A Defence of Restorative Nostalgia

There was a rather critical essay of the Anglofuturist “movement” by Luke O’Reilly in the New Statesman recently. In it, O’Reilly describes the group as self-pitying, delusional nostalgists, who are compared at one point to dementia patients looking for a constructed past that never existed.

I am on friendly terms with the Anglofuturists. I’ve been on the podcast twice and go to the drinky-doos. I also get on well with some who think the movement is embarrassing and ridiculous. Personally, I believe Ough and Drysdale, the two podcasters popularising the ideology, have proven to be good sports in the face of criticism and are attracting the attention of interesting people. The average get-together is not composed of sad cases and Westminster obsessives, but instead of commodity analysts, engineers, investors, AI researchers, Palantir types, and civil servants. Whether this smattering of yuppies can be organised into a real movement is debatable, but it’s an interesting and fairly self-aware crowd. When it is unfairly maligned, I feel duty-bound to respond.

Some of the comparisons underpinning the critique are just wrong. O’Reilly describes Anglofuturists at one point as descendants of the Victorian William Blake, who longed for an idealised feudal Albion in touch with nature and free from industry. But Anglofutism is on the side of the Satanic mills. The podcast discusses space travel, machine tools and raising Dogger Bank. While there are desires to rekindle the Welsh rainforest, it will not be brought about through Miliband-style demand management, but through terraforming and genetic engineering. This is most certainly not a green movement.

O’Reilly also argues that Anglofuturism is descended from Afrofuturism. But he asserts that while the latter is good because of power dynamics, the former is self-pity. This is just bizarre. You could read the entire oeuvre of Anglofuturism and not hear the word ‘Afrofuturism’ once. Was Afrofuturism the first political movement to imagine alternative futures?

Apparently, the latter is good and noble because it is a repressed group imagining a future where it is centred. The validity of imagining a future in which one is a protagonist depends on the group being centred. If one wanted to be mean-spirited, as some on the Right certainly are prone to be, the rather implausible Afrofuturist-inspired Wakanda of the Marvel films could seem just as self-pitying as a thatched-roof space station. I think this is a stock observation: “This right-coded thing is a left-coded thing but is bastardised and infused with anger and hate.”

It will get a nod from the usual crowd, but it poorly understands what motivates Anglofuturism. To the extent it is reactive to other cultures, it is China. The rapid buildout of entire new cities, the bulk-buying of machine tools, and Capitalism prioritising market dominance over share buybacks all create the image of a confident civilisation that is not burdened by sacred texts. Is this entirely accurate? Probably not. But China’s limitations aside, it will probably be able to take Taiwan relatively soon. There is plenty of pro-China coverage that is unnecessarily fawning. Still, when every corporate slide deck shows Chinese primacy —or atleast competitiveness —in every new technology, it’s hard not to be a little jealous.

This is where Anglofuturism differs from standard pro-growthism. Of course, all centre-right British people are talking about energy abundance, housing and infrastructure. The lack of material growth in Britain is not an illusion; less tonnage of goods flows through the economy each year. For the respectable, housing and energy are important for GDP growth and making the pie bigger, so we can pay for our NHS and pensions. The Anglofuturist view is that the dynamism is an end in itself, and if we need to engorge the executive or crush institutions to obtain it, then that’s what we should do. What the nation might do with such technology-infused vitality is up for debate.

It would not be a Staggers article without the author casually name-dropping various writers with, at best, a tangential connection to the subject and presenting their quotes as high authority. In a reasonably short article about a distinctly British phenomenon, O’Reilly draws inspiration from Baudrillard, Georgi Gospodinov, and Orhan Pamuk.

Pamuk’s concept of hüzün apparently describes Anglofuturism—an ambient sadness about decline, but a failure to accept it. However, Anglofuturists are more alert to the country’s decline than most. There is no remote interest in foreign wars, leading on the world stage or taking bold action. The interest in an idealised past stems not from delusion but from an acknowledgement of the present. If wanting Britain to be at the vanguard of civilizational progress is silly, so be it, but it is not coming from self-denial.

For better or worse, Pamuk’s acceptance of decline is not accepted by the leaders of his native Turkey, where neo-Ottomanism is a fashionable term. Intertwining a romanticised yet substantive reading of the past with a determination to reverse decline is resurgent worldwide. It’s also clearly a powerful force historically, including for movements that the Left holds to its bosom. Were the protagonists of the Renaissance or the French Revolution not reliant on a constructed past, with their endless odes to Greece and Rome? Anglofuturism is a survival instinct kicking in. If other countries and peoples are imagining the future in their image, it is better not to be passive observers.

The critique is best when asking the simple question: “How can a multicultural society connect to a past where it wasn’t one?” Anglofuturists, I think, would say they do not accept the impositions of the Present on their understanding of the Past or on how we imagine the Future. O’Reilly’s implication is that Anglofuturism is ethnically exclusive. While it’s undoubtedly a less diverse crowd than one would typically get in London, it is not remotely exclusivist.

The multicultural society, as defined by the five fingers of British Values, is not really one in which any group, right or left, has a concrete stake. No British citizen had any agency in making it. It was never proposed or articulated before enactment, and within its great fables, those who populate the anglofuturist email list are generally portrayed as arch-villains, or at best, poorly educated orcs who don’t know where their enlightenment comes from. This ranges from silly hotepisms to scholars publishing utterly misleading claims about British industrialists stealing the Industrial Revolution from West Africans.

For multicultural Britain, our past beyond the Empire is treated basically as pre-history. Just as Richard Dawkins might have used an Archaeopteryx to prove evolution, modern archaeologists will use one skeleton here or there to draw a straight line of English identity between 723 AD and today. Contemporary interest in Britain’s pre-modern past is less about the Angevins and more about constructing a primordial diversity to validate modern immigration retrospectively.

It is perhaps not surprising then that some young Britons, whether they be the descendants of Brythonic bogtrotters or more recent arrivals, would push back and look to the past for inspiration, and to centre themselves in preparation for a turbulent future. Is it futile? Possibly, and if so, the Staggers have nothing to worry about.

The New Statesman is an interesting magazine because it hosts the competing mental states of the British Left. The Editor at Large is Andrew Marr, who is every bit as befuddled by modern Britain as Charles Moore or Michael Heseltine. Messrs McTague and Lloyd are more mischievous, boosting Andy Burnham’s phantom challenge during conference season and making pointed critiques of our exhausted monarchy.

It is a brilliant magazine that is ill at ease. It largely got the future the Left of the nineties wanted, and is now deeply troubled. It is natural, then, to see tongue-in-cheek restorative nostalgia from younger people and be a bit dismissive. But in the world that is being born, restorative nostalgia has its uses.