Porter’s Pensées

Forget – if you can – the lies of the past dozen years or so; the gross incompetence; the sheer human stupidity, even, of those who were supposed to be looking after the people’s best interests, in those years of political mayhem, international crisis, and pandemic. What gets me – and what I think lies behind a lot of this – is the trivialisation of British politics that Boris Johnson personified, but which of course – as I know as a historian – went back some years before him. (Probably to the 1890s.)

So it wasn’t entirely new. The crucial difference now however is that that opinion-makers – especially the ‘tabloid’ newspapers (including now the Telegraph), and of course the ‘social media’ – have realised, embraced and exploited this trivialisation, for their own political or personal ends. Serious politics is marginalised; elections reduced to a popularity show, or just a ‘game’, in the other papers and on social media; and policies or serious argument are scarcely featured at all. Instead it’s Ed Milliband with his bacon butty; Boris with his ‘bendy bananas’ (which he claimed the EU were plotting to ban) and new European regulations for condoms (to cater for the less well-endowed Italians) – which steal the headlines, appealing as they do because they’re ‘fun’. (Both the latter claims of course were untrue.) It could be that it was jokes like these, and his general image of clownish bonhomie, that won Johnson the 2019 Election. That; and having a ‘serious’ candidate standing against him. Whatever you may think of Corbyn, at least his policies were thought-out.

Do the trivialisers realise what they’re doing? Or do they genuinely believe in the trivia they churned out? In Boris’s case, I get the impression that it didn’t much matter to him. It was all just part of the game of politics, bearing about as much relation to truth and reality as would a clever speech for the Eton College debating society. (Eton is almost the quintessence of upper-class triviality.) For the more popular Press – ‘yellow’ or ‘gutter’ as it used to be called – the original decision to go trivial, a hundred-odd  years ago, was a marketing one, based on what was conceived to be a popular demand. The newspaper magnate Lord Harmsworth (a Tory, of course) held that the ‘lower’ classes were only interested in sex, sensation and sport (today we could add another ‘S’, Strictly), and so concentrated his new Daily Mail’s reportage on those three things. ‘Do not forget that you are writing for the meanest intelligences’, its reporters were instructed. They never have forgotten, in 130 years. Hence the trivial nature of today’s tabloid press.

That – the press – must be a reason behind much of this trivialisation. This sort of media is not found in every country; not in Sweden, for example, where even the evening papers – the closest equivalents to the British tabloids – have serious political reportage (albeit alongside those three S’s); and even issue ‘Culture’ or ‘Arts’ supplements. (Americans may recognise the genre more easily.) Maybe the problem really is that we Brits (and Americans) are more superficial than the Swedes, more jokey (my Swedish friends think so), more sport- and sex-obsessed, and less interested in real politics; in other words more trivial ourselves. In that case, the trivialisation must be our own fault. Otherwise they – the rich newspaper proprietors – are foisting it upon us. I don’t know.

Trivialisation may not lie at the root of Britain’s present political troubles. The aforementioned lies, incompetence and stupidity are probably more significant, and behind them, no doubt, the monster of ‘late-stage capitalism’ (those press magnates). But it must enable those troubles, to a significant extent.

I’ve always disliked the Old Testament, ever since I was given it to study in ‘Divinity’ classes at school, and then seeing it through New Testament eyes in my former (very liberal: today it would be called ‘wokeish’) Christian church. But I’m glad now that I was made to read it, because it makes some sense of what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon today.

The Old Testament – roughly identical, as I understand it, to the Jewish Torah – has some good stuff in it, much of it appropriated by Christianity; but also contains some rank bigotry (Leviticus), silliness (dietary rules), bad pre-history (Genesis), and also wars, massacres of whole peoples (the Flood); and of course – as its main narrative – the sufferings but eventual triumph (hopefully) of ‘God’s chosen people’, inspired by heroic and supernaturally empowered ‘Prophets’.

I wonder whether Netanyahu sees himself as one of those? The IDF’s conduct in Palestine and latterly Lebanon – especially the indiscriminate bombing, widely seen as ‘genocidal’ – strike me as being very ‘Old Testament’ in character. Netanyahu seems to be casting himself as a successor to the old Prophets, the latest saviour of the Chosen People (and never mind the rest of humanity); with the USA, perhaps, performing the ‘supernatural’ role here.

(Incidentally – and I’m by no means the first person to raise this question: why do American Christians make so much of the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments, insisting that they be displayed in schools, for example; in preference to the New Testament’s – rather more woke-ish – Beatitudes?) 

But Netanyahu’s elevation to the status of an Old Testament prophet will of course require him to win his present war: the whole project, that is, not just the fight against the Hezbollah. And, of course, it also rests on worldwide Jewry’s acceptance of his militant, racist, nationalist, colonialist and frankly amoral reading of the Torah, which many other Jews dispute. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2024/08/24/gods-covenant/.) Moral: beware ‘holy books’. The Koran, of course, read selectively, serves much the same purpose for the other ‘side’.

I do hope these comments don’t brand me as ‘anti-Semitic’. It is of course difficult these days for even a friendly critic of Israel to avoid this.

‘…your Mum and Dad. They may not mean to, but they do.’ (That’s Philip Larkin, of course.)

Well, not necessarily; and I wouldn’t like to blame my parents for my own fuck-uppedness (everyone’s fucked up to a degree). But obviously one’s early upbringing has some influence on one’s later development, for good or for ill; together with many other factors, and – hopefully – one’s own free agency. In the course of our lives these influences mingle together in subtle and complex ways, so that one can never say for certain that – for example – Adolf Hitler was only the product of his upbringing by the Schicklgrubers, or Boris Johnson of his awful father and abused mother and – in loco parentis – his boarding school. That would be too simple.

Looking back on my own childhood, however, I can see how not I, but my mother, was clearly fucked up by her Mum and Dad; in ways that gave me an insight into how people of her generation, especially, could be fucked up, in ways that might have had an effect on history. She was the only child of a grim Baptist father, Ernest, and a doormat of a mother, who tried to block her marriage to my father on the grounds that his father was too working class – in reality there was only a sliver of difference between them socially – and as a result boycotted their wedding, so that a cousin of my father’s had to stand in to ‘give the bride away’. He also got my granddad sacked from the factory where he worked, until his fellow-workers went on strike to have him reinstated. He only visited us once, when I was about twelve; bringing me as a present a collection of ‘improving’ sermons. (I remember it was called In the Days of Thy Youth. Amazon have it: https://www.amazon.com/Days-Thy-Youth-Practical-Marlborough/dp/B00A84CHBI.) When he died he left my grandmother penniless and without a home, so that she had to move into a caravan on a relative’s farm. A curious thing about him was that at some stage he had changed his family name by deed poll from ‘Rabbit’ to ‘Rabbett’, which seemed odd to me; if he was paying all that money in legal fees (I presumed), why stick with a name which still sounded silly? (Maybe he thought it would be pronounced ‘Rabbé’, like Hyacinth Bucket (‘Bouquet’) in Keeping Up Appearances.)

I won’t elaborate on my poor mother’s fucked-upness here. Maybe later. But it’s too painful for me to recall just now; and I think ‘bad form’ for one to sneak on one’s own mother. It also looks like making excuses for one’s faults and failures. In the main I think I survived it.But who knows?

And besides, how much have I fucked up my own children? ‘We may not mean to, but we do.’

Is it normal for an 83 year-old to wake up every morning feeling that the world – or at least decent liberal society – is coming to an end? (I mean ‘liberal’ in the original broad sense of the term; not ‘neo-’.) Or is it simply my age; or my declining health; or my years of reading dystopian novels; or the events of today; or my present fascination with TV science documentaries chronicling the origin – and so by implication the destruction – of the entire universe?

I used to think that my early introduction to science fiction – specifically HG Wells and Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future (https://wordpress.com/post/bernardjporter.com/9678) – gave me a broader view of human events; a context for the narrow stretch of history I later came to write about professionally. And so it does. But now I’m beginning to regard it differently. What’s the point in my writing books for posterity, when the scientists tell us that posterity is going to hurtle into the sun eventually?

Not that I’m at all worried for my own work, or for me personally. The sun can frizzle us all up in a nano-second so far as I’m concerned. (Oblivion sounds quite attractive, the way I’m feeling now.) But what I will regret is some of the greatest artistic achievements of our current human civilisation being lost for ever: Mozart’s music, Leonardo’s paintings, Shakespeare’s Tragedies, the Elgin marbles, the great Gothic cathedrals of northern France – and their non-European equivalents; artefacts that to my mind justify our species, and in fact are the only things that do. To think that they might not last forever fills me with the deepest sorrow; especially in the wee small hours.

Of course there may be rescue on the way. Liberalism – real liberalism – might be more resistant to ‘populism’ than we fear. On the broader galactic front, maybe Mozart will survive the earth’s destruction, via the non-material internet. (Will our pdf files still be here when we’re gone?) Or those clever scientists might discover a way to bridge the universe and transport CDs, books and even buildings physically to distant and younger galaxies. Or are there other dimensions of reality – parallel universes – in which they might pop up again? (You can see the effect SciFi has had on me.) Of course we’ll never know; especially if oblivion is our next stage.

Religious people, I imagine, can cope with this. They don’t fear oblivion, but have a variety of alternative futures to look forward to: some of them horrific, true, but futures nonetheless. It’s almost worth joining a religion for the comfort of that. Angels with harps – playing Mozart? – sound nice and relaxing. 72 virgins rather less so. (Incidentally, do Moslem women get houris too?) Reincarnation seems chancy: suppose you are reborn as a beetle; or as yourself, but not remembering? (That’s my personal nightmare.) But at least religion gives one answers.

Sorry for this uncharacteristic diversion into the quasi-spiritual. It’s a long way from our more immediate worries, I admit; with Putin, Netanyahu, Trump and Farage currently in the ascendant, climate change threatening an Armageddon even earlier than the galactic one, and winter coming on. But for me these ‘big’ thoughts frame those more immediate concerns. They may not for other people. We’re programmed as a species to think only short-term; luckily, no doubt, for most of us.

Pleased as I am about the outcome of the recent UK general election, I’m still not happy about how it was secured, and – in particular – about the way it has given such a massive majority to Labour on the basis of only a third of the votes. I alluded to this in my previous post; and I expressed my discomfort over our ‘First Past the Post’ electoral system – a common complaint – in a much earlier blog: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/. But in that piece I also suggested a couple of ways in which we could reconcile the personal MP-constituency connexion, which we rightly value so much, with a more ‘proportional’ system, which should meet all the objections that First-Past-the-Posters have to PR. In the eight years since then I’ve not noticed anyone taking my ideas up. But then this blog is very obscure.

The article that ‘Phil’ sent me in response to yesterday’s post is worth everyone’s reading: https://gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2024/09/03/understanding-the-2024-election-7/. (Thank you so much, Phil.) It shows how Labour played the FPTP game more cleverly than the Tories, which was unusual; but also how this means that their victory wasn’t really a ‘Labour’ one, and so is not something that the new government should rely on to get their reforms accepted by the public, as Attlee’s were. Of course more of the 66% might be brought around to them eventually; but with the dreadful tabloids, masquerading as the ‘public’, still baying at Starmer’s heels, it won’t be easy.

Keir Starmer presents as the antithesis of Boris Johnson, and is all the more welcome for that. In 1945 Clement Attlee was a bit of a dullard too. Each offered serious ‘change’ in Britain’s domestic politics, after a turbulent period of history; but whether the more recent period was quite turbulent enough to enable a revolution on Attlee’s post-War scale may be doubted.

Labour after all won only 9,708,716 votes in the recent election, or 33.7% of those who voted. That contrasts with 11,967,746 and 48% for Attlee’s government in 1945. More significantly, perhaps, the popular Labour vote back in 2019 – when the much maligned Corbyn was leader – was 10,295,907: which was significantly higher than Starmer’s last month. Which suggests that the latter’s decorbynisation of his party may have been less significant a factor in Labour’s win than he has been claiming, including in his (rather good, I thought) Conference speech today. Obviously detestation of the Tories was a bigger, if negative, factor. That was emphatically not true in Attlee’s case. People then voted for his programme. And back in 1945 he had Winston Churchill to defeat; a rather more formidable opponent than poor Rishi, or than any of the other inadequacies squabbling for his crown today.

The suburb next to ours is called Sandsborg. It has a swimming pool for the elderly and disabled, water 30 degrees C, lots of equipment for crocks like me, staffed by people who can get you in and out of the water, and charging just 70 kronor (about £6) for a single visit. The pool is part of an attractive complex of small flats (for oldies who don’t have Kajsas to live with), with little squares and gardens, a supermarket, cafes, a library, a gym, an Apotek, a doctor and a dentist, a sauna, and a Tunnelbana station nearby; all provided by the local municipality. Here are some pics of the pool.

https://motionera.stockholm/trana-gymma-simma/sandsborgsbadet/

I was there today, hoping the warm water would soothe my ankle. I broke it, incidentally, forty-odd years ago, getting off a plane at Chicago O’Hare Airport. Have I told you the story? About how an employee of the airport rushed to my aid; her first question was ‘can I get you a lawyer?’ – not ‘can I get you a doctor?’  Yes; I’m in America, I thought. Anyhow, a charity hospital in Bloomington (I think) repaired the ankle, but warned me that when I got old, that was where arthritis would strike. It has.

All this – the Sandsborg complex – is a wonderful example of post-war Swedish social democracy. The ‘nanny state’, some in Britain would call it. But most Swedes don’t mind paying high-ish taxes if they can be nannied when they need it.

Next week I’m being assessed for a possible op on the ankle. (The cartilage has gone.) Then I’ll know how well the hospitals work here. Wish me luck.

A correspondent asks me what I have against golf. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2024/09/19/zeitgeists/, btl.) Well, it’s not only Trump. (Who apparently cheats at it.)

Firstly, there’s the fact that it has gobbled up so much of our beautiful English countryside, with its unnaturally close-cut grass fairways, and ugly sand-filled ditches (‘bunkers’?), which we proles are always being instructed to ‘keep off!’. Then there’s the sheer nonsense of hitting a ball with a long stick dozens of yards to get it into a tiny hole in the ground – I can’t even imagine a transferable skill that gives you – when it would be far easier to run along and plop it in by hand. Obviously golf is a waste of time, which could be spent doing something useful, like writing a book, or having a nap. Usually one is ‘competing’ only with oneself – have you ever seen Trump with a golf partner? – which makes it a kind of sporting onanism. – ‘Sporting’? Give me a break. Where’s the physical exercise it requires, even? There’s always the walking, I suppose; but these days golfers seem to drive from hole to hole in little electric carts. There can’t be much there to keep one’s body in trim. (Look at Trump, again.)

However, I first took a personal dislike to the game on grounds of class; especially ‘golf clubs’ (not the sticks, but the societies), with their restricted membership – no blacks, proles or, at one time, women; their strict vetting to ensure you were none of these things; their deliberate exclusivity, therefore; and the upper-middle class – or aspiring upper-middle class – way their members talked and behaved. Club golfers were notorious for this, maybe unfairly these days – particularly in Scotland, where the game was invented; but the (supposed) culture put me right off. That prejudice remained with me even when I had to drive my teen-aged son and his friend – and all their golfing paraphernalia – to a local course on one of its ‘free’ non-members’ days, to play there. But then you’d do anything for your boy, wouldn’t you?

All that set up my general aversion. The clincher, however, came when a close friend of mine, a keen golfer, tried to introduce me to the game by taking me for a round on a nine-hole course in Scotland. I’d never held a golf club before; but my first hit (stroke?) turned out to be an unexpectedly good one. Beginner’s luck, of course; but as a joke I pretended it was deliberate, and suggested that my partner use a five-iron (I think it was) when he tee-ed off. (Have I got the terminology right yet?) His immediate response was to insist on fining me two points (runs? goals? strokes?), on the grounds that rule 42 (I think it was) of the Laws of Golf forbade a player giving advice to his or her playing partner.

It was then that I really took against golf. What kind of game was it, I thought, where you can’t try to help another player – even as a sheer beginner, and in jest  – with advice? How could it have turned my great and reasonable friend into such a monster, after just one stroke? It was this experience that made me realise what a thoroughly evil game golf is. No wonder Trump is such a fan.

And the late Margaret Thatcher’s husband, apparently, too. In fact I’ve arrived at the conclusion that golf is the most quintessentially Thatcherite game on the planet, or at least in England; the most individualistic, anti-social (except in the clubhouse over a few gins), easy to cheat at, and basically Tory activity. Now that my son can drive himself there, I’m having nothing more to do with it.

So there you have it, ‘jfkyachts’. (Goddam these pesky pseudonyms!) You imply that you share the same prejudice. Could it be for similar reasons?

In 19^th-century Britain – and probably around the world – ‘democracy’ was opposed and resisted mainly on the grounds that it would enfranchise the unlettered and stupid, who were unfitted to make the sorts of intelligent decisions on which stable government depended. As well as this, they would likely vote for what today we would characterise as left-wing, worker-friendly or socialist policies, which both Conservatives and Liberals assumed was what the ‘great unwashed’ wanted.

Nonetheless, democracy eventually came to Britain, by stages (1832, 1867, 1884…), albeit excluding poor people and women initially, and never entirely satisfactorily. Which only exacerbated the problem. One of prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s solutions to the danger of democracy was better schooling: ‘we must educate our masters’ was the way he put it; leading to some major educational reforms after the 1860s.

But he also had another cunning plan. That was to appeal to the plebs’ more visceral or tribal instincts over their material needs; especially to patriotism, morphing later into imperialism: ‘Make Britain Great Again’ (although of course he never used that resonant phrase). This worked a treat, helping to keep the Tories and the Liberal Imperialists in power for another half-century, despite the growing challenge of Labour during those years. Later on it helped keep Thatcher in power too.

By then the Right had learned that they could control the Great Unwashed – divert them from socialism – by means of propaganda, developing out of commercial advertising, and seeping into the political world through the new (circa 1900) ‘yellow press’, now largely owned by capitalists with amoral commercial motives, and with reactionary political agendas. Throughout the 20^th century the Daily Mail was the main exemplar of this type; joined in Thatcher’s time by the infamous Murdoch press.

So, that’s the situation as it stands today. And it leaves Britain’s ‘democracy’ no better off, essentially, than it was before the plebs won the vote. If Disraeli’s ‘masters’ are more formally ‘educated’ than they used to be, it is not in a way that renders them necessarily better able to take political decisions; largely because their school curricula often exclude ‘Politics’, for fear of being accused of ‘bias’. At least, this was the situation when I was at school; it may very well have changed since, which will perhaps account for young people’s more ‘progressive’ inclinations today. That’s judging by their relative support for the EU in the 2016 Referendum, and by the several polls that found that support for ‘Brexit’ was, and is, at its greatest among the more elderly, and the relatively uneducated.

Mention this, however, and one is accused of being ‘élitist’; which is difficult to counter, because it’s true. In this case it simply means that you have been schooled in politics and history and – crucially – critical thinking more than the non-élite, which should by rights and in logic give you more authority over the latter. Gary Lineker is not accused of being a football élitist because he knows more about the game.

There is, surely, no better explanation for the general state of British (and American) politics today, on all sides but mainly on the Right. This includes the clownish personnel; the lying propaganda, appealing to feelings and instincts rather than to evidence and argument; image valued over reality; the cheating, faking and general amoralism of so many politicians and the tabloid press; the idea that all opinions are equal, however crazy – ‘I’m a free American and I can believe anything I like’, as I heard on a US phone-in programme years ago, from a contributor being challenged on his claim that the London blitz was in retaliation for the bombing of Dresden (!) – and all the other nonsense that we’re seeing on social media today. It all comes from the ‘great unwashed’ presumably; but exploited by better-educated men and women who should – and presumably do – know better.

It’s called ‘stupidity’, and should be called out for that. But it’s not entirely the stupids’ fault.

Context is important. All serious historians know this. It’s what makes us chary of making judgments of people’s actions in the past; actions which could in fact be largely attributable to the Zeitgeists within which they acted.

That won’t entirely excuse, for example, 18^th-century slavery and slave-trading, which a significant part of the contemporary British Zeitgeist was hostile to; or British imperialism, which also had its enemies and critics at the time. (Zeitgeists were not homogenous.) But it should help us to understand them better. Slavery was not so unusual in the world in the 1700s, and imperialism not as excoriated in the 19^th century, as they are today. That’s what their apologists are always telling us, quite rightly: not to judge the past by today’s standards, or – to put it another way – according to our current preconceptions.

Apart from anything else, it leaves our generation open to be hoisted by the same petard fifty or a hundred years hence. One can imagine a future in which people will judge us just as badly for permitting cigarette smoking, for example, or gross inequality, or ‘Public’ schools, or golf. (Sorry; golf is a particular bugbear of mine.) Or, if the Zeitgeist moves in another direction, we could be criticized for our naïve liberalism, our tolerance of immigrants, and our ‘wokeness’ (whatever that means). In other words: most historical judgments are based on the predominant assumptions of their times.

Which is a reason why we professional historians should – and generally do – seek to avoid such judgments altogether; and instead explore why people and societies believed and acted as they did. In many cases that will be because they were at the mercy of broad historical forces they had no real control over, often manifested in religions (the worst offenders), or other ideologies. My own assumption – which again will have been heavily influenced by the Geist of my Zeit – is that in modern European and world history these underlying forces were primarily economic, with the development of capitalism, through its several stages, determining the broad progress (or regress) of most western societies, quite impersonally. Move over Thatcher and Reagan, and give the Zeitgeist its due.