2nd February 1998
Dear Christopher,
If there is anything worse than a young conservative, it is an old revolutionary. Young Tories are now practically extinct, but the western world is infested with paunchy radicals. My own path-a silly flirtation with revolution in my teens and 20s followed by a comfortable return to Tory certainties in middle age-used to be a cliche. Now I am an exception-asked, in wondering tones, how I come to be a reactionary. The disturbing thing about the late 1960s is that they are still going on; and we have not had to grow up.
The 1960s were not the emotional spasm they appeared to be, but a genuine upheaval with permanent effects. The year 1968 was not the beginning of this, but it was the moment when all its strands-political, moral, sexual and artistic-were woven most closely together. This was a cultural revolution far more destructive and iconoclastic than the Reformation-and lacking any true liberation. It reduced beloved institutions to rubble, while elevating musical, artistic and literary garbage. It introduced dope into western daily life. Its corrosive effects on language, manners, true human kindness, the education and upbringing of children, have been a disaster to anyone who has the slightest tenderness for the next generation. I regret that I was involved in it at all, and squirm with embarrassment when I recall most of what I said and did. I recognise my responsibility for the loss of things which I should have been cherishing and defending, while I was helping to knock them down.
You ought to agree with me. You went deeper into this than I ever did and understood it better than I. You cannot be pleased by the nurseries of ignorance we call schools and universities. You cannot be glad that heroin is sold openly in pit villages such as Grimethorpe. You cannot be happy that rock music is the nearest most people now get to poetry, or that faith, class and deference have been replaced-not, as you might have hoped, by rational self-confidence, but by the syrupy celebrity worship epitomised in the recent festival of the Goddess Diana.
Nor can you be delighted by the achievements of the political causes, foreign and domestic, that we espoused. Vietnam holds public executions of "economic saboteurs." Africa is an economic and political slum, from Cape Town to Cairo. The Clintons, that perfect counter-culture couple rooted more deeply in the movement than they now care to admit, turn out to be as inspiring in office as Warren Harding, liberated only in the president's unconventional sexual tastes.
The favourite social causes of our generation-unrestricted abortion, easy divorce, radical education, sexual equality, homosexual law reform, the end of censorship and the abolition of capital punishment-have all been victorious. In every single case, the warnings of the crustiest and stupidest conservatives now turn out to have been sober and accurate prophecies. The family is disappearing. Life, born and unborn, is cheaper than it has been for almost two centuries. Millions of women, willingly or not, abandon their children to the care of paid strangers. Sexual tolerance led not to civilised contentment but to demands for legal and moral equality between homosexual partners and married couples. Morality has been replaced by a cold hedonism which promotes sterility rather than fertility.
An ethical person is no longer one who behaves well, but one who publicly conforms to orthodox opinions. As for the liquid manure which gurgles out of Hollywood and television studios, who can now say that Mary Whitehouse did not have a case when she predicted this and warned of its effects? And who can now read the evidence of clerics and literary persons, who declared that Lady Chatterley's Lover was a puritan and moral book, without a snigger?
We have not merely changed the rules of politics and morality. With our complacent acceptance of narcotics and our worship of talentless rock music-both of which provide exaltation without effort-we have broken the link between pleasure and reward as well as that between crime and punishment. By mocking the ideal of the gentleman we have elevated ambition and greed, unrestrained by concern for others. Surely this is not what we wanted? We have cut down the forest of custom and law which protected us. Yet to oppose or criticise these changes is to become a lonely dissident.
It is fashionable in Britain at the moment to blame our social decay on Margaret Thatcher and the "cuts" which she failed to make in social spending. As it happens, I accept that both the Thatcher and the Reagan administrations lacked a moral centre, and I believe that this is why they failed to achieve anything lasting. However, the truly serious diseases of our society are the work of our own spoiled generation: we wanted everything designed for our convenience and gratification, chose causes because they made us feel superior to our parents rather than because we were truly concerned about them, and then called our selfish wails a revolution.
Yours fraternally,
Peter
3rd February 1998
Dear Peter,
I think we might start as we mean to go on, and leave my circumference out of it. (After all, in your eyes, I was worse when I was leaner.)
In the autumn of 1996, I was interviewing Václav Havel in Prague. He spoke very warmly of Bill Clinton and declared himself-rather indiscreetly, I thought-in favour of his re-election. "I feel a bond with Mr Clinton," he said. "Like me, he is a man of the 1960s." A definite gloom descended upon me. As a relatively unrepentant soixante-huitard, I felt that I could trace some of the filiations connecting 1968 to 1989. Sixty-eighters I had known, or came to know, had become valiant eighty-niners. I mention Adam Michnik, Jan Kavan, Miklos Haraszti, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Peter Schneider and the late Rudolf Bahro-not in order to drop illustrious names but to show "where I'm coming from." In the old debate between EP Thompson and Leszek Kolakowski, for example, I always thought that Thompson had the right of it because he believed that some of the 1960s spirit, however unintended, had begun in 1956.
Bill Clinton, on the other hand, has always seemed to me a gruesome combination of baby-boomer narcissism and political correctness. All decades are arbitrary, of course (and I suspect that you would rather periodise history by reigns), but the 1960s did have a definite shape and definition. By its close, in a phrase that I detested at the time, "the personal had become political." Much of what you do not like in the modern world can indeed be blamed on the ethos concealed in that slogan. But it was the exhausted and demoralised terminus of the time, rather than its most authentic expression.
I am writing this from my current roost at the University of California at Berkeley. What was the position as viewed from here in the spring of, say, 1967? The college and state authorities claimed the right to invigilate and suppress most forms of political expression. Volunteers from the campus took their lives in their hands if they journeyed-as many did-south of the Mason-Dixon line, where millions of Americans were denied the essentials of citizenship. Meanwhile the university served as a think-tank and laboratory for an unjust war of aggression in Indochina. And much of the state of California was a proving ground for thermonuclear experiments which calmly envisaged the extinction of the human species for the sake of a dishonest superpower quarrel. Thanks in part to a cultural and political rebellion with which the name Berkeley is identified, the extension of civil rights became unstoppable, while a lousy war was actually stopped-in large part by a movement of citizens.
My chief regret, looking back on that period, is that I didn't play a more active part. Two of the great initiatives which also featured locally-the struggle for decent treatment for the Spanish-speaking underclass and the movement for nuclear disarmament-still await their dénouement. I was, I might add, relatively unmoved by the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and totally unmoved by the music of Frank Zappa. But Václav Havel says that these voices came to him as liberators. It's not much of a test of one's broadmindedness to see what he must be driving at.
Take the same moment in Europe and elsewhere and you find that military fascists in Greece have just joined the sub-Nato club comprised of Spain and Portugal; that a British Labour government is capitulating to a racist settler revolt in Southern Rhodesia; that Northern Ireland is a sectarian political protectorate of a cynical "Conservative and Unionist" party and that Israel has taken the leap from tiny David to the role of occupying Goliath. Nelson Mandela has two decades of confinement still ahead of him. At Oxford University, the PPE course ends before the study of Keynes-and official permission must be sought for everything from apparel to the distribution of leaflets, to say nothing of equal overnight rights for heterosexuals in college (male guests had always been allowed). I probably did more to alter the conditions in the last category than in any other, but I did at least witness and applaud and argue for some of the later triumphs in the other areas too, all of which were substantially soixante-huitard in origin, and some of which still need more attention of the same kind. I would not take back a word or deed of it.
Nor would I-do you invite me to do so?-restore the ban on DH Lawrence. Furthermore, Zimbabwe and South Africa are much less "slummy" than they would have been under the old dispensation; and Vietnam, if our lot had had any say in the matter, would have become independent in 1945. Grimethorpe was fairly rugged when I saw it last during the miners' strike of 1974, but the prevalence of illegal hard stuff is the work of serious cartels with occasionally frightening friends in high places; hardly the outcome of a flower-child ethic. I am in favour of decriminalisation of all narcotics and also the unfettered availability of all forms of contraception. But I don't get your drift about fertility. Apart from your status as a Jeremiah who sees little hope for our species, do you want the human sexual urge to lead to the production of more bambini? (I realise that, like all Christians and monotheists, you are stuck with the belief that we are (a) created sick and (b) commanded to be well.)
Looking back, I am most of all struck by how little the theories of the ownership of the means of production had to do with the outcome of anything. I wouldn't have believed that at the time. There is also the matter of unintended consequences. (Endless grudge suits about harassment, say, instead of any talk about workplace democracy.) You could reply that I am picking the good bits and leaving the bad bits out. But in order to say that you would have to be a different kind of critic, one who is not merely issuing an undifferentiated Whitehousean lament.
Fraternally,
Christopher
4th February 1998
Dear Christopher,
As a person of girth, I can assure you that it is the politics, not the podge, that I object to.
You have found my weak point with your mention of Václav Havel and his comrades, but I think I can explain their forgivable error. They were engaged in a genuine, dangerous liberation struggle rather than the vainglorious play-acting on our side of the curtain. There was no nonsense about repressive tolerance from Comrades Gierek and Honecker. It is true that some eastern and central Europeans may have taken inspiration from our silliness, and mistaken the self-pitying whine of rock music for the sound of revolt. However, I suspect this was only because they thought we were more serious than we were. Being so serious themselves, they could not conceive that we were so trivial. They may also have felt that the banal contentment of the Nato countries lacked nobility as a goal, even if it was what millions desired.
Do you perhaps overstate the horrors of pre-revolutionary life? In your Oxford, the PPE course may have ended before Keynes. In today's Oxford, undergraduates are enrolled who have never heard of Keynes-and could not spell his name even if they had, although they are of course free to engage in any kind of sex, while eminent college principals publicly excuse illegal drug-taking. Could these things be connected? You say the Berkeley and California authorities "claimed the right to suppress most forms of political expression?" What sort of language remains to describe real dictatorships?
Narcotic cartels thrive because we removed the moral barriers against drugs. DH Lawrence was never banned, just subtly restricted so that true pornography could be prohibited. Break the link between the sexual urge and procreation, and you get-well, what we have got. And I knew you wouldn't like it, but as a monotheist I have to point out that of course the dismantling of faith is to blame for the Spencer cult and many other pagan manifestations that you rightly despise.
Yours fraternally,
Peter
5th February 1998
Dear Peter,
Do not think for a moment that a more generous and expansive tone is going to save you. As head of the family it is my job-nay, it is my duty-to inculcate some lessons that you will not soon forget.
My old college was good enough to award me a scholarship to visit the US, and by way of return I still offer myself on the hospitality list for those who benefit from the same programme. As the years have passed, the main change is that about half the recipients are young women. (That's up from a whopping 0 per cent in 1970, when there were no female members of the college at all.) It would be condescending to say that they seem bright and well read, because I am aware that admiration for youth is a trap set for middle age. What I can say for sure is that they are no worse than my contemporaries were.
As late as Harold Wilson's "victory" in 1966, it was illegal to be grown up and "queer" in Britain. Felons were executed by hanging, and the debased concept of "deterrence" made some people argue that it didn't matter if the odd innocent went through the trapdoor as well. There was book and theatre censorship, the latter imposed by someone styling himself "The Lord Chamberlain." These were indeed the days of traditional standards.
You may think that you have caught me in a slothful phrasing about "political expression," but if I had been writing about a totalitarian system I would have elided the word "most," and substituted "forbid" or "compel" for "suppress." I would also have omitted the word "claim." Casuists and neo-conservatives may have fooled about with the genuine distinction between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian," but I give them credit for being deadly serious about the authoritarian option. They preferred it to democracy, as well as to absolutism-at home, as well as abroad.
A considerable part of the grandeur of Martin Luther King, Jr was that, with a pretty full plate in front of him-including daily threats to his life-he insisted on going the extra mile and denouncing the Vietnam war and nuclear blackmail. The entire black and white establishment united in saying that this proved his "extremism." You might want to reconsider your choice of the term "self-interested."
Once you are done with murder and theft and the other human universals, there is no serious behavioural problem to which prohibition is the solution. And there is no way of "breaking the link" between the sexual urge and procreation. A bit of distance between those two things has, however, been found helpful by many people who are ethically superior to both of us. It is also the profound aspiration of many in those poor countries which you loftily wrote off as "slums."
Faith in the supernatural and the paranormal is not my responsibility. But did not the same Church of England, a state church, which sanctified a royal wedding while knowing it to be a sham, play hypocritical host to the obsequies in an ancient abbey? And was this paganism? The struggle against cretinism must be waged every day and in every decade, and is not much forwarded by those who grizzle that it's been all downhill ever since, whatever year it was when their own memories began to go a bit dim.
Yours fraternally,
Christopher
6th February 1998
Dear Christopher,
In the Dallas Museum of Art there is, or used to be, a rather frightening painting of the prodigal son returning, years too late, to a ruined and deserted homestead. I am afraid that our generation, the most indulged in human history, has wasted its substance on riotous living, shrugged, and charged it to our credit cards. If we ever realise that it is time to turn for home, we too will probably have left it too late. I am frustrated by the Panglossian refusal of the left even to consider the possibility that the past 30 years have been a dreadful mistake. Your side has just as much to fear as mine from the approaching breakdown of social peace and the dark age of ignorance which will accompany it. If my tone is generous, it is because this subject matters too much to be lost in ad hominem bickering.
So let me teach you one or two lessons. I suspect that you were exceptional when you were chosen for your scholarship. I think it likely that your young visitors are also outstanding and may have given you a false impression. Friends of mine in the universities no longer bother to dispute that there has been a serious fall in standards, particularly in the body of knowledge expected at entrance. Interestingly, it is only governments (of both parties) which still seek to lie about this. I would have thought that might at least make you suspicious.
I am sure you don't mean to give the impression (although you very nearly do) that pre-1966 Britain punished buggery with the noose. However, this would accord with the dark picture you paint, of iron censorship and cruel intolerance. This is where we have to remember which question we are trying to answer. Mine is not: "Were things bad then?" It is: "Are they worse now? If so, why?" My monotheist view warns me that human society is not perfectible, and my reactionary position warns me that motion is not necessarily progress (ideas which ought not to be as eccentric as they are).
It seems to me that there is, or ought to be, some tolerant midpoint between the dreary excesses of Old Compton Street and illegal homosexual scuffles in the Hyde Park gentlemen's convenience. I would also prefer not to have to defend any censorship at all, even the gentle restraining hand of the Lord Chamberlain. However, the torrent of coarseness and pornography which now overwhelms television, the cinema and the stage suggests to me that we may not have the proper moral equipment needed to handle liberty. And this is my reply to your assertion that there is no serious behavioural problem to which prohibition is the solution. I partly agree with this, but I think you will have to admit that the law can be a useful support for the true remedy, which is a universally accepted moral code, enforced by convention, disapproval and shame rather than by courts, prisons and gallows. It is this invisible web of protection which the enthusiasts of 1968 (and of 1789 and 1917) sought to tear to pieces. They also hoped to break down the pillars which held it up-love of country, loyalty, a shared acceptance of what is good and beautiful, religion, tradition, deference and respect for family and authority, and perhaps above all the great virtue of self-control.
They succeeded rather well. It is astonishing how short a time it has taken to smash up the family, to popularise abortion (the most violent, but not the only way of breaking the link between the sexual urge and procreation), to abolish history and literature, strip the altars, burn the flags, spit on the crown, give dope and contraceptives to children but deny them poetry or parents. Every wretched slogan shouted on the streets in 1968 has come to pass in the real lives of the millions. How can you still be pleased?
Yours fraternally,
Peter
7th February 1998
Dear Peter,
I suppose that you keep a high horse conveniently tethered nearby, and leap aboard to flog it round the paddock, whatever the topic may be. Well, I have a patient old donkey on my Animal Farm, and what he says is that history goes on for a very long time. As I think I conceded (taking my turn at the concessionary tone), there were "1960s" slogans that mutated into either silliness or nastiness or both. To the one I cited I could add: "Take your desire for reality"-a popular Parisian poster of the time. Taken literally, these helped to raise the curtain on the "me decade" and the "New Age." But, as I have also tried to remind you, they originated as notes of desperation or defeat when it became obvious that the short term was not to be millennial. Against that, I recently read an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, in which he defined himself as one of the shestidesyatniki-"people of the 1960s"-who were changed forever and for the better by the events and debates of that period. Glasnost and perestroika are grand words and always will be. They eclipse, for me, the downsides of sex and drugs and rock and roll (which do have their upsides as well).
You-if you will forgive me for saying so-sound a bit like one of today's Russian blimps, growling about how everything has gone to hell on a sled since the firm hand was withdrawn. I appreciate that you identify more with those who would restore the Orthodox dispensation but, having seen the Serbian cousins of this movement at work, I'll pass on that too.
An interesting question arises: which of us is the nostalgic one? I admit to finding political life in the 1960s more vivid and authentic and worthwhile than I have ever found it since. The current age of populism-and the manipulation of that populism by elite devices and techniques-has no charms for me. But this is a result of the 1960s only in the sense that the "gilded age" of corruption was the outcome of the American civil war. That is to say, it is true, but not the truth. And the standards and experiences of the abolitionists (who had not sought the war but did not shirk it) were mobilised for new battles under different flags. What could not be restored was the ante bellum "ideal" of an organic society in which each knew his or her place in some ineffable contract. Your yearning for something like this is utopian, but only in the most arid sense.
My students at Berkeley freely confess that they arrive with some large holes where their education should have been. But they were educated for a consumer society and not by my comrades; we will, nevertheless, contrive to keep the Dark Ages at bay. It is true that the television and cinema screens are full of crap (most of it rather sexless) but there are several excellent and flourishing bookstores within strolling distance to which I can direct them; and on the shelves are works by old literary and political allies of mine which for moral seriousness will bear comparison with any throne, altar or crown on offer.
After 30 years, I quite understand that there's no going back. But there are ways forward, even through the inevitable thicket of unintended consequences. You deny this to yourself by adopting an ethos of "deference" exploded long before the first baby ever boomed.
Fraternally,
Christopher
Dear Christopher,
If there is anything worse than a young conservative, it is an old revolutionary. Young Tories are now practically extinct, but the western world is infested with paunchy radicals. My own path-a silly flirtation with revolution in my teens and 20s followed by a comfortable return to Tory certainties in middle age-used to be a cliche. Now I am an exception-asked, in wondering tones, how I come to be a reactionary. The disturbing thing about the late 1960s is that they are still going on; and we have not had to grow up.
The 1960s were not the emotional spasm they appeared to be, but a genuine upheaval with permanent effects. The year 1968 was not the beginning of this, but it was the moment when all its strands-political, moral, sexual and artistic-were woven most closely together. This was a cultural revolution far more destructive and iconoclastic than the Reformation-and lacking any true liberation. It reduced beloved institutions to rubble, while elevating musical, artistic and literary garbage. It introduced dope into western daily life. Its corrosive effects on language, manners, true human kindness, the education and upbringing of children, have been a disaster to anyone who has the slightest tenderness for the next generation. I regret that I was involved in it at all, and squirm with embarrassment when I recall most of what I said and did. I recognise my responsibility for the loss of things which I should have been cherishing and defending, while I was helping to knock them down.
You ought to agree with me. You went deeper into this than I ever did and understood it better than I. You cannot be pleased by the nurseries of ignorance we call schools and universities. You cannot be glad that heroin is sold openly in pit villages such as Grimethorpe. You cannot be happy that rock music is the nearest most people now get to poetry, or that faith, class and deference have been replaced-not, as you might have hoped, by rational self-confidence, but by the syrupy celebrity worship epitomised in the recent festival of the Goddess Diana.
Nor can you be delighted by the achievements of the political causes, foreign and domestic, that we espoused. Vietnam holds public executions of "economic saboteurs." Africa is an economic and political slum, from Cape Town to Cairo. The Clintons, that perfect counter-culture couple rooted more deeply in the movement than they now care to admit, turn out to be as inspiring in office as Warren Harding, liberated only in the president's unconventional sexual tastes.
The favourite social causes of our generation-unrestricted abortion, easy divorce, radical education, sexual equality, homosexual law reform, the end of censorship and the abolition of capital punishment-have all been victorious. In every single case, the warnings of the crustiest and stupidest conservatives now turn out to have been sober and accurate prophecies. The family is disappearing. Life, born and unborn, is cheaper than it has been for almost two centuries. Millions of women, willingly or not, abandon their children to the care of paid strangers. Sexual tolerance led not to civilised contentment but to demands for legal and moral equality between homosexual partners and married couples. Morality has been replaced by a cold hedonism which promotes sterility rather than fertility.
An ethical person is no longer one who behaves well, but one who publicly conforms to orthodox opinions. As for the liquid manure which gurgles out of Hollywood and television studios, who can now say that Mary Whitehouse did not have a case when she predicted this and warned of its effects? And who can now read the evidence of clerics and literary persons, who declared that Lady Chatterley's Lover was a puritan and moral book, without a snigger?
We have not merely changed the rules of politics and morality. With our complacent acceptance of narcotics and our worship of talentless rock music-both of which provide exaltation without effort-we have broken the link between pleasure and reward as well as that between crime and punishment. By mocking the ideal of the gentleman we have elevated ambition and greed, unrestrained by concern for others. Surely this is not what we wanted? We have cut down the forest of custom and law which protected us. Yet to oppose or criticise these changes is to become a lonely dissident.
It is fashionable in Britain at the moment to blame our social decay on Margaret Thatcher and the "cuts" which she failed to make in social spending. As it happens, I accept that both the Thatcher and the Reagan administrations lacked a moral centre, and I believe that this is why they failed to achieve anything lasting. However, the truly serious diseases of our society are the work of our own spoiled generation: we wanted everything designed for our convenience and gratification, chose causes because they made us feel superior to our parents rather than because we were truly concerned about them, and then called our selfish wails a revolution.
Yours fraternally,
Peter
3rd February 1998
Dear Peter,
I think we might start as we mean to go on, and leave my circumference out of it. (After all, in your eyes, I was worse when I was leaner.)
In the autumn of 1996, I was interviewing Václav Havel in Prague. He spoke very warmly of Bill Clinton and declared himself-rather indiscreetly, I thought-in favour of his re-election. "I feel a bond with Mr Clinton," he said. "Like me, he is a man of the 1960s." A definite gloom descended upon me. As a relatively unrepentant soixante-huitard, I felt that I could trace some of the filiations connecting 1968 to 1989. Sixty-eighters I had known, or came to know, had become valiant eighty-niners. I mention Adam Michnik, Jan Kavan, Miklos Haraszti, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Peter Schneider and the late Rudolf Bahro-not in order to drop illustrious names but to show "where I'm coming from." In the old debate between EP Thompson and Leszek Kolakowski, for example, I always thought that Thompson had the right of it because he believed that some of the 1960s spirit, however unintended, had begun in 1956.
Bill Clinton, on the other hand, has always seemed to me a gruesome combination of baby-boomer narcissism and political correctness. All decades are arbitrary, of course (and I suspect that you would rather periodise history by reigns), but the 1960s did have a definite shape and definition. By its close, in a phrase that I detested at the time, "the personal had become political." Much of what you do not like in the modern world can indeed be blamed on the ethos concealed in that slogan. But it was the exhausted and demoralised terminus of the time, rather than its most authentic expression.
I am writing this from my current roost at the University of California at Berkeley. What was the position as viewed from here in the spring of, say, 1967? The college and state authorities claimed the right to invigilate and suppress most forms of political expression. Volunteers from the campus took their lives in their hands if they journeyed-as many did-south of the Mason-Dixon line, where millions of Americans were denied the essentials of citizenship. Meanwhile the university served as a think-tank and laboratory for an unjust war of aggression in Indochina. And much of the state of California was a proving ground for thermonuclear experiments which calmly envisaged the extinction of the human species for the sake of a dishonest superpower quarrel. Thanks in part to a cultural and political rebellion with which the name Berkeley is identified, the extension of civil rights became unstoppable, while a lousy war was actually stopped-in large part by a movement of citizens.
My chief regret, looking back on that period, is that I didn't play a more active part. Two of the great initiatives which also featured locally-the struggle for decent treatment for the Spanish-speaking underclass and the movement for nuclear disarmament-still await their dénouement. I was, I might add, relatively unmoved by the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and totally unmoved by the music of Frank Zappa. But Václav Havel says that these voices came to him as liberators. It's not much of a test of one's broadmindedness to see what he must be driving at.
Take the same moment in Europe and elsewhere and you find that military fascists in Greece have just joined the sub-Nato club comprised of Spain and Portugal; that a British Labour government is capitulating to a racist settler revolt in Southern Rhodesia; that Northern Ireland is a sectarian political protectorate of a cynical "Conservative and Unionist" party and that Israel has taken the leap from tiny David to the role of occupying Goliath. Nelson Mandela has two decades of confinement still ahead of him. At Oxford University, the PPE course ends before the study of Keynes-and official permission must be sought for everything from apparel to the distribution of leaflets, to say nothing of equal overnight rights for heterosexuals in college (male guests had always been allowed). I probably did more to alter the conditions in the last category than in any other, but I did at least witness and applaud and argue for some of the later triumphs in the other areas too, all of which were substantially soixante-huitard in origin, and some of which still need more attention of the same kind. I would not take back a word or deed of it.
Nor would I-do you invite me to do so?-restore the ban on DH Lawrence. Furthermore, Zimbabwe and South Africa are much less "slummy" than they would have been under the old dispensation; and Vietnam, if our lot had had any say in the matter, would have become independent in 1945. Grimethorpe was fairly rugged when I saw it last during the miners' strike of 1974, but the prevalence of illegal hard stuff is the work of serious cartels with occasionally frightening friends in high places; hardly the outcome of a flower-child ethic. I am in favour of decriminalisation of all narcotics and also the unfettered availability of all forms of contraception. But I don't get your drift about fertility. Apart from your status as a Jeremiah who sees little hope for our species, do you want the human sexual urge to lead to the production of more bambini? (I realise that, like all Christians and monotheists, you are stuck with the belief that we are (a) created sick and (b) commanded to be well.)
Looking back, I am most of all struck by how little the theories of the ownership of the means of production had to do with the outcome of anything. I wouldn't have believed that at the time. There is also the matter of unintended consequences. (Endless grudge suits about harassment, say, instead of any talk about workplace democracy.) You could reply that I am picking the good bits and leaving the bad bits out. But in order to say that you would have to be a different kind of critic, one who is not merely issuing an undifferentiated Whitehousean lament.
Fraternally,
Christopher
4th February 1998
Dear Christopher,
As a person of girth, I can assure you that it is the politics, not the podge, that I object to.
You have found my weak point with your mention of Václav Havel and his comrades, but I think I can explain their forgivable error. They were engaged in a genuine, dangerous liberation struggle rather than the vainglorious play-acting on our side of the curtain. There was no nonsense about repressive tolerance from Comrades Gierek and Honecker. It is true that some eastern and central Europeans may have taken inspiration from our silliness, and mistaken the self-pitying whine of rock music for the sound of revolt. However, I suspect this was only because they thought we were more serious than we were. Being so serious themselves, they could not conceive that we were so trivial. They may also have felt that the banal contentment of the Nato countries lacked nobility as a goal, even if it was what millions desired.
Do you perhaps overstate the horrors of pre-revolutionary life? In your Oxford, the PPE course may have ended before Keynes. In today's Oxford, undergraduates are enrolled who have never heard of Keynes-and could not spell his name even if they had, although they are of course free to engage in any kind of sex, while eminent college principals publicly excuse illegal drug-taking. Could these things be connected? You say the Berkeley and California authorities "claimed the right to suppress most forms of political expression?" What sort of language remains to describe real dictatorships?
Narcotic cartels thrive because we removed the moral barriers against drugs. DH Lawrence was never banned, just subtly restricted so that true pornography could be prohibited. Break the link between the sexual urge and procreation, and you get-well, what we have got. And I knew you wouldn't like it, but as a monotheist I have to point out that of course the dismantling of faith is to blame for the Spencer cult and many other pagan manifestations that you rightly despise.
Yours fraternally,
Peter
5th February 1998
Dear Peter,
Do not think for a moment that a more generous and expansive tone is going to save you. As head of the family it is my job-nay, it is my duty-to inculcate some lessons that you will not soon forget.
My old college was good enough to award me a scholarship to visit the US, and by way of return I still offer myself on the hospitality list for those who benefit from the same programme. As the years have passed, the main change is that about half the recipients are young women. (That's up from a whopping 0 per cent in 1970, when there were no female members of the college at all.) It would be condescending to say that they seem bright and well read, because I am aware that admiration for youth is a trap set for middle age. What I can say for sure is that they are no worse than my contemporaries were.
As late as Harold Wilson's "victory" in 1966, it was illegal to be grown up and "queer" in Britain. Felons were executed by hanging, and the debased concept of "deterrence" made some people argue that it didn't matter if the odd innocent went through the trapdoor as well. There was book and theatre censorship, the latter imposed by someone styling himself "The Lord Chamberlain." These were indeed the days of traditional standards.
You may think that you have caught me in a slothful phrasing about "political expression," but if I had been writing about a totalitarian system I would have elided the word "most," and substituted "forbid" or "compel" for "suppress." I would also have omitted the word "claim." Casuists and neo-conservatives may have fooled about with the genuine distinction between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian," but I give them credit for being deadly serious about the authoritarian option. They preferred it to democracy, as well as to absolutism-at home, as well as abroad.
A considerable part of the grandeur of Martin Luther King, Jr was that, with a pretty full plate in front of him-including daily threats to his life-he insisted on going the extra mile and denouncing the Vietnam war and nuclear blackmail. The entire black and white establishment united in saying that this proved his "extremism." You might want to reconsider your choice of the term "self-interested."
Once you are done with murder and theft and the other human universals, there is no serious behavioural problem to which prohibition is the solution. And there is no way of "breaking the link" between the sexual urge and procreation. A bit of distance between those two things has, however, been found helpful by many people who are ethically superior to both of us. It is also the profound aspiration of many in those poor countries which you loftily wrote off as "slums."
Faith in the supernatural and the paranormal is not my responsibility. But did not the same Church of England, a state church, which sanctified a royal wedding while knowing it to be a sham, play hypocritical host to the obsequies in an ancient abbey? And was this paganism? The struggle against cretinism must be waged every day and in every decade, and is not much forwarded by those who grizzle that it's been all downhill ever since, whatever year it was when their own memories began to go a bit dim.
Yours fraternally,
Christopher
6th February 1998
Dear Christopher,
In the Dallas Museum of Art there is, or used to be, a rather frightening painting of the prodigal son returning, years too late, to a ruined and deserted homestead. I am afraid that our generation, the most indulged in human history, has wasted its substance on riotous living, shrugged, and charged it to our credit cards. If we ever realise that it is time to turn for home, we too will probably have left it too late. I am frustrated by the Panglossian refusal of the left even to consider the possibility that the past 30 years have been a dreadful mistake. Your side has just as much to fear as mine from the approaching breakdown of social peace and the dark age of ignorance which will accompany it. If my tone is generous, it is because this subject matters too much to be lost in ad hominem bickering.
So let me teach you one or two lessons. I suspect that you were exceptional when you were chosen for your scholarship. I think it likely that your young visitors are also outstanding and may have given you a false impression. Friends of mine in the universities no longer bother to dispute that there has been a serious fall in standards, particularly in the body of knowledge expected at entrance. Interestingly, it is only governments (of both parties) which still seek to lie about this. I would have thought that might at least make you suspicious.
I am sure you don't mean to give the impression (although you very nearly do) that pre-1966 Britain punished buggery with the noose. However, this would accord with the dark picture you paint, of iron censorship and cruel intolerance. This is where we have to remember which question we are trying to answer. Mine is not: "Were things bad then?" It is: "Are they worse now? If so, why?" My monotheist view warns me that human society is not perfectible, and my reactionary position warns me that motion is not necessarily progress (ideas which ought not to be as eccentric as they are).
It seems to me that there is, or ought to be, some tolerant midpoint between the dreary excesses of Old Compton Street and illegal homosexual scuffles in the Hyde Park gentlemen's convenience. I would also prefer not to have to defend any censorship at all, even the gentle restraining hand of the Lord Chamberlain. However, the torrent of coarseness and pornography which now overwhelms television, the cinema and the stage suggests to me that we may not have the proper moral equipment needed to handle liberty. And this is my reply to your assertion that there is no serious behavioural problem to which prohibition is the solution. I partly agree with this, but I think you will have to admit that the law can be a useful support for the true remedy, which is a universally accepted moral code, enforced by convention, disapproval and shame rather than by courts, prisons and gallows. It is this invisible web of protection which the enthusiasts of 1968 (and of 1789 and 1917) sought to tear to pieces. They also hoped to break down the pillars which held it up-love of country, loyalty, a shared acceptance of what is good and beautiful, religion, tradition, deference and respect for family and authority, and perhaps above all the great virtue of self-control.
They succeeded rather well. It is astonishing how short a time it has taken to smash up the family, to popularise abortion (the most violent, but not the only way of breaking the link between the sexual urge and procreation), to abolish history and literature, strip the altars, burn the flags, spit on the crown, give dope and contraceptives to children but deny them poetry or parents. Every wretched slogan shouted on the streets in 1968 has come to pass in the real lives of the millions. How can you still be pleased?
Yours fraternally,
Peter
7th February 1998
Dear Peter,
I suppose that you keep a high horse conveniently tethered nearby, and leap aboard to flog it round the paddock, whatever the topic may be. Well, I have a patient old donkey on my Animal Farm, and what he says is that history goes on for a very long time. As I think I conceded (taking my turn at the concessionary tone), there were "1960s" slogans that mutated into either silliness or nastiness or both. To the one I cited I could add: "Take your desire for reality"-a popular Parisian poster of the time. Taken literally, these helped to raise the curtain on the "me decade" and the "New Age." But, as I have also tried to remind you, they originated as notes of desperation or defeat when it became obvious that the short term was not to be millennial. Against that, I recently read an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, in which he defined himself as one of the shestidesyatniki-"people of the 1960s"-who were changed forever and for the better by the events and debates of that period. Glasnost and perestroika are grand words and always will be. They eclipse, for me, the downsides of sex and drugs and rock and roll (which do have their upsides as well).
You-if you will forgive me for saying so-sound a bit like one of today's Russian blimps, growling about how everything has gone to hell on a sled since the firm hand was withdrawn. I appreciate that you identify more with those who would restore the Orthodox dispensation but, having seen the Serbian cousins of this movement at work, I'll pass on that too.
An interesting question arises: which of us is the nostalgic one? I admit to finding political life in the 1960s more vivid and authentic and worthwhile than I have ever found it since. The current age of populism-and the manipulation of that populism by elite devices and techniques-has no charms for me. But this is a result of the 1960s only in the sense that the "gilded age" of corruption was the outcome of the American civil war. That is to say, it is true, but not the truth. And the standards and experiences of the abolitionists (who had not sought the war but did not shirk it) were mobilised for new battles under different flags. What could not be restored was the ante bellum "ideal" of an organic society in which each knew his or her place in some ineffable contract. Your yearning for something like this is utopian, but only in the most arid sense.
My students at Berkeley freely confess that they arrive with some large holes where their education should have been. But they were educated for a consumer society and not by my comrades; we will, nevertheless, contrive to keep the Dark Ages at bay. It is true that the television and cinema screens are full of crap (most of it rather sexless) but there are several excellent and flourishing bookstores within strolling distance to which I can direct them; and on the shelves are works by old literary and political allies of mine which for moral seriousness will bear comparison with any throne, altar or crown on offer.
After 30 years, I quite understand that there's no going back. But there are ways forward, even through the inevitable thicket of unintended consequences. You deny this to yourself by adopting an ethos of "deference" exploded long before the first baby ever boomed.
Fraternally,
Christopher
