Only connect
EM Forster's words resonate as the world appears to fragment
But, only if we let it. Human agency is what we all have to cling onto, that and each other, to a greater or lesser extent. We’ve grown complacent, allowing our own ability to affect our everyday lives to be eroded in so many ways. Time to flex that mental muscle again. And, please don’t over reach for the sick bowl: take back control. But, to do that, we have to stop believing the neo-liberal lie that we’re all just single actors in a deadly zero sum game where each is pitted against the other and which always ends one way: survival of the (largely inherited) richest.
We need to rebuild face-to-face human communities. It starts in my street, your street, and moves on up and outward, a gathering together until the centres of power are forced to listen and to act. Why do we feel so isolated/ George Monbiot says this: ‘I believe part of the answer lies in a fundamental aspect of our humanity: the urge to destroy that from which you feel excluded.’
He continues: ‘This urge, I think, is crucial to understanding politics. Yet hardly anyone seems to recognise it. Hardly anyone, that is, except the far right, who see it all too well. There is strong evidence of a causal association between growing inequality and the rise of populist authoritarian movements.
‘Why might this be? There are various, related explanations: feelings of marginalisation, status anxiety and social threat, insecurity triggering an authoritarian reflex [see Theodore Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality] and a loss of trust in other social groups. At the root of some of these explanations, I feel, is something deeply embedded in the human psyche: if you can’t get even, get mean.’ [my emphasis]
Which neatly brings me back to my point: to break out of this cycle of despair and hopelessness, to unpick the vicious and pernicious petty meanness of the exclusion of groups you are endlessly told are the problem to your individual woes, your poverty perhaps, your failure to secure a good job, yourchildren’s bad education, you and me have to reconnect.
It starts with your neighbours (I am taking as given the ‘natural’ connection of family and friends). You don’t have to be best buddies, just get to know them, acknowledge them for the similarities and the differences, understand their problems, which are likely to be very like your own. That localism can extend to the broader perspective of hamlet, village or town – even cities.
Cities are all alike insofar as, like London (where I lived off and on for more than three decades, in seven very different locations) are as has so often been noted, just dense collections of villages (mine in London were Blackheath, Peckham, Bloomsbury, Chiswick, Ealing, Bermondsey and Fulham). It has been said that villages are the biggest entities in which people can comfortably live together, once again emphasising the local community level of engagement. Towns, too, can be ‘zoned’ as collections of smaller ‘villages’.
The fragmentation of modern life – the sociologists call its worst aspects anomie – aided and abetted by anti-social media which less connects than divides into warring factions of angry, helpless individuals railing against their perceived impotence, can only be ended by that simplest of human actions: real life contact. So, the next time you leave your front door, say good day to the first person you meet, look to provide a simple act of kindness to a stranger, maybe lost in your neighbourhood.
You may be surprised at how good it makes you feel. So, only connect. What else do we have that distinguishes us from social and personal oblivion?
Land of lost content
It is all too easy to view the past through rose-tinted spectacles, most of all one’s childhood. In my case, the truth is those times were as good and idyllic as if in a storybook. We lived on the edge of a market town, the countryside was close by. We children, from a young age (six or seven) roamed the woods and fields, made shelters from fallen branches in the woods, lit fires (!!!), got chased out of orchards whence we had gone to snaffle fruit by enraged farmers. We were as good as ordered to get lost by our parents in the holidays but, equally fiercely, enjoined not to ‘get into any kind of trouble’.
Our parents’ biggest fear was the shame of a stern constable at the door, seeking to admonish for some transgression that had gone noticed. It happened to me once, when, with a bunch of friends, we had discovered it was much more fun to come home from primary school by jumping over the school playground wall, sliding down a steep embankment and walking up the main railway line. I (we) was caught because the finish of this adventure involved crossing a neighbour’s back garden; she saw me. Shock, horror and, yes, shame (for getting caught, actually).
Our childhoods then were devoid of the internet, mobile phones, cars (mostly). We had our bikes to ride: along the main roads (busy but not lethal) we hurtled. There were, undoubtedly, the exact same proportion of paedophiles (we were told to keep clear of ‘funny’ men, and that was that). Innocent, up to a point (my friends and I made a huge quantity of high explosives, including nitro-glycerine) but gloriously free. We survived measles, mumps, whooping cough and polio outbreaks (there was no vaccines for these diseases of largely poverty in my early childhood) but, by Zeus, we lived. I could weep for those halcyon days.
But, we were firmly told to be seen and not heard when adults were in the room (not that we wanted to be in the same space; yuk!) and we were not ever helicoptered by them. There was a code among us of self-discipline. We were, within the confines of any childhood, happy and content. We made our own entertainment; in my house, we didn’t have a television. For games, we joined with others in real life; we were never isolated, never felt alone. We were definitely never targeted, either by commerce (we had no money to speak of), nor toxic sites seeking to suborn us in any way.
Today, we have this kind of absolute horror. Lucy Mangan is discussing the rise and, if not fall, the forcible diversification of child-then-teen social media star Piper Rockelle and her mother and manager, Tiffany Smith. After Rockelle’s success within the bizarre American phenomenon that is the toddler and child pageantry circuit, Smith took her on to social media. ‘To increase her daughter’s appeal and her YouTube channel views and follower numbers.
‘Smith gradually added other children – friends? performers? – to Rockelle’s videos, and they became known and loved by their ever-growing audience as “the Squad”. Smith’s much younger boyfriend, Hunter Hill, would film the videos as she directed. At her peak, Rockelle was making more than half a million dollars a month from her content.
‘In 2022, 11 former members of the Squad filed a lawsuit filed against Smith and Hill, alleging violations of child labour laws, alongside being subject to “inappropriate, offensive and abusive treatment” including “wildly offensive and sexually explicit comments” from Smith. One former member, Corinne, says she remembers at the age of 12 or 13 going to a post office with Smith, who was sending off what appeared to be a package of Rockelle’s underwear. When she asked why, she says Smith declared: “Old men like to smell it.”’
The commodification (and casual sexualisation) of childhood: that’s neo-liberalism for you. Time to give children their childhood back. We owe it to them: just as the saying goes, we are not giving our children their future, we are borrowing it from them.
I cannot refrain ending this week by quoting AE Housman (writing about his childhood). He was killed early in the First World War, part of that ‘lost generation’ of youth.
He wrote: ‘That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain. The happy highways where I went…and cannot come again.’
This week: Tim watched What They Found, ‘directed’ by Sam Mendes, and on BBC iPlayer for a year, drawing on official British army film photography made by two sergeants of the army film unit on entering Belsen in April, 1945. It is utterly appalling, sparing the viewer – why should it? – none of the stark horrors of the camp the British army stumbled across. [A rare warning from me: this is not for the squeamish.] The most telling comment is from one of the film-makers who, interviewed in the 1980s, says, ‘I realised that any nation of people could do this. There was nothing uniquely German about it at all’. Right now, with Trump and his vile mafia (scum rises to the top) in charge of the USA, gleefully demonising immigrants (less than human, at least one of his followers has posted), his words send out a message we all need to heed.
Quote of the week: a little light relief. Martin Bell, the former BBC international correspondent and independent MP, has posted this clerihew:
His tariffs were imposed on every nation
Regardless of their size and population
His people sang a plaintive song
‘The penguins have abused us for too long’.
Music of the week: Berlioz’s mighty (90 minutes) Requiem Mass (Grande Messe des Morts), with its 16 kettledrums and four brass bands (originally to be placed in the corners of Notre Dame when the mass, as intended, was to be played to an audience gathered for an imperial funeral, like that of Napoleon II; that never happened). I saw a performance of this work at the RAH, conducted by Davis (qv) where the brass bands were placed in four of the boxes spread right round the hall. It’s overblown music but equally magnificent, glorious and moving. The Des Irae is almost as superb as the Verdi version but the Tuba Mirum is better. There is a splendid (1970) version by Colin Davis with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (and the Wandsworth Boys Choir). The double Philips CD also contains Berlioz’s sublime Te Deum.