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thinking about my father; reading the Mill biography; and teaching Schiller in a seminar today (the link is to some unpublished notes I never developed).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