Unthinking dogmatism

James MacMillan

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

James MacMillan explains why he hates the assumption that he is a liberal left-winger

My revulsion is particularly acute in the artistic circles I sometimes find myself in. I regret to say that the most eager acceptance of the new hectoring political puerilities are to be found in The Arts. This has its roots in Romanticism, of course, but a gradual systemisation of radical politics settled in the early 20th century. Think of how, from the 1920s, groups such as Imagists, Vorticists, Futurists, Surrealists, Expressionists habitually declare their commitment to Revolution. Yes, any old revolution would do, but as long as it overturned manners and lifestyles as well as aesthetics and politics.

This has nothing to do with a love of life, a love of the poor or the outsider, but all to do with a love of transgression. It becomes addictive and in the past has led artists as much to the extreme Right as to the far Left. Childish ‘anti-bourgeois’ militancy has no political intelligence or moral fibre. Witness, for example, Harold Pinter’s descent into infantilism every time he mentions the United States, or for that matter decides to write poetry. Rather than being ridiculed for the embarrassing doggerel-merchant he has become, he is lauded to the highest by his fellow-travellers, easily impressed by easy rhetoric and equally determined to maintain their favoured positions in the back-slapping arts establishment.

The legacy of this militancy can be seen nowadays in ‘arts criticism’ and the rise of a secular priesthood whose dogmas we now endure day in, day out. The common purpose of this new cultural élite is to attack the institutions and principles of our shared common life. What passes in Britain for an intelligentsia has appropriated the Arts for their own designs — a recent debate at the South Bank proclaimed ‘All Modern Art Is Left Wing’. No dissent from the party line goes unpunished. What we are seeing here is a cultural regime which adjudicates artists and their work on the basis of how they contribute to the remodelling, indeed the overthrow of society’s core institutions and ethics.

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Alastair Simmons

February 1st, 2008 11:56am Report this comment

Three cheers for James MacMillan's attack on the liberal left whose intolerant dogma has infected like a virus every level of decision making in our society - in particular their "their fundamentalist hatred of Christianity". I encountered it as a former Principal Teacher of Religious Education. I still encounter it today as a Pastor of an "evangelical" church in MacMillan's home county of Ayrshire - which gave us Robert Burn's memorable poem "The Cotter's Saturday Night" depicting a Bible loving Scotland which is now savaged and sneered at by today's PC police. Burn's closing comments seem very apposite - "From scenes like these, old Scotia's [Scotland] grandeur springs That makes her lov'd at home, rever'd abroad: Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, 'An honest man's the noblest work of God';

Rictus, USA

February 2nd, 2008 5:39pm Report this comment

I am still on the left, but I agree wholeheartedly with this article. The sad irony is that much of this Pomo, identity politics, multicult "left" actually is a trendy elitist cover for the very market values they pretend to decry. How, for example, could modern advertizing survive without Debord and Situationism? The list could go on . . .

David Preiser

February 2nd, 2008 8:22pm Report this comment

Brilliant, and well done. These things must be said. Thank you.

alan stoddart

February 21st, 2008 6:07pm Report this comment

My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Rick Walsh

April 3rd, 2008 11:11am Report this comment

That a bloke who believes Jesus rose from the dead can accuse, without irony,'progressive elites' of lacking 'intellectual rigour' just takes the breath away. You couldn't make it up.

Arthur Pendragon

July 2nd, 2008 6:57am Report this comment

I would rather an article that articulates what MacMillan does believe. I am tired of a media that is simply dominated by polemic, right or left, and seemingly cannot bear witness to what we might be for!

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