Still singing Galway Bay

It is a mark of a certain kind of good song that it sounds good when sung drunk. I Will Survive, in spite of being a good song of a different sort, does not fall into this privileged category, as many veterans of pub karaoke have yet to learn. Some songs, the baleful Chelsea Dagger being an example lodged in my medium-term memory, not only do not sound good when sung drunk, but are also simply bad songs.  Such is this vale of tears we inhabit that these songs none the less reverberate down many a high street on a Friday night. The Pogues and Kirsty Maccoll's Fairytale of New York, a song that is very much of the moment, it being both a week from Christmas and the fifteenth anniversary of Maccoll's death, meanwhile occupies an elite position. It is a good song, that sounds good when drunk, and is often sung drunk.



At this point I should apologise to an Irish friend who nurtures an impressive loathing of the song, the result of years of over-exposure, confirmation if it were needed that familiarity sometimes really does breed contempt. I think there are things to be said in favour of Fairytale's greatness, since I am unfashionable enough to think that one can actually argue about the worth of art, as well as being sufficiently non-elitist to think that a song's retaining its poignancy when sung by a bunch of forty-something blokes with a blood alcohol content that would make even its author wince counts in favour of that worth.

At this point a nervous critic of a certain sort will catch a whiff of sentimentality. The accusation of sentimentality is one that needs to be handled with care. Its use is shot through with a patrician disdain of popular affect. On this usage, it is sentimental to set up a roadside shrine to the victim of a traffic accident, whereas shuddering in one's seat at the unfolding of a sophoclean tragedy is magnificent. It is a creed for refined monsters. There is, however, a more cutting, and less problematic way of criticising a work's sentimentality. This was at play in Oscar Wilde's barb that 'one must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing'. There is a type of sentimentality that is undesirable because it occludes the truth, summoning our emotions to its aid in this task. In the case of Dickens' novel the untruthfulness resides in the character of little Nell herself, a child who is too diabolically saintly to have inhabited this planet. Rather more damaging is the sentimentality that arises around war. The first casualty of this is, notoriously, truth, but it is patriotic fervour, pride, tears for our boys, and cheers for our heroes that do the killing.

Fairytale is emphatically not sentimental in this latter sense. It is brutally truthful about human failure and fractured relationships. The fake snow at the beginning of the music video in no way prepares us for the lyrical horror that follows. MacGowan's lyrics do not  romanticise the characters whose drink-sodden, hate-filled relationship they narrate, even though they portray them sympathetically. Words and music cohere beautifully, the upbeat accordion-backed call and response carries an exchange between a couple whose contempt for one another is real, but who seem to be unable to shake the need to tell one another this. It is perhaps surprising that large numbers of people quite so readily sing along with lyrics like: 'you're a bum/ you're a punk/ you're an old slut on junk': a point to which I'll return.The strings towards the end, far from being festive musical chintz, add an ironic underlining to the male protagonist's insistence that things might be looking up. He is, we are left in no doubt, a deluded idiot, and yet we cannot help rooting for him.

It is for this reason that Fairytale's popularity gives us some reason for hope. I do not want to try to convince my friend to change his mind about the song, but I do want to suggest that there is something interesting about its continued appeal. What I've just described is a track soaked in moral complexity, charting the sheer mess of human existence. These themes are no more approved of in contemporary society than the cigarettes and alcohol prominent on MacGowan's piano throughout the video. Ours is an age of censure, of a law from on high that does not negotiate with mortal frailty: the profound moralism that has near ruined the contemporary activist left echoes a broader love affair with the super-ego. There are, it is thought, saints and sinners with no middle ground; whether the mark of sin is having insufficiently checked your privilege, not being a member of a hard-working family, or having consumed more than your daily units of alcohol is a secondary matter. Yet, in spite of the odd predictable complaint about some of the language in the song ('slut', 'faggot') from people constitutionally unable to understand the concept of narration, Fairytale remains widely loved. Large numbers of people recognise that its anti-heroes are in many respects clearly complete bastards, they would certainly be judged unsafe by the standards operative in New Statesman columns, whilst also seeing where they are coming from and wishing them well. This reveals a recalcitrant ethical sophistication that the times have yet to kill; as art can sometimes do, it reminds a society of truths they would rather forget.

That, in any case, is something I think that deserves noticing about this song. And, at the very least, nobody is foolish enough to ask if they know it's Christmas. Of course they know it's Christmas, and that's the problem.

Out with the old

Apparently Hogmanay got going as a result of the Calvinist Kirk having a downer on the celebration of Christmas, which smacked of both popery and fun. It is fair to say that these days the festivities don't wear their puritanical origins on their sleeve. Your host is, alas, prevented by reasons of health from participating in the occasion with full dionysian vigour this year. It's probable, however, that I'll be spending midnight with Mr Jools Holland and his orchestra. So I'll offer you my reflections now. You're on the edge of your collective seat; I can sense it.

When I say 'my reflections', I don't mean my reflection on the state of things in 2014. When viewed with sufficient generality, the situation is perfectly clear already: things are shit, but could get better if enough of us do something about them. We make history, as Marx reminded us, but not in conditions of our own choosing. The mere fact that our present unchosen conditions are to history as Coldplay are to the avant-garde is no good reason not to make some more history.

I want to blog instead about New Year celebrations themselves. There is a increasing tendency for people to adopt a cynical distance from these: "we're only celebrating a arbitrary unit of time passing", "we might have chosen some other measure of time, how can the fact that we didn't be important, or worth celebrating?" It's not that people who say these sort of things don't go on to celebrate the New Year; it's just that they do so in knowing detachment from the whole meaningless affair, presumably smugly fancying that their co-revellers suppose that the gods have decreed that it is 2015, or something. One word for this state of mind is "nihilism".

The arbitrary, you see, matters. Signification is arbitrary, that is to say, meaning is arbitrary. Yet we are language using creatures, we succeed in meaning things. We do this with times and seasons just as readily as we do with words. The randomly chosen measure of time, the festival that so easily could have been elsewhen (or not occured at all), the anniversary, the birthday - all of these serve as landmarks, fixed points around which we structure the narratives of our lives. They lend a life-giving rhythm to our reality, rather like a healthy heart-beat as contrasted with the morbid tremor of fibrillation. The relentless forward march of capital lends to our time the features of the latter: it is not that things are still, after all capital cannot be accumulated without constantly revolutionising the means of production. But the movement we experience is, in the main, unstructured, chaotic. It cares not tuppence for us, our loves and our observances. One moment of time is no more or less important than any other - each moment is abstractly equivalent, equally apt for production and consumption. It's unsurprising, then, that this society finds itself wondering whether the arbitrariness of its new year celebration negates its meaningfulness.

It's similar with Christmas itself. The bonanza of consumption for which this provides the opportunity has become indispensable to the process of circulation in Western capitalism. And yet the cultural logic of the system itself cannot make any sense of the feast. The problem isn't particularly the widespread disbelief in the religious basis of Christmas; we can still just about appreciate a good story. The same kind of worry that we have about the arbitrariness of New Year reappears, of course. There is always some pub bore who can relied upon to tell us, perfectly truthfully, that we don't know the day of Jesus' birth.

The real problem late capitalism has with Christmas lies not with the foundations but with the actuality of the feast in its classical form. Think about it: a significant period of time, twelve days, set apart, marked with special observances and the absence of productive labour, and, in pre-modern times, prepared for by Advent, a period of abstinence. This is hardly the stuff that brings a smile to the face of the bourgeoisie, whose unobtainable fantasy is of constant production alongside constant consumption (this latter somehow obtained without undue encroachment on the wages bill). And so Christmas collapses into an amorphous blob of a Christmas season, starting in October, when the shops lose the Halloween decorations and the restaurants introduce their Christmas menu. It is mostly over by Boxing Day. For all but the statutory bank holidays, business continues as usual, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word 'business', only with a backing soundtrack of Jingle Bells and the occasional offer of a mince pie. Even attempts to re-sanctify Christmas don't re-establish the fine structure of the liturgical year. Carol services can be attended any time from mid-November onwards. The year is flattened at the behest of capital.

Left stranded, as we are, in a time without landmarks, there is a temptation to recover the past, with its organic ebb and flow of the seasons. This dream of a restored temporality is the natural pairing of a vision of a restored order, that is of the politics of conservatism, even fascism. Yet the need for structure and narrative, for history rather than an encounter with time as an alien presence, is real and pressing. It's just that the cure proffered for our lost condition is worse than the disease. Adorno once wrote,

As long as the face of the earth keeps being ravished by utilitarian pseudo-progress, it will turn out to be impossible to disabuse human intelligence of the notion that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the pre-modern world was better and more humane, its backwardness nothwithstanding.

So there's one excellent reason to be a socialist in 2015, to safeguard the future from both chaos and the death-dealing power of the past.

On Christmas

It's not a novel point, but there's a strange ideological two-facedness around the religious side of Christmas celebrations. The central narrative, or more strictly speaking narratives - Matthew and Luke offer us inconsistent accounts - is one in which that which is most significant in humankind is found in the poor and dispossessed, where deity is found in a manger, and which - in its Lukan version - is prefaced by an episode in which the newborn child's mother sings about the overthrow of the rich and powerful. This is not generally the kind of stuff that goes down well in Downing Street.

And yet, there's a notable trend amongst our ruling class to push for a more explicitly 'Christian' celebration of the season. David Cameron's Christmas message, not something - I have to say - that I make a priority on 25th December, has taken a more stridently religious tone over the past couple of years. This is of a piece with his rather improbable recent claim that he is an 'evangelical' about the Christian faith.

Even in secular Britain, religious stories, if not the content of religious belief, have a symbolic power, a capacity to secure a certain social unity in a world whose every tendency is to dissolve social bonds. This is too much of a gift for the guardians of that world to give up. Not only can the Christmas story bind together symbol, emotion, and collectivity: its background religious basis can be invoked on behalf of 'morality'. The characteristic bourgeois use for religion is as a kind of celestial superego, a means of establishing moral norms and an economy of reward and blame long after the social basis that would make such things genuinely intelligible has been swept away by the drive for profit. This policing function would have surprised no small number of more classical Christian authors, for whom their faith has rather more to do with human moral failure, and its overcoming by a thoroughly unsentimental yet gratuitous love, than with securing social respectability. No matter; austerity Britain needs a populace who behave.

There is a circle to be squared, then. How to tell the Christmas story in a way that serves order, without awakening what Bloch called 'the subversive memory' of the text? One way, of course, is the typical ideological disavowal whereby the manner in which something is said shows the speaker not to mean what they are really saying. When the words "he hath put down the mighty from their seats" are proclaimed in a crisp RP accent in King's chapel, Cambridge, even the most anxious burgher is unlikely to call the police. Things have been different when those same words issue from the mouths of Latin American protesters.

These days sentiment and nostalgia play an equal part. We live in a gruesomely mawkish age, moved to tears by the most superficial, manufactured, feelings, yet unmoved by the starvation of a good proportion of the world's population. We are encouraged to yearn for an imagined national past, replete with bunting, cupcakes, parsons on bicycles, and Bisto in a jug on the table. It's a vision that looks a bit like the 1950s, is suspiciously white, and offers a world where women seem to spend most of their time in aprons. We pretend to remember an age when things were more straightforward, where at least we had a place, and could navigate our way around the world - even if our wanderings only ever lead us from the kitchen to the factory and back again. Better that than zero hour contracts and the relentless threat of the future. Christmas, or rather, the celebration of Christmas, fits nicely into this cultural niche. Remember when we all believed? Let's sing along like we used to, for old time's sake. And we'll do it as a family. Just like the good old days, simpler, days. It causes the eyes to well up, and the mind to conjure smell of chestnuts roasting. The child in the crib ceases to be a sign of contradiction, and becomes a prop in a living museum.

All of which is really to say that religion, like the rest of the culture in which it exists, is a site of ideological contest. Remember that when you're eating your sprouts.