Why I am a moderate
A manifesto for a disposition
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Over the years, I’ve thought deeply about the transgressive in art. Raised on a diet of Chris Morris and Monty Python, and with a love of the absurd stretching back further to Samuel Beckett and Alfred Jarry, I’ve been intrigued as to how artists put the cat amongst the proverbial pigeons1. At the same time, my politics have made a journey away from radicalism, towards the consensual, and finally to a position of self-describing as a moderate. It’s these two ostensibly contrary developments, which I see as in fact complimentary, that I’d like to explore today.
What does it mean though to be transgressive in art? It’s surely dependent upon context. Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’, for example, a work considered wildly shocking at its 1879 premiere, would be unlikely to cause a scandal now for its depiction of its heroine leaving her husband. Indeed you could argue the opposite – that depicting precisely a woman staying with her partner to the detriment of her personal self-actualization would be the transgressive move.
The reason I wouldn’t argue that the trad is now the transgressive, though, is that the trad remains trad. As soon as conservative morality becomes dominant, it becomes just another oppressive force. The trad is only transgressive in a particular liberal context which adds to it a frisson of danger; it is transgressive for exactly the same reason a performance of ‘A Doll’s House’ might still be transgressive in, say, a religiously conservative community today.
This does though allow us to confirm a distinction between the inherently transgressive and what is transgressive in a particular context. The task of the person seeking to transgress is to identify those points, or where to transgress at a given moment. And once we acknowledge that transgression is dependent on context, we can acknowledge that artistic transgression and political transgression manifest in different forms, even from the same person at the same time.
Take this dreadful Tweet:
There is the obvious point that many great artists are indeed conservative. But the more relevant objection for our focus is that in the context of artistic milieus being conservative is one of the most inherently transgressive things you could do, just as, say, a radical socialist hedge-fund manager might stand out in his or her sector. In any given sphere, a particular mode of politics is likely to be hegemonic, and a set of beliefs adopted which bring career advantage - names you have to say, things you have to object to or support. 90% of the social media positioning on contemporary debates is about being seen to be the right kind of person to benefit from the right kind of opportunity, and that goes as much for those who object to ‘wokeness’ as those who embody it.
In an artistic milieu, it seems to me at present much more transgressive to be a moderate, eschewing extremes on both sides, and implying one’s willingness to sacrifice one’s own chance of career advancement. Being unaffiliated to any extreme is a better way of actually talking about current affairs at all, to separate that out from the self-interest I mention above. I am not saying this is a permanent state; if we were in the 700th year of China’s Zhou Dynasty, calling for radical reform might indeed seem timely, but at the current time, calls for a complete reset, as opposed to careful thoroughness, come cheap.
I would say that being a political moderate, but still interested in and trying to locate what remains transgressive in art, represents the most vibrant combination currently available to an artist. What I see at the moment more frequently is a formal conservatism combined with a somewhat synthetic radical politics; fake political extremism and rather empty narrative art; loud politics, smallbore work. That is a less radical combination for me than political moderation and an attempt to address difficult subjects, in a way open to multiple perspectives, with room for creative play. There is a lot of transgression in the moment of just letting your work contain multiple perspectives play themselves out, without editorializing - not least because the parameters of what is acceptable in artistic expression have been policed considerably more thoroughly of late.
You could go further. You could argue that artistic radicalism inevitably manifests itself in politic moderation; if you have a bleak, Béla-Tarr-esque view of the human condition, you’re much less likely to be open to radical schemes. That certainly explains why a figure like Camus manifested as both philosophically radical while hostile to real-life political extremes, breaking early with the totalitarian Soviet bloc; people who imagine dystopias are rarely conducive to being pitched utopias in real life.
So how then does political moderation manifest itself in a Western political context at this moment in time? Certainly we shouldn’t confuse it as an easy stance for, far from being appreciated as a mediator, someone currently aiming for constructive consensus is much more likely to earn only the opprobrium of both sides. The old politics joke about people who stand in the middle of the road getting run over serves also a commentary on dangerous driving.
This is not because the moderate position is always exactly between two extremes – a ridiculous caricature of ‘centrism’, which is not for an approach for example that, as some people say HS2 is expensive and others say it’s essential, we should only build half of it – but because you refuse to cleave to either of two defined positions. You are insisting above all on your ability to keep your own counsel, and in that attempt you are taking a certain approach; good-humoured, open to different arguments, more interested in specifics than generalities and trying to avoid anger. You are seeking to act almost as a one-person refutation of intransigence.
Social media plays a key role in how I perform moderation. I try to respond to abuse with humour; I report accounts I see behaving with extreme prejudice; and when I’m angry, I don’t post. Sometimes I do kindness runs, replying to any Tweet or message I can see which expresses setbacks or fears with positive messages. It’s not always easy to check anger, and at the present moment the environment is too hostile to easily perform that without getting dragged into the mire; the recent rise in online and offline antisemitism has made me feel genuinely sick. But I’ve always figured it costs nothing to be kind when it’s literally free – and I try to accentuate the positive side of things too.
Years ago, I read a newspaper letter of a parent recalling the birth of their child itself decades back. There’d been a problem with a form; a potentially serious bureaucratic issue was about to emerge. On that day, though, they’d encountered a flexible NHS worker who’d bent the rules slightly to go and find the relevant form, slightly exceeding their level of competency - and even decades later, that small simple gesture had stuck with this letter’s writer. That has always struck me as something to aspire to, that the people who’d met you would feel they have had good fortune to encounter you in this world. To be a good human node.