A Point of View

by Clive James

  Today, several generations along into the continued prosperity of the West – so abundant that it holds together even when the banks collapse – that knowledge becomes even more important, because the question arises of how it can be passed on when those in the next generation have no memory of anything else. On television they see something else: they see the sufferings of the deprived and oppressed all over the world, and they hear voices saying that all the deprivation and oppression are the fault of the society they themselves live in. The best of the young will always tend to believe this, because compassion is a powerful motive among the good. And anyway, in the harshest days of colonialism it was true, and partly it is still true now. But the larger truth is that the poor countries can make little use of our wealth, even when they are handed it for free, if they have not embraced liberal democracy first.

  The importance of liberal democracy has been the only real idea I have felt qualified to pass on in these broadcasts. Qualified because I was born and raised at a time when liberal democracy was under threat, and have lived into a time when it has become obvious that liberal democracy is the first and essential requirement for all the nations of the world. Whether there is a painless way of learning that lesson, without having to learn it from experience, is a real question, to which I don’t yet have the answer. I want to write a book on the subject, which is why this will be not only the last broadcast in my share of the series, but my last for some time.

  A few years back I published a book about culture and politics in the twentieth century, and this new book will deal with the further subject of how historical lessons can still be learned if the prospect of political tragedy is eliminated. But even more misleading than pessimism is optimism, and it’s probably optimistic to think that things will ever get that good. There will always be a salutary disaster somewhere, even if it’s not happening to us. At the moment, very slowly and quietly, just such a disaster is happening to Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma. I want to end my stint by paying tribute to her, for her personal bravery, and for what her life under house arrest symbolically represents.

  I am very conscious, when I think of her, that I am an armchair warrior and she is a warrior. She was a child when her father was assassinated, but she must have learned a lot from his example. Spending his short life in the quest for Burma’s independence, he rebelled against British imperial rule and backed the Japanese version of the same thing, until he realized that it was even worse. After the war, having learned his lesson, he led his country towards democracy, and paid the price for getting too close. And now his daughter is still paying the price, for her own people, and for us. And for all the small people in my house except Tommasina, who will never grow up, never have doubts, never know disappointment, but only because she will never live. She doesn’t know what she’s missing.

  Postscript

  And so I bowed out, playing to the gallery even as the curtain fell. Through three years of broadcasting I had made capital out of the mileage I had on the clock, with many a philosophical remark meant to convey my equanimity at the thought of approaching death. But that was just autumn talking, and in truth I had relished the opportunity to sum up: reflecting on experience is, after all, the one thing that an older guy can do more of. I walked away congratulating myself that I had played the fogey role to some effect. Hubris had its due reward. A few days later, over the New Year weekend, my waterworks packed up and I almost bought the farm. After they saved my life in Addenbrooke’s Hospital I found myself being a lot less philosophical about death, and equanimity was in short supply. From the radio studio I had been trying to convey that the prosperous Western world, with its democratic institutions, was a decisive improvement on nature; and here, in the collective technical miracle of the clinics and the wards, was the proof. Technology saved my neck, and the machines needed bags of cheap electricity. From my angle at least, those unarguable facts put paid to any idea of ‘de-developing’ industrial society: a potentially lethal fantasy which I had already poured cold water on several times in my broadcasts.

  But I like to think that I would have gone on promoting the same conclusion even if my health had stayed sound: on behalf of the next two generations in my family, I had always been suspicious of doomsayers who claimed that anyone holding my opinions must be harbouring a callous indifference to the fate of ‘our children and grandchildren’. Anyone who wants to make the lives of children in Africa dependent on windmills and solar panels doesn’t really care if they live or die, and we only have his word for it that he cares more than we do about the children here at home. Frequently, at the lunch table, I had been watching one of my children attempting to bring the blue plastic-handled spoon of my grandchild under control, and although it was true that the generation after next could be a terrific pest, I couldn’t help wishing that, in the life she would lead after her grandfather’s departure, the world would continue in its modern tradition of being a more benevolent place than the cave or the savannah.

  Really, indifference is the last thing I felt, and even as death’s door loomed I cursed all those propagandists who wanted the West to expiate its blame for the world’s poverty by making itself as poor as possible. The wish was not only callous, it was historically illiterate. In the twentieth century many millions of lives had been wasted in a hideous practical demonstration that the growth of an economy could not be fully planned by governments. In the glaring light of that fact, the assumption that the shrinkage of an economy – a Great Leap Backward – could be fully planned by governments seemed worse than Quixotic, it seemed wilfully murderous. But that was only one of the issues that had marked the period without being thoroughly discussed, and at least the heavy curtain of silence had now been at least partly lifted. Though most of the mainstream media outlets went on peddling their standard line about imminent destruction, its credibility had been steadily eroded by the obviously limitless flexibility as to just how imminent the imminent was, and a true discussion now seemed possible.

  The same was not true for an issue that had always been more important. The savage ill-treatment of women by backward cultures and religions was another salient issue that had barely been debated, least of all by Western feminists, who had surely missed an opportunity while shirking their duty. In the following year, while I lay in hospital, Aung San Suu Kyi sent the world a message that she was in despair. Here was the time to spring from my bed, change into my Superman costume, and fly to her aid. Oh, and on the way back I could descend from the sky in Iran and take care of that little matter about the woman scheduled for death by stoning. I could pick up a couple of the designated stoners and bang their heads together until they saw the point. But I wasn’t strong enough to make the leap, and wouldn’t have been even if I had been well. Eventually, later in that same year, Aung San Suu Kyi was allowed out, but probably on the understanding that if she got too active in the cause of freedom she would be locked up again. As usual, the men with the guns called the shots.

  We have no super powers. If my three seasons of broadcasting were united by a single theme, that was the one: for most of us, our only magic weapon against fate is our power of speech, and all it can do is state the case reasonably. Truth, justice, equal rights, fair play: if radio is the modern pulpit, then a broadcast stating such elementary principles is the modern sermon. Preaching it, one should not scant the duty to be entertaining – even in a mere ten minutes, people will go to sleep in their pews if you aren’t – but nor is it wise to underestimate the forces of confusion against which one fights. As Eve found to her cost, the Devil is his own best advocate: that forked tongue of his drips a smooth liquid. Nobody who shapes a speech should ever forget that he is following in the sinuous trail of an expert. The difference between you and the Devil, though, is that one of you can trust the intelligent public to tell good plain water from snake oil – always provided, of course, that you know the difference yourself.

  About the intelligent public, there is a book to be written. W
here do they come from, these marvellous people? They must have been there before the BBC was created, but undoubtedly the BBC helped to create another generation of them, and has gone on doing so. The interplay between civilized institutions and the people they serve is a complex subject, but there is one conspicuous and unsettling thing that we know about it for certain. Though ideally it should be scarcely visible and operate with a light hand, a strong and confident democratic state is crucial. Without that, to rely on the continuance and efficacy of an intelligent public is the merest sentimentality. For proof, we need only think of those millions of cultivated German citizens in 1933 who suddenly found that their good will was of no effect, and put them in danger.

  Conclusion

  Three years, a long time in an individual life, is no time at all in the eye of history: scarcely time for a fashion to have its reign. Afterwards, the period of its supremacy is remembered as a mere moment, if it is remembered at all. Then it melts as mysteriously as it took shape. Even when it shakes the world for decades on end, the incontestable belief will fade away without having to be contested, as if the capacity to be forgotten had been part of what made it memorable in the first place. Sometimes the belief will leave millions of corpses behind it when it retreats. It won’t go without putting up a fight. But almost always it goes without putting up an argument. When Nazi Germany collapsed in 1945, the occupying Allies couldn’t find any Nazis. It turned out that there had never been any. Apart from the few prominent fanatics who committed suicide or stubbornly continued to proclaim the dominance of the master race even as they sat without belts and shoelaces in their jail cells, nobody had ever really believed all that stuff. Reasonable people had worn Party buttons in their lapels only so that they would be allowed to conduct orchestras, like Herbert von Karajan. A pity about the Jews, but really they had died by accident.

  Throughout 2010, the year after my brief career as a radio preacher, the mainstream media in the English-speaking countries continued to leave the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming thesis unquestioned. (Though the best of the German commentariat had already got out of the whole business after a key article in Der Spiegel, and the Chinese and the Indians had never got into it, the Anglosphere can still be depressingly provincial in its tendency to think of itself as the whole world.) But journalists who had built their careers on the theory had begun to intercalate their articles about the approaching disaster with other articles about how not enough people were listening to them, and this second category of articles had the merit of being demonstrably true. The assurance was ebbing from the belief, and it became possible to suggest that some of those who had been most noisily assured had never believed at all. Al Gore fell silent, or as close to silent as he ever gets. For my generation he had never been a very persuasive figure. After World War II we were brought up to question the wisdom of buying anything being sold from the back of a truck by a large, loud American called Al. But those less blessed with wisdom, or at any rate less crippled with arthritis, had found Al more plausible on the subject than his slim scientific credentials might normally have permitted. Now, finally, he had ceased to proclaim the crack of doom, and it became necessary to ask whether he had ever believed it. Why had he had so large a carbon footprint, flown so often by jet, bought a house at sea level when ‘sea level rise’ was one of the factors ensuring, according to the United Nations University, that there would be ‘fifty million environmental refugees’ by 2010? The nominated year having been and gone, it was time for the newspapers to notice that the number of environmental refugees was zero.

  They didn’t, of course; or if they did they said nothing. But the silence was stentorian. For the media, indeed, the silence was the message. This was equally true for politics. In Australia, when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was removed from office by his own party, it soon became fashionable for the reporters to say that his polling figures had sunk because he had gone silent on his own cherished Emissions Trading Scheme, and was therefore being punished by voters of a Green persuasion. But there weren’t that many people of a Green persuasion and it seemed much more likely that he was being punished by potential voters of every stamp, simply because his sudden silence on the subject of ‘the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time’ was an indicator that he had never really believed in its existence. Admittedly, for having said that time was running out and then later deciding that there was plenty of time after all, Rudd was unusual in being called to account. Before the make-or-break, do-or-die climate crisis international get-together in Copenhagen, Gordon Brown of Britain had said, with the aid of the Independent newspaper and other megaphones, that there were only fifty days left to save the world. When, after fifty days, it transpired that the day of decision could be put off indefinitely, he was not called upon to explain why he had ever promoted such a load of millenarian flapdoodle. He lost an election, but for other reasons. Nor has Prince Charles yet been punished for having said, in March 2009, that there were only a hundred months left to save the world. It was more time than Brown had allowed, but it was still a measurably short span, and after it expires, people might well say something.

  They have said nothing yet. Personally, as someone who feels that Prince Charles will make a good king, I hope that he will get rid of any among his environmental advisers who encourage him in the belief that, should he ever decide to run his Aston-Martin on biofuel, he can do so without damaging the rainforest. But he should start by firing the writers who sent him in front of the television cameras with a speech contending that there were only so many months left to decide against the green planet’s certain death. This contention, which started off sounding inflated and is bound, well before the stated number of months runs out, to end sounding hollow, could have no business except to rouse a rabble: not, normally, the proper concern of a monarch in waiting. The business of the future king is to be a pillar of reason, not a focus for panic. Prince Charles, ever the thoughtful student of the heritage in which he operates, might care to look at the passage in Clarendon where London catches fire and the desperate population, thinking that there must be a malicious cause, pick on all the resident French, Dutch and Catholics. Many members of these target groups were assaulted or locked up even as the flames leapt from street to street. Properly more disturbed by the persecutions than by the fire, the King sent his men to all parts of the city, telling the people that there was no blame to be placed.

  In the three years I was broadcasting, there was a similarly widespread belief that anyone who did not think the climate was in crisis must be in the pay of an oil company. Being sceptical about the alarmist version of global warming was not only held to be the product of a general scepticism against science itself, it was thought to be explicable only as the result of a devious initiative by big business. Even quite late into 2010, Judith Curry, the climate scientist who has done the best job of reminding her erstwhile colleagues that they were supposed to be pursuing critical enquiry and not propaganda, held to the notion that any questioning of the theory earlier on – i.e. before she herself finally realized that too many of her fellow researchers had gone into showbusiness – had been made possible only by the surreptitious support of Big Oil. If only: I, for one, could have used the money. BBC radio pays peanuts, which have some oil in them, but not a lot.

  During this period it was no fun watching, even from a distance, my first homeland turn itself into a burlesque house. Luckily the rest of the world wasn’t paying attention – which is the real fear of the Australian intelligentsia whatever the subject – but if you were Australian yourself it was embarrassing to log on and be deafened by the clatter of slap-sticks and the yelp of clowns with their loose tights on fire. The joke was intensified by the lingering inability of Australia’s literate classes to realize that they were being led by a character out of Molière. Enunciated with unblinking urgency during the course of three long and shameful years, Kevin Rudd’s brain fever on the subject of the oncoming climatic m
enace should have been readily detectable from how he always left out the crucial fact that Australia produced somewhere between 1.4 per cent and 1.5 per cent of the world’s emissions. That was the only number anyone needed to know. Knowing that number, you knew that Australia’s part in resolving the putative crisis could only be symbolic.

  But symbolism mattered, to the point where it infected the facts. In whatever field – not just climate but in any area of the human story, so long as the focus lay in the future – it was as if no fact could any longer exist without the context of a belief. In Oxford a new academic boondoggle got started which called itself post-normal science, an expansive non-discipline which held, if it held anything, that a projection could be a correct ‘narrative’ whether the ascertainable facts fitted it or not. Post-normality made great play with rubber figures, a device by which any figure cited in favour of your own argument could be infinitely flexible, whereas any figure cited in favour of the opposite argument could be ignored. When cooking up a figure, it was always useful to talk in millions if you could, but for the sake of plausibility it helped to add an increment which made it sound as if a careful audit had been taken. Whether talking about square miles of melting ice or the number of African children per day currently dying because of excessive Western consumption of carbohydrates, one and a quarter million will sound even better than two million, because it will sound a bit less as if you made it up. Swift, the first man to study the mind-set of the Projectors, was also the first to spot the utility of the precise-sounding increment to the purveyor of rubber figures. Thus, in Laputa, the celestial students engaged in plotting the course of the comet whose perihelion could destroy the earth have established that it carries ‘a blazing tail ten hundred thousand and fourteen miles long’.