It's always puzzled me, this thing about people getting right-wing as they get older. You'd think that the opposite would happen.
I mean, as you get older, you notice that the world keeps having the same problems, and that they tend to have the same underlying causes, and that nothing is ever done about them. You notice more and more of the same kinds of scandals reoccurring over the years, time and again, and always based upon imbalances of power, and upon powerful people being unaccountable. You're more likely to have a mortgage and debts, the older you are. You're more likely to owe lots of money to banks and credit agencies, and to be crippled by these debts. You're more likely to have health problems, and thus to need medical care, and thus to see that the Health Service is underfunded and overstretched. You're more likely to realise that your investments and savings (if you have any) don't pay off in anything like the way you're told they will when you're younger. You're more likely to worry about how you will look after yourself and your partner in old age. You're more likely to notice your retirement receding into the distance. You're more likely to find yourself paying through the nose for medications that go with age, medications your parents didn't have to pay through the nose for. You're more likely to meet more and more people of different 'races' and nationalities, and thus to notice that they're not too different to you. You're more likely to have been mistreated at work, or sacked, or been forced to find second jobs or third jobs. You're more likely to have seen talentless people around you rising while you stay still, simply because they were born with advantages you never had. You're more likely to have lived through several wars and recessions instead of just one or two. You're more likely to have observed the way the world's weather systems have catastrophically changed even in the last few decades. You're more likely to have seen friends' lives ruined by discrimination or depression or stress. You're more likely to have seen your parents face an uncertain and neglected old age. And you're more likely to have kids and grandkids, and to see all the challenges they face. A restricted job market, more and more pressure on them to work harder to have a chance of being employed one day, the escalating cost of further and higher education, more debt earlier in life, less chance of being able to afford to buy a house or even move out of their parents' home, spiraling costs of living, less social safety nets, a squeezed education system. And on and on it goes.
Decades of life means decades of observing the world getting worse, and the so-called solutions never working, and the so-called progressive parties always selling people out, and the persistence of poverty and corruption never being addressed, and inequality and injustice always being at the root of the problems. And it means becoming more and more vulnerable, as an individual or as part of a family, to the insecurity and hardships capitalism causes and relies upon.
Basically, the saying "you get more right-wing as you get older" is something only applicable to people who are already economically and socially privileged. Such people can afford to dabble with being left-wing when they're young, if they feel like it. They can rely on rich parents to bankroll such flirtations with leftiness. When they're young and cushioned, it costs them nothing. Principles are always easier if they cost you nothing. Then, as they get older, they take their place in the system of privilege that was always waiting to welcome them. They see their savings and investments rising (because, generally, the more you have the more you make from it), their property becoming more and more valuable, their financial situation getting comfier and more secure every day. At the very least, they see themselves comparatively insulated. Their parents enjoy a luxurious old-age and then die, leaving them more property and investments and savings. Their own children and grandchildren don't have to worry about the deficiencies of state education, or the deficiencies of the NHS, or the debts accrued during further and higher education, or the uncertainties of the job market. Jobs wait for them. Economic security is built into life for such people and their families. Like all people with privilege, their primary focus is to hold onto it ferociously. We all know that privilege causes people to feel aggrieved by the faintest suggestion of a challenge to their privilege. This is at the root of much misogyny. Patriarchy causes men think of women as appliances. How angry would you be if your vacuum cleaner suddenly refused to work? I dunno about you, but when things like that happen to me I swear at the errant machine and feel pretty damned aggrieved. Men extend the same logic to women who don't want to be treated as equipment. And Corey Robin, a historian of ideas, has done some very good work describing how modern conservatism is, at bottom, the ideological expression of the struggle to retain privilege.
This pattern is most pronounced in the very rich, of course. But it used to hold pretty reliably (if scaled down) for the moderately rich, and down to the middle classes. (It even used to hold for a certain extent to the working classes during the long post-war boom, which looks like a utopia of economic justice, job security and progressive welfarism compared to where we are now.) However, like many old cultural certainties of capitalism, this pattern is breaking up - with increasing speed. (Capitalism does this.) The middle classes and petty bourgeoisie are more and more squeezed, more and more threatened by uncertainty. The iron law of neoliberalism is the redistribution of wealth upwards - and this is really just a variation on what always happens in capitalism during its built-in periodic crises. And, the bottom looking increasingly drained, neoliberalism - especially now in this era of crisis and austerity - is feeding on the middle.
Of course, the people in the middle can't be expected to draw left-wing conclusions from all this. Such people generally drift to... da daaa!... the populist far-right (i.e. UKIP, BNP, the Tea Party, various European equivalents). And, in the absence of organised organs of workers' struggle, the people at the bottom will often drift that way too. Especially when you factor in the massive effort neoliberal capitalism puts into pushing and sustaining ideological disorientation.
Neoliberal capitalism itself is getting more ideologically right-wing as it gets older. The only sane response is to go in the other direction.
But it's not easy. Because, with that lifetime of confronting the horrors there also comes a lifetime of getting entangled in the very hard work and stress it takes to navigate them, and the fatalism of seeing nothing ever getting better, and the pessimism of constant defeats, and the confusion sewn by decades of 'There Is No Alternative'. That's why the only thing that has a chance of fundamentally altering this downward spiral is a resurgence in working class organisation, in the teeth of the longstanding and hugely-successful neoliberal project of destroying the power of unions.
That's why every success for the left, however compromised, however embedded in reformist politics and parliamentarianism, has to be seized upon.
Because the dialectic of change has to start somewhere.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label conservatism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservatism. Show all posts
Wednesday, 28 January 2015
Wednesday, 20 November 2013
9
Wow. Single figures. Okay, time for some fun.
"I'm asking you to help yourselves," says the Doctor.
Revolution isn't about everyone suddenly becoming altruistic and angelic. It is, as Marx saw it, "the movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority".
"Nothing will change round here unless you change it," says the Doctor. Here is 'freedom and necessity'. It must be done, but they can choose to do it or not to do it.
"What will we do with two guns against all those guards?" asks Veet.
"You can't do anything, but there are fifty million people in this city. Think how the guards will react to that number."
"It's crazy talk," says Goudry, "Rebellion? No one would support you." Capitalist realism.
"Given the chance to breathe clean air for a few hours, they might. Have you thought of that?"
The Company pumps a chemical fug into the air that makes people anxious and weak. That's how it works on Pluto. Here we call it ideology, or hegemony.
The Doctor and Bisham discuss ways of knocking out the gas pumps.
"I was a B grade in Main Control," says Mandrell, "The Doctor's right. It could work."
Until now, nobody has been more cynical. But Mandrell has, in a sense, just been given the chance to breathe clean air.
The Doctor isn't stinting on the revolutionary optimism. He suggests taking over main control. Mandrell thinks it could be done.
"What have we got to lose?" he asks.
"Only your claims," says the Doctor.
Everyone is quite impressed by this. It's a sign of the times that we, the audience, are evidently expected to recognise and relish the reference. The Doctor knows full well what he's saying - and he's not just punning. Workers don't usually have to wear chains these days, but they still have nothing compared to the Companies of this world. They have their 'claims' of course - claims upon democracy and human rights, etc... But the Company never gives refunds unless forced to, so the workers' 'claims' are essentially the same as 'nothing'.
"Anything's worth trying," says Cordo, a man who was trying to kill himself that morning, but who is now frantic with revolutionary confidence, "If only we could win. Just think, if we could beat the Company!"
"There's no 'if' about it, Cordo," says the Doctor, "We will."
There's 'the actuality of the revolution' for you.
Robert Holmes is often called a cynic... but he was at least as much a romantic. This story is a full-on romantic political drama of revolution. The cynical and self-seeking drop-outs turn strike-leaders. The cowed and suicidally-miserable worker is transformed by revolution until he's a whooping, gung-ho, gun-toting freedom fighter. (Revolution changes people even as they change society - one reason why waiting until we've all changed ourselves for the better is functionally the same as accepting the status quo. You change yourself by changing society, and vice versa.) The workers collectively overthrow capitalism and set up a workers' state in about a day. Much to the blinking incomprehension of many who have tried to understand this story, the Gatherer's final flight is treated unequivocally as a joke and an inspirational achievement. It's not Robert Holmes being cynical about revolution; it's Robert Holmes getting infected with rebellious fervour. Even Synge and Hacket, intially forced to aid the revolution at gun-point, gradually get swept along and start helping willingly. Marn cynically switches sides to save her own skin... but, as with so much Holmesian cynicism, that should make us ask: who and what is this cynicism really about? This is cynicism about the powerful. If we just call it, in general terms, 'cynicism', then we're conceding that the actions of the powerful define politics and society.
'The Sun Makers' is often said to be a right-wing 'satire' of the UK tax system. But I have a question: how much tax does the Company pay?
It's a sign of how utterly the Right has set the agenda that criticising taxation is seen as an inherently right-wing thing to do. There is, astonishingly enough, a left-critique of state taxation in capitalist states. The Right attack taxation because they want, in this neoliberal age, to effectively abolish any penalty or restraint upon big business. They call this 'liberty'. They've already managed it to an astonishing degree. Meanwhile, regressive taxation - combined with deregulation, privatisation and the erosion of the social wage - disproportionately penalises those on lower-incomes. That is not a concern of the right. In fact, it's a priority.
This idea that the Right hate tax is related to the idea that the Right hate the state. But the Right is, essentially, a coalition around the defence of class privilege, and in capitalist society class privilege is defended by the state. What the Right hates is the idea that the state can be used for any purposes other than their own. The social-democratic idea that the state should provid services in return for taxation is too much for them.
As Terry Eagleton has written, nobody was more hostile to the state than Marx. He saw it as an emanation of class society. It was pure alienation of human 'species-being'. Engels called it little more than "a body of armed men" tasked with repression.
One of the quintessetial traits of neoliberalism is anti-state rhetoric combined with the heavy use of the state to further the interests of the ruling class. You 'roll back the state's frontiers' while also using it to fund military imperialism, police repression, bail-outs for banks and corporations during times of crisis, etc. State funding of the welfare state is restricted and curtailed while largesse flows freely to corporations. The US government gets taken over by oil-executives who talk about how much they hate the state while using it to plunder oil-rich countries. Even as the state supposedly gets downgraded, it becomes ever more violent and monomaniacal in its determination to support capitalism.
In 'The Sun Makers', the state has basically been bought out and taken over by a private concern. The Gatherer's state exists to pour profits into the Collector's Company. The state gathers and the Company collects. They call these profits "taxes" but they actually amount to charges for services, i.e. the production of air for breathing, the construction of suns, the provision of time for sleeping. You have to pay to be euthanased, to be buried, to be employed, to take pills, to go outside. The social wage and the welfare state have been abolished - privatised in all but name - and every aspect of private and social life has been commodified, marketised. The state charges you for everything and invades your life and watches everything you do and punishes you when you disobey... but it does all this as a private contractor for a monolithic block of predatory capital.
As so often, Doctor Who expresses anxieties about capitalism in terms of aesthetics that recall Stalinism or 'totalitarianism'... but this isn't just confusion. The essence of Stalinism was the functioning of the state as capital. This would have been no surprise to Marx, who wrote primarily of capitalist relations and of the property form as just a social expression of such relations, one form among possible others. Marx knew how central the state was to supporting the rise of capitalism. The Soviet bureaucrats were no less directors of capital (or exploiters of workers) for the fact that they didn't formally 'own' any factories.
We only have to look around us today to see how prescient it was for Doctor Who, in 1977, in the early years of neoliberalism, to see the total privatisation of the state leading to pervasive state intrusion, regressive taxation, carrion-feeding austerity and social authoritarianism.
And it's quite breathtaking that, in 1977, as the tide of struggle called 'the 60s' faded into memory, Robert Holmes romantically and unrestrainedly suggested workers' revolution as the solution.
Well, I had fun.
"I'm asking you to help yourselves," says the Doctor.
Revolution isn't about everyone suddenly becoming altruistic and angelic. It is, as Marx saw it, "the movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority".
"Nothing will change round here unless you change it," says the Doctor. Here is 'freedom and necessity'. It must be done, but they can choose to do it or not to do it.
"What will we do with two guns against all those guards?" asks Veet.
"You can't do anything, but there are fifty million people in this city. Think how the guards will react to that number."
"It's crazy talk," says Goudry, "Rebellion? No one would support you." Capitalist realism.
"Given the chance to breathe clean air for a few hours, they might. Have you thought of that?"
The Company pumps a chemical fug into the air that makes people anxious and weak. That's how it works on Pluto. Here we call it ideology, or hegemony.
The Doctor and Bisham discuss ways of knocking out the gas pumps.
"I was a B grade in Main Control," says Mandrell, "The Doctor's right. It could work."
Until now, nobody has been more cynical. But Mandrell has, in a sense, just been given the chance to breathe clean air.
The Doctor isn't stinting on the revolutionary optimism. He suggests taking over main control. Mandrell thinks it could be done.
"What have we got to lose?" he asks.
"Only your claims," says the Doctor.
Everyone is quite impressed by this. It's a sign of the times that we, the audience, are evidently expected to recognise and relish the reference. The Doctor knows full well what he's saying - and he's not just punning. Workers don't usually have to wear chains these days, but they still have nothing compared to the Companies of this world. They have their 'claims' of course - claims upon democracy and human rights, etc... But the Company never gives refunds unless forced to, so the workers' 'claims' are essentially the same as 'nothing'.
"Anything's worth trying," says Cordo, a man who was trying to kill himself that morning, but who is now frantic with revolutionary confidence, "If only we could win. Just think, if we could beat the Company!"
"There's no 'if' about it, Cordo," says the Doctor, "We will."
There's 'the actuality of the revolution' for you.
Robert Holmes is often called a cynic... but he was at least as much a romantic. This story is a full-on romantic political drama of revolution. The cynical and self-seeking drop-outs turn strike-leaders. The cowed and suicidally-miserable worker is transformed by revolution until he's a whooping, gung-ho, gun-toting freedom fighter. (Revolution changes people even as they change society - one reason why waiting until we've all changed ourselves for the better is functionally the same as accepting the status quo. You change yourself by changing society, and vice versa.) The workers collectively overthrow capitalism and set up a workers' state in about a day. Much to the blinking incomprehension of many who have tried to understand this story, the Gatherer's final flight is treated unequivocally as a joke and an inspirational achievement. It's not Robert Holmes being cynical about revolution; it's Robert Holmes getting infected with rebellious fervour. Even Synge and Hacket, intially forced to aid the revolution at gun-point, gradually get swept along and start helping willingly. Marn cynically switches sides to save her own skin... but, as with so much Holmesian cynicism, that should make us ask: who and what is this cynicism really about? This is cynicism about the powerful. If we just call it, in general terms, 'cynicism', then we're conceding that the actions of the powerful define politics and society.
'The Sun Makers' is often said to be a right-wing 'satire' of the UK tax system. But I have a question: how much tax does the Company pay?
It's a sign of how utterly the Right has set the agenda that criticising taxation is seen as an inherently right-wing thing to do. There is, astonishingly enough, a left-critique of state taxation in capitalist states. The Right attack taxation because they want, in this neoliberal age, to effectively abolish any penalty or restraint upon big business. They call this 'liberty'. They've already managed it to an astonishing degree. Meanwhile, regressive taxation - combined with deregulation, privatisation and the erosion of the social wage - disproportionately penalises those on lower-incomes. That is not a concern of the right. In fact, it's a priority.
This idea that the Right hate tax is related to the idea that the Right hate the state. But the Right is, essentially, a coalition around the defence of class privilege, and in capitalist society class privilege is defended by the state. What the Right hates is the idea that the state can be used for any purposes other than their own. The social-democratic idea that the state should provid services in return for taxation is too much for them.
As Terry Eagleton has written, nobody was more hostile to the state than Marx. He saw it as an emanation of class society. It was pure alienation of human 'species-being'. Engels called it little more than "a body of armed men" tasked with repression.
One of the quintessetial traits of neoliberalism is anti-state rhetoric combined with the heavy use of the state to further the interests of the ruling class. You 'roll back the state's frontiers' while also using it to fund military imperialism, police repression, bail-outs for banks and corporations during times of crisis, etc. State funding of the welfare state is restricted and curtailed while largesse flows freely to corporations. The US government gets taken over by oil-executives who talk about how much they hate the state while using it to plunder oil-rich countries. Even as the state supposedly gets downgraded, it becomes ever more violent and monomaniacal in its determination to support capitalism.
In 'The Sun Makers', the state has basically been bought out and taken over by a private concern. The Gatherer's state exists to pour profits into the Collector's Company. The state gathers and the Company collects. They call these profits "taxes" but they actually amount to charges for services, i.e. the production of air for breathing, the construction of suns, the provision of time for sleeping. You have to pay to be euthanased, to be buried, to be employed, to take pills, to go outside. The social wage and the welfare state have been abolished - privatised in all but name - and every aspect of private and social life has been commodified, marketised. The state charges you for everything and invades your life and watches everything you do and punishes you when you disobey... but it does all this as a private contractor for a monolithic block of predatory capital.
As so often, Doctor Who expresses anxieties about capitalism in terms of aesthetics that recall Stalinism or 'totalitarianism'... but this isn't just confusion. The essence of Stalinism was the functioning of the state as capital. This would have been no surprise to Marx, who wrote primarily of capitalist relations and of the property form as just a social expression of such relations, one form among possible others. Marx knew how central the state was to supporting the rise of capitalism. The Soviet bureaucrats were no less directors of capital (or exploiters of workers) for the fact that they didn't formally 'own' any factories.
We only have to look around us today to see how prescient it was for Doctor Who, in 1977, in the early years of neoliberalism, to see the total privatisation of the state leading to pervasive state intrusion, regressive taxation, carrion-feeding austerity and social authoritarianism.
And it's quite breathtaking that, in 1977, as the tide of struggle called 'the 60s' faded into memory, Robert Holmes romantically and unrestrainedly suggested workers' revolution as the solution.
Well, I had fun.
Thursday, 31 January 2013
Apocalypse Below (or The Tractate Face-Off)
From Panic Moon, July 2011. Edited, and with new material in a seprate coda.
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
At first, 'Frontios' seems like the odd one out amongst Christopher H. Bidmead’s Doctor Who scripts. Unlike 'Logopolis' and 'Castrovalva', it’s overtly political and doesn’t seem to be powered by any underlying scientific concept. Also, it has monsters in it.
Bidmead included monsters – reluctantly – at the insistence of John Nathan-Turner. On reflection, this seems a dodgy call. Monsters from Bidmead were always going to be too concept-heavy to realise properly on screen. Sure enough, he comes up with giant woodlice that can disguise themselves as rocks until they unexpectedly uncurl… which was never gonna look good on the day.
Apparently finding the macabre more fascinating than he expected, Bidmead also included alien machines made with bits of corpses. This was very tuned in to the then-current turn towards biomechanics and ‘body horror’ in the fantasy genre, but it proved too horrific for Doctor Who to attempt on screen (though it livens up the novelisation).
The politics is also a departure. Aside from Tegan’s worries about sweatshops in 'Logopolis' and the hilarious sexism of the Castrovalvans, previous Bidmead scripts seem politically detached. He’s a world-builder, but not in the utopian or dystopian manner. So 'Frontios' comes a little out of leftfield... though that’s the only leftish thing about it. I’ve no idea what Bidmead’s own politics may be, but 'Frontios' seems to say that the ordinary people require stern discipline, that they want and need confident rulers. The story frowns on the ‘every man for himself’ ethic, yet implies that only hierarchy and obedience stand between society and what Hobbes described as the “war of all against all”.
In the absence of Plantagenet, there is “anarchy”, with the colonists turning to looting with a rapidity that is almost funny. Thrown “outside the system”, Cockerill is quickly attacked by ravening ‘Retrogrades’. However, when he apparently defeats the hungry earth, Cockerill is eagerly adopted as a replacement leader by the mob. Meanwhile, Plantagenet’s bravery proves he is genetically fit to rule (he is, after all, named after a line of kings). Brazen – the personification of authority – ultimately proves himself admirable, his noble final words being “that’s an order!”.
Actually, I think 'Frontios' has more in common with 'Logopolis' than it appears. Bidmead never takes the series into the past – he’s too aware of entropy as ‘time’s arrow’ to believe that you can go backwards – and his view of the far future is one of maximum entropy. The “failure proof technology” that failed, the dwindling population, the wrecked ship, the malfunctioning generator, the “doomed planet Earth”, etc. Mine shafts collapse. Lights stop working. The TARDIS falls apart. Even “eaten by the earth” sounds like a metaphor for putrefaction.
The politics reflects this state of decay. Order becomes disorder as Orderlies become disorderly. The structure of society crumbles, undermined from below, as people die unaccountably and the ‘Rets’ desert the sinking ship. Bidmead is always treating entropy as corrupted information; in 'Frontios', Range’s secret file is information uselessly pooled, like waste heat in a machine.
Even the monsters are “an infection”, like all Bidmead baddies. The Master is like a computer virus in both 'Logopolis' and 'Castrovalva', infecting the hard drive of reality and corrupting the information. Interestingly, however, the Tractators also fight entropy in their own nasty way. The gravity drive and excavating machine represent structure, after all. That’s why it’s such a shame that we never get to see the Tractators’ corpse engines, because what could better express their parasitic method of fighting entropy than machines patched up with bits of people?
Additional: Peter Davison as Rambo
The Tractators burrow away. Like all burrowing creatures, they carry connotations of the busy and the unseen. Like the 'mole of history', they are always working beneath our feet. This must carry valences in a story so obviously predicated upon the human race having reached an endpoint. Despite the ostensibly hopeful ending of the story, I think it's clear that the humans on Frontios are quite likely doomed. This is the end. This is what it was all leading up to. The history that burrows beneath them has lead them to the point of maximum entropy (as noted), to isolation in a cosmos where everything has drifted so far away from everything else that space itself isolates you.
The Tractators are, from one angle, manifestations of History as busy industry leading to decay anyway, of the entropy inherent in time. They lead the human race to an echoing, muddy telos... moreover, it's a telos of authoritarianism, necessary to counter our original sins as they are exacerbated by siege and starvation. Yet Plantagenet is no Leviathan, however much the world he tries to rule conforms to Hobbesian pessimism. He won't be able to save them. In a way, the Tractators were their last hope. Not to live, but to fight. The Gravis could've been Leviathan for them... and his busy, selfish, greedy, industrious grotesques (they are, of course, echoes of the subterrenean Semitic dwarves of Wagner and Tolkien) were the humans' last hope to cheat the cosmic/social 'running down' endemic at the endpoint of space/time and History. The Tractators could've used them. They could've used the humans as raw material in their fearsome engines, their gravity drive, their anti-entropy machine, their anti-History contraption.
There is a strange, unsettling ambiguity here that chimes with the political implications of the face-off between the two races. The humans are colonists and, as ever, it is assumed that colonists that look like whitey have every right to be there... and yet the Tractators don't convince as natives. They don't come from this final F/frontier. They are as much colonists as are the humans. They are as much anti-entropists as the humans (though they're better at it). They are as much Hobbesian authoritarians as the humans, with their one Absolute Leader whose brain is the key to their collective will (though again, as noted, they are more effective in this respect than their two-legged rivals). Woodlice are actually crustaceans (which may even give the Tractators a touch of the Weird...) but they look and act enough like bugs to fool most of us into instinctively linking them with insects, and insects (with their hives and castes and hierarchies and group will) are always symbols of human society as an antheap, as a pyramid of the mindlessly obedient.
In short, there's little to choose between the Tractators and the humans in 'Frontios'. The Tractators are the aggressors... but would the humans, so eager to stamp on each other when needed, forebear to do unto the Tractators as the Tractators have done unto them? Again, the only difference is in efficiency. So, at the end of History, it all comes down to ruthless Darwinian effectiveness... and/or how entropy-proof our machines are. The Tractators machines, as noted, sidewind around entropy by roping in life itself, the only force that ever temporarily stalls entropy (this is not, by the way, necessarily my metaphysics). We humans look doomed because, for all our best efforts to be as ruthless as we need to be, we can't cut it. We go squishy when it counts. Brazen gets himself killed by compromising (he lets himself be interrogated by an inquiry! he makes peace with Range the whining liberal backstabber!) and then having a bash at altruism. We are outstripped by the utter mercilessness of the animals. It's the sociobiologist's wet dream. And, again, it's deeply Hobbesian.
Plantagenet's tottering camp is the old regime. Decadent. Gone soft. Insufficiently strong and brutal to defend itself against the onrushing Puritans/Jacobins/Bolsheviks/Jews, etc., unable to make the grade in the bellum omnium contra omnes. I've been reading Corey Robin on this just recently. This contempt for the old regime as weak, this anger at the softness of the very regime for which it takes up the cudgels, is a staple of conservatism... right up to, to pick an instance entirely at random (honest guv), John Milius's script for Apocalypse Now. 'Charlie' (i.e. the Viet Cong) will win because "his idea of R&R is a little rat meat". If Kurtz had a division of men strong enough to hack off the arms of babies, he could win the war. Much as I love that film, one of its most prominent inner logics (to its credit it has several conflicting inner logics) is the same inner logic as Rambo II, which is itself a self-induced orgasm of the dreary ultra-conservative attitude to America's wars. Kurtz/Rambo is the Leviathan the inferior liberal Americans need to carry them past cowardice, decadence or scruple. At least Coppola's film has the decent queasiness to see that Kurtz has to go mad first.
Similarly, in 'Frontios', the only reason the humans ultimately win is because of the Doctor's intervention. He becomes their (sane and reasonable) Leviathan. He terminates the termites with extreme prejudice. He saves the human antheap against the crustacean one. He saves the ancient regime from the barbarians at the gate, and from its own softness.
Even so, it's hard to quite read 'Frontios' straightforwardly as a celebration of the Leviathan, of the rule of law and hierarchy, of the victory of the strongest, of the defeat of the Niebelung by Wotan. In the end - and we are definitely at the end, beautiful friend - entropy still lies in wait. There's always something stronger than you. Time and History (that burrowing little thing) will kill even Rambo one day. Doctor Kurtz... he dead.
31/01/13
(Lyrics by The Doors... as if you didn't know.)
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
At first, 'Frontios' seems like the odd one out amongst Christopher H. Bidmead’s Doctor Who scripts. Unlike 'Logopolis' and 'Castrovalva', it’s overtly political and doesn’t seem to be powered by any underlying scientific concept. Also, it has monsters in it.
Apparently finding the macabre more fascinating than he expected, Bidmead also included alien machines made with bits of corpses. This was very tuned in to the then-current turn towards biomechanics and ‘body horror’ in the fantasy genre, but it proved too horrific for Doctor Who to attempt on screen (though it livens up the novelisation).
The politics is also a departure. Aside from Tegan’s worries about sweatshops in 'Logopolis' and the hilarious sexism of the Castrovalvans, previous Bidmead scripts seem politically detached. He’s a world-builder, but not in the utopian or dystopian manner. So 'Frontios' comes a little out of leftfield... though that’s the only leftish thing about it. I’ve no idea what Bidmead’s own politics may be, but 'Frontios' seems to say that the ordinary people require stern discipline, that they want and need confident rulers. The story frowns on the ‘every man for himself’ ethic, yet implies that only hierarchy and obedience stand between society and what Hobbes described as the “war of all against all”.
In the absence of Plantagenet, there is “anarchy”, with the colonists turning to looting with a rapidity that is almost funny. Thrown “outside the system”, Cockerill is quickly attacked by ravening ‘Retrogrades’. However, when he apparently defeats the hungry earth, Cockerill is eagerly adopted as a replacement leader by the mob. Meanwhile, Plantagenet’s bravery proves he is genetically fit to rule (he is, after all, named after a line of kings). Brazen – the personification of authority – ultimately proves himself admirable, his noble final words being “that’s an order!”.
Actually, I think 'Frontios' has more in common with 'Logopolis' than it appears. Bidmead never takes the series into the past – he’s too aware of entropy as ‘time’s arrow’ to believe that you can go backwards – and his view of the far future is one of maximum entropy. The “failure proof technology” that failed, the dwindling population, the wrecked ship, the malfunctioning generator, the “doomed planet Earth”, etc. Mine shafts collapse. Lights stop working. The TARDIS falls apart. Even “eaten by the earth” sounds like a metaphor for putrefaction.
The politics reflects this state of decay. Order becomes disorder as Orderlies become disorderly. The structure of society crumbles, undermined from below, as people die unaccountably and the ‘Rets’ desert the sinking ship. Bidmead is always treating entropy as corrupted information; in 'Frontios', Range’s secret file is information uselessly pooled, like waste heat in a machine.
Even the monsters are “an infection”, like all Bidmead baddies. The Master is like a computer virus in both 'Logopolis' and 'Castrovalva', infecting the hard drive of reality and corrupting the information. Interestingly, however, the Tractators also fight entropy in their own nasty way. The gravity drive and excavating machine represent structure, after all. That’s why it’s such a shame that we never get to see the Tractators’ corpse engines, because what could better express their parasitic method of fighting entropy than machines patched up with bits of people?
Additional: Peter Davison as Rambo
Desperately in need of some stranger's hand
In a desperate land
In a desperate land
The Tractators burrow away. Like all burrowing creatures, they carry connotations of the busy and the unseen. Like the 'mole of history', they are always working beneath our feet. This must carry valences in a story so obviously predicated upon the human race having reached an endpoint. Despite the ostensibly hopeful ending of the story, I think it's clear that the humans on Frontios are quite likely doomed. This is the end. This is what it was all leading up to. The history that burrows beneath them has lead them to the point of maximum entropy (as noted), to isolation in a cosmos where everything has drifted so far away from everything else that space itself isolates you.
The Tractators are, from one angle, manifestations of History as busy industry leading to decay anyway, of the entropy inherent in time. They lead the human race to an echoing, muddy telos... moreover, it's a telos of authoritarianism, necessary to counter our original sins as they are exacerbated by siege and starvation. Yet Plantagenet is no Leviathan, however much the world he tries to rule conforms to Hobbesian pessimism. He won't be able to save them. In a way, the Tractators were their last hope. Not to live, but to fight. The Gravis could've been Leviathan for them... and his busy, selfish, greedy, industrious grotesques (they are, of course, echoes of the subterrenean Semitic dwarves of Wagner and Tolkien) were the humans' last hope to cheat the cosmic/social 'running down' endemic at the endpoint of space/time and History. The Tractators could've used them. They could've used the humans as raw material in their fearsome engines, their gravity drive, their anti-entropy machine, their anti-History contraption.
There is a strange, unsettling ambiguity here that chimes with the political implications of the face-off between the two races. The humans are colonists and, as ever, it is assumed that colonists that look like whitey have every right to be there... and yet the Tractators don't convince as natives. They don't come from this final F/frontier. They are as much colonists as are the humans. They are as much anti-entropists as the humans (though they're better at it). They are as much Hobbesian authoritarians as the humans, with their one Absolute Leader whose brain is the key to their collective will (though again, as noted, they are more effective in this respect than their two-legged rivals). Woodlice are actually crustaceans (which may even give the Tractators a touch of the Weird...) but they look and act enough like bugs to fool most of us into instinctively linking them with insects, and insects (with their hives and castes and hierarchies and group will) are always symbols of human society as an antheap, as a pyramid of the mindlessly obedient.
In short, there's little to choose between the Tractators and the humans in 'Frontios'. The Tractators are the aggressors... but would the humans, so eager to stamp on each other when needed, forebear to do unto the Tractators as the Tractators have done unto them? Again, the only difference is in efficiency. So, at the end of History, it all comes down to ruthless Darwinian effectiveness... and/or how entropy-proof our machines are. The Tractators machines, as noted, sidewind around entropy by roping in life itself, the only force that ever temporarily stalls entropy (this is not, by the way, necessarily my metaphysics). We humans look doomed because, for all our best efforts to be as ruthless as we need to be, we can't cut it. We go squishy when it counts. Brazen gets himself killed by compromising (he lets himself be interrogated by an inquiry! he makes peace with Range the whining liberal backstabber!) and then having a bash at altruism. We are outstripped by the utter mercilessness of the animals. It's the sociobiologist's wet dream. And, again, it's deeply Hobbesian.
Plantagenet's tottering camp is the old regime. Decadent. Gone soft. Insufficiently strong and brutal to defend itself against the onrushing Puritans/Jacobins/Bolsheviks/Jews, etc., unable to make the grade in the bellum omnium contra omnes. I've been reading Corey Robin on this just recently. This contempt for the old regime as weak, this anger at the softness of the very regime for which it takes up the cudgels, is a staple of conservatism... right up to, to pick an instance entirely at random (honest guv), John Milius's script for Apocalypse Now. 'Charlie' (i.e. the Viet Cong) will win because "his idea of R&R is a little rat meat". If Kurtz had a division of men strong enough to hack off the arms of babies, he could win the war. Much as I love that film, one of its most prominent inner logics (to its credit it has several conflicting inner logics) is the same inner logic as Rambo II, which is itself a self-induced orgasm of the dreary ultra-conservative attitude to America's wars. Kurtz/Rambo is the Leviathan the inferior liberal Americans need to carry them past cowardice, decadence or scruple. At least Coppola's film has the decent queasiness to see that Kurtz has to go mad first.
Similarly, in 'Frontios', the only reason the humans ultimately win is because of the Doctor's intervention. He becomes their (sane and reasonable) Leviathan. He terminates the termites with extreme prejudice. He saves the human antheap against the crustacean one. He saves the ancient regime from the barbarians at the gate, and from its own softness.
Even so, it's hard to quite read 'Frontios' straightforwardly as a celebration of the Leviathan, of the rule of law and hierarchy, of the victory of the strongest, of the defeat of the Niebelung by Wotan. In the end - and we are definitely at the end, beautiful friend - entropy still lies in wait. There's always something stronger than you. Time and History (that burrowing little thing) will kill even Rambo one day. Doctor Kurtz... he dead.
31/01/13
(Lyrics by The Doors... as if you didn't know.)
Tuesday, 15 January 2013
Review: 'The Reactionary Mind' by Corey Robin
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin by Corey RobinMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Superb.
As an historian of ideas, Robin concentrates on the patterns of thinking within conservatism, but never seems to say that conservative actions and policies stem entirely from ideology. Indeed, he frequently points out the ruptures between theory and practice... yet he can usually find hidden resonances within the conservative idea/s that are consistent in ironic, unexpected ways, ways that often make seemingly paradoxical dissonances between theory and practice seem much more explicable.
Disjointed, of necessity (since this is a compilation of previously published essays on a variety of subjects), there are still clear and original linking ideas which are spelled out mostly in the new introduction. Conservatism is fundamentally a reaction to the loss of privilege, or the challenge to privilege from the oppressed. Conservatism is much less enamoured of stasis, familiarity etc than it thinks it is. Conservatism is much more depressive and melancholy than many people think. It is dependant upon left-wing ideas to provide it with negative stimulus. It is animated by a preoccupation with violence. It is more revolutionary than it pretends, being often as critical of ancient regimes as of radical challenges. Etc.
Robin delineates these ideas with a selection of profiles and intellectual traceries, hunting down the lineages of certain preoccupations through history. The most entertaining chapter is probably his thorough and brief (it need not be extensive to be thorough) takedown of that malignant mediocrity Ayn Rand. The most piercing is probably his analysis of the malaise that afflicted and spurred on conservatives after the supposedly-desired triumph over communism. The analysis of conservatism as an ever-changing yet essentially consistent range of ideas that prize the retention of privilege is tested and found highly persuasive as he charts conservative disillusion with capitalism triumphant after the end of the Cold War.
It's hard to imagine anybody interested in modern politics coming away from this book without a lot more to think about.
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