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.
Friday, 21 March 2014
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.
Monday, 28 October 2013
The Fool in Shakespeare's tragedies
In preparation for this morning's (forecast) Great Storm I reread Act III scene ii of King Lear and was struck again by the strangeness of the Fool's role in the scene. It is the scene that starts with Lear's famous "Blow winds and crack your cheeks" speech and whilst the Fool in one sense plays his role as Lear's minder, he also interrupts the old King's rant with an apparently irrelevant little ditty about cod-pieces and lice:
"He that has a house to put his head in has a good head-piece.
The cod-piece that will house
Before the head has any,
The head and he shall louse;
So beggars marry many.
The man that makes his toe
What he his heart should make,
Shall of a corn cry woe,
And turn his sleep to wake.
For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass."
Aside from the first and last lines this was presumably sung, and it is hard to imagine a more incongruous note for Shakespeare to strike whilst simultaneously evoking, through Lear's words alone, the power and majesty of the "oak-cleaving thunderbolts" and "all-shaking thunder" of the great tempest that threatens to overwhelm them. Later on in the scene, as Lear's thoughts turn to the various "undivulged crimes,/Unwhipp’d of justice" the Fool's digressions act more directly as a counterpoint to Lear's anger, but the issue of tone still remains: why does Shakespeare introduce elements of levity and humour at such moments of high drama?
Of course he has form in this. Think of the porter in Macbeth, immediately after the murder of Duncan, or of the gravediggers in Hamlet just after Ophelia's suicide. These are amongst the most difficult Shakespeare scenes for modern students to relate to, if for no other reason than that topical stand-up (which is effectively what these scenes are) generally does not date well, and we have to take the scholars' word for it that they would have been hilariously funny to a contemporary audience.
Yet even if we accept that the scenes were funny we are still left with the central question: why are they there? The Fool was obviously a big draw for Shakespeare's audiences and much has been written by many more learned than I about the Fool's sociological significance and historical context. I have nothing useful to add in that regard, but wanted to reflect a little purely on how the Fools' speeches work in the context of the great tragedies.
To some extent, the Fools provide a "way in" for contemporary audiences into the rarefied world of the kings depicted in the plays. The Fool is always the voice of the common people, and counterpoints the grandiosity of others. So when Lear reaches the apotheosis of his rage and strips off his clothes to stand naked in the storm, the Fool injects a note of common sense: " Prithee, nuncle, be contented; ’tis a naughty night to swim in," and when Lear is fulminating against the manifold iniquities of the world in the mad 'trial' of his (imaginary) daughters, the Fool repeatedly interjects with sayings like "He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath."
There is something deeper going on here too though. In some ways the Fools seem to provide Shakespeare with a means to step outside the world he has created for a time and reflect on the plays as constructs. This is done explicitly at the end of Twelfth Night of course, when Feste ends the play with a song, whose last verse is:
"A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day."
but (as so often) it is in Hamlet that Shakespeare pursues this idea to its conclusion. At a key point in a play that is concerned amongst other things with the nature of madness, this interchange occurs between Hamlet and the gravedigger:
"Gravedigger: Of all the days i’ the year, I came to ’t that day that our last King Hamlet overcame Fortinbras.
Hamlet: How long is that since?
Gravedigger: Cannot you tell that? every fool can tell that; it was the very day that young Hamlet was born; he that is mad, and sent into England.
Hamlet: Ay, marry; why was he sent into England?
Gravedigger: Why, because he was mad: he shall recover his wits there; or, if he do not, ’tis no great matter there,
Hamlet: Why?
Gravedigger: ’Twill not be seen in him there; there the men are as mad as he."
What can this joke do but cause the (English) audience to reflect on the fact that they are watching a play?
Hamlet is of course full of this sort of thing (as I have argued in this post for instance) and it is a mark of the supreme confidence Shakespeare had in his ability that he chose to remind us of the 'fourth wall' so frequently, when tragedies are supposed to be dependent on the willing suspension of disbelief. However you don't even need specific lines to realise that this is part of what he was doing with the Fools in his tragedies. It seems pretty clear that the actor playing the Fool would have been a comic star in his own right and that the audience would have seen him as comedian first and character in the play a distant second. It is as if Bill Bailey or Eddie Izzard appeared in a serious drama and didn't play it straight, but launched into a stand-up routine. One can easily imagine the profound change in atmosphere whenever the Fool appeared on stage.
And that is the point. Why did Shakespeare want that change in atmosphere? Would it not utterly destroy the tension and drama he was otherwise trying to build up?
In Lear the situation is potentially even more puzzling as it has been suggested that the Fool and Cordelia were played by the same actor and that Lear's apparently incongruous concern for the Fool's fate ("and my poor fool is hanged") in the midst of grieving Cordelia's death by hanging points up this link. In a sense they play similar roles in undercutting Lear's pompous arrogance whilst simultaneously caring deeply for the "foolish fond old man" hidden beneath the bluster. Yet once again the issue is one of tone. Cordelia is a tragic and the Fool a comic figure, so why would Shakespeare choose (if indeed he did) to have them played by the same actor?
The key, I believe, is in the nature of human emotion. You see, whilst emotion is generally understood as something individual, personal and internalised it is also in a sense social, interpersonal and externalised. As well as hugely powerful effects on the individual who experiences them, strong emotions always have external and very public manifestations. Facial expressions are almost universally understood guides to emotional states (though those on the autistic spectrum for instance seem to find them hard to decode) and at the extremes emotions give rise to behaviours that seem designed to communicate them to others, providing strong visual and aural clues to make them socially understood. So at the extreme: sadness gives rise to tears and sobbing; amusement to smiling, then the full opening of the mouth, the doubling-up of the body and loud uncontrollable laughter; anger to redness in the face, the raising of the voice and roaring; and fear to the placing of the hands in front of the face, whimpering and finally screaming.
And all of these manifestations are to some degree infectious. When you are feeling prone to sadness there is nothing more likely to 'set your off' than the sound of someone else crying and anyone who has experienced the phenomenon of 'corpsing' knows how the same applies to audible laughter (just click here for the perfect example). It is as if these manifestations of emotion were specifically designed to spread the emotion: to transform it from an intra-persoanl to an inter-personal phenomenon.
And that, I believe, is the point and the reason for Shakespeare's introduction of Fools into moments of high drama. In his great tragedies he is dealing with strong but subtle and problematic emotions. King Lear is angry with his daughters but he is also regretful and bitter about his earlier misjudgments and beginning even to feel guilt about the high-handed way that Kings ignore the concerns of the poor. Macbeth is horrified by the blood on his hands and his guilt at his murder of Duncan, but also beginning to glimpse a more profound despair at the pointlessness of life and as for Hamlet- well I haven't got the time or space to list all of the contradictory emotions running through his head.
Shakespeare wants to involve individual members of his audience in these emotional journeys and does so extremely effectively. However he is also aware that audiences are a collective and that an important part of our experience of emotions can be social as well as individual. He wants to harness the collective power of those emotions to enhance each individual's emotional engagement. So how does he do this?
Well, one of the ways is through laughter. Assuming that the Fools' various speeches were hilariously funny at the time and so did give rise to actual audible laughter, then what better way to bind an audience together in a communal expression of emotion?
Of course you may well feel that this is hardly a new observation. Critics have long argued that the various Fools' interjections act as ways to ratchet up the tension through temporary release, much as do the various false alarms in any horror film.
What I am saying here though is, I believe, something slightly different. I think the main effect Shakespeare sought was the communal and social effect that audible laughter can bring about. He wants to bind the audience together so that they can to some extent act as an emotionally connected whole, capable of accessing some of the deeper and more troubling messages of the tragedy. In this process I believe the Fool becomes something of a conduit, and certainly in Lear it is he who first introduces the note of regretful Weltschmerz that becomes Lear's predominant emotion by the end. In the scene with which I started this post, the Fool caps Lears majestic railing against the storm with the quieter but in the end much more touching lines:
"He that has a little tiny wit,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
Though the rain it raineth every day."
"He that has a house to put his head in has a good head-piece.
The cod-piece that will house
Before the head has any,
The head and he shall louse;
So beggars marry many.
The man that makes his toe
What he his heart should make,
Shall of a corn cry woe,
And turn his sleep to wake.
For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass."
Aside from the first and last lines this was presumably sung, and it is hard to imagine a more incongruous note for Shakespeare to strike whilst simultaneously evoking, through Lear's words alone, the power and majesty of the "oak-cleaving thunderbolts" and "all-shaking thunder" of the great tempest that threatens to overwhelm them. Later on in the scene, as Lear's thoughts turn to the various "undivulged crimes,/Unwhipp’d of justice" the Fool's digressions act more directly as a counterpoint to Lear's anger, but the issue of tone still remains: why does Shakespeare introduce elements of levity and humour at such moments of high drama?
Of course he has form in this. Think of the porter in Macbeth, immediately after the murder of Duncan, or of the gravediggers in Hamlet just after Ophelia's suicide. These are amongst the most difficult Shakespeare scenes for modern students to relate to, if for no other reason than that topical stand-up (which is effectively what these scenes are) generally does not date well, and we have to take the scholars' word for it that they would have been hilariously funny to a contemporary audience.
Yet even if we accept that the scenes were funny we are still left with the central question: why are they there? The Fool was obviously a big draw for Shakespeare's audiences and much has been written by many more learned than I about the Fool's sociological significance and historical context. I have nothing useful to add in that regard, but wanted to reflect a little purely on how the Fools' speeches work in the context of the great tragedies.
To some extent, the Fools provide a "way in" for contemporary audiences into the rarefied world of the kings depicted in the plays. The Fool is always the voice of the common people, and counterpoints the grandiosity of others. So when Lear reaches the apotheosis of his rage and strips off his clothes to stand naked in the storm, the Fool injects a note of common sense: " Prithee, nuncle, be contented; ’tis a naughty night to swim in," and when Lear is fulminating against the manifold iniquities of the world in the mad 'trial' of his (imaginary) daughters, the Fool repeatedly interjects with sayings like "He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath."
There is something deeper going on here too though. In some ways the Fools seem to provide Shakespeare with a means to step outside the world he has created for a time and reflect on the plays as constructs. This is done explicitly at the end of Twelfth Night of course, when Feste ends the play with a song, whose last verse is:
"A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day."
but (as so often) it is in Hamlet that Shakespeare pursues this idea to its conclusion. At a key point in a play that is concerned amongst other things with the nature of madness, this interchange occurs between Hamlet and the gravedigger:
"Gravedigger: Of all the days i’ the year, I came to ’t that day that our last King Hamlet overcame Fortinbras.
Hamlet: How long is that since?
Gravedigger: Cannot you tell that? every fool can tell that; it was the very day that young Hamlet was born; he that is mad, and sent into England.
Hamlet: Ay, marry; why was he sent into England?
Gravedigger: Why, because he was mad: he shall recover his wits there; or, if he do not, ’tis no great matter there,
Hamlet: Why?
Gravedigger: ’Twill not be seen in him there; there the men are as mad as he."
What can this joke do but cause the (English) audience to reflect on the fact that they are watching a play?
Hamlet is of course full of this sort of thing (as I have argued in this post for instance) and it is a mark of the supreme confidence Shakespeare had in his ability that he chose to remind us of the 'fourth wall' so frequently, when tragedies are supposed to be dependent on the willing suspension of disbelief. However you don't even need specific lines to realise that this is part of what he was doing with the Fools in his tragedies. It seems pretty clear that the actor playing the Fool would have been a comic star in his own right and that the audience would have seen him as comedian first and character in the play a distant second. It is as if Bill Bailey or Eddie Izzard appeared in a serious drama and didn't play it straight, but launched into a stand-up routine. One can easily imagine the profound change in atmosphere whenever the Fool appeared on stage.
And that is the point. Why did Shakespeare want that change in atmosphere? Would it not utterly destroy the tension and drama he was otherwise trying to build up?
In Lear the situation is potentially even more puzzling as it has been suggested that the Fool and Cordelia were played by the same actor and that Lear's apparently incongruous concern for the Fool's fate ("and my poor fool is hanged") in the midst of grieving Cordelia's death by hanging points up this link. In a sense they play similar roles in undercutting Lear's pompous arrogance whilst simultaneously caring deeply for the "foolish fond old man" hidden beneath the bluster. Yet once again the issue is one of tone. Cordelia is a tragic and the Fool a comic figure, so why would Shakespeare choose (if indeed he did) to have them played by the same actor?
The key, I believe, is in the nature of human emotion. You see, whilst emotion is generally understood as something individual, personal and internalised it is also in a sense social, interpersonal and externalised. As well as hugely powerful effects on the individual who experiences them, strong emotions always have external and very public manifestations. Facial expressions are almost universally understood guides to emotional states (though those on the autistic spectrum for instance seem to find them hard to decode) and at the extremes emotions give rise to behaviours that seem designed to communicate them to others, providing strong visual and aural clues to make them socially understood. So at the extreme: sadness gives rise to tears and sobbing; amusement to smiling, then the full opening of the mouth, the doubling-up of the body and loud uncontrollable laughter; anger to redness in the face, the raising of the voice and roaring; and fear to the placing of the hands in front of the face, whimpering and finally screaming.
And all of these manifestations are to some degree infectious. When you are feeling prone to sadness there is nothing more likely to 'set your off' than the sound of someone else crying and anyone who has experienced the phenomenon of 'corpsing' knows how the same applies to audible laughter (just click here for the perfect example). It is as if these manifestations of emotion were specifically designed to spread the emotion: to transform it from an intra-persoanl to an inter-personal phenomenon.
And that, I believe, is the point and the reason for Shakespeare's introduction of Fools into moments of high drama. In his great tragedies he is dealing with strong but subtle and problematic emotions. King Lear is angry with his daughters but he is also regretful and bitter about his earlier misjudgments and beginning even to feel guilt about the high-handed way that Kings ignore the concerns of the poor. Macbeth is horrified by the blood on his hands and his guilt at his murder of Duncan, but also beginning to glimpse a more profound despair at the pointlessness of life and as for Hamlet- well I haven't got the time or space to list all of the contradictory emotions running through his head.
Shakespeare wants to involve individual members of his audience in these emotional journeys and does so extremely effectively. However he is also aware that audiences are a collective and that an important part of our experience of emotions can be social as well as individual. He wants to harness the collective power of those emotions to enhance each individual's emotional engagement. So how does he do this?
Well, one of the ways is through laughter. Assuming that the Fools' various speeches were hilariously funny at the time and so did give rise to actual audible laughter, then what better way to bind an audience together in a communal expression of emotion?
Of course you may well feel that this is hardly a new observation. Critics have long argued that the various Fools' interjections act as ways to ratchet up the tension through temporary release, much as do the various false alarms in any horror film.
What I am saying here though is, I believe, something slightly different. I think the main effect Shakespeare sought was the communal and social effect that audible laughter can bring about. He wants to bind the audience together so that they can to some extent act as an emotionally connected whole, capable of accessing some of the deeper and more troubling messages of the tragedy. In this process I believe the Fool becomes something of a conduit, and certainly in Lear it is he who first introduces the note of regretful Weltschmerz that becomes Lear's predominant emotion by the end. In the scene with which I started this post, the Fool caps Lears majestic railing against the storm with the quieter but in the end much more touching lines:
"He that has a little tiny wit,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
Though the rain it raineth every day."
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
Friday, 4 October 2013
The best form of (neo-conservative) government is attack
The above was a phrase I came up with in a previous post, but it got me thinking. I watched some of the lovely David Cameron's speech to the Tory party conference, which took place at the same time as the Tea Party Republicans were engaged in the hamstringing of effective government in the USA. What I witnessed from both was a pugnaciousness that seems actually to underlie much of the attitude of today's neo-cons whether in opposition or in government.
The central message of the neo-cons appears to be that government of any sort is essentially destructive and counter-productive: the dead hand of the State weighing down the burgeoning energy of private sector enterprise. Markets still hold the solutions to all problems (including those that markets have created) and state control is the embodiment of all that is contemptible and wrong.
This is, incidentally, perhaps why the neo-cons enjoy electoral success: politicians are bad, inept, out of touch; government is (or appears from the outside to be) done by politicians; government is bad, inept, out of touch. QED. Vote for the ones who want to tear down government.
And tear down government is clearly what the Tories in the UK are setting out to do. In education Michael Gove has systematically set out to denigrate every element of the State education system, presenting his solution in the form of Free Schools, which are free from almost every aspect of government by any State body. This even applies to the provision of school places. What used to be seen as the central responsibility of the branches of government concerned with educating the nation's youth has now been removed from that control and "freed up" for provision by the private sector. Local government has no say whatever in the location of any new Free School, and virtually none over the provision of new places in Academies, but they have no finance to build schools themselves.
In Health, the current government seems almost to relish the constant flood of negative news stories about the NHS (hardly surprising, since they have been the origin of many of them). Their narrative, it is beginning to appear, is that the NHS is too big, too unwieldy, too uncaring, and essentially too governed to carry out its role effectively. The answer, it is becoming abundantly clear, is to develop health provision where the private sector and the profit motive are the guiding principles, rather than the pernicious and stultifying dead hand of government.
And of course as regards the economy this is the very central narrative. The financial problems the UK (and the rest of the world, presumably) are currently suffering are down to government spending. The solution: less government. Then we'll all be happy. This appears to sweep under the carpet the indisputable fact that the majority of the world's current economic woes were caused by the precipitous and virtually ungoverned rise in the size, power and recklessness of private sector entities like banks, hedge funds and derivative dealerships. It was precisely the lack of government oversight of the scale of the gambles in which such institutions were engaged that enabled the bubble to inflate so massively and then burst so cataclysmically.
There are huge advantages to this sort of narrative if you happen to be in government though. Time was that if something appalling happened in an area of public life (like the crisis in A&E care; like the decline in GCSE performance in schools or the looming school place crises; like the prolonged inability of the economy to show any sort of recovery) the minister involved would have to take responsibility, or at least endure long periods of anguished squirming. I used to feel sorry for such ministers sometimes, because clearly the problems they were facing had been long in the making, but them's the breaks: if you're the one in charge at the time, you take the responsibility when things go tits up.
Or so it used to be. Nowadays, government ministers seem to relish bad news almost more than their opposition shadows. They glory in it- trumpet it to the right wing tabloids. Because each piece of bad news is further proof that GOVERNMENT ISN'T WORKING and needs to have its monopolistic power (and funding) reduced. The role of those in government, in the UK at least, really seems to have developed into one of attacking rather than defending the areas for which they are responsible. And the populace, fed up with politicians of all parties and keen to see them brought down a peg or two, seem quite content to go along with it.
It is interesting, of course, to ponder a little on how this notion could come about. I believe that partly at least it is down to our use of the word "government" itself. There is an urban myth being peddled on facebook and elsewhere apparently that the etymology of the word reveals that it means "control the mind" (from Latin "gubernare"=to control and "mens, mentis"= mind). This is utter bollocks of course (the -ment suffix has nothing to do with the word for mind) but it reveals a strand of opinion of what government is and what governments do.
In fact, the word comes originally from the Ancient Greek κυβερνάω, meaning to steer or pilot a ship. Of course "steering" and "control" have similar meanings, but as ever it is the connotations that make the difference. "Control" (particularly as in "State control") implies a diminution of freedom and of the capacity of individuals to function effectively. "Steering," (as in "steering a steady course" or "steering through a difficult passage") implies almost the opposite. It is about enabling individuals to function effectively and happily, free from the dangers they might encounter were the vessel they were in unsteered.
But if governments begin to set their face against the process of government: to renounce their duty as helmsmen of the ship of State, then what?
The central message of the neo-cons appears to be that government of any sort is essentially destructive and counter-productive: the dead hand of the State weighing down the burgeoning energy of private sector enterprise. Markets still hold the solutions to all problems (including those that markets have created) and state control is the embodiment of all that is contemptible and wrong.
This is, incidentally, perhaps why the neo-cons enjoy electoral success: politicians are bad, inept, out of touch; government is (or appears from the outside to be) done by politicians; government is bad, inept, out of touch. QED. Vote for the ones who want to tear down government.
And tear down government is clearly what the Tories in the UK are setting out to do. In education Michael Gove has systematically set out to denigrate every element of the State education system, presenting his solution in the form of Free Schools, which are free from almost every aspect of government by any State body. This even applies to the provision of school places. What used to be seen as the central responsibility of the branches of government concerned with educating the nation's youth has now been removed from that control and "freed up" for provision by the private sector. Local government has no say whatever in the location of any new Free School, and virtually none over the provision of new places in Academies, but they have no finance to build schools themselves.
In Health, the current government seems almost to relish the constant flood of negative news stories about the NHS (hardly surprising, since they have been the origin of many of them). Their narrative, it is beginning to appear, is that the NHS is too big, too unwieldy, too uncaring, and essentially too governed to carry out its role effectively. The answer, it is becoming abundantly clear, is to develop health provision where the private sector and the profit motive are the guiding principles, rather than the pernicious and stultifying dead hand of government.
And of course as regards the economy this is the very central narrative. The financial problems the UK (and the rest of the world, presumably) are currently suffering are down to government spending. The solution: less government. Then we'll all be happy. This appears to sweep under the carpet the indisputable fact that the majority of the world's current economic woes were caused by the precipitous and virtually ungoverned rise in the size, power and recklessness of private sector entities like banks, hedge funds and derivative dealerships. It was precisely the lack of government oversight of the scale of the gambles in which such institutions were engaged that enabled the bubble to inflate so massively and then burst so cataclysmically.
There are huge advantages to this sort of narrative if you happen to be in government though. Time was that if something appalling happened in an area of public life (like the crisis in A&E care; like the decline in GCSE performance in schools or the looming school place crises; like the prolonged inability of the economy to show any sort of recovery) the minister involved would have to take responsibility, or at least endure long periods of anguished squirming. I used to feel sorry for such ministers sometimes, because clearly the problems they were facing had been long in the making, but them's the breaks: if you're the one in charge at the time, you take the responsibility when things go tits up.
Or so it used to be. Nowadays, government ministers seem to relish bad news almost more than their opposition shadows. They glory in it- trumpet it to the right wing tabloids. Because each piece of bad news is further proof that GOVERNMENT ISN'T WORKING and needs to have its monopolistic power (and funding) reduced. The role of those in government, in the UK at least, really seems to have developed into one of attacking rather than defending the areas for which they are responsible. And the populace, fed up with politicians of all parties and keen to see them brought down a peg or two, seem quite content to go along with it.
It is interesting, of course, to ponder a little on how this notion could come about. I believe that partly at least it is down to our use of the word "government" itself. There is an urban myth being peddled on facebook and elsewhere apparently that the etymology of the word reveals that it means "control the mind" (from Latin "gubernare"=to control and "mens, mentis"= mind). This is utter bollocks of course (the -ment suffix has nothing to do with the word for mind) but it reveals a strand of opinion of what government is and what governments do.
In fact, the word comes originally from the Ancient Greek κυβερνάω, meaning to steer or pilot a ship. Of course "steering" and "control" have similar meanings, but as ever it is the connotations that make the difference. "Control" (particularly as in "State control") implies a diminution of freedom and of the capacity of individuals to function effectively. "Steering," (as in "steering a steady course" or "steering through a difficult passage") implies almost the opposite. It is about enabling individuals to function effectively and happily, free from the dangers they might encounter were the vessel they were in unsteered.
But if governments begin to set their face against the process of government: to renounce their duty as helmsmen of the ship of State, then what?
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