26 Monday February 21 2022 | the times
Comment
This apartheid reduces us to mere cut-outs
Language police are crushing creativity and robbing society of the diversity they claim to protect
intellectual William F Buckley has
brought a fresh understanding of the
civil rights struggle to a new
generation.
The implications of this speech
apartheid for those who work in the
realm of creativity and the
imagination are crushing. But they
are even more alarming for those
who operate on less exalted planes.
The vogue for adding pronouns to
email addresses may seem a small act
of politeness, such additions to the
message being sold as a courteous,
inclusive gesture. But inclusion should
not be reduced to a fashion statement.
Many people have perfectly good
reasons not to disclose aspects of
their identity. There is a reason why
people called JK (Rowling) and
George (Eliot) have found publishers
more amenable than people called
Joanne and Mary Ann. Yet the same
firms that boast race and gender-
blind recruitment are now requiring
women to declare their sex in every
communication.
The most pernicious effect of this
new apartheid is that each of us is
steadily being reduced to cardboard
cut-outs defined by a single
characteristic, forced to conform
with our stereotype. This robs society
of the very diversity the language
police claim to be protecting. The
pressure to limit our ability to speak
openly and civilly, to and about each
other, marks an assault on the open-
mindedness of a liberal society. As
we say in the Caribbean: “Every rope
got two ends” — meaning there
should always be more than one way
to see any situation. We can all hold
the same rope without being forced
to pull it in the same direction.by her own publisher. Her editors
had summoned a group of so-called
experts to judge her work. They were
clearly not chosen for their literary
scholarship — one complained that
the poet e e cummings had had his
name misspelt.
On the face of it none of these
“experts” needed to be able read an
entire sentence. In fact, appreciation
of context might even be regarded as
a distraction from spotting a
potentially dangerous word such as
“disfigure”, which in Clanchy’s book
was applied to a landscape but
excised in case it offended a reader
who suffered from acne. Despite one
of the young Afghan women who
figure in the memoir expressly
saying that she delighted in
Clanchy’s description of her as
“almond-eyed” the assembled
inquisition found the phrase
unacceptable. Ironically, a book that
won the Orwell Prize was itself
found guilty of thought crime.
A new order is emerging, defined
by the degree of victimhood.
Clanchy is female, so is free to
complain of sexism; but being white
she has no right to describe the
experience of young minority
students. Adele would be permitted
to point her elegant nails at male
bosses but needs to have her words
about her own sexual identity vetted
by someone “trans”.
It seems to have escaped the critics
that most creative people spend their
lives trying to convey a human
experience, often not their own, so
that we can understand each other
better. A case in point: the brilliant
black actor David Harewood’s recent
portrayal of the white segregationistT
he world’s best-selling
singer, Adele, celebrated
her triumph at a gender-
neutral Brit Awards with
the uncompromising
declaration: “I love being a woman.”
She earned warm applause on the
night but her words brought furious
condemnation from a minority of
activists who believe your sex should
be what you make of it. Their
bandwagon is picking up speed.
The Scottish government’s
unambiguously female leader, Nicola
Sturgeon, seems determined to
reduce sex to a matter of personal
taste rather than biology. Her Green
Party coalition colleagues are sacking
those who dare to say that women
exist. According to this way of
thinking, the possession of a cervix or
a prostate gland should not prevent
you claiming a sexual identity
different from that on your birth
certificate. Many who took aim at
Adele lauded the Eurovision Song
Contest winner, Conchita Wurst
(who is not transgender), for
impersonating a bearded woman. In
their minds, anyone can celebrate
being a woman, just as long as they
are not an actual... woman.
The decision to make the Brits
gender neutral does not in itself
seem offensive to me. Men and
women compete fairly in many
contests where sex offers no natural
advantage: equestrian sports, TV
competitions such as Bake Off. I have
yet to discover the lyrics of a popular
song in which the sex of the singer
matters fundamentally. The greatest
single ever recorded, the Ronettes’
Be My Baby (don’t even try to argue)
could equally have been recorded by
the girl group’s great fan Brian Wilson
of the Beach Boys. Sometimes a song
title (Maria) presupposes a particular
sexual identity for the subject. But the
singer could be male or female since
these days we don’t need to adjust our
minds to the possibility of a same-
sex relationship. And before you say
Astrud Gilberto, the great Nancy
Wilson brought us her “tall andtanned and young and handsome”
The Boy from Ipanema 60 years ago.
You can take the sex out of a song
but you shouldn’t have to take it
away from the singer. The language
despotism that is frightening the
grown-ups demands that institutions
prioritise something called “lived
experience” over common sense.
What is usually meant by this is that
small groups of activists should be
able to veto the actions and words of
the majority. And the new weapon of
choice for those who want to police
who can say what is the “sensitivity
reader”.
The teacher and poet Kate Clanchy
found her memoir Some Kids I Taught
and What They Taught Me censoredBook that won Orwell
prize was found guilty
of thought crime
Nature’s health kick
must be accessible
to everyone by law
Nigel Crisp
I
was walking in the rain last
week in Lumsdale Valley where
water tumbles vigorously down
a steep gorge. Its natural power
drove the mills in an earlier
technological revolution. A niece
WhatsApps me photos of swimming
in the North Sea, her “happy place”.
Small children splash in the rain,
fizzing with their own vital energy.
These snapshots reveal our love
of nature and how it enhances our
lives. Lockdown accelerated our
understanding of this and led to new
emphasis on community gardens,
school farm projects, rewilding
programmes, forest schools and the
“daily mile” now run in almost 14,000
schools and nurseries. They echo an
older tradition embracing garden
cities, Outward Bound and Florence
Nightingale’s prescription of fresh air.
This isn’t just fashion. There is
good evidence that being in a green
environment changes our mood and
improves our mental as well as
physical health. However — and it’s a
big however — the benefits of being
close to nature are not spread evenly.
Any city map shows more greenspace in affluent areas. New housing
is built without such access. One in
three people don’t have green space
within a 15-minute walk of their
home. These are the communities
worst affected by Covid-19.
Access to nature is a vital part of
how to improve health in poorer
communities. It links with other
health-giving activities. Community
allotments, for example, provide social
contact and exercise as do team sports
and farm visits. It can help tackle air
pollution and smoking, the biggest
contributors to health inequalities.
That’s why I’m supporting the
Nature for Everyone campaign which
backs a legal right to local nature.
The NHS and its staff are under
enormous pressures yet there is still
a tendency to load it with unrealistic
expectations. The NHS can’t by
itself prevent obesity, tackle diabetes,
confront knife crime, control
addictions or ease depression. All too
frequently it can only pick up the
pieces, doing the repairs.
People need a good environment
in every sense — physical, social and
economic — in which to thrive. Too
often, the natural environment is
forgotten. But it has a powerful role
in creating health, taking pressure off
the NHS and building the resilience
needed for future pandemics.
Inequality in access to nature
reinforces inequality in other areas of
life. It should be a core test of levelling
up and wider government policy.Lord Crisp is a former chief executive
of NHS EnglandOne in three lack
green space within
15 minutes of home
Trevor
Phillips@trevorptweets
L
ast week I was relieved to
read in a viral New York
Magazine article of an
impending “vibe shift”. The
term refers, apparently, to
a change in the “dominant social
wavelength”. The author traces
three periods: “hipster/indie music”
(2003–09); the “post-internet/techno
revival” (2010–16); and “hypebeast/
woke” (2016-2022).
If this really is an accurate
account of the century’s vibes so far
(and frankly I’m sceptical) then I’ve
missed all of them and have not so
much been surfing the cultural wave
as floundering around in the shallow
end, spluttering and signalling
pathetically for help.
I’m hoping the new vibes, when
they come, will suit me better than
the current ones. I’ve never really
got on with the whole woke thing
and I don’t think any reasonable
person would describe me as a
“hypebeast”. So I am hereby
leveraging whatever influence I can
muster to help shift the vibe in the
right direction. I’m thinking...
spectacles, melancholy, jumpers,
poetry. Tell your fashionable friends.
We can make this happen.A life less ordinary
I
n one of the hipster cafés near
my flat last week, I spotted a
guy about my age reading an
old-fashioned, dead-tree, physical
copy of The Times. This being an
abnormal sight (why, for instance,
wasn’t he availing himself of our
high-quality digital offering?), we
got talking.
It turned out that he was living
off-grid (or as off-grid as is
possible in 21st-century east
London). No smartphone,
just a borderline-
functionless Nokia
thing. It’s not an easy
life. The 26-30
railcard comes only
as an app. If you
want a physical
copy of the NHS
vaccine passport
you have to write
off for one. Living
like this means a lot of
weary letter-writing,
though he says it is life-
enhancing. Music is an event
not, as it has become for lots
of us, just background noise.Reflecting on our conversation, it
hadn’t quite occurred to me how
much life is now organised to punish
and harass those without
smartphones. Are we absolutely sure
we want to make it so that these
devices — built by tech companies to
addict us to their apps and adverts —
are essential to participate in
society? As my new friend said, one
day he’ll need a smartphone to
unlock his front door, and at that
point he’ll have to give in.Thief defies history
T
here is, amazingly,
another brilliant Big
Thief album. Including
her solo records, the band’s
lead singer Adrianne Lenker
is averaging more than an
album a year. This rate of
productivity is rare in
modern music. It seems
to me a mark of the
originality and
unselfconsciousness of
Lenker’s talent.
An album a year
seemed normal to the
Beatles who were at
the beginning of a
new kind of popular
music. My theory is
that in the Sixties,
when rock music was
viewed as ephemeral or
marginal to “proper”culture, there was no need to fret
about making masterpieces or your
contribution to the “canon”. Nobody
thought what you were doing was
that serious. You just got on with it.
Eventually, art forms are weighed
down by a punishing sense of
history, an awareness of the vast
tradition, of everything amazing that
has ever been made and how hard it
is to do anything new. To access the
freedom and innocence so abundant
at the birth of a new genre becomes
increasingly rare. To recapture it is
one of the principal attributes of
artistic genius.This planet is boring
I
have been re-watching the original
BBC series Planet Earth and
thinking how repetitive a lot of the
animals are, falling broadly into the
category of either dog, cat or deer/
cow.
So far we’ve had a snow leopard
(cat) hunting something called a
markhor (deer/cow), a lion (cat)
hunting an antelope (deer/cow), a
puma (cat) hunting a llama (deer/
cow), wolves (dog) hunting caribou
(deer/cow), arctic foxes (dog)
hunting musk oxen (deer/cow) etc
etc. It results in the same plot over
and over again. Fish are much more
interesting.James Marriott Notebook
Get into the
new ‘vibe’ of
spectacles
and poetry
@j_amesmarriott