Will Self

The latest Madness of Crowds column looks at, er, the dynamics of crowd behaviour:

“It’s been a fantastic three months for those of us gripped by the dynamics of crowds. First, we had student demonstrations here in Britain spiralling out of control; then, we saw Tunisians link arms to push out their corrupt regime; finally, millions took to the streets of Egyptian cities, pitting their sheer weight of numbers against the sclerotic – but still vicious – government of Hosni Mubarak.

“Perhaps the most celebrated analyst of the crowd was the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, whose 1960 magnum opus, Crowds and Power, aimed to do for modern mass movements what Frazer’s Golden Bough did for “primitive” ritual. To Canetti, both socialism and capitalism were political systems defined by “the modern frenzy of increase”, in which production led to ever bigger crowds of goods and consumers.

“This sense of industrialised society as a crowd, at root, directs Canetti to his definition of power as the coincidence of the desires of the ruler(s) and the ruled.

“By this view, it’s easy to understand the presence of crowds of people on the streets as symptomatic of a disjunction between the two: only when the crowd has been reabsorbed into the social fabric has synchronous equilibrium been achieved. In Canetti’s jargon, the crowd in Tahrir Square was ‘stagnating’, whereas the crowds of the quiescent Cairene unemployed before the revolt could be characterised as ‘rhythmic’.

“Canetti showed a nice understanding of how masses of people make their own political weather when he caustically observed that ‘fire unites a theatre more than a play can’ – but his vision was underscored by the apocalyptic mood music of mutually assured destruction. ‘Rulers tremble today,’ he wrote, not ‘because they are rulers but as the equals of everyone else . . . Either everyone will survive or no one.’

“Fifty years on, and with examples of people power toppling regimes from Iran to Russia and Ukraine and – almost – back again, we’ve come to believe that there is an inherent ‘goodness’ to the crowd. At least, this is what we believe in the west, where, apart from kettled teens jiggling to dubstep and lobbing firecrackers, the mob has become a purely recreational event. Our crowds hold up lighters and sway in stadiums; their mobs do away with tyrants, replacing rulers we were happy to do business with, one hopes, others we’re even happier to do business with.

“One man who experienced an epiphany while holding up a lighter at a stadium-rock gig was the inappropriately named Professor Keith Still. This mathematician was moved to invent the science – if it is one – of ‘crowd dynamics’, a discipline he teaches at Bucks New University and on a course at the UK Cabinet Office Emergency Planning College.

“A few weeks ago, I heard Still speaking on the radio about his work for the Saudi Arabian government, ensuring that the millions of pilgrims descending on Mecca for the Haj don’t crush each other to death. I was struck by the technicality of Still’s exposition and so, when crowds took to the streets across the Middle East, it seemed to me that he was the person to consult, rather than some woolly-minded foreign-policy expert.

“I sent Professor Still a suitably humble email: ‘I appreciate that your methodology is not able to tell us whether or not crowd power will oust Mubarak but, nonetheless, it does occur to me that there is some kind of metric at work in the interaction between largely unarmed demonstrators, passive troops and active police – I wondered if you had any comment?’ As quickly as a stampeding mob came back the prof’s reply: ‘We have a range of models for assessing risk to the crowd and this is the sort of application we use for training purposes. I’m not sure I could comment further, other than that the type of work I do is related to understanding crowd behaviour and anticipating action/ reaction in this kind of situation.’ He then referred me to his website.

“Rather than being chagrined, I was gratified. There’s a fabulous section on Still’s site that details incidents of ‘crowd crazing’, when businesses hype up crowds for sales and openings. One fatal ‘crazing’ happened in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2004, when 20,000 people turned up for the opening of a new Ikea. I dare say Still’s crowd dynamics might have prevented this – but only Canetti could have explained it.”

“I feel it in my fingers/I feel it in my toes/Love is all around me/And so the feeling grows . . .” So have crooned a succession of pop stars, from the Troggs, who first coined the expression, to Bill Nighy and Wet Wet Wet. But from where I’m sitting a more plausible candidate for omni­presence would be cancer. Let’s make the substitution and see how it sounds: “I feel it in my fingers/I feel it in my toes/Cancer is all around me/And so the feeling grows . . .” Ye-es, much better, I’m sure you’ll agree.

“Both of my parents died of cancer; my wife is receiving radiotherapy for breast cancer; the sister of one of my closest friends is in a hospice dying of lung cancer; I was on the phone recently to another friend whose breast cancer – treated a decade ago with a mastectomy and chemotherapy – has recurred and metastasised into her bones; another good friend is suffering from throat cancer; indeed, cancer is so much all around me that two people I know well are being treated for leukaemia in the same ward of the same hospital.”

Read the rest of Self’s New Statesman piece here.

This time last year, I was in Berlin. One evening, strolling towards Unter den Linden after a concert at the Philharmonie by the Tiergarten, I decided to take a short cut by walking through the Holocaust Memorial.

A lot of print and hot air has been expended on the whys and wherefores of Peter Eisenman’s 4.7-acre “sculpture”, which consists of a grid of 2,711 concrete slabs or “stelae”, implanted in a shallowly sloping depression in the ground. According to Eisenman’s proposal, the memorial is designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere and, let me tell you, alone, late at night in the snowy midwinter, trudging down the long defiles with the slabs rising up above me to twice head height, I felt this and more: an intense oppression and a sense of the man-made as inherently minatory, if not genocidal, began to bear down on me.

This feeling of unutterable desolation was broken only when, mounting up the far side of the memorial, I saw some cheery lights that, as I drew closer, resolved themselves into the neon-lit façade of a Greek restaurant with a name as deliciously inappropriate as Pericles’s Taverna.

I’d like to report that I entered the taverna without demur and replaced the nightmare of history with some stuffed vine leaves – but I’d already eaten. However, the experience did get me thinking on the connections between ordinary eateries and mass murder. A half-Swiss friend tells me that, in his father’s home village in some God-awful backwoods canton, the local Schnitzeleria serves a dish called Chicken Himmler. When my friend asked why, the unashamed answer came back: because Himmler once ate here and this is what he had.

But you don’t have to go that far. In London, there’s a trio of noodle bars with the arresting name of New Culture Revolution. I’ve often passed the one in Notting Hill Gate and wondered what would persuade people to eat in such an establishment. I mean, surely it would be difficult to suck down your ma la niu rou mein without, at least, a stray troubling thought? Possibly the killing that inaugurated the Cultural Revolution would come to mind: in August 1966, the deputy head teacher of a school in Beijing where the children of Mao Zedong and other officials had been educated was kicked and beaten to death by her own female pupils.

This intergenerational frenzy launched a convulsion in Chinese society that resulted in the violent deaths of an estimated three million people . But then, wasn’t it Mao who observed that the revolution was “not a dinner party”? Perhaps I shouldn’t be so squeamish about the sight of dumb-ass trustafarians and baby Cameroons tucking in to dumplings under the banner of a tyrant’s zeal because, after all, I once ate at the New Culture Revolution on King’s Road – and the dumplings were pretty damn tasty.

Still, I couldn’t forbear from writing to David Lau, New Culture Revolution’s senior cadre, and asking about his chain’s nomenclature. Here is his reply:

Dear Will Self,

Our name originates from our style of cooking. This style is from the north of China, which has a colder climate, and where people use wheat flour rather than rice. We cook noodle and dumpling dishes just as people in that region do. Furthermore, we do not use flavour-enhancing additives such as monosodium glutamate. We make our own noodles and dumplings. When we founded the first restaurant, this was an innovation – a revolution – and this made us think of the memorable name.

Culinary art is part of humanity’s culture. If we can be of any assistance on Chinese cuisine in general, please let us know and we will try to help.

Kind regards,

David Lau

Only a churl would press a restaurateur further after such a gracious reply. But I am a churl, so I went on badgering poor Mr Lau. He held firm, even when I pointed out that analogous restaurant names might be New Final Solution (a bratwurst and beer joint in Harpenden) or New Terror (a borscht and vodka bar near Chorleywood). I’m inclined to take him at his word, as I recall the sign my late mother once saw in a café window: “Come in and eat – before we both starve.”