Porter’s Pensées

The LRB Xmas party was pretty good fun, as usual. I always feel at home there, amongst the Metropolitan Lefty intellectuals; much more so than at the Literary Review ‘Bad Sex Awards’ party, held just before, at the Army and Navy Club, surrounded by pictures of heroic massacres (a.k.a. ‘battles’), and peopled mainly, it seems, by the upper-classes, celebrities, and the literary set. It’s odd how much the two tribes differ. I’d have expected there to be more overlap. Again, it was fun (the ‘bad sex’ bits read from the prizewinning novels), but I didn’t feel comfortable. As one gets older one leaves off exploring new and exotic environments, as I used to delight in doing, and reverts to type. I realised at the LRB ‘do’ that I should really live in Islington. Most of the others there seemed to. Impossible now, of course, with London house prices as they are.

I was even less comfortable at that Swedish lawyers’ event, which I reported on earlier (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/11/25/the-swedish-lawyers/), and thought at the time had gone OK, but I now realise didn’t. My talk was obviously not what they wanted, but never having been in or anywhere near the mind of a besuited conservative Swedish lawyer before I still have no idea what that might have been. I’ve received no thanks for my talk, only for ‘making the journey’; and they demanded I produce receipts for all my (very modest) travel expenses. I don’t have them all – for taxis, for example. I thought they might recompense me for other ‘expenses’ too, like the four days’ profitable writing time I took out to prepare and travel for the talk – I should have been working on my LRB piece: 800 quid! – but no sign of that yet. And I always thought that lawyers were well-heeled! It was explained to me afterwards that this wasn’t in my (verbal) ‘contract’ with them. That illustrates the difference between our two worlds. Academics don’t ask for fees or expenses up front – asking is too mercenary for their elevated calling – but they quite like to get something for their efforts, contract or no. Next time I’ll remember to negotiate beforehand. And get it in writing.

My expenses haven’t come through yet. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.* In which case I apologise to my hosts. But I still don’t think I could ever feel relaxed in their world. It’s not a national –  Swedish/British – thing, but professional. It’s our callings in life that mainly define our ‘identities’. I can get on perfectly well with Stockholm’s equivalent of our Islington set. (Enskedegruppen? Kajsa – to the left in the photo below – will correct me.) And I’m sure Sweden’s lawyers would have plenty in common with ours.

*No. The bare minimum. 20/12.

No proper post this time, just a pic.

With our lost leader, at the LRB Christmas Party, 12 December. He would be my choice still.

So, David Cameron blames his ignominious defeat over Brexit on the rise of ‘populism’ (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/david-cameron-populism-cost-him-his-job-following-eu-referendum_uk_584a6921e4b0fccb67992bcc). By that he clearly means the ‘mob’, which has been the great bugbear of his class and political persuasion for centuries. It was the fear of ‘mob rule’, in fact, which led the makers – or rather evolvers – of the British constitution, such as it is, to insert safeguards into it in order to avoid the great unwashed’s storming the ramparts of their privileges, so endangering not only those privileges, but also – they claimed – the security and well-being of the nation as a whole.

The ascendency of Parliament – composed (the Commons, that is) of elected representatives who would be able to channel the will of the people safely, after due debate (three readings of any bill), and then subject to amendment by the House of Lords and clarification by the judiciary, the powers of all of these being ‘separated’, as in the USA – was the main formal means to this. Other means, rather less overt, but still effective, were official secrecy (about which I’m just now writing a piece for the LRB); the oppressive use of certain laws; privileges granted to unelected people and bodies; propaganda; and various other forms of chicanery. All this, of course, as it becomes revealed – as it is being, for example in the book I’m reviewing for the LRB – somewhat undermines the claim that these ‘checks and balances’ are working to the benefit of ‘the people’ at large.

But there’s something in what Dave says. Analysis has shown that Brexit voters were on average lower-class, less well educated and poorer than those who voted the other way: a pretty good indication what the upper-classes would regard as ‘mobbery’. (See http://www.politico.eu/article/graphics-how-the-uk-voted-eu-referendum-brexit-demographics-age-education-party-london-final-results/.) But that’s not the main point. It doesn’t matter who voted for Brexit, so much as the circumstances in which they voted. I can imagine other demographics voting (in my opinion) wrongly, on this or on other questions; if, as in this case, they aren’t given the opportunity to consider their votes calmly and seriously, and are forced to decide on the basis of inaccurate facts (those Brexit battlebuses and posters of invading Turks), and on just one single occasion, at a time of great political feeling about other issues, and of popular frustration and resentment on a number of grounds – I’ve already argued that it was these that lay behind many of the ‘leave’ votes (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/); on the basis of a simple and, as it turned out, very narrow majority of votes (most foreign referenda on fundamental constitutional issues demand a significantly larger-than-50% majority); and – lastly – with no mechanism for reconsideration. There is one such mechanism, in fact, which however is what the Brexiteers are getting so het up about now: putting it to Parliament, they say, will flout the ‘popular voice’. But that is exactly what British Parliamentary democracy, which they claim to want to liberate from Brussels tyranny, is – or was – all about. Not flouting the popular will, necessarily, but ensuring that, on such an important issue as this, it is a considered and tested will. Not just a hasty decision taken for reasons irrelevant to the main issue, and which might melt away in the very near future, and especially without sober consideration: meaning three readings in the Commons, at least.

According to Wikipedia Cameron took History A-Level at Eton – though he didn’t follow this through at Oxford. Didn’t he study any British Constitutional history, which should have taught him all this? If he had done, he would have realised that Britain has never been a country ruled by plebiscite, and for very good reasons, quite apart from the less laudable ones. At the very least, he would have made it plain that the referendum he called to appease his wilder backbenchers was advisory only; should have emphasised that Parliament was still sovereign; and possibly – taking the example of other nations – might have required a (say) 60% majority, for such a huge and shattering decision. And if he’d been more in touch with the ‘people’, he might have seen the popular reaction against his government  – indeed, against ‘Westminster’ generally – emerging a lot sooner than he did. There were clear signs of it. The surprise is that it took him so much by surprise.

What an ignorant and irresponsible fool he was; to have so misjudged the nation, and then wagered its entire fate on the flip of one coin.

My latest review is of a book about Scandinavia: literaryreview.co.uk/nordic-by-nature. It’s behind a paywall; but here is my original version.

Robert Ferguson, Scandinavians. In Search of the Soul of the North. Blake Books, 455 pp., illustrated, £25. 3 Nov 2016.

This book started out as a quest for the Holy Grail of Scandinavian ‘melancholy’. Robert Ferguson has lived in Norway for thirty years, and published biographies of the pretty gloomy Ibsen and the unrelievedly depressing (and fascist) Knut Hamsun, so he must know something of it. The book is an odd one, jumping around from one country and one historical era to another, interspersed with personal reminiscences and transcriptions of conversations he has had with literary figures, interrupted in medias res with an original three-act playlet featuring Ibsen, his wife, and the mother of the illegitimate child he fathered in his youth, and mentioning melancholia every now and then; but never quite reaching his stated goal. Indeed, we’re left feeling at the end that it has all been something of a wild goose chase, the myth of Scandinavian melancholy being simply that – a myth – spread around Europe by a few well-known artists – Ibsen, Strindberg, Munch, Ingmar Bergman – and latterly by the popularity in Britain of those astonishingly popular ‘Nordic noir’ TV series, themselves rooted in the same fin-de-siècle stereotype. It’s one of Ferguson’s literary friends, the translator Birger Rønning, whose conversation, retailed here, is most persuasive of this, even if we can’t be sure that Ferguson himself has been quite convinced. ‘Scandinavian melancholy is a literary illusion… For a hundred years that’s all the world ever knew about the Scandinavians. We were appointed official purveyors of melancholy to the rest of Europe.’ In fact the gloomy stereotype of the Nordics is no more accurate than their idea of the Brits as tweed-clad pipe-smokers with silly upper-class accents. More generally (though this is my conclusion, not Ferguson’s or Rønning’s) this could be taken as a cautionary lesson for literary scholars who assume they can ever divine the ‘soul’ of any nation from its élite literature. You need to search more widely than that. (If a nation could be said to have a ‘soul’, that is.)

That said, Scandinavians is a terrific read. It has some great descriptions of the Vikings (from the Sagas plus a few stones), Denmark’s and then Sweden’s Stormaktstider (Great Power ages), and later murders, like the infamous Malexander ones in 1999, by a pair of prison inmates paroled in order to perform a play in public as a form of therapy, under Sweden’s proudly progressive penal policy. The mass-murderer Breivik also comes into it, though less prominently. It even has a car-chase. Ordinary democratic life in Scandinavia features far less, making Ferguson’s account less recognizable to someone who lives there more dully; though it is not entirely neglected, its consensual nature being held largely responsible, if not for Scandinavian melancholy, then for the madness and extreme forms of artistic expression (Munch, Strindberg) that it produces, Ferguson claims, as a desperate attempt to escape from it. It’s this that accounts for the otherwise seemingly inexplicable factor, actually measured in a number of recent international surveys, that Scandinavia is the happiest place on earth. How can you be both happy and sad? If there is a key, this is it.

All this looks like a wild guess to me. But literary scholars are good at wild guesses, some of which might be true, and in any case are generally thought-provoking. That’s what makes a book like this worthwhile. It reads like many nineteenth-century travel books, which also combined wonderful narrative description with bright speculation. It’s splendid on the differences between what Ferguson calls the three main Scandinavian ‘tribes’, which are too often lumped together, but which go right back to Viking times; on the age-old competition between them; on the long tradition in Scandinavian history of powerful (as well as beautiful) women, which he attributes to the fact that Viking men were out raiding most of the time, leaving the women to take charge of everything else; on the elevated position of writers in Norwegian society, taking the place of the aristocracy that was formally abolished in 1821; on the serious wars that were fought between Denmark-Norway and Muslim north Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, provoked by the latter’s slave-raiding in the north, which were new to me; on the three countries’ very different experiences of World War II (Ferguson suggests that Sweden’s guilt over her semi-collaboration with Germany then may partly explain her generosity towards Middle Eastern refugees today); on polar explorers, especially the ludicrous and ill-fated effort by the Swede Salomon August Andrée and his crew to beat their more famous Norwegian contemporaries to the North Pole by flying over them in a balloon (too heavy to take off at the start, they jettisoned their furs but kept the crate of champagne – they were later found frozen to death); on the enlightened Danish regent Johann Friedrich Struensee and his ghastly end (in the process of his execution his genitals were cut off and displayed to the watching crowd); on the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who turns out to be far more interesting than I, for one, had thought; on Danish football; and quite a bit more.

Not too much more, because Ferguson prefers to elaborate a limited number of themes, characters and events in a novelistic kind of way, rather than to attempt any kind of comprehensiveness, or impose a logical order on his material. But it’s this that makes the book so thoroughly enjoyable – to me at any rate, as a fellow-exile in the not very melancholic North; but I should guess for anyone new to it, too.

Sorry for the silence. Due to travel, family, despair at the way things are going (except in Austria), and the feeling that I’ve nothing new or original to say. But I’ll be back.

In the meantime this (below) seems to me a brilliant strategy, albeit a painful one, for us Remainers. – Don’t try to row back on the referendum, however unsatisfactory it may seem as an expression of the established ‘will of the people’, taken as it was at one tiny moment of a very confused and difficult time. Let Nigel, Boris, Govey and Co. hang themselves with their own petards. Don’t make it easy for them, with a ‘soft Brexit’, which they won’t appreciate in any case. Then rub it in; and hope for a return to sanity.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/david-vigar/let-brexit-happen-let-peo_b_13374722.html?utm_hp_ref=uk.

I posted some historical background to the ‘Snooper’s Charter’, which has just been passed, in March this year. Here it is: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/03/01/the-snoopers-charter/.

The talk seemed to go OK, though you can never tell. About 60 there? I kept it short and informal. My host thought parts of it might be ‘outside their comfort zone’ (I think he meant a bit left-wing), and so made them think; but that’s not a bad thing. Everyone very formally dressed, as Kajsa warned me, but some – obviously the rebels – had open-neck shirts. Food v.g., and genuine champagne, not Prosecco (I checked). 80% men. A nice bunch of people. Probably.

What made me sad was how upset they felt about Brexit. They had regarded the Brits as their main allies in Europe, sharing many of the same criticisms of the EU that they have. That made me feel guilty. As well as fucking ourselves up, we’ve betrayed our friends.

Clio has let me down. Not that I’ve ever regarded History as a reliable guide to the present or the future, and much of my recent writing activity has been devoted to questioning the lessons that others have believed they could infer from the past; but I can usually find one or two historical precedents that might shed some light on the present. There are of course some obvious ones to act as warnings against Trump and Trumpery and Farage and Farageism today, of which Europe in the 1930s is the one that usually comes to all our minds, perfectly reasonably, I think: so long as we take account of the peculiarly American cultural influences that serve to differentiate American Fascism (which it is) from, say, Nazism. But I can think of no historical precedent for the degree of irrationalism that is infecting Anglo-American politics today. The best I can do are inter-war Germany; Berlusconi; the witch-burnings of the 17^th century; and lots of events in more ‘primitive’ ages. Even these rarely exhibited the kind of light-headed craziness we are seeing nowadays, and which is a major characteristic. (I touched on this, briefly, many posts ago: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/tragedy-or-farce/). Nazism was always deadly serious – though many foreign contemporaries early on regarded Hitler as a bit of a joke. Farage and Trump seem to have entered mainstream politics by donning clownish uniforms, possibly to reassure people. Who wouldn’t mind, in ordinary circumstances, sharing a pint with Nige? (I mean, of course, white men.) We already have ‘Post-Truth’ – it’s just entered the Oxford English Dictionary; why not ‘Post-History‘? (The Sequel to Fukuyama.) I may return to this.

In the meantime I have my talk to give to the Swedish lawyers this afternoon. (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/11/18/brexit-for-swedish-lawyers/.) I’m nervous. I always like to know my audience, and I’ve had little to do with lawyers, apart from academic ones, since they fleeced me of £5000 in connection with my divorce twenty years ago. (In Sweden it would have been much cheaper.) Being Swedish, they probably know at least as much about Brexit as I do: their press reported every twist and turn of the EU debate fully, and much more objectively than ours. Still, I shall dress smartly for them, with a jacket and tie (Kajsa tells me that lawyers are the last profession in Sweden to wear suits); and I understand that wine will be available, to calm me down. (Note to self: Don’t mention Assange.)

The Queen is asking for £369 millions of taxpayers’ money to refurbish Buckingham Palace. I’m sure it needs it, just as the Palace of Westminster does. I don’t go along with those who say we could use the money to build a thousand new hospitals (or whatever); we ought to be able to afford both. (And would, if we taxed ourselves enough.) Public buildings are important, in all kinds of ways: people recognise and like them, and they give a sense of visual identity to places which otherwise wouldn’t be worth visiting. Just imagine a town whose most impressive building was a Tescos (there may be some: Stoke-on-Trent?), or a row of similarly utilitarian edifices. Or something as vulgar as a Trump Tower. London is defined and recognised, in part, by Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. So it’s worth some money – I’m not sure about the £369 million – to shore them up.

My only gripe is that they are such poor buildings, architecturally. If they weren’t so ‘iconic’ I might be in favour of pulling them down. The Palace of Westminster was always an uncomfortable merging of opposite styles of architecture, by a classical and a Gothic architect, before Pugin (the Goth) had truly mastered his style. The view that we all know of Buckingham Palace is of a re-facing job that was done in 1911, possibly the worst period in British history for official public architecture, and reeks of philistine imperialism, which it was intended (I think) to celebrate: dull, repetitive, and soulless. Most of the other large buildings erected at around that time were the same. ‘High’ imperialism and art don’t mix.

But then what distinguished public buildings does London have, to compare with – for example – Vienna , Paris, Berlin, even Stockholm? Wren’s St Paul’s looks like a bank. Westminster Abbey is ruined by those awful, disproportioned West Towers – designed by Hawksmoor, a great architect in his own English baroque style, but not here. The National Galley looks cheapskate – that pathetic dome. The British Museum is OK, I suppose, if you have to copy Roman temples. There are a few good monumental buildings – myself, I’d go for the Natural History Museum, and the new British Library in St Pancras – and of course some attractive smaller ones. But in general London is far from being a beautiful city, architecturally. (I explore some of the reasons for this in my The Battle of the Styles, 2011, if anyone’s interested.)

OK, let Queenie have her re-fit. The only alternative would be to pull the building down and replace it, but I’m not at all confident of how the replacement would turn out. Especially if the architecturally super-reactionary Prince Charles had any say in it, which of course he would be bound to have. Or perhaps you could evacuate it, leave just the facade as a landmark, with a children’s playground behind it, perhaps, or one of your thousand new hospitals, and move the Royals out to a mock-tudor semi-detached in Hornchurch. That – or something like it – was what I had to put up with. It wasn’t so bad.

For me personally, the most chilling of the many chilling statements I’ve heard from the Right in the course of our recent ‘double whammy’ – the Brexit vote and the election of the Donald – was Michael Gove’s last June: ‘I think people in this country have had enough of experts.’ (https://www.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d108c.)

Michael Gove is a curious figure. He is widely regarded as an ‘intellectual’, because, I think, he used to be a Times leader-writer, has ‘big ideas’, and is supremely confident – you might say ‘cocky’ – in expressing them. I first took against him when I watched him giving evidence at the Leveson Inquiry, where he offered a little potted history of the British Press – in order to make the point that it has always been the same as it is now – which I knew, from my ‘expert’ studies of the press over the last 200 years, to be utterly false. No-one challenged him, because there was no newspaper history ‘expert’ there. Gove was one of the prime defenders of the Murdoch press at that inquiry. The Times, of course, is a Murdoch paper. I’m not saying that this influenced him in any corrupt way, though we can never be sure; but being a leader writer for a paper that doesn’t particularly care for ‘truth’ as one of its major concerns, as compared with promoting what its (right-wing) readers want to read and its proprietors want them to think – in other words, propaganda – must have had an effect on him. You can see why he derides ‘experts’. They can so often get in the way of propaganda; or, at the very least, encourage you to think.

Of course Gove’s throwaway line isn’t the worst thing that’s been said in the course of the Brexit and presidential campaigns. Trump has trumped it a hundred times. Farage has said some pretty despicable things, too. It may be that Gove’s dismissal of ‘experts’ got under my skin particularly because I’m one of them myself: only in certain areas, of course, which doesn’t mean I’m free to pronounce authoritatively in others – of course I can hold opinions, but only on the condition that I will change them in the light of evidence – but in a way that makes me shudder at a leading political figure who can seem to undervalue ‘expertise’ wholesale. Of course ‘experts’ are often wrong; but their saving grace is that other experts will usually step in here, with evidence or rational argument, to put them right. It’s called the ‘scientific method’. It lies at the base of everything we scholars and intellectuals do. But beyond that, I also believe that the core of it – discovering truth objectively, or as objectively as is humanly possible – is essential in the wider political sphere in order to enable people to test and counter some of the more outrageous claims made by the likes of Trump and Farage. We have to keep hold of our rationality.

Over the last few months that hold has certainly slipped. There have always of course been anti-rational strains in both American and European society. Nazism could be said to have elevated irrationalism into a philosophy. In America the powerful ‘anti-intellectual strain’ in her politics was noticed and written about as early as 1963, with this path-breaking book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anti-intellectualism-American-Vintage-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479474812&sr=1-1&keywords=anti-intellectualism+in+american+life. There, as in Britain, ‘intellectuals’ were often associated with ‘elites’, which is what helped fuel the disparagement of them by ‘ordinary folk’ or ‘middle America/England’ or the ‘silent majority’, to whom both the Trumpist Republicans and Ukip sought to appeal. The social media are currently another powerful vehicle of irrationalism, as seen in the myriad of crazy ‘conspiracy’ sites that have appeared, as well as Right-wing so-called ‘news’ agencies like Breitbart. We know of one internet troll who knowingly fed anti-Clinton lies into this polluted stream, as ‘satire’, he claims (he is in fact a Democrat), and now deeply regrets it: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me’. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/17/facebook-fake-news-writer-i-think-donald-trump-is-in-the-white-house-because-of-me/.) Poor fellow; but even more, poor us.

The Right knows it’s dissembling. Just a day or so after that notorious ‘£350 million-a-week’ slogan appeared on the side of the Brexit ‘battle-bus’ in June, the claim (that Britain was losing that amount of money to the EU, which could be spent on the NHS) was nailed conclusively as a lie – and yet the Brexiteers continued with it to the end. Currently it is being challenged in the courts, as having possibly broken electoral law (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/07/cps-considers-complaint-that-leave-campaigns-misled-eu-referendu/); but by the time the courts have ruled, of course, it will be too late. The interesting thing is that the purveyors of these untruths – especially Boris Johnson, who was frequently photographed in front of the offending vehicle – don’t seem to care in the least when their deceptions are revealed: so long, I imagine, as they’ve had their desired impact on voters. Everyone – or at least many people on the Right – appear to accept the ‘post-truth’ culture, as it is now coming to be called. Any lies are acceptable, so long as they sell. (Capitalism again!)

Which is why I put Gove’s statement about ‘experts’ at the head of my list of deplorable statements made during the campaigns that have just saddled us with these two awful outcomes. Trump’s ‘pussy’ boast, and libelling of Mexicans, and criminalising of Hillary Clinton, are of course much worse. The point is, however, that if America and Britain had been sensible, rational societies, willing to listen (critically) to ‘experts’, or people who knew, all these lies could have been more effectively challenged, and hopefully emasculated. (The use of a male metaphor here is deliberate.) Experts, and in particular the thinking processes that contribute to expertise, are our last line of defence against all kinds of democratic dangers; including, in this case, incipient fascism. Experts of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your – what? Tenured positions in a Trumpian/Goveian world?