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2020 was an awful year for all of us. For some it was utterly heartbreaking.
But for me and my family there was one beautiful day, when we were reunited with Joey at the St Elizabeth Centre in Hertfordshire after three long months in lockdown.
The great photographer, Edmond Terakopian, was there to catch it.
Let’s hope 2021 brings more joy.
In his masterpiece, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), the great Marxist historian, EP Thompson, explained that he was seeking to rescue the labouring poor from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity.’ And with this exhortation the boundaries of history expanded exponentially to include a vast range of subjects usually overlooked, especially in terms of gender, ethnicity, religious belief, sexual orientation, class and so on.
But there is one group which has been almost entirely ignored: namely, people with what we would now call ‘learning disabilities.’ This is partly because of a paucity in the documentary record but more significant, perhaps, is the feeling that such people aren’t very interesting: after all, who wants to read a book about ‘idiots’ when there are so many geniuses to study? But as anyone who loves a learning disabled person will know, if anybody needs rescuing from the ‘condescension of posterity’ it’s this loosely defined group who’ve so often been mocked and abused, neglected and ignored, segregated, sterilised and murdered, all for the crime of lacking the cognitive powers that the rest of us take for granted.
There are many challenges involved in such a history, but one of the biggest is that the language keeps changing. As Simon Jarrett’s title suggests, ‘those they called idiots’ may not be the same people we would call ‘idiots’ today, just as the other terms—'imbecile,’ ‘moron,’ ‘cretin,’ ‘mental defect’, ‘retard’ and so on—all mean something different to when they were first coined. Indeed, they carry such negative connotations that they’re unusable in modern professional practice—if all too common in everyday speech.
Jarrett’s exceptionally readable—and beautifully illustrated—history describes in meticulous detail the way that this group has been treated by a largely uncomprehending world. ‘Idiots,’ he explains, were subjected to a gradual process of institutionalisation in the 200 years between the French Revolution and the coming of Mrs Thatcher; but also that this ‘great incarceration’ was followed by the ‘great return’ when, finally, the worst of the asylums and long-stay hospitals were closed and their inhabitants—many of whom had never lived anywhere else—were moved back into ‘the community,’ where many still live, often with inadequate support and company.
Jarrett emphasises the idealism that informed the early days of the ‘idiot asylums’ but explains how this gradually gave way to something much darker as the learning disabled came to be seen as an inchoate menace to the social order. He also describes the emergence of the eugenics movement, with its conviction that ‘the race’ could be improved if only ‘mental defectives’ were prevented from reproducing, leading to segregation, sterilization and, in Nazi Germany at least, state sponsored murder.
Although Jarrett’s account brings us up to the present day, it’s particularly strong on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and I’m especially grateful to him for two key insights. The first is into the relatively relaxed and tolerant attitudes of Georgian England, where, it seems, the ‘idiot’ was accepted: subject to mockery and jokes, certainly, but also recognized as part of society and celebrated as an expression of those frailties which are fundamental to the human condition. As such, Jarrett argues, the learning disabled—many of whom held down jobs and lived alongside the rest of the population—avoided the categorisation, exclusion and persecution that was such a feature of the worst that soon followed.
His other great insight is into the relationship between nineteenth-century colonialism and the disabled mind, with humanity being divided into three distinct ranks: at the top sat civilised white men, capable of rational thought and, of course, European; next stood barbarians—Chinese, Indian etc—who lived in cities and organized societies but were irrational, greedy and cruel; at the bottom were nomadic savages who seemingly lacked any powers of reason or intellect, ‘idiots’ who couldn’t manage their affairs and had no rights over the territories where they were found. Thus, in championing the great achievements of the European Enlightenment, the very idea of ‘idiocy’ was used to describe ’inferior races’ in ways which are still deeply damaging.
Jarrett’s subtitle is ‘the idea of the disabled mind from 1700 to the present day’ and he tracks with considerable care the way that the learning disabled have provided the rest of us with a contrast group against which we can define ourselves. And he shows in the most elegant way imaginable that the evolution of this idea and its many perversions has not just had incalculable impact on those with learning disabilities, it’s shaped the assumptions that inform our most deeply held beliefs.
The history of learning disabilities matter to us all because in our response we can see a mirror for who we are and what we care about. We should be grateful to Simon Jarrett for telling this complex, compelling and frequently troubling story with such tremendous clarity and style. I can’t recommend this wonderful book highly enough, even if—especially if, perhaps—you have no lived experience of the subject.
Every parent of a learning-disabled or autistic child is different. What unites us, however, is the experience of fighting for our child’s inalienable human rights and basic dignities. We don’t want special treatment and detest the notion of our children being ‘special’ or having ‘special’ needs. All we want is what we expect for our other children. It shouldn’t be too much to ask.
Sara Ryan—whose wondrous new book, Love, Learning Disabilities and Pockets of Brilliance, is out next month—knows this better than most. In July 2013 her gorgeous 18 year old son, Connor Sparrowhawk, drowned in a bath in an NHS Assessment and Treatment Unit in Oxford. After an exhausting campaign for justice, an Inquest eventually concluded that his death was ‘avoidable’ (he had epilepsy and shouldn’t have been left alone in the bath) and not, as previously claimed, ‘of natural causes.’ But ‘Justice for Laughing Boy’ (#justiceforLB) wasn’t finished and Sara and the many people who worked alongside her didn’t just ensure that those responsible for Connor’s death were named, they showed up a systematic failure to investigate the deaths of hundreds of learning-disabled people and pointed to still broader issues in the way that our society engages and tries to support this very loosely defined group.
Sara described all this in heart-breaking detail in her previous book, Justice for Laughing Boy (2017). And, although she inevitably refers to Connor in her equally important new book, she turns her attention to the way the powers that be—social workers, local authorities, big charities, educationalists, health care professionals and other specialists—interact with learning-disabled and autistic people and their families, and she details the way the system so often ignores the most important point of all: that we’re all human beings with our own individual frailties, emotions, and anxieties, and that those who regard our children as problems to be managed, tragedies to be endured, or defectives who require special treatment, are failing in their most basic duties, and are part of a culture which denies learning-disabled and autistic people the chance of a decent, happy and rewarding life.
Sara’s subtitle is ‘How Practitioners Can Make a Difference to the Lives of Children, Families and Adults’ and it should be compulsory reading for anyone training to work in this field. It would certainly have prevented many moments of grief in my struggles for my learning disabled son, Joey. After a ‘brief historical whizz through’ of the appalling mistreatment of learning disabled and autistic people in the past, Sara shows the way that these attitudes all too often shape contemporary practice. And she itemises with exhaustive, at times exhausting, patience the endless nightmares—both big and little, trivial and catastrophic, institutional and personal—faced by families, especially mothers, in their seemingly endless struggle to secure a decent life for their loved ones. That this bad practice is so wearily familiar should shock society out of its complacency. And the fact, as Sara emphasises, that progress is so eye-wateringly slow should make us all howl with rage.
But—amazingly, beautifully, surprisingly—Sara’s book isn’t just critical, and one of the remarkable things is the way she includes so many examples of best practice, where something little—often just a simple human kindness or an act of imagination—made a huge difference. Many of these were collected in response to Sara’s call on Twitter, and, to my surprise, include my own account of paramedics chatting to my young daughter, Bea, about Harry Potter, even as they loaded Joey—in mid status epilepticus—into an ambulance while managing to keep my soaring anxiety under control. But the point is, these ‘pockets of brilliance,’ as Sara calls them, should become the norm, not the exception. Above all, Sara’s simple and straightforward lessons need to be learnt by the large institutions who are so often Kafkaesque in their bureaucratic obscurity, and chillingly hurtful in their impersonality. The situation will only change when everyone involved understands that the biggest problem faced by families like ours isn’t loving and accepting our slightly ‘different’ children, it’s the endless fights to secure for them the simplest things imaginable.
After Connor’s dreadful death and the hugely challenging campaign that followed, no-one would have blamed Sara if she’d put her feet up. What’s astonishing about her new book is that she’s reached out to a large number of other families for their own, mostly less traumatic but very real, experiences and alerted us all to the all-conquering truth that learning-disabled and autistic people are just as human as the rest of us. I know Sara Ryan a little—Assistant Professor Dr Ryan, as we now must call her!—and I suspect she’ll only relax when the voices of the learning-disabled and the autistic and their families have been heard and acted on.
I was consumed by waves of melancholy driving down the Cut last night. I spent so many years of my life on that short little road near Waterloo.
And now the pandemic.
Just off the Cut is ETT, the company I founded, which for so many years was my home, my office, my palace with its very own rehearsal room. Oh luxury. Then the Young Vic, the Old Vic (where my productions of Henry IV and King Lear both played), the NT Studio where I spent six fascinating, challenging, bewildering months in the 1980s learning pretty much everything that matters really. The Jerwood Space where I rehearsed so many plays, including All Our Children, my favourite. There used to be an old church on Short Street (was it called Upstream?) with a great big room which smelt of incense and urine. The Windmill, that pub where I used to drink beneath all those framed pictures of famous, and not so famous, actors and actresses. So many conversations. So many plans. So many wasted hours.
And taking actors out to lunch at Tas. The Chinese noodle bar for laughter. The old Acropolis where Peter Gill held court over moussaka before it closed down and got turned into an expensive fish restaurant (Live Bait, Peter Hall’s favourite) and is now a burger chain. Diana Quick striding along so elegantly. Vanessa Redgrave and a friend, I don’t know who. Paterson Joseph and Joe O’Connor sharing a dressing room at the Old Vic. The Calder Bookshop where I used to listen to John Calder talking about (his friend) Sam Beckett and I greedily bought copies of Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. The Baltic (where I had my 50th birthday and drank too many shots of cherry vodka and my friend made that lovely speech) and the tapas bar on the corner of Short Street where so many plans were hatched. La Barca on the Marsh with Tim and Sam West, and Ultz’s old studio in that building by the station in the corner which has now been pulled down. And back by the Young Vic: The Anchor and Hope. Or is it the Hope and Anchor? I had lunch with Simon Beale there once and we sank deep into our anecdotage, rambling on about Cambridge, and more times lost, another space of friendship, art and dreams.
Fragments of my life, all torn. All gone.
And now all shut. All closed down. Shuttered up as the virus passes by.
“The night is long that never finds the day.” Shakespeare
“You can’t step twice into the same river.” Heraclitus
The following letter was written in Chicago in 1914 by the mother of a profoundly disabled son to his teacher in an ‘idiot asylum’ in rural Illinois.
“Will you find out if S— is in need of anything and let me know. Also will you see if his shoes are big enough? His Oxfords I know are but if his old shoes seem small, wish you would throw them out. I don’t want the child to suffer with his feet. If you will do that for me I will appreciate it very much. I miss him so, and often wonder if those little details are noticed. Wonder if he misses his mama. He loved me so much it seems a pity to put him away. Is little S— learning to talk or is he just the same? Sometimes I still have hope for him although I know it is useless.”
As the dad of a profoundly learning disabled son who, likewise, is in (a modern version) of institutional care, it strikes home in so many ways: the polite, almost deferential attitude towards the authorities, with the hope that if you’re polite and friendly they’ll look after your son better; the everyday nature of the inquiries—shoes, feet, and the endless anxiety that these ‘little details’ won’t be noticed; the almost embarrassed nature of the revelation of her mutual love for him and the deep regret that he has been ‘put away’; and finally the hope against hope that he might develop speech and the desperate, humiliating, heartrending acceptance that ‘it is useless’.
100 years later, everything has changed. But so much remains the same.
[Quoted in James W Trent’s magisterial Inventing the Feeblemind, A History of intellectual disability in the United States. Oxford, (2017)]
Photograph by Edmond Terakopian
So, yesterday we saw Joey for the first time since early March.
We had to book the session in advance and were told that we’d have an hour and half and that there should be no physical contact. And when we arrived at the St Elizabeth Centre at 11.00 there was a little tent with gloves and masks and cleaning equipment which we approached tentatively. And suddenly there was my Joey getting out of the car that had brought him from his supported living. I called his name and he smiled shyly, cheekily, distinctively and we wandered over to see him, as the table and chairs were carefully wiped down from the last family visitor by one of his lovely carers, Clare Thackeray.
Joey has an amazing ability to accept things without getting upset. And as he opened up the bag of goodies that his step mum, Ginny, had bought for him—his usual favourites: waffles, diet Coke, crisps, Jaffa Cakes and, oh best of all! sliced processed cheese—we all started to relax. We were obediently wearing our PPE (masks and gloves) and as my friend, the extraordinary photo-journalist, Edmond Terakopian, started taking pictures, we joked and smiled and felt so happy to be back with Joey again after all these months.
But we couldn’t touch him: Noli Me Tangere (‘don’t touch me!’), the resurrected Christ says to Mary Magdalene, and I kept remembering the phrase. Because, you see, Joey has no speech and communication has to take other forms: simple Makaton, smiles and giggles, one-way talking, and glances and eyes and gestures but, above all, in normal circumstances, physical contact: an arm round, a cuddle, a tickle, a squeeze, sometimes even a comic push, these are all how Joey communicates and we all know what to do. And I don’t think I’ve ever known such a strong urge to hug anyone as I did yesterday.
Soon, Joey got restless and we followed him over to the willow where he and his sister started pulling on the boughs, Bea hanging upside down, Joey tugging and breaking off branches and inspecting them ever so carefully, displaying them like a fish caught on a line. And then we headed off to the apple orchard—one of Joey’s blissful places, whose apple juice is beyond compare, where the grass is tall and the sun always shines—in a comical procession of Edmond walking backwards up the path really fast trying to focus his Leica (he didn’t fall over: see the picture above), Joey pushing ahead, the three of us trailing behind, up past the apple trees to the little cemetery with the carved crucifix where the nuns and some of the residents have their final resting place.
It started to drizzle steadily, and we picked our way back through the orchard to the tent. Joey and I sat beside each other and I put my feet up on his lap and we talked (no words, but lots of communication) about how his Mum and his big brother, Laurie, had visited him the previous weekend and he told me how much he’d liked seeing them. And we talked about Monsters Inc and The Jungle Book and Joey covered his ears when the rain on the canvas started to rumble. And we did high-fives with my carefully gloved hands and I remembered, as I do so often with Joey, that the old jokes are the best.
But soon Joey decided he wanted to go to another willow tree and Ginny gave Bea an umbrella which she shared with him and the two of them headed off across the lawn laughing in the rain: ‘that’s the shot’, I called out, but Edmond had already caught it brilliantly. See below: the love is palpable, and it’s the definition of inclusion.
And, finally, the time came for us to leave. Clare came back and Joey got into the back and calmly put on his seat belt and we waved our goodbyes and walked back to our car. And as I turned my back on him I was overwhelmed by great rushing gulps of emotion. Yes, by my love for him and, yes, by all of us being together with him again after all this time. And, I’ll admit, glancing at my phone, I was touched by the dozens of people who had so quickly responded to a tweet I posted earlier of Joey smiling and laughing as he pulled on that poor willow tree.
I was struck by the utter strangeness of the whole situation, but there was something else too: the meticulous care, the lightest of touches, the elegance with which St Elizabeth’s had managed this most personal of moments. We weren’t policed but we knew, as I’m sure did all the other visitors, that there are bigger things than our temporary frustrations, that the health of the residents and the staff at St Elizabeth’s is more important than my desperate, yearning desire to squeeze Joey tight and not let him go.
I’m an absurdly tactile person and this whole thing went against my deepest instincts. But it showed me again that some things are more important than instinct and I only wish our leaders, their special advisers, and so many of our fellow citizens, realised this too.
As so often—to my mind, at least—Joey and his world reveals the truth.
Photograph by Edmond Terakopian
This article first published in Byline Times
There is a weary familiarity to families of learning disabled people in this current crisis as we see that yet again their loved ones have been sidelined, ignored or plain discriminated against.
Steve Broach, one of the leading lawyers in the field, has pointed out that this is the first time in decades that children with special educational needs have no clear right to the level of provision they require. Under new emergency powers, local authorities are now only required to use ‘reasonable endeavours,’ and such softening of the statutory obligations offers cover for any local authority trying to reduce such costs. What’s more, there has been continuing confusion about the position of the learning disabled in triage and the use of Do Not Resuscitate orders; indeed, according to the learning disability academic, Chris Hatton, it’s been impossible to get clear figures on the impact of Covid-19 on learning disabled people, be it rates of infection, tests, hospital admissions or deaths.
This for me is personal. I’ve not been able to visit my severely learning-disabled son, Joey (23), who lives in supported living in Hertfordshire; I wrote about it for Byline a few weeks ago and I’ve been very touched by the response. But the truth is that in many ways what we’re going through—like so many other families with learning-disabled children—is yet another in a long list of challenges. The fact is that since Joey was born we’ve been involved in an endless battle to secure for him what any non-disabled child would be given as standard. We had to fight to ensure that he received the right level of SEN support at his primary school and to make sure that he was transferred to a special school when his disabilities made inclusion impossible; then we had to identify the right residential education and medical placement when the epilepsy became too dangerous, and insist that our local authority didn’t put him in a deeply unsuitable (if cheaper) setting nearer home. And it never stops.
I have box files of letters stacked up in my study and once calculated that his mother or I spent an average of ten hours a week for about fifteen years involved in this struggle. We’ve bawled down the phone trying to get the message across, spent hours worrying about the wording of a letter, and attended dozens of meetings at the local authority which only made real progress when we were prepared to put everything on the line, including our very darkest fears, so as to make the case. Each one of these battles is exhausting: physically, intellectually and emotionally.
And, of course, we’ve researched and accessed all the free support available, instructed expensive lawyers, threatened to contact the press and practiced all the dark arts that being a middle class professional allows you. For the truth is that, despite some good reforms in 2014, the system for providing support to learning-disabled children and young adults is not fit for purpose, and many of the local authorities have been struggling desperately to deliver on their statutory duties. And while it’s true that ten years of austerity have cut their budgets to shreds, the challenges that families like ours face are cultural as much as economic, especially in the vertigo-inducing gap between the positive, aspirational language that is used to anaesthetise our rage, and the all too often shabby, grudging and evasive reality. If the local authorities are now required only to use ‘reasonable endeavours’, the outcomes for our children are likely to get worse.
Each battle is unique but what every parent of a learning-disabled child shares are the scars on our backs from fighting for their basic rights. We’re sometimes accused of acting like a cabal, but we have to do everything we can to help each other, with parents of older children passing on their bitterly earned insights to new generations. We’re hard-bitten, frequently sceptical and, I’m afraid, grimace drily when we hear parents of neurotypical 11 year olds ‘desperately worried’ about getting them into a decent secondary school. They don’t know how lucky they are.
But I do know how lucky we are: at the moment, Joey is happy, safe and well looked after in supported living, and long may he stay so. The same, I’m afraid, can’t be said for the many children and young people bullied and abused in care homes and specialist institutions up and down the country, or the more than 600 autistic and neuro-divergent children sectioned, locked up, secluded and physically restrained in NHS Assessment and Treatment Units (ATUs). There are dozens of dreadful examples, including the autistic Bethany, locked away in an ATU for years despite wanting to live in the community; the remarkable Ella Chapple, who lost her sight as a result of the traumatic impact of restrictive interventions; or poor Connor Sparrowhawk, the strikingly charismatic learning-disabled young man with epilepsy who drowned unattended in an NHS bath in 2015. Yes, let’s clap loudly for the NHS and the brilliant care professionals who do so much, but while these gut-wrenching failings continue we must keep asking questions and never console ourselves that all will be well once this ghastly virus has passed. And if you don’t believe me, read Ian Birrell whose brilliant journalism has unearthed a whole universe of pain.
Some people have asked me about my deepest fears for Joey at the moment. My biggest worry is not so much about him catching the virus, it’s about him having to go into hospital if he did. And that’s not just because of what that would indicate about the seriousness of his condition, let alone the concerns that he would be further down the triage list than other healthy 23 year olds or even subjected to a Do Not Resuscitate order. No, it’s because the health outcomes for learning-disabled people in hospitals are so shockingly bad at the best of times. It’s been grimly observed that learning disabilities (which have never killed anyone) are a life-threatening condition in our society, and the idea of Joey being alone in hospital is more than I can bear. And I say that as someone who’s hugely grateful to the NHS for all it’s done for me and my family, not least getting Joey’s epilepsy under control and, no doubt, saving his life on several occasions.
We’re often told that nothing will be the same after this crisis. But for families of learning-disabled people this feels like yet another set of hoops for us to jump through to ensure that those we love are given what the rest of the population expects by right. There are so many decent people committed to helping the learning disabled and their families—in social care, local authorities, law, the charity sector, the NHS, the arts, politics even. But if this crisis is to have a real positive impact, can we at least ensure that our oft-stated commitment to universal human rights extends to the most vulnerable among us, some of whom—like my darling Joey—have no capacity to speak for themselves?
It’s surely not too much to ask.
When I first heard of the impending crisis my initial instinct was to jump into my car, drive forty minutes up the motorway, bundle my Joey in, and bring him back to my flat, where we could lie on the sofa watching endless reruns of Monsters Inc. until the whole ghastly thing had gone away. It was a classic left side / right side of the brain moment, as I struggled to work out where he was actually safest, and I decided to leave him where he was. My daughter was still going to school, and God knows whether I was an asymptomatic carrier. But now, of course, with the lockdown, I can’t go and see him, and I don’t know when I’ll see him again. It hurts, as I’m sure you can imagine.
So why am I telling you this? After all, we all have our own nightmares and we really mustn’t compete with each other for victimhood. But, you see, in some ways my Joey is very different: aged 23, he has severe learning disabilities (no speech at all), intractable epilepsy, and is on the autism spectrum. He communicates his needs with a mixture of simple Makaton sign language and stubborn persistence. He’s a happy young man, who loves the countryside, going on big walks, and hanging out in the natural world: trees, flowing water and animals (all barred at the moment). He’s eccentric, intriguing and infuriating, with a dazzling smile and an engaging innocence that brings out the best in people. He’s at the heart of a big family, and he’s loved and celebrated by many people, even by some who don’t know him.
Self-isolation isn’t an option for Joey. He needs help with pretty much everything: cooking, medication, dressing and personal hygiene. He lives in a terrific ‘supported living’ unit, part of the remarkable St Elizabeth’s Centre in Hertfordshire, and is looked after by a rota of carers (from all around the world): they’re well managed, properly trained and driven by a deep ethic of care. They’re scrupulous in their procedures and I have every confidence in their professionalism. But the brutal fact is—and I don’t blame St Elizabeth’s for this—they don’t have the right protective equipment yet and haven’t been tested for the virus. Some are quite rightly self-isolating but, with a shrinking pool of care staff, are under increasing pressure. And so, like everyone in care homes at the moment, my small and fragile Joey is at greater risk than I am. By day I calm my nerves with rational analysis, but all too often howl into my pillow at night.
Like all moments of profound crisis, this brings out the best in people—and the worst. This was vividly brought home to me when I rang Joey’s house the other day: “Yeah, we’re alright, we’re always alright, Joey’s laughing, so we must be alright,” was the wonderful, indomitable, reassuring answer. But the care manager’s account of the difficulties of getting food and other essentials because of the behaviour of more fortunate people was a lot less heart-warming, to put it mildly.
The uncomfortable truth is that an emergency like this exposes unconscious bias. Thus, there was an outpouring of justified rage when it was discovered that in the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s (NICE) triage guidelines, learning disabled people were placed just above patients with extreme life-threatening illnesses. Now while it’s true that the learning disabled do die earlier than the average, especially in hospitals, it’s not their learning disabilities that kill them, it’s ignorance. And I’m afraid that NICE’s guidelines (which they’ve now thankfully changed) showed the same lack of understanding that families so often encounter.
These are, surely, revolutionary times and we can only hope that, as we emerge, fundamental change will follow. After all, it was the end of the Second World War that ushered in the NHS, and our every waking breath must be devoted to ensuring that the recession that will ensue doesn’t take us into the even darker times that consumed Europe in the 1930s. But is it pie in the sky to dream that this extraordinary moment might banish the great lie that there is ‘no such thing as society,’ and offer us the chance to reset our values? Dare we dream of better times? I think my Joey offers us two essential insights.
The first is that if we don’t find a way of supporting, celebrating and investing in the care of the vulnerable, the core values of our society will wither and die. We rightly applaud the heroics of our NHS, but if, as Gandhi insisted, ‘a nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members,’ this crisis sets us a profound moral challenge. For decades our society has consistently undermined the care profession, but if we don’t celebrate, reward and champion those people who look after us in our frailty, we cannot claim that we live in a society which values all people equally. Carers matter to us all, whoever we are, however strong, however healthy, and this crisis shows us that in the starkest form imaginable.
What Joey will also tell you—and he will, if you engage with him properly—is that he’s as deserving of a decent, happy, safe life as anyone is. The Nazis condemned people like him as living ‘lives unworthy of life,’ but if Joey can teach us anything it’s how monstrous such thinking is. At another moment of national crisis, the great Leveller, Thomas Rainsborough, declared ‘that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he.’ Now’s the time to ensure that Rainsborough’s vision extends not just to the poor, but the vulnerable and the weak, even to people like my Joey whose views can only be heard by those who are prepared to listen. For our society desperately needs to recognise that people like Joey are central to what we are as humans. They are our brothers and sisters, our fathers and mothers, our children and our grandchildren. They are us and we are them. And if we don’t remember that, we are doomed.
Listen to Joey. He’ll show you the way.
For those of us of a certain class and background who came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the arts seemed the best possible refuge from the suburban certainties of our parents and the grinding of Mrs Thatcher’s dark satanic mills. Having been brought up on milky readings of the European classics, occasionally thickened by dollops of socialist realism, the wonders of translated literature felt like handfuls of Provençal herbs. And so we devoured the novels of Milan Kundera and Günter Grass, gorged on Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, and guzzled down the masterpieces of modernism. In the cinema we lined up at the Academy on Oxford Street to see the latest from Tarkovsky, Godard and Derek Jarman, and, in the theatre, watched the European avant-garde—Kantor, Peter Brook, etc.—in stunned silence. We were desperate to banish the kitchen sink, break the fourth wall (not just in the theatre) and express new universes of experience. For a brief moment, bushy-tailed and breathless, we lived our very own cultural revolution.
Inevitably however, what was fresh and new started to look faded and overdone. And, in recent years, I find myself increasingly questioning the value of what had seemed so important. For we were convinced that progressive—popular, even—art had to be experimental if it was to be meaningful and scoffed at the idea that the nineteenth-century realists might have anything to offer. But now we have to accept the uncomfortable fact that more people read Great Expectations every year than have ever got through Finnegans Wake, that much bigger audiences show up for a starry revival of The Importance of Being Earnest than a boutique production of Saint Joan of the Stockyards, and that the Impressionists attract vastly bigger crowds than the latest from the Turner Prize. The distinctly reactionary Downton Abbey and The Crown rule supreme on television, while Harry Potter and historical novels dominate in fiction. What’s more, many of the characteristics of the international avant-garde have become de rigueur and the gestures of the revolution have become the essential commodities of the mainstream. Yes, we must be prepared to die for the right for experimental work to be created, but we should also acknowledge that the genuinely radical is–largely–withering on the vine. And so those of us who embraced perpetual revolution should consider how it fell on the ears and eyes of those we thought we were talking to. Not only do our exertions seem now like a distraction from the pressing realities faced by everyone else, it’s time for culture to accept its share of the blame for the fatal divisions that are currently tearing our society to pieces.
For we find ourselves confronted with a new version of an old problem. How do we champion the workings of the imagination when our inventions are trapped in ersatz, how do we delight in creativity when we’re governed by people who, as Bonnie Greer has argued, are a branch of show business themselves? To put it another way, what is the point of fiction, especially the most extravagant fiction, in a world where facts are regularly derided? What is the purpose of art when all challenge is dismissed as ‘fake news’ and the politician who lies the most confidently walks off with the prize?
The editor of the Byline Time describes himself as a ‘dramatist wrenched out of fiction by the fierce urgency of fact,’ which lays down a pretty stern challenge to the rest of us. The usual defence of fiction is that the lie reveals the truth. But in the current circumstances, it’s perhaps wiser for cultural producers to work how to challenge untruths while recognising that it’s going to require something more analytical than has been offered for a long time.
History, needless to say, offers its own repeats (‘first as tragedy, then as farce’), and we should perhaps recall the Neue Sachlichkeit, the cultural movement that emerged in Germany in the mid 1920s. Sometimes translated as the ‘new objectivity’ (John Willett brilliantly dubbed it the ‘new sobriety’), this was partly a reaction against the self-indulgence of Expressionism but also an attempt to confront the aestheticisation of politics that the right was starting to master. And so painters like Georg Grosz and Otto Dix mercilessly depicted the real-life consequences of Imperial war, while Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus, Piscator for the Volksbühne, and John Heartfield with his photomontages, exposed politics to the bright light of scrutiny.
Certainly the great deceptions of today—whether it’s the lies that brought about Brexit and Trump, the catastrophe of climate denial, or the preposterous suggestion that our millionaire leaders will do anything to help the most vulnerable—deserve a full-voiced response, not just from independent journalists but the full range of cultural producers. In ‘dark times’ like these, artists, writers and poets may be tempted to hide their heads and hope that the storm will pass. They should, instead, forge a new kind of art for the new realities and prioritise the stern disciplines of science over the shapeshifting extravaganzas of magical realism.
Such work would blur the boundaries between facts and the imagination. For example, it’s not enough to write a play which champions minority rights, we need to argue the case with the scientific rigour that Adam Rutherford does in his terrific How to Argue with a Racist. Look at the way Steve McQueen’s tremendous Year 3 project (which took hundreds of class photos of Year 3s across London primary schools) implied in such a forceful, but sober, way the great diversity of the capital and the rights and aspirations of every child. Another example might be David Baddiel’s excellent programme about Holocaust denial, which combined a powerfully personal viewpoint with scrupulous attention to detail, and made his fundamental argument—that there is no such thing as Holocaust denial which isn’t a proxy for antisemitism—incontrovertible.
The crucial point is that the lies we face every day need to be confronted head on, and artists should consider using their imaginative talents to help our society recover its respect for reality. We all wear the badge of radicalism with pride, but what does that really mean today? When a government is as committed to ‘creative destruction’ as this one, we need to think about what we want to preserve, because if we don’t try to stop the onward march of lies, it’ll be hard for us to blame others when we wake up and realise what we’ve lost. And that may be the biggest and most bitter lesson of Weimar.
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It’s been quite a weekend for eugenics. First there was news of Andrew Sabinsky, one of Dominic Cummings’ new intake of ‘weirdos and misfits,’ with his claim that eugenics was about ‘selecting “for” good things’ and that ‘intelligence is largely inherited,’ and then Richard Dawkins popped up on Twitter claiming that since eugenics ‘works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses’ there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t ‘work for humans.’ He concedes that there might be grounds for rejecting the practice before claiming, absurdly, that ‘facts ignore ideology.’ But why do the apparently intelligent and well-educated so often hold the unintelligent or the disabled in such contempt? As the father of a young man with severe learning disabilities it’s a question I confront regularly.
It was the distinguished English scientist, Francis Galton, who, fascinated by his uncle Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species, asked, ‘Could not the race of men be similarly improved? Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?’ In 1883, he coined the term ‘eugenics’ and set out to improve the human race by ‘better breeding.’ His supporters soon linked such ‘undesirables’ to a range of social problems and called for government action to improve ‘biological quality.’ In 1907, Galton co-founded the Eugenics Society and a senior doctor soon recommended the compulsory sterilisation of the ‘feeble minded’, describing them as ‘social rubbish’ who should be ‘swept up and garnered and utilised as far as possible’. Darwin’s own son presided over the first eugenics conference in 1912 and lobbied the government to establish squads of scientists, with the power of arrest, who would travel around the country identifying the ‘unfit’. Those so classified should be segregated in special colonies or sterilised.
Political supporters included the Socialist firebrand, Will Crooks, who described ‘mentally defective children’ as ‘absolutely useless,’ comparing them to ‘human vermin’ who do ‘absolutely nothing, except polluting and corrupting everything they touch.’ Meanwhile, Julian Huxley asked plaintively: ‘What are we going to do? Every defective is an extra body for the nation to feed and clothe but produces little or nothing in return.’ A bill for the compulsory sterilisation of certain categories of ‘mental patient’ was proposed, with the Labour MP, Archibald Church, wanting to stop the reproduction of those ‘who are in every way a burden to their parents, a misery to themselves and in my opinion a menace to the social life of the community.’ Soon, a government committee recommended legislation to ensure the ‘voluntary’ sterilisation of ‘mentally defective women,’ which was welcomed by the Manchester Guardianbut, thankfully, never passed into law.
Confronted by a ‘long line of imbecile,’ Virginia Woolf insisted that they should ‘certainly be killed,’ and the birth control champions, Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, were both confirmed eugenicists, championing not just contraception but, as Sanger put it, sterilization for ‘that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.’ Some of British socialism's most celebrated names agreed, including the founders of the Fabian Society, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, along with Harold Laski, later Chairman of the Labour Party, who predicted that the time was coming ‘when society will look upon the production of a weakling as a crime against itself.’ These views were echoed by John Maynard Keynes and, in 1931, the New Statesman asserted that ‘the legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement.’ Bertrand Russell proposed colour-coded ‘procreation tickets’ to prevent the elite’s gene pool being diluted by inferior stock, while Bernard Shaw insisted that ‘the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man,’ suggesting that defectives could be dealt with in a ‘lethal chamber.’ Using the same haunting phrase, DH Lawrence declared:
‘If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I'd go out into the back streets and the main streets and bring them all in, the sick, the halt and the maimed: I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the brass band would softly bubble out the Hallelujah Chorus.’
He could be describing a suburban English Treblinka.
It took Nazi Germany, and the murder of approximately 250,000 people deemed to be living ‘lives unworthy of life,’ to put these fantasies into action. But the unhappy truth is that, even after the war, the eugenics agenda in Britain was still current. On the day in 1943 when his famous report was being debated, William Beveridge, the creator of the welfare state, slipped out of the gallery of the House of Commons to reassure a meeting of the Eugenics Society of his continued support; and, in 1952, the eminent British neurologist AF Tredgold concluded that:
‘Many of the defectives are utterly helpless, repulsive in appearance and revolting in their manners. Their existence is a perpetual source of sorrow and unhappiness to their parents, in my opinion it would be an economical and humane procedure were their very existence to be painlessly terminated.’
The Nazis had been defeated but, for a moment, it seemed possible that one of their most repulsive policies might survive.
Such views are rare today (though perhaps not in Downing Street), but a double standard is still in evidence in the way that abusive language is used, with racist and sexist terms being strictly taboo, but their learning disabled equivalents—‘idiot’, ‘cretin,’ ‘imbecile’, ‘retarded’ etc.—are all too common, even in supposedly progressive circles. Representations in drama and art are infrequent and often misguided, emphasising individual tragedy not the broader social experience. And scholarship is hardly exempt, with the moral philosopher, Peter Singer, dismissing our protection of the profoundly disabled on the grounds of ‘speciesism,’ declaring that their intellectual capacity is less than many animals. One of his followers even wrote an article entitled ‘Do the Mentally Retarded Have a Right to be Eaten?’ which he insisted was a philosophical exploration, intended to ‘raise the issue of rights for the retarded in its hardest context,’ adding, sternly, that ‘too much well-meaning sentimentality is allowed to pass for thought in the discussion of the retarded, and I want to shock my way through this.’ And Dawkins, in response to an enquiry from a woman about what to do if she discovered that she was pregnant with a foetus with Down’s Syndrome, replied ‘abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.’ He denied that he is a ‘eugenicist’, but it’s hard to understand what he means by the word ‘immoral’ in such a context. What, of course, Dawkins forgets is that eugenics have been tried and failed abysmally: despite the Nazi programme of murdered and sterilisation, Germany’s population of disabled people is entirely in line with other countries.
It takes an intellectual to come up with such poisonous guff. Protecting the rights and opportunities of the learning disabled is hard enough; what’s striking is the way that so many otherwise clever people fail to get it.
This article was first published in Byline.
So today the country I call home gives up its membership of the European Union. There are so many reasons to regret this preposterously self-destructive act of vanity, that it’s hard to know where to start.
The most substantial issue is, of course, the economy. The plan to break away from the biggest and most successful single market in the world, only 21 miles away, in order to trade with and offer services to - what?- Sri Lanka and New Zealand is self-evidently absurd. The Brexiters huff and puff about Project Fear, but things will change when the economy suffers, especially if no deal is negotiated and we end up trying to trade ‘on WTO terms.’ The country may have spent four years indulging in identity politics but it’s still ‘the economy, stupid’ that ultimately matters.
But what I want to address here is the tone of the debate and its consequences. And to do that we need to go back to the immediate aftermath of the referendum. Responsible politicians would have stated the obvious: that the outcome was close, informed opinion was worried, and that the best option was a cross-party agreement which tried to deliver on the result but with minimal economic fallout. They would have emphasised the rule of law and the supremacy of parliament and reminded everyone that the referendum was ‘advisory’. Above all, they wouldn’t have triggered Article 50 until they’d secured broad support. Brexit is far too serious a matter to be left to one bitterly divided political party. Instead, Theresa May, terrified of her ultras, repeated the meaningless phrase ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and the endlessly prevaricating Jeremy Corbyn was no better. Terrible political leadership simply weaponised the already toxic debate and what should have been a question of grave national concern was politicised in the worst way possible.
So many things have been coarsened by this whole sorry mess, and it’s difficult to know how we’ll emerge. But, it seems, some fundamental British values are under threat. Look, for example at the attacks on knowledge and expertise. ‘The British people have had enough of experts’, declared Michael Gove, and soon all opinions, however ignorant, were regarded as equally valid. But this isn’t how we operate in the rest of life and certainly shouldn’t apply to the extraordinary complexity of international trade and cross border services, let alone the intricacies of the Northern Ireland peace process or the transport of time sensitive medicines. ‘Facts are stubborn things,’ said John Adams, and all too often in this row, the facts have been twisted and falsified, not just by the newly empowered Twitter mob (on both sides), but the Brexit leadership itself.
One of the most shocking developments has been the demonising of the ‘elite,’ a group apparently dedicated to opposing ‘the will of the people.’ This kind of language has a terrible pedigree: Goebbels used the ‘people’s community’ to justify Nazi atrocities, Stalin’s dictatorship was predicated on the persecution of anyone who wasn’t a worker or a peasant, and Mao and Pol Pot killed millions of people who just wanted to get on in life. ‘Dear’, my great teacher, Margot Heinemann said, ‘be careful not to use the phrase “the people” in the way Hitler would have done,’ and all dictatorships turn their backs on experts, with fatal consequences to millions, including, of course, the ‘people’ whose interests they claim to be championing.
This kind of language is built on deep felt resentment and an inferiority complex. Indeed, it’s notable that the Brexit leaders have consistently ignored the real divide in this country, between the rich and the poor, partly because so many of them are millionaires themselves. (It’s a funny world when the supposed tribunes of the people are millionaire Etonians). Instead, they’ve attacked the 48% (52% now) who supported Remain as ‘out of touch metropolitans’ who want to ‘overturn democracy’. It’s as absurd as it’s dangerous, but who are these sixteen million people who ‘ordinary people’ are being encouraged to despise? They include school teachers and academics, police officers and lawyers, economists and accountants, consultants and businessmen, doctors, nurses and scientists, as well as writers, entertainers, trading experts, sportsmen and women, unionists, musicians, intellectuals, engineers, civil servants, judges and on and on: in fact, a whole range of people that a civilised society needs onside if it’s going to function. ‘Hang all the lawyers’ proclaims one of Jack Cade’s followers in Henry VI, and for the Brexiters to attack this huge group of professionals and encourage a mockery of their knowledge, commitment and expertise, is deeply counterproductive. Brexit Britain will need the goodwill and commitment of these people if it is to survive the icy cold sea we’ve been thrown into.
When challenged about the nature of their fantasies, Brexiters offer a range of answers, including questionable notions of a democratic deficit, the cost of membership, and the issues raised by European immigration. And when confronted by the many concerns expressed by all sectors of informed opinion, they tell us that their project is about something other than prosperity, it’s an emotional sense of belonging which we, as ‘people of nowhere’ couldn’t possibly understand. They’ve been ignored for far too long, they moan, and it’s time that their dreams of independent nationhood were realized. Apart from the fact that Britain’s independence was never actually threatened by British membership, and many of us ‘elitists’ have problems of our own to deal with, we should, perhaps, counter this ludicrous attempt at monopolising patriotic emotion by sharing our own feelings about Britain and its place in the great continent of Europe. The Brexiters will say that we’re only leaving the bureaucracy of the EU, not Europe itself. In which case I look forward to a leading Brexiter proclaiming his identity as a European, instead of dreaming of another time when, it’s thought, Britannia ruled the waves. It’s long past the time for us proud Europeans to shrug off the Union Jack and stand up for what we care about, and, at last, talk about what we feel. Brexiters shouldn’t be allowed a monopoly in emotion.
The truth is, I am first and foremost a European. My mother was born in Germany, my father’s family comes from Ireland. My main language is English, but I can also manage in French, German and Italian. My cooking is mostly poor imitations of French and Italian and I drink European wine and beer. I take most of my holidays in continental Europe and many of my formative experiences were European. My great teacher was the daughter of Jewish refugees and many of my favourite novels, plays and works of art are European. The vast proportion of the books in my library are European (yes, I include English literature in that category) and hundreds are translations from European languages. European blood runs in my veins and I’m acutely aware of the enduring impact of Greek and Latin on all aspects of the civilisation in which I live.
What’s more, while I have a penchant for late twentieth century American music and love Chinese food, my attitude to the individual and society are distinctly European. In the USA I find myself in a very strange land which champions the individual above any sense of shared social responsibility and so often resorts to sentimentality as a way of dealing with difficulty. When I go to China, the opposite end of the spectrum, I’m shocked by the sense of the massive scale of the country and an underlying brutality in the way it regards the individual. I dread to imagine how my profoundly disabled son, Joey, would have managed to thrive in either country. Postwar Europe offers a kinder, better way of being human, and we leave that family of beliefs at our peril.
And so when I look out across the Channel I know that my heart belongs to Europe and it always will: its culture, its history and its way of life. What’s more, I know that the country in which I live, the country that I will always love despite this dreadful mistake, has played a hugely important and creative part in the making of the uniquely European civilisation. Our pragmatism, our tolerance, our professionalism, our inventiveness, our creativity, our skills and our talents, our passion and our commitment. And we in turn, ever since the Norman Conquest, have benefitted hugely from the Continent, in so many ways. Just think, for a moment, of the huge benefits of the various waves of Jewish immigration, especially, of course, in the 1930s. The great European movement that emerged after the war was a way of putting nationalist division aside, not eradicating national character, and it’s part of the Brexiter strategy of resentment and self-pity to fail to see the astonishing mutual benefit of our membership. And so in response to reactionary nostalgia, I suggest we should reassert the astonishing achievements of Britain’s essential role in European civilisation, from the abolition of slavery to the promotion of women’s rights, from William Shakespeare to Stephen Hawkins, the best of us, working together, have made all of Europe a better, happier place. The tragedy is that a small group of resentful reactionaries have dragged us away from that extraordinary achievement. We can only hope that their nationalism doesn’t lead us back into the disasters of the Europe of only a hundred years ago.
Our job now—as ‘elitists’, ‘remoaners’, ‘traitors’, and ‘enemies of the people’—is to hold the Brexiters’ feet to the fire. For years they’ve posed as the insurgents, they’ve moaned and complained and mocked and whined, they’ve dubbed themselves ‘bad boys’ and made clear that nothing is ever good enough for them and showed that their self-pity knows no ends. Well, they should have been careful what they wished for, because whatever happens now they’re responsible for it, from the Prime Minister right on down to the good voters of Sunderland. Of course, they’ll try to blame everyone else: the EU, the Remainers, and, no doubt, immigrants and the disabled and anyone else who doesn’t fit into their view of what British people should be. But we must call them out on that, every step of the way. There was something good and they broke it. And now they must be made to own it. It’s the Brexiters and the Brexiters alone who are to blame for what happens next.
The whole world is watching, their mouths wide open.
We’ve certainly got our work cut out.
The painful truth is that those of us who work in culture and see ourselves as progressives were comprehensively thrashed in the 2019 General Election. Yes, Jeremy Corbyn’s troubled Labour Party suffered its worst election defeat since the 1930s, but the Liberal Democrats only gained one solitary seat and, crucially, all the Tory and Labour rebels—whether independents, Lib Dems or Change UK—failed to get elected anywhere. There are, inevitably, various reasons for this wipe-out, and some people think—mistakenly, in my view—that victory will allow Boris Johnson to show himself to be a liberal, but no amount of casuistry can seize victory from these gaping and terrible jaws of defeat.
The danger, of course, lies in turning away in despair. It’s all too tempting to say that this is just the squalid world of party politics and refuse to have anything to do with it. If we don’t go that far, we can insist that, since no-one pays any attention to artists, it’s vanity to think that we can make any difference. After all, every time an artist has commented in the past, he or she is mocked and ignored and, in the face of such a disaster, silence might be the best response. But I’m not convinced it’s wise.
We should, perhaps, start by asking what we mean by cultural engagement in politics. And here, while artists making political statements is perfectly valid, their status as artists and cultural workers doesn’t grant them any greater wisdom than any other observer. So we should recognize that political engagement means more than an interest in the doings of politicians and political parties: it’s about shaping the way we live together as human beings and how our society functions.
We should also recognise that it was culture—the very thing we apparently know about—that was the ground on which we were beaten. In the 1980s we were defeated on economics and, in the 1990s, New Labour’s embrace of the seemingly unstoppable force of globalisation left us protesting from the side lines. But in both cases, the cultural sphere was largely untouched or, where it was, for the most part had the confidence to come through refreshed (although I recognise that Mrs Thatcher’s assault on the miners was as bold a cultural revolution as anything attempted by Dominic Cummings).
The peculiar challenge of the present moment is that Johnson’s triumph was, above all, a cultural one. Although the central debate was about ‘delivering Brexit’ (a question Labour signally failed to address), the underlying argument was bigger than that, and a very right wing and populist Conservative party managed to stake out the radical high ground, contrasting ‘ordinary people’ with the ‘metropolitan elite’ and labelling anyone who questioned the wisdom (let alone legitimacy) of Brexit as an enemy of democracy itself. The Conservatives have always weaponised patriotism, but never before has the ‘enemy within’ been more than half the population of the country.
And so those of us who opposed Brexit found ourselves in agreement with people we’ve always regarded as our diametrical opposites. Who could have imagined that old-fashioned one nation Tories could have seemed like the torchbearers for the truth? Or that so many of us voted for parties we’ve never supported in the past, in a desperate attempt to stop Brexit in its tracks? But we were comprehensively outmanoeuvred. What’s more, our attempts to work together failed dismally. The progressive cause tripped up over its own shoelaces and allowed Boris Johnson’s insatiable hunger for power to push us into the ditch.
And so we woke up on December 13th with not just the prospect of being out of power for a decade, but the triumph of a vicious caricature of what we stand for. Because the truth is, we were all too easily presented as anti-democratic elitists, consumed by the vanity of our small differences, talking to each other in our echo chambers, worrying about things that mystify the ‘ordinary people’ who support Brexiteer Conservativism. We may not like this caricature, and we may protest forcefully against it and deny its truth, but we have to start by acknowledging that it has, for the time being, got the upper hand. For people who are supposedly experts in culture, we have spectacularly lost this latest episode in the culture wars.
So what do we do now? Various things strike me. Above all, it seems, we need to reach out beyond the barricades of identity politics. For it was identity politics which defeated us: not just the cultural identity behind the Brexit vote and the cultural identity we mistakenly used to dismiss that Brexit vote; but also the vicious identity politics behind the caricatures used to criticize and dismiss us. So long as we define people by things they cannot change, similar identity politics will be used against us. Having championed identity as lying at the heart of our progressive agenda, we’re going through the uncomfortable experience of being defined by the same limiting factors, and it hurts.
In order to shrug off these shackles, I think, we should remember that in the history of the great liberation struggles it’s never been special treatment that has had traction. It’s the demand for equal rights not special rights that has made the difference. Certainly I’ve noticed in my campaigning for learning disabled people, progress is only made when I make clear that I’m not looking for special treatment for people like my Joey, I just want them to have the same opportunities as everyone else.
I think we have to answer five key questions about our cultural work.
First, where should we operate? And here I’d suggest, as I’ve said so often, that ‘there is a world elsewhere’. Culture is so ludicrously London centric it’s almost obscene. Getting out of London is good for everyone and is the first step in entering into the dialogue that we all know we have to enter into. And here the old imperial model of the regions has to be decisively rejected: touring isn’t about bringing your cultural jewels to the benighted corners of the land; instead, artists should be travelling to learn from their fellow human beings.
Then we should ask, who is our cultural activity for, and who is it we want to work with? I’d venture that most of us have had the experience of going to a cultural event in London—a theatre first night is a classic example—and we know nearly everyone there. There’s nothing criminal about this, but if we’re worried that social media is an echo chamber, this is much worse. And so we should do everything we can to reach new audiences and work with new artists. But diversity must mean more than simply employing one or two more BAME actors. It must means broadening reach in every direction, regardless of ethnicity, class, age, ability, education or background. All too often cultural activity seems to be by and for a very narrow group of fashionable and healthy 20 to 40 year olds. Culture should open its arms wider.
We should then be scrupulously honest in asking ourselves why we’re involved in cultural production, and why we think it matters? Is it because we think it’s a nice way of earning a (very) modest living? Are we more interested in the frankly superficial experience of ‘being an artist’ than in the challenges it raises? Shouldn’t we, instead, be motivated by something deeper, less enjoyable and stable, but more important: namely the exploration of how people live in the world? The artist’s vocation is a serious and challenging one and if, as Shelley said, poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, we need to ensure that our grasp of the world is firm and profound.
Fourth, we should consider what our work consists of? And here, of course, you should never be prescriptive. But I suspect in the current context we should avoid the kind of work which simply furthers the perceived divide between an artistic elite and the millions of people who are naturally interested in culture, but don’t see themselves as practitioners or aficionados. There’s nothing deadlier than the vanity of a self-appointed artistic elite and we need to be brave enough to recognise it for what it is. Which is not to deny the importance of skill and knowledge, but it is to question to what purposes those abilities are being deployed.
And finally, I’d suggest, we should think about how our work should look and feel? As Brecht pointed out, those who criticise artists for being formalists are, in fact, the real formalists, but if form follows content, we should surely beware of producing work which pursues a fascinating but entirely closed discussion about the shape that it takes, with little questioning of the conversation with the people who are still gallantly wanting to engage with it.
One of the many dismal things I’ve discovered in my research into the pre-war Eugenics movement is how many progressive artists and liberals (Virginia Woolf, Bernard Shaw, DH Lawrence, HG Wells and so many others) supported this utterly repulsive pseudo-science. This, I’d say, was only possible because they closed themselves off from the realities of disability and despised the difference that they saw there. But the world is wide, and those of us working in culture need to do everything we can to open our minds to experiences and lifestyles which seem like the very opposite of what we care about. ‘All that is human is my friend,’ said the Romans, and we need to find ways of making new connections, new networks, new colleagues and new friends. And to do that we’re going to need the courage to leave our bunkers and insist again on the universal values that tie us together, whoever we voted for and wherever we stand.
And if we manage to do that, cultural activity just might regain the respect that has been destroyed in these desperate culture wars that have torn us all to pieces.
So terrible being the dad of a learning disabled young man. pic.twitter.com/innKcdKFje
— Stephen Unwin (@RoseUnwin) January 1, 2021 " target="_blank" class="sqs-svg-icon--wrapper twitter-unauth">