THE documentary-maker Adam Curtis’s latest BBC series, Shifty, tells the story of life in Britain at the end of the 20th century. But the inspiration came from an earlier period — the unrest that engulfed Europe in 1848, as recounted in Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring (Penguin, 2023). Britain may be on a similar cusp of that turmoil, “on the edge of a new kind of society we don’t yet have the language to describe”, Curtis suggested in the Guardian last week. “It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how.”
The struggle to articulate a vision is an idea picked up by Tom McTague, the new editor of The New Statesman, in his profile of the Prime Minister, published last week. Entitled “What Keir Starmer can’t say”, it concludes that the Prime Minister finds it difficult to “capture the mood of the nation in its raw reality, much as he finds it hard to explain his emotions . . . He must understand the national trauma and its causes, to connect with emotion and anger. Yet he seems reluctant to poke at the reasons the country is so tense and angry and poor, to analyse the cause of the country’s malaise, much as he seems uninterested by his own motivations in life.”
For Christians, such diagnoses might bring to mind the words of Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Yet, before critiquing the Government’s struggle, we should ask whether the Church has a grasp of the causes of the “national hopelessness” identified by McTague. What lies behind the rapid rise in young people referred to mental-health services? Why are record levels of people out of work because of long-term sickness? While economic and political factors play a part, could it be that a spiritual deficit is also revealing itself? Is a “restlessness for a heavenly home” — a diagnosis offered by the Bishop of Ramsbury (Features, 2 June 2017) — among the unmet, subconscious, desires driving discontent?
Curtis admitted that he was was complicit in Britain’s “obsession with constantly replaying the past”. It is a tendency that the Anglican writer Francis Spufford explored some years ago, describing a country “agitated by the vacuum where larger-than-individual meaning used to be” (Features, 21 December 2017). The appeal of the past was, he suggested, that it was “real”: the place where contemporary Britain went “to taste, in virtual form, the kind of collective, even coercive, experience that trumps, that renders moot, the autonomous self-definition that is supposed to be the pride of the present”.
The Church does not lack thinkers capable of “analysing the cause of the country’s malaise”. Its challenge is to share such thinking with the country at large, to inspire a diagnosis that will help us to understand ourselves better. This will include acknowledging our souls as well as our bodies — no less real and present and arguably more important.
