A half of Britons admit to dropping litter, and a third of drivers do so. Surveys of men aged 18 to 25 suggest that now many believe that dropping litter is “cool”, a sign of a relaxed way of life. Among farmers, 19 out of 20 say that they have cleared away dumped rubbish. A quarter of smokers do not consider cigarette butts to be litter in the first place. Some 180,000 sacks of rubbish are cleared from the sides of roads every day, without any visible impact on the prevalence of litter as a whole. Most of the rubbish dropped takes years to degrade.   

What does all this litter signify? Archaeologists sift the detritus of past civilisations in order to reconstruct something of the daily life of its citizens, and I try to reconstruct the lives and mentality of my fellow-countrymen by what they leave behind them. If I am right in my surmises, the conclusions are not
encouraging.

I have been interested in litter for quite a time, both its content and distribution, ever since I used to walk every day between the hospital in which I worked in the morning and the prison in which I worked in the afternoon, a distance of a few hundred yards. This was an area in which many, perhaps most, children hardly ever ate a meal with another member of their household. They were, rather, domestic hunter-gatherers, from an early age searchers in the fridge for prepared foods, living in homes in which the microwave was the entire batterie de cuisine. When they grew up they ate, if not principally at least very often, on the street: for an Englishman’s street is now his dining room. Meals for many in our country are not social occasions but occasions for solipsists.

Their diet was not healthy. It consisted of snacks, fast food, sweet canned drinks and alcohol. It scarcely came as a surprise to me to learn that the British were among the fattest people in the world. The inhabitants of the area seemed to regard bushes as convenient repositories for their empty cans and polystyrene containers of hamburgers and fried chicken once they had finished with them. Householders did not even clear up the litter in their own front gardens.

But the problem of litter is not confined to areas such as this, very far from it. From time to time I go litter-picking in and around the town in which I live. I find it not unpleasant, and rewarding inasmuch as you can immediately see the results of your efforts. I have discovered that it takes on average about an hour to clear four hundred yards of grass verge of even a country road of its litter.

The overwhelming majority of the litter is the detritus of refreshments taken in cars and thrown out of the windows of passing vehicles. For the sheer quantities disposed of in this fashion you might suppose that British drivers were like those insectivorous shrews that to survive must consume their own body weight every 24 hours. (British medical students now bring plastic bottles of water with them into examination rooms, as if global warming had already turned Britain into the Sahara.) One does sometimes come across other things, such as used condoms and defunct mobile phones, but these are only a small proportion of what is discarded.

But I must mention the shreds—sometimes the very large shreds—of dirty polythene that hang from the trees, and one of the most curious phenomena of all, namely the carefully tied plastic bags of household rubbish that are then attached to the low branches of trees, to hang there like some kind of poisonous fruit. It is curious because it takes more effort to dispose of rubbish in this way than in the more regular manner. While I am on the subject of the peculiar phenomena relating to litter, I have several times noticed people with litter in their hand approach a litter bin and then drop the litter not in the bin, but by it, as if they knew that litter bins had something to do with litter but could not make the final leap of the imagination as to what it was. In lay-bys, moreover, a notice warning people that littering attracts a heavy fine is sure to be unusually heavily littered, as a man who walks into a pub with No Fear tattooed on the side of his neck is sure to attract violent attention.

Littering cannot be the activity of a tiny number of malevolent people. Even an army of a thousand litterers dedicated exclusively to the task could not spread even a small fraction of Britain’s litter. The billions and billions of pieces can only be the result of the efforts of an enormous number of people: a minority of the whole population, perhaps, but by no means a small one, probably numbered in the millions.

What is going through the mind of the litterers? Are they merely thoughtless, like cows relieving themselves in a field? Is it that they do not see, or that they do not care about, the results of what they do? It is certainly true that many parts of the country are now so littered that another piece will make no difference, will not even be noticeable, but that does not explain why the country has become so littered in the
first place. Besides, those of us who do not litter refrain from doing so even where it would make no difference. 

It is difficult to ask litterers why they do it because they are not often caught in the act. One does occasionally see litter flying out of a car window, but rarely by comparison with the amount that there is by the side of the road, and one cannot stop a car from which litter has been thrown in order to ask the culprit what was going through his mind as he threw it. Nevertheless, one can conclude that litterers know that what they are doing is wrong because it is for the most part a clandestine activity, and few people would readily own up to it. Littering proves that the old idea that no one does wrong knowingly is false. Millions of people do wrong knowingly, every day and repeatedly.

On the assumption that to litter is not an unconscious action, millions of decisions a day are taken to perform it. The question then is why? Why do so many people (their precise number must remain a matter of speculation) regularly do what they know to be antisocial, frowned upon by their fellow citizens, and usually illegal? After all, it is not so very difficult to refrain from littering.

The conclusion then must be that litterers act as they do not in spite of the anti-social and illegal nature of littering, but because of its anti-social and illegal nature. It is an expression of hatred towards the world as they find it, and even towards beauty itself. Beauty offers them a disturbing contrast with the ugliness of their lives, an ugliness which is part chosen by and part imposed on them (most British towns and cities have been as thoroughly uglified in the last 50 years as the countryside has been littered, and there is no escaping ugliness). In conditions of inescapable ugliness, beauty itself is a highly disturbing phenomenon and anything beautiful must be brought down to the level of the ugly. It is the contrast that is painful and it is far easier to destroy beauty than to remove the ugliness against which we are completely impotent. If you can’t beat it, join it.

There is another question about litter, however. Why has it been allowed to accumulate to a point at which it is difficult to conceive how it could ever be cleared up, short of a national crusade, backed by members of the royal family, such as the one launched by the Daily Mail? Why has the litter not been cleared up as it was spread? We have, after all, a giant apparatus of public administration that interferes with, or at least intervenes in, practically every aspect of our lives. Is cleaning up litter so difficult a task that it is intellectually beyond it to arrange for it?

Presumably, then, little priority is given to it. Our public administration acts on the reverse of the broken-windows theory, namely that small problems should be left to solve themselves until larger problems, such as social injustice and the wickedness of the human heart as manifested in inequality, have been solved. The resultant slovenliness is to be seen everywhere. If you observe British roadworks, for example, you notice that they are performed without pride in the result, making a mess in the meanwhile that you do not see elsewhere in Europe. The contractors leave the rusting frames of temporary road signs, and the sandbags that hold them down, behind them on the verges after they have finished their work, as well as other detritus, and no one can be bothered or thinks it his job to tell them to clear up after themselves. The temporary road signs are often set at crazy angles because it is the easier thing to do than to set them at the perpendicular; and in general one has the impression that the work is not taken seriously. It is at best a regrettable necessity, an imposition on the time of those doing it.

Even now, however, the littering of our country is not quite a fatality. I recently drove from Shropshire to Yorkshire, passing though Staffordshire and Derbyshire. All these counties were unbelievably filthy (unbelievably, that is, to someone not entirely resigned to the condition of England). I already knew Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and Warwickshire to be in the same case, as well as many other counties. But as soon as I reached Yorkshire, things markedly improved. Whether this was because Yorkshiremen still have some pride in their county and therefore drop less litter in the first place, or whether Yorkshire councils are more attentive to their elementary duties than elsewhere I do not know. But after the disgusting filthiness of even so beautiful a county as Shropshire, it came as a relief.

There is, however, good news for patriotic Britons. I also drove recently from Calais to Paris, and the motorways which not very long ago were impeccable from the litter point of view have suddenly deteriorated, and while they had not yet reached British levels of filth, if something is not done quickly, they will soon catch up. My heart swelled with pride at the prospect. 

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A recent edition of the British Medical Journal recently had a cover story with the title The new politics targeting the nanny state. The accompanying artwork on the cover consisted of a Mary Poppins-type figure carrying an umbrella as the bulls-eye of a target (see above). The drift of the article inside was as follows: a number of Conservative Members of Parliament (some of them prominent and likely to be ministers) had either supported or been supported by the Institute of Economic Affairs; the Institute of  Economic Affairs received financial support from tobacco, processed food and alcoholic drink companies; therefore, future health policy is likely to reflect the vested financial interests of these companies rather than those of the public health as defined by experts without vested interests of their own.

No one could deny that large corporations have often resorted to intellectual and financial dishonesty in defending their interests. The large tobacco companies, for example, long sought to deny or minimise the harm done by their products. Pharmaceutical companies suppressed data from trials that were not flattering to their products. But this is not the same as saying that such companies are the only organisations with vested interests to defend, or indeed that they have no legitimate interests to defend or no interests that serve or coincide with the general good. The crudity of thought in the article in the BMJ  is worthy of that of 1970s polytechnic sociologists; the article could have been written by Mr Corbyn, if he had the literary ability.

The main rhetorical instrument of the article is insinuation. Thus we read about the Conservative MP Owen Paterson, who recorded a contribution of £84 from the IEA for travelling expenses to a conference in the US:

In 2014 Paterson, a former environment secretary, formed his own “independent centre-right think-tank” called UK 2020, set up “to produce a manifesto for the leader of the Conservative Party contesting the general election in 2020.” In 2016 it published its first report, written by Kristian Niemietz, the IEA’s head of political economy, which compared the NHS unfavourably with other national health systems. In a speech launching the report, Paterson questioned whether “a centralised state-run monopoly of healthcare is the best and only way to run a universal healthcare system that is fair.” Paterson has complied with parliamentary rules by declaring receipt of donations from his own think tank, which does not reveal its funders, but he had declined to say where its money comes from.

‘Whatever one’s view of the NHS, it is surely possible to criticise it on perfectly rational grounds’

The implication is clear: the view that a centralised monopoly of healthcare might not be the best way to organise healthcare is merely an intellectual smokescreen for predatory commercial interests.

This is surely rather peculiar, and in a way sinister, as if criticism of the NHS were ipso facto heresy. But whatever one’s view of the NHS (for example that it is a curate’s egg), it is surely possible to criticise it on perfectly rational grounds. Study after study shows that its results in certain important fields are among the poorest in Western Europe; indeed, this is something that even its leaders accept, though they always attribute poor performance to lack of funds. To take only one comparison: when the NHS was founded, the health of the French or Spanish populations was markedly worse than that of the British, but after three-quarter of a century of the NHS, it was markedly better. To be sure, the health of a population is not determined only by its healthcare system; nevertheless, this cannot be depicted as a triumph for the NHS, nor can anyone who seeks the no doubt complex reasons for the reversal be simply characterised as a paid propagandist for commercial interests. It is possible, after all, that Owen Paterson received the funding because he held the views he did, rather than that he held the views he did because he received funding.

It is possible for everyone, of whatever point of view, to play the insinuation game. The British Medical Journal is at least as much the politico-ideological arm of the British Medical Association as it is a scientific journal (the balance between science and propaganda has changed completely within the span of my career). The BMA itself is paid for by the subscriptions of doctors, who in Britain probably receive at least 90 per cent of their income from public funds: ergo it is only natural that it should not only consistently seek ever-greater government intervention in the affairs of man, but place a preponderant importance on funding for health.

Perhaps that is the reason that modern doctors can see the consumption of tobacco and alcohol (indeed, of almost anything else) only through the lens of health effects. To most modern doctor-philosophers, everything, up to and including a meal, is either health-giving or health-harming, and it is the most important function of a government, under their expert direction, to promote the health and prevent the harmful. They are the Islamic fundamentalists of human welfare: their religion allows the healthy and forbids the unhealthy. They do not recognise any ambiguities. Vested interest for them arises only from the possibility of making a commercial profit: their own demand for control over ever more resources, or for ever more power to forbid, is purely and objectively for the good of humanity. As the BMJ puts it, concern has been “prompted” that the current Health Secretary might be “listening to the views of vested interests above those of the health community”. The “health community”—assumed to be of one mind, incidentally—has no vested interests, because its interests by definition cannot be vested.

The article (by no means the first of its type) seems to accept the vulgar Marxist notion that private economic interest is the only kind of sectional interest that there is or can be. According to this worldview, public institutions cannot develop an interest, nor can the desire for power play any role in human affairs independently of financial advantage. That is no doubt why the only kind of conflict of interests that have to be declared in scientific publications are commercial ones. It is true, of course, that such interests are the easiest to measure or expose: but what is easily measurable is not necessarily the most important, nor is the most important necessarily what is easily measurable.

Financial and moral interests are in any case sometimes ambiguous. The article says, in an unmistakable tone of self-righteousness:

The MPs Raab, Hancock and Truss, as well as IEA’s trustee [Neil] Record and life vice president Nigel Vinson, did not respond to requests from the BMJ to clarify whether they were even aware of the institute’s financial relations with BAT [British American Tobacco], which was part of an industry responsible for “the single largest cause of preventable deaths and one of the largest causes of health inequalities in England”.

But was the BMJ itself not aware that four-fifths of the price of a packet of cigarettes was tax, and therefore that the government was by far the biggest financial beneficiary of smoking, at least in absolute terms? True, the tobacco companies are almost entirely dependent on tobacco sales for their income, but if the government suppressed the sales of tobacco and alcohol altogether, as it is entitled to do and as the BMJ’s article would logically require it to do, it would lose approximately £30 billion in revenues, perhaps considerably more, in so far as large numbers of people would be thrown out of work and become liabilities of the state.  No government could possibly contemplate this, and it is therefore dependent on industries whose products the article characterises as “bad for public health”—as, of course, is the BMJ dependent, at least if its argument of guilt by association is accepted as valid. Would members of the BMA volunteer to donate approximately 5 per cent of their income to the government if it would prevent their patients from smoking or drinking? It is possible, I suppose, that they would, but if I know my colleagues in the profession they would on the whole prefer that other people sacrificed their 5 per cent to achieve this.

A sense of irony is another thing missing from the article. It is a curious fact that, in this country at least, an increase in health inequality between the richest and poorest decile, so often lamented by the BMJ, increased as public health campaigns against tobacco seemed to take effect. Because differentials in the rate of smoking between these deciles account for a considerable part of the health inequality, anything that more effectively persuaded the highest decile not to smoke than the lowest was bound to increase health inequality. Doctors were the first group in the population to give up smoking, being the first to be persuaded by the evidence (a refutation of the dismal idea that rational argument can have no effect upon human behaviour). Then came the rest of the educated class, and bringing up the rear social class V, the least likely to attend to logic and evidence—or alternatively that valued its own life the least.

I personally do not suffer any guilt feelings from a widened inequality caused by such a disparity in accepting the evidence, but others, who value equality of outcome more highly than I, do feel it, or say that they do. Since they can hardly advocate that the higher social classes start smoking more heavily in order to catch up (or is it down?) with the mortality of the lower classes, there is only one strategy left for them: more or less to tell the lower classes to stop doing what they are doing.

In view of the tobacco experience, whether they are likely to do as they are told is another question. The article in the BMJ  is outraged that some MPs oppose putting the precise calorific and other content on the packaging of foods, in an attempt to combat obesity. I don’t have any real quarrel with this idea except that it has a Canute-ish ring about it. The other day, for instance, I watched a fat slatternly mother in my local bakery try to force a cake on a child who clearly did not want one. Eventually, like some fanatical evangelist for obesity, she succeeded in making him eat it. If she had known how many calories the cake contained, would she have desisted?

On matters of public health I am not an ideologist, more a pragmatist. I do not think there is a simple principle that covers all cases. The trouble with libertarianism is that, as a matter of political reality, it cannot bring home to people all the consequences of their own conduct. The problem with nanny-statism is that it treats people as if they were minors, not really responsible for their own choices, and then is surprised when the faculty of making proper choices withers.          

I am not so much concerned that the views expressed in this article should be expressed (everyone is entitled to his opinions) as that there is not likely to be much debate about them. One has the impression on reading the medical journals—the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the BMJ—that a kind of stifling pensée unique has overtaken or infected an important part of the medical world: a pensée unique from which it is increasingly harmful to a career to dissent.   

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The prisoners’ tattoos were mainly crude, the product of cottage industry as it were, with messages such as “Made in Britain” round a nipple, or a dotted line with “Cut here” round a wrist. One man had been attacked several times in pubs because of the words “No fear” tattooed on the side of his neck. Another had a policeman hanging from a lamp-post on the inside of his forearm.

‘That must do you a lot of good down the station,” I said.

The letters “ACAB” tattooed on the knuckles could mean either All Coppers Are Bastards or Always Carry A Bible, depending on context (criminals were the first post-modernists). When the letters LTFC and ESUK tattooed on the knuckles were conjoined, they read LETS FUCK: and, according to those whom I asked about thus, the invitation sometimes worked in a pub when the bearer approached a woman there, at least often enough to make having the tattoo worthwhile.

In those days, the prison, anxious to do something positive for the prisoners, offered a tattoo-removal service, since it was difficult to find employment with an antisocial message inscribed on one’s forehead or other prominent part. But removal was possible only on a small scale: nothing much could be done for those who had, for example, a spider’s web tattooed all over their face and often their scalp. Another interesting phenomenon was the blue borstal spot over a cheekbone that was the equivalent of the old school tie. Quite a number of my younger patients in the hospital next door to the prison tattooed themselves with this spot even though they had never been to borstal but wanted to look as if they had been, since a reputation for, or appearance of, toughness was the best form locally of defence.     

But I noticed that the tattoos began to change in type. Where once they were simple and amateurish designs in India ink, they were now more elaborate—tattoos of many colours. First came hearts in red surrounded by green foliage, with the names of girlfriends or wives written across them, sometimes with their names crossed through once the loved one had become the hated one. Fathers came to think that tattooing the names of their children on their arms was the highest manifestation of parental concern.

‘I used to love to go to Speakers’ Corner, where there was a man tattooed from head to foot who did not speak but simply revealed his body’ 

It was obvious that tattooing was undergoing a change: it was becoming professional and increasingly skilled. The increasing skill of it appalled me, for what should not be done at all is all the worse for being done well. Skilled tastelessness and kitsch is worse than botched tastelessness and kitsch. But even more alarming to me was the spread upwards on the social scale that I noticed, I think earlier than many people.

Whereas tattooing was once the province of the sailor, the marginalised, the criminal and the odd degenerate of the upper classes, it was fast becoming fashionable in the middle classes. In the early Sixties, I used to love to go to Speakers’ Corner, where (among the fanatics and the religious missionaries, including an evangelical atheist) there was a man tattooed from head to foot who did not speak at all but simply took off his clothes to reveal his tattooed body, to the accompaniment of the oohs and aahs of the amazed audience—or that part of it that had never seen him before, or anyone like him. But now such a man would not be regarded as the freak that he seemed then, but rather, at worst, as a weak-minded follower or acolyte of David Beckham, or more likely as perfectly normal person merely expressing himself.

What did the ascension of tattooing up the social scale mean or signify? When the ascent was still in its infancy, as it were, I interpreted it as an attempt by middle-class persons of intellectual disposition to demonstrate their affinity with and sympathy for the marginalised, thereby demonstrating their political virtue. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, it is also imagined to be empathic, and in our otherwise relativist times there is no virtue as great as empathy.

I reviewed the book Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community, published in 2000 by an academic press, written by a cultural anthropologist, Margo DeMello. She drew my attention to, among other things, the fact that young academics were getting themselves tattooed. I began to notice junior doctors with tattoos, usually discreet and visible only when they bent over or otherwise accidentally revealed some small portion of their flesh. Policemen were tattooed, immigration officers, no doubt politicians too: certainly the wife of one recent Prime Minister. A friend of mine went to Uppsala University to deliver a lecture there and noticed (it being a warm summer’s day on which people revealed more of their flesh than usual) that practically every male student was tattooed.

Certainly, statistics bear this out. At least a third of men under the age of 40 in Britain and America are now tattooed and, with the cultural masculinisation of women, an increasing proportion of women, too. The type of person who would once never have dreamed of getting a tattoo, the thought of which would never have entered his or her head for a fraction of an instant, is now frequently joining what DeMello called “the modern tattoo community”. Of my 12 middle-class French nieces and nephews, at least five are tattooed, one of them heavily: and, until the last 15 years or so, the French were much less inclined than the British to have themselves tattooed. Indeed, until quite recently, no member of my family, no friend of my family, no family member of a friend of my family, was tattooed. It has all happened quite suddenly.

An article in the French newspaper Libération not long ago claimed that the number of professional tattooists in France had increased from 400 in 2000 to 4,000 ten years later. France being France, the tattoo “artists” apparently wanted the government to give them an officially-recognised status and statute: in other words, they wanted to be regulated. On the other hand, the names of their studios, often in English, the language of, among other things, international abominable taste—Evil in the Ink, for example—suggested a kind of emotional antinomianism. 

The article was published on the occasion of a tattoo fair held in a large former market hall in Paris. Entry was not cheap at 30 euros, and apparently 30,000 people attended, mainly young of course. The latest technology was on display. There was a time when a full sleeve, a tattoo that covers an entire arm, would have taken many sessions of work by the tattooist and have been very painful, indicating a kind of devotion to a cause. (Devotion to a cause is by no means always an admirable quality.) But these days, thanks to technological advance and moral and aesthetic regress, large areas of the skin can be covered in a matter of a couple of hours, moreover using colours such as bright lemon yellow that were once unknown to tattooists.

At the end of each day of the fair, there was a contest to choose the most “beautiful” tattoo done that day. About a score of people, mostly young women, and mostly very pretty, competed for the title. Whereas previously my predominant emotions had been disdain and even disgust, I was suddenly seized by sorrow and pity. Why were people, by no means stupid, uneducated or deformed, doing this to themselves?

Even if tattooing is now so common that it can be considered normal in the statistical sense, as once it was not, it retains a faint connotation of rebellion or revolt, at least for those who cannot be considered marginal themselves and would therefore not have had themselves tattooed. They think that by having themselves tattooed they are shocking the bourgeoisie à la Baudelaire; and in so far as their parents don’t like it, and are in effect silencing them by a fait accompli of which it is useless for them to complain, they are exercising power over them.

However, at the same time as the tattooed think that they are rebelling, they are joining what DeMello called a “community”. (More recently, in what is no doubt a manifestation of the desire to fit in with the majority, even dark-skinned minorities, whose epidermis is unsuited to tattooing, are having themselves tattooed in ever-larger numbers.)

DeMello’s use of the word community is telling in itself. In an increasingly atomised society (such that flats are now commonly constructed in which there is nowhere for people to eat together), any commonality between people—such as having a tattoo—is said to create a “community”.  A butterfly on a buttock gives one something important in common with someone who has a skull tattooed on his shoulder. By this standard of community, I am a member of the anchovy-on-toast community, among many other communities. 

As all good things come in threes—Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité or Travail, Famille, Patrie, for example—in addition to rebellion and community, tattoos confer, at least in the eyes of those who have them, the quality of individuality: thus Rebellion, Community, Identity.

Tattooed people think they are expressing themselves by inscribing some symbol or other on their skins: although, of course, the iconography of tattoos is very limited. Strangely enough, much of it resembles the art work of prisoners when, with time on their hands, they begin to draw and paint. It is true that some people have a photographic portrait of Einstein or Elvis Presley tattooed on their back with a skilful realism that I find chilling; but for the most part, the designs are very limited in variety.

It seems obvious to me that if a person feels he has to tattoo himself in order to “express” his difference from others, he must have some difficulty in individuating himself, perhaps indicative (when this difficulty is on a mass scale, as it clearly is) of an individualistic society without individuals.

What has also struck me about this modern fashion (which goes along with that for self-mutilation by piercing) is that it is almost free of any kind of criticism: on the contrary, there is an almost obsequious acceptance of it, as if to say that you found it aesthetically hideous and deeply savage were to declare yourself an Enemy of the People. Famous persons tattoo themselves and appear in advertisements: it would be lèse-celebrité to comment unfavourably on it.

What of the future of tattooing? Will the fashion pass as, say, the fashion for kipper ties passed, or will it persist? One thing that might keep it going is the fact that, were it to pass, those who had had themselves tattooed would feel themselves humiliated by the contempt in which the untattooed who were younger than they might begin to hold them: for there is only one thing more pitiful than a tattoo on young skin, and that is a tattoo on old skin. Therefore the tattooed have a vested interest in ensuring that the fashion continue, and will even become evangelical on its behalf. They are in ink stepped in so far that, should they wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er. 

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To know the good, we have to know the bad. The precise quantity and degree of the bad that we have to know in order to appreciate the good is debatable, and certainly there is no great difficulty in finding the bad, whether it be bad food, bad films, bad theatre productions, bad behaviour or bad books. Indeed, the only thing that can be said in favour of the current overwhelming prevalence of the bad is that it adds to the pleasure of finding the good — the piquancy both of discovery and relief.

But quite apart from the valuable function that the bad performs in helping us to appreciate the good, I would amend Connolly’s dictum as follows: the more books we read, the clearer it becomes that there is no book, however bad or merely mediocre it may be, that has nothing to say to us, for every book tells us something. Thus reading a book may be a relative waste of time, for we might be doing something better or more useful than reading it, such as reading a better book. But it is never a waste of time in the absolute sense, at least for the inquisitive or reflective mind. For the uninquisitve or unreflective mind, of course, Armageddon itself would be dull and without interest or lessons.

Every contact leaves a trace, said the great French forensic scientist, Edmond Locard; and likewise, every book tells us something (even if, unlike every crime, it appears to leave no trace). This is especially so for those, which is almost all of us, who have access to the internet.

Allow me to conduct a small experiment. I will choose, with my eyes shut and at random, a book from the piles in my study. (If it be objected that the choice will not be random because I know the disposition of books in my study, I can only reply that the objector does not know my study. Ah, if only the hours could be returned to me that I have spent searching in my study on all fours for a particular book, my life expectancy would be considerably extended.)

There, it is done, I have chosen. By happy chance, my hand fell on an ancient book, Via Rectam ad Vitam Longam, or a Treatise wherein the right way and best manner of living for attaining to a long and healthfull life, is clearly demonstrated and punctually applied to every age and consitution of body, by Tobias Venner, published in 1650.

No one would go to this book for medical information or advice, but anything of such an age must be of at least of historical interest, and there is something instructive in it besides. Tobias Venner is by no means a name to conjure with in the history of medicine (like the immense majority of doctors, he discovered nothing), and yet it is not entirely pointless to read him.

We are apt to believe that our own preoccupations are new and unprecedented, but they seldom are. Venner practised in Bath, already a spa town in his day, but “concourse to our Baths was hindered” thanks to “our late unnaturall Civill War, and unparalleld Divisions, [and therefore] I had leasure once againe to take in my hand this Treatise, and to enlarge it with many profitable additions”. Are we not back to “unparalleld Divisions” which hinder our concourse? And although I am inclined to believe that our narcissistic age is uniquely preoccupied with health, it is salutary to read that “Verily Health is the Summum Bonum in this life.” There was more excuse for this attitude in Venner’s day, of course.

In essence medical advice has not changed in the past 369 years as much as one might have supposed. Without benefit of epidemiological studies, Venner tells us that

. . . a fat and grosse habit of body is worse than a leane, for besides that it is more subject to sicknesse, it is for all corporall actions far more inapt . . . And because they are repleated with grosse humors . . . they easily incurre the Apoplexie, shortnesse and heavinesse of breath . . . and sudden death.

Good sleep is necessary also:

I advise all men . . . that they carefully go to their bed with a quiet and free mind . . . if therefore ye desire peacable and comfortable rest, live soberly, eschew crudity, and embrace tranquillity of mind.

On the last page, he says:

It is not sufficient for any that desire to live long and healthily to observe moderation concerning passions and affections of the mind, and to be immoderate and irregular in matter of diet; neither is it sufficient to be moderate and discreet in matter of diet, and to be immoderate and irregular concerning sleep . . . if there be excesse or defect in any one of them, especially often, the state and constitution of the body, though firme and good, is soon vitiated and corrupted, sicknesse occasioned, and life abbreviated, which daily experience doth confirme. To conclude, a discreet and moderate course of life retardeth the coming of an old Age, and when it come maketh it the longer lasting.

Health advice would not be so very different now. There is value, and even consolation, in realising this. Human nature, both for good and evil, remains much the same as ever it was: and just as Spanish kings were obliged to repeat their instructions to their colonial governors over and over again because they never obeyed them, despite their protestations that they would, so doctors have had for centuries to recall their patients to the value of moderation, advice no sooner uttered than disregarded. That mankind will remain for ever stubbornly imperfectible and prey to its own nature is both dispiriting and reassuring, certainly for a writer for whom writing has become an existential necessity: for there will never be nothing to write about and material, alas and thank goodness, will always abound.

It might be objected that the books to be found in my study, even at random, are unlikely to be utterly valueless to me, for I selected them all myself. To meet this objection to my thesis that every book has something of worth to the reader, I asked my wife to go to the nearest Oxfam shop — Oxfam shops being to British high streets what rats are to urban dwellings: you are never more than a few yards from one — and buy at random an airport novel of the kind that people donate to Oxfam under the misapprehension that, while disembarrassing themselves of household clutter, they are thereby assisting the people of the Third World. Oddly enough, among the pulp novels, biographies of Beckham and discarded cookbooks is often to be found a work of arcane or specialised academic interest, my latest purchase of that description being a multiauthor book on encephalitis lethargica, the mysterious disease whose cause is even more disputed than that of the First World War, which it followed.

My wife returned with a copy of Her Frozen Heart by Lulu Taylor, a best-selling author of whom I had not previously heard. I had asked her to choose at random a well-preserved paperback from among the rows of disposable romantic novels (I have a neurotic distaste for reading paperbacks in bad condition, whatever the merit of the content) to be found on the shelves of all charity shops, with their garish vulgar covers of the kitschiest possible design of a type which presumably appeals to and reflects — oh horrible thought — the taste of the public. It was, unfortunately, 483 pages long, and therefore gave rise to an experiment somewhat longer than I had wanted or anticipated.

Lulu Taylor! Was it a real or an assumed name? If the latter, it was perfectly chosen for a romantic novelist, and if the former it was almost a confirmation of the theory of nominal determinism, namely that a person’s name in some way influenced his destiny or choice of profession. For example the two preeminent British neurologists of the first half of the 20th century were Henry Head and Russell Brain. Lulu Taylor! In the absence of silent films, I should have put her down at once as a likely romantic novelist.

Miss Taylor is, by all accounts, quite unashamedly a producer of entertainment without literary pretension. Her aim is to make the reader care what happens to her characters and turn over the page, and in this aim, which is far from easy to fulfil, she undoubtedly succeeds. Her plot is clever and there are many more ambitious writers who could learn a thing or two about style from her, give or take a few lapses — for even Homer nods. Humour is lacking, the characterisation is simple, the story ends in emotional slush (genres imposing their rules as they do), and there is an undertow of modern psychological cliché to it all — wanting closure, ownership of problems, emotional healing, survival, self-esteem, emotional support and so forth. But the novel as a whole is not without potential as far as reflection is concerned, at least for those who do not read purely for distraction.

There are two stories that run parallel in the book, one concerning a generation that lived through the war and the genuine austerity of the post-war years (anyone who believes that we are passing through austerity now would do well to read it), and a generation that grew to adulthood in the 1990s in an environment of assumed plenty. The two stories are united at the end of the book by a Jacobean mansion in the Oxfordshire countryside.

Despite the difference in the circumstances of the two generations, the same or similar characters and characteristics are seen in both. Egotism, selfishness, self-doubt, and self-sacrifice survive in altered conditions: thus human nature does not change very much and we would therefore be wise not to expect it to do so by a mere change of environment (shades of Tobias Venner). This is a lesson both depressing and reassuring; there being no new thing under the sun, we are rarely as favourably or unfavourably situated as we might suppose.

A book such as this evokes reflection in two ways: first by suggesting analogies with the reader’s own life, which of course will depend on the particular biography of the individual reader, and second by suggesting more general, even philosophical questions.

Among the former, in my case, was the following description of one of the main characters in the story of the contemporary generation. Patrick is a high-flying lawyer who is killed in a taxi on his way from the airport, leaving his young widow to wonder about the exact nature of their seemingly happy marriage. The truth was that Patrick’s whole existence had been dedicated to removing himself from his family and embracing a self he carefully constructed.

This had a powerful resonance in my mind because, while I do not think that I have constructed myself according to some conscious plan or blueprint as cold-bloodedly as Patrick, nevertheless (in retrospect) I can construe the whole of my life as having been a flight from my childhood — on the whole, a successful flight. I surely cannot be the only person of whom this is true, though it will not be true of every reader, who will find other resonances with his or her life.

In the story about the war generation, a young woman known as Tommy (Thomasina) is widowed when her husband, Alec, is killed in France early in the war. Considerably later in the book we learn that she married Alec only because she had been with child by him, and she had been with child by him only because he had raped her. She did not tell her mother, Mrs Whitfield, what had happened, and her mother, being a narrow-minded stickler for propriety and respectability, insisted on marriage. Tommy agreed to this because, at the time (1939 or 1940), it was better for the child-to-be to have a married mother than an unmarried one, the stigma unjustly attaching to the child as well as the parent.

Despite the marriage, which not surprisingly Tommy found repellent to her, Mrs Whitfield did not forgive her daughter, for it was obvious that the child had been conceived out of wedlock, and this was a taint on the family’s respectability. Mrs Whitfield is depicted as a censorious bigot, and there is no doubt that such censorious bigotry as she displays actually existed. I once worked in a mental hospital in which there was a woman who had been a “patient” there solely (at first) because she had had a child out of wedlock in the 1920s, although she had quickly become so institutionalised that it would have been cruel to discharge her. She was by no means the only such “patient”.

Clearly, we are intended to dislike Mrs Whitfield and, by extension, all that she stands for. But romantic novels being what they are (I presume, for I cannot claim to have read many), there must be a reconciliation between mother and daughter at the end, otherwise the reader would go away with the unpleasant impression that some conflicts are above or beyond resolution. In the end, Mrs Whitfield recognises that she had misjudged her daughter.

The implicit condemnation of her previous censoriousness remains, however. But this aspect of the story caused me to think of the great French economist, Frédéric Bastiat, with his fundamental distinction between the things seen and the things not seen (some commentators consider that Bastiat was the originator of the concept of opportunity cost).

We see clearly enough the unpleasantness and bad consequences of Mrs Whitfield’s attachment of importance to respectability. What we do not see is the consequences of the complete absence of importance attached to respectability. It is only on reflection that we realise that, if Mrs Whitfield’s attitude is indeed deeply cruel, a mirror image of this attitude is catastrophic also, perhaps on a larger scale. How to keep the balance between censoriousness and licentiousness has not proved easy; indeed, our current resolution of this tension is to indulge in what might be called censorious licentiousness, according to which anybody who disapproves of any choice of lifestyle or conduct is the subject of disapprobation of the most censorious kind.

I do not want to endow (or burden) Lulu Taylor’s book with a philosophical depth to which it does not pretend. It is entertainment, after all; there are contradictions in it and sometimes anachronisms. But that is not to say that it is contentless, or cannot provide mental sustenance. I think the same would be true of any other book that my wife had brought home, even if it were true that my time might be more profitably employed reading something better.

Nothing written is utterly without value, without something to teach, whatever its intentions. But I am reminded of what Samuel Johnson said of travelling, for it is true of reading also:

He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him. So it is in travelling. A man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge.

The post The lasting worth of ‘worthless’ books appeared first on Standpoint.

Samuel Johnson, author of the poems “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes”, weekly essayist of The Rambler and The Idler, and lexicographer of his celebrated Dictionary of the English Language, has now given us a philosophic fable entitled The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale. Rumour has it that he wrote it in a week to pay first the medical bills and then for the interment of his mother. But notwithstanding the swiftness of its composition, we may with assurance say that, so long as men have eyes to read and brains to think, this short tale will find its readers and encourage the reflective.

This is not to say that everyone will find it immediately to his liking, for it is calculated to destroy the illusions of dreamers, who think that, contrary to what our Redeemer expressly said, His kingdom is indeed of this world. To the contrary, Doctor Johnson, as we must now address and refer to him, intimates from his very first lines that dissatisfaction is the permanent state of Mankind, whatever earthly progress it might make. The Doctor begins:

YE who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of thepresent day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

It is precisely to undeceive those who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy that this tale was written. There are those still alive who remember with clarity the hopes placed in swift enrichment by investment in the South Sea Company, and it may confidently be predicted that in the future, great schemes, both political and economic, preached by the unscrupulous to those who listen with credulity to the whispers of their fancy, will continue to lead Mankind to disaster, as they led investors in the South Sea Company to bankruptcy.

Some have accused the Doctor of orotundity, heaviness and grandiloquence of style, but his prose is so dense with meaning that there is scarcely a sentence that is unworthy of close attention: and it is this that those who are accustomed to read with inattention, or with their minds half-elsewhere that in the book they are reading, object to.

The hero of the tale, if such he can be called, is Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. The offspring of the Emperor of that immense African empire are enclosed, as is Rasselas, in the Happy Valley, a mountainous grove completely separated from the rest of the world, in which everything possible that can be done or provided to make them perfectly content is done or provided. The food and drink is abundant, varied and delicious, and the entertainments amusing and without cease. There is always delightful music on hand to soothe any disquiet, should it ever arise.

But despite the prelapsarian nature of the Happy Valley, and the fulfilment of his every wish as and when it arises, Rasselas suffers from a strange discontent that is like a pain whose precise location it is impossible for the sufferer to point to. The young man asks the difference between a man such as himself and the animals:

Every beast that strays beside me has the same corporal necessities with myself: he is hungry, and crops the grass; he is thirsty, and drinks the stream; his thirst and hunger are appeased; he is satisfied, and sleeps; he rises again, and is hungry; he is again fed, and is at rest. I am hungry and thirsty, like him, but when thirst and hunger cease, I am not at rest. I am, like him, pained with want, but am not, like him, satisfied with fulness.

The Prince needs more than the satisfaction of his material appetites: 

I can discover in me no power of perception which is not glutted with its proper pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted.  Man surely has some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification; or he has some desire distinct from sense, which must be satisfied before he can be happy.

When he tells his old instructor this, the instructor replies:

“Sir, if you had seen the miseries of the world, you would know  how to value your present state.”

“Now,” said the Prince, “you have given me something to desire. I shall long to see the miseries of the world, since the sight of them is necessary to happiness.”

Does this not go with admirable precision to the heart of Mankind’s predicament on earth, that without unhappiness there can be no purpose, and without purpose there can be no happiness? We are destined by our nature, then, never to be perfectly happy. He spoke truly when he said that His kingdom is not of this world.
Rasselas, his sister Nekayah, and an older man experienced in the ways of the outside world, Imlac, escape from the Happy Valley and begin a philosophical peregrination to find what Rasselas calls “the choice of life”, which is to say the perfect way to live. Imlac knows that it does not exist, but is wise enough to let Rasselas discover this for himself, since example and experience are more powerful than precept.

Disillusion swiftly follows illusion. When Rasselas is impressed by the stoic teaching of a professor in Cairo who preaches a disengagement from the world as the way to avoid suffering, Imlac warns him, “Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men.” And indeed, the very next day Rasselas discovers the stoic philosopher in a state of despair because his daughter has died overnight. Rasselas says to him:

“Have you then forgot the precepts which you so powerfully enforced? Consider that external things are naturally variable, but truth and reason are always the same.”

The mourning philosopher says: “What comfort can truth and reason afford me? Of what effect are they now, but to tell me that my daughter will not be restored?”
The heart truly has its reasons that reason knows not of, and therefore the Prince “went away, convinced of the emptiness of rhetorical sounds . . .”

Rhetorical sounds—are they not the curse of Mankind? Doctor Johnson has compressed immeasurable wisdom into the smallest of compasses, and his book will live for ever.   

The post The Doctor’s infinite wisdom appeared first on Standpoint.

There are people who deny this, of course. They say that book sales are holding up or even increasing; that the number of titles published is greater than ever; and that if you see fewer people reading books on the train it is because they are all reading on their tablets and Kindles.

I am not convinced, however — perhaps because I don’t like good news, which I find so uninteresting by comparison with bad. The book review, for example, used to be very important to our more cerebral newspapers; now it comes a long way behind cookery, to say nothing of football. Even the charity shops that so disfigure our shopping streets, and that used sometimes to have an interesting book or two in the middle of yards of novels by Danielle Steel, have now greatly reduced the space they devote to books.

The downgrading of books is international. There used to be a good bookshop at Charles de Gaulle Airport, for example, but it has been replaced by a pharmacy. It seems that people need moisturising creams on flights these days more than they need something to read. I have not personally observed that the habit of reading printed books on planes has been replaced by that of reading electronic ones, though this might be the consequence of my observer bias.

Libraries and colleges are clearing out books as if they were asbestos. Computer terminals are what are wanted now, in the same way that Mr Gradgrind wanted facts. I am not entirely technophobic: the internet is a superb instrument and I am very grateful for it, but it is by no means a perfect substitute for books.

When it comes to second-hand bookshops, they have been killed, at least in this country, by the internet, by the odious soi-disant charity Oxfam, and by the loss of interest in browsing other than on a computer. George Orwell, who once served in a second-hand bookshop, wrote disparagingly of the trade; to him “the sweet smell of decaying paper appeals . . . no longer” and “is too  closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles”. But for me the bus tickets, annotations, invoices, cigarette cards and silverfish found in old books are an endless source of fascination and reverie.

I have been obsessed by books all my life, and now I feel the melancholy that I suppose old artisans must once have felt when their trade became industrialised. All these years I have been on the wrong, or at least losing, side of history, a dinosaur that did not foresee its extinction.

The post On The Shelf appeared first on Standpoint.

Harm reduction has long been the mantra of the British approach to the problem of drug addiction, particularly to heroin. The argument in favour of this approach is as follows:

Certain people will continue to take drugs whatever prohibitive or restrictive measures are taken to interdict supply, and whatever   therapeutic means are employed to encourage them to stop.

These people are a hazard to themselves and to others, for example by taking variable quantities of the drug, thus risking dangerous overdose, and by sharing needles so that they spread blood-borne viruses which, by means of sexual contact, can enter the general population.

Moreover, these people who will take drugs irrespective of anything else generally find it difficult or impossible to meet the economic costs of continuing by legal means, and therefore resort to crime to ‘feed their habit,’ thus causing much misery to the rest of the population. 

In view of the intractability of their addiction, then, it is best to supply them with drugs and injecting equipment that will reduce, though not entirely eliminate, the harm they do to themselves and others. 

It is not my purpose here to argue whether harm reduction works or not, a question of formidable complexity and indeed moral import. I wish merely to point out an interesting contradiction, of some cultural significance, in the British Medical Journal, which has in the past published a large number of articles in favour of harm reduction. 

The edition for 5 January, 2013, included a three-page article about the concept of harm reduction in addiction to tobacco. If the argument is sound for heroin, why should it not be sound for tobacco? There are, after all, certain people who, come what may, will not give up their habit. It is true that, for the moment, smokers do not commit many crimes in pursuit of their poison but, if the argument about the connection between addiction to heroin and crime were correct (which, actually, I believe that it is not) – if, I say, it were true, then the time could come, if the price of cigarettes were increased much further in an attempt to reduce consumption, when smokers, who generally come, as do heroin addicts, from the lower economic reaches of society, would feel obliged to commit crimes in order to ‘feed their habit.’ No doubt criminal gangs would move into the trade in contraband tobacco. And, of course, second-hand smoke is the tobacco equivalent of the blood-borne viruses of heroin addiction.  

Now it so happens that substitute devices for delivering nicotine – the drug to which smokers are addicted – have been developed both by tobacco and pharmaceutical companies. They assist inveterate smokers to avoid the more harmful contents of tobacco smoke. Whatever the hazards of nicotine might be, they are much less when separated from the other contents of tobacco smoke. Hence the arguments for harm reduction for tobacco are very similar to those for harm reduction for heroin addiction.  

What, then, does the BMJ, so much in favour of harm reduction for heroin addicts, say about harm reduction for smokers? 

A broad perspective suggests potential problems [from a public health perspective].

Firstly, the new nicotine containing products are not intuitively appealing; smokers will need to be persuaded of their benefits. For public health there is a key benefit: it is easier to use them than to   quit. Here I interject that the same is true of the methadone or other substitute for heroin. But for most smokers quitting is the best option and should be presented as achievable and attractive. 

   So rolling out harm reduction puts public health in the contradictory position of having to emphasise both the difficulties and attractions of quitting. Why should harm reduction for heroin addiction be any different, one might ask? A related danger is that children will pick up on this apparent confusion. While previous generations were told simply that tobacco is bad, new ones would learn that nicotine is acceptable – just be careful how you access it. This is precisely the burden of public health “education” with regard to heroin and other drug addiction. Moreover, promotion of harm reduction might reduce the perceived “cost” of uptake. Would not the same effect apply to the medical treatment of drug addiction, to say nothing of the provision of free needles? Finally, the fact that e-cigarettes deliberately mimic conventional ones (even to emitting fake smoke) may result in the inadvertent modelling of smoking. Would not the prescription of injectable methadone not do the same? More broadly, the media, which in the UK have become a reliable supporter of comprehensive control measures, might also struggle with this more complex position. How much media effort, one is inclined to ask, ‘reliably’ goes into supporting ‘comprehensive control measures’ with regard to illicit drugs? Thus the benefits of harm reduction are not as obvious as they seem. 

The article goes on to criticise harm reduction in tobacco because of the obvious, if not entirely consistent, commercial interests that the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries have in it. But inconsistency is rarely greater than in the spying-out of other people’s economic interests. Motes and beams come to mind.

Let me illustrate this point by a letter from a consultant paediatrician in the same edition of the BMJ. The letter is entitled ‘What hope is there for ethical investment?,’ and draws the attention of readers to the investments of the Wesleyan Life insurance company, which specialises (inter alia) in pension funds of doctors, and claims also to be an ethical investor. But the Wesleyan holds large quantities of shares in tobacco companies. The author of the letter pointed out that tobacco companies were among the top 10 holdings of the Wesleyan’s fund and finished by asking “If investing in tobacco counts as responsible policy in a company specifically catering for doctors, what hope is there for any ethical investment?” 

The unfortunate paediatrician does not realise just how hypocritical his letter is. His salary is paid entirely by the British government; if a packet of cigarettes costs £7.00, at least £5.47 of it goes to the British government, which is by far the biggest financial beneficiary of smoking, far bigger than the tobacco companies in absolute terms (it has, after all, only to collect the excise, while the tobacco companies actually have to make the product). Moreover, tobacco excise is one of the top ten sources of income of the British government. Thus, by working for the British government, the paediatrician is working for a tobacco trafficker. He should resign at once, and work only in the private sphere. 

The economic interests involved in harm reduction for heroin addicts are no doubt relatively small by contrast, but that it not to say they are unimportant for those who have them, or that they will not fight to retain them. The manufacturers who make substitute drugs and the governmental therapo-bureaucrats who distribute them will defend their interests just as the rest of us do. 

Consistency, no doubt, is the hobgoblin of little minds, but we must make some effort, at least, in its direction, or else deliver ourselves up to our own prejudices.          

The post ONLINE ONLY: What’s the Difference Between Heroin and Cigarettes? appeared first on Standpoint.

According to the Daily Telegraph, the chief executive of Centrica, the company that owns British Gas, Mr Sam Laidlaw, said at Davos that hopes were misplaced that development of shale gas deposits in Britain would be a miracle solution to the country’s declining North Sea oil production, and “a game-changer” for the British economy. This was in marked contrast to the United States, where the recovery of shale gas has lowered energy costs to US manufacturers and turned the country into a net exporter of energy.

Mr Laidlaw cited several reasons for his pessimism; for example the environmentalist opposition to shale gas extraction, the density of the population in the gas-bearing area, the lack of infrastructure to distribute the gas and the absence of political will to overcome difficulties, political and other.

However, it seems to me that Mr Laidlaw misses the point about shale gas and why it will not be, for Britain, what he calls in his horrible cliché “a game-changer”. It would not be a “game-changer” even if it were developed to the full; rather it would be a game-preserver. It would hold back change rather than promote it.

Why is this? Surely cheap energy and vast tax revenues would transform our prospects?

For Britain to hope that the exploitation of a natural resource would rescue its ailing economy seems to me like a man who purchases lottery tickets in the hope that they will secure his old age. Britain is not Kuwait, where a valuable natural resource is so abundant by comparison with the size of the population that all it would have to do to be prosperous is to pay someone else to do the work, sit back and relax as the revenues rolled in. This is an impossible dream — or nightmare.

What would we do with our large revenues? It is not necessary to be Nostradamus to imagine. At least one government would use this free gift of Nature (give or take the costs of extraction) to increase the size and emoluments of the so-called public service, and also the generosity of welfare payments: increases that any subsequent government would find it difficult or impossible to reverse. It would take enormous courage to do so, and courage is not exactly the first characteristic that one thinks of in connection with the British political class. Thus any change wrought by the large revenues from shale gas would almost certainly be in the wrong direction and would serve only to put off the evil hour of reckoning.

As for industry, something rather similar would probably happen. Cheap energy would obviate, at least to a degree, the need to become more efficient; it could (and I think would) be used to maintain wages that would otherwise not be justified and to avoid the necessity for innovation and adjustment. It would allow cheap imports and thereby raise not just the standard of living without concomitant effort, but permanently raise expectations. If the cheap energy were exhausted, the supposedly “healthy” economy would very soon stand revealed as a painted corpse.

Pasteur famously said that chance favours only the mind prepared, that is to say a mind that is alert, knowledgeable and flexible enough to realise the importance of phenomena that it happens upon by chance. In the same way, one might say that gifts of Nature, in the form of resources, favour only an economy prepared. The United States still has an economy so prepared; the United Kingdom has not.

What is the difference? No doubt it is a question of degree rather than of type, but as Engels once remarked, degree, when it is marked enough, turns into type.

Britain would resemble Nigeria more than the US in the way in which it responded to the gift of the gas. A mad politicised scramble for control of the revenues would ensue; they would become the object of political competition, possibly of a very vicious kind. Of course, shareholders in the gas companies and the workers for those companies would participate in the real wealth created, and there would no doubt be a multiplier effect; but the beneficial effects would soon be dwarfed by the harmful ones. In other words, because of out inveterate political entrepreneurialism, we would suffer what was once called the Dutch disease.

Naïve people often allude to the supposed paradox of African countries richly endowed with natural resources that nevertheless remain deeply impoverished. This is not a paradox at all: with the wrong institutions, the wrong ideas and the wrong culture, such resources can be a curse rather than a blessing, increasing in stability as the political fight over those resources becomes more desperate or acute, and undermining other productive activities. In the same way, incidentally, an educated population, if it is educated in the wrong things, imbued with the wrong expectations, is a curse rather than a blessing.

The corporatist culture of Britain, together with an underlying pessimism about the possibility of a durably high standard of living based upon our own intelligent adaptation to a constantly changing world, means that the real wealth that the gas would bring would be soon consumed in an orgy of consumption: sufficient unto the day would be the revenue thereof. But we spare no thought for the morrow not because we are ethical or philosophical followers of the Sermon of the Mount, but because experience has taught us to have no real faith in the future of our country. We are no longer a nation of shopkeepers, but a nation of political manipulators, whose main hope of betterment is a larger slice of whatever cake exists in the present moment. Moreover, we are economic puritans, as puritans were defined by H L Mencken: people who were afraid that someone, somewhere, was enjoying himself. We are afraid that someone, somewhere, is rich, and we would much rather impoverish him than enrich ourselves, slowly, by effort and accretion. Dragging people down is both easier, and to many much more gratifying, than raising themselves up: in whose possibility, in an case, they don’t really believe, because there are so many people who would want to drag them down again should they succeed in raising themselves up.

So all economic advantage has to be for the present moment alone; a pound in the hand is worth two in a week. Of course the United States has more natural advantages than Britain; but its real advantage is that it knows how to take advantage of its advantages. And this is a cultural advantage. 

The post ONLINE ONLY: Will Shale Gas Save the British Economy? appeared first on Standpoint.

The Francis Enquiry into the failings of the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust will almost certainly replay close reading, and will also be invaluable to future social historians of our country. Indeed, it will tell them all that they need to know: for far from being a betrayal of the ruling principles of the NHS, as claimed by the Health Secretary in the Sunday Telegraph of 6 January, the events in Mid-Staffordshire were their apotheosis. To put it bacteriologically, Mid-Staffordshire was the modern NHS in pure culture, uncontaminated by such organisms as kindness, competence or the most elementary concern for patients. Where these persist — and of course they persist in many places — it is in spite of the administration of the NHS, not because of it. Even under the worst of totalitarian dictatorships, human qualities cannot be everywhere eliminated.

What the Francis Enquiry will almost certainly reveal is a combination of the ravening ambition of bureaucratic mediocrities, institutionally perverted incentives that reward those who do worst, the creation of a nomenklatura class at the head of an apparat staffed by bullied, intimidated, fearful but also unscrupulous apparatchiks, intellectual dishonesty with compulsory lying on a vast scale, the proliferation of procedural objectives and bureaucratic tasks completely unrelated either to reality or to the welfare of patients, all combined with a revolting tendency to Pecksniffian self-congratulation and righteousness and an inability or unwillingness to speak or write in plain English. The fact that those at the top of the local bureaucratic hierarchy, having decimated the immediately surrounding countryside, moved on to higher or at least even better-paid things (such as private consultancy with the NHS) will not surprise observers of the NHS, because they have long known that no senior manager is ever truly sacked from that vast charitable organisation for the outdoor relief of second-rate bureaucrats. We should abandon the expression “turning up again like a bad penny” for “turning up again like a sacked NHS manager”. The Francis Report will almost certainly say that while it is the worst case that has so far come to light, the Mid-Staffordshire case is far from unique: and indeed, why should it be unique, when the principles upon which its management acted were those that pervaded, and continue to pervade, the NHS? It is a long time since I first asked the question of an NHS manager, “What is the government order you would refuse to obey?” and received no reply, because (I suspect) there is no such order. I remember a manager in the hospital in which I worked before my retirement, with no medical or even nursing qualifications, prowling the wards to look for patients who could be hurried home so that beds would become available for patients who would otherwise break the government’s four-hour rule, that is to say the rule that no patient should wait more than four hours after the decision to admit him had been taken. The concern that patients should not have to wait for more than four hours was not for their sake, of course, but merely so that the central government could claim that it was improving services, and so that the hospital could claim to have met its target. In the event the target was met by the simple expedient of redesignating hospital corridors as wards, satisfactory all round – except for the patients, of course. Not long ago I was asked conduct an inquiry into a spate of fatal events among the patients of an NHS Trust, and to determine whether there was a single factor that explained them. There was not; but when I reported to the Medical Director of the trust that while there was no such factor, it was clear to me that his staff were incompetent, unmotivated and completely unaware of what the purpose of their work was other than the filling in of forms (thousands of them, often with contradictory answers to the same questions in them), he replied with an almost Buddhist calm, ‘But that is the standard expected these days.’ He reminded me of a collaborator in an occupied country explaining that there was nothing he could do in the face of overwhelming military force. Just as the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust was not unique in the NHS, so the NHS is not unique in British public administration, but rather one example, and perhaps not even the most important example, of the way in which it now works. It is true that scandals in the NHS cause more commotion when they are uncovered than scandals elsewhere in the public sector, because we are (wrongly, in my view) more worried about our health than anything else. But for the long-term future of the country, education is more important. There is a deal of ruin in a nation, said Adam Smith; but the use of procedural outcomes in practically all the educational institutions of the country, from kindergartens to universities, is one way to produce that deal of ruination. Who is responsible for this ruination? I think Mrs Thatcher, with her crude sub-Marxist view of the professions as mere exploitative monopolists, set the process going, putting the bacteria in the milk as it were. She thought that the methods and disciplines of the marketplace, imposed by ‘scientific’ management, but in the absence of anything resembling a real market, would eliminate chronic inefficiency in the public service. This was naïve, not to say stupid; only too predictably it called into being a managerial class, cunning and unscrupulous, that quickly developed its own vested interests and that was easily able to outwit any little politician who lined up against it. After all, a minister is only for a few months; a bureaucrat is for life. Moreover, Mr Blair seized his chance very cleverly, transforming his party from that of the working to that of the nomenklatura class. The chief executive of one of the NHS trusts in which I worked stated quite openly that he job was to get the government re-elected. The problem is that defeating this class is like trying to get the sourness out of sour milk. So we have seen the future, and it is Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust. The  best we can hope for (though it is a rather forlorn hope) that any reforms suggested by the Francis Report will not make things worse. Unfortunately, for every disaster produced by the adoption of procedural outcomes there are six procedural outcomes waiting to be adopted.    

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It seems to me that Roger Kimball is of this exalted company. He is, like them, a man of parts: the editor of a distinguished cultural review that has just celebrated its 30th anniversary (the New Criterion), and that exerts an influence far beyond its faithful and discriminating subscribers; he runs a publishing house and blogs for PJ Media. Yet he also writes elegant essays of literary and cultural criticism, of which this book is a further collection (he has published several others), which show broad interests, wide reading and deep understanding. He examines everything from a definite but not rigid philosophical standpoint; this enables him to discuss a wide range of topics, from John Buchan to an exhibition of architectural drawings by two contrasting contemporary architects, from G.K. Chesterton to an art museum at Bard College, without the reader feeling that he has a mere New Criterion miscellany in his hand. 

Kimball’s viewpoint-which I freely admit is mine-is that there are constants in human existence which it is vain and indeed dangerous to deny, and that the task of culture is to examine the present with an eye to the eternal. Good cultural criticism, therefore, will remain of interest and value long after it was written, and I suspect that in a hundred years or more Kimball will unexpectedly delight someone as much as Bagehot or Birrell have delighted me. 

He writes with clarity and wit, which perhaps explains his turning away from the academic life in the humanities to which, at a different time, he might have seemed suited; for example he writes of the supposed age of information in which we live, “Data, data everywhere, but no one knows a thing.” This is a characteristically witty but also highly suggestive formulation, for it reminds readers of the necessity for a framework into which factual knowledge can be put, of the vital need for intellectual and moral perspective, and so forth. One of the aims of culture is, or ought to be, to provide such a framework and perspective, which is why easy resort to an iPhone is no substitute for a deeply-ingrained apprehension that the Roman Empire came before the French Revolution, Exodus before the Rolling Stones, and that the past may illuminate the present as much as the present illuminates itself. 

The extraction of the significance of authors or artists is a more intellectually exacting and worthwhile task than recording everything known or knowable about them, which is the favoured method of all too many biographers who seem to believe that all facts are created equal. Kimball performs the task with Somerset Maugham’s trinity of the virtues of good prose: simplicity, lucidity and euphony.

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