Pater familias

I had been wondering, worrying about fatherhood already much before this Sunday's miraculous event. Beyond words these things are, as tightly folded buds, in Larkin's words, we arrive here. Tiny and helpless, full of promise and daring recklessly leaping into this cold, random world. A miraculous event indeed and it did enforce my earlier thoughts: surely the only way of being a meaningful father, capable of love and protection, is to be a meaningful person. The same goes for all our human roles, being a man or a woman, a citizen, a member of a civilization. The essence is inner, it is not found in any outward characteristics, in any boastful embellishments. Having a true security about oneself but at the same acknowledging also the precariousness of all human life, the brutal limits of all personal power and aims. Acknowledging the terrible defencelessness we have here and daring still to feel, to risk love. Surely, surely the bravest thing in this world is to love: such fierce hostages to fortune we do give - should we be so lucky.

The myriad ways of Islam

I have lately been reading descriptions of modern Islam written from within the faith itself - admittedly from the more liberal end of the spectrum. The latest has been Ziauddin Sardar's most fascinating and enlightening Desperately Seeking Paradise. What strikes me most in these descriptions is the polyphonic multitude of different interpretations of Islam, a polyphony of individual voices.

When you then turn towards the Western, especially US media, what you get is an undifferentiated, ridiculously simplified monolith. Highly placed officials can't even tell the difference between Sunni and Shia, or place al-Qaida correctly within the Islamic tradition. Such criminal ignorance is guiding and leading this absurd "Global War on Terror" which in practice often translates as a somewhat random war against somewhat randomly chosen varieties of political Islam.

What the various elites offer to the electorate instead of any deep understanding are silly platitudes, slogans, whether politically correct or incorrect: "Islam is a religion of peace", "No, it's a religion of war!" etc. etc. ad infinitum et nauseam. Of course, any great religion is a huge spectrum of interpretations, from the most eloquently mystical, open and tolerant to the most pitifully literalist, primitive and aggressive. So with Islam.

This is not to say that some forms of these current fundamentalist interpretations (much in evidence for example in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan) wouldn't be a threat to Western enlightenment and liberal democracy (and the same can be said also of much of George W. Bush's fundamentalist Christian base), but that Islam in itself cannot be that threat: there is no one Islam. Perhaps one day the majestic potential for liberation and openness that is contained in those universal visions will be released.

Against painkillers

Namely the triple curse of our modern age: cheap sentiment, fundamentalist religion and reflexive cynicism. All three serve a common purpose of distancing ourselves from the scary reaches of our infinite, passing, ephemeral experience. All avoid living with loss, avoid giving hostages to fortune, to time. They offer easy escapes from our human predicament. But to turn away from experience is to avoid living, of being in the world - a cruel, random place surely, where all of us, quickly passing in any case, offer our loved ones, ourselves to a daily barbaric lottery of life and death, yes, but without that offering how could we perceive this sharp, harsh, amazing beauty of existence, the breathtaking vistas that open before our eyes, the ice cold, purifying shock of water as we plunge into every day? Without that sense of living without any false comforts, without any safe conducts, how can we live truly - and if we don't truly live, how could we live ethically, esthetically?

So distinct a shade

I am most fascinated - and baffled - about the way we invest our experience of the world, and thus the world itself, with meaning. Naturally, science is the most reasonable tool available in giving us a framework for that process but I don't think it can in any way logically dictate the meaning of its findings. I would guess that a hard materialist would say that the question itself is meaningless; which for me is a peculiarly pointless view. Traditional religion, in those brief times that it has not been hopelessly entangled in temporal power struggles, has functioned as a kind of a shortcut to meaning, but it obviously is, in this peculiarly human form, intellectually and logically totally untenable.

Philosophy and art are much better, much more effective and aware in their exploration: ideally, perhaps, a combination of those two would bring us closer to understanding the structure of our passionate being here. In some sense, I would think that this incompleteness of self-understanding is a permanent feature of our human nature - and that any real progress will mean abandoning that state of being. Until that our existence will unavoidably have the partial character of an intellectual and cultural cul-de-sac, with the only open question being the concrete historical level of fear, hysteria and aggression that this state generates.

S Novym godom - svetom - kraem - krovom!

It has been a longstanding regret of mine not to be able to read the magnificent Russian literary tradition in the original. Brodsky's exhilarating essay on Marina Tsvetaeva's "Novogodnee" (the brilliant, joyous opening line of which is the title of this post) was another occasion to reflect on this. Brodsky is such a great essayist combining an artist's reckless courage and style with a critic's discerning, detached eye. 

I have only rudimentary Russian - having studied it for just two years at high school - but I have always felt that there is such a depth and vitality in the language that translations simply can't capture. And a great tradition it certainly is, this language of Pushkin, and that greatness undoubtedly at least partly explained by the horrendous social and political history of the the heroic, long suffering nation.

It is very strange to realize that Russia has actually never experienced an administrative system not morally corrupt, not venal, not brutal (whether or not clumsily disguised). There have been brief times of fresher air, of optimism soon to be dispelled, and never a strong and healthy civil society. Out of the darkness we have got these amazing flashes of genius and integrity. A high price certainly. And so the curious combination goes on: a magnificent nation docile under the control of cynical, ruthless pygmies. 

If this would be a permanent Russian Sonderweg, which I don't believe for a moment, it certainly would be a tragic, fruitless cul-de-sac. But that corruption was not the image that stayed with me yesterday having finished Brodsky's essay: it was of the exiled Marina Tsvetaeva and her angelic speech to stars, to Rilke.

In one of the dives on Fifty-second Street

Joseph Brodsky's heavenly essays (On "September 1, 1939" and To Please a Shadow) are once again half-persuading me to have another look at Auden. I have been here earlier. It is very hard to pinpoint the problem: Auden is accomplished and profound, but his cadences and rhythms seem to be a hard taste to acquire for me. There is something there that feels lifeless and vague, something that fails to raise emotion and thought. You admire but are not engaged, encaptivated.

Of course to my shame there are some external factors involved as well - I have always found Auden's person slighly distasteful. All his various ideological phases, Freudian, Marxist and religious are varyingly unsympathetic to me. Freud was a mechanical, totalitarian thinker, the European heart of darkness in the 1930's was surely in Moscow, not Berlin (this shifted concretely only during 1941-42, whatever pre-existing hidden potential there was: in any case, if you were blind enough to venerate Stalin and discredit liberal democracy, you wouldn't have perceived any hidden montrosities anyway). The move to the neutral and isolationist USA in 1939 of all years does leave a questionable taste to mouth: after all that exhortation comes - a well timed departure. His bewilderingly shifting strands of Christianity I'm least familiar with; in case they obviously weren't very beneficial for his later poetry.

Still, once again Brodsky makes such a powerful, eloquent case that leaves very tempting echoes in the mind: years have passed since the last effort, perhaps I have matured enough for Auden...

And so to Iran?

Josh Marshall perfectly encapsulates my own position on this question. Any rationally behaving administration would not stake all into another war of choice after the complete debacle in Iraq. Such an idea would simply be preposterous, there are no resources left, no rationale left. But this is not a rationally behaving administration: ideology trumps empirical observation, facts on the ground don't matter. The president's motto is very obviously "Après' mois le deluge" - it is quite frightening to think that the US political system would be so dysfunctional as to bring us to this point. One wonders if the corrective actions will come in time of if there are any self-corrective impulses left within the administration itself: for the next two years this disastrous, criminally incompetent and impetuous president doesn't need to think about democratic elections. Interesting times indeed.

Through Western Eyes

I suppose I'm in a very small minority identifying myself culturally as a Westerner first, a Finn second and a European as a fairly distant third. For me the most essential identity is truly the membership of the modern, liberal and post-industrial West. One could no doubt draw crude Huntingdonian conclusions of this in line with the current hubristic atmosphere of the decadent Washington. But that is not my point: religion, history and ethnicity are irrelevant here. I do not feel any affinity with the old, Catholic and aristocratic, rural Europe that gave birth not only (somewhat accidentally) to Enlightenment but much more essentially to aggressive imperialism and all pervasive racism. In this inherent aggression it didn't essentially separate itself from any other agricultural and aristocratic civilization.

Where we do have truly new beginnings is in the Enlightenment, in the fresh, unique formulations of radical, progressive and inclusive philosophies and ideologies - so universal that any specific, local cultural background will surely be buried under the vast, limitless visions of the implied universalism. Of course, so pitifully little of all this has ever been realized, and maybe this is most that will ever be accomplished (in most areas in the modern West we see currently more deteriation than progress). Nevertheless, I would argue quite defiantly: so far all history has been a slow, irrational holocaust anyway - what is the only new thing is this radical attempt to break free of this circle of human aggression and ignorance. For this we should never apologize.

Ethics and esthetics

Having freshly read Alan Hollinghurst's excellent "Line of Beauty", I began to thing about this strange, complex connection, perhaps more implicit than explicit in the book itself. Of course, I see art as fusion of these two, but I have not regarded them as directly connected in any essential way. It would seem that might be a too hasty conclusion. There is a certain proportion to our mostly tragic, brief and ephemeral fates and actions here, to our wild, unsafe experience, so quickly forgotten. A sense that too fortright ethical conclusions are lacking depth and understanding. In that way it could be said that esthetics have a deep ethical dimension - and vice versa. There are appropriate endings and valuations in the particular contexts and shapes of our passionate lifes that escape any simple ethical conclusions. This to me is not devaluing ethics but the opposite: giving a deeper, more universal moral significance to our scattered, inpermanent persons and actions.

For Dockery a son

These past six months have been remarkable time: a new life on its way with all the attendant scarily high stakes and worries. And optimism - that cannot be denied. For a long time I shared Larkin's mock mock-distant attitude with the innermost feeling being pure relief at not having that harsh patronage. Of course it is always hard to tell with Larkin what would be that innermost feeling, probably as contradictory, as poised, as the poems (at heart) were. 

Of myself I can be sure - we do change, I have changed. Matured, yes, but there are many ways to maturity, procreation surely not the most significant of them. In this particular case, within this particular context, a new life does make sense, is fitting, despite all the attendant high stakes and worries. This no doubt is how we all arrive in the world: into other contexts, other constellations - hopefully welcome, hopefully loved. In these respects at least our new family member should not worry.

The past is dead

I suppose it is due to my most thorough historical education that I automatically view our modern society as something very strange, very odd. This week I was surveying the dark plains of my native Ostrobothnia from a sauna balcony, the freezing night lit by pale stars, the old way of living that preceded our last half-century as consumers seemed very real, very close. Slow centuries formed those fields, those roads. Not to mention that those slow centuries, or in many places, millenniums, were themselves a radical innovation after hundreds of thousands of uncounted years of hunting and gathering. Yet it is this mere decades old, frantic, ephemeral flux that is taken for granted, for permanent.

My current home town of Espoo is only a sizable suburb of Helsinki, grown from 12 000 to 220 000 inhabitants in 60 years, now the proud home of Nokia and other high-tech companies - but the past is still here to see: fields, placenames, patterns of roads and streets. But it is not seen, not imagined at all. The past is utterly dead for our society: we are completely unable to imagine other ways of thinking, of living, we can't picture what once was so real. This is will happen to us too, so immersed in this passing moment, so self-important. The high ship sails on.

The great melody

I have always thought that the great admiration and respect Keynes had for Burke is very revealing - of both of them. Keynes was the archetypal pragmatic liberal, distrustful of hypothetical theoretical benefits as opposed to concrete existing and working structures. To see him as a doctrinaire left wing ideologue is simply plain silly (so, it is not a great surprise that this is how libertarians see him today). And Burke really was a whig, as traditional and conservative as imaginable (with many silly ideas), but a whig still, and it is only with some violence that he is now fitted to be a part of the English conservative tradition.

Well, I suppose this only shows that modern Tories are actually nothing but a branch of liberalism. I wonder if there is anyone alive today that you could say would still be the genuine article? A few decades ago the most anti-Burkean intellectual tradition around was Marxism-Leninism, and after its unmourned death, the position has been held by free market doctrinaires. An abstract theoretical mechanism is seen as the universal answer to all human problems without regard to any particular place or time. This is pure folly.

For Burke - as for Keynes - we have unique constellations, particular contexts, things and structures that work in practice (something we have always had great difficulties in creating). Pure reason becomes only too easily the prisoner of our animal and fearful natures, violent means turn into nightmarish ends. The French Revolution certainly proved that, but we got an even more awful example with the Russian Revolution. But where Keynes is more logical than Burke is that he sees more clearly that pragmatism should then be the most logical answer for political ideology. Sometimes, often, the existing structures are a danger to a free society without being reformed but reform itself should not be doctrinaire and unempirical, irrational, but particular, particularly suited to the existing, unique conditions.

I adopted this view while becoming acquainted to both Keynes and the marvellously optimistic and exuberant young Walter Lippman, whose "Preface to Politics" is one of the great specimens of 20th century liberal thought. His faith got obviously badly shaken by the nightmares then still only looming, but I don't think that it would be reasonable to abandon his outlook. So we should see a society as a living thing, organic in many ways with meanings and coherence beyond any abstract logic. This makes gradual reform a very difficult and unpredictable task but, I would also argue, an absolute necessity: humankind is best at destroyal, without intelligent reform, structures will collapse with all the attendant irrational destruction that it entails.

Liberal beliefs

I have often wondered what really would be the core foundation of liberalism: yes, anyone can recite its historical structures (for some reason liberalism is always criticized based on its concrete - and meagre - achievements and not for its ideals like all the other political ideologies...) For what it's worth, and maybe not much, I have come to hold that there are two core beliefs that sustain the liberal project: a conviction that people are able to create coherent meanings (combined with a suspicion that all coherent meanings are thus created in our finite minds) and a faith, a trust in the human will to ethical behaviour. If these premises are accepted, it is easy to see how they would sustain and support each other; if we are able to create coherent meanings, no crude (and fictional) divine being is needed to give absolutes readymade, if there is a will to ethical behaviour it will find its goal defined by our ability to coherent creation which in turn will then be directed by that will.

So, then there follows of course a third, mostly unspoken argument, or instinct: that the world is inherently in harmony with this premise, that we have to only discover, only be aware, only use our intelligence and wisdom - and there we might even have use for absolutes and divine beings, whether or not they pre-exist materially. The alternative to this is conservative fiction, an eternal, mostly bloody and unjust existence in history - perhaps some made up stories can dicipline us enough to live in those conditions and even moderately prosper but the intellectual and moral cost would be awful. Even if our liberal instincts are correct, this might be the situation we will find ourselves in - there is prescious little enlightenment and awareness, prescious little wisdom in humankind: we might not even perceive the truth should we be confronted by it.

Not washed into rinds by rotting winter rains

The weather has continued to be unseasonably mild in Finland (one wonders what connotations this type of innocent phrase will have in the coming decades). For the most part I have quite enjoyed these subdued November colours and mists - as dismal as I have usually considered this time of the year be even with better weather: so little light, people busy and tired, withdrawn inwards to withstand the subarctic winter. There is now actual clear daylight for about 3-4 hours but most days even the midday feels dark with heavy grey clouds overhead and no snow in sight. A strange, still atmosphere: quiet earth waiting for winter to come. Snow would instantly bring more light and a certain wintry sharpness into the landscape, blue colours lit by the city lamps. This Friday on my afternoon train back from work I was thinking of just these bleak joys of Finnish November (in the native tongue it is called 'marraskuu', "dead month") and was struck by how little I remembered of last November: I staggered to work and back home in darkness, literal and mental, often seeing none of the daylight hours, with no resources anyway left for esthetic observation. What a difference a year can make.

Some say the Devil is dead and buried in Killarney

Having a long, though comfortable, early morning work trip I have succumbed to a MP3 player instead of the customary book. This week has been quite Irish: The Pogues, Cruiskeen, The Dubliners and the excellent Tartu band Paddy have been providing Celtic mornings and afternoons. Listening to those familiar and confident, defiant cadences I have been reflecting on this wonder of Irish anti-imperialism - the colonization of the English language itself. It is undeniable that Ireland, real and imagined, has stayed triumphantly un-English even with the loss of the native language. This is an interesting fact for a Finnish person coming from a tradition of very strictly language centred nationalism (albeit in many senses a bilingual tradition). Nationalism is not necessarily bounded with language, it can have many, even polyphonic and pluralist incarnations.

Of course it is an ideology that has very negative connotations - often expressed by writers and thinkers from great powers. Somehow, they do not often seem to notice that their imperial and metropolitan nation is also nationalist and narrow, so English, French, Russian, American nationalisms go often unnoticed, excused. Non-threatening, non-expansionist small nation nationalism is something not even perceived. I welcome a world with vibrant and thriving small nations and national cultures, such as Finland, Ireland, Estonia and many others - the tradition of Finnish nationalism has been one of the central factors preventing this country from being subsumed into the Russian imperial sphere and gradually losing her language, her uniqueness. A process that is now heart breakingly happening for several small Finno-Ugric peoples and languages within the neo-aggressive and uncaring Russia. Of course we have to always beware exclusivist, aggressive and narrow ideas and movements everywhere, perhaps especially when they are disguised under false "universalist" labels of selfish great power politics.

I say he rose again and joined the British Army...