Review of 'The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is perfectly apt, pretty much essential, that this book should be a black swan: an unexpected bestseller, topping the New York Times non-fiction lists. Otherwise Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s theory wouldn’t carry nearly the weight that it does. A quirky and engaging writer, Taleb’s central thesis is that we are frequently taken for suckers by the unexpected. Until the discovery of Australia, everyone in Europe believed swans could only be white. We should be careful of all the certainties we hold and be ready to be sceptical about our beliefs. Not in a Cartesian manner following the Descartes fashion (Taleb, for reasons not entirely clear, rejects this throw out all of your beliefs and start again line of thought). Rather we should be very wary of trusting established models for forecasting in economics, society, cultural and natural trends. Will the sun rise tomorrow? – probably, but Taleb takes great pleasure in chronicling the fallacies of the ‘bildungsphilisters’ – the intellectual economic forecasters who believe the world will conform to their platonic models only to discover time after time that, well, shit happens.

Taleb’s message is an apt one for the modern interconnected world. The future (which of course can’t be predicted) will probably be dominated by a few more J.K. Rowlings and Bill Gates who inhabit what Taleb calls extremistan, and a greater number of dissatisfied and disenfranchised unfortunates (mediocristan). As a Humanist, Taleb says, he hates this disparity, and it hardly tallies with those in mediocristan who cling to the protestant work ethic view of life, that the harder you work the proportionally greater the rewards. But he offers succour to the second rate towards the end of the book with the tale of Yevgenia Krasnova, a novelist whose first novel is an unexpected success and her second book is an equally unexpected flop. There is charm in secure mediocrity, and wild success is not always all it is cracked up to be. Take comfort in the fact that you are a black swan – the biggest black swan of all, by virtue of your birth against gigantic odds.

Once the central message is grasped, you don’t really need to plough through all of the book , which is overlong at some 300 pages, unless you want to take in all the quirky asides and stories about the author’s intellectual friends and colleagues and detailed economic theories deconstructing the Gaussian Bell Curve. A vast array of obscure economists and philosophers are referenced which comes across as intellectually show-offy, and Taleb’s style is a clunking dog’s dinner, peppered with faux yiddishisms such as ‘nobel schnobel’ and prefixing any thinker he admires with the Germanic ‘über’. Still, it is partially inthis linguistic naivety, uprooted from his Lebanese homeland (or Levantine as he anachronistically calls his roots), and finding a place in the world as an eccentric commodoties trader in New York, that he is an eccentric and admirable writer. Someone who sees a crowd, and deliberately heads off in the other direction.

By Fred Bosanquet

Review of 'Straw Dogs' and 'Black Mass' by John Gray

Human progress is a myth, freedom is a fantasy, the individual self is a chimera, our lives are lived from start to finish as illusions, justice and morality are social constructs relied on solely for convenience, human beings are entirely ignorant of motivation and can no more control the future of the race than the most base amoeba can.

This is the pessimistic world view of John Gray, one of the few genuine practising philosophers alive today who still devotes his life’s work to making sense of the human condition. We are no better than beasts, he concludes, because – frankly – we are beasts. The earth has existed long before humans arrived, and humans will disappear millions of years before the sun finally bursts apart and swallows up the solar system. Humans are merely one of millions of species who have inhabited the earth only as long as the span of our striations of DNA lasts.

If you think your own life might be small and purposeless in the scheme of things, reading John Gray may only exacerbate such feelings until your sense of your self shrinks into a miserable chewing gum sized ball. An epigram for his whole collection of writing might be the scribble Darwin wrote in his notebook in 1838: ‘He who understands baboon will do more for metaphysics than Locke’. Gray, to put it bluntly, is a man at odds with the whole corpus of Western Enlightenment philosophy, from Rousseau, Descartes and beyond.

In Straw Dogs, his 2002 polemic, he devotes a brisk 200 pages to a sweeping destruction job of a whole gamut of Post-Enlightenment theories. For example, atheism: ‘Secularism is like chastity, a condition defined by what it denies’, Post-Modernism: ‘just the latest fad in anthropocentrism’ – humans arrogantly thinking they can define the terms of reality, environmentalism: ‘A high-tech Green utopia, in which a few humans live happily in balance with the rest of life’.

Environmentalism, Gray argues may be scientifically feasible, but is humanly unimaginable. In the 17th Century, the population of the world was half a billion people, the same number as the increase in people in the last decade alone. This, points out Gray, is palpably unsustainable. If the Twentieth Century was dire for its spate of genocidal warfare, this one could be even worse, as increasing population growth combined with scarcity of resources will ignite flashpoints all over the planet as the game is up for the rich nations and their hitherto unquestioned dominance over the world’s reserves.

Straw Dogs is a wide ranging polemic, but in Black Mass, the successor book, the target is more specific: the policies of neo-conservative Western governments who believe that the world can be remade in their image. Politics, given the animal natures of human beings, is inherently impossible and therefore corrupting. The desire of Bush, Blair, and the team of neo-cons who laid out the Iraq plans is the modern incarnation of a religious will, which, Gray argues, has always been present in societies. The Enlightenment, 250 years ago, merely gave this yearning a secular edge.

Stalinism, National Socialism, Neo-Conservatism, free market liberalism: all are ideologies that betray a religious, utopian impulse. The plans to introduce democracy in Iraq was as misguided and unrealisable as the Marxist claims that capitalism would be overthrown and a post-state brotherhood of humanity would be realised. Gray concludes the book by saying the only way to proceed in political affairs, as with all human affairs, is with clear eyed realism in the manner of his few philosophical and political heroes: David Hume, Edmund Burke, Isaiah Berlin.

Those who maintain faith in progress will reject Gray’s analysis on the grounds that some reforming, progressive ideals have been instilled in society: slavery was abolished, in the face of those who said it was unrealisable. Why should the citizens of the Middle East not have a chance to be freed from tyranny and live in democratic peace like their more fortunate coevals in Western Europe? However this is precisely Gray’s point – there is not enough resources in the world for everyone to eat at the ‘rational’ liberal democratic table. That is the privilege of the wealthy nations, who fiercely safeguard their resources (successfully, up to now at least). Liberalism is cast as a sort of Range Rover, I-Phone type of political theory – something only the rich can afford.

Gray’s arguments are trenchant, and easy to follow if hard to swallow. His style is that of the apercu – brisk, swift, impressionistic. Such a loose limbed writing style is easily open to objection. But he incorporates large bibliographies in the back of his books for those interested in investigating his arguments further. De-coupling human beings from their human-centric world view is a difficult operation. The tradition in which Gray writes: Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Schopenhauer, is a lonely and uncomfortable one, and it is unsurprising that his bulletins on the current state of man are met with hot opposition.

By Fred Bosanquet

Review of 'Queuing for Beginners' by Joe Moran

Surely the British have always been obsessed by the weather, consumed clutcher inducing fry ups for breakfast, and have stood in line since time immemorial.

Not so, says Joe Moran, who in this intricate little book, outlines the provenance of these and many other everyday lifestyle traits. Queuing for beginners is a social history book that looks at society through a close lens microscope. Eschewing the big political and economic themes normally associated with social change, he shows just what crazy folk we really are as he traces the typical day of an average British adult – a person who arises in the morning, eats a bowl of cereal for breakfast, squeezes into a packed train and commutes to the office, sits at a desk with a computer, attends meetings, fires off more emails than are strictly necessary, has a pint or two in the pub after work, heats up a supermarket ready-meal for dinner, watches a bit of TV (especially the weather forecast) then retires to bed under a duvet (a now commonplace bed furnishing that only dates from 1964 when Terence Conran opened the first Habitat store in South Kensington) and tries to get as much sleep as possible in this era of constant bustle and distraction.

Such a narrative might seem like the most boring book since the two volume Paddy Ashdown diaries, but it is actually a compelling look of the myriad little things that appear in our days. Drawing on a vast range of archival research (Moran is a lecturer in everyday life at Liverpool John Moores University), the author finds that there is a fascinating story behind just about everything we take for granted. The first pedestrian crossings, marked by Belisha Beacons (named after the minister of transport, Leslie Hore-Belisha in 1934) caused a scandal when they were first introduced. Militant protestors fired shots at them with air rifles as they believed the introduction of pedestrian crossings had effectively conceded the rest of the highway to the motor car. The modern form of queue – a single line in which people are called to the next free cashier by an electronic display –only became widespread in the 1990s. Before that, individual queue lines were the norm, leading to the commonplace frustration of joining the shortest queue only to find it was the slowest moving since an elderly man at the front was engaged in a long and protracted argument with the cashier.

An entire chapter is devoted to a single item of furniture – the sofa. Historically, it was a low status item, mocked as a shapeless, lumpen article. In the twentieth century, design traits from Scandinavia slimmed and reduced the size of the sofa and its modern manifestation - especially the minimalist IKEA sofa, often bought on hire purchase - is a far cry from the traditional sofa which was traditionally a lifetime wedding present for a married couple.

In so much as the book is didactical, the lesson Joe Moran seems to want to impart, is to make us take a closer look at our everyday surroundings. If we occasionally pause in our hectic lives to take note of exactly how the packaged sandwich has come to dominate our lunchtime eating habits, or why we have so many more TV channels than we used to, we can begin to realise that our lives are not endlessly recycled Groundhog Day style routines, but part of a constantly evolving historical time. In twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years time, many aspects of our everyday lives will be quite different, and the Prêt a Manger sandwich and the IKEA sofa may be objects of as much nostalgia as the Bakelite telephone or the 1940s railway carriage.

Review: 'Nothing to be Frightened Of' by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes has long been a novelist preoccupied with death. Every one of his previous books has, I think, contained at least one section featuring ruminations on the inevitable dénouement to life, but never before has he devoted a whole book to the subject.

Nothing to be Frightened of is a book that will appeal mainly to long term Barnes fans. It is a return to the smorgasbord style – part essay, part epistolary debate, part philosophical disquisition, part literary homage that hallmarked his great 1984 novel Flaubert’s Parrot, and was reprised in his 1989 meditation on history, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. This book is hard to summarize, but the blurb writer has an impressive stab in one sentence: ‘among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard.’ That just about does it. It is something of a departure from Barnes’s previous novels and essays, a comedown from the lofty heights of intellectual detachment, as he gives the reader an insight into episodes from his own life, particularly his relations with his family, people he has written of very little in the past.

Not that we should read this as his autobiography mind. A scrupulous guarder of his privacy, Barnes is unlikely to rip the lid off and spill everything in a messy reveal all in one go. Rather, he reaches into the pot to reach out carefully chosen morsels, starting with an account of his maternal grandparents who were an arch conservative and communist respectively. He recalls how his grandfather used to let the young Julian and his brother watch while he wrang chicken’s necks in the garage. Here, the Barnes brothers’ memories diverge over the exact nature of the execution (was there a guillotine mechanism? Was there a bucket to catch the heads?), and a tense dualism between them is set for much of the book.

Barnes, the younger of the brothers, gives us the impression that he is an intuitive, novelist thinker who is interested in things such as whether human life has a narrative, what happens after our death (he contemplates a huge array of options), how to get value out of a life in an age where Darwin and Dawkins have pretty much done for the idea of God – his chosen path, is a devout appreciation, the religion of art as Flaubert called it, even to the extent where he downplays his blood relations and instead considers his genetic lineage as a line of great artists including Renard (a death haunted artist who features prominently in the book), Flaubert, and Stravinsky.

Perhaps this worship of art is a result of his tricky family relations. His older brother, Jonathan, is a remote, fiercely rational Aristotelian philosopher. He features at points throughout the book, hoisted in at carefully chosen moments to illustrate a cold, philosophical angle on life. In an early exchange Barnes recounts a discussion in the car on the way home from their mother’s funeral that turned into a stern grammatical debate on the music that should have been played at the service, and whether this construed an inadmissible ‘hypothetical want of the dead’. Some readers may find this medical gloved dissection of the event appealing in its precision, many more may find the reaction of the Barnes brothers, with their mother’s corpse not yet cold, rather sub zero on the emotional scale.

Barnes's pere and mere were a difficult couple too. His father was a quiet, reserved French teacher, frequently overruled by his domineering wife who was frequently damning of her sons’ literary talents ‘one son writes books I can read but can’t understand, the other writes books I can understand but can’t read’. Parts of the book focus on their respective declines and deaths, Barnes painfully watching as his father suffers a series of strokes, his mother reacting with stern admonishing towards his aphasia.

The deaths of his parents are the way into this book, the gate at the entrance, but most of the short sections feature great artists and their reactions to the inevitable. Philip Larkin, author of the great death angst poem Aubade, we learn would have died gibbering with fear in a Hull hospital were he not heavily sedated. Flaubert maintained stoical impassivity in the face of the void. Renard himself aimed to die a stylish, French death and eventually succumbed to standard emphysema. Barnes himself fears death constantly, waking up in the night pounding his pillow screaming NO, NO, NO at the injustice of it all. He says he expects his departure to be preceded by extreme pain, coupled with extreme frustration at the euphemistic, imprecise language used by those about him. A grammarian to the end.

Coupled with fear of death is fear of God, or rather, wistful unhappiness at the absence of God. ‘I don’t believe in God, but I miss him,’ is the first sentence of the book. His brother finds this soppy, but Barnes can’t give up so easily. As with his 1986 novel Staring at the Sun he asks a number of questions concerning God - on Pascal’s wager: ‘What if it turns out that God exists but disapprovesof gambling’. He ponders the hypothetical fury of the resurrected atheist and posits a would you rather question (one of many in the book – would you rather be an atheist philosopher who finds a wonderful surprise after your death, or be right after all.

The scale of the philosophising in this book stretches from the solipsistic to the very large. In the worst passages of the book, Barnes engages in self indulgent games, wondering what the last ever reader of his books will be like, or how it would work if he were to die in the middle of writing the book, or a sentence, or a wo (not one of the high points of his normally erudite style). But he can also stretch his mind to contemplate the bigger picture. Towards the end he considers Martin Rees’s warning to us that humans are nothing in the scheme of things. By the sun’s demise, in 6bn years time, any creatures left will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

Yes, as John Maynard Keynes said, in the long run, we’re all dead. So enjoy this witty and contemplative death volume while you can, and try not to worry about it too much.

By Fred Bosanquet

Review: How To Lose Friends And Alienate People/ The Sound Of No Hands Clapping

I've always been a fan of 'loser-lit'. Call it schadenfreude, but from Mr Pooter to Adrian Mole, reading about the inadequacies of others makes me feel all warm inside. So with this in mind, Toby Young's books about his failure to make it as both a glossy magazine editor (in How To Lose Friends) and a Hollywood scriptwriter (in The Sound Of No Hands Clapping) represent something of a holy grail.

In HTLFAAP (as it shall henceforth be known), Young recounts his years spent trying to 'hack it' in New York, following an invitation to work at Vanity Fair by it's somewhat naive editor Graydon Carter. Carter clearly sees something of himself in Young (pictured), but what he doesn't count on is the 30-something journalist's combination of naked ambition and interminable self-sabotage. After committing faux-pas such as embarrassing Carter at public events and making the grave mistake of asking Nathan Lane about his sexuality (my favourite anecdote), Young manages to lose his job, his status and his dignity in one fell swoop.

Of course, the irony of HTLFAAP is that Young has now reached the levels of fame and acclaim he so desired when he set out to New York. In The Sound Of No Hands Clapping (TSONHC), he writes about the effect the success of the first novel has on him, and admits that one of the prime motivations for writing it was to prove his capabilities to Graydon Carter. And he certainly manages that. The story, although not always wholly cohesive, is engrossing and as with most 'stick it to the man'-type books it reminds you of the reason you hate the establishment, the media and the world of celebrity. Of course, you knew this already, but reading about it from an insider's perspective gives you a real feeling of 'living with the enemy' that is utterly compulsive. The Graydon Carters of this world are not bad people, they just exist in a framework that seems utterly removed from any kind of ethical normality. It's a world where in order to climb the ladder, you have to be a snake.

For sheer readability, I actually preffered TSONHC (I do hope these acronyms aren't getting too confusing!). It certainly has more laugh-out-loud moments and has an added emotional depth thanks to Young's pitch-perfect description of the trials of fatherhood. He is very much an everyman, and like John O'Farrell managed in The Best A Man Can Get, defines the quandries faced by all 'modern men' without an over-reliance on pyschobabble. As Young is courted by Hollywood, it seems his dreams are within touching distance, but as ever the proverbial banana skin is on hand to ensure he remains 'one of us'. While it's not entirely clear this time round what has caused him to be frozen out, the implication is that as a screenwriter he simply doesn't cut the mustard. As a journalist however, Young is in a league of his own, helped largely by his uncomparable levels of self-awareness.

One small criticism is that his constant repetition of the phrase 'needless to say' makes him sound a bit like Alan Partridge at times - which is surprising considering that in the acknowledgements he actually thanks a friend of his for pointing out the number of times he uses it!

With a film version of How To Lose Friends (starring Simon Pegg) due out later in the year, now is as good a time as any to familarise yourself with these books - if only so you can snootily say "well of course the book was better" as you leave the cinema.

Click here to buy How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Click here to buy The Sound of No Hands Clapping

Review of ‘The Second Plane’ by Martin Amis

Martin Amis’s political books have typically been the least well received of his oeuvre. His 1987 collection of stories ‘Einstein’s Monsters’ felt too contrived and naively over heavy on the big ideas (nuclear weapons) compared to the two satirical masterpieces - Money and London Fields, it was chronologically sandwiched between, and his 2002 Koba the Dread, a book to honour the victims of Stalin, was a bit of a hash of an exercise that strained too hard for effect, comparing, at one point, the screams of his infant child with the millions that perished under Stalin in the Gulag.

In this collection of essays and fiction, however, Amis has rather more success in mixing his personal life and concerns with the big political themes that affect us all. The book brings together a collection of Amis’s writings on the theme of September 11, and the myriad fallout from the events of that day: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the wider concerns to assert American power more fully in the Middle East, and more generally (and this is Amis’s real concern) the subliminal effects that terrorism has on us all: ‘it’s mystery, its instability, and its terrible dynamism’.

The publication of this collection comes after a long running media spat concerning Amis’s views on Islam. Terry Eagleton, Amis’s colleague at Manchester University accused him of being tantamount to a ‘British National Party thug’; the satirical comedian Chris Morris tagged Amis as ‘The New Abu Hamza’. All this following an interview Amis gave to the Independent in which he mused that ‘don’t you feel the urge that the Muslim community must suffer in order to get its house in order. What measures? ‘Things like strip searching people who look like they come from The Middle East, or Pakistan.’

Clearly, the old saw about all publicity being good publicity has worked in this case, as The Second Plane is already on its third print run. But what is Amis actually advocating in his views towards Islam? The reality, now that these pieces are all bought together under the same cover, and not merely the disparate fragments of journalism written over a variety of years and numinous publications, is an interestingly thought out, rationally developed view on the burgeoning problem of Islamism. Amis starts the collection with the title piece written immediately after September 11, the almost hallucinogenic quality of the prose bringing back memories of this period when everyone in the world was dealing with the shock of the event. The long term ramifications were unknown, but even then Amis was perceptive in turning his attentions to the terrain, mental and physical, he believed would be most keenly affected – the hitherto protected western liberal worldview, and the wrecked, Taliban crippled badlands of Afghanistan, ‘they should be firmly bombarded with consignments of food, firmly marked LENDLEASE USA’, was his recommendation then.

Now, six and a half years on, we know a lot more. Amis states in the introduction that geopolitics may not be his natural subject, but masculinity is. And he uses this leitmotif to paint an interesting picture of terrorism as masculinity gone wrong, warped, banjaxed with religious and cultural strain. He traces this back to the figure of Sayyid Qutb, a young Egyptian man who came to America in the 1950s. Already semi-radicalised by the vestiges of the British Protectorate in Cairo, and the establishment of Israel, he found himself repulsed by the liberties that were established in America. With almost comical lack of self awareness he found himself threatened by the ‘bulging breasts and smooth legs’ of the young women. Raged and inspired, he embarked on a large corpus of work, prose and poetry, of which the following lines are indicative:

A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an
enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she
approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside
her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent
of perfume but flesh, only flesh
Clearly, not a man at ease with his sexuality.

Islamism (at times Amis takes pains to distinguish this from Islam in general, at other points he seems to elide the two notions) as it is now, is at crisis point. The civil war within Islam has been won by the fundamentalists, Amis argues, the moderates have lost out, and now the dominant force is a retrograde, barbaric, misogynistic, homophobic, murderous ideology. This is the point at which Amis (like his fellow media cohorts on the left, Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen – or should that be, formerly on the left?) parts company with type of liberal who would far more eagerly bash the administration of George Bush than the address the human rights disaster going on in the Middle East. Amis spares no effort in using his full descriptive talents to outline the horrors. For example he describes a magazine picture of a Saudi newscaster beaten by her husband as looking like a ‘crudely cross-sectioned watermelon, but you could make out one or two humanoid features half submerged in the crimson pulp.’

Does he go too far in trying to draw a clean cut line between the moral West and the backward and barbaric Arab cultures? There is little in this collection to suggest that Amis is an outright Islamophobe. His writing is certainly too precise, stylish and intelligent to lapse into careless racist slurs, and he does devote a small amount of space to acknowledging the vast cultural contributions Islam has made to the world. But there are undoubtedly weaknesses in the collection. The number of actual, real life Muslims Amis encounters is very few. There is an encounter with a gatekeeper at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem: ‘I will never forget the look on (his) face when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway’, and an anecdote from Pakistan when, travelling with Christopher Hitchens, they encounter a street stall selling Osama Bin Laden t-shirts. That is pretty much it. Most of the pieces are from the viewpoint of a man who has approached the issue on a purely cerebral level – buttressed by a whole raft of books (4 pieces in these 14 piece collection are, themselves, book reviews, and citations to other secondary sources litter almost every page), privileged access to the entourage of Tony Blair (documented at length in an extended piece of reportage), and a strong position as a highly regarded intellectual figure in the Western world with a tendency to epater les bien pensants de la gauche. It is a little like the people who proclaim loftily and radically on how to reform the education system or the NHS. Those with experience on the ground can usually supply key insights that the pure thinkers don’t have access too.

Further still, is a curious piece on Mark Steyn, a neo-con Canadian writer who most civilized readers can see through as a plain fascist in frontiersman’s clothing. Amis considers Steyn’s book America Alone and writes ‘Mark Steyn is an oddity: his thoughts and themes are sane and serious – but he writes like a maniac.’ After some fun poking at his style, Amis agrees that we should take very seriously Steyn’s prediction that the rising birth-rates amongst Islamic cultures may drown out the culture of choice and rights and entitlements in the lower birth-rate, Western European countries.

Such points are the low end of the wide spectrum of Amis’s us and them mentality towards Islam and Islamism. For the most part, he has devoted much time and intellectual rigour to this most vital of contemporary themes, and his writing is as vigorous and stylish as ever.

By Fred Bosanquet

What Ails Us - A Review of ‘Affluenza’ by Oliver James

Sam is a New Yorker with a whole host of problems. He is heir to a billion pound fortune and is on his way to creating a similar one in his own name. He lives alone in a gigantic Manhattan apartment over five floors (with one bedroom). He frequently sleeps with stunning Russian models, specially procured for him, one so perfect she appears as if she is ‘hatched directly from an egg’. But his biggest problem is that he is an asshole and has no friends. He is miserable, bitter, and resentful and withdraws from personable society, choosing to fester instead in the self absorbed slough of his own vast wealth.

Oliver James would have us believe that Sam is indicative of the way in which life in Western democratic societies has slipped into some uncomfortable registers in the last few decades. We are obsessed by fame, money and our own image to the extent that we cannot enjoy the things that matter. He compares the plight of Sam with that of Chet, a Nigerian taxi driver also living New York. Chet is who is an amiable man holding homespun Christian beliefs and earns less than a thousand times Sam’s income. He is frequently attacked by his passengers and has serious health problems, and there is no safety net for him in the America he has chosen to live in as he is a semi illegal immigrant, not entitled to a Green Card. Yet for all this, Chet appears to be content, or at least, far more content with his life than Sam.

It is easy to be sceptical of such findings. As a well known American actress once said, I’ve been poor and miserable and rich and miserable and rich is better. But James’s prognosis is another addition to the large corpus of literature that diagnoses the curious mental state of the richest upper quartile members of the richest societies in the world. The novels and non-fiction of writers as diverse as J.G. Ballard, Will Self (who features prominently on the blurb of this book), Barbara Eichenreich, Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Joan Didion, Alain de Botton, Nick Hornby, Florian Zeller, Michel Houellebecq and Martin Amis have all chronicled the gnawing angst at the core of the Western European and American middle classes. Tendencies such as the fame surge, the susceptibility to addiction, the paralysis of choice, the inability to hold on to tender emotional commitments. James lays out his case as follows. People in ‘selfish capitalist’ countries –The USA, Australia and the UK, not Denmark or New Zealand which are ‘unselfish’ capitalist countries - are on a treadmill pretty much from the moment they hit puberty. Children are pressured to achieve high academic results at school, and are made to feel bad even if they achieve them as they could do better. University choices are increasingly predicated on choosing subjects that have some technical merit in securing a high paying job. Careers are chosen not for intrinsic job satisfaction but on grounds such as how well they pay or how much status or proximity to fame and celebrity they bring us.

This is a familiar life arc to many living in urban societies. Graduates will take frighteningly tedious jobs in things such as media sales, lured into them by the pious and fake promise that it could be an opportunity to break into bigger things in the media. A staggering 80% of UK graduates want to work in the media and many bright and talented people will forsake more rewarding careers in other sectors. A huge number of contemporary graduates seem to be working either in soulless City, corporate ladder jobs they hate, and are only doing it for the money, or in unstable, bitty jobs in the lower echelons of journalism, publishing or broadcasting with no guarantee of future progression. The majority of these people are miserable. Beyond this, adults are working longer hours than ever just to support themselves and their overstretched mortgages. The value of parenting and family life has plummeted as young women are increasingly reluctant to make the commitment to child rearing and instead choose pursue high pressure careers in a twisted fulfilment of the 1960s feminist dream. No wonder that mental anxiety and illness is far higher than it was than the far more austere 1950s.

What to do? James spends much of this chunky book (500 pages including appendices) adumbrating solutions. We must reject the mawkish psychobabble pedalled by the Orwellian ‘positive think’ merchants – those charlatan magazine columnists and psychotherapists (often American) who exhort us to put a positive spin on things and suppress negative emotions. When things are fucked up, it is time to face them directly. This means stripping away many of the materialist urges we are suffused with. Don’t spend your whole life pining for a bigger house, a faster car, a better looking partner, a higher paying job, a flashier set of golf clubs. Don’t think that the answer to emotional problems lies at the bottom of a bottle or in the release of toxins contained in a pill. Instead it is important to meet your needs, not your wants. This means closely monitoring your emotional needs as you go through life (which means doing a job that absorbs you intrinsically, irrespective of the money or status attached to it) and free time, which means making time for yourself and your interests, and bringing up children properly if you have them.

A word on the critical reception to Affluenza. It is, of course, impossible to write a bestselling book (4th in the WH Smith charts on the last check) about toning down desires for fame and status. The predictable attacks are as certain as those directed at wealthy and/or successful people who profess egalitarian sentiments. You will be accused of being a hypocrite, a champagne socialist, a Bolly Bolshevik. James bears the full brunt of such kneejerk rebarbative posturing. Amazon website reviews (always a reliable corkboard for ill informed opinion) accuse James of, variously: ingratiating himself with media figures, being a media tart, knowing all the answers before he sets the questions, being a self-publicist, having his book published by a capitalist publishing company (as if he could promote his work any other way), a self aggrandizing authorial style (this, to be fair does grate: there are nauseating tics of taxi driver telling you what is good for you guv type prose).

What about the long term context of the kind of thinking Oliver James embodies? There are signs that the culture is changing. Many schools now incorporate a large component of PHSE into the curriculum, with lessons on wellbeing and emotional intelligence. But progress will almost certainly be slow. The vast majority of people, it seems, are not yet ready to undertake what James asks of them: to completely reappraise the values and lights by which they lead their life. It is easy to dismiss such a polemic as psychobabble cynically manufactured to enrich another media psychiatrist. But the reality hits a lot harder. If you look closely, the signs of affluenza are all around: stacked up on the tube escalators are posters promoting holidays, beauty products, mobile phones, Mp3 players, personal computers, cars, bestselling books(including, of course, Affluenza - the slogan, with delicious lack of irony, proclaiming ‘this book could change your life’), blockbuster movies, the next bright young thing. For the average citizen, struggling back exhausted through the throng after a day at work which may or may not have been satisfactory, the daily assault of these images is bound to hold an unflattering mirror up to their condition, automatically lowering their self perception unless they have enough inner resources to fight it.

James explains that repeatedly comparing ourselves to others is a classic instance of modern life. Through the forces of the internet and globalization, we are aware of the lives of hundreds of people we do not know. This is something very new in human life. A far cry from the hermetic village cultures of most of human history. No wonder it is so difficult these days to form any kind of conception of a self, a soul. The affluenza virus is riddled throughout the modern political and media class. Every newspaper, from the formerly respectable tabloids to the piss poor free sheet rags handed out by benighted shivering anoraked figures on street corners, is laced with celebrity gossip –tales of people whose lives are perceived to have a lustre and gloss that far exceeds our own, lists of up and coming people – a new CEO, an up and coming actress, a billboard face. Of course, much of the wealth in the current economy ends up in the hands of this tiny group of people. Some may be genuinely talented and deserve it, the vast majority are photogenic mediocrities who have shaken out fortuitously at the top of a random lottery. The people who suffer most from all of this, as James points out, are those already vulnerable to emotional instability – people from poor educational backgrounds, from broken homes and so on. The gap between the wealthiest few and the poorest many, grows ever wider.

If we look to our elected politicians for some powerful gravitas, some statesmanlike derobing of all this hype, what do we get? Downing Street parties filled with the same celebrities. Peter Mandleson’s nauseating pronouncement that New Labour (the Labour Party remember) is ‘seriously relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. Towards the end of the book, James goes to the heart of government to find that senior New Labour figures are some of the worst afflicted of all! A very high powered female frontbencher on a thwacking salary and a job invested with huge potential to make a difference to people’s lives admits she can never be fully contented because she can now never be the first female Prime Minister. James reports that the daughter of someone at the very heart of the New Labour project recently made a suicide attempt. Gordon Brown is rumoured to be privately uncomfortable with this sham glitzy wrecked beach resort of contemporary culture, but he has done little about it in terms of pronouncements or policy.

We shouldn’t be seriously relaxed about all of this at all. And that is why Oliver James’s book, with his well researched diagnoses of the causes of the affluenza virus, and a route map out of it, deserves a close and thorough read.

By Fred Bosanquet

Affluenza

The Beautiful Game Is Over

Over the last twenty years football has moved from being a local sport, with success based on gate receipts and good leadership, to being a global sport based on TV ratings, sponsorship and lots of money.
A few teams dominate, both on the pitch and in the transfer market. In the Premiership there are 16 clubs who face relegation and four who have a chance of being champions. What’s up with the beautiful game?

This is a book for football fans who are fed up with reading about the successes, the transfer dealings, the wage negotiations and the scandals of the few ‘elite’ clubs.

Why have some clubs hit the big time and so many more missed out?

Will the game be up for many more struggling teams, or can they claw their way back to the big time?

The Beautiful Game is Over argues convincingly and urgently for change.

The Beautiful Game Is Over: The Globalisation of Football

1812: Napoleon's Fatal March On Moscow

By Adam Zamoyski
A sweeping account of one of the most dramatic military campaigns in history. Opening in 1811, when Napoleon was at the peak of his powers, it details the complicated series of events which led up to Napoleon's 1812 march into Russia. Made famous particularly by Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' it is a campaign which has gone down in history as one of the great military disasters. It is largely the story of a huge power struggle between two arrogant, yet extremely able men - Napoleon and Alexander, the Russian Tsar. The speed with which they went from having a close friendship, formed during their talks at Tilsit in 1807, to becoming sworn enemies a few years later, is a fascinating story told with real panache by Zamoyski, and one which clearly exposes the best and the worst sides of Napoleon's character. In one instance he is the all-powerful manipulator, twisting Alexander round his little finger and enthralling the Russian aristoracy. In the next, he is an angry, uncontrollable and somewhat pathetic figure, throwing furniture out of windows in reaction to Alexander's letters detailing his refusal to cooporate with Napoleon's increasingly difficult demands.

The campaign itself is described from the top level down to the experiences of the ordinary soldier. The seminal battle of Borodino in particular is described with real drama, and one really gets a sense of how Napoleon's tactical brilliance was beginning to wane, costing the lives of many soldiers who might have otherwise been saved. But the most harrowing section of the book is the description of the long retreat from Moscow. It began as a strategic withdrawal, and ended up costing the lives of almost the entire French army as they battled through the arctic temperatures of the Russian winter. How any of them made it back at all is remarkable, and Zamoyski tells many incredible individual stories.

I'd recommend this book to anyone with even a passing interest in Napolenonic history, for it's not only a detailed military history, but a genuinely gripping and dramatic read, filled with fascinating characters. Something that struck me in particular was how much of the events Zamoyski writes about had a direct link to the conflicts of the 20th century - for it was as a result of the 1812 campaign that Napoleon's grip on Europe was weakened, and hence the modern Germany began to take shape. It is easy to see how the European superpowers soon became locked into uneasy alliances that were to have deadly consequences. This is the story of a true military catastrophe.