“Simple” People

“Sometimes western Europeans come here looking for communism. There’s a park a few miles from the city center where they can go see old statues and things if they want.” Evening, an upscale bistro, Budapest—a friend of a friend is talking. “But I don’t think it’s worth it. Today all the people who used to be communists are nationalists who just want to wear traditional Hungarian garb and speak Hungarian. It’s reactionary. In this country, you have to know English, Spanish, German to be competitive—at least.” How can so many have gone from wanting an international world order to advocating isolationism, I ask? “Simple people,” he scoffs, swirling his drink. “They can totally 180 just because they have to believe in something.”

That condescension for the “simple people,” felt by many well-to-do eastern Europeans who dismiss those who cling to certain ideologies as laughable or naive, can be contagious. The tendency to flip-flop for the sake of political expediency is on display all the time, in the U.S. included. Even this week, Obama’s administration finally helped protect the health of millions of Americans while simultaneously stripping protection from oil-rich areas off the eastern and Alaskan coasts.

But this “simple” kind of inconsistency comes to seem attractive when set against what is perhaps the greater plague—the absence of any conviction at all. Accompanying the rise in political correctness, the refusal to adhere to one point of view has been a shift from a conversation broadly centered around ethics to one focused on the intricacies of policy. (Fodder for the conspiracy theorist: Is initiating sharp high school kids into American policy jargon through activities like debate merely a way of diverting the politically minded from the protests they would otherwise be attending?) The Keynesian invention of a British Arts Council in England, for instance—arising during WWII out of a public demand for the arts—is what Christopher Frayling calls a “classic example of what Adam Smith called the ‘moral sentiments’ that should underpin economic conversations. And there aren’t too many of those around today.”

What’s around instead is a stylistically sublime kind of evasion. In 1957 Roland Barthes introduced the term “neither-nor criticism” to describe the form of bourgeois verbal foot-shuffling so much public comment takes. “I’m neither right nor left; I’d call myself moderate”—a familiar refrain, one that eschews any definition of terms. It’s a nice way of saying that one isn’t really committed to anything.

And so, while political squabbling may be the bread-and-butter of blogs like The Daily Dish, it’s very difficult to point to any coherent political system at the moment. As this month’s Economist, engaging in a bit of its own neither-nor criticism, put it in a review of Tony Judt’s new book “Ill Fares the Land:” “Preaching aside, his key point is sound. Neither right nor left has any longer a plausible story to tell about the state.” In the book, Judt advocates a kind of social democracy; his writing is saturated with nostalgia for a pre-1970s era when inequality was on the wane, communitarianism was on the rise, and Reagan-Thatcher free-marketeering was an unimaginable specter in the far-off future.

Not all convictions are of a kind, of course. The late cultural critic Susan Sontag found herself on the wrong side of the media pitchfork when in the wake of 9/11 she wrote that, “Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.” Jihad for jihad’s sake is probably not what she meant.

But lacking any kind of conviction at all is a shame of its own, especially when it comes to art. If literature and visual media so often seem beside the point—if an art that really matters in the public sphere seems nearly inconceivable, forced to rely on shock to say anything at all—it’s because shock is what remains when there’s no content in which to believe, because it’s so much gold paper wrapping an empty box. “Religion used to be the bolster of art. No longer,” writes Nicholas Shakespeare, chief book reviewer of The Daily Telegraph. “Graham Sutherland and Stanley Spencer left striking work on cathedral walls—Sutherland’s tapestry Christ in Glory for Coventry Cathedral, and his Crucifixion at St. Matthew, Northampton; Spencer’s war paintings at the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere. One can’t imagine the Church of England approaching Damien Hirst for a high altar, still less the Vatican commissioning Lucian Freud to paint a Sistine Chapel.”

So what can replace that conviction? Perhaps only something as basic, and yet as deep-seated, as a belief in other people—a stringent refusal to abide any needless suffering whatsoever. Judt never explicitly defines what his social democracy would look like—he just states clearly that Europe isn’t one (and even less so the U.S.). Figuring out how to set up a system based on, at the very least, care for others may be a “simple” request. But it’s one that necessitates a very complex answer.

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a former Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House currently studying abroad at the University of Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.