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22 July, 2023

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1887) by Viktor Vasnetsov

Don’t let the doomsters get you down

There used to be two main views about the future, says Simon Kuper in the FT. One, held by “Marxists, Whigs and followers of the psychologist Steven Pinker”, was that humanity naturally progresses. The other saw history as “patternless”, with no set direction of travel. But a third view is fast becoming the norm: that we are “heading for apocalypse”. In this view, the only real question is which of the four horsemen gets us first – climate change, artificial intelligence, a pandemic, or “plain old nukes”. In Gallup’s latest “Hope Index”, which polls what people feel about the year ahead, “pessimists exceed optimists by the largest margin since the index launched”.

But all this gloominess is blinding us to some “cheering shifts”. In fact, it’s perfectly possible that energy, health and working life will all be transformed for the better this decade. For one thing, the International Energy Agency predicts the world will build 2,400 gigawatts of new renewable power by 2027, “equal to the entire power capacity of China today”. Improved green tech and plummeting prices mean climate change may well get fixed by countries pursuing “cold, hard, short-term self-interest”. We’re also curing diseases at a staggering rate – the first malaria vaccines will arrive in Africa this year; the UN says we can end Aids by 2030. The advanced RNA tech used to develop multiple Covid jabs in under a year is now being harnessed to develop cancer vaccines. And so far, rather than wiping out humanity, AI is helping it – not just by turbocharging complex tasks like finding new drugs, but by automating boring ones like coding, leading to a possible boom in productivity. These optimistic scenarios are entirely plausible. “Our job is to make them happen.”

Kim modelling her life-saving shapewear. Skims

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Kim Kardashian, whose line of body-hugging “shapewear” has saved a customer’s life. A 22-year-old TikToker recently attested that she was hit four times during a mass shooting in Missouri on New Year’s Day – but her Skims bodysuit was so tight “that it literally kept me from bleeding out”. “If this doesn’t land you a Skims sponsorship,” one user commented, “I don’t know what will.”

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Performance poetry, which might just end the war in Ukraine. A recent letter to The Guardian criticising Joe Biden for sending cluster bombs to Kyiv concludes: “In these fractured times, the need for a resurgence of political performance poetry has never been greater.” I completely agree, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph – President Zelensky should be gracious enough to accept British aid in all forms. If we want to supply pink-haired pansexuals from Brighton “rapping about the evils of late-stage capitalism”, rather than cruise missiles, “he should jolly well be grateful”.

Not more of this, surely. Hugh Grant and Martine McCutcheon in Love Actually

Villain

Richard Curtis, at least according to Hannah Betts in The Times, because the veteran director is threatening to stage a Christmas variety show this December. The “Antichrist of cinema” describes the project as “a real chocolate box – or perhaps advent calendar – of delights”. But I surely cannot be the only one who awaits this festive assortment with a nausea of the “projectile, indeed, Exorcist variety”.

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Robbert Dijkgraaf, the Dutch education minister, who has banned smartphones, smartwatches and tablets from classrooms starting next year. Teachers “deserve the undivided attention of their students”, he says in The Daily Telegraph, and pilot schemes show that mobile-free lessons boost attainment levels and reduce online bullying. What’s stopping Britain from following suit? 

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Past his best? Auden in 1973. Don Smith/Getty

Why WH Auden was never poet laureate

The honorary role of British poet laureate dates back to the 17th century; its celebrated incumbents include Tennyson and Wordsworth. But newly released government files show that finding a suitable candidate hasn’t always been easy, says the BBC’s Sanchia Berg. When Downing Street was considering whose name should be submitted to the Queen to succeed Cecil Day-Lewis in 1972, the candidates were subjected to withering assessments from officials, advisers and fellow poets. Robert Graves, then living in Spain, was dismissed by one critic as “the wild man of Mallorca”; Philip Larkin, though a “first-rate craftsman”, was thought too “reserved” for the job.

Bookies’ favourite WH Auden was ruled out because of his US citizenship and because he’d once published a pornographic poem which, according to John Hewitt, the Downing Street appointments secretary, was “of so filthy a character that his appointment would bring disgrace upon the office”. Which was ridiculous, says Tristram Saunders in The Daily Telegraph: in this piece of doggerel, Auden refers to the male organ as “A royal column, ineffably solemn and wise” – less scandalous than amusing. In the end the laureateship went to John Betjeman, variously described in the files as a “poetic hack” and, by the Arts Council, as “the songster of tennis lawns and cathedral cloisters”. He may have been a “lightweight”, says Saunders, but he was beloved by the British public. Auden was way past his best in 1972, but should have been given the post back in 1930. His writing “shaped that ‘low, dishonest decade’ (as he called it) more than the work of any other English poet”.

Getty

On a recent holiday to Brazil, says Sushma Subramanian in The New York Times, my two-year-old fell and suffered a deep cut on her face. We rushed to the hospital where a plastic surgeon expertly stitched the wound to minimise scarring. “Don’t worry,” he told me, “Brazil has the best plastic surgeons in the world.” It turns out the nation has been subsidising cosmetic procedures – nearly half a million of them each year – since the 1950s, when a famous surgeon convinced the president that ugliness could cause “painful psychological suffering”. Most countries’ health coverage applies just to reconstructive care, not aesthetic. Brazil sees more “continuity” between the two. And perhaps they’re right. Perhaps beauty is a form of health, and “small changes we can make to our surfaces” can have profound influence on our quality of life. 

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Clare with a few of her “controversial” pots

Nettling the bien pensants of the London art world

There are few things more unsettling to the “decolonised dinner party bores who run the art world”, says Jo Bartosch in The Critic, than a “61-year-old lesbian who, in her own words, ‘has fuck all left to lose’”. The ceramicist Claudia Clare makes exquisite pots that tell “unpopular stories”, daring to mock illiberal leftists’ “trinity of acclaim” for Islamism, prostitution and gender identity. In 2009, as a Farsi speaker with an adopted Iranian family, she was invited to exhibit a collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Isfahan. She soon “got under the beards of the Ayatollahs”, and they withdrew her visa.

But the same year, she began to experience similar disapproval in Britain. When a curator in a London gallery became noticeably “nervous”, Clare eventually teased out of her that she was “terrified that a big, hairy, scary Muslim man might get upset”, because one of the pieces was about hymen reconstruction among women in the UK. The exhibition was so popular it was extended – and not one Muslim complained. In fact, several Turkish women told her it was the “first time they felt connected to a work of art”. But the bien pensants of the London art world were appalled. It’s crazy. Clare’s feminist view – that no woman deserves to be “disappeared” under a veil or reduced to merely an object of male desire – puts her “beyond the bounds of decency” by which most public galleries abide.

🗿🏺 Ironically, Clare was an early supporter of “decolonisation” and learning about the cultures and people “buried under inaccurate, colonialist labels”. She remembers visiting galleries and gazing perplexed at Egyptian pots accompanied by just a date and a “British bloke’s name.” But what was once well intentioned has descended into “lifeless box-ticking” and “pious lecturing.”

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”

Logan Pearsall Smith

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