Remembering the Civilian Cost of War

There is a raking light and a hint of frost in the air. Nobody has bothered to rake the leaves among the grave stones. The moss growing over the footpaths suggests desertion, a return to nature. A few early twentieth-century mausoleum facades stick out here and there among the hoary branches, fraktur engravings signalling a sense of self-importance that died with Weimar. One or two of the living are titivating, laying a winter rose for their family stone with cursive script. Death here is well organised. At the entrance to the graveyard is a florist. Directly across the street, a grave stone merchant. Adjacent to that, a large old-people’s home.


In the middle of this large suburban graveyard, a row of diminutive stone blocks hides among the fallen leaves. Nothing about them invites you to investigate. They are black, unadorned, inconspicuous: ignorable. But if you kick away the autumnal detritus you will discover that each stone bears the same date: April or May 1945. These people, mainly civilians, some of them without names, all perished during the fall of Berlin. Perhaps they met with disease, starvation, or a stray bullet. Who knows what privations they endured before the terminal date?

Remembrance Sunday in Berlin simply isn’t. Despite all of the recent moves to make the annual marking of the armistice about the general cost of war, the triumphalism of the victors still casts a pall. In any war, innocence is a grey area. People are caught up, swept along, killed, maimed, forgotten. Whatever their stories, the why of their deaths is filled with a futility that ought to move us. Wars, we expect, have a military cost. But among the celebrated fallen and the vanquished enemy lie the rest. I, for one, would like to remember them.

The Politics of Mindlessness; Or, I Predict A Riot

I’ve been watching in despair as my country goes to the dogs, in almost as much horror at the politicians as at the rioters. I’ve heard the word ‘mindless’ bandied around so much by the powers that be, in an almost Tsarist display of denial at the social reality of the nation over which they preside and sit in judgement, that one truly suspects the word would best be reserved for the politicians themselves. The outpouring of violence and brand-name-driven looting – aggressive shopping, you might say – was frightening enough, but the failure of the authorities to understand its causes is more alarming still.

The segment of this generation of teenagers who saw fit to riot and help themselves is lost to a greater extent than any since the teenager was invented around the turn of the twentieth century. They have no idea of anything greater than themselves. They have been raised to aspire to empty celebrity, sloth, consumption, and all the glistering fool’s gold of post-modern consumerism. They have never been subjected to a meaningful ‘no’, for they have not been raised with a moral code or a moral conscience. Their idols laud criminality, anti-intellectualism, and the acquisition of shiny things. One way or another, English society has spawned a generation of magpies.

I remember distinctly when religious instruction in English state schools was outlawed. It preceded the birth of last week’s rioters by a year or three. Up until the age of about twelve, I used to get my moral education in school through the preaching of Christian values in daily assemblies. Whether one is religious or not, one has to figure that the idiom of this moral education ought not to have been removed without some plan to continue the moral education somehow. It might be considered possible, even useful, to educate people about morality, community, citizenship, without demanding that children make a pact with God. Values are embedded in tradition, in a sense of belonging (civic pride), and are based on human relations (family, friends, school). The instillation of esprit de corps, or the notion of a greater collective purpose than that of any individual aim, fuels self-respect and a sense of mutual responsibility. If people in authority do not provide the foundation for this esprit de corps you can bet that young people with come up with their own. Gangs of rampaging youths organised together through social networking could just as easily have been pulling for a worthy cause. But it’s too late now.

Sure enough, once religious assemblies were outlawed they were replaced by meaningless activities and collective head scratching about what to do. The timing of this pedagogical innovation coincided with the enforced death of Britain as a centre of manufacturing (primary industry was already dead) and of the demise of training in technological, vocational, or artisanal skills. Meanwhile the universities underwent massive expansion so that degrees could be handed out en masse, affording the hordes of the future unemployed a chance at dejection and feelings of under-achievement on a greater scale of self-inflated ego than hitherto. Those unable to matriculate could no longer depend on a trade or a skill, but were glamorised by the laddish lager and drug culture. Their sense of social exclusion was intensified. The ironic anthem of my generation – is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for? / It’s a crazy situation, but all I need are cigarettes and alcohol – became the disturbing reality of the next. The political landscape was squashed into an ugly composite portrait: a set of homogeneous white men distinguishable only by their respective red, blue and yellow ties. The lack of purpose in the individual lives of poor youths was mirrored in the lack of political will to really do anything about social fragmentation and ever-widening inequality. The lack of political choice led to disengagement, apathy, fatalism. Votes, as it became painfully obvious in the last General Election, have ceased to mean anything. Go to Burger King or go to MacDonald’s. In the end you get much the same thing: a bland burger that will kill you eventually.

What happened to the spirit of the Blitz?

These riots were not mindless. This violence did not come out of the clear blue sky. The situation has been produced by the aimless and feckless politicking of a generation and it is time that somebody stood up and took responsibility. There can be all the talk in the world about the future policing of this kind of collective outburst, but until somebody starts talking seriously about how to teach values and virtues, and until somebody starts to think seriously about how communities work, there will only be one certainty: it will happen again.

How Many British Royals Have A Degree?

I was given to ask this question yesterday when I remembered that the Duke of Cambridge’s last title will forever be ‘MA’. Such a fuss was made years ago when Prince William opted for St. Andrews that anyone might have been forgiven for thinking he had broken with sacred tradition in snubbing Cambridge. In truth, William was probably the first to go to University according to merit (in the Blairite sense). Military careers have been more the norm for the British monarchy, not known for its intellectual nous, and in fact the royal degree remains a rare bird indeed.

Only six of the royal family ever have earned a degree. You can find out quite easily that Charles, current Prince of Wales, was the third ever royal to gain a degree, with a 2:2 from Trinity, Cambridge in 1970. Working out who the two before him were has proven challenging. Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, seems to have been the first to attend university, most notably studying history with Charles Kingsley at Trinity, Cambridge, but he didn’t graduate. That takes us down to the 1860s already. Queen Victoria’s eighth child, the Prince Leopold (Duke of Albany) went to Christ Church, Oxford, and left with an honorary Doctorate in Civil Law in 1876. Does that count? The second would then have been Prince Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, who has a BA in Architecture from Magdalene, Cambridge (1966).

Prince Richard, the bright spark in the Royal Family

More recently, Prince Edward, current Earl of Wessex has a degree in History from Jesus, Cambridge (1986, after some controversy about his rather unmeritorious admission); Peter Phillips, who often gets forgotten because his mother didn’t want them to have royal titles, has a BA in Sports Science from Exeter (his sister Zara also went to Exeter, but I’m not sure her physiotherapy qualification is a degree); and then there’s William, with his Geography MA from St. Andrews. Beatrice (Goldsmiths, 2011) and Eugenie (Newcastle, 2012) will follow along soon, all being well. And I suppose we must now count the Duchess of Cambridge as number seven?

My interest here is purely academic, as it were, but I’d be grateful to anyone who could correct any of this, or provide further information.

Freedom to Think in England

Being in England, and being in England amongst English academics, one cannot escape thinking about thinking, even though there is no time here to think about anything. What’s happening here in the academic arena will do truly appalling damage to the intellectual life of the country in both the short and long terms, and with consequences that threaten to go far beyond academic life.

Of course, one man’s appalling damage is another man’s political expediency, and one might argue about policy until cows are extinct. But, and here is the rub, one might only engage in this endless argument – and argument is in itself worthwhile – if one has the space, time, money and freedom to stage it. Argument comes, or should come at any rate, after thought. Critical debate is contingent upon critical thinking. Leaping takes place after looking, etc. What seems to be happening to scholarly life here is the rapid removal of all the prior conditions. Work is demanded without the necessary time to think about what work ought to be done. The solution to that problem is the provision of all the thought in pre-packaged governmental notions of what constitutes importance in the realm of ideas, projects and outcomes. Party policy is supplanting liberal thinking; rhetorical big ideas are being deployed to prevent the emergence of real ideas; research agendas are being set a priori, instead of being formed through research itself. And just in case anybody has other ideas about how to proceed, the money required to fund research is now being directed at only those scholars who are prepared to toe the line. Want funding? Do what the government wants (or think how the government wants you to think).

Tell any American professor in the humanities that you’re an English academic and they will roll their eyes, sucking air sharply over their teeth as if they were builders and you’d just asked them for a quote. This is not to say that American academia is by any means a perfect model, but England is the laughing stock of the academic world because its academics are increasingly becoming powerless in determining how they work and what they think about. They are increasingly subject to government – and hence party – policy to such a degree that even beginning to think without first attaining government approval (in the form of funding) is unlikely. They are forced to publish at a rate non-conducive to the production of high-quality research, and they are compelled to teach more and more students of ever-decreasing intellectual capabilities. Each time I return to England the situation is worse, and the forecast is for yet worse to come. And protest as loudly as the lowly scholars do, not a shred of difference is made.

The universities ought to be the cornerstones of civilised life. They ought to be our guarantors of freedom, for within their walls the vigilance required to maintain freedom is fed by intellectual inquiry. The ivory tower’s doors open onto society in such a way as to make sure that society knows when it is being held-back, its freedoms curtailed, its opportunities limited. Freedom itself depends upon the freedom to think about what it means to be free. If you limit that thought space by demanding that thought go only in this direction or that, then the risks to us all are nightmarish to consider. 

A Musical Education, Part III

Returning again to the Berliner Philharmoniker, I couldn’t help feeling that something was up. This was a night of debuts – young men emerging from a youth spent practicing – and it was full, like them, of promise. Yet further to my prior assertion that casualness in appearance breeds casualness in performance, last night offered some kind of proof.

I do not wish to detract from the the young soloists, for although the are already a long way down a path to greatness, they are nevertheless young. With youth comes the expectation of a certain attitude. Adrien Boisseau, but twenty years old (he looks a mere fifteen), chopped at his viola as if it were an electric guitar, and he a rock god. Perhaps Leo Smit, whose concerto for viola and string orchestra he attacked, would have approved. Inevitably, control was a tricky proposition for the more serene notes. The other debutant was Pierre Génisson, a mid-twenties clarinetist from Marseille, who cut the figure of a man looking for a jazz dive, unexpectedly finding himself in front of a symphony orchestra. With swagger, he seemed to shrug, and turned out Debussy’s première rhapsodie with impressionistic aplomb. The instrument occasionally got lost in Max Bruch’s concerto for clarinet, viola and orchestra in E minor, played into Génisson’s feet in a soundscape that lacked balance.

 

Pierre Génisson

Adrien Boisseau

The detractions of this evening were twofold. First, the audience (as usual); second, the orchestra (but it was the audience’s fault). Up in the gods, a large group of adolescents whispered and giggled throughout the concert. Although some distance from me, their twitterings were perfectly audible and distracting. The lengths to which concert-hall designers go to make sound travel behoove us to shut up and listen, lest our own sound travels. This rudeness was heightened at a pause between movements, during which a cacophany of coughing rang out. These pauses are the appointed time for the clearing of the throat, but it is not mandatory! The opportunity to stamp their presence on the evening appealed to the assembled youth, who extended their spluttering for a full minute, causing giggles and mutterings throughout the hall. The young maestro, Krzysztof Urbański, stood, arms aloft, waiting patiently for the audience to button it. You could see the orchestra rolling its collective eyes and wishing the stage would swallow them up.

This lack of respect clearly affected the musicians. The final piece, Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, a difficult composition, seemed at times to overtax some parts of the distracted orchestra. I am often given to wonder if concert musicians hate the people who pay their salaries. After all, they turn up in white tie for a formal event, and a bunch of teenagers, amongst others, turn up to watch (for they fail to listen) in what barely passes for streetwear. The incongruity of the whole affair was made more stark by the appearance of the compère, looking for all the world as if he’d come straight from another job as a football pundit: sack-jacket black worsted suit with belted, low-slung trousers, a greenish shirt and loud orange-striped tie. It was just as well that I couldn’t really understand this man, for I wouldn’t have listened in any case. The room exuded a casualness that was totally inappropriate for the event, and I think it took its toll. My companion and I tried our best to rise above, remaining serious and attentive. But seriousness and attentiveness, when things are not as they should be, only make one more aware of the lack of those qualities in one’s midst. It was a shame, for there was here on display a sense of what seriousness can achieve when admixed with diligence and talent. The example of young virtuoisity was, I fear, largely lost on the examples of young concert goers.

How Good A Victorian Are You?

I’m an inveterate museum goer, but I’m discerning about where I spend my time. Museums have to walk a fine line these days for the sake of making money. Such vulgar pursuits ought really to be beyond their purview, but alas, everyone must play the game. The museum – which had its zenith under the Victorians – is now a sort of theme park. And like all theme parks, some are better than others.

There are museums that flaunt their superstar objets d’art, which they claim are objets trouvés, but which (in the West, at least) are usually objets volés. From the Elgin Marbles to Nefertiti, these artefacts pull in the tourists to gawk and throng, without really imparting any obvious benefit to the viewers. They must be seen because travel guides inform travellers that they simply must be seen. And that’s that.

Nefertiti: nicked.

Then there are the museums that make up for their conspicuous lack of Elgin Marbles by being interactive. I hate interactive museums. ‘Lift this’, ‘Pull that’, ‘Open this drawer’, ‘Play this stupid game’: it’s all such a frightful bore, and inevitably so. After all, these museums have been designed for children, with no mind given to the poor parents who have to schlep around after them, looking increasingly beleaguered at the mass display of over-stimulated ADD. Unfortunately, the Natural History Museum in London has gone in this direction, when there was really no need. The statue of Darwin sits atop the main staircase looking for all the world like none of his living headaches was ever this bad. Make it stop, make it stop, please God (?) make it stop…

Darwin: Cheesed off

Next there are the museums that demand you read everything. A wall of text greets you, and you spend the next fourteen hours craning to read small wall-mounted signs that tell you all a good scholar could ever want to know on the subject. You can read about different interpretations of this and that, scholarly debates, where exactly the horde was dug up and its significance and, probably, you can find out precisely what you’re supposed to think about it all. The signs will tell you. These museums are often complemented by a catholic collection of artefacts that fit the description: ‘Everything ever done or ever made. Ever’.

The best museums somehow manage to take the best elements of all these models and balance them out. They are usually small, often specialist, typically focused on singular artistic or historical themes. A couple of my favourites are the Bergruenn Museum in Berlin, the new building of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, and the Morgan in New York. But no museum as yet had ever managed to convince me about the need for interactive technological contrivances. That is until today, when some friends pointed me in the direction of the McCord Museum in Montreal.

A frivolous interactive doodad at the NHM

Shamefully, I’ve never been to this place, even though I lived for several years about two minutes away on foot. Now I am 4,000 miles away and yet I have been lured in. So much about the Victorian era is encapsulated in the museum, yet most people know precisely nothing about what Victorians were like. Now’s your chance to play a little game, online (shudder), where you can discover just how good a Victorian you would have made. It’s all about dressing, manners and etiquette. It is right up my street, and damn it if it isn’t interactive.

Go and have a play. I discovered I have a tendency to overdress, but otherwise I am a ‘picture of politeness’. Now, when a museum application tells you this, you jolly well shake it by the hand and invite it over for tea. It seems I have been formally welcomed to post-modernity, through the Victorians of all people.

Unrattled at the Philharmonie

We turned up at the wrong house. Amateur mistake, you might think, but I thought this guy was a big draw. Turns out he was next door, and a cosy little gathering it was. As it transpires, the night was all the better for it.

Over in the Philharmonie, Leif Ove Andsnes was giving his first orchestral performance as pianist in residence. Simon Rattle, who is the chief conductor, had sent out a message to the Japanese people, with whom there are great connections in the classical music world. There was a feeling of necessity about the atmosphere – an overwhelming sense that it was important to carry on. We only got as far as the lobby and ticket touts. In the Kammermusiksaal next door, Ray Chen was about to wow a half-filled room.

Photo: Altmann, Beer

Ray Chen was born in 1989. It’s enough to make you swallow your tongue. 1989! This young man plays the violin like he was born with it attached to his arm. It is absolutely a part of him. He won the Yehudi Menuhin Competition in 2008 and has become hot stuff ever since. I can’t for the life of me think why the room wasn’t full, but I’m willing to bet that the acoustics were all the better for the lack of German girth. We were treated to a virtuoso evening with the young star, whose selections absolutely showed off his depth of skills to the enraptured audience. Some of them were so taken aback that they coughed noisily through all the most delicate and quiet moments of emotion poured into his Stradivarius. The rest of us held our breaths for two hours.

The highlights of the evening in this beautifully intimate chamber were Giuseppe Tartini’s Devil’s Trill, Bach’s Chaconne from the Partita for solo violin No. 2 in D minor, and Henryk Wieniawski’s Saltarelle in A minor, which frankly left me feeling giddy. You know me: I’m highly critical of audiences at this kind of event. This one, apart from the one or two who gave the impression of being terminally ill, was there because they really knew something. The reception started warmly, and grew ever more affectionate. The largely empty room raised enough noise of appreciation to gain two encores, and the young Chen treated us to his sense of humour, his German, and his beaming smile. Would that all performances were so utterly worthwhile.

In the audience a few seats down from me was a mother with a young daughter, aged about 5. The little girl fidgeted a bit, but was largely engrossed in the movement of Chen’s fingers, and carried on his melodies. I love to see children being exposed to such things, especially when they seem to realise that it is important. Knowing how to behave as an adult comes from childhood experience, or else is dearly bought. This young one looked inspired, and gave Mr. Chen a standing ovation. It was clearly not her first time. And so a musical education has begun, to her great benefit, and, should she be the next Ray Chen, also to ours.

Boys versus Men; Or, the School Match Debacle

The boy had kept score the previous year when the fifth formers had taken on the teachers at cricket. It seemed to him a privilege accorded to those about to be ushered into adult life. In the final summer of school, two teams met on a level playing field and played for the honour. The teachers would win, of course, for they outgunned their rivals in strength, experience, and skill. But there was pride in every wicket taken, and valiantness in every run scored. The boy looked forward to his final year, when he might take his chance.

The following spring the young man – for that is the status he felt he had attained – raised the issue with the teachers. He should like to play them at cricket, as had his forebears, and he should like to raise a team for the purpose. Were they willing? Answers were received in the affirmative. The young man set about organising his eleven.

On the day in question the eleven, feeling a certain pride in representing the budding manliness of their peers, took to the field. And then something untoward happened. Half a dozen or more fourth formers appeared in kit, ready to play. Who were they? What did they think they were doing? And then the teachers arrived: eighteen of them. The young man made enquiries. Apparently the Young Turks had protested at being left out, and the teachers had invited them to play, without informing the fifth-form eleven. It had been decided, unilaterally, that it was to be eighteen-a-side, and that the fifth form were to share their moment with these boys. There was indignation in the ranks. The privilege had been besmirched. The teachers’ equation of one group of boys with another group of young men had emasculated them before a ball had been bowled. It was dispiriting, and guaranteed the worst of defeats.

To make matters worse, the teachers condescended to bowl with a plastic ball that robbed the young men even of the satisfaction of feeling leather on willow. At the change of innings, tea was taken in the school library. The young man did not go. He could not, in his rage, break bread with these men. He sulked, cried foul, and malingered in the field.

As we grow, we learn

At a certain age a boy wants to be treated like a man. If, under such circumstances, he fails as a man, he must face his responsibilities, and take his punishment like a man would. If, however, you treat him who would be a man like a boy, then you must not be surprised when he behaves like one.

A Musical Education, Part II

Of all the badly taught subjects the boy experienced at school, music was the worst. He despised music lessons, for they seemed to have nothing to do with musical experience. In the latter days of Thatcher, music education was on the verge of being abolished (along with drama and art), and what was left – two hours a week were shared by the EPA (expressive and performing arts: a way of making one subject out of three) – was not even close to resembling education. 

On each desk was a small Yamaha keyboard, complete with headphones. In his way, the teacher must have been a genius: twenty-five teenagers were left unguided with noise making machines, but with their headphones on they neither talked nor made any other audible sound. Most of the lesson was spent fiddling with the stored playback of these machines. Then we would gather round to sing collectively. Everyone knew the possibilities, and competed with each other for quietness:

‘Stop!’ bellows the music teacher. ‘Somebody here sounds good’. The class begins an awkwardness of foot shuffling and an intent staring at the ground. The music teacher’s finger is outstretched and scanning the ensemble.

‘You! You boy! I think it is you!’ The boy visibly winces and shrinks into his clothes. Everyone is looking, happy it is him and not them. They are not sympathetic. The culture of this room has led them to see the pain of others as the nearest thing to pleasure.

‘Sing! On your own! Let’s hear it!’ The piano starts up. It is Kumbaya, or On the roof, or Raining in my heart. It doesn’t matter. The teacher only knows how to play fortissimo. The boy’s voice has died to a whisper. Any unintended essence of the carefree that had before led him to sing out has now shrivelled. There are giggles from the ensemble. The teacher makes it last the eternity of a whole verse.

‘Pathetic!’ he shouts. ‘Everyone, start again’. And so it went on, interminably.

Never has music been so without joy, or teaching so lacking in substance, so damaging to the confidence. Happily, the boy never connected these dreadful hours with the real, lived experience of music. At home he sang from the moment he woke. He rifled his parents’ records, and listened intently to John Peel at nights, his head under the covers. Peel was his real music master. There was a Yamaha keyboard in the house, similar to those in the school, but at home the boy taught himself to play, learning how to read music by himself. Utterly unguided, the emerging man had music in his heart and could do nothing but follow the beat.

A man must have a musical education. He may have to fall back on his own resources to get it.

Repositories of Masculinity; Or, Keep Libraries Open

Your average macho man would, if he conformed to the stereotype, not have much to say in favour of milksop bookworms who spend their time dreamily composing poetry. The two images could not be farther apart, and yet they are in each other’s debt. For without poets we should have no Achilles, and no Aeneas; we should have a more sober notion of Henry V; and the Charge of Light Brigade would be merely a military disaster. How else are we to know the measure of a man, without some great insight from other men who understand greatness?

The juxtaposition has been made many times I am sure. Yet there is a missing element here, for poets need readers. If poets are not read, then no magnitude of eloquence will serve posterity. Original manuscripts of ancient texts were preserved by religious orders. Those texts were consulted by scholars who transcribed, translated, and published them, to be forever preserved in libraries. Of all the great strides of the nineteenth century, the opening of libraries – the democratisation of knowledge – is surely among the most important. Public bodies assumed the duty to maintain and preserve the store of human knowledge and to make it freely available to anybody who wished to pursue, or simply to peruse it. We, the readers, owe a great deal to those people who opened the doors to self-education.

Not so long ago, in a town or city like yours, a university administrative committee congratulated itself that it could finally get rid of hundreds of tonnes of volumes from the university library, thanks to newly available digital resources. The old tomes, which were formerly available for consultation by any member of the public, had been thrown into skips. Since the local library was also scheduled to close, the reading public was left with no recourse. The new digital version of the library was made available only to those fortunate people who could boast a university log-in name. Cost of said log-in is shortly to rise to £9,000 per year, since the only way to get one, other than by being employed by the university, is to be a student. Meanwhile the administrators basked in the empty space of the library. It was so much easier to breathe without all the books. And it was so much easier now to find a seat.

The self-appointed guardians of the internet have taken on no notion of liberal access to knowledge, and in this they are ably supported by governments looking to save pennies. By day, the internet is being made a pay-per-view medium, just as libraries are slated to shut down. The digitisation of the world’s libraries is a fantastic idea, but only if we can get at it. Giant scanning projects are not undertaken with a mind to making libraries more available; they are undertaken to make money. There’s nothing wrong with that ambition per se, but if the result is the closure of real libraries that inhabit real space, because they no longer fit digital-age models of value, then we have taken a drastically wrong turn. Knowledge is being returned to the realm of those who can afford it, and the richness of existence that lines the shelves of countless public libraries is set to disappear (see the map below of UK library closures).

View Public Library Closures in the UK in a larger map

The books will not be burned, but for no better reason than that we are now environmentally friendly. The books will be pulped.

The Grand Tour

If it were possible, illustrious philosopher! to write to you without that respect which hinders the imagination by introducing a degree of fear, I should flatter myself that I could entertain you with an account of my tour of Italy. I shall do my best; and if I am not successful you will know what to ascribe my failure to.

    You were indeed right to congratulate me when my father gave me permission to travel in Italy. Nine months in this delicious country have done more for me than all the sage lessons which books, or men formed by books, could have taught me. It was my imagination that needed correction, and nothing but travel could have produced this effect (Boswell to Rousseau, 1765).

Athens, 1813

Aristocratic I am not. But then, seldom few are anymore. And yet, as only an aristocrat could in days of yore, I have travelled and learned, consuming culture as if I were entitled to it. I am not alone in this. Travel has been democratised to an impressive, if not alarming, level. What, for the millions who pack up and jet off, is it for?

I have a sense of loss, or rather, of opportunity lost. For modern travel is an empty experience for most travellers. The masses who line up to escape set about recapitulating the things from which they run as soon as they arrive at their destination. In the West, we tour in crowds of our peers, consuming kitsch that has no bearing on its location other than that it is sold there. For years, as an undergraduate living in the north of England, I sold Christmas decorations in the shape of Royal Guards to Americans. The decorations were made in China, and marked up 300 per cent. And now they sit, in their thousands, annually adorning the plastic trees of Texans, as memorials of their European tour. The English (not all of them, naturally, but as a composite generalisation) seek only a warm place to eat the same greasy food, drink the same bland lager, and engage in the same meaningless ‘relationships’ as can be found in any sleazy nightclub at home. From what I can gather, the discerning classes (a term I use to denote a relatively rare cosmopolitan intellect) of each Occidental nation carry a degree of shame with respect to their countrymen who, when abroad, represent their respective national characters in the worst possible light.

Emil Brack, Planning the Grand Tour

The world is small to us, but has become so only in proportion with the narrowing of our minds. When it took purpose, planning, and considerable effort to travel, it was undertaken with a view to enrichment – of the mind (and perhaps the purse, for some). For certain, there have always been voyeurs and opportunists, but the ideal of travel was to complete one’s education; to be enriched by cultures and histories richer than one’s own; and to return with a broadened, a more experienced mind. This possibility is upon us now, and with a simplicity of execution hitherto unknown and, for aught we know, for only a small window of time. Most of us spurn this opportunity, instead wreaking havoc on the lands upon which we trespass, in both senses.

The world, despite its borders and restrictions, is, to the privileged West, largely open. What if we were to visit it with an open mind?

School Uniform; or, The Beginnings of Self-Respect

My paternal grandmother was a fierce woman. I don’t think that anyone who knew her would disagree. Until she was 80 she would go on long marches with a stick, and I was never convinced that the stick served any purpose but for beating stubborn livestock that crossed her path. No doubt her early experience with a bull that had blocked her way home across a field had taught her a lesson. On that occasion she had been forced to spend the night under the stars, staring down the animal with contempt.

The 5th Earl of Carnarvon, or my grandma's largely absentee squire

Always take a stick. This lesson applied to life in general, and she wouldn’t suffer any nonsense. Nevertheless, my grandmother knew her place. She was working class, and defiantly proud of it. I’m sure she used to curtsey for the Earl of Carnarvon when he was up there shooting, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she cuffed the lads who weren’t prompt enough in the tugging of forelocks. Being working class was about being respectable: work hard; never let anybody see that you’re hurting, or that you have feelings; toe the line, even when you hate it, but give ‘em what for if there’s a whiff of injustice. Knowing one’s place involved everyone also knowing their respective places. In its own way, it worked. Of course, it also damaged. All that swallowed anger and resentment, those bottled up emotions and un-talked about problems – it was a patchwork of scarring. Still, face was saved. Respectability was assured. Heads could always be held high.


C.J. Vaughan

I wonder if we can dispense with the scarring and somehow reinvigorate the self-respect. What drove people then was a sense of belonging to a group, the code of which ensured that social transgression was policed not by parliament but by community. The same held good for the elite. C.J. Vaughan, headmaster of Harrow in the 1850s, once gave a lecture at Repton (home town of the aforementioned grandmother), claiming that authority and respect was maintained in the elite public schools by the prefects and praeposters, keeping bullying and oppression in check through their own activity of mind, industry and good conduct. Self-respect among leaders set the example for followers.


Local (to me) working-class school uniforms, c. 1970.

This week I read in the news that Education Secretary Michael Gove wants to encourage schools to re-introduce blazer and tie uniforms, and traditional prefect and house systems. There’s not much that’s come out of the mouth of this man in the last few months that I would care to endorse, but I think this is a worthy idea. I was looking through some archival photographs of kids from my childhood locale and noting that it really wasn’t so long ago that even the lowliest of comprehensive schools chose to sport collar, blazer and tie. Kids used to look smart, and schools had an identity because of their colours. Children felt like they belonged, and took ownership of their identity. Sure, they chaffed at the system at times, but surely they looked (and behaved) better than the track-suited and denim tribes one sees these days. I also remember with fondness the house system, with its house points, as late as the 1980s. I was in Nightingale house, and there was a genuine sense of wanting to do well for it. Good conduct, not to mention good work, benefitted the group as well as the individual. Bad behaviour penalised the group, and the group therefore policed itself. I really don’t know why we scrapped such things. To be house Captain surely was no bad thing. Why would we not want that for our children? All of it taught them self-respect, and all of it helped to ensure that the community sorted out its own transgressors.

My senior school scrapped the blazer and tie just before I joined it at 11. I’m sure my grandmother was appalled. Given the chance she would, no doubt, have cuffed the headmaster. Bring it back, I say, and let’s re-begin with self-respect.

Decline and Fall

The world has been in a bad way, to such an extent that one can only personalise the experience in order to make sense of it. People do not understand deficits, downturns, depressions. Those things are mere numbers on the news. They only understand their own unemployment; their own house’s repossession; there own dwindling savings and pensions. This personalisation of the economy does, in some places, take the form of a general reaction against government policy. The French are so adept at this. A million personal gripes – the collective selfishness of the mob – somehow gets coordinated and the country is shut down. Like it or not, you have to marvel at the effort.

Then there is the other extreme. In Britain, so it seems, the cuts are so breathtakingly universal that everyone has his own distinctive complaint, and nobody does a damn thing. A generation is being turned to face a new dark age, and we shall usher them into it without so much as a peep. The culmination of our apathy, our decadent indulgence, and our broken political system is to be their loss. For shame!

Last night I attended a lecture given by a very British man: bald, blue blazer, ill-considered tie, old-fashioned spectacles, Cambridge elocution, Knighthood, Professorship, interest in things aristocratic, interest in things past. This man, as so many of the best British men will come to do, lives and works abroad. He talked, from a flowery yet elegant script, of Churchill’s hopes and dreams for the English-speaking peoples – wistful fantasies come naïve expectations come ridiculous anachronisms – and reminded his German audience (patient, listening, laughing), of the absolutely sealed status of Britain’s decline. After the war, the nation looked inwards – it saw that its problems lay at its own doorstep, and it voted ‘charity begins at home’ – and nobody could blame it. As the nation once again confronts the wolf at the door, with what staggering lack of vision do the nation’s leaders plot to feed it?

One cannot help thinking that the whimper of dissent with regard to all of this is terrifically unmanly. We have succeeded in failing to educate our youth, so that they know not how intelligently to protest; we have succeeded in failing to safeguard our political institutions, so that there is no viable opposition; we have inculcated apathy until it became normal, and now we blink like stunned rabbits as the snares tighten around our ankles. Isn’t it time we woke up?

Missing Pieces

I used to be somebody’s boss. I was a friend too, in that mitigated way that befalls the manager and the managed. He said I was the best boss he’d ever had. He was ten years older than me. He was clinically depressed. He was probably a genius. For one reason or another, he came up in conversation recently, and I was given pause to think why this man was, in most respects, an abject failure as a man. Let us call him Sebastian.

Sebastian had somewhat miraculously survived a rain of arrows, but the course of life had left him scarred. His father left in early childhood, occasionally reappearing to open up old wounds. At thirteen or so his mother committed suicide, and the ensuing years were dogged by shadowy thoughts and dark depressions. Institutionalised for a time, he never again could entirely break free from the shackles of guilt, anguish, and deep pain. Lacking a father figure, or any strong character to guide him, he floundered through adolescence, emerging as a peculiar and singular adult.

He was educated, by virtue of a scholarship, at a famous Northern English public school (for North American readers, that means he was among the elite). Without much effort, he mastered the classics, and saw life as the endless re-telling and re-working of those fundamental ideas and plotlines. Existence, for him, lacked the joyous sense of the discovery of the new. Everything had already been said. The creative instinct had died shortly before he was born, and this was to him the tragedy of his timing. He obsessed about the lives of Picasso and Bob Dylan, as if they were the last humans to signal new directions. When he experienced their art, it was not to him a joy, but a lament. Humanity had peaked, and he had missed it.

Most people found him impossible to engage in conversation, for he could not abide small talk, and he heard little else. If you could engage him, you would find him in deadly earnest, and should you approach him intellectually he would stop in his tracks at the wonderment of a mind worthy of his contemplation. On the whole, he was an intellectual recluse, unfit for society as he saw it (essentially an uncivilised place). He had a pathological fear of the exhaust fumes of motor vehicles, causing him to cross all roads with wanton abandon for his life and limbs. He could not enter parts of the city where cars went, and would not wait on the kerb for anything. Our walks together were curious, for he knew every route that kept him out harm’s way. And yet he smoked incessantly. He told me he was aware of the inconsistency, and that it was his problem.

His home was a scantily furnished hovel, bedecked with books and LPs. The sky-rise towers of tomes, on every seat and every square inch of hidden carpet, were interleaved with scraps of paper, marking his place in each. For all of these books were being read and re-read. He wrote songs lamenting lost love – he had loved only once, and she had absconded with a Welshman – and sang them to himself. I told him, jokingly, that his was the pyrrhic victory, since the reward for her cruelty had been the Welsh. He took me very seriously, and brightened for a moment.

Toward the end of my relationship with Sebastian, just prior to circumstances throwing me upon the world in a new way, he broached the topic of his father. He said that he had come to the conclusion that his father was a bastard while he was shaving. Nobody, he reflected, had taught him how to shave, and in his mid-thirties he was only just realising that he had always done it badly: trivial, perhaps, but also the thin end of the wedge. Here stood a man, broken in spirit and suspicious of his fellow man, acknowledging that he was only partly formed. Formal education had opened to him the power of thought, but the lack of informal guidance had left him stranded, and all too aware of the impossibility of recovery.

Sebastian had been the innocent victim of the lives of others, and the aloofness of the safety net. He had not fallen and failed as a man, but he had been failed as a boy. In my naiveté I had tried to find ways to direct him, to encourage him, to thrust him into the light. But I was no antidote for a fear instilled in formative years, and I was not then a teacher. The manly man is never timid, I have said, and so say again. We must also, however, be the enemies of fear, and guard against its installation. Without shaping, without careful guidance, without ideas of the men boys should come to be, we risk the emergence of men like Sebastian: men whose heads knew of the good, but whose hearts had never felt it.

And Other Utterances

It is ‘Frosh Week’, which seems to mean that the neighbourhood goes to hell for a few days. Not being overly inclined to dwelling within Sodom and Gomorrah, I annually reflect on the reasons for this descent into every kind of vice. Alcohol, immaturity, and the complicity of the university authorities seem to make the lethal cocktail. The immaturity we may blame on the parents; the university should be ashamed of itself; the alcohol would perhaps not be such a problem without the other two. In any case, I wonder how many fun first weeks end in unanticipated tragedy of one form or another. The principal chant, boomed out military style all week by hordes of roaming children (with apologies to readers who’d care not to know), goes ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, three cheers for fucking’. These words will no doubt haunt those afflicted with unintended pregnancies, diseases, and humiliations. And how many alcoholics begin their journey here?

 (c) 2010 academicmice.com

A less weighty observation to terminate this post: whooping, out of the mouths of young women, is unladylike; out of the mouths of young men it is effeminate. Can the young not find a more civilised way to utter their enthusiasm for their misguided lives?

Speaking in Tongues

Our Hollywood brethren have broadcast the myth that the essential qualifications for manliness can be boiled down to the bicep and the grunt, and the influence of this stalks our streets all too evidently, its knuckles knocking the sidewalks. It has been particularly effective in the English-speaking world, where the idea of intelligent writing has been reduced to such choice phrases as ‘Gr8 2 c u’. I shudder. Helping all this along is the prevailing Anglophone cultural arrogance that usually makes us unilingual. We readily dismiss the majority of the globe’s people since they are unable to speak English. And this is our loss.

I confess to being a victim of the aforementioned arrogance. At school, French was introduced at age 11, but the tuition was pitched at the least able, and the least able was unfortunately illiterate in English. Not much hope there. German began at 13, with similar ineffectiveness. The education system being what it was, nobody was compelled to continue with these foreign tongues after the age of 14. Even then, there was no clear idea put forward for why learning these languages might be an advantage. Since then, moves have been afoot to steer certain people away from language learning altogether because it is ‘not useful’. To that end, we might well dispense with school completely, and send young boys of a particular station down the mines at age 12.

Not if I can help it.

I am attempting to correct my own shortcomings, which I greatly regret, and doubtless another spell in Germany won’t do me any harm. For those youngsters currently progressing through school, certainly our first priority is to improve their English. But we should dare also to push them to engage with the other, for in teaching them to speak in tongues, we shall improve their brains. And if we improve their brains, we may make better men (and women) of them.

A Musical Education

And perhaps a man brought out his guitar to the front of his tent. And he sat on a box to play, and everyone in the camp moved slowly in toward him, drawn in toward him. Many men can chord a guitar, but perhaps this man was a picker. There you have something – the deep chords beating, beating, while the melody runs on the strings like little footsteps. Heavy hard fingers marching on the frets. The man played and the people moved slowly in on him until the circle was closed and tight and then he sang “Ten-Cent Cotton and Forty-Cent Meat.” And the circle sang softly with him. And he sang, “I’m leaving Old Texas,” that eerie song that was sung before the Spaniards came, only the words were Indian then.

And now the group was welded to one thing, one unit, so that in the dark the eyes of the people were inward, and their minds played in other times, and their sadness was like rest, like sleep. He sang the “McAlester Blues” and then, to make up for it to the older people, he sang “Jesus Calls Me to His Side.” The children drowsed with the music and went into the tents to sleep, and the singing came into their dreams.

And after a while the man with the guitar stood up and yawned. Good night, folks, he said.

And they murmured, Good night to you.

And each wished he could pick a guitar, because it is a gracious thing.

(John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath).

The power to enchant; to bring together; to bond through common voice; to discover humanity through melody; to bare one’s soul to strangers and thereby to gain their confidence: this sounds like a rare power. But such is the power of the musician, and particularly the guitarist. I have had the pleasure to be the man in Steinbeck’s description on a number of glorious campfire-lit nights in dusty America, and in those moments of shared song, and in the thrilled eyes of the listener who discovers you can play his favourite ballad, I have experienced something akin to pure joy.

It is a long road to that moment, of pain and practice, of failure and frustration. To play fluently, spontaneously, and with abandon, takes years of deliberate action, muscle memory, and dedication. Hours each day of tuneless fumbling, the sound near to the dying wails of a wild animal. No one wants to listen to you, or even to be around you in your obsessive and compulsive need to get it right. But the glimmer of a future moment, when the sparks of a fire will be sucked into a sky untainted by another manmade light, and when the assembled faces of new friends and old will hang on every note, convinces you that the struggle will be worth it. And not only for you.

To play is to have learned to play. And to learn to play is to understand that life does not come ready made. One doesn’t necessarily need a music teacher, but one would be strongly advised to get a musical education.

Go Climb a Rock

Climbing is the best possible physical developer of nerve and muscle and endurance. A good rock climber cannot be a weakling (Baden-Powell, Rovering to Success).

We could dwell for many an hour on the life and works of Lord Robert Baden-Powell of Gilwell, founder of the Scout movement, hero of Mafeking, and teacher of youth. Strange to say, but Baden-Powell’s book detailing the rocks that will hinder the boy’s passage into manhood has not lodged so firmly into the popular consciousness as his Scouting for Boys. Sure, it sold a canoe-full of copies, but I suspect not many fathers will be giving Rovering to Success: A Guide for Young Manhood to their budding sons. More is the pity, for despite its antiquated style, it still has much to offer.

The ‘rutting season’ was a principal concern of Baden-Powell’s guide to becoming manly. Of course, his image of young stags with warm blood seems far removed from anything we might connect with the adolescent sweat boxes of today, but the metaphor is not so far-fetched. His prescription was a tried and tested mix of active participation, hard work, team work balanced by self-reliance, and, perhaps above all, temperance in all things. Baden-Powell pointed to rock climbing as the exemplary activity to instil these qualities. He exhorted teams of rutting stags to club together and support each other up some craggy edifice in order thereby to learn the lessons of life. They would reap ‘the moral effect of learning to face a difficulty, even when it looks like an impossibility, with calm determination and good cheer’. They would thereafter ‘face the difficulties of life in the same spirit, and by sticking to it and trying the different ways round or over the obstacle [they would] get there in the end’.

We don’t all have to go climb a rock, but the example is a good one. One way or another, young men must get a foothold on life.

On Becoming Manly, Part III

Allow me to resume this thread, with increasing trepidation. I have been uncertain whether to put the how before the why or vice versa, but decided that method should precede what may well be madness on my part. Of course, any attempt at prescription is bound hopelessly to fail, for men being men, and boys being boys, rules will be dismissed peremptorily. All I may offer, therefore, is a sketch (something sketchy?).

Unburdening responsibility upon a greater mind than mine, let us hear what Carlyle has to say (when he unburdens responsibility upon his own fictitious inventions):

In all the sports of Children, were it only in their wanton breakages and defacements, you shall discern a creative instinct: the Mankin feels that he is a born Man, that his vocation is to Work. The choicest present you can make him is a Tool; be it knife or pen-gun, for construction or for destruction; either way it is for Work, for Change. In gregarious sports of skill or strength, the Boy trains himself to Cooperation, for war or peace, as governor or governed… (Sartor Resartus).

Boys, in short, must play at being men if they are to become men. This is not to say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but then again, men will be incomplete without having sensed victory and pleasure, and, perhaps more importantly, defeat and pain. Furthermore, they must be given the freedom to build and fashion, to be frustrated and to bleed. We wrap our boys in cotton wool at their peril, for the adult world will not cushion their falls. The chips of life fall in much the same way in childhood as in adulthood, but the stakes are not so high. A boy needs to learn to win with magnanimity and to lose with humility (and to resolve to win the next time) before the blinds become too big.

The Playing Fields of Eton, by Edmund Bristow (1822)

What does this mean in practical terms? Nothing more than the rough-and-tumble, active life, indoors and out, that some of us took for granted. I wonder, nervously, how many boys now enjoy this kind of experience. There is so much fear, and so few playing fields, that kids are cloistered, attached umbilically to their video games and gadgetry. Perhaps the most fundamental step, therefore, is to unplug.

On Becoming Manly, Part II

In the first part of this thread, I noted that the questions of when, how, and why to become a man are of pressing importance. I propose now to deal with each in turn, insofar as a humble blog such as this can treat such weighty subjects. I shall begin with the when of the matter, although I already find myself somewhat at a loss...

In 1746, or thereabouts, the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his then eight-year-old son the following:

Everybody has ambition, of some kind or other, and is vexed when that ambition is disappointed: the difference is, that the ambition of silly people is a silly and mistaken ambition; and the ambition of people of sense is a right and commendable one. For instance; the ambition of a silly boy, of your age, would be to have fine clothes, and money to throw away in idle follies; which, you plainly see, would be no proofs of merit in him, but only of folly in his parents, in dressing him out like a jackanapes, and giving him money to play the fool with. Whereas a boy of good sense places his ambition in excelling other boys of his own age, and even older, in virtue and knowledge. His glory is in being known always to speak the truth, in showing good-nature and compassion, in learning quicker, and applying himself more than other boys. These are real proofs of merit in him, and consequently proper objects of ambition; and will acquire him a solid reputation and character. This holds true in men, as well as in boys… (Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to His Son, 1746-7).

The last clause holds the key. The spark of becoming manly occurs when the interests of boys and men begin to align. This entails that men know what their own interests are or should be, and recognise when boys become receptive to them. Fathers need to recognise their importance! We are wont to let boys be boys for rather too long, so that the vigorous, playful, unserious youth is never given a sober check, or a manful duty, until he is already physically a man. ‘Don’t let them grow up too fast’ is a phrase you’ll hear often. I would like to have parents add another clause to the imperative: ‘Don’t let them grow up too fast, but do let them grow up’. Before you know it, if you’re not careful, your boy will become just another undergraduate who does not know that it is rude to talk and chew gum in the library, with his girlfriend (rather than a book) sitting provocatively in his lap.

It is unthinkable, today, that a child of eight would receive such a letter from his father, extolling the virtues of a serious intellect, decency of character, and hard work. So when should it come? It seems to me that we rather underestimate the capacity of children, with school curricula increasingly spoon-feeding watered-down knowledge into the gaping mouths of perennial babes even up to the University years. Little room is given for initiative, for individual expression, for self-reliance, or for self-education. Since children are not given the responsibility to do anything, they do not learn that there are consequences to actions, and that they must take ownership of them. In most schools, there is no scope for building character at any point up to the age of eighteen. I suggest that, from the age of eleven or so, boys be given increasing freedom to act, within certain boundaries: to succeed and take the honour; to make mistakes and pay for them. There is no fixed point at which the boy of good sense will emerge from among his silly peers, but when he does he will likely serve as a positive example, if he can bear his exceptional status with courage. Becoming manly takes time, but at some point the process must begin.