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When Britney Spears totters from a night club at 5am—hair askew, often drunk, often without knickers—we tend to assume her behaviour is terribly modern. Certainly Toby Young, who argues that we are “lulled by the celebritariat” (December), seems to think so. But celebrities are not new. Nor is our obsession with them, as Prince Charles recently demonstrated with his 60th birthday portrait, modelled on Victorian hero Frederick Burnaby (1842-85). Burnaby is almost totally forgotten, but in his day he was so famous that the Queen reportedly fainted at news of his death. The Times gave him a 5000-word obituary. Grown men broke down and wept in the street.
It is easy to see why. Burnaby’s exploits make Rambo look wet. Few people have survived frostbite, typhus, an exploding air balloon, and poisoning with arsenic; explored Uzbekistan (where it was so cold, his beard froze solid and snapped off), led the household cavalry, stood for parliament, could speak seven languages, crossed the channel by air, written a string of bestsellers, commanded the Turkish army, and founded Vanity Fair; all before his early death aged 42.
In Defense of Lost Causes
by Slavoj Zizek (Verso, £19.99)
If you had to put money on which academic would be the first to play Wembley Arena, you’d have to go for Slavoj Zizek. Once dubbed “the Elvis of cultural theory,” Zizek is the author of some 40 books ranging in subject from Hitchcock to Christianity, from the Iraq war to Lacanian psychoanalysis. As relaxed discussing Jennifer Aniston as Kant’s theory of the phenomenon, he’s almost too good to be true. Look at his background: born in 1949 in Slovenia, a country perfect for that outsider, slightly marginalised status every intellectual needs. And it comes with the added bonus of an outrageous accent which, as anyone who’s seen him lecture will vouch, simply adds to his undeniable charisma. Then there’s that fantastic Scrabble-winning triumph of a name (worth 43 points—never let it be said that book reviewers don’t do their research). Surely he’s actually a bloke from Wolverhampton called Kevin who’s taking us all for a ride.
If that is the case, then Kevin is doing a brilliant job. In Defense of Lost Causes is typical Zizek: exhilarating, inspiring, thought-provoking and sometimes very, very hard. Zizek is a Lacanian-Hegelian, constantly drawing on Lacan’s reworking of Freud and his own reworking of Hegel’s idealist philosophy as he whips from Kierkegaard to Borat, from Althusser to internet masturbatathons. Chapter headings like “The Crisis of Determinate Negation” and “Unbehagen in der Natur” don’t exactly conjure up a relaxed deckchair read, but what makes the difficult bits worthwhile is the sheer verve and passion of Zizek’s argument—that, and the machine-gun scattering of original thought and mischievous wit from his headlong narrative. As a particularly competitive friend of mine put it, you’re conversationally guaranteed to “win” any dinner party with this kind of ammunition. I’m certainly looking forward to some extra aubergine polenta for my Zizekian thesis that Schindler’s List is just Jurassic Park with the Nazis as dinosaurs.
Do women put in more work hours than men? It is one of the most commonplace arguments, conducted in kitchens and sitting rooms throughout the land. Until now there have been two answers—men did more paid work and women more unpaid work—and because the latter was unquantified, there was no way of comparing the two workloads.
The lack of hard data has not stopped many people from stressing the “double shift” that many women do: full-time or part-time paid work followed by countless hours of unpaid work in households (childcare, domestic work, family work) as well as countless hours of voluntary work in local communities which are essential for maintaining the social fabric. Sociologists have turned to qualitative research and case studies to prove that it is women who work the longest hours—due to those invisible, uncounted hours of unpaid work in the home that prop up the formal market economy.
Two studies, in particular, have attained almost iconic status. In Britain, Ann Oakley’s Housewife catalogues the unremitting 18-hour work days of mothers with no jobs but with children under five at home. In the US, Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift details the domestic work and childcare done by women after they return home from their full-time day jobs. The trouble is, these case studies invariably focus on women with babies or young children at home—a relatively temporary phase within the life cycle. Critics have argued that such studies cannot be representative of women generally.
Estates: An Intimate History by Lynsey Hanley
Granta Books, £12
Lynsey Hanley, who grew up on the huge Chelmsley Wood estate just outside Birmingham, has written an impassioned personal-cum-political account of the story of public housing in Britain. In the great tradition of working-class autobiography, there is a tone of “this is me, this is who I am” in the authorial voice, along with a touch of chip on shoulder. “It’s hard to explain why I feel so strongly about housing in this way,” she writes, “other than I know I had a lucky escape where others did not, and that too many people will not know what I mean by that.”
Hanley tells us that she started with a hunch that “class is built into the physical landscape of the country.” Public housing can indeed be seen as a form of social apartheid that has given rise to what the author calls “the wall in the head” separating the consciousness of people on council estates from the world outside, although what Hanley sees as the stubborn rigidity of the British class system fails to account for the enormous growth of the middle class, the spread of home ownership and her own career progression.
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
Harvard University Press $27.95
Chicago has an irresistible allure for social scientists, and no wonder. Its university, one of the world’s great research institutions, has some of the grimmest of urban ghettoes right on its doorstep on the city’s South Side. Chicago’s most famous (or notorious) economists drew free market lessons from this daily drive-by brush with poverty. Nobel laureates such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker made Chicago economics a byword for the proposition that the economy and society in general can be understood as the outcome of individual rational choice. Then Steven Levitt, in his bestseller Freakonomics, delved more deeply into the ghetto to debunk the Chicago school free-to-choose account of why so many young African-American men opt for drug dealing as a career (rather than, say, investment banking).
Or rather, Levitt delved by proxy, drawing on the research of a young Chicago sociologist, Sudhir Venkatesh. Venkatesh (now a professor at Columbia) spent years hanging about in the poorest parts of the city. He observed Southsiders at work, at the shops, at home, at play. He conducted surveys among the small businesses. He interviewed pastors and politicians. Off the Books is his account of this detailed web of daily life.
If you happen to believe that debates should be settled by reason rather than revelation, as I assume many Prospect readers do, you have nothing to fear from the demographic changes facing western society. Eric Kaufmann, like many demographers, talks about categories—in his case, the major category is “religion”—without ever specifying what those categories contain. The moment we look inside the box of religion, we get a very different picture of what is going on than the one Kaufmann presents.
Kaufmann cites the research of Michael Hout, Andrew Greeley and Melissa Wilde, which shows that conservative Protestant denominations are growing at rapid rates in the US. What he neglects to mention is that they offer this data to refute the very trend Kaufmann is trying to identify: growing religious conservatism. It had long been believed that conservative Protestants were expanding their membership because they offered a “strict” faith that stood out in the marketplace, attracting those who wished to return to orthodoxy. But as Hout and Greeley point out in their important new book, The Truth about Conservative Christians, the rise of evangelical denominations in the US owes more to rising birth rates than to increased bible believing. They explicitly reject the conclusion that liberal churches are losing members because of their liberalism, which in turn suggests that conservative churches are not growing because of their conservatism.
In a similar manner, demographic data tends to overlook changes in what religion means to different generations. This is not a matter of “apostasy,” or the fact that significant numbers of children “defect” from the Mormonism or Pentecostalism of their parents. True, there are significant such defections, especially among evangelicals, whose leaders regularly lament their failure to prevent younger born-again Christians from concluding that perhaps there is nothing wrong with gay marriage. But there is a particular reason why younger evangelicals do not automatically inherit the faith of their parents: evangelicalism is an inherently unstable faith. The parents of today’s twentysomething evangelicals went through a born-again conversion at some point in their lives. Can their children therefore be expected simply to adopt the religion in which they happen to be raised without going through a conversion experience of their own? Evangelicalism is conservative in theology but quite radical in its sense of personal transformation. Since authenticity counts for more than tradition, younger evangelicals feel that they must take their own journey to God, and this does not always lead them to Jesus the same way it did their parents. So even if evangelicalism were to reproduce itself among younger cohorts—which in fact it does not—their form of religion would likely resemble only superficially the sin-obsessed faith of their parents.
For most of the past century, analysis of the origins of crime has been dominated by sociological models. When Tony Blair declared in 1992 that his party would be “tough on the causes of crime,” his audience presumed that he meant that Labour would try to eliminate crime-generating social ills such as poor housing, unemployment and inadequate schools. Discussion of the possible roots of offending and antisocial behaviour within individuals rarely formed part of elite public discourse. Punishment, the courts held, should be regulated by the severity of the crime, not the criminal’s propensity to commit further offences.
One of the few challenges to this orthodoxy was made in the 1960s by Hans J Eysenck, for many years a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry. Eysenck believed that criminals’ personalities could be rigidly categorised and that most of their behaviour was inherited. But his work on crime was attacked by mainstream sociological criminologists and had little influence on policy. Indeed, for most criminologists the concept of a personality more likely to commit crime was abhorrent.
The resistance to Eysenck was especially fierce because he was writing during the vogue for “radical criminology,” when crime was seen as a social construct and the “labelling” of deviants an aspect of social control. Thirty years later, intellectual fashion has shifted beyond recognition, with, for example, a heavy new emphasis on the experiences of victims of crime. Nevertheless, investigation of the factors that put an individual at high risk of engaging in criminal and antisocial behaviour remains controversial, and most criminologists continue to steer well clear of it.
Britain’s digital infrastructure is in rather good shape. Broadband internet rollout was all but completed in 2005. It also became possible last year to transact with government online—from registering a vehicle to filing a tax return. The 2005 “e-readiness” survey produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Britain as the fifth best digitally equipped nation in the world, a table currently topped by Denmark, with Germany and France straggling in 13th and 18th places respectively. Britain’s first wave of digital modernisation is thus almost complete, a period in which the internet evolved from a niche interest to an everyday tool for over half the population, and mobile phones became ubiquitous and classless.
The second wave of development looks set to merge these two trends, as the rapid spread of wireless internet access pushes us towards an “always on everywhere” society. Bandwidth levels, which determine how much information we can send and receive, are now reaching the point where television programmes can be transmitted online. And after much anticipation, mobile phones are beginning to act as web browsers and televisions, not to mention cameras and camcorders.
Most of the argument about our progress into the digital future assumes that it is both inevitable and desirable. Its shape has already been mapped out by a network of consultancies, academics and think tanks. The only question left unanswered is how quickly we will get there. But while the benefits of the digital revolution are evident enough, we should surely be wary of embracing a worldview that sees technological bottlenecks only as restraints on freedom. London Underground is looking at ways of enabling mobile phones to work on the tube, to eradicate one of the city’s last blocks on digital connectivity. But what else will be lost in the process? Technological bottlenecks can also be necessary conditions of social interaction or valuable moments of isolation.
Why are women paid less than men? Why were there riots in some northwestern English cities in 2000 but not in London? What is the significance of bloggers, or of the World Social Forum?
One of the strange features of our times is that well-educated people can get by with very little idea of how to answer questions like these. Over the last few decades, we have witnessed great progress in the public’s level of scientific understanding, thanks to many brilliant expositors. In history, too, some of the most original minds are also first rate communicators. Much of economics has permeated into common sense, particularly of decision-makers around the world. But sociology has faded from view. Its heyday a generation ago feels like another era. As a result, many people rely on very simple interpretive frameworks to make sense of what they see around them or on the evening news. So conflicts between Muslims and Christians are attributed to culture or history. Gender pay gaps are seen as the result of misogyny. The internet is ascribed with magical powers to turn the tables on multinational corporations or governments.
Some of the reasons for sociology’s retreat from public awareness lie in the discipline itself, which took a turn towards abstract theory in the 1970s and away from observation, description and detailed historical analysis. Some of the reasons lie in the shape of professional careers which enabled sociologists to progress without having to do primary observation. Within sociology very good work is continuing to be done, and sense is being made of complex issues. But little of it is penetrating the public consciousness.
Charles Tilly is probably the outstanding contemporary exponent of an engaged but theoretically rigorous sociology. It is a symptom of sociology’s relative detachment that he remains largely unknown outside academic circles in Britain, even though he is by some margin the most fertile thinker in the American social sciences, covering topics as diverse as the rise of the state in 18th-century Europe to racial inequality, political violence to the conditions for democracy in central Asia. In some ways he is old fashioned—he offers explanations and shows how some things cause other things to happen. His accounts contain real people, history and drama, and have lessons for how change might be achieved more successfully.
The man looks out at the Rollright Stones from his little wooden hut, with the weariness of wardens the world over. By the door is an honesty box (50p a person) and a glass jar with six dowsing rods for you to borrow. The trust he works for was established eight years ago to try to defend these once-obscure megalithic remains—now thought by some to be magical—on the Oxfordshire-Warwickshire border. Passionate paganists, satanists, pantheists and mere tourists threatened to overwhelm them with their hugs, kisses and sheer weight of feet.
I am here, in the English midlands, in a Tolkien-like quest for middle England. I wonder if I have found it in this very strange, but also strangely tamed, place. Many of the components are here: a rural dream, a hint of DIY, some voluntary work, a passion for tidiness, a scarcely hidden eccentricity.
When I pull up in the new lay-by, two solidly built middle-aged women volunteers, in baggy jeans and waxed jackets, are bending over to creosote the fence. The trust’s brochures mention ley lines, witchcraft and druidism, as well as water-divining. To my eye there is little sense of magic left, but it may be different at dawn or dusk. A family wanders around the circle, with the youngest child always on the verge of ignoring the “do not climb” signs. “On a good day, we get 400 visitors,” the warden says. How do they behave? “A few nutters, as you can see from the paint splashes on the stones.” On the wall of his hut is a bleached-out CCTV photo of a young man suspected of paint-daubing: £1,000 reward. “They got him,” the warden says. But why do it? “People are people. Why do they blow up 200 people in Madrid? Some have a grudge, or think they can change the world. Him, perhaps he’d had a row with his girlfriend the night before, and she was a pagan. Who knows?”
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