Things Written Randomly in Doubt Read online

  A true liberal believes that society is made by its human components, who are in constant dialogue with each other. No individual can make the weather, as everyone must be free to express their will.

  A liberal-socialist adds two essential ideas to that of the liberal: justice is as important as freedom, and there can be no freedom where there are huge inequalities.

  Revolutionaries often start as liberals but are militarised by the warfare that almost always follows a revolution. They become generals and think like generals, forgetting their original motives for the struggle.

  Revolutionaries abolish the death penalty and then restore it.

  Revolutionaries come to despise the people they wanted to liberate, and secretly yearn for a normalisation of relations with the reactionary states that surround them.

  Revolutionaries are all different, but end up the same if their revolution is violent. That is a tragedy within a tragedy.

  The rich and propertied always rise to the top, even in revolutionary organisations intent upon the abolition of property. Property provides confidence and leisure to improve one’s skills.

  Only non-violent revolution can retain the integrity of its participants. This is the age of non-violent revolution and it will last for as long as we can defend our hard-won human rights, which are currently being dismantled.

  VI

  There never was an absolute free market, a fully socialist nation or a genuinely sovereign state. Today the sovereign state is an increasingly distant reality. The era of mutually interdependent peoples – a nineteenth-century dream – may yet begin.

  The age of “ethnicity” is over and the age of culture has begun.

  Without biodiversity, humanity cannot survive. Without cultural diversity, human culture cannot survive.

  The essence of global capitalism is uniformity, not diversity.

  The essence of Taylorism, once beloved of both the United States and the Soviet Union, is productivity and not creativity.

  All production can be done creatively, and only through creative production can we maintain diversity and our species and cultures.

  Humanity is now god of this planet, and holds the destinies of living things in its hands. To govern it properly it must rediscover the gods to guide it.

  Not the god of the market, not the god of pleasure, but the god of altruism and the god of duty. Ultimately it must rediscover the God of Love and Bewilderment.

  Individuals create their essence after their existence, as Sartre claimed, but he failed to admit that society gives them the tools to do this.

  Of the tools a society bequeaths an individual, its language is the most important one, closely followed by its culture and its religion.

  A good society has a plurality of languages and a plurality of religions, which will enrich it with complexities.

  An oppressive society may desire pluralities for a different reason: to create divisions and exploit them for the furtherance of oppressive behaviour. It is not diversity that undermines society; it is the way it is used by the powerful.

  A religion allows an individual to reject it, accept it, mutate it or place it amongst the unknowable things that teach us most.

  A language empowers individuals to express whatever they want and to depict in words the meanders of their imaginations.

  A child that is brought up without a rich linguistic environment is a child deprived.

  A child that is brought up without a religion or a substitute like humanism, or at least a political morality, is a child deprived of something to reject.

  We learn to think up new ideas by rejecting others and observing the evolving reality around us. Deprived of the ability to do the first, the second becomes an exercise in vacuity.

  VII

  Belief in God does not presuppose belief in an afterlife.

  God concerns our relationship with others, the truth and ourselves.

  God requires closeness to others and distance from the self.

  Forget about the next life, pie in the sky and greenshield stamps for being good! The next life, if it exists, will look after itself.

  We make our own decisions and act upon them, and are the happier when we take responsibility for them too. The reward for virtuous behaviour, when it comes, comes in this world.

  Whatever your religion or non-religion, never be certain of anything – not even your own god, lest you kill him with your own fanatic will. Not knowing is not the terror you thought it was.

  The infinite possibilities of our human existence are an ocean on which you can navigate for a lifetime, and when you die not that much the wiser for your efforts, you will have experienced life to the full.

  A life lived in faith would be a life diminished, even were your one true faith the one true faith.

  We know nothing of heaven, but we do know that, should it exist, entrance will not be restricted to those with the right membership card, nor will there be an entrance exam in theology.

  We know nothing of hell, but we do know that, should it exist, it will not have been designed as an eternal Auschwitz.

  When I observe the religious, I often feel more of an atheist, and when I observe atheists I feel more religious. This is not because any of them are bad people; it is just my irritation at their perennial certitudes.

  A contrarian is a useless person who has at last found a role in society. It’s my job to irritate those who irritate me, and it’s their job to be certain of how the world is made, because without their certainties the world would cease to turn on its axis.

  VIII

  The Americans haven’t understood yet that post-imperialism is more fun than imperialism.

  With post-imperialism you no longer fear that the satellite and tributary states will refuse to do what they’re told, because they already have.

  The less well-off in imperialist countries have a miserable time and are fed on dreams of greatness.

  The less well-off in imperialist countries are denied the dignity and authenticity of the less well-off elsewhere.

  The English lost their imperial identity, but Thatcher resurrected it by invading a couple of islands whose sovereignty she had, six months earlier, been trying to transfer to Argentina on a fifty-year leaseback. The break-up of Britain within the EU will not be Balkanisation, but it will be a break with imperial discourse and the last few untidy imperial hankerings.

  By losing Scotland, its former junior partner in a successful but now defunct imperial project, England will be free to choose between a future in Europe or a future as the current junior partner with the United States in a once successful imperial project now on the wane.

  The only good thing about mercantile empires is the brevity of their reign. A scattered empire built on economic advantage cannot be held together for long by military might, once the economic advantage has disappeared.

  Will America be the new Europe and become politically awake? We can only hope.

  Will Europe, as we unlearn the hard-learnt lessons of the past, revert to xenophobia and internecine strife? We can only despair.

  The great thing about history is that, if studied correctly, no nation can boast moral superiority, and each should look to its own crimes.

  The current fashion for apologies over centuries-old crimes while ignoring current crimes is a perfidy worthy of our past. To weep over the clearances whilst assisting in the plan to flood the homes of another minority people, the Kurds of Turkey, is a fine example.

  Clearance by water is even more effective than clearance by sheep.

  It’s pointless to decry the horrors of slavery in America while remaining silent about the horrors that continue to be inflicted on African Americans to this day: principally kangaroo courts, solitary confinement for endless periods of time, and a gulag of prison labourers. History is important because it teaches us about the present: its exploitation for moral posturing and inaction is an insult to those who suffered in the past.

  Jean Cocteau wrote,
“I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.” How very wrong: history’s contribution to civilisation has been to undermine and occasionally destroy myths. Mythology is a lie that more often than not becomes a brutal reality. Mythology interferes with rational thought.

  Cocteau should have been wary of the chiastic attraction of his statement. A lesson to all of us who adapt our thoughts to rhetorical templates.

  Real history is as elusive as it is fascinating. A historian who does not admit to its elusiveness and cannot exploit its fascination is not a historian of any worth.

  IX

  Each generation has its own culture, which is transnational. It crosses not only borders, but also ideologies. It has an individuality that will never be repeated, but will be resembled.

  Each generation has its genius, each its terrible lacunae, for which the previous generation is in part responsible. One generation may have generosity and open-mindedness as a reaction against the lack of these in their parents, or a lack of formal education because their parents were too lazy, too self-obsessed and, above all, too mean as a society to provide them with one.

  When people tut-tut over the misuse of the apostrophe and inability to calculate simple additions, they think that this is a permanent change. Probably not: it is quite possible that in fifteen years young people will be as obsessed about the health of their brains as they have been about their bodies for the past fifteen years. Perhaps they have already started to take them for regular exercise.

  Jogging the brain is less visible than jogging the body.

  It’s true what they say: “Get an education. It weighs nothing when you have to move around.” If, however, you hold your education too grandly, your body may be light and your nose lifted to the heavens, but your soul will fall to your feet and look like a sack of potatoes. Occasionally it will trip you up.

  I knew a old man in Turin. Erudite and unassuming, he was held to that city by his weight of his and his family’s memories. He was as hard on his birthplace as he was on himself. As a rootless individual, I admire those who are rooted in their own place but cosmopolitan in their thoughts and hopes. They belong to the few and they belong to us all.

  Social goods – cultural, moral and political – have to be fought hard for unceasingly.

  Social goods are hard to maintain from one generation to another. In each the battle has to be repeated, but by people who have never been without those particular social goods and therefore do not value them as much as they should.

  Is it the case that it takes a degree of authoritarianism to maintain a social good over the long term? Probably yes, but authoritarian regimes maintain social goods by ossifying them. Then they become brittle and collapse.

  The only way to maintain social goods is through an unending process of participation and reinvention. This is an exhausting idea for an old man like me who yearns for the return of ideas now dead. But how exhilarating!

  If the meagre intellects of Reagan and Thatcher could reverse all the gains of a century of working-class movements and start running the nineteenth century backwards, there is hope for us to regain our past just as easily without violence and without the demonisation of any class or social group.

  Reagan and Thatcher unintentionally weakened the West and remind us of the shabby restrictiveness of nineteenthcentury economic theories. The dismal science may have started to rebalance wealth globally. In a hundred years, this may be what is remembered, rather than the devastation inflicted by their economic theories.

  Only an idiot or a banker would think that capitalist consumption could not only continue but expand to cover all the globe without harming it irreparably.

  Will we only start to dismantle capitalism when it is too late? Will we commission an army of consultants and spivs to dismantle the capitalism that spawned them? Will G4 police regulatory changes to the stock exchange, whilst launching another share issue to celebrate the new contract?

  Are we a foolish species? There is great goodness and intelligence in the human race. The problem is that we quite rightly expend our goodness and intelligence on the crucial little things of life: our families, our friends and our work. We have never invented a political system – a public thing or common wealth – that works satisfactorily and creates a collective equal to our needs and worthy of our potential.

  But every state, however vile, works better than no state, because amongst the goodness and intelligence there is a powerful minority of viciousness, greed and the will to power.

  Where nominally there is no power, power is recreated in its crudest form.

  So-called democratic politicians only see the worst in their electorates, and we despise them because they reflect back the baseness stored within us.

  The class of politicians who go from privileged school to parliamentary “research” posts and then to parliament as members have ushered in the rule of automatons.

  The rule of automatons is the perfect system for the capitalist elite. The automatons are even weaker than we are.

  The automatons look pleased with themselves, because they think they are in charge, and there is a massive industrialcultural apparatus whose principal task is to convince them and us of this delusion.

  Gordon Brown says that the intrinsically British values are tolerance and fair play. Given the intolerance and lack of fair play intrinsic to that statement, we can marvel at its splendid incongruity.

  And leaving aside the incongruity of arguing that foreigners are relatively intolerant and unfair compared with the British and not perceiving the statement’s self-subversion, we can marvel at a former British prime minister being so ignorant of the history of the state he served.

  Nations have cultural traits; they don’t have moral ones.

  More or less all states are immoral, particularly in their international relations. Some are more immoral than others. The British state has always been one of the most immoral precisely because it has been an imperialist one with an unquenchable global ambition and a far-reaching network of relations. Old habits failed to pass away with the passing of its empire.

  If you are powerful, beware your friends, particularly your best and dearest friends – the ones on whom you showered your greatest favours. They will never forgive you.

  X

  Good music unites; good literature divides and unsettles – not humanity but the self.

  Music speaks to everyone and everyone can hear; literature speaks to the literate and not all the literate can hear.

  A good society requires both music and literature.

  We are entering the post-literate society in which the image is all. We do not know where we’re going, and the post-literate society doesn’t care.

  Literature requires as much effort from the reader as it does from the writer. Without a large community of skilled readers, literature as we have known it over the last three hundred years will die.

  For both writer and reader, literature is a solitary activity that, unseen, builds society because it increases the collective intelligence by questioning easy myths and sharing ideas amongst those who never meet.

  It is more difficult to find the solution than to ask the question: a country could not be run by satirists, but without satirists a country could not be run.

  Literature abhors sameness. If all books become the same, it would be better not to read.

  To write is to become another person or other people. That is the writer’s true salary, worth more than all the royalties.

  “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” said Samuel Johnson. Didn’t he know that writing is for blockheads and madmen? Was he not a sublimely talented and bumbling example of both?

  To be guided exclusively by pecuniary advancement is to mistake the purpose not only of writing but also of life.

  The greatest acts of kindness come from the poor.

  Money in this society is
necessary for survival, but above a certain level it is like keeping rotten fruit.

  Penury deprives us of our humanity, but so does excessive wealth.

  A writer can receive no greater compliment than to be dismissed as a fool by those who have never read her words.

  A writer should leave his rancours outside his study door.

  A good writer should only remember his readership when it comes to the second or third draft. No great work of literature came out of a focus group.

  A good writer should trust her readers to adapt to different voices and to enjoy them.

  An elitist writer disregards his readers altogether. He would do better to stop writing and invite them to supper.

  Good writing is produced by compulsives who can do nothing else. Professional writers find writing a chore, complain about meagre royalties and do other more remunerative jobs.

  Thank God for arts council grants. Without them the compulsives wouldn’t eat and the professionals couldn’t buy their suits.

  Life begins when you relinquish ambition.

  You can move beyond ambition at twenty-eight or eighty-two, but most do so around forty, when they have either failed or succeeded. Hence the wisdom in that apparently banal adage on when life begins.

  Those who perversely become ambitious in old age, put their lives on hold and spoil their years of close relationships and reflection.

  Putting ambition aside can be the second step towards creativity – paradoxically, because ambition may well have been the first step.

  Ambition is both an obstacle to creativity and the drive towards it.

  The flaw in ambition is that it cares too much about how creativity is assessed publicly. Hence it is a mixture of confidence and a lack of it.

  Too much confidence undermines the self-critical approach required of writing or any other creative activity. Too little confidence deprives writers of their ability to write at all.