Terry Eagleton's Blog, page 2
January 18, 2017
The New Politics of Class review – has the working class been left behind?
Class divisions are as real as ever – it’s the politicians who have changed their priorities, as this illuminating book shows
If you open a history of Britain at random, it will tell you two things about the period you chance on: that it was a time of rapid change, and that the middle classes went on rising. Rising is what God put the middle classes on Earth to do. In fact, according to this illuminating study, they have now risen to the point where they outnumber the working class.
Whether this is true depends of course on how you define these categories. One might also wonder how much size matters. Marx thought that the proletariat would overthrow capitalism, but he did not think that this was because it formed a majority of the population. In fact, he was well aware that factory workers did not even constitute the majority of the working class, let alone of the nation as a whole. Most working people in Victorian Britain were domestic servants, of whom a large majority were women. Most of those who laboured in Marx’s day were not blue-collar male but white-petticoated female. The word proletariat derives from the Latin word for offspring, meaning those who were too poor to serve the state with anything but the potential workers they produced from their wombs. Today, in a world of postcolonial sweatshops and agricultural labour, the typical proletarian is still a woman.
Schooling is still the key factor in determining higher education and job: the privately schooled have a huge advantage
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August 2, 2016
The Happiness Industry by William Davies review – why capitalism has turned us into narcissists
Our age is characterised by tender self-obsession: what matters is not what you think or do but how you feel
There is no doubt that what everybody wants is happiness. The only problem is what being happy consists in, an issue that moral thinkers have never been able to agree on and probably never will. Is happiness a purely subjective feeling, or can it be somehow measured? Can you be happy without knowing it? Can you only be happy without knowing it? Could someone be thoroughly miserable yet be convinced they were in ecstasy?
In our own time, the concept of happiness has moved from the private sphere to the public one. As William Davies reports in this fascinating study, a growing number of corporations employ chief happiness officers, while Google has a “jolly good fellow” to keep the company’s spirits up. Maybe the Bank of England should consider hiring a jester. Specialist happiness consultants advise those who have been forcibly displaced from their homes on how to move on emotionally. Two years ago, British Airways trialled a “happiness blanket”, which turns from red to blue as the passenger becomes more relaxed so that your level of contentment is visible to the flight attendants. A new drug, Wellbutrin, promises to alleviate major depressive symptoms occurring after the loss of a loved one. It is supposed to work so effectively that the American Psychiatric Association has ruled that to be unhappy for more than two weeks after the death of another human being can be considered a mental illness. Bereavement is a risk to one’s psychological wellbeing.
The more you chase after money, status and power, the lower your sense of worth is likely to be
Related: Money can't buy happiness? That's just wishful thinking | Ruth Whippman
Continue reading...March 29, 2016
The Name of God Is Mercy by Pope Francis; Francis by Jimmy Burns review – the world’s most powerful voice against neoliberalism?
A competent tango dancer and lifelong football fan who was “a little devil” at school, Pope Francis is not one’s conventional idea of a supreme pontiff. One of the several contradictions about him is that he is a Jesuit who behaves like a Franciscan. The Jesuits, despite their ascetic cult of military-style discipline, are for the most part a suave, worldly wise bunch – diplomats, administrators and intellectuals whose society was founded to defend Catholic orthodoxy against reformist zeal. They would be unlikely to find God in a sparrow, manual labour or the simple life, as a Franciscan would.
Despite being brought up within this spiritual aristocracy, Francis behaves like a plebeian, discarding the red shoes and decorative shoulder cape of his predecessors and shunning the Vatican’s magnificent Apostolic Palace for a more modest dwelling. He has also condemned the Vatican court, with its Byzantine intrigues and gross financial corruption, as “the leprosy of the papacy”. During church ceremonies, he has washed the feet of young prisoners and Muslim women in a gesture of humility, and when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires he travelled by public transport and sent his priests out to work in the slums.
February 17, 2016
The Dark Side of the Soul review – an insider’s guide to sin, by a priest
How did wickedness become so alluring? The Anglican author suggests that vice is not to be prohibited, but is ‘something with which we need to develop a constructive relationship’
Some people think sex is sinful, while others think sin is sexy. The glamour of evil is the reason half the postgraduate English students in the world seem to be working on vampires and the gothic. Traditionally, however, it is virtue that is beguiling and vice that is boring. For Aristotle and Aquinas, the good life is about living as exuberantly as you can, whereas wickedness is a lack or defect. The wicked are those who have never quite got the hang of being human. They are botched imitations of real human beings, flashy but depthless. Then there are the genuinely evil, who destroy others not for some practical purpose but just for the obscene delight of it. The immoral are two a penny, but the evil are as rare a species as Tea Party intellectuals.
How, then, did wickedness become so alluring? Part of the answer may lie in that legendary phenomenon: the rise of the middle classes. Once the merchants and accountants got their hands on virtue, redefining it as prudence, thrift, chastity, meekness, sobriety, self-discipline and so on, vice was bound to appear alluring by contrast. Dickens’s Fagin has a larger fan club than Oliver Twist. There is also the English tradition of the devil-may-care patrician, from Byron to Boris Johnson, whose appeal lies in his roguery.
The conceited 'are in many ways like the arrogant', and politeness is, apparently, the most fundamental of the virtues
Continue reading...January 15, 2016
And Yet ... by Christopher Hitchens review – fearless, self-admiring, effortlessly eloquent
How the incomparable polemicist moved from being a practising Trotskyist (though he never practised enough to get good at it) to cosying up to the Washington neocons
Christopher Hitchens was the ultimate champagne socialist, though as his career progressed the champagne gradually took over from the socialism. Known in his student days as Hypocritchens for his habit of marching for the poor and dining with the rich, he was a public school renegade in a long English tradition of well-bred bohemians and upper-class dissenters. Had he been born a little earlier, he might well have been a raffish spy propping up the bar of a Pall Mall club.
Like a querulous infant, he wanted everything and he wanted enormous helpings of it. He moved with aplomb from squatting in Afghan caves to holding forth about Saul Bellow at New York dinner parties, and endured a number of forms of torture, from being experimentally waterboarded to being thwacked on the backside by Margaret Thatcher. (He once actually voted for her, though whether this was out of masochistic gratitude for the walloping or because she sank the Belgrano is hard to say.) He also spent his life courting anybody who was anybody. It wasn’t easy to do this while maintaining his public image as a scourge of the governing powers, but the Great Contrarian had long experience of such duplicity. His desire to belabour the establishment was matched only by his eagerness to belong to it. Fearless, self-admiring, effortlessly eloquent and assiduously self-promoting, he combined the pugnacity of a Norman Mailer with the wit of an Oscar Wilde.
Continue reading...January 13, 2016
Neil Middleton obituary
As managing editor of the publishers Sheed and Ward, Neil Middleton, who has died aged 83, played a key role in the renewal of the Roman Catholic church in Britain during the period of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. More or less single-handedly he imported some of the most enlightened mainland European theology of the time, notably by Hans Küng and Karl Rahner, as well as publishing works by the leftwing Dominican Herbert McCabe, his close friend.
The reforming spirit of the council was evident on a number of levels: more democracy in the church and a greater openness to the world beyond it, a more enlightened sexual morality, moves towards unity between the Christian churches, a renewal of the liturgy which included the replacement of Latin with English, and a theology that placed community, the humanity of Christ and the service of others at its centre.
Continue reading...September 30, 2015
Elizabeth II by Douglas Hurd review – bootlicking obsequiousness
The Queen is revealed by the former home secretary to be without moral defect, possessed of penetrating insight and only an accidental tax dodger
Slight, dry and dismally unoriginal though it is, Douglas Hurd’s oleaginous portrait of the Queen contains one stunning revelation. Uniquely among humankind, it would seem that she is afflicted by not a single moral defect. No suggestion that she falls short of the archangel Gabriel in perfection is allowed to pollute these pages. Her notorious rudeness and intellectual nullity? Not a whisper. The swollen coffers of this former tax dodger, some of whose subjects can scarcely feed their children? No comment. Her renowned ability to freeze a dandelion at 100 paces? All a misunderstanding. Hurd even manages to whitewash her curmudgeonly consort, a man who has “unintentionally [sic] acquired a reputation for tactless, even brutal remarks”, though he wisely draws the line at putting in a good word for Andrew and Edward. If the Duke of Edinburgh passes the odd ethnically dubious comment, it is simply because he “wants to stir things up” and longs “for something exceptional to happen”. Over the years, however, these embarrassing episodes have become “fewer and better understood”. With his saccharine, insufferably bland sensibility, Hurd would no doubt find Abu Ghraib a little distasteful.
Early in the book, there is a delicious “Hitler: my part in his downfall” moment, as the former foreign secretary insists that Elizabeth Windsor played “a small but noticeable part in the cause of Britain’s lonely stand against the Nazis”. She pulled off this feat, he tells us, by “learning about the inner workings of a motor car” while a member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service. That must have had Goebbels shaking in his boots. Despite what Hurd more or less concedes is her utterly conformist, conventional mind, she is capable of some remarkably penetrating insights. Asked by her sister, Margaret, whether their father’s ascent to the throne meant that she herself would one day be Queen, she replied: “Yes, I suppose it does.”
Continue reading...April 24, 2015
Which party’s election manifesto is the best written?
Dull and duller: Terry Eagleton, literary theorist, scours the manifestos for any wit or originality among the bland promises
For the last century or so, by far the finest manifestos have been the work of artists, not politicians. From the futurists and dadaists to the surrealists and situationists, no self-respecting group of poets or painters could afford to be without such a public statement. Most of them were trenchant, provocative broadsides intent on scandalising the middle classes. They were couched in extravagantly metaphorical language, full of capital letters, and sometimes liberally sprinkled with obscenities. Whereas political manifestos explain how they will build the nation up, the typical avant-garde manifesto describes how it intends to smash it to pieces.
This election’s manifestos, one regrets to report, remain unenlivened by a single obscenity. Ukip’s bellicose little document aside, they are decent, civilised, kid-gloved affairs, reluctant for the most part to go on the offensive against the other parties for fear of negative campaigning. By a striking coincidence, almost all of them advocate a prosperous economy, a better deal for young people, a better deal for old people, a better deal for farmers, babies and badgers, a world-class educational system, affordable housing, controlled but fair immigration, the best possible start in life for your child, higher wages for everybody and equal opportunities for all. Only the Greens break with this bland consensus by having a special policy for helping bees. Not a single manifesto has the guts to declare its intention to discriminate against people with freckles, strip the inhabitants of Swansea of their civil rights, deport Bruce Forsyth or promise a free bottle of whisky a day to every household. Most of them promise to put the patient first when it comes to the NHS, rather than breaking with this banal orthodoxy and prioritising syringes or stethoscopes instead.
Continue reading...March 31, 2015
Freedom Regained by Julian Baggini review – the question of free will
Two or three centuries ago, most of the common people of Europe believed in God, while a small bunch of intellectuals were convinced this was a delusion. For some of these scholars, however, it was a delusion of a mightily convenient kind. Religious faith played a key role in maintaining social order, and so was not to be brutally exposed as bogus. The truth can be wantonly destructive, and not everyone is tough-minded enough to take it. Voltaire was famously anxious about the effects of his own religious scepticism on his domestic servants. Plenty of Victorian agnostics clambered into a pew in the belief that behaving as though there was a God would keep society on the rails. As Friedrich Nietzsche was among the first to recognise, an increasingly secular civilisation had killed God off; but it had disowned its act of deicide and pretended he was still alive.
There is a similar doublethink in our own time, but it is now freedom, not God, which is at stake. Rarely has the idea of freedom been so popular in practice and so disdained in theory. Almost everyone assumes that they are free, except for a small band of neuroscientists and geneticists for whom neural firings or inherited genes lie at the root of everything we do, including our sentimental attachment to the myth of free will. For them, as Julian Baggini remarks in this excellent book, “consciousness is just the noise made by the firing of neurons”. Like the closet atheists of Victorian England, however, these people continue to choose from menus, vote Lib Dem or select posh schools for their children, for all the world as though they were possessed of the very liberty they deny. For them, social existence is one enormous fiction, in which we suspend our theoretical disbelief in free will and pitch in with the deluded, freedom-loving masses for the sake of a quiet life.
Related: Do you genes determine your entire life? | Julian Baggini
Continue reading...Freedom Regained by Julian Baggini review – the question of free will
Two or three centuries ago, most of the common people of Europe believed in God, while a small bunch of intellectuals were convinced this was a delusion. For some of these scholars, however, it was a delusion of a mightily convenient kind. Religious faith played a key role in maintaining social order, and so was not to be brutally exposed as bogus. The truth can be wantonly destructive, and not everyone is tough-minded enough to take it. Voltaire was famously anxious about the effects of his own religious scepticism on his domestic servants. Plenty of Victorian agnostics clambered into a pew in the belief that behaving as though there was a God would keep society on the rails. As Friedrich Nietzsche was among the first to recognise, an increasingly secular civilisation had killed God off; but it had disowned its act of deicide and pretended he was still alive.
There is a similar doublethink in our own time, but it is now freedom, not God, which is at stake. Rarely has the idea of freedom been so popular in practice and so disdained in theory. Almost everyone assumes that they are free, except for a small band of neuroscientists and geneticists for whom neural firings or inherited genes lie at the root of everything we do, including our sentimental attachment to the myth of free will. For them, as Julian Baggini remarks in this excellent book, “consciousness is just the noise made by the firing of neurons”. Like the closet atheists of Victorian England, however, these people continue to choose from menus, vote Lib Dem or select posh schools for their children, for all the world as though they were possessed of the very liberty they deny. For them, social existence is one enormous fiction, in which we suspend our theoretical disbelief in free will and pitch in with the deluded, freedom-loving masses for the sake of a quiet life.
Related: Do you genes determine your entire life? | Julian Baggini
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