Zoo in the head

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.

Penguin: Dogs in space

However commonplace the shapes in which it may become incarnate, health always has a strong, attractive influence on man. And the fact is, Niki's story is hardly more than a faithful account of her health. And we are now dealing with a period in Niki's life when the charm of youth reinforced that condition of health which, even by itself, is so seductive; a period, in short, when what pleases us is precisely that quality which is, in reality, still wanting, to wit the imminent perfection of body and mind. The awkward and exaggerated movements which sometimes miss their aim and make us smile; the avid curiosity which sends the nose questing into everything, but ready to be withdrawn with a sneeze of alarm; the awkwardness, clumsiness, excessive freedom sometimes manifest and all symbolic of the strength and suppleness to come - all these things compose a spectacle so reassuring that even experience and embittered age may well see in it a denial of its pessimistic prophesyings.

A thing I didn't expect when we got our dog was how much pleasure and pride I would take in his prowess - his strength and speed and nimbleness, not to mention the joy he radiates when showing them off (Blake: "Exuberance is beauty"); I'm like a dad at sports day. People talk a lot about a dog's mental or emotional qualities (gentleness, loyalty, obedience, or their contraries) but in the end it's mostly a physical thing. Dogs are unselfconscious about their movements, their bodies, to an inhuman degree; perhaps that make us more conscious of those things - filling the gap the dogs have left. In any case, we love them for it. Among people, physical affection - that is, affection for the body, as well as expressed with the body - so often gets muddled up with sex; our love of dogs can be purer than that (but some time we're going to have to talk about J. R. Ackerley).

At the heart of Niki is the most authentic fictional account that I've read of a dog's body, and the effect it has on humans. (The Call of the Wild is good on Buck's transformation from pampered housepet to überwolf, but necessarily over-dramatized.) The book is also a sharp political allegory. It was first published in Hungary in 1956, shortly before the revolution and Soviet intervention, and set a few years before, during the early days of Communist rule. Niki's owners, the Ancsas, are loyal party members, and Mr. Ancsa's enthusiasm for the new state, and for the role he plays as an engineer in its building, is explicitly compared to Niki's enthusiasm for life; the loving discipline they impose on her is contrasted with the harsher, more arbitrary role of the party in their lives:

The abuse of power, baleful vice of kings, leaders, dictators, directors, heads of departments, secretaries, shepherds, cowherds, and swineherds, heads of families, pedagogues, elder brothers, of old and young in what authority so-ever, this stench, this sickness, this source of infection, peculiar to man and unknown to any other carnivore, even the bloodiest, this curse and blasphemy, this war and cholera, was a thing unknown in the Ancsas' house. No pointless constraint was placed on Niki's freedom.

Mr. Ancsa vanishes - to prison, his wife eventually discovers. With his departure, Niki's abundant health begins to fade, her decline a commentary on the slow death of her masters' ideals, their hope, and perhaps more than a commentary: dogs take so much of their feeling from us; perhaps the death of hope is what kills Niki.

This is the 1961 Penguin edition (the only one I know of) - drawing by Barry Driscoll. For comparison, here is the cover of the current New York Review Books edition:

Wrong dog - Niki is supposed to be a pure white fox terrier with brown ears - but it gets the spirit rather better than Driscoll, whose drawing is in a tacky English tradition of comically pathetic dogs. Same translation as the Penguin, by Edward Hyams (a very interesting character - novelist, journalist, historian of wine, gardening, political assassination and terrorism, anti-nuclear campaigner, pioneering ecologist. He wrote several books on soil, in particular the failure of fertility: A Prophecy of Famine was co-written with H. J. Massingham, who I'll talk about some time). 

My Penguin copy set me back 99p plus p&p on eBay, which turns out to be a bargain: six or seven quid is usual, and there are sharks out there trying to pretend it's a rarity and charging £15 and up. The NYRB, with an introduction by the excellent George Szirtes, may be better value.

Post dedicated to Tim Dee, who introduced me to Niki, and who had a birthday last week. Many happy etc.

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?

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.

Where we're at

David Cameron (right) and Nick Clegg hold their first joint press conference

My, that was an election, wasn't it? Not precisely exciting, as the media kept insisting it was - for that, we'd all have to have felt some deep emotional investment in the outcome; and for that to happen, we'd have had to feel that at least one of the parties was offering something new and different; and for that to happen, we'd have to have felt like they weren't treating us like idiots with their bland prescriptions for "change", their almost affected aversion to any concrete discussion of economic reality, and the party leaders' continual insistence on their affection for Britain. The vacuous irrelevance of that claim was brought home by Sky News's Adam Boulton, who capped a witless on-air spat with Alistair Campbell by whining "I actually care about this country." Quick, a quiz: "Patriotism is the last refuge of ..." — what? Is it a) "an idealistic and strictly impartial broadcaster"; b) "a wronged man, struggling to reclaim his reputation" or c) "a slimy prick"? (The answer is c), although I'm quoting from memory and can't guarantee that Dr. Johnson used those exact words.)

But it was, if not exciting, unpredictable. I was one of those who expected Labour to face electoral annihilation; and while my boyhood allegiance to the party has been loosened, I was relieved that it did as well as it did. By contrast, Andrew Sullivan - who had a terrible election, substituting wishful thinking about the Conservative Party's talents and chances for hardnosed analysis - wrote 10 days before the election: "There is nothing I'd rather see than the demise of the Labour party, the architect of the socialist state and the culture of class-hatred that I grew up in and that Thatcher alone helped partially dismantle." It's true! Before the Labour party sprang into existence, cultivating class-hatred in order to invent an electoral base that otherwise could never have existed, Britain was a harmonious nation whose major public health issue was that vast number of proles with heads scarred and depilated by over-enthusiastic forelock-tugging as the grateful lower-orders strove to express their appreciation of the paternal kindness constantly lavished on them by their betters. (By the way, I infer from that sentence that Sullivan thinks class-hatred is something felt exclusively by lower classes towards their betters - "the politics of envy" is the usual dismissive phrase. If he really does believe that, he ought to spend some time discussing education with middle-class parents in London.)

The oddest thing is how well things have turned out all round. The morning after the election, the consensus was that everybody had lost - the Tories didn't have an overall majority, the Liberal Democrats hadn't capitalised on their leader's supposedly marvellous (in reality, bland and trivial) performance in the leadership debates, Labour had seen its share of votes and seats slashed. A week on, Cameron is prime minister of a government with at least a paper majority; the Liberal Democrats have got a place at the table on surprisingly favourable terms; and Labour - having flirted dangerously with the idea of a minority coalition government of dubious legitimacy - has ended up shot of an unelectable leader and retiring into opposition with clean hands. All we need now is for Labour to shed some of its enthusiasm for markets and regain a little love for civil liberties and we're set.

Also, it would be good if the weather could stop being so unseasonably bloody cold.

Tyranny of the majority?!?

I've been puzzling and puzzling over an argument deployed by Megan McArdle in a wail of agony at the passing of the healthcare bill in the US Congress last night. Describing this turn of events as "pretty worrying", she goes on to ask: "Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority? Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn't want this bill. And that mattered basically not at all." She goes on to refer to the Democrats' "contempt for those mouth-breathing illiterates in the electorate".

What are we to make of this? The fact that Obama, and other Democrats, have stood for election promising healthcare reform is, apparently, unimportant: if the opinion polls suggest opposition to reform, promises should be abandoned. The lurking premise seems to be that elections don't confer legitimacy, polls do. This is, in fact, how many politicians behave, here and in the US; and it is one of the things that has fucked our politics up so comprehensively. Democracy is not simply a matter of more versus less: it is, at least as importantly, a matter of law and procedure, of sticking to the rules.

To take the electorate at their word - to say, that is what you voted for, so that is what I'm doing - is not to treat them with contempt; it's to treat them like adults. And Megan McArdle is a big baby.

De mortuis, etc.

Pat Robertson's views on the role of Satan in Haitian history have been reverberating around cyberspace. There's a particularly interesting post by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the question of whether good deeds can excuse evil words (short answer: No): in his support, Coates enlists Christopher Hitchens, seen on video explaining his refusal to pretend to mourn the Rev. Jerry Falwell. (Scholars of loon may wish to scan this 2001 footage of Falwell and Robertson agreeing that the USA brought September 11th on itself, on account of all that sodomising and abortion and not supporting Israel enough - you can't knock Robertson for inconsistency.)

The comments after the Coates post, debating the rights and wrongs of speaking ill of the dead, point towards an extraordinary piece of post-mortem invective, H. L. Mencken's obituary of William Jennings Bryan, best remembered now as an opponent of Darwinism - just before he died, in 1925, he made a fool of himself at the Scopes trial. Here's Mencken's assessment:

Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

Possibly Mencken went too far. Before his evangelising days Bryan had been secretary of state, three times Democratic presidential candidate, and a champion of liberal, democratic ideals - he led campaigns against big banks and America's new-minted imperial ambitions; and a century on, was he wrong?

I always associate his name with Vachel Lindsay's poem, recalling the effect of Bryan's 1896 presidential campaign on a young idealist:

Prairie avenger, mountain lion,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,
Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West