Things Written Randomly in Doubt Read online

  A mix of or, better, an alternation between supreme confidence and a complete lack of it can be extremely productive. Creativity is a manic, unstable condition – a form of controlled madness.

  Write for the present and you’ll be forgotten. Write for the future and you’ll be forgotten too, most probably, and in the meantime you’ll starve. Just get on and write. Fate favours the careless, in the arts as in all other fields.

  If I could remember why I started to write, I might be able to stop.

  There are some who would pay me for doing just that. An income at last!

  XI

  Printing and mass literacy gradually created nation states. The new media and the end of mass literacy will destroy the nation state. In their place may come either superstates or global fragmentation and anarchy.

  To guess the future is only foolish; to forget about the future and live only in the present is criminal negligence.

  The age of hope and progress that started with the French Revolution has now ended. If change for the better is to occur, it will be through the restless action of the many and not the grand ideas of the few.

  But the grand ideas are still grand, and survive like broken treasures.

  While land is owned privately, there can be no social freedom.

  Real freedom today can only be in the mind.

  An act of kindness is a powerful argument against our current economic model. It reminds us of the future we envisaged in the past.

  A conceptual artist said that she would leave the country if they put the top tax rate up to 50 per cent. They did (clearly not having heard her threat), and she didn’t leave of course. Where else would she find people willing to pay for her tedious self-obsessions?

  Go, go! Fly to your tax haven and finish your days grumpily drinking gin and vermouth, while a red sun sets on a perfect sea and the locals clean the interminable detritus of your lurid bohemianism.

  Another conceptual artist worked away less noisily turning commonplace rooms inside out, making concrete of the air and air of solid things. We saw that the common place is intricate and good, and understood our blindness. She will be one of the few such artists remembered in the future.

  Every artistic movement produces dross. Do not judge it by the dross.

  XII

  The neo-conservatives scream about freedom, which demonstrates that they have no understanding of it. If they did, they would whisper.

  By freedom, neo-conservatives mean not the freedom of human beings but the freedom of an abstract thing they worship like a god: the market or, more precisely, the market under the political control of America and lesser Western powers.

  The unnatural stentorian advocates of the free market are quick to impose import controls when their own interests are affected – controls they would allow no one else to introduce.

  Freedom is in the mind, and one person can be freer in prison than another addictively trading on the Stock Exchange.

  Freedom is noticing that your car has been vandalised and not caring in the slightest. Even smiling at someone’s pointless expenditure of energy and feeling mildly sorry for them.

  Freedom is both earned and learnt. It requires a special kind of passivity: one that retains compassion while it relinquishes the desire to control.

  Social and political freedom is an elusive concept – constantly abused and tethered to the carriage of state so that it can occasionally be drawn around town and displayed for the strange but imposing creature that it is.

  One person’s freedom not only excludes another’s; it doesn’t even perceive it.

  Wealth is liquid freedom that can overwhelm by presenting too many choices.

  Having too many choices is like having no choice at all.

  Lucky are the thinkers of the left who work in a time when the right is dominant. Their companions are sincere, and no flesh-and-blood corrupters come close: this is a time for thought, and the principal question – how do we rebuild? – spins off in a myriad directions building not the left but complexities enough to provide for a lifetime.

  But one abstract corrupter remains and fattens in this time of want: our ability to forget why we embarked on this troubled road, which comes and should come with small humiliations, and to think that it is, after all, little more than an intellectual game. Lucky are the thinkers of the left who retain their outrage and passion deep into their old age.

  All understanding of the world requires categorisation. You can alter categorisation to achieve the analysis you originally sought.

  After defeating the working class, the British establishment fragmented the concept, lest it should return.

  The courtier intellectuals of modern Britain have renamed the lumpenproletariat as the precariat. Thus one callous label replaces another, and the least fortunate part of our society is dismissed as the undeserving, undisciplined and unthinking poor.

  It is adversity that makes us think. Wealth and security merely seduce us into thinking we are thinkers – and splendidly entertaining ones at that.

  Security means that you can make more mistakes without paying a high price.

  True categories exist where there is little mobility between them. There has always been a high degree of mobility between the working class and the lumpen-precariat. Thus the two belong to each other. They are all working class.

  Class is not about the kind of coffee you drink.

  An important feature of modern society is not the fragmentation of class into eight castes with silly names like the “precariat” and the “emergent service workers”; it is the proletarianisation and casualisation of almost everyone except those in financial services, who once were risk-takers and freebooters.

  The adventurous stage of capitalism is long gone, and its tragic contradictions are best expressed by Rudyard Kipling’s narrative poem, “The Mary Gloster”.

  A certain brand of communist dismissed some fundamental freedoms as “bourgeois freedoms”, although they were won by the working-class movement and the mass mobilisations of two world wars.

  The proof of this is that with the defeat of the European working-class movement, those “bourgeois freedoms” are being eroded.

  The revival of the left is inevitable, but will the same mistakes be made? The past is a lesson, not a golden age.

  Even teenage rebellion and working-class history have been privatised and floated on the stock exchange.

  Monetise is the word. I’ve heard it many a time on the mouths of those who live precariously, but only now have I used it for the first time.

  Capitalism is secure when even the beggars think they are in business.

  Capitalism is like yeast: its growth is phenomenal, but if another timely process does not act upon it to harden and secure its advances, it will render all the material around it barren and entirely useless.

  Failure to understand is the surest route to success.

  Failure, conversely, is the surest route to understanding.

  Capitalism creates the spectacular success of the few, and therefore creates nothing.

  A society that creates the mediocre wealth of the many will also be spectacularly creative.

  Or will it only be smug and conformist?

  Leisure allows creativity, but only in an educated society.

  Without education we are restless and insatiable.

  The main purpose of education should be to leave us dissatisfied with our education.

  The main purpose of education as it is organised in our society is to convince children in one set of schools that they are highly educated when they aren’t, and the children in the other set of schools that they aren’t educated and never can be. The first set of schools equips children for power, and the second equips children for life in a consumer society.

  XIII

  What does it mean to say that there is life after death? If we drink the waters of the Lethe, forget our past life and clothe ourselves in a new body with new strengths and weaknesses, wh
ere is the continuity? We are no longer the same person.

  If life is a moral test, isn’t eternity too long to ponder our faults? Even for the saintly – especially for the saintly who will have little to do. Surely the universe cannot be organised like an everlasting boarding school run by a strict and joyless headmistress?

  Goodness is more fragile than evil. All things beautiful and noble evolve and cannot endure, excepting the Ideal or God who is eternal and unchanging.

  Humanity, lost and suspended between good and evil, has a short but intense life. For this it should be envied, even by God.

  In a cold universe, the courage and emotional intensity of humanity is a quotidian work of art.

  God loves humanity because only through its intensity does He find meaning to His timeless and spaceless existence.

  God is a Form implanted in our souls by Himself, by Nature or by something else.

  God is the realisation that the self and the will to power are a pit into which we can be drawn, and that only through the love of others do we achieve some contentment in this existence, but He does not tell us why.

  God’s message is an abstraction. Those who speak to Him engage in a mental exercise whose benefits may only be psychological. Those who believe that He has spoken back to them directly and individually are mad, and should be avoided where possible. There can be no dialogue with those who dialogue with divinity. They speak not just with certainty, but also with righteous fury.

  God belongs not to the hundreds of one true religions that inhabit our societies, but to us all. He is the realisation that our souls are more important than our bodies, even though they too are very possibly mortal or precisely because they are.

  We ruin our short contingent lives by seeking out a permanence and security that are not ours to have. We ruin the contingent by trying to fathom the immeasurable impossibilities of eternity.

  There’s so very little we can know with any certainty in this world; there’s nothing we can know in the next (not even its existence).

  The Epicureans were right: fear of the next world destroys our enjoyment of this one.

  The Epicureans were wrong: the purpose of this life is not simply pleasure, not even their ascetic pleasure of secluded study and certainly not the obscene pleasure of unrestrained consumerism, which has no pleasure in it.

  The purpose of life is to invent one’s own purpose. Many have spent their lives in search of it, a noble and courageous purpose in itself. Others know their purpose from early childhood, but allow distractions to deny it.

  To lay out a sentence whose reason for being is itself and not the representation of any thought would not delight the reader. Nor would it make them smile.

  Subtlety is out of fashion. The age of the reassuringly predictable and the reassuringly shocking has come.

  The purpose of our media is to titillate our baseness and leave uncultivated our finer and more humane nature.

  The pen was mightier than the sword, but the gun and the television are each mightier than them both.

  The television is mightier than the gun, as it hypnotises viewers and programmes them with simplicities. More dangerous than its manipulation for propaganda purposes is its inability to examine the complexities of our modern lives, reducing us to unconscious animals prey to an artificial and unnatural habitat.

  Television is didactic and soporific at the same time. It therefore must also be mesmeric.

  Television reveals our world with the same efficacy of the barred window of a prison cell.

  XIV

  Let humanity be everyone’s religion, and religion everyone’s personal philosophy.

  Let the cathedral be the mosque and the mosque the cathedral – for a month in every year.

  Let Friday be Sunday and Sunday be Saturday, and each moment one that we live.

  Syncretism is obviously right, but once universal it might be a little dull.

  Universal anything is dull, but universalism should be our passion.

  We should all be universalists, but learn to do it differently.

  Blessed are the Yezudis; I don’t know what they do (except the constant baptism), but they do it differently.

  The soul of capitalism is uniformity. The soul of humanity is human diversity. The soul of religion should be tolerance. That our societies are such a mess does not surprise us.

  And yet our human desire for an unnatural order produces so much disorder and such a disorderly pile of ideas that I have to smile and congratulate myself on not being a huntergatherer, noble though he may have been.

  Religions are ethical languages, taught to us in childhood and helpful in moral discussion. That people go to war or commit atrocities in their name is an obscenity to the gods of all religions.

  Religions can be learnt like languages, and are the means to understanding a given society or community – not just the orthodox but also the more interesting heretics amongst them.

  Heretics are not debunkers or non-believers, but people who hold a body of beliefs so dear that they take them seriously.

  Heretics are subversive because naively they don’t realise that they’re being subversive.

  Heretics are the most dangerous subversives of all. That is why Stalin filled the Gulag with devout communists.

  Religions survive because of heretics, who only bring about partial reforms and unwittingly greater orthodoxy, because the religion or social movement defines itself more rigidly in the wake of the heresy and tries to police the new orthodoxy against any further change.

  Judaism was a religion in constant radical evolution up to the time of the heretic Jesus, after which it changed more slowly. In its first three centuries, Christianity was a religion on the move, but after the heretic Arius the Empire set it in stone – created the monolith.

  An atheist can be a better Christian than most Christians. George Eliot was a fine example.

  It is true that every town, village or city has its poet, thief, fighter, maternal babushka, obsessive, dreamer, grump, the sexually promiscuous and the religious fanatic (the last one and the last but one are often one and the same), but they speak and comport themselves through the language and culture of their place.

  Language and culture are important and formative but most fundamental is the individual. A European vase and a Chinese vase both hold water, but their appearance is very different. That difference provides us with the taste of life. However, both vases are more similar to each other than either is to a frying pan.

  The free-market policies of Reagan and Thatcher laid the foundations for a global, post-nationalist consciousness they would have abhorred. This unintended consequence should be the platform for a fight-back from the left.

  The uniformity of global capitalism is removing the taste of life, but it may be helping us to rid ourselves of ethnic mythologies. If we can rid ourselves of capitalism before it destroys our cultural diversity but late enough to destroy our ethnic identities (if indeed it is doing so), then global capitalism will have served a useful purpose to be balanced against the destruction it has caused.

  Of one thing we can be certain, real existing socialism only temporarily submerged ethnic identities, and when it collapsed, they returned with a vengeance. Is there any reason to believe global capitalism has affected hearts more deeply, or has it temporarily submerged them too, creating unity around shared profits?

  There are phenomenologies of urban life and rural life – so different between each other and yet that difference is constant around the world.

  One change within urban life is its attitude to rural life: once it was utter contempt for what it considered to be bestial. Then it started to idealise the countryside – not in the bucolic sense – but a deep respect and desire to be amongst “nature”. Very often this change of heart came after the disappearance of the alien people that once was nearly all humanity: the peasantry.

  The peasantry is a courageous, moral, sociable and sometimes cruel or even brutal class.
Its passing may cause more damage than we can imagine.

  When the peasantry moves to the city, it brings with it many of the peasants’ virtues and seizes the skills of the city with both hands. Recently urbanised peasants create the most radical, self-aware and unstable class in history.

  The peasantry brings energy and solidarity to the city – a place that is both exciting and enervating.

  The peasantry suffers when it arrives in the city, but then the peasantry knows how to suffer.

  XV

  George Eliot lost her belief in God, but managed to resurrect the meaning of Jesus’s life in the modern world.

  When she writes that fanatical, evangelical Christians “look on the rest of mankind as a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for heaven”, she demonstrates that many Christians had lost their Christianity long before the advent of modern science and Darwinism. That kind of Christianity was invented in the Reformation, or perhaps as far back as Saint Augustine.

  Christianity’s great weakness in the Modern Era was its rootedness in power. Ultimately this led to the loss of its power, because it no longer had anything to give to power. It forgot that it has to keep a foot in both camps.

  Better to serve egalitarian humanity than to reign through hell and hellish power games.

  I don’t say that we should fight for justice, but we should at least have the courage to speak up for it, and the bolder of us should place our cumbersome bodies in the road of injustice and the power behind it.

  Awareness of injustice appears to be difficult to some people, but it is simplicity itself compared with finding a way to impose justice.

  Imposing justice so often leads to greater injustices.

  If you want your children to be happy, give them no toys. If you do this, you avoid stunting a child’s imagination with an adult’s one.

  If you want your children to be educated, never underestimate their capacity to learn. They’re much brighter than we are, unless we place our own limitations upon them.