Posted on by Ronald Maxwell

On the Occasion of President Obama’s Wreath for the Confederate Memorial

General Robert E. Lee

RONALD MAXWELL says Americans should treat their contested past with imaginative sympathy

A speech delivered 7 June 2009 at the annual commemoration of the Confederate Monument in Arlington National Cemetery

Greetings. I am humbled when I see the list of former speakers for this event: the great Civil War historian James I. Robertson, former Secretary of the Navy and current Senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia, Jim Webb, former National Park Service chief historian and revered doyen of Civil War battlefield guides, Ed Bearrs. Following in his footsteps, on a hot and humid day at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri as I did a few years back, doesn’t mean I can fill his shoes today.

The history of America is a history of liberation.

Liberation from the dark superstitions of the Salem witch hunts, from ignorance about the native peoples who inhabited this continent before the 17th century, liberation from a domineering and oppressive parent country an ocean away, liberation from the religious wars of Europe by codifying in law the separation of church and state, liberation from hereditary power, from aristocratic noblesse oblige, from arbitrary justice and unchecked political power.

The history of America is a history of liberation.

Transforming hearts

In the 19th century the work of liberation would continue, slowly, falteringly, but steadily. Before slavery could be ended by law a transformation of the hearts and minds of Americans had to take place. Mammon is a heavy shackle on the soul. When profits are fused with prejudice change is even harder to accomplish. It is argued that the liberation of America from the nightmare of slavery would have happened in time, as it did throughout the rest of the Western Hemisphere, without a savage Civil War. Alternate histories and speculations of paths not taken are of endless interest, but the facts of history cannot be undone. We did have a brutal Civil War. And the work of liberation continued.

Even with a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution protecting the rights of the individual more securely than in any other society, by the last third of the 19th century half of the population, at least in the law, were viewed as 2nd class citizens. It took another liberation movement, led by the Suffragettes, to secure women their rightful place among a free people.

The history of America is a history of liberation.

Opening minds

Pre-dating the American Revolution, the Enlightenment had created a new and initially limited space for intellectual scepticism and inquiry that would lead in time to the great scientific discoveries of the 18th and 19th centuries. The Founders of the great American experiment in self-government were students of the social philosophers and natural scientists of their time. They designed a society that would enable innovation, invention and scientific inquiry. Dogma, the heavy blinders of ignorance, would yield, decade by decade, to the advance of knowledge — or, to put it another way, the liberation of the mind.

No one was prescient enough to anticipate the extent of the horrors of the 20th century. While Americans wrestled with the lingering, festering vestiges of racism, with the repeal of Jim Crow laws and the eventual implementation of integration and Civil Rights, Europe and Asia fell under the seductive spell of the totalitarian impulse — as Nazism and Communism both sought to dominate mankind, to usher in a new dark age of a thousand year Reich or a New Soviet man. Our work of liberation continued. It was hard fought and hard won.

The price of liberty

We stand in the middle of a cemetery where thousands of graves give mute testimony to the price of liberty — for ourselves and for others. These graves stand as monuments not just to the slain — but to remind us of a world that could have been, but for their sacrifice. A world of oppression, a world of ignorance, a world of conformity. One need only look at the images from Pyong Yang in North Korea — the regimented masses offering homage to their supreme leader — to catch a glimpse of the prison camp that could have been our destiny as well.

The work of liberation is not done. Perhaps it is a work that can never end, because as long as there is unjustified prejudice in the human heart society must fashion laws to protect and to defend the vulnerable, the weak, the different or the unpopular. No person can be a second class citizen in America.

The history of America is a history of liberation.

A Nation of Firsts

Perhaps because we are, by world standards, a young country, we pride ourselves with firsts. Daniel Boone crossing the Alleghenies. Lewis and Clark venturing to the Pacific-Northwest, the first man on the moon. This year we are celebrating the first African-American president. Agree or disagree with his policies, one must be amazed and impressed, not just by Barack Obama’s individual qualities and personal story, but by America’s story.

Nearly 150 years ago, this nation was torn apart in an apocalyptic orgy of violence that endured for more than four years, costing more than a half million lives, maiming and crippling many more and laying waste to half the country. Anyone who still thinks violence is a means to redress a grievance hasn’t studied the American Civil War.

There is no way that words alone can begin to convey the suffering of that generation. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I made my two movies, Gettysburg and Gods & Generals. To try to bring that time alive for us and for our children.

Reviving our history

Writing a screenplay on an historical subject requires months, yes even years of research before even a word of a screenplay can be written. How could I, or anyone, write dialogue for Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, for Robert E. Lee or Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson without spending hour upon hour listening to their own voices in their own time? But how can we know what Jackson said or thought, how he spoke or what was in his heart?

As a filmmaker I have to get as close to these men and women as is humanly possible. I have to make the effort. There are no shortcuts. It must be total immersion. Not just in the record of their own words, written themselves or reported by others, but also of the journalistic accounts of the time, the letters and diaries of those in their immediate circle and the literature they read. It’s from the literature of contemporary authors, whether it be Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mary Johnston or Sidney Lanier that we catch a flavor of how people actually spoke, the vocabulary they used, the sense of metaphor, of colloquialism, accent or regional flavor.

At some point, and every writer finds this place on his or her own, you gain the confidence to begin writing. It’s as if Lee and Jackson, Chamberlain and Hancock are now, somehow, in the room with you. It’s as if you are now listening to what they have to say and just recording their words as someone taking dictation. This is why there is no room for generational judgment or propaganda in filmmaking. I’m not interested in it. Audiences are not interested in it and our posterity will dismiss and discredit any filmmaker who does it.

Why the South fought

This is how I came to know, through the study of their own words, both written and reported by contemporaries and can say without any hesitation, that Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson were in their own hearts and minds fighting in a war for liberty, or as they themselves called it, a second War of Independence. To fail to understand this or to refuse to understand this is to fundamentally fail to understand the American Civil War.

Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson were in their own hearts and minds fighting in a war for liberty

I’m not saying this out of some misguided notion that we have to feel good about our ancestors or in keeping with 19th century imperatives for reconciliation or to indulge in the futile exercise of trying to justify the present by the past or the past by the present. We can be justifiably appalled at both crimes of commission as well as crimes of omission perpetrated by every generation before and including our own.

As a citizen and as a filmmaker I have no interest in putting anyone on a pedestal or turning anyone into a saint. There simply ain’t no such thing on earth. I am, however, very interested in getting at that elusive thing we call the truth. For two reasons, because it’s important to try, or else why study history at all? And because the closer you get to the truth the more dramatic and exciting it is!

Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson represented at the Confederate Memorial carving at Stone Mountain, GA

A second War of Independence? Or a war for slavery?

Imagine for a moment the irony, the contradiction. Here you have two iconic figures of American History, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, risking their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honour to defend the independence of a new Southern nation called the Confederate States of America. In their eyes they see Federal armies, more than one, marching across the Mason-Dixon Line into their sovereign state of Virginia to suppress their independence, arrest their leaders and forcibly keep them in the polity of the United States.

But here’s the rub. Although both men are individually opposed to slavery and see in the institution a great moral wrong, they are fighting for a government that seeks to continue the institution into the future and possibly into other territories to the west. From our perspective almost a century and a half later, this contradiction makes the fierce intensity of their courage and the steadfast dedication to their cause all the more difficult to understand.

We must talk about the past

In the spirit of the characters who populated my films I gave the question to Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who in Gods & Generals has this conversation with his brother Tom. The scene is the Federal encampment at Stoneman’s Switch, February 1863. Chamberlain motions across the empty vastness across the Rappahannock River to the south.

Somewhere out there is the Confederate Army. They claim they are fighting for their independence, for their freedom. I cannot question their integrity. I believe they are wrong, but I cannot question it. But I do question a system that defends its own freedom while it denies it to others — to an entire race of men. I will admit it, Tom – war is a scourge. But so is slavery. It is the systematic coercion of one group of men over another. It is as old as the Book of Genesis and has existed in every corner of the globe. But that is no excuse for us to tolerate it here, when we find it before our very eyes, in our own country

We’re all sinners … and potential saints

We know that Southerners were torn over the issue of secession. We know from countless diaries, letters and other original documents that it was a personal struggle to determine where their deepest duty resided. Each story is unique, whether it be Robert E. Lee’s or a foot soldier from the Shenandoah Valley.

Cadet Moses Ezekiel

The war was already well into its second year when Moses Ezekiel entered his class at VMI, the first cadet of Jewish descent to do so. In May, 1863, one of VMI’s most beloved teachers was brought back to lay in repose in his old classroom, before his burial in Lexington. Moses Ezekiel stood as a Corporal of the Guard by the casket of the slain Confederate hero.

In the spring of 1864 the VMI Cadet Battalion was called on by Major General John C. Breckenridge to come to the aid of their Southern comrades. Of the 257 cadets who marched out of Lexington, the average age was 18, but several had just celebrated their 15th birthday. Their commander was Lieutenant Colonel Scott Shipp, a 24 year old graduate of the Institute. Ezekiel, at age 20, was a private in Company C.

The first battle of the 1864 Shenandoah Campaign occurred on 15 May, 1864 at the village of New Market, some 80 miles north of Lexington. Union Major General Franz Sigel was attempting to control the terminus of the Manassas Gap Railroad and capture New Market to control the only road across Massanutten Mountain to the east. Breckenridge’s Confederate force numbered about 5,500 troops while the Union force was close to 8,500, spread throughout the region.

On that Sunday morning, as rain began to fall, the armies engaged. At one point, as combined Union artillery and musket fire forced a break in the Confederate line, General Breckenridge gave the command, “Put the boys in and may God forgive me for the order.” The cadets spearheaded the Confederate charge across a rain-drenched wheat field into the Union line.

The butcher’s bill

Almost 60 years later, writing about another war, Wilfred Owen could have been describing the Cadets of VMI in this very moment.

So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together
Over an open stretch of herb and heather
Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned
With fury against them: and soft sudden cups
Opened in thousands for their blood; and the green slopes
Chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space

Charging directly into one of the Union artillery positions, the cadets captured a Federal cannon. Soon after, the men in blue were forced to retreat. Ten VMI cadets were killed and forty seven wounded. It remains until today the only time in American history that a college student body engaged in pitched battle as a single unit. After the battle, Ezekiel was detailed to recovering his classmates, the dead and wounded. It wasn’t long before he found his roommate, Thomas Garland Jefferson, a descendant of President Thomas Jefferson. He had a serious wound to his chest.

Taking him to a nearby home, Ezekiel tended to his suffering friend. On the evening of May 17th, fully two days after the battle, this young Jewish soldier read to his dying Christian brother-in-arms, his requested passages from the New Testament. “In my Father’s house there are many mansions…” Moments later, Jefferson died in Ezekiel’s arms.

Virginia Military Academy after General Hunter’s capture of Lexington

A month after the battle, Union General David Hunter’s 18,000 troops marched into Lexington. In retaliation for the VMI Cadets’ role at New Market, Hunter ordered the Institute burned to the ground.

Commemorating the dead

When the war was over VMI reopened in makeshift circumstances and Ezekiel returned to finish his education. Robert E. Lee, appointed president of nearby Washington College, encouraged Ezekiel’s burgeoning artistic talents. Although he had thoughts of becoming a painter, his interest soon turned to sculpture. His studies and subsequent work led him to Cincinnati, to New York City and eventually to Berlin.

In Berlin he met Rudolf Steimering, a well known sculptor, who offered Ezekiel a place in his studio. While there, he produced his first statue, Virginia Mourning Her Dead, which, some 30 years later, he cast in bronze and presented to his alma mater, VMI. She keeps vigil over ten inscribed stone tablets, one for each of the cadets who died at Newmarket.

In 1873, at age 29, Ezekiel won the coveted Prix de Rome with his bas relief, Israel. Previous recipients included Delacroix and Ingres. This award allowed him to study in Rome where commissions and fame soon followed.

Ezekiel’s regard for his native South and the Confederate cause never wavered. On a trip to the United States in 1910 he was present at the unveiling of his Stonewall Jackson monument at Charleston, West Virginia and his Thomas Jefferson monument at the University of Virginia. President Taft invited Ezekiel to make a social call to the White House. While waiting for the President, Ezekiel sat in an outer office sketching his thoughts for a new commission he had received from the Congress the day before — a Confederate monument for Arlington Cemetery.

Healing the wounds

The cornerstone was laid on 12 November, 1912, at a ceremony featuring well known orator and presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and James A. Tanner. A former Union corporal who lost both his legs at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Tanner was the national commander of The Grand Army of the Republic, the largest organization of Union veterans in the country.

Sir Moses Ezekiel

Two years later, now Sir Moses Ezekiel (having been knighted by the King of Italy), the aging sculptor participated in the 50th anniversary of the Battle of New Market with veterans of both sides. Then, on 14 June, 1914 this monument was unveiled before a large crowd. President Woodrow Wilson delivered an address and veterans from North and South placed wreaths on the graves.

We cannot wish our ancestors away, nor should we

During World War One Ezekiel was not able to travel out of Italy. The great artist died of pneumonia on March 27, 1917. The New York Times reported,

The death of Moses Ezekiel, the distinguished and greatly beloved American sculptor, who lived in Rome for more than forty years, caused universal regret in the Eternal City

Ezekiel’s body was finally shipped back to the United States in 1921. On 31 March that year he was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, at the foot of this monument. The Marine band played Liszt’s “Liebestraume” and a eulogy was read from President Warren G. Harding, praising Ezekiel as “a great Virginian, a great artist, a great American and a great citizen of world fame.” Flanking his flower-bedecked and American-flag covered casket were six VMI cadets. At the grave site next to the Confederate memorial, a small headstone was placed with the simple words:

Moses J. Ezekiel
Sergeant of Company C
Battalion of Cadets
Virginia Military Institute

Obama honoured fallen Confederates

A few weeks ago a group of more than 40 college professors and historians sent an open letter to President Obama asking him to break with tradition, imploring him NOT to send a wreath to this statue on Memorial Day. In no uncertain terms their argument is that we should not honour the 20 year old Moses Ezekiel who fought so bravely at New Market. We should not honour the boy who cared for his wounded roommate in his dying hour. We should not honour the boy who would spend a lifetime of apprenticing and study to master an art which would bring him prominence on the world stage. We should not honor the artist who was visited in his Rome studio by President Theodore Roosevelt as well as the luminaries and artists of Europe. We should not honor the man who is buried at the foot of this monument, nor any of those whose deaths he commemorated in his magnificent work of art.

President Harding said more on that blustery March day in 1921. He said:

Every line and curve and expression of this monument carries the plea for a truly united nation that may be equal to the burdens of these exacting times. It speaks to us the ardent wish, the untiring purpose, to help make our people one people, secure in independence, dedicated to freedom, and ever ready to lend the hand of confident strength in aid of the oppressed and needy. Its long drawn shadows of earliest morn and latest evening will always fall on sacred soil. The genius that produced, the love that gave, the devotion that will cherish it, will forever be numbered among our ennobling possessions

Moses Ezekiel accepted the verdict of the Civil War’s arbitrament with all that fine generosity that has been characteristic of both the North and South; and the splendid product of his art, that here testifies to our nation’s reunion, will stand from this day forth as guardian over his ashes.

Wishing our ancestors away

We cannot wish our ancestors away, nor should we. In the act of designing and erecting these monuments and statues they are telling us what was important to them in their time. By leaving for us, their progeny, a record in stone, they are expressly calling upon us, their grand-children, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren to remember.

Shall we do as the professors who signed the letter to our president asked him to do — shall we heap scorn upon these monuments and chastise those who will not? Should we do as their doctrinaire kin in Afghanistan did? Shall we, like the Taliban, destroy our statues with dynamite because they offend a prevailing dogma? Shall we disinter the bones of our ancestors like the radical Jacobins of the French Revolution did, scattering their unearthed remains to the winds — first to be reviled, then ever to be forgotten?

Unless we’re prepared to tear down every statue and monument in America we must instead take stock. What are these statues? Who cared so much to place them in the village green, the town square or the local cemetery? Instead of behaving like censorious cultural commissars or inquisitorial accusers, can we not instead meditate on their meaning for our country and in our own lives? Can they not be seen as invitations of rediscovery, of sacred places set aside in the quiet corners of our lives, for communion with our ancestors — for a portal to understanding who they were and who we are?

Confederate prisoners after the Battle of Gettysburg

Columbus, the Pilgrims, the Founders, the Confederates

Yes, Christopher Columbus’ discovery hearkened the demise of native civilizations. But he was also the bold navigator and explorer who discovered a New World.

Yes, the Pilgrim Fathers of New England brought the medieval darkness of witch trials to the Massachusetts Bay colony. They also founded a culture that gave birth to the great institutions of learning at Harvard and Yale.

Yes, Peter Stuyvesant was a ruthless administrator who meted out arbitrary justice and dispossessed natives from the Hudson Valley. He was also at the center of a Dutch-American culture that introduced religious tolerance, free trade and innovation to the American colonies.

Yes, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. They also founded a new country which enshrined liberty in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Yes, Robert E. Lee and Thomas Stonewall Jackson fought on the side of a fledgling nation that practiced the indefensible and intolerable institution of slavery. They were also men of great honor, impeccable integrity and extraordinary personal courage.

Yes, the migration to the West following the Civil War caused death and destruction to the Native American populations from the Mississippi to the Pacific. It also forged the pioneer spirit, built the transcontinental railroad, fostered the economic development of vast natural resources and laid the foundations that became the world in which we live.

Yes, the greatest generation fire-bombed Dresden and Leipzig and dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. They also liberated millions and won a war against evil on a scale the world had never seen before.

Shall we imitate the Taliban?

Perhaps we should, as these professors imply, tear down all the statues. Far fetched? Didn’t Bill Ayers, who signed this letter, already do this very thing in the sixties and seventies? Blow up statues with explosives? In an interview that was published in the New York Times, would you believe, on 11 September, 2001, Bill Ayers is quoted as saying, ‘’I don’t regret setting bombs, I feel we didn’t do enough.’’

Why then would we want to remember or commemorate any of our history? Why indeed? Why pay homage at monuments to World War Two veterans or Vietnam vets? As I remember it, back in the day more than a few signers of this letter were less than friendly, to put it charitably, to returning vets from Vietnam.

And what about our brothers and sisters risking their lives today in Iraq or Afghanistan? Surely, the requirement to honor their sacrifice must be reconsidered in the light of the scandal of prisoner abuse. Why honour or remember anyone or anything at all? In fact, why should our descendants, living a hundred or two hundred years from now have any interest at all in what we said or did in our time? That is of course, assuming they’re still living with the blessings of liberty.

Name and shame the vandals

I think there’s a solution to this quandary. The American people should subscribe to a national monument to the professors who signed this letter. Their names should be prominent, engraved in stone for eternity. Can you just see it now, in letters four feet tall, William C. Ayers, James M. McPherson. All 48 heroes. Then, the inscription below:

Behold, the learned scribes. They showed us the way to our true humanity. Before this, the one and only true monument was erected, there were vile statues in every town, in every park, in every corner of America. Thanks to these saviours from academe, the false idols were struck from their pedestals and erased from memory. Now there is only this, the monument to the Holier Than Thou

Edmund Burke, political philosopher, member of Parliament and friend to the American Patriots of ‘76, of whom, incidentally, there stands a statue in Washington DC, penned these words:

Society is an open ended partnership between generations. The dead and the unborn are as much members of society as the living. To dishonor the dead is to reject the relation on which society is built — the relation of obligation between generations. Those who have lost respect for the dead have ceased to be trustees of their inheritance. Inevitably therefore, they lose the sense of obligation to future generations. The web of obligations shrinks to the present tense

President Barack Obama, to his everlasting honour, and in keeping with the tradition of his predecessors, on Memorial Day just two weeks ago sent a wreath to Moses Ezekiel’s monument to the Confederate dead.

Shall we dig them up and kill them again?

Can we not now, finally and at long last liberate ourselves from this dark night of political correctness, from sectarian ideologues who refuse to see those with whom they disagree as human beings? Will we liberate ourselves from this stultifying, sanctimonious self-justifying moral righteousness — this need to demonize, to condemn and to desecrate? How many times must we exhume these corpses to kill them again and again and again? Can we not see our ancestors, finally and unequivocally, as the flawed imperfect men and women they were, trying desperately to do the right thing and often risking their lives to do so? Black and white, man and woman, north and south — they paid in their blood. They paid in their sorrow and in their loss.

I myself am neither a Confederate nor a neo-Confederate, whatever that means. I am simply an American — and that’s enough for me. I belong to no organizations, clubs, round-tables or societies related to the Civil War or indeed to anything else. But I will not be intimidated from speaking at memorials for Confederate or Yankee soldiers — nor silently stand by as others heap insult and scorn on anyone who does. I am no one’s mouth-piece or propagandist. I have no axe to grind or grievance to nurse. I am no more and no less than a free man.

I spent 25 years making two films on the Civil War. I know I have fallen far short of my own aspirations and the expectations of many others — but it was not for want of trying nor of making anything less than the fiercest effort to get to the truth of the matter — to the mysterious heart of the human condition with all its paradoxes, contradictions and complexities.

The line through the human heart

It’s only because some folks have appreciated these movies that I’m called upon to speak at Civil War events across the country — at colleges, high schools, civic groups, history fairs, film festivals and commemorations like the one today. For James McPherson to lend his name to this cheap personal smear, a man whom I have met with mutual friends and colleagues at Civil War events over the past 17 years, says more about him than me.

This is what happens when actual people are dehumanized for ideological reasons. This is how a good man like Moses Ezekiel gets turned into a war criminal deserving of no respect.

In The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote:

If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and to destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being

One people, under God

This monument is dedicated simply to, Our Dead Heroes. Let us today, rededicate ourselves to a renewed healing for ourselves and for our posterity. I believe President Obama when he calls us to move and grow beyond our sectarian or regional differences. Not blue states or red states but the United States. Isn’t this just another way of saying not North or South, but America? Isn’t his voice, shaped on the south side of Chicago in the Twentieth Century, the same as Ezekiel Moses’s voice, shaped in the Shenandoah Valley in the 19th — calling us to be one people under God?

We cannot get there unless we get right with all our ancestors. We cannot get there as a people until we recognize that Frederick Douglass and Robert E. Lee are our fathers, that Harriet Tubman and Anna Jackson are our mothers. We cannot get there until, in Lincoln’s words, “with malice towards none and charity towards all, we bind up the nation’s wounds,” even the lingering wounds of memory, even the festering wounds of prejudice, even the self-blinding wounds of moral narcissism. Can we, even we here, become the better angels of our nature?

I will close my remarks with a poem by Walt Whitman, entitled “Pensive On Her Dead Gazing,” written within days of Appomattox. It is a poem I kept tucked in my breast pocket or taped to the motion-picture camera on each and every day of filming on Gettysburg and Gods & Generals:

Pensive on her dead gazing I heard the Mother of All,
Desperate on the torn bodies, on the forms covering the battlefields gazing,
(As the last gun ceased, but the scent of the powder-smoke linger’d,)
As she call’d to her earth with mournful voice while she stalk’d,
Absorb them well O my earth, she cried, I charge you lose not my
sons, lose not an atom,
And you streams absorb them well, taking their dear blood,
And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly
impalpable,
And all you essences of soil and growth, and you my rivers’ depths,
And you mountain sides, and the woods where my dear children’s
blood trickling redden’d,
And you trees down in your roots to bequeath to all future trees,
My dead absorb of South of North—my young men’s bodies absorb,
and their precious precious blood,
Which holding in trust for me faithfully back again give me many a year hence,
In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence,
In blowing airs from the fields back again give me my darlings, give my immortal heroes,
Exhale me them centuries hence, breathe me their breath, let not an atom be lost,
O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet!
Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence.

(Selected research text by permission of Keith Gibson, from Moses Ezekiel, Virginia Military Institute Museum, 2007)

Posted on by Sydney Lord

Medusa’s hair

Head of Medusa, by Peter Paul Rubens, 1610

SYDNEY LORD finds a metaphor for cancel culture in mythology

Medusa, with her famous hair of writhing snakes, has had many metamorphoses over the centuries – so many the Greeks and Romans stopped counting. After World War II, some feminist activists – which I call ‘femocrats’- used Medusa as a mascot. The Gorgon’s gaze, as we know, was enough to strike dead any male (nowadays, preferably a white male) who held back any talented, brilliant, intellectually savvy, sovereign woman. Yet Medusa, who was considered beautiful in one of her guises, is also used by the fashion house, Versace.

To me, Medusa’s hairdo is the perfect mascot for all the quarrelling, snarling and bickering by the Opinionated and the Offended we enjoy in well-to-do democracies. If ever a hairstyle disagreed with itself, it is Medusa’s, and disagreeing with themselves is what democracies do every day – distracting them from their own protection, while their pockets are being systematically picked.

People snarl about sex, which has been dissociated from love and marriage, and rechristened ‘gender’, which until recently was a purely grammatical term. ‘Gender’ enables those with sex-in-the-head (thank you, D. H. Lawrence), often non-medical teachers or school counsellors, to insist there are ever so many sexes or, rather, genders, in some cases necessitating surgery for full realisation. It seems to me that rushing to diagnose a pupil or student, and suggest hormone treatment or even surgery, reeks of ‘social engineering’ and maybe even child abuse. Is this more about asserting power than righting wrongs? (1)

A second area of quarrelling is ‘equality’. What exactly this means is a puzzle. Does it mean equity? Does it mean equal legal rights for all – or that we should all be the same in a mental Mao suit? Doesn’t affirmative action, or quotas, contradict sameness, or equity, or equality? Must inequality, for whatever reason, always be compensated for? Mightn’t affirmative action mean that someone who enters school or university with a lower education than those who enter normally is always running hard to keep in the same place? Why not give everyone of every background such a good education, even if this means extra effort at times, that they will not need affirmative action? Forgive the thought, but who would want an affirmative action brain surgeon? Affirmative action may be fine in Gender Studies, which are unlikely do any harm – unless it is in school counselling. (Shouldn’t school counsellors have a degree in Offence Studies too?)

A propos equality, equity, and sameness, I feel compelled to mention that in Mao’s gift of Marx’s equality to women, women were still given lower wages than men. Educated, CEO-class femocrats in highly developed democracies argue endlessly about getting equal pay for equal work. But this is a wealthy women’s quarrel. Here in Australia, the altruistic professions, generally lowly paid everywhere, have ‘equity of pay’. Those who do really important everyday jobs –  nurses, carers, emergency phone operators, ambulance medicos, police, fire fighters, coastguards and soldiers are given equal pay. (Some want no pay at all, and wish to remain volunteers.) But should equity of pay ever waver, there are unions, plus open, cogent and constructive debate – while the CEO sector bickers over millions of dollars. Recently, University of Sydney management magnanimously gave up 20% of their income – but it turned out to be their bonuses. Such feminists might briefly stop thinking about money, and spare a very deep thought for brave, individually-minded women in some Islamic countries, like the recently shot Afghan woman film director, Saba Sahar.

A third area of bickering is ‘diversity’. This is simultaneously a dull abstraction, and an enforced mantra that sparks all sorts of unpleasantness. I don’t have a definition and have never heard a good one, but I suspect it means diversity of ethnicities. It seems to me to mean something like this – there are too many Anglo-Celts in the world; they should either be equalled in numbers by ‘Others’ or they should be flooded out. Yet highly-paid jobs that rely heavily on appearances, like TV presenting, display oodles of beautiful and professional persons of many ethnicities. So too do the highly educated professions, like law or medicine, and innumerable small businesses. Given all this evidence, no doubt the squabbling over diversity will soon cease…and then all those corporations and universities that have ‘Diversity Toolkits’ (don’t laugh) can put them away for good.

Alas, this leads into a fourth area – racism. This is not a dull abstraction, but one fraught with very loud squabbling, and self-righteous rage of the worst kind, plus oodles of conceit and confected Offence. This is apparently not an improved situation and gives rise nearly every day to both big and small squabbles, and very muddled arguments. Medusa’s vipers are in a downright frenzy over this.

A small example concerned the taxpayer-funded national broadcaster of Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The ABC was utterly abashed and compelled to spend quite a large amount of extra tax money averting a racist disaster in a children’s series, featuring a dog named Bluey. No, Bluey did not offend any blue races. The offence was that a phrase “ooga booga” was used in this children’s series. ‘Someone’ unnamed complained, because ‘ooga booga’ was used in Hollywood movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s to represent ‘traditional cultures’ negatively. This offence was important enough to be reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (2). The ABC suspended the episodes until they could be changed in case any tiny tot film buffs or, indeed, any representatives of ‘traditional cultures’ were in the ABC audience. Embarrassing and expensive silliness occurs repeatedly to avoid varying degrees of guilt imposed by the Perennially Offended, in this case, the certain ‘someone’ who complained. Quite mysterious. I have a vision of a tiny tot or tribesman phoning in their complaint… (To make offence easier, why not have an app?)

Recently, the Australian Senator Matthias Cormann was criticised for joking that the Commonwealth was ditching its white official cars for dark grey, as whiteness was colonial. Should I open the floodgates of squabbling, guilt and offence by revealing that our great Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies was chauffeured in a black Bentley? Black and British-made! How could he have been so inept? He obviously did not foresee the offence 70 years hence. Joking aside, we must never lose sight of the ignorance that is necessitated for genuine silly offence. There is a long-established brand of cheddar sold in Australia, called Coon Cheese. Inevitably, overnight this became racially offensive, and now the name is to change. But the first maker of the cheddar was a Mr Coon. So who has race writ large in their empty head space – Mr Coon, or those who saw his name as racist?

Australia is not trivial all the time. It does some egregious acts of trying to retro-right old wrongs. Recently, a Green Party employee, Ms Xiaoran Shi, was charged with vandalism  for spray-painting Captain Cook’s statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park with the message “No Pride in Genocide”. Usually Captain Cook is accused of discovering Australia, in his time called New Holland (whoever by?), when he wended his way along the East Coast. Why he is accused of discovering Australia, I don’t know. (He brilliantly mapped Newfoundland too, but no one has accused him of discovering Newfoundland.) George Collingridge’s classic 1895 account of the discovery of Australia by Europeans is called, reasonably enough, Discovery of Australia. It stops before Captain Cook. Why? Because he did not discover Australia. This worthy book ends with the 17th century, and mainly the Dutch – although the English buccaneer William Dampier is in here too. Dampier luckily has no statue. I am guessing a statue of him would need quite a long explanatory plaque. He was very offensive. He came to Australia more than once. He took a look at the west coast, collected some botanical specimens, and was in contact with what appeared to him near-starving natives. Finally, he gave the land a miss after some investigation near Broome. Think of how one could vandalise his statue for that 400-year insult – ‘Don’t give a Damn for Dampier’.

But it is Cook who cops it all. No one seems dispassionate about him. Cook is supposed to have taken pride in genocide. But he was not on land long enough; nor did he have a Gatling gun which might have enabled him to commit genocide during his short stay. Besides, he did not want to. To Cook, the natives were amazing. There were natural misunderstandings and skirmishes, but Cook avowed “their features are far from disagreeable and their voices soft and tunable” (3). He felt them to be “happier than Europeans”, and clearly respected them. Admittedly, he was shocked at their nudity – and failed to see this was wise dress sense in northern Australian summers (perhaps the vandals of his statues should have written “No Prudity in Nudity”). But this was his own private thought, as an abstemious man. He could not have known what Lord Byron aka Don Juan, later rhymed with great personal understanding:

The flesh is frail, and so the soul undone: 
What men call gallantry, and gods call adultery, 
 Is much more common where the climate’s sultry

Blame such dress sense on the sun. But Cook did not scold the natives like some missionary bore, nor did he take advantage of the climate sultry, surely an overlooked point in his favour.

Most significantly, Cook felt that the natives could not be numerous – a fact that ought to be remembered before levelling wild allegations of mass slaughter. He saw that the natives searched for food over large tracts of land. Not only that, having seen canoes all over the world, Cook deemed the barks he saw of poor quality, which may very well be the reason a people living in this huge land for 60,000 years did not discover Europe first. This observation is surely not to be held against the Captain. So on the whole Cook was a good guy, if not wholly au fait with Aboriginal ways of life. Let’s forgive him for coming to Australia. This great big extraordinary chunk of an island continent was bound to be a curiosity to any thinking being, as it is to the thinking beings already here. Whatever happened, good or bad, after he paddled along the east coast was not his fault. In fact, his visit to Hawaii brought horror upon him rather than the reverse, and few would argue that fate was deserved.

Admittedly, under orders from George III, Cook did ‘plant the flag’. Perhaps that is his real Offence. But one might say he also planted modernity, which grew and thrived eventually, everyone on this land participating in it to some degree or other, as cultures should – borrowing, learning and growing. Perhaps Ms Xiaoran Shi should have vandalised a statue of George III with, say, “No Obsession for Possession”. Unfortunately, George III is hardly ever given a fair press, and anyway he has no statue in Australia.

But before hatred for George III comes into play, spare a kind thought for him. Whatever his failures about “taxation without representation” (his statue in the 13 colonies was vandalised and destroyed), he amazed his courtiers by being faithful to his wife. He also founded the heart of a national library; he was interested in science (his collection of instruments is housed in the Science Museum); he had built the King’s Observatory at Richmond-upon-Thames; and he funded the world’s largest telescope for Herschel.  What’s more, he gave half his income to charity. Not only that – he was interested in the seminary of Maynooth and its founding in 1795 for Irish Catholics, and granted the charter for Dartmouth College in America for the “local Indians” and Anglo “gentlemen”. He was much interested eventually in stopping slavery. Later, the Royal Navy interdicted slave ships from many countries, and in some countries, like Brazil, stopped it completely. As a proud historian of Britain and anti-slavery, Professor Jeremy Black of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, says:

The Royal Navy was still in action against the slave trade in the Red Sea in the 1920s…. the role of the Royal Navy was central to ending the slave trade…. That was a great achievement of imperial Britain, and Britain today remains a key state in the suppression of the vile trade in human misery (5)

So before porphyria so cruelly overtook him, George III did many good deeds that today are unknown or ignored. Disparage him for not doing enough against slavery, if you will, but he did try.

But before I start to discuss my beloved Britain, warts and all, I feel compelled to say something of education in Australia, which applies to universities elsewhere. This is too large an issue to explain in detail, but may I mention that education is generally dumbed down, wherever it is required to make more money, to get more students? Kevin Donnelly demonstrates this clearly in a recent work (6). Dr. Donnelly is Australia’s pre-eminent warrior on education against think-shrink, groupthink, mandated ideology, and the many quislings in educational structures, be they academics, union leaders, or Vice Chancellors. He reminds us that the harm of a poor or dishonest education is incalculable. There is harm to the teachers and to the pupils and students and to the future. 

The most recent spectacle in a long line of Australian spectacles was the treatment of Peter Ridd, a Queensland academic who was sacked after 30 years for disagreeing over his university’s “mandated policy” on the Great Barrier Reef. Drew Pavlou, a university student in Queensland, was also a victim of his university’s wrath, for warning against too much reliance on China. Schools and universities used to mean getting a sense of the interconnectedness of knowledge, knowledge from any and every capable culture, and come to understand the world. Even if, at university level, you decided to specialise in aspects of that knowledge, you could have faith you were learning truth, could debate freely, and engage in significant thought. With lectures one could trust, one could feel able to face the future.

But now universities in Australia have strayed into thinking they are in the corporate world rather than the service sector. They have become ‘useful idiots’ in a cause even they only dimly comprehend. Sydney University actually advertised itself as the “University of Unlearning”. Universities have pushed easy and foolish subjects, while at the same time pleasing China by sharing research and hosting Chinese government-subsidised Confucius Centres (7).

Universities and institutes are not meant for mandated ideas or fixed group-think. Such engineering in education will inevitably make you the obedient owner of that dangerous thing, “a little learning” (thanks, Alexander Pope). Having a fixed ideology makes you the vacuum which nature abhors but a tyrant adores. Knowledge, openness and truth benefit all mankind. It is the duty of every school or university to expand and share knowledge and make sure it is the truth, so that we all may stand on what Isaac Newton famously called “the shoulders of giants” (8), rather than give in to bullies, social media sillies, and cringing quislings. Whether activists or universities like it or not, they are a part of Western Civilization (an antediluvian-sounding term, but now needed more than ever).

As Professor Simon Haines notes,

The very terms …critics use to attack ’Western civilisation’, sceptical, empirical, political, are the terms it has taught them. The …spaces they march in and protest in, the institutions they condemn are the ones it has built and opened and maintained for them. The liberal tolerance they sneer at is what tolerates their sneers, where other civilisations would have imprisoned them, and do. Its openness to the whole world, to new experience, its adventurous spirit of discovery and curiosity, its desire ‘to strive, to seek, to find’, and yes, its capacity to criticise itself, is what has distinguished this civilisation from others. Its very variety of culture and values, so often incompatible and conflicted, has also given it a hybrid toughness, a capacity to adopt and assimilate, to tolerate, and include. Millions of non-Westerners (including some who think it wicked) want nothing more than to live in it, while Westerners lucky enough to have it as a birthright, take it for granted. How we would miss it if it really didn’t exist! It may not be a perfect model for a fully inclusive or genuinely liberal human civilisation, one neither repressive nor prodigal, but truly magnanimous. Still it may be the closest we’ve yet come as a species (9)

A few years ago, what British femocrats did to a genuine old-time learned scholar and scientist, Sir Timothy Hunt, for a jokey remark about women in laboratories, was more despicable, and ominous, than mere bickering. None of them weighed the achievements of this man against their Offence at a passing remark. Medusa could hardly keep her lid on over this.

By contrast, along comes Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University. Not long ago, Professor Andrews, although he does write books too, would have been called an ‘airport professor’, but today, with morning TV shows that have to be filled with something, he is a TV professor and fronts many disagreements on these shows – mostly disagreements of his own making. He calls himself an “activist”, apparently seeing no conflict between that and disinterested, deep learning. He got enormous publicity on Good Morning Britain by labelling Winston Churchill a racist, even a man who committed war crimes. He also called ‘whiteness’ a psychosis, referring to all the endeavours of those pinky-beige skinned people.

Not only this, but he took the view that the British Empire was worse than the Nazi regime – because it lasted longer than Nazi Germany, and was similarly based on race. Andrews is an intelligent man, albeit a Johnny-one-note. He knows he is hurting his TV viewers, but that’s activism for you. (A scholar would never strive to hurt.) He ignores the simple fact that Britain was the sole free country in Europe, facing a titanic threat. And at the head of that little country was a brave, brilliant, chubby old man, on whose every word people everywhere hung. I recall his voice coming through the crackling short wave radio, as we crouched in our basement, thousands of miles from the action, wanting his words to help bring home a beloved brother.

Whatever Professor Andrews says, Birmingham City University – mirabile dictu – stands behind him. Whether out of a sense of real guilt or to avoid being sued, it said:

We do recognise that comments such as those you [the complainant] refer to may be considered controversial by some but this does not negate our respect [sic] for the ability of all individuals to exercise freedom of speech within the law

(If only Sir Timothy Hunt had worked for Birmingham City University.) As for the Empire, when all is sorted out, it was of its time and is no more.  The Commonwealth that emerged in its place, with its shared experience, knowledge and values, may prove more globally useful than the UN with its toothless vetoes.

Reckless assertions of racism encourage it from others. Caught up in the excited climate, no less a person than the Chief Librarian of the British Library has said “racism is a creation of white people”. Now why isn’t that a racist remark? Isn’t this ‘reverse racism’? Whatever will she think of herself when she looks back in cooler times on what she said? I cringe for her. She is like the young person who rushes to get a tattoo without thinking what it will look like on aged skin when you try to scrub it off. 

There is a wrecking ball at work, trying to smash all the things the British hold dear.  The BBC wanted to change the end of the Proms, the playing of Land of Hope and Glory and Rule, Britannia. Classical music culture-cleansers may soon go after Eric Coates’s theme to The Dambusters, because mission commander Guy Gibson’s black Labrador bore the name of a then unobjectionable, but now unspeakable, epithet. Small wonder that persons not normally given to public debate are speaking out against the loss of freedom of speech, the loss of perspective, the conceit of being faux-offended and wanting to punish the offender, whether an offence is hundreds of years old or yesterday. Performers who would not normally take to the podium have been doing so recently – Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, Nick Cave, Ricky Gervais, Laurence Fox, and others – performers whose time is money, and who stand to lose their reputation and work by speaking out. Famous performers are presently tops for the tumbrils.

Medusa, Frank Stuck, 1892

How can we avert all this ugliness on TV, in the kindergarten, primary school, university and nearly every institution? How can we gel down Medusa’s hair? May I suggest a few home cures?

We could start by knowing more about Marx, in whose name so many idiocies and crimes are carried out. The awkward truth is that Karl hated utopians. He was essentially of the bourgeoisie, a class many think he held among his many hates. But his father, Heinrich, was a highly successful attorney who mightily valued the Enlightenment, and converted to Protestantism in order to avoid the anti-Jewish tergiversation of the Prussian authorities. Karl was an extraordinarily lucky boy. He received a splendid education up to, and including, his PhD at age 23 – the sort of education we all crave, in noted contrast to that of, say, Abe Lincoln. He married a Prussian aristocrat (of little dowry, alas), Jenny von Westphalen. Today, we would call Karl an upper-class prat or a silvertail, but in those days he was only a misguided youngster and a bit of a disappointment to Daddy, who eventually stopped subsidizing him. By joining the Young Hegelians, Marx was combining revolutionary zeal with a filial resentment about money. Even after he found himself living in considerable poverty in London, Jenny continued to have her writing paper embossed, and Karl aspired to a bourgeois marriage for their daughter Laura.

The great idealist would always gravitate towards people with money. Friedrich Engels was a perfect mark – a revolutionary and a man supported by a wealthy Daddy too, a cotton (think slavery, child labour) manufacturer in Manchester. Karl and Jenny battened on him endlessly, eventually inveigling him into also supporting Laura and her equally improvident husband. Many have written astutely on Karl’s true nature and the failings of his philosophy, but still he exerts a mesmeric influence on people who really should know better (10). The countries that adopted or adapted his ideas do not allow the free play of the intellect, whereas Western democracies do (or, perhaps I should say, did).

Avoid labelling anyone anything. When Dehinde Andrews called Churchill a racist, it didn’t allow him a youthful past, a different present, or any inner growth along the way. The young Churchill in the Khyber Pass in the last years of the 19th century was not the same man as the 65 years-old wartime Prime Minister. Labelling cancels complex knowledge; it is a form of think-shrink. Be fair to others, as you would like them to be fair to you. Steer by your own compass; make your own choices. And of course, two wrongs don’t make a right. You cannot solve an old wrong by committing a new one. Vandalising a reputation, or a statue, or a shop, causing anger in and danger to others, decides nothing, solves nothing. It may even make things worse, by awakening old demons, opening old wounds.

Take advantage of intellectual openness while you can. Think, before you join a mob and wreck a statue, a street or a city. As far as possible, learn the truth of every situation, and allow it to temper your temper. You may not achieve Matthew Arnold’s “sweetness and light”, but you may avoid a ludicrous wrong, or even achieve good judgement. How would it feel in later life to look back, and see you had been manipulated, an automaton when you could have been an independent thinker? Unfashionable though they are, and terribly difficult at times, freedom of speech and thought are your main protections against having all of the Gorgon in agreement for once, her terrible hair roiling and coiling in laughter at you.

Author’s Notes

  1. Dr John Whitehall, a professor of paediatric surgery at the University of Western Sydney, has made a rare stand against the drive to increase gender/sexual hypochondria, neglecting the fullness of a personality with all the co-morbidities of the situation. This brave doctor has amazingly not lost his job for trying to establish the real facts of cases before children face life-changing hormone treatments, or scalpels
  2. 21st August 2020, p.4
  3. See the Sun-Herald Commemorative Portfolio on Cook, Sydney, no date – and Christopher Allen, “A Shared History Worth Celebrating,” Weekend Australian Review, 29th -30th August 2020, pp. 10-11
  4. Fr. George W. Rutler, Crisis, 30th June 2014
  5. Quadrant, September 2020, pp 12-14
  6. How Political Correctness is Destroying Australia, Wilkinson, Melbourne, 2019
  7. Sydney sociology professor Salvatore Babones is acutely aware of this need for money by the corporate university and its complicity with China; he goes so far as to say Australian universities are a “fifth column”. Newsletter, August 2020
  8. Letter to Robert Hooke, 2nd May 1675, although he was not the first to use the expression, which has been traced as far back as the 6th century Latin grammarian Priscianus Caesariensis
  9. See Reclaiming Education, Renewing Schools and Universities in Contemporary Western Culture, eds. C. Runcie and D. Brooks, Edwin A. Lowe, Sydney, 2018, p.51
  10. Marx’s dismissive ideas about women are summed up in what he writes to Ludwig Kugelman: “Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the female foment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social status of the beautiful sex (the ugly ones included)” (Letters of Karl Marx, Selected and edited by Saul Padower, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1979, p.259). For other works on Marx’s life and his work see The Great Economists by Linda Yueh, Penguin. For a critique and elucidation of Marx by a scholarly economist, try The Development of Economic Thought by Alexander Gray (Longman, Green, and Co., London, 1931.  For the slam-dunk on Marx, one must not miss the great Austrian economist, Joseph A. Schumpeter (Oxford University Press, New York, 1954, edited by his widow, Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter)
Posted on by Ken Bell

From Westminster to Whitechapel, and back

Lord Boothby, Reggie Kray and friend

The Peer And The Gangster

Daniel Smith, The History Press, 2020, hb, 256 pages, £14.99

KEN BELL traces an old and sordid story uniting West End and East

The Sunday Mirror thought that it had the scoop of the century in July 1964, when it ran a front-page splash about a prominent peer and a London gangster who were having a homosexual affair. By the following Sunday, the Mirror had obtained photographs of the two men with drinks in their hands, clearly at ease in each other’s company, yet by the following month the paper had issued a grovelling apology and paid the peer the goodly sum of £40,000.

The peer was Bob Boothby, a very well-known radio and television personality in the post-war years. The gangster was Ronnie Kray, who ran the Kray Twins’ gang along with his heterosexual brother, Reggie. Daniel Smith’s book is the story of how and why the tale of these two charmers did not see the light of day for many decades.

Boothby was not a very popular man in senior Tory circles. He had been the lover of Dorothy MacMillan, wife of Harold, who just happened to be the Prime Minister for many of the years when the relationship between Boothby and Kray was in full swing. One would have thought that Harold MacMillan would have wanted to pay back Robert Boothby with interest for putting the horns on him, but the asexual MacMillan just seems to have shrugged his shoulders at the affair. That was probably Boothby’s first bit of luck.

His second came about because the story was set to break in the wake of the Vassall scandal (1) and then the Profumo affair which followed hard on its heels. A third sordid scandal was too much for the government to stand, so the order went out to give Boothby a helping hand. Thus a key hinge to the Mirror story, which was that the Metropolitan Police were investigating the Krays, was kicked away when the compliant Met obligingly denied that any such investigation was taking place.

Labour wanted to take over from the Tories as the government, but they chose to help save Boothby’s political skin. So Harold Wilson sat back whilst the Labour-connected lawyer, Arnold Goodman, went to work putting the screws on the Mirror. Ronnie Kray was not just involved with Bob Boothby, but also Tom Driberg, a homosexual Labour MP. For Wilson, this was about saving Labour as much as anything else. Boothby was obviously bisexual, but there was enough heterosexuality about him to suggest that he might have been able to shrug off the allegations of inversion. That was not the case with the ever-cottaging Driberg, who had no interest in women at all. Had the story been allowed to break, it is quite likely that Labour would have been dragged into it via Driberg, so Wilson seems to have decided that it was better to cover it all up.

The paper provided Boothby’s final card with its poorly-worded story which claimed that the affair was between the peer and the gangster. In fact, Kray had no interest in the fat, over-60, Boothby; what drew them together was a shared desire for “boys”, as they both called the late-teenaged, early-twenties young toughs that came within Ronnie Kray’s orbit and whom he passed on to Boothby.

The relationship between the peer and the gangster, stripped of its homosexuality, was really one of those classical upper-class and working-class meetings of minds based upon a set of shared values. Put bluntly, both groups enjoy their drink, change their bed partners regularly, and both loathe the uptight middle-class. That is probably one of the reasons why working class people vote for Boris Johnson, because he is what they would be if they had money. In mid-1980s Oxford, Boris was very popular with the former miners, steelworkers and dockers who made up the bulk of the Ruskin College junior membership and quite happily voted for him every time he stood for Oxford Union office – and that was at the height of the miners’ strike. I know, as I am the Ruskin man who introduced Boris to my fellows.

The unpleasant aspect of this affair was not the easy sex and louche attitudes of everyone involved. Rather it was the fact that thanks to an establishment cover-up the Krays were allowed to continue wreaking havoc for five more years that left at least two people dead and any number of young men coerced into having sex with Kray and Boothby. One of Kray’s victims was a very young reporter with the Daily Telegraph, who was only able to escape thanks to the intervention of Reggie Kray – but that did not stop Ronnie from sending him on his way with a kick or two, or stop him ordering some underthugs to go and dish out a serious kicking to the poor hack some weeks later. As he was left battered and bleeding on the road, the message was given that it was the price he had to pay for defying Ronnie Kray.

If that could be done to a broadsheet journalist, then the price that a young Eastender would have to pay for defiance does not bear thinking about. That Boothby knew that his playthings had been coerced is beyond doubt, since at least one was produced for him, battered and bruised, and told firmly that if he did not please Boothby he could expect more of the same. This is the sickening aspect of the Boothby/Kray story. It demonstrates that from Boothby via Jeremy Thorpe to Cyril Smith, the list of homosexual abusers really does seem to be never-ending, and all with the connivance of an establishment that seems to be indifferent to the fate of the victims.

Editor’s Note

  1. John Vassall, 1924-1996, was a junior civil servant blackmailed by the KGB into providing the Soviet Union with sensitive naval information. His 1962 arrest and subsequent imprisonment (he was released in 1972) was a major embarrassment to the Macmillan government, and provoked a public investigation of the security services
Posted on by Selby Whittingham

English impressions

The Wilton Diptych

SELBY WHITTINGHAM looks back on a life in the arts, from the New Elizabethans to Generation Z

The latest bout of iconoclasm has produced renewed demands for a statue of Cecil Rhodes to be removed from a building built with his money at his and my alma mater, Oriel College, Oxford. The protesters claim that he was an imperialist and racist, though some authorities say that the charge of racism is partly misplaced. At least one protester was under the misapprehension that he was a slave owner.

At the same time, the BBC has been showing programmes on the history of Persia, reverently admiring its emperors, whose images are set amid the figures of the tributary peoples whom they had conquered. Of course the Persian empire belongs to the distant past, while the British one is more recent and its misdemeanours still a live issue for some of its subject peoples. Other bouts of iconoclasm are also now remote, such as the Protestant destruction of Catholic images. Today no one is very concerned about those disputes, but art lovers deplore the loss of works that once adorned our churches.

Among the last I count myself. Believing that everyone suffers from prejudices in varying degrees and that I too am a product of my background, I feel I should state what that was. I was brought up by my mother, who was a Conservative, an historian, a barrister, a journalist and a lover of the theatre. Those interests led to my being taken to see the cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard II – Henry V, at Stratford-upon-Avon put on by the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre for the Festival of Britain in 1951. In 1948, John Harvey, the promoter of Perpendicular Gothic as a great English stylistic invention, had had published The Plantagenets, which began with a paean in praise of monarchy and continued by emphasising the biographer’s need for authentic portraits of his subjects. That led to my helping my mother with the task of finding such for her history and then to my doctoral thesis. Harvey’s royalism was matched by my mother’s. She would stand when the national anthem was played, even at home.

In 1953 I witnessed the preparations for the coronation, which seemed like some glorious pageant, a fit opening for the New Elizabethan Age. At the same time was performed at Stratford Antony and Cleopatra with Michael Redgrave as Mark Anthony and Peggy Ashcroft as Cleopatra and directed brilliantly by Glen Byam Shaw. The French were rather rude about Redgrave, comparing him with a Scottish highlander rather than a Latin lover. I was particularly captivated by Ashcroft, and avidly eavesdropped – not quite the word to describe listening to her declamatory style of talking – when my mother and I sat at the theatre restaurant table next to hers. That was the closest I got, whereas in 1951 Richard Burton had shown us round back stage and we got reluctant permission to attend a rehearsal taken by Redgrave.

The schools which I attended conventionally prized the classics most highly and at university I continued to study them while pursuing my mediaeval interests. Visits to the Mediterranean had complemented that. In 1948 we stayed at the seaside villa of an anglophile Italian family at Sta Margherita Ligure. Being covered in oil discharged from an Italian warship into the sea, to the indignation of our Italian hostess, who said the British navy would never do such a thing, did nothing to diminish the shock of delight after the bleak 1947 winter and rationing in the UK. The fresh food by itself was a revelation. And the unaccustomed brilliance of the scene enhanced by the colourful cafe umbrellas at Rapallo, which my mother and I tried to catch in chalk sketches (now lost), created an indelible impression.

I made many visits to Italy later, partly in pursuit of mediaeval portrait sculptures. At university I twice joined parties visiting Greece, and was delighted both with the classical sites and the Byzantine churches. I was already in agreement with those who believed that the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Athens, not so much on national or moral grounds, but because I thought that they could be much better appreciated there than in the British Museum. This contributed to my long-held view that art should generally remain in its original situation. Once the British had returned works to Italy that Napoleon had taken for the Louvre, but that of course was different! Curators have a similar Napoleonic urge to amass and centralise and to set up the Universal Museum as the great desideratum, though the public does not altogether share that view.

On the return from Italy we stopped briefly at Paris and visited Versailles – my mother wanted to show me the Galerie des Glaces – where guided parties of different nationals followed closely one after another. The following year my father, on leave from Malaya, was nostalgic for England and as a compromise we stayed on a farm on Guernsey. But in 1950 my mother and I went to a small village on the Normandy coast. We combined that with a day excursion to Rouen, the cathedral blackened by war, and then took a bus to the 18th century Chateau du Grésil where my mother had stayed with a family, which I think had a South American business association with her grandfather, when she was a teenager and was the commencement of her Francophilia. She wrote an account for Blackwood’s Magazine under the title of “The Adopted Son”, in reference to an Argentinian boy and now in 1950 an elderly man and sole family survivor at the house. Later for a while it served as a research centre for Shell.

The article followed immediately on an hilarious contribution by a British army officer who had been invited to stay with the 7th Raja of Poonch (1) in the 1930s, an example of the friendly relations that often existed between the British and Asiatic rulers in their colonies. However, the British were never so sentimental as to prefer these ties to realpolitik and in a postwar treaty partly dumped the Malay sultans, an act deplored by my mother in 1946 in an article “Malaya Betrayed!” for the World Review, edited by Edward Hulton (2) – who incidentally had an address in Cromwell Road when I first came to live there, and whose nephew, Jocelyn Stevens, was the partner of Sir Charles Clore’s daughter, to whom I come later.

Like Hulton, my mother had been an active Lancashire Conservative in the 1930s, supporting Randolph Churchill’s doomed attempt to be elected an MP and then his father’s opposition to Appeasement. She embarked on a history of Liverpool politics, in which figures such as Canning and Gladstone’s father had played a part. In her time, it was divided into two cultures, Protestant English and Catholic Irish, not reconciled until Bishop David Sheppard and Archbishop Warlock (whose parents, later neighbours of my father, I knew). My grandfather and mother, part of the Anglican tradition, already favoured greater unity, but the local Conservative party was strongly Protestant and tolerated with difficulty one of its MPs who, following a long Lancashire tradition of recusants, was a Roman Catholic. This made my mother both a constitutionalist and a rebel.

After the visit to Stratford in 1951 we toured the vineyards of the Rhone, on which my mother wrote several articles, at the invitation of Baron Le Roy de Boiseaumarié, who had been a French fighter pilot in World War I, winning the Croix de Guerre, and had set up the system of Appellation d’Origine Controlée. My mother had had the option of writing about the Rhône wines or those of Languedoc, staying at Perpignan. She was torn between the two and left the choice to me, and I plumped for Provence because it seemed more historic. This showed that I had already developed a taste for the past, perhaps encouraged by the Shakespeare history cycle seen a few months earlier. My mother too was more interested in history than in wine, and her account of Rhône viticulture was mostly about its Roman past and its being prized by the English, first under Queen Eleanor of Provence and again in the 18th century. The 19th century phylloxera outbreak was devastating (a company started by my great-uncles, McKechnie Bros, exported sulphate of copper to spray on the vines, and a photograph exists of their stand at the 1919 Lyons Fair). In 1951 Rhône wines were again at a low ebb, despite the efforts of Baron Le Roy, and in need of publicity.

From an historical point of view, the trip was partly disappointing. Avignon, where we spent the first night in a small modern hotel, was unexciting, and the Palais des Papes was closed to visitors. The Roman remains at Vaison-la-Romaine and theatre at Orange left me rather cold. But the romance of the vineyards, which suggested to my mother the idea of a film about the oldest, Chateau de la Nerthe, was different. I had not read then the memoirs of Captain Gronow (3), who was equally at home in London and in Paris, a fact appreciated by Winston Churchill when preparing to meet De Gaulle. One of his most entertaining anecdotes was about General Palmer, who bought a fine Bordeaux vineyard (still called Chateau Palmer), whose wine he ruined after taking the advice of the Prince Regent, who shared the English preference for fortifying claret with the more robust Hermitage, where we were the guests of Louis Jaboulet, whose firm was founded by his ancestor in 1834. Its labels depicted the hermit’s chapel, while those of Le Roy showed Chateau Fortia on labels unchanged down to the present. However, under the pressure to appeal to non-Europeans unconcerned with history some Bordeaux vineyards have jettisoned the chateaux for silly names and trite designs. This dumbing down was in contrast to the commissioning by a Rothschild of designs from the leading artists of the 1950s, an example of innovation which is fruitful rather than destructive or decadent.

Then in 1957 I followed my mother’s teenage experience by staying with a French family at their Angevin chateau which had the ruins of a mediaeval castle in its grounds (they had advertised in the Times for an exchange with their eldest son, whose English needed improving). Three years later, before entering Oxford University, I spent two terms at the Sorbonne studying the course for foreigners on French Civilisation. A popular lecturer on French 19th century literature, Antoine Adam, declared that there were two types of Frenchmen, ‘Franks/Germans’ and ‘Gauls/Latins’. He was the epitome of the second, while his fellow lecturer on literature epitomised the Frankish strain.

The contrast between the English and French has been endlessly drawn. It was shown in stylised fashion in the cartoons of Hogarth and Rowlandson, and later in Olivier’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, to which we took my French teenage exchange. Often, of course, people do not conform to these stereotypes and one needs to regard people as individuals. However, the generalisations remain, though in the case of the English (sent up by our neighbours, Flanders and Swann (4), in their song, The English, The English are Best, which they performed to the slight bemusement of an American audience) the image with which I grew up, of the stiff upper lip and either bowler hat or cloth cap, has now gone, though the reluctance to make a fuss remains. It is a nice philosophical question how far such generalisations, whether about race or tradition, are ever valid. What many hold as tradition only goes back a few generations or, with regard to the fine arts, to the Renaissance, whereas my mediaeval and classical perspectives are different.

In a stay on a farm at Coniston with my father in 1956 among the places visited was Brantwood, the last home of John Ruskin. I was then more in tune with Wordsworth, one of whose descendants, with a marked resemblance to his ancestor, was the only other visitor to Dove Cottage when I entered it. It was only some years later that I began to read Ruskin’s works that I found I had an affinity with him. This began with his championship of Gothic and contention that all portraiture is essentially Gothic, while the Renaissance sculptors “rounded their chins by precedent” (5). This view appealed to me because it suited my thesis, and for its contrarian nature.

In 1975, when I started a campaign to honour Turner’s testamentary wishes to have his works displayed in a special Turner gallery, I had Ruskin again as on the whole a support. This campaign naturally met the opposition of the three (now two) museums between which Turner’s paintings had been split. But it had the support of leading panjandrums in the art world and of some politicians. Decades later, Boris Johnson wrote that the continuing failure to observe Turner’s last wishes merited an enquiry, but latterly there has been silence. Various Conservative politicians have expressed an admiration for the work of Turner as well as for heritage, and some even for honouring conditions attached to gifts and accepted with them. But, despite the Turner wing at the Tate given by Sir Charles Clore’s daughter being an additional failure, they have latterly shown no concern. The Conservative Party, as Matthew Parris has written, has no set beliefs, and today is more the heir of Gladstonian liberalism than of the conservatism of the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (6).

While at university I became a supporter of the Liberal party and have remained one of its successor. This is mainly because of its emphasis on individualism and free choice, but also because influences were the party’s colour, yellow, the colour of Turner and Van Gogh, and the fact that some of my forebears and cousins were Liberals on free trade or other grounds. That may seem a trivial reason, but others were Liberals by heredity as well as belief, and the same goes for other parties, which all are conscious of their traditions. Bertrand Russell, though not a member of the Liberal Party, was conscious of his Liberal heritage. He regarded doubt as essential and that addiction to certainty as the cause of the world’s ills. Today he would surely condemn the epidemic of wokeness, puritanism and illiberalism masking as liberalism, a distinction made recently by among others Tim Farron, who was pilloried for his evangelical beliefs, regardless of his liberal voting record.

Memorial to Byron, Walter Scott & Thomas Moore, by J M W Turner

If the arts in England, especially the fine arts, are now at a low ebb, there are many causes. Traditional Englishness has been diluted by foreign influence, notably from America. Of course English art has always been subject to foreign influence, from France especially. But it evolved some distinct traits in the Middle Ages, as Nikolaus Pevsner traced in his now unfashionable 1955 book The Englishness of English Art (7) (my copy of which a young, non-English architectural student stole!). I found this useful in my analysis of the style of the Wilton Diptych, with its puzzling portrait of Richard II, on which my mother had started me. While looking at popular books on Gainsborough and his contemporaries on the bouqiniste stalls by the Seine I was struck by how they had an English air distinct from that of French portraits. But Pevsner’s rules only hold good so far, and in the end artists are individuals and go off in all sorts of directions. That is especially true of Turner, who early on captured the Englishness of the Thames and Medway valleys, and also was steeped in tradition and the past (Lady Eastlake commented how knowledgeable he was about the history of all the castles he depicted). However, in his later works he moved on and prompted commentators to call him un-English, Germanic, a proto-French-Impressionist and so on.

In the Turner campaign one of our supporters, the late Dr William Allen, a scientific adviser to the National Gallery, discouragingly cited the law of physics, “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”, as also a law of society. That is certainly true in history. The enthusiastic admiration for British imperialism has given rise to an equally passionate denunciation. Lenin acted partly in reaction to the Tsarist execution of his teenage brother, and liberals have then reacted violently against him, whereas I would keep some of his statues as being of historical importance. Of course Africans had not done anything to cause them to be enslaved, but those today demanding extreme measures in recompense risk provoking a violent counter-reaction.

Unfortunately, academics have too often failed to be more objective than their students. When I was an undergraduate at Oriel, it was a notably conservative college, with Hugh Trevor-Roper a hovering presence. Today the enlarged body of fellows has few historians but a number of colonials (as has the university), and few are former alumni. The Provost (8), however, is one, and has just been ennobled as a Conservative peer ostensibly for his involvement in the museum world. Will he be willing or able to direct the college to keep the statue of Rhodes in line with the opinions of the Chancellor of the University and the Prime Minister? I have tried to show why my bias is in favour of retention.

Notes

  1. Both India and Pakistan have districts named Poonch, parts of the disputed Kashmir region (Editor’s note)
  2. Sir Edward George Warris Hulton, 1906-1988, chiefly remembered now as founder of the Eagle comic and The Picture Post, whose name is perpetuated in Getty Images’ Hulton Archive (Editor’s note)
  3. Captain Rees Howell Gronow, 1794-1865, who served in the Grenadier Guards during the Peninsular War and at Waterloo, dandy, debtor, briefly an MP, and author of four volumes of justly highly-regarded reminiscences (Editor’s note)
  4. Flanders and Swann, British comedy double act, made up of Michael Flanders, 1922-1975, and Donald Swann, 1923-1994 (Editor’s note)
  5. “You may understand broadly that we Goths claim portraiture altogether for our own, and contentedly leave the classic people to round their chins by rule, and fix their smiles by precedent” (The Art of England, III, “The Classic Schools of Painting”, 1873, pp.72-3;  Works, ed. E.T.Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 1905, XXXIII, p.316). Also “Some Characteristics of Greek Art in Relation to Christian”, (Works, XX, p.409). I returned to this question in “The Face in Mediaeval Sculpture”, ArtWatch UK Journal, 32, Autumn 2019, pp.12-17 (Author’s note)
  6. Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 1830–1903, three times Conservative Prime Minister between 1885 and 1902 (Editor’s note)
  7. London: Architectural Press, expanded and annotated version of the 1955 BBC Reith Lectures. Pevsner says “the English portrait keeps long silences, and when it speaks, speaks in a low voice”. He goes on to say English painting is characterised by an interest in the everyday world and the observed fact, by “temperance, smoothness, judiciousness, moderation”, a consequence of “a decent home, a temperate climate, and a moderate nation”. He goes on, “There is no Michelangelo, no Titian, no Rembrandt, no Dürer or Grünewald… but there are exquisite water-colours and miniatures, things on a small scale, and there are in the Middle Ages exquisitely carved bosses and capitals…The amateur is altogether characteristic of England, and not the specialist. This has much to recommend it.” He also cites the understatement of Perpendicular architecture, and feels England has contributed more to architecture than to either painting or sculpture (he does not discuss music) (Editor’s note)
  8. Neil Mendoza, Provost of Oriel since 2018, also Chairman of the Landmark Trust, and the government’s Commissioner for Cultural Recovery and Renewal (Editor’s note)
Posted on by Peter King

Mod cons

Flooded Modernity – installation by Danish artist Asmund Havesteen-Mikkelsen (a replica of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye)

PETER KING finds some household technologies turn security into anxiety, and convenience into control

The modernist architect going by the name Le Corbusier famously described the house as “a machine for living in”. This view was very much associated with the modernist movement that favoured function over form, or better stated, saw function as form. We like to believe that we have left this dreary modernism behind, but in fact what we have achieved is to make the houses we dwell in not machines in themselves but assemblages of many machines, from Echo and Siri to home security products like Ring.

Just as Le Corbusier saw the machinic aesthetic as transformation, so these new assemblages are transforming how we use our dwelling spaces. We are told that these machines do new things and so will allow us to live differently. They will allow us to keep in touch with the dwelling when we are remote from it, and to allow possible intruders to know we are in touch. They can ‘learn’ our speech patterns, and simply act on our commands.

Are devices like Echo and Ring distinctly different from earlier technologies in dwellings, and will they affect how we use them? These devices use wi-fi to link our dwelling with the external world directly without our intervention and to allow us to connect with our dwelling remotely.

Ring is a home security product that notifies the householder if someone comes to the door or is in the vicinity of the house. It offers real-time video and audio and so allows one to ‘answer’ the door even when one is out of the house. We can, then, keep watch over the dwelling when physically absent, provided we have a wi-fi signal and a charged phone or tablet.

Echo is a hands-free voice activated device that connects with the web and with compatible devices in the dwelling. These may all still be emerging technologies and some or all them may just be passing fads. They may, though, prefigure a major shift in the way we use dwellings, and that is certainly how they are being promoted. We might see it as part of a move towards the connected dwelling, where we can control all aspects of the dwelling from one device, and where there is the possibility of devices ‘learning’ from our behaviour and regulating the dwelling environment accordingly.

This, it would seem, is a case of technology leading use. The technology makes it possible so it can – and perhaps should – happen. Some may find a certain kudos in being early adopters, while others will wait to see their obvious utility (if any) before committing to them. But whether one now sees them as attractive or not, there had been no great call for these technologies, and they had not been developed to meet any pressing need. The demand for them was, and is, latent at best. We might see this as an example of Say’s Law (1), of supply creating its own demand: there is a device available and affordable (to some) and so we use it and now tell ourselves we need it. The demand, however, did not exist before the invention of the device.

These devices are marketed in terms of the control and flexibility they allow us. We can be aware what is happening to our dwelling when we are away. We can alter the dwelling environment as our circumstances change and be in immediate control, even when remote from the dwelling. It is convenient, with technology taking on the burden for us and perhaps even pre-empting our needs, having learnt how we behave and what our needs apparently are.

At this point, we might ask if these devices do represent a step change, or are they really just a development from existing technologies, such the thermostat and the timer clock? The fact that these new devices can ‘learn’ appears to make them different, but they still depend on how they are programmed and how we use them. They may learn from our habits, but they still depend on these habits. They depend on the regularity of our use, that we have distinct patterns of behaviour. The device learns what we do on certain days and at certain times, and reacts accordingly. In this sense, it is merely being programmed in a less conscious manner, but we are still doing it as if we set up the heating clock differently for each day and adjust it as conditions change with the seasons. The device in no way alters the habitual nature of dwelling, and perhaps it even embeds it further.

But do these devices make us feel any safer? This presumably is the point of products such as Ring. We can feel more secure about our dwelling and our possessions even when we are away. In one of the adverts for Ring we see a rather smug householder in a supermarket queue who remotely warns a possible intruder, having been warned of his presence from an app on his phone. The intruder, surprised and worried he might be identified, scurries off and the camera returns to the contented householder looking up from his phone. A potential burglary has been prevented, and no nasty surprises await the stout householder on his return home. The device is marketed as preventing crime and giving us peace of mind. Of course, it may just shift the crime to next door or to the next road, but we might not get to know about this, and it is not us who are suffering. So we can remain smug as we warn off the burglar. If our neighbours had any sense, they would be doing the same as us and investing in this new gadget.

However, the device connects only to a rather particular notion of safety. We may consider one the main aims of a dwelling is to keep us safe and secure, to protect us from the elements and from intruders, and to keep the world at bay. But the issue here is the safety of the dwelling and its physical contents. By definition, we use the device when we are absent and so in no personal danger from intruders. Using a device like Ring suggests our main concern is with the integrity and safety of the dwelling, of preserving it as an asset. We should obviously not dismiss the trauma and sense of violation caused by invasion and the loss of valuable and familiar items, but is Ring nothing more than a possession to help protect our other possessions? Ring protects the things we own, but it does not make us safer.

Indeed, we ought to ask whether controlling the dwelling from outside enhances or detracts from private dwelling? We may feel in control, but we have to notice that we are. We cannot take our control for granted. We might even suggest that video security externalises the anxieties that we might have. We take our anxiety with us when we leave. We get no respite from it, and it only becomes heightened. The device emphasises the notion of a dwelling as an asset and not as a tool. Accordingly, our use becomes conscious and deliberative. The way the dwelling works as an object becomes more transparent to us and more obviously contingent by being so overtly linked to technology. It heightens the sense of dwelling as an end in itself – a material object with a quantifiable value – rather than as a means to pursue our own ends.

Using Ring means that we are constantly guarding the dwelling. Its purpose is to allow us to be continually aware of the integrity of our dwelling. But this too means being continually aware that it is under threat. Our focus is now on our need to protect the dwelling, rather than on it protecting us. The dwelling thus becomes a burden, an expensive asset that might turn into a liability. It becomes a cause for anxiety instead of a place of caring. We worry that something might happen to it instead of it keeping us safe. We remain on guard. We now see a greater threat of invasion precisely because we have taken steps against it.

What about control inside a dwelling? Echo aims at making our domestic lives more convenient. But we might question whether we are becoming more dependent on technology and so less able to use and control the dwelling ourselves. With these devices, there is extra layer of mediation between us and the dwelling. Using Echo – asking Alexa – might make us less capable. We feel safe, we feel more comfortable, but pre-programmed devices are acting – making decisions – for us on the basis of algorithms and common assumptions made outside the dwelling, and based on generalised presumptions of behaviour.

In the advertising, Echo is shown doing tasks that are basically inconsequential, such as playing a particular piece of music or turning lights down. They can certainly do more than this and, as the technology develops, they will doubtless do so, connecting up many other areas of our lives, such as banking and bill paying. In a few years, this might become the norm, and we should therefore ask if it is something to be welcomed or indeed if it matters to any great degree. Should not we welcome it and see it as progress? What makes our lives easier surely must be a good thing. But we also need to remember that what these devices are replacing are the perfectly straightforward arrangements that we already have. We have no great difficulty in turning on a light or putting on some music, and there are already perfectly convenient and accessible means of paying our bills.

What may alter the situation though is when access through certain devices becomes the default. They may be taken up by government and the large companies and institutions we deal with, and as such we are forced to use them ourselves. There are many examples of this shifting of the default, such as the general insistence of paying salaries and wages into bank accounts in the 1980s through to paperless on-line billing in 2010s. There is a presumption here that we wish to use the technology and are capable of using it. A majority may be able to become accustomed to this, even if some may cavil at the imposition of having to do so. But some households will struggle with it, whether due to financial reasons or because of age and infirmity. There will also be knock-on consequences in terms of access to services. We are already seeing that one effect of on-line banking is mass branch closures, causing difficulties for some people in accessing their accounts.

Technology forces us to remain up to date (on a timetable set by others) and to alter our behaviour to fit into the new norm. It tends to do this under the banner of convenience and flexibility (even as if panders to our anxieties and insecurities). It will make our lives easier and we can then focus on more pleasurable things, like playing with the children and shopping on-line. There indeed does tend to be a short period of flexibility, where several options are offered. However, within a relatively short period a new norm is imposed, and the older options dropped as obsolete. It is certainly convenient to use on-line banking and once we have become accustomed to it there is no need to use any other method to pay bills and control our finances. But should we have a choice over whether we wish to manage our finances in this manner? If we lack the choice, then are we not becoming dependent on particular technologies? If they stop working, then so do we.

Those with relatively recent laptops will now be encouraged to use cloud storage for their data. It is doubtless useful to be able to store and transfer large amounts of data and to gain access to it when we choose and via several devices. But the virtual ‘warehouse’ where our data is stored has to be reliable and permanently accessible, as does our connection to the internet. If the cloud goes down, then we have no access to our data and no alternative means of retrieving it. The cloud is now the default, sold to us on the assumption that we do need to store lots of data but require quick access to it. The software and hardware that is available is now configured on this basis, and so it becomes self-fulfilling. Of course, we can alter the default, but we have first to understand what is happening. We are being offered a fixed path, from which we can only deviate if we are sufficiently aware. We are presumed to want to go down this route; we are told that it is what we want, and most of us, most of the time, go along with it. We may not notice or care that we are being directed, but it is happening nonetheless.

Our dependence on technology allows us to maintain the illusion of safety, control and convenience, all of which masks our dependency on technology that we cannot fully understand. Of course, being an illusion, we do not feel we are dependent. We feel that our lives have been made easier, and to an extent they have been. But it means an increasing distance from a dwelling as something that we have made, and continue to make, ourselves.

A certain dependency on technology is not though by any means new. We have always been dependent on some form of technology. A few months ago we had a local power cut. We spent all of 30 minutes without any power in the house whatsoever. It was 7.30 on a warm May morning, so there was no need for light or heat. However, power was cut for the whole neighbourhood, taking out the local mobile phone masts as well. So we had no TV, radio, wi-fi, phone signal, no kettle or toaster, and the fridge and freezer were turned off. This is as near to isolation as we can get in the modern world and it was a little discomforting. It occurred to me that other than going out and trying to find someone to talk to – who would probably know no more than me what was going on – I had no means of finding out the cause or extent of the problem, and whether it was a small or large issue. For all I knew, the nuclear winter was about to start.

This mild anxiety was partly due to my expectations about how connected I am to a range of devices. We tend to get used to what we have and take it as normal: what are in reality add-ons and incidentals to our lives become necessities. Prior to 1998 I had no TV, wi-fi, and no mobile phone. I relied on radio and my CD player (iTunes was still five years away). So a power outage in 1998 would have caused less of a problem.

When discussing the idea of need with my undergraduate students, I would ask them the following question: “Imagine your house is on fire. You know all humans and pets are safely out. You can take one thing with you. What would it be?” I asked this question many times, the purpose being to bring out the difference between needs and wants, and identify the concept of the imperative. Over the years of asking this question more than half of the students said the same thing: they would reach for their mobile phone. A few mentioned their wallet or credit cards, and one person said she would take her wedding photo album. But the majority felt they could not manage without their phones. This led to interesting discussions about what we actually do need, and why we feel we need things that are actually fulfilling wants and desires.

It is a cliché, and therefore true, that many people live through their phones. Not because, properly speaking, they have to, but because that is how we can all now live. What is properly incidental – the opposite of existential – now seems to be all important to us. We have to stay connected, to be able to contact anyone immediately and be ourselves contactable. We cannot miss a message or lose our contacts. We use our phones to find out about the world, and to store our memories. It is a torment to have to wait an hour, let alone a day, to be in touch with others. But many of us can remember a time when we had access only to public payphones and relied for information on three TV channels, newspapers (carrying news of yesterday’s events) and the public library. Computers were the size of a house and outside of the experience of most of us. I do not see this as an idyllic time – in the 1970s we also had to make do without central heating or double glazing. My point is one of expectations and the opportunities and aspirations that create them. We had a different sense of what was normal for us to expect and so we acted accordingly.

During the half-hour power cut I did not really need the technologies I usually have at my disposal. At 7.30 am, the biggest problem was not being able to boil a kettle to make a pot of tea. There was nothing I wanted to watch on TV, nothing I needed the internet for and no one to ring at that hour. There was nothing that could not wait for an hour or two if needs be. What troubled me though was the possibility of connection – or rather, the lack thereof. I felt isolated by not being able to connect even though I did not particularly need to. Of course, like my wife, if I had slept for another hour, I might not have even noticed any issue. But I was awake and all the clever devices around me were not.

What was being knocked here was my complacency. I could not use my dwelling as I would expect to. My normal routines of a leisurely breakfast while looking at the news on-line had been stymied and I was put out, albeit mildly and only for a few minutes. I could no longer take for granted my use of these devices. I had to notice how dependent I had become on them. We accept and accommodate to what we are used to. When a new device comes along, we might see this as new and a real change, but we soon assimilate it into dwelling and take it for granted (for as long as it works). We may soon not notice what Ring, Echo or what as yet uninvented devices follow it do in our lives. But we will come to expect them to keep doing it.

Editor’s Note

  1. Named after French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, 1767-1832, who expressed the theory in his 1803 book A Treatise on Political Economy (Traité d’économie politique), although some economic historians say he was not the first to make the argument
Posted on by Mark Gullick · 2 Comments

Gimme shelter – the fall and rise of the 60s

Rites of Dionysus, by Tim Shaw

MARK GULLICK says the hyperbolised decade turned naivety into nastiness

“They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man. We’re at the end of the greatest decade in the history of mankind, and as Presumin’ Ed has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.” Withnail and I

“At first sight, the whole period, the whole state of the world, seems to offer no more secure footing to an historical adventurer than the chaos of Milton – to be in a state of irreclaimable disorder…” Editorial introduction to Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

If you can remember the Sixties, runs the rusted old adage, you weren’t there. For today’s political Left, most of whom weren’t there, it was the blessed decade, a time of liberation, sticking it to The Man, and sex and drugs and rock and roll. For those few Conservatives who remain, it was the fons et origo of the chaotic times in which we find ourselves.

The world-historical events of the 1960s centred around America. JFK’s assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Act and King’s killing, Vietnam, the Apollo moon landing – all these shook, rattled and rolled the country where, as de Tocqueville had claimed in 1835, the world’s first great experiment in democracy had begun. And if the Sixties were remade as a movie, for good or ill, then it would feature an Anglo-American soundtrack – rock music.

Defining musical genres is a mug’s game. With rock music, it defines itself on listening. As with the famous American judicial case requiring a judge’s clerk to define hard-core pornography, with rock music you will know it when you see it. And, in this case, hear it. The first band I saw, at the age of 14 in 1975 and for £2.50, was Led Zeppelin, themselves a product of the Sixties and its bequest of rock music. The man I was watching transfixedly, Jimmy Page, was inspired to pick up the guitar after hearing Presley’s Come On Baby, Let’s Play House. Zeppelin were shatteringly loud. This was a while before The Who forced legislation to reduce the volume at concerts following their 1977 gig at Charlton Football Stadium in south London. The band could be heard in Brighton. I couldn’t really hear anything, not with any clarity, for two days after Led Zeppelin. Quite simply, in Nietzschean terms, here was Dionysus.

But rock music grew not out of its father’s thigh, as did the mythical Dionysus, but out of electric pop and R&B. The details are unimportant, but The Stones began the Sixties as a Chuck Berry tribute band and ended it as Their Satanic Majesties. The Sixties – something happened out there. A number of tributaries flowed into one river, and the counter-culture got the music it required.

I’ll return to the schism which eventually separated rock music from rock and roll, R&B and pop music, but a mixture of youth rebellion, drugs hard and soft, and economic affluence produced a coat of arms for a culture-changing musical crusade which began at El Paso, the Marty Robbins single which was the first January Billboard number one of the Sixties, and ended at Altamont Speedway Stadium in December 1969.

Rock music itself took a broad base of blues, R&B and rock and roll and used it to weave the bands’ own designs, all amplified beyond old-school levels. Rock music is primal and it is Dionysiac. The Sixties’ alchemical mixture which became rock music was bubbling away before synthesisers, sequencers and computers (some experiments aside), and so was visceral, sweat-soaked and animalistic.

Certainly the electric guitar was the weapon of choice for the cultural skirmishes ahead, the staff adorned with pine-cones held aloft by the followers of Dionysus. Coming from the back row of the swing bands of the 40s and 50s, the electric version of the instrument became more prominent when people like Louis Jordan began cutting band numbers to save money on the road. It was Charlie Christian who first made the electric guitar talk through amplification (his famous original guitar was bought by Steve Howe of Yes), and the thread would wind through the guitarists of the Sixties – Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, and Pete Townshend – the last included as possibly the greatest rhythm guitarist of a crew best known for their solos.

It was the way in which the instrument was played rather than innovation in guitars themselves, with vintage guitars being prized as the age of mass-production began. The riff was born in the Sixties. When Townshend got back from an American tour in 1964 and turned on the radio, he heard the famous staccato barre chords of You Really Got Me by The Kinks. It certainly got Townshend. He sat down and wrote the equally famous chopped riff for I Can’t Explain.

John Entwistle of The Who

The Sixties also saw the rebirth of the often-forgotten bass guitar in rock music. As a bass player myself, I can say that the decade energised and freed the instrument. McCartney’s melodic scales on his iconic Hofner Violin bass, Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones’s rhythmic work in tandem with the mighty John Bonham, the blues scales of Free’s Andy Frazer, The Faces’ Ronnie Lane and Cream’s Jack Bruce set the instrument free, away from the straight rock ‘n’ roll runs and country plod of the Fifties, and no one more so that The Who’s legendary John “Thunderfingers” Entwistle, who brought the bass to forefront of the band’s tumultuous sound.

Rock music was banned in Yugoslavia in the Sixties as subversive, which was precisely its appeal to bored and affluent Western youth who were experiencing a relaxation of authority and discipline after the strait-laced Fifties. Todd Gitlin called rock music incoherent and primitively regressive, while Gerard Howard dubbed it the “Pied Piper’s tune of the new freedoms”. The children led by the Piper in the fairy-tale, of course, were free right up until they were slaughtered in the wood.

Jimi Hendrix

Hendrix nut-shelled the Sixties in one performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. He played the electric guitar in a way no one had ever seen or heard. Then he set light to it and smashed it to pieces. This was a sign, a pointer to where the American dream was heading. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud famously writes that dreams are “the royal road to the unconscious”. The dream-work becomes a text to be read off, and the signifiers relate to a signified which is never fully present (Derrida had much to say about this). What type of unconscious can be read off from, and thus lurks beneath, the American dream? In terms of rock music, the dream was interrupted.

Just as the first British invasion of the 18th century led to the Declaration of Independence, American pragmatism built on British conceptual guidelines (Locke and so on), so too it could be argued that the British invasion of the 1960s led to rock music as a progression of electric pop and rock and roll. Arguably, The Beatles began the metamorphosis, moving from covering R&B and Motown songs to writing their own, influenced by both but with something British layered on top. The list of British bands desperate to ‘crack America’ grew quickly. The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Kinks, The Dave Clark Five, The Who, Herman’s Hermits… When The Stones recorded at blues HQ Chess Records, significant ground had been ceded by American forces.

There were, of course, two main offensives from Blighty, two very different bands who were attracted to America under different pretences. And, just as Coleridge claimed every man was born a Platonist or an Aristotelean, so too the Sixties had an ontological choice of its own: The Beatles or The Stones?

The Beatles had the shop-store mannequin look A&R men had been looking for, while The Stones always looked to be up to no good in publicity photos. After the amphetamine-crazed early Hamburg scene, The Beatles settled into a life, viewed in terms of narcotics, of marijuana and LSD, mostly. The Fab Four were not known for their live work, which were mostly exercises in young girls screaming themselves hoarse at a slightly animated version of Kraftwerk. The Stones were becoming notorious for their live transformation. Jagger had stopped hopping about like a small variety of garden bird and was now part-turkeycock, part infernal drag queen. Richards was becoming the troubadour. It has to be The Stones, for me, but debate is welcomed. In the end, The Stones couldn’t write Blackbird, but The Beatles certainly couldn’t have performed Midnight Rambler.

In the end, the British took coals to Newcastle (home of The Animals). American rhythm and blues made it to the record shops of the home counties, bands began emulating them, realised that with minor alterations they could cut the suit to fit them, and sold the result back to a willing American public. Perhaps America could have come up with rock music unaided, but then maybe it was too affluent, too shiftless, too relaxed in its hedonistic consumerism. It wasn’t getting over the effects of the worst war the world had even seen, it wasn’t rationed, it wasn’t austere and economically fragile. The British invasion added urban grit to rock music in its infancy, some gin in the baby’s bottle. For this tonic, we have the institution of the British Art College to thank, partly, for bringing Townshend and Clapton and others out from their artistic shells.

America tried to replicate the success of The Beatles with the manufactured Monkees, who actually went on to be a halfway-decent pop band. It is regrettable that the urban myth informing us that Charles Manson auditioned for the band proves to be untrue. Manson was in Rikers at the time, but how would the band have developed? Manson did actually write music; Guns ‘n’ Roses covered his Look at Your Game, Girl.

The rock music whose source lies in the Sixties would be a raging river in the 1970s, and one of its effects would be punk at the end of the decade. Psychedelic rock made its appearance in the 60s and was not confined to freakish one-offs like The Chocolate Watch band. The Beatles, Stones, Kinks, The Who all had their flirtation with psychedelia, as did – more tellingly – the early Pink Floyd, waiting for the Seventies for ultimate fame.

One of the tributaries from the 1960s was garage rock. Determinedly lo-fi, garage was cheaply recorded electric pop music, a dress rehearsal for punk, and a genre only really defined after it was gone. But it must have stirred the sediment of the rock mix. The FBI investigated Link Wray’s 1958 classic Rumble. What were they looking for? Seditious lyrics? (Rumble was famously an instrumental.) (1)

Link Wray

The most obvious and influential off-shoot of garage rock was The Velvet Underground. In the context of the 1960s, Andy Warhol’s ethos of combining consumerism with multimedia with business was visionary. It is said of the first Velvet Underground LP that not many bought it, but everyone who did formed a band. The band combined raw garage rattle and roll with a Euro-gothic, dilettante style. Rock would always have more than a trace element of poison, which is where Velvet Underground came in, to attempt to puncture the homely sureties of, say, Crosby, Still, Nash and Young.

CSN&Y were a sort of anti-Velvet Underground, rural in feel as opposed to urban, harmonic not dissonant, lyrically upbeat, not dabblers in despair. But both of these elements would combine in the best rock music. America had two sides of its rock ball mask, the Apollonian and the Dionysiac, perhaps, and they may as well be thought of as rural and urban. Rock music was far from being one monolithic creature as the Sixties ended. In the last two years of the Sixties, The Band released their debut studio album, Music From Big Pink,and Iggy and the Stooges released their eponymous debut album, featuring Now I Wanna be Your Dog.

CSN&Y also shared with The Velvet Underground a microcosmic tendency of America: internal rifts and splits, acrimony, self-induced problems, civil war. Rock music may have been formed by the coming together of many influences, both musical and cultural, but it was going to be its father’s son, part brilliance, part destructive self-hatred.

Warhol epitomised a big part of the Sixties’ cultural ethos: business. Further to this, rock music as business. This was the days of album and single sales and gigs, and that’s it. No brand association, no commercials in your videos, no many-headed hydra of internet hits and downloads. Now, everything is a hit record just like every book is a best-seller. You just tell people it is. Everyone’s a winner. Warhol famously said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. But he went on to write in his autobiography From A to B and Back Again, “…in 15 minutes, everyone will be famous”.

The two sides to rock music in the 1960s shows the same rift, the same oscillation between genius (or vast success) and madness (or a vast amount of drugs) as existed throughout America, with a metaphorical shift or two. Rock music, like its Anglo-American parents, would be born schizophrenic, presenting both the Apollonian spectacle of live rock music and its ornamental imagery, and the Dionysiac back beat, a music which could be exhilarating for a time, then change into something mad, bad and dangerous to know.

In the end, rock music might be the consolation for what the 1960s did to us. This Janus-faced god has returned to the woodland, true, and there is no real rock music to be found today. Entertainment has become wholly Apollonian and rock was always the herald of the Dionysiac, even when the harbinger was a fairly witless stoner like Jim Morrison.

“There is no real rock music to be found today…”

Rock music in the Sixties wore the reversible mask of tragedy and comedy, or at least light-heartedness. It aimed at Woodstock but it ended up with Altamont. And so did we.

Woodstock was the very model of how capitalism works in that it set up a huge venture, lost money partly due to the concert being half attended by people who had no tickets, then made its money back selling the film rights. The performances were legendary, and the counter-culture had a focal point, a quasi-religious event.

But what could counter the counter-culture? The other face of the mask, perhaps, the one shown at Altamont, a few months after Woodstock and an attempt to cash in on the idea. Students of popular culture will be familiar with received opinion. Promoters were beginning to realise in post-Woodstock 1969 that there was an awful lot of money to be made from the potent combination of rock music and the kids who wanted to hear it live. Altamont Speedway in Indiana was duly selected for a gig headlined by The Stones.

Their Satanic Majesties hired Hell’s Angels to see to security, and provided them with $500 dollars’ worth of beer. As things became increasingly fractious in front of the stage, and while the band were playing Under my Thumb, not the diabolic anthem Sympathy for the Devil as legend would prefer, a young black man named Meredith Hunter was fatally stabbed by one of the bikers. It was December, 1969.

The Sixties strove for Woodstock but it ended up as Altamont. Remind you of anything? The contemporary Western world, for example, forever telling us we are on the road to Woodstock, only to find we had the Altamont tickets. Front row. And the Sixties was not only music. Rock and roll was also an attitude. Hunter S. Thompson, Warhol, Lennie Bruce, the Beat – all of these acts were riffing on the same centre of gravity.

Rock music was the answer to a lot of questions, musical, social, political, aesthetic, and it had the broadest sweep both of influences and by what it went on to create. In the UK, among other genres, glam rock and punk were both waiting to see what the seeds of the Sixties would grow in a darker part of the garden.

One of Baudelaire’s collection of poems, Les fleurs du mal, is entitled Music, and contains lines Dionysian enough to serve as an epitaph, if it is that time, for rock music:

I feel the tremblings of all passions known 
To ships before the breeze; 
Cradled by gentle winds, or tempest-blown 
I pass the abysmal seas 
That are, when calm, the mirror level and fairy-tale 
Of my despair!

Editor’s Note

  1. Link Wray is No. 45 in Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 greatest guitarists, credited with inventing the much-copied distorted “power chord”. A live version of Rumble may be found here
Posted on by Derek Turner

Tories and true believers

Cassandra by A. F. Sandys (1829-1904)

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History – The Decline, Fall, and Unlikely Return of Conservatism, Ed West, London, Constable, 2020, 426 pages

DEREK TURNER likes a conservative critique of conservatism

The story of conservatism since 1945 has been one of failure wrapped up in frequent electoral success. While anatomising this oft-noted conundrum, Ed West outlines excellently the intellectual and stylistic differences between Left and Right, before concluding ruefully that the forces of conservatism are unlikely to regroup, let alone regain lost ground.

Politics is about ideas, morals, and practicality. It is also about radically oppositional personality types, reflected in culture and possibly rooted in neurobiology, which govern our aesthetics and outlooks, and compel us to choose sides in a culture clash that has been continuing since the Greeks dreamed up Cassandra and Pandora. Cassandra is an archetypal ‘conservative’, and Pandora the original ‘liberal’ – the former eternally seeking grounds for gloom, the latter reasons to hope. The author is instinctively in the Cassandran camp, although many of his allies are almost as little to his taste as the myrmidons of the other side.

West is the son of two conservative journalists, Mary Kenny and the late Richard West, and the brother of another (Patrick). Sometimes sympathies run in families, almost as persistently as physical features. Now in early middle age, West finds himself turning into his father, a man so reactionary he didn’t learn to drive, and spoiled his ballot papers. He was brought up in ‘bohemian conservative’ circumstances in London, encountering eccentrics like the buckled shoe and monocle-wearing French priest, ‘aristocratic-looking’ descendant of a palace guard killed during the Revolution, who called France the ‘regicide state’.

The broad-minded author loathes the limited philosophy expressed by British tabloids, climate change deniers, conspiracy theorists, Creationists, identitarians, incels, Objectivists, populists, ‘shock jocks’, Trump, or UKIP, all of whom he thinks make the Right much uglier than it ought to be. The American thinker Sam Francis famously called the Republican Party ‘beautiful losers’; West would dispute that ‘beautiful’. But however abysmal his opinion of many on the Right, his opinion of the alternative is lower yet. Union Jack waistcoat-wearers et al are embarrassments, but they’re his embarrassments.

He broods on the diminishing socioeconomic status of the Right’s supporters. The erstwhile party of the influential rich now draws ever-growing allegiance from the lower middle and working classes. The author favours uplift, and realises that the rough auxiliaries who founded his Europe of the faith were as unvarnished as today’s Trumpians, living in their centuries’ equivalents of Flyover Country. But short-term electoral success may entail longer-term irrelevance. Conservatism is retreating into older age-groups, less wealthy suburbs, left-behind towns and backwoods, while Leftists consolidate their control of the institutions that set agendas and the metropolises forming the future. They are assailed as ‘elitists’, and they are – but elitism is always more a help than a hindrance. Faiths, like fashions, filter downwards – and today’s minority opinion is often the mainstream view of tomorrow, with which the day-after-tomorrow’s conservatives will probably play catch-up.

It is a cultural commonplace that conservatives are boring, dim-witted, morally inferior and repressed. Sometimes, they even see themselves in such lights, leading them either to avoid engagement (except in the ballot box, whose ‘shy Tories’ surprise psephologists), or adopt perverse positions at least partly to provoke. Some Rightists actually are, as Barack Obama remarked of Al-Qaida, ‘small men on the wrong side of history’, overcompensating for existential fear with intemperate anger. Where Conservatives do cling on in prominent positions, they are imperilled islands, like Catholic recusants in the days of Dissolution.

5th century BC Attic vase depiction of Pandora (centre)

The Cassandra-Pandora dichotomy has reproduced itself in reality. In countless contretemps, conservatives have found themselves on history’s back foot, fighting implacable opponents with a gallantry touching because ultimately unavailing. The humorous 1930 classic, 1066 And All That, summarised one emblematic Left-Right confrontation – ‘The Roundheads were right, but repulsive. The Cavaliers were wrong, but romantic’. Today’s Right has been robbed not just of victory, but even of romance, its adherents now and retrospectively regarded as ‘phobes’ and rubes, carriers of contagions and false consciousness. Old icons have been pushed from the pantheon, as saints’ faces were scratched from medieval rood-screens – chivalry, Church, femininity, hierarchy, masculinity, monarchy, nation, race – and colourless, country-less, ‘rational’, sexless idols have taken their place on the shockingly bare plinths. This is the cruellest of outcomes for instinctive conservatives, who privately revel in ruination, so long as they can gild their myriad ‘lost causes’ with mythic lustre.

The Right’s old emphases on duty, emotional restraint, experience and realism are intrinsically less appealing than the Left’s freedom, novelty and utopianism. It is the perennial difference between Augustine and Pelagius, Burke and Rousseau, a Pope and a Pentecostalist, Churchill’s funeral and Diana’s, Margaret Thatcher and Michelle Obama, a soldier and a singer, a coat of arms and a rainbow flag. On what psychologists call ‘the Big Five personality traits’, Rightists score highest only on conscientiousness, leaving Leftists to lay claim to agreeableness, extroversion and openness. They also score more highly on the last trait, neuroticism, which they display abundantly on Twitter. They burnish their reputation endlessly through their dominance in academia, the arts, and the broadcast media. Conservatives wind up on the ‘wrong side of history’, because they rarely write histories – while, as Shelley noted hopefully, ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ Often, the Right has good ideas, badly presented, and the Left bad ones, imaginatively expressed.

Leftists also practise solidarity. Strangely for those who so stress freedom, Leftists are frequently herd animals. They appoint and promote allies, decline to denounce each other, and ignore their side’s crimes while exaggerating those of the Right. There is even de facto ‘discipline’ through the antifa fringe, who routinely subject outspoken Rightists to ‘deplatforming’, ‘doxxing’, vandalism, and violence. To Leftists, political parties are communal, almost covenanting organisations – while for conservatives, parties are just means to an (indefinite) end. Everything, to true-believing Leftists, is political, while conservatives are usually content to expostulate, before abandoning events to individuals, or Fate. Individualism extends to the Right’s farthest fringe; while the Left has goon-squads, the most lethal terrorists of recent times have been lone wolf Rightists.

Another difficulty is that the conservative worldview is not reducible to simple statements, and varies between countries. It is an essence, not a set of rigid and (supposedly) universal ideas that even children can comprehend. Leftist values can be summed up (and have been consciously) in Sesame Street, Star Trek, and Harry Potter – and inculcation continues as those children graduate to Ibsen, Harper Lee, Margaret Atwood, Mad Men, or stand-up comedians. It matters hugely that women are increasingly un-conservative, as it is usually women who set a household’s moral tone. Young people no longer rove rightwards with age, if they ever did in recent decades.

The author enjoys puncturing priggish pretensions, while admitting to inconsistencies in his own argument. He combines the ancients and obvious authorities (Burke, Kirk, and Oakeshott) with moderns like John Derbyshire, segueing skilfully from classics to pop culture, neo-reaction, and social media folk-tales. It seems a pity to cavil with so likeable a contribution to the corpus, but arguably he is overly fastidious – for instance, ridiculing those who are fixated on the Frankfurt School, before admitting it really was influential. He asserts dubiously that Germany and Israel have ‘found inner peace’ after World War Two. He claims ‘memes…are perhaps the first art form in two hundred years in which the Right has excelled’, somehow overlooking Céline, Joyce, Marinetti, Pound, Yeats, and others. He disagrees with von Krafft-Ebing’s (surely incontrovertible) assertion that self-mortifying saints may have had masochistic urges.

Eventually, he undercuts his own side – a tradition in itself among conservative commentators. According to this desponding analysis, there is almost certainly no salvation in politics, and all that remains is retreat into religion. But this is unfeasible, and even if it wasn’t it wouldn’t alter much, because as he observes, ‘progressivism is a heresy of Christianity’ – albeit lacking Christianity’s charity, culture, humility, and transcendental quality. There were good reasons why the Romans tried to repress the upstart faith, with its imperially unsettling equality, eschatology, free will, individualism, ostentatious piety, sentimentality, and universalism (and sentimentality’s obverse, bitter hatreds of ‘heretics’).

Probably his resignation is born more of private diffidence than public despair, because, as he shows, liberalism is vulnerable – embedded for so long it is atrophying, its yawn-inducing clichés eliciting counter-rebellion among the least ‘awokened’ most awake. It has listened only to itself for so long that many of its members are automata, like the ‘non-player characters’ in Dungeons & Dragons. As the West shrivels, liberalism is becoming a luxury even liberals can’t afford – and their vapid ideas of identity politics will be overtaken by earthier, older variants. Where conservatives prove unequal, new parties will emerge, with more determined and lateral-thinking leaders, who understand metapolitics, and pay attention to presentation. These mightn’t all call themselves conservative, but on the other hand they might actually conserve.

Posted on by Robert Henderson · 1 Comment

Forget coronavirus – the true global existential threat

ROBERT HENDERSON warns of the unprecedented challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence

The attention of the world is currently fixed on coronavirus, but there is another far more serious danger hurtling towards us, in the shape of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics.

Both are advancing rapidly. Probably within the lifetime of most people now living – quite possibly in the next 15 years – there will be general purpose robots (GPRs) capable of doing the vast majority of the work now undertaken by humans. When that happens, international free trade and free market economics will become untenable. The real “final crisis” of capitalism will be the development of technology so advanced that it makes capitalism in the long run impossible, as machines make humans redundant across vast swathes of the economy.

Before the advent of digital technology, technological advance created new work. It may have had very painful consequences for individuals whose livelihoods disappeared – the British hand-loom weavers of the early Industrial Revolution are a classic example – but new opportunities for employment have always appeared as an economy becomes more sophisticated and variegated. The hand-loom weaver found work in the new factories – the redundant Western factory worker of today in a call centre. At worst they might only get a MacJob, but at least it was a job.

But if the GPRs can do the MacJobs as well as the more demanding work, then there will not be many new jobs for humans – not even much supervisory work because GPRs will need little supervising, and less and less of that as they become ever more sophisticated. Hence, this technological advance will be like no other; GPRs will not only take away existing jobs, they will devour any new work – the easier work first, then the more complex.

‘It’ll never happen’

The normal human response to such ideas is not reasonable scepticism, but rejection based on a refusal to accept the reality of change, a rejection expressed with ridicule along the lines of the Victorians’ response to the car: ‘It will never replace the horse’. Mention robots, and people commonly scoff ‘science fiction’ to get rid of the matter without further debate.

This type of response is natural enough because human beings, apart from disliking change, do not like to think of themselves as dispensable or redundant. Moreover, incessant propagandising by Western elites has made it received opinion that work is becoming ever more demanding and requires an increasingly educated and knowledgeable workforce – which seems to most humans to make them uniquely capable of doing the jobs of the future. By implication, this excludes mechanisation (and robots) from the majority of future human employments.

The hard truth is that most modern work requires less knowledge and skill than was required in the past. A peasant 400 years ago had to know about his soil, his plants and animals, the seasons, the weather, where natural water was, and to be able to do 101 practical things such as ploughing, sowing, harvesting, making and repairing of fences and ditches, using tools and turning out cheese and cream and dried meat and vegetables. How many jobs today require a tenth of that volume of knowledge?

Nor did more demanding work stop at peasants. A 17th century craftsman would have served a long apprenticeship. Jobs which did not require an apprenticeship would have probably required some manual skill. Those who aspired to intellectual employment had to laboriously write and amend their works rather than enjoying the immense convenience of a word processor. That, and the cost of writing materials, forced them to become precise in a way that virtually no one is today. Perhaps most importantly, modern division of labour with one person doing a repetitive job was not king. A person making something four centuries ago would probably make the entire item, and quite often a variety of other items; a 17th century blacksmith would not merely shoe horses but make a wide range of iron goods. GPRs today could take over a great deal of employment in Western economies and much of the industrialised parts of the developing world, especially China, because there are so many simple jobs which would be within the capabilities of very basic GPRs.

But that is only half of the story. If most jobs are not demanding of much by way of learned skills and even less of intellect, they do need diligence. Human beings are generally more than a little reluctant to put themselves out in work which has no intrinsic interest for them, or which is not very highly paid. So what will an employer do when he can employ a robot instead? He will go and get himself some GPRs which will do what they are told, keep working all the time without being watched, do not make regular mistakes and require no wages, or social security taxes, or holidays, or sick leave. And it will not be able to sue you for being a bad employer.

What will an employer do when he can employ a robot instead? He will go and get himself some GPRs which will do what they are told, keep working all the time without being watched, do not make regular mistakes and require no wages, or social security taxes, or holidays, or sick leave. And it will not be able to sue you for being a bad employer

In the beginning at least, there will still be a sizeable chunk of jobs which GPRs will not be able to do. These will be the jobs which cannot be reduced to quantifiable tasks – jobs which cannot be done by following an algorithm, jobs which require judgement motivation to achieve a complex end which is not obvious from the units of means which are required to achieve it.  But that work is only a minority of jobs, probably a small minority, perhaps 20% of the total. If the earliest GPRs could only undertake 50% of the jobs which humans do that would be catastrophic.

There will be two further advantages enjoyed by GPRs over humans. In principle there are no limits to increases in the capabilities of GPRs; there is no such human potential in the present state of knowledge. For the foreseeable future, there is nothing to suggest that human capacity can be raised dramatically through education and training, not least because attempts to raise IQ substantially and permanently through enhanced environments have a record of unadulterated failure over the past 50 years or more.

The second advantage is that GPRs will come with a guarantee of performance. An employer gets what it says on the tin. Moreover, the performance will be consistent. Humans beings do not carry such a guarantee. The individual’s qualities only become apparent once on the job and are subject to variation according to the physical and mental wellbeing of the person. This makes them a gamble for anyone who employs them. A faulty or rogue GPR could be repaired or replaced without moral qualms; sacking a human being raises all sorts of ethical questions and matters of sentiment.

What could governments do?

When the first GPRs appear, those in political authority will probably try to say everything will be all right. It might be thought it would be pretty obvious that a GPR which could do everything the average human could do and then some would spell trouble for the human race. But it never does to underestimate the power of custom, ideology and the sheer unwillingness of human beings to face troubles which are not immediately upon them. The tired, old and worthless comparison with technological change in the past will doubtless be made, namely, that new jobs for humans will be generated by the GPRs. But that will not last long, because the reality of the situation will very rapidly force elites to accept entirely new circumstances.

There will be a dilemma for the makers and distributors of goods and services. At first it might seem attractive to use GPRs, but as humans lose their employment and the purchasing power derived from it the question for private business would be who are we producing for? Fewer and fewer people, would be the answer. For politicians, the question would be how can we finance government, including public services, when our tax base has collapsed? The answer is we cannot as things stand.

As GPRs threaten to destroy the world’s economy, politicians will be faced with an excruciating dilemma. If GPRs are allowed free rein by governments, the consequence will be a catastrophic collapse in demand as humans lose their employment en masse – highlighting the inability of the state as presently constituted to provide welfare to those put out of work or even to maintain the essential services of the minimalist state, such as the police and army.

The situation will be pressing no matter how supposedly rich a country is, because the majority of people even in the developed world are actually poor – only a few pay packets away from destitution. Even those who own their own home will not be able to sell the property because who will there be to buy it?

To begin with, attempts will probably be made to control the crisis bureaucratically by instigating rationing and price controls. But how to sustain an economy in which most people are not working? In the end, politicians will be faced with two choices: ban or at least seriously curb, the use of GPRs, or adopt a largely non-market economy. Banning GPRs completely would create a particular problem because some countries would continue to use them and this could lead not merely to cheaper goods and services but technological leaps which exceeded anything humans could do. A country which relied only on humans would be at a hopeless disadvantage.

The widespread banning of the use of GPRs in national territories would severely shrink international trade, because not all countries would stop using GPRs to produce items for export. Any country using GPRs could undercut any country which banned them. Protectionist barriers against countries using GPRs freely would have to be erected, although human nature being what it is, this would doubtless result in GPR products being supplied through a third country which had ostensibly banned GPR-produced goods and services. The likely outcome of such a situation would be for protectionism to grow beyond the banning of GPR products to the banning of products simply because they were suspected to be GPR-produced. This would also be a convenient excuse for simply banning imports.

The alternative to a protected economy in which GPRs are banned or severely restricted is a society in which the market is largely defunct. A perfectly rational and workable society could be created in which human beings stopped thinking they had to work to live, and simply lived off the products and services the GPRs produced. The GPRs would do the large majority of the work and the goods and services they provide would be given free to everyone whether or not they had formal employment. No GPRs would be allowed in private hands. Such a situation would mean the market would not make the choice of which goods and services were provided. Rather, the choice would be made by the consumer through an expression of what was needed or wanted before products were developed or supplied.  This could be done through elected representatives to online voting by any member of a community for which goods and services should be supplied. For example, all available items could be voted from by the general population and those which were least popular dropped. The provision of proposed new lines or inventions could be similarly decided.

As for allocating who could have what in such a world, money could be issued equally to everyone in lieu of wages (a form of the social wage). Alternatively, in a more controlled society, vouchers or ration cards could be issued equally to everyone for specific classes of goods. Greater flexibility could be built into the system by allowing the vouchers to be swopped between individuals, for example, a voucher for footwear swapped for food vouchers.

In such societies there would be scope for a limited use of private enterprise. People could provide personal services, for example, entertainment, and produce goods just using human labour (‘human-made’ would gain the cachet ‘handmade’ has now). There would also need to be some greater reward for those who occupied those jobs which still required a human to do them such as political representation, management and administration. The reward could either be material or public approbation. It would not be unreasonable to imagine that in a society where necessary work was at a premium quite a few would take on such positions for the kudos. There could also be some legal requirement to undertake work when required.

It might be thought that the people best placed to survive would have been those in the least industrially developed states because they would be less dependent on machines. But there is scarcely a part of the world which has not been tied into the global economy. Even countries that do not manufacture products or offer services on a large scale probably export food and raw materials. One could even include the recipients of foreign aid, for that flow of money, goods, expertise and manpower is dependent on the aid-giving countries remaining economically robust.

The rate at which robotics evolves will play a large part in how the story unfolds.  The speed with which GPRs replace human beings could be truly bewildering. Digital technology to date suggests that the stretch from a primitive GPR doing simple work which can be broken down into physical actions, to a GPR with some sort of consciousness or a facsimile of what humans think of as consciousness, will not be massive.

Such development could well be speeded up by GPRs assisting with development as they attain more and more sophisticated abilities. The faster the development of really sophisticated GPRs, the more chaos there is likely to be, because there will be little time to plan and implement changes or for people to accommodate themselves psychologically and sociologically.

It is reasonable to assume technology will develop until GPRs are showing behaviour which suggests consciousness. They will make decisions such as what would be the best way of achieving ends which are loosely defined, for example, an instruction to design a city redevelopment in a way which would have the greatest utility for human beings. At that point the GPRs would be effectively making value judgements.

This is a real danger with potentially catastrophic world-wide consequences. The problem is getting people in power to address the subject seriously. There needs to be discussion and planning now about how far GPRs, or indeed robots or any type, should be allowed to displace human beings in the functioning of human societies. Nor should we assume humans will happily tolerate GPRs for reasons other than economic. Robots which are too like humans make humans uncomfortable, probably because it is difficult to view a machine which looks like a human and acts like a human simply as a machine. 

But the loss of jobs and incomes is only part of the problem which comes with intelligent machines. The general consequence of our ever growing reliance on digital technology is that we are increasingly being controlled by the needs of the technology, rather than using technology to serve us. It is very difficult to escape such control. A person in work will almost certainly have to use it; if in education, they definitely will. Even if a person does not encounter digital technology in their work or education, they find it increasingly difficult to avoid it in their private lives even if they refuse to use a computer or a mobile phone, because businesses and governments increasingly require those dealing with them do so by computer. People are being driven to own and use computers to avoid feeling isolated and excluded.

Despite all these pressures, there are still a large number of people in Britain who have remained distant from the digital world. According to a 2019 Office for National Statistics report, millions of  British adults have never been online. It  is unreasonable in a civilised society to simply hang the computer-ignorant or the intellectually-underpowered out to dry as digital technology looms ever larger. Yet that is precisely what is happening.

There is one thing the government of any advanced country should do – create circumstances in which those who cannot come to terms with digital technology can live in an ever more computer-controlled world. They can do this by maintaining non-computer access to state-funded organisations and forcing through legislation larger businesses and not-for-profit organisations to do the same. Worryingly, there is little evidence that UK politicians are taking this problem seriously. There have been rather half hearted attempts to ensure that cash point machines are provided so that  no one has to travel more than a few miles to draw cash, but that is wholly inadequate because many people, especially the old, cannot readily travel several miles.

At the same time the UK government is dragging its feet over making access to cash a legal right. Failure to do so could all too easily allow the UK to sleepwalk into a cashless society, a state of affairs which would not only potentially give the government immense opportunity to intrude on private lives, but be a constant worry even for those accustomed to digital technology.

Someone living in Britain between 1815 and 1914 saw more radical technological change than any generation before. But that change was the difference between living in a still largely pre-industrial society (in 1815) and an industrial society in its early middle age (in 1914). Moreover, the change did not require the vast majority of the population to master complicated machines at their work, let alone in their own homes. In 1914 the most complicated machine most people would have had to operate was probably the telephone, and vast swathes of the population would not even have had to go that far into the world of technology. 

In the past 30 years, all this has changed hugely. We are now in a world in which computers are absolutely integral to business and public administration, and are the norm rather than the exception in homes. For most people, it is literally impossible to escape them. Worse, they have become ever more complex and demanding to use, and invade ever more of our lives, as microprocessors are inserted into the most unlikely things, such as clothes. All machines are becoming more and more demanding. We desperately need politicians who will act to avert the looming disaster this unique situation threatens to bring. Don’t hold your breath waiting.

Posted on by Benjamin Gelman

Corporate account

Diego Rivera mural at the Detroit Institute of the Arts

BENJAMIN GELMAN describes a shocking – but salutary – first foray into the ruthless world of work

It was my first relaxing summer weekend. I had been toiling away at one of America’s ‘Big Four’ accounting firms as a consultant for ten months, and felt I needed a break. I received a negative COVID test, took off from work on Friday, and drove a couple of hours for a peaceful few days in the woods with a friend. I was about five minutes into my return journey when I got phone service again. Alone in my car, I pulled over to see if I’d missed anything important on my work phone. There were the Friday newsletters and a few emails I was CC’d on. I also noticed I now had A Conversation With the Talent Leader on my calendar for Monday midmorning, which I knew wasn’t the protocol for getting a raise. Sure enough, within 24 hours I had been fired.

Once COVID-19 sent the United States into full-blown lockdown, my firm claimed its employees were its number one priority. It would limit promotions and raises, reduce discretionary spending, and contract the partnership payout pool, all to protect employees during these tough times. The higher up in the company, the more you’d feel the impact – the logic being that higher-ups are, quite literally, able to afford it. As an entry-level analyst, this sounded quite fair, if not altogether redemptive for Corporate America.

Then COVID survived its first news cycle unhindered, and it was pretty clear we were dealing with a radically different kind of event. All bets were off. The Big Four entered survival mode, and would do whatever they had to. I was just one of thousands of employees left to fend for themselves.

My family and friends have assured me that these are unprecedented times. It wasn’t my fault and I shouldn’t beat myself up. And to some extent they’re right. If COVID hadn’t ravaged the world, I probably wouldn’t have had The Conversation put on my calendar. However, while COVID was the catalyst, my downfall began long before. If I’m being honest with myself, I deserved what came my way.

Even if the impetus was unforeseen, like all things done at the Big Four, the selection process was incredibly structured. The firm didn’t part with 50% or even 25% of their workforce. I was on the left-hand side of the bell curve. I fitted right in with the auto-generated list of lower-tier professionals to terminate. Given the circumstances, I would’ve fired me too. And yet…

It wasn’t always like this. In high school, I scored a 36 out of 36 on the college placement exam. I graduated from a prestigious undergraduate business school with just about the highest honours available. Several of my professors made it seem like my career success would be a given. But it turns out that academic success does not transpose so neatly into professional success.

It’s worth revisiting the university business structure at this point. To keep the lights on, private universities in America charge students hundreds of thousands of dollars. They also rely on alumni remembering their university days fondly enough to donate years later. These schools, therefore, have a strong incentive to keep their students happy and satisfied. Put another way, students are consumers. They pay money and expect an experience that’s ‘worth it’.

Much of my achievement has taken place within this quasi-consumerist framework. The institutions and people I knew were typically on my side, helping and rooting for me to succeed, conspiring alongside me. So I learned to work with understanding and patient stakeholders. When it took me longer to read than my sixth-grade peers, I was given extra time on my exams, which, astoundingly, lasted through the end of university. If I had too much on my plate during finals, I could almost assume one professor would allow me to turn in a term paper late. And even my summers spent in professional environments manufactured a sense that the intern had special privileges and status. Rules tended to feel more like guidelines. Accommodations were boundless.

Older people often tell my generation (I am 24) that we feel an undue sense of entitlement – we expect much more than we deserve. I have to admit I was a very fortunate child. My parents worked tirelessly to provide me and my brothers with all the opportunities they’d never had – private education from kindergarten to the age of 18, carefree summers, a debt-free college experience. If my laptop or phone broke, I knew I’d have a replacement soon enough. My family didn’t go on lavish vacations, but I struggle to remember a time when I didn’t get something I really wanted.

At the same time, though, I do not feel wholly responsible for the charges held against me. In fact, those who complain about the young are themselves at least partly culpable. Children and adolescents react to what they see, absorbing and digesting what’s around them. And if ‘the culture’ is responsible for cultivating this sense of entitlement, who made that culture? I’m not sure of the answer, but if you let children eat candy, they’ll do it till they’re sick.

I don’t mean to offshore responsibility with this logic. I could spend time dissecting who’s to blame and why, or harping on what I would’ve done differently. But in the end, it doesn’t matter. Shifting the blame doesn’t shift the reality. Part of growing up is owning what’s yours. I thought I already knew this from books of ancient wisdom and modern psychology, which said essentially the same thing. For example, in Jewish culture, once you become Bar Mitvah’ed, and thus a man (at the respectable age of 13), you’re accountable for all your deeds, good and bad. Victor Frankle, a Holocaust survivor with all the reason to resent and crumble to his environment, credits his survival to the

…the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

More recently, J.K. Rowling counseled

There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

My ten months at the Big Four was a proper lesson in accountability – making me confront and internalize my failings.

When I started at my firm, I discovered immediately that a boss wasn’t the same kind of authority figure as my parents or professors. Bosses are not necessarily invested in your personal success or happiness. Moreover, I was receiving money, and others had their expectations of me. All my naive assumptions were flipped on their head. My belief in myself and benevolent cultural, even cosmic, forces was shaken to the root. I’m not sure all those carefree summers had prepared me properly.

I bumped up against my project manager almost immediately. Our personalities clashed head-on, and unlike many of the people I had known, he was unwilling to accommodate himself to me. I sought consensus and hoped to know my new colleagues on a personal level. He had more of a ‘Get Shit Done’ philosophy. When I asked about his weekends, he’d answer in a breath, “It was good,” then smile in a way that said this-is-the-end-of-this-conversation. In one feedback session over a firm-sponsored trendy coffee, he told me I wasn’t “hungry enough.” My other advocates and mentors scoffed when I unpacked the feedback with them. What the hell, they asked, does that even mean?

I did what was asked of me. I got my work done. I dropped the ball once in a while, but not markedly more than the other First Years. And I knew I was capable of persistent, strenuous effort. Maybe my mentors were right – he was speaking in vague terms because the subject of the feedback was subjective. We simply didn’t get along. But even if I couldn’t follow the exact calculus, in a way I understood my manager was picking up on something more profound than working styles. Eventually, I’d come to understand what he meant.

The first reason had to do with entitlement and expectations. Through recruiting pitches and conversations, I had developed a rather glamorous picture of consulting, and my reality simply didn’t match. For the entire, albeit short, duration of my employment, I was working on a long-term, internal project. That meant while my peers were flying around the country, rotating through different industries and teams, solving real-world business problems for Fortune 500 companies, I was maintaining internal programming for the Big Four. Furthermore, the “cross-functional” aspect of my project meant my superiors tended to be auditors or financial advisors instead of consultants. Almost none of the things I had expected to find in consulting were present. I was disappointed, unhappy, and unmotivated. I didn’t want to work myself into the ground on something I hadn’t signed up for.

So I tried to get out. I spent a lot of energy and brainpower ruminating on the shortcomings of my project and wondering how to remove myself. I dabbled in corporate politics. I even entertained an attempt to ‘fail out’ of the project (1). I thought I was being responsible – taking ownership of my situation, changing my environment. In hindsight, I see all this mental energy would have been better aimed at helping my project, succeeding where I was. I was wrong to expect my situation to adapt to my strengths and preferences, or to believe the onus was on the firm to find me better opportunities.

The second reason for my apparent lack of hunger had to do with why I entered consulting in the first place. For the easily compiled laundry list of gripes, I am extremely grateful for my childhood. I cherished the Jewish education I received from my private school, and I loved that my mom was always around to pick me up from the bus stop. I grew up with an air of love and support. When thinking about myself as an adult, I consistently return to these standards. To raise a happy, successful Jewish family, I must ensure there’s a yard on which to play and sound finances, including a near-bottomless education fund. Because I’m a man, tradition dictates financial responsibility falls mostly on me. Although my girlfriend says she cares about having a career of her own, the communal indoctrination of Man as The Provider lives deep in my psyche, kept alive by anxiety and responsibility.

Business schools espouse and reinforce similar values. From what felt like the first days of our first year, students were already preparing themselves to secure prestigious, high-paying corporate jobs. In many schools, students have an end-of-term practice, calculating precisely what scores they need on the final exam to secure an A in the class. My business school peers, meanwhile, would congregate to project the financial returns of various career trajectories. For a college student concerned about paying his bills as a 45-year-old, I found a strange satisfaction in the ritual. However, watching my talented friends filter into the same handful of jobs raised concerns. These were young adults who would succeed in anything they put their minds to. I had trouble believing half of my graduating class was so interested in investment banking.

When I got to the Big Four, I found myself doubting my motivations and decisions. I still felt acute pressure to ascend to the upper-middle class. If I wanted to raise a family like that of my childhood, the Big Four was certainly the place for me. On the other hand, I kept wondering why I felt the urgency to enter corporate life. I didn’t grow up dreaming of having a career in consulting, and could see enough of the industry to know it wouldn’t really stir my passions. Perhaps, I started to think, having a contented father was more important to a happy family life than money. While my childhood had been glorious, thanks to my parents’ self-sacrifice, maybe there were other possibilities. And yet, it’s possible – even probable – I wouldn’t be enamored of any job, so I might as well choose one with a large salary. Maybe I shouldn’t risk everything on account of a post-college existential crisis. Consumed with such doubts, I found it hard to exert myself to my true potential. I wasn’t “hungry” because I wasn’t fully bought in.

As I continued to ponder my manager’s feedback, I started to see myself more objectively. I developed a new attitude based on a simple fact – my project wouldn’t last forever. Even if this particular project, or this job for that matter, was not how I wanted to spend my energy, it was where I was. When I moved on to whatever was next, I’d be taking something with me. The demanding and unsympathetic nature of the corporate world had shocked me, but I had begun to realise the very discontinuity and discomfort could offer life-lessons richer than any business skill. But if I wanted to learn these lessons, I would need to exert earnest effort – a feat near-impossible while keeping a tally of what’s ‘fair’. Perhaps, as clichéd as it sounded, if I worked hard, was persistent, and stayed humble, things might even themselves out.

My performance slowly improved. I ended conversations by asking how else I could help, kept assignments and timelines organized for my team, and volunteered to do grunt work for my managers. I took notes and formatted documents. I drafted emails and double-checked instructions. But I’d left it too late. When my firm decided to terminate employees en masse, they didn’t look at my last month of work. That fell outside the firm’s fiscal year-end, and therefore outside their evaluation parameters. Truthfully, even with my new attitude I still had a long way to go. Nevertheless, it’s unfortunate; I would have loved to get an honest second chance, a tabula rasa. But that’s not the way things work.

My current challenge is parsing through my experience. Our culture often speaks of ‘resilience’ after a disrupting or shocking incident, but the way it is commonly described is misleading, if not altogether wrong. You tend to hear metaphors like you get hit and you have to pick yourself right back up, or when you fall off the horse you have to get back on. These suggest the incident from which you must recover happens in an instant. Sure, with proper traumatic experiences there might be a focal point of resilience. But there are many other categories that demand a different type of resilience.

I experienced a slow, steady mental rewiring. I willingly submitted, even conspired, in my own downfall. Over the course of ten months, I came to accept the hierarchical truth that I was replaceable – a nobody at the bottom of the food chain. In trying to play my corporate-assigned role and listen, I forgot what my voice sounded like. I forgot my drives, my passions, and my capabilities. I let the Big Four prey and when it was done, I found a neglected self. Even so, I’m resisting the urge to hit the reset button. Although I’m left with a larger sense of self-doubt and a greater risk-aversion, I also feel more grateful for – and less entitled to – the good in my life. My Big Four experience, though leaving psychological turmoil, has stimulated tremendous growth that I would dare trade-in. So I’ll continue to sit with my pain to (hopefully) make sense of my experiences.

From where I stand now, I see glimmers of hope. I remember that I’m smart and capable. I tell myself I don’t need to have my 25-year plan mapped out. I don’t need to hold myself to a preset standard of success, which is bound to cause stress and restrict some of life’s excitement. With good principles and the right amount of luck, I trust I’ll figure something out. It will take time for me to come to terms with my deflation, and rebuild confidence. But I know this confidence will be built on things more real and stable. Besides, all over the world, COVID has disrupted countless lives and forced millions to rethink all kinds of assumptions. I’m just one of many. This is the hand I was dealt. I might as well try to play with it.

Author’s Note

  1. In the back of my mind was a story Malcom Gladwell told of himself where he once purposely flew into the wrong Carolina to avoid the work he didn’t like. His editor told him to cover a story in XYZ town. But there was an XYZ town in both North and South Carolina. Instead of clarifying, like a normal person, he got on a plane to the wrong town, guessing (rightly) his editor would never book him on a similar project