A few days ago, I posted a long piece about Mircea Eliade, Francis Fukuyama, and The Legend of Zelda. This post serves as an introduction for those who couldn't quite bring themselves to read those 15,000 words. What this essay does is introduce Mircea Eliade’s thought and argue for his continued relevance by setting out how the Deano - an everyman mass archetype - suggests most people continue - with good reason - to refuse historicism. To become an everyman, in other words, is to lose your historical individuality. To own a newbuild, have the latest car on lease, new trainers, and uncanny teeth is to signal your rejection of linear time and claim your place in a millennia-old primitive ontology that offers an escape from what Eliade calls the “terror of history”. While this description might seem snobbish, in reality this approach to history has always been the most common and the most reasonable. It is the valuation of historical individuality, personal identity, one’s place in inexorable history in itself, reliant on utter faith that the historical moment has value in itself, that is almost impossible. The word faith here is key; Eliade points out that such historicism - created by the Prophets and nurtured by St Augustine - has only ever been an elite concern. Even for the elite, it is difficult; the more history one is exposed to, and he wrote at the end of the second world war in a fractured Europe, the less likely one finds it tolerable. The resurgence of the Deano then, read via Eliade, should be viewed both uneasily and sympathetically; history has returned - to flee from it is the sensible route.
As Tom McTague has pointed out, the Deano is the nouveau riche. He has therefore always been the target of elite scorn. He is ‘a lifestyle choice as much as an identity,’ one that can be ‘boiled down to not moving to London.’
Deano, I should stress, is not a real person. He is an avatar, an internet meme, a representation — the personification of a certain type who can be found almost anywhere in the country. He is an everyday man; a middle manager with a new-build home and a car on finance, a large TV and a PS4.
[...]
He is an aspirational figure, living the life most people aspired to — and governments of all stripes have long encouraged. Deano, he told me, enjoys a day at the races and weekend trips to Europe, spends money and owns his own home. There are black Deanos and Asian Deanos. There are also plenty of female Deanos. And while they might not read the Guardian, that doesn’t make them some kind of Jim Davidson parody. Their views are likely to be run of the mill, in line with the majority opinion of the country.
Tom McTague, ‘The Political Power of the Deano’, Unherd, April 21 2023.
McTague is wrong, I think, to say that the Deano is not an identity. One does not identify as a Deano, rather one is a Deano. To prefigure our discussion of Eliade, we might say the Deano is driven by a fundamental desire for the ontic, for being. McTague is partly right, however, when he says that the Deano is not an elite identity. Elite identity is driven by a desire to strike out from the community. As McTague suggests, to go to university and to make oneself anew in the experience. Yet the question of the Deano’s rootedness to the community is problematic. The old hierarchies have withered away. The Deano’s umwelt is oddly intangible, a product of the zero interest rate phenomena but a late phenomena at that: the heavily mortgaged house, the expensive car on lease, the ps4 and large tv (perhaps the items the Deano most tangibly owns), and the numerous clothes, supplements, make up, and dental work all point as much to uprootedness as to a common identity. All of these are fragile, continually refreshed; the fact that nothing is owned allows the Deano to be ever more responsible to the consumer demands of their group identity. The Deano, then, is almost a non-elite anti-identity. Yet it betrays, as we have said, a powerful longing for being. If the elite identity is predicated on self-expression (going to university, making a difference, writing an autobiography) then, then the Deano lives in horror of anything that might betray the passage of time.
Key here is the phenomenon of ‘Turkey Teeth’. In brief, people want to replace their healthy teeth to attain the uniform celebrity-like whiteness. Healthy teeth are ground down to almost nothing, then covered by ceramic crowns. This is often done in Turkey for a fraction of the cost of a regulated UK procedure. The risks and results are inevitable. Newspapers and gossip sites barely contain their derision at Love Island wannabes and their uncanny mouths. Despite the mockery, they and their even cheaper non-surgical replacement veneers remain almost unfathomably popular. Like other popular beauty treatments - and here we hear a quiet qualifier among those sorts of people - beauty therapies and surgeries appear predicated on unnaturalness. This attitude of course is one of old misogynistic attacks on makeup; that it is too explicit, unnatural, unladylike, a signal of loose sexual morals and decayed flesh. People, especially women, should age both naturally and not at all; the fact that they are not just aging but apparently failing to age well is received as a mortal sin. Turkey teeth’s attraction however is in their explicit display of a perfection that paradoxically undermines their claims to ‘naturalness’. This is, like other facet of mass identity, the point; it is precisely the atemporal, anhistoric qualities that define this identity.
Teeth, of course, are a particularly English class signifier. Turkish dental clinics offering full crowns and Instagram storefronts for veneers are explicit that all dental irregularities - tooth loss, horrid decay - can be erased. Everything, in other words, that betrays the passage of time or memory. Natural teeth record the hardships of the body’s life; drug use, neglect, poor diet, or blind genetic chance. The NHS will, in some cases, pay for or subsidize braces. Assuming, of course, your parents were able to register you with one of the ever-decreasing number of NHS surgeries. If not, you’d best hope they were able to afford the private medical cost. Even if you were lucky enough to get an NHS Dentist however, there is only so much the NHS will do, and even that requires you or your parents to hand over up to £300. The uncanny whiteness that is the hallmark of these teeth marks the erasure of the patient’s personal history that the natural, unadorned mouth stubbornly displays. To leave your teeth natural, or rather to have subtle aesthetic dental treatment - straightening, cleaning, natural whitening - is to display your mastery over and therefore acceptance of aging, time, and health. Your continuing faith, in other words, that you can control your own history, that you can look at grand historical currents with cheerful acceptance.
Deano's everyman identity therefore reflects his resistance to history. To see this, it is worth exploring briefly a summation of Eliade’s thought. Mircea Eliade argued that humans can be split into ‘modern’ and ‘archaic’ consciences. These are not civilisational, nor temporal categorisation; ‘primitive ontology’ is not in some sense a lesser step in a civilizational hierarchy than ‘modern ontology.’ Rather, primitive and modern ontologies are characterized by their approaches to history, with most people in all and even contemporary societies being ‘primitive’ and very few being ‘modern.’ Primitive man lived in a world of archetypes, cyclical lunar-derived myths and eternal repetition. Anything that was meaningful held meaning only insofar as it had some archetype in the mythic world. Profane, secular, individual and inexorable history was utterly resisted. Eliade in particular tells the story of an ethnologist in Romania who recorded a myth about a jealous mountain fairy killing a man betrothed to a village woman. He was then surprised to meet the woman, who confirmed a fairy was not involved:
Thus, despite the presence of the principal witness, a few years had sufficed to strip the event of all historical authenticity, to transform it into a legendary tale: the jealous fairy, the murder of the young man, the discovery of the dead body, the lament, rich in mythological themes, chanted by the fiancee.
This lack of ‘historical authenticity’ is the point. Eternal repetition of archetypes offers comfort to those confronted with the intolerable suffering humanity has had to endure. The belief that linear, inexorable, novel, unpredictable history might have value in and of itself was first proposed by the Hebrew Prophets, and later developed by Christianity. From this, we derived secular historicisms such as Hegelianism and Marxism. Yet it was only ever the possibility, Eliade is keen to stress, of faith that God’s will might be found in, and thereby redeem our suffering from, invading armies, illness, death, crop failure, &c. As he wrote among the wreckage of post-war Europe, exposure to history does not tend to endear a population to acceptance of blind historical chance.
Examining the figure of the everyman via the work of Mircea Eliade therefore reveals the Deano as a familiar and most of all understandable meta-historical identity. If it is a mass ‘primitive’ identity, that is not to say that it is unsophisticated. Nor is it to say that contemporary elite identities denote a radical historicism. To delineate your individuality by going off to London, getting a particular degree, dressing a certain way, believing that your self can create its own meaning is just as reliant on archetypes as the Deano. As Eliade was keen to point out, very few believers in historicism were pure in their historicism. Judaism, Christianity, Hegelianism, Marxism, and all their derivatives still contain ideas of redemption and transcendence, of lunar cycles and the agricultural festivals which dominated human societies for millenia. For Eliade himself, the only tolerable way to suffer history as history was through the christian agonies of a character from Dostoyevesky.
In my longer post, I argued that the work of Eliade showed how identity politics were a harbinger, rather than cause, of longer term historical cycles. Fukuyama’s theory of the end of history and his later attempts to defend his theory via Samuel Huntington’s ideas of Political Order and Decay should be seen as an attempt to keep the historical faith against a quite natural human attitude to political, economic, and personal crises.
Here, I want to suggest that the rise of the Deano as a distinct identity does much the same thing. McTague identifies this particular iteration of the everyman as a zero interest rate phenomena. This is true in the particular trappings of the Deano; the car lease, the mortgage, the middle management job. What this obscures is the homogenisation that has taken place over the last twenty years in society at large. In other words, while emo, goth, punk, scene kid, skater, inter alia were products of the early 21st century, they have diluted to nothing as the 2020s dawned. They too were products of the era. Now, however, there is - with a few exceptions in streaming culture - either the deano or the elite. In Eliadian terms, the homogenisation of culture against history in the face of world historical crisis is the natural response to the “terror of history”. While the world before the global financial crisis had its events, it was the GFC which forced the British public at large to confront history. Of course, the long twentieth century had swept away the old hierarchies on which previous mass identity relied. This should not obscure the history of the Deano. Whereas the early 20th century had social order and institutions to annihilate the self, we have consumerism and credit. It is in these, in the cycles of fashion and commerce, of one trend and product after the other, that express eternal repetition.