Don’t look back in anger
Objects are guiltless. A Roman spearhead bears no responsibility for the slaughter of Celtic tribes, nor is a looted African bronze to blame for the actions of the imperial looters. Only humans have moral responsibility for the actions of humans; the beautiful or mundane detritus of our lives is ethically inert. So I follow Tristram Hunt in his balanced and thoughtful recent piece in Prospect (“Museum peace,” November). Museums and galleries are teaching places in which context is all and through which wider moral debates can properly be conducted.
I don’t think it’s the job, however, of curatorial staff to direct the visitor towards a simple viewpoint. Once we impose a singular hierarchy of value—the Jewishness in the story is less important than the slave wealth in the story—we are imposing argument, not opening debate. This is what, after all, the earliest colonialist European museum collections were doing in implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) guiding their visitors to the “truth” that the hoarding culture, symbolised by the rococo marbled grandeur of the building itself, was superior to the harvested cultures displayed like shopkeepers’ wares. Throughout human history, where one culture—Christian, Muslim, Hindu—has enjoyed a technological superiority over others around it, the consequence has been exploitation. The result of that is the world we live in today, and if museums teach one lesson (they shouldn’t), that would be it.
Andrew Marr, broadcaster and author
Britain seems uncertain about its national history, its direction, and its place in the world. Not all of this is new. Our international posture has always been contested. After the Second World War, the right favoured Britain playing its role in the Cold War, while the left wanted the UK to lead towards a more internationalist and less militaristic future. But both retained one assumption of the fast-passing imperial age, namely the belief that Britain could make the world a better place.
More recently, trust that Britain can act as a “force for good” in world politics has waned. The centre has lost ground, and narratives about Britain’s national history have been reinvented. The populist right sees in Britain’s history a tradition of greatness; the activist left sees systemic, racist oppression. Hunt rightly says that most visitors to well-known museums have less acute politics.
History has transformative potential, and museums can reflect that. Making central the histories of previously oppressed or obscured communities can humanise those groups, and that can change lives. But history should not be in service to the present. Museums enable visitors to find things that they did not know existed; to see worlds that differ from their own. History is human life in the past, and human life moves on. Understanding it starts there.
Helen Parr, professor of history and author of “Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper” (Allen Lane)
Trivialising atrocity
David Allen Green is not the first person to have concluded that an enabling act could happen here (“At law,” November). Many social media commentators take the possibility for granted as they metaphorically scribble Hitler’s moustache onto the face of the prime minister. Of course, Green’s analysis is far more measured and meticulous than that, and he carefully puts the 1933 Act into its legal and historical context.
Nonetheless, to make the comparison, and to illustrate itwith Hitler’s speech at the Kroll Opera House beneath a swastika flag as Prospect chose to do online, may invite contemplation but also risks trivialisation of the many horrors of Nazism.
As regards Green’s argument, it is myopic to look only at the functional content of laws as if they were software programs, without also acknowledging the role of many other forces beyond the law in precipitating the rise of any dictatorship. Notwithstanding parliamentary sovereignty in the UK, and the absence of any entrenched civil liberties (the two “enabling” factors mentioned in the article), there has been no regime even approaching the description of a dictatorship since Cromwell’s death in 1658.
To make these observations is not to advocate for the view that “it can’t happen here,” but for a more balanced perspective, somewhere between that and the alarmism provoked by this article.
Barbara Rich, Lincoln’s Inn
The west is still losing
Regarding Deirdre McCloskey’s response (“Letters,” November) to my essay “How the west lost” the previous month, it is amusing, in view of her virulent anti-communism, that she so strongly resembles those conservative Soviet bureaucrats whom I met in the last years of the USSR: trapped in their exhausted ideological clichés, the tone of which became more hysterical the more their system collapsed around them.
As I made abundantly clear, my argument is not directed against capitalism as such, but in favour of a reformed and regulated capitalism serving the public good. Franklin D Roosevelt’s enemies accused him of communism. Do I really have to point out that the New Deal saved capitalism, and laid the foundation for the greatest period of mass prosperity in American history? Does successful capitalism really require that CEOs be paid 248 times the salary of their workers (as opposed to 25 times in the 1950s), and allow for manipulation by whicha multi-billionaire can pay less in taxes than his or her secretary?
As to McCloskey’s claim that China succeeded through “liberalisation,” this is deliberate distortion. China abandoned communism, but followed the examples of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore in adopting a highly state-led form of capitalism. So far, this has succeeded magnificently—especially when compared to the turmoil we are currently witnessing in the US.
Anatol Lieven, Georgetown University in Qatar
The growth cure
Barry Eichengreen’s public debt history is thoughtful and insightful (“A world awash with debt,” November). However, he is wrong to believe that the UK’s post-Napoleonic debt/GDP ratio was brought down by austerity, and that the post-Second World War debt ratio was “inflated away.”
There certainly was fiscal austerity in the 19th century, but the Napoleonic debt was brought down mainly by a century of buoyant economic growth. After the Second World War, debt reduction was achieved even faster despite looser fiscal policy. The reason was that the real rate of growth was double that in the 19th century.
Significantly, Eichengreen ignores what happened to the First World War debt. After a decade of fiscal austerity, it was higher in 1929 than it had been in 1918.
The lesson of all this is that debt is not a problem if the real economy grows faster than debt does. Keynes pointed out that in conditions of severe recession, an increased budget deficit can cause this to happen. But the idea of increasing the debt in order to reduce it is a paradox too far for our neoclassically trained economists. As is Keynes’s remark: “Look after unemployment and the budget will look after itself.”
Robert Skidelsky, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy, University of Warwick
What ails Auntie
Jean Seaton’s fascinating study of Tim Davie, the new Director-General of the BBC (“Mr cold eyes,” November), offers some hope for an organisation under fire both from a hostile government and counter-cultural headwinds.
Davie’s early moves to shore up the impartiality and universality of a still widely trusted news organisation suggest he recognises that it is through the support of the people themselves that he will win the fight for the future of the national broadcaster. Early comments in which he ruled out moving to “a subscription BBC that serves the few” were heartening.
Yet the challenges ahead are enormous, not just from an unfriendly government but from a changing nation in which minorities, the young and the poor are all just as likely to see the BBC as a disappointment as the majority of over 75s, now forced to pay the licence fee having previously been exempt.
And all this before the likely appointment of a government-approved, right-wing chair who many expect to be opposed to the idea of public service broadcasting.
Seaton ends by suggesting that Davie will defend an organisation he cares deeply about from attack. Let’s hope for the future of trusted, universal media of the calibre of the BBC’s output that she is right.
Jane Martinson, media columnist and Professor of Financial Journalism at City, University of London
Health and happiness
Nicholas Timmins provides a masterly account of the history and politics of social care policy—and the current lack of one (“The care conundrum,” November). He asks three questions: “Who pays for it? What do people get for that? And how and by whom should it be provided?”
All are important, but so is a fourth—what is the aim of the policy? Are we trying to mend a broken system and provide a minimal safety net for the old and vulnerable? Or could we be more ambitious about the sort of society we want to live in as our population ages?
Prevention is obviously key: tackling the causes of ill health and injury and keeping people out of care for as long as possible. Two million older households live in poor conditions, where they are at greater risk from the cold and from falls, and thus more likely to need care prematurely. Only 7 per cent of homes in the community are accessible for disabled people.
Creating good health is perhaps even more important than prevention: addressing our needs for meaning and purpose, social connections and autonomy. We need a positive vision of the future and not a narrow focus on damage limitation.
Timmins’s questions need answering—and the funding is fundamental—but they don’t go far enough. To put it simply, you can’t successfully reform the care system just by reforming the care system. Reforms need to be accompanied by bigger societal changes and a broader, more optimistic, vision.
Nigel Crisp, former head of NHS England, is author of “Health is made at home, hospitals are for repairs” (Salus)
Impenetrable cruelty
Regarding Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s excellent review of the second volume of William Feaver’s fascinating biography of Lucian Freud (“How far can you go?”, October), I have one query. It is the artist’s prerogative never to apologise, never to explain. As Freud once said, “the painter must give a completely free rein to any feeling or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn.” And it is not the critic’s role to hunt behind the picture for anything not there in the paint. By contrast, a biographer could perhaps risk conjecture about the roots of Freud’s cruelty, and weigh up both its human cost and its fierce power.
Emma Crichton-Miller, freelance arts journalist
Great minds can dislike
It was good to see the extract about Russell’s encouragement of Wittgenstein (“The way we were,” Aug/Sept), but it is important to realise just how turbulent their relationship could be.
A month after Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge, Russell complained that Wittgenstein was “very argumentative and tiresome.” A few months later Russell wrote: “I love him and feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve… He is the young man one hopes for. But… he is unstable and may go to pieces.” Russell wrote the introduction to the only book of philosophy Wittgenstein published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but Wittgenstein thought that all that remained after Russell’s words had been translated into German was “superficiality and misunderstanding.” In 1929, Russell was one of the examiners for Wittgenstein’s PhD, for which the Tractatus had been entered as his thesis. As Wittgenstein left his viva he said to his examiners, “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.”
Jonathan Beale and Constantine Sandis, British Wittgenstein Society
New heights of pedantry
November’s“In fact” column states that the last time every person was inside the Earth’s atmosphere was 31st October 2000 as, ever since two days after this date, the International Space Station has been continuously inhabited.
In fact, the ISS orbits within the thermosphere, which is considered a constituent layer of the atmosphere.
I apologise for my stratospheric, or perhaps even thermospheric, level of pedantry.
James Gardiner, London
Emperors of immodesty
I was interested to see Joyce Carol Oates mention Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s “fascination” with Napoleon (“Brief Encounter, Aug/Sept), because it implies genuine investment of some sort, which is accurate—if not always readily apparent. The two iconic Russian authors pilloried the French emperor as a shallow and pernicious narcissist. They criticised what they saw as the ego and hubris that drove his achievements and often connected the Napoleonic drive to success with unethical acts—in Crime and Punishment ambition leads to murder, whereas in War and Peace it sends young men to their deaths on the battlefield. However, I can think of few authors more ambitious than Tolstoy, who placed himself in the pantheon of world literature, told Soviet writer Maskim Gorky that “without false modesty, War and Peace is like the Iliad,” and went on to reinvent himself as a spiritual sage in later years. Surely such a man could not hate Napoleon for his ambition? Perhaps he and Dostoevsky were protesting a bit too much in their proclaimed distaste for the French emperor. Ani Kokobobo, University of KansasIn fact:
In 2019, 70,936 cases of gonorrhoea were reported in England, the highest level since records began over 100 years ago.
BBC News, 3rd September 2020
Dan Quayle, US Vice President (1989-93) was born in 1947 and is younger than Donald Trump (1946) and Joe Biden (1942).
@ifanmj, 7th October 2020
The pandemic has left nearly 20 per cent of the world’s 1.6m merchant sailors stranded at sea.
Bloomberg, 17th September 2020
Boris Johnson’s salary is £150,000, less than the prime ministers of New Zealand (Jacinda Ardern earns £240,000) or Liechtenstein (Adrian Hasler receives £195,000).
Daily Mail, 25th September 2020
Out of 71 recipients of the PDSA Dickin Medal, awarded to animals serving with valour in war, there have been 34 dogs, 32 messenger pigeons, four horses and one cat.
Telegraph, 29th August 2020
For the first time since independence, Singapore has an official leader of the opposition: Pritam Singh of the Workers’ Party.
The Ballot, 1st October 2020
About 9 per cent of the global Jewish population lives in Europe, compared with nearly 90 per cent in the late 19th century.
Guardian, 25th October 2020
In August, chess.com, the world’s biggest website for online players, banned almost 17,000 members for computer-assisted cheating.
Sunday Post, 25th October 2020
Children’s author Beatrix Potter loved mycology and wrote a paper on the germination of fungi spores, but as a woman was not allowed to present it herself to the Linnean Society. Her drawings are still used to identify mushrooms.
Book Riot, 28th July 2020
