Investigations of a Dog

I’m still dreaming of a time when everyone is sick to death of Labour and Tories, but that time isn’t now. There are still some crumbs of comfort:

• We already have fixed term parliaments. This is a major reform which takes an unfair advantage away from parties in government.
• The coalition agreement commits the government to making the House of Lords elected by Proportional Representation. The result of the referendum on AV for the Commons does not affect this. The Lords could potentially end up being more democratic and representative than the Commons!
• No more than 28% of the electorate actively supports the current system. While only 13% voted for AV, in absolute terms that amounts to more than 6 million people. We are not going to shut up or go away just because a different 12 million people say so. The uncommitted 59% is still potentially open to persuasion by either side. There are also many people who are not currently allowed to vote but probably should be (16 and 17-year-olds, prisoners, immigrants without full citizenship).
• Now that AV has been discredited, STV is the only alternative for the Commons. We can expect supporters of electoral reform to be more united and more enthusiastic in future.
• While the current system is still broken there are at least opportunities to bleed through the cracks. All parties will still have a chance to win seats with less than a third of the vote. Many Labour and Tory supporters have gambled on this advantaging their own party more than the others, but even if this gamble pays off the Lib Dems will not be silenced.
• Maybe liberals will now have to take the problem of ideological hegemony more seriously. The people who voted No are not necessarily stupid or evil (but those who actively campaigned for a No vote probably are), and they have not necessarily been tricked by propaganda. It’s just that to many people it’s common sense that we should keep what we’ve got because it’s ‘just normal’, and that the majority, or the biggest minority, should get everything while other groups are excluded and erased because ‘there has to be a clear winner’ and ‘someone has to lose’. These assumptions are so deeply embedded that they are seen as natural, self-evident and completely beyond question, rather than policies in a political manifesto which are up for debate. In this situation having better arguments is not enough. People need to be encouraged to question their own ideological assumptions, but they will probably find this difficult and disturbing. Tackling this problem will require liberals to challenge one of their own assumptions: that people make the best decisions when left to their own devices. Freeing people from state control is only half the battle. They also need to emancipate themselves from mental slavery.
• In future I will do more to help the Lib Dems and electoral reform (although more than I’ve done in the past might still not be very much!). The referendum has just confirmed that British politics is currently dominated by fear, ignorance, resentment and bullying. The Liberal Democrats currently offer the best chance of a positive alternative. (The Green Party offers the second best chance, so I wouldn’t mind helping them at the same time.) I might not have started voting Lib Dem so soon, or at all, if it wasn’t for my friend Andrew Hickey. One man can make a difference (say this in Richard Basehart voice for maximum effect).
• On the same day as the referendum we had a parish council election. There were nine candidates and eight vacancies, and the ballot papers said ‘vote for no more than eight candidates’. This is confusing, it breaks the principle of one person one vote, and does not give one clear winner. The people have clearly decided that they don’t want electoral systems like this. The No2AV campaign will now have to seek further reform to bring all other elections in line with First Past the Post. No2ParishCouncils!
• I promised that I’d post more if we lost the referendum. Don’t expect quality – my good writing is all going into the book – but quantity might be slightly greater than it has been in the last few months.

From the Journal of the House of Lords, 19 December 1644:

Whereas some Doubts have been raised, whether the next Fast shall be celebrated, because it falleth on the Day which heretofore was usually called The Feast of the Nativity of our Saviour: The Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled do Order and Ordain, That Public Notice be given, that the Fast appointed to be kept on the last Wednesday in every Month ought to be observed, until it be otherwise Ordered by both Houses of Parliament; and that this Day particularly is to be kept with the more solemn Humiliation, because it may call to Remembrance our Sins, and the Sins of our Forefathers, who have turned this Feast, pretending the Memory of Christ, into an extreme Forgetfulness of Him, by giving Liberty to carnal and sensual Delights, being contrary to the Life which Christ Himself led here upon Earth, and to the spiritual Life of Christ in our Souls; for the sanctifying and saving whereof, Christ was pleased both to take a human Life, and to lay it down again.

And from an affidavit given to Parliament on 7 January 1647:

That, in Pursuance of the Directory and the National Covenant, your Petitioner acquainted his People, the Lord’s-day before, that they should not observe Christmas-day, because a Penalty is laid on those Ministers who do not observe the Directory, and by it Holidays are not to be continued;

Meanwhile, the Church of Scotland had no official Christmas or Easter celebrations for nearly 400 years from 1560 to 1958 (Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, p. 179).

So there was a time when Christmas was banned in Britain, but it was done by British Christians who didn’t think the traditional festivities were Christian enough. It wasn’t changed to Winterval because of political correctness.

Following on from my last post about ideology, I want to introduce a new concept which I’ll probably be mentioning a lot in the future: the FedEx Arrow. I got this from yukie1013 via Debi Linton. The basic idea is that the FedEx logo has an arrow in it. Some people notice it and some people don’t, but once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it. This is analogous to ideological assumptions in texts (and for the historian this applies whether those texts are fiction, primary sources, or secondary works; it also applies to films, comics, art and any other cultural artefact you can think of). Some people notice ideology in a text, and some people don’t. Once you’ve noticed it you can’t make it go away, and that changes the meaning for you.

Probably my first major experience of this effect was the film The Spitfire Grill. Maybe it was never a great film but I used to really like it. It was kind of like Twin Peaks re-imagined as a chick flick, which somehow appealed to me. But then I read somewhere on the internet that it was anti-abortion propaganda funded by the Catholic Church. That wasn’t particularly obvious from the film itself. Although it was obviously very sentimental and manipulative, Percy’s situation was so far removed from reality that I didn’t connect it with real women having real abortions. It doesn’t really matter whether the rumour is true or not, because once the possibility was there in my head it wouldn’t go away and I started to notice things in the film which were definitely there but which I hadn’t noticed before. Suddenly it became unwatchable because it seemed so misogynistic. The message I get from it now is not only that if you have an abortion you’re a murderer who deserves to die, but that if someone rapes you and gets you pregnant, and you decide that you definitely won’t have an abortion, but the rapist beats you up until you have a miscarriage, that you’re still a murderer and deserve to die. Now it doesn’t quite say that explicitly. Percy doesn’t actually get tried and executed for the death of her unborn baby. But it’s strongly implied that she has an unbearable burden of guilt that won’t ever go away until she dies. No-one ever tells her it’s not her fault. Yes, I’ve spoilt it now, but spoilers or not, just don’t watch it. I’m never going to watch it again.

But as Debi says, seeing the arrow doesn’t have to ruin something completely. It’s still possible to enjoy something while seeing the arrows in it. I really like old TV action series like The Sweeney and The Professionals even though they’re full of casual racism, misogyny and homophobia. Actually, having watched every single episode of both of them earlier this year (there’s a limited range of things you can do when you’re recovering from RSI) I think they’re not quite as bad as they’re often assumed to be, but there are still lots of problems with them. I can still be influenced by Nietzsche even though I can see that he had some very dodgy ideas about race and inadvertently encouraged the Nazis. The Smiths will probably always be my favourite band despite Morrissey’s blatantly horrible misogyny in songs like “Pretty Girls Make Graves” (and the fact that it’s such a great song probably just makes it all the more dangerous).

So that’s the FedEx arrow. Try and spot some. They’re everywhere even if you don’t realise it.

A couple of weeks ago George Simmers at Great War Fiction posted about some problems with applying the Marxist concept of ideological hegemony to the outbreak of the First World War. He criticized some vaguely Marxist influenced historians and literary critics who said that people were tricked by propaganda into supporting the war and then became disillusioned. I wanted to reply to his post, but every time I drafted a comment in my head it just ended up saying “I don’t really know”. I do know that George is right to say “These are words to be used with care.” Like many things, the concept of ideology can be useful if used well but can also be counterproductive if used badly. So in this post I’m going to try and explain what ideology means to me, and how it’s useful in my own work. Bear that in mind while reading, as when you see the words “ideology is”, that’s shorthand for “I think ideology is”, and not the definite assertion that it looks like. (more…)