Category: Poetry

Easter messages

It’s Easter Morning. The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for peace in the Middle East. No doubt Pope Leo will do too. (See later!) Donald Trump will not listen. But the main headline today is the rescue of an American pilot shot down in Iran. What might have been the other big news story is the first sighting by the Artemis astronauts of the other side of the moon. My sense – our collective sense – of wonder is tempered by the sense that we’re in a space race with China, more serious than the old Russian one, that space could be militarised, that Musk wants to get us to Mars.

Violence where it isn’t explicit is an undercurrent. Trump is part of a long tradition, where violence is visited on civilians. It is as if Netanyahu’s disregard for life in Gaza and the Lebanon and the West Bank has opened a door in Trump’s mind. He will bomb Iran, in his words, ‘back to the Stone Age’.

It is a little realised truth that when the USA has gone beyond its own continental borders and attacked another much older civilisation it has always come off worse. Vietnam looked to be a forever warning. It wasn’t. The Second Iraq War took on a country which occupies the territory, Mesopotamia, of arguably the oldest civilisation on earth. Moving into tribal Afghanistan, America in the end proved no match for old loyalties. And now Iran. Iran – ancient Persia – is one of the world’s great civilisations, of a depth and indeed humanity (in its broadest sense) which the USA has never achieved. The current government of Iran is, in the long history of Persia, an abomination.

I’ll quote here from an article by Pankaj Mishra. ‘Indeed, if Persian nationalism has maintained a profound sense of historical continuity transcending many different political regimes it is because of its roots in the achievements of an expansive and long-lasting Persia civilisation. The poetry of Rumi and Hafez [and others] assumed a canonical authority across Asia. Rulers everywhere, whether Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist, adopted Persian ideologies of statecraft that privileged the notion of justice and connecting economy, morality and politics’.*

It’s worth remembering here that for almost fifteen hundred years since the rise of Islam Christianity remained a tolerated, albeit subordinated, faith under the rule of multiple Islamic states.

Bombing ‘back to the Stone Age’ has an irony all its own when asserted by Trump. It should hardly go without saying that Obama and the Europeans’ approach to containing the nuclear aspirations of a brutal regime in Iran was the better approach. Contain the regime, allow the country to function, and wait on a time when some measure of individual freedom can be restored.

There is a long and terrible tradition of violence against civilians in war. Cities stormed could be obliterated, as was Carthage, citizens murdered, raped, enslaved. There is by contrast a nobility in defence, as we saw in the two World Wars. But even then… think of the destruction of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945. Also of Tokyo in the firestorm of April 1945, when clusters of bombs ‘blew open two thousand feet above the ground, scattering six-pound canisters of napalm’. The raid ‘destroyed 15.8 square miles of Tokyo, including 267,171 homes, shops and businesses, and killed 105,000 people, more than twice the number of deaths in Hamburg the two years earlier’. Curtis LeMay, the man behind the Japanese raids, won later notoriety ‘ for remarking that the USA should bomb North Vietnam ‘back to the Stone Age’.*

This is the language and level of malevolence practised by Donald Trump. The Stone Age should be Iran’s destination too. It is a convenience of war to elide an enemy’s military and its people. It would behove Trump and Netanyahu and Pete Hegseth to imagine themselves under the bombs their air forces rain down on Gaza and Iran and the Lebanon. As we ordinary folk can. Imagine themselves working with the doctors and nurses who tend the dying and wounded. The Geneva Convention of 1949, ratified by all members of the United Nations, outlaws the ‘wilful killing of persons not involved in conflict, as well as ‘wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health’, and ‘extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity’. 

We’ve had Pete Hegseth leading prayers at the White House. He is a proponent of a new-wave ‘Christian nationalism’, which by some extraordinary sleight of hand weaponises Christ. He argues for ‘overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy’. Iranians are religious fanatics? All Iranians? Can that be any greater a fanaticism than his own? I won’t labour this further now, but whatever we had in World War Two, or in Vietnam, or in the Gulf or Afghanistan, was an attempt to establish, or restore, and embed the ‘old’ rules-based order. Where nations traded and cooperated and we in the West hoped that in time that commercial contact would bring all of us closer together. Now we have the main proponent of that world order taken over by men of violence.

Just how many of us in the UK have registered this agenda, how many who understand when we are enjoined to join the fight just what that fight, that battle, might be? A holy war propagated and proselytised by … let’s leave as ‘men of violence’.

Christian nationalism is the USA has evolved out of more traditional right-wing policies. Just how that has evolved out of small-state and family values American conservatism is a subject for another time. At what point did it become specifically illiberal?

I will sign off with words from Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican this Easter Sunday morning. ‘On this day of celebration, let us abandon every desire for conflict, domination, and power…’ He has a battle on his hands against those, amongst them a good few American Catholics (and Protestants), who see their faith as an ‘onward march of Christian soldiers’.  

* Quotations from two articles in New York Review of Books, dated 9th April, by Pankaj Mishra (‘A Bitter Education’) and Joshua Hammer (‘A Man-Made Disaster’)

A not-so-warm welcome for our new PM

As we change prime ministers, a few thoughts.

Let’s start with integrity. Journalists at the self-described ‘right leaning’ GB News weren’t like the BBC, ‘because at least they got their facts right’. This was Liz Truss a few weeks ago. A throwaway line from one of the candidates in the Tory leadership debate. No more than that? Or Truss, in pursuit of Tory member votes, peddling a ‘fake news’ agenda.

Emily Maitlis just now setting up her own podcast with Jon Sopel is good on the subject. Politics she argues has changed fundamentally and journalism and broadcasting haven’t caught up. ‘We haven’t realised that when people say fake news they are trying to disorientate you and demean your work, so they can ignore any scrutiny you put them under.’

I jib at calling the new incumbent ’our PM’, just as I did with Johnson. Playing the ‘fake news’ game is, let’s not beat about the bush, pretty base. Not that she would understand for a moment the deeper implications of what she said. She’s doing no more than her predecessor did during the Brexit debate. Plus ca change…

Another cheap line from Truss: the jury is out on whether ‘Mr Macron is Britain’s friend or foe’. A quote from the poet Ian Duhig’s ‘Fauvel’s Prologue’ applies:

‘De Gaulle would snigger; he well knew
The tactic of imperialist Brits
Who ruled by inculcating splits.’

Tories of the current dominant persuasion have this preference for enmity over amity, for two fingers rather than a handshake.

Facts are one thing. What about opinion? Maitlis is also good in this subject. The BBC back in Brexit time tried to balance argument. But their notions of balance were politicised.

‘Balance is a word we always used at the BBC but balance is complicated. If it takes me five minutes to find ten economists who think Brexit is a terrible idea, and five hours to find an economist who says it will be absolutely brilliant, then having one of each side isn’t balanced.’

The Daily Telegraph carried an interview a few days ago with someone who might claim to be ‘the one economist’. (Though to be fair there are a few hanging out at the Institute of Economic Affairs, Policy Exchange and the Adam Smith Institute – low-tax ‘free-traders’ all.) I’m thinking of Patrick Minford, one-time advisor to Thatcher. He rails against the Treasury’s short-term rules ‘in which borrowing mustn’t happen’.

But with massive support about to be announced for energy bills, £100m or more, and built-in increases in health and social care expenditure, and defence, and other areas, which will push borrowing to an even high level, maybe unsustainable as the Institute of Fiscal Studies has warned – how and where do we cut?

Borrowing as a proportion of national debt was 41% in 2007 and 74% in 2010, and it’s 99% now. But Minford remains cool. ‘Solvency doesn’t mean we should be paying off debts tomorrow. It means a long-term strategy in which state spending is consistent with our tax revenues…’ Minford argues for the importance of infrastructure, health and education, ‘but ‘state spending has to be controlled’.

‘The NHS has to be made more efficient.’ One good example. For Minford and far right opinion more generally this is an ancient mantra. And we can all agree. But they see it in market terms. The competition-led Lansley reforms under Cameron were a miserable failure. So where now for ‘efficiency’. The focus should have been then and must be now on the better integration of health and social care. What chance Truss?

A recent Telegraph leader laid into Matthew Taylor, CEO of the NHS Confederation, for highlighting the impact of the energy crisis on the NHS. Focus on reform and leave the energy crisis to others was the deeply unhelpful conclusion.

Taylor, policy advisor to Tony Blair, author of a key report for Theresa May on employment practices, and for fifteen years chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, is one of the people to get behind to help reform the NHS, someone with a skill set and experience way ahead of anything the government, or a Telegraph leader writer, could offer.

Policy Exchange, a right-wing think tank, reminds us of the wider context. ‘Public spending that yields clear economic and social returns, including spending on the welfare state, enhances the performance of the economy, but beyond a certain point the cost is greater than the return and government spending begins to crowd out private sector economic activity and the tax base that public spending depends on.’

It’s an old-as-the-hills mantra. ‘Crowding out the private sector.’ And it might have applied in the days of mass nationalisation. But the state these days works, and has to work, in different and much more productive ways – working with the private sector.

Ultimately, we’re back to the old small-state low-tax trickle down shibboleths. Free traders argue that recent Tory governments pushed up taxes and obsessed about borrowing. The wrong targets they think. They argue for a diametrically opposite approach. At the same time they miss altogether the real focus, which has to include maximising opportunities in markets close to home – far more important than the Antipodes. Also, the Chinese aren’t a bunch of free traders. And the Americans have a vast internal market. We’re 70 million, and on our own. We need to get real.

Let’s see how the next year or two pan out. I think Truss and her team will find that they are radically disconnected from realities. Also, that they simple lack the ability to carry their policies through. They’ll jib at Civil Service resistance – from people who have to be cautious because they know the implications of foolishness.

They’ll also increasingly divorce themselves from the levelling-up cohort within the party. To argue that levelling up has to come from improved economic performance will not cut the mustard. The regions have been promised some evidence of jam now, or in the foreseeable, and they won’t get it.

Truss is also on record as saying that people outside London don’t work hard enough and, going back to a book she co-authored in 2012, that British workers as among the ‘worst idlers in the world’. ‘If you go to China it’s quite different. There’s a fundamental issue of British working culture.’ Yes, we are falling short compared to our neighbours on measures of both growth and productivity. I’d agree absolutely we need a more entrepreneurial spirit in this country. But blame the workers??

From all I’ve seen I have to conclude that Truss is simply unqualified for the job, a woman lacking the experience and the ability, and connection with realities, that we have a right to expect from our prime ministers. The same applies to her cabinet, a right-wing rump which has self-excluded the wisest and brightest in the wider party.

Do I (and so many others with me) misjudge? Time will tell. But I thought I’d put marker down, against which I can judge her in future time.

‘Avoid anyone with ideas’

Isabel Allende in her wonderful novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, highlights the extraordinary achievement of Pablo Neruda in arranging the transportation to Chile of two thousand refugees from the Spanish Civil War on an old cargo ship, the Winnipeg, in August 1939. The decision on who or who not should be accepted lay with Neruda. He cast his net wide to include ‘fishermen, farm and factory workers, manual labourers, and intellectuals as well, despite instructions from his government to avoid anyone with ideas.’

A cross-section of working populations would today look very different, but there is one category which governments feared, now as then, and that is ‘anyone with ideas’.

The market as understood by neoliberalism, epitomised probably better than anywhere else by Pinochet’s Chile, after the 1973 coup, but still pervading so much of Western, and especially American, society, has little time for ideas. Chile is a classic case where ideas, and freedom of expression, were pitched against market forces, and market forces won.

Tom Clark focuses on neo-liberalism in an excellent book review* in the current edition of Prospect. One point (of many) that caught my attention: ‘….a lot of the neoliberal agenda can be thought of … as akin to the historic enclosures of common land, excluding some in order to strengthen the property rights of others’. Readers of my blog will remember my review of Nick Hayes’ ‘The Book of Trespass’. Tom Clark goes on to remind us of ‘the American intellectual property regime that (prior to a 2013 court ruling) developed to allow 4,300 genes to be patented as if they were inventions’.

At an everyday level we have ‘other audacious enclosures’ which ‘have blocked most Britons from watching live football of TV and obliterated awareness of cricket from the young’. (Recent England internationals on free-to-air channels have been so bad that watching is best seen as an act of penance. Cricket on the other hand has been superb – and should have been out there on free-to air TV.)

Isabel Allende in ‘A Long Petal of the Sea’ sums up the situation in Pinochet’s Chile succinctly. ‘The government had decided public services should be in private hands. Health was not a right but a consumer good, to be bought and sold.’

This ties in neatly with Clark’s conclusion: ‘Only with a “property first” rather than a “freedom first” reading of neoliberalism can we …. grasp how [Friedrich] Hayek would defend the 1970s coup against an elected socialist government in Chile, which brought Pinochet’s murderous regime to power.’

The irony is that ‘ideas played an important part in the neoliberal story’. Its great proselytisers, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, thrived in that environment. But in Chile the coup closed off debate, closed out ideas, put an end to freedom of expression. Property (traditional landowners and American-owned mining companies) usurped freedom, when ultimately, in a democracy, the balance has always to be toward freedom.

The ‘audacious enclosures’ referred to above may seem small beer by comparison but as we’ve seen they are part of the same debate. Market forces are part of our lives, they drive our economies, but when they’re allied too closely with wealth, to property in the form of land and investments, as opposed to the incomes each of us earns, on our merits, in each generation, they over-reach – and the challenge lies in containing that over-reach. And for that we need, more than ever, an open market in ideas.

* ‘How the rich ate us’, reviewing books by Francis Fukuyama and Gary Gerstle

April, and no politics

It’s 26th April. We had snow three days three weeks back, and we’ve had sunshine since then, often brilliant sunshine, days on end, and the sky’s been a Siberian blue. But it’s not been enough. Not enough to tempt the blossom to really get going. True, the blackthorn which so brilliantly belies its name has been bursting white for several weeks. Only now is the green peeking through on the lilac and the rowan and the laburnum in the garden. The early beech leaves are that so-perfect lighter shade of green. Oak is poking, reluctant, slow.

And the ash is nowhere to be seen. It’s always late of course. Some branches have a few desultory flowers. But how much will they leaf this spring?

And yet…

Yes, it’s chill. But I’m enjoying ‘slow’. I want to lock in this April, its blue skies, and long-drawn out sense of promise.

I’m even listening to the news. At 8am and 1pm. And Channel 4 at 7pm. It’s not winding me up as it has through these torrid and foolish Brexit years. April has worked wonders.

Ted Hughes maybe overstates it, but I’ll go with

A soft animal of peace/Has come a million years/With shoulders of pre-dawn and shaggy belly

Has got up from under the glacier/And now lies openly sunning/Huge bones and space-weathered hide.

We’re up on the moors, grazing sheep, lambs maybe, above Calderdale where Yorkshire meets Lancashire. Ted Hughes country. Also my grandfather’s.

Imagine, also, if we could hear as once we did the cocks crowing across the morning:

I stood on a dark summit, among dark summits –/Tidal dawn splitting heaven from earth,/The oyster opening to taste gold.

And I heard the cockcrows kindling in the valley/Under the mist –/They were sleepy,/Bubbling deep in the valley cauldron.

Then one or two tossed clear, like soft rockets/And sank back again dimming.

(Others join in, ‘challenge against challenge’)

Till the whole valley brimmed with cockcrows,/A magical soft mixture boiling over,/Spilling and sparkling into other valleys….

Sadly, not into my valley. But we can imagine…

Poetry and politics out of San Francisco

Ferlinghetti and Hirschman, and remembering also the Turkish writer, Ahmet Altan

Back in the 1950s and 60s people were living on the edge, as they are now, in Covid times. The threat of nuclear war was ever-present. And by the 60s many of us were engaged in a fully-fledged protest movement. But we could be out there, talking, drinking, smoking, demonstrating. And a whole lot more.

I’ve been reading two San Francisco poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Hirschman. Back in 1953 Ferlinghetti founded the City Lights Bookstore, and in 1956 he published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and after he was prosecuted famously won a court case asserting the right of free speech under the First Amendment. Some forty years later, in 1998, he was named the first San Francisco Poet Laureate. Hirschman, in 2006, was the fourth.  

I had a Hirschman book on order… this was last Monday. The following day there arrived an email from a friend over in the States with a PS – had I seen the news, Ferlinghetti had just died. Aged 101. I’m sad, really sad, he’s gone. Amazed he was still alive.

Remember Howl? OK, you don’t remember. We weren’t alive or we were too young. But it’s a manifesto for anarchy, of a very 1950s and 60s kind. Not the destructive anarchy of the New Right of our own time. It’s the dream anarchy that the world will somehow set itself right. It’s just that ‘America’ is getting in the way.  Ginsberg celebrates ‘the best minds of his generation’, they’re ‘angel-headed hipsters … who poverty and tatters and hollowed-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz’. It’s political – but it doesn’t have a prospectus. It just wants you to know that it scorns the whole crazy moneyed apparatus of society.

Ferlinghetti also had the anarchist instinct but he was a practical guy. Founded the bookstore, published Howl, won that court case. But he also knew how to hit home: his is a ‘concrete continent/ spaced with bland billboards/ illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness’. (A Coney Island of the Mind, 1958)  Come 2007 he was more relaxed, the gentrification of San Francisco a big issue. But he was still campaigning for ‘poems that say something supremely original and supremely important, which everyone aches to hear, poetry that cries out to be heard, poetry that’s news’. Maybe the mass media might just print it, if it was ‘a new kind of news’. Though maybe ‘poets would still be ignored by our dominant culture, because they’re saying what our materialist, technophiliac world doesn’t want to hear’.

He was also asking that big question – what exactly what is a poet? He’s like an acrobat ‘on a high wire of his own making/ … a little charliechaplin man/ who may or may not catch/her fair eternal form’ when she comes swinging toward him. That’s from ‘A Coney Island’. His ‘Challenges to Young Poets’ from forty years later keeps it simple: ‘Write short poems in the voice of birds.’

Hirschman was something else, a Street not a Beat poet, a radical communist. (His book, ‘All That’s Left’, arrived yesterday.) ‘It was the Street poets who united with common causes…’ He celebrated SF’s Cafe Trieste, where you’d find ‘local radiances like Lawrence Ferlinghetti’, and ‘the older Beats and Baby Beats and the commies, the surrealists, the anarchists, the socialists, the jazzmen, the urban screwballs, the walk-in weirdos’. From another age he remembered ‘Federico, who would die for poetry’ – Lorca was a hero. ‘The sinking house of the setting sun’ was how he characterised New Orleans after Katrina. And, remembering the Virginia Tech massacre of thirty-two people, he wrote, ‘and now you know what a market/in old Baghdad feels like.’.

By contrast, the latter-day Ferlinghetti could be whimsical, a poet to smile and relax with in poems such as the ‘Green Street Mortuary Marching Band’. But he was still the same man. ‘To the Oracle at Delphi’ talks of America as a ‘new Empire … with its electronic highways/carrying its corporate monoculture/round the world’. (San Francisco Poems, 2001)

Hirschman never let up – hasn’t I’m sure to this day. You may or may not appreciate his encomium on Fidel Castro. But in the case of Mumia (Mumia Abu-Jamal) he drills his message home. Black Panther background, sentenced to death for murder in 1981, commuted in 2001, still in jail, many still arguing his case and his cause. Mumia has studied, taken a degree, written books, and inspired, all from jail. Hirschman imagines his final victory – ‘your victory will be the priceless uplifting of the human spirit’.

He refers to Mumia as the ‘Nazim Hikmet/of the American grain, that Turkish poet who/spent 26 years in prison…. No amount of bars/or shackles can chain/the revolutionary impulse/of the human heart’.

Mumia’s case still divides America, along party lines, Right and Left. I am, over in the UK, in no position to comment on the rights and wrongs of his conviction. But the reference to Nazim Hikmet does strike home.

In our own time, as some of us are planning holidays in Turkey, we have the extraordinary and vicious incarceration of Turkish journalists and writers (and teachers and lawyers and many others) under the Erdogan regime. One is the writer Ahmet Altan, arrested in 2016, then released and re-arrested the same day. Now serving a life sentence. In his book (smuggled as extracts from jail), ‘Never will I see the world again’, he writes:

‘Never again would I be able to kiss the woman I love, embrace my kids, meet with my friends…I would not be able to listen to a violin concerto or to go on a trip or browse in bookstores or buy bread from a bakery or gaze at the sea…’

It’s a long paragraph. And it hit me hard.

Distant rooftops

I watched Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats last night, via YouTube and The Show Must Go On.  I loved it – for its music, its singing, dancing, choreography, characterisation. The whole things knocked me out.

I’m taking it as my stepping-off point on a very different subject. From musical theatre to hard-core political theatre.

There’s a revealing short article, part of a feature on trade, by Liz Truss (Minister for Distant Rooftops) in the current edition of Prospect.

She highlights the many long international supply chains ‘with little resilience to shocks’. The answer is, she believes, ‘not isolation and self-sufficiency – neither of which are credible in the interdependent world we live in. Instead we should broaden our range of trading relationships, so we are not limited to just one country, bloc or continent. We can then begin to achieve the kind of diverse supply chains that will safeguard us against future crises.’

This is what you’d expect from one of the authors of that cheerful libertarian document, Britannia Unchained, and trailblazer of the dream world of Global Britain.

(I’m reminded of Dick Whittington, a cat from another time and place, seeking his fortune – but this time in China.)

I’d like to pitch against that, as a down-home example, Preston’s policy of prioritising local suppliers. Two radically different paradigms. Preston’s is compatible with global trading relationships. But not with a libertarian free-market paradigm, whereby you source the cheapest goods and services, regardless of origin. Boris Johnson has indeed singled-out Preston for back-handed praise: recognising its success but making it clear it isn’t the way forward for the country.

(Boris, our absentee prime minister: ‘Whatever time the deed took place,/Macavity wasn’t there!’ Only, in Boris’s case, he too often hasn’t been there in the first place.)

It should be self-evident, but sadly isn’t to the current Cabinet, that local and international need to work in tandem.

Diversified supply chains, even if they are achievable in Truss’s romanticised world, will not safeguard us against future crises. The further we reach beyond Europe, and the more we’re exposed to issues of distance and transport, and all the problems that arise from political and military conflict, the higher the levels of risk.

The latest edition of The Economist is on the same page, though not quite the same tack, as I am: ‘The pandemic will politicise travel and migration and entrench a bias towards self-reliance. This inward-looking lurch will enfeeble the recovery, leave the economy vulnerable and spread geopolitical instability.’

No-one is arguing against global trade. The reverse. Pursue it as hard as we can. But it’s essential we secure our base, and that is our local and national economies – and indeed European economies. That need not be ‘an inward-looking lurch’.

I shouldn’t push parallels with Cats too far. But – secure your own rooftop, then your wider patch. Don’t rely on Mr Mistoffelees, aka Dom Cummings, to magic your way out of trouble.

An obsession with global trade is especially bizarre from a government which secured its election on the basis of an appeal to the country’s insular instincts. But that’s taking us back to old arguments.

‘… a new day will begin,’ as Elaine Page sings. It won’t come the way we’re going now.

 

 

That bloody liberal establishment …

I took in the newspaper headlines in the supermarket yesterday. The TLS (Times Literary Supplement) caught my eye, snugged in near the Daily Mail. I bought a copy and over lunch read up on a recent biography of Descartes and the correspondence of Albert Camus and Maria Casares, celebrated author and the most celebrated French (though born in Spain) actress of her time. I was taken down back alleys which intrigue in themselves, and also have resonances with the here and now. Descartes escaping to the Netherlands to be free to explore his ideas on the primacy of human reason, away from the frivolities and scepticism of the Richelieu-dominated court. Camus and Casares: a correspondence that’s so distinctively French – could there be an English equivalent, and a bestseller to boot?

I’ve not found such byways of the intellect so rewarding recently. They belong to the old certainties, and the old certainties have faced a pretty ruthless challenge.

We had crises in politics ten years ago, indeed the biggest financial crisis for eighty years, but reason and rational debate were still the order of the day. That curious liberal idea of progress, however intermittent, however blighted, still underlay our attitudes, incremental, one step forward, one back – but we had a direction of travel. The House of Commons took a big hit with the expenses scandal, and austerity divided the nation in the years that followed, but debate still followed the traditional course in parliament, the media sniped and panicked, but didn’t dominate. Likewise the Tory right with their psychodramatic skills: they were kept on the periphery.

Post-referendum, the idea of a perverse ‘liberal establishment’ has taken hold, with all the anger toward and alienation from the ‘establishment’ now pinned on a  supposed liberal elite. Thinkers like David Goodhart have not helped, recusing themselves from a ‘liberal establishment’ (overly fond of smart dinner parties) of which they claim to have been a part.

Now we find liberal democracy ‘fighting for its life’. There’s a Times (newspaper) debate at the forthcoming Cheltenham Literary Festival entitled ‘Is Liberal Democracy Dying?’.  The Economist has just launched, as a counter-punch to doubters, a series of articles on great liberal thinkers, beginning with John Stuart Mill.

In much of the media the word ‘liberal’ is pitched against the ‘will of the people’, expertise against an instinct for change regardless of where change might take us. A new establishment, which has pulled strings covertly for many a year, asserts itself, funded by billionaires, pursuing apparently simple solutions to intractable problems, and supporting leaders who they think might enact those solutions.

How does this connect back to the two Frenchmen, Descartes and Camus? Simply that intellectual debate, and the pursuit of intellect byways as well as highways, is the very substance of our humanity. We might hide from it, in front of the TV many an evening, we may affect to scorn intellectuals and highbrow pursuits. The Economist quotes the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, ‘who thought that pushpin, a board game, was  “of equal value … with poetry”’.’

The intellectual life, as well as cultural life, is about sustained thought, sustained engagement, about expertise, about the ability to argue and debate, and change and challenge. It’s all about imagination, but not about dreams or fantasies. (Though they have their place.) Deeper pleasures build on themselves, take us in new directions. Simple pleasures endlessly repeat. There should be no snobbery here, but it’s too easy to paint intellectual life that way.

Taking John Stuart Mill as an exemplar, in The Economist’s words: ‘He renounced shibboleths, orthodoxies and received wisdom: anything that stopped people thinking for themselves.’

I don’t want to see this country ruled by a liberal establishment, or a media establishment. But I do hold to liberal ideas of openness and debate, and to the belief that intellectual life should be part of the warp and weft of everyday life, and not an adjunct hived off to universities.

That’s a tall order of course. But what if we re-define ‘intellectual life’ and take it out of its ivory tower. To quote the Economist on Mill again: ‘[He] wanted [people] to be exposed to as wide a range of opinion as possible, and for no idea or practice to remain unchallenged. That was the path to both true happiness and progress.’

And it allows us to re-define intellectual life, as the life of the mind.

Holding to that definition, we won’t suddenly solve the world’s problems. But we will at least be opening doors, rather than closing them, and that is the first pre-requisite of progress.

Political dream worlds – the case of Daniel Hannan

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams …

WB Yeats was writing about love… but I’m thinking here of shattered political dreams. Dreams of love, yes, they drive our lives, and they are, just occasionally, fulfilled. But they are personal, one to one. And we accept and expect the risk.

But do not transfer the world of dreams to politics. Aspirations, yes. Not dreams.

Why do some people who are trained as historians not act like them? Bring the rigour that history requires to argument? One reason is that they see history as story, they’re story-tellers, conjurers of dream worlds, they fit the realities to the story and they come to believe the story. Another is that they engage in hypotheses, and parade them as fact, without the rigour of peer-review that we get in scientific disciplines. Story and hypotheses can of course inspire each other.

Why would, for example, the arch-Brexiteer and free-trader Daniel Hannan (and Oxford-educated historian) miss the mark by such a margin? Brexit, he wrote on the Conservative Home website back in May, isn’t working out as he thought it would. I remember a piece he wrote in the Daily Telegraph before the referendum vote about how a post-Brexit Britain would look in ten years’ time. He imagined the future – or rather, a future, anticipated it as if truth and certainty were engrained within it, which no trained historian should do. He believed his own imaginings. Hope became a certain future reality.

He fooled himself, and he gave substance to the visions of others.

The past is full of accidents, wrong turnings, expectations which are never realised, impossible to realise, based on dreams and imaginings. We have no choice but to have radical ideas, our world requires it, on the way the world economy functions, disparities of wealth, population growth and movements, the poverty of much of mass-culture, climate change – Christ, yes! – be radical. But pursue change incrementally. Avoid the sudden turnings.

The NHS, which we are busy celebrating, came about and has survived over seventy years, because it was of its time, it was a logical and necessary step. It may seem to us, with our hindsights, like the fulfilment of a dream, but it was anything but.  It came out of the hard necessities of its time.

Connections…

How we each connect to events and stories … how our personal connections make them more real for us. My context here is the story Philippe Sands tells in East West Street. (See my last post.)

Poetry is a powerful connector. Sands quotes the Polish poet, Jozef Wittlin, ‘the poet of hopeful idylls’.

‘Where are you now, park benches of Lwow, blackened with age and rain, coarse and  cracked like the bark of medieval olive trees,’ he wrote in 1946.  (Lwow has many names – Lvov, Lemberg, Lviv.)

‘I can hear the bells of Lwow ringing, each one rings differently. I can hear the splash of the fountains in market square, and the soughing of fragrant trees, which the spring rain has washed clean of dust.’

I was reminded of a powerful poem I discovered two or three years ago, To Go To Lvov, by Adam Zagajewski.

To leave/in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September/or in March. But only if Lvov exists,/if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just/in my new passport, if lances of trees/—of poplar and ash—still breathe aloud …

Why do I connect to this – to the many identities of Lvov, its history, the frontiers that change around the city, but the city remains?

In part because in the foolishness of our own times, and the mega-weight of warfare we can bring to bear, and the arrogance of our notions of superiority, we have destroyed cities and communities which date back to biblical times. ‘Our notions’ – innocent, protesting our innocence, we have disturbed the age-old patterns, the habits and simple tolerance that allowed people’s and ways of life to rub along – sometime only just, but they did –  they rubbed along together.

But more, even more, because of the destruction of the Jewish community in Poland and Ukraine.

Martin Buber lectured in Lemberg. He was a passionate advocate of Jewish and Arab coexistence in Palestine, and author of ‘I and Thou’, and he’s long-time hero of mine. Coexistence. Two peoples, side by side. 

Sands’ grandfather moved from Lemberg to Vienna, his mother Ruth escaped Vienna on a train in 1939. Also in that decade, though earlier, my professor at the Warburg Institute, Ernst Gombrich, had left Vienna for London, along with many others from the Jewish community of that remarkable city.

Gombrich suggested to me I might make the Jewish ghetto in 18th century Venice my subject for a PhD thesis. That sadly never happened.

One final link. I see that Sands serves on the board of the Hay Festival, from which we’ve just returned. His advocacy of human rights in the context of international law matches the mood and commitment of many of the speakers at Hay … matches the mood of so many people around the world, their belief that their own small contributions, taking in the aggregate, will ultimately turn the tides of history around, and we as individuals whatever our groups, communities, countries, will come to see ourselves as citizens of the world.

Gloucester, Easter Sunday morning

Easter Sunday, and a forecast of dullness belied by brilliant sun, and a blue sky which set off the white stone of Gloucester Cathedral. 8pm, early morning communion in the choir, before the high altar. Above us the great 14th century window reputedly commemorating the battle of Crecy. About thirty people at communion, come 11pm the cathedral will be packed, chairs await them in every corner of nave and aisle. After communion I waited awhile, and stood at the back of the nave, looking toward organ and altar, and all was (for a few minutes) empty, not a soul, just the great Norman columns in stately procession toward the transept, and the simple vaulted ceiling, in sharp contrast to the wonderful fan vaulting of the choir.

(Should anyone wonder why a blog with zen in its title should be comfortable with early communion… There’s a silence, a time for contemplation, in the early morning. I’ll say no more than that.)

In the cathedral precinct there’s major landscaping, and fences everywhere, but lift your eyes to the cathedral walls, the tower and the sky, and there is all the space, and all the serenity you could wish for in the world.

Ivor Gurney has a close association with the cathedral.  The son of a Gloucester tailor, he was composer, writer of songs, poet, and a celebrant of the Gloucestershire landscape, in his poems from the front, and in his letters. Windows in the Lady Chapel commemorate him, and I always pay a visit when I come to the cathedral – but not today. The Lady Chapel is fenced off, major renovations until the autumn. They will make for easier access, and maybe more people will find sanctuary there, and take in the wonderful stained glass (by Tom Denny) of the Gurney memorial. He survived the first war, but his mind didn’t, incarcerated in a mental home in Kent he longed for his home county, and the Severn vale, where he’d walked countless times…

One place he walked was Cranham, whose woods he celebrated, and where I am now. Reached via the Portway, down and up which I drove an hour or two ago. Gurney would have walked, and he’d have seen that amphitheatre of woodland and meadow opening up ahead, farms either side, and a vast sky above. He was obsessed with the idea of beauty, above all the beauty of his home county. It gave him comfort in France. He recalls in a letter home how the tower of the church of Merville reminds him of Gloucester’s tower. Both churches rise above the landscape, are landmarks, and inspirations.

Walking back to my car, I passed along pedestrianised streets, stained, a little ragged, forlorn, and empty on an Easter Sunday morning. Only Macdonalds and Burger King open, and they only just. How would Gurney have responded to the decay of his old city? To the contrast between shops, and cathedral and precinct, an absolute contrast. How I wondered as I walked back could the city be revived, made vibrant and colourful as a city centre should be – and keep all the while the quiet and sanctity and celebration of the cathedral and its surrounds.

One of many questions this Easter, an Easter where questions seem to crowd in on all sides – so many questions where there are no obvious answers.