Tuesday 26 February 2008

On being a barbarian

Several things come together: thinking about my father; reading the Mill biography; and teaching Schiller in a seminar today (the link is to some unpublished notes I never developed).

Reeves quotes a passage from an article about Guizot in the Edinburgh Review from 1845 in which Mill writes that "... the modern spirit of liberty ... is the love of individual independence; the claim for freedom of action, with as little interference as is compatible with the necessities of society, from any authority other than the conscience of the individual. It is in fact the self-will of the savage, moderated and limited by the demands of civilised life; and M. Guizot is not mistaken in believing that it came to us, not from ancient civilisation, but from the savage element infused into that enervated civilisation by its barbarous conquerors." Mill had previously referred to Guizot's account of 'systematic antagonism' between rival sources of power and had agreed that the barbarian invaders had brought something vital into the European mix (see Reeves p 194).

This sounded attractive as I read it in the bath this morning: how delicately one has to move in a bath in order to preserve the integrity of a heavy book against the curiosity of soapy water.

The premise is that the civilisation that was invaded was already in a state of enervation and needed the injection of some wilful and wayward energy. How would one ever verify such a large cultural claim, though. It is attractive in part because it suggests a culture of such self-will, as he puts it, one not already repressed by the necessities of civilisation that brings about Freudian discontent: something of the wild Irish, perhaps, in contrast to the buttoned-up Brits, though the Church (and the Brits) managed to button up a lot of the Irish in the end. (But Guizot and Mill are more optimistic than Freud: what Mill describes sounds like the expression of a reasonably liberated psyche, 'moderated and limited' rather than repressed)). The point is that it is a genuine historical claim and is not merely a projection of the difficulties experienced by the id, though 'enervation' must be the state of exhaustion brought about by the struggle involved in repression. You run out of steam rather than building up an explosive pressure that seeks release: Blake's 'till it is only the shadow of desire'. A culture in which self-will, truculence, a casual attitude to rules, bloody-mindedness have much more scope .... (At my local station they put in those automatic barriers a couple of years ago. Hilariously, no one ever uses them, they just push the gate open and go through as though they weren't there). But this concept of freedom is at the heart of On Liberty.

But also, I was so unaware of how deeply Mill was involved in European, particularly French, intellectual life, with a corresponding contempt for the British scene. I recall my friend, Michael Weston, commenting that the continental philosophers try to address questions not even conceived by the British analytic philosophers. It seems that not much has changed. What a way to be brought up, all that ignorant sneering. all that insular disdain.

I was teaching Schiller and the translators use the term 'enervation' which echoed back the Mill and Guizot. What is extraordinary about Schiller is that he attempts to offer a philosophical diagnosis of the ills of, the state of, society, in his case the swift perversion of the ideals of the revolution, the dividing intellect, the repression of the natural, the loss of harmony. It makes me wonder what an analogous diagnosis of our own global civilisation would look like.

As for id and superego and the memory of my father, all the wildness had been crushed in his generation by poverty and deference to the Church. Perhaps he was cowed by the drunken rages of his own father (and a fierce protectiveness towards his 'saintly' mother and an emotional obedience to her Catholic will) and so walked a narrow and disciplined path which could, however, brook no opposition or dissent in his children. Apart from the frequent punishments (in which I know he took no pleasure) I think I was chilled in my childhood by an atmosphere of disapproval and incomprehension that was as pervasive and palpable as the smoke from the woodbines. And all along I should have been a (quiet) barbarian, as he should have been. After his time as a window cleaner he became a manual worker and was compelled by necessity to work hours of overtime each week. I knew how hard he worked, felt his weariness, but also this Oedipal relief when he closed the door behind him to go to work and a corresponding anxiety when I heard his key on his return. Fear of the father, then, later, of the priests ...

Saturday 23 February 2008

Thin winter sunlight in the late afternoon picks out the pale green on the bark of trees starkly lit against the rainclouds. I am walking down an avenue towards Victoria Park and can see the far banks of the Mersey south of Liverpool, grass, woodland, as it would always have been, and, almost as a matter of course, I wish I could see the whole scene in some pristine and prehistoric form and, as usual, wonder about the origins of this desire. Is it some form of misanthropy I am unable to acknowledge? Or is it just this city, this conurbation, and its history? Or neither of these, perhaps, just the longing, the need, for some image of original innocence but a need set off by these ugly neglected streets, some pure image of the soul, always spoilt. I walk on down Derby Road and pass St Catherine's, the hospital to which my desperate parents came in the late forties, pushing two children in the pram, to seek shelter after their eviction from their rented room and, as usual as I pass that way, I try to imagine that scene too, my mother retching on the yellow fish they brought her in the public ward, realising she was pregnant again. My father had to go to a separate ward. He must have been in despair, homeless with a beautiful wife and their little family. They went to my grandmother's house and made it officially over-crowded and got their own council house after some months, in Bebington, a mile from woods and farmland descending from a spine from which you could see both the Mersey and the Dee. My mother still lives in the house, alone, where once there were seven of us.

Monday 11 February 2008

All these voices calling for his resignation, what a lamentable state of affairs, especially perhaps on the part of those who accuse him of naivety and ineptness. Implicitly it is a new informal version of Erastianism, the doctrine that the Church should be subservient to the State, in the sense that these people would really like to be the ones who decide what is politically opportune and what is not. But they are implicated in its very inopportuness by their misrepresentation. And their track record in the way of political shrewdness ...


I heard excerpts from Rowan Williams's Today programme interview and have now read the lecture. When I say that I have 'read' the lecture I mean that I have read through it fairly fast and therefore there is much that I would have to go back to if I were to formulate an assessment or reponse.

Williams makes hardly any positive suggestion, but simply raises issues about what would be reasonable and what would be unacceptable. For instance, I thought it was interesting that he raised the distinction between vexatious and serious conscientious objection, the Muslim girl who wouldn't handle a book of bible stories and the medics who refused to perform abortions. In that context his suggestion that there should be some recognised Muslim body that would provide criteria about what was vexatious and what was serious was a helpful one. Though it would not be the end of the story. We should have to reflect on how far we should want to go along with their recommendations. This would introduce a debate similar to those occasioned by Catholic scruples. Thus, at a certain point during the writing of the Abortion Act there would have been discusion about whether catholic (or other) doctors and nurses should be entitled to opt out. It was determined that they should be allowed to opt out. By contrast Catholic adoption agencies were not allowed effectively to discriminate against particular adoption candidates. It seems to me that the right judgment was made in the two cases. It also seems to me that the issue would always be one of particular debates and resolutions and it would work in this way in Muslim contexts as well as Catholic or other ...


Ironically, I have been reading about Mill and his reflections on the tyranny of the majority, on the need for philosophers (as opposed to philosopher-kings) and here we are with the entrenched anti-intellectualism of these islands, though 'anti-intellectualism' hardly captures the hatred ... Is there a country where even the popular press would attempt to understand and not thoughtlessly misrepresent, attempt to understand and set out, though not uncritically ...


... do I really enter my 63rd year shocked that various interests groups prefer their interests to the truth?

Friday 8 February 2008

Archiepiscopal reflections

It is interesting to oberve the reactions to Rowan Williams' carefully qualified, though still unspecific comments on the introduction of some aspects of Sharia law. The thing that stands out is how the political parties feel they have no choice but to reject his comments by quite deliberately misrepresenting him and insisting on what he would not have denied, that we cannot have one law for Muslims and one law for the rest of us, etc. So, deliberate misrepresentation must be seen sometimes as a political necessity, he muses naively. And this because the political parties are themselves terrified of being misrepresented, as endorsing stoning or whatever. Enormous fearfulness, really, and it is hardly true that any of them exhibit political finesse, and they will certainly override public opinion if the stakes are high enough ... I suppose they don't want to give comfort to the enemy.

The headliness too seem to misrepresent him quite casually, as wanting to introduce Sharia law as an absolute alternative. The more intelligent newspapers don't misrepresent him (except in their headlines) but accuse him of political ineptness: this is not the time to speak publically about such matters because it looks like appeasement of the extremists.

And yet, as the media and the parties seek to stroke and placate the populace, Williams can surely be said to be showing the virtue of parrhesia, speaking truth to power (here the tyrannous power of the majority), and is accused for his pains of the foolishness mentioned by St Paul, not comfortable, but part of the Christian package.

Wednesday 6 February 2008

A bad cold

I have started to read a biography of John Stuart Mill by Richard Reeves, actually one of the few things I can do at the moment, thanks to some bug that I seem to be sharing with my mother and youngest sister, though I did watch an episode of Torchwood on BBC iPlayer just now. I have also just finished reading a biography of Chopin that I picked up in one of those remaindered books shops, a desperately sad story, Chopin and George Sand, Chopin and his consumption, imagining him on the train from Edinburgh to Manchester to play at a concert before he finally returns to Paris to die. It all reminds me, the despair and paranoia, of Keats, and Benita Eisler also refers to him, dying in Rome. I remember him asking something like, who will deliver me from this posthumous life? And, since I'm not quite firing on all cylinders, I watched a Time Team dig of a Roman villa in the Cotswolds. I seem to suffer from a disturbingly poignant sense of incredulity when I read of life in Roman Briton, or of life in C19th France, for that matter. We can hardly carry the collective burden of memory, the idea that they were like us, at least in their primal emotions, that they rejoiced and grieved, were happy or afraid, and died, but in the real time of human life far in the past but on this very ground. I cannot carry the burden of it in my imagination, and yet my imagination demands that I should do so. The utterly transient meaning of a human life, its finite pulses, but still a human life, still a 'meaning', though that word does not come to me naturally here ... and all, disturbingly, in some complex causal relation to what we are now. Okay, I'm ill. Perhaps the real point is that the poignancy lies in a transferred sense of the transient meaning of my own life, projected into the past but seen therefore as one with it, one brief set of its pulses. But not futile or cancelled by its transience: one thinks of the way that one can zoom out from the Earth and no longer see regions or countries, then zoom out further until the planet has wholly disappeared, and its galaxy, but it is still the case that an adequate description of the planet or the galaxy or the universe will include this slow history of human experience, misery, happiness, wisdom, ignorance. So I end with a kind of Kantian thought, among all these whirling, burning cinders self-conscious life.

Sunday 3 February 2008

An Abstract


What do those who call themselves secularists seek thereby to reject or rule out? What should they reject?

And those who retain some ‘loyalty’ or 'allegiance' to religion ... what do they want thereby to hold on to? And what should they hold on to? And the proper measure for either decision?

It is well known that there is no straightforward symmetry between what the one party rejects and the other holds on to and that some of those who are sympathetic to religion share the secularists’ rejection at least of particular theologies, dualisms, supernaturalisms (which some secularists take to be the thing itself)—and have for that reason been criticised by more full-blooded religionists as really secular humanists with a nostalgia for traditional religious language.

But this is a nostalgia that is worthy of further exploration since it concerns what we conceive as properly to be abandoned and what we are in danger of losing. If the ‘apparent world’ goes out of the window with the ‘real world’, as Nietzsche might have said, so that we are left ‘merely’ with the ‘natural world'—well, what counts as the ‘natural world’?—and in what ways might our conception of nature be enriched or impoverished, and by what measure do we form these judgments?

I shall try (in the first person because we are talking about the forms of our own subjectivity here) to reflect on this difficult conceptual terrain between what we call the secular and what we call the religious, with a view to elaborating an idea of transcendence or spirituality that at least accords with some notion of naturalism. I shall try to do this through an attempt to test the adequacy of particular conceptions of the moral life against the language of its interior conditions which is embedded in some of what we would call religious language .... I think I have in mind the sort of difference everybody notices between Plato and Augustine. Plato is profound, of course, but it is only in Augustine that you get the sense of inner struggle which is inseparable from the winning of wisdom. Religious language, or at least some of it, at least embeds such ideas as that he who would find his life must lose it, or that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it will not bear fruit. Death and transfiguration ... a language of inner experience forged by those who know that this is what the territory looks like ... know or seem to know ... and this is where the trust in the teacher becomes important: you trust their knowledge but they may let you down, and if they do ...

Friday 1 February 2008

Serving time

Severe weather, gale to storm force winds, high seas in Orkney ... or so I am told. I feel surprisingly bereft not to be there, surprising because my acquaintance with my adopted home is so slight yet my connection with it so visceral. The elements there are so much more in the foreground, they force themselves on your attention, the first thing you notice on rising, whereas here, in Merseyside, they are always in the background and you notice wind and rain only when they scream for attention. That cannot be entirely true, the moon shines high above Birkenhead as it does above St Tredwell's Loch or the Straits of Dover, but somehow it is also occluded and muted, by buildings, traffic and crowds.

Wirral and Orkney, Vikings and Irish priests, plus ca change ...

Today I enter my 63rd year and time and mortality force themselves on my attention as palpably as the elements on Papa Westray. So much to do, so little time, but also an increasing resentment at serving out a sentence, serving the time of the other, petty administration, a series of little tasks that stand in the way of serious work, whose possibility lies beyond the temporal horizon ... but, on the other hand, much of it is behind me and I am starting to accelerate towards the moment of taking thought and submitting myself to its processes, which have a life of their own to which obedience is a necessity.



To Lancaster and junketing