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Posts Tagged ‘Change’

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Global leadership opinion: Where will the West turn for its survival?

In Uncategorized on December 23, 2025 at 1:22 pm

WALKING DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN craning the Twin Towers in the summer of 2001, capitalism had won, and won big. Mid-70s to the fin de millénaire, democratic nations doubled in number. From Portugal’s Carnation Revolution to Eastern Europe’s assimilation. Liberalism lifted the world, crushing hellscape communism and fascism. Back in Britain that year, a mid-Atlantic drawl was everywhere: “Enjoy!”

Now, 19 years of democratic recession, a debt crisis, expose Western systems as frail. In our hubristic flush we assumed democratic capitalism was downloadable. Run by a dull-administrative-class alert to the ruinous. The presumption of continuous growth handed agency from politics to borg-institutions, who bent, then snapped their public-mood antennae.

Under all is our obsession with liberty. A history-busting-run at Western freedom is under threat by liberalism transmogrifying into nihilism. The strongmen and tech disruptors’ wells of ressentiment are accelerating an end to post-war sensibilities. They have mastered narrative speed and promised breakthrough-innovation (Norman Mailer: ‘Technology is erotic’).

The tediously long years of the UK’s conservative government between 2010-‘24, was aversion to agency. Characterising Western paralysis. Unlike 1951-’64 (consolidating post-war consensus), and ‘79-’97 (economic re-balancing). Two periods of consequential power. The UK’s four decades of ‘Brussels make the rules’ has drippified British politics. The ontic wake-up has only just started.

The EU, a constitution-eating bureaucratic monster, nudged the UK’s two main parties to become an undifferentiated liberal uniparty. Britain’s Liberal Party proper last won a general election in 1906 and were a spent force by the 1950s. The Conservative (sort of Republican) and Labour (sort of Democrat) parties absorbed deep-seated liberalising moods, shunting their former constitutional-beliefs to the margins. The unifying elements of the two main parties, imperialism (Conservative) and clubbish-socialism (Labour), gradually faded as people sensed genuine social change beneath their feet. An effective constitution being measured by the glacial inexorability of its Goldilocks economics: Not too hot, not too cold, just right.

The temptation of unities

Now, the idealogues on the reactionary right have gained traction as the uniparty has not restrained liberal excesses. Both market and social liberalism have become enchanted by extreme variation. Extremes tend towards ideological unities, which themselves require modern efficiency. The constant appeal within UK politics to modernise into an efficiency-state has been undermined by an inbuilt British transgressiveness. Germany, Japan and even the United States are regarded with a measure of suspicion for their unifying proclivities.

Britain’s post-war self-loathing was not a result of colonial overreach alone, but having spent too long under imperial sermonising about unity. If you are an empire, constant self-justification wears the soul. Learning to love a post-imperial nation is a work of quiet courage. Post-empire we are surprised by our attractive sensibilities. We scan the room and note, we are not that bad after all. But, tempted towards unities. Many of which are illusions. Such as a state-nation in place of a nation-state.

A monumental challenge is to steer, and not destroy our rules-based system, its built-in insurances, civil society’s cohesion, and nation-state autonomy, within a functioning global economy. One that prefers transparency rather than a world of murky state protectionism and eccentric deal-making.

After the nihilism, what?

It is worth reminding that liberal democracy is civil society. Civil society being that plural liberal space we occupy and sustain through constant compromise. Not screaming across the abyss, but crossing it to negotiate with those we profoundly disagree with. For the engine of Western freedom stems from the private realm, the collaborating trusts and mutual partnerships.

And this is a very modern phenomenon, an outturn of the Protestant Reformation’s separation of spheres (politics, religion, economics, family life). This mindset of self-governance defeated the totalising unities of the Catholic Church’s hierarchical social frames. It spawned the myriad voluntary associations, and supercharged industrial capitalism’s distribution of wealth. But we are newly fragile, suffering the enervating effects of supra-institutionalisation. Western confidence is at an all-time low and we are in search of renewal.

Among other egregious illusions is the assumption economic growth itself builds civil society. That is, as social mobility slows, economic hyper-individualism will perpetuate openness and tolerance that previously came from an open public square. By contracting Western institutions to determine the good on our behalf they have drifted into infantile functionalism, distributing liberal rights and privileges devoid of negotiation and compromise. We cannot switch off this machine’s autopilot, with the stark awareness that, as Daniel Bell puts it, “The national state has become too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems”. 

Up to the end of the Cold War, as another writer puts it, we were a “centrally organised, rigidly bounded, and hysterically concerned with impenetrable boundaries” which have now given way to a world “in which territorial, ideological, and issue boundaries are attenuated, unclear, and confusing”. The boundary was of course inter-locking international agreements, civil society, with private bodies and individuals as principal arbiters of the good, with their hard yards of moderation.

The collapse of Western institutional legitimacy has meant a lurch from international rules to unrestrained liberalism. Naivete has permitted overspend, supranationalism, an AI gamble, as a means to sustain ‘sacred’ growth above moral authority. This has working communities, those who persist in civil society’s ritual of sustained interaction, as losers in the extreme liberal experiment, craving security.

Motorville and Workington Man throwing spanners in the works

As a result, the working public is on the move, hunting leaders with moral seriousness who can arrest institutional overreach. Motorville, USA, the New Deal Democrat heartland states, has turned red (Republican). Why? Trump is a fighter, they say. In the UK, Workington Man, possessing Motorville’s white post-industrial discontents, is heading towards its version of Trumpism, at speed. Largely with the intent of lobbing a spanner into the machinery. It must be careful for what unities it wishes.

Britain and Europe have allowed sufficient dissolving of negotiated settlements, with their loci of love and politics, and their visible measurable outcomes, to invite authoritarianism. The UK, France and Germany are heading towards populist government at their next elections. America has already responded by gutting the Republican Party of its patrician class. The post-war moderate order, the passive centrists (PCs) trusted a growth model (unending expansion of liberal democracy), not least when its hard power failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, which remain strategic mysteries.

911, it turns out, has had lasting strategic impact. An unseen, unlocatable enemy, wake politicians in the night, and has led to salami sliced civil liberties, and security overreach. A patient, slow-burn UK populace, whose fur is often available for stroking, is roused from its post-war stupor.

In the UK, patrician institutions, such as the BBC, an expanded public sector, even the Church of England, are Fur Strokers in Chief, as they represent the hinterland between extreme liberalism and civil society. They are asked to reassure, by offering the language of a shared consciousness that restrains any sense of a fragile social order. They are split between serving and pacifying.

Bounded liberal capitalism worked because it was put to work generating wealth and well-being within the human settlements it served, measured by the quality of service at the point of delivery. Business and civic society knew who its principal client was. But untrammelled optimism thought, in time, China would, on the back of trade, capitulate to Westerners’ commodious living.

The passive centrists as the new extremists

Trumpism and the Trump Era (ten years of influence) has, in the UK and parts of Europe, exposed the radical centre not as just complacent, but rabidly against action, a violent laissez faire’ism. The EU’s performance leave ribs aching. These are aggressive non-aggressives. You will be passive, and let da system hum and whirr. Trumpism is irking the passionate ‘do nothing’ majority here.

Passive centrism, aggressively passive, points to unities that deny any sense of ultimacy. As in: ‘Ultimate concern for what is ultimately important’. Imperialism, solidarity-socialism, and extreme liberalism are unities that avoid notions of what is possible, and begs the question of what overarching objectives does a modern Western polity reach for next. Is there anything in our inheritance that can anchor our ship?

19th century critic John Ruskin saw a modernism (education and arts) where the images of Christ, as Western civilisation’s ultimacy, its square root of culture, being squeezed out of the canon, and with society denying this ommission to itself in the process. Modernity (society and culture) has then done the same, shunted the horizon out of its dialectic. If the Present Age is turning to reacquaint itself with something real it starts with an agreement that we are, in fact, denying what is possible. Or, as W B Yeats puts it:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity”

In The Second Coming Yeats offers another image, the beast-cynic, on his way to re-birth. Weary Willie’s poetry gave in to temptation. He starts Vacillation with a flash of honesty: “Between extremities, Man runs his course”. And slides into disillusionment, seeing more in Homer’s and Shakespeare’s complacent centrism than Christ’s ultimacy.

The PCs have reacted similarly against ultimacy. Christ rejects the synagogue’s rabbi fast-track programme, striking out for the top of the horizon, but the centre prefer him as itinerant prophet-wanderer. The centre’s mumbler, denying Christ as reality realist (T S Eliot). Eliot restores Christ into modernism’s imagery. But misses that Christ was the first modern man, and is not leading us back to the grinding authority of Eliot’s rediscovered orthodoxies.

The PCs respond to the expansionist aspirations of China, who wish to roll back, with Russia and others, the influence of the West, and especially the USA’s global dominance, with all the critical response of a noctambulist. The institutionalised are three iterations behind reality, and, probably unwittingly, have made the fatal slip from cynicism into disillusionment.

Cynicism in the Western vision is a category error. Modernity itself is not a cynical reaction. Reactions to modernity oft are, but the modern itself is not a cynical response to tradition. Modernity, as The New, was and is always there. But modernity itself does not have to unify in place of dialogue.

3rd c. biographer Diogenes Laertius offers Plato’s man in a modern category, labelled functionally as a ‘featherless bi-ped’: “Plato defined man thus: “Man is a two-footed, featherless animal,” and was much praised for the definition; so Diogenes [the Cynic] plucked a cock and brought it into his school, and said, “This is Plato’s man.” 

““And I,” said he, “am Diogenes the dog.” And when he was asked to what actions of his it was owing that he was called a dog, he said, “Because I fawn upon those who give me anything, and bark at those who give me nothing, and bite the rogues.” 

So, cynicism has an ability to explore reality, but collapses like Yeats in its inability to offer a path. Populism is built from a cynical offering of unities. And the centrists have fallen into the same vision of modernity.

What centrist governance does not spot during democratic expansion is the extent of its infantilising and categorising, transferring parliamentary sovereignty into a chop technocracy. That is, centrism entered the ‘broken middle’ between dystopia and utopia, but only to over-unify. The technocrat, at a personal level, cannot stomach the necessary messiness of growth, so grab the sensation of unified order. ‘Practical duty’ without a horizon.

Diogenes the dog fawns over physics as a means to understanding, with its visible frames of connections across space and time, but barks at the moment of truth. Ordinary people on the ground, in their creative absurdity, cannot see that technocracy’s boilerplate is a loss of consciousness.

As we face completeness in the West, it turns out to be an illusion of unities. We should not be surprised how so many are in fierce agreement. In fact, everyone in the room. The West, even in its achievements, is being lowered steadily. To borrow from Simone Weil: “We have to think that [whoever has done us harm] has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level”. A humbled West is its best opportunity to offer a renewed ultimacy of what is possible. Albeit over a coffee, or three, in a steaming coffee house, which we offer to pay for.

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Global leadership opinion: Searching for virtues in the US administration’s New World Order

In Uncategorized on March 24, 2025 at 12:52 pm

WHEN YOU DRIVE INTO CANADA from New York State, USA there is a sense of coming home for the English traveller. Food portions are saner, grass greener, and they say ‘sorry’ nearly as much. Despite the US government’s desire to despoil Canada, I could easily be an American. Half the English spirit is spent coping with the British Isles’ maritime climate, whereas huge bright US skies make Americans admirably engaged, leaning-in, sometimes where they should. As Martin Amis says of the English, ‘If their long-lost cousin became a world-famous author and held a book-signing event next door, the English will say: ‘I might pop my head round the door, but then again…’’

The Great Plains MAGA voter propelling the new US administration’s economic nationalism, has both a grasp of their country’s constitution, and of what might be ‘the good society’. These instincts have called time on what they perceive as an opaque global system. One that extracts value from honest-sweated-labour, and pours it into snake-oil-capital-markets that fail to produce much of tangible value.

The typical American family’s relative decline in income and wealth, against a multiplying super-rich, are structural inequalities stretching back to the 1970s, and these sit at the root of American discontents. With Peter Turchin offering that where serious political candidates have failed, those prepared to “channel… popular discontent” in the most outlandish way, succeed. It is a bonus to MAGA’s grassroots that the Trump-Vance team’s ascent to power appears free from ‘shadowy-conspiracy’ and the forces of a coercive corporate-lobby. The plutocratic nature of US power is somehow overlooked for the moment.

By contrast the heartland British provincial voter has no working knowledge of their constitution, nor can they spell out any version of ‘the good society’, largely through disinterest (a survival posture). Instead, they trust their instincts (as does everybody in the final analysis). And it was the gut-led-British voter who called time on the European Union. This supranational value system could not be weighed or measured in plain sight, and bog-standard-gut-ethics doomed it to history.

This societal battle between the nomadic-world-citizen’s blind trust of market-led client-politics, and the heartland settlers’ stay-and-build commitment, was no more visible than when President Zelenskyy, in barrack-room sans-culottes, met the New World Order in the Oval Office.

One target of this reality TV moment was the liberal progressive Euro-politician. Who is now awake, and talking. The message: your defence shield has expired. American presidents have been trying and failing for fifty years to get Europe to fund its own security. Overnight the Trump-Vance administration has EU leaders committing nearly a trillion Euros on infrastructure and defence. Some going.

American pragmatism has called out Europe, which, in its moral flummery, has not stood up to Russia. It has been buying Russian oil and back-door-exporting through Central Asian states. The MAGA farmer says ‘why should I fund Euro-duplicity?’. The American heartland voter does not believe in a globalised rules-based institutional leadership. Institutions are client-politicians’ agents also, they say.

It may of course still go extremely badly for Ukraine. That the Russian war-tractor will hit full-smoke-spewing-tilt and cannot be stopped, spluttering towards Kyiv in a re-run of Saigon in 1975. But for the Trump-Vance administration to, in the parlance, ‘monster’ Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office is a reversal of principled politics. As Dag Hammarskjöld, UN secretary-general from 1953-61, put it: “Apparently easy successes with the public are possible for a juggler, but lasting results are achieved only by the patient builder.”

But, after decades of the principled global statesman and woman, and their celebrated grand servanthood, many sense these globocrats were not alert to their own complicity in letting the West drift into shallow commercial interest. And to even let it sail its gunboats unwittingly up to the front door of a wounded Russia, whose natural sense of pride makes it recoil. America’s Monroe Doctrine has no truck with foreign threats near or far.  Soviet missiles lasted 25 days on Cuban soil, and left after the threat of global nuclear conflagration. Secretly, the US pulled its own missiles from Turkey and southern Italy as the deal clincher.

For our Nebraskan farmer, she does not wish for Zelenskyy to become another client-politician. The modernist Barbara Hepworth sculpture memorial to Dag Hammarskjöld would leave many heartland voters unmoved. A symbol of unreality that permeates notions of world government. Apostles of the Enlightenment are privately contemplating how an illiterate and know-nothing political-base might just, after all, possess acute wisdom, born of life, rather than the academy.

The turn against globalisation, and its beneficial aspects, is not dissimilar to the vehement rejection of the more enduring fruits of the British Empire. Those elements of pre-WWI British power which enabled for some an idyll, including those whose dedication was marked by love, are no longer remembered. What is recalled of British involvement today, are the parts which, as Anthony Nutting, senior Foreign Office official in Anthony Eden’s government, would term, the ‘sordid conspiracies and political insanities’, such as the Suez Crisis.

Britain and France lost their empires amidst turmoil. Nutting resigned over the Suez debacle. An act which guaranteed his isolation. Few resign today as they know it is the end of both friendships and careers, as Nutting found. Rather, many plod on with repeated resurrections, compounding a moribund politics.

What might serve as a brake on the US’s rush to economic nationalism, is their reliance on imports: semi-conductors, metals, pharmaceuticals, plus an international network of military bases, integrated supplier networks, transport infrastructure, storage, and banking links. All equate to a functioning Western model that an isolationist America might send back into a pre-war world of trade bottlenecks strangling global market activity.

If an emboldened EU does get its act together, the US’s new transactional foreign policy might unwittingly boost the Euro as an international currency. If Europe takes the lead in NATO, then Japan and South Korea might seek deeper partnership with it. And it might make sense for Britain’s nuclear deterrent to further link with France in a continent-wide defence policy.

In terms of statecraft, President Zelenskyy is wise to wear his Oval Office drubbing as a gift. Be true to your humiliation, to borrow from Albert Camus. Wear it well, like a suit. Machiavelli, largely misinterpreted, offers that virtù (virtue) sits at the heart of statecraft, and any senior leader can, with suitable patience, convert their scars. There is potential to win over doubters who are newly sympathetic to your wounds, if not pleased you have crashed to earth.

Humiliation is not far from humility, which is the ground zero of enduring symbolism. And symbols run on eternal fuel, travelling around the world on your behalf. Recent poll ratings show Ukrainians maintaining substantial support for their president, and his grizzled pursuit of this miserable war.

For the US team, impatience risks them being despised for no reason. High principle still matters and if the state’s survival is not threatened, do not burn voter capital if you can help it. Markets thought the threat of tariffs were purely a negotiation lever. Since pressing the button some growth forecasts have been cut. Some analysts predict recession.

But like the pupil brought up on facts in Dickens’ Hard Times who says to Mr Gradgrind, “But surely you must know that self-interest is the law of life”, the core of this debate is the question of whether America will forget that all life in truth is a ‘complete and unlimited dependence of each of us upon the other’. Its vaunted position is the result of its constant curiosity and collaboration.

This very public Oval Office spat steers the Trump-Vance doctrine into a form of realpolitik. And the West has not seen pragmatic realism like this since Margaret Thatcher, Willy Brandt, Charles de Gaulle, and Richard Milhous Nixon.

Trickier is a sense of nihilistic patrimonialism. Operating a royal household, me and my mates, can be a blunt petulant counterforce to the state’s overshadowing bureaucratic apparatus. And it involves firing the competent, and packing your court with sycophants who are pleased to be there.

Quixotic moods mean US policy appears referent on some days to pragmatism, and on others to significant unpredictably, and this further troubles the state’s stability. It is too early to tell. The damage to state architecture is unknown. It is better if the unpredictability operates like a carnival (rule disruptor), rolling through town, and at some point, heading out the other side, allowing the streets to be restored to working order.

The West is stuck in a mire of regulation. If the USA does not wish to destroy its moral authority, take the carnival float through town, make necessary adjustments, but retain the intellectual capital within its institutions. If you smash them, it might be some time before institutional learning is restored. Business leaders think in terms of excellence cultures, but bureaucracies are sub-optimal by design.

And social strata is regularly re-shaped, but not always for the long-term good. The English ruling-class decayed steadily, its idle-rich marrying the entrepreneurial arriviste, and slowly disappeared, taking with it some of the aesthetic values needed for political judgement. As odd as that sounds. Flat meritocratic societies lack the repositories of social capital that are needed to be passed on faithfully to the next generation. America took the keys of global power about two years into the WWII, stepping over Britain’s bankrupt and bombed-out corpse. It was always going to happen.

In the realm of hegemonic stability, it is assumed we have moved from the bi-polarity of a US-Soviet balance of power, onto an unassailable US unipolarity over the past 20 years. But post-Iraq administrations have preferred strategic drift. With a vague notion the West will glide into a materialist utopia by itself. That institutions will replicate their values automatically. It is possible that future notions of bi or multi-polar worlds no longer applies.

Under a non-polar world of inter-relating global institutions, there is a heartland fear that Washington will slide into just another former locus of power. A has-been, like London and Rome. American voters’ resistance to ceding dominance to liberal-progressive globocrats leaves the stage vacant for a world led by a handful of power-brokers. Visible strong-men and women, locatable, and channelling heartland emotions and intuitions. If the good society is the sum of its intuitions, they will not be embodied by the rootless transnational bureaucrat. Dislocated officialdom is undemocratic. 

In America’s fight with global communism, much turned out to be shadow boxing. Cold War I was fought via proxy hot wars. But much was hitting and missing. In Vietnam the communist insurgency in the north turned out to be Vietnamese nationalists, fighting for their homeland rather than international socialism. There was no grand communist alliance, but rather a chimera.

Such huge misreading is down to paranoia. But in Cold War II, there is a very real alliance: Russia, North Korea, China and Iran. The Ukraine war is a basis for hard military-industrial co-operation between this bloc of power, who are entirely locatable on the map, unlike McCarthy’s ‘Reds under the bed’. Will America’s emergent doctrine of realpolitik and its transactional methodology be emotionally capable of understanding this threat?

In the UK the Brexit-behemoth awoke from hibernation in reaction to the Blair-Cameron-governments’ globalised-city-finance-public-sector-model. Politics has descended into a stoogeocracy, where genuine leadership is a threat to in-group power. Britain’s drift, morally and intellectually, showed up no more cruelly than within its attempt to monetise its Post Office retail network. Local post offices in the UK are regarded by some as second only to the local parish church, and pub, for community cohesion. The UK government’s desire to modernise required a new computer system. When anomalies in branch account balancing emerged the Post Office ended up prosecuting over 900 postmasters, with a Public Inquiry hearing that at the root of discrepancies were software errors rather than skulduggery. Regarded by UK politicians as the ‘UK’s most widespread miscarriage of justice’, journalist Nick Wallis said this public sector run institution was “stuffed to the gills with lifers, plodders and gormless apparatchiks inexplicably promoted into positions way beyond their ability.”

This ugly injustice points to under-performing institutions led by weakened governments and weaker politicians. And globalised liberal democracy has been costly in the minds of Mr & Mrs Ordinary-Tax-Payer in the UK. £800bn in taxes to bail bankers, £49bn on Iraq-Afghan Wars of Enforced Democracy (on countries that did not want Starbucks on every corner), the all-hours-working-to-buy-a-box-plus-child-in-a-for-profit-sub-standard-nursery, capped off by the self-loathing anti-Britain-anti-Western-everything narratives, adding to perceptions in heartland communities in the UK that the EU was part of the malaise. How the Trump-Vance turn against supranationalism will bring new accountability to institutions is unknown as transformational change is deeply complex.

In the US, heartland voters may be ready to accept market turmoil as a price it wishes to pay for re-balancing. Many are enjoying DOGE’s chainsaw, even if it will in reality yield limited results in deficit shrinkage. Slashing overheads is the accountant’s soft target, but when plates start crashing much gets quietly reinstated at a later date. Some unfiring has already begun.

This shifting moral terrain shows up as particularly muddy with Europe letting Ukraine and Russia’s blood and treasure disappear into the bottom of Somme-like trench warfare. The generals say they prefer to go into battle with a 10-1 advantage, and certainly not less than 3-1. Since neither side in the war has any advantage, the ‘do something’ option becomes a moral necessity. Realpolitik means Zelenskyy’s blushes in The Oval Office are momentary when an ‘endless war’ eviscerates a generation of young, and not so young, Ukrainians and Russians for no purpose whatsoever.  

And Russia’s deaths in Ukraine are staggering. Unsustainable. So why let them off the hook. Well, America’s economy is also not as strong as it looks. The US debt pile reaches to the moon. They are spending more in interest than their defence budget. Slash America Inc.’s monster spending on any wasteful secondary entanglements or it will implode economically. America is a debtor nation historically, but now it is a long way into the red-zone.

Here in Britain, we are comfortable for the moment to let Canada take one for the team. The popcorn tub is being shared as Prime Minister Mark Carney returns serve to his neighbours. We might be next. Do not upset POTUS is the current mood. If we just look at Britain’s nuclear deterrent, although it is “operationally independent” it “[relies] on a 67-year-old agreement under which America shares its nuclear technology and infrastructure with Britain”, unlike France, which is a “wholly national endeavour”.

But this is early days for all analysts. Every morning a new eye-gouging headline contradicts the previous day’s fragile trend. Leadership strategists like me are currently scanning their history books, biographies and just about every genre, for meaningful context. Two obvious entities emerge, NATO’s birth, and the rehabilitated legacy of Richard Nixon.

It is cold comfort to recall that Britain after WWII split its factory production capacity in half to fund re-arming, and to play lead partner (second fiddle) in the newly formed NATO alliance. Britain was factory to the world, its order books full, but gradually customers drifted away frustrated, as we switched to rebuilding a huge army to protect a dying Empire’s trade routes. It took Britain some time, possibly 70 years, to accept it was a bit part actor in geo-politics. The peace dividend has meant successive governments have let the UK army shrink to half its Cold War complement, bringing into question home defence let alone projecting power into the far reaches of Europe. UK defence spend rising to 3% by 2030 is essential if we are serious about NATO’s Article 5, armed response.

Newly fragile due to America’s resurgent exceptionalism, NATO now needs Britain as its champion. NATO’s raison d’être was the Soviet Union’s glowering presence. If America rehabilitates Russia into the West’s good books, this further calls Article 5 into doubt. In fact, it calls into question the array of international agreements whose ligaments formed around a shared Western worldview.

The last time such a grand scale balance of hegemonic power needed a jolt from Western leadership, Richard Nixon jumped on a plane to meet Chairman Mao and invite China in from the cold after 25 years of diplomatic non-communication. If we think it is a lot to swallow for the West to rehabilitate Vladimir Putin, Mao’s Great Leap Forward took the lives of up to 45 million people. Isolation is logical but often ineffective. Nixon’s, and more so, Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik looked past ideology and values towards the potential of reduced global threats. China’s hybrid economy, the blending of state-planning and market apparatus was the result, with the West fully embedded industrially, if not politically. This appears as the escape path for Putin, as galling as that is to swallow.

Importantly, Britain is not as politically polarised as America. Our constitution might be haemorrhaging due to successive governments’ erosion of parliamentary accountability, but we are still talking to each other with sufficient respect. So, wheeling in Homeric cyclopes to bludgeon one side or the other is unnecessary. That the Trump II team has not dissembled one jot, might give some relief. What you see is what you get. Everything externalised and nothing hidden. A world governed by transactional pragmatics, realpolitik, is with us for some time.

We get the leaders we deserve. Once Trump II has achieved a rebalancing of American interests, what next? And, if MAGA’s instincts prove more consequential to history than the globocrats’, and Trump wins the Nobel Peace Prize, then let us all eat out in Canada before the Maple syrup gets renamed Trump treacle!

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TRUMP II’s existential politics: ‘MAGA’dom versus the university men and women’

In Uncategorized on February 24, 2025 at 9:34 am

THE TRUMP II administration is on its Gulliver’s Travels, re-sizing US international relations. A return to seignorial power politics. And to borrow from Norman Mailer, will ‘MAGA’dom’ bring the existential experience that ‘university men and women’ cannot? Many feel a generation’s progress is lost, and argue it is Buggins’ Turn carpetbaggers, the beige elite, who are at fault. The government time-servers, who when in power prefer grandmother’s steps, and only deliver what W. H. Auden termed accidie, by ‘accepting social values of the day’. Historian Harold James coined it as Late Soviet America. Where the Soviet peoples woke up one morning and said meh to communism, now the Western voter’s truck is unhitched from “bogus ideologies” dominating its institutions.

Like Sykes-Picot’s Middle East carve up, which was a settling of old scores between Britain and France, the US’s internal pathologies are spilling onto the world. If Congress had its way after WWII the US would have turned inwards and ‘gone to the movies and drank Cokes’. Instead, visionary minds ‘saved the possibilities of freedom’. The so-called ‘wise men’, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman et al, also led with a “sense of selflessness” and “not playing to the galleries”.

For America Inc. to hedge the Pax Americana and lose Cold War II in a game of Russian roulette appears unconscionable, in the light of America’s sacrifices in WWII and their global fight against communism. Acheson said Britain had lost its role after WWII. With America’s overnight equivocation Britain has found its place. To double down on its support for Ukrainian sovereignty, and offer a stark alternative to Germany’s lurch to the right. But it should also recognise The Long Peace is over. The ‘university men and women’ in the legacy media and party elites have gone one way, the voter the other.

In the blur of early-action has a dossier on history’s cycle of ‘catastrophe and salvation’ reached the much-bandaged presidential ear? If the Oval Office’s recent Kremlin contact is the first hi-level encounter since the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, then maybe Trump II has read more historic precedent than the pedestrian Biden administration. But to what end? John F Kennedy, for example, was prepared, as is Trump II, to question received wisdom from the ‘wise men and women’ in government, but the difference being there was a generosity about America after the war, offering its ideals.

Seven US presidents served in WWII, and although not eliminating Richard Nixon’s paranoia, war experience resists myopia. The architects of The American Century, like Harriman, Robert Lovett, through to George Keenan, married business, law and diplomacy. Harriman’s Moscow meetings with the Soviets were tough, commercial, and pragmatic. I suspect Harriman and Trump might have had much in common.

When JFK’s granddaughter rang me a few years ago, I instinctively stood up. She had spotted the catastrophic regional flooding here in northern England, and could I, as a local community organiser, host her visit. The New York Times’s climate reporter’s presence in waterlogged Cumbria, was a boost to the community. But my reverence for America’s stylish dynasty is not misplaced. Britain looked to Jack and Jackie Kennedy with as much hope as did Americans.

Britain’s post-war leaders were desiccated, like the touring remains of Tutankhamun; especially when compared to JFK’s physiognomy. JFK was an American president who in summer ’63 crossed the mythical leadership credibility threshold early. Buoyed by soaring rhetoric he had gone toe-to-toe with Nikita Khrushchev abroad, and seen off terrifying nuclear hawks at home. The tragedy in Dallas in November that year was shattering news.

We here (in Britain) had no Norman Mailers, Gore Vidals or JFK’s to capture our mood for public consumption. France had Sartre and Camus. We had undoubted brilliance in Auden, Benjamin Britten, Stuart Hall, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Burgess, J. B. Priestley, even Kingsley Amis and The Angry Young Men, but they were eulogists at Britain’s funeral. Existentialism fizzed in Paris and visionary-pragmatism roared in growth-America. Our public-thought-mojo retreated inside the academy, and stayed there.

DOGE is supposedly ripping into the Pentagon’s procurement and federal spending programmes. We do not know yet whether the tech-bros have a world-picture on the wall, and a room of game-theorists fishbone-diagramming every move.  We suspect this is not three-dimensional chess, but flicking matches in the oil refinery to get our attention. We are certainly interested in their commercial nous doing the numbers on government spend. Who wouldn’t?

JFK, Boston Brahmin, Trump, New York businessman, are unlikely buddies, but their leadership shares a sceptical view of experts, the experienced, the so-called ‘brightest and best’ who laid the ground for Vietnam, Iraq, the 2008 recession, and the mindless withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But where JFK offered a transformational US-led West, an engaged America, Trump II is asserting greater power-distance with allies. An early-term tactic of rattling the cozy has its logics. We know there is much myth-making in the JFK-model of leadership which travelled well. The rhetoric went above the action. And the Trumpoos can pull on the strain of “self-criticism, wit, ideas, the vision of a civilised society” that fed JFK’s playbook.

If MAGA’s ‘street-wisdom’ asks clean-limbed politicos the right questions in the right order, it might impact the ponderous defence bureaucracy that cannot keep pace with Ukraine’s drone technology. And wake up an ineffective EU defence policy, with Germany continuing to fail in its leadership. It has to, as the EU lacks decisiveness without NATO leadership.

What we do know is MAGA ideology puts at risk the patchwork quilt of post-war institutions. Without better crafted language MAGA’s divide and rule unsettles global equilibrium. Here in Britain, we feel the quilt stifling innovation. Its major institutions from the Church of England to the BBC operate ‘pernicious neutrality’, simultaneously holding open a vital lacuna, often brilliantly, but then flattening what that space produces, for fear of the unknown. The risk averse careerists are in charge.

By unswerving coincidence my mother was in labour with me when the news of JFK’s assassination arrived onto the maternity ward. The nursing staff disappeared to gather round the transistor radio. The tears flowed. The Kennedys embodied the American Aesthetic like nobody before or after. Ample British babies like me were temporarily Winston, the Old Man, American baby boys, Jack, the New Man.

When criticising the current crop of cretins, incompetents and cry-babies, who fraudulently claim to be scions of Western freedom, especially the chancers on the new right, we can call some of them out for who they are, naïve ideologues and clueless reactionaries. But they are a symptom of iron-cage bureaucracies that have deadened the existential-politics of ordinary man and woman. The voter.

For this discussion is about ‘hostility to power’ among the ‘university men and women’, the career time-servers. Those who in the European Union have failed in the exercise of modern power. And we see the rise of grassroots anti-intellectualism in Europe. The CDU getting into bed with the Alternative for Germany should give all my generation a sick feeling, especially when bumped by the Trumpers’ support. I feel the pain of Americans, as Trump is not the first choice for many, including those who voted for him.

My parents were teenage volunteers in WWII. My father moved from Suffolk’s airfield defences during The Battle of Britain, to London during The Blitz, meeting my mother (an Auxiliary Territorial Service volunteer) whilst defending Portsmouth’s naval docks, then out to India, to halt the Japanese advance. The Greatest Generation did not have the luxury of deconstructing Western values via Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, the celebrities of French Thought, who gulled British and American academies. And still do.

Their generation had ‘great intuition’, gifted from parents’ pre-welfare resilience. My father’s father ‘enjoyed’ four years in a German PoW camp during WWI, after being shot and captured at the Battle of Le Cateau (26th August 1914) after the British Expeditionary Force’s II Corp were ordered to ‘stand and fight’ to halt the German advance on the retreat from Mons. Here in Britain, the 2020s have more than a bit of the 1920s about it. The inter-war period saw Europe fail to spot the madmen. Failure of collective security was the brutal lesson.

For the Trumpites are a cod liver oil dose of anti-politics. Whether it is a tone-deaf and nihilistic backseat-bus-type revolt, we will see. But Trump II brings real world practice to kick the Western world in its orthodoxies. Shake the cage of a complacent West by all means, but do not give succour to the far-right wreckers who are simply desperate for attention. Sir Roderick Spode and the Black Shorts are best left in comical visions. And, over-regulation needs reform, but not overnight. Businesses are spending a fortune on mounds of paperwork. This has to change. And Trump II might well target this, but they need to take a step back and plan over the next year these moves. Less haste, more prep.

Life appearing short, like many, my parents married on a 48-hour pass, and at the height of Britain’s onslaught by the Luftwaffe. Once the battlefront shifted to mainland Europe, mother waved father off to India, back into the infantry, not expecting him to return. These women were supported by the church, and she found faith in the love of Christian community. Neither mother or father collected their medals after the war. Nor marched in its remembrance. Life was forwards and upwards for them. They saw Britain had opened up its doors to rebuilding, and their love was real.

They would see the new right for who they are, fakes and frauds, scapegoating the immigrant and paedophile. To wreckers, the outsider and outlaw is available for demonisation. Playground bullies pick on the nearest vulnerable frame. And the new right are a mix of the frightened and weak.

The notion of British values is deeply complex. You will not find these in a manifesto. We make them today and tomorrow. One thing for sure is, we are an island of immigrants, as much as Europe is an overflow continent. Its citizens originally escaped from somewhere. If Britain is to recover its moral authority, we take immigrants escaping persecution. We take them because that is our duty as a nation. As humans.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with asking young men and women who arrive can we equip you to eventually return to fight for your people. To bring change if you can. Our influence in the world quadruples when we lead by example. And, our ability to effect change through our immigrant population grows when we renounce isolationism and nationalism.

Britain is at its best when offering a model society. Multiculturism was a wheeze that carried many for three to four decades. In truth we are a successful multiracial nation. But there is no such thing as a multiculture nation. It is a contradiction in terms. We steadily come together to form a shared culture based on our traditions, values and institutions. It requires compromise and learning.

We should of course privilege our own citizens when it comes to jobs and training. Those that have stayed to build communities should say to immigrants: ‘Stay and build with us’ and become part of the “we”. But we should not make a trophy out of alienating our refugee community. What we do do is enable their integration, through opening our homes and feeding them, getting to know them and their needs.

When you hear their stories, you understand few leave home for selfish reasoning. One day you might need hospitality and a bed. Life takes funny turns. Now that is my belief, and this must rightly come into contact with other beliefs in the community. A collective reasoning process, where we seek mutual solutions towards integration of the alien. If I would like my neighbour to move their perspective I must be a reciprocal interlocutor.

I will say it is likely an immigrant will be a greater champion of Britishness than many. They know what living under fear is like! British Conservative politician Norman Tebbit’s ‘which cricket team do you support?’ test is specious. You can love your place of birth, and the place you now call home. We have multiple passions, and inviting love of place is a long journey of effective assimilation. You love your settlement over time only if it can form part of your personal story. Conversely, dishing out universal rights at no cost to the individual is unsustainable as it alienates rather than integrates. Rights have costs the community meets through their pot of social capital. An account that needs topping up regularly. The universalist and nowhere citizen who digs into local pots of somewhere people uninvited understandably causes another form of injustice.

It is for Britain to hold its nerve through the Trumpista’s early-term feverish rhetoric. You cannot build any society on a ‘deficit theology’, on what you are against. America is no longer a model-society and MAGA’dom’s ressentiment is a form of admission.

Britain’s industrial decline plus war threw this country into structural change. Some for the good. It is a horrible truism that war resolves as well as destroys. When my father made it back from India, mother pleaded with him to share her Christian faith. He capitulated after attending a tent mission. He got religion quite badly. The Father, Son and King James Bible. But mellowed eventually. The law gave way to grace.

This story will be typical for these islands. A country forcibly and strategically arranged by existential threats of invasion, a resilient island people, dogged, fending off. Not least seeing off Napoleon’s existential politics and huge army amassing across the water. Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805 was a breath-taking piece of seamanship. It allowed the south coast of England to breathe for the first time in a long time. Jane Austen’s Sanditon, based on my hometown of Worthing, West Sussex, where the author stayed in 1805, offers the rise of the seaside community, newly free from France’s aspirations.

As a young infantryman being shot up by German fighters on Suffolk airfields my father chatted to the RAF bomber crews as they returned from firebombing German invasion barges. Pilots said: “That has put a stop to their little game”. How serious Hitler was about risking the Royal Navy’s domination of The English Channel is debateable.

Napoleon was a poor naval strategist. He meddled with The Combined Fleet’s movements. As they sailed out of Cadiz harbour, their fate was sealed. Nelson, a leader not without his cry-baby moments, a worrier, also possessed personal courage, worthy of recognition. He was undoubtedly a tactician. His famous “England expects” final message to the British fleet came after he had told his ships’ captains to break the enemy’s line at right-angles, defying conventional line abreast cannonades.

He wanted a pell-mell battle, liberating his captains to interpret the battle as it unfolded. The battle was won in a nerve-wrenchingly slow 30 minutes as Nelson’s ships crawled – exposed, hammered by deadly cannon fire – on a gentle breeze into the enemy line, and to then finally open fire through the stern and bows of the enemy. As he strolled the deck of HMS Victory, symbolising fearlessness in the face of the enemy, his war shattered body succumbed.

Such courage, patience, delegation and trust is unlikely to emerge initially in Trump II if all the arrows of power point into POTUS. This will gradually throttle American ingenuity and its global institutions. This is leadership-poor. Nelson, prior to appointment as overall fleet commander, was assessed for his wider consciousness. In spite of storied tactical successes his journals were studied by superiors for strategic capability beyond operational prowess.

As of now, Trump II remains an unknown. We suspect revanchism, but maybe dogmatism, pragmatism or even idealism is present. Britain’s role, shrunken as it is, is to attempt to use its long history of fending off ideologues and shaping spheres of influence. Especially when it can see some cruelties are just unnecessary to maintaining its legacy in meeting existential threats. Building a complex society like Britain is a work of continual attentiveness. America’s attention span is getting shorter. Its citizens drifting quietly from their previous wholehearted commitment to ‘America as project’. Its elite and media increasingly living in another world from ‘the voter’. JFK’s contribution was not unlike Churchill’s, rhetorical. It offered language and meaning that others could adopt. It appeared to gather more than it divided.

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An ironic by-blow: the nation-state wriggles out of European modernity

In Uncategorized on October 9, 2024 at 8:45 am

AS THE JOKE GOES, Britain has left the EU, when will it leave the US? Exiting the EU was more than retreating from the Pax Europaea, the post-war settlement of ‘let’s stop fighting and get on’. It was a slipping out the back door from European modernity, without a bye or toodle-pip.  François Hollande, in his 2022 book Bouleversements (Upheavals), argues the EU is a project of “reason and not of the heart”. Which is warm prose for creating sacred symbols out of modernity. A project which European modernes believe still requires completion, and is in danger now of being left undone.

Although Hollande advocates halting the march towards unfettered federalism he says “European construction continues as before”. This leaves European nation-states with nowhere to go. They are junior to the supra-national EU. Hence the future will be a gradual, and messy, slunk back to the only workable unit in political-economy, the independent nation-state. The value of heading back to this boundary marker, as led by Britain, is it further sees off nascent far-right populism.

For the nation-state is Europe’s great achievement, our inheritance, the place where religion was privatised, and difference not only made essential but welcome. It has been hiding in plain sight, unloved and written out of the curriculum, but remains the golden triumph of Europe’s brutal struggles.

Within its jurisdiction neighbourliness and shared citizenship transcend both old tribal boundaries and blind family loyalties. We are free to associate whatever our colour or creed, as we are neighbours and citizens. “I” require reason and forbearance to resolve differences with my neighbour as I cannot call on gang enmities. Together we form the “we”, bound by moral values, social customs, political institutions. To throw this wildly successful model away for the vague trans-nationalism of the Euro Mod is not just reckless but unthinking.

We in the UK are currently wondering just where are the coordinates of this new government. We know UK governments of late have a tendency to confusion: conservative on Monday, progressive come Tuesday. But both Conservative and Labour policy hearts tend to beat still with European modernity. A collective intellectual laziness. This goes to serve increased awareness that the UK populace has not seen a conservative government in over a generation. Thatcher, the economic liberal (indebtedness as wise and good), Blair-Brown likewise, but gilded with vague metro-moods. And the Cameron-Clegg coalition rolled-over the Blair-Brown government’s desire to knock the electorate off-balance by radiating selfsame turbo-confidence. And now the new Labour government has stolen Blair-Brown’s mantra: “Change is coming”. It is one thing to roll out a cliché, another to repeat it years later knowing just how empty it was then. The technocrat’s great weakness is unworldliness. If we are not ‘obedient to wider meaning, then we must accept the authority of local fashion’, to paraphrase W. H. Auden.

As shared actualities fragment, in our case the faltering post-war consensus between former warring nation-states, modern irony spreads in random forms. Epochal change, if it is indeed that, produces perverse effects, not least the hi-ironists of late-modernity. Irony here in the sense of negating what appears obvious. We the people crave good order, but if a normalcy is ending then figures emerge with “Der Geist der stets verneint”, the spirit that always denies, as in Goethe’s Mephistopheles.

And it is the nation-state that gives the most scope to the subjective self who seeks to negate dying orders, as well as exist outside of any march of history. Irony appears here also as hesitation in the face of anything cravenly unquestioned. In Britain the Great Hesitation was in the face of an unbelievable utopian Europe. The hard-won concept of the free self tends to creak at the prospect of universal ethics or a faux international “we”. Any international “we” is of course an abstraction of language, an unreality.

The change mantra offers a sensation of pace which is a kind of dopamine fix, but is equally an abstraction from the real sensations of daily living. Moving at speed towards faux change invites more clichés, as the faithful are those who ‘get on board’. The antidote is dealing with real things that bind ordinary people together inside their real encounter.

The value of modern irony (which challenges the whole, rather than Socratic irony which took cheery aim at the individual) is it has the potential to flip worldviews upside down. If a revived nation-state is an ironic negation of European modernity, where are its proponents? Genuine conservatives are by degrees an exiled diaspora hiding in The National Trust, the Church of England, and the legion of civic bodies that better represent loyalties to place, past, and the future. Genuine conservatism hesitatingly mutters: ‘Please stop, better do nothing for the time being’. It runs against the inner-drivebelt of European modernity which remains world-as-mechanism and not world-as-organism. World-as-mechanism chases down life down to destruction, and paints an ideal abstract of ‘man and woman’, which gives rise to modern ressentiment. Pursuing ideals is a contradiction in terms as life by necessity is without an ideal.

And in the meantime, our ex, America, is where a progressive landslide has not materialised. The majority of voters remain either conservative or moderate. Liberals have only just moved into the majority amongst Democrat voters. And America is so embattled as a monetary hegemon, with the Fed putting out economic forest fires, as well as the Republican Party being taken over by its members, appointing one of their own as leader, do they have any time for western leadership?

Underneath the return to the nation-state as the only sane model of government, is this tension between the social-conservatism of the voting public, and the metro-modernity of the unrooted political class who wander in a cosmopolitan haze far from ordinary existence. As such Brexit blew another whistle on modernity as a completable project. Hence, the UK’s Conservative Party has a dilemma. Should it appoint a genuine conservative leader who actually represents conservatives, which will see it in the wilderness for some time. The past is the future is not a vote winner.  Hence an ideological wasteland in UK politics, but undertowed by a residuum of Euro modernity.

As a result of Brexit the sun is setting on the EU, for in losing Britain it has lost its Anglo-Saxon trophy, and raison d’etre, which is to counter US hegemony, and to advance France’s Enlightenment vision of a modern Europe. Even though English and US law diverges, the US remains a conservative force, and at direct odds with the European project. Notions of harmony and unity under the English constitution sees English-modernity as a process of tradition constantly shaping ‘the new’, moulding it, making it continuous and stable. English-modernity is bound by its historical continuity. Where French-modernity is a huge effort to found a settled constitution on ill-defined modern progress. 15 constitutions since 1791 and still counting.

For change within a modern context is rooted in contingent spaces and their provisional qualities. The assumption is that forums fill their own vacuum. They do not. Modern public spheres are largely empty spaces and get filled quite quickly, not unlike resort sunbeds. What goes into the western forum always remains provisional. What reaches the modern English sunbed first is the utilitarian argument. It throws its towel down at dawn, but under this seeming pragmatism is a disguised ironic commitment to continuity. Tradition hides very effectively inside chop pragmatism.

And irony is the second casualty of modern rationalism. Irony understands the relationship between modernisation as a project and its effects on the creative life force of nation-states. For organisational leaders in the commercial sector, markets are carriers of modernity and tradition. Effective strategic leadership is alert to both forces and holds the space open. And is alert to how both work in terms of speed and change. The dance or art of the CEO as strategist is understanding how modern rationalism and irony influence notions of authority and leadership.

Authority has been found to be quite distinct from the increasingly contingent word ‘leadership’. Leadership, with sufficient revision, can again effect genuine long-term value-adding stability, but when misused, gradually diminishes authority.

Nature, in response, builds in tension between authority and leadership with unsurpassable majesty. We argue nature’s beauty stems from truth and love, and ugliness in the world finds its root in power and control. Life itself being a target for modern control mechanisms. The ancient argument is that the opposite of love is not hate, but power. Those that seek it gradually shrivel, and their organisation becomes an echo chamber for others to fix at a later stage. Those that do not seek power gain it. As do those who give power away. This presents the problem of vulnerability.

Now that is all well and lovely, as we know monsters do enact revolutions in their own country and manage to hold onto power for decades relatively untroubled. Of course everything around them rots. But here in the West we are prone to working in long evolved democratic spheres which invite extended engagement.  

Currently strategic leadership offers an ability to hold all the above in an adaptive tension. By all means react to new market signals, especially weak signals, but they are always carrying mixed messages which need evaluation. We can re-open dialogue around change and progress, and what they are in the post-industrial, late-modern, post-critical, post-theory, post-post landscape. Under modernity progress was forwards and upwards at speed, which has its inbuilt dilemmas.

T. S. Eliot’s vision in his 1922 poem The Waste Land pointed a finger at the solidified symbols of ‘industrial modern progress’ and reveals them as not progress but rather screen glitches in the eternal. Later in The Four Quartets he suggests it is a question of time confusion. If progress is always in the future, we are fundamentally forgetting progress itself, paradoxically, might be more a work of the past. That is, an instituting of values that leak their meaning throughout the organisation, effecting all behaviours, visible and invisible.

And a new UK government begs questions of not just international alignment but its ideological attachment to modern future, past and present. Turning from Europe to the US means a renewed relationship with both a low-modernity and a hidden conservatism. America invaded Britain after the war with televisual saturation. But America failed to export its conservatism as effectively. Both into Europe or Britain. The odd glimpse of European TV output, by contrast, seemed like something from a Proustian daydream. Renewing vows with the Pax Americana is made more interesting by the fact that western governments have let slip their grip on conservative politics, and its force for stability. Any defence of the eternal ‘western institution’ is being roughed up under monetisation. And the surge of right-wing popularism, with its national and nativist spirits.

Hollande offers that there is no European identity. He is not proposing total integration. But possibly not far off. The UK is still moving its emotional furniture from political integration as ‘the future’ into a surprise encounter with another Blairite progressive Labour government. Which will still largely be as metro-liberal as the outgoing metro-liberal Conservatives, who did little to foster meaningful development of the political ideological landscape. Both parties have fallen foul of technocratic utilitarian panic.

What actually is the ‘Change is coming!’ shtick? Continued modernisation via market liberalism, somewhat limply. It did not really know what it stood for. It did seem to be a code-phrase to say if we disrupt old-institutions through the market, something might happen that is better. But institutions are, despite their turmoil, holding something of a conservative line. Even if led by unworldly metro-liberal technocrats.

This means modernity remains a version of time that is unsustainable. The facing outwards toward a modern future was more importantly a turning away from facing each other. Conservatism (of any political shade) remains a turning towards each other’s face. At root, this is a face-to-face encounter with the ‘eyes and lips of the soul’, and the soul possesses its own natural order. If the “industrial revolution was, at bottom, an effort to substitute a technical order, an engineering conception of function and rationality for the haphazard ecological distributions of resources and climates”, against us adapting nature to our needs, then, as Daniel Bell argued, we are now in that position of being both “outside nature, and less and less with machinery and things”. Our modernity has pushed us past both nature and mechanisation, and into a clearing where we all stand and look at each other afresh, and go, ‘so?’, how do we recover a sustainable ordering of good society.

Bell is suggesting here that the celebrated industrial revolution might actually have been a rejection of a good technical order and even good engineering. A ripping up of good industrial progress itself for the sake of rapacious progress.

The strange mood and sensation of the now is, too few have the desire to complete the modern project. In Bell’s terms it is too random. As Oswald Spengler puts it: “Knowledge, for Kant, is mathematical knowledge. He deals with innate intuition-forms and categories of reason, but he never thinks of the wholly different mechanism by which historical impressions are apprehended.” Better known as we have been thinking inside the world-history box of limited time and space logics. The sweep of civilisations and its patterns reveals more. That is, a culture emerges in its power, and then is spread to the masses (civilianised). That is, our Western Civilisation is a twilight of Western Culture, not its perpetuation. A questionable conception, as with many conservative philosophers, they miss the depth of lifeforce within humans to convert the most inhospitable conditions into life itself.  

Nevertheless, the arc of the Enlightenment project has touched down to ground and we can say science, culture, art, politics, economics have all underperformed under a modernised Western Civilisation. The Right and Left are almost in agreement. This is no more visible than in the hotchpotch of variable architecture in Britain. The beautiful and ugly within our post-war built environment reveal the confusion of what time and progress is.

Social media mimics this confusion. It creates narrow slices of reality. Which paradoxically is restoring context. Viewers repeatedly land on enduring imagery as glimpses of what might be possible if formed inside a new and more helpful world-history. In the background behind a manic presenter fishing for hits is something disturbingly durable, such as an ancient monument leaking its timeless symbolic meaning. A Doric column with its the image of the pure present. It was easy for the architect and developer to destroy these symbols as they pointed to a world that was already changing and needed none of their expensive improvements.

This disjuncture between the timeless and the modern is outlined in Roland Barthes’ studium and punctum. Studium is the desire to make contextual sense of a photographic image, and punctum is your eye falling on something in that image that it is not supposed to. At the opera or stand-up comedy gig, we cannot help notice the audience member on their phone, or the cracked ceiling speaking its own resonant message of reality.

Modern rationalism could not calculate civic value, and we look to a revived nation-state as a means to recovering aesthetic judgement. The same type of judgement that knows what is right and wrong in architecture or music, and is formed from centuries of communal face-to-face participation.


‘Great Tidal Waves of Energy’: Music’s Revolutionary Zeal

In Uncategorized on April 22, 2013 at 11:17 am

‘The oddest person… and at the same time the most rare and consistently witty’ is how Russian composer Igor Stravinsky is supposed to have ‘praised’ his French contemporary Erik Satie (1866-1925)*.  Music is not just tolerant of eccentricity. It seems to embrace it in ways that other domains  iron out. Paul Kildea’s new biography on Benjamin Britten describes the great British 20th century composer as: “Loving, spontaneous, loyal, corrupt, humorous, humourless, soulless, courageous, weak, abnormal, flawed, beautiful, ugly, petulant, secretive, wonderful, crippled, sadistic, charming, great, hateful.” Full of human contradiction, and, according to Kildea, at odds with the world around him. In Britten’s centenary year his music endures and grows in appreciation. 20th century music at least, and its people, seem to avoid flattening or balancing plurality at all costs.

Irish pianist and conductor Barry Douglas reveals to James Naughtie in the March BBC Music Magazine: “I love to try each time to make [each performance] different: to find a better way. A Dutch conductor once told me that early in his career he had played the Beethoven Violin Concerto with a certain performer. About 20 years later, they did it again. And he was shocked – shocked! – that it sounded exactly the same. This from someone who is a very well-known name. That’s just not the way to be a musician. It should always change. Sometimes it might be revolutionary; sometimes not. But it should never be just the same. That means there’s nothing going on.”

Sometimes revolutionary, sometimes not but not the same. The music here, to be worthwhile, has to carry some new meaning in its outworking.  There is something about the music fraternity’s ability to reframe and reinvent, if not shift their foundations.  As if the core set of beliefs or axioms underpinning music itself has to shift. There is no room then for what some call Foundationalism; a worldview with a basic core that remains fixed come what may. No cries of No Surrender here.

Was Douglas’ ‘well-known name’ a Foundationalist being true to deeply held core values? The difficulty in beginning to touch on ‘core beliefs’ is the room seems to empty as soon as polemics or ‘unsympathy’ appears.  In the April BBC Music mag Bayan Northcott’s review of Paul Kildea’s Britten bio is not overly complimentary but ends: “I wonder… whether there can ever be a definitive biography”.  He politely admonishes Kildea for “ambiguous syntax and mixed metaphors” giving it 3-stars compared to 4-stars for Neil Powell’s similarly-timed Britten bio which offers “sympathetic” treatment to a “good man”. Avoiding difficult arguments is like being definitive and Foundational, implausible in lived life, even if necessary at times.

Changing tack slightly but staying in April’s mag conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner chimes in with his concerns about whether by playing Bach on period instruments this helps capture the composer’s Foundational meaning or worldview. He says the choir in general terms has ‘been going downhill since the 17th century’ because singers have been “picked because of their academic credentials rather than what they can do vocally”. Likewise being interested in Bach isn’t about “dealing with a dusty periwigged bust from the distant past”.  The idea of locating the Foundation of what authors or composers Mean is then fraught and can’t be found by employing modern academic credentials.

In other words bringing meaning up-to-date isn’t about returning to the past, recreating the past in the now with ‘original instruments’ in the vain hope this will point us to True Foundations, or, what some might spuriously term Authentic; it’s about a “living, breathing relationship with this astonishing composer”. That is Bach’s music lives now and speaks now even if, in Barthes’ terms, the Author is Dead. (So that means we can say Bach is in the present tense, which will infuriate Radio 4 listeners for hours!… Good!) How is this ‘relationship’ of understanding the now protected? Sir Eliot adds: “I’m trying to make sure that the text is always the driving force in vocal music, and that means trying to get instrumentalists to imitate singers and singers to emulate instrumentalists, so that there’s a collective discourse between the voices and the players and not an artificial divide.” He goes on to challenge the anodyne sounds of so much contemporary choral music:  Interviewer Tom Service whispers in the ear of the reader: “…if you’re thinking blond-haired West Coast choral composers, you could be on the right track”. Sir Eliot bemoans the attempts to re-create Bach ‘by-the-theory-book’: “…It was all perfectly euphonious, perfectly honed, blended, and tuned. And it meant absolutely squiddeldy-dee. “

The polished harmonies of the Foundational, definitive, blended tunes that sell well are what Sir Eliot calls “nice”! I recall my English teacher pouring scorn and damnation on the word Nice. And not in a Nice way. Only then in two-way discourse is there salvation from blond-haired West Coast harmonies? (“Wouldn’t it be nice… ?”)

What ‘good music’ then achieves is suitable discordance and constant difference each time it’s performed. This is an Anti-Foundationalism opposed to unmoving Core Beliefs. Eliot uses terms such as ‘jumping tracks’, ‘mutant forms’ and he is willing to acknowledge when there is a new ‘heliocentricity’ abroad resulting from the arrival of a Copernicus or Galileo. There are new Copernican turns now  and there are Galileo’s being locked up. The noise of our discomfort in the background might be us and our community ‘crossing the points’ into a revolutionary understanding which really threatens the definitive.

I’d suggest also it is a disillusionment with Foundationalism itself. That much of modern management and leadership is seeking euphonious Niceness ahead of two-way discourses that create ‘collective discourses’. Blond-hair is beating scrawny Pauline oddities such as John Adams, the geeky composer of Nixon in China, or Erik Satie, him of Gnossiennes,  the oddest man according to Igor Stravinsky (no Blondy himself!). ‘Perfectly honed’ unities are then a disaster.

The protection it seems against polished unities is Sir Eliot’s mutations in response to Revolutions and this sustains flexibility and imagination and avoids “ghettos between repertoires and specialisms”. It seems vitality requires certain imbalances that are awkward.  Sir Eliot says this striving for two-wayness offers “great tidal wave[s] of energy”. The music community seem hungry in large parts to mutate beyond Foundationalist views and ready to come-to-terms with any outfall but only in the context of a relationship between members of the community.

This two-wayness is dangerous, of course, as it is diametrically at odds with instrumentalism. Invoking the modern mantras of ‘being inspirational’; ‘focused’; ‘excellent’; ‘outstanding’ and so on, carry the same texture as Sir Eliot’s euphonious niceness; that once the dust has settled they leave the concert-goers going home early. The answer again appears to be not departing for a cave as a sandaled aesthete, in a slight huff, mumbling on the way about being above the puerile, but rather both parties aiming for a collective discourse: ‘I will try and sound a bit like you and if you could sound a bit like me’; the strings mapping into woodwind and the chorus dropping their lifelong adherence to the Royal Society. Somebody recently pointed out that Institutions are designed to capture and imprison a ‘moment of revolutionary change’ and then resist all future revolutions. If Institutions can revisit their Foundations as part of their core-beliefs it seems wise. If the US Constitution added an Amendment saying ‘Revisit these Amendments regularly’ and the church said we’re Reforming-as-a-way-of-life not Reformed how much pain might have been saved? Plus when the Galileos and Copernicus’s of today’s world turn up, can we invite them in now and not later? Also, maybe something here similar to Gulliver’s ability to speak the language of each ‘Land’ he visits?

*Sleeve notes to Gymnopedies: A Selection of Piano Pieces, by Erik Satie, Naxos 8.550.305