28 Jan 2014 00:35:40
The centenary of the first world war, "the war to end all wars", with its terrible tally of 16 million dead and 20 million wounded, and its contentious origins and outcomes, has recently seen renewed wrestling in the comfortable trenches of the commentariat. A motley crew that includes Michael Gove, the education secretary; Tristram Hunt, historian and Gove's shadow; comedian David Mitchell; Jeremy Paxman and refugees from Blackadder have been exercising their opinions about the causes and meaning of the four-year debacle that ended in nations paralysed by grief and no lasting peace, only a postponement of hostilities. As Marshal Foch remarked of the Treaty of Versailles, "This… is an armistice for 20 years." Sociologist Frank Furedi in First World War: Still No End in Sight is not focused on whether Britain fought a just war in defence of democracy and liberalism (main ally tsarist Russia? 40% of the British troops yet to have the vote?) or the merits or demerits of patriotism and the officer class sending Tommies "over the top" to certain death. Instead, he warns that there is a danger in treating the past mainly as a lamp to illuminate the present. Modern wars such as the global "war on terror" (recently renamed the "overseas contingency operation" by the American administration, adopting managerialism in a vain attempt to distract from the rising death count) and the wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan are viewed by many today as incomprehensible and unpopular, influenced by "contemporary attitudes of cynicism, apathy and mistrust of any cause or belief", Furedi writes. (Tell that to the young men and women leaving Britain to take up arms in Syria.) As a result, there is a concerted effort to pin the same label of incomprehensibility on 1914-18.
That is misguided, Furedi argues. The public showed "remarkable" support for the conflict at the outbreak of war, "because they believed that it would provide them with a cause that had true meaning" (and employment and food in the belly without much harm done – or so 15-year-old volunteers thought). "Many young people believed that this was a cause worth fighting and potentially even dying for."
What Furedi contests with brio, unlimited pessimism and references to an army of intellectuals that span the century, is that the first world war has never ended. It heralded the death rattle of empire, deference, white racial superiority and the docility of the masses. It fostered a fear of populism (rising again today) and, as the late Tony Judt reminds us in Ill Fares the Land, the first world war was followed by epidemics, revolutions, the failure of states, currency collapses, unemployment, dictatorship and fascism. Democracy, however, has proved resilient if battered.
Those seismic shifts, Furedi is not the first to argue, have influenced the way we think about our cultural and political life; our values or lack of them; our national identity and the draining away of trust in our institutions and notions of authority. "After the bitter experience of a century of conflicts," Furedi writes, "tackling the question of how to ensure that popular consent serves as the foundation for authority remains the question of our time."
Furedi's broad, stimulating and ambitious canvas is framed by his own politics. Self-described as a libertarian, he has roots in the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and is now a prominent figure in the Institute of Ideas (IoI). Furedi is prolific. Many of his books reflect the IoI's contrarian and anti-"problem-mongering" position. His books, built on convincing grains of truth, include Paranoid Parenting (too much of it), Therapy Culture (too much of it) and Politics of Fear (too much of it). Essentially the message is that the ordinary man and woman are becoming fearful, risk-averse, infantilised, bossed about by self-appointed experts at a cost to democracy, science and reason.
In Still No End in Sight, however, it is not problem-mongering that is the target for trenchant criticism but "the culture wars", lifestyle choices that delineate a traditionalists-versus-progressives civil war on "hot-button" issues such as abortion, homosexuality and marriage. Culture wars, he argues, have filled the vacuum created by the demise of ideologies and the exhaustion of left and right.
What Furedi terms "lifestyle" issues, however, may also personify an individual's politics; the personal is political. The values of a radical Islamist and how he may or may not gel with the values of an emancipated feminist secularist, both of whom are part of British citizenry, neither of whom may wish to trade off personal convictions, is not a concern about "segmented lifestyles" but part of a dynamic that – along with reshaping capitalism so that the social compact is infinitely fairer – are among the major issues of our democratic times. Yet Furedi concludes that we have to "consign cultural and lifestyle issues to the margins" and "re-politicise the ideal of democracy and public life" or risk violent conflict and war. That, surely, is as surreal as taking the bullets out of a gun and still squeezing the trigger to fire?
