Look Back in Perpexity

Photo of Hanif Kureishi: Brett Weinstein

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion was one of the greatest plays ever written about class and it developed directly out of the particularities of language that defined British society in a way that was notorious and sometimes clichéd. The genius of the play is not only to create a character like the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle but to embellish the contrast by making her Pygmalion not only upper crust, but a student of language itself. Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady set it all to music. Language is of course what plays are made of, but it’s really only the tip of the iceberg. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were inhabitants of London who found a deeper explanation for class division. Das Kapital was Marx’s analysis of the workings of the capitalist economy. Later on Ralf Dahrendorf, a sociologist who was a member of both the German parliament and the House of Lords, would offer an post-Marxist understanding of society in Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. And the legacy of colonialism evidenced in a movie like Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette, written by Hanif Kureishi, the son of a Pakistani immigrant, might better speak to class division than the facile linguistic dichotomies put forth by Shaw at the turn of the last century. But here comes Fiona Devine, a sociologist from Manchester University hired by the BBC to create The Great British Class Survey. According to the Times (“Multiplying the Old Divisions of Class in Britain,” NYT 4/3/13), the results of the survey responded to by 161,000 people were that “in today’s complicated world, there are now seven different social classes…These range from the ‘elite’ at the top, distinguished by money, connections and rarefied cultural interests, to the ‘precariat’ at the bottom, characterized by lack of money, lack of connections and unrarefied cultural interests.” The in- between categories that the study describes as quoted by the Times include “the ‘technical middle class,’ a group that has a lot of money but few superior social connections,” “’the emergent service workers,’ a young urban group that has li little money but a high amount of social and cultural capital” and “the ‘new affluent workers,’ who score high on social and cultural activity, but have only a middling amount of money.” Sounds like it’s no longer the mythological character of Pygmalion, but Pandora or Proteus, that the up and coming generation of British playwrights will turn to when they try to deal with the changing complexion of English Society at the Royal Court.

The Art of Distraction

Photo: Brett Weinstein

Hanif Kureishi’s profound and provocative essay, “The Art of Distraction” in the Sunday Review section of the Times (NYT, 2/18/12) will undoubtedly prove very troubling to some readers whose children are suffering from learning disorders and who have experienced success using drugs like Ritalin. Here is Kureishi, the brilliant director of My Beautiful Laundrette, “You could say that attention needs to be paid to intuition; that one can learn to attend to the hidden self, and there might be something there worth listening to. If the Ritalin boy prefers obedience to creativity, he may be sacrificing his best interests in a way that might infuriate him later. A flighty mind might be going somewhere.” The essay is loaded with gems like this. Kureishi had trouble learning as does one of his sons and in the throes of his adolescence he went through a particularly wretched period. “I was suffering from a form of intellectual anorexia—the refusal to be given anything, to take anything in. As a result of that self-stymieing, I lost hope and believed I’d never catch up or achieve anything.” Many jeremiads about those suffering from symptoms like the ones Kureishi describes point to the consequences of not using drugs. Kureishi points to the consequences of using them, but the path he charts out is one that is not free of things like pain, disappointment and ostracism. He freely admits that he dreamt frequently of the rewards of possessing what one would suppose to be a typical high functioning analytic intelligence and of the feelings of belonging such a gift can produce. But he obviously believes that the pain he endured was justified—if sensibility itself is a just reward. “Ritalin and other forms of enforcement and psychological policing are the contemporary equivalent of the old practice of tying up children’s hands in bed, so they won’t touch their genitals. The parent stupefies the child for the parent’s good.” Undoubtedly there will be lots of irate letters to the Times about this piece, and that itself is a good thing. Those who come out on either side of this issue might recall Baudelaire’s famous words, “hypocrite lecteur,--mon semblable,--mon frère!”