Mother Country

by Marilynne Robinson

  To appreciate the elegance of all this, the reader must be aware that in Britain there is still no legal obligation to inform a future developer that a site has been used as a waste dump.3 So if the bleak cities of the North enjoy some reversal of their economic situation, they may look forward to excavations into pockets of undescribed contamination. The dumping industry adopts the genial theory that a maximum of dispersion through the environment is to be hoped for, reasoning that dilution will attenuate the toxicity of these poisons. This practice has been a boon to the bottled drinking water industry.

  Next to the article about importing toxins is another, beneath a picture of a swan on the river Tees.4 Somewhere behind the swan are two enormous open concrete vats. These vats contain toxic chemicals contaminated with uranium, and they are “weeping.” No one can decide what to do with them. The German owners proposed emptying them gradually into the river, another instance of the notion that toxins are controlled by dispersion. This plan met local resistance. Between the wind and the weeping, however, the dispersion of toxins into the environment will surely go forward on its own. All these strategies of dilution, undertaken in one little island which has gallantly assumed the burden of the most noxious wastes of huge industrial economies, cannot finally be considered dilution at all but, instead, commingling and compounding.

  The British government must know why other countries will pay good money to be rid of the wastes Britain imports. So the question arises—do they imagine no future for their own country? Is it simply to be exploited to death? Britain is the greatest source of acid rain in Europe. The government does not put filters on its coal-fired electrical plants because no economic use has been found for the filth they would trap, which it would then be an expense to dispose of. So forests die, and stone decays, and the damage to the landscape and public health entails little expense in money because little is done to defend against such damage. Would these policies be acceptable to any government that looked forward even twenty years?

  I know I will shock my readers with my speculations. But more is at stake than their goodwill, though I value approval as heartily as anyone. The fact is that the role the British government has imposed on the country is not finally compatible with its survival. The functions the other Europeans have allowed it to assume are not compatible with their own survival, ultimately. And in the long term, the health of the planet is severely compromised, at very best.

  Is there any reason to believe the British are entirely exceptional in adopting such strategies of self-destruction? None that I know of. It seems probable to me that other methods, just as outlandish and unthinkable, for scraping together a few billion dollars in contempt of everything we take to be of value are flourishing in other regions, eluding our notice because the world’s calamitous history has not alerted us yet to the profoundly destructive tendencies of this sad species. We are still naive enough to believe that there is a difference between peace and war, in terms of their impact on the environment and on human prospects for survival. Clearly, if the world is to be preserved, our thinking must change altogether, to take account of phenomena which lack even the abysmal logic of war. We must look at ourselves, and at those we trust and admire, assuming nothing on the basis of such notions as “Western,” or “advanced,” or, for that matter, “Third World” or “socialist.” There are many people of goodwill ready to take action against destructive forces where they perceive them. But Sellafield, the plutonium factory, which gathers radioactive material from the ends of the earth and then pours it into the environment of Europe, is a thoroughly sufficient proof that the world’s would-be defenders neither see nor perceive nor hear nor understand. The most important and difficult thing to believe, out of all I will say, is that Sellafield is no secret. Most of what I write about comes from newspapers, often from the front pages of newspapers. It is said that American tourists buy 30 percent of the books sold in Britain. This indicates the kind of travelers who go there—people literate in English, and inclined to read. Is it possible to conclude otherwise than that our education produces an acculturated blindness which precludes our taking in available, unambiguous information if it is contrary to our assumptions?

  This book deals with Sellafield and the peculiarities of British culture which allow it to flourish. It deals also with British and American social history. The nuclear threat to civilization and life is a subject talked almost to exhaustion. We think we know something about our “Anglo-Saxon heritage,” which we take to be loosely comprehended in the more amiable features of our own society, never implicated in its darker side. Marxism, which I will touch upon, has the chic of a modern, brave, and dangerous philosophy, but Marx is unread, and the versions of his thinking with which we are wearied are the opportunistic inventions of the sort of persons who love to believe they are brave and dangerous. Marx is by no means the source of the vocabulary we routinely use to describe the world. His reputation for intellectual giantism has been put to the uses of notions that were never his. So a slovenly, dishonest, self-congratulatory enthusiasm has affixed itself to him parasitically. His totemization is primitive nonsense, a major example of the necrosis in American intellectual life.

  Looking at Sellafield and modern Britain, at British social history, and at Marx, I hope to disrupt assumptions which are important in America, and which are without basis. The subjects I have chosen do not together make a shapely book, but I forgive myself these formal inadequacies on the grounds that very large questions have had to be dealt with in order to anchor the fact of Sellafield’s existence in the reader’s understanding. I know that Sellafield will be dismissed, if it can be, on the grounds that Britain is a mild and decent society, and that while the plant developed and assumed its economic role, Britain claimed to be a socialist society. Oddly, these notions are potent enough in the minds of many people to mitigate the offense, as if ferocious plutonium, when it is the off-scourings of a government-owned factory pouring into the environment of a virtuous and public-spirited nation, takes on the character of its surroundings and becomes rose-hip tea.

  I will suggest that the matter be looked at from another side, that the plutonium should be seen to cast doubt on the benevolence of the British government, and more generally on the legitimacy of the notion that government-run industries are less grasping than others, or that modern governments are reliably more benign than their nightmare progenitors in other ages. In Britain Sellafield’s profitability is considered a sufficient answer to every objection. The prospect of diminished profitability is sufficient to postpone improvements in the functioning of this old and primitive plant. The general, long-term effects of government policies, including economic stagnation, meager social benefits, and high unemployment, give the government great leverage, because people are desperate to work on any terms. As industrial employer, the government reaps rewards from its failures, if they are indeed failures, and not simply strategies for creating a cheap and docile work force. Could this be the key to interpreting the sorry condition of the working classes in other countries where the government is also the industrialist? The stability of these countries does not suggest failure, from the point of view of the existing regime. Why do we persist in assuming that any government has the welfare of the mass of its people as an object, where neither history nor present experience encourages this idea?

  Can Sellafield exist in a country that is truly committed to economic justice? The plant’s great and often-invoked contribution to the economy of depressed Cumbria translates into exploitation of an area especially vulnerable to such abuse, just as it would if the same “contribution” were made to an impoverished region of Africa or Asia. Is a government that knowingly exposes its people to radioactive contamination for profit an appropriate provider of health care or reporter of health data?

  Other questions come to mind. What, at this point, can possibly be meant by the defense of Europe? Have we bent our efforts to ensuring them the leisure and freedom to destroy themselve
s? Will anyone defend the notion that nuclear stalemate has brought us forty years of peace? Or must we give new meaning to the phrase “cold war,” seeing that the desolations of war will have been achieved in an atmosphere of quiet and civil order, by the cool, unforced policies of stable and prosperous governments?

  It is instructive to consider the content, in practical terms, of the economic statistical categories that are used to compare the successes of governments, and even, bizarrely, the moral solvency of peoples. To the extent that they are accurate, such statistics do not necessarily reflect economic activity as we usually think of it, barter in soybeans and clock radios. Any fluctuation upward in British employment reflects in part the growth of the toxic waste-dumping industry. Any positive movement in Britain’s balance of trade reflects in part its successful marketing abroad of these wretched services. Japanese employment and balance of trade must then be thought to suffer a corresponding setback. Yet a sane method of accounting would express all this as aching deficit on the side of Britain.

  It is time we developed ways of describing the world which can give us a better sense of its health and prospects. I am not the first to observe that there is, so far as we can know, only one living planet. And even if there were another, nothing in our present state of consciousness would save it from the abuse that threatens to kill this one.

  My history of modern England is based largely on newspaper reports, usually contemporary with whatever is being described. Since the British impound all government records for thirty years and then release them selectively, and the Official Secrets Act makes it a crime for anyone to reveal, without authorization, any information acquired by him as a public employee, contemporary histories of Britain are typically undocumented, vague, lame, and opinionated or, when they are memoirs, self-serving. Such legal prohibitions on the flow of information are obviously significant in a country where doctors and nurses are public employees. These restraints necessarily render all data suspect. Where poverty and unemployment are endemic, educational attainment is low, and pollution is uncontrolled, as in Britain, there is no reason to be much impressed by statistics indicating a high average life expectancy, for example.

  At the same time, the secretiveness of the government and the potency of the laws restraining the press assure that newspaper versions of events will be more than fair to the government. Most of the information I use has passed through a filter of official approval, simply by virtue of the workings of the Official Secrets Act and the government’s exercise of prior restraint, and because of regular, off-the-record briefings of journalists by government, which are a major source of news. The information to be found in the British press is alarming enough, however incomplete it may be, to provide material for a dozen sobering volumes. It is absorbed by the public very quietly, which means that the government has made a fair estimate of public passivity. In fact, the greatest burst of official admissions about the scale of contamination and the fecklessness of Sellafield’s management arose just at the time that the planned expansion of the plant and the construction of a similar plant at Dounreay, Scotland, were made known. Why this should be an effective way of managing public reaction I cannot speculate, but the government has encountered no important resistance, so, within the British context, the government must be seen to have handled it all very smoothly. Admissions of incompetence seem to ingratiate, and to enlist loyalty in their public. Admissions of past mismanagement seem to be accepted as earnests of good intention. American opinion was, of course, unruffled. So, again, all this alarming news alarmed no one, the plant grows and prospers, and the little earth is still without an ally, despite all the funds and clubs and naturalists, or because of them.

  This book is essentially an effort to break down some of the structures of thinking that make reality invisible to us. These are monumental structures, large and central to our civilization. So my attack will seem ill-tempered and eccentric, a veering toward anarchy, the unsettling emergence of lady novelist as petroleuse. I have had time and occasion to note the disproportion between my objective and my resources. If I accomplish no more than to jar a pillar or crack a fresco, or totter a god or two, I hope no one will therefore take my assault as symbolic rather than as failed. If I had my way I would not leave one stone upon another.

  I am angry to the depths of my soul that the earth has been so injured while we were all bemused by supposed monuments of value and intellect, vaults of bogus cultural riches. I feel the worth of my own life diminished by the tedious years I have spent acquiring competence in the arcana of mediocre invention, for all the world like one of those people who knows all there is to know about some defunct comic-book hero or television series. The grief borne home to others while I and my kind have been thus occupied lies on my conscience like a crime.

  This book is written in a state of mind and spirit I could not have imagined before Sellafield presented itself to me, so grossly anomalous that I had to jettison almost every assumption I had before I could begin to make sense of it. My writing has perhaps taken too much of the stain of my anger and disappointment. I must ask the reader to pardon and assist me, by always keeping Sellafield in mind—Sellafield, which pours waste plutonium into the world’s natural environment, and bomb-grade plutonium into the world’s political environment. For money.

  PART ONE

  The first questions that arise in attempting to understand Sellafield, and more generally the nuclear and environmental policies of the British government, are: How have they gotten away with so much? and Why on earth would they want to get away with it? To put it in other terms, why should the relationship of those who govern Britain to its land and population be that of a shrewd adversary contriving to do harm for profit? For decades the British government has presided over the release of deadly toxins into its own environment, for money, using secrecy, scientism, and public trust or passivity to preclude resistance or criticism and to quiet fears. Such extraordinary behavior cannot have a motive in any usual sense, since it is in no one’s interest. It has, however, an etiology and a history, in which the institutions which expedite it and the relations it expresses evolve together. This is of more than casual interest to Americans, because there is no stronger cultural force than atavism. Our past is a good commentary on the future we seem to be preparing for ourselves.

  It is often said that Britain has no written constitution. If a constitution is a body of law that defines the fundamental relations among the elements of a society, then Britain has an ancient one indeed, solidly encoded, enshrined in literature, in history, and in an array of institutions. The core of British culture is Poor Law, which emerged in the fourteenth century and was reformed once, in 1834, when it became the Victorians’ notorious New Poor Law. It remained in force until 1948. Then it was superseded by the Welfare State, in which its features were plainly discernible.

  In essence, Poor Law restricted people who lived by their labor to the parish where they were born, and mandated assistance from the parish for those who were needy and deemed deserving of help, while wages were depressed to a level that made recourse to such help frequent. This often meant entering a poorhouse, institutions whose wretchedness made them, over centuries, objects of the minutest study to generations of philanthropists. Working people who were forced to accept parish assistance, and whose destitution was absolute, and who were found otherwise worthy of aid, surrendered whatever rights they may have had. Or the fact that they had no rights was thoroughly and ingeniously exploited once they accepted this status. Under the Old Poor Law, before the 1834 reforms that made the operation of the system more punitive and severe, child paupers, that is, the children of destitute parents, were given to employers, each with a little bonus to reward the employer for relieving the public of this burden. The children would be worked brutally, because with each new pauper child the employer received another little bonus. To starve such children was entirely in the interest of those who set them to work. Aside from all the work the c
hild performed under duress, its death brought the reward that came with a new child. The authorities asserted an absolute right to disrupt families, and to expose young children to imprisonment and forced labor. The invasiveness of the Poor Laws was never impeded by the development of any system of assured legal rights, with which the entire institution would have been wholly incompatible and out of sympathy. Leslie Scarman, a member of the House of Lords and a legal authority, has written: “It is the helplessness of law in [the] face of the legislative sovereignty of Parliament which makes it difficult for the legal system to accommodate the concept of fundamental and inviolable human rights.”5 More to the point, the social history of Britain has never reflected any sense of the unconditional value of human lives or any respect for the modest baggage of person and property, the little circumference of inviolability on which personal rights depend.

  The indigent who were considered worthy of parish assistance were called paupers. The unworthy, those who were considered able-bodied but shiftless, were not to be relieved, though in fact they were often assisted on the same terms as the “deserving poor,” that is, meagerly and punitively, since the system was in any case preoccupied with the need to withhold charity, considered the great source of moral corruption of the poor and therefore the great source of poverty. So late and well reputed a social thinker as the young William Beveridge urged that starvation be left as a final incentive to industry among the shiftless poor. Beveridge was to become the father of the Welfare State.