How to reveal yourself with words

The 1968 Buckley - Vidal debate

Jahan Ganesh is one of the Financial Times centre-page commentators: these are, for the most part, the most respected figures writing for the newspaper. They represent the voice of the newspaper, a little more measured and dispassionate than the news reporters, and for the most part, worth reading for their reflections on political events.

Does Jahan Ganesh belong in this elite group? He clearly thinks he does; he writes with the assurance and stylishness that makes you feel this is someone who went to a high-ranking public school followed by Oxbridge. Never use an expected word in a sentence. As a result, his style is so elliptical that you sometimes have to parse each sentence a couple of times to work out what he means.

Today’s column, How conservatives lost the culture war, is about the perennial battle for hegemony between left and right for much of the last 75 years. He uses the analogy of a televised debate between the archetypal conservative William Buckley and the radical, if not quite liberal, Gore Vidal, in 1968. This debate was made into a film in 2015, and has recently been the subject of a recent book, The Fire Is Upon Us, by Nicolas Buccola, reviewed in the TLS on May 22 2020. Ganesh doesn’t mention this book, but no matter, since the Buckley-Vidal debate is well known from several sources.

Which side is Ganesh on? And what does he believe in himself? Perhaps it’s not fair to ask such a straightforward question of a this highly stylish writer – he describes the Buckley-Vidal debate as less "kinetic" than the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations. In other words, much of the point is to parade the style, rather than to reveal the meaning, and perhaps as a result I am really not quite sure, at times, of Ganesh’s viewpoint. Ganesh writes for the FT as the thinking man’s conservative, providing some kind of intellectual justification for at least some of the misguided actions of the present government. Here is how the ostensible message of the column becomes rather murky.

Ganesh’s argument here is that the conservative forces have lost influence since 1945 in many ways, most recently last week’s US Supreme Court judgement to solidify LBGT rights in law. He then goes on to analyse why the forces of conservatism failed in the battle against liberalism. The conservatives, in his opinion, made two mistakes (always a good thing in political columns to include a list; it makes your thinking appear more organised). First, they sided with free-market economics (you could call it neoliberalism, but unfortunately that word has been so widely used as to lose much of its original meaning). Here, he correctly points out that the value-free economics espoused by neoliberals removes much of the social justice idea common to more traditional conservatives:

Capitalism is miraculously good at lots of things. Fostering stable communities, a sense of national belonging and deference to the sacred are not among them.

If correct, this reasoning invalidates much of the conservative thinking Ganesh describes, quite apart from bringing into question many of the actions, if not the rhetoric, of the present government. Secondly, he points out that the political victories of the right have not been matched by equivalent cultural victories. There is no triumph of the right in Hollywood, nor elsewhere in the media. Ganesh comments:

The best the right did was to set up parallel bodies, such as Fox News, and even these often address true believers.

But by now I begin to question the conservative right that Ganesh describes. Fox News does not, I think, contribute to the any cultural hegemony of the right; it is too divisive and offensive to ever achieve any genuine consensus. Is this a real conservativism in which he believes, or the populist parody offered by Trump, which reveals its hollowness as soon as a genuine moment of crisis occurs, such as the Floyd killing? If all the right has achieved in the media in the last 75 years is Fox News, then we are in a bad way.

Finally, Ganesh appears to show his true colours. He points out that universities remain resolutely liberal, for the most part. He states “Conservatives resent the infusion of universities with critical theory and other relativist lines of thought. If it matters that much, the burden is on them to clamber into the arena and compete”. Which conservatives is he describing here? The same conservatives who created Fox News? The handful of academics who have nailed their right-wing political colours to the mast are a very small and cantankerous group: Scruton, Minford, and others. I don't think anyone would describe them as forming a coherent body of conservative thought .

Ganesh’s final recommendation can hardly be taken any more seriously than the determination of Stendhal’s perpetual adolescent Julien Sorel to turn his back on the enlightenment and to embrace the forces of reaction in the most uncompromising, and unrealistic, way possible. You enjoy the posturing, but you don’t take it at all seriously. Ganesh might write about the right, but I don't for a moment think he genuinely believes any of this stuff. At most, he might encourage a few Talleyrands. 

Clopton, the village that disappeared

Why should a few ridges and bumps in the land have such an effect on you when pointed out to you? Today I visited the site of the former village of Clopton, which disappeared in the 16th century. Clopton is only 15 miles west of Cambridge, but it felt very distant indeed. According to recent estimates, there are thousands of villages in England that have ceased to exist. For the most part, no trace is visible of these village sites. But the very rough and untidy site of Clopton (as the archaeologists say, just “lumps and bumps”), with cows grazing contentedly at the bottom of the hill, and just a few rough tracks made by walkers and mountain bikers, was very moving. In 1377 there had been 104 taxpayers in the village.

I took photos, but to be honest they don’t make much sense without a written account that has been pieced together from reports of digs and articles in obscure journals, as well as the remarkable Archaeology of Cambridgeshire (1997) by Alison Taylor, a remarkably accessible and well illustrated guide that was being sold off for £5 in the rather sad Cambridge Local Studies Library.

The decline of Clopton is particularly sad, because it was avoidable. It was not the result of a natural disaster such as plague, or simple economic recession. It seems to have been the work of one man, John Fisher, and his son, who together between around 1500 and the 1530s used their legal knowledge to enclose the land to convert it from arable to pasture, and thereby gain control of the whole village, forcing all the inhabitants out, including a lawsuit with the rector and imprisoning the lord of the manor and his wife. Not a pretty story. Did those cows realise they were grazing a few feet above the remains of one of the largest villages in the area? Did the mountain bikers, with their fluorescent jackets and fancy kit, notice those lumps and bumps and wonder how they had come about? Would I even have given this side of a hill a second thought if I hadn’t been told about it in advance?

Coriolanus: the personal or the political?

Tom Hiddleston as Coriolanus. A quick Google Image search for "Coriolanus" suggests you cannot play Coriolanus without being covered in blood for much of the play.

Like many other people, I benefited from the National Theatre’s posting of live productions during the Coronavirus lockdown, and this week’s play was Coriolanus, from the Donmar Warehouse. Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays, perhaps because it has a rather relentless focus on the main story: a highly successful soldier’s refusal to pander to popular appeal, which leads in the end to his own downfall. Several people in the play describe it as “pride”, but I think it is rather different.

In this production, perhaps true for all productions, the play shifts in a rather unexpected fashion towards the end. At the interval, around the end of Act Three, I would have described the play as “populism versus principle”. Just as John Stuart Mill, when he stood as a candidate to be member of Parliament, stated openly he would follow his own opinions rather than those of his constituents, Coriolanus has no belief that the common people could be right. As the play opens, the people are rebelling against the price of grain. When Coriolanus hears this, his first response is “Hang ‘em!”, which does not suggest someone ready to listen.  

So you could describe this, at least for the first half, as a political play. It would appear that the Tribunes were indeed a feature of Roman society, chosen to represent the people. Around the presumed time of Coriolanus (his historical existence is disputed) the Tribunes began to lose real political power. But in Shakespeare’s presentation, the Tribunes are evil personified. They manipulate popular opinion against Coriolanus in a way that leaves us with little regard either for them or for the people.

Yet the end of the play seems to go off at a tangent. Coriolanus, rejected by the people and banished from Rome, chooses rather strangely, and abjectly, to more or less prostrate himself in front of the very enemy he has just defeated, and asks to be taken on by them. Is this his tragic flaw? Was it pride, was it the inability to identify any solution other than black or white, victory or surrender? In a strange kind of epitaph before Coriolanus dies, Tullius Aufidius sums him up very well :

                 Whether ‘twas pride,
Which out of daily fortune ever taints
The happy man; whether defect of judgement,
To fail in the disposing of those chances
Which we was lord of; of whether nature
Not to be other than one thing, not moving
From th’ casque to th’ cushion, but commanding peace
Even with the same austerity and garb
As he controlled the war; but one of these …
Made him feared

In the end, Coriolanus unexpectedly gives in to the appeals of this mother, wife and son, and sues for peace. He negotiates peace, but is then murdered by Tullis Aufidius and his men. The political has become the personal. Until the final act, I could have imagined this as a drama written by Machiavelli, trying to make sense of the political disaster story that was Florentine history. And even Plutarch describes the fall of Coriolanus as a public, rather than a private event:

Now in those days, valiantness was honoured in Rome above all other virtues. which they call virtus, by the name of virtue itself, as including in that general name all other special virtues besides. So that virtus in the Latin was as much as valiantness. But Martius [Coriolanus] being more inclined to the wars than any other gentleman of his time, began from his childhood to give himself to handle weapons, and daily did exercise himself therein: and he esteemed outward armour to no purpose, unless one were naturally armed within. [North translation]

Thus, for Plutarch, Coriolanus’ flaw is his excessive virtus – not something that would be recognized by Machiavelli, I think. But for Shakespeare, the flaw seems to be for Coriolanus to capitulate abjectly to his family’s request. In Plutarch, several reasons are given for the murder of Coriolanus, most notably “they would not suffer a traitor to usurp tyrannical power over the tribe of the Volsces, who would not yield up his state and authority”  - and makes it clear that “this murder was not generally consented unto of the most part of the Volsces”. Shakespeare has none of this; he moves the political to the personal. In the end, Coriolanus becomes a family tragedy. This gory end, strung up by soldiers, is what comes of listening to your wife and family.