If I ruled the world: Howard Jacobson

Forget spring. If I ruled the world every day would be the first day of autumn. It’s autumn that concentrates the mind on serious things and we are dying of triviality. We are dying of hatred and brutality as well, of course, but I will be no fantasist despot. I will change only what’s within my power to change, in order that life might be a little more dignified for those fortunate enough to escape the violence.

A Minister for Scepticism will be my first appointment, and he will be in his job for no more than a month to prevent his scepticism degenerating into dogma. No dogma can be tolerated. Any thinker, writer or politician caught in the vicinity of an ideology—embracing one view because it accords with another or contributes to a worldview or schema—will be subject to house arrest and made to read the works of authors he politically abominates. It would be mandatory for anyone in the business of expressing views to demonstrate that in any single week he has moved at least once to the left of prevailing opinion, at least once to the right, and the rest of the time has had no truck with prevailing opinion at all. Beliefs, at all levels of society, are to be abjured.

Make no mistake: I will prove to be the People’s Potentate, benign to the point of indulgence when it comes to the animal appetites and affections of the populace. But just as the people cannot be trusted with a conviction, so they cannot be allowed to exercise what they see as their democratic right to pass judgement. They can exchange what gossip and photographs of themselves they choose on social media, but the minute they are caught disclosing how far into a book they are—as if anyone gives a monkey’s—or announcing how many stars they intend to award it—as though their verdict is of the slightest value—their accounts will be closed. That what passes as judgement is most of the time no more than a description of the limitations of the person passing it will be an axiom of my rule.

There will be no musicals performed that were written after 1950, and no chorus lines tolerated in any of them. This is not a bias against dancing in itself. Let the people dance, I say. My own palaces will reverberate to the sound of balls. It’s watching dancing that will be outlawed. Dancing no more exists to be watched than does motor racing or cycling. Gawping will be the moral death of us. As, of course, cycling will be the actual death of anyone who prefers to walk. Hence cyclists will no longer be permitted on public roads and pavements. Private parks are to be set aside for cyclists so they can pedal without offence to everybody else. Here there will be traffic lights set permanently on red so cyclists can satisfy their compulsion to ignore them, causing bodily harm only to one another. No restrictions will be made on what they wear. In the privacy of these parks, sartorial ugliness will be winked at.

But, to return to musicals: where they are licensed, those licenses will expire after three months. Anything longer and the easily-besotted start to lose their minds. Crazes develop, queues form, tickets change hands for inordinate amounts of money, songs are sung that should be forgotten and singers lauded who should be locked away. The final straw is the wearing of T-shirts listing the venues where the musical has been staged. Why people want to wear T-shirts listing venues is a mystery my rule will not have the time to ponder. There will simply be no wearing of T-shirts with words on them, full stop. Just as the faculty of admiration is too precious to be wasted on musicals, so is language too sacred to be thrown away on a garment.

It will not, I accept, be achieved all at once, but little by little the very concept of the “fan”—a species of idolatry, and therefore inimical to the rational scepticism of my rule—will disappear. No person will bow down before another—not before an athlete, however fast; not before a weather girl, however winsome; not before a stand-up comedian, however much his observational comedy reminds you of your own. In the matter of laughter my ministries will be particularly vigilant. It is good to laugh. It is a sign of emotional and intellectual health. But inordinate, collusive laughter—the automatic laughter occasioned by the use of expletives, for example—denotes the opposite of health. It is the expression of a culture at its wit’s end. Between the excessive crying over musicals and the excessive laughing at comedians, between the murderousness of the urban cyclist and the same-minded conformity of the ideologue, there must be some mean of sanity to cling to. This it will be the function of my rule to locate.