13 November 2007

Dystopias

Dystopias are usually dark images presented as what may be to come, or what could have been, often in order to comment on the present and current trends. What follows below is a list of writers and their works exploring variously the predicted future, or imagined futures, or imagined pasts, or imagined presents. I do not know whether the focus is merely mine, but technology and stage of technological development seem to play a significant role, whether through science fiction or through fantasy. An issue faced by all dystopic works is how to separate the dystopia from the real world. One method is to set the dystopia in the past. More commonly, the dystopia is set in the future, sometimes post-apocalyptically. A second method is to invent a fantasy world (Gormenghast, Middle Earth). A third is to place the dystopia on an island.

Early Works
Although I feel reluctant to include here The Revelation of St. John, canonically the final book of the New Testament, it purports to consider the future. Indeed, it is an eschatological work, that expresses the fears and hopes of the writer. There is no sense of a different technology, merely the destruction of society, maybe on moral grounds.
In total contrast, some of the writings and drawings of Galileo Galilei focus on moving technology forwards so as to better the lot of people in contemporary society.
Thomas More wrote a utopia, a pastoral idyll that I guess (for I have not read it) to be a kind of correction to all that was wrong with Elizabethan England. As I understand it, his writing was not about the future.
Nostradamus purported to predict the future. No doubt he had an agenda that was more financial and less mystical than popular imagination would care to believe. However, for people who take him seriously, the future was his to observe, not to control or judge. Why are people fascinated with his writing? What sort of people are fascinated with his writing?

Island Dystopias
Published in 1719, Daniel Defoe's novel about Robinson Crusoe, was based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk was shipwrecked, and for four years lived on an island off the coast of Chile. This was at a time when Britain was developing its empire. Selkirk and Crusoe had access only to pre-Iron Age technology, and the island represented regression.
The issue of regression, but much more explicitly regarding human nature, was explored by William Golding in The Lord of the Flies. In this 1950s novel, the aeroplane crash lands on a desert island, and the only survivors are children. The atavism that lies at the root of what it is to be human is progressively exposed by the island, leading to the savage murders of both Simon and Piggy.
In 1980, Lucy Irvine agreed with Gerald Kingsland to be Castaway (book, and movie starring Oliver Reed, 1986) on a desert island (Tuin Island in the Torres Straight, off the northern coast of Australia), as were both Joanna Lumley in Girl Friday (1994), and Tom Hanks, albeit fictionally, in Cast Away (2000).
Islas Sorna and Nublar constitute a different kind of island dystopia, inhabited by dinosaurs. These are largely closed worlds in which technology has been or becomes destroyed. It is ironic that it is only the most advanced technology that has permitted the re-creation of the archaic animal (and plant) life, whereas the dinosaurs themselves have the effect of destroying all technology. There is an obvious sense of disclocated time: 65 million years ago, a kind of present day, a near future in which such technology would be possible. There is also the observation in each movie that our society is fixated with entertainment I: theme park, II: safari, III: extreme sports / personal recreation.

Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe
During the height of the industrial revolution, with new sources of energy and new forms of power, the promise and threat of modern technology began to be explored.
In France, Jules Verne was writing exciting adventure stories, such as Journey to the Centre of the Earth, with exploration at their heart and new understandings of science and technology to add spice and suspend disbelief.
H.G.Wells wrote about possible futures. In The Time Machine, his protagonist is an observer; however, the tension between the Eloi and the Morlocks suggests a moral dimension that accords with Wells' eugenicist leanings. In both War of the Worlds and The Shape of Things to Come, Wells focuses on England in the future, although he gives a sense of life beyond Britain.
Fritz Lang's Metropolis is distinctly set in a future. It is not comforting.
Aldous Huxley set Brave New World in the future of the 26th century. It is a utopia in that it is a place of order, but it is a dystopia in that to a contemporary person there is no freedom. Huxley was extrapolating from what he knew of social (rise of Nazism and Stalinism) and technological developments (eugenics and the steadily increasing mechanisation of society).
Tolkein's response to what was happening in the world was to regress into the early medieval times of Middle Earth. In his highly moral tales, social relationships are rigid, and there is an absence of technology beyond the Iron Age. Middle Earth includes England (The Shire), but also includes dangerous places that are far away.
C.S.Lewis, in his writings, also explored a moral (Christian) past in Narnia (some of which resembles the medieval England of Robin Hood tales). However, Lewis also looked into the future, albeit with moral foreboding (Voyage to Venus, Out of the Silent Planet, That Hideous Strength).
Mervyn Peake also apparently retreated into a kind of Gothic (perhaps early 19th century) English past in his Gormenghast trilogy. However, his work is also more obviously a comment on what he was experiencing in mid-20th century England.
Written in 1947, and also commenting on post-war England, albeit set in the near future, is Orwell/Blair's 1984. There is technology, but no science. There is no freedom. For faithful party worker Winston Smith, the bad dream turns into a nightmare when he transgresses. There is for me an irony that whilst Orwell/Blair wrote that Big Brother is watching us, and therefore we must not transgress, in early twenty-first century, everyone is watching Big Brother, and has little time to transgress. With the exception, perhaps, of Monaco and Singapore, metropolitan Britain is probably one of the most observed places in the world, with webcams, cellphone cameras and closed-circuit television cameras beyond count. However, it is also clear from incidents such as the terrorist bombings in London on 7 July 2005, that despite hugely more advanced technology to the British state than was available in 1947 Britain, or to Airstrip One in 1984, it was not possible to prevent the bombings: the sense of being watched is more in the mind than in reality.
In Brazil, Terry Gilliam reworks 1984 into a darkly humourous absurdity. Whilst the location of the drama is a city in an economically-developed state, the place is more obviously New York than London.
In Escape from New York, John Carpenter takes the New York dystopia almost to its logical conclusion: the city as a prison from which there is no escape.
On the other hand, although A Clockwork Orange, is set both in place (southern England) and time (1960s), Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick, in their dystopia, consider the breakdown of morals.
In John Wyndham's novels, there is a breakdown in society, usually precipitated by the desire for dangerous (scientific) knowledge: The Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos (Village of the Damned: John Carpenter), The Kraken Wakes.
On the other hand, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick see progressive and evolutionary development of human awareness both as co-dependent on technological development, and also continuing into the future, as shown in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Similar ideas are developed more dystopically in Minority Report (starring Tom Cruise)
In I, Robot, Isaac Asimov develops a future in which the distinction between humankind and our technological creations become indistinguishable.

Post-Apocalyptic Visions of the Future
In The Postman, Kevin Costner plays the part of a drifter in a post-apocalyptic future in which society and civilised values and morals have been all-but destroyed. The stage of technological development is a mixture of early-Iron Age (I think that there is a blacksmith) and legacy industrial. Although the movie is critically held as flawed, it raises some interesting issues, for instance about what it is that we carry into the future. A hope for their future lies in rebuilding their civilisation, initially focused around the US Mail (c.f. the role of the Post Office in Die Blechtrommel).
In Waterworld, Kevin Costner plays the part of a drifter in a post-apocalyptic future in which society and civilised values and morals have been all-but destroyed. The stage of technological development is a mixture of pre-Iron Age and legacy industrial. The movie questions what will be left of our civilisation in centuries to come. A hope for the future, which becomes realised in the movie, is finding and re-inhabiting dry land.
In the Mad Max series, Mel Gibson plays the part of a drifter in a post-apocalyptic future in which society and civilised values and morals have been all-but destroyed. There is no hope for the future, and all hope has been destroyed.

08 November 2007

The UK Immigration Debate

This post is based partly on two postings I made on the weblog of BBC television's flagship current affairs programme: Newsnight. During late October and early November 2007 the print and broadcast media have been making much of announcements made by the UK government about the number of people without British nationality who are living in the UK. I have been very unhappy about the tone of the discourse, the tenor of which is to wish to reduce or relegate the validity of people not born in the UK to live and/or work in the UK. The pronouns most frequently used are "we" (referring to people born in the UK, with the strong implication that these people are white-skinned and speak English as a first language) and "them" (referring to people not born in the UK, with the strong implication that these people may or may not be white-skinned, but do not speak English as a first language). I do not wish to be categorised as part of the "we". I should much rather that the focus were on 'people living and/or working in the UK'.

I am fed up with hearing commentators endlessly repeat immigration statistics. I would much rather listen to an informed and intelligent discussion about the changing demographics of ecomically-developed and -developing states, about the desirability or otherwise of doing anything about the changing demographics, about an ethical analysis of migration (refugees, asylum seekers, poor people wanting a better life), about the pros and cons of classic nationhood in this
globalised world, and about the ways in which the news media and political parties address, or fail to address, these issues.

Myth-buster 1:
Britain is not a small island. Britain is huge: not only are there are vast, unpopulated tracts, there are many towns and cities in northern England that are under-populated with stagnant local economies awaiting revitalisation. Britain is far from the most densely populated economically-developed country. Greater Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York City, Monaco and the Netherlands, for example, are more densely populated than the supposedly over-populated south east of England, and they are social and economic powerhouses for that.


Myth-buster 2:
Indigenous culture is a determinant only for people who wish to make it so. Contemporary Britain has more in common with most of the economically-developed world than it does with Britain a century ago ("The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Hartley, L.P., London, 1953) The culture of a country is whatever the people who happen to live in that place make it to be, not what it used to be. Christianity was once alien to the islands now called Britain. Happily, few of the world's major cultures are now strangers to each other here in Britain.


Myth-buster 3:
I have neither a legal nor a moral right to determine who lives in my street. I do have a right to choose in which street I live. Many Britons choose to exercise that right by migrating to France, Spain, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and so on. I am happy that people from all around the globe choose to exercise their legal right to migrate to Britain. Rather than tightened, as the current political rhetoric would have, I should prefer that legal restrictions on migration were eased.

Listening to an edition of Newsnight broadcast on the evening of Thursday 8 November 2007, during which telephone callers were invited to offer their opinions, it became clear that few if any of the callers were interested in generalisable facts and statistics. They did little to demonstrate that their minds were open to rational argument. Instead they used slogans such as "Britain is a small island", and "We are an island nation", "Our country has been flooded with immigrants" and "We have become an ethnic minority". It was, at the same time, clear that many of the callers, speaking from their own experience, perceived no benefit to themselves from the presence of people who they considered to be from elsewhere ("foreign", "immigrant"). Whilst I am enthusiastic to live in a modern, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic country, many people born in the UK would prefer to live in a society made up of English-speaking, white-skinned, anglo-saxons. Their intentions, as they so readily (too readily, perhaps) stated, are not (strongly) racist. However, they directly experience the discomfort of social change, including dislocation, but perceive themselves as receiving none of the benefits. Arguments such as "The NHS/London Transport/fruit picking would collapse without the work of people from overseas" are weak in their eyes for two reasons: many of the jobs undertaken by unskilled people from overseas are low status jobs, and are invisible in the way that homeless people on the street tend to be looked through (and being poorly recognised quite how many jobs of this kind there are, there is little sense of how vulnerable to collapse these sections of the UK economy may be); there are white British people who are unemployed who should be doing such jobs (with little attention being given to the location of the people versus jobs, and the health status of many unemployed people in relation to physically demanding jobs).

Migrant Workers

Some of the UK public debate about immigration focuses on the perceived value to the UK economy of people from other countries. The argument is that the British economy benefits from both the specialist skills, and also the lower wage expectations, of people from other countries. The debate revolves around the concept of migrant workers. The term is used largely to refer to people who are undertaking low-skilled, poorly-paid jobs such as fruit picking and other agricultural work, office and hospital cleaning, and low status care roles. At the high-status end of the spectrum, it would be unusual for a Chicago-born Managing Director of the UK office of a transnational corporation, or a young, Hong-Kong-born international banker working for a few years in the City, or a partly Frankfurt-based Commodities and Futures Manager who commutes to London for three days each week, to be referred to as 'migrant workers'. Perhaps intermediate in status are the specialist skills of a computer software engineer from, say, Bangalore, who takes a well-paid job in Bristol, Birmingham or Manchester, sending much of his salary to his family in India; or a dentist who has let her flat in Warsaw so that she can live and work in Nottingham for a few years, earning enough money to be able to buy a house in the southern mountains of Poland.

I am unhappy that people from other countries are being seen in terms of their economic worth to the British economy. To me, this view approaches the attitude of seeing people primarily, or even merely, as units of production. Ultimately this is the attitude that permitted (and in some cases still permits) the slave trade. People are, first and foremost, human beings.

Asylum Seekers and Bogus Asylum Seekers and Refugees

I am certain, although I cannot prove it, that in the minds of many people in the UK there is no distinction between the categories of refugee and asylum seeker, and there is an elision between the categories of asylum seeker and migrant worker (who in this context is more typically referred to as an economic migrant, which is considered synonymous with 'someone who is out for whatever they can get'). I am equally certain that, whilst there are occasions when the overall tenor of public discourse leads to more overt expressions of compassion for people fleeing disasters such as drought, flood, famine and wars, the duration of the compassion rarely extends to an enthusiasm to rehouse the victims of such circumstances in the UK. For example, when a volcanic eruption devastated the Caribbean island of Monserrat, there was a national failure in Britain to understand why the displaced people had to come to the UK. "Why can't they go elsewhere?" It was the same with refugees from the war in Bosnia. There appears both to be an unwillingness to accept that, along with every other country with UN membership, the UK has international legal obligations, and also a belief that Britain already does more than its fair share. There is also the perception, expressed most vocally in the 'red-top' press, that people claiming a fear of persecution as the reason for their need to leave their home country, are either lying or exaggerating, and are principally motivated by the simple desire for a better life. These so-called "bogus asylum seekers" are most charitably described as economic migrants, and much resentment is expressed by white British people who would like a better life for themselves. The fact that it may be very hard to leave the country in which one has always lived, the country in which one's relatives and friends (those that remain alive) still live, a country in which one fears that the police (e.g. Jack Mapange) or the military (e.g. asylum seekers from Rwanda and Burundi) or the death squads, will be watching the ports, and also that it is remarkably difficult to arrive in, and gain admittance to (see The Terminal starring Tom Hanks), the UK, is considered to be of little relevance. In The Net, the character played by Sandra Bullock expects to get her life back, which she does in the end, as do the characters played by Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, and by Will Smith in Enemy of the State. Life on the run in one's own country is lonely and miserable, and played by Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State.

06 November 2007

Edinburgh: the best place to live in the UK

Edinburgh (population 430,082) is considered to be the best place to live in the UK.

It is easy to offer reasons for Edinburgh's status. The city has shops: (inter)national chain and independent, and the reputation of Princess Street extends beyond the UK. There are restaurants (including several vegetarian restaurants) offering a wide range of cuisines at a range of prices. Tripadvisor lists 194 hotels, 219 B&Bs and inns, and 45 speciality lodgings. There are cinemas, theatres and art galleries that are swept up in an internationally-renowned summer arts festival. Murrayfield is well known to sports fans, and there are golf courses around the city. Encircling the southern half of the city is a near-motorway by-pass, and there is a well-used local bus network, a local rail network, and construction of a tram network is underway. The local economy is thriving, boosted by tourism. The presence of the Scottish parliament is a vote of confidence in the city.

The building that houses the Scottish parliament is a wonderful construction. Although much criticised, and unjustly mocked, it is highly original in design, in excellent taste, apparently fit for purpose (although I should want to hear the opinions of MSPs before firming up on that statement), and an impressive intertwining of contemporary and historical.

05 November 2007

Middlesbrough: the worst place to live in the UK

In a recent popular UK television property programme (Location, Location, Location) focusing on the best and worst places to live in the UK, it was announced that Middlesbrough is the worst to live in 2007. The programme-makers compiled and analysed what they implied were vast quantities of statistical data about the areas defined by each local government authority in the UK. The data for Middlesbrough are depressingly clear: poor diet leading to high levels of obesity; heavy use of tobacco leading to poor health; high levels of crime, especially violent crime; high levels of prostitution and illicit drug use; poor quality housing; and poor educational achievement. According to the Office for National Statistics, the population around the docks have the poorest life-expectancy in the UK. Hartlepool, Hull and Grimsby also fared badly for similar reasons. All four are North Sea coast industrial towns that thrived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but are now stuggling to find new twenty-first century roles, and some kind of post-industrial purpose in life.

When interviewed, people in Middlesbrough expressed unhappiness about the designation. It is not that they expressed any (misplaced, perhaps) sense of responsibility. Some of these people identify with the town, and in a love-me-love-my-dog kind of a way, take the label as a personal criticism: criticise my town and you criticise me. Some denied the designation, claiming that the programme researchers were in error. Although approximations and judgments will have been made, and mistakes are possible, it seems unlikely that the four North Sea coast industrial towns should in truth be designated as deeply desirable places in which to live. The long-held British penchant for empiricism over abstract theory is not lightly to be dumped by denying the data. Some people denied the designation, claiming a southern conspiracy. However, the purpose and motivation for such a conspiracy are unclear.

It would be easy to understand were the people of Middlesbrough to express anger that they are ill-served by the statutory services of local government, the police and the National Health Service, for it is the authorities and the statutory services that are failing the people. However, Ray Mallon, the mayor of Middlesbrough, and its former police chief, rather than committing himself and his office to social improvement, chose to express dissatisfaction with the designation. It is not my intention to criticise the work of any individual, as I am certain that there are many people working in the statutory or voluntary sectors who are performing sterling work under difficult circumstances. However, there is a responsibility for the people who lead and manage these services to be in possession of an analysis and a vision that can lead Middlesbrough, and its people, away from its current status.

Another comment I have heard in this context is that it is unhelpful to kick a dog when it is down. However, Middlesbrough is not a dog, it is a town on some 142,691 people who deserve better services than they are receiving from the organisations with responsibility to serve them. Better a bleak, stark picture that tells the truth, even if it is only a snapshot, than a comforting chocolate box image that glosses over what should be unacceptable.