Things Written Randomly in Doubt Read online

  A good society not only has to provide work for its citizens – not too much and not too little – but has to create the right conditions for its citizens to go about their work and enjoy it. The idea goes back at least as far as Plato, but the idea that everyone has the perfect job suited to their nature is as questionable as the idea that everyone has a perfect partner – an idea also found in Plato.7 People grow to like their work, if they are allowed to; ideally it is a relationship in which they change the work and the work changes them, but how a person gets to a certain occupation will always be dependent on a degree of happenchance.

  Plato also asserted that both affluence and poverty are detrimental to work and to craftsmanship.8 An idea that we can surely embrace. He also argued that the guardians should live a life of poverty.9 They were not representatives – far from it – but the idea that those who rule should not be highly remunerated is a good one. Marx said that representatives should only get a worker’s average wage, as no one who is rich could understand most people’s lives. That is still true, and the professionalisation of politicians is in fact the antithesis of democracy. The Westminster Compound is busy with whatever it has to do, but there is absolutely no awareness of what is going on in the rest of the country. This is perhaps the most startling aspect of the current referendum campaign on Scottish independence. No politicians and very few London journalists have bothered to find out what it’s about. Belatedly someone has notified them that it’s about social rights, and this has been reinterpreted as moral superiority on the part of Scots, and Labour in Scotland, which up until yesterday was complaining about the “something-for-nothing society”, is wanting to project itself as the defender of those who need something because they have nothing, after thirty years of “neo-liberalism”. If they earned an average wage, they would never have been so deaf to the people they were supposed to represent.

  Politics, then, is about class. That’s been said before and long ago. Each class is a conglomerate of economic activities we call work. We are defined by both class and work, but class defines our political interests, even if we are unaware of it or wish to disregard them, and work defines our own natures. The longer we do a certain kind of work, the more we become imbued with it and the more difficult it is to break free of it, if we dislike it – and sadly some people do. Work is where we can be creative if we’re lucky enough to have the right conditions. These three things – class, work and politics – are all closely interrelated. Work is where real democratic politics starts, and it was there that the first determined campaign for universal manhood suffrage was launched (sadly, it was only manhood suffrage at that stage). The various stages of the Chartist movement had all run their course long before every worker got the vote, at the same time as women did, but with a bizarre difference in the age qualification for women, which as far as I know was never introduced anywhere else. Only in Britain! The middle class was the beneficiary, but it displayed no gratitude.

  A couple of years ago I heard a young old Etonian, whose qualification to advise the country through the microphones of the BBC seemed unclear. He was arguing that there should be a return to the property qualification for electors, because people had to be educated enough to vote (an interesting category shift here). This issue, once considered ancient history, will be revived again. He scorned the term “working class”, but that was what he meant: the working class should have its vote taken away. Once I laughed at the idiot ideas of the right, now I am fearful. They have a bad habit of passing into law a decade or so later. I take some encouragement from the fact that the current ideas of the right were once believed back in the late nineteenth century, and when I was in my teens, those ideas were considered something laughable that belonged permanently to the past. If that was the case for the right, then we can also come back from the dead and start to create a more equal society. And this time we will hopefully do it better. We will do it with good manners, with understanding. We will do it slowly, with sensitivity to the losers of the present as well as correcting the harm done to the losers of the past. We will not do it from central command, but through debate and involvement at local level. We will do it not for our own affluence, but for our children and our environment, by investing in education and in preventing pollution. And we will do it for our creative satisfaction by starting with how we work and why we work. As I have said, every kind of work is opaque to the outsider, even when the outsider thinks there isn’t much to it, so none of us can dictate how this should happen. Each profession and trade will have to make its own decisions.

  Lastly we should speak up for the irreducibly lazy, for whom I personally have great affection. On this I am genuinely on my own. I could probably read all the ancients and never find one to support my belief, never mind all the busy people who came after. Sometimes I happen upon a beautifully lazy person, who has perhaps secured some gentle sinecure that has gone unnoticed by the accountants and time-and-motion people, possibly in one of our more remote villages or islands. They usually drive a crippled van and roll their own. Typically they roll a cigarette slowly, enjoying every movement, and then only start talking when they place the skinny roll-up in their mouth. This is a tricky business and the sentences are fragmented, which only makes them more interesting. They look out to sea and focus on a distant headland and say things like, “Aye, he’s only working his way through life, like the rest of us,” or “There’s no need for all this rush, you know.” They rarely read or do the crossword puzzle, and never go on cross-country runs, but have their own reliable thoughts, occasionally assisted by illegal or legal substances. They never harm anyone, and often do a good turn. When I look at them, exchange a few words and observe how snugly they fit into this world, I don’t feel envy but relief that they exist. I don’t envy them, because I wouldn’t want to live like them. I, like most of my fellow human beings, have been cursed with restlessness and this need to do things – very possibly things that don’t need to be done, but seem inexplicably important because they fill in time – the double enemy that both eats away at life and yet weighs upon us if we don’t get busy.

  I am sick of hearing Labour and Conservative politicians talking about helping “hardworking families”, even as they prepare another blow to the living standards of those families, and pay large amounts of money to Atos to interview disabled people. Surely a country that can afford to subsidise house buyers to keep the inflated house prices in their inflated state can afford to carry the very few individuals who don’t want to work or who cannot work. There are many ways to contribute to society, and many of them cannot be detected by accountants, economists, moralists, politicians, intellectuals and other grand people who know what’s what and what we should do.10 “Hardworking families” is a cheap propaganda trick to shift blame to some vague category which presumably could be defined as “work-shy families”. If they exist, and they probably do in very small numbers, they are not the problem.

  On Essays

  A good essay examines the arguments for and against, and requires a degree of balance not found in the polemic. The essay is not better or worse than the polemic, but it is more suited to certain writers and, more interestingly, to certain times. When the left is more influential, the polemic is important because it can make a difference. Writers in such times write because they want something to happen, and that is a responsibility (even if they do not realise it). The irresponsibility of writers often consists in their desire to demonstrate their own worthiness and commitment to the temporarily popular cause.

  When the left is weak, polemic is generally more muted, although the evils to be denounced are more common and more outrageous. This is a time for the essay, which examines questions more deeply precisely because there is little hope of immediate action to address them.

  I won’t say much about writers of the right here, mainly because their behaviour is not a mirror image of the left’s. The right’s ideas go with the grain of the hierarchies, and their authors find it
easy to publish whether or not the right is on the rise. There are notable exceptions, such as Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset. The former was an outcast throughout his active life, and the latter was, at the very least, a maverick. More common are talentless writers like Gabriele d’Annunzio whose real talents lay in the self-promotion and bombast that left a miserable legacy for Italian letters. The courtier intellectuals of the right allow themselves crass errors that writers of the left would not be excused.

  The freedom the essay offers the writer of the left is the opportunity to put ideology aside and investigate even those unpalatable truths that undermine our belief in a better and more equal society. The word “essay” derives from the same root as “assay”, the Latin exagium which means “weighing” – hence the title of this collection of essays.

  The essay is a literary form precisely because it does not have to have the last word. An essay is generally short: it should be easily digestible, but also satisfying – if not a good meal, at least a hearty snack.1 But this is not what defines it. The essay does not instruct the reader; it provides material for an already thoughtful reader to chew on. This makes it ideal for fragmented reading, such as short train journeys or for keeping on the bedside table. You plough on with a novel but, as I say, each essay has to be digested before you move on to the next, because the important thing is where it takes your thoughts.

  An essay can have fun. It can be perverse. It can occasionally set out to rile people, but too much of that would be tiresome. Its tone should appear conversational, but only appear. That conversationality is artifice, and good artifice is never apparent. Essayists can talk about themselves, but never lament. The best ones are usually self-deprecating, and this apparent intimacy has been around since Montaigne, who sometimes took it too far, but then his original readers were probably known to him. The important thing – and Montaigne understood this, I think – is that the “I” in an essay must be an observer and not a protagonist.

  The essay borders with the article – on the one side with the journalistic article and on the other with the academic article. The former must entertain as well as inform, whereas the latter often appears to suggest that entertainment is beneath its dignity.2 I occasionally look over my unpublished works – an unpleasant task on the whole – and I retrieved one essay for this collection, “Nations and Nationalism”.3 When I wrote it – some time ago – I still wrote like an academic. I seemed concerned with demonstrating that I had done the necessary background reading, and assuming that anyone would care a damn about some of the writers mentioned. I was more concerned with disproving what had been said than with saying what might be new and interesting. There was less recklessness and there was a fear of being misunderstood. These are constraints that should never concern an essayist.

  Now I’m a hack – not a successful one, but a hack no less. “Hack” is a good word, and it is one of those derogatory words that don’t really offend. It is a better word than the Italian one, poligrafo, which is a pompous term but also a very precise definition: someone who writes on all manner of subjects and, the implication is, with little knowledge. Generally speaking hacks and poligrafi write because they need to earn some money, but they may write because they are graphomaniacs. What’s this? you ask. It’s a word I have just coined – or rather just calqued on the Italian, grafomane – someone with a mania for writing. Essayists are generally hacks and graphomaniacs, and happy to be so. Note, please, that English has some great words, but it also lacks some.

  Surely the greatest essayist of twentieth-century English literature was George Orwell. No doubt some would challenge this. Certainly I think he was a greater essayist than novelist, but his novels are more prominent, because they project him into an almost exclusively anti-communist stance, and he was an anti-communist with good reason, following his Spanish experience. He was also once a communist fellow traveller in his own opinion and in that of MI5. He had the attributes of a good essayist, as I have listed them, and when he described, for instance, how he shot an elephant, he observed his own experience to explain an important point about the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, while showing himself in a negative light. No one could argue with him, because he was the perpetrator. That he may have been overly harsh on himself is not the point, or rather it is: that’s what makes the essay so effective.

  Orwell’s masterpiece is Homage to Catalonia, a mix of long essay and reportage. This hybrid genre would become the stock-in-trade of Kapu´sczi´nski, who was more whimsical, literary and possibly even more brilliant. Orwell, on the other hand, had something more specific to say: he was a socialist at a time when socialism was a force, and even though he became very pessimistic about humanity’s future in the light of what had happened in Russia or, from his personal experience, in Spain, he remained a socialist. This is something many people forget. When politicians and the press discuss Orwell, they make constant references to his Englishness, as though there were something strange or even unnatural in there being an English socialist, in spite of England having been home to most of the pre-Marxist socialist ideas. English socialists are reviled in their lifetimes and then beatified on death along with a sigh of relief. Tony Benn is only the most recent example. Benn, an agreeable soul, did not have the stature of Orwell, who was a great man for two reasons: his combat in Spain with his invaluable record of it, and his essays. His novels are important, but they need to be viewed within the context of his whole work.

  Kapu´sczi´nski did write a short collection of essays,4 but they didn’t match the reportage essays. We remember from school the sometimes bizarre essay titles we were set for homework. These were both enjoyable and useful, because they were merely a trigger – because it is difficult to write when there is complete freedom. Some authors, like Kapu´sczi´nski and Chatwin, need to travel in order to write, and this does not detract from the brilliance of their writing. It enhances it.

  An aphorism is a few bold lines on a page, and the boldness prompts the viewer to develop it further. The depth is in what is not shown – not said. The essay is a detailed sketch and has a greater range and versatility. It too is a limited form empowered by its limitations. But the most important thing with an essay is to know when to stop…

  A Sceptic’s Defence of Religion

  Ortega y Gasset argued that the ideas of intellectuals become the ideological currency of the streets three or four generations later. There is a distastefully elitist truth in what he wrote, although his own subtleties have never become common currency.

  In the second half of the nineteenth century, atheism, which in my opinion was always present in ancient, medieval and early modern societies, suddenly became an intellectual force and spread widely amongst thinkers of all kinds and in all classes, even amongst those like George Eliot who had a certain religiosity. This was in many ways a positive force as it challenged the decadence of religion, its remoteness and, to be frank, its barminess. It was not until my generation reached adulthood that atheism and agnosticism became the majority credo of our societies. As a child, I witnessed adults drift a little reluctantly off to church dragging us along with them. Many were simply conforming, and the signs of the various churches’ doubtful futures were there for all to see. Perhaps we children had a clearer idea. Marx, Nietzsche and Darwin had filtered out into every corner of society, albeit in a very anodyne form.

  I was an atheist from the moment I was capable of forming a view on the question, probably when I was seven or eight. The usual arguments occurred. How could an all-powerful God allow such terrible injustices to take place? If there are many religions in this world, why should we think that our religion is the right one? I found the paraphernalia of church services unconvincing and even distasteful. I didn’t mind the sermons, although I rarely agreed with them. Christian ethics remained an influence.

  I therefore approached the question of religion as a tolerant non-believer and sceptic, and that approach has not really changed, altho
ugh I now believe that God probably does exist, whereas life after death remains for me an unlikely possibility. This change in thinking was not the product of any religious experience or revelation. It was principally a reaction against the thoughtlessness with which modern Europeans reject God – a mirror image of the thoughtlessness of those who accept God and even personalise Him and turn Him into a father figure. Partly the change arose from reading medieval and early modern writers, and finding that their views were very distant from the caricature of religion presented to me by believers and unbelievers alike.

  I am distrustful of modern Christian phraseology: “Jesus loves me” and the less egotistical but still non-sensical “God loves you” are meaningless statements, as they confuse categories. Human beings can love, and that emotion, which is peculiarly ours and embraces – in common parlance at least – a spectrum of emotions, must surely have evolved from another perhaps cruder emotion known to our animal forbears. The statement “God is love” is, on the other hand, entirely comprehensible. I do not say that it is true, because I am aware that this is something I want to believe – an act of faith, if you like, or an opinion, and therefore not of interest to anyone but myself. Besides, it is only one of the many definitions of God that I occasionally entertain in my mind, without coming to any meaningful conclusion.

  With the process of secularisation that commenced at the end of the wars of religion in the seventeenth century, religion was increasingly abandoned to extremists and literalists. The voices of people like Erasmus and Servetus1 had all but disappeared. Later other religions appear to have been affected in a similar manner, while the problem for Christianity had probably started a little earlier at the beginning of the modern era, in the wake of the changes brought about by the printing press and the Reformation. New ideas had to be staunched with rigid and often quite bizarre certainties. Transubstantiation – an outlandish belief in the physical powers of the Eucharist – had been circulating in the Middle Ages but only in the 1560s did it become official Catholic dogma that every Catholic had to believe in unquestioningly. In the 1860s the Catholic Church introduced Papal Infallibility, which would have perplexed the medieval mind as much as it does ours.