Tavern Talk with William Shepherd
at
The Cinque Ports Academic Inn16th September 1990 William Shepherd takes afternoon tea at The Mermaid Inn on Monday, Wednesday and Friday between 4.15 pm. and 5.30 pm. Visitors to Rye are welcome to join him after they have finished their discussions with Henry James over at Lamb House.
Academic Inn Guests
William Shepherd (44) Author of 'The Rise & Fall of The Swedish Green Party (1982-1997)' and a scholar of The Cinque Ports Academic Inn.
Tom Barnes (17) Fourth World Young Scholar currently studying English History and English Literature for his GCE 'A' Levels at d'Overbroeck's Tutorial College in Oxford.
Thore Jonason (18) Fourth World Bergman Scholar currently engaged in Theatre Studies and Swedish GCE 'A' Level at Duff Miller College in KensingtonAbout The Book
With sound bioregional awareness, this book is set on the Baltic island of Gotland and in the Swedish city region of Stockholm and provides the key to understanding the forces at work in our representative democracies - forces which green movements everywhere must come to terms with if they are to play their vital part in re-establishing a right balance between the pursuit of power and property and the celebration of creation and community.
If you are interested in the world of political ideas and are seeking to understand the philosophy behind our political parties then this book, written for a teenage audience by William Shepherd, a regular contributor to Fourth World Review provides a concise, entertaining and readable introduction to the political environment in which green parties must learn the tactical skills of competition and cooperation.
TB: Thanks for the book, Mr. Shepherd. It was brilliant.WS: Good. I'm glad you liked it. I hope you weren't disappointed that there wasn't much about The Swedish Green Party in it.
TB: No, actually that was a relief. Books on politics are usually so boring, but once I'd started this and began to get into the style of it, I couldn't put it down. I think I finished it in an evening. And I didn't even notice that I'd missed the highlights of one of the World Cup games.
WS: What made you read it in the first place if you hate boring political books?
TB: Well, I don't hate them exactly. In fact I'm always going on about politics. I mean Alice Cooper's stuff is all political, and even some of the really big hits...The Housemartins' with Build for instance...are really brilliant political criticism. But it's like there's two worlds. Our world with Heavy Metal and House Music and all that. And then The Grown-Up World of books and letters and elections and political parties.
TJ: Yes, I know exactly what you mean. It is the same for us in Sweden. I thought you had got it just right, Sir, when you went on about The General Election being a religious festival in Sweden and the devout Swedish citizen presenting herself at the Altar of Democracy and making the sign of the cross upon the ballot paper. I can't remember where that bit came.
TB: From the Suburban Politics chapter. I remember because I went back to find the bit about ROB. You remember. Returns on Bribery (ROB) were 72.36% higher than propaganda broadcasting on Radio Gotland. And I was surprised to find it there just a few lines after the stuff about the Democracy God having laid claim to the land.
TJ: Yes, our English teacher at STS a couple of years back had us doing some analysis. It was really interesting how condensed everything was. A sentence would start with one train of thought and by the end you would find yourself in a completely different thought universe. The teacher seemed to really enjoy explaining some of the complex associations that certain words have, and how you would lead into the word on one meaning and then pull out of it riding on the other meaning.
WS: It's strange for me sitting here listening to this, because I wrote it. But yet in a funny way, it might be more accurate to say that it wrote me. Ivan Illich wrote a little book a couple of years ago with Barry Sanders called ABC: The Alphabetization of The Popular Mind. And, in this, he discusses the work of a professor by the name of Parry who was teaching at Harvard in the 1920s. Parry was fascinated by Homer's sagas The Iliad and The Odyssey and devoted a great deal of his life to their study. What he concluded was that there is something which I now call The Homeric Mode in which a writer is 'wired up' differently than when he is writing in the more academic 'Critical Mode' or Emersonian Mode as I like to refer to it so as to get students interested in Emerson's essay on Man Thinking.
TB: You know, it's interesting that. I play in a band, and you know it's the same thing. You're jamming, maybe, and it's OK, but then it's like something takes over the show and the music is playing you. Some of the Manchester bunch where we have a studio reckon they can tell which bits were done on drugs, but only Tim ever takes any. What they're hearing I think is when we slip between the Emersonian and the Homeric mode.
WS: Anyway, Thore, let's get back to the question. How come you found yourself reading a book on politics? What got your interest?
TJ: Well, it was Linda. I was going on about something or other. Oh, I remember what it was. I was saying how Green Party men were all wimps, but that I got on really well with the Green Party women, and how I thought that was weird because with Vänster Party, that's the Communists, it was quite different. So I then went on to say how politicians were nowadays just trying to look nice for the middle class ladies in the suburbs and that all that was needed was a good Heavy metal type of Viking Man to come along looking half tidy and he would sweep the board getting all the real men and most of the ladies voting for him.
TJ: Linda didn't agree. She never does. But she said I should read your book, because you were into things like that. Yeah. That was it, I remember now.
WS: What about you, Tom?
TB: They had some Academic Inn Books on the counter at Georgina's. I think it's like there are magazines to read at the hairdressers. I was waiting for somebody, can't remember, Brendon probably. And the map caught my eye. I'd never really thought about there being four exits from the North Atlantic, so that you could get to a place on the dark side of the earth four different ways. So I thought, hey, this guy's neat. Anyway Brendon finally showed up with Sandra and Tamarisk and some others, and Tam must have noticed me reading it, or maybe I said something. Anyway I got a copy for my birthday. And you know, I don't know whether he really read it properly, but I saw my old man with it, and afterwards I had the first decent conversation I'd ever had with him on politics. You know what he said. And he's a shrewd old cookie. The Local Young Conservatives are thinking along the same lines. The Tories will be latching onto this young man in the nineties. Mark my word!
WS: Well, that's a thought. Then perhaps it really isn't about The Swedish Green Party after all and I should be sued for misleading labelling.
TJ: But it is about The Swedish Green Party. It is like the book is saying that the rise and fall of The Swedish Green Party doesn't really have that much to do with The Swedish Green Party at all. Do you see what I mean?
TB: So, it's about the rise and fall of any party anywhere.
TJ: Yes, in a way. But let me tell you a story. I was 15 or 16, something like that, at the last election, and we had to read this stuff in school. Now I was always good for an argument in school, at least when I showed up, and I started to say that this GNP stuff was bullshit and so was inflation and a lot of other things they were all yapping about as if they knew. I felt quite good at the end, 'cos I think even the teacher was having problems with it all after I had 'destroyed their premises' as I now call it. Anyway that was about the last I had to do with school. But then when I was reading this book, there kept popping up little remarks, and these would keep reminding me of some of that school stuff. And it was like it all sort of came together. But...what is it...two years ago...It was strange. Whole conversations came back to me, like that one in the classroom, and they suddenly seemed to make sense. I was right before. Almost every time. But after reading this, I knew why I was right. Yeah, that's it. Funny, I almost sent my teacher a copy the other day!
WS: I think it works with a lot of people that way. And not just young people. And she wasn't such a bad teacher, letting you go on like that.
TJ: Well, that's the Swedish way of teaching. It ought to be good, but somehow it doesn't really work out the way it should. Instead of everybody thinking for themselves, they all think like each other.
WS: Buckminster Fuller used to insist that a teacher's job was to teach students to think for themselves. But, as you say, there's rather more to all that than meets the eye. Remember in The Life of Brian when Brian is addressing the multitudes from his bedroom window and tells them that they must all think for themselves, because they were all individuals. At which point, the whole crowd repeated back to him in unison 'Yes, we are all individuals'. Immediately after, the camera just shifted a fraction onto one bearded face at the front of the crowd, and you saw his somewhat bemused look as he lifted up his hand, as if to say 'Please Teacher', and said in a puzzled tone 'I'm not!'. Classic Monty Python humour, but also brilliant philosophy. But we are wandering again. Back to the Swedish Green Party. Any further thoughts, Thore?
TJ: Well, Tom was saying that it's about the rise and fall of any party anywhere, and I think that's right in that contained within these two covers are revealed all the forces that are working to shape the fortunes of the political parties. So, it is theoretically possible to put them together and figure out the overall effect.
WS: I'm glad you think so. I'm not so sure. But, I've thought it worth trying to find out, so I've asked George Richardson, a teacher at Simon's Rock College in Massachusetts and an old colleague of mine from my MIT days, to try to interest some graduate students or teenage hackers in building a system dynamics model to test the idea.
TJ: Yeah. Anyway. I think this whole thing is actually rather interesting.
TB: What whole thing?
TJ: Well, you see there is this Green Movement, right. And then out of this Green Movement a Green Party is formed. It happened in Germany, and then in Sweden and other places. And, now even the Americans are forming themselves into Green Parties. But that's besides the point. You see, what happens to a Green Party then seems to me to depend not so much on what they do or don't do. But on how the other political parties respond to them. Here it is always safer to watch the old established democracies, such as the British, because they show where the others are eventually headed.
TB: So your Tories immediately start painting their policies green for instance.
WS: Well, they are a party which includes the interests of the Country Gentry, so a large part of their support is based on Locality. Labour on the other hand perceive themselves to be an Interests party, as a result of their Marxist and Trade Unionist roots. Had The Populist Party grown instead out of The Luddites Movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century then I think British politics would have developed rather differently. But I'm sorry, I interrupted you, Thore.
TJ: Yeah, we can talk about that, but I want to get further, so you see what I'm getting at. You see, it's like there's some type of infinite regression that William Shepherd has identified here.
WS: You're not mixing me up with Nietzsche now and Eternal Recurrence.
TJ: No. You go from Green Movement to Green Party to Party Politics and then you don't stop there you go to The Seven Great Mechanisms of Society.
TB: I see what you're getting at. It's a bit like one of those Russian dolls that was all you could get in Leningrad for a pair of jeans. I must have a hundred of those bloody things at home.
WS: I think we're losing Tom, Thore.
TB: No, you're not. There are these seven systems of human action. Do you know I actually went and got a copy of Thomas Robertson's book Human Ecology out of the library. It took them two months to get it, but it was real good. He has this great story about a king, and then the gunboats pulled into his bay, and...oh, sorry, carry on.
TJ: Well, the Political Mechanism is constrained by the Education Mechanism on the one side, and the Administrative Mechanism on the other. And then there's all that stuff about societal inversion and the way that it is Finance instead of Religion that has somehow gotten to the top of the heap.
TB: Well, not somehow. It's the Usury Virus. The 'Time is Money' heresy.
TJ: Well, whatever. But that's the point. Having gone from Green Movement to Green Party to Politics to Society he then uses the dynamics of societal inversion to regress yet again into The Life Cycles of Civilisations. Now, you can easily miss all this when you just read it through. I think it's brilliant. I went back several times because I got more and more intrigued with the technique that had been used.
WS: It's not a technique. It's the Muse. The White Goddess. I was but a humble instrument.
TB: Bring on the violins. Actually there's another one.
TJ: Another what?
TB: Another regression. Having got into the life cycles of civilisation, what happens is that the book then starts pulling together all the little remarks peppered around the place that makes it quite clear that the author places something outside all this.
TJ: Yeah, that remark in the Gotland chapter, for instance. How did it go? As a Bergman Scholar I should know it off by heart. Yes, here it is. 'Gotland returned to its former peaceful glory and became the home from home of such great Swedish poetic spirits as Ingmar Bergman, creator of the rich visual and emotional feast that is his silver screen production of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute.
TB: 'How do all the hoards of Anglo Saxon silver coins in Visby compare to the treasures of the soul that such great art provides?'
WS: I'm impressed. Actually I must confess I was very flattered when Jean Gimpel, the medieval historian, came up to me, and told me that my thirty line history of the Hansa was better than all the books he had ever read on the subject. And those lines rounded it off rather nicely I thought.
TJ: But, you see the inside-outing.
TB: The what?
TJ: It's a Bucky Fuller concept, when he talks about taking a glove off one hand, peeling it off, and then you have it ready for the other. We started off with The Green Movement and finish up with Deep Ecology and the ideas of Gaia and the spiritual world. You see, it's all there, linked together. It's brilliant.
WS: Well, thank you, Thore. You are herewith awarded a Fourth World Scholarship and appointed to the job of my Public Relations Adviser. Give me a wig and some shoulder pads and let's take the Swedish electorate by storm. Blond Viking was it? Does that mean the gym at five every morning?
TJ: No good at taking compliments the English. But, joking apart, you see what I'm getting at. It is brilliant. And it's why the book works. Tamarisk was actually in tears at one point. A book about politics affecting you emotionally! Wow! Pure poetry man. How about writing us some songs? Go for a double whammy. Maybe even Tom will play them instead of all that synchronised crap.
TB: Synthesised, my good man. And, yes...Cleverly Repetitive And Poignant it is indeed. Works at your soul. What is the world coming to when our swear words are no longer our own, and can be taken up by any foreign Thore, Dieter und Haggar.
WS: Thank you Tom. You have said all the right things. This tavern talk has been illegally bugged, and even now, while we sit sipping our amber nectar it is being transcribed from talk to letters for the edification of Fourth World Review's many listeners. How about a toast? Tom?
TB: Well, what else? Here's to The New Left. Or, as Thore would put it, 'Wimps of the World Unite. All you have to gain is the inalienable sovereignty of the human spirit.'
WS: Or as J.B. Priestley put it. 'The deepest cut of all is not Socialism against Capitalism, nor is it Fascism against Communism or even in its modern form Totalitarianism against Democracy. it is between those who think in terms of the masses and those who think in terms of the people'.
TJ: What's that got to do with anything?
TB: Thore. Don't start him off again. The pursuit of Truth is hereby banned. Let the drinking begin! Let the ale flow free!
WS: And Let The People Sing!
TB: Tiddle-i-pom
TJ: Skål!
About The Author Order the Book The Rise & Fall of The Swedish Green Party (1982-1997) by William Shepherd Publisher: Academic Inn Books, 1989