The end of white collar work, building the pyramids, the best medieval films and more

Plus links and quotes

Possible victim of elite over-production (see below)

Hello,

Welcome to Cultural Capital. In The Times this week I wrote about how AI is poised to replace white collar work at just the time when that work has been invested with more meaning and significance than ever before in history.

*** On Tuesday I will be live in conversation in west London with the critic and novelist Leo Robson. Apparently this event briefly sold out but the venue has said they will put out more chairs so there are tickets available again.***

How AI will reshape our politics
One of the important forces shaping our politics over the last few decades has been deindustrialisation and the ensuing waves of populist anger from “left behind” blue collar workers. The coming wave of AI automation looks set to do something similar to white collar work. Knowledge work, as we are all now aware, is much more easy to automate than physical labour. As James Kanagasooriam says in this fascinating piece, the consequences will be extremely politically interesting. Many of the graduates about to lose their jobs to AI already feel left behind:

The white-collar promise of stability and higher incomes may be imploding completely. The graduate earnings premium has eroded in Britain.

Student debt compounded by high interest rates and punitive marginal rates of taxation provide penury for millions of graduates. Sky-high house prices to income ratios in cities have weighed heavily on younger, white collar Britain.

Automation may be the final straw I reckon before white collar Britain goes into full revolt.

Who will benefit? It’s hard not to imagine this will be a gift to the Greens or other left populist parties.

Kanagasooriam intriguingly breaks down how it might play out electorally. The posh bits of London full of lawyers, consultants and bankers will suffer but Reform-voting constituencies will be relatively insulated from the effects of AI:

the top 5 constituencies for job exposure to AI are Richmond Park, Highgate & Hampstead, Cities of London and Westminster, Battersea and Wimbledon. Britain’s leafy, Remain heavy, high income London boroughs might face more trouble than they realise.

[. . .]

If you look at the top 10 constituencies where automation risk is lowest, 8 are currently forecast as Reform holds or gains. Areas like Boston, Great Grimsby, Stoke Central, Hull, Tipton all voted heavily for Leave, and currently tilt Farage strongly.

How they built the great pyramid
Interesting episode of the LRB podcast about how newly-discovered papyrological evidence sheds light on the building of the great pyramid. Apparently in the context of Ancient Egyptian society, being put to work building pyramids was not the worst job. You got to live in a special community and had two types of beer — a fun alcoholic one and a nutritious low-alcohol variant.

AI-generated image illustrating the concept of an London Review of Books (or London Review of Booboks) article about the pyramids

The weakness of Keir Starmer
Perceptive psychological insight in Janan Ganesh’s most recent column on Keir Starmer:

If nothing else, Starmer’s brittleness should finish off the idea that a tough start in life must necessarily steel someone for adversity ever after. Yes, trauma can have that effect. But it can also instil the opposing characteristic: a heightened sensitivity, an understandable reluctance to volunteer for more struggle. The politicians I have covered who least minded conflict — Donald Trump, who relishes it, and David Cameron, who barely noticed it — were pampered as youths. Those of us from nearer the Starmer than Cameron end of things might wish the old trope were true, that pressure makes diamonds and so on, but the exceptions to this rule in public life are too stark. Highlight

Elite over-production in eighteenth-century Prussia
One of my favourite books about the romantic movement is Henri Brunschwig’s Enlightenment and Romanticism in Eighteenth Century Prussia. It’s also one of the best books I know about the social and cultural causes of an intellectual or artistic movement. Part of Brunschwig’s thesis is that the German Romantic movement was partly a symptom of what we would nowadays call elite-overproduction (the Peter Turchin thesis which proposes that used social unrest is often caused by the disaffection which results when a society educates too many of citizens for too few elite jobs).

According to Brunschwig much of the anti-establishment literary energy in Prussia at the end of the eighteenth century was driven by precisely this phenomenon. Young highly-educated middle class men failed to get jobs in the clergy or the civil service (which were often dominated by nobles). Highly disaffected but desperate for social recognition they threw themselves into literature and produced one of the greatest cultural and philosophical flourishings in history (though they didn’t necessarily get rich):

Of all the openings available to young men of the middle class, literature is certainly the most hazardous. Brilliant success is the exception; most of those who devote themselves to literature are doomed to indigence; and even when they acquire a genuine reputation, they are still only too well aware of the wolf lurking near the door. “The horde of famished poets,” Wieland notes gloomily, “is growing daily.” It is all very well for them to form a mutual admiration society, but “for all that, the outcome ... is still starvation. They grow sour and write satires against those poets who have a regular meal waiting for them on the table at home”

Not much has changed since the eighteenth century.

Robert Sapolsky on the science of determinism
Another interesting podcast: in this episode of EconTalk Russ Roberts talks to Robert Sapolsky, one of the most articulate and persuasive proponents of determinism (though I found his last book hard going and prefer him as a speaker than as a writer).

(Determinism is one of the few views I hold that I feel really evangelical about. Unless you are religious you have to accept that we are all biological machines operating (albeit with incredible complexity) according to chemical and physical laws. Many defenders of free will annoy me because it seems they want to introduce a spiritual component to human life (much woo-woo rubbish is spoken about quantum randomness at the moment) without admitting that is what they’re doing. If you sign up for the scientific world view you have to accept that from the perspective of an intelligent ape it will often seem harsh, counterintuitive and disconcerting!)

Obviously, Sapolsky puts all this far better than I could.

The best introduction to the middle ages I’ve read
Last week I finished Norman Cantor’s brilliant book The Civilisation of the Middle Ages. The cover makes it look much worthier and drier than it is. In fact its a splendidly opinionated, curious and original book. Cantor begins in Ancient Egypt, arguing that it is impossible to understand the middle ages without grasping the deep history of Mediterranean civilisation and its hierarchical social organisation.

There are times when Cantor seems actively frustrated with the middle ages. There is something of the Larry David about him. In his account on the decline of the Western Roman Empire he discusses three successive emperors as “stupid”, “very silly”, and “incredibly stupid”. Later, Thomas Becket is “clearly a psychologically disturbed person” with “neurotic tendencies”. It's good fun but along the way you get your head around all the important stuff like the rise of feudalism, neoplatonism, the decline of the armoured knight etc.

Anthony Burgess in the Encyclopaedia Britannica
A random gem of the internet: Anthony Burgess’s brilliant Encylopaedia Britannica entry on the novel (unearthed by my friend Tanjil Rashid). Its a fantastic piece of writing, opinionated and full of ideas:

Novelists, being neither poets nor philosophers, rarely originate modes of thinking and expression. Poets such as Chaucer and Shakespeare have had much to do with the making of the English language, and Byron was responsible for the articulation of the new romantic sensibility in it in the early 19th century. Books like the Bible, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf may underlie permanent or transient cultures, but it is hard to find, except in the early Romantic period, a novelist capable of arousing new attitudes to life (as opposed to aspects of the social order) and forging the vocabulary of such attitudes.

Often find there’s nothing more pleasurable and interesting than someone really brilliant having to explain their subject from first principles. The article also makes you feel how dull and worthy Wikipedia is by comparison. Wikipedia would never start spontaneously moralising at you like this:

Any reader of fiction has a right to an occasional escape from the dullness or misery of his existence, but he has the critical duty of finding the best modes of escape—in the most efficiently engineered detective or adventure stories, in humor that is more than sentimental buffoonery, in dreams of love that are not mere pornography.

The best films about the middle ages
Norman Cantor finishes his book a list of the best films about the middle ages. Of the ones on his list I’ve seen Henry V, The Seventh Seal and Ran. All great. When I was growing up Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V was one of the only films I was allowed to watch. But I’ve since come to appreciate the Olivier version too. The colourful and stylised nature of the movement/set really authentically feels medieval in a way that so many brown-toned sludgily “realistic” modern films about the middle ages just don’t:

Anywhere here is Cantor’s full list:

Films are not a substitute for history books, but films can evoke the ambience and sensibility, as well as the visual locus, of the Middle Ages, not only in a supplementary reinforcing and entertaining manner, but sometimes in a distinctly perceptive and persuasive way.

Here are the ten best films ever made with a medieval context, ranked approximately in order of merit. The story lines of three of them occur outside the conventional medieval era, but nevertheless describe scenes and events that are still medieval. One takes place in Japan, but in a social context that directly parallels the European situation. It will be noted that among the directors of these films are some of the greatest directors of all time: Eisenstein, Bergman, Kurosawa, Olivier, Pasolini, Russell.

1. The Seventh Seal Ingmar Bergman’s incomparable masterpiece, set in Sweden at the time of the Black Death, is in a class by itself when it comes to evoking medieval sensibility about life and death.

2. Ran Akira Kurosawa’s film is loosely based on Shakespeare’s King Lear and is set in late medieval Japan. It perfectly captures the violence and beauty of the chivalric world.

3. Henry V Laurence Olivier made this film of Shakespeare’s play in 1944 as a patriotic gesture, and hence he cut two scenes in which the Bard accurately indicated the downside of the Hundred Years’ War. These scenes were restored in Kenneth Branagh’s neo-Brechtian 1989 version. Yet Olivier’s version is much closer than Branagh’s to the ambience of the fifteenth century, and he had the whole Irish army to fight the Battle of Agincourt.

4. The Name of the Rose This careful and expensive adaptation of Umbert Eco’s best-selling novel was a commercial failure despite a wonderful performance by Sean Connery as a Franciscan friar modeled on William of Occam. If it had been explained to the history-ignorant audience at the beginning of the film that the pope and many Franciscans were at loggerheads in the fourteenth century, the film’s plot would have made much more sense.

5. Alexander Nevsky Sergei Eisenstein made this film in 1938 about the prince of Novograd’s fight with the Teutonic knights as patriotic anti-German propaganda withStalin’s support. The film had to be suppressed during the era of the Hitler-Soviet pact, but it came back strong after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Eisenstein’s German expressionist 1920s kind of dramaturgy is a bit off-putting today, but it fits in well with the iconology of Byzantine and late medieval kingship.

6. The Return of Martin Guerre This film depicts a crisis in an affluent peasant family in France in the early sixteenth century, based on the research of Princeton’s Natalie Zemon Davis, who acted as historical adviser for this French production. The story closely follows the record of a court trial. The peasants are a bit too articulate for historical accuracy, at times the ambience seems more twentieth than sixteenth century.

7. The Navigator About half this 1988 little-known New Zealand science fiction film is convincingly set in a northern English coal-mining village during the time of the Black Death and is obviously under Bergman’s influence. It is closer to the reality of medieval peasant culture than is The Return of Martin Guerre.

8. Black Robe This stunning French Canadian film, made in Quebec in 1990, about Jesuit missionaries among the Canadian aborigines in the early seventeenth century, is fiercely accurate and evocative of an important and underwritten segment of medieval church history—missionary work among the heathens on the frontier. Think of St. Boniface and the Frisians in the eighth century.

9. The Gospel According to St. Matthew The life of Jesus, as written by Matthew, is bleakly depicted by the Italian Communist director Pier Pasolini. The result is much closer to late medieval Sicily, it is not surprising, than to ancient Judea.

10. The Devils Ken Russell’s characteristically over-the-top version of Aldous Huxley’s novel about hysteria and witchcraft in early seventeenth century France nevertheless captures persuasively important aspects of the medieval religious experience. Even its remorseless anticlericalism replicates a prominent ingredient of late medieval culture.

Incidentally — and frankly I don’t really know anything about the middle ages on film — I would also add the documentary Into Great Silence about life in the French monastery La Grande Chartreuse which is one of my all-time favourite films really seems to capture a way of life unchanged since the middle ages (the Carthusians are the only monastic order that was never reformed):

Until next week!

James