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Why the educated classes had better get breeding
'All the wrong people are having babies" said my ferocious history mistress long ago at my very strict girls' school, glaring at us as though we were certain, on the reproductive front as on so many others, to fall wilfully short of her expectations.
What she meant was that the lower orders were breeding like rabbits while girls like us were not, that the social consequences would be highly undesirable and, of course, it was all our fault. Teachers were allowed to talk like that in those days.
How right she was. The women who have the most babies today are the least-educated. A study released last week by the Office of National Statistics showed that women with higher educational qualifications are 50% less likely to have children than those without them. Almost a quarter of all women with degrees remain childless.
This is a remarkable social change; intelligence and opportunity for women have brought infertility. The opportunity cost, as it has been described, of having babies is too high for many ambitious women, unless they take the precaution of being rich as well as clever. Or choosing a rich mate - for then, with a successful husband to ease the opportunity cost, they are likely to have three or more babies.
At the other end of the social scale, women with no opportunities at all feel they might as well have as many babies as they fancy - and they often do, with the opportunity cost borne by the taxpayer.
Clearly the proportion of the most-educated middle classes in society is falling rapidly. There must soon come a point, if the brightest and the best continue not to breed, when there will no longer be a critical mass of the aspirational bourgeoisie in Britain.
Perhaps this doesn't matter. However, my history teacher clearly thought it did - and I am tempted to agree with her.
One of the many difficulties in thinking about this inflammatory subject is the language we now conventionally use. We have been gently coerced into using the term middle-class to mean almost anything, including the upper classes and most of the proletariat. What I am referring to, although there isn't an English word for it, is the bourgeoisie - and beyond that, the bourgeois intelligentsia.
I mean all those people who share certain unglamorous values and standards that are essential to a civilised society. And I also mean the well-educated, although having a degree is becoming increasingly irrelevant because 50% of the population will soon have university degrees and some universities already accept students without A-level passes.
Could we do without the bourgeoisie? I am convinced that most people think, whatever they may say, that the bourgeoisie is a Good Thing. Repulsive maybe, but correct. For instance social commentators of all political views, when discussing a inner-city sink school, always complain about the absence of bourgeois ("middle-class") parents, who have abandoned the area by fleeing to the safer suburbs.
All commentators, from brightest red to deepest blue, make the unquestioned assumption that a small but critical mass of bourgeois parents and children at a school would do it enormous good and raise its standards. They are right, of course.
We could all argue about why that is so, but most people seem to be agreed on it, even those leftwingers for whom it is intellectually rather awkward. The bourgeois mentality is crucial to an orderly and prosperous society. It has to do with old-fashioned ideas of deferred gratification, self-restraint, an acceptance both of social responsibility and of competition, of leadership and duty and other harsh and unappealing notions.
It also has to do with sensibility, with the value of learning and art for their own sakes. A society without a critical mass of the best of the bourgeoise is doomed to incompetence, philistinism and anarchy.
Last week's news that graduate women are not breeding caused consternation. I rather doubt that this had much in common with my anxieties about the decline and fall of the bourgeoisie, but it hit a nerve and the cry immediately went up, as ever, that something must be done.
Various worthies have already called for classes in schools promoting the joys of motherhood, or for more laws enforcing flexible working hours for parents.
Somebody even demanded that fathers should do more housework, though not necessarily under legal compulsion - at least, not yet. Of course everybody thinks the solution lies in more childcare, government-provided or subsidised.
I am sorry to say that this will not work. It cannot work. There are some dilemmas that are insoluble. There is nothing that anybody can do, least of all the state, about the conflict of interest between a mother and her child - between her need and desire for work and the child's need and desire for her.
A child may not need its mother all day, every day. But it needs a great deal of her time, which a high-flying graduate with a serious career will not be able to give. And she needs very good childcare as a substitute for herself, which she almost certainly will be unable to find.
The great unmentionable fact about childcare is that there is not, and cannot be, enough good childcare to go round. In the past graduate women could easily get excellent nannies and helpers - bright, capable girls - because there were so few opportunities for bright girls. Now those girls are graduates too and can find better jobs than childcare, so only the less bright go in for looking after children.
There are a few excellent top nannies for the rich. Other parents have to make do with very expensive childcare, in the home or in creches, that is inadequate, provided by poorly trained and ignorant girls, with an unacceptable staff turnover.
Many au pairs are immature foreign teenagers with no skills and little English, who still need mothers themselves. I know from long experience, and from friends' experience, that it is unbelievably difficult to find good childcare and that many people settle for childcare they know to be unsatisfactory. They even settle for none at all, for older children in the holidays (who need supervision just as much as toddlers).
Besides, the numbers don't add up. It takes at least a third of a childcarer to replace one working mother - ideally more. And that is before you count the psychological risks - all well documented - of the institutional childcare that is becoming the norm.
No wonder most mothers talk of feeling guilty. I don't pretend to know what people should do about these intractable problems. What I do know is that subsidies and legislation and government intervention generally cannot help. If anything, they compound most problems.
Left to itself, the bourgeoisie has traditionally been able to look after itself very well. But beleaguered species do stop breeding. Overtaxed, overregulated, overseen and overwhelmed, perhaps the bourgeoisie is heading the way of the dodo.
Unlike the dodo, it may be missed.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 27, 2003 | Comments (0)
Forget the Madonna work ethic, learn to live a little
Now that spring is in the air and in the heart, now that the sun is drawing people out into back gardens and parks, now that for once there is a brief dream of languor and pleasure, and now that most of us have a little free time at Easter to enjoy it, Madonna has taken it upon herself to tell us we are lazy.
She gave an interview in which she said that the British aren't willing to work for 12 hours a day, unlike the Americans. Madonna says we are not so work oriented but - shocking to relate - are much more interested in the quality of life. The same goes for Europeans, too. This is partly why she has left England, but she is glad she was here for a while: "It was really important for me to get outside of America, to live in England and appreciate the fabulous things about America, like customer service and stuff."
There are indeed many fabulous things about America, but very long working hours and astonishingly short holidays are not on my list of things American to admire.
Nor, really, is Madonna. What she said was crass and smug and astonishingly old-fashioned.
It shows a total misunderstanding of how most people live or what is precious about life. She sounds astonishingly like an Edwardian dowager who is outraged that her maid is unwilling to stay up all night waiting for her mistress to come home so she can then undo the dowager's stays.
Madonna may herself work extremely hard, for extremely long hours, to produce her erotic, soft porn videos, photographs and performances and to sculpt her fearsome body. But she gives every impression of enjoying it, and in any case her efforts bring her vast amounts of power and glory and masses of money. And money buys time; it can almost recreate time.
Money can airbrush away long working hours - drivers, cooks, nannies, assistants and even people to answer the telephone can give time back to a rich woman who works. All that takes most of the misery out of long working hours.
There are other people, too, who though not highly paid are willing to work very long hours just because they love what they do and its many rewards - artists, mothers, entrepreneurs and lords of the universe. And even journalists.
But the obvious truth is that, even in the wealthy West, most people do unrewarding work for low pay and many millions do rubbish work for a pittance.
What possible reason could they have, other than brute necessity, for working harder? There are shades of Marie Antoinette in a pampered, manicured, pedicured, adulated celebrity like Madonna expecting the modestly paid masses to work for 12 hours a day, only to commute for one or two more and eat or sleep through the rest. The poor and the unrich like free time, too, and probably more than the rich and successful.
Some would-be George Orwells have written recently about the miserable lives of people here who do what in America would be called McJobs - low-paid, dead end, spirit-crushing work. There is an American bestseller, published a couple of years ago, written by a woman who tried to live the life of the lowest paid for a while in various different McJobs. She found that she could barely survive. And that is the point, surely.
We must all (or nearly all) work to live. But must we live only to work? What kind of life is that in a supposedly rich and civilised society?
One might well accept that there are economic reasons why some people in a rich society find themselves poor and overworked with a negligible chance of anything better. One might accept that the great majority may not enjoy their work much, yet must do it. But there is no intellectual alchemy that can turn that into something to be proud of, still less into an ethical principle.
I cannot see how it has anything to do with the idea of a Protestant work ethic.
If it has, then it is not much of an ethic. Besides, that was a profoundly religious conviction. Work and worldly success were the means of, and the sign of, standing right with God and being one of the chosen and earning your salvation hereafter.
And in so far as it is an American ethic, I am for once in my life on the side of the old Europeans who, as Madonna so generously says, "know how to enjoy life better".
Much though I admire America, I have always found the American work ethic rather shocking. My eldest brother, for example, worked for many years in America as a heart surgeon; he was not self-employed and therefore did not become rich, but chose to work for a well known hospital that practises a form of semi-socialised medicine and pays its doctors a fixed and rather modest salary. The hospital accepted the worst of cases, the sickest of people, and my brother was constantly on call and constantly in and out of the hospital, early and late, after stressful operations lasting many hours.
Yet he got only two weeks' holiday a year. Two weeks. And that is common in America; it used to be universal. To my mind it was barely enough to calm the tremors of exhaustion. My brother loved his work. But not surprisingly he took early retirement in his early fifties. What he had been denied, and what he longed for, was time. Free time, away from work.
He is someone whose work was immensely fulfilling and interesting. For those whose work is not, time away from it is even more important.
Time to be with family, friends, lovers and private obsessions. Time for pigeon fancying and salsa dancing, for going to raves or tending the compost heap. Time away from the clocking-in card and the delivery date and the exquisite demands of the ferociously rich. Time to do those thousand little things that imperceptibly come together as a sense of belonging, a sense of community. It seems to me a terrible immodesty on the part of the rich and successful to imagine that time is something the unrich should give up without protest, in the name of some bogus ethic; after all, time is their only wealth.
Unaccustomed though I am to sounding like a socialist or sympathising with the Europeans, I do feel very strongly that it is wrong to expect people to live only to work. We pass this way just once, or so most of us believe. There is nothing beyond this life and our only hope of happiness is here. I am not at all sure that governments should legislate about working hours. It's true that in the past it was necessary so as to protect workers from terrible exploitation. It was right in the 19th and 20th centuries to restrain the inhumane greed of the factory owners by law.
Now it seems, at least in Europe with its working time directive, that the balance has swung too far the other way.
A 37-hour working week is clearly an absurdity, although Britain's 48-hour week seems to me too long. In any case, sweat shop owners and bullies will ignore legislation.
What I am quite sure of is that nobody should be taken in by nonsense talked about the Anglo-Saxon work ethic or by silly accusations of laziness. Free time matters.
Holidays, and plenty of them, are a very good thing. Happy Easter.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 20, 2003 | Comments (0)
Zeta-Jones through the privacy looking glass
Avert your eyes from what is unseemly, Confucius supposedly said. I have been trying to avert my eyes from the extremely unseemly case of Catherine Zeta Jones's wedding photographs, which ended last week. It has been difficult.
Very often it's difficult because the story has been a saga of thrillingly comic detail and the news that really matters - the war - has been so depressing.
However, there has been the excuse that there are, underneath all this Hollywood nonsense, important legal questions about a right to privacy. So, like many people, I have indulged myself in the spectacle.
I loved the "volatile" Uruguayan marquesa of Hello! magazine, who admitted she had lied to help out her employer but offered in mitigation a list of the dependants she has to support - three children, six grandchildren, an elderly mother and almost 200 dogs (she takes in stray dogs on her ranch). Not a bad try in our country of dog lovers.
A particularly high point was the moment when Catherine Zeta-Jones, in these times of international murder, terror and mayhem, said she felt "violated" by the publication of unauthorised photographs of herself.
I sometimes wonder what they put in the water in Hollywood - it seems to soften the brain. I am afraid the poor girl will find it difficult to live that one down, along with the remark she made in court that Pounds 1m is "not that much" for her and her husband.
I saw some of these violating pictures and thought Zeta-Jones looked, as always, very pretty and, one might almost think, rather sweet. In a couple of photos she was eating her wedding cake, which upset her terribly, we were told.
It is charmingly quaint that a movie star shouldn't object to being shown on huge screens across the world in passionate sexual embraces with someone to whom she is not married, frequently eating his face, as they say, yet can't bear us to see her exercising her lips and throat on some fragments of complex carbohydrate (with the assistance of her lawfully wedded husband). Maybe eating is a shame and a disgrace in LaLa land, the final remaining sin in Hollywood.
Actually I do have some slight sympathy for Mr and Mrs Douglas. Any girl would be very upset if an unwanted guest sneakily gatecrashed her wedding reception. If he took photographs and flogged them to someone else later, any girl would be very angry. By any standards it was very mean and wrong.
Incidentally, by a strange quirk of scandal, the photographer was a young man called Rupert Thorpe. He turned out to be none other than the son of the Right Hon Jeremy Thorpe PC, who was himself the lead character in another famously preposterous trial long ago, packed with delicious detail for those of us with tabloid tastes.
The phrase "Bunnies can and will go to Paris" floats back to me across the years, along with thoughts of the sad fate of Rinka the great dane on a lonely moor. I seem to remember that this led the late lamented Auberon Waugh to found the Dog Lovers' party - dogs again.
The loopy air of unreality of this latest trial was particularly appealing. "I went to great lengths," said Zeta-Jones, "to retain the privacy of my wedding dress and the cake" - that cake again - "which was of a personal design." Or perhaps it was the dress. Anyway, Zeta-Jones thinks her privacy was violated, which strictly speaking it obviously was, and she and her husband took that and a great many other charges to court.
But her idea of privacy appears to be oddly flexible. She and her husband had already sold photographs of the entire thing to OK! magazine, if only for "not that much", ie, Pounds 1m and a large chunk of royalties.
In fact Zeta-Jones said rather sweetly later: "Both my husband and I wanted to show the world the joy of what we were sharing." That's what I mean by unreality. That's what she said. I sometimes wonder whether the strange creatures living on Planet Hollywood really speak the same language as the rest of us.
An elaborate plan of "showing the world the joy of what we were sharing" does not suggest a woman obsessed with keeping the day to herself. It does not suggest a woman intent on privacy. It suggests a woman intent on keeping a commercial bargain and on controlling our perceptions of her husband and herself.
There is nothing wrong in that, of course. And it was, in my view rightly, on commercial grounds that the Douglases won their case, or some of it. Mr Justice Lindsay found that they were entitled to damages for breach of commercial confidentiality or, in ordinary English, trade secrets.
While the judge pointed out that Hello! had broken the code of the Press Complaints Commission, he said that the Douglases' rights could be protected under the existing law of confidence and data protection provisions.
That did not stop the couple issuing a statement declaring: "We deeply appreciate that the court has recognised the principle that every individual has the right to be protected from excessive and unwanted media intrusion into their private lives." But the court recognised no such thing and neither did the judgment. There is no such right to privacy in English law.
In fact it's a curiosity of this case, as I understand it, that if the Douglases had not, in fact, sold their wedding story for public consumption, the judge's findings and certainly the amount of any damages might have been very different, because no commercial confidence would have been breached by the dastardly conduct of Thorpe, the marquesa, the proprietor of Hello! and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all.
Perverse, or what?
People who get agitated one way or the other about a new legal right to privacy all say these proceedings were a landmark case. Yet they do not entirely seem to agree on why. Some have welcomed it as a good thing because the judge did not, as they feared, try to use the case to introduce a privacy law by the back door.
"There is no need," said Mr Justice Lindsay, "for me to attempt to construct a law of privacy and it would be wrong of me to attempt to do so."
Yet some people fear, with reason, that other judges might think it right to attempt this and that they have the means to do so under the 1998 Human Rights Act.
And if not the judges, then parliament. Mr Justice Lindsay said that the subject of privacy is so broad, and the ramifications of any free-standing law of privacy so involved, that it would be better left to parliament. There are plenty of MPs who are very keen to get going on it. I myself can't decide which would be worse - a rump of trendy liberal judges or a gaggle of third-rate MPs - in deciding such a momentous matter.
Although we resent having our privacy invaded, the dangers of censorship through privacy legislation are alarming. It can hardly have escaped anybody's attention that countries with stricter privacy laws, such as France, are much more corrupt.
With any luck there will be disagreement and dither for years and nothing much will happen - very much as in Confucian China, come to think of it. So perhaps we can ignore it after all.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 13, 2003 | Comments (0)
Thou shalt not diss: the peace recipe for Bush
Respect seems to be the holy grail of emotional wellbeing. For many years people have talked of the importance of self-esteem, but self-esteem depends on the esteem - the respect - of others. Respect! This is the constant demand in the mean streets of the inner city, where people lack it most painfully.
Even those who know almost nothing of these conventions may have seen Ali G, in his comic role as ghetto boy, raising his hand and solemnly pronouncing "Respect!". Conversely, disrespect, or dissing, is a source of rage and anguish.
In the emergence of the new word dissing, disrespect has been turned, by those most subject to it, into an active verb. Rap lyrics are full of it, and the painful, impotent rage it provokes.
Disrespect is dangerous; humiliation leads to vengeance and violence. If this is so on the mean streets of the West, it is even more on what's called the Arab street. Arab societies of the Middle East, and Muslims more broadly, have suffered a very long, drawn-out humiliation. It is getting worse.
After all, there is no more effective way of dissing a country than to invade it.
And however successful the peace in Iraq might be, however quickly the Iraqis might achieve justice, prosperity and success, that very achievement would be a thorn in Arab and/or Muslim flesh, in those countries where these things are so conspicuously lacking. There will be no enduring peace, or any peace at all, if the western world cannot find some way to avoid dissing the Muslim world.
There's nothing new about this profound sense of humiliation. Anti-American commentators might like to blame it on colonialism, or on the state of Israel, but it is much older than that. Islam was once a dazzling empire, vast and sophisticated and confident of its own supremacy. But with the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment in the West, the infidel overtook the faithful and Islamic culture. Muslim intellectuals were clearly and painfully aware of it by the 19th century, if not before.
Whatever the behaviour since then of the West or Israel, citizens of Arab states are confronted every day, ever since their own independence, with poverty, brutality and corruption in their own countries, despite the wealth of oil.
Scapegoats are essential: the great Satan of the West is ideal.
Though I am a westerner, both half-American and pro-American, I have a great deal of sympathy for all the people of the un-western world in their resentment of the cultural triumph of the West. There's something horribly depressing in the way that traditional music always gives way to western pop-pap, that elegant local dress gives way to flip-flops and crop tops and hideous perms.
Who would not want to resist the fierce tidal waves of lowest-common denominator American culture crashing all over the planet, with their flotsam and jetsam of junk food and junk dreams? Why do everybody's preferences from Timbuktu to Popocatepetl go down like ninepins before the hard bowling of American taste?
I even have some sympathy with the French, in their absurd efforts to stem these tides, with injunctions against Franglais slang and demonstrations against McDonald's. But this is not the real grievance of the Muslim world. The real grievance has to do with power, wealth and cultural success, and the fact that most people in the world, including Arabs, would do almost anything for the chance to live in the wicked West.
The shame of all this must be intolerable to Arab feelings. And there can be no relief for this shame in any post-war dispensation which is seen as an imposition of the United States. Some form of international respect will have to be shown; the current US plans for post-war Iraq show every sign of showing serious disrespect.
Personally I am of the dissing tendency. Like the Americans, I have trouble expressing (or pretending) respect where I don't feel it. I do not feel respect for countries which are brutal police-state theocracies and where women are oppressed. Like the Americans (I suspect), I feel positively driven to diss the United Nations.
The idle pretence of the UN to international moral leadership has long since been exposed as a preposterous joke. How anybody ever supposed that this confederacy of mass murderers, dictators and kleptocrats could offer moral leadership has always been a mystery to me.
Most people now know that Libya, of all countries, is chairman this year of the UN Human Rights Commission. Not so many, perhaps, noticed that the country appointed in February to chair this year's UN conference on disarmament was - no, you couldn't possibly have guessed - Iraq. There are times when dissing just isn't enough.
Then it's hard to respect France. I don't mean the French people. I mean it's impossible to respect their cynical, greedy and destructive political elite. The Russians have not enhanced their credibility either. As for the Americans, it's hard to view their proposed carve-up of post-war Iraq with much respect either; it will be the most terrible disgrace if the peace is seen to be lining the pockets of the president's cronies. And there could be no worse dissing of the entire world, and of America's supporters.
I sympathise with the Americans' impulse to do the peace their own way, given how most of the rest of the world has dissed them. But dissing in not an option, except perhaps for jobbing columnists. It is too dangerous, especially for a superpower. There should be a new commandment: thou shalt not diss thy neighbour.
Like most commandments, it will be hard to follow. I cannot really imagine how America and fellow travellers could, in practice, show they are determined not to diss the rest of the world in the coming peace. It may be impossible.
First of all there is (according to Arabists) the Arab contempt for signs of weakness. More importantly there is the disinformation and propaganda on the Arab street, so that people genuinely believe things that are untrue; this will be almost impossible to contend with, in the short term anyway. Then there is the hearts and minds problem.
America's warmest admirers must admit that history suggests Americans are just not very good at hearts and minds. Perhaps it is because their own are too confident, too unambiguous, too sure of the American way. They can be generous in victory, but can they be subtle?
Everyone has remarked on the contrast between the way British and American soldiers behave towards Iraqis. Americans are distant, uneasy; the British play football and a Northern Irish officer, when encouraging his men on the eve of battle, paid a tribute to the Iraqis and their civilisation that was truly lyrical, and which will be one of the unforgotten noble moments of this war.
Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. Strong in action, gracious in style.
The Americans are wonderful at fortiter, but not so good at suaviter. That's why they need the rest of the world, British squaddies, surrender monkeys, cynics, and even the UN, to try to make peace and offer some tokens, at least, of respect.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 06, 2003 | Comments (0)
