Tag Archives: Religion

BOOK REVIEW: The Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death, by Richard Holloway

Richard Holloway writes in The Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death that all of us are guaranteed citizenship in ‘the great democracy of the dead.’ A typically witty and concise way of summarising human fate.

Holloway’s book is written with his characteristic gentleness of tone, but the themes are demanding and theological. In fact, the great strength of The Last Bus is that its author is able to masterfully distill terrifying and complex philosophical ideas into accessible, enjoyable prose.

A former Episcopalian bishop, and now something of a wistful agnostic, Holloway does not offer any priestly reassurances. His manner is more that of the Scottish headmaster you never had. A friendly but admonishing voice, urging us to face and accept the unknown. This may be a negative to readers hoping for self-help-style consolation. Holloway is artful and humane, but whatever hope there is in this book is to be found in strategies of acceptance, rather than of transcendence.

Early in the book, Holloway recalls visiting Kelham Hall in England, where he trained for the Episcopal ministry when he was still a boy. He finds this former haven of Christian contemplation converted into a luxury hotel, and the domed chapel hosting a colourful, Asian wedding. The austere beauty of his beloved church is now the home of a modern, multicultural union. Holloway is melancholy about the loss of his teenage memories in such a dramatic change, but insists that it also allows him to let go of it. Change can be wrenching, but without change, we would be left clinging to memories, stuck in moments that are now abstractions.

This introduces a theme which runs through all of Holloway’s meditations in the book. It is our clinging to experience that causes us pain. Time brings death and loss, but it also brings renewal, freedom and relief. If we cannot let go of what came before, we condemn ourselves to imprisonment in the past. The sense of nostalgia brings with it the heartbreak of disappointment. We are confronted with the dreams and hopes that never came to pass. But for Holloway, stark shifts such as that of a seminary becoming a luxury hotel can force us to release those disappointments, and to move on unburdened.

Holloway identifies himself with St. Peter, the apostle who began as a blustering and boastful defender of Christ but ended up betraying Jesus three times over when he was arrested. Holloway’s discussion of this biblical story centres around Peter The Penitent by Guercico (1639), which hangs in the Scottish National Gallery. Our image of ourselves is very rarely what manifests itself when we face the moment of truth, when our values are tested and our character is stripped of its masks. Like St. Peter, we are likely to burst into tears when we confront the horrible facts of our weaknesses, and the lies we have told ourselves about ourselves.

In the moment of betrayal, Christ looked upon Peter as the bible teaches he looks upon everyone, with compassion and pity. Jesus being human as well God, knows the self-deceits of the human heart. When Peter sees Jesus look at him with warmth and understanding, the apostle is thrown into shame and depression. Only when Jesus reappears after his resurrection and offers Peter a chance to atone, is he able to release himself from suffering.

Holloway seems to see the story of St. Peter as a way of viewing his own folly. It helps him confront the self-aggrandisement of his religious years, and to forgive himself for not living up to the self-image of the wise philosopher-scholar. The story also sheds light on the nature of forgiveness itself. We cannot undo the past. Peter cannot return to the image of himself as the fierce warrior of Christ. But Jesus’s pity gives him an opening to release the shame, and to move onwards in life with a renewed, more mature spiritual mission.

Quoting St. Paul in Romans, this leads Holloway to meditate upon the concept of ‘predestination’. We are sinners. We are weak in the heart and mind. We chose the very things we don’t want. But as Paul says, God is in charge and law is good. So in some sense even our sinfulness is part of God’s plan. We are who we are, warts and all, because God wills it that way. Our lives then, are predetermined. Though the passage from Romans has no definitive interpretation, its mystery would be the very faultline that fractured the church during the Reformation. Anyone interested in the minutiae of this theological controversy, will be impressed with how Holloway handles it here. He not only explains it in swift, approachable prose, but he manages to apply it to the everyday challenges of the human condition.

In acceptance of our sinful nature, we find the compassion necessary to forgive ourselves. We see that though we are responsible for our failures, they are also the product of our environments, the pressures of circumstance and countless forces acting upon our conscience. We may never be able to undo the damage done by our shortcomings, but we can learn from them if we are prepared to face the truth about who we are, without the posturing of narcissistic masks. Once we accept that we are not perfect, our imperfections cease to haunt us.

Holloway’s discussion of predestination marries well with his reflections on free will, earlier in the book. Again, a complex and persistent philosophical puzzle is tackled with a lightness of touch. To Holloway, free will is defined as the sense that we could have chosen differently, that we were somehow in charge. And it is a foundational notion to our sense of justice and free society.

But Holloway insists that our sense of control over our lives is at least partially a convenient illusion. Instead of being the supreme auteurs of lives, the truth is we are more like craftsmen. He cites a friend’s preferred metaphor, that our lives like woven cloth. The thread is inherited, the loom is time, and the pattern is often surprisingly complex. It manifests itself as we merely sit and work the mechanical process of our lives. We play a part, but there are many other forces that we can’t control, which will affect the outcome.

More examples can be found of Holloway’s ability to hit the sweet spot when distilling difficult problems into accessible prose. ‘Being dead is beyond or past experience. But dying isn’t.’ ‘The mind is its own place and does its own thing.’ Or, with a subtle wryness: fear of death is ‘an entirely ecumenical emotion.’

Holloway describes himself as having a ‘romantic temperament’, but he’s critical of this fact. As a child he dreamed of being a cowboy, escaping the central Scotland village he grew up in and discovering his great mission. This desire for new experiences, he says, stopped him from truly relishing the beauty of the world around him. Death, says Holloway, forces us out of this kind of romantic preoccupation. And if we cling to our ideals, we can do ourselves a disservice in failing to prepare for our end.

This somewhat jars with an earlier section of the book, where Holloway seems to affirm the power of beauty, the romance of ritual and creative sacrament in religion, in helping us to face death with defiance. In this discussion, Holloway says it’s through our songs and our imagination that we can find the only conquest of death available to us. Life after death, the notion of salvation, the promise of a messiah – all of these are ways of the soul remaining heroic in the face of our common fate. Through them we create meaning and beauty in our lives. ‘Death gets us all in the end, but it can never kill our songs. And that is they only victory they give us.’

So it seems odd that Holloway is so damning about the romantic instinct in a later chapter. Using John Wayne as an example, he seems to relish the difference between the projected image of cultural heroes and the ‘quotidian’ reality of their lives. Wayne appeared to be the paragon of courage and masculine resolve on screen, but he ‘finessed’ his way out of service during the Second World War. Only when the Duke was on his deathbed did he actually become heroic in real life. Certainly we must be cautious when revering images rather than genuine human character, but none of this condemns romance and the idealistic longing intrinsic in the human soul. Surely it possible to be both romantic and idealistic, while also accepting the facts of existence? The odes of Keats would stand in testament to that possibility.

That said, there is wisdom in the idea that if we spend our lives trying to escape who we really are, we risk losing the chance to see grace and beauty in death. The very shortness of life means we cannot afford to kid ourselves. Only by making friends with ‘the stranger’ that is our true self, can we hope to meet our end with strength, acceptance and poise.

Acceptance of our fragility does not imply capitulation to death. Rather it is a chance to show virtue in the face of that which we can’t control. As Holloway deftly puts it, ‘We didn’t get to deal our hand in life. We only got to play the cards we were given. And how we play the last card can win the game.’

The Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death is published by Canongate and can be purchased here

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What’s so bad about political correctness?

‘Be not too moral,’ said Henry David Thoreau. ‘You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.’

People who really live for change, the people who really care about their fellow man, are the people we never hear from, the ones who have no need to posture about ideologies, who have no need to lecture others about ‘tolerance’.

Political correctness is the ideology which props up a dangerously false niceness. It is the marketing strategy of the power hungry, the propaganda of the bully, who wishes to whitewash his reputation. Thus we have pictures of Harvey Weinstein wearing a ‘pussy hat’ and joining female celebrities on the Women’s March last year.

The point is not the hypocrisy. Anyone with ideals is manifestly hypocritical. The point is the way virtue is used as part of a power strategy, a way of securing status and abusive control over others through the manipulation of reputation.

Reducing good morals to a set of tick boxes or making complex ethical dilemmas into matters of sloganeering, robs human life of an essential part of its evolving value. Human agency requires a confrontation with competing goods. To do good, we must live with conscience, come to understand our own sinful natures and meet face to face with the capacity for evil in each of our own souls.

Political correctness is the creed of the godless. It turns moral action into a simplistic algorithm, an automated exchange of inputs and outputs. It requires no wrestling with demons, no dark night of the soul, no solitude of contemplation. And most of all, it comes at no real cost to the moral agent who lives by such a creed.

Jesus Christ said ‘I come not abolish the law, but to fulfil it’. The shift from rule-based religious dogma into the emancipatory truths of the Christian gospel, is a shift from prescriptiveness towards the moral growth of the individual self. In other words, Christ came to teach that it is not the washing of hands or the observance of ritual propriety that makes us a good person, or which secures our place in heaven. Rather it is quality of our souls.

Good behaviour does not emerge from simple algorithms of ‘niceness’. Good behaviour emerges from a cleansing of the spirit. Good actions are the fruit of a good soul, they are not ways of buying our way into heaven.

This too was the message of Krishna to Arjuna, as he stood poised on the fatal edge of battle. How can I do good, Lord, if I am to kill my brethren? Krishna’s answer was that it is the quality of one’s soul, the cleanness of one’s consciousness that marks a truly holy man, not the simplistic dogmas of right and wrong found in worldly life.
Some may defensively say that this is a license to rudeness and power-grabbing in itself.

Like the fascist misuse of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Not so. It is merely a reminder that we do not become good, we do not find salvation, in simplistic moral prescriptions. The proof of this is to be found in the way abusive people use politically correct language to cover up the truth of their souls. Or the way vicious killers use the rhetoric of human rights to add a veneer of respectability to their murderous exploits.

ISIS understood the power of political correctness. Not only did they use hipster-quality video propaganda and publish their own glossy and attractive magazines, they also exploited the cognitive dissonance that would affect the bourgeois minds of western observers, by seeming to add PC behaviours to their barbarous tactics.

At one point, as they were executing gay men by throwing them off the rooftops of buildings – as cheering mobs slavered at the brutality below – jihadis would hug the men before hand, offering the supposed milk of human kindness as a precursor to brutal execution. This nasty fake compassion is a direct product of politically correct morality, and shows how sadistically it can be exploited.

If we were able to rise above PC prescriptiveness, we would feel no cognitive dissonance. We would not be susceptible to the confusion tactics of ISIS propaganda. It is the fact that we have reduced morality to a set of simplistic soundbites, that makes both genuine moral discourse impossible, and evil people able to market their dangerous ambitions as essential to human emancipation.

What’s so wrong about peace, love and understanding? Nothing, as long as it is not just skin deep. Very often the most moral among us, are not the best at marketing their own virtue. Anyone can talk about charity and goodwill, the real test of our humanity comes when it is not convenient for us to do so, and when talking about morality becomes irrelevant to a genuine moral outcome.

Why the NFL is more welcoming than UK football

Music and sports rarely go together in British games, but in American football, thumping beats and blaring choruses are part of the festive appeal. At last night’s game between the Cardinals and Rams at Twickenham, I experienced a brilliant overload of the senses.

Music is a constant, whether it’s the opening concerts, half-time entertainment at the Super Bowl or – how could I forget – the cheerleader set pieces.

Like all things American, NFL football is grounded in a cinematic drama. Shiny strips, bright glistening headgear streaked with tribal symbols and even the manicured grass of the pitch. All are designed to conjure intense emotional reactions.

Some of this of course is meant to be a distraction. When penalty decisions or TV umpire controversies go on for more than half a minute, the screens start to flash, the music gets louder and circus acts on stilts bounce down the sidelines. The cheerleaders spring to life. Anything to keep the crowd from getting restless.

It’s well known that advertising is crucial part of the football experience in the States, and this can be overwhelming and wearing.

Attention is the premium commodity, and organisers will do anything to stop spectators devolving into boredom.

It would be wrong, however, to conclude that the pageantry and colour of an NFL game is nothing but a cynical and corporate ‘bread and circuses’ scam.

Noam Chomsky, ever the dreary intellectual snob, once said that football was nothing more than crowd control, managing the testosterone of the numbskull masses, to avoid social unrest.

Typically, there is a grain of truth in what the professor says, but it’s simplified into a dismissive and reductive sneer, to the point of being uninteresting.

As well as the garish corporate distraction of an NFL game, there is also something life-affirming, something that unifies the spirit and makes you feel part of a whole.

Is this the comfort of the mob? Is it is the security of mystifying rituals? Perhaps. There may be something more going on, though.

NFL games are intimately connected to the military. The games in London include both American and British soldiers on parade, and last night at Twickenham, two very English brass bands opened the game for the packed crowd.

Sure there is an aspect of propaganda here, but no one is forcing us to believe that every war the west fights is morally righteous. Rather, you are left with a vertiginous awareness of civic fragility. The pleasure and escapism of the moment is beautifully diluted by the reality of freedom.

Rather than being jingoistic, this show of military theatre is a ritualistic reminder of the duty and sacrifice at the heart of our valued liberties.

At what other British sport would they parade a 30-foot national flag onto the pitch and welcome uniformed soldiers to the sidelines as the country’s anthem is sung? And if there is another sport, would this moment be so unapologetic and devoid of shame?

American Football as a game is baffling to the newcomer, but once you understand the phases of the game, it becomes one of the most accessible sports.

As a middle-class arty boy in Scotland, I always found it a forbidding and humiliating experience to involve myself with football.

UK football is indeed a beautiful and balletic game. At its best the games can be silky and athletic masterpieces. But there is a so much anachronistic and protestant machismo around British football, that only a certain temperament is welcome.

British football is buried in inverted faux-working class snobbery and in-group Puritanism. If you are a newcomer, you are a ‘poser’, not a ‘real fan.’ If you are still getting to grips with the rules of the game, you are quickly ridiculed and put in your place.

In a word, homegrown football is aggressively parochial and devoted fans resent new blood. They are obsessed with their own so-called authenticity. The game is used as a form of macho ranking. Real fans are real men. New fans are fly-by-nights, wannabes.

Despite all the claims of the beautiful game to being a ‘working man’s game’ it is the least inclusive and welcoming of sports. It is a compulsion of the initiated.

Not so with NFL. There is a slightly corporate outreach programme to make the NFL global right now, but the game itself is also inclusive and accessible.

One of the advantages of the game is that you can enjoy it from a distance. The drama and explosive rhythm of it is watchable for its own sake, without any real deep knowledge of offence and defence strategy.

Most importantly, though, the sheer theatre and filmic scope of experiencing an NFL game amounts to a celebration of the human spirit. It’s cathartic and gladiatorial, but it’s also a pagan sacrament, an unashamed performance of human passion and common citizenship.

 

The important difference between scepticism and cynicism

In reactions to recent posts, where I have attacked a certain kind of snotty, nihilistic attitude of mind which I feel is dominant in western culture right now, I have found some who have mistaken my intentions. Some responders think I am attacking all doubt, and therefore calling for a reversion to a reactionary gullibility. Nothing could be further from the truth.

However, in the course of some discussion a useful distinction has arisen, which requires further exploration. It has become clear that what I have been attacking is a certain kind of doubting, a form of cynicism. However, some responders have accused me of attacking scepticism, which is a very different frame of mind altogether.

Many responders spend a lot of time defending scepticism as a healthy product of enlightenment thinking, something which goes hand in hand with liberalism and and open society. Such arguments are preaching to the converted. I don’t need persuaded of this.

Having said that, the distinction between cynicism and scepticism is welcome, and it seems to me that most of us go about the world conflating these two things.

To be a sceptic is to remain open to alternative possibilities. To be a cynic is to close oneself off to most possibilities.

The cynic uses doubt to claim a certainty about life’s outcomes. If one always suspects the worst in life, one is never disappointed. However, there is hypocrisy in this position, because to expect the worst is still to expect something. The cynic might claim that she is not actually expecting anything, merely avoiding any expectation of the good. However, there really is no such thing as expecting nothing.

Jean Paul Sartre would have called this bad faith. You are lying to yourself. If one avoids expecting positive outcomes at all times, one is by definition expecting the worst.

Eventually, you train your mind to expect negativity so much, that it becomes an affront to end up with a positive outcome, and you begin to resent those who do not share your outlook.

Of course, cynics will deny this furiously, as they are very much identified with their fatalism, believing themselves to have risen above the naivety and callowness of ordinary people.

This is another conceit of the cynic: that of claiming special insight, a superior understanding of the world, by exorcising from their minds any hope or positive ambition.

Again, the cynic tells herself this fatalism and arrogance is a form discipline, a kind of scepticism. In reality it is a lazy, ill-considered renunciation of the imagination. For the cynic, all that can be expected is doom, betrayal and narcissism. One’s fellow man cannot be relied upon. Humanity is the worst of nature, in disguise.

Sceptics, however, are indeed disciplined. They are, like scientists, able to entertain multiple possibilities, while avoiding the grief and loss involved with investing in one particular outcome. Life is a series of hypothesises. The sceptic lives with doubt, but that doubt is a means to an end, a tool, by which the sceptic achieves the spiritual release of living in a state of constant potential.

Like the cynics, sceptics do not expect the best, they are free from the perils of idealism. This also frees them from the dangers of Utopianism and political ideology. The sceptic has made peace with the ragged edges of humanity, the complexities of people’s common frailties.

However, unlike the cynic, the sceptic never rules out the pleasant surprises of human tenderness and empathy, the spontaneous shows of brotherly love, which are common in times of crises.

The cynic’s stance is one of limited intelligence. Because the cynic finds a rigid certainty in her bleak world-view. She would rather sacrifice the surprise charity of common goodwill, reducing it to Freudian motivations, in order to salvage the stability and control that living negativity gives her.

The sceptic, rather, lives like an artist, on the edges of the possible, in a beautiful anxiety. Doubt is not an ideology, to which reality must bow; it is a method of thinking, similar to that of a samurai warrior.

To live as a sceptic is to live fluidly, to live in a prepared state, like a kind of meditative contemplation. The discipline of the sceptic is one of reining in the imagination, rather than cutting it off completely.

Unfortunately for the cynic, only the worst kinds of possibilities are entertained. Doubt itself becomes a god to be worshipped, ironically becoming a dogmatic fatalism. To aggressively hold to the claim that ‘there are no truths’, is itself a truth-claim.

The sceptic is not concerned with ultimate truth, so much as his own humility in the face of the limits of his own perception and imagination. Scepticism means to live in a healthy relationship with one’s own limitations.

Why then, do cynicism and scepticism get so easily conflated?

A huge part of the reason must be the overwhelming nature of modern living. The nervous system runs on empty for most of us, and the threats of the unknown are, as a result, more terrifying. The more useless stimulation we have to process, the more anxious we become, because our survival mechanisms – whatever they may be, I’m not a brain scientist – are in a state of perpetual overdrive.

It is not unreasonable to propose that our imaginative abilities, our faculties of seeing beyond the immediate situation into the realm of possibility, are what have sustained human beings and placed them at the top of the food chain.

In the modern world this imaginative faculty, this hyper-perception of what has not yet occurred but might, becomes strained. It is therefore easy to slip into cynicism.

The natural scepticism of the scientific world view, that healthy ability to entertain multiple hypotheses, is used as a sort of PR gloss, a way of convincing ourselves that the uncertainty of being overwhelmed is the same uncertainty as the disciplined scientist and philosopher.

We congratulate ourselves that our anxious state of cynical unknowing is the ironic methodology of Hume, Francis Bacon and Descartes.

The reason we conflate cynicism and scepticism then, is simply because it makes us feel better. The two attitudes grew in power simultaneously as a response to the growth and dominance of the technological era. However, they are in fact, entirely different ways of looking at the world.

Strange Days: Revisiting a classic Doors album

 Edinburgh in mid-Autumn can be a cold, lonely and haunted place. The sky is blanketed by a faceless mask of cloud, and at night the orange streetlights reflect a dreary turmeric pall across the city.

And it’s windy. Irritating winds, that muffle your conversations and your thoughts. Winds that cocoon you in a morose isolation.

On Saturdays at my boarding school we were allowed ‘uptown’ for a couple of hours in the afternoons, and the typical day out would be a trip to HMV on Prince’s Street then a milkshake at MacDonalds, and then run home for a dinner of dry, chewy beef and roast potatoes. Maybe you could steal a brief conversation from a pretty girl if you sat at the right table.

All the while the breezy darkness was closing in on you. Time running out, and your rationing of privacy and freedom running out too.

On one of these horrible windy days, I walked up Cockburn Street to a newly opened Fopp. Having recently discovered The Doors, I spotted a cassette of Strange Days, which I immediately bought for £4.99.

I wish I still had this tape. In the coming weeks, huddled in my icy room with bear walls and linoleum flooring, I’d listen to Strange Days over and over again. The barren, banshee-like screaming organ lines were perfect for the strained whine of cassette, which added to the discomforting and exhilarating circus-gothic mood of the album.

September 1967, when this album was originally released, would have been the anxious comedown after the naked highs of the Summer of Love. The choice of title and the first track being all the more fascinating as a result.

Strange Days. An echoing Manzarek organ gives way to chiming guitar and a rolling jazz-march on the tom-toms. ‘Strange Days have tracked us down…’ This is not the manifesto of liberation, this is not a flower power declaration of intent. Morrison’s voice glides across the beat like a melted liquorice narcotic.

‘The hostess is grinning, her guests sleep from sinning.’ Free love anyone?

You have the feeling of falling into a death-trance, the clouded hangover vision of backstreet whorehouses and doss rooms, the lantern glow of chinatown. The word ‘strange’ repeats through the lyrics like a dance motif, a lyrical melody, and Morrison draws out is drawling vowels like he’s spinning silk.

The deep cuts are the best cuts. Love Me Two Times is on every good compilation, but Unhappy Girl is a lost masterpiece. Along with Lost Little Girl, this song paints a picture of broken innocence, urban corruptions chiselling away at the mind of the American prom queen.

Unlike Dylan’s Miss Lonely, however, Morrison’s lost girls are a little more knowing, a little more complicit in their own intoxicating demise. For Morrison, losing one’s virgin soul is not the stuff immortal tragedy, it doesn’t symbolise the unthinking hubris of a generation. It’s simply the seductive self-destruction of freedom. It’s human nature. There’s no shock of surprise realisation.

Perhaps the strange days are the days of aftermath, when the sexual revolution turns to the terror of unshackled desires and liberation becomes licentious hunger. ‘You’re charged in a prison of your own device.’

Strange Days is an album that proves psychedelia doesn’t need to be mass, sprawling guitar jams and self-indulgent riffs and muso compositions for the initiated. Strange Days is mostly made up of tight, well-written and crafted pop songs, with suggestive, imaginative lyrical flourishes and dynamic mixes of tenderness and explosiveness.

Whatever you feel about The Doors, they knew how to lay down a song. Their albums are always crafted, thematically complete and integrated works of art.

Strange Days is a kind of drug album – of its time, but the antithesis of the zeitgeist of that moment. The psychedelia exists in the open spaces of the chilly soundscapes, as well as in the open-ended lyrics, which point to unseen torment rather than laboured dread.

Minimalism is not a word associated with The Doors, but in terms of how the actual compositions relate to the overwhelming effect of the songs, it’s absolutely appropriate. The organ riffs are manic but never crammed with notes. The drumming is thunderous but equally capable of a calm, massaging accompaniment.

Krieger’s guitar takes flight when the moment calls for it, and yet he never takes centre-stage. The solos are more like country or early rock and roll solos than they are hard cock rock eruptions of sound.

Morrison’s vocal style here is studied and restrained. He is experimenting with mic technique, adopting a lullaby intimacy as a counterpoint to his trademark booze-soaked yawp.

Horse Latitudes is a poem about death, and again, human nature. The performance here still creeps me out, and acts as a kind of avant garde balance to the streamlined pop songwriting of the first side of the record.

Two back to back hidden beauties, My Eyes Have Seen You and Can’t See Your Face, are Morrison at his most uncomfortably voyeuristic.

My Eyes is a short precursor to LA Woman. It’s a song of lust and sex – go figure. But whereas The Stones’ Straycat Blues is a one-dimension and lovable testament to groupie orgies and sixties free love, Morrison’s imagery creates a cinematic noir around the urban, transactional awkwardness of sexual encounters.

‘Free from disguise,
Gazing on a city under television skies,
Television skies, television skies

Let them photograph your your soul,
Memorize your alleys on an endless roll,
endless roll, endless roll’

The city and the female form are deliberately and subtly conflated. As in LA Woman, the girl’s body is a fractured landscape, an untravelled world to be captured in time, in the ripeness of the dying moment. Imprisoned in the polished gloss of celluloid. 

‘Carnival dogs consume the lines’ – no idea what that means but it is wonderfully predatory and manic. Can’t See Your Face is a paranoid song, but the delivery from Morrison is liquid elegance, allowing his voice to easefully trip off the consonants with relish, despite the almost schizophrenic nature of the words – ‘I can’t seem to find the right lie’.

Both these songs revolve around love as a doomed photographic effort, the futility of seeking to apprehend the shadowed soul of another. As a result, both these masterpieces are songs about loneliness and despair, just as much as the more overt People Are Strange is.

Legend has it that The Doors recorded the music for When The Music’s Over without Morrison, the singer being somewhere on the Sunset Strip boozing and fucking.

The lyrical improvisations in the band’s epic rock crescendos like The End and Music’s Over, were made on top of crafted spaces left by the band. They weren’t winging it, in other words.

Densmore’s drumming in particular evolves itself around Morrison’s careful, cat-like phrases. The band know when to pull back, and to push behind Morrison when the eruptions of angst come.

A great example of this is the way Densmore’s rolls curl round Morrison’s delivery at:

‘The face in the mirror won’t stop
The girl in the window won’t drop
A feast of friends alive she cried,
Waiting for me outside’

‘I want to hear the scream of the butterfly’ is said to be a reference to Chang Tzu’s poem about a butterfly, the sound being the inaudible sound of the soul beyond the veil of death. Or something like that. In any case, that’s probably what Morrison was getting at.

As life-affirming as this tour de force is, Morrison’s Birth Of Tragedy philosophy always teetered on the edge of nihilism. At times it seemed the best he could hope for was one final burst of poetic thrills before death came stalking.

However, there’s something overtly Romantic – in the Keats/Shelley sense of the word, about Music’s Over. Life is not worth living without art. Without beauty and self-expression, we are reduced to boredom and selfishness. Our vision is impaired without the primal and ecstatic growth offered to us by the ritual of rock n roll.

Without this song there would be no Patti Smith’s Horses. The poetic improv about raping the earth, points to the idea that it is the communal ceremony of togetherness and erotic connection afforded us by rock n roll, which frees us from our own narcissism.

Throughout Morrison’s poems and lyrics there is this homage to the primal and primeval. Music’s Over, like The End, reaches an orgasm before sinking back into a melodic coda. But unlike The End, there is an uplifting sense of possibility; we’ve undergone a ritualised death, a bacchanalian form of worship that helps us expunge our inwardness and exorcise hopelessness.

In that dim, lifeless study over twenty years ago, I think I was captivated by this album because of its atmosphere. Paranoia and aloneness are woven delicately with strains of fragile melodies and bluesy vocal phrasings. Pain and joy wrapped together like lovers in a tantric statue.

I was also enthralled by Morrison’s observational writing, the way he could capture a soul, photograph it, with only a few lyric strokes.

These days, it’s not as cool to like The Doors as it is to profess love of The Velvet Underground. However, Strange Days is the best counterexample to the tired and typical charges thrown at Morrison and this band. There is nothing overblown, nothing extraneous. You’ll find no extra fat on the cinematic bones of these songs.

What stops The Doors, and this album, being more popular is the fact that despite all the noir and the sexual paranoia, the songwriting is optimistic and poetically earnest.

Nothing could be more uncool these days, of course. And yet nothing could be more needed than the poise, subtlety and life-affirming craft exhibited by The Doors on Strange Days.

Strange Days will be reissued on an anniversary double disc remaster on November 17. Pre-order your copy here

 

‘Equal marriage’ is a phoney emancipation for lifestyle activists

After the weekend’s LGBT marches in Northern Ireland, and the German parliament’s vote in favour of gay marriage, the great non-issue of ‘equal marriage’ is back in the headlines.

Writer Colm Toibin, in a recent interview, said that the referendum vote in the Republic of Ireland a couple of years ago, marked a historic moment for gay people like himself. In a religiously conservative culture, the acceptance of gay people’s right to marry in a church, said Toibin, is final proof of inclusion for LGBT people.

It is certainly part of civil freedom to allow any one of us to declare love to another person in any which way we want, and have that recognised and protected by law. One thing the reactionaries like the DUP have right, is that marriage is a vital force of social cohesion.

When we make a commitment to another person under the law, we promise to invest the power of our citizenship in their lives. We are making a symbolic gesture of the very meaning of citizenship itself, that with one’s freedom comes a responsibility to protect that same freedom for another. Marriage is a very intimate way of expressing that responsibility.

There are differences between marriage, civil partnerships, and civil marriages. However, these differences are purely material. What each contract embodies, is the same level of freedom to love and the duty of care that involves. Whatever imbalances may exist between civil partnerships and Christian marriage, these are not matters of human rights, but legal procedure.

Colm Toibin may be right in claiming that allowing gay people to marry in church is profoundly symbolic, especially in countries where the church has wielded serious political clout. If that is true, then it should be permitted, without question.

However, the idea that this campaign is the new civil rights question of our age, or is a matter of ‘equality’ and human rights, is tiresome and fatuous. The hard political battle over LGBT rights has been won. The reason that it is still treated like some great fight for emancipation is because it makes people feel like revolutionaries, without actually calling on campaigners to expose themselves to any risk.

The recent resignation of Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron shows how twisted the issue of ‘equal marriage’ is. Farron is a typical Westminster centrist, and a committed human rights advocate. His own personal beliefs about the nature of marriage are of little consequence.

Part of what it means to be a liberal, is an ability to separate questions of civic justice, from personal conscience. The balance of liberty can only exist if we tolerate opposing views on what constitutes the moral good, while we protect each person’s right to determine the answers to such moral questions on their own terms.

‘Equal marriage’, as it is pompously called, is a perfect way to see into the heart of modern liberalism. We can see why the free press and free speech are issues treated with contempt by the left. Liberals have no interest in allowing people to form opinions based on personal conscience.

The ‘good’ in society is prescribed before one’s conscience even comes into play. If you fail to fall in line with what has been determined as right thinking, you are branded a bigot, excluded, just as gay people were ostracised before 1965.

The DUP in Northern Ireland are indeed wrong. They are stunting democracy and imposing their own views by abusing their veto on gay marriage. However, this is the very same tactic used by many of the LGBT side, especially those who called for Tim Farron’s resignation.

Liberty means that no one’s personal whims can be imposed on the constitution. The benefit of this, is that we are all free to express love, hate and indifference to each other as we please, as long as that doesn’t amputate aspects of each other’s citizenship.

‘Marriage equality’, bears no resemblance to any case of emancipation.

What are the core features of a real act of emancipation? The first has to be that there is some form of social and conservative oppression. The great trick of the modern left, of course, has been to redefine ‘oppression’ to be so broad, so abstract and invisible, that it exists everywhere. But the real moments of emancipation – the freeing of slaves, the civil rights act, the legalisation of homosexuality – conversely, happened against the backdrop of identifiable crimes.

To go out and protest these crimes meant you were up against an infrastructure of repressive state violence and corruption, and this meant a direct threat to one’s physical safety and livelihood. Speaking out meant ostracisation, blacklisting, or being beaten up.

The second feature of authentic emancipation is a clear and tangible miscarriage of justice. What’s interesting about the great movements of emancipation was the fact that they involved fighting an internal contradiction between the proposed values of the state, and the way the state was actually behaving.

Today, protesters and activists are not going up against miscarriages of injustice, so much as claiming that the very structures of society are unjust. This must be treated with suspicion. It’s not enough to mouth off about ‘inherent privilege’ or contort everyday unfairness into some evidence of hidden structural inequality.

Real emancipation can only happen when real violations of basic rights have occurred. In the case of marriage, it’s not a right. So it cannot, by definition, be an issue of equality. The only question of rights would be whether people are free to declare their love to each other without fear of persecution or danger.

Yes, it is wrong to stop people from using their Christian faith to declare their love. But allowing this to happen is not a matter of human rights or justice.

The final feature of an emancipation is that it radically alters the society from a restrictive one to a free one. Can we really claim that allowing ‘equal marriage’ does this? Is there some great attitudinal shift at the heart of this issue? Are people who were once deprived of basic human dignity now tasting the fresh air of liberty?

The only people who are actively against ‘equal marriage’ are evangelicals and reactionary conservatives. These people are a laughable minority, and their views have no hope of oppressing anyone politically, or violating anyone’s human rights in a legal sense.

And yet, the social justice movements, and the triangulating politicians that feed off such movements, give the impression that the bowler-hatted 50s Tory is still the great threat, that we are still fighting forces of establishment aristocracy and Victorian conformity.

These activists need to invent an archaic establishment to fight against, and refuse to see the massive social changes that have happened since the 60s. The bowler-hatted man is dead. And the stuffy, bourgeois conservatism that was so dangerous to gay people, has been deposed.

This is the problem with the Left in general. It has been ossified, trapped in history and over-saturated with 1960s iconography, to the point where it is wildly ill-equipped to identify the real, modern battles for justice, and to see new challenges and new forms of oppression when they present themselves.

And the new establishment of the Merkels and the Camerons and Mays love this delusional kind of activism, because it acts as no real threat. As long as people mistakenly battle against an idea of the establishment that died years ago, they pose no danger to the yuppy, neoliberal, corporate globalism that is doing the real damage to people’s lives.

You can tell this is a non-issue by the feebleness of those objecting to it. The celebrations, protests and marches are completely disproportionate to the moral and political victory that is supposed to be had by making equal marriage legal.

Protest has become a lifestyle choice. Since Apple Mac’s ‘think different’ ad campaign in the late nineties, freedom-fighting has become a kind of branding, a social status symbol, rather than a moral necessity.

Essential to this neutered, narcissistic version of emancipation is the fighting of causes that have little or no impact. Nothing substantial is achieved by allowing gay people to marry in churches. Most people, gay or straight, probably get married in civil ceremonies anyway.

Virtue-signalling about ‘equal marriage’ is an easy way to give yourself a moral high-ground, but the truth is it has little to do with gay rights, gay health, or the well-being of individuals struggling against religious fascism or political persecution for their sexuality.

There is no need for barricades, no long nights starving in the flanks. There is no danger involved. It’s a false issue. A great way to make yourself seem like a revolutionary when what you are is really the worst kind of bourgeois sheep.

All the while gay people are thrown off roofs in the middle east, and the best they can hope for from their LGBT brothers and sisters in west is the signing of a few petitions and some Facebook outrage.

Why ideas matter in a mechanised culture

An idea is the opposite of automatic thinking.

Human beings are clearly more than just higher order apes, and it is our capacity for ideas that helps us rise above the purely instinctual. Ideas are the opposite of inevitability.

The easiest place to see this is in our sexuality. Human sexuality has become so much more sophisticated than procreative instinct. It certainly emerges out of whatever imperatives exist in our biology, but the diversity and confusion, the whole range of sub-cultures from fashion photography to the nudes of Rubens, all the way up to the decadence of Oscar Wilde through to modern transsexuality, reveal that much more is going on than just a quest for survival.

There is something essential about being human that doesn’t fit into a simple reduction to the procreative instinct. There is something unique and beautiful about human beings that marks us out from the instinctual world completely.

Ideas are what create the space between our instinctual imperatives, and our free choices in the world. To create this space, an idea doesn’t need to be philosophical, or literary, or even conceived in language at all. An idea is simply that which stops us being prisoners of inevitability.

Great works of beauty, sweet melodies and even the heartfelt intimacy of a truly loving kiss, all these are forms of ideas, because they convey something to us that stops our instincts in their tracks.

Ideas don’t matter because they perform a function. They are not practical or utilitarian. Ideas matter because they take us out of the trap of automatic, reactive thinking, out of our programming.

To do this, an idea doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t need to be new, it just needs to be fresh, to create that space between you and your instincts. There is no way of preconceiving what such a thing might look like. The only way you can tell a powerful idea from a bad one, or from a lack of ideas completely, is whether or not it frees you from automatic thinking.

When George Orwell wrote Politics and the English Language, warning of the way political language degrades public dialogue and therefore human potential, he was not being a grammar nazi. Neither was he, as some have mistakenly thought, asking for constant originality in language. All language is a product of other language, just as all culture is a product of yet more culture.

Orwell’s concern in avoiding cliche was not about avoiding what had already been done, so much as avoiding anything that narrowed the scope of human thought, that trained the human mind to reduce the possibilities of individual potential.

Orwell’s project was to encourage fresh thinking, a way of using language that was the opposite of propaganda, or reactive, ideological behaviour.

Advertisers and PR managers and political spin doctors are heavily invested in automatic thinking. Orwell could see the dangers posed in an industrialised society, to language use, critical thinking and private agency – all the things he presumably thought democracy and egalitarianism were supposed to promote.

Today, Orwell’s fears are playing out for us, but not in the fascist nightmare of 1984. Rather, they are being manifest in the erosion of private reason, narrowing the space between our sense of who we are, and our instinctual and automatic biological programming.

Some may respond by saying, ‘of course ideas matter, you are not saying anything new’. But most probably what they mean by ‘ideas’ is just ‘clever solutions’. Ideas have been reduced to problem solving. What is generally meant by a ‘good idea’ in this sense is something like the Iphone, or the Uber taxi app or Elon Musk’s Tesla cars.

These are indeed the products and examples of good ideas, but they don’t embody the whole of what a good idea can be.

Far more powerful examples of ‘good ideas’ are Magna Carta, democratic sovereignty, or the truths conveyed in the famous soliloquy of Hamlet.

These are not necessarily ‘solutions’ in the local, technical sense of helping one get from A to B while overcoming an obstacle. They don’t necessarily offer mind-blowing answers, either.

Magna Carta was a revolutionary idea because it conceived of the state and justice system as more than the mere limbs of sovereign power. In Magna Carta we have the first instance of a state’s power being there to protect the people from the whims of a king, rather than just consolidating the entitlements of that office. This puts a space between the society, and its leader’s personal ambition.

Human instincts and biological programming seem to suggest hierarchies will always be the product of human relationship. Magna Carta marked a shift in human society by freeing us from that inevitability. Human civilisation stopped being the product of instinct, and became a way of distancing ourselves from it.

The dangers of a technologically driven society are that automation becomes not just function the culture, but the desirable end of it. Technology helps us satisfy our basic needs in constantly revolutionary ways. However, we forget that a great part of human progress is not just the fulfilment of our desires, but our ability to be free from them.

Ideas are not a form of technology. They are ways in which we create space between our evolutionary needs and our higher-order culture. If human life was about survival only, we would not have created religious culture, democratic societies and any heritage of beauty and art. We would not be obsessed with making a meaningful life, only a long one.

The dogma of the day is that humans are merely sophisticated apes, and our programming is so strong that we are bound to destroy ourselves; the cruel irony of our survival instincts being that they conflict with each other, and our desire for survival leads to a desire for power, which leads to a desire to destroy.

This view of human nature fits conveniently into the ideology of technology, because it means that a culture of automation is not foreign to us, it’s not troubling or dangerous, because our whole instinct is towards automation and complex problem solving. Technology is just the advancement of our instincts by other means.

Viewing ideas and civilisation in the way being laid out here, however, disturbs the convenience and comfort of this modern ideology.

The aim of human life is not to fulfil our animal needs, but to rise above them. Instinct and survival programming are strong, but this is not the complete picture of what humanity is, or is capable of.

Consumerism, technological thinking, marketing, Public Relations and political propaganda, are all mechanisms of automatic thinking. They are the enemies of ideas. So it follows that much of what we call modern culture is also the enemy of ideas. Much of what we see in the public sphere, from textureless glass-box buildings to monotonous popular music and simplistic debate in online media, reflect this anti-idea culture.

The way to fight this, is to insists on creative thinking, in constantly refreshing our capacity for ideas, clearing a space between our instinctual programming and our dreams for ourselves and each other. Technology is great, only if it is matched with equally strident experimentation and advancement in ideas.

If technology advances faster than our capacity for ideas, or worse, if it actively erodes our ability to develop them, then the Darwinist nihilists will create a self-fulfilling prophecy. We fight this by resisting automation, inevitability and capitulation to instinct. This resistance is the secret behind the achievements of Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Steve Jobs. It’s also the secret to becoming a truly free human.

 

Michelangelo: His Epic Life (book review)

The greatest strength of Michelangelo: His Epic Life, by Martin Gayford is the way that Gayford distills the sweeping genius of Michelangelo into accessible, journalistic prose, a style of writing directed at the curious layman, rather than the pontificating specialist.

Like all young artists, Michelangelo faced severe, sometimes, physical resistance to his choice of career from his family the Buonarotti. Gayford demonstrates the timeless struggle of artist versus bourgeois security in a clear and contemporary way.

‘We read about the ‘rise of the artist’ in Renaissance Italy, but of course such changes are not homogenous, any more than the causes of racial and gender equality have been in our own times…. Not everyone was so admiring of artists and the arts. The Buonarotti brothers, it seems, saw nothing but painful social slippage. A clever boy who might have become a bishop was determined instead to become an artisan who worked with hands. They probably felt it was their duty to try to beat it out of him.’ (pg45)

Gayford is an aproachable storyteller, able to get out out of the way of the story, while at the same time succinctly brief us on the context and background of the drama of Renaissance life.

He brilliantly sets up Michelangelo’s place in his time, capturing the way the man was both a product of the society into which he was born, but how he fought against these circumstances. It is this paradox of inheriting the ambitions of his forerunners and his patrons, but not being content to follow their script that makes Michelangelo worth returning to for biographers.

‘One day when he was high up in the mountains above the town of Carrara, looking down at the peaks and valleys below and the Mediterranean in the distance beyond, “he formed the wish to make a colossus that would be visible to mariners from a afar.” In other words, Michelangelo wanted to carve a chunk of mountain into a human figure. One guesses, though the subject is not described, that he had in mind a naked male body.’ (pg 211)

Storytelling clarity and accessibility are pre-eminent in Gayford’s short discussion of Michelangelo’s early painting copy of an engraving by Martin Schongauer – The Temptation of St Anthony.

‘Schongauer’s St Anthony was a powerful example of a new medium which some people were probably already hanging on their walls as an affordable substitute for a picture. The thirteen-or-fourteen-year-old Michelangelo was therefore doing something shrewd and timely by transposing it into colour. It was also a bizarre phantasmagoria of an image which it is easy imagining appealing to a teenager. In modern terms, as art historian Keith Christiansen has put it, this is “a Star Wars picture.” “…a fastidious sense of line and form, a willingness to work ferociously hard to produce as sharply telling as possible and an overpowering urge to compete.”‘ (pg 59 and pg 61)

Michelangelo comes across as exactly the temperamental genius we always assume him to be. However, his irascibility, his grumpy egotism and aggressive ambitions, don’t take away from the essential lovability of the man. Gayford calls him a ‘….hugely talented, neurotic, complicated, curmudgeonly but ultimately engaging man…’

Gayford is never shy of demonstrating the man’s limitations emotionally, nor his lack of hygiene and his manifestly anti-social character. What’s strange, though, is that the overall result of Gayford’s portrait is not an artist whose arrogance and violent moods make us hate him, but a brilliant and sometimes unstable genius whose volatility was necessary to his achievements.

‘[Ascanio] Condivi reported some thoroughly insanitary habits: “When he was more robust he often slept in his clothes and in the boots he had always worn for reason of cramp, from which he has continually suffered, as much as for anything else. And sometimes he has been so long in taking them off that subsequently along with his boots he sloughed off his skin, like a snake’s.’ Vasari had little more information on that last, revolting, point. The buskins were dog skin, worn next to the skin, with which they bonded.’’’ (pg228)

Gayford points out that the more Michelangelo complained and threw tantrums against his family, friends and even his patrons, the more brilliant and historic the work he must have been working on.

This offers a point worth considering. Mood swings and aggressive paranoia do not, as we often lazily suppose, go hand in hand with creative ability. There are plenty of stable, compliant and socially adaptive people who are creative, and man great artists who are too.

However, visionary power, the ability and proclivity to see beyond your times, to entertain impossible feats and to have the obsessive, arrogant and hubristic determination to carry them out – these qualities seem necessary linked to some kind of peculiarly neurotic genius. Civilisation comes at a cost, and that cost is very often an epic and violent discontent, both within the artist, and his surroundings.

Michelangelo was a malcontent, oblivious social norms, gentilisms and social expectations. His only considerations of class seem purely egotistical, given his desire to elevate the status of his family name through his achievements.

Gayford illustrates this brilliantly by contrasting Michelangelo with Raphael:

‘Raphael’s art projected just this sense of mastery with ease, whereas Michelangelo expressed heroic effort and passionate vehemence. A sixteenth century critic observed that Raphael painted gentlemen but Michelangelo’s figures looked like porters. Clearly, Raphael had the manners of a courier himself. It was rumoured that Leo X intended to make him a cardinal, but was prevented by Raphael’s early death. This, too, emphasizes the contrast: it is impossible to imagine Michelangelo as a prince of the Church – a hermit or a mystic, perhaps, but not a cardinal.’ (pg 257)
One of the mysteries of Michelangelo is how he was able to sustain his characteristic levels of physical and mental concentration. From an angle of pure physical labour, the Sistine Chapel is a superhuman accomplishment. And that’s before we consider the grandeur of the aesthetic achievement.

The decision by Michelangelo to include scenes from the gospel that had not been covered by the existing frescoes on the lower walls of the chapel, is probably the key to what makes the work truly great, rather than just a work of genius. As a simple depiction of the Apostles, the project could have had no particular interest to Michelangelo, it was a decorative assignment. But with a multidimensional creative design, suddenly the rolling and shifting challenges of cramming so much poetry into the limited designs of the architecture of the ceiling, must have given Michelangelo enough sense of shifting possibilities, to make it worth the blood and the sweat.

Gayford’s Michelangelo is gruff, anti-social, cruel and egotistical. Yes, he’s a product of his times. Yes, he’s a deranged genius. Yes, he’s a self-mythologiser, and all the things we have come to associate with the self-aggrandising Renaissance man. However, the sincerity of the man, and the limitless poetic ambition of imagination are what redeem him, and it is this crucial element in the Renaissance and in Michelangelo, that is often forgotten in the impersonal, critical hindsight art history that seeks to reduce individual greatness to impersonal forces.

Michelangelo: His Epic Life by Martin Gayford (Penguin) is available on Amazon

 

‘Love and peace’ is not enough: We must show them who we really are

Our enemies think of us as a decadent race. They think they have the advantage over us. They believe that they have a passion and a readiness to die for something greater than themselves, and we do not. They believe we are ripe for the plucking, because we are on the turn.

We need to show them that we too are friends with death. That we are not hiding our faces from the devil. That we are not so conceited that we live in some cartoonish, deathless world of consumerism fuelled by infantilism, just as they believe we do.

We must reject the critique of western civilisation, that it is somehow all simply founded on exploitation. That is self-hatred, and a gross oversimplification. Unfortunately, all societies, all nations and civilisations have exploitation and bloodshed in their history. The human DNA is packed full of trauma, and each of us has inherited monsters, rapists, abusers and warmongers. We are, without doubt, descended from tyrants and imperialists.

However, that is only a fraction of the story. The history of civilisation is a history of man’s battle with himself. Everything from Greek democracy right down to the speeches of Martin Luther King Jnr, through Michelanglo’s David, is a catalogue of desperate self-transcendence. Whatever our faults as a civilisation, the need to overcome our animal impulses is a defining feature of who we are, and what we have become.

Western civilisation is not decadent. Western culture is not the product of empire. Western civilisation is not the preserve of fat, white, iphone-addicted MacDonalds-munching morons.

No, our civilisation, with its secular ideals, its love of beauty and the belief in man’s capacity to overcome himself, is the product of the essential evolutionary impulse, the knowledge that culture can conquer death. We must get back the deeply understood knowledge buried in our biology, that we are parts only of some greater whole, some greater potential and cosmic project.

This knowledge is our greatest weapon against our enemies. They have missed this crucial piece of the battle plan. They have missed it because they are incapable of understanding it. Their minds are swept up in the passionate, bloodthirsty conviction of moral righteousness that attaches itself in desperation to anything that resembles the finality of truth.

They are convinced that this conviction and zeal gives them the upper hand. That they alone have the capacity to sacrifice themselves for a higher, divine order. In their narcissistic lust for martyrdom, they have blinded themselves to the fact that civilisation has the advantage. That they are fighting a losing battle.

However, it remains for us to reconnect with the beauty and brilliance of what our forebears have bequeathed us. It is time to stop apologising, to stop navel-gazing and indulging in guilt over our power and history. It is perfectly possible for us to extend the powers and privileges of our liberties and freedoms to those who were previously exploited, while at the same time salvaging the best of our inheritance.

Every family has a history of abuse and trauma. But every family equally has the assets of survival, struggle and overcoming that can be harnessed by its young. To salvage what is best in our culture, without guilt, without shame, without self-flagellation, does not mean we live in denial of the crimes of the past. It simply means we understand the context of those crimes, and we make sure that whatever powers we glean from our past are not excluded to the least among us.

And like our forefathers, we learn too to see this inheritance of survival and self-overcoming as the very blood of our culture, it is the means by which our genes survive.
We are not impressed by the supposed self-sacrifice of our enemies. We are not intimidated by it. Because, contrary to what they tell themselves, we are entirely familiar with it. We have seen it before, we too were once a culture that delighted in the egotism of a death wish. Some say that our culture is done for, that we are living in the last days of Rome, that the empire is collapsing on itself. History is repeating, and we are prisoners to inevitability.

Such gloom and self-hatred is the work of false prophecy. No culture before us has survived its own crimes of slavery and exploitation, no culture in history has triumphed over its own savagery, the cults of nationalism, pathological war, like the culture we call our own.

The 20th century is a blot of demonic shame on the history of human life. However, we came through it. And not only did we survive it, we learned from it, we grew, we innovated our way out of the squalor.

Rather than merely rise from the ashes of our unthinkable past crimes, we have emerged a resilient and loving people, willing to extend the hand of brotherhood to all who may wish to join us.

However, somewhere along the line we have convinced ourselves that we need to abandon our past in order to be free of its crimes. This is to give the enemy a free pass. The crimes of our history are not the products of our culture, but aberrations of it. It is our democratic values, our humanism, our love of beauty, truth and the ‘known rules of ancient liberty’ that define the best of our inheritance, not the many instances of our failure to live up to these ideals.

Our enemies are counting on us to hate ourselves. What they don’t understand is that civilisation triumphs over warmongering every time, because civilisation is never undermined by its own failures, and neither are we.

These people think they are the only ones with a cause. They think they only have the zeal and fire to die for the sake of their future generations. They think they and they only have the capacity to face horror, death and the monster of malevolent darkness. They think they have the upper hand because they write us off as scared, spineless, self-consumed animals, buried under technology, privilege and wealth.

They lack the intelligence to see what we are. To see that we are the product of Hellenistic democracy, the Renaissance, the birth of science, the emancipation of slaves, the suffrage of women. Our past is full of war crimes and slaughter. However, through all the struggle and blood we have bequeathed to the world landmark innovations of human progress that our race will never be able to undo.

We need to let our enemies know that if they go to war with us, they go to war with history itself. That even if they kill us, they cannot kill what we represent. That they may be able to rob us of individual life, but they will never rob us, or the world, of the indefatigable victories of our culture. And we must let them know that we too, then, have a creed worth dying for, and that we too are willing to sacrifice comfort, ease, and privilege to ensure that the triumphs of our civilisation also triumph over their boring, childish, conceited barbarism.

Art, utility and bohemianism: The challenge for the modern artist

The biggest challenge for a writer and an artist these days is persistence. The sad truth of the matter is that as artists we are engaged in activities that don’t have immediate value in the market of exchange.

The artist is engaged in the celebration of life, not necessarily its enhancement, and his or her work is only valued in as much as it is a relief, a tonic to the business and pressure of the marketplace.

This means not only that our work cannot be valued in the same way as typical commercial products, but also that our work culture is different.

The first thing to remember in this battle is that there is actually a divide, between the values of beauty and the market. For sure they overlap, and they have been successfully combined at rare moments in civilisation. The Renaissance being one of them. And there remain pockets in contemporary life where examples of this overlap are very prominent.

Some of the older university colleges maintain a culture based on beauty and contemplation, while still offering value to the marketplace, for example. Some art galleries maintain a commitment to beauty for its own sake, and are a celebration of older, more permanent values, while they still function in the world as commercially viable enterprises.

These are rare examples, however, and in each of them the battle to preserve non-commercial values is ongoing. The beautiful for its own sake is always being infringed upon, and you can see that most starkly in places like London, where heritage buildings are never left alone by local councils. There is always some kind of tinkering and modification going on in the name of “accessibility” and “community education”.

It’s almost as if the price we have to pay for not demolishing old buildings (just for the crime of being old) is to allow the philistines to have their say, to leave their scars upon the heritage of beauty. It’s only way to placate the monster of modernity.

So how does the individual live in this world? How do we preserve those parts of ourselves that are of no utility, but of the deepest significance?

It’s very hard, because science and technology have reached a stage if unprecedented arrogance, and they have convinced the world that there is no underlying value other than utility.

However, the reality of being human doesn’t match up to their supercilious simplicities. The very fact that churches will be packed to the rafters this weekend is one example of this hidden, inexplicable dimension of human reality.

Another example is the tourist industry. Why do people flock to historic sites, to the Vatican, to London’s galleries, to the old monasteries of Scotland, if utility is the only permanent value worth integrating into culture and education?

Another slightly more ironic example is the fact that once people have enough money, having committed to the market their time and labour, they flock to older parts of cities, to more ornate houses built pre-modernism. The problem of gentrification in places like Brooklyn, San Francisco, or Shoreditch, speaks directly to this problem. Utility does not seem to be enough to those aspiring to climb the hierarchy of the market.

The best sign of status in the marketplace, seems to be the ability to exhibit non-market-based or utilitarian values. This could just be a kind of aristocratic self-indulgence. Or it could be proof of the fact that people demand more from their life than utility. Perhaps beauty and civilisation are of inherently higher value than the market?

None of this helps the artist, or the creator of those buildings, and thinkers of ideas, that become the sought-after artefacts of status. The artist as individual is stuck trying to prove his or her worth to the world of the market.

Not only that, but a modern artist understands that the true holy grail of their craft is to affect the market in a non-market way, to re-establish the values of beauty, contemplation and civilisation as a kind of guerilla assault on the marketplace.

For those who simply want to confine themselves to the cloisters, to puzzle away on useless problems, or who are content to sit in the quietude of creative privacy, it is enough to put up a barrier between the beautiful and the market.

For the artist, who sees herself as part of a tradition, who feels anxious about preserving the heritage of the culture, life is not so easy. You have to live in the market, but not of it.

This living in, but not of, the marketplace was what was once called bohemianism. Bohemians were neither bourgeois (though often they came from the middle classes, which is different), nor are they working class dissenters of the trade union, Marxist type.

The bohemian does not conform to, nor demolish, the marketplace. The first true bohemian could be said to be Socrates – a man who devoted the same energies most of us devote to survival, to ideas and the search for truth.

Jesus Christ, too, was a bohemian. Oscar Wilde called him the first Romantic, for calling on people to live “flower-like lives”. The whole Sermon on the Mount is a call to abandon the demands of the marketplace, and to live with “no thought for the morrow”. That is, not to get caught up in the busyness of trade and ambition, but to live for the enrichment of the spirit, to nourish the highest aspects of ourselves.

The Marxist Terry Eagleton has said that the commodification of culture has robbed culture of one of its most vital functions – to offer a critique of the marketplace. Eagleton says that culture has in fact become an engine of the marketplace – through public relations, the creative industries, advertising – rather than a counterbalance to it.

This explains why it is so hard to be a bohemian artist in the current economic culture. There is no room for a dissenting way of life manifested in creative values, because consumerism has subsumed dissent into itself.

This is the exact phenomenon we see in the recent outrage over the Kendall Jenner Pepsi advert. The language of critique and dissent is used for the propaganda of commodities. The imagery of resistance is used to induce capitulation.

The most prophetic example of this was the legendary Apple Mac Superbowl advert from 1985, whereby IMB was portrayed as the evil Big Brother state, and Mac users were shown to be the free-spirited individualists, emancipated by their personal computers.

How, then, does the artist live? How do we keep our spirits enraptured to our values, when anything that is said by an artist is subsumed into the marketplace?

The only way to live is to live ironically. That is, to accept the sorry state of affairs for what it is, but to refuse to let the marketplace have the final say.

This will require toughening up a bit. We have to become immune to accusations of delusion, madness and naivete. We have to abandon the need to prove our worth the a world that doesn’t deserve such efforts.

But finally, we have to keep working. There is a certain amount of trust involved. In truth, there has always been such an element of faith in the work of any great artist.

Michelangelo and Shakespeare were both adept at winning patronage in the marketplace of their times. However, their compromises probably came from viewing their work on a historic plane. They were okay doing a dance with the devil, for the long-term gain of imprinting their art on the cultural heritage.

It only seems harder to live as a bohemian, if you accept the view that contemporary, utilitarian values, are the end-of-history, final say of cultural evolution. The ironic shift in perspective necessary for an artist comes from finding emancipation in a private dialogue with history, with spending as much time in the timeless realm of ideas as possible.

This quiet, unobtrusive dissent will actually raise us up to the level of great artists, but it will do so to the scorn and ridicule of the world. We have to abandon the “cool”, we have to shun the group, and we have to resist the moronic need to prove the utility of our daily work.