Taking as his frame the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, Andrew Marr attempts to draw a portrait of the UK, using many little biographies of those whom he considers to be the most influential change-makers, changing the 'culture' of Britain.
He makes two important points.
- Many of the social changes of modern society were heralded in important legislative changes (though he doesn't really give the credit to the revolutionary Labour government of 1964 - 1970).
- The culture of a society depends on how (and even if) we work so that the huge workplaces of the 1950s in which massive factories produced a vast amount of manufactured goods had a major effect on how the people of the time thought, and that our post-industrial society must inevitably think differently.
But his choice of biographies is inevitably biased. He includes many politicians and activists but very few scientists. He repeatedly talks about the massive societal changes wrought by the technological revolution and he includes Clive Sinclair and the inventor of the Raspberry Pi but not Tim Berners-Lee and nobody from the biological and medical sciences (save Francis Crick, in passing) so the incredible changes in health-care caused by the discovery of DNA seems to have passed him by. David Attenborough is there, of course, but what of the British Scientists who spotted the hole in the Ozone Layer and brought about a world-wdie reductions in CFCs, not to mention James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis which heralded concerns about climate change. Surely the last seventy years have been dominated by science; perhaps Marr doesn't really understand science and that is why he fought shy of it.
There are a lot of entrepreneurs and businesspeople which is odd because he criticizes our obsession with 'The Market': “We have become an increasingly market-saturated society. Relentless consumers, we are schooled to see most of our human exchanges in terms of price and profit. We measure success by wealth.” (Ch 62)
But what about the arts? Pop Music gets a mention (Freddy Mercury, the Beatles, Victoria Beckham, Bob Geldoff) but literature doesn't (no mention of British-resident Nobel Laureates such as Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Golding or Abdulrazak Gurnah). It can't be that he thinks that literature doesn't influence modern culture or why would he mention the Eagle magazine and encourage us, in the last chapter, to read? Perhaps even more shockingly, he doesn't mention TV soap operas except in passing: the man who invented Coronation Street surely had a huge influence on how we think about issues.
It's well-written and interesting but I thought that it was limited, biased and flawed.
Selected quotes:
- “Textbook sociology suggests that we become less religious together, we become more accepting of sexual minorities together and so on, a swooping, twisting, thickening murmuration of attitudinal starlings moving through human history.” (Introduction)
- “ British journalism is, in short, a slapdash preparation for serious politics.” (Introduction)
- “There is nothing so irritating as looking back at previous generations in a spirit of moralizing self-righteousness.” (Ch 1)
- “If people can buy advancement, through better teaching and a vast web of social contacts, then a truly meritocratic society is impossible.” (Ch 13)
- “In Sweden it [Monty Python's Life of Brian] was advertised as the film that was so funny it had been banned in Norway.” (ch 15)
- “One had so many love affairs that it was delightfully said of her, ‘My dear, that woman knew every ceiling in England’.” (Ch 16)
- “The culture of the mid-twentieth century was also one of personal restraint, which didn't see individual sexual fulfilment as one of the great goods of life, and in which self-repression could be seen as admirable rather than simply sad.” (Ch 16)
- “Despite the Luftwaffe, in 1952 Britain turned out a quarter of all the world's manufacturing exports. It's around two per cent today.” (Ch 43)
- “Compared to France or Germany, or indeed the US, Britain had far more people at the top of the tree educated in Greek, literature or history rather than in engineering or the sciences.” (Ch 49)
- “In March 1976, she opened the first branch of the Body Shop ... Unhappily, given its name, it was sandwiched between two funeral parlours. Local people thought, and some hoped, that it was going to be Brighton first sex shop.” (Ch 54)
- “‘The market’ during the 1980s had become a quasi-religious metaphor for profit-driven capitalism.” (Ch 54)
- “The way to the top smelled only of sweat.” (Ch 61)
- “Why should those of us in work care about those on the breadline? Why should any of us in relatively safe and well-ordered Britain concern ourselves with refugees? The market, our dominant economic order, has no answer to these questions and no way of even beginning to think about them.” (Ch 62)
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