normblog

Enjoying the wedding, no buts

Was it OK to enjoy yesterday's marriage of Prince William to Catherine Middleton? Because I did enjoy it. It was an event I had taken no interest in whatever in the lead-up, and one to which I didn't expect to give any time on the day. As it turned out, however, I did give time to it. I got drawn into the BBC's coverage, being watched wall-to-wall in this house by my own dearly beloved; and occasionally popping my head round the door to see how things were going eventually hooked me good and proper. The huge amount of wedding chat on Twitter also helped to pull me in.

So I've been wondering if I should feel guilty about this behaviour. Was it OK - OK for me as for a zillion other people - to enjoy the Royal wedding? Not that anyone needs my agreement or endorsement, but I shall argue below that it was OK, even if one's commitments are, as mine are, democratic and republican. I make the argument in two stages. First, I set out the positive case. Then I meet what I take to be the main form of carping objection.

(1) I do not support monarchy: neither monarchy in general, nor the British monarchy as is. Yet I have the good fortune to live in a democratic country, in which, if opinion surveys are to be trusted, somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of the population do support the continuation of that institution. If many of this number want to make a Royal event the occasion for a great party, why should I begrudge them that? Why, indeed, feel it necessary to grumble from the sidelines rather than joining in and enjoying the day? After all, nothing stops anyone who wants out to stay out. And apart from that - apart from the fact that participation is not compulsory - there are other more substantive reasons why one might want to join in. Many might be taking part because they have royalist sympathies, but even without these you might share some of the other impulses evident in what the participants say.

Here are three such impulses. (a) Feeling part of a wider national community, which many take the monarchy to symbolize: even if you aren't attached to this particular symbolism, you might find the occasion one you can identify with as an experience shared by a wider collectivity to which you are pleased to belong. (b) The wedding, like any wedding, expresses the love of two people, and one may enjoy the sight of their happiness and the celebration of it. (c) The occasion is, just in itself, a grand get-together, with some considerable pageantry thrown in; and people seem to like taking part in such events periodically. For any or all of these reasons, none of them noxious, someone might, without any qualms, enjoy what took place yesterday.

(2) But then you read a certain kind of reaction to the Royal wedding and are given to understand that simply enjoying it - just like that, no buts - is too narrow a focus ideologically. It is failing to see some related and lamentable phenomena. This is the view of Polly Toynbee. She flirts for a brief moment with the temptation to go along with the happy proceedings - 'we may just wish them well and use the day off to party, as many did' - but she finds this not to her taste, preferring to strike a more ominous note:

History may see the wedding as a Marie Antoinette moment, a layer of ormolu hiding a social dislocation whose cracks are only starting to emerge.

And Toynbee details those cracks: static GDP, shrinking household incomes, jobs and services cut, the NHS at risk. The same thing in today's Guardian leader: 'only a churl', it starts out by saying, would deny that this was a sumptuous and spectacular day. But:

Britain is not now a happier or a safer, a more purposive or a less unequal place than it was before Prince William placed the ring on his bride's finger.

And in case its readers had imagined that a wedding could have dispatched all troublesome questions, the Guardian reminds us of what some of those questions are.

Let us distinguish in these two pieces their grudging spirit from the political concerns of which they remind us. That I do not invent about the first is shown by the fact that neither piece flinches from speculating on the future of this marriage - on whether or not it will be a success. Toynbee writes: 'The more extreme a ceremony's extravagance, the more superstitious you might feel about the outcome: the simpler the better the prognosis, in my experience.' The Guardian, likewise, editorializes: 'An undeniably affecting wedding between two people who seem nicely primed for their shared future – though who can really say, after last time?' Compare this sentiment with that of the crowds yesterday: people wishing the couple well, wishing it in spades, hoping for the best on their behalf - the sort of thing one does at a wedding. Of course marriages fail as well as succeed; everybody knows this. But who, other than precisely a churl, makes it their business at the side of a wedding party to hint darkly that the marriage may go wrong. How miserly, how pathetic.

As for the political concerns, these are real enough. But insisting on their linkage to William and Kate's wedding presumes something that, though it is loosely true, is in context false. This presumption is that everything must be connected. Well, metaphysically perhaps everything is connected; and it is certainly proper to remind all of us who live reasonably well in this world that not everybody does and we have a moral obligation to others in need or emergency to do something to help. This is not the same thing at all, however, as saying that no one may enjoy any part of her life, have a good time, celebrate together with others. That would be a bleak, inhumane philosophy. Would you forbid a child a birthday party, or anyone a holiday or the price of a book or a visit to the theatre or a football match because there are people for whom these are unaffordable luxuries, or who are, indeed, even worse off than that? An unlikely reference here - unlikely because of the extremity to which it refers - is Adorno's famous dictum about no poetry after Auschwitz. What was wrong with that thought, as he himself later recognized, provides a necessary pointer; for not only is poetry needed as a form of response to adversity, even the most terrible, but the idea that human beings should forego all enjoyments while there is trouble or evil in the world is also a sorry counsel of deprivation.

We should not let great occasions that enhance the lives of many obscure the hardships of others, but then there never was a danger that Britain's current political problems would be lost sight of behind yesterday's celebration. It was, after all, only one day. You can still make your republican points, if that is what you want to do. You can still fight for a more egalitarian society likewise; you can focus on global poverty. And you can think it a serious misjudgement that two former prime ministers weren't invited to this palpably national occasion. But none of these was a 'but' to puncture the enjoyment of a splendid day.

The normblog profile 386: Meg Rosoff

Meg Rosoff was born in Boston and educated at Harvard and St Martin's College of Art, London. She worked in New York City before moving to London in 1989. Her first novel, How I Live Now, has been translated into 28 languages and is currently being made into a film. Her second novel, Just In Case, won the Carnegie Medal and earned her the title of 'Queen of Weird' from the LA Times. Her fifth novel, There Is No Dog, will be published in September 2011. Meg lives in North London with her artist husband, daughter and two lurchers. She blogs at Meg Rosoff.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > If you don't love it, don't do it.

What are your favourite blogs? > Hyperbole and a Half, and Blood In The Sand.

What are you reading at the moment? > Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones; Mal Peet's Life: An Exploded Diagram; Through The Language Glass by Guy Deutscher.

What is the best novel you've ever read? > Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow has to be up there.

What is your favourite poem? > W.B. Yeats, 'Sailing to Byzantium'.

What is your favourite movie? > Decalogue, by Kieslowski. Slightly cheating because it's ten films.

What is your favourite song? > 'Blue Red and Grey', Pete Townsend, from The Who By Numbers.

Who is your favourite composer? > Ravel.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > Theism.

What is your favourite piece of political wisdom? > Not sure this counts, but the quote I live by is from Napoleon: 'If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna.'

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > Outlaw private education.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > I think it's long past.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Think about death every day. Make your life into something you won't regret at the last minute.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Compassion.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Mediocrity.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Cooking. I'd eat beans out of cans, fruit, and toast if I lived alone.

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you'd do differently? > Almost everything. Only then I wouldn't have got to this point, which I like.

What would you call your autobiography? > Just Starting To Get The Hang of It.

Who would play you in the movie about your life? > Eddie Izzard.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > A village in the Himalayas.

What would your ideal holiday be? > What it is now - staring out at the sea in Suffolk.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > Riding horses.

What is your most treasured possession? > I have an Indian glass painting of a lute player from around 1820. My husband gave it to me for my birthday. It is astonishingly beautiful.

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to? > Malachy.

What talent would you most like to have? > I would give my left arm to speak 12 languages fluently.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > Olympic dressage rider.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > James Thurber.

If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come true, what would you wish for? > I'd wish that whatever miserable process of evolution created a species plagued by overpopulation, starvation, greed, illness and war could be replaced by humans adapted to live quietly, happily and at peace.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > I would give more money away.

What animal would you most like to be? > A killer whale.

[A list of all the normblog profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

From eternity to here

In the Sydney Morning Herald Elizabeth Farrelly is lamenting the loss of eternity: 'we no longer see ourselves as part of eternity', she writes, 'but simply as the poor, bare, forked animals that Darwinian modernism bequeathed us. Our allotted span is all we have'. This is bad in various ways, Farrelly believes, and those ways seem to include materialism, egalitarianism (being 'the refusal of excellence'), populism and even the stripping out of 'all mystery, depth and texture' in church.

However, the most telling thing is Farrelly's conclusion:

At this rate it may soon be last supper time for us all. But what's worse, if we're reducible to primates, is how hard it is to care.

What a poor posing of the alternatives: either eternity or else we're mere primates and who gives a damn? Yet that's her reduction, and a lot of people who don't think they'll make eternity do give a damn. They do because of, oh, Shakespeare and Austen and Damon Runyon; and Bach and Thelonious Monk and Bob Dylan and Hank Williams; and the good things people have done for love, and love itself; and every kind of human beauty and courage and dignity; and walking in the sun, and spending good time with friends; and (hey, why not?) Lionel Messi's second goal last night. Humanity is not impoverished by the loss of eternity unless by your own impoverishing insistence.

Recognizing their refusal

I have previously noted the omissions of the Obama administration with respect to the interrogation practices authorized by its predecessor. Jameel Jaffer and Larry Siems focus on one of the things it might now do to make a difference for the better in the same regard:

There are many things the Obama administration could do to repair some of the damage done by the last administration, but among the simplest and most urgent is this: It could recognize and honor the public servants who rejected torture.
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President Obama has disavowed torture, but he has been unenthusiastic about examining the last administration's interrogation policies. He has said the country should look to the future rather than the past. But averting our eyes from recent history means... that we betray the public servants who risked so much to reverse what they knew was a disastrous and shameful course.

Those who stayed true to our values and stood up against cruelty are worthy of a wide range of civilian and military commendations, up to and including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Honoring them is a way of encouraging the best in our public servants, now and in the future. It is also a way of honoring the best in ourselves.

Failed memenik

Usually I like having a go at this sort of thing, but Harriet's Meme of Fours is leaving me with too many blanks, so I'd better give it a miss. Four Jobs I Have Had in My Life? I worked a few months in an accountant's office after leaving school, and I've been an academic. That's it. Four Books I Would Read Over and Over Again? Not a one - not even those I love best. There's too much else to read. Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now? Nowhere at all. I'm happy at home. OK, I could answer the others, but I reckon a failure rate of one in three excludes me. You might like to have a go, though.

Awaiting the AV verdict

Hilary Wainwright is supporting AV 'as an opportunity to open up a process of structural political change'. As readers of this blog will know, I'm also supporting AV, though my first reason for doing so is that I think it's fairer than FPTP. So I'm on the same side as Hilary in this. But there are two things she says in making the case that I don't agree with. She writes:

Parliament's numbness to the million-strong march against the Iraq war has left a legacy of profound scepticism about parliamentary politics as we know it.

It isn't the function of a representative assembly to exactly reflect the will of a mass demonstration. This is even assuming that the latter gives an accurate expression of opinion in the country at large. As it happens the march against the Iraq war didn't do that, since opinion was divided.

Hilary also writes:

A no vote to electoral reform would send out all the wrong messages, and be trumpeted as evidence that the British public is broadly content with our politics.

Wrong messages? I don't know about its showing contentment with our politics, but a no vote would show that a majority of those who cared enough to vote preferred to keep FPTP. That would be a legitimate democratic verdict, wouldn't it?

Happy days clouded

It's a complicated business, happiness research, and that is no doubt because happiness itself is complicated. Ian, at Marbury, has the details of a study that correlates populations which are happier, on the one hand, with higher rates of suicide, on the other. (I'd better throw in there an 'all other things equal', just in case.) I find this result puzzling. I find it puzzling because, if the happier population is a place of more suicides, doesn't this immediately - even ipso facto - decrease the happiness level being measured? I mean, some of the people in the happier populations are so unhappy, they're dead. Surely that must be factored into the aggregate result.

The researchers' hypothesis as to why greater happiness correlates with a higher suicide rate is that 'human beings measure themselves against each other'; those tending towards feeling unhappy feel more unhappy when others around them are cheerful. I think the hypothesis is incomplete. There's also the fact that happier people have more time to contemplate ways of doing themselves in; less happy people are preoccupied with trying to make it through the day. (Via.)

A Jewish failure

Howard Jacobson nails the way Jews are blamed because of the Holocaust:

By brute consensus, now, Israel is the proof that Jews did not adequately learn the lesson of the Holocaust.

Forget Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is old hat. The new strategy... is to depict the Holocaust in all its horror in order that Jews can be charged ("You, of all people") with failing to live up to it. By this logic the Holocaust becomes an educational experience from which Jews were ethically obliged to graduate summa cum laude, Israel being the proof that they didn't... Thus are Jews doubly damned: to the Holocaust itself and to the moral wasteland of having found no humanising redemption in its horrors.
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In a morally intelligent world – that's to say one in which, for starters, Jews are not judged more harshly than their fellows for having been despatched to concentration camps...

Yes, the rest is also well worth your time. (Via Engage.)

A turn for the worse?

Writing that it would be imprudent for Western countries to contemplate intervening in Syria, Patrick Cockburn says:

Britain, France and Italy have called for sanctions against Syria. But they should not do more because intrusive foreign intervention is likely to prove counter-productive. There are already signs of this in Libya. Justifiable action against impending massacre turns into imperial intervention. Nato air strikes against Colonel Gaddafi's tanks advancing on Benghazi have escalated into an air war, aided by foreign advisers on the ground, with the purpose of overthrowing the regime. In such an offensive the Libyan rebels, whatever their popular support and skill in media relations, may play only a walk-on part.

It is worth recalling that most Afghans were pleased when the Taliban collapsed in 2001 and most Iraqis were glad to see the back of Saddam Hussein in 2003. But it did not follow that the opponents of autocracy were united, had real support or were less corrupt or more competent than their predecessors. Nor were Afghans or Iraqis prepared to see foreign armies determine who should hold power in their countries.

I say nothing for my part about the wisdom or otherwise of an intervention in Syria. But a question I'm interested in is this: when does justifiable action for some humanitarian purpose 'turn into' imperial intervention? The answer one might think implied by Patrick Cockburn is: when it aims to overthrow the regime. However, what if only overthrowing the regime protects the people of the country against massacre and suchlike? And what if the regime overthrown or to be overthrown is not one that a majority there would, respectively, welcome back or want to see survive? Might the justified action in these circumstances remain what it is?

The rights of humankind

It's a year since Fred Halliday died. The extent of the loss to us in his early death may be gauged from this article by him on solidarity at OpenDemocracy. I give no excerpts and no pull-quotes. Just read the whole for all that it contains.