“WE HAVE to imagine something beyond all this. Politics used to share a sense of transcendence with religion. We did once believe in something, but the belief that arose in the ’80s of individual self-fulfilment as the central goal of society has failed. The politicians have lost control, and we have a lot of individuals who feel very alone. The only vision of the future is fear.”
So says the filmmaker Adam Curtis, whose most recent work, Shifty, released on BBC iPlayer in June, explores 1980s and ’90s Britain. He does this not only through the great political changes that came along with the premierships of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, but also stories that explore the rapidly shifting culture of those decades, as varied as racist skinheads in Coventry, the emergence of the ultra-cheap supermarket Netto, and the fall of Mohamed Al-Fayed. Joining the dots between seemingly unconnected events is central to Curtis’s work — something that his critics find tendentious, and his fans find inspired.
Born in Dartford in 1955, and educated as a scholarship boy at Sevenoaks School, and then as an undergraduate at Mansfield College, Oxford, he had early hopes of an academic career which were abandoned in disillusionment. Joining the BBC’s graduate training scheme, he spent essentially his entire working life as a programme-maker for the Corporation, despite being openly critical of it.
His first BBC job was on That’s Life, in the heyday of Esther Rantzen, but it was in the 1990s and 2000s that he found his voice as a documentary-maker in his own right, with a series of films, acclaimed by critics, that created sweeping, globe-spanning narratives of recent history, stitched together with archive footage.
Across his work, Curtis identifies two forces that created today’s world: one is the rise of individualism, something that he thinks is broadly positive, albeit with challenging side-effects; the other is huge international flows of money and credit. Late-20th-century Britain interests him not just because it formed him, but because it was particularly impacted by these forces. While Thatcher is usually understood by both admirers and detractors as an era-defining figure, Curtis argues that she was merely borne on the coat-tails of these forces.
“Thatcher was obsessed with [the economist Friedrich von] Hayek’s idea that money was a force that could be dealt with using rationality. As the old revolutions centred on progressive ideologies failed, what began to rise up in Britain and across the West was the idea that societies could be managed in a rational way. The domination of politics by economics was part of that. But, when we apply rationality to vast forces operating in society, they don’t often operate as expected.”
When Labour took power in 1997, these forces had also made its traditional democratic Socialist vision impossible; so it, too, embraced managerialism through mathematical economics. “The mass democracy of the mid-20th century found it increasingly difficult to cope with individualism, because it depends on people surrendering themselves to the collective. That’s what all politicians are struggling with.”
MR CURTIS believes that the train of revolutionary progress, once seemingly unstoppable, has stalled. “Western society has been through a period of failed revolutions which had an optimistic view of human nature; so you’re going to get this pessimistic counter-revolutionary view.”
This inspired his film Bitter Lake (2015), which explored the history of the world since the Second World War, not with the great powers at its centre, but Afghanistan. The country was particularly interesting to him, as intervention there shattered the confidence of both Western liberals and the Soviets that their political system could provide a universal vision for humanity.
Those systems were different from one another, but both depended on an optimistic view of human nature and the capacity for progress. Similarly, the TV series Can’t Get You Out of my Head (2021) claimed that the rise of individualism had corroded the very different political visions that had once animated the United States and Communist China, causing the leadership of both countries to lose hope in the future and become frightened of their own populations, and so retreat into a materialist managerialism motivated by maintaining control rather than any inspiring vision.
He does not share this fear of the populace. “I’m a progressive. I see plenty of evidence in history that humans have an extraordinary fluidity about them, and are capable of great good in terrible circumstances. I’m suspicious of the current ideology that we are motivated only by self-interest.”
This ideology has become “decayed and foetid”, large parts of society retreating from politics and social organisation. Many people want simply “to be left alone and have a government that looks after their needs medically and in old age”. The people in Westminster are blind to this, he argues, and to many other things.
“You see this in the new private estates of recent decades, which are full of people who are fairly well-off, but who have entirely retreated. They are potentially a powerful part of society, but nobody has realised it yet.”
FAITH had not previously played a significant part in Mr Curtis’s work, but Shifty featured several religious plotlines, including the Millennium Dome’s vacuous “Spirit Zone”, the way in which Stephen Hawking’s convinced atheism clashed with his wife’s devout Christianity, causing tensions in their marriage, and a deconsecrated parish church in Rotherham.
Mr Curtis, however, gainsays the suggestion that he has any particular interest in religion, and says that those stories were chosen for other reasons — but he does allow that, along with art, faith is one of two forces that can lift people out of a present in which many live largely inside their own heads, consumed by their own thoughts and desires. “Don’t I remember a line about ‘Whose service is perfect freedom’?” he asks.
“While I still know many religious people, we are, in a mass sense, in a post-Christian age,” he says. “But, while the majority of people may believe in morality, they don’t have a belief in what a good society would be. Either you’re going to have a society where big beliefs aren’t possible, or we’re in the eye of a dark and foreboding storm, waiting for the next big idea to come. This may be religious, but it won’t be the Church. It may be in a form we can’t conceive of yet, in the way the Romans could never have conceived of Christianity.
“We are limited in spotting it, because we have such limited imaginations. What’s missing is imagination, and good religion is as much about imagination as faith.”
If there is no big idea, no new collective belief, AI may make it possible to manage a society of individualists. “All the AI people, whom I am suspicious of, are confident they can manage society to that degree. Then we’ll have a society managed by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, with AI that can identify and fulfil millions of individual desires — that’s their dream.” He finds that idea depressing.
HE OFFERS a final possibility: a moment like 1848, when an attempt to break the counter-revolutionary era fails in its own terms, but leaves behind a new set of ideas that help us to imagine our way out of the current predicament in the longer term.
While 1848 failed, it left behind sociology and statistics, Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola. Unless that happens, he fears that we are in a stalemate. “Humans have an extraordinary potential, but in this society you get the desiccated ideology that people are self-interested, and that is exploited by those in whose interest it is to treat everyone as self-interested.”
And what next for him? He isn’t sure. He had hoped to extend his work on Britain up to the present, but finds his method of mining TV archives to discover ordinary people’s authentic voices becomes less effective after 2000.
“By the end of the 1990s, people stopped behaving on film in any way you could call real. Nobody ever behaved entirely naturally on camera, but all of a sudden they all started to act, to become simulations.”
The problem, Mr Curtis says, is that we don’t even have the language to describe our predicament. “Maybe the self has retreated inside. The first step may be to realise the people you’re seeing now aren’t the real people, that we can’t find our true selves.
“A good religion has to comprehend the language we’re talking about ourselves. Listen to late-evening conversations in bars, and a lot of it is about whether what people say is what they’re really feeling — ‘Is that really you?’ People have been told to live their authentic self, but can’t actually find what that authentic self is.”
If he is right that a foetid old order is about to collapse through its lack of vision, and that good religion is partly about imagination, his work presents a challenge to the Church to imagine a better dream than that offered by politicians and managers.
Shifty can be viewed on BBC iPlayer.
