The habit of dividing the past into centuries or decades might be historiographically suspect, but by now it seems unavoidable. And it is possible that, because we now expect decades to have flavours of their own, they end up actually having them. We change our behaviour when the year ends in 0. Can there be anyone who has never used ‘The Twenties,’ ‘The Thirties,’ ‘The Fifties’ or ‘The Sixties’ as historical shorthand, expecting his interlocutor to know exactly what he means by it?
By comparison with the Sixties, the flavour of the Seventies is indistinct and muted. Everyone is agreed that, for better or worse, the Sixties now represent the breakdown of social restraints on personal behaviour; but what do the Seventies represent in popular imagination? This is the question that Francis Wheen sets out to answer in his breezy and readable, but superficial, account of these years.
He answers in a single word: paranoia. All over the world, he says, politicians saw conspiracies all around them, and so did the populations over whom they ruled. He illustrates his thesis with repeated (and to me tedious) references to the Hollywood films of the era.
The Seventies were the years in which we learned to distrust our rulers, when we started to assume that all politicians, ex officio, as it were, lied continually, and when we came to believe that skulduggery was a normal instrument of government, not only abroad (where it had always been practised), but at home. Indeed, all figures of authority were tarred with the same brush, and came under the same indiscriminate suspicion.
I personally do not remember it quite like this — which does not make it wholly untrue, of course. Having qualified as a doctor in the Seventies, my medical superiors seemed to me eminently worthy of their authority, with a few exceptions. But medicine, though a large part of my life, is but a small part of the wider culture. It is incontestable that all forms of authority have declined in the allegiance they are able to claim, and perhaps the events of the Seventies played a disproportionate role in this decline.
The United States in general, and Richard Nixon in particular, loom large in the book. Nixon was that dangerous and unattractive type, the ambitious man of humble origins who can never quite believe that he has really succeeded. Such a man can never sleep easy in his bed, for he assumes that his former social superiors are all planning to pull him back down to his proper place in the world. There is no alleviation of this condition, save death; but in the meantime, Nixon behaved so badly, with such a lack of personal dignity, because of his paranoia, that he brought the position of president forever into disrepute, if not disrespect.
Is this right? I am not sure that, had it not been for him, Americans would hold the presidency in more awe than they do now. But Wheen is firm in his belief that mistrust and disrespect were Nixon’s legacy, and his alone.
Wheen’s view of the Seventies in Britain is unrelentingly grim. He doesn’t quite say it, but Britain’s post-war obsession with social justice rather than with economic reconstruction led to humiliation upon humiliation. Though I doubt that he intended it as such, his book is in fact a very powerful apologia for Mrs Thatcher — a figure about whose role, in retrospect, I am very much more ambivalent than I once was. The Mrs Thatcher of Wheen’s book — whether he realises it or not — is the saviour of her nation.
Although the book has pretensions to global reach, it is culturally and politically parochial. For example, Nixon and Harold Wilson are lumped together with Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot as political paranoids, but it seems to me that the Watergate affair, lamentable and sordid as it was, casts no useful light on the Cultural Revolution — or vice versa.
Wheen’s grasp and understanding of African affairs is weak. I was pleased to see that he took notice of Macias Nguema, Equatorial Guinea’s first president and ‘Unique Miracle,’ who wanted to kill everyone who wore glasses as a dangerous intellectual and kept the national treasury under his bed. But he omits the most significant single fact about him: that he was democratically elected. Wheen also repeats the old chestnut that Africa’s post-independence travails are ascribable to the ethnic unreality of the borders drawn by the colonial masters. But what, then, of Burundi, Rwanda and Somalia? Have things gone swimmingly there? And would Nigeria have fared better if it had been divided into territories corresponding to its scores of ethnic groups, even if overlapping had not made this impossible?
I am not convinced that the central trope of this book is a good one, and that political paranoia was peculiar to the Seventies. To take one example at random: Dr Jose Gaspar Rodriquez de Francia, El Supremo of Peru from 1811 to 1840. He cut down the trees of Asunción, so that assassins might not hide in them, and unrolled the cigars that his sister rolled for him in case she had inserted poison. Power breeds paranoia.