Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  Orghast (1971) was a recasting of the Prometheus myth, performed at Persepolis and written in a new language devised by the British poet tell Hughes (who was appointed poet laureate in 1984). This play in particular explored the way the delivery of the lines – many of which were sung in incantation – affected their reception. Hughes was also using the ideas of Noam Chomsky, and the deep structure of language, in the new forms he invented.83

  Moving into the abandoned Bouffes du Nord theatre, built in 1874 but empty since 1952, Brook embarked on an ambitious – unparalleled – experiment, which had two strands. One was to use theatre in an attempt to find a common, global language, by peopling his productions with actors from different traditions – South American, Japanese, European – but also by exposing these experimental productions to audiences of different traditions, to see how they were received and understood. This meant that Brook tackled some improbable ideas – for example, Conference of the Birds (1979), based on a twelfth-century Sufi poem, a comic but painful allegory about a group of birds that sets off on a perilous journey in search of a legendary bird, the Simourg, their hidden king.84 Of course, the journey becomes a stripping away of each bird’s/person’s façades and defences, which Brook used as a basis for improvisation. A second improbable production was The Mahabharata (1985), the Sanskrit epic poem, fifteen times the length of the Bible. This six-hour production, which reduces the epic to the ‘core narrative’ of two warring families, was researched in India, which Brook referred to fondly in his memoirs: ‘Perhaps India is the last place where every period of history can coexist, where the ugliness of neon lighting can illuminate ceremonies that have not changed in ritual form nor in outer clothing since the origin of the Hindu faith.’85 He took his leading actors to India to spend time in holy places, so that they might at least half-appreciate the Vedic world they were about to portray. (The various versions of the script took ten years to pare down.) The third of Brook’s great non-Western innovations was The Ik, a play about famine in Africa. This looked back to the books of the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who had discovered a series of extraordinary tribes around the world, and forward to the economics of Amartya Sen, the Indian who would win the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his theories, expressed throughout the 1980s, about the way famines developed. To complement these non-Western ideas, Brook also took his company on three great tours – to Iran, to Africa, and to the United States, not simply to entertain and inform but also to study the reaction to his productions of the audiences in these very different places. The tours were intended as a test for Brook’s ideas about a global language for theatre, and to see how the company might evolve if it wasn’t driven by commercial constraints.86

  But Peter Brook was not only experimental, and not only French-oriented – he thought theatre in Britain ‘very vital.’87 The CICT continued to produce Shakespeare and Chekhov, and he himself produced several mainstream films and opera: Lord of the Flies (1963), based on William Golding’s novel about a group of young boys marooned on a desert island, who soon ‘return’ to savagery; Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), based on the spiritualist George Ivanovich Gurdjieff’s autobiography; and La Tragédie de Carmen (1983). He also produced a seminal book on the theatre, in which he described four categories of theatrical experience – deadly, holy, rough, and immediate. At the end of his memoirs, Brook said that ‘at its origin, theatre was an act of healing, of healing the city. According to the action of fundamental, entropie forces, no city can avoid an inevitable process of fragmentation. But when the population assembles together in a special place under special conditions to partake in a mystery, the scattered limbs are drawn together, and a momentary healing reunites the larger body, in which each member, re-membered, finds it place … Hunger, violence, gratuitous cruelty, rape, crime – these are constant companions in the present time. Theatre can penetrate into the darkest zones of terror and despair for one reason only: to be able to affirm, neither before nor after but at the very same moment, that light is present in darkness. Progress may have become an empty concept, but evolution is not, and although evolution can take millions of years, the theatre can free us from this time frame.’88

  Later on, Brook made a play from Oliver Sacks’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, describing a number of neurological oddities. And that surely underlines Brook’s great significance in the postwar world. His attempts to go beyond the narrow confines of nationality, to discover the humanity in science, to use scientific techniques in the production of great art, show an unusual vision on his part as to where the healing in modern society is necessary.89 Brook, though he himself might eschew the term, is also an existentialist. To return to his memoirs: ‘I have witnessed no miracles, but I have seen that remarkable men and women do exist, remarkable because of the degree to which they have worked on themselves in their lives.’90 That applies exactly to Peter Brook. In particular, and perhaps uniquely, he showed how it was possible to bestride both the francophone and anglophone culture of his time.

  * Barthes’s views contain at least one contradiction. If an author’s intentions mean little, how can Barthes’s own views mean anything?

  36

  DOING WELL, AND DOING GOOD

  In 1944, in An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal had forecast that in order to advance the situation of Negroes, the U.S. courts would need to take up the cause. In the years between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s, that is exactly what happened, but then a reaction set in. President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew queried whether the Supreme Court in the United States was not taking decisions that (a) were more properly the work of government, making political decisions masquerading as legal ones, and (b) were flagrantly disregarding the views of the ‘silent majority,’ sowing social tension by always putting the minorities first.

  President Nixon and Vice President Agnew left office in disgrace, and so their personal involvement in these debates was compromised. But the issues were real enough. They were addressed, in detail, by Ronald Dworkin, a professor at New York University’s law school, in Taking Rights Seriously, which was published in 1977.1 Dworkin’s book was an examination of the way law evolves and itself an example of that evolution. It combined thinking about law, moral philosophy, linguistic philosophy, politics, and political economy, and took into account recent developments in civil rights, women’s liberation, homosexual emancipation, and the theories and arguments of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Herbert Marcuse, Willard van Orman Quine, and even R. D. Laing. But Dworkin’s main aim was to clarify certain legal concepts in the wake of the civil rights movement, Rawls’s theory of justice, and Berlin’s notions of negative and positive freedom. In doing so, Dworkin offered a defence of civil disobedience, a legal justification for reverse discrimination, and argued, most fundamentally, that there is no right to general liberty, when by liberty is meant licence. Instead, Dworkin argued, the most basic right (insofar as the phrase makes sense) is of the individual against the state, and this is best understood as having the right to be treated as an equal with everyone else. For Dworkin, in other words, equality before the law came ahead of everything else, and above all other meanings of freedom.

  Besides considering the great social/legal problems of the day, Dworkin grounded his work in the all-important question of how, in a democracy, the rights of the majority, the minorities, and the state can be maintained. As with Rawls v. Nozick, in an earlier exchange, he compared utilitarian notions (that such-and-such a law would benefit the greatest number) in favour of the ideal (that fairness be seen as the greatest common good). He was suspicious of Isaiah Berlin’s notion of ‘negative’ freedom as the basic form.2 Berlin, it will be recalled, defined negative freedom as the right to be left alone, unconstrained, whereas positive freedom was the right to be appreciated as whatever kind of person one wished to be appreciated as. Dworkin thought that provided one had equality before the law, this distinction of Berlin’s turned out to be false, and that therefore, in a sense, l
aw preceded politics. (This was reminiscent of Friedrich von Hayek’s view that the ‘spontaneous’ way that man has worked out his system of laws precedes any political party.) On Dworkin’s analysis, equality before the law precluded a general right to property, which Hayek and Berlin thought was a sine qua non of freedom. Dworkin arrived at his view because, as the title of his books suggests, he thought that rights are serious in a modern society, and that without taking rights seriously, the law cannot be serious.3 (His book was also a specific reply to Vice President Agnew, who in a speech had argued that ‘rights are divisive,’ that liberals’ concern for individuals’ rights ‘was a headwind blowing in the face of the ship of state,’ not so very different from President Nixon’s comments about the silent majority.) As Dworkin put it at the end of his central chapter, ‘If we want our laws and legal institutions to provide the ground rules within which these [social and political] issues will be contested then these ground rules must not be the conqueror’s law that the dominant class imposes on the weaker, as Marx supposed the law of a capitalist society must be. The bulk of the law – that part which defines and implements social, economic, and foreign policy – cannot be neutral. It must state, in its greatest part, the majority’s view of the common good. The institution of rights is therefore crucial, because it represents the majority’s promise to the minorities that their dignity and equality will be respected…. The Government will not re-establish respect for law without giving the law some claim to respect. It cannot do that if it neglects the one feature that distinguishes law from ordered brutality. If the Government does not take rights seriously, then it does not take the law seriously either.’4 Dworkin’s conclusion that in the modern age, the post-1960s age, the right to be treated equally – by government – was a prerequisite of all freedoms, was congenial to most liberals.

  An alternative view of the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s, the freedom and the equalities the period had produced, and a very different picture of the laws that had been passed, came from two conservative economists in Chicago. Milton and Rose Friedman took equality before the law for granted but thought that freedom could only be guaranteed if there were economic freedom, if men and women were ‘free to choose’ – the title of their 1980 book – the way they earned their living, the price they paid for the goods they wished to buy, and the wage they were willing to pay anyone who worked for them.5 Milton Friedman had advanced very similar views two decades before, in Capitalism and Freedom, published in 1962, and considered in chapter 30 (see page 519). He and his wife returned to the subject, they said, because they were anxious that during the interim, ‘big government’ had grown to the point where its mushrooming legal infrastructure, much of it concerned with ‘rights,’ seriously interfered with people’s lives, because unemployment and inflation were growing to unacceptable levels in the West, and because they felt that, as they put it, ‘the tide [was] turning,’ that people were growing tired and sceptical of the ‘liberal’ approach to economics and government in the West, and looking for a new direction.6

  Free to Choose, as its authors were at pains to point out, was a much more practical and concrete book than Capitalism and Freedom. The Friedmans had specific targets and specific villains in their view of the world. They began by reanalysing the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing depression. Their aim was to counter the view that these two events amounted to the collapse of capitalism, and that the capitalist system was responsible for the failure of so many banks and the longest-running depression the world has ever known. They argued that there had been mismanagement of specific banks, specifically the Bank of the United States, which closed its doors on II December 1930, the largest financial institution ever to fail in the history of the U.S. Although a rescue plan had been drawn up for this bank, anti-Semitism on the part of ‘leading members of the banking community’ in New York was at least partly responsible for the plan not being put into effect. The Bank of the United States was run by Jews, servicing mainly the Jewish community, and the rescue plan envisaged it merging with another Jewish bank. But, according to Friedman (himself Jewish), this could not be stomached ‘in an industry that, more than almost any other, has been the preserve of the well-born and the well placed.’7 This sociological – rather than economic – failure was followed by others; by Britain abandoning the gold standard in 1931, by mismanagement of the Federal Reserve System’s response to the various crises, and by the interregnum between Herbert Hoover’s presidency and Franklin Roosevelt’s in 1933, when neither man would take any action in the economic sphere for a period of three months. On the Friedman analysis, therefore, the great crash and the depression were more the result of technical mismanagement than anything fundamental to capitalism per se.

  The crash/depression was important, however, because it was followed so soon by world war, when the intellectual climate changed: people saw – or thought they could see – that cooperation worked, rather than competition; the idea of a welfare state caught on in wartime and set the tone for government between 1945 and, say, 1980. But, and this was the main point of the Friedmans’ book, ‘New Deal liberalism,’ as they called it, and Keynesianism, didn’t work (though they were relatively easy on Keynes: even President Nixon had declared, ‘We are all Keynesians now’). They looked at schools, at the unions, at consumer protection, and at inflation, and found that in all cases free-market capitalism not only produced a more efficient society but created greater freedom, greater equality, and more public benefit overall: ‘Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those societies that do not permit the free market to operate. That is true of mediaeval societies like Europe, India before independence, and much of modern South America, where inherited status determines position. It is equally true of centrally planned societies, like Russia or China or India since independence, where access to government determines position. It is true even where central planning was introduced, as in all three of these countries, in the name of equality.’8 Even in the Western democracies, the Friedmans said, echoing something first observed by Irving Kristol, a ‘new class’ has arisen – government bureaucrats or academics whose research is supported by government funds, who are privileged but preach equality. ‘They remind us very much of the old, if unfair, saw about the Quakers: “They came to the New World to do good, and ended up doing well.” ‘9

  The Friedmans gave many instances of how capitalism promotes freedom, equality, and the wider spread of benefits. In attacking the unions they did not confine themselves to the ‘labour’ unions but focused on middle-class unions as well, such as the doctors, and quoted the case of the introduction of ‘paramedics’ in one district of California. This had been vigorously opposed by doctors – ostensibly because only properly trained medical personnel could cope, but really because they wanted to limit entry to the profession, to keep up their salaries. In fact, the number of people surviving cardiac arrest rose in the first six months after the introduction of paramedics from 1 percent to 23 percent. In the case of consumer rights, the Friedmans claimed that in America there was far too much government legislation interfering with the free market, one result being a ‘drug lag’: the United States had dropped behind countries like Great Britain in the introduction of new drugs – they specifically referred to beta-blockers. The introduction of new drugs to the market, for example, had fallen, they said, by about 50 percent since 1962, mainly because the cost of testing their effects on the consumer had risen disproportionately. The Friedmans considered that government response to exposés like Rachel Carson’s had been too enthusiastic; ‘all the movements of the past two decades – the consumer movement, the ecology movement, the back-to-the-land movement, the hippie movement, the organic-food movement, the protect-the-wilderness movement, the zero-population-growth movement, the “small is beautiful” movement, the anti-nuclear movement – have had one thing in common. All have been anti-growth. They have been opposed to new devel
opments, to industrial innovation, to the increased use of natural resources.’10 It was time to shout enough is enough, that the forces for control, for ‘rights’, had gone too far. At the end of their book, however, the Friedmans said they thought a change was coming, that many people wanted ‘big government’ rolled back. In particular, they pointed to the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979, on a promise ‘to haul back the frontiers of the state,’ and to the revolt in America against the government monopoly of the postal service. They ended by calling for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, for what would in effect be an Economic Bill of Rights that would force the government to limit federal spending.

  Why this change in public mood? The main reason, alluded to in an earlier chapter, was that following the oil crisis in 1973–74, the long stagnation in the living standards of the West produced a growing dissatisfaction. As the economist Paul Krugman of MIT described it, the ‘magic’ of the Western economies, their ever-higher standards of living, went away in 1973. It took time for these trends to emerge, but as they did, certain academic economists, notably Martin Feldstein of Harvard, began to document the negative effects of taxation and government expenditure on investment and savings.11 Friedman actually predicted that there would come a time of stagnation – zero growth – combined with inflation, which according to classical economics couldn’t happen. Paul Samuelson gave this phenomenon its name, ‘stagflation,’ but it was Friedman, rightly, who received the Nobel Prize for the insight. Where Friedman and Feldstein led, others soon followed, and by the late 1970s there emerged a hard core of ‘supply-side’ economists who rejected Keynesianism and believed that a sharp reduction in taxation, meaning that more money would be ‘supplied’ to the economy, would produce such a surge in growth that there was no need to worry about expenditure. These ideas were behind the election of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom in 1979, and of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States a year later. In the United States the Reagan years were marked by massive budget deficits, which were still being paid for in the 1990s, but also by a striking rally on Wall Street, which faltered between 1987 and 1992 but then recovered. In Britain, in addition to a similar rise in the stock market, there was also an important series of policy initiatives, known as privatisation, in which mainly public utilities were returned to private hands.12 In social, economic, and political terms, privatisation was a huge success, transforming ungainly and outdated businesses into modern, efficient corporations where, in some cases at least, real costs to the consumer fell. The idea of privatisation was widely exported – to Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa.