Blog

I’ve been known to say that September is my favourite month. There’s still a bit of summer left, but also some autumn. Sometimes in September the light has a particularly kind of intensity that’s unique to this time of year.

So I love September, but I also hate it. I associate it with coming back from a holiday, when the grass is overgrown and strewn with dead leaves and rotting apples, and I know that I’m going to have to go back to school very soon, or back to work at a job that worries me sick – and when I know that next it will be October, and then November and winter.

My feelings about months and seasons are different now from how they were when I was young, because time flows much more quickly – months come and go, seasons whirl round, I never have the feeling that I once did of summer stretching ahead almost forever, or of winter doing so either – but I still have the same ambivalence about this time of year.

Assuming I live until my mid-eighties, as my parents did, I’m in the mid-September of my life, which is to say, about three quarters of the way through. At the end of this year I will start receiving my state pension. It will be nice to have of course, but at the same time it is a message from the state: ‘nothing is expected of you any more.’ The fact that nothing is expected doesn’t mean I don’t have anything to give, of course – I think I have a couple more books in me, I still have things to give as a father and a grandfather… – but still, the message is a reminder that I’m entering the final part of my life.

I’m not like Frank Sinatra. I do have regrets. I’ve done many shitty things. But I think what I regret most of all is my own timidity, which I think lies at the core of most of those shitty things anyway. Timidity, I’m calling it, though I could call it cowardice: the thing that stopped me from grasping nettles, the thing that stopped me properly confronting things that needed to be confronted. At the root of timidity, or so it seems to me, is a lack of trust in one’s own self: ‘I do not trust myself to be able to deal with this situation,’ the timid person says, ‘and so I’m going to avoid it altogether, and maybe even pretend to myself that I haven’t even noticed it.’

But of course one shouldn’t spend September thinking about all the things you should have done in April or May or June. The winter is coming. No sense in wasting this time too.

(Postscript: on reflection, it isn’t particularly original to say that a lack of trust in one’s self causes timidity! After all, ‘trust’ is a synonym of ‘confidence’, and so all I am really talking about is a lack of self-confidence. But interestingly using the word ‘trust’ made the idea seem fresh to me, so that it had the force of a sudden flash of insight! I suppose this is simply because ‘self-confidence’ has become such a widely used term that its meaning has become blunted. When I was a child, teachers also talked a lot about ‘self-respect’, which is a different idea and an important one: more of an ethical principle, a duty towards oneself which is akin to the duty one had towards others.)

I think all belief systems that deal with human conduct are attempts to reconcile two principles. One: self-centredness, our tendency to prioritise our own experience, our own feelings, our own needs. Two: empathy, our ability to recognise that the feelings, needs and experience of others are equivalent to our own. I guess some other animals have no capacity for empathy at all. They experience themselves as being the entire universe. (I wrote a story called ‘Ooze’, in which I attempted to think myself into the mind of such a creature.) But very few humans are completely devoid of empathy.

Some people say that what we should strive for is to be completely un-self-centred, and completely empathetic, treating other people’s needs as equally important to our own (there are even those who would have us treat other people’s needs as more important). Such people might argue that self-centredness is not a principle at all. It is simply a falling short. This strikes me as a somewhat empty piety. I say that not just because most of us are incapable of being entirely selfless, but also because I don’t think that would even be desirable. Happiness is only possible because we are able, at least sometimes, to shut out the suffering of others. At any moment of time, someone is being tortured, someone is starving. How could we ever laugh, or fall in love, or savour life in any way, if we were never able to set that to one side, just as we set aside our own future and past suffering?

But even our limited capacity for empathy is, for most of us, enough to make it impossible to completely disregard the needs of other people. So our belief systems are all designed to allow us to think of ourselves as ‘good’ even though our behaviour suggests that we are quite largely motivated by self-interest. Christian theology for example includes the idea of original sin -we can’t help being bad- but also includes a way of nevertheless being redeemable by faith, even if not by deeds, a formulation that also rather neatly serves the self-interest of priests, who provide the formula we need to believe in in order to be saved. Under all the theological elaboration, though, this idea does contain a simple truth: we are bad (selfish), but we are not completely bad. It also has the effect of burying the unworkable morality of absolute empathy which some sayings of Christ rather inconveniently imply. (Easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven… etc)

Or, another example, Adam Smith argued that the mechanism of the market place meant that more good was done by people pursuing their own interests, than by people trying to be good. This idea is as comforting for rich people as the idea of salvation through faith alone is for Christians, (and of course it isn’t unusual to combine the two). How nice to think that buying nice things and having lovely holidays are actually morally good things to do! But then again, attempts to impose economic systems that are not driven by the pursuit of personal gain have tended to end in tyranny. And, since fear is no less selfish a driver of human activity than the pursuit of pleasure or status, but is a lot less efficient, maybe Adam Smith had a point.

Anyone who ever spends any money on nonessential things -and I don’t know anyone personally who doesn’t- is placing his or her own pleasure or comfort in that moment above the needs of people who are hungry, or homeless, or unable to afford treatment for illness. Our awareness of this stops most of us from being entirely selfish, but we remain selfish all the same. One way out is to blame the unhappy for their own misfortunes. Another is to look for others who are more selfish than we are, and build up a sense of moral superiority by condemning them. (It is a common activity to condemn the extravagance of folk who are richer than we are, even though we ourselves are many times richer than most people on the planet.) In this way, morality itself is turned upside down, becoming, not a system of guidance for ourselves, but a means of proving our superiority to others. This technique is as old as history and now forms a staple of arguments on social media.

Just over a week ago, in Bury, in Greater Manchester, a woman called Sarah Hussein was set alight in the street and subsequently died of her burns.

It’s surprising how little prominence this story has been given. I only happen to know about it because I saw it posted on social media by someone of fairly right wing political views, who for convenience I’ll call X. X’s angle on this was to compare the coverage given to this Sarah with that given to another Sarah, Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a police officer earlier this year, and whose case was very widely discussed, and made into something of a political cause. Since both cases involved murderous violence directed at a woman by a man or men (the details don’t yet seem to be clear in Hussein’s case but three men were arrested), why, X wonders, did one horrific crime become a feminist cause celebre and not the other?

Hussein had a Pakistani background, and X, apparently assuming that her assailants had the same background, seems to think that her case has not been taken up in the way that Everard’s was, because ugly behaviour in a Muslim community can’t be fitted neatly into a liberal narrative, and drawing attention to it risks accusations of racism. X’s belief that the media is controlled by liberals and leftists seems questionable (!) but the underlying point may have some validity: we are all prone to focus on stories that can be fitted into our preferred worldview (or at least into a worldview which we imagine other people expect of us), and steer away from those that don’t.

X is doing the very same thing of course. He is picking up on the lack of coverage of this story because he feels this supports a right wing narrative in which people on the left are hypocrites whose claims to be the caring ones are shallow and self-serving (a view of the left, incidentally, shared by my late, and rather right wing, father). It’s agreeable to X, no doubt, to feel himself to be the one saying that a Pakistani woman deserves the same attention as a white one, while those lefties who are always going on about racism remain (as he sees it) silent. It reassures him about the virtue of his own position, the dishonesty of theirs. (They, whoever they are, would of course have a different view.)

I’m not sneering at X here, though, because I’m no different. I too notice stories that fit into my own worldview. I’ve picked up on the lack of coverage of this story and X’s reaction to it because both connect with a topic that preoccupies me: the self-serving nature of the narratives that each human individual and each human tribe is constantly telling itself about the world.

Can we make anything of a news item like this, I wonder, other than by either ignoring it, or else connecting it up with things we feel we already know?

There are people to whom this event is not reducible to a story: first and foremost poor Sarah herself and those who love her. To them it wasn’t a story about horror, but horror itself, the thing we are all constantly seeking to avoid, to manage, to hold at a distance. The rest of us, though, carry on trying to avoid it, or manage it, or hold it at a distance.

Liberal friends claiming not to like this country and to much prefer other countries…

Hmmph. This has become more widespread after Brexit, but it’s been around for a long time. I don’t like it. A lot of funny stuff going on, it seems to me, in those kinds of claims. A lot of idealisation of the foreign other. A lot of taking your least favourite Brits (or more usually, your least favourite English people, since there’s been a certain amount of idealisation of Scotland too), and comparing them, not with their equivalents in other countries, but with the foreign equivalents of the English people you do like.

A fair amount of ‘classism’ in the mix too: Middle-class folk trying to distance themselves from their ‘own’ plebs in order to ingratiate themselves (if only in their imaginations) with middle class folk in other countries.

Jingoistic patriotism is unattractive, but equally so, I think, is the affectation of despising your own country.

Parents are not appealing when they’re always bragging about how much better their own kids are than anyone else’s or shoving other people’s kids aside to get the best for their own. But the opposite is, if anything, even worse: parents who put their own kids down and say other people’s kids are better.

My subjective feeling is that my children and grandchildren are the best in the world. I know this is subjective and that other parents and grandparents quite naturally feel the same about their own, but it still seems natural and appropriate to feel that way.

Not an exact parallel, obviously, but to have a special feeling for my own country seems natural and appropriate in the same kind of way, while similarly recognizing that it is subjective and personal. A special contempt for my own country would no less subjective, but also feels mean spirited and perverse.

Gnostics saw the material world as a cage in which the spirit was trapped. Christianity (like other religions) has been preoccupied with the idea of the soul needing to free itself from base, animal instincts.

But oddly at the same time as characterizing our animal nature as something to be struggled against, Christianity has insisted that ‘unnatural’ behaviour is wrong: homosexuality, contraception, feminism have all been portrayed as going against the natural order of things.

Progressive liberal morality, which sees itself as supplanting those old moral codes, is nevertheless their heir. It is no longer stern about sexual continence. It sees sexual diversity as something to be celebrated, and gender, or the roles to be played by people of each biological sex, as a choice, rather than something to be imposed or enforced. But there is still, in progressive liberal morality, that same sense that our animal nature is something to be fought against. It’s just that other aspects of our biological nature are now the focus: our tendency to form hierarchies, our tendency to favour our own family and our own tribe.

Progressive liberal morality still expects people to struggle against what comes naturally to them. Any morality must, I suppose.

And liberal moralists get confused, tied in knots, just like the old moralists. There are tribes of anti-tribalists, who look out in contempt at the tribalists beyond their circle. There are hierarchies of anti-hierarchalists, with powerful opinion-formers at the top who lay down the anti-hierarchical doctrine, and armies of followers below to hound those who do not conform.

(History shows how easily the religion of the God of Love turned its hand to torture and murder, and how quickly the political doctrine of equality created its own godlike despots.)

These days people fight human biology on its own ground, by modifying bodies and body chemistry with surgery and medicine, and even altering the genetic code. We now have alternative bodies too in the form of thinking machines which one day may have souls of their own. Some people, weary of the endless struggle between humanity and itself, speak of evolving a new a better kind of being: superhumans, robot saints.

But I don’t believe that a self-reflecting being could exist that didn’t experience the conditions of its own existence in the same ambivalent way that we do. Is a human being happier than a lark, or kinder than a lark is to its fellow creatures? If not why would we expect a superhuman to be happier or kinder than we are?

I went to the 70th birthday party of a friend recently. Since she has friends who are older than herself as well as friends who are younger, I was among the younger people there, but I’ll be 66 at Christmas, so I was very definitely part of the same generation as the people there in their seventies. I was in a group of old people with white hair, and brittle skin, and stiff limbs, and I was one of them.

It is a cliche, and only partly true, to say that I don’t feel old. In some respects I certainly do feel old. I have arthritis. I have health conditions which I’m now stuck with. I ache in the mornings. I have to pee at least three times every night. I have to make a effort to stand up from a sitting position. I am a granddad.

It’s not all bad, and that last is definitely one of the nice parts.

Another thing: my parents are dead, and have been for several years, which to be honest is also one of the nice parts. They were not bad people, and I felt affection for them, but all my life their neediness felt like a ball and chain which I had to drag around behind me . Latterly, neither of them wanted to carry on living and both of them deliberately hastened their own deaths. The fact that they no longer wanted to live was part of the burden, and now I’m free of it.

Another freedom I have now comes from having a pension. I don’t have to work unless I want to. This is obviously also a nice part (and perhaps especially so for a writer). I well remember, a few months after finally retiring from my last part-time day job as a university lecturer, suddenly realising how lucky I was to have an income until the day I die (not particularly high, but perfectly livable), and giving a little whoop of relief and delight at this new freedom which I have, whether or not I deserve it. The only downside is that it’s a reminder that I’m in the last part of my life, I am in the part of my life where society no longer demands anything of me.

The sense in which I don’t feel old – and I remember my mother saying the same thing- is that it feels like the same me looking out through my eyes as looked out through those eyes when I was 21, still grappling with essentially the same things.

Continue reading “Old”