PERSONAL COLUMN

Bad taste

ROGER BARNARD

Last Remembrance Sunday at the Ceno- taph. Whitehall, a group of people courag- eously voiced their objections to British government policy in Nigeria. By 'voiced' I mean they shouted, as loud as they could, that it was selfish and immoral and that we ought to remember the dead in Biafra as well as the dead of two world wars. As a result, the nation was treated the next day to photos in the press of scenes one might, ten years ago, have thought inconceivable in Britain: policemen with their hands clamped over the mouths of demonstrators, forcibly restrain- ing young men ‘Ind women from exercising the democratic right to speak their mind in the streets of the capital. A right royal con- troversy soon developed in the columns of

the Times, with an overwhelming majority of correspondents seeking to provide plausible reasons for regarding the demonstrators as

bad-mannered crackpots of dubious political views.

Now there may be readers who feel that some of these correspondents had a valid point. Perhaps it was 'bad taste' to exploit an allegedly non-political event, with all its , ritual undertones (for most people) of respect and gratitude, in order to get attention for unpopular views. And yet perhaps the de- monstrators knew that what they did would be regarded as bad taste, but went right on and did it anyway. Why?

One reason is that there is practically no way to get a hearing for radical opinion, nowadays, except by some kind of rule- breaking. A glaze of comfortable acceptance of whatever the mass media put out as fact or correct opinion afflicts very nearly the en- tire population, so that the voice of criticism or dissent, if it is heard at all, is heard only in connection with some sort of Anarchism of

the Deed. You break a rule, say your piece, and maybe you'll have a few moments of the

time of the millions who, whether reading, listening, or viewing, are shocked into curio- sity. Of course, to get their attention, you have to do something daring and outlandish,

something they wouldn't do. so that what- ever you say has an initial handicap, but

sometimes it works. The correction of mas-

sive wrongs—wrongs which have been tole- rated for so long by a majority of the popu-

lation that they seem practically 'right'— requites heroic measures. This means break- ing some rules.

What does such a situation tell us about Out- society? At least two things. It tells us, for a start, that there is no serious public dialogue going on in Britain. The tedious monotony of agreement in the mass media is

broken only by the tiny radical and some-

what larger liberal press, and because the mass audience never hears the radical and liberal form of the dialogue, except by occasional Misquotation or in broken con- text. its finding of issues is blandly ignored. The progressive alienation of moral intelli- gence, especially among the young. is one result of this neglect. Another is that those who feel personal moral responsibility, such as that small group at the Cenotaph, are Compelled to seize what opportunities they can get attention, sometimes by breaking rules or violating canons of behaviour. The situation also tells us that intellectual life in Britain has been dehorned by homo- genisation as well as suborned by the com- promises of the intellectual community itself. At no time in history has the dominant cul- tural establishment had so many intellectual employees and talented apologists as at pre- sent. The big, if not the good, jobs are prac- tically all subsidised, today, by the status quo, either of politics or of technology, so that expressed and heard independent opin- ion hardly exists at all: and its impact, where it does manage to survive, is dulled and ab- sorbed by the general mushiness of the entire system, with its armies of crackpot realists and technocratic professionals. Under such circumstances, the vocabulary of genuine protest and radical intransigence, since it is heard so seldom, has no familiarity: it might as well be the language of men from another planet. It becomes relatively easy, therefore, to ridicule dissidents as discontented or im- mature people who lack understanding of the true values and benefits of our society.

The result is that any sign of serious com- mitment, if it cannot be contained by the accepted structure of roles and values, takes on an 'extreme'-appearance, to be shrugged off as indicating maladjustment, or an in- ability to grow up. When to this is added the fact that a public relations programme of defiant acts, disruption and agitation, civil disobedience, and outspoken moral indict- ment has become almost the only means for protesters to gain attention, then the con- trast with ordinary 'respectable' behaviour is so great that the self-approval of the con- forming majority is doubly reinforced. This drives expressions of uncompromised radical intelligence to the periphery of the social order, gives practical justification to the neurotic fringe in the protest movement, and condemns people who might be the very salt of society to a loneliness which verges on moral isolation.

We have here, in fact, a problem which approaches the level of a constitutional crisis. At its most elementary, the danger is that of brainwashing, no less. The compon- ents are (a) an increasingly uniform world- view, (b) the absence of any viable alterna- tive, (c) confusion among people about the relevance of their own experience and feel- ings, and consequently (d) chronic anxiety, so that they cling to the one worldview as their only security. This is thought control, though on a fairly benevolent level, and it makes real democracy impossible. So instead we have symbolic democracy, democracy by consent: an inauthentic style of politics, grounded in roles and rhetoric, poisoned by votes and cash, cleaving to trivial comforts and satisfactions, avoiding at every point utility, truth, risk, and meaning, all of it wrapped round in cellophane paper without any live contact whatever.

The really important problems that face us in our society—the economy, the poverty and bad housing, the unemployment, the apathy of workmen, the attack on civil liberties, the destruction of the environment, the lack of popular democracy, the cynicism of the young—will be certainly not solved, but immediately diminished, if only we can get rid of this cellophane wrapping. What is wanted is the initiative and responsibility of free men. but there is not available to them a living field of intelligent and constantly extended thought concerning the affairs of men, concerning the good of men, and the social means of obtaining it. The people have had nothing to help them think about their freedom and how it is preserved.

Suppose, for example, you want to make peace, or at least reduce the hazards of war. Today, all you can do is start from scratch with all those people out there, and the only voice they know is the voice of existing political power. You want to propose an al- ternative view, so if you are poor, you crank up your mimeograph machine, or if you are rich, you put out an excellent pamphlet with the names of some worthy professors on the cover, and get together some mailing lists. The people you reach must have ex- plained to them the entire development, from start to finish, of your dissenting views. They have no ground for starting anywhere except at the beginning. And you can't do it with a pamphlet, or even a dozen pam- phlets. Who are you to counter the authority of the established political system'? You are one little private man, and in our society there is no longer any real respect for little private men. They have remained too little, too silent, and too concerned with their own private ends, for far too long.

There is savage irony in the fact that the British, who boast loudly of their freedom. at the same time plead total dependency on big institutions when it comes to inaugura- ting change. It is as though, under some law of natural decline in character, they now mistake effect for cause, the tools of confinement for the instruments of libera- tion. Freedom is what men enjoy without the definitions and limitations of political control. My proposition here—and it is directed mainly at intellectual employees of the cultural establishment—is that only by the use of this freedom can its quality be enriched and its scope extended. And my further proposition is that what is needed is vigorous, conscious use of this freedom, overtly, publicly, in all established channels of human expression. I am speaking, in other words, of the responsibility of the scholars and professionals of the intellectual com- munity to establish genuine plateaus of moral and humanistic judgment.

At one time, this role in our social life might have been played by the universities, but these institutions are now so heavily subsidised by Big Business and the State, and so laced with Establishment attitudes, that they are little more than immobilised Gullivers. But suppose that, instead of only a few, there were scores of men who re- cognised the absolute necessity of an authen- tic bar of public opinion, before which the actions of government would be examined and arraigned. And suppose they had been able to learn from experience that indepen- dent, enlightened, critical opinion is the indispensable condition of survival for a free society, so that instead of labouring under the curse of office-seeking, institu- tional pressures, and the drive to power, they were able to discover and communicate the facts of current events and provide impartial humanistic readings of their mean- ing. Wouldn't the future make more sense than we dare hope at present?

If these things could happen—if they could be made to happen by a renewed recognition on the part of intellectuals and professionals that true human freedom exists in the tension which results from the flow of ideas from the ideal to the practical, and not in the slack conceits which equate social good with political and technological feas- ibility—then the common life of our society might experience the exhilarating stimulus of real growth, instead of the nervous twitch- ing it manifests today. If we honestly want a decent society. with social justice and free citizens, we had better get busy restoring its circulatory system.