Philip Pullman on "the greedy ghost" threatening libraries in the UK

Philip Pullman, bestselling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, the Sally Lockhart series, and several other great novels for adults and children, gave a speech last week at a meeting in Oxford to protest against the decision to close nearly half the public libraries in Oxfordshire. Anti-cuts website False Economy, in conjunction with openDemocracy, published the transcript of the speech.

Mr Pullman covers several issues, from the ridiculous notion of David Cameron's "Big Society" to the problems of purist free market theory. Along the way, he talks about how this will (what a surprise) hit the poorest the hardest.

On Big Society:

Nor do I think we should respond to the fatuous idea that libraries can stay open if they’re staffed by volunteers. What patronising nonsense

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And who are these volunteers? Who are these people whose lives are so empty, whose time spreads out in front of them like the limitless steppes of central Asia, who have no families to look after, no jobs to do, no responsibilities of any sort, and yet are so wealthy that they can commit hours of their time every week to working for nothing?

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Especially since the council is hoping that the youth service, which by a strange coincidence is also going to lose 20 centres, will be staffed by – guess what – volunteers. Are these the same volunteers, or a different lot of volunteers?

This is the Big Society, you see. It must be big, to contain so many volunteers.

Of course, if you're Mr Cameron or from his background, then maybe you do have this sort of time on your hands. As Mr Pullman explains:

But there’s a prize being dangled in front of these imaginary volunteers. People who want to save their library, we’re told, are going to be “allowed to bid” for some money from a central pot. We must sit up and beg for it, like little dogs, and wag our tails when we get a bit.

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But just for the sake of simplicity let’s imagine it’s only libraries. Imagine two communities that have been told their local library is going to be closed. One of them is full of people with generous pension arrangements, plenty of time on their hands, lots of experience of negotiating planning applications and that sort of thing, broadband connections to every household, two cars in every drive, neighbourhood watch schemes in every road, all organised and ready to go. Now I like people like that. They are the backbone of many communities. I approve of them and of their desire to do something for their villages or towns. I’m not knocking them.

And here, Mr Pullman reveals the first way in which the poor get hurt most:

But they do have certain advantages that the other community, the second one I’m talking about, does not. There people are out of work, there are a lot of single parent households, young mothers struggling to look after their toddlers, and as for broadband and two cars, they might have a slow old computer if they’re lucky and a beaten-up old van and they dread the MOT test – people for whom a trip to the centre of Oxford takes a lot of time to organise, a lot of energy to negotiate, getting the children into something warm, getting the buggy set up and the baby stuff all organised, and the bus isn’t free, either – you can imagine it. Which of those two communities will get a bid organised to fund their local library?

Mr Cameron's "Big Society" is a model based on the idea that the people who are actually a part of society are in fact wealthy people. Poor people, on minimum wage or out of a job for whatever reason, struggling to get through life, don't matter. They aren't part of "society" in Mr Cameron's eyes. They are instead, in his eyes, merely a lumpen burden on society.

Mr Pullman continues to discuss the bigger issues caused by the push towards free market theory - what he calls "free market fundamentalism":

What I personally hate about this bidding culture is that it sets one community, one group, one school, against another. If one wins, the other loses.

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And it always results in victory for one side and defeat for the other. It’s set up to do that. It’s imported the worst excesses of market fundamentalism into the one arena that used to be safe from them, the one part of our public and social life that used to be free of the commercial pressure to win or to lose, to survive or to die, which is the very essence of the religion of the market. Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of political power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life. I think that little by little we’re waking up to the truth about the market fanatics and their creed. We’re coming to see that old Karl Marx had his finger on the heart of the matter when he pointed out that the market in the end will destroy everything we know, everything we thought was safe and solid. It is the most powerful solvent known to history. “Everything solid melts into air,” he said. “All that is holy is profaned.”

Market fundamentalism, this madness that’s infected the human race, is like a greedy ghost that haunts the boardrooms and council chambers and committee rooms from which the world is run these days.

"The greedy ghost" is an excellent turn of phrase (what else would you expect from a talented author like Mr Pullman, though?) It was interesting to see that Mr Pullman is aware of some of the lesser known quotations from Karl Marx, and at least on this issue agrees with him. The more I see of life, the more it seems that the work of Marx and Engels (also supported by libraries, specifically the British Library, as well as by Engels pilfering from his father's business!) is borne out by reality. This "greedy ghost" vandalising so many things that do not show value in instant profit, is just another example.

Mr Pullman describes the greedy ghost thus:

The greedy ghost is everywhere. That office block isn’t making enough money: tear it down and put up a block of flats. The flats aren’t making enough money: rip them apart and put up a hotel. The hotel isn’t making enough money: smash it to the ground and put up a multiplex cinema. The cinema isn’t making enough money: demolish it and put up a shopping mall.

The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that’s all he understands. What he doesn’t understand is enterprises that don’t make a profit, because they’re not set up to do that but to do something different. He doesn’t understand libraries at all, for instance. That branch – how much money did it make last year? Why aren’t you charging higher fines? Why don’t you charge for library cards? Why don’t you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books – you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there – what’s on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs.

That’s all the greedy ghost thinks libraries are for.

Which leads Mr Pullman on to discuss briefly the threat of fundamentalism in any form:

The ultimate source is probably the tendency in some of us, part of our psychological inheritance from our far-distant ancestors, the tendency to look for extreme solutions, absolute truths, abstract answers. All fanatics and fundamentalists share this tendency, which is so alien and unpleasing to the rest of us. The theory says they must do such-and-such, so they do it, never mind the human consequences, never mind the social cost, never mind the terrible damage to the fabric of everything decent and humane.

I’m afraid these fundamentalists of one sort or another will always be with us. We just have to keep them as far away as possible from the levers of power.

Of course, it's actually quite hard to keep fundamentalists away from the levers of power, because pretty much by the definition Mr Pullman gives us, they will do whatever it takes to get there, "never mind the human consequences". I am sure that Mr Pullman would agree that his argument goes for religious fundamentalism just as strongly, where in place of "theory" we put "doctrine".

Mr Pullman finishes his piece with a series of anecdotes from his life about the valuable role that libraries played in his development and career. He talks about his first ever visit to a library, about how the library helped in his university studies, and about how he used the public library for research on his latest book.

He concludes the whole thing with a paragraph summarising his points and extolling the human values that libraries uphold:

The public library, again. Yes, I’m writing a book, Mr Mitchell, and yes, I hope it’ll make some money. But I’m not praising the public library service for money. I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence in a town or a city reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about, things that have the power to baffle the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism, things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight.

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Leave the libraries alone. You don’t know the value of what you’re looking after. It is too precious to destroy.

Libraries have always been a huge influence for me, such an invaluable resource, from my earliest days reading. They have been a huge boost to social mobility from when the first ones came into being, and when unions created libraries for their members in the 19th Century, and so on. Closing libraries is a means to prevent people from climbing the ladder, and of keeping power with those who currently have it. I agree with Philip Pullman that the value cannot be quantified purely in terms of immediate profit, but the social benefits (which often do help to produce a profit further down the line) are huge.