Dear Reader,
No, The Pineapple is not reinventing itself as a self-help/lifestyle newsletter. But it is always interested in those moments when the language of self-help crosses over into politics. For instance,
To be fair to the Mayor of London, Emma Raducanu herself drew a similar moral from her victory at the US Open. “If you just do the best you can with every single day, time flies, and you can really achieve anything with inner belief.”
And to be fair to both of them, the belief that anything is achievable – given a few conditions like hard work, living in the right country, or having the right government (Khan has more recently explained that “If you work hard, and get a helping hand, you can achieve anything. @UKLabour is that helping hand”) is ubiquitous, across the political spectrum and in most branches of public life. The Pineapple’s research department brings to my attention Arnold Schwarzenegger (“If you work hard and you play by the rules, then this country is truly open to you. You can achieve anything”), Sajid Javid (“in today’s Britain it doesn’t matter where you come from. As long as you’re willing to put in the effort you can achieve anything”), Nicola Sturgeon, the cross-dressing Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst, Sayeeda Warsi, Richard Branson, Marcus Rashford, Victoria Beckham, The Rock and any number of Olympic medal-winners, as well as the millionaire influencer Hushpuppi, who added belief in God to the necessity of working hard, and recently pleaded guilty to money-laundering. And so on.
The best defence of Anythingism is that Samuel Johnson would have had a sneaking sympathy with it. One of Johnson’s favourite themes was how easily we convince ourselves that our goals are impossible or not worth the effort. The mind, he thought, was better at seeing reasons not to act, than reasons to give something a try: he called it “the perspicacity of cowardice”. There are always people, Johnson wrote, who will pop up to explain that some new scheme is doomed, or to mock it as ridiculous. “Their notions and discourse are so agreeable to the lazy, the envious, and the timorous, that they seldom fail of becoming popular, and directing the opinions of mankind.” In that sense, we all need to be reminded that more is possible than we think.
The Johnsonian version of the principle is a bit different, though:
Few things are impossible to diligence and skill … Great works are performed, not by strength, but perseverance.
The focus here is on the work – mapping an unknown continent, translating an epic poem, discovering a new vaccine – with the implication that it will be for the benefit of humanity. The Anythingist mantra implies something rather different: that the magic dust of stardom can fall on you too. The people who say it tend to be millionaires, actors, politicians – implying, in effect, that you too can ascend this high.
Most often, it falls from the lips of sportspeople. Exhausted after some competitive triumph, and aware of the pressure to say something weighty, they tell the public to dream big, because if you work hard and believe in yourself... Yet it is sport which most clearly reveals the trouble with Anythingism. Read, for instance, Michael Calvin’s No Hunger in Paradise, about the system which chews up thousands of promising young footballers and then, most often, spits them out with no chance of a permanent playing career – let alone a place in a Premier League squad, let alone being able to make the first team of a Big Six club. The harsh truth is that to make one Marcus Rashford, the system also has to make a host of also-rans. In such an environment, however hard you work, you might still achieve not that much.
The same applies to much of the 21st century economy. How many small businesses have been shuttered, how many workers have had to be ground down, on the way to creating a single Jeff Bezos? How many online platforms exhibit what Mary Harrington calls “Aella’s Law”, where the top 1% take 90% of the profits?
In a 2017 survey of 3,000 children in Britain, China, and the US, the most popular answers to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” were
1. YouTuber – 34.20 per cent
2. Blogger/Vlogger – 18.10 per cent
3. Musician/Singer – 16 per cent
4. Actor – 15.7 per cent
5. Film Maker – 13.6 per cent
A lot of people, in other words, are being set up for disappointment. Of course it’s good to have a few dreams. And in an economy which creates some big winners, maybe it’s reasonable enough to dream of being one of them. But the questions our society struggles to answer are “What are all the non-winners supposed to do?” and “Is there something more to life than winning?” I wouldn’t quite claim that Anythingism is how the winner class distracts the rest of us from asking those questions. It is, though, a highly convenient myth.
The Pineapple’s favourite modern poet turns 104 today – or would have done had he not died in 1976, leaving behind the modern world he half-hated, half-embraced. Here’s an essay by me on his life and work.
Turns out it is possible to write sanely and persuasively about vaccine mandates. Edward Feser does so here and here.
Why is social care in crisis? Christine Corlet Walker points out one of the reasons: the kind of firms who ultimately own much of the care sector. One of those alarming glimpses of where power actually resides.
Britain has always been comparatively short of trees, and the north of England is especially under-wooded. Three cheers, then, for the Northern Forest project, a plan to plant 50m of them by mid-century.
“Every schoolchild has heard of Leonardo’s sketch of a flying machine that would never have flown, yet few to none of them have heard of Eilmer of Malmesbury’s actual eleventh century glider, which not only could have flown, but did.”
Why the Renaissance is overrated.
Stephen Marche, who a few years ago wrote an extraordinary essay about “the return of the incest aesthetic”, has done it again. At Literary Hub he describes Sally Rooney’s fiction as exemplifying “the literature of the pose”. It sounds like an insult, but it is really an insight into the “deep anxiety” of the millennial mind: whereas the Philip Roth generation pursued self-expression and self-fulfilment, Rooney’s cohort is “obsessed with how not to say the wrong thing, how much, exactly, to give away.” Marche’s eventual conclusion is hair-raising.
Also read BD McClay’s take on Rooney’s new novel, which notes a quiet yearning running through the book: “I don’t mean that Beautiful World is a brief for becoming Catholic (it isn’t a brief for anything… it is a novel). I mean that the consistent alternative in the book itself – the possibility that unites living a human life, loving and cultivating beauty, and working for a better world – is Catholicism... It is not an especially realized Catholicism ... but it’s there and takes up a substantial part of the story.”
This is reminiscent of Fleabag; also of Rachel Connolly’s recent confession on the Corbynist website Novara Media: “Sometimes I think I might start going to church again (I grew up Catholic), and then I go and I feel like it was the solution to everything and decide I will go straight back the next chance I get, and then things come up...”
Is there a trend here? A not-quite-hidden, mostly-suppressed longing for the old faith, somehow or other, to turn out to be true? Please send any examples you’ve spotted to the usual address: danhitchens1989@gmail.com.
Photo: pmenzel86/Creative Commons