Radical Optimism

"Things can only get better

Can only get better if we see it through

That means me and I mean you too

So teach me now that things can only get better

They can only get, they only get, take it on from here

You know I know that things can only get better"

Was 1997 as good as it gets for us?

That was the question posed at dinner a few evenings back to a group of self-identifying left leaning progressives deeply unhappy at the recent coup and the new 'government' comprised almost entirely of people so alien as to be barely recognisable as members of the same species. 

That kind of conversation tends to oscillate, sometimes at speed, back and forth along the spectrum from demoralised to utterly incandescent.  

For many of us there is a sense of profound pessimism. Increasingly people openly discuss emigrating; seeking dual nationality or an Irish passport or moving to Scotland and hoping that it might become independent. In a word fleeing a version of England which seems less and less to have anything positive to offer.

Yet the new government trumpets an obsession with optimism. Which made me think not only about whether 1997 was truly the highpoint in my lifetime but also about the uses and abuses of optimism in politics and political discourse.

In 1997 optimism too was the touchstone. Things could only get better. After 18 years in government, the tories had been trounced and seemed likely to be out of power for at least a generation. The threat of nuclear annihilation had dissipated. Arms control was being strengthened. Europe was reunited following the collapse of the Soviet Union. A Democratic President was re-elected in the US.  This was a world at least in Europe in which liberal democracy seemed to have clearly won the day; a Europe of Vaclav Havel not Viktor Orban (at least not in his current guise).

Many of these hopes were ultimately frustrated. In particular, many of us ended up on huge marches and demonstrations against war in Iraq.

Yet the version of optimism on offer in 1997 was genuine. It had identified, progressive ambitions, a version of the future that was genuinely different to the past, and a set of programmes to achieve it.

There was also positive political valency; despite the rhetoric of 'what matters is what works', there was still enough of a sense that the broad inclination of the government would generally be in a progressive direction whatever the vicissitudes of policy. There was a clear belief in the active power of the state to change lives for the better, whatever the ensuing madness of new public management theory and the associated obsessions with targetry.

So when it comes to optimism the 1997 version had distinct characteristics: a sense of direction,  goals which aimed to secure change from the past, a rational engagement with real world issues which needed to be understood in order for a practical programme of change to be put in place. In other words the rhetoric had a reality and there was broad congruence between them. Lived experience at least in large part reflected political ambition.

Whilst reflecting on all of this I happened to listen to the latest Such Stuff podcast which was intriguingly titled 'Radical Optimism' and focused on A Midsummer Night's Dream. This optimism is radical in that it indeed suggests the positive power of living in a dream state for a period as a collective experience in which the focus is on our similarities rather than our differences and in which we get to know each other in the same way as the characters change as a result of their experiences whilst dreaming. The collective experience of the groundlings in the Jacobean theatre is to be distanced from everyday life, taken out of ourselves and allowed to reflect the on the possible. Given a different perspective; not manipulated or instructed but empowered. Athens is different at the end of the play because of what happens in the dream.

This version of optimism envisages changing both the people and the world by virtue of the people reflecting on the world they wish to see.

Art in the possible.

Contrast that with the 2019 version of 'optimism'. 

Rather than A Midsummer Night's Dream the book that springs to mind is 1984.

What we are now experiencing is what might be termed the political project of optimism. Its characteristics are majoritarian and authoritarian. It demands belief in the same way as a cult. If the dream state radical optimism of the groundlings is a profoundly democratic concept; the political project of optimism is one that is associated with monarchs and demagogues - it requires acquiescence to an imposed belief system.

True optimism does not remove rationality or scepticism; it co-exists with and channels them. Authoritarian optimism treats both as bogus. Naturally, any  questioning is by definition not optimistic.

This optimism is majoritarian not collective. It does not seek to allow us to understand our differences and our possibilities. It does not want a collectively owned and developed sense of the future achieved through deliberation. It needs an 'other'. It  needs enemies who would betray it.

This version of optimism has no congruence with the real world or with lived experience. Far from using a limited dream state to think differently and change the world, the political project wants to put the world into a permanent dream state of delusion.

Fundamentally, the political project of optimism is actually not even about optimism.  It is not about thinking differently to change the world. It is not about thinking at all, simply believing or at least securing a wilful suspension of disbelief. 

So the 2019 version of optimism is profoundly pessimistic. It is a classic example of doublespeak. On the surface the UK variant may seem at odds with that practiced by the bedfellows on the other side of the Atlantic who quite explicitly base their authoritarianism on fear. Fear of losing status; making something great once again. Yet clearly both of these political projects are firmly and deliberately rooted in the past. There is no coherent sense of what the future might comprise, just high profile gestures that suggest that some aspect of the past will be reintroduced or reimposed.  

The future with which the political project of optimism actually seeks to connect is a more specific version of the past: it is nationalistic but it is also neoliberal. It seeks the absence of things. In particular the absence of regulation and of taxes. The absence of control on the powerful. This optimism is a version of nostalgia designed to usher in a turbo-charged version of the late 19th century.

It is a fraud being perpetrated on a grand scale with demonisation of anyone or anything that has the temerity to question it.  New Labour may have been criticised for stealth taxes. The political project of optimism has an entire stealth agenda to be secured through brainwashing.

But for a moment back to a more positive version of optimism. The radical optimism of the groundlings is still vibrant. We can see it in Extinction Rebellion. The most frightening and truly pessimistic aspect of our times is that not content with destroying the habitats of the animals with which we share the earth we are intent on destroying the whole planet and ushering ourselves towards extinction. The only way we can combat this is through a version of radical optimism in which we think ourselves coherently into a different future and have the strength and the bravery to take the steps required. It means facing the unpalatable head on and it requires change from us all on an almost unimaginable scale.

Not bromides and bollocks and just 'believing'. Rather, hard, rational, practical, sweeping changes that have the prospect of alleviating the worst.

Optimism may kill us but we can't live without it.

The profound question for our species and our planet is whether the political project of optimism or radical optimism emerges triumphant.

Heritage, History, Historiography ... and Hauntology

One of the most pernicious aspects of contemporary political discourse is the obsession with an imagined past which is defined in specific ways to support current prejudices. 

Along with outright xenophobia, nationalism (and in some cases a hefty sprinkling of neo-liberalism), the current wave of authoritarian populists play heavily on nostalgia, producing a weapons grade, moonshine version which they hope is powerful enough to strip away rational engagement and overwhelm scepticism. Sadly, for far too many it does.

Nostalgia for the individual can be comforting; a way of reflecting on good times with added sunshine. Yet just like the absurd idea that held good for far too long that the state should budget like a corner shop or a household, community level nostalgia is a dangerous notion that necessarily privileges one view of the past over all others. 

Worse, it is deliberately uncritical engagement. Things were so much better when - there were fewer people who didn't look or sound different, less frequent engagement with other cultures, a class based hierarchical society in which posh men in tweed knew what was what and in which there were fewer constraints on chauvinism and bigotry.  

Nostalgia is closely linked to the only slightly less pernicious notion of heritage. I utterly loathe the 'heritage industry' in its promotion of a single, sanctified view of the past which can be commodified and sold. It glories in pageantry, costume and tradition - all of it surface gloss on what was often a much more uncomfortable set of underpinnings reflecting wholesale exploitation and servitude. Our country houses owe much to the wealth produced by the slave trade and the sugar plantations as well as children working down coal mines and men and women losing limbs in badly regulated factories.

I spend a lot of time wandering around old buildings. I unashamedly love looking at the architecture and the fine arts on display. I may find them curious, sometimes ridiculous but often stunningly impressive. But they should be considered in their historical context: the product of extreme privilege and ostentatious luxury. 

We should engage with both: the historical context and the wonders of human ingenuity and creativity.

That's where history comes in. One can debate endlessly the precise methodological approach but, whatever else it is, the study of history should be warts and all; it should consider structural issues as well as individual genius. The mole hill only mattered  because posh people rode around on horses. 

We see far too much heritage and understand far too little history. 

However, if I could change one thing it would be to introduce a mandatory requirement for schools to teach historiography alongside history. 

Historiography in simple terms is why people thought the things that they did about the past and how those views have changed so much over time. Changed not just because of better evidence or a clearer understanding; but changed because the reasons why people wanted to believe certain things have altered.

We currently want to glorify the Second World War as a time when plucky Britain stood strong against overwhelming odds. One can believe that or one can also believe that alongside the undoubted heroism Britain only survived because Russia lost millions and millions of civilians and soldiers fighting one of the most horrific campaigns in history against Germany on the eastern front. We choose to talk about one. We don't generally choose to talk about the other. Certainly not when its inconvenient. 

We also choose not to talk about the way that British lawyers wrote much of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights which was then translated into the European Convention on Human Rights. Some of us might say that in fact this was one of the greatest legacies of the UK to the world and to a stable Europe determined not to repeat the horrors of the past.  

That brings us to hauntology, a difficult concept perhaps best considered as 'nostalgia for lost futures'. So whilst it is also about loss, unlike nostalgia it does not glory in a particular view of how things were; it reflects concern that we seem stuck at the end of history and haunted by its spectres. That we have no future.

Twenty-first century English culture is at risk of being more concerned with co-opting the past than embracing the future.

Hauntologists often like old analogue synths or vinyl. In musical terms the crackle and hiss on the analogue recording are valuable for the sense they convey that these artefacts were never pristine; they always contained the seeds of their own decay. 

We might beneficially ponder whether the wider sonic range of the analogue recording has merit as a better way to explore the full intentions of the composer and the performer whilst also reflecting that the modern obsession to smooth has lost not just that wider range - but also the interference and imperfections.

A clearer eyed view of the past gives us more chance of having a future which is informed by its failings rather than being in hock to its prejudices.