Notebook
Perhaps Jimmy Carter will not turn out to be quite as awful as some of us had feared. There has been an appropriate diffidence about some of his statements during the first fortnight (or, as one should say, the 'first twenty days') of his presidency. At the same time he retains his special flair for embarrassment-potential and slight creepiness. Mr Peter Jenkins has accused fellowjournalists of nasty cynicism towards Carter. The point is not that he is necessarily a 'liar' (although very few successful politicians have never been guilty of some form of terminological inexactitude) so much as that his religiosity and 'sincerity'—gleaming like heavy make-up—are inappropriate and displeasing. As Mr Harold Macmillan used to say, if people want moral uplift they should get it from their bishops. In any case, the tone of the Carter years looks like being one of banality and bathos. On his Inauguration day Carter was caught by the microphones saying to well-wishers, 'This is as much your country as mine.' Well, yes, that's what one had somehow imagined. And at the beginning of this week we heard him, on the subject of the terrible blizzards sweeping America, actually start with the words, 'We're all in this together' —beforegoing on to urge his fellow-citizens to wear cellular underclothes.
The story about the 'sixteen Britons lost in the lion-infested wastes of central Africa' with which the popular papers have been enjoying themselves, so much has left me chillier than cold. What were Lady Listowel and her companions doing in Uganda? They were 'attending the celebrations to mark the sixth anniversary of President Amin's military coup.' Like every other tyrant Amin needs his 'useful fools' and besotted groupies. I have not read Judith Listowel's biography of Amin, but her presence in Uganda suggests that it must be relatively uncritical. In an abstract way I do not wish her any harm but I reserve my anguish and compassion for worthier objects.
'Keynesian' is one of those words which is rapidly losing any very precise meaning and becoming a hoorah word. No doubt Keynes would be as little pleased by what has been done under the imprimatur of his name as he would be puzzled by its use as a term of abuse. He might very well have been the first to agree with Mrs Thatcher that Keynesian solutions were appropriate to Keynesian circumstances. Perhaps his very considerable genius might have produced some insight into our present predicament ; but his immediate reaction—if he were transported to England today—would surely be one of bafflement. No economist of his generation, let alone any of his predecessors, would have believed that it was possible to combine simultaneously recession, high unemployment and acute inflation. That is the unique achievement of our present political and economic masters.
If Keynes does earn the execration of posterity it will be for a different reason than one would expect from contemporary antiKeynesians. It will be because his ideas, or the perversion of them, has taught—as Mr Geoffrey Barraclough observed in our final article on the Keynesian era in last week's Spectator—that 'the only way to keep the economy ticking over was to consume as much as possible.' That is the notion that has predominated in the West in our time. Oddly enough (or perhaps not) the same legitimation of incessant, prodigal consumption of natural resources and, inevitably, of devastation of the environment, is provided in the East by Marx's theory of surplus value. Both societies— liberal capitalist and state communist— seem determined to see that in the not-solong run we are all dead.
Having just written the word 'environment' I have to admit that when I hear it I reach for my ear-plugs, or my glass; I fear that most people's reaction is the same. Like so many true and important matters, it has a high built-in boredom potential. Added to that is a perfectly reasonable feeling of impotence: the Coal Board wants to mine the Vale of Belvoir, and it will. This morning's news is that Mr Ravi Tikoo is planning to build a fleet of nuclear-powered 600,000 ton oil tankers (my italics, his profits). And he will. There is no point in discussing something like that. Either you think it is a good thing to build such ships—one of which, on a simple actuarial calculation, is bound sooner or later to collide with another ship —or you don't. As Chesterton once said, it is a matter of taste, like cannibalism.
On another page Benny Green writes about the after-dinner game revived in the birthday number of the Times Lit. Stipp. (to whom our belated greetings). We all have our literary betes noires—writers who seem to us to have inflated reputations—as well as our favourite neglected masters. (I cannot, incidentally, express adequately here my feelings at seeing J. K. Galbraith condemn Orwell as grossly overrated.) Several contributors to the TLS missed their opportunity, though, by going for straw figures. In particular. is Arnold Toynbee 'overrated,' as more than one person claimed ? By whom ? The inscrutable Japanese are said to have made a cult of him; and if a hilarious piece of dialogue I recall from a terrible 'campus movie a feW years back is anything to go by, American students are told to revere him. But in this country the Study of History is not rated at all. Indeed, it is simply not read. I know many learned and well-read men and women. I doubt if I have ever met anyone who has read more than a fragment of the Study, if that. I'm prepared to take Hugh Trevor-Roper's view of Toynbee on trust. But I must admit that, for all 1 know mYself' the Japanese might be right.
Lord Denning has one achievement to his name that no other fame or notoriety should obscure: the lowering of the fifty-Year sequestration of official papers to thirty years, against the unanimous opposition of the civil service. A small but very worthY service.
No Englishman can begrudge the Indians success in the Bangalore Test. England have, had the morale-raiser that they needed, ana a bit more. A mildly chastening experience will do them no harm. There is als° a natural element of Schadenfreude or 1-toldyou-so for those who have been moaning about the course of English cricket in recent years. Sooner or later the Indian spinners were bound to find the right wicket, and Chandrasekhar's figures-9 for I 1 1 in the two innings—suggest that it was a true legspinner's wicket (Benaud always says that a wrist-spinner needs bounce more than turn). It is no surprise that England should integrate in front of such an attack : when did any young English batsman last face an prolonged spell from a top class leg-spinner Perhaps our cricket administrators will See that the recent takeover of one-day cricket' means that England will before long, be quite unable to find a side capable °It playing true fast bowling (Australia, Wes, Indies), or, as in India,' true slow, flighteu spin.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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