Ours is an evangelical culture. So many people convinced that they’ve been saved by Jesus, cured by homeopathy or the laying on of hands, abducted by aliens or protected by angels seek public acknowledgement that their convictions are true. Imbued with messianic fervour, or simply seeking ‘validation’, they are not content to hoard the truth; they are compelled to share it and convert the unenlightened, relying on the force of their own intense emotions. Generally, the only proof offered for a fantastic belief is the passion it inspires.
WENDY KAMINER, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials (1999)
In September 1981, a few months after Ronald Reagan’s arrival in the White House, the University of Notre Dame Press published After Virtue, a short philosophical tract by the British academic Alasdair MacIntyre – and suddenly found that it had a bestseller on its hands, thanks to an ecstatic article in Newsweek magazine praising this ‘stunning new study of ethics’ which ‘projects a conservative revolution far more radical than any imagined by the men who rule America today’. As Newsweek reported, ‘His slogan, he quips in conversation, is “forward to the twelfth century” – but he’s not joking about the chaos and decay of modern society.’ MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment had been ‘a catastrophe’ for ethical discourse: by substituting its idea of universally available and necessary moral principles for older notions of virtue ordained by divine authority, and by abandoning religious teleology (the belief that there is an ultimate purpose in life), it had ushered in a ‘new dark age’ of barbarism and nihilism. ‘What, then,’ he asked, ‘is to be done in the face of such wholesale moral collapse?’ The answer, bizarrely, was to take refuge in medieval monastic orders such as the Benedictines.
What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond our frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St Benedict.
MacIntyre was a former Marxist, whose intense anti-liberalism facilitated his transfer of allegiance from Leon Trotsky to Thomas Aquinas. Ex-Trotskyists who have been ‘mugged by reality’ (in the words of one such apostate, Irving Kristol) usually become enthusiastic cheerleaders for liberal capitalism. Not so MacIntyre, who remained wholly unreconciled to modernity. The natural rights and self-evident truths proclaimed in the American declaration of independence were tantamount to ‘belief in witches and in unicorns’; Edmund Burke, a hero to most conservatives, was ‘an agent of positive harm’. Since writing After Virtue MacIntyre has formally converted to Catholicism, and continues to propose a revival of the Thomist tradition as the only way of ‘defeating’ Enlightenment liberalism.
This might sound like merely another lament from a nostalgic old grump who thinks the world is going to the dogs. But it clearly strikes a chord. In 1999 the Weekly Standard described Alasdair MacIntyre as ‘possibly the greatest moral philosopher of the last fifty years’, and After Virtue as ‘the most widely discussed book of philosophy in English – not just among philosophers, but among general readers across America’. Where he led, many other intellectuals have followed: conservatives, Marxists, post-modernists and pre-modernists have queued up to take a kick at the bruised ideas of the eighteenth century. The most vicious of these boot-boys is John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, who has published dozens of increasingly apocalyptic books and articles on the need to end the Enlightenment project forthwith. Whereas MacIntyre seeks sanctuary in twelfth-century monasteries, for Gray our only hope of salvation is to embrace Eastern mysticism: ‘Any prospect of cultural recovery from the nihilism that the Enlightenment has spawned may lie with non-Occidental peoples, whose task will then be in part that of protecting themselves from the debris cast up by Western shipwreck.’ Taoism seems to be his favoured creed but it is hard to interpret Gray’s prescriptions with any certainty, partly because of his wild scattergun style but mostly because he changes his mind so often. A line on the dust-jacket of Enlightenment’s Wake (1995), which says that the book ‘stakes out the elements of John Gray’s new position’, could just as well be appended to everything he writes. ‘One of the strange features of Gray’s writings’, an Australian commentator notes, ‘is that he frequently offers us criticisms of various positions which he himself seems to have held until fairly recently, but which are then characterised in the most pejorative of terms, and as if only a fool or a knave could hold them.’ Having been a long-haired socialist in 1968, in the 1970s he became a Thatcherite almost before Margaret Thatcher herself. His book Hayek on Liberty, published in 1984, was described by Friedrich von Hayek as ‘the first survey of my work which not only fully understands but is able to carry on my ideas beyond the point at which I left off’. Thatcher sought his advice, as did many of the new right-wing think-tanks in London and Washington. By the mid-1990s, however, he was denouncing his hero Hayek as a ‘neo-liberal ideologue’ whose creed elevating ‘the impersonal nexus of market exchange’ threatened the very fabric of human civilisation.
‘Whatever happened to John Gray?’ Margaret Thatcher asked the economic historian Lord Skidelsky a few years ago. ‘He used to be one of us.’ She might well have been puzzled. Gray’s Beyond the New Right (1993) offered a ‘radical critique’ of neo-liberalism ‘from a standpoint which I believe to be that of traditional conservatism … It is by returning to the homely truths of traditional conservatism that we are best protected from the illusions of ideology.’ But in Endgames (1997) he announced that ‘Tory politics has reached a dead end … There is and can be no coherent form of conservative thought, and no effective mode of conservative practice, in a late modern culture.’ The second edition of his book Liberalism (1995) warned that since the first edition in 1986 ‘the author’s views have changed significantly’. They have been in perpetual motion ever since: his political affiliation now is with the animal liberationists and the New Age wing of the Green movement. Liberalism, rationalism and all other manifestations of the Enlightenment spirit are discredited and dying, he says – and about time too.
The charge-sheet against the Enlightenment produced by Gray, MacIntyre and others seems formidably damning. One of its crimes was to promote the idea of universal values – a camouflage, if the critics are to be believed, for a brutal imperialistic project to subjugate other cultures and impose Western hegemony. But of all the likely suspects who could be arraigned for this offence, why single out the Enlightenment philosophers, who actually made some effort to understand distant peoples and free them from subjugation? See, for example, Voltaire’s denunciation of slavery in Candide, or the Abbé Raynal’s tract Histoire philosophique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, one of the earliest and most powerful polemics against the slave trade: the Enlightenment provided much of the political language and principles that were to be used by anti-slavery campaigners in the nineteenth century, when the immorality of slave-owning became commonly – though not universally – accepted. Those who routinely deplore the ‘imperialism’ of Enlightenment attitudes cannot have read Reynal, Diderot, Kant, Condorcet or Adam Smith. ‘When America, the Negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape and so forth were discovered,’ Kant wrote in Towards Perpetual Peace, ‘they were, to [the Europeans], countries belonging to no one, since they counted the inhabitants as nothing.’ For these authors, moral universalism was not incommensurate with cultural pluralism. Quite the opposite: an insistence on universal standards of morality, freedom and human dignity was what inspired their defence of indigenous peoples against invaders who trashed ‘inferior’ cultures. As Diderot complained, ‘the Spaniard, the first to be thrown up by the waves on to the shores of the New World, thought he had no duty to people who did not share his colour, customs or religion’.
No doubt the Enlightenment’s give-and-take with other cultures was sometimes tainted by what is now called Orientalism – a fondness for exotic stereotypes – even if these were usually positive rather than negative. One thinks of Voltaire’s reverence for the wisdom and decency of Confucian civilisation (‘the best that the world has ever seen’), or the sarcastic observations on Parisians and their strange customs from the sophisticated Persian travellers Usbek and Rica in Montesquieu’s novel Persian Letters. (‘This king [Louis XV] is a great magician … If there are only a million crowns in the exchequer, and he needs two million, all he needs to do is persuade them that one crown is worth two, and they believe it.’) But in contrast with the eighteenth century, as the historian Robert Darnton has pointed out, other ages were all take and no give:
Byron and Kipling, Delacroix and Ingres, Verdi and Puccini outdid the artists of the eighteenth century by far in creating exotic Orientals. Moreover, the exoticising began long before the Enlightenment, and it often took the form of demonising. Cruel Saracens, Oriental despots, and ‘têtes de Turcs’ have proliferated in the Western imagination since the early wars against the Ottoman Empire. Older prejudices date from the Crusades. They developed over centuries, accompanied, it must be said, by Eastern prejudices against the West … To pin Orientalism on the Enlightenment is to confuse the thought of a few intellectuals in the eighteenth century with the entire course of Western civilisation.
But the Enlightenment stands accused of even more heinous crimes than Orientalism: its cavalry charge against mystification and unreason is said to have led to the fanaticism of the French revolutionary terror, the Nazi gas-chambers and the Soviet Gulag. In their celebrated work on ‘the dialectic of Enlightenment’, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that, by replacing myth with science and treating the natural world as an object to be dominated and exploited, modernist thinkers created a repressive new system of power relations, uninhibited by any external morality, in which man himself acquired the characteristics of God. They cite the Marquis de Sade as a typical specimen of ‘the bourgeois individual freed from tutelage’, revelling in barbarism and cruelty. The merciless tendency exemplified by de Sade, and later celebrated in Nietzsche’s worship of the will-to-power and the super-man, reached its logical culmination in Adolf Hitler. Thus, by a ‘negative dialectic’, the supposedly progressive Enlightenment gave birth to genocidal tyranny.
One should make allowance for the fact that Adorno and Horkheimer were refugees from Nazi Germany, but their dialectic is so outrageously flawed that polite disagreement is impossible. Nietzsche was indeed Hitler’s favourite philosopher, but he was not a philosopher of Enlightenment: he belonged to the Romantic tradition, a reaction against demythologising rationalism. Hitler was a fanatical nationalist, a man of blood and soil – whereas the philosophes, in Robert Darnton’s words, ‘lived in a Republic of Letters that was truly cosmopolitan. It had neither borders nor police.’ More astonishing still, in a book which purports to debunk the Enlightenment, is the fact that few of its most prominent thinkers earn a mention. (The Marquis de Sade is, to be sure, an interesting figure, but scarcely a representative one.) The omission is understandable, if dishonest: Adorno and Horkheimer could not discuss Voltaire or Diderot or Rousseau without conceding that they opposed despotism and argued passionately for justice, liberty and respect for the individual. Why, after all, are we so shocked by Nazi atrocities? Because they are an outrage against human rights. And who developed this concept of human rights, which has been proclaimed again and again to the great benefit of mankind, whether by the American founding fathers or Amnesty International? To quote Robert Darnton again:
True, the Enlightenment was time-bound as well as culture-bound. It took place in a world where some causes of the twentieth century remained unthinkable … The point is not to make an inventory of ideas, crossing some off the list and adding others. It is to adopt an intellectual position that will serve when lines are drawn and one’s back is to the wall. When challenged to condemn torture in Argentina, war in Vietnam, or racism in the United States, where can we make our stand if not on principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen?
By the end of the twentieth century, however, the reassertion of these values had become increasingly unfashionable. There were countless indications of a general retreat from reason – the search for millennial portents, the revival of interest in Nostradamus (a bestseller after 11 September 2001), the appearance of horoscopes in even serious broadsheets, the flood of books about angels, fairies, Inca secrets, Egyptian rituals and secret Bible Codes. A coven of witches protesting against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle at the end of 1999 carried banners advocating salvation through wizardry, inspired by the Harry Potter novels: ‘Wake Up, Muggles!’
The new irrationalism is an expression of despair by people who feel impotent to improve their lives and suspect that they are at the mercy of secretive, impersonal forces, whether these be the Pentagon or invaders from Mars. Political leaders accept it as a safe outlet for dissent, fulfilling much the same function that Marx attributed to religion – the heart of a heartless world, the opium of the people. Far better for the powerless to seek solace in crystals, ley-lines and the myth of Abraham than in actually challenging the rulers, or the social and economic system over which they preside. Ever since idealist philosophers such as Hegel and Schopenhauer denounced the demythologising spirit of modernity, empirical analysis has always been opposed by those who fear that the stripping away of illusions can only end in miserable disillusion.
But superstition is not the only enemy of rational thought and action. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though often bracketed with other founders of the Enlightenment because of his progressive politics, may also be regarded as the first Romantic because of his exaltation of feeling over reason. Herder, another figurehead of the early Counter-Enlightenment, once said that ‘I am not here to think, but to be, feel, live.’ The common portayal of Enlightenment thinkers as cold, bloodless rationalists who wished to strip the universe of colour and passion is a grotesque caricature: the historian Peter Gay has pointed out that this generalisation would hold ‘only if we disregarded the philosophes’ defence of imagination, their pioneering analysis of passion, their bold creation of literary forms, and their almost unanimous infatuation with [Samuel] Richardson’s sensibility’. Nevertheless, they did appreciate the danger of continually allowing the heart to rule the head. Just as the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century reacted against their apparently chilly and soulless logic by asserting the primacy of fantasy and emotion, so the new Counter-Enlightenment is often characterised by intense sentimentality as well as metaphysical credulity – both at the expense of reasoned consideration. The presidency of Ronald Reagan has rightly been described as ‘the era of good feelings’. His successor, George Bush, never understood how to exploit the public’s emotional volatility, which may well explain his departure from the White House after only one term. Then came Bill Clinton, the master of empathy – a talent that won him huge popularity even after eight years of deception and dishonour.
Alas for the Democrats, Clinton’s designated successor, Al Gore, had the misfortune to be a stiff and unemotional politician in an age when voters’ hearts counted for more than their minds. He mocked his own woodenness, but every so often – every four years, to be precise, as an election loomed – he would try to jettison the reputation with a carefully rehearsed exercise in heart-tugging. In his vice-presidential acceptance speech at the 1992 Democratic national convention in New York, Gore described a car accident that nearly killed his son, Albert: ‘Tipper [Mrs Gore] and I watched as he was thrown 30 feet in the air and scraped another 20 feet on the pavement after he hit the ground. I ran to his side and called his name, but he was limp and still, without breath or pulse. His eyes were open with the empty stare of death, and we prayed, the two of us, there in the gutter, with only my voice.’ The experience ‘changed me forever’, he informed the moist-eyed delegates: ‘When you’ve seen your six-year-old son fighting for his life, you realise that some things matter a lot more than winning. You lose patience with the lazy assumption of so many in politics that we can always just muddle through.’ Had they been in a fit state for ratiocination, delegates might have wondered how the second sentence related to the first, and what any of it actually meant: happily, however, they were far too busy sobbing and sighing to demand anything as vulgar as coherence – which was, of course, Gore’s very purpose in including this pointless parable. In the era of solipsism and subliminal marketing, rhetoric had been supplanted by mood music: how people ‘felt’ was far more important than how they thought.
Four years later, at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, Al Gore was preparing for a second outing as Clinton’s running-mate but also looking ahead to the 2000 campaign – when, if all went according to plan, he would be the Democratic nominee in his own right. Hence the increasingly urgent need, as the Washington Post put it, ‘both to move his audience and provide a more complex glimpse into his personality and life’. The tale of little Albert’s brush with death might not be quite so effective at a second hearing, so this time Gore summoned up the ghost of his sister Nancy Gore Hunger, who had died of lung cancer in 1984 at the age of forty-six.
Not since Dickens re-enacted the death of Little Nell had an American audience witnessed anything quite like it. Nancy – whom Gore loved ‘more than life itself – started smoking at thirteen and had a lung removed thirty years later. ‘Her husband, Frank, and all of us who loved her so much tried to get her to stop smoking. Of course she should have. But she couldn’t.’ Then the cancer returned and her family took turns to sit beside her hospital bed. ‘By then her pain was nearly unbearable, and as a result they used very powerful painkillers. Eventually, it got so bad they had to use such heavy doses that she could barely retain consciousness … She looked up and from out of that haze, her eyes focused tensely right at me. She couldn’t speak, but I felt clearly I knew she was forming a question: Do you bring me hope? But all I could do was to say back to her, with all the gentleness in my heart, “I love you”. And then I knelt by her bed and held her hand. And in a very short time her breathing became laboured and then she breathed her last breath.’ While tears dribbled down the cheeks of many delegates in the Chicago convention hall – and, no doubt, many more watching the speech live on network television – Gore came to the moral of his ghastly fable: ‘Tomorrow morning, another thirteen-year-old girl will start smoking. I love her, too. Three thousand young people in America will start smoking tomorrow. One thousand of them will die a death not unlike my sister’s, and that is why, until I draw my last breath, I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking.’
Applause for what the Washington Post called ‘a powerful and personal story of pain and suffering’ was almost unanimous (except for the right-wing wag who suggested that ‘Tipper must be nervously eyeing the gorgeous go-go Gore girls and wondering on whose head the next quadrennial family tragedy will fall’), and no pundit was tasteless enough to question his sincerity. It was only several weeks later that one or two newspapers exposed the obvious flaws in Gore’s epiphany. In 1988, four years after his sister’s death, Gore had spoken to an audience of tobacco farmers while on the stump in North Carolina. ‘Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco,’ he boasted. ‘I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I’ve put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I’ve hoed it. I’ve dug in it. I’ve sprayed it, I’ve chopped it, I’ve shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.’ No mention there of his heart-and-soul struggle against the evil weed. Another four years on, in 1992, Gore’s doom-mongering book Earth in the Balance warned of the perils of addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, even overwork and TV-watching, but omitted any reference to the addictive leaf that was cultivated so profitably for decades on the Gore family farm in Tennessee. During that year’s election campaign, both Bill Clinton and Al Gore accepted financial contributions from the tobacco lobby. How could he reconcile all that with his supposedly sacred duty to Nancy’s memory, and to all those thirteen-year-old girls whom he loved dearly and wished to save? When a reporter eventually had the chance to ask him, Gore replied: ‘I felt the numbness that prevented me from integrating into all aspects of my life the implications of what that tragedy really meant. We are in the midst of a profound shift in the way we approach issues. I really do believe that in our politics and in our personal lives, we are seeing an effort to integrate our emotional lives in a more balanced fashion.’
A skilled parodist would struggle to produce a more perfect specimen of the modern language of feeling. ‘Nobody has mastered the feminisation of political discourse more thoroughly than Gore,’ the conservative journalist Mark Steyn wrote. ‘Even his habit of speaking. Very. Slowly. Seems to play well with the “soccer moms”, reminding them of a concerned grade-school teacher taking the time to explain to little Johnny why eating too much candy is bad for you.’
Yet in this, as in all other contests, Gore would surely have to yield first place to Bill Clinton, the empathy-junkie who allegedly read John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus more than twenty times. As a sexually aggressive Alpha male, Clinton might seem an unlikely Venus-dweller; but by appropriating the old feminist phrase ‘the personal is political’ and turning it on its head, he managed to disguise self-indulgence as a progressive politics for the Oprah-watching generation. Mark Steyn pointed out that ‘the new sentimentalised, feminised, Venusian media-digestible politics is … a drag-queen travesty of what the women’s movement intended’, but it seemed to work. President Clinton lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky (‘that woman’, in his contemptuous phrase), and sought to rescue his own reputation by traducing hers. Twenty or thirty years earlier, feminists would have known what to make of a man who behaved like this. Yet throughout the Lewinsky saga and beyond, Clinton enjoyed the support of Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Erica Jong. No less remarkable was the willingness of so many men of God to accept Clinton’s invitation to a televised ‘prayer breakfast’ at the White House immediately after his confession of mendacity – an event at which the disgraced chief executive sought once again to redeem himself by blubbing about his grief and hurt and regret, while showing no actual contrition whatever. Clinton – one must say it again – was the most powerful man on earth, a sexual predator and alleged rapist; a man of no discernible moral scruples who in 1992 interrupted his primary campaign and hastened back to Arkansas to execute a brain-damaged black man, Rickey Ray Rector, solely to forestall any suspicion that he was ‘soft’. (A year later, the novelist Toni Morrison described Clinton as ‘our first black president’.) In August 1998 he bombed a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan to distract attention from Lewinsky’s testimony to the Starr inquiry, which was due to begin that very day. Despite all this and more, he sought to portray himself as a victim. And many less exalted fellow-victims loved him for it: opinion polls found that if Clinton had been permitted to run for a third term, even after all the scandals and skulduggery, he’d have won with ease.
Here again, he proved himself a truly emblematic figure – representing an age in which even the most debauched and dissipated millionaire rock-stars were canonised after their inevitable deaths, and celebrities felt inadequate unless they had serious ‘problems’ that could be displayed to the public’s empathetic gaze. In her 1991 autobiography, Ali MacGraw claimed to be a ‘recovering alcoholic’ and gave a lengthy account of her spell in the Betty Ford clinic. ‘The only flaw in this script’, Lynn Barber noted in the Independent on Sunday, ‘is that nobody who knows Ali MacGraw believes that she was ever an alcoholic. Her friends say they never saw her drinking; Bob Evans, her ex-husband and still a good friend, says the whole idea is absurd.’ When Barber asked about her consumption, MacGraw said that she sometimes had two shots of tequila in an evening and once even drank a whole bottle and a half of red wine, but often went for months without a drink. ‘So how could she be an alcoholic?’ Barber wondered. ‘Perhaps in California you can achieve a sort of Zen alcoholism without the consumption of alcohol. MacGraw keeps saying that she “behaved alcoholically” whether she was drinking or not.’ MacGraw’s friend Joan Juliet Buck suggested in Vanity Fair that the real purpose of her sojourn in the clinic was to reconcile herself to the fact that she was no longer a movie star. For actors who found their fame dwindling, the smart career move was to check into Betty Ford and then write a confessional autobiography about it.
In Britain, the undisputed champion of implausible selfpity was Lady Diana Spencer. At the time of her engagement to Prince Charles in 1981 she was just another dim, roundfaced Sloaney girl of the kind you could see on almost every street in Pimlico, Kensington or Earl’s Court, clad in the unprepossessing uniform that prompted some observers to liken her, cruelly but accurately, to a stewardess from Air Bulgaria. By the time of her funeral sixteen years later she was routinely if ludicrously described as one of the most beautiful women in the world, and the most saintly. (‘Critical judgment musters no lustre beside the sheen of global celebrity, and royal celebrity at that,’ the philosopher Glen Newey wrote. ‘Imagine Diana’s life as a comparably talentless prole – a single mother in Gateshead, say – and you get the picture.’) More implausibly still, the simpering princess transformed herself into a feminist heroine with her 1995 appearance on the BBC’s Panorama: staring nervously at the interviewer through smudgily kohl-rimmed eyes, she spoke of her betrayal by the man she adored, Major James Hewitt, and by the prince she married. Elaine Showalter hailed her as ‘one of the great success stories of contemporary psychotherapy’.
Not everyone accepted the invitation to share her pain. ‘That Diana’s therapised victim-speak could turn her into a feminist role-model seems like a bad joke,’ the literary critic Linda Holt complained. ‘But it is the result of the way feminism – as a movement and ideology – has fragmented and become bound up in a cultural backlash against its original political project. Much of what has been called “victim feminism” has been absorbed into mainstream culture, shorn of its political context, no more than a licence for rampant subjectivity … In this “new feminism” even flamboyant consumerism, as exemplified by Diana’s pursuit of fashion and beauty, can be celebrated as an emancipatory choice.’ Plenty of Fleet Street commentators shared Holt’s distaste, though for different reasons, and continued to deride her as a spoilt and manipulative little vixen until the very eve of her death.
All that changed with the car crash in a Parisian tunnel in the early hours of 31 August 1997 – so much so that the demise of Mother Teresa a few days later was all but eclipsed. Overnight, the ‘simpering Bambi narcissist’ became not only the loveliest woman of the century but also the Queen of Hearts, the Nabob of Sob. According to Elton John, singing his heart out in Westminster Abbey while mixing metaphors with glorious abandon, she was also England’s rose, a candle that never faded with the sunset when the rain set in (as candles so often do) but strode off across England’s greenest hills, its footprints preserved for eternity. The leader of the Conservative Party, William Hague, proposed that Heathrow be renamed Diana Airport without delay. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, wondered if the anniversary of her death should henceforth be a public holiday, Diana Day. But the prime minister effortlessly outdid them all with his instant oxymoronic soundbite about ‘the People’s Princess’, and his hilariously hammy reading of a passage from Corinthians at her funeral service. Those commentators who praised Tony Blair for ‘capturing the mood of the nation’ had unintentionally stumbled on exactly the right verb: when he dubbed her the People’s Princess, at 10.30 on the Sunday morning, most of the nation had scarcely taken in the news from Paris, still less transmuted its reaction into a ‘mood’. (There was, to be sure, sadness and shock at a life cut short; but many viewers must also have wrestled uncomfortably with the knowledge that only a few days earlier, studying the pictures of Diana cavorting with a dodgy playboy on Mohamed Fayed’s yacht, they had derided her as a hedonistic flibbertigibbet.) Blair’s pre-emptive tribute set the tone for the mourning, foreclosing any more measured assessment – and, as an American writer noticed, subliminally offered his own Christian decency and choirboy countenance as claim on the virtue represented by the deceased.
On that Sunday afternoon I was telephoned by a neighbour, a ferociously conservative columnist on the Daily Mail: ‘I can’t bear much more of this. Fancy a drink in the pub?’ He had been given a week’s holiday from the paper after informing the editor that he couldn’t participate in the national ululation and genuflection; having watched several hours of hyperbolic homage on TV, he was beginning to fear that he might be the only sane person left in the country.
The obvious solution, to flee abroad for the next few months, would have offered no escape. In France, the publishers Descartes rushed out Diana Crash, a collection of essays by intellectuals such as Régis Debray and (inevitably) Jean Baudrillard. The princess’s funeral was carried live on all American networks, after a week in which Diana had been the sole topic of conversation on all US chat-shows. For a front-page story on 13 September, the New York Times interviewed forty psychotherapists in New York and its suburbs, of whom only two said that their female patients hadn’t talked about the princess. Tellingly, both were men. The Times reported that many women in therapy.
were stunned by the power of their reaction to her death, unable to talk of anything else, obsessed with reading every word and watching every newscast, and dismayed that the men in their life hadn’t a clue what so moved them.
‘She’s a magnet for all their issues, a reflection of them writ large,’ said Steven Tuber, a clinical psychologist and director of the doctoral program in psychology at City University of New York. He was one of scores of therapists who called Diana – at once frail and beautiful, flawed and grand – a perfect transference symbol, a Rorschach test, a blank screen on which women could not resist projecting their fantasies and fears.
Even women who disdain the celebrity culture, who would never confess to reading People magazine or watching Life Styles of the Rich and Famous, devoted entire 50-minute hours and hundreds of hard-earned dollars to dissecting the parts of Diana’s life that resonated for them. ‘She spoke to their woundedness and to their battle to be heard and to be loved,’ said Brenda Berger, a clinical psychologist in New York City and Larchmont, N.Y.
As several therapists pointed out, ‘men didn’t get it’. Dr Edgar A. Levenson of the William Alanson White Institute for psychoanalytic training said that while women considered her ‘a member of the family’, his male patients dismissed the event with a brusque ‘It’s too bad she got killed.’ In the era of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, this was of course interpreted as further proof of male insensitivity, an inability to cope with intense emotion and self-revelation. But was ‘it’s too bad she got killed’ really a less mature or reasonable reaction than that of New Yorkers who (in the words of Dr Levenson) ‘grieved as if it was their own life’?
In Britain, supposedly the epicentre of grief, there were many women and men who declined to succumb to Diarrhoea: in the days after the crash, the BBC switchboard was inundated with calls from viewers demanding less coverage. But the few who managed to make their voices heard publicly found themselves treated as pariahs or worse. Private Eye magazine was banned from branches of W. H. Smith for daring to mock the humbug of people who, while deploring ‘media intrusion’ into the princess’s life (and death), maintained a voracious appetite for every prurient word and titillating picture. Even the Queen incurred the wrath of the tabloid lynchmob for not emoting openly and extravagantly enough: ‘Show Some Heart, Ma’am!’, ‘Your People Are Grieving’, ‘What About the Boys, Ma’am?’ Among both the lowbrows and highbrows of the media – and the even higher brows of academe, which hosted dozens of jargon-strewn conferences and seminars on Diana – the hysteria was astonishingly contagious. The sober, serious Independent, thitherto famous for ignoring all royal stories, printed reams of drivel, including this effusion from its columnist Suzanne Moore the morning after the princess’s death:
Icons do not die. Diana’s afterlife is only just starting. Forever frozen at the height of her beauty, Diana, like Marilyn, that other troubled goddess, will not age. She will continue to glow, forever young, forever vital, in the hearts of those she touched. For the pop princess, the people’s princess, the media princess understood the power of touch, the language of intimacy, of a hug, a gesture that was always more eloquent than mere words.
Note the unexamined assumption that her status as a pop princess and media icon somehow confirmed her talent for intimacy, rather as if a facility for writing Hallmark-card verses might prove that one understood the secrets of the human heart. Two weeks after the event, under the headline ‘New Britain’, contributors to the Observer celebrated the Dianafication of Britain: the feminist psychotherapist Susie Orbach interpreted the Floral Revolution outside Kensington Palace as proof that we were ‘growing up as a nation’; to the novelist A. L. Kennedy it represented a new ‘emotional maturity’; the paper’s editor Will Hutton – radical social democrat and republican – claimed that the collective genuflection before a dead aristocrat showed that the British were ‘freeing ourselves from the reins of the past’.
One man told the BBC that he had cried far more at Diana’s funeral than at that of his own father eight years earlier. Was this, too, evidence of ‘emotional maturity’? Or proof that the outpouring of emotion was not so much genuine love or grief as what Shelley called ‘The desire of the moth for the star / Of the night for the morrow / The devotion to something afar / From the sphere of our sorrow’? For many months after the event, it was treasonous even to pose the question. In April 1998 Professor Anthony O’Hear of Bradford University suddenly achieved tabloid notoriety by writing a short article about the Diana phenomenon in a collection of essays published by the right-wing Social Affairs Unit. ‘There is no doubt that she did quite a lot of good both for individuals and for the causes with which she was associated,’ he acknowledged. ‘There was something touching in her reaching out to the socially excluded …’ Nor had the grieving crowds been hysterical or deranged: ‘They were, in fact, quiet, orderly and in demeanour dignified.’ All he ventured to suggest was that the reaction to Princess Diana lacked a sense of proportion – a point amply confirmed by the reaction to his own modest heresy. O’Hear was attacked by the Daily Mirror as a ‘rat-faced little loser’, described as a ‘desiccated calculating machine’ by Lord St John of Fawsley (a castle-creeping royal sycophant often nicknamed Lord Cringe-on-all-Foursly) and dismissed as an ‘old-fashioned snob’ by Tony Blair, who was visiting the Middle East at the time. Why would a British prime minister feel obliged to interrupt crucial diplomatic business to attack an eight-page essay written by an obscure academic for a little-known think-tank? The pillorying of O’Hear, like the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass, appeared to confirm that he had discovered an intolerable truth.
A Guardian editorial argued that the Social Affairs Unit ‘emerge as a slightly fogeyish bunch’. And yet, perversely, O’Hear was also criticised for not being fogeyish enough. ‘The professor is right, of course, in his wider point that there is a powerful streak of sentimentality in the British character,’ wrote Dominic Lawson, one of the princess’s friends. ‘But he is startlingly wrong in thinking that there is anything new in it. The British have been this way before, and at a time of greatness rather than of decadence.’ Readers of Dickens will know that there was indeed plenty of mawkishness in nineteenth-century England: as the historian G. M. Young recorded in his classic Portrait of an Age, it was a period when ministers often wept at the dinner table and ‘the sight of an infant school could reduce a civil servant to a passion of tears’. But these lachrymose performances were often little more than a pose: some Victorians deliberately smudged the ink on letters of condolence, sprinkling water over the page to simulate the tears they could not summon. Nevertheless, according to Lawson’s interpretation, sentimentality was a grand old national tradition that should be cherished by true conservatives.
The ‘language of feeling’ first entered British discourse in the mid-eighteenth century through the novels of Laurence Sterne and Samuel Richardson, and the moral philosophy of David Hume. Sterne played it strictly for laughs, fearing that if he ever took anything seriously he would sink into a quicksand of melancholy. Richardson, who enjoyed a good blub, preferred to explore the ‘feminine sensibility’ of sighing and swooning. Hume’s purpose was to examine the tension between passion and reason. In spite of their differences, however, all these authors regarded sentimentality as a cure for solitude – hence the title of John Mullan’s excellent book on the subject, Sentiment and Sociability. ‘The passions are so contagious’, Hume wrote in his Treatise of Human Nature, ‘that they pass with the greatest facility from one person to another, and produce correspondent movement in all human breasts.’ This is precisely what happened in the late summer of 1997. Far from being signs of ‘greatness’ or emotional maturity, the periodic swellings of emotion in England over the past couple of centuries were the anguished pleas of a lonely and atomised populace, desperate for company. What fascinated many foreign visitors in London at the time of the princess’s funeral was the obvious yearning for an excuse – any excuse – to talk to complete strangers without embarrassment. ‘We have Independence Day and Thanksgiving,’ one American said, ‘but I suppose you don’t have many occasions when you can get together as a nation.’ In the last years of the twentieth century, absurdly and pathetically, Britons’ only such opportunity was the death of a pampered princess – whom they were then forced to beatify, in defiance of all reason, simply to justify their own rational desires.
‘When they go on about fake sentimentality in relation to Princess Diana, people really felt that,’ Tony Blair protested. ‘Why is it fake?’ But O’Hear never said it was. He emphasised that the emotion was spontaneous and genuine –‘misdirected maybe, as in the case of the man who said that Diana’s death meant more to him than that of his parents, and, in that sense, irrational, but it was not insincere or superficial. Whatever it was people felt, they really felt it.’ In his study of eighteenth-century feelings, John Mullan argues that sentimental passion and sympathy offered ‘a more inclusive vocabulary of social coherence’ than politics could provide. This turned out to be equally true of the late twentieth century. During the 1980s politics was dominated by somebody who insisted that ‘there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families’; by 1997 Britain was governed by a Labour prime minister who regarded comradeship and collective association as anachronisms that should be excluded from the political lexicon. Was it any wonder that so many people clung to the memory of ‘the Diana effect’, just as an earlier generation tried to revive the spirit of the Blitz or Dunkirk? If a large throng of demonstrators had stopped the traffic to express their solidarity with a victimised trade unionist whom they had never met, Blair would have been quick to condemn it as ‘unlawful secondary action’. To take to the streets on behalf of a victimised princess, however, was quite permissible, not least as a distraction from the vacuous inadequacy of contemporary politics: far better to have a mass emote than a mass debate. ‘Grief is a vital safety valve,’ the Sun commented eight months after the princess’s funeral, accidentally giving the game away. It is difficult if not impossible to weep and think at the same time. And so, as the Sun cheerfully exhorted its readers: ‘Keep grieving.’ The Observer columnist Euan Ferguson viewed this orgy of narcissistic emoting as part of ‘the Liverpudlianisation of Britain … [which] turned us into a country that fills its gutters with tears for girls we’ve never met and scrawls mawkish thank-yous to the most privileged woman this land has ever known’.
The arguments about the merits or dangers of unbridled emotionalism produced some strange political bedfellows. Several anti-monarchists hastened to defend the Queen against the belligerent indignation of those who wanted her to abandon the stiff upper lip and behave more like a guest on the Jerry Springer show. (‘This was the expression of “feeling” at its worst,’ one complained. ‘There was something very unpleasant about the way in which the royal family was bullied and hounded for not displaying emotion in the way in which the tabloids approved; and I say that as a convinced republican.’) Just as conservative pundits savaged the right-wing Professor O’Hear, so allegedly progressive feminist writers such as Linda Grant and Beatrix Campbell turned on liberals and socialists who declined to join the great Diana blubfest, scorning them as ‘elitists’ who couldn’t cope with feeling. This provoked a spirited riposte from Professor Elizabeth Wilson in New Left Review:
In the case of Diana’s death ‘the Left’ could be attacked also because socialism was a product of the Enlightenment that it is now fashionable to demonise as a terroristic project: there never was ‘reason’, there was only a different form of domination masquerading as rational. Thus grief for Diana privileges the values of feeling over reason and is therefore a good, whereas ideas associated with socialism, such as justice and equality, make a fatal claim to rationality and are therefore bad.
Into this political vacuum of thought step the twin figures of Tony Blair and Princess Diana. And, just as ‘Candle in the Wind’ reduces the whole complex story of Diana to one single, easy sob, so the myth of the ‘People’s Princess’ condenses the whole complex political challenge of our times into one poignant moment of regret without real change.
In his reply to Professor O’Hear, Tony Blair said that ‘Diana’s power is born out of emotion, and there’s nothing wrong with that – I’m an emotional person too.’ Only a week or two later the British tabloids tracked down Mary Bell, who committed a notorious child-murder back in the 1960s. Although she had served her sentence and subsequently lived in apparently blameless anonymity with her daughter, the press chose this moment to hound her out of her house and into protective custody – with the blessing of the prime minister and his home secretary, whose backing for the campaign tipped several gallons of petrol on to a moral panic that was already dangerously ablaze. A few days later, on a TV chat-show hosted by the right-wing rabble-rouser Richard Littlejohn (England’s answer to Rush Limbaugh), a man who dared to suggest that lynch-law was a bad idea found himself howled down and threatened by the studio audience. When a woman on the same programme revealed that she had shot dead two men whom she suspected of paedophilia, she was given a thunderous ovation.
All this was merely a curtain-raiser for the madness that swept the nation in the summer of 2000, when the News of the World announced that it would publish the whereabouts of every paedophile in Britain. ‘There are 110,000 proven paedophiles in the UK,’ it declared. ‘Today we start by identifying the first of these offenders but we make a pledge that we will not stop until all 110,000 are named and shamed. Week in, week out, we will add to our record …’ Although the newspaper did warn that ‘our campaign will be counter-productive if it provokes any display of animosity to those we name’, its editorial began with this ringing battle-cry: ‘There must be no hiding place for the evil perverts who prey on our children … We are taking the first step to publish the names and addresses.’ The consequences were all too predictable: within days, lynch-mobs were rampaging through dozens of British towns – smashing windows, setting cars alight and screaming threats through the letterboxes of anybody who had a vaguely similar name to someone once rumoured to be a child-molester. (A Private Eye cartoon showed a man running from one such mob, pleading ‘But I’m a paediatrician!’ As ever, reality caught up with satire: shortly afterwards a paediatrician in Wales fled her home after being menaced by illiterate News of the World readers.) Throughout all this mayhem, neither the emotional Tony Blair nor any of his colleagues was prepared to condemn the newspaper’s incitement to ochlocracy: the Home Office minister Paul Boateng daringly opined that the News of the World’s behaviour was ‘unhelpful’ – but then praised the paper for making ‘an important contribution to the debate’.
Many people remember Lord Macaulay’s famous line: ‘We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.’ Few, however, have read the essay in which it appears, a review of Thomas Moore’s Life of Byron from 1831. In general, Macaulay wrote, scandals are discussed for a day and then forgotten. ‘But once in every six or seven years our virtue becomes outrageous. We cannot suffer the laws of religion and decency to be violated. We must make a stand against vice … Accordingly some unfortunate man, in no respect more depraved than hundreds whose offences have been treated with lenity, is singled out as an expiatory sacrifice.’ As Macaulay argued, it is right and desirable that public opinion should condemn vices. ‘But it should be directed against them uniformly, steadily and temperately, not by sudden fits and starts. There should be one weight and one measure … It is good that a certain portion of disgrace should constantly attend on certain bad actions. But it is not good that the offenders should merely have to stand the risks of a lottery of infamy.’ Or, conversely, a lottery of sanctity (as with the Princess of Wales), which can be just as oppressively authoritarian in its consequences for those who fail to cheer the winner.
These periodical fits of hysteria are easy enough to incite but far harder to subdue. ‘Men, it has been well said, think in herds,’ the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay wrote in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published more than 150 years ago; ‘it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.’ The need to temper instinct with reason, and find a harmony between individual and social needs, has long preoccupied thinkers who (unlike Tony Blair) appreciate that governance by raw emotion is tantamount to tyranny. In the eighteenth century, Bishop Butler argued that human nature was ‘not merely a system of impulses … but a system in which some springs of action are naturally governing and regulative, while others are naturally submissive to regulation’. The importance of balancing what Butler called Universal Reason and Egoistic Reason, or Conscience and Self-Love, is also emphasised in Pope’s Essay on Man:
Two principles in human nature reign;
Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain;
Nor this a good, nor that a bad we call,
Each works its end, to move or govern all.
The emotional populism of modern politicians – as manifested in Al Gore’s lachrymose convention speeches, Bill Clinton’s televised prayer breakfasts and Tony Blair’s promotion of the Diana cult – may seem to be a form of collective experience. In truth, however, by asserting the primacy of feeling over reason, of the personal over the political, it stands revealed as nothing more than a disguised version of self-love.