...A Meretricious Society...
What can we learn from other stages of our development to here?
‘…A Meretricious Society…’
“This so-called affluent society is an ugly society still. It is a vulgar society. It is a meretricious society. It is a society in which priorities have gone all wrong.”
Aneurin Bevan’s Labour Party conference speech of 1959 was a defiant defence of socialism after Labour’s third electoral defeat by the Conservative Party. In the speech, Bevan highlighted a series of difficulties the Labour movement had to overcome to gain power in order to fundamentally transform society.
He is perspicacious in his analysis of many problems the worker’s movement faced and prophetic about where these developments would lead, as we have subsequently learned. Since Nye Bevan thought that fascism was a natural outgrowth of capitalism, he would not be that surprised at the position in which we now find ourselves. Although, his disgust with the unions by their facilitation of neo-feudalism would be equalled by his shock at their dim, credulousness.
As far as his speech offers a redress to these challenges, we now know from experience that some of the solutions he proposed were misguided and, at times, naïve. Whether a socialist solution is the answer, then or now, is debateable. Education, another answer he propounded, either as it is currently constructed or as a euphemism for ideological instruction is a remedy that is so contaminated with competing agendas that its use for any honest collective purpose is highly questionable. Still, there is a great deal in the speech that will resonate with a contemporary audience and worth pondering.
The Affluent Society
‘Mass Man equals Mass Murder,’ wrote the central character in William H. Gass’ masterwork The Tunnel, a novel about a historian completing his own magnum opus on the causes of World War Two. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, there was much discussion concerning the type of human being that industrial society was producing: humans, being so similar to the commodities, in their identicalness, that were rolling-off the production lines in their endless millions, had become less impressive than their forebears. And like the single-use products, Industrial Man was one-dimensional, discardable and replaceable. This was the type of person, a few pessimistic thinkers argued, who could perform the routine, bureaucratic, perfunctory roles necessary for genocide and not raise an objection to it or query their part in it. (How accurate they were!)
The Second World War amply demonstrated these thinkers premonitions and although the war did end the industrial killing in Europe, the narrative established as a cause of the horror tended to focus on legitimate responses to economic hardship instead of human maldevelopment. Drawing such conclusions, policy-makers dangled in front of themselves the carrot of peace only through economic growth or barbarism due to recession. The hope was material well-being would make the other deeper issues disappear. It did not.
Post-war economic gains brought more wealth to the population, but it did not enrich the mind and character of the average human being. Mass Man became Mass Man with sunglasses, a holiday and a series of endless desires that needed to be satisfied. And was still equally capable of summing-up indifference to moral imperatives when instructed to comply or threatened with a disruption to comfort or consumer habits as his pre-war forebear.
Nor did the first shoots of the revolutions in culture, sex and production liberate; they only changed the expression of oppression. The economic shackles of subsistence living, the factory whistle and ‘going on the parish’ might have disappeared, yet they were interchanged with an ‘unrepressed repression’: a hierarchy of conspicuous consumption was apparent, from the council estates to the watering holes of the rich, “coercing” people towards greater accumulation, borrowing and achieving an enviable ‘lifestyle’. At the same time, in the hidden recesses of the heart, resentment, jealousy, corruption and loss was generated in equal abundance.
For those that might doubt this, we need only point to the last fifteen years. The want of sex and the frustration of material needs were often determined as the prime cause of the humanity’s unhappiness and discontent. However, few obstacles barred these appetites from satisfaction during these past couple of decades – certainly much less so than fifty or a hundred years ago. Nevertheless, the affluent, permissive, ‘free’ society has not healed mankind’s neurosis.
The iron crown placed on the head as a denouement to such a society’s development was its doctors abandonment of all ethical duties and taking themselves on a jab-spree with the Covid experimental vaxxes, pocketing a substantial bonus per stab, on top of the benefits of having no patients to attend to, while still being paid, in full. Dentists, envious of the medics’ role as recipients of easy-cash-for-stab, ground their teeth in choler and demanded their right-to-jab, not the individual’s right to fully-informed consent. This from the people staffing Aneurin Bevan’s beloved NHS.
Obviously, the priority of a larger car, a more expensive house, more frequent holidays, looking good, having a higher status, wearing brands, dining out, climbing the ladder, getting the latest gadget and having more ‘stuff’ has taken precedence over more humane and classical values. Mass Man in action. Yet Bevan had foreseen where the ‘never had it so good’ society was heading and the category of person it was bringing forth.
Conscious of Constriction
Bevan placed the genesis of the Labour Party’s defeat in 1959 at the feet of Prosperity. She had spread her mantle across the British Isles, increasing provision and installing modern conveniences, and bewitching the ordinary working voter to ‘vote against their own interests’ by voting for their own interests and the party that offered the prospect of further acquisition and well-being.
In his analysis of his party’s defeat, Bevan recalled how even after the First World War, during the unemployment of the inter-war years, when joblessness had risen to twenty or thirty per cent in some areas, the labour movement still lost seats. This could not be due to the policies that had been adopted since the evidence suggested that increased unemployment was a vote-winner. No, it was, argued Bevan, due to the restricted nature of the average voter.
At the time, post-war expansion carried millions to an elevation in wages sparking dreams of car and home ownership and a desire for more. The population wanted a freezer, not nationalisation. Mass consciousness was directed towards further emolument rather than implementing tenuous socialist solutions to problems that were beginning to feel like they belonged to a different era.
For Bevan this was merely a symptom of capitalism’s ability to produce and support a false consciousness while an underlying restriction and frustration remained unacknowledged by the individual. Bevan belonged to the more romantic division of left-wing thought whose ideal was the creative, social, organic human being that built and sculpted the churches of Britain, made their own furniture and who extended themselves into what they produced by immersion in their work. The type imagined to exist as craftsmen of the Middle Ages and whose habits were very far from the average 9 to 5 employee who had tinned soup at dinner before settling down to an evening’s television of variety performances.
The solution was to expand individual consciousness, urged Bevan, to make the People aware of this state of unfulfilled potential, and that was to be done through education, political, presumably. Awareness would lead to dissatisfaction and that would lead to the election of a radical Labour government with the power to revolutionise the country.
In hindsight, Bevan’s redress seems strikingly naïve and I wonder if we in the freedom movement (far more disjointed and individualised than the labour movement back then) are committing some of the thinking. People did not want to be ‘woken-up’ to their failure to inhabit the full scope of their personalities; they wanted to go on holiday like their neighbours were. They were not thinking about large programmes of economic restructuring or equalising the distribution of surplus to realise human potential. They were seeking a promotion at work to re-distribute part of any surplus to themselves.
The parallels with the late Fifties are here in today’s society and so are the instructions of its failings. Currently, if it’s a choice between Netflix or researching something uncomfortable, like Convid or medical malpractice, then the preferred option, for the majority, is settling down in front of the streaming service. Trying to educate people to ‘grow’, whether conducted politically or through the school system, would likely engender a furious backlash that would claim it made people ‘sad’; or be met with a stony indifference. There is an absence of an appetite to learn difficult truths. They are too disruptive, too threatening. The majority do not want to expand, at least not into the areas that the past four years have shown are crucially important.
The retreat of individuals into a material narcissism, fostered by manipulation, atomisation, technology and consent has brought us to this juncture. It is very difficult to see a path out of it. Even if there were not a misanthropic grouping trying to lock us up in a control system, technology, apathy and ambition have their own dynamics which are driving us to a similar destination. Bevan saw this, though even the parts of his speech which fulminate against the degeneration of his society - reduced NHS spending, no increase in pensions and a £1500 million stock market boom undistributed – make these outgrowths of greed and neglect seem incredibly mild. We would wish for such a level of decadent corruption! I don’t think Bevan’s imagination could grasp the enormity of the ‘evil’ that can permeate this country. That lesson has been left to us.
We have learnt that lesson and we should try to teach ourselves others. As our requirements are more urgent than the later 1950s, to achieve a different outcome we must grasp that other means must be created or applied other than the fruitless ones applied by even such a widespread, deeply set one as the labour movement led by orators like Nye Bevan.
Hope for the Future
It is probably worth quoting the conclusion of Bevan’s speech:
I have enough faith in my fellow creatures in Great Britain to believe that when they have got over the delirium of the television, when they realise that their new homes that they have been put into are mortgaged to the hilt, when they realise that the moneylender has been elevated to the highest position in the land, when they realise that the refinements for which they should look are not there, that it is a vulgar society of which no decent person could be proud, when they realise all those things, when the years go by and they see the challenge of modern society not being met by the Tories who can consolidate their political powers only on the basis of national mediocrity, who are unable to exploit the resources of their scientists because they are prevented by the greed of their capitalism from doing so, when they realise that the flower of our youth goes abroad today because they are not being given opportunities of using their skill and their knowledge properly at home, when they realise that all the tides of history are flowing in our direction, that we are not beaten, that we represent the future: then, when we say it and mean it, then we shall lead our people to where they deserve to be led!
Putting aside party politics, as we know both are just means to an end for far more powerful entities, we are still waiting for people to get over the ‘delirium’ of the TV never mind the phone or the next piece of tech that will embed them deeper in the matrix. Again, Bevan, to our senses, comes across as naïve in his optimism. Yet, he was speaking after the World War Two and the horrific actions of the Nazis, of which he was well aware.
Maybe this is where we should pause and reflect on what we can take from a speech that could be viewed more a historical curiosity than as something relevant to today’s difficulties. The analysis born of defeat has a core of optimism and that optimism is built upon a faith. A faith in people. A faith that says that once people see the right thing, they will do the right thing.
The cynical elites might dismiss that faith as simplistic and childlike, pointing to the unquantifiable number of human criminality. Yet perhaps that is the magical thing about faith: it is naïve. And profound. Homer’s The Iliad ends with the lines:
“Achilles, whose name will live forever,
To remind all men of Honour.”
We still know of Achilles. We still know of honour. Homer’s faith is still being justified.
The problems of Bevan’s day are ours, except our are deeper, sharper, more urgent and more treacherous. Still, with faith, we can and will surmount them, now or in the future.
Ut Fidem.
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