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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Woolsacked

After the defeat of AV, expect the next epic battle (and the next poisoned wooden spoon Cameron hands the Lib Dems) to be House of Lords reform.  At this point I’d better declare an interest as having worked there (as an erstwhile Hansard reporter).  Despite knowing the institution more intimately than I do any other, I don’t think I’ve written much about it before; this is because I find it quite difficult to make up my mind about what to do about the damn place.

Walter Bagehot famously quipped that “the cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it”.  Having sat through several postprandial hours of a debate on ‘the benefits of the Segway personal transporter’, it’s hard to disagree.  It’s also hard, on the other hand, to keep one’s rational faculties clear when in the building and not be seduced by the awful, artificial and amusing work of Augustus Pugin and Charles Barry and its supremely confident Gothic (that is, explicitly non-Roman) assertion of British exceptionalism.  I find it takes a great effort, and I can’t be alone in this, to disregard the indisputable aesthetic and technical accomplishments of the age of empire when weighing up its social, economic and moral pros and cons; too easy, in other words, to use beauty as a proxy for truth, justice, virtue.  The whole place is a spectacular triumph of Victorian propaganda: the Soviet Union had its stirring anthem and its heroic art, the US has its sexy movies, and we had the Tudor rose and the portcullis.  In the little reporters’ corner of the chamber, with some anonymous lifer suggesting to half a dozen of his fellows how to decide the makeup of a committee to determine the composition of a working group to investigate the regulation of the makeup of the committee, the eyes are inevitably drawn by the carved lions and unicorns, by the heraldic oak panels of the four patron saints, and eventually by the dazzling gilded ceiling whose ornaments and chandeliers seem to melt off it like stalactites, and your distracted reporter, overcome by a sort of reactionary Stendhal syndrome, finds himself transported to his own Burkean Ambrosia.  (The Commons is much less ornate and perhaps cosier for it, but the most profound sensation to be had in the estate is to be alone at night in Westminster Hall, gazing up at the hammerbeam angels still keeping watch nine centuries on, and only dimly aware of the restless metropolis beyond the buttressed walls: on such occasions I always find myself communing with Bede and his sparrow.)  So perhaps Bagehot would have been more accurate to say that the cure is to go and listen to it, while keeping your eyes shut.

I digress.  The question is: what use does the place serve now, and how could it be improved?  Here the traditionalist and the radical democrat in me clash (a problem Orwell had all the time).  A few perceptions about the noble and not-so-noble Lords persist that are no longer quite accurate.  Only 88 of the old hereditaries — Wilde’s old unspeakables — remain.  The vast majority of the rest are life peers, appointed by various prime ministers; a few bishops are left (and are we really about to see a Conservative prime minister eject them?), and the law Lords have moved across the road to the Supreme Court.  A lot of these are former or failed politicians, but a great many are also those who’ve excelled in various non-political fields: the arts, law, media, sport, business, academia, war.  In this sense, at least, they could be considered more diverse than the Commons, which with every election becomes more and more the preserve of PPE Oxonians in their mid-40s from north London who have only ever worked in politics.  The Lords, unlike the Commons, still has plenty of endearingly amateurish speakers (whom I always hope to avoid having to report on) and endearingly unsmooth operators.  And despite Cameron’s additions, Labour still has more peers than the Tories.

The balance that needs to be struck is to combine the resilient independence of the incumbent Lords (who stood up to the previous government on, among other things, the chilling effects of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act) with a greater (that is, any) popular mandate.

It seems inevitable, with the defeat of the AV referendum, that the Lords will become proportionately elected before the Commons ever does.  There is one serious objection to this: that, by picking who appears on the lists and in what order, the party managers would retain or even strengthen control over this occasionally rebellious House.  The Lords aren’t so easily whipped now, but their replacement senators (most of them presumably seeking re-election) could well be.  Might the coalition, then, use this opportunity to strengthen the executive relative to parliament?  That would surely be the opposite of what we should hope for.

So the extent to which we should welcome reform really depends on what sort of PR is on offer.  If Cameron, Clegg and Miliband have complete control over the party lists, then what comes next might if anything be worse than what we have now.  But if the government is actually willing to give power away — perhaps in the form of multi-member STV wards, or even open primaries, as are now used to pick some Commons candidates — then the public will have more say than the politicians, and the reformed chamber will have more legitimacy than the one it replaces.  There is a great opportunity for something better, but we will have to wait and see whether we are given another stitchup instead.

Our zeal for reform shouldn’t lead us to assume that what is done in its name will necessarily be more truly democratic, rather than a pale imitation of the deeply dysfunctional Commons; instead, we have to hold the coalition to account and insist that the upper House becomes as democratic as it possibly can, and that it gives power away from politicians, both elected and appointed: on this occasion, we have to keep our eyes wide open.

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Fight the powder

A couple of quick points about the elections: while I’m disappointed by the AV result (made inevitable by a campaign run by liberal leftists who took the ‘progressive majority’ as axiomatic and spoke only to other liberal leftists who were going to vote for it anyway), I am pleased about three things in particular.  First: the overdue collapse of the arrogant, cynical Tammany Hall machine that was the Scottish Labour Party.  Second: the failure of George Galloway to get elected (which has gone a long way towards restoring my faith in my home town).  Third: the collapse, even greater than the Lib Dems’, of the BNP in English local authorities.  Would it be opportunistic to suggest this is a welcome result of Cameron’s more populist stance on immigration and multiculturalism?

Naturally, if perhaps hypocritically, I will celebrate all of the above by stocking up on cheap booze while I still can.  That is one issue on which I hope moral conservatism will eventually trump big business conservatism.

I turn rather awkwardly to an unrelated issue which sort of fits that description: graffiti and its role in contemporary art.  Before I do so, have a read of these two pieces in City Journal which skewer a cruel form of decadence very eloquently.

The articles remind me of Orwell’s piece pondering why ‘if you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back’.  The difference is that rich people can throw whatever expensive crap they want at each other, but this new form of ‘art’ is an obviously hypocritical celebration of a destructive selfishness that exclusively harms the non-rich.

I have to confess to being slightly pleased that the Greens’ Martha Wardrop failed to get herself elected to the Scottish Parliament: purely because, as a councillor (see blogs passim on why multi-member single transferable voting is so great) she has been helpful and responsive in pestering the Council to clean up our own various neighbourhood works of low art, as well as other quotidia like litter.

What is it about graffiti that annoys me?  Perhaps the same things that make decadent people enjoy it: that it is a rejection of the rule of law.  A moment’s thought — and clearly the graffiti artists and their novelty-seeking propagandists have wasted very few moments on thinking — shows why this is a bad thing.  Leave aside the debate over the broken windows theory, and the practical problems of having street signs and public information notices covered in writing or paint.  The graffitist explicitly says: I don’t care about your private property, therefore I don’t care about your economic wellbeing.  From this it seems logical to infer that he is also saying, more subtly: I don’t care about your physical wellbeing, your safety or your health either.  In sum, the graffiti artist says: I don’t care about other people.

I make one or two exceptions for warranted and clever political statements: the enormous ‘ONE NATION UNDER CCTV’ painted on the side of a tall building in central London was impressive; but for every one example like this (and for every community mural, which are a far better use of young people’s artistic talent and of which there are several good examples, like the one beside Kelvinbridge Underground) there are a million annoying and disfiguring tags and scrawls.

I say private property, but more often than not the vandalism targets public property (usually postboxes, bins, etc) and has to be cleaned up at public expense, if it is at all.  Am I autistically out-of-touch, or do other people find it as incredible as I do that it needs to be explained to otherwise intelligent and educated people — the mainstream of the contemporary art world — why destruction of both public space and private property, and a general disrespect towards other people, and especially towards people in more deprived communities, is bad?

Perhaps the best response — an explicitly petty-bourgeois Marxist one — to the barbaric-decadent underclass-overclass axis, buggering those of us in between who still aspire to something better, would be to graffiti-bomb the museum, or the homes of its directors, and see how they like it.  I think it would be legitimate, in the spirit and tradition of situationist direct action against powerful elites, to call such an action a subversive work of art in itself.

It’s tempting to blame the excuse-making, poverty-blaming, bed-wetting liberal left for this, or perhaps that section of the left (these days best represented by Laurie Penny, who may or may not be a rightwing satirist) that romanticises violence and disorder on the streets (the right generally only romanticise violence in or against other countries).  But I suspect the egoism, and denial of delayed gratification, inherent in consumerism also have quite a lot to do with it.  The confluence of the two, I suggest, is at the heart of our modern anomie; hence my sympathy for the emerging Blue Labour school of thought that addresses both.

If the new SNP majority government can give minor offenders (eg those who do graffiti) community sentences that actually involve their removing this damage, that will probably be a better bet than sending them to prison.  Whether these community sentences actually do that, or become like ASBOs a laughable and easily ignored stunt, remains to be seen.

Finally, you may have noticed a while ago that, while Brown presented Obama with “an ornamental pen holder made from the timbers of the Victorian anti-slave ship HMS Gannet” (and got a set of region 1 DVDs in return!), Cameron, when it was his turn, gave Obama “a painting by a graffiti artist with three convictions for criminal damage”.  This suggests to me, unfortunately, that our prime minister has rather more in common with the curators of the LA Museum of Contemporary Art than with most of the rest of us.

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The king called up his jet fighters

A general consensus seems to have emerged in the middle ground of British politics in favour of the UN-approved coalition air attacks on Gaddafi’s forces.  Cameron, Clegg and Miliband took their positions on the frontbenches as moderates who wanted anything but another Iraq; events have turned them into multilateral hawks.  As a Young Turk I was sceptical of the idea that the thugs of Moscow, or the waxworks of Beijing, could confer legal or moral legitimacy on any military act; but the hatred the world felt towards the West for our bungled invasion of Iraq means that, if nothing else, it can no longer be in our national interest to act in the Arab world without Security Council approval.  Thankfully the new leaders of our warmongering political parties seem to have agreed.

There’s no need for me to repeat the arguments in favour of intervention: you’ll have read little else all week.  I’ll also leave aside Sarkozy’s Napoleonic motives, and the legitimate question of whether a US President is in breach of their Constitution by acting without Congressional approval (having dragged his heels for a fortnight, he can’t say he didn’t have enough time).  In this country (as, it seems, in the US) this is one of those issues that divide the centre-left and centre-right from the further left and further right.  On this position (unlike, say, the EU) I’m on the side of the centre, as it were.

On the left, we constantly hear the refrain: “What about Bahrain/Yemen/Saudi Arabia/Zimbabwe/North Korea/China?”  I would argue that just because it isn’t always practical to change the world doesn’t mean we never should.  Our policy should be one of liberal realism: deal with the world as it is but, without getting ahead of ourselves, try to make it more like what we would all like it to be when an obvious opportunity to do so presents itself (such as when a nearby dictator is hours away from completing a massacre).  But, of course, your leftist sees the world in binary terms, and rejects any possibility of incremental improvements: for him it must be all or nothing, and we must either use force against everyone or no-one.

Thinking he has thought of something very original that can’t possibly have occurred to you, he then retorts that the real reason we intervene in Libya, and not in the others, is to get our hands on its oil.  But why does it follow that just because a policy is in our national interest it must necessarily not be in the interests of the other party?  It doesn’t follow at all.  If we help the rebels to overthrow their dictators, thus helping them into power, one would hope that they would then return the favour in some way.  Everyone’s then happy, except the old regime and their pals in China/Russia/Germany/wherever.  What’s wrong with that?

On the right we see a different variant of this ‘splendid isolationism’.  Kelvin MacKenzie says on Question Time that “Libya is not worth one ounce of British blood”.  I would say that anyone joining our armed forces knows the risks perfectly well — and if they have a profound aversion to the idea of shedding their blood then perhaps they should consider an alternative career — and that preventing the torture and murder of large numbers of civilians is as good a use of their bravery and our resources as any.  Meanwhile Peter Hitchens writes that we should leave them to fight it out and make a deal with the winner.  For a man who argues that the Christian faith should be taught as truth in schools, this seems a pretty unchristian position (and, I am certain, not one that his, his brother’s and my hero Orwell would have taken).  He rightly admits his policy is “heartless”.

The left fall back on their two most feeble arguments; the right think compassion and the rule of law should stop at our borders.  Blair tried to draw Gaddafi in from the cold after he gave up his nuclear programme, but selling him the tools to brutalise Libyan citizens (I refuse to use the phrase ‘his own people’) was a step too far.  The SNP gave him back al-Megrahi while his appeal was pending; it may be that they did so for compassionate reasons, and it may well be that he was innocent, but thanks to Salmond and MacAskill we’ll never know.  So far, then, I prefer the new policy.

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The wisdom of the crowdsource

As a politics student I never much liked the term ‘political science’.  It seemed to imply that those of us doing the studying could somehow put our own prejudices aside, achieve a pure state of dispassionate reason, and study other people as if they were rats in a laboratory, rather than people just like us.  In the same way, the problem with ‘evidence-based policymaking’, which is one of the buzzwords of the day, is that the certainty of the sciences can never be fully applied to the social sciences, because it’s never possible to run fully controlled experiments on people’s lives.  Correlation, in trying to analyse the effect of one influence among millions on how people act, can rarely prove causation: at best it can give us an educated guess, which falls some way short of pure science.

Economics is a good example: the mountains of data it has accumulated still refuse to point to a clear conclusion.  The more the discipline progresses, the more disagreement there is between the Keynesians and the Austrians, both of whom can torture the statistics as they see fit and produce apparently convincing arguments.  The more I read from either, the less clear I am about which side is right: in theory the Keynesian position is appealing, but in practice the amount of responsibility it places in relatively few hands is a problem too.  Neither Ed Balls nor George Osborne really has a clue what will happen if we fiscally retrench, stimulate demand, put up interest rates, print more money, or whatever.  Each can quote roughly appropriate and superficially attractive examples from history to support his case, but neither can possibly quote examples that cover all of the variables that are in play in what is today an enormous, unique and uncontrollable experiment.  Beyond the very short term, our economic outlook is simply unknowable: unfortunately, politicians and commentators are respected for making confident predictions (even if those turn out to be completely wrong) so you won’t catch many of them admitting it.  Science and social science are, as it were, overlapping magisteria: the bigger and more complicated the political question, the weaker our ability to deal with it by scientific method.

The phrase ‘evidence-based’, then, when applied to politics, where there is rarely a definitively correct answer, is one we ought to be wary of.  Indeed, since governments so often debase evidence-based policymaking into policy-based evidencemaking, we have to be even more sceptical than usual when dealing with any politician, journalist or public figure who purports to be operating on the basis of ‘the evidence’.  Politics is about how we run society, what we do with our and other people’s money, how we share our time on earth with other people, how we order the fundamentals of our lives.  Unlike crunching data from radio telescopes or splicing plant genomes, these are emotive issues, and it is impossible to be fully dispassionate and to disregard our own experiences of our lives and of society.  Anyone who claims to be able to do so should warrant our suspicion.  Anyone who can genuinely do so is a sociopath.

If we are being honest, we all — scientists and academics included — at some point or other fall into one of the following:

1. anchoring trap — giving disproportionate weight to the first item of information received
2. status quo trap — bias towards maintaining the current situation
3. sunk cost trap — making decisions which justify previous decisions, even if these are no longer sound
4. confirming-evidence trap — concentrating on finding evidence to support a favoured option
5. framing trap — posing the question for the decision in a particular way
6. overconfidence trap — overestimating the accuracy of estimates and forecasts
7. prudence trap — being over-cautious
8. recallability trap — giving more weight to recent and dramatic events

(Hammond, J S, Keeney, R L and Raiffa, H (1998), ‘The Hidden Traps in Decision Making’, Harvard Business Review, September-October)

As ever, Orwell is ahead of me:

Implied in the demand for more scientific education is the claim that if one has been scientifically trained one’s approach to all subjects will be more intelligent than if one had had no such training.  A scientist’s political opinions, it is assumed, his opinions on sociological questions, on morals, on philosophy, perhaps even on the arts, will be more valuable than those of a layman.  The world, in other words, would be a better place if the scientists were in control of it. … The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook.  The physicists of half a dozen great nations, all feverishly and secretly working away at the atomic bomb, are a demonstration of this.

Go and read his short piece in full, then come back to this one.

The problem is at its most acute when, as with the Keynes/Hayek question, an issue presents us with binary choices.  The drugs debate is a good example, and one where the liberal side (including the BBC’s Mark Easton, who no longer makes any pretence of impartial journalism) claims to have monopolised the evidence, citing Britain before prohibition, contemporary Portugal, and elsewhere as examples of successful legalisation and harm reduction.  Many of these arguments are convincing, but then so is the argument that giving visitors boarding passes that read WARNING: MANDATORY DEATH SENTENCE FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER SINGAPORE LAW, and carrying out the threat, has resulted in a low drugs problem there.  Though they are clearly incompatible, essentially I agree with both sides: either extreme would be an improvement on the status quo.  But there is evidence on both sides, and neither side can conclusively demonstrate that their position, when applied to all of the other circumstances that are unique to our socio-economic situation, will work as they intend it to (for example, on the one hand the relaxation of late-night licensing laws failed to turn us into a continental-style cafe culture and merely extended the existing problems later into the night in the areas that adopted it, but on the other we had the legality and availability of ‘legal highs’ like mephedrone to thank for a drop in the use of other, nastier drugs like cocaine — at least until we made them illegal highs).  Both sides are advocating a leap in the dark, to a greater or lesser extent: but both are on firm ground to say that it is impossible to call the compromise that is our present policy a success.  What we ideally need is a global referendum in which the status quo is not on the ballot.  Much the same applies to the debate on crime and penal policy, where again the government seem to be advocating a mixed policy of community-based rehabilitation rather than short-term imprisonment, but without the vast amounts of money that such a policy would clearly need to have any chance of working — this seems to be the same sort of compromise as we have in drugs policy, and seems to me to have about as much chance of working.

The best way forward for politics and political science is to try to apply the methods of the information revolution: by acknowledging the limitations of social science as a discipline and the limitations on how much any individual or small group of people can know, by admitting the role of individual and social experiences in shaping people’s opinions, and by aggregating as much information as possible when formulating policy.  Policy should operate in the free market of ideas as price does in the free market of exchange: in the modern parlance, we should crowdsource it.  This is the opposite approach to fascism and communism (both of which, Orwell tells us, were supported by plenty of scientists and academics in their time), which both ultimately failed because too many decisions were being made by too few people with too little information.  The representative democracy we currently have — whereby we are ruled by an elite making what it thinks are the best decisions on our behalf, with a degree of our consent — is half way between the two positions.  The ultimate, revolutionary, goal — in synthesis with the revolution in access to information, which inclines me towards the rational optimist camp — is for as many people as possible to have as much of a say in as many decisions that affect them as possible.  Direct democracy may be some way off yet, but it is the direction in which we should be agitating to travel.

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Darlin’, we’re Lieven

Reading about the latest Kanye West video, I thought I should go and watch it for myself before passing comment.  As I did, I couldn’t help thinking: how did black American culture go from Leadbelly, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone to 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg and this?

As ever, our old pal Orwell is something of a guide.  In ‘Benefit of Clergy‘, he discussed why the European elite of the 1920s lapped up Dali’s ‘diseased and disgusting’ work, and why ‘if you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back’.  Lamenting the lack of a middle ground between conservatives unable to see any aesthetic merit in morally bad art, and liberals unable to see any moral harm in aesthetically good art, he wrote:

The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘Art’, and everything is O.K.: kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or is O.K. It is also O.K. that Dali should batten on France for years and then scuttle off like rat as soon as France is in danger. So long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.

Another Telegraph writer falls perfectly into Orwell’s trap without even getting beyond the headline — which reminds me of this brilliant bit of satire.

What’s happened since Orwell’s day is, despite his best efforts, the triumph of self-centred Bloomsbury values and their filtration through to every level of western society.  Combined with the awful inheritance that has come down to America’s black population (including, with a third of black men spending time in prison, the normalisation of crime), plus the absolute triumph of consumer capitalism over any opposing values (also inadvertently thanks to the Bloomsbury set, as the selfishness of the ’80s would have been impossible without its forerunner in the ’60s), hip-hop is the depressing result.  The stagnation of living standards has turned the American dream into a warped fantasy.

Music is quite a good proxy for the state of popular culture.  The blues and jazz artists of the first half of the 20th century sang of hardship but also of hope (mixed, in Leadbelly’s case, with great gallows humour).  This was the essence of gospel, and it was still discernible up to the Motown era.  By the 1980s, though, as the promise of the civil rights era waned, hope turned to anger in black music, and from the justified anger of early rap to the pointless, despairing, hedonistic anger of hip-hop — a sort of tribal return to a pre-slavery, pre-Christian culture of polygamous strongmen.  (By the way, I predict that in the coming decades the right to be married to more than one person at once will be enshrined in western legal systems.)

Animism and voodoo are more in evidence than gospel in postmodern black culture: no doubt this makes for more amusing entertainment for its white, middle-class consumers, but one would have to be pretty dogmatically anti-Christian to see this as an improvement for black Americans themselves.  No doubt Christianity became less appealing for them the more it was hijacked by rightwing white politicians.  As in Europe, the backlash is now coming from Islam, which — having not abandoned moral struggle for Christianity’s complicated, self-defeating liberal omphaloskepsis — is really in quite a strong position.  It’s already formed a powerful movement among disenchanted and downtrodden black men in America and Britain: when this reaches the white underclass, perhaps the rest of us will start to take belated note.

I mused on all of this as I reread Anatol Lieven’s ripsnorting bit of apocalypse porn from 2001 in Prospect magazine (nicely bookended by a link with a picture of cheeseburgers and the caption ‘all you can eat in Glasgow — up to 70% cheaper here’).  In it, he more or less predicts the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina and the credit crunch.  With the exception of the latter, which he dates to 2007, these events happened a lot sooner than he expected.  One line in the piece seems apt to this discussion:

This was only the last stage in a long process of the moral degeneration of popular culture, beginning with the spread of television in the 1950s. Erotica, pornography and, at the extremes, sadistic violence, had already made big advances through the popularity of film and video in the 20th century.

Perhaps; I doubt there’s anything new under the sun, but the process that began with TV and continues with YouTube has certainly exposed a lot of sadistic violence that was previously hidden, and has no doubt turned many impressionable people in the wrong direction.  When the harm that passes for public entertainment becomes real rather than simulated, I suppose we will have crossed the line.  Note, though, that as the commodification of life-affirming sex in pop music can go no further without becoming indistinguishable from pornography, so death-affirming sex is commodified instead (compare, say, Madonna’s Justify My Love video, forged in rebellion against repressive sexual morality, with any video by her very boring successor Lady Gaga, forged in rebellion against absolutely nothing, and you’ll see what I mean).

Anyway, the commercialisation of hip-hop is merely the latest and most watered-down incarnation of the cruelty inflicted by white elites on the black underclass, from slavery and imperialism via lynching and segregation.  King Leopold would have loved it; his successors are no doubt perfectly chuffed with the triumph of the completely apolitical gangsta rappers.  I’m almost tempted to tip my hat to the racist Kanye for taking the genre out of its comfort zone of black-on-black violence.  I have to ask, though: if 50 years ago black America had had role models like him, would the civil rights movement actually have happened?

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I like to say I told you so

In 1945, in ‘Notes on Nationalism’, the great George Orwell wrote: “For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. Out of the hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies, the U.S.S.R., Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In theory, it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would therefore start by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America as the case might be, and only after this would begin searching for arguments that seemed to support his case. And there are whole strings of kindred questions to which you can only get an honest answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of all the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939. And when news of the Pact broke, the most wildly divergent explanations of it were given, and predictions were made which were falsified almost immediately, being based in nearly every case not on a study of probabilities but on a desire to make the U.S.S.R. seem good or bad, strong or weak. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.”

So it is with our LibCon coalition today.  For astrologers, read commentators like Mehdi Hassan and Polly Toynbee, who has somehow survived more mistakes than anyone and still persists with headlines like ‘David Laws’s life goal was to cast people out of work’.  The left now seems divided into a couple of camps.  The first and more open-minded of these, mainly Lib Dems, accept that New Labour had run its course and welcome the coalition’s policies on raising the lowest income tax threshold (redressing Brown’s assault on the poor when he removed the 10p tax band) and on reform of the voting system and the Houses of Commons and Lords.  The second lot, mostly Labour drones but also quite a few anti-Tory tactical Lib Dem voters, regard the whole thing as an epic betrayal and bleat that the ConDem government will again “rape the country” etc – oblivious, of course, to the fact that it was Brown’s mismanagement of the economy and the public finances that made the coming cuts a necessity.

Most of those in the second camp are disappointed because they bought into Cleggmania after the first TV leaders’ debate, when his natty line in putting his hands in his pockets, looking at the camera and remembering the audiences’ names led a remarkable number of people to regard him as an Obama-like insurgent, despite sharing Cameron’s charmed upbringing and career and leading a party that was as old and almost as soiled as the other two.  I say to this lot: why haven’t you been paying attention for the last three years?

As the Orange Book suggested before he was even an MP, Clegg is as much of an anti-statist liberal as Cameron is a socially liberal conservative.  (Likewise the sadly defenestrated David Laws, though Vince Cable can’t seem to make his mind up about which side he’s on, and is now behaving like more of a human being than his devotees gave him credit for.)  I suppose the legions of students who in the end failed to turn out for Clegg hadn’t read this book either.  The rape camp have desperately peddled the line that “there is a progressive majority in this country”.  I suppose it depends what you mean by “progressive” (though I wonder what Orwell would have thought of the word being claimed by Brown, Blair, Balls or either Miliband) but it’s a dubious claim: it’s very lazy, and I think insulting, to assume that the bulk of Lib Dems would see their party as some sort of slightly more competent offshoot of Labour, rather than representing a wholly separate tradition of liberty that the past 13 years have undermined.  Indeed, of all parties they seem closest to rejecting the left/right bifurcation.  Perhaps the “progressive majority” was less of a logical stretch under Paddy Ashdown or Charles Kennedy, but Clegg has undoubtedly moved his party away from the social democrats and nearer its pre-SDP radical liberal traditions, just as Cameron has moved his party from the ideological hard right to the pragmatic centre-right – which the tribal left has also done its best to ignore, though the tribal right has not.  (The obvious rejoinder to them is: if you can’t win a majority after 13 years of Labour government, a useless Scottish prime minister and the worst economic crisis since the ’30s, you never will again.)

If all that wasn’t enough of a hint, Clegg said during the campaign that he would open negotiations with the party with the biggest mandate from the electorate, which was never going to be Labour.  Many of those claiming to support a ‘new politics’ were horrified when he stuck to his word.  So anyone who thought Clegg would defy the arithmetic of seats, and prop up the government he has spent his leadership reviling and intellectually dismantling, was fooling himself.

I said in my last post before the election, “the figleaf of a deal with the Lib Dems would probably be the best result – for [the Tories] and us.”  I stick by that (albeit with reservations about power grabs like changing the rules on the dissolution of parliament).  A Tory prime minister will implement the best bits of Lib Dem thinking, and the Lib Dems will keep a check on the worst excesses of the machine that is historically our natural party of government.  Labour should go away and examine why they became so arrogantly removed from public sentiment, so captured by vested interests and so scared of democratic reform.  Part of the problem is that, instead of putting it that way, they will doubtless pay consultants to answer the question: “how did we fail to communicate our message to the C2s?”

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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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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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