Cuttings: June 2023

Polly Toynbee: what my privileged start in life taught me about the British class system – article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, extracted from her book An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals. “Children know. They breathe it in early, for there’s no unknowing the difference between nannies, cleaners, below-stairs people and the family upstairs. Children are the go-betweens, one foot in each world, and yet they know very well from the earliest age where they belong, where their destiny lies or, to put it crudely, who pays whom. Tiny hands are steeped young in the essence of class and caste. In nursery school, in reception they see the Harry Potter sorting hat at work. They know.... Aged seven like me, Maureen ... lived in a pebble-dashed council house by the water tower..... One day we had a cart, an old orange box set on pram wheels. We took it in turns pulling along the rope harness and riding in the box, up and down the flat road outside her house, shouting, 'Giddy-up,' and waving a stick as a mock whip. It was my turn, I was in the box and Maureen was yoked in as my horse, she heaving me along making neighing and whinnying noises while I whooped and thrashed the air with my stick. Suddenly, there came a loud yell, a bark of command. 'Maureen! Get right back in the house, now! Right now!' Her mother was standing in the doorway with the baby in her arms. 'You, who do you think you are, your ladyship, getting my girl to pull you around! What makes you think she should pull you, eh? Off you go home and don’t you ever, never come back round here again!' Maureen dropped the rope and scuttled back home. I thought she’d explain we were taking turns, but she was scared of her mother. I jumped out of the cart and ran all the way back to my father’s house in tears of indignation. Not fair! But something else in me knew very well that there was another unfairness that wasn’t about taking turns, that couldn’t be explained away. Somewhere deep inside, I knew it meant Maureen would never have the turns I had. And Maureen’s family knew it well enough.”

Rigged Capitalism and the Rise of Pluto-populism: On Martin Wolf’s “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” – article by Jonathan Kirschner in Los Angeles Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism is an essential read for its articulation of the perilous crossroads at which the future of enlightened liberal civilization now stands. Wolf argues persuasively that, for all their visible flaws and imperfections, competitive market capitalism and liberal democracy are the best bad systems available for organizing human societies. And each requires the other to thrive—‘[b]ut this marriage between those complementary opposites […] is always fragile.’ Capitalism has been allowed to run amok, and it has elicited a backlash that threatens democracy…. Wolf’s central argument is that capitalism and democracy are inherently interdependent, yet also often in tension with one another—and managing the balance of that indispensable relationship is akin to walking a tightrope. In traditional autocracies, the economy has been captured by those that control the state, and that control is the basis of their power (which is why they are so reluctant to let go of the reins of authority). Liberal democracies today face the inverse problem: the capture of the state by those that control the economy. … Decades of stagnant incomes, rising inequality, and the erosion of high-quality jobs for the middle class and the less-educated have allowed the relationship between capitalism and democracy to become dangerously unbalanced. The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism argues that the fault lies with the failure of public policy to tame the excesses of capitalism; it warns that those excesses will unleash the forces that destroy democracy. … When it comes to solutions, unfortunately, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism comes up short. Wolf, ever measured, is convincing in making the case for reform over revolution. Although it is tempting to think that deeply ingrained problems require tearing things down, revolutionary movements almost invariably spiral out of control, fall into the hands of ever more radical extremists, and devolve into bloodbaths. Yet it is disheartening that the sensible, reformist agenda of reasonable, practical measures that Wolf outlines already seems beyond the capacity of our politics.”

The policy paradox: the more obvious an idea is the less likely it will happen – blog post by Sam Freedman, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “This struck me with renewed force when reading a recent review of the health system by Patricia Hewitt, the former New Labour health minister. Hewitt argues for a greater focus on preventative health. … Despite everyone agreeing with the policy – including the person who was health secretary in 2015 and is Chancellor now – funding has been cut rather than increased. … As I tell the eager young think-tankers I meet, there’s no point writing another report making the case. The blockage needs to be identified and removed. In my experience there are three core categories of barrier that prevent the obvious ideas happening: spending rules; misdiagnosis; and fear of the electorate. Spending rules. … The Treasury’s objective in a spending review is to hit a target number that is driven by an arbitrary fiscal rule. To do this they have to overcome various obstacles including promises to protect highly politically sensitive budgets like hospitals and schools. One trick to achieve this is to move money into unprotected budgets. They did this with public health during the coalition years, removing the money from the NHS and giving it to local authorities instead. Once it was in was in the local government budget it could be cut while keeping promises to protect NHS spending. … Misdiagnosis…. Vocational education is a classic example… The misdiagnosis here is the belief that academic qualifications are more valued either for reasons of cultural snobbery, or because vocational qualifications are poor quality. But it is simply a function of labour markets…. The belief that ‘esteem’ is something that governments can provide means politicians keep pulling at the wrong policy levers…. Fear of the electorate. … An obvious example is council tax revaluation. … The bit that no can defend is that, in England, properties have never been revalued since the tax was introduced in 1991…. Why will it be different this time? … It's taken me a long time to realise it but ideas are overrated in policy. The real skill is figuring out how to make the ideas we already have happen.”

‘Red Team Blues’ and the As-You-Know-Bob problem – review of Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow by Henry Farrell on his Crooked Timer blog, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “The ‘As-You-Know-Bob’ problem of bad science fiction [is that of] indigestible lumps of technical explanation of detail in the guise of purported dialogue. ‘As you know, Bob, the neutron flux problem eases after we pass the hyperluminal barrier. That’s how we were able to escape the Wixilit fleet.’ The problem is not only that this kind of stuff is painfully dull to read, but that it does not make narrative or logical sense. If both parties know how something works, why is one telling the other about it?… Red Team Blues… takes on … the technical workings of cryptocurrency. The book’s protagonist is an accountant in his mid-sixties. These are not promising sounding premises for a fun book that you might want to buy, and read. [But] you do want to read it, and I say this as someone who (a) has read more about accounting standards than he ever wanted to, and (b) has regularly had the ‘oh f***, here we go’ feeling when someone mentions the word ‘blockchain’ at a conference. Red Team Blues shows you how to solve the Bob problem for a wildly unpromising topic. And it not simply entertains readers, but explains things to them that they absolutely ought to know about – the evil crap that the complexities of the modern financial system enable…. Making it so that all this information about complicated and boring seeming details doesn’t seem complicated or boring at all – that requires technical skill. You don’t notice this artistry as a reader, which is the point unless you’re watching closely to try to figure out how the magic trick works, so that you can one day perhaps replicate it yourself. There are important lessons here for academics who want to push out their ideas to a popular audience.”

Interrobang? – review of Florence Hazrat, An Admirable Point: A History of the Exclamation Mark, by Kieran Setiya on the Under the Net website, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Punctuation is said to originate almost 5000 years after the invention of the written word, with the Mesha Stele in 840 BCE, a stone inscribed for King Mesha of Moab in present-day Jordan. The text of the stone features full stops or periods between each word and vertical strokes to mark the ends of sections. Six hundred and forty years later, Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced a system of dots to indicate the amount of breath one would need to complete a given stretch of text when reading aloud, a mid-level dot marking a short passage or komma, a dot at the bottom marking a longer passage or kolon, and for very long pauses, a dot near the top of the line. Skip ahead eight hundred years, to the 7th century CE, and the Spanish theologian, Isidore of Seville invents the comma, colon, and full stop, adapting Aristophanes’ pauses as grammatical markers. The modern system of punctuation was completed between 1400 and 1600 and has remained static since then: a technology not subject to improvement. There is no Moore’s Law for punctuation marks. A sorry consequence of this is that the list of books devoted to individual signs cannot go on forever, commas giving way to comforting ellipsis. Instead, we face a full stop. There are fourteen books to write and some have been written already: Semicolon by Cecelia Watson, F***ing Apostrophes by Simon Griffin, and now An Admirable Point, a history of the exclamation mark by Florence Hazrat.”

The backlash: how slavery research came under fire – article by Samira Shackle in The Guardian. “When the historian Nicolas Bell-Romero started a job researching Cambridge University’s past links to transatlantic slavery three years ago, he did not expect to be pilloried in the national press by anonymous dons as 'a "woke activist" with an agenda'. Before his work was even published, it would spark a bitter conflict at the university – with accusations of bullying and censorship that were quickly picked up by rightwing papers as a warning about 'fanatical' scholars tarnishing Britain’s history.... In the spring of 2020, Bell-Romero and another post-doctoral researcher, Sabine Cadeau, began work on the legacies of enslavement inquiry. Cadeau and Bell-Romero had a wide-ranging brief: to examine how the university gained from slavery, through specific financial bequests and gifts, but also to investigate how its scholarship might have reinforced, validated or challenged race-based thinking.... [Then] Bell-Romero was approached by Gonville and Caius, the college where he had recently completed his PhD, to conduct a separate piece of research into the college’s links to slavery... As with the university inquiry, the idea was to look at all possible links to slavery. Alongside investigating whether the college held investments in slave-trading entities such as the Royal African Company, he was asked to explore any connections to slavery among alumni, students and faculty.... But it was at Gonville and Caius that the problems would begin. The reaction to Bell-Romero’s draft report caused a rift among faculty at the college – with some pushing to prevent its publication entirely. According to the critics, the work suggested all white people 'carry the taint of original sin' and that it was motivated by an 'agenda' to 'implicate' the college in slavery. What happened at the college demonstrates the collision between two different worldviews: one that sees research into the history of slavery as a routine, but vital, academic exercise; and another that sees it as an overtly biased undertaking and a threat to the way historical knowledge is produced. The intensity of this clash sheds some light on why it has proved so difficult to reappraise Britain’s past.”

Rebecca F Kuang: ‘Who has the right to tell a story? It’s the wrong question to ask’ – interview by Rebecca Liu in The Guardian. “[The protagonist of Kuang's new thriller, Yellowface,] who describes herself as a boring 'brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward from Philly', is viciously jealous of fellow writer Athena Liu, a 'beautiful, Yale-educated, international, ambiguously queer woman of colour'... After Athena suddenly dies, June discovers a manuscript she had been working on, about the 95,000-strong Chinese Labour Corps who supported Britain in the first world war. It’s intimidatingly good. When June polishes it up and passes it off as her own, the book shoots her to literary stardom. Reviewers then debate June’s right to tell the story, echoing familiar conversations on whether authors should write about characters and histories outside their own race or lived experiences.... Kuang’s view, however, is clearer. 'I really do not like this framework,' she says. Concerns about 'who has permission to tell these stories, or who has the right, or who is qualified' seem like 'the wrong questions to ask'. 'We’re storytellers, and the point of storytelling is, among other things, to imagine outside of your lived experience and empathise with people who are not you, and to ideally write truthfully, and with compassion, a whole range of characters,' she continues.... For her, more interesting is how authors approach these stories: 'Are they engaging critically with tropes and stereotypes that already exist in the genre? Or are they just replicating them? What is their relationship to the people who are being represented?' And, 'most importantly, does the work do something interesting? Is it good?'”

‘Lunch of suffering’: plain ‘white people food’ goes viral in China – article by Rafqa Touma in The Guardian. “Under a photo of processed cheese, ham and crackers packed neatly in plastic, a Weibo user writes that to eat this for lunch is to 'learn what it feels like to be dead'. The post is part of a trend among Chinese social media users who are recreating 'báirén fàn' or 'white people food' to better understand – or poke fun at – western packed lunches made up of plain ingredients such as raw vegetables and sliced meats. The social media platforms Weibo and Xiaohongshu have been inundated with photos and reviews of cold sandwiches, raw carrots and canned tuna. Many are from Chinese international students surprised by the simple lunches eaten by their peers overseas.... Marcelo Wang explains that the fascination with these meals comes from that fact that many Chinese people are used to cooking with a lot of different ingredients. But to some Chinese netizens, this kind of food is the 'lunch of suffering', as put by blogger Shanyoule, who bought a pack of string beans and a tomato to see what it was like to eat them raw: 'It’s so lawless and outrageous.'”

Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge explores founder’s slavery links – article by Nadia Khomami in The Guardian. “An exhibition by the Fitzwilliam Museum will explore Cambridge’s connections to enslavement and exploitation for the first time, both in the university and the city. Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance features works made in west Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Europe, and interrogates the ways Atlantic enslavement and the Black Atlantic shaped the University of Cambridge’s collections.... By asking questions about how Atlantic enslavement and the Black Atlantic shaped the university’s collections, the museum said it has made new discoveries about Cambridge’s own connection to colonialism.... The exhibition, which opens in September, is the first in a series of planned shows and interventions at the Fitzwilliam Museum between 2023 and 2026.”

Overambitious beach reads – cartoon by Tom Gaud in The Guardian. “It's a sunny day at the beach and the litguards have spotted somebody who has got into difficulties... [Wife:] 'Please help! He's just reading the same page over and over!' [Litguard:] 'We see this a lot: people make overambitious book choices at home, then get overwhelmed on holiday.... I've given him a sedative and a soothing mystery novel. if you keep him away from challenging multigenerational epics, he should be fine.' [Wife:] 'Thank you!'”

Self-Made by Tara Isabella Burton: selfie society – review by Rachel Aspden in The Guardian. “What do a 41-minute sex tape featuring a little-known personal stylist and a sombre self-portrait in oils by the Renaissance polymath Albrecht Dürer have in common? According to a compelling new study of the ways in which we see ourselves and attempt to shape how we’re seen by others, they are both masterpieces not just of self-promotion, but self-creation. Kim Kardashian, Superstar – as the tape became known – and Dürer’s Self-Portrait at 28 are controversial statements of their subjects’ fame worthiness and magnetism; both were successfully parlayed into real-life celebrity and riches. The eye-opening comparison is typical of Self-Made, US cultural critic Tara Isabella Burton’s fun, insightful romp through an identity parade of geniuses, dandies, charlatans, moguls and film stars. It’s a journey that culminates in the billions of us with smartphone cameras and social media accounts. Burton is a scholar of religion in its broadest sense. Her previous book, Strange Rites, unpacked the ways in which people stubbornly continue to create meaning, ritual and faith in supposedly ever more secular western societies. Self-Made picks up that thread, identifying a key imaginative shift during the Renaissance as the foundation of our 21st-century world of selfies and brand collabs. As belief in God as the arbiter of destiny began to wane, faith in humans’ ability to shape their own selves and therefore their lives grew. (In Dürer’s 1500 self-portrait, the artist appears face-on in a pose usually reserved for depictions of Jesus.) Self-Made is strong on the weirdly mystical dimensions of celebrity: the notion that there are innate qualities that can be nurtured but not learned or taught.”

The Diary of Virginia Woolf: a book for the ages – review by Hermione Lee in The Guardian. “Woolf’s first surviving diary entry was made in 1897, when she was nearly 15; her last was on 24 March 1941, four days before her death. She kept these 42 years’ worth of writings in unlined notebooks with soft covers which she bound in coloured papers.... How many different uses she puts her diary to! It is a record of her world, and if you want to know the details, written up at speed in the heat of the moment, of the general strike, or the abdication crisis, or the civilian experience of the second world war, this is the place to go. It is a writer’s exercise book, where she works at finding an 'elastic' form which will make something of 'this loose, drifting material of life': 'It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales.' It is an essential form of therapy, where dangerous feelings – anger over a row with Leonard about money, terror at the onset of depression, pain in illness, social embarrassment, apprehension of being laughed at when her books are coming out – can be laid to rest. This is where she 'composes' herself: 'To soothe these whirlpools, I write here.' It is a reader’s notebook, where she records her literary responses and judgments and often tells herself 'what a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me!' It is an intimate account of her own writing process, like the joyous moment in her bath when she suddenly invents Three Guineas – 'Lord how exciting!' – or the evolution of To the Lighthouse, from the first thought: 'to have father’s character done complete in it; & mothers; & St Ives; & childhood; & all the usual things I try to put in – life, death, etc'. It is a memory book, which, very importantly for her, brings back her past and compulsively revisits key dates like her mother’s death when she was 13, or her marriage to Leonard, or the moves to different houses. It is a book about mortality, knowing that death is coming and making the most of what is now and here.... She wrings all the juice from life: love, pleasure, affection and enjoyment run all through. She wants to live for the moment. 'If one does not lie back & sum up & say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough. Always hurry. I am now going in, to see L & say stay this moment.'”

There are two kinds of antiracism. Only one works, and it has nothing to do with ‘diversity training’ – article by Arun Kundnani in The Guardian, based on his book What is Antiracism? And Why it Means Anticapitalism. “The liberal tradition sees racism as essentially a matter of irrational beliefs and attitudes. Its founders, such as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld, were interested in understanding the rise of nazism in the 1930s.... To remove this danger, they called on the liberal establishment to persuade the masses, especially the poor and uneducated, that racist opinions have no legitimate basis. This approach remains at the core of liberal antiracism today, from the enthusiasm for diversity training ... to the hope that better representation in Hollywood films will educate us out of our biases.... The radical tradition, on the other hand, sees racism as a matter of how economic resources are distributed differently across racial groups.... The Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon argued in 1956 that we should abandon the habit 'of regarding racism as a disposition of the mind, a psychological flaw'. Rather, 'military and economic oppression most frequently precedes, makes possible and legitimates' racist beliefs. And this 'systematic oppression of a people' can continue even if a majority of citizens do not have racist biases, unconsciously held or otherwise. Radical antiracists argue that the only way to fight this oppression is to build autonomous organisations with the power to dismantle existing social systems and build new ones. To them, racism is closely connected to capitalism. This is partly because racism weakens class struggle by dividing white workers from most of the world’s working people. More fundamentally, race provides a means by which capitalism can more intensively exploit certain categories of worker – the enslaved, the indentured, colonised peasantries, migrant workers – as well as justify discarding peoples deemed superfluous to the economy.”