I watched 'Question Time' on TV last week because one of the participants was the film director Ken Loach whose films have consistently, though variably, offered a powerful critique of the dominant ideological forces that have directed our, and  other countries', political culture over the last fifty years or so. There was a time when Loach was the kind of director that the BBC was proud to employ. Now that pride resides in 'Strictly Come Dancing', innumerable celebrity based mind-sapping shows and 'edgy' (time for a moratorium on this word) dramas featuring serial killers, British and Scandinavian, graphically mutilating young women. These are often, mysteriously, lauded by women reviewers in the liberal bourgeois press.
Question Time perfectly reflects the BBC's woeful idea of political 'impartiality' by being primarily focused on representatives of the three main political parties, thus defining the parameters of acceptable political debate. A 'celebrity' or controversialist of some description will also be allowed in to add a dash of populism to the proceedings. This role is usually filled with cartoonish figures from the right -Peter Hitchens, David Starkey, Melanie Phillips et al - so  Loach was an uncharacteristically perceptive voice who was unlikely to fulfil the usual demands of the brief. That is, he is thoughtful, intelligent and has been a thorn in the side of establishment figures for decades.
 His answers, though not given too much space in the proceedings, cut through the usual blather that passes for political debate in our mass media, and placed issues in a wider and more comprehensible historical framework than the other panellists could manage. He also showed his customary deep understanding of the lives of ordinary people and the difficulties they face. He was, interestingly, warmly applauded when urging the Parliamentary Labour Party to get behind Jeremy Corbyn rather than continually undermining him.
The final question asked whether Britain had become less compassionate since the making of 'Cathy Come Home', Loach's powerful 1963 drama, made for the BBC, about the housing crisis and its human consequences. Someone called Dia Chakravarty, representing a group called the Taxpayer's Alliance, whoever they are, (I've paid taxes all my life and I have never 'allied' with them and I object to being yoked into this appalling little clique) began the answers with such a wilful misunderstanding of Loach's film that even he, the epitome of politeness, felt constrained to intervene and take apart the fatuity of her answer. Ms. Chakravarty could easily be mistaken for the gauche head girl of a 1950's public school a little too eager to win a sixth-form debating competition, her every intervention (and there were many) showing a spectacular unfamiliarity with the lives of most people in the 21st. century.
Ken Loach began his answer with the simple observation that he felt that Britain had become less compassionate, and that this change began with the destruction of the idea of the 'common good' during the 1980's and its replacement with the selfish individualism that now dominates our culture. I'm sure he's right, but it set me thinking about what the purpose of compassion is and what or who should be the object of our compassion. Should compassion be our response to injustice? When all the forces of the state are organised to defend the rich and powerful and the relatively powerless are made to suffer in order to maintain the status quo, should our response be compassion or anger?

This train of thought led me to a poem I have mentioned in an earlier post, 'The Human Abstract' by William Blake, written in the 1790's, but as relevant now as then. The poem begins:

                                    "Pity would be no more
                                     If we did not make somebody poor;
                                     And Mercy no more could be
                                     If all were as happy as we.

It's a brilliantly confrontational opening seething with a deep moral anger contained in its challenge to traditional thinking and succinctly and powerfully states the hypocrisy underlying our socially determined impulses. We tolerate inequality and injustice and applaud ourselves for our magnanimity in feeling pity and being merciful rather than acting upon the righteous anger we should feel in order to eliminate the causes of this suffering. The philanthropy of some of the super rich is often lauded in the media and used as a justification for the obscene levels of personal wealth that some enjoy while the living standards of the vast majority inexorably decline, and thus we are encouraged to tolerate the ever growing levels of inequality. The poem continues:

                                     And mutual fear brings peace,
                                     Till the selfish loves increase
                                     Then cruelty knits a snare
                                     And spreads his baits with care


                                     He sits down with holy fears
                                     And waters the ground with tears
                                     Then humility takes its root
                                     Underneath his foot.

Blake, of course, lived at a time when religion held a much stronger hold over people's lives than it does today, but the ideological hold of the church has simply been replaced with the secular ideologies constructed in an age of consumer capitalism. Our society is deeply divided and different kinds of fear maintain those divisions - fear of the power of those who have more than us, of the state as it defends the interests of the powerful, of those at the bottom who may rebel, of foreigners, immigrants,  of the precarious state of our own lives and how quickly we too could become the objects of pity and so on it goes. This leads to selfishness and cruelty towards any group who we are encouraged to fear by politicians and the mass media. They collude with the powerful to encourage us to see this state of affairs as largely the product of the victims own doing and incapable of change. Thus now, as then, we live in the shadow of this 'dismal shade of mystery', the ideological forces that control and determine much of our thinking. 

                                     Soon spreads the dismal shade
                                     Of Mystery over his head;
                                     And the Caterpillar and fly
                                     Feed on the Mystery.

                                     And it bears the fruit of deceit,
                                     Ruddy and sweet to eat;

We learn to live a lie - that poverty, hunger, injustice, inequality -  are 'natural' states and we should simply accept them - while, of course, showing some pity and mercy, or, as we are more likely to say now, compassion. Blake shows us that there is nothing 'natural' about this state of affairs; it is the product of our own doing. And we will need more than 'compassion' to challenge and change it.

                                    The Gods of the earth and sea
                                    Sought through nature to find this Tree;
                                    But their search was all in vain:
                                    There grows one in the human brain.
    

 We are locked in - to use another Blake phrase - the 'mind forg'd manacles' we have constructed for ourselves. In Blake's original 'illuminated book', humanity, in the shape of an old man, lies bound and shackled amidst a landscape of death and decay.

In September 1961 I was feeling in need of a great deal of pity. Indeed I was consumed with self-pity. I'm still not sure why I reacted so badly to my new secondary school. I just felt completely disoriented by almost every thing about it. It seemed huge to me and the corridors were both confusing and policed by prefects (the ones with the silk bands on their blazer cuffs I mentioned in my last post) who had the power - seemingly used completely arbitrarily - to suddenly bellow at you and put you in detention for no reason I could ever fathom. The teachers were remote and uninterested in any pupil as an individual. And, unlike my junior school, I really had no friends at all. I just felt an indeterminate sense of fear of the place and my heart would sink the closer I got to the school each morning. This was made worse by an incident that occurred some weeks into my first term.
We were lining up outside the classroom of our Maths teacher while his last class were leaving. We must have made too much noise because, when we had entered he ordered us all outside to do the manoeuvre  again. He was a very tall man, probably in his mid thirties and, though I never understood anything that went on in a Maths lesson, he always seemed okay to me. He never seemed very interested in any of us, but this was true of all the teachers, but he had a presence in the classroom that made the lessons pretty predictable and straightforward affairs. To send us out to line up again was unusual and I must have made some remark to another class member that he overheard.
When we had returned to the classroom, I was summoned to the front. This was so unusual, I had a real sense of foreboding. "I won't stand for insolence" he said, rather wearily, "bend over." He pushed my head forward until I was bent right over the side of his desk in front of the whole class. I heard a drawer open and, looking awkwardly from one eye since my face was pressed against the desk, he produced what seemed to me to be an enormous gym shoe - more the size of something a clown might wear. But there was nothing funny to follow. There was a pause, and then the sound of a short run and I was hit with a force I had never experienced in my life before. The pain took a second to register, but I felt my whole body jerk as though from an electric shock. My head was pushed down and the sound of the short run recurred and then another almighty shock wave right through me. I couldn't believe that this could possibly happen again, but it did, a third excruciating blow. "Next time it'll be six" he said. I straightened and had to walk back to my desk with the eyes of the whole class fixed upon me while I desperately tried to prevent the tears that threatened to shame me even more.
From that moment on, the school became simply a place of fear for me. I dreaded having to get up in the morning knowing where I was going. I often cried myself to sleep at night, feeling like a baby for doing so, but being unable to control my feelings. I had been able to adapt to life on the council estate and to deal with the threats from the likes of Georgie Burton (see earlier posts), but this school seemed so arbitrary, so unpredictable in its punishments and threats that I was powerless to find any means of dealing with it. I, of course, had no choice but to continue as best I could with this new, and profoundly unwelcome, phase of my life. And there were some brighter moments, particularly my brief, and unlikely, career as a minor entrepreneur in the 'adult' entertainment business. But more of that next post.