After the cabinet resignations and outbreak of open civil war in the Conservative party it’s clear now that the future has narrowed down to two sorts of Brexit.
First is the kind of Brexit that nobody wants. This is the one Theresa May is trying to organise. Not even she herself wants or believes in it, and the EU certainly doesn’t, but it’s the logical outcome of her commitment to deliver the impossible outcome of a Brexist that changes everything in the imagination and nothing much in reality.
The second sort is the “clean break” or “hard” Brexit that only about a third of the Conservative party MPs, and a much smaller proportion of the country, wants and that everyone else, including most of the MPs and cabinet, understands will be a catastrophe. The problem is that this is the desire of a great majority of Conservative grass roots members, and they want it for reasons that are almost entirely mythical.
There is also the Brexit that is averted at the very last moment, which would be the choice of a small, but clear and growing majority of the British people. But that would require both a second referendum, a general election, and the patient forbearance of our European partners while our politics went into complete meltdown.
My guess is that we will end up with the Brexit that everyone pretends didn’t happen, where the “transition” arrangements drag on for decades, and all that the referendum result has accomplished is a complete and irreversible transfer of power to Brussels.
If this happens, it will be both the result that any sane observer would have predicted at the outset of the process, and the result which hard brexiteers were most afraid of and which they were acting – they thought – to avert.
So how did they drag the rest of us there? In particular, what produced the ludicrous and self-defeating fantasy of a “global Britain”, which could somehow cast itself off from Europe and reposition itself anywhere it chose in the world? To answer this question, you must delve into the mythical version of British history they were brought up to believe.
You won’t find the answer in politics. It emerges from the subculture of the British upper classes, and the sort of people who become Conservative MPs. It may not have been taught in classrooms, but it was much more powerful for that. It wasn’t something that needed to be taught or believed explicitly: it was just one of those things that everybody knows.The Hornblower novels of C.S. Forester track the progress from midshipman to Admiral of and English hero, Horatio Hornblower. They have much less subtlety of character than the later novels of Patrick O’Brien, which deal with the same period but they are huge fun to read. The action is vivid. There are storms, mutinies, battles on land and in everything that floats from a rowing boat to a ship of the line. By the end of the books the reader feels confident that he (I doubt she) could serve competently on a ship of the line.
Hornblower himself is the perfect Englishman: honourable, brave, resourceful in ways that no foreigner could approach. Nothing frightens him except failure — or the expression of any emotion.
As the series progresses, and he is successively promoted, he is rewarded by a marriage with the Duke of Wellington’s (imaginary) sister, a perfect fantasy figure: “Her stoic English upbringing had schooled her into distrusting emotion and into contempt for any exhibition of emotion … But she could only trust herself to say a single word. ‘Orders?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ answered Hornblower, and then gave vent to some of the powerful mixed emotions within him. ‘Yes, dear.’”
These bloodthirsty wooden sailors play their parts set against a particular geopolitical background and this is what is still influential in the Tory imagination. Europe is under the rule of “the Corsican Tyrant”. Britain alone stands for freedom, even though its freedom is guaranteed by ships manned by kidnapping men off the streets of port cities and flogging them into obedience. But the point is that the British navy, and the British command of the seas, enables Britain to defeat the most powerful land army the world had ever seen. Hornblower, as a young man reflects on what it meant to have command of the sea:“the fleets of her enemies [were] cooped up in port, blockaded by vigilant squadrons eager to come to grips with them …The Renown could sail the seas in utter confidence that she had nothing to fear. She could flout the hostile coasts; with the enemy blockaded and helpless she could bring her ponderous might to bear in a blow struck wherever she might choose.”This was in fact true as long as the empire lasted and it stayed long after that in the institutional memory of the governing classes. In 1963, when I was first shipped off to boarding school, aged eight, my housemaster was a former naval captain and the dormitories were named after battleships and aircraft carriers – Ark Royal, Illustrious, and Hood.
In the real world, the last kick of this dying tradition was the Falklands War, when the Navy once again projected British force around the world. In most British schools children today learn nothing of the history of the Empire as we were taught it: a set of glorious battles fought on foreign soil and made possible by the heroics of the Royal Navy. We don’t have the ships to fight another Falklands War today, even if we could secure the necessary American permission to do so.
But the belief that Britain could be anywhere in the world it wanted to be, because Britannia rules the waves lurks in the imagination of anyone over sixty who was privately educated – and these people are the core membership of the Conservative Party and they can’t see that anything has changed. It is as if there were a powerful lobby in Swedish politics arguing that the country’s geopolitical future lay in re-establishing the union with Finland, and reconquering the Baltic states.
This goes much deeper that the obvious British nostalgia for the second world war, important though that it. The generation who fought in that war was also the one which led us into the EU. They were realists. But Mrs May, as she faces her party, is fighting with spirits (vålnad). It is not just Michel Barnier she must negotiate with: it is the angry ghost of Admiral Hornblower and all his great, departed, ships.
]]>Since this is armistice day, I want to start with a historical fact. The German army, in the First World War, believed it was fighting for civilisation. In those days, no one thought it necessary to add the prefix “Western”. They thought, before the First World War, that there was only one civilisation. How did they define it? How could they have been so wrong? One hint at an answer is that they gave each soldier two books to remind them what they were fighting for. One was the St John’s Gospel, and the other was a selection of Nietzsche’s writings.
Nietzsche is of course considered the greatest poet of Victorian atheism; the Bible is generally supposed to be on the other side of that dispute. Yet they have something in common. They are both part of the same argument, as Nietzsche very clearly saw; and if you take them together, you have something quite close to the heart of Western civilisation, of the insights, the arguments, and the ways of looking at life which gave us both our values and our self- confidence.
And here they were, working together from the heart of a great civilisation in aid of the most disastrous, cruel, and above all murderous war that the world had known up till then; certainly the war which gave European civilisation a wound from which it has not yet recovered and probably never will.
I will return to this.
The thing that we’re asked to talk about in this series is the trouble with religion; and it’s an assignment which looks incredibly easy at first, and almost impossibly difficult when you get into it.
The easy part is finding all the crimes and follies which have been and in fact are associated with religion. I’ll skip the normal rota of crusades, jihad, the burning of widows by Hindus, the human sacrifices of the Aztecs, and so on. I’ll even skip over the civil war in Bosnia, of which I had some small personal experience, and which was clearly understood by the participants and a religious war. Here in Cambridge there’s a small, vile scandal which goes to the heart of elitist Christianity in the form of the John Smyth case, where a perverted evangelical barrister beat boys at Winchester until they bled, and when he was caught, because one of the victims attempted suicide, had his crimes covered up by some of the most respected Christians in that milieu; was sent to Africa and subsidised by them; was responsible for the death of one young man in Zimbabwe and then hurried on to South Africa — and all of the participants in this carnival of horrors, including the victims, were motivated by their religious faith.
Surely the world would be better without such a means of self-deception.
Yes, the world would be better without self-deception, but how would we get there? Would you, personally be better off without self-deception?
Very few people honestly think that they would — I’m inclined to think that it’s part of the definition of a saint really to strive for truth even about themselves.
Douglas Adams and Jonathan Swift each held it was axiomatic that we only keep going because of self-deception. Adams imagined the Total Perspective Vortex, which drives mad anyone who understands their absolute insignificance in the universe. Only Zaphod Beeblebrox, invincibly armoured in self-esteem, can look at it and survive.
Swift wrote that sex and indeed life itself were ridiculous and irrational aims:
“in two points of the greatest moment to the being and continuance of the world, God hath intended our passions to prevail over reason. The first it, the propagation of our species, since no wise man ever married from the dictates of reason. The other is, the love of life, which, from the dictates of reason, every man would despise and wish it at an end, or that it never had a beginning”
I think Hume, too, shared the same radical scepticism about the benefits of unillusioned knowledge, no matter how he strove to share it.
Although Swift and Hume were of course ignorant of modern biology, I brought them up to make the point that a world without self-deception would also have to be a world without individual self-deceivers. To get there from here, we must each try to see the world as clearly as possible, and transmit this longing to our neighbours and in due course our families. I rather hope, in an ancient and romantic way, that this is what the university is helping you to do, and to desire. But I may of course be fooling myself here, and it’s all a transactional matter of getting more highly paid jobs after you leave.
Even if that is not what this university is about, it is certainly what others are selling, and they prosper as a result. Self-deception, in other words, leads to worldly success; and worldly success is in Darwinian terms its own reward. In fact it’s the only reward, even for beings that can’t enjoy it. Most of the successful life forms in the world are entirely incapable of anything we would recognise as emotion or even feeling.
Think of cockroaches, or bacteria.
AS you may have gathered from this survey I am a depressive. One of the things about depressed people is that they tend to see the world more accurately — or at least to make some judgements more clearly — than sane people do. The world is normally worse than normal people expect. But the persistence of optimism suggests that hope is a useful strategy even if it does involve self-deception.
Imagine a crowd of lemmings on the edge of a lake, and the most charismatic lemming promises the rest that if only they swim across it there will be a land of unparalleled plenty on the other side – global Lemmingia, perhaps. In this crowd the depressed lemming who predicts that they will almost all drown, or be eaten by giant Siberian trout, is almost certainly right. But the mistaken belief of the majority will propel them into the lake. Some, at least, will survive. They will indeed find a land of plenty. And the depressed, and realistic lemming who decides to wait on the safe bank? He gets eaten by a passing weasel.
No, the real danger and corruption does not come from being wrong about the outside world, but from being wrong about our own interior lives — thinking ourselves better, and more virtuous than we are. This also has an evolutionary use. Lying to ourselves allows us to lie to others more convincingly, and to better tell when they are lying to us. Once you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.
But it is also what leads to the greatest atrocities. It allows us to think the best of ourselves when we are behaving at our worst.
Now we come to the difficult bit. I’m supposed to talk about religion and I don’t think it exists as a distinct thing. I can’t define it. I don’t think there is any specifically religious mode of thought or feeling, or even of social organisation. But even if I can’t find the boundaries of the concept I can make a stab at the heart of it. Here goes.
Religion, in its broadest sense is the construction of communities through the manipulation of symbols that refer to or point towards something more powerful and infinitely more valuable than the individual. These symbols can be musical, verbal, olfactory, anything, in fact that we can experience and saturate with meaning.
[Gestures round the chapel] It’s obvious to anyone in this chapel what I mean; still more obvious when we have heard this wonderful choir.
Religions give us the ability to transform our own actions into rituals that point to something greater. This complex and various world of the embodied imagination is the only one in which large numbers of people can be mobilised in order to accomplish the things that only large numbers of people can do.
So, yes, I do consider that any ritually strengthened ideology is a religion, whatever view it takes on theological questions like the nature or even the existence of God.
When communities come into existence in this religious way, they will be distinct from each other, with different aims, sometimes overlapping and sometimes conflicting. Other things being equal, the more successfully religious ones will triumph in conflict. Other things seldom are equal. If you look at the clash between Spanish Catholicism and Aztec or Inca beliefs, there may have been nothing to choose between them in terms of religious fervour, but the Spaniards had guns, germs, and steel and these — the germs especially — made them masters of a continent,
Both sides in that struggle, just as both sides in the First World War, were profoundly religious. But it doesn’t follow that you can blame religion for their crimes, for the cruelty of the native Americans and the larger, more successful cruelties of the Europeans. You can certainly say that religion shaped their understanding of what was, and was not, a crime. In the case of Christianity you must point out that was a force for moderation in both conflicts, as well as force for greater violence and self-sacrifice. Christians of course commit atrocities, but they also have ways of seeing these atrocities for what they are, if they really want to.
If they really want to. The difficulty here is of course that we don’t much want to look our own behaviour in the face. Religions are instruments of collective self-deception amongst other things just as the individual imagination is – among other things – an instrument of individual self-deception. But they are that way because this is what we wanted them to be and because that is how they have been most useful to us.
Yet they are also something more. The sociologist may say that the religious ecstasy is simply an identification with the group and its aims — that between a choral evensong and a terrace full of football supporters singing vile songs about their opponents there is only a difference of degree and not of kind.
This isn’t a view that can simply be dismissed. Many of the psalms are fantasies of hideous bloody vengeance on the opposing teams, set sometimes to wonderful music, and always expressed with poetic force.
For instance, we have Psalm 18 from this evening’s readings.
I pursued my enemies and overtook them;
I did not turn back till they were destroyed.
I crushed them so that they could not rise;
they fell beneath my feet.
I beat them as fine as windblown dust;
I trampled them like mud in the streets.
People I did not know now serve me,
foreigners cower before me;
as soon as they hear of me, they obey me.
They all lose heart;
they come trembling from their strongholds.
If you were to set that to drill music today the Daily Mail would demand it was banned.
Yet there is always something more. The football-supporterish aspects of religious practice don’t capture everything of what keeps religions alive, and what in turn nourishes believers. There is also a sense, a glimpse, of something beyond time and struggle, even if it can only be reached through immense suffering. There is a sense, sometimes, of a profoundly inhuman or perhaps unnatural, some would say supernatural, perspective in which life is good in itself, and the futility and oblivion to which it is all in the long run doomed simply doesn’t matter; a sense of peace and reconciliation which stands above the struggling existence of everything in time.
This seems to me the good that religion can offer, and it’s not available in any other way. In particular, it’s not available without relationships and society, because we are social beings, who can exist only in a web of relationships. Ursula K. Le Guin, one of those people who use “religion” as a word to comprehend all the obstacles that are in the way to reaching that which the religious impulse seems to seek, wrote beautifully about this in the preface to her last poems.
“We humans appear as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes of relation to an infinite network of connections, simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or very long-lasting. A web of connections, infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything – all beings – including what we generally class as things, objects … science describes accurately from the outside, poetry describes accurately from the inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. “
These relationships inside us as well as outside, must necessarily entail conflict as well as reconciliation. Religion of course does the same. It is the largest
, if not the most powerful instrument we have to think ourselves outside of history and all its crimes and wastes and follies. But it is still made out of our dreams. It serves our selfish purposes even as it suggests the service of a purpose not our own. Without religion we would have no adequate language, no way to say the words of inexpressible sorrow on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier – “Known to God” – even if it also true that without it there would have been no war quite so bitter and so terrible for him to die in.
So, in the end, the trouble with religion is the trouble with us. If you want to purify the one, you’ll have to purify the other. Starting with ourselves.
]]>In situations where limited resources are being struggled over, it is often advantageous to belong to a team or coalition. Sometimes, team membership becomes more or less essential: consider access to modern healthcare, which is almost entirely supplied by team membership, whether the teams involved are American corporations or European nation states, or even private insurance schemes.
Religious belief is an aspect of team, or tribal or ethnic identity in almost all societies anyone has ever studied outside modern Northern Europe. So it clearly plays a role in inter-group conflicts, and so, ultimately, in the allocation of resource and status. In the light of this, I want to examine two phenomena: the spread of missionary, monotheistic religions, especially the way in which Christianity supplanted the more sophisticated and psychologically realistic paganisms of the Roman Empire; and sudden outbursts of popular interests in theology once Christianity had so triumphed.
I am not offering a general theory of religious belief or even of the function of religion in human societies. Religions serve many functions; and spread many different beliefs. The piety of a Buddhist monk does not closely resemble that of a modern Taliban guerrilla, while even within contemporary religions the modern African nun has few interests in common with the Archbishop who keeps her in his harem.
However, it still seems legitimate to ask why theology has, from time to time in human history, raised hugely violent passions far outside the restricted circles of intellectual life.
It is a commonplace that one of the advantages of Christianity as it has spread across the ancient world is that it appealed to outcasts: slaves and women, especially. I want to make this argument more precise by showing that it increased both their access to resources, and — just as important — their status within a group. The significance of Christianity in this context was that it provided a team, or tribe, or coalition, which almost anyone could join. “In xt there is neither Greek nor Jew; slave nor free, etc”, and while this was not strictly speaking true there was certainly a lot less of slave or woman involved in being an early Christian than an early pagan. The coalitions which form the traditional bases of human society are pretty much involuntary and based on birth. This may not matter in a rural or peasant setting where the family or village is the basic unit of production, so there is no advantage to changing.
In an urban situation, though, where the family is no longer the prime economic unit, monotheistic religions with clear boundary conditions provide a way for people to join new coalitions more suitable to the conditions than the ones they are born with. It is undisputed that Christianity spread in the Mediterranean world among those people who had least status in the existing coalitions, especially women and slaves.
This is not a general theory of the spread of Christianity. But I am not trying to come up with a general theory. The pattern outside the Roman Empire, for example, was entirely different. In some cases monotheistic religions spread along existing coalitional lines, without disrupting or dissolving existing social structures; but in those cases, they are adopted by elites , for perfectly comprehensible geopolitical reasons, and then enforced on subject peoples.
In this model, conversion – joining a new religious coalition or tribe – offers two kinds of advantage independent of the truth of the theology espoused. The first is that you may become a member because it conveys a higher status within the group than outside it. This need not convey any actual, material advantages, though there are recurrent features of Christianity very suited to outcasts who can be content with raised inner status – the whole apocalyptic tradition. But it is also possible, once the coalition or tribe is established that you will stay, and your children will stay, if there are more tangible advantages to being a member of the new religion.
I don’t think that religious beliefs need be held for individual advantage, either consciously or unconsciously. It is easy to think of cases where this is quite untrue, and where religious passions have done much to cause pain to their bearers, by all sorts of martyrdom short of death. But these are individual cases, and I do think it is fair to argue that religions, however they may arise, do not persist as mass movements without offering most of their followers most of the time, the best deal available on this earth.
Monotheistic Religions which have clear boundaries provide a means of team building across traditional boundaries which are not available to “pagan”, syncretic or polytheistic religions. In a traditional society, the most important thing about you is where you are born and into which networks. You’re not going to get away from those. But the monotheistic and proseletysing religions push away from that. [“Who is your mother and father?” asked Jesus. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek].
So they will spread in troubled polytheistic societies because they offer new coalitions to belong to – and these are not purely contractual, like market relationships which can at any time be revoked when a more attractive opportunity presents itself.
But what happens once the whole of a society has converted to monotheism? How can new coalitions and constellations of loyalty arise? This is where heresy comes in.
One of the minor puzzles of history is why there are sudden outbreaks of popular enthusiasm for theology. The classic example is found in Byzantium, under the early Christian emperors, when mobs rampaged through the streets, united by trinitarian slogans.
Traditionally, for example the interest of the Byzantines in trinitarian disputes — theological riots etc — has been put down to the subtleties of the Greek language or temperament. Now, I just don’t believe this. Fifteenth and Sixteenth century England was convulsed by quite similar disputes without their being any particular theological virtue to the English language or temperament. German, a language eminently well suited to metaphysics, has not in fact seen that kind of widespread popular theological enthusiasm — and whatever else the 30 years war may have been, it was not an outburst of popular interest in theology.
Another explanation is that people are crazy: why argue over the number of persons in the Trinity, or their exact relations to one another, when the answer is completely unknowable and impossible to decide from any imaginable evidence. But this explanation, or objection, needs to be turned on its head. It is precisely because theological questions have no earthly answers, or use, that they are so valuable as things to argue about when times are hard. They are pure contests of rhetoric and political skill. Theological argument supplies the hot air necessary for a balloon debate to take place and the purpose of such a debate is to expel the losers.
In situations where limited resources are being struggled over, it is almost always advantageous to belong to a team. So you would expect an interest in divisive religious questions to rise at times of economic uncertainty or heightened competition for resources. If there is not enough land in Bosnia for all the peasants, there is almost certainly enough for all the Serbs, the Catholics, or the Muslims.
Widespread popular interest in theology is correlated with competition for resources precisely because it leads to disputes and schisms. It follows that it is a form of gambling to be interested in these things: you are going to multiply your losses and your profits. But perhaps that’s the only choice. If there is to be a religious war, then one side will end up much worse off. That alone shows that a sizeable minority, at least, of the participants, are not activated by any very obvious kind of self-interest. But once one party, team, or sect has started to lay claim to particular resources, the only way for outsides to cope is either to join the winning team, or to form one of their own.
I think the idea of pure fundamentalists overthrowing corrupt elites is a special case of this, in the sense that a corrupt elite may be considered to be robbing the (poor, honest) masses of resources rightfully theirs.
This ties in with Scott Atran’s theory that it is the meaninglessness of theological statements that makes them useful indicators of sincerity. Someone who dies defending their family is less to be feared – because more rational – than someone who allows herself to be burned at the stake to defend the supremacy of the papacy.
This is a very compressed form of the argument, but I think it more or less stands up to explain what wants explaining, which is why, sometimes, whole societies understand their differences as theological ones, when at other times they don’t at all. The questions don’t change , after all.]]>An astonishingly peaceful and good-humoured crowd, 80-90% white; very greenbelt. Unlike Greenbelt, though, there were youngish people, and many in the thirties, which are entirely missing from GB. Few children, of course, though not none. The usual suspects were there: socialist worker, the stop the war coalition, momentum, even. But this was not a particularly left wing crowd in the sectarian sense.
Bumped into Name Redacted [who after all works at Chatham House] outside the National Gallery and failed entirely to recognise him. He took a picture of Claire and me – she in her T shirt that says in rather flowery copperplate script “Well, the patriarchy won’t fuck itself”. I hope to get this back from Bill eventually.
There were incomprehensible speeches delivered from from an invisible rostrum somewhere down near the bottom of the square. Screens showed a speaker we guessed to be David Lammy, but almost all the action came from the signs of the crowd around us. I never did see the very best one, which had been on my twitter feed somewhere – “I came here to drink tea and fight fascism, and now I have drunk my tea.”
Others ranged from the sincere: “Trump: I hope you get stuck on the central line in rush hour” to the self-consciously patriotic – “Feed him to the corgis” – through to the merely heart-felt: “Fuck off, you cunt-faced Muggle”
As the evening wore on the crowd became less and less self-consciously political, and more of an ordinary Friday night on a summer evening joyousness. This was middle London, if not Middle England. Yet when we had first entered the square and were pushing our way through the dense crowd in front of the National Gallery, I had had the strangest, uncomfortable premonition that this was one of those peaceful demonstrations that suddenly gets fired on. I remembered a scene from the television adaptation of the Handmaid’s Tale. I thought, mastering myself, not this time – that would be ridiculous – but in five years’ time, when people are still doing this, from a sense of duty against despair, someone is going to charge this crowd, or shoot, and it will all be drowned in a welter of violence. And if not here, in America.
When we got home, the boys wanted to know why we’d bothered and why people called Trump a fascist. I should have sent them Fintan O’Toole’s piece from the Irish Times about Trump as a “Prefascist”. But I said he had all the elements of fascism – the belief in a strong leader
, that national destiny stuff, the use of racial minorities as a scapegoat who must be purged if America is to be made great again; the subordination of legality to the will of the people – except for the glorification of war as the purifying purpose of the people. That is as yet missing, though it is present in the outer fringes, the survivalists and the KKK. It would be difficult for such an obvious draft dodger as Trump to sell, and difficult also when so many of America’s troops are black or latino and the army is so comprehensively integrated. But I don’t underestimate the ability of the US to sell itself anything.
The last period when I was obsessively thinking about global American politics was the turn of the century and then the run up to the Iraq War. In those days I used to worry about “Weimar America” emerging after the Vietnam War. That was before 9/11, when we worried about sanctions, or at least I did. After the Twin Towers the militarism of the American nation was on flamboyant display, though I would not have understood this had I not travelled in the country in November 2001. The way that people treated uniforms in public then was more telling even than the craziness of the media. Well, there’s very little of that after the long defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it will revive some time. It must. There hasn’t been nearly enough of a defeat to inoculate the country against a belief in military salvation and in an era of nuclear weapons there probably never will be. When that happens, the two waves of proto-fascism will join in the middle.
The main thing wrong with this analysis, so far as I can see, is that Trump has no party. Fascism was organised around parties, and physical membership. Perhaps this is less necessary in an age of social media. I don’t know. It’s certainly true that in Church politics, and the great schism there, physical presence has not been important to either side. The imaginary community can be constructed and maintained online. But where are the boundaries? Where are the membership cards?
]]>You learn a lot about Wolff and about Murdoch from that; you learn something about Jared and Ivanka (has Murdoch read them right?) – but by that stage we learn nothing at all about Trump. That he is a pampered boor and ignorant bully has been already established by the brutal technique of quoting him at length.
When Trump talks to an intelligent and moderately sceptical audience – people who respect his office but not necessarily the man – he has no idea what to say. His speech to the CIA, which Wolff quotes at length from the official transcript, is quite terrifying. I have heard less self-obsessed and more articulate people on daytime television. But they are not Presidents of the USA. What I think Wolff gets importantly right is in his portrait of Trump as a seducer: a man with the ability to listen to people he is trying to con, and usually to gauge their responses accurately.
This doesn’t always work. It didn’t work with James Comey. But one of the most striking aspects of Trump’s infantilism is that part of him is clearly always asking “What can I do to make you love me?”; even while another, closely related part , is ready to pre-empt rejection and say “You are completely worthless and I care nothing for your opinions”. This last, of course, is where inherited wealth has really shaped his character, by largely insulating him from the consequences of that attitude.Hence the rapport with crowds and the gift as an entertainer: he tries out whatever line falls into his head and goes with the one that gets the best response. But when he sees no need to con or to manipulate, he has nothing to say except whatever was placed in his mind by the most recent TV programme he saw: “Much of the president’s daily conversation was a repetitive rundown of what various anchors and hosts had said about him.”
The other theme in the book which is completely believable is the constant dishonesty and backstabbing of everyone involved. I loved this passage:“After the bill had been pulled that Friday, Katie Walsh, feeling both angry and disgusted, told Kushner she wanted out. Outlining what she saw as the grim debacle of the Trump White House, she spoke with harsh candour about bitter rivalries joined to vast incompetence and an uncertain mission. Kushner, understanding that she needed to be discredited immediately, leaked that she had been leaking and hence had to be pushed out.”The lying is seen from two perspectives – Bannon’s hatreds are voiced, so you can hear the personality behind them; whereas the other players, Jared and Ivanka mostly, are heard from the outside, at second hand.
“Jail was possible. So was bankruptcy. Trump may have been talking defiantly about offering pardons, or bragging about his power to give them, but that did not solve Kushner’s business problems, nor did it provide a way to mollify Charlie Kushner, Jared’s choleric and often irrational father. What’s more, successfully navigating through the eye of the legal needle would require a careful touch and nuanced strategic approach on the part of the president—quite an unlikely development. Meanwhile, the couple blamed everyone else in the White House. “Jared and Ivanka helped to coordinate a set of lurid leaks—alleging drinking, bad behavior, personal life in disarray—about Marc Kasowitz, who had advised the president to send the couple home. Shortly after the presidential party returned to Washington, Kasowitz was out.”Bannon’s reaction to that expulsion is even juicier now that we have the porn star scandal to cope with:
“Kasowitz has gotten him out of all kinds of jams. Kasowitz on the campaign—what did we have, a hundred women? Kasowitz took care of all of them. And now he’s out in, what, four weeks? He’s New York’s toughest lawyer.”Yet all those lies are, so to say, adult. They are told in pursuit of limited gains which can be accomplished. The lies that Trump himself tells are only sometimes of that sort. Often they are simply vanity covering emptiness, like his hair. And this sense of evil as a privation, an insatiable hunger, is the strongest flavour the book left me with. There is a kind of destructive instinct which is simply a hunger: a primal need to see what you can get away with; an acid which eats at weakness as if it were etching wax away. I’ve known corrupt policemen, and journalists too, who carry this hunger but the type is as old as history. Only this morning, looking through the history of the Thirty Years’ War, I came across Christoph Karl von Slippenbach, a Swedish diplomat who said in the late 1650s that
“In the modern world a convenient opportunity of injuring a neighbour and annexing territory must take the place of dreams and prophecy as indicating the Divine Will”.Such men investigate humanity by probing its wounds. Nothing but superior force will stop them. All that makes Trump remarkable is that he has never yet met a lasting, superior force. Three wives and four bankruptcies have not left him poorer. The horror and derision of the establishment has not checked his path to glory. He must feel the Divine Will leading him onwards.]]>
In principle, it is possible for these two things to be separated: people might gather spontaneously, utter words, and perform some kind of ceremony together, even if these things had never been said or done before. (Perhaps Pentecostals’ speaking in tongues is an example of this kind of thing.)Not only was the Asuza Street revival an entirely self-conscious attempt to return to the condition of the early Church; the services today are as ritualised as post-77 Grateful Dead concert. So for that matter, is an Alpha Course. Everything is done to condition expectations towards the arrival of the Holy Spirit. See also the “Was he slain or was he pushed?” passage of our church book. Then there is the dispute between Roger Scruton and Timothy Williamson, also flagged on the cover. As usual, Scruton seems to be punching where his opponents aren’t, but landing some real blows none the less. I still think that the best approach to his philosophy is through his thoughts on music.
There are concepts that play an organizing role in our experience but which belong to no scientific theory, because they divide the world into the wrong kinds of kind – concepts like those of ornament, melody, duty, freedom, purity, which divide up the world in a way that no natural science could countenance. Consider the concept of melody. Science tells us a lot about the properties of pitched sounds; but it tells us nothing about melodies. A melody is not an acoustical but a musical object. And musical objects belong to the purely intentional realm: they are sounds heard under a musical description. That meansI am particularly susceptible to these arguments as someone who is profoundly affected by music but unable to reproduce or even consciously analyse it. But even if I were able to do that to the degree that a professionally trained musician can there would still be — I think — an absolute divide between analysis and experience. I find from music that I don’t believe in zombies. There is something it is like to listen to music which is absolutely unlike anything available in the third person world. , sounds as we self-conscious beings hear them, under concepts that have no place in the science of sounds. No sound could rise from the depths as the E-flat major arpeggio rises from the depths at the start of Das Rheingold.
What I find odd is the question of whether this arises, as Scruton says, from our experience of other subjects. What effect does music have on severely handicapped babies?
]]>Byron was an egoist and, like all egoists, capable of falling in love with a succession of dream-figures, but incapable of genuine love or fidelity which accepts a personality completely. This did not prevent his writing good love poetry like Hebrew Melodies. In fact, nearly all love poetry is dream-figure poetry. Love may stimulate an artist indirectly and intensify his general vision of life; it does not often make him write love poems: their source is more commonly egoism or frustrated lust.
But Byron was not only an egoist; he was also acutely conscious of guilt and sin. Sometimes these two traits ran in harness, and their conjunction brought out the worst in him, both in his personal life and in his art; the self-conscious Satanism of his affairs, and the worst parts of The Corsair, At other times they were in opposition, and the conflict brought out the best; Don Juan and the Greek expedition.
…
No egoist can become a mature writer until he has learnt to recognize and to accept, a little ruefully perhaps, his egoism. When Byron had ceased to identify his moral sense with himself and had discovered how to extract the Byronic Satanism from his lonely hero and to turn it into the Byronic Irony which illuminated the whole setting, when he realized that he was a little ridiculous, but also not as odd as he had imagined, he became a great poet.
I discovered while writing this that the whole text of the anthology is available
, eccentrically scanned, on the Internet Archive. I doubt this is in strict conformance with copyright law: it can’t be seventy years since Auden, Lewis and MacNeice all died, to name only the contributors I recognised. But that makes it much easier to copy the delicious passage in which Pope (whom Auden thought was one of Byron’s models) explains the dynamics of modern day Twitter. Take it away, Alex:
]]>’Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
Appear in writing or in judging ill;
But, of the two, less dangerous is the offence
To tire our patience, than mislead our sense.
Some few in that, but numbers err in this,
Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss;
A fool might once himself alone expose.
Now one in verse makes many more in prose.
….
Some are bewilder’d in the maze of schools.
And some made coxcombs Nature meant but fools.
In search of wit these lose their common sense,
And then turn critics in their own defence:
Each burns alike, who can, or cannot write.
Or with a rival’s, or an eunuch’s spite.
All fools have still an itching to deride,
And fain would be upon the laughing side.
They are all catastrophes, in which the breakdown of large-scale civilisation produces a breakdown of the small structures of morality: men emerge as killers and rapists; women as tough and resourceful victims. In The Death of Grass, the catastrophe is a plague which starves most of the world by annihilating rice, wheat, barley, and all other grains. Only potatoes remain as a source of carbohydrates. In The World in Winter it is an ice age, with glaciers returning almost all the way down to London, and white refugees fleeing in boats to Africa, where they are not welcome. In Pendulum, the most dated, it is a Sixties apocalypse: Britain goes broke and gangs of “yobs” on motorbikes take over.
The breakdown of moral order is extremely well done in the first two books and genuinely shocking. In both cases there are conflicts of duty, difficult to resolve. Two brothers end up fighting to the death over possession of a potato patch. A man must choose between loyalty to the friend who saved his life, repeatedly, and to his wife who is pregnant possibly by another man. People find themselves doing things which neither they nor the reader thought themselves capable of, and we care. The scene setting is also extremely well done, especially in The World in Winter.
Pendulum is much the weakest of the three, though I still gobbled it down. Read fifty years later, it’s mostly illuminating for showing how the fears of Daily Mail readers and Brexit voters have evolved and been racialised in the intervening period. The hero is a successful and decent businessman whose wife is a bit of a bleeding heart liberal. He is loyal to his family, for whom he generously provides. The only cloud on his life is the presence of yobs from the local estates, who vandalise his outbuildings and roar about on motorbikes.
His sister in law is conducting an affair with an unscrupulous and demagogic sociologist, who emerges as the sinister power behind a movement of student revolt. The students — get this — are rioting because their grants have not been increased in line with inflation. The sister in law is a complex and interesting character, with a keen interest in sex. She sees right through her lover, but enjoys, as she later realises, being able to despise his weakness and hunger for affirmation. She also takes up with a police inspector, with whom, she thinks, she has nothing in common but limerance.
Eventually, the students and the yobs combine, as in the cultural revolution, and take over the government. The police stations are sacked and many are killed. There is a wonderful parody of a sycophantic Times leader praising this development. The police inspector takes shelter with his lover and they move out to the mansion in the country. But that has been commandeered by the yobs, and the owner’s family are confined to a couple of rooms at the top of the house.
Things get worse , in ways both predictable and unexpected. Eventually, the yobocracy is overthrown by a fundamentalist Christian uprising — this is surprisingly plausible — and the decent hero ends up in a work camp in the outer Hebrides for helping a yob whom the mob has beaten half to death. The sister in law finds a rather implausible and fragile happiness with the policeman, whose taciturn, competent pessimism turns out to conceal enormous courage and decency*.So, it’s a straight and skilful exposition of the provincial conservative worldview: hard work and providing for your family is good. Students, layabouts, oiks, and sociologists are all enemies of the people. Religion is good but impractical until it turns bad and frighteningly practical. Women are strong, resourceful and full of agency, but still dependent on a good man to love them. France is remote and hostile but America is benign and will help as much as it can.
But there’s a sort of innocence about this which I don’t see in today’s right wing press. For one thing everyone, to a first approximation, is white. Only at the end, when some characters are sunk in extreme poverty, do they come in contact with a black family, whose cooking smells. But the underclass has not been racialised at all, and class substitutes for Islam as the expression of alien cultural difference.
Then there is the aforementioned idea of student grants.
There is the way the bad times come as a surprise: no sense that the world is rigged against decent people, though there is of course a powerful sense that the world is rigged against decency itself. But that’s tragedy, not resentment.
At the end of the book there are blurbs, in Amazon fashion, for others republished in the same series. In one, a small party get trapped in tunnels under a mountain, and have to make their way for days towards an unknown exit. In another, a small group is trapped on a desert island, and must struggle against the elements etc etc. I was reminded of Robert Graves’s squib
He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits
The formula for comic rabbits paid
Alas, he found he could not change the tragic habits
The formula for drawing comic rabbits made.
“When you meet somebody who claims to be religious, ask them what they really believe. … Mock them! Ridicule them! [applause, whoops] In public! [laughter!] Don’t fall for the convention that we’re all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt.”Now, if you make a mashup of the more respectable bits of Dawkins’ speech with Minchin’s song – and this is not unfair, since Dawkins promoted Minchin in the issue of the New Statesman that he guest-edited – we get a flavour of the peculiar quality of the New Atheism:
“Science makes us see what we could not see before/ Fuck the motherfucker, fuck the motherfucking fucker/ Religion does its best to snuff out even what we can see / Fuck the mother fucker, fuck the motherfucking fucker/ So we’re here to stand up for reason / Fuck the motherfucker fuck the motherfucking fucker/ to stand up for logic/ fuck you motherfucker for a motherfucking papist/ to stand up for the beauty of reality / Fuck you, motherfucker“ da capoPut together like this, it actually makes more sense than either of the constituent parts on their own. Minchin’s song is the battle hymn of the speccy twats. His whole persona, with eyeshadow and long hair, is that of an adolescent misfit. It fits wonderfully with a comment by one of the regulars at PZ Myers’ site Pharyngula:
“Personally I don’t see what’s uncivil about saying things like “that’s so unbelievably goddamned stupid” when something really is so. Nor is there anything wrong with saying “only an ignoramus can believe crap like that”. If we put up with nonsense and idiots we’ll surely have to suffer more nonsense and idiots, and personally I think there is way to much nonsense and far too many idiots to begin with.”So what are sophisticated intellectuals like Dawkins doing in front of this crowd? One of the things that Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens contribute to this mix was the same contempt but with an Oxonian gloss. There are some things you can only teach people young, and the easy, unshakeable assumption of superiority that Oxford teaches the British ruling class is impossible to fake. Contempt and ridicule come naturally to these people, and nowadays, of course, they are more urgent because there is no real superiority behind the rhetorical manner.
“It’s very much like the reaction of Victorian bishops to Darwin. There was a certain view among Protestants, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to the effect that civilisation and democracy were progressing and that they came from Christianity. And then this torpedo [Darwin] comes from the side and they’re very upset by it. Similarly, many of the liberal intelligentsia in the late 20th century thought that we were moving towards a higher civilisation, that religion was disappearing. Then suddenly, it seems to return. So a kind of panic and anger arises. It’s the outlook of an emerging establishment that finds itself destabilised.”or you can simply say, as I prefer, that in the USA the New Atheism is fundamentalism for the college educated.
“a) “We shall descend upon them as a horde and sweep through their “museum”, documenting the foolishness and mocking the silly. b) “the Christians running this show, and the Christian attendees, are the delusional victims here. Feel some pity for them. Do not, however, forget that this is an institution dedicated to promoting lies and ignorance. Do not pull a Michael Ruse and start admiring what they’ve accomplished.”This is a remarkably mixed message, but with one constant theme: never for one moment forget that you are superior to these miserable, common, twerps. Real anthropologists, whether skeptical or not, don’t tell themselves, or their grant committees, that they are going to observe “the peculiar and pathological folkways of a backwards, intellectually impoverished people.”
and
c) “you are not a gang of hooligans planning to vandalize the place, you are skeptical anthropologists there to observe the peculiar and pathological folkways of a backwards, intellectually impoverished people.”
“He has said that ‘the scum rose to the top of the atheist movement’, that it is ‘burdened by cretinous reactionaries’, that ‘sexist and misogynistic scumbags’ are ‘not a fringe phenomenon’, and that if you don’t agree with Atheism Plus, you are an ‘Asshole Atheist’. He agreed that science fetishism reproduces the ‘white supremacist logic of the New Atheist Movement.’ He said ‘I officially divorce myself from the skeptic movement,’ which ‘has attracted way too many thuggish jerks, especially in the leadership’. “He said Richard Dawkins ‘seems to have developed a callous indifference to the sexual abuse of children’ and ‘has been eaten by brain parasites’, Michael Nugent is ‘the Irish wanker’ and a ‘demented fuckwit’, Ann Marie Waters is a ‘nutter’, Russell Blackford is a ‘lying fuckhead’, Bill Maher’s date at an event was ‘candy to decorate [her sugar daddy’s] arm in public’, Ben Radford is a ‘revolting narcissistic scumbag’ and his lawyer is ‘J Noble Dogshit’, Rosetta scientist Matt Taylor and Bill Maher are ‘assholes’, and Abbie Smith and her ‘coterie of slimy acolytes’ are ‘virtual non-entities’. He called Irish blogger ZenBuffy a ‘narcissistic wanker,’ after she said she has experienced mental illness.”One need not have heard of many, or any, of these people to understand the way in which movement Atheists love one another.
I believe that I have successfully argued for the use of torture in any circumstance in which we would be willing to cause collateral damage (p198) Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only permissible, but necessary. (p199)Is this enthusiasm? And does he think that the circumstance are such that torture is justified today? As to whether it’s enthusiasm, he admits that we may feel a certain squeamishness at the results of his reasoning; he says he does so himself. But – and this rather more important – he thinks this squeamishness, this ethical revulsion, is misplaced and mistaken.
I believe that here we come across an ethical illusion of sorts, analogous to the perceptual illusions that are of such abiding interest to scientists who study the visual pathways in the brain. The full moon appearing on the horizon is no bigger than the full moon when it appears overhead, but it looks bigger, for reasons that are still obscure to neuroscientists. A ruler held up to the sky reveals something that we are otherwise incapable of seeing, even when we understand that our eyes are deceiving us … (p198)
(p199) … the reasons for [our inability to understand that torture is necessary] are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion … Clearly, these intuitions are fallible … It may be time to take out our rulers and hold them up to the sky.It simply won’t do to say that this has been misunderstood. It is entirely unambiguous. Harris believes that there are scientific (“neurological”) grounds for supposing that his moral reasoning is correct and that we ought to be torturing people.
Fearing that the above reflection on torture may offer a potent argument for pacifism, I would like to briefly state why I believe we must accept the fact that violence (or its threat) is often an ethical necessity. (p199)Has he any particular war in mind? As it happens, yes: the war that the US was just then starting, with British help, in Iraq:
We are at war with Islam. It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran. (p 109) … No amount of casuistry can disguise the fact that the outer of “lesser” jihad – war against infidels and apostates – is a central feature of the faith. Armed conflict “in the defence of Islam” is a religious obligation for every Muslim man (p111) Islam, more than any religion humans have ever devised, has the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death (p123)And, in case you hadn’t quite got the point,
Is Islam compatible with a civil society? Is it possible to believe what you must believe to be a good Muslim, to have military and economic power, and not to pose an unconscionable threat to the civil societies of others? I believe that the answer to this question is no. (p152)In other words, we are at war, we must be at war; and in this war we must accept collateral damage, because that’s the way wars are; and if we accept collateral damage, we must also accept, and practice torture (see above).
Enter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: our most valuable capture in our war on terror … his membership in Al Qaeda more or less rules out his “innocence” in any important sense, and his rank in the organisation suggests that his knowledge of planned atrocities must be extensive. The bomb is ticking. Given the damage we were willing to cause to the bodies and minds of innocent children in Afghanistan and Iraq, our disavowal of torture in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed seems perverse. If there is even one chance in a million that he will tell use something under torture that will lead to the further dismantling of Al Qaeda, it seems that we should use ever means at our disposal to get him talking. (p198)So, yes. I do rather think that Sam Harris can reasonably be described as a defender and advocate of torture, at least when it is practised on Muslims.