Sweet Talk
Only the anthropologist, albeit an unusual one, his fingers attuned to the subtleties of style, this one plays like a Scriabin sonata, to think society a symbol. Who else to call Ruth Benedict a poet? He watches her catch cultures in the nets of her metaphors. Metaphor. More powerful, it has the potency of magic, than a filing cabinet of facts; for facts alone, lacking the alchemical formulae, cannot create our intellectual gold. The Germans call us Island Monkeys; a key insight into how seen by many Europeans. And explains an intelligentsia’s support for a First World War that would save them from Western barbarism; our ‘civilisation’ to go down in the trenches.1 Americans too love to diss; Benedict herself distinguishing between soft and hard empires, we on the callused end of the spectrum. In a high piece of chutzpah, she redistributes the colonies; the warriors going to us Brits - we like to match ourselves against tough types - the peaceful to the nice Dutch.2 A history encapsulated in such a phrase; it backgrounds contemporary calls for kindness, that cover for native aggressiveness and a reaction to an unpleasant past. Our affinity is with thug and yob. It is why many in Europe have admired us.3 I think of Hippolyte Taine, the theme to his history of English literature our barbarian nature.4 No wonder we continue to invest so much in our military, swagger across east and middle Asia. Unfair! shouts the Schloss. Yes yes my friend; I ignore our once historical aversion to a standing army: preferring trade to war, we paid others to stand on our battlefields. Shouting and chanting the pacifists don’t hear us. Rushing into the plaza to pick a fight with György Lukács and Thomas Mann they find little me. Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Stracheys and Virginia Woolf circle their victim with a banner: ‘Stop doin’ us down’. Jane is in my face: ‘We are never in uniform.’ I run to the Ministry of Defence as Virginia, Vanessa and Rebecca West hit me with parasols. I make it to the steps...unlike the majority, who think style an add-on, a luxury, a waste of typing time. Quick march to the conclusion!
To lose ourselves to detail. In metaphors we find truth. Truths where much is false or fiction.Sidney Mintz’s comment on Benedict’s ideas is acute and idiosyncratic: ‘I didn’t agree with what she said, but I was fascinated that she could think like that’. Less about what is true and false than a way to think - thought as perspectivism. It suggests curiosity and a willingness to look at the world from outside the usual categories; an anthropologist open to visions not his own. It is to get out of the car and travel to New York on a camel. Not what you know, but how you came to know it. This the gift of great teachers and geniuses, who, in turning minds inside out, force us to look at the times with our own eyes. ‘Take off the sunglasses, young man.’ And we do! It is less their ideas, although these can be extraordinary, stimulating us to new thought, as how they arrive at these ideas, navigating a zig-zag path through their mental labyrinth; this the secret of originality, and a way to our own. Looking at the universe as God is making it. Yet, Mintz says, the vast majority of students - ‘pinkos’ like himself - rejected not only Benedict’s ideas but Benedict herself. Travelling through unfamiliar territory, this town was too strange, too scary, too provoking, to get off the train.
Social scientists are literalists. It is why so little is understood.
Mintz is no typical academic. I watch him describe Benedict: spare body, silver hair, badly applied make-up, blue eyes, which match a blue dress. It is a novelist creating a character. He touches up the portrait...an impressive person, who imperious at the lectern could be charming one-on-one. And adds the epiphanic detail: she praises a Mintz essay for its style. Such attention to personal characteristics is rarely heard in Alan’s interviews; where extremely clever people struggle to recall even the most obvious marks of a person. It suggests the limits to the academic mind, with its crucifying tendency to ignore, even wilfully erase, the individual.5 Text. Number. Concept. Diatribe. Kill off the subjective! This campus’ clarion call. Me and you, Vanessa Bell and the Schloss, to vanish in the neutron bomb of generality. Yet the Modern has enormously increased an individual’s power; from the poverty of To’uluwa, chief of Omarakana, to the riches of Phillip II, the Babylonian luxuries of a Bush and Blair. Nevertheless, for many in academe such characters are epiphenomena; time’s flotsam the ocean tosses onto History’s beach. Of course the humanities are in decline. They have removed the main object from their subject.6
A novel without a hero or heroine.
Mintz says that Benedict was a lousy fieldworker. Bound to be; poets are maladroit with facts. Getting in the way of an image, they crowd the queenly metaphor with the hoi polloi of unsightly detail. ‘Out! Out! Out!’ shouts Glenda Jackson playing Elizabeth I. The imagination, feeding off the royal banquet of allegory and myth, disdains the peasant’s diet of argument and fact.7 Reality is what I make, not what you see! Even within the discipline of anthropology, which prides itself on its empiricism, it is the theorist, our conceptual magician, who enjoys the studio lights; the straight ethnographer cloistered in a backroom, the servants’ quarters. Everybody knows Lévi-Strauss. Who’s heard of Fürer-Haimendorf? Because he doesn't pull theoretical marmosets out of a pith helmet.
Facts last forever; Christoph, I suspect, to live longer than Claude. But here’s the problem: facts alone are not enough for a mind greedy for generalities. To understand ourselves we need ideas, theories, images, metaphors; even if quickly carted off the historical scene. Explaining all things today; they tell us nothing tomorrow, good then only for the guillotine. No matter. Ideas are essential. Only through them do we understand a time and a place. Essential but ephemeral. Ha! An essence doesn’t last long. This the great mistake of the Greeks; but that’s for other interviews.
Until framed within an image or a story - think of ideas and metaphors as fields - our culture and its politics are but stray words in a foreign language we do not speak. Mintz is nodding against the fetishism of fieldwork. He’s right, there is more to anthropology than participant observation. Students need to be taught, teachers to organise material in an intellectual form. Time to ask a question of the Educator: factual obesity or the asceticism of a cultivated mind that knows oneself and others? As she is thinking the Schloss jumps in: ‘to know a myriad plants is good. Better to become a plant.’ Yippee! cries Mr Garden, who tells me about the soil’s detail, a rain of heavy ideas, the sun's poiesis. Only then imagination to enjoy its springtime. I, at least, have to be stimulated by the brilliant and the fanciful; that electric charge to the mind’s battery. Do we nurture young heads by dumping a truckload of jargon on them? Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! as they run for cover....
Sonia Ryang says Yes! to the Schloss. Then makes a controversial statement: Ruth Benedict wrote the best book on Japan. I stop the tape, and ask Alan for his opinion. I receive the answer in a private conversation. Tape back on.... When Sonia goes on to say that Benedict created Japan, I witness a wry smile on Sidney’s face and a civilised silence. He has other targets in view. He contrasts the self-knowledge of his teachers with the latest incompetents, blind to their own ineptitudes. He calls them novelists. A mocking reference to the ‘subjective turn’ when scholars looked at the world through the window of their own reflection. Schloss adds this caveat: they are poor novelists. In fact, many can hardly write at all; the work a recycling of formalised narratives, overpopulated with the latest technical patois and theoretical cliché.8 Anthropology is literature if a sophisticated literary talent captures a social texture in words. Although unlike a novelist, who concentrates on individuals, the anthropologist’s subject is society and is more abstract. And yet, amongst adepts these differences narrow down to nothing: both have an eye for the telling detail; making it dance to the rhythm of a sentence.
My mother, a political radical, said one of the things she noticed in the US, coming from Tsarist Russia, was looking out of the back window she could see the policeman standing at the corner of the street where there was a school, and when it rained he would cover children with his raincoat and take them across to the school, like a mother hen. In the Russia if you saw a policeman you would run the other way; most people I have told this to agree, but a black student said that in his neighbourhood they ran from cops ie. not yet a full citizen; a society where the policemen are not enemies is on the way to becoming civilised.9
Sidney Mintz has all the great writer’s qualities - insight, humour, style, self-reflexiveness. Did he write a classic? Alan and Stephen Hugh-Jones recommend I read Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Ummmmm...will I ever drink tea again?
The interview starts with a war. Though all wars are bad some have good effects. To prove the point Sidney begins ambiguously, with an image of Americans lining up to enlist for World War Two. Teetering on the edge of prejudice, thoughts of bloodlust and hysteria cross the horizon of my mind...trust the character not the sentence, Mr Schloss! I let Sidney take me to the end of the paragraph: in this war many felt American for the first time. During these years a new America emerges, one more cohesive and socially just. He gives the example of a Japanese division that won the most battle honours in the US army: from internment camp to the heroes’ podium, and all because - Sidney knocks us out with a wisecrack - of a haircut! Only an anthropologist to think of a rite of passage, that transformative social practice, to explain a major societal change. The army shaves a previous life bare. It is to lose hair, clothes, status; a millionaire his millions. The equality of a crew cut. This generates a potent sense of intimacy which lingers long after the troops return home. Sidney is giving us an explanation for the progressivism of the post-war period; the good war making a good peace, as leaders held onto a vestige of that soldierly bond; President and cowboy, steelworker and corporate executive, sharing still the conscript mentality, its collective ethos, a spirit of camaraderie. This lasts until the 1970s.
Sidney makes a typically interesting point: I’m all for the draft; it forces people from every level of society to serve the nation. Sociology’s superglue. A citizen’s army benefits a country, because it fosters cross-class solidarity. It was abolished by Nixon, when he ended conscription. How much of our present predicament is explained by this one act? As we float around this thought, Sidney hits us again with another heavy idea: to end the draft stopped any real chance of social democracy in America. Can the good angels of society, aka the collective spirit, only be nurtured in the armed services, where everybody to enjoy an egalitarian bashing? Is socialism, progressivism, social justice, all dependent on a short back and sides? To cooperate only when our civvies are thrown in a locker?10 It is an arresting thought....
My mind ponders that ‘arrest’.
Sidney Mintz is a true radical: a man who thinks for himself.11 So hard to pin him down... Now he is criticising those anthropologists who worked for the government during the Vietnam War. Conscription in a just cause is one thing; volunteering to participate in an unjust one is not acceptable.12
Thinking with Sidney I rethink my social democratic biases; as I look at the post-war period from a different angle; that of the conscript pushed into revolt by the pressure of army life. The Good can suffocate the spirit, which requires a space for the spontaneous that only liberty secures.13 It’s not just Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. This suffocation increases over time. In the early 1950s it was a relatively easy task to transfer the collective ethos of the armed forces into the institutions; and to convince us they were bringing the Good News of Progress.14 After all, these institutions had been transformed into socially responsible actors during a People’s War. But some characters had been overlooked; the buccaneers, experimentalists, mavericks and rebels; these to see only rules and restraints, high walls and barbed wire fences, where others saw only benevolence.15 Hospitals to suddenly seem like sanatoria, schools a prison.16 Get me out of here! The crazies need freedom.17 They need it now. Beginning with the bohemian elite of the 1950s - the Beats - it climaxes in the 1960s, when the counter-culture is sold to the bourgeoisie in Haight Ashbury and Carnaby Street.18 Progress has started to feel like coercion.
Something changed inside these institutions. The Good is a short-lived phenomenon: a committed army in a just war; the politician’s public spirit the length of a soldier’s memory; institutions self-sacrifice the time of an idealist’s tenure. Our generosity is as long as our patience. There comes a moment when an institution’s spirit dies. To create a company is a creative act. To maintain it over decades requires bureaucrats, with this inevitable consequence: process not spirit becomes the governing principle.19 Institutional self-interest and institutional indifference now to sit behind those desks; soon they are interviewing Ian and Iona Injelititis.20 Oh dear! Twenty years is how long it takes? Twenty years for the spirit to seep out of the front and back doors. It was the key oversight of social democracy; thinking to create beneficent institutions to last the long term, it forgot these places are in fact machines; and that without continuous intervention, regular injections of imagination and idealism, they fall into a mind-lite mechanism. So much is auto-pilot.
War does odd things to people.
Yes, but the occasion’s comic. We’re not far from the Billy Butlin Holiday Camps, so popular in the post-war days. You were awakened in the morning with jocular cries from tannoys. You were cajoled into before-breakfast exercises to loud music.... the interesting thing is that they were immensely popular for a time, and that was when the term camp and the thought of even harmless regimentation ought to have sickened the average Briton. Of course, they were comparatively cheap. But that wasn’t enough to recommend them. Men came out of the army to spend a summer fortnight with wife and family in an ambience which had a great deal of the army about it - reveille, cookhouses, dining-halls, organized diversions, physical jerks (an aspect of army life which most soldiers hated worse than going into battle). There were uniformed camp officers called redcoats - a name uncomfortably close to redcaps, which was what the Military Police were called. And there was always this loud big-brotherly voice from the loudspeakers, exhorting everybody to be happy. Late drinkers-up in the canteen at closing-time were danced off in a cunning conga-line by the female redcoats. The Butlin Holiday Camps proved that the British proletariat was not really averse to discipline. The working man opposed to army life not civilian freedom so much as the infusion of geniality into regimentation. The post-war proletariat accepted the Holiday Camps as readily as they accepted American Army units in English villages, endless shopping lines, the insolence of petty bureaucrats.21
A country’s approach to life - from war to work to home to leisure - was shaped around a military camp; the model for social democratic societies in the 1950s. Rigid hierarchies, but with internal mobility, this war against backwardness and ill health. The State to become the society’s surgeon not its funeral director.22 And the post-war corporation...its teams and departments the ‘genial’ equivalent of an army’s platoons and battalions. It is why even elites could be socialist. In America the chief recruiting ground for Marxism was the suburbs.23 Luckily, in a liberal society such regimentation could not last. The top lot wanting to relax the rigours of its rule - it’s bloody hard work! - while those below resent and resist the ‘insolence’ and the petty oppression.24 And so the authoritarian pressure tap is turned down then off; the dilemma of our public institutions today, where the spirit fading, the force has gone out of the management teams. Given a mandate to serve the citizen these organisations can no longer compel employees to sacrifice themselves for citizens. Serve the people? Yes, once I've served myself...the collective conscience decomposes. To remain only in the verbals; ritual ablutions to a faith that has long been lost.
I’ve done the tests. When asked to choose between the interests of the institution and those of the public, staff choose the former; not necessarily through self-interest: the idea of the public realm is too abstract for most to conceive, let alone embody in their actions. To stand out for a principle? ‘You’ve gotta be jokin’ mate. Think me a nutter or what?’ Then they look at me with a crazy eye....
A marvellous interview. It is typically Mintzian: held in a cafe, the questions and answers are punctuated by wine and the customers’ chatter, a sociologist's background music. Our man - we must thank Sonia Ryang - doesn't follow the usual Alan itinerary of ancestors, parents, school and the rest. Mintz is too radical to follow a programme. No Butlins reveille for him. Jesus no! This chap’s a bohemian!
Interview: Sidney Mintz25
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Notes
1 J G Merquior, Western Marxism, p.69.
3 Italians have admired our football hooligans: Tim Parks, A Season with Verona.
4 See the wonderful debunking essay by Leslie Stephen, in Men, Books and Mountains, edited by S.O. Ullman.
5 For a brief history in Shakespeare studies: Gordon McMullan, Stylistic worlds, TLS 11/06/2021.
6 The move towards theory and abstraction the main reason, I would argue, why the humanities are in decline and on the way out. For their dehumanising: Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness.
7 See my comments on Spinoza in So Open. Also Stuart Hampshire’s splendidly lucid Spinoza: An Introduction to His Philosophical Thought.
8 Michael Billig, Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences.
9 Quoted from the transcript.
10 For the transformative effects of war on British society: Alan S Milward, The Economic Effects of the Two World Wars on Britain. The army as a model for social and economic life in the early 20th-century: Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism.
11 In the 1970s the definition of radical changed: from freethinker to camp follower: David Wardle, English Popular Education 1780-1975.
12 Not just a question of morality. For the poor quality of that anthropological work: Jill Lepore, If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future.
13 See Iris Murdoch’s extraordinary An Unofficial Rose.
14 See Steven Gudeman’s interview with Alan, where he talks about his father, and his (justified) belief that the corporations were improving the lives of ordinary Americans.
15 Ian Collins’ John Craxton: A Life of Gifts is a biography of such a character.
16 Brilliantly captured by Ivan Illich in the early pages of Deschooling Society.
17 For the rebels inside the corporate world: Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set.
18 A journalist’s informative but poor account of a Fifties’ elite: Cathy Curtis, Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter. A writer’s brilliant description of the next generation: Robert Irwin, Memoirs of A Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties. The satire on the fakes and frauds is Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. For an odd memoir that captures the bohemia, the business and the boosterism in San Francisco: Emmet Grogan, Ringolevio.
19 I was going to write ‘ideas’, but realised an idea has many qualities. Then I read George Berkley’s description of spirit as an active force while ideas are passive. A New Theory of Vision & Other Writings. One of the problems with our public institutions: they are idea-saturated, leading to passivity and rigidity.
20A joke on jargon it means stupidity. Though it is glossed thus: the incompetent with their inherent fragility. C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law: or the Pursuit of Progress.
21 Anthony Burgess, 1985, p.24.
22 Yet even this could be coercive. JR Hay, The Origins of the Liberal Welfare Reforms 1906-1914.
23 For the socialism of the suburbs: Willard H. Whyte: Organisation Man.
24 Constantine’s complaints in Evelyn Waugh’s Helena show why leaders tire of the top. The drudgery!
25 A large part of the interview is missing, and is only available in transcript.
Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Sugar
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