All posts tagged Thomas Hobbes

Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq by Rory Stewart (2007)

‘If you put my cousin on the council, I will slit his throat.’
(Typical threat from an Iraqi sheikh, Occupational Hazards, page 231)

Rory Stewart

Stewart (born 1973) is posh. He comes from a family of Scottish landed gentry. Like lots of poshos born into a family which helped administer the last shreds of empire, Stewart was born abroad, in Hong Kong in his case, and then brought up in Malaysia. He, of course, was sent back to the old country to be educated at Eton and Oxford. After a brief spell in a posh regiment in the British Army (the Black Watch) he went on to work in the Diplomatic Service. Absolutely stock, standard posh-boy career. Then, in the footsteps of the posh travellers of the 1920s and 30s (Wilfred Thesiger et al), he left the Diplomatic Service to undertake a two-year walk across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal, and then, of course, wrote a best-selling book about the experience, ‘The Places in Between’ (p.8).

Post-war Iraq

Stewart’s posh boy qualifications, his experience in the Foreign Office, his (supposed) knowledge of Arab and Muslim culture (he’s very candid about his shortcomings in speaking or understanding Arabic, as he is about everything else) meant that when the Coalition Provisional Authority (the provisional Western power set up in Iraq after the American invasion of March 2003) put out feelers to the British Foreign Office for volunteers to work as ‘governorate co-ordinators’ in the southern provinces of Iraq (which had been assigned to the British to manage) Stewart was a prime candidate.

In fact, surprisingly, he received no response to his initial application and so, with the confidence borne of his Eton-Oxford-Foreign Office pedigree, he flew to Jordan, took a taxi to Baghdad and lobbied for the job on the spot. He was vouched for by the Director of Operations and Infrastructure at the CPA, Andy Bearpark and was duly appointed (p.73).

Stewart in Iraq timeline

Thus it was that on 28 September 2003 Stewart found himself on a flight from Baghdad down to Amara, capital of Maysan Province in southern Iraq (p.10). Here he worked as ‘governorate co-ordinator’ running a team of ten or so civil affairs officers, alongside the British Army’s (completely separate) military operations for the next 6 months.

Map of Iraq’s provinces, by Orthuberra and published under Creative Commons attribution Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

In November 2003 the American diplomat Molly Phee arrived, assuming the position of Governorate Co-ordinator and Rory switched to become her deputy (p.188). A few days later, Paul Bremer announced the CPA would hand over authority to a provisional Iraqi government on 30 June 2004. In the same month an opinion poll revealed that two-thirds of Iraqis described the allies as ‘an occupying force’ (p.220).

In January 2004 the security situation suddenly deteriorated and the compound at Amara started coming under attack (p.288).

In March 2004 Stewart was moved from Maysan to its western neighbour, Dhi Qar, and its capital Nasiriyah, where he served as senior advisor to the civil affairs team. There were mounting attacks on occupation garrisons throughout Iraq.

In April 2004 the Shiite cleric, politician and militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr unleashed his supporters’ insurgency against the occupying forces, leading to attacks against Coalition offices throughout Iraq, and against Stewart’s compound in Nasiriyah. The very fierce fighting would continue until al-Sadr declared a ceasefire in September 2004.

Meanwhile, in June 2004, the Coalition Authority handed all its powers over to the Iraqi Provisional government, and Stewart’s job came to an end.

He revisited Iraq a couple of times, later in 2004 and in 2005, but his day-to-day involvement at that point came to an end.

A memoir not a history

I bought this paperback when it came out in 2007. I remember being disappointed. Now I realise this was because I was expecting a historical overview, a comprehensive chronological account of the coalition invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, and Stewart’s book is definitely not that. For that kind of objective, historical and analytical overview, I recommend Jack Fairweather’s thorough and authoritative account, A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris and Sacrifice: The British in Iraq (2012).

I now realise I was disappointed by Stewart’s account because it is something else entirely: it is a highly personal memoir of the day-to-day challenges he faced, first in Maysan and then in Dhi Qar, and doesn’t even attempt to be an overall survey.

Instead, it is much more like a diary account (it’s not quite a diary because, as he tells us, he didn’t have time to keep a day-by-day record) of where he went and who he saw, and the issues and challenges he had to address, of the countless conversations and arguments with innumerable Iraqi officials, political leaders, sheikhs and clerics, interspersed with conversations with senior officers in the British Army in both provinces, and occasional meetings with masters in the CPA up in Baghdad. Above all, it is an odyssey through the amazingly convoluted networks of tribes and parties and gangs and warlords and militias which made up the immensely complicated tapestry of political life in his province.

And it is very deliberately provincial in focus. Occasionally he mentions politicking up in Baghdad or outbreaks of violence in the rest of the country, but only the briefest of mentions because his focus is overwhelmingly on the multiple parties and sects and forces at work in his province that he has to deal with.

This explains several things about the book:

1. At 434 pages, it is surprisingly long. But as you get into it you realise this is because it takes a long time to get to know all the many, many tribal and political leaders in Maysan. Stewart’s understanding only inches forward via long conversations, arguments, meetings, pledges, threats and unexpected revelations. In all these ways his book is more like a novel than a history: it’s not to be read for the facts; it’s to be read so as to allow the behaviours, conversations, promises, threats and actions of the various factions to slowly build up a complex, multi-layered portrait.

2. It also explains why, right at the start of the book, there’s a 4-page list of dramatis personae i.e. key figures from the narrative, just as in a classic nineteenth century Russian novel. Initially I thought I could skip these, but slowly realised that reading the book only makes sense if you maintain a good grasp of who’s who and, more to the point, who is conspiring against who, rubbishing them behind their backs, and why. Or at least, why Stewart thinks they’re doing so.

At which point I realised something quite important: that there are more Iraqi, Arab and Muslim voices in this than any other book I’ve read about Iraq or Afghanistan.

The clash of cultures

This point brings us to one of the two central themes of the book which is the immense, unbridgeable cultural gulf between this highly educated, objective and dispassionate civil servant, and the maze of Iraqi politicians he struggles to understand and manage. Over the book’s 430 pages he (and we the readers) obviously gain insight into people’s characters and motivations; but it’s delusive. Tribal leaders still abruptly reverse their positions, or pull out of agreements, for no motive that Stewart can fathom. One minute he’s enjoying a cup of tea in his pokey office in the CPA compound in Amara with a Shia cleric who promises to work with Stewart’s plans to set up a provincial council. A week later the same person is leading an angry mob on the same compound, inciting them to riot, chanting ‘Death to the Coalition’ and publishing a leaflet calling for all devout Muslims to assassinate CPA officials like Stewart (p.228). It is an impassable gulf:

Even in the stable context of our office, with good translators, it was often difficult for us to understand Iraqi guests and for them to understand us…the truth was that the most basic concepts like, ‘civil society’ or ‘sharia law’, meant very different things to each of us. (p.242)

The more he understands, the more he realises he’ll never understand. Not least because quite a few of the local players themselves don’t fully understand what’s going on. In a Hobbesian world where everyone’s hand is against everyone else’s, nobody can be sure of any of their pacts or alliances or deals.

‘These people talk randomly,’ said the governor in a tense, tired, quiet voice. ‘Even among themselves they agree about nothing. It is impossible even to get a consistent demand from them.’ (p.294)

This explains something else absolutely central which is that, when push comes to shove, if you’re in doubt about who was your ally and who was conspiring to have you assassinated, the One Thing that was guaranteed to win you brownie points with almost all the other Iraqi parties, was declaring ‘Death to the West! Death to the Coalition!’

Stewart doesn’t say it in so many words, but it emerges naturally from his countless stories of promises broken and double crosses, that opposition to the Coalition, to the occupying forces, and the West in general, was so vehement because it was, at bottom, the only policy on which almost all the squabbling Iraqi parties could unite on.

Being political illiterates, having absolutely no concept whatsoever of democratic processes or conventions, ‘Death to the West’ was the one and only policy that could (for a while) unite parties, tribes and interest groups who were, otherwise, at each other’s throats (for example, at the first meeting of the council Stewart has himself selected, p.277).

Security, security, security

All of which is related to the other, deeper, central message of the book which comes over loud and clear. Young Rory arrived with the naive belief that people are basically decent; that, if given space, law and order emerges naturally from the culture of a society; and so he initially allowed himself to be dazzled by the enormous number of economic and social development projects being worked up by the ten-person civil society team which he found in Maysan before him.

Only slowly and brutally, does he realise that the locals don’t give a monkeys about educational programmes on human rights, the free market, feminism, federalism and constitutional reform (p.82) or ‘gender-awareness workshops’ (p.83).

What they wanted was security security security. What they wanted was law and order. What they wanted was to be able to walk down the street at night (or even during the day) without being held up, mugged, sexually assaulted, kidnapped and held to ransom, or tortured and murdered.

And that, as it turned out – the provision of basic security, elementary standards of law and order – was something the occupying forces turned out to be completely incapable of providing. And Stewart’s account is a priceless testimony as to why. You might as well try to get a box of frogs to put on a military tattoo as get the endlessly bickering Arabs who Stewart profiles to agree about anything.

The rivals

Amid the blizzard of other projects and responsibilities, the central consuming project of the first, Maysan, part of the narrative, is Stewart’s attempts to appoint a provisional council which can then meet and agree a) a new provincial governor and b) a new chief of police.

The police are poorly trained, cowardly and corrupt (p.83). For example, tribal leader Abu Rashid drafted hundreds of his militia followers into the police, some of them as young as 12. The day before a meeting with Rashid Stewart hears that, when Abu Rashid’s mother had been told to wait when she went to hospital, some of these boys had drawn their weapons and threatened to shoot the doctors unless she was treated immediately (p.87). What can you do with a society split into such fiercely partisan warlord groups, and where that kind of instant resort to extreme violence is normal?

Pretty much all the sheikhs and party leaders he has to deal with are criminals. When Stewart appoints Abu Rashid chief of police it is in the knowledge that Rashid’s cousins run the major smuggling operation in the area. Stewart’s thinking is it’s better to have the big gangsters inside the organisation and let power slowly educate them, than simply making them eternal foes.

Most of the leaders he deals with are involved in some kind of criminal activity, such as smuggling drugs or diesel. Most have threatened to assassinate each other and some are responsible for murders, while most had had some member of their family killed over crime or tribal vendettas. Most of them run extortion and blackmail rackets. All the contractors he allots CPA funds to for ‘development’ projects, skim some or most of the money into their personal accounts, with sometimes hilarious results.

‘There were 54 political parties, 20 substantial tribes, and a dozen leading political figures in the province’ (p.169). Broadly speaking there are:

  • tribal sheiks: there are two massive tribes in the province but innumerable sub-tribes and smaller tribes all jostling for power, slow to forgive ancient feuds (‘Most urban Iraqis perceived the sheikhs as illiterate, embarrassing, criminal, powerless anachronisms,’ p.231)
  • some of these sheikhs had forebears who had proudly fought against the British occupier and coloniser in the 1920s and so, even if they’d wanted to be co-operative, family tradition and pride insisted that they be seen to be as unco-operative and obstructive as possible
  • there are the various candidates and parties which are all fronts for the self-styled Prince of the Marshes, a charming, educated and thoroughly untrustworthy figure, who leads a gang of semi-literate criminals who, immediately after Saddam’s fall, comprehensively looted Amara
  • clerics, all Shia, but with a surprising number of fierce rivals; incongruously to British readers, many of these religious leaders have their own militias which regularly kidnap or assassinate opponents
  • Iran-backed parties: during Saddam’s long tyranny (1968 to 2003) tens of thousands of political and religious leaders fled abroad; only a handful of them were ‘secular’ (or what passes for secular in a Muslim country); most of them were various flavours of Shia and fled east to Shia Iran; here they were kept on the Iranian government payroll awaiting the day when Saddam (a Sunni) was overthrown; so Stewart had not only to deal with Shia clerics who remained in the country, but with a whole cohort who had returned from Iran and were all, to some extent or other, in hock to Iran and carrying out pro-Iran policies; thus, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was funded by Iran and represented Iran’s interests (p.65), lobbying for wilayat-e-faqih, meaning government of the jurists i.e. a Shia theocracy identical to Iran’s
  • then there were the Sadrists, followers of Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who shouted the same kind of anti-Coalition slogans from their pulpits as the returners-from-exile but with one key difference: Muqtada had never gone into exile and was a fierce Iraqi nationalist i.e. opposed the Iran-backed parties as violently as they opposed the Coalition; his militia calls itself ‘the Army of the Redeeming Imam’ (p.86); Muqtada ‘created his own armed militia, assassinated clerical rivals, declared an alternative government and called for the immediate departure of the infidel Coalition’, p.253; Stewart makes the point that all the Shia groups seem to be represented by younger and younger men who reject the moderation of their elders; in other words, political Islam was becoming more unstable (p.230)
  • there weren’t many Sunnis in Maysan (the further south in Iraq you go, the more Shia it becomes) but by and large the Sunni were more moderate and better educated than the Shia, who they regarded as uneducated, backward heretics (p.46)
  • last and least, quavering in the shadow of all these fierce and violent factions, were the handful of genuinely secular, middle class, liberal democratically minded Iraqis and the handful of ‘feminists’; none of these stood a hope in hell of being elected to anything but Stewart and his boss, Molly Phee, appointed some to their provincial council because it’s what the CPA in Baghdad, and all the Western politicians bankrolling the whole thing, had told their populations we were doing in Iraq – building a modern democratic state which respects the human rights of all blah blah blah

The point is that nobody in Iraq trusts anybody else; they are all prepared to believe the absolute worst of all the other tribes, clans, groups, militias, police forces and so on; and, knowing no other way of calmly settling disputes, and also conceiving of power as a zero sum game where you are either in total control or nothing, they routinely try to kidnap or assassinate each other.

A society where nobody believes in anybody else’s good intentions, yes, it probably does require a strong, authoritarian ruler to quash all these rival sources of authority and, above all, of violence. Only a really strong, violent man with a strong, violent security apparatus can quell all the other violent rivalrous groups into submission. Stewart starts off believing this is anti-Arab propaganda, but runs into trouble when Arab after Arab tells him it is true.

‘We Iraqis, we admire strong men. We have tough heads. You must be strong.’ (His first Iraqi interpreter, page 32)

How many Iraqis are you going to ignore when they tell you point blank that their society just won’t function unless it is governed with a fist of steel? It may be racist for us to make such sweeping statements, but isn’t it just as racist to ignore an Arab’s description of their own society because we supposedly know better than they do?

Thus various tribal and religious and political leaders tell him again and again that only an extremely strong, dictatorial authority can enforce security in Iraq (pages 59, 81, 82). When he and Molly finally agree settle on the members of the provisional council they’ve nominated, Stewart gives a characteristically droll summary of them:

I knew these people well. Most had killed others; all had lost close relatives. Some wanted a state modelled on seventh-century Arabia, some wanted something that resembled even older, pre-Islamic tribal systems. Some were funded by the Iranian secret service; others old oil on the black market, ran protection rackets, looted government property, and smuggled drugs. Most were linked to construction companies which made immense profits by cheating us. Two were first cousins and six were from the same tribe; some had tried to assassinate each other. This dubious gathering included and balanced, however, all the most powerful political factions in the province and I believed that if anyone could secure the province, they could. (p.268)

And at their very first meeting the Sadrist member announced that the council was illegal, poisoned by the presence of the Coalition and forbade anyone from taking their oaths. Lolz, as my kids would say.

Or when, after the first guy they appointed as chief of police is assassinated, after much heart-searching Stewart and Molly appoint the Prince of the Marshes’ brother, Riyadh Mahood Hatab on the basis that he is a competent administrator with 20 years experience in the civil service, the respect of the ministry directors, the power of his brother’s militia behind him and contacts in Baghdad. Yes, he’ll do. And then the comic horror with which Molly and Rory listen as the newly installed chief of police outlines his programme: he wants to take full control of the police, set up a secret intelligence service, ban demonstrations, arrest a journalist who had insulted him and expel his Sadrist opponents from the council (p.275).

This is how everyone they try to negotiate thinks about power; it is a zero sum game and, if they are given a position of power, they must immediately move to assume complete control as quickly as possible in order to forestall the inevitable attempts and assassinations and coups which all their rivals will mount against them. Given half a chance, everyone turns into Saddam. No-one turns into the kind of mild liberal democrat the CPA in Baghdad, and their masters in Washington and London, fantasised about.

Violent rhetoric

In the build-up to the Iraq war Saddam Hussein promised the Mother of all Battles but as soon as the invasion started most of his soldiers ran away (some didn’t; some stayed at their posts and fought very hard until obliterated by bombs from the air). I have read serious, sympathetic, Arab writers trying to explain that flowery and impassioned rhetoric is part of their culture. Alternatively, maybe they genuinely are as bloodthirsty and cut-throat as the characters in Stewart’s book suggest.

Stewart visits one of the many schools he’s helped refurbish with CPA money only to bump into the Prince of the Marshes who is ranting about the shoddy quality of the plasterwork, leading up to the blood-curdling threat:

‘Now I need to know the name of the contractor who did this work – tell me his name and I will rip out his tongue.’ (p.98)

Is this bombastic showing off, especially as he said it for the benefit of the school’s headmistress who was standing nearby? Even so, it’s hard to fit this kind of language into anything that might be said in a civilised society. Or was it meant literally? After all, there was always a low level current of mafia-style violence across the province and that was before the insurgency began, which itself degenerated into sectarian civil war, when thousands of people were kidnapped, had their eyes gouged out, their kneecaps drilled through and otherwise hurt in the most cruel and sadistic ways imaginable.

If it was rhetoric, it paved the way for real life atrocities. But more likely, the language just matched the actions.

Tribal fights were still very common – it was not rare for two or three men to be killed in a week in tribal disagreements. (p.143)

Stewart helps a sheikh of the Suwaad tribe who graciously invites him for lunch. Next day the sheikh’s house is firebombed. At an art exhibition he is introduced to Dr Kifiyah, a confident woman who is working for an aid organisation educating women (p.175). He supervises the election of a mayor for the town of Ali Al Sharj. Three days later, the mayor is ambushed and killed (p.226).

The central event of the first section, set in Maysan, is the assassination of the chief of police who Stewart and the CPA had put all their hopes on, which unleashes a kidnapping, and various forms of sectarian violence. The point is that everyone has so many enemies that they’re not at all sure who carried out the assassination.

Under siege

The first 300 pages chronicle Stewart’s time in Maysan. Around page 300 he leaves that post and is driven across the border into Dhi Qar province and on to the Coalition’s base in the provincial capital, Nasiriyah. He discovers it is a far bigger, more populous place than Maysan. He discovers that the team here held elections to appoint a provincial council and they were judged a success, shedding light on his decision to appoint a council, which led to all the problems which made up most of the text about Maysan.

The next most important thing he discovers is the military presence here is Italian and, living down to their hard-won reputation, they are useless. Never on time, never serious or committed, they rarely lose an opportunity to run away from a fight. To be fair this was because, a few months earlier, in November 2003, a huge truck bomb had detonated at the Italian headquarters in Nassiriya, killing 17 Italians. At which point Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ordered his 2,300-strong contingent not to take any risks. Any more casualties and negative public opinion would force him to withdraw from the Coalition. There were strong political and operational reasons for the Italians’ tardiness and unreliability.

All of which is important because Stewart is in Nassiriya when the dual insurgencies, of Sunnis in Fallujah and Sadrist Shia militias across the entire south, kick off in April, and the CPA compound in Nassiriya comes under sustained attack. It’s a really serious situation, with the compound besieged, running low on water, two guards at the gate are seriously injured, scores of mortars and RPGs attack the compound continuously, the entire civilian staff have to take cover.

Eventually he manages to get them extracted from the besieged base in a convoy of armoured patrol vehicles, only for them to trundle straight into an ambush and be bombarded with machine guns and RPGs and, having remained behind in the base, he has an agonising half an hour wondering if he’s just sent his entire team to a violent death, before getting a phone call to confirm that they had all arrived safe at the allied base at the airport outside of town.

Even here there’s Waughesque comedy, as the incompetent driver of the first APV unexpectedly throws it into reverse, nearly running over Stewart and a colleague who were remaining behind. When his infuriated commander leans down to cuff the harassed driver round the ear, he then accelerates into a pile of barbed wire which promptly tangle up the wheels and prevent it going any further, till the wire is slowly painfully untangled.

There’s page after page detailing the amazing ineffectiveness and cowardliness of the Italians, and it’s not just Stewart who is gobsmacked. A team of British and American security contractors from Control Risk Group (CRG) remain in the base with him and cannot believe how useless the Italians are (pages 390 to 393). Eventually after 3 days of siege a Coalition Spectre plane uses its night sights to locate the mortar bombers and pick them off one by one, killing or wounding the entire insurgent group. Next day the city is back to its normal bustling self. Stewart is full of praise for the consultants (aka mercenaries) who manned the machine gun posts and prevented the Sadrists storming over the walls and massacring Stewart and the garrison.

But Baghdad orders the compound to be evacuated. Obviously, the minute they’ve left the looters move in and strip the place of any moveable values, right down to the wiring, before gutting and burning it.

Once safely ensconced in the Italians’ main base at Tallil Stewart comes to like them. Wherever they go, they build pizza ovens and their food is extraordinary. In fact, once you stop thinking about the Italian Army as soldiers, but actually as great chefs in fancy uniforms, what’s not to love about them?

The CPA

In case I’m accused of being anti-Arab, Stewart also has a chapter devoted to a visit to the Coalition Provincial Authority in Baghdad which overflows with details of the inane, out of touch, ludicrous, over-ambitions of inexperienced Yanks who worked all the hours that God sent and yet somehow presided over a complete shambles (pages 105 to 121). I particularly liked the deliberately comic passage where he describes going to one of the evening discos in the Green Zone and being introduced to two men who were both under the impression they had been appointed acting Interior Minister. A little later he meets two men who both think they are the Media Commissioner (p.112). Chaos.

More seriously, Stewart describes talking at different times to two soldiers, one American, one British, who both try to get him to admit that the whole war and occupation was to do with taking Iraqi oil. If even the troops on our own side believe this myth, Stewart reflects, what hope of stopping most of the Iraqi population from believing it, too (p.108). After all, Iraq is sitting on the second biggest oil reserves in the world and yet throughout the Coalition’s rule, ordinary Iraqis had to form long lines at petrol stations. Why else could that be except that the West was stealing their oil? The real explanation, that Saddam’s extraction and refining industry was on its last legs and insurgents kept blowing up pipelines and facilities, was believed by no-one (p.152).

Talk of blowing up stuff raises the point that the Iraqis devoted an extraordinary amount of energy not just to killing each other, but to destroying the infrastructure of their own country (pages 205 to 206). The Great Looting in the days after the allied victory wasn’t an anomaly but a revelation of the true character of the Iraqis, a nation of looters and thieves.

Long after those days of chaos the looting continues. Everything not tied down is stolen. Factories are looted, warehouses are looted. In January, rioters storm the governor’s compound and loot every single piece of moveable furniture or equipment, even the filing cabinets (pages 289 to 297).

Several times Stewart mentions the practice of Iraqi criminal gangs who blow up power pylons so they can strip the copper from the coil, melt it down and sell it on the black market. The criminal gangs get tens of thousands of dollars from the venture but it costs the Americans tens of millions to rebuild series of pylons and rewire them. Obviously, most of the rest of the population suffers even worse power shortages than they already did.

As soon as he, the Italian garrison and the mercenaries withdraw from the CPA compound in Nasiriyah, it is comprehensively looted and trashed.

In a sentimental mode he describes the huge mudhif, a building built entirely out of marsh reeds using ancient skills of local builders, which had been constructed in such a way as to let light through a latticework of openings. It is ornate and beautiful as a cathedral. The Sadrists burn it to the ground.

When you have a people so absolutely determined to loot and vandalise their own country, what can you do? Leave them to get on with it.

On 28 June the CPA formally handed over authority to local council and governors in Iraq’s 34 provinces. The ones Stewart was involved in immediately plunge into chaos and violence. The Prince of the Marshes promptly allies with the Sadrists against the Iranian-backed parties. He shoots the chief of police of Majar dead. The remaining Coalition compounds such as the one where Stewart spent his first 6 months, in Amara, are now under continual, ferocious attack.

Church and state

It’s my view that it took hundreds of years for us in Britain to break the power of religion over the state. Three hundred years ago it took a civil war and a revolution to loosen the grip of the church over the nation’s political life. During the long Victorian century and well into the twentieth, the Christian denominations still exercised a very negative, anti-progressive influence, especially on what is loosely called the nation’s morals (anti-sex, anti-abortion, anti-free speech, anti-gay). It was a long, hard battle to overthrow religious influence on our national life.

Here, in this book, are countless examples of Muslim clerics insisting that their religion, their religious values, their ancient forms of social organisation and their dark age forms of political process eclipse, trump and obviate the need for ‘modern, ‘western’ ideas like democracy or human rights or women’s rights. A cleric named Seyyed Faqr puts it with particular clarity:

‘What matters is not the law. What matters is God, children, possessions, lives. These things are more important than the law. Forget the law. God is above the law and I represent God.’ (p.222)

But what happens if two clerics claim to represent God, a Sadrist and an Iranian? And if you throw in a Sunni cleric? And one from this tribe and one from that tribe? And they all claim a direct line from God so that they can’t negotiate or compromise? Then you have a recipe for endless civil war, as in Libya, Sudan, the Yemen, Iraq and Syria.

Only when all sides agree to abide by a law which is above all of them, impersonal and objective, and agree to thrash out their disagreements via legal channels, can you have a civil society. This is the lesson the Coalition Provisional Authority should have been trying to teach the fractious Iraqis. A legal system to which everyone submits, an independent judiciary, and an impartial police force, these are the bedrock of a civilised states, not the flashy trappings of elections. Elections and the trappings of democracy are a subset of law and order, which trumps every other concern. (cf p.315)

Humorous stories

Anyway, so far this summary has failed to mention the single most important thing, not about the book’s subject and themes, but about it’s style and manner. For this is an extremely readable and enjoyable book. I thought I’d had enough of books about Iraq and took it down off my shelf one evening only because I was bored watching TV. To my surprise, the next time I looked up, I was on page 50. I was hooked.

Occupational Hazards is beautifully written and by far the easiest to read of all the books I’ve read about Iraq and Afghanistan. A large part of that is down to Stewart’s appealingly British irony and deadpan humour which you may or may not attribute to classic upper-class sang-froid and irony. He expects things to go wrong and is never upset when they do. Many of the accounts of his meetings, with tribal leaders or top army officers, or foreign civilians in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) end with a bathetic, ironic, darkly humorous punchline.

It helps that so many of the facts are themselves blackly, bleakly comical, in the style of Evelyn Waugh’s comic accounts of Africa, walking a fine line between horror and hilarity. The secret is in the very dry, clipped phrasing. Here he is reflecting on the rather ludicrous title the Prince of the Marshes had awarded himself:

In truth, of course, Iraq didn’t have princes any more, and it hardly had marshes. The last princes were murdered on the kitchen steps of the palace in 1958 and disembowelled and mutilated in the streets, where the mob used the Regent’s intestines as necklaces. (p.18)

This is the Waugh tone, the casual, ironic, drawling half-humorous description of shocking criminality or scandalous behaviour:

I had spent my first two weeks almost entirely in my office or in camp and I was eager to visit rural towns, which I had heard were bastions of corruption, inefficiency and political tension. (p.90)

On one of these rural rides Stewart stops at an isolated compound to chat with a genuine farmer, not some politico with an axe to grind:

As I left I asked him what I should be doing. ‘Don’t trust the police chief, he replied. ‘He is a gangster. Don’t trust anyone who lives south of Al Amara. They are thieves and bandits.’
‘But you live south of Al Amara,’ I protested.
‘Don’t trust me either,’ he said. He presented me with a live guinea fowl in parting as a gift. (p.96)

The guinea fowl clinches the comedy of the anecdote. Whether this encounter ever happened or took place as Stewart recounts it, who cares? It’s not as if it made the slightest difference to what actually happened in Iraq. It’s these throwaway details at the end of each anecdote or cadence which give it the true Waugh feel.

The Bazun sheikhdom was in dispute between the two main families, one of which had stolen all the heavy digging equipment from the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works. (p.234)

And:

We drove past the main government building, which Nate had seen demolished by rockets: only a fragile facade of coloured tiles remained, and a sculpture commemorating the Iraqis’ 1920 uprising against the British. It depicted a British officer being shot in the back of the head. (p.303)

Of course horrible things happen. For example, quite a few of the Western civilians, administrators and soldiers Stewart meets on his first arrival end up dead, shot or blown up in suicide attacks. And then, in April, the four US contractors are lynched and their burned bodies hung from a bridge in Fallujah (p.342) which so infuriates President George W. Bush that he orders the US Army to storm the city to find their murderers and ‘bring them  to justice’ ho ho ho. In the same week Muqtada al-Sadr starts his Shia rebellion across the whole south of the country. Hundreds and then thousands died as a result of these parallel insurgencies, one by Sunnis (Fallujah), one by Shias (Muqtada’s).

Black comedy

An extended comic sequence is provided by the story of the kidnapping of a British hostage, Gary Teeley. The first part is all panic and concern among CPA officials and the military to establish who kidnapped him and why and how to get him back. In the event, some of the many tribal leaders Stewart has been having lengthy discussions with simply turn up at the gates of the compound and hand over the filthy and disorientated Brit, directly to Stewart, in person, expecting thanks.

Over the next few days various other tribal and religious factions, including the Sadrists, contact Stewart to claim the credit for releasing Teeley, even though it seems fairly certain that some of them were the ones who kidnapped him in the first place.

But that’s just the start. Stewart debriefs the shattered and disorientated hostage, who had been kept blindfolded for a week, then packs him into an ambulance to be taken to the nearby Italian hospital. Walking back through the compound he is accosted by an irate British woman who tells him she is a hostage negotiator who has been on high alert for 3 days, why didn’t he contact her? Because he didn’t know she existed. Why did he hand over Teeley to the Italians? Because he clearly needed to go to a hospital to be checked over. Yes, says the woman, but he should have been sent to the British hospital at Basra.

By now Stewart realises there is a propaganda battle going on between the British and Italian military, both wanting to be seen to be the hostage’s liberators, not least for the benefit of the Americans and the CPA in Baghdad. Thus the Italian commander sends an email round claiming the release was the result of the Italians working with their favourite tribal leader, Sheikh Talib of the Beni Rikaab tribe.

But it’s not finished yet. The released Teeley turns out to be selling his story to the papers, and – in the style of Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel of Fleet Street, Scoop – three different British newspapers print three completely conflicting accounts of his ordeal. The Daily Telegraph leads with a big photo of the Italian general shaking hands with Teeley as if the Italians negotiated his release. Then The Sun reported that Teeley had been released by Italian forces who used a helicopter to track a suspicious car to an apartment which they then stormed, discovering the captive bound by the legs. Then The Mail on Sunday led with the scoop that the Italian forces who had been credited with finding and releasing Teeley were in fact elite SAS officers wearing Italian military outfits!

Three different packs of lies, each more outrageously untrue than its predecessor.

The moral(s) of the story

1. Stewart’s book shows in more granular detail than any other account the sheer folly of expecting a backward, illiterate, tribal, sectarian society full of cut-throat, corrupt, criminal and hyper-violent tribal, religious and political leaders to become anything like a democratic society in the sense we understand it.

In Stewart’s account any Iraqi leader who gains even a modicum of power immediately moves to reinforce their position, arm their followers, and harass, arrest or assassinate any possible rivals. Saddam politics. This is what even the Shia Prime Minister, Nouri al-Malaki, did as soon as the Americans finally withdrew, in 2011. I love the fact that the very day after the last US forces withdrew, Maliki issued an arrest warrant for his own vice president, the Sunni Tariq al-Hashemi, who was forced to flee to Turkey and, convicted of terrorism, was swiftly sentenced to death in his absence. Saddam politics.

2. If there’s one message from all this, as from all the other books I’ve read about the British effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s not to believe a word about the Britain’s foreign exploits, either a) given in press releases by the military but b) even more by the British newspapers, who will fall over themselves to invent any old lies to promote their respective agendas (The Sun: ‘Our Brave Boys Save The Day’; The Telegraph: ‘Secret SAS Mission’; The Guardian: ‘Shame of British Troops’ etc).

Lasting thought

As I closed the book and reflected on it for a few days, one thought rose above all the others, which is that there are more Iraqi, Arab and Muslim voices in this than any other book I’ve read about Iraq or Afghanistan. OK, not saying things the Coalition or the West or Iraqi apologists or themselves would be very pleased to read. But all the other books I’ve read focus on Americans and Brits and Westerners and the occupiers – Stewart’s book, alone, goes way out of its way to focus on the actual Iraqis he met and talked to and tried and failed to manage.

In fact, this ends up being the conclusion of the epilogue he added to the paperback edition of the book published in 2007. By that point the insurgency had become general and had evolved in many places into a sectarian civil war. Stewart criticises politicians, academics and journalists for dealing in fine words, abstract concepts and abstract statistics.

No one is offering a granular and patient account of the insurgency in all its evolving and surprising multiplicity. We prefer the universal and the theoretical: the historical analogy and the statistics. But politics is local, the catastrophe of Iraq is discovered best through individual interactions.

And it’s precisely a multitude of such ‘individual interactions’, bleakly disillusioning though most of them are, that this impressive, illuminating and drily humorous book offers, in abundance.

Credit

Occupational Hazards by Rory Stewart was published by Picador in 2006. References are to the revised 2007 Picador paperback edition.

New world disorder reviews

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by Simon on October 18, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 18, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/10/18/occupational-hazards-rory-stewart/

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 1. Key features of 17th century Britain

Mark Kishlansky (1948 to 2015) was an American historian of seventeenth-century British politics. He was the Frank Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, editor of the Journal of British Studies from 1984 to 1991, and editor-in-chief of History Compass from 2003 to 2009.

Kishlansky wrote half a dozen or so books and lots of articles about Stuart Britain and so was invited to write Volume Six of the Penguin History of England covering that period, under the general editorship of historian David Cannadine.

I think of the history of Britain in the 17th century as consisting of four parts:

  1. The first two Stuarts (Kings James I and Charles I) 1603 to 1642
  2. The Civil Wars and Protectorate (Oliver Cromwell) 1642 to 1660
  3. The Restoration (Kings Charles II and James II) 1660 to 1688
  4. The Glorious Revolution and Whig monarchs (William and Mary, then Queen Anne) 1688 to 1714

Although obviously you can also divide it by monarch:

  1. James I (1603 to 1625)
  2. Charles I (1625 to 1642)
  3. Wars of the three kingdoms (1637 to 1653)
  4. Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653 to 1660)
  5. Charles II (1660 to 1685)
  6. James II and the Glorious Revolution (1685 to 1688)
  7. William and Mary (1688 to 1702)

I appreciate that this is an English perspective, and Kishlansky is the first to acknowledge that his history tends to focus on England, by far the largest and most powerful of the three kingdoms of Britain. The histories of Scotland and Ireland over the same period shadowed the English timeline but – obviously – had significant events, personnel and continuities of their own. From the start Kishlansky acknowledges he doesn’t have space to give these separate histories the space they deserve.

Why is the history of seventeenth century Britain so attractive and exciting?

The seventeenth century has a good claim to being the most important, the most interesting and maybe the most exciting century in English history because of the sweeping changes that affected every level of society. In 1600 England was still a late-medieval society; in 1700 it was an early modern society and in many ways the most advanced country on earth.

Social changes

  • business the modern business world was created, with the founding of the Bank of England and Lloyds insurance, cheques, banknotes and milled coins were invented; the Stock Exchange was founded and the National Debt, a financial device which allowed the British government to raise large sums for wars and colonial settlement; excise and land taxes provided reliable sources of revenue for the government
  • empire the British Empire was defined with the growth of colonies in North America and India
  • feudal forms of government withered and medieval practices such as torture and the demonisation of witchcraft and heresy died out
  • media newspapers were invented and went from weekly to daily editions
  • new consumer products domestic consumption was transformed by the arrival of new products including tobacco, sugar, rum, gin, port, champagne, tea, coffee and Cheddar cheese
  • the scientific revolution biology, chemistry and physics trace their origins to discoveries made in the 1600s – Francis Bacon laid the intellectual foundations for the scientific method; William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood; Robert Boyle posited the existence of chemical elements, invented perfected the air pump and created the first vacuum; Isaac Newton discovered his laws of thermodynamics, the composition of light, the laws of gravity; William Napier invented logarithms; William Oughtred invented the multiplication sign in maths; Edmund Halley identified the comet which bears his name, Robert Hooke invented the microscope, the quadrant, and the marine barometer; the Royal College of Physicians published the first pharmacopeia listing the properties of drugs; Peter Chamberlen invented the forceps; the Royal Society (for the sciences) was founded in 1660
  • sport the first cricket and gold clubs were founded; Izaak Walton codified knowledge about fishing in The Compleat Angler; Charles II inaugurated yacht racing at Cowes and Queen Anne founded Royal Ascot
  • architecture Inigo Jones, Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh created wonderful stately homes and public buildings e.g. Jones laid out the Covent Garden piazza which remains an attraction in London to this day and Wren designed the new St Paul’s cathedral which became a symbol of London
  • philosophy the political upheavals produced two masterworks of political philosophy, the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which are still studied and applied in a way most previous philosophy isn’t
  • non conformists despite repeated attempts to ban them, Puritan sects who refused to ‘conform’ to the Restoration settlement of the Church of England were grudgingly accepted and went on to become a permanent and fertile element of British society – the Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians

Political upheaval

At the centre of the century sits the great 20-year upheaval, the civil wars or British wars or Great Rebellion or the Wars of Three Kingdoms, fought between the armies of parliament and the armies of King Charles I, with significant interventions by armies of Scotland and Ireland, which eventually led to the execution of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords and the disestablishment of the Church of England – achievements which still form a core of the radical agenda to this day. These revolutionary changes were followed by a series of constitutional experiments under the aegis of the military dictator Oliver Cromwell, which radicalised and politicised an entire generation.

Soon after Cromwell’s death in 1658, his regime began to collapse and elements of it arranged for the Restoration of King Charles II, who returned but under a new, more constitutional monarchy, restrained by laws and conventions guaranteeing the liberties of British subjects and well aware of the mistakes which led to the overthrow of his father.

But none of this stopped his overtly Roman Catholic brother, who succeeded him as James II in 1685, making a string of mistakes which collectively alienated the Protestant grandees of the land who conspired to overthrow him and replace him with the reliably Protestant Prince William of Orange. James was forced to flee, William was invited to become King of England and to rule according to a new, clearly defined constitution or Bill of Rights, which guaranteed all kinds of liberties including of speech and assembly.

All of these upheavals meant that by 1700 England had the most advanced, liberal and open society in Europe, maybe in the world, had experimented with a wide variety of political reforms and constitutions, and developed one which seemed most practical and workable – which was to become the envy of liberals in neighbouring France, and the basis of the more thoroughly worked-out Constitution devised by the founders of the American republic in the 1780s.

Studying the 17th century combines the intellectual excitement of watching these constitutional and political developments unfold, alongside the more visceral excitement of following the dramatic twists and turns in the long civil wars – and then following the slow-burning problems which led to the second great upheaval, the overthrow of James II. There is tremendous pleasure to be had from getting to know the lead characters in both stories and understanding their motives and psychologies.

Key features of 17th century England

The first two chapters of Mark Kishlansky’s book set out the social and political situation in Britain in 1600. These include:

Patriarchy

Britain was a comprehensively patriarchal society. The king ruled the country and his word meant life or death. Le Roy le veult – the King wishes it – was the medieval French phrase still used to ratify statutes into law. The monarch made all political, legal, administrative and religious appointments – lords, ministers, bishops, judges and magistrates owed their position to him. In every locality, knights of the shires, justices of the peace administered the king’s laws. The peerage was very finely gradated and jealously policed. Status was everything.

Hierarchy

And this hierarchy was echoed in families which were run by the male head of the household who had complete power over his wife and children, a patriarchal household structure endorsed by the examples in the Bible. Women might have as many as 9 pregnancies, of which 6 went to term and three died in infancy, with a further three children dying in infancy.

The family was primarily a unit of production, with all family members down to small children having specified tasks in the often backbreaking toil involved in agricultural work, caring for livestock, foraging for edibles in woods and fields, producing clothes and shoes. Hard physical labour was the unavoidable lot of almost the entire population.

Marriages

Marriages were a vital way of passing on land and thus wealth, as well as family names and lineages. Most marriages were arranged to achieve these ends. The top responsibility of both spouses were the rights and responsibilities of marriage i.e. a wife obeyed her husband and a husband cherished and supported his wife. It was thought that ‘love’ would grow as a result of carrying out these duties, but wasn’t a necessary component.

Geography

80% of the population in 1600 worked on the land. Britain can be divided into two geographical zones:

1. The North and West

The uplands of the north-west, including Scotland and Wales, whose thin soils encouraged livestock supplemented by a thin diet of oats and barley. Settlements here were scattered and people arranged themselves by kin, in Scotland by clans. Lords owned vast estates and preserved an old-fashioned medieval idea of hospitality and patronage.

Poor harvests had a catastrophic impact. A run of bad harvests in the 1690s led to mass emigration from Scotland to America, and also to the closer ‘plantations’ in Ulster.

It was at this point that Scottish Presbyterians became the majority community in the province. Whereas in the 1660s, they made up some 20% of Ulster’s population… by 1720 they were an absolute majority in Ulster, with up to 50,000 having arrived during the period 1690-1710. (Wikipedia)

2. The south and east

The south and east of Britain was more densely populated, with villages and towns instead of scattered homesteads. Agriculture was more diverse and productive. Where you have more people – in towns and cities – ties of kinship become weaker and people assess each other less by ‘family’ than by achievements, social standing and wealth.

The North prided itself on its older, more traditional values. The South prided itself on being more productive and competitive.

Population

The population of England rose from 4 million in 1600 to 5 million in 1700. There were maybe 600 ‘towns’ with populations of around 1,000. Big provincial capitals like Norwich, Exeter or Bristol (with pops from 10,000 to 30,000) were exceptions.

London

London was unlike anywhere else in Britain, with a population of 200,000 in 1600 growing to around 600,000 by 1700. It was home to the Court, government with its Houses of Lords and Commons, all the main law courts, and the financial and mercantile hub of the nation (Royal Exchange, Royal Mint, later the Bank of England and Stock Exchange). The centre of publishing and the new science, literature, the arts and theatre. By 1700 London was the largest city in the Western world. Edinburgh, the second largest city in Britain, had a paltry 40,000 population.

Inflation

Rising population led to a squeeze on food since agricultural production couldn’t keep pace. This resulted in continuous inflation with foodstuffs becoming more expensive throughout the century, which reduced living standards in the countryside and contributed to periods of near famine. On the other hand, the gentry who managed to hang onto or increase their landholdings saw an unprecedented rise in their income. The rise of this class led to the development of local and regional markets and to the marketisation of agriculture. Those who did well spent lavishly, building manors and grand houses, cutting a fine figure in their coaches, sending the sons to university or the army, educating their daughters in order to attract wealthy husbands.

Vagrancy

The change in working patterns on the land, plus the rising population, led to a big increase in vagrancy, which the authorities tackled with varying degrees of savagery, including branding on the face with a V for Vagrant. Contemporary theorists blamed overpopulation for poverty, vagrancy and rising crime. One solution was to encourage the excess population to settle plantations in sparsely populated Ireland or emigrate to New England. There were moral panics about rising alcoholism, and sex outside marriage.

Puritans

Leading the charge to control immoral behaviour were the Puritans, a negative word applied to a range of people who believed that the Church of England needed to be further reformed in order to reach the state of purity achieved by Calvinists on the continent. Their aims included:

  • abolition of the 26 bishops (who were appointed by the king) and their replacement by Elders elected by congregations
  • reforms of theology and practice: getting rid of images, candles, carvings etc inside churches, getting rid of elaborate ceremonies, bells and incense and other ‘Roman’ superstitions
  • reducing the number of sacraments to the only two practiced by Jesus in the New Testament
  • adult baptism replacing infant baptism

Banning

Closely connected was the impulse to crack down on all ungodly behaviour e.g. alcohol (close pubs), immorality (close theatres), licentiousness (ban most books except the Bible), lewd behaviour (force women to wear modest outfits, keep their eyes on the ground), ban festivals, ban Christmas, and so on.

Trans-shipping

The key driver of Britain’s economic wealth was shipping and more precisely trans-shipping – where goods were brought in from one source before being transhipped on elsewhere. The size of Britain’s merchant fleet more than tripled and the sized of the cargo ships increased tenfold. London’s wealth was based on the trans-shipping trade.

The end of consensus politics

The second of Kishlansky’s introductory chapters describes in detail the political and administrative system in early 17th century Britain. It is fascinating about a) the complexity of the system b) its highly personal orientation about the person the monarch. It’s far too complicated to summarise here but a few key themes emerge:

Consensus

Decisions at every level were reached by consensus. To give an example, when a new Parliament was called by the king, the justices of the peace in a county met at a session where, usually, two candidates put themselves forward and the assembled JPs discussed and chose one. Only very rarely were they forced back on the expedient of consulting local householders i.e. actually having a vote on the matter.

Kishlansky explains how this principle of consensus applied in lots of other areas of administration and politics, for example in discussions in Parliament about acts proposed by the king and which needed to be agreed by both Commons and Lords.

He then goes on to launch what is – for me at any rate – a new and massive idea: that the entire 17th century can be seen as the slow and very painful progression from a political model of consensus to an adversarial model.

The entire sequence of civil war, dictatorship, restoration and overthrow can be interpreted as a series of attempts to reach a consensus by excluding your opponents. King Charles prorogued Parliament to get his way, then tried to arrest its leading members. Cromwell, notoriously, was forced to continually remodel and eventually handpick a Parliament which would agree to do his bidding. After the Restoration Charles II tried to exclude both Catholics and non-conforming Protestants from the body politic, imposing an oath of allegiance in order to preserve the model of consensus sought by his grandfather and father.

The point is that all these attempts to purify the body politic in order to achieve consensus failed.

The advent of William of Orange and the Bill of Rights in 1689 can be seen as not so much defining liberties and freedoms but as finally accepting the new reality, that political consensus was no longer possible and only a well-managed adversarial system could work in a modern mixed society.

Religion

What made consensus increasingly impossible? Religion. The reformation of Roman Catholicism which began in 1517, and continued throughout the 16th century meant that, by the 1620s, British society was no longer one culturally and religiously unified community, but included irreducible minorities of Catholics and new-style Calvinist Puritans. Both sides in what became the civil wars tried to preserve the old-fashioned consensus by excluding what they saw as disruptive elements who prevented consensus agreements being reached i.e. the Royalists tried to exclude the Parliamentarians, the Parliamentarians tried to exclude the Royalists, both of them tried to exclude Catholics, the Puritans once in power tried to exclude the Anglicans and so on.

But the consensus model was based on the notion that, deep down, all participants shared the same religious, cultural and social values. Once they had ceased to do that the model was doomed.

Seen from this point of view the entire history of the 17th century was the slow, bloody, and very reluctant acceptance that the old model was dead and that an entirely new model was required in which political elites simply had to accept the long-term existence of sincere and loyal but completely different opinions from their own.

Political parties

It is no accident that it was after the Glorious Revolution that the seeds of what became political parties first began to emerge. Under the consensus model they weren’t needed; grandees and royal ministers and so on managed affairs so that most of them agreed or acquiesced on the big decisions. Political parties only become necessary or possible once it had become widely accepted that consensus was no longer possible and that one side or another in a debate over policy would simply lose and would have to put up with losing.

So Kishlansky’s long and fascinating introduction leads up to this insight – that the succession of rebellions and civil wars across the three kingdoms, the instability of the Restoration and then the overthrow of James II were all necessary to utterly and finally discredit the old late-medieval notion of political decision-making by consensus, and to usher in the new world of political decision-making by votes, by parties, by lobbying, by organising, by arguing and taking your arguments to a broader political nation i.e. the electorate.

In large part the English Revolution resulted from the inability of the consensual political system to accommodate principled dissension. (p.63)

At a deep level, the adoption of democracy means the abandonment of attempts to repress a society into agreement. On this view, the core meaning of democracy isn’t the paraphernalia about voting, that’s secondary. In its essence democracy means accepting other people’s right to disagree, sincerely and deeply, with what you hold to be profoundly true. Crafting a system which allows people to think differently and speak differently and live differently, without fear or intimidation.

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by Simon on August 24, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 24, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/a-monarchy-transformed-mark-kishlansky-1/

The Soul of the Marionette by John Gray (2015)

Everywhere , the self-assured confidence of priests, scribes and intellectuals has been mocked by unexpected events…
(The Soul of the Marionette, page 143)

‘Humanity’ is only a name for a ragtag animal with no capacity to take charge of anything. (p.145)

The Soul of the Marionette

The Soul of the Marionette is a short, easy and very stimulating read. Its brevity is indicated by the way it’s set in a larger-than-usual typeface for a Penguin paperback in order to pad the text out to 170 or so pages. In reality, it’s two extended magazine essays linked by a common theme.

John Gray (b.1948)

Gray is a retired political philosopher. He mainly taught at the London School of Economics with spells at Yale etc, so he’s an academic by trade. For the past thirty years or more he’s been writing non-technical and accessible books, as well as numerous articles and reviews, and from time to time popping up with thought pieces on Radio 4. All of them bang on about the same handful of themes over and over again:

1. Modern liberals are wrong

Modern progressive thought is wrong. Modern secular thinkers are wrong. How so? In several connected ways.

a) ‘Modern liberals’ think history is progressing towards a good end, think that there is some purpose or end-point of evolution, think that human societies are heading onward and upward, becoming more enlightened, liberal, permissive and diverse.

The belief that evolution is advancing towards some desirable end is ubiquitous… (p.61)

BUT

Evolution has no attachment to the attributes modern thinkers imagine are essentially human… (p.143)

There is no purpose, there is no end goal, there is absolutely no assurance that things are moving forward, it is perfectly possible that societies might regress, become less liberal, permissive, and more authoritarian, vide the USA and UK of our time.

Above all, modern liberals think human nature can be changed whereas all of Gray’s work represents a barrage of arguments designed to annihilate this position:

2. The survival of violence and barbarism disproves the idea that humans are ‘improving’

Evolution has no goal or plan or design or intention. Stuff is just changing and humans are mad if they think they can alter it very much. Progressives like to think that we ‘learn from history’ or that liberal values are succeeding around the world – but terrible, crude, sadistic violence, is still practiced all round the globe.

There may be no repeats of the two epic world wars, but violence and brutality haven’t gone away; they have merely been scattered and diffused into the form of asymmetrical conflicts in a variety of failed states such as Syria and Libya, or sudden eruptions of barbarism as in Myanmar, or the ongoing horrors of the war in the Congo.

Or else many states find themselves in a permanent state of civil unrest, where violent protests teeter on the brink of uprisings and armed conflict, Sudan. This is the new normal.

In a scathing passage, Gray describes how violence has been internalised in the West. He points to the ways that America, for example, the supposed ‘land of the free’, imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world, and experiences almost daily mass shootings, with the result that its entire police force is now a warzone militia armed with machine guns and bullet-proof vests.

About 40,000 people were killed by guns in America in 2017, compared to the 2,500 who died on D-Day. Gray’s point is that homicidal violence hasn’t gone away because world wars have ceased; it’s just become normalised in other ways.

The normalisation of amoral hyper-violence in American culture. This movie is a ‘comedy’.

3. The popularity of dictators demonstrates that human societies aren’t particularly progressing

On a purely political level, the elections of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdoğan in Turkey, Modi in India, the endless rule of Putin in Russia, and the increasing authoritarianism of Xi Jinping in China – all show conclusively that human political or cultural history is emphatically not moving steadily upwards towards some progressive, liberal nirvana.

Even more disillusioning for progressives is that most of these leaders were democratically elected. This is because of the primal fact, so often overlooked by well-heeled progressives, that most people, in most societies, more than anything else want meaning, order and security in their lives. People prefer meaning, order and security to uncertainty and chaos.

4. We aren’t in control

You and I, being enlightened progressives, may think that the leaders I’ve listed above are not going to provide the meaning and security which they promised their electorates, but that only proves another of Gray’s points which is that none of us are really in control of our lives: we choose one thing, we get something completely different.

Most people’s lives are demonstrably in the grip of various impersonal, suprahuman forces – but almost all of us desperately want to feel that we’re in control. Electing strong leaders with assertive agendas gives us electors the illusion of control, a) both in the big bad world – that we’re taking part in a fightback against them, the nameless forces which seem to be ruining the world; but just as importantly, b) in our own lives. Identifying with strong decisive leaders helps us overlook the fact that we so often feel powerless and helpless in our own day to day existences.

5. Technology changes, but people don’t change

Above all (to repeat the point, as Gray does again and again), modern liberals think human nature can be changed and improved – but it can’t. The amazing technologies we have developed over the past 200 years or so have given over-educated and under-experienced Westerners the deluded sense that we can change human nature. But, repeat after me: Technologies may change, but people don’t change.

One of the book’s central strands is a brief and sketchy history of human attempts to create super-humans, from Frankenstein in 1816 to all the hype about artificial intelligence in 2020.

Gray makes the simple point: How can we hope to make better, superior versions of human beings, when we don’t even understand ourselves? Scientists still don’t actually understand how minds work, how consciousness arises from matter, how flashing synapses produce the strange thing called consciousness.

Eradicating evil may produce a new species, but not the one its innocent creators have in mind. Humans have too little self-knowledge to be able to fashion a higher version of themselves. (p.43)

And:

We think we have some kind of privileged access to our own motives and intentions. In fact we have no clear insight into what moves us to live as we do. The stories that we tell ourselves are like messages which appear on Ouija boards. If we are authors of our lives, it is only in retrospect. (p.137)

Freud would have approved, and I entirely agree: we are lived by forces we never fully understand.

6. Artificial intelligence is doomed to fail

For the simple reason that we don’t understand human intelligence. This is why the exhibitions I’ve been to recently showcasing artificial intelligence seemed so pathetic and inadequate. (And it’s not just me saying that: the BBC journalist sent to review the Barbican’s exhibition about artificial intelligence thought the best examples of artificial intelligence the curators could assemble from all around the world were, to quote him, ‘pathetic’.)

It’s because any ordinary person knows that machines which can climb up a flight of stairs on their own or a computer which can beat the world chess champion or one which does cumulative facial recognition, are trivial and irrelevant compared to what it is like to be a person – a confused, sleepy, fantasy-driven human consciousness making endless mistakes about bus times or shopping lists or homework or the countless other chores we struggle with every day, as well as trying to manage personal relations with family, friends and work colleagues.

Compared to the complexity of being human, beating this or that chess champion is so very, very narrow an achievement on the part of the programmers who have been slaving away perfecting chess programs for fifty years or more, as to be almost sublimely, hilariously irrelevant.

In fact the most telling thing about artificial intelligence – which comes over very strongly when you read interviews with the scientists developing it – is how keen they are to rush towards a post-human future. But why? Because, Gray says, they cannot cope with the human present.

Struggling to escape from the world that science has revealed, humanity has taken refuge in the illusion that science enables them to remake the world in their own image. (p.30)

7. Communism and other failed utopias

Gray reserves some of his most scathing criticism for communists, the followers of Lenin and Stalin, who – in effect – thought that it was worth murdering millions of people in the here and now in order to secure a remote future in which everyone will live in peace. And then in the Cold War era to foment small wars around the world (Africa, South America, South-East Asia) in order to bring an end to war.

Same with the Nazis, who thought they could create a better world by first of all exterminating all the Jews and then all the Slavs.

In the twentieth century the worst episodes of mass killing were perpetrated with the aim of remaking the species. (p.88)

All the atrocities of the 20th century were carried out in the name of building a better world. Gray mocks modern liberals who carry on the same mantra (obviously without the holocausts) because they are basing it on the same basic delusions – that you can remodel human nature. You can’t.

8. Humans are, at bottom, incapable

In fact, the reality is that humans barely understand themselves, and are laughably unable to ‘take control of their own destinies’:

Today’s Darwinists will tell you that the task of humanity is to take charge of evolution. But ‘humanity’ is only a name for a ragtag animal with no capacity to take charge of anything. (p.145)

Thus the comedy of climate change is that these pathetic people, this pathetic species, having created a global catastrophe, thinks it can change or fix anything. Oh no it can’t. Watch and learn.

9. The fundamental basis of all modern liberal thought – that things will get better i.e. history has a direction and an end goal – is based on Christian theology

If you go back to the ancient Greeks or sideways to read the surviving works of the Aztecs, you find societies which were under no illusion that things – society of human nature – would ever change. Their religions and rituals were not linear and progressive but cyclical, based on the circular rhythm of the seasons plus the recurring astrological cycles.

Aztecs did not share the modern conceit that mass killing can bring about universal peace. They did not envision any future when humans ceased to be violent. (p.86)

The notion that history has a purpose and is heading for a Grand End-Point is a Christian idea (in fact it may be a Zoroastrian or Eastern idea originally, but it was picked up and incorporated in Christianity from its earliest days and thus spread throughout all Christian and post-Christian societies).

It is Christian theology which declares that history is heading to a Glorious End-Point when the Son of Man will return in glory and wind up history as we know it, at which point the dead will be raised and everyone will be judged and dispatched to heaven or hell.

Modern liberals unwittingly base their concept of history as a steady improvement towards some kind of nirvana or utopia on this very Christian theology, but without the subtle and complex insights into human nature developed by Christian thinkers over 2,000 years. Progressives have been:

reared on a curdled brew of Socratism and scraps of decayed Christianity… (p.160)

This is why progressive liberalism feels so shallow. It is piggy-backing on the back of Christian theology, but without the deep and penetrating insights into all aspects of the human psyche which tens of thousands of Christian theologians and writers carried out.

Secular thinking follows a pattern dictated by religion while suppressing religion’s most valuable insights. (p.19)

Instead, modern liberals join hands, sing Things Can Only Get Better and are shocked and amazed when they don’t. Their conviction that everyone is a progressive liberal at heart, if only they had enough education and the opportunity to read the right newspapers, cannot cope with the actual world in its often violent and even evil reality.

This basic naivety explains, in Gray’s opinion, the fact that ‘liberals’ are continually surprised at renewed outbreaks of human atrocity. ‘Liberals’ and ‘modern thinkers’ thought we had learned from the Holocaust and had ‘progressed’, and so they were unable to compute modern horrors like the wars in Yugoslavia, the Rwanda genocide or 9/11 or the Syrian civil war or the Rohynga massacres… and on and on it goes, the roll call of never-ending atrocities.

Events like that just don’t fit into the narrative that every day, in very way, we are becoming more tolerant and free and fair-minded and equal and ‘woke’ and aware. Oh no, Gray says, we aren’t.

Cherry picking from literature

The book’s strength is also its weakness. This is that it takes the form less of a sustained argument than of a kind of daisy chain of potted analyses of authors who Gray likes or whose works provide useful ammunition for his position.

It is very much not a work of political philosophy, in fact it references hardly any philosophers of any kind (apart from two or three pages about Thomas Hobbes and the same about Jeremy Bentham) and certainly no contemporary philosophers.

Instead, Gray takes us on a hugely entertaining and colourful journey through the thought of a bright and shiny array of creative writers through the ages, cherry-picking authors whose mordant and gloomy points of view echo, support or anticipate his own.

This is exactly what Christians do with the Bible. The Bible is so vast, varied and contradictory, that you can find quotes to support almost any point of view, from the most socially conservative (Honour your father and mother) to radical revolutionary (Blessed are the meek) to wacky science fiction fantasies (Ezekiel), if you search hard enough.

So, as a literature graduate, I know exactly the same is true for the corpus of secular literature, especially if you broaden it out to include all European literature, and extend it back in time to the Renaissance, the Middle Ages or, as Gray does, back to the ancient Greeks. There are now so many points of view, expressed by so many hundreds of thousands of authors, that – if you adopt Gray’s approach – it is easy to cherry pick ‘proofs’ and ‘evidence’ for any point of view imaginable.

But of course none of this is proof of any kind about human nature or human existence or consciousness or history or anything. Literature is just opinion – colourful, creative and beautifully expressed and plausible, but still only one person’s opinion.

Proof of the kinds of things Gray is claiming would require an engagement with the latest scientific literature in areas of consciousness, AI, sociology and so on, with properly carried out studies, and with a world of data and statistics.

Gray skips lightly away from any such engagement and instead gives us an entertaining stroll through some of his favourite authors. Each of these gets a thumbnail biography and then four or five pages summarising their thoughts and musings about human nature, history and so on.

So it comes as no surprise that all of the thinkers he’s carefully cherry picked, plus his interpretations of various historical cultural events (his scepticism about the so-called ‘scientific revolution’, his dazzling reinterpretation of Aztec culture), all go to reinforce his anti-liberal, anti-modern secular bias.

A daisy chain of authors

For my own amusement I made a complete list of the authors and works referenced in The Soul of the Marionette:

Heinrich von Kleist (1777 to 1811)’s essay The Puppet Theatre (1810) paradoxically suggests that it is the puppet who is free because he is not conflicted by a torn and agonised self-consciousness.

Novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell (1912 to 1990) in The Avignon Quartet describes a modern-day Gnostic.

Communist crystallographer J.D. Bernal (1901 to 1971) speculated that human society would be replaced by a Utopia of post-human cyborgs.

Director of Engineering at Google Ray Kurzweil (b.1948) published a book with the sub-title When Humans Transcend Biology.

Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz (1892 to 1942) wrote short stories on the theme of Gnosticism i.e that the world wasn’t created by a benevolent all-powerful God but by a blind or malevolent Demiurge, which explains why it is so botched and chaotic. Only those who come to know this (gnosis is Greek for knowledge) can, through an arduous apprenticeship and reading many mystical books, arrive at true knowledge of their place as souls trapped in fallen bodies in a badly made world, and break out towards the light of the True God.

Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798 to 1837) is famous for his sensuously melancholy verse but also wrote a long work of thoughts about human nature, the Zibaldone, which is bitingly pessimistic about human nature and ridicules the idea that science will improve humanity. He is particularly savage about Christianity which, he thinks (with plenty of evidence to back him up) promotes a universalist claim, Christ’s injunction to his disciples to convert the whole world, which – in practice – gave carte blanche to force everyone in the world to convert, at the point of a sword or under threat of being burned at the stake. This, in Leopardi’s view, explains why the barbarity of the Middle Ages far eclipsed anything known or comprehensible in the ancient, pre-Christian world.

American poet and short story writer Edgar Allen Poe (1809 to 1849) wrote some fictions which touch on the Gnostic theme in which characters have dreams which come true, or dream a better world into existence.

Mary Shelley (1797 to 1851) wrote Frankenstein, always predictably dragged out on these occasions as the forerunner of all ‘modern’ debate about creating artificial life or intelligence.

The Symbolist poet Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1838 to 1889) coined the word ‘android’.

Gustav Meyrink (1868 to to 1932) wrote The Golem (1915) another novel about people creating new uber-humans.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 to 1986) in his story The Circular Ruins imagines a magician whose dreams come true before he realises that he himself is someone else’s dream.

Polish science fiction author Stanislav Lem (1921 to 2006) in his novel Solaris (1961) imagines a planet whose surface seems to be alive and conscious in ways we cannot conceive, and which communicates with the humans in the space station orbiting it by creating people from their past or creatures from their dreams.

American science fiction author Philip K. Dick (1928 to 1982) wrote a whole series of novels exploring the possibility of alternative consciousness, and how individual consciousnesses might be able to bend and warp reality. Gray devotes an unusually prolonged passage to Dick and his works.

H.G. Wells (1866 to 1946) wrote The War of the Worlds suggesting other intelligences have no concern about us.

Michel Faber (b.1960) wrote Under The Skin in which aliens come to earth purely to capture and eat humans, whose meat is tasty!

Boris and Arkady Strugasky‘s novel Roadside Picnic is about people who venture into the forbidden zones where alien spaceships landed, settled, then took off again. The thrust of all three of these stories is why should we think artificial intelligences we create (if we ever do) will give a damn about us.

T.F. Powys (1875 to 1953) wrote a series of novels in the 1920s and 30s which featured God or Devil or Demiurge characters appearing as normal people, giving rise to a lot of discussion about creation and reality.

Thomas Hobbes (1588 to 1679) masterpiece Leviathan is based on the idea that people will do anything, and submit to a strong central authority to avoid violence. But Gray thinks this is a chimera, a far too rational view of human nature. All the evidence suggests that people can initiate and put up with a quite staggering degree of violence i.e. human nature isn’t as one-dimensional as Hobbes paints it.

John Dee (1527 to 1608) was Elizabeth I’s astrologer and magician and an epitome of Gray’s view that what modern secular thinkers like to think of as ‘the scientific revolution’ was in fact deeply intertwined with all kinds of magical and voodoo beliefs, the prime example being Sir Isaac Newton who formulated the laws which underpinned the new scientific view of the universe but was also a mystic and heretical Christian who devoted an enormous amount of energy trying to decipher the prophecies contained in the Book of Revelation.

Norbert Wiener (1894 to 1964), mathematician and philosopher, helped the Manhattan Project, is acknowledged as the father of cybernetics, and envisaged a future where man makes machines which outdo man.

John von Neumann (1903 to 1957), mathematician, physicist and computer scientist, also helped with the Manhattan Project and founded game theory. The ideas of both men underpin futurists’ confidence that man can remake man, or make a super-man machine, or machines which can help people achieve super-lives.

Guy Debord (1931 to 1994) is popular with students of the humanities and the arts because of his book Society of the Spectacle which expands on Marxist ideas that governments control us by getting us to buy into the mindless entertainments of the mass media. More than that, even political protests or extreme events like terrorist attacks, are all part of The Spectacle. Gray is, as you might expect, bitingly sceptical about Debord, concentrating on his career after the 1968 revolution failed to materialise, wandering the French provinces, slowly expelling all the members of his organisation, the Situationist International, drinking heavily, coming to the despairing conclusion that there can be no revolution because The Spectacle can assimilate anything and eventually committing suicide in 1994.

Jeremy Bentham (1748 to 1832) the ultimate in rationalist philosophers who formulated the ideas of Utilitarianism and said social policy should be judged on whether it promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Gray describes Bentham’s idea for the Panopticon, a prison built in a circle so guards at the centre could monitor all the prisoners, and then goes on to claim that we live in a surveillance society infinitely more thorough and extensive than anything Bentham could have imagined.

E.M. Foster (1879 to 1970) famous for his novels of Edwardian upper class life, wrote a striking science fiction story, The Machine Stops (which I happen to have read and reviewed). Gray criticises the story for giving no indication of how the bubble world entirely controlled by some vast central machine came into existence. But he mentions it in order to speculate about how our societies might collapse and fall.

Samuel Butler (1835 to 1902) wrote his satirical vision of the future, Erewhon which predicted there would be labour-saving machines and robots in the future. Well, half of that was correct.

So you see what I mean by literary dilettantism, picking and choosing from the endless flowerbed of  imaginative literature, with no attempt whatsoever to engage with the professional, philosophical or scientific literature on the subjects he discusses.

Straw men

Most debaters set up straw men i.e. simplify the arguments of their opponents in order to caricature and counter them. I was struck by the way Gray does just this – establishing an entity or group or party or movement of ‘modern secular thinkers’ which he then proceeds to hammer from all directions – and in particular by the way that he doesn’t mention a single specific name. Instead, he rings the changes on a set of generic terms for ‘the Enemy’, which I began to find interesting in themselves:

  • many people today…
  • modern secular thinkers believe mankind can be recreated in a higher form…
  • it does not occur to these sublime moralists that in human beings the good and the bad may be intermixed…
  • those who aim to fashion a higher humanity with science…
  • … Gnostic themes that unnoticed or repressed, shape much of modern thinking…
  • this view of things is nowadays close to being incomprehensible…
  • The modern world inherits the Christian view…
  • … human impulses that modern thinking denies..
  • … how tenuous are the assumptions on which western thinkers base their hopes of peace…
  • … modern humanity insists that violence is inhuman…
  • … believers in reason, lacking any deeper faith and too feeble to tolerate doubt…
  • modern individualism tends…
  • Today there are some who expect such machines to be among us within a few decades…
  • …this modern catechism is mistaken…
  • modern thinkers have imagined that humans can achieve a state of freedom…

You can see how the repetition of the central terms builds up an image of a straw man (or straw liberal) who is particularly dim and uninsightful – but without troubling to name names or quote any texts.

Mentioning specific named writers would, of course, instantly complicate the situation, because it is unlikely that any ‘modern secular liberal’ would be quite as dim as Gray likes to make out.

As with the cherry picking of authors, this approach allows him to unfurl his favourite themes and hobby horses with no fear of resistance or critique.

Sick writers

There are many ways to be entertained, amused and informed by this lovely jumble sale of a book. IN among the amusing stories and hobby horse diatribes against ‘modern liberals’ I began to notice another strand which unintentionally confirms one of my own bête noirs or obsessions: which is that  imaginative writers – poets and novelist and playwrights and philosophers – are, on the whole, among the very last people whose advice you would want to take about life and living, seeing as almost all of them have been sick misfits suffering from a variety of mental illnesses and substance addictions. Thus:

Kleist was forced to join the civil service which he hated, wanted to be a writer but struggled to produce anything which satisfied him, tried and failed to join up to Napoleon’s army and ended up committing suicide in 1811.

Schulz was forced to become a school teacher in order to support ailing relatives, hated his job, struggled to write, had a failed engagement to a woman, and, as a Jew, was murdered by the Nazis.

Leopardi was a hunchback with poor sight, who was frail and sickly all his life, having a long but unsuccessful involvement with a married woman, living most of his life in poverty, before moving to Naples and dying of TB aged 38.

Edgar Allen Poe was a disastrous shambles of a man, who never secured a regular income despite starting umpteen magazines and journals, living hand to mouth in poverty, a chronic alcoholic, before being discovered roaming the streets of Baltimore out of his mind and wearing someone else’s clothes, dying in a pauper’s hospital aged 40.

Philip K. Dick was mentally ill for most of his life, dosing himself with alcohol and amphetamines to fuel his prodigious output of disturbing novels until he suffered a full-blown mental collapse in 1974, during which he claimed to have a had a great Revelation about life which he spent the rest of his life struggling to understand. Psychosis, five marriages, heavy drug addiction, repeated suicide attempts.

Guy Debord heavy drinker, despair, suicide aged 63.

Not exactly role models, are they? More to the point, where are all the people of their times who lived healthy, happy, fulfilled and productive lives? Well, they were too busy living life to the full, to write anything.

In other words, writers, on the whole, are a self-selecting and self-reinforcing, self-supporting, self-promoting group of the sick, the mentally ill, the addicted, impoverished, failed and frustrated.

To put it another way, imaginative writers in their writings tend to give a wildly inaccurate picture of human nature and human society. The works and thoughts of any ‘creative’ writer should, therefore, be taken with a large pinch of salt and not treated as any kind of ‘truth’, let alone as lessons by which to live life. And definitely not as evidence about what the ‘society’ of their time ‘thought’.

Gray’s prescription – withdrawal

Seeing all around him chaos, resurgent barbarism, and an array of misguided beliefs in meliorism, social improvement and scientific advances, Gray recommends withdrawal. He recommends withdrawing into yourself and seeking to achieve harmony and mental peace through acceptance of the fact that you are an irrational, conflicted being which doesn’t understand itself, let alone the world it lives in – and by this acceptance, cultivating an inner freedom.

It’s worth quoting the book’s final passage in full as this turns out to be a surprisingly frank and candid piece of advice about how to live.

We do not know how matter came to dream our world into being; we do not know what, if anything, comes when the dream ends for us and we die. We yearn for a type of knowledge that would make us other than we are – though what we would like to be, we cannot say.

Why try to escape from yourself? Accepting the fact of unknowing makes possible an inner freedom very different from that pursued by the Gnostics. If you have this negative capability, you will not want a higher form of consciousness; your ordinary mind will give you all that you need. Rather than trying to impose sense on your life, you will be content to let meaning come and go. (p.165)

My thoughts

I agree with him.

I too believe human nature is unchangeable, that Western progressive liberals make up a minority of the human population which they arrogantly and ignorantly claim to speak for, that their view of human nature is insultingly shallow (amounting to little more that shouting ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ at anyone who doesn’t fit their narrow parameters) and that their shallow ideology:

  1. fails to grasp, understand or prevent the failure of their political movements – as graphically represented by the election of Trump, Johnson, Brexit
  2. fails to understand why populations would democratically elect right-wing populists such as Bolsonaro or Erdogan – and above all:
  3. fails to understand or explain why people continue to be barbaric, violent and sadistic in terrible conflicts all around the world

It’s not that progressive liberalism is morally wrong. It is that it is factually inadequate, biologically illiterate, philosophically impoverished, and so politically and socially misleading.

It is doomed to fail because it is based on a false model of human nature.

As to Gray’s prescription, that we abandon the effort to understand either ourselves or the world around us, I think this is a nice idea to read about, here or in Ursula Le Guin, or in a thousand Christian or Eastern mystics. It is a nice fictional place to inhabit, a discursive possibility, in the same way that I – and billions of other readers – inhabit novels or plays or works of art for a while.

But then I am forced to return to the workaday world where I must earn a living and look after my family, and where simply ‘letting meaning come and go’ is not an adequate guide to life.

To thinking about life, maybe. But not to actually living it.

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by Simon on January 15, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 15, 2020

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