Childhood's End

A review of "Escaping From Childishness: The Need For a
Conserver Party" by Robert Johnston

The "hedonist radicalism" of the 1960s eventually settled
into a combination of demands for plurality and tolerance
in lifestyle choice with a censorious attitude towards
actually-existing social norms. An anti-family attitude
may have aimed to subvert the supposed breeding-ground of
authoritarian attitudes through which commodity society
reproduced itself, but it snuggled in beside lifestyle
purchase. The management of difference and intrusive
social engineering had come to offer suitable professional
career opportunities.

One attempt at a critical angle on these developments
took aspects of the works of Richard Sennett and
Christopher Lasch and argued in favour of "the condition
of anonymity which is privacy in public". Such a liberal
viewpoint could usefully be opposed to the idea that
"transparency" was a better way to live and that anything
else was just a token of repression.

It may be time to acknowledge the limits of such an
approach. After all, it derives from, and refers to the
virtues of, a society in circulation. The approach
recognises managerial special pleading in the way that
real issues play out, but has been unable to embody
itself in new forms of activity. One response to that
failure may involve a more critical attitude to
liberalism itself; another digs deeper into liberalism in
an attempt to imbue the political norms with a new
ecological and ethical position.

Robert Johnson's pamphlet follows that second path.
However, the problems which it faces in taking the
ethical high ground are the same as those identifiable in
a critique of liberalism.

For example, both positions see in current social
conditions a dependency culture which erodes "untutored
common sense, emotional reserves and intrinsic skills"
(p.4) and qualities of "restraint..., moderation and
obligation to others" (p.9). It is dangerous to locate
such qualities as innate / instinctual or elevate them to
a political-ethical position. Where they exist, they
derive from something resembling apprenticeship: learning
in and through a tradition to obtain a measure of things
appropriate to accession to a community.

But under liberalism the commodity has corroded the
values based on anything being handed-down. The Left was
complicit in this progressivism, and continues to be so.
Traditional values are marked as reactionary.  For
example, Simon Frith and Jon Savage ("Pearls and Swine",
NLR 198)  set up the "conservative ideal" of the
"defiantly dull" allotment culture. They contrast this
stolid figure with the "strange people - young, female,
foreign, homosexual", whose "strange ideas" supposedly
identify them as agents of social change (although
usually under professional mediation). This allegiance to
progressivism as the norm of social theory provides the
difficulty in pigeonholing Lasch or the anti-
Enlightenment positions of Alasdair MacIntyre's recent
books.

Johnson discusses the inabilities of the socialist,
green, social-democratic and conservative political
agencies to base an agenda on anything other than
progressivism. Through discussing the inadequacies, he
intends to identify a constituency which is disillusioned
by the existing parties and has withdrawn from politics.
This apparently provides an opportunity to base a
politics on ecological imperatives, such as that "Eco-
politics can give a lead by restating the principle that
the basic needs of everyone should take precedence over
the demands of anyone" (p.5). But what agency is to exert
that principle? It seems to invite the intrusion of a
bureaucratic-technical agency. That can only further the
malaise of disempowerment.

This attempted political renewal acknowledges the crisis
produced by liberalism, but seeks position within the
hollowed-out area of liberal politics, and even shies
away from the real ecological oppositional campaigns. A
sense of imperative is allowed to substitute for agency.
But a bedrock of popular apathy plus a voluntarist layer
of imperative-fired politicians forms a strange and even
dangerous political structure.

Alex Richards

From Here & Now no. 15

Title: Childhood's End
Author: Alex Richards
Date: 1994
Description: 
A review of "Escaping From Childishness: The Need For a
Conserver Party" by Robert Johnston 
Keywords:
Green, Conserver 


