Thursday, December 25, 2008
The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike
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Harold Pinter R.I.P.
A poet's ear for language and a flawless sense of dramatic rhythm'
Michael Billington reflects on the life and work of Harold Pinter and his immense contribution to the world of drama
The death of Harold Pinter comes as a great shock. We all knew, of course, that he had endured a succession of illnesses ever since 2000. But there was a physical toughness and tenacity of will about Harold that made us all believe he would survive for a few more years yet. Sadly, it was not to be.
My own memories of Harold, and it's hard to think of him in more formal terms, are entirely happy. We'd had a relatively distant professional relationship for many years. I'd reviewed his plays, sometimes favourably, sometimes not. (I made a spectacular ass of myself over the original production of Betrayal.) Then in 1992 I was approached by Faber and Faber to write a book about him. What was intended as a short book about his plays and politics turned, thanks to his openness, into a full-scale biography. I talked to Harold himself at great length, to his friends and colleagues. And what I discovered was that his plays, so often dubbed enigmatic and mysterious, were nearly all spun out of memories of his own experience. If they connected with audiences the world over, it was because he understood the insecurity of human life and the sense that it was often based on psychological and territorial battles.
Pinter's contribution to drama was immense. He had a poet's ear for language, an almost flawless sense of dramatic rhythm and the ability to distil the conflicts of daily life. I believe his plays, from The Room in 1957 to Celebration in 2000, will endure wind and weather. Indeed many of them already, such as The Birthday Party, The Homeconming and No Man's Land, have the status of modern classics. Pinter was also, of course, a highly political animal, as evidenced by his later plays, his crusading articles and speeches and his famous Nobel Lecture which brilliantly skewered the lies surrounding US foreign policy.
But, just a few hours after learning of his death, what I chiefly remember is the generosity of the man himself. Harold had a great talent for friendship, as the next few days will surely testify. He also had a remarkable sense of loyalty. Eight weeks ago I directed a group of LAMDA students in a triple-bill of Party Time, Celebration and the Nobel Lecture. At the time, Harold was extremely ill. But he had promised to come and see the productions and, on the final Saturday-night performance, he and his wife, Antonia, duly arrived. They not only saw the shows. Harold got a up and made a speech afterwards thanking all the students. He then stayed on to drink and chat with them. Only later did I realise how much of a physical effort it was for Harold. But it was a golden night for the student-actors and, I have to say, for me too. It was also typical of the man. Harold was a great dramatist and screenwriter, a ferocious polemicist, a fighter against all forms of hypocrisy. What we should also remember today is his generosity of spirit and his rage for life.
copyright: The Guardian
From Times Online
December 25, 2008
Pinter: not just a playwright, but an adjective too
Pinteresque: "marked especially by halting dialogue, uncertainty of identity, and air of menace" (OED).
Pinter on Pinteresque: "I've no idea what it means. Never have. I really don't."
Philippe Naughton
Few playwrights are honoured with their own eponymous adjective; even more rarely does it gain currency.
But so distinctive was the voice of Harold Pinter, who has died aged 78, that the first recorded use of the word Pinteresque came as early as 1960, just three years after the first production of any of his plays.
Its precise meaning has been the subject of academic theses and learned articles over the years since then although most people will have their own understanding of the word: Pinter's plays keep the audience guessing, his dialogue keeps them off-balance, unable to relax.
His most famous literary device was borrowed from Samuel Beckett, although it is never described as Beckettian. Like his friend and mentor, Pinter punctuated his scripts with the word "pause", followed by a number of dots to indicate its duration. For a particularly long, menacing pause, he wrote the word "silence".
Of his major works, Betrayal contains no less than 140 scripted pauses, The Caretaker 149 and The Homecoming 224.
But although Pinter later advised actors that they did not have to follow his pauses religiously – and said that he himself, when acting in his own plays, had ignored up to half of them – the pauses were clearly crucial. They helped destroy the words in between, to induce the sense of crisis, from words left unspoken.
Yet the writer himself resolutely rejected that "damn word" Pinteresque, including in a Newsnight Review interview in 2006 when he was asked by Kirsty Wark to "finally acknowledge that there is such a thing as a Pinteresque moment".
"I've no idea what it means. Never have. I really don't," he said. I can detect where a thing is 'Kafkaesque' or 'Chekhovian' but with respect to the 'Pinteresque' I can't define what it is myself. You use the term 'menace' and so on. I have no explanation of any of that really. What I write is what I write."
Michael Billington reflects on the life and work of Harold Pinter and his immense contribution to the world of drama
The death of Harold Pinter comes as a great shock. We all knew, of course, that he had endured a succession of illnesses ever since 2000. But there was a physical toughness and tenacity of will about Harold that made us all believe he would survive for a few more years yet. Sadly, it was not to be.
My own memories of Harold, and it's hard to think of him in more formal terms, are entirely happy. We'd had a relatively distant professional relationship for many years. I'd reviewed his plays, sometimes favourably, sometimes not. (I made a spectacular ass of myself over the original production of Betrayal.) Then in 1992 I was approached by Faber and Faber to write a book about him. What was intended as a short book about his plays and politics turned, thanks to his openness, into a full-scale biography. I talked to Harold himself at great length, to his friends and colleagues. And what I discovered was that his plays, so often dubbed enigmatic and mysterious, were nearly all spun out of memories of his own experience. If they connected with audiences the world over, it was because he understood the insecurity of human life and the sense that it was often based on psychological and territorial battles.
Pinter's contribution to drama was immense. He had a poet's ear for language, an almost flawless sense of dramatic rhythm and the ability to distil the conflicts of daily life. I believe his plays, from The Room in 1957 to Celebration in 2000, will endure wind and weather. Indeed many of them already, such as The Birthday Party, The Homeconming and No Man's Land, have the status of modern classics. Pinter was also, of course, a highly political animal, as evidenced by his later plays, his crusading articles and speeches and his famous Nobel Lecture which brilliantly skewered the lies surrounding US foreign policy.
But, just a few hours after learning of his death, what I chiefly remember is the generosity of the man himself. Harold had a great talent for friendship, as the next few days will surely testify. He also had a remarkable sense of loyalty. Eight weeks ago I directed a group of LAMDA students in a triple-bill of Party Time, Celebration and the Nobel Lecture. At the time, Harold was extremely ill. But he had promised to come and see the productions and, on the final Saturday-night performance, he and his wife, Antonia, duly arrived. They not only saw the shows. Harold got a up and made a speech afterwards thanking all the students. He then stayed on to drink and chat with them. Only later did I realise how much of a physical effort it was for Harold. But it was a golden night for the student-actors and, I have to say, for me too. It was also typical of the man. Harold was a great dramatist and screenwriter, a ferocious polemicist, a fighter against all forms of hypocrisy. What we should also remember today is his generosity of spirit and his rage for life.
copyright: The Guardian
From Times Online
December 25, 2008
Pinter: not just a playwright, but an adjective too
Pinteresque: "marked especially by halting dialogue, uncertainty of identity, and air of menace" (OED).
Pinter on Pinteresque: "I've no idea what it means. Never have. I really don't."
Philippe Naughton
Few playwrights are honoured with their own eponymous adjective; even more rarely does it gain currency.
But so distinctive was the voice of Harold Pinter, who has died aged 78, that the first recorded use of the word Pinteresque came as early as 1960, just three years after the first production of any of his plays.
Its precise meaning has been the subject of academic theses and learned articles over the years since then although most people will have their own understanding of the word: Pinter's plays keep the audience guessing, his dialogue keeps them off-balance, unable to relax.
His most famous literary device was borrowed from Samuel Beckett, although it is never described as Beckettian. Like his friend and mentor, Pinter punctuated his scripts with the word "pause", followed by a number of dots to indicate its duration. For a particularly long, menacing pause, he wrote the word "silence".
Of his major works, Betrayal contains no less than 140 scripted pauses, The Caretaker 149 and The Homecoming 224.
But although Pinter later advised actors that they did not have to follow his pauses religiously – and said that he himself, when acting in his own plays, had ignored up to half of them – the pauses were clearly crucial. They helped destroy the words in between, to induce the sense of crisis, from words left unspoken.
Yet the writer himself resolutely rejected that "damn word" Pinteresque, including in a Newsnight Review interview in 2006 when he was asked by Kirsty Wark to "finally acknowledge that there is such a thing as a Pinteresque moment".
"I've no idea what it means. Never have. I really don't," he said. I can detect where a thing is 'Kafkaesque' or 'Chekhovian' but with respect to the 'Pinteresque' I can't define what it is myself. You use the term 'menace' and so on. I have no explanation of any of that really. What I write is what I write."
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Classical Dancers as Half-Witted Canaries
Lady Talky
Alison Light
* Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes by Judith Mackrell Buy this book
Why does she want the red shoes? She wants to be special and she wants to be looked at. In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale, Karen, a peasant girl, goes barefoot in summer and in winter wears wooden clogs that rub her feet raw, but the mirror tells her she’s lovely and she thinks that wearing the red shoes will make her feel like a princess. Like selfish Heidi and tomboy Katy, Karen is a mid-19th century girl crippled by egotism. The shoes force her to dance non-stop and to display herself ‘wherever proud and vain children live’. Though it seems simply a punitive response to female narcissism, this is a Christian morality tale intended to warn against the sin of self-love. Karen is cast out of her community and her church; she has her feet hacked off, and the story ends with her repentance. What we remember, though, is not the final image of her blissful reunion with God but the red shoes, with the little feet still in them, going on dancing. Shoes were a homely and powerful symbol of status for Andersen, the son of a cobbler, a lonely, ungainly outsider. He was greedy for fame yet tormented by guilt at his success; ‘The Red Shoes’ inflicts a cruel comeuppance on exhibitionists and social climbers like himself.
Judith Mackrell suspects that Lydia Lopokova was being mischievous when she chose to read ‘The Red Shoes’ on the wireless for the BBC in 1935. Lopokova was a born show-off but she never sold her soul to the dance. She was unusually free of ‘the psychological perils of her vocation’: ‘masochism, obsession and narcissism’. In fact she was always ‘hopping off somewhere’, as Lydia Sokolova, a fellow dancer in the Ballets Russes, recalled. Lopokova played fast and loose with Serge Diaghilev, the company’s formidable impresario, making and breaking contracts, abandoning dancing for acting when she felt like it, putting her love life first. After her marriage to Maynard Keynes she continued to work, but when his health began to deteriorate in the late 1930s she devoted herself to caring for him. As his widow she more or less withdrew from public life. Despite Mackrell’s title, Lopokova certainly wasn’t a ‘Bloomsbury ballerina’, if that implies cliquishness and hauteur. Though hailed as one of a new breed of dancers who turned ballet into an art form for the avant-garde, she was also ‘Loppie’, a huge favourite with British audiences in the 1920s. Mackrell, the dance critic for the Guardian, restores her to her rightful place in the history of ballet, but equally engrossing, and more unusual, is the story of a woman who refused to be sacrificed on the altar of her art and was equally happy out of the limelight.
Lopokova’s life was often dogged by good luck. Though she grew up in a cramped St Petersburg flat, her father, an usher at the prestigious Alexandrinsky Theatre, managed to wangle auditions for his children at the Imperial Theatre School. Fed, clothed and housed courtesy of the tsar, Lydia earned twice her father’s salary even as a junior dancer. She was pretty, with a natural sense of drama and rhythm, and blessed with remarkable leg muscles. Almost as soon as she arrived – aged nine – she became a show-pupil. If she was lonely and homesick, or suffered under the harsh discipline of the school, she learned to hide her feelings (she told Keynes that she had dreamed of running away to the circus).
She responded instinctively to the expressive choreography of Mikhail Fokine, his rebellion against the stiff academicism of the classical style, and her chance came when she was chosen to join the Ballets Russes – Fokine was then the choreographer for Diaghilev’s troupe – on their European tour in 1910. Diaghilev picked her out from the corps, casting her as a sweetly naughty Columbine in Fokine’s Carnaval, and, by contrast, as a baby-faced peasant girl whirling to Borodin’s frantic tribal rhythms in the Polovtsian folk dances. She even took the lead in Stravinsky’s L’Oiseau de feu (though one journalist thought her less a flaming phoenix than a delicate hummingbird). Tiny, fast and feather light, with a leap almost as high as Nijinsky’s, at 18 she was the latest sensation of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev knocked a year off her age and promoted her as a child star.
Mackrell is astute about Lopokova’s handling of her early celebrity and her ‘cultural doubleness’. ‘La Précose’ already had an eye on her future. If she returned home she would soon be back in the corps: she was the wrong shape and size for the grand roles and there were already plenty of prima ballerinas in St Petersburg. Offered eight months’ work in America and a fee of £13,000 a month, she broke with the Mariinsky and crossed the Atlantic, accompanied by Alexandre Volinine from the Bolshoi and her brother Fedor, whose contract was an extra inducement. In the US, Lydia learned to ‘work her assets’: her high spirits, her Russianness and her juvenile appearance. Nicknamed ‘Little Pet’, though she was nearly 20, she was the darling of the press, as cute and dimpled as that other little sunbeam, Mary Pickford. Of all the things she liked in America, ‘the very most’, she told reporters, ‘is the shortcake strawberry’, charming the pants off them as she waved ‘goodbysky’. Though ‘Little Lydie’ seemed demure in her sandals and simple frocks (they made it easier, she said, to run and dance), there were already rumours of lovers and marriage offers. She enthusiastically praised American democracy and Americanised her name from its original Lopoukhova. Mackrell suspects she was thinking of getting US citizenship and thus being able to travel back to Russia. The Mariinsky had washed its hands of her.
Mackrell has scoured the press for details of Lopokova’s career in the US, tracking her across the continent. Americans had seen very little ballet except bowdlerised classics offered as light entertainment. Russian dancers had a reputation for immorality and their performances were censored or toned down (when the Ballets Russes played Kansas City the Police Department threatened to come up on stage if there was any funny business, complaining that ‘Dogleaf, or whatever his name is, couldn’t understand plain English’). Lydia managed to keep her nice girl image, but she learned more about showbiz than art. Demoted to a ‘toe dancer’ in musical interludes sandwiched into popular musicals, playing vaudeville alongside ‘Loughlin’s bicycle-riding dogs’ and other novelty acts, billed with singers, comics and Isadora Duncan wannabees in clunky revue imitations of Diaghilev, she was increasingly adored by audiences and increasingly weary of being an Americanised ballerina. Her ebullience just about kept her afloat until finally, after performing yet another dying swan solo in a Broadway operetta, she had had enough. She holed up for months in the Catskills, announcing that she was resting and practising her elocution with a view to a theatrical career. There may also have been a miscarriage or an abortion.
With no private income, Lopokova had to keep on dancing for her supper or look to men for security. Lovers were played off against one another. She dumped her nice American fiancé, the journalist Heywood Broun, in the heat of a reunion with Diaghilev in 1916, and married the company’s business manager, Randolfo Barocchi, instead. A ‘glossy man of the world’, he stole her earnings and – luckily – turned out to be a bigamist; meanwhile, in the midst of a wartime European tour, she had an on-off affair with Stravinsky, who was married and already attracted to the Parisian actress Vera Sudeykina (she eventually became his second wife). Shortly after her triumphant premiere with the Ballets Russes in London in 1918, Lydia suddenly disappeared again. She pleaded a breakdown but it was probably a desperate attempt to escape Barocchi; there was also a lover, a mysterious Russian general who might have offered a way back to Russia. Mackrell has trouble getting to the bottom of it all, though clearly one of Keynes’s attractions was his capacity to become her protector and manage her finances without turning into a Svengali.
When the Ballets Russes arrived in London, they brought a frisson of the avant-garde. Mackrell deftly weaves Lopokova’s performances into an account of the company’s fluctuating reputation at a time when ballet was a ‘modernist battlefield’. Diaghilev’s latest choreographer, Leonide Massine, far more experimental than his predecessors, had collaborated with Picasso, Cocteau and Satie on Parade (for which Lydia had donned a unitard as a female acrobat), grandly advertised in Paris as ‘the world’s first Cubist ballet’; his La Boutique fantasque brought André Derain’s designs to the Coliseum, then a music hall. The story of two cancan dolls who elope from a Victorian toyshop, it provided a satirical view of 19th-century mores, its human characters more like ironic cartoons and its dancing toys – Massine and Lopokova – strangely sinister as well as touching. Everyone loved it: the ‘kid glove and tiara set’ in the stalls, the balletomanes in the cheap gallery seats – bearded young men and intense young women with bobbed hair – and leading intellectuals too. Clive Bell praised the absence of naturalism and the emptying out of the characters; T.S. Eliot argued that on stage Massine embodied all that was ‘most completely unhuman, impersonal, abstract’. No longer clogged by Romanticism, soaring or sinking into emotion, it was possible to tell the dancer from the dance.
Keynes met Lopokova when she was on the verge of becoming a cult figure. Her final frenzied cancan with Massine, which transformed her from an inert doll into a bacchante, sent her fans crazy; they stood on their seats, clapping and chanting her name. It wasn’t long before ‘Lydia’ dolls were being sold. The British press loved her because she was more like the girl next door than an exotic Slav; she was a ‘London sparrow’ with an ‘exquisite plebeian beauty’. Lopokova was a fan of the music hall and her childlike, wistful face could imbue a role with Chaplinesque dignity and pathos. Nor was she above a bit of clowning. When her knickers slithered to the floor as she danced the lead in Les Sylphides – the most poetic of ballets – she threw them into the wings with a flourish (she used other such ‘accidents’ to play to the gallery). In 1921, hoping to bring in the crowds, Diaghilev staged a lavish version of The Sleeping Beauty. The production flopped. The critics felt it was a retrograde step and London’s postwar audiences were too jaded for romance. Except for Keynes. He sat every night in the stalls, enchanted by Lydia as the Lilac Fairy casting spells over the cradle.
Keynes had been an avowed homosexual since the age of 16, and now at 38 was apparently settled into an agreeable life divided between his teaching at Cambridge and his ‘London family’, centred on Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, who had been the great love of his life. One of Lydia’s charms, he told Vanessa, ‘is the most knowing and judicious use of English words’, and Mackrell makes the most of their courtship correspondence, which was for both of them a source of erotic excitement and a release. Lydia fashioned a tender, affectionate language of arousal in her humorous, transliterated Russian, quite free of English prurience or smut. She wrote of ‘gobbling’ and ‘regobbling’ him, ‘detaining infinitely our warm wet kisses’, ‘tasting’ his ‘buttons’, ‘warming’ him with her ‘foxy lips’, or saluting his ‘slender’ and ‘subtle’ fingers. Lopokova was unfazed by his history (Nijinsky and Massine had both abandoned Diaghilev for wives) and sometimes played the part of a boy or man in her letters, flirtatiously conjuring up images of herself in trousers or pyjamas. Much more diffident about his appearance and less sexually confident, Keynes warmed to her easy physicality and her seductive ‘Lydian English’ – sending ‘many touchings’ to ‘his dearest pupsik’. Not for her the ‘left-handed’ or ‘intermediate’ relationship of Bell and Grant (who confided to his diary that in the absence of male lovers during the war ‘it is a convenient way the females have of letting off one’s spunk’), or a ‘marriage blanc’ like that of the Woolfs. Both wanted sex and a home, perfection of the life and the work. ‘I would come to your study,’ Lydia promised, ‘sit on the couch and you speak simple words to me, peacefully joyful.’
Lydia was Maynard’s escape route from the airless worlds of Cambridge and Whitehall. Her opinions were fresh and untainted by education; he thought her a natural poet, and, above all, she was an artist, a free spirit like Grant, as accomplished in her own sphere as Keynes was in his. Keynes never lost his reverence for the arts, part of his commitment to the moral philosophy of G.E. Moore which had so influenced him as an undergraduate, with its ideals of beauty and friendship. She, in turn, revered his intellect and knew how lucky she was to be tutored by him: ‘You do develop my cranium miely Maynarochka.’ If he found her Russianness and nomadic past romantic, she found his faith in rational argument, his sense of duty and honesty equally exotic. ‘Is there any resemblance between you and me?’ Lydia asked. ‘No! So different it becomes attractive.’ But perhaps only a foreigner could have coped with Keynes’s tendency to show off his cleverness; he too had been a horribly precocious child. Marriage to Keynes, Mackrell writes shrewdly, was another country to which she would acclimatise herself, but some of the territory was already familiar.
Keynes and Lopokova became lovers two weeks after meeting, but it took two years to wean him from the bosom of Bloomsbury. Initially untroubled by the liaison, Maynard’s circle were more and more appalled at their most brilliant mind falling for a ‘half-witted canary’, as Lytton Strachey described her. Bell and Grant were anxious about losing their friend but worried too about the prospect of losing his cash, which supported their work and subsidised Charleston, Vanessa’s house in Sussex (Keynes went on pouring funds into Bloomsbury’s projects). They barely tolerated Lydia, tried to keep her out of the Charleston ménage and, when marriage was on the cards, Vanessa suggested all kinds of places the couple might live, as long as it wasn’t in Maynard’s own house, 46 Gordon Square, where she and Grant were his tenants. Lydia was an extrovert who loved luxury, shopping and silly pranks; she was unapologetically foreign and blithely full of herself. ‘Maynar’ liked your article so much Leonar’,’ Virginia mimicked to Vanessa; Lydia’s ‘spiritual home’ was Woolworths, Clive Bell sneered. Admittedly ‘Lady Talky’ (as Keynes liked to call her) chattered merrily to Vanessa when she was trying to paint, ruining the precious little time she had to work; but they certainly looked down on her as a prole. When Virginia remarked snidely that Lydia had been racketing about the world ‘with the daughters of publicans’, it had its grain of truth: Lopokova’s great ally, Sokolova, was born Hilda Munnings in East London, where her mother had run an off-licence (she had a brief spell as ‘Munningsova’).
Yet Bloomsbury’s snobbery, Mackrell points out, was less surprising than their parochialism: there was a complete lack of curiosity about this woman who had danced before the tsar, seen the dead piled in Palace Square in St Petersburg on ‘Bloody Sunday’, travelled across continents and worked in the vanguard of the arts. There was also a failure to appreciate her intelligence: ‘How we all used to underestimate her,’ E.M. Forster had the decency to write with hindsight. If Lopokova was hurt by this she said little about it; her letters are remarkably uncatty. At Charleston she often found better company in the kitchen with Grace Germany, Vanessa’s housekeeper, or with the children and grandchildren (Quentin Bell remembered her ‘complete lack of side’). When Mackrell tells us that one of Lydia’s first acts of ‘festive rebellion’ after her marriage was to whitewash over Bell and Grant’s murals at No. 46, the reader wants to cheer.
Did the marriage work, as Mackrell suggests, because it was full of separations for the first ten years? With Keynes teaching at King’s for a large part of the week (and having lunch with his parents every Sunday in Harvey Road in Cambridge), Lopokova was free to cultivate her own motley crowd of theatre folk in London. She marvelled at Keynes’s ferocious capacity for work and never tried to trim his sails, though she thought economists a sad bunch: ‘tiresome, no wide outlooks, no touch with life, inferiority complexes and no great ideas’. She fussed over his digestion and his underwear; he kept track of her menstrual cycle, and felt his mood swings sympathised with hers. Their quietly connubial times at Tilton, the house they rented up the track from Charleston, were their happiest. Lopokova discovered the pleasures of ‘losing time’ and took up gardening and rambling between her daily ballet exercises. Domestic routine – thanks in large measure to Ruby Weller, their cook and housekeeper, who stayed with Lopokova for 50 years – made Keynes even more productive: he wrote a 20,000-word memoir of his economics teacher, Alfred Marshall, in their first two months at Tilton. Lopokova’s imaginative insights and spontaneous judgments appealed to what Robert Skidelsky, in his biography of Keynes, called the ‘liquidity’ of his mind. She didn’t pretend to understand his theories in detail but she responded to the patterning of his thought. His final book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, she found ‘beautiful like Bach’.
Lopokova had been unable to visit her family since the 1917 Revolution until ‘Maynarochka’ managed to take her there as a wedding present. In 1936 her brother Fedor’s new ballet, The Bright Stream, with a score by Shostakovich, was condemned for ‘aesthetic formalism’; he was stripped of his post and his librettist sent to the gulag; her mother would die, half-starved, during the Siege of Leningrad. And there were no children though they had both wanted them. Then, after being weakened by pleurisy, Keynes’s health began to go downhill. In 1937 he collapsed after an attack of angina (he was a very heavy smoker). Mackrell follows Skidelsky, mining Lopokova’s diary and her letters for details of the bizarre and seemingly effective treatments Keynes underwent with the unorthodox Janos Plesch, whom Lydia called ‘the Ogre’: a regime of coffee, tea, raw cabbage and sour oranges; icepacks placed for hours on his chest; homemade shock treatment when Plesch bounced up and down on the mattress while Maynard lay feeling ‘like Desdemona’; and injections with a red dye called Prontosil, an early antibiotic. Lopokova kept a journal monitoring Keynes’s health; she policed his diet and made sure he got enough rest; she cheered him and nursed him and accompanied him on all his Treasury missions across the Atlantic between 1941 and 1946. When she got the chance, she went shopping, and when she shopped, Maynard proudly reported to his mother, Lydia shopped for Britain, buying ‘some two hundred objects’ in a week in Washington: 18 pairs of shoes, 40 pairs of stockings, a large trunkful of food – the list goes on. Lopokova would certainly have spent her way out of a recession. But without her constant attention and her joie de vivre, Keynes might not have made it to Bretton Woods.
Professionally, in her forties, Lopokova made do with odds and ends of broadcasting, translating and the occasional foray onto the stage. Her most successful role was as Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, Keynes’s gift to Cambridge and to Lydia. The couple provided crucial support to the Camargo Society, which helped keep British ballet alive in the 1930s; in 1933 Lopokova danced her last dance as Swanilda in Coppélia for Ninette de Valois’s new company, the Vic-Wells Ballet, and later the Keyneses were backers of de Valois’s Royal Ballet. In the late 1930s, when Lopokova reprised her reading of ‘The Red Shoes’, this time for BBC television, ballet fever was on the rampage. Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, which was top of the children’s bestseller list, had been prompted by a memory of seeing Edris Stannus (aka de Valois) performing the Dying Swan as one of Lila Fields’s ‘Little Wonders’; a more recent inspiration was the latest baby ballerina of the Ballets Russes to take London by storm, the 14-year-old Irina Baronova. Lopokova’s gory warning against hubris would have fallen on deaf ears. All across the country, in makeshift dancing academies, in pubs or chilly village halls, little girls were longing for tutus and tarlatan, dreaming of glory and pointing their toes for ‘Madame’.
Mackrell divides Lopokova’s life into two, before and after marriage. But it is actually a life of three parts. At the age of 54 Lydia was widowed. She had been married to Keynes for 21 years. Mackrell writes that she lived her ‘last years’ in ‘obscurity’: these decades – Lydia’s sixties and seventies and eighties – become a brief coda of 27 pages entitled ‘After Maynard’. Partly, as Mackrell says, it’s a problem of sources – much less Bloomsbury tittle-tattle. I also think she is genuinely baffled by Lopokova’s retreat from public life. She briskly comments that ‘even two years’ after Maynard’s death, Lydia was ‘still’ grief-stricken; she sounds mildly suspicious that ‘it took her, she claimed, five years to get over her grief’ and surprised that ‘even after that, she never left the UK again.’ Yet she acknowledges that Lopokova had been globetrotting since her teens, and that the last nine years with Keynes had left her very little time to herself. Perhaps mourning gave Lydia another chance to go AWOL and the licence to leave off being Lopokova. She did not need to go on creating what Frederick Ashton saw as her special gift – ‘the illusion of spontaneity’.
Mackrell doesn’t idealise her subject: Lopokova was often ‘outrageously childish’, deliberately provocative in company, and inclined to lord it over her servants. Widowhood meant life on her own terms. She grew ‘nostalgic and insular’, sour about income tax and the Labour government. Not nostalgic enough, though, to pick over old memories with prying journalists and fans. She never traded on being the great man’s widow. She carried on his tradition of Sunday lunch in Cambridge with his parents, and embarrassed a new generation of students in the Keynes box at the Arts Theatre, applauding when she felt the dancers needed it: ‘I know how difficult it is,’ she insisted. But she gradually withdrew from the ballet world: she wasn’t going to spend her last years teaching or giving master-classes, strenuously groomed and coiffed. She just seems to have been glad to have had her day and to spend the stipend Keynes left her, though it meant wrangling with his trustee, Richard Kahn, and complaining constantly about a lack of cash. Eventually she dug in at Tilton, where she was, one visitor observed, ‘very comfortable in her own skin’. More so, one imagines, than the hikers who glimpsed her sunbathing naked in her seventies from the public footpath which bordered her garden.
Biographers often have trouble with old age. They want their subjects to go on dancing. But Lopokova was hardly a hermit, nor was her life uneventful – it depends what you mean by an event. She told friends she was relishing ‘contemplative idleness’. I wanted to know more about her final pas de deux with Logan Thomson, the farm manager of Tilton, who moved into the house and became her companion. He was 16 years her junior, a man of few words, and always called her ‘madam’; their relationship was mildly feudal but deeply intimate, though not sexually. The romantic in me wanted to see Lopokova’s old age as her last bid for freedom, and obscurity as the final adventure. Not seeing people, not bothering with proper meals, dressing like a bag lady: all this could be a way of turning one’s face to the sun (quite literally – Lydia and Logan had their armchairs installed in the hall so they could sit with the front door open and get a blast from an overhead electric heater too). But Mackrell’s final picture of their ‘nest’ is sobering: an increasingly dilapidated house, a squalid tableau of mouldering newspapers, old shoes and rusty tins, like a scene from Beckett, the actors’ heads just showing above the debris.
Dancers, as Mackrell knows, are hard to memorialise, their fleeting physical presence, their grace and energy surviving only in the memory of those who saw them. Lopokova looks lumpen on film. Virginia Woolf, who finally came to admire Lydia’s intelligence and acknowledge her artistry, thought biography was a compound of granite and rainbow. But I found this biography entirely enjoyable. Mackrell captures the fizz of Lopokova’s personality, her loveability, and makes her come alive. There is also a happy ending of sorts, a rapprochement with Charleston, when Vanessa Bell’s ten-year-old granddaughter Henrietta discovered by chance the funny, crinkly old lady who lived up the lane. They had sausage for elevenses or a glass of Sauternes for tea and Lopokova chatted gaily about ballet and death. ‘To have wrinkles is to be noble,’ she told her visitor. ‘We all of us grow old, what matters is how you age. We all grow old, very old and then we die.’
Alison Light was recently made a professor of modern English literature and culture at Newcastle University. Mrs Woolf and the Servants is out in paperback.
Alison Light
* Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes by Judith Mackrell Buy this book
Why does she want the red shoes? She wants to be special and she wants to be looked at. In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale, Karen, a peasant girl, goes barefoot in summer and in winter wears wooden clogs that rub her feet raw, but the mirror tells her she’s lovely and she thinks that wearing the red shoes will make her feel like a princess. Like selfish Heidi and tomboy Katy, Karen is a mid-19th century girl crippled by egotism. The shoes force her to dance non-stop and to display herself ‘wherever proud and vain children live’. Though it seems simply a punitive response to female narcissism, this is a Christian morality tale intended to warn against the sin of self-love. Karen is cast out of her community and her church; she has her feet hacked off, and the story ends with her repentance. What we remember, though, is not the final image of her blissful reunion with God but the red shoes, with the little feet still in them, going on dancing. Shoes were a homely and powerful symbol of status for Andersen, the son of a cobbler, a lonely, ungainly outsider. He was greedy for fame yet tormented by guilt at his success; ‘The Red Shoes’ inflicts a cruel comeuppance on exhibitionists and social climbers like himself.
Judith Mackrell suspects that Lydia Lopokova was being mischievous when she chose to read ‘The Red Shoes’ on the wireless for the BBC in 1935. Lopokova was a born show-off but she never sold her soul to the dance. She was unusually free of ‘the psychological perils of her vocation’: ‘masochism, obsession and narcissism’. In fact she was always ‘hopping off somewhere’, as Lydia Sokolova, a fellow dancer in the Ballets Russes, recalled. Lopokova played fast and loose with Serge Diaghilev, the company’s formidable impresario, making and breaking contracts, abandoning dancing for acting when she felt like it, putting her love life first. After her marriage to Maynard Keynes she continued to work, but when his health began to deteriorate in the late 1930s she devoted herself to caring for him. As his widow she more or less withdrew from public life. Despite Mackrell’s title, Lopokova certainly wasn’t a ‘Bloomsbury ballerina’, if that implies cliquishness and hauteur. Though hailed as one of a new breed of dancers who turned ballet into an art form for the avant-garde, she was also ‘Loppie’, a huge favourite with British audiences in the 1920s. Mackrell, the dance critic for the Guardian, restores her to her rightful place in the history of ballet, but equally engrossing, and more unusual, is the story of a woman who refused to be sacrificed on the altar of her art and was equally happy out of the limelight.
Lopokova’s life was often dogged by good luck. Though she grew up in a cramped St Petersburg flat, her father, an usher at the prestigious Alexandrinsky Theatre, managed to wangle auditions for his children at the Imperial Theatre School. Fed, clothed and housed courtesy of the tsar, Lydia earned twice her father’s salary even as a junior dancer. She was pretty, with a natural sense of drama and rhythm, and blessed with remarkable leg muscles. Almost as soon as she arrived – aged nine – she became a show-pupil. If she was lonely and homesick, or suffered under the harsh discipline of the school, she learned to hide her feelings (she told Keynes that she had dreamed of running away to the circus).
She responded instinctively to the expressive choreography of Mikhail Fokine, his rebellion against the stiff academicism of the classical style, and her chance came when she was chosen to join the Ballets Russes – Fokine was then the choreographer for Diaghilev’s troupe – on their European tour in 1910. Diaghilev picked her out from the corps, casting her as a sweetly naughty Columbine in Fokine’s Carnaval, and, by contrast, as a baby-faced peasant girl whirling to Borodin’s frantic tribal rhythms in the Polovtsian folk dances. She even took the lead in Stravinsky’s L’Oiseau de feu (though one journalist thought her less a flaming phoenix than a delicate hummingbird). Tiny, fast and feather light, with a leap almost as high as Nijinsky’s, at 18 she was the latest sensation of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev knocked a year off her age and promoted her as a child star.
Mackrell is astute about Lopokova’s handling of her early celebrity and her ‘cultural doubleness’. ‘La Précose’ already had an eye on her future. If she returned home she would soon be back in the corps: she was the wrong shape and size for the grand roles and there were already plenty of prima ballerinas in St Petersburg. Offered eight months’ work in America and a fee of £13,000 a month, she broke with the Mariinsky and crossed the Atlantic, accompanied by Alexandre Volinine from the Bolshoi and her brother Fedor, whose contract was an extra inducement. In the US, Lydia learned to ‘work her assets’: her high spirits, her Russianness and her juvenile appearance. Nicknamed ‘Little Pet’, though she was nearly 20, she was the darling of the press, as cute and dimpled as that other little sunbeam, Mary Pickford. Of all the things she liked in America, ‘the very most’, she told reporters, ‘is the shortcake strawberry’, charming the pants off them as she waved ‘goodbysky’. Though ‘Little Lydie’ seemed demure in her sandals and simple frocks (they made it easier, she said, to run and dance), there were already rumours of lovers and marriage offers. She enthusiastically praised American democracy and Americanised her name from its original Lopoukhova. Mackrell suspects she was thinking of getting US citizenship and thus being able to travel back to Russia. The Mariinsky had washed its hands of her.
Mackrell has scoured the press for details of Lopokova’s career in the US, tracking her across the continent. Americans had seen very little ballet except bowdlerised classics offered as light entertainment. Russian dancers had a reputation for immorality and their performances were censored or toned down (when the Ballets Russes played Kansas City the Police Department threatened to come up on stage if there was any funny business, complaining that ‘Dogleaf, or whatever his name is, couldn’t understand plain English’). Lydia managed to keep her nice girl image, but she learned more about showbiz than art. Demoted to a ‘toe dancer’ in musical interludes sandwiched into popular musicals, playing vaudeville alongside ‘Loughlin’s bicycle-riding dogs’ and other novelty acts, billed with singers, comics and Isadora Duncan wannabees in clunky revue imitations of Diaghilev, she was increasingly adored by audiences and increasingly weary of being an Americanised ballerina. Her ebullience just about kept her afloat until finally, after performing yet another dying swan solo in a Broadway operetta, she had had enough. She holed up for months in the Catskills, announcing that she was resting and practising her elocution with a view to a theatrical career. There may also have been a miscarriage or an abortion.
With no private income, Lopokova had to keep on dancing for her supper or look to men for security. Lovers were played off against one another. She dumped her nice American fiancé, the journalist Heywood Broun, in the heat of a reunion with Diaghilev in 1916, and married the company’s business manager, Randolfo Barocchi, instead. A ‘glossy man of the world’, he stole her earnings and – luckily – turned out to be a bigamist; meanwhile, in the midst of a wartime European tour, she had an on-off affair with Stravinsky, who was married and already attracted to the Parisian actress Vera Sudeykina (she eventually became his second wife). Shortly after her triumphant premiere with the Ballets Russes in London in 1918, Lydia suddenly disappeared again. She pleaded a breakdown but it was probably a desperate attempt to escape Barocchi; there was also a lover, a mysterious Russian general who might have offered a way back to Russia. Mackrell has trouble getting to the bottom of it all, though clearly one of Keynes’s attractions was his capacity to become her protector and manage her finances without turning into a Svengali.
When the Ballets Russes arrived in London, they brought a frisson of the avant-garde. Mackrell deftly weaves Lopokova’s performances into an account of the company’s fluctuating reputation at a time when ballet was a ‘modernist battlefield’. Diaghilev’s latest choreographer, Leonide Massine, far more experimental than his predecessors, had collaborated with Picasso, Cocteau and Satie on Parade (for which Lydia had donned a unitard as a female acrobat), grandly advertised in Paris as ‘the world’s first Cubist ballet’; his La Boutique fantasque brought André Derain’s designs to the Coliseum, then a music hall. The story of two cancan dolls who elope from a Victorian toyshop, it provided a satirical view of 19th-century mores, its human characters more like ironic cartoons and its dancing toys – Massine and Lopokova – strangely sinister as well as touching. Everyone loved it: the ‘kid glove and tiara set’ in the stalls, the balletomanes in the cheap gallery seats – bearded young men and intense young women with bobbed hair – and leading intellectuals too. Clive Bell praised the absence of naturalism and the emptying out of the characters; T.S. Eliot argued that on stage Massine embodied all that was ‘most completely unhuman, impersonal, abstract’. No longer clogged by Romanticism, soaring or sinking into emotion, it was possible to tell the dancer from the dance.
Keynes met Lopokova when she was on the verge of becoming a cult figure. Her final frenzied cancan with Massine, which transformed her from an inert doll into a bacchante, sent her fans crazy; they stood on their seats, clapping and chanting her name. It wasn’t long before ‘Lydia’ dolls were being sold. The British press loved her because she was more like the girl next door than an exotic Slav; she was a ‘London sparrow’ with an ‘exquisite plebeian beauty’. Lopokova was a fan of the music hall and her childlike, wistful face could imbue a role with Chaplinesque dignity and pathos. Nor was she above a bit of clowning. When her knickers slithered to the floor as she danced the lead in Les Sylphides – the most poetic of ballets – she threw them into the wings with a flourish (she used other such ‘accidents’ to play to the gallery). In 1921, hoping to bring in the crowds, Diaghilev staged a lavish version of The Sleeping Beauty. The production flopped. The critics felt it was a retrograde step and London’s postwar audiences were too jaded for romance. Except for Keynes. He sat every night in the stalls, enchanted by Lydia as the Lilac Fairy casting spells over the cradle.
Keynes had been an avowed homosexual since the age of 16, and now at 38 was apparently settled into an agreeable life divided between his teaching at Cambridge and his ‘London family’, centred on Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, who had been the great love of his life. One of Lydia’s charms, he told Vanessa, ‘is the most knowing and judicious use of English words’, and Mackrell makes the most of their courtship correspondence, which was for both of them a source of erotic excitement and a release. Lydia fashioned a tender, affectionate language of arousal in her humorous, transliterated Russian, quite free of English prurience or smut. She wrote of ‘gobbling’ and ‘regobbling’ him, ‘detaining infinitely our warm wet kisses’, ‘tasting’ his ‘buttons’, ‘warming’ him with her ‘foxy lips’, or saluting his ‘slender’ and ‘subtle’ fingers. Lopokova was unfazed by his history (Nijinsky and Massine had both abandoned Diaghilev for wives) and sometimes played the part of a boy or man in her letters, flirtatiously conjuring up images of herself in trousers or pyjamas. Much more diffident about his appearance and less sexually confident, Keynes warmed to her easy physicality and her seductive ‘Lydian English’ – sending ‘many touchings’ to ‘his dearest pupsik’. Not for her the ‘left-handed’ or ‘intermediate’ relationship of Bell and Grant (who confided to his diary that in the absence of male lovers during the war ‘it is a convenient way the females have of letting off one’s spunk’), or a ‘marriage blanc’ like that of the Woolfs. Both wanted sex and a home, perfection of the life and the work. ‘I would come to your study,’ Lydia promised, ‘sit on the couch and you speak simple words to me, peacefully joyful.’
Lydia was Maynard’s escape route from the airless worlds of Cambridge and Whitehall. Her opinions were fresh and untainted by education; he thought her a natural poet, and, above all, she was an artist, a free spirit like Grant, as accomplished in her own sphere as Keynes was in his. Keynes never lost his reverence for the arts, part of his commitment to the moral philosophy of G.E. Moore which had so influenced him as an undergraduate, with its ideals of beauty and friendship. She, in turn, revered his intellect and knew how lucky she was to be tutored by him: ‘You do develop my cranium miely Maynarochka.’ If he found her Russianness and nomadic past romantic, she found his faith in rational argument, his sense of duty and honesty equally exotic. ‘Is there any resemblance between you and me?’ Lydia asked. ‘No! So different it becomes attractive.’ But perhaps only a foreigner could have coped with Keynes’s tendency to show off his cleverness; he too had been a horribly precocious child. Marriage to Keynes, Mackrell writes shrewdly, was another country to which she would acclimatise herself, but some of the territory was already familiar.
Keynes and Lopokova became lovers two weeks after meeting, but it took two years to wean him from the bosom of Bloomsbury. Initially untroubled by the liaison, Maynard’s circle were more and more appalled at their most brilliant mind falling for a ‘half-witted canary’, as Lytton Strachey described her. Bell and Grant were anxious about losing their friend but worried too about the prospect of losing his cash, which supported their work and subsidised Charleston, Vanessa’s house in Sussex (Keynes went on pouring funds into Bloomsbury’s projects). They barely tolerated Lydia, tried to keep her out of the Charleston ménage and, when marriage was on the cards, Vanessa suggested all kinds of places the couple might live, as long as it wasn’t in Maynard’s own house, 46 Gordon Square, where she and Grant were his tenants. Lydia was an extrovert who loved luxury, shopping and silly pranks; she was unapologetically foreign and blithely full of herself. ‘Maynar’ liked your article so much Leonar’,’ Virginia mimicked to Vanessa; Lydia’s ‘spiritual home’ was Woolworths, Clive Bell sneered. Admittedly ‘Lady Talky’ (as Keynes liked to call her) chattered merrily to Vanessa when she was trying to paint, ruining the precious little time she had to work; but they certainly looked down on her as a prole. When Virginia remarked snidely that Lydia had been racketing about the world ‘with the daughters of publicans’, it had its grain of truth: Lopokova’s great ally, Sokolova, was born Hilda Munnings in East London, where her mother had run an off-licence (she had a brief spell as ‘Munningsova’).
Yet Bloomsbury’s snobbery, Mackrell points out, was less surprising than their parochialism: there was a complete lack of curiosity about this woman who had danced before the tsar, seen the dead piled in Palace Square in St Petersburg on ‘Bloody Sunday’, travelled across continents and worked in the vanguard of the arts. There was also a failure to appreciate her intelligence: ‘How we all used to underestimate her,’ E.M. Forster had the decency to write with hindsight. If Lopokova was hurt by this she said little about it; her letters are remarkably uncatty. At Charleston she often found better company in the kitchen with Grace Germany, Vanessa’s housekeeper, or with the children and grandchildren (Quentin Bell remembered her ‘complete lack of side’). When Mackrell tells us that one of Lydia’s first acts of ‘festive rebellion’ after her marriage was to whitewash over Bell and Grant’s murals at No. 46, the reader wants to cheer.
Did the marriage work, as Mackrell suggests, because it was full of separations for the first ten years? With Keynes teaching at King’s for a large part of the week (and having lunch with his parents every Sunday in Harvey Road in Cambridge), Lopokova was free to cultivate her own motley crowd of theatre folk in London. She marvelled at Keynes’s ferocious capacity for work and never tried to trim his sails, though she thought economists a sad bunch: ‘tiresome, no wide outlooks, no touch with life, inferiority complexes and no great ideas’. She fussed over his digestion and his underwear; he kept track of her menstrual cycle, and felt his mood swings sympathised with hers. Their quietly connubial times at Tilton, the house they rented up the track from Charleston, were their happiest. Lopokova discovered the pleasures of ‘losing time’ and took up gardening and rambling between her daily ballet exercises. Domestic routine – thanks in large measure to Ruby Weller, their cook and housekeeper, who stayed with Lopokova for 50 years – made Keynes even more productive: he wrote a 20,000-word memoir of his economics teacher, Alfred Marshall, in their first two months at Tilton. Lopokova’s imaginative insights and spontaneous judgments appealed to what Robert Skidelsky, in his biography of Keynes, called the ‘liquidity’ of his mind. She didn’t pretend to understand his theories in detail but she responded to the patterning of his thought. His final book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, she found ‘beautiful like Bach’.
Lopokova had been unable to visit her family since the 1917 Revolution until ‘Maynarochka’ managed to take her there as a wedding present. In 1936 her brother Fedor’s new ballet, The Bright Stream, with a score by Shostakovich, was condemned for ‘aesthetic formalism’; he was stripped of his post and his librettist sent to the gulag; her mother would die, half-starved, during the Siege of Leningrad. And there were no children though they had both wanted them. Then, after being weakened by pleurisy, Keynes’s health began to go downhill. In 1937 he collapsed after an attack of angina (he was a very heavy smoker). Mackrell follows Skidelsky, mining Lopokova’s diary and her letters for details of the bizarre and seemingly effective treatments Keynes underwent with the unorthodox Janos Plesch, whom Lydia called ‘the Ogre’: a regime of coffee, tea, raw cabbage and sour oranges; icepacks placed for hours on his chest; homemade shock treatment when Plesch bounced up and down on the mattress while Maynard lay feeling ‘like Desdemona’; and injections with a red dye called Prontosil, an early antibiotic. Lopokova kept a journal monitoring Keynes’s health; she policed his diet and made sure he got enough rest; she cheered him and nursed him and accompanied him on all his Treasury missions across the Atlantic between 1941 and 1946. When she got the chance, she went shopping, and when she shopped, Maynard proudly reported to his mother, Lydia shopped for Britain, buying ‘some two hundred objects’ in a week in Washington: 18 pairs of shoes, 40 pairs of stockings, a large trunkful of food – the list goes on. Lopokova would certainly have spent her way out of a recession. But without her constant attention and her joie de vivre, Keynes might not have made it to Bretton Woods.
Professionally, in her forties, Lopokova made do with odds and ends of broadcasting, translating and the occasional foray onto the stage. Her most successful role was as Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, Keynes’s gift to Cambridge and to Lydia. The couple provided crucial support to the Camargo Society, which helped keep British ballet alive in the 1930s; in 1933 Lopokova danced her last dance as Swanilda in Coppélia for Ninette de Valois’s new company, the Vic-Wells Ballet, and later the Keyneses were backers of de Valois’s Royal Ballet. In the late 1930s, when Lopokova reprised her reading of ‘The Red Shoes’, this time for BBC television, ballet fever was on the rampage. Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, which was top of the children’s bestseller list, had been prompted by a memory of seeing Edris Stannus (aka de Valois) performing the Dying Swan as one of Lila Fields’s ‘Little Wonders’; a more recent inspiration was the latest baby ballerina of the Ballets Russes to take London by storm, the 14-year-old Irina Baronova. Lopokova’s gory warning against hubris would have fallen on deaf ears. All across the country, in makeshift dancing academies, in pubs or chilly village halls, little girls were longing for tutus and tarlatan, dreaming of glory and pointing their toes for ‘Madame’.
Mackrell divides Lopokova’s life into two, before and after marriage. But it is actually a life of three parts. At the age of 54 Lydia was widowed. She had been married to Keynes for 21 years. Mackrell writes that she lived her ‘last years’ in ‘obscurity’: these decades – Lydia’s sixties and seventies and eighties – become a brief coda of 27 pages entitled ‘After Maynard’. Partly, as Mackrell says, it’s a problem of sources – much less Bloomsbury tittle-tattle. I also think she is genuinely baffled by Lopokova’s retreat from public life. She briskly comments that ‘even two years’ after Maynard’s death, Lydia was ‘still’ grief-stricken; she sounds mildly suspicious that ‘it took her, she claimed, five years to get over her grief’ and surprised that ‘even after that, she never left the UK again.’ Yet she acknowledges that Lopokova had been globetrotting since her teens, and that the last nine years with Keynes had left her very little time to herself. Perhaps mourning gave Lydia another chance to go AWOL and the licence to leave off being Lopokova. She did not need to go on creating what Frederick Ashton saw as her special gift – ‘the illusion of spontaneity’.
Mackrell doesn’t idealise her subject: Lopokova was often ‘outrageously childish’, deliberately provocative in company, and inclined to lord it over her servants. Widowhood meant life on her own terms. She grew ‘nostalgic and insular’, sour about income tax and the Labour government. Not nostalgic enough, though, to pick over old memories with prying journalists and fans. She never traded on being the great man’s widow. She carried on his tradition of Sunday lunch in Cambridge with his parents, and embarrassed a new generation of students in the Keynes box at the Arts Theatre, applauding when she felt the dancers needed it: ‘I know how difficult it is,’ she insisted. But she gradually withdrew from the ballet world: she wasn’t going to spend her last years teaching or giving master-classes, strenuously groomed and coiffed. She just seems to have been glad to have had her day and to spend the stipend Keynes left her, though it meant wrangling with his trustee, Richard Kahn, and complaining constantly about a lack of cash. Eventually she dug in at Tilton, where she was, one visitor observed, ‘very comfortable in her own skin’. More so, one imagines, than the hikers who glimpsed her sunbathing naked in her seventies from the public footpath which bordered her garden.
Biographers often have trouble with old age. They want their subjects to go on dancing. But Lopokova was hardly a hermit, nor was her life uneventful – it depends what you mean by an event. She told friends she was relishing ‘contemplative idleness’. I wanted to know more about her final pas de deux with Logan Thomson, the farm manager of Tilton, who moved into the house and became her companion. He was 16 years her junior, a man of few words, and always called her ‘madam’; their relationship was mildly feudal but deeply intimate, though not sexually. The romantic in me wanted to see Lopokova’s old age as her last bid for freedom, and obscurity as the final adventure. Not seeing people, not bothering with proper meals, dressing like a bag lady: all this could be a way of turning one’s face to the sun (quite literally – Lydia and Logan had their armchairs installed in the hall so they could sit with the front door open and get a blast from an overhead electric heater too). But Mackrell’s final picture of their ‘nest’ is sobering: an increasingly dilapidated house, a squalid tableau of mouldering newspapers, old shoes and rusty tins, like a scene from Beckett, the actors’ heads just showing above the debris.
Dancers, as Mackrell knows, are hard to memorialise, their fleeting physical presence, their grace and energy surviving only in the memory of those who saw them. Lopokova looks lumpen on film. Virginia Woolf, who finally came to admire Lydia’s intelligence and acknowledge her artistry, thought biography was a compound of granite and rainbow. But I found this biography entirely enjoyable. Mackrell captures the fizz of Lopokova’s personality, her loveability, and makes her come alive. There is also a happy ending of sorts, a rapprochement with Charleston, when Vanessa Bell’s ten-year-old granddaughter Henrietta discovered by chance the funny, crinkly old lady who lived up the lane. They had sausage for elevenses or a glass of Sauternes for tea and Lopokova chatted gaily about ballet and death. ‘To have wrinkles is to be noble,’ she told her visitor. ‘We all of us grow old, what matters is how you age. We all grow old, very old and then we die.’
Alison Light was recently made a professor of modern English literature and culture at Newcastle University. Mrs Woolf and the Servants is out in paperback.
“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”: The USA and China
In his first interview since the world financial crisis, Gao Xiqing, the man who oversees $200 billion of China’s $2 trillion in dollar holdings, explains why he’s betting against the dollar, praises American pragmatism, and wonders about enormous Wall Street paychecks. And he has a friendly piece of advice:
by James Fallows
“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”
Americans know that China has financed much of their nation’s public and private debt. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and John McCain generally agreed on the peril of borrowing so heavily from this one foreign source. For instance, in their final debate, McCain warned about the “$10 trillion debt we’re giving to our kids, a half a trillion dollars we owe China,” and Obama said, “Nothing is more important than us no longer borrowing $700billion or more from China and sending it to Saudi Arabia.” Their numbers on the debt differed, and both were way low. One year ago, when I wrote about China’s U.S. dollar holdings, the article was called “The $1.4 trillion Question.” When Barack Obama takes office, the figure will be well over $2 trillion.
During the late stages of this year’s campaign, I had several chances to talk with the man who oversees many of China’s American holdings. He is Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation, which manages “only” about $200billion of the country’s foreign assets but makes most of the high-visibility investments, like buying stakes in Blackstone and Morgan Stanley, as opposed to just holding Treasury notes.
Gao, whom I mentioned in my article, would fit no American’s preexisting idea of a Communist Chinese official. He speaks accented but fully colloquial and very high-speed English. He has a law degree from Duke, which he earned in the 1980s after working as a lawyer and professor in China, and he was an associate in Richard Nixon’s former Wall Street law firm. His office, in one of the more tasteful new glass-walled high-rises in Beijing, itself seems less Chinese than internationally “fusion”-minded in its aesthetic and furnishings. Bonsai trees in large pots, elegant Japanese-looking arrangements of individual smooth stones on display shelves, Chinese and Western financial textbooks behind the desk, with a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. perched among the books. Two very large, very thin desktop monitors read out financial data from around the world. As we spoke, Western classical music played softly from a good sound system.
Gao dressed and acted like a Silicon Valley moneyman rather than one from Wall Street—open-necked tattersall shirt, muted plaid jacket, dark slacks, scuffed walking shoes. Rimless glasses. His father was a Red Army officer who was on the Long March with Mao. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, Gao worked on a railroad-building gang and in an ammunition factory. He is 55, fit-looking, with crew-cut hair and a jokey demeanor rather than an air of sternness.
His comments below are from our one on-the-record discussion, two weeks before the U.S. elections. As I transcribed his words, I realized that many will look more astringent on the page than they sounded when coming from him. In person, he seemed to be relying on shared experience in the United States—that is, his and mine—to entitle him to criticize the country the way its own people might. The conversation was entirely in English. Because Gao’s answers tended to be long, I am not presenting them in straight Q&A form but instead grouping his comments about his main recurring themes.
Does America wonder who its new Chinese banking overlords might be? This is what one of the very most influential of them had to say about the world financial crisis, what is wrong with Wall Street, whether one still-poor country with tremendous internal needs could continue subsidizing a still-rich one, and how he thought America could adjust to its “realistic” place in the world. My point for the moment is to convey what it is like to hear from such a man, rather than to expand upon, challenge, or agree with his stated views.
.....
About the financial crisis of 2008, which eliminated hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of savings that the Chinese government had extracted from its people, through deliberately suppressed consumption levels:
We are not quite at the bottom yet. Because we don’t really know what’s going to happen next. Everyone is saying, “Oh, look, the dollar is getting stronger!” [As it was when we spoke.] I say, that’s really temporary. It’s simply because a lot of people need to cash in, they need U.S. dollars in order to pay back their creditors. But after a short while, the dollar may be going down again. I’d like to bet on that!
The overall financial situation in the U.S. is changing, and that’s what we don’t know about. It’s going to be changed fundamentally in many ways.
Think about the way we’ve been living the past 30 years. Thirty years ago, the leverage of the investment banks was like 4-to-1, 5-to-1. Today, it’s 30-to-1. This is not just a change of numbers. This is a change of fundamental thinking.
People, especially Americans, started believing that they can live on other people’s money. And more and more so. First other people’s money in your own country. And then the savings rate comes down, and you start living on other people’s money from outside. At first it was the Japanese. Now the Chinese and the Middle Easterners.
We—the Chinese, the Middle Easterners, the Japanese—we can see this too. Okay, we’d love to support you guys—if it’s sustainable. But if it’s not, why should we be doing this? After we are gone, you cannot just go to the moon to get more money. So, forget it. Let’s change the way of living. [By which he meant: less debt, lower rewards for financial wizardry, more attention to the “real economy,” etc.]
.....
About stock market derivatives and their role as source of evil:
If you look at every one of these [derivative] products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bullshit. They are crap. They serve to cheat people.
I was predicting this many years ago. In 1999 or 2000, I gave a talk to the State Council [China’s main ruling body], with Premier Zhu Rongji. They wanted me to explain about capital markets and how they worked. These were all ministers and mostly not from a financial background. So I wondered, How do I explain derivatives?, and I used the model of mirrors.
First of all, you have this book to sell. [He picks up a leather-bound book.] This is worth something, because of all the labor and so on you put in it. But then someone says, “I don’t have to sell the book itself! I have a mirror, and I can sell the mirror image of the book!” Okay. That’s a stock certificate. And then someone else says, “I have another mirror—I can sell a mirror image of that mirror.” Derivatives. That’s fine too, for a while. Then you have 10,000 mirrors, and the image is almost perfect. People start to believe that these mirrors are almost the real thing. But at some point, the image is interrupted. And all the rest will go.
When I told the State Council about the mirrors, they all started laughing. “How can you sell a mirror image! Won’t there be distortion?” But this is what happened with the American economy, and it will be a long and painful process to come down.
I think we should do an overhaul and say, “Let’s get rid of 90 percent of the derivatives.” Of course, that’s going to be very unpopular, because many people will lose jobs.
.....
About Wall Street jobs, wealth, and the cultural distortion of America:
I have to say it: you have to do something about pay in the financial system. People in this field have way too much money. And this is not right.
When I graduated from Duke [in 1986], as a first-year lawyer, I got $60,000. I thought it was astronomical! I was making somewhere a bit more than $80,000 when I came back to China in 1988. And that first month’s salary I got in China, on a little slip of paper, was 59 yuan. A few dollars! With a few yuan deducted for my rent and my water bill. I laughed when I saw it: 59 yuan!
The thing is, we are working as hard as, if not harder than, those people. And we’re not stupid. Today those people fresh out of law school would get $130,000, or $150,000. It doesn’t sound right.
Individually, everyone needs to be compensated. But collectively, this directs the resources of the country. It distorts the talents of the country. The best and brightest minds go to lawyering, go to M.B.A.s. And that affects our country, too! Many of the brightest youngsters come to me and say, “Okay, I want to go to the U.S. and get into business school, or law school.” I say, “Why? Why not science and engineering?” They say, “Look at some of my primary-school classmates. Their IQ is half of mine, but they’re in finance and now they’re making all this money.” So you have all these clever people going into financial engineering, where they come up with all these complicated products to sell to people.
.....
About the $700 billion U.S. financial-rescue plan enacted in October:
Finally, after months and months of struggling with your own ideology, with your own pride, your self-right-eousness … finally [the U.S. applied] one of the great gifts of Americans, which is that you’re pragmatic. Now our people are joking that we look at the U.S. and see “socialism with American characteristics.” [The Chinese term for its mainly capitalist market-opening of the last 30 years is “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”]
It is joking, and many people are saying: “No, Americans still believe in free capitalism and they think this is just a hiccup.” This is like our great leader Deng Xiaoping, who said that it doesn’t matter if the cat is white or black, as long as it catches the mouse. It doesn’t matter what we call this. It’s pragmatic.
.....
With so much of China’s money at stake, did U.S. officials consult the Chinese about the rescue plan?
Not directly. We were talking to people there, and they were hoping that we would be supportive by not pulling out our money. We know that by pulling out money, we’re not serving anyone’s good. Including ourselves. [This is the famous modern “balance of financial terror.” If Chinese officials started pulling assets out of the U.S. and touched off a run on the dollar, their vast remaining dollar holdings would plummet in value.] So we’re trying to help, at least by not aggravating the problem.
But I think at the end of the day, the American government needs to talk with people and say: “Why don’t we get together and think about this? If China has $2 trillion, Japan has almost $2 trillion, and Russia has some, and all the others, then—let’s throw away the ideological differences and think about what’s good for everyone.” We can get all the relevant people together and think up what people are calling a second Bretton Woods system, like the first Bretton Woods convention did.
.....
On what might make the Chinese government start taking its dollars out of America (I began the question by saying that China would hurt itself by pulling out dollar assets—at which he interjected, “in the short term”—and then asked about the long-term view):
Today when we look at all the markets, the U.S. still is probably the most viable, the most predictable. I was trained as a lawyer, and predictability is always very important for me.
We have a PR department, which collects all the comments about us, from Chinese newspapers and the Web. Every night, I try to pick a time when I’m in a relatively good mood to read it, because most of the comments are very critical of us. Recently we increased our holdings in Blackstone a little bit. Now we’re increasing a little bit our holdings in Morgan Stanley, so as not to be diluted by the Japanese. People here hate it. They come out and say, “Why the hell are you trying to save those people? You are the representative of the poor people eating porridge, and you’re saving people eating shark fins!” It’s always that sort of thing.
.....
And how should Americans feel about the growing Chinese presence in their economy? Isn’t it natural for them to worry that China will keep increasing its stake in American debt and assets—or that China won’t, essentially cutting America off?
I can understand why Americans might feel that way. But, talking with my lawyer head once again, it’s not relevant to discuss how Americans “should” think. We should discuss how Americans might think.
This concern is not really about China itself. It could be any country. It could be Japan, or Germany. This generation of Americans is so used to your supremacy. Your being treated nicely by everyone. It hurts to think, Okay, now we have to be on equal footing to other people. “On equal footing” would necessarily mean that sometimes you have to stoop to appear to be humble to other people.
And you can’t think as a soldier. You put yourself at the enemy end of everyone. I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, when people really treated other people like enemies. I grew up in an environment where our friends, our relatives, people I called Uncle or Auntie, could turn around and put a nasty face to me as a small child. One time, Vladimir Lenin told Gorky, after reading Gorky’s autobiography, “Oh my god! You could have become a very nasty person!” Those are exactly the words one of my dear professors told me after hearing what I went through.
But over the years, I believe I learned to be humble. To treat other people nicely. I learned that, from a social point of view, no matter how lowly statured a person you are talking to, as a person, they are the same human being as you are. You have to respect them. You have to apologize if you inadvertently hurt them. And often you have to go out of your way to be nice to them, because they will not like you simply because of the difference in social structure.
Americans are not sensitive in that regard. I mean, as a whole. The simple truth today is that your economy is built on the global economy. And it’s built on the support, the gratuitous support, of a lot of countries. So why don’t you come over and … I won’t say kowtow [with a laugh], but at least, be nice to the countries that lend you money.
Talk to the Chinese! Talk to the Middle Easterners! And pull your troops back! Take the troops back, demobilize many of the troops, so that you can save some money rather than spending $2 billion every day on them. And then tell your people that you need to save, and come out with a long-term, sustainable financial policy.
.....
Although Gao has frequently mentioned Chairman Mao’s maxim—“Go with the Republicans. They’re predictable!”—he obviously was hoping for a “change” agenda under the Democrats:
The current conditions can’t go on. It is time for the new government, under Obama or even McCain, to really tell people: “Look, this is wartime, this is about the survival of our nation. It’s not about our supremacy in the world. Let’s not even talk about that any more. Let’s get down to the very basics of our livelihood.”
I have great admiration of American people. Creative, hard-working, trusting, and freedom-loving. But you have to have someone to tell you the truth. And then, start realizing it. And if you do it, just like what you did in the Second World War, then you’ll be great again!
If that happens, then of course—American power would still be there for at least as long as I am living. But many people are betting on the other side.
All material copyright The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
by James Fallows
“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”
Americans know that China has financed much of their nation’s public and private debt. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and John McCain generally agreed on the peril of borrowing so heavily from this one foreign source. For instance, in their final debate, McCain warned about the “$10 trillion debt we’re giving to our kids, a half a trillion dollars we owe China,” and Obama said, “Nothing is more important than us no longer borrowing $700billion or more from China and sending it to Saudi Arabia.” Their numbers on the debt differed, and both were way low. One year ago, when I wrote about China’s U.S. dollar holdings, the article was called “The $1.4 trillion Question.” When Barack Obama takes office, the figure will be well over $2 trillion.
During the late stages of this year’s campaign, I had several chances to talk with the man who oversees many of China’s American holdings. He is Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation, which manages “only” about $200billion of the country’s foreign assets but makes most of the high-visibility investments, like buying stakes in Blackstone and Morgan Stanley, as opposed to just holding Treasury notes.
Gao, whom I mentioned in my article, would fit no American’s preexisting idea of a Communist Chinese official. He speaks accented but fully colloquial and very high-speed English. He has a law degree from Duke, which he earned in the 1980s after working as a lawyer and professor in China, and he was an associate in Richard Nixon’s former Wall Street law firm. His office, in one of the more tasteful new glass-walled high-rises in Beijing, itself seems less Chinese than internationally “fusion”-minded in its aesthetic and furnishings. Bonsai trees in large pots, elegant Japanese-looking arrangements of individual smooth stones on display shelves, Chinese and Western financial textbooks behind the desk, with a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. perched among the books. Two very large, very thin desktop monitors read out financial data from around the world. As we spoke, Western classical music played softly from a good sound system.
Gao dressed and acted like a Silicon Valley moneyman rather than one from Wall Street—open-necked tattersall shirt, muted plaid jacket, dark slacks, scuffed walking shoes. Rimless glasses. His father was a Red Army officer who was on the Long March with Mao. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, Gao worked on a railroad-building gang and in an ammunition factory. He is 55, fit-looking, with crew-cut hair and a jokey demeanor rather than an air of sternness.
His comments below are from our one on-the-record discussion, two weeks before the U.S. elections. As I transcribed his words, I realized that many will look more astringent on the page than they sounded when coming from him. In person, he seemed to be relying on shared experience in the United States—that is, his and mine—to entitle him to criticize the country the way its own people might. The conversation was entirely in English. Because Gao’s answers tended to be long, I am not presenting them in straight Q&A form but instead grouping his comments about his main recurring themes.
Does America wonder who its new Chinese banking overlords might be? This is what one of the very most influential of them had to say about the world financial crisis, what is wrong with Wall Street, whether one still-poor country with tremendous internal needs could continue subsidizing a still-rich one, and how he thought America could adjust to its “realistic” place in the world. My point for the moment is to convey what it is like to hear from such a man, rather than to expand upon, challenge, or agree with his stated views.
.....
About the financial crisis of 2008, which eliminated hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of savings that the Chinese government had extracted from its people, through deliberately suppressed consumption levels:
We are not quite at the bottom yet. Because we don’t really know what’s going to happen next. Everyone is saying, “Oh, look, the dollar is getting stronger!” [As it was when we spoke.] I say, that’s really temporary. It’s simply because a lot of people need to cash in, they need U.S. dollars in order to pay back their creditors. But after a short while, the dollar may be going down again. I’d like to bet on that!
The overall financial situation in the U.S. is changing, and that’s what we don’t know about. It’s going to be changed fundamentally in many ways.
Think about the way we’ve been living the past 30 years. Thirty years ago, the leverage of the investment banks was like 4-to-1, 5-to-1. Today, it’s 30-to-1. This is not just a change of numbers. This is a change of fundamental thinking.
People, especially Americans, started believing that they can live on other people’s money. And more and more so. First other people’s money in your own country. And then the savings rate comes down, and you start living on other people’s money from outside. At first it was the Japanese. Now the Chinese and the Middle Easterners.
We—the Chinese, the Middle Easterners, the Japanese—we can see this too. Okay, we’d love to support you guys—if it’s sustainable. But if it’s not, why should we be doing this? After we are gone, you cannot just go to the moon to get more money. So, forget it. Let’s change the way of living. [By which he meant: less debt, lower rewards for financial wizardry, more attention to the “real economy,” etc.]
.....
About stock market derivatives and their role as source of evil:
If you look at every one of these [derivative] products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bullshit. They are crap. They serve to cheat people.
I was predicting this many years ago. In 1999 or 2000, I gave a talk to the State Council [China’s main ruling body], with Premier Zhu Rongji. They wanted me to explain about capital markets and how they worked. These were all ministers and mostly not from a financial background. So I wondered, How do I explain derivatives?, and I used the model of mirrors.
First of all, you have this book to sell. [He picks up a leather-bound book.] This is worth something, because of all the labor and so on you put in it. But then someone says, “I don’t have to sell the book itself! I have a mirror, and I can sell the mirror image of the book!” Okay. That’s a stock certificate. And then someone else says, “I have another mirror—I can sell a mirror image of that mirror.” Derivatives. That’s fine too, for a while. Then you have 10,000 mirrors, and the image is almost perfect. People start to believe that these mirrors are almost the real thing. But at some point, the image is interrupted. And all the rest will go.
When I told the State Council about the mirrors, they all started laughing. “How can you sell a mirror image! Won’t there be distortion?” But this is what happened with the American economy, and it will be a long and painful process to come down.
I think we should do an overhaul and say, “Let’s get rid of 90 percent of the derivatives.” Of course, that’s going to be very unpopular, because many people will lose jobs.
.....
About Wall Street jobs, wealth, and the cultural distortion of America:
I have to say it: you have to do something about pay in the financial system. People in this field have way too much money. And this is not right.
When I graduated from Duke [in 1986], as a first-year lawyer, I got $60,000. I thought it was astronomical! I was making somewhere a bit more than $80,000 when I came back to China in 1988. And that first month’s salary I got in China, on a little slip of paper, was 59 yuan. A few dollars! With a few yuan deducted for my rent and my water bill. I laughed when I saw it: 59 yuan!
The thing is, we are working as hard as, if not harder than, those people. And we’re not stupid. Today those people fresh out of law school would get $130,000, or $150,000. It doesn’t sound right.
Individually, everyone needs to be compensated. But collectively, this directs the resources of the country. It distorts the talents of the country. The best and brightest minds go to lawyering, go to M.B.A.s. And that affects our country, too! Many of the brightest youngsters come to me and say, “Okay, I want to go to the U.S. and get into business school, or law school.” I say, “Why? Why not science and engineering?” They say, “Look at some of my primary-school classmates. Their IQ is half of mine, but they’re in finance and now they’re making all this money.” So you have all these clever people going into financial engineering, where they come up with all these complicated products to sell to people.
.....
About the $700 billion U.S. financial-rescue plan enacted in October:
Finally, after months and months of struggling with your own ideology, with your own pride, your self-right-eousness … finally [the U.S. applied] one of the great gifts of Americans, which is that you’re pragmatic. Now our people are joking that we look at the U.S. and see “socialism with American characteristics.” [The Chinese term for its mainly capitalist market-opening of the last 30 years is “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”]
It is joking, and many people are saying: “No, Americans still believe in free capitalism and they think this is just a hiccup.” This is like our great leader Deng Xiaoping, who said that it doesn’t matter if the cat is white or black, as long as it catches the mouse. It doesn’t matter what we call this. It’s pragmatic.
.....
With so much of China’s money at stake, did U.S. officials consult the Chinese about the rescue plan?
Not directly. We were talking to people there, and they were hoping that we would be supportive by not pulling out our money. We know that by pulling out money, we’re not serving anyone’s good. Including ourselves. [This is the famous modern “balance of financial terror.” If Chinese officials started pulling assets out of the U.S. and touched off a run on the dollar, their vast remaining dollar holdings would plummet in value.] So we’re trying to help, at least by not aggravating the problem.
But I think at the end of the day, the American government needs to talk with people and say: “Why don’t we get together and think about this? If China has $2 trillion, Japan has almost $2 trillion, and Russia has some, and all the others, then—let’s throw away the ideological differences and think about what’s good for everyone.” We can get all the relevant people together and think up what people are calling a second Bretton Woods system, like the first Bretton Woods convention did.
.....
On what might make the Chinese government start taking its dollars out of America (I began the question by saying that China would hurt itself by pulling out dollar assets—at which he interjected, “in the short term”—and then asked about the long-term view):
Today when we look at all the markets, the U.S. still is probably the most viable, the most predictable. I was trained as a lawyer, and predictability is always very important for me.
We have a PR department, which collects all the comments about us, from Chinese newspapers and the Web. Every night, I try to pick a time when I’m in a relatively good mood to read it, because most of the comments are very critical of us. Recently we increased our holdings in Blackstone a little bit. Now we’re increasing a little bit our holdings in Morgan Stanley, so as not to be diluted by the Japanese. People here hate it. They come out and say, “Why the hell are you trying to save those people? You are the representative of the poor people eating porridge, and you’re saving people eating shark fins!” It’s always that sort of thing.
.....
And how should Americans feel about the growing Chinese presence in their economy? Isn’t it natural for them to worry that China will keep increasing its stake in American debt and assets—or that China won’t, essentially cutting America off?
I can understand why Americans might feel that way. But, talking with my lawyer head once again, it’s not relevant to discuss how Americans “should” think. We should discuss how Americans might think.
This concern is not really about China itself. It could be any country. It could be Japan, or Germany. This generation of Americans is so used to your supremacy. Your being treated nicely by everyone. It hurts to think, Okay, now we have to be on equal footing to other people. “On equal footing” would necessarily mean that sometimes you have to stoop to appear to be humble to other people.
And you can’t think as a soldier. You put yourself at the enemy end of everyone. I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, when people really treated other people like enemies. I grew up in an environment where our friends, our relatives, people I called Uncle or Auntie, could turn around and put a nasty face to me as a small child. One time, Vladimir Lenin told Gorky, after reading Gorky’s autobiography, “Oh my god! You could have become a very nasty person!” Those are exactly the words one of my dear professors told me after hearing what I went through.
But over the years, I believe I learned to be humble. To treat other people nicely. I learned that, from a social point of view, no matter how lowly statured a person you are talking to, as a person, they are the same human being as you are. You have to respect them. You have to apologize if you inadvertently hurt them. And often you have to go out of your way to be nice to them, because they will not like you simply because of the difference in social structure.
Americans are not sensitive in that regard. I mean, as a whole. The simple truth today is that your economy is built on the global economy. And it’s built on the support, the gratuitous support, of a lot of countries. So why don’t you come over and … I won’t say kowtow [with a laugh], but at least, be nice to the countries that lend you money.
Talk to the Chinese! Talk to the Middle Easterners! And pull your troops back! Take the troops back, demobilize many of the troops, so that you can save some money rather than spending $2 billion every day on them. And then tell your people that you need to save, and come out with a long-term, sustainable financial policy.
.....
Although Gao has frequently mentioned Chairman Mao’s maxim—“Go with the Republicans. They’re predictable!”—he obviously was hoping for a “change” agenda under the Democrats:
The current conditions can’t go on. It is time for the new government, under Obama or even McCain, to really tell people: “Look, this is wartime, this is about the survival of our nation. It’s not about our supremacy in the world. Let’s not even talk about that any more. Let’s get down to the very basics of our livelihood.”
I have great admiration of American people. Creative, hard-working, trusting, and freedom-loving. But you have to have someone to tell you the truth. And then, start realizing it. And if you do it, just like what you did in the Second World War, then you’ll be great again!
If that happens, then of course—American power would still be there for at least as long as I am living. But many people are betting on the other side.
All material copyright The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
When Jesus met Buddha
When Jesus met Buddha
Something remarkable happened when evangelists for two great religions crossed paths more than 1,000 years ago: they got along
By Philip Jenkins
December 14, 2008
WAS THE BUDDHA a demon?
While few mainline Christians would put the matter in such confrontational terms, any religion claiming exclusive access to truth has real difficulties reconciling other great faiths into its cosmic scheme. Most Christian churches hold that Jesus alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and many also feel an obligation to carry that message to the world's unbelievers. But this creates a fundamental conflict with the followers of famous spiritual figures like Mohammed or Buddha, who preached radically different messages. Drawing on a strict interpretation of the Bible, some Christians see these rival faiths as not merely false, but as deliberate traps set by the forces of evil.
Being intolerant of other religions - consigning them to hell, in fact - may be bad enough in its own right, but it increasingly has real-world consequences. As trade and technology shrink the globe, so different religions come into ever-closer contact with one another, and the results can be bloody: witness the apocalyptic assaults in Mumbai. In such a world, teaching different faiths to acknowledge one another's claims, to live peaceably together side by side, stops being a matter of good manners and becomes a prerequisite for human survival.
Over the past 30 years, the Roman Catholic Church has faced repeated battles over this question of Christ's uniqueness, and has cracked down on thinkers who have made daring efforts to accommodate other world religions. While the Christian dialogue with Islam has attracted
most of the headlines, it is the encounters with Hinduism and especially Buddhism that have stirred the most controversy within the church. Sri Lankan theologians Aloysius Pieris and Tissa Balasuriya have had many run-ins with Vatican critics, and, more recently, the battle has come to American shores. Last year, the Vatican ordered an investigation of Georgetown University's Peter Phan, a Jesuit theologian whose main sin, in official eyes, has been to treat the Buddhism of his Vietnamese homeland as a parallel path to salvation.
Following the ideas of Pope Benedict XVI, though, the church refuses to give up its fundamental belief in the unique role of Christ. In a widely publicized open letter to Italian politician Marcello Pera, Pope Benedict declared that "an inter-religious dialogue in the strict sense of the term is not possible." By all means, he said, we should hold conversations with other cultures, but not in a way that acknowledges other religions as equally valid. While the Vatican does not of course see the Buddha as a demon, it does fear the prospect of syncretism, the dilution of Christian truth in an unholy mixture with other faiths.
Beyond doubt, this view places Benedict in a strong tradition of Christianity as it has developed in Europe since Roman times. But there is another, ancient tradition, which suggests a very different course. Europe's is not the only version of the Christian faith, nor is it necessarily the oldest heir of the ancient church. For more than 1,000 years, other quite separate branches of the church established thriving communities across Asia, and in their sheer numbers, these churches were comparable to anything Europe could muster at the time. These Christian bodies traced their ancestry back not through Rome, but directly to the original Jesus movement of ancient Palestine. They moved across India, Central Asia, and China, showing no hesitation to share - and learn from - the other great religions of the East.
Just how far these Christians were prepared to go is suggested by a startling symbol that appeared on memorials and stone carvings in both southern India and coastal China during the early Middle Ages. We can easily see that the image depicts a cross, but it takes a moment to realize that the base of the picture - the root from which the cross is growing - is a lotus flower, the symbol of Buddhist enlightenment.
In modern times, most mainstream churches would condemn such an amalgam as a betrayal of the Christian faith, an example of multiculturalism run wild. Yet concerns about syncretism did not bother these early Asian Christians, who called themselves Nasraye, Nazarenes, like Jesus's earliest followers. They were comfortable associating themselves with the other great monastic and mystical religion of the time, and moreover, they believed that both lotus and cross carried similar messages about the quest for light and salvation. If these Nazarenes could find meaning in the lotus-cross, then why can't modern Catholics, or other inheritors of the faith Jesus inspired?
Many Christians are coming to terms with just how thoroughly so many of their fundamental assumptions will have to be rethought as their faith today becomes a global religion. Even modern church leaders who know how rapidly the church is expanding in the global South tend to see European values and traditions as the indispensable norm, in matters of liturgy and theology as much as music and architecture.
Yet the reality is that Christianity has from its earliest days been an intercontinental faith, as firmly established in Asia and Africa as in Europe itself. When we broaden our scope to look at the faith that by 800 or so stretched from Ireland to Korea, we see the many different ways in which Christians interacted with other believers, in encounters that reshaped both sides. At their best, these meetings allowed the traditions not just to exchange ideas but to intertwine in productive and enriching ways, in an awe-inspiring chapter of Christian history that the Western churches have all but forgotten.
To understand this story, we need to reconfigure our mental maps. When we think of the growth of Christianity, we think above all of Europe. We visualize a movement growing west from Palestine and Syria and spreading into Greece and Italy, and gradually into northern regions. Europe is still the center of the Catholic Church, of course, but it was also the birthplace of the Protestant denominations that split from it. For most of us, even speaking of the "Eastern Church" refers to another group of Europeans, namely to the Orthodox believers who stem from the eastern parts of the continent. English Catholic thinker Hilaire Belloc once proclaimed that "Europe is the Faith; and the Faith is Europe."
But in the early centuries other Christians expanded east into Asia and south into Africa, and those other churches survived for the first 1,200 years or so of Christian history. Far from being fringe sects, these forgotten churches were firmly rooted in the oldest traditions of the apostolic church. Throughout their history, these Nazarenes used Syriac, which is close to Jesus' own language of Aramaic, and they followed Yeshua, not Jesus. No other church - not Roman Catholics, not Eastern Orthodox - has a stronger claim to a direct inheritance from the earliest Jesus movement.
The most stunningly successful of these eastern Christian bodies was the Church of the East, often called the Nestorian church. While the Western churches were expanding their influence within the framework of the Roman Empire, the Syriac-speaking churches colonized the vast Persian kingdom that ruled from Syria to Pakistan and the borders of China. From their bases in Mesopotamia - modern Iraq - Nestorian Christians carried out their vast missionary efforts along the Silk Route that crossed Central Asia. By the eighth century, the Church of the East had an extensive structure across most of central Asia and China, and in southern India. The church had senior clergy - metropolitans - in Samarkand and Bokhara, in Herat in Afghanistan. A bishop had his seat in Chang'an, the imperial capital of China, which was then the world's greatest superpower.
When Nestorian Christians were pressing across Central Asia during the sixth and seventh centuries, they met the missionaries and saints of an equally confident and expansionist religion: Mahayana Buddhism. Buddhists too wanted to take their saving message to the world, and launched great missions from India's monasteries and temples. In this diverse world, Buddhist and Christian monasteries were likely to stand side by side, as neighbors and even, sometimes, as collaborators. Some historians believe that Nestorian missionaries influenced the religious practices of the Buddhist religion then developing in Tibet. Monks spoke to monks.
In presenting their faith, Christians naturally used the cultural forms that would be familiar to Asians. They told their stories in the forms of sutras, verse patterns already made famous by Buddhist missionaries and teachers. A stunning collection of Jesus Sutras was found in caves at Dunhuang, in northwest China. Some Nestorian writings draw heavily on Buddhist ideas, as they translate prayers and Christian services in ways that would make sense to Asian readers. In some texts, the Christian phrase "angels and archangels and hosts of heaven" is translated into the language of buddhas and devas.
One story in particular suggests an almost shocking degree of collaboration between the faiths. In 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived in Chang'an, bearing rich treasures of sutras and other scriptures. Unfortunately, these were written in Indian languages. He consulted the local Nestorian bishop, Adam, who had already translated parts of the Bible into Chinese. Together, Buddhist and Christian scholars worked amiably together for some years to translate seven copious volumes of Buddhist wisdom. Probably, Adam did this as much from intellectual curiosity as from ecumenical good will, and we can only guess about the conversations that would have ensued: Do you really care more about relieving suffering than atoning for sin? And your monks meditate like ours do?
These efforts bore fruit far beyond China. Other residents of Chang'an at this very time included Japanese monks, who took these very translations back with them to their homeland. In Japan, these works became the founding texts of the great Buddhist schools of the Middle Ages. All the famous movements of later Japanese history, including Zen, can be traced to one of those ancient schools and, ultimately - incredibly - to the work of a Christian bishop.
By the 12th century, flourishing churches in China and southern India were using the lotus-cross. The lotus is a superbly beautiful flower that grows out of muck and slime. No symbol could better represent the rise of the soul from the material, the victory of enlightenment over ignorance, desire, and attachment. For 2,000 years, Buddhist artists have used the lotus to convey these messages in countless paintings and sculptures. The Christian cross, meanwhile, teaches a comparable lesson, of divine victory over sin and injustice, of the defeat of the world. Somewhere in Asia, Yeshua's forgotten followers made the daring decision to integrate the two emblems, which still today forces us to think about the parallels between the kinds of liberation and redemption offered by each faith.
Christianity, for much of its history, was just as much an Asian religion as Buddhism. Asia's Christian churches survived for more than a millennium, and not until the 10th century, halfway through Christian history, did the number of Christians in Europe exceed that in Asia.
What ultimately obliterated the Asian Christians were the Mongol invasions, which spread across Central Asia and the Middle East from the 1220s onward. From the late 13th century, too, the world entered a terrifying era of climate change, of global cooling, which severely cut food supplies and contributed to mass famine. The collapse of trade and commerce crippled cities, leaving the world much poorer and more vulnerable. Intolerant nationalism wiped out Christian communities in China, while a surging militant Islam destroyed the churches of Central Asia.
But awareness of this deep Christian history contributes powerfully to understanding the future of the religion, as much as its past. For long centuries, Asian Christians kept up neighborly relations with other faiths, which they saw not as deadly rivals but as fellow travelers on the road to enlightenment. Their worldview differed enormously from the norms that developed in Europe.
To take one example, we are used to the idea of Christianity operating as the official religion of powerful states, which were only too willing to impose a particular orthodoxy upon their subjects. Yet when we look at the African and Asian experience, we find millions of Christians whose normal experience was as minorities or even majorities within nations dominated by some other religion. Struggling to win hearts and minds, leading churches had no option but to frame the Christian message in the context of non-European intellectual traditions. Christian thinkers did present their message in the categories of Buddhism - and Taoism, and Confucianism - and there is no reason why they could not do so again. When modern scholars like Peter Phan try to place Christianity in an Asian and Buddhist context, they are resuming a task begun at least 1,500 years ago.
Perhaps, in fact, we are looking at our history upside down. Some day, future historians might look at the last few hundred years of Euro-American dominance within Christianity and regard it as an unnatural interlude in a much longer story of fruitful interchange between the great religions.
Consider the story told by Timothy, a patriarch of the Nestorian church. Around 800, he engaged in a famous debate with the Muslim caliph in Baghdad, a discussion marked by reason and civility on both sides. Imagine, Timothy said, that we are all in a dark house, and someone throws a precious pearl in the midst of a pile of ordinary stones. Everyone scrabbles for the pearl, and some think they've found it, but nobody can be sure until day breaks.
In the same way, he said, the pearl of true faith and wisdom had fallen into the darkness of this transitory world; each faith believed that it alone had found the pearl. Yet all he could claim - and all the caliph could say in response - was that some faiths thought they had enough evidence to prove that they were indeed holding the real pearl, but the final truth would not be known in this world.
Knowing other faiths firsthand grants believers an enviable sophistication, founded on humility. We could do a lot worse than to learn from what we sometimes call the Dark Ages.
Philip Jenkins is Edwin Erle Sparks professor of the humanities at Penn State University. He is author of "The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia -- and How It Died," published last month.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
Something remarkable happened when evangelists for two great religions crossed paths more than 1,000 years ago: they got along
By Philip Jenkins
December 14, 2008
WAS THE BUDDHA a demon?
While few mainline Christians would put the matter in such confrontational terms, any religion claiming exclusive access to truth has real difficulties reconciling other great faiths into its cosmic scheme. Most Christian churches hold that Jesus alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and many also feel an obligation to carry that message to the world's unbelievers. But this creates a fundamental conflict with the followers of famous spiritual figures like Mohammed or Buddha, who preached radically different messages. Drawing on a strict interpretation of the Bible, some Christians see these rival faiths as not merely false, but as deliberate traps set by the forces of evil.
Being intolerant of other religions - consigning them to hell, in fact - may be bad enough in its own right, but it increasingly has real-world consequences. As trade and technology shrink the globe, so different religions come into ever-closer contact with one another, and the results can be bloody: witness the apocalyptic assaults in Mumbai. In such a world, teaching different faiths to acknowledge one another's claims, to live peaceably together side by side, stops being a matter of good manners and becomes a prerequisite for human survival.
Over the past 30 years, the Roman Catholic Church has faced repeated battles over this question of Christ's uniqueness, and has cracked down on thinkers who have made daring efforts to accommodate other world religions. While the Christian dialogue with Islam has attracted
most of the headlines, it is the encounters with Hinduism and especially Buddhism that have stirred the most controversy within the church. Sri Lankan theologians Aloysius Pieris and Tissa Balasuriya have had many run-ins with Vatican critics, and, more recently, the battle has come to American shores. Last year, the Vatican ordered an investigation of Georgetown University's Peter Phan, a Jesuit theologian whose main sin, in official eyes, has been to treat the Buddhism of his Vietnamese homeland as a parallel path to salvation.
Following the ideas of Pope Benedict XVI, though, the church refuses to give up its fundamental belief in the unique role of Christ. In a widely publicized open letter to Italian politician Marcello Pera, Pope Benedict declared that "an inter-religious dialogue in the strict sense of the term is not possible." By all means, he said, we should hold conversations with other cultures, but not in a way that acknowledges other religions as equally valid. While the Vatican does not of course see the Buddha as a demon, it does fear the prospect of syncretism, the dilution of Christian truth in an unholy mixture with other faiths.
Beyond doubt, this view places Benedict in a strong tradition of Christianity as it has developed in Europe since Roman times. But there is another, ancient tradition, which suggests a very different course. Europe's is not the only version of the Christian faith, nor is it necessarily the oldest heir of the ancient church. For more than 1,000 years, other quite separate branches of the church established thriving communities across Asia, and in their sheer numbers, these churches were comparable to anything Europe could muster at the time. These Christian bodies traced their ancestry back not through Rome, but directly to the original Jesus movement of ancient Palestine. They moved across India, Central Asia, and China, showing no hesitation to share - and learn from - the other great religions of the East.
Just how far these Christians were prepared to go is suggested by a startling symbol that appeared on memorials and stone carvings in both southern India and coastal China during the early Middle Ages. We can easily see that the image depicts a cross, but it takes a moment to realize that the base of the picture - the root from which the cross is growing - is a lotus flower, the symbol of Buddhist enlightenment.
In modern times, most mainstream churches would condemn such an amalgam as a betrayal of the Christian faith, an example of multiculturalism run wild. Yet concerns about syncretism did not bother these early Asian Christians, who called themselves Nasraye, Nazarenes, like Jesus's earliest followers. They were comfortable associating themselves with the other great monastic and mystical religion of the time, and moreover, they believed that both lotus and cross carried similar messages about the quest for light and salvation. If these Nazarenes could find meaning in the lotus-cross, then why can't modern Catholics, or other inheritors of the faith Jesus inspired?
Many Christians are coming to terms with just how thoroughly so many of their fundamental assumptions will have to be rethought as their faith today becomes a global religion. Even modern church leaders who know how rapidly the church is expanding in the global South tend to see European values and traditions as the indispensable norm, in matters of liturgy and theology as much as music and architecture.
Yet the reality is that Christianity has from its earliest days been an intercontinental faith, as firmly established in Asia and Africa as in Europe itself. When we broaden our scope to look at the faith that by 800 or so stretched from Ireland to Korea, we see the many different ways in which Christians interacted with other believers, in encounters that reshaped both sides. At their best, these meetings allowed the traditions not just to exchange ideas but to intertwine in productive and enriching ways, in an awe-inspiring chapter of Christian history that the Western churches have all but forgotten.
To understand this story, we need to reconfigure our mental maps. When we think of the growth of Christianity, we think above all of Europe. We visualize a movement growing west from Palestine and Syria and spreading into Greece and Italy, and gradually into northern regions. Europe is still the center of the Catholic Church, of course, but it was also the birthplace of the Protestant denominations that split from it. For most of us, even speaking of the "Eastern Church" refers to another group of Europeans, namely to the Orthodox believers who stem from the eastern parts of the continent. English Catholic thinker Hilaire Belloc once proclaimed that "Europe is the Faith; and the Faith is Europe."
But in the early centuries other Christians expanded east into Asia and south into Africa, and those other churches survived for the first 1,200 years or so of Christian history. Far from being fringe sects, these forgotten churches were firmly rooted in the oldest traditions of the apostolic church. Throughout their history, these Nazarenes used Syriac, which is close to Jesus' own language of Aramaic, and they followed Yeshua, not Jesus. No other church - not Roman Catholics, not Eastern Orthodox - has a stronger claim to a direct inheritance from the earliest Jesus movement.
The most stunningly successful of these eastern Christian bodies was the Church of the East, often called the Nestorian church. While the Western churches were expanding their influence within the framework of the Roman Empire, the Syriac-speaking churches colonized the vast Persian kingdom that ruled from Syria to Pakistan and the borders of China. From their bases in Mesopotamia - modern Iraq - Nestorian Christians carried out their vast missionary efforts along the Silk Route that crossed Central Asia. By the eighth century, the Church of the East had an extensive structure across most of central Asia and China, and in southern India. The church had senior clergy - metropolitans - in Samarkand and Bokhara, in Herat in Afghanistan. A bishop had his seat in Chang'an, the imperial capital of China, which was then the world's greatest superpower.
When Nestorian Christians were pressing across Central Asia during the sixth and seventh centuries, they met the missionaries and saints of an equally confident and expansionist religion: Mahayana Buddhism. Buddhists too wanted to take their saving message to the world, and launched great missions from India's monasteries and temples. In this diverse world, Buddhist and Christian monasteries were likely to stand side by side, as neighbors and even, sometimes, as collaborators. Some historians believe that Nestorian missionaries influenced the religious practices of the Buddhist religion then developing in Tibet. Monks spoke to monks.
In presenting their faith, Christians naturally used the cultural forms that would be familiar to Asians. They told their stories in the forms of sutras, verse patterns already made famous by Buddhist missionaries and teachers. A stunning collection of Jesus Sutras was found in caves at Dunhuang, in northwest China. Some Nestorian writings draw heavily on Buddhist ideas, as they translate prayers and Christian services in ways that would make sense to Asian readers. In some texts, the Christian phrase "angels and archangels and hosts of heaven" is translated into the language of buddhas and devas.
One story in particular suggests an almost shocking degree of collaboration between the faiths. In 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived in Chang'an, bearing rich treasures of sutras and other scriptures. Unfortunately, these were written in Indian languages. He consulted the local Nestorian bishop, Adam, who had already translated parts of the Bible into Chinese. Together, Buddhist and Christian scholars worked amiably together for some years to translate seven copious volumes of Buddhist wisdom. Probably, Adam did this as much from intellectual curiosity as from ecumenical good will, and we can only guess about the conversations that would have ensued: Do you really care more about relieving suffering than atoning for sin? And your monks meditate like ours do?
These efforts bore fruit far beyond China. Other residents of Chang'an at this very time included Japanese monks, who took these very translations back with them to their homeland. In Japan, these works became the founding texts of the great Buddhist schools of the Middle Ages. All the famous movements of later Japanese history, including Zen, can be traced to one of those ancient schools and, ultimately - incredibly - to the work of a Christian bishop.
By the 12th century, flourishing churches in China and southern India were using the lotus-cross. The lotus is a superbly beautiful flower that grows out of muck and slime. No symbol could better represent the rise of the soul from the material, the victory of enlightenment over ignorance, desire, and attachment. For 2,000 years, Buddhist artists have used the lotus to convey these messages in countless paintings and sculptures. The Christian cross, meanwhile, teaches a comparable lesson, of divine victory over sin and injustice, of the defeat of the world. Somewhere in Asia, Yeshua's forgotten followers made the daring decision to integrate the two emblems, which still today forces us to think about the parallels between the kinds of liberation and redemption offered by each faith.
Christianity, for much of its history, was just as much an Asian religion as Buddhism. Asia's Christian churches survived for more than a millennium, and not until the 10th century, halfway through Christian history, did the number of Christians in Europe exceed that in Asia.
What ultimately obliterated the Asian Christians were the Mongol invasions, which spread across Central Asia and the Middle East from the 1220s onward. From the late 13th century, too, the world entered a terrifying era of climate change, of global cooling, which severely cut food supplies and contributed to mass famine. The collapse of trade and commerce crippled cities, leaving the world much poorer and more vulnerable. Intolerant nationalism wiped out Christian communities in China, while a surging militant Islam destroyed the churches of Central Asia.
But awareness of this deep Christian history contributes powerfully to understanding the future of the religion, as much as its past. For long centuries, Asian Christians kept up neighborly relations with other faiths, which they saw not as deadly rivals but as fellow travelers on the road to enlightenment. Their worldview differed enormously from the norms that developed in Europe.
To take one example, we are used to the idea of Christianity operating as the official religion of powerful states, which were only too willing to impose a particular orthodoxy upon their subjects. Yet when we look at the African and Asian experience, we find millions of Christians whose normal experience was as minorities or even majorities within nations dominated by some other religion. Struggling to win hearts and minds, leading churches had no option but to frame the Christian message in the context of non-European intellectual traditions. Christian thinkers did present their message in the categories of Buddhism - and Taoism, and Confucianism - and there is no reason why they could not do so again. When modern scholars like Peter Phan try to place Christianity in an Asian and Buddhist context, they are resuming a task begun at least 1,500 years ago.
Perhaps, in fact, we are looking at our history upside down. Some day, future historians might look at the last few hundred years of Euro-American dominance within Christianity and regard it as an unnatural interlude in a much longer story of fruitful interchange between the great religions.
Consider the story told by Timothy, a patriarch of the Nestorian church. Around 800, he engaged in a famous debate with the Muslim caliph in Baghdad, a discussion marked by reason and civility on both sides. Imagine, Timothy said, that we are all in a dark house, and someone throws a precious pearl in the midst of a pile of ordinary stones. Everyone scrabbles for the pearl, and some think they've found it, but nobody can be sure until day breaks.
In the same way, he said, the pearl of true faith and wisdom had fallen into the darkness of this transitory world; each faith believed that it alone had found the pearl. Yet all he could claim - and all the caliph could say in response - was that some faiths thought they had enough evidence to prove that they were indeed holding the real pearl, but the final truth would not be known in this world.
Knowing other faiths firsthand grants believers an enviable sophistication, founded on humility. We could do a lot worse than to learn from what we sometimes call the Dark Ages.
Philip Jenkins is Edwin Erle Sparks professor of the humanities at Penn State University. He is author of "The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia -- and How It Died," published last month.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
Do high heels empower or constrain? (I think they kill your back. Period.)
From Times Online
December 13, 2008
Do high heels empower or constrain?
High heels have never been higher, with women teetering on the brink from Milan to Manchester. Germaine Greer ponders whether extreme shoes empower or constrain women, and we ask leading female thinkers what heels say today about sex, style, politics and power
Germaine Greer
Heels have gone about as far as they can go. Nine-inch heels with four-inch platforms is usually the cut-off point. We’ve witnessed this moment before, in the Seventies, in the Eighties, and in the Nineties. Now is the towering shoe moment of the Noughties, which will be followed by the inevitable fall. Women in Westfield may be gazing hungrily at fabulous displays of kick-arse shoes, but nine out of ten of them will be wearing Ugg boots. Few of them will have the spare cash to invest in shoes that can be safely worn only in bed. You can shop online for high-heeled shoes for baby girls aged nought to six months, which seems rather early to be introducing someone to a fetish, unless it’s meant to work as aversion therapy. Shoemania can have serious consequences. My mother gave up her valuable scholarship and went to work as a milliner’s apprentice because she hated having to wear flat shoes to school.
Ever since the courtesans of Ancient Greece signalled their presence by the clacking of their shoes, high heels have been sexy. The margins of my surviving schoolbooks are filled with drawings of f***-me shoes. As an eight-year-old whiling away the long hours of watching over my baby sister I would prop my feet on dominoes set on their ends, and twirl my newly leggy self in front of my mother’s full-length mirror, yearning for proper high heels. Sadly, long before I was old enough to wear them, I had grown too tall. Like Jackie Kennedy, Princess Di and now Carla Bruni, I found myself restricted to kitten heels or downright flats.
Most of my mother’s considerable store of energy was spent on browning her legs so that she could display them to good advantage in slingback cork-soled white kid wedgies. High heels made her Swiss-Italian bottom look cute and curvy rather than plain broad. Even now, at the age of 93, she sees herself as a red-headed version of Betty Grable, whose legs were insured by Lloyd’s in 1943 for $1 million. One and a half million American troops owned a copy of the pin-up photograph of Grable as a bathing beauty, wearing a one-piece bathing suit – and high-heeled shoes. For a century beauty queens swayed along countless catwalks sporting the same improbable combination of swimsuit and heels. Even Paula Radcliffe wore four-inch heels with a bathing suit for her appearance on the cover of The Observer Sport Monthly.
When the New Look came in and skirts fell to ankle-length, heels went either down to utterly flat or up to four inches. My grandmother, whose legs were the shortest in the family, was never to be seen in anything lower than four-inch heels. By middle age her calf muscles had shortened so much that even her bedroom slippers had to have heels. One day she lost her balance and fell, breaking her hip. Three weeks later she was dead, only a few months older than I am now.
In the Sixties and the Seventies we mostly wore boots. The best were made to measure, right up to the knee (because nothing is less flattering to leg or thigh than boots that are too short) with a stacked leather heel. The cheapest were Biba suede, with a very silly heel. The Eighties were the Diana years. It was not until Diana had given up being seen at the side of the Prince of Wales that she could add on the extra inches and show a shapely leg in Jimmy Choos. Heels then shot up at a dizzying rate; they were already at nine inches in 1993 when Naomi Campbell fell off the super-elevated Ghillie platform shoes she was wearing for Vivienne Westwood at the first Anglomania show. Westwood knew perfectly well that the notion that high heels might empower a woman by bringing her eyes level with a man’s was rubbish. By dropping on to her bottom in a froth of plaid and petticoats Campbell made exactly the connection between taboo and tradition that Westwood was hoping for.
The success of the TV series Sex and the City since 1998 derives partly from the accuracy of its basic tenets that chocolate and shopping are more satisfactory than sex and that all women hanker after extravagant shoes. Improved engineering had by then made Manolo Blahnik’s dizzier heels wearable. Just. Women who wear trainers to travel to work will change into serious heels when they get there, unless they are salespeople or factory workers or nurses. As well as carrying a complex set of sexual implications, heels are a way of signalling vicarious leisure.
Some say that foot fetishism gains ground when intercourse becomes too dangerous. Lap dancers, strippers and porn stars wear the highest platforms of all. An Italian urologist has declared that high heels “directly work the pleasure muscles that are linked to orgasm”. What is more, “They influence and work the pelvic muscles and reduce the need to exercise them.” However, she also admits that she adores high-heeled shoes and “wanted to find something positive about them”. You’d be rash to trust to your Christian Louboutins to cure your stress incontinence. Comments on an osteoarthritis sufferers’ website indicate that despite the known facts about the stress on the knee caused by wearing high heels, women have no intention of giving them up. Those now unfashionable psychoanalysts who explained women’s psychology as a perpetual struggle between narcissism and masochism might have had a point.
It makes no more sense to put women’s addiction to silly shoes down to men, than it does to blame men for cosmetic polysurgery and female genital cutting. If women spend fortunes on dreadfully uncomfortable shoes it is their choice – except maybe in Italy where the Italian police have kitted out their 14,750 female officers with high heels.
On a visit to China in 1994, I witnessed the ultimate foot fetish. As an elderly woman came gliding towards me, peeping under the hem of her blue silk trousers I could see her broken feet, tiny black satin points that seemed barely to touch the earth. I had never imagined that so cruel a mutilation could produce anything so graceful. Cramming a dancer’s feet into pointe shoes and making her dance on them is hardly less barbaric, and the results far less beautiful. In July 2007, Louboutin designed a series of crazily high-heeled shoes in which the wearer must walk on the tip of her big toe, to be photographed by David Lynch for an exhibition called Fetish at the Galerie du Passage. The designer is now under pressure to produce a version of these entirely unwearable shoes for commercial sale.
Footbinding is no longer practised but, as soon as China opened to Western commerce, Chinese girls rushed to spend their hard-earned yuan on high-heeled shoes. For ten years Japanese girls have been hoisting their bottoms higher off the ground by wearing the highest heels of all. Closer to home, women are prepared to spend hundreds of pounds on shoes they would never try to wear in public. While feminists have been struggling to set women free, high heels have conquered the world. N
Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer
The shoe is theatrical, beautiful, and clothes and accessories have the effect of giving one a role to play. To walk in very high heels with an in-built platform you need to draw the body up straight and centred. One can’t help but feel powerful, beautiful, when wearing them.
Amanda Foreman, historian, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
These fashions are a way of limiting women at times when they are getting more powerful. In the mid and late-19th century, the bustle and corset became the style of the times – fashions that limited the female form. In came a physical restriction that created an idealised version of women.
You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to figure it out, but fashion is largely controlled by gay men, who can ultra-feminise the female form through their designs. Now, there are fewer power struggles than at any point in history, but fashion doesn’t reflect the power of women being free: they are still constrained.
These shoes are obviously not for the working woman, they aren’t designed for cobbled streets. They’re not real life, but a little fantasy. You have to ask as a purchaser, what do these do to me as a human being? These shoes should go back in the box – they are ridiculous and essentially disempowering.
Alexandra Shulman, editor, British Vogue
Designer brands have done particularly well with accessories over the past five years. Big shoes were an obvious next step. They can’t get much higher, so I think it’ll calm down now.
Heels can be comfortable no matter how high. A great shoe designer can make a skyscraper – with careful balancing and skill it’ll look easy to wear.
People will always notice shoes – I personally think it’s from too many people spending too long looking down at the floor – so they’re worth investing in.
I have always worn heels, but you can see that in some people it really changes the way they feel. It’s the same as putting on a new dress – something that takes you out of the everyday.
Men do find them attractive – wearing heels is certainly not all about women and other women. Attraction is part of the attraction.
Lady Antonia Fraser, historian and author
The thing that fascinates me about high heels (which I adore) is that men have also worn them as a fashion statement – not because, like Sarkozy, they were physically challenged. Although it is often said that Louis XIV wore high heels to enhance his height, this is quite untrue. He wore them because they were elegant.
How I wish I could wear one of those fabulous pairs of black stilettos with flashing red soles by Christian Louboutin. But I’m afraid the result would be the following: “Lady biographer bites dust.”
Plum Sykes, novelist and fashion journalist
When you hit 30 you lose your edge. I am 38 now, and these weird space-age shoes look cool and trendy and are a way of getting that back to some degree. Younger girls can handle the extreme pain, they can take more shocks to the system. These shoes are exhausting.
The girls who are meant to wear them are walking out of their house, getting straight into a chauffeur-driven car; the shoes come off, and then they’re back on again, straight on to a nice soft red carpet where they walk for 20 yards. They, unlike us, don’t need really to be able to walk.
This type of trend is not a classic version of beauty. Men want women to be sexy. They’d be happy if we were all Gisele Bündchen, but that’s just not fashion. Men don’t like to be towered over by women, so it’s really only for gay men and other women.
Camille Paglia, academic and author
High heels with exposed legs are a distinctly modern fetish, part of the Jazz Age legacy of rising hemlines and manic, hot-to-trot dancing.
The Fifties stiletto heel put the wiggle in Marilyn Monroe’s walk: it was so teetering that it gave women’s hips a mesmerisingly seductive sway.
In our time of amplified bosoms, liposuction and Botox, pretty feet are the one thing that can’t be faked. Male-to-female transsexuals can get it all chopped off, but they’re still stuck with those big, bony feet. Today’s ultra-high heels are unforgivingly candid about legs, too – showing off great ones and cruelly exposing thick ankles and knock knees.
Height does indeed equal power in a man’s world – which is how shrimpy Napoleon’s name ended up on a complex. I don’t blame women for boosting their height – it’s a shrewd social strategy to see and be seen. But long-term mutilation of a crucial body part is inevitable for the compulsive fashionista.
Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.
December 13, 2008
Do high heels empower or constrain?
High heels have never been higher, with women teetering on the brink from Milan to Manchester. Germaine Greer ponders whether extreme shoes empower or constrain women, and we ask leading female thinkers what heels say today about sex, style, politics and power
Germaine Greer
Heels have gone about as far as they can go. Nine-inch heels with four-inch platforms is usually the cut-off point. We’ve witnessed this moment before, in the Seventies, in the Eighties, and in the Nineties. Now is the towering shoe moment of the Noughties, which will be followed by the inevitable fall. Women in Westfield may be gazing hungrily at fabulous displays of kick-arse shoes, but nine out of ten of them will be wearing Ugg boots. Few of them will have the spare cash to invest in shoes that can be safely worn only in bed. You can shop online for high-heeled shoes for baby girls aged nought to six months, which seems rather early to be introducing someone to a fetish, unless it’s meant to work as aversion therapy. Shoemania can have serious consequences. My mother gave up her valuable scholarship and went to work as a milliner’s apprentice because she hated having to wear flat shoes to school.
Ever since the courtesans of Ancient Greece signalled their presence by the clacking of their shoes, high heels have been sexy. The margins of my surviving schoolbooks are filled with drawings of f***-me shoes. As an eight-year-old whiling away the long hours of watching over my baby sister I would prop my feet on dominoes set on their ends, and twirl my newly leggy self in front of my mother’s full-length mirror, yearning for proper high heels. Sadly, long before I was old enough to wear them, I had grown too tall. Like Jackie Kennedy, Princess Di and now Carla Bruni, I found myself restricted to kitten heels or downright flats.
Most of my mother’s considerable store of energy was spent on browning her legs so that she could display them to good advantage in slingback cork-soled white kid wedgies. High heels made her Swiss-Italian bottom look cute and curvy rather than plain broad. Even now, at the age of 93, she sees herself as a red-headed version of Betty Grable, whose legs were insured by Lloyd’s in 1943 for $1 million. One and a half million American troops owned a copy of the pin-up photograph of Grable as a bathing beauty, wearing a one-piece bathing suit – and high-heeled shoes. For a century beauty queens swayed along countless catwalks sporting the same improbable combination of swimsuit and heels. Even Paula Radcliffe wore four-inch heels with a bathing suit for her appearance on the cover of The Observer Sport Monthly.
When the New Look came in and skirts fell to ankle-length, heels went either down to utterly flat or up to four inches. My grandmother, whose legs were the shortest in the family, was never to be seen in anything lower than four-inch heels. By middle age her calf muscles had shortened so much that even her bedroom slippers had to have heels. One day she lost her balance and fell, breaking her hip. Three weeks later she was dead, only a few months older than I am now.
In the Sixties and the Seventies we mostly wore boots. The best were made to measure, right up to the knee (because nothing is less flattering to leg or thigh than boots that are too short) with a stacked leather heel. The cheapest were Biba suede, with a very silly heel. The Eighties were the Diana years. It was not until Diana had given up being seen at the side of the Prince of Wales that she could add on the extra inches and show a shapely leg in Jimmy Choos. Heels then shot up at a dizzying rate; they were already at nine inches in 1993 when Naomi Campbell fell off the super-elevated Ghillie platform shoes she was wearing for Vivienne Westwood at the first Anglomania show. Westwood knew perfectly well that the notion that high heels might empower a woman by bringing her eyes level with a man’s was rubbish. By dropping on to her bottom in a froth of plaid and petticoats Campbell made exactly the connection between taboo and tradition that Westwood was hoping for.
The success of the TV series Sex and the City since 1998 derives partly from the accuracy of its basic tenets that chocolate and shopping are more satisfactory than sex and that all women hanker after extravagant shoes. Improved engineering had by then made Manolo Blahnik’s dizzier heels wearable. Just. Women who wear trainers to travel to work will change into serious heels when they get there, unless they are salespeople or factory workers or nurses. As well as carrying a complex set of sexual implications, heels are a way of signalling vicarious leisure.
Some say that foot fetishism gains ground when intercourse becomes too dangerous. Lap dancers, strippers and porn stars wear the highest platforms of all. An Italian urologist has declared that high heels “directly work the pleasure muscles that are linked to orgasm”. What is more, “They influence and work the pelvic muscles and reduce the need to exercise them.” However, she also admits that she adores high-heeled shoes and “wanted to find something positive about them”. You’d be rash to trust to your Christian Louboutins to cure your stress incontinence. Comments on an osteoarthritis sufferers’ website indicate that despite the known facts about the stress on the knee caused by wearing high heels, women have no intention of giving them up. Those now unfashionable psychoanalysts who explained women’s psychology as a perpetual struggle between narcissism and masochism might have had a point.
It makes no more sense to put women’s addiction to silly shoes down to men, than it does to blame men for cosmetic polysurgery and female genital cutting. If women spend fortunes on dreadfully uncomfortable shoes it is their choice – except maybe in Italy where the Italian police have kitted out their 14,750 female officers with high heels.
On a visit to China in 1994, I witnessed the ultimate foot fetish. As an elderly woman came gliding towards me, peeping under the hem of her blue silk trousers I could see her broken feet, tiny black satin points that seemed barely to touch the earth. I had never imagined that so cruel a mutilation could produce anything so graceful. Cramming a dancer’s feet into pointe shoes and making her dance on them is hardly less barbaric, and the results far less beautiful. In July 2007, Louboutin designed a series of crazily high-heeled shoes in which the wearer must walk on the tip of her big toe, to be photographed by David Lynch for an exhibition called Fetish at the Galerie du Passage. The designer is now under pressure to produce a version of these entirely unwearable shoes for commercial sale.
Footbinding is no longer practised but, as soon as China opened to Western commerce, Chinese girls rushed to spend their hard-earned yuan on high-heeled shoes. For ten years Japanese girls have been hoisting their bottoms higher off the ground by wearing the highest heels of all. Closer to home, women are prepared to spend hundreds of pounds on shoes they would never try to wear in public. While feminists have been struggling to set women free, high heels have conquered the world. N
Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer
The shoe is theatrical, beautiful, and clothes and accessories have the effect of giving one a role to play. To walk in very high heels with an in-built platform you need to draw the body up straight and centred. One can’t help but feel powerful, beautiful, when wearing them.
Amanda Foreman, historian, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
These fashions are a way of limiting women at times when they are getting more powerful. In the mid and late-19th century, the bustle and corset became the style of the times – fashions that limited the female form. In came a physical restriction that created an idealised version of women.
You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to figure it out, but fashion is largely controlled by gay men, who can ultra-feminise the female form through their designs. Now, there are fewer power struggles than at any point in history, but fashion doesn’t reflect the power of women being free: they are still constrained.
These shoes are obviously not for the working woman, they aren’t designed for cobbled streets. They’re not real life, but a little fantasy. You have to ask as a purchaser, what do these do to me as a human being? These shoes should go back in the box – they are ridiculous and essentially disempowering.
Alexandra Shulman, editor, British Vogue
Designer brands have done particularly well with accessories over the past five years. Big shoes were an obvious next step. They can’t get much higher, so I think it’ll calm down now.
Heels can be comfortable no matter how high. A great shoe designer can make a skyscraper – with careful balancing and skill it’ll look easy to wear.
People will always notice shoes – I personally think it’s from too many people spending too long looking down at the floor – so they’re worth investing in.
I have always worn heels, but you can see that in some people it really changes the way they feel. It’s the same as putting on a new dress – something that takes you out of the everyday.
Men do find them attractive – wearing heels is certainly not all about women and other women. Attraction is part of the attraction.
Lady Antonia Fraser, historian and author
The thing that fascinates me about high heels (which I adore) is that men have also worn them as a fashion statement – not because, like Sarkozy, they were physically challenged. Although it is often said that Louis XIV wore high heels to enhance his height, this is quite untrue. He wore them because they were elegant.
How I wish I could wear one of those fabulous pairs of black stilettos with flashing red soles by Christian Louboutin. But I’m afraid the result would be the following: “Lady biographer bites dust.”
Plum Sykes, novelist and fashion journalist
When you hit 30 you lose your edge. I am 38 now, and these weird space-age shoes look cool and trendy and are a way of getting that back to some degree. Younger girls can handle the extreme pain, they can take more shocks to the system. These shoes are exhausting.
The girls who are meant to wear them are walking out of their house, getting straight into a chauffeur-driven car; the shoes come off, and then they’re back on again, straight on to a nice soft red carpet where they walk for 20 yards. They, unlike us, don’t need really to be able to walk.
This type of trend is not a classic version of beauty. Men want women to be sexy. They’d be happy if we were all Gisele Bündchen, but that’s just not fashion. Men don’t like to be towered over by women, so it’s really only for gay men and other women.
Camille Paglia, academic and author
High heels with exposed legs are a distinctly modern fetish, part of the Jazz Age legacy of rising hemlines and manic, hot-to-trot dancing.
The Fifties stiletto heel put the wiggle in Marilyn Monroe’s walk: it was so teetering that it gave women’s hips a mesmerisingly seductive sway.
In our time of amplified bosoms, liposuction and Botox, pretty feet are the one thing that can’t be faked. Male-to-female transsexuals can get it all chopped off, but they’re still stuck with those big, bony feet. Today’s ultra-high heels are unforgivingly candid about legs, too – showing off great ones and cruelly exposing thick ankles and knock knees.
Height does indeed equal power in a man’s world – which is how shrimpy Napoleon’s name ended up on a complex. I don’t blame women for boosting their height – it’s a shrewd social strategy to see and be seen. But long-term mutilation of a crucial body part is inevitable for the compulsive fashionista.
Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.
Where do we go from here? by Robert Skidelsky
Where do we go from here?
by Robert Skidelsky
The markets have ruled for a third of a century, but it has all ended in tears. A return to selfish nationalism is possible. If we are to avoid this sombre outcome, we must find ways to rub the rough edges off globalisation
Robert Skidelsky is the author of John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (Pan)
Any great failure should force us to rethink. The present economic crisis is a great failure of the market system. As George Soros has rightly pointed out, "the salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock like Opec… the crisis was generated by the system itself." It originated in the US, the heart of the world's financial system and the source of much of its financial innovation. That is why the crisis is global, and is indeed a crisis of globalisation.
There were three kinds of failure. The first, discussed by John Kay in this issue, was institutional: banks mutated from utilities into casinos. However, they did so because they, their regulators and the policymakers sitting on top of the regulators all succumbed to something called the "efficient market hypothesis": the view that financial markets could not consistently mis-price assets and therefore needed little regulation. So the second failure was intellectual. The most astonishing admission was that of former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in autumn 2008 that the Fed's regime of monetary management had been based on a "flaw." The "whole intellectual edifice," he said, "collapsed in the summer of last year." Behind the efficient market idea lay the intellectual failure of mainstream economics. It could neither predict nor explain the meltdown because nearly all economists believed that markets were self-correcting. As a consequence, economics itself was marginalised.
But the crisis also represents a moral failure: that of a system built on debt. At the heart of the moral failure is the worship of growth for its own sake, rather than as a way to achieve the "good life." As a result, economic efficiency—the means to growth—has been given absolute priority in our thinking and policy. The only moral compass we now have is the thin and degraded notion of economic welfare. This moral lacuna explains uncritical acceptance of globalisation and financial innovation. Leverage is a duty because it "levers" faster growth. The theological language which would have recognised the collapse of the credit bubble as the "wages of sin," the come-uppance for prodigious profligacy, has become unusable. But the come-uppance has come, nevertheless.
Historians have always been fascinated by cyclical theories of history. Societies are said to swing like pendulums between alternating phases of vigour and decay; progress and reaction; licentiousness and puritanism. Each outward movement produces a crisis of excess which leads to a reaction. The equilibrium position is hard to achieve and always unstable.
In his Cycles of American History (1986) Arthur Schlesinger Jr defined a political economy cycle as "a continuing shift in national involvement between public purpose and private interest." The swing he identified was between "liberal" (what we would call social democratic) and "conservative" epochs. The idea of the "crisis" is central. Liberal periods succumb to the corruption of power, as idealists yield to time-servers, and conservative arguments against rent-seeking excesses win the day. But the conservative era then succumbs to a corruption of money, as financiers and businessmen use the freedom of de-regulation to rip off the public. A crisis of under-regulated markets presages the return to a liberal era.
This idea fits the American historical narrative tolerably well. It also makes sense globally. The era of what Americans would call "conservative" economics opened with the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776. Yet despite the early intellectual ascendancy of free trade, it took a major crisis—the potato famine of the early 1840s—to produce an actual shift in policy: the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws that ushered in the free trade era.
***
In the 1870s, the pendulum started to swing back to what the historian AV Dicey called the "age of collectivism." The major crisis that triggered this was the first great global depression, produced by a collapse in food prices. It was a severe enough shock to produce a major shift in political economy. This came in two waves. First, all industrial countries except Britain put up tariffs to protect employment in agriculture and industry. (Britain relied on mass emigration to eliminate rural unemployment.) Second, all industrial countries except the US started schemes of social insurance to protect their citizens against life's hazards. The great depression of 1929-32 produced a second wave of collectivism, now associated with the "Keynesian" use of fiscal and monetary policy to maintain full employment. Most capitalist countries nationalised key industries. Roosevelt's new deal regulated banking and the power utilities, and belatedly embarked on the road of social security. International capital movements were severely controlled everywhere.
This movement was not all one way, or else the west would have ended up with communism, which was the fate of large parts of the globe. Even before the crisis of collectivism in the 1970s, a swing back had started, as trade, after 1945, was progressively freed and capital movements liberalised. The rule was free trade abroad and social democracy at home.
The Bretton Woods system, set up with Keynes's help in 1944, was the international expression of liberal/social democratic political economy. It aimed to free foreign trade after the freeze of the 1930s, by providing an environment that reduced incentives for economic nationalism. At its heart was a system of fixed exchange rates, subject to agreed adjustment, to avoid competitive currency depreciation.
The crisis of liberalism, or social democracy, unfolded with stagflation and ungovernability in the 1970s. It broadly fits Schlesinger's notion of the "corruption of power." The Keynesian/social democratic policymakers succumbed to hubris, an intellectual corruption which convinced them that they possessed the knowledge and the tools to manage and control the economy and society from the top. This was the malady against which Hayek inveighed in his classic The Road to Serfdom (1944). The attempt in the 1970s to control inflation by wage and price controls led directly to a "crisis of governability," as trade unions, particularly in Britain, refused to accept them. Large state subsidies to producer groups, both public and private, fed the typical corruptions of behaviour identified by the new right: rent-seeking, moral hazard, free-riding. Palpable evidence of government failure obliterated memories of market failure. The new generation of economists abandoned Keynes and, with the help of sophisticated mathematics, reinvented the classical economics of the self-correcting market. Battered by the crises of the 1970s, governments caved in to the "inevitability" of free market forces. The swing-back became worldwide with the collapse of communism.
A conspicuous casualty of the swing-back was the Bretton Woods system that succumbed in the 1970s to the refusal of the US to curb its domestic spending. Currencies were set free to float and controls on international capital flows were progressively lifted. This heralded a wholesale change of direction towards free markets and the idea of globalisation. This was, in concept, not unattractive. The idea was that the nation state—which had been responsible for so much organised violence and wasteful spending—was on its way out, to be replaced by the global market. The prospectus was perhaps best set out by the Canadian philosopher, John Ralston Saul, in a 2004 essay in which he proclaimed the collapse of globalisation: "In the future, economics, not politics or arms, would determine the course of human events. Freed markets would quickly establish natural international balances, impervious to the old boom-and-bust cycles. The growth in international trade, as a result of lowering barriers, would unleash an economic-social tide that would raise all ships, whether of our western poor or of the developing world in general. Prosperous markets would turn dictatorships into democracies."
Today we are living through a crisis of conservatism. The financial crisis has brought to a head a growing dissatisfaction with the corruption of money. Neo-conservatism has sought to justify fabulous rewards to a financial plutocracy while median incomes stagnate or even fall; in the name of efficiency it has promoted the off-shoring of millions of jobs, the undermining of national communities, and the rape of nature. Such a system needs to be fabulously successful to command allegiance. Spectacular failure is bound to discredit it.
The situation we are in now thus puts into question the speed and direction of progress. Will there be a pause for thought, or will we continue much as before after a cascade of minor adjustments? The answer lies in the intellectual and moral sphere. Is economics capable of rethinking its core principles? What institutions, policies and rules are needed to make markets "well behaved"? Do we have the moral resources to challenge the dominance of money without reverting to the selfish nationalisms of the 1930s?
***
The enquiry must start with economics. If the case for the deregulated market system is intellectually sound, it will be very hard to change. Free- marketeers claim, contrary to Soros, that the crisis is the fault of governments. US money was kept too cheap for too long after the technology bubble burst in 2000 and the attacks of 11th September 2001. The market was temporarily fooled by the government. This is a shaky defence, to say the least: if the market is so easily fooled, it cannot be very efficient.
One can also argue that the problem is not with the market system, but the fact that markets are too few and inflexible. This seems to be the view of Yale economist Robert J Shiller. He likens the financial system to an early aircraft. Just because it is prone to crash doesn't mean we should stop trying to perfect it. Shiller claims that new derivative products will soon be able to insure homeowners against the risk of house prices going down. To my mind, this is an example of trying to cure a state of inebriation by having another whiskey. There are two things wrong with it. First, if financial innovation is, in fact, the route to greater market efficiency, the financial system would have been getting more stable in the last 25 years of explosive financial engineering. Instead it has become more volatile. Second, the assumption that, given enough innovation, uncertainty can be reduced to risk, is just wrong. There will never be sufficient knowledge to enable contracts to be made to cover all future contingencies.
An analogous argument is that there was not enough marketisation in the global monetary system. Instead of the "clean" floating of currencies, "dirty" floating became the rule. Importantly, China and most of east Asia refused to float their currencies freely. China reverted unilaterally to a form of Bretton Woods, deliberately undervaluing the yuan against the US dollar. The resulting imbalances enabled American consumers to borrow $700bn a year from the parsimonious but super-competitive Chinese, at the cost of losing millions of manufacturing jobs to them. The Chinese saved, the Americans spent, and their debt-fuelled spending created the asset bubbles that led to the credit collapse. This source of instability needs no revision of economic theory, simply the establishment of a free market in foreign currencies. However, the assumption that a world in which currencies were allowed to float freely would be immune from the financial storms we have experienced depends on the belief that currencies will always trade at the correct prices—the global version of the efficient market hypothesis.
A different claim, which goes back to Marx, is that certain structures of economy are less stable than others. Globalisation has increased instability by producing a shift in world GDP shares from wages to profits as the release of low-wage populations into the global economy has undermined the bargaining power of labour in rich countries. This has led to a crisis of under-consumption, staved off only by the expansion of debt (as Gerald Holtham points out, in Prospect's December 2008 issue). There is some truth in this. A greater equality of incomes would create more stable purchasing power.
But the main source of instability lies in the financial markets themselves. And here it is clear that the battle of economic ideas still needs to be fought. Keynes is important in this because he produced the most powerful case for supposing that financial markets are not efficient in the sense required by efficient market theory. As he explained in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), classical economics had ignored the two main causes of systemic financial failure: the existence of (unmeasurable) uncertainty and the role of money as a "store of value." The first led to periodic collapses of confidence; the second led investors to hoard cash if interest rates fell too low, making automatic recovery from collapses difficult. The function of government was to remove the depressive effect of both by giving investors continuous confidence to invest.
Contrary to the belief of some recent economic theories, the future is just as unknowable as Keynes thought it was. The mathematical "quants" who set up the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1994 worked to a risk model which showed that the kind of financial meltdown which, in fact, bankrupted them four years later, could occur only once every four million years. This was not a rationalisation of financial interests: it was self-deception.
What economics needs, therefore, if it is to have any purchase on real world behaviour, is a new starting point. It needs to accept that the changing nature of the world precludes people from having enough information to always make contracts at the "right" prices. Such a change is a necessary condition for a permanent change in policy. Each previous crisis has produced a leading economist with the authority to challenge the prevailing consensus. So the call for a new Keynes is not just rhetorical.
Opinion as to the degree of supervision, regulation and control needed to make a market economy well-behaved is to be found along a continuum. At one end are the free-marketeers who believe only the lightest touch only is needed; at the other are classical Marxists who believe it requires public ownership of the whole economy. In between are varieties of social democrats and middle wayers, the most famous of whom is Keynes. This territory is sure to be extensively explored over the next few years as the pendulum starts swinging back. For the question of making markets well behaved goes beyond the question of securing their efficiency. It involves making the market economy compatible with other valued aspects of life. The French social democratic slogan of the mid-1990s—"market economy yes, market society no"—encapsulates the idea that limits should be placed on the power of the market to shape social life according to its own logic.
The battleground will be about the role of the nation-state in the globalising economy of the future, for the nation-state is the main repository and guardian of the values and traditions threatened by the disruptive power of the global market. A paradox of globalisation—which was supposed to see a withering of the nation-state—is that it has led to a revival of nationalism. A deregulated world turned out, unsurprisingly, to be one dominated by the strong. This process reached its apogee with the presidency of George W Bush and the Iraq war—which emphasised US determination to act as a free agent. Other states, too, in Europe and elsewhere, are now acting as semi-free agents. The effective choice is between a more regulated global capitalist system and its possibly violent breakup into a menagerie of warrior nationalisms.
But to ensure we have an ordered system requires us to make globalisation efficient and acceptable. In the course of that debate, I expect one crucial point to emerge: the benefits of globalisation are real, but have been exaggerated. Improvements in the allocation of capital and reductions in opportunities for corruption are offset by increased volatility. Globalisation also raises huge issues of political accountability and social cohesion that are scarcely considered by economists, and only lazily by politicians.
There seem to be four main reasons for this blind spot. The first is the intellectual domination of economics in this debate, with its individualistic and developmental perspective. Globalisation—the integration of markets in goods, services, capital and labour—must be good because it has raised many millions out of poverty in poorer countries faster than would otherwise have been possible. Any interference with this process is impious. A second idea is that it is inevitable: technology—most conspicuously the internet—abolishes national frontiers. Technology cannot be undone. So, whether we like it or not, globalisation is our fate, and our morals and social conventions must adapt to it. The third idea is that globalisation is evolutionary; any check would be regressive. Fourthly, globalisation forces us to think of the world as a unit, which is necessary if we are to solve planet-wide problems.
These are powerful propositions, derived from the era of scarcity and not adjusted to the era of partial abundance, nor to the existence of natural limits to growth. Today the benefits of globalisation are much more obvious for poor than for rich countries. In the 1950s and 1960s, the northern hemisphere was for free trade, the southern protectionist. Today the position is partly reversed. Globalisation offers the best hope for poor countries to catch up with the rich. But growth has become less important for rich countries. In the early 1930s, Keynes thought that the international division of labour could be carried too far. "Let goods be homespun," was the title of an article he wrote in 1932. He wanted a "well-balanced" or "complete" national life, allowing a country to display the full range of its aptitudes, and not simply to be a link in a value-adding productive chain spanning the globe. Moreover, the economic benefits of offshoring are far from evident for richer states. Since 1997, Britain has lost 1.1m manufacturing jobs—29 per cent of its total—many of them to developing countries. The result has been a dramatic deterioration in Britain's current account balance, and a decline into deficit on the investment income balance too, meaning we pay more to foreign investors in interest and dividends than we receive from abroad. This makes it harder for Britons to pay down their huge debts to the outside world.
Keynes's warning that the pursuit of export-led growth is bound to set nations at each others' throats is still relevant. But that does not mean just sticking as we are. Some rowing back of financial globalisation and cross-border financial institutions is required to rebalance market and state. This process is underway, as national regulators take a tighter grip over the financial institutions they are bailing out. Regulators are increasingly sceptical of banks that depend excessively on wholesale funding. Without this, there will be a natural tendency for banks to shrink back within their own frontiers.
One of the biggest problems with the global trading order remains the enormous arbitrages in tax, labour and non-wage costs that exist. These have encouraged companies to relocate operations, and depressed the bargaining power of labour. Companies like WalMart of the US and Nokia of Finland have been huge outsourcers to Asia. The only solution short of raising barriers is for governments to co-operate in flattening out some of these differences—for China, for example, to increase wages. Ralston Saul has noted that the era of globalisation saw "multiple binding economic treaties… put in place while almost no counterbalancing binding treaties were negotiated for work conditions, taxation, the environment or legal obligations." It will be difficult to create new global systems that balance public good and self interest. But the alternative is the beggar-my-neighbour world of protectionism.
Another way to curb outsourcers would be to use antitrust powers. Breaking up megalithic multinationals would at least prevent them enjoying quasi-monopoly rents, and thus reduce the incentive.
Globalisation is necessarily blind to the idea of political accountability because none exists at the planetary level. Yet the crisis has challenged the idea that we should all unthinkingly follow the logic of the bond market. When the crunch came, we discovered that national taxpayers still stand behind banks, and national insolvency regimes matter. A more rules-based exchange rate system is not inconceivable. This might seek to put some curbs on capital movements—especially at times of economic stress.
And, in this new climate, national politicians are likely to reach for ideas and influences that until recently would have seemed exotic. The idea, for example, that economic growth does not, beyond a certain point, make people happier. David Cameron, a market-friendly Conservative, has talked about the importance of general wellbeing as an alternative to the mania for economic growth. Rich countries could probably abandon the globalist project without much damage to their material standards and with possible gain to their quality of life. Rejecting the inevitability of market-based globalisation would not necessarily be harmful—especially if it were accompanied by a reassertion of democracy at a national level. This is not a pipe dream. New Zealand, which was the first country to attempt to become a post-national nation state in the 1980s with a radical programme of privatisation and deregulation, changed tack in 1999. The electorate endorsed an interventionist government devoted to raising taxes, reimposing economic regulations and establishing a stable private sector. It happened because reform failed to deliver the goods. Other countries may follow suit if the political costs of maintaining a global economy are seen as too high. Rich countries surely have a duty to help poor countries, but not at the expense of an awful way of life.
"Well-behaved" markets should not only be more stable, they should be more morally acceptable. It is indefensible for a top American CEO to earn 367 times more than the average worker (against 40 times in the 1970s). Part of the swing-back in political economy will be to use the tax system to redress the balance between capital and impotent labour.
The crisis has rightly led to a revival of interest in Keynes. But he was a moralist as well as an economist. He believed that material wellbeing is a necessary condition of the good life, but that beyond a certain standard of comfort, its pursuit can produce corruption, both for the individual and for society.
He reunited economics with ethics by taking us back to the primary question: what is wealth for? The good life was one to be lived in harmony with nature and our fellows. Yet "we destroy the beauty of the countryside because the unappropriated splendours of nature have no economic value. We are capable of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend." Not everything should be sacrificed for efficiency. And Keynes was a liberal nationalist.
In terms of our pendulum analogy, he was someone who instinctively sought an equipoise: not in the timeless equilibrium of classical economics, but in a balance in political economy between freedom and control, national and international wellbeing, efficiency and morality. He was an Aristotelian, who believed that vices are virtues carried to excess. This is a good philosophy for today.
copyright: Prospect
by Robert Skidelsky
The markets have ruled for a third of a century, but it has all ended in tears. A return to selfish nationalism is possible. If we are to avoid this sombre outcome, we must find ways to rub the rough edges off globalisation
Robert Skidelsky is the author of John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (Pan)
Any great failure should force us to rethink. The present economic crisis is a great failure of the market system. As George Soros has rightly pointed out, "the salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock like Opec… the crisis was generated by the system itself." It originated in the US, the heart of the world's financial system and the source of much of its financial innovation. That is why the crisis is global, and is indeed a crisis of globalisation.
There were three kinds of failure. The first, discussed by John Kay in this issue, was institutional: banks mutated from utilities into casinos. However, they did so because they, their regulators and the policymakers sitting on top of the regulators all succumbed to something called the "efficient market hypothesis": the view that financial markets could not consistently mis-price assets and therefore needed little regulation. So the second failure was intellectual. The most astonishing admission was that of former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in autumn 2008 that the Fed's regime of monetary management had been based on a "flaw." The "whole intellectual edifice," he said, "collapsed in the summer of last year." Behind the efficient market idea lay the intellectual failure of mainstream economics. It could neither predict nor explain the meltdown because nearly all economists believed that markets were self-correcting. As a consequence, economics itself was marginalised.
But the crisis also represents a moral failure: that of a system built on debt. At the heart of the moral failure is the worship of growth for its own sake, rather than as a way to achieve the "good life." As a result, economic efficiency—the means to growth—has been given absolute priority in our thinking and policy. The only moral compass we now have is the thin and degraded notion of economic welfare. This moral lacuna explains uncritical acceptance of globalisation and financial innovation. Leverage is a duty because it "levers" faster growth. The theological language which would have recognised the collapse of the credit bubble as the "wages of sin," the come-uppance for prodigious profligacy, has become unusable. But the come-uppance has come, nevertheless.
Historians have always been fascinated by cyclical theories of history. Societies are said to swing like pendulums between alternating phases of vigour and decay; progress and reaction; licentiousness and puritanism. Each outward movement produces a crisis of excess which leads to a reaction. The equilibrium position is hard to achieve and always unstable.
In his Cycles of American History (1986) Arthur Schlesinger Jr defined a political economy cycle as "a continuing shift in national involvement between public purpose and private interest." The swing he identified was between "liberal" (what we would call social democratic) and "conservative" epochs. The idea of the "crisis" is central. Liberal periods succumb to the corruption of power, as idealists yield to time-servers, and conservative arguments against rent-seeking excesses win the day. But the conservative era then succumbs to a corruption of money, as financiers and businessmen use the freedom of de-regulation to rip off the public. A crisis of under-regulated markets presages the return to a liberal era.
This idea fits the American historical narrative tolerably well. It also makes sense globally. The era of what Americans would call "conservative" economics opened with the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776. Yet despite the early intellectual ascendancy of free trade, it took a major crisis—the potato famine of the early 1840s—to produce an actual shift in policy: the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws that ushered in the free trade era.
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In the 1870s, the pendulum started to swing back to what the historian AV Dicey called the "age of collectivism." The major crisis that triggered this was the first great global depression, produced by a collapse in food prices. It was a severe enough shock to produce a major shift in political economy. This came in two waves. First, all industrial countries except Britain put up tariffs to protect employment in agriculture and industry. (Britain relied on mass emigration to eliminate rural unemployment.) Second, all industrial countries except the US started schemes of social insurance to protect their citizens against life's hazards. The great depression of 1929-32 produced a second wave of collectivism, now associated with the "Keynesian" use of fiscal and monetary policy to maintain full employment. Most capitalist countries nationalised key industries. Roosevelt's new deal regulated banking and the power utilities, and belatedly embarked on the road of social security. International capital movements were severely controlled everywhere.
This movement was not all one way, or else the west would have ended up with communism, which was the fate of large parts of the globe. Even before the crisis of collectivism in the 1970s, a swing back had started, as trade, after 1945, was progressively freed and capital movements liberalised. The rule was free trade abroad and social democracy at home.
The Bretton Woods system, set up with Keynes's help in 1944, was the international expression of liberal/social democratic political economy. It aimed to free foreign trade after the freeze of the 1930s, by providing an environment that reduced incentives for economic nationalism. At its heart was a system of fixed exchange rates, subject to agreed adjustment, to avoid competitive currency depreciation.
The crisis of liberalism, or social democracy, unfolded with stagflation and ungovernability in the 1970s. It broadly fits Schlesinger's notion of the "corruption of power." The Keynesian/social democratic policymakers succumbed to hubris, an intellectual corruption which convinced them that they possessed the knowledge and the tools to manage and control the economy and society from the top. This was the malady against which Hayek inveighed in his classic The Road to Serfdom (1944). The attempt in the 1970s to control inflation by wage and price controls led directly to a "crisis of governability," as trade unions, particularly in Britain, refused to accept them. Large state subsidies to producer groups, both public and private, fed the typical corruptions of behaviour identified by the new right: rent-seeking, moral hazard, free-riding. Palpable evidence of government failure obliterated memories of market failure. The new generation of economists abandoned Keynes and, with the help of sophisticated mathematics, reinvented the classical economics of the self-correcting market. Battered by the crises of the 1970s, governments caved in to the "inevitability" of free market forces. The swing-back became worldwide with the collapse of communism.
A conspicuous casualty of the swing-back was the Bretton Woods system that succumbed in the 1970s to the refusal of the US to curb its domestic spending. Currencies were set free to float and controls on international capital flows were progressively lifted. This heralded a wholesale change of direction towards free markets and the idea of globalisation. This was, in concept, not unattractive. The idea was that the nation state—which had been responsible for so much organised violence and wasteful spending—was on its way out, to be replaced by the global market. The prospectus was perhaps best set out by the Canadian philosopher, John Ralston Saul, in a 2004 essay in which he proclaimed the collapse of globalisation: "In the future, economics, not politics or arms, would determine the course of human events. Freed markets would quickly establish natural international balances, impervious to the old boom-and-bust cycles. The growth in international trade, as a result of lowering barriers, would unleash an economic-social tide that would raise all ships, whether of our western poor or of the developing world in general. Prosperous markets would turn dictatorships into democracies."
Today we are living through a crisis of conservatism. The financial crisis has brought to a head a growing dissatisfaction with the corruption of money. Neo-conservatism has sought to justify fabulous rewards to a financial plutocracy while median incomes stagnate or even fall; in the name of efficiency it has promoted the off-shoring of millions of jobs, the undermining of national communities, and the rape of nature. Such a system needs to be fabulously successful to command allegiance. Spectacular failure is bound to discredit it.
The situation we are in now thus puts into question the speed and direction of progress. Will there be a pause for thought, or will we continue much as before after a cascade of minor adjustments? The answer lies in the intellectual and moral sphere. Is economics capable of rethinking its core principles? What institutions, policies and rules are needed to make markets "well behaved"? Do we have the moral resources to challenge the dominance of money without reverting to the selfish nationalisms of the 1930s?
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The enquiry must start with economics. If the case for the deregulated market system is intellectually sound, it will be very hard to change. Free- marketeers claim, contrary to Soros, that the crisis is the fault of governments. US money was kept too cheap for too long after the technology bubble burst in 2000 and the attacks of 11th September 2001. The market was temporarily fooled by the government. This is a shaky defence, to say the least: if the market is so easily fooled, it cannot be very efficient.
One can also argue that the problem is not with the market system, but the fact that markets are too few and inflexible. This seems to be the view of Yale economist Robert J Shiller. He likens the financial system to an early aircraft. Just because it is prone to crash doesn't mean we should stop trying to perfect it. Shiller claims that new derivative products will soon be able to insure homeowners against the risk of house prices going down. To my mind, this is an example of trying to cure a state of inebriation by having another whiskey. There are two things wrong with it. First, if financial innovation is, in fact, the route to greater market efficiency, the financial system would have been getting more stable in the last 25 years of explosive financial engineering. Instead it has become more volatile. Second, the assumption that, given enough innovation, uncertainty can be reduced to risk, is just wrong. There will never be sufficient knowledge to enable contracts to be made to cover all future contingencies.
An analogous argument is that there was not enough marketisation in the global monetary system. Instead of the "clean" floating of currencies, "dirty" floating became the rule. Importantly, China and most of east Asia refused to float their currencies freely. China reverted unilaterally to a form of Bretton Woods, deliberately undervaluing the yuan against the US dollar. The resulting imbalances enabled American consumers to borrow $700bn a year from the parsimonious but super-competitive Chinese, at the cost of losing millions of manufacturing jobs to them. The Chinese saved, the Americans spent, and their debt-fuelled spending created the asset bubbles that led to the credit collapse. This source of instability needs no revision of economic theory, simply the establishment of a free market in foreign currencies. However, the assumption that a world in which currencies were allowed to float freely would be immune from the financial storms we have experienced depends on the belief that currencies will always trade at the correct prices—the global version of the efficient market hypothesis.
A different claim, which goes back to Marx, is that certain structures of economy are less stable than others. Globalisation has increased instability by producing a shift in world GDP shares from wages to profits as the release of low-wage populations into the global economy has undermined the bargaining power of labour in rich countries. This has led to a crisis of under-consumption, staved off only by the expansion of debt (as Gerald Holtham points out, in Prospect's December 2008 issue). There is some truth in this. A greater equality of incomes would create more stable purchasing power.
But the main source of instability lies in the financial markets themselves. And here it is clear that the battle of economic ideas still needs to be fought. Keynes is important in this because he produced the most powerful case for supposing that financial markets are not efficient in the sense required by efficient market theory. As he explained in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), classical economics had ignored the two main causes of systemic financial failure: the existence of (unmeasurable) uncertainty and the role of money as a "store of value." The first led to periodic collapses of confidence; the second led investors to hoard cash if interest rates fell too low, making automatic recovery from collapses difficult. The function of government was to remove the depressive effect of both by giving investors continuous confidence to invest.
Contrary to the belief of some recent economic theories, the future is just as unknowable as Keynes thought it was. The mathematical "quants" who set up the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1994 worked to a risk model which showed that the kind of financial meltdown which, in fact, bankrupted them four years later, could occur only once every four million years. This was not a rationalisation of financial interests: it was self-deception.
What economics needs, therefore, if it is to have any purchase on real world behaviour, is a new starting point. It needs to accept that the changing nature of the world precludes people from having enough information to always make contracts at the "right" prices. Such a change is a necessary condition for a permanent change in policy. Each previous crisis has produced a leading economist with the authority to challenge the prevailing consensus. So the call for a new Keynes is not just rhetorical.
Opinion as to the degree of supervision, regulation and control needed to make a market economy well-behaved is to be found along a continuum. At one end are the free-marketeers who believe only the lightest touch only is needed; at the other are classical Marxists who believe it requires public ownership of the whole economy. In between are varieties of social democrats and middle wayers, the most famous of whom is Keynes. This territory is sure to be extensively explored over the next few years as the pendulum starts swinging back. For the question of making markets well behaved goes beyond the question of securing their efficiency. It involves making the market economy compatible with other valued aspects of life. The French social democratic slogan of the mid-1990s—"market economy yes, market society no"—encapsulates the idea that limits should be placed on the power of the market to shape social life according to its own logic.
The battleground will be about the role of the nation-state in the globalising economy of the future, for the nation-state is the main repository and guardian of the values and traditions threatened by the disruptive power of the global market. A paradox of globalisation—which was supposed to see a withering of the nation-state—is that it has led to a revival of nationalism. A deregulated world turned out, unsurprisingly, to be one dominated by the strong. This process reached its apogee with the presidency of George W Bush and the Iraq war—which emphasised US determination to act as a free agent. Other states, too, in Europe and elsewhere, are now acting as semi-free agents. The effective choice is between a more regulated global capitalist system and its possibly violent breakup into a menagerie of warrior nationalisms.
But to ensure we have an ordered system requires us to make globalisation efficient and acceptable. In the course of that debate, I expect one crucial point to emerge: the benefits of globalisation are real, but have been exaggerated. Improvements in the allocation of capital and reductions in opportunities for corruption are offset by increased volatility. Globalisation also raises huge issues of political accountability and social cohesion that are scarcely considered by economists, and only lazily by politicians.
There seem to be four main reasons for this blind spot. The first is the intellectual domination of economics in this debate, with its individualistic and developmental perspective. Globalisation—the integration of markets in goods, services, capital and labour—must be good because it has raised many millions out of poverty in poorer countries faster than would otherwise have been possible. Any interference with this process is impious. A second idea is that it is inevitable: technology—most conspicuously the internet—abolishes national frontiers. Technology cannot be undone. So, whether we like it or not, globalisation is our fate, and our morals and social conventions must adapt to it. The third idea is that globalisation is evolutionary; any check would be regressive. Fourthly, globalisation forces us to think of the world as a unit, which is necessary if we are to solve planet-wide problems.
These are powerful propositions, derived from the era of scarcity and not adjusted to the era of partial abundance, nor to the existence of natural limits to growth. Today the benefits of globalisation are much more obvious for poor than for rich countries. In the 1950s and 1960s, the northern hemisphere was for free trade, the southern protectionist. Today the position is partly reversed. Globalisation offers the best hope for poor countries to catch up with the rich. But growth has become less important for rich countries. In the early 1930s, Keynes thought that the international division of labour could be carried too far. "Let goods be homespun," was the title of an article he wrote in 1932. He wanted a "well-balanced" or "complete" national life, allowing a country to display the full range of its aptitudes, and not simply to be a link in a value-adding productive chain spanning the globe. Moreover, the economic benefits of offshoring are far from evident for richer states. Since 1997, Britain has lost 1.1m manufacturing jobs—29 per cent of its total—many of them to developing countries. The result has been a dramatic deterioration in Britain's current account balance, and a decline into deficit on the investment income balance too, meaning we pay more to foreign investors in interest and dividends than we receive from abroad. This makes it harder for Britons to pay down their huge debts to the outside world.
Keynes's warning that the pursuit of export-led growth is bound to set nations at each others' throats is still relevant. But that does not mean just sticking as we are. Some rowing back of financial globalisation and cross-border financial institutions is required to rebalance market and state. This process is underway, as national regulators take a tighter grip over the financial institutions they are bailing out. Regulators are increasingly sceptical of banks that depend excessively on wholesale funding. Without this, there will be a natural tendency for banks to shrink back within their own frontiers.
One of the biggest problems with the global trading order remains the enormous arbitrages in tax, labour and non-wage costs that exist. These have encouraged companies to relocate operations, and depressed the bargaining power of labour. Companies like WalMart of the US and Nokia of Finland have been huge outsourcers to Asia. The only solution short of raising barriers is for governments to co-operate in flattening out some of these differences—for China, for example, to increase wages. Ralston Saul has noted that the era of globalisation saw "multiple binding economic treaties… put in place while almost no counterbalancing binding treaties were negotiated for work conditions, taxation, the environment or legal obligations." It will be difficult to create new global systems that balance public good and self interest. But the alternative is the beggar-my-neighbour world of protectionism.
Another way to curb outsourcers would be to use antitrust powers. Breaking up megalithic multinationals would at least prevent them enjoying quasi-monopoly rents, and thus reduce the incentive.
Globalisation is necessarily blind to the idea of political accountability because none exists at the planetary level. Yet the crisis has challenged the idea that we should all unthinkingly follow the logic of the bond market. When the crunch came, we discovered that national taxpayers still stand behind banks, and national insolvency regimes matter. A more rules-based exchange rate system is not inconceivable. This might seek to put some curbs on capital movements—especially at times of economic stress.
And, in this new climate, national politicians are likely to reach for ideas and influences that until recently would have seemed exotic. The idea, for example, that economic growth does not, beyond a certain point, make people happier. David Cameron, a market-friendly Conservative, has talked about the importance of general wellbeing as an alternative to the mania for economic growth. Rich countries could probably abandon the globalist project without much damage to their material standards and with possible gain to their quality of life. Rejecting the inevitability of market-based globalisation would not necessarily be harmful—especially if it were accompanied by a reassertion of democracy at a national level. This is not a pipe dream. New Zealand, which was the first country to attempt to become a post-national nation state in the 1980s with a radical programme of privatisation and deregulation, changed tack in 1999. The electorate endorsed an interventionist government devoted to raising taxes, reimposing economic regulations and establishing a stable private sector. It happened because reform failed to deliver the goods. Other countries may follow suit if the political costs of maintaining a global economy are seen as too high. Rich countries surely have a duty to help poor countries, but not at the expense of an awful way of life.
"Well-behaved" markets should not only be more stable, they should be more morally acceptable. It is indefensible for a top American CEO to earn 367 times more than the average worker (against 40 times in the 1970s). Part of the swing-back in political economy will be to use the tax system to redress the balance between capital and impotent labour.
The crisis has rightly led to a revival of interest in Keynes. But he was a moralist as well as an economist. He believed that material wellbeing is a necessary condition of the good life, but that beyond a certain standard of comfort, its pursuit can produce corruption, both for the individual and for society.
He reunited economics with ethics by taking us back to the primary question: what is wealth for? The good life was one to be lived in harmony with nature and our fellows. Yet "we destroy the beauty of the countryside because the unappropriated splendours of nature have no economic value. We are capable of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend." Not everything should be sacrificed for efficiency. And Keynes was a liberal nationalist.
In terms of our pendulum analogy, he was someone who instinctively sought an equipoise: not in the timeless equilibrium of classical economics, but in a balance in political economy between freedom and control, national and international wellbeing, efficiency and morality. He was an Aristotelian, who believed that vices are virtues carried to excess. This is a good philosophy for today.
copyright: Prospect
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