Gotham Diary:
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15 July 2014
By mistake, I bought a DVD of the second season of Endeavor, without having seen the episodes of the first. I neglected to mention this yesterday, when I reported on my English sojourn. Which is ongoing. Not only am I reading Charles Todd on the Kindle, but I’ve pulled down The Man in the Wooden Hat, the second volume of Jane Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy. I’ve had it for years, but never read it. It’s an alarmingly quick read, so I’ve put the third volume, Last Friends, in my shopping cart. On the horizon: John Campbell’s book about Mrs Thatcher, and two books by (not about) Roy Jenkins: his Churchill biography, and Twelve Cities. I’m in raptures to read the latter, not so much for its purple prose as to savor the parody of Jenkins’s style that I think is on the way, Craig Brown’s Twelve Tube Stations.
[The Warren Street station] is not, perhaps, a first-rate station, still less a second-rate station, but as the lower third-rate stations go, I have always considered it ranks really rather high, if not at the very top, then quite near the upper-middle.
Weeps. At first, I confused “Warren” with “Warwick,” the latter being the stop for Little Venice. I’ve actually been there, and it’s certainly nothing special. (I’ve walked by the Warren Street Station: are not I coolesque.) Anyway, I’ve ordered the first season of Endeavour. When Kathleen forgets the name of the actor who plays the young Inspector Morse, I say, “B-E-N,” with all the Annette Bening oomph that I can summon. “Endeavour,” if you didn’t know, is the Christian name that the mature Morse never admitted to. and “Filth” is an acronym for “Failed in London; Try Hong Kong.” Now, if I could only learn how to say Kingston Bagpuize, I’d be fixed. Or at least upper-middle.
***
If everybody’s tired of this Cool Britannia cruise, I can always go back to Hannah Arendt.
That’s not really a joke, because I haven’t left Arendt behind at all. I’ve stopped writing about her, but not writing about her ideas, which I now rather brassily pass off, if not as my own, then as common-sense observations. I see what I can get away with. Re-reading DBR entries from 2011 — I’m up to June at the moment — I’m impressed by how ready, how prepared, how pre-deformed, really, I was for her thinking. And, now that I’ve read most of her work — most of the published books, anyway — I’m back to chugging along my own course, but now with the aid of her much better navigational charts.
As I’ve written about before, Arendt had a terrible time with a concept that she invented, more or less as a dustbin into which to toss things but never to examine, called “the social.” Hannah Pitkin has writtten a very good book about “the social,” The Attack of the Blob, which I wrote a bit about in April. For quite a while, I steered clear of talk about “social” life or “society,” not because I agreed with Arendt but because I wanted to see where abstinence would lead me. And it lead me back to an old friend, a term that I have used in the titles of two of my own productions, the abandoned Web site, Civil Pleasures and, much earlier, back before any Web sites of my own, a mailing-list weekly called “Civil Letters.”
What’s the difference between “social” and “civil”? That’s easy. It’s the difference between high school and parenthood. We are all, at some point, creatures of society, pinched and bent by peer pressures and political fads. Then (it is to be hoped) we grow up, and take part in shaping the world we live in: civil society. Instead of doing what everyone else does, we begin to do what we think is right. Little things, big things. The goal of civil society, to which each of us must make a personal contribution of some kind or other, is the protection of its members, who are simply our neighbors, without patronizing or infantilizing them. As a rule, civil society works indirectly: laws and customs conduce to the general benefit. That’s why our current laws about corporations (as persons, in particular) are so uncivil: they expose many of our neighbors to the caprices of a handful of business managers. To the extent that those managers are neighbors, they deserve protection, too; what they don’t deserve is privilege and advantage as a matter of law. Privileges and advantages will always be with us, just as will “special needs” — that awful euphemism for disadvantage. But the law —and our customs — ought to be more effectively blind to privilege and advantage than it is.
In a well-ordered civil society, everyone has a home that is decent and secure, and nobody worries about hunger or routine medical care. Everyone receives an education: an introduction to the world that we share, with a focus on the many problems that our struggles for a better world have encountered during recorded history. Economies strive to be local. I am not saying anything remotely visionary or imaginative here: it is nothing but a basic socialist program, and it has so far proved to be unattainable. I believe that the difficulty has always been impatience — that and a certain thick-headedness (among reformers) about private property, which is vital in principle if not absolutely. (By which I mean that the notion of unlimited private property is dubious.) Political reform is still saddled with the short-sighted zeal for immediate achievement that I look to women to see beyond.
Hannah Arendt believed that two things were essential for civil society: honest promises (promises that are kept) and generosity (or forgiveness). We would be fools to expect to meet with these boons at every turn, but we can certainly expect ourselves to offer them. While we must never offer more than we can actually give, we ought (to adapt an established principle of physical fitness) to offer a little more than is quite comfortable.
Above all, we must worry a lot less about our selves and a lot more about our minds.
Daily Blague news update: FIFA and Fassbinder.