A history of middle class dystopia

FOR THREE weeks at the end of 2009 the world was overshadowed by the Copenhagen climate conference, only for it to end without agreement. What was driving those world leaders and their negotiators was just the latest middle class fantasy of THE END.

Middle class people have often been fixed on the idea of the collapse of civilisation or the end of the world. No doubt there is some serious science behind climate change, but that would not explain why so many earnest young educated people are quite so excited by the end of days.

The demands of the protestors at the climate change conference were so extreme that no agreement could ever have satisfied them: what they want is nothing less that the cessation of industrial society, since that is what zero carbon emissions’ would mean. In the event, and not surprisingly it was the developing world that was unwilling to back a halt to development being used to hearing from those who had climbed the ladder, that now they had to throw the ladder away.

The climate change protestors even managed to cast the good and liberal people of Copenhagen in the role of supporters of the Police State. But that is only because the point of climate change protest is not to be sullied by actual and practical policies. The point of climate change protest is to illustrate the dystopian vision of the outraged middle classes.

For more than a hundred years, middle class fears have dwelt on imaginary threats from the deep often a fantastic projection of their own sense of being squeezed between the masses from below, and an indifferent capitalist class from above. Romantic anti-industrialism of one kind or another has usually been the outlook of the embattled middle classes. But whatever the special form of middle class preoccupation, the mainstay of their outlook is fear.

Ten years ago, all the same people who are today so worried about climate change were preoccupied with the rising tide of ethno-nationalism in the post-Communist world. There was not a dinner party in Islington, Dublin 4 or Park Slope that did not shudder with fear at the threat of third-world nationalist dictators. Over the canapés educated people raged at Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, General Noriega, Mohammed Farah Aideed of Somalia, Indonesia’s Suharto, and the Burmese Generals. Joan Baez, Susan Sontag, Bernard Henri Levy and Michael Ignatieff went to Sarajevo as emissaries to share Bosnia’s pain. Any one of these scary men in military fatigues could be built up to becoming the new threat to world peace in the minds of the literati. Then, one terrible day, the chattering classes got their wish, and Britain, America, Italy and Spain fought the good fight against Saddam so this was what ‘humanitarian intervention’ looked like. They took one look at the horrors of war and de-camped en masse to the other side, cheering on the suicide bombers.

Hooligans

In the early nineties, outraged opinion was sounding more and more like its square parents, fixated on a supposed rising tide of crime. The ‘New Criminologists’ said that you did not have to be a Tory to be outraged about ‘law’n'order’ clamping down on ‘anti-social behaviour’ was what socialists should be doing. Where mum and dad had their own unreconstructed prejudices about black muggers’ and shifty Pakistanis, their more enlightened children had their own folk devils more suited to our politically correct age: they imagined a crime wave led by lumpen white skin-heads, domestic abusers out of a Roddy Doyle novel, pit-bull owners.

Cold war

Before that, when there still was a Cold War, middle class fears were fixated on the Soviet threat, and its fifth column in the trade union movement. Otherwise sensible novelists like Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess wrote hysterical novels Russian Hide and Seek and Nineteen Eighty-Five respectively, about Britain under Soviet Occupation. Margaret Thatcher was elected on the back of middle class fears of trade union bully-boys and fantasies of standing up to the Soviet Union.

But just as much as the Hampstead intellectuals were motivated by anti-Russian anxieties, they were just as resentful of American Cold Warriors, and tended to blame them for stirring up the Russians. Take the example of Bertrand Russell, who called on the Americans to use the atom bomb to defeat Soviet Russia, but once the Russians got their own, became a stalwart of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Indeed, the Cold War was the perfect foil for middle class fears. They could see themselves menaced, in the middle, between the two superpowers, proxies for their two terrible enemies: the bully-boy leftists, and the tub-thumping rightists. The middle class loved the Cold War, and marched up and down, terrifying small children with stories about nuclear war.

Global cooling

One facet of the impeding nuclear war that particularly excited middle class fears was the Nuclear Winter when the material blown into the atmosphere would blot out the Sun, causing global cooling.

In fact the underlying belief in Global Cooling was one of those prejudices that resonated with the Middle Class world view. Around that time physicists’ theories of entropy and heat death when all unevenly distributed temperatures would even out corresponded to an underlying fear that the dynamic of progress was exhausted. Surprisingly for those who thought that Climate Change’ meant Global Warming’, it was Global Cooling’ that gripped educated opinion in the 1970s.  In his book Climate Change and the Affairs of Men Iben Browning wrote all respectable scientists know that global cooling is inevitable’.

It was true. Mainstream scientists wrote about Global Cooling as if it was an established fact, just as they write today about Global Warming. Here is an article from The New Scientist magazine about the problem:

Here is an article citing a CIA report on the threat of Global Cooling to agriculture:

And here is one from Time, showing how the Arctic is expanding.

The idea of the glaciers advancing to plunge mankind into a new ice age is a strong theme of middle class anxiety. Seventy years earlier this explorer’s journey to Greenland was supposed to herald a new ice age.

The limits to growth

In the late 1960s biologist Rachel Carson had a big impact with her dystopian screed about the supposed impact of pollutants like DDT on the environment. A Silent Spring was coming, she warned, when no new flowers would open.

In 1970 the cyberneticists Donella and Dennis Meadows, Joergen Randers and William Behrens warned that industrial growth was using up the Earth’s resources. The report was paid for by the industrialists’ ‘Club of Rome’, but it struck a chord with the unwashed hippies of America who embraced its warning of resource depletion.

1970 was also the first Earth Day, when Green activists stood up against corporate greed and for the simpler life. All the predictions that the Club of Rome put out, turned out to be untrue. The collapse of the earth’s resources expected for 1990 just never happened. But that did not matter they had written the script for the middle class panic of its age and it was a compelling one.

Population growth

The correlate of resource depletion was the fear of population growth. For the middle classes, nothing was more terrible than the idea that they might be outbred by the lower orders.

Young college students signed up to join Population Concern, just as they did Greenpeace. (John Brunner’s novel Last Stand on Zanzibar imagines an overcrowded world).

The Central Intelligence Agency were excited at the prospect of using population control as a stick with which to beat developing countries, and set out their plans in National State Security Memo 200.

Of course, the Middle Classes had been galvanised by fears of population growth before. In the early twentieth century, the Eugenics movement started a panic about what they called race suicide’, the decline in the size of middle class families, while working class people continued to have more children.

Associated with the crusade against race suicide was the fear that the coloured races were outbreeding the white, which was the argument of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. In the end the eugenics movement would provide the intellectual ballast for the Nazi movement in Germany, another middle class project motivated by the desire to prevent the domination of the small shopkeeper and farmer by big business and organised labour.