As advanced societies are de-politicised, the changes are both subtle and spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesised in 1984. Democracy is now a rhetorical device. Peace is perpetual war. Global is imperial. The once hopeful concept of reform now means regression, even destruction. Austerity is the imposition of extreme capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich: an ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few. In the arts, hostility to political truth-telling is an article of bourgeois faith. Picassos red period, says an Observer headline, and why politics dont make good art. Consider this in a newspaper that promoted the bloodbath in Iraq as a liberal crusade. Picassos lifelong opposition to fascism is a footnote, just as Orwells radicalism has faded from the prize that appropriated his name. A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice. Among the insistent voices of consumer-feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described the arts of dominating other people... of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 08:11:24 +0000
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