Civilised places

Plastercast of the Farnese Hercules in Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology 

I read, shocked, recently, that German Jews have been warned not to wear kippas in the face of a rising tide of anti-semitism. This however only contrasts in its small-mindedness with Angela Merkel's gesture to welcome some one and half million mostly young refugees to that country while other parts of Europe closed their borders. According to a recent Washington Post article that act is already starting to benefit the German economy.

Why is anti-Semitism apparently on the rise? The German government's anti-Semitism commissioner Felix Klein, quoted in the BBC, article suggested as reasons: "the lifting of inhibitions and the uncouthness" of society could be behind the spike in anti-Semitic crimes. The internet, social media and "constant attacks against our culture of remembrance" may be contributing factors, he said.

Uncouthness is a malaise often ascribed by older people to those younger and perhaps always has been. John Cleese was lambasted recently for saying from his Caribbean home - one he had escaped to as he turns 80: "I suspect I should apologise for my affection for the Englishness of my upbringing, but in some ways I found it calmer, more polite, more humorous, less tabloid, and less money-oriented than the one that is replacing it."

I felt sorry for him, misunderstood perhaps by people who never knew the England he remembers. Maybe John Cleese is another Peter Hitchens whom I saw memorably lambasted, in his absence, by his brother (probably around the time of their falling out).  Christopher claimed that Peter wanted, today, an England of steam trains where porters in uniform would meet you off the train and take your luggage.  But Cleese is an ageing former comic and Hitchens even twenty years ago was a  journalist writing for the Mail on Sunday. The poet Philip Larkin also mourned what he saw as the coarsening and concreting over of Britain, physically and metaphorically.  We could tar all three as misanthropic, probably misogynist, outmoded moaners.  The former two, certainly advocate against political correctness which makes them fantastically easy targets.  Any nuance there might be in their views, that perhaps we are losing, have already lost something, is already thrown out with that dirty water.  Meanwhile, people become busier and unhappier in manic lives lived relentlessly and sanitised on social media.  We might agree there could be something intangible wrong in the way we are living, but no way might they in any sense be right...

I grew up in something of a bubble, among the families of British Army officers, overwhelmingly nuclear, of course, straight, where people were civilised to one another, generous and humourous.  Those pleasant social behaviours come so much more easily when one doesn't have worries about money, employment, marriage and the accompanying ills and strife associated with the shadowed side of those things. So I don't know if Cleese is imagining or remembering, though I suspect the latter. You glimpse it when you speak to some older people. One is never sure if their courteousness has come about through the mellowing of age or whether they always were like that, but again I think the latter.   At the end of my street I wound down the car window the other day to ask an elderly lady if she was alright. She was sitting at an odd angle perched on a push-along shopping walker under a bridge full of softly cooing, defecating pigeons - a place where people never do stop.  She answered with great dignity and appreciation that she was thank-you-very-much. She is the sort of older person I mean.

I for one, as much as possible, hide from modern life.  Or rather, it's not modern life I dislike.  Much technology is empowering.  It is rather that I try to avoid people in modern life.  Some I can't avoid: teachers, school management, doctors, council officials - very often harassed, self-important, arrogant, patronising with barely an attempt to disguise those invidious traits.  One wants to avoid them because such interactions are rife with double-dealing, self-interest, inattention and, worst of all, can have a coarsening effect.  

The other place I meet people is on the street.  Believing the car responsible for many societal ills, I am mostly a pedestrian.  Occasionally I use the train.  In place of buses I prefer a bicycle.  I practically cheered my son when, discussing the topic, perennial in our house, of cars and zebra crossings, he suggested horse and trap as better suited to the city than cars.  In many ways I agree.  On the street I meet spitters, cars that turn into side streets but never do give way to pedestrians as is the law; cars that drive deliberately at pedestrians, cars that drive routinely over zebra crossings and cars which cut up vulnerable cyclists.

Last week, after not a few requests, the council, at last, repainted the zebra crossing on Tay Street near our house in Perth.  My friend recently described it as the one that "would soon kill someone".   Motorists regularly failed to stop at this crossing, partly because it is on a long stretch of straight road without traffic calming measures, partly because they are often distracted, partly because the paint was all but invisible and also just because - "might is right" - they can.  I have used it with my children several times daily over the last year and it is a rare day when cars always stop for us. Last week I was standing on the crossing, with my bike also half on the crossing when three cars drove over the crossing without stopping.  They tend to adopt a copycat attitude.  I decided to make a point - not the wisest idea - and force the issue.  I walked into the path of the oncoming car, so that my large bike was fully on the crossing.  I have some practice at this and assumed the car would be forced to stop.  The woman saw me and with a coolness that took my breath away, instead of stopping, drove around me  - because she could.  It is that same arrogance I mentioned. Sadly behaviour like this has happened many times.   The council said their van driver (and others like her) simply hadn't seen the pedestrian on the crossing, as though that were an excuse. But it is illegal to drive over a pedestrian crossing in use.

So these days and increasingly, like John Cleese - albeit he is on Nevis and I am in Perth - I try to avoid people.  There is a superb early passage in a book I think by Ian McEwan describing a woman, worn down by poverty and the associated ills, maltreating a toddler.  It is a scene, shocking in its plausibility, that has stayed with me for many years and it is a stark reminder that exposure to the brutal sides of life has a brutalising effect.  But the cause and effect at work there is not just connected to poverty, it works at other levels.  Deal with people coarse and crass in manner and you are likely to become coarsened.  Deal with the sly or the uncaring and you are likely to take on those characteristics.  A.C. Grayling has written in one of his essays that the appropriate attitude in such circumstances is to withhold communication from those behaving crassly, boorishly or are otherwise uncivilized, but this is difficult when the behaviour comes from those in positions of responsibility.  I know it to my cost from my recent dealings people in the professions I mentioned, but never more so than with the Perth & Kinross council education department - infamous across Scotland for their bullying and intimidation of families actually in need of support.  While I respect the professor immensely it has often occurred to me that some of his advice is easier in theory than in practice; still those essays are useful signposts when the way feels uncharted. It is uncharted because these are behaviours simply not expected from those with the privilege of working for the society they are supposed to serve.   It is however what happens when there is little transparency or accountability to those they should serve and no recourse but the ombudsman for complaints about behaviours and policies in, for example, councils and doctors surgeries.

While there may not currently be a cure there is an antidote of sorts, a place to at least forget these unassailable dens of iniquity.  Go to the civilised places.  This does not always require money.  Museums and galleries are civilised places and they are free.  True, they can be mobbed by people aimlessly wandering about taking little in.  The new V&A in Dundee is a case in point.  It has been crammed since it opened, last September, largely because of the huge publicity.  In contrast, the Queen's Gallery, Holyrood, a picture gallery of superlative quality, I had to myself for an hour between 5 and 6pm on one recent Sunday visit.  But museum-goers are usually in attendance for good motives and are at worst, like peaceable beasts lumbering around a waterhole.   Museums and galleries are packed with artefacts relating to the best endeavours, achievements and stories of remarkable people.  

Wonderful things happen in civilised places.  In Cambridge this weekend I enjoyed several of the many museums.  Among the naked bodies in the (free) museum of classical archaeology, a magnificent collection of plaster casts of famous statues, I found myself in conversation with a jovial man, like me visiting that weekend and at something of a loose end.  He offered to show me his college (ordinarily tourists pay), including the baronial dining hall, which was just closing.  So we went for lunch in the "grad pad", the graduate restaurant with views of the river and rooftops and then punting with some people we met, at a fiver apiece, something I would not have done alone.

Punting, Cambridge

Walking into any good quality public art gallery is however, to be confronted with how much we have lost, culturally.  Art before the mid-twentieth century is jammed with references to the great stories from the Bible and from classical literature.  If you do not know those stories - and how many do, today? - you will be at sea.  Latin and the associated classical education in Britain was systematically erased with the educational reforms in Britain of the 196os and 70s which was part of the general 'democratisation' of society.   

Museums and galleries are like modern temples.  The soul finds peace, solace, nourishment, inspiration.  The imagination can take flight. But how relevant are they to most people, requiring, as they do an intellectual investment to do them justice.  Without that, one painting can look very like another.  If you do not know the story of Judith and Holofernes then the fact that Cristofano Allori painted himself as the severed head and Judith, as apparently, the girlfriend who spurned him, will mean little. At the recent exhibition in the Queen's Gallery there were two paintings of the infant Christ affectionately playing with John the Baptist. Poignantly, the saint's head appears midway between these two paintings on Salome's platter but the story of Salmone and Herodias gives that painting meaning.

Norwich castle in the 21sr centrury

In Britain we should not take for granted the great blessing that many of these institutions make no charge.  I rather felt that Norwich castle museum was letting the side down by charging £10 entry for the half a day it opens on the Sunday I visited.  It charges extra for tours but for that ten pounds you get to see a keep with impressive medieval graffiti, more museum galleries than I could even look in and a series of excellent picture galleries - exploration aplenty for a full day at the very least.  Especially in Scotland, an outmoded, moribund education system, strangled by procedure and rules is failing many.  But, thanks to the enduring Victorian legacy of public art, museums, galleries and libraries, those motivated to do so can, throughout Britain, forge their own education, especially in the arts.  It will be one with more stimulation, interaction, interest and freedom than is usually found in the classroom.  Sometimes I think it is our only hope.