There is nothing useful in asking a disparate and diverse set of people to solve a problem they have little or no control over
by Sameer Rahim / June 5, 2017 / Leave a comment
Whitechapel’s East London Mosque, which quickly issued a statement condemning Saturday’s attack. Photo: PA
On Saturday night I was in bed, reading Henry James, when I learnt of the attacks in progress on London Bridge. By chance, the novel was James’s 1886 work The Princess Casamassima, one of his few novels to engage with contemporary political events. The protagonist is Hyacinth Robinson, the illegitimate son of an aristocrat and a dressmaker, who joins a terrorist organisation. James is best known for writing about the love lives of the monied classes, but here he imagines what it was like to be excluded from such hallowed circles. As he writes in his preface, Hyacinth “revolve[s] around” the elite “but at the most respectful of distances and with every door of approach shut in his face.” Among the radicals James detects, in his resonant phrase, a “chronic spiritual inflammation.” They see the world as a perpetual battle between two clearly defined groups—in this case, rich and poor.
I put the book down and read on my phone, with increasing horror, eyewitness accounts from London Bridge. After a terrorist attack we first feel numb and fearful, and then angry. We want someone or something to blame, whether it is Theresa May for cutting police numbers, or UK foreign policy since 9/11 or—as has become wearily predictable over the last 16 years—the religion of Islam. Certainly, that seemed to be the mood Twitter was in.
Soon, though, I had returned to James. The novelist showed me a better way of thinking about such extreme behaviour. In that book, he does something audacious: he extends his…
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