The Sleepwalk of the West

When even the Telegraph gushes over a Marxist philosopher, you know he’s finally attained social utopia. Slavoj Zizek is everywhere, with his radical (or is it radically bemusing?) ideas. The end justifies the means; why have a messy proletarian revolution when book sales will get you there instead?

How big is the Good Society? What is human-scale – and are our cities within it? Success – as it prevails in the material urban mind – is a measure of one’s ability to deny the city. There are various ways the rich do this: in secondary country houses; in pleasantly expensive tree-lined oases, in the “exclusive” (note its shameless literal meaning) silence of penthouses.

What do you get from a political party? A cocktail of top-notch beliefs that you can go right ahead and believe. The main pleasure to be had from your prêt-a-croyer values is to clap your hands repeatedly each time someone at a podium repeats one. I know this, having recently attended A New Hope – a conference on the future of the Labour party.

The Department Whose Name We Dare Not Speak has been restored to it’s former purpose. Obscured under New Labour as The Department for Children, Schools and Families, it is again called The Department for Education – the first move by Michael Gove, the new UK Minister for Education. Does this mark the end of education as we have come to know it? Hopefully so.

The tenet of liberalism is freedom of the individual; everyone should be free to “be themselves”. Appealing – from the individual’s viewpoint. But whether it’s necessarily a basis for living together is less clear. What if your “being yourself” prevents my “being myself”? If your cultural norms imply a curb on my cultural norms, what does liberalism offer to help resolve our conflict?

It’s fashionable to claim there is “no such thing” as democracy. The view ranges from the moderate complaint of paltry electoral choice to radical claims that we are utterly in the grip of dark and unaccounted powers. Cue everything from apathy to Chomsky-esque polemics about the “manufacture of consent”, capitalism’s “false consciousness”, etcetera.

It has been suggested to me that my writings express a certain lack of tolerance. This is, of course, entirely true. Why rail against something, unless you find it intolerable? Despite agreeing with such critics, I suspect we nonetheless have a different idea of what “tolerance” means, or how it comes about. Because a motive [...]

French cinema is the high-visibility indicator of a great country’s cultural hara-kiri. Awards ceremonies are always fundamentally political, but in France they’re actually… fundamentalist. After winning at Cannes last years, the film A Prophet was fawned over at the Césars, with no less than nine awards. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best… [...]

Q: Why does the Left like Communism, again? A: Because the stock market’s down. Joking apart, there’s also a selfish reason. The idea of Communism is so abstract now, so cleansed of reality, that it can be invoked at zero cost. It’s a faux-humble chat-up line with a double payoff: you get to look impeccably [...]

Socrates said that he would not have survived in public office, that anyone true to their morals would reach conflict there, and that there is no politician who is not morally compromised. They put him on trial for his impious observations. Then they put him to death. Even if you disagree with Geert Wilders‘ morals, [...]

A vast office and retail building is rising next to St Paul’s Cathedral, set to “transform the City into a seven-day shopping and leisure destination with a difference“. A friend in the trade told me the story: The site was up for redevelopment (why? it looked grand as it was). Certain constraints apply around the Cathedral to [...]

It’s official! The stylists of the French Senate, after a protracted squabble over what should/shouldn’t be accepted as French fashion, have announced: Out: Burkas. In: Hair Shirts. Don’t bin your burka yet though; you can still wear it on the boulevards – it’s hipper than ever – only not on public transport or when picking [...]

If you haven’t seen Avatar, it’s a half-a-billion-dollar adaptation of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, where Mr Meek gets to be Mr Hero, kill Baddies, and get Big Chief’s ethnically-optimised uber-daughter into the sack. All in his sleep. Apart from being more visually stunning than anything you’ve ever seen, it’s nothing new. Except, many [...]

In the US, the process whereby a hick church can become a Sunday school then “college” then “university” in only a few short years is trenchantly and hilariously documented in Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide through the American Status System. An equivalent – only slightly less radical – change happened in the UK when technical [...]

The BBC’s moral relativism is epitomised by this joke on Radio 4′s The Now Show (iPlayler, 12:23): “What’s the difference between nuclear proliferation in Iran, and nuclear proliferation in the US?” (Prolonged silence.) “Exactly!” Oh, isn’t that good. Ha. Unbridled hilarity aside, what is the difference? Let’s see… one wants to use military might to [...]

The news these last few days seems to belong to our religious leaders and their wrestle for our souls. The Pope was dramatically thrown to the ground, but immediately bounced back. Muscling in on a defenceless position, the mighty Roman made a quick lunge for all those displaced by “hunger, intolerance or environmental degradation”. The [...]

France is the word’s most popular tourist destination. 80 million people visit annually; 25 million more than the second-ranking USA, 15 million more than France’s own population – who holiday in millions in their own country rather than go abroad, or have chosen to settle in France rather than in their country of origin. So… [...]

When national will (especially a Swiss “legitimacy-rich” democratic one) clashes with trans-national will (especially a European “legitimacy-poor” undemocratic one), who should win? The answer seems transparently obvious; but the European project has never been too interested in transparency. (Witness the recent magical apparition of a new EU constitution and President. Or maybe I just mislaid [...]

Talking of Cannes festival winners – and the politics they embody – last year’s Entre les Murs (The Class) is another example of the agendas lurking in our culture, in this case French but more generally Western. The ideas behind the film are best illustrated by the perennial debate – or its paucity – over [...]

Allan Bloom traces the popular enthusiasm for criminality to the 19th century German philosophers. Culturally – according to him – the new appetite hits the mainstream with “Mack the Knife” from Brecht’s and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, in 1928 Weimar Germany. It was the first time the bourgeoisie could blithely – almost compulsively – sing [...]