Hubris and Nemesis

 Hubris, from Ancient Greek ὕβρις (húbris) ‘pride, insolence, outrage’) … is extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence and complacency, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance. Hubris, arrogance, and pretension are related to the need for victory (even if it does not always mean winning) instead of reconciliation, which ‘friendly’ groups might promote.

In ancient Greek religion and myth, Nemesis, from Ancient Greek Νέμεσις (Némesis, lit. ‘Distribution’) … was the goddess who personified retribution for the sin of hubris: arrogance before the gods.

— Wikipedia

Lionel Shriver on the death of fiction

It comes to something when a writer as liberal – in the classical, original meaning of that word – as Lionel Shriver is characterised as right-wing; or, to use the version of that term habitually applied to anyone who does not fully subscribe to every aspect of today's shape-shifting orthodoxy, 'far-right'. She makes the point in this interview that brainwashed children are now setting forth from their campuses and taking influential positions in society. Her run-in with Penguin shows just how pernicious this will become.

She also says that she feels like a lone voice; that other writers who may be of a like mind seem to keep their heads down, no doubt in fear. Well, even though I am far less successful than Ms Shriver, I nonetheless may be classified as a 'writer', and I completely endorse her views.

I am coming to the end of drafting a new novel and have been toying with the idea of submitting it to a traditional publisher rather than, as I have with my last few books, self-publishing the thing. The novel makes no concessions to political correctness whatever. I have even set it in the early 1960s before the rot set in. It will be very interesting to me to see what reception it meets, and I shall leave this post in place for any prospective publisher to read.

We must fight back against this creeping tyranny. Unless we do, it will morph into something far, far worse than being hounded on and deplatformed by Twitter and Facebook, far worse even than being doxxed and having your employers blackmailed into firing you from your job.

The most relevant part of this interview starts at 8'31, though the whole of it is well worth your time; Part One is here.

On keeping one’s word

Elections were held in England today for local councils. In the ward where I live four candidates were standing, one from each of the three traditional parties (Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat) and an independent. I know nothing about any of them except that the prospective Conservative councillor, a beefy young fellow, rang my doorbell the other day and introduced himself.

Given the recent antics of the Conservatives at Westminster, and especially the despicable conduct of their leader, Theresa May, they are now so universally hated that I marvelled at his bravery – or foolhardiness – in thus opening himself to the abuse of the electorate.

This in itself generated some sympathy in my breast. Like other politicians or would-be politicians, he probably persists in the pleasant self-delusion that his aim is to ‘serve’, whereas narcissism or even megalomania are bound to be at the root of his ambition. However, he is still young, and assured me that if he himself were involved in Brexit he would soon sort things out in Brussels. Feeling a bit sorry for him as I did, I subjected him only to a gentle wigging about the behaviour of his party, and such was his gratitude (and my desire to be rid of him) that I foolishly promised to give him my vote, whereupon he pathetically shook my hand.

In the succeeding days I wished I had not made this promise. Following the betrayal of those, like me, who voted to leave the EU, my inclination is never to vote again, since my vote has been definitively revealed as worthless and I have better things to do than leg it down to the village hall (which today was labelled POLLING STATION) and waste my time and the council’s pencil-lead. I considered the hypothetical situation in which the Conservative candidate discovered that I had not voted and confronted me with this breach of faith. ‘I lied,’ I would tell him. ‘Now you know how it feels to be lied to.’

I cannot bring myself to vote for a Labour candidate, since Labour has now been fully taken over by Marxist entryists (as opposed to being controlled by crypto-communists and Soviet moles, as in the past). The Liberal Democrats are just a joke, and one in poor taste, at that. I did think of voting for the independent candidate, though, as I say, I have no notion of what, if anything, she stands for. The idea there would be to deny a vote to what is known as LibLabCon, the godless cabal that takes its orders from the European Commission and pretends to run things at Westminster.

I also thought of spoiling my ballot by scrawling NONE OF THE ABOVE, or something rather more blunt, on my paper.

The final and dominating idea was the first I had entertained, which was not to vote at all.

After my tea I decided to go for a walk; and I decided on a route that takes me past the POLLING STATION. I felt guilty. Sure enough, I found myself entering and making myself known to the two clerks.

Confronted with the four choices on the ballot paper, I briefly hesitated, pencil in hand. Then, because I had said I would, I marked an X next to the Conservative’s name. He won’t be elected – the Lib Dems rule round here – and anyway my vote is a grain of sand on a beach pounded and reshaped by the mighty forces of globalism: it is a meaningless speck, only granted me as part of the cynical theatrics designed to convince the herd that we live in a democracy.

However, I had kept my word. Had I acted otherwise, I would have made myself no better than Theresa May and I, at least, still retain a shred or two of self-respect.

The European Union

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22.”

I first read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 when I was seventeen, and was aware even then that a thorough understanding of Catch-22 was not the best preparation for an unclouded adulthood.

To me, the most notable manifestation of Catch-22 is any organization set up to ameliorate or eliminate a perceived problem. I should make it clear that this principally concerns the public sector, which nowadays includes certain charities, many of which receive much or most of their funding from the taxpayer.

At first all seems well. Progress is made and everybody is keen to see the organization succeed. But some of those employed in it soon begin to perceive that amelioration or elimination of the problem is not in their best interests because this will cost them their jobs. The more idealistic members of staff – typically those who, at the outset, were the most enthusiastic – either resign in frustration or are sidelined and dismissed. The people left behind are the ones interviewing replacement candidates and will obviously engage others like themselves. An ethos develops in which jobs in the organization, and the organization itself, become more important to its members than its original aims.

The organization next undergoes another change: it henceforth exists in order to perpetuate and if possible exacerbate the problem. Exacerbation of the problem allows the organization to grow in size and (as far as the perception of society at large is concerned) value. Those at the top, those directing the organization, can thus command higher salaries and juicier perks, and join the ranks of the great and the good.

The evidence is all around us. It is not in the interests of the police to eliminate crime, of the National Health Service to keep the populace healthy, of your local council to be efficient, nor of the bodies dealing with race relations and gender politics to promote harmony. Most damaging of all, it is not in the interests of those in government that welfare dependency and the national debt should do anything but grow.

It is possible that our armies of politicians, quangocrats and civil servants think they are doing the right thing. It is equally possible that they don’t. The more senior they are, the more suspect their motives.

In ancient China, apparently, doctors were paid only if their patients remained healthy. A solution along those lines might be conceived: but, really, no one can do anything about this problem, because that would mean setting up an organization to deal with it, and that, my friends, is the biggest catch of them all.

The wellsprings of fiction

In 1946 George Orwell published an essay entitled “Why I Write”.

Quote:

Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centred than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. – Using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

He also says:

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, “I am going to produce a work of art”. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

In my view an overt political agenda can be toxic to the relationship between the reader and the story, particularly if the reader’s beliefs are at odds with the author’s. Samuel Goldwyn is said to have declared, “If you have a message, call Western Union”. That Orwell succeeds so well with Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four is down to his gifts as a storyteller.

Vladimir Nabokov had no time for political fiction. He is scathing about Dostoevsky:

My position in regard to Dostoevsky is a curious and difficult one. In all my courses I approach literature from the only point of view that literature interests me – namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius. From this point of view Dostoevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one – with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between.

This is belied by evidence that Nabokov had read, closely, most if not all of Dostoevsky’s work. Dostoevsky was a polemicist, for sure, but he was a greater artist than Orwell, with a deep interest in and sympathy with the human condition. He also had a better sense of humour than Nabokov gives him credit for. Some Dostoevsky is laugh-out-loud funny (e.g. when Nikolai seizes Pyotr Pavlovitch Gaganov by the nose in Demons; that whole book can be taken as a monstrous joke). Nabokov’s jokes are just as good, though quite different (e.g. the entire character of Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire, the portrait of Lolita’s all-American mother, and of course entertaining felicities and plays on words throughout).

So Nabokov put poetry above polemic. Yet he adored Dickens:

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

If Dickens’s novels aren’t polemical then I don’t know whose are.

Towards the end of his essay, Orwell informs us that:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Unfortunately he goes on to say:

For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

Trying to define “good prose” (for fiction, at any rate) is a waste of time. Orwell’s writing is so transparent that it is dead to the subtlety and music found on every page of Nabokov. Then again, Nabokov is perhaps too much the stylist. When reading him we are never far from a suspicion that he is showing off: that the subject-matter interests him less than the language with which it is expressed. In Nabokov the second of Orwell’s “great motives” (aesthetic enthusiasm) predominates.

Orwell says he wanted “to reconcile [his] ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us”. If he was a public writer, Nabokov was essentially a private one; and it is in the territory between the public and the private that we find the fifth and most interesting motive for writing fiction.

Apparently without fully realizing what he is saying, Orwell mentions the “desire to see things as they are”. He goes on to say that “at the very bottom of [authors’] motives there lies a mystery. … [One is] driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand”.

That demon is surely the quest for self-knowledge. It is the religious need to find evidence that our lives are not meaningless.

The tyro writer is usually unaware of any such demon – or angel. His motives are those listed by Orwell. His personality is such that he likes embroidering personal anecdotes: my Irish grandfather, when accused of exaggeration or outright untruth, would reply that he was merely an author whose books had never been published. Our tyro progresses from these petty lies to more elaborate ones, on paper, and is likely to tap into the primeval need to tell and to hear stories. The storyteller’s vanity looms large, together with unrealistic expectations, but he has withal a poetic impulse and this needs to be satisfied. Depending on the quality of that impulse, his early work will be more or less readable. As his career advances and his technique improves, he will begin (assuming he is not a complete dolt) to be gripped by the possibilities of language and the opportunities that fictioneering gives him for exploring the grand puzzle of his existence.

Pablo Picasso is credited with saying “Art is the lie that tells the truth”. A novel can be inherently more truthful than any history or biography, but a novel written with an agenda, whether commercial or political, cannot be a faithful reflection of the unique experiences and inner world of its author.

One measure of the truthfulness of a book is its longevity. Most if not all of the books we regard as classics are truthful, which is why we still read them. They may also be admirable in some other way, but it is to their truth that we chiefly respond.

If writing a novel is an exercise in self-exploration, why should its author – besides hoping for payment – want to see it published? Sometimes, in fact, he doesn’t, but usually he does, because he wants validation, praise, and possibly fame. These will all feed his vanity, especially in the early stages of his career, but unless he offers his work to the world and gets some feedback he will never know whether he has struck a chord with anyone else. He will not “connect”, to use E M Forster’s word: recognition that others feel as you do is the prime motor of both the storyteller and his listener, and I contend that the urge to find it is the deepest source of literary art.

To Orwell’s four motives, then, I’d like to add this fifth. In conclusion I would also like to say that for all his superficial insouciance, Nabokov was a serious artist. I feel I know the Russia of his childhood, the nostalgia of the émigré, what it is like to be a foreigner living in America. He has risked sharing these and a multitude of other confidences; he opens our eyes to the beauty of his synaesthetic world; and in a profoundly polemical fashion he upholds whatever is courageous, noble and virtuous. That is my little tribute to a great writer at the furthest end of the spectrum. His fiction deserves to endure.

Opinion piece

There is a line I encountered at school, and have always remembered, from the Roman playwright known as Terence: nihil ad me attinet, “it does not concern me at all”.

The Latin has a pleasing concinnity and the idea it expresses is worthy of reflection. In an increasingly opinionated world, having no opinion on a tendentious subject is a difficult position to maintain. It is the only honest position if you have no direct knowledge of the subject in question. A corollary is that you should be wary of what you read and hear (even when editorial bias is not obvious). Ask first “cui bono?” and then wonder where the money leads.

But what if you do have direct knowledge and that knowledge is so detailed that you can speak with authority? This, the obverse of happy ignorance, is, for a thinker, even more lethal to a firm opinion. Dostoevsky says (Notes from Underground, 1.5) “ ... the direct, immediate, legitimate fruit of heightened consciousness is inertia, that is, the deliberate refusal to do anything.” The French proverb “to understand all is to forgive all” implies much the same thing. The more you know about something, the less you realize you are entitled to adopt a stance on it.

Violent opinions are expressed either by the unthinking or by those with an axe to grind. Somebody living one of Socrates’s unexamined lives looks no further than the opinions he has absorbed ready-made. In discourse with others with a similar background, his opinions are reinforced and gradually assume the properties of prejudice, so that if evidence contrary to his beliefs is adduced he will reject it. He wants you to believe as he does because your agreement helps confirm that he is right.

The unthinking are manipulated and reprogrammed by more informed and crafty people, people with an agenda (usually political or financial, or both). The intellectuals of the Frankfurt School are one such group, and they have had spectacular success in moulding opinion. Or we may cite the way Edward Bernays harnessed Freudian theory to pioneer the techniques of public relations to which so much of our commerce and polity has become thrall.

This post too expresses an opinion. Am I grinding an axe? Perhaps. Clearly, I want your agreement or constructive disagreement. Then there is the effect that the piece might have on your opinion of me. With luck you will think me a clever fellow; equally my references to Terence, Socrates and Dostoevsky might not flatter you at all, but make you decide I am nothing but an elitist and a show-off.

Or it may simply be that the idea for this piece has been long gestating and I was suddenly taken by the impulse to give it form.

DNA and Glengarry Glen Ross

I first saw Glengarry Glen Ross about twenty years ago. It made a big impression on me, not least for its excoriation of capitalism, scouring away the epidermis to reveal the unbridled self-interest that lies beneath. Self-interest is the source of the beneficent “invisible hand” revealed in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and I have to say that I have always regarded self-interest as the prime motivator of all living things.

This view was fostered by my training in biology. Even before the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene it had dawned on me that the promotion and replication of one’s own genetic material was the basic driving force in human affairs. My thinking went further: it was the DNA itself (and to an extent, the RNA) that was so ruthless, and our bodies were mere vehicles to be cast aside when we had served our purpose.

Consider human courtship and mating. Generally speaking, we are most attractive to potential mates between the ages of fifteen and thirty, and nature lavishes herself without stint on making young people attractive. She blinds us to the responsibilities and sheer hard work of parenthood; we are suckered by our psychology into the business of passing on our genes. Since human offspring take such a long time to mature, we are encouraged by an elaborate bonding process to stay together until such time as they are independent, after which we are tolerated because we have resources or experience that they may find helpful (in producing their own young); and then, once our usefulness is over, we die.

There are many exceptions to this general pattern, of course. Some males adopt a strategy of spreading their genetic material more widely, and are denounced, especially by females, as “love rats”. Females choose a mate primarily for his genes, but, almost as importantly, also for his likelihood to stick around and help raise the brood. From the male perspective, each of these strategies has its advantages, since the presence of a father is conducive to the successful rearing of children.

And in order to survive to breed and to preserve and promote his young, the individual must selfishly preserve and promote his own health and wellbeing.

What, then, is the biology of altruism? At the university we studied the altruistic – or seemingly altruistic – behaviour of flocks and herds, and of mammals (such as cetaceans) that tend to their sick and disabled. However complex the mathematics, in all such cases there appears to be a benefit to the individual, whether through “paying it forward” or through the establishment of a system that benefits every individual in the group. For example, emperor penguins congregate in autumn on their Antarctic breeding grounds. The females perforce absent themselves to feed during the worst of the polar winter, leaving an all-male crowd behind to carry on the task of incubation. The male balances his egg on his feet and keeps it warm using a special brood-patch. If the temperature of the egg drops below a critical point, even briefly, the embryo will die. The males must survive horrendously low temperatures and storm-force winds. Individually, none of them could make it; but the penguins huddle together in a single, remarkable mass that is constantly circulating. Each bird spends some time on the freezing periphery before his place is taken by another from the blood-warmed centre. Those birds on the periphery are behaving altruistically, even if only for twenty minutes at a time, as are the ones making their way outwards from the centre. Without such co-operation, the whole flock would die.

This behaviour puts one in mind of the extreme courage of parents when their young are threatened. A mother linnet will remain with the nest during a heath fire, and be consumed by it; a number of bird species have evolved so-called distraction displays in which the parent pretends to be injured, gradually luring a predator away from the nest and so exposing itself to danger. A human parent will risk or expend everything to save his or her child from death.

We applaud such bravery, and are moved by the penguins’ stoicism, precisely because we have been programmed by evolution to do so. In analysing our thoughts and reactions, we should never forget that we are animals too. But we are more than mere animals: we have the power of ratiocination, and this is where I come back to Glengarry Glen Ross.

Its author, David Mamet, is rightly celebrated as one of the finest modern playwrights. Glengarry Glen Ross first appeared in 1984, as a play, at a time when Mamet espoused left-wing – what nowadays are termed “liberal” – views. Since then he has made something of a political journey to the right:


For the early-1990s film version of Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet wrote an additional, absolutely electrifying, monologue, delivered by Alec Baldwin:

(NB contains extreme profanity – not safe for work)

Those emperor penguins, in permanent darkness at eighty below, cowering before hundred-mile-an-hour winds, are always closing.

Surely, David Mamet could not have written Baldwin’s speech before he met his new neighbour and started exchanging books. For a brilliant exposition of the monologue, see this piece by David Wong. Thanks are due to Mike Cane for putting me onto it and for starting this train of thought.

The House of Shaw

 

Image: PaulSkin 

On a chilly Saturday in March 1966 I visited Shaw’s Corner at Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire, which is a half-hour drive from where I then lived. This should not be construed as a pilgrimage to the country residence of George Bernard Shaw: it was just part of an outing with my mother and one of her oldest woman-friends. On these occasional sorties we would explore by car, stopping at a tea-shop and maybe taking in some place of interest.

We were admitted to Shaw’s ground-floor study. The window overlooked the garden, in which stood his “writing hut”, a shed where he composed much of his stuff when in Hertfordshire. This was made to revolve so that it could follow the sun. According to the BBC (item 81, quoted by Wikipedia) “Shaw dubbed the hut ‘London, so that unwanted visitors could be told he was away ‘visiting the capital’.”

The study had been left much as it had been on the day of his death in 1950. This was a specimen of the usual, pointless and reverentially curated, museum of a writer’s outward life.

I knew little about Shaw except that he was the author of a play we had read out in English classes. Though I did then have some inchoate feeling that I wanted to write, I wanted far more to be a scientist. My interest in biology had been kindled particularly by an interest in birds and I owned a pair of ex-naval binoculars. These, while (by present standards) clumsy and with a small field of view, were of the best quality available in wartime Britain. Twenty years on, such instruments went cheaply enough even for a schoolboy to afford.

On Shaw’s desk was a pair of what I thought of as “field-glasses”, non-prismatic binoculars. Presumably he peered at the garden through these from time to time, whether in quest of a woodpecker or an over-zealous fan hiding in the shrubbery. I took them up, had a peep, and was surprised to note how bad they were. Surely such a famous fellow could have afforded better.

Shaw was a committed socialist, a member of the Fabian Society, whose philosophies have inspired so many of those Lenin is said to have termed “useful idiots”. A proponent of vegetarianism and eugenics, Shaw also used his writing as a political pulpit. In other words, he was a typical left-leaning intellectual who thought his prowess in one arcane field of endeavour gave him the authority to tell everyone else how to live.

In 1906 he wrote: “I have striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare’s philosophy, to the superficiality and second-handedness of his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the philosophic eminence claimed for him … With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.”

This is a revealing quotation, and not just for the glimpse it gives us of his conceit. He plainly did not get the electric thrill of reading, and especially hearing, Shakespeare’s words. It is revealing too that he execrates Homer, whom Alexander Pope, in the preface to his translation of The Iliad, introduces thus:

Homer is universally allowed to have had the greatest invention of any writer whatever. The praise of judgment Virgil has justly contested with him, and others may have their pretensions as to particular excellences; but his invention remains yet unrivalled. … It is to the strength of this amazing invention we are to attribute that unequalled fire and rapture which is so forcible in Homer, that no man of a true poetical spirit is master of himself while he reads him.

Notice also that Shaw reproves Shakespeare for being “vulgar”, which is an odd charge to come from the progenitor of Eliza Doolittle. Shakespeare can be vulgar right enough, but he is everything else as well.

As for his “snobbery”, and the unopened “English eyes”, I wonder how much Shaw’s Irish birth had to do with that. In Shakespeare’s time, Lord Arthur Grey de Wilton was made Lord Deputy of Ireland. One of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the poet Edmund Spenser, was appointed as Grey’s secretary. Spenser is much hated in Ireland even to this day, mostly for his A View of the Present State of Ireland. That report was suppressed on its completion as incendiary: it effectively recommends genocide as the answer to the “Irish problem”. Though Spenser gets the blame, the opinions might well be those of his boss.

Christopher Highley’s Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland “explores the most serious crisis the Elizabethan regime faced: its attempts to subdue and colonize the native Irish. Through a range of literary representations from Shakespeare and Spenser, and contemporaries such as John Hooker, John Derricke, George Peele and Thomas Churchyard he shows how these writers produced a complex discourse about Ireland that cannot be reduced to a simple ethnic opposition. Highley argues that the confrontation between an English imperial presence and a Gaelic ‘other’ was a profound factor in the definition of an English poetic self.”

In 1906 Éire was still part of the United Kingdom, and an intelligent Dubliner like Shaw would rightly have resented the English. This may supply one reason for his antipathy to Shakespeare, but I think there is another, in Shaw’s political position. Shakespeare is right-wing rather than left, though what he represents and celebrates is a fundamentally English, bloody-minded independence that is hard to classify. It has elements of anarchy, but also of monarch-worship. It survives to this day in our contempt for politicians and their lackeys, of whatever stripe; the Queen has never been more popular or highly regarded.

This independence goes back to Agincourt and probably beyond, but the reign of the first Elizabeth was perhaps the time when it was most evident. Her father, Henry VIII, had stuck two fingers up at the Pope. The Royal Navy was being turned into a power that would help England subdue much of the world – including Ireland. There was an upsurge of talent and invention; our agriculture began to thrive. The nation found confidence in itself. Britain was no longer an unimportant island just off the mainland of Europe. This attitude led, hundreds of years later, to a famous headline in an evening paper: Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off.

If you were suspected of Catholic sympathies, Elizabethan England was a dangerous place to be, especially if you were also well known. Spenser compromised his artistic integrity in the interests of safety and preferment. The Faerie Queene, his masterpiece, is vitiated by anti-Catholic propaganda and toadying to “Gloriana” (neither of which did him much good in the end, it must be said). Some parts of this unfinished poem, unspoilt by such things, are among the most sublime achievements in English verse. Spenser’s reputation would stand much higher today if he had left the toadying and propaganda out.

Shakespeare may have had Catholic sympathies, but if he did he kept them locked away. His genius was greater than Spenser’s, almost as great as Homer’s, in fact, and he could do with language just about anything he pleased. Envy might also have fed into Shaw’s disapproval. For example, in the quotation above, he uses the ugly nonce-word “second-handedness” to avoid the repetition of “-ality” that would have ensued had he written “unoriginality” instead; Shakespeare would have seen that coming a country mile away.

Shakespeare does not preach. His work is true to itself. It has no purpose other than to enthrall the audience and, in the case of the plays, to make the playwright and his company rich. When people pay to hear a story, a story and not a sermon is what they want to hear. It takes a master like Dickens or Orwell to get away with a political message as well, but such a message detracts from the ability of the piece to engage. The results of a search for productions at the online London Theatre Guide say it all: Shakespeare 33, Shaw 0.

A message is so much associated with the left that the absence of a message has almost become identified with the right. This is a problem for readers and playgoers, and for authors too, because for the past few decades received opinion in the arts establishment has come from the left. The term “liberal” itself, from the Latin word for “free”, is now applied to an increasingly conformist set of views. Those daring to question or diverge from it are howled down, with an inevitable effect on the sort of work that sees the light of day.

Shaw’s part in this fiasco is a tiny one, but he contributed nonetheless. He was evidently an avuncular, well-meaning sort of gent, if an insufferable egotist unable to see his own prejudices. His conviction that he was correct about everything led him to places, like the Fabian Society, where he shouldn’t have gone. There he found the like-minded twerps whose influence has since made it morally unacceptable to question the new orthodoxy. I am sure he would have been appalled by such illiberality, but the Law of Unintended Consequences operates round the clock, 365 days a year.

His cheap and cloudy field-glasses, then, are a metaphor for his view of the world, and I am glad I put them down so quickly. (The curator, by the way, had no objection to my picking them up.) As for the revolving hut, I’m not sure it’s a good idea always to be looking in the same direction with respect to the sun. Better to get some shadow and contrast: they give you a better idea of the depth of field.

To close, here is part of a comment posted by Lester Hunt on a blog-post about Shakespeare-hatred. “Although I don’t share S’s ultra-hyper-conservative political views, I find it a refreshing escape from the increasingly democratical culture we now are stuck in. We now live in the House that Shaw built. Ugh.”

Thomas Sowell: Intellectuals and Society

I have a new hero – Thomas Sowell, a former Marxist, who recalls his observation, in this fascinating interview, that: “... other people’s well-being would never be the priority of politicians and bureaucrats.”

His insistence on the value of empiricism is a joy. I trained as a scientist, and without the empirical method science is worthless. He explains the horrible intolerance behind the liberal mask and identifies its vulgar source: pride. This interview is very well worth your time; it may even revolutionize your outlook.

Yeah. That's it.

From Key Largo (1948)

Frank McCloud: He knows what he wants. Don't you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco: Sure.
James Temple: What's that?
Frank McCloud: Tell him, Rocco.
Johnny Rocco: Well, I want uh ...
Frank McCloud: He wants more, don't you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco: Yeah. That's it. More. That's right! I want more!

... the 1% capturing the economic and political system of the United States and using it to ransack the wealth of the formerly working middle class. The fatal flaw which will ultimately result in a fitting end for the powerful elitists is their egos. They are psychopaths, unable to feel empathy for their fellow man. Enough is never enough. They always want more. Life is a game to them. They truly believe they can pull the right strings and continue to accumulate more riches. But they are wrong. They are blinded by their hubris. There are limits to growth based solely on debt and we’ve reached that limit. The world is crumbling under the weight of crippling debt created by these Wall Street psychopaths, while the corrupted bought off politicians try to shift the losses from the bankers who incurred them to the citizens who have already been fleeced.

Jim Quinn's passion takes him over the top in some places, but fundamentally this is what's going on.

H/T: Zero Hedge

H. L. Mencken on politicians

Germany has drawn up secret plans to prevent a British referendum on the overhaul of the EU

As the sinister ambitions of the European political elite become ever more visible, we need someone over here like H. L. Mencken to cut through it all. Here are some of his observations on politicians and their henchmen and lickspittles.

... politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people’s money. No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.

One hears murmurs against Mussolini on the ground that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is a politician. Indeed, he is probably the most perfect specimen of the genus politician on view in the world today. His career has been impeccably classical. Beginning life as a ranting Socialist of the worst type, he abjured Socialism the moment he saw better opportunities for himself on the other side, and ever since then he has devoted himself gaudily to clapping Socialists in jail, filling them with castor oil, sending blacklegs to burn down their houses, and otherwise roughing them. Modern politics has produced no more adept practitioner.

No government as such is ever in favor of the freedom of the individual. It invariably seeks to limit that freedom, if not by overt denial, then by seeking constantly to widen its own functions.

The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Says it all, really

More here ...

The riots

Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party (the party of government in Britain, 1997-2010), debates the riots with Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education. (Background: she was prominent in the 1977 Grunwick dispute and met her future husband, Jack Dromey, on the picket line.)

For the most concise analysis of the causes so far, see The Disastrous Death of Common Sense by Charles Crawford.

What’s Your Excuse?

My bonedome

This is a seemingly straightforward article about the benefits of wearing a helmet when cycling. The author adduces various examples of cyclists having their heads bashed in and lectures us on the irresponsibility of going helmetless. The article is worth a few minutes of your time, but the comments are worth more. As you’ll see, nothing in this life is straightforward.

After the introduction of a helmet law in Australia, apparently, cycle use declined, as did injuries to cyclists; but the proportion of head-injuries rose. Maybe that was because a newly helmeted cyclist feels himself less vulnerable and more prepared to take risks.

A number of commentators remark on the fact that the occupants of cars should wear helmets, since they are by no means immune to head injuries. Two or three simply raise a middle finger at the author. One says, “... an overweight woman riding in an SUV leaned out her window to yell at me, ‘Wear a helmet!’ I thought about yelling back, ‘Ride a bike!’”

This last contains the nucleus of the argument. First, the woman’s eating habits have put her health at risk and placed a possible future burden on the state. Secondly, her choice of personal transportation is spewing pollutants into the atmosphere. If she swapped her SUV for a bike we might all be better off.

But why should she?

The reason that this argument, and others like it, rages is simple. Once a government provides healthcare, it has purchased, with your money, the right to lecture you on how to minimize risks to your health. By extension, other taxpayers (such as the woman in the SUV, or the author of the article) have also purchased the right to nanny you. The harangues delivered are partial, contentious and poorly researched. Smoking and drinking are obvious targets, whereas other risky behaviours, such as the the reckless replication of genetic defects, are currently ignored.

Now that smokers have been demonized, the next target will probably be fatties, even though evidence is emerging that much obesity is the result of addiction mediated by self-generated drugs such as dopamine and adrenaline. After that, your guess is as good as mine.

There are some things that only governments can do, but there are many other things that governments also do and that they should not.

The typical career politician today has never had a job in the real economy; has gone straight from law-school or university into some position as policy wonk or PR stooge. Such a creature, once elected, can then be given control of the ministry governing healthcare. All a politician in office cares about is promotion; or retaining that office. The health of the citizen is necessarily a secondary concern. I speak from personal experience of a lifetime’s exposure to Britain’s National Health Service.

In Britain, where healthcare is sponsored by the state, the individual’s responsibility for himself is lessened. If we had to pay directly for healthcare we might think twice about indulging in certain behaviours.

Anyhow, I shall continue to wear my cycle helmet, not because anyone tells me to, but because I have followed the arguments pro and con, and have decided that, for me, pro wins out. But (as one of the commentators points out) a “bicycle mirror is far more beneficial than a helmet.” Amen to that! I have a mirror on each of my two bikes, and have lost count of the times they have saved my bacon.

That’s my choice. Yours may differ, and amen to that too.

Hat-tip: Longform.org

Politics and fiction

Political fiction is not to my taste, unless, perhaps, it confirms my prejudices. The short story or novel is not at its best when used as a megaphone. Dickens's agitation for reform was always subordinate to his vocation as a storyteller. Even that most political of novels, Orwell's Animal Farm, succeeds primarily as fiction and is happily read by schoolchildren who know nothing of Stalin and the USSR. Whether he intended it or not, Orwell's talent for engaging the reader's humanity trumps the political message, powerful and memorable though that is.

In the hands of lesser writers, the political novel is not only lumpen and dreary but soon dates. Characters whose sole function is to embody some political idea have no life outside themselves. We cannot identify with them. They have no organic interaction with the other characters or the plot. That is because they are a product of the conscious mind: the calculating mind of the author, who is trying to persuade the reader to his point of view.

The best fiction is produced in the subconscious. Employing certain skills that he has acquired (for example, a knowledge of vocabulary and usage), the author uses his taste and sense of rhythm to order words on the page, but the ideas spring from a deeper source. He is often unaware of exactly what he is doing. He supposes that the story has taken on a life of its own, or that this character or that demands more attention than he intended, whereas all that is happening is that he is following the dictates of the mysterious vat where the story has been fermenting - his subconscious.

The act of composition is of two kinds. First, there is the Monday-morning, blank-screen, must-do-500-words-today kind, which is not only unmitigated torment but usually produces little that is not pedestrian. But then there is the other kind. Somehow, the author's brain slips into a different state. He puts self to one side: perhaps, as in meditation, there is some change in electrical activity. At any rate, he finds the words suggesting themselves. He imagines the scene and it is transmuted into prose. The more vividly he imagines it, the more vividly the reader will recreate it.

This second state is fragile and precious. When it is shattered - for example, by some trivial interruption - the author knows at once what he has lost and is angry with the interrupter. His anger may seem exaggerated and irrational, but it could have taken him an hour, a morning, a whole day, or even a week, to reach that magic state.

There is a widespread misconception, then, about the cleverness of authors who seem to have a God-like overview, who are aware of every nuance of symbolism that goes to reinforce the thrust of their work. If credit is due, give it to the subconscious, that receiver of all experiences and impressions, that vessel shaped by upbringing, class and personality. The conscious author is merely its clerk.

That is what makes good literature so engaging. As readers, we connect with it also at a subconscious level. Mind speaks to mind. Our subconscious can quickly spot a fake, which is why overtly political fiction is so dull.

The unwitting content (political and otherwise) of good fiction is fascinating. In telling his tale, the author inadvertently reveals much about himself and his beliefs.

These thoughts were prompted by a re-reading of Billy Liar by the late Keith Waterhouse. It is one of my favourite books, not least because it is, especially in the early chapters, very funny. Billy Fisher is nineteen and living in 1950s Yorkshire. He rails against the small-mindedness of his surroundings: his dead-end job at an undertaker's, his lower-middle-class parents and grandma; and he rails even more against the philistinism that assails him on every side. His solace is fantasy. To relieve his boredom he tells lies, many of them pointless. Of course, these land him in trouble, not least from the two girls to whom he is engaged simultaneously and who share a single ring. And he regularly escapes into his imaginary country of Ambrosia, where he sees himself as progressive leader and hero.

Keith Waterhouse was born in 1929, into a working-class household in Leeds, Yorkshire. His father sold fruit and vegetables from a barrow and his mother was a cleaner; she encouraged young Keith to apply himself to his books in the hope of getting a place at the local grammar school.

Grammar schools then were a stepladder to the professions for children of all backgrounds: the tuition was freely provided by the state. I went to one myself. I had to pass the 11+ (an exam taken at the end of one's time in primary school, ages 5-11), then sit an I.Q. test. Finally I was interviewed.

Once inside the school we were streamed. Half of us were earmarked for an academic education. The curriculum for the others was weighted towards vocational subjects like technical drawing and metalwork. Boys (it was a single-sex school) who failed to pull their weight were chucked out. They landed at the "secondary modern", the school for the also-rans. Here the teaching was as unashamedly vocational as ours was unashamedly elitist: such subjects as plumbing and typing were taught in addition to the core curriculum. Just as underperforming children could be demoted from the grammar schools, so pupils in the secondary moderns could be promoted.

Perhaps the worst defect of this system was its reliance on the 11+, for which some comparatively gifted children were not, at that age, ready, and which (if exacerbated by ambitious parents) put intolerable pressure on the candidates. If you failed, you were perceived to be a failure, doomed to a lifetime of servitude - a palpable untruth, by the way, since many graduates of the secondary modern schools went on to become successful business-people earning far more than their grammar-school peers in the Civil Service, say.

The system's blatant meritocracy also offended on ideological grounds. In 1965, under a newly elected Labour government, its abolition began in earnest. Anthony Crosland, Harold Wilson's Secretary of State for Education and Science, is quoted by his wife as saying: "If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland". By 1970 my former school had been turned into a "comprehensive", admitting children of all abilities.

A debate has raged ever since about the destruction of the grammar schools. Some say that the socialists (many of whom themselves attended such schools) spitefully kicked the ladder away; that the abolition was part of a larger, Gramscian, and entirely successful, plan to dumb down the voters and make them more susceptible to propaganda and, by impoverishing their life chances as well, to make them ever more reliant on the state. Others say that the comprehensive system allows all children to flourish, not just the privileged few who happen to be able to pass an exam; that such inequality so early in life can lead only to a perpetuation of the class structure which is such a curse on Britain. The issue, as neatly as any other, divides left from right.

Waterhouse failed his 11+ and the experience scarred him for ever. Thanks to an inspirational teacher at his secondary modern, he did not give up his ambition to write, but the going was very hard, and it was not until the success of Billy Liar, published when he was thirty, that he was freed from poverty.

Yorkshire, the north of England generally, has a tradition of supporting the Labour Party rather than the Conservatives. Coming as he did from a lowly background in the Labour stronghold of Leeds, it is not surprising that Waterhouse espoused left-wing views. These are on display in Billy Liar. Billy is contemptuous of the middle-class pretensions and capitalistic attitudes of Shadrack, his boss at the "funeral furnishers". Because Shadrack, a former car salesman, inherited his share of the firm on the death of his father, his position is seen as undeserved. When Billy's grandmother dies, he recommends that his mother enlist the Co-op (a socialist organization) rather than Shadrack. When Billy fantasizes about standing for Parliament, he unquestioningly casts himself in the role of Labour candidate. During Billy's daydreams about Ambrosia, his arch-enemy is categorized as the "reactionary" Dr Grover; and so on.

Yet, reading more closely, one detects something else at work. On almost every page we see that Billy is an individualist, a lone wolf who refuses to be bound by convention. His burning ambition is to be a scriptwriter: he has already submitted jokes to a famous comic in London, whose vague but encouraging response Billy tries to twist, in his own mind, into an offer of work. Billy and society are at odds. It is very hard to picture him living by the socialist creed.

Besides the two girls to whom he is engaged there is a third, Liz, a free spirit whom Billy genuinely loves. Each of the other two is a parody of the mindless voter for Labour or Conservative, but the enigmatic Liz is different. We do not know her politics, even though, in Ambrosia, she is cast as Billy's Home Secretary. She plays an increasingly important part in the story, becoming pivotal at the climax when Billy must decide between the adventure of London and staying at home in Stradhoughton.

After Billy Liar, Waterhouse actually lived Billy's dream and went on to great success as a journalist and writer for theatre, film and TV. In 1970 he joined the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror as a columnist and remained there until 1986, when that paper was bought by the fraudster and quondam Labour M.P., the late Robert Maxwell. In what might be seen as a surprising move, Waterhouse went to another mass-circulation daily, the rabidly rightist Daily Mail, where he remained for 23 years. To quote from his obituary in the Times:

By that time the tone and content of his columns had moved a long way from those of his early days on the Mirror. The socialist convictions nurtured by his upbringing in the industrial North had been sorely tried by the direction he felt the modern Labour Party was taking, and he came to see its years in Government from the famous electoral victory of 1997 as being rudderless and without conviction.

I used to read his column whenever I got the chance, for his use of language, for his wit and inventiveness, and for his wry point of view. Even before Tony Blair's victory of 1997, I was struck by what seemed a drift to the right. It is likely that Waterhouse and his many friends believed himself a socialist to the end, an adherent of old rather than New Labour, but I am not so sure.

The seeds of my doubt are in Billy Liar. As an employee, a member of the team, one of the collective, Billy is hopeless. He is late for work, idle, and accomplishes the minimum. He steals from the petty cash and, when tasked with sending out promotional calendars, dumps them and trousers the postage money. He has no respect for his family or anyone else except himself and Liz. These are hardly socialist virtues: yet they make a sort of vague prototype, however repressed and transmogrified, of the author himself.

I am not suggesting for a moment that Keith Waterhouse was ever like that in reality. It is the subconscious, contradictory portrait I find interesting: the portrait of someone who would be unlikely ever to vote at all; or, if he could be bothered to vote, it would certainly not be for Labour.

But then ... contradiction within contradiction: let me end with a quotation from the book itself.

The strange, poppy-like flowers seen nowhere else in the world were in full bloom in Ambrosia, or what was left of it. We had won the elections, and I was pressing forward with my visionary plan to build an entire city over the dunes on a gigantic wooden platform. The reactionary Dr Grover had got a commission set up to investigate me, but I knew for a fact that he had been bribed to put forward a rival plan for another city to the west, over the marshes. In the inner layers of No. 1 thinking, Grover got his way and the houses began to sink, seventy-one dead and fourteen unaccounted for. "We will rebuild," I announced in The Ambrosia Poppy. "We will build on the dunes."

Fuzzy Computing

I am intrigued by the way the brain works; by all the assumptions, allowances and compromises it must make in order to negotiate the maze of everyday life. My special interest is language, and nowhere do we employ so much fuzzy computing as in the interpretation of words -- whether spoken or written.

Fr xmpl, y r bl t mk sns, jst abt, f sntnc dprvd cmpltly f vwls. Your brain has filled in the gaps. It is helpful: it co-operates with an inexpert author in the business of communication. This is the way it has to be, or you would understand no more than a tiny proportion of the text you are presented with each day. If your mind operated like a silicon-based computer, it would baulk at the first misspelling or grammatical howler. An error message, or even a Blue Screen of Death, would be generated and that would be that.

I have long been a private collector of literalisms. These are a species of lexical, rather than optical, illusion. Capable of more than one interpretation, they confuse the mind -- or at least the mind of one who demands adherence to the rules.

I found the following pleasing headline in a local newspaper: TRADERS EXPRESS SQUARE FEARS. The story, obviously, was about the redevelopment of a shopping square, but I prefer the literal sense. Or what about this beauty, collected by that connoisseur, Mr Vladimir Nabokov, from an American paper? TORSO KILLER BEATS CHAIR.

Once you start to look out for them, literalisms are everywhere. My favourite might just be this, seen on a canister of bleach:

KEEP UPRIGHT IN A COOL SAFE PLACE WELL AWAY FROM CHILDREN

Literalism is the very substance of life for someone suffering from autism. Such a one, deficient in useful fuzziness, has great trouble dealing with the imprecision of others.

"The imprecision of others" includes the baggy language used by politicians, many of whom are lawyers, know exactly what they are saying, and rely on our innate decency and helpfulness to draw the wrong meaning from their words. Our fuzzy brains enable them to tell lies while apparently speaking the truth, to confess failure while apparently applauding their own success, and to promise nothing while assuring us that our expectations will be fulfilled.

This form of deception is analysed in George Orwell's essay, Politics and the English Language. Though published in 1946, it is even more relevant now. It also provides valuable advice for writers:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.

Much bad writing is the product of laziness -- (i) and (iii); and of a wish to impress -- (ii), (iv), (v). Both these traits are lethal to the development of an authentic voice. The former earns the impatience of the reader, the second his contempt. He may not understand exactly why he finds a piece of writing turgid or preposterous; he just rejects it.

Orwell, with typical modesty, says that he himself frequently breaks his own rules. Any writer would have to be superhuman not to. Rather, he urges on us all, writers and readers, the need to analyse language, to develop the clarity of thought that only linguistic clarity can bestow. It is the most effective weapon against the lies of politicians.

Orwell belonged to the British left. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he was an honourable man. He spoke out against Stalin, notably of course in Animal Farm, a book that the champagne socialist, Victor Gollancz, refused to publish.

What Orwell would have made of Tony Blair and New Labour, of Gordon Brown and the quagmire of deceit in which British politics is conducted today, is easy to imagine. His essay belongs in the survival kit of every modern citizen.

Feminism

Towards the end of the Second World War my mother went for a job interview. Her husband was serving in Egypt with the Eighth Army. She had not set eyes on him since early in 1940: and would not do so again until the end of 1945. Her current employer, a manufacturer of bombsights, was on the verge of bankruptcy caused by mismanagement and waste.

The interview was conducted by a Mr Weiss, a Viennese businessman who had escaped the Nazis by the skin of his teeth, his life having been saved by a phone call saying that arrest was only minutes away. He had fled Austria with his wife and two suitcases, together with her jewellery and whatever sum of cash he had been able, in the anxiety of the preceding weeks, to scrape together and convert into precious metal. His house, his thriving business, his extensive factory, Weiss had bequeathed to Hitler.

Soon after his arrival in London war had broken out and he had been temporarily interned as a suspicious alien. On release he had bought a manufacturing business in the town where my mother then lived. The business was very small, not much more than a kitchen-table outfit, but he was working it up and needed a personal assistant, a secretary, someone intelligent and responsible who, if he were away trying to drum up trade, could make decisions on his behalf.

My mother had left school at fourteen, when she was miraculously chosen from a snaking queue of girls and their mothers who had heard that a job was vacant in a box factory. By dint of voracious reading and night school she educated herself and became proficient in shorthand and typing, skills which in the 1930s could lift a girl out of the swamp and into the uplands of office work. The factory made boxes for a large and very famous London department store. At sixteen she was transferred to the store itself, being given, for her first day, the humiliating job of wandering the floors selling Boat Race favours – little ribbons in dark or light blue – from a tray suspended by a strap round her neck. She had been given this job because she was pretty: more than pretty, and she attracted a steady stream of customers, preponderantly young and preponderantly male. The following day she was found some proper work to do.

By this time her typing speed and accuracy were impressive, thanks to the night school, though she knew she had more progress to make. From the typing pool she soon found herself appropriated by a management type, the head of legal affairs, who needed a secretary. Quickly realizing what he had, this excellent man encouraged my mother in every fatherly way, and under his tutelage she began to learn a great deal about human nature, the judicious exercise of authority, and the way the world works. But in the course of time she was poached by someone higher up, the son of the owner, and then by the owner himself. In 1938 she married and left the company. Had she stayed, I don’t doubt that she would have ended up on the board.

So there she was, in 1944, not just being interviewed by Mr Weiss but also – if he did but know it – interviewing him. She liked what she saw, she needed the job, and he offered it to her.

Mr Weiss wished to get back to the industry he knew best, making electrical fittings. That was what he had been doing in Vienna. A few months after the interview, he found some suitable premises, a smallish factory that had been used for light assembly. He assumed there would be no difficulty with the planning permission, with the change of use: what concerned him more was getting the necessary certification to make the metal parts for his plugs and sockets. Priority was given to “war work” – manufacturing directly related to the struggle against Germany.

To his surprise, the town council turned down his application for change of use. The factory was located at the end of a somewhat lowly residential street, but the use Weiss was proposing was no more disruptive than the last: he couldn’t make it out.

Meanwhile, the request for certification was in train. Having seen what had gone on at the bombsight factory, my mother had a jaundiced view about this. She reasoned also that electrical fittings were crucial to the war effort in many different ways, and had felt no compunction in applying for the most enabling permission there was.

The local official charged with dispensing such permissions was a man of about my mother’s age. Somewhat unconventionally, he invited her to lunch to discuss the matter, and during the conversation my mother mentioned her employer’s troubles with the town hall.

“Oh,” said the man. “That factory? He’ll never get his hands on it.”

“Really?”

“Course not.” He gave her a conspiratorial smile. “You know. He’s one of those.”

“One of what?”

“The Chosen.”

If her life had worked out differently, my mother might have been an actress. She could maintain a most equable front, no matter what was going on inside. At this critical moment she managed to produce a smile of her own, a counterpart of the one he had given her.

“Thompkins wants it,” he went on, thinking that he had achieved his goal and impressed her with his inside knowledge. “The builder. He’s on the council. The planning committee, as a matter of fact.”

“That explains it.”

“Oh yes. Thing is, he’s having trouble raising the money. We’re at the same lodge, you know.” The Masonic Lodge.

On my father’s left hand, somewhere in Egypt, was a gold ring. Its companion, in plain sight, was on my mother’s hand. The official reached in his pocket and brought out a comb, a woman’s comb, unused, in a paper wrapper. It was not easy to get such things in wartime. “Would you like this?” he said. “I came by it yesterday. I thought it might be of some use to you.”

My mother looked at the comb, gave another smile, and accepted, thinking of her friend Mr Weiss. Thereupon she skilfully steered the official away from asking for a date, but left him with a faint impression that such a request, in the future, might not be declined.

When she got back to the office she made a telephone call. During her time working for the head of legal affairs, she had had many dealings with London’s leading firm of planning consultants. She now engaged them on behalf of Mr Weiss and his application.

A few days later the certification came through. The proposed factory would have A1 Priority, meaning it would have no trouble sourcing machine tools, brass, steel – everything it needed. The day after that, Mr Weiss received a call from the agent handling the sale. Was he still interested? Another buyer was in the frame.

Instantly Weiss knew that the other buyer was offering less: why else should he have been called? He said he was engaged at the moment and asked whether he might call back in ten minutes. He needed time to think.

The planning consultants had by no means arrived at a definitive answer, but would if necessary go over the heads of the town hall and appeal to Whitehall. My mother had naturally divulged this to Weiss, but not the full contents of her lunchtime chat.

Weiss told her what the agent had said. What should he do?

“Buy it.”

He looked away, racked with indecision, and looked back again.

“You did ask me, Franz. I say buy it.”

He bought the factory, for the full asking price. My mother later learned, with quiet satisfaction, of the anger and discomfiture of Thompkins. The business was successful; she became a director and worked with Mr Weiss until 1954, when he died of a heart attack and his wife took over.

His wife was a different sort of woman altogether, and my mother resigned in 1955 to start her own business, but that, as you are already half expecting me to say, is another story.

An execration of public libraries

You will not find a more passionate advocate of literacy than me. Reading is the key to so much -- education, enlightenment, defence against tyranny -- that I am anguished by the thought of its decline. Books can entertain and delight, transport and comfort us. Truly, as the motto on that series has it, Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side. I was blessed to have been born into a house full of books, but I soon used them up, and after that my chief haunt was the public library.

This was a fusty place of parquet floors and silence. All the librarians but one seemed to be spinsters, with every connotation of that word. The exception was their leader. He wore a discreet blazer and an old boys' tie from the grammar school. He sometimes worked on the front desk, with the rubber stamps and the plywood trays of cards. His sternness concealed a kindly nature. "You again?" he would say, looking down.

Developing the argument

Times change. The library is no longer silent, and it no longer favours books. Indeed, the stock at my local libraries is dwindling. As books fall to pieces, they are unlikely to be replaced. I search the shelves for quality: and find most of it has been relegated to a cramped section labelled Classics.

The building, now, hardly merits the name "library" at all. It is a media centre, a shop, a nexus of propaganda and control, by government both local and central.

Much space is taken up by stands of music and films. These are rented out, directly competing with private companies; the titles on offer cover the whole spectrum of taste. More space is occupied by tables of PCs giving "free" access to the internet. The other week my home connection went down. I needed the Web, so I went to the library, but stayed as briefly as possible, for I was surrounded by children playing noisy online games and found it hard to concentrate.

Yet more space is given over to racks of greetings cards for sale, also in competition with nearby businesses. And regularly, laid out on trestles or even on one of the counters, I find a display of jewellery, or clothing, or craftwork, produced locally and put on subsidized sale.

Subsidized, of course, by taxpayers, because we supply the premises. I think particularly of an elderly council-tax payer, a widow perhaps, who cannot afford to heat her home. Her wretched pension is no longer even supplemented by the wretched income from her savings, thanks to Brown's bullying down the bank rate. She has received, last month, a whopping demand from the council, and if she can't or won't pay up they'll put her in jail.

And don't get me started on the multitude of nannying posters and leaflets and the smug, right-on ecosystem of which they form a part. It's as if the studio of You and Yours has, like some technicolor nightmare, come to life, the air pervaded by an unspoken injunction that we must be grateful.

Well, I am not grateful. Indeed, I am doubly ungrateful. If the library system is subsidized by the taxpayer, it is even more heavily subsidized by the content-providers. Notable among these are authors, whose own average income makes that of our elderly widow look positively plutocratic.

Going deeper

For the patient reader who has got this far, a few words about the economics of authorship are in order. Consider a hardback retailing for £17.99. For a middling or beginning author, a royalty rate of 10% is about the best to be had. After the agent's cut, the author might be credited with £1.49.

That is for a copy sold at full price. The collapse of the Net Book Agreement and the rise of discounters is pushing per-copy rates ever lower. On such deals, the author receives 10% of the price received; maybe as low as 40p on a £17.99 copy. Paperback rates are even worse, since 50% must typically be given to the publisher of the original hardback.

Let's pretend the library pays full price for the book. If, over its lifetime, it is lent out 150 times, that copy will effectively generate the author 1p a loan. An unknown number of other copies will not be sold.

For decades, authors' groups pressed for an end to this injustice. Their scheme was called Public Lending Right. It provided for authors to be remunerated from central funds for every notional loan. By the 1980s the campaign was bearing fruit, and the culture minister of the day, Paul Channon, started a consultation process.

I wrote to him. He replied. I can still remember one line of my acknowledgement: "Your answer is every bit as flat and evasive as I had feared it would be."

I had argued against Public Lending Right. I saw no reason why it should be paid from the public purse. No reason why the reading matter of the prosperous should be subsidized by the poor and by those who never set foot in a library. No reason why anyone who could afford it -- excluding the young, pensioners, and those in full-time education or on benefits -- should not pay a reasonable sum per loan.

Like most consultation processes, this one was probably a sham. The present PLR scheme was brought in. It involves a largish staff, computers, hefty admin costs. The per-loan rate is insultingly low, and in no way compensates the author or indeed the publisher for the consequent loss of sales. With rewards for writing as low as they are, every sale counts.

You might argue that libraries provide a showcase for authors. That readers are willing to borrow a book they would never risk buying. Perhaps so, but that is still no reason not to charge a commercial loan-fee. Librarians make one for a CD. Why not a book?

Deeper still

Now we come to the real problems with libraries. The first is editorial control. Someone you don't know, in some government-funded office, decides which books will and will not appear on the library shelves. If a book is panned in the Library Journal, or even if it just receives a dismissive "not a necessary purchase", it's doomed, as least as far as the "showcase" is concerned.

The next is the devaluation of what writers do. An attitude has arisen that books should be cheap, if not completely free. The corollary of this is the destruction of talent. No one who has not started a literary career from scratch can know how grindingly depressing it can be. Just finding an agent can take years of expense, submission and rejection. And at the moment, the publishing industry is in a tailspin. Times have rarely been worse. Authorship has become Hollywoodized: because of the economies of scale, publishers only want bestsellers.

Who knows how many writers just give up? Who knows what books have been lost to the world? Not all the blame can be laid at the library's door, but some of it certainly can.

The future

I believe that little or no case can now be made for public libraries as an agent of literacy. Most literature in the public domain is freely available on the net. Do you want a copy of Paradise Lost? Choose one here. In a few years' time electronic publication will be the norm. Ebook displays will have developed to the point where any sort of print can be perfectly reproduced on a screen.

Years ago, the public library system was one of the glories of our culture. It enabled the working class to better itself -- although here I involuntarily think of Leonard Bast in Howards End. Still, it was a profound force for good.

But as I said earlier, times change. And it's time we called time on the libraries.

The power of Facebook

I gave away my TV set three years ago, mainly because I rarely watched it, but also because many of the programmes offended me. In my innocence I wrote to TV Licensing to tell them that I would no longer be sending them the annual licence fee due in the UK from anyone who watches television. The money funds the BBC, whose shameless output of government propaganda was a further disincentive for me to keep the thing.

TVL’s reply, in so many words, called me a liar and a cheat. They said they would be sending someone to inspect my home to check up on me.

As you may imagine, I did not take kindly to this, nor did I take kindly to the stream of subsequent letters from TVL, all more or less bullying and intimidating. My Member of Parliament was of no help whatever, but facts gleaned from the internet provided me with the necessary defence. I was finally compelled to write a suitably insulting letter to the BBC itself, since when TVL have left me in peace.

The Corporation has made of me an abiding enemy. I look forward to the day when it is destroyed or broken up. For a rehearsal of some of its faults, see this post by Jonathan Miller.

Recently, anti-BBC sentiment has been spreading more widely, catalysed by a scandal. Two radio presenters left obscene messages on the answerphone of Andrew Sachs, an elderly, respected, and much loved British actor. One of the presenters, Russell Brand, informed Mr Sachs in graphic terms of what he had got up to with his granddaughter, while the other, Jonathan Ross, who is paid £6 million a year by the BBC, sniggered and egged him on. Brand has since resigned from that show, and Ross was suspended for three months without pay.

The resulting furore, initially handled with dismissive arrogance, revealed just how far the BBC has fallen in the national esteem. It has given rise to a Facebook group whose members have pledged to stop paying the licence fee.

The group has grown with astonishing speed. Currently it numbers 221,637, representing, if all the members do indeed withhold payment, an annual loss to the BBC of about £30 million. Now, this is only about 1% of the sum raised by the licence fee, but it is still a fair chunk of change. Without it the BBC will have to make some major readjustments in its spending plans. If the group ever reaches its stated goal of 10 million members, the BBC’s licence-fee income will be halved and the organization will in all likelihood collapse.

I have been following the development of this group with interest. It gives a hint of things to come.

In Britain, as in most developed countries, we are sitting on what newspapers usually call a “demographic timebomb”. There are too many old people. Increasingly, younger workers will be paying more and more tax to support them. This is likely to give rise to much resentment, since not a few of the elderly have made little provision for their own support, having swallowed the cruel lie that the state would look after them.

There will come a point when this resentment crystallizes into a political movement; when overworked and penurious young people decide to stage a tax strike. The television licence fee is officially classified as a tax, and a strike is exactly what is happening right now on Facebook.

If you are 50 years of age or over, living in a developed country, and have no savings, this may be a very good time to reassess what your future holds.