Threats of Pain and Ruin

by Theodore Dalrymple

  Then Squire thinks of another solution to the problem he has set himself:

  Our enlightened capitalists are always said to be exploring new methods of eliminating waste. May it not be that it long ago occurred to one of them that a sufficient accumulation of Christmas verses was now in existence, that there was no difference between old ones and new ones, that nobody could ever remember if he had seen one of them before, and that it was criminally extravagant to go on employing labour in the fabrication of new goods before the old were worn out? Surely if these truths were not grasped by keen business minds in the old days of fat and plenty [before the First World War] they must have occurred to somebody during the war when every ounce of effort had to be put into war-work, and he was who mis-employed labour was helping the Germans. If not, are we to understand that the composers of Christmas verses, after five years’ inactivity, have actually been set to work again at their own trade – or (awful thought) that some of those extraordinary tribunals [that decided who need not go into the armed forces] exempted them as indispensable?

  There is in this a love of absurdity, which is almost a sufficient condition for a love of life, and also for a civilised outlook. My copy of Essays at Large has a small ink inscription, To Gwen from Mary Eccles, written in a hand, that I think is contemporary with the book, that does not suggest intellectuality, which in turn suggests a generally literate culture (for only a literate person would think of offering such a book as a gift, and only to another literate person). In the book I found a bookmark, with a little picture of a pixie-like figure in a jester’ costume, holding in his elfin hand a glass of champagne, beneath which are the words LONG LIVE FRIENDSHIP. Above it are the words From Mary to Gwen.

  And long live J C Squire, a man who had in many ways a rather tragic life. He was, by the way, the first poet of the Great War to publish anti-war poems, though he believed in the justice of the Allied cause.

  7 - Ancient and/or Modern

  To believe or trust in the wisdom of crowds just because crowds are composed of many people and two heads are better than one seems to me absurd; but equally it is wrong to reject an opinion merely because it is held by a crowd. We are condemned, or privileged, or both, constantly to have to make up our own minds about things: to be nonjudgmental, as the cant word has it, means not to participate fully in or of human life. And what most people probably mean when they describe themselves (almost always in a self-congratulatory way) as being nonjudgmental is that they are uncensorious—other than about people who are censorious, of course. An inadequate vocabulary can be pregnant with consequences.

  An article in the French leftish-liberal newspaper, Le Monde, for 15 September, drew attention with evident unease or even mild disapproval to the results of a poll conducted in France by the fine arts magazine, Beaux Arts. To the question of whether it is more important to safeguard the treasures of the past or to promote creativity, the respondents replied by a very large majority that the former is the more important. The article implied that, pace the advertisement, forty million Frenchman can be wrong.

  Of course, France is in a slightly unusual position by comparison with many other countries. It is by far the most visited country in the world, with 70 million tourists annually; more than twice as many Frenchmen now live by tourism as by agriculture. And it isn’t French modernity that people come to see: it is the French past (together, of course, with the pleasures, comforts and conveniences of the present, in which the country is by no means deficient).

  But I doubt very much that those who answered the poll were thinking of their pocketbooks or economic interests as they answered. They were thinking of their country; and if I had been asked I would have answered in the same way.

  The unease or disapproval of the writer in Le Monde derived from more than one consideration. The rapid increase in the number of buildings (or even landscapes) deemed to be part of the national patrimony, and the difficulty or impossibility of withdrawing them from it once they are inscribed as such, means that France is at risk, at least in the estimation of the writer, of becoming a vast museum or theme park. Moreover, by declaring this or that building to be part of the national patrimony, the state takes on more and more financial obligations, for upkeep does not come cheap. Many of the buildings or sites of the patrimony do not pay for themselves by means of tourist receipts; and these are not times propitious for yet more government expenditure.

  But I think the main concern of the author of the article is what might be called that of cultural psychology. For the author, the poll (the actual figures of which she does not give) indicates that the French are now a backward looking people, with no confidence in the future and not much ability to create one either. They are living the dream of a past than cannot be recaptured.

  I will leave aside the question of whether, if one is concerned to conserve the past, one is destined to be uncreative: in other words, whether the dichotomy between preservation and creativity is a genuine one. Personally, I do not think that it is; attachment to what exists does not inhibit creative effort and in my opinion might ever spur it. The fact that so many classic books have been written has not, so far as I am aware, inhibited anyone from putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard in the hope of adding another.

  But the article itself gives us a clue to the reason why the French who were polled by Beaux Arts magazine (who are almost certainly not a cross section of the general population, perhaps we should remember) voted the way they did. On the second page of the article is a photograph of la cité de l’Etoile, a housing project in Bobigny on the outskirts of Paris designed by the architect Georges Candilis and built in 1962.

  These ugly, soulless, prefabricated concrete blocks have been declared by the authorities to be part of the ‘patrimony of the Twentieth Century,’ and therefore as being too culturally important to demolish or replace. The people who have been trapped into living in these concrete ant-heaps have protested vigorously at the designation: they know in their own persons what it is to live out the social-cum-futuristic fantasies of nth-rate French architects like Candilis, and they are demanding demolition. The only thing to do with such architecture, as far as they are concerned, is to grind it into the dust and try to forget that it ever existed.

  Actually, I believe one or two such buildings ought to be deliberately preserved, to remind us of the aesthetic incompetence, lack of imagination or even criminality, of such as Candilis. But of course there is a question that haunts me: if le cité de l’Etoile were pulled down as it deserves, would it be replaced by anything better?

  If what is built nowadays (that is to say half a century later) is anything to go by, the answer must be equivocal. I don’t think anything quite as bad would be built, but almost certainly it would not be much better; almost certainly it would look gimcrack and not as if anyone really intended it to last longer than thirty years. The fact is that, after hundreds of years, the French have lost altogether the knack of building something that someone in the future might look upon with pleasure. They are not the only European nation to have done so; but their architects are definitely among the worst and most incompetent in the world.

  It was in this context that the magazine Beaux Arts took the poll. With a few notable exceptions, all that has been erected in the last ninety years in France has been ugly. It is true that the worst phase in the double-millennial history of French architecture has been passed, that office blocks that are now erected in France sometimes have the kind of glassy elegance that might be pleasing to men with the souls of insects or other cold-blooded creatures (but are not to be distinguished in the slightest from such buildings erected on the other side of the globe); but where architecture is concerned, the Mandate of Heaven has passed from France, though whether it has arrived somewhere else might be doubted.

  That modernism in France was and is more than a merely aesthetic mistake, but was and is motivated by a
mean-spirited, envious, ideological levelling impulse, is something that the article in Le Monde makes clear:

  The classification or labelling [of buildings to be preserved], without regard to the social class protected, could be a brake on modernity… It also limits brave new forms in architecture. It promotes the process of gentrification, chasing the least well-off classes from the city centres when real estate prices rise with the growth of tourism.

  It seems to me that this amounts to something like the following: I cannot, and will never be able to, afford to live in the best part of Paris, therefore I would prefer that no one should live in the best part of Paris, at least as it currently exists; I would prefer it to be the kind of place that I could afford to live in, that is to say much uglier and less desirable. For this to happen, it must be ruined by, for example, the kind of buildings erected in la cité de l’Etoile—a single one of which, incidentally, would be more than enough to destroy the appearance of whole quarters of Paris. (If you doubt my word, look down the rue de Rennes in the direction of la tour Montparnasse; I might, of course, say the same of any of the better parts of any of the old cities of the world.) In other words, if not everyone can live in a beautiful place then no one should be able to do so, and no one should be protected merely by his money from the corrosive effect of ugliness, because an ugliness shared is an ugliness halved. Social engineering thus trumps aesthetics; the assuaging of my resentment that others are richer, better born, more fortunate, more talented than I, is more important than the aesthetic legacy I leave to my descendants, or that I have been fortunate enough to receive myself.

  The problem would not arise so acutely, perhaps, were modern French architects able to create something of worth, but they are not, and haven’t been able for decades. You have only to look at the exterior of Jean Nouvel’s Musée du quai Branly, President Chirac’s equivalent of the Pyramid of Cheops, not far from the Eiffel Tower, to understand the terminal incapability of modern French architects. Indeed, I am not in favour of the guillotine except prophylactically for modern French architects. (They should, of course, be given the choice between the guillotine and the fate of the architects of St Basil’s Cathedral and the Taj Mahal. The latter had their eyes put out so that they would not build anything as beautiful again. Modern French architects should have their eyes put out, but for precisely the opposite reason. They do not use them anyway.)

  Just as in England you cannot bring up the question of public drunkenness without someone piping up about Gin Lane, as if nothing had happened in England between 1740 and 2010, so you cannot mention the depredations of modern French architects without someone mentioning Baron Haussmann who, at the behest of Louis Napoleon, refashioned a lot of Paris, in the process pulling down a huge number of ancient buildings, mainly so that troops could take easy pot-shots at revolutionary rabbles gathering in the new boulevards. Whether the Haussmannian reconfiguration of Paris was a good thing or not, an important, indeed vital, distinction between him and modern French architects is that he not only had taste but humanity, in the sense that he knew what a civilised urban life consisted of and required. He didn’t pull down old Paris in order to build Rostov-on-Don or Pyongyang.

  According to one person quoted in the article in Le Monde, the ‘over-patrimonialisation’ of France, that is to say the over-protection of buildings that already exist, is an undesirable and retrograde manifestation of the French fear of globalisation (which in other contexts, such as the preservation of les acquis, that is to say the social charges that render French labour so uncompetitive compared with German, it would praise as anti-neoliberal). This, it seems to me, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is, or what is needed, to be modern in the best sense. It is magical thinking. It is as if I decided that, in order to take advantage of high-speed internet connections, I had to pull my 300 year-old house in England down and put up a glass and steel box, and then use the internet mainly to gain access to pornography because that is what the majority of people use it for.

  Again, one has only to see the vast wasteland by which Paris is surrounded to understand why the French who were polled by Beaux Arts magazine might come to the conclusion that it would be better to preserve what exists than to give French architects and town planners their head. Of the latters’ financial corruption I will not speak (how they must be salivating at the thought of Tours Montparnasses equivalents overlooking the Place de la Concorde—think of the penthouse prices!)

  They—the architects and town planners—would retire to the few unspoilt parts of the city, which would undergo not gentrification as much as super-gentrification, where only marquis and ducs of the new dispensation, not mere barons and comtes, could afford, or would have sufficient political connections, to live.

  Our problem is not that we preserve the past; it is that we produce so little that is, or ever will be, worth preserving. Destroying the past will not improve our performance, only make us less aware of how deficient our performance actually is. I suppose that is a solution of a kind.

  8 - A Word to the Wise

  Recently I read a slim volume that makes you tremble for humanity as you read it, and this is so even if it presents only a one-sided account of its subject matter as some critics allege: for that one side is more than terrible enough to induce the said trembling.

  The book is Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross, written with the help of his wife Irena. Gross is a professor of history at Princeton, specialising in the social history of Poland during the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust; he is no stranger to controversy, to the point of being the object of threats. His main theme is the co-operation of ordinary Poles in the extermination of the Jews in Poland, and the controversy is not whether such co-operation took place, everyone admitting that it did, but over how extensive it was.

  Golden Harvest is an historical meditation on a single photograph that acts as the book’s frontispiece. It is of Polish peasants, together with a few militiamen, standing behind a row of human skulls with a pair of crossbones in the middle. Two of the women have shovels or spades. The ground looks bleached, like a desert; the sun is shining brightly. The ground is bleached because the topsoil consists of human ashes. The photograph was taken at Treblinka, the extermination camp, a year after the end of the war; and, according to the author, the peasants have sifted, or are about to sift, through the ashes for items of value such as gold teeth missed by the Nazis.

  Personally I think the author over-interprets the photograph. He says that the people in it stare at the camera in an unembarrassed way, as if they are just going about business as usual; but actually quite a few of the people in the photograph (which is of very bad quality, and very badly reproduced by the Oxford University Press) seem to me not to be facing the camera. Perhaps they are ashamed or frightened to show their full faces, perhaps the photographer was not very good at co-ordinating his human subjects. Perhaps the group photo was coerced rather than voluntary. It is impossible to say.

  Nevertheless, no one could read this book without being, yet again, horrified by man’s inhumanity to man. Indeed, the term inhumanity seems almost an odd one in the circumstances, assuming as it does that Man’s default setting is to decency and kindness, whereas the evidence presented in this book is that, once legal and social restraints are removed, Man becomes an utter savage.

  According to Gross, people of all social strata in Poland gladly, even joyfully, plundered their Jewish neighbours; if so, they were not unique in having done so, for it happened across Europe during Nazi occupation, while in Rwanda, in 1994, ordinary Hutus happily and without conscience appropriated the property of their erstwhile but now massacred Tutsi neighbours.

  The question of what proportion of the population behaved like this is obviously an important one, for upon the answer will depend one’s subsequent view of average human nature. Was the behaviour statistically normal
or deviant in the circumstances, or something in between the two?

  Gross’s answer is uncompromising: he thinks it was statistically normal. He does not make any claims of statistical exactitude, which would clearly be impossible; but he presents evidence which, in his opinion, shows that what he says is so.

  He uses a method that, in a very different context (thank goodness) I have used myself. He quotes the testimony of several survivors of those times, the very language in which it is couched being very, one might say horrifically, instructive. I quote at some length just one of the cases:

  The takeover of Jewish property was so widespread in occupied Poland that it called for the emergence of rules determining distribution. Thus when in August 1941 a certain Helena Klimaszewska went from the hamlet of GoniÄ…dz to RadziÅ‚ów “to get an apartment for her husband’s parents because she knew that after the liquidation of the Jews there are empty apartments,” she was told on arrival that a certain “Godlewski decides what to do with ‘post-Jewish’ apartments.” She presented her request to him but, she later testified in court, “Godlewski replied, ‘don’t even think about it.’ When I said that Mr Godlewski has four houses at his disposal and I don’t even have one he replied ‘this is none of your business, I am awaiting a brother returning from Russia where the Soviets deported him and he has to have a house.’ When I insisted that I need an apartment, he replied, ‘when people were needed to kill the Jews, you weren’t here, and now you want an apartment,’” an argument that met with a strong rebuttal from Klimaszewska’s mother-in-law: “They don’t want to give an apartment, but they sent my grandson to douse the house with gasoline…” And so, we are witnessing a conversation between an older woman and other adults that is premised on the assumption that one gains a right to valuable goods by taking part in murder of their owners.