Liberal positions

Surely the sum of our enlightened experience is that the only reasonable hope for us is in historical progress leading to a transformation, the nature of which we can hardly even begin to imagine. As we now are we will never escape: imprisoned by the cruel spectacles of history and nature and our own panicky animal instincts. A state all the more hateful because not all hateful: so many acts of human kindness, of integrity, of love flicker in the darkness, brightly, briefly, perpetually surrounded by the eternal freezing cold that is our human stupidity, ignorance and fear. That instinct towards the better, those acts of love and integrity, we must set free thus fundamentally changing ourselves into something else and leaving (hopefully) all history and nature behind. 

This is the fundamental liberal position, surely. A refusal of both the narrowly shrewd, self-perpetuating conservative wallowing in the wretchedness that is humankind and the blind radical insistence that this wretchedness is not integral to us and easy and simple to abolish. This is what our serious human inquiry has established, and on this bleak position any hopes for future must be based.

In defence of George Eliot

In the course of the assorted tragedies and collapses of the 20th century we surely have lost an essential tone of doubt, inquiry and worry that was simultaneously perpetually, and rationally, uncertain of its own significance but still crucially confident of its internal coherance. It was an unflinching but humane gaze on mankind and our messy and bloody history of ignorance and aggression - nevertheless combined with a firm belief on the possibility of progress. Now instead we have the forever shifting language of the largely - and self-confessedly - irrelevant and self-doubting, self fleeing postmodern tradition accompanied with the most destructive and amoral materialism that it refuses to confront in its all pervasive relativism. Surely this is an overreaction to these not any more so recent shocks? History, quite apart from its modern guises, has in any case been one slow holocaust - and will perpetually continue to be so by the weight of its own logic and motored by our blind, panicky, animal passions.

The only exception, thus far, has been our brief enlightened, though largely failed, quest and hope for human understanding and progress. Just one pitiful, first attempt in all this time - and one reaching so far even in the deepest failure. There surely is ample time yet for change for the better, for developement, for reasoned self-control - for further attempts. And what is the alternative: should we never attempt more than what unspeakably little we have, and are? Who can set a meaningful limit for human growth, for serious human inquiry?

On not being an island

Now with a new member in the family I have noticed an excess of Donnean feelings: a sunny, vulnerable little boy has made the harshness of the world very concrete. Yes, with any luck we’ll be able to protect his way till the time he’ll start choosing it for himself (hopefully doing it also under lucky stars). But I know, we all do, that this is not the case for countless of families, for countless of children: today, tomorrow, every day random tragedies strike from blue or stormy skies. Every day we offer ourselves, our loved ones for this reversed lottery. The callousness we need for living is largely devoted to ignoring this reality. More horror than boredom in this world certainly.

Not that I would think that we are entitled to any perfect sorrow, or perfect joy here: we are, will perpetually remain, incomplete and hesitant beings, unsure of meanings, impermanent, quickly fading. But as much as we have permanence and promise it's connected with love, with giving, with this offering of hostages, however reluctantly, to the fate - with this decision to live with reckless abandon. When I survey the remains of my once proud ramparts that were so impenetrable and intricate, I now notice gaping holes: walls have been throughly razed down, no resistance will be possible here. That truly is a measure of success, but it comes at a high price, as everything valuable does.

So many of the ways of the world are designed to hide, to ignore and to protect us from this realization of how much we have gambled - or how much, out of base fear, we have not dared to gamble and grasped something graspable instead. Of course in place of any serious tones on this subject of living we have endless entertainment, corrupt, ignoble politics and sheer physical and mental tiredness: this society has its way chosen for itself and it will not be a conscious path towards increased awareness. And perhaps that is for the better, humankind cannot bear very much reality. If we could we would be something else, be somewhere else, in a different situation - but one wonders whether it would really be an easier situation... Still, my own preference would be for a far more austere, more serious disposition in this world of love and loss.

On the suicide of Alan Turing

I never cease to be amazed at how stupid our organizations are and how stupid, unimaginative and ignorant are the people in charge of them. Perhaps it is a failing to be surprised by this: it is the way of the world. Any philosophy will be used as an excuse for power - that may be their most fundamental use - and stupidity will forever congregate around power and its institutions. This is how it goes, how it has always gone. Perhaps our tragedy is that we can always see amazingly far beyond our painfully narrow scopes of action but we will always remain powerless to free ourselves from them. So, the stupidity is only a half of the story, the other half is that it couldn't be otherwise: we remain poised, wise enough to see the cruel limits but incapable of ever breaking them down. Not without a transformation that would change us into something almost unrecognizable. That transformation will surely remain the dream, but hardly a goal of practical action. Not in any foreseeable future.

Marie, Marie hold on tight

Reading Ackroyd's biography I have been quite struck how odd a person T.S.Eliot really was. In many ways his beliefs and personality were actually much crazier than those of Yeats, and that is much said. He was forced to construct an iron cage of a philosophy, however absurd, literally to survive as a poet, as a person. One sees disintegration and chaos following on his footsteps, and a panicked flight away from them. Touch and go it was on the way, a desperate survival game but one that yielded such majestic, such odd poetry. Strange music. 

Now it is easy to see the response to the Waste Land as a significant historical phenomenon itself, so much of it surely unintended and unforeseen by the author: that badly shaken, wounded era demanded an artistic expression and would have gotten one in any case but Eliot's disjointed, apocalyptic language was uniquely suited those circumstances. In many ways violence was done to his art in the process, but I don't think that either the poetry or its effect, diminish from the misunderstanding. Perhaps the opposite. Such a century to have.

Decline and fall

I have lately been wondering whether I should stop following US politics altogether. This largely for the same reason as I don't any more much follow contemporary Russian politics: the truth will not emerge, or change anything, just causes will not be rewarded and the whole political discourse is absurdly skewed and unreal, vile things are said, celebrated and rewarded. Where is now the American Revolution with its enlightenment values, where is the proud and selfconfident Republic that once took seriously the idea that there are inalienable rights and an absolute equality before the law?

I am not saying that those principles were ever perfectly implemented but they were taken seriously and there was a sincere, widespread faith in progress and rational political discourse. Now we have a staggering 30% of the electorate obsessively, even voluntarily divorced from the empirical reality. We have amazing concentrations of wealth that cannot but corrupt the political process. We have an alliance of primitive fundamentalist religion and cynical corporate elites that has created a very permanent seeming corrupt populist logic to the political process. Yes, there might be a polite, housetrained Democrat elected to the presidency in 2008, the majorities of polite, housetrained Democrats in the Congress might increase. There might be some temporary, marginal tinkering of the system before the orchestrated media onslaught and the unavoidable burdens of office will create a new, hysterical and irrational backlash.

We would desperately need a fundamental shift of the political constellation everywhere in the West but it is very hard to see any such transformation happening with the current distribution of power. There is an irrational and atavistic lock on political power that seems in many ways organic and natural concequence of the structures of the modern Western society. I'm no longer that sure that the system works anywhere: the wheels are slowing down and once coherent political traditions are gradually disintegrating into corruption and meaninglessness. History has always followed power and the highest form of power are increasingly in the stupendous concentrations of capital that we now have in the modern world economy. Once capitalism was best protected by a (limited) selection of enlightenment values and protestant Christianity but now it does quite well with just the entertainment industry combined with the increasing demands of "work place efficiency" and painkilling doses of primitive religion purged of any genuine thought.

I really wonder what permanent improvement any progressive movement can accomplish in these hostile circumstances (certainly at their most hostile and most powerful in the USA but in existence everywhere in the West). The deep currents of social and economic change seem mostly to be against any serious reform and return to enlightenment values and to the discourse of progess and reason. Perhaps this is a too pessimistic and in any case unhelpful, impractical contribution. Still, I would think that the modern left is quite in need of the broad perspectives and coherent, holistic approaches to the political process. These chaotic skirmishes and daily battles with the irrational and atavistic opponents are invaluable, a civilizational defence indeed, but on this ground, with this balance of forces, can they be anything more than holding actions? Inch by inch we seem to lose real ground even when having scattered local successes and apparent reversals of fortune. Can we turn the tide?

(A cross post from DK.)

Homines maxime homines

I have never found any classical control or proportion in the ancients. They have seemed untame, reckless, uncouth - dare one say - barbaric. Certainly there is much nobility in that wild leap forward, but such narrow nobility: no universal themes of redemption and compassion that our civilization was only infused with by Christianity (and then liberalism). But this said, with the burst of Athens into the world history a theme of emancipation was introduced that has not ever been since silenced. Yes, originally it was interpreted very narrowly, very harshly indeed, in a way almost contradicting itself, but that theme was of a nature to rupture any arbitrary boundaries.

So, even with the softening influence Christianity, we are fundamentally still in the same position: recklessly exposed to fate as free individuals, as individuals striving for freedom. That has led in history to similar bloody and cruel dominions and cul-de-sacs as Athens experienced, but our human experience has in any case been dominated by those issues: what is radically new is this new note, this promise and hope of emancipation, of reason and self-control. It is dangerous to exalt those barbarian times (remembering poor Friedrich, for example) but they nevertheless constituted a majestic beginning of a great experiment.

Joseph, my little man

In 1923 the Catholic Bulletin bitterly berated Yeats for his failure to write more like this: "Una, my little one, be a nun. Joseph, my little man, be a priest if you can." But the call went unheeded - instead Yeats kept stubbornly producing this kind of language: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The contrast is humiliating: this is Christianity shrunk and enfeebled by modernity, once universal, universally serious world view is shrivelled to a set of narrow rules, blindly and unquestioningly to be followed against all dictates of reason, esthetics and humanity. Today the equivalents of this parochiality of dogmatic religion can be seen in the clumsy, pseudo-scientific formulations of intelligent design and creationism. These forms of religion cannot any longer operate without denying reason and empirical observation - there was a time when Christianity self-confidently saw no reason to doubt that reason and empirical observation would be in any conflict with its teachings. If Christianity as a force in culture cannot any more reach to the complexity, the majesty and tragedy of our being in the world, it will have lost its meaning. It might remain popular as an easy pain killer, a handy blindfold, but it would not have any moral significance or value. 

I know from my native Finnish Pietism that there are approaches that can still easily escape any blunt Dawkinsian instruments - but outside such occasional oases of universal visions directly connected to the original revelation, we seem to have increasingly only a choice between bland, convictionless official churches or then shallow and escapist fundamentalist interpretations. Not really encouraging thinking of the gift, the vision once so memorably received.

Once out of nature

I have again immersed myself in the excellent biography of Yeats by R.F.Foster. Foster’s text does need several readings, a subtle and beautiful study. Surely that personality, those poems are one of the miracles of the Western world. Yeats must have been such a maddening person abounding with self-centred childishness, half-baked philosophies. In some ways craving for art, for otherness, must be a sign of immaturity, a sign of not having come to terms with the world, as it has dictated those terms. In that sense full maturity, full satiety is a kind of surrender: how could we not want more, strive for more than this? Yes, Yeats was childish, self-centred, maddening, but under what aesthetic control those forces were kept, what amazing, haunting poetry was written about our condition in the world. Perhaps real maturity is actually based on part on reckless folly, on not fully accepting this world, its harsh limits. “The light of evening, Lissadell, / Great windows open to the south”…

Well wadded

Today was saved early by coming accross two George Eliot quotes by A.S.Byatt in the Guardian:

"When the commonplace 'We must all die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness 'I must die - and soon', then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first."

"That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."

What a wise, serious voice we have here, so acutely concerned with our human experience. We surely have lost something when we have lost this scope, this aim. Perhaps it has made the situation easier to bear: the pace has quickened indeed, well wadded we pass through the moments, constantly entertained, amused, shielded.

That Shakespeherian rag

We don't know much anything about Shakespeare, one of the most pivotal artists of the modern West. I don't know if he wrote for all ages but he certainly did write for ours. It was all laid out almost before the age, our age, had even properly begun. Only we don't know much anything about him as a person: just a very bare outline of facts can be sketched. This seems to be hard to take for the more commercially inclined academia - there is today a veritable Shakespearean biographical industry in place with the most outrageous, farfetched and elaborate interpretations loudly presented. And not only outrageous, there are also some fairly plausible arguments, just totally unsupported by any actual evidence. There is next to no evidence. We just don't know.

What we do have is the body of his work and so these modern scholars mainly work backwards from that: based on this and that reference, a few lines in a play, a few plays, he's a Catholic, or no, he's a Protestant, an atheist, you name it, gay, straight, bi-sexual, soldier, sailor - anything does go, anything can be claimed. It is after all a huge body of work, in all senses of the word. Previously it was quite typical that somehow miraculously, the Shakespeare that emerged resembled in his views and attitudes quite a bit his humble biographer. In these, more practical days the interpretation just needs to be anything that can be marketed as "new and groundbreaking". So the more outrageous and daring you can be within some distance of the empirical matter, the better. Capitalism in action in literary studies.

But we just can't know. We won't know. Some writers can be fairly obvious in their sympathies and experiences of life (though even then we can't extrapolate any detailed biography out of the text), some then can be like chameleons adapting into all kinds of skins and shapes. Shakespeare very obviously belongs to the last category - contradictory positions get marvellous lines, no obvious lessons are learned, no perspective underlined as being the "correct" one. There is a scary comprehensiveness, a scarily life like openness and uncertainty of view. To cherry pick individual positions and experiences from this kind of almost uniquely multidimensional text is not only folly, but criminally stupid: forcing, flattening arbitrarily one note out of a polyphonic melody. Of course we can't help ourselves, we read the text and form impressions, guesses about the author. It is natural, even fascinating, but no material for a serious study.

For what it's worth, for me he remains an ever lasting mystery: that open endedness, that incompleteness is baffling, scary. Who knows, maybe it was accidentally dictated by the pressures of commerce or the primitive Tudor era politics, or perhaps it was innate, his organic vision of the world. It would seem to be a clue that he absolutely didn't write any religiously motivated text which would have been perfectly easy even for a secret Catholic of the time. Instead he seems to be only concerned with this chaotic, uncertain human experience of the world and not in any proposed supernatural aspect of it. A modern person, stranger in a strange land. (Oddly enough this position would, surely coincidentally, be sympathetic to my own preferences...)

On human constellations

In my student years it was quite a revelation to acquaint myself with classical sociology: such unreal, formal approach to our messy human organizations. As if you could replace people, their connections, their persons with abstract, dispassionate functions. Schooled in the rigorous standards of the Helsinki History Department it seemed like an elaborate and pointless game of meticulously misportraying our chaotic human reality as timeless, rational construct of formal relationships – in jargon filled dead language, as dead as the thought behind it. This was the epitome of academic blindness for me: any moment, any constellation in history is surely unique, brief and passing. A totality of chaotic, passionate, blind strivings for short term gain, constantly shifting, constantly improvised.

Yes, it is hard to build a science on this shifting, ephemeral foundation. But surely it is not sensible, not rational to opt for manageable, logical, clean and clear unreality instead. This has remained my firm conviction ever since: I approach all situations in time as unique constellations, as particular, momentary systems fuelled by human passion and partial vision (or, so often, complete blindness). This is not to deny themes and structures in history, but to argue that they interact chaotically forming always unique combinations, unique moments. Thus history, our mad projectory through time is uncontrolled, uncontrollable – whatever sociology and sociologically based human sciences imply, or wish.

The dissociation of modernist sensibility

I currently have the pleasure of reading a collection of Edmund Wilson's essays (published in 1950). That confident, coherent, serious tone does bring back feelings of regret. Surely in that tone, in that moment, our liberal Western civilization achieved its peak. I do not see any other competitors to moral seriousness than this great liberal tradition of literature and literary criticism. Certainly not organized religion with its feverish and comforting, undisciplined imaginations, as much as it has been a historical source for meaningful ethical thinking. Nor really in the artificially abstract, dry formulations of formal philosophy. But it is 2007 now, and books don't matter any more, or no-one any longer believes or pretends that they do - instead the chorus of primitive Bible (or Koran or for all I know Bhagavad Ghita) thumpers is actually growing ever louder. Loud they might be, but not serious, there is no seriousness in that atavistic escape to wishful thinking. The kind of ethical, secular, austere tone that is so proudly ringing in Wilson (among many others) has mostly disappeared. Naturally one should be careful when establishing glorious pasts, Eliot himself being a good example, but I still would argue that something valuable has been lost in the relentless onslaught of postmodern all-doubting scholastism. Essential foundations have been needlessly undermined and nothing really ethically and morally serious and durable has been built to replace the current ruins. Ruins are all we have left, if you don't count the entertainment industry, of course.

Naputäis püssirohtu

It is strange to think back to times when I did not pursue the origin and course of love but was instead so hopelessly lost in the abstract maze of my mistaken lordly studies. Now, having found my person, my place by finding another person, every aspect of life has come so integrally together that those once so vividly dark days seem distant and hazy. I can't now easily recollect that frigid, frozen atmosphere where no quick thought was ever quick enough to escape through the impasse. Of course, this present brightness gives most distinct shades: bitterly, relunctanctly offered hostages to indifferent fortune, but to have achieved this, to have this, to have arrived here, is still an incredible, indescribable feeling. There is such joy in this moment having survived the desert of years that constituted my intellectual education: come what may, and perhaps mainly good things will come, I have found my person, my place by finding love. And that's such a huge thing that it is scary even to acknowledge it in language - so much importance, meaning in someone other, protected by no special providence.

Will to meaning

Often our various enlightened quests for understanding come bogged down with Nietzschean counterarguments: there never are good enough reasons for action, so we stand still, paralyzed by the infinity of the possibilities of the world. Out of this cul-de-sac we must then manouver ourselves: I have come to see us as meaning giving beings, the physical world is observed with varying degrees of accuracy, but those observations don't in themselves contain any self-evident meanings, any automatic significance. So, we give, generously, out of our own beings, and in that sense continuously diminish our separateness, merging, cohering with the world.

Thus I see the nature of our experience in non-rational terms: passionate, wild, untamed, personal. But to see it so, is making a rational conclusion. This is the proposed solution then to the Nietzschean dilemma - even if only a partial one: what exactly is the mechanism of this passionate will to meaning remains an unsolved mystery in the context of any attempt to a universal explanation. We exist locally, are served with local contexts, cultural meanings, and supplied with those tools we then proceed to our semi-independent directions. Any conflicts that arise cannot then be objectively resolved, unless it can be argued that the structure of our experience will neutrally point us to a specific conclusion. That is the question that does remain stubbornly open, not kept open by Nietzsche but by the world.