Category: All posts

To Become a Warrior 2017

I first wrote ‘To Become a Warrior’ in 2002.  It was published in Interzone, and subequently in one of Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best anthologies.  It’s about Carl, a poorly educated, not particularly bright young man who’s been left outside of the prosperous, liberal society of which he is nominally a citizen, and his recruitment by a murderous gang of ‘shifters’ who want to take the world back to the world of the Vikings.

It was one of a number of stories set in this world, the first being ‘The Welfare Man’ written in 1993.   Judging by reprints in anthologies and reader’s polls, they have been among my most popular stories.  However, I didn’t include them in either of my story collections, choosing instead to incorporate them into my second novel, Marcher.

My work as a social worker – when I wrote the story I was only a couple of years on from working as the manager of a social work team- had given me a powerful sense that even a prosperous, economically booming, middle class town like Cambridge (where I lived then and still live now), has another side to it, people who share no part of the prosperity.  There was the famous Cambridge, with its beautiful old buildings, its ancient University, its IT and biotech industries, its bright, educated, liberal-minded citizens, and there was this alternate Cambridge which no one comes to visit, where I would go as part of my job.

When I incorporated ‘To Become a Warrior’ into the novel Marcher, I shifted from first to third person, added and changed details to make it fit in with the rest of the book, swapped around some characters, and gave the story two additional endings, in keeping with the novel’s theme of branching time lines and alternate presents.  Below, I have restored the original first person short story, except that  this time I have opted for one of the other endings.

I’m putting it out here now to mark the inauguration of Donald Trump.   A clamour of rage and fear is going up today from the members of, so to speak, my own tribe, the liberal middle class.  We see everything we value under threat, and we look around for people to blame.  But I have a strong sense, which I’ve tried rather clumsily to explore in previous posts (for instance this), that we ourselves must take a share of that blame. If you leave people outside, they turn to others who offer to take them in.

Anyway, here it is in full, ‘To Become a Warrior ‘ to mark this historic day:

Continue reading “To Become a Warrior 2017”

The smartsplaining voice

There’s a lot of talk these days about a growing contempt in the world for evidence, for experts, for reason itself.  It’s a real concern. Not much hope for the future if decades of meticulous scientific work on climate change can all be tossed aside by know-nothing ‘common sense’.  Not much hope for a decent society if obvious lies can be uncritically accepted as true, while facts are dismissed out of hand

But another kind of ugliness that’s been coming to the fore lately is the voice that says, in effect, we smart people know best, and those thick people should just shut up and wait to be told what’s good for them.  Weary, angry, contemptuous: the smartsplaining voice, it might be called.

Clever educated people who are good at reasoning, should be careful not to assume that this alone makes them right.

I remember once in my social work days, visiting a barely literate client and her saying to me resentfully at the end: ‘I suppose you’re going to go away and write this all down, aren’t you?’  However reasonable I was, however conscientious, the fact remained that my interpretation of events was going to go on the record, and hers was not.

A few years later, after a change of job, I acquired a reading ticket for the Cambridge University Library, and had the habit for a while of sitting in the cafe over there to write.  As I half-listened to the people at the tables around me, academics and students coming and going with their cups of coffee and tea, I noticed that I could go all day without even once hearing a regional accent of any kind, only the distinctive drawl of the British private school system.

There’s no question in my mind that every one of those people in the library would have been much better at rational argument and far better-informed than that former client of mine in her council house three miles away.  But every one of their arguments, however beautifully constructed, would necessarily be based on their own experience and what they’d read, and I’ll bet that neither their experience nor their reading equipped them to know anything about that woman’s world.  (This is true of me too, incidentally, although my former job afforded me small glimpses into it.)

So when some of them become politicians, or economists, or entrepreneurs, their judgements about the world, however carefully reasoned, will take almost no account at all of what that woman feels, what’s important to her, how she imbues her life with meaning.  Their judgements will, on the other hand, be very amply informed by the needs of people like themselves, what’s important to them, what imbues their life with meaning.

And that makes me think that what may look like a revolt against reason itself, may be in fact be a revolt against a class that is very good at reasoning, and very good at explaining why the world ought to be run in a way that suits that very same class.   Not revolt against reason as such, in other words, but revolt against reasoning that (however unintentionally) is rigged in favour of the reasoners.   After all, if you’re good at reasoning, you’re good at rationalising too.

Which is why I think that members of that class, including me, would do better to think about what we’ve been excluding from our view of the world, than to dismiss whole groups of people as ignorant thugs.

End times?

Trump actually winning now seems rather likely, but even if he loses, the very fact that so many support him may be a sign that the checks and balances of the American political system have now been weakened so badly (and some would say deliberately) that it is only a matter of time before they cave in and crumble.

Sooner or later, empires do fall.  When you live in one, its power seems so solid, its essential logic so unassailable, that it easy to imagine that it will go on for ever in the same familar way as it’s done all your life.  But the algorithm is never perfect.  Sooner or later, it either comes up against some external fact which its design didn’t anticipate, or is snarled up from within by its own unintended consequences.

The particular genius of Anglo-Saxon institutions, people sometimes say, is that they are both solid and flexible, allowing them to adjust to changing times without coming tumbling down.  It’s pretty impressive that the US constitution has lasted since 1789, or that the British constitution has evolved more or less peacefully since the Glorious Revolution in 1688, but their survival has always depended on their legitimacy being generally accepted, even by people who, in other respects, disagree profoundly with one another.  When I go out to vote, here in the UK, I’m always struck by the sight of the representatives of the various rival parties chatting amicably to one another outside the polling station, and even helping each other by telling each other the names of voters so they can tick them off on their lists.   There are plenty of countries where members of rival parties are killing each other, torturing each other, locking each other up, countries where the loser in an election will promptly declare a foul, and  begin a civil war.   But those people chatting and joking outside my polling station demonstate to me that, whatever their political differences,  they are still all players of a peaceful and orderly game whose rules they all accept.

But when something approaching half of the population believes that the whole system is rigged, and when serious contenders for office begin to argue not just that their opponents’ views are wrong or harmful, but that their opponents themselves are criminal, evil, illegitimate or traitorous then it seems to me that the game may nearly be up.

Hate-filled ignorant scum

I’ve been struck for some time by the increasing invisibility of working class people in Britain.   Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, I’ve been struck by the increasing invisibility of class as a social division.  The concerns of progressive-minded people have shifted away from class to other divisions -gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability/disability- to a degree that, as Owen Jones points out at the beginning of his important book, Chavs*, the kind of derogatory comment that would be completely unacceptable if applied to, say, an ethnic minority, or to women, or to people with disabilities, can now be quite openly made about people who are working class or poor.  This was particularly evident to me in the wake of the Brexit referendum.  I was very stuck, not only by the way that liberal middle-class Remain voters tended to characterise working-class Leave voters as ignorant, stupid, bigoted and racist, but also by their shock at being defeated.  Many Remain voters, it seemed, only knew folk who voted Remain.  There was a whole bloc of people out there, whose lives and opinions they knew almost nothing about.

When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s working class people were not invisible in the same way.   The city I grew up in, Oxford, was at that time a major car-manufacturing town.  Trade unions were powerful working-class organisations and, though I came from a middle-class and not particularly political background, in my teens I would have been able to name probably nine or ten trade union leaders in the same way that I could name senior government ministers.  Changes since then have not abolished the working class, but fragmented it, disempowered it and rendered it invisible as a class to the point that some middle-class people, who clearly lead very sheltered lives, now speak of a classless society, or a post-class society, or of us ‘all being middle-class’ now.

The changes, described in Owen’s book, include, the dismantling of much of manufacturing industry, the attack, begun by Margaret Thatcher, on trade union power, and the deliberate policy of the Thatcher government, through the selling off of social housing, to encourage as many working class people as possible to begin to think of themselves as middle-class home owners, or at least to drive a wedge between them, and those that remained in social housing.  The Labour Party, a party originally established with the precise purpose of ensuring that working class people were politically represented, was to carry on with this programme.  Under New Labour, as Owen notes, the idea of emancipating the working class people morphed from improving conditions for the class as a whole, to helping individual working class people to become middle-class.  The emphasis shifted from ‘equality’ to ‘equality of opportunity’.  ‘The new Britain is a meritocracy’, Tony Blair said when he came to power, though the term ‘was not originally meant to describe a desirable society…[but] was meant to raise the alarm at what Britain could become’ (Chavs, p 96).

Not all working class people can become middle class.  ‘If everyone became middle class, who would man the supermarket checkouts, empty the bins and answer the phones in call-in centres?’ (Chavs, p 250).   And not everyone has the same aptitudes.  But the shift of emphasis from improving the condition of a whole class, to helping people with the necessary abilities to leave that class and join the middle class, means that those who are left behind can be blamed for their own problems, and the poorest among them can be described in terms which, if applied to ethnic minorities rather than social classes, could have come straight from some 1930s Nazi tract:

‘…that sub (human) class that now exists in the murkiest, darkest corners of this country…good-for-nothing scroungers who have no morals, no compassion, no sense of responsibility and are incapable of feeling love or guilt’ (Carole Malone, News of the World, cited in Chavs, p 22)

One of the interesting points raised by Owen, and one which very much chimes with my own experience, is that denigration of working class people isn’t confined to the right-wing of British politics, but can also be found among liberal and even left-wing people.  I read an article in the Guardian a few years ago, reporting on a poll which found that the middle class was now more ‘left-wing’ than the working class.  And in the comment thread I came across the following, offered, as far as I could tell, without conscious irony:

… [The working class] consistently vote against their own interests. I have always imagined that the reason is that they think they are “middle-class” as was my own family’s delusion. However, I suspect that the real reason is that they are just hate-filled ignorant scum and we middle-class people should just say fuck them.

Hate-filled, ignorant scum.  ‘One of the ways people have made their snobbery socially acceptable…’ says Johann Hari (cited in Chavs, p 116) ‘[is] by acting as though they are defending immigrants from the “ignorant” white working class’.  Indeed some commentators quite specifically contrast hard-working immigrants with lazy good-for-nothing British workers.  Writing in the Times in 1994, Janet Daley (cited in Chavs, p 118-9) characterised British working-class people as a ‘self-loathing, self-destructive tranche of the population’ and contrasted them with the ‘religion, cultural dignity and… sense of family’ brought by people from ethnic minorities, who were only held back by the ‘mindless hatred of the indigenous working classes, who loathe them precisely for their cultural integrity…  I fear long after Britain has become a successful multi-racial society, it will be plagued by this diminishing…detritus of the Industrial Revolution’.

*   *   *

I heard a lot of that kind of talk from Remainers in the aftermath of Brexit.  But it seems to me that describing working class British people as ‘hate-filled ignorant scum’ and contrasting them unfavourably with immigrant workers was never exactly calculated to endear them to the European project.

*References are to the new 2016 edition of this book, published by Verso

Not so pretty things

My son was playing old David Bowie tracks recently and one of them was ‘Oh You Pretty Things,’ from Hunky Dory, an album which I adored and must have listened to thousands of times in my teens.  ‘Pretty Things’ is a paeon to a new generation shouldering aside a stale old one:

Look at your children
See their faces in golden rays
Don’t kid yourself they belong to you
They’re the start of a coming race…

You gotta make way for the homo superior

It was a common theme in the late 60s and 70s.  See Joni Mitchell’s lovely ‘Woodstock,’ for instance, or Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Volunteers’ (‘…One generation got old/One generation got soul…’)   But as I listened to it, it struck me with a mixture of sadness and wry amusement that the generation Bowie was thinking of were the Baby Boomers, the very people, now at the threshold of old age, who many in a new generation are blaming for the current dire state of the world.

Headland anthology

I’m very pleased that my short story ‘Monsters’, first published in Interzone way back in 2003, will be appearing, in very distinguished company, in the Headland anthology, published by Edge Hill University Press to mark 10 years of the Edge Hill Prize.  The Edge Hill Prize is the UK’s main prize for single author collections of stories (of any genre) and winning it for my collection, The Turing Test, was a huge breakthrough in my writing career.

Although it’s not the story that people most often mention when they read The Turing Test, ‘Monsters’ is a personal favourite of mine, perhaps because, although autobiographical elements are present in almost all my fiction, they are particularly to the fore here in this story about how writers both use and are held back by their demons, and about a poet’s emotionally stifling relationship with his mother.

Here’s the blurb about me and the story on the Edge Hill website.

 

Brexit Eeyores

Absolutely awful

As I mentioned before, I voted ‘remain’ in the UK’s recent referendum, but I am growing very tired of what now I think of as the Brexit Eeyores: the weary, ‘I know better’ voices predicting economic calamity, lamenting that a vote was ever held on a matter that ordinary people couldn’t be expected to understand, and dismissing ‘leave’ voters as some combination of ignorant, uneducated, racist, or gullible.  I am sometimes reminded of white Rhodesians  telling each other how they always knew the country would go to the dogs if the Africans were given the vote.

One can argue about the merits or otherwise of referendums, but if we were only allowed to vote on matters of which we possessed expert knowledge, then most of us wouldn’t be permitted to vote at all.  General elections usually hinge on economic policy and the management of public services, after all, both of which are highly complex and technical matters.  The fact is that, in a democracy, those who possess expertise have to persuade the rest of us that they understand what our concerns are, and have a plan that will help to address them.  You can’t just say, ‘we know better than you do what’s good for you, so do as you’re told.’

The key thing here is that, even though all the established political parties, almost all economists, and the great majority of business leaders, supported the ‘remain’ cause, the majority of the electorate decided to ignore them.  That’s quite a consensus to go against!  Why did it happen?  Presumably it is because that wide range of eminent people failed to convince 17,000,000 voters that their concerns were being heard or being addressed.  Dismissing those seventeen million voters as thick, or racist or gullible dupes will not help them with that feeling of not being heard.  And if that feeling isn’t addressed, we really are in for some difficult times.

As I say, I’m not an expert but here is one of the best analyses I’ve read recently of what’s going on behind the Brexit vote here and the rise of the likes of Donald Trump.

Meritocracy

I was interested in this article asking whether meritocracy in the UK is a sham.  I live in Cambridge and for a time I used go and write in the Cambridge University Library (I was eligible for a library card at the time as a member of staff of Cambridge’s other, marginally less famous, university: Anglia Ruskin).  I got into the habit of working in the cafe there  -I find a background hum of voices more conducive to writing than absolute silence- and I can tell you that I could go all day without seeing a single black face, or hearing a single regional accent.  There’d  be some foreigners, but  the British people in there, students and academics, were almost all white and almost all spoke with the  distinctive accent, somehow both languid and gushing, of the English private school system.   (I myself was no exception btw: I too am white, I too went to private school.)  That tells you quite a lot, I think, about the extent to which we live in a meritocracy!

What we do live in, though, is a society which sees being a meritocracy as a desireable goal, a society which, when it talks about equality, talks about equality of opportunity, about removing the obstacles that prevent gifted people from poor backgrounds from achieving their potential.  There’s not a lot of talk about people whose talents are not exceptional, people who are not especially bright, people who are of average or below average ability, even though this group, by definition, includes more than half of the population.

Equality of opportunity is desireable, but it’s not sufficient, a point made in the article by the former Labour leader, Ed Milliband (someone who I never thought I’d look back on with some degree of nostalgia!).   A meritocracy, per se, would not necessarily be good society.  In fact, thinking about it now, I’d go as far as to say that, if I was designing a society in which the power of an elite was to be permenantly entrenched, I’d make it a meritocracy, and give it an excellent universal educational system, designed to ensure that anyone with above average ability, from whatever background, could be identified from an early age and channelled to a position in society commensurate with those abilities.  That way the elite could be constantly strengthened, because it would continously co-opt the most able and continuously deprive therest of the population of those who would otherwise have been their natural leaders.

Or am I being unfair?  I suppose that what would moderate such a society, and make it more humane, would be that the elite would contain many people who had memories of, and family connections with, the rest of society, whereas the more stratified system we have now means that many  people (including some of those I overheard in the University library) may never really have known anyone from outside of their own class.

css.php