Be careful what you throw away

Be careful what you throw away
Many years ago I lived on the edge of Islington nearest to the City in what some claimed was the smallest house in London. It had a kitchen about the size of my current kitchen table, a bathroom that was not much bigger, another reasonable sized room downstairs and upstairs there was one large studio room, with a huge window overlooking the gardens at the back.
The kitchen was largely free of paper. The bathroom usually had a couple of books, a newspaper and some magazines in it. But the other two rooms were piled high with paper, books, magazines and newspaper clippings.
Sadly, my partner Mimi doesn’t share my enthusiasm for paper and when I moved in with her to the depths of Hackney most of the paper had to go. Her argument was, “You can always find it in a library.”
This I discovered was untrue.
When my then colleague Liz McQuiston was researching her book “Graphic Agitation” she would often mention that she was looking for a particular copy of an underground magazine without success and I would remember it sitting in my collection – a collection tragically dumped when the College I had donated it to decided they would clear the room where it had been archived to make more teaching space.
Even now I still get flashbacks to that collection. I was writing a piece about the Sixties and how at the time I had been pretty snotty about much of what going on and wanted to reference a piece written by Raymond Durgnat, which I knew once had but no longer did. I remembered that he was being critical about much of the sloppiness in thinking and execution that characterised many in the underground or alternative society. The bit that stuck in my mind went something to the effect of, “There are two ways, the easy way and the hard way. The easy way isn’t easy and the hard way is bloody hard”. Of course, I haven’t been able to find it on-line, so, for the moment, it remains an echo in my memory.
(Curiously, the point I was trying make in the unfinished piece I was writing was that although I was snotty at the time, in retrospect the period I think of as being the Sixties, which ran from some point in the mid-Sixties to somewhere in the mid point of the Seventies was more fruitful and productive than I had realised while it was happening. Durgnat and I may have been right to feel critical of the sloppiness, but what we failed to recognise was that the sloppiness was the price for the festival of ideas and possibilities that was being generated. I guess I, at least, was taking that for granted only to see the fear of freedom generated by the festival take over as economies fell into the phenomenon we called stagflation. As the fear took over, categories hardened, people moved back to old positions and the conceptual and creative space contracted. And yet, if we look carefully we can see much of the world we live in today had its origins in the ideas and experiments of that time. It’s just that some of that took a long time to work through the system. Reading through the various looking back at Sixty Eight pieces that are popping up now, I am struck by how much of the important stuff has got lost or forgotten and what has remained is essentially superficial and transitory. Perhaps this is another example of “be careful of what you throw away. (To bracket within a bracket – I have a very strong sense that if you were to look at that time like the waste from an old mine you would find that there was still much valuable ore amongst the rubbish that while not realisable then would now seem fresh, doable and pertinent to the world we face today))
But to return to my narrower theme. Now we are in the process of trying to sell our house – it seemed like a good idea a year or so ago – I am again under instructions to dispose of at least some of my accumulated paper. In the process of throwing away some magazines, wrapped in plastic at the back of a cupboard, thinking if I haven’t looked at them for years I might as well get rid of them, I discovered a copy of the very last New Society.
New Society was a great quirky weekly magazine (originally seen as a kind of social science equivalent of the New Scientist) which featured some great writers such as Reyner Banham, Colin MacInnes, Laurie Taylor, Peter Hall, John Berger, Angela Carter, Ray Gosling, George Melly, Simon Frith, Colin Ward and others I will remember after I have posted this piece. (New Society also has a special place in my heart because as well as opening up my young mind to ideas and people I might not otherwise encountered, it also was the first place I was published – a very short piece on the ferment in art schools going on at the time – somewhere in my piles of paper I still have a photocopy of the cheque I received – so, thank you Paul Barker, one of New Society’s great editors, for my very first commission.)
It was seeing Michael Young’s name on the cover that saved me from consigning this very special copy to the bin. It was Michael Young, who suggested the idea for the magazine to Timothy Raison, who had found the New Scientist. (A gem that that I have just discovered as I write in a fascinating history of the magazine by Steve Platt in this last issue.) I shouldn’t have found this surprising for Michael Young was one of the most extraordinary social entrepreneurs, whose list of achievements makes the mind boggle – go and see for yourself.
However, it wasn’t Michael Young’s role as a social entrepreneur that saved this copy from the bin. It was his work as a sociologist, in particular some of his later work on time. As regular readers will know, one of my current pre-occupations is with the nature of time, particularly the Greek idea of Chronos and Chairos, which can loosely be translated as clock time as opposed to the right or appropriate time. So I was anxious to re-discover Michael Young’s thinking on this matter.
What I had forgotten was that in the article in new Society Michael Young was not just talking about time, but also biology – as the blurb accompanying the article read, “Michael Young has been credited with being the first to propose a magazine called “New Society”. If he is right in his new book that there is going to be a unification of the social and biological sciences, the magazine which in due course replace New Society will eventually be named “New Society and Biology””
Which, curiously, brings me to the roots of this piece. The other day I was flattered to find this web site recommended by Daniel Lende of Neuroanthropology along side Grant McCracken’s This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics, which regular readers will know is an old favourite of mine and three others that were new to me, Open Range Anthropologist, The Restless Mind and Experientia.
With a little superficial digging I saw that Neuroanthropology was concerned about crossing the boundaries between cultural anthropology and the neurosciences:
“In general, cultural anthropology has not kept abreast of new research in the neurosciences so that our theory of culture does not sufficiently take into account what we now know about the brain. A more open exchange is likely to produce a cultural anthropology that is not only more scientifically plausible, but also much more scientifically engaged with those interested in cultural variation (although they might not call it that) in a host of fields.”
So Greg Downey and Daniel Lende actually seem to be pushing forward the enterprise that Michael Young was advocating at the end of the Eighties. A link I wouldn’t have seen if that copy of New Society had been put in the bin. Which, of course, was what got me thinking about, “be careful what you throw away”. (A further question comes to mind, would I have then gone on to explore the site in so much detail had I not made that link? Maybe. But, certainly, having made that link encouraged me to explore the site in detail and to my delight found a cavern of riches, filled with ideas, suggestions and stimulating stuff, which will keep me busy and thinking for quite a while.)
Writing this piece has also surfaced some thoughts that have been bubbling around in my mind for a while. Back in the Sixties I thought of myself as a radical and I guess I still do. When we look around at the world there is clearly much that needs changing, but our hunger for change should be tempered by some humility and empathy. Our bright, clear visions for a better future too often do not take account of the seeming messiness and complexity of our world. In our eagerness to implement change we should pause occasionally and consider whether there maybe something valuable that in making our changes we are throwing away. So to all of us who see ourselves in the business of change I would extend this warning, be careful what you throw away, it may be more important than you imagine.