Things Written Randomly in Doubt Page 4

  Try to instruct your children in something. They need something to reject.

  A true atheist needs a religious education. No one can reject what they simply cannot understand.

  To say that your children need your love is to state an obvious but nevertheless essential truth. To say that they only need your love is to condemn them to lifelong imprisonment.

  Having children teaches you the melancholy joy of closeness mixed with distance.

  Your children live in another country whose values may be the only evidence of progress – tortuous progress but progress no less.

  Those of us born in the late foties and early fifties belong to the last generation brought up to believe wholly in progress.

  The religion of progress survived the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century, but floundered in the listlessness of “affluence”, as the ghettoisation of poverty is often called.

  From now on progress will have to justify itself with hard evidence of its existence. That perhaps is another shred of evidence.

  Deskilled, we’re increasingly dependent on technology and its autonomous progress. Isn’t that regressive for our freedom, however we define it?

  Early industrialisation empowered the powerless, and the powerful had to concede a little power and use their wits. Modern technology is not only a soporific; it allows the powerful to monitor everything.

  The noble savage lived in the era of myth and is therefore as unknowable as God. To idealise him or despise him is an irrational act.

  Running a business makes you dull, because it reduces creativity to economic gain – the dullest and most pointless good we can obtain, unless we are wise.

  To be free in this society it is sometimes necessary to start a business. Thus Marxists fill in VAT returns and Thatcherites like Mario Monti act like commissars.

  Beware those who feign self-disgust, who self-deprecate with panache and self-confidence, particularly when they’re women, because women on the whole are better at subtlety and sophistication, and are therefore more convincing.

  Literature is a continuation of religion and philosophy in the late modern era. It is religion without certainty and philosophy without system.

  Has the late modern era come to an end? It is too early to know, but its cultural pillars appear to be cracking.

  Anton Francesco Doni said in the sixteenth century that the fumes of the printing press drive people mad. He should have lived to see what our odourless mass-media can do.

  Our mass-media rots, but its colours never fade.

  The impossibility of understanding anything with absolute certainty is not an excuse for not wanting to understand.

  Love and the desire to understand are the two elements that make life worthwhile. They detach us from our tyrannical selves.

  Today the middle classes are only virtuous and empathetic within their own class. They have returned to their pre-war mindset and cannot perceive the “lower classes” – whatever strange names they invent for them – as anything except people without potential, and incapable of governing their own lives. In this sense, their social outlook is like primitive religion: enclosed within the group and fearful of those outside. The urban working class is more likely to be internationalist and classist or nationalist and xenophobic. Marx and other nineteenth-century radicals were not complete dreamers to place so many hopes in this virtuous and disciplined class when it tended to be more in the first category than in the second. Today in Europe, it is sadly tending towards the second.

  Scotland has bucked the trend: it is internationalist and nationalist, because it wants to defend its “outdated” class analysis.

  Unlike the middle class, the “traditional” working class was too disciplined and not insurrectionary enough to make a permanent difference, and the new middle class is too contemptuous to acknowledge that the labour movement created the freedoms it benefits the most from.

  A riot is a beast, an insurrection is an artist, particularly if it has a good heart.

  Do not confuse virtue with manners.

  Manners are transversal to class, as they are more the product of family and culture. They depend on such things as honour and shame, or the lack of one or the other, or both.

  A society with too much honour is stifling or often brutal when honour requires an absolute defence. A society in which there’s no shame is unstable and will not last.

  Manners vary from place to place, as do the subjects appropriate for discussion. Surely openness is best, as it makes for rational and honest debate. But isn’t openness also likely to create cynicism and then shallowness: an endless jabbering of insatiable selves?

  Perhaps the best society is neither a closed one nor an open one, but a closed one turning into an open one – possible only in transition.

  This instability of a social good is the greatest social tragedy. There’s no final utopia – a destination never reached. There are only heroic attempts and tragic failures.

  When a problem is solved, another is created.

  Good is built in the air and evil at the foot of the mountain. No wonder evil prevails, even though human beings are far more good than evil.

  The powerful and wealthy should be called the “lower class” because they live at the foot of the mountain – secure and stable.

  Those who live high above the mountains and subsist on air and their dreams are the “upper class” but maintaining their position is difficult. Gravity does not like to be defied for too long, and suddenly they fall down to the mountain tops, if they’re lucky, or down to the soulless existence in the valley.

  It is as asinine to say that everything must change as it is to say that nothing must change.

  Ortega y Gasset was right to talk of the arrogance of the men of 1789 who thought they could knock together an entirely new society – complete with new language and religion – in a matter of years, but he failed to say that it was a more dramatic and heroic version of the arrogance of Louis XVI’s court – the men of 1788.

  If we defeat our enemies, they defeat us and our success by making us become their mirror image.

  The smaller the project the greater our control over how it will develop.

  Building socialism would be easier in a small country if it weren’t for foreign intervention.

  An island nation is more independent. That is why it fails to understand foreignness and to evolve through it. Its external strength creates its internal weakness.

  The best relationships are across cultural divides, because they’re not based on the language and manners of convention.

  The most fragile relationships are across cultural divides, because the ways to misunderstanding are more numerous.

  Fragility adds to experience.

  XVI

  Do not mention class if you want a stock conversation, just as in the sixties and seventies you would mention it to get one. Every age has its own prejudices and blindnesses.

  The middle classes hate to be reminded of the working class: it makes them feel guilty – or perhaps only slightly uncomfortable. When the working class are submissive, the middle class occasionally take a little time out to feel sorry for them. When they are active and conscious, the working class are almost universally feared and considered ungrateful and unreliable.

  There are more or less the same proportions of well-mannered and ill-mannered people in every class, but each class is convinced that they’re the well-mannered ones, because they mistake different manners to be bad manners without distinctions.

  We want to believe that mankind is at least a potentially rational animal; as we get older, we experience the distressing sensation that we may always be an animal driven by the instincts of the pack, even when it comes to matters of high culture.

  Bureaucrats and the politicians who promote reforms always believe in progress, because they’re the ones who are introducing them – be they Soviet communists, American neocons or British New Labourites.

  XVIIr />
  I was asked what I thought God was. “Uncertainty,” I answered, with the intent of deflecting the question, but not without a kernel of truth: uncertainty reflects not so much the nature of God as our relationship with Him.

  The desire to know is laudable. Knowing, or rather thinking that we know, is not.

  Living with the possibility of God is beneficial. Living with the certainty of God’s existence or non-existence is not, in most cases.

  Some women and men live good and significant lives in spite of their faith in God or His absence from what becomes a wholly mechanical and material world. To do so they need absolute tolerance and a trinity of virtues: gentleness, loyalty and a clear morality they apply to themselves alone. I know these people exist because I have met them, and some I have loved. Those that I loved were all atheists. The first assertion is reliable, and the second is not, because it probably only reflects my natural social milieu.

  The problem with believing in life after death is that it clouds our judgement in this world. It makes a patriarch of God and either sanctimonious conformists or terrified mice of us. We should either deny the possibility altogether or at least disregard the argument as irrelevant and unknowable.

  There is the deists’ God of creation and the theists’ God of intervention. Surely they cannot be the same, and the theists’ God must be as dependent on us as we are on Him. He exists because we are conscious enough to know good and evil. We are not made in his image, but He reflects an ideal that is within us all or He instils it in us.

  God is a series of questions: “Do I really need this?” “Why be ambitious?” “What would I feel if I were this other person?” “Do I give back as much as I take?” He challenges the dominance of the self, which in consumer society has become a deranged ringmaster trained by the biggest ringmaster of them all: the mass media that attempt to manipulate our every action and want, and do so very successfully.

  We need a God who takes us back to the earth, to the air, to the noise of argument and vitality, and above all to the meditative.

  Taylorism did not improve our lives and led, a hundred years later, to our children being bombarded with ugly plastic toys made by exploited labour.

  We need, God knows how, to build an economy of creativity in which we exploit our minds and imaginations more and our poor planet less.

  The human being is a social animal and without society we could not survive, but to avoid becoming a pack animal (in both senses), she needs to get away from society and let her mind wander.

  So God, you say, may only be a mental exercise. Possibly, but one that can do much good if done correctly.

  Others might say, “Why do you blaspheme?” I would be blaspheming much more if I were to claim a revelation I have never experienced; I am working in the dark, as do we all, and reacting against the utilitarian certainties of enlightened self-interest. God leads us away from the demons of desire and into the land of possibilities generated by passivity and an active consciousness.

  A friend said, “Your religious ideas are just a form of humanism.” Maybe, but do I want to replace the sonorous name of God with that empty and cumbersome term, “the Voice of Ideal Humanity”, just because theism implies an interdependence between God and Mankind.

  Every week I am a theist for three days, a deist for another three and an atheist for a day – usually a Sunday. It’s a state of utter confusion and I recommend it.

  XVIII

  Good writers must write in order to invent the language of the future. They will never succeed but they should try.

  Good writers need to read the literature of the past in order to understand the character of the language they write in, and what it can and could do with a little pressure from writers themselves.

  Writers should take pleasure in the achievements of other writers, and even if they are mediocre writers, this makes them good people, which for them is much more important. By working together and not competing, writers assist in building a literary culture – the essential environment for any good writer to become a great one.

  XIX

  Fanatical communists who cease to be communists become the most vicious anti-communists. They cannot live with uncertainty.

  Cosmopolitan but anchored in a city – Moscow or Rome – and with very similar systems for reproducing power – Politburo or Conclave – Soviet communism and the Catholic Church had much in common: a powerful elite parasitically manoeuvring a committee of sacrifice and good intentions producing both good and bad effects, but representing something better than you would expect from the corrupt centre. The demise of the first, which I welcomed briefly at the time, turned out to be a tragedy for Russia and for humanity, and I suspect that the demise of the second would be similar.

  Do not destroy something until you have something better to put in its place, and rely on a prolonged period of transition.

  Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West used the Helsinki Agreement as a weapon against their Cold War enemy, then preoccupied with its own delicate transition. Since the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the West has, at best, shown little interest in human rights there and openly boasts of how it fixed the election of Yeltsin who had rehired the censors Gorbachev had sacked.

  With the fall of the Soviet Union, the West started to dismantle all the advances in human rights achieved over centuries. Under the requirements of the so-called War on Terror, they have done away with Habeas Corpus and spy on us in a manner the KGB would have dearly wanted to, had it had the technology. Over the last thirty years, we have also fallen under the control of a state-financed private bureaucracy that regulates an ideological free market – a veritable army of lawyers, consultants, accountants and swindlers, no less malign and inefficient than the state-run bureaucracy of the Soviet Union was. Was 9/11 our Kirov moment? Is the worst yet to come?

  If it hasn’t become our Kirov moment yet, then we have a small group of courageous whistleblowers to thank for slowing down the progress of the right-authoritarian juggernaut. Can we rely on their assistance forever?

  There is the left and the right, and there is the libertarian and the authoritarian, whatever our attitude to left and right, we must hold the libertarian dear, as without our stunted and fragile liberties there is little hope of honest political debate.

  Social truth is manufactured by power structures, both locally and nationally.

  Truth itself exists in an elusive realm, and all we can hope for is to snatch a few of its rays which, in their partiality, can create misleading images.

  The many have intelligence and generosity, in spite of Nietzsche’s misplaced contempt for what he called the herd, but they are badly misled by the few.

  Being misled by the few requires a willingness to be misled, and that willingness derives from a desire for comfort and an existential sleep, particularly when we arrive at middle age tired by our wasted efforts and disillusioned by betrayals.

  Another few maintain a “naive” belief in humanity and, having refused to believe the powerful few, they must pay a price for their naivety – a tax imposed by history and redeemed by later generations.

  Nothing frees us more than a belief in our moral possibilities.

  The deification of the crowd is the great deceit of modernity’s so-called democracies.

  The crowd at the stadium or the military parade has no purpose but to conform. In its bustle, it has no effect save that of shoring up the walls of power.

  The active crowd is like a beast, and every member a potential god – if only they would leave the crowd and each go for their separate and appropriate paths.

  The only crowd of any worth is the passive crowd that threatens no one and says, “I shall not budge, because you’ve gone too far. I do not hate you for it, but I will not move until you understand, or at least start to think.” That is the crowd the powerful really fear: it moves them because it does not move, and it mobilises through its immobility.

  “People power”
is a term used by the BBC to describe demonstrations outside Britain and the United States.

  People power should be judged by what it wishes to achieve and how it wants to achieve it.

  People power often doesn’t know what it wants to achieve, which is sensible but impractical.

  People power sometimes wishes to do great harm to another part of the people – perhaps a minority.

  People power occasionally desires the greatest human good – and then it is sublime. Its season will be short as spies and agents provocateur wriggle through the ranks of its naivety.

  Come to my heart, the soul of humanity and warm it with your hope. It grew cold as I wrote those lines – lines that extinguish everything else I’ve written in this book.

  XX

  Community exists but a good community does not have a voice, as no single voice can represent it.

  Community, like most social goods, is elusive.

  When people talk of “the community”, they actually mean an organised part of it. Themselves.

  “Community”, in the way the word is generally used, is something not just conformist but also stultifying and destructive to creative dialogue.

  The task of democratic representatives is to represent the people’s demands and best interests to the wealthy and powerful, and not to represent the demands and best interests of the wealthy and powerful to the people.

  Which is more arbitrary: the market or a bureaucratic elite? There is little difference, although the market is always deaf to rational argument and yet, in its case, it feels to many that no one is to blame.

  Some complain that democracy is the rule of mediocrity. They have a point, but aristocracy was the rule of stupidity. Progress, if it exists, is slight and always relative. The fact that a perfectly functioning democracy is unattainable is no reason why we should cease to strive to get as close to one as possible.