Keep It Cold

I post a piece, munch my lunch, then settle down with a cup of tea - an odd blend: Jane Austen, with a touch of milk, its specks of sugar - to read a book. Time for my old friend Selina Synchronicity to peer over the page; she points a finger at Mr Edmund Burke….

Uncultivated people are but ordinary observers of things, and not critical in distinguishing them; but, for that reason, they admire more, and are more affected with what they see, and therefore express themselves in a warmer and more passionate manner.1

In Tough on Concepts I write about changes across historical space, as value shifts from the private to a public realm where increasingly we seek our identity. My argument that sometime in those removal vans, transplanting us from fields and factories to classrooms and offices, corsets were put around the emotions; which are now held in, kept thin, by the tightly bound laces of the mind. That once famous British reserve.2 Inevitably there is doubt. When was the last time the Schloss looked at Facebook and Instagram? My screen overflowing with the drama of friends, relatives, celebrities, dunderheads. Hasn’t TV and the Internet loosened the laces, is removing them altogether…. 

The old fogey has missed something. The culture transformed, it fuels a more expressive mentality, as we move away from the written to the spoken word and image. It’s taken a long time to weaken the foundations - the new media’s first shockwaves were in the 1960s - but now the institutions that constitute the culture are cracking up; as the tensions accumulate between the Gutenberg Mind and the street theatre of speech and gesture. Our institutions, founded on that written mentality, its emotional asceticism, are finding it hard to cope with the luxuries of the body, its calls for attention, for comfort, for me! me! me! they flounder before the unpredictability, the laziness, the flow. Too much humanity is banging on those doors. And inside the building…Dan and Deirdre Pleazone are running naked down the corridors.

The Gutenberg word is of a special kind: cool, distant, ‘discriminating’; it speaks in the language of textbook, exam and official memo. Designed to subject the individual to the ‘objective’, the general, an organisation’s ways and means, it teaches us that our own concerns are secondary; our subjective feelings less important than the purposes to which we apply a salaried mind. Our feelings, like our casual clothes, left in the company locker. Taught to lower the emotional temperature, which if too high disrupts a lesson, spoils the finance meeting, makes one-to-ones very difficult indeed, we come to willingly accept the scrivener’s role, feel ashamed at some mad outburst amongst our quieter, more controlled colleagues. The written word, the asylum in which we deposit our insanities.

Rip off the hard covers….

Life has moved considerably on since Burke made his distinction between the cultivated and the hoi polloi: we are all educated now. Albeit education itself has changed; turned almost upside down, as it expands across the social plain, absorbing ever greater numbers of the population, many lacking the aptitude for study. Grown obese, the shear weight of mental flesh loosens the ties of that straitjacket.3 But to return a moment to what Burke means: there is a refinement in all the arts that tends against the pure expression of feeling, which loses some of its force when filtered through sentences and paragraphs. Any kind of knowledge puts the mind first; though what kind of mind is another question…for centuries there has been a type of education that tries, not to make us wise, but to shape us around the social mould, whether factory, office or television screen. No longer craft but mass production; less Homer than Max Weber, statistics before storytelling, adverts not the scholarly tome. Already in Burke’s time the language of the poets was giving ground to that of the bureaucrat; though, as always, there were paradoxes and anomalies: Burke himself part of the Romantic reaction against the deep freeze of rational discourse.

It failed. The institutions only grew in power, the Enlightenment providing the weapon to make them invincible: bureaucratic reason; that greatest of revolutionary forces.

He must have evidence of everything that he believes; he wants to be shown either by rational argument or empirical data why this or that rule of life should be followed, and nature and reason are largely negative symbols indicating rejection of authority and of revelation and of scholastic metaphysics, or of all voices which have spoken to the prophets and the saints. And he wishes to convey an equally vigorous rejection of the opinions of the unenlightened mob....4

Reason at its most powerful when most destructive. The poets didn't have a chance. Kill them all! Tear everything down! To replace with something called…um um um…happiness. In trying to make this idea real, the pursuit of pleasure morphed into progress, into today’s consumer paradise. Progress. An activity only a society as a whole can achieve. Society? Another conceptual soap bubble, to be decided by those who run the times. So bye bye the individual, as it succumbs to the latest coterie, the ever renewed avant-garde of reason - philosophes, Jacobins, professors, administrators, geeks5 - who think to make society in their image; by destroying present and previous ones. Odd to think of progressives as barbarians, but then you know J.G. Ballard’s extraordinary The Garden of Time. You don’t? Read it in a tea break.

Why do we need philosophes, utilitarians, radicals, progs, if happiness is natural to the human species, is our essence? Rousseau of course gives the easy answer: we are corrupted by civilisation, whose culture oppresses us. All well and good, but…the radicals of all tribes, and this includes Rousseau himself, want to prepare, prune, compost, burn, grow; in a word, change the human animal; to cultivate what is good out of the bad. To improve us by going back (or is it forward…). If we read Rousseau right the only happiness is to remove culture altogether; the very people who read his books to destroy the books they read.6 Oh dear! Innocence requires the civilised to eviscerate their own civilisation. The true barbarism. A savage in a scholar’s gown.

Burke gave an answer to my question: happiness is not the normal state of human beings; which is indifference, unconsciousness, an easy habit, that neutral state that flows us through life without resistance. In contrast, pleasure and pain are active elements, positive and negative states; the hot and the cold when for most of the time we live in temperate climes. Burke offers the great critique of the Enlightenment project, which believed that removing all obstacles to happiness - the King, the Pope, whole libraries of superstition - would automatically produce the desired pleasures. Utopia as fairground attraction. Yet killing a king doesn't of itself produce happiness, except in that moment of destruction, those orgies around the building’s bonfires, the parties at the guillotine. Because new institutions - State, School, Corporation - must be created to manufacture it. They will force us to enjoy ourselves. Happiness is not a natural permanent state. Short moments of intoxication have to be extended artificially…happiness no longer a mild stimulant but synthesised into an addictive drug.7

People say we are an unhappy society. Isn’t it the hangover from the night before? Though if we follow Burke - I attach a lead to the Schloss’s collar - there is a deeper explanation: the educated society itself is making us sad. Because our instinctive use of words, to express and even exaggerate the emotions - to blast or to bless -, is ever more closely controlled; confined to the hospital ward of language, our paragraphs released only when they are safe for official communication and polite repartee. The laces pulled ever tighter on that corset.

Sir Isaiah Berlin pops his head under the reading lamp, then stays to give me a lecture. Nodding to the naivety of characters like Helvétius, he notes how our modern conception of education, as a social conditioning and an adjustment to the public realm, was there from its Enlightenment source. No wonder we can’t stop throwing buckets of cold water on hot heads.

Not only must all the ultimate ends - the absolute values in terms of which all legislation, education, life itself must be organised - be in harmony: but - and this is very fundamental - they must all be discoverable by any man of normal ability if he goes about looking for them in the right way, with the right tools; as discoverable, that is, by the methods of the empirical sciences. They are there - objective facts - for rational men to find, and had always been within his grasp, if he had only known about it. The reformers of the 18th century declared - and profoundly believed - that once the scales had fallen from man’s eyes, the nightmare of ignorance and despotism would be lifted of itself. The problem was technological, the ideals had only to be translated into reality with the newly discovered methods that were the glory of the new enlightenment.8

The problem of the Enlightenment was its belief in social harmony, which could be miraculously - miracles were called reason back then -  achieved through education and legislation (if the legislators themselves were properly educated); society's mechanics. This overlooked the self-interest of reason, its limits and biases; its tendency to favour particular character types - the academic, bureaucrat, statistician - and its propensity to genuflect before the powerful. Society isn’t simply out there, a part of Nature. Always it is being constructed by the key players in any epoch; albeit, as Berlin says, some epochs are more critical, more change-making, than others. Moreover, society isn’t simply a collection of individuals, it is constructed out of what Durkheim called social facts: organisations, received ideas, movements, groups…society exists independently of each one of us. It is institutions, and those who run them, who create the culture and secure its ideas; the rest of us expected to acquiesce and adapt without fuss. Always where there is a belief in Society there will be social engineering, the individual encouraged to fit smoothly into the whole; the question whether the force - of opinion, of law, of ideological control - is weak or strong, aggressive or benign. Helvétius & Co, concentrating on Church and Court, overlooked the inherent power of all institutions, their propensity to look after their own interests and to pervert the idea of the common good. Give them too much power and we risk our own coercion. The peace of the classroom, the quiet industrialism of an open plan office - a chap looks at me askance when I say I prefer the privacy of little rooms - are these not designed to reduce individual expression? Quiet that mob of words…. The function of our educational thermometer to lower the emotional temperature, so that individuals do not heat up the institution. No hot air here!

Always that mad man in a town square.

New industries create new institutions who have new products to sell. First the Media, now Silicon Valley, disturb the cosy cartels of an institutional elite.9 ‘Give me some space! Get out of the way! I’m going to run this place….’ For every new industry much of the old will have to go. Destruction aplenty for every sociopath. It is producing wide, profound and strange effects, as the whole institutional system begins to creak. Because all the movements since the 1960s have in some way undermined the institution’s culture, even when making the individual organisations ever more prosperous and powerful; Neo-liberalism both extending and intensifying capital accumulation while weakening the underlying institutional ethos, as executives encouraged to treat companies as their own private bank. The very nature of an institution relies on a stable, written culture, and this is falling away. In the junkie society that is consumer capitalism, how many sober employees are left to work the levers, press the buttons, write the crafted email…. No problem! cry the vigilantes around Palo Alto: the machine will save us. Never trust a barbarian when he’s at the controls of a social experiment. Get those kids out of that caterpillar truck!

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Notes

1. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, edited by Adam Philips, p.160.

2. Although how much an upper middle class phenomenon is an open question. An example of how such reserve, with its warm but limited emotional expressiveness, was a perfect fit for a particular kind of public relationship, see Richard Bowlby on his father. For the origins of the British gentleman: Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier.

3. One possible explanation: the vast expansion of the educational system has been unable to absorb the spontaneous humanity of most of the British population. British reserve always something of an elite taste.

4. Isaiah Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought, p.68.

5. These characters in turn change the nature of education itself, aligning it to their mode of being and mentality. See Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap; a book that mistakes bank accounts for IQ.

6. It is not quite so simple. For Rousseau we have to learn to be citizens, somehow find and touch the General Will, the Enlightenment’s divine being; the moment Society itself becomes sacred. The mistake here is to confound politics with religion, which should be a voluntary activity; for politics always contains a strong element of coercion.

7. Richard Davenport-Hines The Pursuit of Oblivion. Although about drugs this book could be describing Western society in its totality.

8. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought, p.55.

9. For the effects of the new media on politics listen to The Rest is History’s podcast: The Riot That Tore The Democratic Party Apart: Chicago '68. The Democrat’s machine couldn’t cope with the theatre of the absurd, so intimate with television.