The Times - UK (2021-11-11)

30 Thursday November 11 2021 | the times

Comment

grew up when smartphones could

not even be imagined remember

putting two-pence coins the size of

Wagon Wheels in the slot when we

could barely reach the dial (yes, dial).

I think they were 10p pieces by the

time I was calling home from

university — that’s if I wasn’t

reversing the charges.

As a baby journalist in the 1990s,

when only serious high-flyers had

those giant mobile phones, I dictated

copy to this very newspaper on a

freephone number from a

telephone box.

They don’t have to become

miniature follies only suitable

as changing rooms for

superheroes or for drug

dealers’ contact details.

Most are structurally

robust and can

easily be put to

good use. It is

satisfying to

see so many

of them

now being

used to

house

defibrillators

and local book

exchanges. And their

most infrequent uses are

the most important ones:

emergency calls to the

Samaritans, Childline

and 999.

Paris truly is a city of love

P

aris has got friendly. I say this

with some confidence because

I’ve been twice in three weeks,

which counts as extensive research

under controlled conditions, I am

sure we all agree.

I have never been so je vous en prie

madame-ed or enthusiastically

helped with directions and menus in

the many times I have visited in the

past. It could be down to some

societal post-pandemic

reaction, but the city of light

and snooty waiters now offers

a warm welcome I have only

ever felt in my home town

(Manchester). The usual

condescending and frosty

encounters seem to have

been replaced by hotel

staff and taxi

drivers’

laughing and

muffled

chatting

(Paris is

very masky

indeed). Has

Paris forgotten

how to be rude to us?

Did it miss us? London,

meanwhile, has become

grumpy and impatient,

so the apparent entente

cordiale could just be

relative.

C

all me a sentimental fool
but do we have to get rid of
telephone boxes just
because they are not being
used? Is this really a good
enough reason?
If I threw out all the things that
aren’t being regularly used in my life,
what a perfectly functioning, joyless
existence it would be.
There are about 21,000 phone
boxes in the UK — there were
92,000 before BT began
decommissioning them a few years
ago. Ofcom has just proposed saving
5,000 boxes because they are in
crucial locations. Can we rescue a
few more?
Don’t telephone boxes, even the
ones that smell of wee and are used
as free advertisement space for
massage services, spark joy? Teeny,
nostalgic landmarks in places where
there aren’t any others.
Almost every British adult now has
a mobile phone, but those of us who

Culture warriors are driven by insecurity

From medieval apocalyptic cults onwards, zealotry has been fuelled by economic grievances

powerful way to express your hatred

of the system that is thwarting you

economically is to denounce it as

fascist, as people on Twitter often do.

Once these new ideas are in the

atmosphere, their appeal broadens:

merchants and clerks frequently

joined the apocalyptic cults that

originated among the poor.

None of this is to say all culture

war ideas are necessarily invalid or

eccentric — the evil of racism and the

need for a mature society to confront

the crimes of its imperial past seem

obvious. The point is that new moral

ideas do not spring spontaneously

from the ether, like revelations. They

have material roots.

The strange relationship between

economics and social values has been

measured by the psychologist

Michele Gelfand, who has found

societies with a history of political

and economic distress are more likely

to be socially conformist and more

invested in correct moral behaviour.

Thus Germany’s 20th-century

history of war and economic

depression may explain the

punctuality of its citizens and their

respect for weekly “quiet hours”. That

eccentric (to British eyes) behaviour

has no rational economic explanation

but it can be explained by economics.

Culture wars are about many

things but they are always, and most

fundamentally, about sublimated

economics, even when the issues at

hand — race, gender, free speech —

seem very far from economics. When

economic anxiety and resentment

catalyse the moral ideas floating

about in society, all kinds of strange

and weird monsters are brought

forth. Just not, as yet, any flagellants.

emperors, saw fiery angels and

received prophecies. Many acted in

direct contradiction of their rational

economic interest, abandoning their

“normal poverty” in favour of a more

spiritual “extreme destitution”.

Injustice is felt as much as it is

rationally understood. Seeking a way

of describing the profoundly felt evil

of the system that had visited such

terrible economic oppression on them,

helpless and furious people reached

not for rational argument but for the

most potent moral language then

available, that of Christian prophecy.

The system was not just economically

unfair but the work of satanic forces.

Today’s culture warriors are also

the products of a time of unusual

economic insecurity and inequality.

Thanks to exploding house prices

and stagnating wages, there is a new

precarious urban poor. The internet

performs the envy-generating

functions of a medieval city —

bringing us all into intimate virtual

proximity with the wealthy.

In a secular society that lacks

religious concepts to describe

injustice, culture warriors seize on

whatever moral ideas are floating

about in the cultural atmosphere to

express their sense of the evil of the

system. It’s hardly surprising that

many poor rural Americans believe

the Democratic Party establishment

is a paedophile network — the

tabloid press and shock-jock TV

hosts have been obsessed by

paedophiles as a kind of ultimate

moral evil since at least the 1990s.

For those on the other side, the

ambient language of the worst

possible evil is to do with offence

against personal identity. The most

W

atched over by an
angel named Venus,
the “secret
flagellants” of 14th-
century Thuringia
whipped their bodies to raw shreds
in order to baptise themselves with
their own blood. The idea was to
prepare for the apocalypse, when the
cult’s adepts hoped to form an
angelic choir singing hymns to the
deceased Emperor Frederick, who
was apparently also going to be a
sort of god. Even by the generous
standards of medieval heresy, this
counted as eccentric.
How did people arrive at such
beliefs? According to Norman Cohn’s
classic study of medieval apocalyptic
movements, The Pursuit of the
Millennium, the answer (roughly) is
economics. Listening to Jon Ronson’s
excellent new podcast about the
origins of the culture wars, Things Fell
Apart, I turned again to Cohn’s book,
convinced that he gets to something
even more fundamental than Ronson
manages to about the deep weirdness
of our present social strife. For what
Cohn’s book brilliantly shows is the
way rational economic frustrations
are transmuted into totally irrational
moral and cultural beliefs.
The idea that the culture wars are
about economics is not new. My
colleague Daniel Finkelstein wrote a

perceptive column a few months ago

arguing that supposedly “cultural”

battles are almost always really about

material self-interest. So, in order to

protect their incomes, less well-

educated people will fight to prevent

the government “opening the labour

market to outsiders”, and those most

likely to face discrimination will be

“particularly keen on emphasising

civic equality”. I agree. But I also

think the relation between economics

and morality operates in much

weirder, less predictable ways, too.

Cohn argues that the social

circumstance most predictive of the

appearance of bands of millenarian

anarchists and flagellants was the

growth of the precarious urban poor,

which accompanied the expansion of

cities. A peasant in the countryside

was subject to strong networks of

social relations and lived among

people much like himself. The urban

poor were not only materially

deprived but socially atomised and

living in close proximity to the

massively wealthy new merchant

class, thus acquiring “a bitter sense of

frustration” with economic inequality.

The rational economic response

would have been to join a movement

calling for the redistribution of

wealth. And though millenarian

movements were often concerned

with social justice they were always

supernatural: people joined flagellant

bands, followed resurrected

Moral ideas don’t arrive

spontaneously, they

have material roots

All stand, please

I

have loved being back in theatres

and have spent far too much

money on “friends of the theatre”

programmes, which seem to be the

only way to secure a booking with

my slow broadband. I know we are

excited to be back but I have not

been to a single show where there

hasn’t been a standing ovation. I was

stingy about getting on my feet pre-

Covid and now factor in what a

privilege it is to experience live

performance before deciding

whether to rise with the applause. I

stay seated 70 per cent of the time —

and it’s starting to look like a protest.

Partied out

M

uch as I have embraced a bit

of travel, live performance

and parties indoors, I am now

ready to step back from socialising

until December. It’s not the events I

want to escape but the organising. I

have planning fatigue. Not wanting

to break the economy here but I

wouldn’t mind a diary with nothing

in it apart from walks and a spot of

work for a few weeks. Autumn is the

time we normally embrace staying in

— but 2021 has different rules.

Janice Turner is away

Lesley Thomas Notebook

Dial up the

campaign to

save more

phone boxes

@lesleythomas

Overreaction to the

Rafiq case could

taint race relations

Hasan Suroor

A

s a South Asian immigrant

— a Muslim from India —

with some experience of

covert racism and

Islamophobia, I can’t but be

pleased that Yorkshire County Cricket

Club has been called out for trying to

cover up the behaviour of some its

white players. But I worry that a

kneejerk reaction risks deepening the

racial divide and hindering integration.

We have seen signs of an

overreaction in the past week: a ban

on Yorkshire hosting international or

significant matches, resignations of

senior management figures, the

media and political class baying for

the blood of anyone who’s anyone at

the club, and its new chairman, Lord

Patel of Bradford, promising “seismic

change”, whatever that might mean.

There’s a need to tread cautiously

in case our enthusiasm for seismic

change results in shutting down

cross-community interaction

altogether. It’s not hard to visualise a

situation where our white colleagues

and neighbours might prefer to stop

speaking to their non-white peers for

fear of saying something that might

be construed as racist.

Of all the thousands of words that

have been written about the

Yorkshire row, sparked by Azeem

Rafiq’s allegation of racism against

his fellow white players, what jumped

out at me was Gary Ballance’s

statement in response to Rafiq’s claim

that he used the racist “P” word to

refer to him because of his Pakistani

origin. Ballance said: “He was my

best mate in cricket and I cared

deeply for him ... Rafa said things to

me that were not acceptable and I

did the same with Rafa.”

This is the operational bit, so to

speak. We all know that when we are

among mates we sometimes say

things to each other we won’t say in

public. Growing up in India I was

routinely called “maulana” (an

Islamic cleric) and “miyanji”, a term

of ridicule for Muslims. In turn, I

often said to them: “You bloody

kaffirs [infidels]”. None of us ever

minded. I’ve heard Pakistanis

jokingly using the “P” word for

fellow Pakistanis. Both Indian and

Pakistani cricketers openly call white

players “gora”, a disparaging

reference to the colour of their skin.

This is not to condone racism in

any form, but friends must be

allowed some breathing space to

speak to each other without having

to censor themselves. Like it or not,

there is such a thing as a “friendly

banter”, and a good thing too. If we

allow this space to shrink in the

name of fighting racism we risk

losing the moral high ground vis-a-

vis the “woke” warriors we decry.

Wokeness has already done great

damage to free speech. Don’t let it

interfere in what friends of different

skin colour and ethnicity get up to

over a drink in a pub.

Hasan Suroor is a freelance writer

James

Marriott

@j_amesmarriott

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