The Salvo, vol. 10: Book Against Death
Elias Canetti's war on mortality, an ode to David Marquand, and why Kemi Badenoch should read some Edmund Burke
Welcome to the tenth edition of The Salvo, your regular newsletter about ideas from the New Statesman. This week: A round-up.
Some readers may have been expecting my interview with John Ganz. Alas, illness these past couple of weeks has disrupted my write-up of that, but I’m planning to do so next week. For now, here are some recent pieces for your delectation.
The critic Jared Marcel Pollen charts the life and work of the 20th-century writer Elias Canetti, whose Book Against Death has been translated into English for the first time.
One of the oldest definitions of philosophy is “to learn how to die.” Presupposing no final answer, it captures the essence of philosophy itself. It suggests that the problem of death is the problem to which all problems must ultimately answer. This was true for the writer Elias Canetti, who declared himself “a mortal enemy of death,” and for whom learning how to die meant generating arguments against it. A partisan of the living, the incomprehensibility of non-existence was something he loathed and he appointed himself its chief antagonist. If Socrates went to his death tranquilly, Canetti went to his with a bitter fist.
His contempt for death was, by his own admission: “my ‘Cogito ergo sum.’ I hate death, therefore I am”. It is the subject that animated and informed all of his intellectual activity, which was considerable––less in terms of works published than in extent and exhaustiveness. The bulk of his output includes a three-volume memoir (approaching 1000 pages)––The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in the Ear, The Play of the Eyes; a novel, a book on Kafka, three plays, and the work for which he is best known, the one that won him the Nobel Prize in 1981, Crowds and Power. But much of Canetti’s writing took the form of what he called Aufzeichnungen, a dry, near-bureaucratic term which translates to something like “notes” or “things written down”. A compulsive diarist, his method was one of “incessant recording,” for which “Nothing was suppressed”. His stated aim was to think about everything, “to learn everything” and “to take everything seriously”. To think about everything, one must therefore confront nothing.
On 23 April, David Marquand, the intellectual historian and Labour MP, died. He was once a regular contributor to the NS. Anthony Barnett has written a short appreciation of Marquand.
A politician, a moralist, a professor and a deeply original historian, David Marquand, who was born in 1934 and died on 23 April, was arguably the most important thinker, polemicist, and theorist of the democratic left in Britain during a crucial period between Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in 1987 and David Cameron’s in 2015.
At the end of the 1980s , when the journal Marxism Today headed towards extinction, Marquand published The Unprincipled Society (1988). It analysed what he saw as a century long failure to create a Keynesian developmental state, and critiqued neoliberalism for its assertion of market supremacy and hostility to government, finally declaring: “There is only us”. It was a call for a ‘we-society’ similar to the one that the commentator Will Hutton has just reproduced in This Time No Mistakes, his pitch to Keir Starmer.
[…]
As Marquand explained in a compelling interview in 2020 with the historian Ben Jackson in Renewal, his trajectory was an expression of his inner consistency, as he uncompromisingly sought the best way to give political expression to a pluralist, progressive majority.
The real change in his thinking developed after Blair took the Labour government down the road of authoritarian war-mongering and neoliberalism. He became a fierce opponent of the political order Blair created, which Cameron and Clegg then intensified after 2010, whose collective indifference and hubris led to the present implosion of British government.
Marquand theorised what had happened in his outstanding history, Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy (2010). Its organising thesis provides an essential framework for comprehending today’s grim realities. He shows that politics in the UK simply cannot be understood in binary terms of Tory vs Labour or Conservatives vs Social Democrats, or by sticking a ‘third way’ between them.
On the contrary, four traditions have always been woven through all sides of British government and opposition to it. Marquand called them “four distinct strands of rhetoric and feeling”: Whig imperialism, Tory nationalism, democratic centralism (the term Sidney Webb used when he helped turn Labour into a governing party), and democratic republicanism.
Each party has, until now at least, been home to elements of all four strands; while the best politicians have traditionally fused two or even three of them in different ways. Whig imperialism seeks a negotiated global role and laissez faire consensus at home; Tory nationalism a belligerent assertion of British interests abroad and populist division within; democratic centralism an inclusive, paternalist consensus based on directing the domestic economy. Finally, while democratic republicanism has never had a place in the Cabinet since John Milton was Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary for Foreign Tongues, its spirit in the land has never been extinguished.
What was the source of Britain’s wealth? Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary, thinks it was the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The writer and academic Kojo Koram takers her deliberately fact-free reading of history to task.
Badenoch’s ode to 1688 unwittingly undermined her own argument. The “island” narrative of domestic British innovation over the past few centuries is inexorably interwoven with the story of empire. For better or worse, Britain did have the largest, most powerful and wealthiest empire in history and this has influenced everything from our constitution, to our tax system, to our global military presence. Reading cries of indignation in the Spectator or the Telegraph against the public’s growing interest in imperial history would lead you to think that the empire wasn’t a real-life, world-changing political phenomenon but merely something that the left has invented to make white people feel bad about themselves.
But it is also crucial to remember that this discussion isn’t actually driven by a curiosity about the past. Badenoch and her media outriders didn’t raise this argument – that colonialism wasn’t the source of British wealth – because they want to find the correct historical answer to a complex question. They are not interested in an answer at all. The purpose is distraction, to say something that will drag the nation back into the cul-de-sac of pointless culture-war slanging matches about whether Britain should feel guilty or proud about itself.
There is something almost obscene about debating “what made Britain so wealthy” in the midst of the worst decline in living standards across the country since records began. Perhaps the government’s hope is that by making people feel that their national identity is under attack by woke academics, they might be able to minimise the beating from the voters at the ballot box later this year. But the real danger of people reading about Britain’s colonial history in India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Malaysia, Kenya and elsewhere is that they might realise how much the British elite built their fortunes on monopolised rentierism and the extraction of precariat labour. Then they will see how similar structures contribute to the accelerating impoverishment of working people in Britain today. If that happened, things in this country might even have to change. And, for some, that would be the biggest historical crime of them all.
Readings from the NS
“The truth is that human beings are not well-oiled machines who act with clean, comprehensible logic. Our drive to recover, to survive, in the face of such ordeals is astonishingly and admirably fierce, and it involves some strange, circular thinking. It’s maddening to observe in others, and soul-destroying to sense in ourselves, this incessant returning to the well of our own torment. Yet, watching it play out in Gadd’s magnificent script, I was relieved and heartened. Partly, this is simply because it is so novel to see the dramatisation of this trauma response, so common and yet so unspoken of, so shameful. But it also reveals the paradox of our humanity: how pathetically, endearingly incoherent and yet resourceful we are. How admiring, how fond I feel of our species, witnessing our inventive, ineffectual struggles – the myriad ways we persevere, and try to endure the unendurable”. Megan Nolan writes on Baby Reindeer.
“To paint, Friedrich had once written, it was necessary to: ‘Close your bodily eye so that you can see your image now with your mental eye. Then bring out into the light that which you have seen in the darkness, so that it now has an impact on others, from the outside towards the inside.’ He closed his bodily eye for the last time in 1840: his death went largely unremarked”. Michael Prodger reviews the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week.
— Gavin.
If philosophy is “to learn how to die” than history is “to learn how to live”.