28 MAY 1983, Page 10

A higher form of apathy

Shiva Naipaul

My electoral record is suspect: I have faced a ballot box only once in my life — and that in a local council election. Somewhat irresponsibly, I helped put a Conservative in office. (And even the modest self-interest expressed by that `swing' was frustrated: I still, amazingly enough, have problems with the dustmen). It is possible I voted the way I did because it was going to be a cheap thrill to be iden- tified, however spuriously, with the winning side for a change. Looking at the matter levelly, it would not be easy to refute a charge of frivolity, not to say apathy. Yet, while not frenziedly seeking to defend myself, I like to think of it as a higher form of frivolity; a higher form of apathy. Let me explain. Or try to explain.

My earliest election memories come from Trinidad where two uncles of mine were ac- tively involved in politics. One of them, curiously enough, actually became Leader of the Opposition for a while. Political preference, as I came to know it during my childhood, was never remotely ideological. Even after prolonged reflection I can't say with certainty what (if any) political beliefs my uncles harboured, whether they were men of the Right, Centre of the Left. The question never arose. Nobody — not even their opponents — ever bothered to ask; and they, being not without wisdom, never bothered to tell. Politics didn't work like that in Trinidad. You merely manifested yourself to the electorate: you didn't offer `policies' — you offered yourself.

Party loyalty was an extension of family loyalty. Our adversaries were wicked beyond the telling, impure in their private lives, steeped in corruption in their public ones; possessed of natures so wicked that it gave one nightmares to see them shameless- ly stalk the streets soliciting the support of the credulous and untutored. An election was transformed into a prolonged family festival. Inevitably, ineluctably, arrived the moment of truth. As the news of debacle after debacle was relayed over the radio we gazed in consternation at one another and murmured about intimidation, about ballot boxes seen floating in rivers and lagoons, about the iniquity of returning officers. So it happened that electioneering became associated in my mind with disappointment and defeat: with forever being on the wrong side of the power game. I expect it to be no different this time.

I must have been about sixteen or seven- teen when I discovered that politics, apart from its familiar instinctive and tribal con- tent, could also have an ideological — and altruistic — basis. The revelation came in the form of a tract (I believe the author was called Strachey) written by a member of the British Labour Party. It had some such title as, 'Why You Must Be A Socialist'. It was Mr Strachey who introduced me to the alluring concepts of surplus value, class war, the gradual withering away of the state and so on. He deployed his arguments with Euclidean precision and rigour. I read this tract — and was convinced. No rational, humane person, I felt, could either oppose or ignore Mr Strachey's conclusions; and, bizarrely, some part of myself still pays homage to those conclusions. I began to call myself a socialist. This amused my family. Their amusement of- fended me. Indeed, it offended me so much that I began to hint that I might, for all they knew, be a communist. This amused them even more. They were, of course, complete- ly correct. My fantasies have been many and varied, but never have they seriously in- cluded being a ruler of men. Adolescent rapture soon attenuated itself. At universi- ty, the assorted political clubs held no at- traction. My one aberration occurred when I joined the Humanist Society. I reached a peak of worldly success when I was aP- pointed the Society's College representative - only to be dismissed a few weeks later for not acquiring any new adherents. The pur- suit of power, I realised then, was a dirty business. Disgusted, I withdrew from public life and turned my back on the Humanist cause. Political life was enacted on a distant stage. Harold Wilson's initial accession to the prime-ministership stimulated vague sentiments of approval. Subsequent elec- tions came and went rousing no emotions that I can now recollect. Quite simPlY, . didn't really understand what was going on. If many years before I had discovered that politics could be ideological, I was rl°wt

a returning to an older perception that under the cloak of ideas there were hidden elusive, instinctively tribal loyalties, mhi- tions and resentments. Years of living in

England had done its work. Youthful vulnerability to abstract fervours had been drained out of me. Largely without my be- ing aware of it, there had been implanted in me a contentious and obscure intuition of complexity. Euclidean precision, however noble its aims, did not accurately descibe the reality in which I moved every day; utopias only existed within the covers of books.

You have to live a while here before you can appreciate (to take one obvious and notorious example) that the conflict bet- ween the advocates of state and private schooling is not really an argument about education at all; that all the impassioned talk about 'equality of opportunity', 'stan- dards', 'freedom of choice', etc... amounts to little more than a congenial surface disturbance of the atmosphere. Language merely provides a veil of rationality. It disguises tensions too deep-seated for de- cent articulation. Similarly (to take another obvious and notorious example) it takes time to understand what is meant by 'work- ing class' ; or, maybe, I should say 'working people' - to use the more folksy term that appears in the Labour Party manifesto.

According to that astonishing document, a is the Party's intention to promote 'a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families'. These working people, to whom such frightening promises are made, have next to no connec- tion with the surplus value martyrs over whose wretched fate I wept so copiously when I first read Mr Strachey's tract. They constitute a gens, not an oppressed pro- letariat in the conventional Marxist sense. (It takes, I may add, an even longer time to understand the role of the Redgraves in the revolutionary process.) An aversion to ideology, to deceiving abstraction and beguiling sentiment, took root in me. Orwell became my favourite political writer. In darker moments I would turn to Jonathan Swift, to his descriptions of the Yahoos, those 'most unteachable of all Animals'. Or, to put it another way, the conservative outlook (the small 'c' is deliberate) acquired a hitherto unsuspected cogency.

Now here we are, confronted with an election in which both the major par- ties seem to be claiming that we are living in the Last Days; that the nation must choose between Salvation and Damnation. A strange messianism has crept into the political scene. The Labour Party paints pictures of nuclear devastation; of industry ruined beyond redemption; it conjures up visions of millions of jobless 'working People' being trodden under the heel of Tory reaction. They may frighten me — but they do not convince me. Labour is a schizophrenic coalition. In one aspect the Party clings to the imagery spawned by half- forgotten hunger marches; of Jarrow (where is Jarrow?) in the Thirties. Mr Wedgwood Benn, much given to evoking these memories, is a folk-singer, not a

political theorist, a prosaic Woody Guthrie. This stratum of the party belongs to a quasi- mythical past. It has shut itself out of any recognisable or feasible future. Its other aspect is represented by the Militant tenden- cy and Ken Livingstone. Part of the trouble may lie with the unruly nature of socialist doctrine - in particular with the notion of 'consciousness' which has strayed far beyond its original proletarian circumscrip- tion. That notion, dividing and sub- dividing itself like a cancerous cell, has moved on to embrace the consciousness of women, of 'ethnic minorities', of one- parent families, of the handicapped. Nowadays every group, every perversity, has been endowed with a consciousness and a militancy of its own. We shall all be liberated, all be given grants. We shall all be categorised, all be loved (separately). Socialism ends, paradoxically, not by bring- ing people together, not by asserting a com- mon humanity: it pigeon-holes. We all belong to a gens. It imposes on us the terri- ble tyranny of a fractured compassion; a compassion that has ceased to understand itself. The Labour manifesto has about it a wonderful Gothic quality. It is a magical castle 'full of noises, sounds and sweet airs . . . The clouds methought would open, and show riches ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again'.

The Conservatives have played no small role in the creation of this messianic land- scape. Thatcherism is a disturbingly tempestuous creed of national regenera- tion, economic and moral. It has the virtue possessed by all extremist outgrowths: simplicity. Arguing with a convinced That- cherite is not altogether dissimilar from arguing with a Moonie. But, like all virtue, it has its attendant vices. The most con- spicuous of these is the improbable Tory obsession with 'thinking'. To perform this worrisome activity, 'tanks' have been set up. From these tanks there emerge at regular intervals 'thoughts' on just about every aspect of our sad lives.

Out of the blue (so to speak) ideological passion has descended upon us - for me symbolised by the determined upward tilt of the Prime Minister's jaw and the cadaverous countenance of Norman Teb- bit. The latter has always exercised a peculiar fascination. This used to puzzle me. Now I feel I know why: his face brings to mind Charon, ferryman of the shades in Hades. Charon, interestingly, might be connected with the 'hammer-god' (Charun) of the Etruscans. Too much thinking, in my opinion, is not becoming to Toryism. It ought not to be encouraged. Thought is a Socialist temptation, not a Tory one. It is the political disease from which I have fled; against which I have sought to inoculate myself. How at sea poor Francis Pym looks! How it must tire William Whitelaw! They, let it be admitted, are more in tune with my temperament. They are kind, civilised men; men of instinct, of broad, tribal understanding, The robust and resolute Britain, daily promised, sounds as if it will be an altogether disagreeable place;

I do not want to see this country overrun by purveyors of the micro-chip revolution. Nevertheless, I do not for a moment doubt that the extravagant sums I earn will be much safer under Conservative guardian- ship. It would be foolish not to concede that. Yet, voting determined by such naked self-interest makes me uneasy.

This, until recently, had posed something

of a dilemma. That dilemma, I'm pleased to report, has now been resolved at a stroke by the editor of the Spectator. `Next week,' he announced, 'Shiva Naipaul will explain why he will be voting for the SDP/Liberal Alliance.'

He is the editor; I am a man of honour. I bow to his choice.

© Shiva Naipaul