Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

 

TU QUOQUE (or “WHATABOUTERY”)

There is a moral standard which I reasoned my way to quite a number of years ago. It goes like this “A crime against humanity is a crime against humanity, regardless of who commits it.” This may sound like a trite and obvious truism, but it is amazing how many people do not hold to this standard. I am wearily used to hearing people loudly denouncing or protesting against one major atrocity somewhere in the world, while justifying (or ignoring) another. Usually this is a matter of political bias, played along a Left-Right axis. “Your” atrocities (the atrocities of regimes of which you approve) are to be condemned as crimes against humanity. “My” atrocities (the atrocities of regimes of which I approve) are to be ignored or condoned or somehow justified on the grounds of necessity. I put up a posting on this matter some years ago, called Your Atrocitiesor Mine?

Not exactly the same topic, but closely allied to it, is what it’s now fashionable to call “whataboutery”, more fomally known as the “Tu Quoque” or “you too” argument. The term “whataboutery” is not as new as you might think . It was first used in the 1950s, when Americans pointed out that if the old Soviet Union were condemned for its totalitarianism and failure to respect human rights, somebody would be bound to pipe up “Well what about the United States where blacks get lynched?” The sturdy old Tu Quoque was often pulled out during the Cold War.

Now it takes such forms as “Vladimir Putin is a demagogue looking to make himself dictator for life.” “Well what about Donald Trump?”

Or

“American policing disproportionately punishes blacks.” “Well what about the concentration camps the Chinese are building for Muslims?”

In one sense this is often just the pot calling the kettle black. The Tu Quoque argument is an attempt to justify evil deeds by pointing to evil deeds of which your opponent is either ignorant or of which your opponent tacitly approves. But looked at rationally, it is always a flawed argument. After all, it admits, implicitly, that what you are attempting to defend is as bad as what you are drawing attention to. You are saying, in effect, that B is justified because A is as bad as B.

Schoolground wisdom says that two wrongs don’t make a right. Tu Quoque merely says one thing is bad and here is another thing that’s bad.

So let’s condemn both.

Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“UPTURNED” by Kay McKenzie Cooke (The Cuba Press,  $NZ25); “FRAGMENTS FROM AN INFINITE CATALOGUE” by John Tane Christeller (The Cuba Press,  $NZ30); “HOW TO BE OLD” by Rachel McAlpine (The Cuba Press,  $NZ25); “THE WANDERER” by Ron Riddell (HeadworX, $NZ25); “THREE POETS – A HEADWORX ANTHOLOGY” by Marion Rego, Alex Jeune and Margaret Jeune (HeadworX, $NZ@%)

There’s a section in Kay McKenzie Cooke’s new collection Upturned where the poet writes about her visits to Berlin and the alienness of that city. The language is different. She has difficulty communicating with Germans in a bakery (the poem “Tough light”). Her little bilingual granddaughter shows more confidence in German than in English (“Foxes or squirrels”). In a stately sequence called “Baltic Coast in autumn” she is aware that the very rhythm of that northern sea is different from the rhythm of the seas about New Zealand – “a wide and flat ocean, no breakers, / any wildness held / behind horizon lines, / contained by distance, / a motionless tideline.” Yet with strangers and with German-domiciled members of her family, there is still a warm fellow-feeling.

But this excursion into the great land called Overseas is the only section of Upturned where Kay McKenzie Cooke is an alien. For most of this collection she is very much at home, dedicating some poems specifically to places in the great New Zealand South -  Gore, Balclutha, the Maniototo and locations in or around Dunedin like Caversham, St. Kilda and Mount Cargill, where the winds whistle up from the Antarctic.

Cooke is more concerned with (modified) nature than with the city, but her landscape poems are not idyllic dreams. Many are situated in the present world where the bangs of hunters’ guns and the noise of traffic are heard (“Inlet”, “Bucklands Crossing”). There is also the strong pull of the past in her poetry, and the influence of whakapapa, with poems honouring her late parents, her great-great-grandmother, her great-grandmother and a much-loved Maori grandfather Reg Lee “our grandad / who always wore a hat, / cut the kindling, kept a good garden, / shovelled coal into the fire.” The past also means childhood, where sitting at a grandmother’s table gives comfort when a southern storm is brewing outside (“Two tables”); or where children at primary school, seated at their teacher’s feet, make local interpretations of the songs from faraway that they are singing (“On a mat at the bottom of the world”). Not that childood is entirely innocent, especially when sibling rivalry creeps in (“Being there”).

As a reviewer of poetry-collections, I have the very bad habit of nominating poems as favourites – even suggesting that some future anthologist might embrace them. But I can’t resist indulging the habit.

In Upturned, two poems grabbed me for their fine quality and acute observation.

“Monkey Island shadows” is a joyful and detailed recall to a family mussel-collecting excursion on the shore facing Foveaux Strait, where “all the gathered mussels are clattering in a tin drum / over an open fire, shells opening into grins, / and flounder too from nets our uncles hauled in”. Such abundance! – and maybe a reminder that such days are now gone.

“Full pardon” is a poem celebrating summer, but even as she celebrates, Cook insinuates subtly an awareness of transcience and the brevity of the warmer season.

Perhaps I shouldn’t single out two poems this way. Upturned is a fine and well-crafted collection – the product of a mature and thoughtful mind.

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Kay McKenzie Cooke is Ngai Tahu and Pakeha. John Tane Christeller is a New Zealander of Kiwi and German-Jewish descent. This may seem an odd way to begin a notice about his debut collection of poetry Fragments from an Infinite Catalogue, but ethnicity is relevant because, the blurb tells us, Christeller has learnt te reo and this collection contains some poems in the Maori language, not all of which are presented with English-language equivalents. I do not profess to be able to comment on the poems in Maori only.

 It’s also important to note that Fragments from an Infinite Catalogue has to be judged as an objet d’art as much as a work of literature. The text is accompanied with 24 colourful images in a variety of styles, reproduced from Christeller’s screenprints and woodblocks. Some draw on Maori motifs (the curled red taniwha on page 73). Some are in the tradition of naturalists’ drawings (the cicada on page 46) and some combine naturalist sketch with Maori style (the owl on page 70). A young child’s drawing appears on page 29 and there is the influence of ancient Greek art on page 14. It makes for a varied and intereresting gallery.

But what of the text?

Fragments from an Infinite Catalogue is a collection of poetry, prose and brief gnomic statements. The term “fragments” is apt. Here, titled “Odyssey:19”, is the reflection of a patient Penelope in its entirety: “Trust in my fidelity and in the threads I draw, / trust in your desire and in your taut bowstring, / for two millennia or twenty years / or the lifespan of geese.” Certainly Homer inspired it. But is this a pithy aphorism in the tradition of Martial or Propertius? Or is it an isolated image? You decide.

In extreme contrast “Old Songs, Summer Songs” is a naturalistic memory of summer as experienced by the handyman Kiwi bloke a couple of generations back, and there are other poems on the New Zealand scene, on dragonflies, irises and blackberrying, some couched in nostalgic terms.

And in further extreme contrast, there is the prose statement “On a Flyleaf” about the poet’s relatives who were killed in the Holocaust; and a prose poem, “The Fence” about a fictitious journey involving James K. Baxter and Kendrick Smithyman; and the prose statement “ATTRwt Amyloidosis: An Aquatic Timeline” about respiratory tests. Herein the poet, a DSIR scientist by profession, uses precise scientic language mixed with the colloquial.

So through a section drawing on Christeller’s experience of Japan; and finally the poems relating to Maori culture. The poem “Te Poho / Fronting Up”, published in both Maori and English, calls upon Maori gods as it reconstructs the poet’s experience in undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery. In other poems, afflicted cabbage trees, a dying red beech and a stripped kawakawa are seen as images of human mortality…. And there is a prose poem in which the old man recalls his rugby-playing days on the Petone Rugby Club grounds. Almost inevitably, the last two poems in the book refer to death, the unavoidable end of old age, with their reference to piwakawaka and Cape Reinga.

What I have done here is to report on the contents of Fragments from an Infinite Catalogue without passing any sort of critical judgement upon it. I enjoyed reading many parts of this very varied collection. I enjoyed the colourful artwork. But I could find no consistent tone or thread of thought to fully engage me. A matter of pure taste.

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“I’m 80 and it’s getting late / so I’m rushing at this like a bull at a gate… I could be arcane, I could be smart / I could crochet the strings of your heart / I could be subtle, I could be wise / sprinkle my lines with splendid lies / but now that I’m staring at my own demise / I don’t have time. So here’s the deal. / I’ll stop talking to myself / and talk to you.”

Thus speaks Rachel McAlpine in the “Forward” to her collection How to be Old, and it is a forthright and honest introduction. These are poems about being old, the consolations and pains of old age, the delusions younger people might have about what ageing is, and the changed status in society that old people now have.

The first section “Not a Memoir” gives us these lessons: Getting old is not something other people congratulate you on (the poem “Getting old is not like getting pregnant”). As you get older, you realise how much like your parents you have become (“Voices”). Old people are aware that they can be a burden on their younger relatives (“The burden”). And what other people think of as old can almost be the prime of life (“Templates”). Your body decays (“The body singular”). Your libido dies – but you can enjoy remembering it (“Lust”). And if you have children or grandchildren you are increasingly protective of them, believing that by rights you should die long before they do. As the poem “A family secret” says, “if that bastard Death / should cast his bloody eye their way / I will always bellow, ‘Look at me! / I’m old. Pick me. Pick me.’ ” Also, though the clock may say you are old, you don’t necessarily feel that way (“Epic”)

The second section “Boot camp for the bonus years” turns to the fact that, at least in our society, people nowadays tend to live longer and it is harder to remember a time when people died routinely in their 60s or 70s. Are you in your 80s or 90s or knocking 100?  No problem. There are plenty like you. The old are a growing part of the population. But living longer means often missing a routine of work. As “What is your job?” says “work gave you friends, a schedule, a label / a space and a fable / a reason to get out of bed / a dress code and your daily bread /and at your very core / a sense of who you are / and what you’re for.” And people put in handrails for you (“A safe home”) And you worry that make-up may not really disguise your age (“Beauty tips for older ladies”). And you know that younger people patronise you, think you have slowed down and can’t find the right word quickly enough (“Slow”).

The third section “The gentle narrative of happy” is not quite count-your-blessings territory, but it centres mainly on the quiet pleasures of ageing. As for the coda “Elsie’s Tactics”, it records the darndest things a young grand-daughter says to he grannie.

Old (elderly/ senior?) people are often accused of babbling of green fields and indulging in nostalgia. Of course Rachel McAlpine has a number of poems referencing her childhood as a member of a vicar’s large family; but this is simply a point of reference, and not her focus, which is very much in the present.

Most of these are poems of clear statement and simple syntax, accessible to a wide audience, imagery never obscure. At her best, McAlpine is bouncy and buoyant and cheerfully ironical, putting in rhymes when it will help things jingle along, both realistic and optimistic and never maudlin. In her weaker moments, she can sound a mite admonitory, like a visiting district nurse giving good advice. But those are the weaker moments.

How to be Old succeeds in what I believe it set out to do – to appeal to a wide audience.

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Ron Riddell’s The Wanderer is a long, discursive poem of spiritual intent. The poet’s own introduction tells us that this is just the first instalment of a longer work, and a second instalment will appear in due course. It presents itself as a journey in search of the self. As the journey unfolds, titles of successive sections indicate that we are passing through towns and cities in Colombia, where the poet has spent much of his life. But some of the landscape is dream landscape of a surrealistic sort, and there is one section set specifically in New Zealand.

The desire for fulfilment, the desire for oneness with other human beings, and ultimately the desire for a soul at peace are the goals of the narrating voice. This appears to be the “wanderer” himself, although another “wanderer”, so-called, is introduced at a certain point as a sort of guide to the journeying soul. Occasionally – but only occasionally – there are specifically Christian tropes.

In the book-length poem’s structure, there is much inversion and repetition, and allusion to other texts, as in:

“In my breath is my breath

the breath upon the water

the breath in every step

the step in every breath.”

And as in:

“In my end there is no end:

acting out of the back streets

from the dim recesses of memory.”

There is a general sense of goodwill towards others, guided by some form of benevolent unity, expressed thus:

“There is a common note that runs

through eveyone and everything

don’t miss that music

that sustains us

with its secret swell.”

And as we near the end of this first instalment of The Wanderer, there is a sense of achievement that the journey has been undertaken, even if it is not yet completed:

“We’re getting near the mountain top

getting near, not giving up

getting near and reaching out.

With startled cry, with joyous shout

We spy the summit looming up.”

Short lined-meditations with much repetition often have the effect of incantation. It can become hypnotic (or lulling) and its structure means that it is probably best read aloud, like a sort of running chorus. While the intention is admirable, there is one major stylistic flaw, however, which weakens the overall effect. There are repeated images of river, mountain and road but, even if geographic indicators are given, this imagery is altogether too generic. We miss the detail of specific landscape. We miss the sense of real people being encountered and understood in a real world. The Wanderer, far from being a plausible human journey, becomes aetherial, theoretical, detached from the world in which any of us live. An ideal that is not given human flesh.

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One of the best things about Three Poets, the HeadworX anthology is that the three poets are of different ages – Marion Rego in her 80s; Margaret Jeune in her 60s; and Alex Jeune in his 30s, thus offering a spectrum of viewpoints from different generations. Yet, as both Mark Pirie’s Foreword and a biographical endnote point out, the three poets also have much in common. They have, we are told, all performed in the Kapiti “Poets to the People” readings and at other venues. I asume too that Margaret and Alex Feune are related (mother and son?). Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Published together as “Windows on Life”, Marion Rego’s verse references childhood accidents, work done for children, the love of grandchildren and the frustrations of having to exchange inanities with check-out operators. A very impressive, well-structured poem called “Choices” contrasts regimented and silent church services in the old days with more noisy and boisterous services now, and asks provocatively “What would you rather have/ A church full of quiet people / who may or may not have wanted to be there? / Or a half-empty church of people / who are there because they want to be?” In fact, the image I am getting from these poems is of a granny who really does not wish to be patronised or treated like a senile person, whether by local councils or insurance companies or well-meaning juniors. Not that this is a grumpy old lady out of touch with the world. The poems about rising sea levels show that, as does her well aimed swipe at having to uproot non-native species of plants when you don’t want to (“Native Species?”). And they are ‘poems for the people’ because they are expressed as simple declarative statements.

Alex Jeune’s poems are titled “Images of Time”. They are more terse, gnomic and philosophical than Marion Rego’s cheerful garrulity. In its entirety, the verse given as “Untitled” goes thus: “I ought to be / More than I am / I need to be / What I felt to be right / The space between / The hopes and the hoped for / The real and the ideal type.” Other examples of similar tentative existentialism are found in statements called “Compulsion”, “Credulity”, “Strength” and “The Dark Night”. However this is not the only key in which Alex Jeune plays. He can wax positively lyrical about physical realities of nature or human habitation, as in “Springtime” or in  “Petone” where “Pohutukawa blossoms red / And evening stretch across the blue suburban skies / Light pouring through this valley of green.” Perhaps this is the key in which he should play more variations.

Margaret Jeune positively embraces human society and the natural world, which makes the title of her section particularly apt – “The Natural Landscape”. She chronicles in detail a trip to Auckland (“Auckland 2019”) and to its suburb in the Waitakeres (“Titirangi”), and she rejoices in summer’s chirping insects (“Cicadas”). Regrettably, while it might work as oratory, too many of her poems are prosey and end with a piece of neat moralising which is usually a dull commonplace and with which nobody would want to argue. Thus “Time for Tolerance” (written in response to the Christchurch mosque massacre) ends telling us “New Zealand is now home to many nationalities and faiths / Perhaps it is time for tolerance of our difference / and an understanding of each other’s cultures.” This is not poetry. It is editorial.  Thus too with the endings of  “The Natural Landscape” and “Christmas Time 2019”. There’s nothing wrong with saying what everyone is already thinking, but I’m reminded of Alexander Pope’s line that poetry is “what oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d”.  These offerings need to be expressed with more flair and originality to avoid the editorial trap.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“VOLTAIRE’S BASTARDS – The Dictatorship of Reason in the West” by John Ralston Saul (first published in 1992)

By now, I think every literate person is aware of the phenomenon known as the “intellectual bestseller”. Every two or three years there will appear a non-fiction book (usually a fat one) which is praised by all the pundits in the better newspapers and magazines and which, we are told, will totally change our views on life, the universe and the meaning of everything. The book can be about politics, economics, history, science, philosophy, religion, sociology or any of the big topics. So people who aspire to be intellectuals buy it in their droves. And then they try to read it. And often, tiring of it after a chapter or two, they put it on the bookshelf and think wistfully that they might get around to reading it some other day. But they rarely do.

For there is a widely-understood thing about intellectual bestsellers. Often they are bought more than they are read. I am thinking of books such as Margaret Wertheim’s Pythagoras’ Trousers, published in 1995, about the reprehensible masculine bias in the study of science; or Thomas Piketty’s 2013 blockbuster Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a very theoretical take-down of capitalism. A man of my acquaintance has been crawling his way through it, chapter by chapter, for the last two or three years; but most potential readers haven’t made the effort. Perhaps the pioneer of the bought-but-not-read intellectual bestseller was Stephen Hawking’s quite slim A Brief History of Time, published in 1988. Even though Hawking famously included only one equation, in order not to put off the general readership, many who bought A Brief History of Time were at once repelled by its theoretical physics and did not get past the first chapter. It has the reputation of being the world’s most famous unread book.

Back in 1992, the big intellectual bestseller was John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards – The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. The fat paperback copy I read has a back-cover blurb in which it is praised by everyone from the London Times to Christopher Hitchens and Camille Paglia. John Ralston Saul is a Canadian “public intellectual” (God, I hate that pompous term) and polymath. Bilingual, he writes in both English and French and is a long-time student of American, Canadian, French and British life and politics. He has written six novels (mostly before he produced Voltaire’s Bastards) and eleven non-fiction works (mostly after Voltaire’s Bastards was published). But Voltaire’s Bastards is still the book for which he is best-known internationally. If you want the private details, you might also like to know that his wife is a former Governor-General of Canada.

I had meant for some years to read Voltaire’s Bastards, but only recently did I get around to borrowing my son-in-law’s copy and making my way through its 585 pages of small print (before its 50-plus pages of end-notes and index). I am now convinced that it is one of those books that many people never finish. To give a quick and glib summary of it, I would say that it has an excellent central argument, makes very many wise points, but is also too damned long, goes windily rhetorical in places, sometimes says very silly things and occasionally is guilty of factual errors, especially in the matter of history.

So after the verdict of the court, here in detail is the evidence.

John Ralston Saul’s essential argument is that reason and ridicule, as they were used by Voltaire and other men of the Enlightenment, were wonderful tools for bringing down autocracy, absolute monarchies and clericalism. But unfortunately reason and ridicule can be harnessed to any cause. Reason becomes a mere logical framework detached from any public good as it pushes relentlessly towards its logical comclusions. (Without being too immodest about it, this is a line of thought I have often expressed – see my postings The Unreason of Pure Reason and my re-hash of it as Limits of Reason.) Reason is not of itself a value or way towards a sane morality. Reason is only as good as its premises. Reason, as Saul sees it in the modern world, leads to specialisation disconnected from most people’s everyday lives or needs. In his view, specialization has created the age of technocrats who flatter their superiors by appealing to “reason”. He frequently uses the term “courtiers” to characterise such technocrats, bending to powerful politicians like the toadies at the court of Versailles who once bent to an absolute monarch. Thus Saul is able to attack furiously the likes of Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, advisers to American presidents whose logical and rational schemes led to disaster. Incidentally, Saul is an equal-opportunity critic, lacerating equally American, Canadian, British and French systems and politicans. For some English-speaking readers, his intimate knowledge of French politics may lead to references that seem a little obscure. In a dizzying five pages (Chapter 2, pp.98-103) Saul manages to take down Jacques Chirac, Giscard D’Estaing, Harold Wilson, Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and a few others.

Saul has a particular horror of schools of business and administration that encourage only one particular (logical, rational, but essentially immoral) way of looking at society and economics. He criticises the Harvard Business School, the London Business School and the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration, whose graduates he calls “Enarques”. In his view, these institutions churn out bureaucrats, businessmen, politicians, lobbyists, British MPs seeking “directorships” and “special advisers” to governments, all of whom tend to favour monetarism and neo-liberalism without any regard for the common good. So long as their theories conform to the framework of “reason”, they can ignore genuine civil service. But when organizations have no real purpose, they tend to decay. As he says at the beginnng of Chapter 10 (p.234): “So long as there is a clear belief in the purpose of an organization, those responsible will find a sensible way to run it. But if the heart of belief is only in structure, then the whole body will gradually lose its sense of direction and then its ability to function.”

In his chapter on the arms industry (Chapter 6), he argues that armaments have become the largest industry in the world, not because of defence, but because “reason” says their manufacture provides employment and arms are excellent capital goods for export.

“This warping of war from a tool of last resort, theoretically aimed at improving a state’s non-military position, into a twin-headed monster of abstract methodology and cathartic bloodletting, is one of the most unexpected children of reason. In some ways it is linked to the killing of God and his replacement by both the Hero and the modern military planner… It is difficult to think of another era in which individuals have so carefully turned their backs upon the evidence of their own continuing violence by treating each dark event as if it were somehow unexpected – or the last of its kind. And they have done so in the midst of our millennium’s most violent century.” (Chapter 7, p. 178) (I underline the last part of this quotation to note that it contradicts the thesis of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature – reviewed on this blog – which claims that violence declined in the 20^th century.)

Elaborating on the matter of war in Chapters 8 and 9, he further argues that the professionalisation and rationalisation of armies in the 18^th century led directly to the deadlocked bloodbath of the First World War. He claims that the only winning strategies were conceived and carried out by mavericks who were not overly influenced by staff colleges. Again, “reason” doesn’t work.

So the rest of this very long book winds its way through various effects of the misuse of reason and the rise of specialised technocrats.  The public relations industry  specialises in “myth-making”. It creates images of decisive or admirable political leaders to beguile the public while the technocrats can get on with the real agenda (Chapter 11). Governments indulge in unnecessary secrecy about policies which should be known to the general public, and scientists often collude in this unnecessary secrecy. (Chapters 12 and 13 – in which Saul of course references the nuclear power industry.) Real democracy is suborned by specialists in the legal system (such as America’s Supreme Court), where lawyers, in effect, make laws rather than elected legislators. Powerful corporations are able to influence the law, leaving the general populace more sceptical of both the legal system and the political process (Chapter 14). In response to such widespread public disillusionment, there is a hunger for “heroes”, who will bypass the political process and fix everything up – in other words, an opportunity for demagogues (Chapter 15). (I wonder what Saul would have to say if this book were written in the age of Donald Trump).The professionalised managerial class has taken over, and corrupted, capitalism by disconnecting it from real entrepreneurial capitalists who produce real goods for a profit. Instead, the managers look at the bottom line and chase illusory profits based on speculation rather than the sale of real goods. Corporations do not take risks the way real entrepreneurs do. Meanwhile, service industries  create artificial needs and lead to core things (health, education, welfare) being underfunded (Chapter 16). The monetary system is manipulated by corporations and their “profits” are made by buy-outs of other companies and not by producing real profits or benefits for the community at large. (Chapter 17).

Saul’s central thesis is sound. Flawed “reason” and specialisation have created many of the modern world’s problems. This is true even if Saul often wanders off track and appears to introduce matters that are not strictly connected with his central thesis, or perhaps with his areas of expertise. (His take-downs of modern art and the modern novel – in Chapters 18 and 21 – seem peevish rather than informed).  I find myself nodding in agreement with many of Saul’s views, including the following assertion:

“One of the specialist’s most successful discoveries was that he could easily defend his territory by the simple development of a specialised language incomprehensible to non-experts… The new specialised terminology amounts to a serious attack on language as a tool of common understanding. Certainly today, the walls between the boxes of expertise continue to grow thicker. The dialects of political science and sociology, for example, are increasingly incomprehensible to each other, even though they are examining identical areas. It is doubtful whether they have any separate existence from one another. In fact, it is doubtful whether either of them exists at all as a real subject of expertise.” (Chapter 19, p.475)

As I read this, I think of all the verbose, obfuscating gobbledegook which has passed for literary criticism in the postmodern era, clearly devised by people determined to claim a special expertise while repelling those who are not initiated into their verbal codes.

I also applaud Saul’s views when, in Chapter 19, he argues that the lauded “indivdualism” of modern society is really consumer-driven conformism which never takes on social responsibility or challenges the political and economic status quo. “Individualism” now means falling back into private “lifestyles”. Further, pop culture figures who are said to be “rebels” are no more than inciters of such self-absorption. Saul lines up a list of “rebels” from Arthur Rimbaud to Elvis, and remarks: “These romantic victims – the Heroes of individualism – exude an ethos of rebellion. And yet, when you look at the contemporary lifestyles which are built on that rebellious mythology, you discover that they are profoundly conformist.” (Chapter 19, p.481) Quite so. And in Chapter 20 he rather labours the point that “stars” have become the focus of media attention rather than serious journalism – another diversion from the public good.

But now I come to my quarrels with Voltaire’s Bastards. First, a slightly nit-picking quarrel with some of Saul’s statements related to history. I have often found that big, fat books like this one, which aim to present an all-embracing thesis on history and life, will err in some of the fine details. In the matter of history, Saul makes sweeping and sometimes silly statements.

He clearly has a thing about the Jesuits, whom he mentions negatively a number of times, and makes the extraordinary claim (Chapter 5 pp. 108-109) “A unified Western elite, using a single system of reasoning, was precisely what [Ignatius] Loyola [founder of the Jesuits] set out to create in 1593. Thanks to his extraordinary invention, the Jesuits constituted the first international intellectual system” which Saul says “linked itself inextricably to nationalism”. Really? Was Christianity itself not an “international intellectual system”, or does Saul exclude religion from being intellectual? For that matter, wasn’t medieval Scholasticism an “international intellectual system”? As for the “nationalism” bit, Saul condemns Cardinal Richelieu for creating what he sees as the first modern, rationalised nation state. This seems to be part of a general animus towards Catholicism (seen especially in Chapter 18, where Saul goes apoplectic about church art). His interpretation is eccentric to say the least. Surely it was the the Protestant Reformation that broke up Europe’s international consensus, encouraging nation states separated from Rome. Indeed if anyone first set up a rationalised nation state in Europe, it was Henry VIII.

 There are other minor historical distortions. Repeatedly Saul credits Thomas Jefferson as the man who attempted to devise the best system of government, but ignores the fact that the sympathies of the slave-owning Virginian gentleman did not extend to the whole human race. In Chapter 11 (p.275), Saul blandly tells us that President Francois Mitterand was in the Resistance during the war, failing to mention Mitterand’s preceding service to the Vichy (collaborationist) regime – a matter of controversy and public knowledge in France before Voltaire’s Bastards was written. Equally blandly, he tells us in Chapter 12 (a chapter condemning state secrets) that “given that there are no real secrets, those betrayed by [Soviet spy Kim] Philby are, to all intents and purposes, as important as those of each citizen.” (p.299)  Again, I can only ask – Really? Or perhaps, for the purposes of polemic, Saul is simply acting dumb about the consequences for many people of Philby’s espionage. The most egregious howler is in Chapter 18 (p.455), where Saul spends a whole paragraph on Marie Antoinette’s saying “Let them eat brioche [cake]”, discoursing upon it as an example of the flippant attitudes typical of an uncaring monarchy. Clearly he accepts this as an historical fact, but the idea that Marie Antoinette ever said such a thing has long since been proven to be pure fiction.

Okay, those are all minor and relatively trivial quibbles with Voltaire’s Bastards, a bit like pointing out that many of this 30-year-old book’s topical references are now inevitably dated. But there are more major problems with this overlong text. Consider this key statement from Chapter 5, (p.135):

 “At the heart of our problem lies the belief in the idea of single, all-purpose elites using a single all-purpose methodology. We have developed this in search of a social cohesion based on reason. Certainly there is an essential need to find common ground on which an integrated moral view can be built. Without that society can’t function. But a society which teaches the philosophy of administration and ‘problem solving’, as if it were the summit of learning, and concentrates on the creation of elites – whose primary talent is administration – has lost not only its common sense and its sense of moral value but also its understanding of technical advance. Management cannot solve problems. Nor can it stir creativity of any sort. It can only manage what it is given. If aked to do more, it will deform whatever is put into its hands.”

Repeatedly, as here, Saul sets “common sense” against “reason”, but then has a hard time telling us what exactly “common sense” is, apart from a vague idea of community good will and solidarity. I am irresitably reminded of that ringing opening to Rene Descartes’ Discours de la Methode, where Descartes says “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagee..” or in English  “Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.” Good sense, or common sense, is really a very shaky concept, and means very different things to different people. How is it defined? What norms does it set out? Regrettably, on this matter, in the last chapter of Voltaire’s Bastards, Saul is reduced to vague generalisations about the need for scepticism in the face of technocrats and an acceptance that there are no definitive answers to the problems that beset us and – oh yes! – that we must use our “common sense”. This is not exactly a programme for anything, and comes as a limp conclusion after the previous 500-plus pages.

There is a similar problem in Saul’s dissection of individualism, right though he is about some things. In Chapter 19 (p.467), he asks a rhetorical question and answers it: 

“What is real individualism in the contemporary secular state? If it is self-gratification, then this is the golden era. If it has to do with personal public commitment, then we are witnessing the death of the individual and living in an age of unparallelled conformism. Specialization and professionalism have provided the great innovations in social structure during the age of Reason. But they have not created the bonds necessary for public cooperation. Instead they have served to build defensive cells in which the individual is locked.”

Again, this argument reminds me of another canonical work. In his The Duties of Man, Guiseppe Mazzini said that the declared “Rights of Man” of the French Revolution had opened to us all the liberal freedoms, and had allowed us to live as individuals. But unfortunately there were fewer “Duties of Man” to bind society together. Society was atomised. This is essentially what Saul says too. Mazzini’s solution was to promote the notion of the nation to which we should pledge our loyalty. As it happened, and in no way the radical republican Mazzini’s fault, this turned out to be a disastrous suggestion because, like “common sense”, the “nation” can mean different things to different people. Years later Mazzini’s idea was picked up by Italy’s Fascists, who had quite a different concept of what the nation was. But at least Mazzini had suggested a solution. Saul suggests none. To read the last chapter of Voltaire’s Bastards is to hear much hot air escaping from a punctured cushion. We are left on the cold, hard floor where we started.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

UNREASONING CROWDS

Very, very occasionally, you read something from many centuries ago which seems to have huge and urgent relevance to the present day. Pardon my preciosity, but recently I was, with great pleasure, reading my way through the collected letters of Pliny the Younger, as translated by Betty Radice for Penguin Books back in the 1960s. Pliny the Younger, born in 67 AD and dying in 113 AD, lived nearly two thousand years ago. Because they are the largest section of his works to have survived from antiquity, his letters are now his best-known writings. Among them are the two letters that have been most anthologised, in which he gives an eyewitness account of the explosion of Vesuvius and the burying of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD. His uncle Pliny the Elder, a naturalist and an admiral of the Roman fleet, died in this disaster.

But this was not what caught my attention as I read his letters. It was his comment (in Book Two of his letters) to one Maturus Arrianus, in which he describes the effects of public clamour thus: “In a general uproar many will support an opinion which no one is prepared to defend when silence is restored, for only when separated from the crowd is it possible to form a clear view of a situation which the crowd hitherto obscured.”

As I read these words I thought of mass protests (peaceful or violent) in which slogans are shouted and much noise is made, but very few participants are able to articulate why they are protesting… apart from repeating slogans, clichés learnt from the media and probably insults. A demonstration (or riot) has a dynamic of its own. Whatever motives may have led people to join the mass demonstration, they will be caught up in the passion of the event itself and frequently reason flies away. In one sense, demonstrations are shows of strength, or shows of strength of feeling, but no logical proof of the rightness of any cause. And in saying all this, I am fully aware that some demonstrations take place for very valid reasons indeed. But it is only when people, calmly and rationally and with real evidence to support them, present the reasons for their discontent that any sort of clarity will be achieved.

While reading Pliny, I was aware that there was what we might now call an anti-democratic streak to him (remember, he was living in an imperial system where the common voice counted for little). Speaking of a measure, of which he disapproved, that was passed in a popular assembly, he writes in the same letter: “But the majority gave their consent; for votes are counted, their value is not weighed, and no other method is possible in a public assembly. Yet this strict equality results in something very different from equity, so long as men have the same right to judge but not the same ability to judge wisely.” This argument has often been used against democracy, hasn’t it? Not everybody has the same level of intelligence. Haven’t we all, at some time, regretted that the vote of that idiotic chump over there carries as much weight as the vote of incredibly intelligent me? But that line of thinking quickly degenerates into contempt for democracy itself, and fathers extreme systems (left-wing or right-wing) which assume that only a closed power elite is allowed to make policy.

Still, while he reflects some attitudes that should now be forgotten, Pliny the Younger was right about the behaviour of crowds. Where mass demonstrations are concerned, much noise and fury does not add up to being right.