Reading and Democracy

Most contemporary journalism about social developments starts with a series of assertions. This is a form of argument that can be described as "Imagine if this were true". A recent example is John Harris in The Guardian suggesting that we're all so distracted by TikTok that the death of reading is imminent, and that in turn spells an end to democracy. The mechanism that Harris offers for the first assertion is contextual ignorance: the youth of today - subject to "a distracting and seemingly infinite jumble of random moving images" - cannot see the Fascist overtones of masked men blocking a port. As he puts it (with a smidgen of self-awareness): "But a background in the pre-digital world helps people not just follow national and global events, but clarify and contextualise them. In this case, at the risk of sounding hopelessly pompous, the fear many of us felt as we watched what happened in both ports was surely full of the perspectives gleaned from years of soaking up books and newspapers – and the sense that history often either repeats itself, or rhymes." In support of his claim, Harris cites a new book by the Times columnist James Marriott. I've not read the book (and am not about to), but have read the Substack essay (The dawn of the post-literate society) that was the germ of it and which provides the gist of the argument that we are undergoing an epochal transformation.

According to Marriott, "The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed. As the world of Rome’s educated elite fell apart, many writers and works of literature passed out of human memory — either to be lost forever or to be rediscovered hundreds of years later in the Renaissance." Marriott's conservative register - the Burkean "linking" of the generations, the dissolution of the educated elite, the immigrant "tides" - means his prose sounds like something that could have been written in the Edwardian era (and probably was). This tone is front and centre in the expanded and scary title of the book: "The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society". As the more libertarian conservative Henry Oliver puts it in a review, "it feels as if James is part of a cohort that wishes to be in a different part of history".

That use of the discredited term "Dark Ages" should set alarm bells ringing. Historians prefer Late Antiquity, a period that runs from the late 3rd to the early 8th century in Western Europe. There was no "collapse" of the Western Roman Empire in 476AD, no "snapping of the thread", but a gradual evolution of the socioeconomic structure away from slave production and commodity trade towards stationary subsistence and a more attenuated trade in elite goods. The social order this gave rise to was more rural and less urban, but this was not an end to civilisation - i.e. the culture of the city - even in areas where towns were largely abandoned, such as Britain. Rome's educated elite didn't disappear, they simply became Church prelates. It's also worth noting that many of the barbarians had already been employed and even educated by the Romans, a longstanding practice. Perhaps the most famous of these was Arminius (Hermann the German), who was taken as a child to Rome, eventually becoming an equestrian rank military officer before leading a revolt in 9AD in defiance of Rome's plans to extend its territory from the Rhine to the Elbe. 

Taking high-ranking hostages like this was routine policy throughout the history of both the Republic and the Empire, which emphasises both the porous nature of the Roman/barbarian boundary at the personal and social level as well as the fact that many barbarian tribes were formal clients or allies of Rome. A similar policy was adopted by many subsequent empires, most notably the British, particularly in respect of the Indian princely states (think of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh becoming an excellent young gentleman at Greyfriars School). The Dark Ages was a popular trope with conservatives a century ago both because of an anglocentrism that assumed the atypical end of Roman rule in Britain was typical of Western Europe and because of long-held fears, from Gibbon onwards, that the British Empire would end in a similar manner: weakened from within and assaulted from without. Or to put it in terms that remain resonant for conservatives today, betrayed by its elites and over-run by foreign invaders.

The historical reality is that the successor states were as literate at an elite level as the same areas were during the late Empire. In other words, literacy was always confined to a small minority of the population. We can be confident about this because of those states' adoption of Christianity, a religion of the Book that drew a clear distinction between the need for a literate elite stratum and for the restriction of literacy among the wider population. By the time of Charlemagne and Alfred the Great, the state was taking a lead in encouraging the spread of literacy, at least among the nobility and the auxiliary classes required to support the state, such as the clergy and merchants. This gradual expansion highlighted a tension in the competing needs of secular society (as commerce and civil law became more prevalent) and the superstructure of the state. This would eventually lead to the Reformation, the explosion of printed matter and popular literacy.

Prior to printing, works of literature frequently "passed out of human memory" due to their fragility and the paucity of copies. Much of Greek literature was lost during the heyday of the Roman Empire, notably with the shift in medium from papyrus scrolls to bound parchment codexes. The latter were more expensive to produce, but longer-lasting, which resulted in many lesser works being dropped. This was exacerbated by a tendency to value Christian texts over pagan at a time when most manuscripts were predominantly produced by the Church (and which explains why many works of Greek philosophy come down to us via Arab copies). Marriott ironically reveals his own ignorance by assuming that these elisions were calculated rather than banally selective: "Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments." This would explain the total absence of any peasants' revolts during said era. John Ball, one of the leaders of the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was a priest, which meant he was literate ("When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?")

Harris doesn't back up his second assertion, that a decline in reading will lead to a decline in democracy, but Marriott does. Unfortunately, he simply cites Neil Postman whose rather silly 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death claimed that television was making us passive and incapable of rational argument. For Marriott, "Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy." This is wrong on three counts. The period of expanding print literature (the post-incunabula era) runs for 300 years from 1500 to 1800. The final death blow to feudalism did not happen till 1806 with the formal end of the Holy Roman Empire. Likewise, we have been entranced by screens for over a century now, both in the cinema and the corner of the living room, yet that period saw the apotheosis of liberal democracy during les trentes glorieuses. Cause and effect is hardly proved in either case. 

Lastly, despite the focus on TikTok, most of what we see on phone screens is print. The Internet is a literary medium that incorporates images. It's like a book with illustrations, but dynamic and with added interactivity (so not passive). It's still the case that print > image online. The idea that we're going to lose the ability to read is obviously ridiculous, but there is no shortage of evidence that particular reading skills or habits are changing. But this isn't novel or even necessarily worrying, and the evidence for this evolution has been around for a very long time. For example, the claim that new university students are functionally illiterate is one that academics have been making since the curriculum was exclusively in Latin. This is self-serving both in the sense that it emphasises that students are empty vessels who must first accept their inferiority, and in the sense that it suggests academics have an ever harder job to do and should be paid accordingly. Likewise, the idea that the young (or the lower orders) are acquiring a novel argot that debases manners and promotes vice has prompted moral panics ever since the earliest days of newspapers.

The reality is that reading techniques change over time to suit the medium and the social context. When you owned only one book, you didn't skim read. When you bought a disposable daily newspaper, you did. The contemporary concern about the loss of literacy is about the how and why of reading, as much as the what. Rose Horowitch, in an influential essay in The Atlantic, claimed that "people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis". That "higher-order" is a tell, like the assumption in 1984 that the proles could be kept quiet with pornography. The challenges of comprehension and synthesis are better explained by the superabundance of text (a fact) rather than the degradation of our abilities (an assumption about the weakness of others, rather than our literate selves). We are inundated with the written word - adverts, labels, tags - in a way that a Medieval scholastic would have found terrifying. This is capitalism, not a loss of virtue.

Just as the remnants of feudalism were cleared away by geopolitics rather than The Rights of Man (let alone the spread of the vernacular Bible in the 16th century), so democracy is now under threat from the power of money in politics and a general disillusion among voters as choice has been restricted to the options acceptable to the rich. Blaming our current situation on TikTok is akin to European reactionaries blaming Napoleon on the Freemasons or twentieth century liberals claiming that Hitler came to power solely because of the Volksempfänger (the people's radio receiver). This kind of hyperbolic history and naive technological determinism, repurposed to justify contemporary pessimism, is what you would expect from a conservative writer like Marriott. What remains less clear is why Harris should echo him so willingly. Is this simply The Guardian's hatred of social media finding common cause with Eeyorish reaction? Or does it reflect the nonconformist traditions of the paper and its belief that the lower orders should devote themselves to self-improvement? Answers on a postcard, if you still know how to write.

Fair Game

One of the values of a historical perspective is that much of the noise disappears. This principle operates over years and decades, but it can also operate over days and weeks. Jason Arday died on the 14th of August, less than 4 weeks ago. With politics and football both back, you might have expected the media circus to have moved on, and British journalists have certainly made the effort to tempt us with new outrages, from Harry and Meghan to dodgy donations. But it's also clear that anger at Arday's treatment by the media has not subsided (the fact that Caroline Flack's name has resurfaced in the discourse tells you there is a deep undertow here), hence the ongoing interest in Nathan Cofnas getting his just desserts and the persistence of columnists attempting to justify their (or their colleagues') treatment of Arday. Examples of the latter include Sarah Ditum's piece for the right-leaning Free Press, in which she attributed the prominence of the story to the summer lull ("As a country, we were desperate for something to talk about"); and Helen Lewis's article in the Nation in which she described Arday as a "fabulist". This term has proved popular with journalists, which is ironic coming from people for whom exaggeration and outright invention is less an occupational hazard than standard operating practice.

According to Lewis, "The central question in this dispute is whether the treatment of Arday—the subject of more than 200 articles in print this year, according to CNN, and hundreds more online—was proportionate." This is correct in identifying the disproportion of the media coverage, which can't be excused as a product of the "silly season", as Ditum does, but Lewis is guilty of a misdirection here. She concedes that he "was subject to extra scrutiny because of his race", and admits that "the media coverage of Arday was harsh and high-volume." But she also claims that this "volume came from competing outlets breaking fresh news, as more and more of Arday’s extraordinary claims crumbled under scrutiny." In short, it was unfair, but he was asking for it. But what exactly was Arday's offence in the eyes of the media, as opposed to in the eyes of the academic community, who remain largely sympathetic to a colleague, or in the eyes of Nathan Cofnas and other "race realists", who remain unsympathetic as a matter of principle.

The use of the word fabulist offers a clue. The classic examples of this type in literature - Walter Mitty and Billy Liar - are comic characters with whom we sympathise. But clearly the type being identified here is a more serious case: someone who has materially gained through deliberate deceit and the manipulation of others. The literary template is more a mountebank like Augustus Melmotte, in Trollope's The Way We Live Now, or even Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley. The emphasis  placed by Lewis on the quote from Arday that "To be honest with you, I thought you'd just believe me", which appeared in Lanre Bakare's Guardian takedown on the 1st of August, is telling. The real charge then is one of imposture. In this narrative, Arday didn't deserve his position, which he secured through a combination of his cheating and exaggeration, Cambridge's lack of due diligence, and a general desire to promote diversity that has had the effect of undermining academic integrity (in a sweet irony, Bakare's piece was amended multiple times due to errors of fact.) This line allows Lewis and other journalists to swerve the accusation of racial prejudice by emphasising that the affair is about academic standards and the corrosive nature of plagiarism.

The problem is that academics themselves have suggested that the general concern with plagiarism is overblown, and that's before you get to the specific examples attributed to Arday. Unsurprisingly, Lewis does not hesitate to attack them for this: "The smaller his alleged offenses, the more easily one can argue that the media hounded him to death. And so Arday has been recast as a small-time plagiarist; academics have lined up to argue that, You know, even that isn’t a very big deal." She criticises Professor Jason Stanley, who wrote a throughtful blog explaining why journalists hadn't even done decent journalism by checking Arday's citations, and Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project, who is a bete noire of the media due to his involvement in legal cases against newspapers. More generally, she dimisses Arday's supporters as "left-wing new media, activist nonprofits, and visual social networks such as Instagram and TikTok." Lewis is delegitimising them, dismissing them as people with an unhelpful agenda or simply unserious and easily-led. It is, of course, her habitual critique of the left.

Though race was obviously a major factor in the wider media's pursuit of Arday, for the liberal media the issue was class. This much became evident in the aftermath of his death. The Guardian's considered assessment sought to divide the sheep and goats in its headline: "A rightwing witch-hunt focused on Jason Arday – but so did legitimate journalism". In the article, Hugh Muir emphasised the distinction: "The right in its hostile, partisan pursuit nevertheless uncovered doubts about the professor’s academic work – accusations of plagiarism – that could not be satisfactorily dismissed. The professor himself made public claims about his life and achievements that could not be verified. Of course that was a good thing for those who, for racist and political reasons, sought to denigrate him, but wasn’t that also a legitimate concern for those who bore him no ill will – indeed cheered his ascent – but see the importance of integrity in academia and public life?" The use of "legitmate concern" appears to be wholly unironic.

Tabloid readers are not assumed to be interested in academic plagiarism, but they are interested in the idea that someone may be nicking a living, or that someone is in the wrong social position. The ideological core of tabloidism is the preservation of hierarchies, hence the fawning over royalty, the obsession with fashionability, and the beasting of the socially marginal. Racial hierarchies are important, but they are invariably trumped by class. Arday's problem wasn't that he was a black man in a built-up area but that he didn't look the part of a pillar of the establishment. He wore dreadlocks and casual clothing. You wouldn't mistake him for Trevor Phillips or Trevor McDonald. Had he stayed at Liverpool John Moores University, it's unlikely that the affair would ever have blown up. At worst, Cofnas's allegations would have been taken as evidence that outside the Russell Group standards continue to decline due to the folly of getting more working class kids into higher education.

Though the hounding of Arday was initiated by the Daily Telegraph's attack on him as "Cambridge’s diversity poster boy", the story quickly spread among the other broadsheets, with predictable results. In the Observer, Kenan Malik insisted that Arday's supporters were fuelling the right by taking up the cudgels, a variation on his usual theme that however objectionable the right might be the left has done itself no favours. In The Times, Camilla Long symbolically reclaimed the Cambridge office of the "God-level fabulist and nonsense-monger", while blaming Arday's rise on "privileged, self-hating white people". The Guardian's sanctimonious approach - deploring the racist bigotry while elevating inconsequential plagiarism to a capital crime - was typical of the way that the story fed upon itself. As Will Self noted in a suitably acerbic attack on the media en masse, "evidence that the pursuit is hurting its object itself becomes content, such that his pain becomes another story, and objections to the coverage—no matter from whom—become another controversy."

It is significant that while the British press did what they normally do - crowbarring the story into existing frames about indulged minorities, the decline of academic standards and the corrosive nature of "woke" in universities and cultural production - it was the US press, albeit commissioning British writers like Ditum and Lewis, that emphasised that this was really a story about the media itself. The headline on Ditum's article - "The Press Didn’t Kill Jason Arday" - is a classic of the "My T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt" genre. The headline on Lewis's article - "The Jason Arday Truthers" - was an attempt to construct an opposition in unflattering terms that could be sneered at for its gullibility, in contrast to the ceaseless professional questers for truth in the press corps. Just re-read her description of it: "left-wing new media, activist nonprofits, and visual social networks such as Instagram and TikTok." Is that a coherent community with shared "truths"? Does it even make sense in its combination of organisations and platforms?

The reason for this transatlantic difference is that the class dimension of the Arday affair has less salience in the US where attacks on Black acdemics have usually targeted middle-class high-achievers whose primary offence is being Black and whose secondary offence is promoting Black Studies. Jason Arday studied race in the context of sociology, but his offence was being appointed as a professor at Cambridge, hence the deflection of blame in Ditum's piece to "The institutional failures that elevated him to Cambridge without vetting his work", which makes it sound like his appointment was almost random, which it clearly was not, as Jason Stanley pointed out at length. At the end of the day, Arday was "not one of us", while the journalists and columnists who hounded him were very much part of the gilded circle of British public life, many of whom went to Oxford or Cambridge. The regret over Arday's death is synthetic, just as it was over Caroline Flack and other victims of press bullying.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous lines from The Great Gatsby are relevant here: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Journalists are not necessarily rich, but they serve the interests of the rich and consequently tend to adopt the same attitudes, most notably condescension towards the opinions of others (recall Helen Lewis's contempt towards Jeremy Corbyn for lauding the artistic abilities of ordinary people), and a refusal to accept responsibility for their own actions. Journalists and opinion-writers tend to flit from job to job, but for this reason they have a strong professional culture, which is why working for the Guardian doesn't make you a different animal: you're still writing to order. 

The traditional cry "Nobody tells us what to write" is true only inasmuch as the profession selects for conformity. As a result, it tends to move like a herd ("competing outlets breaking fresh news", as Helen Lewis put it). Jason Arday's tragedy did not arise from his personal failings or the administrative shortcomings of Cambridge university but simply because he got caught in the path of the herd. If he was at fault, it was in his willingness to put himself in the public eye through press interviews about his appointment and back-story, and in his agreement to publish a triumph-over-the-odds memoir, which was never going to be brutally honest any more than any other celebrity memoir is. Once he realised his mistake, it was too late to get out of the way of the herd and its momentum was too great to avoid the inevitable trampling. Jason Arday wasn't fair game; he was road-kill.

An Odyssey

Emily Wilson, now arguably the most famous translator of Homer, is understandably concerned with promoting the Odyssey. In her LRB review of Christopher Nolan's new film, she acknowledges that her translation is " flying off the shelves", but I suspect she worries that many of those sales will be for the purposes of bookshelf adornment and Instagramable content rather than engagement with the text. Her review is a plea for that engagement. In contrast, Nolan is making a film that necessarily fillets the book to provide a primarily visual narrative in which there is little verbal poetry but a fair amount of clunky exposition. It is An Odyssey rather than The Odyssey. Wilson is not a Nolan fan: she finds most of his work boring, grandiose and superficial, her one backhanded compliment to his film being that her teenagers enjoyed it, but she does pay him the respect of engaging critically with his films, noting the common themes of discontinuities in time, vengeance and recovery, and a strange preoccupation with drowning. In her review, she consequently emphasises what Nolan does not - the sex, the humour, the glory - to remind us that there is much more to the book. 

But the difference in the media is ultimately all that their difference in opinion comes down to, despite the best attempts by the press (another medium) to talk it up as a fight or even as more grist to the "culture war" that started with the illiterate ravings of Elon Musk when he discovered that Helen wasn't played by an Aryan (presumably he'd have been OK if Charlize Theron and Lupita Nyong'o had swapped roles). Ironically, "talking up a fight" is pretty much at the core of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, something that Nolan makes explicit when Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, tells Penelope, his doting queen, that the war is really about trade routes (i.e. access to the Hellespont and thence the Black Sea), not honour. The exchange highlights that the film is really a conflation of the two books. That in turn explains why even at 3 hours a lot of the second book was never going to make it to the screen (Telemachus's visit to Nestor, the extended sojourn with Circe, the Nausicaa episode). 

One lesser known scene that remains is the raid on the Cicones, on the coast of Thrace, after Odysseus and his men have first left Troy (this is improbable, as they're meant to be heading south, but anyway). Nolan has a captured local speak unintelligibly to the Ithacans, actually in modern Greek. This is an early sight of a key theme of the film that originates hors-texte: that the returning Achaean Greeks were actually the feared and mysterious Sea People. There is no historical substance to this, but it works as a device in a film that places much emphasis on the tropes of disguise and misdirection. "You have the eyes of Athena" is a phrase that approaches cliché, as does the sometimes laboured explanations of Zeus's Law (xenia) being justified as a beggar might be a god in disguise. You might think that Nolan is making broader points here about hypocrisy and class injustice, but a simpler explanation is that he is using those parts of the epic that lend themselves to the screen: impersonation, double-crossing, revelation. The same principle applies to the Trojan Horse, which doesn't appear in the Iliad and is only mentioned incidentally in the Odyssey.

The two works are quite different. Not only was Homer a collective effort, spread over centuries, but there were two distinct collectives, unrelated but with overlapping influences, representing different oral traditions. The Iliad is an ethnic origin legend that seeks to root Greek culture in the mythos of Mycenae, not unlike the way that Europeans long sought to locate their own racial genius in Classical Greece, a tendency that persists among suburban Americans with their Molon labe bumper stickers. In contrast, the Odyssey is a patchwork of Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern tales that echoes Gilgamesh and foreshadows the Arabian Nights. As a quest (actually two, that of Telemachus and his father) the Odyssey would influence Medieval literature and later, as a collection of incidents centring on food, sex and hubris, the emergence of the picaresque novel in the sixteenth century, from where you can trace a straight line to Modernism and the epic and bathetic retelling of the adventures of Odysseus and Telemachus in James Joyce's Ulysses.

But enough about the literature; what about the film? Nolan's decision to combine the two is interesting because The Iliad isn't particularly cinematic, as Wolfgang Peterson proved with his Troy in 2004. Warfare is actually an often dull subject on the screen: an impressive spectacle (Ridley Scott is arguably the pre-eminent director of this genre, as in Kingdom of Heaven or Napoleon) but one that struggles to connect emotionally (Scott's notable exception being Gladiator). 10 years before the walls of Troy is grim in anybody's book. The tendency to foreground the individual isn't just about the limitations of the budget, as Homer himself proved with Achilles and Patroclus. The Trojan Horse is a ridiculous plot device to a modern audience (surely the Trojans couldn't be that stupid?), and in Nolan's hands an improbable feat of artistry as well as engineering. It certainly doesn't look like it was fashioned from broken ship planks. But we accept it as the symbol of deception (of both the Trojans and Sinon), and as a portent of the coming divine vengeance as it burns in the conflagration of Troy. It's also worth noting that the Trojan scenes owe more to Virgil's Aeneid (such as the character of Sinon) than to either of Homer's works. Likewise, the film's ending owes more to Tennyson's Ulysses, which in turn links it cinematically to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings.

Nolan's syncretic approach bears fruit inasmuch as the film has a clear narrative line. Amusingly, it is less convoluted in its chronology than the original poem, which is full of flashbacks and tales within tales, and thus something of a departure from his earlier time-bending films such as Memento and Dunkirk. What it shares with those films is a focus on story over style. Nolan is interested in the technology of filmmaking, not only in his use of IMAX but in his dedication to "real world" illusion (The Prestige), to editing as time manipulation (Interstellar) and to the construction of narrative (Oppenheimer). But that last is very much about the construction, not the quality of writing. Nolan had been nominated for his screenplays but has never won a major award. His Oscars and BAFTAs are for best picture and best direction. In his interview with Christopher Frayling in Sight and Sound, Nolan states "What I was trying to do, actually, was to get through the text and have it disappear and get to the events." That comment comes after his admission that while he read Wilson's translation, he read many others too. So, no love lost there.

In that interview he cites Akira Kurosawa's Ran (an adapation of Shakespeare's King Lear) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (the biopic of a Medieval icon painter) as influences on the film, the one for its spectacle and grandeur, the other for its historical immersiveness. But I think you could make as good a case for Kurosawa's Yojimbo. That also makes more sense when Nolan cites Sergio Leone, who adapted the tale of a trickster warrior as A Fistful of Dollars, both in the stylised confrontation of the assault on Eumaeus and in the use of a diegetic sound that punctuates the drama: in Leone a pocketwatch (For a Few Dollars More) and in Nolan's film a plucked bowstring. Nolan also admits that the final scene of The Planet of the Apes was an inspiration for the setting of the Trojan Horse, listing to its side and part-buried in the sand like the Statue of Liberty, but again the bigger influence of that film may be in the theme of a desperate desire to return home only to discover that you were the alien all along. 

Frayling attempts to broach the subject of Uberto Pasolini's 2024 film The Return, which covers the same ground as the second half of Nolan's film, but the director politely shuts him down. However, that film lingers in the background in Frayling's next question about the choice of a consistent accent: contemporary American ("Mom" and "Dad" both feature in the dialogue). While Nolan swerves the convention of the baddies in a sword-and-sandals film being RP-speaking Brits, it means his film lacks any real class dimension. Jon Bernthal's Menelaus, the King of Sparta, could have appeared in The Godfather, if he'd improved his table manners, while the social hierarchy that protects Antinous and exploits Sinon has to be patiently explained. In contrast, The Return employs a range of accents. We know Eumaeus and Eurycleia are slaves because they have non-English accents.

Pasolini's film is the superior drama, informed by Fiennes's Shakespearian chops (see his 2011 version of Coriolanus), Binoche's familiarity with Greek drama (she has appeared on stage as Antigone), and their evident screen chemistry (Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, The English Patient). But the most striking comparison between the films may be in the role of Antinous, played in The Return by Marwan Kenzari as an Iago-like character, whereas in Nolan's film, which is actually truer to Homer, Robert Pattinson thoroughly enjoys himself as a cowardly braggart. Nolan's casting of Matt Damon as Odysseus (like Jason Bourne, a resourceful character who must recover his memory) makes cinematic sense. We must identify with Odysseus sufficiently to excuse the climactic mass murder (incidentally, Telemachus killing the slave women is unsurprisingly omitted from the story because, well, it's Tom Holland). Equally, we must identify with Penelope's faithfulness, as played by the doe-eyed Anne Hathaway. The ambiguity and suspicion about her husband's return that Binoche displays is nowhere to be seen.

In Homer, Odysseus is semi-divine: he speaks with the gods; he is deceitful, as they are; he shags around, as they do. Nolan's hero is more like a desert hermit, with Calypso as an occasional temptress rather than a long-term lover. His visions of Athena (played by Zendaya) are presented as symptoms of PTSD, as he recalls the Trojan temple girl beheaded before him and other war crimes. Odysseus is guilty of dishonouring xenia, Zeus's law, by the gift of the wooden horse. His long journey home is an extended lesson in hospitality and the consequences of breaching it. Insofar as Nolan's film has a politics, it is founded on the liberal ideal of carefully-calibrated generosity to those less fortunate, the recognition that all we have to fear is fear itself (the Sea People are us), and a refusal of the supernatural in favour of rationalism. That last might appear odd in a film based on a text in which the gods are everywhere and decisive, but Nolan's Odysseus regularly defies them and he just as regularly disenchants his credulous crew.

Nolan's film is a good watch. I've seen it twice now, once on IMAX (I am intimately familiar with Anne Hathaway's pores in a way I never expected to be) and would recommend that bigger frame if you can manage to see it. It is big enough and bold enough to bear the weight of all the cultural history and the modern criticism thrown at it, which is why I think contributions like Wilson's are ultimately more helpful than hindering. It is a fascinatingly rich and rewarding subject, and while I don't think Nolan's interpretation is the most adventurous or challenging, it has every right to expect to be the definitive version for the next few decades (I doubt Elon Musk's mooted AI version in the original Greek will prove a hit). My chief regret is that Nolan didn't cast Fiennes and Binoche before Pasolini did, but that would likely have resulted in a smaller budget and Nolan is probably no longer capable of making a film under such constraints. He reached his cinematic apotheosis with Oppenheimer and doesn't look likely to return to the realm of the mortals just yet. He is on his own odyssey.

Of Fictions and Factions

The media response to Andy Burnham's first week as Prime Minister has been both positive and sniffy. His communication skills have drawn praise, though doing a better job than Keir Starmer in this regard is just walking and chewing gum at the same time, to coin a phrase. His early announcements around the cost-of-living have been eye-catching but also small-beer in the grand fiscal scheme of things, while his willingness to start disappointing the left over defence spending and support for America's wars has brought a warm glow of contentment to Atlanticists everywhere. The Financial Times delivered a typical school report: "But so far, the parts of Burnhamonomics that are bold are not concrete, and those that are concrete are not bold." Meanwhile, the Grand Panjandrum of centrist opinion, Andrew Rawnsley, was prepared to be indulgent: "If the aim was to get off to a positive start, before pivoting away from sticking plasters and towards fixing the underlying problems, then perhaps some sketchy short-termist policies with sketchy funding is a price worth paying."

The most interesting response has focused on the reaction of those members of the Starmer cabinet who were promptly relieved of their duties on Monday. By Tuesday, Peter Walker in the Guardian reported that "Allies of Keir Starmer have questioned Andy Burnham’s pledge to end factional infighting after he removed or demoted more than half of the outgoing prime minister’s cabinet in his first reshuffle." The jarring detail here is the suggestion that Starmer had allies, as opposed to the contingent support of career opportunists. The man was promoted as a clean-skin who could gull the membership, but that just made him a willing (if ignorant) tool, not the intellectual pole around which a party tendency would coalesce. By Wednesday, this freshly-conjured grouping was being described by an unnamed Labour MP in a Politics Home report as "an incredibly powerful phalanx of skilled political operators who intimately know the government’s fiscal position", which sounded both delusional and threatening

Thursday was relatively quiet on the faction fabrication front but by Friday the Guardian had decided to go all in on the call-to-arms. According to Kiran Stacey, "Keir Starmer’s leaving party had been planned for some time. But in years to come it might be seen as the birth of a new Labour movement." By Sunday, Andrew Rawnsley had got with the programme: "Having previously said that he wanted to “move beyond” the “infighting” and “factionalism” that has “bedevilled us”, he sacked 11 cabinet ministers, many of whose common offence was declining to call for Sir Keir to quit. He then carried out a purge of Starmer loyalists in the junior ministerial ranks." Stacey's explanation for this sudden emergence was not the petulance and sense of entitlement of the likes of Darren Jones and Steve Reed but Starmer's own curious path to power: "One of Starmer’s biggest problems in government was that he did not have an identifiable faction of people who were willing to defend him at all costs – a symptom of both his late entry into politics and of his relative lack of ideology."

Given the ruthless purge conducted against the left of the party, the idea that Starmer lacked ideology or factional muscle is ridiculous, and that's before you consider his record in office, from unnecessarily persisting with austerity to backing Israel's "right" to murder civilians. For the last two years you would struggle to find anyone who would willingly identify as a "Starmerite", but now we are asked to believe that they are a disciplined army that could threaten a government majority of 158. The political press have a long tradition of inventing Labour factions, usually in order to isolate the socialist left - most notably the ever-useful and mutable "soft left", the Play-Doh of social democratic aspiration - but they've excelled themselves in conjuring a "movement" around the cypher of Keir Starmer and the totem of Rachel Reeves' fiscal rules. Stacey eventually concedes that this novel faction may only be the result of musical chairs: "But many of those whom Burnham sacked or demoted after entering office did have one thing in common: they were close to the former prime minister and had not called for him to resign."

Since Burnham won the Makerfield byelection, there has been a noticeable shift in the Guardian's use of the term "factionalism". During the Starmer era, it was rarely mentioned in the context of the expulsion of the left, despite that being a textbook factional operation that many participants were only to happy to brag about publicly, for example in Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund's tell-all book Get In. It is axiomatic to centrists that they are not factional, with the implications of blind loyalty and a refusal to face facts, while their critics are. Unsurprisingly, Rafael Behr now compares those disappointed opportunists with the "radical left", essentially to dismiss them as not serious people: "Labour’s radical left is always on a hair trigger, poised to denounce compromise as betrayal of socialist principle. Now there is also a small but aggrieved band of Starmer loyalists in exile poised to highlight (or relish) missteps and vulnerabilities." It's bad enough to lose your cabinet job, but to be expelled from the ranks of the sensible must really hurt.

The whining of Starmer's supposed "allies" is a return to the faux-factionalism of Blair/Brown, in which ideological congruity is obscured by personal hatred. The attempt to conjure the soft left as part of Ed Miliband's threat to market stability was shortlived, but you can expect that notional faction to reappear when the need once more arises. Andy Burnham was always going to get rid of the higher profile Starmer appointees to the cabinet, if only to emphasise that he was a new broom, so I don't think too much can be read into Reeves, Lammy, Reed, Kyle, Kendall, Hermer et al getting the elbow. None particularly distinguished themselves in office. Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood have offended many, at either end of the ideological spectrum, but they've also proved they can get stuff done, and Labour badly need tangible results by 2029. The same rationale explains why John Healey is now the latest Iron Chancellor: butter rations will be halved but we will definitely have more guns.

Insofar as the reshuffle advanced one faction over another, it was in the geographical rather than the ideological sense, with a noticeable shift to more Northern MPs in cabinet and particularly those from the North West. This is not just a symbolic attempt to push the narrative of devolution, reinforced by the launch of "Number 10 North" this week, but a reflection that Starmer was very reliant on a London core for his support, both in terms of MPs, party apparatchiks and the media. Whether this will impart a genuinely different flavour to the government is moot. It's notable that none of the MPs aligned with the Mainstream grouping, set up to counter the drift to the right under Starmer, got a sniff at a junior ministerial post. So far, Burnham does not look likely to diverge from the post-Thatcher consensus despite his early talk of an end to Neoliberalism and regrets over privatisation. A tilt towards Ordoliberalism, which historically valued devolution, seems more likely, which means there will be little challenge to property rights and little that is recognisably socialist.

In this context, the creation of factions serves to substitute court politics for the clash of interests that might have a more profound, and therefore destabilising, impact on policy. Though there have been the usual "warnings" from union leaders directed at Number 10, the discourse has barely featured the concerns of organised labour (outside of oil and gas jobs) any more than the particular concerns of civil society organisations. As usual, we've heard more from think-tanks than protest groups. Of course this is manna from heaven for political journalists and commentators, for whom ideology is a dirty word. Of the current political caucuses at Westminster, Blue Labour and the Labour Growth Group are likely to be absorbed into the main body of Burnham's support, while the soft left will remain quiescent. This leaves the for/against dichotomy familiar from the New Labour years but with those resentful of Burnham lacking any obvious champion, leading to the current absurdity of the Starmerite resistance. 

Looking back over the last 16 years, the PLP lacked the talent to succeed Blair and Brown, hence the Miliband(s) debacle and the runaway success of Corbyn. The result of that was the decision to import a leader from outside Westminster: first the unknown Starmer conning the membership; and then a recycled Burnham avoiding the need for an election through PLP discipline. What few are prepared to acknowledge is that this underlying dearth of talent, as much as the shenanigans, reflects the slow death of the Labour Party as an organic product of civil society, a process accelerated by the purge of the left. Burnham's municipalism (a more accurate label than Manchesterism) is a desperate attempt to reconnect with society through revitalised local government, even as it requires central government to mandate capped bus fares. The acid test will be council housebuilding. She wasn't central to the week's discourse, beyond ruling out rent controls, but the success of this government will probably now rest on the shoulders of Angela Rayner, the new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. She will no doubt shortly be awarded her own faction.

Burnhamesque

The symbolic moment of the handover of power between Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham this week was not the former's maudlin PMQs session but the leak that the latter is thinking of appointing Shabana Mahmood as Chancellor of the Exchequer. This may not actually come to pass, but what matters is the public emphasis placed on the need to keep the bond markets happy, and the private reassurance that it is the party right that remains firmly in charge, not the battalions of the soft left (once more conjured into existence by the media) massing behind "Red" Ed Miliband. Mahmood is not known for heterodox thinking on economics, while her stint as Shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury lasted all of 4 months, ending when she resigned from the Shadow Cabinet the day after Jeremy Corbyn assumed the party leadership. It is that action that clearly commends her both to the PLP and to the media. 

In some ways it is remarkable that we have moved so quickly from the expectation that Andy Burnham would bring down the curtain on "40 years of Neoliberalism" (it was only in May) to a resigned acknowledgment that little will change. In June in The New Stateman, Michael Jacobs commended the sentiment but worried that Burnham might be fighting the last war, while Karel Williams and David Edgerton characterised the coming administration as likely to be "more of the same, with added vibes", a theme promptly picked up by Owen Jones in the Guardian as part of the campaign to get Miliband promoted. Since then, Burnham appears to have been speed-running Starmer's trajectory, caveating previous statements and rowing back on his assumed intentions, albeit having had the sense to not put much in writing. He is obviously not a man of cast-iron pledges but of cheery vibes, and that will probably help avoid repeating those tricky situations where a shifty Starmer was confronted with his bald lies. So far, Burnham has disappointed the left on Gaza and defence, and shows every sign of intending to disappoint them elsewhere too. 

Central to cartel politics is the idea of the markeplace of ideas, in which policy entrepreneurs compete to attract the admiring gaze of the political class in a sort of intellectual beauty contest conducted through the medium of slide-decks and chunky PDFs - i.e. in the manner of a business pitch. The ideological frame is clear enough, but so is the idea that politicians themselves have no fixed beliefs and are merely pragmatists interested in "what works". Burnham's victory in the Makerfield by-election prompted a rash of ideas that quickly coalesced under the title of Manchesterism. Matthew Lawrence and Alex Williams' paper on The Productive State, subtitled "A Framework for Manchesterism", is perhaps the most substantial offering to date, largely because it has been long-gestated at the Common Wealth think tank (someone must have been very pleased with herself for coming up with that name). The problem is that these ideas have been knocking around among progressives for some years now but, outside of the Corbyn/McDonnell interregnum, there has been litlle interest in them from the Labour Party.

Chris Dillow made the point that while Lawrence and Williams recognise the central issue of power - "The fundamental problem is ownership, not conduct. It is impossible to regulate away a problem created by ownership" - they offer little in the way of practical advice on how power can be acquired beyond noting that "Postwar nationalisations used government debt as compensation" and that "compulsory acquisition would typically require compensation based on fair market value, and acquiring assets materially below prevailing market valuations would likely require primary legislation and could face legal challenge." Given that public utilities and the NHS have been systematically looted for decades now, we surely need to question whether we want to re-enact the prim and proper approach of the Attlee government. Instead, the advocates of nationalisation today have been at pains to emphasise this pragmatism. Thus Larry Elliott in The Guardian noted that "Compensation to the owners of the mines and the big four rail companies was actually quite generous, which is why the nationalisation programme was relatively trouble-free." No shit.

This timidity is the consequence of the marketplace of ideas as much as ancestor-worship: the elevation of theory over practice, unless the latter is in the form of "reforms" to existing services and regulations - i.e. within the boundaries of neoliberal practice. Nobody at Common Wealth or the Resolution Foundation is going to put up a slide saying we need a general strike, a mass boycott or a refusal to pay. Revolutionary methods cannot be expected from the "radical realists" of Labour's latest grouping, Mainstream (just typing these labels is depressing), any more than we can expect them to invoke democracy and the people except at the most abstract level, hence the popularity of the phrase "public control", which is less about masking the preference for regulation over ownership than making the public a mere fetish. The competition for Andy Burham's ear is about securing influence over the mechanisms of the centralised state. For this reason, we should be sceptical about the talk of devolution.

The Productive State came out in June. I doubt many people still have much hope for its recommendations to be taken up by the new administration, or even for many of them to make their way, however heavily diluted, into the manifesto for the next general election. The media have focused their attention on the promise/threat of a wealth tax, the "debates" over whether we should junk Net Zero and the ECHR, and the need for more crackdowns on immigration and welfare. This is not simply a case of media-owners pursuing their own interests in those areas but a conscious attempt to narrow the government's bandwith, by "flooding the zone with shit", such that more radical ideas will be squeezed out. The debate over who should be Chancellor has similarly been conducted as a distracting and tedious contest between "Chaos with Ed Miliband" and whichever Labour politician looks most likely to continue Rachel Reeves' good work and do nothing to frighten the horses.

By July, the progressive end of the media was focused on prodding Burnham to consider practical solutions, such as Larry Elliott urging him to mandate the Bank of England "to provide a flow of low-cost, patient capital needed to fund the reindustrialisation strategy", an idea that obviously isn't going to survive contact with Shabana Mahmood, while Andy Beckett was insisting that "Overcoming Britain’s aversion to fundamental reform is not impossible. In the last century, David Lloyd George, Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher managed it, for three very different governments in three very different contexts". What Beckett didn't note was that the political context that gave them the authority to make radical change was actually the same: the kudos arising from a successful war, but also the recognition that the decades prior to the conflict could not be returned to. Burnham has made that acknowledgment, but he doesn't have the goodwill engendered by wartime sacrifice and victory.

Meanwhile, the helpful suggestions continue to come in from outside government, from rationalising the tax code to devolving power and finance to the regions. But when we turn to the ideas emanating from within government, we find a call to stop "simply writing a cheque" for health and disability benefit claimants, which sound awfully like a return to workfare. The other symbolic moment of the week was the passage of the Hillsborough Law - the Public Office (Accountability) Bill - in the House of Commons after much foot-dragging by the government over the security services' duty of candour (a major issue in respect of the Manchester Arena bombing). Burnham has been a  sincere champion for this cause, at least since he was publicly booed at a memorial ceremony held at Anfield in 2009, but the long delay in the passage of the bill indicates the limits of state reform, as much as the resilience of the campaigners. Burnham claim that the bill is "truly a rewiring of the state" is hyperbole.

In summary, there is little reason to believe that Burnham will be the social democratic saviour of the country that some were pining for back in May, but his deft media footwork and his willingness to cast greater regulation, whether by Whitehall or local authorities, as populist activism may be enough to save the Labour Party from electoral oblivion. The creation of some new public corporations, an emphasis on the common good, and an unabashed promotion of the state as a regulator of markets, all intended to help alleviate the cost-of-living through an attack on rentierism and private monopolies, may be enough for many voters. The irony is that the man promising an end to Neoliberalism may turn out to be the first truly Ordoliberal Prime Minister of the UK.