Saariaho's La Passion de Simone

It's a comment both on current availability and prevailing mentality that I choose to write a piece about a television experience, albeit via the internet. There are not many concerts around during this year of lock down.

The broadcast in question was courtesy of Operavision and, given rules on social mixing around Europe at the time of the recording - last October - it is no surprise it came from Sweden. It was a performance of the oratorio La Passion de Simone, based on the writings of Simone Weil composed by Kaija Saariaho on text by Amin Maalouf. This is a piece for orchestra, chorus and soprano that its composer describes both as an oratorio and an opera. The latter is stretching concepts, because there is only one character and no action. There are also electronics, which extend further than the taped quotations from Simone Weil's work that mark the movements, to include at various points augmentation to the orchestral sounds in order to change textures, add depth or surprise.

The structure is fifteen movements, each representing one station of the cross, the whole representing a passion play. The underpinning idea is that the life and work of mystic, political thinker and philosopher, Simone, Weil, was like that of a modern Christ, who gave her life to identify the shortcoming in the rest of humanity. This does not seem to come across in the music, perhaps because, in updating the idea, Saariaho and Maalouf have completely transformed the image into something both contemporary and unfamiliar.

Simone Weil was academically successful, a classmate of Simone de Beauvoir, and one time Marxist. She was born into a middle-class professional Jewish family and excelled from the start, but not in the realm of health. And her eyesight was none too good…

She took a job in a factory at one stage to fully understand what it was to be a worker. She took up arm on behalf of the anarchists in Spain, before her comrades took the rifle away from her on account of her eyesight’s inability to aim it. She had always had a “spiritual” streak, it seems, and later on went on to formulate a pantheistic version of Christianity, apparently rejecting her Judaism. She eventually, aged 34, finished up in hospital in Britain with tuberculosis. And died. The judgment was that she had in fact starved herself to death. The basis of Saariaho’s piece is that this was an act of personal sacrifice to atone for the sins of humanity.  The case is made.

Saariaho's music is all about timbre and texture. It tends to sound one paced, though it rarely is. It deceptively seems to offer a wall of experience but close up that expanse of sound comprises many miniscule shards. The chorus acts like a commentator, not quite like an evangelist as in Bach, but always playing a secondary role compared to the presence of the soprano soloist. The principal character is not only the voice of Simone Weil, but also a commentary on her writing, an interpreter, sometimes even a third person critic, probably the voice of the author. And Sophie van Otter's performance is so good it is impossible to describe. One aspect of the text which I do not understand is the repeated references to Simone as if the narrator is a younger sister. Simone had no younger sister, so this is perhaps the personification of the rest of humanity who have adopted her as a sibling in gratitude to her gesture of solidarity.

But overall, as so often with Saariaho, we are left with a sense of something having passed us by, greeted us perhaps, held our attention for its duration, but without ever really revealing itself to us. It may be an enigmatic style, but it may also be something deeply personal, as the composer revealed in the barely comfortable interview that followed. It may be shyness, a desire to remain apart, removed from direct contact. It was also revealing to hear the composer say that this was only the work’s second production in 14 years.

The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan

Ostensibly, The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan is a book for children. It’s not really a novel, because the author himself conceived these pieces as separate stories to be told to his own children. Assembled in this way, however, in form they resemble many contemporary writers’ novels that portray apparently disparate and unrelated scenes featuring a main character who acts as a thread. It’s not a linear plot that is desired, but recognition that the character responds and develops as a result of what life presents and is changed by that experience. 

In his introduction to these “Peter stories”, Ian McEwan describes how he tried to forget about “our mighty tradition of children’s literature and to write a book for adults about a child in the language of the children could understand”. In so doing, and very succinctly, the author has achieved his aim and has thus created a world which is multi-layered in that there are events themselves and then there are the emotional worlds related to them.

Peter Fortune is eleven or thereabouts. Precision doesn’t matter. He has a younger sister called Kate who always seems to be able to get her own way, either by guile or by politics. Parents Thomas and Viola both work, it seems, but we never get to know them. From Peter`s point of view it is as parents that they exist and thus all possible questions about them are both answered and irrelevant.

What Peter experiences via imagination is at the core of this work, as so the review will not reveal any detail. Suffice it to say there is a cat, some toys, a burglar, a bully and even an adult in the mix. Peter address is these objects of interest directly and without analysis. He is rarely in control of his thoughts and regularly surprises himself. He addresses no great questions directly, but raises many for his co-travellers.

Costa Blanca Arts Update – Orquesta de Valencia under Trigueros and guitarists in Alicante

Two concerts in five days might sound quite a lot, but we achieved that by skipping the others on offer. But could one imagine two more different musical events? How many times across two concerts have you been presented with orchestral music and solo guitar comprising ten works, seven of which you have never hear before and featuring no less than four composers who are completely new to you? And this comment comes from someone who has a personal library of recordings that feature almost five thousand different composers… 

The Orquesta de Valencia under José Trigueros gave their concert in La Rambleta Arts Centre in Valencia. The acoustic of the hall might be a little too dry for music, but it must have served the orchestra’s purposes well for their recording session.

It began with the Serenata Española by Miguel Asins Arbó, who was known for writing music for film and television. This was an atmospheric piece that made its point by understatement, which is not a word that would apply to Keiko Abe’s Prism Rhapsody No2. This is a highly virtuoso concerto for two marimbas and orchestra. The solo parts were played by Josep Furió and Luis Osca with the kind of expertise that leaves an audience breathless both from exhaustion and admiration. There is a lot to do for the musicians in this piece, which is roller-coaster excitement from beginning to end. But it is also highly crafted music, skilfully constructed to do more than merely shimmer in the light. It was a piece of contemporary music that was rapturously received by the audience, prompting the players to offer an encore that allowed them to show off a more reflective side of their instruments.

After the interval, we were treated to a superb reading of the Symphony No10 by Shostakovich. Now this is a work that I have personally been listening to for more than fifty years. And still, it never fails to make its point. In live performance, it’s a work that comes alive beyond the pyrotechnics of its presence. It has a humanity and depicts a world that is a great deal more personal than many analyses might suggest. Particularly impressive was Trigueros’s reading of the scherzo, which he conducted from memory. Hearing such a work again is like meeting an old friend who always surprises.

The next trip was to Alicante to hear students from the Esplá conservatory. They were all on a master’s course in performance, so they ought to be nearing professional standard. The three of them were superb, but the last, Juan José Rodriguez, was outstanding. It was not what he played, it was how he played it. The pieces were shaped, communicative and faultless all at the same time.

Before him, Xuan Lien Liu gave a very clear and evenly paced account of the Sor Sonata. I feel that Sor was less at home with sonata form than with other ways of expressing himself, though I hesitate to belittle the towering achievement of this work. The form, however, appears to dominate the writing, but in this performance, there was a little hint of “going through the motions”. The playing was superb, if a little unspectacular, though this is no criticism because the music itself demands this kind of approach.

Miguel Verdu Andreu chose a much more ambitious programme. He started with the first movement of a sonata for guitar. The Amando Blanquer that followed was industrial in conception. The music was not composed using serial techniques, but it did employ atonality. The form was always clear, and it owed much to classical structures, but the material was like hardened steel. Again, the playing was completely convincing.

The last performer also started with an off-programme piece and continued with two works by a Valencian composer, Vicente Asenio. Who also had good connections with Alicante. The music was superb. The playing better.

This was completely modern guitar music, but there was more than a hint of the vernacular style about the compositional technique, hardly surprising when paying homage to Lorca. The Collectici Intim was a five-movement suite that had the clear structure of a five-movement single work. There was a musical sense to the overall shape, a sense that was admirably conveyed by the expert, Juan José Rodriguez

Cities of the Plain by Marcel Proust

 

Times change. Of that there is no doubt. Platitudes, however, remain platitudes whenever they are, like a dose of vaccine, rolled out. Their use, perhaps just once, but certainly on the second occasion, ought to inoculate and protect their user from ever again suffering their nauseating mundanity. But such immunity is rarely achieved, especially amongst those who find simple instructions, such as "don't gather", “stay at home” or “avoid clichés, at all costs” quite impossible to interpret or indeed remember.

I recall the time, not so long distanced, when even the mention of certain sexual habits might only be referred to in passing, accompanied by the bat of an eye, the nervous clearing of the throat or the deliberate and calculated inclusion of classical allusion, lest the speaker appear himself to be tainted by such professedly immoral practices. The inclusion of gender was important, here, for these unspoken, unnamed behaviours, alluded to habits that remained illegal and indictable amongst men, while the female equivalent bore a different name, lusciously classical, and, whilst not officially tolerated, it generally remained beyond the interest of the law.

But it was not only the classical, but also the biblical world that provided the means of referring to these despicable, but apparently common practices. The Cities of the Plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, suffered divine retribution - at least the experience is recorded as divine - because of the prevalence of these crimes against nature within their walls. In more modern times, we have passed beyond the age when the natural can be criminal, and also beyond the clichés of vilifying and ridiculing via censorious judgment or humour. For all its use of the theme, the filmed series never did include the title Carry on Sodomy, despite the near-repeated scripts’ regular use of both censure and ridicule to raise laughs from audiences who elsewhere might judge and scorn.

And so we arrive at Sodom and Gomorrah, volume four of A La Recherche De Temps Perdu, A Remembrance Of Things Past, or words to that effect. At its time of writing, an observation that significant numbers of French high society might just be able to trace their descent to these cities of the plain would have shocked. Eyebrows would have been raised, throats cleared, and private laughs would have hidden behind social condemnation, as gentlemen conversed on the way to the brothel, where the workers to be encountered did not really count, because it was clearly poverty that required them to behave thus. But times do change. Now it is not this discussion of homosexuality that might shock, but the destination of the conversants.

So now when we read of homosexual men and women, gays and lesbians, queers and dykes, we cannot suffer either the shock or the surprise of exposure to ideas we now ignore politely in public or condemn only in private. Neither can we, almost certainly, associate with the kind of society in which the revelations were being made. The lives, and more exactly the attitudes, of these people are now utterly foreign to our experience, though they may well still exist. The realization reminds us that we regularly admire images in the form of galleried art, which bear as little relation to our own lives as do the characters Marcel Proust creates, but because paintings have nothing audible to say in their own words, we fail to recognize the cultural gulf of our distance from what they depict.

Times may change, but our propensity to apply false logic persists. Marcel Proust’s observation of doctors is almost contemporary. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to outcome. “Wine in moderation, it can do no harm, it is always a tonic… Sexual enjoyment? After all it is a natural function. I allow you to use, but not to abuse it, you understand. Excess in anything is wrong.” At once, what a temptation to the patient, to renounce those two life givers, water and chastity. He also recognized that by a certain age, human beings cease to be individuals and become research projects. He had arrived at that stage of exhaustion in which a sick man’s body became a retort in which we study chemical reactions. In our own time, we codify this as aging.

But then we may, like the English public schoolboy, develop personal and internal resistance to propensities that could previously prosecute via physical activity. Various English Prime Ministers have thus profited from the Eton Wall Game in public whilst in private they probably remained on the other side of the wall. “Suppose we took a turn in the garden, Sir,” I said to Swann, while Comte Arnulphe, in a lisping voice which seem to indicate that mentally at least, his development was incomplete, replied to M. de Charlus with an artlessly obliging precision: “I, oh, golf chiefly, tennis, football, running, polo I’m really keen on.” So Minerva, being subdivided, ceased in certain deities to be goddess of wisdom, and incarnated part of herself in a purely sporting, horse loving deity, Athene Hippia. Thus we may find the limitations we impose on ourselves limiting.

At least the Old Etonian Prime Ministers would have coped admirably with the classical allusion, and probably still would. Times may change, but we only understand how they have changed when we trouble ourselves to experience remembrance of times past and engage with its characters, both larger and ultimately smaller than life.

According To Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge

On the surface, According To Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge might appear to be firmly rooted in the genre of historical fiction. Its cover portrays two gentlewomen, perhaps a mother and daughter, of the eighteenth century. Their arms are intertwined hinting at an intimacy their expressions do not convey. The elder, perhaps of the mother, stares into a distance beyond the landscape, beyond the viewer, but her imaginings are surely internal. The younger looks rather quizzically towards the mother, but there is a formality close to an assertion of independence in her demeanour. Her arm, on which her mother’s rests, is offered stiffly, tolerating her other’s presence rather than engaging with it. Surely this is to be a family affair.

We are told not to judge a book by its cover. We should also not be influenced by presumptions of genre. According To Queeney might be an historical fiction, but there is little that is purely historical about this plot. Some of the salient detail is documented elsewhere. Samuel Johnson, after labouring on his dictionary, needed silence and rest to avoid breakdown, both physical and mental. The Thrale family, who resided in Streatham, then a country retreat far from the bustle of the city, lived comfortably by virtue of profits from the family brewery. They had space and the inclination to invite. Johnsen accepted. His sojourn with the family, perhaps the most settled years of his life, is not documented, even by Boswell, though the diarist occasionally walks in and out of this novel, that charts the transformation of Johnson in the household from mere lodger to something more than a companion.

According To Queenie has nothing to do with genre fiction. It fits no mould, occupies no stereotypical niche. The events that unfold while Johnson’s relationship with the Thrales develops, especially with Mrs. Thrale, are described by Hester, a daughter of the household, who is better known to all as Queeney. The same character, via letters from decades later, also reflects upon what happened in an illuminating light. According To Queeney is thus a series of probably recalled scenes during Samuel Johnson’s stay with the Thrales, recollections that shed considerable light on the eighteenth century family, social relations and cultures of the era and contemporary concerns, as well as the specifics of Samuel Johnson’s character. We meet other notable names along the way, such as Charles Burney and his scribbling daughter Fanny, Joshua Reynolds of the peeling paint and David (Davy) Garrick who seems to ham his way through life.

Genre fiction this is not. What happens is not important here, only how it happens. Johnson develops an apparently pragmatic relationship with Mrs. Thrale, who tolerates, encourages, enjoys and rejects all at the same time. We are left with the impression that marriage may be for life, but commitment within it is taken as variable. Her overeating husband munches away. Hester, the Queenie, seems determined to compete with her mother, perhaps merely to state her own claim on individuality. Her insights along the way and afterwards are often grounded more in judgment than insight.

But what is most startling about Beryl Bainbridge’s novel, communicated via simple, transparent yet vivid prose, is the proximity the reader is brought to eighteenth century life. By the end of the book, we feel we have been there, rather than have been told about it. Exactly where we have been, let alone let alone why, is as confusing as life itself was, and remains, for its protagonists. Things happen that have no explanation. People do things for complex, often contradictory reasons. Individuals put themselves first. They overeat. They over-indulge. They get ill. They get better. They die. They pee by the roadside. They pontificate. They hurt one another. They use their stools in public. That, it seems, is life, whatever the era and whoever the celebrity. Some, like Queenie, do survive, at least for a while.

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

 

In a turn of uncharacteristic succinctness, Gioachino Rossini, himself the composer of long-winded and often empty vocal gymnastics undertaken because they were possible - or not! - rather than apposite or even aesthetic, uttered a remark, probably between courses, probably apocryphally, somewhere sandwiched between the tournedos Rossini and the baked Alaska, which wasn’t called by that name at the time because the Americans, who put the dish and the state on the map, had not yet purchased the real estate, a remark that became an oft-quoted opinion on Richard Wagner, a fellow composer, who was actually writing music at the time, rather than being a professional whipped cream spreader on the back of cigarette packets. “Wagner‘s music,” said the composer, “has its moments. It’s the hours in between that are the problem.” No doubt the other guests, also choking by now on the strozzapreti, probably guffawed their recognition of the maestro’s wit. And that was two sentences.

It is a sentiment that is often associated with the so-called task of reading A la recherche de temps perdu of Marcel Proust. He does go on, doesn’t he? Well, yes, a bit like life really, until the end. It’s where we go along the way that forms the point, a point of departure, a point of destination, a point of return and eventually no point at all. And that is the point, at least for one reader of this work.

Marcel Proust lives amongst an elite. He describes them in detail. He brushes shoulders, bellies and other parts on a regular, even daily basis, with members of “society”. It was Margaret Thatcher who claimed there was no such thing as society, only the individuals who constitute it. It is wonderful how something can be defined not to exist in terms of an agglomeration of things that unquestionably do. I digress, and so does Marcel Proust, regularly, but not because digression is an end in itself, rather because digression is all we have. Of course, when one is bored with such society one can always retire to other parts and brush bellies with one of those working women - never ladies! - who have a little time for digression. For them, it's the matter in hand that takes precedence, but usually not in the hand, itself. Times, it seems, have changed. Perhaps…

“Oh, my dear Charles," she went on, "what a bore it can be, dining out. There are evenings when one would sooner die! It is true that dying may be perhaps just as great a bore, because we don't know what it's like." A servant appeared. It was the young lover who used to have trouble with the porter, until the Duchess, in her kindness of heart, brought about an apparent peace between them. "Am I to go up this evening to inquire for M. le Marquis d'Osmond?" he asked. "Most certainly not, nothing before to-morrow morning. In fact I don't want you to remain in the house to-night. The only thing that will happen will be that his footman, who knows you, will come to you with the latest report and send you out after us. Get off, go anywhere you like, have a woman, sleep out, but I don't want to see you here before to-morrow morning." An immense joy overflowed from the footman's face. He would at last be able to spend long hours with his ladylove, whom he had practically ceased to see ever since, after a final scene with the porter, the Duchess had considerately explained to him that it would be better, to avoid further conflicts, if he did not go out at all. He floated, at the thought of having an evening free at last, in a happiness which the Duchess saw and guessed its reason

In The Guermantes Way, Marcel Proust describes these creatures of society, upper crust, titled, even royal, certainly rich if we ignore the debts, propertied, (no doubt proprietarian in Piketty’s terms), conceited, racist, learned yet ignorant, self-obsessed, selfish. They even have the odd good point. I could go on. They do. But at the root, they are pretty ordinary rather than pretty.

But in the other boxes, everywhere almost, the white deities who inhabited those sombre abodes had flown for shelter against their shadowy walls and remained invisible. Gradually, however, as the performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached themselves, one by one, from the shades of night which they patterned, and, raising themselves towards the light, allowed their semi-nude bodies to emerge, and rose, and stopped at the limit of their course, at the luminous, shaded surface on which their brilliant faces appeared behind the gaily breaking foam of the feather fans they unfurled and lightly waved, beneath their hyacinthine locks begemmed with pearls, which the flow of the tide seemed to have caught and drawn with it…

They dress to the nines, but for many of the species adornment makes little difference.

The Marquis de Palancy, his face bent downwards at the end of his long neck, his round bulging eye glued to the glass of his monocle, was moving with a leisurely displacement through the transparent shade and appeared no more to see the public in the stalls than a fish that drifts past, unconscious of the press of curious gazers, behind the glass wall of an aquarium. Now and again he paused, a venerable, wheezing monument, and the audience could not have told whether he was in pain, asleep, swimming, about to spawn, or merely taking breath

This society is certainly snobbish, but it is also deeply racist. But then that was the norm of the time, wasn’t it? They were, after all, professedly Christian in an era where, in order to claim this allegiance, it may have been almost expected to be anti-Semitic. But a theme that underpins this society’s ever-competitive camaraderie deals with opposing and divisive views on the Dreyfus affair, the details of which may now be referenced with ease across a democratic internet, noted for its thorough fair-mindedness, disinterest and impartiality.

"In the first place because at heart all these people are anti-Semites," replied Swann, who, all the same, knew very well from experience that certain of them were not, but, like everyone who supports any cause with ardour, preferred, to explain the fact that other people did not share his opinion, to suppose in them a preconceived reason, a prejudice against which there was nothing to be done, rather than reasons which might permit of discussion. Besides, having come to the premature term of his life, like a weary animal that is goaded on, he cried out against these persecutions and was returning to the spiritual fold of his fathers. "Yes, the Prince de Guermantes," I said, "it is true, I've heard that he was anti-semitic." "Oh, that fellow! I wasn't even thinking about him. He carries it to such a point that when he was in the army and had a frightful toothache he preferred to grin and bear it rather than go to the only dentist in the district, who happened to be a Jew, and later on he allowed a wing of his castle which had caught fire to be burned to the ground, because he would have had to send for extinguishers to the place next door, which belongs to the Rothschilds."

Like the contemporary and newly enacted Brexit in the United Kingdom, the Dreyfus affair began in untruths married to conceit and racism, peddled by those with ideological interest in pursuing it, perpetrated by others who found their own identity in an insane bigotry that appealed to inane prejudice, and, unlike Brexit at least thus far, was eventually revealed as utter untruth. What it did do was bring to the fore the ideological cleavages born of racism that cut through this otherwise apparently monolithic society, revealing its inhabitants’ penchant for competition rather than the cooperation their decorum tried to advertise. For all their apparent politeness, for all their overt adherence to manners, these people are vicious cynics capable of waging war to achieve their interests. And that is precisely what they would do.

And the concerns of difference are so small minded that, like Remainers and Brexiteers, these Dreyfusards and their opponents cannot conceive that anything of interest might live outside their own myopic ambit. The universe, it seems, consists of my parlour and the rest.

…at this point in the social year, when people invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dinner, making every effort to see that she was not already engaged, she declined, for the one reason of which nobody in society would ever have thought; she was just starting on a cruise among the Norwegian fjords, which were so interesting. People in society were stupefied, and, without any thought of following the Duchess's example, derived nevertheless from her action that sense of relief which one has in reading Kant when after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism one finds that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom. Every invention of which no one has ever thought before excites the interest even of people who can derive no benefit from it. That of steam navigation was a small thing compared with the employment of steam navigation at that sedentary time of year called 'the season.' The idea that anyone could voluntarily renounce a hundred dinners or luncheons, twice as many afternoon teas, three times as many evening parties, the most brilliant Mondays at the Opera and Tuesdays at the Français to visit the Norwegian fjords seemed to the Courvoisiers no more explicable than the idea of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea…

But just how self-obsessed and selfish these people are is indicated by the Guermantes’ reaction to Swann’s revelation that he has just three months to live.

"I don't know why I am telling you this; I have never said a word to you before about my illness. But as you asked me, and as now I may die at any moment. But whatever I do I mustn't make you late; you're dining out, remember," he added, because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took precedence of the death of a friend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctive politeness. But that of the Duchess enabled her also to perceive in a vague way that the dinner to which she was going must count for less to Swann than his own death. And so, while continuing on her way towards the carriage, she let her shoulders droop, saying: "Don't worry about our dinner. It's not of any importance!" But this put the Duke in a bad humour, who exclaimed: "Come, Oriane, don't stop there chattering like that and exchanging your jeremiads with Swann; you know very well that Mme. de Saint-Euverte insists on sitting down to table at eight o'clock sharp. We must know what you propose to do; the horses have been waiting for a good five minutes. I beg your pardon, Charles," he went on, turning to Swann, "but it's ten minutes to eight already. Oriane is always late, and it will take us more than five minutes to get to old Saint-Euverte's."

I mean, Darling, doesn’t the man realise that in society there is a time and place for everything? And this, surely, is neither the time nor the place to talk of dea… of such things! Get a move on! We’ll be late! Our friend’s demise will have to wait until after liqueurs, dessert at least. Bid him goodbye and come along! But then there are things that are just not done, Darling. Such as…

"You know, we can talk about that another time; I don't believe a word you've been saying, but we must discuss it quietly. I expect they gave you a dreadful fright, come to luncheon, whatever day you like" (with Mme. de Guermantes things always resolved themselves into luncheons), "you will let me know your day and time," and, lifting her red skirt, she set her foot on the step. She was just getting into the carriage when, seeing this foot exposed, the Duke cried in a terrifying voice: "Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch? You've kept on your black shoes! With a red dress! Go upstairs quick and put on red shoes, or rather," he said to the footman, "tell the lady's maid at once to bring down a pair of red shoes."

I mean, black shoes with a red dress… What could she be thinking of? Well he was Jewish, after all… Perhaps she should just have kept talking… The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing things, and in this case the absence of any description of my external surroundings is tantamount to a description of my internal state… I bet she talked quickly and, at the same time, said very little. Just how little Marcel Proust says in the five hundred pages that constitute The Guermantes Way might just be its point. And, in the grand run of time, we have yet to reach perhaps the crowning absurdity of the century, The Great War, the apparently heroic event of unquestioned and racist imperialism we have all recently been honouring after its centenary. Times change, perhaps also assumptions.

Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty

 

Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology is a monumental achievement. Its scope is vast, its size is daunting, its scholarship and vision both quite breath-taking on every one of its 1000-plus pages. Ostensibly, it claims to be an analysis of the origins, politics and economics of inequality, but it goes considerably deeper and further than its brief. This work is nothing less than a snapshot of global economic history and politics taken at the time of writing. Though the historical element might be seen in different forms via the lenses of centuries and assumed perspectives, the book’s analysis of current political issues was always going to be subject to faster change.  I doubt whether Thomas Piketty himself would have predicted that, just a few months after his work’s publication, the global economic and political landscape would be redrawn by a new, microscopic virus. But that is exactly what has happened. And, given the effects on wealth and asset distribution the author attributes to the capital-destroying wars that dictated the history of the twentieth century, one wonders what a post-Covid analysis of the mechanisms that create and maintain inequality might look like. One suspects that the political prescriptions in the book’s last chapter may just, out of sheer necessity, have been rendered more likely.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century charted the origins and extent of inequality in human societies. Capital and Ideology follows on by examining current and historical circumstances and mechanisms that determine its extent and influence its propagation. The book charts comparisons of inequality across countries, continents, cultures and eras. In doing so, its author uses much more than statistical comparisons. Historical and cultural perspectives are offered. Economic analyses are suggested. Crucially, societal structures are analysed, especially those of triumvirate societies, where the ownership of religious, scientific and military power provide the justification and the means of establishing and maintaining skewed ownership of assets. Though the book covers much ground, many different civilizations, locations and eras, the overall analytical focus is never lost.

A criticism of such an achievement may seem petty, but the book could have profitably dealt with one of its weaknesses much earlier. A constantly aired opinion of Thomas Piketty’s work is that, like all socialists, he wants everyone to be the same, to compress all to the same lowest common denominator. This, the criticism continues, would stifle creativity and drive in any society that tried to implement his recommended policies or even tried to address the obvious and growing inequality caused by market capitalism. Readers of Capital and Ideology, however, will have to wait until the book’s last chapter before reading this passage.

“A just society is one that allows all of its members access to the widest possible range of fundamental goods. Fundamental goods include education, health, the right to vote, and more generally to participate as fully as possible in the various forms of social, cultural, economic, civic, and political life. A just society organizes socioeconomic relations, property rights, and the distribution of income and wealth in such a way as to allow its least advantaged members to enjoy the highest possible life conditions. A just society in no way requires absolute uniformity or equality. To the extent that income and wealth inequalities are the result of different aspirations and distinct life choices or permit improvement of the standard of living and expansion of the opportunities available to the disadvantaged, they may be considered just. But this must be demonstrated, not assumed, and this argument cannot be invoked to justify any degree of inequality whatsoever, as it too often is.”

Let’s juxtapose this quote from page 967 of Thomas Piketty’s book with the following: “Above all, we will listen to the people who have felt left behind by the last few decades of economic growth and want to have control of their future. (We) will give the public services the resources they need, supporting our hospitals, our schools and our police. We will help people and families throughout their lives…” This latter passage is quoted verbatim from the webpage of the British Conservative Party, from the manifesto upon which they fought their successful campaign for the 2019 election, an election where an unprecedented number of voters from disadvantaged communities (largely as a result of previous Conservative governments’ priorities) opted to vote for the party in the hope they would honour a promise to “level up” the country. There seems to be electoral kudos in levelling, despite the opinion of right-wing politicians who extol the need for libertarian individualism married to economically deregulated separatism. Thomas Piketty analyses such tendencies and offers a paradigm to explain these shifting political alliances.

Capital and Ideology is the perfect text for anyone needing an update on the world. It has so many succinct and pertinent analyses that even a list of its insights would be a tome in itself. Some examples will suffice.

For instance, if anyone finds it hard to understand why certain elite groups from Western democracies might now be sympathetic towards Putin’s Russia, Thomas Piketty can enlighten.

“It is important to note that it is very difficult to measure and analyse income and wealth in postcommunist Russia because the society is so opaque. This is due in large part to decisions taken first by the government headed by Boris Yeltsin and later by Vladimir Putin to permit unprecedented evasion of Russian law through the use of offshore entities and tax havens. In addition, the postcommunist regime abandoned not only any ambition to redistribute property but also any effort to record income or wealth. For example, there is no inheritance tax in postcommunist Russia, so there are no data on the size of inheritances. There is an income tax, but it is strictly proportional, and its rate since 2001 has been just 13 percent, whether the income being taxed is 1000 rubles or 100 billion rubles.”

When this is placed alongside the fact that Europe in general and the European Union in particular is a global outlier in the extent of its greater equality of wealth and income and we can see immediately why the libertarian, individualists of the political right, who for example favour Brexit for the United Kingdom, might also cast an envious glance towards Russia’s largely unregulated treatment of wealth, no matter how it was amassed.

Thomas Piketty offers numerous such insights. He analyses India’s castes, charts the French Revolution, analyses politics in the USA and takes long hard looks at colonialism and empires. And what is more, all of this is accomplished with transparency and fluidity, so that at no stage does a reader feel presented with a mere list. The analysis of current political strands is particularly enlightening.

Piketty rejects the term “populism” as meaningless. He prefers to use “identitarian” to describe the tendency for many voters in democracies to retreat behind promised protectionism and fortified borders to exclude foreigners. In doing so, he sums up both cause and effect in a single idea, a summary that is both more accurate and more enlightening than “populism” in terms of understanding the political direction being followed. But he goes beyond description and offers analysis of motives. He cites, for example, evidence relating to Poland and Hungary, both of whom currently have governments that have displayed tendencies to restrict freedom or roll back liberalism, even to the extent that they are at odds with a European Union they were once eager to join. Many observers are perplexed by this phenomenon, noting that both countries have benefitted hugely from European development aid and inward investment. Piketty’s analysis, however, examines net transfers and finds that for both countries, capital flow has consistently been out of the country and towards Europe’s epicentres of wealth. And electorates are aware of this bloodletting. The only solution, he maintains, is greater political integration, not less.

He analyses politics in the USA, though obviously not in great depth. He does, however, make enlightening points about race to illustrate how the Democrats became transformed from the party of southern slavery to the natural home of the “ethnic” vote. It is a process that happened over a century, from the Civil War, when the Republicans were the champions of opposition to slavery through the New Deal and into the late 1960s, when it was the Democrats who espoused civil rights.

The author spends much of the early part of the book identifying the structure of triumvirate societies, where a peasant majority is ruled by an alliance between warrior and priestly classes who, combined, rarely accounted for more than ten percent of the population. He then shows how this structure developed into proprietarianism, which preserved the right of the ruling classes to own property. This later evolved into capitalism when the owners of property increased the scale of operations and created industrialization. He makes a convincing case in relation to the political control claimed by an alliance of religion and sword that was used to justify and then preserve property ownership of the ruling minority. Piketty offers the following, again late in the book:

“I have defined proprietarianism as a political ideology based on the absolute defense of private property; capitalism as the extension of proprietarianism into the age of large-scale industry, international finance, and more recently to the digital economy. At bottom capitalism rests on the concentration of economic power in the hands of the owners of capital. In principle, the owners of real estate capital can decide to whom they wish to rent and at what price while the owners of financial and professional capital govern corporations according to the principle of “one share one vote”, which entitles them, among other things, to decide by themselves whom to hire and at what wage.”

And then there arose democracy and later war. It was not that wars had been unknown in the pre-modern era, but he suggests that the industrialization of war after the dawn of the modern era rendered it more thoroughly and extensively destructive than it had previously been. Because of its destruction of property and the creation of debt via interruption of economic life, war threatened proprietarian societies in a way they had never before experienced. Democracy also threatened ownership directly unless it could be manipulated, of course, and both of these threats to the classes born to own had to be managed. Ownership had previously coped with war losses, the twice national income debt in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars, for instance, having been turned to the owners’ advantage by the issuing of bonds their capital bought and a century of poor people’s contributions rendered lucrative to their owners via interest and redemptions.

Democracy posed a new type of challenge to the owners of assets, and still does. So, to explain how systems of inequality can be maintained after everyone, at least in theory, has an equal say, Thomas Piketty needs to examine in detail how politics have changed over the last century. He now finds there exist four almost equally popular political ideologies. He writes:

“In 2017, 21 percent of voters could be classified as “egalitarian internationalists” (pro-immigrant, pro-poor); 26 percent are “inegalitarian nativists” (anti-immigrant, pro-rich); 23 percent are “inegalitarian internationalists” (pro-immigrant, pro-rich), and 30 percent are “egalitarian nativists” (anti-immigrant, pro-poor).”

Furthermore, he finds that there is now a tendency for there to develop an alliance between the two factions of nativism, an alliance that does not challenge property rights.

And, crucially, he finds that the social democrat model that made significant inroads into inequality in the middle of the twentieth century has now been transformed into an ideology of a Brahmin-like educated elite, leaving the votes of the losers in the distribution of wealth to be hoovered into an identitarian trap by the owners of an increasing share of property. This, in essence, is not dissimilar in character to the concept of false consciousness that Marxists find they have to apply in order to explain why masses of people regularly vote or act against their own interests. Here, Thomas Piketty offers a rational mechanism and a convincing argument by which false consciousness can be cultivated and exploited, an approach which does not fall into the distasteful trap of branding poorer people merely stupid.

There is so much in Capital and Ideology that it is almost impossible to review. Reading it comes close to a life-changing experience. Please do read it. Do persevere with its length. Take it at a steady pace and read something else, something contrasting, alongside. Readers will immediately and repeatedly find themselves amazed at the scholarship, the revelations and the rationality of the book’s argument. Anyone interested in our own times should regard it as essential reading. The presence of a virus, however, probably demands a companion volume, since the political and economic landscape is now surely transformed, just like war ripped up its design a century ago.

Eventually, Thomas Piketty champions the politics of social democracy as the solution to growing inequality and, eventually, environmental degradation. He cites the example of Sweden, in that:

“it shows that inequality is not the product of some essential cultural predisposition: in the space of a few years Sweden moved from the most extreme hyper-inegalitarian proprietarian system, which survived until 1909-11, to a quintessential egalitarian social-democratic society once SAP came to power in the 1920s and then ruled almost continuously from 1932 to 2006.”

With the right policies and crucially an end to the retreat into identitarian separatism, the author sees a future where, during an individual lifetime, people can be as entrepreneurial and as successful as they like, but where tax systems and inheritance management ensure the recirculation of wealth and capital to ensure it does not become the permanent property of an ever-smaller elite. A still far from perfect Europe is the example, while the libertarian, identitarian deregulators pose the threat.