Author: philipbradford

Vaclav Havel’s Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World

In 1994, shortly after becoming President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel travelled to the USA and delivered an address in Philadelphia called “The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World”. The USSR had recently collapsed and a new form of capitalism was spreading its influence over the world, connecting disparate cultures via fractal conduits of trade and migration. Havel worried that without some new narrative to paper over their differences, this abrupt connection of cultures would lead to conflict. Wars were already sparking in the Middle East and Europe and international diplomacy was difficult. Cooperation required governments to look past their own interests in favour of a more general conception of progress. People needed a unifying ideal to cleave to, which would encourage them to move with one purpose against international problems. It had to be new, because the 20th Century was an age of emancipation where people had begun to recognize the richness of different perspectives; there were protections for indigenous cultures and no single ideology of the time was strong enough to overpower all the others. Organized religion was also declining in the West, where science had replaced metaphysical explanations of natural phenomena and damaged the credibility of the religious enterprise. Havel therefore looked for inspiration in two ideas drawn directly from modern science. He called them “transcendent” in the hope they might provide us with a sense of rootedness in the cosmos and encourage us to see things from a superhuman vantage. Contemplating them would be like turning over a precious jewel in your hand, as facets become alternately reflective and transparent and expose, by turns, the dark interior of the mineral or the refulgent world around it.

The Ideas

“…Because it’s not enough to just live. You have to have something to live for. Let it be Earth.”

Admiral William “Bill” Adama – Battlestar Galactica.

The first of Havel’s transcendent ideas is the Anthropic principle, which was developed originally to help explain a puzzle in cosmology. By the mid-twentieth century, astronomers had discovered that space was accelerating – the universe did not appear to be in a steady state – and they knew that the heavy elements essential to life had been created gradually in stars through a process of nuclear fusion. They also knew that stars have finite lives – that they burn up and out, cooling over time – and their propensity to harbour life in rocky planetary systems diminishes as the universe ages. It follows that carbon-based life forms like humans could not evolve if the universe were significantly older or younger than its present age. Moreover, it suggests that we find ourselves looking out on a cosmos at an auspicious moment1, a kind of island of habitability where conditions are conducive to life.

The Anthropic principle – or the observation selection argument – says it is natural the universe should be the age it is, since if the universe were significantly older or younger there would be no sentient life around to notice. The same argument can be used to explain why the universe’s physical laws appear to be fine-tuned for life. The various forces and species of matter are related in a very particular way. Were the relative strengths of the fundamental forces slightly different, not only would life be prevented from evolving, but there would be myriad other effects: heavy elements would not be able to fuse in the furnaces of the stars, the structure of atoms would dissolve and the universe might expand too fast or collapse too early to allow life to develop.

In summary, the Anthropic principle says that it is necessary that life forms should observe a universe which operates in a state and at a time propitious for life. Havel felt this tautology might accord humanity a special place in the universe. He observed in his Philadelphia address that:

“…from the countless possible courses of its evolution the universe took the only one that enabled life to emerge.”

In other words: since we are here, privileged to be able to look out at an otherwise sterile cosmos, one might conclude that the purpose of the universe was to produce life on Earth – perhaps, even, to produce humankind2.

It is an arresting thought and like many others I find Havel’s formulation of the Anthropic principle attractive. But there are also some important philosophical objections. By suggesting that the universe was meant to produce human life, Havel follows in a long line of philosophers who try to lend humans a noble position in the hierarchy of things. Strictly speaking, however, one might follow the same line of argument and infer that the purpose of the universe was to create rocks – or puddles. In The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams joked that a puddle might look up at the clouds which disburse rain, then at the numerous puddle-shaped depressions in the ground and equally conclude that the benevolent purpose of the universe was to produce puddles.

I can think of a further, more fundamental objection, which is that it makes no sense to define the purpose of everything there is. Teleology makes no sense with respect to everything – only between two or more things. That is why humans invent Gods to lend meaning to everything they can see – but the logic is faulty, for in positing a God, we have ignored the original problem, which was to explain everything instead of just a part of everything. Asking what is the purpose of everything is therefore meaningless. If modern scientific theories are correct, and humans developed naturally out of the interstellar medium, then human purpose can only be understood in terms of the rules that brought them into being and which govern their development. Purpose only makes sense without a maker if you have a mechanism like evolution, where the rules of the biological system determine how the system will play out.

Havel’s second transcendent idea is the Gaia hypothesis. Introduced in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, Gaia theory says that the Earth is maintained in a state favourable to life by a series of negative feedback loops. The whole of the Earth – atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere – can be viewed as a single, self-regulating system that holds the temperature and chemical composition of the Earth’s surface within limited bounds. The idea was prompted by several observations3: for example, that the biosphere is able to withstand tremendous shocks from volcanic eruption or asteroid impact, that the temperature of the Earth’s surface has been largely constant for billions of years despite increasing solar luminosity and that the atmosphere is maintained within a state of high thermodynamic “disequilibrium”4 (i.e. reactive gases like oxygen and methane are constantly replenished5).

Lovelock illustrated his idea with the Daisyworld model, where a planet is inhabited by two different species of daisy – one white and the other black. Daisyworld is experiencing a period of global warming, caused by the brightening of its parent sun. The white daisies reflect sunlight, cooling the planet, while the black ones absorb sunlight and heat the planet up. Their growth rates are assumed to depend solely on temperature and neither daisy can survive in excessive heat or cold, so the populations reorganize themselves, as the sunlight intensifies, so that the temperature remains comfortable. The daisies are therefore able to stabilize their environment without conscious intention. Lovelock proposed that similar (though much more complex) feedback mechanisms of biology and chemistry have been active on the Earth throughout its history. If there is a significant perturbation in living conditions, then the balance of biological populations will adjust to compensate. Havel put it like this:

“[Gaia] theory brings together proof that the dense network of mutual interactions between the organic and inorganic portions of the earth’s surface form a single system, a kind of mega-organism, a living planet – Gaia – named after an ancient goddess who is recognizable as an archetype of the Earth Mother in perhaps all religions. According to the Gaia Hypothesis, we are parts of a greater whole. If we endanger her, she will dispense with us in the interest of a higher value – that is, life itself.”

The Point

In his capacity as playwright and politician, Havel was trying to generate a narrative anchor that would inspire people to work for the general good of the planet. In a way, his argument is a humanist response to nihilism. Like Nietzsche, he is striving to impose meaning on a meaningless world. This may sound absurd (it is absurd) but there is nothing strange or laughable about it. Humans are compelled to weave their own struggles into stories so that they can make decisions about the future. We can understand this with an analogy:

Imagine you have designed a species of biological robot whose sole purpose is to pass on its genetic programming to future generations. The robot lives as part of a group in order to increase its chances of survival and procreation and therefore needs to consider its own needs and to weigh them against those of other individuals in the group. Since there is no absolute purpose to their lives beyond the continuation of their genes – and because you cannot hard-code a response to every imaginable crisis – you program the robots to make decisions based on the problems they can see around them. They build these problems into abstract narratives, which place the robots in the context of the problem and shut out all the extraneous noise of the universe. In this way, the tremendous complexity of a real-life problem is reduced to a simple, idealized case. The process is similar to building theoretical models in the sciences.

It seems to me that humans have developed like this and we use narratives like this. When faced with global problems, we invent stories which involve all of humanity in a struggle against those problems. Difficulties arise when other humans (most of us who do not work in international relations) have their own troubles that resonate louder than the global narrative. These might be because day-to-day survival is more important, or simply because an individual cannot picture themselves in a global context and chooses to pursue personal goals instead. Looking at recent progress in tackling climate change, it is clear that we cannot easily make a global narrative more urgent in the mind than a narrative of nationhood, race, or personal gain6. Inventing an inter-planetary or inter-species war would probably be the most expedient way to overcome our differences – something akin to the plot of the Battlestar Galactica television series, Watchmen or The Three Body Problem. The tragedy – if one can call it that – of our isolation is that the only enemies we can find, now, are other humans.

Notes and Further Reading

  1. In this context, “moment” refers to a span of several billion years…! ↩︎
  2. Although the non-avian dinosaurs – whose own evolutionary aspirations were so rudely curtailed at the end of the Cretaceous period – might have something to say about Havel’s anthropocentric philosophy. ↩︎
  3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/gaia-hypothesis ↩︎
  4. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01969-y ↩︎
  5. This can be contrasted with the atmosphere of a dead planet like Mars, which is static and composed almost exclusively of inert carbon dioxide. ↩︎
  6. J. Diamond, Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change, Penguin Books, 2020. ↩︎

Prisoners of Progress

From Modern Elfland by G. K. Chesterton

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Human technological and military advances are locked in a perpetual striving for improvement that can never end except by mutual agreement. It comes down to a problem of trust: can you rely on your neighbour not to continue their research and either outcompete you economically or threaten you with physical attack? Military expansion is not, therefore, just caused by a few belligerent generals. It responds to a strategic problem that – in the absence of trust between parties – forces countries into a permanent state of escalation.

This question of trust appears in a whole range of leadership scenarios: in the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, in the tension between the state and the market and the coordination of an international response to climate change. All of these situations can be recast in terms of the “prisoner’s dilemma” – a thought experiment in game theory – where two rational people can cooperate for mutual gain or betray their partner for an individual reward. The cycle of hostility can only be broken through cooperation or total domination of foreign parties.

Unfortunately for the human race, many of the major threats to its existence hinge, now, on its ability to coordinate internationally. This is difficult because sympathy and understanding must bridge cultural and historical divides. Worse: technology has now reached a point where the consequences of one nation’s actions have world-spanning consequences. As Asimov observed in the twentieth century, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by Brazil would destabilize the climate of the entire Earth.

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“Invisible even in a telescope magnifying sixty times, even in purest summer sky, they drifted idly above the glittering Channel water. They had no song. Their calls were harsh and ugly. But their soaring was like an endless silent singing. What else had they to do? They were sea falcons now. There was nothing to keep them to the land. Foul poison burned within them like a burrowing fuse. Their life was lonely death, and would not be renewed. All they could do was take their glory to the sky. They were the last of their race.”

J. A. Baker, Peregrine [1]

All technology relies on a localized imbalance that can be leveraged for material advantage. Consider monocultures, where large areas of land are given over to the intensive cultivation of a particular crop. In the interests of efficiency and short-term yield, the farmer replaces a mix of many species with just a single variety. This technique works, provided natural systems of renewal can continue to function outside of the area under management. Once the disturbance becomes more general, however, the existing biological system will start to break down. Success relies on the technology remaining a localised – rather than a global – disturbance. If the imbalance becomes general – if the disturbance spans the entire system – then a crisis is necessarily triggered.

The world has always been finite, but only now that human industry has surpassed a certain critical size is this reality noticeable. Like Uroborus of the Greeks or the Norse Miogarosormr [2], our appetites have grown so large that they compass the world. The biosphere is engaged in new kind of auto-ingestion, where we consume processed foods and supplements and bi-directional digital media is integrated more and more invasively into our bodies and minds. But there are other products of industry which find their way inside us accidentally: detergents, pesticides and agricultural run-off seep quietly into our rivers and seas and the kilter of gases in the atmosphere is warped by the products of combustion – not enough to affect our ability to breathe, but sufficient to alter the climate and the growth rate of trees.

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“We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene.

Assuming that it did not just appear one day fully-formed, as an emergent property of consciousness, morality must have developed by some statistical rule of survival. Morality would therefore have grown naturally out of a process of Darwinian selection, like the rest of our bodies; and since they have an important influence on how we behave towards other animals, moral principles must mirror the mathematics of game theory, which is the mathematics of interpersonal relationships.

In The Evolution of Cooperation, Robert Axelrod used computer algorithms to study how morality might be naturally selected. The algorithms competed one-on-one in successive bouts of a game called the prisoner’s dilemma. In the game, two players are given the choice of cooperating with one another or defecting. The players are isolated, so their decision can’t be affected by knowledge of the other’s choice. If both players cooperate then they will receive a reward and if both defect they will be punished, but if one defects and the other cooperates then the defector will receive a more significant reward than if both parties had cooperated. So there is a temptation to defect if your opponent cooperates, but a punishment is incurred if both parties defect. Axelrod’s rules of quantitative reward and punishment can be seen in the “pay-off matrix” below [3]:

Each of Axelrod’s algorithms were programmed with different moral principles – different relationship strategies – which determined to what extent they would cooperate or defect. Two algorithms would play the game a set number of times and their cumulative scores would be recorded before a winner was declared. Algorithms would also be able to make decisions based on the outcome of previous encounters. For example, they might be programmed to defect if their opponent defected in the previous round. Remarkably, Axelrod found that the algorithms which were most successful in large tournaments (where each algorithm would play against many other algorithms over a long period of time) tended to possess the following four characteristics [4]:

(i) They would be “nice”, which means they would tend to cooperate and never be the first to defect.
(ii) They would be reciprocal, or retaliatory. They would return defection for defection, or cooperation for cooperation.
(iii) They would not be “envious”. They would try to maximize their own score, rather than try to keep their score higher than their competitor’s.
(iv) They would not be too obscure or scheming in their approach. They would have clarity of strategy to encourage cooperation.

In effect, he found that “altruistic” strategies were more successful than “greedy” strategies.

Axelrod’s experiments were simplified zero-sum scenarios1, but we already have evidence that cooperation is a more effective social survival strategy than selfishness, because humans are cooperative and other social animals are too. Chimps, gorillas, whales and various birds exhibit emotional behaviours that closely mirror our own. They appear to be capable of experiencing emotions like grief and love; they have their own social hierarchy and sometimes can even recognize the social hierarchies of humans. What we are finding, then, is that our emotions and even our morality grow naturally out of physical and mathematical laws rather than automatically from the spark of human consciousness itself – they develop in animals with strong social relationships because survival in groups promotes a certain type of behaviour.

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Technological progress is much easier to define than progress for humanity as a whole. Where technological innovations enhance the speed, scope, power or efficiency of a machine, their benefit to humanity can only be assessed subjectively, according to context. Often it is difficult to say whether a given technology represents a genuine step forward because (i) its implications must be determined for many people in diverse scenarios before you can say with any certainty what its impact will be on humanity as a whole, and (ii) certain of our human needs are in conflict with one another, which means a technology that is valuable in one scenario may be useless or even damaging in another.

Using a machine to reduce your burden of work isn’t automatically a good thing. Though kitchen appliances and washing machines have saved many of us from lives of crushing drudgery, it is also clear that humans aren’t built for leisure alone. Too much free time breeds neurosis and the experience of genuine hardship – physical or mental – is the source of many human capacities we admire. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell writes [5]:

“The truth is that many of the qualities that we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain, or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain and difficulty. In books like The Dream and Men Like Gods, it is assumed that such qualities as strength, courage, generosity etc., will be kept alive because they are comely qualities and necessary attributes of a full human being. Presumably, for instance, the inhabitants of Utopia would create artificial dangers in order to exercise their courage, and do dumb-bell exercises to harden muscles which they would never be obliged to use. And here you observe the huge contradiction which is usually present in the idea of progress. The tendency of mechanical work is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard.”

Now that many of us do live in technological Utopias where material difficulties are slight, we find that there is a peculiar loss of meaning in our lives. Dangers must be manufactured; we consume increasingly violent and exaggerated forms of passive entertainment; and instead of using our muscles for work, we exercise to look good, or simply because it is healthy – even though we know it is less spiritually nourishing than constructive work. All this in a society that has seen decades of technological “progress”.

Thus the debate about human progress continues, with one side citing huge improvements in the security of ordinary people, and the other a decline in quality of life brought about by these same changes. We have academics like Steven Pinker who undertake large-scale quantitative assessments of human wellbeing and conclude that we have never had it so good. Then there are thinkers like Havel and McGilchrist who contend that – despite the huge material advances we have seen in recent decades – there is something deeply unsatisfying at the heart of our 21st Century techno-bureaucratic utopias.

It seems that once the basic requisites of human survival have been fulfilled, it becomes more difficult to say whether new technologies are truly useful. It isn’t even possible to say in what way a new technology will change us. What is the value of a light that is activated by voice? Is it the same for a member of the public or for workers from a specialist field? Common sense suggests not. What is the value of a machine that thinks for you, eats for you and moves for you? Again, common sense is required to identify the type of scenario where the technology might be applied advantageously. Often the question is more about who should use the technology, rather than the intrinsic value of the technology itself. If our human natures are so disposed that we cannot use a particular technology wisely, then it should not be used. The difficulty is how to establish this in advance.

Determining the benefits of a new technology to society is further complicated by human psychology. We find ourselves driven towards opposing goals like excitement and security, or work and leisure, where fulfillment of one goal conflicts with fulfillment of the other. Our brains try to resolve this paradox by employing “common sense” – a kind of implicit knowledge of where to stop – because we have impulses that are simultaneously hard-wired and ineluctably opposed.

The tension between our needs and desires is what makes the praxis of government so difficult, but it also provides fuel for the eternal battle between Luddites and technophiles. Once you have used technology to satisfy the fundamental needs of a people, your attention necessarily moves onto needs or desires further down the hierarchy of importance. And these needs – depending on the situation – may not truly be needs at all. In some cases, your satisfaction may be unnecessary or even dangerous. And identification of a desirable desire is rarely straightforward. Some things are good for you even if you do not want them, and so there is a confusion between things you “want”. On one level you want to eat the chocolate and on another level you want to be healthy, or to be the type of person who can resist temptation. Orwell felt that, as technology becomes more advanced and ubiquitous, it would be harder to reconcile these two types of desire – the desire to solve a problem mechanically and the desire to become a better person by working through it yourself [5]:

“Barring wars and unforeseen disasters, the future is envisaged as an ever more rapid march of mechanical progress; machines to save work, machines to save thought, machines to save pain, hygiene, efficiency, organisation, more hygiene, more efficiency, more organisation, more machines – until finally you land up in the by now familiar Wellsian Utopia, aptly caricatured by Huxley in Brave New World, the paradise of little fat men. Of course, in their day-dreams the little fat men are neither fat nor little; they are Men Like Gods. But why should they be? All mechanical progress is towards greater and greater efficiency; ultimately, therefore, to a world in which nothing goes wrong.”

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The advance of technology, while opening up new possibilities for power, also modifies the skills of human individuals. We have no objects in the modern world as beautiful as the netsuke of the Japanese, or the wine bowls of fourteenth century Syria. Skills are lost, and with them the awareness – the “sense ratio” [6] – that allowed these artworks to be produced. Though the human creative impulse cannot be killed, its expression can be stunted or changed. Digital word processing tools replaced letraset and now AI is replacing computer-aided graphic design. At every stage, there is a reformulation of technique. It is a corollary of McLuhan’s idea that different types of media alter the balance of our senses. While it is probably impossible to say whether the CAD revolution was a net gain or a net loss for humanity, it is clear that it will have changed the way designers think and see. This is the objection of the Chinese sage [7] who warned their peasant followers against the irrigation of crops by mechanical means, because they recognized that using machines begets a certain type of mechanistic thinking.

Recently I spoke to a scientist who designed several diagnostic beamlines on the Diamond synchrotron. She recalled how, at the start of her career, she was forced to learn about how every aspect of a beamline worked – all the instruments, measurement techniques, all the beamline physics – in order to build them. Now, she said, you can buy more advanced equipment directly from private companies. This is much easier and allows her students to focus on different questions – questions of science more than engineering. They use more sophisticated tools to advance a different species of knowledge.

Notes

  1. In Game Theory, “zero-sum” games are where, if the total benefits and total losses to each participant are added up, the sum will be zero. ↩︎

References

[1] J. A. Baker, Peregrine, p. 123

[2] J. L. Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, Vintage, p. 150, 2002

[3] R. Axelrod and W. D. Hamilton, The Evolution of Cooperation, Science, 211 (4489): 1390–96, (1981)

[4] Wikipedia, Prisoner’s Dilemma. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

[5] G. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Penguin Classics, pp. 179-181, 2001

[6] M. McLuhan, Understanding Media, Routledge, 2001

[7] As Ref. 6, on pp. 69-70. McLuhan quotes from Werner Heisenberg’s The Physicist’s Conception of Nature.

Sympathy for the Devil

Araneus diademata on the Camino near Astorga. Taken 28 October 2021 with an Apple iPhone.

Human beings are all biological machines, though our functions are not wholly determined by the reproductive purpose that shaped us. Individually, we are all more or less deficient and more or less unique in our needs. Indeed our “needs” cannot even be comprehensively or objectively defined. Philosophical advice, therefore, can only ever be approximate and good philosophy – like good literature – can be quite general, but never definitive.

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Sometimes our spirit is just a “bad kiln” and the whole act of life is a sort of compromise1. But even in this absurd predicament, the human animal can still find moments of clarity – of bliss – that it plucks from diverse sources and holds by way of compensation. Since we are all working with different raw materials, it is instructive to write out your own maxims – as Marcus Aurelius did in his Meditations – and return to them regularly. This will serve as a reminder of how to live well and push you closer to the Tao.

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James Lovelock proposed that the Earth’s biosphere acts as a single organism to regulate the temperature and habitability of its surface. Tolstoy’s view of history was similar, where individuals – even those with the stature and force of character of a Humboldt or Napoleon – play unwitting roles in a greater, more general flood of human activity, governed by myriad invisible forces. Looking at humanity as a kind of superorganism, we see that the vast majority of people – those who cannot usefully contribute to the fight against global warming, or the relentless exploitation of the world’s resources, or any of the other major threats to civilization – would do better to stop worrying and focus on their life at measurable scales. Attending to tangible, small-scale decisions gives us a sense of personal value and benefits those close to us. You can volunteer in an art or conservation group, get involved in local support groups or school governorships. If more people decide to “sweat the small stuff” and really engage in their immediate environment, we may find that the bigger picture looks after itself. Only when you have mastered the small things that you have real control over should you move onto generalities. As Voltaire famously observed, il faut cultiver notre jardin.

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Many of us do not pay sufficient attention to the reality of what our life means to those around us. We fixate on the frightening stories projected by our portable computers and we go to great lengths to isolate ourselves from our surroundings. In Oxford, it is now more common for me to see students running or walking with headphones than without; and fast, efficient vehicular transport is everywhere privileged over the long, meditative dérive. In the past, religions like Christianity would encourage regular self-scrutiny. On a weekly or even daily basis, priests would remind their errant congregations that they were being supervised by an eternal, lidless eye and that their actions would be weighed accordingly. Having lost our belief in the metaphysics of religion, we have thrown out many of the rituals that travelled in tandem, including the useful habit of looking at our actions from “outside”.

The Self has insinuated itself onto the altar recently vacated by God and human interests have been allowed to eclipse all other considerations. We idolize certain characters in literature and art, but rarely think about how people would react if they could watch our own lives, as though we were the hero in a story. Would they admire my strength or wisdom? Would they view my actions with approval? Why not? In trying to answer these questions, we can better appreciate our own significance. You may be shocked to discover – as I was, on reflection – that you are not a particularly good person.

As religion’s hold on young people has waned, other stories have grown in influence, playing on similar themes. Walk into a public viewing of The Return of the King and you will see that the cinema is packed with young men of the most diverse extraction. All will be deeply conversant with the script and the screenplay. Some of them may reach such a pitch of excitement that they quote the script out loud, along with the film; others are absolutely silent, their faces rapt, eyes glittering, as they follow the Madonna-like figure of Liv Tyler and squeeze the hands of their terrestrial girlfriends. Watching these films is a form of communion for these men. They idolize Aragorn and Faramir – noble characters with wide appeal – and their response is subconscious, absolutely religious and animal.

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Is there any reason why religious rituals cannot be resurrected for atheists? I would argue that watching a sermon by Rowan Williams or Malcolm Guite is just as valuable for me – a secular atheist – as for a true Christian believer. And reading one of Williams’ essays or poems is just as illuminating, just as moving. It is interesting to wonder why modern attempts by de Botton and Grayling to secularize religious teachings have met with little success. Is it a failure of concept or execution? Could it be bad luck? Perhaps it would be better to just go and skeptically participate in religious services, arm-in-arm with the faithful.

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Losing touch with our physical environment makes us vulnerable to errors of judgement. Part of this is linked to our obsessive consumption of digital media, which turns other people into categories and isolated soundbites. If all we have to work with are journalistic reports, then we tend to become interested only in a person’s ideological identity, as McCarthyists, communists and Catholics were in the past. The Twitter user does not debate with humans: they engage in skirmishes with “TERFs”, or “woke” people. But these terms (so often incorrectly applied) are distortions of reality. Bellow observed that people who watch lots of television derive their observations ready-made, packaged by somebody else. This is dangerous for common sense, because it is predicated on the human context, on specificity and texture, which cannot be communicated via newsprint. Common sense develops rather through action and direct enquiry. The loss of this intuitive mode is damaging to thought. Einstein said2: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift”. I think we see this in the absurd and totally disproportionate vilification of J. K. Rowling. Her views on transgender rights – expressed with the utmost respect and careful moderation of tone3 – are misrepresented by some as a form of physical violence or taken as proof of an irredeemably flawed character. There is much that can (and should) be said about the scape-goating and straw-manning of Rowling, but for now it is interesting simply to note that, had these frothing critics met Rowling before her views on transgender issues became public, they would – unanimously, I am sure – have declared her the very model of a wise and decent person.

Sympathy is easy when you live online: you can virtue signal with black squares or little rainbows whilst having no genuine feeling for anyone who disagrees with you, or for the person down the road with a distasteful opinion and a life loaded with extenuating circumstances. For good evolutionary reasons, most of us are generous to people we know, or to strangers that do not threaten us. Most people also harbour exaggerated opinions which can be massaged into softer, less virulent forms through conversation. This is not evident if you have never spoken to a stranger, or spend all of your time listening to podcasts.

If all you can see of a person is 280 characters, then your opinion of them is necessarily reductive. Without serious conscious effort, your brain will extrapolate that person’s entire character from one comment on a single issue. You will become a snob, in other words. And because their comments live on in cold characters immutable, you cannot assess the person’s level of conviction. You do not know if they have changed their mind, you cannot catch their ironic smile, or the spark of humour dancing behind their eyes – all these details that are automatically and subconsciously interpreted during a conversation, which we use to inform our emotional response. Presumably this is why, in an era of near-ubiquitous video conferencing, government diplomacy is still conducted in person.

The greatness (and goodness) of individual men and women is a fairly static quantity when averaged across time and culture. In The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow’s eponymous hero unashamedly places the brilliant, crippled Jewish property magnate William Einhorn in the same league as Caesar, Machiavelli and Ulysses. Augie says:

“It was him that I knew and what I understand of them in him. Unless you want to say that we’re at the dwarf end of all times and mere children whose only share of grandeur is like a boy’s share in fairy-tale king’s, beings of a different kind from times better and stronger than ours. But if we’re comparing men and men, not men and children or men and demigods… then I have the right to praise Einhorn and not care about smiles of derogation from those who think the race no longer has in any important degree the traits we honor in these fabulous names.”

If your point of departure is that your interlocutor is stupid or evil then you will understand nothing about your point of view or theirs. Why? Because if you assume that their opinion is a natural concomitant of faulty brain chemistry, then nothing can reasonably be done about it. Chances are that you will go further and illogically assume that their stupidity/iniquity proves you are correct. Suppose instead that this person is averagely good or averagely reasonable and you will find they generally have a good reason for holding the opinions they do. This is because we are like machines – we have errors of input and errors of computation – and like all things we obey laws of averages. Chomsky has brought up the same point in the context of scientific enquiry4. He observes that finding the right question is equivalent to finding a fruitful way of looking at a problem, which means that finding the right question takes you a long way on the journey towards a solution. The crucial point is to look at some physical phenomenon and not just assume that it is obvious. Deciding that an apple falling from a tree is a surprising fact rather than an inevitability may lead you down a path of inquiry that eventuates in new knowledge.

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Machines are fallible. Humans are fallible. When making a decision about what to think or do, we carefully weigh our personal experiences against the opinions of others. There is no absolutely general way of doing this, which is probably why the faculty never evolved.

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In politics, straying too far from the middle – in any direction – always leads to ideological inconsistency and disaster. Why? Perhaps because our human needs are in conflict with one another5. Perhaps also because rules of government must function on average to be successful. Our needs and desires sit on scales that we measure against the reality of our own lives. In politics as in literature, we use our own experience as a yardstick. We want autonomy, but not too much. We want support, but excessive support is impractical and counter-productive. Rules are developed (ostensibly, at least) so that a maximum of people experience a minimum of discomfort.

Now this “middle path” of politics may seem a rather insipid, toothless goal to strive for: we all know that we should tolerate others, try to question our own opinions, maintain a degree of skepticism… But it isn’t really, because many of us do not truly apprehend it, nor do we always vote for it. There is a world of difference between knowing and understanding. Ethical ideals must be weighed against the exigencies of life and experience is needed to harden knowledge into understanding. We are all of us like the birds in Attar’s story, who travel in search of their King, the Simurgh, whose name means thirty birds. Borges describes how a host of bird-pilgrims journeys through seven valleys or seas on their way to the Simurgh’s castle6: “the next to last bearing the name Bewilderment, the last the name Annihilation.”. Most of the pilgrims desert or succumb to the rigours of the journey. In the end, however:

“Thirty, made pure by their sufferings, reach the great peak of the Simurgh. At last they behold him; they realize that they are the Simurgh, and that the Simurgh is each of them and all of them.”

+++

Footnotes and References

  1. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, Penguin Modern Classics (2001) ↩︎
  2. James Lovelock and Bryan Appleyard, Novacene, Allen Lane, pp. 20 (2019) ↩︎
  3. J. K. Rowling, J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues, http://www.jkrowling.com [Last Accessed: May 2024] https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/ ↩︎
  4. Noam Chomsky, Asking the right questions, YouTube [Last Accessed: May 2024] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGs-4h0wQj4&list=LL&index=2&t=2231s ↩︎
  5. I will discuss this point further in my next article, Prisoners of Progress, which examines our relationship to technology. ↩︎
  6. Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, Vintage, pp. 130-131 (2002) ↩︎

Reluctant Messiah

First of all, there’s no theory. In fact, I don’t know of any theories in the social sciences… I don’t think the term ‘theory’ should be applied to fields as intellectually thin as the social sciences… Theory is very different from understanding. We live our lives often pretty successfully without any theories about other people… There [are] very few areas of human life where there’s anything that you might call a theory. Even in biology, when you get very far beyond big molecules it starts to get pretty descriptive… In the world of human affairs I don’t think there’s much in the way of theory. I think the message you’ve got to take is use your sense… Look at history… Break through the propaganda images. Remember that the institutions are trying to indoctrinate you… Keep that in mind. Compensate for it. And if you do these things I think you can get as good a sense of the world as anybody has.

N. Chomsky, The New World Order. Recorded speaking at the University of Maryland (30/12/1998).

A boom surged over the reedbeds. The marsh harriers hesitated, their long, cruciform bodies suspended for an instant before they resumed their heavy-winged hawking. A treecreeper stopped on the trunk of a yew, absolutely still, then whipped suddenly back into life like a glitch in the great cosmic video feed. Another boom was heard. This time a general pause descended as the birds recognized the ancient call to moot. It was a signal given traditionally by the bittern, but none of the other birds had seen him for years. The heron said he had followed the swallows south and would never return. Others thought perhaps he had been caught by a fox or crushed by a plow. But the bittern had been an important figure, once. Even the crows and the owls begrudgingly admitted that he was worth listening to on selected topics.

And so it was that the birds started to gather in a circle around the stump of an old oak. A grasping, clutching wind lifted beneath a canopy of cloud. It tugged at the birds’ soft plumage and whipped at the reed heads, writing strange, shifting glyphs into the water beneath. Some of the birds started to mutter anxiously amongst themselves: would he really come? Was it not rather a foghorn they had heard, carried here from the coast? But by now the birds were too numerous to be mistaken, so they waited impatiently for the bittern to appear. It was two minutes to six. The setting sun fled into the west beneath a bruise of purple cloud. Then suddenly a shadow detached itself from the body of the reeds and the bittern was there, water dripping copiously from the base of his jacket.

The bittern stalked swiftly and awkwardly to the middle of the circle. A bird of retiring disposition, unaccustomed to the gaze of other animals, his frame bowed beneath their scrutiny and the weight of their expectation. When he reached the stump, however, he stood very tall, his striped neck longer even than his body, his beak thrust like a sword-stick over the congregation. His inscrutable fish-eyes picked out the starlings bobbing on a telephone wire above him, then the bright-breasted finches, tits, stippled falcons, squat and mottled drakes that formed his audience on the ground. Nervous laughter bubbled from rooks in a nearby hawthorn. The bittern cleared his throat and the sound was like the crackling of cigarette paper on a cold day.

“I have lately walked abroad. I rode in foreign vehicles, spoke in foreign tongues and afterwards I flew back over our native isles – famed for their great wealth but full of the poor and hungry, the hungry and the poor… It was not so, abroad – wherefore then this paradox? Are we not a proud and noble people? Did we not recently win this land, so rich in life and resources, from the clutches of tyranny?

“As I flew, I saw how decades of Austerity has bankrupted our towns and wrung the vitality from its people. Water. Energy. Public transport. Security. The Postal Service. Healthcare. Education. Management of the prisons. Everything privatised or monetised! Rendered flimsy and mean.

“They say that government must be weak and local government weaker: only then can business be done. And when they have total freedom these businessmen say they must bow to the forces of an unfettered economy, which represent the truest aspects of avian psychology. I say, but are they the best? They say these economic forces – these dictates of Mammon – cannot be circumvented. I say they contradicted themselves when they took an axe to our institutions and its government. They say we are rich – just look at their balance sheets! I say look at France and Germany, then look at the corpses wandering our streets. There are holes in our roads and the futures of our children.”

“We try to nourish ourselves on images of the past, but the images look ridiculous, screen-projected from collapsing walls. They will not save the tourists from disappointment. England is become a gang of pallid, tracksuited waifs marauding through a driverless, conductorless, late-running, two-carriage train on a voyage to nowhere. It is become the echo of a scream. New housing developments empty of amenities – void, therefore, of community – glide plangently past the windows. The poverty of imagination, the stench of ugliness is everywhere.

“Where is our shame? We cannot feel shame for things we do not see. The other train passengers are captivated by screens, their eyes mirrored in surfaces smooth and iridescent as an oil-slick, headphones piping an alternative present straight into their ears. Stuck in the long queue for a ticket machine, sitting on a soiled and broken chair, eating a muffin made by a 3D printer, there is always Netflix. Thus have the enervating winds of technology and the free market stripped the wealth from our society and atomised our communities. Never in the history of this country has the ordinary person been so alone and consequently so impotent.

“In the midst of this nightmare, a General Election approaches. Yet Labour is without charismatic leadership. Why this matters so much to the electorate is clear as newsprint. Over years in opposition, Labour grew demoralised, purposeless and desperate to please; then, faced with flagrant lying on the part of the government, they became self-righteous too. This unfortunate combination has made them vulnerable to media pressure, causing them to swing erratically from one position to another on contentious issues like transgender rights. The result is that Labour has become associated with the the illiberal liberal élite, embittering a large proportion of the British working class against them.

“On the other side of the benches, the Conservatives endure. Probably the least imaginative of the major parties, they continue to pump public money into their own businesses, devastating society at large and destroying the institution of government. While they may appear more resistant to media opinion than Labour, their own concessions to Trumpian electability produced Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. By refusing to be held accountable for anything, they have allowed the stupidest, most venal members of their party to entrench themselves in government and in the Lords. Ironically, they consider this evidence of success.

“Somewhere in the centre, ignored by all, lies the still-living corpse of the Liberal Democrats. At the level of public political debate they do not even exist. In this way, the power of the market, through its influence on the media and the thinking of the electorate, has eroded government competency to a critical point.

“Our country therefore lies poised for a new party to bring forth a new political method. Its ministers will be the disaffected members of other parties and its supporters will come from every corner of the land, every echelon of society. At first, our focus will be exclusively on ideas: the praxis of government and the problems facing our people. Only with an iron grip on policy can we haul ourselves above the media mêlée. Modern political debate is a game of name-calling and myth-making, but against the clarity we will bring this will become irrelevant. We reject all comparison with previous political ideologies because we want to borrow ideas from any source. We will not pretend our answers are immortal or universal – they will be expedient; appropriate to time and context. Thus will we befriend Sufis and scientists and birds of every imaginable colour. We will come with fresh eyes to the problems of the world and through discovery we will advance, fording the river stone by stone.

“Our focus on ideas will confer two further advantages. First, immunity from labels like Conservative and Liberal will allow us to borrow soldiers from the ranks of the other political parties. If we are to succeed – to rule ourselves, or to bring other, worthier candidates to power – we will need the expertise of those already in government. These refugee parliamentarians will be united under a principle that transcends them. Instead of grappling with each other, they will fall on problems like electoral reform, overpopulation, education, greenhouse gas emissions, recycling… Gradually, organically, they will find brotherhood in the excitement of discovery. Second, by focusing exclusively on policy rather than ideology, we will elevate the overall level of political discourse. We will become the bar against which other parties are measured.

“I spoke to many people during my travels and listened to their problems. They were hungry for answers… Truly, they were like children! And at the end, as I turned to go, in a pleading voice they asked: ‘But what can we do…?’ And what they meant, of course, is: ‘Give me an answer – reassure me that the experts will do something.’ But I cannot. No one can say precisely what form the solution will take, if indeed it arrives at all. I can only point to precedents, where groups of people have banded together and, after long and arduous struggle, changed laws or systems of government. There never has been a shortcut to change or an easy substitute for collective action.

“We have among us an army of young professionals who are cynical about politics, but their lives are too easy to impel them to change it. Convenience has not just liberated us from the drudgery of everyday tasks: it has made us passive, anxious and wounded our sense of personal significance and meaning. From this position, then, if you have a brain but know little about the structure of power, change seems impossible. Only by walking out of the door, across the field and over the next hill will you realise that it is up to you – it is your duty – to fall on top of a solution. This does not mean that everyone needs to become a climate scientist or a politician – but we must start to talk to each other again, find solutions as communities.

“Let me address them directly, these young people who still secretly believe love and happiness are their birthright: go listen to the waves pounding on the rocks beneath the pier; spend an afternoon in a home for the elderly. Gaia will endure with or without humanity. We are a dream passing over the pale blue film of Her mind’s eye. Now that Her climate is warming, it is likely that there is nothing to hope for except a noble end to our civilisation. We can take the Ouroboros as our emblem – a metaphor for all societies with the power to produce more than they need. To die suffocated by our own greed… That is the prospect before us now. Perhaps it is the fate of all higher forms of life.”

Gradually, the twilight took on a foreboding depth. The starlings flickered like marsh lights on the telephone wire overhead, illuminated by their portable electronic devices. Raindrops crackled on fallen leaves and plunged headlong into the reed spears. A sussuration grew until it washed away the meaning of the bittern’s words and only the faint sound of his voice was left in the darkness at the centre of the circle. The birds crowded close and listened as best they could, but the bittern, unseeing, continued at the same volume – his voice converted into a kind of static interference.

The Limits of Art

Pseud’s Corner?

Light Red Over Black. Two dark rectangles under an orange bar, hanging in a scarlet void. Black below orange, above brown. The black is burning, bordered with blue, pullulating at the edges. An oblong wedge of anthracite, so hot that its fringes lose their definition and sublimate into the carmine deep. You have the impression that your own eyes are losing focus. Your grip loosens and you drift upwards again.

Brown below, black above – but the black is too uniform. It is Yin. Is there enough? Anxious eyes range over the near-emptiness. The insanity of a perfectly smooth, white wall. Gratefully, they find texture in the brown. Hanging fabric in an endless fire. Heat of the end of the world. Sun setting over a dead land. But there is movement in the silence. The motion of inanimate things. A car tail light descending into a littoral of tarmac. And flickering over all the deadly heat of an iron bar fresh from the forge-fire. Unyielding, unmerciful. The Governing Principle exposed, briefly, before the ego reasserts itself.

The Matter

Lewes is the county town of East Sussex, cosy home of artists and “makers” in the affluent south east of England. We are walking towards Harvey’s Brewery, past Tesco’s sham cathedral and the exposed endoskeleton of a new housing development. Under the Phoenix Causeway bridge, some young product of the bourgeoisie has defiantly rendered “ART HAS NO RULES” in bold, irregular capitals. Apparently a nose piercing and penchant for anime was not enough: they had to try their hand at graffiti too. Now we all have to suffer this non-statement whenever we take the scenic route into town.

Obviously if there are no rules then there is no art and no argument. Art must obey rules, even if it is sometimes difficult to agree on their exact number or the manner of their expression. We can start from a dictionary definition. In the English and French languages, then, art is:

“…the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” [1]

“…the making of objects, images, music, etc. that are beautiful or that express feelings.” [2]

“[l’é]xpression d’un idéal esthétique; ensemble des activités humaines créatrices visant à cette expression.” [3]

“Chacun des modes d’expression de la beauté.” [3]

Some of these definitions involve beauty, while others simply state that art is the physical expression of an emotion. Taken in its most expansive, dilute and inclusive form, art therefore needn’t be beautiful nor require any great technical skill to produce. It is this vision of art, otherwise known as conceptual art, which is in the ascendant. Since the emphasis is now on “ideas” rather than a physical product, appearance and execution are subordinated to the artist’s “intentions”. Essentially the late-stage metastasis of political correctness and inclusivity politics, it allows anyone to identify as an artist whether or not they are actually capable of making anything themselves. Often the word “conceptual” is deliberately confused with “cerebral”, insinuating that if you don’t see anything significant in a turd then it is somehow your own fault, either because you haven’t appreciated what the artist was trying to achieve (requiring you to read the foot-long gallery text, written in desperate and meaningless jargon), or because you are a snob who is denying someone’s human right to be perceived as a “creative”. When the onus is entirely on the viewer to appreciate an artwork, there is no way to distinguish between art and any old object, an artist or a charlatan. But now we are flying high, way above the Turbine Hall. What seems to be keeping conceptual art alive today, at least in the public sphere, is exceptionally humble and can be found in an ordinary conversation in an ordinary context: a café, or perhaps better a botanical garden, with big band music floating over pigtails and dungarees. The argument goes something like this…

Bourgeois Dialectic

Two Morlocks debate a difficult point of philosophy.

Proteus: Wonderful how the Eloi have so many outdoor events: free activities, music… They are a very culturally sensitive race. You can feel that they really value their traditions and invest in beauty for beauty’s sake – which is great – even if it makes them a little vulnerable to their own bullsh*t.

Pangloss: I don’t know that art is better appreciated here than in Morlock-land.

Proteus: Sure it is…! Try going to a vernissage. Everyone is there: young and old. It is a serious social event. They have a party with a DJ. They like to consider things intellectually. But there’s a lot of sh*t over here too. Art, I mean. There’s sh*t art everywhere, but maybe there’s a higher tolerance for it here.

Pangloss: I’ve seen a lot of good art over here.

Proteus: Well there is an awful lot of terrible guff too. Feeble daubings on the lids of wine barrels…

Pangloss: It’s not necessarily bad, though. There is that painting… It’s just a red square. I think it’s by Rothko. Or Malevich. Thousands queue to look at it.

Proteus: Granted, but you can’t compare something like that – a square – to the Mona Lisa. There just isn’t enough there.

Pangloss: I don’t know… You can look at a red square and feel a powerful emotion.

Proteus: Yes, but you can look at a flag or a kitchen utensil and feel a powerful emotion too. I think there is a minimum level of complexity required for something to be suggestive. Otherwise you can just say anything is good because a certain person – perhaps a highly intelligent, sensitive person – managed to look at it and extract something of emotional aliment.

Pangloss: I disagree. If someone scrunches up a napkin and calls it art then it’s still art. It’s their art.

Proteus: That doesn’t mean it merits being called art. I could pluck a turnip from the ground, put it on a plinth and call it art but it doesn’t make it good and it doesn’t make it art.

Pangloss: It sounds like you want all artworks to be beautifully crafted and highly complex, but you can have simple art too.

Proteus: Of course. Art doesn’t necessarily need to be intricate – you just need a sufficient degree of complexity and aesthetic quality. That is what creates depth. It is the same with poetry and music: too pure and the thing is ridiculous. You cannot compare a red square to Mozart. It’s more like John Cage’s 4’33”.

Pangloss: Hah! “Sufficient”…

Proteus: Well, you can never make the thing quantitative. The problem with your argument is you want me to demonstrate a perfect set of seven rules with fixed definitions. And if I can’t deliver them then you say I shouldn’t make any judgements at all.

Pangloss: It’s you who wants to be quantitative because you want to make rules about what is and isn’t art. Look at science: there are infinitely many ways to do it. There are some scientists who construct grand theorems after years of study and then there are others who just fall over a discovery in the lab.

Proteus: That’s not an equivalent situation at all. The guy who discovered graphene discovered graphene. It doesn’t matter how. You are essentially insisting that if I can’t say this piece is 20% better than that piece and there is a cap where art begins at 30% of a Mona Lisa then I can’t say if anything is art or not.

Pangloss: I wouldn’t want to ban art that I don’t like. Going back to the scientific analogy: some scientists just scrape some numbers off the floor and put them in an article and publish them. I hate that sort of thing but I wouldn’t want to block them from doing it.

Proteus: Sure. Fair enough, but they don’t get published in reputable journals because the quality isn’t good enough. You have to apply some standards. There is the arXiv online repository where you can publish anything you like, but we all agree that publishing on arXiv is no evidence of a paper’s value because there is no peer review process.

Pangloss: Well, I think there’s room for all types of art. I love looking at really complex paintings with lots of layers of detail. I can lose myself for hours. But sometimes I’m happy to just look at something simple too. If there are thousands of people who love to go look at Malevich then how can you say it is bad?

Proteus: If hordes of tourists go to look at some blank canvas or virtually featureless red square by Malevich then it is more likely because it’s exhibited in a big, important gallery than because it is actually good. Sometimes the cognoscenti are just wrong.

Pangloss: Hahaha! You want there to be just one man who says “This is good”, “This is bad”, “That is not art”…!

Proteus: Well clearly that isn’t actually how it would work. People make quality judgements about art all the time. If you want to get into the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy then your work must first be judged by a panel of experts. If you want your work in an ordinary gallery then the gallery owner first appraises its quality and then decides how it might fit into the rest of the works on display. The problem is that there are now lots of people who share your opinion that no matter how fatuous or non-existent the composition the thing can still be called art. A scribble by Tracey Emin, for example.

Pangloss: How can you judge that the people are wrong?

Proteus: Well frankly, if we reach the point where, in all seriousness and honesty, the majority of people say they get more out of contemplating a red square than the Mona Lisa, then I think we have reached the end of civilization.

Pangloss: The Impressionists were considered not to be real artists in their time. They were banned from exhibiting in salons.

Proteus: There is a clear difference between the level of intellectual and technical accomplishment inherent in a Monet and a turnip on a plinth. Although, it is important to add, not one that can be quantified… I agree that it can be important to push the boundaries of an art form. You can do it with novels, we see it in architecture, but there is no guarantee that what you produce when you have pushed out the boundary is any good.

Pangloss: Well I agree that I hate a lot of modern architecture too. I sort of agree with what you saying. Basically you would like an ideal world where everyone is highly educated and appreciates looking at art. Then the quality of art would increase.

Proteus: I suppose, yes. Sort of. Perhaps “highly sensitized” rather than “highly educated” per se, but yes. That is what we are aiming for as a society after all.

Pangloss: I just don’t think you can say that a red square isn’t art. It annoys me when I see the millions of dollars made by Marvel films, but it is still art.

Proteus: The old Marvel vs Bergman problem. Well… I suppose it’s just another example of how the number of people that like a thing aren’t always a good indication of whether it is good or not. A certain degree of knowledge and sensitivity is required to appreciate a work of art. Popularity is also a function of cultural pressures…

Pangloss: I hate Marvel. Marvel is close to where I would say it is not art.

Proteus: I would probably call it sh*t art. Or propaganda. So you accept that there is a boundary where art ends?

Pangloss: No. I think there is really bad art, like Marvel, but you can’t say something isn’t art.

Proteus: You want there to be no rules. But if there are no rules then your definition is meaningless. Art is everything and nothing.

Pangloss: There are rules. Art should be created by man and intended to elicit an emotional response.

Proteus: Two rules then. Okay. But not enough to distinguish art from a turnip on a plinth, or political propaganda. You think that just because the rules cannot be written in stone then they do not exist. But the rules of art are like rules of morality. I agree there is a grey area at the extreme ends, where exceptional crafts might be called art. There is always this fuzziness… Well we’re not so far away from each other, perhaps. We just disagree on-

Pangloss: …Whether something should be called art or just bad art.

Proteus: Yes… Not so important I suppose.

Pangloss: No.

Afterword

And lo, our spade has struck ideology: a sprawling subterranean belief system responsible for much of the flimsy nonsense present in galleries and degree shows today. Conceptual art may have been born as people tested (sometimes ironically) the limits of what art could be, but it now survives in the middle class consciousness primarily as an extension of inclusivity politics. Anything labelled “art” is art and there is a general reluctance to call out bullsh*t in case someone is offended or it was made by a “disadvantaged” person.

The first, glaringly obvious objection to conceptual art is that it would be better rendered in essay form. Indeed it often is, if you compare the length of time people spend reading gallery text these days compared to actually looking at the artwork. Writing down their ideas would force the artist to confront the subject seriously, instead of settling for something easy that is visually and spiritually unsatisfying. Calling an artwork “conceptual” is often just an excuse for mediocrity.

Physical craft is an important – possibly essential – element in the creation of art. Humans have old brains and nervous systems. If this ever ceases to be the case, and we start to merge significantly with technology, then we will no longer be human and the whole purpose of art will change. Plastic artworks are made compulsively, as a sensitive reaction, and craft has always been integral to the process. This is partly because the limitations of the medium breed inventiveness – they add sensual information to the artist’s neural palette – but also because the artistic process is non-linear. The artist improves gradually as they grow familiar with different media. Beauty isn’t disgorged spontaneously by a timeless soul; there is constant feedback from the words on the page or the paint on the canvas.

When the observer is asked to focus more on an idea than a physical object, not only does the point of art start to evaporate but the frame risks becoming more important than the art itself. Even the fact that the object has been placed in a gallery can be seen as an achievement. It is certainly true that context is important in the perception of art. One thinks immediately of the work of Andy Goldsworthy and Antony Gormley, or the social experiment where virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell busked in the New York metro for forty three minutes with virtually no recognition from the public. Clearly the exhibition space and psychological state of the observer has some influence on the impact of an artwork, but it would be ridiculous to say that a blank canvas suddenly becomes valuable because of the context it is exhibited in.

In the “hipster” corner, support for conceptual art probably comes from a misinterpretation of Eastern philosophy. Well-versed in self-help literature and long-form, toothsome podcasts, hipsters are (at least superficially) familiar with a whole host of Eastern-inspired principles and craft techniques. There are wabi sabi, sashiko and kintsugi, which emphasise the beauty of the passing of time and material imperfection that builds narrative texture in objects. Taoism and Zen Buddhism try to teach people to appreciate the beauty of finitude and limitation, or how to convert the “dross of the workaday world… into sheerest gold”, as Enderby-Burgess memorably put it. They show that all manner of things can be beautiful or poignant – even the very simple or mundane. The crucial point, however, is that these ideas are supposed to apply to ordinary objects rather than works of art. The appreciation of imperfection, as an observer, is opposed to the artist’s personal striving for excellence. This is the difference between contemplating a plastic bag and watching the plastic bag sequence in American Beauty. Both can be meaningful, properly considered, but only one of them is art. It also helps us to distinguish between the baffling, shapeless ceramics peddled in high street candle shops (sorry – homeware stores) and authentic Japanese raku bowls. Both are examples of craft objects, but where one is the product of a skilled artisan who has left small imperfections as a kind of visual accent, the other is a lazy attempt to make money out of shoddy workmanship.

Tolerance1 of conceptual art is (perhaps unsurprisingly) common among science graduates and the comfortably Left. These people generally have greater technical nous than aesthetic sensitivity and they assert that, because they personally know nothing about art and one’s emotional response is anyway subjective, nothing negative can be said about an artwork. But there is an asymmetry here: they label your judgement too hasty or extreme – insufficiently plural – when moments later they mount their own excoriating critique of the Game of Thrones series finale, or something else that they personally find aggravating and worthy of derision. Essentially they are not really interested in art, so they don’t try to engage with it. But this is just philistinism disguised as egalitarianism and anti-snobbishness.

Another common pitfall is to confound the subjectivity of art criticism with identity politics or freedom of expression. This means that if someone has a political grievance then they are automatically an artist – independent of technical ability. Criticism amounts to an almost visceral attack on this person, who must be protected on account of the depth of their conviction, exceptional neurosis or underprivileged personal background. Perhaps the tired old truism bears repeating: you can respect a person without accepting their point of view.

It isn’t kind to defend an artist’s work if it is manifestly cr*p. It will not help them to improve or contribute anything to the zeitgeist. Obviously there are times when it is considerate to hold one’s tongue and offer some choice words of encouragement. It is, however, disrespectful and patronising to defend appalling work because you think the artist should be protected, or you are afraid of committing thoughtcrime. Paying to go and see it – much as going to see the latest Hobbit or Marvel film in the full knowledge that it will be terrible – is a tacit signal of approval to the rich and cretinous who rule the contemporary art world.

  1. I say “Tolerance” rather than “Love” because there are few people sufficiently passionate about conceptual art to consider actually buying it themselves – to hang in their own homes, for example. ↩︎

References

[1] Oxford English Dictionary.

[2] Cambridge English Dictionary.

[3] Le Robert French Dictionary.

Further Reading

Will Self has written an entertaining short essay called I Know What I Hate (An Excursus), which was first published in:

L. K. Jones, A Hedonist’s Guide to Art, Hg2 (2010)

It can also be found here: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/self/I-know-what-I-hate1-3-11.asp

Advertising and Filters in Perception

We are going on a dérive. The oyster-lamps of Bordeaux are glowing pink and silver-green over the quais. Beneath my feet the Garonne races quietly inland, massive and mud-coloured, folding creamily around the piers and then away to join the black nimbus of sky. It is late, but the pont de pierre is still busy with couples heading into town. Some talk animatedly and stride with purpose towards their goal; others are taut, more alert to your gaze, half-expectant. Restless and a little dizzy in the heat, I hope to lose myself under the trees of la rive droite. At Place Stalingrad a young man eases insolently past, his headphones ostentatiously proportioned, incongruous against delicate waves of hair, the soft skin around his jaw. They seem by turns terribly secure and terribly vulnerable, these headphone-wearers, cocooned in a stream of sound. They have replaced their journey with a diversion, with better prospects, with self-improvement, piped straight into their ears. I have the surreal impression that I have been replaced too. Filtered out. I do not really exist. I am become a kind of wallpaper.

People are more or less unique depending on how you scrutinize them. If you examine someone closely, talk to them a little, they may well appear singular in character or appearance. But should you choose a coarser filter – just their gross daily perambulations – they become shallower, more uniform and predictable, less important. Like in physics, where different mathematical models are needed to capture the behaviour of systems at different spatial or temporal scales, so human interactions can be treated at different levels of complexity. With the correct choice of perceptual filter, a human being can be extruded into a set of speeds and oscillations. When I arrive at a hotel in a new city, believing myself free, I am quickly ensnared by the local geography. My movements become more predictable, determined by the shortest distance to the local metro station or grocery store. From above, I can be seen running through grooves in the city architecture – channels of low potential. Perhaps you cannot predict exactly where I will be moment-to-moment, but you might start to build a statistical picture, even use this picture to manipulate me.

Our conscious awareness has natural frequency filters, just as our eyes are only sensitive to a certain range of electromagnetic frequencies. Walking through the countryside, my attention tends to rest at small and medium scales. I notice birds, certain insects, cloud formations. I have a dim awareness of plants and trees… Bird calls may transport me further afield, but my knowledge of geology is poor and the wider context is often overlooked. A geographer or local historian would have the intellectual tools to interpret features in the landscape which are physically larger or vary more slowly. They could point to links between stone and soil characteristics, associate the shape of hills with our industrial past (e.g. chalk pits or old lime kilns). They could probably assimilate things that I would not even see.

I remember watching a family wandering around Ashdown forest shortly after the pandemic. The sky was grey and lachrymose. Rain came reluctantly and vertically from a luminous belly of stratus. There were Dartford warblers in gorse on the other side of the valley and goldcrests down by the river. The family passed in front of me, chatting and laughing in a loose train – all except one of the daughters, who was absorbed in her mobile phone. She followed in the wake of her elder relations and would only look up for the briefest moment to avoid walking into something or to take a photo of the scenery. Her surroundings were always perceived via a screen, like a Chinese teen in the National Portrait Gallery. There is the same three-second choreography: a half-second to register the scene, the phone is raised as intermediary, the camera is engaged, a photo taken – and already her back is turned and she is walking away…! Head lowered and ears insulated from unforeseen distractions. Even liberated from the smartphone, I wonder how much this girl would have been able to extract from her countryside experience? Her parents probably hadn’t given her the tools to take anything except the minimum of wonder allotted to all human beings when faced with the superhuman and the beautiful. No one’s fault, as such. Just unfortunate.

On the other hand, teenagers are famously difficult to impress and our interests evolve as we age. Even now I might arrive in a multi-storey hotel and explore nothing except the route from my apartment to the common room and the exit. I am happy to exist like this for weeks at a time, but I have friends whose restless curiosity drives them to examine the full corridor and all the floors. They will know the floor plan, the plumbing, the history of the experimental nuclear facility next door and the times the wild dogs are most active in the evening. The security guards, the ladies who prepare our meals, the national spirit and national spirits are all swiftly and ruthlessly incorporated into their vision of the world. These friends of mine – these people of exceptional capacity – they are hard to tie down. Sometimes I liken them to angels, speaking in a language that can only be approximated, appearing briefly on the road, ministering, advising, then off again on their own private crusade, leaving behind them gifts of fading embers that we cannot read. I wonder if an officer in Napoleon’s army might have reflected similarly on how a military campaign can be mobilized by the will of one man, the force of character required, but also, perhaps, the complicity of others around them and eventually the formation of a personality separate from the man himself.

Standing (as I once did) in the lobby of Henri-Coandă airport, every muscle scolding, head fugged with sleeplessness and the soot of small-time aspirations, a sense of elation dawned that I was about to return to France, but also that perhaps no great things can be achieved without serious struggle – and perhaps I have to make a choice between the uncomfortable and the comfortable. When you work with these men and women of great internal stature, you can feel the rules creaking – they apply pressure at the edges of our small certainties to make space for their ideas.

Another headphone-wearing Frenchman angles past, eyes averted. How do I appear to these people? Am I a shade flickering at the edge of their awareness? What about in England, in Morlock-land, where public spaces are tightly packed and there is meagre, perfunctory support for local government – would these EarPod introverts see the potholes, the cracked bus shelters? Would they interpret these things as an economic necessity? Would they really feel the deprivation?

The headphone-wearing pedestrian deliberately rejects reality in favour of entertainment – usually a podcast or musical stimulus – that is divorced from the process of travel. In these moments they are no longer citizens in the same way – they exist separately from their immediate surroundings and join the mediaverse. They become, perhaps, an element in the great global smoothing of ideas – the force that levels traditions, particularity, and cultural asperities – embracing a monoscape of cafés serving coffee in the same aseptic surroundings, with Tolix chairs, crass tattoos and tumbling tropical houseplants.

Self-indulgent cynicism, you say? Armchair sophistry? Perhaps so. Clearly headphones help you to learn on the move or enjoy a musical digression, they can save you from rampant advertisements and the speechless drudgery of the daily commute, but if the action of covering your ears becomes ingrained then you have already started to fall off the world, to lose your grip on the parquet floor. The inveterate headphone-wearer renounces their citizenship because they choose not to engage with their environment and the people in it. It is the first duty of a citizen to notice. Looking at the appalling reality of the dilapidated station platform and then savouring your discomfort without artificial distraction or aural analgesic is an essential ingredient of political engagement. People rarely act to right a wrong unless they are personally wounded. Let the boredom mellow. Stop reading about what other people think. You will find that your own thoughts rise like vapour into the vacuum. Specious justifications for selling off public spaces, citing “unprecedented” economic challenges, will cease to be convincing. Your curiosity will engage, and you will lock into the running flywheel of experience. You may catch the arrival of the first swifts in April and marvel how their screams are thrown sideways by the sonic envelope of an approaching tram; a confusion of whooping, strangled cries may lead you to a hidden corridor of greenery between terraced houses, where a sparrowhawk beats its wings in a tumult of gulls and jackdaws.

I remember passing through Paris on New Year’s Day, when I decided to try to walk around without consulting my smartphone. Suddenly my long list of objectives shrank to just one: locating the Seine (from which point I knew I could find my way around). The day was overcast, so my eyes keyed into small details like the shape of trees, the flow of pedestrians and traffic – anything that might help me orient myself as I groped slowly southwards. I took eccentric side streets and was kindly advised by an old lady in a shop that sold chocolate Florentines. I spoke to the Florentine-seller himself, who quietly suggested I ignore the old lady and continue on my original bearing. Not knowing where I would end up, I took the time to scrutinize the graffiti I passed, the façades. I started to build a mental map of major roads. I gave myself up to serendipity and accepted that I might have to settle for a restaurant that was there rather than a restaurant that was good value or well-regarded. There was no “wow” fatigue, such as you get when wandering around certain national monuments, where five Egyptian sarcophagi may be ranged side by side, succeeded closely by a hundred Greek and Roman statues. I absorbed impressions slowly. They were digested. If we take a more playful attitude towards exploration, maybe we can avoid an over-concentration of footfall in popular places – achieve a temporal and spatial smoothing of flux.

Similar to the way the urban fox has physically diverged from its rural cousins, humans that live in big cities are forced to adapt to new “survival” pressures. Our intelligence has made us more flexible than foxes, so the shape of our skulls remains the same regardless of where we live. It is rather the shape of our minds that changes. Where a countryman might be free to let their awareness roam unchecked over sights, sounds and new acquaintances, city dwellers must resist a thousand daily attacks on their attention. Even walking under trees on la rive droite of Bordeaux, finding the tranquillity to form three contiguous sentences as part of my internal monologue is difficult. I tread over lights – absurdly bright – recessed into the ground. Like the arboreal moths which will find it impossible to traverse without becoming disoriented, so my thoughts are interrupted repeatedly by the intensity of the light. The frequency at which the lights have been placed become superimposed on the frequency of my thoughts. Poor urban design is a violence against the mind of the individual. Ugly buildings should not be tolerated any more than buildings that pollute.

Why do we allow our attention to be exploited in public places? Compare the metro systems in Prague and London: in Prague, the platforms are completely free of advertisements, the walls are generally uncluttered and you can leave the metro almost as refreshed as you entered it; in London, however, every square inch of the metro has been sold off for product placement. Travelling down the escalator portals, walking to the platforms, waiting for a train, seated inside the carriages – at every stage there are billboards selling sex, supplements and fast fashion which drag terribly at our attention. This visual bombardment is made worse by noise – produced by the roughness of train wheels and track – which can exceed 100dB on some lines. The psychic friction born out of these audiovisual distractions is converted into brain fug and a reluctance to engage with our surroundings. We would not tolerate an audible beep or periodic electric shock designed (yes, designed) to annihilate our train of thought – so why advertisements?

Typical view during an Easyjet flight, where promotional material is pasted to the back of every seat down the length of the cabin.
Perfume advert placed as close to eye-level as possible.

On the Personal Use of AI

A Cumulus humilis homogenitus cloud forming over the Centrale Nucléaire de Golfech. Photo taken near Moissac on 23 September 2021 with an Apple iPhone.

Dialectic for Four Physicists

This post was written after speaking to a number of professional physicists who now use ChatGPT to complete certain language-based tasks. First, an excerpt (not-too-faithfully reproduced) from one of our conversations:

X: “Haha! Christ… Now Z is starting to understand why I hate Grammarly…”

Y: “Why do you hate Grammarly?”

X: “Because it infantilises us. You just need to learn how to spell, how to construct a sentence… The adverts are ridiculous: they ‘interview’ people who have English as their first language – whose job it is to draft emails or write reports – and these people gush about how Grammarly corrects their spelling and completely re-structures their syntax. They should be ashamed…!”

Y: “I use it all the time. Otherwise I can read the same sentence ten times and it still doesn’t make any sense.”

X: “It’s probably better to use Word, which just corrects spelling and prompts you when you’ve made a grammar error with a blue line.”

Y: “I think it’s fine as long as you’re just using it to check what you’ve written.”

X: “Yeah, but the effort of trying to compose the text yourself is useful. It is exactly the same principle as when you were writing your PhD thesis: the thesis has no intrinsic value as a book in itself – nobody reads it except maybe two or three beleaguered doctoral students. The entire purpose of writing it was to help you pass your viva. The thesis is designed to shape your mind, to streamline your ideas in preparation for the final oral exam. Writing the theory section forced me to confront important details I had succeeded in glossing over for three years…”

Z: “I would rather do science than spend all my time writing about it. I used ChatGPT to write an abstract for [insert conference acronym here] last week. I just gave it a list of all the things I wanted to say, it wrote the text, then I checked it and sent it off.”

X: “God… But if you use ChatGPT to draft things all the time you will start to lose the ability to do it yourself! Writing an abstract gives you an opportunity to reflect on what you’ve achieved and its real impact. Sure, you can probably travel a little way with just the bullet points, but building syntax is important. It’s part of how we think. They say that the best coders are those who grew up with computers because they practically had to build the computers themselves, they were involved in all the fundamental stages of its development, the hardware, early internet…”

Z: “You don’t have any evidence for this!”

X: “Of course I don’t have any statistics or convenient examples. No one has studied this stuff. But there’s lots of evidence for losing skills if you neglect them. My handwriting is terrible because I have spent the last few years coding and drafting most of my writing on a computer. And if I used ChatGPT to generate all of my French emails then in a couple of months I wouldn’t be able to write them properly. I would lose part of my vocabulary.”

Z: “True. But you actually want to learn French…”

X: “It doesn’t matter whether I want to do it or not – it’s a clear example of how our skills atrophy without practice. And even if you don’t like writing it is still an essential skill. There are plenty of people you meet who will say ‘I have no interest in maths’, or ‘I have no interest in politics’, but these things are still important to understand. It’s why we educate our children. They need to be able to think critically if they are going to be free, which means they need to learn how to read properly and do basic calculations even if it bores them.”

Z: “Yes, that’s true, but obviously I wouldn’t allow children to use ChatGPT. They would have to write their own essays until they become adults.”

X: “You are an adult – in fact I am speaking to three adults with physics PhDs – so you are in the highest echelon of educated people in the world and yet you are using an AI to write English for you and even little bits of code. I don’t think there is an age at which we become immune to the seductions of technology. Maturity helps, but we are surrounded by people in thrall to their mobile phones. Just having the option is often too much temptation. I use Google to get instantaneous translations when perhaps I should just sit and think for a few more minutes. And in ten years, when society is collapsing and the owls are dropping from their perches, I think we will look back and shake our heads at how people could have been foolish enough to rely on computers to do everything for them.”

Z: “Now you’re straw-manning me – who says society is going to collapse!?”

X: “I’m not. And anyway, it is collapsing now…! The climate is literally in free-fall and our society will suffer if people lose more of their fundamental skills to computers.”

Z: “AI could help us with these things. ChatGPT is a super-powerful way to make sense out of huge amounts of information.”

X: “Yeah, that’s true. Obviously ChatGPT is a formidable tool. Maybe it could help us solve some huge problems, but people shouldn’t be able to use it for trifling things that they should be doing themselves. It’s not to say I don’t see the difficulty here: it won’t work to say that only certain people are allowed to have access to ChatGPT. It’s a question of education. I expect there are also a multitude of inane and thankless jobs that can and should be automated – even if these jobs have probably grown out of prior technological revolutions. Perhaps there are some problems that can only be tackled with an AI, but really the fraction of the human population dealing with this type of complex problem is very small.”

Z: “I still don’t want to waste all my time writing abstracts for conferences! I am more efficient as a scientist if I use ChatGPT to do the boring stuff that I am not interested in doing.”

V: “And before computers we had to do all our integrals by hand…”

X: “Efficiency is rarely a good justification for anything. At least, not in the way it is usually defined. It’s like when we choose between a lawn mower and a scythe to cut the grass. Everyone uses a lawn mower because it is more “efficient”, but it is hideously noisy, violent and composed of hundreds of components made from exotic materials. A scythe is often much better: it requires a human to do physical exercise to wield it, there is a technique to learn… Even the fact that it takes longer can be beneficial if it allows you time to think, to escape into quietude. It may seem more efficient to let ChatGPT write your abstracts, but it is actually robbing you of time spent on a useful activity.”

“As for the integrals, it’s much better when you know how to do them. At work, the head of my lab is practically the only person who still can and it is incredibly useful to have a feeling for what they mean.”

V: “But X, you told me the head of your lab is a maths genius…”

X: “He is! But the integrals aren’t all that difficult in themselves – not all of them, anyway. You’re right that there are moments when it is preferable – even necessary – to reach for your computer, but we do it too much. There is a middle path, where we think carefully about when we should be using them. It shouldn’t be a reflex. Going back to efficiency, look at Dyson’s much-vaunted hand-driers: when I was last at Amsterdam Schiphol I saw a little girl in pigtails walk out of the toilets with her eyes screwed shut and her hands clamped over her ears! It was perfect crystalline proof of how abysmal the design of these machines is, even if they dry your hands in ten seconds and everyone considers them marvellously efficient…”

The Great Leveller

On further reflection, having spoken to a data scientist friend who has started to use ChatGPT to help him draft code:

Fellow pilgrim and distinguished visitor to La Halte de Larressingle, in Larressingle. Photo taken at 21:04 on 26 September 2021 with an Apple iPhone.

Using ChatGPT to write code risks catapulting you out of your intellectual depth, making it harder for you to personally progress even if you appear, superficially, to be completing assignments. This means you become increasingly reliant on the AI for a creative solution and may begin to feel bored – even redundant. The practice develops at first because it means that people with little real experience or training can quickly start to do work that would ordinarily be beyond them. In the short-term this seems valuable, but eventually it prevents people from developing the deeper understanding required for real innovation. Later, it will probably lead to a rapid turnover of disillusioned workers that employers will (erroneously) cite as evidence that ChatGPT is needed to maintain productivity in a fast-flowing and capricious labour landscape.

I have seen this effect in universities, where students naturally want to “succeed” and feel pressured to get the best grades possible to distinguish themselves from their legions of peers. These students quickly resort to the Google search engine rather than accept that they do not really understand and should appeal to a professor for guidance or simply accept a lower grade. Then as they rely more on the internet for “prompts” and the course content gets more difficult, they lose confidence and become reliant on it. There is genuinely only a vanishingly small percentage of students who are immune to this effect and they are only immune because they are brilliant.

This is also why there is little point (from the point of view of improving humanity) in using an AI to produce art and why it is extraordinary that architects and so-called “creatives” are dedicating so much time to Midjourney, even if the output is frequently breathtaking. Creating art is beneficial in large part because of the effect it has on the artist. Making art is, in fact, a compulsion. It forms you, because learning and growth are non-linear feedback processes. People who become interested in Midjourney are not artists in any meaningful sense, willing as they are to exchange all the joy of craft for an outcome that they played only the most incidental part in creating. It is doubtful that half of them have more than a rudimentary understanding of how to balance, or lead the eye into, an image and Midjourney will not help them to develop these skills. So it has proved with the revolution in digital photography, which enables people with even the most impoverished technical and artistic nous to photograph a goldcrest in darkness at five hundred yards, with perfect resolution of rain-flecked feathers and claws, but without an atom of drama or sensitivity in their composition. Another triumph for democracy, whose importance cannot reasonably be denied, which produces, however, a near-endless photo-montage of no artistic value whatever.

The most spirited defense of AI technology usually comes from the highly intelligent, well-educated, affluent minority who have identified how AI can be used effectively in their own work. They do not see that they are the exception that proves the rule; they wear noise-cancelling headphones in the London metro like everyone else.

Scouting for Men, or Traditional Values in a Liberal Education

Sylvain Azuré – Southern White Admiral – Limenitis Reducta. Taken with Apple iPhone on 30 April 2023 at the Réserve Ornithologique du Teich.

Foreword on Self-Discipline

Self-discipline is, by definition, the ability to transcend your own wants. It is among the most valuable human characteristics and it defines many people of excellence – good scientists, good walkers, good interlocutors, good soldiers. A great number of us, however, appear to lack self-discipline – we see this in the internet-mediated epidemic of “procrastination” – and it is therefore interesting to examine the question: How can discipline be developed in an adult human being?

When you want to work on yourself – that is, when the task is personal, internal – it is hard to inflame your own natural sympathies: an abstract motivation is needed to act as fulcrum – a lightning rod – for your efforts.

Let us take the following extreme example of a modern white-collar worker: they rent their apartment, they have no long-term partner, their job is boring but intellectually demanding, they may also be living abroad, far from family and friends. They lack many of the things that lend purpose to life and which (through the simple calculus of human psychology) impose discipline, a sense of usefulness and self-worth. A person in this situation must therefore find an external “prompt” – some abstract, ideological motivation – that can act as a surrogate for the loving partner or the fulfilling career. The nature of this prompt is of course entirely arbitrary and can lead to good or bad outcomes. History has already shown us numerous and contradictory interpretations of “The Greater Good”…

Finding an animating principle is difficult in the present social climate, where communities are weak and the Self is sovereign over both God and the Übermensch. Partly this is caused by recent history, which has revealed the horror of what unthinking obedience can achieve in the service of something evil, but it is also driven by technology. An appalling fraction of our lives are now conducted online in virtual environments, either directly via screens or indirectly through algorithmically-curated content – and most of us are concentrated in cities, where technology is more prevalent than in rural areas. So we are living in a world where nature and ideology have become resources, subservient to the individual. Unfortunately, the “Self” is a flimsy foundation of self-discipline. Comfort is no better, and many of us now grow up in situations of material ease. Children who experience a degree of hardship (e.g. physical, financial) naturally and quickly learn that the world does not revolve around their own whims. What follows here is an exploration of self-discipline in adults and, by extension, the education of children.

Where Michaela Meets the Boy Scouts

The modern urban male has a problem: the Übermensch is dead and so is community. Bewildered by world events and buffeted by the merciless strobing of helmet-mounted LEDs, how is he to face the absurd? Without a partner and a satisfying career to absorb him he is at the mercy of reality, untethered from strength-giving abstractions like duty or religion, which means that he needs a source of personal pride and some way to prioritize caring for others1. What he needs, if we dig a little deeper into the marrow, is self-discipline and a ritual system to help embed positive character traits.

Developing rituals is important because habit formation is just a visible artefact of neural change. For better or worse, manners maketh man and we are, in a certain sense, just the aggregation of our internal and external routines. The same idea underpins certain religious customs that are designed to draw your attention to useful thoughts or modes of behaviour. Unfortunately for our hypothetical urban exemplar (and society at large), the closest many of us come to a regular religious experience is taking out the recycling bins.

Bleak as the prospect may appear at the end of a long day at the office, when your self-improvement routine has all the allure of the megot you just trod into the pavement, today we are in the happy position where scientists and psychologists are learning a great deal about habit formation. There is a glut of information online, particularly on YouTube, where millenia-old techniques come in gaudy commercial packaging. We can introduce a morning calisthenics routine for strength, a shower for cleanliness, perhaps a cold shower for bravery or endurance. Before leaving for work we might repeat Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, or something from Marcus Aurelius. We can resolve to do at least one selfless deed per day and before going to sleep we can note down five things to be grateful for. The problem is that there is no social reinforcement in this routine and building new habits as an adult is anyway difficult. The most efficient way to acquire good habits is to inculcate them during childhood, as part of one’s education.

Looking at the problems faced by children today, particularly the children of our liberal-seeming middle class, the importance of a decent education is stark. These children have names like “Dash” or “Raven”, they don’t eat carrots or broccoli, have no respect for their parents and little respect for anyone else. Aged five they are taught about the holocaust and transgender rights, but they can eat pasta with their hands if they want to and they can open their Christmas presents on the 23rd if they will “please” stop screaming. When their parents buy a dog, the poor animal is brought up in exactly the same way: adorable to look at, the pitiful creature can’t sit still and will leap in front of cars with little more than an impotent whinge from the owner. What does this picture amount to? If a child is brought up without discipline they risk losing respect for themselves, for other people and the natural world. The difficulty is that nowadays discipline is mistrusted. The 20th Century has shown us what discipline can do in the service of something evil. Now Hegel’s pendulum has swung too far the other way and it is widely considered a fascist aberration.

If discipline is to be developed in a group of young people without tyranny, then some form of holistic doctrine is needed – a principle that can unite them sympathetically and show them that something exists beyond their own childish desires. When thinking about the type of doctrine that is needed to encourage discipline and selflessness it is interesting to examine the writing of Aldous Huxley, since he was deeply interested in education, technology and systems of power – both insofar as they can be used to enslave a population and as a means of individual liberation. In writing Island and Brave New World Revisited, Huxley moved beyond the time-honoured tradition of the author who responds sensitively to the problems around them by simply describing/illuminating them. Drawing together his knowledge of Eastern philosophy and Western scientific techniques, the elder Huxley grappled with the more difficult task of trying to imagine how one could build and maintain a Utopia. Knowing that designing a near-perfect society requires a treatment of humanity at all scales ranging from the individual up to small groups and ultimately mass organization, Huxley was forced to treat topics as diverse as spiritual ideology, agricultural practices, genetics, communal parenting and political organization. On the level of education, he felt the best results could be achieved with a combination of mindfulness and rational-spiritual instruction. He imagines the fictional paradise-island of Pala, where secular rituals are used to bind the community together with shared images, metaphors and values. Violent urges are redirected into physical challenges that are useful either emotionally (for example in athletic achievement/competition) or practically (in chopping wood or hauling heavy loads). The glamorous halo that surrounds physics and engineering in Western societies is shifted towards biology and psychology, which crucially means that humans are not enslaved by their inventions – a lawn mower is not used where a scythe will do and efficiency is not measured in the parochial sense of units of time and units of people. Though Huxley presents his ideas clearly, they are embedded in the context of a fictional tropical island that is (necessarily, as it turns out) isolated from modern society. A more concrete example of what we can do from “within the walls” is provided by Baden-Powell’s boy scouts.

Although many of us associate the scouts with an outmoded institution, primarily useful for teaching small boys how to light fires and tie knots, Baden-Powell developed scouting as a sophisticated system of education that treats all non-academic aspects of a child’s development. There are games to encourage resourcefulness, knowledge of the natural world and physical endurance. Boys are shown how to make money honestly, they are enjoined to help others and to be brave in danger. The neurotic-solipsistic impulse that fuels muscle-building in young men is roundly scorned. Emphasis is placed on duty to others, rather than self-improvement as an end in itself: we are here to serve and we should train ourselves against the day when we are needed. In this way, scouting openly shares many principles with the medieval chivalric code. It instils a sense of duty in each child that hopefully will endure into adulthood.

Prince Philip introduced the Duke of Edinburgh Award to institutionalize some of the most important aspects of scouting, even if it did not necessitate the wearing of a uniform or the joining of an organization. The programme borrowed heavily from Kurt Hahn’s philosophy and pedagogy [1,2]. In his Six Declines of the Modern Youth, Hahn outlined what he saw as the major obstacles faced in the development of children. Here are the Six Declines, as listed by Wikipedia [2]:

  1. Decline of Fitness due to modern methods of locomotion;
    1. Decline of Initiative and Enterprise due to the widespread disease of spectatoritis (i.e. “excessive indulgence in forms of amusement in which one is a passive spectator rather than an active participant”);
    2. Decline of Memory and Imagination due to the confused restlessness of modern life;
    3. Decline of Skill and Care due to the weakened tradition of craftsmanship;
    4. Decline of Self-discipline due to the ever-present availability of stimulants and tranquillisers;
    5. Decline of Compassion due to the unseemly haste with which modern life is conducted or, as William Temple called it, “spiritual death”.

Reading through the list, it is remarkable how few of the points need editing to reflect recent changes in society. Even today, for many children, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Bronze Award remains their first and possibly sole exposure to volunteering or spending time in the countryside. Children are taught how to orient themselves physically in a world that is increasingly virtual [3] and this will only become more important if technology continues to replace human interaction, traditional communities are eroded and animals disappear.

In Landmarks, Robert MacFarlane observes that the Oxford Junior Dictionary is bleeding nature words because they are considered – in many respects rightly – to no longer be relevant to the lives of children. Words as elemental as “acorn”, “ash”, “bluebell” and “buttercup” have been replaced with sterile portmanteaux like “chatroom” and “broadband”. Despite Feynman’s disdain for name-knowing without “classical” understanding2, a name is a hook on which to hang new learning and its loss is greatly damaging. I mention the importance of knowing about and experiencing wilderness in the context of education because discipline can also grow out of confrontation with the unknown, with the chafing of damp boots, as well as through classroom instruction. Shakespeare, as usual, has the measure of it. Here he speaks via the Old Duke in As You Like It, who has been exiled from court and now lives in the forest with those followers still loyal to him:

“Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
‘This is no flattery: these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”

We know it is important to develop discipline when young, so it is natural then to look at how the concept of the “good scout” might be applied to teaching in schools. I thought immediately of a friend who teaches in a London school called Michaela and decided to do a little research on their unusual teaching methods. Reading about the school and its academic ethos, I was struck by how self-consciously the teachers invoked ideas of duty, self-discipline and habit formation when talking about their work.

Michaela achieved notoriety originally for the perceived strictness of the teachers, its traditional (thus atypical) teaching methods and curricula – then later for its exceptional results. The school is located in Brent – a London borough which is ethnically diverse but economically deprived – which means it has to contend with a powerful street culture of gangs and drugs. This only makes the achievements of the school more astonishing, in a period where many schools are losing their bright young teachers due to workload stresses and children’s poor behaviour. Michaela was opened in 2014 and by 2019 its Progress 8 results were among the best in the country [4.1]. The school’s founder and headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh ascribes its success to “small c conservative values” [4.2], which comprise the abstract narrative that all members of the school subscribe to.

In The Power of Culture, Birbalsingh and her colleagues – the other teachers at Michaela – try to explain the principles behind their teaching methods. They describe how the school has rejected the conclusions of the 1967 Plowden Report, which entreated teachers to “allow students to be themselves”, instead trying to give children the essential knowledge and self-control they need to navigate freely in the world. Michaela’s curriculum is therefore centred more on acquiring knowledge than “skills” and teaching is didactic – that is, directed by the teacher rather than the students themselves [4.3]. Following Patrick Deneen [4.4], they believe that the freedom to live well, think for oneself and vote in a truly democratic way is not “a condition into which we are naturally born”, but must be won through a degree of training and “habituation”. Two quotes given in the chapter written by Jonathan Porter are particularly relevant. The first is from Edmund Burke:

“It is written in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate natures cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

And the second from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics:

“Our actions become our habits, our habits become our character, our character is who we are.”

These two quotes are adopted as foundational tenets of Michaela’s approach to education. In their first week of school, pupils are taught about self-control in assemblies and in the classroom. They are encouraged to reflect on so-called “monster moments” – those periods in the day when they may have misbehaved, or lost control of their emotions. Teachers encourage the children by sharing their own monster moments and injecting a little humour. It is a technique that recalls Huxley’s Mynah birds of Pala, which ceaselessly call you to pay “Attention!” to yourself and your surroundings.

To reinforce this doctrine of self-reflection, teachers at Michaela maintain discipline with the lavish and inflexible application of detentions. Though the strictness of teaching at Michaela has proved shocking to many proponents of “child-led” parenting, punishments are designed to promote a culture of excellence over a culture of victimhood and are delivered with great sensitivity. Teacher James Sibley describes how students – even quite seriously troubled individuals – are never given special treatment. Children are taught that they are responsible for their own actions even if, of course, there are aspects of their lives that are difficult and lie beyond their control [4.5]. They must behave for their own good and for the benefit of their peers, who are all “Michaela” – they are exceptional. Sibley observes that this is the model of any “competitive team” [4.6] – they share an aspiration to be the best. To some this may seem a xenophobic and perhaps even psychologically-damaging ethical standard, but at Michaela the importance of building a sense of belonging is considered critical to prevent the children from being seduced by other, easier sources of personal identity, like the very real presence of gangs, or the atavistic values they find online, in music or in films. Pupils are also “taught” gratitude and humility by repeatedly having their attention drawn to moments when others have done something for them [4.7]. It is these values that prevent the “competitive team” mentality from boiling over into an Etonian sense of entitlement.

Whether or not the Michaela approach is correct on all points, Birbalsingh and her colleagues have certainly demonstrated the “power of culture” in education. But what of the unhappy multitude who missed out on Michaela and the boy scouts, who feel rudderless and lack discipline in their adult life? YouTube will suggest the self-help approach mentioned at the beginning, where we drip-feed good activities into our daily routine until a change in personality is produced. An alternative is to embark on a trip that shocks you into a new way of thinking. The Camino de Santiago, or le Chemin de Saint-Jacques, is a good example of this. Walking for weeks and even months with nothing but a bag on your back forces a sort of discipline on you that is profoundly liberating. It also gives you an enormous amount of time for reflection. Scientists are even beginning to study the effects this type of extreme activity has on the human brain [5]. Then there is Alain de Botton’s School of Life, which tries to take self-improvement into adulthood. The company uses books and social media to educate people about a variety of subjects related to love and work and how philosophers can contribute to problems encountered in modern society. They also used to run secular Sunday sermons, which recognized the importance of social reinforcement in building new habits. I remember attending one of their meetings in London when I was at university. There were readings, group songs and a “sermon” from Paul Mason on “Postcapitalism”. While clearly a line-up of fairly limited appeal, the idea of a secular sermon seems to be pushing in the right direction.

Practically the whole history of philosophy is men trying to reason their way out of anxiety. This anxiety can take diverse forms, but it is born out of the conflict between human desire and reality. The rational impulse is to try to attack this emotional problem intellectually, before any action is taken, while the religious response is to draw a line around it and leave the boundary well alone. Neither method is particularly useful. Eventually one needs to stop circling the ineffable and just start doing the things we know to be good. This is, after all, how we teach our children. Eventually these good things become a part of you.

Notes

1This last point about caring for others is no non sequitur: going out of your way to help someone gives you a sense of importance, of purpose, that is fulfilling and helps to transcend the petty wants of the individual.

2Here I am referring to “classical” knowledge as defined by Robert Persig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Clumsy photo of a Black-winged stilt (Himantopus himantopus). Taken with Apple iPhone on 30 April 2023 at the Réserve Ornithologique du Teich.

References

[1] R. Igo, “Kurt Hahn: Six Declines of the Modern Youth“, URL: https://www.outwardbound.org/blog/kurt-hahn-six-declines-of-modern-youth/ [Last Accessed: 21/05/2023]

[2] “Kurt Hahn“, Wikipedia. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Hahn [Last Accessed: 10/5/2023]

[3] Ofcom, “Children and parents: media use and attitudes report 2022” (30 March 2022) URL: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/234609/childrens-media-use-and-attitudes-report-2022.pdf [Last Accessed: 10/5/2023]

[4] K. Birbalsingh et al. “Michaela: The Power of Culture (Kindle Edition)”, John Catt Education Ltd (2020)

[4.1] K. Birbalsingh et al. “Michaela: The Power of Culture (Kindle Edition)”, John Catt Education Ltd, Loc 242 (2020)

[4.2] K. Birbalsingh et al. “Michaela: The Power of Culture (Kindle Edition)”, John Catt Education Ltd, Loc 279 (2020)

[4.3] K. Birbalsingh et al. “Michaela: The Power of Culture (Kindle Edition)”, John Catt Education Ltd, Loc 1758 (2020)

[4.5] K. Birbalsingh et al. “Michaela: The Power of Culture (Kindle Edition)”, John Catt Education Ltd, Loc 608 (2020)

[4.6] K. Birbalsingh et al. “Michaela: The Power of Culture (Kindle Edition)”, John Catt Education Ltd, Loc 1820 (2020)

[4.7] K. Birbalsingh et al. “Michaela: The Power of Culture (Kindle Edition)”, John Catt Education Ltd, Loc 1857 (2020)

[4.8] K. Birbalsingh et al. “Michaela: The Power of Culture (Kindle Edition)”, John Catt Education Ltd, Loc 1963 (2020)

[5] Axe 2 : Adaptation comportementale, Human Adaptation Institute. URL: https://adaptation-institute.com/adaptation-comportementale/ [Last Accessed: 21/5/2023]

Possible Provençal Fritillaries – Mélitée des linaires – Melitaea deione. Taken with an Apple iPhone on 13 September 2021 near Noailhac.

Rain Over Earthsea

“A ce moment, la Chine reste surprenante, inquiétante, dérangante. Pour essayer de mieux les comprendre il faut souligner certain particularités qui tiennent à son mode de pensée, à son mode d’écrire, mais aussi à la réalité historique, géographique, qui rendent la civilization Chinoise assez différent des autres civilizations nés sur la continent et d’européens.“

C. Javary [1]

Bluebottle, Cahors, September 2021. Taken with Apple iPhone.

There is a fly walking on the window pane. The window is ajar, hanging open on its hinges and a hot wind from the Garonne is seeping through the gap, but the fly is confounded: the gaudy matrices of its eyes are trained on bushes and buildings, tabletops and me. Somehow it does not see the glass. An alien membrane, only visible obliquely.

Tomorrow morning as I “construct myself” over breakfast, transparent walls will glide silently into place, cutting me off from swathes of the city, until I see only the narrow path to work. Almost as quickly as I know who I am, I will be left with a choice between the tram and the bicycle. Perhaps I will feel tired and decide to take the tram – join the ragged file of students and young professionals, each with their own complex internal psycho-geography, converging quietly on two opposing platforms in the grey of the morning. We will be coiffed, perfumed, secure between the walls. But suppose a man were to step out from our company and onto the tram rails? Perhaps he bends at the waist and removes his shoes, placing them neatly one beside the other, then dances jerkily up and down the length of the platform like an animated scarecrow. I expect many of us onlookers would exchange amused or quizzical glances, but ironically it is those of us in the audience who would feel ridiculous. We would be looking at the glass walls from that magic angle where the light is reflected and the surface becomes partially opaque. The man has afforded us a brief glimpse of the contingency of our situation, the shape of our egos, which is an essential ingredient of wu wei.

Wu wei is a defining principle of Taoism which continues to exert enormous influence on Chinese politics, philosophy, medicine and martial arts. Its literal translation from the Chinese – non-agir, or inaction – may give the misleading impression that Taoist doctrine is predicated on doing nothing. A more faithful translation is probably “ne pas forcer les choses” [2], or “not forcing” [3]. The idea is to try to follow the natural rhythms inherent in all things. By moving in accordance with Nature, with Cosmic law, one is able to act in the most powerful, most efficient possible way. A practitioner of wu wei is therefore characterized by an extreme receptivity to the course of events. They are an embodiment of water: supple and yielding at one moment and irresistible the next.

People who hold too tightly to their preconceptions live with a skewed interpretation of the world. Only when your ego has been sufficiently diminished, when you can faithfully follow the eternal mêlée of yin and yang, can you begin to apply wei wu wei (or agir-sans-agir) to further your own projects. Both the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching use the philosophy of wu wei to point to prudent or worthy actions, which probably goes a long way towards explaining its importance in Chinese culture. In Chapter 38 of the Tao Te Ching, for example, a virtuous action is presented as a thing done effortlessly [4]:

“The highest good is not to seek to do good,
but to allow yourself to become it.
The ordinary person seeks to do good things,
and finds that they cannot do them continually.

“The Master does not force virtue on others,
thus she is able to accomplish her task.
The ordinary person who uses force,
will find that they accomplish nothing.”

A truly virtuous person has honed their mind to such an extent that doing good is now an automatic operation. They do not bemoan their fate. They recognize their own limitations and those of other people with compassion, acting only and precisely when they need to. It is important to note that this hypothetical final state of goodness is permanent and it is the business of all major practical philosophies to try to push the mind of the individual towards a similar state of dynamic perfection. Ultimately, this is similar in spirit to the philosophy of Bushido, or indeed the boy scouts.

Tournesols, Montcuq, September 2021. Taken with Apple iPhone.

Kung Fu is one discipline where wu wei has been given obvious practical application, but the same principles have penetrated into the Chinese visual artistic tradition as well. In a video interview earlier this year, French sinologue Cyrille Javary recalled watching members of the Chinese public as they reacted to an exhibition of Chinese calligraphy in Chengdu [2]:

“… Dans cette exposition de calligraphie à Chengdu, je voyais les chinois qui commencent par s’approcher pour voir la teneur de l’encre… et après ils se réculaient pour voir la calligraphie… et à ce moment là, inconsciamment, avec leur main ils le ré–écrivait en l’air… Parce que ce qu’ils voyaient, ce qui… leur procurer une émotion, c’était le tracer. C’était pas ce qui à été écrit.”

Here Javary describes how the Chinese interest themselves almost as much in the physical procedure of writing calligraphy as the calligraphic form itself. The artist is implicated in the artwork because they have taken an internal – intellectual or spiritual – beauty and given it external form. Put another way, the artist has tried to find the essence – the Qi – of their subject within themselves and allowed it to disgorge spontaneously onto the page. In this way, one can consider the artist’s studio a place of “applied philosophy” [5]. The connection is clearer, perhaps, when we watch a musician perform and we can almost see the music being pulled out of the person in front of us.

In the West, we have remarkably few overtly Chinese elements in our popular culture. We do, however, have the writings of Ursula K. LeGuin and Philip K. Dick, who have quietly folded Taoist philosophy into their fiction to the delight of adults and children alike. LeGuin’s approach in her Earthsea novels was to create a fantasy world with many superficial elements of Western culture – a school of magic like a British boy’s public school, dragons that breathe fire and hoard treasure – but painted over a substructure of Chinese philosophy. In her first book in the series, A Wizard of Earthsea, LeGuin’s protagonist is a young boy called Ged. He is born on an island where the people live in rustic fashion by fishing and farming. Magical ability is a rare gift of birth and used mainly for practical tasks like working of the weather, or for mending and charming boats and tools. Like human technology, LeGuin’s magic has no moral dimension – only a power and a cost. The most puissant mages in Earthsea use magic sparingly because they understand that to divert the course of nature in one place will often cause an unlooked-for change elsewhere. There is Ogion, a famous mage who lives simply as a goatherd and refuses to use even an elementary weatherworking spell when caught out in a storm; then there are the seven Masters of the wizarding school on Roke, each of whom counsels extreme prudence when working magic. In the words of the Master Summoner [6]:

“The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow…”

Much of A Wizard of Earthsea charts the repercussions that follow when Ged forgets this fundamental principle. Goaded on by a rival sorcerer, Ged resolves to prove his mastery and summon a spirit from the dead. On the night of the Long Dance, with the stars hanging cold and watchful above the island of wizardry, he walks to the top of Roke Knoll with a small group of young wizards and pronounces the invocation. A keening wind begins to blow and a pale luminescence waxes in the darkness. Yet even as Ged successfully breaches the fabric between the lands of the living and the dead, he looses a shadow into the world – a shadow of himself, deadly and ravenous – that tries over the course of the novel to possess him and work evil. It is a theme that returns over and again in the tales of Earthsea: a disturbance in the natural order pitches the world towards an extreme and the characters must work hard, within the limits of wu wei, to restore a stable equilibrium.

Later in the book, Ged travels to the land of Osskil where he is shown a precious stone called Terrenon. Caught in the jewel is an ancient spirit with knowledge of the past and future [7]:

“Time is nothing to it. If you lay your hand upon it and ask a question of it, it will answer, according to the power that is in you. It has a voice, if you know how to listen.”

This description will be familiar to anyone who has ever seriously tried to use the I Ching.

And yet, despite the efforts of LeGuin and others, how little we in the West know of Chinese culture…! Information about China is nearly always mediated by journalists and mired in geopolitics. The closest many of us come to meeting Chinese people is to watch their student offspring giggling in bubble tea bars, or wandering the streets in white puffer jackets and designer trainers. News reporters seem almost to take pleasure in presenting China as a monstrous perplexity/synecdoche. It is reassuring for the East-West narrative if we in the “West” are dealing with a “dragon”: a totalitarian government that, in Xinjiang province, has achieved possibly the most advanced system of control in the history of man, but which can simultaneously produce startling positive social change in parts of the world, like Africa, where the West has completely failed. I think more diplomatic progress would be made with a better public understanding of China’s cultural achievements. Politicians do not operate in a vacuum. They drink the copious effluvium of Think Tanks, but they also read books, watch films, plays – they may even play video games – and this is where the seat of their convictions ultimately lies.

[1] C. Javary. Cyrille Javary – La souplesse du dragon, les fondamentaux de la culture chinoise, Librairie Mollat, URL: https://youtu.be/teIU4l3pFhA [Last Accessed: 2 Dec 2022]

[2] C. Javary. Un Entretien avec Cyrille Javary sur Wu Wei, URL: https://youtu.be/rSfp8UTsqX4 [Last Accessed: 2 Dec 2022]

[3] A. Watts. Alan Watts – The Principle of Not Forcing, https://youtu.be/ZzaUGhhnlQ8 [Last Accessed: 2 Dec 2022]

[4] J. H. McDonald. Tao Te Ching – A Translation for the public domain (1996)

[5] A. de Botton, EASTERN PHILOSOPHY: Wu Wei, The School of Life, https://youtu.be/NvZi7ZV-SWI [Last Accessed: 2 Dec 2022]

[6] U. K. LeGuin, Earthsea: The First Four Books, Penguin Random House, pp.48 (2016)

[7] U. K. LeGuin, Earthsea: The First Four Books, Penguin Random House, pp.108-109 (2016)

Queen of Spain, Lectoure, September 2021. Taken with Apple iPhone.

The Tao

The cherry-bloom has gone–

a temple, in among the trees,

is what it has become.

Buson [1]

Ice on a Nissan Almera, December 2021. Taken with Apple iPhone.

Om. Tao. The origin of form. The indefinable non-thing that lends structure to the Universe.

According to the Tao Te Ching, which attempts to describe, in a manner as general as possible, the ingredients of a superior life, the Tao is ineffable – is not, in fact, an “it” at all. By living close to the Tao, however, by aligning yourself to “it”, one can live a good life. To the average educated Westerner this probably smacks of sophistry: what possible use is the Tao if it cannot be held in the hand? If it is irreducible and therefore irrational? In the Tao Te Ching, the pursuit of the Tao appears to be synonymous with excellence, but the Tao itself is indifferent, encompassing both good and bad. If following the Tao allows you to live well, but the Tao is not intrinsically good, this suggests that it lies at the root of our ability to assign value to something, to separate good from bad, one thing from another. It is therefore related to our ability to discriminate, perhaps even to think. We arrive then at Robert Persig’s conclusion, expounded in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that Tao is “Quality”. Can we explain precisely what is meant by Quality, to show the enormous progress we have made by uniting it with the Tao? Not exactly, no – although perhaps we can explain its flavour in a way that is easier for a scientifically-literate Western audience, largely ignorant of Eastern philosophy, to appreciate.

Quality is the indefinable essence of excellence that marks out good work. In poetry, it is the right balance of specificity and ambiguity of images, purity of subject matter and depth of linguistic expression. For the master craftsman, it is the unselfconscious production of an object that is simultaneously aesthetically and functionally beautiful. In science, an understanding of Quality allows a great scientist to siphon a powerful (c’est-à-dire general) law out of an infinite number of associated facts and phenomena. The Tao is then present in all aspects of human endeavour: in our crafts, but crucially also in our façon de vie. If the link we have made between Quality and the Tao is true, it simply confirms what has been averred by Taoists for centuries: that the Tao is central to a human perception of the Universe.  

Does the Tao have an analogue in other religions or philosophies? Persig points to the Greek concept of aretê – excellence, duty to oneself – and to Dharma in Hinduism [2]. He also observes that the words “God” and “good” have the same linguistic root in English [3]. We can quote the familiar phrase:

God is Good.

Left unqualified, this expression seems more like a description of a person than a statement of equality. It is only looking at one side of the good-bad continuum and ignores the absurdity of human life, the indifference of the universe to human desires. In times of anxiety or self-reflection, humans cleave to the super-human, but it is impossible, as a thinking person, to embrace a loving God. Our only recourse is to dedicate ourselves to “goodness of life”, “goodness of humanity” or some other lofty principle. We can try to develop our previous statement with this in mind: 

God is Goodness.

And now the landscape begins to clear because we are talking explicitly about a scale. Goodness is like a voltage, defined by two arbitrary points of reference, but instead of electrical potential we are measuring fitness/rightness/excellence. The Tao appears therefore as a value judgment – an assessment of quality. We arrive again at Persig’s conclusion:

God is Quality.

When God became personal and helpful, all the subtlety and power of the Tao was lost to superstition and muddy-thinking. God, or Quality, is beyond description – it is impersonal – but you can approach it in work and life through a sensitivity to context. This is difficult for the Westerner to understand because the word “God” is welded to the image of a white-bearded patriarch. In the sphere of industry, Tao is present in the craft of the master artisan who feels intuitively how to mold the materials that they work with. Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery describes the loss of self-consciousness that accompanies the work of a master who is able to identify so completely with their discipline that the work is produced naturally, almost by itself [4]. If art is defined as quality of endeavour [3] then one might say this is when technical work is elevated to the level of art. In life more generally, God lies in the actions that brings mankind into balance with their surroundings, that allows them to cope with the absurdity of existence, with disappointment and suffering.

Taoists understand that the good life cannot be achieved by trying to follow a single set of rules – even those laid out in the Tao Te Ching. Human psychology is too mercurial to be mastered by reading an instruction manual, so the way must be found through experience, by changing our minds gradually and definitively. Though there is no totally general way to achieve this, religious works attempt to trace aspects of the ideal human character: pointing to the importance of humility, unselfconsciousness, amor fati, generosity, moderation. Sufism, for example, teaches that this terraforming of the mind cannot be transmitted purely intellectually. We cannot know in advance what we need, as an individual, to reach enlightenment. We therefore have to learn through action and observation. Sufis also believe that there is a different teacher adapted for every person. This teacher may be a person themselves, or some formative experience. They maintain that the way can be found through the pursuit of any discipline, via ecstatic or mystical or practical experience. In his translation of The Tale of the Three Dervishes, Idries Shah describes three dervishes who are searching for the Deep Truth [5]:

The first, Yak-Baba, sat down and contemplated until his head was sore. The second, Do-Agha, stood on his head until his feet ached. The third, Se-Kalandar, read books until his nose bled. Finally they decided upon a common effort. They went into retirement and carried out their exercises in unison, hoping by that means to summon enough effort to produce the appearance of Truth, which they called Deep Truth. For forty days and forty nights they persevered. At last in a whirl of white smoke the head of a very old man appeared, as if from the ground, in front of them. ‘Are you the mysterious Khidr, guide of men?’ asked the first. ‘No, he is the Qutub, the Pillar of the Universe,’ said the second. ‘I am convinced that this is none other than one of the Abdals, The Changed Ones,’ said the third.

‘I am none of these,’ roared the apparition, ‘but I am that which you may think me to be.’

The head directs the first dervish to the Country of Fools, the second to gaze into a Magic Mirror and the third to seek the aid of the Jinn of the Whirlpool. After many trials, each of the dervishes succeeds in their task and is granted a vision of the Deep Truth. They attract many followers, each of whom desires to know the Truth for themselves, and these followers, having superficially observed the progress of the dervishes, try to emulate the actions that led them to enlightenment. None are successful, however. In a similar way, many of us enjoy reading about people who have achieved extraordinary things. Here, for example, is the story of a woman who achieved enlightenment:

Following the death of  a close friend, an ordinarily diligent and single-minded woman develops a degree of existential anxiety. Her work as a software engineer, originally a source of intellectual stimulation, now feels demanding and even pointless. She begins to worry about the future and shrinks from the enormity of the dangers facing the world. For several days she lives alone in her apartment, leaving only to satisfy her basic needs, without making a special effort to speak to anyone. Nothing happens and her despair deepens. Eventually she starts to search for something fixed and super-human that might allow her to escape her own problems, but finds that she can’t bring herself to believe in a personal God. It occurs to her that she might dedicate herself to principles like “love” or “goodness of life” which feel spiritually fulfilling. She sees that these principles are not entirely abstract, but nonetheless cannot be rigorously defined.

Thinking about why she feels the need to dedicate herself to a super-human entity, the woman realizes she would feel ridiculous labouring under something ephemeral and she struggles for a while to fix a definition of “goodness”. But then, she thinks, all psychological states are arbitrary – from the pessimistic to the optimistic and the soi-disant rationalist outlooks. The “why” is anyway meaningless. She is being given a choice about how to respond to reality. From here, her ability to lead an excellent life depends simply on her ability to alter her mind.

The woman now adopts a less judgmental, more optimistic, more constructive response to life and gradually she starts to live for other people. Her friends admire her and try to emulate her. Strangers are touched by her openness, curiosity and clarity of thought. She understands that not to take this approach to life would be equally “justified”, equally arbitrary, but would not lead to a high-quality life.  

Perhaps this little narrative has been in some sense instructive, but it is doubtful anyone could reach the same conclusions as the woman in the story just by reading about it. Reading about her journey may even impede one’s own development if the mind is not properly prepared.

What is the connection between the Tao, science and morality? In his Foundations of Science, Poincaré examines the origin of scientific and mathematical discovery [6]. He observes that a mathematician cannot just choose facts at random and see if they bespeak a general law – the process would be impossibly long! Gradually, like any craftsman, a mathematician learns what to look for; they become sensitized to a particular kind of abstract beauty. Poincaré concludes that we have to possess an internal critical faculty – a “subliminal self” – that sifts the myriad different mathematical relationships and only promotes a few to the conscious mind.

Travelling a little further along this path, we see that whatever inner capacity (i.e. neurological mechanism) allows us to distinguish good from bad is probably the same that allows us to distinguish a straight line from a curved one. Note that this certainly does not imply that every great mathematician is a moral exemplar. It does suggest, however, that the decision to try to lead a good life is not a choice for most people. Humanity has an instinctive spiritual impulse to reach for the good and the moral that stems from our ability to reason. Without an appreciation of Quality, we would not be able to build a hierarchy of facts and thereby construct the general laws that allow us to adapt to new situations and survive. We admire Quality where we see it1 and it is a more ancient and durable source of morality than the Ten Commandments because it is the mechanism by which a Christian decides to follow Christian doctrine in the first place. 

Moral relativists are horrified by apparent exceptions: inveterate criminals or psychopaths who do not understand the foundational rules of society and who appear to cast doubt on the entire field of ethics. But these exceptionally immoral people are quite natural. Everyone understands Quality to a different degree. People who have an exceptionally high sensitivity to Quality we call variously prophets, angels, geniuses, yogis, enlightened ones. The good life is not weakened because some – perhaps even the majority – cannot see how to achieve it. The wisdom contained in old religious texts is empirical. The sages who wrote them had seen how human psychology can be brought towards goodness in the most general possible way² .

Having considered the pursuit of the Tao as an individual, one can begin to speculate on how best to organize humanity en masse. Years after writing his cynical portrait of a futuristic society in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagined a fictional island called Pala where Eastern and Western approaches to philosophy and medicine combine, producing people that are peaceful and deeply spiritual but resistant to superstition [7]. The Palanese treat human well-being holistically. Through meditation, hypnotherapy, physical exercise, regular sex, shared parental duties, communal living, artificial insemination and drugs³, the Palanese people approach an upper limit of human happiness. As a country, Pala is scientifically advanced while avoiding many of the social and environmental ills that we associate with contemporary society. Huxley’s Island therefore forms a kind of mirror to Brave New World, where modern technology and psychological understanding are used deliberately for egalitarian rather than totalitarian ends.

Religious people are often concerned about the objective grounding of ethics, but the question of “why” you should be good is ill-posed – it has no meaning. The fact is simply that good actions produce good things and human beings naturally strive for quality in life – for transcendence. It is no more an answer to say I do this because a personal God has decreed it than because I know, on some fundamental biological level, what goodness is. Dawkins rightly points out that most Christians, for example, choose not to take the Bible literally in its entirety, but cherry-pick the bits that seem palatable (i.e. those that conform to the zeitgeist). Nor is it useful to try to write ethical rules in stone. Our society’s understanding of ethics is continually evolving. Graven commandments are often so obvious as to be redundant and later they may even be found to be wrong or incomplete. Where possible, education should help people to discover the rules for themselves. The good life is therefore long like an unending road and must be traveled with an open mind. Aspects of goodness can be described and communicated, which is what produced the Tao Te Ching, Rumi’s Masnavi and other major religious works.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Persig builds up his theory of Quality from the perspective of technical work and artistic expression. Here, we have reached the same conclusions starting from the desire for spiritual fulfilment. We have recast the Tao in terms that are easier for a modern, technically-minded person to understand and have shown how the Tao unites science with “God” and the pursuit of a moral life. The goals of Sufism and Taoism are shown to be identical and the religious or mystic impulse is denuded: all religions come from same source and this source may even be responsible for scientific and philosophical discoveries. Properly considered, we see that there is no conflict between these things. The good life can be followed without appeal to an omnipotent divinity. Nor is this goodness limited to personal relationships because it lies at the heart of all human endeavour: scientific, moral, practical and artistic.

Notes

1 Obviously it does not follow that everyone will agree on what constitutes high quality. Go to an art gallery with a friend and see if you agree on the worth of every artwork…

² Within the limits of the zeitgeist.

³ Drugs are used for social bonding and to help induce ecstatic experiences.

References and Further Reading

[1] H. G. Henderson. An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Bashō to Shiki. Doubleday Anchor Books, pp. 95, 1958.

[2] R. M. Persig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Corgi, pp. 340, 1981.

[3] R. M. Persig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Corgi, pp. 231, 1981.

[4] E. Herrigel. Zen in the Art of Archery. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1953.

[5] I. Shah. Tales of the Dervishes: Teaching Stories of the Sufi Masters Over the Past Thousand Years. Octagon Press Ltd, pp. 103, 1982.

[6] R. M. Persig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Corgi, pp. 237-241, 1981.

[7] A. Huxley. Island, Vintage Classics, Random House, 2005.

Wasp spider (Apple iPhone) – Castle Hill Nature Reserve, South Downs, 03/08/2022.