Things Written Randomly in Doubt Read online

  Things Written Randomly in Doubt

  by Allan Cameron

  The work of a fool who has stumbled through life and, quite inexplicably, survived. Someone who can stumble that well should be listened to – not to evoke your consensus but your stupefaction at the random blows of fate that have allowed such a tiresome mischief-maker to continue with his rant.

  In memory of Eric Hobsbawm whose friendship, kindness and conversation I miss

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  How Not to Be a Ruminant

  Weight and Counterweights

  Cats and Dogs, and Other Things We Cannot Understand

  On Tolstoy’s Resurrection

  On Aphorisms

  Did My Father Have Free Will?

  Nations and Nationalism

  On Friendship

  On Writing about Ourselves

  On the Soul

  On Publishing

  On Nation, Polity and Cosmopolity

  On Class, Work and Politics

  On Essays

  A Sceptic’s Defence of Religion

  What Was Wrong with the Left?

  Conclusion

  By the Metre

  The Mystic

  Life’s a Bitch

  The Poverty of Wealth

  Where the Beauty, Where the Hope

  Scientific Progress

  Time and my Wife

  Riflusso

  On Seeing a Photo of Victims’ Skulls from the Cambodian Genocide

  This

  Endnotes

  Copyright

  Things Written Randomly in Doubt

  How Not to Be a Ruminant

  I

  Life is a serious affair that has to be treated light-heartedly.

  To be light-hearted in the face of so much misery and remain human requires an effort of will.

  Humour is a release, but not the purpose of life. Humour is an acceptance that not every wrong can be righted. The world should be turned upside down, but when it is the bottom floats to the top again.

  Change is needed, but so is time. Hence the mix of gravity and levity we all must seek out in measures suited to our own natures.

  The recurring problem with revolutions is that some mediocrity always wants to embody them.

  To make a sensible decision a person must first be certain of the parameters involved. As no wise person can ever be certain of anything, we must infer that no wise person can ever make a sensible decision.

  As decisions must be taken to govern the state and develop our parasitic corporations, it must also follow that our lives are at the mercy of knaves and chancers who have no mercy.

  Why do men who chew gum throw their well-chewed gum in urinals? If we could quantify the mass of this sticky, pisssteeped matter, would we have a measure of male vacuity?

  Why, in fact, does anyone chew gum? Is it to imbestialate a ruminant? If so, is that gentle satire of another being or solidarity across the species? Neither. It is the instinct to switch off and give up on the tedious task of being a homo sapiens.

  The only way to love the abstraction that is this curious cosmos we inhabit is to love and experience fully its many particulars individually. On the whole, abstractions are unlovely.

  A good understanding of literature leads to disdain for too many books. That is why an old practitioner nostalgically recalls the joy of her teenage years when she read indiscriminately and was excited by the unfamiliarity of ideas and forms. To understand is one of our virtues, but it can undermine another more innocent one: delight in the mysteries of this world.

  The wisest man never destroys the child within him, but the child will abandon him nevertheless – perhaps in disgust. The limitations of the written word are what make it the greatest art, and the greatest artist is the reader.

  A powerful man at whatever level of society will always convince himself that his tyranny is benign and his intentions pure. Richard III’s honesty and self-knowledge are peculiarly attractive solely because they could never exist.

  Malignity is banal, because it lacks self-awareness. Pure malignity would lack it altogether and certainly would not strut the antechambers to the throne room listing its evil intentions and delighting in their cunning.

  Our forbears were in awe of the immensity of our world, which is now remarkable for its lonely finitude in undistinguished orbit of a workaday star. We are crushed between claustrophobia and the immense diversity of the circumscribed – a universe in a postage stamp.

  By instinct unaffected by education, the young believe in free will and the old in predestination or necessity. The young are dazzled by their liberty and potential, their ability to invent themselves; the old are impressed by the solidity of their past and disappointed by its meagre results. How could they not believe in its inevitability?

  To live a full life is not to be perverse, but it is to appear so.

  To live a full life is to follow the path of reason unflinchingly. People will think that you’re perverse, but you are only being prosaically reasonable.

  All violence should be condemned, but the violence of the powerful the more so, because it goes unpunished.

  Violence in a good cause corrupts the cause it champions, and therefore destroys what it wishes to attain long before it attains it.

  Those who fought for Irish independence and then divided over how and when to end the war were all in the right, but fated to another fratricidal bloodletting amongst themselves.

  That’s the essence of tragedy. Courage and justice cannot avoid paying the tribute of violence: sparkling necessities and senseless brutalities mirrored in the sluggish waters of history.

  The Scots, offered a peaceful route to independence, do not deserve it if, unconscious of their luck, they fail to vote for it.

  To become an independent country and remain simply that would reveal a lack of vision. Every national independence must have a narrative that is both honest and moral. That the finger-waggers and finger-pointers will abuse it and exploit it for their own purposes does not remove the need to clarify the narrative.

  The British Empire was an Anglo-Scottish empire, and Scotland – the junior partner as Britain is to America today – must compensate the world it injured by providing a new definition of what a nation is.

  In politics and war, the most common tactical mistake is to use the tactic most successful in the past or elsewhere.

  To love specific humans brings with all its joys the terror of loss.

  To love the universality of humans is to be emboldened by the insignificance of the loss of oneself.

  Beware of those who love the universality of humans without loving any specific ones. They are, at best, prophets of dull philosophies or, at worst, ferocious megalomaniacs of the left.

  Admire and learn from those who love both the universality of humans and some specific ones. They are not so rare as we often think. It is the condition most of us would seek, if we weren’t embarrassed by the idea of it.

  Such a man was Jesus: not God dressed up in human form, but something less improbable and more divine: a man like any other, a complete man at ease with his God and unfrightened by his fate.

  Admire the Christ-like, who may never have heard of Jesus, and shun bloodthirsty Christians, who would be considered oxymorons if they were not so numerous.

  Some argue that nations do not exist, because they’re abstractions that in reality lack uniformity and evolve, eventually dying. When they argue this, they explain the reasons for the existence of nations.

  Nationalism as a solid state is a source of great cruelty. Its myths blind its peoples to reason. “Eternal” natio
ns cannot last, and are outlived by more flexible neighbours.

  A nation that does not belong to all humanity is a province.

  A small nation can be less provincial than a large one, precisely because it cannot live wholly within itself.

  Christianity is a pacifist religion in which all the major churches preach the concept of the just war, which goes back to pre-Christian times. Islam has the concept of the just war as part of its original credo but, excepting Wahhabism, it has been a slightly less bellicose religion in practice. Is a religion the better for not expecting too much of its believers? Or was the greatest misfortune to affect the followers of the dreamer of Gallilee that the religion he possibly did not intend to found became the state religion of an expansionist empire?

  Did the universalist and egalitarian religion slightly improve the state that twisted it to its own political interests? Having become Christians, were the emperors slightly less afflicted by the madness of power? Good and evil mix in strange and unpredictable ways. Did the governors become better and did they benefit from the governed becoming more governable?

  Distrust the pious, their masks disguise a mischievous desire to appear good.

  Disdain the scoffers, they reduce existence to self-interest, a market and a jungle. They would have us and, perversely, themselves herded into a meadow of artificial grass.

  To scoff at human nature is to build our prison walls.

  Embrace the confused, their confusion expresses their loving intelligence.

  Above all, beware the powerful, they perceive everyone as an instrument of their power.

  If you’re tired of my prescriptions, remember: you can always learn from a fool, and from a loser you can glimpse the advantages you lost through what little success you achieved in life.

  To learn from a fool, you must first learn to distrust him.

  II

  Beware the powerful again: they can assist you and they can crush you. Better to be crushed than sell your soul.

  Do we have any use for the idea of a free egalitarian society in which all can contribute and all can benefit in as equitable a fashion as possible without burdening that society with an over-inflated bureaucracy and installing a dismal rule by accountants? Of course we do. Hold it dear in your mind and learn to live in the society we have, whilst pinching your nose and keeping silent where silence is advised.

  Silence is only an admission of your powerlessness. To support or, worse, to justify tyranny, however cleverly it dresses up its purposes, is an act of obeisance that will lead to others.

  Happiness is elusive for those who seek after it.

  Happiness passes unnoticed by those who achieve it, except in those moments of ecstasy.

  Happiness is a product of love and creativity – both things that distract you from the self that undermines you from within.

  Sometimes I have tired of London and sometimes, more seriously, I have tired of life, though not necessarily at the same time. But always life and London have revived my interest in them.

  Is this surprising? Not at all, we all tire of our own lives and we tire of all places. Then we enthuse once again. Our condition is a cyclical one that fades in smaller and smaller circles, or is snuffed out.

  If you fail, then fail spectacularly.

  It takes as much work to fail spectacularly as it does to succeed spectacularly, and is more uncomfortable.

  Discomfort keeps us alive – like a bed of nails.

  To balance yourself unsteadily between success and failure produces a respectable and happy condition, which in the period of early capitalism was moderately achievable, but is now almost impossible – at least in the so-called “creative industries”.

  To succeed spectacularly in this field requires unscrupulousness and energy, assisted by a high degree of judicious mendacity, except a few who achieve it through a judicious mix of generous humanity and startling intellectual brilliance.

  The high court of rumour and gossip is one in which the accused has no right to read the indictment and no right of appeal. Its sentence is final.

  Jesus suffered on the cross because he unsettled the powerful with apparently innocuous truths. He did not die alone that day, nor did he in history.

  The death of Jesus only has meaning if he was a man like you and I. He then comes to represent all the hundreds of millions of others – innocent and guilty – extinguished by power and hidden from history.

  Even his message had and has been propogated by others, but that does not lessen its power. We should not turn our backs on the Christian ethic, just because we cannot believe in the Virgin Birth or the divinity of Christ.

  His message and similar ones might have been argued by others, but churches have not been built in their names. He belongs to our history, and we speak the ethics of his stories as they have come down to us, battered and abused perhaps but still more vibrant than the sugared niceties of our materialistic bien pensants.

  The pious are not necessarily those who believe in religion; they are those who believe in the moral rectitude of their own behaviour and wish to persuade everyone else of this act of faith.

  The pious atheist is not the worst and most dangerous of the pious, but he is the most irritating and ridiculous – the most lacking in self-awareness.

  The art of writing involves the avoidance of the sententious, except for the aphorism: brevity provides licence for the sweeping generalisation.

  III

  Tolerance is the oxygen of society.

  To argue for tolerance is the primary task of any writer or intellectual. But is there anything new that can be said? The Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio wondered about how tolerant we should be of the intolerant. We could also ask how tolerant we should be of those who are intolerant of the intolerant, because the intolerant will always be with us.

  The intolerant are fractured human beings, and are therefore to be pitied. But in particular historical circumstances they are as dangerous as rabid dogs. Our tolerance should be contingent.

  In his desire to conjure up an original thought an intellectual will twist a thought one more time and in so doing become a mere conjurer who produces not truths but entertaining tricks.

  The truth is often banal, but occasionally miraculous.

  Few truths have been uncovered outside science, where every discovery reveals our ignorance and increases our bewilderment.

  Perhaps not: this impetuous technological advance that undermines our humanity and deskills us provides an opportunity to generate new ideas on our demise.

  It is an opportunity to grumble our way out of existence. There will be some slight splenetic pleasure in that.

  A programmer will eventually write the software to produce novels mechanically. It won’t change things much: writers are already programmed by accountancy and market research.

  IV

  The peoples of Tasmania were visited by a plague of particularly virulent parasites that wiped them from the face of the earth: the parasites were called the British and came in the name of sweet religion and the wealth of nations, concepts unknown to the Tasmanians and we will never know what useful concepts they may have developed.

  “Why do you always belittle our own potentates?” you ask. “They are not the only ones in the world.” You’re right, of course, but so what? A gadfly must act the gadfly, and a horse must act the horse. Would a gadfly go up to a horse’s ear and whisper, “My dear horse, I promise not to bite you or torment you. I will only afflict the other horses. All I ask in return is that you allow me to make my home in your hair and appoint me king of the gadflies.” A gadfly is an ugly little creature that quickly populates the air, but it has its purpose.

  Satirists are the most effective gadflies, because they only have to ridicule the status quo; they do not have to propose any alternatives.

  To improve society, we must first ask the right questions. In choosing the right questions, we are guided by our moral priorities.

  There are
many of these, but only two fundamental ones. Some of us are guided by the sanctity of property, and others by the sanctity of humans, by which we mean the right to a voice and to a creative and useful life.

  By revealing the absurdities of our regimes and leaders, satirists pose important questions.

  Satire, like charity, starts at home.

  An intellectual who denounces crimes and abuses of power abroad, but ignores them at home, is no more than a pen for sale, a cultural mercenary. Now they are legion, and how thoroughly they chew their cud.

  Abel Tasman gave his sponsor’s name to the island, and others, much later, gave it his. He discovered it, because the Tasmanians were incapable of discovering anything, including the malignity of discoverers.

  Lucky is the land that becomes a nation after the age of nationalism.

  Lucky is the nation that, at its birth, does not cry, “We must go out bearing our precious civilisation and spread it round this unhappy world,” but pleads instead, “Come to us, we have a nation yet to build.” Lucky is the land that does not wish to replicate itself.

  Lucky is the land that, uncertain of who it is, explores its own interior.

  The modern nation must blind itself to nationality. Its citizenship must be based on residency alone.

  If you breathe our air, you belong.

  V

  Revolutionaries treat society as a surgeon treats his patient; they ruthlessly sever limbs they consider to be diseased. In other words, a revolutionary perceives a living human collectivity as an entity on which he can operate without reference to its own views. Society is objectified.

  That ideas are held by impatient revolutionaries intent upon forcing the pace of history does not mean that their ideas are bad.

  A revolutionary movement rarely wins if it has no constituency of support, although that constituency may not fully understand its intentions.

  Advocates of the “free market” perceive society as an inert entity subject to natural laws, over which no one can exert any control or influence. The freedom they speak of would be like freedom for the weather. Society is objectified.