Creative destruction

A friend of mine mentioned the other day that he couldn’t disapprove of hip hop because he couldn’t make out the words.  I can’t remember any of the conversation that led up to that line, but I suggested, in return, that perhaps he just didn’t enjoy it enough to disapprove of it.  Secret, shameful pleasure often seems a key component of disapproval; on the other side of the cultural divide, perhaps the more liberal minded are (in ways that make them nice people to be around) less in touch with what Stephen King called “the dark fuckery of the human heart”, and so are less aware of how thin is the film between civilisation and its alternatives.  This is captured to hilarious effect by the absurd, medievalist character of Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, who takes great pleasure in regular trips to the cinema to simultaneously denounce and get off on what he sees:

“Filth!” Ignatius shouted, spewing wet popcorn over several rows. “How dare she pretend to be virgin. Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!”

(The same phenomenon was also recently captured in a dubious story in the Daily Mail about the effects of porn, illustrated by a photo of a man looking at actual porn.)

I’ve only been to one rap gig (are they even called gigs? probably not) but it was one of the best I’ve been to; the energy, lyrical dexterity and interactivity of Skinnyman and Killa Kela were such a refreshing change from the mumbling, shoegazing, tedious indie bands I usually went to see in those days.  Skinnyman’s theme tune was about his shooting a crackhead paedophile, so his music at least had a sort of spaghetti western morality to it, rather than the usual gangsta rap bravado.

It seems odd that a song about shooting a crackhead paedophile could be made to seem quaint and innocent, but this guy manages it.  The Guardian won’t stop writing about him, so I feel compelled to do the same.  His shtick seems to be rapping about rape and calling everyone a faggot.  Naturally the Guardian divides into two camps: the nihilists, who think words don’t mean anything so we shouldn’t take them seriously and should just relax and enjoy the music; and the moralists — in this case gay and women’s rights lobbyists, as those who are primarily troubled by the glamorisation of young black men shooting other young black men have long since been sidelined — who disagree.  As Ken Clarke’s rapegate showed, feminists and gay people are now the foremost moralists in our society.  My sympathies are with them, but maybe I’m just jealous because the band I was in at his age had equally depraved lyrics, but it never made us rich.

I don’t want to get too far into assomeonewhoery, but as someone who makes a living out of correcting other people’s grammar, I of course think language is important and has social and political consequences.  Context is of paramount importance.  You and I can see that the cheeky chap in question isn’t really a rapist, and very probably isn’t really even a homophobe, and that he’s merely trying to shock a largely unshockable postmodern culture by challenging some of its last taboos; I suspect there would be much more of an outcry if someone clearly devoid of irony — 50 Cent, say — were to mine this seam instead.  No doubt going to a concert of his full of other irony-drenched Guardianistas in their late 20s would be very entertaining.  But I would be troubled to find myself at such a show surrounded by impressionable 13-year-olds, who may not yet have developed an advanced capacity for irony and so may take the words at face value.  Does this make me sound hypocritical?  Perhaps, but hypocrisy gets a worse press than it deserves.  Were you, cynical and worldly wise reader, honestly not more impressionable, more open to peer pressure, when you were 13 than you are now?  I think you were.  Hypocrisy (in the sense of one rule for me, another for others) is often a sensible alternative to irresponsibility.  I don’t imagine that most or even many people of that age will immediately hear gangsta rap, or rape rap, and go out and start shooting or raping people, but very few of us are quite as insusceptible to cultural influences — to the vast sums spent very effectively but more prosaically on advertising, marketing and branding, for instance — as we suppose, and some of us have minds so open our brains have fallen out completely.  To quote my favourite socially conservative anarchist: all art is propaganda.

So, the extent to which artists (or, more realistically, those who sell their work) are obliged to exercise moral responsibility really depends on their hinterland.  In the case of Lars von Trier, for example, his audience entirely consists of sophisticated intellectuals dripping with irony and thus with emotional immunity to anything they might rationally be able to see as morally dubious.  He is therefore freed of the same responsibilities that should lie with those shaping young and impressionable minds, which is why I can’t believe anyone could really be shocked by anything he does, whether making an outrageously misogynistic (but brilliantly done and impossible to take seriously) film like Antichrist, or this week pretending to be a Nazi.  He is a professional provocateur and should be enjoyed as such, whereas because of the different context I can’t quite share the nihilists’ sanguinity about the rapey rapper.  Honestly, though, I defy you to read the transcript of Lars von Trier’s gaffe and not lol.

Anyway, here’s a slice of hip hop we can all enjoy —

Their first effort wasn’t bad either, though it should be pointed out that the people behind the videos are big Hayekians, which explains his underdog treatment —

Who’s right?  No idea.  I have a lot of time for the idea that the Second World War and its highly ordered, heavily mobilised aftermath was the closest Britain ever came to being an equal and unified society.  Keynes’ theories have clearly not withered with the winding down of wartime production, but in times of peace, freedom and openness Hayek’s epistemological scepticism seems more appealing and more relevant.  My sense is that both are somewhat misrepresented in today’s debates (and in these videos, however entertaining) and that there is perhaps more common ground than meets the eye.  I read The Road to Serfdom recently, and didn’t recognise the libertarian bible it’s held up to be at all.  He argues that, while the government should practise economic liberalism (in the old sense of the word), it should also use taxes to fund a social safety net for those left behind, and should intervene in the market to prevent the growth of monopolies.  This seems much more like a small-c centre-right agenda than a minimalist one.  Ayn Rand, the Mrs Rochester of the American right, recognised this and thought him a despicable traitor (another big point in his favour for me).  As for Keynes, his contemporary supporters seem too happy to overlook the bit about reducing deficits during booms — but should we expect governments to do this, any more than we should expect them to follow Hayek’s advice and put interest rates up?

The question I would ask any Keynesians who might be reading is this: if everyone as a whole, i.e. the market left to its own devices, is incapable of organising the economy efficiently, why should it be the case that a far smaller group of people, i.e. the government, should be able to do any better?  The dispersal of information seems to warrant the dispersal of power, which is why I support more direct democracy.  The paradox of this, of course, is that a completely democratic society would never vote for a completely unfettered market.

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Blue ops

Daniel Hannan used a nice phrase on his blog the other day: deformation professionelle, or, ‘a tendency to look at things from the point of view of one’s own profession rather than from a broader perspective’, as Wikipedia has it.  I thought of this tendency as I listened to an interesting programme on Radio 4 last week on the ‘blue Labour’ movement, which holds that previous incarnations of the Labour leadership have, over recent decades, slowly abandoned the concerns of the working classes in favour of the chatterings’; abandoned Humberside for Hampstead, if you like.

Roy Hattersley, liberal elitist and professional deformer, argues against the idea that Labour should again concentrate on the anxieties of the working classes.  But have a listen to the example he gives: gay rights.  This is perhaps the only issue which is not a zero-sum game between the liberal middle classes and the socially conservative working classes.  In fact, gay rights are clearly in everyone’s interest, since homosexuality is hardly the preserve of the middle classes.  Traditional Labour voters may (I don’t know) have antiquated views on homosexuality, but I doubt many would describe it as one of their core concerns, up there with immigration, housing or crime.  On these issues Hattersley is typically disingenuous in his silence.

The liberal left wrings its hands over its failure to sell immigration, multiculturalism and globalisation to the C2s, Ds and Es.  What they never admit is that none of these changes, even if they are positive overall, are universally in everyone’s interest.  For the middle classes, they provide public sector jobs, allow us to own holiday homes in sunny climes, and give us a handy source of cheap labour: a “21st century incomes policy” as blue Labourite Jon Cruddas puts it.  But for the non-immigrant working classes, their relatively privileged position (relative to their peers in poorer countries) disappears as the manufacturing jobs, council housing and much else that was once part of our social settlement becomes unavailable.  Immigrants don’t “steal our jobs” as the BNP would have you believe, but on a big enough scale the process can keep wages at the bottom under control: this is good for inflation, but less good for equality.  And while there may not be a lump of labour, there is certainly a lump of land.

Ultimately the liberal left will have to choose between equality and diversity.  Can you, thoughtful reader, think of many countries that truly have both?  A quick glance at Russia (the world’s most diverse country, and increasingly its most unequal, though this is entirely the fault of its proto-fascist elite), the US, Brazil, Japan and Scandinavia suggests an inverse link between the two, and between levels of immigration and the extent to which the state is able or willing to protect its citizens from the caprices of the free market.  Personally I wouldn’t want us to end the free movement of people (or for that matter goods and services) around Europe: but we have to be honest about what this means for wages, for inequality (the growth of which may be inevitable but should still worry us) and for the welfare state.  The boom years allowed us to paper over the cracks inherent in trying to have it both ways and (to mix my metaphors a bit further) to sweep too many of our own underclass under the carpet: the undercarpetclass, to coin a phrase.

The blue Labour movement is at least making an honest attempt to solve this conundrum, but it seems doomed to be a romantic minority pursuit, especially since the Guardian readers will flock back to Labour from the treacherous Lib Dems.  But it is just possible, thanks to those same Lib Dems, that fewer young working class people will become exposed to the left-liberal groupthink of our universities, and will no longer buy into the dubious idea that a degree will guarantee them entry to a middle class career and lifestyle, and so will no longer buy into the liberal middle class weltanschauung.  If this aspirational false consciousness erodes at the same rate as our living standards, then… who knows?

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A history of violence

Reading the Guardian every day can be an exasperating experience.  Their output ranges from wildly popular grouch Charlie Brooker, to the BBC3ish rubbish of the Guide, to the Orwell-like reportage of Ian Jack, to dangerously misguided articles like this and this.  “Sent to jail for throwing a single bottle”, eh?  Quite right too.  But I’ve been left particularly unsettled by the tone of their recent reporting on the debate around crime and antisocial behaviour sparked by a few high profile cases.

I hope it goes without saying that I find the tabloid reporting of these issues distasteful; but the Guardian’s response can be just as bad.  Polly Toynbee, the liberal left’s standard bearer on that road that is paved with good intentions, speaks for the elite when she derides the “moral panic” whipped up by the Daily Mail and cynically latched onto by David Cameron.  This is classic Brownite politics: rather than confront what should be (and, tellingly, used to be) a non-partisan issue, turn it into a binary divide and blame the Tories for “talking down Britain”.  Both Labour and the Tories have recently been criticised for trying to make claims about crime going up / down: it’s almost impossible to judge objectively, and crime is perhaps the best example of the maxim “torture the statistics and they will confess”.  But murder and serious assaults are merely the top of a pyramid, built on immeasurable casual violence, built in turn on a general unquantifiable selfishness.  The Economist, in an article that might have been drafted in Downing Street, gives the dismal science a bad name by adjudicating on the basis of unreliable figures that only measure the tip of the problem.  Not for the first time, they’ve missed the point completely.

John Harris’s article in yesterday’s edition is the first honest thing the Guardian’s produced on the matter, and it’s gone a long way to restoring my faith in the paper.  (If you only read one link from this post, make it that one.)  He admits the problem exists, unlike Simon Jenkins who fumes against the “lynch mob” mentality.  If there is such a mentality out in the shires, it’s because public opinion on crime and punishment has become so divorced from the groupthink of the political class and the judiciary – and that’s not the public’s fault.  This division is dangerous for our democracy.  Sentencing policy should reflect harm caused, as should drugs policy: don’t make criminals of students munching magic mushrooms, do lock up heroin dealers for decades.

Fundamentally, the liberal left sees the criminal as a victim of society, whereas the people who have to live among criminals see themselves as the victims.  Many criminals certainly have been victims, but as Dominic Lawson points out, whenever they commit a crime they force someone else further down the pecking order than themselves.  To argue that the poorest and worst brought up will inevitably become criminals is fatalistic and factually incorrect, since most people who match that description don’t commit crimes.  We shouldn’t let individual criminals off the hook, then – but we should recognise the inevitability of crime in the dysfunctional, welfare-dependent and generally deprived parts of society.  Crime and antisocial behaviour are overwhelmingly worst for the poorest and most vulnerable in Britain: they, more than Guardian writers, need the protection of the state and the society that have so far (i.e. since before the Norman invasion) failed them.  As Lawson puts it:

“In polite circles it is not done to demand higher sentences for criminals; it is thought to be “barbaric” — and, worse, “populist”. It is true that pure vicarious rage for punishment is unattractive; it is also true that those who hate the whole idea of incarceration are motivated by an admirable intuitive sympathy for the underdog — which in their view of the world is represented by the man under lock and key. They find it almost impossible to understand that it is a similar sympathy for the underdog that inspires those of us who take the opposite view. For us the underdogs are the victims of crime — of those crimes that have taken place and those crimes that will assuredly happen when dangerous criminals are released early.”

The paper that produced the greatest writer of the twentieth century should follow him back to Wigan Pier, or back to their roots in Manchester: perhaps the day they moved to Farringdon was the day they stopped really caring about the downtrodden of the north.  Orwell, the Dickens of his time, uniquely spoke truth to power, to the poor and to everyone in between, and did so in language that was analytical but always clear and honest.  Proof of his genius is that, also uniquely, left and right both claim him as one of their own – and they’re both right, because he appeals to the better natures of both sides, the “what ifs” of the left and the “ah, buts” of the right.  The best writers challenge their natural audiences, as Peter Hitchens does on the right, railing against cars and consumerism in his Sunday sermons, and as George Monbiot has done on the left with his impressive attack on middle-class cocaine users.  With the exception of him, John Harris, Ian Jack and one or two others, today’s Guardianistas seem to prefer wallowing in complacency to challenging their own prejudices: the “what if” has become “so what”.  Perhaps this is because, deep down, they fear the other side have hit on a more fundamental truth: that decency, civility and even deference might be a greater protection to those at the bottom of the heap than the me-first permissiveness that the liberal left replaced them with.

The right argue that, since the overpaperworked police can’t be everywhere at once and are generally useless anyway, crime has flourished as the state has taken over the responsibilities of the community and the family.  The left argue that these social problems spread as stable manufacturing jobs gave way to the anxieties of neoliberalism (and are belatedly realising that immigration has helped the rich and hurt the poor).  Both sides have a point, but the solution can’t just be top-down – particularly if those at the top refuse even to acknowledge the problem.  “It was ever thus” might be true – I honestly have no idea – but either way it’s a nihilistic response.  As societies as varied as Singapore, Japan and Scandinavia show, crime can be minimised by an interventionist left / right mix of conservative social values and relative economic equality: but we have little appetite for either in Britain.  And while it’s easy to mock political correctness, its imposition has at least forced stupid white men to be a bit more civilised towards women, ethnic minorities and gays.  Now all we need is to extend the lengthy sentences for hate crimes against those groups to cover the rest of us.  When we do, the liberal left revolution will finally have been undone by its own contradictions.

Another totem of the liberal left is that (unlike themselves, who are more sophisticated) conservatives divide everyone into good and evil, with criminals necessarily in the latter camp.  I don’t think most criminals are evil: I think most criminals are rational.  With the exception of a few sociopaths, who are just as likely to rob your pension as burgle your house, most of us go about our lives by weighing up the pros and cons of various possible actions.  Criminals are no different: if it’s impossible to solve the causes of crime (and we should certainly try), we should at least give potential criminals greater disincentives against crime.  I expect that if I’d grown up on a sink estate I would correctly judge that I could get away with stealing things and would do so: but I wouldn’t extend that empathy for my parallel universe person to saying he / I shouldn’t be punished.

The BBC had a report this week about Muslim gangs taking over jails and punishing disrespectful prisoners.  Perhaps this, if nothing else, will give our indigenous underclass pause for thought.  Again, then, we see the conflict between the consequences of immigration and the decline of Christianity, and the liberal beliefs of those who have promoted immigration and sought to undermine Christianity.  There is zero chance of Britain being forced into a radical-conservative theocracy through the actions of a few hotheads with bombs strapped round their waists – there is some chance of Britain choosing to become a radical-conservative theocracy because much of the general population comes to actively welcome it.  For more on what that might look like, you’ll just have to wait for my forthcoming book.

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