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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
In his latest collection of essays, Milan Kundera wrote that the social changes in the Czech Republic after the fall of communism, as property rights were returned to their original owners and a middle class accompanied by social inequality returned overnight. Kundera wrote that after Kafka and Broch he did not feel equipped to write a Balzacian novel on the subject, but the material nonetheless found its way into his last novel, Ignorance. I tend to agree with Kundera; when nineteenth century novelists like Thackerary and Dickens wrote it was out of a reforming spirit that seems remote in an age characterised by its rejection of reforming projects in favour of pragmatic and incremental measures. Nontheless, modern society is perhaps easier to describe in the terms Eliot and Zola had available to them than the ones devised for the age of Freud, Marx and World War.
I live in an English provinical town. It doesn't matter which one, as like most English provincial towns it suffers from an absence of any sense of place and could very easily be found in any part of the country. When I arrived there, it was a rather dowdy and humdrum place with its rows of terraced housing, grey sixties concrete and a town centre that was invariably empty and closed on Sundays. Since then, much of that quiet town centre has been dismembered and reconstructed, with gleaming new shopping centres and towering hotels dwarfing and frequently demolishing the redbrick and terracotta building surrounding them. The centre now throngs with people at any time of the week, from incessant shopping to incessant clubbing and drinking. Conspicuous consumption sets the tone throughout, with old fashioned furniture shops making way for casinos. Shops routinely go bankrupt and new franchises open in their place at a dizzying speed. Voices in multiple languages fill the streets as English newspaper headlines on rising house prices or the risk of social inequality leading to rioting alternate with newspaper headlines written in Polish. Posters calling for the destruction of the state of Israel briefly appear before being torn down. Small shops now stock readymade ghoulash, pickled gherkin and tripe while swanky restaurants for the affluent open nearby. Mosques, Methodist, Baptist and Polish churches nestle close to one another. Gleaming glass and steel offies or flats rise up everywhere.
Elsewhere, just at the margins of all this, the number of down and outs seems to have swelled and the streets seem to be filled with the displaced. I pass by a man at a bus stop every morning shouts loudly into the air and gesticulates wildly while those that have joined him in the queue stare fixedly down at the ground. A man in a supermarket queue gently talks gibberish to himself and chuckles. Those that had joined him in that queue also stare fixedly down at the ground. Estates with rotting sixties tower blocks and burnt our cars are left to fester. Crime has increased markedly with reportings of shooting having become common, in spite of the burgeoning numbers of CCTV cameras now found on every street corner. Needles and glass from smashed car windows are regularly found on pavements. Television adverts appear for social darwinist programmes that celebrate entrepreneurship and the firing of the substandard.
It is rather easier to describe this picture than to interpret it. I would not wish to live in a slightly earlier time, with a more homogenous, repressed and straightlaced society but that does little to accommodate me to the rather alinated society I do happen to find myself in. I have often enough cited Anthony Giddens' work on post-traditionalist societies and in theory much of what I see around should be an exemplar of it. In practice, it is not quite as easy and as the country transitions from one administration to another, it is difficult not to conclude that England as a place is more unequal, more divided, less liberal and more brutual than it seemed to be before. As an end-note, this article on London's recent socio-economic history puts my rather anecdotal account of how England has changed into a more specific context:"Each year from 1997 to 2006 saw a net inflow of 100,000 foreigners to London, to which must be added the population's natural growth (more births than deaths) of 50,000 to 75,000 a year. These increases are partly offset by an annual outflow of around 80,000 to the rest of Britain—take immigration out of the picture and, according to some estimates, the capital's population would have fallen by around 600,000 between 1993 and 2000. The net effect of this population "churn" is that London's population is now around 35 per cent foreign-born, a figure moving rapidly towards 50 per cent...
There are 108,000 people in London earning over £100,000 a year, which as a proportion of its population is more than twice the national figure, and there are 38,000 who earn more than £200,000—over a third of the national total. (If those working in the City of London were removed from the national earnings figures, Britain's income differentials would look far more like the more egalitarian continental European countries.) Even average annual earnings in London are far higher than the rest of the country: £37,323 compared with £24,301 for Britain as a whole...
As London adapts to its new status as the global city, there remain doubts about the quality of life it is able to offer the majority of its citizens. London's growth is already creating stark inequalities. The new jobs being created tend to be at the very top and bottom of the pay scale. Despite all the wealth generated in the city, London has some of the highest levels of poverty in the country, as well as the highest unemployment rate, at over 7 per cent. From 2002 to 2005, 52 per cent of children in inner London were living below the poverty line. As Livingstone himself says, "It's worse being poor here than anywhere else." The cost of housing, as well as transport, is very high for those on low incomes. The average house price in London is almost £300,000 (almost 50 per cent higher than the British average), and, if you are not an emergency case, the wait for public rental housing can be as long as three years. The expected sharp increase in population can only exacerbate those problems...
The most obvious symptom of social stress is the rise in support for extremist politics in London—challenging Livingstone's rosy vision of a happily multicultural and unsegregated city... The problems are particularly acute in the borough of Barking & Dagenham, which has in the space of a few years lost a Ford assembly plant that had employed generations and gained a host of new ethnic groups, attracted by low house prices. The result was a striking result for the BNP in last year's local elections—they won 12 seats to become the council's official opposition. The BNP has not yet reached the mid-1970s levels of support for the National Front, but a survey at the 2005 general election found that the capital had among the highest levels of potential support for the BNP of any part of the country, with 23 per cent of respondents saying they might vote for the party... Ronald Dworkin once described New York as a "carnival on the edge of frenzy." Modern London occasionally totters close to an edge of this kind."Labels: England
posted by Richard 1:12 pm
