Adam Curtis released his latest documentary series, 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head', last week. All six episodes are currently available for UK viewers to watch on the BBC's iPlayer, while worldwide viewers can watch it here. As one might expect from Curtis, it is an expertly made visual collage with a superlative soundtrack, telling the stories of some fascinating figures largely forgotten to history, which Curtis ties together as part of his overall mission statement. This time, he is telling an 'emotional history' of how Western society embraced individualism to compensate for how the radicals of the past failed the change the world for the better, eventually leading to the rise of conspiracy theories and populism.
If that sounds familiar to Curtis' fans, it should: the documentary acts as something of a greatest hits of his previous concerns, ending up feeling almost as much of a retreat into Curtis' own history as that of the world. His signature phrases, '...And then something strange happened' and 'So they went back, into the passed' are trotted out in key moments much as how Marvel deploys beloved characters at unexpected moments for maximum fan excitement. It's as exciting, electric and eclectic as the best of his work to date. But then something strange happened: in going back, into his past, Curtis became infected with the very nostalgia-driven nihilism he attributed to others. In repeating his familiar refrains about our failures to improve the world, he missed how the world has been steadily improving in a different way to how he was expecting.
In 1831, the French philosopher and diplomat, Alexis de Tocqueville, along with his colleague, the prison reformer Gustave de Beaumont, were sent by the French government to write a report on the American prison system. Instead, de Tocqueville produced a treatise on the unique historical and social conditions which led to the success of representative democracy in the United States. Within his analysis, de Tocqueville noted a paradox which occurred as societies begin to reform towards greater fairness and equality. 'The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable,' de Tocqueville says, 'so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. [...] When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes.'
In other words, as society becomes more equal, its people become increasingly sensitive to any inequalities remaining within it. This paradox is rife in Western societies at the moment: in 2018, a poll for the Thomas Reuters Foundation found that its consulted experts placed the United States in tenth place in a list of the world's most dangerous countries for women, listing it with such nations as Afghanistan, the Taliban-controlled country where women can be jailed for fleeing abusive husbands, or Saudi Arabia, a heavily segregated country where women's lives are controlled from birth to death by a male guardian and where they can be harshly punished for interacting with any man they are not related to.
The poll was taken in the aftermath of the MeToo social media campaign and the since proven accusations of rape and sexual abuse against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Within this febrile atmosphere, the polled experts ranked the United States equal third in the world with Syria for women being in danger of sexual violence, despite all data showing a huge decline in rape and sexual violence over the past decades and any year-on-year statistics bucking that trend being attributable to expanding definitions of sexual crimes. While rape and sexual violence remain a significant problem in the United States, it should also be self-evident that it is not only one of the safest places to be a woman, but in common with all Western nations, among the safest and most just places for anyone to exist in the entirety of human history.
In the fourth episode of 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head', Curtis tells the heartbreaking story of a transwoman named Julia Grant applying to the NHS to be allowed to surgically transition. At every step, she finds a system working against her, exemplified by a psychiatrist who persistently questions the rationality of her thinking despite her obvious lucidity. Every time she attempts to take matters into her own hands, it is used against her. Finally, she has a private operation which leaves her unable to have sex, resulting in her partner leaving her.
Curtis' precise intent in relaying this story is slightly unclear, a problem with the documentary as a whole. Taken as part of the documentary as a whole, it is reasonable to assume that Curtis believes it bolsters his argument that individualism has crippled the ability for individuals to change the world for the better. However, were Julia Grant going through the same process in today's world, she may well encounter discrimination in various forms, but would also find a world more aware of and sympathetic to her plight. Indeed, one of the major current questions regarding trans rights is not the validity of transitioning at all, but whether access to hormonal and surgical transitions is excessively permissive, specifically for children. Issues remain, but contrary to Curtis' thesis, our individualistic world has changed for the better.
Curtis' nostalgia for the radicalism of the past also ignores how radicalism and a desire to change the world remains as potent today as it ever was. It was radicalism among Twitter activists which pushed for greater acceptance of people like Julia Grant, as well as harassing those who they perceive as obstructing future progress. Equally, two of the political events most maligned in recent years by many of those same left-wing radicals, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, were themselves radical moves motivated by a working class wanting to push back against an out-of-touch political establishment. Contrary to Curtis' assertion, those people succeeded in changing the world, whether one believes it for better or worse.
That these recent acts of social upheaval - whether Trump, Brexit, trans rights or any almost other big issue of the day - are so divisive speaks to the problem with Curtis' faith in radicalism. It is not individualism, or nihilism, or an absence of a vision of the future which has led to the rise in conspiracy theories and populism, but precisely the thing which Curtis believes to be the solution. Real changes for the better in the world occur incrementally and almost imperceptibly, a slow shift towards consensus essential for change to endure and which radicalism is fundamentally incapable of. That this kind of change is so gradual means it is often overlooked and as de Tocqueville predicted, leads people to take an outsized view of society's remaining problems rather than the improvements it has made. This leads to a desire for the big, imaginative visions of the future which Curtis longs for, except those visions are always offered by the radical populists he laments.
In the third episode of one of his previous documentaries, 'The Trap', Curtis fundamentally misunderstood that Isaiah Berlin's concepts of positive and negative liberty were not mutually exclusive, but that elements of both were necessary for a fair and functional society. (I was introduced to positive and negative liberty via Curtis and wrote about them here). Curtis' view of individualism appears similarly blinkered and exclusive, conflating it with the beliefs of extreme Randian objectivists rather than the way most would understand it in everyday life: that every individual in society should be free to act, speak and vote without fear of reprisal as long as they do so within the law and without harming others. Contrary to Randian objectivism, this individualism is not only compatible with the existence of communities and shared action, but rooted in it: no society can be prosperous and representative unless the individuals within it are free to be themselves within the law.
'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' is another gripping and informative piece of work by Curtis, whose big picture shortcomings are more than compensated for by his ability to introduce a wide array of fascinating stories, people and ideas to a mainstream audience in an engaging way. It has always been better to use Curtis' work as a launchpad for wider learning rather than taking at face value his sometimes questionable grasp of the facts. For instance, his offhanded claim in episode five that 'the slave trade was one of the main forces behind the rise of the British Empire' is a myth: the slave trade and its associated industries is estimated to have been accountable for no more than 3% of the Empire's capital formation by the late Eighteenth century (bottom of page 49 at the link).
The weakest aspects of Curtis' work, the broad theses under which he gathers his individual stories, reveal him as guilty of that which he ascribes to others. Just as he describes Brexit voters as motivated by an idealised, constructed vision of the past, so too does he preach for a sanitised, imaginary version of radicalism free of populism yet bringing swathes of people together under a communal vision of the future. He describes how individualism has crippled people's ability to imagine a better world, yet fails to recognise how the world has simply been improving in a different way to how he thinks it should. 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' inadvertently reflects the failings of modern discourse back at us: it is dazzling and energising, full of spectacle and storytelling. In other words, precisely the kind of passionate lament which de Tocqueville observed as a consequence of steady, unobserved progress making any remaining social shortcomings so exciting in their relative scarcity.
