Archive for the ‘literature’ Category
Jeanne Julie Eleanore de Lespinasse: an open heart, a closed book?
If I were young, pretty, and very charming, I should not fail to see much art in your conduct to me; but as I am nothing of all that, I find a kindness and an honour in it which have won you rights over my soul forever.
Julie de L’Espinasse, to the Comte de Guibert, 1773
Although I managed to spend a bit of time at a university in my thirties, I think I’m largely self-educated, being reluctant to follow any course set down for me, and allergic to too much discipline, and so I’m always fascinated to hear of historical characters of a similar type – Montaigne, Rousseau and Stendhal come to mind (not that I’m comparing my ‘achievements’ to theirs!), and it’s probably not coincidental that they’re all French, though I’ve no idea what this signifies.
So the other day, finishing Aldous Huxley’s strange, well-meaning but unconvincing utopian novel Island, I wondered at the passing mention of Mlle de Lespinasse, a woman I ‘knew’ from my recent rereading of Stendhal’s Love. So here’s a couple of key passages about her from Wikipedia:
Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse (9 November 1732 – 23 May 1776) was a French salon holder and letter writer. She held a prominent salon in Paris during the Enlightenment. She is best-known today, however, for her letters, first published in 1809, which offer compelling accounts of two tragic love affairs.
Looked down on for her poverty and illegitimate birth, Mlle de Lespinasse had an unhappy childhood marked by neglect. She acquired a basic education at a convent, but she was largely self-educated, an impressive feat given that she was later able to hold her own among France’s top intellectuals.
This second passage in particular captured my heart, so to speak. I wouldn’t say that I was neglected, or impoverished, growing up, and the term ‘illegitimate’ seems quaint if not grotesque in today’s WEIRD world, but I identify with the thrill, and much of the isolation, of self-education. I feel I’ve spent much of my life talking to myself. As for salons, today’s equivalent, if there is any, would be the meet-ups I’ve occasionally been part of, for humanists, skeptics, ‘literature-lovers’ and the like. Somehow, though, they’ve never quite worked for me. I’m not one for ‘holding forth’, and am pretty easily overwhelmed by others.
But let me focus on Mlle de Lespinasse, a rather formal title, and a rather more tragic figure. She died at 43, probably of tuberculosis, exacerbated, it seems, by an impassioned and immiserated spirit, not to mention liberal quantities of opium. One might say that she died of a broken heart. When I was a kid and first heard the notion of a broken heart, I imagined it snapping like a biscuit, and then you fell down dead. But even then it wasn’t quite so silly, it was awe-inspiring in fact, that the heart could be so brittle, so damaged by a love unrequited or rejected. Now of course, I see this sinking, this despair, this death of a highly intelligent and admired woman, confidante of the likes of d’Alembert and Condorcet, as more of a ‘feminist’ issue. In Saint-Beuve’s introduction to her life and letters, he refers to her emotionality:
But of what use is it to become clear-sighted? Did a woman’s mind, great as it may be, ever check her heart? “The mind of most women serves to strengthen their folly rather than their reason!” La Rochefoucauld says that, and Mlle. de Lespinasse proves the truth of it.
Of course this is just another patronising, patriarchal comment, from a world that largely debarred women from being movers and shakers in any political, scientific and enterprising arenas. Partnership with and encouragement of the males who dominated those arenas was all that could be hoped for. It seems that Julie de Lespinasse, along with Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (aka Mme de Staël), her mother Suzanne Churchod (known at the time as Madame Necker), and other salonistes of their time, were all expected to play the purely nurturing role that has been woman’s lot since religio-cultural politics reduced women to vassalage, whenever that might have been – since the rise of agricultural society, at least. The notes to her published letters present a nice example of this nurturing:
In her last hours, already lying on her deathbed, she secured that of La Harpe [to L’Académie française]. “M. de La Harpe”, says Bachaumont in his Memoirs, “was one of her nurslings; by her influence she opened the doors of the Academy to him who is now its secretary. This poet was the last of those whom she enabled to enter them.”
So that would have been in 1776. The novelist Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman elected to L’Académie française, in 1980.
So I’m currently learning more of Julie de Lespinasse, as she was known, and I’m nervous about my experience of her being filtered through the notes to her letters by “
So I’ve read the first letter in the 1809 collection, addressed to the Comte de Guibert, one of the two men who most occupied her passionate and guilt-ridden thoughts, the other being the Marquis de Mora. Obviously these weren’t your Mellors the gardener types. Guibert was an ambitious army officer, later a General, and Mora was a tubercular semi-invalid. Both were quite a bit younger than Julie (I can’t help thinking of la nouvelle Héloïse), who was forty at the time of the first letter, in 1773. It’s a bit hard to make sense of this letter, being a bit in medias res – she writes a lot of ‘him’ – Mora? – and of ‘you’, and seems almost terrified of her own thoughts – what she thinks and what she should think, as one passion rises and the other falls. Here’s how the letter ends:
But tell me, is this the tone of friendship, the tone of confidence? What is it that is drawing me?Make me know myself; aid me to recover myself in a measure; my soul is convulsed; is it you, is it your departure, what is it that persecutes me? I can no more. At this moment I have confidence in you, even to abandonment, but perhaps I shall never speak to you again of my life. Adieu, I shall see you to-morrow; possibly I shall feel embarrassed by what I have now written to you. Would to heaven that you were my friend, or that I had never known you! Do you believe me? Will you be my friend? Think of it, once only; is that too much?
That is the question – is it too much? I try, and largely fail, to imagine receiving such a convoluted letter, from a person I admired but didn’t love, in the romantic sense. What would a bonobo do? No, that’s not a joke question – I mean of course, what would a ‘bonobo-ised’ human do? I think he would offer comfort, hugs and kisses, but not eternal, undivided devotion. That may not seem enough, but then a bonobo-ised Julie de Lespinasse wouldn’t be placing all her hopes in one individual – especially not a male.
So I may or may not continue reading these letters, and reflecting on what they reveal about human need and pain in an individual surrounded, it seems, by gifted admirers. Sad but uplifting too. It’s a privilege to ride along with someone who feels so much.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Julie_Éléonore_de_Lespinasse
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c005633001&seq=65
Dostoyevsky, Ivan Karamazov and the Grand Inquisitor fantasy
cushy torture – ‘nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition…’
I don’t tend to read novels these days, but I’ve recently joined a book group of friends who meet to discuss a selected Work of Literary Importance, and currently it’s Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I’ve actually read the book twice before, but as many have said, when you read the same book decades apart, it really isn’t the same book.
And of course when you’re reading a book in translation, and written over 150 years ago, can you trust what you’re reading? Is it better to read a modern translation or, in this case, one closer to Dostoyevsky’s time? Imagine, say, translating Shakespeare into Russian. Impossible, right? But surely it’s been done, and why not? I’ve no doubt there are highly intelligent bilinguists who’ve managed to render the freshness of Shakespeare’s 400-year-old language into dazzlingly fresh 400-year-old Russian, though my brain hurts just thinking about it.
Anyway, I’m currently reading Karamazov online in the good old Constance Garnett 1916 translation (the original was first published in 1880), and when I get to part two I’ll switch to David Magarshack’s 1958 translation, which I have on my shelves. And personally I find that Garnett’s translation does a fine job of capturing Dostoyevsky’s sometimes over-the-top intensity and self-mocking humour. It really rollicks along, in a grotesque sort of way.
I’m definitely getting more out of this third reading than from previous ones (or maybe I’ve just forgotten…) and I certainly feel that Ivan Karamazov is the novel’s central and most interesting character and obviously closest to Dostoyevsky himself. This is brought home in the conversation with Alyosha – actually largely a monologue – that precedes his fantasy of the Grand Inquisitor, which I’ll focus on in detail – or maybe not.
Actually I found the Grand Inquisitor story, which has of course become famous, something of an anti-climax, and a source of irritation, probably because my anti-Catholicism has hardened over the years. I was more impressed and moved by Ivan’s distress at the everyday injustices of Russian life, especially the treatment of children. In his rambling but passionate monologue on injustice and cruelty with precedes the Grand Inquisitor fable he comes closer to modern thinking – it seems to me – than in all the god talk that follows. Take this, for example:
Suppose I, for instance, suffer intensely. Another can never know how much I suffer, because he is another and not I. And what’s more, a man is rarely ready to admit another’s suffering (as though it were a distinction). Why won’t he admit it, do you think? Because I smell unpleasant, because I have a stupid face, because I once trod on his foot. Besides, there is suffering and suffering; degrading, humiliating suffering such as humbles me—hunger, for instance—my benefactor will perhaps allow me; but when you come to higher suffering—for an idea, for instance—he will very rarely admit that, perhaps because my face strikes him as not at all what he fancies a man should have who suffers for an idea.
Living in the centre of a city, as I do, it’s impossible not to see physical suffering on a daily basis – as well as the inscrutable faces of a procession of people who may or may not be carrying a world of regret or frustration in their hearts. To think about it is often too overwhelming – better to confine yourself to your own business and its profits and losses. Which makes me think of what we owe to others, as the most socially constructed species on the planet, and what we’ve come to believe we owe to ourselves as fully-fledged members of the increasingly individualised WEIRD world (see the references).
But let’s get back to Ivan. Or Ivan/Dostoyevsky. He comes out with half-truths, half-buried insights, as people do in conversation:
… the stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward. I’ve led the conversation to my despair, and the more stupidly I have presented it, the better for me.
Dostoyevsky, it seems to me is very good at presenting people struggling for insight and often failing. What we get here, I think, is Ivan’s mixed feelings of irritation and envy for the ‘simple-minded’, however he conceives them. He seems often tormented by his own intellect, and the complexity of his feelings. Hence his sympathy, mixed with a degree of contempt, for Alyosha. He takes the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’ (Matthew 22:39) as impossibly unreasonable, though makes something of an exception for children, channeling into the concern we all have for the powerless, vulnerable and innocent. To highlight the impossibility of Christ’s injunction he cites a host of historical cruelties by ‘Turks and Circassians’, though of course he could’ve cited the Mongols under Ghengis Khan and Tamarlane and others, the Christian slaughter of tens of thousands of Moslems and Jews in the Holy Land, the Catholic mass-murder of the fellow-Christian Cathars, and the Russian massacres in the east under Ivan the Terrible – etc etc. Then he tells another more modern story of a young man, brought up in squalor and horribly mistreated, who grows up to be a thief and finally a murderer. At the end he repents and is made much of as a redeemed soul, before being guillotined. What are we to make of this story, and Ivan’s attitude? It seems clear that he’s mocking, or expressing disgust for, our dehumanising of others, and then punishing them for their inhumane behaviour, while congratulating ourselves on their repentance. Could something be rotten in the state of Christianity?
Ivan next turns to the ill-treatment of the clearly innocent, from pack horses being beaten to death, to children:
You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. It’s just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain…
This sort of stuff is personal for me, I must say, as I left school at fifteen after being slapped across the face with full force by a sadistic headmaster, and have been plagued by revenge fantasies ever since. But this was nothing compared to the stories of child abuse and murder Ivan goes on to recount, stories, or rather, truths, which make him almost ashamed to love his own human life so much, when he observes the inhumanity around him. And although he’s friendly to and sometimes envious of Alyosha, he’s not easily taken in his brother’s ‘loving-kindness’ – “You are trying to save me, but perhaps I am not lost!”
Ivan professes belief in ‘God’- clearly the ultra-male monolatrist-cum-monotheist one created in the land of Canaan around 2,600 years ago – but he understandably wonders how one could respect a god that permits such cruelty in the world, or, more to the point, creates creatures who commit such cruelties. And this appears to be the point of his talk with Alyosha, to whom he at one point says “I won’t give you up to your Zossima”. Ivan may only be pretending to believe in God in order to get Alyosha to listen and question. Even if all he can offer is torment and cynicism.
And yet, what Ivan expresses a hope and a hearing for makes perfect sense. An end to wanton cruelty, including the additional cruelty imposed upon the cruel. Hell’s torture imposed upon the damned, for example. All of this, thinking from a post-religious context, one that I inhabit, brings me to the issue of free will, crime and punishment, but that I’ll reserve for a future post.
So, after all this tortured talk, Ivan relates his fable of the Grand Inquisitor. It’s a clever idea. Jesus, the putative son of God, supposedly martyred for our sins 2000 years ago, turns up in 15th century Seville in the midst of a large-scale auto-da-fé and, though silent, is immediately recognised and adored by the crowd, especially after he starts tossing miracles about the place. He’s just performed the highlight of his show, raising a dead child from her coffin, when a 90-year-old Cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, arrives on the scene, orders the Jesus to be arrested and imprisoned, and his men to get back to the business of burning heretics, Jews and other riffraff.
Later that evening, the Inquisitor pays a visit to God’s offspring in his cell. Turns out he (the Inquisitor) has a lot to say, and his speech is impressively voluminous for a ninety-year-old. The Jesus figure, meanwhile, remains as silent as a god. And the Inquisitor’s message, for all its verbosity, is pretty basic (and I suspect a modern translator would dispense with the ‘thou wast’ and ‘thou hast’ etc, as per the MEV Bible). He’s saying that, after many centuries of struggle, the Church (as it was then, before the Reformation put a spanner in the works) has effectively corrected the ‘I will make you free’ promise made somewhere in the gospels:
let me tell Thee that now, to‐day, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing.
It’s the old argument of dictators everywhere, still used – in fact it’s the MAGA argument, if you can call it an argument. Leave everything to me/us and we will provide you with something much better than freedom. ‘Man was created a rebel and how can rebels be happy?’ says the nonagenarian.
Next, our Inquisitor goes on at length about the three ‘satanic’ temptations in the desert – in short, providing food to the people gratis, proclaiming/displaying absolute power, and dazzling the people into belief through miraculous displays. We’re treated to a lot of rhetoric here, to the effect that the Church, groaning under the weight of its own leadership, has taken upon itself the burden that Jesus rejected, providing sustenance, authority, and officially sanctioned miracles, and there’s no way they’re going to let any sons of deities come along and upset all that hard graft. Oh, and by the way, he admits in passing that they’ve done all this by working for the Other Side.
So the whole of the Inquisitor’s speech can be seen, perhaps, as an anti-Catholic tirade presented as a pro-Catholic tirade, as well as a withering description of human inhumanity and fecklessness. It goes a bit far, in my view, but then in my own reading and researches, at least recently, I tend to learn about exceptionally clever people – generally more clever than myself – doing exceptionally clever things, so I suppose that’s a different bias…
References
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The brothers Karamazov, 1980. Translated by Constance Garnett, 1916
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, The world, a family history, 2022
on Dostoyevskian gobbledygook and clear thinking – do soi-disant great novels withstand the test of time?
This painting doesn’t represent the brothers to my mind…
I’m reading Dostoyevski’s The Brothers Karamazov for the third time, but in many respects every reading is for the first time. I’m sure that when I first read Great Literature as a young person who hated school I approached ‘The Greats’ with an appropriate sense of awe, assuming them to be the real masters to learn from, masters who wouldn’t give me homework to do, or belittle me in front of my peers etc etc. If they wrote odd or confronting things, who was I, a mere novice, to contradict them?
Decades later, it’s a different story (and if not, something’s gone very wrong!), and proof, to me at least, that rereading such texts is more than useful, if you can be bothered.
Here’s how Wikipedia describes the novel:
Set in 19th-century Russia, The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel that discusses questions of God, free will, and morality.
These days I have little interest in gods except from a historical-psychological perspective, but free will, or the lack thereof, and associated ethical issues interest me greatly. So here’s a passage from early in Dostoyevsky’s novel that may or may not be worth analysing:
I fancy that Alyosha was more of a realist than any one. Oh! no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling‐block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he said, “My Lord and my God!” Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said, “I do not believe till I see.”
The Brothers Karamazov, from Part 1, Book 1 – the history of a family. Section V ‘Elders’
The ‘I’ that opens this passage is Dostoyevsky’s more or less reliable narrator. In this passage he’s more than simply unreliable, he’s pretty much nonsensical. What could he possibly mean, that ‘miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist’? Could the translator, Constance Garnett, be at fault here? Highly unlikely. Is it some kind of irony? Possibly this is intended. He describes unbelievers as a sub-category of ‘genuine realists’, though today all realists would be, by definition, unbelievers, or non-religious. Realists in this sense aren’t confronted by miracles as ‘irrefutable facts’, though they may be confronted by miraculous claims, which they would treat with skepticism. All this can be cleared up if we assume that the narrator firmly believes in miracles, which is a bit of a let-down but alerts us to how he will treat Alyosha’s credulity and pious passivity throughout the novel. The idea of a ‘miracle as an irrefutable fact’ makes me think of a brilliantly managed magician’s trick. You have no idea how she did it, you see the subject disappear before your eyes, but your realism tells you it’s very clever conjuring, not a miracle or an upending of the laws of nature. A magician who can’t make her audience gasp over the seemingly counter-to-reality quality of her tricks is unlikely to make a living thereby. But if you believe her tricks are truly miracles, you’re not a realist, though you may not want your pleasure spoiled by knowing her secrets.
Needless to say, the religious elements of this novel will grate on me more than they did in previous readings – I’m becoming less tolerant of that sort of stuff in my old age. Then again, I recall years ago, when I was doing Honours French at Adelaide University (later abandoned), and had decided to do my thesis on the writings of Stendhal, I read an essay in the form of a dialogue between two literary critics, comparing Stendhal’s novels to those of Tolstoy. Both critics chose to agree that Tolstoy was the greater writer because Stendhal’s work lacked a ‘religious dimension’, or words to that effect. It really really pissed me off. And I should add that, in referring to religion they were surely referring only to Christianity, which, apart from its violently rejected father, Judaism, is the only religion treated with literary credence in the WEIRD world.
As to standing up to the test of time, that’s probably an unfair test. Novels may hold up a mirror to their own time and culture, they can’t be expected to transcend them.
There will doubtless be more on this novel, from time to time, as I read on.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1881
The last of Wilde, I hope: De Profundis, etc, and why I rarely read fiction these days…
Henry James
Oscar Wilde
So I’m writing this on the day that a book group I’m a part of will be discussing The picture of Dorian Gray, which I’ve written about quite disdainfully in a couple of previous posts. Interestingly, I’ve been sorting my very messed-up library in recent days, putting stuff into categories, and fiction into alphabetical order. During this process I made the shocking discovery that I had a ‘Penguin Classics’ copy of the novel all along, leading me to wonder whether I’d read the book years ago or not. I think not. More interestingly, I discovered a copy of De Profundis, Wilde’s ‘letter’ to Lord Alfred Douglas, written from prison and clearly intended for a wider audience. The most touching thing for me about the book was the name of the original purchaser, ‘Ethel Gwmes, or Gwymer, 1913’. Not that I wasn’t affected by Wilde’s plight – the fall from grace, the plank bed, the hard labour (for a time), the injustice, the humiliation – but it soon became clear in the reading that Wilde was still Wilde. As one would expect. (NB – I’ve just read, in a brief chronology of his life, that he was received into the Roman Catholic church the day before his death, so the concept of sin, which comes up so often in Dorian Gray, was one he really took seriously, maybe. If only he’d known what we now know about that August institution, he could’ve taken Holy Orders long before, diddled as many young lads as he liked, and ended life as a fat, self-satisfied Cardinal).
In De Profundis he makes a number of self-flattering observations and comparisons:
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.
Oh dear. Never trust people’s views of themselves – we’re evolved to have an overly positive view of ourselves, after all, for our survival and thriving. Nevertheless, reading of others’ high opinions of themselves can be a fun pastime. And so let’s on:
I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation…
Interesting lines, of course, in considering Dorian Gray as an autobiography, of sorts. I certainly find it hard to see it as a moral work. The word ‘sin’ is often used – a perfunctory term that has no place in the courts or in works of moral philosophy. And for much of the novel – up to the murder of Basil – his evil-doings are a matter of ‘strange conjecture’, delineated more in ‘the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth’ of the portrait, rather than in any account of actual crimes or debaucheries. This is what makes it ‘gothic’ of course – more creepy and horror-show than in any way thought-provoking from an ethical perspective.
Now, having attended the book club’s discussion of the novel – all very lively and civilised – I want to return to a chapter discussed with some interest (chapter 18), in which James Vane, Dorian’s nemesis, is accidentally shot dead during a hunting party, while skulking in the bushes, apparently awaiting an opportunity to shoot the anti-hero. Lord Henry, one of the party, reveals himself in all his colours in this scene. Dorian, who’s recently been spooked by the sight of Vane peering into the window of some mansion that he (Dorian) is visiting, is deeply troubled by this shooting, which at this time was thought to be of one of the aristocrats’ servants, acting as a ‘beater’ to frighten the quarry into view:
Dorian looked at Lord Henry, and said, with a heavy sigh, ‘It is a bad omen, Harry, a very bad omen.’
‘What is?’ asked Lord Henry. ‘Oh! this accident, I suppose. My dear fellow, it can’t be helped. It was the man’s own fault. Why did he get in front of the guns? Besides, it is nothing to us. It is rather awkward for Geoffrey, of course. It does not do to pepper beaters. It makes one think that one is a wild shot…
These remarks occur after the man has been pronounced dead, and presents Lord Henry as something worse than a droll, loquacious layabout. The question our readers were discussing vis-a-vis this passage, I think, was whether Wilde was censuring Lord Henry in any serious way, or just gently mocking the upper classes as he does in his plays. I would tend to think the latter is true, (or more true) as he never breathes any life into his ‘lower-class’ characters, except when they’re instrumental to the plot, as is the case with the Vane siblings. But then, considering the class he wholly identified with, maybe it’s just as well that he didn’t try to.
But returning to De Profundis, Wilde’s predilection for trying to say something impressive (whether witty or wise) in a sentence works well enough in the plays and in the remarks of Lord Henry and his entourage, but when he writes them in his own voice, they come across more like Daniel Dennett’s ‘deepities’, unworthy of too much scrutiny. But I don’t necessarily consider Wilde’s comparison of himself with Christ (whom I prefer to call Jesus) as an act of vanity, since Jesus is delineated in the ‘gospels’, in my view, as a more or less kindly ‘everyman’, from a period when depth and complexity of character is hardly explored.
And then there’s the matter of class. When I were a lad I worked in factories and read about working people in the 19th century, especially through the novels of Thomas Hardy – stonemasons, farmers and milkmaids – and their emotional highs and lows. I read Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch and lived a kind of extra life through the characters in those novels. But I can feel no emotional connection to the characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and I don’t think it’s just because I’m now an old codger. My teenage obsession with Hardy caused me to buy a biography of the author, in which I read of Henry James’ disdainful opinion of him. My reaction was typical – I thought ‘what an arsehole’, and then I went out and bought one of James’ most acclaimed novels, The portrait of a lady. What I got from it, some 50 years ago now, was an intro to the same world as Wilde – the parasitic upper class – a lot of intellectual verbiage, and a vague sense of outsiderdom and resentment (James, as it turned out, was also homosexual, FWIW). Nowadays I don’t read fiction at all, except for these book club choices. I’m not quite sure why that is, I just seem to get more of a buzz from learning about Neanderthals, nuclear fusion and stuff that stretches my brain such as AI and other new technologies. Perhaps because, in doing so, I can leave class and relative poverty behind, and feel myself a part of the great wave of transcending humanity…
on blogging: a personal view
I have a feeling – I haven’t researched this – that the heyday of blogging is over. Even I rarely read blogs these days, and I’m a committed blogger, and have been since the mid 2000s. I tend to read books and science magazines, and some online news sites, and I listen to podcasts and watch videos – news, historical, academic, etc.
I should read more blogs. Shoulda-coulda-woulda. Even out of self-interest – reading and commenting on other blogs will drive traffic to my own, as all the advisers say. Perhaps one of the problems is that there aren’t too many blogs like mine – they tend to be personal interest or lifestyle blogs, at least going by those bloggers who ‘like’ my blog, which which gives me the distinct impression that those ‘likers’ are just trying to drive traffic to their blogs, as advised. But the thing is, I like to think of myself as a real writer, whatever that is. Or a public intellectual, ditto.
However, I’ve never been published in a real newspaper, apart from one article 25 years ago in the Adelaide Review (the only article I’ve ever submitted to a newspaper), which led to my only published novel, In Elizabeth. But I’ve never really seen myself as a fiction writer. I’m essentially a diarist turned blogger – and that transition from diary writing to blogging was transformational, because with blogging I was able to imagine that I had a readership. It’s a kind of private fantasy of being a public intellectual.
I’ve always been inspired by my reading, thinking ‘I could do that”. Two very different writers, among many others, inspired me to keep a diary from the early 1980s, to reflect on my own experiences and the world I found myself in: Franz Kafka and Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne’s influence, I think, has been more lasting, not in terms of what he actually wrote, but his focus on the wider world, though it was Kafka that was the most immediate influence back in those youthful days, when I was still a little more self-obsessed.
Interestingly, though, writing about the world is a self-interested project in many ways. It’s less painful, and less dangerous. I once read that the philosopher and essayist Bertrand Russell, who had attempted suicide a couple of times in his twenties, was asked about those days and how he survived them. ‘I stopped thinking about myself and thought about the world’, he responded.
I seem to recall that Montaigne wrote something like ‘I write not to find out what I think about a topic, but to create that thinking.’ I strongly identify with that sentiment. It really describes my life’s work, such as it is. Considering that, from all outside perspectives, I’m deemed a failure, with a patchy work record, a life mostly spent below the poverty line and virtually no readership as a writer, I’m objective enough and well-read enough to realise that my writing stands up pretty well against those who make a living from their works. Maybe that’s what prevents me from ever feeling suicidal.
Writing about the world is intrinsically rewarding because it’s a lifelong learning project. Uninformed opinions are of little value, so I’ve been able to take advantage of the internet – which is surely the greatest development in the dissemination of human knowledge since the invention of writing – to embark on this lifelong learning at very little cost. I left school quite young, with no qualifications to speak of, and spent the next few years – actually decades – in and out of dead-end jobs while being both attracted and repelled by the idea of further academic study. At first I imagined myself as a legend in my lunch-time – the smartest person I knew without academic qualifications of any kind. And of course I could cite my journals as proof. These were the pre-internet days of course, so the only feedback I got was from the odd friend to whom I read or showed some piece of interest. My greatest failing, as a person rather than a writer, is my introversion. I’m perhaps too self-reliant, too unwilling or unable to join communities. The presence of others rather overwhelms me. I recall reading, in a Saul Bellow novel, of the Yiddish term trepverter – meaning the responses to conversations you only think of after the moment has passed. For me, this trepverter experience takes up much of my time, because the responses are lengthy, even never-ending. It’s a common thing, of course, Chekhov claimed that the best conversations we have are with ourselves, and Adam Smith used to haunt the Edinburgh streets in his day, arguing with himself on points of economics and probably much more trivial matters. How many people I’ve seen drifting along kerbsides, shouting and gesticulating at some invisible, tormenting adversary.
Anyway, blogging remains my destiny. I tried my hand at podcasting, even vodcasting, but I feel I’m not the most spontaneous thinker, and my voice catches in my throat due to my bronchiectasis – another reason for avoiding others. Yet I love the company of others, in an abstract sort of way. Or perhaps I should say, I like others, more than I like company – though I have had great experience in company with others. But mostly I feel constrained in company, which makes me dislike my public self. That’s why I like reading – it puts me in an idealised company with the writer. I must admit though, that after my novel was published, and also as a member of the local humanist society, I gave a few public talks or lectures, which I enjoyed immensely – I relish nothing more than being the centre of attention. So it’s an odd combo of shyness and self-confidence that often leaves me scratching my own head.
This also makes my message an odd one. I’m an advocate of community, and the example of community-orientated bonobos, who’s also something of a loner, awkward with small-talk, wanting to meet people, afraid of being overwhelmed by them. Or of being disappointed.
Here’s an example. Back in the eighties, I read a book called Melanie. It was a collection of diary writings of a young girl who committed suicide, at age 18 as I remember. It was full of light and dark thoughts about family, friends, school and so forth. She came across as witty, perceptive, mostly a ‘normal’ teenager, but with this dark side that seemed incomprehensible to herself. Needless to say, it was an intimate, emotional and impactful reading experience. I later showed the book to a housemate, a student of literature, and his response shocked me. He dismissed it out of hand, as essentially childish, and was particularly annoyed that the girl should have a readership simply because she had suicided. He also protested, rather too much, I felt, about suicide itself, which I found revealing. He found such acts to be both cowardly and selfish.
I didn’t argue with him, though there was no doubt a lot of trepverter going on in my head afterwards. For the record, I find suicides can’t be easily generalised, motives are multifactorial, and our control over our own actions are often more questionable than they seem. In any case human sympathy should be in abundant supply, especially for the young.
So sometimes it feels safer to confide in an abstract readership, even a non-existent one. I’ll blog on, one post after another.
Shakespeare and the English language
Canto: I think from time to time about Shakespeare – in fact ever since I was given a complete works for Christmas when I was thirteen or fourteen, and I used to read it on the swing in our backyard – congratulating myself on getting some of Falstaff’s witticisms. The Abbey Library Shakespeare. I still have it almost fifty years later, though I can barely read its minuscule print these days.
Jacinta: Yes I know you’re an admirer, but what do you think of all this stuff about Shakespeare’s massive contribution to the English language? I’ve always thought it was a bit exaggerated.
Canto: Interesting topic, because in one sense I agree with you. But this relates to all those awful people – Derek Jacobi was unfortunately among them – who seem to think that Shakespeare was too low-class to have written the plays. As a not very upper-class bloke meself I feel deeply miffed. Shakespeare’s plays run the class gamut because he himself was about as déclassé as a fellow in Elizabethan England could be, son of a successful businessman, educated in a relatively déclassé school, and, like us, motivated to learn by ear and by the lessons of life – an autodidact and a dilettante.
Jacinta: The counter-argument I’ve heard – to the idea that he must’ve been some Lord or other – is that upper-class education of that time, and perhaps in most periods, just wasn’t all that good. Not to mention the generally cloistered lives of scions of the aristocracy, who not only wouldn’t have been much exposed to a lot of ‘street-talk’, but would’ve been inhibited by their class pride to admit to such knowledge. Writers like Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney were more in the aristocratic mould, full of classical references, ancient legends, knight-errants and lords and ladies – not at all rough around the edges.
Canto: Yes it seems to me Shakespeare was more drawn to real life, and plays were the perfect vehicle for him, to present, in what he imagined were their own terms, kings, commoners and everyone in between. Which brings me to your question about his contribution to the English language. Clearly this was a guy who loved language, almost for its own sake, and he had a finely-tuned ear for it. He certainly read plenty, for his history plays and classically-themed plays, and travelled in his mind and through reading to Venice, Verona, Rome, Athens, Padua, Paris, Ephesus, Alexandria, Navarre, Troy, Messina, Marseilles, Inverness, Illyria – and that’s not a complete list of venues outside of England. I won’t go on with the English settings. I think this need or desire to set his plays in such varied and far-flung places and eras is an indication of an all-encompassing mind, a wannabe space-time traveller, sampling human discourse and psychology in all its variety, and his interest in language was in keeping with that. As to his contribution to English, speaking quantitatively, the reason that I’m perhaps inclined to agree with you is that scholars, historians, lexicographers and so forth, probably tend to emphasise the written over the spoken language, and so under-estimate the inventiveness of the spoken word, and those who speak it. My uneducated guess is that many if not most of the new coinages we find in Shakespeare, including nouns from verbs and vice versa, may have been part of the ‘illiterate’ street discourse Shakespeare picked up in the London taverns where he conceived, and possibly even wrote, scenes for his plays. They just hadn’t been committed to writing before.
Jacinta: Yes, sounds like a class thing – the idea that the lower classes, not being formally educated, or literate as you say, couldn’t be inventive or creative…
Canto: Or simply indifferent to the ‘rules’ in their need to communicate. We know that new languages – creoles – are created by children, equipped by evolution with some unconscious sense of linguistic structure which allows them to bridge the gap between two distinctive language groups thrown together by chance or coercion. The urge to communicate overthrows any sense of linguistic purity or pride, which in any case is merely nascent in the child’s mind. I’m not saying that Shakespeare was tapping into anything so radical as a new language, and I’m not sure how polyglot London was in his time, but there was undoubtedly a diversity of classes and trades…
Jacinta: Some basic research gives a feel for the place:
The population of London had risen to 200,000 by 1600 and the city was evolving as the multicultural city that it is today. There was a Jewish community in Bishopsgate and a few thousand black people – servants, musicians, and dancers. There were also many Huguenot and Flemish refugees.
Southwark [site of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre] was London’s entertainment zone… . The theatres, surrounded by inns, taverns, cockpits, gambling houses and brothels were in Southwark. Partly because of the influx of crowds, Southwark was a dangerous place to wander about in after dark, with muggers, drunkards and pickpockets everywhere.
Shakespeare would almost certainly have visited the Royal Exchange on Threadneedle street – the world’s first shopping mall. It was similar to a modern shopping mall, a huge arcaded building with banking facilities and accommodation for more than two hundred shops and thousands of businessmen. One could buy wigs, jewellery, perfume, hats, shoes, breeches, shirts, ruffles, feathers, silks, drugs, wine, spices, paper, ink, candles, toys, and anything else you could think of.
Public executions were Elizabethan Londoners’ most popular spectator activity. Londoners had a choice among the different kinds of executions: they could go to Tower Hill where the upper class condemned were beheaded with a broadsword or axe or head to Tyburn or Smithfield to see some hangings of ordinary traitors and common criminals. There were about a thousand hangings a year.
Canto: Yes, so you could imagine all sorts of raunchy patois ringing in Will’s ears as he constructed plays set throughout Europe but full of the bustling energy of the city he’d made his home. This richness of language had never been set down in language before. Chaucer should no doubt be cited as a precursor, but the language had changed markedly in the intervening years, what with the ‘great vowel shift’ and the transformations from Middle English. These two great artists were stand-outs in preserving, and no doubt imaginatively adding to, much of the richness of ‘ordinary’ speech of their time.
Jacinta: Okay, two cheers for autodidacts and dilettantes…
More subsequent remarks preliminary to a voyage
my officially incipient tache – a supposedly fun thing I’ll never grow again
So as flight-time draws nigh, it’s hard to describe my tangle of emotions. The first is dread that this is the end [litt ref 3.5, with apologies to the Doors]. I have a micro-fear of flying, and this’ll be the first long haul. I love embracing travellers’ lingo. We’re flying Emirates, stopping over at Dubai, but the thing is, we’re flying all night. I mean, how do the pilots see anything?
OK, I know it’s all ineffably hi-tech and the safest form of transport ever invented and night flights are pushbuttoningly routine, and Mick Jagger’s still alive and dancin after 10 zillion flights, but there have to be exceptions to prove rules perhaps, and when disasters do happen they’re always spectacular. I mean, you don’t get a dose of whiplash from a plane crash. They’re not called prangs. It’s, like, 279 dead, body parts spread over an xx-kilometre zone, so much for safety in numbers, and I’m wondering, as strangely-pathetically I often do, what will be the reaction to my passing…
But enough self-indulgence, I’ll be right on the night. Still the other emotions and stressors are pastel in comparison. In fact, actually, truthfully, the flight’s the only real issue. Money, la langue francaise, communications home, possible tensions with my TC, health concerns (not flu jabbed, tsk tsk), all mere nanothemes. I’m collecting gratis advice – take a KO dose of valium, get drunk, use nasal spray (done), chew gum (will do), sleep, get over it, enough self-indulgence.
The home I leave behind will be tenanted by a sweet young miss of whom I will say no more in the unlikely event that she reads this blog, and I must say I’ll miss the daily watched-kettle-not-boiling progress of the various building sites in my neighbourhood, with, as a neighbour pointed out, possibly lethally ambitious NYC names like the Bowery, the Beeline (or is it the Beehive?) and Park Central. Really. Cafés and R & R areas are proliferating and jackhammers and earth-pounding noise-makers are just starting to shape the projected City Square a few blocks away. How thrilling it’ll be to actually notice a difference come the end of May. I don’t feel at all cynical about it, as a relative newcomer to regular acceptable employment, a parvenu, a bourgeois – but not assez plat, to recall the slicing words of Stendhal [litt ref 4.5]. Besides, I’ve encountered a few of the occupants of the new medium density constructs sprouting around me (I mean sighted them, not met them) and mostly they look just as spivvy as myself. And the enviro-ideas shaping those buildings really are exciting, but I’m too excited – just about to be picked up and driven to the airport – to detail them now. I will survive [musical reference 1 – but then the Doors reference should really be a musical reference not a half-litt reference – ok no more ref-mentions].
remarks subsequent to my preliminary remarks preliminary to a voyage
the modest vessel we may be travelling on – specially designed to resemble passing buildings
As might’ve been guessed, I’ll be maxing out on prétention française in this blog series, as soon I’ll be desecrating French soil for the première fois since gaining a degree in French Lang & Litt, aged 32, more than a standard generation ago. Just the other day I reached the end of my French duolingo app. I was horror-shocked, I thought it just lingoed on forever, but no they have no more to teach (BS really) and the only next step is immersion, supposedly.
The problem is, l have enough trouble speaking to people in my first language. I wouldn’t be surprised if l’ve spoken to myself (aloud) more than to the whole rest of humanity. The best conversations, selon Chekhov [literary ref 1]. My vocab’s pretty extensive, my reading’s well fluent but I have trouble stringing a speaking sentence together even in my head (l’m referring to French by the way), so l’m looking forward/not looking forward to the challenge of Paris.
But before that lies the riverboat cruise, and I’m prepping for it by rereading David Foster Wallace’s ‘a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again’ [litt ref 2], which l first read when it came out 20 years ago and found almost inexplicably exciting, comparing it (in conversation with myself, aloud) to Shakespeare himself [litt ref 3] in its lingual liveliness.
‘a supposedly fun thing…’ was a piece of journalism Wallace wrote for Harper’s, reflections on a 7-day Carribean cruise in one of those floating wedding-cake-type vessels passengered almost entirely by obese middle-aged-to-elderly Americans and mainly owned-and-operated by those seafarers of long standing, Greeks and Scandinavians. I thought that rereading it now would happily reinforce my cynicism about such pleasure cruises, and also provide a rich scatter of points of comparison. What I’ve found is a darker side to his observations I hadn’t fully noted on first reading, but which Wallace’s suicide in 2008 has naturally primed my attention to. Here’s the clearest example:
There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir – especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased – I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture – a weird yearning for death combined with the crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.
These dark remarks, out of a clear Carribean sky, made for an unexpected turn in the narrative, but they forced my focus onto the saturnine aspects of the whole. Was the staff’s hierarchy really so aggressive? The pampering so relentless? The passengers so grotesque or pathetic? The cruise in general so despair-engendering?
Anyhow, Travel Marvel, the cruise company we’ll be sailing (deliciously al fresco word) with, is Australian-owned, a marvel in itself, so l’ll be expecting a more laid-back perfection. And though l may lack Wallace’s prose luminosity l may also lack his lugubriosity, for better or worse. Encore, on verra.
Silly postscript: While writing this and getting tired, I baulked at having to copy out the longish quote from Wallace (I type horribly), so I tried Siri, the not-so-hot Apple voice-recognition thingy. It did mostly OK with the occasional mangle, to be expected with oddities like ‘banalised’ and ‘gaiety-noise’, but there was one cackle-inducing clanger – ‘with the crushing sense of my own small nose’. Poor D F Wallace, rest in peace with no more crushing burdens large or small.
the fall – when curiosity was shameful, and miracles abounded
the benedictine abbey of Gottweig in the Danube Valley, now enjoying more freedom as a guesthouse
I’ve been reading some medieval literature recently, and I’d like to make a brief comparison here between the writings of Benedict of Nursia (c480-547) and Pope Greg the Great (reigned from 589 to 604), and the Roman writers of a few centuries before, such as Livy, Tacitus, Cicero and Plutarch. It’s maybe a bit unfair as Greg and Ben perhaps weren’t typical writers of the sixth century, I’m hardly medievalist enough to say, but still they capture for me the tragedy of the soi-disant Dark Ages for the development of thought and ideas. I’ll be quoting from the medieval writers, but only referring to the Romans – you’ll just have to take my word for it about their smarts.
Benedict of Nursia is probably better known as Saint Benedict, but I don’t like that appellation – not because he doesn’t deserve it, but because nobody does, as in order to become a saint it must’ve been ‘proven’ that you performed miracles, and such silliness shouldn’t be encouraged. More importantly, this nominatively determined method of severing such individuals from common humanity does us all a disservice. Anyway, Benedict was the founder of 12 monasteries or communities in Italy, and he wrote rules for them which were later adopted in other regions to form the basis of the Benedictine system of monks – though there was never really a strict Benedictine order (monks who live communally under a set of rules are called cenobites). I’ve just read these rules, followed by Pope Gregory’s hagiography of Benedict, and it gives me a perspective on the closing of the European mind – if that’s not too grandiose a term – associated with the Dark Ages.
Benedict is praised for what Wikipedia calls the ‘balance, moderation and reasonableness’ of his rules, which facilitated their adoption by many European monasteries. However, moderation is a relative term, and as a rabid anti-authoritarian I probably chafe more than most under imposed rules. Still, I reckon most independent-minded modern westerners would find Benedict’s rules deadeningly stifling, and if they were considered moderate for the time, I’d hate to think about the more immoderate rules that the pious were forced to submit to. But judge for yourself.
Benedict states at the outset that ‘we are going to establish a school for the service of the Lord’. This isn’t of course a school in the modern sense, it’s more like certain types of Madrassa, in which nothing outside of sacred texts is studied. The school or institute is to be presided over by an Abbot, chosen for his personal qualities, including self-discipline, firmness, compassion and insight into the ways of the Lord. Recalcitrant souls need to be coaxed or reproved into the narrow path. However,
… bold, proud, hard and disobedient characters he should curb at the very beginning of their ill-doing by stripes and other bodily punishments, knowing that it is written, ‘The fool is not corrected with words’, and again, ‘Beat your son with the rod and you will deliver his soul from death’.
I suppose this isn’t too much worse than a lot of army-style biffo, as depicted in Full Metal Jacket and the like, but there’s more, and monasticism was a life commitment. Benedict goes on a lot about humility and seriousness – he frowns upon laughter. He also insists, ominously, on narrowness, for ‘strait is the gate and narrow is the way’ to salvation, as we all know. Clearly the lives of these life-long penitents are going to be highly circumscribed. Patience, endurance, humility and obedience are the watchwords.
The monks’ days are rigidly ordered. Prayers are to be offered up 7 times a day (more often than in Islam, even) because, according to Benedict, the Prophet says ‘seven times in the day I have rendered praise to you’. Who this prophet was I can’t ascertain, and there’s no such quote in the Bible, though Isaiah and Luke both display a fondness for the number. In any case, Benedict gives instructions about the number and type of psalms to be sung at the Morning Office, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. Prayers are to be ‘short and pure’, in compliance with the spirit of silence that should inhabit, not to say inhibit, the school. One of the longest chapters is ‘On Humility’, in which Benedict defines 12 different degrees of humility, as the monk becomes more and more cleansed of vice and sin:
The tenth degree of humility is that he be not ready and quick to laugh, for it is written, ‘The fool lifts up his voice in laughter’.
The eleventh degree of humility is that when a monk speaks he do so gently and without laughter, humbly and seriously, in few and sensible words, and that he be not noisy in his speech. It is written, ‘A wise man is known by the fewness of his words.’
Again, Benedict doesn’t tells us where these dubious claims are written, but they don’t seem to come from the Bible. In any case, you get the idea, the fantasy that suppression of all spontaneity and originality leads through the narrow gate unto heaven.
Of course, the microcosm of the monastery doesn’t necessarily reflect the macrocosm of medieval Europe, but in a world of more or less homogenous Christian belief many of these ‘ideals’ would have been prominent. Not that the previous Roman world was that much better, as far as the nurturing of curiosity and intellectual inquiry was concerned. Roman society was also quite rigid in its structure, and philosophically, neither the Stoics nor the Epicureans thought in terms of intellectual progress. But the near-obsessive stifling of curiosity, the obsession with an obedient, humble, slavish attitude before an all-knowing master-god, that was very much a product of the Christianising of the Empire and ultimately of all Europe. The kind of reflective history-writing and philosophising found in the work of Tacitus, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, dealing with human psychology and conduct in its own right, without reference to divine expectations, all but disappeared for centuries.
Interestingly, along with the fashion for slavishness came a flourishing of credulity. Pope Gregory the Great’s bio of Benedict teems with his miracles and fulfilled prophecies, reminding us that the age of Jesus wasn’t the dimmest for unbelievable beliefs, though it may have sparked the fashion for them. There’s virtually a miracle on every page, so I’ll quote here one of the first, from when he was a youth, having abandoned his studies to serve his Master, to give you a taste:
When Benedict abandoned his studies to go into solitude, he was accompanied by his nurse, who loved him dearly. As they were passing through Affile, a number of devout men invited them to stay there and provided them with lodging near the Church of St Peter. One day, after asking her neighbours to lend her a tray for cleaning wheat, the nurse happened to leave it on the edge of the table and when she came back she found it had slipped off and broken in two. The poor woman burst into tears, she had just borrowed this tray and now it was ruined. Benedict, who had always been a devout and thoughtful boy, felt sorry for his nurse when he saw her weeping. Quietly picking up both the pieces, he knelt down by himself and prayed earnestly to God, even to the point of tears. No sooner had he finished his prayer than he noticed that the two pieces were joined together, without even a mark to show where the tray had been broken. Hurrying back at once, he cheerfully reassured his nurse and handed her the tray in perfect condition.
Of course, this little tale is partly designed to show Benedict’s kindness and attentiveness in small matters, and perhaps that’s the best take-home message, but not all the miracles are so nice, and some display the wish-fulfilling fantasy of bringing down enemies. The point, though, is that these miracles are disseminated by the highest religious authorities in Europe, so that it would amount to sacrilege to deny them. Interestingly, when I was nine years old, my mother bought me a collection of books called ‘Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories’ – about ten books each with about ten stories in them, and every one told of a miracle much like this one (and to be fair to my mother, she hadn’t vetted them first and wasn’t aware that they were Christian propaganda). People had fallen on hard times or had suffered an accident, they prayed to God, their fortunes were miraculously reversed. They were very formulaic stories, and I steamed with annoyance on reading them, but it’s fascinating to find a template for that kind of writing from nearly 1400 years before. How the world has changed and how some aspects of it remain.
What is interesting for me, though, is the connection between credulity and authority that marks the Dark Ages. As a youngster I was free to, and took delight in, spurning the ‘authority’ of Uncle Arthur and his benevolent miracles. I’m a creature of my era and social milieu, as we all are, but there are many social milieux in our world. I’ve just seen a TV clip about the ‘fight of the century’ between one Floyd Mayweather and the Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao. I’m not much into boxing these days (I was a keen follower of the sport in my youth), but I hear this fight is being billed as goodie v baddie, because Mayweather is a convicted wife-beater and apparently something of a self-advertising loudmouth whereas Pacquiao is a member of parliament, charity worker and other respectable things. However, when I just looked at the screen I saw Pacquaio wearing a t-shirt with ‘Jesus is my Lord’ or some such thing emblazoned on it, and I felt a spurt of disgust. I have a visceral reaction to the slavishness and submission of the two most common religions on the planet. The old ‘pagan’ religions certainly engaged in seasonal placatory gestures but they didn’t practice or preach eternal submission to their invisible and undetectable masters. And not only are we supposed to accept our enslavement, but to exalt in our specialness. It’s the most horrible kind of unreality, to me. So there’s still plenty of darkness to deal with, or to avoid. Let’s remember Goethe’s reputed last words – more light.
some thoughts on humanism and activism
What Australia needs
I’ve been a little more involved in ‘movements’ in recent years, though I’m not usually much of a joiner, and I’ve always been wary of ‘activism’, which is often associated with protesting, personning the barricades (doesn’t have quite the aggressive ring to it, does it?), even a bit of biffo – if largely verbal, by preference. I’ve just been hungry for a bit of stimulus – salon culture, witty and cultured and informative exchanges with people cleverer than myself. But since I’ve been occasionally asked to engage on a higher, or deeper level, in ‘the culture wars’, on the side of reason, atheism, secularism, humanism, whatever, my thoughts on the matter have started to crystallise, and they’re hopefully in evidence in my blog writing.
I don’t mind calling myself an activist for humanism, or for other isms, but I think we should be activists for rather than against. Now it might be argued that to argue for one thing is to argue against another, so it doesn’t really matter, but I think it matters a great deal. It’s a matter of trying to be positive and influencing others with your positivity. Secular humanism has a great case to promote, as do reason, self-awareness and ‘skepticism with sympathy’.
I’ve learned from years of teaching students from scores of different countries and cultures that we all can be excited by learning new stuff, that we’re amused by similar things, that we all want to improve and to be loved and appreciated. The ties that bind us as humans are far greater than those that divide us culturally or in other ways. I’ve also learned that the first principle of good teaching is to engage your students, rather than haranguing or badgering them. This may not seem easy when you’re teaching something as apparently dry and contentless as language and grammar, but language is essentially a technology for communicating content, and if we didn’t have anything meaningful or important to communicate, we’d never have developed it. So the key is to engage students with content that’s relevant to them, and stimulating and thought-provoking enough that they’ll want to communicate those thoughts.
I suppose I’m talking about constructive engagement, and this is the best form of activism. Of course, like everyone, I don’t always ‘constructively engage’. I get mad and frustrated, I dismiss with contempt, I feel offended or vengeful, yet the best antidote to those negative feelings is simple, and that is to throw yourself into the lives, the culture, the background of your ‘enemy’, or the ‘other’, which requires imagination as well as knowledge. I mis-spent a lot of my youth reading fiction from non-English backgrounds – from France and Germany, from Russia and eastern Europe, from Africa and Asia. It was a lot cheaper than travelling, especially as I avoided a lot of paid work in order to indulge my reading. Of course I read other stuff too, history, philosophy, psychology, new-wave feminism, but fiction – good fiction, of course – situated all these subjects and issues within conflicted, emotional, culturally-shaped and striving individuals, and provided me with a sense of the almost unfathomable complexity of human endeavour. The understanding of multiple backgrounds and contexts, especially when recognising that your own background is a product of so much chance, creates multiple sympathies, and that’s essential to humanism, to my mind.
However, there are limits to such identifications. Steven Pinker discusses this in The better angels of our nature (the best advertisement for humanism I’ve ever read) by criticising the overuse, or abuse, of the term ’empathy’ and expressing his preference for ‘sympathy’. Empathy is an impossible ideal, and it can involve losing your own bearings in identifying with another. There are always broader considerations.
Take the case of the vaccination debate. While there are definitely charlatans out there directly benefitting from the spread of misinformation, most of the people we meet who are opposed to vaccination aren’t of that kind, usually they have personal stories or information from people they trust that has caused them to think the way they do. We can surely feel sympathy with such people – after all, we also have had personal experiences that have massively influenced how we think, and we get much of our info from people we trust. But we also have evidence, or know how to get it. We owe it to ourselves and others to be educated on these matters. How many of us who advocate vaccination know how a vaccine actually works? If we wish to enter that particular debate, a working knowledge of the science is an essential prerequisite (and it’s not so difficult, there’s a lot of reliable explanatory material online, including videos), together with a historical knowledge of the benefits of vaccination in virtually eradicating various diseases. To arm yourself with and disseminate such knowledge is, to me, the best form of humanist activism.
I’ll choose a couple more topical issues, to look at how we could and should be positively active, IMHO. The first, current in Australia, is chaplaincy in schools. The second, a pressing issue right now for Australians but of universal import, is capital punishment.
The rather odd idea of chaplaincy in schools was first mooted by Federal Minister Greg Hunt in 2006 after lobbying from a church leader and was acted upon by the Howard government in 2007. It was odd for a number of reasons. First, education is generally held to be a state rather than a federal responsibility, and second, our public education system has no provision in it for religious instruction or religious proselytising. The term ‘chaplain’ has a clear religious, or to be more precise Christian, association, so why, in the 21st century, in an increasingly multicultural society in which Christianity was clearly on the decline according to decades of census figures, and more obviously evidenced by scores of empty churches in each state, was the federal government introducing these Christian reps into our schools via taxpayer funds? It was an issue tailor-made for humanist organisations, humanism being dedicated – and I trust my view on this is uncontroversial – to emphasising what unites us, in terms of human rights and responsibilities, rather than what divides us (religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation etc). To introduce these specifically Christian workers, out of the blue, into an increasingly non-Christian arena, seemed almost deliberately divisive.
Currently the National School Chaplaincy Program is in recess, having been stymied by two effective High Court challenges brought by a private citizen, Ron Williams, of the Humanist Society of Queensland. As far as I’m aware, Williams’ challenge was largely self-funded, but assisted by a donation from at least one of the state humanist societies. This was a cause that could and should have been financed and driven by humanists in a nationally co-ordinated campaign, which would have enabled humanists to have a voice on the issue, and to make a positive contribution to the debate.
What would have been that contribution? Above all to provide evidence, for the growing secularism and multiculturalism of the nation and therefore the clearly anachronistic and potentially divisive nature of the government’s policy. Identification with every Christian denomination is dropping as a percentage of the national population, and the drop is accelerating. This is nobody’s opinion, it’s simply a fact. Church attendance is at the lowest it’s ever been in our Christian history – another fact. Humanists could have gone on the front foot in questioning the role of these chaplains. In the legislation they’re expected to provide “support and guidance about ethics, values, relationships and spirituality”, but there’s an insistence that they shouldn’t replace school counsellors, for counselling isn’t their role. Apparently they’re to provide support without counselling, just by ‘being there’. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just have their photos on the school walls? The ‘spirituality’ role is one that humanists could have a lot of fun with. I’ve heard the argument that people are just as religious as ever, but that they’ve rejected the established churches, and are developing their own spirituality, their own relationship to their god, so I suppose it would follow that their spirituality needs to be nourished at school. But the government has made a clear requirement that chaplains need to be members of an established religion (and obviously of a Christian denomination), so how exactly is that going to work?
While humour, along with High Court challenges and pointed questions about commitment to real education and student welfare, would be the way to ‘get active’ with the school chaplaincy fiasco, the capital punishment issue is rather more serious.
The Indonesian decision to execute convicted drug pedlars of various nationalities has attracted a lot of unwanted publicity, from an Indonesian perspective, but a lot of the response, including some from our government, has been lecturing and hectoring. People almost gleefully describe the Indonesians as barbarians and delight in the term ‘state-sanctioned murder’, mostly unaware of the vast changes in our society that have made capital punishment, which ended here in the sixties, seem like something positively medieval. These changes have not occurred to the same degree in other parts of the world, and as humanists, with a hopefully international perspective, we should be cognisant of this, aware of the diversity, and sympathetic to the issues faced by other nations faced with serious drug and crime problems. But above all we should look to offer humane solutions.
By far the best contribution to this issue I’ve heard so far has come from Richard Branson, representing the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP), who spoke of his and other commissioners’ interest in speaking to the Indonesians about solutions to their drug problems, not to lecture or to threaten, but to advise on drug policies that work. No mention was made about capital punishment, which I think was a good thing, for what has rendered capital punishment obsolete more than anything else has been the development of societies that see their members as flawed but capable, mostly, of development for the better. Solutions to crime, drug use and many other issues – including, for that matter, joining terrorist organisations – are rarely punitive. They involve support, communication and connection. Branson, interviewed on the ABC’s morning news program, pointed to the evidence showing that harsh penalties had no effect on the drug trade, and that the most effective policy by far was legalisation. It’s probably not a story that our government would be sympathetic to, and it takes us deeply into the politics of drug law reform, but it is in fact a science-based approach to the issue that humanists should be active in supporting and promulgating. Branson pointed to the example of Portugal, which had, he claimed, drug problems as serious as that of Indonesia, which have since been greatly alleviated through a decriminalisation and harm-reduction approach.
I hope to write more about the GCDP’s interesting and productive-looking take on drug policy on my Solutions OK website in the future. Meanwhile, this is just the sort of helpful initiative that humanists should be active in getting behind. Indonesians are arguing that the damage being done by drug pushers requires harshly punitive measures, but the GCDP’s approach, which bypasses the tricky issue of national sovereignty, and capital punishment itself, is offered in a spirit of co-operation that is perfectly in line with an active, positive humanism.
So humanism should be as active as possible, in my view, and humanists should strive to get themselves heard on such broad issues as education, crime, equity and the environment, but they should enter the fray armed with solutions that are thoughtful, practicable and humane. Hopefully, we’re here to help.