Maybe Your Opinion Is Just a Feeling About a Story

On Changing My Mind About the Elgin Marbles. Plus: How To Get Hold of An Advance Copy of 'John & Paul'. Plus a Juicy Rattle Bag of Goodies.

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Opinions are deceiving. Over the years, there have been political decisions that I’ve been strongly for, or strongly against, and it’s only afterwards that I’ve realised I never really had an opinion on the decision itself. What I had was a feeling about a story that was being told about it, and a feeling about the people doing the storytelling, and those feelings had substituted for what I really thought.

The latest of Britain’s perennial controversies over the Elgin Marbles has reminded me of this tendency. The British Museum has been in negotiations with the Greek government over returning these thirty or so statues to Athens. The Greek Prime Minister visited Downing Street last week, and while there’s no evidence they discussed the question, Greek sources claim that Keir Starmer indicated he’s open to any forthcoming deal. Hence its reappearance in the news.

I love it when this issue comes up, because it enables me to have a Contrarian Opinion - at least, contrarian among the well-meaning liberals who constitute my friends, and family, and me. “The Marbles are in exactly the right place”, I shout, to disbelief and bafflement. The confident consensus is that of course we ought to give them back. “We are terrible, arrogant colonialists who robbed these treasures from Greece. Now we’re hanging on to them for no good reason. It’s time to get those marbles (are they actually marbles by the way?) back where they belong!”

If you have more than millimetre-deep knowledge about the history of this affair you know there are some serious problems with this story. Yes, the marbles were removed from the Parthenon by the Scottish nobleman Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin. But Bruce was a solo adventurer, and an eccentric cultural collector, not some brutal, greedy colonialist armed to the teeth. And while it’s true that Athens was under colonial rule, it wasn’t under the rule of the British, but the Ottoman Turks.

The Turks were completely indifferent to the Acropolis. They used it as an ammunition store and a garrison and let the whole site decay. Statues were frequently dismantled for use as mortar, or just carted away by locals. Bruce recognised that the statues were beautiful and precious and ought to be preserved and loved, and he worked out a deal with the local authorities that allowed him to take them home. Back in England, he was criticised by some politicians and artists and applauded by others, and hauled before parliament to make the case that he had taken them legally and decently.¹ In short, whether or not we conclude he should have taken them, we’re a long way from the popular myth that the arrogant Brits did a smash and grab.

But that was ages ago - why haven’t they been handed back? For a long time, there was a good case that they were simply safer here; Greece achieved stability and prosperity relatively recently. But there’s a deeper reason too. The marbles aren’t just Greek. They’re a lynchpin of Europe’s cultural history. The British Museum puts the marbles in the context of ancient Egyptian and Persian art. It makes them a symbol of how interconnected we all are. The political polarity, then, is not quite the one people assume. Sending the marbles back is the nationalist position; keeping them where they are the progressive, internationalist one.

I like this story. I believe in it a lot more than the simplistic, self-abasing one about evil Britain’s plundered treasures. But liking this story - actually, hating the other story - has obscured my view of the right thing to do. The Scrutonesque view that culture is not an abstraction but thrives on attachment to specific times and places has a lot to recommend it. The Greeks have built a marvellous museum in the shadow of the Acropolis which can display the marbles in the unsurpassably rich context of Hellenic culture. Of course they should be there.

This only crystallised for me when I read Ed West’s recent Substack post. Go read it, but in essence he argues that we should return the Marbles and return them proudly. It shouldn’t be a presented as the return of stolen goods, or the correction of historic injustice, but as a good-faith act of generosity towards another great country after a long period of safekeeping during which we raised the prestige of the Marbles and hence of Greek culture. Starmer - or whoever tells this story - can politely demur from any claims that the marbles should never have left the premises, since if they’d stayed in Greece they might not exist anymore, let alone be celebrated around the world. It’s a tribute to a good side of the British character - our cultural curiosity and respect for history - that the Marbles are today so highly esteemed.

Ed’s reframing made me change my mind about the issue: I now support a decision I was previously against. But actually, I hadn’t really been against the decision at all. I’d had an adverse reaction to a story about the decision, and against the people telling that story (because I felt they were making it out of ignorance). And that had hindered my ability to think the decision through.

Noticing this has made me reflect on how often I’ve done something similar. Let me give you one and a half examples. I supported America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. This was partly because I was a young man under the influence of powerful drugs known on the street as Hitch and Sully. But it was also because I had contempt for the people most loudly protesting the war: the far left, Stop The War, Chomskyites, and all the knee-jerk anti-Americans. I still do. But the fact is that they were right and I was wrong.

They were right for the wrong reasons. They told a false story about what was happening (no, America did not invade to steal Iraq’s oil - that would at least have constituted a realistic goal). But they were correct about the decision itself, and in the most important way: that it would bring destruction and chaos, not democracy and peace. It took me too long to accept that. It’s hard to admit you were wrong at the best of times, but it’s especially hard to admit it when the wrong people, with the wrong story, are on the right side.

The half example is Brexit. I always thought it was bad idea. I never thought the British state would magically reinvent itself once it broke free of Brussels. It always seemed to me that we would just be creating another massive and complex problem for ourselves at a time when we already had several massive and complex problems to deal with.

However, I hated the arrogance and myopia of the Remainers: their unearned superiority complex, their parochialism disguised as cosmopolitanism. The story they told about Britain’s anti-EU sentiment being the product of xenophobia and racism never fitted the evidence. That pushed me towards Leave. But the story told by Leavers about Britain’s buccaneering post-Brexit future was such an obvious fairy tale that I never went all the way. I voted Remain, grudgingly.

It’s not ‘tribalism’ that threatens to override my rational mind; Remainers were largely my ‘tribe’ and I had no affiliation with Leavers. It’s more about not wanting to be contaminated by all the bad ideas that can surround a good one. A correct decision made for the wrong reasons is still right and vice versa, however. The Remainers' smugness didn't make Brexit wise; the anti-war left's simplistic narratives didn't make Iraq prudent. And my distaste for performative self-flagellation about Britain's past shouldn't have blinded me to the simple truth that the Parthenon Marbles belong in Athens. The challenge isn't just to form the right opinions, but to recognize them even when they come wrapped in stories we'd rather not tell.

How To Get An Advance Copy of John & Paul

As I’m sure my impeccably urbane readers know, publishers send advance copies (“uncorrected proofs”) of new books to journalists and influencers, in the months prior to publication. Even as I work on final edits to the text, Very Important People have been reading advance copies of John & Paul. As you can see from the Amazon page some of them have already said nice things about it.

But what if you - a reader without vast global fame or control of a powerful media platform - want to get hold of an advance copy? Well, you can’t, sorry.

UNLESS…you get yourself to the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park, New York, on Sunday, December 8th (tomorrow).

It should be a fun place to be. Sunday is the anniversary of John Lennon’s death which means that the memorial will be thronged with Beatles fans who have come to pay respects and express love. There will no doubt be music and singing. There will also be lovely people from my US publisher Celadon dispensing advance copies of John & Paul. So if you want to get a sneak preview of my book, board a plane or hop on a train and get yourself down to Strawberry Fields.

After the jump: on the most heinous presidential pardon of recent times (it’s not Biden’s), and a rattle bag of goodies: good and bad uses of ChatGPT; my thoughts on Conclave; why South Korean politics is crazy; and much more…