BOOKS

Business
as usual
In a society dominated by the language of markets,
have we lost all sense of moral purpose?
By Rowan Williams
Mammons Kingdom: an Essay on Britain, Now
David Marquand
Allen Lane, 276pp, 20
The titles of this books chapters tell us
baldly that it is a story of decline and corruption: Britain, Now (listen to the effect
of that comma) is a culture that has moved
away from any effective commitments to
honour, to intelligent collective memory,
to ideals of public life and reasoned public debate. Hedonism Trumps Honour,

Charismatic Populism Smothers Democratic Debate; this is our story, and it leaves
us disturbingly at sea when we try to answer the question posed in the last chapter:
Who Do We Think We Are?
It is not an unfamiliar story, and a groundswell of articulately angry books has raised
comparable questions, from Will Hutton,

Richard Hoggart and Nicholas Boyle in

the Nineties to Michael Sandel and Robert
and Edward Skidelsky in the past couple
of years. Marquand, like all of these, insists
that we have, in effect, lost the very idea
of public morality; he argues that we are
increasingly condemned to live in a world
not only of self-interested individuals but
of stupid self-interested individuals; and it
is perhaps his acute awareness of this stupidity that makes him distinctive in this
group of writers.
Deprived of most of the resources of intelligent scepticism, irony and perspective,
even humility, which in a more functional
culture would give us a bit of critical distance on our dreams and on those who
fall over each other in claiming to realise
our dreams for us we are at the mercy of
those whose self-interest is served by exploiting our self-interest.
But, in turn, those cunning and resourceful enough to exploit our self-interest also
have to be stupid enough not to be distracted from the profitable business of managing
our interests by any larger considerations

KRISTIAN BUUS/IN PICTURES/CORBIS

These little piggies went to market: scandals such as MPs expenses and bankers bonuses suggest a mindset that shirks moral challenges

42 | NEW STATESMAN | 23-29 MAY 2014

2014+20books lead.indd 42

20/05/2014 16:42:17

attitude that sees the natural order as a bit of

a menace to human freedom.
Putting us back into the natural order as
a participant not a proprietor is an essential
move in breaking away from what currently
enslaves us. Hence Marquands interest in
the resources of religious language: he is
crystal-clear that we cannot write off religious traditions because they have some
toxic manifestations; but this makes it all
the more important to grasp what matters
most in them, which is the way in which
they affirm simultaneously a human dignity that is not dependent on status or
productivity or political convenience and a
human finitude that demands to be taken
seriously. We are not our own creators; we
are not magically protected from what happens to the material world we live in. We
are more dependent than we might like to
be. And far from this pushing us towards
passivity, it intensifies the weight of taking
responsibility for each other.

Marquand is clear
that we cannot write off
religious traditions
This is a good deal more than just a general appeal to religious values as part of
our social capital (lots of goodwill to make
volunteer organisations work, and so on).
Marquand, who has no confessional axe to
grind, has actually done some of the necessary reflection on religious doctrine that so
many commentators find too taxing. Readers will doubtless disagree about whether
these themes outweigh what they see as the
less constructive elements in communities
of faith. But at least there is the material here
for informed argument.
It is interesting that he uses the word
honour to encapsulate some of what has
been lost. Its a word that many will find
uncomfortable; it has suffered from associations with patriarchy (the nightmare
world of honour killings), with status
obsession and the hypocrisies that go with
it with a world of artificial conventions,
thin-skinned rivalries and murderous repressiveness. Yet Marquand boldly sets out
to reclaim it as an essential aspect of reinstating public virtue, and his case deserves
to be taken seriously.
Stripped of some of its cultural deformations, what is this about? Basically, honour is what makes it possible to look into
your eyes in the mirror without shrinking
too much. It does not have to be self-congratulatory; in its simplest form, it is just a
matter of knowing what questions you need
to be asking yourself for the sake of staying

honest and consistent. It is being faithful to

that moral self-image, which is emphatically not the image of yourself-as-moral
(self-congratulation) but the image of what
would make a morally coherent story out of
your uneven and varied experience (honour
can demand the clear expression of shame
or remorse). Marquand would say, I think,
that matters such as MPs expenses and
bankers bonuses are troubling because they
suggest a dishonourable mindset, a habit
of avoiding difficult questions, dismissing
the significance of being or feeling shamed,
walking away from a moral challenge.
We dont much like using the language
of shame these days, because we are rightly
sensitive to its horrible abuses, especially in
the treatment of women; and increasingly,
naming and shaming has become a way
of trivialising and personalising issues and
feeding an appetite for cynical gossip. Yet
what has happened if we are never able to
say of some behaviours that (even when
they do relatively little damage) they are
something to be ashamed of? Something
that ought to mean that you are taken less
seriously as a person to be relied on? Honour is to do with meeting our own gaze in
the mirror, but it is also to do with meeting
the gaze of others.
All this depends on the one obstinate
theme at the centre of this books argument.
Do we or dont we believe that the public
realm has an appropriate moral significance
and solidity? Is it something for whose service people can be trained as a fulfilling, not
to say honourable, professional career?
If the fundamental deciding categories of
your culture are rooted in financial transactions (if we are all producers and consumers), public life is an afterthought: you
can sort it out with the skills and habits of
other fields of activity, ideally commercial
ones, so that the involvement of businesses
with schools or hospitals will guarantee efficient outcomes, the greatest good for the
greatest number at the lowest cost.
Marquand is not arguing for clinical separation between impure commerce and pure
public service, a seductive model for the left,
the voluntary sector and many more. The
issue is whether public service and public
good can be so completely translated into
the language of market provision that nothing remains that cannot be rendered in business models, no goals without measurable
profitable outcomes. If we believe in that
non-translatable dimension, we have some
theoretical work to do in reframing concepts of honour, in insisting on an education
that makes us familiar with where we have
come from (not to reinforce a national myth
but to remind us that we depend on the
words and acts of others), in restating that

of long-term effects, whether social, environmental or whatever. As Marquand says,

free choice has become a self-validating
mantra, from which we cant escape because we cannot act collectively in a purposeful way. The relation between producer
and consumer, now the norm for every imaginable human interaction, locks us in to
a devils pact of collective foolishness with
no long-term outcome except disaster and
universal impoverishment.
The paradox Marquand might have
flagged up even more clearly is that we are
an increasingly mistrustful society (for the
pretty obvious reason that we lack robust
social bonds and tangible commitments
to the common good) and yet, at the same
time, an increasingly credulous society,
apparently vulnerable to being swayed by
various forms of populist manipulation.
Marquand is unsparing on the corrupting
effect of leadership (whether putatively
right or left, Thatcher or Blair) that seeks
to appeal to a mass public while bypassing
the mediating structures and networks that
allow patient critique and scrutiny.
The marketisation of politics, signalled so eloquently in presidential-style
televised debates and the hectic analysis of
opinion polls, not only erodes our political
health, it actually makes us worse people;
and Marquand has no qualms about such
fierce judgements of value. A properly open
society one in which there is pluralism,
honest public debate, social mobility and
controls on spiralling inequality requires
certain virtues: fortitude, self-discipline,
a willingness to make hard choices in the
public interest and to accept responsibility for them. We cannot survive without
a moral image of ourselves as individuals.
Such a moral image is the only thing that
will allow us to be sceptical without being
cynical, critical without being destructive
the only thing that will allow the possibility
of genuine social trust and a shared social
goal. Anyone who has read Fred Ingliss
admirable biography of Richard Hoggart,
published last autumn, will recognise the
apostolic succession here, the elegy for a political consciousness in which solidarity and
irony could flourish together.
But Marquand goes further than Hoggart,
further than the Keynesian/Orwellian land
of lost content, in insisting that a new public philosophy must locate human beings
in an environment of finite adaptability: we
have to be taught that we are tenants rather
than freeholders of the earth. The truth is
that the mythology of the independent person, self-endowed with illimitable will and
inalienable claims the myth that dominates populist rhetoric, from advertising to
electioneering goes hand in hand with an

23-29 MAY 2014 | NEW STATESMAN | 43

2014+20books lead.indd 43

20/05/2014 16:42:17

BOOKS
we are part of a sensitive ecology of interdependent physical processes. We need an
answer to the question of Marquands last
chapter: what sort of life is human life?
Like Robert and Edward Skidelskys How
Much Is Enough?, this book challenges us
to think whether we have any coherent
idea of a good or desirable life at all. In Isaiah
Berlins terms, it seems that all we have left
is negative liberty. Given Marquands severe
convictions about our collective stupidity,
that isnt a very promising resource for the
middle-term future.
The prospect is not unrelieved; Marquand
notes the persistent energy in grass-roots
politics, in co-operative movements and
green activism. He might also take some
comfort from noting that, despite his anxieties about stupidity, it is perfectly clear that
what people read or consume in the populist media does not automatically shape how
they act; scepticism survives, and Middle
England is less Mail-clad in conviction than
our politicians often assume (a significant
test is the levels of generosity in response to
aid or emergency appeals, international as
well as local, even in times of austerity).
Social media (rather a deafening absence,
for a book about Britain now) presents
problems, yet it can function extraordinarily effectively in assembling younger citizens around positive campaigns: I am writing this a few hours after speaking in south
London with the gifted teenage organisers
of a major electronic-forum discussion on
youth crime.
There are aspects of Mammons Kingdom
that some readers will regard as just a little
rose-coloured and the irritable dismissal
of late-Sixties radicalism, especially R D Laing and Edmund Leach, is not entirely fair:
there were oppressive family structures,
violent domestic arrangements and corrupt habits to be challenged, even if some
of the challenges ended up generating new
and equally corrupting follies. But overall,
Marquand has given us a crisp and serious
essay to stand alongside all those others
mentioned earlier.
That, though, is one of the disturbing issues we are left with. How many such essays does it take to shift the sluggish bulk
of political muddle and evasion? They
have Moses and the prophets; let them listen to them, as one authority observed;
and if they will not listen to them, they
will not be convinced even if someone
rises from the dead. Essays, yes, by all
means; but also the sheer practice of other
kinds of life. l
Rowan Williams is a lead book reviewer
for the New Statesman. His new collection
of poetry, The Other Mountain, will be
published by Carcanet in September

Heart
of Glass
Leo Robson
J D Salinger: the Escape Artist
Thomas Beller
New Harvest, 192pp, $20
My Salinger Year
Joanna Rakoff
Bloomsbury Circus, 256pp, 16.99
A genius who cant tie his shoelaces,
Thomas Bellers description of J D Salinger
(1919-2010), might not be far off, but why
use a metaphor when the facts speak just as
well? Salinger was a genius a literary genius with a particular interest in human appetite who didnt understand that retreating
from public life when he was famous and
feted would, rather than secure his solitude,
turn reporters into scavengers, neighbours
into eavesdroppers, friends into witnesses.
And fans into biographers and intimates
into memoirists. The writing by Salinger legally available in book form amounts to one
novel, The Catcher in the Rye, and 13 stories,
more than half of them containing some
allusion to the shimmering, fragile Glass
children. The writing published about Salinger, which began pouring forth around the
time he shut up shop in the mid-1960s, runs
to thousands of pages. If you hive off the
critical monographs and anthologies, which
every writer gets these days, this work can
be divided into conjecture-bound pseudobiography undertaken by men Beller follows recent works by Kenneth Slawenski and Shane Salerno and none-tooconjectural, though possibly delusional,
reminiscences offered by women. Of these,
Joanna Rakoffs new book is the least invasive, for the simple reason that during her
Salinger year she spoke to the writer just a

Master of elusion: Salinger

few times, by telephone and never for long,

and shook his warm, dry hand but once.
At the time This was 1996. The country was in the grips of a recession, and so
on Rakoff was working as an assistant at
a place she calls the Agency and specifically for a woman she refers to as my boss.
In the kind of disclaimer one doesnt like
to read at the beginning of a tell-all memoir
(or any memoir), Rakoff states: Ive fiddled with the chronology of a few events,
and Ive changed the names and identifying traits of most, though not all, of
the people. Youd be forgiven for wondering what Rakoff didnt change. Youd
also be forgiven for wondering on what
principle she has protected various gladhanding literary agents while betraying
a deeply wounded eremite whose privacy
she was once employed to protect: Salingers name and identifying traits remain
unfiddled with.
Unfortunately, Rakoff had already sold
her story to the online magazine Slate,
where she happily identified the Agency
as Harold Ober Associates and her boss as
Phyllis Westberg. My Salinger Year is little more than a rehash of that 2,000-word
piece, its stretched and padded character
a tribute, perhaps, to Salingers later narratives, in particular his last printed story,
Hapworth 16, 1924, which takes the form
of a letter rightly described by its author,
the seven-year-old Seymour Glass, as an
onslaught, and with whose complicated
afterlife Rakoffs book is partly concerned.
Not long after she was hired, Salinger
called the Agency to say that he was considering publishing Hapworth 16 with Orchises Press, a tiny imprint, in commercial
terms barely distinguishable from a vanity
press. While Salinger negotiates with the
sole employee of Orchises over details of
design (he wants the title printed horizontally on the spine, hard to achieve in a book
of under 30,000 words), Rakoff struggles
to get over her college boyfriend, to get
along with her current boyfriend, to get
by financially and to get around to reading Salinger, the dramatic irony being that
this would provide just the amusement
and consolation just the perspective
she needs.
Rakoffs responsibility for Salinger, beyond putting his phone calls through to her
boss, is confined to sending form replies to
the stream of letters asking him to do things
he would never want to do deliver commencement addresses, for instance or to
passing along compliments he no longer
wants to hear, if he ever did. She becomes
fond of the letter writers but since she has
presumably blurred their identifying details,
who can say what they actually wrote?

44 | NEW STATESMAN | 23-29 MAY 2014

2014+20books Leo Robson.indd 44

20/05/2014 16:14:59

Copyright of New Statesman is the property of New Statesman Ltd. and its content may not
be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.