New Puritans

Continuing the Trump-related posts, here's part of a talk I delivered early in 2016 at a conference in Lyon. The talk was titled TOMORROW NEVER KNOWN : LE FUTUR IMPRÉVISIBLE DE LA POP CULTURE and as is my frequent wont, the text was way too long to deliver in the allotted time. So I never actually got to read out this final section - perhaps just as well, given its speculative nature. 

NEW PURITANISM

Recently I interviewed the author Chuck Klosterman about his forthcoming  book But What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past  - a series of thought experiments trying to imagine what aspects of knowledge today – things we are certain about, in terms of science or what we think is important in culture or the arts – which of these could be completely rejected or thought about in a radically different way, at some point in the near future – 50 years, 100 years, 200 years from now.  He looks at music, literature, sports as well as scientific knowledge like our understanding of gravity.

One thing Klosterman suggests is that whatever we can imagine, is precisely the thing that won’t happen -  because it’s those assumptions, those limits to what we can conceive or that are thinkable for us, all of that is precisely what will disappear. And it’s true that there are plenty of examples of discredited knowledge in history, not just of discredited values or ideology, but actually discredited quasi-scientific belief – the late 18th Century belief that masturbation was the cause of physical and emotional debility – the concept of hysteria – phrenology. 

So right now, we think of the culture heroes of the present as the sexually adventurous, the gender experimenters -- that’s the story of rock - Prince for instance is celebrated in those terms, playing games with gender, inciting us all to free our bodies – and I as a vulture, someone descending on the corpse to write athinkpiece about his career, that’s what I argued – the genius of Prince’s androgyny – but in the back of my mind, even as I wrote it, I was thinking: hmmm. Maybe one day – sooner than we think - all these figures – Mick Jagger, Prince, Madonna or Lady Gaga – they will seem mystifying - That could be because we’ll all live in some kind of trans utopia where the battles of gender will have been won and we’ll be whatever we define ourselves as – man-woman will be a spectrum not a binary.

However it could also be because the whole investment in sexual liberation and sexual expression that is the dominant ideology of our time, that maybe will just be left behind.

Michel Foucault speculated about this in the History of Sexuality, a book I read at the age of 19 and which rearranged my mind, I’ve never covered from the perspectival turnaround -  he wonders whether in the future people will look back on the 20the Century and wonder why we regard sex as the truth of our being, rather than anything else – our minds, our hobbies, our citizenship, our public participation in democracy or whatever.

So I can easily imagine a time when the cultural heroes of the late 20^th and early 21^st Century will the few public figures who are militantly vegetarian or vegan – Morrissey and Prince would be among them, remembered not for Morrissey’s sexual ambiguity and being celibate, or Prince for his polymorphous perversity – but both remembered only as pop stars who were vegan and publicly stood up for that cause. 

Imagine in two hundred years time, there’s a world government, the eating of meat is banned – I know we’re in Lyon, you like to eat animals, every bit of the animal –but a lot can change in two hundred years – so there’s a world government and meat eating is abolished for reasons of ecology, personal health, and for ethical-humanitarian reasons -  only a few hundred thousand livestock still exist on the planet in agricultural museums – there is a black market underground of carnivores, who are prosecuted as perverts – and meanwhile the grand project of the human race is repairing and restoring the biosphere.

Just as we look back to the abolitionists of the 19^th Century as cultural heroes – resisting the obvious evil of slavery – one day our descendants may look back to Morrissey, Prince, Ariana Grande, Natalie Portman, Jared Leto, Ellie Goulding, not for their music or their acting but for being public vegans – abolitionists of the slave trade in animal flesh.  

Paul McCartney will be remembered only as the musician spouse of Linda McCartney. 

But in a larger sense, it could be that the entire rock era with its incitement to self indulgence and excess and living for the now, that will seem not only decadent but  inexplicable -  the cultural values of this future world-society would be equilibrium, continence, restraint, dedication to communal values and duty for the future.  Our era’s popular culture would be seen as antagonistic to those values. Perhaps even criminal, in the biospheric sense.

So if you ask me about the future of popular culture – then what I’m arguing, or at least what I’m playing with as an idea – is that popular culture as we understand it – which is the riotous rebellion of the id against the super-ego – a dark carnival of sexuality, violence, narcissism, vanity, self aggrandizement, poor impulse control, the cult of adolescence as a supreme states of being   - there may be not much of a future for this -  humanity might just grow out of it, it might have to mature out of it.

That’s a thought experiment to play with, have fun with.

But is there any evidence that humanity is suddenly going to get virtuous and self-sacrificing and self-denying?

I don’t necessarily humans will, but I do think there’s evidence for the coming of a new puritanism – my new book Shock and Awe is about glam rock in the 70s and the idea of decadence, and one thing I’ve learned is that pop history goes through cycles of glam and anti-glam – anti-glam phases would be the counterculture, where the values were those of Rousseau – nature, primitivism, childhood, purity, authenticity – then the next anti-glam phase would be punk and postpunk: hedonism distrusted and despised, an emphasis on the didactic, on content over form -  the Eighties are very glam, very narcissistic, image-oriented – and then you have another wave of anti-glam – grunge and to an extent gangsta rap, the values are underground, they’re not to do with looking fabulous or glamorous or being famous.

Right now we have een in the longest glam cycle I can think of - from late 90s rap with its bling aesthetic through the last 15 years of Beyonce, Lady Gaga, it's been nonstop glitz and glamour,  obsession with fame....

I think we are long overdue a switch back to anti-glam, to underground values and a rejection of the idea of music as simply showbiz, simply entertainment.

What evidence do I have for this new puritanism, this suspicion of pleasure and spectacle and glamorous appearance?

I would point not to music or even entertainment but to the huge cult following among young people for Bernie Sanders in the USA and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

First thing that is striking about this development is that these are old men – they’re not young and hip like Obama, or young and slick like Tony Blair and David Cameron when they first came to power  - these are old men who look old – they aren’t telegenic or handsome, they don’t put any effort into appearance or image.

They are wholly lacking charisma as we’ve come to understand as a political necessity

They don’t go in for political theater – statesmanship as stagecraft (pseudo-events, photo ops) -  Sanders and Corbyn are not even that good at oratory or uplifting rhetoric or slogans

Corbyn and Sanders are the opposite of politicians like Cameron or Mitt Romney or Trump, who is an entertainer, a salesman, a huckster.

What Corbyn and Sanders offer isn’t image but pure substance – policy policy policy. Technical solutions.

There is a taste out there, a demand, for politics without theatre, without spin, without optics or any of the bullshit of public relations.

And these candidates’ very ineptness and lack of polish signifies authenticity, their being in touch with the common people, with reality.

I use the term Puritan in reference to the historical phenomenon – the Protestants who disdained theatricality – the paganism and irrationalism of Catholic ceremony – along with worldly, earthly pleasure.

Corbyn is actually a modern day Puritan – he’s famous for his drab clothing, his frugality (he had the lowest expenses claim of any member of parliament, just 13 Euros in one year for a printer ribbon), he has described himself as a parsimonious MP -  he rides a bicycle, grows vegetables, he’s a vegetarian and he doesn’t drink.

Like the original Puritans of the 17^th Century he is anti-royalist, a republican who refuses to  kneel to the Queen..

Corbyn is an anti-dandy, a Roundhead who despises the Cavaliers for their frivolous ways, their vanity. He said this about the House of Commons: "It's not a fashion parade, it's not a gentleman's club, it's not a bankers institute. It's a place where the people are represented."

Like many on the Left he has an unconscious sympathy for radical Islamic critiques of the West as decadent, sexually permissive, narcissistic – the contempt for a culture that produced pornography, cosmetic surgery, reality TV, and so forth.

Now let’s say global warming gets worse, various other ecological crises get worse – I could imagine in the near future a confluence between Sanders and Corbyn style politics – which is anti-capitalist, anti-plutocratic -  I could imagine this populist anticapitalism merging with Green politics into a potent cultural wave. Probably it’s already happening  – but what if it wasn’t just a revolt against the corporations who are destroying the Earth, causing climate change – what if it was a revolt against the culture of that kind of capitalism? Hyper-competitive, disruptive, oriented around winners – around fame, around glamour, around advertising and PR -  this is the definition of popular culture today.

A new resurgent populism that would define pop culture as the culture of uncontrollable greed, irrationality, world-destruction.

It’s not hard to imagine because things like the folk revival in the 50s were based around the same set of ideas. So was anarcho-punk and the more straight-edge, ascetic forms of hardcore punk in the USA.

Adding Green politics to this mix makes it all the more consistent – Green is about zero-growth, which mean consuming less, it means a restraint on hedonism, the cultivation of a balanced and quiet lifestyle,  a stilling of the ego – all these things feed into a new puritanism. You could factor the ideal of purity in here too - organic food sources, locally produced foods – these are all based around the idea of authenticity and a rejection of artifice, the synthetic.

So the cult of health and fitness – young people increasingly giving up drinking for staying fit – could factor into this. In a culture that incites you to impulsive expression of your appetites, constantly tempting you to indulge, what’s needed is discipline and imposition of restrictions on the self - for the survival of the individual self as much as the biosphere.

Another factor that could feed into this new puritanism would be political correctness – the kind of close scrutiny of conduct and speech for infractions of offensiveness, insufficient respect and soundness of value –  a new piety in which conduct and speech held up to very exacting principles.

If this new puritanism became anything like a prominent force in popular culture, a lot of what we think popular culture is about today – freedom, wildness, un-repression – would start to seem like it was regressive. The entire rock era would be suddenly seen as very much on the same side as capitalism – promoting self-ishness, hedonism, impulsiveness, excess, waste, living for the moment, irrationalism and emotionalism. The libertinism of rock and the libertarian capitalist view of the world actually have a far better fit than rock and socialism, or rock and ecology – capitalism wants us to spend, to enjoy, to indulge ourselves.

You could even imagine a revulsion against mediation itself.

-     Again I think of the communitarian aspect to the Sanders and Corbyn phenomenon  - the  huge throngs that Sanders convened in America, the large hall events Corbyn organized, with people unable to get into the hall it’s so crowded, such that he had to have a second speech given for the benefit of the people outside – and this is not someone who is great orator, not a very inspiring speaker really – but that plain spoken, dour list of policies and ideals is what people want to hear, rather than empty uplifting rhetoric.

A A hunger for communitas, for fellowship and collective purpose. 

At At the extreme you could imagine that the pseudo-community and the pseudo-politics of social media would be rejected in  favour of an insistence of physical togetherness in a collective space, face to face politics – the agora of Greek democracy. Politics as a Quaker-style society of friends, meetings without hierarchy. 

Now the final thing in this speculative fantasy of a new Puritanism – which is not something I predict with any great enthusiasm, being a creature of the rock era – but the final aspect is I think that we are overdue a wave of revulsion against the culture of fame – the ideal of worldly glory  as publicity

The original Puritans were virulently opposed to theatre, for a whole bunch of reasons ranging from the very idea of mimesis and actors pretending to be something they were not, to the association of theatre with vice and with the stirring up of emotions, violent passions, 

During Oliver Cromwell’s rule in the mid-17^th Century they actually closed down the theatres. Theatre went underground. There were troupes of actors who perform secretly in the manors and large country houses of the upper class. 

You can hear an echo of this when Corbyn talks about removing the theatre from politics, making it about substance and policy – in a recent Parliamentary debate at which Cameron was making scripted jokes at his expense, Corbyn said “I invite the prime minister to leave the theatre and return to reality” – Cameron who formerly worked in public relations for Carlton TV company in the UK

So that’s a call to leave the seductively irrational elements of politics – image, rhetoric, projection of authority or power using image and gesture - the stuff that Donald Trump excels at, what in old English was called Trumpery – which I believe comes from your French word tromper, to deceive – in English trumpery means empty show, bluster, “practices that are superficially or visually appealing but have little real value or worth” 

It’s a call to leave behind illusion and delusion

The Puritans were anti theatre; today they'd be opposed to the entire landscape of modern entertainment --  TV movies pop music – anything involving escape, fantasy, spectacle, and intoxicating depictions of sex and violence. 

It’s not inconceivable to imagine a virulent reaction against the trumpery of pop culture in its totality, what Guy Debord called the Spectacle.

So imagine - perhaps 30 years from now – as various crises deepen, converge, aggravate each other – imagine  the emergence of a modern Savonarola  - Savonarola, the 15^th Century priest who led a movement to renew the Church and purge society of its indulgences – a new Savanorola who possesses a compelling anti-charisma, a contagious and persuasive sense of the corruption of the contemporary world

Imagine the rejected and excluded who follow him rising up and igniting 21^st Century equivalents of Savonarola’s bonfires of the vanities

Into the flames go not just mirrors and cosmetics, but selfie sticks and smartphones and unimaginable communication devices yet to be developed, into the flames go breast implants and lip-filler and fake eyelashes and bronzer and every kind of name brand fashion item you can think of

In its place a new modesty, self-restraint, reticence, a dour renunciation of beauty, style and all forms of seeking attention for oneself.

Now this new puritanism won’t be a majority of population – but it doesn’t need to be – history shows that a forceful minority convinced of the righteousness of its own historical project can have a disproportionate influence  on events – look at the Nazis, look at the counterculture, look at the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini who brought down the Shah of Iran despite the relative prosperity and peace of the country at that time.

A new theocracy in which the ‘theo’ element, the god part,  might not be God but might be Gaia or some kind of principle of natural balance or homeostasis – not a new world order but a new ordered world.

For security and stability, the cult of freedom and self-expression itself might be relinquished. 

Rock itself would be an absurd relic, inexplicable, denounced, or just forgotten in embarrassment - a childish thing put away as humanity reaches maturity.