It's hard to precis this story, but let's just say it involves a Harvard law professor who meets a woman in a hardware store (in one of the many impossible-to-invent details, the fact that she is wearing a dress is a key part of her allure), becomes involved with her, in a way, and also caught up with her transgender friend - and then it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. It is a cracking story and so much of the delight resides in the details that I shouldn't tell you more.
There is a further irony. At a point when he was feeling more friendly towards his on-off girlfriend's transgender friend, the professor wrote this weirdly odd piece speaking ill of the late Justice Scalia - but accurately describing himself as a naive fool.
Wednesday, 24 July 2019
Friday, 19 July 2019
The United Kingdom
Some glimpses of this country.
1. Miners, the aristocracy of the working class. (Also on the subject of the north-east, "Marat was, of course, best known for living in Newcastle, where he wrote an essay on gonorrhoea.")
2. The other aristocracy: an article by James Wood on his old school, Eton. This, I thought, was an unpleasant and meretricious article. Unpleasant in the grating lack of filial piety (which to some extent must reflect badly on the school, I suppose) and otherwise entirely meretricious. It reveals that some boys at Eton come from rich and well-connected families: David Cameron was one. Some of them have double or even triple-barreled surnames! Other boys are less well-off but talented in some other respect: these included Boris Johnson and Kwasi Kwarteng. Many of the people involved in the Brexit debate went to Eton (there are King's Scholars on both sides of the debate), as did some other prominent people in the fields of acting and the Church of England. It is possible to maintain friendships across the Brexit debate lines. Boris Johnson has not changed his appearance much since he was a teenager. If any of this surprises you then you have come to the wrong blog. Wood writes that he has tended to avoid the topic of Eton "mainly because I dislike a retrospect that might sound like some nasty combination of complaint, boast and self-pity": well, he has largely avoided the element of boast. Nonetheless, Wood does write very nicely, as he is well aware, and I happily found myself reading the article right to the end, having cheerfully abandoned many others in the LRB.
3. Not long ago, I mentioned that it's surprising how many times discussion of Brexit turns to discussion of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. Here is Dawn Foster in the Guardian summing it up: "Centrist thinking is focused on two false premises. The first is that the 2012 London Olympic ceremony represented an idyllic high-point of culture and unity in the UK, rather than occurring amid the brutal onslaught of austerity, with food bank use growing and the bedroom tax ruining lives. The second is that the UK became divided by Brexit and the 2016 vote, rather than it being a symptom of long-term problems ...". It really is worth looking out for the references to this little bit of made-for-television spectacle: truly the Great Exhibition of our time. Wherever I go I spot them.
4. A literary map of the UK.
5. A little glimpse into the wonderful world of politics on the Left: it appears that, for so long as the UK remains in the EU, it would be illegal to impose VAT on private school fees. This view seems to be kosher (Art 132.1(i)), so long as private schools fall within the scope of "bodies governed by public law having [education] as their aim or by other organisations recognised by the Member State concerned as having similar objects" (the words after the "or" are crucial here). This might make the vehemence of pro-EU support among the normally affable London professional classes perhaps a little easier to understand. (Of course VAT on female sanitary products is mandatory within the EU until 2022, according to Wikipedia.)
6. London from the Monument. A little different from the view that prevailed when the Monument was first erected.
1. Miners, the aristocracy of the working class. (Also on the subject of the north-east, "Marat was, of course, best known for living in Newcastle, where he wrote an essay on gonorrhoea.")
2. The other aristocracy: an article by James Wood on his old school, Eton. This, I thought, was an unpleasant and meretricious article. Unpleasant in the grating lack of filial piety (which to some extent must reflect badly on the school, I suppose) and otherwise entirely meretricious. It reveals that some boys at Eton come from rich and well-connected families: David Cameron was one. Some of them have double or even triple-barreled surnames! Other boys are less well-off but talented in some other respect: these included Boris Johnson and Kwasi Kwarteng. Many of the people involved in the Brexit debate went to Eton (there are King's Scholars on both sides of the debate), as did some other prominent people in the fields of acting and the Church of England. It is possible to maintain friendships across the Brexit debate lines. Boris Johnson has not changed his appearance much since he was a teenager. If any of this surprises you then you have come to the wrong blog. Wood writes that he has tended to avoid the topic of Eton "mainly because I dislike a retrospect that might sound like some nasty combination of complaint, boast and self-pity": well, he has largely avoided the element of boast. Nonetheless, Wood does write very nicely, as he is well aware, and I happily found myself reading the article right to the end, having cheerfully abandoned many others in the LRB.
3. Not long ago, I mentioned that it's surprising how many times discussion of Brexit turns to discussion of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. Here is Dawn Foster in the Guardian summing it up: "Centrist thinking is focused on two false premises. The first is that the 2012 London Olympic ceremony represented an idyllic high-point of culture and unity in the UK, rather than occurring amid the brutal onslaught of austerity, with food bank use growing and the bedroom tax ruining lives. The second is that the UK became divided by Brexit and the 2016 vote, rather than it being a symptom of long-term problems ...". It really is worth looking out for the references to this little bit of made-for-television spectacle: truly the Great Exhibition of our time. Wherever I go I spot them.
4. A literary map of the UK.
5. A little glimpse into the wonderful world of politics on the Left: it appears that, for so long as the UK remains in the EU, it would be illegal to impose VAT on private school fees. This view seems to be kosher (Art 132.1(i)), so long as private schools fall within the scope of "bodies governed by public law having [education] as their aim or by other organisations recognised by the Member State concerned as having similar objects" (the words after the "or" are crucial here). This might make the vehemence of pro-EU support among the normally affable London professional classes perhaps a little easier to understand. (Of course VAT on female sanitary products is mandatory within the EU until 2022, according to Wikipedia.)
6. London from the Monument. A little different from the view that prevailed when the Monument was first erected.
7. Here is something written by a transwoman who became a Catholic after transitioning: Durham University's Centre for Catholic Studies' "nurturing, dialogical community showed [her] the possibility for reconciliation with the ecclesial tradition that had nourished [her] theological imagination".
Thursday, 11 July 2019
Links for fun
1. In 1587, Urbano Monte made the largest known early map of Earth. You can play around with a digital version made into a globe here.
3. Come, Josephine, in my Flying Machine! "You're surprised that, having scored big with one ethnic novelty song, the wily Kraut didn't follow it with "If The Man In The Sun Were A Hun". Instead, over the next three and a half decades, he prospered in just about every genre: Irish songs ("Peg O' My Heart", one of the most beguiling of Tin Pan Alley's shamrock ballads), Irish mother songs ("Ireland Must Be Heaven For My Mother Came From There"), substitute mother songs ("Daddy, You've Been A Mother To Me"), anti-German luff ballads ("Lorraine, My Beautiful Alsace Lorraine"), pro-American luff songs ("Would You Rather Be A General With An Eagle On Your Arm Or A Private With A Chicken On Your Knee?"), songs about pedal extremities ("Your Feet's Too Big"), songs about railroad excursions through mining country ("Phoebe Snow The Anthracite Mama"), and songs of sound general philosophy ("There's A Little Bit Of Bad In Every Good Little Girl")." Mark Steyn - and with observations on Titanic too.
4. A Norwegian woman who runs and jumps like a horse.
5. When Slavoj Žižek wrote the text for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue.
6. "As a gaggle of teenage girls waved their Blue-Shield-advertisement-paddles to cheer on the police, I thought to myself “Yes, this exactly captures the spirit of the original Stonewall rioters”." Scott Alexander on civil religion, specifically American civil religion.
7. Christopher Walken dancing.
4. A Norwegian woman who runs and jumps like a horse.
5. When Slavoj Žižek wrote the text for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue.
6. "As a gaggle of teenage girls waved their Blue-Shield-advertisement-paddles to cheer on the police, I thought to myself “Yes, this exactly captures the spirit of the original Stonewall rioters”." Scott Alexander on civil religion, specifically American civil religion.
7. Christopher Walken dancing.
Thursday, 6 June 2019
Manioc and Maniacs
This is an absolutely fascinating Scott Alexander review of The Secret Of Our Success by Joseph Heinrich. Read it. There are plenty of interesting things in it that I do not touch on below (see here for more of the interesting details).
The book is about the importance for human life of the transmission of cultural practices, and how difficult it would have been for anyone trying to interrogate those cultural practices using (what we might describe as) pure reason.
The best example concerns manioc, a tuber native to the Americas that contains cyanide. "In the Americas, where manioc was first domesticated, societies who have relied on bitter varieties for thousands of years show no evidence of chronic cyanide poisoning. In the Colombian Amazon, for example, indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multiday processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots in order to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid." If you don’t carry out these arduous and time-consuming steps then you die. You might think, if you were being critical about it, that these steps are really designed to make the tuber palatable. But if that is all you want to do then you can skip some of the steps and you will end up with a perfectly decent-tasting manioc product and have more time to spend on other things. But then - a long time later and in a way that you would find hard to link to the fact that you skimped on manioc processing - you would die. So your best bet is to follow all the steps of manioc preparation, even though you cannot understand why they are necessary and even though you could not understand them if you tried. Free-thinking rationalism is not your friend; blind obedience to tradition is.
That’s all well and good. But we should take more from the manioc story than that. The moral I want to press on you is that even if "We" think we have understood the objective benefit of the taboo, we might be wrong. We might remove the bitterness of the manioc, so to speak, and then die - but without being able to understand the link between our deaths and our breaking of the taboo.
What I mean is this: even now our scientific knowledge is not sufficient to give us confidence that we understand the objective justifications for all our cultural practices. I’m not being dismissive of the hard sciences here: I’m sure "We" understand quite enough about which food taboos are worth keeping and which are not; there’s no replication crisis in chemistry. But our understanding of psychology and social science has not reached the same levels. Sure, we can throw out the rules of Leviticus on pork and mixed fibres if all we care about is our bodily health. But what about when it comes to our psychological and social health?
Let’s take just one example of a disturbing psychological/social development in a rich Western country, namely the alarming rise in self-harm in England: "Among 16 to 24-year-old women in 2014, 19.7% reported having self-harmed at some point in their life, compared with 11.7% in 2007 and 6.5% in 2000", says the BBC. (There are plenty of other such sad developments to choose from, e.g., "Life expectancy in Canada has stopped increasing for the first time in more than four decades, due largely to soaring overdose deaths in the Western provinces", but let’s just stick to one.) What has caused this?
The BBC’s article on self-harm says: "The triggers can be complex, but experts suggest academic pressures, and problems such as bullying or body image, are increasingly significant factors." Maybe. Or maybe those things are just the bitter taste of some underlying cyanide poisoning. Who is doing the bullying? Why are they doing it? Where does this body image problem come from?
Some might see no difficulty in saying that, obviously, growing up in the age of social media and Tinder is tougher on women than growing up in the age of Blockbuster video and landlines and so more self-harm is inevitable. But is that right? You don’t know and no one does. There is no proper, replicable, reliable science here. Think of the manioc again: you can deal with the readily observable bitterness without eradicating the long-term invisible threat of cyanide poisoning. Are mental illnesses not capable of being brought on as subtly as physical ones?
If 16-24 year-old women are in a bad way, and it seems that they are, then I’d blame the parents: maybe the cyanide here is something to do with parenting practices having changed in the last couple of generations. As a cultural conservative I might be interested in looking at, say, absent fathers or lack of church attendance. But there are left-wing alternatives too: changing work and income patterns arising from 1980s and 1990s privatisations, for example, or declines in trade union membership. Or it could be something completely different: increased male consumption of video games or pornography (which has not led to increased violence or sexual violence in societies proportionate to the increase in consumption - but might it have caused something else entirely?) or the long term effects of compulsory education and the end of child labour? I’m joking, but only a little: most of human history has seen 16-24 year old women making valuable contributions to the income or lives of their families, not just sitting in classrooms writing essays that no-one wants to write and no-one wants to read, and even "the experts" mentioned in the BBC article refer to academic pressures rather than the pressures of work or family life.
All we know for certain is that the last couple of generations have seen massive changes to a whole range of social practices: relations between the generations (teenage rebellion was invented and has now been un-invented again as parents and children get on better now - back to the olden days on this, I suspect), marriage and sexual relations, child-rearing, work-life patterns, gender roles, religious observance, public nudity, lengthy retirements, old people in old people’s homes, tattoos, not wearing hats, doing make-up on the train, using rude words - the list goes on. We are cooking the manioc of our minds in completely different ways. And what do we know about those minds? What was it we used to do that rinsed out the cyanide of self-harm? What can the scientists tell us?
This is the state of the art in the science of psychiatry (read the link - it’s fun). The psychological sciences have made a lot of progress from a standing start not long ago, but they are not yet at the stage where they can even tell us what makes an attractive woman attractive to a heterosexual man: it’s not the waist to hips ratio; is it nubility? Or do we have no idea (other than not looking like a man)?
I don’t think increasing self-harm is related to the fact that men don’t wear hats any more or are prepared to spend large sums of money on cups of coffee. But these things can be pretty complicated. If you read the link to Alexander’s review at the top of this piece then you will see why divination using birds or bones is in fact a good idea for hunting caribou or planting crops. If you haven’t yet read the link, try to work out why that might be before you do so. This stuff is tricky, even when we do understand what is going on.
Note also that being half-right about what is going on is not necessarily any better than blindly following tradition. Imagine visiting the Tukanoans with a feminist sensibility, seeing their women working hard on the manioc (Tukanoan women spend about a quarter of the day detoxifying manioc) and concluding that the social purpose of manioc preparation from an objective standpoint is the subjection of women in a patriarchal society. You might be half-right about that: it might be that women are forced to do the work in order to keep them down while the men swan about writing blog posts. But you’d be wrong if you thought no one needed to do the work. Liberate the women by stopping intensive manioc preparation and you would condemn everyone to cyanide poisoning. Let’s take the analogy back to England: maybe a woman’s place isn’t in the home and a man doesn’t need to wear a hat; but perhaps, for psychological health, someone needs to be in the home or someone needs to wear a hat (or someone needs to [your theory here]).
The manioc story has a sad epilogue: "At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese transported manioc from South America to West Africa for the first time. They did not, however, transport the age-old indigenous processing protocols or the underlying commitment to using those techniques. ... Even after hundreds of years, chronic cyanide poisoning remains a serious health problem in Africa." Will an African one day write a book that explains the causes of self-harm and then sadly concludes: "Even after hundreds of years, self-harm among young women remains a serious health problem in England"?
The book is about the importance for human life of the transmission of cultural practices, and how difficult it would have been for anyone trying to interrogate those cultural practices using (what we might describe as) pure reason.
The best example concerns manioc, a tuber native to the Americas that contains cyanide. "In the Americas, where manioc was first domesticated, societies who have relied on bitter varieties for thousands of years show no evidence of chronic cyanide poisoning. In the Colombian Amazon, for example, indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multiday processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots in order to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid." If you don’t carry out these arduous and time-consuming steps then you die. You might think, if you were being critical about it, that these steps are really designed to make the tuber palatable. But if that is all you want to do then you can skip some of the steps and you will end up with a perfectly decent-tasting manioc product and have more time to spend on other things. But then - a long time later and in a way that you would find hard to link to the fact that you skimped on manioc processing - you would die. So your best bet is to follow all the steps of manioc preparation, even though you cannot understand why they are necessary and even though you could not understand them if you tried. Free-thinking rationalism is not your friend; blind obedience to tradition is.
You can see how this kind of story, a beefed-up Chesterton’s Fence, potentially explains lots of taboos and other cultural practices. You might think that it explains them away: once you see that, say, the dietary restrictions of Leviticus have health benefits (do they?) then you might say that you don’t need the hypothesis that God ordered them. (Not that that is a strictly logical conclusion: isn’t it more likely that a beneficent God would order you to follow rules that are beneficial to your health? I don’t think it is a disproof of the existence of my parents that I have discovered reasons for washing my hands independent of the fact that they told me to.)
But I want to go beyond this. Let’s go back to the manioc. One way of reading the story is that, by some means (trial and error, cultural evolution/memes, beneficent intervention of a deity), humans landed upon cultural practices that have practical benefits that they could not justify to themselves, but which "We", with the benefit our scientific knowledge of (e.g.) cyanide, can now understand. So now "We" can look critically at the cultural practices we have inherited - and of course "We" do so with a respectful and admiring eye, knowing that they are the result of centuries of cultural evolution, not just dismissing them as superstitious nonsense (as we would have done before we heard the manioc story) - and decide which to keep and which to throw away. So, for example, let’s say that we hear that people haven’t built in such and such an area despite humans having lived nearby for centuries. The locals say that the area is haunted or that it’s bad luck to live there. We don't just laugh. We have a look and maybe find out that it’s in a flood plain or has groundwater with some carcinogenic properties.
That’s all well and good. But we should take more from the manioc story than that. The moral I want to press on you is that even if "We" think we have understood the objective benefit of the taboo, we might be wrong. We might remove the bitterness of the manioc, so to speak, and then die - but without being able to understand the link between our deaths and our breaking of the taboo.
What I mean is this: even now our scientific knowledge is not sufficient to give us confidence that we understand the objective justifications for all our cultural practices. I’m not being dismissive of the hard sciences here: I’m sure "We" understand quite enough about which food taboos are worth keeping and which are not; there’s no replication crisis in chemistry. But our understanding of psychology and social science has not reached the same levels. Sure, we can throw out the rules of Leviticus on pork and mixed fibres if all we care about is our bodily health. But what about when it comes to our psychological and social health?
Let’s take just one example of a disturbing psychological/social development in a rich Western country, namely the alarming rise in self-harm in England: "Among 16 to 24-year-old women in 2014, 19.7% reported having self-harmed at some point in their life, compared with 11.7% in 2007 and 6.5% in 2000", says the BBC. (There are plenty of other such sad developments to choose from, e.g., "Life expectancy in Canada has stopped increasing for the first time in more than four decades, due largely to soaring overdose deaths in the Western provinces", but let’s just stick to one.) What has caused this?
The BBC’s article on self-harm says: "The triggers can be complex, but experts suggest academic pressures, and problems such as bullying or body image, are increasingly significant factors." Maybe. Or maybe those things are just the bitter taste of some underlying cyanide poisoning. Who is doing the bullying? Why are they doing it? Where does this body image problem come from?
Some might see no difficulty in saying that, obviously, growing up in the age of social media and Tinder is tougher on women than growing up in the age of Blockbuster video and landlines and so more self-harm is inevitable. But is that right? You don’t know and no one does. There is no proper, replicable, reliable science here. Think of the manioc again: you can deal with the readily observable bitterness without eradicating the long-term invisible threat of cyanide poisoning. Are mental illnesses not capable of being brought on as subtly as physical ones?
If 16-24 year-old women are in a bad way, and it seems that they are, then I’d blame the parents: maybe the cyanide here is something to do with parenting practices having changed in the last couple of generations. As a cultural conservative I might be interested in looking at, say, absent fathers or lack of church attendance. But there are left-wing alternatives too: changing work and income patterns arising from 1980s and 1990s privatisations, for example, or declines in trade union membership. Or it could be something completely different: increased male consumption of video games or pornography (which has not led to increased violence or sexual violence in societies proportionate to the increase in consumption - but might it have caused something else entirely?) or the long term effects of compulsory education and the end of child labour? I’m joking, but only a little: most of human history has seen 16-24 year old women making valuable contributions to the income or lives of their families, not just sitting in classrooms writing essays that no-one wants to write and no-one wants to read, and even "the experts" mentioned in the BBC article refer to academic pressures rather than the pressures of work or family life.
All we know for certain is that the last couple of generations have seen massive changes to a whole range of social practices: relations between the generations (teenage rebellion was invented and has now been un-invented again as parents and children get on better now - back to the olden days on this, I suspect), marriage and sexual relations, child-rearing, work-life patterns, gender roles, religious observance, public nudity, lengthy retirements, old people in old people’s homes, tattoos, not wearing hats, doing make-up on the train, using rude words - the list goes on. We are cooking the manioc of our minds in completely different ways. And what do we know about those minds? What was it we used to do that rinsed out the cyanide of self-harm? What can the scientists tell us?
This is the state of the art in the science of psychiatry (read the link - it’s fun). The psychological sciences have made a lot of progress from a standing start not long ago, but they are not yet at the stage where they can even tell us what makes an attractive woman attractive to a heterosexual man: it’s not the waist to hips ratio; is it nubility? Or do we have no idea (other than not looking like a man)?
I don’t think increasing self-harm is related to the fact that men don’t wear hats any more or are prepared to spend large sums of money on cups of coffee. But these things can be pretty complicated. If you read the link to Alexander’s review at the top of this piece then you will see why divination using birds or bones is in fact a good idea for hunting caribou or planting crops. If you haven’t yet read the link, try to work out why that might be before you do so. This stuff is tricky, even when we do understand what is going on.
Note also that being half-right about what is going on is not necessarily any better than blindly following tradition. Imagine visiting the Tukanoans with a feminist sensibility, seeing their women working hard on the manioc (Tukanoan women spend about a quarter of the day detoxifying manioc) and concluding that the social purpose of manioc preparation from an objective standpoint is the subjection of women in a patriarchal society. You might be half-right about that: it might be that women are forced to do the work in order to keep them down while the men swan about writing blog posts. But you’d be wrong if you thought no one needed to do the work. Liberate the women by stopping intensive manioc preparation and you would condemn everyone to cyanide poisoning. Let’s take the analogy back to England: maybe a woman’s place isn’t in the home and a man doesn’t need to wear a hat; but perhaps, for psychological health, someone needs to be in the home or someone needs to wear a hat (or someone needs to [your theory here]).
The manioc story has a sad epilogue: "At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese transported manioc from South America to West Africa for the first time. They did not, however, transport the age-old indigenous processing protocols or the underlying commitment to using those techniques. ... Even after hundreds of years, chronic cyanide poisoning remains a serious health problem in Africa." Will an African one day write a book that explains the causes of self-harm and then sadly concludes: "Even after hundreds of years, self-harm among young women remains a serious health problem in England"?
Monday, 20 May 2019
Gentleman Jack: a review
Gentleman Jack is a Sunday evening BBC-HBO co-production period drama set in the 1830s, with high production values (the scenes set in Hastings aside) and a high-quality cast. You know the sort of thing.
As I watched the first episode, I starting thinking: how would you go about constructing a villain for a modern TV show set in Victorian times?
You'd obviously make them a wealthy landowner. No, stronger than that, they would be an absentee landowner who had no apparent interest in their estates other than the income it brought them. They'd have to return to the family pile for plot reasons (and because you'd spent a fair chunk of the production budget on hiring a nice country house), but they would openly talk about moving away again quickly, perhaps (for added villainy) by going to a slave-owning US state, say, Virginia.
You would rub in the economics: perhaps you would give the villain a soft-hearted old relative who sometimes went easy on the tenants and then have your villain turn up to renege on a rent indulgence shown by the elderly relative, and humiliate him in front of his tenant to boot. When collecting rents, you would make sure that the villain evicted an 80-year old man who had nowhere else to live; and if any tenant, faced with your duplicity, were to venture an opinion that one day the tenants would throw the landowners off the land, your villain would respond by saying that that was all the more reason for the landowners to give as good as they got.
You could really lay it on thick. How about having the villain express an interest in exploiting fossil fuel deposits? And if the elderly relative were to opine that coal is 'dirty stuff' and then the villain ignore him in favour of profit?
If you were not scared of going too far then you could have the characters discuss the modest widening of the franchise resulting from the Great Reform Act, the showpiece of the reforming Whig Government of the 1830s, and have your villain say "Don't talk to me about progress. It's change that's unnecessary and entirely in the wrong direction!".
You would of course give your villain some personal failings as well. How about treating inferiors badly? Make them generally curt and unthinking with servants. But that's just for starters. You would also introduce a doctor who ventures a progressive opinion, e.g. that a depressed wealthy heiress might be better off working for a living, then allow a woman of the household to offer the doctor a drink, and then have your villain countermand the offer of a drink and order the doctor to look at your horse.
It goes without saying that your villain would be indulging in a casual adulterous affair. And the episode would end with the villain literally twirling a cane while strolling off to seduce the depressed and vulnerable wealthy heiress discussed earlier.
I have described what the supposed heroine of our story, Anne Lister, says and does in the first episode. As I understand it, because she is a lesbian rather than a man, all of these characteristics of the typical villain of a Victorian TV drama are now supposed to be signs that she is "fearless, charismatic, and determined to do things her own way ... she defies every convention of the society she lives in", as the BBC itself puts it.
If I were an old-fashioned Marxist then I know exactly what I would say about this. This is the most egregious example of rentier-bourgeoisie propaganda: there is a very thin veneer of progressivism provided by making the main character a woman, but otherwise this is well-funded cheerleading for the worst excesses of the Victorian capitalist-landowning classes. It is a parody of Jacob Rees-Mogg in drag! Is it just like the way multinational corporations wave a rainbow flag to pretend to be progressive, and then use that as a distraction from crushing unions, oppressing workers in the third world, ruining the environment etc etc.
But I'm not a Marxist of any kind. I'm just pleased to see that the BBC can provide a sympathetic portrait of reactionary politics and capitalist endeavour. "She’s an efficient landlord and runs rings around her coal mining rivals", the BBC says, bigging her up. I'm now looking forward to the BBC spotting that General Gordon was gay and using that as an excuse for a lavish costume drama with him as the hero. The tagline: "He's an efficient imperialist and runs rings around the natives!" Andrew Scott could play Gordon, with a few knowing, Fleabag-esque, looks at the camera. Give it a soundtrack with some pop music on and we're looking at 3 BAFTAs at least.
Anyway, the Marxists needn't worry. I'm sure the proletariat has better things to do than watch BBC costume dramas on a Sunday evening. They've got Ubers to drive, Deliveroo orders to fulfil and Amazon parcels to pack.
Monday, 13 May 2019
The populist revolt yet to come?
I originally gave a link to this, from Lewis Goodall, as an update to my earlier Plea to Parliament post but it really deserves its own entry.
Goodall points out that the 2016 referendum was "an expression of faith in the strength and durability of the British political system and in its leaders. // Voters were certain that their wishes in the referendum would be carried out without too much difficulty: I lost count of the numbers of voters who, during the referendum and since, dismissed concerns about our withdrawal, not only from the EU but of its myriad political, economic and social auspices, with a variant of the following reply: "I'm sure they can sort it out." // In other words the Brexit vote, as well as a cri de coeur for Westminster to listen, was also an affirmation of faith by the British public in the fundamental competence of the British state to prosecute even the most difficult political outcomes."
Failing or refusing to carry out the promise to enact the result of the referendum has, Goodall says, caused the faith in the system that we saw in 2016 to disappear. Things have got so bad that, well, this is how he puts it: "How else can a working class crowd of voters on the Fylde, in Newport, in Durham, cheer figures once associated with the economic and Thatcherite right, like Farage, Widdecombe and multimillionaire Richard Tice? These are people for whom such places would once have had nothing but contempt. But now they are cheered as the true and authentic voice of ordinary people, of "real" people; politics is regearing along new, jagged and unpredictable axes."
Goodall is sceptical that that faith can re-appear. The thrust of his story is that we are in a new age of fury.
Goodall points out that the 2016 referendum was "an expression of faith in the strength and durability of the British political system and in its leaders. // Voters were certain that their wishes in the referendum would be carried out without too much difficulty: I lost count of the numbers of voters who, during the referendum and since, dismissed concerns about our withdrawal, not only from the EU but of its myriad political, economic and social auspices, with a variant of the following reply: "I'm sure they can sort it out." // In other words the Brexit vote, as well as a cri de coeur for Westminster to listen, was also an affirmation of faith by the British public in the fundamental competence of the British state to prosecute even the most difficult political outcomes."
That is a good point. We were given a choice and everyone thought that it was a real choice. The basic competence, honesty and good faith of the politicians offering us the choice were taken for granted. The high turnout was itself a vote of confidence in the system.
A large part of the rationale for Remainers demanding a second referendum is that things have changed because we can now see that leaving the EU is so very tricky. What does this mean?
We were told at the time that leaving would be difficult. So it must mean something more than that.
One thing it might mean is that leaving is just plain impossible. But it's not. It wasn't a referendum on making pi a more sensible number or moving the UK to the southern hemisphere or building a submarine out of cheese. There are some countries that are in the EU and some that are not, and moving from one condition to the other is politically possible. Hugo Rifkind is wrong about this.
We were told at the time that leaving would be difficult. So it must mean something more than that.
One thing it might mean is that leaving is just plain impossible. But it's not. It wasn't a referendum on making pi a more sensible number or moving the UK to the southern hemisphere or building a submarine out of cheese. There are some countries that are in the EU and some that are not, and moving from one condition to the other is politically possible. Hugo Rifkind is wrong about this.
Another thing Remainers might mean is this: we, the political leaders of the country, are incompetent and simply can't make Brexit happen, so you'd better give up on that and aim lower. That's not what anyone was told at the time and not what anyone believed then. I don't believe it even today. Or maybe it means: we won't do it. Either way, as we lawyers observe, sometimes it doesn't matter whether someone is unwilling or unable, what matters is that they are not doing what they promised to do.
Failing or refusing to carry out the promise to enact the result of the referendum has, Goodall says, caused the faith in the system that we saw in 2016 to disappear. Things have got so bad that, well, this is how he puts it: "How else can a working class crowd of voters on the Fylde, in Newport, in Durham, cheer figures once associated with the economic and Thatcherite right, like Farage, Widdecombe and multimillionaire Richard Tice? These are people for whom such places would once have had nothing but contempt. But now they are cheered as the true and authentic voice of ordinary people, of "real" people; politics is regearing along new, jagged and unpredictable axes."
Goodall is sceptical that that faith can re-appear. The thrust of his story is that we are in a new age of fury.
I disagree. A new age of fury is a great story. But let's just remember the 2017 General Election. That was after the referendum. Remainers were already in deep mourning for the result and worked up about reversing it: 4 million people had already signed a petition asking for a second referendum (remember that one?). Things weren't that different from today. But the two main parties agreed that Brexit should happen and we had a return to traditional two party politics: indeed, there was huge support for each of the two main parties, each of which espoused a distinctive set of policies, and each of which was reaching out, in different ways, to the left-behind Leavers recently uncovered by the referendum. The third parties that had recently flourished, UKIP and the LibDems, disappeared into irrelevance. It was democratic politics working as it is meant to work. Sure, it led to a hung Parliament, but so did the 2010 election, and that was back in the good old 'I agree with Nick' days when no one doubted the basic competence of our political classes.
All of that can be recaptured. All that has changed since 2017 is that the deadline for leaving the EU has passed and Parliament is giving every impression that it will move that deadline to 'never'. So all it will take to recapture faith in the political classes, as I said before, is for Britain actually to leave the EU. Competence just means doing the job: so do it. If the builders finish late then we sigh and put up with it: it's if the builders simply refuse to build it that we get really annoyed. So build it! Finish the job! Then politics will return to 2017: Nigel Farage will be squashed again, Change UK - The Independent Party - #Remain Alliance - whatever they are (the people whose logo is a drop-down menu icon that offers no choices) will wither, and the people who want Corbynism can argue with the people who don't in the confident expectation that one or other will prevail.
I appreciate that that will leave a sizeable number of often quite wealthy, well-educated, comfortable, articulate and well-connected people very annoyed that Britain has left the EU. But they will be annoyed that they lost a referendum. Good. They can try to win the next one. They can have no other complaint: the system worked as it meant to. That is - by far - the lesser evil than having a sizeable number of people utterly disillusioned and furious with the fundamental political structure of the country - and rightly so. And if you think it is more important to ensure that the rich and comfortable group gets everything they want from the political classes than that the less privileged and more dispersed group gets the one thing many of them have ever asked for then you should reflect on your priorities. Or, at the very least, consider what a new age of fury would do for house prices.
Wednesday, 8 May 2019
"‘This country is a blessed nation,’ he said. ‘The British are special. The world knows it. In our innermost thoughts, we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth.’"
This, I think, is one of the better pieces about Brexit by a self-reflective Remainer.
The writer, Tom Crewe, is not immune to patriotism. My title is taken from his quotation from Blair's farewell speech. He comments: "if tears didn’t spring to my eyes, and I’m not prepared to say they didn’t, I undoubtedly brimmed with pride". Leavers sometimes need to be reminded that not all Remainers are busy robbing poor boxes in order to avoid standing for the National Anthem.
Crewe concludes: "But it’s also possible to see the vote to Leave another way: as a moment when reality triumphed over storytelling. ... Brexit, whatever the dangers, is forcing Britain to get to know itself better. Not all countries are given that opportunity." He's right. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, but I'm hopeful that this is an opportunity that Britain will put to good use.
The writer, Tom Crewe, is not immune to patriotism. My title is taken from his quotation from Blair's farewell speech. He comments: "if tears didn’t spring to my eyes, and I’m not prepared to say they didn’t, I undoubtedly brimmed with pride". Leavers sometimes need to be reminded that not all Remainers are busy robbing poor boxes in order to avoid standing for the National Anthem.
He talks about the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. It's surprising how many times discussion of Brexit turns to this urtext of Britain at its best: carry out a Google search if you doubt me. But Crewe is able to note that it was "a minutely calculated, essentially propagandist, publicly funded spectacle". Of course it was, you might say. So what?, you might ask. But, at some level, some people seem to have regarded it as a quasi-spontaneous outburst of feeling from the Real Britain, and there is a fair degree of overlap between those people and the most upset Remainers. I'm afraid the closest thing to a spontaneous outburst of feeling from the Real Britain that we have seen recently is the Leave vote itself. (For the record, I enjoyed the 2012 ceremony.)
Crewe also notes that it is Remainers, not Leavers, who get really worked up about Britain's influence in the world. The typical Remainer worries that leaving the EU means that Britain is leaving the 'top table', or ceasing to 'punch above its weight'. The typical Leaver would be happy if he could influence his own MP to do what he voted for in 2016, and influence on the rest of the world be damned.
Crewe also notes that Remainers are principally afflicted by embarrassment. He asks why that embarrassment strikes now when it has not affected right-thinking people earlier, for example, given the "ideological savagery of the Tory-led governments since 2010"? (Gosh: the mild centrism of a Con-LibDem alliance is now "ideological savagery": I suppose same-sex marriage is pretty extreme by historical standards, but it was pretty mainstream at the time.)
The answer, of course, is that Remainers feel that the world is watching them - and laughing. (Leavers have enough to worry about with Remainers laughing at them before they start worrying about what foreigners think.) It is akin to that feeling of being abroad and spotting other British people, loud and vulgar and, well, just plain embarrassing. It's ok if people behave like that back home, but it's just too much to bear when they do it in front of foreigners, making us look bad by association. (Why is that? Is it because even the most sophisticated and cultured Brits are secretly convinced that they are much less sophisticated and cultured than foreigners, and that outward crudeness from a fellow Brit will expose the truth?) I am sure that if Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau and Hillary Clinton and Emmanuel Macron and everyone who has ever been in a Scandi-drama all turned round and said that they thought that Brexit was a jolly good idea and they wished they'd thought of it first then Remainers would be a lot more happy about it, despite all the underlying facts being the same.
Crewe concludes: "But it’s also possible to see the vote to Leave another way: as a moment when reality triumphed over storytelling. ... Brexit, whatever the dangers, is forcing Britain to get to know itself better. Not all countries are given that opportunity." He's right. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, but I'm hopeful that this is an opportunity that Britain will put to good use.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)