My fiction addiction

I’ve given up on Goodreads, the website (now owned by Amazon, I understand) that lets you tell people which books you’ve been reading, and what you think of them. Not only is the site counter-intuitive (or maybe it’s just me), but there’s a patronising whiff of the school report about its updates: ‘Martin made progress with Cousin Bette’, indeed. On the other hand, what’s the point of reading a book if you can’t share the experience with your friends?  So today I’m writing a post about my recent reading.

I'll begin with a confession. Until a few months ago, my reading of fiction had fallen away and in the past year or two there have been very few novels leavening my diet of historical works and biographies. This, despite having not one but two degrees in English Literature: but then, as a student, my primary passion was always for poetry rather than prose. There was a brief Mauriac obsession last summer, after our visit to Bordeaux, but my most memorable reading experiences of late have been John Guy’s book on Thomas Becket, Amanda Vickery on the lives of eighteenth-century women, and James McPherson on the American Civil War. If asked to justify my focus on non-fiction, I would have argued that the best historical writing encompasses many of the characteristics of good novels: engrossing narrative, compelling characters, stylish prose.

But I began to think I was missing something, and so this summer my novel reading revived. It’s one more thing that I can credit the late Norman Geras with. As I wrote in my appreciation of him the other week, I never ceased to be impressed by his appetite for fiction and his insightful writing on his favourite novelists, from Jane Austen to Anne Tyler. When we visited him earlier this year, Norm described his daily novel-reading habits and quizzed me about my own preference for non-fiction, so that I began to feel rather embarrassed by my abstention from fiction.

Spurred into action, I took from the shelf a novel that I’d been meaning to finish for ages: Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise. If you look back at my Normblog profile, you’ll see that I claimed to be reading this as long ago as 2007, but in fact I never got beyond the first few pages. Returning to the book, I was immediately captivated by Nemirovsky’s account of refugees fleeing occupied Paris – made even more compelling by the author’s personal experience of her subject-matter, and by the knowledge that very soon after writing it, she would herself become a victim of Nazi terror.

Having realised what I was missing by excluding fiction from my imaginative diet, I went on to fulfill a long-overdue promise to myself, to re-read Dostoievsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I’d seen that there was a new translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, that supposedly captured the dynamism of the original Russian better than the Penguin version by Constance Garnett that I’d read many years ago. (I should add that my return to Dostoievsky was partly prompted by my renewed interest in religion: Karamazov was the book that inspired the actor Martin Sheen to return to Catholicism, and it’s surely one of the great Christian novels.) The new translation turned out to be every bit as lively and engaging as its was reputed to be, capturing the humour as well as the pathos of this greatest of Russian writers.

This doorstop of a novel book-ended, so to speak, my summer: I read about half before we went away on holiday and the other half when we returned. In between, I spent two weeks lying beside a Portuguese pool, but whereas normally I would have packed mostly non-fiction, this time I threw in a scattering of novels. On the long train journey south through France and Spain, I’d been reading a book about the little-known wartime hero Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux who was responsible for helping hundreds of Jews and others escape from occupied France. Then, on arrival in Portugal, I followed this with something I’d really been looking forward to: Neill Lochery’s account of wartime Lisbon, which included a fascinating collection of photographs of the city and the celebrities and spies who took refuge there. Unfortunately, the photos turned out to be the best thing about this badly-written and poorly-edited volume. Nevertheless, there was a connection between these two non-fiction appetisers and the first novel I read on holiday - Joseph Roth’s Radetsky March, set in the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire – since Otto von Hapbsurg had been one of those helped by de Sousa Mendes to escape to Portugal. I shall certainly be reading more by Roth. Then it was on to a non-fiction book with an Austrian theme: Alexander Waugh’s House of Wittgenstein, which I bought because of my interest in Ludwig’s philosophy, though he turned out to be just one member of a fascinatingly eccentric family, none more so than his brother Paul, an accomplished one-armed concert pianist.

Norm Geras’ influence was apparent in my next novel choice (he’d recommended it on his blog): John Williams’ reissued Stoner. My absorption in this slim volume was reflected in the fact that I read it in virtually one poolside sitting. However, I should add that I found the story of this obscure, disappointed mid-western teacher unrelievedly depressing, lacking any hint of possible redemption.

My ‘big read’ of the holiday was Os Maias – The Maias – by the nineteenth century Portuguese novelist Eca de Queiros. One of my New Year’s resolutions had been to improve my knowledge of Portuguese to the extent that I’d be able to be read something by this author, or perhaps by Pessoa or Saramago, in the original, by the time we went on holiday. However, this went the way of most of my resolutions, and I ended up, once again, opting for a new English translation. I’d bought the Carcanet edition following our first visit to Lisbon seven years ago, when we’d stayed in a small hotel that had been the model for the family home in de Queiros’ novel, but had never quite got around to reading it. Then I read that Margaret Jull Costa, whose renderings of Saramago and of Spanish authors such as Javier Marias I had long admired, had produced a new translation. I wasn’t disappointed: the novel is compendious, rollicking, moving, a great nineteenth-century realist novel, with some Dickensian touches but without any Dickensian caricatures or sentimentality. I thoroughly recommend it.

De Queiros was influenced by the great French realists, and especially by Balzac, another embarrassing gap in my reading, so on my return I plucked Cousin Bette from the shelf and jumped into the middle of the ‘Comedie Humaine’ cycle. The experience was rewarding, but it didn’t really whet my appetite for more by the same author, not just yet anyway. However, I was now feeling inspired to plug other shameful gaps in my literary knowledge, and at the same time wanting to stick with the nineteenth century for a little longer, so this autumn I turned back to the English classics. From Balzac I went on to Dickens, rapidly consuming The Old Curiosity Shop – sentimental and maudlin at times, but still compelling – and Oliver Twist – apprentice work for the far superior David Copperfield, but a lively youthful narrative all the same. Then from George Eliot's oeuvre I selected Adam Bede, which I’d never read, and found completely absorbing, not least because of my identification with its Methodist theme, and at the moment I’m rather plodding my way through The Mill on the Floss.

Another novel I’d never got round to reading was Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which starts very engagingly, but then kind of loses its way. What critics describe as a fascinating double narrative replete with fluid identities, I thought was a flawed and poorly structured piece of work, in which personal biography was never quite fully transformed into imaginative literature. But the highlight of my autumn reading so far has been Vanity Fair, another unforgivable omission from my literary knowledge. There were many similarities with The Maias - another thoroughly engaging, inventive and light-filled imaginative experience.

So, after a dry period with no novel-reading at all, I’ve now become reliant on my regular fiction fix and have to have a novel in progress all the time. (This doesn't mean I've stopped reading history books: I'm part-way through Hugh Thomas' classic account of the Spanish Civil War and am just finishing Mark Kishlansky's Penguin history of seventeenth-century Britain.) Now, I’m planning my December reading schedule. Nothing is set in stone yet, but I definitely want to be reading Dickens at Christmas. Christmas Carol would be too obvious but should I re-read Great Expectations or Bleak House, or seek out the unread Pickwick Papers or Our Mutual Friend?

Watch this space for updates. And please feel free share your own recommendations, or your opinions of any of the books mentioned here.

Lost up the Kilburn High Road

Last week I received an invitation to a showing of the new film about Stuart Hall (not that one – this one) – you can watch a trailer here - which has prompted me to dust off a half-written post that I started earlier this year.

Stuart Hall was one of my heroes. I discovered him in the early 1980s via his classic articles about Thatcherism in Marxism Today and, as I wrote in my last post, went on from there to explore his work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. I also have him to thank for introducing me to the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Back then Hall carved out an original and sophisticated political position, clearly critical of Thatcherism and its ‘authoritarian populism’, but attempting to understand its popularity (in Gramscian terms, the ‘good sense’ in its ‘common sense’) and to develop a contemporary progressive response that embraced ‘New Times’. It was a world away from the shrill sloganeering of the old revolutionary left, whether Trotskyite or ‘tankie’, and showed a much clearer understanding of how Britain, and its working class, had changed, than the ‘one-more-push’ oppositionalism of the Bennites. At a personal level, too, I found it easy to identify with Stuart. Like him, I had begun as a student of literature, had worked in adult education, and my politics were also grounded in an attempt to understand the intersection of class and culture. Hall soon joined William Morris, Raymond Williams and E P Thompson in the pantheon of my political and cultural heroes.

Some time later, I found myself on a postgraduate adult education course at Nottingham, supposedly run along ‘dialogic’ Freirean lines, but in fact an induction into a distinctly old-school Marxism, from which dissent was difficult. The tutors were particularly hostile to Hall and to ‘New Times’ analysis, regarding it as a betrayal of the true Marxist gospel, and I found myself regularly forced into defending him – which only strengthened my attachment to his ideas. It wasn’t long after this that I came to work at The Open University, where Hall himself had migrated from Birmingham. In fact, my first piece of course writing – on ‘culture’, as it happened - was sent to him for critical reading. Stuart was characteristically generous and helpful in his response to this piece of callow apprentice work. It was a few years before I actually plucked up the courage to speak to him – or rather, before a mutual colleague introduced us. I shyly muttered a few words about how his Marxism Today articles had kept me going through the Thatcher years, and Hall said something self-effacing about how ‘a few of us’ were hoping to get a similar venture going again soon. That venture turned out to be Soundings, the journal of culture and politics that has now produced its own political programme – the Kilburn Manifesto – which prompted the writing of this post.

I think my unadulterated admiration of Stuart Hall’s work began to diminish some time in the late 1990s, for both political and academic reasons. Marxism Today, which had collapsed along with its Communist Party sponsors after the events of 1989, revived itself for a special edition to mark Labour’s landslide victory of 1997. As someone who had rejoined the Labour Party shortly after Tony Blair was elected leader, in part because the New Labour project seemed to embody much of what Hall’s ‘New Times’ thinking was pointing towards (modernisation of the progressive message, new kinds of alliances, an understanding of the changing identities and aspirations of post-Thatcher Britain), I was deeply disappointed by the analysis that Hall and his fellow contributors now offered. Not that I was completely uncritical of Blair, but the simple negativity of that response seemed indistinguishable from the knee-jerk oppositionalism of the ‘old’ left, whether parliamentary or otherwise, from which Hall’s writings had once offered such a refreshing change.

Academically, too, but over a much longer period, I had gradually became disillusioned with the direction that cultural studies, the discipline that Stuart Hall had founded virtually singlehandedly, and of which he was still the key theoretical luminary, had begun to take. In my view it had become increasingly obsessed with high-theoretical hairsplitting, riddled with obfuscating jargon, and divorced from any engagement with practical politics. Theoretically, cultural studies seemed lost in a post-structuralist fog that I came to see not just as aloof from politics but dangerously apolitical and morally relativist, exemplified (to cite two of the most egregious examples) by Michel Foucault’s endorsement of the ayatollahs and Judith Butler’s claim that the racist, misogynist Hamas was part of the ‘global left’.

Of course, I should acknowledge that I too had changed in the interim. No longer describing myself as any kind of Marxist, like many others in the aftermath of 1989 I had come to accept that any form of progressive change worth having must be rooted in individual liberty, representative democracy and – yes, free markets.  As I explained in my last post, I had moved away from both the Bennite Labourism of my youth and the Gramscian Eurocommunism of later years and was now an unashamed social democrat. Then, in the wake of 9/11 and the rise of the new global threat of militant fundamentalism, I began to find myself in sympathy with the anti-totalitarian democratic leftism of the Euston Manifesto.

There’s a definite nod to that document, of course, in the name of the Soundings team’s latest intervention, which I suppose Eustonites should take as some kind of compliment. Given my earlier engagement with Stuart Hall’s work, it was with mixed feelings that I read his introduction to the Kilburn Manifesto in The Guardian back in April, and then the first instalment of the programme itself that has been published online (more instalments have since been published, but I have to confess that I haven't read them thoroughly yet). There’s much in the document and the article that resonates, particularly the delineation of our current ills. Who on the Left could take issue with this description of where we are currently:

The breakdown of old forms of social solidarity is accompanied by the dramatic growth of inequality and a widening gap between those who run the system or are well paid as its agents, and the working poor, unemployed, under-employed or unwell. 

But while the diagnosis may be (partly) sound, the prognosis often feels like a blast from the past, as if nothing has really changed since those heady days of the late Seventies and early Eighties. The language and style of argument used, the forms of address, all seem to be resonant of that earlier era in our political history – and in my personal political journey.

I say ‘partly’ sound because I think the Kilburnites also get some things wrong about the current state of things. Of Margaret Thatcher, who died shortly before his article was written, Hall writes that her funeral ‘was designed to install her as the emblem of a unified nation, and set the seal on three decades of work by three political regimes – Thatcherism, New Labour and the coalition – to fundamentally reshape Britain.’ Leaving aside the way this skates over very real differences between three democratically elected governments, the model of political change assumed here is of a unified exercise of power by a dominant elite. We’re back in the mechanistic, top-down world of Louis Althusser, and a world away from the multiple sites of power identified by Foucault, one of Hall’s key influences, never mind the unending struggle for hegemony described by Gramsci. It’s not far removed, in fact, from conspiratorial thinking about a hidden hand pulling the strings behind the scenes, with democratic ‘choice’ being little more than an illusion.

A similar one-way model of the exercise of power is evidenced in these words about popular culture:

Market forces have begun to model institutional life and press deeply into our private lives, as well as dominating political discourse. They have shaped a popular culture that extols celebrity and success and promotes values of private gain and possessive individualism. 

There’s a grain of truth in this, of course, as there is in much of what Hall and the Kilburnites have to say – the good sense in their common sense, one might cheekily say. But one gets the feeling that, in this political worldview, it’s only external forces – of which market forces are one example – that have any agency and are able to ‘shape…extol…promote’. Reading this, you’d think that people never voluntarily watched a television programme or freely voted for measures that encouraged individualism. The same forces are said to have ‘thoroughly undermined the redistributive egalitarian consensus that underpinned the welfare state’. But what if that consensus failed because it lost credibility and popular support? Where now the complex ‘New Times’ understanding of Thatcherism, the past failures of the Left, and new class formations?

Moreover, Hall’s use here of the word ‘regime’ for the elected British government, as if this were the Soviet Union or some tin-pot dictatorship, rather grates. It’s the sign of a worrying inability to distinguish between western democracies, however fallible, and truly oppressive systems. In fact, you’ll search in vain in this article, or in the online extract from the Kilburn Manifesto, for any acknowledgement that every radical social experiment of the kind advocated here has ended in some form of tyranny.

I found it telling, too, that the only footnote in the first online extract is a reference to Althusser, the anti-humanist Marxist theorist whom E P Thompson so memorably excoriated in The Poverty of Theory, and whose mechanistic, top-down systematizing of culture and society were robustly criticised in Hall’s earlier writings. And then, while it’s only a footnote, there’s surely something awry when your sole secondary reference is to a theorist whose name will mean nothing beyond the social scientific academy.

The writers of the manifesto still seem, after all this time, to be seeking new social movements to unite with the traditional working class (whatever that might be, these days), to form a majority for their progressive project. This leads to an unwarranted excitement about entirely marginal, unrepresentative and sometimes worryingly illiberal insurgencies like the Occupy movement. Behind this chimeric search for an extra-parliamentary alliance is a tacit admission that the existing electoral system has, time and again, failed to provide a majority in favour of radical socialist change. This comes across as fundamentally elitist, as if the British public were wrong to vote repeatedly for New Labour, and more recently to reject all forms of Labourism and elect a coalition of Conservatives and the Liberals. To quote Brecht, it sounds like a call to dissolve the people and elect another.

Where do the Kilburnites look for templates for their political programme? Two get a mention in Hall’s piece: ‘the short era of Ken Livingstone's GLC and the radical experiments under way in Latin America’, and indeed our Ken’s image adorns the head of the article. But you’ll find no reference here to critiques of Livingstone’s communalism or to his more dubious alliances in the interests of civic multiculturalism. And which Latin American ‘radical experiments’ are signified here, or is it left deliberately vague? One hopes it doesn’t mean Hugo Chavez’ dictatorial regime: now there’s ‘authoritarian populism’ for you. Once again, there’s little sense of the failures and shortcomings in these socialist experiments, whether at the local or national level, nor of the risks of history repeating itself if the same formula is followed.

So while I shall watch the new film about Stuart Hall with interest (not least for its cool jazz soundtrack), and continue to value his huge contribution to our understanding of the intersection of politics and culture, and of course to my own intellectual development, I shan’t be signing the Kilburn Manifesto. My politics will remain firmly rooted in NW1, rather than NW6.

That speech in brief

A month after David Cameron's multiculturalism speech, I'm still trying to gather my thoughts about it into a coherent blog post. Watch this space.

In the meantime, you could do worse than read what some others have had to say, and I particularly recommend these responses by Martin Bright, Alan Johnson, Michael Weiss and Douglas Murray.

Progress, primitivism and the politics of 'Avatar'

There was a fascinating exchange on yesterday's Today programme, about a planned scientific expedition to Paraguay. Fascinating, because it exemplified some key trends in current debates about 'culture' and 'progress'.

On one side of the argument was Professor Richard Lane, director of science at the Natural History Museum, which is sponsoring the expedition. Lane was measured, thoughtful, weighing up the benefits and risks of the venture, very much the voice of academic, scientific reason. On the other side was Benno Glauser, director of an indigenous people’s protection group, who argued that the expedition should be called off, because of the threat it poses to communities who have never had any contact with the outside world.

Glauser suggested, somewhat melodramatically, that any contact between the expedition and these indigenous groups would be tantamount to 'genocide'. This was primarily due to the risk of exposure to western diseases, a risk that was disputed by Professor Lane. But there was another, deeper layer to Glauser's concern. He was also worried that any meeting between these hitherto isolated communities and the representatives of western modernity would lead to the breakdown of what he called their 'life model'. He proceeded to elaborate on this in glowing terms, claiming that these indigenous people 'live in complete interdependence with nature', that 'they have a principle of life which is a principle of minimal intervention' in which 'the world protects them as long as they protect the world'.

In other words, Glauser painted a picture of life among isolated indigenous communities in Paraguay as some kind of ecological Eden. By implication, he cast the civilisation represented by the expedition - scientific, modern, western - in entirely negative terms, as a threat or pollutant to this paradisal scene. The echoes of James Cameron's Avatar seemed almost deliberate. (Mischievously, I also wondered how Glauser could speak with such certainty about the way of life of these groups, if they have never had any contact with the outside world.)

Listening to the exchange, it struck me that two hundred years ago, the terms of the debate would have been completely reversed. At the height of colonial expansion and missionary zeal, it was the world of the indigenous tribes that would have been viewed negatively - as backward, godless, darkened by ignorance - and western civilisation as advanced, enlightened, in possession of truth. In the last century, secularised versions of this discourse - both capitalist and communist - held sway, with the prevailing wisdom on all sides being that exposure to modern medicine, scientific knowledge, mechanical methods and so forth, would bring enormous benefits to the lives of 'primitive' peoples.

Even half a century ago - in the Sixties - the dominant paradigm for representing the needs of Third World people was 'development', the notion that lives could be infinitely improved by providing access to modern farming methods, industrial production, safer childbirth, etc.

Since then, as Benno Glauser’s argument (and the popularity of films like Avatar) demonstrates, there has been a massive loss of confidence in ‘progress’ and in 'western' ideas and values (the very labelling of them as 'western', rather than as universal and an aspiration for everyone, is symptomatic). Running alongside this has been the rise of a culturalism that reifies the values and way of life of communities (particularly if those communities are non-western and 'other') as static and almost sacred, together with a relativism that tends to see all cultures as equally valid and therefore beyond rational criticism.

Both trends are evident in the fulminations of cultural commentators such as the Guardian's Madeleine Bunting, with her hand-wringing about the shortcomings of modern civilisation - the individualism, the consumerism, the shallowness - and wondering whether, perhaps, the religious fundamentalists might not have a point - and after all, who are we to judge?

Of course, this kind of thing is not new. Alongside a rhetoric of reason and scientific advance, liberal progressivism has always included a romanticising strain, a tendency to idealise the primitive and the 'other'. Indeed - to get pretentious for a moment - maybe what we are seeing in the rise of the new eco-primitivism (not to mention the new pro-faithism) is the revenge of Romanticism on the Enlightenment. But I digress...

Returning to Benno Glauser's glorification of indigenous 'culture': I notice there was no mention of any less desirable features in the lives of these isolated hunter-gatherers. I wonder what their life expectancy is, or what proportion of their offspring survive infancy? How many of them die from unexplained diseases, and how many of their women are worn down by a constant round of childbirth, or their men by a life devoted to the exhausting daily search for sustenance?

Let’s imagine for a moment that the Natural History Museum's expedition goes ahead and that, despite its best efforts, it makes 'accidental' contact with one of these indigenous groups, which leads in turn to an opening-up of that community to the outside world. Now, imagine that in about fifty years' time the grand-daughter of one of those tribesmen, who has had the opportunity to leave her native village to go to school and then university, has become (say) a pioneering medical researcher, or an acclaimed novelist, or a globetrotting politician. Would the likes of Benno Glauser still argue that her life would have been better if the expedition had not happened, if contact had not been made, and she had been compelled to lead the same kind of life as her mother and her grandmother?

To be sure, if contact is made, there will be losses as well as gains. And those responsible need not to repeat the mistakes of previous incursions, ensuring that rapacious developers and mad-eyed missionaries are kept at bay, and that the rights and freedoms of indigenous peoples are respected. But how strange it would have seemed to progressives of earlier times to argue that indigenous people should be forbidden access to the benefits of modernity - and that every effort should be made to deny them the right to choose for themselves the kind of lives they wish to lead.

Lusolinks

Our imminent departure for a couple of weeks' holiday not far from Lisbon provides me with an excuse to link to some of my past scribblings on things Portuguese:

On Lisbon and Portuguese literary and musical culture

On Lisbon and Portuguese / Cape Verdean / Brazilian music

On a neglected Portuguese hero

On music again, specifically the saudade of Cesaria Evora and Mariza

On my feeble attempts to learn Portuguese

On the death of Jose Saramago.

As they say over there: Adeus, até logo.

Once upon a time in Afghanistan

Where do you think this photograph was taken: somewhere in Europe or America, perhaps, circa 1960? In fact it's a picture of a record store in Kabul, Afghanistan, at around that time. It's one of a remarkable series of images from a photobook of the country published by Afghanistan's planning ministry in the late '50s or early '60s, and bought in a market by an Afghani schoolboy, Mohammad Qayoumi, who emigrated to the States and is now president of California State University, East Bay.

Other photos (which you can see here) show mixed-sex groups of students and workers, in modern dress, at universities, factories, parks and cinemas. In case we're tempted to think this was some kind of sub-Soviet propaganda exercise, it's worth remembering that the pictures date from before the Russian invasion, which initiated the process of dismembering modern Afghanistan that continued during the civil war and Taliban takeover. Qayoumi uses the photographs to counter the myth, recently reinforced by Liam Fox with his 'broken 13th century country' jibe, that Afghanistan has always been 'an ungovernable land where chaos is carved into the hills'. Qayoumi begis to differ:

But that is not the Afghanistan I remember. [...] A half-century ago Afghan women pursued careers in medicine; men and women mingled casually at movie theaters and university campuses in Kabul; factories in the suburbs churned out textiles and other goods. There was a tradition of law and order, and a government capable of undertaking large national infrastructure projects, like building hydropower stations and roads, albeit with outside help. Ordinary people had a sense of hope, a belief that education could open opportunities for all, a conviction that a bright future lay ahead. All that has been destroyed by three decades of war, but it was real.

Qayoumi admits that the images were 'perhaps a little airbrushed by government officials', but they serve as a reminder that, even in a country ravaged by decades of conflict like Afghanistan, 'disorder, terrorism, and violence against schools that educate girls are not inevitable.' Some of the photos, and Qayoumi's comments on them which point up the contrast with the current situation, are incredibly poignant: 'Remembering Afghanistan's hopeful past only makes its present misery seem more tragic'.

There is an overpowering sense of generations of lost opportunity, of lives constrained. The images are a reminder, too, of the sheer barbarism of the fundamentalist ideology that laid waste to much of this burgeoning modernity, and the stupidity of a cultural relativism, present as much in pseudo-leftist posturing as in Fox's post-imperial condescension, which assumes that secular modernity is a 'western' phenonomen whose benefits are not relevant to the lives of people in other 'cultures'.

(Via Kenan Malik)

Everywhere and nowhere

Yet another post about religion: but that seems fitting this weekend. Writing in the Guardian, Cole Morton surveys the British religious landscape at Easter:

The Roman Catholic hierarchy remains engulfed in the scandal of abusive priests. The Church of England [...] is struggling to cope with the loss of its status, wealth and most of its people.

Neither organisation can muster a million followers on a Sunday, and attendance has fallen for the fifth year in a row. The pews may fill a little more this weekend, but on the whole people don't want to belong anything, let alone a needy, demanding church.

But, argues Morton, this doesn't mean that people have stopped believing. Instead, he celebrates 'the rise of a new national faith', which he calls 'the Church of Everywhere':

The Church of Everywhere consists of all those people who believe in a god of some kind but don't belong to a religious organisation. [...] They don't have a collective voice because they are each doing their own thing. But they are certainly in the majority.

And where does Moreton find evidence of this new spiritual sensibility?

You can see it at Stonehenge for solstice, or at festivals, as people seek the divine in the open air. Even new forms of morris dancing, most eccentric of 'traditional' pursuits, have become a way for people to express their spirituality outdoors.

They are part of the new faith, which doesn't mind what your god is called. Improvised, individualistic and hard to pin down, it does still have some identifiable collective values, including fair play, individual freedom and the notion of the Earth as a sacred space.

I think there's a grain of truth in Moreton's description, but I take issue both with aspects of his analysis and with his celebratory tone. While it's true that, over a long period, traditional religion has been losing both its appeal and its influence, it would be a mistake to overlook the continuing strength (and modern revival) of more conservative versions, such as evangelical Christianity and fundamentalist Islam.

Moreton correctly identifies the ecological and individualistic strains in contemporary popular thinking, but he's in danger of confusing disparate phenomena and claiming too much for his new multi-faith religiosity. The trouble with 'spirituality' is that it can be made to include pretty much anything: morris dancing as an expression of faith is taking it a bit far, I think. And surely there's a contradiction in arguing that the new spirituality is all about doing your own thing, and at the same time claiming that these 'improvised, individualistic' pursuits are part of some larger collective movement.

Moreton wants us to believe that the current popular interests in 'paganism, Buddhism and the green movement' are not only connected with each other, but somehow part of the same phenomenon as the mourning for Princess Diana and Jade Goody's funeral. He argues that the latter event 'put the new faith of the people on display, live on television with white doves, party balloons and lots of tears', adding:

The crowds watching on screens outside gasped at the home videos and blinked back tears at slushy songs. I was there, and this was powerful stuff that worked for people.

Again, Moreton has captured some kind of shift in the collective psyche. The lapsed Catholic in me is tempted to describe it as the return of the Catholic repressed, a half-conscious popular yearning for a sense of ritual meaning that was lost in the transition to modernity. But whether it can be described as a new form of faith, rather than yet another symptom of a consumerist celebrity culture, I'm not sure.

But even if Moreton has identified something real stirring in the collective imagination, both the lapsed Christian and the secular humanist in me question his excitement at this new all-embracing, content-free spiritual 'movement'. Traditional Christians (and Jews, and Muslims) would argue that true faith leads to selfless action in the interest of others. But Moreton's Church of Everywhere appears to encourage a narcissistic absorption in one's own feelings which has more in common with pop psychology and the self-improvement industry.

And then there's the suspicion that this new faith-lite is little more than a popular version of the 'faith in faith' peddled by the likes of Stanley Fish, Terry Eagleton and Karen Armstrong. The crowds blinking back tears at Goody's funeral and the rhetorical manoeuvres of the multi-faithists are both caught up in a cloying sentimentalism: a sense that it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe in something. Don't worry whether it's true, just feel the faith.

This Easter, humanists and traditional believers can unite in their rejection of this worrying irrationalism.

Thou shalt join in

This is the kind of thing that sends me running for cover:

Imagine a summer's day on which millions of us, throughout the UK, sit down to have lunch together, with our neighbours in the middle of our streets, around our tower blocks and on every patch of common ground. The food, entertainment and decorations we will have either grown, cooked, or created ourselves. This will be a day to break bread with our neighbours, to put a smile on Britain's face.

Ever since I heard about The Big Lunch, I've been nervously dreading the knock at the door, announcing that some enterprising individual has organised an event in our street. And from time to time, I've checked the website, where you can find out if there's a lunch near you. Oh, the relief of reading that 'there are currently no lunches on your street'. It's just a couple of days away now: I think I can probably relax.

What's wrong with me? Am I some kind of misanthrope, or are my introverted tendencies coming to the fore again? Maybe I'm just reacting against growing up in a Methodist church where 'Thou shalt join in' was the eleventh commandment. (One of the things that attracted me to Catholicism in my early twenties was the opportunity to slip anonymously into a back pew, then slip out again at the end without being asked earnestly if I was new to the area, or besieged with invitations to stay for coffee, or come along to the sports and social club on Thursday night). It's probably a combination of my Nonconformist upbringing and socialist politics that make me feel I ought to join in with community activities of this kind, and guilty that I'd rather stay at home and read a good book.

But recently I've discovered a more elevated way of rationalising my reaction to this kind of thing. I've been reading Jane Jacobs' 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which argues for the virtues of organic city life against both contemporary urban planning and modern suburbia. One of the characteristics of the 'good' city, according to Jacobs, is that it enables social interaction without everyone knowing your business:

Cities are full of people with whom, from your viewpoint, or mine, or any other individual's, a certain degree of contact is useful or enjoyable; but you do not want them in your hair. And they do not want you in theirs either.

Jacobs lays great emphasis on the value of privacy:

Privacy is precious in cities. It is indispensable. Perhaps it is precious and indispensable everywhere, but most places you cannot get it. In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not – only those you choose to tell will know much about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people…and it is a gift of great-city life deeply cherished and jealously guarded.

This isn't to argue for the net curtain culture of suburbia. In Jacobs' view, what's remarkable about the city is its ability to combine a respect for privacy with enjoyable social contact:

A good city street neighbourhood achieves a marvel of balance between its people’s determination to have essential privacy and their simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of contact, enjoyment or help from the people around. This balance is largely made up of small, sensitively managed details, practiced and accepted so casually that they are normally taken for granted.

The important thing to stress here is the informal and voluntary nature of these social interactions - Jacobs gives many examples, drawn from the experience of her own street in Greenwich Village. But she is emphatically against any attempts to stage-manage a sense of community:

‘Togetherness’ is a fittingly nauseating name for an old ideal in planning theory. This ideal is that if anything is shared among people, much should be shared. ‘Togetherness’…works destructively in cities. The requirement that much shall be shared drives city people apart.

Elsewhere, she elaborates on this paradox - that official initiatives (or semi-official ones, like The Big Lunch) to 'organise' togetherness often have the unintended consequence of driving people back inside their little boxes:

The…common outcome in cities, where people are faced with the choice of sharing much or nothing, is nothing….If mere contact with your neighbous threatens to entangle you in their private lives, or entangle them in yours….the logical solution is absolutely to avoid friendliness or casual offers of help. Better to say thoroughly distant.

Although she is writing about a particular inner city environment, I would argue that Jacobs' arguments have universal validity.

Lest you still think I'm a curmudgeonly misanthrope, let me enter in my defence the fact that I do, actually, belong to a number of communities: my family, first and foremost, then various overlapping communities of interest associated with my work, not to mention the virtual communities of like-minded bloggers and fellow family historians. And I am a member of some local, geographically-based communities - based around our children's schools and my musical interests, for example. But the crucial thing is that these, too, are voluntary and purposive, rather than arising from the accident of living on the same street.

Attempts to recreate a chimeric sense of local community, like The Big Lunch, are misguided and backward-looking. They are of a piece with Gordon Brown's paternalist-communitarian version of New Labourism, in which 'community' is offered as a means of creating social cohesion and mediating social inequalities and differences. As an adult educator working on disadvantaged estates in the 1980s, I resented the way in which 'community' seemed to be offered as a sop or compensation for poverty and unemployment. The middle classes had education, resources, mobility, but the poor were expected to stay put and be satisfied with a 'sense of community'.

So when I hear the word 'community', particularly when some government agency or social entrepreneur is seeking to impose it on the rest of us, I reach for my (metaphorical) net curtains and double-bolted front door.

Incidentally, the BBC coverage of The Big Lunch includes this 'then and now' look at a street that last held a street party in 1977, for the Silver Jubilee. The reporter's questions are of the leading, 'Do you think things are worse now than they were then?' kind, but the clips of the original party are fascinating - they look like they come from another age. To people who don't remember the Seventies, they must seem as ancient as my parents' photos of their VE Day street parties did to me when I was growing up. Watching the video, I suddenly felt rather old:

Unflashy mob

After the living statues at Grand Central Station and the T-Mobile dance-in, it was only a matter of time before the Church got in on the flashmob craze. Actually, 'Dream' (sub-title: 'Re-imagining Church' - don't you just cringe at that omission of the definite article?) is described as a 'fringe Anglican group' (how does that work? do they hang around on the edge of the cake sale?). On Easter Saturday they congregated in the Liverpool One Mall and, at a pre-arranged signal, took off their shoes (to signify that even shopping centres are 'sacred ground', apparently) and made their way to a grassy space where they formed themselves into a human cross. 

Unfortunately, the whole thing comes across as somewhat sheepish, low-key and - well, Anglican. The solitary heart-shaped balloon let off at the end looked rather forlorn. And, to tell the truth, the cross was somewhat shapeless. I know, I know, 'my kingdom is not of this world', etc, but if you're going to steal the secular world's methods you need to match its flair and pzazz. (Incidentally, guys: isn't the whole 'guerilla worship' thing a bit dated? That logo of Jesus looking like discredited Stalinist Che Guevara is just so Seventies, and with the best will in the world, your little throng of mums, dads and kids with shopping bags look nothing like insurgents.)

By the way, I've nothing against Anglicans. Some of my best friends, etc.  As regular readers will know, this is an equal-opportunities secularist blog: we mock all religions (and secular ideologies, when they deserve it) without distinction.

Anyway, see what you think:

Against 'culturalism'

There is scarcely a more important task in contemporary politics and political philosophy than giving full consideration to developing universal enlightenment and with the greatest possible force turning against both prevailing right and leftwing forms of culturalism and their enslavement of the individual in his or her own 'culture'.

From an excellent critique of the 'culturalism' of left and right that has overtaken European political debate, by Danish writers Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt. Do read the whole thing - it's in the online journal eurozine, which I hadn't come across before.

Eriksen and Stjernfelt have recently published a book whose title translates as The Politics of Segregation. Multiculturalism - Ideology and Reality. If anyone has come across an English translation, please let me know - it sounds good.