Page 73 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

of experience have taught people in the mass to be deeply skeptical of the
grandiose promises made by politicians and to look behind the glitter of
monarchies. It will take more than the promotion of middle-class civic
activism to address this very hard-headed, political and social popular
realism. As recent experience with the Blair regime and the British
monarchy has shown, efforts such as Giddens’s are far more likely to be
dismissed as ‘spin’ than to be accepted as ‘sacred’ in the manner pro-
posed. After all, millions of people around the world have had decades of
real, everyday, practical experience with ‘real existing socialism’ as well
as with contemporary monopoly capitalism and globalization. The pro-
found skepticism towards the self-serving claims of disinterestedness
made by public figures of every stripe are hardly likely to be dispelled by
rationalistic or non-rationalistic rituals or constitutional devolutions of
any kind. People judge the state of the British National Health Service
not by statistics emerging from Downing Street or by criticisms coming
from the militant left. They judge it empirically by their practical experi-
ence. Likewise, the issue of nationalization or privatization of the British
rail system is not judged by the public on an ideological basis. It is judged
on the basis of comparing their past experience of the British nationalized
system, the present effectiveness of the state-owned French system, and
their dismal experience of privatized rail in Britain. It is ‘really existing
state socialism and monopoly capitalism’ which have been put in the
dock, not ideological concepts. Giddens himself notes: ‘The communica-
tions revolution has produced more active, reflexive citizens than existed
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before.’ But it is more than just communications and more than just
‘reflexivity’. Indeed, this very concept of ‘reflexivity’ is an intellectualiz-
ing of a process which has far deeper foundations in actual practical
political, economic and social experience. Neither intellectual reflection
nor the effect of the growth of mass communications adequately captures
what has occurred, although these obviously play a role. It has been the
tumultuous practical political and economic experiences of the twentieth
and now of the twenty-first century which have made hundreds of
millions of people worldwide into hard-headed skeptical empiricists!
At the same time, the notion of a new civic religion for the age of
globalization – on the face of it, a bizarre idea – is unlikely to satisfy con-
servative (not to mention fundamentalist) adherents of tradition within
Western society, not only in the United States but also in Britain. They
are likely to see it as a hopelessly outdated rationalistic maneuver – just
what one would expect from a secular humanist cosmopolitan intellec-
tual. From this point of view, the very notion of a ‘rationalistic sacred’
represents the kind of liberal oxymoron which neo-conservatives abhor

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