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Upon Blackfriars Station, Platform 1

I frequently travel back and forth these days between my home in Cambridge and London, in order to spend time with grandchildren. I rather enjoy being part of that enormous tide of people that flows into London every day, and across it, and then flows back out again every night, train after train from all those mainline stations, each train filling up with people and rushing out into the home counties, only for another another train to arrive and fill up in turn. What a strange thing: all those thousands of human souls on the move, each one an entire universe!

My favourite station is Blackfriars, which (uniquely as far as I know) straddles the Thames on its own bridge. As you emerge from the train on Platform 1, you are faced with a single enormous window, the length and height of the station itself, which takes in, to your left, St Pauls and the prestige office blocks of the City, and to the right, the Tate Modern building in the foreground and the Shard behind it, while between them the wide river, sparkling in the sun, is spanned by a series of bridges, each slightly more hazy than the last, stretching back to Tower Bridge in grey silhouette in the distance. It’s an extraordinary spectacle, and it puts me in mind of a poem by Wordsworth that my father liked to recite, about the morning view from another London bridge:

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty…

* * *

I was talking to a writer friend, Colette, about the Neapolitan Quartet and I said one of the things I felt the lack of when I was reading it was sensory information of any kind. The narrator just talks about relationships and interactions and, if she mentions the material setting at all, does so only minimally, in the way that a dramatist does in stage directions. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a personal choice. What you exclude is as important as what you include in any sort of work of art. Colette likes pared-down writing and, as she says, descriptive passages in books are often boring and can feel quite self-indulgent on the author’s part. But my own personal feeling is that I want a novel to evoke, as far as possible, the full breadth of the feeling of being alive, and experiences such as standing in front of that window, or being part of the flow of people in and out of London, are as much a part of that, as are personal interactions.

It seems to me (and this probably isn’t an original thought) that of all art forms, novels are uniquely well placed to encompass the whole picture: interior and exterior worlds, human relationships and material reality… Other art forms can arguably portray any one of these things better than novels can, but novels (and even short stories for that matter) have a sort of ‘jack of all trades’ quality that means they can bring everything together in a way that no other form quite can.

* * *

The other day on Platform 1 of Blackfriars station, with a few minutes to wait for the train to Peckham, I was standing by the glass taking in the view next to a smartly-dressed woman who was doing the same thing. I made some comment about how beautiful it was and she said ‘You know what? I pass through this station every single day, and I never grow tired of it.’

See also (while on London bridges): Waterloo Sunset

Meritocracy and Its Discontents

In his excellent book, The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor of political philosophy, refers to another book, now out of print, published in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young. It was called The Rise of the Meritocracy, and took the form of a dystopia.

Writing as if he were a historian looking back from the year 2033, he [Young] described with uncanny clarity the moral logic of the meritocratic society that was beginning to unfold in the postwar Britain of his day. Without defending the class-bound order that was passing, Young suggested that its moral arbitrariness and manifest unfairness at least had this desirable effect: It tempered the self-regard of the upper class and prevented the working class from viewing its subordinate status as personal failure.

As Young’s imaginary historian writes:

Now that people are classified by ability, the gap between the classes has inevitably become wider. The upper classes are… no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism. Today the eminent know that success is just reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement. They deserve to belong to a superior class. They know too that not only are they of higher calibre to start with, but that a first-class education has been built upon their native gifts.

‘Not only did Young anticipate the meritocratic hubris of elites;’ writes Sandel, ‘he glimpsed their affinity for technocratic expertise, their tendency to look down on those who lack their lustrous credentials.’ He quotes Young again (still writing as if a historian in 2033) who suggests that ‘some members of the meritocracy… have become so impressed with their own importance as to lose sympathy with the people whom they govern’. Some of them, indeed, are ‘so tactless that even people of low calibre have been quite unnecessarily offended’. Here Sandel references Hillary Clinton’s famous —and extraordinarily politically inept— remark about half of Trump supporters being ‘a basket of deplorables’. I saw the same kind of contempt over and over again coming from remain voters in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. Indeed I felt so disgusted by it, as a remain voter myself, that I wished I’d voted leave.

As Sandel notes, in Young’s dystopia, ‘resentment against elites was compounded by the self-doubt that a meritocracy inflicts on those who fail to rise’, for, as Young’s historian wrote, ‘Today all persons, however humble, know they have had every chance.’ Sandel goes on:

Young predicted that this toxic brew of hubris and resentment would fuel a political backlash. He concluded his dystopian tale by predicting that, in 2034, the less-educated classes would rise up in a populist revolt against the meritocratic elites. In 2016, as Britain voted for Brexit and America for Trump, that revolt arrived eighteen years ahead of schedule.
Continue reading “Meritocracy and Its Discontents”

Trump etc

I have read a lot of pieces lately that thundered about the many infamies of Donald Trump. It’s certainly not hard to compile such a list, or to get upset about it, but I’m reminded of the aftermath of Brexit, when stunned/outraged remainers liked to enumerate, over and over, the many reasons why Brexit was wrong, why leavers had lied etc etc. In both cases (or all three cases, given that Trump is in his second term) what I think these pieces fail to engage with is the fact that people voted for Brexit and voted for Trump – a majority in the case of Brexit and Trump Mk. 2 – and did so in spite of all these many arguments against.

It should be obvious by now that what we are calling ‘populism’ is not just a glitch or temporary aberration from which we will one day return to the comfort of the old familiar world. That world is history now. It’s gone. If you are going to accuse Brexiters and Trumpers of harking back to a mythical golden age, then don’t do the same thing yourself. We’re here now, and wishing you didn’t have to start from here is as futile in politics as it is in personal life. You have to ask yourself why those things did happen.

Why did people vote for things you hate and not for the things you wanted? Why did they ignore all the wise counsel, all the expert advice? The answers often given are either that people were duped by bad actors and foreign dictators, or that they were in some way morally bad themselves (racists, bigots, misogynists perhaps – or wilfully ignorant – or only interested in their own financial gain…) I have seen both remainers and Democrat voters speaking of those who voted the other way almost in the way that religious folk talk about sinners. I have seen both remainers and Democrats say they are not prepared to ‘forgive’ those who voted the other way, even if they subsequently change their minds. (I mean, come on! You’re talking about people here whose votes you’re going to need!)

I have also heard many remainers say that people should not have been allowed a vote on EU membership (something, incidentally, that in relatively recent times has been a manifesto commitment of Greens and Liberal Democrats as well as of the Tories) or that the outcome of the vote should have been ignored. Casting your opponents as the dupes of saboteurs and foreign agents, demonizing them as evil, denying them the vote, or overruling votes that they win are surprisingly Stalinist moves to come from the supposedly liberal side of the argument. They also fail to engage with the new reality.

The people who voted for Trump 2.0 or for Brexit are not some small minority cult. They were more than half of those who turned out to vote. Of course they are deluded, but to varying degrees we all are. We all have our own dreams and fantasies, designed to comfort and reassure us that we are the good guys, that we are entitled to what we have, and that the ‘precious ordinary’* that makes us feel secure can somehow be preserved. And even the clearest-eyed among us project these fantasies into the political sphere where there are in fact no certainties, and no experts who can tell us for sure what the consequences might be of any particular action.

Politicians of all stripes seek to win our votes by pursuading us that they will nurture the things we cherish, and typically fail to live up to their own rhetoric. (Quick thought experiment: imagine that by some electoral freak, the Green Party, who I sometimes vote for myself, had won the last UK election. Would the gap between aspirational rhetoric and practical reality by this point have been any less wide than the gap between Leaver rhetoric and Brexit in practice?) We all know you can’t take politicians’ rhetoric literally, but we try anyway to choose the options we find the most reassuring, and in Britain in 2016 and America in 2024 that was, for a small majority, respectively Brexit and Trump. Unless the opponents of these things are willing to engage with that fact and address the fears and insecurities that Brexit and Trump apparently do address, then they’ll continue to lose, no matter how loudly they thunder their outrage.

The liberal elite/experts. Voting for Brexit involved voting against the recommendations of all the major political parties in mainland Britain, most of the intelligentsia, most business leaders, and most economists and bankers. Instead of asking, ‘how could people be so stupid as not to listen to all those wise, successful, and knowledgeable people?’, a more productive question might be, ‘why are all those voters so distrustful of the whole educated class?’ (I’m going to write another post about this soon, but previous thoughts here and here.)

Disruption. Also, instead of asking the question, ‘how could people be so reckless as to do such damage to so many precious things?’ it might be more useful, even just from a self-interested, strategic point of view, to ask ‘why are people willing to risk so much?’, or ‘what is it about major disruption that appeals to so many people?’, or ‘why does what seems precious to me, not seem equally precious to all these compatriots of mine?’

Globalisation. Both Trump’s programme and Brexit place a strong emphasis on restricting migration from other countries, and putting up barriers to international trade. While it’s possible to respond to this with a lot of thundering about racism, xenophobia, inward-looking nationalism, and how you ‘don’t recognise your own country anymore’ and are going to move somewhere else, it would also be reasonable to ask why so many people are hostile to economic globalisation.

It doesn’t require rocket-science levels of expertise to guess at answers to that one. Why would anyone be a fan of having their job outsourced to another country, or of having to compete for work with people from poor countries who are willing to work for much less, and put up with much worse conditions, than you’ve learned to think of as your due? There are no easy answers here -even people who are threatened by globalisation as producers, are beneficiaries of it as consumers – but these are reasonable concerns and, however simplistically, the populists address them while the old mainstream politics really didn’t.

Even concerns about losing a community of likeminded folk and being surrounded by people with an entirely different culture are actually reasonable ones -as any impeccably liberal person knows who prefers to live in a nice bougie part of town with likeminded neighbours. Populists are prone to address such concerns with dangerous rhetoric that encourages racist hostility, but mainstream parties have historically dismissed the concerns themselves as racist.

I saw someone saying the other day that it was time we understood that migration was part of human life and always has been. This is perfectly true. Every human being on Earth is descended from someone who came from somewhere else. But it would be equally true to say that frontiers, and restrictions on movements across frontiers, are part of life and always have been. If we want grownup politics that deals with reality, let’s try not to cherrypick the bits of reality that suit us and pretend the others don’t exist.

*The phrase ‘the precious ordinary’, a favourite of my wife’s, comes from Benediction by Kent Haruf, a novelist of small lives in small forgotten places.

Alice Bradley Sheldon

Alice Sheldon, 1983, aged 58, four years before her suicide: Photo by Patti Perret

Alice Sheldon (‘Alli’) wrote science fiction mainly under the name of James Tiptree, Jr. Some while back, I wrote an appreciation of her stories here. Of all science fiction writers, she and Philip Dick are the two I feel the closest affinity with.

Alli liked to correspond on a friendly basis with editors and with other writers whose work she enjoyed. Her penfriends included Joanna Russ, Frederick Pohl, Ursula le Guin, Robert Silverberg, Gardner Dozois and Harlan Ellison. I’d like to think that, if I’d been older and my writing career had started ten or twenty years earlier, I might have been one of her penpals too. I think she might have liked my stories -some of my stuff, including the novel I’m struggling with right now, is thematically quite close to hers- and she made a point of contacting writers whose stuff she liked. But in fact she died – she shot herself, to be precise, after first shooting her blind husband in his sleep – three years before my first story appeared in print. (My first ever published story, A Matter of Survival, was about a nation of men at war with a nation of women, a very Alice Sheldon subject.)

The odd thing is, though, that if there had been an overlap between our careers and I had been her penpal, I, like all the people I’ve just listed, would have believed I was writing to a man. Because James Tiptree wasn’t just a pen-name for her stories, but the persona under which, over some years, she engaged in all this correspondence. It wasn’t just superficial stuff, it was often quite deep and intimate, yet it was all signed off by James Tiptree.

I’ve been reading her biography by Julie Phillips. Alli (I’m calling her that because Julie Phillips does, and because Sheldon was her married name and not a name she had from birth) was the only child of a wealthy Chicago family. Her parents were adventurous people with the resources to have big adventures. As a child Alli was taken on trips to Africa – living in the bush, hunting, visiting remote communities… – and her mother was a successful writer who also did lecture tours in which she regaled audiences with tales of these adventures. Alli herself grew up as a vigorous, outdoorsy sort of person who liked riding and fishing and shooting.

She was a painter for a while. In the war she was a photo analyst for the army, and went on to do this work for the CIA, which is where she met her second husband, Ting, who was 12 years older than her and came from a similarly elite background. Ting was who she lived with for the rest of her life and eventually killed, believing this to be an act of kindness.

She wanted a child but wasn’t able to have one. She studied psychology and engaged in psychological research. She enjoyed ‘masculine’ pursuits and the company of men, though she was sexually drawn to women. She suffered from depression. She had a difficult relationship with her mother, loving in a way, but intense and stifling. And when I say stifling, I mean stifling. Alli told Joanna Russ that, when she was fourteen, in a stateroom on a ship, her mother had ‘more or less openly invited me to bed with her’.

My main criticism of Phillips’ excellent book would be that she doesn’t dig deeper into this episode. I can appreciate the difficulty of doing so in the absence of any other material, but to be sexually propositioned by a loved parent -and in fact even just to have the sort of enmeshed, boundaryless relationship with a parent in which that is even thinkable – is liable to turn the rest of your life into a knot that can never completely be undone. Nothing quite makes sense any more. The things you most long for are also the things you dread. You’re like a circuit board with the components linked up wrong so that the switches don’t do what they’re supposed to do: lights that are supposed to come on at the same time don’t do so and others that aren’t supposed to come on at the same time, nevertheless always do. The fact that 14-year-old Alli was tempted to say yes to her mother’s proposition, and never blamed her for it, doesn’t alter that fact – it just shows how tangled things already were. I wonder what else happened that Alli never chose to share?

Anyway, when you know about that, you can certainly understand better why she wrote stories like ‘Love is the Plan the Plan is Death’ in which the spider-like narrator is slowly being eaten alive by his mate.

Tiptree was unmasked as Alice Sheldon in 1976. (He had told his correspondents about his mother’s death, and people looked up the obituary notices in the Chicago papers and worked it out.) Alli was frightened that all her pen friends would be upset by the deception and desert her, but it seems that everyone, men and women, reassured her of their continued friendship. Ursula le Guin wrote her a particularly lovely letter, welcoming her as a ‘sister soul’.

I found the chapter in which Tiptree unravelled particularly powerful. It reduced me to tears in fact. It was touching to see le Guin and others welcoming Alli as a woman friend but it was also obvious that something important to her had begun to fall apart, something that had made it possible for her to share her inner self, and yet feel safely hidden. I think of a spider creature again, one that longs to join with others, but fears being devoured.

Happy Ēostre

I looked up the etymology of ‘Easter’. According to Bede it was named for a pagan Germanic goddess, Ēostre. So as with Christmas, a Christian festival may be piggybacking a previous pagan celebration, and so cashing in on the extra depth, the layers of associations, that this would have provided for recent converts from paganism.

Ēostre is thought by historical linguists to be traceable to a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn, *H₂éwsōs, and to be cognate with ‘East’, that being where the sun rises. Apparently, in Indo-European myths, the *H₂éwsōs figure is often a daughter of the sky-god, who brings light to the world only reluctantly and is punished for doing so. In which case a daughter of the supreme god who is punished for bringing light has been supplanted by a son of the supreme god who is also punished for bringing (many would say) a kind of light.

There’s lot of guesswork in all this whose plausibility I am certainly not qualified to evaluate on the basis of reading a couple of Wikipedia articles, but I love the depth of words, the stories they contain, the endless chains of associations from which they derive their meaning, stretching back until they disappear into the mists of the past. There’s more more richness in this than in rigid theological systems which, like language pedantry, seek to set in stone something which is by nature always in a state of flux.

Alien Life

Astronomers believe they may have discovered signs of life on the exoplanet K2-18b. The planet itself is only known to them because of the slight flicker that occurs each time it passes between its sun (K2-18) and us, and the indicators of life are the tiny changes in the colour composition of that light that occur at the same time, assumed to be the result of light passing through the planet’s atmosphere. Spectroscopy suggests that these changes indicate the presence of dimethyl sulphide and/or dimethyl disulphide, both of them gases which on Earth are produced by marine algae and bacteria. The planet is so far away that the light being analysed has been travelling towards us for 124 years.

There have been claims like this before which haven’t stood up to further examination -claims, for instance, that the imprints of bacteria had been found found in meteorites of Martian origin – so too much excitement is premature. Also, even supposing that the biological origin of these chemicals is somehow confirmed, this doesn’t mean that K2-18b is populated by organisms like our animals and plants. On Earth, as I understand it, these chemicals are produced by simple prokaryote organisms, and there is a really huge evolutionary leap involved in getting from prokaryotes to the much more complex eukaryotes that are the basis for all large multicellular organisms on Earth.

Nevertheless, even the discovery of something resembling bacteria or algae on another planet would represent an enormous change in our knowledge of the universe. As far as we’ve known up to now, life could be unique to our own planet -the result perhaps of a set of coincidences so unlikely as to literally never have occurred anywhere else. But if we know that life also exists on another planet only 124 lightyears away (‘only’ is an odd word to use for such an immense distance, but bear in mind that our galaxy, itself one of billions, is some 90,000 lightyears wide, and 1,000 lightyears deep), it becomes clear that life must be present all over the place. Like the Copernican revolution, proof that this was the case would represent a futher radical decentring of our place in the universe. Or at least it would do so, if it wasn’t for the fact that it doesn’t feel all that surprising. We have been familiar for a long time, after all, with the idea of life on other planets, which has been a staple of science fiction for a century and more.

This, for me, is a reminder that science fiction, dismissed by many as a rather lowly form of writing -escapist entertainment and no more- is a modern form of fantastical literature that burgeoned in the wake of the incredibly rapid scientific and technological changes of the past two centuries, and perhaps serves a rather important cultural function for such a constantly changing world. Interplanetary travel, robots, artificial intelligence… all were explored in fiction long before they actually existed. (Social media, admittedly, not so much!) And, just as children’s play helps prepare them for adulthood, science fiction helps us deal with the fact that, unlike people in earlier ages, we live in a time where, within a single lifespan, things will be discovered that will turn upside-down the way we see and interact with the world.

And science fiction also provides a way of visiting, if only in our imaginations, the places in the universe which we know might well exist, but which we know we will never actually see. I mean, how could we bear knowing that there is, or may be, other life out there, without at least speculating about the forms that life might take? And isn’t it the function of all fiction, in fact, to take us to places where we couldn’t otherwise go?

The wrong side of history

I don’t always like Marina Hynde’s column in the Guardian – her heavy sarcasm can get a bit relentless – and, for that matter, I don’t always like the Guardian, but I thought this piece of hers, about the reaction to the movie Emilia Pérez and what it tells us, was right on the nose, so much so that I’m going to quote about half of it right here:

… A few months ago I was chatting to the pollster James Kanagasooriam about something, and he noted that “the left tends to issue-bundle”. Which feels a good way of putting it. Many people will have felt the increasingly illogical strictures of this all-or-nothing deal in recent years of supposed progressivism. It’s as though you can’t consider each subject or cause on what you, personally, judge to be its individual merits. Instead, you must buy the entire suite of opinions off the shelf, and you have to agree with all of them, or you are “on the wrong side of history” with the ones you don’t. This was odd, James pointed out, because outside the small minority of the hyper-politically-engaged, most people in the world are not actually like this. His example was to say that most people in the UK are extremely pro gay rights, but a substantial proportion of this group might also support the non-progressive cause of the death penalty.

Anyway: Emilia Pérez. A trans story! Latin actors! Big-swing cinema! It’s all good, right? Except: no. Apparently Mexicans hate it. Apparently trans people hate it. Now old-skewing liberal Academy voters – who loved it – have seen these controversies and know they have to do a 180 and hate it too… It was pitched as a progressive triumph – now it’s on “the wrong side of history”.

… I can’t stand that infantilising, hectoring phrase, which has spent the past decade being the laziest but most successful way to force someone to agree with you. Ditto the idea that if you share any opinion – at all – with people on the other side of a supposed divide, then you should just consider what that makes you, and fall back into line with your tribe. What bollocks.

In fact, the present political climate in the US seems to have been exacerbated by people performing their endless taxonomy of what is and isn’t on the wrong side of history. It’s enough to make you feel that the left, who bang on about polarisation the whole time, are actually more invested in it than the right…

I agree. I think that particular kind of judgy, conformist, witch-hunting ‘leftism’ must take some share of the blame for the rise of the authoritarian right. In other words, in its own terms, it’s ‘on the wrong side of history’, though, like Marina Hynde, I’ve always hated that phrase, with its smug implication that the speaker’s world view is the one that will ultimately prevail.

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.