Eminentoes/The Iron Lady of Collectivism
Greer, Herb
ty has served a vital purpose of its founders: It has been the instrument of procuring reconciliation between France and West Germany. The finanCial burdens it has imposed on its members,...
...There was not a film being made that truly inspired me to sit down at the typewriter and bat out the thousand words necessary to fill this space...
...I would call him the "consumer guide...
...more important, on those rare occasions when I truly detest a movie, I find there is something especially loathsome about that movie that gives me reason to attack it...
...Webb's feudal model for society...
...It might also be an epitaph for those politics, if they were dead and gone...
...What mainly interests the sociological critic is the failure or success of a given film with its audience--himself included...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 egregious and so widespread...
...British democracy seems headed away from a ritual of electoral consent to govern, into a mutually destructive b a t t l e which a c t u a l l y impairs government...
...mense manuscript takes her story up to the last quarter of 1905, just before the redoubtable Fabian and social researcher was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Poor Law and the Relief of Distress...
...There are, I think, basically three kinds of movie critics...
...Minor art, perhaps...
...British politicians, more concerned with the democratic business of getting votes, appalled her by their implementation of her ideas...
...the form was pioneered by Robert Warshow and Manny Farber...
...The principal result has been and still is a pattern of expectation which centers on government, not just as the source of protection and guaranteed survival, but of general, almost godlike wisdom which confers a constantly rising standard of living...
...it does not break men's will hut softens, bends, and guides it...
...A nice bit of scenery, a good musical number, even the sight of my old neighborhood in New York can obviate much that I do not enjoy...
...Discounting the onerous myth of original sin, Pelagius held that salvation was a prize to be earned purely by human effort, without the complicating factor of God's grace...
...I'm not sure I would like to have a drink with them, though...
...The alliance foundered_9 Beatrice turned first to social work and then discovered her vocation with research into the great puzzle of the age: why, amidst the spectacular scientific and commercial progress of the nineteenth century, poverty was so ~My Apprenticeship and Our Partnership...
...That her "experts" would be lords and the rest vassals was beyond doubt, and she was not very concerned with what this would mean for the individual: "Experimenting in the lives of other people, how cold-blooded...
...It is necessary to explain that "experimenting" cannot be avoided...
...The well-to-do prided themselves on belonging to the greatest and richest empire in history, served by the best scientists, engineers, and businessmen who had helped to make Britain the most successful and advanced country in the world...
...He contributes huge, detailed articles to scholarly journals like Film Comment, Sight and Sound, and Films in Review...
...The third is the one I would call the "sociological critic...
...It is a bitter comment on the Fabian belief that, if only people were better housed and clothed, they would be better or (which was the same thing to the reformers) behave better...
...A person who loves Clint Eastwood cannot possibly explain why to a person who hates Eastwood...
...If I were, I would long ago have run screaming from a movie theater, vowing never to return...
...When it comes to the movies, I am an unremitting lowbrow...
...Even now political parties, especially Labour, make it their business to inflate Welfare-State expectations to an impossible degree, in particular exaggerating the control of government in economic matters...
...he is the fellow granted 90 seconds on the nightly news to offer his often monosyllabic judgment on a given movie...
...This meant real effort from the recipient to improve both his circumstances and character, and so contribute to the health of society_9 This contribution was to be the real motive behind welfare...
...But this is not where present changes in Britain seem to be heading_9 The British tradition of stroppy individualism, while not dead, is often malversed into a subnational collective of some kind...
...Poverty was supposed to be caused by defects of character such as laziness, or a supine acceptance of misfortune...
...As a result, not once during my previous tenure did I review a foreignlanguage film...
...The second is the "academic critic," of whom the general public is by and large ignorant...
...The tyranny of the state is implicit in her earliest thinking about society...
...There was a pervasive feeling of puzzled guilt among the middle classes and the wellto-do--what Beatrice Webb called a class consciousness of sin...
...but the truly great movies, the ones that seem to elevate us to a higher plane, can, I think, literally be counted on one hand...
...I ' m certainly happy to offer my views and will do so during the course of a piece...
...But her books stress again and again that the nature of her quest was religious--not just in her "Christian" faith in the sacrifice of the individual to the state, but in this summing up of her own true belief: I have staked all on the essential goodness of human nature, on that which maketh toward righteousness...
...It is true that her Minority Report for the Royal Commission on the Poor Law outlined many o f Britain's later "social" reforms...
...I think we all operate in much the same way...
...Her "housekeeping state" was not to be run on an eighteenth-century system of values, with inalienable rights and all that...
...Malcolm Muggeridge, who knew her well, wrote: _9 . . her severely practical side, inherited from her father, made her realize at once that handing out unconditional largesse to the citizenry of a universal suffrage democracy would have grave moral and social implications...
...Today we have it in the "ideal" Welfare State, whose business, according to socialist thinker Anthony Crosland, is to "remove all sources of discontent...
...But the idea that she progressed from the "housekeeping state" to the Welfare State and then lurched into a strange uncritical admiration of the Soviet Union does not square either with her character or with her ideas as they appear in her diaries and autobiographies...
...She hated Lloyd George's 1911 National Insurance Act because it enTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 3 1 tailed just that...
...Neither in her diary nor in her autobiographies does she mention him...
...Instead of breaking up the system (her diary makes it clear that she knew this was neither possible nor desirable in Britain), she proposed to replace the plutocrats and their amateur political "artists" with a corps of experts professionally trained and indoctrinated with her ideas...
...Like all academics, he takes up specific " a u t e u r s , " directors usually, and examines these masters' works over the course of a career, looking for the themes, symbols, and issues that supposedly run through all of the movies...
...A generation from now we will, I think, wonder what it was all about, as the nations of Western Europe take their collective place in history with the once mighty medieval combination of German city states in the Hanseatic League...
...B e a t r i c e Webb is often portrayed as a kind of patron saint to the Welfare State...
...Their anointed elite of experts were going to wipe out evil by getting rid of poverty and the inequalities of wealth...
...Now, this may seem like a cardinal violation of the principal purpose of any critic: to discuss and evaluate the artistic quality of the works within his general purview...
...This paradox has puzzled many observers, not least some of the "liberals" themselves...
...That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, prudent, and gentle . . . . It provides for [the citizens'] security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances...
...If this be mere illusion, mere cant, then my own little life is a wretched failure, an absurd bubble pretending substance...
...these good works, in true Pelagian fashion, would save society and mankind...
...Until the cholera epidemics of the early 1800s, middle-class Britons had no accurate idea of how the poor lived or what they were really like...
...I for one cannot believe that Hollywood would think of casting Robby Benson in anything, but it continues to do so, and there are probably nice, normal human beings out there whose hearts leap with joy when they see Benson's name in the opening credits...
...In the sociological equation, the audience for foreign films is too small and too unrepresentative of the nation as a whole to tell us very much about the mood of the country...
...Harvard University Press, $25.00 each...
...This is the category I would place myself in...
...Webb did not believe in unconditional rights of any kind...
...So what the movie says is of great importance...
...Fabian socialism was essentially a secular version of this belief...
...Webb and her colleagues meant to achieve salvation (they called it socialism) not in the next world but in this one...
...This is happening today despite the fact that the poor are on the whole far more comfortable than they were in the time of Beatrice Webb, as is almost everybody else...
...Webb had a solution: They were to be shown the error of their whys, i.e., sent to what we now call a re-education camp...
...Today this is a less respectable idea, because of what has happened where statism triumphed: the slaughter of millions upon millions of Russians (at a time when the Webbs were hailing the USSR as a "new civilization...
...I f she had lived to see it, the sight would not have pleased her very much...
...She did consider marriage with the Liberal demagogue and reformer Joseph Chamberlain, and in fact remained in love with him for much of her life...
...I may like or dislike The Last Starfighter or Conan the Destroyer, but I simply don't know you well enough to know whether you would agree with me...
...Part of its origin can be explored in The Diary of Beatrice Webb, ' the first two volumes of which appeared last year in a new edition by ~qorman and Jeanne MacKenzie...
...Webb and her colleagues was to extirpate what they saw as a corrupt, anarchic individualism and replace it with a clean efficient "housekeeging s t a t e , " in which everyone would be to some extent a public servantmnot with the dirty motive of profit, but for the honorable rewards of praise and promotion...
...Neither Mrs...
...Consequent public dissatisfaction is then exploited in a zero-sum power game for control of 3As I write this, I see in today's (London) Times: "How can we eat and stay healthy...
...or the work of altruists like Heinrich Himmler, whose corps of efficient public servants included such stars as Adolf Eichmann...
...It becomes the aim of the loser in this contest (Labour is by far the worst in this respect) not just to keep the ruling party honest in the normal way of a loyal opposition, but further to inflame and exploit popular discontent and expectations by fair means or foul, and to use these forces to destroy the current government...
...This judgment did not express a real sense of sin...
...When an audience responds positively or negatively to a movie, in the sociological critic's eye, it is revealing a great deal about its own thoughts on the subjects the movie is dealing with...
...Clearly 1 have had a change of heart, since I am resuming my duties as TAS's movie critic...
...But this is precisely the point: As a critic, I am not really interested in the movies as an art...
...Occasionally this points to a possibility at once messier and more dangerous than the tyranny-nightmares: degeneration of the political and social body into a congeries of snarling and uninhibited pressure groups, based mostly on trade unions and ethnic communities and shouting about "rights" when they mean privileges...
...A pretty girl can go a long way toward redeeming a bomb...
...When middle-class doctors went among the poor to fight cholera, they discovered a different reality: not a tribe of scroungers and malingerers but honest, hard-working folk trapped and suffering in what amounted to another world...
...This might be an elegy for Beatrice Webb herself, or a lament for the mutually corrupting influence of her ideas and the democratic politics of Britain...
...During the postwar decades these implications have emerged with great force, not just among the poor but in the comfortable middle classes...
...The only true redeemer was to be the state, with its ultimate sanction of coercive force...
...Now its prosperous burghers were told that many, indeed most, of their fellow-citizens were illhoused, ill-paid, and, through no fault of their own, living "on the very verge of starvation...
...Evidently something was badly out of joint...
...She despised the common herd...
...He is the daily reviewer who often uses stars and halves of stars to evaluate the movies he discusses...
...The first is the one we are all immediately familiar with...
...This interest led her into Fabian circles and eventually into marriage and partnership with Sidney Webb...
...The aim of Mrs...
...Webb and her colleagues knew better than that...
...they cast a particularly cold light on why, as one of her family wrote, she crowned her life's work by commending " t o her countrymen and the whole world a system of servitude more far-reaching and comprehensive than any hitherto known_9 B e a t r i c e Webb, n~e Potter, was born and bred in the very heart o f nineteenth-century capitalism_9 Her father was a war profiteer, and the individualist philosopher Herbert Spencer remained her close friend until he died...
...I prefer The Godfather to Children o f Paradise, Duck Soup to Smiles o f a Summer Night...
...It was a token of outrage at the bad (i.e., selfish) behavior of a relative few who possessed large amounts of money and property...
...My hope is that, as this melancholy prospect unfolds before unbelieving eyes, the United States and the United Kingdom will have the good sense to preserve their alliance, the intelligence gradually to distance themselves from continental squabbling, and the wisdom to see the alternative steps they must take...
...In any case, I like far too many movies, and for far too many reasons, for my personal judgment on them to be of any use to anyone...
...Tocqueville supposed that such a system would reduce people to " a flock of timid and hard-working animals, with the government as its shepherd," ~luite like the human battery farm for tractable and sedulous proles envisaged by Beatrice Webb...
...After writing a score of articles on the movies, I found that I had run dry, could think of nothing more to say...
...She meant to make sure that the elimination o f poverty was answered by a proper expression of gratitude and obligation to the state...
...Her "Welfare State" outline in the Poor Law Commission's Minority Report did not include the unconditional doling out of money...
...Four years later she carried it from religion into politics: _9 . . I maintain that I am the true socialist, through my willingness to sacrifice the individual to the community...
...F o r the brightest and the best of a hundred years ago in Britain, an individualist was by definition morally depraved...
...1: (1873-1892) "Glitter Around and the Darkness Within...
...These books, together with Beatrice Webb's autobiographiesfl do much to explain the bizarre politics of this complex and fascinating woman...
...Hayek is concerned that it will inspire a growing acceptance of tyranny in the style of Russia or Nazi Germany...
...Webb's im' Vol...
...Herb Greer is an Arnerican writer and playwright living in Europe...
...In The Road to Serfdom F.A...
...These persons, it was felt, had to be rescued along with the rest of mankind from the bondage of their own selfishnessmbut not by individual conscience or grace or common sense...
...And amusingly enough, these movies are far from my favorites...
...In this sense, at least, I think I am pretty close to the mass audience as a whole, which overwhelmingly prefers the low to the high in the movies...
...he is Gene Siskel or Roger Ebert, the often unintentionally hilarious hosts of the popular syndicated television program "At the Movies...
...This is why, unlike all the other arts, movies don't really require that their THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 33...
...revenue, administrative favor, and finally of Parliament with its unlimited sovereignty...
...This habit, together with a puritan temperament of extraordinary ferocity, guided her political and social ideas all her life, and with great consistency...
...This lust for tutelage has penetrated some rather surprising and personal areas of life...
...Webb nor her Fabian friends, nor the postwar idealists in the Labour party realized the infinite nature of expectations...
...At the age of twenty-five she wrote with admiration, almost awe, of _9 . . the great central idea of Christianity, this sacrifice of the individual to the community...
...It seemed obvious that if the poor were not at fault, then the villainy lay elsewhere, in the selfish individualism of the few who ruled in business and government...
...it is possible--but.., government should show the way...
...Since movies are made for the purpose of garnering profits, the sociological critic assumes that the moviemakers are seeking audience approval by tapping into an audience's mood, by seeking t ~ play chords that will be pleasing to an audience...
...I n September 1979, I became the movie critic of The American Spectator, and in February 1982 I contributed what was to be my last review during that stint...
...The residue of nineteenth-century radical chic has been less dramatic in the free societies, but no less real...
...There was some talk of democratic action to set things right, but Mrs...
...and if not, could we, by taking thought, mend or end it...
...For us, to whom poverty is a kind of media clichd and a political football for pressure groups, it is not always easy to understand the impact of this new reality on Victorian society...
...Collectivism was the latest cry, and as Beatrice Webb put it in the first volume of her autobiography: _ 9 in the world of philanthropy as in the world of politics as I knew it in the eighties, there seemed to be one predominant question: Were we or were we not to assume the continuance of the capitalist system as it then existed...
...Of course Beatrice Webb did not consciously model herself on Pelagius...
...Its damage here is more subtle, mostly occurring in the minds of intelligent, honest, and genuinely compassionate people who still work unselfishly and long (as the Webbs did) for a dream which--as hard experience now shows--is a peculiarly horrible nightmare plausibly disguised...
...I hear the reader object...
...Writing that, Tocqueville complained that he could noi.find a term to express what he was describing...
...Our own generation has its examples of altruistic efficiency in more remote places like Vietnam and Cambodia, and of course in the Soviet system of psychiatric hospitals and the wide clean precincts of the Gulag...
...3 The British (and not a few Americans of "liberal" disposition) show signs of longing for a system of government imagined about 150 years ago like this: _9 . . an immense protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate...
...Disraeli's concept of "two nations" was no mere catchword in the last century...
...Doctors were followed by researchers, by novelists like Dickens and Mrs, Gaskell, and finally by reformers intent on a rescue mission...
...it is not at all tyrannical...
...one of her central concerns was to raise the moral tone of the lower classes--first by making them better off, then by compulsion if necessary...
...that all administration.., necessarily amounts to nothing less than "experimenting in the lives of Other people_9 As she admitted, she came from a class of people who were accustomed to giving orders...
...The finanCial burdens it has imposed on its members, however, the attendant hubris that inflicts upon otherwise relatively sane political leaders the destructive ambition of creating a foreign policy independent of and different from the United States, and the sheer consumption of political energy through its continual and often squalid quarreling, has more than a little tarnished the bright dreams shared by those who drafted the Treaty of Rome...
...I f the popcorn is inedible, that inevitably colors my reaction to what is happening on the screen...
...In the normal course of events she, like her sisters, would have grown up into a society wife in the upper-middle ruling class of Britain...
...There is time enough still for this little confession to serve as a grim warning...
...But they are not--yet...
...Their heavily cut version of Mrs...
...The ideas of the Webbs altered not only in the hands of Lloyd George, but (for all that Clement Attlee paid tribute to the Webbs) under the postwar Labour government which actually set up the Welfare State...
...They made profits and enjoyed life while their workers made barely enough (and sometimes not enough) to live like human beings...
...For those who out of weakness or stubbornness failed to measure up, Mrs...
...Like Nietzsche's ass-worshipers in Also Sprach Zarathustra, Mrs...
...Her inspiration lay further back in time, in the feudal system with its tissue of mutual obligation between vassal and lord...
...But the two of them were like positive magnetic poles: He demanded absolute submission while she, brilliantly intelligent and self-educated, clung to her independence of mind and character...
...This "housekeeping state" of (benevolent) despots would turn the system around and run it for the benefit of the vast majority...
...I f the movies are to be considered high art, then they have failed massively...
...But many factors contribute to my overall opinion of a movie...
...But the sorts of difficulties that caused my initial block are in fact at the very core of the problems with movie criticism in general...
...Webb in these words: . . . the longer I studied the social organization in which I was born and bred, the stronger became my conviction that the distribution of power and wealth among my fellow-citizens was being controlled, and very deliberately controlled, in the interests of the propertied classes, to the detriment of the vast majority of the p e o p l e . . . This notional clearing-house for wealth and a species of power that (in Eric Hoffer's phrase) seemed to come in cans was not absurd to Victorians who were used to being ruled (and ruling) through an oligarchic elite...
...Their assumptions rested on a certain concept of human nature, much older even than Mrs...
...His studies are as intricate and worshipful as an English professor's on one of the great works in the literary canon...
...2: (1892-1905) "All the Good Things of Life...
...Her conception included a quid pro quo for all state largesse...
...This logic, leavened with a kind of perverted richesse oblige, led into a conspiracy theory, expressed by Mrs...
...This view appeared as a major influence in Europe on the cusp of the fourth and fifth centuries when another Briton, a monk called Pelagius, offered a famous heresy to the Western world, one which appealed (as Fabianism later did) to the sort of rough common sense which then held that the world was flat...
...John Podhoretz is critic-at-large o f the Washington Times and movie critic o f The American Spectator...
...it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits action...
Vol. 17 • September 1984 • No. 9
