‘The Opposite of Faith is not Doubt, it is Certainty’

Sunday, March 11th, 2012

On 9th July 2009 Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, stood weeping in a graveyard in Nottinghamshire. His daughter, Annie, phoned him from America; it was her birthday. Alarmed at her father’s state, she then called his wife, Jean.

“She called her mother,” he recalls, “and said, ‘You’d better get in touch with Dad, he’s standing in a graveyard crying’ But Jeannie knew what I had gone down there to do…. I was looking at those gravestones. I remember those old guys more vividly than almost anything else in my life and I decided to find out what was going on by writing this book.”

The book is Leaving Alexandria: A  Memoir of Faith and Doubt. It is a beautifully written and often very funny emotional and intellectual self-exploration by one of the most extraordinary churchmen of our time. Once known by the tabloids as the ‘barmy bishop’ for his views on God and gay marriage, he has become in old age – he is 78 – a man who lost his belief in God belief but gained, in the process, a rare kind of spiritual genius.

“The opposite of faith,” he says with piercing insight, “is not doubt, it is certainty.”

He is now agnostic which, for him, is the acceptance of ignorance and uncertainty as the inevitable basis of the human condition. He simply laughs at the idea that the human mind can ever be capable of grasping ultimate reality. But mostly he weeps – he chokes up five times in the course of our conversation – when he thinks of the past, of poetry, of suffering, of his old churches and of the world’s need for ‘redemptive pity’.

“Man, man,” he says, quoting Dostoyevsky, “one cannot live quite without pity.”

He simply laughs at the idea that the human mind can ever be capable of grasping ultimate reality

Holloway lives in Edinburgh’s Morningside, a few yards from ‘Holy Corner’, a crossroads with four thunderous stone churches and a Tesco Metro, “our most recent temple”. Today his wife is in London looking after their two grandchildren and he is alone with his dog, a delirious border terrier named Daisy, in the cosy confines of his stone terraced house. A lean, fit man – he walks the Pentland Hills with Daisy – his almost hairless head is that of a prophet or, perhaps, of the saint he wanted to be. His accent is genteel east coast with its overtones of mischief and irony, though more often, with him, of grief.

That graveyard was by Kelham Hall, just outside Newark. It used to be the home of the Society of the Sacred Mission, an Anglican order which trained Holloway in the priesthood. The son of a poor  and not very religious Glasgow family, he gravitated towards the faith only, at Kelham, to find himself in conflict with its most austere demands. Notably he felt guilt about his own perfectly ordinary sexual urges. Now he blames St Paul and St Augustine for Christianity’s morbid obsession with sex.

“It’s not doctrinal but it became the tail that wags the whole dog… When you think of dear old lusty St Jerome, who was obsessed with sex himself, who said the only good thing about marriage was that it breeds virgins. They want the human race to die out by stopping breeding.”

As a priest, he was happy to marry divorcees. He empathised with the pain they had been through and their determination to try again.

“We are all sexual convalescents of one sort or another.”

As bishop, he campaigned for gay marriage. This led to the one of the funniest – though also one of the most horrible – moments in the book. In a toilet in Windsor he is accosted by an Asian bishop who accuses him of consigning gays to hell by encouraging them in their sin.

“I resisted the impulse to deck him,” he writes, “and left him to go on pissing his wormwood and gall into the Queen’s urinal.”

Also in the book is a story of a close, loving yet celibate friendship with another Kelham trainee. One review linked this with his gay marriage campaign and resulted, much to his amusement, in emails from friends asking, “You’re not gay are you?” He laughs it off.

We are all sexual convalescents of one sort or another.

“I think if I were gay I’d know it by now and, being the kind of person I am, I would have tried it.”

In 1999 he published a book called Godless Morality and that, combined with his own admitted institutional disloyalty, led to his resignation from the Edinburgh bishopric.

“I disappointed,” he says sorrowfully, “many people.”

In this book he writes of  that time, “I felt glutted with the verbal promiscuity of religion and the absolute confidence with which it talks about what was beyond our knowing.”

He had to “find his soul’ and so he launched on a host of public jobs – chair of the Scotrtish Arts Council, for example – and on a series of books which reaches and personal and spiritual climax with Leaving Alexandria. (Alexandria was the resonantly-named town where he grew up.)

He still loves the church and, this, week he watched with sorrow as Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, was forced by church politics to come out against gay marriage. He loves and admires Williams as “one of the most profound theologians there has ever been” but points out that he has been given an impossible job.

Occupy were engaging in a prophetic act, he says, and, in their hearts, the priests knew it.

“I’m depressed by the way the church has responded to gay marriage because they have shown no generosity or magnanimity…. They claim the right to define words and they define marriage in a way that excludes the possibility of people of the same sex doing it. They once defined ‘priest’ in a way that excluded the possibility of women doing it. But we change the definition of words as the social reality of our lives change. I am saddened by the sheer philosophical illiteracy of it all.”

Living by fixed codes, he says, makes people do the opposite of what they know in their hearts to be right. It is this that has left the Church of England “profoundly compromised”.  He points to the contrast between the magnificence of St Paul’s and the ragged tents of the Occupy protesters that, until this week, filled its forecourt. Occupy were engaging in a prophetic act, he says, and, in their hearts, the priests knew it.

“We are all profoundly compromised. We try to follow this mad revolutionary who believed in a kind of mad, bringable-in commonwealth of love and forgiveness and compassion and mercy and the church carries that memory and yet it’s all dressed up, it’s in big houses, it’s all decorated and it knows in its heart if Jesus came in he’d be sad before he was angry. The Dean who resigned, he was a lovely man, I bet he knew that the system meant he could couldn’t actually identify what is the true reality.”

And yet his fondness for the Church of England  seems undiminished.  He fears an evangelical takeover is currently “draining a lot of the old liberalism of the church”, but, on the whole, it has been “a very benign way of being religious”. He still attends his old church – Old St Paul’s in Edinburgh – and even preaches there but, as an agnostic, he has to stick to “a very narrow bandwidth” for fear of offedning the believers.

The two big points about Holloway are his open eagerness and his sensitivity. He is always experimenting, most hilariously when he once got an American to help him “speak in tongues”. He started babbling so wildly that he had to hide in the toilet on the train home. By the time he got to Edinburgh he was convinced he was speaking perfect Mandarin and terrified a “wee Chinese lassie” by babbling incomprehensibly at her. But this whole book is also an experiment, an attempt to explain himself to himself and to define a way of living within our predicament as he sees it – always disappointed, utterly uncertain and ultimately ignorant.

It is his sensitivity, however, which endows him with his own peculiar greatness.  His regular tears are not of self-pity or sentimentality but of empathy.

“I love that bit in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory when he says that hatred is a failure of the imagination. Even in the brute, even in the tyrant, there is a pitiful humanity and unless we can get in touch with that in ourselves we cannot empathise with others.”

Now he faces death without expectation. He wants to be cremated and his ashes to be scattered by histhree  children on the heather-clad summit of Scald Law, the highest of his beloved Pentlands. He doesn’t expect to meet his maker but, in case he does, be warned, God. This guy has a few perfectly reasonable complaints and, believe me, he’s serious.

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April is the Cruellest Copyright

Sunday, March 4th, 2012

The first 70 of Bob Dylan’s recorded songs were copies, according to a Library of Congress musicologist. Two-thirds of his tunes from that period were lifted from traditional British, African and American songs. He also ruthlessly plundered the works of the folk singer Woody Guthrie and the blues singer Robert Johnson. In Chronicles, his autobiography, Dylan admits he writes by running somebody else’s song through his head: “At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”

This is no insult to Dylan’s genius: Shakespeare routinely stole his plots, and TS Eliot’s great poem The Waste Land was, in part, a pre-internet version of the “mashup”, a collage of the work of others. As Eliot said: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” The point is not the theft, it is the fact that art comes from art, that any creator is constantly in debt. When Dylan heard Rimbaud’s line “Je est un autre” — I is another — he recognised it at once. It made, he said, “perfect sense”, as it would to any magpie mind.

Fifty years on from Dylan’s beginnings, it may still make perfect sense, but “I is another” has become a legally risky doctrine. Let me explain by breaking the law: April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land…

This is no insult to Dylan’s genius: Shakespeare routinely stole his plots

I have not asked permission of the Eliot estate (via his publisher, Faber & Faber) to quote the first lines of The Waste Land; and, if I did, it would be months before I got it, and I would have to pay a fee. Yet I could say those lines to you and, as they represent the opening of one of the greatest works of art of the modern era, they form an important part of our common culture. Still, they are protected by copyright, and will be until the end of 2035, 70 years after Eliot’s death. This, you may reasonably think, is daft, because I can just cut and paste those lines from an internet copy of the entire poem.

It is thanks to the internet that copyright law is now more fiercely applied than ever before. Electronic territory is being enclosed as ruthlessly as common land was enclosed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Indeed, the American scholar Lewis Hyde describes this as the “second enclosure”: we have entered a world in which the young Dylan might have been crushed by lawyers.

“The second enclosure,” Hyde writes, “had not yet settled over the cultural commons, and it was thus a lot easier for him to become himself, a collective being with both great powers of absorption and great gifts to bestow.”

Hyde’s book The Gift (1983) was a brilliant and critically applauded defence of the value of art and creativity in the modern world. His latest, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership, is a call for a radical reform of copyright law to ensure the protection of the cultural common land on which we can all graze. “There is a threat,” he says. “I feel that many things we used to assume were our common property turn out to be vulnerable to capture, and there’s a sort of submerged culture war going on, in which people with a clear economic interest are happily fencing off things the rest of us assumed we have a right to use.”

He was inspired by a law passed in the 1990s that, under pressure from the entertainment industry, extended significantly the time for which works were copyrighted. “There was no clear evidence of public benefit,” he says. “I was irritated by that. It was a power grab on the part of commercial interests to take something from the public domain that should be preserved or dedicated to other public ends. I began to think about the way we now begin to have fights over how we think about the value and the ownership of cultural property.”

Perhaps Hyde’s most terrifying example is the enclosure of the works of Martin Luther King by his son Dexter Scott King. Believe it or not, even “I have a dream”, arguably the greatest speech of the 20th century, is now hedged about with legal sanctions. It is part of who we are, yet it cannot be printed without permission and crippling payments.

So what has happened? One answer is the end of scarcity. “Copyright exercised legal controls over the scale of scarce commodities,” says William Patry, senior copyright counsel at Google, “but it is not true now that things are scarce.”

Patry is the author of How to Fix Copyright, another new book demanding reform. His big point is that technology has changed everything by overthrowing the idea of the unique, physical version. Any music or print file can be reproduced in an instant. Furthermore, people — especially the young — do not pursue ownership of anything. Rather, they just want access. “I’m an old-fashioned guy,” Patry says. “I like physical things. But most younger kids want access, they don’t want to own a physical copy. So a copyright law concerned with copies doesn’t make a lot of sense — you can’t enforce artificial scarcity when you have digital abundance.”

In pre-18th-century England, guild printers were licensed to produce books, an effective monopoly. This was broken in 1710 by the Statute of Anne, which took copyright away from the printers and gave it to the authors. The statute formed the foundation of copyright throughout the world for the next 300 years and, along with patent law, is generally regarded as one of the great triumphs of legal history, laying the foundations for the wealth enjoyed by the industrialised nations. If Hyde and Patry are right, that period is now over.

Neither is against a system of copyright that rewards creators for their work, but both feel that the old system is failing, and that the imperious extension of copyright powers since the 1990s is a disaster for free speech and creativity.

‘So a copyright law concerned with copies doesn’t make a lot of sense — you can’t enforce artificial scarcity when you have digital abundance’

They are not alone. Negativland is partly an experimental San Francisco band, partly a legal cause. Its members make collages of music samples, a method that landed them with a famous legal case when U2 sued over a single called, well, U2, a provocation compounded by the fact that the single was a parody of a U2 song. Negativland effectively back Hyde and Patry when they speak of the way they use the deluge of available material — “pranks, media hoaxes, advert­ising, media literacy, the evolving art of collage, the bizarre banality of suburban existence, creative anticorporate activism in a media-saturated multinational world, file sharing, intellectual property issues, wacky surrealism, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in a digital age, and artistic and humorous observations of mass media and mass culture”.

Or, as Hyde puts it: “All of us presently live in a soup of commercially and politically motivated stories, images and music.” The only way we can make sense of this soup and avoid drowning is by reprocessing it as our own private narrative or as art. It would seem to be impossible not to be a sampler. Yet this is precisely what the copyright hawks would prevent us from doing.

Hyde is generally a pessimist about this state of affairs, assuming that the rich and powerful will have their way, but bottom-up projects like Negativland give him hope, as does Creative Commons, a Silicon Valley not-for-profit organisation that augments copyright. So, for example, a CC licence may allow public use of an image, subject to certain conditions that ensure only a few key rights for the owner, such as commercial exploitation.

CC is crucial to the development of Wikipedia, as it allows extensive use of its material. It was started by Lawrence Lessig, an academic and activist who has warned of the dangers of a “permission culture”, in which “creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past”.

Incontestably worthy as all of this may sound, there is a problem. The other side of the coin is institutional collapse in the face of digital abundance. The existence of every media industry is now threatened by the routine and almost universal undermining of the old traditions of copyright and by the sheer cheapness of electronic reproduction.

The Silicon Valley pioneer Jaron Lanier has spoken eloquently of the destruction of the musical middle class — engineers, producers and so on — by the economic catastrophe of illegal downloads and the deflationary pressures of the internet. This, he points out, is exactly what the early internet idealists did not want to happen. “In my view,” he says, “music is the canary down the coal mine for humanity. If the musical middle class is killed, then eventually the whole of the middle class will be killed.”

Yet it is hard to see how this middle class can be saved on any kind of scale, now that recording is more or less a defunct or loss-leading business. The earnings of the big bands — U2, the Rolling Stones — come overwhelmingly from touring, and, increasingly, recordings are simply the promotional tools for gigs. “Musicians,” Hyde says, “have the natural monopoly on their own live performance.”

Artists learning to switch their income streams is not a new development. Charles Dickens used to complain that the Americans were defrauding him of his royalties, but in fact he made a fortune out of giving readings and lectures in the USA. Ultimately, the best protection of the artist’s income may lie in a change of business plan.

As ever in the digital world, nobody really knows. Yet, arcane and complex though it is, the status of copyright law is now one of the most important problems facing our culture. On one side are the old media players, whose instinctive response is to extend legal protection as far as possible. (Jack Valenti, the late boss of the Motion Picture Association of America, was once asked how long copyright should last. Forever minus one day, he replied.) On the other side are the internet radicals who would make everything free, and who ignore the fact that this would all but destroy the incentive to create.

In the middle are thinkers like Patry and Hyde, who want to preserve a viable way of life for the artist while protecting the landscape of the cultural commons, a place where we can all play. If they are right, then copyright must be shrunk radically, and artists must be made to consider what Hyde calls “copyduties”, their obligations to the past and to the people who made them.

“Dear Landlord,” sang Dylan (breaking the law again here), “please don’t put a price on my soul.” But, in the end, someone, somehow, must.

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Pale PJ the Gamine-Goth

Sunday, February 26th, 2012

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Real Cinemas Will Destroy the Mulitplexes

Sunday, February 26th, 2012

Like most discerning people, I had stopped going to the cinema at Whiteleys, in Bayswater. It was a bog-standard multiplex, apparently designed by somebody who hated humanity not quite, but almost, enough to go on a killing spree. We all know about multiplexes: the auditoriums cold (keeps down the smells, apparently — nice), the carpets usually sticky, the staff surly, the brats restive and, of course, the food packed in the noisiest wrappers known to man. The tickets are pricey and the disgusting food and flat Cokes so expensive, they are bought only by people so up to their eyeballs in debt that it really doesn’t matter any more.

Yet here I am in the new Whiteleys Odeon, climbing the stairs to something called, seductively, the Lounge. Having paid £15 for a matinée ticket for Man on a Ledge, I now find myself arriving in a gastro-bar expensively kitted out approximately in the style of a Roger Moore-era Bond movie. Polite, smiling staff flock to my side and usher me to a table, where I am given a glass of merlot and a menu “overseen” by the star chef Rowley Leigh — so not nachos and hot dogs, but stuff like chicken and goat’s cheese mousse with mesclun and hazelnut toast (£8.50).

Entering the auditorium, I am confronted by giant adjustable armchairs with attached tables, and a hostess who shows me to my seat and says she will be looking after me. Planes have been trying to be like cinemas for the past few decades; now cinemas are trying to be like planes.

The hostess feels a little excessive, but, succumbing to her charms and to Rowley, I order salsify fritters with aïoli (£6) — excellent — and another glass of merlot (£6) — meh. The film is a routine caper with a flawed plot, and the experience ends up costing me £33. But, well, previously there was no chance I would come here. Now I know I’ll be back.

The tickets are pricey and the disgusting food and flat Cokes so expensive, they are bought only by people so up to their eyeballs in debt that it really doesn’t matter any more.

Sadly, 90% of movies in Britain are seen not in Lounges, but in cold, noisy, sticky and usually out-of-town multiplexes. These aliens arrived in the mid-1980s, an Amer­ican import, as a way of making cinemas more efficient in the face of the long post-war decline in British audiences — from 1.6 billion admissions in 1946 to 54m in 1984. They worked. By 1991, attendances were back up to 100m. There were, of course, casualties. Town-centre, single-screen cinemas closed, leaving a legacy of listed but unuseable art-deco palaces.

Annual admissions now hover around 160m-170m, the variations almost entirely dependent on the number of blockbusters in a given year. Last year, there was a spike because of The King’s Speech. But there is a dark cloud on the cinema horizon: home entertainment. Giant flatscreens, surround sound and internet streaming services offering increasingly close to first-run movies will tempt people to stay at home. Can the multi­plexes, can cinemas in general, survive? Is the flatscreen the industry’s iPod, Kindle or iPad moment?

James Hannaway looks thoughtful. “Well,” he says, “the multiplexes were built for the wrong purpose, and they built them out of town. They weren’t designed to show films, they were designed to sell popcorn and hot dogs. They took off in the States, then expanded around the world their philosophy that the film was secondary.”

Hannaway, a very dapper 64-year-old, runs what I can unhesitatingly say is the best cinema I have ever attended: the Rex, in Berkhamsted. One of those town-centre deco palaces, it was bought by Hannaway with the aid of a silent partner in 2004. They had lost the palatial foyer to a restaurant, but the magnificent interior was intact. It was all restored and the seating was cut from 1,100 to 300 — big armchairs in the circle, tables and chairs in the stalls.

Tickets go on sale on the third Saturday of every month, and usually they sell out at once. Some are held back and raffled to people who turn up on the night. Food is reasonable, mainly contained in silent plastic tubs; if you’re in the stalls, it will be served at your table. Seat prices are low by London standards — the highest is £10 for a seat at a table, or £8 for one in the circle.

Sitting with Hannaway in the foyer before a showing of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is like being with grandad at a giant family party. Children walk in and say, “Hi, James.” Hannaway does a little speech on the stage before the film. “Now, children, this film is in a brand-new technology — 2-D!” He is no fan of 3-D. Finally, and most magically of all, the kids then watch the entire film in rapt silence. That never happens in a multiplex. “It’s because it’s an event, something special,” he says. “The children know that. And you won’t stick to the carpet here.”

In the foyer are a long shelf of movie books and an old film-editing machine. It was one of Stanley Kubrick’s. The Kubrick family live nearby and are supporters of the Rex. Meanwhile, Hannaway has been lured, somewhat reluctantly, into taking on another cinema — the old Odeon in St Albans, renamed the Odyssey in honour of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Much of the £1m needed to buy the building has been raised from local people. He has turned away millions from venture capitalists because he doesn’t want any pressure to maximise profits at the expense of the audience. “Pressure from them,” he says, “would be the wrong pressure.”

What the Rex proves is that there is a demand for real local cinemas, and that people really do want to go out for their films, but preferably not to an out-of-town multiplex. At the level of the experience, there is no comparison. The Rex’s bustling sense of excitement is the exact opposite of the cold alienation of the multiplex. Furthermore, in new or restored cinemas, you will often find a better picture, as they will have bought the latest digital projectors.

In its style and local roots, the Rex is unique, but “real” cinemas are springing up around the country, just as real beer reappeared when real drinkers turned against the chemical horrors of “keg” in the 1970s. The small Picturehouse and Everyman chains have led the way with, as far as possible, town-centre sites and an “event” style, including proper restaurants and bars.

“We focus on being at the heart of the community, rather than on the periphery. We want people to be able to walk to the site,” says Andrew Myers, chief executive of Everyman. “People are still interested in going to multiplexes,” says Marc Allenby, head of commercial development at Picturehouse — “at least through lack of choice. We’re offering something different and challenging the multiplex experience.”

These two chains don’t go as far as the Rex, with grandad in the foyer conducting the raffle and greeting regulars by name. Rather, they are competing head to head not only with the multiplexes, but with other high-street attractions, especially the buoyant restaurant culture. The Hackney Picturehouse, for example, looks as much like a modern cafe/bar/restaurant as it does a cinema. “These are venues in their own right,” Allenby says. “They’re not sterile or closed.”

Meanwhile, there are plenty of Rex-like one-offs springing up. Supported by big names such as Michael Palin, Mark Kermode and Maureen Lipman, the Phoenix, in East Finchley, a cinema that is exactly 100 years old, is run by a local charitable trust. With one screen and 255 seats, it manages to hold its own against nearby multiplexes, largely because, as with the Rex, people want to go to a “real” cinema. “We love what we do,” says Kate McCar­thy, the operations manager. “The Artist was a classic example. This cinema was showing films when they were silent, so people wanted to see it here, not at the Odeon, because it was the sort of film we would have been showing in the 1920s.”

People are still interested in going to multiplexes,at least through lack of choice. We’re offering something different and challenging the multiplex experience.

Then there is the Broadway, in Notting­ham, the Kino, in Hawkhurst, Kent, Cinema City, in Norwich, the Electric, in Notting Hill, Rich Mix, in Bethnal Green, and so on and so on. In America, typically, there’s a new spin on “real cinema” — a unique programme. The improbably named reRun Gastropub Theater, in Brooklyn, has 60 reclaimed car seats and a 12ft screen, offering an “intimate art-house theater experience”. It shows festival films that might not otherwise be distributed.

So, “real cinema” is well on the way to matching the real-ale movement of the 1970s. But can it possibly work as well? Furthermore, can premium offers such as the Lounge at Whiteleys or “VIP” seats save the multiplexes?

Nobody I spoke to, with the exception of the maverick industry outsider Hannaway, came straight out and attacked the multiplexes. Myers and Allenby said they served their purpose; McCarthy said they were happy to redirect people who turned up at the Phoenix to see Transformers to the Odeon. But it seems to me, and they hesitantly seemed to agree, that “real cinemas” are better placed to withstand the giant-screen-and-surround-sound-at-home culture. “Our offering,” Allenby says cautiously, “may be more sustainable.”

The trick is to revive as far as possible the idea of cinema as an event, an experience that beats staying at home with your giant screen. Much of this is achieved by placing cinemas among shops, instead of on windblown sites also occupied by B&Q and Comet. Even more is achieved by having grandad to greet you and a sensational art-deco interior. It also depends on having the right films, but, happily, this need not be entirely determined by the whim of Hollywood. All these cinemas make a point of showing old films — the Rex, of course, runs It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas — and they get full houses by screening live opera and theatre. Running films in repertory also helps, because it gives customers a reason to come more than once a week. But, of course, in the film business, as the great screenwriter William Goldman imperish­ably observed: “Nobody knows anything.”

My guess — call it wishful thinking — is that the multiplexes are dying, and that the gap at the premium and local end of the market will continue to widen. Cinema must survive: movies are made to be shown in darkness, on a big screen, to many people. The rest is just TV and shopping.

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Against the Neo-Atheists

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

Two atheists – John Gray and Alain de Botton – and two agnostics – Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I – meet for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Bayswater, London. The talk is genial, friendly and then, suddenly, intense when neo-atheism comes up. Three of us, including both atheists, have suffered abuse at the hands of this cult. Only Taleb seems to have escaped unscathed and this, we conclude, must be because he can do maths and people are afraid of maths.

De Botton is the most recent and, consequently, the most shocked victim. He has just produced a book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, mildly suggesting that atheists like himself have much to learn from religion and that, in fact, religion is too important to be left to believers. He has also proposed an atheists’ temple, a place where non-believers can partake of the consolations of silence and meditation.

This has been enough to bring the full force of a neo-atheist fatwa crashing down on his head. The temple idea in particular made them reach for their best books of curses.

“I am rolling my eyes so hard that it hurts,” wrote the American biologist and neo-atheist blogger P Z Myers. “You may take a moment to retch. I hope you have buckets handy.” Myers has a vivid but limited prose palette.

There have been threats of violence. De Botton has been told he will be beaten up and his guts taken out of him. One email simply said, “You have betrayed Atheism. Go over to the other side and die.”

‘You may take a moment to retch. I hope you have buckets handy.’ Myers has a vivid but limited prose palette.

De Botton finds it bewildering, the unexpected appearance in the culture of a tyrannical sect, content to whip up a mob mentality. “To say something along the lines of ‘I’m an atheist; I think religions are not all bad’ has become a dramatically peculiar thing to say and if you do say it on the internet you will get savage messages calling you a fascist, an idiot or a fool. This is a very odd moment in our culture. Why has this happened?”

First, a definition. By “neo-atheism”, I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.

Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist – indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, “Render unto Caesar” – and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by the cultists.

The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.

“There is this strange supposition,” says the American philosopher Jerry Fodor, “that if you’re a Darwinian you have to be an atheist. In my case, I’m an anti-Darwinian and I’m an atheist. But people are so incoherent on these issues that it’s hard for me to figure out what is driving them.”

The neo-atheist cause has been gathering strength for roughly two decades and recently exploded into very public view. Sayeeda Warsi, co-chairman of the Conservative Party, was in the headlines for making a speech at the Vatican warning of the dangers of secular fundamentalism, which aims to prevent religions from having a public voice or role. Warsi, a Muslim, subdivides propagators of this anti-religious impulse into two categories. First, there are the well-meaning liberal elite, who want to suppress religion in order not to cause offence to anybody. Second, there is the “perverse kind of secular” believer, who wants to “wipe religion from the public sphere” on principle.

“Why,” she asks me, “are the followers of reason so unreasonable?”

As Warsi was on her way to catch her flight to Rome she heard Dawkins, the supreme prophet of neo-atheism, on Radio 4′s Today programme. He was attempting to celebrate a survey that proved, at least to his satisfaction, that supposedly Christian Britain was a fraud. People who said they were Christians did not go to church and knew little of the faith. Giles Fraser, a priest of the Church of England, then challenged Dawkins to give the full title of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Falling into confusion, he failed. Fraser’s point was that Dawkins was therefore, by his own criterion, not a Darwinian. Becoming even more confused, Dawkins exclaimed in his response: “Oh, God!”

“Immediately he was out of control, he said, ‘Oh, God!’” Warsi recalls, “so even the most self-confessed secular fundamentalist at this moment of need needed to turn to the Almighty. It kind of defeats his own argument that only people who go to church have a faith.”

De Botton finds Dawkins a psychologically troubling figure.

“He has taken a very strange position. He’s unusual, in that he came from an elite British Anglican family with all its privileges and then he had this extraordinary career, and now he stands at the head of what can really be called a cult . . . I think what happened was that he has been frightened by the militancy of religious people he has met on his travels and it has driven him to the other side.

De Botton finds Dawkins a psychologically troubling figure.

“It smacks of a sort of psychological collapse in him, a collapse in those resources of maturity that would keep someone on an even keel. There is what psychoanalysts would call a deep rigidity in him.”

I ask Fraser what he thinks are the roots of this ideological rigidity among the neo-atheists. “It coincides with post-9/11,” he says. “The enemy is Islam for them. That was true about [Christopher] Hitchens in an obvious way and Dawkins said something like ‘it was the most evil religion in the world’.

“With Hitchens, it was bound up with liberal interventionism. It is also clearly an Americanisation. It has come over from their culture wars . . . People are pissed off with Dawkins because there is a feeling that we don’t do that over here.”

For me, the events of 9/11 were certainly a catalyst, the new ingredient that turned the already bubbling mix of anti-religious feeling into an explosive concoction. Coming from a scientific family, I had accepted the common-sense orthodoxy that religion and science were two separate but complementary and non-conflicting entities, or what the great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA). I first became aware of my own complacency in this regard when I interviewed Stephen Hawking just before the publication of A Brief History of Time (1988). He had become – it was his then wife who told me this – vehemently anti-religious. And in my presence he was contemptuously anti-philosophical.

There had always been an anti-religious strain in science, a strain that had been present since Galileo and which, indeed, had grown stronger after Darwin. In the postwar period, both Francis Crick and James Watson conceded that one of their main motivations in unravelling the molecular structure of DNA was to undermine religion. It was strengthened even further in the popular imagination when Dawkins expounded the outlines of the neo-Darwinian synthesis in his fine book The Selfish Gene (1976). In the 1990s it became routine to hear scientists – notably in this country Peter Atkins and Lewis Wolpert – pouring scorn on the claims of philosophy and religion. They were, for entirely non-scientific reasons, in a triumph­ant mood. The sales of A Brief History of Time had sent publishing advances for popular science books soaring, and the more astounding the claims, the better the money.

While observing this, I became aware that the ground had shifted beneath my own cosy orthodoxy. Scientistic thinkers were no longer prepared to accept NOMA, the separate, complementary, non-conflicting realms. In the early 1990s I was engaged in a debate with Dawkins at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He said, to much applause, that the existence of God was a scientific issue. If, in effect, God could not live up to the standards of scientific proof, then He must be declared dead. There were no longer two magisteria, but just one, before which we must all bow.

After the September 2001 attacks, all the dams of reticence burst and neo-atheism became a full-blooded ideology, informed by books such as Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, Daniel Dennett’sBreaking the Spell and Christoper Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

These authors became known as the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. It was no accident that their books appeared not just after the 9/11 attacks, but also at a time of neo-Darwinian triumphalism. The Human Genome Project, combined with the popularisation of the latest Darwinian thinking, was presented as an announcement that science had cracked the problem of human life. Furthermore, the rise of evolutionary psychology – an analysis of human behaviour based on the tracing of evolved traits – seemed to suggest that the human mind, too, would soon succumb to the logic of neo-atheism.

After the September 2001 attacks, all the dams of reticence burst and neo-atheism became a full-blooded ideology

It was in the midst of this that Fodor and the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini published What Darwin Got Wrong, a highly sophisticated analysis of Darwinian thought which concluded that the theory of natural selection could not be stated coherently. All hell broke loose. Such was the abuse that Fodor vowed never to read a blog again. Myers the provocateur announced that he had no intention of reading the book but spent 3,000 words trashing it anyway, a remarkably frank statement of intellectual tyranny.

Fodor now chuckles at the memory. “I said we should write back saying we had no intention of reading his review but we thought it was all wrong anyway.”

For him, evolutionary psychology plays a large part in this mindset with its loathing of religion. “I think the story is that we are supposed to
understand why there is religion on Darwinian grounds without having to raise the question as to whether it’s true. But these are just fabricated stories. If you found something with two heads and a horn in the middle you could cook up some story from evolution saying it was just dandy to have two heads with a horn in the middle. It’s just sloppy thinking.”

Ultimately, the problem with militant neo-atheism is that it represents a profound category error. Explaining religion – or, indeed, the human experience – in scientific terms is futile. “It would be as bizarre as to launch a scientific investigation into the truth of Anna Karenina or love,” de Botton says. “It’s a symptom of the misplaced confidence of science . . . It’s a kind of category error. It’s a fatally wrong question and the more you ask it, the more you come up with bizarre and odd answers.”

The project is also curiously pointless. A couple of years ago I hired a car at Los Angeles Airport. The radio was tuned to a religious station. Too terrified to attempt simultaneously to change the channel and drive on the I-405, the scariest road in the world, in a strange car, I heard to my astonishment that Christopher Hitchens was the next guest on a Christian chat show.

In his finest fruity tones and deploying $100 words, Hitchens took the poor presenter apart. Then he was asked if this would be a better world if we disposed of all religions. “No,” he replied. I almost crashed the car.

The answer demonstrates the futility of the neo-atheist project. Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance. One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown. Furthermore, as Hitchens in effect acknowledged and as the neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery, absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn’t.

Happily, the backlash against neo-atheism has begun, inspired by the cult’s own intolerance. In the Christmas issue of this magazine, Dawkins interviewed Hitchens. Halfway through, Dawkins asked: “Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?” At dinner at the restaurant in Bayswater we all laughed at this, but our laughter was uneasy. The history of attempts to destroy religion is littered with the corpses of believers and unbelievers alike. There are many roads to truth, but cultish intolerance is not one of them.

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Rupert Sheldrake’s Alternative Science

Sunday, February 19th, 2012

Richard Dawkins will barely give him the time of day and many other scientists hint darkly that he has gone mad. Since 1981, when a leader in the journal Nature accused him of “pseudoscience” and “finding a place for magic within scientific discussion”, Rupert Sheldrake has been outlawed by the science establishment.

But, before he went rogue, he was accepted as a very distinguished biochemist indeed so he cannot easily be dismissed as an ill-informed fantasist. The origin of his heresy lay in his conviction that biochemistry alone could not solve the problem of how organisms assumed their final form, the process of morphogenesis. He alighted on the idea of morphic resonance. We are all surrounded by as yet undetected fields, which carry information from the past that forms new organisms. Not only that, they carry our memories and store skills. So, thanks to morphic resonance, the first person who learns to ride a bike makes it easier for the second person and so on.

In a series of books, Sheldrake has explored the evidence for and the implications of this idea. This involves ordinary phenomena such as dogs who know when their owner is coming home and the way people seem to know they are being stared at, as well as critiques of the whole edifice of materialist science.

The Science Delusion (a dig at Dawkins’s 2006 atheist tract The God Delusion) is a systematic summary of Sheldrake’s thought. It questions what he describes as the 10 core beliefs of orthodox materialist science. So he asks: Is nature mechanical? Are the laws of nature fixed? Are minds confined to brains? And so on. The book rambles a bit, but, on the whole, it’s a brisk and entertaining read that may not convince you of all his arguments but should convince you he is not mad.

There are two aspects to this: Sheldrake’s own scientific theories and his broad critique of contemporary science. Morphic resonance is widely derided and narrowly supported. Most of the experimental ­evidence is contested, though Sheldrake claims there are “statistically significant” results for occurrences such as knowing that someone is staring at your back, for the transmission of skills and for dogs’ awareness of a returning owner.

This points to a perennial failing of the institution of science (and, in fairness, of most institutions) — dogmatic vanity.

He also comes up with a rather brilliant and, to me, unexpected example that does seem to be adequately explained by his theory. Ever since IQ tests were started, people around the world appear to have been scoring ever higher marks, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. This is so far inexplicable, but what is certain is that there cannot be any such rise in real intelligence. But morphic resonance would, indeed, predict such a result since the more people did IQ tests, the higher the scores would be.

Sheldrake extends his theory to take in psychic phenomena and the possibility of survival after death, and brings in discussions of the efficacy of alternative medicine and the meaning of the placebo effect. His idea that our memories are stored in his fields rather than our heads is also a rebuke to current neuroscience, which tends to assume everything must be discoverable within the physical structure of our brains.

Morphic resonance may be a step too far for you. I simply can’t tell whether it makes sense or not and it is certainly highly speculative. But the very fact of the theory does make a reasonable point that tends to be forgotten. Science is not an unchanging edifice of knowledge, it is constantly in flux and one age’s certainties are often overthrown in an instant, as Newton was by Einstein. Currently, the glaring failure of genetics to produce the medical outcomes we were promised could signal that the human genome is not, after all, our destiny or our identity.

This points to a perennial failing of the institution of science (and, in fairness, of most institutions) — dogmatic vanity. Here Sheldrake is at his most incisive. He is good on certain types of dogmatism. ­Notably there is the widespread conviction that our consciousness is an illusion — “a magical mystery show that we stage for ourselves inside our own heads”, in the words of the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. This is dogmatism because, for Humphrey, consciousness must be an illusion since materialist science can find no way in which matter could become conscious. But, of course, it is nonsense because who is ­suffering from the illusion? — me, my ­consciousness or, in Sheldrake’s words, “Illusion is a mode of consciousness.”

He also quotes the philosopher Paul Churchland, who says mental states cannot exist because they cannot be reduced to the language of neuroscience. There is, I need hardly point out, no such language.

Then there is the disastrous advent of the new scientism — the belief that science and only science is the way to truth and that it will, ultimately, find all truth. This is faith not science and, latterly, it has morphed into the ravings of the militant atheists. ­Scientism, as Sheldrake repeatedly shows, closes minds. For example, scientists ­frequently ignore the possibility of experimental bias in the determination to get the results they want. They are often corrupted — usually by drugs companies — to produce commercially favourable results. ­Furthermore, the peer-review system of ­scientific journals often fails. Marc Hauser, the Harvard professor who was found guilty of falsifying results in experiments on monkeys, was exposed not by peer reviewers but by a whistle-blowing student. ­Science is a method that aspires to a superhuman perspective, an aspiration constantly thwarted by its human practitioners.

Sheldrake, the highly speculative theorist, is fascinating but his ideas often feel like a bit of a cul-de-sac since it is not clear where they can currently be taken. Sheldrake, the critic of science as it is now proselytised, is an invaluable mosquito buzzing around some complacent and intolerant heads.

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A Capital Fellow: John Lanchester

Sunday, February 19th, 2012

A pleasantly rounded, softly spoken, avuncular figure — the first thing you have to say about John Lanchester is that he is nice. Mention his name to anybody who knows him and the response is always the same: “Nice bloke, John.” Niceness rises from him like a fine vapour, ­coating ­everybody in his vicinity. Except bankers’ wives.

“Somebody told me,” he says with a slightly conspiratorial air, “that he overheard a banker’s wife ­saying her husband was working for free this year — this was 2009. What she meant was, he was just getting his basic salary of £300,000, and no bonus. Their sense of entitlement is, in the proper sense of the word, psychotic.”

Inspired by these psychotics — people who don’t process reality in the same way as others and cannot empathise with them — this very nice man has created a vision of such cold nastiness, such inhuman savagery, such entitled selfishness, that, if there were any justice, her very existence would cancel bonuses across the City. Her name is Arabella Yount, and she is a banker’s wife.

“Arabella is important in the sense that she doesn’t really learn anything. One of the conventions that’s over-represented in fiction is people learning things, realising things. Actually, a lot of the time, people don’t realise things. People in books are always realising things, but they almost never do in life. I reckon I’ve made about two choices in my life. Most of the time, you just don’t.”

So, in Lanchester’s new and mighty 650-page novel, Capital, Arabella is exactly the same at the end as she is at the beginning — frigid and uncaring, lost in her vicious dreams of ­self-concern. She cares nothing for her children, less for her ­husband. Sustained by her ­villainous friend Saskia, even as the 2008 crash looms, her only concerns are spas and spending. She doesn’t feel entitled, she is entitlement incarnate.

 this very nice man has created a vision of such cold nastiness, such inhuman savagery, such entitled selfishness, that, if there were any justice, her very existence would cancel bonuses across the City

Were he a slightly less stable and modest character, Lanchester might be feeling pretty entitled himself at this point. Capital arrives with a weight of expectation that would turn any author’s head. “The great London novel” and “I doubt there will be a better novel this year” are just a couple of the pre-publication quotes that have been floating around. Lanchester has heard none of them. He reads nothing about his books.

“I don’t read things. If you read nice things, you have to read ­everything. I just set the switch to ‘Off’. It makes the whole ­process more solipsistic. My wife [the biographer Miranda Carter] says it makes it a much more internal event.”

Capital is set on a single fictional street in London. It is a ­brilliant device, in that it ties the many stories together, but also brilliant in its choice of street. This one is south of the river, but near enough to the centre, and with large enough houses to make it fatally gentrifiable. As a result, by the time the crash comes, the ­setting provides a choppy social mix of bankers, old people, ­Pakistani shop owners, oppor­tunistic Polish builders, traffic wardens and a Premier League footballer. There is even the remote but crucial involvement of an anonymous but hugely successful Banksy-like artist.

It is a panoramic novel and, in every sense, a very traditional one. In fact, Lanchester went out of his way to tell his stories as straightforwardly as possible. While writing it, he read big, solid Victorian novels, and there is a feeling in the book that, in literary terms, the excesses of the 20th century never happened, that the experimental novel is dead.

“If we had been having the conversation in 1970, we’d have been talking about the avant-garde, the nouveau roman, ­Robbe-Grillet and how Joyce had permanently reconfigured the domain of the novel. It’s sort of amazing how the novel has swerved back from all that. It hasn’t happened in the visual arts, in serious music. It hasn’t happened in poetry. But I do think the novel has a slightly different connection with the reading ­public. Having swerved away from them, the novel has swerved back towards the readers. So I gave myself ­permission not to think about the formal things I would normally think about.”

This means that Capital slots neatly into a new wave of novels, by authors such as Chad Harbach and Jonathan Franzen, that are conventionally narrative, character-driven and more sociopolitical and less ­introspective than many of the highly regarded novels of the recent past. What’s different about Lanchester — his niceness and modesty aside — is that he’s ­worried and English. Or, rather, that he’s worried and not quite English.

He was born in Hamburg 50 years ago this week. His father was an employee of what became known as HSBC — it was a real bank back then — who happened to speak German. But his real upbringing was in Hong Kong, from where he was sent, in the best colonial tradition, back to boarding school: Gresham’s, in Holt, Norfolk.

This background gave him two things that feed directly into Capital: an outsider’s perspective on England and an ease with the language and logic of finance. “For a lot of people, banking is an inherently alien subject,” he says. “You can never get to grips with it. Because my dad worked in a bank, I never had that.”

What’s different about Lanchester — his niceness and modesty aside — is that he’s ­worried and English. Or, rather, that he’s worried and not quite English.

Lanchester’s background also gave him something odd, though, something that was to explode into his life in his twenties. To win his father, his mother, who had left a convent, had pretended to be nine years younger than she ­actually was. She even had a false passport in the name of her younger sister. The whole thing seemed to cast a pall of damaging reticence over the family. His father died when he was 21 and at university — St John’s, Oxford — and the event precipitated a breakdown.

“I had panic attacks for about a decade,” he says. “I saw a therapist. The funny thing was that the therapist helped with all sorts of things, but what really helped was ­writing books.

“Writing had this slightly ­magical effect, in that it put things in the past, and the thing that really put it all in the past was writing the book about my parents [Family Romance].”

Meanwhile, having refined his exam-passing technique, Lan­chester suddenly realised, in 1984, when he graduated, that he wasn’t cut out for more academic trials and swerved into jour­nalism. It was a good move. The business was in an expansive mood and, for one brief golden period, understood good writing. He rapidly became an established essayist and, from the 1990s, a restaurant critic. The latter job provided him with the subject of his first novel, The Debt to Pleasure. It won awards, and he was on his way as a novelist.

There was one further, ­significant, swerve. It is now 10 years since his previous novel, Fragrant Harbour, a gap caused by a big intrusion of the nonfiction mode. He actually began Capital in 2005 with what turned out to be a huge misconception. “I assumed what was happening then was a bog-standard property bubble. It’s the sort of thing we all live through, then forget. The culture is so amnesiac — the pre­vious property crash was in 1987, not even 1887.”

Applying the sound novelist’s technique of the desk drawer — putting an effectively finished manuscript away for a few months — he put Capital to one side, only to discover that he had mis­identified the bubble. It wasn’t property that was about to burst, but the entire banking system. “I was completely wrong. It is still absolutely amazing and incomprehensible to me that there hasn’t been a property crash in London, not a proper one. I’m lucky I’m not a trader — I would have lost everything betting against the euro and house prices.”

So, leaving Capital in the desk, he wrote Whoops! Why ­Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, a nonfiction account of what happened in the City. Then he went back to Capital and found it was more or less okay: the ominous cloud hanging over the characters simply turns out to be a banking, rather than a property, crash. “If I hadn’t done Whoops!, I would have altered it more. There would have been the temptation to put in all this explanation, which really doesn’t work in a novel.”

But I said he was worried. Though Capital is not a lament as such, there is a clear feeling in the book that there is something wrong with this society that goes well beyond the crash. “We have returned to almost 19th-century levels of inequality, and that gives you these dramatic juxtapositions of people that you see in Capital. There’s also something quite disturbing about small breakings of the rules. On the bus, there are teenagers who will go deaf by their mid-­twenties — they are ­playing music so loud, it invades ­everybody else’s space.

“These small incivilities are quite consequential for everyday life. You get the feeling we are very precisely not in this together.”

He points out that politicians talk about communities, but urban life is one vast demonstration that there are no such things. He fears Britain is losing its manners and returning to its violent, piratical pre-Victorian, state.

“It’s odd when you see the things that have disappeared from British culture. I remember vul­garity being quite an important negative quality, and restraint being an important virtue. There used to be something morally wrong about public displays of wealth and consumption, flaunting things. All that has vanished.”

He is also worried about ­technology. He has a Mercedes with a problem that can’t be fixed because it’s lost somewhere in its computers. He also points out that, when we use the word “technology”, we mean things that don’t quite work. When technology does work — spectacles, books — it ceases to be technology. There is in all this a background of mystery in his sense of the world that may echo his mother’s deceptions. Certainly, Capital is a mystery book, not just in its overall plot, but in the way all the characters seem puzzled by what is happening to them. London is, of course, the ultimate mystery. We had met in 2 Brydges Place, a club lost down a narrow, dark, Dickensian alley in the West End. As we wrap, I ask him how long he has been a member. “I’m not — I thought you were.”

We stare at each other, baffled, once again, by the dark city. “How the f***,” we say simultaneously, “did we get in?”

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Tom Morris and the Death of Klinghoffer

Sunday, February 12th, 2012

Slightly baby-faced, springy, alert but also distracted, Tom Morris strides through the rehearsal space where he is working, in London’s Docklands. “What’s that?” I say, pointing at a curious distant structure. “Uh?” he says. Okay, no small talk.

Fair enough, really. We have just left a giant room where he has been directing the massed battalions of English National Opera. As Morris has never tackled a full-scale opera before, a certain urge to get on with stuff is understandable. In fact, it’s more than understandable, because the opera is John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, a 1991 piece that inflames Middle Eastern, and specifically Israeli, feelings. Morris’s will be the first London production.

“I lurch,” he says, when we have finally found a little room for big talk, “between moments of being excited and of being absolutely terrified of it.”

Strictly speaking, Morris has done opera before. He did little musical things when he ran Battersea Arts Centre, and he was the producer of Jerry Springer: The Opera. In his production of Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the National, he handled a symphony orchestra, and his War Horse is full of music. But this is full-fat opera, with a grown-up company.

On the other hand, he is at the top of his game. Steven Spielberg has filmed War Horse, purely because he was inspired by the superb stage version Morris co­-directed for the National with Marianne Elliott. Meanwhile, the stage show thunders on in London and New York. Down in Bristol, the Old Vic — “The most beautiful theatre in Britain,” he says — of which he is artistic director, is thriving, and Morris’s acclaimed production of Swallows and Amazons is now on tour. No surprise that John Berry, the artistic director of ENO, started talking to him about developing an opera. The idea was that it would be a new work; Morris liked the idea of the freedom this would offer, as opposed to the straitjacket imposed by the existing repertory. Then Berry sprang Klinghoffer on him.

As Morris has never tackled a full-scale opera before, a certain urge to get on with stuff is understandable.

“We were slowly turning over different ideas, and, in the middle of this, he asked me to take a look at Klinghoffer, saying he wanted to revive it. I thought it was extraordinary. I hadn’t heard it before, though I had heard of it.”

Composed by the American John Adams, with a libretto by the poet Alice Goodman, who wrote the book for Adams’s ­earlier opera Nixon in China, Klinghoffer is about the hijacking of the ship Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985. One man, an elderly, wheelchair-bound American Jew called Leon Klinghoffer, was killed and thrown overboard. The opera, which opened in Brussels and New York in 1991, led to Jewish protests on the basis that it was too sympathetic to the terrorists and their cause. Planned productions in Glyndebourne and Los Angeles did not take place, and the opera has been widely avoided ever since.

The career of Goodman, an American Jew who is now an Anglican rector, and is married to the British poet Geoffrey Hill, was blighted — she was never to write another libretto. Her mistake, she now says, was to show the ­terrorists as human beings. “The bad people in it are not entirely bad,” she has said, “and the good people are not entirely good.”

So how does Morris feel about taking on the first London production? “To be honest, I read the libretto and I was very, very struck by the strengths of its response to a particular situation, in what is the generating conflict of the last quarter of the 20th century.”

He had spent some time in Israel in the 1990s, working with a dance company and as a journalist. Even though he was mixing with liberal Israelis, he was struck by the fact that he was only hearing one side of the story, and he arranged to visit Gaza and the West Bank. “We were in a refugee camp just outside Bethlehem, and we were introduced to a guy who said he would tell me what it was like. He said he was walking past a building with his brother, and a huge piece of masonry fell on his brother and killed him. He looked up and, on the top of the building, he saw two Israeli soldiers laughing. It was emotionally a checkmate narrative, and he was using that to articulate his resistance.”

Both sides, he says, have such “checkmate narratives” — irrefutable injustices inflicted by the other side. An Israeli killed by a terrorist bomb is as absolute a truth as that brother killed by falling masonry. Such things cannot be wished away, but they can be heard. “From that point on,” Morris says, “I understood this conflict in terms of the narratives that sustain each intractable position.”

Morris points to one crucial point in Klinghoffer, where a hijacker tells the ship’s captain about his upbringing. The captain responds by saying that, if his enemies could hear him talk like this, peace would come. “At the heart of the opera,” he says, “is the possibility of listening, of what it would be like if these stories that get locked into each side of the conflict could be exchanged — how do you move from myth­ology and isolation towards a conversation without losing your identity?”

The word terrorism is a problem for him. “It ought to mean the use of terror as a weapon and, by extension, blackmailing a civilian population into agreeing with your position through fear. You can understand how that might apply to the Twin Towers attack and how that applies to our bombing campaign in the second world war. You can say that one of those is a justifiable end, but the idea that the deliberate manipulation of terror is purely the province of poorer soldiers is just nonsense.”

So far Morris has heard of no planned demonstrations to mark this first London production — and anyway, he adds, he has no interest in anybody who objects to the show without seeing it. Perhaps, I suggest, although the two sides remain checkmated, many people, the young in particular, are much more anti-Israel than they were in the early 1990s, so the opera is less likely to provoke outrage.

“When it was first written, the balance of opinion in the West was probably more pro-Israeli than it is now. But people who object to the opinions of fictionalised characters will find things to disagree with on both sides of the argument. I do think that the changed balance of opinion allows us to listen a little more closely to the opera than was the case in 1991. It’s hard to take on board a different point of view when, for whatever reason, you’re feeling angry.”

The fundamental thing, for me, is that the point of engaging artists to do things is that they are likely to see the world differently and to articulate what they see in ways you can’t predict

With such careful rationalisations, Morris is plainly trying to make the opera his own. Like Terry Gilliam, a previous inexperienced opera director hired by ENO, he is used to pursuing his own vision. In opera, however, the director is some way down the pecking order from the composer. “The composer is actually the dramatist, and that may have something to do with Wagner, the fact that he was both composer and dramatist. But it is strange, and it means that, because of the nature and structure of the score, and the way opera houses behave, it’s very, very hard to muck around with that.” He is not especially musical, although he does admit, with a slightly reticent giggle, to having played the trombone. He reckons he can still do it well enough to amuse his daughter, though, strictly speaking, you are “supposed to keep your lip in shape”.

Meanwhile, War Horse gallops on, with real horses in film and puppets on stage. Spielberg’s film is radically different, but Morris pays generous tribute. “His treatment of the whole sequence of running through no man’s land — I’m sure people will go back to that and say it was a definitive moment in film-making.”

More important, he sees the commercial success of the show as a vindication of subsidy. “The one thing about War Horse it’s vital to keep reminding those decision-makers about is that it simply could not have evolved on the basis of commercial investments,” he says. “The fundamental thing, for me, is that the point of engaging artists to do things is that they are likely to see the world differently and to articulate what they see in ways you can’t predict — which includes not being able to predict whether it’s going to make any money or not. The idea that you would invest in a creative industry entirely on the basis of commercial return mis­apprehends the nature of what an artist can offer society.”

The point is delivered with some passion. He is a man who can get carried away with his own feelings, though perhaps not quite to the extent of his older brother. Chris Morris is our master satirist, a contemporary Peter Cook, who made Brass Eye and The Day Today and generally manages to upset people in ways previously unimaginable. But he also made Four Lions, a movie about four amateur British jihadists that succeeded in being a compassionate tragicomedy. Chris is secretive and generally inaccessible, so I ask Morris what he can tell me about his brother’s activities. “Obviously he doesn’t choose to announce his plans through me,” he replies. “But I’d love to see how he’d have approached staging this opera.

“I think Four Lions is a profound piece of political film-making, which mercilessly ridicules its subjects without ever losing its compassion for them. Maybe you should ask him to make an opera out of that.”

Good idea. Now Morris is edgy and wants to get back to the ENO battalions in their giant rehearsal room. Yet there’s one last nervous but ambitious outburst about Klinghoffer. “It is about real stuff. You can’t treat it lightly. John Adams is not a decade-long artist, he is a century-long, life-span artist, a major, major artist of our age. Alice Goodman is an extra­ordinary librettist. If we attend to what artists of that calibre hear in a conflict as protracted and insoluble as this one, we might discover something helpful, if we are sufficiently open-minded. That only makes me feel more nervous, more responsible. But it might lead us to think about opera in a completely different way.”

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Daldry’s 9/11

Sunday, February 5th, 2012

At the Soho Hotel, Stephen Daldry is in a state. He can’t smoke in here, he has a bad cold and he’s edgy about his new film. His conversation is, er, hesitant. “No, er, I don’t think so, no,” he says, and “But I, yeah, no.” “I don’t know” comes up a lot, as do baffled silences. One silence ends with the mysterious words “paid in eggs, you know, chickens”. After a while, I realise he is talking about what will happen if the euro collapses. But there are also sudden flashes of insight — “I think grief has always been my subject, one way or another” — although even they seem hedged and uncertain.

The problem is, I think, that his new film, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, is a bit of a poser and has already divided the critics. “Kitsch,” says Manohla Dargis in The New York Times, “an impossible movie that has no reason for being other than as another pop-culture palliative for a trauma it can’t bear to face”. “A classy, well-ordered production,” says Brent Simon in Screen Daily, though the review is largely negative.

“People will feel passionately about the film,” Daldry says. “Some will really like it, some will really hate it. I doubt there will be a middle ground… That’s the nature of the beast, you’ve just got to take it.” Given that Daldry’s three previous films — Billy Elliot, The Hours and The Reader — each won him a best director Oscar nomination, this is nervy stuff. But this was pre-Oscar nominations. He could have relaxed: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was duly nominated in the best picture category.

The film is based on a Jonathan Safran Foer novel about 9/11. A boy’s beloved father dies in one of the Twin Towers. The boy, Oskar Schell, is difficult and obsessive. He may have some form of autism. “Inevitably, we went through our own diagnosis,” Daldry says. “We put him on a spectrum. Let’s assume it is some kind of Asperger’s — that would fit this.”

After the “worst day”, as he keeps calling 9/11, Oskar sets out across New York with a backpack and a tambourine in pursuit of a clue he is convinced his father left him. He has a key and he wants to find the right lock. To tell you anything more would be a spoiler, because the plot has so many twists, it makes Tony Blair look like a pretty straight kind of guy. The first big thing you have to say about this film is that the ­performance of Thomas Horn as Oskar is extraordinary, not least because he was plucked out of show-business nowhere; he comes from a family of San Francisco doctors, not actors, and his one previous claim to fame is that he won the kids’ version of the American television gameshow Jeopardy!

“I do think it is one of the more astonishing performances by a young actor in the canon of cinema,” says Daldry, evidently relieved to have got away from the subject of critical voices. “He has this ability to access his emotional life — how, I have no idea.”

To tell you anything more would be a spoiler, because the plot has so many twists, it makes Tony Blair look like a pretty straight kind of guy.

It was also a relief not to be directing a professional American actor in the lead part. “Sometimes it’s much harder to have a conversation with American adult actors. They have this thing called the method, so, in their tradition, the director is not involved in the creation of the character. But ­Thomas came without any baggage. It means you don’t have to undo anything or relearn the language.”

It took a year to find Thomas, and the deal with Warner Bros was that if they couldn’t cast the boy, they wouldn’t make the film. Scott Rudin, the producer, finally spotted him on Jeopardy! He was 12 when he won and is 14 now, although Oskar is played as an 11-year-old.

“It was hard to explain to the ­family, who don’t really go to the cinema, that I would be taking over. That’s what happened. One of the parents was there the whole time — he should go back to school and go to Yale. I kept saying to the parents, ‘Let’s try not getting him any offers.’ ”

Horn leads a spectacular cast: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, John Goodman. Even Max von Sydow appears to play, well, Max von Sydow, although this time he is mute. (It was enough, apparently, to persuade the Academy to give him a best ­supporting actor nomination.)

“Isn’t Max great?” Daldry says. “He always delivers. He’s spent a long time ­getting away from priests of one kind or another.”

Over it all, however, looms the spectre of the Twin Towers, a tricky subject for any director and a sacred one for New Yorkers. I tell him something Steven Spielberg said to me — that it would be years before the great 9/11 movie came out. “I always knew I wanted to make this film to come out after the 10th anniversary, but, whether it is too soon or too late, everybody will have to make their own personal choice,” he replies. “Some people will still feel very close to 9/11. Some do not. But there are thousands of stories to be told and many films to be made about it.”

When the planes hit, Daldry was in a Soho editing suite, finishing The Hours with Rudin. “We both went down and watched the TV. The strange thing was, we could get through to people in New York on the phone, but nobody in New York could. I remember feeling it was an out-of-control situation, that the world had changed into a dangerous and strange place. Suddenly, this was chaos.”

What is striking to anybody over the age of, say, 15, however, is how quickly it has all been ­normalised, if not forgotten. We live in a post-9/11 world, but, for some, the event is all but ignored. Daldry lives in New York and his two daughters go to school there. “You know 9/11 is not taught in American schools? My kids only know about it ­properly because of this movie. Loads of kids in New York don’t really know what happened, and why and what the con­sequences were. I was shocked, and other people agree with me — there’s a campaign to have it taught.”

Perhaps the point is that nobody would yet know how to teach it. In some ways — in Afghanistan, most obviously — it is still happening, and the story has no ending. The film is about the beginnings of this feeling of incomprehension that the event engenders. Oskar idolises his father, almost cutting his mother out of the family and, therefore, turning himself into an orphan in the process. The father’s death is beyond anything the boy can imagine. He creates his search project to give ­meaning where there is none. This isolates him even further.

“Grief is messy and difficult,” Daldry says. “It’s one of the more complicated and distressing of emotions, so it didn’t feel like it was a ­useful exercise or truthful to make this into anything other than what it was — a mother locked in her grief, a kid locked in his. Yes, they fight, and actually they’re having a really hard time together.”

He creates his search project to give ­meaning where there is none. This isolates him even further.

There is a tension here between this “small” private grief and the larger public grief surrounding the event itself. It echoes the tension in Daldry’s previous film, The Reader, in which one man’s search for meaning in the Holocaust comes up against the big, public, brute fact of the thing itself. The seeker, played by Ralph Fiennes, is eventually told to seek his ­therapy in art and literature, because nothing comes out of the concentration camps. I won’t tell you how Oskar finds peace, but keep your eyes on the answering machine.

I can tell you that it involves something Oskar did not do, and that brings out two rare autobiographical asides from Daldry. He was 14, and his father was dying of ­cancer. One day, his mother said they really had to go to the hospital: “I decided I didn’t want to go, I wanted to watch TV, and he died. That stays with you, that mistake.”

Then there was the matter of the empty coffin. There is no body in Oskar’s father’s coffin — it had not been found — so, to the boy, the funeral service seems meaningless. Again, there is a parallel. “I remember my father having a massive autopsy. Somebody said at the funeral that there was only a bit of my dad in there, the rest was sandbags. So the empty coffin thing chimed with me.”

The film, you will gather, is played at a high emotional level. It has as many tear-jerking moments as plot twists. “I find the film quite upsetting. It sort of gets to its level, and it stays there in terms of its intensity. It has a long start, then it settles into its level. Perhaps there’s too much emotion, so some people will respond to that and some people won’t. That’s all you know.”

Both the emotion and Oskar’s way of seeing the world are further intensified by the way it is filmed. Daldry plays around with depth of field and extreme focus on certain things. Also, it is shot using a system Daldry calls “Alexa raw”. He says it is the first time this has been used in a movie. The result is very high definition and very sharp colours. When the film started, I thought the visual quality was an attempt to suggest a dream, but it is actually intended to capture something of Oskar’s autistic understanding of things. If Daldry has his way, it will also drive yet another nail into the coffin of 3-D.

“It’s a raw digital format that gives you a level of saturation that is so much more vibrant. I love it — it pulls me closer to the people. There was an ability to access the human face that felt new to me. It is so much more interesting than 3-D — that gives me a headache.”

Daldry, like the film, is a strange package. He always gives the impression of not quite knowing what he is doing or what he has done. At the same time, his appearance (tautly smart) and his voice (Jeremy Irons-ish) contradict the mental dishevelment he expresses. I felt the same discontinuity when I spoke to him about The Reader. This time, I guess it’s worse, because he really doesn’t know what he’s done with EL&IC.

It missed out at the Golden Globes, and the signs for the Oscars are not good. The problem is, as everybody says, the number of plot twists. If you know there is a twist round every corner — and there is — then you stop caring and, more to the point, your tears aren’t jerked. The moment we wrap, Daldry rushes outside to have a fag, still talking about the way some people will like it and some will hate it. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know.”

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Richard Sennett’s Togetherness

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation

By Richard Sennett

(Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 324pp £25)

Human interactions are not necessarily well served by human inventions. Take the ‘call tree’, the telephone answering device that makes you choose a series of options so that the company ‘may better direct your calls’. People hate these because they detect the exploitation inherent in the transference of a company’s inefficiency to its customers. But there it is, almost daily, making us all miserable. What the machine is doing is simplifying you into a series of attributes which it has been programmed to understand; it is making you ‘machine readable’. Ideally, it would like you to be a machine. Humans are just too infuriatingly complex.

That is my example, but, in its own mundane, consumerist way, it illustrates the thesis of Richard Sennett’s book: that ‘our emotional and cognitive capacities are erratically realized in modern society’. Building on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, he argues that ‘people’s capacities for cooperation are far greater and more complex than institutions allow them to be’.

The starting point for any such argument is a refutation of the highly individualistic or atomised view of human nature that dominated economic and social thinking until, approximately, the Eighties and still persists among a few economic fundamentalists. In this, the individual was considered as a snooker ball-like unit simply bouncing off other balls. This was always implausible and, for Sennett, was replaced by the much more coherent view advanced by, among others, the psychologist Erik Erikson, that it is only through interactions with others that individuality emerges. We are very odd snooker balls whose colour and shape change constantly in contact with other balls.

Thus cooperation is the only way we can be human at all, and the suppression of cooperation – which is what the call tree does so ruthlessly – is the suppression of humanity. Together is a grand tour around the historical and cultural implications of this idea. Sennett starts at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1900 and takes us, via evolutionary theory, religion, inequality, the quandaries of the Left and little oddities like his musical adventures with the editor of The Guardian, to his conclusion that ‘we are capable of cooperating more deeply than the existing social order envisions’.

This is, you will gather, a somewhat rambling book and Sennett’s prose is far from focused. His conclusion is effectively the same as his introduction, though I don’t condemn him for this because the problem he is addressing is too fundamental to be solved by argument, advice or policy. It involves a reversal of the ‘age of brutal simplifiers’, as Jacob Burckhardt characterised the modern era.

We are very odd snooker balls whose colour and shape change constantly in contact with other balls.

The problem is that we are being ‘de-skilled’ when it comes to cooperation. Such skills are embedded in rituals and forms of discourse. The standard radio or TV debate on a topical issue involves representatives of the two opposing points of view arguing with each other in terms that cannot possibly be resolved. The format pushes them to extremes. Radio phone-ins are worse as their sole purpose seems to be to push each new caller to say something more stupid than the last. This is all entertaining but it is predicated on the idea that cooperation is impossible and, as far as the broadcaster is concerned, undesirable.

For Sennett the way out of this impasse is ‘dialogic cooperation’ which ‘entails a special kind of openness, one which enlists empathy rather than sympathy in its service’. In this form of conversation, listening is as important as speaking, because only by listening can you understand and empathise with the opposing point of view and thereby gain perspective on your own position.

Sennett says ‘dialogic cooperation’ is the ‘Holy Grail’, implying that it is out of reach. This is understandable. Individualism within the context of the free market has, since the Seventies, been the prevailing orthodoxy, an orthodoxy with which the Left had to come to terms because, until the crash of 2008, it seemed to be making us richer and to have defeated competing systems. But the Left has failed to respond coherently to the crash and the Right has quietly arranged for the bankers to go back to business as usual, so even that cataclysm has failed to lead us back to the dialogic Grail.

The answer is, as Sennett rightly says, to relocate the concept of the competitive free market within the cooperative human world. Much neo-liberal rhetoric seemed to treat the market as some kind of natural system with which we tamper at our peril. This attitude seems to have been supported by some dubious Darwinian rhetoric about the survival of the fittest. In fact, all markets are very intricate human creations, products of cooperation rather than competition. It is this kind of insight that may inspire new thinking on the Left – though perhaps not in Ed Miliband.

On the Right, anxieties about the impact of unbridled capitalism have tended to circle around the concept of community, an idea which seems to have sprung from Robert Nisbet’s book of 1953, The Quest for Community, and to have filtered all the way down to David Cameron’s Big Society and, in a rather different way, to the Tea Party in America. These are rather specialised and fragile responses to the problems of urbanised and polyglot societies. Of course, we want communities – they are nice things – but, in a big city, a degree of what Erving Goffman called ‘civil inattention’ towards others may be safer.

It is hard to summarise the scope and erudition in these pages, or fully capture the seriousness of Sennett’s intent, which is, essentially, to find a way out of the quandaries – particularly for the Left – of the post-Cold War world. He does not in the end find a way but he does find an image, that of Montaigne’s cat. When the great thinker played with his pet, he wondered if it was not, in reality, playing with him. Others are opaque, cooperation is difficult. But the cat and the man do play because both of them want to and that, in the end, ought to be the benign order of things.

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