Nigel Spivey interviews John Keane for the Financial Times Weekend Edition, 25/26 May 1996
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Nigel Spivey meets Professor John Keane, the celebrated academic.
I never knew about the Spanish Club in London’s Cavendish Square. I wonder how many people do. It is a promising location for the gourmet: sited above the office of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce, it seems bound to please with ambassadorial purpose.
You see portly Spaniards heading there, brimming hunger and nostalgia. Julio Iglesias croons steadily in the background, and little children scamper around the tables with the usual Mediterranean indulgence.
It was, as John Keane pointed out, a handy place for him, just around the corner from his base at the University of Westminster, where he is a celebrated professor of politics and director of the Centre for Democracy. But I wondered about the wisdom of his choice, since he declared also that he had a seminar starting at two.
We arrived at 12.45 and а glance at the staff and clientele of the Spanish Club suggested immediately that, while they might be naturalised enough to contemplate a London lunch finishing by three, two would be a problem. Not so much optimistic as barbarous. Paella, after all, is not a flash in the pan. But paella we ordered. And, to his professorial credit, Keane competed stoutly with Julio throughout the intervening hour.
We were intending mainly to talk about his latest political interest, which is violence. But we began with the more delicate topic of academics writing for newspapers.
“I think,” said Keane, “that a lot of damage has been done by the division of the don and the journalist in post-war Britain. Look back at the 1920s and 1930s. You see a much greater fluidity of role, which was healthy for the country’s political imagination.
“Now, with the institutionalisation of academic life, you get journalists who are paid to write but either can’t think or don’t have time to; and academics who are paid to think but can’t write.”
He has just chaired the award of the Orwell prize, given for the sort of imaginative writing research that Orwell himself might have thought worth supporting.
Didn’t thoughtful journalists put in a good showing there? “Yes. That’s the good news.
OK, not many intelligent journalists are writing the good, old-fashioned, up-yer-nose stuff that Orwell did so well. But we had some excellent submissions: Fergal Keane [no relation, the awardwinning BBC correspondent who won]; Will Hutton, [the
new editor of The Observer newspaper]; François Duchene, [Jean Monnet’s biographer] And Tony Benn’s diaries.”
At this juncture, I emitted a loud mock-snore. “Well, OK, perhaps not the Benn diaries.” Whom, I asked, did he consider as an intellectual in politics? Blank. He shrugged his shoulders; I raised my eyebrows.
“Do you mix with politicians?” I inquired. “Not really,” he confessed. “Their milieu is miles apart from mine. This country is coming to the end of what I take to be a protracted period of oligarchy. But it’s a depressing scene in terms of the political zeitgeist. No debate about fundamentals seems to go on.
“Did you see that survey of what Labour parliamentarians read? Once upon a time they were reared on Orwell, Dickens, Cole and Postgate, and The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist. Now, they admit to reading just Marx and the Bible – and there I don’t
believe them.”
Would he be deterred from voting at all by the prospect of what, in effect, might be a one-party state in Britain?
“Oh no. We still need a change of personnel, a clearing of the stables. There’s a certain
arrogance, a certain laziness, and a tendency to flout the law about our present representatives, which we need to be rid of. But, otherwise, it’s true that I rather despair about the state of our democracy. There’s not enough trouble-making going on.”
A starter dish of mushrooms did find its way to the table by 1.30. We broached violence, on which subject Keane has just produced a fluent and passionate monograph. He admitted to writing it all in a couple of months. What moved him?
He nibbled pensively on his lower lib. “I used to teach in Dubrovnik,” he said, haltingly. “I had – still have – many close friends in that region. I kept quiet too long about what was happening in the former Yugoslavia. I decided it was time to address what has gone wrong there.”
Which is?
“The breakdown of civil society. Or if you like, the triumph of incivility. Because incivility, which also denotes the ‘law and order’ debate, is not an exclusively right wing issue. Nor is it religious. So, in my essay, I’ve tried to create a public and political and secular way to talk about violence.”
The book is articulate as regards the history of violence and its philosophical perception. He gave me a lucid summary of his arguments there. But what advice, I pressed him, could the professor offer to the City gent confronted by a mugger, or the schoolteacher harried by daily insolence?
“None,” he replied, candidly. “Intellectuals should never presume to draft social policy: they always make a hash of it. But what we can do is make clear what the issues are, in a language that everyone can relate to. After the Dunblane shooting, for instance, it was obvious that no one really had anything to say beyond the obvious tired sentiments.”
He talked of the new multiple roots of world conflict: “uncivil” civil wars, such as in
Bosnia and Rwanda, where the “pleasures” of maniacal violence were indulged freely, like the “storms of steel” on the Russian front. He talked of the technological sophistication of violence as an instrument of state policy. And he talked of the tendency to permanent instability which supposedly “civil” capitalist society fosters
by generating inequality and resentment relentlessly.
From an evidently mild and pacific scholar, it was an impressively engaged analysis.
Then, at about three minutes to two, with much sizzling, two colossal plates of paella were set down before us.
I watched John Keane as he battled with the dilemma of foregoing his lunch, or being a quarter of an hour late to chair his seminar. The latter was an option which no continental professor would have felt any shame in taking.
Keane ate two succulent mussels before duty prevailed. The Spanish Club paella, the
best I have tasted (and I have to admit I did not let them sweep away the deserted portion) lost out.
Democracy might be in a sorry state at the Palace of Westminster but, plainly, it is
still at least more important than food at the University of Westminster.
