We asked writers and thinkers associated with Blue Labour for their reading suggestions for lockdown. The choices both reflect the strange circumstances we now find ourselves in and provide the intellectual and cultural backdrop to the wider politics of Blue Labour. The third selection in this series is by Jack Hutchison.
You can read the first selection, by Jonathan Rutherford, here. The second selection, by Tobias Phibbs, here. The fourth selection, by Liam Stokes, here. The fifth selection, by Paul Embery, here. And the final selection, by Maurice Glasman, here.
My lockdown joy has come in the form of a slim collection of British poetry of the 1890s, Poetry of the Nineties, edited by RKR Thornton and focused on what came to be called the Decadent movement.
Featuring the likes of Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, and WB Yeats, and tempered by the less mournful Kipling and Housman, the collection is a portrait of a time seized by an apparent clash between cultural convention and free playing vitality. The Decadents, as the name suggests, saw themselves as challenging the old order through their celebration of desire, excess and the artificial. But in so doing, they frequently found themselves knocking against the limits of sensory experience.
Echoing the critique of Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism, which Tobias Phibbs recommended in the previous piece in this series, many Decadents discovered that desire, uncontained and without boundary, led only to self-absorption. As a result, many of these writers, including the great figures Oscar Wilde and JK Huysmans, converted to Catholicism, finding in its structure and the overflowing excess of its God an answer to deeper questions left unanswered by art, without relapsing into puritanism.
The paradox of the Decadence movement is that its fiction and poetry contain a far more accurate understanding of desire than that handed to us by the liberal orthodoxy of the 1960s and late modern social theory. Writing at the end of the 19th Century, the Decadent writers laid bare all the bundled contradictions of one era giving way to another. Our time too has the feeling of a fin de siècle, and it is unclear in which direction it will be resolved.
Alongside reading the poetry of the Decadence, I have enjoyed the US conservative writer Ross Douthat’s recent book The Decadent Society. Douthat’s decadence is defined by “economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.” Douthat’s case is well made and mirrors arguments made by others including left-wing anarchist David Graeber and right-wing entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Technological stagnation as a defining feature of 21st Century life seems counterintuitive, but outside telecommunications progress has been slow for the past few decades.
Douthat, despite his pessimism, thinks a developed world collapse off the cards. It often takes a crisis, however, to reveal a decline. The last two weeks have seen the killing of George Floyd at the hands of US police and subsequent protest around the world. The spectacle of American cities riven by epidemic, protest, and riot while the Government struggles to provide its citizens with face masks speaks for itself.
Since the protests began I have returned to the fiction of the unrivalled chronicler of the American south, Flannery O’Connor, and the poetry of Harlem Renaissance writer Countee Cullen. O’Connor’s Complete Stories, published by Faber and Faber, are short and parochial, and purposefully so, written in a clear crisp prose. Forgoing simplistic narratives of good and evil, she shows how we are all implicated in each other’s sin and absolution. She paired her skewering of polite white racism with a mournful portrait of a southern society slowly passing from view.
Cullen, one of the giants of early twentieth century African American literature, is now often overlooked in favour of the more outwardly radical Langston Hughes. But Cullen created an extraordinary body of work drawing on English poetry, particularly Wordsworth, Keats, and Housman, adopting the Romantic style to give voice to the struggle for racial equality in America. His debut collection, Color, published in 1925, combines traditional form with a politics of racial solidarity. During this past week of unrest, both O’Connor and Cullen have been welcome companions.
My final lockdown recommendation is Ed West’s new book Small Men on the Wrong Side of History. Part-political treatise and part memoir, the book traces the decline, fall, and unlikely return of conservatism through West’s own life and the wider culture. It is the funniest book I have read in a very long time. Taking its title from Obama’s description of Al-Qaeda, the book takes a tour through what West sees as modern decline, lamenting the disappearance, from the 1960s onwards, of one conservative value after another. For West, even pointing this out is painfully embarrassing; he paints a picture of conservatives as low-status outsiders, grappling with the difficulty of speaking up or keeping quiet at dinner parties.
Progressive ideas, in West’s analysis, are relatively straightforward and tug on our heartstrings with their simplistic appeal to compassion. Conservative ones – beyond the tabloid variety – are complex and difficult to explain, relying on older and more pessimistic conceptions of what it is to be a human being. West writes particularly well on the dangers of political polarisation, lamenting the rise of ‘political deserts’ in which certain views becomes incomprehensible aberrations, rather than complex and reflective human phenomena in their own right. Where I part from West is in his great negativity about the future. As working-class opinion settles on a paradoxical politics of economic radicalism and cultural conservatism, that which once was low status is becoming more attractive to those on the right and left across Europe and the US. Whether something similar can be built here remains to be seen, but there is a rich history of left-wing conservatism in Britain to draw upon, from William Morris to Blue Labour’s own Maurice Glasman. In any case West’s book is a delight, and it is heartily recommended.