Return to Lynn
Saturday, September 19th, 2009
No deep philosophy this week: instead, a family outing to Kings Lynn. We lived there a few years ago, and I still retain an enormous fondness for the place. It’s easy to love Paris or Venice, but affection for a provincial town in the middle of the fens is arguably more special.
Lynn (as the locals call it) always had a kind of faded glory, both in its (outstanding) mediaeval relics and in its more modern buildings: lots of rather shabby sixties concrete stuff, the architectural equivalent of a chain-smoking ex-hippie who’s suddenly realized quite how old they look.
But the town is making a real effort to smarten itself up. Greyfriars tower, featured on Restoration, has been shored up and the park around it is in good order (I miss the rather eccentric collection of caged birds that used to be there, but I guess it wasn’t very PC). The fountain on the way to the station works, which it never did when I lived there. Someone has fished the shopping trolleys out of the Ouse, and quirky decorative whales made of chicken wire and filled with plants have appeared on Boal Quay. Further downstream is the huge bastion of Palm Paper, over £100m of investment in a world class mill which will bring new jobs to the area.
There are still little oases of dilapidation, which have their own charm. The grain siloes at the south end of the main Quay have been decommissioned. Buddleia is growing from the outbuildings, and the odd metal structure that poured the contents into waiting ships is now idle – I wonder how long it will be there for. I’ll miss it when it goes.
We stopped at Green Quay, a nice place to eat on the waterfront. This is a kind of café plus eco-exhibition set up in an old warehouse called Marriott’s Wharf. It probably saved the warehouse from falling down. It opened when we were leaving, and looked like one of those rather worthy projects that was only going to attract a minority following, bumble along for a few years till the funding ran out then suddenly close. But it seems to be doing well, and good luck to it!
Dilapidation has its attractions, but in the end, life is about renewal and success.
More on Green Quay at www.thegreenquay.co.uk
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The Horror
Saturday, September 12th, 2009
A current case in the papers is about two boys from Doncaster who tortured two other children. It is unspeakable – though, of course, such brutality is happening all over the world, wherever wars are being fought.
Ha, ha, I hear a sneering voice. So much for your nice liberal philosophy about ‘mutual respect’ and other people being ‘OK’. Some people out there don’t give a fuck for that, and – here’s the real punch – they have the last word if they choose to. All this arty, cultural, goody-goody stuff can be blown away with one blast of a revolver, an over-elaborate sandcastle kicked over by a triumphant beach bully.
My reply?
When horrible cases like this occur, it usually comes out that the perpetrators were themselves the victims of some kind of violence or sexual abuse.
But of course, the god of violence can reply to this: ‘Exactly. If I want to squeeze out other feelings in people, I can.’
If we are good post-Nietzscheans and believe that we must be authentic and true to ourselves, don’t we have to accept this darkness as part of who we are? But once we accept it, it insists on power, and in the name of what do we deny it that power?
The only authentic answer has to be ‘in the name of something bigger and more powerful’.
Love? That’s a good one – albeit unreliable: it’s not always to hand when you need it, especially at that time in one’s life, 18 – 25, when violence seems to be at its most seductive.
How about life itself? Surely, an essentially destructive force cannot be ‘primary’ in the world, which is essentially a place made by, and buzzing with, life. Life is growing, renewing, forming, bountiful power. Violence is one tiny offshoot of this power, related to protection (which is necessary) and, I suppose, competition (though most species have built-in constraints against excessive violence).
What about individuality, the way life expresses itself in the human world? Violence is a sin against the sacred message that we are all unique and of value.
Well, those are three good candidates. I’m not sure which one is the winner. Maybe there doesn’t have to be one winner – is that being too logical?
I am pretty sure that that people who let violence rule their lives are actually deeply afraid. They lash out at others to try and still the terror at their hearts – ‘the horror!’ to quote Conrad’s Kurtz.
But I might be wrong about this idea. I’ve been greatly enjoying a book called ‘The Decisive Moment’ (in the USA it’s called ‘How we Decide’) which is actually about decision making – I’m ghosting a book on that subject right now – but which has a fascinating chapter on the ‘neurology of ethics’. The latest neurology seems to show that we are ‘hard-wired’ for moral judgements: we have ‘mirror neurons’ that make us sympathize with what other people are feeling and our brain factors this information into the behavioural orders it gives us. The Golden Rule, it seems, is actually built into us; those philosophers like Hutcheson and Smith who built an ethical system on ‘moral sentiments’ were right; and those philosophers who say there is no innate morality inside us are incorrect.
I find this deeply reassuring. However my ‘violent people are actually scared’ thesis takes a bit of a knock. The book says that psychopaths have developmental abnormalities that mean they lack the capacity for emotion: those ‘mirror neurons’ either don’t grow in the first place or don’t get to influence behaviour. OK, psychopaths are only one type of violent person, so my ‘scared’ thesis still holds for some people…
Either way, the upshot of this is that violence is not the secret power behind the psychic throne, but one tool in the toolbox of survival that in some people, for various reasons, gets to acquire more power than it should. As canny liberal philosophers, we must watch out for people in its thrall, but we do not need to fear that these people are somehow right, that they have stumbled upon the real, dark truth of the human condition while we are still sitting around with fluffy lambs pretending otherwise. They are not the authentic ones and we are not the fakes. Mr Kurtz, he wrong.
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Friend of all the world?
Saturday, September 5th, 2009
The quote from Kim is deliberate. The book is a favourite of mine. It fizzes with life; it’s a glorious celebration of life in all its multifariousness. (India was still like that when I visited it back in the 80s: I hope some of that spirit still remains.) And that celebration lies at the heart of the philosophy I’m looking at in these postings. It’s not just ‘I’m OK; you’re OK’, but that plus ‘And we’re very different, and isn’t that great!’
Kim, of course, is caught up with a system that tries to impose uniformity – as we all are, up to a point – and finds his own way round that. We all have to deal with the uniformity culture, but it is essential we do not sell our souls to it, for it seeks to place a false god in our hearts, one that seeks to limit, corral and, where necessary, exclude.
But isn’t the philosophy a recipe for anarchy, then? That’s another argument against it – and it’s a good one, because anarchy is hell. I always distrusted those cool prophets of anarchy – anarchy meant their chance to sneak power over other people.
Again, I can’t at once come up with a rock-solid answer to that objection, only to reassert the philosophy like a faith. And surely, to say that it implies protection of individual difference against people who seek power over others, or people who seek to hurt others. And that beneath it all, rock solid, lies the Golden Rule, ‘Do as you would be done by’.
I guess it does mean we can’t look to systems to protect us, the way things appeared to be in the old days. We need to protect ourselves. Which is where the ‘friend of all the world’ stuff comes in. Kim was a marvellous self-protector, with boundless resources of charm, chutzpah and shrewdness to get himself out of any situation (although even he needed luck to get him away from the narrow, imprisoning world of the drummer boy).
The rest of us are less blessed. We cannot be friends to all the world, because we do not know which individuals or institutions in that world will turn round and hurt us, either through active cruelty or just because they have an agenda that requires we be used as a means or at least shoved unceremoniously out of the way. (Kipling himself was terribly hurt by the world – especially the death of his son at the Somme – and turned into a rather lugubrious defender of a harsh imposer of uniformity, the Empire.)
We are under no obligation to be friends with anyone we choose not to be. This does not mean we have to disapprove of those people we choose not to befriend. It’s just ‘thanks, but no thanks. ‘You walk your way in life; I shall walk mine, accompanied by people I have chosen with care and with love. I may watch the spectacle of your journey with enjoyment – or I may not: there are many wonderful spectacles on offer – but that’s a different matter.’
One can love life – one must love life, I feel, actually – but you do not have to give your heart to everybody, or anybody you choose not to. It’s too precious – which is, surely, a message at the heart of the philosophy.
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Still OK?
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
I’ve had some good discussions since the last blog, so I’m going to put a ‘midweek’ one in here.
Two big objections have been raised to the philosophy expressed in it (or one objection in two main guises).
One is that life is hierarchical. This blokey egalitarianism is all very well down the pub, but in real life, some people take on huge responsibilities while others take on as little as possible, and to say that we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin is irrelevant. A nurse who saves lives or a business leader who takes responsibility for the livelihoods of thousands of people are just more important than a beach bum or a currency speculator, end of story.
In the world of the arts, a cynic might say that nobody takes responsibility for much, but we are still faced by hierarchies, of talent and sensitivity. Talent is the cruellest one – as Peter Shaffer’s play, Amadeus, so neatly pointed out. Sensitivity is broader and subtler. Millions of people watch EastEnders slavishly every time it comes on; when I hear those tom-toms I rush for the remote control (or, as I can never find the bloody thing when I want it that urgently, to the set itself: anything to get these awful, self-dramatizing people out of my life). This does make me a superior being in some sense, surely?
But as I write those words (with a rather self-satisfied smile), I hear Terence and John Donne rebuking me. I am a man, and thus think nothing human alien to me. No man is an island. (Both writers use ‘man’ in the sense of human being, not male, of course).
Bad art is crass. It turns life into a series of melodramas, squeezing all the subtlety out of it, and with it much of the truth. How crass do you have to be to mistake melodrama for reality?
But of course the grand subtlety of life is that people who are crass in some areas can be very noble in others, and people of exquisite sensibility in some areas can be pinched and vicious in others. Alex in The Enlightenment Club is a truly sensitive musician but dumps Stella with little kindness.
Maybe what the ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’ philosophy recommends is just to look for the best in everybody. In the day-to-day conduct of life, this may not always be relevant: someone who does dodgy business deals may be a loving parent, but I must make sure I don’t do business with them. But I can still talk to them about parenting, and value the discussion.
That old writer’s adage: ‘everybody has a story to tell’.
In the end, however many hierarchies there are stacked up all round us – and there are lots of them, and they are real and powerful – something in me rebels against them. I accept that they are meaningful and need to be lived with – but in the end they are secondary. Behind them lurks, as unprovable and mysterious as a religious faith, this fundamental belief in the essential value of shared humanity.
Does this mean I have to be a ‘friend of all the world’? That sounds a bit of a tall order… But maybe that’s for another post.
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I’m OK, you’re OK. OK?
Saturday, August 29th, 2009
Thomas A Harris’ seventies self-help bestseller is often regarded as glib and is regularly parodied (‘I suck, you suck,’ as one comic put it). But I think the book was onto something very important.
How would I like a genuine hero of a book to be? The answer is someone with that attitude to him- or herself and others. I respect myself, and I respect you. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’ To me that is how to live.
So many people are defensive in some way or other. Who knows what secret fear lurks in the back of their mind, or prejudice, or some kind of ‘chip on the shoulder’ about being born poor, or born with some kind of special ‘privilege’ they feel they have to inflict on the rest of us, or being born black or white or whatever. The sad truth is that obsession with these things makes people imbalanced, self-centred and immature. It means that the individual has an agenda, a secret game they want to rope you into.
The book business tends to exacerbate this, particularly if the writer comes from a section of society perceived as marginal or the victim of prejudice. While it may boost sales, in my view it does the writers no favours as human beings, and instead herds them back into a ghetto. But to grow, we actually need to climb out of whatever ghetto we were born in and walk cheerfully along the road of life on an equal footing with all our fellows.
Of course, there’s something unhealthy about being ‘marketed’ anyway. ‘Look at me!’ is not the catchphrase of the healthy, happy, balanced adult, but it’s what marketers want us to say (to be fair to them, that’s their job).
If we want to earn a living as writers, the temptation to be ‘interesting’ in a rather superficial way can be strong. The true artist works quietly, concerned with the excellence of their work. He or she is at peace with their fellow human beings, who are mostly doing what they can to live decent and enjoyable lives, and the best of whom live out those sentiments cornily but accurately caught by Thomas A Harris.
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