The Swinish
Multitude
by Johnny Reb
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as
the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.-
Anatole France
"The Swinish Multitude" was a phrase
employed by Edmund Burke (1729-1797), deemed the high priest of political
conservatism.
Burke used this denigrating appellation in a
reactionary polemic called Reflections on the Revolution
in France (1790) to describe the poor and oppressed working classes
in Britain while pointing out the futility of any attempt to "educate" or
"civilize" them. It's an iconic and all-too-typical conservative epithet that
reflects their inbred elitism, arrogance, snobbery and contempt for the lower
classes. Do I need to mention racism and their disdain for science?
But when the war loving conservative power
elites need these working class "swine" to fight and die in their
colonial/imperialistic wars while they remain safely at home and profit from
them, their hypocrisy is at its most grotesque - perhaps even more than the
sanctimonious form of Christianity that they conveniently espouse.
The publication of Edmund
Burke's book drew an immediate critical response that included A Vindication
of the Rights of Men (1790) by Mary Wollstonecraft and Rights of Man (1792)
by Thomas Paine. It not at all surprising that Burke's work became popular
with other arch-conservatives, monarchists and reactionaries such as King George
III and Joseph de Maistre, the latter a deeply committed Catholic authoritarian,
harsh critic of the French Enlightenment and a man considered by some political
philosophers to be a prototypical theorist of fascism.
This depiction of the rabble as slavish
vermin continues to percolate within mainstream conservatism today. One could
rightly argue that the neo-conservative mutation of the past three or four
decades is even more debased and decadent than the former classical or
aristocratic version. I've always considered it peculiar that anyone born into
humble beginnings, especially conditions of real economic deprivation, could
ever embrace a static and reactionary ideology such as conservatism. But many
clearly do, despite the obvious fact that conservatives they often support such
as Stephen Harper and Christy Clark do not, and never have, cared one whit
about social justice or the interests of the working classes. Other than the
power of propaganda that conservatives exclusively dominate and their monopoly
of the corporate media, one other explanation for working class support of
conservatives might be the enticing fairy tale that they dangle in front of the
under-classes, the notion that if they "work hard enough" they too may become
multi-millionaires. It differs little from the Christian bribe that you will be
rewarded with eternal life in heaven if you are prepared to commit intellectual
suicide by believing in comparable fables.
In my view conservatism is, and always has
been, a morally and philosophically bankrupt political philosophy. Conceding the
risk of oversimplification, I submit that conservatism can be summed up in two
terse dictums: "might is right" and "what's in it for me". Unlike liberalism and
socialism, perhaps the facile nature of conservative ideology is what makes it
attractive to so many; there's precious little latitude for ambiguity, nuance or
possible dissention.
Entitled conservatives, their acolytes,
courtiers and careerists love to pontificate on the mythology of the "self-made
man" while preaching the myth of the meritocracy and
the work ethic for those in their employ while managing an
inherited family fortune from offshore tax shelters. Their ethics are generally
restricted to genteel behavior in the company of those they consider their peers
that may include key moral imperatives such as oaths of allegiance to god,
country and the crown, singing national anthems, holding prayer meetings, how to
gracefully open a champagne bottle, eat caviar or properly navigate a knife and
fork around plate of steak and lobster. Beyond these and other hollow rituals of
dedication and decorum, any behavior that pads their already bloated bank
accounts and investment portfolios is permitted.
Below is an essay by Christopher Hitchens
that reflects some of the reasons for my long standing contempt for
conservatism.
Let Them Eat Pork Rinds
by Christopher Hitchens
Vanity Fair. December 2005
And even in Atlantis of the legend,
The night the seas rushed in:
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.
These lines are taken from Bertold Brecht's magnificent poem "A Worker Reads
History". These days, people associate Brecht with old Red cartoons in which men
in shiny top hats spit on the poor while wielding truncheon-size cigars and
flourishing gold watch chains across their distended bow-window waistcoats. And
surely that epoch of ruling-class arrogance is in our past? Of course it is, but
that doesn't mean that certain instincts and attitudes just evaporate. Here was
the American president's mother, speaking grandly from Texas as the descendants
of slaves took refuge in the Astrodome after the seas had rushed in upon their
city:
What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas.
Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the
arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very
well for them.
The White House was later to qualify these gorgeously phrased insults as
"personal observation", which indeed they were. The unmediated personal
observation, that is, of a very much over-privileged person. They made a good
"fit" with the performance of her son on his visit to the submerged region.
Meeting two sisters who had only the clothes on their backs, the president of
the United States directed them to a Salvation Army shelter down the road. The
shelter itself, as an embarrassed aide was quick to whisper, had been swept
away. But the point was the same and contains the tone of the workhouse master
down the ages: "You appear to be distinctly poor and fucked up. Do you not have
a church basement to go to?" Even at such a critical moments, the "faith-based
initiative" takes priority. The poor we have always with us. And the rich we
always have with us, too. Various benign arrangements will take care of the
latter, while the former are better off on their knees and should pray as hard
as they can. Perhaps a tract on "intelligent design" to go with that bowl of
nourishing gruel?
The subconscious mentality of the uncontrollably well-off was deftly caught by
the novelist Joyce Cary (a chap, despite his name), who evolved the phrase "tumbril
remark" to catch the essence of the polite upper-class incredulity at the sheer
inconvenience of having to put up with other people. My preferred example of the
remark was once given by the late British Tory politician Julian Amery, who
described an acquaintance of his (was it Lady Diana Cooper? - there's an element
of the apocryphal to some of these tales) as she waited under an umbrella
outside the Dorchester hotel in the 1930's and tapped her foot with impatience
as the Rolls was brought round the front. Seizing his chance, a ragged man
approached her without the courtesy of an introduction and announced that he had
not eaten anything for three days. The outraged Lady Diana drew herself up.
"Foolish man that you are," she instructed. "You must try. If need be, you must force yourself."
Wilde's Lady Bracknell could hardly have bettered this. ("Fortunate in England,
at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever," she says. "If it did, it
would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of
violence in Grosvenor Square.") Yet it's easy to cull non-aprocryphal
tumbrilisms. Let me introduce George Orwell, who was writing a wartime diary in
1940 as London braced for the Blitz. He noted:
From a letter from Lady Oxford to the Daily Telegraph, on the subject
of the war economies: "Since most London houses are deserted there is little
entertaining... In any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live
in hotels."
Commenting on these perfectly wonderful uses of "most", Orwell noted,
"Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the
populations exists." Lady Oxford, by the way, was the title of the great
socialite and memoirist Margot Asquith. And the decade then just closing - the
1930's - was the scene fo some splendid tumbril stuff. The diaries of Sir Henry
"Chips" Channon provide an especially rich seam, as he describes toddling off to
Savile Row to spend a king's ransom on socks and scarves, before lunching at the
German Embassy with the divine Herr and Frau Ribbentrop - the dessert consisting
on one occasion of lobster ice cream. What a nuisance, thought, to have to step
over dirty and unwholesome people as one makes one's rounds.
"I see no point in being poor," the late Queen Mother is supposed to have said
while being driven through some slum. "Mind you, that was a lot of money in
those days," an English duke once told an interviewer known to me, while
recalling the loss of some £150 million by one of his ancestors in the
goldfields of Africa. These are the real thing: the failure of the upper crust
and the cream of society to have the remotest glimmer of an idea of what life is
like for others. (The "cream" was described by Samuel Beckett as "thick and
rich", while nobody seems to know who defined the "upper crust" as "a lot of
crumbs held together by dough".) Sometimes you can make an educated guess that
the speaker is joking at his own expense. "I would not have The Times,"
remarked the late Duke of Devonshire in speaking of the decline of that
newspaper, "in any of my houses." While making a documentary in Liverpool about
how the other half lived, Auberon Waugh addressed a group of proles and breezily
told them that his own manor in Somerset "probably costs more to heat than most
of you people earn". Mark Bower, that effortlessly superior and dandyish
cartoonist, once drew a scene of two people in a restaurant during a coal
miners' strike. "Do you mind the carafe wine?" says the host, looking up over a
hugely ornate and tasseled menu. "I'm faintly unhappy when the bill gets too
close to the miners' take-home pay." Mr. Humphrey Berkeley, an Englishman whose
ancestors came over with the Norman conquerors, left the Conservative Party
partly in protest at its Africa policy and eventually ran for Parliament as a
Labor candidate. Asked what was the difference about the experience, he replied
with apparently perfect gravity that "I've been meeting the working class and I
simply must say that it's absolutely the nicest class I've so far met."
But then there are old jokes - most of them also English for a reason that
barely needs explaining - that are based more on Schadenfreude. Example: Two
extremely rich men are sitting in companionable silence in their overstuffed
armchairs in the upstairs window of the Carlton Club, in London. The silence is
broken when the first man calls attention to the situation outside and says,
"It's raining." "Good," replies the second man without looking up from his
newspaper. "It'll wet the people."
Auberon Waugh's father, Evelyn, was a tremendous snob in many ways, but was
generally rather careful to avoid such direct class combat. Indeed, in his
masterpiece Scoop he gives a tumbril character to a radical type - Mr.
Pappenhacker of the Daily Twopence, who is rude to waiters at a
restaurant that must be the Savoy Grill. "He seems to be in a very bad temper,"
the shy William Boot observes of Pappenhacker to his host, Mr. Salter:
"Not really. He's always like that to waiters. You see he's a communist. Most
of the staff at the Twopence are - they're University men, you see.
Pappenhacker says that every time you are polite to a proletarian you are
helping bolster up the capitalist system. He's very clever of course, but he
gets rather unpopular."
In Kingsley Amis's Girl, 20, the radical-chic Sir Roy Vandervane tries
for the same effect by plastering reactionary bumper stickers all over his
limousine and driving as arrogantly as he can, honking the horn like Mr. Toad
and seeking to create resentment among lesser drivers and humble pedestrians.
That didn't work. A tumbril remark doesn't work if it's conscious or deliberate.
(Indeed, one definition of a gentleman is that of someone who is never rude by
accident.) But what does work is an unmistakable, revealing, unfakeable
reminder of how superiors really view inferiors. The wife of a British diplomat
in Saigon in the 1960's, a certain Lady So-and-So, once considered the
surrounding carnage and observed soothingly that it wasn't as bad as it might
look, since one had to bear in mind that "Orientals" had a different attitude to
death. My friend the poet and journalist James Fenton noted as calmly as he
dared that from this you could tell one thing for certain - namely that Lady
So-and-So had a different attitude toward the death of Asians.
For some reason, the Bush family excels at this kind of thing. I remember George
senior, having come in third (after Pat Robertson, of all people) in a 1987 Iowa
straw poll, being asked why his own supporters apparently hadn't bothered to
turn out. Oh well, he replied, there was more to life than politics, and his
sort of people "were at their daughters' coming-out parties, or teeing up at the
golf course for that all-important last round." To be absolutely honest with
you, I do not know to this day exactly what a "coming-out party" is, but it has
a nice debutante, Marie Antoinette ring to it when uttered amid the
corn-infested fields and pig-strewn farms of Iowa. (A bit like the distribution
of free gáteau to the masses, which somehow failed to occur in the inundated
states of the Gulf of Mexico in September.) At a later stage, offended by the
very idea that he lacked the common touch, George H. W. Bush put himself to the
fatiguing effort of declaring in public his love of pork rinds and country
music, and of guising himself in plebe-like clothing as if to the manner born.
This is worse, in a way, because "slumming" on the part of the elite is a
carefully graded insult - to the intelligence, among other things. (I knew that
John Kerry was through when a friend of mine looked up from The New York
Times and said, "Oh dear. He's gone goose hunting again.") Oddly enough, and
for all the Versailles teasing that she herself had to endure, Nancy Reagan had
more "class" when she turned up in rags to sing the parodic "Secondhand Clothes"
at the Gridiron Club and "pre-empted" the media tumbrils that had been rumbling
around Pennsylvania Avenue district in the early 1980's.
"Because it turns on a sixpence, whatever that is." Thus remarked the Armenian
tycoon Nubar Gulbenjian when asked why he modeled his custom town car on a
London taxi. One can be reasonably certain that this is a rich man's joke. But
"The levees broke? Who knew they could do that?" is not funny for one thing, and
doesn't demonstrate any sense of noblesse oblige, either. It shows in a blinding
flash of what someone really thinks of you. It is not self-satirizing, or
deflecting. It is myopic, and arrogant. It reminds one that levée was the
word used by King Louis XVI himself, in his royal bedchamber upon rising, for
the reception of his courtiers. The word "tumbril" is in our language and in our
minds because of the imperishable passage in A Tale of Two Cities where
the carts full of those same, now fallen, haggard courtiers come grinding their
way to the Place de la Révolution, and where Madame Defarge sits knitting with
her fellow tricoteuses, coldly and contentedly marking each crashing
slice of the blade. But, for me, the most chilling mention is the very first
one, where Dickens recalls a particularly hideous torture-execution ordered by
France's "Christian pastors" in defence of the old king's regime:
It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy
lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day,
rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in
by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of
the Revolution."
You can feel it coming... "like the stillness in the wind/'Fore the hurricane
begins." The reference to "mire", incidentally, isn't Dickens's only euphemism.
A tumbril really means a cart for the carrying away of excrement. Don't tempt
me...
Other expressions are in our language, also. We still use the adjective "noble"
as positive and "base" as negative: terms that derive their original meaning
from the Anglo-French feudal order, where every person knew their divinely
ordained position. We employ the word "chivalrous" to mean honorable and
gallant, when all it denotes is a noble who owns a horse, or horses, and can
thus ride over the un-mounted - rather as if a specialist in Arabian equines was
to be appointed head of FEMA, and raise his eyebrows politely at the distasteful
news that lesser breeds were sweltering in a dome. Another expression less
"commonly" used - and there I go again with another instance of the same
linguistic bias - is "below the salt". This refers to the long table in the
baron's hall, when seating was by social gradation all the way to the bottom,
where sat the greasiest serfs and scullions. The precious condiment could not be
passed below a certain place about halfway down. How we smile now to think of
such primitive social and class prejudices. And then there came a day in New
Orleans, a town named for a scion of French feudalism, when the saltwater rose
up and didn't just wet the people but drowned them, and nobody was above that
salt except those who could fly over it and look down de haut en bas,
while a lot of lowly people were suddenly well below it. Whatever is that
distant rumble that I dimly hear?
You can listen to Roger
Allam of BBC read the text here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfzL6KtVweI
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