Brave New World

Brave New World

After watching England's football team (mercifully but deservedly) beat Tunisia in the last few minutes two nights ago I spent a very enjoyable hour on my balcony, calvados in hand and breathing in the scent of the jasmine all around me (see photo), and got to wondering about the rôle of the middle classes in a society. I'm not sure why that thought occurred, although I am very conscious of a battle that seems to me to be going on for supremacy between the extreme right and the middle ground in Europe (and elsewhere).

I immediately recalled something that a Ghanaian student had said to me at Bristol university in the early 1960s. At the time, the Ghanaian president Nkrumah was busy slaughtering the middle classes in his country in order to cement his power. She said, ruefully: “At least it shows we have a middle class”. Why was that important? Because at the time most of the rest of the post-colonial, recently independent countries were engaged in conflict between extreme right and left-wing contenders for power, promoted by external capitalist/communist influences. They didn't have a middle class.

So what is the significance of a middle class, in Napoleon's scornful terms Britain's “shopkeepers”? According to George Bernard Shaw it was the bastion of morality (of a sort). GBS said that only the middle classes valued morality; the rich didn't need it and the poor couldn't afford it. And the middle classes, the bourgeousie, were widely ridiculed in artistic circles for their presumed philistinism; they rejected art that was extreme in any sense, irrespective of its artistic value, and embraced what was unchallenging. In general, the middle classes got a poor Press, neither one thing nor the other, portrayed as having no aesthetic sensibilities and as having aspirations only to distinguish themselves from the lower classes and aspiring to (slavishly aping ) the upper classes. This was the stereotypical picture of the middle classes in a lot of Europe in the (post-war) 1950s.

Someone significant (shame on me, I can't remember who) once said that all important battles have to be fought continually; they are never truly resolved. That is most certainly true of democracy. And, I think, the role of the middle classes in democracy is now more important than ever. Philistines to art and the possibilities of how life might be lived (keep the aspidistra flying) they may be, though not necessarily, but they are the bastions that keep extremes of political greed and power at bay. They also, almost innocently, assumed the importance and general acceptance of standards: honesty, integrity, moderation (and, OK, often God and the Queen and so on but so what). And no one believes that they always adhered to these “principles” but they did assert the importance of them. I believe that that assertion (in practice or not) had great importance in itself.

What I think is happening in our brave new world is that this “innocence” persists in middle classes but has become increasingly different from reality and blinds them to that reality. You could believe (and did) in what you read in newspapers, heard on the radio or saw on TV. OK, there were slightly different slants/angles but you could generally accept the substance as true. You most certainly can't now. There was a pride in the journalistic profession that journalists checked facts and gave reasoned opinions on them; that is most certainly no longer true. The distinction, once the “credo” of The Times newspaper, between the facts and the opinion, has long gone. There was a belief that institutions such as the BBC was independent and would report accurately and fairly, overlooking (innocently) its dependence on the government for budget. Broadly, you believed what you heard and saw and that, generally, wasn't too far from reality. You believed that your local MP did have the interests of his/her constituency at heart, whatever the conflict of views. The assumed standards prevailed. Only a true innocent or ignoramus would believe that now.

What, in contrast, we have now is “nature red in tooth and claw”. The power struggles are naked; lies repeated ad nauseam can become accepted as fact. But persisting innocence makes the middle classes blind to them and, perhaps, to the power that the middle classes have in a democracy if wielded as a collectivity. I think we need the middle classes and their value of standards more than ever now but we also need the middle classes to lose their innocence and wake up to the new reality.

Society, Community And The Politics Of The Pigs' Troth

Society, Community And The politics Of The Pig's Troth

I had some friends around to eat the other night, among them friend Nick who lives just along the road. We ended up, over coffee and calvados, reminiscing about our childhood. Both of us had what could today be called a deprived childhood, although neither of us wanted to claim that, but it certainly wasn't privileged. It was both happy and innocent but involved actions that today could have called down the wrath of authorities, court cases and who knows what else. So exactly what has changed, and made things worse?

I think there are three basic causes. one is political correctness, another is the politics of the pigs' troth and the third is a lack of any sense of society and community.

In our youngest days (and I speak here without Nick's specific if perhaps general consent) we would try to see a girl's knickers, claiming to be one up if we did so, and girls would collapse giggling if they saw a boy's penis (or nearly). So what? It's what kids of 7-8 do, isn't it? They're curious and want to get one-up on their mates. But a boy bending down to see a girl's knickers or flipping up her skirt, or a girl doing something to see a boy's underpants /penis is technically a sexual assault. Similarly, a kid scrumping apples/pears/cherries even flowers (which we all did; I well remember pinching a rose from someone's garden to give to a girlfriend) is technically theft but would be met with a thick ear if you were caught. There was never any question of making a court case out of such routine occurrences. Of course there were paedophiles then, as there are now, but then you lived in a community who knew who the paedophiles were and kids were warned to stay clear of them. It wasn't watertight prevention but was generally effective.

A clue? I've used the word “technically” twice and that is what the political correctness adherents do. They advocate that what is technically true has to be the truth and want the full force of the law to back them. To what end? To prove that they are right, whatever the social consequences; necessary at the time, perhaps they would claim, in denial of the consequences.

If this is music to the ears of anyone it is to those of unscrupulous lawyers and insurance companies. Lawyers want legal challenges; that is their source of revenue. Insurance companies want risks you might be persuaded to insure against.

Which leads me to the politics of the pig's troth, of which unscrupulous lawyers and insurance companies are only part. When Nick and I were young there were numerous trades, disciplines, potential careers apparently available; but just making money wasn't obviously one of them. You made money if you were successful in your career. Now, making money is a career in itself (means irrelevant) in an analogy to those people who, by general consent, are famous for being famous rather than for anything exceptional that they have done.

Once making money becomes a career (means irrelevant), the idea of achievement in any field becomes irrelevant. It doesn't matter how good you are, at anything, what matters is how much money you make, by fair means or foul. So we have the rip-off society, which ignores all social consequences. Society is dismissed. It is a hymn to Thatcherism, “there is no such thing as society”.

Mitterand once said that “nationalism is war”. The same could be said of a lack of any sense of society or community, as is evidenced in numerous suburbs of large towns around Europe. In the place of community and society, destructive gangs proliferate, feeding off their own. “Alienation” is the word always used there. So, we need to get rid of aliens? Or do we need to build a consciousness of the importance of society and community?