In my next life I intend to have my brain removed in order to become a telly executive. You know: ‘where ignorance is bliss/ ’Tis folly to be wise’ (Thomas Gray, OE). Such ignorance is a state which, happily enough, Rory Stewart, OE and a fully tooled-up Mob from rent-a-thinker (what one of those executives, without a hint of irony or faint praise, once called ‘television intellectuals’) are just now kicking around in the hope that they may rehabilitate it and release it from its sty of obloquy.
Rory is a very keen type – what used to be called an all-rounder – and, despite his protestations otherwise, he is untouched by the piggiest ignorance, and addresses his audience and contributors with the zeal of a scoutmaster.
Its repeated subject is not really ignorance but the perennial favourite: me, me, me
The BBC has clearly poured a generous couple of quid into this rich if random talking-head radio series. Rory is, in all but name, going on a ‘journey’ (mandatory for the lame-brain sheep who run the BBC), a house tic that is no style but a formulaic crib that lacks all wit, all humour – rank absences which signal ‘seriousness’ in BBC eyes.
Most of the six episodes are made up of the Mob putting their extemporised foot in it. Had they been obliged to write scripts and reflect on those scripts beforehand, they might have done better than nervously proffer a familiar OE-led balls-up, whose repeated subject is not really ignorance but the perennial favourite: me, me, me. Boastful solipsism comes readily to this caste. (Though being so humbly down to earth it is reluctant to call a syllogism a syllogism.)
The choppy collaged format is appropriate to the medium. The great master of improvisation Keith Johnstone knew very well that spontaneity which has not been rehearsed invariably falls back on generalities and comforting commonplaces. Many of the threadbare maxims here are one-sentence drama-school platitudes – ‘creativity is a maintenance of childlike openness to experience’, etc. Occasionally it dares to stretch to two: ‘Knowing things is never entirely separate from… bragging about it I suppose a bit, um, be sort of that feeling that you’ve mastered something.’
The wobbly articulacy is Mary Beard’s. And so is the false modesty which implies that profession of ignorance is a cheerily egalitarian party turn which distances its owner from dreaded elitism. Our capacities for the acquisition of knowledge and its retention are reduced then to a game, all legerdemain and tricks against nature like top-spin or soufflés. This is a game played with some élan by the late Donald Rumsfeld.
The fun-loving old warmonger may have been ignorantly xenophobic but his starter-size taxonomy of ignorance is sure and accurate, if stunted. As we know, there are known knowns, there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we know we do not know – for instance, which side did god dress on.
Who – it may be impertinent to ask – is this construct named ‘we’? A communal construct that apparently shares knowledge. But there are many things that can only be learned by having experience of them yourself. And that’s only available with an immense transition and the knowledge that accompanies it. Think of Hardy’s nocturnal insects: ‘“God’s humblest, they!” I muse. Yet why?/ They know Earth-secrets that know not I.’
According to Michael Ignatieff: ‘You [not we] know more and more about less and less and end up knowing everything about nothing. The pathos of specialisation.’ It is only communal if everyone shares the same kernel of specialisation and, thus, the same ignorance about everything without that kernel.
Georges Braque contended that art should disturb, science should reassure. My contention is that there are too many artists who want to be scientists and too many scientists who want to be artists. Which makes the world both a dangerous place and one that looks like the Bayswater Road railings. Rory’s project includes sculptors being sculptors, historians being historians, spooks being spooks – all playing roles that confirm Ignatieff’s observation. Which confirm too that much of academia is so far up itself it hurts but that it can bear the pain so long as it has an audience or, at least, a mirror in which to witness its winces.
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