Ideas and Time

Ideas can take a while to have currency - meaning to be taken seriously as a genuine tender. So ideas have their time; they also have their elasticity - an idea that exists in a theoretical sense can change dramatically (even on its head) in practice, or be used for that purpose. Religious theology sits at one extreme - both in the sense that there is "only one book" and the endless interpretation that theologists extrapolate from that.

A historical perspective is helpful. Surely, we know there were political as well as social and theoretical reasons how Christianity became the official religion of the Roman  Empire, though the ideas itself are sophisticated. One God rather than many; a son who came to earth as man to save us; the idea of "love" replacing "fear" in the lexicon of believers.

You can say that political ideas are often less sophisticated, more prone to corruption - ends justifying means. Ideas, are, I think ticks that attach themselves to the body of our society's wildebeest, at first unnoticed, then symbiotic in some way. The idea of an independent Scotland for instance; or paradoxically a Britain distanced from Europe.

I sit there thinking that we should surely be more European than ever now - not just because of the market opportunity, but because the idea of Europe embodied in the European Union should surely have taken hold now. Not for the last time, I find myself on the wrong side of history. There seems an inevitable pulling away from Europe which is fuelled by a strange right wing Conservatism. It is not the old stagers of the Tory party who are anti-Europe but people my age and younger who joined parliament in 2010 or the one before. Some of this is about power of course: a distinct ruling class that are angry at anything that takes away from their "right to rule". For all Europe's faults, its mandate is a sophisticated one: not one of particular democratic vote (for one side or another), but a sense of the demotic, the agora, the populus. We haven't a constitution like American proclaiming "the pursuit of happiness" as a right; but we have a multi-state organisation based on the idea that equality between the massed citizenship is what matters. The mechanisms to ensure that happens are necessarily weak (and you could argue have been broken by the Frankfurt bankers) but they remain - enshrined in laws such as the social chapter.

Yet in the week that Conservative of around my age skips over to UKIP causing an unecessary election, the tab of which has to be picked up by the taxpayer, who might rather prefer it to be spent on helping those in need, I worry that the ideas of the time are now not mine. I see Europe, and an enlarged Europe, north to even include Russia, south and east into Turkey as a historical opportunity, but no longer a historical inevitability. Why are so many Europeans coming to Britain? (And its not just Romanians and Poles, now its Italians and Spanish.) The economic opportunity; the ubiquity of English; our socially liberal mores; the sclerotic systems of favour in their own countries... yet at the same time that we appreciate the cheap Aldi and Lidl, the wide range of foods in the supermarket, the Danish crime dramas, and Swedish pop music, and beach holidays away from the British summer, we as a nation aer edging away from all ideas of Europe.

And I sit there and wonder "who are these people?" who take the advantages of Europe but have created a bogeyman of it. We have been a European state forever, with a German royal family... and our lands owned by a succession of Norman placemen, leading up to and including our current prime minister. Part of me remembers Christopher Isherwood's "Mr. Norris Changes Trains" and the dark forces moving in the background  that him and his intelligent young friends knew about but couldn't see. Ideas that become of a time require actors to enact them. I cannot for a minute understand how someone - politician, individual, newspaper editor - could have a twenty year or more seething resentment of Europe. Its like the Europe I know is "unseen" as the cities in Mieville's "The City and The city".

We know an idea can have currency. Scottish independence seems to be one that has and doesn't have it. We are unseeing - those of us without a vote - because it `has not been something that has ever really needed us to think of it. We don't resent the Scots, hell we've even made Dr. Who Scottish. Its a like time since Tartan armies broke the Wembley goalposts or even had a side to support that could be a genuine rival to our equally disappointing English side. What's the bit in Trainspotting? "Its nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers." 

History seems inevitable in retrospect; at present neither Scotland leaving the Union or Britain leaving the EU seems inevitable; but they both seem possible. The failure of them to happen will be the bigger shock I think - for what then? The split in the Tory party over Europe does seem inevitable at some point - and that must be what is exercising the brains on the far right. A bit like the American Tea Party, ideologues who have misjudged the time will find themselves with a world that they didn't want or expect. Let us hope so.

In art, ideas also have a tendency to find their appropriate time. The cult artist (Velvet Underground for instance) depends on it. The artistic ideas that matter are the ones that both seem right of the time but make the earlier times seem irrelevant. Cliff Richard made little sense once the Beatles came along, Prog Rock seemed indulgent faced with the Ramones and Sex Pistols; once Picasso or Henry Moore had remade how we look at the human form it was hard to go back to a representative version.

Sometimes ideas flounder on the margins for years.  I don't remember hearing the names Rachel Carson or Jane Jacobs during the eighties and early nineties, but their classic books get namechecked all the time nowadays. Yet we have strange countercurrents as well. Green issues seem to have either been mainstreamed, found wanting or ignored by a new generation of consumers. The urban regeneration of our cities continues as the embedded interests in gentrification are able to drown out any other voices.

I've often wondered where my generation went - between the punk rockers and the ravers was there room for us as well? Our endless Western recessions mean that as I approach fifty I don't know what a fifty year old should be like now; what they should look like; what they should feel. The radical who becomes a conservative requires self-interest along the way; my generation struggle with the baby boomers above us taking all the air sometimes.

Its often possible, as a writer, or musician or an artist to wonder what happens between being the outsider firebrand and yesterday's news. We sometimes miss the boat; like a relationship that spirals from heady first date to messy divorce without the steady years or marriage in between.

Life - I suspect - gets in the way, so that ideas we should have been pursuing at an earlier age are left to the ideologues: we then get a skewed version offering us a "choice" that we never asked for and don't need.