“Where there’s no future, how can there be sin?"- the rise of the age of Brutalism

Save the Queen made it to number one. In those days, for young people, Top of the Pops was like Sunday church. We waited anxiously to see which group and song would reach No 1 each week.

When it was God Save the Queen, the BBC promptly banned the song.

In response, the Sex Pistols hired a barge and played it on the River Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament. The police were sent out to commandeer the boat and they were promptly arrested.

Prompt was the operative word in the heady days when punk rockers fought the monarchy with music. Cauterise the infection quickly. Or so the establishment thought.

What had this motley crew done wrong?

In God Save the Queen, an anthem powered by an opening riff to beat all riffs, the Sex Pistols called the Queen’s “a fascist regime”. It wasn’t. It was sclerotic and pampered by taxpayers. But the words rhymed, so why not? It was shocking. Believe me.

But there was much more to punk rock than exaggeration.

One of the lines in the song had much darker implications:

“Where there’s no future, how can there be sin?” rasped lead singer Johnny Rotten before adding poetically:

“We’re the flowers in your dustbin
We’re the poison in the human machine
We’re the future, your future”

“We” were the doomed, thrown-away working-class youth. At a time of rising unemployment, they were in rebellion by making a fashion of torn clothes, Mohican hair cuts and safety pins through their ears and noses.

“Foul-mouthed yobs” the establishment media called them.

They made their point and changed the direction of popular music as well as of society.

But it didn’t end there. Almost 50 years later, the line “where there’s no future, how can there be sin?” reveals a surprising prescience. Looked at carefully, it’s an existential statement that may offer a key to understanding the industrial cruelty being inflicted in Gaza and other places that ordinary people are unwilling bystanders to in the world at this moment.

For “sin”, not coming from the dispossessed youth, but from the over-possessed elites, is now the name of the game.

Post-colonialism has given way to Brutalism; social contract to social assault; human rights to human wronging.

The sin pandemic

There’s a whole lot of sin in the world at the moment.

Genocide is sin.

Ecocide is sin.

Femicide is sin.

Infanticide is sin.

Democide is sin.

What’s different is that the sinners have become oblivious to their sinning. They are certainly not sinned against. They don’t sugar coat it; they think they are beyond sin.

Why?

I have been trying to comprehend such a quantum leap in loss of humanity, to work out how elected political leaders and oligarchs have become so brutalised. An epiphany that came to me while walking around Oxford recently. I think I have the answer.

The world is undergoing a change of age where the future, even the question of whether there is any future, has become extremely uncertain.

As climate chaos explodes, as the sixth mass extinction accelerates and now extends even to human beings, a largely uninhabitable earth may be a real prospect within several generations.

The evidence is mounting:

• Nasa data reveals dramatic rise in intensity of weather events | Extreme weather | The Guardian;
• WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level;
• Climate change: World’s oceans suffer from record-breaking year of heat – BBC News

As the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh pointed out in a lecture he gave at Wits University in September 2024, the ultra-rich, while financing Trump and his climate denialism, are simultaneously preparing for the social breakdown that may be one consequence of the climate crisis.

Ghosh writes:

“It is well known now that several billionaire tech entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Peter Thiel are preparing for an impending apocalypse by building enormously expensive and heavily fortified retreats on remote islands, or in sparsely populated stretches of the United States and Canada. Not to be left behind, a bevy of America’s most popular stars, such as Taylor Swift and Tom Cruise, have also acquired cutting-edge apocalypse shelters. Nor are the ultra-rich the only Americans who are investing in doomsday retreats: so great is the demand that a new and rapidly growing industry has emerged to cater to it.”

This is the time of survival of the richest. Democratic restraints and rules that took several centuries to establish are being broken with manic abandon. “Death capitalism”; “crack-up capitalism”. Call it what you like.

The hypocrisies are worthy of Shakespeare.

A political establishment that less than 30 years ago impeached a president for lying about having sex in the sacrosanct Oval Office, now enables a deranged president who blatantly abuses the office for private profit and has appropriated to himself the divine right to permit, stoke, arm or directly make wars that threatens millions of lives.

For rulers who would be kings, who believe that the future is uncertain, indeed that for billions of human beings whose lives are extremely precarious, the very idea of a future is becoming untenable, moral rules fall away.

Sin becomes permissible.

Welcome to the new world disorder.

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This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.