SP2011: "Bloggers & the Leviathan..."

"Yes, we're getting a terrible response on the doorsteps in [insert local area]. One [insert sturdy, homespun Scottish character] told me that he'd rather nail his genitals to a speedy inter-city train than stain his soul and defame the memory of his departed father by voting for us. Another said that if I showed my ugly phizog in that part of town again, she'd punch the living tit off me. Our canvassers all return with cauliflowered extremities and are astonishingly demoralised. I'm confident that we'll be handily defeated here in [insert constituency]. On a particularly stinking night, we may well lose our deposit - funds I'd earmarked for a depression-dousing dram. It's all bloody depressing." ~ Sir Reginald Sittish-Standish, Scottish Liberal-Unionist and Labour-Conservative party candidate for Universal Scottish Constituency (West).

Nobody ever says this, do they? No matter how hopeless their electoral situation appears, no matter how general the knowledge that the election is closely divided, every candidate is full of breezy reassurances that all is well, and triumph impends. If you believe the rhetoric, all are greeted warmly at every door, every voter a friend of their party. Practically, of course, I do understand. No would-be parliamentarian wants to appear in the next morning's press, making bloodhound-faced predictions about electoral calamity and disaster. No campaign terrier wants to share their demoralisation and feelings of political insecurity with the public. Understandable, without question. However, it is just another example of one of every embattled election campaign's least attractive qualities - their pervasive dishonesty.

I do love elections. They are more fascinating, in many ways, than their common sense familiarity allows us to recognise. Using relatively simple technologies of pen and paper, the great shapeless and muddled body of our collected opinions are gathered, simplified - and actively inscribed on the social fabric. Obviously, there are those who refuse to take up the pen, on principle, or out of disaffection. However, in elections, we ask millions of people to take an affirmative view, to make a choice. Millions do so.  The French sociologist, Bruno Latour, nicely demonstrates the quotidian interest of the democratic endeavour. In Reassembling the Social, he shows a series of photographs of "Alice", a French voter. In the first, she examines political discussion in Le Monde. The second shows her in the bureau de vote. From the third, her feet peep out, as she casts her ballot behind the obscuring veil of the voting cubicle. In the fourth, her vote is cast into the ballot box - and so on, ending with Alice watching coverage of the result on French television. Latour is making a theoretical point about how we envisage scale, but the paragraph is worth quoting, if only to afford a reflective pause on how our polity is constituted and reshaped using such apparently elementary connective technologies:

"Consider for instance this series of photos that show Alice voting in France for a general election. Go from the first to the last and try to decide which one is more local or more global than the other. The first, where Alice ponders the newspaper Le Monde to make up her mind about which party to vote for, cannot be said to be local simply because she is alone reading at her breakfast table. The same issue of this newspaper is read that day by millions. Alice is bombarded by a flood of clichés, arguments, columns, and opinions out of which she has to make up her own mind. But the last image that sums up the result cannot be said to be global either under the pretext that it's the "whole of France", that is summarized in one pie chart on television (with the surprising result that the left is winning). On the television inside Alice's apartment, this pie chart is a few centimetres wide. So, once we realize that none of the successive images in the photomontage can be said to be smaller or bigger than any other, the key feature of their connectedness becomes fully visible - though is not graspable on any single photograph!

Something is circulating here from the first to the last. In the opaque voting booth, Alice's opinion is transformed into a piece of paper certified by her signature and then placed by scrutinisers into a ballot box, where it is then ticked off as one anonymous dot in a tally whose sum is wired to the Ministry of the Interior's central bureau to be merged inside other double checked additions. What is the relationship been the "small" Alice and "France as a whole"? This path, laid down by this instrument, makes it physically possible to collect, through the circulation of paper technologies, a link between Alice and France whose exacting traceability has been slowly elaborated through two centuries of violent political history and contested voting reforms." Bruno Latour (2005) Reassembling the Social, p. 222.

While this aspect of elections excites me, I find the pervasive mendacity of our discourse and its hollow factiousness, however understandable from the partisan perspective, deeply dispiriting. On all sides, people engage in the ludicrous re-publication of party press releases. The Scotsman's Steamie blog seems primarily sustained these days by reprinting tales of Annabel Goldie tonguing a cone or Tavish visiting a creamery and arguing that an opponents policy is bunk. Blogging, it is not. NewsnetScotland has indulged in the same antics, publishing a series of only slightly re-configured Nationalist notices, laying into Labour. I'm all for gouging one's foes, where gouging seems indicated. However, much of this is without substantial comment, detailed critique - and worse - this committed political stupidity is wholly earnest, bereft of even the smallest tickle of humour.

Some bloggers prosper well during elections. I've often wondered why I feel a certain dread as electioneering approaches. Having given it a bit of thought, I think my reticence to great extent derives from the character of my party commitments. As someone writing about politics, it only seems right that I declare my allegiances, such as they are, prominently at the head of the page, so readers may consider themselves forewarned. Come elections, where the composition of the Scottish Parliament is at stake, I obviously wish to see the Scottish National Party romp to triumph. There is much of the ban and censure caught in the phrase there is an election to win. Much of the vexation of this is precisely because such conformity is not externally imposed. I suspect other writers in the Cinquième Etat who are properly unaligned do not feel these pressures. They are able to exercise a constant critique, uninterrupted by elections, continuously pointing out fallacies, stupidities, inadequacies wherever they detect them. Stuart Winton is an excellent Scots example of how well this universally distributed political cynicism can prosper. For the declared partisan, I find things are not so easy, and an election calls for a profound disruption in the ordinary habits of your political writing, assuming you aren't already an all-consuming "party man". With the imminent prospect of the election of a new parliament, all that is likely to change is the pitch of his fulminating loyalty, rather than calling for something of a mental re-orientation. I'm reminded of George Orwell's essay "Writers and the Leviathan", first published in 1948. It would be grotesque to suggest that the pressures discussed by Orwell exactly align with the contemporary political partisan. However, I find that there is much in Orwell's reflection, that remains directly pertinent for bloggers of whatever colour, who find themselves sharing some of my inchoate qualms about elections, writing honestly and independent-mindedly - and how these interlace with specific party ties. Interestingly, in this respect, bloggers strongly associated with a particular political party are unlike members of the press, who are at least theoretically (but often totally implausibly) inoculated with the idea that they are independent from advancing the Labour, Green, Liberal, Tory or Nationalist cause. Much more than journalists, we are directly exposed to struggles with our leviathans...

Excerpt from George Orwell, "Writers and the Leviathan" (1948)...

"To accept an orthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions. Take for instance the fact that all sensitive people are revolted by industrialism and its products, and yet are aware that the conquest of poverty and the emancipation of the working class demand not less industrialisation, but more and more. Or take the fact that certain jobs are absolutely necessary and yet are never done except under some kind of coercion. Or take the fact that it is impossible to have a positive foreign policy without having powerful armed forces. One could multiply examples. In every such case there is a conclusion which is perfectly plain but which can only be drawn if one is privately disloyal to the official ideology. The normal response is to push the question, unanswered, into a corner of one’s mind, and then continue repeating contradictory catchwords. One does not have to search far through the reviews and magazines to discover the effects of this kind of thinking.

I am not, of course, suggesting that mental dishonesty is peculiar to Socialists and left-wingers generally, or is commonest among them. It is merely that acceptance of ANY political discipline seems to be incompatible with literary integrity. This applies equally to movements like Pacifism and Personalism, which claim to be outside the ordinary political struggle. Indeed, the mere sound of words ending in — ism seems to bring with it the smell of propaganda. Group loyalties are necessary, and yet they are poisonous to literature, so long as literature is the product of individuals. As soon as they are allowed to have any influence, even a negative one, on creative writing, the result is not only falsification, but often the actual drying-up of the inventive faculties.

Well, then what? Do we have to conclude that it is the duty of every writer to “keep out of politics”? Certainly not! In any case, as I have said already, no thinking person can or does genuinely keep out of politics, in an age like the present one. I only suggest that we should draw a sharper distinction than we do at present between our political and our literary loyalties, and should recognise that a willingness to DO certain distasteful but necessary things does not carry with it any obligation to swallow the beliefs that usually go with them. When a writer engages in politics he should do so as a citizen, as a human being, but not AS A WRITER. I do not think that he has the right, merely on the score of his sensibilities, to shirk the ordinary dirty work of politics. Just as much as anyone else, he should be prepared to deliver lectures in draughty halls, to chalk pavements, to canvass voters, to distribute leaflets, even to fight in civil wars if it seems necessary. But whatever else he does in the service of his party, he should never write for it. He should make it clear that his writing is a thing apart. And he should be able to act co-operatively while, if he chooses, completely rejecting the official ideology. He should never turn back from a train of thought because it may lead to a heresy, and he should not mind very much if his unorthodoxy is smelt out, as it probably will be. Perhaps it is even a bad sign in a writer if he is not suspected of reactionary tendencies today, just as it was a bad sign if he was not suspected of Communist sympathies twenty years ago.

But does all this mean that a writer should not only refuse to be dictated to by political bosses, but also that he should refrain from writing ABOUT politics? Once again, certainly not! There is no reason why he should not write in the most crudely political way, if he wishes to. Only he should do so as an individual, an outsider, at the most an unwelcome guerilla on the flank of a regular army. This attitude is quite compatible with ordinary political usefulness. It is reasonable, for example, to be willing to fight in a war because one thinks the war ought to be won, and at the same time to refuse to write war propaganda. Sometimes, if a writer is honest, his writings and his political activities may actually contradict one another. There are occasions when that is plainly undesirable: but then the remedy is not to falsify one’s impulses, but to remain silent.

To suggest that a creative writer, in a time of conflict, must split his life into two compartments, may seem defeatist or frivolous: yet in practice I do not see what else he can do. To lock yourself up in an ivory tower is impossible and undesirable. To yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer. We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is. And most of us still have a lingering belief that every choice, even every political choice, is between good and evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think, get rid of this belief, which belongs to the nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the lesser, and there are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic. War, for example, may be necessary, but it is certainly not right or sane. Even a General Election is not exactly a pleasant or edifying spectacle. If you have to take part in such things — and I think you do have to, unless you are armoured by old age or stupidity or hypocrisy — then you also have to keep part of yourself inviolate. For most people the problem does not arise in the same form, because their lives are split already. They are truly alive only in their leisure hours, and there is no emotional connection between their work and their political activities. Nor are they generally asked, in the name of political loyalty, to debase themselves as workers. The artist, and especially the writer, is asked just that — in fact, it is the only thing that Politicians ever ask of him. If he refuses, that does not mean that he is condemned to inactivity. One half of him, which in a sense is the whole of him, can act as resolutely, even as violently if need be, as anyone else. But his writings, in so far as they have any value, will always be the product of the saner self that stands aside, records the things that are done and admits their necessity, but refuses to be deceived as to their true nature."