A Rake makes progressives of us all
A visit to Glyndebourne makes George Pitcher reflect on how we try to make political progress out of self-destructive decline
I went to an opera at Glyndebourne this morning and it was a slightly weird experience. It’s weird to be there at coffee time, before the sun’s over the wind turbine, as it were. And it was weird because it set me thinking about what it is to be progressive – I don’t usually go to Glyndebourne to think (it must have been the lack of booze), let alone about being progressive.
First, the opera: It was Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. Unlike Beethoven’s (Fidelio), you can see why it was Stravinsky’s only opera. He’s not shooting any ear-drums out with the music (though there’s a lovely overture in the final act) and it’s more than saved by WH Auden’s witty libretto and David Hockney’s fabulous design, which nods knowingly to William Hogarth’s cartoons.
And it’s an interesting mix of tragi-comedy; at moments like the auction of the Rake’s assets it’s a lark (Gilbert & Stravinsky anyone?), while the Bedlam lunatic asylum at the end is haunting. Go see, if you can – it’s touring from early November, after three shows at Glyndebourne.
Relentlessly downward
But to the point: Why is it about the Rake’s “progress” and not his “decline” (Stravinsky gives him the definite article “The”, incidentally, while Hogarth’s original is indefinite)? His progress is relentlessly downward, while most people tend to view progress as positive.
True, a progressive cancer employs the word in an entirely pejorative sense. And many so-called Prog Rock acts in the Seventies were truly terrible, as it happens. But progressive – as in making progress – is usually deployed as a term of approval.
Even when we’re referring to things of which for a variety of reasons we might deeply disapprove – London’s City skyline (to which our anti-hero Tom Rakewell was drawn in his day), motorways or social-media technologies – we tend to say “I’m all in favour of progress, but...”, as if progress is naturally a good thing, like clean air.
Interesting, then, that Tom’s experience of being progressive is almost entirely bad. Stravinsky’s treatment is altogether more Faustian, with an added love interest, than Hogarth’s original, and the satanic figure who is after Tom’s soul, Nick Shadow (geddit?), devises for him a machine that allegedly turns stones into bread. The scriptural allusion to mankind being unable to live by bread alone is unmistakable, as is a profit-motive that will return Tom to an “Eden of goodwill”, and much else besides.
The machine ruins Tom and his investors. Progress is a chimera. The Rake progresses, but humanity is in free-fall. Sounds a bit like a set-up for next month’s COP26 climate summit.
What Stravinsky seems to be saying – and it’s worth asking whether his opera is a progressive version of Hogarth’s storyboard – is that part of the human condition is to kid ourselves that everything’s going terrifically well, even as we’re in the process of destroying ourselves.
Socio-economic Nirvana
What he doesn’t say is that it didn’t have to be like this. The progressivism that emerged from the European Enlightenment, under the supervision of philosophic figures such as Immanuel Kant, told us that science and technology were the keys to a socio-economic Nirvana; that human progress was at the very heart of what it means to be good. It rather follows that being a progressive is a quite good (even possibly a holy) thing to be.
Progressives in the post-modern era have tended to be associated with the left-wing of politics, presumably because social markets have tended to be too. But that’s not fair. Progressive conservatism can be traced from the 18th and 19th centuries in the ministries of William Pitt the Younger and Benjamin Disraeli.
Progressive taxation is historically associated with social democracy, whereby the wealthy pay higher proportions of tax. But the UK’s current Conservative government would stake a claim to it, partly as a consequence of the greatest public-spending splurge outside wartime during the pandemic and partly to fulfil the political pledge of “levelling up”, whatever that may come to mean, if anything.
And there surely lies the point. Western free-democratic politics is broken when it serves up world leaders such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, who don’t even know what they think and, as such, are simply in the business of managing or mismanaging their declines, rather as the Rake “progresses”.
But we get the politicians we deserve, so it may be that the mirror they hold up to us shows a demos that doesn’t know what it wants – and more dangerously doesn’t kmow what it believes either.
Prudes and preachers
Across the brothel scene early in The Rake’s Progress hangs a banner with the legend “Shut your ears to prude and preacher, let Nature be your teacher”. As we approach COP26, it’s a little difficult to know on which side of that equation to stand – who are the prudes and preachers and should Nature, human or otherwise, have its hegemony? But the riddle nevertheless demonstrates that we don’t know where we are, other than, like our leaders and the Rake, managing our decline.
It’s really to do with an absence of belief, or rather an absence of knowing what to believe in, that beggars the progressive in all of us. There’s a little of George Bernard Shaw’s “There’s no progress without change” in this, which again (wrongly) gets ascribed to Marxism.
To progress downwards is the prerogative of the feckless and rakish politician. We can do better than that but, like Tom Rakewell, it means deciding what we want.
To do that, we have to answer that question first. Another couple of questions we might pose along the way of our current political journey are: Who is paying Nick Shadow? And what are his wages?
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest