Porter’s Pensées

I once – or it may have been twice – wrote to Eton College to ask about its History syllabus: mainly in order to find out what may have lain behind the version of British history presented in the Old Etonian Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg’s The Victorians: Twelve Titans who Forged Britain, published in 2019 to almost universal derision. I got no reply from Eton (surprise, surprise!); and so remained with only my suspicions of how it must have been; until I came across this memoir by another Old Etonian, which confirmed those suspicions to the hilt. It’s written by a man of Ugandan heritage, and is well worth reading for its unique account of how Eton appeared to someone who couldn’t be considered to be one of its normal (upper-class white) clientele. The book is One of Them, by Musa Okwonga, and is by no means as critical you might expect. But this passage on the British history he was taught at Eton told me all I needed to know. (And felt familiar to me, having been educated at a school which wasn’t a proper ‘Public’ one, but aspired to be.)

Here’s what he writes (around p.44).

“Given the importance of history, I find it interesting to reflect on what I was taught about Britain at school, as well as what I wasn’t. Upon leaving, if someone had asked me what I knew about the British  Empire, I would probably have told them that the country of my birth had long ruled the world through a heady mix of commerce and conquest. Had I been asked about the details of that conquest, my answers would have been uncertain. I wouldn’t have been able to tell them much, if anything, about Partition or the Opium Wars or the scramble for Africa or the trade of enslaved people, because I covered those pivotal historical events in little or no depth. I therefore grew up with a somewhat hazy sense of the British Empire; it was an edifice as distant grand and unknowable to me as the statues of Easter Island. The conflict in Uganda was already so protracted that there was little discussion of the colonial power that had destabilised my parents’ country long before and had given it its present-day form. But Britain’s imperial machinations were never lost on my grandfather, who once told me in an ominous tone – one that demanded no further clarification – The last man on Earth will be an Englishman.

“It is not as if I am not taught much about Britain. I learn about when Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror invaded the island and about when its barons forced the king to submit with the Magna Carta. I learn about the struggle to resist the influence of the Continent, its stand-off with the Vatican. I spend far more time studying Britain’s role in the end of slavery than its prominent role in promoting and profiting from this uniquely lucrative system of human suffering. In my view, my country was primarily the great liberator, not the cruel subjugator. I could reel off all kinds of facts about how terrifying the Vikings were, but if someone had asserted that the British could be similarly barbaric and on a far greater scale, then at first I might have been very defensive.

“The Britain about which I learn is either heroic abroad or beset by internal turbulence or doing its very best to repel external threats. My Britain is a victim and yet somehow ruling and never being enslaved; it is being free and then breaking further free; a plucky underdog or the victor of fair fights; a reluctant and dignified winner of the rough and tumble of global politics. My Britain is quiet and unassuming, yet somehow stumbled upon the possession of all this territory abroad, a bumbling traveller who wandered about the world and just happened to come home with the lion’s share of its wealth.

“The only time I examine the sustained savagery of which Britain has been capable is during one of my specialist subjects in my final year. Here I look at the First Crusade, whose harrowing climax – the slaughter of Jews and Muslims by Christians at the siege of Jerusalem – fundamentally reshapes the way I look at the Middle East. I begin to see that Britain is not an innocent actor in so many of these scenarios but a much more sophisticated player than I ever imagined.

“It will still be a few years until I find out what else Britain did – about the Amritsar massacre and the Bengal famine and the eviction of the people of the Chagos Islands and the suppression of the Mau Mau, many of whose resistance of British rule was punished by their castration with pliers. It will be even longer until I learn about Operation Legacy, the British government’s carefully orchestrated destruction of the bulk of the records of what it did in colonial times, so that the countries recently released from its rule would not know the extent of its deeds.”

We went to a jazz performance the other evening in a pub back garden in Lidköping (Sweden). ‘Trad’, and pretty good. Also well attended – a couple of hundred at least.

But …. nearly all of us, musicians and audience, were elderly, and male. A sea of grey heads and beards. I’ve found the same in the UK; and even in New Orleans where I visited once, and was greatly disappointed to find most of the musical pubs blaring out amplified pop music into those famous streets – Frenchmen, Bourbon, Basin, Beale…. Eventually I found one with a proper jazz band (I bought their CD); but when the leader asked us where we all came from, only one was a local. The rest were Canadians, Bostonians or Europeans. And grey-haired, again.

Was I just unlucky? Or has jazz, in all its genres, become an old man’s kind of music exclusively, picked up in the fifties and sixties when it was for the trendy young, and now supplanted by pop music – and so bound to disappear when most of us oldies have died off? What a tragedy for such a glorious musical heritage, if so.

By contrast, last night we attended an outdoor performance of Verdi’s Macbeth in a 17^th-century castle – much like the mediaeval Scottish castles I’ve visited, and so an apt setting for this (literally) bloody opera. I’m not a great Verdi fan (and of Macbeth least of all – no tunes); but it was a superb production; and the audience only about 20% grey-heads. Lots of youngsters there; indicating, perhaps, that classical opera has a brighter future ahead of it, at least in Sweden, than does jazz. 

Dickens’s Gradgrind would surely have approved of Rishi Sunak. And of the less familiar Orcadian Samuel Laing the Elder, whom I discovered and then wrote about in the historical journal Albion, thirty years ago. (The essay is recycled in my Britain Before Brexit, chapter 5.) Laing was a quintessential Victorian philistine; as of course was the fictional Thomas Gradgrind.

I’m thinking here of course of Sunak’s recent policy statement, that ‘low value’ university courses should be abolished or ‘capped’. By ‘low value’ he means courses that don’t materially profit those who take them. ‘Under his plans, the Office for Students (OfS) will be asked to limit the student numbers on courses seen to fail to deliver good outcomes – including on future earnings potential.’ At present, ‘people are being taken advantage of with low-quality courses that don’t lead to a job that makes it worth it – leaves them financially worse-off.’ (That’s a direct quote from Sunak.)

Which is OK if you think that the only purpose of a university education is to maximise your earnings or profits after it. But most of us who have actually taught in universities regard it quite differently. Universities have far more extensive agendas: broadening minds, stimulating critical thinking, introducing young people to matters beyond the ‘practical’, and so contributing to the quality as well as the profitability of personal and national life. As a by-product, they may maximise wealth in unexpected ways – look at the contributions that many ‘Arts’ graduates have indirectly made to the Exchequer. But that is emphatically not their purpose.

In the broad if uneven advance of ‘late’ capitalism, which seems to be the main underlying trend of British and world history at the present time (and is a running theme of this whole blog), non-utilitarian education, together with the arts, could be seen as capitalism’s final frontier: the fortress to be scaled and destroyed in order to complete the victory of the market and its values. Rishi must be looking forward to that. And Gradgrind chortling happily in his grave.

Sorry for the further delay. My medical problem is still holding me up. (No, I’m not going to tell you what it is! Slightly embarrassing.) But I should be able to resume blogging soon.

In the meantime I wonder how the climate-change deniers are reacting to the current terrible global heat-wave. ‘Nothing abnormal.’ ‘It’s happened before.’ ‘Don’t interfere.’ ‘Trust to nature’…?

In fact trusting to nature (or to a benevolent God) could be at the root of many of our problems today. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and pandemics are ‘natural’ too. As are financial crises, trade depressions and the like.

Which is the best argument against the neo-liberal way of looking at political economy. Laissez-faire, or the free market, doesn’t conduce to the good of all. Those who believed it did, from the nineteenth century onwards, were in hock to a notion as foolish as the belief that God (or nature) would take care of everything. In other words, it’s based on a great leap of blind faith, and not on logic. And a very convenient leap, of course, if it means you don’t need to put yourself out, and do anything.

I wonder how many climate-change deniers are neo-liberals too? Ex-Chancellor Nigel Lawson I know is one… Do the two ideologies go together?

And – very incidentally – neither nature nor God is solving my medical condition. For that I’m depending on state intervention – in this case from the excellent Swedish health service.

If he had not been so controversially dismissed on Sunday, Johnny Bairstow might possibly have won the match for England. He would probably have had the necessary 42 runs in him, which the tail-enders didn’t.

But that isn’t the important thing. Quite apart from its effect on the result of the game, the nature of YJB’s dismissal has sullied an Ashes series that was developing – whoever the ultimate victor – into one of the best of modern times. I’m one of those old-fashioned cricket fans who admire the game for its ‘spirit’; against which the Aussies clearly offended by not withdrawing their appeal. For me, the remainder of the series will now be inevitably devalued.

But: am I necessarily a worse human being for being more angered by this incident – albeit hopefully only momentarily – than by Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine?

(American readers may not understand. I’m afraid the US won its independence before cricket was firmly rooted there. I see that the modern US has a national team, but mostly made up of people with south Asian names. – I wonder whether the idea of ‘sportsmanship’ – ‘it’s just not cricket’ – has the same purchase there that it used to have in the UK? Obviously not in the GOP.)

I don’t believe that all those who voted for Brexit were racists; or – to put it differently, because I have no evidence for this – I don’t want to believe that they were racists. There were, and are, better reasons for voting for ‘sov’rinty’ than that. For those who were racist, however, it must be disconcerting to find that the white Europeans who used to work for us have now been replaced by browner Asians and others, who must appear more objectionable than Klaus from Germany or Marie from France, to anyone who measures a person’s worth by the colour of his or her skin.

This is what my recent experience in a British hospital brought home to me. All my (admirable) doctors and nurses were non-European (apart from one – but is Lithuania in the EU?), and – as it happens – women. Mind you, this was in Hull, where I understand the shortage of British-trained medical staff is more acute than anywhere else in the country. Is it the same elsewhere? And did Brexit play a part in this? Was one of its effects to make Britain even more multi-racial than before? That would be ironic if so; and perhaps a reason for true – global –  internationalists to thank Farage.

Back in Sweden it’s all very different, of course. The health system works here as it doesn’t any longer in Britain. I’m getting excellent treatment (for the same condition) from my Swedish doctor and nurses. Not free, admittedly (200 kronor a visit, up to a certain amount each year); but worth it.

But it’s obviously unfair to compare Stockholm with Hull in this regard. One is a national metropolis, with world-leading hospitals; the other a neglected backwater, with not much to recommend it for ambitious medics. And Sweden, of course, is still in the EU.

It was John Stuart Mill who is supposed to have first called the Tories ‘the stupid party’; a reputation they seem to be intent on living up (or down) to today. This is not a partisan point, or intended to be; I’ve never characterised those with political views I don’t share as necessarily ‘stupid’, and indeed regard ‘stupidity’ as pretty evenly distributed among all parties at most times. The present-day British Conservative party, however, is beginning to look as though it is taking on the label as a badge of honour; maybe to distinguish it from the ‘experts’ whom Michael Gove so memorably rubbished around 2020 (when they were predicting that Brexit would make us worse off), and from the over-educated ‘élitists’ who are seen as looking down their noses at ordinary folk.

This is why we of the ‘intelligentsia’ (I suppose I must be one of them) need to be careful before calling out the objective stupidity (surely) of men like Lee Anderson, the new Tory MP for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, and recently appointed deputy Chair of the Conservative Party; when he recently made the astonishing claim that ‘Britain invented everything that’s good in this world’. That came soon after his other notorious assertion: that there was no need for food banks, because anyone with any nous could prepare a nutritious meal from scratch for 30 pence. Hence his current nickname: ‘30p Lee’.

I can’t say whether these statements are proof of genuine stupidity; or of simple ignorance, which is not necessarily the same thing; or (thirdly) of deliberate falsehood, in order to encourage what Anderson would regard as British ‘patriotism’ in his potential voters. But they certainly fit with the current trend not only in British politics, but also worldwide, of disregarding truth and logic in favour of assertions that might carry warmer feelings in those you want to persuade. It’s all part of the new ‘post-truth’ era, associated nowadays with ex-President Trump, but with much older and deeper roots, and a broader appeal, especially to a certain kind of democrat. ‘I’m a free American, and can believe anything I like’, as I heard a contributor to a phone-in programme declare on US radio a few years ago. (He’d been caught out on an obvious falsity.) Arguments are weapons, nothing more; and don’t need to be true or even credible to be effective.

I’d like to think that the recent fashion for ‘postmodern’ relativism – the bane of my scholarly life – is partly responsible for this; but I doubt whether 30p Lee has read any Foucault or Derrida. The solution must lie in education; and education in rational thinking – logic – above all. And perhaps we ‘élitists’ should be less nervous of calling out stupidity, when it’s obvious.

No-one comes out of this incident well. The Iraqi immigrant who burned the book outside a Stockholm mosque most obviously – the burning of books has a poor historical reputation in Europe. But also the crowds of Muslims who demonstrated violently against the event in other countries, and have given the Turkish president another excuse to block Sweden’s joining of NATO; what on earth has a perceived insult to a religion to do with national defence? And of course it’s ridiculous that destroying a single copy of a ‘sacred’ text should give such offence to anyone, let alone a whole religion; which must itself damage the reputation of that religion – or of any organised religion – among rational people.

Thirdly, however: the Swedish authorities should have realised the harm the burning might cause, which would have been a practical if not a very principled excuse for disallowing it; which the police did initially, until overruled by the courts. Sweden is strong on ‘free speech’; but it also has laws against ‘incitement’, which I imagine were behind the police’s initial ban. We live in irrational times, which require us to appease even religious bigotry occasionally. If Sweden is to be condemned, it’s for its innocence; which is at least to be preferred to the bigotry of Salwan Momika (the arsonist) and the Moslem fanatics who are demonstrating against him.

Whatever you may think of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin – and if you’re reading this blog I guess it isn’t very much – you must be struck by the way the personalities of all three of them seem to reflect the present-day characteristics, or widely perceived characteristics, of their respective countries. Trump is a crooked capitalist who headed a crooked capitalist USA; Johnson a representative of the faux-aristocratic public school-educated class that the Brits (or at least the English) are supposed to have subjected themselves to for decades; and Putin, with his KGB background, could be said to personify the cruel autocracy that has been a feature of Russian life from Tsarist right through to Soviet times. Who could be more quintessentially American, or British, or Russian than these three?

Of course two of them are gone now, for the time being at least; and the third is possibly on his way out, thanks to Ukraine and Wagner – although I wouldn’t bet on it. Whether their successors will be quite so starkly representative of their nations remains to be seen. Rishi Sunak – public school, ex-empire, and a wealthy financier – reflects a slightly different, but still characteristic, side of modern Britain. In all these cases, our leaders mirror our dominant (but not necessarily typical) national characteristics in a quite remarkable way; far more than Wilson, say, or Thatcher, or Major ever did; or Khrushchev and the Bushes, for that matter.

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Grateful thanks to those who sent me good wishes during my spell in hospital. I’m out now, and back in Sweden; to whose health service I’m about to entrust my elderly body tomorrow. (I’m afraid – and I’m reluctant to write this, in view of my principled and I think patriotic support for our NHS – that my English hospital made a bit of a mess of me.)

Sorry for the long silence. I was unexpectedly whisked into (UK) hospital a month ago. Nothing serious, as it turns out, but some pretty unpleasant procedures before that was established; and I came out feeling worse than when I went in. With loving help from Kajsa and my children I’ve just managed the hairy journey back to Sweden, where I’m currently resting up, with tubes coming out of me, and about 24 tablets to swallow a day. Of course I’ve been following the crazy news from Britain, and hope to be well enough to comment on it in a few days’ time.