Conservatism and the arts
An argument for ideological diversity
I have a scenario I like to present to fellow people in the arts. Imagine, I say, a group of artists of refreshingly diverse backgrounds - mixed gender identities, ethnicities and sexualities - apply for funding to stage an evening of performance that advocates for the reintroduction of the death penalty. What would be the outcome of their application, apart from a few Arts Council employees doing double takes? The answer my friends give me is that they would have to get their funding elsewhere. Many would even add that they think art in part exists to advance progressive goals.
But think about this a moment. These days we have an Arts Council and wider arts culture justly committed to expanding access to the arts for those with protected characteristics and from previously underrepresented backgrounds. Yet our hypothetical case suggests this access is contingent on them not expressing certain political viewpoints; identity can and to some degree must be diverse, but acceptable opinion enjoys distinct constraints. And yet support for the death penalty in the UK is by no means a minority opinion; polling shows just under half of UK adults support it, even more than 50 years after its abolition. Is it a problem for the arts sector that expressing such a widely held view would be at best bizarre and at worst out of bounds?
In my case I despise the death penalty, so why should I care? Besides, people who worked for the Arts Council would tell me, the reason an evening of performance advocacy for capital punishment wouldn’t get funded is because it is in fact a terrible idea for a show. And, to give funding bodies their due, I believe that would be exactly the same reaction to a piece arguing for the death penalty’s abolition in those countries which still have it. If the scope of the piece were altered to investigate why the death penalty remains so popular – say an interview series showcasing a range of views on this issue - then it might get a hearing and even some funding. In this view, one reason more right-wing art is not being funded or performed is because not enough right-wing artists are making it. It’s just one of those sectoral imbalances like farmers skewing conservative; left-wingers are making art while right-wingers are making hay.
Those on the left prepared to admit their dominance in the culture sector would say that it would be strange for left-wing ideas to surrender one of the few sectors where they are hegemonic. Personally, I’d argue that a world with more left-wing farmers and right-wing artists would be more stimulating for us all – and it’s not as if right-wing artists are an unheard-of phenomenon either. Just in writing, Houellebecq, Naipaul, Dostoevsky and T.S. Eliot are nobody’s ideas of left-wingers. That list might indicate that the written word provides a space for artists who are openly conservative to express themselves and that reading is still a place where we can go to admit the darkness of our individualism.
This kind of pessimism is of course contrary to the ideology which the Arts Council does explicitly hold, namely to promote art of social value. Faced with an application for funding from Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel, the Arts Council would say that though the idea has potential, could it be painted on the ceiling of a bus and driven round the country to provincial towns instead? Also Michelangelo should definitely make clear on the form that he’s gay.
It still strikes me though that in over twenty years of being in and around theatre and film I have never seen an explicitly right-wing play or film, during which time I have consumed my own body weight in left-wing ideas and arguments of every minute shade. There is though a distinction between that and not having seen any conservative work. Perhaps in art conservatism is represented by the aesthetic status quo, with the conservative work of art as the one which is consciously apolitical; the play with Nigel Havers on at the local provincial arts centre, the Agatha Christie adaption playing to an older crowd. Conservatism in art is located where a style has become tradition.
Nonetheless the sector of the ‘new’ or even ‘revolutionary’ has its own shibboleths and traditions too. Fundamentally, there’s an inherent paradox in ‘rebellion’ being publicly subsidized, in taking government money to tell the government it’s shit, especially as said money is normally generated by the private sector. As rebellions go that is one pretty morally compromised from the off. It recalls the idea of the Italian actor Franca Rame that the anti-bourgeois plays she made with Dario Fo represented a kind of birch twig for the bourgeois before their sauna – but the bourgeois still got their sauna. Isn’t capitalism awful, and did you see the price of these theatre tickets?
This is kind of the problem with the left being so dominant in cultural sectors; we run around, and take our subventions, and condemn the government of the day in ever more outraged terms, but what actually happens? It might even be argued that this is a safe space to put the left so it has as little real world impact as possible. And even in terms of striking a rebellious pose, it would surely be more iconoclastic in the arts to be openly conservative, nationalistic and right-wing than to pursue cultural liberalism to an absurd endpoint. Meanwhile in the farming sector the opposite is almost certainly true: Farmers for Intersectionality would be something new indeed.
One way out of these concerns is to stop seeing the political affiliations of artists as defining anyway, given that art possesses the ability transcend the ideological particularities of its creator. That was why the recent debate over the balance of ‘left or right-wing’ comedy missed the point so spectacularly; whatever their personal politics, comedians have an enormous overriding commonality of being comedians, a similarity profound enough to transcend any difference in mere voting behaviour. This feeling of creativity being the real commonality applies across the arts: Anybody who has been engaged in the creation of a piece of fiction knows the feeling that they are able to be, through the medium of invented characters and scenarios, more truthful and transparent than when discussing people who really exist.
It’s this openness which creates the space for the internal dissent and open discussion art enables better than anything else. Good art always ends up being cleverer than its creator, and certainly cleverer than their politics; D.H. Lawrence’s personal views on gender and sex as a straight man may be reactionary by modern standards, but it seems so much more significant that the characters in his best books systematically undermine them - that he has brought contradiction into his own work.
Making and consuming art is one of the few places we can put aside the restrictions of identity and consider things from multiple points of view which are expressed in and by a multitude of voices. That is a liberal conception of what art is for, and the advantage of a liberal framework is it can represent multiple viewpoints more effectively than ideological agendas which do not recognize their dissenters as legitimate or even sincere.
Whatever our politics, I am sure we all agree that part of art’s power is to look at difficult subjects, such as, once again, the death penalty. One of the outstanding examples of a difficult discussion in our time is the ugly, hate-filled conflict over trans rights, largely played out in social media spaces. The recent case of the writer Jenny Lindsay, harassed and labelled transphobic for objecting to threats of violence against lesbians – to such detriment to her career that she recently received a statement of apology from Scottish PEN - shows that this issue can be particularly fraught within cultural spaces, these one of the few areas where trans people have any significant representation. And of course, even by referring to it there an ‘issue’ I have already for some articulated a particular view on this subject, whereas in fact all I have, and I mean this sincerely, is both respect for transgender people and a desire for women who have clearly felt maligned to be heard out.
More cynically, though, I also recognize it’s a juicy subject; there’s real conflict, the basis of drama, there; there are clashes between competing rights and these clashes are almost certainly best explored in a space better suited to complexity than social media. Theatre would be an ideal place to do so. And yet I do not think at this time the undertaking is possible and some would now argue that as a straightish white man I wouldn’t even have the right to try. Even if I did by some miracle manage to portray the conflicts in a balanced and fair manner, if I arrived at a view more complex than one of two pre-defined positions in an ugly online forever war, I would only earn the loathing of all sides – and what theatre would want the hassle of that? In these conditions, any benefits art can bring to the discussion are negated.
This is only talking about the attempt to portray things with balance, let alone being seen to endorse explicitly right-wing ideas such as the death penalty, opposing abortion or praising the nation state. The idea has been lost to us that a great work of art can be explicitly nationalistic, let alone that it could be explicitly religious, forgetting that religiosity was the primary motivation of art of thousands of years. Instead, for creators of culture the lines around what can be articulated have become much more pre-determined and the identity of who is saying certain things a much more decisive factor in whether they can be said and certainly in their critical reception.
All this adds up to a culture sector sheltering itself, deliberately or not, from intellectual pluralism, committed to representing minority communities but not honest about the diversity of opinion within them – suffice to say the arts community has not exactly celebrated two of the great offices of state being currently held by British Indians - and is on the way to becoming a place where a certain language is approved, memorized and then regurgitated to audiences of our peers, and we already have academia for that. Ironically, some of the most popular recent works of public art, such as the actors dressed as soldiers appearing at London stations on the 100th anniversary of the Somme, were from artists grappling with events far beyond the modern progressive vocabulary. If art is there in part to make us understand our history, we cannot sanitize ideas that are nationalist, jingoistic and even colonial and to only ever engage with such ideas after inserting denunciatory parentheses will actually make us understand our history worse. The role of art which explores the past should not be to tell us how superior we are to people back then.
Even if you do see culture as a means to advance progressive viewpoints, as many people within the arts clearly do, I am not sure exiling conservative ones is the means to achieve that for the good of either culture itself or the progressive goals themselves. This is in part because it lends conservative ideas more appeal by giving them an aura of taboo, but also because it means that culture workers have too poor an understanding of conservatism to effectively argue against it. Generally, artists don’t have much to say about conservatism beyond that the Tories are evil and want innocent people to die, whereas in reality conservatives generally have only a genuinely different conception of the role of the state can provide. Whether this view is justified or not, it is far from being out of the political mainstream, and that is before we even engage with the different varieties of conservatism itself.
Insulated in a bubble from the beliefs of vast numbers of their compatriots, UK artists make poor political decisions, such as rowing in behind the inept leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and as a result facilitating the election of a government hostile to many of the culture sector’s interests, as the recent fiasco over musicians’ touring visas post-Brexit ably demonstrated. And pretty soon artists are left begging for a hunk of subsidised bread at the Festival of Brexit.
Here I should show my own cards: I would like to live in a country with a government that better valued the arts. Despite the lengthy criticisms above, I love art and really do believe culture has the power to improve lives. For me, one small way of moving towards getting better conditions for the sector is having it engage more with the political dynamics in their country as they actually are. If only for the sake of variety, I would like people in the arts to be able to present right-wing views without offence at their very existence; should be able to, in the useful phrase, steelman the arguments of conservatism.
The political right has after all long pulled this trick, getting left-wingers to write for their newspapers and appear on their TV shows, content to leave that part of the left interested only talking to itself secure in the cultural realm, emerging only occasionally to facilitate electoral defeat. A greater engagement with conservatism might lead the culture sector to, in the end, develop both richer art and smarter arguments; such as that our current government, in dealing so casually with our institutions and traditions, has betrayed rather than embodied conservatism. Now that might be an interesting attack line for your local avant-garde theatre troupe.
A note on the text: I spent quite some time trying to get this placed at various liberal publications, without success. If anyone would be interested in bringing this piece to a larger, though of course not better, audience, please be in touch.