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Sola fide and the ‘internet Left’

In an earlier post, I talked about the disadvantages of ‘belief’ but also its necessity in a world where so much can’t be known for certain. However I didn’t even mention the utility of ‘belief’ as a marker of belonging, as when a religious person explains their faith by saying ‘we believe X’, where it is the belief that makes possible that ‘we’ – and therefore also an excluded ‘them’. In many religions, notably in Protestant Christianity, belief in the correct dogma is, or at least has been, seen as far more important than moral behaviour. Only faith – sola fide – can save you from the fires of hell. And of course many religions, including Islam and most branches of Christianity, have not even waited for the afterlife, but have had people tortured and killed in this one for not subscribing to the correct dogma.

There are all kinds of advantages to sola fide. It’s easier to conform to a set of beliefs than it is to change your way of life. It’s also helpful for the wealthy and powerful who might otherwise have to take seriously moral teachings such as, in Christianity, Matthew 5.5 (‘blessed are the meek’), or Matthew 19:24 (‘ it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God’). At my primary school – a famous fee-paying school, and therefore only accessible to well-off people- the ‘eye of the needle’ was explained away by the chaplain as the name of a gate in the walls of Jerusalem through which a camel could actually pass, though it might be a bit of a squeeze, which makes the whole saying rather lame, and is quite funny when you consider all the other sayings which religions have insisted should be taken completely literally. Many people have been burned alive, for instance, for denying that communion bread and wine are literally the blood and flesh of Christ.

But this takes us back to importance of belief as a marker of belonging, the means by which a virtuous ‘us’ is separated from a ‘them’ which at best is ignorant and in need of enlightenment, and at worst does not deserve to be treated as part of the moral community at all. This is very handy. It makes priesthood important, for one thing (because priests are the ones who let you know what you have to believe in). It gives even the lowliest of believers the comfort of feeling superior to somebody (which is useful for elites who want to keep them in their place). And it provides a rationale for treating unbelievers badly, which is great if you want to conquer their country, or make them into slaves, or even just dismiss them as of no account.

The thing about this kind of belief, though, is that it’s no good just asking people to believe something obvious. You can’t build an ‘us’ and a them’ on the back of, say, ‘the sun rises every day’ or ‘on the whole, it’s good to treat people nicely’. It has to be something that isn’t obvious and that wouldn’t normally occur to you. In fact, more than that, it needs to be something which everyday experience would suggest there is no evidence for. Even ‘there is a god’ isn’t really sufficient, because that’s a pretty widespread idea which isn’t associated with any particular belief system, but ‘God consists of three persons – not two, mind you, or four, but three – who are all distinct, but are still somehow only one god’ – now, that’s more like it, no way is anyone going to come up with that empirically! And ‘bread and wine are literally blood and flesh’ is perfect.

Sorry to pick on Christianity by the way -I know many good people who are Christians, and who don’t use their religion in this kind of way- but it just happens to be the religious tradition I was brought up in, and therefore the one I feel best qualified to criticise. The point I am actually coming to is that sola fide is not confined to religions. In particular, I am struck by the way that politics has degenerated into competing belief systems of this kind. Hence the so-called culture wars, the internet-fuelled tendency to separate into competing tribes, each with its own priesthood and its own rigid and often arbitrary beliefs which you have to subscribe to in order to belong, even when your head is secretly saying to you ‘it’s really not as simple as that.’

Since my own politics, cloudy as they are, are on the left (which is to say, it seems to me that the people at the bottom of society get a lousy deal, and the people higher up are obscenely privileged) my particular concern is this tendency on the left. If being on the left is reduced to expressing the latest ‘correct’ views on social media in the latest approved language, with the aim of demonstrating your loyalty to your faction, and your distance from that other lot, it has ceased to really be politics in the sense of a practical attempt to make things different, and has just become a way of feeling superior.

And this at a time when oligarchy is on the rise and oligarchs are managing to persuade a lot of people who would normally be your natural allies, that you belong to a haughty self-righteous elite who don’t even like them, and that they should throw in their lot with them, the oligarchs.

The New Barons

I’m not really a joiner at heart, but back in the late seventies I was a member of the Labour Party, and I helped as a canvasser and teller in the 1979 election, (which famously Labour lost).

One thing stayed with me from that experience. As a teller outside the polling station, checking off people’s names as they turned up to vote, I was sitting with the tellers of the other parties, Tory and Liberal, and we chatted to each other, and even occasionally helped one another out if one of us had somehow missed a voter’s name. It occurred to me that this was pretty remarkable. We didn’t agree with each other but we accepted each other’s humanity and right to be there, when for most of history, and in most countries in the world, factions resorted to violence to get their way, and, if they succeeded in taking power, used torture, murder, imprisonment and censorship to suppress their rivals. This struck me as something precious, and much more important than the actual outcome of the election, important though that also was: a system of government that relied on consent.

I should not delude myself. What now, looking back, can seem like a golden age, really wasn’t. In the middle of the twentieth century, industrialised nations like Britain were still taking advantage of a massive head start in the world economy resulting in large part from the imperial system, in which most of Asia and Africa was run by European powers, or America, in a way that was rigged for their own benefit.

India had only been independent for 31 years at the time of that election, many African countries for considerably less, and in some cases only after brutal wars. (Algeria, for instance, had only won its independence 15 years previously after an ugly war with France that may have killed up to a million people.) In fact Britain had only been a democracy at all for less than twenty years unless you chose to discount all the subject peoples, outnumbering its own population, that Britain ruled over whether they wanted it or not, imprisoning those who challenged its rule. (‘The overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat,’ George Orwell had pointed out in 1939, ‘resides not in Britain but in Africa and Asia’).

And even in 1979, when Britain had shed most of its empire, its democracy was still bolstered by the prosperity that the empire had brought. Democracy is much easier when there’s prosperity -it’s hard to win people’s consent when most of them are living in poverty- and our prosperity been built on top of a tower of tyranny, from which we were still benefitting, and still do benefit now, though progressively less and less.

So that peaceful tolerant scene outside the ballot box wasn’t quite what it seemed. But still, what a lovely dream it was! A world that didn’t work by violence.

These days, polls show increasing numbers of people saying that liberal democracy doesn’t work and they’d prefer a strong leader who doesn’t need to answer to an electorate. America has effectively said so through the ballot box and many other countries are heading the same way. Across the world, large numbers of countries have never had democracy, or have had it and lost it already.

Democracy is disappointing if things aren’t going well. When we were children, my sisters and I used to discuss elaborate games of let’s pretend – we were a family of explorers in the Amazon, I was the dad, one of my sisters was the mum, another was the dog, another was a deaf-blind child etc etc – but once we’d set up the game, it was kind of done, and we never actually played it. Democracy can end up being a bit like that. One party lays out a set of policies and ideas which it says are going to solve our problems, but they never really happen (think of David Cameron’s Big Society) -or if they do happen, they don’t work in the way they were supposed to, or don’t happen quickly enough to fit into the electoral cycle – and then we chuck that party out, and the other party discards whatever’s left of its set of ideas and introduces its own, which also do not happen, or don’t work, or don’t work quickly enough.

And meanwhile things keep chuntering on in much the same way regardless, except that these days they seem for most people to be steadily getting just a bit more shitty all the time. You just lose interest after a while. You get cynical. You start wondering about alternatives. And there’s no denying that there are some advantages in a system where a single regime can carry out its programme over a long period of time without always having to think about short-term popularity.

The thing is though, that there has to be some way to determine who gets to be in charge, and if it’s not a ballot, what is it? If you look at dictatorships around the world, the mechanism is always some combination of violence and bribery. You eliminate rivals, you buy the acquiesence of as many people as you can, either with money and material assets or with non-material benefits such as enemies they can hate- and you repress the others. The most ruthless player wins.

We are heading back to the brutal world of rule by competing barons, by powerful thugs, jockeying with each other for position. Many countries never left it. But this time it’s barons with the internet, AI, satellites, drones and nuclear weapons.

Woke

Exhibit A: In the early seventies there was a programme on ITV called The Comedians, in which a number of stand-up comedians stood in a row and took it in turns to tell jokes. I can only remember one joke. The comedian – it may have been Bernard Manning – said that he’d met a Pakistani in the street, walking a pet duck on a lead. ‘I didn’t know you had a monkey,’ the comedian said. ‘It’s not a monkey, it’s a duck,’ replied the Pakistani, to which the comedian responded -and this was the punchline- ‘I was talking to the duck.’

The reason this has stuck in my mind is that, even at 14 or so, and even in those times when racist jokes were commonplace even among liberal middle-class kids like me, I could see this was vile, a joke that doesn’t even work unless you think it’s funny to describe a stranger, to his face, as non-human, because he has brown skin and a different culture. It seemed vile to me then, and it seems, if anything, even more vile now when two of my own grandchildren – two of the people I love best in the world – have brown skin. The thought of those two cheerful little girls being exposed to stuff like that and realising they’re the target of it, quite literally keeps me awake at night.

In the culture wars, the accusation of being woke – it used to be called politically correct – is constantly being thrown at those who object to inappropriate language being directed at people because of their skin colour, ethnicity, gender etc. ‘So what exactly is wrong with objecting to offensive language?’ the defenders of wokeness reply. ‘What you call wokeness is just common courtesy and basic human decency.’ And of course in many cases this is true, as it would be if someone raised objections to the ‘joke’ above. (Presumably the reason filth like that is no longer heard on on national TV is because of the many objections to it people have raised over the past 50 years – and good for them.)

But the trouble with the whole yah-boo culture wars phenomenon is that it obliterates nuance. There is another side to wokeness, I don’t find it hard to see why it raises people’s hackles, and I find it a little disingenuous when the defenders of wokeness claim not to see it.

Exhibit B: Some years ago, in the late nineties, when I was still involved in social work, another incident occurred which also stuck in my mind. A colleague (white) expressed horror at the fact that some foster-parents had used the term ‘coloured people’, which was seen at that time as derogatory. (Indeed, another white colleague, I now remember, had actually posted a sign in the office with a quotation from somewhere which objected to the word ‘coloured’ in terms something like this: ‘How dare white people call us coloured, when they are the ones that come in all sorts of different colours, and change colour when they’re angry or cold or embarassed.’)

This is different from Exhibit A, because there was no reason to believe the foster parents were intentionally using the term in a derogatory way. In fact, they very probably thought that ‘coloured people’, as opposed to, say, ‘black people’ or ‘Asian people’, was the polite and respectful expression to use, as it had indeed once been – hence the name of the American civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And of course nowadays, the term ‘people of colour’ (POC) is widely used by the wokest folk, and no one, as far as I know, suggests it is derogatory, or objects to the association of the word ‘colour’ with people who are not white.

Terms not intended to be offensive do acquite offensive connotations over time -I get that: look at the word ‘spastic’ for example- but not keeping up with the currently acceptable language is not even vaguely in the same category as telling a Pakistani man he is a monkey. And it seems to me that to affect outrage when someone uses outmoded language is something more akin to the cool kids at school mocking some poor schmuck who still listens to music that’s now uncool, or wears clothes that are no longer in fashion. In other words, it’s about proving your own superiority.

It’s often not clear who decides when words become unacceptable, or who chooses their replacements. Sometimes, as in the case of ‘spastic’, I guess it just becomes obvious to everyone in the field that what was once a neutral term has now become a term of abuse. (Was this ever the case with ‘coloured people’?) But I do think there are self-appointed mindguards out there – assertive, educated, social-media-savvy people- who actually enjoy catching other people out and feeling superior to them, and having a following of herd animals who join in.

The people most likely to be caught out -apart from those who actively pride themselves on being ‘anti-woke’, or who simply don’t agree with what the mindguards have decreed to be correct- are those who are less educated (like those foster-parents) and less social-media-savvy, and therefore less up to date. In this way ‘wokeness’, which is supposed to be (and often is) about challenging exclusion, can itself become a tool for excluding people, a form of classism, hiding in the guise of being anti-isms – and of course the people so excluded notice this and resent it. More generally, it just makes it harder to express an opinion that is genuinely your own.

(Meanwhile, on the other side, the ‘anti-woke’ have their own mindguards, and their own herd animals, and their own stubborn refusal to see the game they are playing.)

Words

Looking back at the time in 2023 when I receiving chemotherapy, I can remember it felt horrible. I have a sense of what that horribleness felt like, and I’d know the feeling instantly if I felt it again, but I can’t describe it in words, because it was unlike any other sensation I have experienced. To myself I call it the ‘chemo feeling’, and I know what I mean by it, but there are many different kinds of chemo, and people react to each kind in many different ways, so what I call the chemo feeling is not necessarily the same as anyone else’s, and most people haven’t experienced chemo at all. At the time I sometimes said that it was a bit like nausea, but only in the sense that they were both sensations that, while not painful, were nevertheless pervasive, unpleasant, debilitating, poisonous. The ‘chemo feeling’ was actually something quite distinct from nausea. (Sometimes I felt nausea as well, but that’s another story.)

There is a school of thought which says that reality is entirely mediated by language, that a thing is brought into existence by words. But actually surprisingly little of our experience can be named. Take actual nausea for instance. If you say ‘I feel nauseous’ people know what you mean because everyone has felt nauseous at some point. But suppose you had to describe the sensation of nausea to someone who’d never experienced it. It would be impossible, like describing the colour red to a person born blind. Words only work by pointing at things that our listener or reader already knows about. (This is presumably why we tend to talk about character traits and internal states, which can’t be pointed at, by analogy with things that can be: I feel trapped, he couldn’t contain himself, she was a bottled-up sort of person…) Trying to describe the ‘chemo feeling’, I had nothing to point to.

This can be true also of pleasant feelings. Sometimes I wake from a vivid dream. I remember the dream’s events and characters, but I also remember a powerful mood or feeling, which was different from anything I’ve experienced in real life. If I try to tell others about the dream, I can describe the events and characters, but the mood is impossible to name because there is absolutely nothing I can point to which is comparable. I think this is why other people’s accounts of dreams usually seem so tedious. They can’t tell you the one thing that made it powerful to them.

This limitation of language makes being a writer difficult. It’s one of the reasons you are always being forced to compromise, giving up what you ideally wanted to convey, and settling for a rough approximation. (This post, for instance, will end up saying something rather simpler than I had in my mind when I started writing it.) But I love the process, the challenge of capturing as much as possible of what I meant to say, in spite of the constraints. (Describing the planet Eden through the eyes of people who’d never seen Earth was a particularly interesting challenge, because I’d forbidden myself all sorts of obvious reference points that would be familiar to the reader.)

Visual images do sometimes seem to convey more than words, I think. You can pack a lot of things into an image which it would be too cumbersome to put into words. I discussed a picture by Tintoretto in a post here once, but I couldn’t begin to name the mood that picture was able to almost instantly evoke in me, any more than I can pin down the feeling of a dream. (Whether that mood was the one that Tintoretto intended to evoke, is of course another question.)

Below is an image I generated some time ago, when I was playing with the Wombo Dream art app and gave it the prompt word ‘nausea’. Weirdly, seeing as it is made by a machine, it really does seem to capture something of the feeling (I suppose it has adapted a human-made image from somewhere). But I don’t know if it would do so for a person who had never experienced nausea themselves.

‘Nausea’ generated by Wombo Dream AI.

“Trump refuses to rule out using military to take Panama Canal and Greenland”

He is also suggesting that Canada become a US state. We are very much back in the world where big powers feel they have the right to annexe small countries if it serves their purposes, simply because they can. It never completely went away, but there was a time in the second half of the twentieth century when it looked (at least from the blinkered perspective of middle class folk in my very prosperous part of the world) as if it was becoming less acceptable. Perhaps it has just become more naked again.

In the case of Greenland, Donald Trump is threatening military action against a small country (Denmark) which, like Canada, is supposed to be a US ally. No wonder he’s never been particularly concerned about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Greenland is unusual in North America (along with Nunavut territory in Canada) in being a large self-governing entity in which indigenous people are still the majority and indigenous politicians are in charge, at least in some spheres. Until recently one might have assumed it would stay that way and that, one day, in spite of its tiny population, it would become a fully independent Inuit state – the first new indigenous majority state in the continent. It now looks increasingly as if this has just been a respite, and that Greenland will go the way of the rest of the Americas. It just hasn’t been worth bothering with up to now.

This is all very much the territory of my novel America City (though things are happening much more quickly than I anticipated) and, I won’t lie, there’s an idiot part of me that wants to crow over my powers of prediction. But another part finds all this absolutely terrifying, because I have ideas about the things that are going to happen next, not in fiction, but in the world that my lovely, lively, optimistic grandchildren are going to have to grow up in. I honestly feel afraid to even name those things, though I don’t think you have to be much of a prophet now to see what they might be.

Suburban Moon

The moon in a suburban sky. A gigantic sphere of rock, shining with the reflected light of a star, hangs over a commonplace scene of semis and front gardens you could find in any town in England.

Seeing the moon up there has often served me as a reminder that the ordinary and the everyday are not the whole story, and that we are surrounded everywhere and all the time by the strange and wonderful. (In fact I used the moon in just such a way in a story called ‘Spring Tide‘).

The strangest part, though, is that the suburban street is actually much rarer and more remarkable than the moon. There are many cratered spheres of rock in the solar system alone -look at Ceres for instance – but, as far as we know, no dwellings of any kind anywhere in the universe other than Earth, let alone something resembling a suburban semi.

* * *

Recently my wife and I were returning from an outing with two of our grandchildren in the back of the car, one aged 3, one nearly 2. We pulled up outside a supermarket with the idea that my wife would nip in to buy a couple of things we needed while I waited in the the car with the children. But the children were determined to go in.

Must we? my grownup self thinks with a sigh. You’ve been in supermarkets many times before. What exactly is so interesting about this one? But they rush through the door, take in the scene for a second or two with expressions that say ‘WOW! CHECK THIS OUT!’, and are off down the aisles, finding things, looking at things, competely delighted and engrossed.

I suppose it’s necessary, from an evolutionary point of view, that everyday things should stop seeming amazing, because otherwise we’d constantly be distracted from necessary tasks, and would lack the necessary incentives to try to improve our survival prospects. I assume that’s why what once seemed wonderful soon becomes merely ordinary, and finally just boring. But the mysterious, the numinous, are not really other, not really remote unreachable places like the moon, but anything at all that we manage to see, by whatever means, without the dulling effect that comes with familiarity.

This, I suppose, is what my character Jeff in Dark Eden is reminding himself when from time to time he says, ‘We are here. We really are here.’

A Family Story

A family man is having a mid-life crisis, his own personal crisis of masculinity. His life is one of comfort, safety and regularity and it feels too easy. He wants to grapple with nature, he wants to feel that he’s protecting and providing for his family. So he persuades his wife that they should leave their comfortable home and move to a remote island to live in a lighthouse: the man, his wife, his son -a gentle, sensitive boy, on the cusp of adolescence- and his physically very small but extremely tough foster-daughter.

The wife is a gentle, calm, nurturing woman, who, without complaint, sets aside her own preferences in order to help her husband get through whatever he feels he has to get through. But she pays a price for her selfnessless. Life is tough on the island, she gets lonely, she misses the things she loves back home, and, for all her overwhelming need to care for others, she can’t completely bury her resentment at being taken for granted, as if her own wishes were of no account. (To add to her sense of being confined, her husband is so determined to be a provider and protector, that he’s constantly telling her to take it easy and leave everything to him.) She occupies herself by making a garden that the sea promptly sweeps away, and then by painting from memory, on the inner walls of the lighthouse, a picture of her beloved garden at home.

Unknown to any of the family, they’re followed to the island by someone who has become obsessed with them. She is a desperately isolated figure, so appallingly alone that it’s frightening just to be in her presence, so lonely that her loneliness freezes everything around her. (Such people do exist – I’ve met them myself).

There is another extremely isolated figure, the island’s single existing inhabitant, who they just call the Fisherman, because he won’t tell them his name. He lives in a tiny hut and refuses to talk to anyone.

It doesn’t sound like a children’s story, but the title of this book is Moominpappa at Sea, by Tove Jansson. The father, his wife and his son are not human, but Moomins, which (as you probably know) are cute, hippo-like, cartoony creatures. The tough girl is a tiny fierce-faced creature called Little My, and the lonely being that follows them is a creature known as the Groke, who freezes the world around her not just in a metaphorical way, but quite literally. If she sits somewhere for too long the ground turns to ice, and everything that grows there dies.

Continue reading “A Family Story”

The Three Classes

In a certain country the people are divided by law into just three classes: the Owners, the Experts and the Workers, the precise boundaries between them being set down in the relevant statutes. At one point the Owners, who were at that time basically warlords and protection racketeers, were in charge of everything. However, as time went on, the Experts – merchants and what we might now call professional people- grew more influential until the Owners deemed it advisable to allow them a share in the running of things. There had in fact always been a few Experts co-opted into the Owning class in return for services rendered, but now they as a class were granted a say – and their very own house of Parliament alongside the House of Owners. And in due course both classes, Owners and Experts, became known collectively as gentlefolk – as opposed to the rough folk, who were the Workers.

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