But certain families of ideas are particularly amenable to this treatment as escutcheons for a coterie; and the history of popular ideas – of intellectual fashions which have taken fire in society at large – is itself essentially a city history, and the basic outlines of its major movements curiously resemble each other. Some ideas are more clubbable than others, more easily turned into commodities and advertisements for oneself. The Victorian craze for spiritualism is a remarkable example. An oblique offshoot of major intellectual movements in the nineteenth century, American transcendentalism and European romanticism, it was thoroughly bourgeois in its clientele. It belonged to the dabblers, the hobbyists, the dinnertime intellectuals. In his monologue for a fraudulent spiritualist, ‘Mr Sludge: “The Medium”’, Browning described the people who held postprandial seances in their drawing-rooms:
There’s a . . . hateful form of foolery –
The social sage’s, Solomon of saloons
And philosophic diner-out, the fribble
Who wants a doctrine for a chopping-block
To try the edge of his faculty upon.
Prove how much common sense he’ll hack and hew
In the critical minute ’twixt the soup and fish!
These were my patrons . . .
The spread of the craze coincided with the peak growth-period of the industrial cities, from the 1850s to the 1890s, and its centres were London, New York and Boston. Certainly it had a great social cachet. Mr Sludge was able to say:
Who finds a picture, digs a medal up,
Hits on a first edition, – he henceforth
Gives it his name, grows notable: how much more
Who ferrets out a medium?
Spiritualism had an impressive, quasi-scientific jargon, with its notions of ‘the ether’, ‘the other side’, ‘materialisation’, ‘ectoplasm’, ‘medium’, and so forth. At the same time at which the physical sciences were devoted to constructing empirical catalogues of the properties of this world, spiritualism was earnestly parodying the process for the next. Mr Sludge observes of the other side that in it ‘all our conventions are reversed’; the spirit world is a reassuring mirror of our own where the reversed ghosts of the dead may be seen acting out their own mimicry of the comfortably well-placed middle-class existence of the living. It offered, in other words, a happily tautologous set of explanations.
These ingredients made a perfect soothing mixture for many of the nagging uncertainties of the Victorian world. Science, already growing distressingly complicated, beyond the reach of the gentleman’s study with its jars of crystals, lengths of rubber tubing and blown-glass retorts, was turned, in spiritualism, into cosy gobbledygook, within the understanding of the dimmest maiden lady. The physical universe, which had been rendered by science into a suddenly lonely and directionless crust, was shown to be so presumptive that it could accommodate the supernatural and eternal too. Science could seemingly be made to bring immortality closer, not to hustle it out of existence. Most important of all, in a period when communities were felt to be breaking up, when the loss of human contact seemed fearfully imminent, especially in the jungles of the cities, spiritualism brought people close. The seance hinged on holding hands; the coterie clung together as they joined not only each other but the dead as well – the famous, the fabulous, and the domestic, family dead – in a sensuous orgy of community life.
Glasses, communally fingered, still scrape over Ouija boards in bedsitters, and forceful women with throaty voices still summon Zarak the Egyptian to ethereal music on long-play stereo records in darkened halls full of stacking chairs. (‘The lady in the third row in the blue hat. I feel someone close to you has recently departed to the other side . . .’ The lady in the blue hat nods solemnly. ‘Your husband, I feel he is called Harry . . . H . . . H . . .’, ‘Henry!’ ‘Henry says you are not to worry, he is very happy . . . I feel there is some little financial difficulty . . .’) But the palliatives of spiritualism survive in more respectable and secular forms, in currently fashionable ideas which are both valued highly and serve as prestigious screens for coteries to shelter behind.
What distinguishes those ideas which make the transition from the study and the learned periodical to the gossip of the dinner table? It is not, I think, simply their current standing in the intellectual community which makes them valuable social objects, but a set of properties quite contingent to their truth or mental force. In London in the last few years such ideas have been sounded more frequently than any others over soup at the Veneerings’: the zoological model of human society as propounded by writers like Desmond Morris and Jane Goodall, the basic theory of Lévi-Strauss’s system of structural anthropology, and the more abstract and intellectually titivating aspects of ecology. They have a number of features in common. Each one lends itself to being stated in an epigrammatic form. Each reduces the world to a simple universal model. Each offers some sort of general explanation about the nature of human society. Each has its own occultly-scientific technical jargon. They are all elegant, commodities with a high surface finish – new, bright, conclusive. They are, as ideas go, unusually communicable: we absorb them by a process of cultural osmosis, from humour, gossip, and television programmes.
The ideas which have become negotiable as prestigious social commodities in recent years have all conformed to this stringent set of conditions. The fashionable philosophies of Herbert Marcuse, Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky have proved themselves capable of being transmitted as slogans, often to the alarm of their originators. They have been turned into industrial objects – cheap, easily acquired things which have a brief popular currency and are then discarded. Their other life, in the university and the professional journals, may go on unimpeded; but at the middle-class dinner table they are as transient and modish as the clothes and cars which in so many ways they resemble. Yet if one attends to the undertone beneath the hectically bright surface of this popular trade in debased academic ideas, one can hear a dark, anguished entirely serious note.
The world postulated by these ideas is a world on the brink of devastation and disintegration. Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology begins by revealing the baffling diversity of human cultures; to every tribe and nation an exclusive and highly developed network of patterns of ritual, custom and kinship. Yet in this global disunity, he discerns a single repeated thread, a universal impulse; the Parisian and the Hopi Indian have different languages and symbols, but the basic stature of their minds is one. Lévi-Strauss is voraciously interested in the cultural details which divide men from each other, but he is finally concerned to resolve these details in a universal model of the Human Mind. He has borrowed the notion of the binary opposition from computer science, and has adapted the techniques of phonemic and morphemic analysis from linguistics. The surface of his writing frequently looks highly technical, but this appearance of hard science is deceptive: most of the terminology turns out to have been grafted on to a prose as direct, simple and moving as that of a good novelist. When, in the last chapter of Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss speaks without his professional mask, appealing for an ultimate brotherhood of man, he reveals the vital component of structuralism which has made it into a popular cult. However elaborately dressed in scientific terms and fine academic distinctions, it promises a reunited world, renders inessential the violent divisions of politics and culture. If we sometimes seem to be suffocating in the details created by our own over-active ingenuity, Lévi-Strauss shows us how to rearrange them so that they become a simple universal pattern, varying only in minor structural qualifications. He offers the oldest of all consolations of philosophy: he sees harmony in chaos, extracts fundamental principles from a bewildering sea of particulars.
The parallels between structuralism and ecology are precise and significant. Where Lévi-Strauss enshrines the binary opposition (nature/culture, raw/cooked) as the fundament of the human mind and its expression in culture, ecology presents the cycle, the self-sustaining eco-system, as a universal
model of life. The world it seeks to regulate is seen as a wasteful, over-productive place; it generates commodities out of all proportion to its needs, and the task of the ecologist is to construct an inventory of essentials, to eliminate the excess from the system. Both ecology and structuralism recognise that the world we live in is too massively diverse, too superfluous in its details, for us to manage capably. Structuralism makes it accessible to the imagination; ecology to practical scientific action.
The wider social force of these ideas is both powerful and dubious. The people who have attached themselves to them, and espoused them as if they were religious beliefs, have frequently used them to conjure alternative, simpler worlds, imaginary Edens. The eco-system is an effective metaphor for just the kind of small, self-sufficient community from which people living in large cities believe they have become disastrously divorced. It lends itself too, to a philosophy of immediate self-help, of consumer action. An article on kitchen gadgets in the Women’s Liberationist magazine Spare Rib:
An ecologically orientated friend of mine chews up her baby’s food for him rather than use the blender that she has been given. She believes that turning-on the blender contributes unnecessarily to the pollution produced by electric power plants.
It is a wonderfully cosy way of avoiding the abyss. When ecology entered the language as a popular epigram, it was easily converted into a series of simple injunctions: we were to go back to the country, live with bicycles and mangles, eat vegetarian food, and stoke log fires under the leaky thatch. Science had given its imprimatur to rural nostalgia.
People often complain of metropolitan life that it coarsens thought, that the intellect is held cheaply, that serious issues degenerate into trends of the moment and the coterie. From the judicious distance of a provincial university town, London and New York often look like circuses, their intelligentsias as sleek as performing seals. So much of talk is fashion and frippery; its buzz of new ideas is brazenly deceptive, there to adorn the talker and to protect him from the incursions of the world. When an idea becomes a commodity, readily transmittable and exchangeable in the bazaar of society at large, it takes on the characteristics of other commodities. It may be unpalatable to think of ideas as if they could have the same function as housefronts, cats or handbags but it is surely true that they very often do so. People gather behind them, for private and highly partial reasons. The inexpensive synthesis, of the kind that can be extracted from ecology, or structuralism, or The Gutenberg Galaxy, or One Dimensional Man, comforts and assuages those who embrace it. It makes the world simpler, gives a thrust of direction and authority to the individual living in a prolix and confusing city. We are not so far here from Gissing’s Thomas Bird, picking himself out from the crowd with his treasured private knowledge of the geography of Polynesia.
These narrow, passionate cognoscenti bolstered by received ideas, given to clubs and cliques and intense sectarian debates, are part of the essence of city life. For the member of an urban guerrilla cell, or an ecological watchdog organisation, or a neo-mystical commune, or one of the countless coffee-and-discussion groups that are always springing up in big cities, his ideology is a route, a consecrated path through the unintelligible scatter of city streets. A sense of community, and the perspective which we acquire as one of the privileges of belonging to a community, are hard to come by in the city. Neither the street nor the neighbourhood (except in some of the leafier suburbs and odd clusters of besieged roads of working-class terraces) confers a sufficient sense of membership on its residents. The turnover of owners and tenants is too rapid, and the sheer physical density with which metropolitan space is occupied makes for a warren of private cubicles in which people jealously and secretively protect their own patches. Ideas, unlike neighbours, are chosen; and a community of people who share an idea, a craze, a belief is perhaps the most precious of all the associations which a man may make in a city. There is a café around the corner from where I live which is a nest of coteries in the long dull middle of the afternoon. Italian au pair girls go there, so do folk music enthusiasts and loitering record collectors. But there is also a curious group of young men in fishermen’s jerseys who have the activist’s look of glinting, mildly fanatical anaemia. One day I learned how to make a bomb; and the technical jargon of revolution spills from their table in single overheard phrases. I am not a party to their beliefs, nor do I know what they are (Trotskyists . . . anarchists . . . People’s Democracy . . . midnight slogan painters . . . colourful fantasising about the lives of other people is a chronic urban habit); and this very quality of unknownness scares me. But there is a real resemblance between this tableful of revolutionaries, if that is in fact what they are up to, and some of the less exotic coterie-milieux which I know better. I sometimes go to a pub in Soho with a corner full of book reviewers, and one catches the same note there: the same pitch of voice, the technical talk, the possessive hunch over the table of people making a close, improvised, temporary community in the middle of a city of strangers. Communities like this, which come to life around an idea, are constantly dissolving; they are not fixed in place or time, although membership of them is a permanently defining feature of one’s identity.
A large city is a honeycomb of such groups. To the outsider, they are likely to seem silly or sinister, and certainly evanescent. For every group which establishes itself with capital and property in a quarter, there are many whose outward and visible signs are known and valued only by their members. Their most important possessions are their ideas, and these are preserved for fellow-initiates, not exposed to the hostile examination of the world outside. They communicate by rumour and the telephone; they meet in public places – in halls, in parks, in pubs and cafés, and on streets and squares. Like their members, they are in a state of constant locomotion in the city. One or two established organisations – the Salvation Army is the prime example – have borrowed the mobile structure of these groups; grasping, as General Booth grasped, that the most effective institutions in a big city must keep on the move with the people.
Sometimes such a group will suddenly move into visibility and claim the attention of outsiders in the crowd with its extreme and bizarre public symbols. In New York, Los Angeles and London, there is a wandering tribe of street folk; they live in Radha Krishna temples, their heads are shaved except for a scrubby tuft on their crowns, they process through the streets in sandals and saffron-dyed sheets, chanting the ‘Hare Krishna’ mantra and beating on tambourines. On Oxford Street, motorists caught in the continual traffic jam yell cheerful obscenities at these outlandish communards. They seem indifferent. Their vegetarian diet and life of indoor meditation have pulled the skins of their faces away from their lips and eyes so that they have a curiously protuberant, root-vegetable look. Yet they are not without dignity: their voices are gentle, hazed, their accents invariably English urban, and patches of Manchester and Stepney show through their stiff, devoted impersonation of the mystic east. They are keen to evangelise, and methodically explain themselves with the rehearsed precision of a telephone answering service. I sat in my socks in a basement, sharing their bowl of grated oranges and vegetables, as they talked at me earnestly, not expecting to be believed, knowing, I suspect, that many of their visitors only come to smirk and peer. They are solemn, courteous, and extremely ugly: their scraped turnip faces nod slowly under the naked 200-watt bulb, which itself looks rather like another communard. Each word and gesture is reverently drawn out; everything here is ritual theatre – self-consciousness is elevated to mystical consciousness of the self, and everyday life turns into a studied allegory.
The International Society for Krishna Consciousness promotes a rural peasant culture as a spiritual antidote to and romantic release from city life. It recruits the disaffiliated young from the streets, offering them spartan communes and a simple, hokum-scientific doctrine of mind power. Like nineteenth-century spiritualism, of which it is a less sophisticated replica, it preaches an ethic of impoverished literalism.
The movement’s swami, in a characteristic booklet called Easy Journey to Other Planets, invites you to join a bargain coach-trip to the spiritual world:
The material world is only a shadow representation of the anti-material world, and intelligent men who are clean in heart and habit will be able to learn, in a nutshell, all the details of the anti-material world from the text of the Gita, and these are in actuality more exhaustive than material details . . .
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