Interviewed recently on BBC’s Newsnight program, Russell Brand has achieved a feat that had for so long been unseen it seemed to have become impossible: ignited the political imagination of a generation.
Growing up in Britain in the 1970’s, from a lower middle class background but happily spared the ravages of inner city social decay, I never felt myself drawn to the left. My political philosophy always has been, and I would say still is, a liberal one. When later I discovered the post-modern social liberalism of philosopher Richard Rorty in the 1990’s, I found him to be articulating the kind of political values I had always believed in. Philosophically this was a comfortable home. Politically, liberalism in the UK, and most other places, was of marginal relevance, caught in a squeeze between the self-interested conservatism of the empowered classes and the equally self-interested socialism of the struggling working class masses. Somehow, these two opposing political forces managed to run the country in alternation, with a good deal of unpleasant rivalry but without either of them going totally off the rails. The left knew its place and was seduced by power, the right had a tradition of social concern, albeit with a dose of condescension and paternalism. Marxists railed on the left wing of the Labour Party in the 1980’s, while Mrs Thatcher foisted an alien set of values on the party of the landed classes whose attitudes had become too archaic and whose appeal had become too limited to address mounting social unrest. Then Tony Blair introduced third-way socialism, in its origins an attempt constructively to engage with the economics of wealth creation which attracted many social liberals to its ranks. But Blair never won over the radical heart of his party, only its pragmatic head, and in hindsight his agenda seems naive, or at best inadequate.
I mistrusted the Left for the reasons most people did who grew up during the Cold War: the spectre of collectivism crushing human individuality and turning all of society into a grey, joyless, paranoid dystopia. This was not, of course, the progressive Left my parents knew. But the fear of nuclear annihilation hung heavily over my generation, and a political system that so elevated ideology over human community could never be my home. To this day, the soul and direction of the Left has seemed to me fatally compromised by its inner ideological struggles. Brand, who by background knows the social reality of the so-called working, increasingly however rather unemployed and economically marginalized, classes much better than I do, sums this up succinctly in his piece in the New Statesman, which is an angry, brilliantly poetic, iconoclastic yet supremely humanistic, epochal rant: the Right has always sought converts, while the Left has looked for traitors.
Brand’s passion for social justice is unquestionable, and at the same time he manages to nail what have always been my misgivings about the British Left. Paraphrasing what I see to be his key message, the Left has always remained in thrall to a system and a political class that embody values which have been taken by the British public to be quasi-constitutional, as the precondition of social stability, values which in fact, however, have never made a clean break from their feudal origins. There is no vision of a new humanity, of a new coexistence. Underlying this strange cohabitation, and it is excruciatingly obvious when it is pointed out, is not just the cult of production but the one unifying institution which bridges, or bridged, the Left-right divide: the church. Today though, it has lost its power to compel acquiescence in a supposedly divinely ordained political order which pretty well every thinking person realizes is no longer fit for purpose, and will not secure any continued human existence, never mind coexistence. There is a gaping hole, increasing angry impatience with the positivist social myth of progress we have been brought up on, and this crisis is not just spiritual and individual, but political and collective. Marxism has failed because it, too, exalted work and production over spirit and community (and fun).
Brand does the unthinkable: he marries the imperative of inner transformation known to us from the mystic core of all religions, but which has always had to seek shelter within and therefore accommodate itself to a hierarchical social order, with a call for radical social change. He seeks to refound the progressive left on essentially a completely novel spiritual basis. Unto Caesar will not be rendered that which is Caesar’s, because nothing is Caesar’s: all that is his is ours. This is truly a prophetic moment, a call for a spiritual democracy from a spiritual demos, a spirituality which itself is phenomenological, unmediated, unimposable, effervescent and evanescent, different in every moment but real, alive, because intrinsically, biologically, shared by every conscious human soul.
There is no doubt that Brand is right, that this is the direction we must take, and there is no doubt either that he is right that revolution is coming whether we like it or not, and the longer we unimaginatively hold on to stale repeat episodes of the old political sitcoms the more painful for everyone that change will be. The direction of change, though, is uncertain, in no way preordained. Contemporary spirituality, the preserve of fortunate middle classes, is far from yet ready for the task. Brand knows it. Those he grew up with have mostly no inkling of this dimension, no idea of this alternative. They are still living as slaves within an archaic paradigm. Or so, at least, I assume. Contemporary spirituality is an ethereal consumer good out of their financial reach and with almost no outreach to them. What they do see and read, if anything, is dumbed down and pious. The media and the marketing engine still have huge influence. Thus modern spirituality at best may inspire a new way of thought; it is, de facto, politically irrelevant. That is a major work ahead of us.