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Value added (2)

So, just as branding can add value to a manufactured product, so can the ‘brand’ resulting from fame and adulation add value to a cultural artifact: a book, a film, a painting, a piece of music… (I’m avoiding the term ‘work of art’ because that tends to imply something highbrow, and this is equally true for works at every level of ‘brow’)

But it’s possible to flip the comparison right over and argue that these cultural products themselves function as a kind of branding that adds value to everyday life.

For instance, I sometimes like to listen to music when I’m driving. Get the music right and it works with the passing scene like the soundtrack of a movie. Life feels that little bit more interesting and intense, and I feel a bit like I’m a character in a story and not just – you know- little inconsequent me.

There was a time once, I remember, when certain young men would put speakers on the outside of their cars with the idea, or so I imagine, that the rest of us, too, would see them as being like characters in movies, and that this in turn would enhance their own sense of being so – their sense of being someone, in other words, and not just anyone, which is an important thing to have, even if putting speakers outside your car is rather narcissistic.

So a cultural artifact, music, is adding richness to a car journey, and therefore adding value to life itself, in the same way that music, words and images can be used to add value to a product advertised on TV.

It may do this just by being pleasurable to listen to, and evoking various moods and feelings which we find engaging, but it may also function by making us feel like we are inside another cultural artifact, a movie, a story-world, a place where life is more vivid and intense. Advertising does this too. Look at car ads on TV, or perfume ads, and, in pretty much every case, you are being invited to think of the product as something that will admit you to a story world. And this is not even a con, exactly.

We’ve got sales targets

While on the subject of ads, let me admit that there is a copywriter inside me, crying to be let out. I once whiled away an hour on a train by devising in my mind an entire advertising campaign for McCoy’s crisps, including TV ads, posters and merchandise.

I did actually think about being a copywriter when I was a kid, inspired, as I said before, by The Space Merchants – in spite of (or, to be honest, probably because of) that book being about the dangerous power of advertising. Unfortunately for my advertising career, I did also internalise the book’s political message, and by the time I was old enough to need a job, I didn’t feel able to give over my life to helping giant corporations sell harmful things.

But I think I would have been good at copywriting. It certainly would have been a better fit with my skills than being a social worker, and an excellent training for being a writer, at least in the narrow sense of honing my skill with words, because the best advertising copy has something in common with poetry – it has to be as succinct as possible and make every word count – but with the added twist that, unlike poetry, it has to work even when its readers have barely noticed that it’s there.

This ad from a while back seems very simple, but is a small masterpiece of compression.

Oasis soft drink ad: ‘It’s summer. You’re thirsty. We’ve got sales targets.’

The final sentence – ‘We’ve got sales targets’ – is disarming and funny because it frankly admits the real purpose of the ad, and yet it doesn’t in any way reduce the impact of the sequence set up by the previous sentences and the picture of the drink: summer (hot), thirsty (unpleasant), and Oasis (a cool and refreshing release from heat and thirst – and, speaking of release, isn’t that image quite blatantly orgasmic?)

In fact, far from reducing its overall impact – the ‘sales target’ sentence allows the rest of the ad to slide gently into your consciousness (and, more importantly, into your unconscious), like the smooth coating on a pill, without seeming too bald and shouty.

And notice how ‘You’re thirsty’ is in a larger font. So often when we’re busy, we don’t notice our bodily sensations until something draws them to our attention. (When I was a social worker, I would often notice right at the end of the afternoon that I felt quite light-headed, and realise that I’d forgotten to eat my lunch.) Also, though I don’t really know why this should be, ‘thirsty’ is a particularly powerful word with lots of bite. Much more so than, say, ‘hungry’ or ‘tired’.

Brilliantly effective writing. And all done in eight words – or nine including the bottle. I can’t stand those kinds of drinks as it happens, but it would have worked on me otherwise, no question about it. And, if only it wasn’t for my political scruples, I would have loved to have worked on ads like that.

Value added

I once heard an advertising professional making the case that advertising doesn’t just sell products, it adds value to them – we enjoy products more because of the associations that advertising has added to them. I’m quite certain this is true (and not just because, ever since I read The Space Merchants as a kid, I have had a fascination with advertising’s dark arts).

For instance, my youngest daughter and I used to love Hobgoblin Ale’s ‘What’s the matter lager boy?’ ads, and bought the beer accordingly. I have no doubt the ads made the drink seem more fun than it would have been if we had drunk it from an unmarked glass without knowing what it was. We would still have liked it it, no doubt, but it would just have been a beer.

This podcast discusses the possibility that Stradivarius instruments might be a spectacular example of this effect. Many people are convinced that these centuries-old violins and violas, which can sell for tens of millions, make a uniquely beautiful sound. And yet, as the podcast shows, musicians involved in blind tests did not favour the Strads over modern violins, or even correctly identify them more often than you’d expect them to do by chance. In the podcast, a professional musician who actually owns a Strad refuses to accept the validity of this finding, but it is very difficult to separate a product from its branding unless you do a blind test (especially if you’ve spent a fortune on it). And, as that advertising man might ask, why would you even want to separate a product from its branding, when the branding really does make you enjoy the product more?

How much does this branding effect apply in the cultural sphere generally? There can’t be much doubt, for instance, that a simple sketch attributed to Picasso will be worth far more, and receive far more attention and praise, than would be the case if that exact same sketch had been made by an artist no one has heard of. (Duchamp famously showed that, just by signing it, he could turn a urinal into a work of art.) I’m pretty sure that I have often given films, books, paintings etc a much more sympathetic hearing when I’ve known in advance that they are considered to be masterpieces, than I might otherwise have done. In fact, it’s hard to see how our appreciation of books and films could not be affected by their reputations, given that books and films only work at all by triggering associations in our mind, and their reputation will inevitably play a part in those associations. (Being perverse and prone to jealousy, I sometimes dislike books and films more than I otherwise would have done, precisely because of the kind of praise they’ve been given – but that’s still a branding effect. It’s still me being influenced by the book or film’s reputation.)

Nevertheless it is still meaningful to ask if it’s the reputation of a work of art, or the associations that would be set up anyway by the work itself, that is the main contributor to the value that’s attributed to it. Watching a particularly good episode of Succession, my wife asked ‘Is Shakespeare really so much better than this?’ I think it’s a good question. If you make up your mind that something’s wonderful, whether it’s Shakespeare or the Beatles, Ulysses or the Bible, then you will find wonderful things in it, and you are much more likely to make up your mind that something’s wonderful if everyone keeps telling you so. In the case of those four examples, there are whole industries devoted to celebrating their wonderfulness.

Life isn’t like a novel

I turn 70 at the end of this year. It’s an interesting time of life. In some ways I feel more myself than I ever did. This is perhaps in part because of not having a day job of any kind – I haven’t had one for 9 years- so I don’t have to play a role, or fit into a system in the way I once did, and I have a lot of time when I can think, or write, or see people, or do whatever I want.

(I’ve sometimes noticed in the past when I’ve met up with people who still work in a place I used to work, how intensely involved they are in the politics of that world, the machinery of it. It seems to be so BIG for them, just as it once did to me, yet now, from outside, it seems so small, like an ants nest on the floor of a forest, and it seems almost comical that they should take it so very seriously.)

Another thing is that a lot of options are closed to me. For instance, I’m not going to begin a whole new career at this point, or start a whole new family. I have had most of my life (I’d have to live to 140 for that not to be true!), and I have to recognise that in many ways, this is it – I’ve got as far with this thing or that thing as I’m ever going to get, whether or not I’d hoped to get further. So I’m sort of stuck with being me.

One thing I do a lot of, though it can be painful, is review my life so far, almost as I might look back at a novel when I’ve reached the end: So those were the main characters! So this was the story arc!

But when I do this, I realise that life doesn’t really work like a novel. For example, if, in a novel, there was a character who met with the protagonist regularly for a chat, but didn’t advance the plot in any way – didn’t have an affair with the protagonist, or set up a business with him, or say some wise or devastating thing that changed the course of his life…- you’d either cut that character out, or give them something to do. I think this is true even in a literary novel which likes to think it’s above the vulgarity of plot, but still has to show the protagonist progressing.

This is why characters in novels often seem to have a rather limited number of friends, and we seldom hear much about the conversations they have with their children or grandchildren, even though friends, family, children are probably for most people the main thing that give their life meaning.

Sola fide and the ‘internet Left’

In an earlier post, I talked about the disadvantages of ‘belief’ but also its necessity in a world where so much can’t be known for certain. However I didn’t even mention the utility of ‘belief’ as a marker of belonging, as when a religious person explains their faith by saying ‘we believe X’, where it is the belief that makes possible that ‘we’ – and therefore also an excluded ‘them’. In many religions, notably in Protestant Christianity, belief in the correct dogma is, or at least has been, seen as far more important than moral behaviour. Only faith – sola fide – can save you from the fires of hell. And of course many religions, including Islam and most branches of Christianity, have not even waited for the afterlife, but have had people tortured and killed in this one for not subscribing to the correct dogma.

There are all kinds of advantages to sola fide. It’s easier to conform to a set of beliefs than it is to change your way of life. It’s also helpful for the wealthy and powerful who might otherwise have to take seriously moral teachings such as, in Christianity, Matthew 5.5 (‘blessed are the meek’), or Matthew 19:24 (‘ it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God’). At my primary school – a famous fee-paying school, and therefore only accessible to well-off people- the ‘eye of the needle’ was explained away by the chaplain as the name of a gate in the walls of Jerusalem through which a camel could actually pass, though it might be a bit of a squeeze, which makes the whole saying rather lame, and is quite funny when you consider all the other sayings which religions have insisted should be taken completely literally. Many people have been burned alive, for instance, for denying that communion bread and wine are literally the blood and flesh of Christ.

But this takes us back to importance of belief as a marker of belonging, the means by which a virtuous ‘us’ is separated from a ‘them’ which at best is ignorant and in need of enlightenment, and at worst does not deserve to be treated as part of the moral community at all. This is very handy. It makes priesthood important, for one thing (because priests are the ones who let you know what you have to believe in). It gives even the lowliest of believers the comfort of feeling superior to somebody (which is useful for elites who want to keep them in their place). And it provides a rationale for treating unbelievers badly, which is great if you want to conquer their country, or make them into slaves, or even just dismiss them as of no account.

The thing about this kind of belief, though, is that it’s no good just asking people to believe something obvious. You can’t build an ‘us’ and a them’ on the back of, say, ‘the sun rises every day’ or ‘on the whole, it’s good to treat people nicely’. It has to be something that isn’t obvious and that wouldn’t normally occur to you. In fact, more than that, it needs to be something which everyday experience would suggest there is no evidence for. Even ‘there is a god’ isn’t really sufficient, because that’s a pretty widespread idea which isn’t associated with any particular belief system, but ‘God consists of three persons – not two, mind you, or four, but three – who are all distinct, but are still somehow only one god’ – now, that’s more like it, no way is anyone going to come up with that empirically! And ‘bread and wine are literally blood and flesh’ is perfect.

Sorry to pick on Christianity by the way -I know many good people who are Christians, and who don’t use their religion in this kind of way- but it just happens to be the religious tradition I was brought up in, and therefore the one I feel best qualified to criticise. The point I am actually coming to is that sola fide is not confined to religions. In particular, I am struck by the way that politics has degenerated into competing belief systems of this kind. Hence the so-called culture wars, the internet-fuelled tendency to separate into competing tribes, each with its own priesthood and its own rigid and often arbitrary beliefs which you have to subscribe to in order to belong, even when your head is secretly saying to you ‘it’s really not as simple as that.’

Since my own politics, cloudy as they are, are on the left (which is to say, it seems to me that the people at the bottom of society get a lousy deal, and the people higher up are obscenely privileged) my particular concern is this tendency on the left. If being on the left is reduced to expressing the latest ‘correct’ views on social media in the latest approved language, with the aim of demonstrating your loyalty to your faction, and your distance from that other lot, it has ceased to really be politics in the sense of a practical attempt to make things different, and has just become a way of feeling superior.

And this at a time when oligarchy is on the rise and oligarchs are managing to persuade a lot of people who would normally be your natural allies, that you belong to a haughty self-righteous elite who don’t even like them, and that they should throw in their lot with them, the oligarchs.

Woke

Exhibit A: In the early seventies there was a programme on ITV called The Comedians, in which a number of stand-up comedians stood in a row and took it in turns to tell jokes. I can only remember one joke. The comedian – it may have been Bernard Manning – said that he’d met a Pakistani in the street, walking a pet duck on a lead. ‘I didn’t know you had a monkey,’ the comedian said. ‘It’s not a monkey, it’s a duck,’ replied the Pakistani, to which the comedian responded -and this was the punchline- ‘I was talking to the duck.’

The reason this has stuck in my mind is that, even at 14 or so, and even in those times when racist jokes were commonplace even among liberal middle-class kids like me, I could see this was vile, a joke that doesn’t even work unless you think it’s funny to describe a stranger, to his face, as non-human, because he has brown skin and a different culture. It seemed vile to me then, and it seems, if anything, even more vile now when two of my own grandchildren – two of the people I love best in the world – have brown skin. The thought of those two cheerful little girls being exposed to stuff like that and realising they’re the target of it, quite literally keeps me awake at night.

In the culture wars, the accusation of being woke – it used to be called politically correct – is constantly being thrown at those who object to inappropriate language being directed at people because of their skin colour, ethnicity, gender etc. ‘So what exactly is wrong with objecting to offensive language?’ the defenders of wokeness reply. ‘What you call wokeness is just common courtesy and basic human decency.’ And of course in many cases this is true, as it would be if someone raised objections to the ‘joke’ above. (Presumably the reason filth like that is no longer heard on on national TV is because of the many objections to it people have raised over the past 50 years – and good for them.)

But the trouble with the whole yah-boo culture wars phenomenon is that it obliterates nuance. There is another side to wokeness, I don’t find it hard to see why it raises people’s hackles, and I find it a little disingenuous when the defenders of wokeness claim not to see it.

Exhibit B: Some years ago, in the late nineties, when I was still involved in social work, another incident occurred which also stuck in my mind. A colleague (white) expressed horror at the fact that some foster-parents had used the term ‘coloured people’, which was seen at that time as derogatory. (Indeed, another white colleague, I now remember, had actually posted a sign in the office with a quotation from somewhere which objected to the word ‘coloured’ in terms something like this: ‘How dare white people call us coloured, when they are the ones that come in all sorts of different colours, and change colour when they’re angry or cold or embarassed.’)

This is different from Exhibit A, because there was no reason to believe the foster parents were intentionally using the term in a derogatory way. In fact, they very probably thought that ‘coloured people’, as opposed to, say, ‘black people’ or ‘Asian people’, was the polite and respectful expression to use, as it had indeed once been – hence the name of the American civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And of course nowadays, the term ‘people of colour’ (POC) is widely used by the wokest folk, and no one, as far as I know, suggests it is derogatory, or objects to the association of the word ‘colour’ with people who are not white.

Terms not intended to be offensive do acquite offensive connotations over time -I get that: look at the word ‘spastic’ for example- but not keeping up with the currently acceptable language is not even vaguely in the same category as telling a Pakistani man he is a monkey. And it seems to me that to affect outrage when someone uses outmoded language is something more akin to the cool kids at school mocking some poor schmuck who still listens to music that’s now uncool, or wears clothes that are no longer in fashion. In other words, it’s about proving your own superiority.

It’s often not clear who decides when words become unacceptable, or who chooses their replacements. Sometimes, as in the case of ‘spastic’, I guess it just becomes obvious to everyone in the field that what was once a neutral term has now become a term of abuse. (Was this ever the case with ‘coloured people’?) But I do think there are self-appointed mindguards out there – assertive, educated, social-media-savvy people- who actually enjoy catching other people out and feeling superior to them, and having a following of herd animals who join in.

The people most likely to be caught out -apart from those who actively pride themselves on being ‘anti-woke’, or who simply don’t agree with what the mindguards have decreed to be correct- are those who are less educated (like those foster-parents) and less social-media-savvy, and therefore less up to date. In this way ‘wokeness’, which is supposed to be (and often is) about challenging exclusion, can itself become a tool for excluding people, a form of classism, hiding in the guise of being anti-isms – and of course the people so excluded notice this and resent it. More generally, it just makes it harder to express an opinion that is genuinely your own.

(Meanwhile, on the other side, the ‘anti-woke’ have their own mindguards, and their own herd animals, and their own stubborn refusal to see the game they are playing.)

I Hope I shall Arrive Soon

Back in my social work days, I was often involved in the placement of children in foster-homes who were from abusive, neglectful or otherwise messed-up backgrounds. Such children are often difficult to look after: closed off, self-destuctive, prone to challenging behaviours. If you didn’t know better, you might think that all their carers had to do was to provide whatever was missing from their own families -love, stability, safety, boundaries- and those children would cease to be sad and difficult, just as a hungry person ceases to be hungry when given food. But in fact closed off and challenging children tend to remain so for many years and few, if any, completely get over early traumas.

I have some personal experience to draw on as well as professional. My own childhood was nothing like as bad as many I encountered in my professional life, but it was not a very happy one all the same, and I often felt profoundly alone and unseen. I am in my late sixties now. I have many kind, warm friends, a lovely wife, grownup children and small grandchildren who I love and who love me – all things that once seemed frighteningly beyond my reach – yet I still often feel myself inside to be that lonely, isolated child. My subjective experience, a lot of the time, is that I still lack things that I do objectively possess. In fact, you could almost call this my resting state, the place I end up if I don’t do something to avoid it.

I read somewhere about a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who would sometimes burst into tears when presented with a meal. No amount of food could take away the memory of starving.

One thing that has helped me to think about this is a story by Philip K. Dick. His own childhood was unhappy, and he had many problems in his adult life, including drug addiction and an inability to sustain relationships with women. The story is called ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon’ (though it was originally published under the equally appropriate title of ‘Frozen Journey’), and it’s sufficiently important to me that I once wrote a whole 20,000-word dissertation on it for an MA in English Studies.

Patrick Hamilton

“He was not a major writer,” says Doris Lessing a few lines into her otherwise appreciative introduction to my copy of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude. This makes me wonder what one has to do to qualify as a ‘major’ writer? Having recently reread The Golden Notebook, which I loved back in the seventies, I have a feeling his work may age rather better than Lessing’s own.

I only knowingly came across Hamilton for the first time a few years ago (though before that I was a fan of the Hitchcock film, Rope, which is based on a Patrick Hamilton play.) He was recommended to me by my friend the late Eric Brown, who had a real feeling for British authors of the mid-twentieth century. I read, in quick succession, Slaves of Solitude, Hangover Square and the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, and loved them: the writing, the humanity, the originality. And, when I recommended these books to other people, they either turned out to already be fans, or, if they read the books for the first time, were as enthusiastic as I was. (Except my wife, to be fair, who is not prone to reckless enthusiasm, and thought Slaves only ‘quite good’). I have recently reread those first two again and remain very impressed. Slaves is my favourite, but with Hangover Square a close second. I also particularly liked the third book of the Twenty Thousand Streets trilogy, The Plains of Cement, in which the barmaid Ella has to choose between marrying a horribly unattractive older man who treats her like a child, and depriving her frail mother of a chance to come out of poverty.

Of the Devil’s party without knowing it

Some further, possibly not very coherent, thoughts carrying on from a previous post. In that post, I expressed my increasing dissatisfaction with TV nature documentaries which, on the one hand, mainly show scenes of predators hunting, or male animals fighting for control of females, accompanied by the kind of tense, exciting, sinister music that I associate with action scenes in movies, and on the other invite us to see nature as something fragile and vulnerable and in need of protection. Why is an orca drowned in a fishing net tragic and pitiful, but a baby seal being tormented by orcas a thrilling spectacle?

Nature

I watched the BBC series Wild Isles, presented by David Attenborough. It was beautiful to look at, but it left me wondering about ‘nature’, as presented by these programmes.

In the first episode we were shown a pod of Orcas off the coast of Shetland (or was it Orkney?). I’ve watched enough of these shows to know the kind of spectacle we can expect from Orcas – they typically harry their prey to a slow and terrifying death and I still vividly remember, from Attenborough’s Arctic show, the closeup shot of an exhausted seal looking straight at the camera, as orcas dragged it off an iceberg to be torn to pieces. It felt wrong to be staring into its eyes.

This time round a baby seal, which had swum out some way off the shore, was caught by a member of the pod. The orca then took it, still alive, to a group of its companions, where, after a certain amount of playing with its victim, the successful hunter demonstrated to younger orcas -Sir David sounded quite aroused at this point- how to hold it under water and drown it.

Later on, though, we were shown an orca that had itself drowned in a fishing net. Sombre music played. This drowned cetacean was apparently a tragedy, while the slow torment of the baby seal had been presented as something rather thrilling. Why, I wondered? Why should I care about one and not the other?

The same pattern persisted throughout the series. Predators hunting and killing -and quite often targeting the young of their prey- dominated most episodes, and were presented as an exciting spectacle, accompanied by rousing, if sinister, music,as you might hear in an action scene in a movie. We were being offered animal-killing as a voyeuristic entertainment, not unlike the animal slaughters that the Romans put on in their arenas, except that this was ‘nature’ so we could savour it guilt-free. But then there would be a sudden switch of tone and talk about the fragility of ‘nature’ and the need to protect it from the depredations of humanity. I found this no longer worked for me. I grew bored of the slaughter, and even sickened by it, and it certainly didn’t put me the mood for ‘only man is vile’ pieties. My thoughts were more on the lines of Kurtz in the Congo jungle: ‘The horror, the horror.’

After hunting scenes, the next most frequent dramas depicted in these shows are the endless combats between male animals fighting to obtain, or defend, access to females. In one episode a huge, repulsive male seal spotted an equally huge and repulsive rival that had emerged from the sea, and flopped and wriggled his blubbery bulk across the sand to do battle. They ripped each others flesh, they roared, they reared up to look as big as possible. The much less repulsive female seals meanwhile hurried to get their babies out of the way, because the males in such battles are apparently so indifferent to anything except their need for dominance, that they will crush their own children to death without a thought if these are foolish enough to get in their way.

It all felt rather familiar actually, like the story-line for much of human history. Not so much a case of ‘only man is vile’, as ‘nature is vile, and we’re a part of it.’