New Statesman - 19 December 2011 01 January 2012

Christopher Hitchens Exclusive He talks to Richard Dawkins about God, US politics and Tony Blair

Current affairs and newspaper magazine of the year

Bill Gates The era of innovation isn’t over Kate Atkinson A new short story, Darktime

Philip Pullman The world needs wonder – a defence of fairy tales

19 December 2011-1 January 2012/£4.95 www.newstatesman.com

Christmas Double lssue Guest editor:

Richard Dawkins

Sam Harris The free will delusion Tim Minchin Lying about Santa Daniel Dennett Carolyn Porco Carol Ann Duffy Paul Nurse Will Self

Contents

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Newstatesman.com George Eaton Samira Shackle

Christmas issue guest editor: Richard Dawkins 6

Up Front

6 8

Leader Correspondence

Observations

12 13 14 15 15 17 17

In the Picture History Bart D Ehrman investigates the story of Jesus’s birth Medicine Edzard Ernst makes an apology, of sorts, to Prince Charles Science Helen Lewis-Hasteley salutes the Royal Institution’s Christmas lectures In the Red Laurie Penny on the Santas who started a riot Commons Confidential Kevin Maguire on what Michael Gove did with a traffic cone Guyana Girish Gupta visits a jungle outpost at the centre of a new gold rush

Columns

11 18 21 23 25 27

First Thoughts Peter Wilby on bulldog spirit, Cameron’s secret plan and a litre of wine a day The Politics Column Rafael Behr explains why the Eurosceptic vision is the only one in town The Guest Column Douglas Alexander offers to work with the Lib Dems over Europe Technology Bill Gates believes that innovation is the way to save the world’s poor Religion Maryam Namazie on why the Charlie Hebdo attack was an assault on free speech Education Rabbi Jonathan Romain weighs in against faith schools for entrenching division

Articles

28 34 38 40 46 48 54 59 60

Cover Story “Never be afraid of stridency” The NS guest editor talks to Christopher Hitchens Adventures in wonderland Carolyn Porco guides us through the solar system to Saturn The NS Interview Sophie Elmhirst asks Carol Ann Duffy about poetry, politics and sexism Give ’em hell, Barry Alan Ryan surveys the US political scene and finds cause for optimism The free will delusion Sam Harris unpicks the complex neuroscience of free will Christmas Essay The social cell The philosopher Daniel Dennett on the ties that bind us The tyranny of the discontinuous mind Richard Dawkins asks why we don’t like grey areas The vision thing Paul Nurse makes the case for investment in science, a key driver of growth The NS Quiz Olav Bjortomt tests your knowledge on the best – and oddest – news of 2011

Contributing Writers Edward Platt Xan Rice John Gray Contributing Editors David Blanchflower Sholto Byrnes Commercial Director Alex Stevenson Head of Projects Adam Bowie Marketing, Website and Circulation Director Rob Phillips eMarketing Executive Tony Nguyen Head of Web Projects Ravindra Nandanar Head of Sales Matt Dowsett 020 7406 6588 Head of Key Accounts Richard Rowe 020 7406 6583 Subscriptions Marketing Sarah Hicks Advertising and Online Production Leon Parks 020 7936 6461

The New Statesman is printed on 100 per cent recycled, eco-friendly paper

Lord of the rings: the wonder of space 34

Illustrations and cartoons By Jon Berkeley, Grizelda, Tom Kirby and Josh Poehlein

In Pictures The Critics

68 74 78 79 80

Short Story “darktime” Kate Atkinson imagines the end of the world as we know it Critic at Large Imaginary friends Philip Pullman remembers his childhood love of fairy tales The sense of an ending Nicholas Clee says the rise in ebook sales has not saved publishers yet The Books Interview Jonathan Derbyshire talks to the Swedish war historian Peter Englund The killing machine Richard J Evans praises a major new biography of Heinrich Himmler

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Editor Jason Cowley Deputy Editor Jon Bernstein Senior Editor (politics) Mehdi Hasan Culture Editor Jonathan Derbyshire Associate Editor Jemima Khan Art Director Anja Wohlstrom Photography Editor Rebecca McClelland Chief Political Commentator Rafael Behr Chief Sub-Editor Nana Yaa Mensah Assistant Editors Sophie Elmhirst Helen Lewis-Hasteley Daniel Trilling Deputy Chief Sub-Editor Thomas Calvocoressi Sub-Editor Yo Zushi Design/Graphics Dan Murrell Designer Henrik Pettersson

19 December 2011 – 1 January 2012

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 3

Cover artwork Julian de Narvaez/ Folio

Fairy godfather: Philip Pullman 68

Back Pages

Poet’s corner: Carol Ann Duffy 38

83 85 85 87 88 89 89

Only the lonely Julie Myerson reviews the art critic Brian Sewell’s tell-all autobiography Known unknown Ryan Gilbey on a parable of modern loneliness, Dreams of a Life Bubbles with your Bublé Rachel Cooke rounds up some Christmas delights on television Farce poetica Andrew Billen revels in a high-spirited performance of The Ladykillers Magic moments Antonia Quirke picks out her recommendations for Christmas listening “Madam” A poem by Christopher Logue, the late New Statesman contributor Real Meals Will Self explains why he loathes the festive meal: for the gluttony it demands More reviews: Sophie Elmhirst takes on the big one – “God”, Jonathan Derbyshire on great Scots and Frozen Planet takes us into worlds of ice-bound beauty

91 92 93 95 97 98

Drink Nina Caplan suggests that overdoing it during the holidays is best done in style NS Christmas Crossword Otterden. Plus answers to the Christmas Quiz NS Christmas Puzzles Brain-teasers to keep you busy on Boxing Day Competition Our final literary challenge for 2011. Plus answers to the Puzzles The Fan Hunter Davies gathers up his best football jokes. Plus This England I love Christmas for its frictions Tim Minchin on ’fessing up about Santa and God

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4 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

The New Year issue of the NS is out on Thursday 29 December. Until then – Merry Christmas!

Established 1913

Do you get it now, Prime Minister? Dear Prime Minister,

Merry Christmas! I mean it. All that “Happy Holiday Season” stuff, with “holiday” cards and “holiday” presents, is a tiresome import from the US, where it has long been fostered more by rival religions than by atheists. A cultural Anglican (whose family has been part of the Chipping Norton Set since 1727, as you’ll see if you look around you in the parish church), I recoil from secular carols such as “White Christmas”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and the loathsome “Jingle Bells”, but I’m happy to sing real carols, and in the unlikely event that anyone wants me to read a lesson I’ll gladly oblige – only from the King James Version, of course. Token objections to cribs and carols are not just silly, they distract vital attention from the real domination of our culture and politics that religion still gets away with, in (tax-free) spades. There’s an important difference between traditions freely embraced by individuals and traditions enforced by government edict. Imagine the outcry if your government were to require every family to celebrate Christmas in a religious way. You wouldn’t dream of abusing your power like that. And yet your government, like its predecessors, does force religion on our society, in ways whose very familiarity disarms us. Setting aside the 26 bishops in the House of Lords, passing lightly over the smooth inside track on which the Charity Commission accelerates faith-based charities to taxfree status while others (quite rightly) have to jump through hoops, the most obvious and most dangerous way in which governments impose religion on our society is through faith schools – as Rabbi Jonathan Romain reminds us on page 27. We should teach about religion, if only because religion is such a salient force in world politics and such a potent driver of lethal conflict. We need more and better instruction in comparative religion (and I’m sure you’ll agree with me that any education in English literature is sadly impoverished if the child can’t take allusions from the King James Bible). But faith schools don’t so much teach about religion as indoctrinate in the particular religion that runs the school. Unconscionably, they give children the message that they belong specifically to one particular faith, usually that of their parents, paving the way, at least in places such as Belfast and Glasgow, for a lifetime of discrimination and prejudice. Psychologists tell us that, if you experimentally separate children in any arbitrary way – say, dress half of them in green T-shirts and half in orange – they will develop in-group 6 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

loyalty and outgroup prejudice. To continue the experiment, suppose that, when they grow up, greens only marry greens and oranges only marry oranges. Moreover, “green children” only go to green schools and “orange children” to orange schools. Carry on for 300 years and what have you got? Northern Ireland, or worse. Religion may not be the only divisive power that can propel dangerous prejudices down through many generations (language and race are other candidates) but religion is the only one that receives active government support in the form of schools. So deeply ingrained is this divisive ethos in our social consciousness that journalists, and indeed most of us, breezily refer to “Catholic children”, “Protestant children”, “Muslim children”, “Christian children”, even where the children are too young to decide what they about questions that diYour government think vide the various faiths. We asforces religion on sume that children of Catholic our society in ways parents (for instance) just are whose familiarity “Catholic children”, and so on. A phrase such as “Muslim disarms us child” should grate like fingernails on a blackboard. The appropriate substitution is “child of Muslim parents”. I satirised the faith-labelling of children, in the Guardian last month (26 November), using an analogy that almost everybody gets as soon as he hears it – we wouldn’t dream of labelling a child a “Keynesian child” simply because her parents were Keynesian economists. Mr Cameron, you replied to that serious and sincere point with what could distinctly be heard on the audio version as a contemptuous snigger: “Comparing John Maynard Keynes to Jesus Christ shows, in my view, why Richard Dawkins just doesn’t really get it.” Do you get it now, Prime Minister? Obviously I was not comparing Keynes with Jesus. I could just as well have used “monetarist child” or “fascist child” or “postmodernist child” or “Europhile child”. Moreover, I wasn’t talking specifically about Jesus, any more than Muhammad or the Buddha. In fact, I think you got it all along. If you are like several government ministers (of all three parties) to whom I have spoken, you are not really a religious believer yourself. Several ministers and ex-ministers of education whom I have met, both Conservative and Labour, don’t believe in God but, to quote the philosopher Daniel Dennett, they do “be-

ARTWORK BY JON BERKELEY

lieve in belief”. A depressingly large number of intelligent and educated people, despite having outgrown religious faith, still vaguely presume without thinking about it that religious faith is somehow “good” for other people, good for society, good for public order, good for instilling morals, good for the common people even if we chaps don’t need it. Condescending? Patronising? Yes, but isn’t that largely what lies behind successive governments’ enthusiasm for faith schools? Baroness Warsi, your Minister Without Portfolio (and without election), has been at pains to inform us that this coalition government does indeed “do God”. But we who elected you mostly do not. It is possible that the recent census may register a slight majority of people ticking the “Christian” box. However, the UK branch of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science commissioned an Ipsos MORI poll in the week following the census. When published, this will enable us to see how many people who selfidentified as Christian are believers. Meanwhile, the latest British Social Attitudes survey, just published, clearly demonstrates that religious affiliation, religious observance and religious attitudes to social issues have all continued their long-term decline and are now irrelevant to all but a minority of the population. When it comes to life choices, social attitudes, moral dilemmas and sense of identity, religion is on its deathbed, even for many of those who still nominally identify with a religion. This is good news. It is good news because if we depended on religion for our values and our sense of cohesion we would be well and truly stuck. The very idea that we might get our

morals from the Bible or the Quran will horrify any decent person today who takes the trouble to read those books – rather than cherry-pick the verses that happen to conform to our modern secular consensus. As for the patronising assumption that people need the promise of heaven (or the obscene threat of torture in hell) in order to be moral, what a contemptibly immoral motive for being moral! What binds us together, what gives us our sense of empathy and compassion – our goodness – is something far more important, more fundamental and more powerful than religion: it is our common humanity, deriving from our pre-religious evolutionary heritage, then refined and improved, as Professor Steven Pinker argues in The Better Angels of Our Nature, by centuries of secular enlightenment. A diverse and largely secular country such as Britain should not privilege the religious over the non-religious, or impose or underwrite religion in any aspect of public life. A government that does so is out of step with modern demographics and values. You seemed to understand that in your excellent, and unfairly criticised, speech on the dangers of “multiculturalism” in February this year. Modern society requires and deserves a truly secular state, by which I mean not state atheism, but state neutrality in all matters pertaining to religion: the recognition that faith is personal and no business of the state. Individuals must always be free to “do God” if they wish; but a government for the people certainly should not. With my best wishes to you and your family for a happy Christmas, Richard Dawkins. l newstatesman.com/leader 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 7

Correspondence newstatesman.com/letters Pride and plebs There are different interpretations of Coriolanus (The Critics, 12 December). The late Paul Foot’s interpretation – shared, I believe, by Bertold Brecht – was that he was a fascist who should have been killed rather than exiled, and the pleb tribunes were the heroes. I have mixed feelings. He was a great soldier and a war hero – but no politician, goaded into losing his temper and consulship by his courage, stubborn pride and snobbery. He and his friends could have slaughtered their opponents in battle. Yet the plebs’ tribunes had reason to fear a Coriolanus consulship, as their powers had been granted against his opposition. The likes of Sparta are good allies but bad role models. Mark Taha London SE26

We are animals I accept Mehdi Hasan’s point that some followers of religion can do good in the world (“The power of a dangerous idea”, 12 December). I am an anti-theist: the evidence from such sources as astronomy demonstrates that there is no god out there in the universe. There would still be wars and injustice if there was no religion, as we are part of the animal world. But we do not need any religious beliefs to have principles of justice, freedom and non-violent action. Michael Moore Loughton, Essex

Method man I’m a great admirer of Brian Cox, but I wish he’d stopped repeating the silly mantra that “making rational decisions based on evidence” is somehow unique to the “scientific method” (NS Interview, 5 December). Believe it or not, this is also what you do in the serious study of literature and history; it’s what happens in law courts; and there are numerous researchers up and down the country assessing the evidence

LETTER OF THE WEEK

In the name of God Two points on Slavoj Žižek’s review of Coriolanus (The Critics, 12 December). First, clearly Žižek hasn’t read Mehdi Hasan’s well-argued and openminded piece in the same issue (“The power of a dangerous idea”) on the pacifism that is at the core of monotheistic religions – and of others, too. Second, Žižek paraphrases Steve Weinberg’s tired old aphorism: only religion can make good people do bad. Weinberg actually said, “But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” And just because Weinberg asserted

something doesn’t mean it’s true. Any belief, creed, religion or ideology can be used to make good people do bad things, but it’s individuals who choose to do those bad things, whatever excuse they might give. Contra Žižek’s statement that very few atheists engage in mass murder: I don’t imagine that Pol Pot’s killers believed they were slaughtering fellow Cambodians for any reason other than that they hoped to bring about the end of religion (and capitalism) in their brave new world. Alastair Llewellyn-Smith London W14

is stealthily infecting the thinking of too many self-professed opponents of prejudice. Keiron Pim Norwich

Your bad health I was disappointed to see the NS publish such a one-sided view of the Health and Social Care Bill reforms (Health Supplement, 12 December). The benefits of choice and competition in health care are nowhere near as clear-cut as your report would suggest. In markets, neither choice nor competition is a guarantee of improving quality – look at exam boards, bus services, or private pensions. Dr Katherine Teale Manchester

Money galore relevant to a broad range of policy decisions. To suggest otherwise smacks of a hubris, which leads to excessive faith in supposedly “scientific” methodologies. This is dangerous for policymakers. Dr Carl Thompson Via email

Khartoum motion Peter Wilby was making a good joke at Lib Dem expense when he suggested that our record was besmirched by Gladstone’s failure to rescue General Gordon in Khartoum (First Thoughts, 5 December). For me it was not so funny: in the 1966 general election, when I was fighting hard to retain the seat I had won in the by-election the previous year, my wife was confronted by a woman, when she was canvassing door to door in Roxburghshire, who said, “I quite like your husband as our MP but I could never vote Liberal.” “Why not?” asked Judy. “Because they didn’t send help to General Gordon.” No doubt people will have other reasons for not voting Lib Dem nowadays. David Steel House of Lords London SW1

8 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

New old hatred Regarding the Chief Rabbi’s observations about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism (NS Interview, 28 November), the subtleties of the association seem to elude many commentators. Of course, anti-Zionism is not innately antiSemitic, but it is contemporary anti-Semitism’s primary vehicle; the current discourse is rich with predictable old tropes. Israel, we gather, has an insatiable appetite for US money; its lobbyists possess mystical power and wealth; its behaviour toward Palestinians bears comparison with the Nazis’ actions; it holds Gentiles in contempt because they are not “chosen”. Meanwhile British Jews should not be trusted in diplomatic relations with Israel lest they “go native”. Double standards apply: the Israel Defence Forces are inhumane, whereas indiscriminate suicide bombing and rocket fire from Gaza are the “understandable” product of a despair engendered by Israeli inhumanity. Here, as ever, Jews have only themselves to blame for their predicament. The oldest hatred

Peter Wilby (First Thoughts, 12 December) makes a good point with regard to the German attitude to inflation. But the idea of inflation could do with more analysis than it usually gets. I remember many years ago seeing Milton Friedman on the television pointing to a printer churning out dollar bills and exclaiming: “That’s the cause of inflation!” Nonsense. The need for more money in circulation is the result of inflation, not its cause. Frank Jackson Harlow, Essex

Let us adore her Congratulations to Sophie Elmhirst for her column “Advent” (Word Games, 12 December). Writing (and thinking) of that calibre is the reason why I buy the New Statesman and nothing else. Felix Sanchez del Rio Felsted, Essex l Send letters for publication to [email protected], fax to 020 7305 7304 or to the address on page 3. We reserve the right to edit letters and to publish a further selection on our website.

CONTRIBUTORS Bill Gates is the former chief executive and current chairman of Microsoft. His work with the company made him one of the richest men in the world. In 2000, he established the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with his wife. The foundation’s aims are to enhance health care and reduce extreme poverty and since its inception it has committed over $26bn in grants. Gates writes about innovation that can help the poor on page 23. Kate Atkinson is a novelist and short-story writer. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Prize in 1995. She has also written a series of crime novels featuring the former detective and now private investigator Jackson Brodie. Her new short story “darktime” is on page 68. Daniel Dennett is an American philosopher, cognitive scientist and writer. He is a professor at Tufts University, Massachusetts, and one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism”, along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Dennett’s most recent book, coauthored with Alvin Plantinga is Science and Religion (Oxford University Press, £6.99). His essay on social systems and the biological cell is on page 48. Carolyn Porco is an American planetary scientist based at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She leads the imaging science team on the joint Nasa/European Space Agency/Italian Space Agency Cassini mission, now in orbit

around Saturn. Her photographs from the mission and essay on the wonders of space exploration are on page 34. Sam Harris is a fellow “horseman” of New Atheism, neuroscientist and polemicist. He has written a series of books on atheism and philosophy, including The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation and The Moral Landscape. Free Will, his new book, will be published in February 2012. His piece on this subject, arguing that it is a delusion, appears on page 46. Philip Pullman is the bestselling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy. A recent work, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, retold the story of Jesus, and Pullman has been outspoken on the subject of faith and religion. He is also a strong advocate for civil rights and defender of public libraries. His account of his childhood games and imaginary friends is on page 74. Children, Pullman argues, are perfectly capable of immersing themselves in an imaginary world without believing in it wholeheartedly. Maryam Namazie is a campaigner, commentator and broadcaster. She is the spokesperson for Equal Rights Now: Organisation against Women’s Discrimination in Iran, the One Law for All Campaign against Sharia Law in Britain and the Council of ExMuslims of Britain. She works closely with Iran Solidarity, which she founded, and the International Committee Against Stoning. Her column on free expression is on page 25.

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 9

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Peter Wilby | First Thoughts

Cameron’s real agenda, the new Dark Ages and a litre of wine a day

WWW.GRIZELDA.NET

Why do we all find Europe so boring? I don’t mean we’re bored with France, Italy, Spain, Greece or even Belgium but bored with the idea of Europe as embodied in the EU. David Cameron, I suspect, spoke for many when he said, of the most important meeting of European leaders since – oh, I don’t know – Munich 1938: “I don’t actually think the world is waiting with bated breath . . . wondering whether there’s going to be a new reverse QMV article on integrated budget setting of blah, blah, blah.” I have lunched, dined and drunk with various informed and opinionated people over the past two weeks and I cannot recall exchanging a single word on the EU’s fate. If the British, as polls suggest, want to get out of the EU and warmly endorse Cameron’s use of the veto, it is probably because they think they won’t have to listen to politicians and pundits wittering interminably on about Europe. Change the script Perhaps there’s something about the word “Europe”. It doesn’t somehow roll off the tongue – “the European people” or “my fellow Europeans” wouldn’t have the same ring as “the British people” or “my fellow Americans” – possibly because it’s short on hard consonants. But it is surely more than that. Most political entities have some inspirational history behind them: a struggle against colonialism, say, or an assertion of great ideals. They have myths, heroes and sacred texts. Europe is just a geographical location, a land mass where people agreed to stop fighting one another. In that, it has been extraordinarily successful, perhaps more so than any other human political endeavour of the past 100 years. We should not underestimate what that meant, and still means, to older generations who lived through two savage wars. But where is the poetry? Where are the great tales to pass on to younger generations? America’s story begins with the Boston Tea Party, George Washington and a declaration that “all men are created equal”; Europe’s with the Coal and Steel Community, the lawyer Robert Schuman and a declaration of “determination to create the first supranational institution”. If the EU dies, it will be for lack of a decent scriptwriter.

The bulldog’s back There are many puzzling aspects of Cameron’s Brussels veto. Why jeopardise a proposal that appears to institutionalise the deflationary, anti-Keynesian deficit reduction policies that the coalition follows? Why be so insouciant about turning us into an offshore Switzerland, when Cameron’s party has historically set such store by Britain retaining its place at the international “top table”? Politically, however, it is win-win for Cameron. He need no longer fear a Lib Dem walkout from the coalition; on the contrary, he may do everything possible to provoke it. He can just call an election and ride to outright victory, posing as the leader who revived the wartime Churchillian bulldog spirit. That, I think, is his real agenda. Bad marks Most parents, I would guess, think GCSEs, Alevels and other exams for teenagers are set and marked by public bodies, learned societies or universities. Now the Daily Telegraph has exposed the truth: the exams that determine the life chances of millions are mainly controlled by private companies, one of which is owned, along with Penguin Books and the Financial Times, by the publishing giant Pearson. They operate on commercial lines (though some are technically non-profit) and compete fiercely

GRIZELDA

“We’re not a Nativity . . . We live here”

with each other. To maximise market share, each board tells schools, which are themselves in a competitive market, that it offers the best chance of high grades. As part of the service, it puts on, for schools that can spare a few hundred pounds, courses on how to help pupils through the exams. That’s what can happen when the market is allowed to penetrate every corner of national life. Michael Gove proposes just one exam board for each subject and quotes with approval the example of collectivist Scotland where he was educated. So a Tory Education Secretary, after an investigation by a Tory newspaper, agrees that markets can be bad. No, you really couldn’t make it up. The roaring 400s The contrived jollity of Christmas normally leaves me in a “Bah, humbug!” frame of mind but, this year, I wonder if I should make a special effort with the flimsy paper hats, useless trinkets and weak jokes that fall out of the overpriced crackers. Next year, we probably won’t be able to afford crackers, even if we feel like pulling them. Think of it: financial Armageddon, war with Iran, a Republican crazy in the White House and, to cap it all, a royal jubilee plus the hullabaloo of the London Olympics. Only the last two, I concede, are certainties but it is hard to imagine that 2012 will bring much cheer. A columnist in the FT, which is oddly keen on apocalyptic predictions, takes seriously the possibility that this is not a reprise of the 1970s or even the 1930s but of the early fifth century, when the Roman empire fell, the Dark Ages began and the British economy (the archaeological record suggests) regressed by 400 years. His conclusion – that it won’t be “quite as bad as that” – is not terribly reassuring. Vine advice Even to curmudgeons such as myself the season presents dangers to health. I shall therefore take inspiration from a French government poster that a friend swears he remembers from the late 1950s or early 1960s. It showed a glass of wine and superimposed upon it the words: “Only a litre a day!” Happy Christmas. l Peter Wilby was editor of the New Statesman from 1998-2005 newstatesman.com/writers/peter_wilby

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 11

Ideas | Science | Events | People

Observations IN THE PICTURE

REUTERS/ANTON GOLUBEV

10 December 2011: Police guard the interior ministry in Moscow during a protest against suspected fraud in Russia’s parliamentary elections. Tens of thousands of demonstrators called for an end to rule by Vladimir Putin

12 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

Medicine Edzard Ernst makes an apology to Prince Charles Science Helen Lewis-Hasteley on 220 years of Royal Institution lectures In the Red Laurie Penny on Santa Claus, extremism and peaceful protest Commons Confidential Kevin Maguire reveals a secret from Michael Gove’s past Guyana Girish Gupta on a new gold rush caused by the financial crisis

HISTORY

Dark side of the manger Bart D Ehrman

These two versions of events cannot be reconciled. In Matthew, Joseph and Mary live in Bethlehem before, during and after the birth; they leave to escape the king’s wrath and only later relocate to Nazareth. Not so for Luke, who introduces the census precisely to take the couple to Bethlehem so that the child can be born where the Hebrew prophet Micah had predicted. Moreover, if Matthew is right that the holy family fled to Egypt, Luke can scarcely be right that they returned home just a month after the birth.

Star treatment

Not only are the accounts at odds, each is problematic on its own terms. Matthew introduces the star leading the wise men to Jesus, a “star” that moves, stops over a city, disappears, reappears, moves again and finally stops over a small town, directly over a particular house. This was no star, comet or supernova; and this is no historical narrative. So, too, with Luke’s tax by Caesar requiring a worldwide census. Joseph registered in Bethlehem because his ancestor King David came from there. But David lived a thousand years before Joseph. Are we to believe that everyone in the Roman empire returned to the homes of their ancestors of ten centuries earlier? They all knew where to go? And no other ancient source mentions it? Then again, none of these stories is mentioned in other ancient sources. But why would they be? They are all part of a complex myth. The myth is

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nce more the season is come upon us. At its heart stands a tale of 2,000-year vintage, the Christmas story. Or perhaps we should say the Christmas myth. When post-Enlightenment scholars turned their critical tools on the tales of Scripture, the birth of Jesus to a virgin in Bethlehem was one of the first subjected to sceptical scrutiny. Not only was the notion of a virgin birth deemed unhistorical on general principle, the other familiar aspects of the story were seriously called into question. The story comes to us as a conflation of episodes found in only two of our Gospels, Matthew and Luke. (The Gospels of Mark and John begin with Jesus as an adult, and give no information about the unusual circumstances of his birth.) Combining these accounts into a mega-story for an annual Christmas pageant bears a cost, as they are very much at odds with one another. Matthew alone has the wise men bearing gifts, Luke alone has the shepherds “watching over their flocks by night”. Matthew alone portrays the wrath of Herod, foiled in his attempt to destroy the child when an angel warns Joseph to flee with his family to Egypt. Luke alone mentions that the “whole world” is to be taxed by Caesar Augustus, forcing Joseph and the pregnant Mary – both from the town of Nazareth, in the northern part of Israel – to return to Joseph’s ancestral home of Bethlehem to register. It is while they are there that Jesus is born, and the three return home a month later.

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 13

Observations t

designed to show that Jesus really did fulfil prophecy, starting with the very beginning of his life. Both Matthew and Luke told stories to make it happen – so that Mary was a virgin who gave birth in Bethlehem – even though the accounts cannot be historical. We all have myths, stories that buttress our view of the world and make our understanding of it appear natural; myths that are religious, national, cultural, political and economic. This is true whether we are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or humanist; whether we are English, American, French, Cambodian, or Chinese; whether we are capitalists, Marxists or anarchists. Or none of the above. We should be careful not to rush to denigrate the myths of others, as those tables are oh so easily turned. But we should also recognise myth for what it is. The myth of Jesus’s birth contains “good news” for believers. It maintains that we are not alone. God came into the world to save us from ourselves and from others, from the evil, pain, misery and suffering that is otherwise the lot of mortals here on earth. At the same time, it is easy to see the problems with this myth. The Christ child who brought good news for his followers brought very bad news for others – not just the “innocents” of Bethlehem who were slaughtered in his wake, but also all those Jews who refused to come and worship him in the manger. The myth, needless to say, had some very bad after effects in the centuries to follow. Myths are like that – and not just the Christian ones. They can have a dark underside, often obscured for their devotees. Even a myth so seemingly innocent as a babe laid in a manger. l Bart D Ehrman is the James A Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent book is “Forged: Writing in the Name of God – Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are” (HarperOne, £19.99)

MEDICINE

Charles, prince of alchemy Edzard Ernst

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ll right, all right, I admit that I have been unfair. In July this year, at a press conference, I got carried away and called Prince Charles’s Duchy Herbals Detox Tincture “Dodgy Originals”. Even worse, I recently suggested that he is a “snake-oil salesman”. But now, in the true Christmas spirit, I am ready to take it all back. Not only that, I profess that Charles’s magic detox potion might be the gift for this year’s festive season. Christmas is the time when we all overindulge. We eat too much, we drink even more and we move too little. Everybody knows how unhealthy this is, but habits die hard and inertia is laborious to overcome. No sweat, says the heir to the throne, just buy my Duchy Herbals Detox Tincture and all will be pukka. According to the Duchy Originals website, the biologically grown dandelions and artichokes in this remedy “support the

14 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

body’s natural elimination and detoxification processes”. Isn’t that just great? Some say that Charles has a bee in his royal bonnet about all things alternative, particularly medicine. He does not know what he is talking about, they claim. I think this is too harsh – after all, it’s only alternative medicine. Sure, when playing with the big boys in conventional health care, one should be in possession of a functioning brain, but Charles isn’t into all that. For alternative medicine, enthusiasm can be quite enough.

Pass the Duchy And, by Jove, enthusiasm he and his marketers from Duchy Originals do have by the bucketload. They even assure us that the Detox Tincture “has been produced to the highest quality standards”. True British quality: thank you, Charles, we didn’t expect anything less. Considering this level of excellence, the tincture is a steal at £9.19 for a 50ml bottle, or £183.80 a litre. Here, Charles demonstrates his empathy with us commoners; this is a present we all can afford.

Don’t expect too much in the way of science, though. Indeed, the tincture turns out to be unadulterated alchemy – no evidence at all that the dandelion and artichoke mixture supports the body’s “detoxification” processes. The NHS Choices website (nhs.uk) agrees. It bluntly states: “There is no evidence that the process of detox works.” The British Dietetic Association goes one impolite step further and calls the whole idea “a load of nonsense”. But please, let’s get a sense of proportion here: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence of detoxification. And anyway, who wants rationality for Christmas? It is the season of joy and belief. So, for Christ’s sake, let’s not be beastly to the Prince of alchemy-based medicine. Let’s put some faith in our future king. Let’s make our friends and family happy with an affordable bottle of his magic potion. If it does not eliminate any toxins from our bodies, at the very least, it will eliminate money from our wallets. l Edzard Ernst is professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter

CORBIS

Too good to be true: an illustration from Claris Artis, a 17th-century treatise on alchemy

Observations SCIENCE

Bang goes the theory

Helen Lewis-Hasteley

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cience is always better when it involves things going bang. So perhaps it should surprise no one that so many of the Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution have involved explosions or minor acts of arson. Even Christopher Zeeman, the first mathematician to do one, blew up a light fitting; although he also insisted on showing the children a series of mathematical proofs on waveforms, so they did deserve some sort of reward. The lectures, which started in 1825, offer leading scientists a chance to explain their specialism to teenagers. Michael Faraday, who gave 19 of them, laid out the rules: speak for less than an hour and make sure “the path be strewed with flowers”. The live recordings are always heavily subscribed and more than two million viewers saw them last year on BBC4. Ask most scientists and they’ll be able to tell you their favourite – perhaps Carl Sagan talking about human beings’ “astronomical egotism” in 1977; Richard Dawkins in a Hawaiian shirt being assaulted by stick insects in 1991; or the physicist Eric M Rogers firing himself off stage on a sledge powered by two fire extinguishers tucked under his arms in 1979. (The 77-year-old was widely reckoned to be the most dangerous experimenter the RI ever hosted.) Preparations for the Christmas lectures begin well in advance, several months for the scientist and more for the lab technicians in charge of the complicated props that have become a hallmark of the series. I got a chance to see the techies in action on 3 December at an event called Ghosts of Christmas Lectures Past. It was held to raise money for the programme, which had to be scaled back from five days to three last year because of funding problems at the RI. The host for the evening was Robin Ince,

a comedian obsessed with Sagan and Richard Feynman, the pioneer of quantum mechanics. True to Christmas lecture form, the props were amazing: Simon Singh brought out an Enigma machine and explained how its rotating cylinders created the cipher that kept Bletchley Park so busy during the Second World War. The chemist Andrea Sella floated soap bubbles in ether in honour of James Dewar’s 1878 lectures on the subject (“There’s no bar tonight,” joked Ince, “so breathe deeply”). And the “standup mathematician” Matt Parker brought out Zeeman’s original wave-generator from 1978: a long snake of slats strung along a wire.

Life cycle The best entrance of the night belonged to the material scientist Mark Miodownik, who rode in on a ten-foot unicycle – a homage to the 1968 series on Gulliver’s Laws by Philip Morrison of MIT, who had giant stationery made to make the audience feel like Lilliputians. As a newspaper at the time put it: “A 5ft professor who helped make the atomic bomb has come to London with an 8ft pencil . . . an urgent little man of 54, he flew overnight from New York and drove straight to the Institute. There he disported himself with the vast pencil, a 12ft ruler and the smallest motor in the world.” (Now, that’s how to write.) The point of the pencil was that scale matters; as Morrison told his audience, elephants can’t jump because of the size of their leg muscles proportionate to their total mass. Last year, Miodownik took on the principle by proving that a hamster is small enough to survive a fall from a skyscraper. The scientist on the hot spot in 2011 is the psychologist Bruce Hood, who refuses to be drawn on his props – though he promises “lots of brains” to help him explain what it means to be human. In between lastminute rehearsals, he told me: “I’m not nervous in the slightest. And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.” l The RI Lectures are on BBC4 on 27, 28 and 29 December at 8pm

IN THE RED

Santa Claus – domestic terrorist? Laurie Penny

Something miraculous occurred on 9 December. Hundreds of robed and bearded men, many of them carrying unmarked packages, descended on central London. A lot of them openly claimed to have flown around the world without passports, collecting information on millions of private citizens, surviving on food donations provided by credulous followers and breaking into private homes at night to deliver suspicious parcels. Yet not one member of the 2011 SantaCon was arrested. The new global Christmas tradition of revellers emerging from the bowels of the internet dressed in tacky Santa suits and flashmobbing public squares to drink heavily and give vaguely to charity is, in practical terms, more of a health and safety threat than many modern-day street protests. In Auckland, New Zealand, in 2005, tanked-up Santas really did start a full-on riot, looting stores, throwing bottles and generally causing jolly havoc. Yet the terrifying paraphernalia of police militarisation deployed during the nationwide public-sector strikes on 30 November was nowhere in evidence. Not a single Santa has been detained or stopped and searched in Britain this year, even though that mustering in large groups and giving out free treats is now more than enough to get you on the official naughty list. According to a recent “Terrorism/extremism update”, sent by the City of London Police to business leaders, protesters against corporate greed in London and elsewhere are now considered domestic terrorists – alongside “external” threats such as al-Qaeda and Belarusian

extremists. Police ask local members of the 1 per cent and their employees to be extravigilant, particularly when talking to young people with cameras in their hands. Peaceful protesters who spend their time distributing soup to the homeless and holding earnest open discussions about the future of capitalism are considered the same flavour of security risk as the perpetrators of the 7 July 2005 bombings.

Present danger This says more about mission creep in the “war on terror” than it does about the protesters. Anti-terror legislation has long been used to intimidate ordinary citizens – in 20092010, not a single charge of terrorism was made over the course of 101,248 stop-andsearches under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, use of which disproportionately targets young black men in urban areas. Now, however, it seems that the description “terrorist” itself is fungible enough that it can be applied to anyone who challenges the status quo. In the US, the National Defence Authorisation Act for the fiscal year 2012 enshrines in policy the military’s power to seize and hold suspected terrorists indefinitely, without charge or trial, “until hostilities end” – which in an age of perpetual war can mean anything. The definition of “terrorist activity” is up to the state department and “suspected terrorists” can include citizens of any country, including the US. The prospect of peaceful domestic dissidents on the left and the right of the political spectrum being held without trial remains unlikely – but for how long? l newstatesman.com/ blogs/laurie-penny

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 15

Observations COMMONS CONFIDENTIAL

The Cone Secretary strikes again Kevin Maguire

Michael Gove, educashon dunce, is one of the most rabid Euroseptics in Little Englander Dave Cameron’s jingoistic band. But it’s I’m All Right Mick’s history as an unruly striker that is of renewed interest, after your correspondent encountered an eyewitness to a notorious incident that ended with the Militant Minister bundled into a police van.

MONTAGE BY DAN MURRELL. MARCO FAROUK BASIR/PANORAMIO

I heard an intriguing explanation for Liam Byrne’s “There’s no money left” suicide note. Byrne left it for his Tory mate Philip Hammond, who was expected to be chief secretary. Instead the Lib Dumb David Laws briefly got the job and released the letter. I hear Byrne, whose seat is to be axed, fancies running for mayor of Birmingham. Nick Brown has similar designs on Newcastle. Mike Elrick, on strike with Gove in Aberdeen during a 1989 local newspaper dispute when both were young hacks, spoke out after Gove attacked public servants as “militants itching for a fight” over pensions. Gove, embarrassed by that photograph of a bespectacled him on a picket line, plays down his past. “The ‘reluctant’ striker,” sneered Elrick, “led a deputation of strikers to Strasbourg to lobby MEPs and to Tory conference.” Fast with a retort, Gisela Stuart. On being introduced to Our Man in Kabul, the Tory Bob Stewart quipped that they shared a surname but weren’t married. “No,” said the Labour woman, “he’s my father.” Ouch! For the record, she’s 56 and he’s 62. Most damaging for Gove, however, is the account of

Elrick, a former adviser to those Labour Johns, Smith and Reid, to an act the minister might well declare worthy of a sacking if committed by a teacher. “I witnessed the future Education Secretary throwing a traffic cone wilfully off a viaduct on Aberdeen’s busiest street on to another street below,” admitted Elrick. “The incident took place on Union Street. The cone was dropped probably 40 feet. No one else was involved.” A friendly Conservative revealed why Cameron’s backbenchers shake their heads when David Milibrother speaks in the Commons. “We can’t believe he’s not the Labour leader,” whispered the grinning Tory. A growing number on the Labour side agree. The Cone Secretary, recalled Elrick, was collared: “Gove was spotted by the police doing it and was bundled swiftly into the back of a police van, which then drove off to police HQ.” The Financial Times scribbler Quentin Peel was overheard in Brussels bemoaning Cameron’s appeasement of the Euroseptic Sun, Mail, Express, etc. Does the Europhile FT regret its May 2010 Tory endorsement? “Sadly,” complained Elrick, “Gove wasn’t charged but let off with a warning. But at the end of the day it was an act of hooliganism. Youthful high jinks? Well, by that stage he had already graduated from Oxford, He was, like me, in his twenties and working. He wasn’t a student. He was old enough to know better.” Quite so. l Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror

A gold-mining settlement near Mahdia

GUYANA

Murder in the jungle Girish Gupta

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ix hours’ journey through savannah and thick jungle from Guyana’s capital, Georgetown, Mahdia boasts no landline telephones or bank machines. But this small dirt town in the Amazon rainforest is experiencing the sharp end of turmoil in the financial markets, as it finds itself at the centre of a new gold rush. “It’s kill or be killed,” says Rovin Allen, a young miner who was shot in the leg and robbed of £1,150-worth of gold just months ago. As investors place their bets on gold – a supposedly secure asset in times of crisis – prices have soared. Prospectors have flocked to Mahdia, but so have thieves. The 26-year-old Allen now carries a 38mm pistol when working at his small camp. “You can’t trust anyone, even your friends and those you work with.” Vivakeanand Bridgemohan, one of the town’s two doctors, is seeing double the number of patients he received 12 months ago. He has treated miners stabbed in the head, face and jugular this week alone. “There are a lot of bandits here,” he says, “for the gold and the money.” Allen works at Pamela camp, in the forest that surrounds Mahdia. As I am driven there on the miner’s quad bike, a large clearing opens, revealing makeshift huts strung with hammocks, next to a small river cutting through the rock. To the side is an electricity generator, allowing the miners to enjoy pirated music DVDs on an antique television set strapped

with white tape to a wooden joist above a small kitchen area. Allen’s small group will take in about £15 for each ounce of gold they find. Allen tells me he finds roughly ten ounces every four days or so, earning him about 80 times less than a trader in New York. Working 12-hour days, the miners must contend with wild animals and disease as well as bandits. “Had malaria many times, says Neil Hutton, one of Allen’s colleagues. “Sick today, tomorrow I get up.” Some days after my visit to Mahdia, I meet Guyana’s outgoing president, Bharrat Jagdeo, at a rally in Anna Regina, a town in the west of the country. Gold reserves in Guyana, a former British colony, were neglected until relatively recently, but Jagdeo tells me that the country expects to produce 320,000 ounces of the precious metal this year, up 5 per cent on last year. “We have seen some movement of criminals,” Jagdeo concedes. Patrick Harding, president of the Guyana Gold and Diamond Miners Association, says that mining makes up 70 per cent of the country’s economy. “The violence is something we’re very worried about,” he says from his office in Georgetown. “It could impact the whole industry.”

Heavy metal For the most part, traders on the financial markets make no link to men on the ground such as those in Mahdia. “For 5,000 years, gold has maintained purchasing power for the holders,” says George Gero, senior vice-president at RBC Wealth Management in New York, who has been trading and analysing gold for half his life. “Investors see gold as an additional currency and as an asset-allocation tool,” he says. “Nobody is that concerned about the people panning for it.” Bridgemohan, speaking after hours in his hospital waiting room, has one message for the traders. “Enjoy the gold,” he says. “It’s a great sacrifice the workers are making out here – so just cherish what they are providing for you.” l newstatesman.com/world-affairs

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 17

Rafael Behr | The Politics Column

Wanted: a vision to trump Cameron’s offer of bleak isolation in Europe

Tory foot-stamping The Lib Dems do have substantial voting rights on the coalition board but Tory backbenchers hold a golden share. That much was proved by the veto that was wielded at the emergency Brussels summit to save the European single currency on 8-9 December. To be clear, I am referring to the prohibition imposed by the Conservative Party on the Prime Minister pursuing a policy of constructive engagement with other continental leaders. The “veto” that Cameron claims to have deployed at the negotiating table doesn’t prevent eurozone countries from pursuing an agenda of closer integration. It merely guarantees that they will do so in consultation with every non-eurozone member state apart from Britain. Obstinate foot-stamping has cleared the room of people minded to accommodate UK interests, especially when it comes

to protecting the City of London from European regulation, which was the advertised motive for Cameron’s intransigence. That outcome caused dismay in Clegg’s team, verging on despair. The words “disaster”, “awful” and “miscalculation” have all been freely used in the Deputy Prime Minister’s office to describe Cameron’s handling of the negotiations. In public, Clegg limits himself to expressions of pained regret and martyred determination to continue fighting for pet causes in government – his signature tune. Lib Dem torment over Europe was prefigured earlier in the year in the referendum campaign on switching to the Alternative Vote (AV) electoral system. Then, too, Clegg thought his intimacy with Cameron was a safeguard against indulgence of Conservative reactionary impulse. Cameron would support the “no” camp, Clegg would call for a “yes” vote, but there was a “gentleman’s agreement” not to let it get personal. Then Tory backbenchers, furious at their leader’s apparent preference for coalition cosiness over party policy, persuaded Cameron to sanction a campaign that mercilessly punched Clegg’s bruises. AV was denounced as a stitch-up to promote perpetual hung parliaments of benefit only to a Lib Dem leader considered to have swapped principle for power. Cameron takes no pleasure in disrupting coalition harmony but he also knows that, when the alternative is rebellion in his own ranks, trampling the Lib Dems is the safer path. Clegg’s miserable poll ratings preclude flouncing out of the coalition. Besides, the Lib Dems have aligned themselves irrevocably with Conservative economic policy, which overshadows all other considerations. George Osborne, Cameron’s election strategist as well as his

18 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

Chancellor, had a plan to subject Britain to a short, sharp dose of austerity and then, as growth returned towards the end of the parliament, compensate voters with pre-polling-day tax cuts. That timetable has been sabotaged by economic reality. The government is now heavily reliant on voters’ continuing to blame Labour for the nation’s economic problems and remaining unconvinced of Miliband’s credentials as a potential prime minister. Cameron will present himself as the only serious candidate, determined to finish a job that Labour only reluctantly acknowledge needs doing at all. The Lib Dems, having backed Osborne’s plan, are obliged to second that attack. Clegg has argued that partnership with the Tories was essential for the pursuit of the national economic interest. Yet he believes Cameron’s sulky isolation in Europe is “dangerous” and “bad” for Britain. It is also a luminous signpost announcing the limitations of Lib Dem influence and the strength of those Conservative MPs for whom enmity with Brussels is an old vendetta. That in turn supports the Labour claim that Cameron’s project to “modernise” his party in opposition was spurious – a line of attack Clegg has discreetly abetted in the hope that voters would see him as a moderating influence, diluting or blocking the ambitions of Tory zealots. Clegg is left staring at a blank sheet of paper where he needs an explanation for why his party should remain in coalition, other than tackling the deficit and postponing electoral annihilation.

Atlantis myth Labour, meanwhile, needs prescriptions for the economy and Britain’s future in Europe that can’t be caricatured as variations on “we wouldn’t start from here”. Miliband complains that Cameron’s path of maximum austerity at home and mean diplomacy abroad makes it harder to boost growth and create jobs. The Tories are confident that the public sees no alternative. More significantly, having captured UK foreign policy, the hard-line Eurosceptics believe they have an alluring destination for the country. Over time, further detachment from the EU is inevitable. The nation will be liberated from the bureaucratic meddling that is supposed to have held back the economy. With entrepreneurial dynamism thus restored, we

HENRIK PETTERSSON

British politics is still hung. As 2011 draws to a close, no party has broken the deadlock that produced an indecisive result in the last general election. Opinion polls have told pretty much the same story all year. The Labour Party is liked much more than it was when led by Gordon Brown, but Ed Miliband is not deemed to be as plausible a national leader as David Cameron. The Prime Minister is much more popular than his party, which still retains a toxic whiff of moneyed complacency. The Liberal Democrats are reviled or ignored. Nick Clegg’s alliance with the Tories has alienated many of his party’s old supporters without recruiting new ones. The Deputy Prime Minister had hoped to fight the next election claiming credit as an equal partner in a joint venture to rescue the economy from the disastrous legacy bequeathed by Labour. The strategy was to make the Lib Dems the party of “competence and compassion”. The former would be expressed in the tough decisions taken to tackle a ruinous budget deficit; the latter in policies to mitigate the harsh effects of spending restraint. Neither is being achieved. The economy is stagnant and we might well see in the new year in recession. The deficit will still need cutting after the next election. What little palliative social intervention the Lib Dems claim to have secured will be scant compensation for falling real incomes and lost public services.

TIM KIRBY

will flourish as a global trading hub while other European nations look on enviously, trussed in red tape, stranded on the capsized hull of their single currency. That is the underlying rationale for Euroscepticism – creating an island utopia where commerce is unencumbered by footling matters such as geography or regional diplomacy; Atlantis. The problem is that if the euro sinks, the UK economy will be dragged down with it and if it is rescued the ill will generated by Britain’s position guarantees unfavourable terms of trade in the future. Companies that are based here because it is a useful avenue into Europe’s single market, the world’s largest unified trading space, will relocate if it becomes clear that British influence is waning. Atlantis is a myth. But the mundane imperative of our dependence on good EU relations is obscured by exaltation in a two-fingered gesture of defiance. Opinion polls show clear support for the Prime Minister’s actions in Brussels. Cameron has proved adept at cutting through complex issues with a glib, parochial account of Britain’s interests. Last year he and Osborne outmanoeuvred Labour by presenting the country’s woes as the result of Gordon Brown blowing the national

budget on public services. With no sign of recovery in sight, the Tories find in Brussels a new scapegoat – and one against which most of the press has spent years whipping up hostility. Anyone looking to Labour for a more uplifting vision for the future will find only a sketch on Miliband’s drawing board. In his party conference speech in September, the Labour leader

The problem is that if the euro sinks, the UK will be dragged down with it expounded his thesis that the British model of capitalism is broken, rewarding delinquent “predatory” behaviour and failing to honour “productive” activity. The financial crisis, he argued, signalled the end of the era in which a tiny minority would be allowed to monopolise wealth and power, while for the rest living standards fall and insecurity rises. It is unclear how Miliband intends to reverse that trend. It is still less clear whether his new model of capitalism envisages Britain more or less integrated with the rest of Europe.

The view in Downing Street is that voters will see Miliband’s moralising calls for fairer capitalism as hand-wringing, well-meaning perhaps, but impotent. “It isn’t as if anyone is out there calling for unfair capitalism,” observes one Cameron aide. But when politics is hung, the deadlock can only be broken by something more compelling than the promise of well-managed stagnation. Labour want to present the Tories as relentlessly pessimistic, offering only grim resignation to long-haul austerity. That attack only works alongside an optimistic counter-offer. The Holy Grail in Westminster is a convincing account of how Britain can make its way in a world made scary by economic crisis, on the periphery of a continent resisting decline. Miliband doesn’t yet have such a story. Nor does Nick Clegg. The most developed project around, and the one with the most momentum, is the populist island tale peddled by the Eurosceptics. The question for David Cameron is whether he wants to lead a real European nation or follow the men from Atlantis. l Rafael Behr is chief political commentator for the New Statesman newstatesman.com/writers/rafael_behr

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 19

Douglas Alexander | The Guest Column

Labour will make a big, open offer to the Lib Dems on Europe Britain’s relationship with the United States and our membership of the European Union have been the fundamental building blocks of our foreign policy but today we risk being less relevant in both. Europe is engulfed by the eurozone crisis and the US, weary after ten years of war in Afghanistan, is rebalancing its priorities from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That broader context only makes the Prime Minister’s decision to leave Britain more isolated than at any time in the 38-year history of our EU membership even more dangerous. The recent EU summit could and should have taken the vital decisions needed to stabilise the eurozone and boost growth and jobs but, instead, it was economically inadequate and politically damaging. There was no plan for growth agreed, no credible plan for reducing deficits agreed, no plan for recapitalising the banks agreed and no plan agreed for the European Central Bank to act as the lender of last resort. That the British government did so little to advance these objectives is inexcusable. There was hardly any evidence of either the Prime Minister or the Foreign Secretary visiting European capitals ahead of the summit to build support for Britain’s position. Indeed, the government’s demands were tabled only a few days before, after David Cameron’s mauling at the hands of his backbenchers at Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons. Why did the Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski – potentially a key ally for Britain – the week before the summit single out the UK for criticism in a speech and accuse the government of failing to provide political leadership on Europe?

HENRIK PETTERSSON

Elephant in the room To win the leadership of his party, Cameron promised to pull out of the centre-right grouping the European People’s Party, as he did, and so he was left unable to attend the pre-summit meeting of the leaders of France, Germany, Portugal, Ireland, Finland, Bulgaria, Malta and Poland. When we entered the final hours of the summit in so shambolic a fashion, is it any wonder that Cameron was left unable to secure a single objective Britain had set or secure a single ally? We have heard a lot about “vetoes” but to veto something means to prevent it from

happening. Cameron walked out having prevented nothing from happening and having failed to secure any of his demands; that is not called a veto – that is called defeat. Isolation can sometimes be a price worth paying for getting your own way but isolation achieving only defeat is unforgivable. Despite all the talk about protecting the City, the Chancellor was unable, 24 hours afterwards, to point to a single piece of financial regulation that was now not going to be applied to Britain as a result. Instead, we’ve got up to 26 countries

Cameron prevented nothing. That is not a veto – that is a defeat discussing financial services without Britain being at the table, a development John Cridland of the Confederation of British Industry described as “the elephant in the room”. The roots of what happened on the night of Thursday 8 December lie deep in Cameron’s failure to modernise the Tory party. Just because he puts party interest before the national interest, there is no reason others should do the same. That is why I make a genuine offer to Liberal Democrats to work with us to try to get a better outcome for Britain, between now and when this agreement is likely to be finally tied down in March. Work can and should start immediately both to win back friends and allies and to consider what rules and procedures can avoid Britain’s further marginalisation. My message to Lib Dems would be that, over the next few years, the public will reward politicians who show serious statesmanship, not shrill showmanship in the face of economic

events none of us has witnessed before and the outcome of which remains uncertain. This is the immediate task. But over the longer term, we must also remake the case for British membership of the EU. Today, according to one ICM poll, 49 per cent would vote to get Britain out of Europe, against just 40 per cent who would prefer to stay in. What are the reasons for this and what should a progressive response be? In a recent speech, I talked about how, to my parents’ generation, the rationale for Europe was establishing peace and stability on the continent after a century scarred by two world wars. This was a cause that had powerful emotional resonance. However, for the 20 years after Britain joined the European Community, that emotional cause was supplemented by a somewhat drier one: that being part of Europe would help reverse Britain’s postwar decline and would help boost our prosperity and productivity.

Riding the tiger Britain’s rising prosperity during the long boom that began in the 1990s contributed to a growing sense of national self-confidence, which again led people to question Europe’s role. One response to this rising scepticism, however, not only failed but, certainly in this country, actually heightened suspicions about the intentions of Europe’s institutions. The push for anthems, flags and the apparent aping of the symbol of nationhood left the impression of a half-built superstate and provided a rallying point for Europe’s opponents. In response, a defence of the status quo won’t be good enough. I do not believe Britain would ever be a “pygmy” nation but I believe we are better off as part of a market of 500 million people, with a £10trn economy. In recent days, in Durban, South Africa, we saw welcome progress in global climate talks. Whether on climate development or trade, Britain’s voice is amplified on the world stage by our European membership. Yet our future in Europe cannot be taken for granted. Cameron has embarked on a very dangerous course. He has closed his eyes and bet that he can ride the Tory eurosceptic tiger. The rest of us should open ours and make the case for a reformed Europe before it is too late. l Douglas Alexander is shadow foreign secretary

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 21

When Philip Hammond, the former Secretary of State for Transport, handed over the reins to Justine Greening, he must have breathed a huge sigh of relief. Every one of the arguments for the £32bn HS2 project has been convincingly challenged by experts in their fields and thoroughly put in doubt by the Transport Select Committee. The last straw was a survey showing peak trains from Euston are only half full, two more carriages are being added next year and more could be added. Given the weakness of the case there can only be one rational conclusion.

HS2 is the wrong priority.

www.hs2actionalliance.org

Bill Gates

The era of innovation isn’t over. For the poor, it’s just beginning The world population just passed seven billion, on its way to at least nine billion. The number of people on the planet is growing so rapidly that the margin of error for the UN’s 2050 population projection is larger than the entire world population in 1950. Meanwhile, climate change is bringing a flood of adverse weather events that affect crop yields. Last year, droughts in eastern Europe cut global wheat production by 5 per cent. This year, floods destroyed 20 per cent of the harvest in the state of Queensland, in Australia – the world’s fourthlargest wheat exporter. At this moment, it seems wise to ask whether we will have enough food to eat in the future. There are plenty of pessimists about food security, but I believe the smart money is on optimism. Pessimists extrapolate from the present to the future in a straight line. As an optimist, I look for key junctures where we can apply innovation to bend trend lines and avert crises. Currently, four million tonnes of rice in India and Bangladesh are lost to flooding every year. But if farmers in the region grow a flood-tolerant variety that recently became available, they will flip that curve upside down, producing enough extra rice to feed 30 million people. In sub-Saharan Africa, new varieties of maize can be 50 per cent more productive under the type of drought conditions that helped cause the Horn of Africa famine. In fact, despite this general environment of scarcity (whether it’s food or government finances), I have never been more optimistic about the future.

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Happy hour I am optimistic because I believe in the power of innovation – and because I believe the world is on the cusp of finally unleashing innovation for the poorest. It is ironic, perhaps, but historically we have been very narrow-minded about innovation. We have put the vast majority of our effort into solving a small minority of the world’s problems. But I believe that era in history is coming to an end. My whole career has been inspired by the conviction that breakthroughs can make the impossible possible.

When I was a teenager, I was addicted to computers, not unlike many teenagers today. But in the early 1970s, computers were a difficult addiction to satisfy, because the personal computer didn’t yet exist. Luckily, I lived a few minutes away from a large research university where I had access to PDP-10 computers, which were about the size of a large car. I would sneak out of my house in the middle of the night to get a few hours of computer time while the students were asleep. Then came the microprocessor, and everything changed. In the past 35 years, everything from storage costs to processor speed has improved exponentially. Now, the very concept of “computer time” makes no sense; there is an infinite amount of it. When my wife Melinda and I created our foundation and gradually started learning more about global development, we were stunned by the underfunding of innovation targeted at the needs of the poor. In information technology, the challenge was to see 20 or 30 years into the future. In development, the task at hand was very different: to catch up with the present. Take the example of tuberculosis, which affects nine million people every year. For the most part, the diagnostic test hasn’t changed in more than a century. The standard practice is to take someone’s saliva, smear it on a slide, stain it and look at it under a microscope. By that method, we catch about half of cases. Finally, last year, there was a breakthrough in rapid diagnostic testing that could change the way we fight TB. What explained this shocking lack of innovation? When I was born, the world was roughly one-third rich and two-thirds poor. The rich portion had an amazing capacity to innovate, but it didn’t have tuberculosis, or harvests destroyed by flooding. The poor had the disease and the hunger, but they didn’t have the technological capability to develop solutions. And so most of the world’s innovation was directed at the world’s least pressing problems, relatively speaking. Now, however, that tragic misallocation of resources is changing, because the world has changed. The number of dynamic, healthy and highly educated countries is much higher. In the past 20 years, China has grown

by an incredible 9 per cent annually and slashed its poverty rate by 75 per cent. In the past ten years, Brazil has lifted 20 million people out of poverty. This group of rapidly growing countries, which also includes India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey, can drive innovation for the poor in ways we never imagined, because they provide a bridge between what used to be the rich and poor worlds. These countries have both a sophisticated understanding of the challenges that developing countries face and the technical capacity to innovate to spur development.

A new awakening There are many examples of this innovation. Last year, the Serum Institute of India released a vaccine it has developed for meningitis A, an epidemic disease that strikes fear in the hearts of people across Africa’s meningitis belt. This vaccine is the first one ever created specifically for poor countries, and only an Indian company accustomed to low-cost manufacturing was able to price it low enough for African governments to purchase. Brazil, which learned how to grow soybeans in its semi-arid soil in the 1980s, is now helping Mozambican farmers cope with very similar climate and soil conditions. Meanwhile, the Chinese, who have the world’s leading rice research programme, have been instrumental in projects such as the floodtolerant rice described earlier. The world’s failure to address the suffering of its poorest people is one of the tragedies of the past century. But our awakening to these issues is one of the most important developments of the past decade. Yes, we have a global food crisis. But with new innovators all over the world focused on the problem, we also have a good chance to fix it. And with more innovators focusing on more areas where innovation is needed, I am optimistic that we are about to enter a new period in global development. Just as innovation over the course of a few decades turned the car-sized computer into a pocket gadget, innovation in the field of development will lift billions out of poverty and make the world a more equitable and prosperous place. l Bill Gates is the chairman of Microsoft and co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. gatesfoundation.org

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 23

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Maryam Namazie

Fear of offending Muslims should not stop us fighting Islamism On 2 November, the offices of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo were firebombed, after the publication of an issue “guest-edited” by Muhammad, Islam’s prophet. Its cover had a caricature of Muhammad, saying: “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.” Though no one has yet claimed responsibility, the attack bears the hallmarks of the political Islamic movement. For its followers, threats and firebombs are business as usual. Where they have political power, they forgo any niceties reserved for western public opinion and imprison and murder anyone who speaks their mind, transgresses Islamist norms and causes “offence”. Under sharia law in Iran, for instance, there are more than 130 offences punishable by death, including apostasy, blasphemy, heresy, enmity against God, homosexuality and crimes against chastity. In the west, the debate on Islam and free expression is absurdly framed within a context of racism and Islamophobia, though Islamism has been creating havoc in the Middle East and North Africa for several decades and most of its victims are Muslims. A piece in Time by its Paris correspondent Bruce Crumley (2 November) was a case in point. He blamed Charlie Hebdo for causing “offence” and “bait[ing] Muslim members”. Tellingly, he seemed to see “extremists” and “Muslim members” of society as one and the same thing, rather than making the distinction between Islamism (a far-right political movement) and Muslims. The Islamists’ barbaric, medieval values are portrayed as the values of all Muslims. This is something both the far right and the postmodernist left do – albeit for different reasons. The far right blames and scapegoats Muslims for Islamism’s crimes and the pro-Islamist left defends Islamism and its crimes as the “right of a Muslim minority”. Both sides oppose or defend Islamism at the expense of human beings.

MEHDI CHEBIL / POLARIS

Sense and sensibility Muslims, like all other groups, are not homogeneous. Among them are secularists, freethinkers, dissenters, rationalists, rights campaigners, humanitarians and socialists. Many belong to civil society organisations, political parties and movements that are diametrically opposed to Islamism. Islamist violence and terrorism are tactics and pillars of the political Islamic

Describing Charlie Hebdo’s criticism as an attack on a Muslim minority not only mistakenly presents Muslims as a uniform group and equates them with Islamists, but fails to acknowledge the power and politics behind Islamism, which in many places is a global movement with state power. Sharia law is now the most widely implemented religious law worldwide. Correspondingly, it would be like discussing the English Defence League without seeing its links with far-right politics in Norway or the US and would be like denouncing criticism of the EDL as an attack on the British working class and Christians. Absurd!

Speak out

Gagged: outside the Charlie Hebdo offices

movement and have nothing to do with “Muslim sensibilities”. Though we are all offended at least some of the time (and often by religion itself), most of us – religious or not, Muslim or not – never resort to death threats and firebombing. Equating the intimidation and terror imposed by political Islam to the expression of Muslim sensibilities is like equating the oppressor with the oppressed, and is intrinsically racist. If those really were people’s sensibilities and beliefs, Islamist states and movements wouldn’t need to resort to such indiscriminate violence. This raises the important question of whose sensibilities one sides with – the mother and daughter stoned to death in Afghanistan in November, or the Taliban who stoned them to death? The actor Marzieh Vafamehr, who was sentenced to one year in jail and 90 lashes for taking part in a film, or the Islamic regime of Iran that sentenced her? Charlie Hebdo or the firebombers? You can’t side with both. Whether you like or dislike Charlie Hebdo’s political position is irrelevant. It’s just as irrelevant as what the woman who was raped was wearing or the nature of the “crime” committed by the person facing execution – that is if you agree that rape, execution and firebombing a publication for expressing a point of view are wrong, irrespective of the circumstances.

Saying Charlie Hebdo shouldn’t criticise Islam is, in effect, saying that Islam, Islamism and sharia law are off-limits, which means that the victims and survivors of Islamism are not allowed to do the only thing they have at their disposal to resist. It is telling people who most need free expression that they cannot speak. It’s an effort to censor people such as the naked Egyptian blogger Aliaa Magda Elmahdy or Gulnaz, one of two women filmed in a documentary, first commissioned by the European Union and then blocked by the EU days before its first screening. Gulnaz was raped and sentenced to 12 years for a “moral crime” under sharia law. She bravely tells her story to help other women avoid the same fate. But the EU is more concerned about “its relations with the [in]justice institutions” in Afghanistan than the abysmal situation of women there. The debate on free expression is much larger than Charlie Hebdo. Restricting free expression to what is acceptable only restricts the right to speak for those, such as Gulnaz, who need it most. After all, what is the point of free expression if you cannot criticise that which is deemed to be taboo? On 1 December, Gulnaz was pardoned by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, but activists are concerned that she will be pressured to marry her rapist to gain a father for her daughter, born on the prison floor. Why aren’t more people angry about this? l Maryam Namazie is spokesperson for One Law for All, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and Equal Rights Now: Organisation Against Women’s Discrimination in Iran. Read her blog: freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 25

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Rabbi Jonathan Romain

Class has divided us for years – don’t let faith schools do the same Once seldom discussed, faith schools are now a contentious part of the political debate. There are four reasons for this. The first is that although they started as private endowments, faith schools are now publicly funded and therefore answerable to the taxpayer. To an extent, that has been the case for at least 100 years but scrutiny has become much more searching for public institutions, with demands for transparency placing the BBC and the NHS under the spotlight. Faith schools have not escaped attention – nor should they. Second, the taxpaying society of today is very different from that of 1870, when the great transition occurred in the Education Act, resulting in church schools receiving funds from the state. Society today is much less religious and many of us no longer see the need for separate faith schools, while others accuse them of being biased and doctrinaire. Third, even the religious element of society has fundamentally changed. Today, we have not one majority faith, but a plethora of religions. This has led to questions over the relationships between them and whether segregating children of different backgrounds encourages integration or inhibits it. The fourth reason is the unease caused by events such as the Bradford riots of July 2001; then there was 9/11 in the US, whose shockwaves hit harder here after the bombings in London on 7 July 2005.

GETTY IMAGES

Pride and prejudice These events forced us to look again at the Church of England’s pledge to build 100 new faith schools, and to look at the expansion of Jewish schools, the growth of Muslim schools and the creation of the first Sikh and Hindu schools. There is a worry that the new shape of education created by such schools – in my view, one that is close to being a form of voluntary apartheid – might produce a landscape in which separatism and prejudice flourish. The battle lines are well rehearsed: proponents of faith schools claim that they maintain identities and produce good citizens, while opponents condemn them for ghettoising the children and fragmenting society. Rather than engaging in stale arguments or swapping anecdotes about best and worst practices, we need to locate larger principles that

be better to have a national curriculum for RE, so that all schools were obliged to teach about all kinds of belief, including humanism? This would help increase general knowledge, as well as prepare pupils for life in a diverse society. A similar argument could apply to the English Baccalaureate. One of its effects has been to diminish the time that schools spend on teaching subjects other than the five core ones of English, mathematics, science, languages and humanities. If RE, with an inclusive syllabus, were made one of the core subjects, it would boost efforts to broaden children’s religious horizons. Once again, this would be of benefit both academically and in terms of future citizenship.

Divide and rule

Separation anxiety: do faith schools discriminate?

will inform the policy options more accurately. For instance, are pupils and society best served by the considerably independent say that voluntary-aided schools (most of which are faithbased) have over admissions, the curriculum and employment of staff, even though they are state-funded? The creation of more state academies and Education Secretary Michael Gove’s free schools – many of which have a religious foundation – has raised the stakes even higher, because although some of us will rejoice at the freedoms they have been granted, others will despair that this includes the freedom to discriminate against admitting pupils and hiring teachers of “the wrong faith” or no faith at all. The task has become more urgent since the government’s astonishing decision this year to abandon Ofsted’s duty to inspect schools’ record of promoting social cohesion. Many fear that this sends out a disheartening message to those who value an inclusive and tolerant Britain. Another pressing issue is that, although religious education (RE) is a statutory subject and has to be taught, it is not part of the National Curriculum and so can be taught in any way a school chooses. While some schools follow a multi-faith syllabus, others limit their pupils to knowledge of only one faith. Would it not

The Runnymede Trust’s 2008 report Right to Divide? is one of many studies that pick up concerns about the social inequalities caused by schools’ freedom to select pupils on the grounds of religion. It finds that, despite high-minded pronouncements suggesting “a mission to serve the most disadvantaged in society”, faith schools “educate a disproportionately small number of young people at the lowest end of the socio-economic scale”. This is borne out by statistics. Faith schools have fewer children on free school meals (11.5 per cent) than other schools (15.7 per cent). They also cater for fewer pupils with special educational needs (SEN). According to the House of Commons Library (2009), 1.2 per cent of pupils at state faith schools had local authority statements for SEN, compared to 1.7 per cent at schools with no religious character. In 2008, the Accord Coalition was created to provide a voice for those, from religious and secular groups alike, who seek to promote inclusive schooling. The goal is to create an environment in which children of different religious backgrounds grow up as neighbours rather than as strangers, and to forge a society that is at ease with itself. Britain has spent centuries struggling to reduce class divisions in society. It would be regrettable indeed if these were now replaced by religious ones. l Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain is the chair of the Accord Coalition. accordcoalition.org.uk newstatesman.com/subjects/religion

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 27

COVER STORY

“Never be afraid of stridency” Interview by Richard Dawkins Photographs by Michael Stravato

Meeting of minds: Richard Dawkins (left) and Christopher Hitchens in conversation

28 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

Is America heading for theocracy? How worrying is the rise of the Tea Party? Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins discuss God and US politics

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Richard Dawkins Do you have any memories of life at the New Statesman? Christopher Hitchens Not that I want to impart. It seems like a different world and a different magazine and it happened to a different person. I’d love them to interview me one day about it, for an edition about the role of the Statesman, but I’d really rather you and I focus on the pulse of the issue, which is obviously our common cause. RD I’ve been reading some of your recent collections of essays – I’m astounded by your sheer erudition. You seem to have read absolutely everything. I can’t think of anybody since Aldous Huxley who’s so well read. CH It may strike some people as being broad but it’s possibly at the cost of being a bit shallow. I became a journalist because one didn’t have to specialise. I remember once going to an evening with Umberto Eco talking to Susan Sontag and the definition of the word “polymath” came up. Eco said it was his ambition to be a polymath; Sontag challenged him and said the definition of a polymath is someone who’s interested in everything and nothing else. I was encouraged in my training to read widely – to flit and sip, as Bertie [Wooster] puts it – and I think I’ve got good memory retention. I retain what’s interesting to me, but I don’t have a lot of strategic depth. A lot of reviewers have said, to the point of embarrassing me, that I’m in the class of Edmund Wilson or even George Orwell. It really does remind me that I’m not. But it’s something to at least have had the comparison made – it’s better than I expected when I started. 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 29

COVER STORY t

RD As an Orwell scholar, you must have a particular view of North Korea, Stalin, the Soviet Union, and you must get irritated – perhaps even more than I do – by the constant refrain we hear: “Stalin was an atheist.” CH We don’t know for sure that he was. Hitler definitely wasn’t. There is a possibility that Himmler was. It’s very unlikely but it wouldn’t make any difference, either way. There’s no mandate in atheism for any particular kind of politics, anyway. RD The people who did Hitler’s dirty work were almost all religious. CH I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny. RD Can you talk a bit about that – the relationship of Nazism with the Catholic Church? CH The way I put it is this: if you’re writing about the history of the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism, you can take out the word “fascist”, if you want, for Italy, Portugal, Spain, Czechoslovakia and Austria and replace it with “extremeright Catholic party”. Almost all of those regimes were in place with the help of the Vatican and with understandings from the Holy See. It’s not denied. These understandings quite often persisted after the Second World War was over and extended to comparable regimes in Argentina and elsewhere. RD But there were individual priests who did good things. CH Not very many. You would know their names if there were more of them. When it comes to National Socialism, there’s no question there’s a mutation, a big one – the Nazis wanted their own form of worship. Just as they thought they were a separate race, they wanted their own religion. They dug out the Norse gods, all kinds of extraordinary myths and legends from the old sagas. They wanted to control the churches. They were willing to make a deal with them. The first deal Hitler made with the Catholic Church was the Konkordat. The Church agreed to dissolve its political party and he got control over German education, which was a pretty good deal. Celebrations of his birthday were actually by order from the pulpit. When Hitler survived an assassination attempt, prayers were said, and so forth. But there’s no doubt about it, [the Nazis] wanted control – and they were willing to clash with the churches to get it. There’s another example. You swore on Almighty God that you would never break your oath to the Führer. This is not even secular, let alone atheist. RD There was also grace before meals, personally thanking Adolf Hitler. CH I believe there was. Certainly, you can hear the oath being taken – there are recordings of

it – but this, Richard, is a red herring. It’s not even secular. They’re changing the subject. RD But it comes up over and over again. CH You mentioned North Korea. It is, in every sense, a theocratic state. It’s almost supernatural, in that the births of the [ruling] Kim family are considered to be mysterious and accompanied by happenings. It’s a necrocracy or mausolocracy, but there’s no possible way you could say it’s a secular state, let alone an atheist one. Attempts to found new religions should attract our scorn just as much as the alliances with

“I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian” Christopher Hitchens the old ones do. All they’re saying is that you can’t claim Hitler was distinctively or specifically Christian: “Maybe if he had gone on much longer, he would have de-Christianised a bit more.” This is all a complete fog of nonsense. It’s bad history and it’s bad propaganda. RD And bad logic, because there’s no connection between atheism and doing horrible things, whereas there easily can be a connection in the case of religion, as we see with modern Islam. CH To the extent that they are new religions – Stalin worship and Kim Il-sungism – we, like all atheists, regard them with horror.

RD You debated with Tony Blair. I’m not sure I watched that. I love listening to you [but] I can’t bear listening to . . . Well, I mustn’t say that. I think he did come over as rather nice on that evening. CH He was charming, that evening. And during the day, as well. RD What was your impression of him? CH You can only have one aim per debate. I had two in debating with Tony Blair. The first one was to get him to admit that it was not done – the stuff we complain of – in only the name of religion. That’s a cop-out. The authority is in

30 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

the text. Second, I wanted to get him to admit, if possible, that giving money to a charity or organising a charity does not vindicate a cause. I got him to the first one and I admired his honesty. He was asked by the interlocutor at about half-time: “Which of Christopher’s points strikes you as the best?” He said: “I have to admit, he’s made his case, he’s right. This stuff, there is authority for it in the canonical texts, in Islam, Judaism.” At that point, I’m ready to fold – I’ve done what I want for the evening. We did debate whether Catholic charities and so on were a good thing and I said: “They are but they don’t prove any point and some of them are only making up for damage done.” For example, the Church had better spend a lot of money doing repair work on its Aids policy in Africa, [to make up for preaching] that condoms don’t prevent disease or, in some cases, that they spread it. It is iniquitous. It has led to a lot of people dying, horribly. Also, I’ve never looked at some of the ground operations of these charities – apart from Mother Teresa – but they do involve a lot of proselytising, a lot of propaganda. They’re not just giving out free stuff. They’re doing work to recruit. RD And Mother Teresa was one of the worst offenders? CH She preached that poverty was a gift from God. And she believed that women should not be given control over the reproductive cycle. Mother Teresa spent her whole life making sure that the one cure for poverty we know is sound was not implemented. So Tony Blair knows this but he doesn’t have an answer. If I say, “Your Church preaches against the one cure for poverty,” he doesn’t deny it, but he doesn’t affirm it either. But remember, I did start with a text and I asked him to comment on it first, but he never did. Cardinal Newman said he would rather the whole world and everyone in it be painfully destroyed and condemned for ever to eternal torture than one sinner go unrebuked for the stealing of a sixpence. It’s right there in the centre of the Apologia. The man whose canonisation Tony had been campaigning for. You put these discrepancies in front of him and he’s like all the others. He keeps two sets of books. And this is also, even in an honest person, shady. RD It’s like two minds, really. One notices this with some scientists. CH I think we all do it a bit. RD Do we? CH We’re all great self-persuaders. RD But do we hold such extreme contradictions in our heads? CH We like to think our colleagues would point them out, in our group, anyway. No one’s pointed out to me in reviewing my God book

COVER STORY Stridency is the least you should muster . . . It’s the shame of your colleagues that they don’t form ranks and say, “Listen, we’re going to defend our colleagues from these appalling and obfuscating elements.” If you go on about something, the worst thing the English will say about you, as we both know – as we can say of them, by the way – is that they’re boring. RD Indeed. Only this morning, I was sent a copy of [advice from] a British government website, called something like “The Responsibilities of Parents”. One of these responsibilities

was “determine the child’s religion”. Literally, determine. It means establish, cause . . . I couldn’t ask for a clearer illustration, because, sometimes, when I make my complaint about this, I’m told nobody actually does label children Catholic children or Muslim children. CH Well, the government does. It’s borrowed, as far as I can see, in part from British imperial policy, in turn borrowed from Ottoman and previous empires – you classify your new subjects according to their faith. You can be an Ottoman citizen but you’re a Jewish one or an

“Extreme Protestant evangelicals may be the most overrated threat” Christopher Hitchens Armenian Christian one. And some of these faiths tell their children that the children of other faiths are going to hell. I think we can’t ban that, nor can we call it “hate speech”, which I’m dubious about anyway, but there should be a wrinkle of disapproval. RD I would call it mental child abuse. CH I can’t find a way, as a libertarian, of saying that people can’t raise their children, as they say, according to their rights. But the child has rights and society does, too. We don’t allow female – and I don’t think we should countenance male – genital mutilation.

Now, it would be very hard to say that you can’t tell your child that they are lucky and they have joined the one true faith. I don’t see how you stop it. I only think the rest of society should look at it with a bit of disapproval, which it doesn’t. If you’re a Mormon and you run for office and say, “Do you believe in the golden plates that were dug up by Joseph Smith?” – which [Mitt] Romney hasn’t been asked yet – sorry, you’re going to get mocked. You’re going to get laughed at. RD There is a tendency among liberals to feel that religion should be off the table. CH Or even that there’s anti-religious racism, which I think is a terrible limitation. RD Romney has questions to answer. CH Certainly, he does. The question of Mormon racism did come up, to be fair, and the Church did very belatedly make amends for saying what, in effect, it had been saying: that black people’s souls weren’t human, quite. They timed it suspiciously for the passage of legislation. Well, OK, then they grant the right of society to amend [the legislation]. To that extent, they’re opportunists. RD But what about the daftness of Mormonism? The fact that Joseph Smith was clearly a charlatan – CH I know, it’s extraordinary. RD I think there is a convention in America that you don’t tackle somebody about their religion. CH Yes, and in a way it’s attributed to pluralism. And so, to that extent, one wants to respect it, but I think it can be exploited. By many people, including splinter-group Mormons who still do things like plural marriage and, very repulsively, compulsory dowries – they basically give away their daughters, often to blood relatives. And also kinship marriages that are too close. This actually won’t quite do. When it is important, they tend to take refuge in: “You’re attacking my fundamental right.” I don’t think they really should be allowed that. RD Do you think America is in danger of becoming a theocracy? CH No, I don’t. The people who we mean when we talk about that – maybe the extreme Protestant evangelicals, who do want a God-run America and believe it was founded on essentially fundamentalist Protestant principles – I think they may be the most overrated threat in the country. RD Oh, good. CH They’ve been defeated everywhere. Why is this? In the 1920s, they had a string of victories. They banned the sale, manufacture and distribution and consumption of alcohol. They made it the constitution. They more or less managed to ban immigration from countries that had non-Protestant, non-white majorities. From these victories, they have never recovered. They’ll never recover from [the failure

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God Is Not Great that there’s a flat discrepancy between the affirmation he makes on page X and the affirmation he makes on page Y. RD But they do accuse you of being a contrarian, which you’ve called yourself . . . CH Well, no, I haven’t. I’ve disowned it. I was asked to address the idea of it and I began by saying it’s got grave shortcomings as an idea, but I am a bit saddled with it. RD I’ve always been very suspicious of the leftright dimension in politics. CH Yes; it’s broken down with me. RD It’s astonishing how much traction the left-right continuum [has] . . . If you know what someone thinks about the death penalty or abortion, then you generally know what they think about everything else. But you clearly break that rule. CH I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do. That has secular forms with gurus and dictators, of course, but it’s essentially the same. There have been some thinkers – Orwell is pre-eminent – who understood that, unfortunately, there is innate in humans a strong tendency to worship, to become abject. So we’re not just fighting the dictators. We’re criticising our fellow humans for trying to short-cut, to make their lives simpler, by surrendering and saying, “[If] you offer me bliss, of course I’m going to give up some of my mental freedom for that.” We say it’s a false bargain: you’ll get nothing. You’re a fool. RD That part of you that was, or is, of the radical left is always against the totalitarian dictators. CH Yes. I was a member of the Trotskyist group – for us, the socialist movement could only be revived if it was purged of Stalinism . . . It’s very much a point for our view that Stalinism was a theocracy. RD One of my main beefs with religion is the way they label children as a “Catholic child” or a “Muslim child”. I’ve become a bit of a bore about it. CH You must never be afraid of that charge, any more than stridency. RD I will remember that. CH If I was strident, it doesn’t matter – I was a jobbing hack, I bang my drum. You have a discipline in which you are very distinguished. You’ve educated a lot of people; nobody denies that, not even your worst enemies. You see your discipline being attacked and defamed and attempts made to drive it out.

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COVER STORY t

of] Prohibition. It was their biggest defeat. They’ll never recover from the Scopes trial. Every time they’ve tried [to introduce the teaching of creationism], the local school board or the parents or the courts have thrown it out and it’s usually because of the work of people like you, who have shown that it’s nonsense. They try to make a free speech question out of it but they will fail with that, also. People don’t want to come from the town or the state or the county that gets laughed at. RD Yes. CH In all my tours around the South, it’s amazing how many people – Christians as well – want to disprove the idea that they’re all in thrall to people like [the fundamentalist preacher Jerry] Falwell. They don’t want to be a laughing stock. RD Yes. CH And if they passed an ordinance saying there will be prayer in school every morning from now on, one of two things would happen: it would be overthrown in no time by all the courts, with barrels of laughter heaped over it, or people would say: “Very well, we’re starting with Hindu prayer on Monday.” They would regret it so bitterly that there are days when I wish they would have their own way for a short time. RD Oh, that’s very cheering. CH I’m a bit more worried about the extreme, reactionary nature of the papacy now. But that again doesn’t seem to command very big allegiance among the American congregation. They are disobedient on contraception, flagrantly; on divorce; on gay marriage, to an extraordinary degree that I wouldn’t have predicted; and they’re only holding firm on abortion, which, in my opinion, is actually a very strong moral question and shouldn’t be decided lightly. I feel very squeamish about it. I believe that the unborn child is a real concept, in other words. We needn’t go there, but I’m not a complete abortion-on-demand fanatic. I think it requires a bit of reflection. But anyway, even on that, the Catholic Communion is very agonised. And also, [when] you go and debate with them, very few of them could tell you very much about what the catechism really is. It’s increasingly cultural Catholicism. RD That is true, of course. CH So, really, the only threat from religious force in America is the same as it is, I’m afraid, in many other countries – from outside. And it’s jihadism, some of it home-grown, but some of that is so weak and so self-discrediting. RD It’s more of a problem in Britain. CH And many other European countries, where its alleged root causes are being allowed slightly too friendly an interrogation, I think. Make that much too friendly. RD Some of our friends are so worried about Islam that they’re prepared to lend support to

Christianity as a kind of bulwark against it. CH I know many Muslims who, in leaving the faith, have opted to go . . . to Christianity or via it to non-belief. Some of them say it’s the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. The mild and meek one, as compared to the rather farouche, physical, martial, rather greedy . . . RD Warlord. CH . . . Muhammad. I can see that that might have an effect. RD Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?

CH No, in a funny way, I don’t worry that we’ll win. All that we can do is make absolutely sure that people know there’s a much more wonderful and interesting and beautiful alternative. No, I don’t think that Europe would fill up with Muslims as it emptied of Christians. Christianity has defeated itself in that it has become a cultural thing. There really aren’t believing Christians in the way there were generations ago. RD Certainly in Europe that’s true – but in America?

“Abortion is a strong moral question and shouldn’t be decided lightly” Christopher Hitchens CH There are revivals, of course, and among Jews as well. But I think there’s a very longrunning tendency in the developed world and in large areas elsewhere for people to see the virtue of secularism, the separation of church and state, because they’ve tried the alternatives . . . Every time something like a jihad or a sharia movement has taken over any country – admittedly they’ve only been able to do it in very primitive cases – it’s a smouldering wreck with no productivity. RD Total failure. If you look at religiosity across countries of the world and, indeed, across the states of the US, you find that religiosity tends

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to correlate with poverty and with various other indices of social deprivation. CH Yes. That’s also what it feeds on. But I don’t want to condescend about that. I know a lot of very educated, very prosperous, very thoughtful people who believe. RD Do you think [Thomas] Jefferson and [James] Madison were deists, as is often said? CH I think they fluctuated, one by one. Jefferson is the one I’m more happy to pronounce on. The furthest he would go in public was to incline to a theistic enlightened view but, in his private correspondence, he goes much further. He says he wishes we could return to the wisdom of more than 2,000 years ago. That’s in his discussion of his own Jefferson Bible, where he cuts out everything supernatural relating to Jesus. But also, very importantly, he says to his nephew Peter Carr in a private letter [on the subject of belief]: “Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and the love of others which it will procure you.” Now, that can only be written by someone who’s had that experience. RD It’s very good, isn’t it? CH In my judgement, it’s an internal reading, but I think it’s a close one. There was certainly no priest at his bedside. But he did violate a rule of C S Lewis’s and here I’m on Lewis’s side. Lewis says it is a cop-out to say Jesus was a great moralist. He said it’s the one thing we must not say; it is a wicked thing to say. If he wasn’t the Son of God, he was a very evil impostor and his teachings were vain and fraudulent. You may not take the easy route here and say: “He may not have been the Son of God and he may not have been the Redeemer, but he was a wonderful moralist.” Lewis is more honest than Jefferson in this point. I admire Lewis for saying that. Rick Perry said it the other day. RD Jesus could just have been mistaken. CH He could. It’s not unknown for people to have the illusion that they’re God or the Son. It’s a common delusion but, again, I don’t think we need to condescend. Rick Perry once said: “Not only do I believe that Jesus is my personal saviour but I believe that those who don’t are going to eternal punishment.” He was challenged at least on the last bit and he said, “I don’t have the right to alter the doctrine. I can’t say it’s fine for me and not for others.” RD So we ought to be on the side of these fundamentalists? CH Not “on the side”, but I think we should say that there’s something about their honesty that we wish we could find. RD Which we don’t get in bishops . . . CH Our soft-centred bishops at Oxford and other people, yes.

COVER STORY RD I’m often asked why it is that this republic [of America], founded in secularism, is so much more religious than those western European countries that have an official state religion, like Scandinavia and Britain. CH [Alexis] de Tocqueville has it exactly right. If you want a church in America, you have to build it by the sweat of your own brow and many have. That’s why they’re attached to them. RD Yes. CH [Look at] the Greek Orthodox community in Brooklyn. What’s the first thing it will do? It will build itself a little shrine. The Jews – not all of them – remarkably abandoned their religion very soon after arriving from the shtetl. RD Are you saying that most Jews have abandoned their religion? CH Increasingly in America. When you came to escape religious persecution and you didn’t want to replicate it, that’s a strong memory. The Jews very quickly secularised when they came. American Jews must be the most secular force on the planet now, as a collective. If they are a collective – which they’re not, really. RD While not being religious, they often still observe the Sabbath and that kind of thing. CH There’s got to be something cultural. I go to Passover every year. Sometimes, even I have a seder, because I want my child to know that she does come very distantly from another tradition. It would explain if she met her greatgrandfather why he spoke Yiddish. It’s cultural, but the Passover seder is also the Socratic forum. It’s dialectical. It’s accompanied by wine. It’s got the bones of quite a good discussion in it. And then there is manifest destiny. People feel America is just so lucky. It’s between two oceans, filled with minerals, wealth, beauty. It does seem providential to many people. RD Promised land, city on a hill. CH All that and the desire for another Eden. Some secular utopians came here with the same idea. Thomas Paine and others all thought of America as a great new start for the species. RD But that was all secular. CH A lot of it was, but you can’t get away from the liturgy: it’s too powerful. You will end up saying things like “promised land” and it can be mobilised for sinister purposes. But in a lot of cases, it’s a mild belief. It’s just: “We should share our good luck.” RD I’ve heard another theory that, America being a country of immigrants, people coming from Europe, where they left their extended family and left their support system, were alone and they needed something. CH Surely that was contained in what I just . . . RD Maybe it was. CH The reason why most of my friends are non-believers is not particularly that they were engaged in the arguments you and I have been

having, but they were made indifferent by compulsory religion at school. RD They got bored by it. CH They’d had enough of it. They took from it occasionally whatever they needed – if you needed to get married, you knew where to go. Some of them, of course, are religious and some of them like the music but, generally speaking, the British people are benignly indifferent to religion. RD And the fact that there is an established church increases that effect. Churches should

“Do you ever worry that if we destroy Christianity, Islam will fill the vacuum?” Richard Dawkins not be tax-free the way that they are. Not automatically, anyway. CH No, certainly not. If the Church has demanded that equal time be given to creationist or pseudo-creationist speculations . . . any Church that teaches that in its school and is in receipt of federal money from the faith-based initiative must, by law, also teach Darwinism and alternative teachings, in order that the debate is being taught. I don’t think they want this. RD No. CH Tell them if they want equal time, we’ll jolly

well have it. That’s why they’ve always been against comparative religion. RD Comparative religion would be one of the best weapons, I suspect. CH It’s got so insipid in parts of America now that a lot of children are brought up – as their parents aren’t doing it and leave it to the schools and the schools are afraid of it – with no knowledge of any religion of any kind. I would like children to know what religion is about because [otherwise] some guru or cult or revivalists will sweep them up. RD They’re vulnerable. I also would like them to know the Bible for literary reasons.

CH Precisely. We both, I was pleased to see, have written pieces about the King James Bible. The AV [Authorised Version], as it was called in my boyhood. A huge amount of English literature would be opaque if people didn’t know it. RD Absolutely, yes. Have you read some of the modern translations? “Futile, said the preacher. Utterly futile.” CH He doesn’t! RD He does, honestly. “Futile, futile said the priest. It’s all futile.” CH That’s Lamentations. RD No, it’s Ecclesiastes. “Vanity, vanity.” CH “Vanity, vanity.” Good God. That’s the least religious book in the Bible. That’s the one that Orwell wanted at his funeral. RD I bet he did. I sometimes think the poetry comes from the intriguing obscurity of mistranslation. “When the sound of the grinding is low, the grasshopper is heard in the land . . . The grasshopper shall be a burden.” What the hell? CH The Book of Job is the other great non-religious one, I always feel. “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Try to do without that. No, I’m glad we’re on the same page there. People tell me that the recitation of the Quran can have the same effect if you understand the original language. I wish I did. Some of the Catholic liturgy is attractive. RD I don’t know enough Latin to judge that. CH Sometimes one has just enough to be irritated. RD Yes [laughs]. Can you say anything about Christmas? CH Yes. There was going to be a winter solstice holiday for sure. The dominant religion was going to take it over and that would have happened without Dickens and without others. RD The Christmas tree comes from Prince Albert; the shepherds and the wise men are all made up. CH Cyrenius wasn’t governor of Syria, all of that. Increasingly, it’s secularised itself. This “Happy Holidays” – I don’t particularly like that, either. RD Horrible, isn’t it? “Happy holiday season.” CH I prefer our stuff about the cosmos. The day after this interview, I was honoured to present an award to Christopher Hitchens in the presence of a large audience in Texas that gave him a standing ovation, first as he entered the hall and again at the end of his deeply moving speech. My own presentation speech ended with a tribute, in which I said that every day he demonstrates the falsehood of the lie that there are no atheists in foxholes: “Hitch is in a foxhole, and he is dealing with it with a courage, an honesty and a dignity that any of us would be, and should be, proud to muster.” l Read an extended version of this interview at: newstatesman.com/subjects/ christopher-hitchens

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 33

34 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

IMAGE COURTESY CICLOPS AND NASA/IPL-CALTECH/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

THE SPACE STORY

New images of the planet Saturn and its rings inspire awe – and could answer the oldest question in human history: are we alone?

Adventures in wonderland By Carolyn Porco

A glistening, golden spaceship, with seven lonely years and billions of miles behind it, glides into orbit around a ringed, softly hued planet. A flying-saucer-shaped machine descends through a hazy atmosphere and lands on the surface of an alien moon, ten times further from the sun than the earth is. Fantastic though they seem, these visions are not a dream. The Cassini spacecraft and its Huygens probe have travelled invisible interplanetary highways to the place we call Saturn. Their successful entry into orbit, the landing of Huygens on the cold, dark equatorial plains of Saturn’s moon Titan and Cassini’s subsequent explorations of the Saturnian environment are already legend – one act in a mythic saga of high adventure and deep spiritual yearning that begins and ends with us. Our tale begins at the dawn of the space age. We humans have been interplanetary travellers now for over 50 years. In that time, we’ve explored nearly every corner of the solar system. We’ve sent robotic spacecraft to the planets, all eight of them. Our exploratory machines have rendezvoused with comets and landed on asteroids, we now have a spacecraft on its way to Pluto and – in what I regard as humanity’s finest hour – we have set foot on our own moon.

Like wandering pilgrims, our spacecraft have journeyed far and wide to quench an innate lust to explore, to survey our cosmic surroundings, to ensure the future of our progeny and to seek the answers to questions that have vexed us and every generation of our ancestors before us: how is it that our small planet, and our living on it, came to be? What is the great cosmic theatre within which life on our planet has unfolded? And are terrestrial organisms, evolved as we are from inanimate materials, the only living creatures there are or ever were in the 13.7-billionyear history of the universe? At the heart of every scientific voyage, be it to the planets or to probe the quantum world of fundamental particles, is the same abiding quest: to understand the deep connections joining us to all that surrounds us and to glimpse our part in the greater whole. A halfcentury of travelling the solar system has rewarded us with insights into the interrelatedness and origins of the earth and its sibling planets and has shown us with unmistakable clarity exactly what our cosmic setting really is. Cassini, the joint American/European mission launched in 1997 to orbit Saturn seven years later and the latest chapter in our saga, has done this and more. Its voyage has been one of hope and daring, an astonishing feat

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The ring cycle: an image taken by the Cassini spacecraft in February 2005 of Saturn with its rings and three of moons – Titan, its largest (far left), its second largest, Rhea (top) and bright Enceladus (furthest right)

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 35

THE SPACE STORY Left: an artist’s rendering shows Cassini passing through jets of vapour and fine icy particles erupting from the south polar terrain of Saturn’s small moon Enceladus Right: a Cassini image from February 2011 shows a vast northern storm and Saturn’s second-largest moon, Rhea, along with the planet’s rings (seen nearly edge on) and their shadows Far right, top: while in the shadow of Saturn, Cassini captured an unprecedented image of a total eclipse of the sun, and a spellbinding view of Planet Earth – a mere dot seen from a billion miles away

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of technological skill and mastery. Its story has been part scientific travelogue, part metaphor: a long reel of alien scenes and extraterrestrial vignettes that have informed and delighted us with startling discoveries and splendour beyond compare, and a metaphor for that acute, uniquely human hunger to understand ourselves and the underlying meaning of our own lives.

A galaxy far, far away Ten times further from the sun than the earth, the Saturnian planetary system is so remote and other-worldly that we might as well have travelled to a faraway place in orbit around a distant star in another quadrant of our galaxy. It is tethered by a giant planet, second in size only to Jupiter, with a muted but complex atmosphere cleaved by ferocious, planet-girding winds and prone to the episodic eruption of colossal storms. Saturn hosts an enormous, resplendent set of rings, wreathing it in a vast garland of icy rubble, perpetually in motion and slicing knife-like across the sky directly above the planet’s equator. It boasts Titan, a moon the size of the planet Mercury, with a cold, thick, hazy atmosphere suffused with simple organic molecules and a strangely earth-like, geologically diverse surface, sculpted by wind and rain, girdled by a broad equatorial belt of dunes and dotted in its polar regions with lakes and seas of liquid organic compounds. And it is home to more than 60

other moons, including bright, icy Enceladus. The south polar terrain of this body, no bigger than Britain, is shockingly warm and crossed by deep fissures whose towering jets of fine, icy particles erupt from salty, organic-rich liquid water reservoirs below its surface. This thrilling set of conditions points to a subsurface oasis in which earth-like prebiotic chemistry – and perhaps even life itself – may be roosting. As an interplanetary vehicle bestowed, through its on-board cameras, with a sense of sight, Cassini has allowed us to peer into these exotic realms with an acuity we once could only dream of. Because we humans are exquisitely engineered to comprehend visual stimuli arrayed into two dimensions, images hold a pre-eminent position in the vocabulary of human communication. And Cassini’s images, coming as they do from across the solar system, have communicated to us a sense of being there, a sense of immersion and engagement in a strange, forbidding environment we could otherwise only imagine. They have achieved the nearmiraculous, converting the fleeting and indifferent fluctuations of light’s electromagnetic fields into powerful visceral emotion – an aweinspired exaltation at seeing what has never been seen before. Look at the images on these pages – only a fraction of Cassini’s offerings – and immerse yourself in their grandeur, and you will come to know the joy and soul-filling sustenance that

36 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

discovery and knowing, the scientist’s ken, can bring. Spectacular phenomena in the atmosphere of Saturn, such as the explosive birth of colossal storms or a giant vortex capping the planet’s south pole, are seen here in mesmerising detail and provide a crucial point of comparison with our own planet in understanding the forces driving earth’s atmospheric systems. Physical mechanisms at work today in Saturn’s rings, which were also key in sculpting and configuring the early solar system, can be observed in these images. Small moons, responsible for keeping the ring gaps in which they dwell open, are the best windows we have into the process by which a planet such as Jupiter, slowly accreting material from the solar nebula, finally grows large enough to truncate its own growth by opening and maintaining a gap along its orbit. Even smaller ring-embedded moonlets can be observed over time drifting back and forth across this disc of icy debris, mimicking the migratory motions of the planets across the solar nebula in the very early days of the solar system. The surface of Titan, once mysterious and unseen, fascinates as you gaze at its geographical contours and meandering riverbeds and consider its position as the only body today in all the solar system where, like the early earth, liquid organics are ponded on its surface. Regard Titan, imagine a long-ago time on our planet when molecular interactions within pools of organic compounds eventually led to the origin

REUTERS/NASA. IMAGE COURTESY CICLOPS AND NASA/IPL-CALTECH/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Far right, bottom: part of a large mosaic of images of Enceladus, Saturn’s most fascinating moon, which harbours an organic-rich sea of liquid water beneath its south polar cap – a potential source of life

THE SPACE STORY

of terrestrial life, and you’ll immediately comprehend the significance of our findings here. And oh, the wonder you will feel at setting eyes for the first time on the geysering turmoil at the south pole of Enceladus, knowing that therein may possibly lie the most promising, most accessible locale in orbit around our sun for unveiling Genesis II: a second origin of living matter beyond the earth. This possibility alone has made the toil of more than two decades on Cassini worth every strain. For, should we ever discover that life has independently arisen twice in our solar system, then at that point we could safely infer that life is not a bug but a feature of the universe in which we live and has occurred a staggering number of times throughout the cosmos during its 13.7 billion years. And that would be a final answer to probably the oldest question in human history. These discoveries and more make clear to us processes that operate well beyond Saturn, from the origin of solar systems to the drivers of meteorology on our own planet, all the way to the origin and cosmic distribution of life itself. In this regard, the scope of Cassini’s mission has been truly universal and its findings are revolutionary.

Moving image As I write, Cassini continues to return one phenomenal discovery after another from within a far-flung planetary system that we have been privileged to come so intimately to know. And

when it is all done, it will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the most scientifically productive missions that has ever flown. But in the end, the story of Cassini, like that of all our interplanetary explorations over the past five decades, has been a story about longing – a longing to know ourselves, to finally understand our place in the magnificent scheme of cosmic evolution. There is one image we have taken of Saturn that says this so much better than words ever could – an image that, despite all the dazzling vistas we have been witness to

The story of Cassini has been about a longing to know ourselves over the past seven years, remains Cassini’s most beloved one. Taken in late 2006, it was a sight humankind had never seen before – a total eclipse of the sun seen from beyond Saturn. Among the striking glories visible in this image – the unfamiliar appearance of backlit rings, the refracted visage of the sun seen diamond-like along the limb of Saturn and the beautiful blue ring created from the spray exhaled by Enceladus – you can spot, across a billion miles of interplanetary space, our own planet, earth, as if nestled in the arms of Saturn’s rings. There is a powerful emotion that stirs within us when we catch sight of our small, fragile,

blue-ocean planet as it would be seen by others in the skies of other worlds. It is that startling recognition of ourselves, as we’ve never seen ourselves before, that never fails to move us. And it moves me to think of evolution. For me, this is where the astronomer Galileo and the biologist Charles Darwin come face to face, because it is an image that was made ultimately possible by Galileo’s first experiments 400 years ago, an image that shouts evolution. I look at this image and see our distant ancestors, stepping down from the trees and walking upright for the first time on to the African savannahs, pausing to look back at the forest from which they came. And I look at this image and I see a species that is unyielding in its pursuit of knowledge and brave and ardent in its longing to grasp the meaning and the significance of its own existence. Finally, I can’t help but look at this image and see the very best that humanity has to offer. We are no doubt the troubled and warlike inhabitants of one insignificant little planet. But we are also the dreamers, thinkers and explorers who took this picture – one world clear across interplanetary space to another. To be so small and reach so far is what makes us, in the end, the extraordinary citizens of Planet Earth. l Carolyn Porco is an American planetary scientist and the director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations in Boulder, Colorado. For more information, see: ciclops.org newstatesman.com/subjects/science

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 37

The NS Interview Carol Ann Duffy, poet

“I used to be called a poetess – it was stuffy and sexist” Portrait by Joss McKinley

You have written often on love, and now your mother’s death. Is all poetry personal? Poetry is the music of being human, isn’t it? The poems are the songs we make out of what happens to us. And the three big things that happen to us are: falling in love, in my case having children, and bereavement or loss. Do you feel that you have a duty of care to the people you’re writing about? I don’t think so, because a love poet is always writing about themselves, even though they might be celebrating. Your latest collection is called The Bees. Why? I’ve loved bees from childhood. When I was reading what I’d written, I noticed the bee was appearing as an image, almost unsummoned. Has the way you write poems evolved? I started writing early – I was 16 – and my poems were to do with subjects: “This is a poem about . . .” As I got older I was more interested in form and the relationship between words. So what do bees mean to you? My bees are my poems. It’s how I see poetry, in the ways that bees gather – they’re very industrious and then they add. I think a good poem is a gift to the world; it adds something. Is writing a poem an act of generosity? Yes, very much so. When I read a wonderful poem I feel that I’ve been given a way of seeing, feeling, remembering. That’s true of all the arts. You feel nourished – as you do with honey. Are there words or images to which you return? You’ll find it hard to find a book of mine that doesn’t have a lot of moon in it. I like to find metaphors for the moon as a private joke. I don’t know whether anyone has noticed that. Your status as Poet Laureate is printed on the front cover of your new book. Against my wishes. Showing off, isn’t it?

Are you accustomed to the role now? I feel more joy about it than I did at the beginning. I’ve loved poetry since childhood, so it’s a privilege to celebrate that. And I’ve found a way to be comfortable with being public. I don’t have to go on Question Time if I don’t want to. Are strong female poetic voices still rare? When I published my first book in 1985, I was still called a poetess – there were very few women around. It felt stuffy, depressing and sexist. I remember doing a reading with Patricia Beer and her sense of having to be the only woman was such that she didn’t talk to me. But now we’ve got so many poets who are women: Alice Oswald, Jo Shapcott, Gillian Clarke, Jackie Kay – you can go on for ever. Your father was politically engaged. Are you? It put me off more than anything. There was this Celtic male socialist atmosphere around my childhood, but it seemed to be quite sexist and argumentative. If anything, it gave me an aversion to party politics – I was much more likely to go to my bedroom and read a poem. Do you feel more involved in politics now? Not at all. All my political or social thinking is done through my poems, but [about] issues I see as moral, not political.

Can a government be guilty of immorality? Yes. The closure of libraries and the outpricing of education are immoral. We’re slamming doors shut to talent. My family was very ordinary. I went to grammar school and university. I had all my fees paid and was given £800 a year to spend and I’m really grateful for it. Someone like me now would not be going, simple as that. I think there should be a 50 per cent tax on every financial transaction. That would sort it. We need a new politics; the word doesn’t have a meaning. Which is probably why I resist it. Would your politics be defined by morality? Yes, a consensus of morality: what we value, what kind of country we want to be, what we want to encourage, treasure and enhance. I also think that politicians should be made to qualify. You should spend three years studying for it. What does God mean to you? [Long pause.] Well, nothing. Not even in your convent days? Up until I was about 12 I suppose I had a Christmassy relationship with God. I’ve always felt that the Christian story is a metaphor for understanding certain values, but it wasn’t any more real than “Hansel and Gretel”. Do you vote? Yes, I’ve always voted Labour.

DEFINING MOMENTS 1955 Born in the Gorbals, Glasgow 1971 First poems published in a pamphlet 1977 BA in philosophy from Liverpool University. Writes two plays while there 1985 Publishes her first collection of poems, Standing Female Nude 1996 Begins teaching poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University 2006 Receives the T S Eliot Prize for her collection of love poems Rapture 2009 Is appointed Poet Laureate

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Is there anything you’d like to forget? No. I quite like remembering. Was there a plan? I wanted a child – that was the one thing I always wanted. Are we all doomed? No. This is a time when we are realising there is change afoot. I’m hoping to go to St Paul’s later. I might read some poems [to the protesters]. l Interview by Sophie Elmhirst newstatesman.com/subjects/interviews

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

The thinker: Obama’s presidency has been marred by a lack of action from a paralysed Congress. But could anyone else have fared better? 40 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

LETTER FROM AMERICA

With the economy in the doldrums, Barack Obama’s best chance of a second term is by breaking free of the deadening search for consensus that blights US politics – and hoping that the Republican Party self-destructs. By Alan Ryan

Give ’em hell, Barry

had fallen to 9 per cent, there was some surprise, not because the number was so low but because it was higher than zero. Politicians are despised by the electorate and the Republicans are particularly disliked, despite their victories in the 2010 midterm elections. Voters describing themselves as “independent” now outnumber those professing an allegiance. “Disenchanted” would win by a landslide. The president’s approval ratings hover in the low 40 per cent range, below what he needs for re-election next year. But the only candidate for the Republican nomination who runs him close is the former governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney, whose own party likes him so little that he has never got much above a 25 per cent approval rating from Republican voters. Polls suggest that Romney will come third place in the upcoming Iowa caucuses. Congress is paralysed. The Republicans refuse to act on anything presented by the president but they rarely even pass motions of their own, knowing that they will go nowhere in the Senate. Occasional indignant flurries of sentiment in favour of a “balanced budget” amendment to the constitution result in a vote; that there won’t be any such amendment is known to everyone. To describe this as “gridlock” is an understatement. The problem is institutional and therefore incurable, as US voters cannot

confront the obvious deficiencies of their constitution – the one thing all Americans worship. The constitution enjoys the same status as the Bible and is often confused with it. They are right to flinch at rewriting the constitution; countries do this in the wake of war or dictators, but rarely otherwise. All the same, it is no accident that, of the 193 members of the United Nations, the only one that has copied the US constitution is the Philippines. A form of parliamentary system is much more popular. Almost every aspect of the US constitution, from the separation of powers to the role of the Supreme Court, is a recipe for gridlock and the exploitation of the public by sectional interests. A president who needs no help from Congress in ordering the incineration of the human race in his role as commander-inchief and who has organised the assassination of Osama Bin Laden and the removal of Colonel Gaddafi cannot get his modest proposals for injecting life into an anaemic economy on to the agenda of either house of Congress. In the lower house, he is at the mercy of the Republican speaker, John Boehner – in the US system not a neutral chairman but the leader of the majority party – and in the Senate, he is at the mercy of procedural rules that result in the Democratic majority being unable to bring up his proposals unless it can rally 60 votes out

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This is an “off-year” in the US electoral cycle. Some states elect their governors and legislatures in odd-numbered years; most follow the congressional and presidential election calendar: in 2010, the Tea Party-inspired Republicans massacred the Democrats and took control of the House of Representatives. In 2012, they have every chance of adding the Senate and White House, if they can find a presidential candidate who doesn’t alienate all but the most wild-eyed of their conservative base – and if the congressional Republicans can avoid being saddled with responsibility for the economy. Their aim is to ensure that Barack Obama carries the can for a 9 per cent unemployment rate – which doesn’t include those who’ve given up looking for work. Obama wants the blame to fall on the Republicans’ bloody-minded obstruction of all his proposals and is berating them for failing to get people back to work. The fear is that he’s left it too late. Election results tend to reflect the state of the economy six months to a year earlier. Nobody expects an economic miracle between now and next November. Common sense remains in short supply on the national political scene. When yet another opinion poll announced that the US public had fallen out of love with its politicians, nobody was surprised. When it was reported in October that the approval rating for Congress

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 41

LETTER FROM AMERICA

JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES

The mess we’re in Progress hangs on the willingness of politicians to cut deals in the interests of getting a compromise that everyone can live with and that is arguably in the interests of the population at large. Among the current problems is the lack of anything like a consensus on the best way to wake up the housing market, clean up the financial mess and get people back to work. The greater problem is that the Republican Party has committed itself to a scorched-earth policy of opposing anything proposed by President Obama. The leader of the Republicans in the Senate, the egregious Mitch McConnell, announced in 2010 that the “overriding objective” of Senate Republicans was to ensure that Obama would be a one-term president. The strategy is simple. The president is the only focus of national political attention. Most Americans can just about identify their own member of Congress and cannot name most members of the cabinet – but they do know who is supposed to be in overall command. If the president can be frustrated in everything he attempts, he will be seen as weak and ineffectual

Anyone but: Mitt Romney on the campaign trail

and will be a pushover for an opposition challenger. Republicans remember Jimmy Carter, the last Democrat to preside over a period of economic depression that he couldn’t fix and, not coincidentally, the last Democrat to be a one-term president. Ronald Reagan had no idea how to fix it either, but he exuded an air of “cando” confidence and that was enough in 1980. It’s a high-risk strategy. Another event etched in the memory of politicians – even those who were not born at the time – is the 1948 defeat of Thomas Dewey by Harry Truman. From 1946, Truman governed with, or against, a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate. He had inherited the presidency when Roosevelt died in the spring of 1945 and was thought to be incompetent. But, running against a “donothing” Congress, he beat the odds and broke Republican hearts – as well as embarrassing the Chicago Daily Tribune, which went to press with the banner headline “Dewey defeats Truman” shortly before Truman defeated Dewey. The battle cry of “Give ’em hell, Harry” – shouted at Truman by a supporter at a speech in 1948 – stirs the hearts of Democrats to this day. Obama’s problem is that he isn’t Truman and in 2008 he ran for president as a candidate who was above partisanship. Although he wrote an autobiography entitled The Audacity of Hope, audacity is not his style. He is a consensusbuilder, and when you are faced with uninhibited hooligans determined to make you look indecisive, that’s the wrong thing to be. Playing chicken with the US economy is not a smart thing to do, but Congress did it in the summer, when it held hostage an increase in the government’s borrowing authority until the president agreed to a programme for reducing the national debt over the next decade, mostly by cutting programmes that benefited the worseoff. Standard & Poor’s lowered the US credit rating and the public decided that the president had no backbone and Congress had no sense.

The problem for Obama is that Republicans play chicken more deftly. If you want to persuade the driver of the car racing towards you that you are not going to change course, the ultimate strategy is to throw the steering wheel out of the window. The Republican version was to sign a declaration that under no circumstances would they raise taxes. Any reduction in the government’s deficit must come by cutting expenditure, and as the Republicans won’t touch the Pentagon’s budget, that entails cutting the deficit by cutting programmes that benefit the worse-off. The author of the anti-tax declaration is a lobbyist and activist called Grover Norquist, whose professed ambition is to shrink government until it’s small enough to “drown in a bathtub”. Politicians routinely break their campaign promises, and so one might think that it’s no big deal to have signed Norquist’s piece of paper. This overlooks the realities. Because almost every seat in Congress is “safe” for one or the other party, the real threat to an incumbent comes from inside his own party. When the ideological temperature rises, small numbers of enthusiasts, if well funded and given access to local television channels to run negative ads, can turf out an incumbent in a primary election. It happened in 2010, notably in Alaska, Florida and Delaware. In Delaware, the Tea Party managed to reject Mike Castle, a competent former governor and congressman, in favour of Christine O’Donnell, whose financial problems and allround flakiness ensured that she lost the actual election by a landslide. Castle would have won. Obama’s supporters have always hoped that he would call the Republicans’ bluff. He has a powerful weapon ready to hand. Many of the country’s economic problems – the size of its national debt and continuing budget deficits – stem from George W Bush’s reckless reductions in income-tax rates in 2001 and 2003; they were due to expire at the end of 2010 if Obama did nothing. He wanted to preserve the lower tax rates for the worse-off and let them expire for the better-off. When the Republicans insisted on keeping the lower rates for the best-off, he blinked. Offered the chance to explain to the country that everyone was going to be worse off because the Republican Party had been bought lock, stock and barrel by the less than 1 per cent of the population that makes more than half a million dollars a year, he turned it down. If anything stiffens his backbone between now and November 2012, it will be the success of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Obama’s most enthusiastic supporters are the most disillusioned. He hasn’t closed Guantanamo Bay and he has continued Bush’s foreign policies and made no progress on a Palestinian peace deal. He has bailed out bankers, failed to pursue the malefactors who brought down the banking system and allowed the cost of sorting out the mortgage mess to fall on hardup homeowners, not the mortgage companies. Public intellectuals such as the philosopher

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of 100 to overcome the minority’s obstruction. It doesn’t help that Boehner is paralysed by his inability to keep his Tea Party-backed rank and file in line and a justified fear that his second-in-command, Eric Cantor, is only waiting for the right moment to grab his job. The creators of the constitution 224 years ago were sure that a government that did nothing was better than a government that did too much. Before embarking on the Louisiana Purchase, which added 828,000 square miles of French-held territory west of the Mississippi to the original 13 states, Thomas Jefferson denounced the idea of an “active executive”. Today, anyone used to the way the UK government dominates proceedings can only stare openmouthed at the spectacle of the head of state and government having to cajole not only the opposition but members of his own party to allow him to progress with his agenda. The one virtue of this sort of power-dispersing system is that it forces everyone to search for consensus. Winston Churchill’s old, unkind joke about Americans always doing the right thing but only after exhausting all the alternatives reflects how getting to a consensus can be a very slow process. It is one reason why so many conflicts end up in court. Where there is intransigence, as there was in the 1950s and 1960s over the elimination of racial segregation in the Southern states, it’s almost inevitable that one side will try to break the logjam by seeking a ruling that the other is acting unconstitutionally, such as getting “separate but equal” schools declared to be a violation of the rights of black students, or as several states are arguing now over some of the provisions of the healthcare reforms. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear their arguments in 2012, which will liven up the presidential race.

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 43

new from polity IMMIGRANT NATIONS Paul Scheffer “An important, ambitious book...and a damn good read too.” Financial Times “Arguably the best study in many years of the effects that mass immigration has had on the countries and cities of western Europe and north America.” European Voice 13 May 2011 – 300 pages 978-0-7456-4962-7 paperback – £19.99

THE LOST MICHELANGELOS Antonio Forcellino “As much a story about the intransigence of the art establishment and the gaps in its tradition-bound methods for considering authentication claims as it is about the ultimate fate of the painting itself.” New York Times “An unlikely and rather miraculous piece of art history.” Bay Area Reporter 27 May 2011 – 180 pages 978-0-7456-5203-0 hardback – £18.99

THE STRANGE NON-DEATH OF NEOLIBERALISM Colin Crouch “A highly approachable and illuminating argument in political economy.” The Guardian “The most important work on the political economy of modern capitalism since Keynes, Kalecki and Schonfield.” Philippe C. Schmitter, European University Institute 24 June 2011 – 224 pages 978-0-7456-5221-4 paperback – £14.99

CULTURE IN A LIQUID MODERN WORLD Zygmunt Bauman “Acerbic interpretations of a long-contested word.” Steven Poole, The Guardian One of the most brilliant and influential social thinkers of our time retraces the peregrinations of the concept of culture and examines its fate in a world marked by the powerful new forces of globalization, migration and the intermingling of populations. 14 June 2011 – 144 pages 978-0-7456-5355-6 – £12.99

Available now from all good bookshops politybooks.com

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Cornel West who thought that Obama would usher in an era of “prophetic” politics, giving a fresh impetus to the fight for social justice, feel betrayed; West has spent two nights in jail recently for protesting with the Occupy Wall Street movement. All of which makes it very odd that next year’s elections, both presidential and congressional, can’t be taken for granted. This autumn’s politics has been enlivened by the Republicans’ search for a plausible candidate. The consensus is that they will end up nominating Romney but that they would prefer almost anyone else; the trouble is that everyone else rises briefly to the top of the polls and then self-destructs. The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, came to the front with a reputation for political savvy, then stumbled on questions about Pakistan at a debate and revealed that he thought that the voting age was 21. It has been 18 for two decades. Herman Cain, boss of the Godfather pizza chain, who leaped ahead of Romney with a mixture of folksy charm and simple economic nostrums, found former employees coming out of the woodwork to accuse him of sexual harassment, and suspended his campaign. Now Newt Gingrich is occupying the “anyone but Romney” slot. How a serial adulterer who led the Republicans to catastrophic defeats came to appeal to socially conservative evangelical Christians is a mystery that baffles all. Nobody supposes the Gingrich bounce can last.

This leaves Romney, who sets records for smooth mendacity surprising even in US politics. He advertises himself as a businessman but the business was the management consultancy Bain, where he made a lot of money by showing clients how to make firms private with leveraged buyouts that seem to have done Bain more good than the firms and the owners far more good than their workers. Far from creating jobs

The one glimmer of intelligence has come from Occupy Wall Street in the US, Bain’s speciality was outsourcing. In any case, Romney has been a full-time professional politician for the past 15 years. Being governor of the liberal state of Massachusetts doesn’t rate highly as a job qualification with members of the Tea Party and he has been engaged in a wholesale reinvention exercise. Being a Mormon may help – anyone who can believe what members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are supposed to believe should find it simple to entertain contradictory views on just about anything. Formerly in favour of same-sex marriage and “pro-choice” on abortion, he is now against both. He created a health-care system in Massachusetts that was the model for Obamacare;

he now says either that it was a mistake or that it’s not like what Obama did. It has emerged that when he left office he spent $100,000 destroying documents. You can see why “anyone but Romney” might appeal to voters with even a modest liking for honesty and consistency. The one glimmer of political intelligence this autumn has come from the Occupy Wall Street movement. Its positive views are inscrutable; but it has done what the respectable media and organisations such as the Pew Charitable Trusts have failed to do: make the public aware of the extent to which the economic growth of the past 30 years has gone to the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population. It may even have given Obama the confidence to go after the Republicans for being ready to sacrifice the 99 per cent to their multimillionaire paymasters. There is still a long way to go. A Pew report showed that self-delusion is alive and well: Americans believe that the US is uniquely open to talent and hard work and that social mobility is greater in the US than anywhere in the world. The truth is that the US and the UK have lower social mobility than almost all other advanced industrial societies. Yet almost 40 per cent of the population also believe that they are, or within a year will be, part of the top 1 per cent. Like any other religious conviction, faith in the great American myth is impervious to mere facts. l Alan Ryan is a lecturer at Princeton University and a former warden of New College, Oxford

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 45

FIRST PERSON

All of our behaviour can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge. By Sam Harris

The free will delusion tend to find these conclusions intellectually and ethically abhorrent. But, in fact, free will is more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot even be rendered coherent conceptually. Either our wills are determined by prior causes, and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance, and we are not responsible for them. If a man’s “choice” to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity, and this neural activity is in turn the product of prior causes – perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of bad genes, an unhappy childhood and bombardment by cosmic rays – what can it possibly mean to say that his will is “free”? No one has ever described a manner in which mental and physical events could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom. Most illusions are made of sterner stuff than this. In physical terms, every human action is reducible to a totality of impersonal events merely propagating their influence; genes are transcribed, neurotransmitters bind to their receptors, muscle fibres contract, and John Doe pulls the trigger on his gun. But, for our commonsense notions of human agency to hold, our actions cannot be merely lawful products of our biology, our conditioning, or anything else that might lead others to predict them.

Quantum leap Consequently, some scientists and philosophers insist that the indeterminacy of quantum processes, at the level of the neuron or its constituents, could yield a form of mental life that would stand free of the causal order. Yet such speculation is pointless – for an indeterminate

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Left, or right, or centre? We seduce ourselves into thinking that we make firm, rational choices

world, governed by chance or quantum probabilities, would grant no more autonomy to human beings than a roulette wheel would, if one could be installed inside the brain. In the face of any real independence from prior patterns, every gesture would seem to merit the statement, “I don’t know what came over me.” Chance events are precisely those for which we can claim no responsibility. And yet, even though we can find no room for it in the causal order, the notion of free will is still accorded a remarkable deference in the scientific and philosophical literature, even by those who believe that the mind is entirely dependent on the workings of the brain. However, the truth is that free will doesn’t even correspond to any subjective fact about us, for introspection soon grows as hostile to the idea as the equations of physics have. Apparent acts of volition merely arise, spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference), and cannot be traced to

© METROPOLIS/IKON IMAGES

Science occasionally uncovers truths that are too counterintuitive or unpalatable for us to accept. The solution to the problem of “free will” is a truth of this kind. That many scientists still consider the question open has nothing to do with the limits of our knowledge: rather, it represents a collective failure of intellectual nerve. Free will is an illusion. The conscious “self” is not the origin of its thoughts, perceptions, emotions and intentions. In each moment, we simply do not know why we think or behave as we do. Our wills are not of our own making. We have known this for the better part of a century, and yet many scientists continue to speak as though human thought and behaviour were primordial mysteries around which the laws of nature must bend. The reticence of scientists on this subject is understandable: if we were to dispense fully with the idea of free will, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than has been waged on the topic of evolution. Unlike many other academic questions, free will is central to most people’s conception of themselves and touches almost everything that they value – personal relationships, moral responsibility, law, politics, religion, public policy, and so on. Abandoning this notion seems to destabilise our thinking in all these areas at once. Without freedom of will, sinners and criminals would be just poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasised their punishment (rather than their deterrence, rehabilitation, or mere containment) would seem deeply incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense. People

entirely dependent on background conditions that he did not make, and of which he was merely a beneficiary. There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress. And yet, living in America, I get the distinct sense that if I asked the average conservative why he wasn’t born with club feet, or why he wasn’t orphaned before the age of five, he would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments. If you have struggled to make the most of what nature gave you, you must still admit your ability and inclination to struggle is part of your inheritance. How much credit does a person deserve for not being lazy? None at all. Laziness, like diligence, is a neurological condition. Of course, conservatives are right to think that we must encourage people to work to the best of their abilities and discourage free riders wherever we can. And it is wise to hold people responsible for their actions when treating them this way influences their behaviour and brings benefit to society. But this does not require that we endorse the cognitive illusion of “free will”. We need only acknowledge that efforts matter and that people can change. We cannot change ourselves, precisely, but we continually influence, and are influenced by, the world around us.

Choices, choices

a point of origin in the stream of consciousness. A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you decide the next thought you think no more than you decide the next thought I write. All of our behaviour can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge. In the 1980s the neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated that activity in the brain’s motor regions can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab recently used functional magnetic resonance imaging data to show that some “conscious” decisions can be predicted up to ten seconds before they enter awareness (long before the preparatory motor activity detected by Libet). Clearly, findings of this kind are difficult to reconcile with the sense that one is the conscious source of one’s thoughts and actions. For better or worse, these truths about human psychology have political implications, because liberals and conservatives are not equally confused about them. Liberals usually understand that every person represents a con-

fluence of forces that he did not will into being – and we can be lucky or very unlucky in this respect. Conservatives, however, have made a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how lucky one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent and physically healthy and not to have been bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse. The disparities in human luck are both morally relevant and harrowing to contemplate. If I had been born with the brain, body and experience of Ted Bundy, I would have been Ted Bundy – a serial killer put to death for his crimes. There is no extra part of me that could have resisted taking his path in life. Even if there is an immortal soul lurking in my brain, my will would acquire no more autonomy in the presence of ectoplasm. Any man who comes into this world with the soul of a serial killer is unlucky indeed. Consider the biography of any “self-made” man, and you will find that his success was

The illusoriness of free will doesn’t render the choices we make in life any less important. As my friend Daniel Dennett has pointed out, many people confuse determinism with fatalism. This gives rise to questions such as, “If everything is determined, why should I do anything? Why not just sit back and see what happens?” That our choices depend on prior causes does not mean that they do not matter. If I had not decided to write this article, it wouldn’t have written itself. My choice to write it was unquestionably the primary cause of its coming into being. Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals and willpower are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviours, and behaviours lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will, nevertheless, come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being. It seems only decent at this moment of pervasive economic hardship and inequality to concede how much luck is required to succeed in this world. Those who have been especially lucky – the smart, healthy, well connected and rich – should count their blessings, and then share some of these blessings with the rest of society. Unfortunately, a belief in free will often stands in their way. l Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and the author of “The Moral Landscape” (Bantam Press, £20) newstatesman.com/subjects/philosophy

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 47

THE CHRISTMAS ESSAY

What do debutante balls, the Japanese tea ceremony, Ponzi schemes and doubting clergy all have in common?

The social cell By Daniel Dennett

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Go forth and multiply: bacteria thrive by replication

there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently – the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs “good tricks”. For instance, flight has evolved independently at least four times, in insects, birds, pterosaurs and mammals, and vision has evolved more often than that. Seeing and flying are very good tricks, for obvious reasons. It is also obvious that human culture has its own roster of good tricks: bows and arrows, boats, writing and the wheel, to name a few. (It is not known if the wheel has been invented many times or just once, with all later wheels being copies of some original wheel, the brainchild of the mythic inventor of the wheel –

Cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to cell biology and it doesn’t matter! Almost certainly wheels would have appeared eventually one place or another.) The typical if tacit assumption is that these good tricks were independently reinvented by intelligent designers among our ancestors, and although this may sometimes have been true – we will probably never know – it is quite possible that they arose in the same way the good tricks of biology did: by mindless processes of differential reproduction in which understanding of what was going on was at a minimum, if not zero. Let us consider the four cultural phenomena, chosen for their relative simplicity and vividness from a much larger array of possibilities, to see how this might have happened. The Japanese tea ceremony is a set of traditions that has accrued over at least a millennium, and now consists of a considerable range of formal

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ceremonies, varying with the season and with the station of the participants, composed of highly elaborate and scrupulously observed rituals of greeting, preparation, serving, cleaning of the utensils, formulaic comments on the quality of the tea and so forth, all conducted either in a tea-house built for that purpose or in a specially furnished tearoom. The neophyte participant in a tea ceremony dutifully complies, silent and respectful, like a visitor at a religious service, though the ceremony is not specifically religious – unless you define religion in such a way that ceremoniously eating foie gras or caviar also counts as a sacrament of sorts. Some people, after all, are said to worship fine wine. A quick glance at biology invites us to ask the following question: why hasn’t the Japanese tea ceremony become extinct? What has sustained it over so many centuries? The system must in some sense keep reproducing itself, ensuring a supply of new officiants to serve as hosts and new participants to serve as guests, and maintaining and replacing all the exquisite equipment used. It requires a lot of energy to keep going. What is its metabolism and how does it work? The Japanese tea ceremony exploits the human desire for status and influence in order to raise the money to capture the energy, and has evolved an elaborate developmental programme for enlisting and training new hosts who can eventually reproduce their own schools (with mutations) for training yet another generation of hosts, and so on, all of this within the kind of protective shell that can readily be constructed and defended in a stratified society. Young girls – and some boys as well – from financially comfortable families are readily induced to enrol, at considerable expense, in “circles” that train them to perform the rituals. It is – or has been for a long time – a path to high status. The cultural virtues of obedience and respect for one’s elders, together with a standard helping of youthful naivety, tend to ensure a ready supply of ideally compliant and attentive initiates allowed inside the gates. At first, as apprentices, they watch quietly, memorising the rituals, inculcating in themselves the ideals, while their parents pay for the operating expenses. Some of them graduate to higher stages, each tier of students educating the lower tier, with the prospect held out of rising to the status of teacher, at which point the energy flow – the money – turns around. Teachers earn a living, but only a few climb that high up the pyramid. And teachers have their own pyramid to climb: associations of circles that in effect compete for prestige with other circles. Once you’re enrolled in the system, there is a strong incentive not to criticise or rebel: we’re all in this boat together – don’t rock it. It doesn’t matter that much whether the initiates continue to believe in the tea ceremony as an important part of life. They are all committed to a trajectory with high costs of leaving and some promise of future benefits.

CORBIS (PREVIOUS SPREAD). GETTY IMAGES (BACTERIA)

single cell, such as a bacterium, is the simplest thing that can be alive. In addition to the materials from which it is constructed, it needs three features: a way of capturing energy (a metabolism), a way of reproducing (genes or something like genes) and a membrane that lets in what needs to come in and keeps out the rest. Converging lines of research from various schools in biology agree on these three necessities, but there is substantial unresolved controversy about the order in which they must have emerged at the origin of life. If the history of evolutionary biology continues along the paths it has followed so far, it is likely that the solution to this problem will prove to be some ingenious and indirect process of chance combinations and gradual refinements, in which metabolism-like cycles and reproduction-like processes joined forces with non-living membranes that were already floating around, objets trouvés that could be appropriated and exploited. Whatever their origins, the resulting designs have now been refined and optimised for more than three billion years and have proven remarkably hardy. Not only are such single cells the most abundant form of life on the planet, but all living things, from trees to fish to human beings, are constructed of them, harnessed by the trillions into co-operating multicellular teams. Cells may be the simplest life forms on the planet – even the simplest possible life forms – but their inner workings, at the molecular level, are breathtakingly complex, composed of thousands of molecular machines, all of them interacting to provide the cell with the energy it needs to build offspring and maintain its membrane. Echoes of the design wisdom embodied in this very effective machinery can be found in human culture, which is dazzlingly complex, too, composed as it is of about seven billion interacting people, with their traditions, languages, institutions, occupations, values and economies. Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution. Consider four unrelated species of social cell that share some interesting features. What do the Japanese tea ceremony, debutante parties, Ponzi schemes and many Christian churches have in common? They are all variations of an insidiously effective social mechanism that: 1) thrives on human innocence, and 2) nobody had to design, and 3) is threatened with extinction by the rising tide of accessibility to information. Like bacteria, as we shall see, they have – and need – metabolisms, methods of reproducing, and membranes, yet there is no need to suppose that these shared features arose from a common ancestor, nor even that the features of one of them inspired copying by the other. Wherever

THE CHRISTMAS ESSAY

THE CHRISTMAS ESSAY

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an the same be said for the debutante ball or cotillion, which has occupied much the same niche in the US, especially in the South? If you are rich enough, and arriviste, you want your daughters to “come out” to society, and expend considerable effort and sums of money manoeuvring into position to accomplish this initiation. If your family arrived generations ago, you may still feel the pressure to preserve your position in society by participating in the prolonged and expensive rituals, something you might think you owed to your daughters, however ungratefully they respond to the pressure. A look at the website of the National League of Junior Cotillions (nljc.com) shows much the same structure as the Japanese tea ceremony: “chapters” in place of “circles”, a hierarchy of volunteers, assistants and (paid) instructors, and – most interestingly – a “strong emphasis on volunteerism, patriotism and involvement in community activities”. Biologists know that you can infer much about the dangers in an organism’s environment by studying its defences, which have been crafted to protect it from the most salient challenges. The entire debutante tradition is threatened by the spreading opinion that it is a superannuated cultural parasite, so it is sporting its good-works overcoat, instead of a mink stole, to protect its high status, on which its life depends. It is important to remember that there is very little inertia in culture; an art form or practice (or language or institution) can become extinct in a generation if its elements aren’t assiduously reproduced and reproduced. Not so many years ago, most city newspapers in the US devoted an entire section to “Society” and covered the ceremonies of debutantes with the same respectful care still accorded weddings and funerals. Today’s coverage tends to make note of the diminishing numbers of debutantes taking part, and often has the same snarky tone

of amusement and withheld approval that distinguishes Hollywood gossip – except that the people named are not celebrities. Farewell, debutantes, except in Texas, where they will no doubt hold out for another decade or two. Ponzi schemes share the pyramidal entry structure. They are obviously parasitic invaders, benefiting neither the individuals entrapped nor the society in general. Charles Ponzi (18821949) did not invent the scheme (and neither did Charles Dickens, who describes one in Martin Chuzzlewit), but Ponzi may have added a few wrinkles and hence, to some degree, may deserve the authorial recognition. How does a Ponzi scheme get started? It doesn’t have to be born in villainy, though it always ends up there. An eager and sincere entrepreneur with what he takes to be a good idea raises the initial capital in good faith and then finds his project running into unanticipated snags. But there is an informational lag that lets the investors keep coming in, and this provides fresh energy – money – to expend in protecting the whole project by providing a dividend to the early investors. The rules forbid this, but . . . can’t we bend them just a bit to get through the storm and keep this wonderful project afloat? A gradual and unalarming entry on to a slippery slope is often a good trick, found in nature and in culture. It is relied on by the pitcher plant and other insectivorous plants, which do not have to comprehend the rationale of their design to benefit from it. Ponzi schemes, and even their proprietors, can also take advantage of this design feature without understanding it. Those schemes that have it thrive; the others do not. Ponzi schemes do, however, have to be composed, unlike plants, of parts – human agents – which understand quite a lot. All these social cells depend critically on language-using, comprehending people. Language is the main medium of interaction, but also of reproduction. Words play a foundational role rather like that of genes and, like genes, they are highly effective transmitters of information that similarly evolved without a helping hand from any intelligent designers. (Words are the pre-eminent vehicles of cultural transmission and evolution.) So language and comprehension are an essential part of the workings of social cells, but here is a surprising twist: it is very important in each case that the participants not understand too much. It is not just that the invention and refinement of these social cells do not depend on any intelligent designer; it is that the cells’ effective operation depends on the relative cluelessness – or innocence – of the participants. The membrane that restricts information flow is just as important as the membrane that restricts entry of outsiders, precisely because inside the barrier there are participants who are capable of understanding that information, information that can quickly transform them into outsiders. Bacteria don’t have

to worry about the disillusionment of their motor proteins, willing slaves that do so much of the heavy lifting. For social cells, this is a big ecological challenge. Money, not social prestige, is the bait that attracts people to Ponzi schemes, but once you’re caught, you encounter the same pressure not to blow the whistle, because it would destroy the gains you have accumulated. And perhaps the anticipated shame of becoming known as a dupe is more motivating than the prospect of financial loss, or the dishonour of being considered a philistine or a social outcast, in the case of the Japanese tea ceremony or the debutante cotillion. These are all strong inducements. The extended success of Bernie Madoff shows that it is still possible for a Ponzi scheme to thrive for some time, in large measure because it exploits networks of trust – a fine feature of a society – and politeness – a fine endowment of individuals – to circumvent the requirements of due diligence that would otherwise expose the fraud. It is no accident that it is typically good, honest people (a bit greedy, maybe, but otherwise trustworthy and trusting) who are lured into Ponzi schemes.

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ow what about religions? They, too, thrive on the goodness of people. For the past few years, Linda LaScola, a clinical social worker, qualitative researcher and psychotherapist, and I have been investigating the curious, sad phenomenon of closeted non-believing clergy – wellmeaning, hard-working pastors who find they do not believe the creed of their denomination, but also find that they cannot just blow the whistle and abandon the pulpit. We knew that many churchgoers have lost whatever faith they had but continue their membership for social and psychological reasons, and surmised that there might be clergy who were similarly attached to their church. What is it like to be a non-believing pastor? We found some examples who were willing to tell us, and are now completing a second survey of volunteers. We want to know, ultimately, how this happens, and how common it is. It is apparently not rare – nobody knows what percentage of clergy fall into this category, not surprisingly. Our first study reported on five pastors in different Protestant denominations, who were interviewed in depth and in strict confidence by LaScola. Because it was published electronically (on the website On Faith) and under the headline “Preachers who are not believers” (Evolutionary Psychology, volume eight, issue one), this first pilot study has received considerable attention and brought us a host of new volunteers for our ongoing research. There are many paths into this predicament, we find, but a common thread runs through most of them: a certain sort of innocence and a powerful desire, not for social prestige or riches, but rather the desire to lead a good life,

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No doubt many of the participants – including the parents paying the bills – feel trapped, but keep their feelings to themselves. Do you want to be an insider or an outsider? The difficulty in answering that question creates the semipermeable membrane that preserves the machinery. As Japanese society becomes less stratified, more homogenised, the contrast has become less effective. Notice that this account remains silent about the value of the Japanese tea ceremony. It may, like university education, be helping both society and the individual in all manner of ways. It may be nurturing the arts, instilling virtues, preserving knowledge and wisdom, stabilising the mores of society – or it may have had, but lost, these roles over time. It may survive today as a sort of self-perpetuating parasitical growth that reproduces itself because it can. It seems on the face of it, however, to be a benign – mutualist, not parasitic – element of society.

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 51

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THE CHRISTMAS ESSAY

REUTERS/ALESSANDRO BIANCHI

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to help other people as much as possible. The tragic trap is baited with goodness itself. Here is how it often works: teenagers glowing with enthusiasm decide to devote their lives to a career of helping others and, looking around in their rather sheltered communities, they see no better, purer option than going into the clergy. When they get to seminary they find themselves being taught things that nobody told them in Sunday school. The more they learn of theology and the history of the composition of the Bible, the less believable they find their creed. Eventually they cease to believe altogether. But, alas, they have already made a substantial commitment in social capital – telling their families and communities about their goals – so the pressure is strong to find an accommodation, or at least to imagine that if they hang in there they will find one. Only a lucky few find either the energy or the right moment to break free. Those who don’t break free then learn the tricks of the trade, the difference between what you can say from the pulpit and what you can say in the sanctum of the seminary, or in your heart. Some, of course, are unfazed by this. One can be initiated into a conspiracy without a single word exchanged or without a secret handshake; all it takes is the dawning realisation, beginning in seminary, that you and the others are privy to a secret, and that they know that you know, and you know that they know that you know. This is what is known to philosophers and linguists as mutual knowledge, and it plays a potent role in many social circumstances. Without any explicit agreement, mutual knowledge seals the deal; you have no right to betray this bond by unilaterally divulging it, or even discussing it. A social membrane is made of such stuff, and it can make a prison for anybody inside who wishes to get out. Like reluctant debutantes or privately suspicious Ponzi victims, they button their lip for an abundance of good reasons. (Redundancy is always a good trick; it allows a collection of individually porous defences to overlap into a nearly impregnable shield.) Historically, pastors have had slender economic resources, and if they live in a parsonage they build up no equity in real estate. Hanging on until the kids are out of college and one can collect one’s meagre pension is an option that can look better than making an honest dash for the door. But a tentative finding of our study so far is that the economic incentive to hang on is sometimes of less importance than the social and psychological factors. As one of our pastors says, “I’m thinking if I leave the church – first of all, what’s that going to do to my family? And I don’t know. Secondly is, I have zero friends outside the church. I’m kind of a loner.” And what about telling his wife? “It’s going to turn her life upside down.” So pastors tend to stay put and search for ways of protecting their conscience from the pangs of hypocrisy. Redoubling one’s efforts to take good care of one’s flock is probably a frequent

No question of faith: observant against the odds

effect, and hence it could be one of the side benefits of this system, a bonus that could almost pay for itself by turning its shepherds into goodness slaves. Guilt is a potent enzyme in many social arrangements, and has been especially promoted in religions. Religions changed more in the past century than they changed in the previous two millennia, and probably will change more in the next decade or two than in the past century. The main environmental change, as many have suggested, is the sudden increase in informational transparency. Religions were beautifully

One can be initiated into a conspiracy without a word being exchanged designed over millennia to work in circumstances in which the people within them could be assumed to be largely ignorant of much that was outside the membrane. Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct. Much has been made of the growing attention to religion in the world, and this has often been interpreted as a revival, an era of expanding religiosity, but all the evidence points away from that interpretation. The fastestgrowing religious category worldwide is no religion at all, and the increasing noise we hear is apparently due to the heightened expenditure of energy by all the threatened varieties in their desperate attempts to fend off extinction. What will the various religions evolve into? That is hard to say, because evolution is a process that amplifies unpredictable accidents into trends and then novel structures. But there are patterns in how this plays out, and if we examine

the good tricks that religions have evolved over the millennia, we may be able to see what new applications are in the offing. Are these biologically inspired reflections on religion offensive? They discuss topics that many people would rather leave unexamined, but, unlike most earlier criticisms of religion, they do not point a finger of blame. It doesn’t take conniving priests to invent these cultural contraptions, any more than it took a devious social engineer to create the Japanese tea ceremony, or debutante cotillions, no matter how resentful and trapped some of the participants in those traditions may feel. Just as there is no Intelligent Designer to be the proper recipient of our gratitude for the magnificent biosphere we live in, there need be no intelligent designers to be the proper targets of our anger when we find ourselves victimised by social cells. There are, to be sure, plenty of greedy and deceitful people, who often rise to power in any of these organisations, but if we concentrate on hunting the villains down, we misdirect our energies. The structures can arise quite innocently out of good intentions and gradually evolve into social mechanisms that perpetuate themselves quite independently of the intentions and values of their constituent parts, the agents who bustle about inside them executing the tasks that keep the whole going. We need to look dispassionately at possibilities that can illuminate – and might eventually eliminate – some serious sources of suffering in the world. Once we appreciate the necessity of metabolism, reproduction and protective membranes for social cells as much as for protein-based cells, we can see more clearly the effects that novel environmental factors are likely to have on the prospects for these phenomena. Will the Japanese tea ceremony morph into something different in order to stay alive, or will the recent destratifications of Japanese society lead to the disintegration of the membrane that has protected the ceremony for a millennium? What will replace debutante balls, and will the niche be taken over by a descendant species of social cell, or by another phenomenon entirely? Ponzi schemes are probably harder to sustain now, and a few minor changes in the flow of information around such phenomena may make them all but impossible – though who knows what entity will invade that niche. The parallels I have noted do not suggest anything like a Law of Nature, nor is there any good reason to believe that all social phenomena are reducible to social cells. Societies are complex in more ways than colonies of bacteria are. What does shine through is a principle of good design. Darwin showed us that the secret of life is the differential reproduction of effective designs for fending off dissolution. When we approach social phenomena with the same spirit of reverse engineering, we find a bounty of insights that can help us plan intelligently for the future. l Daniel Dennett is a philosopher and cognitive scientist and a professor at Tufts University

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 53

THE NS ESSAY

Our strange need for dividing lines, black-and-white answers and absolute definitions leads to unhelpful distortions of reality. If we could accept life’s natural grey areas we would be far better able to calculate risk and comprehend the world we inhabit

The tyranny of the discontinuous mind By Richard Dawkins

Photography by Maja Daniels

line? How many runners exceed the fast line? How many Oxford undergraduates lie above the first-class line? Yes, we in universities do it, too. Examination performance, like most measures of human ability or achievement, is a continuous variable, whose frequency distribution is bellshaped. Yet British universities insist on publishing a class list in which a small number of students receive first-class degrees, a lot obtain Seconds (sometimes divided into Upper and Lower Seconds) and a few get Thirds. That might make sense if the distribution had three or four peaks with deep valleys between, but it doesn’t. Anybody who has ever marked an exam knows that the bottom of one class is separated from the top of the class below by a small fraction of the distance that separates it from the top of its own class. This fact

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alone points to a deep unfairness in the system of discontinuous classification. Examiners go to great trouble to assign a score, perhaps out of 100, to each exam script. Scripts are double- or even triple-marked by various examiners, who may then argue the nuances of whether an answer deserves 55 or 52 marks. Marks are scrupulously added up, normalised, transformed, juggled and fought over. The final marks that emerge, and the rank orders of students, are as richly informative as conscientious examiners can achieve. But then what happens to all that richness of information? Most of it is thrown away, in reckless disregard for all the labour and nuanced deliberation and adjusting that went into the great addition sum. The students are bundled into three or four discrete classes, and that is all the information that penetrates outside the examiners’ room.

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What percentage of the British population lives below the poverty line? When I call that a silly question, a question that doesn’t deserve an answer, I’m not being callous or unfeeling about poverty. I care very much if children starve or pensioners shiver with cold. My objection – and this is just one of many examples – is to the very idea of a line: a gratuitously manufactured discontinuity in a continuous reality. Who decides how poor is poor enough to qualify as below the “poverty line”? What is to stop us moving the line and thereby changing the score? Poverty/wealth is a continuously distributed quantity, which might be measured as, say, income per week. Why throw away most of the information by splitting a continuous variable into two discontinuous categories, above and below the “line”? How many of us lie below the stupidity

Danse macabre: for those who argue that life begins at conception, identical twins present a problem. When the fertilised egg splits, which half gets the soul? 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 55

THE NS ESSAY

First-class mind Perhaps such wastage of information is inevitable, a necessary evil. I don’t want to make too much of it. What is more serious is that there are some educators – dare I say especially in non-scientific subjects – who fool themselves into believing that there is a kind of Platonic ideal called the “first-class mind’ or “alpha mind”, a qualitatively distinct category, as distinct as female is from male, or sheep from goat. This is an extreme form of what I am calling the discontinuous mind. It can probably be traced to the “essentialism” of Plato – one of the most pernicious ideas in all history. For legal purposes, say, in deciding who can vote in elections, we need to draw a line between adult and non-adult. We may dispute the rival merits of 18 versus 21 or 16, but everybody accepts that there has to be a line, and the line must be a birthday. Few would deny that some 15-year-olds are better qualified to vote than some 40-year-olds. But we recoil from the voting equivalent of a driving test, so we accept the age line as a necessary evil. Yet perhaps there are other examples where we should be less willing to do so. Are there cases where the tyranny of the discontinuous mind leads to actual harm, cases where we should actively rebel against it? Yes. There are those who cannot distinguish a 16-cell embryo from a baby. They call abortion murder and feel righteously justified in committing real murder against a doctor – a thinking, feeling, sentient adult, with a loving family to mourn him. The discontinuous mind is blind to intermediates. An embryo is either human or it isn’t. Everything is this or that, yes or no, black or white. But reality isn’t like that. For purposes of legal clarity, just as the 18th birthday is defined as the moment of getting the vote, it may be necessary to draw a line at some arbitrary moment in embryonic development after which abortion is prohibited. But personhood doesn’t spring into existence at any one moment: it matures gradually, and it goes on maturing through childhood and beyond. To the discontinuous mind, an entity either is or is not a person. The discontinuous mind cannot grasp the idea of half a person, or threequarters of a person. Some absolutists go right back to conception as the moment when the

False lines: why is Colin Powell described as “black”?

person comes into existence – the instant the soul is injected – and so they believe that all abortion is murder by definition. The instruction “Donum Vitae” from the Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith says: From the time that the ovum is fertilised, a new life is begun which is neither that of the father nor of the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his own growth. It would never be made human if it were not human already. To this perpetual evidence . . . modern genetic science brings valuable confirmation. It has demonstrated that, from the first instant, the programme is fixed as to what this living being will be: a man, this individual-man with his characteristic aspects already well determined. Right from fertilisation is begun the adventure of a human life . . .

You would eat your ancestor with sauce tartare. He was a fish It is amusing to tease such absolutists by confronting them with a pair of identical twins (they split after fertilisation, of course) and asking which twin got the soul, which twin is the non-person, the zombie. A puerile taunt? Maybe. But it hits home because the belief that it destroys is puerile, and ignorant. “It would never be made human if it were not human already.” Really? Are you serious? Nothing can become something if it is not that something already? Is an acorn an oak tree? Is a hurricane the barely perceptible zephyr that seeds it? Would you apply your doctrine to evolution, too? Do you suppose there was a moment in evolutionary history when a nonperson gave birth to the first person? If a time machine could serve up to you your 200 million greats grandfather, you would eat him with sauce tartare and a slice of lemon. He

56 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

was a fish. Yet you are connected to him by an unbroken line of intermediate ancestors, every one of whom belonged to the same species as its parents and its children. “I’ve danced with a man/Who’s danced with a girl/Who’s danced with the Prince of Wales”, as the song goes. I could mate with a woman, who could mate with a man, who could mate with a woman who . . . after a sufficient number of steps into the past . . . could mate with ancestral fish and produce fertile offspring. To invoke our time machine again, you probably could not mate with Australopithecus (at least not produce fertile offspring) but you are connected to Australopithecus by an unbroken chain of intermediates who could interbreed with their neighbours in the chain every step of the way. And the chain goes on backwards, unbroken, to that Devonian fish and beyond. On the way, about six million years into the past, we would encounter the ancestor we share with modern chimpanzees. It so happens that the intermediates, like the common ancestor itself, are all extinct. But for that (perhaps fortunate) fact, we would be connected to modern chimpanzees by an unbroken chain of intermarrying links, and not just intermarrying but interbreeding – producing fertile offspring. There would be no clear separation between Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes. The only way to maintain our human-privileging laws and morals would be to set up courts to decide whether particular individuals could “pass for human”, like the ludicrous courts with which apartheid South Africa decided who could “pass for white”. And naturally the argument extends to any pair of species you care to name. But for the extinction of the intermediates that connect human beings to the ancestor we share with pigs (it pursued its shrew-like existence 85 million years ago in the shadow of the dinosaurs), and but for the extinction of the intermediates that connect the same ancestor to modern pigs, there would be no clear separation between Homo sapiens and Sus scrofa. You could breed with X who could breed with Y who could breed with (. . . fill in several thousand intermediates . . .) who could produce fertile offspring by mating with a sow.

Fixing Florida Human beings are clearly separable from chimpanzees and pigs and fish and lemons only because the intermediates that would otherwise link them in interbreeding chains happen to be extinct. This is not to deny that we are different from other species. We certainly are different and the differences are important – important enough to justify eating them (vegetables are our cousins, too). But it is a reason for scepticism of any philosophy or theology (or morality or jurisprudence or politics) that treats humanness, or personhood, as some kind of essentialist absolute, which you either definitely have or definitely don’t have.

UPI/ROGER L. WOLLENBERG / EYEVINE

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Cambridge mathematicians, as one might expect, finesse the discontinuity and leak the rank order. It became informally known that Jacob Bronowski was “Senior Wrangler” in his year, Bertrand Russell the Seventh Wrangler in his year, and so on. At other universities, too, tutors’ testimonials may say such things as, “Not only did she get a First: I can tell you in confidence that the examiners ranked her number 3 of her entire class of 106 in the university.” That is the kind of information that counts in a letter of recommendation. And it is that very information that is wantonly thrown away in the officially published class list.

THE NS ESSAY If your theology tells you that human beings should receive special respect and moral privilege as the only species that possesses a soul, you have to face up to the awkward question of when, in human evolution, the first ensouled baby was born. Was it when the first Homo sapiens baby was born to parents belonging to whatever species is considered to be our immediate predecessor (erectus, ergaster, heidelbergensis, rhodesiensis, no matter, the argument stands regardless)? There was no such baby. There never was a “first” Homo sapiens. It is only the discontinuous mind that insists on drawing a hard and fast line between a species and the ancestral species that birthed it. Evolutionary change is gradual – there never was a line, never a line between any species and its evolutionary precursor. In a few cases the intermediates have failed to go extinct, and the discontinuous mind is faced with the stark reality of the problem. Herring gulls (Larus argentatus) and lesser black-backed gulls (Larus fuscus) breed in mixed colonies in western Europe and don’t interbreed. This defines them as good, separate species. But if you travel in a westerly direction around the northern hemisphere and sample the gulls as you go, you find that the local gulls vary from the light grey of the herring gull, getting gradually darker as you progress around the North Pole until, when you go all the way round to western Europe again, they have darkened so far that they “become” lesser black-backed gulls. What’s more, the neighbouring populations interbreed with each other all the way around the ring, even though the ends of the ring, the two species we see in Britain, don’t interbreed. Are they distinct species or not? Only those tyrannised by the discontinuous mind feel obliged to answer that question. If it were not for the accidental extinction of evolutionary intermediates, every species would be linked to every other by interbreeding chains. Where else do we see the tyranny of the discontinuous mind? Colin Powell and Barack Obama are described as black. They do have black ancestors, but they also have white ancestors, so why don’t we call them white? The complication here is the weird convention that the descriptor “black” behaves as the cultural equivalent of a genetic dominant. Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, crossed wrinkled and smooth peas and the offspring were all smooth: smoothness is “dominant”. When a white person breeds with a black person their child is intermediate but is often described as “black”; the cultural label is transmitted down the generations like a dominant gene. This persists even to cases where, say, one out of eight great-grandparents was black and it may not show in skin colour. It is the racist “contamination” metaphor of the “touch of the tarbrush”. Our language is ill-equipped to deal with a continuum of intermediates. Just as people must lie above or below the poverty “line”, so we classify people as “black” even if they are

intermediate. When an official form invites us to tick a “race” or “ethnicity” box, I recommend crossing it out and writing “human”. In US presidential elections, every state (except Maine and Nebraska) has to end up labelled either Democrat or Republican, no matter how evenly divided the voters in that state might be. Each state sends to the Electoral College a number of delegates which is proportional to the population of the state. So far, so good. But the discontinuous mind insists that all the delegates from a given state have to vote the same way. This “winner takes all” system was shown up in all its fatuousness in the 2000 election when there was a dead heat in Florida. Al Gore and George Bush received the same number of votes as each other, the tiny, disputed difference being well within the margin of error.

When asked to tick an “ethnicity” box, cross it out and write “human” Florida sends 25 delegates to the Electoral College. The Supreme Court was asked to decide which candidate should receive all 25 votes (and therefore the presidency). Given that it was a dead heat, it might have seemed reasonable to allot 13 votes to one candidate and 12 to the other. It would have made no difference whether Bush or Gore received the 13 votes: either way, Gore would have been president. I am not saying the Supreme Court should have decided to split the Florida delegates. They had to abide by the rules, no matter how idiotic. I would say that, given the lamentable constitutional rule that the 25 votes had to be bound together as a one-party block, natural

justice should have led the court to allocate the 25 votes to the candidate who would have won the election if the Florida delegates had been divided pro rata, namely Gore.

Reds and blues

Yet that is not the point I am making here. My point here is that the winner-takes-all idea of an electoral college in which each state has an indivisible block of members, either all Democrats or Republicans, no matter how close the vote, is a shockingly undemocratic manifestation of the tyranny of the discontinuous mind. Why is it so hard to admit that there are intermediates, as Maine and Nebraska do? Most states are neither “red” nor “blue” but a complex mixture. Scientists are called upon by governments, by courts of law, and by the public at large, to give a definite, absolute, yes-or-no answer to important questions such as those involving risk. Whether it’s a new medicine, a new weedkiller, a new power station or a new airliner, the scientific “expert” is peremptorily asked: “Is it safe? Answer the question! Yes or no?” In vain the scientist tries to explain that safety and risk are not absolutes. Some things are safer than others, and nothing is perfectly safe. There is a sliding scale of intermediates and probabilities, not hard-and-fast discontinuities between safe and unsafe. That is another story and I have run out of space. But I hope I have said enough to suggest that the summary demand for an absolute yes-or-no answer, so beloved of journalists, politicians and finger-wagging, hectoring lawyers, is yet another unreasonable expression of a particular kind of tyranny, the tyranny of the discontinuous mind. l Read our guest editor Richard Dawkins’s leader column on page 3 newstatesman.com/subjects/science

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 57

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term if our competitors are investing more than we do in research and development. The government spent £76bn on shares in RBS and Lloyds, more than ten times the annual science budget. Surely we would be better served by making strategic investment decisions with such money – look at what we are good at and invest heavily in it. What would it cost to fund the work of the 100 best scientists in Britain and give them the freedom to innovate?

Cash cow

A sense of wonder: pupils in Alperton, north-west London, learn about gases by trying to catch bubbles

COMMENTARY

Science could drive growth in Britain, but it needs more support to succeed, says Paul Nurse

MARCUS ROSE/PANOS PICTURES

The vision thing What is the point of science? It is a question that gets asked in many contexts, from students struggling through science A-levels to governments struggling with decisions on where to spend limited public funds. Science is the discovery of knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. It is about improving health and the quality of life, securing sustainability and protection of the environment, contributing to culture and enhancing our civilisation. It should be at the heart of society. All of this sounds high-minded and such arguments would probably not convince the Treasury in a time of austerity. Yet science has fared better than other areas when it comes to public spending, and for good reason – it is a driver for the economy. Should UK science breathe a sigh of relief and be thankful that cuts were not deeper? No, because the sector is the best bet for fuelling economic growth. Britain’s science sector is one of the world’s best, providing the base to promote innovation and commercialisation here, giving us a sounder economy built on high-end manufacturing and design, rather than just on financial services.

The government seems to understand this, but lacks the courage of its convictions. In his recent autumn statement, George Osborne made repeated reference to the importance of science and engineering in rebalancing the economy towards sustainable, innovation-based growth. But this is stifled by the short-term thinking that is so often the obsession of governments aware of a forthcoming election. We spend roughly 1.8 per cent of our GDP on science. The Americans spend about 2.7 per cent; the South Koreans spend 3 per cent. Between 1989 and 2009 the UK went from being fifth in terms of producing patents in the US to eighth – South Korea went from nowhere to third. A flat-cash settlement for funding the work of our scientists in the last spending review, increases in tax credits on research and development and occasional one-off injections of capital spending, including £200m in the Chancellor’s autumn statement (though still not replacing the £360m a year that was cut from the science capital budget in the Comprehensive Spending Review), are all OK. But what about some real vision? We cannot hope to compete in the long

It’s not just about the money. The UK has not always been great at turning ideas into cash. In the early 1950s British companies such as Ferranti were at the forefront of developing computers, in the 1960s we made the first pocket calculator, and many people’s first experience of home computing was with the Sinclair ZX80 in the 1980s – but where is our IBM or Apple? Go further back, however, and you find one of Britain’s greatest success stories. It was when scientists, engineers, industrialists, social reformers and others got together to share and discuss ideas that we had the Industrial Revolution. It is that same interactive atmosphere that will help drive innovation and growth today. We need to shed our straitjackets. We need greater teamwork, covering not only more scientific disciplines but also activities outside science that are important for innovation and commercialisation, including finance, market analysis and the law. It requires effort to get individuals from diverse backgrounds to work well together. We have too many barriers that encourage suspicion between the very people who need to be working closely together. And where are the scientists and engineers on the boards of our big companies or in government? Let’s promote greater permeability, starting with the young. Let’s give them wider intellectual exposure during higher education and their research training. They need a wider range of placements early in their career, with easy exchanges between sectors at all career stages. We also need to make sure that we have the raw materials: the brains. Science is riding a wave of popularity at present but the wave is still small. For instance, the sciences are becoming more popular at A-level – those studying biology, chemistry and physics are up 5, 10 and 13 per cent, respectively, over the past five years – yet still too many students turn away. We need an education system that inspires wonder, practical science in labs or outdoors, and we need specialist science teachers in every school. The UK has scientific strength. To maintain and capitalise on this will require better education, with science ingrained into other walks of life and both the government and industry showing that they are brave enough to step up their investment. Rather than writing to Father Christmas this year, I’m sending my wish-list to David Cameron and George Osborne. l Paul Nurse is a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and the current president of the Royal Society

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 59

THE NS QUIZ

From Cheryl Cole to Steve Jobs via Tahrir Square: have you kept up with the year’s events? Test yourself here . . .

Question time Compiled by Olav Bjortomt

Illustration by Henrik Pettersson

Politics

1 Theresa May made the false claim that an illegal immigrant had been allowed to stay in the UK based on the ownership of which animal? a Rabbit b Dog c Cat d Racehorse 2 Jack Straw was accused of stereotyping after suggesting that some men of Pakistani origin saw white girls as what? a “Complete idiots” b “Easy meat” c “There for the taking” d “Caucasian temptresses” 3 What did Christine Hemming steal from the house of her Lib Dem MP husband John’s mistress? a A DVD player b A pot plant c A kitten d Lingerie 4 David Cameron told which MP, “Calm down, dear”? a Angela Eagle b Harriet Harman c Nadine Dorries d Diane Abbott

5 Oliver Letwin was caught disposing of government documents in a bin in which London park? a Green Park b Hyde Park c St James’s Park d Regent’s Park 6 The former council candidates Bill and Star Etheridge resigned from the Conservative Party after posing on Facebook doing what? a Kissing an English Defence League poster b Making fun of the disabled c Wearing matching Nazi armbands d Holding golliwog dolls 7 Which minister said “feminism has trumped egalitarianism” and led to middle-class women holding back working-class men? a Michael Gove b Ed Vaizey c Iain Duncan Smith d David Willetts 8 Alan Johnson resigned as shadow chancellor over what? a “A lack of the right know-how” b “My growing dislike of Labour’s direction” c “Personal issues” d “To attend to my constituency”

International affairs

1 What was the reason reportedly given by the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il, for not choosing his middle son, Kim Jong-chol, as his successor? a “Too short” b “Too western” c “Too effeminate” d “Too stupid”

2 Which single word appeared to have sunk the bid of the Texas governor, Rick Perry, for the Republican presidential nomination? a “Dang” b “Oops”

c “Yikes” d “Sugar” 3 What was the code name of the US navy Seals operation that resulted in Osama Bin Laden’s death? a Apache b Neptune Spear c Mermaid Dawn d Indigo 4 What is the stage name of the belly dancer Karima el-Mahroug, the “heart stealer” at the centre of underage sex allegations concerning Silvio Berlusconi? a Myra b Cassandra c Ruby d Salome 5 Norway took China to the World Trade Organisation over its boycott – allegedly in retaliation for Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize – of which Norwegian export? a Christmas trees b Knitwear c Ski equipment d Salmon 6 Denmark’s first female prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, is the daughter-in-law of which British politician? a Neil Kinnock b John Prescott c David Steel d Paddy Ashdown 7 Michael Sata, the new president of Zambia, previously worked in which job at Victoria train station in London? a Ticket vendor b Platform cleaner c Burger King worker d Security guard 8 In November, US Congress defied logic when it declared which of the following to be a “vegetable”? a Pepper-flavoured nachos b Fried mozzarella sticks c Canned spaghetti d Frozen pizza

10 Tahrir Square became a magnet for protests in Egypt. What does its name mean? a Victory b Battle c Patriot d Liberation 11 Who was spotted wearing a “burkini” on Bondi Beach, Sydney, in April? a Liz Hurley b Nigella Lawson c Sophie Dahl d Kate Winslet

Home affairs

1 Which philosopher founded and became the first master of the £18,000-a-year New College of the Humanities in London? a A C Grayling b John Gray c Simon Blackburn d Derek Parfit 2 A cheese shop in Lyme Regis produced two Cheddars to mark the royal wedding. One was called “Congratulations Wills and Kate”. What was the name of the other, which sold eight times faster? a “Sod the Wedding – It’s a Day Off” b “Stinking Archbishop of Canterbury” c “I’d Rather Feign Nonchalance and Wash My Hair” d “Better Tasting Than the Royal Wedding Cake” 3 According to the Women on Boards inquiry, led by Lord Davies of Abersoch, approximately what percentage of FTSE-250 companies have no female directors on their board? a 15 per cent b 35 per cent

3 Which Egyptian artist was shot dead by security forces in Cairo in the early days of the Arab spring? a Ahmed Basiony b Nader Sedek c Adam Henein d Khaled Hafez

c 50 per cent d 60 per cent 4 Which son of rock royalty was sentenced to 16 months in prison for violent disorder during the student riots in London in 2010? a Charlie Gilmour b Otis Ferry c Marlon Richards d James Page, Jr 5 A Freedom of Information request made by the Labour MP David Lammy revealed that which Oxford college had not admitted a single black student in five years? a Hertford b Oriel c Merton d Worcester 6 What was the estimated total cost of this year’s UK census? a £66m b £482m c £903m d £2.35bn 7 What is the name of the DIY paternity testing kit that Boots started selling for £30 a pop? a AssureDNA b UtheDaddy? c CertainX d PaterPura 8 Which of these universities announced that it would not be charging the maximum amount (£9,000) for tuition fees? a Aston b Lancaster c Leeds Metropolitan d Surrey 9 Which creature was the victim of an air-rifle killing spree in Somerset? a Red squirrel b Badger c Cat d Swan

4 Which Monty Python member revealed that he turned down a Lib Dem peerage in 1999 because living in England through winter was “too much of a price to pay”? a John Cleese b Terry Gilliam c Michael Palin d Terry Jones 10 What is the average property value of Victoria Road, Kensington – the most expensive street in England and Wales? a £2.1m b £4.9m c £6.4m d £7.3m 11 Which 144-year-old furniture store in Croydon was burned down in the riots in August? a House of Reeves b Heal’s c Maples d SCP

Online

1 Which of these events led to a record-breaking 8,868 tweets per second? a Osama Bin Laden’s death b Japanese tsunami c Beyoncé’s pregnancy d Final Harry Potter film 2 What did the Narrative Tracker software used by the Global Language Monitor show to be the most used word in English on the internet and in print during 2011? a Occupy b Deficit c Spring d Wedding 3 “Can-a muh fukkasay fuck on here?” Whose debut tweet? a Quentin Tarantino b Spike Lee

c Samuel L Jackson d Ice Cube 4 In April, what percentage of British nine-to-12-yearolds was said to have a profile on a social networking website? a 28 per cent b 43 per cent c 51 per cent d 75 per cent 5 Who became the first celebrity to amass ten million Twitter followers? a Justin Bieber b Barack Obama c Ashton Kutcher d Lady Gaga

Arts

1 Which film director was banned from the Cannes festival for his apparently pro-Nazi remarks? a Roman Polanski b Lars von Trier c Werner Herzog d Oliver Stone 2 New York magazine described which Broadway show as “confusing, distracted, ridiculously slick, shockingly clumsy, unmistakably monomaniacal and clinically bipolar”? a Ghost the Musical b War Horse c The Motherf**ker With a Hat d Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

5 What was the global box-office take of the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 on its first day of release? a $50m b $100m c $200m d $400m

Television

1 Which TV show topped a government-compiled list of “healthy” children’s programmes because the characters are always “walking on short journeys”? a The Flintstones b Teletubbies c Scooby-Doo d In the Night Garden 2 David Dimbleby was accused of being a prima donna for refusing to attend weekly Question Time production meetings in which city? a Cardiff b Salford c Glasgow d Leeds 3 The Dalai Lama appeared on which country’s version of Masterchef but refused to judge any of the dishes he was served because it was against his principles? a Australia b UK c US d India

t

9 Who assumed office as the first president of South Sudan? a John Garang b Riek Machar c Salva Kiir d Musa Hilal

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 61

NEW TO ROUTLEDGE IN 2011

Canadian Foreign Policy Journal

International Critical Thought

Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism

Editor: David Carment, The Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (NPSIA), Canada

Editors-in-Chief: Cheng Enfu, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), China David Schweickart, Loyola University Chicago, USA Tony Andreani, Paris 8 University, France

Editor-in-Chief: Colin Wastell, Macquarie University, Australia

The Canadian Foreign Policy Journal (CFPJ) is a fully peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal published three times a year by the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (NPSIA) at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada. Established in 1992, CFPJ is now Canada’s leading journal of international affairs. The journal features case studies, original articles, reports, and analyses on such issues as global governance, human security, the history of foreign policy making and much more.

International Critical Thought aims to cultivate, encourage and facilitate the development and dissemination of thinking and scholarship responding to the profound social, political, cultural and economic changes taking place in the world today. It aims to provide a multi-disciplinary forum for reflection upon and insight into the major problems facing humanity; energy, environment, poverty, war, etc.

The Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism (JPICT) is a fully refereed journal, produced by the Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. The Journal offers national, regional and international perspectives on important areas of debate such as; Security Studies, Terrorism, Intelligence, Political Violence, while addressing the practical and theoretical issues and considerations that surround them.

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THE NS QUIZ 4 Downton Abbey has turned which country house into a tourist attraction? a Rufford Abbey b Highclere Castle c Stratfield Saye d Chastleton House 5 Which Jamie’s Dream School teacher was told, “You’re a prick, mate” by a member of his GCSE class named Angelique? a Alastair Campbell b Simon Callow c David Starkey d Daley Thompson 6 How long did Cheryl Cole last as an X Factor USA judge before she was dumped for Nicole Scherzinger? a Six days b A fortnight c Three weeks d One month

Media

1 What did Sally Bercow wear for a photo shoot that accompanied the Evening Standard feature “Sex and the city”? a Bedsheet b Dressing gown c Labour Party T-shirt d Imitation Speaker’s cloak 2 In a letter to Richard Desmond, proprietor of the Daily Star, the reporter Richard Peppiatt resigned in protest over which problem with the newspaper? a Obsession with Big Brother b Anti-Muslim propaganda c Only one in three stories he wrote was true d Increasing nudity 3 Which magazine named George Osborne Politician of the Year, only for the Chancellor to make a “wanker” joke that the host David Mitchell said “lowered the tone”

of the awards ceremony? a Esquire b Monocle c FHM d GQ 4 In late April, who spoke of his “embarrassment” at using a superinjunction to protect his family’s privacy and suppress details of an affair? a Jeremy Clarkson b Andrew Marr c Fred Goodwin d Ryan Giggs 5 Rupert Murdoch shut down News of the World after it had enjoyed how many years of publication? a 102 b 129 c 147 d 168 6 Who was ridiculed for writing a column entitled “The caring professions? They just don’t seem to care at all”, after the NHS failed to give her the right jabs for a trip to Somalia? a Sandra Parsons b Liz Jones c Suzanne Moore d Jan Moir

Books

1 Whose crime novel Death Comes to Pemberley used the

characters of Pride and Prejudice six years after the conclusion of Jane Austen’s book? a Ruth Rendell b Frances Fyfield c P D James d Val McDermid 2 A study revealed that the average British household has up to how many unread books, with Pride and Prejudice among the most popular but not read titles? a 20 b 40 c 60 d 80 3 Which author described the royal family as a bunch of “philistines” before moving to New York? a Martin Amis b V S Naipaul c Alan Hollinghurst d Ian McEwan 4 David and Victoria Beckham named their first daughter in honour of which novelist? a Virginia Woolf b Harper Lee c Jane Austen d Louisa May Alcott

Sport

1 Why was the England rugby player Manu Tuilagi fined £3,000, following the World Cup defeat by France? a He was filmed cavorting with strippers b He started a trainingground brawl c He jumped off a ferry in Auckland d He “disrespected” a chambermaid 2 After being named the man of the tournament at the cricket World Cup, which Indian left-hander lent his voice to the superhero in the computer-animated film Captain India? a Sachin Tendulkar b M S Dhoni c Virender Sehwag d Yuvraj Singh 3 Which organisation was described by the reporter Andrew Jennings as nothing but an “organised crime family”? a Fifa b International Olympic Committee c London 2012 committee d Uefa

Who said what?

1 Who did Nick Hewer of The Apprentice say “has the weakest handshake in western Europe”?

a Nick Clegg b Ed Miliband c David Cameron d Alan Sugar 2 Cherie Blair said that Tony still excites her – but how? a With “his commitment to Middle East peace” b In “all possible ways” c By “surprising me with his energy” d “Pretending he’s still prime minister” 3 To whom did David Cameron apologise, after saying that their campaign was “like a blind man, in a dark room, looking for a black cat”? a The McCanns b Hillsborough victims’ relatives c 38 Degrees organisers d Keep Britain Tidy 4 Writing in this magazine, who said: “We are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted”? a Rowan Williams b Ken Livingstone c Gordon Brown d Charles Kennedy 5 Whose last words were: “Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow”? a Elizabeth Taylor b Joe Frazier c Jimmy Savile d Steve Jobs l Answers on page 92 newstatesman.com

19 DECEMBER 2011 | NEW STATESMAN | 63

Supported by

Perspectives on Energy Can we get off carbon by 2040? Renewables We have limited reserves of fossil fuels. In principle at least, there is international agreement that we need to move off carbon and on to renewable energy sources. Yet there is still great debate about how this can be achieved. Although they provide 18 per cent of electricity generation worldwide, renewables’ share of electricity has struggled to keep pace with overall demand growth for power. The term “renewables” refers to electricity that comes from naturally replenished resources such as sunlight, wind and geothermal heat. It can also refer to biofuels and hydrogen. In theory, if methods of turning these into energy are perfected, we need never face another fuel crisis.

So, what’s the problem? One criticism often levelled at wind and solar power is that they are variable or intermittent. There are also “not in my backyard” concerns relating to the visual impact of wind turbines. In the UK, planning laws can be a hindrance to increasing the use of wind turbines. On the other hand, there are benefits to local generation, as it contributes to the flexibility of the system and its resistance to central shocks. Methods of storage are still expensive, and in these austere times there is a risk that investment in improving the technology around renewable energy will not be given priority. However, there is a strong argument in favour of boosting what Nick Clegg has called “the green economy” as a way to tackle climate change and to create jobs. Renewable energy usually gets cheaper with time, even as we see fossil fuels getting more expensive. A report by the International Energy Agency this year was optimistic about this cost-reduction trend for the sector continuing, arguing that, increasingly, renewable energy presents “investment opportunities without the need for specific economic support”. It would benefit the planet, and not just the world economy, if effort were put into making renewables viable for the future. l For more information on Perspectives go to: newstatesman.com/energy

CORBIS

It would benefit the planet, not just the world economy, if renewables became viable

THE EXPERT

“We have to move from talk to walk” Jeremy Rifkin, economist, writer, political adviser and activist How urgent is climate change? Scientists say we could see a 70 per cent wipeout of all life on this planet by the end of the century. Climate change is the energy bill for two centuries of industrial-based carbon activity. We need a new economic vision and game plan. We have to get off carbon by 2040. How could this be achieved? If renewable energies are distributed in every square inch of the world, why are we only collecting them at a few points? The goal is to convert every single existing building in the European Union into a personal, clean micro power plant. So you can collect solar off your roof, wind off your side wall.

How would that translate into wider change? We take internet technology and transform the power grid of the world into an energy internet. So when millions of us are producing our own green energy on site, storing it in hydrogen, our energy internet will allow us to sell and share any extra. We become our own energy producers. We then collaborate and share that energy in the same way as we share information on social media spaces on the internet. Do you see this vision becoming a reality? Young people now favour lateral and side-byside power. That’s the new politics, and it’s favourable to a third industrial revolution. [They] grew up empowered on the internet to

To watch a video of this interview and other energy perspectives go to: newstatesman. com/energy/ perspectiveson-energy

Which countries are behind? The United States is an outlier country. I grew up in the heartlands of America. I know that once America gets the story, no one can move quicker. But we’re lost right now, we’re off track. Those countries that can’t find the imagination and the will and the entrepreneurial spirit are going to fall behind really quickly. Where does the developing world fit in? The third industrial revolution will move faster in the developing world. It has no infrastructure. They can leapfrog straight into this and create a sustainable future. What are the barriers? The biggest barrier is imagination. There is growing denial about climate change. People don’t want to recognise it because it is terrifying. It’s overwhelming. It is also a moment of great opportunity. The third industrial revolution is a practical plan; it’s not utopian. We have to get on to renewables and get off carbon. Is the UK taking sufficient action? I was approached by the Cameron people before the election. Certainly there are people in this administration that understand what needs to be done, but that doesn’t mean it is being done. We have to move from talk to walk. They have a long way to go here and if they really want a third industrial revolution, as they said to me at the beginning of the administration, they have yet to prove it. Should we be more worried about not having enough, or not having the right kind of energy? Energies like coal, gas and uranium are found only in a few places in the world and they require

During your work have you had your assumptions proved wrong or revised your opinion? Back in 1972 I organised a protest. It was the first protest against the oil industry in history. It’s been a long road from 1972 to 2011. During that period, I underestimated the speed of climate change, even though I wrote one of the first books on it. It is moving very aggressively. The urgency of this goes beyond the global economy. This is an urgency for our species and for life on this planet. Are we all doomed? The question is not “Are we all doomed?”, but “What can we do?”. We have a game plan, a third industrial revolution. It can get us to a post-carbon future in 30 years. I absolutely know this can be done. Whether it will be done is the question. Interview by Samira Shackle

Rifkin’s Five Pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution Shifting to renewable energy Converting buildings into . power plants Hydrogen and other energy . storage technology Smart-grid technology Plug-in, electric, hybrid and . fuel-cell-based transportation Growth in electricity generation from renewable sources

2000

2005

2010

Electricity generation from renewable sources increased by roughly 2 per cent between 2009 and 2010 to reach 25.7TWh. Capacity grew by 15 per cent to 9.2GW over the same period.

THE CV 1967 Graduates from Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania 1973 Organises mass protest at Boston Harbour following Opec oil embargo 1988 Co-ordinates first meeting of Global Greenhouse Network in Washington 1994 Becomes senior lecturer on Wharton’s executive education programme 2007 “Third industrial revolution” formally endorsed by European Parliament 2009-2010 Develops master plans for San Antonio (Texas), Rome and Monaco “The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World” is published by Palgrave Macmillan (£16.99)

9 10 The number of households that would have to spend more than £5,000 to make their homes more energy-efficient before they could be eligible for solar panel subsidies under new government rules. This is part four of an eight-part series of Perspectives on Energy. To read other responses from business and academia visit: newstatesman.com/energy/ perspectives-on-energy

SOURCE: DECC

Which country is leading? They are testing this smart grid in six major regions of Germany today. They are converting homes, factories and offices all over Germany. The Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Europe overall, will move quickly.

Where does the main responsibility lie for cutting carbon: with consumers, business or government? We need political mobilisation. We need to have the narrative spread and we need to engage every community with business, society and government to make this happen.

% of electricity 4.0 8.0

Is this only possible during an economic boom? The exact opposite. The second industrial revolution is on life support; it’s dying. Why would you mend a 20th-century infrastructure that gives you no multiplier effect? The European Union has made a formal commitment to a plan to upgrade its infrastructure. That could create millions of jobs.

Facts and figures

huge military investment to secure them. Distributive energies are everywhere in the world. The sun shines all over the world every day, and the wind blows. We have enough distributed renewable green energy to provide for our species until kingdom come.

0.0

create its own information and share it freely. They now need to create their own green energy that they share in vast continental spaces.

Agenda | This week’s best talks and lectures DECEMBER Monday 19th l A Hint of Danger The performance artist Edie Campbell reads from writings by Ted Hughes, Leoš Janácek and Leo Tolstoy (Kreutzer Sonata) to put in context a live performance by the Tamesis String Quartet of its own Kreutzer Sonata – also inspired by Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No 9. Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1. 6.30pm. £12/£8. 020 7324 2570. freewordonline.com l “Hip Joint Failure

Ruined My Life” For the Café Scientifique discussion group, Tom Joyce, a biomedical engineer at Newcastle University, explains how surgeons in the north-east are leading the design of medical implant technology. Urban Café, Dance City, Temple Street, Newcastle. 7pm. Free. 0191 208 3251. ncl.ac.uk

l Everyone Is Living in the Wrong Place Tony Davies of the Bath and Avon Family History Society takes a long-term look at the fluctuating world population. Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, Queen Square, Bath. 7.30pm. £4/£2. 01225 312 084. bafhs.org.uk l The Night Sky in January The astronomer Russell Eberst looks forward to a new year of stargazing and offers suggestions of what to look for in 2012. Royal Observatory Visitor Centre, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh. 7.30pm. £4/£3. 0131 668 8404. roe.ac.uk

Tuesday 20th l Regenerative Medicine for Ageing: Can It Be Comprehensive enough? For the Leicester Secular Society’s Skeptics in the Pub series, the biomedical scientist Aubrey de Grey considers the potential

HOT TICKET

A Hint of Danger

19 December, with Rebecca Swift What’s the event? The Literary Consultancy is delighted to be hosting the Tamesis Quartet and Edie Campbell for an evening celebrating passion and love – with a hint of danger. Why are you involved? The Literary Consultancy is my company. We think great art inspires great art, and want to inspire audiences to challenge themselves creatively as well as enjoy a magnificent experience.

of health therapies in delaying the natural ageing process. Square Bar, 5-9 Hotel Street, Leicester. 7.30pm. £2. leicester.skepticsinthepub.org l Bookshop Barnie Xmas Bash

Balloon Debate Join academics and journalists as they discuss a quirky variety of authors, including Shiv Malik on Norman Mailer, Humphrey Hawksley on Voltaire and Cosmo Landesman on himself. 6pm. Free. Email: [email protected]. Gallery, Foyles, Charing Cross Road, London WC2. futurecities.org.uk Wednesday 21st l Christmas Ghost Stories Julie Gamble reads from the winter tales of the Victorian author Elizabeth Gaskell, a close friend of the Nightingales. Free admission with museum entry. Florence Nightingale Museum, Gassiot House, 2 Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1. 3pm. £5.80/£4.80. 020 7620 0374. florence-nightingale.co.uk l Coins at Christmas Barrie Cook, British Museum curator, gives this seasonal themed talk in the medieval and early modern coinage rooms. Room 46, British Museum, Great 66 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

Why should we come? There’ll be music, words, wine – perhaps even mince pies. Also come and find out more about the Free Word Centre. What questions should we ask? What are the “Intimate Letters”? Who is Kamila Stösslová? What homework should we do? Read Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata, and listen to Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, from where it took its title. l For more details of the event see our listings

Russell Street, London WC1. 1.15pm. Free. 020 7323 8181. britishmuseum.org Wednesday 28th l Explore Barbican

Last chance to learn about the history of the Barbican Centre and Housing Estate site and its early design plans on this dedicated architecture walking tour. Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2. 2pm/4pm. £8/£6. 020 7638 8891. barbican.org.uk Thursday 29th l Hidden Spaces and History . . . Discover the Enlightenment and naval history on a guided tour around this labyrinthine mansion. Somerset House, Strand, London WC2. 1.15pm/2.45pm. Free. 020 7845 4600. somersethouse.org.uk Friday 30th l Grace and Playfulness of Rococo Style A gallery talk on the interior design and architecture typified by the late baroque period. Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Beaumont Street, Oxford. 1.15pm. Free. 01865 278 002. ashmolean.org To list your event, email [email protected]

Art | Books | Music | Film | TV | Radio

The Critics

GALLERYSTOCK. REX FEATURES (SEWELL)

Other worlds: Philip Pullman on the power of fairy tales. 68 FICTION

COMMENTARY

BOOKS

Kate Atkinson

Nicholas Clee

Julie Myerson

“darktime”, a sinister tale of disaster and apocalypse. 72

In the new world of the ebook, big advances are a thing of the past. 78

Brian Sewell’s honesty about his sex life is infectious. 83 19 DECEMBER 2011 | NEW STATESMAN | 67

The Critics FICTION

Nobody expected the apocalypse, but once the Void opened, life on earth would never be the same again

darktime By Kate Atkinson Artwork by Josh Poehlein

In the beginning was the Void. Then came the Word and with the Word the World began. Then one day, to everyone’s surprise, the Void returned and Darkness rolled over the land. Tuesday 15 May 2012, to be precise. On Mountain Standard Time in Cochise County it was 6am and Phil Beckett was still asleep. He usually beat the sun to rising but not today and when he woke a few minutes later, feeling thick-headed and grouchy, he remembered with regret the booze he’d drunk the previous evening. He’d thrown a barbecue in the backyard to celebrate the arrival of his first grandchild – a boy (a bonus, but he knew he couldn’t say that to either his daughter or his wife). “Preston”, he was called. Odd kind of name, in Phil’s opinion. He’d hoped for “Philip”. He usually stuck to beer but last night he had

wetted the baby’s head with an 18-year-old single-barrel bourbon he’d been saving for this very occasion. His daughter, Melissa, his only child, was an ambitious attorney with a law firm in Tucson and the “occasion” had been a long time coming. Thanks to last night’s Elijah Craig, he rolled out of bed like a much older man. His wife had been on Cuba libres all night and was still asleep. She wasn’t a drinker by nature and Phil didn’t much want to be around when she woke. He shambled into the kitchen and switched on the Keurig Elite their son-in-law had bought them for their wedding anniversary last month. Phil preferred the old aluminium stove-top pot but it seemed to have disappeared. The Keurig’s convenient, his wife said, and Blake would be upset if he thought we didn’t use it. How would he know? Phil asked. Blake had been to the Double Diamond exactly three times in five years. He has a hidden camera or something? He drank his coffee on the porch. The morning was hotter than usual. And quieter. He looked out over his land and thanked God for

68 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

His bounty in giving his grandfather this little corner of south-east Arizona. Phil ran a four thousand deeded acre spread, the best watered in the county, three hundred head of cattle out there, prime beef on the hoof. And not one of them was making a sound this morning. He looked for the big skinny tom that he admired and disliked in equal measure. It usually came out to greet Phil as soon as it heard him moving about, slinking out of the barn where it slept at night. If Phil was feeling benevolent he shared the cream from his coffee with it. No cat this morning. No birds either. The dog was here, though, ambling out of the house with the same hungover gait as Phil instead of bounding around enthusiastically. Mitch, a retriever-cross, a big puppy-dog really, not a rancher’s dog. Phil rubbed the top of its head with his knuckles. Sure is quiet this morning, he said to the dog. He was spooked by the sound of his own voice. He glanced up and felt weirdly relieved to see a buzzard high in the sky, revolving slowly on a lazy thermal. Come on, buddy, he said to Mitch, draining his coffee cup. Let’s go for a drive.

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And in that day they shall roar against them like the roaring of the sea: and if one look unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow, and the light is darkened in the heavens thereof. Isaiah 5:30

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hey followed the dirt track up to the ridge, from where there was a good view of the creek and the low pasture below. It took a moment for Phil to understand. What the heck? he said, glancing over at Mitch as if the dog might confirm what he was looking at. The dog’s ears twitched but otherwise it remained impassive. The cattle were lying on the ground – forty or so of them – as if they had been pushed over by a giant hand. When he was a boy Phil had played with an old wooden Noah’s Ark that had been his father’s and he had an unexpected memory of the pleasure he had taken in lining up all the animals and then knocking them over, like dominoes, all the way from elephant down to cat. The smaller species – mice, insects – were lost long before Phil was born. He wondered if the Noah’s Ark was still in the attic and if “Preston” would like it. He crashed the Silverado into reverse and accelerated back down the track and across the rough terrain towards the pasture. When he clambered out of the cab he could feel his heart jittery in his chest. He counted thirty-eight. All dead. He grabbed for his cell, dialled Ken Traub over at the Double E. Ken answered immediately, said he was standing in the middle of a corral of twenty yearling steers. All dead. Next, Phil tried Shane Hollander at the Bar K. He was a strict Lutheran, Phil had never heard him swear, but today he surprised him by answering the phone, saying, What the fuck, Phil? Dead cattle? Phil said. No, Phil. Dead people. Dead people everywhere. All dead. 1pm on the other side of the world. Greenwich Mean Time in the Waitrose on Morningside Road where Genevieve was sheltering from the rain that had suddenly turned heavy and winterish for May. Since being made redundant from an architectural practice three months ago she found herself lingering, loitering even, in places that she would normally have speeded through. She was reflecting on the whiteness, some might say pastiness, of the well-fed faces around her. Not at all like the Chesser Asda where she usually shopped and which, as well as being a haven for the tired, the poor and the huddled masses, was also, unlike Waitrose, populated with people of every nationality and colour.

But not green, Gus said. Or blue, or red or purple or – Enough, Genevieve said. He was a very literal child. He was six, in school. She had lied to get him into his (good) primary, said they lived with her mother in the Grange. (You’re moving back in with me? Genevieve’s mother said, keeping her face admirably neutral.) Now, with all this time on her hands, Genevieve found herself frequenting the school’s catchment area – shops, cafés, the library – mildly paranoid that anonymous authority figures were spying on her, trying to catch her out in the lie. (They are, Genevieve’s mother said.) As an economy measure, she had recently sold her car, so here she was, taking refuge from the lunchtime rain in a clean, well-lighted place where it was reassuring (or possibly not) to know that there were so many different brands of balsamic vinegar in the world, something not apparent in the Chesser Asda. Genevieve picked up a “mini” watermelon, hefty and round like a cannonball, before wandering aimlessly over to the flower-stand where she plucked a slender sheaf of gladioli from a galvanised bucket. She should probably get a basket even though both items seemed too unwieldy to be confined to one. She would not normally have bought either watermelon or gladioli. She wasn’t even sure she wanted them (and, more to the point, could she afford them?). Fetching a basket would be a commitment. She began to experience the usual kind of low-grade existential angst she associated these days with decision-making. From her post at the flower-stand, Genevieve had a clear view of the supermarket’s glass entrance doors. It was still raining heavily. Should she make a run for it? She could hardly stay in Waitrose all afternoon. (Or could she?) She watched as the automatic doors, obedient to an invisible will, swished politely apart to admit a middle-aged woman, the hearty, outdoors type, suitably dressed, top-to-toe, for the rain. Beyond the woman, Genevieve could see an elderly man, stooped and crooked, who

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was snailing heroically towards the doors. He was what her mother would have called “dapper” – good tweed overcoat, a cap on his head, a cane in one hand, an umbrella held awkwardly aloft in the other. He was once a little boy like Gus. Bruised knees, filthy hands (always), a stoic yet hopeful demeanour. Small on the outside, vast on the inside. Gus would one day be an old man like him. Genevieve’s heart came suddenly untethered. A draught of damp air from the open doors made her shiver. The chill brought with it an odd animal-like premonition. She was still holding the watermelon in one hand and the gladioli like a spear, as if she were about to pike something, in the other. Fruit and flowers, offerings at the temple. She returned the flowers to the galvanised bucket and watched as the old man stopped to close his umbrella, shaking the rain off it. The doors closed again before he reached them.

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nd then the world went dark. Completely, as if someone had flicked the switch on the sun. Pulled the plug, too, for there were none of the tiny jewels of coloured light, the humming and thrumming, that indicated electronic life. Smoke alarms and cash registers, freezers, fridges and sprinklers, were all lifeless. No emergency lights, nothing glowing with faint comfort. No daylight coming in through the automatic doors either. Dark inside and out. For a moment Genevieve had the Damascene thought that she had been struck blind. She groped in her bag for her iPhone. Also dead. After what seemed like a long silence, as complete and absolute as the darkness, people began to voice their bafflement. A quiet, poignant Hello? from somewhere near her right shoulder. Who turned the lights out then? from a would-be joker and then the voice of a small child, inquisitive rather than frightened, but nonetheless distressing to Genevieve, saying, Mummy? Is there anyone there? someone asked, as though they were partaking in a seance. A hand brushed Genevieve’s hair and she was reminded of the ghost train at the seaside of her childhood. It was as if they were playing a sombre game of blind man’s buff, governed by rules of extreme bourgeois rectitude. A raised managerial voice advised everyone to keep calm, although as far as Genevieve could tell no one was panicking. Someone bumped against her (Sorry, sorry), knocking the watermelon from her hands. Genevieve heard it land with a thud and roll away, a planet discarded by a careless child-god. She was not the only one, it seemed, who thought they had suddenly lost their sight. Blind? someone said, as if trying out the

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The dog liked sitting up front in the cab of the heavy-duty Silverado with its head out the window, grinning like a dope as its ears fluttered in the breeze. This morning, however, it sat up straight, scouting through the windshield as if it were riding shotgun in Indian country.

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word for size. Genevieve thought of The Day of the Triffids. It seemed improbable. What was more likely – an invasion from outer space by killer alien plants or a total eclipse of the sun and its electronic cohorts? But then surely eclipses were foreseen, charted events, not sudden biblical calamities? The “pulse”. She had read about it in a newspaper a few months ago. It was something to do with solar flares. An increase in sunspot activity was due and was going to cause geomagnetic storms, knocking out satellite communications and causing blackouts on earth. “Catastrophe” and “chaos” were predicted across the globe (it was an article in the Daily Mail, she remembered now). She wished that she had paid more attention. She wasn’t sure what a geomagnetic storm was but it certainly didn’t sound good. But then, just as suddenly as it had been turned off, the power was snapped on again. People blinked at the sudden assault on their retinas from the overhead lights and looked about in confusion as if they were expecting something to have changed during their unexpected daytime journey into night. Everything was just as it had been. Daylight had returned outside. A blink, that was all. The universe blinked. Waitrose rebooted itself and the air was filled once more with the low whining and buzzing noises of robotic insect life as the big fridges and the cash registers came back to life. The automatic doors began dutifully opening and closing again. Several people headed straight for the outside but the majority of customers, after some hesitation, recommenced shopping. A babel of mobile-phone ringtones started to fill the air. Genevieve supposed everyone wanted to share their own experience of the dark. Once they would have written laborious letters and the event would be forgotten by the time the letter was delivered into another hand. Her iPhone vibrated in her own hand. It was Genevieve’s mother asking if she was all right. Yes, she said. (Was she?) Look outside, Genevieve’s mother said.

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he customers who had already left Waitrose were still standing in a little huddle near the doors, looking aghast. Genevieve saw the dapper old man, lying supine on the concrete, his cap tilted rakishly, a peaceful expression on his face, even though the hard rain was falling steadily on it. She hurried towards him, crouching down and feeling for a pulse. None. Standing up, she found herself next to the woman who was dressed so well for the rain. Has someone phoned for an ambulance? Genevieve asked and the woman who was dressed for rain (but who would never leave her house again, no matter the weather) simply

lifted her arm and pointed like a mute seer at the length of Morningside Road. That was when Genevieve realised that the crowd’s distress was not on account of the dapper old man but for a much wider horror. Everywhere that she looked there were people lying on the ground – as though they had been struck by a narcoleptic spell. The Big Issue seller who hung around the entrance to Waitrose was curled up like a baby next to the ranks of wire trolleys. A young woman who was sprawled in the middle of the pelican crossing was still grasping the handle of a pushchair. The baby inside the pushchair looked – like the dapper old man – as if it were taking a muchneeded nap. The old Romanian beggar woman who sat every day outside the hospice shop had keeled over, her hand still outstretched for coins. One man and his dog were bedded down on the pavement together. It was a new Pompeii. Cars had crashed into each other, others were slewed across the road, passengers and drivers lying insensible, half in and out of the doors. A bus standing at a nearby stop had opened to admit passengers into its belly. Everyone inside the bus looked as though they had fallen asleep in their seat. The people waiting in the queue had dropped where they stood in a tidy fashion. The bus driver remained at the bridge, piloting a ghost bus, his head lolling forward as if were taking forty winks while waiting for his tardy passengers to board. The automatic doors kept trying to close but were foiled by the inert body of a woman draped across the platform, her bus pass still clutched in her hand. No one was waking up. No one was climbing to their feet and shaking their head in bewilderment at the sudden enchantment that had overtaken them. They were dead, Genevieve thought. All of them. Dead. From what? Gas? A terrorist attack (in Morningside?). An acoustic device – the kind they had on ships to repel pirates (again – Morningside?). Or had they all simply drunk the Kool-Aid, obedient to some bizarre order, while Genevieve was debating whether to buy a watermelon? But – not everyone was dead. No one who had been locked in Waitrose was dead, for example, and when Genevieve looked around she could see people in cars, in shops, on buses, who were definitely alive. People who had stayed inside. Behind closed doors. Whereas everyone who had been outside – Jesus Christ – the school playground! Gus. Genevieve reeled from the thought as if she taken a physical blow, staggered, and almost tripped over the body of the dapper old man. She set off at a run, pushing her way past the living and dodging the dead with the adroitness of the counties hockey player she had once been. So, Genevieve said tentatively, not wishing to rekindle any alarming memories. What

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happened at school? The little kids were scared, Gus said. You’re a little kid. He made a face. Not really. Thank God for the rain, which had meant that the whole school had spent their lunchtime indoors. There were a few peripheral casualties. The crossing-man on duty, a classroom assistant. Genevieve had to skirt the body of the deputy head lying just outside the school gates. A smoker, paying the price of her habit. I’m never letting you out of my sight again, she said to Gus. Never? Never. He shrugged. OK. Glancing out of the window, Genevieve saw a sparrow land on the bird table in the shared garden of the block of flats. It began to peck nervously at the toast crumbs that one of Genevieve’s elderly neighbours put out each morning. It was the first bird that Genevieve had seen all day. The elderly neighbour herself was spreadeagled on the path. Her fat ginger cat who spent most of his day asleep inside was sniffing the old lady’s body with greedy curiosity. Burying the dead was going to be a problem, Genevieve thought. What? Gus said. Nothing. Now wash your hands.

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n the television, newsreaders and pundits were wallowing in the apocalypse. It had been worldwide and had lasted exactly five minutes. A cataclysmic event more overwhelming in its awfulness than anything previously experienced on the planet – half a million Krakatoas, a hundred thousand Hiroshimas. The commentators were talking in Cretan terms – The end of civilisation as we know it. The greatest disaster since the dinosaurs were wiped out. The Black Death had killed a third of the world’s population but it had taken only people (only!) but the Dark (as it was apparently now called) seemed indiscriminate in its choice of prey. Billions of farm animals in the fields had gone but the battery hens and the veal calves survived. Children in playgrounds and streets all laid out but the worst kind of paedophiles and murderers in jail were spared. Diamond miners survived, trawlermen died. Swaths of the poor were scythed down – workers in the fields, the homeless, the drunks and the whores on the street. In the great shanty towns of Karachi, Lagos and Cape Town, corpses were scooped up by bulldozers. Two-thirds of the population of Africa wiped out. All the animals of the Serengeti, of the Antarctic, of the Malaysian rainforests.

The Critics Planes plummeted like game birds from the sky, although some miraculously survived, coasting silently through the blackout before regaining power. Cyclists, dog walkers, cricket teams, sunbathers, tourists on the Grand Canal. Princess Anne. The Prime Minister. All gone. In the Far East, moving into night at the time of the disaster, there were slightly fewer casualties although it seemed that all it took was an open window – a crack – for the Dark to get in. The population of New Zealand fared best, not so the forty million sheep that lived there. There were myriad theories. In order of popularity these were: a shock-and-awe alien attack; a new kind of plague; a cull by God; a hole in the space-time continuum (this, of course, would evolve into the Void theory); an increase in the earth’s magnetism – or a sudden decrease; a poisonous miasma emanating from Venus; the revenge of Gaia. “A terrible harrowing,” the Archbishop of York said, and was condemned for being overly biblical. Across the globe people rioted and looted and stockpiled. As you would. Genevieve thought of all the useful things she might have bought in Waitrose when she had the opportunity. The shelves would be cleared now, even the balsamic vinegar would have been snatched. Not only the birds but also the bees survived. No one understood why, but they were grateful (pollination and so on). Many scientists, shut away in their labs, had also survived and would soon be set to work on the reason for the illogical staying power of the birds and bees (no one foresaw what a problem they would become). The plump, newly elevated Deputy Prime Minister appeared on television, basking in the seriousness of his position. He exhorted everyone to stay calm and not panic. He sounded like a supermarket manager. The spirit of the Blitz was invoked. Genevieve turned the television off. Will it happen again? Gus asked. I hope not, Genevieve said. But it did. At 1.05pm the following day the universe blinked once more. A lot of the casualties were people who were burying the dead from the first time.

Genevieve wondered what they would do if one day the Dark came and didn’t go away again. Phil Beckett never did make sense of what happened to his daughter and grandson. Five years after the first Dark, when anyone with any sense knew to the exact second when it was coming, knew to take all necessary precautions, she broke down on I-8. Every couple of miles along the interstate there were billboards saying “Avoid the Void!” and “Don’t Let the Dark In!”. Did she not see them? She was so smart. Why had she been so dumb? She was found on the hard shoulder, Preston by her side, holding her hand. He’d just started elementary school. They had got out of the car and had started walking – in eighty-fivedegree heat. Why? Why hadn’t she just waited for a breakdown truck? A passing motorist saw them running back to the car but the Dark overtook them. That was three months ago. His wife had turned to God and pills. Phil had given up on God, didn’t believe in pills. Blake came round all the time. He hadn’t had a job since the first Dark. Phil felt a coldness towards him that was maybe unfair. Maybe not. They had been doing OK. After the cattle went, Phil had transformed the Double Diamond into a dude ranch. We never take you out in the Dark. That all stopped with Melissa’s death. The horses were up for sale now. Midday. The Dark was due at twenty past the hour. Going out to settle the horses, Phil shouted to his wife.

The horses were always skittish beforehand. His wife was watching TV in the living room, reruns of crap – The Bold and the Beautiful, All My Children – shows that were cancelled years ago. His wife didn’t reply. Come on, Phil said to the dog. A shadow passed over them. One of the giant flocks of Arizona grasshopper-sparrows flying overhead. Once on the most endangered list, a darned nuisance now.

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n the barn, Phil checked the windows, searched everywhere for cracks and pinholes, all the time talking soothingly to the horses. At 12.18 he stepped outside and shut the door behind him, leaving the dog inside with the horses, but Mitch started scratching at the door, whining sadly. His wife treated Mitch with amiable indifference. Phil tried to put himself inside the dog’s head. What would Mitch want? Pretty much the same as he wanted himself, he guessed. Come on then, buddy, Phil said, opening the barn door, shutting it carefully again after Mitch came out. The dog stood sentinel by his side, waiting patiently for whatever was going to happen. Phil put out his hand and rubbed the dog’s head. His watch was slow and the Dark surprised them both when it came. l Kate Atkinson’s latest book is the Jackson Brodie detective novel “Started Early, Took My Dog” (Black Swan, £7.99). She is the author of the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum”, and “When Will There Be Good News?” (both Black Swan, £7.99) newstatesman.com/culture

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t lasted for five minutes and came five minutes later every day. Like clockwork. People were thankful for this regularity. You can set your watch by it, but at the same time, as it were, the implications of this machine-like precision were disturbing. The people who remained adapted. Dying embers of church congregations were fanned into life as many turned to religion. Others sank into apathy. Genevieve’s mother said she wished she’d had shares in one of the artificial meat corporations. 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 73

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Imaginary friends

Richard Dawkins’s new book, The Magic of Reality, is a tour de force in which he tells a number of myths (about, for instance, the creation of the earth, or rainbows, or where animals came from) and then gives a scientific account of the phenomenon in question, showing how thrilling knowledge and scientific inquiry can be and what a profound sense of wonder they can give us. It’s a book that I shall certainly give to my grandchildren in a year or two. I have never seen a better introduction to science for young readers. But it reminded me of Dawkins’s misgivings, expressed in a TV news interview two or three years ago, about such things as fairy tales in which frogs turn into princes. He said he would like to know of any evidence about the results of telling children stories like that: did it have a pernicious effect? In particular, he worried that it might lead to an anti-scientific cast of mind, in which people were prepared to believe that things could change into other things. And because I have been working on the tales of the Brothers Grimm recently, the matter of fairy tales and the way we read them has been much on my mind. So, what evidence might there be to settle this question? We believe different things in different ways and for different reasons. There’s the rock-hard certainty of personal experience (“I put my finger in the fire and it hurt”), which is probably the earliest kind we learn. Then there’s the logically convincing, which we probably come to

through the maths we learn at school, in the context of Pythagoras’s theorem or something similar, and which, if we first encounter it at the right moment, bursts on our minds like sunrise, with the whole universe playing a great chord of C major. However, there are other ways of believing that things are true, such as the testimony of trusted friends (“I know him and he’s not a liar”), the plausibility of likelihood based on experience (“It’s exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to happen”), the blind conviction of the religious zealot (“It must be true, because God says so and His holy book doesn’t lie”), the

Scandinavian delight: the Moomins bring pleasure

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placid assent of those who like a quiet life (“If you say so, dear”), and so on. Some of these carry within them the possibility of quiet scepticism (“I know him and he’s not a liar but he might be mistaken”). There’s not just one way of believing in things but a whole spectrum. We don’t demand or require scientific proof of everything we believe, not only because it would be impossible to provide but because, in a lot of cases, it isn’t necessary or appropriate. How could we examine children’s experience of fairy tales? Are there any models for examining children’s experience of story in a reasonably objective way? As it happens, there are. A very interesting study was carried out some years ago by a team led by Gordon Wells and his colleagues at Bristol University and was described in a book called The Meaning Makers: Children Learning Language and Using Language to Learn (1986). Wells and his team wanted to find out how children’s language was influenced by what they heard around them. They selected a large number of families with children who were two or three years old, whom they followed right up to the end of their primary education, giving the children unobtrusive, lightweight radio microphones, to be worn under their clothes, which could pick up not only what the children said but also what was being said by parents or others nearby. The microphones were switched on at random intervals for 90 seconds

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We must not deprive our children of fairy tales – learning that there are different ways of believing is one of the most important lessons of all By Philip Pullman

at a time, the results were recorded and transcribed and then an enormous amount of analysis was done on the results. In brief, they discovered that the more included children were in the conversation and chatter going on around them, the quicker and more fully they picked up every kind of language skill. One interesting discovery was that the most enriching experience of all was the open-ended exploratory talk that arises from the reading of stories. In Language and Learning: an Interactional Perspective (1985), Wells and his colleague John Nicholls write: “Several investigators have noted how much more complex, semantically and syntactically, is the language that occurs in this context . . . Furthermore, the frequency with which children are read to has been found to be a powerful predictor of later success at school.” So, it’s not impossible to set up experiments to test how children acquire various forms of understanding and to learn interesting things from them. But to go back to Dawkins and his question, how on earth would we set up an experiment to test the effect of fairy tales? It would have to go on much longer than the Bristol study: it would have to last as long as

childhood itself. And it would have to differ from that study in an important way, because it would need a control group. Whereas the scholars at Bristol were concerned with finding out what happens in the natural course of a child’s life, this study would depend on having some children who were allowed fairy tales, fantasy and so on, and another group that wasn’t. To make it absolutely beyond question, it would have to be policed pretty rigorously. No Harry Potter under the bedclothes. No nursery rhymes either, which are full of impossible things such as cows jumping over the moon. And we would follow the children all the way through their schooling, right up to leaving age, to see whether the ones who were kept away from magic and spells were thereby advantaged in their understanding of science. Of course, we wouldn’t do it. It would amount to child abuse. To make sure that our subjects never encountered fairy tales of any kind, we would have to keep them in a sort of prison camp. Dawkins knows this; he wouldn’t ask for the unreasonable, or the impossible, or the cruel. When he says that he would like to see some evidence, I assume that he is prepared to be a little generous in his view of what evidence

To dream the impossible dream: Snow White and her Seven Dwarves provide a compelling fantasy tale

there could be. We don’t demand scientific proof of everything we need to know about, not only because it would be impossible to provide but because, in a lot of cases, it isn’t necessary or appropriate.

Matters of trust The only way we can know what is going on in the mind of someone who reads a story is to believe them when they tell us about it and compare it with our own experience of reading and see what we have in common. When it comes to the matter that Dawkins is concerned about, namely the question of children’s belief in fairy tales and magic and spells, all we have to go by is belief and trust. It’s that sort of evidence, and that’s the only sort we’ve got – but then, we get by pretty well with that in most of our dealings with other people. So, do children believe what they read in stories, or don’t they? And if they do, in what way do they believe it? Well, this is what I think about it. I think that childhood reading is more like play than like anything else. Like

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Suspend your disbelief: stories carry us into imaginative worlds where we become bigger than ourselves t

pretending. When I was a boy of eight or nine, in Australia, we pretended to be figures from comics or films and we acted out stories based on the adventures we’d seen. Davy Crockett was very big at that time; every little boy in the western world had a Davy Crockett hat. I knew I wasn’t really Davy Crockett but, at the same time, I liked imitating things that I’d seen Davy Crockett do on the cinema screen – say, at the Siege of the Alamo. We fought with passion, and when we died we did so with heroic extravagance. My body was doing all that an eight-year-old body could do to run out from behind a wall, fire a musket, clutch my chest, stagger, crumple to the ground, slowly drag a revolver from a holster with a trembling hand and kill six Mexicans as I breathed my last. Those were the things my body was doing. What was my mind doing? I think it was feeling a little scrap – a tiny, fluttering, tattered, cheaply printed, torn-off scrap – of heroism. I felt what it was like to be brave and to die facing overwhelming odds. That intensity of feeling is what both fuels and rewards childhood play and reading alike. When we children play at being characters we admire doing things we value, we discover in doing so areas and depths of feeling it would be hard to reach otherwise. Exhilaration, heroism, despair, resolution, triumph, noble renunciation, sacrifice: in acting these out, we experience them in miniature or, as it were, in safety. Yet at no time during the endless hours of play I spent as a child did I believe that I was anyone other than myself. Sometimes I was me

and sometimes I was me pretending to be Davy Crockett. But now that I think about it carefully, I realise that it was a little more complicated than that. When I was playing with my brother and my friends, I was almost entirely Crockett, or Batman, or Dick Tracy, or whoever it was (and I remember games when there were about six different Batmans racing through the neighbourhood gardens). It was when I played alone that I found it possible to be myself, but a different myself, a myself who was Davy Crockett’s close and valued friend, who sat with

I think that childhood reading is more like play than anything else him beside a campfire in the wilderness or hunted bears in the trackless forests of suburban Adelaide. Sometimes I rescued him from danger and sometimes he rescued me, but we were both pretty laconic about it. In some ways, I was more myself at those times than at any other, a stronger and more certain myself, wittier, more clearly defined, a myself of accomplishment and renown, someone Davy Crockett could rely on in a tight spot. What’s more, he seemed to value me more than my friends and family did. He saw the qualities in me that their duller eyes failed to perceive. Davy Crockett wasn’t alone in this superior perception; I remember that King Arthur had a high opinion of me, and so did Superman.

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Now I think that those experiences were an important part of my moral education as well as the development of my imagination. By acting out stories of heroism and sacrifice and (to use a fine phrase that has become a cliché) grace under pressure, I was building patterns of behaviour and expectation into my moral understanding. I might fall short if ever I were really called on but at least I’d know what was the right thing to do. And that sort of play, the solitary play, perhaps, even more than the communal play, seems to me very similar to what we do when we read – at least when we read for no other purpose than our enjoyment and especially when we read as children. I’m conscious that the way I read as an adult is a little different, because there’s a part of my reading mind now that looks with critical attention at the way the story is told as well as at the events it relates. What I thought mostly when I was a child was, “I want to be in this story with them.” It was like the sort of game where I was by myself with Davy Crockett in the wilderness, because in a story I was able to be both myself here and myself there. I didn’t want to stop being myself; I didn’t want to be them; I wanted to put myself into the story and enjoy things happening to me. And in the sort of private, secret, inviolable space that opened out miraculously between the printed page and my young mind, that sort of thing happened all the time. I remember it happening especially powerfully with the Moomins. Little creatures who looked like miniature hippopotamuses and lived on an island in the Baltic Sea? Absurd. What I felt for the Moomin family and all their friends, however, was nothing less than love. In fact, I loved them so much that I would never have said to my friends, “Let’s pretend we’re Moomins.” That would have been inconceivable. I would have had to make public something I felt private and secret about, something I could hardly voice even to myself, something if, were it ever discovered, I would have felt embarrassed by; and the shame of discovery, I’m sure, would have been followed quickly by the even greater and longer-lasting shame of betrayal. To save face, I’d have felt obliged to mock and scoff at those dear friends of mine, and at any kid who was so stupid and babyish as to like stories about them. But when I was alone, with a Moomin book open in front of me and that great, secret space opening up between my mind and the pages, I could revel in their company and sail off in their floating theatre or travel to the mountains to see the great comet or rescue the Snork Maiden from the Groke and no one could possibly have told, from looking at me, what my mind was doing. Here comes the test: did I believe that the Moomins were real? No, of course I didn’t. I

THE ART ARCHIVE/ALAMY

The Critics

The Critics knew that they were made up. I was pretending they were real in order to enjoy being with them in imagination. I wasn’t in the slightest danger of confusing them with real life. The delight of being with the Moomins was a complex kind of delight, made up partly of the sweetness of their characters, partly of the delicate, simple precision of the drawings, partly of the endless inventiveness of Tove Jansson, their creator, partly from the fascination I felt with the northern landscape in which they lived: a whole bundle of things, none of which depended on their being true or real. Nor did I believe for a second that elephants’ trunks were long because one of their ancestors had played a desperate tug of war with a crocodile, as Rudyard Kipling told me in the Just So Stories. If someone had asked me, in a serious kind of way, why I thought elephants had long trunks, I’d have scratched my head and said, “I dunno.” I knew, even when I was very young, that “Because the crocodile got hold of the elephant’s child’s nose and pulled and pulled” was the wrong sort of answer. I would have been just as fascinated, in a different kind of way, to hear the real answer; but that wouldn’t have diminished my pleasure in the story, including the delight that I felt in murmuring the sounds of the words: the “ ’satiable curtiosity” of the elephant’s child,

the “great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees”. I knew these story things, these play things, weren’t real, but that didn’t matter, because I didn’t want them to be real, I wanted them to be funny. Or delightful. Or exciting. Or moving. And they could be all those things and real as well, as some things were, or all those things and imaginary and I could tell the difference, and it didn’t matter.

Life cycle of a frog I agree that it would be a different question entirely if parents actually brought their children up to believe that frogs could change into princes. And some parents do bring their children up to believe that things can change into other things – bread into flesh and wine into blood, to be specific, and that they’ll go to hell if they don’t believe it. Some parents also bring their children up to believe that the world was created 6,000 years ago and that scientists are wrong when they tell us about evolution and shouldn’t be allowed to teach it in schools. I fully agree with Dawkins when he says that this is pernicious and damaging. Yet there’s a world of difference between that sort of thing and offering a child a fairy tale. No one says, “You must believe that the frog changed into a prince, because it’s true and only

wicked people don’t believe it.” Children really do learn quite early on that there are different ways of believing in different kinds of story. And when it comes to evidence, I think there’s nothing for it: we just have to trust what people tell us and check it against our own experience. If what they say is that stories of every kind, from the most realistic to the most fanciful, have nourished their imagination and helped shape their moral understanding, then we have to accept the truth of that. My guess is that the kind of stories children are offered has far less effect on their development than whether they are given stories at all; and that children whose parents take the trouble to sit and read with them – and talk about the stories, not in a lecturing sort of way but genuinely conversing, in the way that Wells describes – will grow up to be much more fluent and confident not only with language but with pretty well any kind of intellectual activity, including science. And children who are deprived of this contact, this interaction, the world of stories, are not likely to flourish at all. What sort of evidence that is, I don’t know, but I believe it. l Philip Pullman’s latest book is “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” (Canongate, £7.99). The trilogy “His Dark Materials” is published by Scholastic (£30/£6.99 each) newstatesman.com/culture

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 77

Easy reader: the arrival of the Kindle is transforming the way we consume books

BOOKS

The sense of an ending Sales of ebooks will reach a new high this Christmas. Yet the outlook for publishers and authors is grim – they need to sell many more to survive. By Nicholas Clee The book industry believes we are about to enjoy an “ebook Christmas”. One thing is for sure: it will not be a print-book Christmas. Gloom about the economy, plus a general perception that publishers are offering us more of the same, only worse (uninteresting “celebrities”, chefs reheating the usual ingredients), have depressed the market. But, in compensation to a certain extent, there is a new vogue for ebooks. In the US, ebooks are accounting for 20 per cent of leading publishers’ revenues, and rising; in the UK, the figure is about 10 per cent and rising. These figures will leap in the new year as people who unwrapped e-readers on 25 December play with their new gadgets. Amazon is pushing its Kindle reader and WHSmith is selling the Kobo, which is attached to a Canada-based retailer. Ebooks for the iPad and other tablets are also gaining in popularity. These developments give publishers a modest satisfaction, offset by a great deal of fear. The

focus of that fear at present is Amazon. The internet giant is by far the most aggressive book retailer they have ever dealt with, and, thanks to its dominance of ebook sales through the Kindle, it is also becoming the most powerful retailer that publishers have ever dealt with. Amazon uses its power largely to depress prices. Should we, as readers, be delighted that books, already widely discounted, are getting cheaper still as the digital revolution spreads? Or is the enthusiasm of giant retailers for pricecutting a mixed blessing at best, as it has been with food? For my new Kobo e-reader, kindly sent to me by a PR firm, I have bought A D Miller’s Booker-shortlisted novel, Snowdrops, for £4.31 and Robert Harris’s thriller The Fear Index for £5.49. In print, Miller’s novel is available in paperback at a recommended retail price (RRP) of £7.99. The Fear Index is a hardback with an RRP of £18.99. So I have saved more than £17 on

78 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

two books. I’ve also downloaded free ebook editions of David Copperfield and Mansfield Park. Buying ebooks affects the way you look at print books. Browsing in the Piccadilly branch of Waterstone’s the other day, I was chastened to find myself seeing the books at this vast, five-floor shop as pricey items, of the kind one might buy if one wanted to indulge oneself, or if one were looking for gifts. I am shocked at myself, because I have always been dismayed when people say – as they so often do – that books are expensive. They are not expensive, I have insisted, by comparison with cinema or theatre tickets. A new paperback is cheaper than a round of drinks. People’s attitudes, not book prices, needed to change, I thought. I have also tried many times to explain why so many books appear first in expensive hardback editions, which only a minority of even committed book buyers want to pay for. It is hard to get publicity for paperbacks, I say; if you produce 10,000 paperback copies of a literary first novel, you may not sell any more copies than you would have done if you had produced 1,500 hardbacks, and you’ll earn a good deal less. Moreover, books by established authors – P D James, say, or Ian McEwan or Claire Tomalin – sell in huge quantities in hardback, and no publisher will happily forgo this income. Ebooks are destroying this economic model. Julian Barnes, whose novel The Sense of an Ending won the most recent Man Booker Prize, is one of those established authors who can sell a lot of hardbacks. Indeed, as I write, he is the fourth-bestselling author at independent bookshops, which are mostly selling his novel at the RRP of £12.99. But in the weeks following the Booker, Amazon decided that the correct price for The Sense of an Ending in ebook was £3.59 (the price has since gone up to £4.79). Some publishers have attempted to hold the line by introducing “agency pricing”, through which they set the retail prices and give retailers a cut of the revenue. Amazon hates taking anyone else’s orders about what it should charge, and is suspected of having had some influence on the decision by the European Commission to investigate the agency model. The evidence is that ebook buyers are with Amazon on this issue, and believe that digital editions should be cheap. Amazon’s customers have blitzed the site with one-star reviews of books, by Ken Follett and others, that they consider to be too expensive, and its Kindle bestseller list at present shows titles priced at less than £1 occupying seven of the top ten slots. Will 99p become the optimum price for an ebook? If so, who is going to make any money out of publishing or writing books for such a market? It turns out that a few people are doing very well out of selling cheap ebooks. In the US, Amanda Hocking and John Locke, two genre authors who self-published their novels, have

© PIERRE CROM / REPORTERS / REPORTERS / EYEVINE

The Critics

The Critics each sold more than one million ebooks through the Kindle store. Some publishers have used ebooks to turn the conventional publishing model on its head: instead of going to market first with expensive hardbacks, they have found substantial audiences by promoting authors with cheap ebooks. Myriad Editions, a small publisher based in Brighton, has sold 70,000 copies in print and ebook of Into the Darkest Corner, a crime novel by the newcomer Elizabeth Haynes; the novel has 445 customer reviews on Amazon and was the site’s editors’ pick as the best book of 2011. These successes lead one to wonder if the complainers were right all along, and books really were too expensive. Surveys suggest that owners of ereading devices are buying books in greater numbers than they did previously. At the Kindle store, Amazon and self-publishers are able to adjust their pricing until they reach a sweet spot at which readers will buy, even if the authors are unfamiliar. As ebooks take a greater share of the market, book sales overall may increase. This will be a happy development, except as it affects shops selling print books, and publishers and authors’ cash flows. In place of the social experience of browsing in bookshops, we will have the social media experience of sharing our tastes through Facebook and Twitter. As for the financial implications – on the Me and My Big Mouth blog, the novelist Ian Hocking (no relation to Amanda, above) has confided his sales figures and revenues from self-publishing ebooks with Amazon. Two of them have sold more than 8,000 copies. This is a figure that many conventionally published novelists would envy. But Hocking’s profit to date is only just over £300 (his revenue is just over £2,000). Had Hocking chosen a conventional publisher, he might well have sold fewer copies, but he would have earned more, thanks to the publisher’s advance. It is not only the likes of Julian Assange, Jeffrey Eugenides (£500,000 each) and Pippa Middleton (£400,000, for a book about parties) who get unrecoverable sums of money upfront from publishers. Most authors, right down to those whose sales are in four figures, depend on such handouts. But it is hard to see how, in the new world of cheap books, downloaded one by one rather than bought in bulk by stockholding booksellers, publishers will be able to afford them. An industry that paid unrecoverable advances for books, and then published them in formats that the public thought too expensive, had its eccentricities. Still, it served readers and literary culture pretty well. Most writing careers have depended on the subsidies that publishers have been able to provide. In the digital world, authors, whether they self-publish or not, will have to sell to survive. l Nicholas Clee is a joint editor of BookBrunch, a book industry newsletter

THE BOOKS INTERVIEW

Peter Englund You have described The Beauty and the Sorrow, your new book about the First World War, as a work of “anti-history”. What do you mean by that? I mean it in the sense that history is usually about taking experiences, documents and sources and collating them, putting them together to make a larger construct called “history”. But this book is about going the other way, going back to the single component of history, which is the individual experience. In my other work as a professional historian – I specialise in the 17th century – I go by the book, and it’s a good formula. You have a grand narrative and then you use the individuals as a splash of colour or as an example, but the grand narrative is the thing. Would it be fair to describe your method here as novelistic? Yes, in the sense that the form and the language used will remind readers more of those used by a novelist rather than the kind used by a historian writing a textbook. But the main difference between the novelist and historian is not about form. It’s about what we can and can’t know. The historian, when he reaches a gap in the sources, must say firmly, “We don’t know.” If you are a novelist, when you reach that gap, you can really do your job and fantasise about what may have happened. You worked as a war correspondent in Bosnia in the 1990s. Did that experience affect the way this book was composed? I could never have written it without it. In fact, I’ve been to four wars as a correspondent. The experience of being smack bang in the middle of events yet not understanding a thing – that was very important. Do you see the First World War as the critical event of the 20th century? Yes. I would agree with those historians who say that the Great War is probably the most important event in European history since the fall of Rome in 476. It defines the 20th century. One of the most striking things about the book is its emphasis on the global scale

of the war. This is about much more than the Western Front. That was quite deliberate. When I was teaching, that was one of the points I would make again and again to my students. The impact of the war in Africa showed for the first time the cracks in the monolith of colonialism. How did you find the people whose war stories you tell in the book? Because there are so many eyewitness accounts, the problem was not finding, but choosing. I ended up with 20 people in this book but I had enough material for at least a hundred. In your day job you are permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature. What does that involve? I spend a lot of time reading. I’m also the CEO of the Academy. The Academy meets once a week on a Thursday, which it has been doing since 1786, and I prepare the agenda and write the minutes. The prize this year was awarded to a Swede, the poet Tomas Tranströmer. What was the reaction in Sweden to his award? The reaction in Sweden was one of elation. There had been speculation here since the Nineties that Tranströmer would get the award. Also, if you know your poetry well, you’ll know that he is the second most translated poet in the United States. One American writer, Philip Roth, has been spoken about as a likely winner for some years now. Yes. But I can, of course, never comment on individual cases. There are secrecy clauses governing the deliberations of the Academy. Perhaps it looks very secretive from the outside, but it at least shields the process. Having a completely open judging process would lead to more furore and debate. It can be a bit frustrating, as we can only hand out one prize and are not allowed to divulge the names of the others on the shortlist. But I think it’s good for writers’ mental stability that they shouldn’t know that they are on the shortlist. It also means we the judges can work in peace. l Interview by Jonathan Derbyshire Peter Englund’s “The Beauty and the Sorrow: an Intimate History of the First World War” is published by Profile Books (£25)

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 79

The Critics

The killing machine Richard J Evans Heinrich Himmler: a Life Peter Longerich Oxford University Press, 1,072pp, £25 There have been many attempts to describe the life and opinions of Heinrich Himmler, but this one, by the German historian Peter Longerich, is the first thorough scholarly biography to appear. It makes excellent use of the voluminous source materials available to historians, including many that originated through the meticulous SS leader himself, such as his appointments diary and the log he kept of his telephone conversations. The result is a major work that breaks ground by linking Himmler’s political career convincingly to his personal life and experiences. The son of a schoolmaster and some-time tutor to the Bavarian royal family, Himmler was too young to fight in the First World War and, like many of his generation, sought solace for having missed the action in drilling himself into a state of ruthless efficiency, so as to ensure that the inevitable next war was won by Germany. For Himmler, this had the added advantage for compensating for his early feelings of physical, social and emotional inadequacy. Interfering in the private lives of others provided another form of compensation for the emotional poverty of his own. So did his attraction to the violent subculture of the far-right paramilitary movements that flourished in Bavaria after their brutal suppression of communist revolutionaries early in 1919. Incapable of inflicting physical violence, he enjoyed experiencing its employment vicariously. Politics for him was a continuation of war by other means. Soon he was in charge of Hitler’s personal protection squad (the Schutzstaffel, or SS), which he built up into an elite corps, distinguished by its discipline and unconditional loyalty to the Nazi leader from the storm-trooper militia Sturmabteilung (SA), led by his nominal boss, Ernst Röhm. When the storm troopers started kicking over the traces, it was Himmler’s SS to which Hitler turned. Himmler delivered, liquidating their entire leadership in the bloody Night of the Long Knives in 1934. By this time, some of Himmler’s main character traits had emerged: his persistence in the pursuit of power and his flexibility in the means he chose to achieve it, his ever-expanding ambition that grew with each Nazi success, and his determination to integrate the many and varied institutions he came to control in a single, functioning whole. From his Bavarian base, he took 80 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

The Critics

GETTY IMAGES

over the police forces in one part of the Reich after another, adding to them the concentration camps, the mobilisation of forced labour and then the organisation of ethnic purification, resettlement and mass murder. At the outset of the war he combined all of these and more in the Reich Security Head Office. On the back of this grew a large economic empire, a burgeoning educational and research apparatus and, as the war progressed, a rapidly expanding military force, the Waffen-SS. Himmler used the enormous power this gave him to put into effect the first stages in a huge plan for the total racial reordering of Europe. Ethnic Germans were moved into the Reich from the east; Poles were “liquidated” in huge numbers as a first step towards the extermination of up to 45 million Slavs and their replacement by German settlers; “Germanic” populations in occupied countries such as Holland and Denmark were to be brought into the fold. In the summer of 1942 it seemed possible to Himmler that his ambition of creating an ethnically pure Greater Germanic Reich covering most of Europe was within reach. Power such as this allowed him to indulge his whims, too, though even these were excrescences of his ideological tenets. In pursuit of his notion of “decency” and self-control in the SS, he issued individual bans on hunting, smoking and drinking. He consigned those officers who did not feed their men properly to a “House of Poor Nourishment”, which he designed, in person, down to the last detail, and where inadequate food (“Tinned food with no fresh vegetables. Badly prepared”) was served, interspersed with the occasional proper meal to show how it should be done. In an effort to ensure that the SS stayed a true racial elite, he required its men and their prospective spouses to be racially examined before getting married, forcing them to provide family trees dating back to 1800. Group solidarity was to be cemented by the creation of a non-Christian pseudo-religious cult, to which

The lives of others: Himmler had a need to control

PICTURE BOOK OF THE WEEK A minke whale surfaces in a small opening in pack ice in the Ross Sea. This image is taken from Frozen Planet: a World Beyond Imagination by Alastair Fothergill and Vanessa Berlowitz (BBC

Books, £25; ebook £9.99). The book accompanies the BBC television series of the same name presented by David Attenborough, who provides a foreword. “No part of the earth is more hostile

all SS men had to belong. Building on what he imagined to be the practices of Germanic tribes in the Dark Ages, he set up cultic sites and introduced runic inscriptions and rituals based on the cycles of the sun. The marriage ceremony for SS men was to include readings from Nietzsche and Hitler instead of the Bible. Himmler linked this pseudo-religion to his idiosyncratic view of world history, in which the Aryan race originated in Tibet and, further back still, in the lost continent of Atlantis, whose disappearance he ascribed to the history of the cosmos through the “world-ice theory”, according to which the earth’s development was determined by the appearance and disappearance of moons and “ice planets” over geological time. Such bizarre theories might have remained harmless eccentricities, had Himmler not had a great deal of power and money and had he not been able to found research institutes or sponsor expeditions in order to prove his ideas. Yet his attempt to foist them on universities came to nothing; his other enterprises began to fall apart from 1942 onwards as Germany’s war fortunes began to decline. It proved impossible to enforce his requirements for Aryan racial purity in the SS. Germany’s economic empire never achieved any coherence. Resettlement plans were put on hold as its territorial grip on Europe weakened. Resistance and partisan groups became impossible to defeat. Himmler’s

to life,” Attenborough writes, “than the snow- and ice-covered regions that lie around its two poles.” However, those species that do survive there flourish in “dramatic numbers”

growing power was exercised within a steadily shrinking Reich. In two of his main aims, however, he succeeded. It was Himmler who intensified terror and repression within the Reich to such a degree in the final phases of the war that the Germans fought on to the end. And it was Himmler who drove on and radicalised the extermination of Europe’s Jews, convinced – no doubt correctly – that he was putting Hitler’s wishes into effect, and saw it through to the last. Longerich sets the mass murder in its proper context of Himmler’s wider plans for the racial restructuring of Europe. Not everyone will agree with his view that a final decision on the extermination was not reached until as late as the early summer of 1942. But this book does succeed in showing convincingly how his cruel ambitions increased over time, rather than reflecting a firmly preconceived set of ideas. The extermination of six million Jews, Himmler told his subordinates, was “a page of glory in our history that can never be written”. He knew, therefore, that it was a crime, and one of gigantic proportions. Nothing showed more clearly the amorality that lay at the heart of the great machine of terror and extermination which he had created. l Richard J Evans is Regius Professor of History and president of Wolfson College at Cambridge and is the author of “The Third Reich at War” (Penguin, £12.99)

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 81

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Only the lonely Julie Myerson

Outsider: Always Almost: Never Quite Brian Sewell Quartet, 338pp, £25 Explaining why at last he feels able to put his own life in print, the art critic and historian Brian Sewell writes that, “approaching my 80th year and old enough to be neither embarrassed nor ashamed, I no longer feel the need for reticence”. It is perhaps graceless to point it out, but there are other advantages to waiting until you’re 80. Total freedom, no libel and the glee of having the last word – so many of the people you might want to write about are dead. And yet, to be fair, one of the most attractive aspects of this occasionally dry and unwieldy but ultimately courageous memoir is that its author seems deliciously aware of that advantage. Sewell may make his living by being rebarbatively outspoken, but here he turns the critical glare on himself. He begins with an account of his emotionally uneven, nomadic childhood: the father whose identity he did not discover until late in life; the beautiful and loving but chaotic mother who “had as much sexual restraint as an alley cat”; and the wellmeaning (but, as it turns out, bigamous) stepfather who gave the young Brian his surname and an “intense interest” in sex (he would frequently come into the young boy’s bedroom to masturbate, apparently unaware that he was being watched). Sewell was convinced from an early age that he was “irrevocably queer”, and he details the various “inappropriate” encounters with teachers at school and the all-too-familiar, predictable experimentation at public school. After that came National Service, during which – in a chilling episode told entirely without melodrama or self-pity – Sewell was painfully raped in his own bed. Increasingly aware that his “wayward sexuality” was something to protect and hide, he embarked on a lengthy period of self-imposed celibacy, even toying with the priesthood. But after he returned to the Courtauld to continue his degree in art history he found that student life was far too enticing. From there, he went to work at Christie’s, where he encountered the bullying and dishonest office politics that form the frequently turgid heart of this book. Sewell’s brusque honesty is nothing if not infectious, and so I will be honest in return. This is a memoir – and, for that matter, a life – with two principal strands: the world of art history and the world of homosexual sex.

The sex is cleverly, roguishly, even artfully depicted. I was fascinated and frequently moved to read about the author’s slow but brave progression from guilty, self-denying “queer” to promiscuous and unapologetic hedonist. As for the first strand, the anecdotage from the Courtauld and Christie’s may seem just as fascinating to those who trade in high art, yet there is little authorial attempt to explain or to evoke its atmosphere, its humanity. And having heard of few of the people Sewell constantly and gossipily namechecks (with the notable exception of Anthony Blunt), I repeatedly found myself guiltily longing for the next bit of sex. Naturally it crossed my mind that I’m not Sewell’s ideal reader – but then, with the exception of all of his (mostly deceased) cohorts, who is? Then there’s the prose. What do you do with a sentence such as, “With Jill this English year had forced a parting of the ways, for she had chosen to study the centuries before 1550 to ensure a firm grounding for the Gothic art and architecture that was to be her special period”? Yet Sewell also offers consolation. A joyously naughty passage describes Robin, who “astonished us with his beauty and unconscious elegance, the immaculate suit of fine greenish tweed marred only by the urine drippings of a man wearing boxer shorts and careless when emptying his bladder”. Even so, these vignettes rarely bring us closer to the people. Sewell tells us what they were like but rarely makes them spring off the page. As I tramped on through the Christie’s mire, I increasingly wondered: where are the emotional highs and passions of Sewell’s life (art and art history apart)? A seven-year relationship with a man called Claudio is referred to only glancingly, and despite all the explicit self-scrutiny, the reader gets little sense of a personal life. Is this, I began to wonder, a book about loneliness? The most chilling – and perceptive – insight comes when the author, leaving the Courtauld one evening, is picked up by a smelly-breathed man with egg on his tie who insists that he come for a milkshake. Contemplating – and smelling – him, Sewell has an appalling, premonitory flash-forward: “Were seedy clubs, food droppings and slopping on my clothes, the empty chattering of seduction and mephitic breath, what I in middle age would inflict on pretty boys?” The man turned out to be Guy Burgess. But I found myself – by now caring only about this memoir’s honest, kind and likeably straightforward protagonist – hoping fervently that the young Sewell’s glimpse of a future would prove untrue. l Julie Myerson’s most recent novel is “Then” (Jonathan Cape, £12.99). Read more by her for the New Statesman at: newstatesman.com/writers/julie_myerson

WORD GAMES

God

Sophie Elmhirst “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” As a literal opening to this column, that line has never made more sense. This week, the word is “God”. The big one. I thought it was time. However, I am neither equipped nor inclined to offer a sophisticated analysis of deism. I know that’s what you were hoping for, but hell (whoops), it’s not going to happen. This is about the word. Not the word when it was being God: I never understood how the word did that. Also couldn’t John just have written, “In the beginning was God, and God was with God, and God was God”? Too repetitive? Anyway, the word is Germanic, from guthan, linked to the Proto-Indo-European ghutóm, from the root ghew, meaning “to call or invoke”. I like the way it unravels not to a tangible being, but to something summoned or imagined. It makes sense of our frequent declamations – “for God’s sake”, “in the name of God”, “God, Boris Johnson is a plonker”. God the word is invoked for emphasis, to make a point. It helps that it is concise. If we’d stuck with Yahweh, I’m not sure the idea would have caught on. But God is neat, elemental. Good for rhyming. Also, it turns out, good for book titles. Here’s a selection for your delectation . . . The God Delusion (by our esteemed guest editor); The Pursuit of God (I’ll stick with love, thanks); God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales; When God Spoke to Me. They’re all at it, you see, the atheists and the believers, wheeling out the big guy as they battle it out on the bookshelves. My own favourites are God According to God (pretty bold from the author, that one) and Trusting God: Even When Life Hurts. But if you really want to get to grips with God, forget the tomes. Forget the Bible. I dug out a couple of children’s books which, judging by their titles, claim to answer some pretty fundamental questions – Where Does God Live? and What Is God Like? (both a snip on Amazon for less than a tenner). This is stuff that people have been trying to figure out for years! And the answers, who knew, are nestled in a couple of 32-page picture books in the four-to-eight age range. Ah well, better late than never. l

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 83

The Critics

Known unknown A chilling fable of city life asks more questions than it answers, says Ryan Gilbey Dreams of a Life (12A)

IMAGENET

dir: Carol Morley Joyce Carol Vincent died alone, at the age of 38, in her north London flat above an unlovely retail complex called Shopping City. That was in December 2003. She was eventually discovered two and a half years later. A pile of presents stood guard beside her remains: she had been wrapping them in front of the television at the time of her death. I do hope that detail hasn’t ruined your Christmas. When bailiffs broke down Joyce’s front door in 2006, there wasn’t much of a body to speak of. As in death, so in life: what sort of impression can a person have made on the world for no one to seek her out for almost three years? The film-maker Carol Morley tries to answer that poser. The story hit the nationals and became a momentary marmalade-dropper but no one turned up much trace of Joyce’s history until Morley placed ads (“Did you know Joyce Vincent?”) and rounded up some of Joyce’s old friends, landlords and lovers to be interviewed on camera. The result, Dreams of a Life, represents a new kind of film: the speculative documentary. The Vincent family declined to participate, as did Joyce’s former fiancé. Their absence is regrettable but not devastating. Dreams of a Life is more about what isn’t there and what can’t be known than what is and what can; hard facts might weigh it down. For every detail that seems to bring Joyce sharply into focus, there is a clutch of contradictions that reduces her again to a blur. Someone refers to her as a chameleon and there is a Zelig-like quality about her meetings with remarkable men. Gil Scott-Heron! Isaac Hayes! Nelson Mandela! Er, Captain Sensible! One of Joyce’s former housemates, an ageing barrow-boy type with the hots for her (“Sexy, wasn’t she? She was sexy”), says it feels now like she is a figment of everyone’s imagination – like they’ve all made her up. Morley must have given a little inward cheer when she heard that. Rudiments of Joyce’s life emerge from the haze. She was born in west London. Her four older sisters helped their Grenadian father raise her after the death of their Indian mother. She was, someone remarks in the Caribbean parlance, “broughtupsy” – she had manners. She worked, she had friends, she liked to sing, she

moved around. Don’t we all? Inconsistencies crop up, each one a gift to a picture so averse to the forensic or definitive. An ex-lover insists: “She had no great dreams, no ambitions.” Cut to another voice: “She had so many ambitions.” It’s like reading an obituary written on a Möbius strip. Zawe Ashton plays Joyce in the largely wordless reconstructions and imaginative digressions, which are sprinkled among the interviews. Most haunting are the attempts to cast her as an eavesdropper at her own memorial. She gazes inscrutably at the television (which was still yapping away in the corner when she was found) while the testimonies of those who knew her play on its flickering screen. Ashton has the sloping, queenly face of Cathy Tyson in Mona Lisa, a likeness that brings a helpful transfusion of that film’s grimy London noir, particularly when Joyce is driven around the city, all dolled up in the back of a black cab. Plastered on the vehicle’s side is Morley’s original appeal for information, lending the passenger the air of a soul being ferried across the Styx. It gradually becomes apparent that it isn’t the intangible Joyce who is the subject of the picture so much as her friends, and London, and the grinding hubbub of city life in general. The chief witness is Martin, an ex-boyfriend, who is as jolly and moon-faced as a giant baby. (It’s a running joke that no one could believe it when the sultry Joyce appeared on his arm.) Martin uses laughter the way other people use full stops or ellipses, until finally he stops laughing and holds his big, bald head in his hands and sobs: “I wish she’d rung me. ’Cos I would’ve helped. ’Cos I love you.” That’s right: I love you. We never do find out what those Christmas presents were, or whom they were for. They stand in for all the details about Joyce Vincent that we have no right to know. l Ryan Gilbey blogs on film every Tuesday at: newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital

Ghostly presence: Joyce (Zawe Ashton)

TELEVISION

Bubbles with your Bublé

From Downton to the Doctor, Rachel Cooke rounds up Christmas TV For anyone foolhardy enough not to know by 20 December what they’ll be cooking for Christmas lunch, this year’s TV schedules will come as a real boon. Rick Stein’s Spanish Christmas (BBC2, 21 December, 9pm), Lorraine’s LastMinute Christmas (BBC2, 22 December, 8pm), Nigel’s Simple Christmas (BBC1, 21 December, 7.30pm), Raymond Blanc’s Christmas Feast (BBC2, 23 December, 8pm) . . . On and on, the list of cookery programmes goes, the BBC’s commissioning editors apparently having no idea how hard it is to book an Ocado delivery in late December, much less get one’s hands on the last pack of jamón ibérico at Sainsbury’s (we can take it for granted that none of these shows features a creative use of frozen peas, fish fingers or white sliced bread and that Lorraine Pascale, pretty as a picture in her “fun” Christmas sweater, is unlikely to recommend dashing to Iceland for a bag of mixed vol-au-vents). All that’s missing is a pithy Michael Mosley medical investigation into indigestion. The BBC could have screened it at 5pm on Christmas Day, when no one in Britain is any less than 22 miles away from the nearest open chemist. But enough with this Grinching! There is lots to watch on telly this Christmas, so long as you are selective: by which I mean you will give Young James Herriot (BBC1, 18 December, 9pm) – does what it says on the tin – a wide berth and ignore altogether Lapland (BBC1, Christmas Eve, 10pm), a comedy drama starring Sue Johnston as a put-upon matriarch who wants to give her family – ugh! – the Christmas of a lifetime. I will be kicking off with Rev (BBC2, 22 December, 9pm), in which Adam’s father-in-law comes to stay. Forgive me if I repeat myself but I think Rev is the comedy of our time, touching and brave in equal measure. Top of my list thereafter is BBC1’s heavenly sounding new adaptation of Great Expectations (27 December, 9pm), starring Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham, Ray Winstone as Magwitch and Douglas Booth as Pip; a new version of Mary Norton’s novel about tiny people The Borrowers (BBC1, Boxing Day, 7.30pm), childhood nostalgia triumphing over any trepidation I feel at the thought of the ubiquitous Stephen Fry playing Professor Mildeye; and Downton Abbey (ITV1, Christmas Day, 9pm), because the tree will be huge and there will roast pheasant and a suitably batty plotline for dinner.

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FILM

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 85

Data Centre Ownership: the Big Cloud Debate

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The Critics

No turkey: Olivia Colman and Tom Hollander in Rev

THEATRE NOTES IN THE MARGIN

Farce poetica

Great Scots

Andrew Billen revels in a high-spirited Ealing comedy revival The Ladykillers Gielgud Theatre, London W1 Graham Linehan, who has turned Alexander Mackendrick’s 1955 film The Ladykillers into a West End farce, is the saviour of studio-based situation comedy on television. As laughter tracks went out of fashion and the mock documentary style took over, the creator of Father Ted ploughed on and kept making studio audiences laugh with Black Books and The IT Crowd. It is fitting that he should seek to liberate on to the stage an old Ealing comedy about a group of bank robbers brought down by a sweet old woman from unwatched box sets and exaggerated cineaste deference. His resuscitation is about eight-tenths successful and if the laughs from his latest live audiences never quite reach hysteria, this Ladykillers certainly creates enough goodwill in the theatre to make the evening appear a genuine treat. The film is surprisingly unfocused – its writer, William Rose, literally dreamed the plot – and Linehan has done much to tighten its shots. Gone are the outside diversions: no Frankie Howerd, no horse, no apple cart. Instead, the action is confined to the good widow Wilberforce’s rambling King’s Cross house. It is, more than in the film, propelled by character. The gangs’ personalities are much more fleshed out; the major, for instance, is no longer just a coward but a coward who would like, but does not dare, to wear women’s dresses. Farce, however, relies on the tension between a controlling personality and anarchy and Linehan’s insight was to realise that Professor Marcus, the brains of the heist, played in the movie by Alec Guinness, is the supreme control freak, a man who compares his plans for the heist to art. For him, using Mrs Wilberforce as the crooks’ unwitting bagman and alibi is the final flourish of genius. Peter Capaldi, garbed in an intellectual’s overlong scarf – which is, of course, his noose – is exceptional as the professor, throwing himself over the stage in an effort to preserve his masterpiece. He is mad and bad. His words pour like honey but from a mouth fixed in a grimace. Everything he does is infused with menace, even his tea, which he takes with a “suspicion” of sugar. Capaldi’s professor is a man who has won the battle to suppress his own nature and now fights a war against everyone else’s.

Robert Rowand Anderson’s magnificent Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG), which opened in 1889, is a Victorian arts and crafts interloper amid the neoclassical, Georgian rigour of Edinburgh’s New Town. The SNPG’s deep red sandstone exterior interrupts the otherwise uniform palette of George Street, one of the New Town’s main arteries. Give or take the odd bout of remedial scrubbing, the face that the SNPG presents to this grand thoroughfare hasn’t changed much in over 120 years. But inside, the gallery has recently undergone a major transformation overseen by the Glasgowbased architectural practice Page\Park. Relocating the SNPG’s previous co-tenant, the National Museum of Antiquities, to the nearby National Museum of Scotland has allowed the creation of a continuous suite of galleries on the upper floor, all of them top-lit and flooded with natural light. But perhaps the most striking interventions of all have occurred in the great hall, which visitors to the SNPG in its previous incarnation remember as a somewhat gloomy, unwelcoming vestibule. The vaulted ceiling of this triple-height space, the first-floor murals and mosaic floor-tiles have all been cleaned, and a processional frieze depicting figures from Scottish history restored to something like its former glory. The SNPG’s chief curator and deputy director, Nicola Kalinsky, describes the frieze as a “great pageant of [Scottish] history”. Much the same might be said of the collection itself, which now comprises nearly 900 works (almost double the number on display before the renovation). For all her and her colleagues attempts to “rethink the meaning of a potrait gallery in the 21st century”, the hang is, Kalinsky admits, “basically chronological”. It’s what the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond, describes in the gallery’s press release as a celebration of “well-known Scots from throughout the ages”, from Robert Burns to Susan Boyle. Not especially ambitious but appropriate, perhaps, for a country anxious to assert its distinctive identity. l Jonathan Derbyshire For more information, visit: nationalgalleries.org/portraitgallery

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BBC PICTURES

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You may want to watch Outnumbered (BBC1, Christmas Eve, 9.30pm) but I will not be joining you. For one thing, it’s so bloody irritating. For another, I am child-free and thus have no need to console myself with the sight of sprogs even less well behaved than my own. What else? For those who miss Val Doonican – and who doesn’t? – ITV1 is screening the schmaltz-fest Michael Bublé: Home for Christmas (18 December, 9pm). Special guest star: Gary Barlow. Let’s hope there will also be chestnuts roasting over an open fire. Channel 5 has a new adaptation of Lew Wallace’s epic novel of first-century Palestine, Ben Hur (28 December, 9pm), with Hugh Bonneville putting in a cameo as Pontius Pilate (this could be fun after three or four large Baileys). Channel 4 has a new sitcom, Felix and Murdo (28 December, 10.35pm) by Simon Nye, starring Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller as Edwardian toffs, which has the potential to be hysterical; and Absolutely Fabulous returns to BBC1 (Christmas Day, 10pm), if you still feel up to jokes about Bolly, Issy and Mossy in these austere times. I’m not sure I do. Finally, shows for those who worry about Christmas brain rot. I like the sound of The Art of the Night on BBC4 (21 December, 9pm), starring Waldemar Januszczak and paintings by Rembrandt, Hopper and others – and I will be unable to resist The Many Lovers of Jane Austen (BBC2, 23 December, 9pm), in which Amanda Vickery meets the fans (the bonnet-wearers of Texas sound like fun) and Jane Austen: the Unseen Portrait (BBC2, Boxing Day, 9pm), in which Paula Byrne tries to discover whether she has found an unknown likeness of the novelist. University Challenge runs on eight nights over the holidays on BBC2 (from 19 December, 7.30pm) – though rumours that Jeremy Paxman will front it with foam antlers on his head are sadly unfounded. Now, I think my work here is done. What’s that? Doctor Who? Yes, of course it’s on: Christmas Day at 7pm on BBC1. It’s set in 1938, guest stars Clare Skinner and Alexander Armstrong and the doctor arrives by climbing down a chimney. l

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 87

The Critics RADIO

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Magic moments

Antonia Quirke on the best of Christmas listening, from the dull to the daft

Pulling strings: Peter Capaldi (right) in The Ladykillers

Michael Taylor’s revolving set is wonderful to scrutinise, even if, on press night, a door knob fell off, providing so many opportunities for ad libs that I bet they keep it unscrewed. Taylor’s solution for showing the robbery – little cars running up the outside of the house – is, however, unnecessary and Mrs Wilberforce’s caged and unseen parrot repeatedly fails to amuse. A final ingenuity depicting the prof’s end makes up for this. The director Sean Foley had not quite yet drilled his company into the precision-timing that farce requires but when that comes, the design faults will matter less. It is, in any case, a delight to see Capaldi enjoying himself so much. If only it were not too late for us to see Alec Guinness’s take on Malcolm Tucker. l Andrew Billen is a staff writer at the Times newstatesman.com/writers/andrew_billen

88 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

Last year’s BBC Christmas cosy was Colin Firth editing Today and a documentary about the Morris Minor. This year, it’s David Jason presenting “classic moments from an array of British Christmas radio programmes past and present” (David Jason’s Comedy Christmas, Radio 2, Christmas Day, 6pm), leaning rather too predictably on Morecambe and Wise. Those less keen to probe the outer limits of tedium might welcome the following alternatives: a long edition of Words and Music (Radio 3, Christmas Day, 6.30pm) on the theme of bells, with music from Rachmaninov, Pete Seeger, Philip Feeney, Grieg and readings from Tennyson (“Ring Out, Wild Bells”) and Charles Dickens (“The Chimes”). We will all be completely under the influence of Dickens until the arrival of his bicentenary in February but one of the most powerful programmes about the man thus far is The Tale of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ (Radio 4, 29 December, 11.30am), in which the crime writer Frances Fyfield looks at original manuscript pages held by the Victoria and Albert Museum and contemplates his “frantic handwriting and ferocious self-editing”. It’s a show that comprehends the distilled lyricism of Dickens’s common speech (and the despair expressed through both sense and a sense of beauty in it). Classic FM keenly attempts to recreate a sort of Fezziwig’s dance with the Parliament Choir Concert (Christmas Eve, 6pm). “From lords and ladies to MP’s and staff,” goes the blurb, “they put aside all their differences for a night to be united in musical harmony!” The Parliament Choir’s first carol concert to be aired in public promises readings by the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, and the Speaker of the House, John Bercow. Time, doubtless, to switch to Planet Rock for a comforting scan of its seasonal rolling-rock stories (“A second Metallica track leaks! ‘Hate Train’ was also seemingly recorded during the Death Magnetic sessions!”) Only a fool would miss Keith Arthur on TalkSport with a particularly Fungus the Bogeyman edition of his peerless, live, “tales from the riverbank” call-in show Fisherman’s Blues (Christmas Day, 6am). “I always plan for the worst,” Arthur told me recently, über-Fungusly. “No callers, no texters, no emailers – and I’m usually surprised to find a plethora of all three. Still, I'll take some angling-related

REX FEATURES

But the war cannot be won, for his lieutenants are hopeless: not just the lovely James Fleet’s major but an idiot bruiser who cannot even remember his alias (Clive Rowe, not on form), a cockney lad addicted to pills (a more than adequate Stephen Wright) and a cynical Italian (Ben Miller, gamely refusing to upstage Capaldi) with poor idiomatic English and a reluctance to generate the necessary lies. Taxed with finding an excuse for his thievery, Lou announces: “I run an orphanage in Romania. How’s that?” The prof’s foil, however, is the widow and Marcia Warren replicates Katie Johnson’s performance exactly. The old lady is a controlling personality also, outraged when her good opinion of the genteel lodger, who has persuaded her his friends are members of an amateur string quintet, needs a major overhaul. The play reaches a glorious climax just before the “intermission”, when the gang is forced to play for Mrs Wilberforce’s elderly friends. In a scene of Linehan’s devising, the professor manufactures a brilliant excuse for their inevitable cacophony. As the band’s conductor and composer, he intones before they begin, his audience must appreciate that he is a “controversial figure in modern music” and the following work will be “difficult”. The evening never gets as funny as this again and, in part, that is a structural weakness of the story, for one by one the gangsters immolate themselves, leaving the stage barer and barer. The second act systematically does away with the elements the professor is so needy to control so there is less and less to enjoy. In the film, this is no problem, for the deaths above the railway station are scary and vivid. Onstage, they go for little.

The Critics material to read. Or angling-related music, anyway. It’s about time the fish had a voice. Even if it’s mine.” Final cast-iron tip: for nightmare-minimisation purposes, tune in at any moment to Net Station, Snow Hill Island, Antarctica (Anetstation.com) a non-commercial internet outfit with a lovely, perpetually low-level air of the dumpee. (“I've met someone else. His name is Shackleton and he’s a script consultant at the penguin rookery”). Here, guitar music solos stop and after a long, long pause, you realise that someone’s been playing live in the studio all this time. Things get said on this station that perilously skirt hippiedom but divert joyously from what a drag everything is: “Emotions are creatures of the jungle, people. Panic, and they devour. But remember: sometimes, when it’s least expected, we get a little help, a little extra, a little surprise, that makes us give thanks. Makes everything magical.” l newstatesman.com/writers/antonia_quirke

“Madam”

REX FEATURES

By Christopher Logue (1926-2011) Madam I have sold you an electric plug an electric torch an electric blanket an electric bell an electric cooker an electric kettle an electric fan an electric iron an electric drier an electric mixer an electric washer an electric knife an electric clock an electric fire an electric toothbrush an electric razor an electric teapot an electric eye and electric light. Allow me to sell you an electric chair.

REAL MEALS

Fast for Christmas; it might do you good Will Self

Well, here we all are – this is the last Real Meals of 2011 and I for one would like to go out with a bang, rather than a whimper. My charming editor at the Statesman suggested that I might like to write something “Christmassy” but why would I want to do that? I made my feelings about Christmas dinner perfectly clear in this column at about this time two years ago and they haven’t changed one jot during the intervening months. Frankly, I’m about as likely to set out on the highways and byways of Albion as a sannyasin as I am to begin at the age of 50 rhapsodising about a meal I’ve never ever enjoyed or even seen the point of. Actually, I’m a good deal more likely to become a mendicant, because if there’s one thing writing about food confirms me in, it’s my ever-lurking manorexia. I like to review fast food outlets rather than fancy restaurants because if there’s one virtue they have, it’s that they exist to satisfy the hunger of the masses, rather than to stimulate the jaded palates of the privileged few – it’s an axiom of gastronomy that the hungrier you are, the better something will taste and, when you’re starving, any old shit will do, so long as it has “US food aid programme” stencilled on it.

Up the sprout My late stepmother once served up a Christmas dinner at the picnic site on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin. I want you to picture the scene: the lake is an artificial one in the middle of the Australian federal capital, Canberra, and on the far shore, the parliament building rises up, a queer pre-postmodernist spaceship of a structure surmounted by what appears to be a giant hypodermic syringe. Possibly the architect’s idea was to suggest that the legislature needed injecting with a hefty dose of common sense, or irony, or both. In 44 degree heat, my stepmother doled out turkey, bread sauce, roast potatoes, sprouts . . . God love her, you might well say, and with the benefit of 20 years hindsight, I do feel that I cruelly misjudged her on that occasion. What aroused my scorn was the small charity collecting envelope she had put beside our plates that featured – if my memory serves me – a photograph of some Somali starvelings. Nothing, I withered at her, could be more calculated to ruin a feast than the

presence – even as representations – of these ghosts! Now I see that her reasoning – whether conscious or not – was perfect: Christmas dinner is a meal fit only for ruining, so why not cut to the chase. And if it offends you to think of all the bellies swollen with air, then I suggest you look away now and get back to pickling your nuts.

Roly poly According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s statistics, there were in 2010 925 million people in the world suffering from innutrition. Innutrition is the preferred term for starving nowadays since the ambit of malnutrition has been expanded to include the obese as well as the meagre. Actually, I think we can all benefit from this new form of usage over the festive season. When roly-poly Uncle Henry, or blubbery Auntie Roberta wallows along, why not greet them at the door saying, “My, you look awfully malnourished, you’d better come in . . .” The facts are that, despite all the love-bombing of Bono, Sir Bob, Tony “Granita” Blair and the rest, world innutrition levels have increased substantially since the mid-1990s. The reasons for this are obvious: the neglect of appropriate sufficiency agriculture by governments, the current world economic crisis and rising food prices. But as ever, the most significant impediment to Tiny Tim gorging himself on goose are the Scrooges of this world, who girdle the earth with the political equivalent of a gastric band so that not enough food reaches southern bellies. There’s more food being produced worldwide than a decade ago; unfortunately there is also more inequality, instability and in the past three years a huge upsurge in refugees, which is why around one-in-seven of the human family will be tucking into bugger-all on 25 December. Why not join them? I hold no brief for tokenistic charity efforts designed to make the moneyed feel better about their status but fasting is another matter: it clears the mind and concentrates the thoughts on both the spiritual verities and the hard realities of life. No wonder all serious religions include it as a key part of their practice. It’s very effective against malnutrition as well – at least, the sort we get down my way. l newstatesman.com/ writers/will_self

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 89

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

“MP3 player or a Brennan? I’ll have both thanks” says Jools Holland In a recent interview Jools reveals that, even though he owns an MP3 player, the ability of the Brennan JB7 to store, browse and play up to 5000 CDs* at the touch of a button, as well as record from CD, tape or vinyl at the very highest quality, makes it the perfect machine for his precious and unique music collection. Since getting my Brennan, some people have asked me why I don’t just have an MP3 player. Well I do, but I’ve got bucket loads of CD’s, yards of tapes and records and I wanted to record and listen to them at the highest quality. If you transfer something from one medium to another and then record it on to a CD, you don’t want to then degrade it again when you store it.

Thfeect Per ft! Gi VOTED ‘BEST BUY’ BY GRAMOPHONE MAGAZINE, WHAT HI-FI & SUNDAY TIMES “Many of my personal recordings in my collection are old and quite rare” For example, I made a film about the music of the film and TV composer Edwin Astley. When making it his family sent me some reel-to-reel tapes of his incidental music from films and dramas. It’s of its time and very charming. When making the film about him I put all his incidental music on to one CD. It is the sort of thing you couldn’t get anywhere. I also have things like a CD of myself and Willie Dixon, the greatest blues composer of all time, in New York together in the 1980’s. The other day somebody sent me a CD of me doing a solo show in Boston in 1981. It’s wonderful to have all of these memories on CD, but as we know, they’re quite fragile and have a limited life span.

An MP3 player typically records at 128 kilobits, whereas the Brennan starts at 192, goes up to 320 and then beyond that you can record uncompressed. My MP3 player is very handy to take on tour or on holiday, but if I want to archive something important I’ll use the Brennan. Downloading from the Internet isn’t bad, but for me it’s a little time consuming. I always want the easiest and fastest way to do something. If I had to unlock my piano, walk through a few hoops and put a password in before playing, it would be rather long winded and I’m not sure I could be bothered.

I’m not trying to load everything in one go. I’m going to slowly enjoy transferring them piece by piece gradually archiving my collection. On my Radio 2 show, I play a lot of blues and roots records. I trawl through a lot of music and I’m constantly at the song face. I’m looking forward to distilling the best of these blues records on to my Brennan. This also includes some 78 recordings I have and enjoy listening to on shellac.

“I’ve got drawers full of cassettes, boxes full of CDs and 28 feet of vinyl records, so I definitely needed a Brennan”

“It’s important for me not to forget the music that has touched me over the years”

Apart from recording quality, what I was really after from the Brennan was being able to archive a lot of my own music. The Brennan is a great way of distilling it all down to be able to enjoy it.

Album and track names are automatically added

“When CDs came out we all assumed you could use them as a Frisbee, spread jam on them and they would still work perfectly well” It turned out this was not the case. You might have noticed that some CD’s have the habit of not working, particularly the ones that you record yourself. These are exactly the sort of things I’m recording on to the Brennan, not just as a back up but so I can listen to them whenever I want without having to search for them.

“Digital break up is as irritating as dandruff”

Built-in hard drive – loading each CD takes JUST 3 - 4 MINUTES

It doesn’t really matter if a piece of music is 5 minutes old or 500 years old. When you hear it if it has the effect of lifting your human spirit then its done its job. My Brennan is enabling me to reconnect with a lot of my old music that did just that.

Find the music you want to hear in SECONDS

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Food | Drink | Competitions | Columns

Back Pages the reason Prince Hal will become a great king is that he drinks such a lot of it. Pepys boasted about the array of drink in his cellar as being more than any of his friends “ever had of his own at one time”. In his 1920 Notes on a Cellar-Book, George Saintsbury acknowledges that beer with breakfast is a bad idea, but adds that, just after, “strongish beer . . . is probatum of many choice scholars, good sportsmen, and, in the best sense of the term, men”.

Grab your goblet

Wafer-thin mint not provided: this is not the time of year for moderation, particularly where tippling is concerned

DRINK

Shout hosanna and raise the 27th glass Nina Caplan

LARS BORGES/ GETTY IMAGES

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hristmas – a time of inviolate traditions, when trees are decked and carols sung, and drink critics pontificate on the wines that best lubricate overcooked turkey. You’re all awash with those suggestions; my adding to them would be as surplus to requirements as another present under the tree. So I shall turn my attention to a matter close to my heart, and probably to yours, although you may not be willing to admit it: the licence Christmas offers to drink too much. We live in hypocritical times, so a paean to excessive drinking is unlikely to please some people. But then, as Kingsley

Amis – no slouch on the alcohol front – once said, if you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing. And the fact is, most of us do overdo it. We go out more, guzzle free refreshment at office parties and then, faced with that fearsome battalion, the family, reach for the nearest loaded glass. Still, let’s accentuate the positive. This is the time of year for goodwill and mercy mild; shouldn’t we apply them to ourselves, too? And, while the will must be good (I am not advocating drinking bad booze in any quantity), the mercy needn’t be all that mild. A good

Manzanilla, a big Rhône red or a fine Armagnac are all excellent adjuncts to Christmas and not one of them is under 14 per cent (in fact, the brandy will be around 40). What with cold weather, excessive socialising and the prospect of a few days off, there seems little reason, once we have found the tipple that works for us, to curb our thirst. Everything in moderation, of course, but that applies to moderation itself: forbearance is a very Puritan virtue, and I’ve always been more of a Cavalier. The odd thing about the British is not that we drink too much; it’s that we used to be so much better at it. Henry IV is full of unrepentant tippling, culminating in Falstaff’s exuberant claim that no amount of bravery or education is worth anything without sherry to fire it up, and that

It is true that most apostles of excessive drinking, right into the 20th century, have been men – often men not especially keen on women (the best-known exception is probably Dorothy Parker, though she didn’t like women much, either). So I am reclaiming fine drinking, in disproportionate quantities, for the modern gourmand of either sex. I am a five foot two female with a very hard head, but those who haven’t invested in my years of intensive training need not fear: if you become irritating, some kind soul, aflush with Yuletide altruism, will surely remove the goblet from your grasp. I, meanwhile, will start 25 December with Philipponnat Grand Blanc 2004 champagne, move on to Finca Allende’s 2008 white Rioja with my turkey, and will eschew Christmas pudding (horrid stuff) in favour of a Castelnau de Suduiraut 2009 Sauternes. Then cocktails: a good Martini is the closest to angel song that I am ever likely to get. Let’s be clear as vodka here. I am not praising drunkenness, merely condemning hypocrisy. We aren’t mealy-mouthed in any other sense at this time of year. Isn’t it time to shout hosanna and raise the 27th glass? l Next week: Jason Cowley on wine

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 91

Back Pages THE NS CHRISTMAS PRIZE CROSSWORD BY OTTERDEN: THREESOMES Solutions to the 15 clues marked * refer to just one member of a closely linked group of three fictitious characters, derived from a range including Greek mythology, Shakespeare and Disney to name a few. These solutions are not otherwise defined, but all other clues are normal.

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Down 1 Moors here once but soon to move to Salford Quays (7) 2 I have no room to study river creature (5) 3 *Union gets drink dispenser (9) 4 Flower not confined to eastern parts of Indonesia (7) 5 *This one or another version? (9) 6 *One is caught up in Iran upheaval (5) 7 Met to revamp iconic image (5) 8 *He was in doubt shortly after opening of academy (5) 9 Dead places with unfinished semierected new development (10) 15 Consider 29 and Leeds for instance (3) 16 Dump last of fertiliser in the river (3) 18 Risk assessor rescued company from unrestrained autocracy (7)

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Across 1/10 *Appalling parts of this scam follow a frightener (5,2,9,4) 11 Spare parts refurbished at brand new plant (9) 12 *Clamour to get right of reply (4) 13 *Troops on a manoeuvre (7) 14 Young bird makes easy sport with gun (4-6) 17 Sing wordlessly sounding like a tellytubby (2-2) 19 Examinations in choral singing(5) 20 Saved again from river by the sea (8) 23 Subtle alteration to rear extension (6) 25 Spike with two parts projecting (5) 26 *Derisory address once recalled (6) 27 *Motorway to South Africa has right turn (6) 29 Grave message to cricket side in Yorkshire (5) 31 Heading off embrace from one’s partner (6) 32 *A small thing to put up with (4,4) 35 Stopping for dinner at French city is more pleasant (5) 37 Brown’s friend eats out (4) 39 *Trees move spasmodically (5,5) 43 Transport to take one into slavery (7) 45 Sacred cow could be covered by prize bull (4) 46 *Offence got substantially reduced after compassion expressed (5-4) 47 *Foreign derivation does not concern editor (4) 48 *Mean tricks lacked resolve (11,5)

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20 *American president not having any inauguration! (5) 21 Homer’s exclamation at both ends of the scale (3) 22 He gets a role in reworking opening (3-4) 24 Lacking pictures around at home is unbelievable (10) 25 Implement stored in spare room (5) 28 Pick-up language (3) 30 Broad believer in his patent mixture (9) 31 Plan to get very large pastries to rise (9) 33 Take deliveries for tobacco company (3) 34 Auntie regularly sees a cuckoo (3) 36 Illness Sebastian about to have to suffer when returning (7) 38 Almost a model village as found at the seaside (4,3) 40Youngster in South Africa assists divers (5) 41 Made cleaner – as were many early TV shows (5) 42 Pupil who gets trade union support (5) 44 Further blacken king under restraint (2-3)

l This week’s solutions will be published

in the next issue of the NS dated 2 January 2012

92 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

Answers to crossword of 12 December 2011 Across 1) Strauss 5) Borodin 9) Hosts 10) Record bid 11) Molotov 12) Liszt 13) Its 15) Nielsen 17) Aye-aye 18) Ski 20) Dvorak 22) Nonagon 25) Yet 26) Ravel 27) Smetana 30) Hole-in-one 31) Grieg 32) Shingle 33) Surfeit Down 1) Schumann 2) Resolve 3) Upset 4) Stravinsky 5) Bach 6) Rural dean 7) Debussy 8) Nudity 14) Saint-Saëns 16) Strolling 19) Uncaught 21) Vivaldi 23) Granite 24) Brahms 28) Elgar 29) Sole

QUIZ ANSWERS Politics 1c Cat 2b “Easy meat” 3c A kitten 4a Angela Eagle 5c St James’s Park 6d Holding golliwog dolls 7d David Willetts 8c “Personal issues” International affairs 1c “Too effeminate” 2b “Oops” 3b Neptune Spear 4c Ruby 5d Salmon 6a Neil Kinnock 7b Platform cleaner 8d Frozen pizza 9c Salva Kiir 10d Liberation

11b Nigella Lawson

4b 43 per cent 5d Lady Gaga

Home affairs 1a A C Grayling 2a “Sod the Wedding – It’s a Day Off” 3c 50 per cent 4a Charlie Gilmore 5c Merton 6b £482m 7a AssureDNA 8c Leeds Metropolitan 9d Swan 10c £6.4m 11a House of Reeves

Arts 1b Lars von Trier 2d Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark 3a Ahmed Basiony 4a John Cleese 5d $400m

Online 1c Beyoncé’s pregnancy 2a Occupy 3c Samuel L Jackson

Television 1c Scooby-Doo 2c Glasgow 3a Australia 4b Highclere Castle 5a Alastair Campbell 6c Three weeks Media 1a A bedsheet 2b Anti-Muslim propaganda 3d GQ

4b Andrew Marr 5d 168 6b Liz Jones Books 1c P D James 2d 80 3a Martin Amis 4b Harper Lee Sport 1c He jumped off a ferry in Auckland 2d Yuvraj Singh 3a Fifa Quotes 1c Ed Miliband 2b In “all possible ways” 3b Hillsborough victims’ relatives 4a Rowan Williams 5d Steve Jobs

Back Pages THE NS CHRISTMAS PUZZLES BY OTTERDEN (SOLUTIONS ON PAGE 95) Elevated titles Senior politicians and other figures who are elevated to the Lords are given titles embodying place names of their choice. Link the following personages with the place/places in their baronial title. PEERS created (from 1970 on)

PLACES (in alphabetical order)

Emanuel Shinwell Quintin Hogg (Hailsham) Laurence Olivier George Brown Victor Feather Lew Grade Bernard Delfont Benjamin Britten Harold Wilson Jo Grimond Len Murray James Callaghan Roy Jenkins Margaret Thatcher Jeffrey Archer Richard Attenborough Colin Cowdrey Betty Boothroyd Michael Heseltine Philip Gould Neil Kinnock Peter Mandelson Michael Howard

Aldeburgh Bedwellty Bradford Brighton Brookwood Cardiff Easington Elstree Epping Forest/Telford Firth Foy/Hartlepool Hillhead/Pontypool Jevington Kesteven Lympne Richmond-upon-Thames Rievaulx/Kirklees Sandwell St Marylebone/Herstmonceux Stepney Thenford Tonbridge Weston-super-Mare/Mark

SUBSCRIBER OF THE WEEK

Andy Read What do you do? I’m director of fisheries for the Isle of Man government. Where do you live? Laxey, a lovely village on the east coast of the island. Do you vote? Always, but rarely with any pleasure. How long have you been a subscriber? Since 1996. Is the NS bug in the family? I’ve given a couple of gift subscriptions. How do you read yours? Late at night after my girls are tucked up in bed. What made you start? I was looking for some political analysis and depth that I wasn’t seeing in the broadsheets.

What pages do you flick to first? Political columns, then the main features. What would you like to see more of in the NS? Africa and Latin America seem to be off your radar. I am a cricket nut – more cricket please. Who’s your favourite NS blogger? I see quite enough of computer screens at work, thank you. Who would you put on the cover of the NS? John Smith. Labour has forgotten that it was electable without needing to betray its principles and roots. Which politicians would you least like to be stuck in a lift with? Thatcher and Blair. The New Statesman is . . . A welcome injection of ideas and information (usually!). l

Dingbats The positional make-up of the material in each box leads to a seasonal word, phrase or message (except 4 which points to the messenger)

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21 Positions Discover a title or phrase from the initial letters and the ordinal number given. FirstFOTL SecondDM CEOTThirdK TFirstPOKHTFourth FifthC IOTSixthH Seventh-DA EighthWOTW BNinthS SOTenthA ATeleventhH

OTTwelfthDOC FTThirteenth TFourteenthOJ-BD O-TFifteenthLOTA AL-SixteenthAP SOTSeventeenthD TEighteenthAIP SYATNineteethH TwentiethCF Twenty-firstBP

THE RETURNING OFFICER

called Member of Parliament. On 19 December he went to the carol service at Highbury Grove School, where the headmaster was the future Tory MP Rhodes Boyson. And on 23 December he noted that there was a day of adjournment debates but, because nobody much turned up, “It was a good chance to do a spot of belated Christmas shopping.” Jamaica goes to the polls on 29 December. Portia SimpsonMiller (the country’s first female prime minister in 2006-2007) of the People’s National Party will be hoping to defeat the current PM, Andrew Holness of the Jamaica Labour Party. l Stephen Brasher

Crackers There are two Christmas islands. One is a territory of Australia in the Indian Ocean and for electoral purposes is part of the Lingiari division of the Australian parliament, currently represented by Labor’s Warren Snowdon. The second is one of the Line Islands, part of the Republic of Kiribati. In 2003 the presidency was won by Anote Tong, who beat his brother Harry by 13,556 votes to 12,457. John Grant was MP for Islington East/Central (1970-83) leaving Labour for the SDP in 1981. In 1973 he kept a diary of his political year,

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 93

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12WEEKS FOR JUST £12 “Penny is reinventing the language of dissent, causing apoplexy among the old men in cardigans who run the British blogosphere” Paul Mason,economics editor of the BBC’s Newsnight

Start your trial subscription today, go online at:

www.newstatesman.com/link/pen or call freephone 0800 7318496 *for the first 20 subscriptions New Statesman Vol 140 No 5084, 5085 Please note that all submissions to the letters page, our competitions and reader offers are accepted solely subject to our terms and conditions: details available on request or on our website. ISSN 1364-7431 USPS 382260 Subscription Rates: (institutional rates in brackets): UK £120 (£145), Airmail Europe (inc Irish Republic) £135/€200 (£180/€220); Rest of world Airmail: £165 (£230); USA $275 ($365); Canada $420 ($455). Quarterly/half-yearly rates at pro-rata. Subscribers paying by direct debit will, after any initial offer, be debited at the standard rate. Syndication/Permissions/Archive: Email: [email protected]. Printed by BGP Ltd, tel: +44 (0)1869 363364. Distribution by Comag. New Statesman (ISSN 1364-7431) is published weekly by New Statesman Ltd, 7 Carmelite Street,London EC4Y 0BS, UK. Registered as a newspaper in the UK and USA

94 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

Back Pages THE NS COMPETITION

No 4206

Answers to puzzles from page 93

CAPTION OF THE WEEK

Set by Brendan O’Byrne We wanted lyrics from “Occupy: the Musical”. This week’s winners Well done. Pats on backs all round! £25 to the winners, with the Tesco vouchers going, in addition, to Brian D Allingham for added oomph. And finally, a very Happy Christmas to you all – and please look out for the Top Ten winners of 2011, which will be published some time in January . . . Oh, What a Beautiful Protest There’s a bright yellow tent on the meadow; There’s a whole bunch of tents on the meadow. That guy is as high as the archdeacon’s eye, And he thinks that he’s floating clear up to the sky. Chorus: Oh, what a beautiful Protest. Oh, what a left-leanin’ day. I’ve got a self-righteous feelin’ We’ll change the world this way.

REX FEATURES

All the clergy are puzzled and flurried And the MPs are def’nitely worried. They don’t turn their heads as we sneak home to bed; And the Daily Mail says we are commies and reds. Chorus All the papers are off’ring us money. And the Murdochs – they don’t think it’s funny. The brokers are bust and the system will rust. And what we are asking is only what’s just. Chorus Brian D Allingham We Occupy, We Occupy Camps are settin’ up all over In London in New York and in Rome Though the politicians mutter Want to sweep us in the gutter We tell ’em we ’aint going home Chorus: We occupy, we occupy Fair shares for all, our battle cry

What was the former Mr Katie Price trying to convey to the mysterious Mayor?

WINNER 05/12 Bill Clinton to Haiti’s PM, Garry Conille, as he lays the first stone of the industrial park: “Is that oil I see down there? Prepare for an invasion!” (Peter Wilkening) Runner-up Clinton: “OK, so that’s what happened to Papa Doc!” (Phil Lee) Max 20 words by 29 December on a postcard, please, or email to: [email protected]

No more banks to save by bailin’ Gravy trains we want de-railin’ Sky-high salaries will vanish And dodgy hedge funds banish. Chorus Occupation all the winter Through wind, rain, ice and sleet and snow Bonuses we swear to batter Stop the fat cats getting fatter Capitalists have got to go. Lisbeth Rake Squatters’ Song We are the very model of the movement you call Occupy, We seek social improvement ’cos the status quo has ossified, Until the day the City’s shot and Cleggeron is crossified We’ll squat here in St Paul’s and behind Church of

England crosses hide. We’d sooner squat in banks but they won’t let us on their property And so we sit pontificating on the weak economy, We’ve urged the clergy to read Marx via needle-eye and dromedary But they just get frocked up, intoning yet more Deuteronomy. Adrian Fry The next challenge No 4209 Set by Gavin Ross After the outcry over Clarkson’s “joke”, we want complaints about famous humorists of the past, eg, Thomas Hood, Edward Lear, Feste. Max 125 words by 5 January [email protected]

In association with

Elevated titles Emanuel Shinwell-Easington; Quintin Hogg-St Marylebone/ Herstmonceux; Laurence OlivierBrighton; George BrownJevington; Victor FeatherBradford; Lew Grade-Elstree; Bernard Delfont-Stepney; Benjamin Britten-Aldeburgh; Harold Wilson-Rievaulx/ Kirklees; Jo Grimond-Firth; Len Murray-Epping Forest/Telford; James Callaghan-Cardiff; Roy Jenkins-Hillhead/Pontypool; Margaret Thatcher-Kesteven; Jeffrey Archer-Weston-superMare/Mark; Richard Attenborough-Richmond-uponThames; Colin CowdreyTonbridge; Betty BoothroydSandwell; Michael HeseltineThenford; Philip GouldBrookwood; Neil KinnockBedwellty; Peter MandelsonFoy/ Hartlepool; Michael Howard-Lympne Christmas Dingbats 1) Noel 2) Turkey leftovers 3) Boxing Day 4) New Statesman 5) The Seasons Greetings 6) Puss in Boots 7) Reindeer 8) Fairy on the tree 9) Peace on Earth 10) Midnight Mass 11) Christmas Broadcast 12) Opening presents 21 positions a) First foot on the ladder, b) Second degree murder, c) Close Encounters of the Third Kind, d) The First Part of King Henry the Fourth (first folio title), e) Fifth column, f) Inn of the Sixth Happiness, g) Seventh-Day Adventist, h) Eighth Wonder of the World, i) Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, j) Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, k) At the eleventh hour, l) On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, m) Friday the Thirteenth, n) The Fourteenth of July-Bastille day, o) O-the fifteenth letter of the alphabet, p) Abraham Lincoln Sixteenth American President, q) Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, r) 1920The Eighteenth Amendment introduced prohibition, s) See you at the Nineteenth hole, t) Twentieth Century Fox, u) Twenty-first birthday party

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 95

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Backpages THE FAN

Joking around the Christmas tree Hunter Davies

This is the season to laugh at football, for football is a joke, you have to laugh. Over the generations jokes have come in different forms and sizes. Period jokes I have in front of me some football programmes from 1907 which are full of real corkers. * Why is a keen footballer like a fretful child? Because he is always ready for a bawl. * Boy: Can I go out and play football? Mum: Not with those socks full of holes. Boy: No with Harry next door, he’s got a proper football. * Schoolboy: We’d have won the game if our captain hadn’t lost his head. Mother: Goodness, was it as bad as that? I heard it was a only an ear. Cracker jokes * Why is a failed manager like Santa Claus? They both get the sack. * What gloves can a goalie see and smell but not wear? Foxgloves. * Why did the winning team spin their trophy round and round? It was the Whirled Cup. * Why was Cinderella rubbish at football? She ran away from the ball. * Why was the mummy no good at football? He was too wrapped up in himself. * Why did the dog refuse to play football ? Because it was a boxer. * What do you call the girl who stands at the end of the pitch and catches the ball? Annette.

* What did the manager do when the pitch got flooded? Sent on a sub. * Why did Peter Crouch? Because he saw Darren Bent Famous names Jokes have always been told about famous players and managers – some of them could even have been true * In the 1870s, Lord Kinnaird, later president of the FA, was known for getting stuck in when he played for Old Etonians. “I worry that one day he will come home with a broken leg,” his mother said to the team captain. “Don’t worry, my lady,” was the reply, “it won’t be his own.” * Stanley Matthews was so fast that he could turn the light off at the bedroom door and be under the blankets before the room got dark. * Bill Shankly was asked if it was true he took his wife to see Liverpool reserves as a wedding anniversary treat. “That’s a lie. It was her birthday.” * Brian Clough was in bed with his wife. “God, your feet are cold,” she says. “You can call me Brian in bed, dear” says Clough. * Victoria Beckham comes home and finds her husband David jumping up and down in excitement. “43 days!”, he shouts. “I’ve finished this jigsaw in 43 days!” “What’s so good about that?”

asks Posh. “Well,” says David, “it says three to six years on the box.” * Fabio Capello is wheeling his trolley in a supermarket when he notices a sweet old lady struggling with her bags. “Can you manage, dear,” he asks her. To which the not so sweet old lady replies, “You got yourself into this fucking mess, don’t ask me to sort it out.” Topical jokes * “If Glenn Hoddle found God,” said Jasper Carrott, “it must have been a hell of a long pass.” * Osama bin Laden had just released a new TV message to prove he was still alive. In it he said that England’s performance in their last game had been complete shite. British intelligence dismissed the tape, stating that the message could have been recorded any time in the past 44 years. Malapropisms – or similar * “I hate perception. There’s too much of it in football” – Sam Allardyce * “Even if the keeper could have saved it, it would have gone in the back of the net” – Les Ferdinand * “What Newcastle lack is a lack of pace” – Charlie Nicholas. * “Robert Mancini’s got that Italian style of play, that old joie de vivre” – Perry Groves * “When you

play midfield, you got to have two legs” – Steve Lomas * “The Boss told us if we win today, we’ll be immortal for the rest of our lives” – Derek Johnstone Cartoons Hard to describe in words, obviously,but my old fave is still one from the 1930s, which shows a tout selling tickets outside Wembley. “Twenty pound for a ticket!” complains a fan, “You could get a woman for that.” “Yes,” says the tout, “but you won’t get 45 minutes each way and a brass band playing in the middle”. Funny facts * Did you know that Hull City is the only English league club where you can’t fill in any of the letters in its name? * You must have followed the saga of Spurs and West Ham arguing about moving to the Olympic site – but did you know that West Ham United is an anagram of The New Stadium? Crowd chants Most, of course, are not repeatable but a new one has been heard this season whenever Brighton, currently doing so well in the Championship, has been playing away, showing that all of England is well aware of Brighton’s reputation. “Does your boyfriend know you’re here,” shout the home fans. “You’re too ugly to be gay,” reply the Brighton fans. l newstatesman.com/ writers/hunter_davies

GETTY IMAGES (BECKHAM)

THIS ENGLAND Each printed entry will receive a £5 book token. Entries to [email protected] or on a postcard to This England, address on page 3 Van gosh! A suspect was driven a few steps from a police station to a court in

a van that had been sent more than 96 miles after prison transport chiefs said it was a human-rights issue. The suspect, Oliver Thomas, 27, arrested for two alleged publicorder offences, said: “Why they couldn’t just walk me over to the court I don’t know. It’s a total

waste of taxpayers’ money.” Metro (Ron Rubin) Flat fare A student with a bus pass was charged a full adult fare for a lifesized cardboard cut-out. Liam Sheridan, 17, paid an extra £1.80 to get the figure, from the Xbox

game Gears of War 3, back home. The driver, in Milton Keynes, said he had to charge as the cutout took up a seat. A spokesman for bus company Arriva said they would be unable to comment until an investigation had taken place. Metro (Imogen Forster)

19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012 | NEW STATESMAN | 97

Tim Minchin | Backpages

I love Christmas, for its fictions as much as its feasts

Beardy weirdy But now something in the assertion of the existence of this bearded philanthropist had given her pause, so she had come to me for clarification. I wasn’t surprised – earlier in the year I’d overheard a conversation she’d had with her friend Alice as they sat by a lake: Violet If you fell in there, you’d drown. Alice Someone would come and pull you out. Violet Yeah, but if the grown-ups weren’t around, you’d die. Alice [Pause] When you die, you go somewhere lovely. Violet But then how would you

know it’s lovely? You wouldn’t have your eyes and ears. . . . an incomplete but still pretty damning dismantling of the infantile idea that we (to quote my editor) survive our own deaths. Violet has always been obsessed by what is “real”. Figuring out what truly exists seems to be the way she deals with her fears. Most of the time when she asks if something is real, she’s hoping it’s not: trolls, dragons and witches have all been happily relegated to the fiction bin and she sleeps well in the knowledge that they’re not going to crawl back out and attack her in her bed. And so I face a dilemma: I had sold her the myth of Father Christmas in the spirit of allowing a child a sense of wonderment, but I felt that lying to her face when she’d asked me point blank about the veracity of my claims was a step too far. I fumbled around a bit before opting for: “Father Christmas is real . . . in the imaginary world.” This didn’t really satisfy her, nor should it have. Like so much language in theology, philosophy and parenting, that sentence has the odour of wisdom, but is a load of old bollocks. Quite nice as a phrase, but pure sophistry, like a lot of the stuff I say on stage and like nearly everything your preacher has ever said. It is the stuff of obfuscation – words to divert, like the passive hand of the magician – not the clarification Vi was seeking. But I suppose my answer served a function. She subsequently went along with the story and I reckon she will again this year. By offering her the paradoxical notion of a non-real real, I allowed her the opportunity to just “go with it” and hopefully she’ll happily do so until her friends find out it’s a myth, at which point she can quietly slip back into knowing what she suspected all along.

98 | NEW STATESMAN | 19 DECEMBER 2011 – 1 JANUARY 2012

There’ll be no crushing blow of revelation aged seven. I have, on the other hand, felt no compulsion to obscure answers to the more serious questions. Vi was very young when she asked what happens when you die, and I told her, “You just stop.” I see no problem at all with that answer. Not only is it demonstrably true, but it also has the wondrous quality of not eliciting a whole lot of further annoying questions.

Story time I was asked recently how I reconcile my reputation for championing a naturalistic world-view with the fact that I have co-written Matilda – a musical based on a Roald Dahl novel about a girl who is preternaturally gifted and, eventually, telekinetic. What an odd question. Do people really think that living a life unencumbered by superstition necessitates the rejection of fiction? I adore stories. Our version of Matilda, even more so than the original Dahl, is a story about stories. About the importance of imagination, and of fiction’s ability not only to educate and enlighten us, but to free us, to set our minds soaring beyond reality. My daughter will grow up reading stories and I hope she will have a rich and lifelong relationship with the imaginary. But I will not try to train her out of the natural instinct to look for truth. I adore Christmas. The fact that I know that Christianity’s origins lie more in Paul of Tarsus’s mental illness and the emperor Constantine’s political savvy than in the existence of the divine has no bearing on my ability to embrace this age-old festival of giving, family and feasting. Our lives would be empty without stories, and the story of Jesus is quite a nice one. One that, in theory and sometimes even in practice, promotes compassion and humility and wisdom and peace. Jesus is real . . . in the imaginary world. A fiveyear-old could tell you that. l Tim Minchin is a comedian. His musical version of “Matilda”, co-written with Dennis Kelly, is being performed at the Cambridge Theatre, London WC2. Details: cambridgetheatrelondon.org newstatesman.com/subjects/comedy

REX

In the lead-up to last Christmas, when my daughter Violet had just turned four, she looked me in the eye and asked, “Is Father Christmas real?” This was a problem for me. I had, up until this point, convinced myself that telling my kid a lie about the origins of her scooter was part and parcel of parenting – that denying a child the idea of Santa would be Scroogian in the extreme. The trouble is, I have no memory of believing in the physics-defying fattie myself. One of our classic Minchin family tales is of Christmas Eve 1978, when I was three and my mum asked me in an excited voice, “Who’s coming down the chimney tonight?!” To which I replied, after a brow-creased pause, “Gran?” (It is also part of Minchin lore that I was a very boring and quite dim kid.) Regardless, our Violet had seemed quite excited the previous year when we had left a mince pie and a beer by the blocked-up chimney – (Violet: “But there’s no hole. How will he get down?” Me: “That’s the least of his worries . . .”) – and I’d felt great when she’d squealed with glee at five in the (fucking) morning upon discovering the comestibles had been consumed and that a reindeer had left hoof-prints in the icing sugar by the piano.

CHICAGO CHICAGO CHICAGO CHICAGO

CHICAGO CHICAGO

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FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LIBRARY

Photography and Jazz 8[d`Wc_d9Wmj^hW

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“A good introduction to the works of a complex man, it adroitly places Niebuhr’s thought among the twentiethcentury intellectual milieu that Mr Diggins spent a lifetime studying.”—Economist

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“Benjamin Cawthra, writing with grace and a formidable command of jazz history and American culture, makes us see the sounds, the social relations, and the myths of jazz.”—John Gennari, author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool

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The children’s books and posters in this catalog plot the development of a new image culture alongside the formation of new social and cultural identities. PAPER £8.00

CLOTH £29.00

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Natural gas – abundant, flexible and central to meeting Europe’s energy needs and challenges A world leader in natural gas www.bg-group.com