Another voice
Kenny's Law
Auberon Waugh It was in the dog days of August, as I mused happily about the July trade deficit and wondered whether to write to The Tittles about High-Rise Housing or Changes in the Roman Liturgy—obviously one or the other required my attention, but I could not decide which—that I saw the light. My point about housing was that vandalism is not confined to tenants of high-rise estates although it is Confined to council tenants—squatters are seldom so destructive or so determined not In mend anything which is broken. My point about changes in the Roman liturgy. ... but no, the gentle readers of the Spectator have already heard my moans on that subject. What is plainly needed is a synthesis between these great issues of our time, relating liturgical changes and lower-class hooliganism to the extremely poor economic prosl3ect, but it is not easy. I was playing with the Idea of taking up Gerard Manley Hopkins's interesting and important question:
'Why do men then now not seek Thy rod ? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod.'
to reach the familiar but strangely disregarded conclusion: spare the rod and spoil 1.rile child—but then, as I say, I saw the light. is came to me when I was reading an `1;teellently well-informed article on the new ,,aris Metro by Mary Kenny. It appeared in ,`„ne Evening Standard under the headline: orriething nasty on the smooth, new autoTated underground,' and made the startling tlisClosure that 'the more the conditions and 13,erformance of the Metro have improved. ""le higher the crime rate has risen.' t„ rs Mode w rnists, planners, building contrac,."it h and the whole army of pressure groups thul/ a vested interest in rebuilding everyca3 in sight will reply that this is a classic se of the logical error called post hoc ergo ."°Pter hoc. I remember some time ago readl„.ng an article by Robert Pitman in the Daily r.l:Press attacking the Daily Mirror which read just announced it had put on a million tk.ders in the past ten years, or some such tt'uoLe. 'But it's rather a funny thing, isn't it', is eu wrote for words to that effect), 'that this coi)(actlY the same figure as the number of theoured immigrants who have come here in same Period ?' ithAt the time I was working for the Mirror eir!nd ut.eed to attribute its meteoric rise in sh`: lation to that cause. This may have eaarkp en en e d. my perception of the logical no ",0 ss in Pitman's case, and there can be pickaubt that the human mind does tend to lflffld choose from the wealth of available ti 0n those snippets which it finds kenn ongenial. Nevertheless, I feel that Ms Y has uncovered an important truth.
She lists the almost unbelievable advantages of the new Metro in Paris. Trains have been speeded up and now run at ninetysecond intervals in peak hours. The new stations gleam with functional efficiency.
Against this, she lists the terrifying rise in violence: 900 serious attacks on passengers in the past twelve months, not counting many thousands of 'incidents' involving theft and violence between rival hooligans If one is to say with any confidence that there is a necessary link between anti-social behaviour of this sort and improved public facilities, one must first try applying Kenny's Law to other fields. What about schools? It is a commonplace to blame the extraordinary increase in violence and hooliganism on the size of the new comprehensives. But what about the architecture? What about all these wonderful and costly new language laboratories and other school equipment which manages to automate and depersonalise the whole system of education? Might it not be discovered that there is a discernible link between the modernity of a school and the delinquency of its pupils? In housing, of course, the link is there for all to see. Although people still talk of the deleterious effects of high-rise buildings and underfloor heating. I am convinced that the vast new estate being planned in Islington. where every tenant will have his own identical house and garden, will prove nearly as disastrous. Human nature recoils from functionalistn, and on this occasion it will be the size of theestate which drives its tenants mad.
At this stage in testing Kenny's Law one can only proceed by intuition, and we may be sure that formidable obstacles will be placed in the way of any scientific inquiry. I know from my own personal experience that the few intimations of madness I have ever known have all visited me in modern luxury hotels. If I am right, it is the cruellest thing imaginable to knock down all our old prison-like loony-bins with their homely smells, leaking roofs and magnificent high walls, to replace them by fibre glass egg boxes with nylon wall-to-wall carpeting. Plainly there is a sexist explanation for the fact that Holloway remains our only major women's prison in the country, while there are those of comparable or greater size for men in London alone. But I prefer an architectural explanation, that Holloway remains one of the finest and least functional buildings in North London. I have no doubt at all that as soon as that beautiful castellated façade is knocked down there will be such outbreaks of violence among the women prisoners as we have never seen.
The sort of questions we should be asking ourselves now are whether prisoners in mod
ern prisons are more violent and anti-social than prisoners in old ones: are loonies in modern loony-bins loonier? Might it not be the architecture which is keeping them there ? Are businessmen in modern offices more crooked? Lawyers and judges in modern courtrooms greedier, idler or stupider? Journalists drunkener? We know that schoolchildren in modern, custom-built classrooms are unrulier. That much, thank God, has been established. But until there has been a formal scientific investigation into every aspect of life where modernist or functionalist doctrines have been applied to the exclusion of aesthetic preference or
traditional practice we can only proceed by intuition and it is an unspoken intuitive process, an irrational reaction against everything modern and everything efficient which. I am convinced, explains last month's disappointing trade figures and the imminent collapse of our economy.
Let us first apply Kenny's Law to the changes in the Roman liturgy. It is quite true that a modernisation of the liturgy has been accompanied by a spectacular fallingaway of church attendance. Yes, yes, we all know that a formal connection remains to be proved, but the coincidence is there, is it not? And since the new liturgy, sloppily Englished, unintelligently arranged and aesthetically unpleasing, can scarcely be described as more functional than what it replaced. this reaction can only be explained in terms of an instinctive rejection of modernism. My argument is that this reaction is rapidly becoming as mindless and Pavlovian as the modernism it opposes. There are, after all, quite a few modern inventions—electric shavers, washing machines, even electronic calculators—which need not be destructive of morality or human dignity if used intelligently.
Let us now apply Kenny's Law to the balance of payments and our economic predicament. If, as we must surely believe by now, human nature recoils from every aspect of functionalism and modern cosseting. is it surprising that Britain should once again be in the lead ? I nst inctively, the British working class, when given power, has created the conditions which make further investment impossible: our manufactured goods are a by-word for shoddiness: every penny of profit is recklessly grabbed by the workers long in advance and thrown away with equal recklessness. Not to put too fine a point on it. there is a mood of general and universal delinquency on the country at the moment which can only lead to the collapse of our currency, an end to all school building. shopping precinct construction, council planning, a total retreat from modernism.
God bless Mary Kenny. She even explains what has always puzzled me, why so many nice and intelligent people become socialists, while so many truly horrible people—like Mr Heath, with his disgusting obsession with his weight—become Conservatives. The answer is simply that socialism can't possibly work, while technological capitalism might but mustn't.be allowed to.
Previous page
