Leave it to amateurs
FOR two months, the world has been inspired by the rhetoric and bravery of President Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine. In his previous life, he was an actor, making him practically an amateur at politics, one might have thought, but, cometh the hour, cometh the man. Our own MPS’ example sometimes suggests that politics ought not to be left only to politicians—we have a strong amateur tradition, still represented, in some enlightened cases, by the small number of hereditary peers in the Lords.
In fiction, we admire Sherlock Holmes, who solved mysterious crimes because they stimulated his brain. John Ruskin, the influential Victorian seer and aesthete, could only take up cudgels against the ugliness of contemporary life because he had inherited a fortune from his father’s sherry business. We rejoiced in Sam Waley-cohen’s fairy-tale Grand National triumph this month; he runs dental clinics in ‘real life’, but has a natural ability to read the Aintree fences.
Boasting about hard work was once thought infra dig by the British upper crust —nobody liked a swot. That attitude persisted as what the American economist Thorstein Veblen called, in 1899, a ‘leisure class’ emerged. This was not limited to Britain—in France, Marcel Proust, the son of a doctor, belonged to it, which gave him the time to write his great novel and the money to publish it; the Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte had private means. Sweden’s Enlightenment monarch Gustavus III designed buildings as a pastime; Russian composer Borodin’s works took an age to write because, by day, he was a professor of chemistry.
After the Second World War, Britain created a State-sponsored version of it in universities, where academics were (it seems in retrospect) funded to pursue intellectual passions, with little oversight from those paying them—a halcyon age for academe. Then, in the 1980s, the British adopted American working practices: out went the expenseaccount lunch (no loss) and promotion went to those who spent longest at their desks.
Covid has broken this addiction to long office hours and reasserted the amateur spirit. Volunteers came forward in their tens of thousands to speed the vaccination programme and are now inspired to apply for NHS jobs. Others, no longer shackled to the drudgery and expense of commuting, have discovered leisure time; remote working will reignite the role of the hobbyist. The amateurs live on and their contributions to the richness of the world’s experience proves that humanity is not solely motivated by economic self-interest, as Karl Marx maintained—another lesson we are learning from Ukraine.