adopting Orthodoxies debate at the Battle of Ideas this year – despite the supposedly liberalising reforms to adoption in the UK, especially with regards sexuality and recognsing the plurality of family forms, the authorities have replaced the old prejudices with a no less illiberal set of criteria for deciding who can and cannot become an adoptive parent.

Importantly, these are not particular to the discussion of adoption but are adopted from the wider political culture. The ever greater involvement of the state in our lives and particularly in our family lives is increasingly regarded as legitimate. The paradox is that in the one instance where the state is divesting itself of the responsibility for the children it is looking after – however, temporarily or badly – that official attitudes and anxieties about parents about the welfare of children are laid bare. Which is why the accounts of Tyler and Buchanan are so important. While drawing our attention to the absurdity of the adoption process and how it impacts on those caught up in it, both make an essentially positive case for adoption. Both are touching in their portrayal of the bonding of parent with child. The lack of a ‘natural’ basis for the adoptive relationship only makes the human capacity for love and intimacy all the more impressive. This is a cause for optimism in the face of the institutionalisation of some very backward and illiberal ideas about what people are like, and what is important when deciding who deserves to be a parent to a child.

David Clements is a social policy writer;and co-editor, The Future of Community.

Buchanan, Emily (2006). From China with Love: a Long Road to Motherhood, London: Wiley.
Tyler, Anne (2007). Digging to America, London: Vintage.
West, Patrick (2005) The poverty of multiculturalism, London: Civitas