Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (21 page)

They won. They always win. They have all those membership fees and profits from rare-species butterfly tea towels to win with. But in the course of our quarrel I was vouchsafed a brief but terrifying glimpse into their unexamined assumptions. ‘If you think we're going to allow the place to be trampled all over,' the head of the whole shebang told me in a moment of temper, ‘just so that you people can sell brass candlesticks to –' He didn't finish. ‘To whom?' I asked him, ignoring the ‘you people'. I knew who the ‘you people' were. ‘To whom?'

He was a man of distinguished not to say military bearing, as befits a senior officer of an occupying power. He was not afraid to look me in the eye. ‘The wrong people,' he spat out. And perhaps I only imagine the horsewhip.

The wrong people
. There it was in a nutshell. The wrong people were coming to Cornwall in general, and to Boscastle in particular, buying brass candlesticks and wearing away the cliffs, and he intended to stop them.

Well, the wrong people get everywhere. I can't pretend I never felt that myself in the course of being elbowed into the sea by the contents of a tenement block from Walsall, a many-headed monster in jesters' hats and comedy Valkyrie pigtails, which had blundered into a part of the world that did not have slot machines and was unable to find its way out. But I was not a charity. I was not in trust to the nation. I sold books about Thomas Hardy – a wrong person if ever there was one – not know-your-hedgerow serviettes. So remember that the next time you're seduced into joining. It's not the National Trust you'll be a member of, but the Trust for People of High Income, Supercilious Class and Maudlin Pastoral Aesthetic.

Hardy hated such idealisation of the countryside by those to whom it was a mere plaything. Real places indurate, and wound the heart. (Ask the traumatised Greek flower-pickers.) Hence Hardy's own fraught pilgrimage to Boscastle in remorseful old age. But the village would not yield him what he wanted, would not be in actuality what it had become in fantasy. Real places never do.

Unconditionality and Murder

The letter killeth. I can see why there is urgency within the Muslim community to disown terrorism as a perversion of Islam as strictly understood. But therein lies a contradiction. For it is not difficult to show that adherence to the strictness of Islam, as indeed to the strictness of any religion, is the first step on a ladder which will take some to sanctity, but just as many, in the name of sanctity, to violence. Onward march the Christian soldiers, despite Christ's refusal of militarism. Though the Bible teaches Jews to love the stranger, there are some Jews who find justification in the Bible not only for despising strangers but for making strangers of them where they live. And in the name of Islam, such crimes have been committed as would make the angels weep.

Never mind that this is not what any of the great faiths have meant to teach. Belief itself is where the problem starts. Laced with the usual humanising laxities and compromises, belief can be an innocent affair. And a little of it, in a naughty world, can go a long way and do a fair amount of good. But once belief hardens into a dogma which allows no deviation – call it orthodoxy or call it fundamentalism – the believer enters the terrain of derangement. Purity has its attractions, but only madmen live by it.

‘Objection, evasion, cheerful mistrust, delight in mockery are signs of health,' said Nietzsche. ‘Everything unconditional belongs to pathology.'

Freud intended a service to the Jewish people when he argued that Moses was an Egyptian. In one stroke he reminded us that neither our most significant prophet, nor the Judaism he taught, was pure. This is not against the spirit of what the Old Testament itself says of Moses – concealed in a crib of bulrushes and found by one of the Pharoah's daughters who brings him up lovingly as her own. A little bit of somewhere else, we are to understand, was necessary to make Moses who he was. The requisite genealogy, this, for all the great men of mythology who give their names to new civilisations or beliefs. They are abandoned to shepherds, they are raised by wolves, they are discovered by alien princesses with compassion in their hearts. It is as though the founding hero, in order to be worthy to lead his people, must first be mongrelised. Thus does the mythical history of mankind give the lie to all theories of national greatness based on racial homogeneity, and to all religions insisting theirs is the one and only truth.

Everything unconditional belongs to pathology. But we would be fools to suppose that the only pathology into which our home-grown terrorists were abducted was that of the mosque. Where were they educated into this? we beat our breasts and ask. From whom did ordinary and apparently amicable Muslim boys from Yorkshire acquire this ideology of hate?

Forgive the brutality of the answer. From us! No doubt it took an induction into unconditional theology to ignite them ultimately into violence. And no doubt men more experienced in the ways of terror primed their final resolution. But what we call their disaffection – that miasma of rage and bewilderment and misinformation without which this death cult could never have taken hold of them – is the staple diet of our own left-leaning news media, no more virulent than anything the educated middle classes have been expressing for years, the received wisdom of teachers, students and academics from one end of the country to the other. Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Kashmir, the Balkans – you name them – all proof of the corrupt Western world's greed, degeneracy and Islamophobia. No sooner did the bombs detonate than we were chanting the litany of our sins again. We had it coming. On the letter pages of every newspaper, the same. Our fault. Our fault. And if we think it is our fault, why shouldn't they?

Basic laws of human decency, Law One: you do not say we had it coming when it is someone else who dies. If you want to say we had it coming, say it when
you
die. You can accept guilt for yourself; you cannot accept it for another person.

Decency aside, the we-had-it-coming lobby are those who, like the pure religionists of hate, subscribe to a purist interpretation of events. It should be no surprise to us to learn that the suicide bombers were not from among the unlettered poor. These days we must worry a) when our children fall quiet and take to reading Holy Scripture, and b) when they go to university. Neither can now be recommended to the impressionable. Both inculcate the unconditional. Witness the historical illiteracy of those academics who nearly pulled off a boycott of Israeli universities a few months ago – determined to see only one side of a cruelly complex conflict – and remember those marches which academics and their charges could not wait to join, associating one cause about which there is to be no discussion with another, and where the faithful have been so catechised into conformity that to demur from a single atom of the rationale would be apostasy.

Afghanistan and Iraq are comparable only if you think every move the West makes is
ipso facto
satanical. And even the invasion of Iraq, however impetuous, brutal and misguided, was not inspired by wanton wickedness alone. As for Zionism, that mantra of universal loathing, it is an aspiration to a homeland not an ideology of hatred directed at Muslims. And if it doesn't look that way to Muslims, that's all the more reason why it shouldn't be depicted irresponsibly by us. We don't help Muslims by flattering them in their conviction of oppression. Muslim paranoia, about which as a Jew I must admit I know something, is not only brewed up on Muslim streets. We feed it with the theology of our self-disgust. Unconditional in our hatred of our own culture, we strengthen unconditionality in others. And when that many pathologies collide, it's no wonder there's a bang.

What Things Are for

We forget what things are for. A lifetime ago, it now seems, we woke to the first Labour government in what might as well have been a thousand years. Old rusted ideas, together with the men that bore them, were at a stroke removed. The sun shone and the very pavements gleamed like El Dorado. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. This morning I don't care a fig who we have elected. Disillusioned.

Shaming, that a man my age should still be subject to illusions in the first place. But I'd forgotten what things are for. Governments are for the management of public finances. Idealism, seriousness, magnanimity, civilised discourse, the intellectual wherewithal to tell a hawk from a handsaw – nothing to do with government, not any of it.

Last week, writing in the
Sunday
Independent
, Janet Street-Porter made a similar mistake with Gilbert and George. She forgot what they are for. The occasion for her article was Tom Stoppard's speech to the Royal Academy in which he said most of the things we all know to be true about conceptual art but feel too weary or too uncertain – in some cases, too browbeaten and too frightened – to say ourselves. Janet Street-Porter wheeled Gilbert and George into the debate in order to discredit Stoppard. Had they ever met the playwright? she asked them. To which their joint answer – for they don't do anything by halves – was ‘Well, years ago we did go to one of his plays, but we didn't last long – there were too many words. So we left.' The value of which testimony is zero, for the very reason that Gilbert and George don't exist to say intelligent things. Gilbert and George exist to bend over and show us their ageing scrotums and whatever else they've got down there in order that we shouldn't entertain too grand an idea of the meaning of life or the function of art.

They are, of course, entitled to their position.

Why Janet Street-Porter thinks Stoppard isn't entitled to his – as a playwright, having views on contemporary life is exactly what he's for – I am at a loss to understand. As a newspaper editor, aren't words what she is for? It is one thing to argue that Stoppard is wrong – which he isn't – it is quite another to attribute his attack to professional jealousy, in Janet Street-Porter's words, to ‘a big fit of the sulks'. Hard to imagine what, in the way of genius or success, Tom Stoppard might have to sulk about. That apart, it is a sad state of affairs when a person cannot demur to a fad without his motives coming under suspicion. There is such a thing as intellectual disinterestedness, which is what we all are for.

Myself, I view Stoppard's intervention – to use an art word – as an important event. A little in advance of Stoppard's speech, Sir Nicholas Serota had made his usual prickly defence of the latest Turner shortlist – ‘I don't feel any pressure to make it easier for ordinary people to understand.' Had any one of us innocently enquired what extraordinary powers were needed to understand a blob of Blu-tack, we would only have demonstrated our ignorance and proved Serota's point. Conceptual art is not the thing you see, it is the strategic placing of a reference in the history of a philosophical idea. Not for you to bother your little uneducated head about, sonny Jim. Enter Stoppard, bristling with philosophical credentials – too many of them, anyway, for Gilbert and George to penetrate. If ever there were a man who did not need to have difficult concepts explained to him, it is Stoppard. O joy, O bliss! Things will no doubt go on as before, but the argument that we don't like it only because we can't understand it is much weaker than it was.

Implied in Stoppard's criticism is a conviction of what art is for. ‘The term artist isn't intelligible to me,' he said, ‘if it doesn't entail making.' An extremely bold assertion, given how indurated, in the visual arts, the arguments against making are, and what a ninny you are thought to be if making is your bag. Janet Street-Porter questions ‘the “craft” factor', but in fact craft has got nothing to do with it. Nor, when we speak of making, are we thinking of William Morris and the honest labour of the hands. A work not made is a work not undergone, a process of discovery and change not submitted to, revelations not revealed. Every good writer and artist will tell you that the most productive days are those which begin in ignorance and confusion, the tunnel ahead black, and not an idea in your head. Strictly speaking, ideas are your enemy. Ideas are what you had before. Ideas are where you stand, not where you might end up. ‘Never trust the artist, trust the tale,' D. H. Lawrence famously wrote, meaning that an achieved work is another thing entirely from anything the artist merely wanted it to be.

The conceptual artist reverses Lawrence's dictum, in effect saying, ‘Never trust the art, trust the artist's intention.'

In art we get beyond ourselves; here is part of the reason we value it. Marooned in the sterility of his will – decreeing this idea, giving orders for that – the conceptual artist fears the process of change and contradiction which is art's justification. Hence the inertness of his work when we stand before it – no trace anywhere of what else it might have been or any argument it might be having with itself. Mere insistence. Which isn't, as Stoppard reminded us, what art is for.

How to Upset a Millionaire

There is a programme on BBC2 which I watch out of the side of my face while I am doing other things – the way you observe bad behaviour in someone else's children, disapproving and yet gripped – whose premise is that we would all like to make a lot of money, but only a few of us know how. Making money in business, that is, not making money by being a celebrity or writing columns for national newspapers. As the child of small business people who never made a penny, but never thought it dishonourable to try, I have a soft spot for business. I have sold leather goods on a market stall in Cambridge, and helped a friend in Wales manufacture crimplene dresses for little girls to wear in religious processions – a foolproof enterprise had the Welsh not been Nonconformists who don't believe in religious processions – and managed a craft centre where none of the craftspeople wanted to demonstrate their craft, and assisted in the running of a tea garden in Cornwall, my assistance consisting of ferrying hot pasties each morning from Liskeard where they were baked to Boscastle where they were consumed, stopping on Bodmin Moor when the sun shone to admire the scenery, pat the wild ponies and consume a few myself. A few pasties, that is, not ponies. Much as I like to think of mine as a life of letters, it has been no less a life of trade. So that when all my friends became Marxists in the 1970s it fell to me to make the case for capital.