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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Where to draw the line when squaring the circle of triangulation

Occasionally on this blog I’m a little behind the news agenda: usually that’s just because life gets in the way, but sometimes I like to have a good think about some issue before I write about it.  This is not a problem that burdens 99% of other bloggers.

The point is relevant to today’s post.  I’ve been thinking about Switzerland’s referendum vote to ban miniature cigarettes minarets.  I suspect I’d've sheepishly voted in favour of the ban, not for any particularly good reason but from a visceral fear of the country turning into relativistic Britain or the ghettoised Netherlands.  Perhaps that shows that the ‘no’ campaign were right to call the whole thing dangerous populism; but the vote should stand, and Swiss democracy will be weakened if, as now seems possible, the vote is overturned by the Swiss supreme court or even the European Court of Human Rights.

Our own representative democracy has failed in many ways: turnout is collapsing, the professional elite who conduct politics seem an ever more remote and self-serving class, and voters are losing patience with mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties and looking at more radical options.  Direct democracy, Swiss-style, therefore seems very appealing.  On the right, Dan Hannan and chums suggest a set of US-style reforms (elected sheriffs, recall elections, open primaries) that would make our democracy more direct, and so re-engage individual and community participation.  On the other side, many liberals and leftists think a more proportional voting system is the answer.  All very nice ideas, though in the former case our love of good public services and hatred of paying for them might well lead to a fiscal collapse of Californian and not merely British proportions, and in the latter case party lists would surely produce even more robotic, docile MPs.  (And the House of Lords, for all its logical incoherence, has stood up to the executive on freedoms of speech, detention without trial and ID cards in a way the Commons hasn’t: so liberals and social democrats should be careful what they wish for.)  Also, look at the direct relationship in the US between local control over electoral boundaries and partisanship and corruption: gerrymandered constituencies become unloseably safe seats, candidates are forced into extreme positions to win primaries, and – like Labour in Glasgow – have no incentive to govern well after their inevitable victory.

So: the Athenian ideal is of an informed citizenry consulted on as many matters of governance as often as possible.  Perhaps the Swiss are nearest this ideal: the US certainly isn’t.  At the moment Britain does worse on the second criterion: but I worry that a US-style relaxation of our broadcasting rules (as seems to be universally supported on the right, if the most popular blogs are anything to go by) would permanently destroy the possibility of the first.  The problem is that most people choose to expose themselves only to the ideas they already agree with, and consume media accordingly: be that Fox News or the Morning Star.  The man on the Clapham omnibus – damn him – prefers to have his opinions massaged than challenged.

What, then, would stop us ending up like the US, where the media has led society to a partisanship of 1860s proportions?  And how uninformed must a society be to elevate buffoons like Glenn Beck and Michael Moore to the status of revered commentators?  The BBC, for all its haters – and it’s to their credit that their news output manages to upset Israeli and Palestinian supporters in equal measure – seems to be one of the few sources of social cohesion left in Britain: and every time it chases ITV (or the increasingly degraded Channel 4) in the ratings race to the bottom, and every time we read that presenters are paid seven-figure salaries, and that hundreds of dispensable middle managers are paid six-figure salaries, its moral and cultural authority weakens a little more.  OK, Sky News is just as capable as News 24 of putting a competent reporter in Westminster to deliver the gossip.  But, as Peter Hitchens repeatedly points out, the BBC is still the only media outlet that bothers to produce challenging, high-quality broadcasting (another strand to his thesis, which perfectly sums up my own political philosophy, that selfish libertarianism is “profoundly unconservative”).  The wonderful serendipity of shows like The Forum on the World Service would, I suspect, never materialise in a purely commercial system.  The most recent episode of that show flits between forest fire management, the efficiencies of global food production, and the relevance of Dadaism.  In an increasingly niche market there might be money to be made in equally deep broadcasting, but not in equally broad.

A little cultural elitism, then, is necessary to stop democracy – which in our case could already become more direct with a referendum on whether to leave the undemocratic European Union – collapsing into mob rule and atomisation.  Would anyone, even fans of capital punishment, be happy with the idea of Simon Cowell deciding such matters in his bearpit?  It’s no surprise that his proposal is to physically divide the audience into two opposing factions, like the Greens and the Blues in the Colloseum, with no possible room for nuance or consensus.  Why not just go the whole hog and literally show bear baiting live on Sky One: that would be a logical consequence of Randy libertarianism too.  Restrained broadcasting, like independently set constituency boundaries, is therefore another example of the necessity of political vaccination: in the same way that a tougher line on debt a few years ago could have prevented our economic collapse, a mild state religion is the best defence against creepy evangelism, and a tougher line on immigration would have prevented the election of fascist representatives today.  Sorry if this doesn’t fit easily into predictable left / right pigeonholes – but you’re welcome to read that on 99% of other blogs.

P.S.  Peter Hitchens is worth quoting in full -

Those who call for the abolition of the BBC show a strange faith in the ability or willingness of commercial broadcasters to attempt serious reporting of news, high culture or religious broadcasting. Without the BBC such things will vanish from the airwaves. They also seem to assume – for reasons I don’t grasp – that privately owned monopoly or oligopoly broadcasters will be inclined to support conservative positions. There is no evidence of this. The three main (commercial) networks in the USA are relentlessly liberal, and Fox is neo-conservative, that is to say uninterested in the great moral and cultural issues. Of course if you want broadcasting to be a howling wilderness, then abolishing the BBC will certainly produce that result. But the BBC will in any case defeat such a campaign, precisely because it is true that commercial broadcasters can’t and won’t produce broadcasting of the quality of Radios Three and Four, or even that of the old (not current) BBC2 or the better bits of (publicly subsidised) Channel Four. Reform, such as I propose, is both more credible and more likely to succeed in the long run. Of course, you may say that it is unlikely (it is) or impossible (it may be) but these are counsels of despair, and if you really believe there is no hope then why bother to enter the debate? Better to cultivate your garden and seek shelter from the coming storm.

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Fanfare for the uncommon man

One of the best things about the spectre of economic and environmental collapse is that journalism’s apocalyptic pornographers are back in the ascendant.  Dystopian propheteering fills the dying newspapers; as Orwell put it: “I felt in a kind of prophetic mood, the mood in which you foresee the end of the world and get a certain kick out of it.”  This piece casts geoengineering in the Bladerunner aesthetic, and I enjoyed this one so much I’ve now linked to it here twice.  The last paragraph is striking:

I often wonder what people will think decades from now if they are able to view those old Doris Day and Rock Hudson comedies of the mid 20th century.  Invariably these stories took place in a Manhattan of sparkly new glass towers, and streets full of cars with tail fins, and companies that ruled the world, and men and women who had come back from a World War full of confidence that there was no limit to what people with good intentions could do and nothing that they couldn’t handle.  We are their children and grandchildren and it is a different world now.

It sure is.  Our lot is pessimism, and anyone who isn’t pessimistic has his head in the sand (possibly literally if he’s a young British soldier sent to Helmand).  At best we can copy Orwell’s resigned stoicism: in Coming Up For Air, presaging the Blitz on the eve of WWII, he wrote:

Whichever way you cross London it’s twenty miles of houses almost without a break.  Christ!  How can the bombers miss us when they come?  We’re just one great big bull’s-eye.  And no warning, probably.  Because who’s going to be such a bloody fool as to declare war nowadays?  If I was Hitler I’d send my bombers across in the middle of a disarmament conference.  Some quiet morning, when the clerks are streaming across London Bridge, and the canary’s singing, and the old woman’s pegging the bloomers on the line – zoom, whizz, plonk!  Houses going up into the air, bloomers soaked with blood, canary singing on above the corpses… If you come to think of it, in the whole of England at this moment there probably isn’t a single bedroom window from which anyone’s firing a machine-gun.  But how about five years from now?  Or two years?  Or one year?

So it turned out.  A Britain already in a terrible state enjoyed a last hurrah then declined some more; this could have been written 70 or even 100 years ago.  But on the other side of the Atlantic, the Manhattan of sparkly new glass towers and Übermenschen took shape and was lionised in The Fountainhead, which I read the other day.  Ayn Rand’s epic laissez faire bible, recently revivified by America’s overnight transition from big government conservatism to big government socialism, is still interesting for its hardline political and philosophical views, for its abstract, sadistic love story, and for its incisive take on modernist and classical forms of architecture.

It tells the tale of an uncompromising young architect, Howard Roark, and his battles with an erudite socialist newspaper columnist.  Roark, self-made and instilled with Rand’s objectivist ideals (borrowed from Nietzsche, whom she quotes approvingly in her introductory essay) rejects the fashions of his peers and sets about designing his own shockingly modern buildings.  Society hates him but he triumphs in the end as the lesser men around him fall.

Some of this iconoclasm is welcome, as when Rand’s alter ego Dominique Francon, a rich journalist and Roark’s lover, goes to live in a slum tenement for a story, then reports back on the experience first to a dinner party of wealthy landlords:

“The house you own on East Twelfth Street, Mrs Palmer,” she said, her hand circling lazily from under the cuff of an emerald bracelet too broad and heavy for her thin wrist, “has a sewer that gets clogged every other day and runs over, all through the courtyard.  It looks blue and purple in the sun, like a rainbow.”  “The block you control for the Claridge estate, Mr Brooks, has the most attractive stalactites growing on all the ceilings,” she said, her golden head leaning to her corsage of white gardenias with drops of water sparkling on the lusterless petals…

then to a meeting of social workers:

She stood in the speaker’s pulpit of an unaired hall and looked at a flat sheet of faces, faces lecherously eager with the sense of their own virtue.  She spoke evenly, without inflection.  She said, among many other things: “The family on the first floor rear do not bother to pay their rent, and the children cannot go to school for lack of clothes.  The father has a charge account at a corner speak-easy.  He is in good health and has a good job.  The couple on the second floor have just purchased a radio for sixty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents cash.  In the fourth floor front, the father of the family has not done a whole day’s work in his life, and does not intend to.  There are nine children, supported by the local parish.  There is a tenth one on its way…”  When she finished there were a few claps of angry applause.  She raised her hand and said: “You don’t have to applaud.  I don’t expect it.”  She asked politely: “Are there any questions?”  There were no questions.

So far, so good.  But uncomfortable truths soon descend into cod Gordon Gecko gibberish, as when Roark discusses maverick sculptor Steven Mallory:

“Most people say they’re concerned with the suffering of others.  I’m not.  And yet there’s one thing I can’t understand.  Most of them would not pass by if they saw a man bleeding in the road, mangled by a hit-and-run driver.  And most of them would not turn their heads to look at Steven Mallory.  But don’t they know that if suffering could be measured, there’s more suffering in Steven Mallory when he can’t do the work he wants to do, than in a whole field of victims mown down by a tank?  If one must relieve the pain of this world, isn’t Mallory the place to begin?”

A whole field of victims, eh?

For those teenagers who decide that true rebellion involves the rejection of their parents’ liberalism and their peers’ socialism, Howard Roark is a hero (albeit a uniquely gingerhaired one).  But readers describing themselves as libertarian on the basis that the man in the street knows better than the elite might be taken aback by her, and her hero’s, contempt for the common man and his mundane worldview.  Clearly she shares Kenneth Clark’s analysis that the last thousand years of Western civilisation hinged on the brilliance of a dozen or so individuals; fine, but a philosophy that glorifies a tiny share of humanity and damns the rest was unlikely ever to have the mass appeal of, say, social democracy.  Rand’s ultra-individualism was shaped by her experience of fleeing the collectivist horrors of the Soviet Union for the haven of America, but intellectually it might have been more rebellious not to go from one extreme to the other.

However, it’s easy to scoff now that modernism is old hat and the profession is dominated by Howard Roark egos like Rogers and Foster.  But on The Fountainhead’s publication in 1943 they still represented an exciting counterculture.  Would Manhattan, the 20th century’s greatest monument to modernism, have been built without determined Howard Roark types?  Would we have had great Bauhaus beauties like Tel Aviv, or even little ones like Britain’s seaside lidos?  Perhaps not.  I love these places, but they are coherent and contextualised, and I’d be just as offended by their vandalism by haphazard postmodern architecture as I am when it happens anywhere older.  As Kunstler puts it again:

The role of architect-as-supernatural-being requires the mystification of the public.  Hence, the more tortured and alienating it is, the better the building.  As city after city “bends over” for these sadistic operations, the architect takes on a persona not unlike the storied Dr Mengele of the Third Reich.

If Libeskind, Hadid and chums want to build a lasting monument to human endeavour (which I doubt) they should found a new city, rather than disfiguring all the old ones – though perhaps Rand would argue, with justification, that our statist times prevent their doing so.  What if she lived somewhere whose main asset was its heritage, and where the only new buildings were totally worthless – like most British cities?  She might reasonably argue that past builders were unconstrained by today’s self-defeating planning laws.  But towards the end of the book she reveals an important truth:

In the past ten years, while most of the new residences continued to be built as faithful historical copies, the principles of Henry Cameron had won the field of commercial structure: the factories, the office buildings, the skyscrapers.  It was a pale, distorted victory; a reluctant compromise that consisted of omitting columns and pediments, allowing a few stretches of wall to remain naked, apologizing for a shape – good through accident – by finishing it off with an edge of simplified Grecian volutes.  Many stole Cameron’s forms; few understood his thinking.  The sole part of his argument irresistible to the owners of new structures was financial economy; he won to that extent.

In the countries of Europe, most prominently in Germany, a new school of building had been growing for a long time: it consisted of putting up four walls and a flat top over them, with a few openings.  This was called new architecture.  The freedom from arbitrary rules, for which Cameron had fought, the freedom that imposed a great new responsibility on the creative builder, became a mere elimination of all effort, even the effort of mastering historical styles.  It became a rigid set of new rules – the discipline of conscious incompetence, creative poverty made into a system, mediocrity boastfully confessed.

“A building creates its own beauty, and its ornament is derived from the rules of its theme and its structure,” Cameron had said.  “A building needs no beauty, no ornament and no theme,” said the new architects.  It was safe to say it.  Cameron and a few men had broken the path and paved it with their lives.  Other men, of whom there were greater numbers, the men who had been safe in copying the Parthenon, saw the danger and found a way to security: to walk Cameron’s path and make it lead them to a new Parthenon, an easier Parthenon in the shape of a packing crate of glass and concrete.  The palm tree had broken through; the fungus came to feed on it, to deform it, to hide, to pull it back into the common jungle.”

That passage should be printed out and nailed to the door of RIBA’s offices.

The political and economic debate between individualism and collectivism will go on for as long as man is capable of reason; but I’d like to see it applied to the realm of aesthetics.  Has any collaboration or collective ever produced worthwhile art?  Perhaps not, though every Michaelangelo needs a Church to commission his Sistine Chapel, just as Roark needed Gail Wynand, his rags-to-riches, will-to-power newspaper magnate.  Though, as Will Self has written:

There are two ways of looking at the traditional demarcations between commissioner and commissioned.  One is that they allow architects, engineers, developers and financiers to divide large projects into suitable chunks of endeavour; the other is that they allow for responsibility for a botched job, or a structure disparaged by the public, to be similarly doled out – or even altogether avoided.

To stand on Ellis Island and gaze across to Manhattan (ideally with Rhapsody in Blue thundering from your iPod) is to marvel at the achievements of the American century.  Imagine Rand were somehow transported to contemporary Shanghai, and that she stood on the Bund looking across to the Pudong, transformed in a decade from paddy fields to a forest of skyscrapers and commerce.  She might imagine it had been done by the hand of Rourk-esque auteurs; but it’s all collective, all the work of committees and corporations, the unforeseen meld of capitalism and communism.  Collectivism endures; man is pragmatic more than he is heroic.  Every functioning city is a collective.  No man is an island, and – despite how it appears from Ellis Island – neither is Manhattan.

I felt in a kind of prophetic mood, the mood in which you foresee
the end of the world and get a certain kick out of it.

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