Author: jamescalumcampbell

Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary in England, has made a speech to the Royal College of Physicians in London, entitled “The Future of Healthcare”, in which he has called for an end to routine face-to-face appointments with GPs.  He also said that even in some emergencies, people should try to go online before turning up at “A & E” (sic).  He is hailing a new era of “Zoom Medicine”.  He says we don’t need to attend our GP surgery “unless there is a compelling clinical reason”.  He also said that following the pandemic the NHS “must not fall back into bad old habits”.

Response from the medical profession has been typically low key.  Professor Martin Marshall, Chair of Council, Royal College of General Practice, has acknowledged that the Covid pandemic has altered the way GPs practise.  Previously, 75% of GP consultations were face to face.  During the height of lockdown, it fell to 15%, and has now risen to about 30%.  Prof Marshall thinks it might settle down at about 50:50.  He is not comfortable with the “remote by default” position.  It doesn’t feel very patient-centred to him.  He also points out that remote medicine will not be an attractive career option for junior doctors.

For the doctors’ union, The British Medical Association, Dr Richard Vautrey has said, “If doctors are given access to the right technology, they will embrace it.  However, (Matt Hancock’s) suggestion that all appointments going forward will be remote by default must be approached with caution.”

All very nuanced.

The subject was raised on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions.  The responses from the panel were predictable: an acknowledgement that the ability to consult remotely has been a boon during the pandemic when we have had few other options, tempered by an appreciation that a face-to-face consultation must inevitably be a better means of communication for both patient and doctor.  The issue came up again on Any Answers, and Dr Carey Lunan phoned in to draw attention to the many disadvantages of remote consulting, as well as to question the assumption that consulting by video saves time.  I think it would have been helpful if she had stated that she is Chair of RCGP Scotland.  She drew particular attention to the many groups of vulnerable patients who would struggle to cope with remote technology, as well as to the advantages of face-to-face consultation.

It strikes me that there is something very odd about Mr Hancock (PPE, Oxford, MPhil, economics, Cambridge) telling a bunch of physicians, (MB ChB, FRCP etc) how to practise their craft.  Well, not really their craft, because Mr Hancock is primarily talking about the delivery of primary care.  Physicians in internal medicine by and large don’t see patients who haven’t already been seen by a GP or an emergency physician.  They might have said to Mr Hancock, with some justification, “Well, we are actually doing what you ask already.  Our colleagues in primary care communicate with us; we vet the referrals and issue advice or arrange to see the patient if required.”  So why didn’t Mr Hancock address the Royal College of General Practitioners rather than the Royal College of Physicians?  Did he have a sense that the audience he chose would give him an easier ride?

But is it not passing strange that an economist should tell a doctor how to do his job?  Imagine the Minister of Transport addressing BALPA, the pilot’s union, and saying, “From now on, you’re grounded.  With drone technology, you can fly the A380 to New Zealand, and back, and never leave Surrey.  No jet lag.  Much more efficient.”

But to return to the Health Minister, given that he addressed his remarks to the wrong college, we may suppose his approach has not been very collegiate.  It doesn’t appear as if he has consulted extensively with the medical profession to come up with his Zoom plan.  This sounds much more like a directive from on high.

The medical profession must be much more robust in telling Mr Hancock not to dictate how medicine is to be practised.  The idea that a Zoom consultation should be superior to a face-to-face encounter is preposterous, chiefly because remote physical examination is impossible.  Once again, the sanctity of the medical consultation is coming under attack.  We must put this attack in historical context.  In 2005 when GPs handed out-of-hours care over to health boards, they gave up power as well as responsibility.  As a result, a third party entered the consulting room, the poltergeist within the computer screen – the Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF) – dictating how GPs should work.  Now that Mr Hancock wants to digitise primary care, the big tech companies are itching to manage our data.  Zoom Medicine will be the QOF on steroids.

Medicine is fundamentally a “hands on” profession.  No medical students will contemplate a career in general practice because they will not wish to spend all day staring at a computer screen.  If no GPs are trained, general practice will collapse.  If general practice collapses, the public hospitals will come under enormous pressure and they, too, will collapse.  The only winners will be the patients who can afford to consult their physician in the private sector, who in turn will be delighted to see them, in person.

Fortunately, here, north of the border, health is devolved.   We don’t need to go down Mr Hancock’s dreadful path.

‘Would to God that all the Lord’s people were Prophets.’

Numbers, xi. ch., 29 v.

 

Dear Brother Suetonius,

Greetings from the edge of the world, believe it or not, my birthplace, here in the farthest reaches of the Empire. I came up yesterday with a detachment of the legion from the fort at Kalendrium.  I was curious to revive the memories of my childhood.  Did I ever tell you that my father had been Caesar’s envoy, charged to treat with the local King Mettalanus?  The King occupied a fortress at the end of a very long, gloomy and savage defile.  There is a monk’s cell by a river at the foot of an escarpment, and a village, more a shanty town of miserable hovels, if the truth be told.  The people are reserved, yet friendly enough, and happy to deal.  Trade is our only interest, not conquest.  Why would we wish to conquer this desperate wilderness?  The winters are protracted, cold, wet, and wretched.  The landscape?  Steep mountains separated by narrow lakes.  The gods only know what lies further to the north.  There are scatterings of remote tribes, endlessly warring with one another.   Rumour has it there is a large island shortly across the sea where the sun sets, but the 59^th legion has no wish to explore there.

For the moment, it is summer, and everything is lush green profusion.  There is a tree here, a yew.  It is very old.  The natives say it has already been here for a hundred generations, but can that be possible?  Would that not make the tree older than the earth itself?  And how could people know such a thing?  Children have always climbed this yew – I did so myself!  We played under its protective foliage, as did our fathers.  And the next generation will do the same.  Hence the tree becomes the stuff of legend.

So, yesterday being a hot and sunny afternoon, I wanted to sit in my old familiar place.  Sure enough, a swarm of ragamuffins were playing a game around the yew’s broad trunk.  They were excessively noisy.  I shooed them away.  You know I am quite patient with children, but I confess I was already irritated.  There is a species of mosquito peculiar to these parts, which thrives in a warm and humid atmosphere, causing an intensely itchy eruption of the skin, a scrofulous inflammation, which, if unchecked, can drive a man to insanity.  I fear my pelt to be particularly sensitive to this intolerable affliction.  Why, had I been in Rome I might have been cast out as a leper!

Once the children had retreated I sat down in the shade with my back to the trunk.  A voice very close to me said, “You ought not to send them away.  They are what keeps the tree alive.”  I started.  The only living creature I could see close by was a tethered white colt, grazing peacefully by a hedgerow.

A tall young man in a rather fashionable white robe, unbidden, sat down beside me.  You may imagine I was minded to censure him for his gross impertinence, but I did not.  I was completely taken aback, because he addressed me in Aramaic.  Instead, I remarked, “Pestiferous urchins!  Their incomprehensible and incessant jabber would drive any man to distraction.”

“Really?  I find the cadences of their speech to be soft and beguiling.  I believe theirs is a very ancient tongue.”

“As ancient as this tree?  They say it is as old as the pyramids.  And they are indeed from the realm of prehistory.  You have travelled in Egypt?”

“Once.  My parents took me.  But I was very young, and have little recollection.  There was trouble at home, in Judea.”

“There’s always trouble in Judea.  You’re a long way from home!”

“As are you.”

“What brings you here?”

“The Imperial Fleet.  A hewer of wood can always find work on a ship.  My father has allowed me to travel before I return home to start my career.  I believe our scholastics call such a break between study and work, an hiatus.  I have walked upon this island’s green and pleasant southern reaches.  Mind, I think I prefer this more rugged, northern wildness.  But, like you, I am soon to return across Mare nostrum.  Perhaps we will travel aboard the same vessel.”

“You seem to anticipate my movements.”

“You are required to take the post of prefect at Caesarea.  You lack enthusiasm for the task, because the peoples of the east are fretful.  They are born to trouble.  Yet for you it is a step closer to Rome.”

“You must not believe everything that is written in the military gazettes.”

“I never read them.”

“Then you should not gossip with the soldiers in the taverns.  But to what station do you yourself aspire?  What are you going back to?”

“My life’s work.”

“Carpentry?”

“The construction of household furniture, or indeed of ships, has been important to me.  Someone who exercises the faculties of mind and spirit should also be practical, and live in the real world.  The head controls the hand, but the hand also informs the head.”

“And how do you intend to use your head?”

“I will embark upon my mission.”

“Mission?”

“To teach.”

“Is that a life time’s work?”

“I anticipate, three years.”

“What will you teach?”

“That which my father tells me.”

“Do you always do as your father instructs you?”

“He is very loving.  He allows me great freedom.  Yet in some things, we are of one mind.”

“And whom will you teach?”

“Whoever cares to listen.”

“All right.  I’m listening.”

He smiled, and absentmindedly drew patterns with a finger, in the dust.  “My time has not yet come.”

“What will be your teaching method?”

“I will tell stories.”

“To what end?  What is your purpose?”

“I am going to turn the world upside down.”

Suetonius, I remember at this point I took a deep breath and let it out slowly through pursed lips.  I suppose I should have told him to shut his mouth, but the truth is I rather liked this young man.  He had a combination of strength and vulnerability quite unlike anything I’d ever come across.  I merely said to him, “My young friend, we can sit here, you and I, on the edge of the world and talk metaphysics to while away an idle afternoon, but when we return to the centre of the world, I strongly advise you to be guarded in what you teach.  The emperor Tiberius is a benevolent and humane ruler, but he would not wish to have the world turned upside down.  He believes in tranquillity and cohesion in a world in which each knows his place.  If you insist in inverting the social order, then some people must be cast down, just as others must be elevated.  Who would you elevate?”

He rapidly enumerated a list; he’d clearly thought it through.  “Those who are sick at heart, bereft, downtrodden, disenfranchised, yet still forgiving, sincere, calm, graceful under pressure, especially when reviled under false accusation.”

“Ha!  Good luck with that.  And who would you topple?”

“I wish ill upon no one, though I confess I have difficulty with people who are smug in their own sense of righteousness.”

“Yet you seem so sure of yourself.”

“It is a paradox I need to resolve, before I return home.”

“You had better tell me one of your stories, and I will tell you whether you should look forward to your ministry.”

He began without preamble.  “A certain young man held a modest position in the administration of a great empire.  He was not prominent, but he was ambitious and hard-working, and determined to do his best and to see how far he could go in accessing the centres of power.  He believed in the sovereignty of the empire, and its divine rite to propagate its culture, even if that meant utilising warfare as an instrument of policy.  If he was commissioned to work in a remote location, he would perform his duties as best he could, always in hope of acknowledgement and reward.  Part of his responsibility was to govern in a colony as a suzerain, there to quell unrest, and to administer justice fairly but dispassionately.  The protection and the prosperity of the empire were paramount.

“One day a man was presented to him, on trial for his life, on charges of sedition.  He listened to the charges.  The activities of the man in question did not sound terribly seditious.  Frankly, they sounded trumped up.  There were being brought against the accused by his own people.  The accused was characterised as an enemy of the state, and yet the man in the dock seemed the absolute antithesis to anybody’s notion of how a violent terrorist might look, or behave.  It occurred to the bench that the people who were bringing the charges rather resented the fact that the accused was not a political activist and revolutionary.  When they realised that this man chose, in fact, to be meek, they turned against him.  There is nothing more revolting than the baying of a disappointed mob.  The bench wanted to find a way to let the man walk free, but he could see that that would incense an already angry crowd, and the last thing he wanted was trouble.

“The dilemma was compounded by the fact that the accused seemed quite indifferent to the ruling of the court, whichever way it went.  He made no plea.  He offered no impassioned defence.  He was content to let events run their course.  The bench sensed that the accused recognised the dilemma set before it, the dichotomy of natural justice as opposed to expediency, and that he even sympathised.

“In the end, the bench prevaricated.  He handed the affair back to the representatives within a locally devolved council, telling them to exercise their own judgement.  He literally washed his hands.  As a result, the man was put to death in a particularly cruel and ignominious manner.”

At this point, the man who was telling me this story drew a chiasmic sign with his finger in the dirt.  “Now,” he said, “you must tell me what you think of this imperial procurator.”

“I say he is a rascal.  He allowed an unruly throng to kill an innocent man.”

“What should he have done?”

“He should have offered the accused the clemency and protection of the empire.”

“And, since he failed to do that, what should become of him now?”

“He should be granted no privilege, save that of falling on his own sword.  So how does your story end?”

“The governor, in time, came greatly to regret his role in this extraordinary episode.  He did, as you say, contemplate falling on his sword.  But he did not.”

“Do not tell me he went on to amass power, wealth and status!”

“These were indeed within his grasp.  Yet to him they had become worthless.  In the end, he made a long pilgrimage, back to his original home, perhaps to sit under the rich green foliage and in the protective shade of an ancient yew tree.  It was in such a place he came to realise that I had already forgiven you.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t follow the last bit.”

“Probably my fault.  Work in progress!  My stories are too abstract.  I think they need to be closer to the soil.”

“I have a notion your stories will sell like hot cakes, yet nobody will understand them.  Now I’m going to have to go.  These mosquitos make a madman of me.”

“You are plagued?”

“Incessantly.”

“Here.  Take this.”  He produced a vial from his robe.  “It is a concoction of local herbs.  Bathe tonight, apply this across the inflammation, and sleep.  Your malady will be gone by dawn.”

“You are a very interesting fellow.  But you must take care.  I hope we meet again.”

“Depend upon it.”

“Next year, Jerusalem!”

And you know what, dear brother Suetonius, I woke the next day, and my affliction was gone.

 

 

 

 

 

With the general easing of lockdown restrictions, I almost feel as if this past week I’ve had a punishing social schedule.  I’ve had visitors, and been able to show them my secret deep pastoral haunts, my broch, my lake isle of Innisfree.  I dined al fresco with friends in the local Biergarten on the day it reopened.  On Sunday I barbecued under the flightpath along the extended centre line of runway 23 into Glasgow.  (The traffic on the roads and in the air was heavier than I’d expected.)  And, at long last, my piano tuner has conducted a compassionate home visit.  His patient was in a bad way.  An A flat in the lower register had fallen silent, and a C sharp in the upper register had gone AWOL.  Not surprisingly the piano was ill-tempered.  But now, all is concord.  Next stop, for me, a haircut.

The Prime Minister is being characteristically bullish.  Back to normal by Christmas!  When he said that, I recalled that the troops were saying something similar in August 1914.  Next stop, Berlin, and home for Christmas.  Yet, when we look at the facts, there is little cause for such optimism.  The only reason the picture is improving is that we have cut down the rate of transmission by social distancing.  But nothing else has changed.  Same pathogen, same host, no vaccine, questionable antibody protection, no silver bullet therapies.  If we start to mingle, we can expect the R number to rise again.  Also, the worldwide picture, particularly in the western hemisphere, is not good.  The PM must know that a second wave is very possible.  This is why he has pledged more money to the NHS.  The idea of a second lockdown is as unpalatable to him as it is to the rest of us, so the contingency planning has been for local lockdowns, as hot spots spring up.  We may have to live with this thing for the foreseeable future.

The Scottish people have accepted the compulsory wearing of face coverings in shops without demur.  No one that I can see is flouting the law.  I was reminded of the banning some years ago of smoking in public places.  That also was accepted by common consent and rapidly became second nature.  If I may say so, young ladies have quickly seen the potential of face coverings as a fashion adjunct.  They are worn with a certain allure.  It’s all in the eyes.  The First Minister wears a rather fetching tartan mask and, inevitably, one of her fiercest critics wrote in to The Herald to complain.  It’s no accident that mask is tartan!  Everything’s political!  Such letters used to make me splutter into my cornflakes but now they just make me laugh, they are so absurd.  There’s a cabal of Nat-bashers.  I think they have a roster.  Whose turn is it to tell The Herald that Scotland is a basket case?

All this week I’ve been reading Anne Frank’s diary.  It is the ultimate lockdown memoir.  It’s terribly sad – but only because we know the outcome.  Ms Frank’s last entry in the diary was on August 1^st 1944.  She was not to know that she, and the rest of the occupants of the warehouse’s secret annex on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam, would be arrested on August 4th.  She knew about D-Day and the advance of British and US troops from the west, and she knew the Russians were advancing from the east.  She knew about the July bomb plot against Hitler.  So the entry of August 1st, albeit introspective, is full of hope.  Reading Anne Frank’s diary is poignant because it turns the usual relationship between writer and reader on its head.  Usually it is the writer who knows what is going to happen in a book, and it is the reader who is kept guessing.  With the diary, precisely the opposite is true.

For those of us lucky enough to steer clear, thus far, of the virus, it must surely be self-indulgent to compare our situation with the plight of Anne Frank.  Certainly we have a sense of uncertainty about the future, but at least I am reasonably confident that if I go out for a walk I am not going to be arrested by a bunch of gangsters in long black leather coats.  At the BBQ under the flightpath yesterday we were talking about the surveillance, overt and occult, via multiple apps and platforms and under the auspices of various governments and multinational companies at home and abroad, which we must endure, assuming we recognise its existence.  One of the group didn’t care what was known of them by “the authorities”.  After all, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

But what if the bad guys get into power?  And what if your views, or your activities, or your provenance, or your appearance, is unpalatable to them?  It can all turn on a sixpence, and change overnight.  Before you know it, you are in secret lockdown, dependent on the goodness and courage of a few beneficent souls, wondering how long you need to live like this.  A week, a month, a year?  Forever?

 

When Chancellor Rishi Sunak unveiled his mini-budget last week he said, “No nationalist (sic) can ignore the undeniable truth” that the furlough scheme financed by government borrowing “has only been possible because we are a United Kingdom.”

I used to think economics was an esoteric “mistery” only understood by Oxford dons who would tell you why it was economically sensible to pay men to dig holes and then fill them in again.  But I’ve changed my mind.  I suspect economics to be fundamentally simple.  Mind you, that which is simple is not necessarily easy to grasp.  Who was it said that the trouble with simple ideas is that they need to be understood very well?  Still, it seems to me, if you have fresh air and clean water, if you can grow crops, feed, clothe, shod, and shelter yourself, then you are economically viable.  It’s pure thermodynamics.  You just need the available energy resources.

The trouble is, economics is a behavioural science.  That is why it is so dismal.  Greed and chicanery can pose as beneficence and altruism.  The art of the scam is the art of smoke and mirrors.  A scam is nearly always an attempt to persuade you that economics does not have to obey the laws of thermodynamics.  Look at the South Sea Bubble, the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the 2008 banking crisis.  It’s okay.  The economy is a perpetual motion machine.  It can run on empty.

It occurs to me that we could learn a lot about economics by looking at ourselves, that is, Homo sapiens, and specifically our physiology.  After all, we have evolved from a unicellular to a multicellular organism over billions of years.  In the management of our resources, we must have done something right.  Physiology is said to be the study of body function.  That is a shorthand for all these billions of years of evolution.  Physiology is the study of the way multicellular organisms have developed systems whereby cells removed from their immediate environment can survive.  They have had to create a “milieu intérieur”.  In order to survive and prosper, cells have had to specialise.  That is economically a very sensible thing to do.  Adam Smith starts his enquiry into the Wealth of Nations by noting the importance of individual workers specialising in one area, rather than personally undertaking every aspect and stage of a given pursuit.

This idea of looking at the body as a model of community organisation is not particularly original.  St Paul compared the early Christian Church to the human body in chapter 12 of the First Letter to the Corinthians

But now are they many members, yet but one body.

And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.      

Nay, much more these members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.

This idea of interdependency, and respect for that which has heretofore been considered lowly, has become all too relevant during the Covid pandemic.  Often the people we have depended on the most to keep the show on the road, have been the low-paid.

What is the currency of the human body?  The high energy phosphate bonds of adenosine triphosphate (ATP).  There is an equation in thermodynamics, ΔG = ΔH – TΔS, where G stands for the Gibbs’ free energy, H is enthalpy, T is temperature, and S is entropy.  It is very beautiful.  It was formulated in 1878 by a quiet and retiring physicist at Yale, J. Willard Gibbs.  Not exactly a household name, and yet Gibbs is the Newton of thermodynamics.  Interestingly, the Scottish physicist James Clark Maxwell knew how important Gibbs’ work was.  His equation predicts whether a physical process, say the formation of a compound from two molecules, will occur spontaneously, or whether energy is required to drive the reaction.  Spontaneous reactions have negative G values and are said to be exergonic.  Non-spontaneous reactions have positive G values and are endergonic.  The Gibbs free energy equation is probably the fundamental equation of the biological sciences because it allows us to quantify the energy requirements of all the biochemical processes fundamental to our survival.  I haven’t looked at the syllabus for Oxford’s politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE) degree, but I would hazard a guess that the Gibbs free energy equation is not covered.

The human body can lodge currency in the bank, in the form of adipose tissue.  It is better to have a cushion, than to subsist at starvation level.  But clearly this can be overdone.  Obesity becomes extremely counterproductive.  It is only recently that we have begun to realise just how self-destructive obesity is.  We ought not to hoard.

It is interesting to note that the human body has no mechanism of debt.  Briefly, you can run up a so-called “oxygen debt” – I did yesterday, running up a hill.  I paused at the top, to “get my breath back”.  But that is not the same as running up a fuel debt.  You can’t burn fuel if it isn’t there.

Imagine trying to construct an economic system that did not rely on debt.  I think the UK national debt has just topped £2,000,000,000,000.  Some people think this is a healthy state of affairs.

Smoke and mirrors.

Parse, if you will, the following sentence:

Expectations as unexacting as these are not, when they encounter significance, grateful for it, and when it meets them in that insistent form where nothing is very engaging as “life” unless its relevance is fully taken, miss it altogether. 

This comes from the Analytical Note on Dickens’ novel Hard Times, in The Great Tradition, by the distinguished literary critic F. R. Leavis (Chatto & Windus, 1948).  The expectations referred to relate to the traditional critical approach to the English novel.  They are that the novelist should create a world, full of abundant life, and that the characters must be living, to the extent that they go on living outside the book.

Are these expectations unexacting?  Anyone who has written a novel, or tried to write a novel, will know that the attempt to breathe life into the novel’s characters, and their world, is the hardest thing of all.  But before I disagree with Dr Leavis’ opinion, I must try to understand what that opinion is.  What does he mean?  I’ve been gnawing away at that sentence all week, like a dog who buries a bone, and periodically digs it up again to worry away at it.

How did I embark on this thankless undertaking?  I picked up Hard Times in a “Yellowback” in WHSmith’s last week.  WHSmith sold these low price editions in railway stations during the nineteenth century, and now Smiths have recreated some of them to celebrate their 225th anniversary.  Earlier this year I read the literary biographer Claire Tomalin’s autobiography, A Life of My Own, (Viking, 2017), in which she took exception to the fact that F. R. Leavis had apparently said that Hard Times was the only novel Dickens had written that was worth reading.

So I took it upon myself to read Hard Times, and then Leavis’ Analytical Note.  Leavis thought the great novelists writing in English were Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence.  Knowing his adulation of Lawrence I wasn’t surprised that he admired Hard Times so much.  It is Lawrencian in its deep suspicion of industrial progress.  It rejects the sterile world of “Facts” in favour of the life of the imagination, indeed, in favour of life itself.  In his analytical note, Leavis actually quotes at length a passage from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a description of Tevershall which might have sat quite comfortably in Hard Times as a description of Coketown, another equally squalid and miserable industrial town of the nineteenth century.  Leavis thought Hard Times was a condemnation of the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.  He was implacably opposed to the quantification of human souls.  You feel the same sense of indignation in his merciless attack on C. P. Snow in his 1962 Richmond Lecture, Two Cultures?  I was minded to write a piece on Hard Times and on Leavis’ reaction to it, but I got side-tracked.  I became preoccupied by that single sentence.  So let us parse it.

The sentence consists of a principal clause in two parts joined by the conjunction and:

Expectations as unexacting as these are not grateful for it, and… miss it altogether.    

In addition, there are four subordinate clauses:

1. …when they encounter significance…
2. …when it meets them in that insistent form…
3. …where nothing is very engaging as “life”…
4. …unless its relevance is fully taken…

The great structural defect of this sentence resides in the fact that following the conjunction “and”, the subject of the sentence is no longer “expectations”, but “significance”.  Now “expectations” are plural, and “significance” is singular; that is the only way we know what “them” and “it” subsequently denote.  The “it” of the principal clause refers to the “significance” of the first subordinate clause, as does the “it” of the second subordinate clause.  It is less clear what the “its” of the fourth subordinate clause refers to; it might too refer to “significance”, but could also refer to “life”.  It might be clearer if we remove the pronouns and replace them with the nouns to which they refer.  Thus:

Expectations as unexacting as these are not, when they encounter significance, grateful for significance, and when significance meets expectations in that insistent form where nothing is very engaging as “life” unless significance’s relevance (or perhaps “life’s” relevance) is fully taken, miss significance altogether.

Can expectations be grateful?  Not really.  But this is a figure of speech, in which the gratitude (or in this case ingratitude) of the holder of the expectations is transferred to the expectations themselves.  I think Dr Leavis is trying to say something like this:

People who enjoy a good read because they like to enter an imagined world can be resentful if the writer chooses to explore a profound and serious matter.  If the reader loses interest because he can’t appreciate how the argument relates to the life of the book, then he will miss the whole point of the book.

But I’m not sure.  Let’s be frank, Frank.  It’s such a clumsy sentence that I’m not sure that it means anything.  Another literary critic, Philip Hobsbaum, another Cambridge man who sat at Leavis’ feet and rather admired him, was a great advocate of clarity of thought.  In his magnum opus, A Theory of Communication (Macmillan, 1970) he developed his concept of “availability”.  If the meaning of a sentence is not available to the reader, then the meaning is just not there.  This implies that the thought behind the language is incoherent.  The great experimental physicist Lord Rutherford of Nelson, who ran the Cavendish Laboratory, said something similar when he said that if you couldn’t explain your research to the person who cleaned the lab, then your research was probably flawed.

But to return to these unexacting expectations, Leavis puts them into quotation marks.  The business of the novel is, “you gather”, to “create a world”.  There must be “life”, “living characters”, and so on.  Leavis is being snooty.  The imputation is that these notions are clichés; that is why they are unexacting.  The effect on the readers who might cherish such expectations is to persuade them that their taste is rather vulgar.  Personally I would have much preferred it if he had removed the quotation marks from “life” and put them round that portentous word “significance”.  The whole futility of critical analysis – at least as she is currently taught in our schools – resides in that single, appalling sentence from F. R. Leavis.  You take an individual who has experienced a visceral and emotional response to literature, you cast aspersions on his, or her, enthusiasm, and then you take the life out of a work of art by recasting it in your own image, and interpreting it through the prism of your own prejudices.

Hard Times is fantastic.  Some of the individual scenes therein are unbelievably vivid.  As a matter of fact, Dickens has created a world that is full of life, and full of living characters.  That’s really all you need to know.  Read it yourself.

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,

And builded parapets and trenches there

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, Wilfred Owen

 

Curious to know whether that punitive instrument from the Kingdom of Fife, the Lochgelly tawse, is still being manufactured, I consulted the web.  One particular firm of saddlers produced an especially robust two- and three-thonged heavy leather strap much sought after by Scottish dominies.  Some would tote this instrument under their collar and down a sleeve, to be drawn with the practised expedition of a sharpshooter from the Wild West.  Corporal punishment is now illegal in Scottish schools.  A mother sought reassurance from her child’s school that her child would not be beaten, and when she received no such reassurance, she took the issue to the European Court of Human Rights, and won.  Belting ceased, by law, in Scottish state schools in 1987, and in private schools a decade later.  So the market must have dried up.  But it occurred to me that there might yet be foreign interest, and that booming belt exports might be an economically healthy subsidiary to the UK’s prosperous arms industry.  Why not?

Well!  I rather regretted my researches.  It appears that the tawse has become, in certain refined and sophisticated quarters, a sex adjunct.  I curtailed my researches, but no doubt for the foreseeable future I will be regaled on line with all sorts of curious advertisements, for “accoutrements”.

The infliction of the strap was an everyday occurrence when I was in school.  One teacher routinely belted you if you made more than two mistakes in a spelling test.  I don’t think the word “dyslexia” was known at the time, or if it was, it would have been regarded as some kind of precious nonsense dreamed up by a bunch of lily-livered, ivory-towered liberal wets.  Another teacher – his nickname was Moses, not because he was religious but because he had a huge black patriarchal beard – was the most ferocious belter I ever saw.  Our day started with a ten minute head count in Registration Class; on Fridays this was extended for forty minutes and the registration teacher was charged to offer us a period of Religious Education.  Moses’ idea of RE was to have us sit quietly and memorise two verses from a metrical Psalm.  At the end of the period, he would select somebody at random to recite the verses from memory.  Failure to do so resulted in the usual chastisement.

Most of us were rather fearful of the strap, and consequently the euphemistic warning, “If you don’t behave, I’ll warm your fingers” was sufficient to hold us in check.  There was however a small cadre of boys who were forever being belted.  On the surface it didn’t seem to bother them at all, and it certainly didn’t function to deter them from their aberrant behaviour, whatever it was.  Girls were seldom belted, particularly as they grew a little older, but the first person I ever saw being belted was a girl, in my infant class.  We were five years old.  The last person I ever saw being belted was a friend of mine, who for reasons best known to himself decided to carve his initials on the surface of his desk.  We were sixteen.  As he extended his crossed hands I remember thinking, “Is this really necessary?”

I was belted on a handful of occasions.  Mostly it was just for fooling around, and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It taught me something about violence, which I observed repeatedly in my professional life, in the emergency department.  Most violence is very sudden; it seems to arise out of nothing, and therefore it appears to be completely unpredictable.

Violence is a culture.  When Germany started to rearm in the 1930s, one of the first things Churchill noticed from his vantage point in the political wilderness was that beatings in German schools were increasing in frequency and severity.  It has been said that the most difficult hurdle to overcome in training conscripted infantry recruits is to brutalise them sufficiently that they relish bayonet practice.

I learned a lot in Primary School.  I think I was lucky with my teachers.  It seemed to me a benign environment.  One of the first things I noticed when I went up to Secondary School was that the teachers addressed me by my surname and not my first name.  I was depersonalised and turned into a cog in some sort of enormous Heath-Robinson contraption whose mechanism, function and purpose I did not understand.  It all seems to me now like a wasteland.  Vast tracts of it I have obliterated from my memory.  I hardly learned a thing.  Fortunately I was already well grounded in the three Rs.  After all, if you can read, write, and count, you can pretty much do the rest yourself.  It’s just as well.  You can’t learn, if you can’t relax.  Intimidation is the great enemy of education.

It is odd to think now that teachers who could not maintain discipline in class, and who did not belt, were disdainfully regarded as weak, by fellow teachers and pupils alike.  I remember one such teacher who was summoned to the Headmaster’s office and was given a dressing down and told to toughen up.  The Headmaster brought in another teacher, one of the school heavies, an enforcement bruiser (it was the bruiser who subsequently told me this).  The Headmaster took out a tawse, threw it at the weakling, pointed to the bruiser, and said, “He’ll show you how to use it.”  It’s all a bit reminiscent of John Wayne’s advice to Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance: “You’d better start packing a handgun, pilgrim.”

And yet, any teacher who resorted to the tawse now would go to jail.  Funny old world.  It would be kind of interesting if one of these poor thrashed souls of yesteryear, or perhaps a group of them, in a class action, pursued their ancient tormentors in court, for historic crimes of persecution and violence.  Like war criminals they might be relentlessly pursued, without statute of limitation, as by victims of a holocaust.  Perhaps we will yet see these decrepit ancients with their zimmer frames, frowning in a puzzled and demented way, playing the amnesia card, as they are led into the dock.  The wielders of the tawse may yet quake in their own shoes.

 

Unspeakable

The Autobiography

John Bercow

(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020)

 

As somebody with the great good fortune to hold dual British and New Zealand citizenship, I’m very keen to figure out why it is that with respect to the pandemic, thus far, NZ has fared so well and the UK has fared so badly.  To date, the UK has recorded nearly 43,000 Covid deaths; NZ has recorded 22.  Now the UK has a population over 13 times as large as New Zealand (67 million people versus 5 million), but even allowing for that, if the UK had fared as well as NZ, the UK total would have been less than 300.

No doubt New Zealand has some inherent advantages.  The NZ landmass is slightly bigger than that of the UK (267,710 square kilometres versus 242,495 square kilometres), so social distancing must be easier to achieve.  Yet this advantage can be exaggerated.  Half the population of New Zealand lives north of Lake Taupo; there are 1.5 million people in Auckland.

New Zealand is a remote group of islands.  Her nearest neighbour, Australia, is a three hour flight away.  The UK is also a group of islands, but connected by the Channel Tunnel to the European Continent which at its closest point is only twenty miles away.  In addition, she has a land border with the Republic of Ireland whose porous nature is highly valued for a whole host of reasons.

New Zealand, like the UK, is a parliamentary democracy, but unlike the UK, has no second chamber.  (It was abolished in 1950.)  There are 120 MPs, a combination of constituency and list MPs in a system of proportional representation.  The UK have 650 MPs in a “first past the post” system, and the House of Lords has nearly 800 sitting peers.  In addition, there are devolved governments in Belfast, Cardiff, and Edinburgh.  The four nations are at liberty, to some extent at least, to implement different policies with respect to controlling the pandemic.  It may be said that NZ is likely overall to be more nimble in its ability quickly to recognise a threat, debate a response, formulate a strategy, and put the strategy into practice.  However else you might characterise the Westminster machine, you would hardly call it nimble.

In the early part of 2020, New Zealand seemed to be more aware than the UK that a problem was looming.  I was in NZ in February and early March, and the newspapers, television and radio were full of reports of what was happening in Wuhan.  The New Zealand media are not normally renowned for their preoccupation with foreign news.  I flew out of Auckland on March 7^th and a couple of days later any visitors went into two weeks’ quarantine.

The Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, then told New Zealanders what they needed to do, and New Zealanders by and large complied.  It seems to me that there are aspects of New Zealand society and culture that make such compliance easier to achieve.  There is a strong sense of nationhood in New Zealand.  That is not to say there are not tensions as in any multicultural society.  But they are addressed.  That is why the Treaty of Waitangi is so important.  New Zealand is very independent-minded and has a “can do” attitude that can analyse a threat and deal with it.  New Zealanders are very self-sufficient.  The gap between the rich and poor is far narrower than it is in the UK.  That is not to say that class, snobbery, and elitism don’t exist, but fabulous wealth or vast tracts of real estate are not hived off by a few individuals, and there really isn’t a discernible “establishment” sitting at the top of the pile.  All this contributes towards greater social cohesion and co-operation.

But what, you might ask, has this got to do with Unspeakable, the autobiography of the outgoing Speaker of the House of Commons, whose name adorns the top of these pages?  The short answer is, nothing at all.  The key words Covid, Sars, Coronavirus, or Pandemic, do not appear in the index to this highly readable book, and indeed none of them get a mention in the text, this, despite the fact that the book’s epilogue, The Next Decade, is an attempt to foretell the future – always a dangerous undertaking, especially in politics.  So Mr Bercow, like the rest of us, didn’t see this coming.  I don’t hold it against him.  He was not to know that his book would be evaluated from the lockdown perspective.  He was not to know that I would read – and enjoy – his book, close it, strike it with the back of my hand, and say, “That’s why we’ve made such a mess of it!”

Of this book, there is much to admire.  John Bercow is clearly a “people” person.  I was always struck by his ability to identify any one of 650 people by name.  (We always admire laudable traits in others that we ourselves do not possess.  If I have to introduce half a dozen people, even whom I know well, to one another, I panic.  It is a recluse’s nightmare.)

People – lots of them – are at the heart of this book, and it is the description of a host of individuals that is the book’s strength.  Mr Bercow is very outspoken.  Some people – Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman, get a good press; others, David Cameron, Theresa May – not so good.  Actually “not so good” is an understatement.  I won’t say he sticks the boot in, for it seldom gets personal, but his assessment of Mrs May’s premiership is pretty damning.  And President Trump gets short shrift.

There are some odd lacunae.  9/11 gets scant attention – and yet 9/11 surely remains the defining moment of this century.  Remember Tony Blair – “The kaleidoscope has been shaken…!”  Also the 2014 referendum on Scottish Independence.  I venture to say Mr Bercow has a Scottish blind spot.  You would have thought this avid tennis player and Roger Federer fan might have at least mentioned Sir Andy Murray.

So Unspeakable is sharp on detail, but perhaps does not take the long view.  I wonder if he has failed to see the wood for the trees.  While he has written a book in praise of an institution he evidently reveres, I wonder if he has unconsciously damned it.  The heart of this autobiography was always going to be the decade 2009 – 19 during which Mr Bercow occupied the Speaker’s chair.  And at the heart of his tenure lies that which he terms “The Brexit Imbroglio”.  An imbroglio is a confused mass, a tangle, an embroilment.  It is worth noting that we are still embroiled.  Covid has kicked the Brexit can further down the road.  Our institutions have not yet been able to “deliver” Brexit, and they have not been able to control Covid.  Why not?

You can see why not by observing Prime Minister’s Questions, the traditional PMQs as it took place before lockdown.  John Bercow cast himself as a reformer, but he certainly wasn’t able to reform PMQs.  It took Covid to do that.  Now we can hear Sir Keir Starmer’s forensic questions, and the Prime Minister gets exasperated because he doesn’t have the supportive wall of derisive cat-calling and booing from the backbenches behind him.  The House of Commons has always seemed to me to be like a school classroom in which the teacher has lost control.  All that infernal racket.  Any speaker serious about reforming the place would have cut it out.  I can think of a few teachers in my old school who would have accomplished such a task in two minutes, although I have to admit it would have involved a thrashing of the utmost severity.  So I can hardly recommend it.  Besides, it is the members, not the Speaker, who hold the power.  Any Speaker who seriously tried to discipline that lot would be out on their ear in a minute.

 

There is a splendid colour picture at the heart of Unspeakable, of a sitting of the United Kingdom Youth Parliament, which Mr Bercow chaired every year throughout his tenure as speaker.  It is supposed to be, and it ought to be, an uplifting vision of the future, but to be honest, I find the picture rather melancholy.  If I were a youngster and I wanted to learn how to conduct human affairs, I wouldn’t go to Westminster and the House of Commons.  I’d go to Wellington and the Beehive.

 

 

 

Whom does this describe, and who is the writer?

I had met (him) several times in England.  He knew that he was dying, and he did not want to die.  He asked me my age.  “You will see it all,” he said bitterly, “and I won’t, for I am going out.”  He gave me various pieces of advice.  One was to beware of the vain man.  “You can make your book with roguery,” he said, “but vanity is incalculable – it will always let you down…”

He impressed me greatly – the sense he gave one of huge but crippled power, the reedy voice and the banal words in which he tried to express ideas which represented for him a whole world of incoherent poetry.  I did not know him well enough to like him or dislike him, but I felt him as one feels the imminence of a thunderstorm.  But I did not realise the greatness of his personality until I had been some time in the country.  Then I found that in all sorts of people… he had kindled some spark of his own idealism.  He had made them take long views.  Common as their minds might be, some window had been opened which gave them a prospect.  They had acquired at least a fragment of a soul.  If it be not genius thus to brood over a land and have this power over the human spirit, then I do not understand the meaning of the word.      

This is John Buchan’s description of Cecil Rhodes, in his autobiography Memory Hold-the-Door (Hodder and Stoughton, 1940).  In the same volume he wrote about the Empire:

I dreamed of a world-wide brotherhood with the background of a common race and creed, consecrated to the service of peace; Britain enriching the rest out of her culture and traditions, and the spirit of the Dominions like a strong wind freshening the stuffiness of the old lands.  I saw in the Empire a means of giving to the congested masses at home open country instead of a blind alley.  I saw hope for a new afflatus in art and literature and thought.  Our creed was not based on antagonism to any other people.  It was humanitarian and international; we believed that we were laying the basis of a federation of the world.  As for the native races under our rule, we had a high conscientiousness; Milner and Rhodes had a far-sighted native policy.  The “white man’s burden” is now an almost meaningless phrase; then it involved a new philosophy of politics, and an ethical standard, serious and surely not ignoble.

Now, with our 2020 vision, this seems to belong to a world as remote and alien as that of Greek Tragedy.  And yet these passages were written a mere eighty years ago.

Do I think the University of Oxford’s statue of Cecil Rhodes should be removed?  I might not be the best person to ask because, statuary-wise, I am a complete philistine.  Ever since I read Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias at school, I’ve thought of statues as being inherently absurd:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal those words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Who would want to put themselves up on a pedestal?  Who would want to have all the complexities of their human character subsumed into an inert 3-D cartoon?  Clearly, looking around my home town, the second city of Empire, rather a lot of people!  Glasgow has always had an irreverent attitude towards its statues.  The Duke of Wellington sits astride his horse outside the Gallery of Modern Art, with a traffic cone on his head.  The Council periodically removes it but it always gets replaced.  It reminds me of the Union Flag that once flew on the hill above that far outreach of Empire, Russell, in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands.  The British Governor would put it up and the Maori chieftain Hone Heke would cut it down.  It’s still down.  I checked in March when I was there.  Russell is a beautiful and tranquil place and you would never guess at its wild, anarchic, and violent frontier history.  From the hill, you can see, across the bay, the treaty grounds at Waitangi.

Have you ever met a statue?  In the flesh I mean.  I once ran into – literally – Donald Dewar at the entrance to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, oddly enough a stone’s throw from the space now occupied by his statue.  He was effusively thanking a staff member for ordering him a taxi, and he nodded and smiled in my direction as I passed.  Nobody could have been less like Ozymandias than Scotland’s first First Minister.  Subsequently his statue’s glasses would be periodically vandalised, and I have a notion the Council increased the height of his pedestal, a strategy that seems to have worked.

There was, and there still is, a movement in Glasgow in favour of the removal of most of the statues from Glasgow’s epicentre, George Square.  Her Majesty’s Sculptor-in-Ordinary Alexander Stoddart wrote a lengthy epistle to the city fathers who occupy that grand edifice to the east, overlooking George Square, the City Chambers, defending the square’s statues as works of art, and attacking the philistinism of those who would wish to remove them.  It was such a devastating critique that I have a notion Mr Stoddart settled the argument single-handedly, at least for that time being.  Mr Stoddart does not go public very often, but when he does, the effect is usually overwhelming.  I remember at the run-up to the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, it was mooted that the demolition of the Red Road flats be incorporated into the Games’ opening ceremony.  Mr Stoddart’s contempt for this idea was expressed in a letter, written in the high style, to The Herald, which remains for me the most powerful letter I have ever read in the Letters page of The Herald or, for that matter, in any other newspaper.  It seems fitting to remember it on this the third anniversary of the Grenfell Tower disaster.

If Oxford University chooses to remove Cecil Rhodes’ statue, I wonder if such an action would be somewhat akin to a university stripping somebody of an honorary degree because that person has become a pariah.  It happens from time to time.  The University of Edinburgh, for example, stripped the late Robert Mugabe of his honorary degree.  I’ve always thought of this as being, on the university’s part, somewhat self-serving.  The university wants to dissociate itself from a tainted brand.  So it chooses to rewrite history.  The university has not conferred a degree upon Mr Mugabe.  It is as if the university has never conferred a degree upon Mr Mugabe.  Let the record be expunged.

I’m not in favour of expunging records.  If I want to watch Warren Mitchell play Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part I really don’t need to be reminded that he is a bigoted monster.  That, after all, is the whole point.  We all need to move with the times, to revise our opinions and change our positions as we will.  But we should not do so by obliterating the past.  Our statements of belief should not be transcribed on to a palimpsest.

We look with horror upon some of the mores of past epochs.  What, about us, will horrify future generations?  What is our blind spot?  I think our age will be characterised as pharisaic.  Virtue signalling is the new bigotry.

 

 

 

This Week’s Composer – last week – on Radio 3, was Beethoven.  Actually this year’s composer – every other week – because it is the 250^th anniversary of his death, has been Beethoven.  The week focused on the late string quartets, and ended on Friday with Beethoven’s last work, the Quartet in F major, opus 135.

I heard the Amadeus Quartet play the Op. 135 many years ago at the Edinburgh Festival.  To start at the end, the final rendition of the rather chirpy theme of its final movement is played pizzicato, and I remember Norbert Brainin, the Amadeus’ first violin, made to play the theme arco, before remembering at the last minute that he needed to pluck rather than to bow the string.  I can vividly recall the look of self-disgust on his face as he berated himself.  Afterwards I went back stage and got the autograph of the Amadeus’ viola player, Peter Schidlof.  Shortly after that I actually played the Op. 135 myself in a chamber concert.  I mention it to say that, note for note, I know the piece pretty well; but to be honest I didn’t really understand it.  The inner movements, maybe.  The second movement, Vivace, with its syncopations and abrupt interjections, is astonishingly modernistic; the ensuing Lento assai, cantata e tranquillo, is one of these profoundly reverential and religious expressions, reminiscent of the Cavatina from the Op. 130, and, from the Op. 132, Molto adagio, the Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart.  But the outer movements?  They are quirky; full of humour.  How does it all fit together?

Beethoven even draws our attention to the contrast between gravitas and quirkiness, by giving a title, and an annotated subtitle, to the last movement:

Der Schwer gefasste Entschluss:

Muss es sein?  Es muss sein!  Es muss sein!

The difficult decision: must it be?  It must be!  It must be!

Given that this is the final movement of Beethoven’s final work, the question arises: is this a portent?  Is it an intimation of mortality?

If it is, then it is as if the composer immediately mocks himself for being “portentous”.  Isn’t it interesting that the very word “portentous”, pertaining to a portent, carries with it a pejorative connotation of pretentiousness, just as does the adjective from “pomp” – “pompous”.  Maybe Beethoven had a sense that the Beethoven brand, the ill-temper, the Sturm und Drang, the seizure of fate by the throat, was vulnerable to parody.  The owners of huge personalities often turn themselves in later life into cartoon figures.  Think of Churchill with the polka-dot bow tie, the defiant jowl, the cigar, and the V-sign.  On Radio 3, Edward Dusinberre, the first violin of the Takács Quartet, said Muss es sein? was all tongue in cheek.  Beethoven was reminding somebody who wanted to borrow some music society’s sheet music that he hadn’t paid his dues to the society.  I’d heard previously that it was a remark about his laundry bill.  Enigmatic quotations at the head of music scores tend to be open to multiple interpretations.

A quality of self-parody is quite common in any artist’s late period.  We see it all the time in popular culture.  Elvis retired to Las Vegas, dressed outlandishly, and started doing Elvis impersonations.  Fleming mocked Bond; made him fight Count Lippé with the therapeutic accoutrements of a Health Farm while weakened by a diet of carrot juice.  Later he made him go mad, and try to murder M.  The Beatles sang “You know my name – look up my number.”  And lest we think this transition from farce to the surreal is restricted to popular culture, think of Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest:

Our revels now are ended.  These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. 

The Tempest and Beethoven’s Op. 135 seem to me to be rather alike.  They share a fey quality.     Milan Kundera called the sense of the gossamer fragility of life, and its melting into thin air, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And in that book, he quotes Muss es sein? from the Op. 135.

The late Beethoven quartets are seen as part of Beethoven’s third, or late period; and musicologists often say that the Op. 135 might have been the start of a “fourth period”.  It’s nice to think that, far from being a statement of resignation, “Es muss sein” is all about embarking on something entirely new.                          

Somebody accused me the other day of being a cynic, when I opined that all the world’s a scam; that all human institutions are designed by the rich and powerful to ensure the preservation of the status quo, whereby those in charge retain their wealth and power.  Is that cynical?  Come to think of it, what exactly is cynicism?  I looked it up.

Chambers: cynic, -al adjs. dog-like: surly: snarling: disinclined to believe in goodness or selflessness, – ns. Cynic one of a set of philosophers founded by Antisthenes of Athens (born c. 444 B.C.), characterised by an ostentatious contempt for riches, arts, science, and amusements – so called from their morose manners: (without cap.) a morose man: (without cap.) a snarler: (without cap.) one who takes a pessimistic view of human motives and actions; cynicism surliness: contempt for and suspicion of human nature: heartlessness, misanthropy: a cynical remark. – adv. cynically, – n. cynicalness. (Gr. kynikos, dog-like – kyon, kynos, dog, or perh. From Kynosarges, the gymnasium where Antisthenes taught.)

Etymologically, I’m a bit sceptical (sceptical – a word to which I shall shortly return) about the dog.  I’ve never thought of dogs as cynics.  Cats, yes.  They’re always sneering.  But dogs?  Of course, as with human beings, there are a few vicious critters out there, but by and large I find dogs to be friendly and affectionate.  They wear their hearts on their sleeve and they presume we do the same.  They don’t have the cynic’s habit of looking for some sordid motive lurking beneath an act of kindness.

Clearly, to be described as a cynic is something of an accusation; the word is pejorative.  But is that fair to cynics?  After all, maybe their dim view of human nature is quite justified.   But I must say that I baulked at being labelled a cynic, and I protest that I am not cynical.  So what is it about the definition of cynicism that makes the adoption of the cynical attitude undesirable and, indeed, reprehensible?

It’s useful here to consider that relative of the cynic, perhaps a step-brother, the sceptic.  Chambers again:

sceptic, sometimes (and in U.S.) skeptic, adj. pertaining to the philosophical school of Pyrrho and his successors, who asserted nothing positively and doubted the possibility of knowledge: sceptical (rarely). – n. a sceptic philosopher: one who withholds from prevailing doctrines, esp. In religion: one who inclines to disbelieve: an inquirer who has not arrived at a conviction. – adj. sceptical of or inclined to scepticism: (now often) doubtful, or inclined towards incredulity. – adv. sceptically. – v.i. scepticise, -ize to act the sceptic. – n. scepticism that condition in which the mind is before it has arrived at conclusive opinions: doubt: the doctrine that no facts can be certainly known: agnosticism: sceptical attitude towards Christianity: general disposition to doubt. (L. scepticus – Gr. skeptikos, thoughtful, skeptesthai, to consider.)

Now unlike cynicism, scepticism, especially in the culture of the west, is seen as being rather a healthy trait.  The entire edifice of the modern scientific method is founded upon Cartesian doubt.  There is no certainty.  Any theory is only as good as its last experimental verification.  The theory remains vulnerable; perhaps the next set of results will topple it.  That is how science progresses.  Sceptics are open-minded.

In fact, open-mindedness is the quality that differentiates the sceptic from the cynic.  The cynic’s mind is closed.  He has made his mind up.  Once you adopt the mind-set of the cynic, there is no going back.  This is why cynicism is such a dangerous attitude to nurture.  The road to cynicism is a one-way street.  And what lies beyond cynicism?  Hopelessness, and then despair.  Don’t go there.

So when I hear people say that the coronavirus pandemic, if and when it subsides, is going to leave us a better and more caring and compassionate people, I hope my attitude is one of scepticism rather than cynicism.  The fact is that many of the people who were at the top of the heap, before it collapsed like a mountain of sludge on to the poor and vulnerable subsisting in the valley below, now want to reconstruct the heap exactly as it was before.  Yet surely the Covid Pause (assuming it is merely a pause) should make us alter our priorities, to value, cherish, and appropriately remunerate health care workers, carers for the elderly, farmers, crop gatherers, garbage collectors, and many other contributors to society who, the very antithesis of cynicism, aren’t just in it for the money.

At this point I was about to write (a) “I’m not holding my breath” or (b) “Well good luck with that” or (c) “It is what it is”.  But the Masters of the Universe want to hear us echo these sentiments because it means we have stopped challenging the world’s injustices.  So I abjure and renounce the threadbare clichés of the cynic.  I am chastened by this accusation of cynicism.  I hereby quit the cynical habit.  You can say to me, “Well, good luck with that” – but only if you really mean it.