Capitalism and Ethical Life
Williams knew that culture was shaped by the underlying system of production. He recalls how from the mountains he could look south to the ‘flare of the blast furnace making a second sunset.’ He wrote at a time when his class was already undergoing momentous change, but he could not have imagined the day when there would be no second sunset and the system of production that had shaped his class and culture was turned into scrap. After that, what would come next?
We need to find answers to this question. Across Europe social democracy is in crisis. In the decade ahead the new technologies will continue to transform the economy creating a diversity of economic structures, business models and forms of ownership. The effervescent quality of wealth creation will require diversity, flexibility and complexity. It will need secure social foundations, but as a society we are politically demobilised and socially divided. A new politics of the left must galvanise the vitalism of the cosmopolitan cultures of difference while being an advocate for mainstream conservative culture. The two sensibilities are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They can divide along differences in age, class and region, but they also constitute the contradictory desires for freedom and security, the unpredictable and the familiar, desire and need, which exist within each of us. The philosophical debates on the individual and our relationship to society which inaugurated modernity remain central to contemporary politics.
Today we good citizens share a predicament with the boys in the park. We live our lives without moral guarantees. There can be no return to a common Christian culture as Enoch Powell would have wished. Nor can we secure a social cohesion through the object of god as the theological orthodoxy of Phillip Blond seeks. We will only ever get hold of the world indirectly though representation in language. God, the sacred, the transcendent, the immanent are all simply metaphors for the ‘unthought known’, the excess of world over word. The left died when it failed imaginatively, creatively, aesthetically and politically to help us in this act of reaching beyond our known selves.
A new left politics must return to first principles and address the big questions of how we live. We need a materialist politics of the individual living and producing in society that values the social goods that give meaning to people’s lives: home, family, friendships, good work, locality, and imaginary communities of belonging. Its ethic of socialism is simple: ‘the best life for each is understood to be that which is best for those around him’.6
The philosopher Charles Taylor echoes this belief in his argument that the desire for self realisation lies deep in our culture. It involves the right of everyone to achieve their own unique way of being human. But it is not selfish individualism. To dispute this right in others is to fail to live within its own terms.8 It is an example of what Paul Ricoeur calls an ethical intention – ‘the requirement of mutual recognition which makes me say: your freedom is equal to my own.’7
The progressive future belongs to a politics which can achieve a balance between individual self-realisation and social solidarity. It will be one that goes beyond a narrow conception of ‘the political’ to include aesthetic and cultural work. The importance of media, intellectual knowledge, art, music, poetry, image making, the spectacle, is that they give form to new sensibilities and forms of consciousness. They can give voice to the silenced and they create meaning where none has existed before.
The aesthetic work of playing, dreaming, thinking and feeling makes the individual feel that life is worth living. What is it in music that exceeds its commodification? The left does not ask such questions. Our philosophies have been shaped by a metaphysics that seeks to understand something by reducing it into separate elements for analysis. We have created an instrumental, technical and objectifying mode of thinking, in which thought attempts to assert mastery and control over the world. But the world, society, individuals, are more than the sum of their parts and we must find ways of speaking them.
In the wake of an economy without ethics and in an age of secular individualism there is a need for allegory that will restore ethical meaning and cultivate representations of our commonality. In the past, intuitive attunement to the world was expressed in religious symbols and spaces of the sacred. They were constructed as timeless, changeless and undifferentiated representations of homogeneous ethnic cultures. Today the search for a new ethical relationship between the individual and society requires non-absolutist objects, practices and spaces in which our inner being finds an emotional connection to the world, and which foster coexistence with the others who occupy it. Making them will not be religious, but it will be a civilisational achievement.
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