Money versus Culture from Martin Amis to Thomas Tuchel
Jumping into my YouTube time machine I went back to 1984 or 1985 to see Martin Amis interviewed by Germaine Greer about his new novel Money: A Suicide Note which I read in the present day, October 2024. Both held court in youngish middle age, Amis more wary of the television’s camera than the confident Greer. But they were talking about his work after all, so Amis looked down and acted bashful from Greer’s questions. Amis said:
“In shorthand, money is the opposite of culture.”
These words were ringing in my ears when England appointed Thomas Tuchel the new men’s football coach. Tuchel will be the third foreigner to manage the men’s team in just over twenty years but the first German; Germany being England’s biggest footballing rival.
Would Germany ever do something similar? Appoint someone who is not German, mostly an outsider to German football or from a rival nation? German football expert Raphael Honigstein answered this question on The Totally Football Show that same week. He said that for Germany such an act would be:
“…too much of an embarrassment and an admission of failure.”
Tuchel’s predecessor, Gareth Southgate, was chosen to reboot English football culture. After the invention of the Premier League in 1992 football became less of a signifier of local culture and identity and increasingly something that is packaged for, sold to, bought and consumed by international audiences — and the men’s national team suffered because of it. The women’s team recently achieved success with a Dutch woman in charge. However, it is still a developing sport that only went fully professional in England in 2018 (women’s football was more popular than men’s according to spectator numbers until it was banned in 1921 destroying it as a sporting, economic, and cultural activity for decades).
Southgate’s leadership embodied a football culture that stretched back to 1966, Sir Alf Ramsey, and all that. Yet since he wasn’t the best possible manager out there, his appointment needed constant justification. His value was something intangible.
The FA undid all this patient culture-building work by not appointing Southgate’s natural successors Graham Potter or Eddie Howe. They took the easy way out. They got out their embossed chequebooks from the inside pocket of their tailored jackets and stumped up the money for the best. ‘Embarrassment’ as Honigstein put it, never entered their heads. Why should it? They are going to win the World Cup.
Money and culture both have value. They have opposing characteristics like fire and ice. Society needs both. We have used money to create material abundance for successive generations. And we have kept and valued culture so we can tell stories about who we are to those same generations.
Amis was writing in and about a time when Britain sold some of its culture and other invaluable assets belonging to the public for cash. Unfortunately, 40 years on, England lost all of that cash. We did build Canary Wharf and…well, it’s not quite clear what we spent it on.
In Money: A Suicide Note, Amis’s protagonist John Self burns through all the culture and all the money possible, leaving him without either by the end of the novel, by which time he starts to wear (unironically since Peaky Blinders had yet to be invented) a cloth cap.
Britain has suffered a similar arc. Since Thatcher, there is much less for British people to share or agree on apart from the pursuit of money, and its cultural and public assets have been meagerly nourished, to say the least. The few institutions with significant cultural cachet in Britain that remain such as pubs, the monarchy, the BBC, sporting clubs, museums, concert halls, live music venues, theatres and the NHS, are subject to regular reductions, crises, scrappings, droughts, cancellings, freezes, cut-backs and sell-offs. Cultural entities struggle to justify their existence when the market indicates they shouldn’t exist and the word ‘subsidy’ is treated as a slur. So, like water in the future, culture is now so scarce we fight over it daily. We call it ‘Culture Wars’.
It’s not that England doesn’t care for its culture but it is quick to see pound signs in its eyes when surveying almost anything. The point isn’t to return to some prelapsarian time before Thatcher. But understanding the Money/Culture dynamic could bring us closer to a general understanding of our time. Take for example the Brexit taboo.
Remainers couldn’t understand that telling Leavers they would be £X.XX per week poorer if we left, didn’t work. For most Leavers it wasn’t about the money. Of course, it was about lots of things, for some it was explicitly about immigration. For others, it was about ‘control’ and ‘sovereignty’ and other uncountable things. Whatever your reason, I would venture to say that for most Brexiters it was, consciously or subconsciously, also about identity, and they would agree with the statement that Britain didn’t really belong in the EU, culturally speaking.
On the other hand, most people who wanted to make money were Remainers, including Thatcher herself by the way. The only longstanding justification Britain had for going into Europe in the first place was to make money. And when it became obvious that the whole nation wasn’t evenly and abundantly wealthy because of its EU membership after a couple of decades Leave became, arguably, inevitable.
Famously, money was written on the side of that bus. “We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead.” Yes, this is a lie in the sense that it gives the reader the impression that it is true. It fails to account for the other side of the ledger, the return on that investment, what it gains from membership or what it might lose over time from pulling the plug. Just like summarising Christianity as “Jesus died on Good Friday”, to be true it needed a follow-up sentence that the sides of buses just can’t provide.
But leaving the EU based on that sentence alone is pre-Thatcherite and pre-Amis’ Money because it is concerned with waste. It wants to take that £350 million and stash it under the mattress. It wants to make do and mend the roof (NHS). Anyone who frames money in this way, instead of the exuberant process of making money, is thinking in a pre-Thatcher way.
There are fewer greater myths in the British mind than that of Margaret Thatcher, the prudent shopkeeper’s daughter, balancing the books of the nation, like her father would have done, on the kitchen table in the attic above 10 Downing Street. She was actually responsible for one of the greatest splurging of national resources in the history of Britain — and that was just the North Sea oil money. But in 2016, something came along that was more important than money. It was Brexit, and like any piece of experimental art from high culture, it remains intangible, confusing, unknowable, decadent, partial, bad for you, unsatisfactory and sad to this day.
“I’m John Self, and I’m addicted to the 20th Century!” is one of the great ringing bells of Amis’ novel. But to my ear, there was something not quite right about it. I couldn’t help but think that George Orwell lived all his life in the 20th Century and saw mostly death, destruction, and valued the world almost entirely in terms of culture, like many of that generation. No, John Self is actually addicted to being a baby boomer. Born, the same year Orwell and his worldview dies, he is crowned as an adult in the ’60s and plunders the world in the ’80s. He thinks increasingly that he fought in the Second World War but he didn’t. And if Self managed to make it to the 2010s he would blame everyone younger than him for the growing and eating of avocados.
In parts the excesses of Money and the 1980s are quaint. Television is the central evil but it can’t escape the fact that the novel still alludes to ‘rented’ television sets. Pornography is consumed several times a week and his step-mum Vron is entrepreneurial by getting into the stripping. It’s pearl-clutching stuff.
In the Greer/Amis interview, Greer asks Amis about his disgust for society and Amis nods and blushes again. Fast forward to today where we live as frogs boiled in our addiction to smartphones and infinite scroll, constantly fed news from the front in the transgender-sports culture war happening in a school far, far away. Revenge Porn and OnlyFans see us scrape the human body hourly for raw material whether She likes it or not. This cultural reality was still new when Martin Amis died in 2023 at the age of 73, so he cannot be disgusted about it — that will be our job.
And when Thomas Tuchel’s England win the World Cup it will remind us all of what we have done — we had enough money to buy the thing we wanted. Stop and take pride in that.
