What happened to reactionaries?

Janan Ganesh, self-described citizen of nowhere, had a piece in the FT recently asking: what happened to all the reactionaries? You can find it here or (subject to paywall) here. 

I would not describe myself as a reactionary but I like to think that I have enough insight into the mind of one to venture a speculative explanation for the apparent disappearance of the species. Read on to discover not only my explanation for the disapperance of the old ones, but also my prediction of the emergence of new ones.

As we all know, a reactionary is someone who wants to return to the past. As Evelyn Waugh, one of Ganesh’s reactionaries, put it, the problem with the Conservative Party is that it has never managed to turn the clock back by one second. 

Reactionary views are often portrayed as an unreasoning impulse or mindset. But we should always credit people with reasons rather than reflexes if we can, and my theory is that there is much more to it than that. I suggest that a reactionary is not merely someone with an unreasoning objection to the present (or the future), but rather someone who has reasons for wanting to turn the clock back to a known past state of affairs.

The Wikipedia page on the subject tells us that the word “reactionary” comes from the French “réactionnaire”, a term coined during their Revolution, and it then takes us through various French groups in the 18th and 19th centuries who wished to return to a status quo ante. 

That’s a good example of my point: there were many people, at many times during the upheavals of French politics in those days, who knew the ways of the ancien régime (or at least an ancien régime) and who also knew the ways of the new order, and who preferred the former to the latter. You may or may not agree with them, but they were not unthinking or acting on reflex: they had their reasons.

So let's test my theory. Is there a known past that the late lamented twentieth century reactionaries of the Anglosphere that Ganesh mentions – the Kennans, Waughs and old fogeys of The Spectator and The Telegraph – knew that we know no more?

I think there are two answers, one positive and one negative. I'll start with the positive one.

People who lived through the middle of the twentieth century likely saw the built and natural landscapes of their youths being marred. 

I don’t need to tell you that a lot of houses were built on the British countryside in the twentieth century. So many that democratic governments established Green Belts and planning controls to stop it carrying on at the same rate – and very popular these measures were and are to this day.

But we can forget that the middle of the twentieth century was also a time when many awful things happened to lovely buildings.

Charles Ryder, the narrator of Brideshead Revisited, has a job painting nice houses before they are destroyed. The symbolism is obvious, but I’m more interested in the fact that it was plausible to write a book in which someone might spend their time doing just that. If you’re interested, Wikipedia has a whole page entitled “Destruction of country houses in 20th-century Britain”. It includes passages such as: “by 1955, one house was being demolished every five days. As early as 1944, the trustees of Castle Howard, convinced there was no future for Britain’s great houses, had begun selling the house’s contents.” Sobering stuff.

Let's take one unexciting corner of suburban London. In 1947, this house - 

 

- was subject to compulsory purchase and replaced with a council estate that looks like this:

Fine. We need houses. Council houses were a decent priority for the post-war period and 1947 was a hard time to find uses for big empty Georgian houses. But you can, I hope, imagine yourself into the shoes of someone who looked at this and saw decay and degradation afoot in the world. 

It wasn’t just houses. Euston was destroyed in the 1960s, and St Pancras Station nearly followed. Think also of those scary plans to drive motorways through central London. And as for the monstrosities that were built instead ...

Across the Atlantic (remember that we are thinking about reactionaries of the Anglosphere), Penn Station (please do look at the link) was also destroyed in the 1960s, galvanising, so Wikipedia tells me, the US historic preservation movement. The Jane Jacobs v Robert Moses Greenwich Village fight, a similar battle of civilisation against ‘progress’, was a 50s/60s affair as well.

The reactionaries saw a vanished world of ‘not knocking down nice buildings and neighbourhoods’, they wanted to return to it. And they won! Charles Ryder’s job would not be plausible in a novel nowadays. Forget Euston Arch: I doubt you could knock down even something as unexciting as Waterloo Station nowadays. The people of the mid-twentieth century would surely have imagined that, once plain brick power stations were not needed any more, they would be knocked down, not preserved for posterity, chimneys and all, as has happened to the Tate Modern and Battersea Power Station. Even in the US, they have the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act. There will certainly be no motorways through Zone 1 or Lower Manhattan in the next few years. (Indeed, nowadays you are far more likely to find someone on the Right complaining about how difficult it is to knock stuff down or build new tower blocks rather than saying it is too easy. I’m afraid the Right is never happy.)

So that’s the first reason why reactionaries have quietened down, the positive one: the world they sought to return to has, at least in part, been brought back to life.

Now to the negative reason. In short, while the reactionaries won a battle, they lost a war.

Architecture has a sui generis place in the arts. If you want to read a novel, listen to music or see a painting then you have to take some initiative – you have to go and do it in some sense. But buildings are just there, forcing themselves upon your notice as you go quietly about your day. Moreover, if you commission a work of art, you get to enjoy it, but if you commission a building with a façade in a city then it is the public who gets to enjoy it. The public nature of architecture means that the public is up to date with the state of the art: the public knows the built environment - just as it knows the natural one - and gets annoyed if it deteriorates.

The other arts are not like that. If the ‘landscape’ of the other arts – what we might call the private arts – changes then the public will not necessarily see it. And what the wrecking ball did to some of our nicer stations and country houses, it also did to our cultural life.

As I have written before, cultural output per person, in the West at least, was much higher in the past than it is now. But even as cultural production declined in the first half of the twentieth century (to be fair, the West had a couple of wars to fight), cultural appreciation continued to increase: education improved while good taste in cultural matters continued to be high status. 

Think, for example, of PG Wodehouse or TS Eliot, two very different writers but each of whom relied on an educated audience for their effects. Similarly, the impact of artworks (or perhaps we should think of them as cultural jokes or comments) such as Duchamp’s Fountain (the urinal as art) or Cage’s 4’33” (silence as concert performance) rely on knowledge of and respect for the cultural institutions that they play with and place in inverted commas.

That world is the world I described here: one in which high culture was high status. It is the world the reactionaries cited by Ganesh knew from their youth. And that world has gone - they saw it pass. It is entirely plausible that someone could pine for the days when the respectable middle classes looked up to high culture and at least paid it lip service: to prefer that situation to what followed is not merely to be an unreasoning opponent of progress; rather it is to see two different worlds and prefer one to the other.

Ganesh’s mention of Peter Hitchens is telling here. Hitchens was born in 1951. He often talks about his childhood and education. He famously quoted Housman on Question Time, expressed concern that children’s minds are not nowadays furnished with poems and hymns as his has been and strongly favours grammar schools, mostly (it seems to me) in order that they might furnish the minds of the young with the glories of high culture. The world he remembers – just about – and wants to return to is the world of his childhood, the tail end of that disappeared world in which high culture was unambiguously high status. 

That, it seems to me, is what explains why we don’t see reactionaries any more. For those who are younger than Hitchens (or have less halcyon memories of their childhoods), what could being a reactionary mean? Wanting to return to the 1970s? What kind of golden aesthetic or cultural age was that? The 1970s, 80s, 90s .... it's all the same - it's the same world that we live in now, one in which the Beatles rank with Beethoven. All times post-the Britten consensus are much of a muchness in that sense.

On the other hand, as I pointed out in my earlier piece, while the world of high-status beliefs in culture has gone, the world of high-status beliefs in politics is with us, but perhaps it's fading away too. Indeed, leaving Ganesh's cultural or aesthetic reactionaries behind, we can readily think of various political or social reactionaries who exist today. I once suggested, without giving it any particular thought, that those who would wish to reverse Brexit could fairly be described as reactionaries: again, agree or disagree, rejoining the EU in order to return to a known state in the past is not an unthinking objection to progress per se but a view that can be supported by reasons. (I suspect that the biggest party of Rejoiners is those who really do wish to turn the clock back to 2016: they don’t want the UK to join afresh on the terms available to new members but rather to resuscitate the unique deal that the UK once had.) 

Other such “reactionaries” are many and varied: those who want to return to life before social media or smartphones, or before the Great Awokening (when pronouns were merely parts of speech), or to the economic and political world of moderation, stability and globalisation before the Global Financial Crisis or even before 9/11. 

These people would not consider themselves reactionaries (the term has too many negative connotations for those who consider themselves moderates or liberals), but when you hear someone regret the decline in “civility” in politics, hanker for the days of “serious media” that discussed “issues” with people who had “proper” attention spans, or loudly wonder why the global leaders of today are such pygmies compared with the giants of yesteryear, then you are surely hearing the expression of reactionary attitudes. 

That, then, is my final answer to Ganesh. He misses the aesthetic reactionaries, the people who would ban TikTok simply because it's ghastly; but all he needs to do is wait, and he will find plenty of new reactionaries, ones who find post-Brexit British politics - or post-Trump American politics - to be every bit as ghastly as their grandfathers found the degraded state of British or American culture.