A perambulation in the forest of words

What is wrong with this sign, which I found yesterday in the Hambleden valley, Buckinghamshire? Its message is clear enough: people are chopping down trees in this area and you should be careful in case one of them should fall on your head and injure or even kill you.

So why, on a long walk through the Chiltern Hills, did I trek back half a mile through the woods to take this photograph? What worm burrowed into the frontal lobe of my cerebral cortex in those ten minutes and, although I was wet and tired and still many miles from my evening's lodgings, made me retrace my steps?

It was, I discovered, the words "in progress". For they are not needed. The words "Danger, tree felling" tell us all we need to know. The words "in progress" are superfluous: they add nothing. Why put up a sign warning of tree felling if it were not in progress? You might just as well put up road signs saying that you don't have to drive at 23 miles per hour.

Why - and I thank you for reading on - is this important? Well, as it is written, with its unnecessary appendage, the sign implies the need for another sign. This would state that tree felling is not in progress. This sign would be erected not only in unexploited forests but also, for the sake of thoroughness and probably Health and Safety legislation, wherever trees are not being felled, so that the people of that area could go about their lives without the fear of gravitationally exacerbated arboreal menace eating away at them.

Picture it. The noble Bedouin would emerge from his tent to find his way to the nearest oasis blocked by such signs. Likewise, the Inuit of northern Canada would do battle not only with the elements and marauding polar bears, but with hordes of signs (let us call them 'hordings') that kept him from his fishing holes and thus threatened not only his health and happiness but those of his loved ones too. Faeroe Island puffin hunters, adrift upon the wild North Atlantic, would look up from their ...

... anyway, it doesn't bear thinking about.

What, you may already have asked - and thank you again for reading on - is my point? Well, as you may already have concluded from my own indulgences, it is that we use far too many words when we don't need to. At a time when everything is being rationalised, stripped down, made redundant, subjected to 'efficiency savings' and the like, we just keep on spewing out words as if they were bankers' bonuses. I know I do.

I propose that the Government step in. God might reasonably have allotted us a given number of words before He called time on us (and how different human history would have been: Hitler would have perished in prison after the Beer Hall Putsch and Stalin would have been just another poet who died young). But He didn't, so it falls upon the state to regulate our output.

It can start by putting its own house in order. May I draw to your attention that my proposed alteration to the sign pictured above amounts to a massive 40% reduction in the number of words used. This should become the minimum. Strategies, policies and the like must be discarded unless they can be fitted onto two sides of A4 paper at most, and with a maximium font size of 11pt. Progress reports get up to a page. Corporate mission statements must be no longer than 10 words for national, 7 for local government. Election manifestos and 5-year plans must be written on the backs of envelopes, if they aren't already.

More widely, and just for starters, Sunday newspapers will not be allowed to weigh more than 5 kilos and Dylan Thomas's poetry will be burned, even the good stuff. It can be done.

As for the rest of us, with a sadly necessary disregard for the great man's other sensitivities, Government should enforce George Orwell's demands for the use of Plain English on pain of a cage full of rats being strapped to offenders' faces:

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

My, I have gone on, haven't I?

Arty Farty Hot Airy Carey

John Carey’s book What Good are the Arts? is of an age - our age - in which those at the top of education aim to be barbarians in citadels not keepers of flames, while too many of those who get the education that this attitude fosters are stunted and small-minded, their only consolation being the bogus, guilt-laden ‘celebration’ that they receive from all quarters, not least Professor Carey’s.

I work with some of these people. Believe me, they don’t need the support that Carey offers. Richard Hoggart, that noble man, parodied the patronising neglectfulness of the anti-elitist elite as ‘just stay as sweet as you are’.

Anyway, Carey attacks some common assumptions about the arts. He claims, among other things, that:

• ‘High art’ is no better than ‘low art’.
• Art doesn’t make us better (Hitler, after all, was artistically a rather cultivated man), although he does say that arts programmes can serve certain utilitarian goals.
• A work of art is anything that anyone thinks is a work of art: since we can’t know how one person - let alone all of us – subjectively responds to anything, there can be no shared definition.

As Emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford, Carey knows more than I do about his subject. That is factually true. But no matter: by his argument (if not mine), I suppose that if I think his book is crap, then it is crap, and I can finish this post here with that clear in my mind, if no one else's (and certainly not, I imagine, his). He might even go so far as to assert that flawed modern belief that I am entitled to my opinion. But if I’m wrong, and I hope he'd allow me to be, I may well be entitled to express my opinion but I’m not entitled to hold it. This gets us nowhere.

So here’s a brief stab at tackling each of Carey’s above claims. What do you think? Am I entitled to my opinions?

‘High art’ is no better than ‘low art’. Yes it is, because it requires more and deeper reserves of human imagination, skill, application, ingenuity and empathy in order to produce it, and these qualities, even if they are not all shared by all human beings in all cultures at all times, are accessible to all. In short, J.S. Bach's The Art of the Fugue is better than The Brotherhood of Man's Save Your Kisses for Me. Oh yes it is.

Art doesn’t make us better. No it doesn’t, but it has a wonderfully rich capacity to do so, which, as moral agents, we can welcome, ignore or pervert as we wish, and that is what matters; for every Adolf Hitler there is a Daniel Barenboim, for every Richard Wagner a Richard Wagner.

A work of art is anything that anyone thinks is a work of art. Only unimaginative, lazy, infantile - or habitually patronised - people will be content to say “I like x because I like it” and leave it at that; humans have and can give reasons for what they think and feel, and we have flawed but potentially fruitful shared means of making these reasons intelligible to others. Art is not an individual statement but a mutual discussion and exploration. The quality of the artistic experience should be a subject for that discussion.

I think Carey’s approach, whatever his intention, will encourage people to close down rather than open up good, inquisitive debate in a spirit of good will. I think it impedes the development of the ‘critical literacy’ (another Hoggart phrase) which Carey has in spades but would deny people who need it. I think it condones and supports the selfish and anti-social individualism encouraged by the market values he no doubt – and, if so, rightly – abhors.

He, and the many relativists in education and beyond, are not as radical as they think they are.

It's Here. And Now.

"Daa-aaad ... Are we there yet?"

Parents everywhere will know this one. I usually ignore it for the first 2 hours, or the first 100 miles if the traffic is bad, or the first 5 miles if I am on the M25. Then I park the car and turn round in my seat. Quite slowly, for effect, and with a languor I do not feel.

For the cry is an important moment in their little lives, and no less so for being repeated every time they get in the damned car. It is the first embrownment of the bright, green leaves of their childhood. Soon they will enter the long, damp Autumn of adult yearning which can only end in the Winter snap of cold disappointment that will, in its turn, finish them off, their songs unsung.

This is my chance to make a difference, to change all that, to shatter the false mirror in which they play so heedlessly.

"My Children,” I say to them, “Enjoy this journey and enjoy the here and now. No, we are not there yet. There is no such thing as ‘there’ because you will find that, when we DO get ‘there’, 'there' will at that very moment have become 'here', which is where you are already. So a life chasing what you think is 'there', or even trying to get 'there', will be a disappointing one. ‘Here’ is where we are now, and is the only place you will ever be, and by Christ we are going to enjoy it.

“Ah, my little ones, fortune is always hiding – and you will find that it is always hiding over there. So live large, my children, and dream small, and ...”

It’s at this point that they usually ask for their Mum.

“She’s over there,” I tell them, and start the car again.

On ContactPoint and Abuse

Today the new government "switched off" ContactPoint, the 11 million name national child database created after the horrible abuse and death of Victoria Climbie in 2000. I am very glad it did.

(How I love that term "switched off", by the way: £235 million to set up, services thrown into turmoil at God knows what extra cost, yet another root and branch reinvention of what public professionals do, their reputation dragged through the mud in the process, and you just ... switch it off!)

Anyway, Despite My Warnings At The Time, ContactPoint was and remained unanimously supported by all the organisations I have worked for and alongside, and most colleagues I have worked with. I fully expect them to be unanimous in rejecting it now. I admire consistency, and they have been consistently unanimous. Well done.


Now that we all agree, here are a few points that I've also been consistent about since the plan was hatched:

Firstly, that governments - not newspapers or public opinion - should make policy, that extreme cases taken out of context make for bad policy, and that the obsession with the elimination of all risk should not trump common sense in either policy or practice.
Secondly, that the Climbie investigation showed that it was mostly the failure by social workers to follow procedures that contributed to her death, not the procedures themselves. So why did we go to all this trouble, expense and inconvenience in the first place?
Thirdly, that the rarity of cases like Climbie and Baby P in a nation with a population approaching 60 million might actually show that care services are working rather well and not the reverse.
Fourthly, given that no professional will want to be fingered for missing a possible case of abuse in the current climate (and given the alarming ways in which 'abuse' is given meaning with which I continue this piece), was it ever right to open every child in this country to well-meaning interference by putting them all on a national database?


Which brings me to Abuse more widely in the context of the general demand, not limited to social care, that we eliminate all risk (not, I stress, minimise it; eliminate it).

'Abuse' is imagined and sought everywhere these days. The term is caught up in a vicious circle: firstly it is deployed with elasticity, then it becomes anchored in a disputable meaning, then it is defended and asserted rigidly - while still being used elastically. It has fairly recently been extended to include 'financial abuse', which I presume by now covers stopping pocket money for drowning the hamster and then feeding it to the cat. But I want to talk about parental smacking.

I once challenged a trainer from a national charity who had asserted that more than a third of all people are abused at some time in their lives. Once the room's collective intake of breath had subsided and a couple of people had been carried from it, I asked him, not very scientifically, if he really meant that at least 12 of the 36 adults present were likely to have been or would at some time be abused. He replied without hesitation that it was probably more. My colleagues were once again unanimous - in their silence.

Whereas I, of course, had been naive and inattentive to recent developments. For 'abuse' now includes, among other things, parental smacking - of any kind, at any time, regardless of immediate and wider contexts and the quality of the overall parent-child relationship - with all the consequences that follow from trying to police it, one of which is the national database that has just been 'switched off' so summarily.

As a result, I sit through meeting after meeting with my head in my hands as I hear earnest, well-meaning people (mostly women: the feminization of discourse within the caring services deserves a brave researcher to examine it) unquestioningly lament the scourge of Abuse as if there were no difference between an occasionally smacked juvenile bum and a regularly violated one.

But there is. We need to be more careful when talking about 'abuse', as about many other things, than we are.

The best writer on this aspect of the risk society is Frank Furedi. Anyone who simultaneously wins the praises of Terry Eagleton and Roger Scruton is OK by me.

On Paul McCartney turning 103.

Last week I said I would attempt to answer the question, "How could the same Paul McCartney write both Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time and Blackbird."

I regret to inform you that I have been unable to do this. I did not help myself by walking into a bar and hearing Ebony and Ivory, and at that point I just gave up.

Open minds? Empty vessels!

Keeping an open mind has become an end not a means. A virtue has become a vice.

As well as being open to new experiences and ideas, the purpose of being open-minded is to assess them with a view to reaching better conclusions about them than you would if you didn't do so. It requires us to be keen to learn and to go beyond what we think we know and believe already, and to make judgements based upon the experience. This may also require us to change our opinions from time to time.

But too many people see ‘an open mind’ as one which reaches no conclusion and avoids judgement for fear of not being seen to be ‘tolerant’. Worse, they seriously believe this to be virtuous behaviour. This kind of thinking suffuses British public service, which I have had the privilege if not the pleasure to inhabit for some 15 years now. Of even more concern is that most people I have prodded on the subject tend to believe it as well.

But this kind of open mind is really an empty one. It's timid, fearful and afraid to make mistakes, and people who never make mistakes never learn. And it’s not even tolerant. You can only tolerate things of which you disapprove. If you shrink from judgement of any kind, and from negative ones in particular, you can't be tolerant. So in fact it's an outward show masking moral squeamishness, like someone who won’t try foreign food and then dresses their small-mindedness as principle.

Worse, these people are intolerant. For all their often rigid sense of personal righteousness, their social ideals are weakly developed. Because of the power they have and exert, they push others backwards too. They work against their own professed aims. Careless as they are in distorting meaning (discrimination, for example, has been reinvented as a vice - unfair discrimination is the vice), they nonetheless insist that everyone else should maintain strict semantic and moral hygiene.

I do wish they'd be more open minded.

Spiritual? ME?

I'm not religious and see the dangers, but find many hardline atheists quite insufferable and pig-headed given that they can't prove their belief either. Were Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot religious? Is Jonathan Ross? Mind you, what the hell does 'spiritual' mean, or is it just the lay term for narcissism?