The author Clifford Sharp was my grandmother Stella’s uncle. I suppose that makes him my great-great-uncle? I remember meeting him a few times at my great-grandmother’s house when I was a child. I was too young to have any impression of his character. My uncle Jim told me that he thought he was a rather arrogant man. He worked as an actuary, including stints in India and Pakistan. I’ve have another thin book of his describing the evolution of the actuarial profession over the years. I wasn’t aware of that he’d written this until last summer when this copy of Human Values was given to me by uncle Simon. It’s very much a family production, having been published in 1997 by DP Press, the firm started by Stella, and also where my mother worked her entire working life, as well as my brother Simon for quite a while. Indeed the cover art is credited to Simon Hadlow. I can picture him knocking it up hurriedly in Photoshop one Friday afternoon.

Great Uncle Cliff was obviously a well read and thoughtful man. I wish I’d know him better. This book is a weird concoction though. I guess “amatuer” is the best way of describing it. It’s fundamentally a summary of everything he’s read with his conclusions added. There’s nothing really surprising or novel. It’s value, if it has any, is a summary of what an elderly well educated man thought about life, the universe, and everything, at the end of the 20th century. I suppose if there is any surprise, it’s about how strongly he comes down on the nature side of the nature/nurture debate. He thinks that values and character are very much genetically determined and that we are very similar to our Chimpanzee and Gorilla cousins in our value systems. It’s quite the opposite of the prevailing opinion in the 90’s. Having said that, he’s quite critical of “modern” education for not strongly instilling a sense of social responsibility and service. He thinks the older British public school system was far better in that regard, and gives the example of the enlightened rule of the Indian Civil Service of the Raj as an example of well that ethos worked. Elderly men over the millenia have always thought the young as immoral and dissipated, so I suppose in that regard he fits the standard pattern. He says that the main reason he’s written the book is in “the hope that it will provoke discussion, particularly in the educational world.” Rather hubristic in retrospect because I doubt very many people read it.

Uncle Cliff isn’t a very good writer. As I said above it comes across as very amatuer, and rather like a bad textbook. I laboured through the first 50 pages or so and decided I had better things to do with my life and skimmed the rest, reading only the conclusions at the end of the chapters. Worth contrasting with John Carey’s book What Good Are the Arts that I read recently and which is a similar musing on values. Carey first introduces previous attempts to answer the same questions he is posing, gives quotes, contrasts and compares, and then gives some concrete examples of behaviours in the wild that support his views. There’s a narrative, it is interesting and readable, despite being a muse on quite abstract questions. Uncle Cliff in contrast just states his beliefs as facts. You might agree, you might not, he doesn’t really try to persuade you. Here’s a fact, here’s another one. I’m glad I made an attempt at it, and I’m glad he wrote it. One always knows far too little about one’s ancestors. I wish they had all written a book. It’s a shame Uncle Cliff didn’t write an autobiography, I would have enjoyed it far more, it seems he had an interesting life. His brother Ronald Sharp wrote a wonderful book about his time in China in the 30s and 40s working for Imperial Tobacco (Another Spring Has Died) that I really enjoyed. He should have followed his lead.