Green Shoots (And Misses)

Natalie Bennett's interview today raises several questions, not least about what the hell the Greens were thinking when they decided to replace Caroline Lucas with her, a decision I likened on Facebook to having Napoleon march in the front rank of the infantry at Austerlitz because it would be Only Fair. I have long suspected the Greens of being a not-terribly-serious party, and this seems to further confirm it.

Many of my good friends support the party, though, because it provides a genuine leftwing alternative to the mainstream, and fair enough. Except that it is not a long-term solution to support an environmentalist party, since the new recruits of the 2015 intake will almost certainly suspect the old guard of being tie-dyed vegetarians with their heads full of soft organic cotton wool. Out of such divisions come immobilising party rifts built on mutual suspicion. Checking out the online comments of left-wingers who wanted to support the Greens, as they tear their hair out at the unpreparedness of the party for the big time, you see a vision of the future wherein the Greens become a permanent fixture of UK politics. The socialists will always blame the tree-huggers for being softies, and the party will either collapse or drift into infighting. One side will suspect that the others would let the working class drown if it meant they could keep their pious certainties, the other that the first would let the world drown if they could keep the working class in carbon-heavy jobs.


No-one really thought the future of the Left would seriously be rooted in environmentalism anyway. The labour movement has often made sympathetic noises to it, but the roots of the two are as fundamentally different as that with Liberalism and Toryism, and no longterm fusion can be made. Die Linke remain apart from Die Grünen in Germany, and they will here too. Even the workaday canvasser in UK politics is trained to separate the two parties within the Greens out: Socialist Greens and Environmentalist Greens, and you can usually tell them apart just by asking about previous votes. Everyone knows the Left has fled to the Greens because they are a port in a storm, even if the lighthouse is solar-powered and the proposed wind farms to harness the power of the storm have gone massively over-budget.


So a question: in an era of multi-party politics, what would a good party for those Socialist Greens look like? Even by Leftwing standards a three-way split would be a bit much. That said, there is definitely a space for a British Syriza or Podemos, and it needn't have anything to do with the Greens. It needn't even be especially radical - imagine a party with Joe Stiglitz or Paul Krugman (hell, even Martin Wolf) as its policy chief, and you'd have something that rejected austerity in a way that Labour has definitely not, and wanted land value taxes and graduate taxes and the sort of thing Labour has simply stopped caring about. Free from the Green and labour traditions you might also have chance to resynthesise the left.


By which I mean that perhaps like the CIA, proper procedure with every leftwing party should be to disband and reform every couple of decades. The fact that the labour movement has deep roots makes it no more useful for uniting today's more disparate Left, proud as those roots are. The working class that powered it no longer exists, but there is still and will always be a strong radical tradition. The Tories will always be Tories because they have the same constituency they always did: the powerful. But why should the left pretend to be the same? Occupiers and UK Uncutters should be able to find a party where they are welcome, and the milquetoast Labour Party is not it. Nor are the Greens.

The key to uniting the left has never really been about policy, but about vitality. Socialists will accept anti-austerian Keynesian capitalists as their leaders if they think they're pushing the country in the right direction and are going to win. Which is why Blair was right to create New Labour, although he could have called it anything - it didn't need a tradition. It was only what he did with his victory that was a failure - a decent new leftwing party would have genuinely fought establishment interests until it became inevitably bogged down and corrupt, at which point it would disband and reform to try again. That is the job of radicalism. It is the opposite of revolution because it weakens revolutionary forces by giving them just enough progress. It is probably essential to a long-term democracy, and I fear we are losing sight of it.


Yet quite what policies a New English Radical Party (or a New Chartist Party, or New Levellers or whatever you like) could agree on I don't know. It's a question I mean to ask more over the coming months, but there's a lot of space for it, and little of it is covered with Greenery.

On Emerging From Darkness

Mental health is not a topic I particularly want to write about on this blog. It's getting talked about a lot more these days, which is excellent news, of course, but also raises new questions I'm not capable of handling. Once we're talking about it, we immediately run headfirst into how ill-fitting our vocabulary is on the subject. Who gets to be "depressed"? Who is circumstantially depressed and who is clinically depressed? Is there a difference between being perennially miserable and being depressed? Can it be possible that a quarter of our population taking medication to regulate their mood is a state of affairs we should regard as prudent and commensurate? And, whisper it in dark corners, are genuinely depressed people now able to engage in a kind of unhealthy narcissism by blogging endlessly about their innermost feelings under the worthwhile guise of ending stigma?

My suspicion is unsurprisingly related to suspicions of myself - I have deliberately attempted to keep the topics of this blog as far from me personally as possible for fear of what I would do if allowed to wallow in my own emotions with an unlimited wordcount. But I do want to talk a bit about my dealings with depression now, because I think there is a time and place for it, and I feel sufficiently emerged from whatever it was I was in to be a bit more useful in my analysis now.

I received a phonecall telling me I would be doing my current job on Blue Monday, January 9th, and I appreciated the irony of being given the chance the emerge from the darkness on that day of all days, for this new job has given me a level of routine considerably better as a painkiller than any antidepressant. I resolved to write about that irony once the pills had worn off properly. But I can't put a name to whatever-it-was. My struggles with depression? I've never really liked that one, since misery makes me lazy, not in the mood to struggle. Suffering depression? That sounds like an illness, and I have long known people who are clinically depressed and don't wish to insult them by saying whatever-it-was was the same thing they had. If I "suffered" it, I'd prefer to think of it on the level of having a leg in a cast for a couple of months. Which is not the same as a proper illness.

I refer to my dealings with depression because I quite like the image of it as a shady envoy of the local mob turning up at my shop to quietly demand some protection money: not actively threatening, certainly not more so than to any other shop on the street, but just someone to watch warily from the other side of the desk. So that doesn't put me in the same camp as other genuine sufferers, but since everyday language is incapable of making the distinction (as are doctors, to be perfectly honest), it is about depression that I must write, even when good verbs to relate to it are unavailable.

What I wanted to do is put forward a thought on the subject of the West's mental health timebomb, as it is known - because as I say, there is something disturbing about the sheer number of antidepressants needed to keep our society going. It has become a fuel as precious as oil. What are we going to do about it going forward? First, I would suggest two interrelated causes of the explosion. Broadly, these are the explosion of freedom and the concurrent understanding of that freedom.  A populace that, with an automated economy and liberal political rights, has a vast number of creative and interesting options to spend their lives on; whether in art, writing, humanitarianism or what have you - but also has the education and popular means of information available to show them those opportunities. Such that an average citizen of the UK has the literacy to write a song, the information from X Factor etc to imagine themselves doing it, the potential free time to write a song, and the understanding that as a democratic citizen, it is their opportunity (if not their right) to become famous as a songwriter.

Everybody's got the right to be happy...

Now, you may have noticed that the two elements of freedom and awareness of freedom are what makes up the classic existential conception of angst, and I think certain dead philosophers would see a grim satisfaction in the entire Western world collapsing in on itself in a fit of godless Kierkegaardian crisis. I don't think this will happen. I wrote before about the possibility that our virtue system is outdated (and I did so in the depths of my funk, which I think is clear from reading it) and it may take time for us to work out what to do with a society where there isn't enough work to do.

The clockmaker in Nuremberg in the 1700s may have had to worry about war and plague, and I do not suppose that his life was in any way nicer than mine. But were I him, I would have a trade for life and no popular information about what else I could be doing with my life, nor the sense of agency to make it happen even if I did. Such a man needs no antidepressants. Remove the war and the plague, add in the information and the freedom, and suddenly it seems the human constitution provides an automatic stabiliser of unhappiness, so that a free and educated population is miserable simply because it has context. The millenials are swamped in context. What is Facebook but a giant industrial engine of context. Where Jesus Christ was the Great I Am, Facebook is the Great Thou Art Not. You are not your friends, and they are living life to the full and you are not.

A society with that context at its heart is one that will deal with depression as its primary enemy, like the hungry Sparta forever eyeing the creative riches of its neighbour Athens. I am to a modest extent a preliminary victim of that struggle - I won't aggrandise myself by saying I myself struggled, because I did not; I was in the path of a historical whirlwind, and there is no struggling against weather. I have begun to accept my place as a mediocrity, which is a terrible shame given the advantages I started life with. But to dwell on the possibilities is to invite annihilation by regret, and how to deal with regret in this freedom-haunted world is a problem I and my civilisation will have to deal with. Regret has faced unfree humans for generations, it may yet threaten to drown free ones.

I shall have to return to this topic, unfortunately, since I think it is important. But I don't regard it as therapy, or an expiation, or a release. I just think it's there. I'm looking at that little mobster over the other side of the table, wondering exactly who he is and just how dangerous he might become.

The Everlasting Animal

I went to school in a place called Sevenoaks, the very exemplar of those strange little Home Counties towns built to store rich people within an amenable commuting distance of London. As a child who had grown up on a farm, I found the city of London intoxicating - it meant the Natural History Museum, dinosaurs, hustle and bustle, ships, skyscrapers and adventure. I also loved the Sussex countryside, its brooks and copses, the smell of cut grass and the distant sound of a propeller plane. But in between the two was a place that thoroughly disquieted me: suburbia. And in that town of Sevenoaks I had the most excellent education possible in quite where that disquiet came from, spending much time as I did wandering those streets on the way to a friends' house.

The threat of suburbia to me was not so much the watching from behind curtains familiar to English stereotype, though that scared me, nor was it the creepy nighttime hum of the streetlight in such a determinedly quiet place, though that scared me too. It was a slightly more existential fear, looking back on it, that got to me. I had been told by Harry Potter and other examples of the cheerfully anarchic strain of English children's literature that every house in the suburbs looked the same. Yet in Sevenoaks they all looked different, every one. So consciously different, in fact, that they entered the uncanny valley of domestic architecture: too different to be recognisably suburban, too deliberate in their difference to be individual. The fabulously wealthy bankers and lawyers had bought their little slice of identity, and it looked the same as everyone else's.

Oh, sure, there was a conservatory here, mock Tudor there, skylights and big modernist extensions and a couple of Doric columns there, but it was all papering over the fact that every plot was the same size and not one architect had thought of anything interesting to do. Nor would the owners have wanted them to. The point is to have individuality, because rich people can afford individuality, but not to actually be interesting with it, just make a point of it. These people were satisfied with their plot and their regular lives, their black labradors and four-by-fours and private tutors for their kids. With the grandness of their individual home they had tapped into the aristocracy's stately home tradition, and were happy to think no more of it. And walking down those streets, I felt both an immense pity and the occasional fleeting wish for a bulldozer.

I mention all this because a similarly Sevenoaks-educated friend who has subsequently joined the fine enfants terribles et riches tradition of George Orwell, Tony Benn and Charlie Gilmour of becoming a socialist (upon leaving that school I quipped that if you weren't a diehard Marxist after seven years of private education you hadn't been paying attention, a glib line that I nevertheless still suspect might be correct) just posted an interesting piece on stately architecture. I don't mean to combat its admirably balanced points too stridently here - though I can't help thinking that were he a young Chinese man surrounded by the noise of the Cultural Revolution the side of his mind that favours the bulldozer might outbalance the one that likes the cathedral.

Its relatively straightforward Marxism aside, I feel a great deal of sympathy for the desire to demolish the houses of the wealthy, if only because they are not only so incredibly dull, but dull in a quite terrifying way - no one can even think of a new style for gargantuan wealth, so just relives old Tudor cliches. I remember visiting an American mansion in Washington DC and being horrified to discover that each room had a different "Old Europe" theme - Renaissance Italy, Belle Epoque France, Georgian Enlgand - as if the owner had decided that wealth just looked Old, so wanted as many kinds of Old as money could buy. It's like going to the opera and realising that so many corporate freebies there are bored stiff but are happy to be there because opera is what rich people do. If all wealth can buy you is an extra slice of your own mediocrity, then it is not just futile, but hatefully futile.

All of which raises an interesting question. 99% of human architecture that has survived a century or more is the preserve of very wealthy people. The built environment of England, the country I feel so patriotic towards and so at home in, is dominated by the remains of people I hate - clergy, aristocrats, slavers, bankers. Yet I love country houses and love country churches. I gain a great sense of peace from an English landscape garden. And indeed the works of Shakespeare and Milton, and just about every artist who ever gained the money to work in any civilisation, were for and in deference to a horrid aristocracy. How can you possibly divorce architecture from the people whose stories it tells? You can't, which is why being an English patriot is a business so tricky most people give up the nuance for a bad job and embrace the flag and the monarch and Downton Abbey despite knowing how stupid it all is. And I must admit, I am mystified as to how a vicious hatred of the class system and monarchy especially can coexist in my imagination with a genuine stirring feeling at the sight of King Theoden leading his knights against orc armies on the big screen.

Tragic liberalism, which means taking seriously the degradations of the past while accepting that horror is the lot of humanity, might be a cure for this. My friend gives a series of principles for the good Marxist when viewing our heritage:

Keep anything that you can reuse.

Preserve any objects of purely aesthetic value as purely aesthetic objects.

Do not let the built environment of the past constrict your conception of what the future might be.

Bulldoze anything that does so.

I wince any time the bulldozer is invoked as a positive good. I know where that instinct comes from, and I distrust it. Like it or not we live with the sins of the past, however much the Marxist might believe we can transcend them. People will be cruel to each other in utopia, too. I would suggest that these rules betray a lack of imagination: to believe that the conceptions of the future are weak enough to be subverted by the built environment, to the point that its destruction is required, is to betray a lack of faith in them. The populace is not a slave to what they see around them. Or on some level we all are, indeed, but this is not something to be willed away by wrecking balls. It is something to be stared at in the face. I keep my faith in human imagination.

I am put in mind of George Orwell (again):

The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

When I go into those National Trust properties now, those same properties my friend believes have been turned into a theme parks rather than the empirical academic antique of aristocracy they should be, I do indeed see children playing in them. That seems quite a radical subversion to me. Not quite children's holiday camps, perhaps, but getting there, and god knows what they are imagining as they slide and play tag through the gardens built on the blood and lucre of England's corpulent war booty. I like to think their imaginations might be freer than mine or my schoolfriends of English public-school suburbia could ever have been.