Pi in the sky
Alison Prince
Sky over Arran
Photograph by Islay McLeod
The Isle of Arran, where I live, has for many years had a well-used Citizens Advice Bureau. In January this will be closed, in line with the required spending cuts. There is of course fury on the island, but NACAS (North Ayrshire Council Advisory Service) says consolingly that a 3% cut is less than it might be. From our point of view, it could not be less. The loss of Arran’s only advice centre is a deprivation of 100%, not 3%. You either have a CAB or you don’t.
Having written to NACAS on behalf of the Arran Community Council, I thought further about the contrasting ways of calibrating that percentage. One of them is social and the other statistical – and they do not connect. From the social point of view, it is obvious that people struggling with debt, homelessness or domestic violence will be further hurt by standing in both public gaze and probably rain, waiting for access to the suggested ‘outreach service’ (van from the mainland). Ethically, such a consideration should carry a lot of weight, but statistically, it has none. Protesters may do better by pointing out that the cost of putting a van on the ferry may be higher than the current shared accommodation.
Knowing how to phrase a protest is a skill made more necessary by the fact that the statistical jugglers use their own language, to the bafflement of the rest of us. The old language of human experience (and of novels and poetry and the law) is specific and actual, the perfect medium for conveying opinion and feeling and knowledge. In total contrast, the quasi-equations floated by statisticians demand non-specific expression, so an Orwellian newspeak has arisen, based on English but heavily adapted. It is used to present formulae that state potential economic relationships without reference to concrete reality, much as algebra states the abstract relationships that underlie mathematics. One might I suppose call it pi in the sky.
The American website, Truthout, said last week that the top-level advice in the US on how to deal with their soaring debt is to service it by printing money. That way, no additional interest is incurred. The debt may look bigger, but the figures never get any worse.
This language is easy to mock. Samples of it have been rightly derided in the Scottish Review, but I am coming to think that as well as being ludicrous it is actively damaging to older and more subtle, precise forms of expression. Like an impressive-looking imported plant, it is colonising acres of territory in the gardens of the powerful, where it is admired and considered essential. This acceptance and admiration has done much to devalue the traditional language that we use between each other. It is no coincidence that it has evolved in conjunction with computer use, for the new technology and the new thinking share a purely self-referential logic. Cyber-function works as dispassionately as a bar-code, with no need to understand the subtle and essential structure called grammar. It has no grey areas between yes and no; it was built to be black or white, on or off. As such, it is the perfect structure for dealing with pure proposition, untrammelled by human interpretation.
To express this purity in everyday language is very difficult, since it requires definition of abstract relationships that are essentially algebraic. Think of expressing an equation in words, and the problem is at once obvious. We will be talking about combination of a primary power and a second but equally significant power brought into relationship with a further combination of two powers that…You can see at once how newspeak is automatically condemned to gobbledy-gook status. It is attempting a generalisation of things that we are used to seeing in specific terms. An email I received yesterday includes the following common samples of this hopeless effort: Interface. Delivery of agreed functions. Alignment to objectives. Broker/signpost startup support.
The desire for freedom from such tiresome disciplines as grammar has a long history. The Biblical fable of Exodus puts a shrewd finger on the moment when the first humans lost their tenure of the Garden of Eden by reaching out for an unearned prize that caught their fancy. The expulsion from a state of God-ruled bliss left a guilt that lasted for many centuries, but that has been shrugged off almost completely now, together with the general notion that there is any such thing as sin. The accepted modern goal is total disregard for the Garden (or planet) with its beautiful but implacable laws. The Green movement protests that this is suicidal, but the forces of money and power are stronger and more attractive, so continual acquisition has become the new religion. It, too, uses the disembodied, pi-in-the-sky language to give a respectable gloss to the principle of greed.
A defining moment in the evolution of this freedom was probably the abandoning of the Gold Standard, when banking first broke its connection with a value based in reality. Wider deregulation allowed the concept of ‘pure’ economics to accelerate fast, and it now stands on a global scale as a work of conceptual economic art. The American website, Truthout, said last week that the top-level advice in the US on how to deal with their soaring debt is to service it by printing money. That way, no additional interest is incurred. The debt may look bigger, but the figures never get any worse. ‘Monetarisation’ of sums owed can be effected at the stroke of a computer key. Nothing is made or sold, no skill is needed. This is the perfect algebraic solution, free of any concern but the ever-dancing relationships.
The public, kept in a state of confusion by professional spin, has ceased to expect to understand what official persons are talking about. There is often an actual need for translators.
Britain, instinctively more conservative (or less imaginative) than the US, can’t bring itself to go quite so far with Quantitative Easing – and the common citizenry is not, of course, encouraged to try a little QE of its own by printing fivers in the attic. Its role in the equation is as a spender. Those without spending ability are valueless, and those who think they can dabble in the algebraic world of their betters will be taught a sharp lesson.
The public, kept in a state of confusion by professional spin, has ceased to expect to understand what official persons are talking about. There is often an actual need for translators. Just last week I heard someone faced with filling in a grant form ask a likely helper, ‘Do you do Official-speak?’ Seekers of funds know they must use the new, abstract language, since plain words tick no boxes. This dominant absurdity is producing a class divide more severe than we have seen since feudal times.
The Scottish Arts Council’s reinvention of itself as Creative Scotland sprang from a frantic desire to be seen as patrician. In order to be respected by the algebraic elite, it had to talk of facilitating an interface of inward investment rather than ‘giving grants’. That conformity of language and thinking was more important than the needs of people who try to live while producing original works of art.
We need to define our thinking on the linguistic split very carefully. We must be clear that to use plain, traditional language is not Luddite but an empowerment to be fiercely protected. We must also refuse to regard any country as an abstract economic pattern. Without people, a country is a landscape, but not a nation. When pi-in-the-sky thinking goes wrong, as it well may do, an ability to grow potatoes and help each other may be more important than grasping how one should broker/signpost startup support. Meanwhile, the battle to save Arran’s CAB continues.
Alison Prince is an author and editor in Arran
What school did you go to?
Norman Fenton
I was deep in the Western Sahara making a documentary about the war being fought there by Polisario guerrillas attempting to liberate their traditional desert home from the illegal occupation (see UN) by Morocco. We were with the Polisario fighters themselves, part of the original ‘blue-men’ who fought the French Foreign Legion in the 1920’s novel/film ‘Beau Geste’. Like most of these sorts of projects there were moments of sheer terror surrounded by hours of staggering boredom.
It was during one of the earlier moments of terror that I was introduced to the subtlety of mortaring. I was standing chatting to Nick, an ex-SAS medical officer, who was accompanying us on our sojourn in the Sahara. Suddenly there was a very loud bang and, within less than a second, I was the only one of the two of us not lying prone in the sand. He looked up at me, and announced: ‘incoming’. He got up, dusted himself off, and we continued chatting as though nothing had happened.
At school in Scotland, I had always been told I was a very quick learner, so when minutes later there was another loud bang, this time I threw myself to the ground. To look at, only a matter of a few inches away, an original pair of Clark’s desert boots whose wearer, Nick, was standing happily lighting his cigarette, and murmuring discretely: ‘outgoing’.
My crew and myself were in the boredom sector, sleeping in our goat-hair tent, waiting for the next delightful meal of camel-knuckles, when I had my Scheherezade moment. We would each spend an evening telling the others about our early lives; where we had grown up; where we had gone to school, etc.
When it came to my turn, my story of Glasgow sectarianism was met with total amicable disbelief. Amusing, they said, but entirely incredible. Sure, they were willing to believe the bit about never mentioning as a youngster what local team you might support, but they had problems with the bit about being constantly afraid of the inevitable and apparently unavoidable question, with which you would always be addressed, in your adolescent life (and even later) by fellow Scots intent on establishing which foot you actually might use. The bit when you would be asked: ‘By the way, what school did you go, to?’ And my audacity in expecting them, the English, to believe such a story, out there in the dunes, of all places.
The moments of terror and the hours of boredom having passed, we found ourselves at Algiers airport. The air-conditioning had expired, so we, complete with boarding passes, sat outside on the steps, facing the incoming various transit passengers. Those were the days – in order to fly, you didn’t even have to take your shoes off.
Anyway, in comes a large Saudi airliner, and down the steps comes a figure in a dark three-piece suit. As he passes to go into the terminal via the transit gate, the crew tell him about the broken air-conditioning and the fact that it’s cooler outside. He explains in a Scots accent that he’s going to buy some tax-free drinks, before he continues to Heathrow. We’re waiting for the Madrid flight, I explain. He asks us what we are doing in Algiers, and we explain about the desert war. ‘Where about in Scotland are you from’, he asks, so I tell him. Off in he goes, and his London flight is eventually called before our Madrid one. As he passes us again, on his way out, he pleasantly asks ‘Oh, by the way, what school did you go to?’. The crew erupts in an explosion of hysterical laughter, as he continues on his way answer-less, showing such a puzzlement that it possibly establishes, to an astute observer, his specific Scottish origins.
Norman Fenton wrote and produced for Thames TV a dramatised version of the inquest in Pretoria into the killing of Steve Biko, the black South African activist. Later, he extended his original version to stage-length and ‘The Biko Inquest’ was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company
