GOT HOPE?

It may look like a piece of bargain-basement irony to be juxtaposing this headline with the notorious photo of Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi giving the Roman salute traditionally associated with (pre-WWII Fascist dictator) Mussolini. But the last thing I want to do is to provoke a cynical shrug of the shoulders: there’s a serious point applying right across the developed West, that views and ideas once seen as too loopy, extreme or simply toxic to be expressed in public are edging into the mainstream.

20-30 years ago it would have been instant political death for any Italian leader to be photographed giving the Fascist salute, as it would have been for an American politician to propose abolishing Social Security or public education, or for a French President to propose expelling citizens of a fellow-EU country from French soil, linking them to the crime and insecurity which he has made his favourite theme.

Pretty much everywhere the Right seems to be on the rampage, and leftists and progressives on the retreat – no longer believing in, or at least no longer arguing with any passion for their supposed ideals. Despite the economic crisis and the outrageous greed and irresponsibility displayed by financial élites, the political parties supported by or in the pockets of those élites are forging ahead.

So what’s going on? The discourse of the Right, of course, is that the progressives had their chances and blew them: the war is over and the tough guys won (like they always do). There is of course a serious conservative critique of progressivism, but I’m intentionally not reproducing it here: the followers of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party in the US or of Berlusconi in Italy don’t demand a rigorous analysis; they’re operating from emotions which the leaders in question are expert at arousing and manipulating. Mostly negative emotions at that: fear of losing what one has, and of foreigners and outsiders. In so far as the Left is offering an analysis of the crisis and of the root causes of terrorism and mass immigration, rather than an emotional response, the battle is lost before it’s engaged. In politics, emotion trumps reason every time, and economic insecurity provokes fear of change and a tendency to cling to authority (just ask anyone who was in Germany in the early 1930s).

But we’re not in the 1930s. Berlusconi isn’t Mussolini and Glenn Beck isn’t Hitler, or even George Wallace. The Italian philosopher Raffaele Simone, in a much-discussed recent book, distinguishes the modern Right from its antecedents of 70-80 years ago by describing it as a “soft monster”. For Simone, the “monster” imposes its increasingly uncontested rule through three absolute commandments:

i) Thou shalt consume. Citizenship and civic identity are defined through consumption, rather than through social participation and engagement. Society becomes fragmented, as people see themselves as exclusively individual rather than social agents, focussed on short-term personal gratification.

ii) Thou shalt have fun. Work becomes devalued as a source of meaning and gratification (conveniently enough, as unemployment continues to rise); the modern “consumizen” lives for Friday night, for the weekends, for the summer holidays – and for the celebrity-focused nonsense and other kinds of froth on TV. (It’s no accident that Berlusconi, who incarnates this tendency more than any other politician, uses the huge chunk of the Italian media which he owns and/or dominates to discourage and devalue discussion of social and political issues.) The “vision” is clear: an atomised society composed of disconnected and disengaged individuals, and offering them an infinity of ways to forget themselves – for money, of course.

iii) Thou shalt be (or look) young. Simone, who’s one of the 1968 generation, may have been feeling his age when he added this – and it’s paradoxical considering that the average age of the population is steadily rising, especially in Western Europe and Japan. But he’s also pointing to the narcissism that’s such a feature of contemporary culture – the gym-honed underwear models, the “Hello!” weddings, the love confessions of Z-list celebrities and all the other detritus I just referred to. And hats off to Berlusconi for pushing this envelope too: Botoxed and hair-implanted to the eyeballs, at 73 he boasts of his successes with girls young enough to be his grand-daughters – and the story of his prodigious feats during a night of passion with a 2000€-a-pop call girl, far from causing embarrassment, seems to have increased his supporters’ admiration. (Is it conceivable, by the way, that this story wasn’t manufactured and planted by the Berlusconi media apparatus?)

So far, so gloomy – and to add to the woes of the left, Simone points out how it’s never shaken off a fatal association with totalitarian Communism – not to mention the destructive political protests of the 60s, 70s and 80s. I was intermittently one of those protestors myself (though never violently), but I could never fully commit to a “movement” that maintained such an ambiguous attitude towards the “Socialist” dictatorships of the time – and anyway, how long would those long-haired, grass-smoking, rock music-listeners have survived in the Maoist China they claimed to admire so much?

What’s happened is that, of the two strands of social-cultural change which emerged from that epoch, the pursuit of individualist self-expression and self-realisation has totally swamped the accompanying urge for a renewed society and sense of community. As Simone goes on to point out, the Left has failed to come to terms with the hedonism and individualism fostered not only by modern capitalism but also by the huge technological changes of the past 25 years – atomizing society and leaving each individual enclosed in his or her own iBubble, as it were.

Simone goes on to argue, neither very originally nor very convincingly, for a “reinvention” of the Left, but that time has surely passed – the opposition of Left and Right, of “socialism” vs. “individualism”, has become a stale and destructive cliché, exploited by the various Tea Partiers and Berlusconis to discredit any form of idealism or collective action.

Out of the rubble of sterile and rigid ideologies must emerge – is emerging, hesitantly – a new progressivism which acknowledges, as the old Left never did, that social change necessarily starts with individual change. Changing structures without changed consciousnesses leads inevitably to dictatorship, while more evolved individuals inevitably and necessarily develop more evolved social structures – and the same technology which isolates “consumizens” from each other is also being used to build new communities and networks.

It’s still early, and the old structures still dominate, but there is hope – there’s always hope – that this new trans-ideological collective consciousness will gradually, sweetly and gently, overwhelm the countervailing forces.