A cartoon in the current issue of the New Yorker shows two working men pumping up a giant inflatable Christmas tree next to a store that sells Christmas trees. “You know,” says one to the other, “it doesn’t seem any time at all since we were pumping up the tree last Christmas!”
A mordant cartoon for a merry season. It captures that part of the underlying spirit of Christmas Present: once again, the old symbols are being pumped up feverishly in order to sustain the purchasing boom. But the cartoon emphasises, too, the absence of that which had been the reality, rather than the spirit, of Christmas – the festival of the birth of one who redeemed the world. We have lived with this for many years. And indeed, Christmas is not the only institution to have a hollow feel about it. From the church to the royal family, the former pillars of society as we know it today look empty.
This past year in Britain, the leaders of both the major Christian denominations – Anglicanism and Catholicism – have warned that their faiths were about to disappear. These were utterances as remarkable for not being much remarked upon as for their content: as Brian Appleyard wrote in the New Statesman (17 September), we are on the edge of a life without the prop of the church.
Not that the very large majority of people ever darken its doors. But the church props up so much else: political life, constitutional life, military life, moral reference, the BBC, education, the appearance of Britain’s cities, towns and villages, and the sense of self-definition of all the national components – English, Scots, Welsh and Irish – of British life, as well as of Britishness itself. And its weakness, perhaps terminal weakness, may act as the first domino in the fall of all of our other institutions. It is a fragility that may be good for us: we don’t know.
This is the Christmas before next year’s Jubilee: the nation will be called upon to celebrate the Queen’s 50 years as monarch. The real interest will focus on how far it will evince a popular response: and how far that response will be a wake for royalty rather than a celebration of one long-living royal. If, as some believe, the Jubilee will be the occasion for passing over the duties of state to Crown Prince Charles, we will also be able to see how far the support for the institution of the monarch can jump from the popular Elizabeth to a prince who, although he is no longer seen as the hounder of Diana, has but a fragile hold on his subjects’ affection.
If support for the monarchy does not collapse, and Charles succeeds, then his instincts to downsize the grandeur and expunge the absurdities – such as the barring of Catholics from succession or marriage – will strip from it the aura of timelessness and make it more of a politically correct, and thus politically determined, affair. Diana, in her vampiric search for adulation, sucked the monarchy nearly dry. Elizabeth may be the last of its branches to survive the drought.
The institution of marriage, which the churches support – indeed, which they insisted on as a sign of virtuous procreation – is no longer generally invested with a higher moral status than not being married. “Views have changed markedly over time,” says the latest British Social Attitudes survey, “and for many, marriage is no longer seen as having any advantage over cohabitation in everyday life. Interestingly, women – especially young women – who we might imagine have more at stake (because they are the more practically involved in bringing up children, and are thus most likely to become financially dependent or vulnerable) have the most ambivalent view about marriage as a practical relationship.” The percentage of the population with “traditional” views about marriage – that is, who feel it should be the framework within which a couple have children – is around 30 per cent: 34 per cent of men have such views, yet only 28 per cent of women.
If women no longer support marriage, then it is indeed – as an institution – doomed. It was the means through which women civilised men for centuries, and a central theme of novels for the past two. It remains the assumed cornerstone of social life: the married couple with a house and a history being the rallying point for children and the aged. It is possible – it is often the case – that those “living together” reproduce most aspects of marriage, and since many marriages end in divorce, the differences would reduce further. But that does not speak to the institution of marriage as both a ceremony and a commitment. Once these have gone, the matter of child-rearing and cohabitation ceases to be socialised – as procreation became in marriage – and becomes individual preference.
This would seem to be a strange time for pointing out the decline of the military: unlike the church, that fellow pillar of the 19th- and 20th-century national order, it is now apparently in revival. The militaries of the US, Britain and France are engaged in Afghanistan in the war against terrorism; the military, floundering since the end of the cold war against communism, now has an urgent reason for being, and for expanding.
But in fact, the war against terrorism simply underscores the consistent movement progress away from military virtues and practice. The talk is not of increasing our military strength, but of reconfiguring it – away from the mass armies and grand navies to elite squads of murderously efficient men who will take on the special tasks thrown up by world policing. When armies no longer clash in grand for-mation, what had been centuries of military tradition is undercut. For then the Black Watch and the Household Cavalry and the Irish Guards are less relevant than the little bands of commandos, modern knights-errant, whose skill, courage, fitness and need for secrecy wall them off from the nation.
Conscript armies are passing out of use now: they will soon be gone in Europe, certainly in the west, and through most of the east, too. The nation-in-arms is now no longer a useful concept: governments want their citizens disarmed, since so many of them commit crimes with guns. As national defence strategies come to be less about geopolitical movements of armies and growths of strength by this nation or that region – though these considerations are far from gone – they become more about the ways in which the price for attacking the fragile institutions of open societies is raised. Inevitably, considerations of the strength of the Russian tank divisions or the purchasing priorities of the Chinese air force give way in urgency to the warlike inclinations of radical Muslim groups whose members are British citizens, or of white supremacists who are US citizens. The enemies have come to be within.
If extreme professionalisation threatens to kill the traditional military, the professions are elsewhere on the retreat. Lawyers, doctors, scholars and teachers are now suffering continuing erosion from within and without. Governments of all stripes seek to reduce the corporate power of the professions, seeing it as hostile to the consumer whom governments want most of all to court and represent. Professional bodies depended on a common view among their memberships of their interests and status: but a common view is harder and harder to maintain.
The sociologist and writer Richard Sennett (see his essay on page 45) has been doing work on cities that leads him to the conclusion that “geography counts more than before. It creates in groups and out groups. A lawyer working in London has a much higher status than one working in Bath.” The professionals in London – and a few elsewhere – can command huge salaries. Doctors, lawyers, accountants and bankers “at the top of their profession” – that is, with the luck and determination to insert themselves in the money-making slots – make seven-figure salaries from early middle age. They are simply not in the same world as the country solicitor or provincial hospital doctor on a middle-class income of £50,000. The professional solidarity that grew up in the 19th century and became a bulwark of nation and society, in that century and the next, is threatened with decay and division.
But the professions are not declining as rapidly as the political parties. The real memberships of the Conservative and the Labour parties are well under 300,000, and that of the Liberal Democrats under 100,000 – memberships that are steadily ageing. Their youth wings are tiny: young people don’t join political parties any more, a phenomenon that is observable everywhere in the rich states, and in many developing states as well.
The less political parties are vehicles for advancement or for expressing a distinct – even an aggressive – ideology, the less they give their members the feeling that they are keeping socialism at bay or advancing socialism, and the less they appeal. They become arcane debating clubs, grumbling centres, or another civic organisation that does good works. People have no interest in their debates, and little interest in what they do in government, except when it annoys them or becomes a scandal. Yet political parties are the way in which our countries produce their ruling classes: if they are not renewed and revived, sooner or later the very basis of politics becomes questionable.
If these institutions are crumbling, which are growing? Above all, those associated with consumption, of either goods or services, and especially of the media. The headmaster of a school in Yorkshire set up a table in his largest local supermarket earlier this month in an attempt to recruit back teachers who had left the profession; it was a back-handed compliment to the centrality of the store as a new institution of social life. The English village of the future would be better represented as huddling round a Sainsbury or Tesco than round a church.
The media have collectively become the central institution of our age. Christmas and New Year take place on screens. A few years ago, “first footing” in the Scots village of my birth, I realised that all the houses I passed in the early hours of the morning had the flickering light of a TV coming through the curtains: Scots were watching the media use the myths of Scots Hogmanay to bring in the New Year.
These manifestations may be individually distressing, but they need not be generally bad. The institutions that held up our society were often constraining, aggressive and exclusive; they had become, like the monarchy, absurd – or, like the military, incapable of answering to needs in traditional form. The individual, and personal networks and choices assisted by the market and market-oriented governments, have kept the citizen of the lucky rich states on an even keel so far. The officially sponsored liberalism allows tolerance of, or at least indifference to, those who still wish to cling to institutions, or those who hold allegiance to quite different ones. It may be that we can survive and flourish in a graveyard of the institutions. We do so now, as we pump up another Christmas.
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