Slim pickings
Suicide of the West
Richard Koch and Chris SmithContinuum, 224pp, £14.99
This is a frustrating book, whose ambition far exceeds its scope. Chris Smith and Richard Koch admit they make unlikely co-authors – as ‘a libertarian conservative businessman and a libertarian politician from the liberal left’ – who combine to clear up some really big questions: what is special about western civilisation, why it succeeded, what threatens it and how it can survive. The big argument is that the west is fundamentally different from the rest. Its uniqueness comes from six key ‘success factors’: Christianity, optimism, science, economic growth, liberalism and individualism. Each is under threat, less from the barbarians at the gates as from an internal crisis of confidence.
This is interesting, if highly contestable, yet much of it is asserted as much as argued. A slim volume under 200 pages never intends to be the intellectual mega-blockbuster in the Paul Kennedy, Jared Diamond or Phillp Bobbitt mould which the scale of those questions demands, while the bracing polemic that the title suggests never quite materialises either.
By the time a ‘traffic light’ shorthand is adopted to identify how far each pillar of western civilisation is in danger (most are flashing yellow for danger), the tone is close to a PowerPoint presentation. Curiously, ‘Christianity’ gets the only green light, largely because adherence to religion turns out to be irrelevant: its contribution is the idea of the ‘self’ and the era of the self-help book (such as Koch’s own best-selling 80-20 Principle) shows how deeply embedded this now is for non-believers too.
These metaphysics generate an unusual political position. The authors are heavily influenced by Samuel Huntingdon’s The Clash of Civilisations, but make it an argument not for an assertive foreign policy but for a more modest one, to avoid the naivety of universalism and the hubris of a liberal imperialism which will fail in imposing change. Like many others, they argue sensibly that it is soft power, or ‘the power of attraction’ that embeds long-term change.
However, like Huntingdon, Koch and Smith downplay diversity within cultures and shared features across them. How deep is cultural differences? Are there any shared values from our common humanity? All universalist projects are caricatured in a couple of paragraphs as the hubris of the Fukuyama school. There is no engagement with Amartya Sen’s evidence for the non-western antecedents of universal values, nor his bigger argument that origins need not dictate contemporary ownership. The idea of human rights barely features.
Yet properly understood, this offers a universalist argument which need not deny cultural diversity (is democratic India less Indian?) but rather questions which great cultures depend for survival on their incompatibility with basic notions of human dignity. The universal declaration of human rights is not, as implied, a chimera or mistakes, but rather the most important political project of both the last half century and the next. The future of freedom now depends on new alliances with non-western advocates. And the contrary case – defining Asian or African values as incompatible with freedom – is made not by scholars or citizens but by leaders of authoritarian states, in unwitting alliance with western chauvinists. Sunder Katwala is general secretary of the Fabian Society
Another Bell-ter
If … Marches On
Steve BellMethuen, 256pp, £12.99
Steve Bell is in danger of becoming a national institution. For almost 30 years the cartoonist has been transposing politics and current affairs into an alternative universe populated by talking penguins, where Ronald Reagan’s hair is capable of unassisted space travel and where John Major’s grey Y-fronts are worn outside, transforming him into a sad, suburban superman. This beautifully produced new collection of daily strips goes from the Iraq war, to the doomed whale swimming up the Thames last winter.
This varied, fractious period is organised round Bell’s muse, his greatest comic inspiration. Bell’s George W Bush is the unholy innocent, a literal dumb ape, a chimpanzee spreading gleeful mass destruction. The fact that the US president is so central to a British political cartoon is itself a piece of commentary. It is an accusation that British foreign policy is both directed abroad and directed from abroad – from the Oval Office, to be precise.
Clearly, this is not a new point. So what makes Bell something more than a kind of Brian Haw, permanently encamped in the back pages of the Guardian? For one thing he has a creative restlessness about the way he says things. He may say the same thing many times, but he says it in many different ways.
He also sows his scorn fairly. This Bell tolls for everyone. He does a nice line on Osama Bin Laden, as a saucer-eyed lunatic romancing Death in an Afghan eatery. He is blissfully free of that cartoonists’ blight, indignation. His colleague in the Guardian, Martin Rowson, seems to have sustained the same hysterical note of personal indignation with Tony Blair for almost a decade. Bell is no friend of Blair. However, he does also find time to attack the Conservatives, the Lib Dems, the Countryside Alliance, and anyone else who has ever mounted the pulpit and claimed to be in the right.
One of the great pleasures of a Bell compilation is watching the process of his imagination work on one of his subjects. People enter the strip looking much like themselves and then they dissolve and are reformed. So Iain Duncan Smith becomes a pale and ghoulish figure and then an empty suit venting steam through the armholes. These characterisations are not fixed; like Doonesbury’s HW Bush as empty space, they are dynamic. We can only look forward to what he does with David Cameron in the next book. Will Higham is head of policy and communications at the Prince Reform Trust