Childhood's End A review of "Escaping From Childishness: The Need For a Conserver Party" by Robert Johnston The "hedonist radicalism" of the 1960s eventually settled into a combination of demands for plurality and tolerance in lifestyle choice with a censorious attitude towards actually-existing social norms. An anti-family attitude may have aimed to subvert the supposed breeding-ground of authoritarian attitudes through which commodity society reproduced itself, but it snuggled in beside lifestyle purchase. The management of difference and intrusive social engineering had come to offer suitable professional career opportunities. One attempt at a critical angle on these developments took aspects of the works of Richard Sennett and Christopher Lasch and argued in favour of "the condition of anonymity which is privacy in public". Such a liberal viewpoint could usefully be opposed to the idea that "transparency" was a better way to live and that anything else was just a token of repression. It may be time to acknowledge the limits of such an approach. After all, it derives from, and refers to the virtues of, a society in circulation. The approach recognises managerial special pleading in the way that real issues play out, but has been unable to embody itself in new forms of activity. One response to that failure may involve a more critical attitude to liberalism itself; another digs deeper into liberalism in an attempt to imbue the political norms with a new ecological and ethical position. Robert Johnson's pamphlet follows that second path. However, the problems which it faces in taking the ethical high ground are the same as those identifiable in a critique of liberalism. For example, both positions see in current social conditions a dependency culture which erodes "untutored common sense, emotional reserves and intrinsic skills" (p.4) and qualities of "restraint..., moderation and obligation to others" (p.9). It is dangerous to locate such qualities as innate / instinctual or elevate them to a political-ethical position. Where they exist, they derive from something resembling apprenticeship: learning in and through a tradition to obtain a measure of things appropriate to accession to a community. But under liberalism the commodity has corroded the values based on anything being handed-down. The Left was complicit in this progressivism, and continues to be so. Traditional values are marked as reactionary. For example, Simon Frith and Jon Savage ("Pearls and Swine", NLR 198) set up the "conservative ideal" of the "defiantly dull" allotment culture. They contrast this stolid figure with the "strange people - young, female, foreign, homosexual", whose "strange ideas" supposedly identify them as agents of social change (although usually under professional mediation). This allegiance to progressivism as the norm of social theory provides the difficulty in pigeonholing Lasch or the anti- Enlightenment positions of Alasdair MacIntyre's recent books. Johnson discusses the inabilities of the socialist, green, social-democratic and conservative political agencies to base an agenda on anything other than progressivism. Through discussing the inadequacies, he intends to identify a constituency which is disillusioned by the existing parties and has withdrawn from politics. This apparently provides an opportunity to base a politics on ecological imperatives, such as that "Eco- politics can give a lead by restating the principle that the basic needs of everyone should take precedence over the demands of anyone" (p.5). But what agency is to exert that principle? It seems to invite the intrusion of a bureaucratic-technical agency. That can only further the malaise of disempowerment. This attempted political renewal acknowledges the crisis produced by liberalism, but seeks position within the hollowed-out area of liberal politics, and even shies away from the real ecological oppositional campaigns. A sense of imperative is allowed to substitute for agency. But a bedrock of popular apathy plus a voluntarist layer of imperative-fired politicians forms a strange and even dangerous political structure. Alex Richards From Here & Now no. 15 Title: Childhood's End Author: Alex Richards Date: 1994 Description: A review of "Escaping From Childishness: The Need For a Conserver Party" by Robert Johnston Keywords: Green, Conserver