Germany: a few thoughts and impressions

https://markenglish.substack.com/p/brief-travel-update-germany?r=3knty7

A few thoughts and personal impressions garnered from my twelve-week stay.

Travel notes: thoughts and observations from Germany, Belgium and Albania

For the past fifteen months I have been travelling in Europe, staying successively in Greece, Bulgaria, Malta, England, Germany, Belgium and Albania. I'm now back in Germany.

I've published occasional pieces on these wanderings but nothing for more than four months now. Here, then, are some recent thoughts and observations on specific places and on Europe in general.

Economic and social problems are everywhere evident, and are getting worse. The cultural decline (or "forgetting") which accompanies these changes — a long, drawn-out process which seems to be gathering pace — has always disturbed me. And, though it would be a mistake to underestimate the depth and resilience of the cultures of Europe and the values which they represent, forces hostile to these values have created in recent years what feels like a dangerous instability.

The natural world is important to me also, both in itself and in terms of how it has influenced and is influenced by regional and national cultures. In places to which I have a connection and/or feel some kind of affinity, I like to be able to identify at least the most common local species (especially birds, animals and trees). I happened to mention this fact to a knowledgeable English friend (the French adjective moqueuse would fit her well) as we walked in the garden of her home in a picturesque part of southern England. Pointing towards a nearby field she said, “Those are black sheep, those are white sheep.”

I spent the first week of September in Dortmund and found it nondescript and a bit unkempt, but my stay was pleasant. There was a park near my hotel to walk and relax in; easy shopping; very friendly and obliging people; a good U-Bahn network linked to a manageable Hauptbahnhof.

From Dortmund I travelled by train (via Cologne, Aachen and Liège) to Namur, the Wallonian capital, and later to Charleroi. National and local elections were held while I was staying in Namur which I did not follow closely but election slogans, graffiti and general conversation reflected social polarization and were very much in line with recent trends across Europe.

Charleroi isn’t a pretty or prosperous city but where I was based (on Place Verte, a pedestrian precinct only a short walk from the main station) there was evidence of new business investment and no obvious signs of social conflict.

In the mid-1930s, an extreme conservative and corporatist political movement and party, the Rexists (after the Latin phrase for Christ the King), was formed in Belgium by Léon Degrelle. It persisted during the German occupation and Degrelle himself fought for the Germans with the Walloon Legion on the Eastern Front. Rexists played prominent roles in government during the occupation and were a target for the local Resistance. Late in the war, there was much civil violence and tit-for-tat killings between these groups. The only memorial I saw which mentioned the Rexists was a plaque on a presbytery wall in central Charleroi honouring a prominent priest, Pierre Harmignies, who was murdered by Rexists in 1944.

Most war memorials in Belgium commemorate soldiers who died during the Great War. There was one, I noticed, in Queen Astrid Park in central Charleroi at which flowers had been laid. A few metres away stands another, more modest, war memorial featuring the representation of a pigeon with wings outstretched atop a pillar with the simple inscription: AU PIGEON SOLDAT.

I mentioned the pigeon memorial to my unsentimental English friend who subsequently made an oblique allusion to it in an email. She won’t mind my quoting her, I’m sure: “Autumn colours seem to be late this year but I am looking out at oak and ash trees that are turning golden brown and already the pigeons and field fares have stripped the berries from the holly (if only some of the former could be sent to The Front!).”

My recent stay in Tirana was more educational than enjoyable. Though the hotel was good, the surrounding area was not, particularly in terms of pedestrian and other local infrastructure. There was nowhere pleasant to walk and no acceptable public transport (other than taxis). As a consequence I breakfasted in the hotel restaurant every day and spent a lot of time in my room. Fortunately the hotel staff (local people) were friendly and easy to talk to and I had positive encounters with a few other Albanian nationals. One was a young man who was on the same flight as me out of Tirana. I noticed that he went out of his way to help a frail woman whom he didn’t know to alight from a tarmac bus and walk to the crowded arrivals hall at Niederrhein Airport where airport staff took over and ushered her through.

Though most of the people I spoke to in Albania were aware of — and frustrated by — government corruption, I didn’t see much evidence of overt political activism there. Nor did I witness the social and religious frictions which are so evident elsewhere in Europe. No doubt there was a lot going on beneath the surface however — these are just impressions from a three-week visit.

The country’s Ottoman past has left indelible marks on religious and other practices and cultural links with Turkey and the Levant persist. This despite the fact that, for more than four decades following World War 2, Albania was governed by a hardline Stalinist (and increasingly isolationist) regime.

I did manage to develop a daily walk routine centred on the mainly residential area behind the hotel in which the streets and lanes are set out — and not in a planned way — like a complicated maze with many dead ends. The “river” on the map turned out to smell like a sewer and its banks looked like an unofficial rubbish dump (building waste etc.).

Car wash businesses operated in virtually every significant street (a consequence of the combination of poor roads and parking areas and a car-proud population). Lots of good German cars. The city of Tirana has no metro and the country has no rail network. Peak-hour traffic is horrendous.

Along the back streets in which I walked, women and old men pushed wheelbarrows with mysterious cargoes. There were some grand houses, but most were shabby. Albanian flags were displayed in private homes and businesses, hung from balconies etc.. National day celebrations had occurred just after my arrival but many of the flags had not been taken down weeks later.

The national anthem or hymn to the flag is basically a call to fight — and die. Strangely the focus in the song seems to be on dying rather than on winning. A warrior culture, certainly. “... From war abstains only he who a traitor is born...”

The children seemed unusually well-behaved. Given the many Christmas trees and fairy lights in private homes, I assumed the area I was in was predominantly Christian. But there was also a significant Muslim presence. Though most of the women I saw were unveiled, quite a few wore the hijab.

My main Albanian interlocutor at the hotel was a Muslim married to an Orthodox Christian. She only wore a head-covering when going to the mosque or to church, she said. There was a mosque nearby and, depending on the depth of my sleep at the time, I would hear early-morning prayers (around 5 am).

Though I had used up (in Belgium and Germany) 88 of my allotted 90 visa-free days (per 180 days) in the Schengen zone, I decided to fly to Germany and invoke a little-known bilateral visa-exemption agreement dating back to the 1950s which allows Australian citizens 90 days in Germany irrespective of previous Schengen country visits so long as certain conditions are met.

I entered Germany (as mentioned previously) via Niederrhein Airport, a very small and isolated facility close to the Dutch border which has been misleadingly dubbed Düsseldorf Weeze by Ryanair. (It’s nowhere near Düsseldorf.) Not so long ago the airport was an RAF base known as Laarbruch.

The border police I dealt with there were not fluent in English and I don’t speak German. They scanned my passport and the system indicated that I would have to depart Germany within 48 hours. I tried to put my case and showed them on my phone a brief explanation of the longstanding visa-exemption agreement from an official German source, but the text was in English and the officer did not read it. Three of them discussed the matter between themselves, asking me the occasional question. Then suddenly it was all smiles and thumbs up on their part as my passport was finally stamped and handed back to me but I have no way of knowing what caused the change of heart. Given that the arrangement doesn’t involve a visa or written authorization, there could conceivably be trouble on my departure from Germany and the Schengen zone but I don’t expect there will be.

It was very cold and almost dark by the time I boarded a local bus which took me from the airport to a train station in a small town nearby (Weeze). And it was completely dark when the train to Düsseldorf arrived. I enjoyed the warmth of the train for the hour-long journey, secure in the knowledge that my hotel was within easy walking distance of the Hauptbahnhof. No more checkpoints or complicated connections.

Travelling independently and (to a certain extent) off the beaten track does pose challenges but so far they are proving manageable. And on this latest journey it was gratifying to realize that others (including younger people and native German speakers) did not necessarily know what I knew or had figured out. Once or twice I was able to help rather than being the one asking for advice or directions.

Having spent a month in Düsseldorf and having quite enjoyed getting to know the city (or parts thereof), I have now bought a train ticket to Dortmund. (I had been planning to stay longer in Düsseldorf actually, but there is a big trade fair coming up and hotel room rates are rising rapidly.)

Future movements are uncertain but the plan to stay in Germany until the spring still looks attractive.

Coming to terms with cultural change in Europe

I haven't been writing much lately but it is important to me to keep some sort of diary going which is accessible to friends, relations and other interested parties. My focus lately has been on Substack but I also want to keep this site active. Reprinted here, then, is my latest Substack piece which has the somewhat unwieldy title, Old memories, current realities: coming to terms with social and cultural change in England and Europe and finding a long-lost friend...

For me the past year has been a time of travel, observation and reflection, and I intend to continue this itinerant lifestyle for the foreseeable future. Not everything has gone smoothly but things have gone well and happily enough for me to want to continue the experiment.

My geopolitical views and opinions have, on the whole, been reinforced as I have followed the events in Ukraine and other areas of conflict or potential conflict. And I have deepened my knowledge of the changes that have occurred and are occurring in Europe and Great Britain, having spent considerable time in the Balkans, Malta and the U.K.. The last six months, spent entirely in England, has been a particularly significant and emotional time for me as I have slowly come to terms with current British social, cultural, political and economic realities.

Though they often become entangled, the personal has always been more important to me than the political. Old memories gain a new lease of life when they are activated and added to, and this process — which can be painful and confronting — has been driving my thoughts and feelings lately in all sorts of ways. I’ve always been fascinated by time and the dynamics of memory, and I’m not alone here: it’s been a perennial literary theme from (at least) the early modern era.

Cultural traditions (including literary and artistic ones for those so inclined) make us who we are. For me, literature and film are important in two main ways: in so far as they reflect the cultures in which they arose; and for the ideas which drive them. Naturally we are drawn to works which reflect a culture with which we feel a strong affinity, attitudes which we share and ideas which we find stimulating.

Artworks only justify themselves, in my view, to the extent that they shape, shake or comfort us; that is, to the extent that they touch individuals at a deep level and nourish the various cultural and transcultural values that we all embody (and so bring to life and carry forward).

I recently had some personal encounters which got me thinking about these matters and about time and memory but privacy concerns prevent me from giving an account of the most significant of these meetings and the communications which led up to it. This encounter involved seeing again an English couple I had not seen or been in touch with for decades.

There is a personal dimension to the story and also a cultural one. The woman in question — who, I readily admit, had made a much greater impression on me than I had on her — influenced my cultural attitudes quite deeply when I was in my twenties. It was fascinating and satisfying to make contact again after so long, and in an England which has changed so radically.

Part of the interest related to seeing to what extent our respective values and attitudes had changed in response to these broader changes as well as to growing older. (Not a lot, as it happens!) But part of the interest was — as is often the case with long-delayed reunions — simply in discovering who remembered what in regard to prior interactions.

The moral of the story (were it to be told) would probably be something along these lines: that the persistence of values and character traits in the respective parties is more important for the possible continuation of a disrupted friendship than a perfect congruence of shared memories.

Calmer and marginally less pessimistic (at least on a personal level), I am leaving England for Germany tomorrow.

Athens interlude

I spent the latter part of October and most of November in Athens. The weather was glorious. And the rocky, dry, austere landscapes of Greece have always appealed to me. But economic pressures are obviously taking their toll and the country appears to be locked into a downward spiral.

Just down the street from where I was staying is Athens railway station (also known as Larissa Station). The station has seen better days. In the past it was integrated into the European rail network and hosted the Orient Express and an express to Berlin. No more. Today there are no international links. You can get a train to Thessaloniki – if you’re lucky. When I tried to book, there was a notification that part of the line was out of action.

Athens road traffic is heavy and not easy to deal with as a pedestrian. There are many parks, however, including Pedion tou Areos with its oleanders and jacarandas and extensive network of paths and walkways.

There is a quaint little park by Larissa Station but this area (like many areas of the city) is impoverished and run down. Next to the park – as if mimicking the ancient ruins which characterize this part of the world – is a derelict basketball court, two hoops lying on the ground with their support structures uprooted. And overlooking the abandoned court is a residential building with its ground floor a boarded-up and apparently fire-damaged retail space. So many buildings hereabouts (hotels, residential, commercial) are standing idle, abandoned and boarded-up or half-demolished.

Many of the people I encountered seemed stressed, unhappy and not well disposed to tourists. I would go so far as to say that there is resentment towards tourists on the part of a sizable proportion of the general population. Such sentiments spill over into politics. I saw some graffiti touching on this theme (“neighbours not toyrists” [sic]).

I won’t go into the political situation except to note that Greece has a long and strong tradition of radical thought and action. Police – with armoured vehicles and riot shields – were out in force on at least two occasions while I was there to deal with student demonstrations. Trade unions were also involved in the demonstrations.

There is widespread poverty and borderline living. Many beggars, some of them elderly; and people selling bags of vegetables etc. on the streets. In the area in which I was staying, there are dozens of depressing “mini-marts” selling the same limited range of groceries and halal products, businesses run for the most part – and patronized by – Muslim immigrants. Service with a scowl seemed to be their preferred approach – though they may, for all I know, have been very pleasant to their regular clientele.

While in Athens I needed to replace my sneakers and bought a new pair from a cluttered local shop-cum-warehouse run by a Chinese couple who import shoes and jackets from the People’s Republic. The mini-marts accept credit and debit cards, but this Chinese entrepreneur only took cash. The shoes I chose were marked €23.

“For you, 20 euro,” he said. A real businessman this one!

One of my high school teachers (his name was Lionel Lobstein) was said to speak six European languages, all with the same accent. He taught us social studies (geography and history) and later joined the Italian department at the local university. He was full of praise for Greek culture. They had their priorities right, he told us, valuing social intercourse and conversation over mundane chores, etc.. He routinely spent his annual holidays in Greece, sipping coffee and chatting in shaded courtyards (or so the story went). Later I latched on to the poems and novels of Lawrence Durrell, a British expatriate who was deeply immersed in the Mediterranean world.

Even allowing for nostalgic and literary distortions, I have the strong sense of a culture which – exposed to various external forces and (perhaps) internal contradictions – has sadly lost its way.

In the Blue Mountains

Having given up the apartment in central Melbourne which I had leased for more than a decade, I have been staying for the most part in hotels – and intend to continue to do so. The general plan is to travel in a slow and leisurely way as I consider my longer term options. One thing I need to do is to develop a shortlist of retirement destinations, places where – when (or if!) the travelling stops – I could live contentedly and within my means.

I won't go into the details of my personal finances here but the general picture is that I have cash savings and a few stock market investments which generate a modest income. Part of my strategy is to simplify my life as much as possible and (without going to extremes) to minimize "overheads", i.e. income taxes and monthly or annual fees and charges.

I am currently staying in the Blue Mountains, about 100 km from Sydney, and intend to move on soon and spend some time in Southeast Asia and, later, Europe.

I have never been all that fond of the Australian bush and feel more comfortable by the sea or in certain urban environments. But the landscapes here, as well as the flora and fauna, are certainly unique and worth taking in. I recently went with a friend on a relatively challenging walk near Blackheath.

The photos were taken on the Centennial Glen walking trail by Anne Williams.

Certain towns in the Blue Mountains were fashionable resorts in the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Foreign tourists still come (to Katoomba and Leura, for example) but the towns and villages of the region, though still reasonably prosperous, have clearly undergone profound social and economic changes over the years, not all of them positive.

This old black and white snap, taken in 1942, bears witness to a family connection with this part of the world.

My mother (nearest to the camera, 17 years old) is holidaying with an older sister and friends in Katoomba.

Circles of concern

There is much to be said for seeing life primarily in local terms, for seeing one’s personal situation as dictating to a large extent one’s actual duties and responsibilities, and for resisting temptations to moralize, pontificate or parade one’s opinions in the public sphere. Sadly, the current digital media environment works against such reticence and self-restraint, exacerbating the drift away from real connections and real communities.

The “uncoupling of shared content from physical proximity and ongoing relations” was recently a topic of discussion at The Electric Agora. One participant lamented the current situation, seeing “the constant deluge of information about far-off goings on” as the root cause of the problem.

Apart from the occasional message from family, it’s not natural for people to be concerned about what’s going on more than a few day’s ride or walk away. It makes diffuse the collective ethics of cooperation, and lends itself to costless performative virtue. Easier for a New Yorker to wave a sign on behalf of a Uyghur than knock on doors for the would-be county mayor, or boycott Israel instead of putting a stone through a scab’s windshield. Solidarity and hope are reduced to self-parody.

I'm not sure I see any form of solidarity or hope worth having in picket lines – but let that pass.

We need to rebuild [heal?] social division geographically. People are best at improving things close by, and knowing what needs improving. Unfettered individualism and social division are symptoms of the sickness. Humanity writ large is not a society, let alone a community. Put your neighborhood, family, and city first, and maybe you’ll feel like part of something bigger. The welfare of your locale is part of the world’s welfare, and the part you can do the most about.

Self improvement comes into it too.

You’re part of the community. Improve yourself, and you improve the community. Prowess, beauty, and fitness are all good. A personable friend to shoot hoops with, a scoutmaster teaching kids to camp, or a schoolgirl putting her all into clarinet chasing that scholarship do far more for a neighborhood than a conscientious news-junkie or devout activist for the identitarian cause of the day.

We need to go back, but most won’t. Streaming videos, internet news, and cell phones are popular for a reason. Distraction has its place, but it’s not a legitimate way of life. The EA crowd has a lot of this going on. Buying 20 Malaria nets for strangers a continent away is less virtuous than playing catch with your kids or baking a pie with grandma, and – no matter how they pretend otherwise – they know it too.

I quote these passages in full because they are vividly expressed and because there is significant overlap with my own views. These sorts of topics are never clearcut, however, and caveats and reservations necessarily apply.

One caveat relates to the fact that there are circumstances in which long-distance concerns demand attention: foreign policy questions, for example.

Quite obviously, the interventionist policies currently being pursued by the U.S. and its closest allies sit uneasily with the principles outlined above, and some kind of regionalism or system of geographically-based spheres of influence would be a better fit.

No set of principles is sacrosanct, however, and it may be – I don’t think they can, but it may be – that current policies can be defended or justified on other grounds. I can see that proximity counts for less and less in purely military terms – in terms of weapons technology, for example – just as it does in terms of general communication. But, of course, any strategic analysis needs to be contextualized and supplemented with a wide range of data and information (including cultural information) if it is to be useful in the real world and effective in the long term.

Some believe that only continued American global dominance can save us and deliver a more just, peaceful and prosperous world but I see dangers in the unipolar model and in the very notion of a global elite, however it is constituted and however sensitive this supposed elite might be to the nuances of cultural variation.

Art Berman's bleak view of the future

Human civilization was built in part on the exploitation of stored energy. Post-World War 2 Western prosperity was built largely on oil, which is a remarkably concentrated energy source. The energy stored in one barrel of oil is said to represent 4.5 man-years of work.

But strange things are happening in the oil market. And, according to Art Berman, they portend drastic and irrevocable social and economic change.

Prices have collapsed and storage is nearly full. The only option for many producers is to shut in their wells. That means no income. Most have considerable debt so bankruptcy is next.

Most people, policy makers and economists are energy blind and cannot, therefore, fully grasp the gravity or the consequences of what is happening.

Energy is the economy and oil is the most important and productive portion of energy. U.S. oil consumption is at its lowest level since 1971 […] As goes oil, so goes the economy: down.

Oil production and price are unlikely to regain late 2018 levels.

So supply will fall; and Berman doubts that there will be a recovery in demand in the third quarter, even if businesses continue to reopen.

That is because we are in a global depression. Unemployment will remain high and consumers will be damaged from lack of income over the months of quarantine. The truth is that I doubt that demand will ever recover.

At best, economies will re-start slowly and fitfully.

Those who see an opportunity for renewable energy in the demise of oil need to think again. The manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars depend on diesel all along the supply chain from extraction to distribution of finished products. A world in economic depression will default to the cheapest and most productive fuels. Oil will be cheap and abundant for a long time. There will be little money or appetite for the massive equipment changes that renewable sources require. Climate change will not be high in the consciousness of people struggling to survive.

Berman notes that prominent economist Lawrence Summers has concerns that the U.S. financial system may collapse because of cascading defaults in the real estate and other sectors. (A quarter of renters and mortgage holders failed to make payments in April.)

He also cites Joseph Stiglitz who believes that the current pandemic will affect the developing world more severely than it has developed countries, and that this could lead to mass migrations even more significant than those we have witnessed (out of the Middle East and Africa, for example) in recent years.

But Berman’s area of expertise is the oil market. He is saying that high-cost producers will fail.

Large segments of the U.S. oil industry will have to be nationalized before the year is over. The price of oil is too low to justify the cost of extraction even if storage were available. The value of a barrel of oil, however, is 4.5 man-years of work and that productivity multiplier will be essential if the U.S. economy is to avoid collapse or for it to recover if collapse is unavoidable.

The economy will continue to be dependent on oil. But the game is over for most of the U.S. oil industry. As he puts it, “someone else’s oil will be cheap to buy for years.”

Berman concludes on a philosophical note:

There are few moments when we may truly say that things are different now. This is one of those moments. We do not know what awful form the future may take, what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. […]

I hope that we learn to view what is happening as a chance to simplify and to learn to be satisfied with no more than what we need. It is unlikely that we will have much choice.

Accentuating the negative

I once claimed that all the best people are dead. Such an assertion, taken at face value, is little more than a rhetorical flourish or provocation. Just a little hyperbolic, you could say.

Compare and contrast the stated views of John Cleese. Informed by an interviewer in September, 2017 that he (Cleese) was “very, very old”, the actor responded:

I’m 77. It’s very nice being this old, because when you’re this old, you’re going to die soon, so you don’t give a [expletive removed in source]… I am not afraid of death. I was thinking about it a lot, because you do when you’re older. I thought: most of the best people are dead.

I have to admit that his “most” is more defensible than my “all”. Cleese added that there are today “a lot of really awful people” about, many of them holding positions of power and influence. Provocation? Yes. But at least half-serious also.

If we are to take such claims even half seriously, however, we need to see them clearly for what they are: judgments not so much about individuals but rather (because individuals are created by the culture which nurtures them) about cultural change.

Moreover, negative or positive assessments of our (or any) society’s cultural trajectory will inevitably be subjective because any given judgment derives from a particular value framework, one amongst many actual and possible such frameworks. And, although they may be objectively described, competing value frameworks cannot be objectively assessed (except perhaps in very broad, functional terms).

Given the assumption that the social, political, educational, professional and familial structures upon which the functioning, health and transmission of a valued culture depend are breaking down or mutating in dangerous or otherwise undesirable ways, negative conclusions about the present and immediate future can be confidently – and quite reasonably – drawn. How plausible (or implausible) such an assumption or set of assumptions might be is debatable, of course. Opinions on these matters will be heavily influenced by ideological views and moral priorities.

Documentation on the decline in educational standards and a concomitant loss of status on the part of teachers and academics is not difficult to find, however. Likewise documentation on the breakdown of the family. But interpretations of the data will inevitably differ, as will the scope and focus of individual concerns.

We are all confronted with – and react in different ways to – the same broad social, political and cultural realities. Strangely – or perhaps, given the binary nature of many of our thought processes, not so strangely – most of us take a clear position not just on particular issues but also on the general trend. It is perceived as positive or as negative; as indicative of general improvement or of general deterioration.

Driven by temperament and who-knows-what, as time passes and as more loved and admired figures topple into the grave, I naturally see my negative stance confirmed. It is not just that all the old family friends, my father, all but one of my aunts and most of my teachers are dead; so are the thinkers and writers and artists who mean most to me. More importantly, the sorts of values these people exemplified or at least aspired to have been replaced by other values entirely.

Because linguistic communication is based on shared assumptions and words have no fixed meanings, talk about alternative assumptions is difficult. Let me try at least to describe the main areas in which I see deep divisions.

One is the social and political arena. So-called progressive attitudes and policies clearly dominate within the education system and within our ever-expanding government and quasi-governmental bureaucracies. Such attitudes also dominate the mainstream media and the increasingly influential technology companies. ‘Conservatism’ has become a dirty word associated either with fundamentalist Christians or war-mongering neocons. Burkean and other sensible and moderate forms of conservatism are not much discussed or widely understood.

Unfortunately, the arts have become a vehicle for the dominant ideology. There is an appalling homogeneity of views amongst actors, directors, screenwriters, dramatists and artists of various kinds. I know a bit about Western cultural history and I have never seen anything like it.

There are, of course, a few dissidents, a few independent voices, but even they find themselves caught up in the general silliness. Satire works only when the basic culture is still more or less intact. It deals with aberrations, exaggerating certain trends. But our politicians, bureaucrats, actors, academics and educators unwittingly satirize themselves.


[This is an extract from a piece published last month at The Electric Agora.]

Karl Lagerfeld

Here is a short extract from a piece I wrote early this year:

Variations on the general theme that things ain’t what they used to be are often heard but rarely taken seriously. And, as a general rule, the older the speaker is, the less seriously the claims are taken. Of course he would say that, the old codger. Life was so much better for him back then.

A couple of years ago the German-born fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld admitted to feeling that the world he had once lived in had ceased to exist. Paris, where he has lived and worked since the 1950s (when “it looked like an old French movie”), had never been as gloomy, dangerous or depressing as it was now.

As fate would have it, Mr Lagerfeld himself ceased to exist two weeks after my piece appeared. He was hospitalized on February 18th and died from complications associated with pancreatic cancer the next morning. In accordance with his wishes, there was no formal funeral, no ceremony.

My attitude to the industry in which Lagerfeld worked is not positive, and I have little knowledge of or interest in the man himself. What is most interesting is the phenomenon, the artifice, the public image – sustained over many years – as a kind of mask or act which was understood to be just that. Whatever his faults, Karl Lagerfeld had style and staying power. He also maintained a sense of privacy, showing himself to be (in this respect at least) very much a product of the lost world which he remembered.

Orwell again

Referencing George Orwell's 1984, Gerald Warner comments on cultural changes in the United Kingdom which mirror similar changes in other Western countries. I agree with the gist of what he is saying but I think it is best said without using the terms 'Marxism' and 'cultural Marxism' in the way that he does – too loosely. As he uses the terms, they are almost semantically empty.

"Political correctness – the euphemism for cultural Marxism – has colonized almost every corner of life in Britain. The social assumptions and public discourse, as well as the legal framework, have become Marxist. Genuine free speech is now an historical memory.

"One can only marvel at the prescient accuracy of George Orwell’s dystopian warnings in “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Thought crime is today called “hate crime”; Newspeak is the constipated, hideous neologisms of PC language. People have begun to police their own speech; formerly articulate individuals now have a hesitant delivery as they negotiate the pitfalls of an ever-expanding minefield of taboos."

(From his article, "Marx is winning", Reaction, May 15, 2018.)

Dirty Uncle Bertie

[This is my latest Electric Agora essay.]

Blaise Pascal saw our need for entertainment and distraction as arising from the very essence of the human condition and dark fears regarding our place in an apparently hostile and infinite universe. He himself was terrified by the silence between the stars.

One does not have to follow Pascal all the way, however, to see something a bit odd about comedy as an institution. Wit and humor help to make life more tolerable, but the institutionalization and professionalization of comedic entertainment can be seen as a depressing reminder of our need for such diversion and — by extension — of our ultimately dire situation.

What’s more, the funniest things – for me at least – happen and are said, wittingly and unwittingly, in the course of ordinary life. There is nothing to compare with a witty, off-the-cuff comment, created on the fly; or even spoonerisms or malapropisms. Such remarks may not bear scrutiny but humor or funniness should not (in my opinion) be required to bear scrutiny. Consequently I feel sorry for professional comics. They are scrutinized. They are under constant pressure. No wonder their lives are often short, and their biographies painfully depressing.

In the midst of a recent bout of Pascalian gloom, I started looking at some old comedy videos, amongst them Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s dialogues. These old tapes are very uneven, but they have their moments. And they are certainly interesting as historical documents. They got me thinking about the way comedy is so often focused on sex and how it reflects the social attitudes of the time. One sketch in particular resonated. It dealt with the excruciating awkwardness which often accompanied ‘facts of life’ sessions between parents and their children, but it also brought some darker aspects of my family history to mind.

It goes without saying that the humor of a particular period or culture reveals much about that culture or period: it derives from – and exploits – a particular set of social assumptions, beliefs and attitudes.  During their undergraduate years, both Cook and Moore were involved in extracurricular theatrical activities, Cook with the Footlights club in Cambridge and Moore with the Oxford Revue. This was in the late 1950’s, so the world that formed them is very distant from our own.

In conjunction with Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, they subsequently developed a satirical stage show, Beyond the Fringe. In this and other work, they were consciously pushing the boundaries and, though not political in a partisan sense, they were definitely anti-establishment. Their humor – much of which was social satire – drew heavily on the peculiarities of the English class system of the time and to a large extent was a reaction against it.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore developed sketches for television in the mid-1960’s. Their Pete and Dud sketches (the so-called ‘Dagenham dialogues’) poke fun at working class and lower-middle-class tastes and habits, like hanging prints of famous paintings in bathrooms. The Laughing Cavalier was bad enough, but Pete’s Auntie Muriel had something worse: the Mona Lisa, “with that awful sniffy look about her, so superior, peering down at you, she looks as if she’d never been to the lav in her life.” (1)

The sketch in question is set in an art gallery. There are speculations about certain strange elements of the Renaissance world such as floating gauze and cherubs and also about changing styles of humor. There is a reference to the Burlington House Cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci (a cartoon in this context being a full-size study for a painting). Pete “couldn’t see the bloody joke.” (2)

Though they were seen at the time as doing something entirely new, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were clearly the inheritors of a long tradition of class- and repression-based British humor. The material about the paintings in bathrooms and the ‘cartoon’ joke both involve making fun of lower-class habits or ignorance and so are hardly cutting edge, but in general the thrust of their humor was anarchic and their targets diverse. This general style of satire became very influential and played a role in undermining the class system and the Puritanism that often went with it. (3) It was nonetheless dependent on that system.

And perhaps this was why Cook – the more intellectually creative of the two – found that he had nowhere to go and gradually just petered out. The social system which formed him and which he mercilessly satirized had slowly disappeared, and – professionally, at least – he lost direction. Moreover, the early dialogues – which by all accounts had seemed daring at the time – exhibit a kind of prurience which now seems very dated (like some of the talk about the wisps of gauze which had a strange propensity for landing on naked women’s private parts).

Another example of Cook and Moore’s work is the father and son sketch in which Cook plays an unworldly upper-class father attempting to explain the facts of life to his 17-year-old son. (4) Mixed in with the innocence and obfuscation are references to rumors about “dirty Uncle Bertie” (who is the boy’s mother’s lover and presumably also his biological father). Despite the silliness, this aspect of the sketch highlights something real: strict notions of respectability and the strenuous avoidance of talk about sexual matters in polite company inevitably led to weird cover-ups and secrecy, even within families. 

The most common such cover-ups are related to children born out of wedlock, of course, and there are heart-rending cases on both sides of my family.  One relates to my paternal grandmother and her mother. My aunt regretted blocking attempts by her grandmother Cordelia to reach out to her when she was a child. Cordelia belonged to a different religious denomination, and my aunt considered her “stuck up.” Only much later did she find out about the real circumstances of her mother’s birth and her grandmother’s traumatic youth.

Cordelia Lester, working as a domestic servant, became pregnant and made her way to a charity hospital. She was quite ill and stayed at the hospital for some months after the birth of her daughter Caroline (my grandmother). The hospital records give the name of the father of her child. He was employed as a groom at the house at which she had been working. But, even within our family, all of this was covered up and Caroline was thought to be the daughter of the man Cordelia subsequently married.

The curious thing is, the boy’s family secretly watched over Cordelia and her daughter Caroline. Even long after Cordelia’s death – and in a city thousands of miles from where the story began – there were still secret contacts and communications (possibly involving financial help) between his family and Caroline. My aunt remembers odd meetings and letters, but they were never explained or discussed. And, at Caroline’s funeral, my aunt was approached by – and unfortunately rebuffed – a stranger claiming to be related to her and her mother.

But that father and son sketch – specifically the references to dirty Uncle Bertie – brought some stranger aspects of my family history to mind. They relate to my mother’s first cousin, Carl. Since the individuals involved are long dead, there seems to be no reason not to tell the story.

My mother told me about her father’s death. He was a saintly man who died quite young of Banti’s syndrome. He was ill for many months and was nursed and died at home. My mother – who was his favorite child and spent a lot of time with him during this period – was about ten years old. It’s a long and terrible story which I won’t tell here, except for one detail.

Apparently my grandmother (who was not particularly close to her husband) was very distraught during the time leading up to her husband’s death. There was something she felt she had to say to him but she kept putting it off, and he died. Normally cool and unemotional, she became extremely distressed, but apparently from guilt rather than from grief.

This episode may or may not be connected with a long-term sexual relationship my maternal grandmother had with her nephew Carl which was covered up for many years. I only found out about it during my last visit (not long before her death) to my mother’s older sister who blithely informed me that my grandmother and Carl had been, as she put it, “an item”. Even my mother didn’t know about it.

I had always thought that Carl was a bit strange. He was living at my grandmother’s house when we came to stay for a couple of months when I was seven years old. Carl played the violin and used to drive us around in his car. I still remember its slightly musty smell and its cavernous, dark interior. We (certainly we children) were all completely unaware of any romantic or sexual relationship between Carl and his aunt Lily. But I sensed a kind of weirdness and unpleasantness about the man, and apparently I asked my mother at the time, quite seriously, if Carl was from another planet.

Nobody would want to return to the classed-based, respectability-obsessed world which Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and others with whom they were associated were reacting against. It was a world of secrecy, hypocrisy and bigotry.

And though the hopes of those who thought that the demise of the old order would usher in a brave, new, enlightened and harmonious world have not been fulfilled, at least the secrecy is gone.

NOTES

1. https://youtu.be/lv-tQ1SP5oU
2. https://youtu.be/sSn1EgSzHyEThis section of the dialogue includes a bit of ad libbing as Cook tries to get Moore to laugh uncontrollably.
3. The satirical magazinePrivate Eye, which Peter Cook helped to fund, was particularly influential.
4. https://youtu.be/m9_kTOgjT3EMy father didn’t even get as far as the Peter Cook character did in the sketch; he chickened out entirely. My mother took on the task.

The culture of rock and roll

Reposted from my Google+ Collection, The Decline of the West...

"[As rock and related forms of music] have become mainstream, the values and attitudes associated with the broader culture of rock and roll have also gained widespread acceptance, changing societies and cultures in subtle or not so subtle ways."

I raised this point in my most recent Electric Agora article but didn't elaborate on it, concentrating more on the music itself and its uneasy relationship with traditional Western musical styles.

Actually I like certain types of rock music, particular songs, etc., but I don't really relate very well to the rock and roll culture. As I said in response to some questions from Dan Kaufman in the comment section of the EA post, I didn't really want the discussion to be focused on my personal views and motivations, etc. but I readily admitted to having contrarian and conservative tendencies. The supposedly rebellious youth culture which I experienced was surprisingly conformist, and I kicked against it – or at least resisted it – to some extent. For example, I have never been interested in experimenting with drugs, and alcohol just makes me feel bad.

Another reason I'm ambivalent about rock is because it has destroyed many local musical traditions and contributed to the erosion of linguistic and geographically-defined cultural diversity. One of the commenters on my article talked about his experiences driving from Amsterdam through France to Italy in the 1980s and 90s and the way there was less and less rock on the car radio the further south you progressed. These regional differences are not so evident today. Rock and derivative forms are everywhere.

Though most rock music is not overtly political, it was from its very origins associated with rebellion and a conscious rejection of tradition. And it is currently being exploited in Europe and elsewhere by the left – and (ironically perhaps) also by the radical right – as a kind of recruiting tool.

Far more significant, however, is the way rock culture has combined with digital technologies to change general values and attitudes. You can't quantify this sort of thing but there is little doubt that the cultural identity of Western countries has been radically changed over recent decades and links to a two-and-a-half-thousand year history have been progressively broken. Who these days is familiar with Greek myths and legends or learns Latin or knows anything much about Western political or cultural or intellectual history? Rock music and the culture of rock and roll may be more of a symptom than a cause but it has undoubtedly played a role in this transformation.

Signs of cultural decline

I have previously* made reference to Daniel Kaufman's provocative critique of Western self-improvement fads. His key examples related to Werner Erhard's est program and its successors. Having no direct experience with these movements I can't really comment meaningfully though I've noted that – whilst I personally am averse to these sorts of programs – some of the underlying ideas do look at least interesting and are not obviously misguided.

I am in strong agreement, however, with Kaufman's general remarks about cultural impoverishment.

Cited below are the final two paragraphs of his piece which make a number of telling points. I especially like the bit about "broadcasting the obvious". And the notion of these fads being symptomatic of a "national emptiness or sadness" is also worth taking seriously.

This last point (deriving from a perception of a deep and general malaise; cultural decline, if you like) is hard to put into words that don't sound histrionic or at least very subjective, but that doesn't mean that such judgments have no basis in reality.

"Of course, self improvement, in the ordinary sense, is a part of the human condition, and an inability or unwillingness to change or evolve over the course of our lives is undoubtedly problematic. Marriage and parenthood and middle age have led to my changing and developing in myriad ways, as has my relocation from New York to the Lower Midwest. I’ve had to begin paying more attention to my physical condition; to moderate some of my more reactive tendencies; to let more things go, rather than fight them all out; and to give up who knows how many personal prerogatives that I would have insisted upon, when I was younger, single, and childless, roaming the hedonistic mecca that was 1980’s and 90’s Manhattan. There is nothing special about this – indeed, it is boringly common. It isn’t the result of a program or a project or a plan. It requires no explicit philosophy or discipline. There is no need to meditate or visualize or take special views or whatever the hell the current Self-Improvement crowd would like to suggest is necessary. The result is not “enlightenment,” but growing up and eventually, growing old. This means, alas, that there is nothing to tweet or blog about, no reason to set up a website or to write a book chronicling “the journey”… unless, that is, one wants to broadcast to the world the bloody obvious, and why on earth would anyone want to do that?

"It’s depressing to realize that the American memory is so stunted, so addled, that these fads have to be unmasked every decade or so and the same criticisms made over and over again. EST [the program developed by Werner Erhard] came upon hard times and was repackaged, in subsequent decades, into the “Landmark Forum,” which was even more successful than the original. Guru after guru has been revealed to be a crook, a fraud, or a pervert, but the parade of such characters and their mobs of credulous, adoring fans continues on, unabated. That Americans continue to exhibit an unending thirst for this sort of thing suggests that for all that has changed, we still have not escaped the grip of the malaise that arose in the wake of the 1960’s, the collapse of the counterculture, and the disintegration of America’s families. The retreat into cyberspace is only the latest and most radical manifestation of this national emptiness and sadness, and we can expect that as it deepens, the Cult of the Self will only grow stronger, easily overwhelming the few voices that rise up in opposition to it, and with no obvious end in sight."


* See my Google+ collection Language, Logic, Life. I also maintain the collection The Decline of the West: Observations and reflections (which is more political). You can follow all my Google+ activity via my profile or just follow a particular collection.

Predictions

[Just up on my Google+ Collection, Social and Political Reflections...]

Political and financial predictions are notoriously – and necessarily – unreliable, but we often have to make them and act on them. This is especially so for those who depend on investments for a large part – or all – of their income.

Predictions about the direction of stock market indices, property prices, interest rates, etc. are much harder to get right than predictions about the outcomes of elections or referenda. The former (like typical referenda and many elections) may involve a simple binary choice but – unlike elections and referenda – they are not tied to a timetable. So bubbles and other market distortions can persist for long periods of time. Timing is crucial for investment, but the best one can hope for in this regard is to get one's timing approximately right. [1]

Political risk is one of the things that makes financial predictions so problematic – and we are seeing a lot of it about these days.

Politics, one might say, is an unfortunate necessity. [2] Really, it's just about – or should be about – the boring business of organizing an institutional and legislative framework which allows large numbers of people to live together in a reasonably cooperative way. But it's also a very human thing, being utterly dependent on basic human attitudes, especially trust: trust in one another, and trust in the powers that be.

Recent events have amply demonstrated that both the US establishment and the EU establishment have lost the trust of (a majority of) the people. Add to that social divisions – the result of economic hardship and cultural changes (arguably compounded in some jurisdictions by large-scale immigration) – and you have a recipe for trouble. [3]

————

[1] I have been expecting a bear market in stocks for more than two years now. It may finally be upon us. But I have been dead wrong about Treasury bills and bonds, etc. (yields just keep dropping!). I know there is supposed to be an inverse relationship between stock and bond prices but (like many others) I see a bubble in both.

[2] The phrase is in my mind because a short commentary of mine on a fascinating episode of an old Canadian television panel discussion series is about to appear at The Electric Agora. The main question the panel addressed was: Is spying an unfortunate necessity?

[3] I know the immigration issue is a sensitive one, and there is a lot of xenophobia about, but it is wrong to accuse everyone who questions the wisdom of large-scale immigration of bigotry or racism. This is part of the problem, in fact. Many years ago Enoch Powell was forced out of British politics when he argued strongly against his country's immigration policies. The subject was taboo and it still is in certain circles. Why can't we just talk sensibly about these things?

Real communication between the generations is under threat

From my latest article at The Electric Agora:

"The logician and writer (as Lewis Carroll) of books for children, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, famously (and more or less innocently though I’m not so sure about the nude photographs, etc.) enjoyed the company of prepubescent girls, the daughters of his social circle. I certainly wouldn’t like his chances of organizing similar contacts today. The tragedy, however, is that opportunities for a whole range of perfectly ordinary (and proper) interactions between older and younger people are slowly but surely disappearing.

New technologies are playing a big role here. Apart from their influence on patterns of perception and cognition, etc., there is also the fact that digital media have produced a situation where information and entertainment is directly available and does not need to be sought so much from older people (parents, teachers, gentlemen logicians…). Everything you ever wanted to know about anything but were afraid to ask is now readily available, embarrassment-free, from documentary sources or from a hugely extended peer group; and we are drowning in entertainment options."

Sentimental education

Perhaps it has got something to do with having a father who was considerably older than my mother – and who himself was regularly mistaken for someone of an even earlier generation than the one he in fact belonged to – but I have always felt more culturally connected to times previous to my own. I am drawn, for example, to the intellectual culture of the early-to-mid 20th century, and to the latter part of that period for popular culture.

As a young undergraduate, I always used to prefer the late-in-the-day tutorials scheduled for the benefit of part-time, 'mature aged' students. They came on their way home from work in the city, the men in suits, the women smartly dressed and smelling of perfume. They knew stuff I didn't know and had strong opinions about things I had never really thought or even heard about.

There was a woman in her late twenties perhaps whom I used to talk to a lot when I was in my second year. She seemed slightly old-fashioned, out of her time somehow. And it turned out that she had quite – unusual – ideas.

For she had something of an obsession with someone I had only vaguely heard of, someone who was obviously a hero for her and who represented an apparently lost but (in her eyes) glorious cause – the fascist leader, Oswald Mosley. But politics (or political history) was not something I had strong opinions about at the time, and I just took her views as one aspect of a slightly odd and intriguing personality.

Not only the student population but also the academic staff (in stark contrast to today's equivalents) reflected a variety of political and social views, from left to right to totally apolitical.

I took a course on W.B. Yeats which influenced me quite deeply. It was taught by a Hungarian who had written a dissertation at Cambridge on 18th-century English gardens and who was very much in sympathy with Yeats's fin de siècle aestheticism as well as his general political tendencies and social views.

As a young student, I was – like the typical student character in a 19th-century novel – almost drowning in Romanticism. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Emily Brontë, Gérard de Nerval, Baudelaire.

Two French novels I read around that time, Adolphe by Benjamin Constant and L'Education sentimentale by Gustave Flaubert, were each centred on a relationship between a younger man and an older woman: dark unpleasant books both of them, but strangely alluring. They and other Romantic texts coloured all my interactions and relationships (or non-relationships!) at the time.

Everything – especially everything female – was seen by me through a kind of literary lens which in retrospect I could have really done without. All that Romantic and pre-Raphaelite baggage made me quite as blind to immediate reality as (in a rather different way) the Mosleyite woman was.

In subsequent years I have come to reject just about everything associated with the Romantic movement. Except one thing, its one true – and overwhelmingly important – insight into the nature of reality: that, morally speaking, the natural world is value-free – there are no values in nature.*

The 18th-century philosophes saw themselves as science-driven and enlightened thinkers, but their deism perpetuated classical notions of a divinely guided universe. Ironically, it took the radical (and often self-consciously emotional) upheaval of the Romantic period to clear the way for a truly scientific and secular view of the world.



* Of course, I don't mean to deny that living beings have values and human beings have moral values, and that we constitute part of the natural world. But since the Romantic period it has been much harder to maintain the view that human values are somehow reflected in – or derive from – non-human realities, whether natural or supernatural. (This point – or one very like it – was made by Isaiah Berlin.)

Watching, waiting and thinking small

I haven't been posting much lately, partly because I've been preoccupied with other matters and partly because I'm a bit more uncertain these days, not about my basic values so much as how those values might relate to current political realities and options.

As I have explained in the past, my kind of conservatism is pragmatic and responsive to changing circumstances. Any intelligent strategy must be responsive in this way.

And circumstances are changing. In terms of global institutions, power relations and general culture, the post-World War II order is fading or failing and it is unclear what kind of order – or disorder – is going to take its place. One thing which is clear is that the more or less continuous economic progress which has underpinned stability in Western democracies seems to be coming to an end.

Continuing financial and economic troubles portend social and ultimately political crises in Europe and perhaps in the US and other developed countries.

As geo-political and economic realities change, political ideas must change. The basic principles and themes may remain the same but the way individuals interpret them and align themselves doesn't.

Sometimes old ideas gain new relevance, or standard assumptions are exposed as inadequate in the light of current events.

I'm not sure if the political center is shifting in Western countries or if we are simply losing that space which has allowed the center-left and the center-right to cooperate and compete and dominate the political landscape since World War II.

Nor is it clear whether the Chinese model of state capitalism or other possible alternatives to liberal democracy will continue to look viable. Corporatism seems to be making a comeback as well as various forms of economic nationalism. Patriotic protectionism is one of the key policies of many far-right Western European parties (the Front National in France, for example).

I am by nature an observer rather than a player, a political quietist rather than an activist. The distinction between watcher and participator is not a clear one, however. There is no neutral place from which one can watch history unfold; what happens inevitably has ramifying consequences, sometimes very significant consequences. And, if we are talking about epochal changes, everyone will be affected in one way or another.

Could what we are currently witnessing be described as epochal change? I think so. There is certainly a lot going on at the moment.

And, though these changes are driven more by economic realities than anything else, ideas play a part too: the crude, emotion-driven ideas that motivate ordinary people to support this or that leader, to protest or not to protest; as well as the more sophisticated ideas promoted by ideologues and intellectuals.

As I have argued elsewhere, these latter kinds of ideas – the more elaborated and intellectualized ones – are often merely post hoc rationalizations or justifications, attempts to make courses of action decided on for other reasons appear morally or intellectually respectable. But ideological structures also play an active role in recruitment and in defining and sustaining political groupings.

Ideological structures, however sophisticated they may appear, are always inadequate as models of social and political reality. They are merely useful (or dangerous) abstractions, attempts to impose some kind of value-based order on an immensely complex social and political landscape.

When we move from the personal to the political, from the particular to the general, there is always some distortion and loss of meaning. The concepts become thinner and more abstract and run the risk of losing touch with psychological and social realities altogether. At least in the social sciences quantifiable measurements are made which guarantee some kind of link to the real world (tenuous though that link all too often is).

I try to keep my orientation empirical and my main focus on the particular rather than the general, on psychology rather than on political or social theory, on cultures and customs rather than on universalizing ideologies, on particular languages rather than on language.*

In line with this way of thinking, the basic values that I cleave to manifest themselves at the level of individual experience, at smaller rather than at larger scales.

This is reality. This is where we truly live.



* Even the notion of a language is at several removes from reality. There are, of course, dialects and regional and social variations. And, as Noam Chomsky has emphasized, in the end there are only idiolects which change over time: the linguistic structures or sets of structures which each of us has internalized are in the final analysis quite individual and unique.

Gloomy about Europe

Borrowing costs may have come down across Europe – even in Greece – but the underlying economic situation in many euro zone countries is still grim. And it may well be that the political consequences are only just starting to emerge.

In a recent piece in the Financial Times Gideon Rachman suggests that the euro crisis hasn't gone away: it has simply moved from the periphery to the core.

Italy, for example, has lost 25% of its industrial capacity since 2008, and the real level of unemployment is about 15%. The country's ratio of debt to GDP is more than 130%. France too has double-digit unemployment and the national debt is rising towards 100% of GDP.

Tension between European Central Bank president Mario Draghi and the German economic establishment including finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble seems to be increasing. And Rachman fears that Europe is very vulnerable to an external shock – such as higher energy prices as a result of any standoff with Russia over Ukraine.

Europe's fragile economy is in danger of being tipped into a deep recession. "And," writes Rachman, "a return to deep recession would favour the radical fringes in Europe."

Anyone who has witnessed Marine Le Pen's unequivocal and outspoken but brilliantly controlled television interview performances will be only too aware of the dangers.

But though she has made the Front National far more respectable than it was under her father and has achieved impressive electoral successes (such as in recent mayoral elections) with the prospect of more to come, she has not moved her party into the political – and certainly not into the economic – mainstream. She appeals directly (and effectively) to the French people and scorns the institutional status quo. And her protectionist economic policies are quite at odds with the economic thinking of both the centre left and the centre right.

The situation in other European countries, of course, is different but groups supporting policies similar to those of the FN are now a common feature of the political landscape.

In Asia, by contrast, despite rising nationalism and real threats to the continuing growth of trade and prosperity, bilateral free trade deals and other new arrangements to facilitate international trade and financial transactions are somehow continuing to happen. (Deals between Australia and Japan and Australia and South Korea have been finalized in recent days, for example, and a suite of new arrangements between Australia and China is expected to be concluded this year.)

Despite problems in some regions – like poor air or water quality, or food contamination – much of East Asia (and South and South-East Asia and Australasia) continues to benefit from strong levels of economic activity, with most countries still firmly committed to further lowering barriers to increased trade and investment.

Meanwhile Europe, driven by long-term historical, economic and demographic trends as well as more contingent cultural factors, is moving slowly (but apparently inexorably) to the periphery of global politics and trade. It doesn't help that, under an ineffective President and an increasingly dysfunctional political system, the United States seems to be drifting into a long, drawn-out and perhaps inevitable decline.

Such prognostications, I know, are not worth much. But as more people come to see things in this way – and they will if nothing happens to suddenly render this narrative implausible – these expectations will affect behaviour, feeding and consolidating deep, underlying economic and social trends. Even now, many Asian cities (like Singapore, for example) are booming and attracting some of Europe's and America's best talent.

I don't know that it makes sense to talk about Europe as a single entity. It has always been a patchwork of nations and regions with very different cultures and levels of prosperity. And – despite attempts over recent decades to create a more unified and homogeneous union – it remains something of a patchwork, more interdependent, certainly, but also more divided in new and complex ways.

Some regions, no doubt, will prosper; others will languish, relatively speaking. Given the overall economic situation, however, the best one can hope for, I think, is that the countries of Europe will maintain social harmony and hold at least to the general levels of prosperity which currently exist.

This would not be so bad. But such an outcome is far from guaranteed.

Death of an art form

I have given up on movies. There was a time when I trusted sections of the cinematic establishment sufficiently to willingly suspend my disbelief and surrender an hour or two of my time and attention to their products several times a week. There were writers and directors whose cultural background and preoccupations I shared to a great extent and who had (as I saw it) something interesting to say. They were people I respected.

It's a trust thing. Art forms are always about trust, even if they are also about making money.

Whilst government subsidies may attempt to keep local film industries alive, they inevitably encourage ideological conformity and artistic self-indulgence. And the main targeted audiences for mainstream films are now younger and globalized. Lowest common denominator. You know the deal.

A recent Telegraph article mentions that one of the people working as a quantitative analyst for American film producers – a former academic statistician – happens to be a distant relative of Albert Einstein. Symbolic somehow, don't you think, emblematic of cultural decline?

Nick Meaney (who is not a cousin of the physicist) runs a company in South London which assesses the earning prospects of film scripts based on algorithmic analysis of human-input scores relating to hundreds of categories (strength of location, proposed actors, etc.).

Their results are, apparently, much in demand by film producers. And they suggest, by the way, that nine times out of ten the big names have no effect on the box-office figures (assuming the replacements are competent).

So not only are movies not movies in the way they were, the stars are no longer stars in the old sense. Does the explanation lie with the actors, their image-makers, the changed nature of the product or the audiences?

Stars didn't come much bigger than Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. But Meaney criticizes the movie classic Casablanca for being "too gloomy, downbeat and too long". He points out that it was only the sixth-best performing film of 1943.

It has performed rather well since, however.

I like Bogart's line as he (Rick) and Bergman (Ilsa) recall their last meeting in Paris at the time of the German invasion: "... You were wearing blue. The Germans were wearing gray."

Quantify that.

Marriage and social change

As progressive causes – like feminism and gay rights – progress, the victories often become less significant.

Why, for example, would a woman want to be a priest or a bishop? Why would anyone want to be a priest or a bishop?

Well, to be serious, I do understand why devout Catholics or Episcopalians (whether they be men or women and whatever their sexual orientation) might aspire to leadership roles within their respective churches, but the question of who gets to be priests etc. is (or should be) of concern only to the members of the churches involved. And, of course, that membership base is much depleted – and shrinking.

The issue of same-sex marriage, however, is both more complicated and more significant. You could ask similar questions to the questions I asked above, but the parallel with ordination breaks down. It's readily understandable and widely understood that – and why – (many) couples want to wed. The cynical take on marriage [cue Eddie Cantor routine (see below)] is – as it always was – a minority position.

However, I think it's fair to say that a personal or theoretical lack of commitment to the institution of marriage in general does not necessarily entail either sexism or cynicism. But I'll save my arguments on this for another day and make do with an anecdote.

A lawyer who lived with and had children with and eventually married (a non-event in the scheme of things) a favorite cousin of mine used to say to her, "Let's not bring the law into our relationship." (He also used to say, "The law is an ass." But I won't go there...)

Clearly, she wanted more security. And he had been through a very messy (and I suspect expensive) divorce as a younger man. Anyway, they stayed together, if you want to know, even after my cousin was struck down with a terrible illness. Faithfulness (or the lack of it) is what defines a relationship in the end.

The only other comment I want to make on this issue is that allowing same-sex couples to marry (which I am not arguing against) does change the meaning of the institution of marriage. This is an obvious fact which some advocates of reform don't seem to acknowledge. Exactly how it changes it is difficult to define precisely. But, clearly, it would make the institution less appealing to those with conservative views.

It is quite possible that many non-religious conservatives who might under the old system have quite liked the idea of marrying their girlfriend (I can only really speak from a male point of view here) may henceforth be put off the idea because marriage no longer sends the same (mildly socially conservative) signal it once did.

Some may detect homophobia in this general line of thought – along the lines that gays and lesbians have somehow contaminated the institution. But this would be stretching the concept of homophobia much too far and distorting some relatively simple semantic and social truths.

In fact, one would have to say that anyone who could interpret a man's choosing not to marry his female partner as a sign of homophobia is living in a quite different linguistic universe from the rest of us.

I am reluctant to talk about liberty or freedom in a political sense, as such talk often rings hollow to me. But, for what it's worth, I do discern within myself a deep psychological – and, perhaps, ideological – commitment to personal freedom. Freedom to love or not to love. Freedom to devise and live by one's own values, whether they be progressive or conservative or something altogether different.

The problem and the paradox of such a view is that we can fully realize these freedoms only in the context of a society in which our particular personal values find widespread expression.