Summary
A great writer and a contrarian thinker that rambles on. It’s light on advice for a budding contrarian or young individual.
Key Takeaways
To be added on a reread. See notes below.
What I got out of it
- Think for yourself.
- Be sceptical of authority (in any field or space, not just government or management).
- Humour can be a double-edged sword.
- Reread the Envoi
Table of Contents
Summary Notes
Preface
Adlai Stevenson once said to Richard Nixon: “If you stop telling lies about me I’ll stop telling the truth about you.”
I
Society, like a benign family, tolerates and even admires eccentricity.
Go too far outside “the box,” of course, and you will encounter a vernacular that is much less “tolerant.”
It’s too much to expect to live in an age that is actually propitious for dissent. And most people, most of the time, prefer to seek approval or security. Nor should this surprise us (and nor, incidentally, are those desires contemptible in themselves). Nonetheless, there are in all periods people who feel themselves in some fashion to be apart. And it is not too much to say that humanity is very much in debt to such people, whether it chooses to acknowledge the debt or not.
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
There is a saying from Roman antiquity: Fiat justitia—ruat caelum. “Do justice, and let the skies fall.” In every epoch, there have been those to argue that “greater” goods, such as tribal solidarity or social cohesion, take precedence over the demands of justice. It is supposed to be an axiom of “Western” civilisation that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as “order.” But in point of fact, such immolations have been very common. To the extent that the ideal is at least paid lip service, this result is the outcome of individual struggles against the collective instinct for a quiet life.
Zola exposed the almost sadomasochistic relationship that existed between insecure mobs and their adulation of “strong men” and the military:
Examine your conscience. Was it in truth your Army which you wished to defend when none were attacking it? Was it not rather the sword that you felt the sudden need of extolling?
At bottom, yours is not yet the real republican blood; the sight of a plumed helmet still makes your heart beat quicker, no king can come amongst us but you fall in love with him. . . . It is not of your Army that you are thinking, but of the General who happens to have caught your fancy.
While courage is not in itself one of the primary virtues, it is the quality that makes the exercise of the virtues possible.
The pressure to keep silent and be a “team player” is reinforceable by the accusations of cowardice or treachery that will swiftly be made against dissenters. Sinister phrases of coercion, such as “stabbing in the back” or “giving ammunition to the enemy,” have their origin in this dilemma and are always available to help compel unanimity.
As so often, the determination of one individual was enough to dishearten those whose courage was mob-derived. But remember, until the crucial moment arrived he had no idea that he was going to behave in this way.
Bertrand Russell in his Autobiography records that his rather fearsome Puritan grandmother “gave me a Bible with her favourite texts written on the fly-leaf.
Among these was ‘Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.’ Her emphasis upon this text led me in later life to be not afraid of belonging to small minorities.”
II
Rilke then goes on to confide in us rather archly about the only two works from which he is never parted: “the Bible and the books of the great Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen.” This piety somewhat spoils the recommendation of Niels Lyhne, Jacobsen’s excellent novel, which was rightly admired by Freud and by Thomas Mann and which is a sort of Danish Young Werther.
III
Your last letter reached me just as I was reading the essays of Aldous Huxley, creator of our notion of a “Brave New World.” Allow me to give you a paragraph that I marked as I went along: “Homer was wrong,” wrote Heracleitus of Ephesus. “Homer was wrong in saying: ‘Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!’ He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away.” These are words on which the superhumanists should meditate. Aspiring toward a consistent perfection, they are aspiring toward annihilation. The Hindus had the wit to see and the courage to proclaim the fact; Nirvana, the goal of their striving, is nothingness. Wherever life exists, there also is inconsistency, division, strife.
You seem to have grasped the point that there is something idiotic about those who believe that consensus (to give the hydra-headed beast just one of its names) is the highest good. Why do I use the offensive word “idiotic”? For two reasons that seem good to me; the first being my conviction that human beings do not, in fact, desire to live in some Disneyland of the mind, where there is an end to striving and a general feeling of contentment and bliss. This would be idiocy in its pejorative sense; the Athenians originally employed the term more lightly, defining as idiotis any man who was blandly indifferent to public affairs.
My second reason is less intuitive. Even if we did really harbor this desire, it would fortunately be unattainable. As a species, we may by all means think ruefully about the waste and horror produced by war and other forms of rivalry and jealousy. However, this can’t alter the fact that in life we make progress by conflict and in mental life by argument and disputation. The concept of the dialectic may well have been partly discredited by its advocates, but that does not permit us to disown it. There must be confrontation and opposition, in order that sparks may be kindled.
Always look to the language.
IV
On Sigmund Freud’s memorial in Vienna appear the words: “The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.”
Allegiance is a powerful force in human affairs; it will not do to treat someone as a mental serf if he is convinced that his thralldom is honorable and voluntary.
An observation of the late Sir Karl Popper, who could himself be a tyrant in argument but who nonetheless recognised that argument was valuable, indeed essential, for its own sake. It is very seldom, as he noticed, that in debate any one of two evenly matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or “converting” the other. But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end up holding exactly the same position as that with which he began. Concessions, refinements and adjustments will occur, and each initial position will have undergone modification even if it remains ostensibly the “same.” Not even the most apparently glacial “system” is immune to this rule.
Frederick Douglass announced that those who expected truth or justice without a struggle were like those who could imagine the sea without an image of the tempest.
Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist in any case and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness; the apotheosis of the ostrich.
Civilisation can increase, and at times actually has increased, the temptation to behave in a civilised way. It is only those who hope to transform humans who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.
Perfectionists and zealots can break but not bend; in my experience they are subject to burnout from diminishing returns or else, to borrow Santayana’s definition of the fanatic, they redouble their efforts just when they have lost sight of their ends. If you find yourself, as Basil Davidson did, in mortal conflict with a hateful foreign occupation, then you can be forgiven for being a zealot and even criticised for not being one. Such cruel tests are rare, however, and they can produce horrors in their turn. If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognise and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows that he is right. For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle.
VI
A truth that’s told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent and anyone who has seen his own statements coming back at him on the Axis radio will feel the force of this. Indeed, anyone who has ever written in defense of unpopular causes or been the witness of events that are likely to cause controversy, knows the fearful temptation to distort or suppress the facts, simply because any honest statement will contain revelations that can be made use of by unscrupulous opponents. But what one has to consider are the long-term effects.
There is only one argument for doing something; the rest are arguments for doing nothing.
The Principle of the Wedge is that you should not act justly now for fear of raising expectations that you may act still more justly in the future—expectations that you are afraid you will not have the courage to satisfy. A little reflection will make it evident that the Wedge argument implies the admission that the persons who use it cannot prove that the action is not just. If they could, that would be the sole and sufficient reason for not doing it, and this argument would be superfluous.
The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that you should not now do any admittedly right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do right in some future case, which, ex hypothesi, is essentially different, but superficially resembles the present one. Every public action that is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.
Another argument is that “the Time is not Ripe.” The Principle of Unripe Time is that people should not do at the present moment what they think right at that moment, because the moment at which they think it right has not yet arrived.
You may not always have the energy to combat each of them every time; you may find that you want to husband and conserve your resources for a better cause or a more propitious day. Beware of this tendency in yourself. Be alert, especially, for that awful day when—without even having meant to do so—you find that you have uttered one of these consoling and corrupting formulations yourself.
VII
in my experience, the extraneous or irrelevant complexities are inserted when a matter of elementary justice or principle is at issue.
It’s not for nothing that we celebrate the story of the small boy and the unclothed emperor. I’m no great advocate of folkloric wisdom, but this tale has stood the test because it emphasises what Orwell once said in another context:
very often the hardest thing to see is what is right in front of your nose. And there is, not infrequently, a considerable social pressure not to take note of the obvious. Every parent knows the moment when children acquire the word “why” and begin to make use of it.
Of course, one should not idealise children, who are very suggestible and who make easy targets for indoctrination. And, of course, innocence will only take you so far. You have to be sophisticated by experience before you are old enough to argue that, say, it might be wrong to launch a thermonuclear war but not wrong, indeed only prudent, to prepare the weaponry of extermination. Or that an act that would be a loathsome crime if committed by an individual is pardonable when committed by a state. But these are the rewards of maturity, to be enjoyed only as we decline.
Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim de omnius dubitandum.
X
What really matters about any individual is not what he thinks, but how he thinks.
Religion is, and always has been, a means of control. Some of those who recommend religion—I am thinking of the school of Leo Strauss—are blunt enough to make this point explicit: it may be myth and mumbo-jumbo but it’s very useful for keeping order. If you want to be able to live at an angle to the safety and mediocrity of consensus you will do well not to begin by granting one of its first premises.
Sigmund Freud was surely right when he concluded that religious superstition is ineradicable, at least for as long as we fear death and fear the darkness. It belongs to the childhood of our race, and childhood is not always—as Freud also helped us to understand—our most attractive or innocent period. I am almost tempted to argue for the moral superiority of secular humanism; it is at least free from any taint of opportunist wish-thinking.
XI
For the party of order, disorder has always had its uses. It is not only reformers and revolutionaries who claim to speak in the name of the “general will.”
Much the same can be said about literary and scientific and even medical matters. Books that were once banned or ridiculed or both, from the time of the condemned Socrates to the time of the forbidden Ulysses, have had to be saved not by the crowd, but from the crowd. The evidence of our own evolution had to be broken to people very gently, lest they take up some stupid slogan about the Rock of Ages being preferable to the age of rocks.
The first thing to notice, surely, is that these voyages into the ocean of the public mind are chartered and commissioned by wealthy and powerful organisations, who do not waste their money satisfying mere curiosity. The tactics are the same as those of market research; the point is not to interpret the world but to change it. A tendency to favor one product over another is something not to be passively discovered and observed but to be nurtured, encouraged and exploited.
Thus to the consumer the “poll”—a suggestive word, by the way, and derived from the old and retrogressive “head count” tax—may seem like a mirror of existing opinion. But to the one who produces it, the poll is a swift photograph of the raw material to be worked upon.
Even general elections, which are supposed to involve voting in the active voice rather than the passive one, have been increasingly compromised by passive dress rehearsals: the polls condition the poll.
XII
In his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, was this:
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower.
XIII
The question you ask—what to read and whom to study—is one that I receive quite often. It ought to be an easy inquiry to answer. But it isn’t, and this is for a series of reasons. The first and most obvious is that you should not look for arguments from authority.
Then there is the question of mood. The oppositional and critical mind need not always be one of engagement and principle; it has to deal with a considerable quantity of discouragement and there are days, even years, when Diogenes has much more appeal than Wilde. I can think of two great authors from the great tradition of East European dissent—Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera—who profited greatly from cultivating the uses of pessimism.
From observing those who have, I conclude that the moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage rather than resignation. In a sense, with the back to the wall and no exit but death or acceptance, the options narrow to one.
I don’t especially recommend Martin Luther—another of those types who resolve the irresoluble by deciding that they have been issued divine orders —but there is a reason why his phrasing is remembered.
Noam Chomsky, a most distinguished intellectual and moral dissident, once wrote that the old motto about “speaking truth to power” is overrated. Power, as he points out, quite probably knows the truth already, and is mainly interested in suppressing or limiting or distorting it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the moral titans of our time, decided to write his nation’s hidden history and was reviled, imprisoned and deported for his pains. By the summer of 1987, however, the Soviet authorities had decided to cancel the existing history curriculum in state schools and not to resume it until new books could be produced. Solzhenitsyn could, I am convinced, have gone to his grave quite content without this vindication, which he never expected. He had already done what he set out to do.
One of the finest moments in our history occurred when Nelson Mandela was visited by the authorities who had kept him in confinement for a quarter of a century. They had been shaken by international condemnation and also by a general rising of the oppressed. The name of Mandela, which was supposed to have been buried by a long and harsh immurement, was on every lip. All right, they nervously said to him, you can go now. You’re a free man. His reply was— I am not leaving. You do not have the power to release me, least of all to release me to gratify yourselves. I shall not leave this cell until I hear that everybody else has been released, and that all the laws of the tyranny have been stricken from the books. At that moment, it was clear who held the keys.
Ask in mixed company if anyone can name the last American to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. Nobel awards are well-reported here, especially in this category. You will find that nobody can do it. (The answer is Jody Williams, on behalf of the international campaign to ban land mines in 1997.) But see if you can find anyone who doesn’t know that Princess Diana once did a photo-op near a minefield. Our standard for these things is subject to its own Gresham’s Law: not only does it recognise the bogus but it overlooks and excludes the genuine.
It took him some time to realise that by describing the brave and generous but low-level and unheroic conduct of so many citizens, he had undermined the moral alibi of many thousands more, whose long-standing excuse for their own inaction had been that, under such terror, no gesture of resistance had been possible. This depressing discovery need not blind us to the true moral, which is that everybody can do something, and that the role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints. In other words, the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example.
XIV
In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which I hope and trust you have read at least once, there is the following exchange between the anti-hero Yossarian and the mind of military authority:
Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile, “But, Yossarian, what if everyone felt that way?”
“Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?”
When I first read that, I was much more at the mercy of schoolmasters and clergymen than I am now, and more in need of defensive ripostes to their dreary objections about “setting a precedent” or “setting an example.” Heller cut straight through all that with his absurdly subversive dialectic; of course if the oddballs and doubters were in a majority they wouldn’t be oddballs and doubters. And of course, one never has to worry about there being a surplus of such people. Those who need or want to think for themselves will always be a minority; the human race may be inherently individualistic and even narcissistic but in the mass it is quite easy to control. People have a need for reassurance and belonging.
Throughout the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, many of the great Promethean individualists were men and women convinced of the rationality and justice of socialism. (I am thinking of moral and intellectual figures of the status of Antonio Gramsci, Karl Liebknecht, Jean Jaures, Dimitri Tucovic, James Connolly, Eugene Debs and others. If you don’t know of their lives and their work, you are the poorer for it.)
Don’t let yourself forget it, but try and profit also from the hard experience of those who contested the old conditions and, in a word or phrase, don’t allow your thinking to be done for you by any party or faction, however high-minded. Distrust any speaker who talks confidently about “we,” or speaks in the name of “us.” Distrust yourself if you hear these tones creeping into your own style. The search for security and majority is not always the same as solidarity; it can be another name for consensus and tyranny and tribalism.
Never forget that, even if there are “masses” to be invoked, or “the people” to be praised, they and it must by definition be composed of individuals.
XV
However, as was once so well said:
“What do they know of England, who only England know?” This applies, with the relevant alteration, to any country or culture. I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It’s as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.
In one way, travelling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight. This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people. In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere. The two worst things, as one can work out without leaving home, are racism and religion.
Freud was brilliantly right when he wrote about “the narcissism of the small difference”: distinctions that seem trivial to the visitor are the obsessive concern of the local and the provincial minds.
It especially annoys me when racists are accused of “discrimination.” The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members of one “race” to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.
I don’t seem to have said enough about the compensating or positive element of exposure to travel. Just as you discover that stupidity and cruelty are the same everywhere, you find that the essential elements of humanism are the same everywhere, too.
Most important of all, the instinct for justice and for liberty is just as much “innate” in us as are the promptings of tribalism and sexual xenophobia and superstition. People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains; every time a Bastille falls one is always pleasantly surprised by how many sane and decent people were there all along. There’s an old argument about whether full bellies or empty bellies lead to contentment or revolt: it’s an argument not worth having.
What you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighborhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn’t change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that “humanity” (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.
XVI
Laughter can be the most unpleasant sound; it’s an essential element in mob conduct and is part of the background noise of taunting and jeering at lynchings and executions. Very often, crowds or audiences will laugh complicitly or slavishly, just to show they “see” the joke and are all together.
Humor ought to be pointed—ought to preserve its relationship to wit—and it ought to be fearless. The easiest forms it takes are those of caricature (the clever politician already knows enough to make an offer for the original cartoon, as a show of his goodheartedness and tolerance) and associated forms of mimicry.
The mordant forms it takes are the ironic and the obscene. Probably only the latter two forms can be revolutionary.
A rule of thumb with humor; if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough. If everybody laughs, you have failed.
XVII
My battle-hardened father, who to his credit tried—even as he failed—to avoid reminiscing too much about the war, once told me that warfare consisted of long periods of tedium punctuated by brief moments of terror. I’ve since heard this confirmed by many veterans and, in the few war zones I’ve briefly visited, had the chance to discover its truth for myself. Much depends, therefore, on how one handles the tedious part. The life of a radical is not dissimilar; barricades and Bastilles are not everyday occurrences. It’s important to be able to recognise and seize crux moments when they do appear, but much of the time one is faced with quotidien tasks and routines. There’s an art and a science to these things; the art consists in trying to improvise more inventive means of breaking a silence, and the science consists in trying to make the periods of silence bearable.
XVIII
First, you may have to be pompous as well as boring. I thought then and I think now that the defense of Bosnia-Herzegovina was a civilisation question; that if we had let Bosnia and its culture and civilisation be obliterated we would stand exposed as hollow and worthless. Try saying that to an indifferent audience; they will wonder who you think you are and so—if you are any good—will you. But if you believe it, then bloody well say it and remember what a small risk, relatively or comparatively, you are running.
Second, do not worry too much about who your friends are, or what company you may be keeping. Any cause worth fighting for will attract a plethora of people
As William Morris put it so finely in The Dream of John Ball:
Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of defeat, and when it comes it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.
That is as “dialectical” as anything in Hegel or Marx, and as ironic as anything in George Eliot. (Incidentally, this is not a primer or a reading list but the work of William Morris and his circle on social and aesthetic questions, is one of the most heroic and beautiful chapters in the history of radicalism, and will repay your study many times over. It is Utopian in the most generous sense of the word.)
The high ambition, therefore, seems to me to be this: That one should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with the maximum of ironic self-criticism. This would mean really deciding to learn from history rather than invoking or sloganising it.
Envoi
Theodor Adorno wrote that an artistically satisfying film could doubless be made, meeting all the conditions and limitations imposed by the Hays Office (the Hollywood censor of the day), but only as long as there was no Hays Office. I have always taken that brilliantly gnomic observation to imply the following two things: First, virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled. Second, no self-description or definition can be relied upon.
So I have no peroration or clarion note on which to close. Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the “transcendent” and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.
Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.
I shall leave you with a few words from George Konrad:
Have a lived life instead of a career. Put yourself in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses. . . . If you don’t like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joy of working can fill your days.