Dare to be a Daniel

Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone,
Dare to have a purpose firm, and dare to make it known.

While reading Richard West's The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Daniel Defoe these lines from a Sunday school hymn bubbled up from the murky depths of my memory. Throughout most of his eventful but poorly documented life Defoe's political instinct seems to have been contrarian and so fiercely independent that he was repeatedly in serious trouble with the powers that be. Though there is something to the claims of his political enemies that in later life he was a paid party hack, West makes a convincing case that Defoe was essentially one of life's natural outsiders and bit the hands that fed him as much as the hands of their opponents. 'Tis hard', he says at the beginning of one of his pamphlets, 'for a man to say, all the world is mistaken but himself, but if it be so, who can help it?'

The intolerance of cant that characterized his political nonconformity had its origin in Defoe's religious nonconformity. He was a presbyterian and nonconformists in late Stuart England were commonly regarded as likely to be as politically subversive as catholics. His mercantile social origins and lack of a university education made him the occasional butt of smart literary society humour and it is clear that this hurt him but also stiffened his resolve to tell the truth as he saw it and damn the consequences.

All this made me think about my own nonconformist upbringing. It's a long time since I could be said to hold any religious beliefs but being brought up in a presbyterian/congregational household does, I think, have a lasting influence on one's view of the society you live in, your place in it and how you think about it. I remember as a child not feeling part of the mainstream. Attending school carol concerts in the anglican parish church made me feel uncomfortable. The iconograpy and ritual even of low church anglicanism was completely alien to me and the idea of kneeling for prayer just one step from idolatry. Our type of nonconformity emphasised the primacy of the individual's unmediated, partly cerebral, relationship with their God. The guidebook was the Bible, but each had to make their own sense as best they could of the coded instructions contained therein. Overt displays of religious emotion, such as we believed the Baptists and Methodists indulged in were held to be vulgar and a distraction from the spiritual sobriety that was required if each was to find their own way.

Maybe my contrarianism, which I'm sure must occasionally drive my colleagues to distraction, is nothing more than an inherent personality defect, but I prefer to believe that it has something to do with the form of the nonconformist conscience which persists even after all the religious content has been excised.

What happened to November?

Too busy to blog for a whole month, how is that possible? I've got a stack of things I want to blog about but also a stack of pressing and post pressing deadlines. To keep the scent hot here is a little number by Tom Lehrer about sociology. I'll be back...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX5II-BJ8hI&feature=related

Nazis in the Neighbourhood

Following the leak of yet another BNP "membership" list I thought it would be fun to try and find out something about the social demography of our homegrown Nazis. What follows should be hedged around with a sackful of caveats. Most importantly the 2009 "membership" list may not be a membership list at all, though there seems to be less doubt about the authenticity of the 2007 figures. There is also rather little individual level information in the leaked lists that can help us draw a portrait of the average wannabe brownshirt. There is however a precise postcode for almost every name with an address in the UK. This means that we can assign them to one of the 18 ACORN groups http://www.caci.co.uk/ACORN/pclookup.asp beloved of all those firms that stuff our letter boxes full of junk mail (sorry, I meant to write - enrich our consumption experience by making us aware of additional life-style options). Being fastidious I should point out that the ACORN labels apply to the households in the geographical areas defined by the postcodes rather than the individuals themselves. But this is a blog not an academic paper so I'll cut myself a little linguistic slack. What strikes me about these numbers is that leaving aside their unhinged political opinions, socio-demographically your typical British Nazi isn't particularly distinctive when compared to the whole of the British population. They are a bit less likely to be wealthy executives, prosperous professionals or educated urbanites - rich, suave and sophisticated don't seem to be terms that are commonly used by the press to describe Nick Griffin. They are also a bit less likely to be living in asian communities which given their policy preferences is scarcely revelatory. Blue-collar roots and settled suburbanity are a little more common than average as is the burden of singledom (given their views is it surprising nobody loves them?). Overall though, BNP members look remarkably similar to you and me and that makes me think twice about the bloke living down my road with the rather retro taste in short upper-lip facial hair.

Lennonist cultural hybridity

I'm told that 'hybridity' and 'liminality' are important concepts in a certain type of cultural sociology. One likes to keep an open mind so here is an example that appeals to me - The Beatles in Yiddish http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vAMgbGEDTY. And why not?

How do we choose what children should read?

This is another post stimulated by my reading habits. I recently walked past a second-hand bookshop and saw on display this late 1950s paperback edition of Wolf Mankowitz's A Kid for Two Farthings. Well of course I had to buy it. It wasn't the rather fetching rendition on the cover of Diana Dors and Sid James drawn from a scene in the screen version that attracted me though. It was pure nostalgia. This is one of the three books that I can remember my class being set to read for English lessons during the first two years of my secondary schooling. It's a relatively slight, middlebrow sort of thing, but charming enough in its own way. The adult me enjoyed it which is more than can be said of the child that it was forced upon. Before "rereading" it I couldn't remember a thing about the story, apart from its title, because my recollection is that I hated it first time around and read barely more than a few pages. Truth be told I couldn't relate to it and my teacher certainly didn't make any effort to help me, or anyone else, understand it. I didn't appreciate the somewhat magical whimsy and the allegorical elements, such as they are, went right over my head. Eleven year olds in the West Midlands during the 1970s were not noted for their sensitive appreciation of the Jewish East End of London during the 1930s and in retrospect it seems an astonishing thing to ask us to read. Perhaps we were expected to learn something by osmosis from the writing itself which is deceptively simple but stylish.

Equally unsuccesful in firing my childish imagination was the second book inflicted on us - Richard Hughes' A High Wind In Jamaica. Hughes is now one of my favourite authors and A High Wind In Jamaica is a masterpiece but it falls squarely into the category of books about children that are best appreciated by adults. I can see that my teacher thought that her 11 year olds ought to like it but the seriousness of the plot and the sophistication of the language were a mile over my head. It just looked to me like a fusty, forty year old, adventure story about a bunch of middle-class children who are captured by pirates. But reading it as an adult you see that it is more Lord of the Flies avant la lettre than Swallows and Amazons and that it isn't the pirates that are the barbarians.

I'm left with a number of thoughts. Were we really only asked to read three books between the ages of 11 and 13? (The other was Ian Seraillier's The Silver Sword which really is a children's adventure story - needless to say I consumed it with alacrity from cover to cover). How and why were these particular books deemed suitable for us? How do you balance relating literature to the everyday lives of the kids that are reading it and persuading them to be curious about events and experiences that are beyond their personnel experience?

While still at school, but somewhat older, we were given Barry Hines' A Kestrel for a Nave as a set text for O Level. I remember that even then I felt we were being patronized. Being mostly working class kids we were meant to relate to the life of the main protagonist, a lonely, hopeless, misfit in a Yorkshire mining village who has but one thing of value in his life - his hawk. The book has a poignancy but it isn't great literatue - "it's a poor novel but a good film script" I remember my, now savvy, English teacher saying - and we certainly didn't relate to it. Sixteen year olds in an affluent Midlands factory town did not consider they had the slightest kinship with scruffy impoverished oiks from Yorkshire. None of us had seen a pit, nor a hawk for that matter and we, we thought, were definitely not headed for dead-end jobs. Just another example of how, when making choices for children, adults can get it wrong.

All this is just a preamble to my final thought. The sociology of literary taste is, as far as I know, pretty unfashionable now. But it occurs to me that for many kids their experience of literature, such as it is, begins and ends with what they are forced to read at school. It would be fascinating to see how that has changed over time. It would also be pretty easy to do. Syllabi for public examinations going back at least to the 1950s are still sitting around in libraries. With a bit of effort a more or less complete list of the novels, plays and poetry inflicted on British school children could be compiled. That would be interesting in itself. Even more interesting would be to get "experts" to rate the "flavours" of the works a bit in the manner that malt whiskies or fine wines are rated. One could then think in terms of projecting each work onto a low dimensional map of literary taste. I wonder what its dimensions might be?

Wie es eigentlich war

My non professional reading is, I guess, pretty random. I have far more unread books on my shelves than I will ever have time to get through but I like the idea of availability - I can pick up something that I've noted as interesting and squirreled away, just as the spirit moves me. Whatever the process is that then guides my selection I have no real idea.
It just so happens that the last two books I read for pleasure had more in common than that they were written by Germans and dealt with painful aspects of German history. Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern) is an account of his life in the front line during World War I. It is extraordinary for several reasons. Firstly it was written very soon (published in 1920) after the end of the war while the experience was still fresh. By contrast most of the classic British accounts (Goodbye to All That, 1929; Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 1930; Undertones of War, 1928; The Middle Parts of Fortune, 1929) date from at least a decade later and are in a sense refined by the simple passage of time. Secondly Jünger most definitely does not belong to the "war and the pity of war" school. He was and remained throughout his life an ardent German nationalist (though not a Nazi - he was peripherally involved in the Stauffenberg bomb plot) and one gets the sense that his war-time service was the most exilerating thing that ever happened to him. What is truly remarkable though is the quite matter of fact nature of his account. Comrades fall around him or are horribly maimed on practically every page. The shells fall within feet and he expects to die at any moment but carries on doing his duty for what else can he do? He rarely sees the enemy and spends most of his time sheltering from artillery fire in dugouts, cellars and shell holes. There is no reflection on right or wrong or the justice or injustice of the cause - the book begins after the war has started and ends before the armistice - and no poetry. In the end he survives, though wounded more than twenty times and is decorated by the Kaiser. Though the attitude that underlies his account is alien (I would imagine) to most people now, there is an honesty about the writing that made me feel, yes, that is what it was really like for an adventurous young man of his social background, temperament and time and that to still convey this long after the events have faded from living memory is an achievement of considerable merit. You don't have to like the man or what he stood for to admire his art.
Honesty is what I also admire about Peter Gay's story of the six years of his life that he spent as a boy in Nazi Germany - My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin. In fact it is about much more than this. What it is really about is his attempt to understand the impact on his subsequent life. He is at pains to make clear that as "assimilated" jews who could pass as gentiles he and his family were able to live comparatively normal lives until just months before they were able to emigrate in 1939. Many suffered much more than they did and most (though not all) of his family survived the Holocaust. To be sure life could be difficult but what were the alternatives? Gay describes his frustration (and anger) at the lack of comprehension shown by people who ask him: why did it take so long to see what was coming? Why did so many stay when their country rejected them? The answer is simple: you stay, endure the indignities and bottle up your anger because this is your home, your life is here, you don't speak a foreign language and you have no skills that have any value in a foreign country. You probably know intellectually that one day you will have to leave, but while you can still go home from work, draw the curtains and enjoy some semblance of family life you try to carry on as normal. After all, notwithstanding the gangsters that are in power, Germany is probably the least anti-semitic country in Central Europe...
Gay's honesty extends to the confession that his Berlin boyhood poisoned Gay the man. It left him with many unresolved tensions in his feelings about Germany and the Germans. He is honest in admitting that many of these feelings are irrational - the account of his projection of anti-semitism onto the wholly innocent demeanour of a woman working in a currency exchange bureau during his first post-war visit to Germany is told with complete candour. He feels only pleasure at the news of the horrific firestorms that swept through German cities after allied bombing raids killing countless innocent women and children. You are given the impression that he doubts whether they were in fact wholly innocent. Just as with Jünger you may not like what you read, you may feel repelled by some of it, but you were not there. He was and if you are prepared to listen you can learn a little of what it was actually like.

Normal and non-normal science

As a coda to my last post about the stange world of sociology journal publishing I found this short paper by Lin Freeman illuminating: http://moreno.ss.uci.edu/87.pdf. It never occurred to me that acceptance rates in hard science journals would be so much higher than in the social sciences though his explanation makes perfect sense. I wonder how it would look if you included in the sample more paradigmatic disciplines like economics or (non social) psychology?