John Plender, Capitalism

The capitalist system, which we live and breathe, rests on a remarkable logic: a group of selfish individuals, each one seeking  private happiness, produces a society where the greatest possible number get what they want – or something like it. Through the magic of the free market, Adam Smith’s too-oft-quoted ‘invisible hand’, selfishness actually produces its opposite, a functioning and prosperous society broadly advantageous to its members. Private acquisition agglomerates into public good; from competition comes community; greed spawns gregariousness, or at any rate its mercantile analogue. This central paradox, which has its origin in utilitarianism’s pursuit of the maximization of pleasure across society, is quite dizzying when you think about it. How can the pursuit of A, by the alchemy of the market, produce not-A? Yet this system, based on the private pursuit of capital and so known as capitalism, has achieved remarkable things. Over two centuries or so, it has raised the living standards of most of the world and dramatically reduced global poverty. The technology, medicine, comforts and luxuries many of us take for granted today would have seemed a miracle even a generation ago.  No other economic system is available as a credible alternative: feudalism has disappeared into history, leaving only a quaint residue such as the peerage system and the royal family; communist central planning collapsed dramatically (economically speaking: central planning in other areas, such as education, is pursued ardently across the bureaucratised West). Other than capitalism, what economic system is going to bring, say, a Bangladeshi or a Somalian the standard of living I enjoy – running water, hygiene, education, all the rest of it? If you agree that they are as entitled to these things as I am  (and what rational basis could there be for disagreement on this point?) what is there to do but to espouse the market as the most likely source of this development? Capitalism has triumphed over its rivals and has a long list of achievements to its credit.

Yet gung-ho, Gordon Gecko ‘Greed is Good’ celebrations of capitalism are rare these days; and Capitalism is presently assailed by many critics, from many shades of the political spectrum (only a very selective observer could say they are all ‘left wing’). For one thing, the fact that it is posited on human selfishness makes it ethically dubious, whatever the alleged long-term beneficial consequences of this greed may be. Moral intuition and religious systems alike persuade us that avarice is a vice, corrupting of the self and damaging to others. And the model of a rational consumer going into a free market , and thereby helping it to function efficiently for the good of the majority, exposes itself to critique at every point: are we really rational consumers? Do we not desire and buy things on a whim, yielding to the tide of fashion, or sometimes - perhaps regularly - in an act of madness?  And what does it do to us psychologically, ethically, to think of ourselves as essentially ‘consumers’ anyway? To make us into non-stop consumers, a massive advertising industry is necessary, playing on every conceivable fear, anxiety and fantasy to make us think that buying stuff will make us happy. And to make all that stuff that we are duped into thinking we need, the planet is steadily raided for its resources, polluted and spoiled. We are consuming the earth we live off; and if that sounds eco-hippy, then capitalism’s purchase of the channels of information in education and the media has been a success. And how free, we may then ask, is the alleged ‘free’ market, where government intervention and policy massively influences trade and production, favouring some in the market at the cost of others? How can we call it efficient, we may persist,  when it is so obviously inherently unstable, with a rollercoaster of booms, busts, frenzies, and recessions? And rather than the greatest good of the greatest number flowing from this market - a market so intrusive and ubiquitous we now carry it around with us on our phones - we see instead ever-widening gaps between the haves and the have-nots as goods are unevenly distributed, partly because the governments that might do something to distribute wealth more equitably are themselves owned by the rich who want to keep their treasure hoard to themselves. Consumerism, materialism, waste and pollution, injustice and inequality, the destruction of the planet and the trivialisation of the human spirit. Capitalism’s defenders face too many sane and sagacious critics to be blandly complacent.

John Plender, thankfully, is anything but complacent, and interested in serious debate. Capitalism leads us through the subject with great dexterity. As a writer for The Financial Times and a member of various financial groups and forums, Plender is what one might think of as a member of the establishment. Yet far from the closed-mindedness  one associates with this rather fictitious group, Plender shows common ground with many anti-establishment critics. He does not believe the mess of 2007-08 has been anywhere near cleared up through improvements in analysis, assumptions and regulation – indeed, he fears another and bigger crash is on the cards. He points out inequitable wage differentials, and notes the waste of human resources as the talented young are drawn into the financial sector and away from productive parts of the economy; and his brilliantly lucid analysis of the Eurozone crisis is pretty severe at the behaviour of the northern countries towards the south. In an interesting chapter on the art market, the author clearly feels commodification, the equation of financial value with other kinds of value, has to stop somewhere. Capitalism is not a defence of the status quo and makes clear that capitalism needs to get its house in much better order if further gains are to be delivered and catastrophe avoided. Like Erasmus on the Catholic Church, Plender believes the system needs to reform from within, not be dismantled and replaced with an unclear substitute.

An attractive feature of the book is the use of literary sources to investigate topics. It is refreshingly historically grounded. So we have passages of Defoe and Addison on the London Exchange, Goethe’s Faust as a commentary on externalities and social dysfunction, and apposite quotations from Dickens, de Tocqueville and many others besides. The author is open to the ideas of many different kinds of economist, too. Like Ha-Joon Chang, Plender thinks it is a pity that many economists today take the Chicago school as a comprehensive explanatory model and ignore other perspectives. Certainly some young students of economics I meet come across as acolytes of a faith rather than serious analysts of events. How satisfying it is to find here a range of writers being drawn on and engaged with: across pages 282-4, for example, we come across Marx, Keynes, Friedman and Raghuram Rajan in a discussion of public debt. Capitalism might perhaps have said something more about the psychology induced by capitalist ideology; and somewhat surprisingly there is no chapter specifically about environmental damage, which the author himself mentions as one of the greatest challenges to be faced. This is also not the book to read it you want to find out what ‘derivative’ or ‘futures market' means, since the author has to take some things for granted just to get going (that said, some terms are defined deftly along the way). However, no one book on this huge subject can do everything and the topics covered by these chapters, from the nature of money itself to debt, speculation, banking and gold are described with style and insight. I learned a lot from Capitalism and would certainly recommend it as a guide to a subject, and debate, which is far too important to be left to economists, establishment or otherwise.

Roger Scruton, Culture Counts

In Culture Counts, Roger Scruton mounts a defence of the heritage of high culture of the West against what he perceives as its enemies: fanatical Islam (only glancingly referred to), the operations of the market (briefly discussed near the end) and, above all, the attitude of 'repudiation' advanced by multiculturalists in the universities. He argues that the literature, music and art handed down to us - or at any rate the best of it - contains a body of emotional and moral knowledge that is intrinsically valuable and provides the imagination with a purer and better air to breathe in than the popular confections of the moment. The purpose of education in the humanities should not be to benefit the student with a set of instrumental skills, but rather to look after the culture itself by training a fresh set of guardians to look after it. The criticism we teach and practise should be to do with elucidating the aesthetic value and moral lessons of works. Despite the depredations he sees wrought by the multiculturalists, Scruton sees hope in the efflorescence of traditional practice in neoclassical architecture, music that returns to pre-Modernist tonality and writing that is similarly embedded in the conversation of canonical works.

One strength of Scruton is always the writing. He frames his arguments clearly and gracefully in a rhythmical prose that is a pleasure to read and a standing lesson for the tone-deaf scribes of the journals. His style is precise but also conveys deep feeling. Consider the phrasing and cadences of this sentence from his description of the decline of architectural teaching: 'Students of architecture were no longer to learn about the properties of natural materials, about the grammar of mouldings and ornaments, about the discipline of the orders, or the nature of light and shade'. Whatever one's views on building design, that is a beautiful summation of the essence of the classical view. The author is particularly strong at explicating philosophical points. I came away from his discussion of the different kinds of knowledge, for example, with that pleasant sensation of having had my mind tidied and cleared. And similarly with the passage on the thin crust of normality, with barbarous instincts beneath and the serene air of art and spiritual empathy above, and in many other instances. Some points are made in a single striking sentence: the few pages on Foucault, for example, ask us to consider whether that thinker can help us at all in elucidating the truth-value of any part of a governing discourse. He can be very funny, as in the attack on Le Corbusier. And I warmed to Scruton's sense of battling against the powers-that-be in academia. Though I am out of touch with the academic world now, I sense that his kind of traditionalism still has little purchase in the modern seminar and lecture hall. The book is an interesting contrast to John Carey's What Good are the Arts, which had the peculiar quality of an author sounding cross at the very idea of a higher culture, even though he was clearly on the winning side. One has to look hard for Carey's enemies - presumably Scruton and a few senior members of Oxford college common rooms - but Scruton's are at any rate easy enough to discern. I wonder if both authors overstate the influence of university courses generally.

Some parts of the book left me with reservations. Perhaps the weakest part is his chapter on teaching, with its wildly romantic vision of children rote-learning and acquiring a love of medieval Latin and the classic texts. There is no sensible suggestion here how such a programme could possibly be implemented, and I don't even see what he imagines happening in a lesson. Most of what he posits, concerning the slow acquisition of moral truths, would happen on a subliminal level anyway rather than by direct instruction. The chief enemy of promise in schools is not an academic culture of scepticism, but the dominant discipline of accountancy, which demands that any piece of work should be judged against a hyper-rational scheme which breaks down skills and 'objectives' into specific categories, each carrying percentage points. It is an insane approach to the business of learning (for a business is what it has become in all sectors of education), and has nothing whatever to do with the way the mind works or how culture lives. But unfortunately it is the system which dictates the practices of every single school and teacher in Britain today. Next to this one can gaze at Scruton's vision and sigh a little. But he must know that his kind of education has no chance whatever of taking effect, and so the chapter really reads as the indulgence of a fantasy.

Nor am I sure what our author would like to happen at university level, except for a mass removal of feminists, Marxists and the like. He castigates universities for adopting a programme based on various kinds of scepticism; but perhaps it is the job of a university to be sceptical. There are some well-aimed shots about some kinds of study which simply deaden the mind because the only tolerable answers are those known in advance; and the point that the so-called liberalism of some kinds of theoretical inquiry is simply a way of excluding anything off-message seems hard to counter, at least at an abstract level. It does seem to be the case that the same dismal left-wing dogma is preached across many university courses. What alternative is being offered, though? Elevating selected cultural artefacts to the 'high' category carries its own dangers. It misses the internal tensions which the great works and their creators leave us with. Is it repudiation to point out that in our greatest literature we also find anti-Semitic caricature? What are we to make of the fact the The Faerie Queene carries in its sumptuous verse the notion that the Irish are savages and should be exterminated by some kind of murderous robot? Is this a denial of our heritage? The issues seem to me rather to be things worth discussing. His reading of texts as embodiments of moral lessons seems painfully reductive (the single example of what we are meant to take from King Lear is most unconvincing. Nor do I see that one has to choose between Scruton's kind of reverence for art as embalming the best that has been thought and said on the one hand, and the hard-edged world of modern criticism on the other. I can be moved by King Lear one day and read a cultural materialist discussion of it the next, without the second experience damaging the first. This is, to be sure, a cognitive challenge, but the human mind is well equipped to perform distinct and even opposite operations at the same time.

Scruton's view continues a tradition from Arnold, Eliot and Leavis, and it is important that this tradition persists. In this book at any rate it seems to be deeply informed by a sense of some lost world of collective values, located chiefly in the shared beliefs of religion. Around Scruton's writing there hovers the yearning for community, for a way of thinking that confers membership in a society resting on firm foundations, at peace with itself. I simply have no idea where in history that world is to be found. I gained a great deal from this book, and would recommend it as a stimulating read; but I do not find myself sufficiently enchanted by the lament for an imagined golden age to seek membership of this particular club.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World

How to See the World is an introduction to the new academic discipline of the study of visual culture. Visual artefacts in the form of fine and decorative arts have been studied in universities for about a century, of course, and before that in salons and art academies. What makes 'visual culture' as a field a new departure is its focus on mass and popular imagery, which now has an unimaginable range and volume in the age of digital media. How to See the World takes us through some of the perspectives this new analysis can take. 'How to See Yourself' takes us fairly speedily from classical portraiture to modern artists such as Cindy Sherman and the ubiquitous selfie. The emphasis here is on how the self is radically unstable, and a matter of performance rather than essence, in tension with traditional social categories. ''How We think about Seeing' is an update on brain science and what it tells us about perception and processing of visual information; we see with our bodies, not simply the retina. Further chapters look at the story of mapping for military purposes from the nineteenth century to the contemporary drone; early film and its conjunction with industrialisation and the train; the rise of the modern megacity; the changing climate; and mass political protest. All of these areas of life have generated, exploited and explored the expressive and interpretive capacities of visual culture. To orient oneself in the modern world, we need to develop skills in reading images from street art to museum-housed installations to instagram snaps and video clips circulated as memes. To be active participants in our own culture, we need to be adept at using these visual codes ourselves.

I had some problems with this book, not least in finding some definition for the discipline itself. It seems to draw on many other fields: the ideas on the performative self, for example, are familiar from feminism and gender studies; the psychology of perception is central to Gombrich's Art and Illusion; and the survey of the giant city draws heavily on authors like Mike Davis.  Mirzoeff acknowledges a debt to the work of John Berger, itself drawing on Walter Benjamin. Sometimes the book felt like familiar ingredients given a slightly new twist rather than an exciting new departure. Visual culture is so vast that it surely takes in just about anything, from a school whiteboard to a weekend watercolour. Unsurprisingly, the book as a whole felt like a disparate gathering of thoughts on subjects the author is interested in (and on which he is clearly very well informed). It's not always easy to find a thread running through a chapter; rather, one item seems to auto-suggest another. 'Divided Cities', for example, uses this suggestive heading to hurtle us through Berlin, the American South, South African apartheid and Israel-Palestine in a few pages, without time to look in any detail at any of these scenarios. In these stretches, it reads as a sequence of riffs rather than an over-arching composition.


Despite these reservations - perhaps I was looking for a more traditional thesis-style book - I must admit found this a riveting read. Mirzoeff has an immediately engaging style, unencumbered by theoretical jargon. Every page offers some fascinating nugget of information, such as the surprising but convincing link between Impressionism and early industrial smog. He conveys a passionate curiosity and is an example of an academic for whom the wall between academic observation and practical action is, like other walls mentioned here, one to be dismantled. He is clearly fascinated and inspired by social protest movements, from the Arab Spring to Occupy, and sees in the visual traces such actions produce a hope for the representation of popular interests in a world in which the 99% are generally excluded by corporate media. Visual Culture is for Mirzoeff something we should do, not simply study. Only through imagining the effects of climate change can we hope to address it; and this imagining necessarily takes the form of the actual making of images. The record of mass protest in Egypt stands as an example of visual artefacts which the regime cannot erase. The commitment to action in the book makes it a refreshing change from the traditional world of formal art criticism, often  confined to a reflective discourse within the space of the museum. If the structure of the book doesn't fit the usual academic conventions, perhaps that is part of the point. 'Once we have learned how to see the world,' he concludes, 'we have taken only one of the required steps. the point is to change it.'

John Finnemore, Teddy Lester

John Finnemore, author of Teddy Lester Captain of Cricket (London: Chambers, 1916), you have given me a joyous lifelong memory. I discovered this book as a boy in my uncle's house. Its orange boards and thick flaky paper intoxicate me still. Now I have rebound Captain of Cricket, I have one other  title in the series, and I search for more whenever I'm in a second-hand bookshop. Teddy, easily the best cricketer in Slapton School, takes the reputation of the house seriously and comes down hard on bullying. He is firm but fair and does what is right. Frank Sandys, brilliant new boy, bowls with a queer shuffling run. His stock ball is a googly (odd, since that is meant to be a surprise delivery), occasionally mixed up with a straight fast one. Ito the Bat is Japanese and bowls with a bizarre action, hence his soubriquet. Teddy and his chums play cricket, in a strange form of the game where bowlers 'find a spot' and become unplayable. They stroll around Slapton school and save the country. Their teachers barely exist.

Penny for your thoughts, Ito, old man.

Who were you, John Finnemore? Wikipedia says there is nothing left now but census returns, and reconstructs your (childless) life with Emma, teaching in Welsh schools, and eventually making real money from writing. I imagine you in your elementary classroom, speaking Welsh, dreaming up Boy's Own plotlines. Is there really nothing out there? No school archives In Aberystwyth, no letters, no manuscripts? Why did you buy a house with fifteen bedrooms?

John Finnemore, you died aged 52. Your books are rare finds today. You are not listed on goodreads, but you are a good read. When I pass by an empty cricket ground, sometimes, at dusk, I stand quite still. The whole of Slapton watches with hushed breath. Everything depends on this last wicket stand, and Frank Sandys is shuffling in to bowl.

Erika Langmuir, A Closer Look: Still Life

This short book, one of a series produced by the National Gallery, is a very helpful introduction to the genre of still life painting. The author explains its beginnings in the Greek xenia (offerings to guests), now known only from description, and Roman wall paintings, like those preserved at Herculaneum and Pompeii. In the medieval and Renaissance period the naturalistic depiction of flowers and objects was justified by their inclusion in narrative paintings, though there are fascinating instances of stand-alones like Gaddi's painting of a cupboard with eucharistic objects in Santa Croce, Florence. The genre really comes into its own around 1600. In just a few pages we get a clear idea of the essential elements of the Dutch still life and the Spanish bodegón, and the subgenres of flower painting and breakast piece. There is an interesting comparison of still life elements in paintings by Caravaggio and Velazquez, in which the author is not shy of expressing an opinion (avoiding the flat even-handedness that can mar expository writing). Other questions are contemplated: how are we to understand the symbolism of a still life, obvious in the case of a vanitas but in other cases more obscure to the modern viewer? What internal dramas are evoked in these mesmerising compositions? I like the thought that often the still life bypasses thought and speaks directly to our sensuous response to the world. The great Chardin is touched on - I would have liked more on him, remembering the wonderful RA exhibition - and there are close engagements with works by Cezanne and Picasso. Because the book is centred on the NG collection, it does not take us further into the twentieth century or into other media like photography and video. I am reading Charles Sterling's book on Still Life, which is superb but weighty with knowledge and lists of painters I have never heard of. This book provided a useful summary of the key episodes of the story. Erika Langmuir, former Head of Education at the NG, has a gift for clear yet passionate writing, and the series as a whole (rebranded as A Closer Look) is beautifully produced.

Erich Fromm, Fear of Freedom

The basic thesis of Fear of Freedom is this. We want more freedom for ourselves, but at the same time we are afraid of it. As individuals, we grow up and become more independent. But the more independent we are, the more alone, the more isolated we are: the help of our elders is taken away and at the same time we see others as competitors for the same goods – success, attention, comfort. It’s hard to be alone and embattled for too long.  So it becomes natural to seek refuge in a group, in a system which gives us guidance and protection. We say we dislike authority, then, but at the same time we want it. At a deep level, we feel a need to submit to something which makes us feel part of something bigger: membership of a religion, of a class or a political movement can all do this.

All of this is part of Fromm’s attempt to explain the rise of fascism in the twentieth century, the phenomenon of modern society renouncing the freedoms it has won and embracing the most authoritarian of codes. Here are three kinds of authority which Fromm talks about: these we can call external, internal and invisible.

External authority we can cover very quickly. It is simply anyone out there who is in some position to tell you what to do, or stop you doing something. Parents, teachers, policemen, religious leaders, doctors, perhaps writers – depending on the circumstances, people such as this will have some authority over us. That authority might be legitimate or illegitimate, we might be right to obey it or morally obliged to rebel against it, it might be exercised benignly or maliciously, it might have been acquired honestly or by corruption. The only point here is that it is external to us, we can clearly see that it comes from outside us.

The second kind of authority is internal. This is when the rules we gathered from the outside become internalized, become part of the way we regulate ourselves. The whole point of making young people go to bed at certain times, I suppose, is that eventually this becomes second instinct. In the same way, the various codes and values that we pick up in our early lives will get internalized. To a large extent, they become our conscience, the little voice inside us telling us what’s right or wrong. Conscience is actually a massively important element in Western culture. In the Protestant Reformation, a huge weight was placed on the importance of the individual conscience, which took over from the external authority of the Church. Moral philosophers like Kant elaborated on this idea at length. Just possibly we might be living at a time when that idea is weakening. I can only speak anecdotally, but there seem to be many examples of people acting without any reference to internal conscience at all: some MPs bleating that their expenses were within the rules is a case in point. But I suspect that a lot of the anger directed at politicians comes from an uneasy feeling that they in some way reflect our own behaviour. What can I get away with? How can I play the system? We all dislike those who remind us of our own faults.  Is conscience still a strong determining factor in modern daily life? Maybe it is. In today’s paper, the boarding card airport shop story, where retailers have been making millions in VAT savings and not passing them on to cutomers;  on another page, City of London people collectively lifting a car off someone who’s got hurt. Evidence points all ways.

After external and internal, Fromm’s third type of authority is what he calls ‘invisible’. This is when you’re obeying an authority without even realizing it. How does this work? If you’ve ever seen someone being hypnotized, you’ll know how easy it is to plant ideas in another person’s mind. A person can genuinely believe he is lost and feel distressed, for example, simply because those thoughts have been put in his mind by the hypnotist, even though he has no recollection of having these suggested to him. According to Fromm, you and I are for much of the time in a very similar condition. We all have, say, likes and dislikes in music, political opinions, preferences for particular clothes and so on. But how did those ideas arise? Much as we like to think that we figured it all out ourselves, we would also recognise that a lot of opinion forming is going on around us: advertisements, newspapers, and so-called common sense can all provide us with pre-packaged views that we willingly make our own. And, like the hypnotized man, we come to believe they are our own. It’s useful. We don’t have time or energy to think through the whole of politics for ourselves, for example, so we read our preferred newspaper to learn what our opinions are on a range of subjects. Influential figures in the media can help us too. Except, of course, we think those really are our opinions. Here’s a scenario to illustrate the point.  You watch a football match on TV. You listen to the analysis of an authority figure, a pro. You think, yes, that makes sense. And, later, when someone asks you your opinion of the game you more or less repeat what he said. Only, when you’re saying it, you actually think it’s your own analysis. I’ve expressed opinions on books and films and realized later that I’ve really just repeated a review I read. And I’ve heard highly educated people do just the same thing. Partly it’s because we all need to belong to a group – it’s a basic human requirement – and membership depends on sharing the same ideas as others in the group. The group might be a religious community, or a class, or a union, or a group of political activists; or we might yearn to be accepted into a wine-tasting and opera-loving set, or a merry band of computer game fanatics. Any such group will have its required set of beliefs which you need to embrace to get the full benefits of membership.  And pretty soon and pretty painlessly you’ll believe that they really were your own private views and tastes all along.

So, one suggestion in this book is that while we’re considering, and maybe resenting, one external authority we’re very much in the grip of another authority altogether, the current of popular opinion that carries us along.  Does it matter? To some extent, it must be inevitable that we simply pick up certain views from what’s going on around us. It’s impossible to think everything through individually, and there’s no great shame in adopting at least some of the fashions of the time. But if we really want to stand as individuals, we should leave some space to think some things through ourselves. Academic work provides some opportunity for that, though maybe not much. But everyone knows the satisfaction that comes from thinking something through in some area of life. You might really think about the football match and find Alan Hansen thinks the same thing. Fine, your thought is original because it originated in you, not outside you. Man is a pack animal, and we will all to an extent go with the pack. But we also have a capacity to pull away for a moment, and do the incredibly hard work of actually forming thoughts and judgements in our own minds. We can draw on external authority if it helps; we are free to reject external authority, if we have good grounds for doing so and it’s not just disagreement for its own sake. That way we begin to develop our own voice, to be authentic. That is where our real authority as persons begins.