CandidCapital

In a departure from normal practice, today’s blog is a Christmas Special looking at how popular culture – such as Ben Elton’s latest novel Blind Faith - can help us understand the phenomenon of social networking and community websites.

Why Should the Devil Have All the Best Tunes?

Back in the days when ‘wireless’ was a noun rather than an adjective (as in ‘your mother is still listening to The Archers on the wireless’, which as often as not was a Roberts that lived in the kitchen), Sir Hugh Carleton Greene appeared on Desert Island Discs. He had been Director General of the BBC during the tumultuous 1960s and a frequent target of intemperate criticism by populist right-wing newspapers.

Desert Island Discs has been running for longer than it is decent to remember and involves inviting a person prominent in public life or the arts (this was before the cult of ‘slebrity’) to chose eight records, a book and a luxury item to accompany him or her as a castaway on a desert island.

Greene sent a frisson down (or at least in search of) the collective spine of Britain’s worthy classes by choosing as one of his recordings the Horst Wessel Lied, otherwise known from its opening line as The Flag on High, the anthem of the Nazi party, of which the eponymous Wessel was a member. And even if you have never heard the words, both tawdry and chilling, you can imagine them: “Already millions are looking to the swastika full of hope/The day of freedom and bread is dawning”, and so nastily on.

What made Greene – wartime RAF officer, brother of the novelist Graham Greene and a man with impeccable establishment credentials and libertarian leanings – chose such a controversial item, a song which is still banned in modern Germany? His answer was pointed: “Why,” he said, “should the devil have all the best tunes?”

Poked

I was reminded of Greene’s nimble piece of intellectual jujitsu, using your opponent’s strength and weight to your own advantage, when a month ago a long-standing friend, now an Oxford don, contacted me via Facebook. I complimented him on the huge number of Facebook Friends he has and confessed that I’d only signed up to keep in contact with the godchildren and in the hope of understanding why any Internet activity can become a craze. The tone (hushed or excited) in which Facebook is discussed by its swelling band of acolytes reminds me of the passionate look elderly Russians adopt even today when reminiscing on their days as Komsomol pioneers.

My Oxford friend had the candour to confess that he’s on Facebook mainly for the sake of his students and he is a very grudging player. In fact, he hates ‘the world’s ghastly, relentless urge to dispense with privacy’ and recommended Ben Elton’s latest novel – Blind Faith – as a commentary on the consequences.

A small but satisfying moment of Greeneian jujitsu: using Facebook to criticise Facebook, and pass on details of a novel that explains some of the environment out of which Facebook has grown.

Blind Faith

I was glad to have grabbed a copy of Blind Faith almost straightaway to read while I emerged from a bout of flu. It presents the London region two generations from now, 56 years ARF, or after the flood caused by global warming. In this bleak world, the inhabitable areas of the globe have been severely reduced, people live in over-crowded tenement blocks and hardly ever cease feeding themselves on the unhealthiest of sugary, fatty fast foods. Public transport is dire and work nominal.

I do not want to risk giving away the plot, but the main action revolves round Trafford Sewell, a civil servant of sorts and in most ways no different from his fellow man – except that he desires privacy in a world where putting everything (really everything) about yourself on your FacePage (geddit?) is the norm. Failing to put even or especially your most intimate moments on FacePage risks bringing the severest social sanctions down on yourself as your work colleagues or neighbours, an easily-manipulated mob, turn against you.

Son of Big Brother

Many strands co-exist without necessarily coming together fully-digested in this timely novel: environmentalism, evangelism, popular culture, the death of real respect (as opposed to the ‘respect’ you ‘earn’ through threatened or actual violence; Trafford Sewell notes how those who demand respect the most are the least likely to show it), the growing dominance of technology that is less and less understood and rampant yobbishness angrily impervious to any ‘snobbish’ restraint.

The one key insight throughout is the collapse of the individual’s ability to think for himself that accompanies a complete erosion of privacy – the aspect of the novel that captured the interest of my Oxford classicist friend - and the parallel loss of respect for ourselves and others that goes with such the loss of privacy. Not being ‘sociable’ all day every day is not the same as being anti-social.

As might be expected from Mr Elton, who made his name in demotic stand-up comedy in the 1980s, the ear for dialogue and the phrase of the hour is acute: in a world where privacy and any sense of shame are (ironically) taboo, all of us all of the time are meant to be either ‘at it’ or ‘up for it’. Even the most trivial achievements are – er – ‘bigged up’ by the groupthink cries of ‘way to go’ (meaning ‘awesome, right-on’, apparently). And so on.

Everyone – by law – is famous. This is a world beyond even Big Brother, where the phrase ‘reality TV’ teeters between oxymoron and emptiness. Of which of the following would you say the same:
• Moderate Republican;
• Liberal Democrat;
• Fox News;
• Department for Culture, Media & Sport;
• Evangelical Christian;
• Sunny Delight;
• Public intellectual;
• Advance praise?

I vote we name such phrases ‘bazalgettes’ out of ‘respect’ for the man who, as Stephen Fry memorably said, undid the good work of his Victorian ancestor.

Children – only ever called ‘kiddies’ – are referred to in terms of treacly sentimentality, not least because fully half of them die young for reasons key to the plot, with bunches of flowers left in abundance at any location associated with the demised kiddy now resting with ‘baby Jesus and Diana’. Parents are ‘encouraged’ to abandon traditional names for their children in favour of brand names and consumer items; Trafford’s daughter is named “Caitlin Happy Meal”. We are tiptoeing here round the territory that caused Boris Johnson to have his infamous run-in with Liverpool.

Infant deaths are eminently preventable but for different reasons the powers that be (‘the Temple’) and ordinary citizens prefer to ignore the benefits of science. (The irony for me was particularly piquant as I read Blind Faith at the time of Children in Need last month – an event which long ago flipped from altruism to celeb-encrusted corporate bullying.) And it’s not the marriage that matters, it’s the wedding, so the more you have the merrier; hello to Hello!.

Less than the Sum of its Parts

Above all, Mr Elton paints convincingly what happens in a world where you cannot say anything critical about me – no matter how factually-based or well-argued – for fear of hurting my feelings and damaging my self esteem. All values, apart from the socially-imposed ones of being remorselessly up-beat all the time – are therefore subjective.

This is a world not so very far away from ours and which trundles ever closer with plans by the egregiously-titled Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, to make incitement to hatred because of sexual orientation a crime similar to racial hatred.

But taken in the round, Blind Faith is less than the sum of its punchy components. Perhaps this is not surprising given that its title is a vain attempt to retrofit a unifying theme on a bundle of topical criticisms. In a revealing interview in the Independent, Mr Elton has trouble remembering the name of the guru from whom he allegedly took his inspiration:

"What I think is original about Blind Faith is that I'm not looking at American fundamentalist preachers or mad Mullahs," he says, "I'm looking at people who boast about or feel there's some inherent value in talking about their star signs." He quickly adds, "It's interesting, it's certainly in the zeitgeist. I mean, the guy – what's his name? – Richard Dawkins just did a Channel 4 series, and I thought bloody hell that's exactly what I'm doing, because he wasn't talking about Christianity, he was talking about just lazy thinking."

Zeitgeist? A one-word bazalgette, I fear. And though ‘reason’ is the value ostensibly at the core of the novel - even becoming a password among the tiny humanist resistance movement - Mr Elton does not have the depth as a novelist to work through the contradictions inherent in the crooked timber that is humanity. After all, it is out of motivations other than reason – love, being in love, the joy of learning - that Trafford Sewell acts to save his daughter, find meaning in his life and put his own life at risk.

But in addition to a good ear for banal and nasty contemporary dialogue, Mr Elton’s view of the future does provide two key insights into the world of community websites.

First, Trafford realises that everyone in such a world is self-obsessed, so you can get away with putting pictures of other people’s most intimate moments on your “FacePage” if you want to preserve some privacy – no one is sufficiently curious to examine your entry in detail.

Secondly, that something intangible but vital is at risk when you do lose any sense of privacy, of the demarcations between public and private, between family and work.

And it is these two aspects that we shall pick up in trying to understand the social networking phenomenon in Part 2 on Christmas Eve.

21 December 07