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If you support the firemen you don't remember the 1970s
In these times of information fatigue, we seem to remember less and less. Atrocities and scandals and historic agreements assault our attention in hectic succession; it is hardly surprising that we have begun to suffer from mass attention deficit disorder.
Recently it emerged that millions of people in Britain didn't know the names of any cabinet ministers: I couldn't help sympathising. Nor did it seem to me so particularly idiotic of President George W Bush not to remember the name of the prime minister of Belgium, or whoever it was he forgot - I myself can no longer remember the embarrassing question. It's not that we never knew these things - it's just that we can't remember them.
This memory deficit must in part be self-protective. As T S Eliot famously wrote, "human kind cannot bear very much reality", and we seem to be deluged these days with far too much reality - far too much detail of atrocities, public grieving, public confession, gossipy speculation and so on. More prosaically, a computer loaded with too much information will crash and the brain similarly dumps millions of extra bytes of knowledge, but not necessarily the right ones.
So it is that anybody who saw Big Brother will probably never forget Jade, but we all keep forgetting just how many times IRA/Sinn Fein has betrayed the Good Friday agreement and been rewarded for it, or the true history of the Palestinians, or which documents Hillary Clinton lost, or what dark deed Jack Straw is supposed to have done in his youth for Harold Wilson.
What's more, we know that most information these days is unreliable; the internet and the airwaves are a cacophony of wild opinion and unchecked facts mixed indiscriminately with useful information.
Then there is disinformation proper - the deliberate lies, solemnly told to us every day but not always easy to spot. So, I suspect, we have learnt to avoid inputting very much into our weary memories since it may not be worth remembering anyway.
This public amnesia is extremely useful to those who want power. And it is so easy to achieve now. In earlier times amnesia had to be worked on: dictators had to blare out disinformation on public address systems, destroy newspapers and books and hire artists to airbrush unpersons out of official photographs by hand.
There's a poignant account in Milan Kundera's novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting of how an eminent communist is airbrushed out of a famous official photograph taken at the birth of communist Czechoslovakia in 1948. He had kindly lent his hat to the leader standing next to him, who shortly afterwards hanged him for treason, and now all that remains of him, in the public imagination and in history, is the fur hat on his killer's head.
Now things are much easier for the manipulators of knowledge. For one thing a growing amount of information is electronically stored, which makes it very easy to change quickly and subtly or to block altogether. But that is hardly necessary: people in pursuit of power can rely on our forgetting. This struck me very forcibly when I first heard about the firefighters' plan to disrupt the entire country, quite consciously inviting death and mayhem, for a 40% pay rise.
Andy Gilchrist, the firefighters' leader, has openly said that he is prepared to unleash widespread chaos. Yet there seemed, unaccountably, to be a lot of public sympathy, no doubt partly because of the heroism of New York's firefighters on September 11 last year.
To me this sympathy is quite astonishing and can be explained only by the fact that most of us have either forgotten or never knew the deliberately planned unions' disruption of the 1970s.
At the time of the last firemen's strike in 1977 the prime minister was only 24, an age when most people are not much interested in politics. Broadly this means that in order to have any personal memory of the pre-Thatcher trade union tyranny and the despairing misery and inefficiency of those times, you have to be pushing 50 at least, unless you were of a William Hague-like political precocity.
The young cannot be expected to remember what they never knew; memories must be handed down by people who did know. That is what's known as culture. Or history. But somehow all this seems to have been forgotten by people who did know. Has it deliberately been put aside?
You never hear much about it these days and certainly not in schools. We hear much more about the 1980s, which have already been rewritten as a time of selfishness and greed; on the contrary, the 1980s were a wonderful time of freedom, opportunity and increasing wealth, in which everybody got richer and Britain began to win some international prestige and confidence. Britain began to be stylish and enviable. The 1980s are my favourite decade.
Yet the conventional throw-away lines in the media about the ugly 1980s obscure our memories of what was a time of real liberation and excitement and they pervert historical memory.
I am conscious as I write that there are lots of people, starting with my own children, who will have no idea of the memories I'm thinking of. They don't remember that Britain was nearly ruined by union militancy. Flying pickets or the closed shop and violent picket lines mean nothing to them, nor the greed and corruption of Spanish practices and jobs for the boys.
They don't know that leading intellectuals of my generation supported the mass murderers Stalin and Mao, in wilful ignorance, in the name of socialism, and sneered at protests as "right-wing paranoia". (That's why I am grateful for Martin Amis's belated cri de coeur, however irritating.) Still less do young people today believe in the possibility of organised, politicised disruption with a hidden agenda in this country; even in those days liberals used to laugh patronisingly at anybody who suggested there might be reds under the bed.
Now we know that there were and it was not just right-wing neo-McCarthyite hysteria to think so. More than 20 senior trade union leaders, it emerged last week, were helping Special Branch during the 1970s in a campaign against union militancy; one of them was Joe Gormley, the former miners' leader.
Today's hard-left core of young unionists behind the firefighters' terrible threats may not have such a clear covert agenda, but those who remember the 1970s will have doubts about what their real intentions are.
To insist so ferociously upon such an impossible demand, so suddenly made and on such shameless restrictive practices, and to find a way of getting round the union laws to create a new kind of flying picket - this is not simply wage bargaining. It is something more profound; it is, at the very least, a flexing of political muscle, an attempt to change the balance of power.
We've seen it before; those who have forgotten will be much more easily taken in. As one of Kundera's characters says: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
The Sunday Times | Sunday, October 27, 2002 | Comments (0)
Choosing your baby's sex is a right worth having
Militant Marxists used to talk about "the long march through the institutions" to destabilise them from within. What we have here and now in Britain is a long and determined march through our private lives to undermine our privacy from within, along with our assumption of personal responsibility.
The foot soldiers of the state press grimly on, despite the long skirmishes of the Thatcher insurgency. History's lessons remain unlearnt. Last week we discovered that we cannot be trusted to hire dog walkers for ourselves. In future we must employ only dog walkers who have been granted a licence by our political masters.
You might have thought, in a nation of fanatical dog lovers and with endless regulations and bylaws and council powers to punish dogs and owners and walkers who go astray in any way, that this was wholly unnecessary. But no. No opportunity to control us and our private joys is too tiny for our bureaucrats to seize upon.
The right to choose one's own dog walker, without benefit of official licence, is not perhaps entirely the same as the right to choose the sex of one's baby, but there are parallels obvious enough to anyone interested in personal freedom. Last week it emerged that parents "may" or "should" have a chance to choose their baby's sex to "balance" their families.
This is supposedly the view of a leaked consultation paper to be produced this week by a quango, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. No doubt we are supposed to be grateful for this new concession.
It is very irritating to be conceded freedoms that we assumed we had already, but such is the way of quangos. It makes no difference how great and good the people on this particular quango may be; they are unelected, appointed by government. It makes very little difference that they are going in for consultation, either. We've all seen such consultation documents before, but we have no way of knowing whether they make the slightest difference to the view that the quango held all along. We can guess, however.
It ought to be an assumption in any civilised country that the best people to decide about the children they bear are not politicians or quangocrats but parents.
What we see now is the assumption going the other way; parents may in special circumstances, such as "balancing their family", be granted the right or very possibly the licence - who knows - to choose pink or blue Babygros. We can all imagine who is to decide what constitutes a "balanced" family.
This is hideous. It is foolish, too. Parents have chosen the sex of their babies, as far as possible, time out of mind and they always will - when they want to. The ancient method, which was 100% effective and without any medical side effects, was infanticide. Nobody worried then about disturbing the balance between the sexes; people were aiming at the balance they wanted and homo sapiens has survived.
Girl babies in China were traditionally called "little debt collectors" before being drowned at birth in a bucket of water. Whatever our abhorrence for these cruel methods, the population of China continued to grow and grow.
Women who produced only girls were cast off, like poor Princess Soraya, the Shah of Iran's first wife. Had she been able to choose to give birth to a boy baby, she would not have been imperially dumped. Indeed, the Church of England was founded by a king who was quite prepared to dump his first and second wives when they failed to provide him with a male heir.
There are girls to this day in India who are set alight in so-called "domestic accidents" because they can't, apparently, produce boys; their successors may do so. My own mother, who was very medically minded, was convinced that she had got to the bottom of sex determination; she argued that it had to do with the alkalinity or acidity of the cervix, which selects out one sex or the other, and could be achieved by the use of an acid or alkaline douche. She was also familiar with old wives' tales about the more likely times of the cycle to conceive girls or boys - since shown to be right.
Whatever her theory, her practice was triumphant; she produced boy, girl, boy, girl; perhaps Boots will catch up with her one day but for now her method remains experimental. These are some of the alternative methods of sex selection; most people would probably prefer the new high-tech variety, given a choice.
It is a mystery to me why people so much disapprove of parents' longing to choose. Of course there are those who object for religious reasons, which are usually difficult to argue with. But even here they are on very poor ground; choosing a baby's sex with new technology for "social reasons" may indeed be playing God, but that is something we do all the time.
We do it, with the agreement of the religious, by enabling people with genetic disorders to survive, have babies and pass on various terrible disorders. God, if he exists, created us in his image and gave us the power to play God. The question is not whether or not one plays God, but whether one plays a good or a bad god.
Gods or no gods, evolution has enabled us to interfere in evolution itself and we can scarcely help doing so constantly, for better and for worse. It is in the nature of human evolution, and therefore of human inventiveness, that new solutions lead to new problems, which then demand new solutions. Human ingenuity responds, causing further problems ad infinitum.
It is, or would be, the same with choosing babies. It is true that at first the results might be rather odd in many places. In most of the less developed world people prefer boys. We in the rich world who are girls ourselves and adore our daughters find this all very odd and reprehensible. But there is a natural economy in these things that will solve the problem.
Once a serious shortage of girls - say - becomes obvious to everyone, girls will suddenly become more valuable and parents will start to want them. For shortages create demand. Young girls are already being kidnapped in China because there aren't enough to go round. It means that the parents of girls have a great economic advantage, one way or another - they can sell them, or marry them up socially and reap the benefits.
For all societies there must be some desirable balance between males and females; it will not always be quite the same. Agricultural or war-like pre-industrial societies will favour boys. More peaceful and prosperous societies, which have less need of brawn and bravado, will be less dismissive of girls.
Lots of parents in the rich West, where girls seem so much less trouble and are more successful than boys, already prefer female babies. Similarly, less developed societies menaced by hordes of violent, unmated young men might well come to see the point of girl babies, too.
It is true that the baby market cannot respond as quickly to demand as the stock market. Babies take time to produce. But it certainly will respond. As I say, there is a natural economy in such matters, which is wiser than any state and quite apart from the question of personal freedom.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, October 20, 2002 | Comments (0)
The BBC's velvet tease is playing with sexual fire
Tipping the velvet is not a phrase in general use these days; there must be millions of people who can't even guess what it means. But enlightenment is upon us. Tipping the Velvet is the title of a big-budget BBC2 drama unveiled last Wednesday to many nudges, giggles and knowing winks; it was preceded by lots of saucy pictures in the press of two actresses undressed in bosomy Victorian corsets, or cross-dressed in titillating top hats and tails.
So we must thank the BBC for extending the public's vocabulary at least. The precise meaning of the phrase was never spelt out in episode one and there must be a few people who were left guessing. There was a lot of tipping of velvety top hats going on, for example, which might have been confusing for some, especially when done only by girls.
I am not sure one can use the more familiar expression for tipping the velvet in a Sunday newspaper. But all the relentless publicity of two pretty women staring intently at each other, followed by the camera dwelling meaningfully and repeatedly on oysters in opened shells, at the mercy of the lapping waves, probably gave most viewers the idea, if they didn't know already.
However, it cannot only have been to extend our knowledge of English slang that the BBC embarked on this ambitious and expensive period drama. Or why it manipulated the advance publicity to attract so much lubricious shock and horror. "BBC faces obscenity row", "Beeb's gay sex shock", "Graphic Sapphic -a scene involving a phallus-like contraption the size of a hat stand", said the papers, and all before transmission.
The lesbian author of the original book, whose second novel is shortlisted for the Booker prize, said: "Of course the BBC are talking it up and Andrew (Davies, the scriptwriter) is talking it up as being quite, well, filthy."
Funnily enough, the first episode wasn't filthy at all. Several disappointed viewers rang the BBC to complain that it wasn't nearly rude enough, with hardly a hint of velvet anywhere; I myself didn't notice any unusual-looking hat stands. On the contrary, it was dismally, heavy-handedly coy. It was not erotic, nor was it interesting, well made or well acted; the two heroines were wooden, unsympathetic and, worst of all, entirely unconvincing sexually.
The filming was regularly interrupted with dreadful cliches, including -even - thunder above the bedroom at a time of sexual tension, and the sea washing over more oyster shells, this time significantly empty. No doubt this could be explained by film sophisticates as ironic, or else possibly as "homage"; the director Tony Richardson kept coming to mind when the camera copied his trick in Tom Jones of closing the picture down to a tiny peep hole, or his very suggestive scene of a woman swallowing an oyster in profile -yes, more oysters, for heaven's sake.
But it could just be seen as vulgar and bad. It was impossible to take this production seriously in any way; it fell between all the stools to hand. Things will at least get much ruder soon, apparently; hat stands, gold body paint and other exotica are due to appear in later episodes and this may cheer some of the disappointed viewers, but beyond this the series doesn't seem to be about anything at all.
So one returns to the question of what the BBC thought it was doing. With all its wealth and talent and freedom, Auntie could have produced a lesbian drama of real distinction. Instead we get another pretty but utterly vacuous period piece of the sort it had so publicly promised to leave behind.
That does not mean the drama need have been serious or restrained or worthy. But I think with such a subject -lesbian experience and lesbian sensibility -and one that has been so little explored in mainstream drama, it could have done something less unworthy. Episode one seemed to me yet another bad example of lesbians being trivialised, of lesbian experience being perverted into something that will be acceptable or titillating to the straights -the sort of chick-on-pretty-chick lit period romp that doesn't frighten heterosexual women but somehow makes heterosexual men feel more excitingly straight.
It plays straight into the mainstream soft porn theme of men watching girls having sex with each other and then taking over to show them the real thing; women don't want other women, they want men!
Ever since Queen Victoria, allegedly, denied that there could be such a thing as lesbianism, gay women have had to put up with the fact that most people don't take them very seriously. (Incidentally, I do know that lesbians don't like to be called gay women; all the same, I think the word gay has become a neutral and useful word, and I don't see why well-meaning people shouldn't use it, especially since lesbian was traditionally a bad word.) The feeling that it doesn't really matter what lesbians get up to, and by extension, perhaps, that they don't matter themselves, has persisted long into what we imagine is a time of tolerance and understanding. The idea that there is a lesbian sensibility, or what it might be, does not appear to be of any interest to heterosexuals outside the wilder shores of academic and artistic life after all this time, at least not in Britain.
Of course it is true that a very strident lesbian lobby emerged in the late 1960s, all over the western world, and no one could be unaware of lesbian grievances. But that lobby to some extent hijacked feminism for a while, which caused a lot of bad feeling among many women, including me. In my view, all that did lesbians a terrible disservice: it made them seem frightening and aggressive -remember the female separatists? -and I think it deprived them of a great deal of fellow feeling. It certainly made them the butt of many jokes, not all of them undeserved. At any rate gay women have not achieved the due deference that gay men now have.
For instance, it would be hard to imagine a big-budget BBC2 drama entitled "Splitting the Peach" -old Chinese slang for buggery -with advance publicity photos of gorgeous half-naked male actors in sexy poses, aimed at swelling the ratings. That would be porn -yet not for women, gay or straight. Sauce for the goose in this case but not for the gander; the gander won't have it.
We have lived through a time of extreme and confusing change in our ideas about sex and sexual identity; arguments still rage about how far our identity as a person is shaped by our sexuality and how far we can choose it. Behind those arguments lies a lot of rage and resentment on many sides. We have also lived through a time of extreme change in our attitudes to what is acceptable, in public as well as in private, which is also deeply unsettling; we have also seen a disturbing sexualisation of every aspect of life. All this is compounded by the loss of the sense of a mainstream culture, a loss for many of a sense of bearings.
It is both liberating and confusing, and this confusion is highly combustible. A national institution such as the BBC has no business adding to this confusion by throwing some second-rate soft porn at it. That's called fanning the flames.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, October 13, 2002 | Comments (0)
Freedom is a better bet than the gene genie
The force of destiny is encoded in our genes, much more, at least, than we would like to think; there was a time when people preferred not to think so at all, but that is now impossible. The only question now is how much.
Every month, every week, scientists announce new discoveries of genetic links with personality and behaviour as well as with illness. And these discoveries, tentative and incomplete though they are, pose questions that haven't been asked before.
"Criminal gene 'should mean lighter sentence'," according to a Times headline last week, reporting on a new study by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics titled Genetics and Human Behaviour. As always with newspaper headlines, that is a gross oversimplification.
There isn't any such thing as a criminal gene, any more than there is a gay gene. It's just shorthand, and misleading shorthand at that. Genetic predispositions are usually infinitely more complex than that, and not yet well understood. Nor has the Nuffield Council said anything so crude.
All the same, the headline poses in sensational language a hard question that is indeed at the bottom of all the cautious, well-considered prose of this excellent report. In plain tabloid speak, are bad genes a good excuse for bad behaviour?
The same day it was reported that Stephen Mobley, an American armed robber and murderer on death row in Georgia, has been granted a stay of execution. Earlier he had tried to argue, with a "genetic appeal", that his genes had predisposed him to his dreadful crimes.
Generations of Mobleys, starting with his great-grandfather, had been antisocial and violent, and his lawyers tried to argue that he was hard-wired to be bad. They cited a famous Dutch case in 1993 of a family of four generations of very violent men who all had the same abnormality in a gene that makes the enzyme MAOA. Other studies suggest this may be associated with aggression.
Mobley's genetic appeal was in fact refused because there is not enough scientific evidence. But it is interesting that the Georgia Supreme Court is holding back Mobley's lethal injection pending a US Supreme Court ruling on a related case. Things are changing.
My mind raced back in time to poor Ron Davies and his famous moment of madness on Clapham Common. It was a seminal moment for me, too: it was when I first noticed this same radical change in this country.
Explaining himself in the Commons, Mr Davies made a remarkable plea for understanding. "We are what we are," he said. "We are all different, the products both of our genes and our experiences." How true. But it struck me that this was the first time in this country that a public figure in disgrace had publicly blamed his genes for his downfall, or at least offered them as a mitigating factor.
This represents a major cultural change, with extraordinary implications. The more that is understood about our genetic predisposition to certain behaviour, the less, inevitably, we will be held responsible for it.
At the moment scientists see through the genetic glass only very darkly, but one day they and we may see ourselves all too clearly, face to face, in the mirror of biological destiny. As Professor Bob Hepple, chairman of the panel of the Nuffield report, says: "We are on the cusp of an explosion" -an odd expression perhaps, but his point is obvious.
Already geneticists know quite a lot about some of the genetic determinants of sexual orientation, personality, intelligence and aggression; the evidence that we're "born that way", in various ways, is growing all the time, and fast. The genetic factors in mental illness are increasingly well understood.
Some scary American studies of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder suggest that the brains of children suffering acutely from this syndrome can be scanned and shown to be working abnormally, and that this offers very good predictions of criminal behaviour later on.
The suggestion in the States that such children should be locked up before they could do any damage was a prefiguration of Jack Straw's sinister suggestion not so long ago that people with untreatable personality disorders should be locked out of harm's way here as well. Alternatively, and more optimistically, one might redirect the destiny of such children by offering them suitable care and attention from an early age. Nurture can modify nature, and all the better with better understanding.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were powerful genetic forces behind kissing and telling and desperately craving attention. Perhaps Edwina Currie has a genetic plea in mitigation.
Investigation into genetic tendencies is dazzling in its scope. There's even a study of identical twins at the University of Minnesota suggesting that an inclination towards religious belief may be partly genetically determined. Before long geneticists will know much more about such things, and finally, perhaps, how these forces interact with environmental forces, for better or for worse.
It is hardly surprising that most of us are confused about nature and nurture. Some of us are very angry. In a recent spat on Radio 3's Nightwaves, the psychotherapist Oliver James fiercely denounced Professor Steven Pinker. The whole thing got entirely out of control because Pinker is a nature man and James, being a passionate nurture man, objects. It is remarkable how many people, informed or not, are passionately inclined to one or other extreme.
The reason for the anger and the confusion has traditionally been political: people emphasising environment tended to be left-wing, people emphasising innate tendencies tended to be right-wing, for obvious reasons, and battle lines were drawn accordingly.
There was always a quaint paradox in these attitudes: nature-minded rightwingers have tended to be very concerned with environment -private school, discipline, manners and so on -and nurture-minded leftwingers have tended to be rather unconcerned with environment -laissez-faire manners and morals, little supervision, working mothers.
The difference now is that we are all equally having to a face the same extremely subversive question: is it really possible to believe in personal responsibility any more? Or are we all equally responsible? The answer, I think, is this: it isn't possible, but it is necessary.
Personal responsibility is a quasi-religious idea, an article of irrational faith, on which everything we value depends. Without this belief there can be no guilt, and therefore no innocence or virtue. Without it there can be no accountability or justice, as we now understand them. Without it, our moral universe is reduced to pathology.
Tradition, convention and community depend on our belief in personal responsibility, and so, above all, do our ideals of equality and freedom. Civilisation involves a great deal of pretending, and the pretence of personal autonomy is one of the best and most generous of all.
And perhaps we are genetically predestined to believe in it, anyway.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, October 06, 2002 | Comments (0)
