I watched a depressing Panorama last night about the plight of Brent residents hit by the benefits cap, then read this morning this comment piece about the lovely Ian Duncan Smith's "reformed" replacement for the Disability Living Allowance. All of this is part of a pattern of course, and I have no intention of adding another pathetic complaint to the mountain that has built against the current government's benefit "reforms."
What I did want to pick up on is a strange but all-pervading reaction that I observed from most of those whose cases were followed in the Panorama programme. As they faced eviction and penury some were confrontational, some resigned, some vocal and truculent, others submissive. However most of all what they felt seemed to be shame. They were ashamed of being poor, ashamed of having to rely on the state, ashamed of the shitholes they lived in. Many of them were also as willing as the general population currently is to turn on and vilify "benefit claimants," as though that was not what they were. Many also seemed to have in their minds a definition of a "benefit claimant" who actually deserved to feel the shame they were themselves experiencing. One truculent man whose benefit was being cut trotted out the old myth about young single mothers having it easy; a young single mother, unsuccessful in her search for work to fit around her childcare responsibilities, blamed those without jobs.
Despite all being trapped in the steadily tightening web of the casually cruel benefits cap I would be very surprised if any of the subjects of this documentary would have voted for a political party whose policies included raising taxes and increasing benefits (should such a party even exist). We were reminded in various soundbites from leading politicians just how universal the political consensus is that benefits have to be cut.
So why is it that almost everyone in the UK (including the poor) believes that in times of austerity the amount of money going to the poor should be cut? How is it that we have developed to a point where poverty is of itself is deemed to be shameful? This used to be a country where "a working-class hero [was] something to be." No more, it seems.
Not so long ago it was the very rich who were typically portrayed as feckless, self-absorbed and decadent. Think of Bertie Wooster, or the Roman Emperors in the 70s productions of I Claudius or Caligula. At the same time there was a prevailing image of the fierce independence of the British working classes. Some of this was a legacy of the "spirit of the Blitz", when the poor of London's East End were portrayed as sticking two fingers up to Hitler's Luftwaffe. Some had an even longer germination, from the images of industrial workers powering the industrial revolution and the glories of the British Empire. The question of how closely these myths related to reality is neither here nor there: we had our archetypes of the miner, the shipworker or the railwayman, their faces blackened and their eyes steely with determination.
The 70s industrial troubles dented these images slightly, and began to introduce the conflicting trope of the "all out lads!" unionist warming his hands round a brazier. However the miners' strike, much as it might have divided Britain, had at its heart a powerful image of the indomitable poor fighting against the oppressive power of the state. From the Clash to Billy Elliot we were presented with images of the poor beaten down and dominated but retaining some dignity nonetheless.
However slowly our iconography has begun to change, and with it, apparently, our attitudes. Despite the prominence of made-to-measure figures of contempt from amongst the hyper-rich, like Fred (the Shred) Goodwin and Paul (meth and crack) Flowers we still seem to be moving towards a US-style veneration of the rich. Depending on our political affiliations (and level of personal wealth) we may feel anger towards them or envy, but we rarely seem to laugh at them any more. They may be figures of hatred, even of contempt, but rarely of fun. We seem to have accepted that, to get where they are, the hyper-rich may be grasping and of questionable morality but they must also be powerful, virile and brilliant. The fact that most of them are probably none of these things seems to have passed us by.
More sadly though, any last vestige of the concept of dignity in poverty seems to have disappeared. We have come to the point where poverty porn seems principally designed to generate not sympathy but contempt for the poor. The word "benefit," in itself an intrinsically positive word (from bene facere: to do good) now seems inextricably linked to the word "cheat."
Shame is a powerful force, but it really needs to find its appropriate target. It is the rich who should feel ashamed, every time they spend more on a meal out than the average family has to live on for a week. And we should feel ashamed at every story we hear of families evicted and the sick and disabled living in penury. The concept is bandied about a fair bit, but often directed by the current government at those in the public sector who, for all their failings are at least making some effort to address the needs of those less fortunate than themselves. Yes, mistakes by social workers, or poor hospital care by nurses are terrible things, but nowhere near as shameful as the simple fact that the 85 richest people in the world own as much as the poorest 3.5 billion or that in Britain today families in poverty can be forced to move 100 miles with no redress because their benefits have been capped.
Showing posts with label Society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Society. Show all posts
Friday, 11 April 2014
Wednesday, 2 April 2014
Portraiture and the #nomakeupselfie
I was alerted to the phenomenon of the no makeup selfie by my daughter, who has written an excellent blog post on the inappropriateness of aligning it with the fight against cancer. I have nothing to add to her post on that subject but wanted to look a little at the place of the phenomenon in the history of portraiture.
Disclaimer: I am emphatically not an art historian, so some of what follows may well be inaccurate. Ah well...
Although it seems a commonplace to state that portraiture has been around "since the dawn of time," or "for as long as people have made art," I am not entirely sure that that is the case in the sense that we understand portraiture today. Most of the Paleolithic art that we have today, if it depicts humans at all, depicts them in generic and non-individualised ways (like these), or records their presence rather than depicting their facial features (like the hand-prints for instance). There is a famous "portrait" in the grotto of Vilhonneur, thought to be 26,000 years old, but it seems to me at least questionable that this is a depiction of any real individual.
Ancient artists seem to me to have been more concerned with depicting archetypes and creating symbols than with recording the physical appearance of individuals. Perhaps art was for them too powerful a medium to direct it to depicting what some particular person looked like. It may also be that the power of art rendered portraiture problematic- that the act of capturing a likeness endangered the person whose likeness was captured. That would seem a plausible thought in a time when the spirit world, with which art was strongly associated, was always close at hand.
When portraiture first really boomed as an art form it was in forms with very different purposes to those we associate with it today. In ancient Egypt and elsewhere portraits started appearing in tombs. Whether or not these were painted or carved post-mortem it seems clear that the primary audience was not the living. These portraits seem almost an attempt to give the deceased an identity in the hereafter. It appears not to have been particularly important that the portrait resembled the sitter physically, since the name inscribed thereon would identify it. Instead the portrait depicted the person symbolically, sometimes with attributes of Gods or sacred animals. Art still seems to be seen as having a magical effect, though one that people now feel can be harnessed to their benefit.
The other forms of portrait in the ancient world have survived to this day, but we scarcely see them as portraits any more. These are depictions of rulers and other powerful people on coins and in public statuary. Here the magical power of art is clearly being used to enhance the temporal power of the sitters. Coins are immensely potent symbols of the power of an emperor or other ruler. The point about coinage is that it is the symbols impressed on the coins that in a sense invest them with monetary value, and it is perhaps unsurprising that rulers chose to associate that symbolic power with their own faces. However there is a clear coding of the use of portraiture on coins: always in profile, apparently decapitated and without any physical context. Realistic and individualised as many of them appear to be these portrayals are clearly different in intention to what we regard as portraits today.
Public statuary (and other public portraits) equally use the magic of art to enhance status and reputation. The focus seems much more on the sitter's role than on their character or personality, with fighting rulers portrayed on horseback, striking heroic poses. Roman statues of emperors, whilst apparently much more realistic than the Greek statues whose style they emulated, were manufactured with generic bodies and replaceable heads. This was handy in the case of a sudden overthrow of an emperor and replacement with another (no need to start a new statue, just chuck away the old head and make a new one) but also tells us something about the statues' purposes and how they were to be read: these were not an attempt to capture the unique character of a sitter at a particular moment in time but a public statement of their power. Such public portraiture is not as popular as it once was, being uncomfortably associated nowadays with repressive dictatorships, but the tradition has lived on in Hollywood posters.
Domestic portraiture in the sense that we would understand it does seem to have existed in Ancient Rome, as evidenced by some of the wonderful frescoes discovered in Pompeii. However what actually struck me when I visited there was how few there are. Many of the apparent portraits are actually depictions of gods or other mythological beings, and given the enormous profusion of art on every wall, ceiling and floor in the city there seem to be precious few straightforward portraits of the owners or their ancestors. Perhaps in a world where the Lares and Penates were physically present in every household it was seen as something like hubris to use the magic of art to associate one's own image with that of the heroes, gods and emperors.
However domestic portraiture survived, though for centuries being associated almost exclusively with the rich and powerful. And even domestic portraits seem often to have been concerned at least as much with a symbolic as a realistic portrayal of the sitter. Renaissance portraits for instance, whilst often beautiful and highly individualised are also frequently packed with symbolic images that lift the portrayal beyond a mere snapshot. Sitters are clearly aware of the power of having their portrait "taken" (the word is an interesting one) and this awareness survives into the beginning of the era of photography.
However the transformation of our concept of domestic portraiture began with the availability of cheap portable cameras. Suddenly portraiture not only became available to everyone but was stripped overnight of its intimidating power. We all took hundreds of pictures of each other, hardly regarding them as portraits, and kept them as mementos of holidays and weddings, early childhood and significant events. These portraits were domestic and personal in an entirely new way, not being intended for viewing beyond the immediate circle of close family (except perhaps in those ghastly slideshow evenings following foreign holidays).
So while public portraiture was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it had once been (outside countries such as Turkmenistan at least) domestic portraiture was booming. And domestic portraiture meant something much more private and informal than it had ever meant before. And so it seemed that the nature of portraiture itself had changed forever and perhaps the process of disassociating it from the magical power of art was complete.
It was social media that began to change things round again, and to reinvest domestic portraiture with some of that magic and erode some of the distinctions between public and domestic portraiture. At first social media seemed to provide nothing more than an electronic version of those slideshow evenings. Facebook was just a way to share (endless) images of people in social situations of various sorts primarily with others who had been there at the time. However the selfie was an interesting development, and the #nomakeupselfie even more so.
Whilst "traditional" Facebook or Instagram uploads are all about images of the user in social contexts, selfies are the precise opposite. A true selfie (unlike the notorious one taken at Mandela's funeral) has only the sitter/photographer, often in a highly domestic setting, such as a bedroom. Its purpose, which has its logical extension in the no makeup selfie, seems to be to present to the world an image of one's essential individuality and uniqueness (which makes the whole notion of the #nomakeupselfie craze even more paradoxical). The only explanation I can find for people doing this goes back to the earliest days of portraiture: it is as if people are aware of the magical power that can be harnessed by creating an image of the human face. In taking and publishing a selfie they want to make a public record: this is me. I exist.
The no makeup selfie is the same but even more so, and seems to me even more an existential act, which again makes it even weirder that many seem to have been moved to create and publish one by an internet craze and the social pressure to conform. If that isn't mauvaise foi then I don't know what is...
Oddly, written analogues for self-portraiture seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Twitter, which for a time seemed doomed to be no more than an interminable sequence of self-indulgent verbal selfies ("Got up early today and brushed my teeth. May go out for a walk later.") has mutated into a medium for social debate and the sharing of memes of various degrees of sophistication and/or humour. No tweet now is complete without at least one hashtag, and these take the attention away from the individual essence of the tweeter in a way that is diagrammatically opposed to the impulse that creates the no makeup selfie. Although the concept of the self-portrait diary got a bit of a boost recently with the broadcasting of Tony Benn's diaries after his sad death that form of diary has begun to sound rather old-fashioned. In writing, it seems, we are to be defined by the size of our audience of followers, or by our humour and our skill and persistence in unearthing gems from the vastness of the internet.
So is the no makeup selfie just a temporary aberration- a craze that will soon die a death? Who knows. However I do suspect that its sudden ubiquitousness as a phenomenon has revealed a yearning to harness the magic power of portraiture that humans have been aware of for so long.
Disclaimer: I am emphatically not an art historian, so some of what follows may well be inaccurate. Ah well...
Although it seems a commonplace to state that portraiture has been around "since the dawn of time," or "for as long as people have made art," I am not entirely sure that that is the case in the sense that we understand portraiture today. Most of the Paleolithic art that we have today, if it depicts humans at all, depicts them in generic and non-individualised ways (like these), or records their presence rather than depicting their facial features (like the hand-prints for instance). There is a famous "portrait" in the grotto of Vilhonneur, thought to be 26,000 years old, but it seems to me at least questionable that this is a depiction of any real individual.
Ancient artists seem to me to have been more concerned with depicting archetypes and creating symbols than with recording the physical appearance of individuals. Perhaps art was for them too powerful a medium to direct it to depicting what some particular person looked like. It may also be that the power of art rendered portraiture problematic- that the act of capturing a likeness endangered the person whose likeness was captured. That would seem a plausible thought in a time when the spirit world, with which art was strongly associated, was always close at hand.
When portraiture first really boomed as an art form it was in forms with very different purposes to those we associate with it today. In ancient Egypt and elsewhere portraits started appearing in tombs. Whether or not these were painted or carved post-mortem it seems clear that the primary audience was not the living. These portraits seem almost an attempt to give the deceased an identity in the hereafter. It appears not to have been particularly important that the portrait resembled the sitter physically, since the name inscribed thereon would identify it. Instead the portrait depicted the person symbolically, sometimes with attributes of Gods or sacred animals. Art still seems to be seen as having a magical effect, though one that people now feel can be harnessed to their benefit.
The other forms of portrait in the ancient world have survived to this day, but we scarcely see them as portraits any more. These are depictions of rulers and other powerful people on coins and in public statuary. Here the magical power of art is clearly being used to enhance the temporal power of the sitters. Coins are immensely potent symbols of the power of an emperor or other ruler. The point about coinage is that it is the symbols impressed on the coins that in a sense invest them with monetary value, and it is perhaps unsurprising that rulers chose to associate that symbolic power with their own faces. However there is a clear coding of the use of portraiture on coins: always in profile, apparently decapitated and without any physical context. Realistic and individualised as many of them appear to be these portrayals are clearly different in intention to what we regard as portraits today.
Public statuary (and other public portraits) equally use the magic of art to enhance status and reputation. The focus seems much more on the sitter's role than on their character or personality, with fighting rulers portrayed on horseback, striking heroic poses. Roman statues of emperors, whilst apparently much more realistic than the Greek statues whose style they emulated, were manufactured with generic bodies and replaceable heads. This was handy in the case of a sudden overthrow of an emperor and replacement with another (no need to start a new statue, just chuck away the old head and make a new one) but also tells us something about the statues' purposes and how they were to be read: these were not an attempt to capture the unique character of a sitter at a particular moment in time but a public statement of their power. Such public portraiture is not as popular as it once was, being uncomfortably associated nowadays with repressive dictatorships, but the tradition has lived on in Hollywood posters.
Domestic portraiture in the sense that we would understand it does seem to have existed in Ancient Rome, as evidenced by some of the wonderful frescoes discovered in Pompeii. However what actually struck me when I visited there was how few there are. Many of the apparent portraits are actually depictions of gods or other mythological beings, and given the enormous profusion of art on every wall, ceiling and floor in the city there seem to be precious few straightforward portraits of the owners or their ancestors. Perhaps in a world where the Lares and Penates were physically present in every household it was seen as something like hubris to use the magic of art to associate one's own image with that of the heroes, gods and emperors.
However domestic portraiture survived, though for centuries being associated almost exclusively with the rich and powerful. And even domestic portraits seem often to have been concerned at least as much with a symbolic as a realistic portrayal of the sitter. Renaissance portraits for instance, whilst often beautiful and highly individualised are also frequently packed with symbolic images that lift the portrayal beyond a mere snapshot. Sitters are clearly aware of the power of having their portrait "taken" (the word is an interesting one) and this awareness survives into the beginning of the era of photography.
However the transformation of our concept of domestic portraiture began with the availability of cheap portable cameras. Suddenly portraiture not only became available to everyone but was stripped overnight of its intimidating power. We all took hundreds of pictures of each other, hardly regarding them as portraits, and kept them as mementos of holidays and weddings, early childhood and significant events. These portraits were domestic and personal in an entirely new way, not being intended for viewing beyond the immediate circle of close family (except perhaps in those ghastly slideshow evenings following foreign holidays).
So while public portraiture was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it had once been (outside countries such as Turkmenistan at least) domestic portraiture was booming. And domestic portraiture meant something much more private and informal than it had ever meant before. And so it seemed that the nature of portraiture itself had changed forever and perhaps the process of disassociating it from the magical power of art was complete.
It was social media that began to change things round again, and to reinvest domestic portraiture with some of that magic and erode some of the distinctions between public and domestic portraiture. At first social media seemed to provide nothing more than an electronic version of those slideshow evenings. Facebook was just a way to share (endless) images of people in social situations of various sorts primarily with others who had been there at the time. However the selfie was an interesting development, and the #nomakeupselfie even more so.
Whilst "traditional" Facebook or Instagram uploads are all about images of the user in social contexts, selfies are the precise opposite. A true selfie (unlike the notorious one taken at Mandela's funeral) has only the sitter/photographer, often in a highly domestic setting, such as a bedroom. Its purpose, which has its logical extension in the no makeup selfie, seems to be to present to the world an image of one's essential individuality and uniqueness (which makes the whole notion of the #nomakeupselfie craze even more paradoxical). The only explanation I can find for people doing this goes back to the earliest days of portraiture: it is as if people are aware of the magical power that can be harnessed by creating an image of the human face. In taking and publishing a selfie they want to make a public record: this is me. I exist.
The no makeup selfie is the same but even more so, and seems to me even more an existential act, which again makes it even weirder that many seem to have been moved to create and publish one by an internet craze and the social pressure to conform. If that isn't mauvaise foi then I don't know what is...
Oddly, written analogues for self-portraiture seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Twitter, which for a time seemed doomed to be no more than an interminable sequence of self-indulgent verbal selfies ("Got up early today and brushed my teeth. May go out for a walk later.") has mutated into a medium for social debate and the sharing of memes of various degrees of sophistication and/or humour. No tweet now is complete without at least one hashtag, and these take the attention away from the individual essence of the tweeter in a way that is diagrammatically opposed to the impulse that creates the no makeup selfie. Although the concept of the self-portrait diary got a bit of a boost recently with the broadcasting of Tony Benn's diaries after his sad death that form of diary has begun to sound rather old-fashioned. In writing, it seems, we are to be defined by the size of our audience of followers, or by our humour and our skill and persistence in unearthing gems from the vastness of the internet.
So is the no makeup selfie just a temporary aberration- a craze that will soon die a death? Who knows. However I do suspect that its sudden ubiquitousness as a phenomenon has revealed a yearning to harness the magic power of portraiture that humans have been aware of for so long.
Friday, 21 March 2014
This is not what disclosure of abuse is like
I am an admirer of Barnardos, and have watched with interest their attempts to put over what they (and others, such as social workers) do to support vulnerable children. Their first TV campaign, "breaking the cycle" was compelling and disturbing, using TV editing (the repetition of the same sequence in shorter and shorter segments) in a similar way to their juxtaposition of visual images in the controversial "heroin baby" poster. They then appear to have decided to put the emphasis more on their supportive work than on the traumas faced by the children they work with, and their first effort at this, "Life story" I think took an excellent approach, even if its intention wasn't quite matched by its execution.
However their recent TV advert is I think dreadful, and carries a real danger of doing more harm than good. My attention was drawn to the advert by the absurd juxtaposition of a small boy worried about playing the recorder at a school concert and a teenage girl disclosing abuse. Having read Barnardos' blurb I learn that this juxtaposition is intended as a contrast between the supportive environment within which the boy confronts his fears and the lack of support faced by the girl. Which of course implies some similarity between the challenges they face. Really? What world precisely do the ad makers live in?
The second reason for taking against the advert was the melodramatically "actorish" playing of the part of the teenage girl. Whilst this seems to conform nicely to most people's image of what the disclosure of abuse is (must be) like, I am afraid that to me it was far more reminiscent of a Year 10 drama class than any actual disclosure. The actress has clearly been told to get into character and then give it all she's got, and I certainly don't blame her for the result. Also, of course, they have to shoehorn the disclosure into a 60 second ad, so cannot possibly give any sense of the halting, reluctant and time-consuming nature of most conversations of this type. Children generally take time, not just to trust the person to whom they are talking but to get round to what the real issues that trouble them are, and of course time is what the ad-makers did not have. Nevertheless "Ellie's" progression from angry self-hatred to reassurance in about 25 seconds of screen time comes across as ludicrously and simplistically compressed.
There is a deeper point at issue here. People at large, if they have to to think about child abuse at all, want to think of it as something "other"- as the action of demonic and inhuman monsters from whom children can, and must, be rescued by social workers or charities. In fact of course the situation is probably always more complex than that. There may be cases where one or more parents is genuinely monstrous, but they are vanishingly rare, and generally in such cases no one is ever allowed to discover what is going on until too late. In every case of disclosure of abuse I have ever encountered the inter-relationships within the family are complex and so are the children's attitudes towards their parents. It is this that makes disclosure so difficult for the child, because they sense at some level that their disclosure is going to change those relationships for ever and may break them completely.
The adult in the TV ad looks reassuringly trustworthy, and gains "Ellie's" trust by telling her that she doesn't think she is worthless. In reality however, it will generally take a lot more than that before a child will effectively hand over the future of their entire family to such a person.
Which leads me on to the real issue I have with the advert, and the aspect that I think makes it dangerous. "Ellie's" nod of trusting agreement comes after the adult tells her that, "Together, we're going to find a way to make this stop." Her voice is calm and reassuring and there is a note almost of complicity when "Ellie" nods her agreement. The implication is that "we" means "Ellie" and the adult, and the viewer is left with a sense that, having thrown her lot in with this lady, "Ellie's" problems are now over because the two of them are going to find a way to sort things out.
This is almost the opposite to the message an adult has to give a child when they disclose abuse. One of the first things the adult MUST say to the child is that they cannot keep this information to themselves and they are going to have to pass it on. Far from drawing the child into the entirely illusory comfort that they and child together will find a way to navigate this abuse it is the adult's duty to tell the child that this situation is NOT their responsibility any more. The child will have been trying for some considerable time to "make this stop" and will have disclosed to an adult precisely because they have recognised that they simply can't do it.
The juxtaposition with the recorder-playing boy makes this even worse. All that the boy needs to conquer his babyish fears about standing in front of an audience is a few comforting words from a supportive teacher. The inevitable implication is that the teenage girl similarly just needs to buck up her ideas a bit and then, with the support of the bespectacled Barnardos lady she too will be able to confront her fears and "make [the abuse] stop."
This is a truly dreadful message to put across, and whilst it may not have been intentional, one would have thought that Barnardos, with all their experience in working with vulnerable children, would have seen that this is how some children might read the ad.
At one level of course I cannot blame Barnardos for all this. The population at large has a simplistic, black-and-white and often contradictory understanding of issues relating to child protection. Social workers are simultaneously condemned for meddling and for allowing abuse to go on under their noses and being taken into care is seen as an obvious solution to any case of familial abuse despite the worrying statistics about the future for children in care.
The public at large want to imagine that the situation is as pictured in this advert: that when a child is being abused, all that needs to happen is for them to pluck up the courage to tell a suitably soft-spoken but determined-looking Barnardos lady and that will make the abuse stop. They don't want to think about the mess and complication and family disruption of a police Sapphire investigation or a Social Services child abuse case conference. They don't want to think about the complications around finding a place of safety for the child (which is worse, an adult brother with a conviction for burglary or police cells until someone can get emergency foster care set up?) and they don't want to think about the burden the abused child is so often carrying in trying against the odds to hold their family together.
Clearly a 60 second advert can't make the public at large understand all these things, and nor (probably) should it. What really worries me though, aside from the appalling messages this advert gives to any child or adult directly involved in a disclosure of abuse, is the illusory comfort it gives the public that by donating to Barnardos they can make the world as reassuringly simple as this ad makes it seem.
However their recent TV advert is I think dreadful, and carries a real danger of doing more harm than good. My attention was drawn to the advert by the absurd juxtaposition of a small boy worried about playing the recorder at a school concert and a teenage girl disclosing abuse. Having read Barnardos' blurb I learn that this juxtaposition is intended as a contrast between the supportive environment within which the boy confronts his fears and the lack of support faced by the girl. Which of course implies some similarity between the challenges they face. Really? What world precisely do the ad makers live in?
The second reason for taking against the advert was the melodramatically "actorish" playing of the part of the teenage girl. Whilst this seems to conform nicely to most people's image of what the disclosure of abuse is (must be) like, I am afraid that to me it was far more reminiscent of a Year 10 drama class than any actual disclosure. The actress has clearly been told to get into character and then give it all she's got, and I certainly don't blame her for the result. Also, of course, they have to shoehorn the disclosure into a 60 second ad, so cannot possibly give any sense of the halting, reluctant and time-consuming nature of most conversations of this type. Children generally take time, not just to trust the person to whom they are talking but to get round to what the real issues that trouble them are, and of course time is what the ad-makers did not have. Nevertheless "Ellie's" progression from angry self-hatred to reassurance in about 25 seconds of screen time comes across as ludicrously and simplistically compressed.
There is a deeper point at issue here. People at large, if they have to to think about child abuse at all, want to think of it as something "other"- as the action of demonic and inhuman monsters from whom children can, and must, be rescued by social workers or charities. In fact of course the situation is probably always more complex than that. There may be cases where one or more parents is genuinely monstrous, but they are vanishingly rare, and generally in such cases no one is ever allowed to discover what is going on until too late. In every case of disclosure of abuse I have ever encountered the inter-relationships within the family are complex and so are the children's attitudes towards their parents. It is this that makes disclosure so difficult for the child, because they sense at some level that their disclosure is going to change those relationships for ever and may break them completely.
The adult in the TV ad looks reassuringly trustworthy, and gains "Ellie's" trust by telling her that she doesn't think she is worthless. In reality however, it will generally take a lot more than that before a child will effectively hand over the future of their entire family to such a person.
Which leads me on to the real issue I have with the advert, and the aspect that I think makes it dangerous. "Ellie's" nod of trusting agreement comes after the adult tells her that, "Together, we're going to find a way to make this stop." Her voice is calm and reassuring and there is a note almost of complicity when "Ellie" nods her agreement. The implication is that "we" means "Ellie" and the adult, and the viewer is left with a sense that, having thrown her lot in with this lady, "Ellie's" problems are now over because the two of them are going to find a way to sort things out.
This is almost the opposite to the message an adult has to give a child when they disclose abuse. One of the first things the adult MUST say to the child is that they cannot keep this information to themselves and they are going to have to pass it on. Far from drawing the child into the entirely illusory comfort that they and child together will find a way to navigate this abuse it is the adult's duty to tell the child that this situation is NOT their responsibility any more. The child will have been trying for some considerable time to "make this stop" and will have disclosed to an adult precisely because they have recognised that they simply can't do it.
The juxtaposition with the recorder-playing boy makes this even worse. All that the boy needs to conquer his babyish fears about standing in front of an audience is a few comforting words from a supportive teacher. The inevitable implication is that the teenage girl similarly just needs to buck up her ideas a bit and then, with the support of the bespectacled Barnardos lady she too will be able to confront her fears and "make [the abuse] stop."
This is a truly dreadful message to put across, and whilst it may not have been intentional, one would have thought that Barnardos, with all their experience in working with vulnerable children, would have seen that this is how some children might read the ad.
At one level of course I cannot blame Barnardos for all this. The population at large has a simplistic, black-and-white and often contradictory understanding of issues relating to child protection. Social workers are simultaneously condemned for meddling and for allowing abuse to go on under their noses and being taken into care is seen as an obvious solution to any case of familial abuse despite the worrying statistics about the future for children in care.
The public at large want to imagine that the situation is as pictured in this advert: that when a child is being abused, all that needs to happen is for them to pluck up the courage to tell a suitably soft-spoken but determined-looking Barnardos lady and that will make the abuse stop. They don't want to think about the mess and complication and family disruption of a police Sapphire investigation or a Social Services child abuse case conference. They don't want to think about the complications around finding a place of safety for the child (which is worse, an adult brother with a conviction for burglary or police cells until someone can get emergency foster care set up?) and they don't want to think about the burden the abused child is so often carrying in trying against the odds to hold their family together.
Clearly a 60 second advert can't make the public at large understand all these things, and nor (probably) should it. What really worries me though, aside from the appalling messages this advert gives to any child or adult directly involved in a disclosure of abuse, is the illusory comfort it gives the public that by donating to Barnardos they can make the world as reassuringly simple as this ad makes it seem.
Tuesday, 7 January 2014
the British and immigration
Warning: the following post may contain sweeping generalisations about the characteristics of entire populations based on very little evidence. If such national stereotyping offends you please look away now. If what you prefer is racial stereotyping, please click here.
So, it seems that 78% of the British public surveyed think that immigration to the UK should be reduced, even though 30% believe that immigration has a good or very good effect on the UK economy. In fact 34% of those who rated the economic impact of immigration as very good still want it to reduce, according to the survey.
The easy way to interpret these findings is that the British are inherently racist and are allowing this instinctive racial prejudice to be whipped up by the right-wing tabloid press. So, like Nigel Farage (who in a recent interview named Enoch Powell as his political hero) they would prefer to suffer economically so long as it meant keeping the foreigners out.
This is certainly a tempting argument, if you look at some of the front pages British tabloids have run in recent years. Look here for instance. And no, they aren't made up.
Yet there is a part of this argument that actually doesn't ring true to me. In everyday life, here in London where issues of race are all around us, I cannot remember the last time I witnessed any sort of behaviour that I would regard as racist. I am convinced that people are much less racist in their attitudes now than they were in the past and that British people are less prone to be racist than are say the French or the Italians.
As head teacher of a large London comprehensive I had to deal with many hundreds of argumentative teenagers of various racial, religious and ethnic origins yet never found racism in interpersonal relations to be a particularly significant issue (nowhere near as significant as homophobia for instance). Yes there was the occasional racist insult but the kids, almost without exception, saw these as unacceptable. Indeed, race seems to have virtually disappeared as an issue for these kids: a prominent member of the unpleasantly violent Dem Africans gang was white British and another Turkish. This is a very different situation to that which pertained even 20 years ago, when racist insults were much commoner in schools and gangs tended to be mono-ethnic and indeed defined by race. Interracial marriages are now so commonplace as to attract no attention whatever where not so long ago they were treated with deep suspicion and even anger.
In Italy by contrast my daughter recently witnessed racist abuse of African street sellers by uniformed police of a sort that would be unthinkable in the UK and in France the comedy l'Italien exposed a degree of anti-Arab racism that is seen there more or less as normal. Yet France and Italy are both signatories to the Schengen accord and in neither is there the same sense as in Britain of paranoia about immigrants swamping the country.
Indeed on closer examination it really does seem to me that British anxieties are much more to do with national populations than with race. The image most people seem to hold is of our island nation desperate to resist invasion and keep the alien hordes the other side of the channel like armies outwith the castle's moat. Indeed the use of this metaphor in the phrase "pulling up the drawbridge" points up precisely the difference between attitudes to race and attitudes to immigration: those pulling up the drawbridge are previous immigrants into Britain and their descendants (which covers all of us I suppose) who are keener than "native" Brits to resist further immigration. In fact in the study cited here a higher proportion of British Asians than White British believe that immigration should be stopped permanently.
So why is this? Why is a population which is, by comparison with previous eras and other countries, fairly tolerant and accepting of other races so intolerant and fearful of immigrants and immigration?
Partly of course this is the fault of the lies peddled by the tabloids and implicitly endorsed by government ministers. The UK population now seem to take it for granted that immigrants milk Britain for benefits and take all the council houses, despite this study for instance showing that immigrants are 59 per cent less likely than natives to receive state benefits or tax credits and 57 per cent less likely to live in social housing. Now, I wonder where they could have got such an idea from...
But that isn't all of it, I don't think. There has to be a kernel of distrust of the outsider somewhere for the tabloids, UKIP and the Tories to play on. So where does that distrust originate?
Well, I will posit two explanations:
1) It's because Brits are so terrified of ABROAD that anything that originates from there is to be distrusted.
Brits do seem to be almost uniquely frightened once outside the boundaries of their own country- more so than any other population with the possible exception of the Chinese. As a people, we have the linguistic ineptitude of all English-speaking peoples without the gung-ho adventurousness of the Aussies or the arrogant sense of entitlement of the Yanks. Wherever we go we huddle together in safe English speaking enclaves or scuttle about in abject terror that we may be called upon to communicate with someone who DOESN'T SPEAK ENGLISH! Some of us, it is true, appear totally at home in Provence or the Algarve, but on closer examination it is clear that we are so only because these places are now as Anglicised as the Costa del Sol.
It seems that the Brits are unique in creating such tropes as the pool-bed-hogging German early-riser and we clearly see foreign holidays as brave sojourns into enemy territory. Other Europeans seem much less phased: they are used to having to operate in a number of languages and can drive from one country to another without ceremony (they don't even have to pack their suitcases full of PG tips and packets of hobnobs). The Americans by contrast seem to see other countries as so utterly alien that they are merely quaint and hence no threat, and Aussies wonder what all the fuss is about, since wherever they go there never seem to be as many highly venomous animals as there are at home.
And I am convinced that this fear of abroad carries over to attitudes to immigration. Apart from anything else, the numbers generally quoted on the subject are for NET migration (numbers of immigrants minus numbers leaving the country) and there is a strictly limited number of places that the British (or the English at least- the Scots and Irish are more adventurous) are prepared to go.
2) It's because Brits distrust the motives of those with the power to control migration
The perception of who immigrants are and why they want to come here seems to have changed radically over recent years, in a very interesting way. It used to be that "immigrant" was equated with "asylum seeker" and conjured up images EITHER of terrified refugees from appalling conflicts overseas OR of hook-handed hate-preachers pretending to be terrified refugees... (depending on your political viewpoint and/or readership of the Daily Mail). Now, it seems, that is not what people think of first when immigration is discussed. Instead, people now see impoverished Eastern Europeans coming over here EITHER to do a fantastically professional but incredibly cheap cash-in-hand job of refitting your kitchen OR to lounge about in council houses claiming benefits (again, depending on political orientation/Daily Mail readership/experience of having cheap cash-in-hand job done on the kitchen).
And in a sense this is not surprising. It turns out that, with the freeing up of employment restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians entering the UK major companies and institutions here have been falling over each other to recruit Romanian and Bulgarian workers. Suddenly they have discovered a new and even cheaper way to outsource work, without even leaving the UK- just get foreign workers in to do the work for next to nothing right here! You don't even need to pay the minimum wage if you go through an agency. Win, win!
And this is hardly the first time this has happened. It seems pretty clear that New Labour's attitudes to Polish immigration were prompted more by the desire to boost the economy than some sort of impulse towards internationalism. Which of course it did, much to the advantage of the captains of industry and the money men who duly profited enormously, while average wages failed to keep up with inflation.
So whilst it is shameful for Britain to turn its back on the refugees from Syria for instance some of the British attitudes to immigration are neither as racist nor as illiberal as they might appear. Immigration has served the rich of the UK very, very well indeed. Immigrants provide a net boost to economic output and increased economic output, more than ever before, benefits the rich. It is perhaps hardly surprising that the less well-off resent the way the movement of people has been used by the rich to keep their wages down.
It is even almost understandable that they direct that resentment towards the least culpable parties to this process: the immigrants themselves.
So, it seems that 78% of the British public surveyed think that immigration to the UK should be reduced, even though 30% believe that immigration has a good or very good effect on the UK economy. In fact 34% of those who rated the economic impact of immigration as very good still want it to reduce, according to the survey.
The easy way to interpret these findings is that the British are inherently racist and are allowing this instinctive racial prejudice to be whipped up by the right-wing tabloid press. So, like Nigel Farage (who in a recent interview named Enoch Powell as his political hero) they would prefer to suffer economically so long as it meant keeping the foreigners out.
This is certainly a tempting argument, if you look at some of the front pages British tabloids have run in recent years. Look here for instance. And no, they aren't made up.
Yet there is a part of this argument that actually doesn't ring true to me. In everyday life, here in London where issues of race are all around us, I cannot remember the last time I witnessed any sort of behaviour that I would regard as racist. I am convinced that people are much less racist in their attitudes now than they were in the past and that British people are less prone to be racist than are say the French or the Italians.
As head teacher of a large London comprehensive I had to deal with many hundreds of argumentative teenagers of various racial, religious and ethnic origins yet never found racism in interpersonal relations to be a particularly significant issue (nowhere near as significant as homophobia for instance). Yes there was the occasional racist insult but the kids, almost without exception, saw these as unacceptable. Indeed, race seems to have virtually disappeared as an issue for these kids: a prominent member of the unpleasantly violent Dem Africans gang was white British and another Turkish. This is a very different situation to that which pertained even 20 years ago, when racist insults were much commoner in schools and gangs tended to be mono-ethnic and indeed defined by race. Interracial marriages are now so commonplace as to attract no attention whatever where not so long ago they were treated with deep suspicion and even anger.
In Italy by contrast my daughter recently witnessed racist abuse of African street sellers by uniformed police of a sort that would be unthinkable in the UK and in France the comedy l'Italien exposed a degree of anti-Arab racism that is seen there more or less as normal. Yet France and Italy are both signatories to the Schengen accord and in neither is there the same sense as in Britain of paranoia about immigrants swamping the country.
Indeed on closer examination it really does seem to me that British anxieties are much more to do with national populations than with race. The image most people seem to hold is of our island nation desperate to resist invasion and keep the alien hordes the other side of the channel like armies outwith the castle's moat. Indeed the use of this metaphor in the phrase "pulling up the drawbridge" points up precisely the difference between attitudes to race and attitudes to immigration: those pulling up the drawbridge are previous immigrants into Britain and their descendants (which covers all of us I suppose) who are keener than "native" Brits to resist further immigration. In fact in the study cited here a higher proportion of British Asians than White British believe that immigration should be stopped permanently.
So why is this? Why is a population which is, by comparison with previous eras and other countries, fairly tolerant and accepting of other races so intolerant and fearful of immigrants and immigration?
Partly of course this is the fault of the lies peddled by the tabloids and implicitly endorsed by government ministers. The UK population now seem to take it for granted that immigrants milk Britain for benefits and take all the council houses, despite this study for instance showing that immigrants are 59 per cent less likely than natives to receive state benefits or tax credits and 57 per cent less likely to live in social housing. Now, I wonder where they could have got such an idea from...
But that isn't all of it, I don't think. There has to be a kernel of distrust of the outsider somewhere for the tabloids, UKIP and the Tories to play on. So where does that distrust originate?
Well, I will posit two explanations:
1) It's because Brits are so terrified of ABROAD that anything that originates from there is to be distrusted.
Brits do seem to be almost uniquely frightened once outside the boundaries of their own country- more so than any other population with the possible exception of the Chinese. As a people, we have the linguistic ineptitude of all English-speaking peoples without the gung-ho adventurousness of the Aussies or the arrogant sense of entitlement of the Yanks. Wherever we go we huddle together in safe English speaking enclaves or scuttle about in abject terror that we may be called upon to communicate with someone who DOESN'T SPEAK ENGLISH! Some of us, it is true, appear totally at home in Provence or the Algarve, but on closer examination it is clear that we are so only because these places are now as Anglicised as the Costa del Sol.
It seems that the Brits are unique in creating such tropes as the pool-bed-hogging German early-riser and we clearly see foreign holidays as brave sojourns into enemy territory. Other Europeans seem much less phased: they are used to having to operate in a number of languages and can drive from one country to another without ceremony (they don't even have to pack their suitcases full of PG tips and packets of hobnobs). The Americans by contrast seem to see other countries as so utterly alien that they are merely quaint and hence no threat, and Aussies wonder what all the fuss is about, since wherever they go there never seem to be as many highly venomous animals as there are at home.
And I am convinced that this fear of abroad carries over to attitudes to immigration. Apart from anything else, the numbers generally quoted on the subject are for NET migration (numbers of immigrants minus numbers leaving the country) and there is a strictly limited number of places that the British (or the English at least- the Scots and Irish are more adventurous) are prepared to go.
2) It's because Brits distrust the motives of those with the power to control migration
The perception of who immigrants are and why they want to come here seems to have changed radically over recent years, in a very interesting way. It used to be that "immigrant" was equated with "asylum seeker" and conjured up images EITHER of terrified refugees from appalling conflicts overseas OR of hook-handed hate-preachers pretending to be terrified refugees... (depending on your political viewpoint and/or readership of the Daily Mail). Now, it seems, that is not what people think of first when immigration is discussed. Instead, people now see impoverished Eastern Europeans coming over here EITHER to do a fantastically professional but incredibly cheap cash-in-hand job of refitting your kitchen OR to lounge about in council houses claiming benefits (again, depending on political orientation/Daily Mail readership/experience of having cheap cash-in-hand job done on the kitchen).
And in a sense this is not surprising. It turns out that, with the freeing up of employment restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians entering the UK major companies and institutions here have been falling over each other to recruit Romanian and Bulgarian workers. Suddenly they have discovered a new and even cheaper way to outsource work, without even leaving the UK- just get foreign workers in to do the work for next to nothing right here! You don't even need to pay the minimum wage if you go through an agency. Win, win!
And this is hardly the first time this has happened. It seems pretty clear that New Labour's attitudes to Polish immigration were prompted more by the desire to boost the economy than some sort of impulse towards internationalism. Which of course it did, much to the advantage of the captains of industry and the money men who duly profited enormously, while average wages failed to keep up with inflation.
So whilst it is shameful for Britain to turn its back on the refugees from Syria for instance some of the British attitudes to immigration are neither as racist nor as illiberal as they might appear. Immigration has served the rich of the UK very, very well indeed. Immigrants provide a net boost to economic output and increased economic output, more than ever before, benefits the rich. It is perhaps hardly surprising that the less well-off resent the way the movement of people has been used by the rich to keep their wages down.
It is even almost understandable that they direct that resentment towards the least culpable parties to this process: the immigrants themselves.
Wednesday, 18 December 2013
Christmas nostalgia
With the Christmas season in full swing we are being bombarded with nostalgic images of log fires, steam trains and flickering candles. This is nothing new of course, in fact nostalgia definitely isn't what it used to be, but there is one particularly egregious example that caught my eye this year. It is an advert for some breakfast cereal and involves three blonde haired Midwych cuckoos who conspire to leave a bowl of breakfast cereal for a particularly creepy looking Father Christmas. The whole advert has a distinctly dated feel to it, to the extent that my daughter asked me if this was some advert from my childhood that they were rerunning.
Which got me to pondering why exactly Christmas is seen so much as a time for looking back into the past. Not that it can be that exclusively of course, since most of what the advertisers are trying to flog us in terms of presents to buy is distinguished by its newness: nostalgia would not seem appropriate when advertising a 50 inch 3D HD television for instance. But nostalgia, warm muted colours and an evocation of lost childhood still remain the predominant themes of advertising in this season.
Much of this is of course down to the dominance of US culture, with its emphasis on sentimentality and small-town family values. It's a Wonderful Life (which I love, by the way) exemplifies this perfectly, but so does the annual Coca Cola campaign. It all goes back to A visit from St Nicholas ("'twas the night before Christmas") written in 1823, even more than our own A Christmas Carol from 1843. The essence of the poem is an evocation of the magic of childhood and this has survived as probably the central element of the modern era Christmas, and is no doubt responsible for much of the sense of nostalgia.
However that is clearly not the only source of our association of Christmas with the past. Father Christmas (the English equivalent of the originally Dutch Sinterklaas, or Santa Claus) has long been depicted as an old man, and much of the symbolism of modern Christmas harks back to ancient times. The holly and ivy (as the carol reminds us) are plants whose symbolic power is rooted in the past. Indeed they hugely predate their appropriation for the Christmas story and evoke a long-lost pagan past.
In fact, on the subject of carols, Christmas is interesting as one of the few occasions that we still universally associate with seasonal songs. And whilst many of these songs are Victorian in origin (still quite a long time ago) many are far older, and almost all use very antiquated language. When else but at Christmas would most people use words like "hark" and "lo" and "ye" or syntax like "let nothing you dismay"?
And in fact the specifically English association of Christmas with times past goes a long way back- to the puritan era. The personification of Christmas became Father Christmas (and an old man) during the puritan clampdown on such festivities, and evoked the good old rip-roaring, drunken Christmases people remembered when they were young. As I said at the start, nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
There's more to it than that too. Christianity has always been adept at highjacking pagan symbolism and Christmas is of course a reworking of winter solstice celebrations such as the Scandinavian Yule, and even of the Roman Saturnalia. The feasting, the emphasis on firelight and the bringing of the greenwood into the house all remain as central to our conception of Christmas and all hark back to long gone former times.
However, interesting as all this is, for me it doesn't get to the essence of why we associate Christmas with the past. The winter solstice (particularly in Northern regions where the day-length effect is most marked) has always been associate with looking both backwards into the old year and forward into the new. The Roman God Janus (from whom January is named) was famously double-faced to symbolise this. He was the God of (amongst other things) gateways and thresholds and the winter solstice has always been seen as a threshold between the past and the future, marking the final death of the old year's sun and the promised rebirth of the new.
However this is a massive concept and most societies appear to have separated out or extended the celebrations of death and rebirth symbolised by the season. Saturnalia, for instance, occupied the "left-over" days following the 12 30-day months of the Roman calendar and Yule was apparently traditionally three nights long.
In modern times we have the week from Christmas to New Year, and it does seem to me that, for all its central image of a birth, Christmas has taken on much of the looking back and New Year the looking forward elements of the winter solstice rituals. Perhaps the clearest way to see this is in a comparison of the symbolism of the two celebrations: where Christmas Day has log fires and candles, New Year has fireworks; where Christmas Day has hand-knitted jumpers and cosy slippers New Year has party dresses and impractically high-heeled shoes; where Christmas Day has slumping in front of the Queen's Speech New Year has partying into the small hours and first-footing; whilst New Year is universally "Happy", Christmas is often "Merry", a much more antiquated sounding word. Even the songs are different. Yes, we do sing Auld Lang Syne at New Year, but we bellow along to Prince's 1999 as well. No "Hark the herald angels" at New Year. And fundamentally New Year's Eve is an adult occasion, contrasting with the child-centred nature of Christmas.
So there you go. Like Janus we look both forwards and backwards over the Christmas/New Year season, and in my opinion that is just as it should be. A society develops the rituals and celebrations it needs to deal with the fundamental themes of life, like death and rebirth, like the inevitable progression from the past into the future. And if the price is having to endure a few saccharine-heavy nostalgia-laden adverts at this time, then does that really matter?
Merry Christmas, I say, and a happy New Year.
Which got me to pondering why exactly Christmas is seen so much as a time for looking back into the past. Not that it can be that exclusively of course, since most of what the advertisers are trying to flog us in terms of presents to buy is distinguished by its newness: nostalgia would not seem appropriate when advertising a 50 inch 3D HD television for instance. But nostalgia, warm muted colours and an evocation of lost childhood still remain the predominant themes of advertising in this season.
Much of this is of course down to the dominance of US culture, with its emphasis on sentimentality and small-town family values. It's a Wonderful Life (which I love, by the way) exemplifies this perfectly, but so does the annual Coca Cola campaign. It all goes back to A visit from St Nicholas ("'twas the night before Christmas") written in 1823, even more than our own A Christmas Carol from 1843. The essence of the poem is an evocation of the magic of childhood and this has survived as probably the central element of the modern era Christmas, and is no doubt responsible for much of the sense of nostalgia.
However that is clearly not the only source of our association of Christmas with the past. Father Christmas (the English equivalent of the originally Dutch Sinterklaas, or Santa Claus) has long been depicted as an old man, and much of the symbolism of modern Christmas harks back to ancient times. The holly and ivy (as the carol reminds us) are plants whose symbolic power is rooted in the past. Indeed they hugely predate their appropriation for the Christmas story and evoke a long-lost pagan past.
In fact, on the subject of carols, Christmas is interesting as one of the few occasions that we still universally associate with seasonal songs. And whilst many of these songs are Victorian in origin (still quite a long time ago) many are far older, and almost all use very antiquated language. When else but at Christmas would most people use words like "hark" and "lo" and "ye" or syntax like "let nothing you dismay"?
And in fact the specifically English association of Christmas with times past goes a long way back- to the puritan era. The personification of Christmas became Father Christmas (and an old man) during the puritan clampdown on such festivities, and evoked the good old rip-roaring, drunken Christmases people remembered when they were young. As I said at the start, nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
There's more to it than that too. Christianity has always been adept at highjacking pagan symbolism and Christmas is of course a reworking of winter solstice celebrations such as the Scandinavian Yule, and even of the Roman Saturnalia. The feasting, the emphasis on firelight and the bringing of the greenwood into the house all remain as central to our conception of Christmas and all hark back to long gone former times.
However, interesting as all this is, for me it doesn't get to the essence of why we associate Christmas with the past. The winter solstice (particularly in Northern regions where the day-length effect is most marked) has always been associate with looking both backwards into the old year and forward into the new. The Roman God Janus (from whom January is named) was famously double-faced to symbolise this. He was the God of (amongst other things) gateways and thresholds and the winter solstice has always been seen as a threshold between the past and the future, marking the final death of the old year's sun and the promised rebirth of the new.
However this is a massive concept and most societies appear to have separated out or extended the celebrations of death and rebirth symbolised by the season. Saturnalia, for instance, occupied the "left-over" days following the 12 30-day months of the Roman calendar and Yule was apparently traditionally three nights long.
In modern times we have the week from Christmas to New Year, and it does seem to me that, for all its central image of a birth, Christmas has taken on much of the looking back and New Year the looking forward elements of the winter solstice rituals. Perhaps the clearest way to see this is in a comparison of the symbolism of the two celebrations: where Christmas Day has log fires and candles, New Year has fireworks; where Christmas Day has hand-knitted jumpers and cosy slippers New Year has party dresses and impractically high-heeled shoes; where Christmas Day has slumping in front of the Queen's Speech New Year has partying into the small hours and first-footing; whilst New Year is universally "Happy", Christmas is often "Merry", a much more antiquated sounding word. Even the songs are different. Yes, we do sing Auld Lang Syne at New Year, but we bellow along to Prince's 1999 as well. No "Hark the herald angels" at New Year. And fundamentally New Year's Eve is an adult occasion, contrasting with the child-centred nature of Christmas.
So there you go. Like Janus we look both forwards and backwards over the Christmas/New Year season, and in my opinion that is just as it should be. A society develops the rituals and celebrations it needs to deal with the fundamental themes of life, like death and rebirth, like the inevitable progression from the past into the future. And if the price is having to endure a few saccharine-heavy nostalgia-laden adverts at this time, then does that really matter?
Merry Christmas, I say, and a happy New Year.
Saturday, 2 November 2013
What makes British public schools so special?
It appears to have been accepted almost as a truism that public (independent) schools in the UK provide a better quality of education than their State equivalents. So prevalent has this idea become that the only issues for debate appear to be how fair or otherwise it is that only those who can afford to pay have access to this superior education and how the State sector can learn from the brilliance of the Great British public schools. And on the face of it this would appear to be a reasonable truism. Independent schools on average outperform the State sector in most areas, particularly achievement at A level and progression to Russel Group universities.
A little digging weakens the conclusion somewhat: this OECD report for instance recognises that once socio-economic factors are taken into account independent schools in the UK actually underperform as compared to the State sector in their PISA reading test, and this report (amongst others) shows that a higher proportion of students from State comprehensives than those from independent schools achieve the highest classes of degree at Cambridge.
Still, this is just nitpicking, isn't it? Independent schools still predominate at the top of almost all school league tables. My question is, why? Let me say first that I cannot pretend to be an expert in independent schools. I attended one for two years as a child (a reasonably prestigious one, whose head went on to be head of Eton) and have dutifully watched the slew of documentaries about private education that have been gracing our TV screens recently, but that's about it. However what I can say is that I have found it very hard to identify anything that marks out the quality of education in independent schools as being in any way superior to that which I witnessed as a teacher, senior leader and Head in a variety of inner and outer London comprehensives.
Teaching has developed enormously in the State sector over recent decades and I can certainly remember no lesson from my own days in independent education that even approached the standard deemed acceptable in modern State schools. What I do remember is gowned masters handing out books, telling us boys to "work from page xx to page xx" and then settling down to a pile of marking, or perhaps the Times crossword.
That is not fair of course: That was then, and the past is a different country after all. Yet I have also never seen any evidence of good (let alone outstanding) teaching in contemporary independent schools. Of all the vast resource of excellent teaching materials on the internet I have never yet seen any that originated from an independent school. The various documentaries I have dipped into have shown next to nothing of the actual lessons in independent schools, but what there has been has not struck me as particularly inspiring or indeed challenging.
In a recent documentary about Radley school there was a snippet of a lesson with a form tutor who was also a maths teacher. He was presented as being maverick but both demanding and inspiring, so presumably this segment of a lesson was included as a demonstration of these qualities. In it the teacher barked out a series of random single-digit numbers and the boys (aged around 13, I would guess) had to add them, up. To be fair, this was probably not a lesson as such, but what we in the State sector would have called a "starter activity". Yet even so, it offered a level of challenge so low that, had I been observing the lesson, my hand would have been poised over the "inadequate" box on my lesson observation sheet. Adding of single-digit integers is a Primary level activity, and if this is how an inspiring and demanding teacher goes about his business at Radley then how the hell do so many of its students end up at Oxbridge?
Which is precisely the question.
There is of course that simple fact that independent schools are often better resourced. It is difficult and controversial to compare the cost of independent and State education, particularly since it is vastly more expensive to educate disadvantaged and troubled students with little or no parental support than the type of student who typically ends up in the independent sector. However in the end it doesn't matter hugely, because things like better facilities and even smaller class sizes are (at least once you exceed a floor figure of acceptable resourcing) rarely game-changers when it comes to rates of achievement. Indeed I remember seeing a LSC study on achievement at A level that showed that rates of achievement actually increased with class size, up to the mid-twenties: students in large classes did better on average than those in small classes. So nice as better facilities and smaller class sizes are for teachers they may not make as much difference as you might think to students.
The more swivel-eyed of Mr Gove's acolytes would have it that independent schools are inherently better because they are free from the dead hand of State control. Indeed Mr Gove himself managed to argue (in debate with Tristram Hunt) that in excluding unqualified teachers from Free schools Mr Hunt was trying to deny today's disadvantaged youth the privilege he gained from his own private education. This is mind-boggling stuff: how could one argue that unqualified, untrained teachers were likely to be better at teaching than trained and qualified ones? Who knows. The idea simply isn't worth wasting mental energy over. Personally though I shall be pressing for the freedom to appoint unqualified doctors to perform surgical procedures.
The other "dead hand" is around the National Curriculum. Having made the National Curriculum more prescriptive than it has ever been Mr Gove is arguing that high achievement can only come when schools are freed from its rigour. Honestly, you couldn't make it up.
Another, slightly less lunatic, argument is that independent schools do better than State schools because they recognise the true value of competitiveness, as opposed to the all-must-win-prizes attitude of State schools. Again, there is some superficial substance to this claim (though I have never witnessed anything close to the all-must-win-prizes parody in any State school I have actually worked at). Independent schools are pretty competitive places. Even I remember that, and the students interviewed in various documentaries seem acutely aware of it too.
However even this is not as stark a difference from the State sector as it first appears. The competitiveness within independent schools has a number of safety nets that render it in a sense less acute than its equivalent in the State sector. First, students appear constantly to be reminded that here they are already amongst the elite. This message comes to them loud and clear from their parents (who need to justify the large amounts of money they have shelled out), the schools (who need to ensure that said vast amounts of money continue to be shelled out) and wider society (which, as I have said, appears to have swallowed the notion quite unquestioningly). Therefore even the student who comes bottom of the class can console themselves with the (probably quite erroneous) idea that that still makes them better than all the State school oiks out there. Secondly, there are a large number of areas within which independent school students can compete successfully, so if they are rubbish at maths that is of little consequence if they are captain of the First Eleven.
Finally of course a little thought will make it apparent that it is manifestly not in an independent school's interest to have any student fail consistently in all available competitive areas, because if they did, then why would their parents continue to pay the fees? So if there is any sector where all must win prizes then logically it would be much more likely to be the independent sector.
Indeed, that I think points to the distinguishing feature of the independent sector, and the reason that its students generally achieve more highly than those from the State sector. One of the strongest impressions I have got from independent-school educated students is a powerful sense of high expectations combined with a perception of inalienable entitlement. You can hear it in the boys interviewed in the programmes about Harrow and Radley, I remember it from my own schoolmates (myself too probably, if the truth be told) and from independent-school educated people I have known since, and my daughter has seen it in college mates at Cambridge.
It's hardly surprising really. These are students who have either been born into privilege, with parents affluent enough and/or committed enough to ensuring their child's success to shell out large sums in school fees, or have won their golden ticket through a hugely competitive entrance exam. Once at school the message they receive from everywhere they look is about their membership of a much-vaunted elite. The message is in the architecture (often so reminiscent of seats of adult power like the Houses of Parliament); in the manicured lawns, boathouses and chapels; in the endless sequences of names carved into ancient oak panels; and in the heavy silver-plated trophies in the glass-covered cabinets. And if that were not enough the message comes through in any forum for discussion. Politicians say it, the papers say it, even TV documentaries now are in on the act.
So is it surprising that these students see themselves as future masters of the universe? Is it strange that they work harder, longer and with better focus than their peers in State schools, and in doing so more than compensate for any inadequacies in their teaching? Nothing succeeds like success, particularly in the teenage years, just as nothing leads to failure quite so surely as failure.
Of course there is a downside. An undiluted diet of this sort of sense of entitlement can lead to arrogance and a propensity to bully and condescend to those less fortunate (you need look no further than Number 10). Also, while a suppression of self-doubt can lead to early success it is not a recipe for true academic rigour. My daughter reports that independent-school educated students at Cambridge were often bamboozled and even affronted when their State educated peers produced more thoughtful, considered and essentially better work than them.
But in the main it does work. If you continue to tell someone that they are one of the chosen few, educated in a sector that is inherently superior to anything else, then they will in the end come to believe you, and they will succeed. Just as, if you continue to tell everyone else that they will never amount to anything because they were educated in a "bog-standard comprehensive" and "students from schools like these never make it to Oxbrdige" then all but the most brilliant, determined and committed will believe that too.
Which is the only reason I can find for students in the independent sector doing better than those from State schools.
So, to the second area for debate that I outlined at the start of this post: what can be taken from the independent sector to improve the State sector? Well, the answer I am afraid is absolutely nothing of any use whatever. Students at independent schools achieve highly because such schools are exclusive. And one thing you can say with some certainty about exclusiveness is that it cannot be inclusive. The only magic that students at independent schools have going for them (and it is a very powerful magic indeed) is that they are the elite.
And that is a message that, by definition, you cannot honestly give to everyone.
A little digging weakens the conclusion somewhat: this OECD report for instance recognises that once socio-economic factors are taken into account independent schools in the UK actually underperform as compared to the State sector in their PISA reading test, and this report (amongst others) shows that a higher proportion of students from State comprehensives than those from independent schools achieve the highest classes of degree at Cambridge.
Still, this is just nitpicking, isn't it? Independent schools still predominate at the top of almost all school league tables. My question is, why? Let me say first that I cannot pretend to be an expert in independent schools. I attended one for two years as a child (a reasonably prestigious one, whose head went on to be head of Eton) and have dutifully watched the slew of documentaries about private education that have been gracing our TV screens recently, but that's about it. However what I can say is that I have found it very hard to identify anything that marks out the quality of education in independent schools as being in any way superior to that which I witnessed as a teacher, senior leader and Head in a variety of inner and outer London comprehensives.
Teaching has developed enormously in the State sector over recent decades and I can certainly remember no lesson from my own days in independent education that even approached the standard deemed acceptable in modern State schools. What I do remember is gowned masters handing out books, telling us boys to "work from page xx to page xx" and then settling down to a pile of marking, or perhaps the Times crossword.
That is not fair of course: That was then, and the past is a different country after all. Yet I have also never seen any evidence of good (let alone outstanding) teaching in contemporary independent schools. Of all the vast resource of excellent teaching materials on the internet I have never yet seen any that originated from an independent school. The various documentaries I have dipped into have shown next to nothing of the actual lessons in independent schools, but what there has been has not struck me as particularly inspiring or indeed challenging.
In a recent documentary about Radley school there was a snippet of a lesson with a form tutor who was also a maths teacher. He was presented as being maverick but both demanding and inspiring, so presumably this segment of a lesson was included as a demonstration of these qualities. In it the teacher barked out a series of random single-digit numbers and the boys (aged around 13, I would guess) had to add them, up. To be fair, this was probably not a lesson as such, but what we in the State sector would have called a "starter activity". Yet even so, it offered a level of challenge so low that, had I been observing the lesson, my hand would have been poised over the "inadequate" box on my lesson observation sheet. Adding of single-digit integers is a Primary level activity, and if this is how an inspiring and demanding teacher goes about his business at Radley then how the hell do so many of its students end up at Oxbridge?
Which is precisely the question.
There is of course that simple fact that independent schools are often better resourced. It is difficult and controversial to compare the cost of independent and State education, particularly since it is vastly more expensive to educate disadvantaged and troubled students with little or no parental support than the type of student who typically ends up in the independent sector. However in the end it doesn't matter hugely, because things like better facilities and even smaller class sizes are (at least once you exceed a floor figure of acceptable resourcing) rarely game-changers when it comes to rates of achievement. Indeed I remember seeing a LSC study on achievement at A level that showed that rates of achievement actually increased with class size, up to the mid-twenties: students in large classes did better on average than those in small classes. So nice as better facilities and smaller class sizes are for teachers they may not make as much difference as you might think to students.
The more swivel-eyed of Mr Gove's acolytes would have it that independent schools are inherently better because they are free from the dead hand of State control. Indeed Mr Gove himself managed to argue (in debate with Tristram Hunt) that in excluding unqualified teachers from Free schools Mr Hunt was trying to deny today's disadvantaged youth the privilege he gained from his own private education. This is mind-boggling stuff: how could one argue that unqualified, untrained teachers were likely to be better at teaching than trained and qualified ones? Who knows. The idea simply isn't worth wasting mental energy over. Personally though I shall be pressing for the freedom to appoint unqualified doctors to perform surgical procedures.
The other "dead hand" is around the National Curriculum. Having made the National Curriculum more prescriptive than it has ever been Mr Gove is arguing that high achievement can only come when schools are freed from its rigour. Honestly, you couldn't make it up.
Another, slightly less lunatic, argument is that independent schools do better than State schools because they recognise the true value of competitiveness, as opposed to the all-must-win-prizes attitude of State schools. Again, there is some superficial substance to this claim (though I have never witnessed anything close to the all-must-win-prizes parody in any State school I have actually worked at). Independent schools are pretty competitive places. Even I remember that, and the students interviewed in various documentaries seem acutely aware of it too.
However even this is not as stark a difference from the State sector as it first appears. The competitiveness within independent schools has a number of safety nets that render it in a sense less acute than its equivalent in the State sector. First, students appear constantly to be reminded that here they are already amongst the elite. This message comes to them loud and clear from their parents (who need to justify the large amounts of money they have shelled out), the schools (who need to ensure that said vast amounts of money continue to be shelled out) and wider society (which, as I have said, appears to have swallowed the notion quite unquestioningly). Therefore even the student who comes bottom of the class can console themselves with the (probably quite erroneous) idea that that still makes them better than all the State school oiks out there. Secondly, there are a large number of areas within which independent school students can compete successfully, so if they are rubbish at maths that is of little consequence if they are captain of the First Eleven.
Finally of course a little thought will make it apparent that it is manifestly not in an independent school's interest to have any student fail consistently in all available competitive areas, because if they did, then why would their parents continue to pay the fees? So if there is any sector where all must win prizes then logically it would be much more likely to be the independent sector.
Indeed, that I think points to the distinguishing feature of the independent sector, and the reason that its students generally achieve more highly than those from the State sector. One of the strongest impressions I have got from independent-school educated students is a powerful sense of high expectations combined with a perception of inalienable entitlement. You can hear it in the boys interviewed in the programmes about Harrow and Radley, I remember it from my own schoolmates (myself too probably, if the truth be told) and from independent-school educated people I have known since, and my daughter has seen it in college mates at Cambridge.
It's hardly surprising really. These are students who have either been born into privilege, with parents affluent enough and/or committed enough to ensuring their child's success to shell out large sums in school fees, or have won their golden ticket through a hugely competitive entrance exam. Once at school the message they receive from everywhere they look is about their membership of a much-vaunted elite. The message is in the architecture (often so reminiscent of seats of adult power like the Houses of Parliament); in the manicured lawns, boathouses and chapels; in the endless sequences of names carved into ancient oak panels; and in the heavy silver-plated trophies in the glass-covered cabinets. And if that were not enough the message comes through in any forum for discussion. Politicians say it, the papers say it, even TV documentaries now are in on the act.
So is it surprising that these students see themselves as future masters of the universe? Is it strange that they work harder, longer and with better focus than their peers in State schools, and in doing so more than compensate for any inadequacies in their teaching? Nothing succeeds like success, particularly in the teenage years, just as nothing leads to failure quite so surely as failure.
Of course there is a downside. An undiluted diet of this sort of sense of entitlement can lead to arrogance and a propensity to bully and condescend to those less fortunate (you need look no further than Number 10). Also, while a suppression of self-doubt can lead to early success it is not a recipe for true academic rigour. My daughter reports that independent-school educated students at Cambridge were often bamboozled and even affronted when their State educated peers produced more thoughtful, considered and essentially better work than them.
But in the main it does work. If you continue to tell someone that they are one of the chosen few, educated in a sector that is inherently superior to anything else, then they will in the end come to believe you, and they will succeed. Just as, if you continue to tell everyone else that they will never amount to anything because they were educated in a "bog-standard comprehensive" and "students from schools like these never make it to Oxbrdige" then all but the most brilliant, determined and committed will believe that too.
Which is the only reason I can find for students in the independent sector doing better than those from State schools.
So, to the second area for debate that I outlined at the start of this post: what can be taken from the independent sector to improve the State sector? Well, the answer I am afraid is absolutely nothing of any use whatever. Students at independent schools achieve highly because such schools are exclusive. And one thing you can say with some certainty about exclusiveness is that it cannot be inclusive. The only magic that students at independent schools have going for them (and it is a very powerful magic indeed) is that they are the elite.
And that is a message that, by definition, you cannot honestly give to everyone.
Sunday, 20 October 2013
The role of the internet in polarising opinion
In a recent TV programme, Frost on Satire, the American satirist Bill Maher was interviewed and the interviewer mentioned his quotation about the US that, "This country is not overrun with rebels & free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep & conformists." Maher went on to say that communities are often polarised, giving the average American "no reason to leave his echo chamber." The focus of the programme was of course on satire, and Maher was followed by Ian Hislop, who argued (much as I have in a previous post) that the main function of satire is not to change opinion but to validate and harden it. However Maher's comment got me thinking about a wider point about the internet in general.
I'm not sure that anyone predicted it in advance, but what the internet has done almost more than anything else is to provide a platform for vast numbers of people across the world to air their opinions in public. Any news article, any video, indeed almost anything on the internet is now followed by reams of comments, tallies of Facebook likes and Google +1s and streams of Twitter posts. All this, of course, provides an unrivalled opportunity for lively debate and the democratisation of opinion-giving and is thus a GOOD THING (to quote Sellar and Yateman). However, note that I said opinion-giving and not opinion-forming, because like satire I think such stuff will always tend to validate and harden opinion rather than forming it.
You see, the distinguishing feature of such internet-based comment, when compared with almost every form of public comment that predated the internet, is shortness- both of the pieces themselves and of the time taken to write them. Twitter is limited in length of its nature of course, but comment pieces tend to be equally short, and if they are not then they are usually truncated, with a "see more" link that few people probably ever use. Also, such pieces tend to offer a single (often fairly extreme) point of view- hardly surprising since they are generally probably fired off in a fit of rage/enthusiasm/irritation/exasperation. It is rare for a comment to start "You make a number of good points, @fascisttroll, but I would like to pick you up on one detail..."
Indeed it would seem that what the internet has done is to refine the ability of the general public to produce and respond to oneliners. Twitter seems precisely designed to limit each tweet to a single pithily expressed point, and memes can combine text and imagery to produce oneliners that are shorter, more focussed and at least as funny as anything that predated their invention.
However there is a big difference between oneliners and debate. In fact since time immemorial oneliners have been used to end rather than to further debate. You may have heard of the wonderful putdown attributed to Andrew Lang, "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination," but do you have any idea of the subject of the debate in the context of which it was presumably used? Done well, oneliners are of course brilliant, and can demolish an idea in seconds. Who could argue for the more arcane features of traditional English grammar, such as never putting a preposition at the end of a sentence, after Winston Churchill's famous "this is the sort of criticism up with which I will not put"?
Oneliners are of course often used to attack a person's reputation, and where they appear to us justified (the comment about Nixon: "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears but by diligent hard work, he overcame them" is a personal favourite) they are brilliant. However they can be cruel too. Churchill was famous for his character assassinations, such as "he was a modest man with much to be modest about," and Mark Twain's comment "I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." is, when you think about it, downright nasty. Best of course is where two artists of the oneliner go head-to-head: when GBS wrote to Churchill "“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... if you have one,” Churchill replied "Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one.”
All of which is slightly off-topic of course. And that is fundamentally my point. The internet-based fora for "debate" do not in fact encourage such digression. If anyone started reading this blog entry in the first place they will probably have clicked away by now. The form of communication fostered by such media as Twitter and comment strands is characterised by speed and immediacy. Pieces are produced swiftly to make a single point, and read as quickly, most of the audience having already framed their personal viewpoint and looking for comments either to agree with (handily, you can often click "like" to register your agreement) or fulminate against. This is new: previously the process by which any statement of opinion appeared in the public domain took time. Even newspaper editors had to write their pieces, have them sub-edited, review them, place them on the page and wait fro them to be printed and distributed. Simple members of the public could only "write in" and hope that their piece would appear in the next day's paper at the earliest.
All of which is fine of course, and the internet has indeed democratised the process of opinion-giving to an extent I would never have predicted. No longer do our opinions come solely from politicians interviewed on the evening news or editorials in newspapers.
However there is a form of debate that the internet does not appear as yet to have fomented, and I think that is a shame. This is the sort of debate where contributors take time to formulate subtle and complex statements of opinion and take time also to absorb, consider and reflect on the contributions of others. As a child I attended Quaker meetings with my family and the one "rule" that I remember is that, if someone has spoken, nobody may respond immediately. There has to be a time of silence between contributions for those present to reflect on what has been said. And of course such silence is not encouraged on the internet. Indeed the opposite is often the case. Should you ever have found yourself following a lively interchange of opinions on a comment thread you will know that if you do not respond IMMEDIATELY then the thread will have moved on by the time your response is posted and it will look completely irrelevant.
It may seem a non-sequitor, but there is a relevance here to poetry. There are poems, such as haikus for instance, that are as short as tweets. However even they they were not produced as quickly, and as a result can have a subtlety that tweets never approach, and promote contemplation rather than instant reaction:
"rain falls on the grass,
filling the ruts left by
the festival cart."
And only slightly longer poems can be constructed to engage the reader in a journey of thought which challenges their preconceptions and encourages deep and repeated reflection, often ending in a surprising place. Shakespeare's most famous sonnet begins "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and draws the reader in by purporting to be a poem about love. Yet by the end he has made the reflective reader think instead about how we form unattainable ideas about people we love, and about the nature and longevity of poetry itself. Show me a comment piece in an internet discussion that does anything similar. Of course, there may be several, but no-one would know, because no-one would have bothered to read to the end, let alone to reread and reflect on the whole piece.
I would like to end on a piece that combines poetry with comment on a political issue and shows the sort of comment that no-one would engage with if it appeared on the internet. And indeed feel free to click away now and scroll through the pages of comments that follow whatever news story is prominent right now.
The piece is Easter, 1916 by WB Yeats and is about the Easter Rising, which many have taken as the start point of the decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Yeats was originally a supporter of the Republicans and had long been in love with Maude Gonne, the estranged wife of John MacBride. Countess Markievicz was a long-time friend, though he is not particularly nice about her at the start of the second stanza.
The point about the poem though is the way that it takes a hugely inflammatory topic (the justifiability of violence in pursuit of a cause) and rather than arguing a single point of view it reflects on a range of issues. Its conclusion, such as it is, is the prescient but hardly simplistic line "a terrible beauty is born."
One of the ways that Yeats "debates" the issues involved is through his use of imagery, particularly in the third stanza. Using the extraordinary power of connotations he causes us to reflect on the image of the stone in the stream. The stone is the vehicle of this image, the tenor being the notion of a band of single-minded revolutionaries living in the midst of a world of more nuanced opinions. The relationship between tenor and vehicle is not straightforward here though, and the grounds subtle and complex, so it is really not clear at the end where Yeats' sympathies lie.
All of which might sound, in today's internet-based world, like woolly, waffly pontification without focus and direction. Yet for me Easter 1916 gives more space and encouragement for thought on a range of issues from Irish Republicanism to jihadist terrorism than thousands of oneliner comment thread contributions. Read it yourself, and see if you agree:
Easter 1916
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
W. B. Yeats
I'm not sure that anyone predicted it in advance, but what the internet has done almost more than anything else is to provide a platform for vast numbers of people across the world to air their opinions in public. Any news article, any video, indeed almost anything on the internet is now followed by reams of comments, tallies of Facebook likes and Google +1s and streams of Twitter posts. All this, of course, provides an unrivalled opportunity for lively debate and the democratisation of opinion-giving and is thus a GOOD THING (to quote Sellar and Yateman). However, note that I said opinion-giving and not opinion-forming, because like satire I think such stuff will always tend to validate and harden opinion rather than forming it.
You see, the distinguishing feature of such internet-based comment, when compared with almost every form of public comment that predated the internet, is shortness- both of the pieces themselves and of the time taken to write them. Twitter is limited in length of its nature of course, but comment pieces tend to be equally short, and if they are not then they are usually truncated, with a "see more" link that few people probably ever use. Also, such pieces tend to offer a single (often fairly extreme) point of view- hardly surprising since they are generally probably fired off in a fit of rage/enthusiasm/irritation/exasperation. It is rare for a comment to start "You make a number of good points, @fascisttroll, but I would like to pick you up on one detail..."
Indeed it would seem that what the internet has done is to refine the ability of the general public to produce and respond to oneliners. Twitter seems precisely designed to limit each tweet to a single pithily expressed point, and memes can combine text and imagery to produce oneliners that are shorter, more focussed and at least as funny as anything that predated their invention.
However there is a big difference between oneliners and debate. In fact since time immemorial oneliners have been used to end rather than to further debate. You may have heard of the wonderful putdown attributed to Andrew Lang, "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination," but do you have any idea of the subject of the debate in the context of which it was presumably used? Done well, oneliners are of course brilliant, and can demolish an idea in seconds. Who could argue for the more arcane features of traditional English grammar, such as never putting a preposition at the end of a sentence, after Winston Churchill's famous "this is the sort of criticism up with which I will not put"?
Oneliners are of course often used to attack a person's reputation, and where they appear to us justified (the comment about Nixon: "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears but by diligent hard work, he overcame them" is a personal favourite) they are brilliant. However they can be cruel too. Churchill was famous for his character assassinations, such as "he was a modest man with much to be modest about," and Mark Twain's comment "I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." is, when you think about it, downright nasty. Best of course is where two artists of the oneliner go head-to-head: when GBS wrote to Churchill "“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... if you have one,” Churchill replied "Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one.”
All of which is slightly off-topic of course. And that is fundamentally my point. The internet-based fora for "debate" do not in fact encourage such digression. If anyone started reading this blog entry in the first place they will probably have clicked away by now. The form of communication fostered by such media as Twitter and comment strands is characterised by speed and immediacy. Pieces are produced swiftly to make a single point, and read as quickly, most of the audience having already framed their personal viewpoint and looking for comments either to agree with (handily, you can often click "like" to register your agreement) or fulminate against. This is new: previously the process by which any statement of opinion appeared in the public domain took time. Even newspaper editors had to write their pieces, have them sub-edited, review them, place them on the page and wait fro them to be printed and distributed. Simple members of the public could only "write in" and hope that their piece would appear in the next day's paper at the earliest.
All of which is fine of course, and the internet has indeed democratised the process of opinion-giving to an extent I would never have predicted. No longer do our opinions come solely from politicians interviewed on the evening news or editorials in newspapers.
However there is a form of debate that the internet does not appear as yet to have fomented, and I think that is a shame. This is the sort of debate where contributors take time to formulate subtle and complex statements of opinion and take time also to absorb, consider and reflect on the contributions of others. As a child I attended Quaker meetings with my family and the one "rule" that I remember is that, if someone has spoken, nobody may respond immediately. There has to be a time of silence between contributions for those present to reflect on what has been said. And of course such silence is not encouraged on the internet. Indeed the opposite is often the case. Should you ever have found yourself following a lively interchange of opinions on a comment thread you will know that if you do not respond IMMEDIATELY then the thread will have moved on by the time your response is posted and it will look completely irrelevant.
It may seem a non-sequitor, but there is a relevance here to poetry. There are poems, such as haikus for instance, that are as short as tweets. However even they they were not produced as quickly, and as a result can have a subtlety that tweets never approach, and promote contemplation rather than instant reaction:
"rain falls on the grass,
filling the ruts left by
the festival cart."
And only slightly longer poems can be constructed to engage the reader in a journey of thought which challenges their preconceptions and encourages deep and repeated reflection, often ending in a surprising place. Shakespeare's most famous sonnet begins "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and draws the reader in by purporting to be a poem about love. Yet by the end he has made the reflective reader think instead about how we form unattainable ideas about people we love, and about the nature and longevity of poetry itself. Show me a comment piece in an internet discussion that does anything similar. Of course, there may be several, but no-one would know, because no-one would have bothered to read to the end, let alone to reread and reflect on the whole piece.
I would like to end on a piece that combines poetry with comment on a political issue and shows the sort of comment that no-one would engage with if it appeared on the internet. And indeed feel free to click away now and scroll through the pages of comments that follow whatever news story is prominent right now.
The piece is Easter, 1916 by WB Yeats and is about the Easter Rising, which many have taken as the start point of the decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Yeats was originally a supporter of the Republicans and had long been in love with Maude Gonne, the estranged wife of John MacBride. Countess Markievicz was a long-time friend, though he is not particularly nice about her at the start of the second stanza.
The point about the poem though is the way that it takes a hugely inflammatory topic (the justifiability of violence in pursuit of a cause) and rather than arguing a single point of view it reflects on a range of issues. Its conclusion, such as it is, is the prescient but hardly simplistic line "a terrible beauty is born."
One of the ways that Yeats "debates" the issues involved is through his use of imagery, particularly in the third stanza. Using the extraordinary power of connotations he causes us to reflect on the image of the stone in the stream. The stone is the vehicle of this image, the tenor being the notion of a band of single-minded revolutionaries living in the midst of a world of more nuanced opinions. The relationship between tenor and vehicle is not straightforward here though, and the grounds subtle and complex, so it is really not clear at the end where Yeats' sympathies lie.
All of which might sound, in today's internet-based world, like woolly, waffly pontification without focus and direction. Yet for me Easter 1916 gives more space and encouragement for thought on a range of issues from Irish Republicanism to jihadist terrorism than thousands of oneliner comment thread contributions. Read it yourself, and see if you agree:
Easter 1916
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
W. B. Yeats
Tuesday, 1 October 2013
Radicalisation and the fifth column that threatens to destroy the USA from within
We have heard a lot about radicalisation (according to Wikipedia "a process by which an individual or group comes to adopt increasingly extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo") over recent weeks, particularly given the tabloids' strange, misogynist fixation with the "White Widow". Radicalisation is usually discussed in terms of muslims listening to "hate preachers" or accessing "terrorist material" on the internet. Radicalisation within the USA is not something that I have seen much discussion of, but I can reveal that in fact it is something that has been going on for decades, with vast amounts of money spent in a huge media campaign that has radicalised significant numbers of US citizens to a terrifying degree.
This radicalisation has not been without its consequences. It has led to countless suicide gun attacks, pernicious campaigns to undermine the rule of law, and most recently to determined efforts to destroy America's economic system and to reverse decisions made through the proper democratic process.
So who is behind this process of radicalisation? Hollywood commercial cinema, that's who. Virtually since its inception Hollywood commercial cinema has presented an image of American masculinity that has inexorably led to large numbers of Americans adopting "increasingly extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo."
Absurd, you say? With American commercial cinema about the most patriotically gung-ho of any media organisation in the world? Well, just look dispassionately at the evidence.
One of the dominant narratives of Hollywood blockbusters since the early days has been that of a lone hero fighting to uphold his individual version of "truth, justice and the American way" and/or protect his friends and/or family from the legion of dangers that threaten to overwhelm them. Whether he be the lone, white-Stetsoned cowboy in a lawless Western town, the maverick cop in a corrupt and inept police force, even the heroic rogue soldier who disobeys orders in pursuit of the greater good the underlying story is the same: truth, justice and the American way (in the movies at least) are protected by an individual's decisive actions, often in contravention of the stultifying, or even actively maleficent dead hand of the State.
The rule of Law in Hollywood blockbusters is almost always something to be distrusted, and even actively opposed. Lawyers are almost universally crooked, devious and obstructive. They use their legal casuistry to frustrate the true hero in his pursuit of true justice, which almost never derives from the courtroom or the legislative chamber. Large scale collective action of any sort is profoundly distrusted, symbolised in films such as Star Wars by the vast, faceless drone armies, or dismissed as irrelevant, as soft liberal hippies wave banners while the true hero takes on the bad guys through direct and bloody action.
The irony of course is how immensely far removed this image of Amercanism is from the actual lives of most Americans. Despite this powerful image of individual freedom and independence from State control, Americans appear to be as placid and easily manipulated as any citizenry on Earth. There has been no tradition of mass protest in most people's lifetime, high proportions of the populace are happy (proud, even) to display that symbol of the state, the US flag, and American children even salute that flag daily in a ceremony that, if it took place in North Korea, would be seen as state brainwashing on an unimaginable scale.
So here we have a paradox: a dominant media narrative pushing a radical (and frequently extremely violent) form of individual freedom in the context of a society that has accepted state control to an unprecedented degree. And these things cannot peacefully coexist. The essence of the Harry Callaghan/John McLane/Hans Solo character is that he decides which laws to obey and which to ignore. He distrusts anyone in a position of authority, and reserves the right to take violent and bloody action against anyone he deems to be frustrating his desire to implement his vision of "truth, justice and the American way." So whilst he may salute the flag, he does not believe in any of the institutions established in the name of that flag. So just how different is such a character from the many rogue gunmen who have taken arms (as they see it) against the faceless hordes who have sought to frustrate and deny them at every turn? What is there, in truth to separate a Hollywood blockbuster thriller hero from a high-school shooter?
The thing that Hollywood heros most particularly do not believe in is government. Government (in the movies) is fundamentally corrupt, out of touch, faceless and irrelevant to the real lives and concerns of the citizenry. What matters that it is democratically elected? Politicians are all on the take, and the sole aim of government seems (in the movies) to be to frustrate the right-thinking hero in his individualistic fight for freedom and justice (and the American way, indeed.)
And so, following this narrative, what does one do if the democratically elected government seeks to implement a law (Obama's healthcare reform) which has effectively been democratically endorsed through the presidential elections, but with which you do not personally agree? Well, it seems there is only one course open to the right-thinking all-American hero (like Ted Cruz) radicalised by decades of Hollywood brainwashing. Having attempted to paralyse the functions of government by talking non-stop for 21 hours, you then seek to bring the nation economically to its knees by denying its access to continuing funding.
If this sort of anti-democratic destructiveness was happening in any other country anguished media analysts would be looking for explanations for the extraordinary radicalisation of a portion of the nation's populace that has led to the election of, and apparent continued support for, people like Ted Cruz. Where did this radicalisation originate, they would be asking. Who is to blame? But this is America, and as I say, we have our explanation already.
Hollywood.
This radicalisation has not been without its consequences. It has led to countless suicide gun attacks, pernicious campaigns to undermine the rule of law, and most recently to determined efforts to destroy America's economic system and to reverse decisions made through the proper democratic process.
So who is behind this process of radicalisation? Hollywood commercial cinema, that's who. Virtually since its inception Hollywood commercial cinema has presented an image of American masculinity that has inexorably led to large numbers of Americans adopting "increasingly extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo."
Absurd, you say? With American commercial cinema about the most patriotically gung-ho of any media organisation in the world? Well, just look dispassionately at the evidence.
One of the dominant narratives of Hollywood blockbusters since the early days has been that of a lone hero fighting to uphold his individual version of "truth, justice and the American way" and/or protect his friends and/or family from the legion of dangers that threaten to overwhelm them. Whether he be the lone, white-Stetsoned cowboy in a lawless Western town, the maverick cop in a corrupt and inept police force, even the heroic rogue soldier who disobeys orders in pursuit of the greater good the underlying story is the same: truth, justice and the American way (in the movies at least) are protected by an individual's decisive actions, often in contravention of the stultifying, or even actively maleficent dead hand of the State.
The rule of Law in Hollywood blockbusters is almost always something to be distrusted, and even actively opposed. Lawyers are almost universally crooked, devious and obstructive. They use their legal casuistry to frustrate the true hero in his pursuit of true justice, which almost never derives from the courtroom or the legislative chamber. Large scale collective action of any sort is profoundly distrusted, symbolised in films such as Star Wars by the vast, faceless drone armies, or dismissed as irrelevant, as soft liberal hippies wave banners while the true hero takes on the bad guys through direct and bloody action.
The irony of course is how immensely far removed this image of Amercanism is from the actual lives of most Americans. Despite this powerful image of individual freedom and independence from State control, Americans appear to be as placid and easily manipulated as any citizenry on Earth. There has been no tradition of mass protest in most people's lifetime, high proportions of the populace are happy (proud, even) to display that symbol of the state, the US flag, and American children even salute that flag daily in a ceremony that, if it took place in North Korea, would be seen as state brainwashing on an unimaginable scale.
So here we have a paradox: a dominant media narrative pushing a radical (and frequently extremely violent) form of individual freedom in the context of a society that has accepted state control to an unprecedented degree. And these things cannot peacefully coexist. The essence of the Harry Callaghan/John McLane/Hans Solo character is that he decides which laws to obey and which to ignore. He distrusts anyone in a position of authority, and reserves the right to take violent and bloody action against anyone he deems to be frustrating his desire to implement his vision of "truth, justice and the American way." So whilst he may salute the flag, he does not believe in any of the institutions established in the name of that flag. So just how different is such a character from the many rogue gunmen who have taken arms (as they see it) against the faceless hordes who have sought to frustrate and deny them at every turn? What is there, in truth to separate a Hollywood blockbuster thriller hero from a high-school shooter?
The thing that Hollywood heros most particularly do not believe in is government. Government (in the movies) is fundamentally corrupt, out of touch, faceless and irrelevant to the real lives and concerns of the citizenry. What matters that it is democratically elected? Politicians are all on the take, and the sole aim of government seems (in the movies) to be to frustrate the right-thinking hero in his individualistic fight for freedom and justice (and the American way, indeed.)
And so, following this narrative, what does one do if the democratically elected government seeks to implement a law (Obama's healthcare reform) which has effectively been democratically endorsed through the presidential elections, but with which you do not personally agree? Well, it seems there is only one course open to the right-thinking all-American hero (like Ted Cruz) radicalised by decades of Hollywood brainwashing. Having attempted to paralyse the functions of government by talking non-stop for 21 hours, you then seek to bring the nation economically to its knees by denying its access to continuing funding.
If this sort of anti-democratic destructiveness was happening in any other country anguished media analysts would be looking for explanations for the extraordinary radicalisation of a portion of the nation's populace that has led to the election of, and apparent continued support for, people like Ted Cruz. Where did this radicalisation originate, they would be asking. Who is to blame? But this is America, and as I say, we have our explanation already.
Hollywood.
Thursday, 12 September 2013
The language of war
One of the abiding mysteries of the ongoing Syrian chemical weapons issue is why it is that the US and UK governments apparently got so exercised over the deaths of a few hundred victims of an apparent chemical gas attack in Damascus that Cameron and Obama were prepared to risk (and in Cameron's case suffer) political humiliation by threatening military intervention. What made those few hundred deaths so different from the estimated 100,000 that preceded them?
I cannot pretend to have an answer to that question but it is interesting to look at the issue at the level of language (it is what this blog is supposed to be about after all). The most obvious phenomenon of course is the use of extreme language to describe the attacks: "horror", "moral obscenity", "outrage" etc. but that sort of thing is hardly surprising, and much of this language was used post hoc in an attempt to whip up international outrage to justify intervention.
What I think is more interesting is the language that we have all quite naturally come to use to differentiate chemical or biological weapons from the nice friendly high explosive kind. The former are, for instance, described as "weapons of mass destruction," despite the fact that their main attraction to unscrupulous dictators is that they actually cause very little destruction indeed, simply removing the inconvenient people from a landscape that is otherwise left untouched. Explosive weapons, by contrast, are universally defined as "conventional," and therefore presumably uncontentious and socially acceptable, if perhaps a tad passé for the really hip military commander.
What is more, while the use of chemical weapons is usually described as "indiscriminate", the use of conventional weapons (particularly when carried by the maybe-not-that-conventional-really drones) is generally "clinical," "focussed," or even "surgical." This carries through to the nouns used. The use of chemical weapons is almost invariably described as an "attack", whilst the use of explosives (when carried by drones, cruise missiles or laser-targeted bombs) is usually a "strike."
On the face of it, these two words look similar, but in fact the difference between them is profound. As I have argued in a number of earlier posts about poetry (here or here for instance) it is the connotations of words that give them their power and the connotations of "attack" and "strike" are quite different. "Attack" has a fairly straightforward set of connotations in both its verb and its noun form. An attack can be violent, unprovoked, vicious, frenzied or bitter. However you look at it, the word has connotations of an animalistic loss of control and the suspension of careful judgment and even of morality.
"Strike" is much more nuanced. For a start, its verb form is now seen as archaic and is rarely used to mean anything close to "attack" (when did you last strike someone?) Oddly, it does seem to have survived in the almost unconnected sense of "striking a pose." In its noun form it has a slightly wider range of meanings than "attack", with some straying well away from the sense of violence. One could argue that a labour strike is almost the antithesis of violence as it involves the suspension of physical activity.
It is also interesting to look at what adjectives can pair with the noun form of "strike." A strike can be preemptive and decisive, as well as the previously mentioned attributes, "clinical," "surgical" and "focussed." What is clear is that the attributes of "strike" and "attack" cannot be interchanged easily. An attack cannot be clinical any more than a strike can be frenzied, or even vicious. The word "strike," it seems, carries with it connotations of careful, analytical precision that are a world away from the connotations of the word "attack."
So there you go. Chemical weapons evoke "horror" and "moral outrage" because their use involves an "attack." Explosive weapons on the other hand are "conventional" and therefore by implication morally acceptable, and their use takes the form not of an "attack" but of a much more rational and carefully thought through "strike."
I am sure that was of enormous comfort to the untold thousands killed by explosive weapons, not just in Syria but in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Yemen and wherever else.
I cannot pretend to have an answer to that question but it is interesting to look at the issue at the level of language (it is what this blog is supposed to be about after all). The most obvious phenomenon of course is the use of extreme language to describe the attacks: "horror", "moral obscenity", "outrage" etc. but that sort of thing is hardly surprising, and much of this language was used post hoc in an attempt to whip up international outrage to justify intervention.
What I think is more interesting is the language that we have all quite naturally come to use to differentiate chemical or biological weapons from the nice friendly high explosive kind. The former are, for instance, described as "weapons of mass destruction," despite the fact that their main attraction to unscrupulous dictators is that they actually cause very little destruction indeed, simply removing the inconvenient people from a landscape that is otherwise left untouched. Explosive weapons, by contrast, are universally defined as "conventional," and therefore presumably uncontentious and socially acceptable, if perhaps a tad passé for the really hip military commander.
What is more, while the use of chemical weapons is usually described as "indiscriminate", the use of conventional weapons (particularly when carried by the maybe-not-that-conventional-really drones) is generally "clinical," "focussed," or even "surgical." This carries through to the nouns used. The use of chemical weapons is almost invariably described as an "attack", whilst the use of explosives (when carried by drones, cruise missiles or laser-targeted bombs) is usually a "strike."
On the face of it, these two words look similar, but in fact the difference between them is profound. As I have argued in a number of earlier posts about poetry (here or here for instance) it is the connotations of words that give them their power and the connotations of "attack" and "strike" are quite different. "Attack" has a fairly straightforward set of connotations in both its verb and its noun form. An attack can be violent, unprovoked, vicious, frenzied or bitter. However you look at it, the word has connotations of an animalistic loss of control and the suspension of careful judgment and even of morality.
"Strike" is much more nuanced. For a start, its verb form is now seen as archaic and is rarely used to mean anything close to "attack" (when did you last strike someone?) Oddly, it does seem to have survived in the almost unconnected sense of "striking a pose." In its noun form it has a slightly wider range of meanings than "attack", with some straying well away from the sense of violence. One could argue that a labour strike is almost the antithesis of violence as it involves the suspension of physical activity.
It is also interesting to look at what adjectives can pair with the noun form of "strike." A strike can be preemptive and decisive, as well as the previously mentioned attributes, "clinical," "surgical" and "focussed." What is clear is that the attributes of "strike" and "attack" cannot be interchanged easily. An attack cannot be clinical any more than a strike can be frenzied, or even vicious. The word "strike," it seems, carries with it connotations of careful, analytical precision that are a world away from the connotations of the word "attack."
So there you go. Chemical weapons evoke "horror" and "moral outrage" because their use involves an "attack." Explosive weapons on the other hand are "conventional" and therefore by implication morally acceptable, and their use takes the form not of an "attack" but of a much more rational and carefully thought through "strike."
I am sure that was of enormous comfort to the untold thousands killed by explosive weapons, not just in Syria but in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Yemen and wherever else.
Wednesday, 23 January 2013
Is the world going to hell in a handcart?
I suppose I've slightly missed the boat on this one, the latest outbreak of such commentary being at the time of the Mayan-apocalypse-that-wasn't, but that wasn't the first nor will it be the last. No doubt, as I write someone somewhere is fulminating about the imminent demise of all that is good and true and the inexorable decline in standards of morality/ethics/good citizenship. And people have been saying much the same for centuries, if not millennia. I have no doubt that when the first homo habilis invented the first flint axe someone in his or her tribe pretty soon started going on about how modern technology was ruining the world.
Typically (though not universally) it is the middle-aged, middle-class, relatively affluent and politically conservative who are most likely to claim that the world is going to hell in a handcart and it is not hard to see why. Mostly, such people will have done pretty damn well out of the status quo and will be nervous about any change whatever. Also, they will probably be beginning to sense an imminent diminution in their personal authority and influence in the world and that is not a prospect they would relish. From being (in their own heads at least) the (potential if not actual) Masters of the Universe they envisage a time when they are the old guard, marginalised, impoverished and emasculated and swept aside by the impatient next generation. Or shuffled off into secure accommodation, anyway.
However as I have said it is not universally such as these who bemoan the direction of travel of humankind, in whatever era they find themselves. There are also the more high-minded doomsayers, who see nothing but menace in the relentless pursuit of progress by their fellow humans. These are the people who have railed in their day against climate change, deforestation, nuclear weapons, the rise of fascism, the growth of empire, slavery, barbarism... There are no doubt more as you go further back in time.
Not that there is anything whatever wrong in railing against such iniquities- far from it. These things are and were iniquitous, and have arisen from the darker side of human nature. Yet what is striking when you look back is to what extent each new manifestation of man's (potential for) inhumanity is, at the time, seen as uniquely and devastatingly terrible. It is as if we forget how far we have progressed as a species: yes, the prospect of climate change is appalling, but it is only 50 years since the world was on the very brink of utter and complete annihilation in a US/USSR nuclear war. Yes, the way America treats detainees in Guantanamo Bay or carries out extra-judicial murders with drone strikes is appalling, but it hardly compares with Hitler's treatment of the Jews or the gypsies.
These are general points, that could apply to any time or place. However since I am now of the generation typically most prone to evoking the (rather odd) handcart image it is worth reflecting a little on the specifics of here and now. These are odd times in the UK. After the decades of relative affluence built on cheap Chinese labour and cheaper (but in the end utterly unaffordable) credit from the banks the nation seems to have descended into a despond of self-hatred and masochistic self-denial. We are a nation stumbling in the cold light of dawn into the bottle-strewn carnage of the post-party kitchen, wondering how the hell we're going to get the red wine stain out of the carpet in the front room. And our government is like some judgmental doctor, shaking his head over our liver-function tests and telling us we've been overdoing it for years and we only have ourselves to blame.
Of course the government has another agenda. It is not our health they care about, but their own narrow ideology. To take the area I know most about- education- Michael Gove has gone full steam ahead undermining public confidence in every element of the system he is presiding over. "It's all total and complete shit," he has effectively said, and the British people, broken and humiliated and self-pitying, have just nodded weakly in agreement. Who cares if international comparators do not actually make the case Gove presents? Who cares if the England and Wales exams system is actually far better regarded overseas than it is here? Gove wants it all swept away so he can rebuild an education system that was outmoded, divisive and unfit for purpose in the 1950s. And we are in danger of letting him.
All of which sounds as if I am saying that, in education at least, the world is going to hell in a handcart. And yes, maybe I do think that English education is in danger of heading at least some of the way along that road by that conveyance.
But the point I want to make is a more general one. Yes there are those who, for their own political or selfish reasons want to return the world to some dimly remembered better times, but there are those too whose opinions I otherwise admire, who equally bemoan some or all of the way human society has been or is progressing. People are becoming more selfish, they feel, or more prone to violence and wickedness. They are caught up in virtual digital worlds and have lost the ability to engage with others. They have become obsessed with money and technology and forgotten what is good and true in the world. And they are prepared to gamble the future of the environment for the price of a bit of feel-good economic growth.
The implication being, of course, that we weren't like that. Back in the day people looked out for each other more, the argument goes. We were more politically motivated. We cared about our neighbours. We didn't go on gap yahs, we travelled the world independently, worked for VSO, really cared about the places we went to. And we dreamed of better things (or if we didn't then our parents did). We thought that one day peace and love would prevail. We imagined that one day the world could be as one.
Only it's all bollocks of course. Although we didn't realise it at the time we were the over-privileged children of the post-War boom. We didn't need to worry about work, because of course there were jobs if you wanted them. We took free university education as an absolute given, and with it the freedom to disappear far, far up our own back passages, fuelled by a range of recreational drugs and funded by the ruthless exploitation of third world labour. In retrospect it is astonishing how much of youth culture back then was geared at introspection and self-centeredness. And yes, many of us may have gone on CND marches or union demos but how much of that was ever really that much more than public theatre? We believed in "them and us" and the corollary of that is that whatever "we" do it will not (cannot) influence what "they" think. And yes, some of us may have gifted our tremendous wisdom to benighted African villagers, but how much of that was really just as patronising and backward-looking as 19th Century missionary work?
And actually, the notion that things generally are worse now than they were then simply does not stand up to scrutiny. So we looked after our neighbours, did we? Well, it depends how you define "neighbours." Can you imagine a sign in a B&B window today saying "No dogs, no blacks, no gypsies"? And today's youth are feral, are they? Perhaps anyone over 50 with a genuine ability to recall their own childhood might like to compare their behaviour with that of today's youth. Personally, I remember: submitting a lonely old man to mental torture by climbing over his fence to steal from his garden; knowing that a boy in my year was carrying a sharpened screwdriver and was likely to use it on other boys; hearing of boys playing "chicken" with a train; and seeing an armed gang of youths from another school at our school gates one lunchtime (they had iron bars, motorcycle chains and broken bottles, as well, no doubt, as concealed knives).
None of these incidents made the news, not because they were concealed or hushed up, but because they were not seen as newsworthy Boys will be boys, it was generally accepted. Meaning that boys will fight, bully, extort money, carry weapons, intimidate and humiliate those weaker than themselves, utter racist, sexist and homophobic abuse. And that was all fine, it seems, and we have allowed such notions the warm, cosy glow of nostalgia.
But it is not like that any more. Incidents of appalling behaviour still take place of course, but they emphatically make the news these days. And it is not just because of the prurience of the news media- partly at least it is because society now sees a far greater range of behaviour as socially unacceptable. Boys (and girls) will not always be all of the things society used to assume they could not prevent them from becoming. Surely that is a giant step forwards, not hellwards.
And in fact, far from becoming more self-centered I genuinely believe that the direction of travel is the opposite one. Certainly there is still hedonism and the pursuit of instant gratification but even that seems to me to be becoming more inter-personal rather than intra-personal. The drugs of choice of earlier generations were acid and marijuana- both tending to enhance the disappearing-up-your-own-arse tendency. Today's youths are more likely to seek to obliterate themselves in the company of others, and it as much being seen to be off your face that is the draw as the insights into the nature of one's own back passage.
Perhaps the clearest measure of how the world has changed though is around the use of technology. There was a time, certainly, when technology threatened something akin to the downfall of human society. As young people became enclosed in their little worlds of Walkmans and Gameboys and sat hunched through the early hours in front of the PCs in their bedrooms it seemed that maybe human interaction would be on the decline, with fatal consequences (ready the handcart. Hell, here we come).
Except of course it hasn't ended up like that at all. Those who embrace technology today are becoming socialised in ways that are developing with dizzying rapidity. Governments have had their polished carapaces of secrecy and privilege stripped away and vast numbers can no longer be tortured and killed in far away countries without anyone so much as noticing. And certainly, a lot of what is on the internet is exploitative of women, or motivated by hatred, or objectifying of sexual relations, or frivolous and pointless. But then again, a lot more of it isn't any of these things. And slowly we are beginning to discriminate and to learn. And the way we can now share opinions and knowledge and creativity and watchfulness is astonishingly powerful.
Yes, the world faces huge problems but when has it not? Yes, Hell is there, and the handcart is ready and waiting, as it has been since the dawn of time. But maybe we really are beginning to face up to some of our responsibility as the dominant species on this planet. We are overusing resources and gambling with ecologies and allowing injustice and oppression to continue, but when have we not? The difference is that maybe for the first time we are beginning to force such concepts onto our collective consciousness.
And just maybe we are even going to find ways to address them.
Typically (though not universally) it is the middle-aged, middle-class, relatively affluent and politically conservative who are most likely to claim that the world is going to hell in a handcart and it is not hard to see why. Mostly, such people will have done pretty damn well out of the status quo and will be nervous about any change whatever. Also, they will probably be beginning to sense an imminent diminution in their personal authority and influence in the world and that is not a prospect they would relish. From being (in their own heads at least) the (potential if not actual) Masters of the Universe they envisage a time when they are the old guard, marginalised, impoverished and emasculated and swept aside by the impatient next generation. Or shuffled off into secure accommodation, anyway.
However as I have said it is not universally such as these who bemoan the direction of travel of humankind, in whatever era they find themselves. There are also the more high-minded doomsayers, who see nothing but menace in the relentless pursuit of progress by their fellow humans. These are the people who have railed in their day against climate change, deforestation, nuclear weapons, the rise of fascism, the growth of empire, slavery, barbarism... There are no doubt more as you go further back in time.
Not that there is anything whatever wrong in railing against such iniquities- far from it. These things are and were iniquitous, and have arisen from the darker side of human nature. Yet what is striking when you look back is to what extent each new manifestation of man's (potential for) inhumanity is, at the time, seen as uniquely and devastatingly terrible. It is as if we forget how far we have progressed as a species: yes, the prospect of climate change is appalling, but it is only 50 years since the world was on the very brink of utter and complete annihilation in a US/USSR nuclear war. Yes, the way America treats detainees in Guantanamo Bay or carries out extra-judicial murders with drone strikes is appalling, but it hardly compares with Hitler's treatment of the Jews or the gypsies.
These are general points, that could apply to any time or place. However since I am now of the generation typically most prone to evoking the (rather odd) handcart image it is worth reflecting a little on the specifics of here and now. These are odd times in the UK. After the decades of relative affluence built on cheap Chinese labour and cheaper (but in the end utterly unaffordable) credit from the banks the nation seems to have descended into a despond of self-hatred and masochistic self-denial. We are a nation stumbling in the cold light of dawn into the bottle-strewn carnage of the post-party kitchen, wondering how the hell we're going to get the red wine stain out of the carpet in the front room. And our government is like some judgmental doctor, shaking his head over our liver-function tests and telling us we've been overdoing it for years and we only have ourselves to blame.
Of course the government has another agenda. It is not our health they care about, but their own narrow ideology. To take the area I know most about- education- Michael Gove has gone full steam ahead undermining public confidence in every element of the system he is presiding over. "It's all total and complete shit," he has effectively said, and the British people, broken and humiliated and self-pitying, have just nodded weakly in agreement. Who cares if international comparators do not actually make the case Gove presents? Who cares if the England and Wales exams system is actually far better regarded overseas than it is here? Gove wants it all swept away so he can rebuild an education system that was outmoded, divisive and unfit for purpose in the 1950s. And we are in danger of letting him.
All of which sounds as if I am saying that, in education at least, the world is going to hell in a handcart. And yes, maybe I do think that English education is in danger of heading at least some of the way along that road by that conveyance.
But the point I want to make is a more general one. Yes there are those who, for their own political or selfish reasons want to return the world to some dimly remembered better times, but there are those too whose opinions I otherwise admire, who equally bemoan some or all of the way human society has been or is progressing. People are becoming more selfish, they feel, or more prone to violence and wickedness. They are caught up in virtual digital worlds and have lost the ability to engage with others. They have become obsessed with money and technology and forgotten what is good and true in the world. And they are prepared to gamble the future of the environment for the price of a bit of feel-good economic growth.
The implication being, of course, that we weren't like that. Back in the day people looked out for each other more, the argument goes. We were more politically motivated. We cared about our neighbours. We didn't go on gap yahs, we travelled the world independently, worked for VSO, really cared about the places we went to. And we dreamed of better things (or if we didn't then our parents did). We thought that one day peace and love would prevail. We imagined that one day the world could be as one.
Only it's all bollocks of course. Although we didn't realise it at the time we were the over-privileged children of the post-War boom. We didn't need to worry about work, because of course there were jobs if you wanted them. We took free university education as an absolute given, and with it the freedom to disappear far, far up our own back passages, fuelled by a range of recreational drugs and funded by the ruthless exploitation of third world labour. In retrospect it is astonishing how much of youth culture back then was geared at introspection and self-centeredness. And yes, many of us may have gone on CND marches or union demos but how much of that was ever really that much more than public theatre? We believed in "them and us" and the corollary of that is that whatever "we" do it will not (cannot) influence what "they" think. And yes, some of us may have gifted our tremendous wisdom to benighted African villagers, but how much of that was really just as patronising and backward-looking as 19th Century missionary work?
And actually, the notion that things generally are worse now than they were then simply does not stand up to scrutiny. So we looked after our neighbours, did we? Well, it depends how you define "neighbours." Can you imagine a sign in a B&B window today saying "No dogs, no blacks, no gypsies"? And today's youth are feral, are they? Perhaps anyone over 50 with a genuine ability to recall their own childhood might like to compare their behaviour with that of today's youth. Personally, I remember: submitting a lonely old man to mental torture by climbing over his fence to steal from his garden; knowing that a boy in my year was carrying a sharpened screwdriver and was likely to use it on other boys; hearing of boys playing "chicken" with a train; and seeing an armed gang of youths from another school at our school gates one lunchtime (they had iron bars, motorcycle chains and broken bottles, as well, no doubt, as concealed knives).
None of these incidents made the news, not because they were concealed or hushed up, but because they were not seen as newsworthy Boys will be boys, it was generally accepted. Meaning that boys will fight, bully, extort money, carry weapons, intimidate and humiliate those weaker than themselves, utter racist, sexist and homophobic abuse. And that was all fine, it seems, and we have allowed such notions the warm, cosy glow of nostalgia.
But it is not like that any more. Incidents of appalling behaviour still take place of course, but they emphatically make the news these days. And it is not just because of the prurience of the news media- partly at least it is because society now sees a far greater range of behaviour as socially unacceptable. Boys (and girls) will not always be all of the things society used to assume they could not prevent them from becoming. Surely that is a giant step forwards, not hellwards.
And in fact, far from becoming more self-centered I genuinely believe that the direction of travel is the opposite one. Certainly there is still hedonism and the pursuit of instant gratification but even that seems to me to be becoming more inter-personal rather than intra-personal. The drugs of choice of earlier generations were acid and marijuana- both tending to enhance the disappearing-up-your-own-arse tendency. Today's youths are more likely to seek to obliterate themselves in the company of others, and it as much being seen to be off your face that is the draw as the insights into the nature of one's own back passage.
Perhaps the clearest measure of how the world has changed though is around the use of technology. There was a time, certainly, when technology threatened something akin to the downfall of human society. As young people became enclosed in their little worlds of Walkmans and Gameboys and sat hunched through the early hours in front of the PCs in their bedrooms it seemed that maybe human interaction would be on the decline, with fatal consequences (ready the handcart. Hell, here we come).
Except of course it hasn't ended up like that at all. Those who embrace technology today are becoming socialised in ways that are developing with dizzying rapidity. Governments have had their polished carapaces of secrecy and privilege stripped away and vast numbers can no longer be tortured and killed in far away countries without anyone so much as noticing. And certainly, a lot of what is on the internet is exploitative of women, or motivated by hatred, or objectifying of sexual relations, or frivolous and pointless. But then again, a lot more of it isn't any of these things. And slowly we are beginning to discriminate and to learn. And the way we can now share opinions and knowledge and creativity and watchfulness is astonishingly powerful.
Yes, the world faces huge problems but when has it not? Yes, Hell is there, and the handcart is ready and waiting, as it has been since the dawn of time. But maybe we really are beginning to face up to some of our responsibility as the dominant species on this planet. We are overusing resources and gambling with ecologies and allowing injustice and oppression to continue, but when have we not? The difference is that maybe for the first time we are beginning to force such concepts onto our collective consciousness.
And just maybe we are even going to find ways to address them.
Saturday, 29 December 2012
Compassion in nursing
There have been a number of distressing news stories recently that have called into question public trust in nursing as a caring and compassionate profession. Partly of course this is just one of the Tories' more despicable tactics in their quest to undermine this nation's faith in its National Health Service, and a tactic that some of the tabloids seem more than happy to assist with. It appears that the sight of a large state-run enterprise doing something as important as protecting the nation's health with such success and such overwhelming public support brings out the inherently destructive nastiness of the neo-cons this side of the Atlantic too.
No doubt there is some basis in truth for such stories of medical staff, including nurses, treating vulnerable patients with neither compassion nor dignity. In any organisation as vast as the NHS there are bound to be some whose motivations are twisted, or whom bitterness, despair and the intolerable stresses of their work have transformed into monsters. And given the nature of their work, if even tiny numbers of nurses are or become monsters, then the power they have over the safety, comfort and indeed life of patients at their most vulnerable is frightening.
However for these stories to gain the currency they have there has, I believe, to be more to it than either Tory tabloid vindictiveness or the despicable behaviour of a tiny minority. Is there then something about what nursing has become that allows the general public to believe that nurses are less compassionate, less caring, than they used to be?
I have recently spent a considerable amount of time in hospitals with my wife, culminating in a few days in the Hyper-Acute Stroke Unit where she died. Sitting at her bedside I had a great deal of time to study the nurses and doctors who cared for her and, while I was immensely impressed with the way they did so, I began also to think about how their role has changed over recent years.
The most obvious change is in the very high degree of professionalism, medical expertise and efficiency required of nurses in today's hospitals. Even something as simple as changing a dressing has become a meticulously thought through and elaborately choreographed procedure that ensures that at no point will anything that is to come into contact with the patient's skin touch anything that is not sterile. Maintaining fluid balance is no longer simply a question of periodically checking up whether the patient has passed urine. In patients on close monitoring every millilitre of fluid in or out is recorded and if a patient has gone more than a specified time without passing urine then a nurse will use a small single-purpose ultrasound scanner to measure the contents of their bladder, considering catheterisation if that quantity exceeds a certain preset threshold. Every aspect of the patient's condition is recorded and cross-checked, with doctors paying as much attention to the nursing notes as to their own, and even something as simple as putting up a bag of saline bound around with procedures and safety checks to ensure that no patient receives the wrong interventions.
And of course everything, but everything, is entered into a variety of databases, both physical and electronic. Nurses have to spend a considerable proportion of their time entering, cross-checking and retrieving data. Of course there are those in the swivel-eyed nether reaches of the Tory party who would point to that very fact as prima facie evidence of the schlerotically bureaucratic nature of the NHS, but the nurses can hardly be blamed for their need to record everything. And neither in fact should the NHS itself. Not only do meticulous records help prevent the sort of appalling accidents in treatment that make for one branch of the anti-NHS tabloid stories (War Hero Has Wrong Leg Amputated!), they are also the only sure protection against the rapacious hordes of injury lawyers who haunt the daytime TV schedules. Even in the midst of the appalling horror of witnessing my wife's sudden death I could not help but notice the nervousness of the medical staff on the ward. Was I going to be the one who blighted all of their futures with a long-drawn-out and bitter battle to establish fault? And the meticulous recording of every detail of treatment is the only protection against malicious accusations of malpractice.
Yet even these additional pressures on nurses today are not, I believe, the central issue in their changing relationship with the patients they treat, and those patients' relatives and friends. Busy as they were, the nurses caring for my wife did so with good humour, compassion and genuine humanity. Whilst the procedures they carried out were such as at one time might have been more associated with doctors they carried them out in such a way that my wife was accorded respect, dignity and even affection. And yet, as I watched them, I began to see some of the ways in which the transformation of nursing from a vocation to a highly-skilled profession could be seen by some as inimical with the image of the compassionate, caring nurse.
Perhaps the clearest example of what I am talking about is the issue of post-thrombolytic monitoring. Thrombolysis (from the Greek- 'thrombos' = a clot and 'lysis' = destruction) is what is popularly known as clot-busting. If caught early enough, many of the effects of an ischemic stroke can be lessened by administering thrombolytic drugs, which dissolve every blood clot in the body, including the one which is depriving part of the brain of its blood supply. This is of course a procedure with considerable risk, not least of which is what is called a hemorrhagic transformation, where the blood clot on the brain is replaced by a brain bleed. To guard against this, nurses have to monitor any thrombolysed patient very closely for 24 hours. And this monitoring is not simply a question of blood pressure, temperature and the rest. The nurses actually have to carry out neurological tests every hour ("Raise your right arm for me. And your left. Now make a fist. Push my arm away. Now pull it towards you..." and on, and on, as the exhausted patient stares beseechingly into their eyes, willing them to stop, to let them sleep.)
This monitoring is clearly absolutely vital and a major factor in the successful treatment of strokes that not long ago would have resulted in death or very severe disability. Yet, on the face of it at least, such monitoring is the very opposite of compassionate. Everyone, especially nurses on a Hyper-Acute Stroke Unit, knows that stroke causes exhaustion. Twice I have been with my wife in the aftermath of a stroke and I can tell you that exhaustion is too pallid and commonplace a term to describe what she went through. In the old days, I am sure, compassionate nurses would see a stroke patient so washed-out, so drained with the simple task of taking a sip of water that they would let them sleep for a while. "I'll come back later," they would have said. "She looks exhausted." And now what do they do? At 3 a.m they come to that same exhausted patient's bed, call to them incessantly until the patient drags themselves from the depths of their desperately sought-for sleep and make them do what my wife called those bloody stupid neurological tests. And then again at 4 a.m. And 5...
Surely that can't be compassionate, a part us must inevitably feel as we witness such nursing. Don't you see how tired she is? Just leave her alone, why can't you?
I didn't say it of course, because they were doing exactly the right thing. What sort of compassion would allow a nurse to leave a patient sleeping while unnoticed in the depths of their brain a hemorrhagic transformation was spreading its dark tide of destruction? The old-fashioned "compassionate" style of nursing that engaged with the patient rather than their medical condition might feel more human and soft-focussed and personal, but I know which I would prefer if it was me who was acutely ill and in imminent danger.
And so in fact I have emerged from this terrible experience with a new-found admiration for the functioning of the NHS at the sharp end, and for the professionalism, expertise and (yes) compassion of so many nurses. As the ones in closest contact with the patients dependent on their care it cannot be easy for nurses to carry out procedures that they know to be painful, uncomfortable, or even distressing to a patient at their most frightened and vulnerable. And yet they do so, efficiently professionally and, in the most part, with real humanity because at the root the nursing profession is, more than ever, solidly founded on a basis of true compassion.
No doubt there is some basis in truth for such stories of medical staff, including nurses, treating vulnerable patients with neither compassion nor dignity. In any organisation as vast as the NHS there are bound to be some whose motivations are twisted, or whom bitterness, despair and the intolerable stresses of their work have transformed into monsters. And given the nature of their work, if even tiny numbers of nurses are or become monsters, then the power they have over the safety, comfort and indeed life of patients at their most vulnerable is frightening.
However for these stories to gain the currency they have there has, I believe, to be more to it than either Tory tabloid vindictiveness or the despicable behaviour of a tiny minority. Is there then something about what nursing has become that allows the general public to believe that nurses are less compassionate, less caring, than they used to be?
I have recently spent a considerable amount of time in hospitals with my wife, culminating in a few days in the Hyper-Acute Stroke Unit where she died. Sitting at her bedside I had a great deal of time to study the nurses and doctors who cared for her and, while I was immensely impressed with the way they did so, I began also to think about how their role has changed over recent years.
The most obvious change is in the very high degree of professionalism, medical expertise and efficiency required of nurses in today's hospitals. Even something as simple as changing a dressing has become a meticulously thought through and elaborately choreographed procedure that ensures that at no point will anything that is to come into contact with the patient's skin touch anything that is not sterile. Maintaining fluid balance is no longer simply a question of periodically checking up whether the patient has passed urine. In patients on close monitoring every millilitre of fluid in or out is recorded and if a patient has gone more than a specified time without passing urine then a nurse will use a small single-purpose ultrasound scanner to measure the contents of their bladder, considering catheterisation if that quantity exceeds a certain preset threshold. Every aspect of the patient's condition is recorded and cross-checked, with doctors paying as much attention to the nursing notes as to their own, and even something as simple as putting up a bag of saline bound around with procedures and safety checks to ensure that no patient receives the wrong interventions.
And of course everything, but everything, is entered into a variety of databases, both physical and electronic. Nurses have to spend a considerable proportion of their time entering, cross-checking and retrieving data. Of course there are those in the swivel-eyed nether reaches of the Tory party who would point to that very fact as prima facie evidence of the schlerotically bureaucratic nature of the NHS, but the nurses can hardly be blamed for their need to record everything. And neither in fact should the NHS itself. Not only do meticulous records help prevent the sort of appalling accidents in treatment that make for one branch of the anti-NHS tabloid stories (War Hero Has Wrong Leg Amputated!), they are also the only sure protection against the rapacious hordes of injury lawyers who haunt the daytime TV schedules. Even in the midst of the appalling horror of witnessing my wife's sudden death I could not help but notice the nervousness of the medical staff on the ward. Was I going to be the one who blighted all of their futures with a long-drawn-out and bitter battle to establish fault? And the meticulous recording of every detail of treatment is the only protection against malicious accusations of malpractice.
Yet even these additional pressures on nurses today are not, I believe, the central issue in their changing relationship with the patients they treat, and those patients' relatives and friends. Busy as they were, the nurses caring for my wife did so with good humour, compassion and genuine humanity. Whilst the procedures they carried out were such as at one time might have been more associated with doctors they carried them out in such a way that my wife was accorded respect, dignity and even affection. And yet, as I watched them, I began to see some of the ways in which the transformation of nursing from a vocation to a highly-skilled profession could be seen by some as inimical with the image of the compassionate, caring nurse.
Perhaps the clearest example of what I am talking about is the issue of post-thrombolytic monitoring. Thrombolysis (from the Greek- 'thrombos' = a clot and 'lysis' = destruction) is what is popularly known as clot-busting. If caught early enough, many of the effects of an ischemic stroke can be lessened by administering thrombolytic drugs, which dissolve every blood clot in the body, including the one which is depriving part of the brain of its blood supply. This is of course a procedure with considerable risk, not least of which is what is called a hemorrhagic transformation, where the blood clot on the brain is replaced by a brain bleed. To guard against this, nurses have to monitor any thrombolysed patient very closely for 24 hours. And this monitoring is not simply a question of blood pressure, temperature and the rest. The nurses actually have to carry out neurological tests every hour ("Raise your right arm for me. And your left. Now make a fist. Push my arm away. Now pull it towards you..." and on, and on, as the exhausted patient stares beseechingly into their eyes, willing them to stop, to let them sleep.)
This monitoring is clearly absolutely vital and a major factor in the successful treatment of strokes that not long ago would have resulted in death or very severe disability. Yet, on the face of it at least, such monitoring is the very opposite of compassionate. Everyone, especially nurses on a Hyper-Acute Stroke Unit, knows that stroke causes exhaustion. Twice I have been with my wife in the aftermath of a stroke and I can tell you that exhaustion is too pallid and commonplace a term to describe what she went through. In the old days, I am sure, compassionate nurses would see a stroke patient so washed-out, so drained with the simple task of taking a sip of water that they would let them sleep for a while. "I'll come back later," they would have said. "She looks exhausted." And now what do they do? At 3 a.m they come to that same exhausted patient's bed, call to them incessantly until the patient drags themselves from the depths of their desperately sought-for sleep and make them do what my wife called those bloody stupid neurological tests. And then again at 4 a.m. And 5...
Surely that can't be compassionate, a part us must inevitably feel as we witness such nursing. Don't you see how tired she is? Just leave her alone, why can't you?
I didn't say it of course, because they were doing exactly the right thing. What sort of compassion would allow a nurse to leave a patient sleeping while unnoticed in the depths of their brain a hemorrhagic transformation was spreading its dark tide of destruction? The old-fashioned "compassionate" style of nursing that engaged with the patient rather than their medical condition might feel more human and soft-focussed and personal, but I know which I would prefer if it was me who was acutely ill and in imminent danger.
And so in fact I have emerged from this terrible experience with a new-found admiration for the functioning of the NHS at the sharp end, and for the professionalism, expertise and (yes) compassion of so many nurses. As the ones in closest contact with the patients dependent on their care it cannot be easy for nurses to carry out procedures that they know to be painful, uncomfortable, or even distressing to a patient at their most frightened and vulnerable. And yet they do so, efficiently professionally and, in the most part, with real humanity because at the root the nursing profession is, more than ever, solidly founded on a basis of true compassion.
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