Gloom from over the dark broad seas
Nigel Spivey
THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE by David Selbourne Sinclair-Stevenson, £20, pp. 388 This is an alternative, Jewish history of our times.' The author's opening decla- ration steels his readers for some tenuous attempts at synthesis: after all, to compose a 'history of our times' is virtually paradoxi- cal, and probably comes from hearing too many newscasters earnestly bill their night- ly entertainment as 'this historic event'. If the epigraph (from Lorenzo de' Medici), di doman non c'e certezza, holds true, one might very well ask whether di oggi non c'e certezza: for how shall we know, except in retrospect? And how does this sort of superficial and essentially journalistic account ever avoid an inconsequential title (e.g. The Pendulum Years), or the sonorous rhetoric of a broadsheet leader?
As for 'alternative', that is hard to take. Selbourne's antipathy towards Socialist dreamers might once have been unfashion- able, but now seems utterly ordinary. It is the standard effluvia from any Tory think- tank. E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm are these old lions worth bagging? One's impression is of an outsider who is frequently off-target in this generally aggressive book, swiping at hobgoblins of his fancy, not ours. Whether it is due to his detachment from academia, or his resi- dence in Italy, it appears not so much `alternative' as out-moded, and that is a serious criticism of something supposed to be 'an account of our times'. A further index of this is the book's jacket, which is obviously intended as a sanguinary night- mare of modern city life. Yes, it is indeed titled 'Metropolis' — but it was done by George Grosz, in 1917. Does that count as `modern'?
The Judaic input is not so easily dis- missed. It undulates throughout narrative and analysis with various partisan animosi- ties (Poles — in particular Lech Walesa and the current Pope — can do nothing right), although too often being Jewish is simply equated with taking a pessimistic view of the world. For instance, the cheery foresight of H. G. Wells regarding mass tourism, 'not being Jewish', is judged 'bland and over-optimistic'. Dispossessed, suspicious and yet highly creative, the Jew- ish intellectual at large in the world
becomes a generic point of reference for Selbourne's purposes. So 'the Jew' thinks this about rising nationalism, 'the Jew' thinks that about democracy, metropolitan violence, etc. There are very few references to the state of Israel; there is nothing at all nuance about Selbourne's image of collec- tive Jewish opinion. Its principal feature is consistency: gloom dominates all.
And so, casting his eyes over multicultur- al Britain, the prophet gets nothing but bad vibes (and good copy). Racial harassment, rivers of blood: as if every city were heaving with bower boys and malvivents. The rich cross-fertilisation of modern music and dance; the daily exchange of civility and services between ordinarily pleasant people of different colours; the astonishingly catholic arrays of food that Lord Sainsbury spreads before us: the prophet sees none of these, and gnaws on his cuttings instead. To one removed abroad, it must indeed seem that British cities now verge on the infernal: the pages of 'Home News' in vir- tually all British papers are considered incomplete without some case of racial harassment /child abuse/murder/thuggery. Undoubtedly the tenor of life (and not just in Britain) is more brutal now than it was 20 years ago. But quotidianal decency and tolerance subsist in a way that utterly escapes this Elijah on our margins.
Selbourne's dependence upon news- papers for his information is patent. I find this peculiar, given that he is also nicely sensitive to the ironies of modern idiom (`stamping out violence', etc), and harbours understandable suspicion towards rival commentators. He makes no allowance for the self-appointed role now assumed by most media people, which is to demoralise their fellows. Too many of his symptomatic examples of modern depravity rely upon sensationalist reporting: apart from some personal insights into the situation of East- ern Europe, there is rarely any evidence that Selbourne himself knows what he is writing about.
Despite this, many of the sentiments expressed here will reach our sympathy. Selbourne's hatred of Eric Hobsbawm and the Guardian is matched by his portrait of what he calls 'the universal plebeian'. For some reason (not made clear) 'the Jew' walks in fear of this figure. We all know the sort: it corresponds more or less to what I think of as the tracksuit-wearing class, and now forms a large part of British exports abroad. In his souped-up Fiesta, the uni- versal plebeian is more mobile and ubiqui- tous than ever before, and you hardly have to be Jewish to want to be elsewhere when the plebs are out in force. But this is democracy. What does Selbourne propose to do with them all? Have them put down at birth?
And here is the main problem with this hook. Despising the nostrums of others, the author has few of his own. He tries, briefly, to argue in favour of imposing civic 'duties' to restore the sense of responsible citizen-
ship, but this is written without conviction. The truth is that his disavowal of Utopian politics (which includes disapproval of those East Europeans, such as Vaclav Havel, vain enough to sustain hopes of Socialist justice) puts Selbourne with those who would rather live in the cesspools of Romulus than Plato's Republic. To the doom-laden problems confronting us, his response is a shrug. The best he can do with AIDS, for example, is to run an extended comparison with Defoe's account of the 1665 plague (not very novel: Susan Sontag has already done that sort of exer- cise, much more thoughtfully), and then conclude that the disease raises 'moral conundrums which only a Solomon might resolve'. This may be true, but it is hardly helpful. Why bother us with the issue at all, then?
I suppose that the merit of this book is its range. It lacks the vision thing, but its view is broad. The collection of newspaper clippings has been diligent. Yet this is no merit if the author, ultimately, has nothing to say.
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