Post-Modernity, Anyone??

The 1960s was a critical period for Europe. My generation left the austerity of the postwar years behind and tasted freedom - not just in the UK but in the world as a whole as vividly shown in this brilliant production by the German Historical Institute 1968 – memories and legacies of a global revolt (2009). These past few days, I stumbled on a short draft about Post-Modernity which I felt needed updating – not least because it traces my intellectual development, a subject on which I tend to be a bit reticent. I’m attaching the new draft because I suspect it reflects the experience of my older readers and might help my younger readers make more sense of the world.

I consider myself lucky because my upbringing made me particularly aware of the very different ways people look at the world. This for various reasons

• My parents lived in a mansion in the West End of a Scottish town – but were poor, my father being a presbyterean Minister.

• I went to a State school although some of my friends came from more privileged backgrounds.

• I became a Labout councillor at a young age (25) in a town very sensitive to class differences and, as a result, became a bit of a “mugwump”.

• At University, I was exposed to the teachings of Karl Popper and therefore resisted the easy ideology of the New Left – despite my avid readings of the early editions of the New Left Review from 1960, with various hiccups, right through to the present. Whether you agree with it or not, it is the most thoughful of publications.

This is a short paper but an important one for me given that we have so many lens through which we look when we’re trying to make sense of the world - be it 2, 3, 4, 5, 12 or 57. The exact number is not a matter of great importance – what does matter is that we recognise that there are these differences in how we view the world. But that is something we seem very reluctant to do. The paper tries to -

• explain how my upbringing and university experience predisposed me to a postmodernist way of thinking

• demonstrate the influence of such writers as EH Carr (1961) and Peter Berger (1966)

• show how the mix of academic and political work developed in me an appreciation of the different ways people understand the worldview

• suggest how this was confirmed in my later reading and work

The paper can be accessed here – or in the list at the top-right column of the blog

AGAINST DESPAIR

The Western world has, in the new millennium, become despondent. In the 90s it was euphoric – but its world came crashing down with the Twin Towers in 2001, dealing a warning about the hubris it had shown. The falling standards of the working class then brought populism; the Global Financial Crisis austerity and rage against the indefensibly rich 1% and the governments in their pay. Global warming has been the last straw.

But what's new? My parents' generation had sleepless nights about economic depression and Fascism - my generation about the threat of nuclear war – although the 1960s brought new hope, starting with the initial issues of New Left Review (still going strong) and crystallised in the rebellious 1968

These thoughts were prompted by a post in Scottish Review which reflected on the author being accused of being too pessimistic in his writing – with links to posts in the same vein

The need for positive thinking has cropped up a couple of times in the blog – for example in a post about commanding hope and one about polarisation. And John Harris of the Guardian is one of the few journalists prepared to show examples of good community work - in his video series "Anwhere but Westminster"

But the real classics in the field (in descending order) are -

Hope in the dark Rebecca Solnit (2004) The classic contemporary statement of the need for a positive spirit – written at the time of the Iraq war. In 2016 Solnit reflected on the little book in this article

The End of Utopia – politics and culture in an age of apathy Russell Jacoby (1999) whose introduction contains this relevant injunction for our days - “At the dawn of another new century, Samuel Coleridge wrote to his friend William Wordsworth. Two hundred years ago, in 1799, he suggested that Wordsworth contest the widespread malaise and resignation. "I wish you would write a poem, in blank verse, addressed to those, who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophes."' I have not written a poem,but I would like to think that in its defence of visionary impulse this book partially fulfills Coleridge's bidding”.

Living in Truth – 22 essays Vaclev Havel 1989 As Havel made clear in earlier works, such as 1992’s Summer Meditations, he saw his new political role as fully consistent with his dissident opposition to totalitarianism. In his post-1989 books and speeches, Havel continued to defend a moral vision of politics that he called “nonpolitical politics” or “politics as morality in practice.” He identified this vision with the demanding but liberating task of “living in truth.” Havel refused to identify politics with a dehumanizing “technology of power,” the notion that power was an end in itself. Instead he defended a moral order that stands above law, politics, and economics—a moral order that “has a metaphysical anchoring in the infinite and eternal.” His speeches as president, many collected in English in The Art of the Impossible (1998), were artful exercises in moral and political philosophizing, enthralling Western audiences.

The Power of the powerless Havel (1978) His classic statement

The Principle of Hope; Ernst Bloch 1923 One of the earliest invitations to get off our butts!  

Speak, Memory - the UK in the late 1960s – part VI of the current series about “Change”

 This post has proved quite a challenge – forcing me to confront the question of the reliability of our own personal memories compared with the sort of collective accounts you find in post-war social history which has become so popular in the last decade  with publics everywhere – eg in the UK David Kynaston and Dominic Sandbrook. Speak, Memory is, of course, the title of Vladimir Nabakov’s autobiography

Take 1968 - which was, in 2018, the subject of celebrations for, and disputations against what it was assumed to stand for – freedom and disdain for authority and tradition. But for me, 1968 was significant more for my election as a councillor for the municipality of a Scottish shipbuilding town and my appointment as a Lecturer at Paisley College of Technology.

After all in 1968 I was 25 – no longer a student - and had more important things to do than tear up Parisian cobbles. Community action was very much in the air and chimed well with “the community power debate” which had been an important one for me during university just a few years earlier. In 1956 C Wright Mills had produced his famous “The Power Elite” - a radical critique of the structure of power in US society – which pluralist political scientists such as Robert Dahl tried to take down. And it was probably Steven Lukes who settled the debate eventually in 1974 with Power – a radical view in which he argued that 

Power has three faces –

·         the public face which Dahl, Polsby and others had studied,

·         a hidden face, which served to keep issues off of the agenda of decision making arenas (Bachrach and Baratz 1962), and

·         an even more ‘insidious’ third face, through which the relatively powerless came to internalise and accept their own condition, and thus might not be aware of nor act upon their interests in any observable way.

 

Lukes’ analysis of what he called the three ‘dimensions of power’ has spawned a series of debates and studies about how power affects not only who participates in decision making processes, but also who does not, and why. 

Those who want to know the details of how that debate has gone since have only to consult the magnificent website kept by William Domhoff for the past 50 years – Who Rules America?

And one of the first books I called for in 1968 - with the library facilities at Paisley College at my full disposal - was Dilemmas of Social Reform – poverty and community in the US by Peter Marris and Martin Rein. This had come out in 1967 and was the more analytical complement to the  activism of Saul Alinsky as I took my first steps in community action.

The promise of change was heavy in the air we breathed in those years - Harold Wilson’s Labour Government of 1964-70 had started well with official and open Inquiries into so many fields which had been causing deep concern – not least the civil service, local government and devolution – and was sufficiently influenced by Johnson’s War on Poverty to set up its own Community Development Programme which is described in this short article.

It also to set up an enquiry into public participation in planning led by Arthur Skeffington, a Labour MP and Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Housing and Local Government, Tony Greenwood. It arose from growing interest in the idea of ‘participatory democracy’ (that ordinary people need to be engaged in decision-making rather than simply voting for representatives to make decisions on their behalves). What became known as the Skeffington Report or “People and Planning” published its report in 1969 with a famous review by Sean Damer and Cliff Hague giving an excellent sense of the issues and prevailing context. The review mentions only at the end Sherry Arnstein’s famous ladder of participation

But all good things have to come to an end – and the Labour government duly ran out of steam. 

Recommended Reading

1968 Memories and Legacies of a global revolt (Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington DC 2009) Trust the Germans to produce the best account of the global wave of protest!  This detailed account looks at all corners of the globe and includes a fascinating last chapter involving a discussion between New Left Norman Birnbaum and Tom Haydn

Gilding the Ghetto – the state and the poverty experiments (CDP 1977) The most famous of the titles which came from the UK anti-poverty programme

local government and the local state – from crisis to crisis a submission as a Conference paper on austerity which gives a good sense of academic discussions a decade ago

Telling Stories about post-war Britain; the crisis of the 1970s (2017) a very thorough and superbly referenced long article which gives a great sense of this turning point in UK history

From the Bronx to Oxford and not quite back Norman Birnbaum (2018) Memoir of a sociologist who helped found “New Left Review” and was in the middle of an amazing global network of intellectuals and activists

Aftermath – life in the fallout from the Third Reich 1945-1955 Harald Jaehner 2021 a German journalist covers the period with the harrowing stories I remember from Heinrich Boll’s novels

Social history of post-war Britain; a few books selected by David Kyanston.