by Clive James
Ten hundred thousand and fourteen: it not only sounds a lot, it sounds precise. In sounding precise lies the whole art of post-normal science, to whose fruits Oxford is welcome. One says so in the hope that Cambridge keeps itself free of such developments. I myself got part of my education in Cambridge, and I still live there. Though I never fully understood what had gone on in the Cavendish Laboratory, I always had a pretty clear picture of the likelihood that it had had to do with real atoms, and not narratives. But for all I know, post-normal science might be the way ahead. To the layman, it could scarcely be more incomprehensible than string theory, although we should never lose sight of the fact that there is a difference between the difficult and the vacuous. Quantum mechanics, for example, is not a field that most of us can understand, but we had better understand that by now there is a connection between quantum mechanics and almost every machine in the house more complicated than a kettle. Whichever way science goes, however, it would clearly be fatal for journalism if it continued to allow itself the dubious liberties of treating the merely conjectural as beyond objection. It would clearly be fatal because it has nearly been fatal already.
Some of the most famous newspapers in the English-speaking world are convinced that their circulations are threatened by the Web. But their circulations are also threatened by their declining authority, the vestiges of which, in this period, further declined until you could barely see them. In journalism, authority depends on the power of analysis. To parrot a fashion won’t do the trick. There was a day when the best journalists could puncture a fashion early in its career because they were sensitive to bogus language. But from the 1960s onwards, pseudo-science got such a grip that it infected every field. (The climate change craze is an example of pseudo-science finally invading science itself.) The largely nonsensical procedures of literary theory and cultural studies should have been rumbled at the start, simply from the double-talk in which they were expressed. Significantly, they were swallowed whole and faithfully revered, ruining the education of countless innocent students until a couple of academics wrote a spoof. The spoof having become news, the matter was finally up for discussion. It shouldn’t have taken the spoof to do it. Similarly, it shouldn’t have taken the Wikileaks revelations of late 2010 to demonstrate that the figure for war-related deaths in Iraq was more like 175,000 people than the 655,000 (note that precise-sounding extra five thousand) previously promoted by the Lancet and faithfully adhered to in the Western mainstream media for years on end. The first figure was still a lot of people, but the second figure had not only been made up out of ‘models’ (projections), it had been wolfed down by the very people who should have been first to question it: journalists.
The deep story of this period was that journalists had become the last people to question anything. One can only hope that they will return to their traditional role of critical enquiry – i.e. scepticism – while printed newspapers still exist to be written for. I did my time in Fleet Street and I loved my craft, but it could just be that its time is up. Time will tell, and probably sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, in whatever medium, the best way to sound human when writing is to cleave as closely as possible to the spoken voice. When Aung San Suu Kyi was allowed out, the first thing the common people wanted to do was just to look at her. After that, they wanted to hear her. And I was all wrong in my projections about the future career of Susan Boyle. People wanted to hear her too. Against all the odds, Subo flourished, rather like the human race.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Unreliable Memoirs Falling Towards England
May Week Was In June Always Unreliable
North Face of Soho The Blaze of Obscurity
FICTION
Brilliant Creatures The Remake
Brrm! Brrm! The Silver Castle
VERSE
Other Passports: Poems 1958–1985
The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958–2003
Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958–2008
Angels Over Elsinore: Collected Verse 2003–2008
CRITICISM
The Metropolitan Critic (new edition, 1994)
Visions Before Midnight
The Crystal Bucket
First Reactions (US)
From the Land of Shadows
Glued to the Box
Snakecharmers in Texas
The Dreaming Swimmer
Fame in the Twentieth Century
On Television
Even as We Speak
Reliable Essays
As of This Writing (US)
The Meaning of Recognition
Cultural Amnesia
The Revolt of the Pendulum
TRAVEL
Flying Visits
First published 2011 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2011 by Picador
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ISBN 978-1-4472-0416-9
Copyright © Clive James 2011
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