Tony Judt: "If we want better rulers, we must learn to ask more from them and less for ourselves"

Clement Attlee (1883-1967), Britain's Labour prime minister, 1945-51: "It was Attlee who presided over the greatest age of reform in modern British history" (Tony Judt).

by Ken

Packing hastily for a short trip, I pounced on the nearly intact-looking New York Review of Books, figuring it must be the issue that turned up in the mailbox most recently, which I'd hardly looked at. However, it turned out to be the previous issue (May 13), but that worked out great, because it contained some really important stuff, notably two more installments in what is described as "a continuing series of memoirs by Tony Judt," the extraordinary British-born historian and political and social commentator (author of, among many other books, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945). I want to talk a bit about one today and the other tomorrow.

The first piece is titled simply "Austerity," and describes the period of extreme austerity in which he grew up in postwar Britain, with shortages (and in many cases of rationing) of almost every imaginable commodity last well into the 1950s, bringing with it a uniformity of such things as dress which often cut across class lines, and breeding to at least an extent a feeling of Britons all all muddling through together.

As Judt, now a New York resident (the May 27 NYRB has another in this "series of memoirs," dealing with his coming to America), establishes straightaway, in his ecologically enlightened family he is regarded as "a prelapsarian relic from the age of ecological innocence." "But," he writes --

who traipses through the apartment switching off lights and checking for leaking faucets? Who favors make-do-and-mend in an era of instant replacement? Who recycles leftovers and carefully preserves old wrapping paper? My sons nudge their friends: Dad grew up in poverty. Not at all, I correct them: I grew up in austerity.

I can't begin to do justice to his description of the conditions he grew up in, so I won't try. But I have to quote this paragraph:

I grew up at least as familiar with World War I as with the one that had just ended. Veterans, memorials, and invocations abounded; but the ostentatious patriotism of contemporary American bellicosity was altogether absent. War, too, was austere: I had two uncles who fought with Montgomery’s Eighth Army from Africa through Italy and there was nothing nostalgic or triumphalist in their accounts of shortage, error, and incompetence. Arrogant music hall evocations of empire --

We don’t want to fight them, but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too!

-- had been replaced by the wartime radio lament of Vera Lynn: We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when. Even in the afterglow of victory, things would never be the same.

Judt writes of the "togetherness" bred in the British public by the hardships of the time:

It was this “togetherness” that made tolerable the characteristic shortages and grayness of postwar Britain. Of course, we weren’t really a family: if we were, then the wrong members -- as Orwell had once noted -- were still in charge. All the same, since the war the rich kept a prudently low profile. There was little evidence in those years of conspicuous consumption. Everyone looked the same and dressed in the same materials: worsted, flannel, or corduroy. People came in modest colors -- brown, beige, gray -- and lived remarkably similar lives. We schoolchildren accepted uniforms all the more readily because our parents too appeared in sartorial lockstep. In April 1947, the ever-dyspeptic Cyril Connolly wrote of our “drab clothes, our ration books and murder stories…. London [is] now the largest, saddest and dirtiest of great cities.”

Now he prepares to make the point he draws from this stroll down memory lane:

I don’t think I fully appreciated the impact of those early childhood years until quite recently. Looking back from our present vantage point, one sees more clearly the virtues of that bare-bones age. No one would welcome its return. But austerity was not just an economic condition: it aspired to a public ethic. Clement Attlee, the Labour prime minister from 1945 to 1951, had emerged -- like Harry Truman -- from the shadow of a charismatic war leader and embodied the reduced expectations of the age.

Judt recalls Churchill's mocking description of Attlee as a modest man “who has much to be modest about,” but observes, as I've noted at the top of this post, that --

it was Attlee who presided over the greatest age of reform in modern British history -- comparable to the achievements of Lyndon Johnson two decades later but under far less auspicious circumstances. Like Truman, he lived and died parsimoniously -- reaping scant material gain from a lifetime of public service. Attlee was an exemplary representative of the great age of middle-class Edwardian reformers: morally serious and a trifle austere. Who among our present leaders could make such a claim—or even understand it?

Moral seriousness in public life is like pornography: hard to define but you know it when you see it. It describes a coherence of intention and action, an ethic of political responsibility. All politics is the art of the possible. But art too has its ethic. If politicians were painters, with FDR as Titian and Churchill as Rubens, then Attlee would be the Vermeer of the profession: precise, restrained -- and long undervalued. Bill Clinton might aspire to the heights of Salvador Dalí (and believe himself complimented by the comparison), Tony Blair to the standing -- and cupidity -- of Damien Hirst.

Judt writes then of moral seriousness in the arts, which he argues "speaks to an economy of form and aesthetic restraint," citing The Bicycle Thief and Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), and the experience of introducing it to his 12-year-old son.

Of a generation raised on a diet of contemporary “message” cinema from The Day After Tomorrow through Avatar, he was stunned: “It’s spare. He does so much with so little.” Quite so. The wealth of resources we apply to entertainment serves only to shield us from the poverty of the product; likewise in politics, where ceaseless chatter and grandiloquent rhetoric mask a yawning emptiness.

And he concludes:

The opposite of austerity is not prosperity but luxe et volupté. We have substituted endless commerce for public purpose, and expect no higher aspirations from our leaders. Sixty years after Churchill could offer only “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” our very own war president -- notwithstanding the hyperventilated moralism of his rhetoric -- could think of nothing more to ask of us in the wake of September 11, 2001, than to continue shopping. This impoverished view of community -- the “togetherness” of consumption -- is all we deserve from those who now govern us. If we want better rulers, we must learn to ask more from them and less for ourselves. A little austerity might be in order.

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