So I think it’s fair to say that in the last five years religious programming by public service broadcasters has dropped significantly, whether you look at spend, broadcast hours or viewing figures. The NSS press release ends with this paragraph:

[NSS President] Mr Sanderson said that while he accepted that the BBC had a public service remit to serve the whole community and that some religion on TV was legitimate; it should be kept in proportion. “Very few people go to church and religion is now very much a minority interest. Its presence on TV should reflect that. The BBC pours far too much of its resources into satisfying these religious demands,” he commented.

The key point here, then, is that religious programming on the BBC should be proportionate to the number of people in the UK professing a religious belief, which according to the 2001 census (the most recent data we have, AFAIK) is 76.8%. The five PSB channels brodcast around 43,800 hours of television per year: Terry Sanderson thinks 0.6% of this being used for religious programming is disproportionate, given that only three quarters of the country profess a religious belief. I grant that 2001 is a while ago now, but it’s hard to believe it’s dropped off a cliff in the last decade simply because of The God Delusion.

The problem here, of course, is that working out what’s proportionate isn’t straightforward. Clearly using 71.6% (the percentage identifying as Christian) of airtime for Songs of Praise wouldn’t be right — religious believers, like everyone else, want to watch a variety of different kinds of programme. Furthermore, the press release points out that church attendance has dropped off, although the figures are complicated, and not going to church regularly doesn’t necessarily imply not wanting to see religious programmes. The missing premise here is that if people don’t go to church they don’t deserve to get programmes made for them, just like you can’t have a BBC4 doc about Monet if you haven’t visited the Nat this year. Religion, contrary to what people like the NSS seem to think, is not just a commitment to a few well-defined metaphysical truth-claims: it’s an ethnic and cultural identity, too.

There’s really no well-established rule for what the percentage should be, although the NSS might start by using up-to-date data (not the 2005 Ofcom report), citing its sources and, most importantly, telling us what proportion it thinks is reasonable and why.

What’s odder is that their arguments are completely unrelated, so far as I can see, to their conclusion. The arguments they offer are nothing to do with this proportionality claim they’re driving towards but to do with popularity. The fact that religious programmes get few viewers is used as a reason why we should get rid of them. This rather defeats the headline claim that we should be frightened by their evangelical powers, and it doesn’t support the conclusion either. The only kind of show with poorer reach than religious programmes is the genre called “education”, and presumably Mr Sanderson thinks those shows should be canned, too.

This argument is so exceptionally poorly-constructed that I’d use it as a counterexample in a critical thinking class, were I teaching one at the moment. The whole thing is a complete non sequitur: no attempt seems to have been made to connect introduction, argument and conclusion. For an organisation that supposedly defends “scientific rationalism” this is pretty embarrassing stuff. But it does push some hot buttons for the regular readers of the NSS’s web site, and lets them know Mr Sanderson is still bravely fighting off the Sky Fairy Visigoths on their behalf.

the only way sensibly to be able to conform to the AHRC guidelines is to apply for money for research you’ve already done

In order to apply for research funding it is no longer sufficient to outline what you’re interested in, and show that it’s something other people are interested in as well. What’s now required is something much more like a project plan, breaking the work down into smaller deliverables and indicating when and how each one will be completed. I suspect the only reason they don’t ask for a Gantt chart is that these projects only involve one person.

This kind of micromanagement is, as Prof Beard points out, a complete nonsense. Most research can’t be planned down to this level of detail before it’s been undertaken; a PhD project, for example, will usually change direction a few times before arriving at a destination that may or may not bear much relation to the original intended goal. The point is that where you end up is better and more interesting than where you were supposed to end up, because you chose to change direction as a result of doing the research. The only way you can know with much assurance where you’ll actually end up is if you’ve done a big chunk of the spadework already.

I suspect this has to do with a creeping commercialization of education. The language of risk management sounds reassuringly as if it will help avoid those cases of PhDs being funded but never completed, or being completed in such a haphazard way that they don’t amount to much. We hear it in teaching, too, where students are identified as “at risk” (of pulling down the institution’s success rate) and managed away into lower-status courses or out of the door entirely. In the last few days we’ve heard about plans to focus PhD funding on the “most productive” HE institutions, in the same way that we’d like to give our business to the companies that can get the best possible job done for the lowest price.

There’s a fair amount of research done in the universities that doesn’t seem to me to be worth very much, and that we could get rid of without any loss to the national culture. Lots of PhDs are written and never read by anyone other than the examiners. The trouble with research, as academics protesting the Government’s emphasis on “impact” continually point out, is that you can’t spot the winners ahead of time. Yes, I’m sure it would be great to run a publishing house that put out one multi-million-selling book a year and nothing else, or a music company that only had hits, or indeed to be a trader who only ever bought shares that went up in price. The big problem with risk is that it cuts both ways: usually reducing downside risk reduces upside risk (the risk that something good will happen) as well.

Back in 2004 Robin Holt published a much-cited essay, “Risk Management: The Talking Cure “, in which he likened the practice to psychoanalysis. In the same year, Demos published a paper “The Risk Management of Everything” drawing on Holt’s work; it’s available free online and its conclusions seem to me to be sensible and worth a read.

The image of Queen’s Library was by clbean.

I’m not even objecting to to the idea that “Gordon” is after this money, as if the Prime Minister is going to turn up at your wake, stuff a roll of fifties in his trouser pocket and then go for a slap-up lunch. Gordon Brown’s personal unpopularity makes this a good gambit even though convention dictates that when you personalise taxation as a money-grabbing exercise it’s the Chancellor, not the PM, who’s supposed to be chasing you with a butterfuly net. Alistair Darling just isn’t as disliked as Brown, so Brown has been substituted. This is a well-worn robber-baron fantasy that the right loves to wheel out, and again it will play well with the people the ad was written for.

I’m not even complaining about the notion that Gordon “wants” this money, implying — as, once again, the right are wont to do — that Labour simply enjoy levying taxes. £20,000 to pay for your care in old age is actually an astonishing bargain, not a “R.I.P. off”, but the idea that taxes are raised in order to be spent on services you might want to use is, obviously, rather destructive of the intended message. The ad suggests that this is just another in a long line of things the socialist revolutionaries are doing to the middle classes out of spite.

Let’s also leave aside that the actual claim here is that Labour ministers have refused to rule out the possibility of a mandatory flat-rate tax on estates as one of a whole family of proposals for how to pay for care of the elderly. This is not the same as Labour planning to take up this option, and certainly not the same as “Gordon” wanting to do so. Still, this is a perfectly valid subject on which to raise concerns and have a debate. And finally, let’s not even engage with the question of whether, in voting for a party in a representative democracy, you are also voting for each and every thing they might do for the next five years as well.

No, the big issue for me is that the poster addresses me — and you — directly. The word “you” is an indexical, meaning it points out of the proposition at something in the world, but depending on where the proposition is said — or, in this case, by whom it’s read — the meaning expressed changes. When Kitchener pointed out of the poster at YOU, he may or may not have wanted you, depending on your age, physical fitness and, indeed, nationality.

In this case (and most others) indexical “you” is “unbound”, meaning roughly that the rest of the proposition doesn’t fix its reference in a helpful way. For instance, if the poster had said “If the eligible portion of your estate is worth more than £200,000, then Gordon wants…” that might have been more truthful. Because there’s nothing like this in the poster, the “you” refers to literally every reader: the visiting tourist, the feckless non-owner of property and, of course, anyone else to whom it doesn’t apply.

Frege gave us a handy way to unpack indexicals: replace them with a “definite description” that doesn’t include an indexical. So instead of “you”, what would we put? “The person reading this poster”? I don’t think so, because that would be wrong. Now some more thought needs to be undertaken: who does Goron actually want to take the money off? How can we describe those people accurately?

I’m not suggesting that people writing copy for campaign posters start doing this; that would be silly. In any case, campaign posters are supposed to stir the emotions, not state factual claims. I do, though, think a bit more care is needed when using that big Kitchener YOU in these contexts unless the parties want to be accused of abandoning the facts altogether. We have enough cynicism about mainstream politics in this country already, thanks.

The word I got from Huddleston & Pullum was “ditransitive”. A ditransitive verb takes two objects. “Throw” can be ditransitive, like this:

Jane threw John the ball

Here Jane is the subject, “the one doing the verb” in schoolchildren’s terms. There are two objects: a direct object, the ball, which is being thrown and an indirect object, John, who’s having something thrown to him.

Interestingly, “throw” can also be monotransitive, meaning it takes one object:

Jane threw the ball

but it can’t be intransitive, meaning it takes none at all:

Jane threw

Now, my tiny revelation about emancipation is that we should, when we’re thinking about it seriously, always be able to associate three nouns with it: an emancipator, someone who’s emancipated (which could be the same person, of course) and something from which the latter is emancipated:

X emancipated Y from Z

We need to know who’s being emancipated and, crucially, from what. There’s no emancipation pure and simple, just like there’s no throwing without something that gets thrown. We need to know who did the emancipating, who was emancipated and what they were emancipated from.

[Note: I'm not making a grammatical point here. Technically speaking, my grammarian friends (thanks for coming), Y is not functioning as an indirect object here but as part of a prepositional phrase and in fact the verb "emancipate" doesn't even license ditransitivity. Still, I hope you can see what I'm getting at.]

This is important in political writing where some or all of these things are assumed. Freire, for instance, was working in the 1970s with peasant labourers under the military dictatorship in Brazil. His goal was democratization, in part through mass education. It’s important, in understanding what he wanted and what he was doing, to understand the three nouns that go with the verb, especially when the verb gets turned into a noun and becomes a rallying-call: Emancipation!

In fact this is an example of a general critical thinking point I’d like to make. For example, this is grammatically fine:

Jane emancipated John

but it’s only useful if we can say what it means. The truth is that without context it could mean Jane did almost anything to John. In order to be able to tell what I need the two objects rather than just one.

This may, in fact, be part of a general malaise about missing objects. The old “avoid the passive” prescription is sometimes said to be because the passive voice is “vague about agency”, which on the face of it is nonsense. This passive-voice sentence from a story in The Telegraph isn’t vague about agency at all:

Witnesses say Neda was shot by the Basij militia

Quick, who shot Neda? There, see? Easy, wasn’t it? Yet this one from the BBC is indeed vague about agency, probably out of necessity since no suspect had yet been named:

UK tourist shot dead in Texas bar

If there’s a bad guy here (aside from those doing the shooting) it’s not the passive voice but the missing noun. Once again, I’m not complaining about this on grammatical or stylistic grounds but on intellectual ones; unless some context fills me in, I can’t tell from this sentence what happened, and that’s what I want out of it. As I said, this may be valid: in the BBC example we don’t know who did the shooting yet, so we can’t say.

So it is with other missing nouns. With “emancipate” my claim is that it expresses an idea with at least three moving parts. A sentence using that verb, or its context, really should provide them. Too often this doesn’t happen: it’s simply assumed that “we” understand what’s meant, as if this “we” is somehow static and known. This leads to the absurdity, for example, of Paulo Freire’s work being hijacked from its historical and socio-political context and used to justify all kinds of talk in utterly different contexts.

This leads me to another personal hobby-horse of mine: local theory. You can’t take a political theory “out” of its socio-historical context without reifying it, turning it into a sort of Platonic object rather than a particular, located practice. As soon as you’ve done that it’s become a piece of junk that’s likely to get in the way, and the only work worth doing with it is taking it out and throwing it in a skip.

The picture is North Korean Propaganda, by Luke Stephens. Creative Commons license

The Silk Mill

The car park at the back of Lewisham Tesco can be reached by Silk Mill Path, its name a clue that a mill had previously stood close to the site. The same theme has been picked up by the new Silkworks development of apartments close by, whose marketing material suggests it is positioning itself as a luxury development. But silk, as it turns out, wasn’t the first thing to be milled on this site.

The mill was made possible by the existence of the River Ravensbourne, one of four waterways that flow through this part of South-East London, eventually converging at Deptford Creek where they meet the Thames. In the middle ages corn mills lined the river; there are said to have been eleven in the area by the time of Domesday, but by Chaucer’s time steel was being produced here. This is an early example of the industrial revolution that was to gradually transform the English economy between the late fourteenth century and the Civil War.

It represented a gradual erosion of the dominance of farming which had been, for centuries, the only way to amass wealth. Indeed, the feudal system was predicated on the idea that wealth and land were more or less synonymous, but steadly the extractive, chemical and manufacturing industries became more advanced and demand grew for their products, both domestically and for export. Lewisham’s corn mill gave way to the demand for steel.

As the nearby Armoury Road reminds us, Lewisham steel was primarily used to make armour and other military equipment. We might imagine Chaucer’s knight equipped by just such a place. Yet the irony is that Chaucer’s knight represented a nostalgic image of a feudal world that was already beginning to show signs of stress. By Tudor times, capitalism was already clearly encroaching on the old order; it threatened the whole social heirarchy, for the power lords held over their vassals was entirely due to the unique capacity of land to generate wealth. The enclosures of the seventeenth century, which led to so much hardship and created such strong antipathy towards landlords, were the final stage of Renaissance industrialisation. They represented, in my view, the birth of the English Baroque.

In 1530 Henry VIII acquired the armoury along with the manorial land in which it stood, and it became part of the Royal Armoury at Greenwich, grinding steel to produce fine armour for the wealthy and powerful. This was a typical gesture of the period, an attempt to subsume these industries into the existing social order. Like the granting of monopolies, it temporarily brought the wealth they generated into the existing power-structure that Feudalism had produced. It was not, ultimately, to be successful.

Pastoral

This industrialisation, like the more famous one of the late eighteenth century, produced a deep anxiety. The medieval world-view was rigidly heirarchical, a Dantean cosmos of crystal spheres characterised by a divinely ordained, cyclic repetition. The turning-over of parts of the land to industry and the growing roles of the cities (especially London) were accompanied by growing economic power among the lesser gentry. All of this threatened to overturn the picture England had of itself.

The Tudor period has its own form of Romanticism to combat these worrying changes. With the English Renaissance of the early sixteenth century came a renewed study of the Latin classics, including Virgil. John Rocque’s 1745 map of the area shows a Free School close by, but grammar schools — which taught Latin grammar alongside literature, mathematics and theology — had been flourishing since the early reign of Henry VIII. At the time the earliest known examples of pastoral were Virgil’s Eclogues, which told of shepherds playing music and falling in love in an Arcadian paradise.

The renaissance of the pastoral genre may have begun with scholarly imitations of Virgil but it soon took on a life of its own in English literary culture. It spoke to the anxiety of the time, the sense that the middle ages (as we now call them) had slipped away, and with them a coherent world had also been lost to the chaos and terror of the Reformation and the especially tyrannical reigns of Henry and his daughter Mary.

The most famous examples appeared in the reign of Elizabeth: the most celebrated are perhaps Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar and The Faerie Queene, but the genre appears in Sydney and Shakespeare as well as countless less well-known poets. These are the sixteenth century’s equivalents of Blake, Wordsworth and Keats: they resist the contemporary by inventing a mythic, rural past, just lost, to which they can return in literature.

The Ravensbourne between Lewisham and Deptford

The Ravensbourne, half of whose course we walked and attempted to photograph yesterday, is in part a contemporary pastoral. Largely man-made, its course has been changed in the past century and it is almost entirely hemmed in by concrete. One exception is the section just below Armoury Mill, where the concrete has been replaced by low wooden supports holding the banks in place. The effect is more “natural”, like the landscape gardens of the early Romantic era. It’s a simulacrum of a natural environment — indeed, of a place of rural beauty.

In many ways this is no different from the other strips of suburban parkland that litter London outside Zone 1. As you walk north you pass a nice playground, a duckpond turned bright green with algae, a flower garden and a fountain spouting stagnant, yellowish water. It’s an odd, postmodern pastiche of several conflicting historical styles. The river has been formed into serpentines recalling Regent’s Park and its banks planted with studied naturalness; just a step away one can find formal gardens, tiny Versailles like icons of the Baroque. Other fixtures — railings, climbing frames — are self-consciously postmodern, brightly-coloured and formally simplistic. The building of the Stephen Lawrence Trust is an angular, sheared reincarnation of Le Corbusier clad in punched steel.

Some areas of our cities look like this because centuries of history have formed them. The Baroque, Romantic and contemporary rub together because they arrived at different times. This section of the Ravensbourne, despite its long history of human occupancy, is a recent invention. As industry became heavier in the late eighteenth century it moved downriver to Deptford Creek; water mills were no longer adequate for its needs. It was turned over to leisure only much later, in the post-war period. The railways had brought a population boom to the area and the Blitz had erased the traces of the rural in the area, and a sentimental pastoralism had tried to recreate something of them here.

St Paul’s and St Alfege’s

At Deptford itself the river runs through industrial estates to which we were unable to gain access; walkers tracing the river are forced away from it for a while. We passed through Deptford High Street to St Paul’s church, built by Thomas Archer, the architect of St John’s, Smith Square. Its interior bears a strong resemblance to the contemporary St Martin’s In The Fields by Gibbs, although on a rather more muted scale. It was one of the famous Queen Anne Churches.

This is English high Baroque, the exterior full of swooping curves and multiple levels, oddly-shaped balusters and clusters of classical ornament that would have made a Tudor schoolman shudder. Inside it is, like St Martin’s, tranquil; clear windows and white stone make it airy and are offset by dark wood. Corinthian columns carved in wood and Portland stone wryly echo one another.

Later in the walk we visited Hawksmoor’s only South London church, St Alfege’s, built on a medieval site and another commissioned as part of the Fifty New Churches project. Thomas Tallis is buried beneath it.

Deptford Creek

When we pick up the Ravensbourne on the north side of Deptford we are in a very different space. The Ravensbourne, Pool and the Quaggy have converged onto the creek, which is suddenly a working river. The landscape is uncompromisingly industrial, as it has been since at least the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII created one of the largest towns in England by establishing the Royal Dockyards there.

The area offers a sharp contrast to the equivalent wharves on the north side of the river. There gentrification and redevelopment have turned the area into a kind of live-in theme park of the industrial revolution. This is a different, perhaps a new kind of pastoral, a fantasy of an earlier, simpler world of high industrial capitalism. It’s the world of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a world dominated by hardware rather than software, the actual as opposed to the virtual.

Here in Deptford we might believe, smugly, we are cutting through that fantasy to a gritty reality. But here, too, we are authenticity tourists. The rusting iron hulks and oily water make us feel as if we’re in touch with a more solid reality. In truth, of course, we’re engaging in a fantasy. The Docklands Light Railway, which also follows the river, hoves back into view again. Its chief purpose is to transport workers from the suburbs to Canary Wharf, reminding us that we live in the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth.

Soon we come to the point at which the creek empties into the Thames. The narrow, riverine view we’ve had for the whole walk opens up into a huge, grey vista.

Lewisham to Catford Bridge

We walked the lower half of the Ravensbourne out of order. We started at Lewisham, walked up to the Thames and crossed to Greenwich for lunch at the excellent Greenwich Union pub. We then took the DLR back to Lewisham and walked south along the Ravensbourne to Catford Bridge station.

This second leg of the walk passes mainly through municipal parkland, and the same observations apply as downstream of Lewisham. It begins at a bridge on which is based Adhesive Specialities Limited; London has few art deco buildings and none, to my knowledge, as ugly as this one. In Ladywell Fields a completely artificial stream has been cut from the Ravensbourne in a ludicrously sinuous route and miniature hillocks have been mounded up around it in a kind of exaggerated parody of Capability Brown. The river is hemmed in by raw concrete near the railway stations, giving it a brutalist quality.

Along the walk we did our best to photograph every section of the river that’s visible from publicly-accessible places. The pictures are available on Flickr in the sets Ravensbourne north of Lewisham and Ravensbourne from Catford Bridge to Lewisham. We hope to walk the upper half from the source in Keston to where we left off at Catford at a future date.

As to the psychogeography of the place, there are two aspects that stand out for me. There’s certainly always something strange about crossing a river in a city, and doing it by tunnel is completely different from doing it by bridge. The latter seems to tie the banks of the river together, whereas travelling by tunnel radically dissociates the two end-points: it’s the closest we can get to teleportation. At the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs we entered a kind of hyperspace and emerged in Greenwich.

The process of getting from one place to another appeared to be unrelated to the topography we could see from either end. This sense that a journey undertaken during a continuous interval of time has mapped us into a discontinuous portion of space — something we intuitively know can’t happen — has been noted before, in particular in relation to air travel. In this case we walk exactly the right distance but, as it were, in a different space — an echoing, constrained space bathed in artificial light, surrounded by crazed tiles and rusted iron. If you commute through the tunnel this effect must disappear; commuting is almost always about erasing the journey so as to make it as much like teleportation as possible.

The second thing is the texture of the place, which was mostly what we wanted to record on this occasion. The surfance of the tunnel is heavily weathered. Rust, wear and tear and small acts of vandalism are everywhere. Almost every square foot of surface in the place is covered in scars, from the large to the microscopic, left by the people who pass through it and the natural processes to which it is, like everything else, subject. This form of natural rustication gives the tunnel much of its present charm for urban Romanticizers, perhaps because it makes it similar to a living thing. I admit it would be a shame to see such a lovely patina of london foot-traffic disappear, but other things matter too: safety, utility, economy, efficiency. These things mattered to the tunnel’s original constructors, and it would seem unreasonable for us to complain if Greenwich Council pursues the same agenda.

The Greenwich Foot Tunnel is a fine piece of Edwardian industrial engineering that’s weathered its heavy usage rather elegantly, probably thanks to the choice of materials and the rather minimal design. Although very battered, it still doesn’t look shabby to me. The pictures we took are intended to record that — and especially some of the less picturesque details such as bolt-heads, makers’ marks etc — in case anything does change in the near future.

As an aside, this activity was apparently illegal, although nobody grumbled at us about it and I’d have grumbled back if they had.

You can see all of my pictures here and Mark’s far more professional ones here.

Brown’s Case

Brown’s short blog post actually advances several separate claims:

1. “[I]n the US, the new atheism is a reassuring fundamentalism for the college educated”
2. “Educated atheism” — the kind characterised by reading Dawkins, attending meetings of your local humanist society and so on — is “an entirely middle-class phenomenon”;
3. In the UK, “unlike the US, the poor are not devout”;
4. Atheism gives the British pseudo-intellectual a group of “despicable believers” against whome to define their own identity, and who “are for the most part lower class”;

I certainly agree with one of Brown’s sentiments, which is that “[s]ocial movements work for social causes more than intellectual ones”; that is, that sociology rather than philosophy is probably the right tool to use to examine something like the rise of contemporary forms of atheism. What’s more, I think it’s interesting and worthwhile to think about movements like this while bracketing off our desire to engage with the arguments themselves. This is something anthrolopogists are trained to do, and it’s an interesting intellectual discipline.

Yet the comments on Brown’s piece display much resistance to the idea that atheism has become a movement, even an identity, for enough people now that it needs this sort of analysis. One objects that “atheism is merely a conclusion based on the evidence”, in other words that it represents belief in a single, specific proposition only; the sentiment is repeated elsewhere, including by Sherine.

This, I think, is manifestly untrue. I’m no sociologist but spending a little time on atheist messageboards soon suggests that there is a whole world-view here for us to subscribe to. It isn’t dogmatic in all of its details but it’s certainly more than a single, bare opinion that “God doesn’t exist”. Try going on one of those sites as an atheist who isn’t an ontological naturalist, an atheist who finds social-constructivist or incommensuabilist accounts of science compelling or an atheist who thinks social structures based around religious beliefs are an important part of the cultural fabric. Or try masquerading as a conservative atheist who expresses illiberal views or right-wing politics. You may or may not be made to feel welcome, but you’ll certainly feel like an outsider, because your views will differ sharply from those of the majority. As far as I can see these communities really don’t appear to exhibit complete pluralism on all points aside from the statement “God doesn’t exist”.

Where are the Demographics?

Brown’s article is, however, extremely flimsy stuff for one simple reason. As the commenters delight in pointing out, he appears to have simply made up all of the demographics he’s quoting. This might partly be caused by the CiF tradition, carried over from the main news section of the Guardian website, of not linking to research that’s used in the piece, but you should still say where your research came from. So Brown is guilty either of plagiarism — using someone else’s research without citing it — or making stuff up to suit his argument. Whichever it was, he comes out looking foolish.

I’m no demographer but I can use Google like anyone else. Those identifying their religion as Christian, Hindu, Sikh or Jewish are way more likely to be homeowners than those self-identifying as having “no religion”; this might be an indicator of class, might it not? On the other hand, it seems true that atheists are a bit more likely to have at least one qualification than believers in most major religions.

Further floundering around the 2001 census continues to suggest that the picture is very murky, and there are many more factors to take into account than the data permits. Determining whether atheism really is a middle class phenomenon would take a lot more work, and might not be possible at all, even assuming we had a robust enough definition of class in contemporary British society to start with. The kinds of anecdotal my-mate’s-an-atheist-plumber comments Brown’s article has drawn don’t tell us anything except that there are at least a handful of exceptions, which you’d expect even with a rock-solid statistical case.

Sherine’s article attempts a similar tack, but she doesn’t even manage that properly as she’s preoccupied with selling her Christmas stocking-filler, a book containing brain-dumps from a range of exactly the kinds of atheists Brown happens to be talking about. Of course, if Brown is lamenting that the public representatives of atheism are middle class then he’s got an easier case to make since journalists, academics, professional speakers and suchlike do jobs that most of us would, I think, consider to be middle class. The same could be said for those who speak and write on behalf of religious groups.

Individualism

So yes, this is a rather woolly bit of point-countepoint, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth considering here. The idea that something you subscribe to is a sociological phenomenon, and that you may be exhibiting statistically predictable behaviour, is extremely disturbing whether we’re talking about religious faith (which on some, but not all, accounts is supposed to be elective) or atheism (which is often grounded on a kind of received and decontextualized verson of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?“) or something else.

It reminds me of Durkheim’s famous study of suicide. One of the most simple yet shocking things about it — and subsequent studies, which have partly overturned some of his claims — is that about the same number of people commit suicide every year. Every act of suicide is a specific, highly personal response to a unique set of circumstances; it’s also rare relative to the size of the population. Surely we would expect the number of times this happens in a year to be highly variable. At the moment it swings between 15 and 25 a year per 100,000 population for men. It’s never as high as 30 or as low as 10. This strikes me as remarkable. What’s more, different coutries have different annual suicide rates, equally stable, suggesting there may be social or cultural variations that make a difference to whether someone takes their own life or not.

I think the resistance to Brown’s kind of argument — aside from his complete lack of evidence — is partly fuelled by the sense that atheism is arrived at by the rational individual who has weighed all the available evidence. This kind of sentiment is expressed in quite a few comments. It amounts to a rejection of determinism, an assertion of the free will of the individual thinker over the machinery of impersonal class conflict.

No individual act of suicide can be predicted by population statistics, but the regularity of the phenomenon of suicide clearly cries out for sociological explanations alongside purely psychological ones. In a similar way, no individual belief can be predicted using a socio-political analysis. Yet if these beliefs are correlated with a wider set of beliefs that are themselves the bases of emergent communities we should, I think, be checking them out on those terms as well as purely individualistic ones.

The Realist Novel

For a start, the novel didn’t start out with the realist conventions associated with the blockbuster mid-nineteenth century writers. I mean what we now consider “psychologically realistic” characters, “believable” situations, the usual Bildungsroman theme of self-discovery championed by the Romantics, the major story-arc supplemented by numerous character-based sub-plots and so on. The realist novel is as formulaic as the Hollywood blockbuster satirised in Charlie Kaufman’s film Adaptation.

Those conventions emerged slowly during the eighteenth century out of a morass of different practices. Depending on your definition of a “novel”, those practices had been creating things that look nothing like Dickens or Hugo for three or four centuries: Cervantes, Rabelais, Behn, Swift and Sterne are a few well-known examples. Even once it was established, the conventions of the realist novel continued to be flouted: think of de Sade, Büchner, Kierkegaard, Ducasse or Jarry. Think even of the original Great American Novel, Moby Dick.

The “fractured” and dissociative aspects of writing have always been part of the novel, since before the term even existed. And the economic dominance of the realist novel in the contemporary fiction industry should not suggest that they’ve now vanished again. Nor should they lead us to conclude that modernism was a brief, incandescent experiment that went wrong and burned out quickly. This is a narrative that works well if you want to make the latest product of the lit fic production line look like something revolutionary and new; it’s therefore a narrative that plays well among the literati. It is, though, a convenient untruth.

Avant Garde As Critique

One assumption lying behind this is that realist novels are fluffy and entertaining while modernism is angry, confrontational, “typographically altered, grammatically shattered, rhetorically obscure”. Grossman sees the triumph of the former as a product of people power, a “revolution from below, up from the supermarket racks” that overthrows the donnish old elites with their Greek and their high aesthetic notions. People want to be excited, not educated, and that’s what they shall have.

Unsurprisingly, this naive free market aesthetic is labelled “postmodern”, as if that’s what “postmodern” used to mean. The idea that somehow Tesco and W H Smith are engaged in a revolution against the powerful intellectual elites is so daft, when you say it out loud, that one can hardly believe it made it into print.

Grossman also betrays what appears to be a complete lack of understanding about the politics of modernism. Yes, of course, T S Elliot and Virigina Woolf were modernists and they were elitists. They believed they were the carriers of a great cultural tradition. They were writing close to the beginning of the age of mass consumption and can perhaps be forgiven for believing it really wasn’t very important. Let the mass media be as apparently insignificant as they’d been in the previous century — the penny dreadfuls, the melodramas, the music hall — and leave literature to the few who appreciated and wanted it. This mostly wasn’t meant to be a revolution but a continuation, even when its rhetoric was sometimes startling. An Ezra Pound or a Pierre Boulez could speak of destroying the remnants of the past in the present because they believed a progressive tradition had begun to stagnate, and felt an urgent need to revitalise it.

In addition, let’s not imagine that the Victorian novel was somehow a complacent, uncritical reflection of an idyllic world. The novel in the hands of Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Hugo or Zola was specifically designed to offer criticism: in their time many realist novelists caused outrage with their alienating, daring use of subject-matter and especially their depictions of poverty, moral breakdown and vice.

It’s not, then, as if the realist form were somehow incapable of critique, or that the events of the early twentieth century therefore created a need for new techniques. It’s also not the case that our own society no longer needs critical representations of itself, regardless of whether they’re realist or avant garde or something else, and regardless of how immediately popular they are.

The Customer’s Always Right

The head for Grossman’s article (maybe not his choice) is “Good Novels Don’t Have To Be Hard Work”. Because our status as citizens is pretty much defined by our status as consumers, we feel as if it’s our right to consume whatever we like and be immune from criticism. If I buy a washing machine, I expect it to make my life easier — to get the washing done quickly, quietly and efficiently. I want to do as little work as possible; that’s the point of the machine. So why wouldn’t we all make the same demands of our books?

Grossman doesn’t name his targets here, but he’s complaining about contemporary fiction, not Joyce or even B S Johnson. I suppose it’s people like Vonnegut, Calvino, Pynchon (whose “cumbersome verbal calisthenics” get a swipe here), Auster, Danielewski, Wallace, Saramago, Winterson, DeLillo and so on. Phew: what a relief not to have to slog through another of their tiresome novels again just so I can pass muster at the next dinner party. Pass the Stephenie Meyer, would you?

I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Andrew Lanyon’s Circular Walks Around Rowley Hall, which I’m sure is on Grossman’s list of novels nobody enjoys if he’s heard of it. I didn’t read it for a research project or because I felt I ought to, but because it sounded fun, and it was. No, it doesn’t have a plot. Yes, it has a bizarre set of characters, each of whom independently may or may not be real. Yes, it’s written in a peculiar style reminiscent of a local history guidebook and illustrated by very odd pictures. No, it doesn’t have a character who learns more about himself after going through a painful personal experience, and nobody robs a bank.

In Grossman’s world, Lanyon’s readers don’t exist, or anyway don’t count. What counts is sales: Grossman’s new book, which appears to be about secret codes and ancient manuscripts à la mocirc;de, reached at least #9 in the NYT bestseller list, which means it’s really really good. Grossman’s world is, of course, the dominant one. But in my view his industry is dead, or dying, and so are its forms. Who on Earth thought it was all about the novel any more?

Mathemantical Theories

The word “theory” is used by mathematicians to refer to a body of knowledge about some particular area of their subject. It does, though, have a precise meaning. We begin with the idea of a theorem, which is a statement that has an accompanying proof of its correctness. A mathematical proof is purely logical: it can be done inside a computer, or in your head. Nothing in the physical world, for instance, gets involved.

In a sense all of mathematics is made of theorems. Conjectures — which look like theorems but don’t have proofs — play a very important part in the practice of maths, but they haven’t yet earned their right to be considered part of mathematical knowledge. The Riemann Hypothesis, to pick a very famous example, stimulates a great deal of research and general curiosity, but we don’t yet really know whether it’s true or false. When we do, it — or its negation — will become a theorem instead.

The theory of some mathematical object is the set of all theorems that can be proved from the definitions of that object (broadly speaking). So group theory is just the set of all theorems we can prove about groups. We can make this as rigorous as we like: the relevant definitions are expressed as axioms in a formal language, and the proofs can be expressed as derivations in the same formal language and checked by machine.

So “theory” in maths means “collection of theorems proved to be true”. Nobody, in this context, would say “that’s just a theory” — “just” would suggest there was something deficient about the status of “theory”, which there isn’t here.

Empirical Theories

In the sciences, of course, the word “theory” means something quite different, and this is where the waters get muddied. A scientific theory may be best thought of as a model. This is a simplified description of reality whose behaviour is governed by mathematical relationships that the scientist defines. If the model is good, the scientist can use it to make predictions: given some conditions, she can see what the model will do, and given equivalent conditions in the real world we might expect an equivalent outcome.

Modelling is good, for instance, if you want to know how to hit an enemy ship with a cannon. You set up a simple description of the cannon as a point the ball is launched from and the ball as another point that moves according to an initial acceleration (due to the charge in the barrel) and another ongoing acceleration due to gravity. If you have a mathematical desription for how position varies as a result of these two forces then you can make predictions about where the point representing the cannonball will end up.

Now you can easily calculate what the size and angle of the initial force should be if you want the cannonball to hit the ground, say, half a mile away. Then you can go out and try it on your real cannon. If the real cannon regularly hits the target that the model predicts then we say the theory is good. A scientific theory is really just a general way of constructing models for certain kinds of problems. In this case, the theory of Newtonian mechanics is gives you a pretty good way of creatinging those crucial mathematical relationships that make the cannonball model work.

The construction of a mathematical model, on this account, is a pragmatic practice, not an enquiry into truth. This is where my view parts company with that of many of the new breed of scientific Naturalists, for whom scientific models are truths. By my lights they are precisely not truths but fictions: useful, even necessary fictions that enable us to get things done.

Cannonballs are not really point masses, and forces are not really vectors and so on. If they were the world we live in would be made of mathematics, which is appears not to be. The mathematical entities of which a scientific model is essentially made are useful exactly because they’re unlike the real world they model: they’re simplified, better-behaved, cheaper and so on.

So on my account a scientific theory is a method for model-building. The method may be good or bad. That evaluation is not based on how true the resulting models are — I don’t even know what that would mean — but on how well they enable us to get something done, and especially how well they make predictions.

This jibes well with the fact that scientific theories are never proved like mathematical theorems. The latter are true, and so it makes sense that they have proofs. The former are useful, and are “proved” in the way that a method for hunting ducks might be “proved” by going out and trying it. These two usages of the word are not in any way similar, except inasmuch as both lead to the acceptance or rejection of something. The kind of thing being accepted, the kind of tests applied and the whole social context in which it’s happening are all utterly different. That we use the same word for both is extremely unfortunate.

There’s a philosophical argument to be had over whether the effectiveness of scientific models suggests that the universe really is structured roughly the way scientists think it is; this is a view that’s certainly held by sophisticated, well-intentioned people who’ve thought hard about the issues. I personally don’t think the prospects for that claim are too good, partly because I don’t see how you would find any evidence to support it. (Notice that “scientific models work really well” isn’t evidence for “they work really well because the universe is structured in the way they say”).

[Attentive geeks may have observed that mathematical modelling of scientific theories on my account has little or nothing to do with what mathematical logicians call "model theory". Alain Badiou has (controversially) argued that a certain sleight of hand can make it look as if these two things are two sides of the same coin, and that that's been part of the political success of positivism, which has survived as a general idea long after it was discredited as an epistemology.]

“Just” A Theory Rather Than A… What?

When we say something is “just a theory” we mean, I think, something different from either of the above kinds of activity. Here we mean by “theory” something more like the mathematician’s “conjecture”: something we have a hunch may be true but we don’t really know. We use the term in everyday life all the time without problems. “I have a theory it’s going to rain later,” and so on. Here we mean “just a theory rather than a fact” or “rather than proper knowledge”, whatever that means. But day-to-day we’re not philosophers, and we know what we mean, and everything works pretty well.

When we say a scientific theory is “just a theory” the question is what you think it should be that a theory isn’t. On my account, a scientific theory isn’t an account of the true nature of the universe, for example. On almost all accounts, a scientific theory isn’t immune to skepticism, doubt and even rejection if we discover an inability to do the things we want it to do. If you want something that doesn’t have those kinds of properties, you don’t want a scientific theory. This is, incidentally, why maths isn’t a science.

That’s OK — science is splendid, but it doesn’t have to do everything, and trying to “scientize” all human questions is a project doomed to failure. It’s also a misconceived one, because people often ask for things that scientific models can’t give them and shouldn’t try to. In the interim, though, pretending something is scientific when it’s not really can lead to serious errors of judgement (mathematical finance is an example that springs to mind).

Hirst alerted the Design and Artists Copyright Society, which is the mechanism by which artists in the UK get paid for their intellectual property. The DACS took legal advice (I assume) and had solicitors’ letters sent to 100artworks, which capitulated and (oddly, to my eyes) handed over the original artwork to the DACS.

At the time the Daily Mail (credibility warning) claimed that Hirst had threatened to sue Cartrain, which doesn’t square with Cartrain’s own version of the story now, and indeed the final paragraphs of its story, as so often with the Mail, contradicts the screaming headline. The Mail also says Hirst’s intention was to recoup his royalty percentage from the proceeds from the sales on 100artworks, which would presumably have been a small sum.

“The legal grounds in which Hirst requested the artworks are very questionable” according to a statement that appears to be written by Cartrain, although it refers to him in the third person. However, as far as I’m aware the ruling has not been challenged.

So the story ended, until July this year when Cartrain walked into the Tate Britain gallery and stole a packet of pencils from Damien Hirst’s installation Pharmacy. Cartrain then posted up mock-up ransom demands, stating that the pencils would be returned if Hirst gave him his artworks back. It’s not clear to me that Hirst has the artworks (the action was taken by the DACS) but perhaps he does.

Shortly afterwards, the police arrested Cartrain for theft and criminal damage: theft of the pencils, which turn out to be an extremely rare set of pencils worth half a million quid (yes, I’m gobsmacked too) and damage to a large artwork by a world-famous artist, the whole of which is valued at ten million (seems not unlikely).

The little media and blogging coverage this story has received so far has been predictable. Nobody in the middlebrow world of mainstream journalism likes Hirst because nobody in that world likes conceptual art. They do like Banksy and his imitators, of which Cartrain appears to be one, because it’s art they understand, and it makes the gentrified bits of City fringe they live in (or pretend they live in) seem edgy and arty and exciting. In any story that features Hirst or (worse!) Sarah Lucas or Tracy Emin, the artist is likely to be the enemy. The attitude is the same as when The Sun screamed “What a Load of Rubbish” at Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII.

So The Indie goes with Hirst’s vicious feud over a box of pencils. Twitter has picked it up, mostly with retweets of uncharacteristically vacuous remarks by Ben Goldacre, Charlie Brooker and Peter Serafinowitz (all people whose work I usually like). The tone has universally been dominated by the following observations:

• Damien Hirst is rich, and doesn’t need any more money
• Damien Hirst’s art isn’t any good
• Modern art is rubbish anyway
• Who would pay £500,000 for a box of pencils LOLZ

Let’s deal with these one by one. First, Hirst does not stand to get any money. The charges are criminal, meaning we’d expect any fine to be paid to the crown, not to Hirst, at least assuming he doesn’t have to replace the pencils. To be clear: there’s no way Cartrain is going to have to pay £500k or £10m, much less pay them to Hirst.

Second, whether Hirst’s art is good or not is not the same as whether or not you like it. The question of how art can be judged is an extremely vexed one, and judgements are often revised, again and again, over the course of time. It seems to me to be largely a social and cultural construction, but that’s just my view. If you don’t like an artist’s work, that doesn’t mean the law shouldn’t protect it from being vandalised or, indeed, to go back to the previous case, from being ripped off.

Third, yes, many people dislike conceptual art, and many people dislike all art that isn’t pictures of horses. That’s fine. It doesn’t mean the art is rubbish. Maybe people who think Hirst is rubbish are wrong, and all those people who know a lot about art are right. Just maybe. But even if (as I think) there’s no right and wrong in such arguments, the law doesn’t and shouldn’t care.

Fourth, only an idiot would pay £500k for a box of pencils. But there are idiots. If that’s what they’d cost to replace, that’s how much you stole. The claim that I thought the new BMW was worthless when I jacked it isn’t a defense I can use in court.

It seems to me that Florence Waters in the Telegraph is the only one so far who’s taken a breath here and seen the stunt for what it is. Cartrain’s excitable statement refers to a (fictional, so far as I can see) “feud between the two artists”. It lists the newspapers that carried the original story. It claims that “[t]he urban art communities are currently heavily debating the actions of Cartrain”. I say this smells strongly like a PR stunt by a naive teenager who wants a career as an artist, and the stunt has gone wrong.

Well, I hate to state the obvious, but stealing from a national gallery and damaging a major work of art are fairly serious criminal acts. That what makes them edgy and stuff; if you can’t do the time, don’t do the art crime. Reardless of the rights and wrongs of the original case, I suspect this has more to do with Cartrain’s thirst for celebrity status than with the evils of Hirst and the British art establishment

[UPDATE 20090908: Fixed Tate Modern / Tate Britain error (see comments)]