Zoo in the head

Sing Sing sing

 Can't have done much for prison as a deterrent.

Imperial lather

The Guardian publishes an extract from Richard Gott's new book, in which he works himself into a lather over the British Empire. It's somewhat overwritten, but that's not the same as overstated; the thrust of the piece is irresistible: that, however much we allow ourselves to be flattered by talk of good intentions or absence of mind or by comparisons with the Belgian Congo, an empire is necessarily violent and oppressive. (The best short version of this argument I know is Sven Lindqvist's 'Exterminate all the brutes'.)

A striking sentence towards the end, though:

The rebellions and resistance of the subject peoples of empire were so extensive that we may eventually come to consider that Britain's imperial experience bears comparison with the exploits of Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun rather than with those of Alexander the Great.

Why let Alexander off the hook? In the New York Review of Books, Mary Beard questions the greatness:

In a now fragmentary passage of his treatise On the State, [Cicero] seems to have quoted an anecdote that would turn up again, almost five hundred years later, in the pages of Saint Augustine. The story was that a petty pirate had been captured and brought before Alexander. What drove him, Alexander asked, to terrorize the seas with his pirate ship? “The same thing as drives you to terrorize the whole world,” the man sharply replied. There were plenty of acts of terror he could have cited: the total massacres of the male population after the sieges at Tyre and Gaza; the mass killing of the local population in the Punjab; the razing of the royal palace at Persepolis, after (so it was said) one of Alexander’s inebriated dinner parties.

It seems to have slipped Gott's mind momentarily that empires rely on propaganda, projecting an image of relatively benign power, as much as on brutality.

Meritocracy: a footnote

From Polly Toynbee's column in today's Guardian:

Aspiration and social mobility are the useful mirage, laying blame squarely with individuals who should try harder to escape their families and friends, instead of seeking great fairness for all. It suits life's winners to pretend this is a meritocracy: we well-off deserve our luck, anyone can join us if they try.

I suppose my question is, would a genuine meritocracy be that much of an improvement? Worth a read.

Travesties

Last Friday I went down - or "up", as we old Oxford hands say - to Oxford to hear Tom Stoppard delivering the annual Richard Hillary Lecture, on the theme of theatre as "A Pragmatic Art". The title didn't have a lot to do with the lecture, except that at one point Sir Tom divided playwrights into those who are all about the text and those who regard the text as in service to the moment, the event: he placed himself in the latter camp; to some this will come as a surprise.

He opened by expressing an anxiety about the ease with which the artist today is "validated", illustrating the point with dialogue from Travesties (1975), his play about the convergence of Lenin, Joyce and Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism, in Zurich in 1917. Tzara extols to Henry Carr, the minor English diplomat out of whose hazy recollections the play is constructed, the life of the artist; Carr regrets that he "can do none of the things by which is meant Art."

TZARA: Doing the things by which is meant Art is no longer considered the proper concern of the artist. In fact it is frowned upon. Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does. A man may be an artist by exhibiting his hindquarters. He may be a poet by drawing words out of a hat. In fact some of my best poems have been drawn out of my hat which I afterwards exhibited to general acclaim at the Dada Gallery in Bahnhofstrasse.

CARR: But that is simply to change the meaning of the word Art.

TZARA: I see I have made myself clear.

CARR: Then you are not actually an artist at all.

TZARA: On the contrary. I have just told you I am.

There's glory for you. Tzara's has become the dominant conception of art. It has inspired masses of shit and a very few possibly great works. Then again, you could say the same about any aesthetic doctrine; it's not the doctrine that makes the art. And Tzara's version has this to be said for it: in the face of academic correctness, bourgeois taste, the capriciousness and ego that go with patronage, it asserts the absolute autonomy of artist and art; that's a kind of heroism. 

On the face of it, Tracey Emin, with her unmade beds and her lists of lovers, sits with Tzara. But here she is in an interview with the Scotsman in 2008:

"I'm not stupid," Emin says. "I don't go around throwing up and saying, 'This is art.' I went to art school for seven years. I've got a first-class honours degree in printmaking. I've got a master of arts in painting. I really know what I'm talking about. I'm a brilliant f***ing artist. If I wasn't, I wouldn't be having the level of success that I am."

Not "I am an artist by my own act of will" but "I am an artist because I've got a certificate. Also, cash": portrait of the artist as a lapdog, submitting to the authority of the academy, of money, of opinion. It's not an isolated incident, by the way - I've heard Emin say as much in a radio interview.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to find her, in the Guardian, justifying her conversion to Toryism on the grounds of their support for the arts: 

"And remember, Tory people are massive collectors of the arts. For a lot of my friends, who think I'm crazy voting for the Tories - I want to know who buys their work? Who are the biggest philanthropists? I promise you, it's not Labour voters."

You might think support for the arts had something to do with putting art before the public, with education, rather than encouraging patronage by the rich (Matthew Arnold: "Culture seeks to do away with classes"). Nuh-uh. Politics, aesthetics, principle - sod 'em: who's going to flash the biggest wad? It would be easy to get cross about Emin's views if they weren't so pathetic.

Penguin: Because you're worth it

In the run-up to the royal wedding the Independent published an article by Geoffrey Robertson QC headlined "A manifesto for British republicans". We agree in principle, it's clear; but details of his argument were puzzling. Take Robertson's claim that because the Act of Settlement of 1701 adopts "the feudal principle of primogeniture (inheritance down the male line)" the future Charles III would lose his throne if he had a sex-change operation: leaving aside the slackness of his definition - primogeniture <em>qua se</em> has nothing to do with sex, and feudal systems have been run without it - isn't he just guessing? I'm pretty sure the framers of the act didn't make any specific provision for gender-reassignment, and the question has never been tested in the courts (so far as we know). It seems entirely reasonable that Queen Charlene would be permitted to remain on the throne, on the grounds that birth-sex trumps subsequent alterations.

Robertson also says that "The Act imposes anti-meritocratic race discrimination: no-one unrelated to this German family (the Windsors changed their name from Saxe-Coburg Gotha during the First World War to disguise their familial relationship with the Kaiser) can aspire to the crown". Odd to bring Germanness into the equation, if it's racism we're sweating about, and bizarre to finger the act as "anti-meritocratic" - as if monarchy isn't always and inevitably anti-meritocratic, and as if we were all agreed that meritocracy is a fine thing.

But Michael Young coined the term in a spirit of derisive irony. The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) purports to be a history of Britain in the age of universal education, written with the benefit of hindsight from 2033: by this time the demands of a modern technological economy have led to the breakdown of the old closed shops of family and seniority; intelligence testing has ensured that promotion is conferred on the ablest and hardest-working, and in consequence the nation is run by the people best fitted to run it - a meritocracy. Meanwhile the masses, for the first time in history, are bound to recognize that "they have an inferior status - not as in the past because they were denied opportunity; but because they are inferior". But in spite of its clear justice and efficiency the system suffers strains and discontents; 2,000 shop assistants have smashed a store at Stevenage, an atomic station has been destroyed at South Shields, there has been a walk-out by domestic servants. The author wonders: "Do not the masses, for all their lack of capacity, sometimes behave as though they suffered from a sense of indignity?" A postscript notes that he died in recent disturbances at Peterloo.

The irony is at times too dry, at times clunking. In some respects Young got it wrong. Extrapolating from postwar trends, he saw Britain becoming a kind of social democracy (he was writing in the historical moment depicted in Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, when socialism looked more efficient and innovative than capitalism). He saw how important it would become for social and educational outcomes to be describable purely in measurable terms; he didn't realize that this would come to imply that the only outcomes that matter are economic ones. He didn't think comprehensive schools would last (then again, looking at the government's plans to encourage free schools, faith schools and academies, he may have got that one right). Other things he saw icy clear, though: the devaluing of experience, the discarding of the old; the university degree, cuckoo-like, pushing out all other qualifications; and he seems to have grasped the extent to which "social mobility" would be seized on by the political classes.

Suzanne Moore wrote a shrewd and funny piece in the Guardian last month about the absurdity of being lectured on social mobility by the current government, posh boys who started at the top and have been stuck there ever since. But she didn't mention the thing that bothers me: that "social mobility" is a get-out clause for the elite, a way for them to stop worrying about inequality. So long as opportunity exists, however rare, we can blame the poor for their own situation. The division of the poor into "deserving" and "undeserving" had its dark side, but the promise of social mobility allows us to abolish the category of deserving poor altogether - to be poor is now, by definition, to be undeserving. Feudalism had its advantages.

About the cover: 1965 reprint of the 1961 edition, design by Hans Unger (who I've mentioned here and here). The little faceless men must allude to Isotype, the pictorial language developed by the Viennese logical philosopher Otto Neurath. I also have the first American hardback edition, 1959: 

The US version has a black face: Young doesn't mention race even in passing.

 

 

Pants on fire

I've used the "Calm down dear" line on my wife, but would plead in mitigation that a) I've loved her dearly for twenty-some years, and b) in casting myself as Michael Winner I'm effectively evacuating the moral high ground and conceding the argument. I don't think this would be a fair characterisation of what David Cameron thought he was doing when he put down Angela Eagle last week. 

Still, the scandal lay not in the rudeness or possible sexism but in the indifference to ordinary fact. Cameron - irrelevantly, to score a cheap point - had said that the former Labour MP Howard Stoate had been defeated by a Conservative candidate at the general election; Eagle pointed out that Dr. Stoate had stood down; Cameron made a bad joke. Knowing that you have said something untrue and refusing to correct the mistake - isn't that lying? It's depressing that the media were so uninterested in that aspect of the affair.

The prime minister was showing a similarly relaxed attitude to truth this morning on Radio 4: John Humphrys, interviewing him on the Today programme, asked about supposed falsehoods in the "No to AV" campaign; jesting Cameron replied that the referendum campaign had been "robust", and that he was not personally responsible for the content Humphrys was talking about. I wonder: when Damian McBride talked about spreading a rumour that Cameron had venereal disease, would Cameron have settled for Gordon Brown waving the matter aside as "robust" campaigning? Or is it only some sorts of lie that we don't allow?

Have you met Miss Jones?



In the Daily Mail, Liz Jones retraces Joanna Yeates' last steps and ponders her death's deeper meanings:

Leaving Jo’s flat, I return to my car. My satnav takes me to the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

The theory is the killer took the long route from the flat to where he dumped the body to avoid the CCTV cameras. Perhaps he also wanted to avoid the 50p toll.

I don’t have 50p and try tossing 30p and a White Company button into the bucket. It doesn’t work.

There is now an angry queue behind me. Isn’t it interesting that you can snatch a young woman’s life away from her in the most violent, painful, frightening way possible, take away her future children, her future Christmases, take away everything she loves, and yet there are elaborate systems in place to ensure you do not cross a bridge for only 30 pence?

Finally, a man in a taxi jumps out, and runs to me brandishing a 50p piece.

‘Not all men are monsters,’ he says, grinning. Maybe not. But one monster is all it takes.

Poignant, sensitive, heart-breaking. Or, to take some of the milder remarks from the comments thread, "Shameful, inept, morbid, irrelevant, patronising", "insensitive, lazy, snobbish" and "unbelievably ill conceived".

Lubbock: a postscript

I realised I ought to share this postcard with the world: Tom Lubbock pasted it together years ago, on a whim, and it's been sitting on my desk or my mantelpiece ever since, because it so closely reflects my own Weltanschauung.  Tom swore he'd found the sentiment in Nietzsche but he couldn't remember where, and all I can find on the web is some complaints about the effect of beer on the German soul, from Twilight of the Idols. Information gratefully received.

Nation of shopkeepers

 

Speaking of bankers, I've been reading a couple of idiot's guides to the economy: Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism and John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. They have their flaws - Chang lunges at a couple of straw men; Lanchester sometimes manages a simplifying tone without actually simplifying the concepts; both overdo the idiot part from time to time - but I found both very helpful in understanding the mess we're in. It's particularly striking that they both say that the underlying problem is a cultural one - subservience of governments (indeed, of entire political classes) to a doctrine of unregulated markets, subordination of the most important social values to economic value. No, what's particularly striking is that they had to say this, that the emptiness of mere monetary value needs to be asserted.

Being a mild-tempered person, I'm surprised to find myself in a state of almost constant rage at the extent to which public discourse has been overtaken by the language of commerce: that disgusting phrase "UK plc", the way that words like passenger, pupil, citizen are replaced by "client" and "customer", the constant reiteration of the notion that business is "the real world" (with the implication that the business of government - running schools, hospitals, armies, rescuing abused children, locking up criminals - is mere froth). I was alarmed to notice, in yesterday's Financial Times, the new Westfield shopping centre at Stratford referred to as the "gateway" to the 2012 Olympic Games: evidently, the plan is that visitors' dominant impression of the London Olympics will be of a great shopping opportunity. 

One point Lanchester makes has stuck in my head: "There are four sectors in which Britain is world-class: finance, arms manufacturing, the creative arts and higher education. Of these, the first receives strong government support, the second lavish investment and strong support, the third is largely left to mind its own business and the fourth has been gradually run down, with three decades of consistent discouragement and underfunding. What would Britain look like today if instead of the arms industry or the City it had been our Russell Group universities which had been the subject of attempts to achieve world supremacy?" And the seas would turn to lemonade.

Too depressing for words

Philip Hammond, MP for Runnymede and Weybridge, is the new Secretary of State for Transport. In an interview with the political editor of the Evening Standard he admits to driving a Jaguar XJ ("greenest car in its class") and having three points on his licence for speeding (62mph in a 50mph zone). He lives in Pimlico - half an hour's walk at most from his office on Horseferry Road, and an easy journey by public transport; but he does the commute in a ministerial car, telling the Standard that it is "a good 10 minutes' hoof" from the tube to his office. 

The awful part comes when he is asked about cycling: "I've never actually cycled in London [...] I'd have to take a deep breath. I think you need to know what you are doing to cycle in London." He goes on to say: "Cyclists need to be more aware of the risks around them. It frightens me to death when I see them pull out around other cyclists, completely unaware there is a car behind. Maybe they need wing mirrors."

Both his points - that you need to know what you are doing to cycle in London and that cyclists need to be more aware of the risks around them - are obviously and uncontroversially true; and cycle training should be an important element of any sane transport policy. But Mr. Hammond seems to think that cyclists' lack of awareness is the main source of danger; as any experienced London cyclist will tell him, that's bollocks. However well-trained your cyclists are, they can't dodge every stupid and aggressive motorist. No amount of wing-mirrors will save cyclists from atrociously designed and maintained cycle lanes and stupid laws drawn up by people who haven't sat on a bike since they were twelve. The last thing we need is another motorised ignoramus in charge of transport policy.

What was that slogan again? Oh yes: "Vote blue, go green." Well, I'm feeling kind of nauseated.