Directory of Lost Causes

I watched this interview with Richey Edwards out of The Manic Street Preachers the other day:



I'm not sure what year it's from, but presumably some time before 1995 (when Richey vanished from the face of the Earth).

The first question the interviewer asks is as follows:

Your role in the band has included the writing of lyrics. All of these have had what might be called a negative or pessimistic tone. Do you think that will change in the future?

I actually can't quite make out all of Richey's words distinctly, but he says something like the following:

I think the whole first world, its suffering is very self-indulgent. There's no reason to be unhappy, but I think everybody feels melancholia quite regularly.

As far as I can make out, the interviewer's next question is:

And that falling into melancholia (before you know it), is that the way your own path in life has taken you?

From Richey's reply:

My father is really, really happy, and his standard of living when he was my age was nothing compared to mine. And yet, I sit in my house and I moan and complain, and he just doesn't understand. And, I don't know why, it's just the way our generation is, I suppose.

I've been thinking about this. Of course, my own feelings are similar (though I don't agree with everything he says in this interview). I don't really want to go into details, but, despite my standard of living being well below the British average, I am also aware that, materially speaking, I am living in relative luxury. Relative, that is, to other countries in the world, and to the foreign country that is the past. I do appreciate the luxuries I have.

What I don't have, however, is any sense that there's a reason to get out of bed other than the fact that things will ultimately end up being harder for me if I stay in bed. I really don't see any future for myself or anyone else now alive unless benevolent aliens swoop down on golden beams of light in 2012 and tell us we've graduated to the 'cosmic party' stage of consciousness.

Of course, Richey references The Smiths later on in his interview, and this is telling. I wonder what it is that many people 'don't get' about The Smiths. Some have the sense that it was all moaning about nothing. And yet, millions of people have felt extraordinarily in tune with that particular moaning about nothing. Some kind of fall had taken place in people's outlook and emotions over the space of a generation or two.



That's how it seems, at least, and if I question what that seeming depends upon, then the immediate answer is popular culture. Popular culture now is vastly more nihilistic than it was in, say... the fifties. For instance, I watched the video of Animal Collective's Peacebone the other day:



Maybe I'm wrong, but I have the feeling if this song, and this video, had come out in the fifties, they would have been extremely shocking. Watching this video just the other day, though, my reaction was a giggle or two, and a yawn. It is 'cute nihilism'. (Probaby more 'cute' than 'nihilism', actually.)

Of course, between the fifties and now there was... the sixties. I can't help wondering whether something in the sixties threw open the doors of the human id to let all the monsters out.

But that's really a wild stab in the dark, and perhaps the kind of theorising that I've heard described as 'coffee-table psychology'. Basically, I don't know.

Since the sixties, of course, we've had all kinds of backlashes (or lashings back). For instance, the writer Michel Houellebecq is well-known for excoriating the hippie ideals of his parents, and for baiting the kinds of liberals who are the cultural descendents of those ideals.

Here's one of my favourite Houellebecq rants:

I had decided at that particular time to remain in Madrid all week, and two days later I had a little argument with Esther on the subject of Ken Park, the latest film by Larry Clark, which she had been keen to go and see. I had hated Kids, and I hated Ken Park even more, the scene where this dirty little shit beats up his grandparents was particularly unbearable. That film-maker completely disgusted me, and it was no doubt this sincere disgust that made me incapable of stopping myself from talking about it, whilst I strongly suspected that Esther liked him out of habit and conformism, because it was generally cool to approve of the representation of violence in the arts, and that she liked him without any real discernment, in the same way she liked, for example, Michael Haneke, without even realising that the meaning of those sorrowful and moral films by Michael Haneke was completely different from that of those by Larry Clark. I knew that it would have been better for me to keep quiet, that abandoning my usual comic character could only bring me trouble, but I couldn't, the imp of the perverse was the stronger. We were in a bizarre, very kitsch bar, with mirrors and gold fixtures, full of paroxysmal homosexuals who buggered themselves silly in adjacent backrooms, yet which was open to everyone, with groups of young boys and girls calmly drinking Coca-Colas at neighbouring tables. I explained to her whilst rapidly downing my iced tequila that I had built the whole of my career and fortune on the commercial exploitation of bad instincts, of the West's absurd attraction to cynicism and evil, and that I therefore felt myself ideally placed to assert that among all the merchants of evil, Larry Clark was one of the most common, most vulgar, simply because he unreservedly took the side of the young against the old, because all his films were an incitement to children to treat their parents without the least humanity, the least pity, and that there was nothing new or original about this, it had been the same in all the cultural sectors for the last fifty-odd years, and this supposedly cultural tendency in fact only hid the desire for a return to a primitive state where the young got rid of the old without ceremony, with no questions asked, simply because they were too weak to defend themselves. It was, therefore, just a brutal regression, typical of modernity, to a stage preceding all civilisation, for any civilisation could judge itself on the fate it reserved for the weakest, for those who were no longer either productive or desirable, in short Larry Clark and his abject accomplice Harmony Korine were just two of the most tedious - and artistically the most miserable - examples of the Nietzschean scum who had been proliferating in the cultural field for far too long, and who could in no way be put on the same level as people like Michael Haneke, or like me, for example - who had always made sure to introduce a certain element of doubt, uncertainty and unease into my shows, even if they were (I was the first to admit it) otherwise repugnant. She listened to me with a sad expression, but with great attention, she hadn't yet touched her Fanta.

The advantage of giving a moral lecture, is that this type of argument had been under such strong censorship, and for so many years, that it provokes an incongruous effect and immediately attracts the attention of the interlocuter; the disadvantage is that the interlocuter never manages to take you completely seriously. The serious and attentive expression on Esther's face threw me for an instant, but I ordered another glass of tequila and ploughed on, whilst becoming conscious that I was getting excited artificially, that there was something false about my sincerity: apart from the patently obvious fact that Larry Clark was just a small, undistinguished merchant and that to cite him in the same sentence as Nietzsche was already in itself something derisory, I felt in my heart of hearts scarcely more concerned about these subjects than by world hunger, human rights or any rubbish of that kind. Nevertheless, I went on, with increasing acrimony, carried away by that strange mixture of nastiness and masochism, which I perhaps hoped would lead me to my destruction, after it had brought me fame and fortune. Not only did the old not have the right to fuck, I continued ferociously, but they no longer had the right to rebel against a world that nevertheless crushed them unsparingly, made them defenceless prey to the violence of juvenile delinquents before dumping them in ignoble twilight homes where they were humiliated and mistreated by decerebrated auxiliary nurses, and despite all this, rebellion was forbidden to them, rebellion too - like sexuality, like pleasure, like love - seemed reserved for the young and to have no point for other people, any cause incapable of mobilising the interest of the young was disqualified in advance, basically, old people were in all matters treated simply as waste, to be granted only a survival that was miserable, conditional and more and more narrowly limited. In my script The Social Security Deficit, which hadn't seen the light of day, and this appeared highly significant to me, I continued, almost besisde myself - I incited instead the old to rebel against the young, to use them and to show them who's boss. Why for example should male and female adolescents, voracious and sheep-like consumers, always greedy for pocket money, not be forced into prostitution, the only means by which they could modestly reimburse the immense efforts and struggles that were made for their well-being? And why, at a time when contraception had been perfected, and the risk of genetic degeneration perfectly localised, should we maintain the absurd and humiliating taboo that is incest? Those are the real questions, the authentic moral issues! I exclaimed angrily; now that was no Larry Clark.

I think one telling detail here is that the narrator admits that he's basically peddling the same kind of nihilism as Larry Clark, but is passionate about certain nuances in the nihilism that make a difference, as if nuances of nihilism is all that we have left.

I wonder if every cultural backlash we will have now will simply be a backlash from one nuance of nihilism to another.

Not that there can be many cultural backlashes left to us now, with time and resources running out as they are.

I suppose one could seek the causes of our general nihilism in the past, and could speculate about the effect that the mere existence of nuclear warheads and so on, have on the human psyche. One could berate a collective figure embodying Richey Edwards's uncomprehending father with the words from Bowie's Changes: "Don't tell them to grow up and out of it/Where's your shame? You've left us up to our necks in it." One could talk about affluenza, about deteriorating education, loss of faith, the breakdown of the family, but I wonder if, after all, our nihilism does not come from the future, and the fact that we are fast approaching its end, and that there is nothing now worth doing, and that the fact that we are, as humans, essentially and irredeemably alone, and moving towards death alone, is increasingly inescapable.

Looking back into the past again, here's another one of those backlashes within the nuances of nihilism: