First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Back in July, on its 10th birthday, I introduced the Prospect Reading Group to this blog, and wondered out loud why reading groups were treated with such suspicion.

I promised to share our future discussions, but as things would have it, the last meeting on August 30 was a real set-to, and I’ve only had time now to pull together a report. Anything I write will inevitably reflect my own views, but hopefully members of the group – and of course anyone else – will add their comments.

The discussion focused on a nonfiction/fiction pair: The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, and Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow, which reportedly used Bloom as inspiration for the main character. In the scrum over Bloom, Bellow’s novel ended up receiving a good deal less attention.

Bloom is now dead but his arguments, first published in book form in 1987, are still part of a continuing debate. Even in our relatively homogenous reading group (professional, well-educated and international) there were strong and differing responses. Many members found his book pleasantly challenging: especially the last third, about the deficiencies of modern university life. But the unfamiliarity of the material to most members of the group could be seen as proof of his main argument, that people in the west lack knowledge of their own culture’s intellectual traditions.

Bloom’s answer is to insist that all university students be acquainted with Plato, and the broad narrative of Western philosophical thought, if the best of its values are to survive. Here, our group may have offered proof for another Bloom argument, that people are not only unfamiliar with the heritage, but also unsympathetic to it: some group members joined wider critics in finding him guilty of elitism, irrelevance or neo-conservatism.

I am not in that camp, and I don’t remember finding the book hard to read (another charge) although I see that I left unmarked the entire first section, where he vents ‘grumpy old man’ prejudices about modern life. But despite its faults I find it prescient: why else do we seem to have so little to say now in defence of western values, except that we are ‘free’ to wear skimpy clothing? (I know, I know, there’s more to it than that, but I am making a point).

I would add that the main reason why Bloom is associated with the right is that, at the time he wrote the book, the left had vacated the space where ‘values’ and western intellectual heritage could be reinterpreted in a positive light. In fact, since then, it has arguably re-entered that space, but that is the topic of another blog, or article, or book.

Last night I joined an odd collection of musos, trendies and City boys at a special gig to mark the closing of the Spitz, the bistro, gallery and music venue in Spitalfields market that for the last ten years or so has built up a reputation as one of the best places to hear live music in London. Although it maintained a refreshingly eclectic programming policy, its particular strengths were in all things “Americana”—country, folk and blues, all of which were well represented last night.

I’ve been a regular visitor over the years, and while the venue has occasionally missed the mark—a troupe of earnest middle-aged white British men trying to pass themselves off as a Congolese soukous band lingers painfully in the memory—the high spots have been many. I’ll remember two in particular—the captivating gravel-voiced Sandy Dillon, who I suppose could be described, roughly, as a female Tom Waits, and my friend Nick Talbot’s band Gravenhurst (I commend to you Nick’s blog, the Police Diver’s Notebook).

The Spitz is looking for another London home, and is soliciting donations to help it do so. Read more here.

Another recent artistic highlight for me was Boilerroom’s Terrific Electric, a play that opened the Barbican’s Bite season of contemporary theatre and dance. Themed loosely around the discovery of electricity, the play deploys an impressive range of lighting, sound and prop devices to explore the changes wrought by powerful new technologies. Its Barbican run has finished, but it may be touring the UK next year.

For the October issue of Prospect, we have invited 50 writers and intellectuals to respond to Gordon Brown’s call in July for a “British statement of values.” What should this statement be and what should inform it? Our respondents ranged from Michael Gove to Eric Hobsbawm to Brian Eno; and you can read their responses here. Let us know what you think in the comments box below.

For the last three years, Bartle Bull has contributed to Prospect a series of dispatches from Iraq that have taken a noticeably more optimistic view of the post-conflict society than most coverage in the western press. His first Prospect piece, in the November 2004 issue, looked forward to the democratic transfer of power to Iraq’s Shia majority. In mid-2005, after spending five weeks in Baghdad embedded with Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army, Bull described the increasing politicisation of a rebel group that less than a year earlier had been battling US troops in Najaf.

Now Bull has written what is likely to be his most controversial piece yet. In the current issue of Prospect, he argues that contrary to the bleak picture of Iraq painted almost universally, at least in the west, most of the big questions in Iraq have largely been settled, and mostly for the good. The country has not fallen apart. It has embraced the ballot box, in huge numbers. It has created a legitimate and fair constitution. It has avoided civil war. Power has been democratically transferred to the Shia majority, while minority rights have been safeguarded. The country has ceased to be a menace in the region. It has even emerged from the trauma of war, occupation and widespread bloodshed with a sense of national unity, as was clearly shown by the national celebrations following the country’s football victory in the Asian Cup in July.

This is an unsettling argument. Iraq is clearly not a country at ease with itself—while sectarian violence may have dipped slightly since the beginning of General Petraeus’s military “surge” earlier this year, Iraqis are still dying violently at the staggering rate of 1,500 a month. But Bull’s argument is that this violence, while horrific, is no longer of strategic importance. Of the Sunni insurgent groups, the former Baathists are finally coming around to Shia majority rule and seeking a place for themselves in the political tent; the tribal groups in western Iraq have accepted the new dispensation and are doing their best to milk it for all its worth; and the violent Wahhabi fundamentalists, most of them foreign, are losing the battle to take Iraq back to the 7th century. As for the Shia anti-occupation violence, since al-Sadr’s uprisings in 2004, it has been non-existent. Scattered death squads and offshoots of the Mahdi army continue to shed blood, but al-Sadr is now more interested in politics than fighting.

Taken on its own, “realist” terms, Bull’s argument can be seductive. But, as David Goodhart points out in his editorial, it is hard to skate over the continuing violence, as well as the steady stream of refugees fleeing the country. Many people will be shocked by the article—indeed, it was the source of many arguments in the Prospect office. Let us know your thoughts below.

My annual 24-hour visit to the Labour party conference did not go according to plan, but it could have been a lot worse. Buoyed by the news that the Daily Telegraph had named me 89th most influential person on the British left (Yes! Bizarrely ahead of real lefties like John Pilger and even the head of the Fabian Society), I jumped on a train to Bournemouth on Monday afternoon. I was looking forward to speaking at an IPPR fringe event on multiculturalism at 7pm, going to the Guardian/Observer party at 9pm, hanging around enjoying the political chit-chat, sticking my nose in at a fringe event or two on Tuesday morning, listening to Gordon Brown’s first speech as leader on Tuesday afternoon and then getting a train back to London. But even before I got off the train I discovered that part of my plan had unravelled—Gordon had already delivered his speech. Tony Blair always spoke on Tuesday; why did nobody tell me Gordon was switching to Monday?

When I got to my bed and breakfast to drop my things and prepare my five-minute contribution to the fringe debate, things looked as if they were going to unravel rather more—I opened the envelope with my conference pass in it and discovered the picture on the pass was of my brother Daniel Goodhart, who works as a cameraman for the German TV network ZDF and who also had a conference pass (see right). Someone in the Labour press office must have picked out a picture from the D Goodhart file without noticing there were two of us. I rang Daniel straight away in case he was still in Bournemouth and could vouch for me if the wrong picture prevented me getting into the secure zone—alas he had already gone back to London. I slumped in a chair and watched the gushing coverage of the Brown speech on the BBC Six o’clock news.

Fortunately the police officer checking passes into the secure zone did not look closely at mine and waved me through. I found my way to the Tralee Hotel, which was a jungle of competing fringe events. I complained to anyone who would listen that more has become less on the fringe. There are far too many events with far too few people attending them; Labour should rationalise the system by insisting that each think tank is only allowed two events a day. But someone from the SMF explained to me that this would wipe out half the think tanks in Britain. “You don’t understand, this is where we make our money,” she said. The scales fell from my eyes. Every event on a dreary specialist subject in a faraway hotel attic attended by nine people is sponsored by three companies which have each put up, say, £5,000—giving a net profit for the event of £14,500. The big companies are happy to spend their money this way—it’s simple, and in its way public-spirited—and the think tanks are happy to survive for another year at the cost of one over-hectic week.

The IPPR event—with the MPs David Blunkett and Parmjit Dhanda, Mori’s Ben Page and me—was reasonably well attended but otherwise unmemorable. (We did have quite an interesting brief debate about the use of school buses to enforce integration in the US, and I ventured that it had been a disaster for the Democrats—to be quite honest I’m not sure if that is true, but nobody contradicted me, anybody care to now?) The rest of the evening was spent in a pleasant alcoholic haze. I remember arguing with Jon Snow’s sycophantic characterisation of Gordon Brown as a giant intellect compared with the empty vessel that was Tony Blair. And cadging cigarettes off the delightful Lauren Booth, who turns out to know rather a lot about the middle east (as much as her brother-in-law?). I also remember an interesting debate with Martin O’Neill (Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan) about what equality could possibly mean in the relationship between England and Scotland.

On Tuesday I experienced (or rather re-experienced) the death of the political speech. I watched a re-run of Brown’s speech from the day before. It was not really a speech at all—there was no argument, no analysis; it was a political positioning exercise for the Brown brand. Nothing wrong with that in principle, although it is a shame that a serious intellectual like Brown cannot make a serious speech. Blair’s conference speeches were miles better—yes, they were often theatrical, but they did also generally have some argument within them, some attempt to persuade his own party of the rightness of some reform or other. The demise of inner-party democracy and a leader who is at peace with his party, like Brown, means that there is no reason for argument at all.

I did see the David Miliband foreign policy speech at lunchtime on Tuesday. By his rather lacklustre standards, it wasn’t too bad. There was lots of meaningless rhetoric and a few statements of the obvious about how democracy cannot be built via the military, and how the motives of Britain and America are perceived negatively by young Muslims around the world. The Guardian described this as a brilliant and daring break with Blair’s foreign policy. But come on David, it must be possible to combine pressing the right soundbite buttons with a bit more intellectual ambition.

It has become the fashion to knock VS Naipaul. Yes, he is a fine prose stylist, and has written some good books (so the wisdom goes), but his recent novels have been shapeless and repetitive and his writing abilities have been eclipsed by his general grumpiness and his reactionary views on such matters as race and multiculturalism.

This account, while reasonable in many ways, leaves out what it is that made Naipaul such a good and original writer in the first place. In his elegant review of Naipaul’s new essay collection in the latest issue of Prospect, Ian Jack reminds us. Naipaul arrived in Britain in the 1950s to find a society which, although attractive in some respects, was of little use to him as a writer. European society had, as Jack puts it, been “crawled over” by the great British, French and Russian novelists. And so Naipaul had to find “a new way of writing, entirely his own, because he could find no models that fitted his experience.” Do Prospect readers agree with Jack’s assessment? Leave your comments here.

Coverage has started to appear, both in Britain and in the US, of Philip Roth’s new novel Exit Ghost, the last of his Nathan Zuckerman books. Roth’s recent work has earned near universal acclaim, but not, it seems, this new novel. Christopher Hitchens’s review in the Atlantic is pretty ferocious (sample observation: “Roth has degraded the Eros-Thanatos dialectic of some of his earlier work and is now using his fiction, first to kill off certain characters and to shoot the wounded, and second to give himself something to masturbate about”). An even nastier, and frankly pretty stupid, assessment is by Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

One uncertainty that the coverage has failed to resolve is that which lingers over the novel’s title. You’d think it came from the famous “exit ghost” stage direction in the first act of Hamlet—and this is what most commentators, including Hitchens, have assumed. But Hermione Lee begins her conversation with Roth in the current issue of the New Yorker by referring to it as being “taken from a stage directon in Macbeth.” There is, indeed, an “exit ghost” command in Macbeth, in the banquet scene when Banquo’s ghost appears. I think one has to trust the New Yorker on this one—not only because their fact-checking is probably more thorough than anyone else’s, but also because Roth himself doesn’t contradict Lee’s assertion (which she repeats) in the course of their conversation. So, it’s Macbeth, not Hamlet, that Roth is alluding to. But what does this mean in terms of the novel’s themes? No doubt that is something literary critics will ponder for many years to come.

“Memory,” the poet Alexander Smith wrote in 1863, is “a man’s real possession… In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.” The title of the particular essay this comes from is “Death and Dying,” and memory certainly can be a sobering topic. Even in 2007, for all the wonders of technology, it remains an absolute limit: the history that living eyes have seen creeps behind us, reaching back only a century or fractionally more. The title of world’s oldest human has, since 13th August 2007, been held by 114-year-old Edna Parker of Indiana, born on 20th April 1893: no human being now alive saw the year 1892.

Consider Henry Allingham, who at 111 is the oldest of the 23 veterans of the first world war still alive today, and one of only 3 British veterans living. Within a few years, this epochal event will have passed from living memory; the government announced in June last year that the death of the last known British first world war veteran would be marked by a national memorial service at Westminster Abbey. It’s a slightly macabre thought, and also begs the question—what else should we be commemorating? It can be surprising how long, and how, the past lingers. In 1869, the last surviving veteran of the Revolutionary War which founded the United States died. In 1956, the last surviving member of the Union Army which fought in the American Civil War died. It was as recently as 1993 that the last surviving veteran of the Boer War died.

In one sense, this is all incredibly banal. Only a tiny slice of history can ever “live” in memory, while every experience comes only once. In another sense, however, anything that puts history and mortality into fresh perspective has its value—and it is worth being reminded that talking to a living person about events they have witnessed is a privilege that time constantly revokes.

One of Terry Pratchett’s neatest jokes in the Discworld novels concerns the troll (big creatures made of rock) system of counting, which entails only the words “one,” “two,” “many” and “lots”—a fact often cited by troll-haters as evidence of their stupidity. What the mockers don’t know is that troll numbers in fact follow a perfectly sensible quaternary system which begins “one, two, many-one, many-two, many-many, many-many-one…”

It’s a gag with a real world parallel: the Amazonian tribe known as the Pirahã, who lack the ability to quantify precisely any group of objects greater than two. And their language, as we’ve discussed in both the magazine and this blog, lies at the heart of a huge debate in modern linguistics, in which nothing less than Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar and the fundamental question of how language and thought relate are at stake.

In his latest book, The Stuff of Thought, the noted language and cognition researcher Steven Pinker has now weighed into the debate; and he offers—in my opinion—a brilliantly lucid exposition of just what it means when a remote hunter-gathering tribe cannot subtract three from six.

To conclude that the lack of precise number thoughts among the Pirahã is caused by their lack of precise number words is, Pinker argues, to make “a dubious leap from correlation to causation.” Instead, he points out, we need to realise that the idea of counting is very different to the idea of number:

It’s tempting to equate a use of the number five with the ability to count five things, but they are very different accomplishment. Counting is an algorithm, like long division or the use of logarithmic tables—in this case an algorithm for assessing the exact numerosity of a set of objects.

Thus, Pinker concludes, the fact that these hunter-gatherers have not developed a counting technique is no more a proof that language dictates thought than the fact that they have not developed a technique for building self-supporting stone arches. Indeed, the existence or non-existence of particular words in a particular language is not itself the crucial factor in whether a technique can be used by its speakers:

…the counting algorithm we teach preschoolers, like the more complex mental arithmetic we teach school-age children, co-opts words in the language. But it is not part of the language, like subject-verb agreement, nor does it come for free with the language… The prerequisite for exact number concepts beyond “two” is a counting algorithm, not a language with number words.

Responses will no doubt be pouring in already from those in the language-determines-thought camp. In the politest possible terms, I’m sure.

To the Frontline Club in west London last night for a public discussion on the Iraq “surge.” Iraq’s man in London, the very personable Salah al-Shaikhly, and Ahmed Rikaby, founder of a Baghdad radio station, both claimed that the increase in US troops had significantly improved the security situation on the ground in Iraq, and al-Shaikhly in particular was, unsurprisingly, bullish about Iraq’s future stability. In the pessimistic corner was the disembodied voice—he was speaking over a telephone link—of former US diplomat Peter Galbraith, who made the case he argued in his 2006 book The End of Iraq that the country has no viable future as a single state, and should be split along Shia/Sunni/Kurdish lines (Gareth Stansfield argued similarly in the May 2006 issue of Prospect).

To a witness of the sectarian carnage in Iraq, Galbraith’s pessimism can be alluring. Although sectarian violence has fallen since the surge, monthly casualty figures are still well into four figures. An overwhelming majority of the Kurds in northern Iraq favour independence, while elsewhere in the country, signs of reconciliation between Iraq’s Shia and Sunni communities are scant, both at street level and among the politicians. Yet amid such gloom, it is easy to forget that Iraqi national feeling is not just a figment of the west’s imagination. Asked in March what constitutional structure they favoured, almost 60 per cent of Iraqis wanted a unified country, with just 15 per cent supporting separate independent states. Salah al-Shaikhly reminded last night’s sceptical audience that Shia Iraqis made up 65 per cent of Saddam’s supposedly pro-Sunni Baath party, and that half of all marriages in Iraq cross the sectarian divide. And in his article in this week’s New Yorker, George Packer states that a poll found that the percentage of Baghdad residents who identified themselves as Iraqis “above all” doubled between 2004 and 2006, despite the rise in sectarian violence. More difficult to quantify, but still telling, is the claim, made both by Rikaby last night and Nibras Kazimi in his most recent Prospect column, that the national celebrations that followed Iraq’s recent football victory in the Asian Cup ran far deeper than the brief coverage in the western media would have us believe. (Rikaby said that parts of Iraqi Kurdistan, where Iraqi flags are usually as hard to find as Iraqi WMD, were immediately decked out in the things after the victory).

Without any apparent appetite for partition, or even “radical federalism,” among either US or Iraqi leaders, it’s difficult to see any future for Iraq that involves the country breaking up—although as Packer’s article makes clear, it is very difficult to predict what effect the inevitable withdrawal of American troops will have on the country.

You can see a video recording of last night’s Frontline discussion here.