Culture and anarchy

Jean Nouvel's Philharmonie de Paris

Jean Nouvel's Philharmonie de Paris, though currently running at twice its projected budget, has been judged too far advanced to cancel or modify by the new government of Francois Hollande, which is casting a crtitical eye over the previous government's grands projets.

China: a 'cultural revolution'?

Lifted out of poverty in Guangdong

Move along, there's nothing to see

In a separate development it has been disclosed that Cheryl Gillan, the Welsh secretary, sold her home in Amersham 500 metres from the proposed route [of the new HS2 high speed railway line] two months before the project was approved. An aide said the sale, which leaves her without a constituency home, was necessary because her elderly husband had difficulty with the stairs.




Modern retailers receive detailed sales data at the end of every day so Noel "Bob" Robbins, UK chief operating officer at Tesco, surely knew on 4 January that the chain had had a lousy Christmas. That was the day he sold 50,000 shares in his employer at 404.5p apiece. One profits warning later, Tesco's share price is 316p, so Robbins is about £44,000 better off by selling eight days ago rather than on Friday.

Correspondence

I have a faith in the power of correspondence - literary correspondence that is, but with the deeper meaning of the word given full weight - to create reality. a belief that if a letter (or even an email) expresses with sufficient skill and power the interweaving of the recipient's history, statements and opinions with one's own concerns and desires it creates a version of reality that cannot be gainsaid.

It is, I suppose, a belief little different from a belief in witchcraft spells, or in voodoo - of from a belief in, an understanding of, the power of poetry, or indeed of any form of art.

Yet it is inferior to voodoo (or witchcraft or art) in that, unlike them, it requires for its efficacy that the recipient should be a believer too. Whilst the modern sceptic dismisses the pricklings in his limbs until he rapidly and unaccountably expires, the recipient of the letter passes his eyes over it without its logic and architecture impinging upon him in the slightest. So that it is, ironically, not a lack of superstition that causes my literary witchcraft to fail, but a lack of imaginative faith in rationality and the inter-relationship of expression, thought and truth.

The heyday of my faith was probably the eighteenth century , when sense was a matter of general agreement among educated gentlemen, and the great example of the power of literary correspondence was to be found in Dr Johnson's famous epistolary rebuke to Lord Chesterfield:

"The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind: but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it."

Lord Chesterfield was so much a fellow believer that, rather than attempt the impossibility of replying to such a letter, he kept it on display and exhibited it to his friends and visitors as an outstanding work of expression.

I like to think (probably erroneously) that it was a recognition of the possibly over-weening power of expression to create its own reality that lead Dr Johnson to advise aspiring writers to strike out anything in their work that they thought particularly fine.

The eighteenth century is normally regarded as a prosaic culture, but there was something heroic in its belief in the power of rationality and human agency, which in some of its strongest authors resulted in outbursts of exuberance, malice or even madness, as one may find, for example, in Alexander Pope or Jonathan Swift. Elsewhere, as T S Eliot observed, 'It crushed a number of lesser men who thought differently but could not bear to face the fact.'

Language, especially figurative language, has the power not only to encapsulate our thoughts but to betray us, almost seamlessly, into accepting further ideas that were not part of our original perception.We all know the feeling of 'swimming against the tide': finding that our efforts do not produce the results we think they should, that they are resisted by some large force 'out there'. But the strength with which we recognise part of the metaphor can blind us to how badly the rest of it fits. Those of us who indulge in sea bathing (including Le Corbusier) know vividly that swimming against the actual tide always gives a far greater sense of achievement, of disciplined productive effort, of pleasure and progress and an enhanced fitness for further work, than does swimming with it - when you may get somewhere faster, but in something of a physical mess. Some people might even be more likely to get a few admiring glances from people on the beach. Is that the metaphor or the thought doing the work?

Atomisation 1

When we nowadays talk, as we so frequently do, about 'communication', we often are referring to techniques to facilitate primarily verbal communication between physically distant individuals: the (nearly obsolete) letter, the telephone, the email, 'social media' - even blogging, though now we are getting more into the territory of publication rather than inter-personal communication.

It must have been very different in the days of settled societies, when personal mobility was heavily circumscribed. People of course talked to each other, but personal social interaction was not necessarily verbal. It consisted to a considerable extent in simple physical presence in the course of quotidian lives, in the interchange of goods and services. That was not necessarily stimulating, but the unexamined assumption that stimulation is always beneficial is a product of our own times.

It is significant that we do now talk about communication so much - its success or failure, its techniques; despite its unprecedented quantity in our time, it is always thought there is not enough of it, that the solution to all problems lies in 'more' or 'more effective' communicaton. There is far less consideration of what we might be communicating or of whether it is desirable that we should seek to develop new realms within ourselves for communication. With it of course goes the whole modern fixation with the virtues of 'self-expression'. In modern times the unexpressed life is the life not worth living.

Product placement

He's worried too

Lacoste, the people who provide golfers and others with fashionably anodyne clothes decorated with a rather twee crocodile, have reportedly asked the Norwegian police to prevent Anders Breivik from appearing publicly in their garments with logo visible to photographers.

It is not known what was the police response, but this clearly exposes a grave gap in international intellectual property protection legislation. It is to be hoped that world trade authorities will take rapid and effective action. Unless global corporations can control who associates themselves with their brands and how (and not only in such high-profile cases as this) the value of these brands, so important to the material and spiritual well-being of us all, will be undermined and social stability and growth will be betrayed.

We need a rapidly formalised and effective system whereby in purchasing any branded product we assent to terms under which the brand-owners can control when we should and should not display their goods to any group of more than three people, in what circumstances, in association with what other products and with what standards of personal appearance and conduct. This must be made to stick; get the legal draughtsmen onto it now.

I wonder, did they ask the crocodiles?

Designers and the riots - an exchange with Skree

I believe, along with many, that the recent riots were not primarily political in nature, certainly unlike the poll tax riots. Many have been blamed or criticised from single mothers to gang culture to the police. Whilst all these professions may have borne some degree of guilt, designers haven't either spoken up nor had fingers pointed their way. What were the most stolen items? not food; Waterstones remained untouched, no, it was the desirable consumables, mobile phones, computer games, laptops, trainers. A feast of designer goods. A new pair of trainers or a Blackberry brings but temporary comfort, dates and needs to be updated to take part in the fashion of object ownership. These rioters who can see no further than a pair of status symbol nikes are a lost generation. Politically the endorsement of material betterment that began with Thatcher but became the thrust of Blair’s 'democracy' has clearly left a gaping hole. These objects of desire deliver a longevity of ‘buzz' not much greater than a bag of heroin or a pipe of crack. But who thinks up material culture? is it not us designers? Are we not equally responsible for delivering these momentary highs as much as any? It is time that designers refuse the throw away, the fashion statement and show a materialism of depth. Arguably the Designer Craftsmen with their adherence to the Arts and Crafts ethos have turned their backs on the trivia of conventional product design and offered an alternative, objects of heirloom significance. The practice must transcend both the attack of the shock of the momentarily new and the self indulgent.

from Skreeworld blog






You could say that, but you would be saying that people rioted because they had been morally debauched by their taste for trainers and mobile phones. Perhaps they had. If they had taken food would we say they had been morally debauched by their need to eat? They didn’t take food, presumably because, although they feel themselves to be materially disadvantaged, they are not, mostly, at the point of not being able to feed themselves. You could simply say that, like most thieves in other contexts, they were after easily portable and saleable objects of high value. Some police spokespeople have said that the riots spread simply because, after the police failure to control the first riots sparked by Mark Duggan’s death, people believed they would get away with it. That amounts to saying that significant sections of society are in a permanent state of potentially violent disaffection and indicates an alarming degree of social alienation. In some broad sense that has to be considered ‘political’. We may be debauched by trashy consumer goods but I think one can overstate the extent to which that is a radical social change. There has always been a taste for quick gratification and often for the tawdry – to some extent. One might equally say that the alienation is produced by the constant display of highly expensive consumer goods that a very small minority can easily enjoy, but only they can. In that picture ‘designer-maker’ furniture comes off less creditably. What is new in our society is an alienation of ordinary people from the processes by which material goods are produced, and that applies equally to the high-tech electronic goods in everybody’s pockets and to the low-tech but immaculate purpose-made furniture.

Smuts

St Mary's church, Whitby was built in the twelfth century but has aisles, galleries (mostly accessed by outside stairways), lanterns (more nautical than ecclesiastical) and box pews, all cobbled together in a strange, makeshift, seafaring sort of way in the eighteenth century, with the result that the altar is effectively shunted away, off centre, and attention focusses on the three-decker pulpit. Arched windows have been replaced with big Georgian fenestration and it is easy to imagine the church packed with the anxious families of seafaring men, with their eyes half on the weather outside as they listen to the sermon.

Inside, amongst the sea of box pews, is a strange muddle of columns: Georgian wooden supports for the galleries, rather crudely done out in painted marbling and older, presumably stone structural columns painted over in best buff gloss paint, for all the world like ship's stanchions repeatedly painted over against the sea-born rust. In the late eighteenth century Whitby was the third most important ship-building town in England, after London and Newcastle.

One of the box pews (not one of those marked 'For strangers only') has a neat canvass cover stretched right across the top and a notice explains:

In times past it was the duty of our Church Maid to cover every privately owned or rented pew after the Service each Sunday. This was to prevent the chimney smuts from the cottages below the Church settling in the pews and spoiling the occupants' best Sunday Clothes.

There is a Church Maid still, but smuts are no longer much in evidencen and, even if they were, I doubt many of the congregation still attend in capitalised best Sunday Clothes.

Whitby, and its then newly founded but already flourishing abbey (now standing ruined a little distance from the church), was the site of the Synod of 664 which settled such matters as calculating the date of Easter and the correct form of monkish tonsures, and, in perhaps a historically ill-informed view, reconciled the Celtic and Roman traditions and practices within the British church.

Mamon in the pulpit

Club card government

In a 'rare intervention' into the domestic political arena, from which he has triumphantly ascended, Tony Blair has advised us that the recent riots (predicted incidentally by Nick Clegg before the election, when he was campaigning against, not in tandem with the Conservatives) were not the result (as David Cameron says) of a general moral decline in society, nor (as Blair's successors in the Labour Party suggest) the result of the coalition government's policies and cuts. According to Blair, the rioters are a distinct and discrete canker - the great bulk of society has nothing in common with the rioters.

It is probably true that there are, among the rioters, people from whom most of us would feel deeply alienated and with whom we would find it almost impossible to forge any relationship. Yet one has only to follow the reporting of the riots and of the court appearances since to see that also amongst them were many who were far from being hard-bitten social disfunctionals and who were either almost surprised at what they had done, or whose alienation was almost trivial; people that is who were responding to a social and cultural development rather than creating it through the force of their malign personalities.

Tony Blair's remedy is 'early intervention' - special state 'support' targetted at distinct individuals and families, preferably identified before they actually offend by information gathered against a range of theoretical or statistical indicators. Blair began this in his final years in office; Brown abandonned it; but, Blair now says, "the papers and the work are still there" handily lying in government offices waiting for Cameron to pick up, once he sees the light.

I find there is always something chilling about Blair's approach. Social institutions and relationships are not at fault or in need of adjustment; rather it is malfunctioning individuals who are to receive the specific ministrations of the state to ensure that they fit the social model. It is not that I think people cannot be deeply influenced and changed by encounters with others, but when the interaction is part of an organised programme conducted by a state or social body, one is in different territory. Perhaps there is something of Blair's churchly inclinations here, but it also makes me think of a different model - the supermarkets, those new Jesuits of the consumer society. Our habits and doings are monitored by government data-gathering, like the supermarket 'club card' (this is a club we are "all in together"), but, unlike Tesco amending its stocking and marketing to fit demand, the government moulds the recalcitrant individual to fit society.

Whitby gravestone

At the top of the almost 200 steps leading up to Whitby church, as one enters the churchyard, one is faced with a gravestone directly exposed to the northern winds. The gravestone has long since been weathered to a gently undulating, scoured surface, devoid of all inscription except for the bottom few lines, which through the years have been sheltered from the elements by a low-lying grave in front. There, after puzzling as to whether she died aged 51 or 61 or maybe younger, one can make out the final sentence of the inscription:

She found in Christ that happiness which the world cannot give.

All-terrain ices

He counted them all out...

According to Max Hastings in the Daily Mail, the rioters “are essentially wild beasts. They respond only to instinctive animal impulses – to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others. Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no-one even shot them for it… At the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’. They simply exist. Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything least of all Britain or their community. They do not watch royal weddings or notice test matches or take pride in being Londoners or Scousers or Brummies. Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present. They have their being only in video games and street fights, casual drug use and crime, sometimes petty, sometimes serious. The notions of doing a nine to five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids, taking up DIY or learning to read properly, are beyond their imaginations.”

Mr Hastings has presumably no more direct personal acquaintance with any individuals in this class of “wild beasts” than I have with individuals in the privileged financial classes, and it does not occur to him that the latter could equally be said to “respond only to instinctive animal impulses – to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others”, except that the latter do it on a grander and more ‘elegant’ scale. Or that the financial classes who have laid our economy low make an explicit bargaining point of the fact that they do not “feel any allegiance to anything least of all Britain” – and in their case it has often, but vainly, been suggested to them that they should, after receiving more public subvention than the rioters could dream of.

The idea of Mr Bob Diamond watching the royal wedding on his telly before pottering off to do a little DIY around his oh-so-affordable house is delightful in the extreme and will no doubt do much in coming weeks to re-cement our society.

People will notice that in his list of the deprivations endured by the rioters (“no skills, education, values or aspirations”) Max Hastings curiously omits “jobs” – only to refer to them later as something these people might take up if they only wished, like DIY or literacy lessons.

With Mr Hastings lamenting that the rioters cannot be shot, like polar bears who have, through no fault of their own, got into the wrong place, and with Melanie Phillips, in the same Daily Mail, telling us that it is all the result of a “three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value. The married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of drugs laws, and many other fundamental conventions were all smashed by a liberal intelligentsia hell bent on a revolutionary transformation of society” – with people like this bending the ears and understanding of middle England, hope is low indeed.

'Designer-maker': a peculiar furniture question - postscript

A colleague has remarked, perhaps not disapprovingly, amongst other comments he had on my 'designer-maker question' and Peter Dormer recent piece,  that “in writing about John Makepeace and Waywood you have crossed that divide where we openly talk about each other's work”.

I was not actually conscious of crossing any divide, certainly not in any improper way. I do in fact have considerable admiration both for John Makepeace’s work as a whole and for the particular cabinet of Waywood’s on which I commented. In any case I did not consider myself to be offering criticism, in the sense of saying whether the work was good or bad. What I was attempting was to place what we do, as ‘designer-makers of furniture’ in the context of a currently live cultural matrix. I took John Makepeace’s work as a whole because he is so evidently the leading exponent of this type of work and the one whose output is both influential on other practitioners and most often commented upon by others. In some sense, willingly or not, he stands as elevated proxy for us all. That particular Waywood cabinet seemed to me to illustrate, better than any other individual piece of which I know, the ambivalent attitude we have (or might have – I do not know whether Barnaby Scott had in his mind any of the thoughts his piece stimulates in mine) to the principles of Arts and Crafts furniture, still our default cultural forebear.

At some level, as I said, it does not really matter: there is always a place for someone producing furniture without regard or deference to the culture around him or her. Yet culture is a collaborative enterprise, depending upon shared senses of what is worthwhile, although they need periodic refreshment or challenge.

It only makes sense, to take an extreme example, to talk of ‘morality’ in design in a context of shared cultural values. No-one is killing babies here. Any matrix of cultural values depends on acceptance rather than argument or logic. As soon as you question the foundations of such a matrix the whole structure above ground begins to look absurd, no matter how rigorously built.

It seems plain to me that we are designing and making furniture at a time when all of those cultural structures are tottering. Most of us, in our little community shelter somewhere near the ruins of the Arts and Crafts. Another group of designers and producers shelters in Modernism. Elsewhere numerous ramshackle structures, Deco and Dada, Constructivism and even neo-Classicism, have a surprising number of inhabitants, some a little shifty. But all of them have seen better days; none now looks entirely convincing. In this landscape of ruins some roam ever further afield, knocking on doors marked art, philosophy, technology.

Historically it is a relatively new kind of landscape. A few centuries back the artist craftsman (to employ a short-hand anachronistic term unsatisfactory at every time), whether he were making furniture or carving cathedral stonework, would have imbibed without deliberate choice or justification. Even later, when competing styles vied against each other, a continuity of basic cultural assumption underlay them. It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that in the production of useful artefacts choices had to be made, about the way in which people worked and the nature of what they produced, that were seen to be acutely culturally defining. The Arts and Crafts and Modernism both had their distinctly moralising and missionary qualities, which we have neither shaken off nor entirely renounced.

In a curious way Modernism echoes the cultural certainty of the eighteenth century and its conception of ‘correct’ taste. If Modernism, from the beginning faced more cultural challenges than eighteenth-century culture it was not because its precepts were less self-confident but rather because no one class any more had a near monopoly of cultural expression.

Yet its day has passed and we have inherited its questions rather than its answers. I don’t believe we shall find new cultural accommodation for ourselves until many much wider questions of our social organisation have been answered (maybe even including in the great tide those hoary old things that troubled Ruskin and Morris). There are a great many contractions for us collectively to work though before we can hope to get to that stage. So, meanwhile, it might be better for us to focus our enquiring minds on what I have not – the actual workings and output of individual makers and making teams – but we do all in fact make it extremely difficult for that to be achieved, sometimes apparently thinking (perhaps in our commercial and socio-cultural anxiety) that the only communication worthwhile is the higher puffery.

Witch-hunts

A storm has just broken over the head of Johann Hari, radical commenting journalist who writes regularly for The Independent.

It seems Hari is in the habit of spatchcocking into his interviews with cultural or political thinkers unacknowledged quotations from their published work, as though those were parts of their utterances during the interview. A great cry of ‘plagiarism’ has gone up.

If anyone ever got to interview me, I would certainly indulge myself in a few regurgitations of my finest coinages from earlier efforts, but, leaving that aside, Hari is certainly guilty of bad practice and possibly of misrepresenting the current views of his interviewees – although it is probably no different from the way in which their work will be assessed (if it is assessed at all) after their deaths, unless they take care to publish regular updates of all their opinions.

Yet to accuse Hari of plagiarism – ‘the taking and using as one’s own of the thoughts, writings or inventions of another’ – is utterly ignorant and absurd. It reminds me somewhat of the recent ostracism of the western, heterosexual man who invented and surreptitiously promoted the gay girl in Damascus blog. He too was guilty of bad practice and perhaps of something much worse, endangering individuals whose cause he apparently sought to promote, but still the reaction all seems a part of the obsessive focussing on the individual rather than engaging with the reality of their creations. It is as though we were afraid of moving beyond the level of an officially scrupulous and prurient mundanity.

At this rate Tolstoy and all his works are certainly in the dustbin, along with most of the writers who are referenced on this blog: Ruskin is certainly included and so, probably, are virtually all the significant writers and artists of our culture. We cannot go to a Wagner opera or read the Cantos of Ezra Pound. If we ever get round to it in the world of design nothing will be safe: we won't be able to sit in a Le Corbusier chair ever again and we shall certainly have to throw over our universal deference to the stern views on decoration of that old reprobate Adolf Loos.

Hari is of course not in that rank, but it’s all part of the same tendency – as if everyone were running for election as president of the United States or wherever.

Culture and Anarchy

“And yet, futile as are many bookmen, and helpless as books and reading often prove for bringing nearer to perfection those who use them, one must, I think, be struck more and more, the longer one lives, to find how much, in our present society, a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value on whether he reads during that day, and, far more still, on what he reads during it. More and more he who examines himself will find the difference it makes to him, at the end of any given day, whether or no he has pursued his avocations throughout it without reading at all; and whether or no, having read something, he has read the newspapers only. This, however, is a matter for each man's private conscience and experience. If a man without books or reading, or reading nothing but his letters and the newspapers, gets nevertheless a fresh and free play of the best thoughts upon his stock notions and habits, he has got culture. He has got that for which we prize and recommend culture; he has got that which at the present moment we seek culture that it may give us. This inward operation is the very life and essence of culture, as we conceive it.”
Matthew Arnold Culture and Anarchy, Preface

Tox take two

I am much taken by an interesting comment on the artistic status of Daniel Halpin’s (‘Tox’) work from Dominique Hurle that has appeared in the Guardian Letters page:

“I should like to defend Daniel Halpin (or "Tox") against the charges of certain establishment figures – police, popular artists, and prosecutors – that his work amounts to nothing more than trivial but pervasive vandalism, lacking in skill or merit (Tox tagger faces prison, 8 June).
I have enjoyed Mr Halpin's work since I started to travel to London extensively and would see "TOX 06" emblazoned on mile after mile of train carriages, railway sidings, bridges and buildings. Its ubiquity, regularity and apparent pointlessness is what makes the work a powerful critique of the monotony and triviality of the many signs and notices put up by the state which bear instructions, prohibitions and statements of the obvious.
When I walk down a street and see in the space of half a mile 20 metal plaques bearing all manner of petty injunctions – "No drinking in this area"; "No parking on matchdays 6.30pm–8.30pm"; "Dogs to be kept on leads in the park" – I feel, to borrow vocabulary from Detective Constable Livings, the state has committed a selfish vandalism which scars the environment and contributes to a sense of oppression, anxiety and lack of personal agency.
As artist Ben Flynn says, Mr Halpin's work is indeed "incredibly basic" and lacking in "style". I think that's the point.”

It would seem that the courts and the experts have simply failed in their art criticism: Mr Halpin’s art is an installation and assessing just one of his tags is like criticising Andy Goldsworthy for the configuration of a single twig.

I wonder whether Dominique Hurle has considered the possibility that the authorities responsible for those petty injunctions are themselves a bunch of artists – of some description – and that we inhabit a total art form, with a larger concept. Perhaps that was what Kafka or Lewis Carroll had in mind.

Is it art? II

A jury has decided that the graffiti of Daniel Halpin, who signs or ‘tags’ himself as ‘Tox’, is not art and so, by default, must be criminal damage. The perpetrator seems headed for prison.

The courts used to be called upon to decide whether usually literary works were art – and so could be excused the charge of pornography. (So little was the establishment’s belief in the power of art that it was thought only trash could deprave and corrupt – I suppose that belief was born of their long experience of falling asleep at the opera.) The burdens imposed upon the judicial mind move on, whilst the essential absurdity remains.

In the case of Mr Halpin other artists, somehow sanctioned by society, have turned state’s evidence against him. A certain Mr Ben ‘Eine’ Flynn, whose work has been presented to Barack Obama by David Cameron (I bet they put it on the wall just whilst he’s visiting) – so it must be art, although Mr Flynn too has previously clocked up five convictions for criminal damage in the past. You might think he was in danger of losing his licence, but somehow the process seems to work in the other direction. He testified as an ‘expert witness’ (that category responsible for many a conspicuous miscarriage of justice) that Tox’s ‘tags’ and ‘dubs’ were ‘incredibly basic’, lacking ‘skill, flair or unique style’. That seems a little reactionary: is Mr Flynn spearheading a campaign for the restoration of life drawing to our art schools? Apart from ‘unique style’ the same was probably said of every major artist since Van Gogh.

Not even Halpin’s record of being able to earn money from his work secured his status, nor his claim that the offending items were actually the work of forgers – forgeries presumably being society’s ultimate validation of art.

So it would appear my walls are protected by the majesty of the law from ‘basic’ graffiti, but not from that Leonardo turning up and decorating them with his ‘Last Supper’. All I could do last time was to give the place over to the horses. Where’s the law and order agenda? I blame that pinko, Ken Clarke.

Brands

The Hands of Jobs

An American company, owned by our very own dearly beloved WPP, has just released its annual ‘global brand power list’, where Apple has shot to the top of a scale that estimates brand value on the basis of such key metrics as ‘desirability’ and ‘buzz’. (Somehow you can tell this is the work of an advertising company, but I think money’s in there somewhere too.)

BP of course (wrong kind of buzz) has slumped to number 64 – do we still love it?

The top of the list is dominated by the commuter and communications world – not just Apple but Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Vodafone, IBM and not forgetting China Mobile – with a strong showing also from staff-of-life companies, MacDonald’s, Coca Cola, Walmart and Marlboro, and a sprinkling of lightweights such as GE.

Many of these brands of course, like WPP itself, share internationally creative taxation practices.

Our own Furniture Designer Makers’ Association doesn’t seem to have made it into the top hundred – perhaps because we haven’t sorted out our logo yet.

The Hands of God and Man

Would anyone like a lift in my direction?

With growing attention being paid to the ever greater concentration of wealth and income in western nations in the hands of a small minority of their populations, we hear less often nowadays that phrase that a rising tide lifts all boats. However, we still often hear of the numbers ‘lifted out of poverty’ in the developing nations.

A recent contributor to debate on the Guardian about the performance of the IMF told us that in the last decade something like 700 million people had been taken out of poverty by global economic growth (2010 having been ‘the second wealthiest year in human history’ and 2011 almost certain to be the record breaker, in terms of measured global GDP). Somewhere someone, probably in Geneva or New York, has numerically defined what constitutes ‘poverty’, and everywhere, from Chad to China, the statistics are diligently collected, to produce – a very round number.

What is it that makes the phrase, ‘lifted out of poverty’, with its very distinctive use of words, so attractive to those who see our present international economic order as the best available and, on the whole, a good thing for humanity?

The wording suggests that poverty is a distinct or absolute state: once people are lifted out of it the job is done; join the club; no more grounds for discontent. It also suggests that the benefit is bestowed on the erstwhile poor by an outside force or agency: it is not their own efforts that have brought them this boon.

Inescapably the phrase brings to the back of the mind the relief helicopter lifting refugees out of the floodwater. All the necessary connotations are there: the technically sophisticated intervention; the charitable intent; the complete helplessness of the victim; the rescue decisively achieved; the condition from which the victim is rescued as something malignly aberrant and unpredictable, quite unconnected to the means of rescue. To question the benefit would be inhuman or uncivilised.

As we, greater beneficiaries of the global economic order, lift these people out of their poverty, we are likely to lift them out of a good many other things besides: their cultures; their homes; their social networks; their relationship to the land. No doubt the poor long to be lifted and probably, at least at the time, would mostly accept the hoist even if they understood what else was part of the process. Yet none of us make good decisions all of the time – which is not to say that we should make the decision for these people, but rather that we should examine critically the world our ways, and still overwhelmingly our benefits, are creating.