We live in an individualist society, a place of lonely nuclear families isolated both horizontally from other human beings and vertically – in time – from the past. Ignatieff says: ‘I never feel I know my friends until either I meet their parents or see their photographs, and since this rarely happens, I often wonder whether I know anybody very well.’
A hundred years ago, not just in Russia, a person’s identity was a larger, vaguer thing, composed not just of data about a self but also about mothers, fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers, many of them firmly encamped in the same household. It was not just Mr Ignatieff, but Michael Georgevitch, son of George. Now most Westerners sit alone with wife, children and photograph album.
But the photograph does not replace ancestors and family. In a way, it removes them even further. The picture stares from the album page, stating: ‘This is how we were. This is us.’ It’s a spurious claim. They were a million things which were not the frozen impression of a second of light. But the statement is convincing, because we are addicted to precision. Even a grandmother has to have an instant, accurate definition.
Preciseness is the keystone of Western material culture. A world in which distances might vary, or time sag in and out like a concertina, seems a nightmare. In this sense, we are still Victorians, largely untouched by the idea of relativity.
On a tour of China, watching the way in which some of my companions compulsively photographed whatever and whoever passed before them, I saw that the camera was being used as a weapon of self-defence. By snapping people, the Western tourists were killing them, robbing them of their power to unsettle or puzzle by turning them into motionless contact prints. Late in the tour, as it dawned on even its densest members that the poor Chinese crowding about the bus actually despised them as big-nosed primitives with some interesting gadgetry, the clicking of shutters grew desperate.
Some 20 years ago, the West Germans built a steel mill at Rourkela in India. There were endless misunderstandings. One arose from the insistence of German foremen that the slots on screws had to be parallel when they were tightened up. The Indian workers did not see the point of this: if a screw was firmly home, it was home wherever the slot lay. One German writer, in the self-flagellating mode of the day, suggested that his compatriots were revealing their innate fascism: ‘Death is a German craftsman,’ as the saying goes. But all the foremen were doing was revealing that precision is not only a necessity of Western ‘civilisation’ but a fetish.
It is a precise prison that we have built for ourselves. Budgets totalling millions of pounds are costed to the last penny; pistons are milled to a tolerance of a thousandth of an inch. The Slobodnian frontier runs exactly here, but a millimetre further you enter the fearsome jurisdiction of the Zachvatchik Republic. There’s no room for argument. A penny out and it isn’t a budget; an infinitely tiny inaccuracy and it isn’t a piston; a state with non-delineated frontiers isn’t a state.
In the precision world, there is only one correct version. The man who happily signed himself Shakspere or Sheakspire, or whatever the quill felt like at the moment, would today be a man hunted on suspicion of cheque fraud, while his history plays would be taken off by the Royal Court after demonstrations by Plantagenets, Danes, Scots and Venetians concerned for ‘historical accuracy.’ If I say ‘tomayto’ and you say ‘tomarto,’ one of us is wrong. Or, more accurately, one of us would be wrong if we were both citizens of the same country. In matters of language, the monopoly of one version is still limited by frontiers. The Poles remain entitled to study the plays of Szekspir.
Linguistic conformity is very much part of the history of modern States. In his brilliant little book ‘Imagined Communities’ Benedict Anderson points to the way that the arrival of printed books gave spoken tongues a new fixity. Tor three centuries now, these stabilised print-languages have been gathering a darkening varnish: the words of our seventeenth-century forbears are accessible to us in a way that his twelfth-century ancestors were not to Villon.’
The print revolution did not only flood Europe with millions of precisely similar self-contained artefacts, perhaps 20 million books by the year 1500. It standardised one dialect out of dozens in each country. It gave millions of people who would never meet a sense of cultural membership in an abstract whole: an ‘imagined community,’ which was to develop into the modern State. The magical language of Latin has bound together the ruling castes of the Christian West. Now High German was to become the official language in Germany. Other dialects, like North-West German, Northern English or Provençal, were condemned to become or remain just speech.
The State is all about this sort of con-trick. ‘The national language’ may well be spoken by a minority of the population. The claim to impose a monopoly version of spelling and grammar and vocabulary goes with the claim to a monopoly of power over life and death. Industry and bureaucracy between them added the tyranny of clocked time, of simultaneous behaviour throughout a nation. It’s night in Lerwick and morning in Littlehampton, but the post office opens at the same moment. Weights and measures, too. Not for nothing was it called an imperial pint.
Against this, I would like to honour all that’s imprecise, all that has vague outlines, all that sort-of-works although in theory it should not. The true memorial of a grandfather should not be a flat photograph but a bungling, ambling, fiddling, mumbling, twiddling, three-dimensional smudge. I agree that this would be hard to fix in an album. But the human race survives not by norms but by hazard and improvisation. If Lech Walesa had been a microchip assembler rather than the acknowledged wizard of Gdansk at making clapped-out cars run on cannibalised parts, he would never have been able to keep Solidarity going for 15 months.
In the end, the cult of precision is deeply conservative. It teaches that there is only one way of doing things correctly, which has to be repeated again and again. This is not craftsmanship, which consists in endless, subtle variations to suit new materials or even worn tools. A deadening formalism has swept over the conduct of British politics: innovating Thatcherite policies contrast strangely with electoral and party practices which are repetitive as any industrial process.
I hope to see a more erratic public life, and a social architecture in which straight lines and right angles give way to rambling borderless shapes like those of Antonio Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona. There is a rumour that once, in nineteenth-century Europe, the surveyors drawing frontiers went askew. Just where Belgium is supposed to join France and Luxembourg, near the railway line at Petange, I have heard it said that there is an Imprecision: a patch of grass and trees (some say a meadow) which is officially nowhere. There, in the space between definitions, one might make a fresh start.
[1987
Pity, Love and the Accident of Birth
‘We are a form of infinitely variable robot.’ Wilfred Beckerman of Oxford wrote that in The Times the other day. Dr Beckerman is a determinist. All that we are and do, for him, proceeds from a mixture of ‘the genetic base of personality’ and the impact of upbringing, events, the individual’s environment in general. Free will is an illusion, and actions – he was talking about Myra Hindley – cannot be called morally bad but only ‘bad’ in that they inflict suffering on others.
This is a deeply unpopular thing to say in England, and especially around Christmas. At this season, there is supposed to be a moment of reflection on birth, babies and their destinies. The English – and this is one of the reasons why they remain a kind people, in spite of growing discouragement – do believe in free will.
A nineteenth-century German would have regarded a human being as a self-realising subject, crowned with fire. The English philosophy takes a lump of this Hegelianism and dissolves it in a comforting cup of Anglican weak tea. There are absolute moral laws, and people can shape their own actions and character, for which they are ultimately responsible. When evil is done, poverty, terror or passion are only extenuating circumstances.
This has never convinced me. A certain revela
tion, not easy to put into words, came to me the first time I saw a baby born. There emerged into loving hands a form apparently of clay, just that blue-grey colour of the volcanic clay which is the bed of the sea in Argyll, where I was a child. It was exactly the shape of a human baby, and then it moved and cried.
I knew – in a split second – that this was both clay and baby, that there exists no real difference between man and nature, life and inanimate un-life, and that the appearance from the womb of a piece of the earth which has in every detail the form and powers of a human being is an accident – an accident even though it is repeated thousands of times every day all over the world. So, for me, the contradictions of predestination and free will, of determinism and chance, solved themselves in a flash of understanding gone before it was fully grasped.
This has been a ‘Calvin Year,’ in which many divines and scholars from different continents have gathered in Geneva and talked about John Calvin, the sixteenth-century Reformer, and his doctrines. I am an unbeliever, but of all Christian faiths. Presbyterianism has the strongest pull on me. The effects of primitive Calvinism on human beings have often been cruel and disastrous. One source of Scotland’s weakness, for example, has been the split between the national religion and the intellectuals, who have through all the modern age nursed hatred of the Kirk’s ‘lovelessness.’ But there is another side.
The Presbyterian faith is an incomparable metaphor for the unity of creation, for the inner conflict between our sense of freedom and our scientific understanding that, in another way, we control nothing that happens. The metaphor says that the human being on his or her own is a component of ‘corrupt’ nature, incapable of achieving salvation. Those who are good are so because the Holy Spirit has entered them, an invasion of grace from outside whose choice of individuals is not explicable and was predestined before the Creation.
Many people regard this as an ‘immoral’ faith. On the one hand, there is an insufferable company of the ‘elect,’ all too certain – in the manner of Burn’s ‘Holy Willie’ – that all that they do is justified before Heaven. On the other, there is the mass of what used to be called the ‘reprobate,’ those who have received no signal of grace and who may well conclude that, if no decent action they choose to perform will make any difference to their rejection by God, they might as well be as wicked and selfish as they please. As Luther said, ‘Sin powerfully!’
But, human beings having the needs they have, matters do not work out so neatly. The ‘elect’ in practice wrestle with doubts about the quality of their assurance of salvation, while the rest – apart from a minority who do decide that if God hates them, they will hate Him – seldom give up the hope of grace. All behave infinitely better than – in logic – they should. Awareness of predestination or determinism in no way makes them resemble Beckerman’s ‘variable robots.’
We live in a society which is becoming not so much individualistic as atomised. The Chinese fanatically pursue the individual profit motive, but their sense of community and conformity remains so strong that it would stifle most of us. Here, however, we are beginning to lose the fundamental confidence that we know each other’s minds and motives, even in a rough, handy sort of way.
As other people become closed houses, behind whose shutters anything might be going on, the cult of free will decays into a vague respect for all behaviour which does not actually harm others. This is not toleration – Queen Elizabeth saying that she did not wish to make windows into men’s souls. It is a defeated agreement that if we cannot judge actions by motives, grown impenetrable, we should not judge them at all. This is the place for whatever turns you on: stamp collecting, party politics, gay love, tin soldiers, novel writing, breeding lizards. This is the place of small, mutually indifferent ghettos.
Two things seem to be wrong about this. One is the abandoning of hope that we can see the universe as a whole, the world of rock, stars, things alive and things inanimate, as something coherent even though we can neither fully control nor comprehend it. The other is a horrible arrogance.
Hegel’s ethic has run mad. The ‘do your own thing’ society assumes that everyone has a nice, personal destiny which he or she can develop and fulfil – that marshal’s baton in every soldier’s knapsack. I would answer that with a fable, told once among Podolian Jews. At the instant of birth, for a split second, an angel appears and unfolds enormous wings. If it can spread them fully, the child will be happy. If the room is too small, so will the child’s soul be cramped. But the first person I told that fable to replied: ‘I was born when my mother was in a Gestapo cell.’
In that sense, most of us are still born in cells. Christian religion, I think, asks us to recognise that, and therefore asks for the most unfashionable of all virtues: mercy and pity. The Presbyterian faith is one of those that understand that we are simulacra of clay, made living by incomprehensible accident. Those who forget this when they rule, who pretend that all our angels spread their pinions without hindrance, are pitiless and merciless.
Many readers, I hope, will remember the end of Tolstoy’s ‘Resurrection.’ Nekhlyudov, the young noble who has tried to redeem himself and the peasant girl he seduced, sits alone reading the parable of the lord and the servant who was forgiven his debt but then cast into prison another servant who owed him money. ‘Shouldest thou not also have had compassion on thy fellow servant, even as I had compassion on thee?’
‘“And can that be the whole answer?” Nekhlyudov suddenly exclaimed aloud. And the inner voice of his whole being said, “Yes, that is all.” ‘
He sees then that ‘society and order generally existed, not thanks to those legalised criminals who judge and punish other men, but because in spite of their depraving influence, people still pity and love one another.’ I am not sure that Britain’s governors deserve a Christmas card. But that is what should be written upon it.
[1986
The Good Soldier Schimek
In the village cemetery of Machowa, in southern Poland, the grave of a Nazi soldier is covered with flowers. The grass around it has been trodden by pilgrims, by Catholic bishops, by journalists from several European countries and – most recently – by the boots of ill-tempered policemen. A touching cult of symbolic reconciliation has been kicked apart, leaving a scatter of recriminations.
Private Otto Schimek, an Austrian conscript in the Wehrmacht, was only 19 in November 1944 when he faced a firing squad. He left behind him a letter to his brothers and sisters: ‘… my heart is calm. Have we anything to lose except this miserable life? And they can’t kill the soul…’ After the war, his family, from a poor district of Vienna, managed to have his body exhumed and transferred to consecrated ground in the Machowa churchyard.
Gradually the rumour spread that Otto Schimek had been executed because he had refused to obey an order to shoot Polish civilian hostages, mostly women and children. It was a story very moving to many, in Poland and Austria. And it was highly convenient to some.
For the Polish Catholic Church, Schimek’s sacrifice was a symbol of the reconciliation between Poles and their wartime oppressors which the Church had begun to preach from the mid-1960s, in the teeth of outraged abuse from the Communist regime. He was given a lavish gravestone, complete with photograph and an inscription commemorating his deed. And the cult became popular. One young friend of mine remembers the priest in his parish church at Gdansk, far away on the Baltic, leading prayers for the canonisation of Schimek as a saint.
Catholic Austria, too, was delighted. Here, at last, was public proof that at least one Austrian who was not a Communist or Socialist had resisted Hitler’s dictatorship at the price of his life. Cardinal Konig travelled from Vienna to pray at the grave. Austrian Catholic journalists wrote respectful articles, noting that Schimek’s grave was drawing not only pilgrimages but votary offerings imploring Schimek’s intervention in heaven to cure sickness or loss. The Polish authorities, deciding to make the best of it, published some of these articles in the official Pres
s.
But then, last year, some left-wing and anti-clerical Austrian journalists began to check the Wehrmacht archives and court-martial record. Nowhere did they find any evidence that Schimek had refused to take part in executions. Instead, he had run away from his unit apparently out of general dislike of military service, and after trying to hide among civilian Poles for a few weeks, had been tried and shot for desertion.
There was consternation in the Church, glee in the Polish Government – and not only there. In West Germany, the social-democrat Frankfurter Rundschau published a disagreeable article remarking that ‘Austria had boasted of its own hero, a victim of National Socialism whose rarity made him precious, while Polish Catholics … venerated Schimek as an example of resistance to political authority, a symbol of Solidarity’s resistance to the regime….’ The article was reprinted in a Polish government newspaper, while an official went on Warsaw television to jeer at Schimek as a mere deserter too cowardly to join the Polish partisans.
A ‘mere deserter’? This was too much. The respected writer Edmund Osmanczyk retorted with an article beginning: ‘I was a deserter from the Hitlerite armies. And I have never hidden the fact.’ Living in Germany at the outbreak of war, he had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht but had escaped to join the Polish resistance, partly with the help of anti-Nazi Austrian soldiers. He could have added that deserting from the armies of foreign occupiers has been a mark of Polish patriotism through the ages.
And things have come to a pretty disgraceful pass when a European government – even one as erratic as Poland’s -suggests that a soldier who deserted from Hitler’s armies deserved his fate. As the famous Cracow columnist Kisiel asked last week: ‘A 19-year-old soldier from a poor Viennese family who escapes from the army and manages to hide among Poles for a few weeks – is that a small thing, in those times of arch-savagery and arch-barbarity?’
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