what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label England. Show all posts
Showing posts with label England. Show all posts

Saturday, September 4, 2021

Evoking Zeitgeist

One of the most difficult challenges for any writer is to try to evoke the spirit of a nation - in a balanced but insightful way. Chauvinism comes all too easily - be it of the American, English, French or even Scots variety.

But summoning up the soul of a country with appropriate text is a much greater challenge – and may well be best done by an outsider who knows the country well…Think Madame de Stael and Germany; de Tocqueville and the USA  

This train of thought is sparked off by my reading – almost in one go – a delightful book called “The Story of Scottish Art” – explored in this nice video. The author is himself a painter and uses a lot of examples (carvings as well as paintings) to illustrate the text - as well as his own water-colours. The book is based on a BBC series.

One of the things which endeared the book to me was the way he skilfully wove together aspects of the painters’ lives with developments in the nation. 

Painting is a good “handle” on a country – but it’s rarely used. Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily gives a “food and Mafia” take on that country; and Simon Winder’s “Germania” and Neil McGregor’s “Germany; memories of a nation” cultural takes on Germany – but skate over painting.

In 2007, I found myself leading a project in Sofia, Bulgaria and quickly became so taken with the paintings – particularly from the interwar period - I came across in its fascinating small galleries that I started to collect them. Naturally I wanted to know something about the artists – and found myself traipsing into antiquarian bookshops in search of information. The result was initially a small book of 50 pages – and, by 2015 or so, a larger one of 250 pages Bulgarian Realists – getting to know Bulgaria through its Art

This particular book started its life quite literally as a scribbled list on the back of an envelope - of painters whom a gallery friend thought I should know about in 2008 or thereabouts…..

It eventually became a list of 250 or so Bulgarian artists of the “realist” style which I developed to help me (and visitors) learn more about the richness of the work (and lives) of artists who are now, for the most part, long dead and often forgotten. 

But it also got me wondering about who is best placed to try to evoke the spirit of a nation….Social historians? Anthropologists? Artists? 

Some of you may know the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb whose book The Black Swan became a best-seller a few years ago. In it he makes a profound point about the process by which artistic “genius” is recognised (or not – the latter being more often the case). More than four centuries ago, the English essayist Francis Bacon had a very simple intuition….about a man who, upon being shown the pictures of those worshippers who paid their vows then subsequently escaped shipwreck, wondered where were the pictures of those who happened to drown after their vowsThe lack of effectiveness of their prayers did not seem to be taken into account by the supporters of the handy rewards of religious practice. “And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like”, he wrote in his Novum Organum, written in 1620.

This is a potent insight: the drowned worshippers, being dead, do not advertise their experiences. They are invisible and will be missed by the casual observer who will be led to believe in miracles.

Not just in miracles, as Taleb goes onto argue…..it is also the process which decides whether an artist is remembered. For every artist of genius, there have been many more with the same talent but whose profile, somehow, was submerged….

Art, of course, is the subject of high fashion – reputations ebb and flow…..we are vaguely aware of this…but it is money that speaks in the art “market” and it is the din of the cash register to which the ears of most art critics and dealers are attuned…… 

As I read Lachlan Goudie’s little vignettes of painters in “The Story of Scottish Art”, I realised that painters have always occupied an important position in social networks – often poor themselves, they rub shoulders with a wider range of people than most of us. In the early days, of course, they would focus on religious figures and then society people. But from the mid 19th Century, artists such as David Wilkie were able to celebrate ordinary folk in their paintings.

Nowadays, of course, we rarely see faces any more in paintings – just blobs and abstractions. Perhaps our artists are telling us something?

But my question is, I think, a good one – who is best placed to gives us insights into a country’s soul? Poets? Writers? Painters? Anthropologists? Historians? Social historians? Travel writers? Sociologists? Or who? 

Further Reading

Watching the English by anthropologist Kate Fox is one of my favourites – for that country.

Theodor Zeldin is probably the best on the French.

Perry Anderson’s article A New Germany? offers a great intellectual and political history of contemporary Germany. But otherwise, it’s not easy to find a serious book about modern Germany (although many good -histories) Gordon Craig’s magnificent “The Germans” came out in 1982 and John Ardagh’s “Germany and the Germans” in 1987 – since then there has be no real update to their insights into the German soul - Gitty Sereny’s “The German Trauma – experiences and reflections 1938-2001 and Fritz Stern ‘s “Five Germanies I have known” (2007) notwithstanding

On Italy, people are spoiled for choice – not just Barzini’s classic “The Italians” (1964) but Foot, Gilmour, Ginsborg, Hooper, Jones and Parks all giving a sense of the modern Italians….You pays your money….

The background to social history is laid out in this article

7 social historians lay their claims here

A book on The anthropology of Ireland demonstrates its possibilities

And the others?

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Mammon's Kingdom

David Marquand is one of England’s most emblematic political figures -
journalist, historian, (briefly) Labour MP and Brussels Eurocrat, University professor, Oxford University Principal and contributor to think tanks galore. Most importantly, he has been for many decades our foremost centre-left public intellectual, taking up arms against the corruption of our society by unprincipled, uncaring, neo-liberal marketisation and the resulting decline of the public realm.
No one (except Tony Judt) has voiced the anxiety of the progressive citizen with greater passion or power, or with more compelling scholarship. His Britain Since 1918 – the strange career of British Democracy  was, for me, the most compelling portrayal of the country’s political development I have ever read. And, to complete, the identikit, he is actually the spitting image of Alan Bennett.

I have just finished his most recent short book - Mammon’s Kingdom – an essay on Britain, Now whose review by Kenneth Morgan, the key historian of figures of the British left, forms the core of this post. The book's theme -
is the commercialisation of our culture and institutions. This has been most destructive since the Thatcher years, but, fine historian that he is, he shows that the roots lie much earlier, with the close link between finance and the state since Hanoverian times. There was a sharp reversal during and after the Second World War, when a new “clerisy”, variously composed of social critics like George Orwell, progressive civil servants like William Beveridge, working-class patriots like Aneurin Bevan and the Communist Arthur Horner recaptured the public ethic of Ruskin, Mill and Arnold.
The rot set in with disciples of economic individualism after 1944, pursuing the mirage of a free-market utopia along with (Marquand believes, perhaps more contentiously), a destructive “moral individualism.” Since then, the cohesion and self-belief of Britain as a comity have been undermined. Marquand analyses superbly the implications of this.
·         A sense of history has been replaced by a glib, uncomprehending journalistic "presentism".
·         A humane Keynesian-style economics has been supplanted by a dogmatic cult whose followers uphold an unthinking, unjustified faith in the impregnable rationality of the market, and the abstract "choices" allegedly open to a rational calculating individual.
·         Communal institutions such as local authorities or the civil service are degraded by a market state. Public values are driven out by an all-encompassing commercialism, as shown variously in the debasement of our universities, the sacrifice of sanity on the environment, and the undermining of the welfare state.
·         The Gini coefficient marches ever upwards, the increasing poor are isolated and humiliated, mass inequality is inescapable.
·         Our democracy is relentlessly eroded by lobbying corporate capitalism, resulting in a tax structure skewed in favour of the rich and a political structure debased by invasion by private wealth. Marquand describes the "revolving doors" through which ex-politicians glide effortlessly into the capitalist utopia, a process most notoriously symbolised by Tony Blair.
·         Worst of all, society is being atomised, riven by class division, its language of cohesion debased by the cheap slogans of media commentators, its sense of belonging, neighbourhood and human sympathy shredded everywhere, from the church to the public library to the bus queue.
We no longer seem to know each other. And so we no longer trust each other. Public goods and services, long taken for granted, are withering into commercialised decay. We have made a cheap, corrosive society, a world fit for Fred Goodwin to shred in.And the tragedy is, as Marquand shows, that much of this is due to moral surrenders by those previously in authority – the "flunkeyism" of civil servants, the avarice of professions (look at current vice-chancellors), the "charismatic populism" of politicians from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron who have destroyed the values they inherited. 
The manifold evils of the process are beyond dispute. But wherein lies the remedy? Here the book is rather more disappointing. The answer, it seems, is "a wide-ranging national conversation", in which the ideas upheld by philosophers past, notably Burke, Mill, Tawney, are proclaimed anew.
The themes for this kind of nationwide seminar are of unquestionable value. Burke, for long an improbable hero for conservatives, is rightly rescued as a celebrant of the social roots of living communities, and a prophet of cultural pluralism whether in Ireland or India. They are to be backed up by two less likely camp-followers – Karl Marx and Jesus Christ, the greatest prophet of the inexorable advance of monopoly capitalism, alongside the prophet of the priesthood of all believers. 
But donnish dominion, like patriotism, may not be enough. We need action as well as conversation. We have now a contrasting critique of the inherent inequalities of the capitalist order from Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He prescribes specific radical policies – global action on higher incomes and tax avoidance, annual taxation on wealth and property, help for working-class victims like a stable minimum wage, a restoration of labour unions.
The difference between Piketty and Marquand may be one of national culture. It is Gallic rage versus Anglo-Saxon sweetness and light.But Marquand has the roots within him to go much further. The book is dedicated to his father, Hilary and his great-grandfather, Ebenezer Rees. They were very different kinds of Welshmen – Hilary an economics professor at Cardiff, Ebenezer a journalist who founded the first Welsh socialist newspaper, Llais Llafur (Voice of Labour). What they had in common was that both were full of radical ideas on how to repair their fractured society.Perhaps Marquand's next work could recapture the values of the land of his fathers, to rebuild that "richer, deeper democracy" which our poor, corrupted country so desperately needs.