The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  The Viking maxim that ‘a human’s joy is another human being’ has for long been interpreted to mean meeting someone like yourself, and nations with the ambition to get bigger and more powerful have wanted their citizens to have a lot in common. Nations were created supposedly to bring together people who shared the same values, memories and hopes. In reality they paper over divergencies. Without relations with the rest of the world most of them would collapse.

  The Scandinavians, despite all that they have in common, divided themselves into several nations, none having a population larger than that of mid-sized modern cities like London or Paris. They have decentralised most of their public activities into much smaller local entities (which the big nations borrowing ideas about unemployment and social welfare from them overlook): is that the way for humans to find joy in the humans they meet every day? Alas, village squabbles have been as annoying and have ruined lives as much as the internal and external hostilities of huge empires.

  I do not ask you the question most people ask of one another: Where do you come from? I prefer to ask: Where are you going? I am interested in how one can build one’s own collection of humans, independently of the nation one belongs to, as a supplement to one’s own inheritance. ‘Where are you going?’ is a question about what outside influences and inspirations one can seek or choose or stumble upon. That is not different from falling in love. I shall try to discover more about the romance of such encounters in the next chapter.

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  How many nations can one love at the same time?

  WHY IS NO-ONE ALLOWED to be a citizen of more than one or two countries, out of over two hundred? How can one feel a kinship with large complicated nations, or very small ones, which are also complicated? When people think of Denmark, for example, they rarely say that they must visit it at all costs and even learn its language. But every nation, or province or city opens one’s eyes in a different way.

  The ‘father’ of modern Denmark, the ‘titanic figure’ Frederik Grundtvig (1783–1872), may superficially appear to be of little interest to those outside his country’s frontiers. He was a pastor, descended from a long line of Lutheran pastors, who proclaimed that God had chosen the Danes to bring Christianity to fulfilment, at the same time as Herman Melville (1819–1891) was saying that ‘Americans are the peculiar chosen people – the Israel of our time’.

  Grundtvig was a charismatic preacher, a popular poet of the ‘simple, cheerful, active life’, gushing with hope and pride, and above all a prolific writer of hymns – about joy rather than sin – which soon dominated the national hymn book, so that deeply emotional music and song carried his influence far beyond the limits that argument could reach. He idealised the common people, dignifying them with romantic Nordic myths about their heroic mediaeval origins and their Viking heritage. Grundtvig’s popularity came from his giving the Danes self-confidence. He saw that to embark on new adventures it always helps to feel that one is continuing an old one, so he grafted a new nationalism onto an old religion. His History of the World announced that it was God’s plan that the Danish people should no longer rely on priests but should inaugurate an authentic Christianity in the language ordinary people spoke, so that even the most humble had a part to play in that grand endeavour.

  However, to regard him as just another leader of a local patriotism is to miss out on what he had to say about people everywhere. His first message was that the world contains no individuals, only persons. Persons are creatures in relationships. No human being can develop without being united with the personal in others.

  A person is free if that relationship is one of reciprocity, enriched by a sense of community with contemporaries and predecessors. Despite being a priest, he insisted that his first concern was not to convert the masses to his faith. His slogan was ‘First a Man, then a Christian’, meaning that an individual needs to start by becoming a person, capable of having fruitful relationships, which could not be found simply by joining a church. For him, Christianity did not originate from the Bible ‘translated from a foreign language’, nor from the commentaries of theologians, but from the behaviour of its adherents. What made a church was neither preaching nor ceremonies but the interaction between its members. A community is born wherever people meet and utter the greeting, ‘Peace Be With You’. Building a nation, for him, did not mean simply uniting people who spoke the same language: they had to learn how to behave. He proposed ‘Schools of Life’, the opposite of what he called the ‘Schools of Death’ in which everyone was still being educated. He called them ‘Folk Schools’ because people taught one another. They were part-time boarding establishments for adults, independent of the state, with no examinations or syllabus, designed to help working people become enlightened, self-sufficient and free. They did not inculcate dogma, but relied on conversation to encourage participants to initiate projects on the basis of their own experience, with a special kind of politeness that forbids individual arrogance and allows pride only in shared achievements. These schools reinforced the cooperative movement in Denmark, which enabled poor and isolated farmers to create in a remarkably short period a highly profitable exporting agricultural industry. All this may seem peculiarly Danish, but it is more than that. There are ideas in Grundtvig that make everyone, to a small extent, also a Dane.

  Something of the Viking temperament that Grundtvig spoke of is to be found all over the world. The Vikings were rebels against boredom, which has been the well-spring of innovation since the beginning of time. Impatience with routine has repeatedly transformed apparently placid souls into restless adventurers, explorers of the unknown, importers and exporters of ideas and people. When the Vikings went marauding as far as Constantinople, Russia, Portugal and America for what they could not find at home, they pillaged, raped and killed, and would doubtless be called terrorists today, but they were also skilled traders and navigators. Priding themselves above all on being ‘good companions’ (drengr), valuing individual independence and (to a certain extent) women’s autonomy, adopting foster-fathers and foster-brothers to cement their relationships, they intermarried with women whose language they did not speak, and left descendants far beyond Scandinavia. They were thus not simply ancestors of the Danes, but reminders that humans have spent longer being nomads, moving and migrating all over the world, than being sedentary tillers of their native soil. The recent great migration from fields to cities, and from poor to rich countries, is the latest episode in what has been a permanent feature of humanity’s response to nature’s diversity. Nations struggle in vain to raise barriers against these wanderings, but technology and communication and education all combine to encourage the new generations to become nomads again.

  Grundtvig makes me think that being Danish and being Chinese may not be wholly different. Asia had its own version of the Vikings in the Mongols, who, like the Vikings, rampaged over large areas in bands held together by loyalties created on a personal basis, between people who knew each other as individuals. They had no trouble getting support from neighbours in what is today northern China, who had only distant relations with the rulers in the south. Alliances for war or booty between people of disparate origin and culture were easily made and easily broken, and there was no shame in changing partners, just as there is none in changing employers today. What Grundtvig was trying to encourage was an additional loyalty to one’s nation, an impersonal loyalty, to people one did not personally know. In the eleventh century Chinese historians had the same ambition. They created a new interpretation of the past to convince Chinese people that they were a distinct species culturally incompatible with ‘barbarians’, that ‘Chinese clothes and food and drink are not the same’ as those of the Mongols, and rather than share such strange customs, ‘it would be better to die than to live’. Biographies appeared idolising a new kind of hero, who rejected personal alliances with foreign warlords and was steadfastly loyal to the Chinese empire. The over-riding loyalty had to be not to an individual but to the state. Be
trayal became treason. Even the emperor had to be loyal to the impersonal interests of the state, embodied in the tao or dao, the principles of the good life.

  Ever since, nations have been bringing together huge numbers of people with a wide variety of tastes and opinions and without any personal attachment to regions of their country that they may never even have visited; they have fostered a sense of belonging that made individuals who had never met feel passionately that they all shared the same values and interests, energised by a thrilling desire to unite to protect their beloved homes from foreigners, even though, when the foreign threat disappears, they are torn apart by innumerable and often insoluble disagreements. The difference between Grundtvig’s nationalist creed and the Chinese one was that he aimed to make the people – the will of the masses – the arbiters of what was good, in contrast to the Chinese, who gave precedence to the teachings of their philosophers.

  But in both cases rising populations encouraged this impersonal national loyalty. China’s population almost quadrupled between A.D. 1000 and A.D. 1200, while these writers were inventing this new loyalty. Nationalism grew into a universal phenomenon when the world’s population exploded even more dramatically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Huge populations, however, have also made many feel lost in the crowd. Then the need for intimate and intense relationships reasserted itself, and that led to the construction of new kinds of friendships. The world is not what it was when nations were first conceived, and they now harbour affinities whichare not necessarily with immediate neighbours.

  Grundtvig insisted that affinities could not be left to grow naturally, but needed to be nourished throughout life. His Schools of Life or Folk Schools were remarkably successful, though his ambition to make his country the pioneer of a new popular Christianity was foiled, and Denmark is now one of the least religious places on earth. He might have adopted other tactics if he had remembered how the Chinese, many centuries before him, also tried to improve the world with ‘schools of life’, not unlike his. Mencius (372–289 B.C.) was the first to advocate them, and the White Deer Grove Academy established by Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi, 1130–1200) made them a much-copied model through succeeding centuries. These Chinese schools offered part-time seasonal education for ordinary farmers who had no ambition to climb into the elite and no interest in preparing for government service entrance examinations; for them, the true elite was not that which flaunted wealth or power but practitioners of morals and culture. They were not concerned with business success, nor with profit from buying and selling, but with the encouragement of mutual respect, ‘worthy deeds’ and the fusion of public and private interests. Communal granaries, self-defence clubs, wine-drinking ceremonies and ‘country compacts’ developed similar goals. Disappointed by the bureaucratic and authoritarian official system, some Confucians moved the emphasis from obeying the law to developing relationships based on moral behaviour and, as Zhu Xi insisted, ‘intimate affection’. But these village schools gradually lost their original purpose and decayed into institutions cramming for official employment. China’s first famous woman scholar, Ban Zhao (A.D. 45–116), who argued in her Admonitions for Women that ‘husbands and wives must be worthy of each other’ and that girls should therefore get the same education as boys, discovered even more rapidly that what moralists have said and what people do has always been very different. But the yearning for bonds not based on pure self-interest remains inextinguishable.

  Grundtvig’s statement that the sign of a community is that its members say to one another ‘Peace Be With You’ spills over every kind of wall and frontier. The Muslim greeting, Salaam Aleikum, is identical, as is the Hebrew Shalom. The Chinese character for Peace, written in three parts, begins with ping, which means equality: there is peace only when there is equality and no-one is trying to dominate or attack another. The second part is pa, represented by a woman under a roof, which means that peace involves a peaceful home and that a mother’s affection is at its heart. The third is ho, picturing a mouth and grain, meaning there is peace only when everyone has enough to eat. To which the Hindu greeting namasté adds: ‘I bow to you’, which means I am no better than you, we are all human with the spirit of life or a spark of divinity in us. All this challenges the idea that humanity’s ultimate destination is to be separated into nations proud of their uniqueness. Civilisations have vanished leaving only dust behind them; and most of the mighty empires ruling over multitudes of different tribes and languages no longer exist. Nations may not be immortal either.

  The world looked different, with different constraints and freedoms, before nation-states appeared, only a few centuries ago, and it was not because people in certain regions suddenly discovered that they were all alike that they decided to unite. Far from being representative of any supposedly common Danish characteristics, Grundtvig was a rebel against almost every aspect of the established order, despising the ruling class, criticising church leaders so violently that he was for a number of years forbidden to preach, condemning the educational system as ‘dull, empty and boring’, whose graduates were ‘cold, self-opinionated and earthbound’, a polemicist pouring out innumerable books and articles on a vast array of subjects, and relentlessly attacking those who disagreed with him. As a scholar he quoted from German philosophers, and from Shakespeare, Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon literature. He cherished memories of summers spent in Oxford and Cambridge, but also of visits to Robert Owen and the pioneers of the English cooperative movement. His enthusiasms were a smorgasbord of lucidity and wishful thinking: for all his admiration for England, he wrote ‘I have a strong suspicion that a great deal of desperation lies at the bottom of this inordinate English busy-ness. Everybody is so inordinately busy . . . just as busy gadding about the world as others are working, just as busy squandering money as others are earning it’, unlike the Germans who ‘pursue industriousness as a virtue for its own sake’. By contrast, the Danes ‘allow themselves good time’. But then Prussia’s annexation of a sizable part of Denmark in 1864 drove him into a nervous breakdown. His passion for a stronger resistance to foreign threats was ignited. Different kinds of patriotism have always battled against each other within Denmark.

  So what is the relationship between patriotism and cosmopolitanism? At present, most people see themselves as exclusively citizens of their own country. But 51 per cent of French people include citizenship of the world as part of their allegiance, as do 50 per cent of Chinese, and significant numbers of Italians (48), Indians (46), Mexicans (44), Britons (38), Thais (38), Germans (37), Argentinians (34), Indonesians (29), Americans (27), Palestinians (27), Egyptians (26), Turks (19) and Russians (17). The more education people receive, the younger they are, and the more they travel, the more likely they are to be citizens of the world, with 47 per cent of those who know people from five other regions of the world seeing themselves in this way.

  These multiple loyalties emphasise that a government is not always the core of a nation, and that ordinary people are busy creating their own affinities, infinitely extendable and retractable. The Islamic Umma, with its vision of a world-wide community, neither tribal nor national, regarded governments as too ephemeral and superficial to generate permanent loyalties: Allahu Akbar meant that no human owed total obedience to any other human and an imam was not a chief, only a ‘guide of a caravan’, though, of course, struggles for power have replaced unity by bitter divisions. The celebrated physician Abu Bakr al-Razi (841–926) even argued that there was no need for organised religion, because all humans had the ability to distinguish between good and bad; they could all use their reason and inspiration (ilhan), the word ilhan being not very far in meaning from what the Greeks called their Muse. The Danes by contrast claim to have contributed to the art of keeping the peace in disagreement by reducing the temperature in the outward expression of dispute and difference.

  Nothing, so far, not even technology, has been able to engineer the seismic shift that would make the ‘fellowship of humanity’ a reality.
The difficulties were already apparent in ancient Greece, when Diogenes (412–323 B.C.), the wayward son of a Black Sea banker, possibly the first man to call himself a citizen of the world, mocked the pursuit of security and prosperity by posing as a street beggar and sleeping in a tub, to show he could live well without luxuries; he went around carrying a lantern in daylight, explaining that he was searching for an honest man; he masturbated in public, saying he wished he could get rid of hunger by rubbing his stomach; he named his philosophy Cynicism (literally, dog-ism), asserting that dogs were the true philosophers because they lived without anxiety, able to distinguish easily between friends and enemies, and without shame, unbothered about making love in public. But his audience felt insulted rather than amused; horrified by the thought that foreigners and barbarians and even animals might be as worthy of respect as the cultured citizens of Athens. People have persistently wanted both a place they can be proud of, and places to hate.

  Cosmopolitanism could not be imposed by force. Ever since the Sumerian king Sargan destroyed the city states around him in the twenty-second century B.C. and conquered what he imagined to be the whole known world, proclaiming himself ‘master of the four regions of the earth’ with the ‘obedience of all men’, an endless succession of military rulers have tried to unite humanity using military might, but in vain. Alexander the Great, aspiring to winning more than obedience, made his ‘cosmopolis’ a union not just of the Hellenic and Persian civilisations but of individuals who, he declared, should consider themselves as all part of one family, intermarrying and accepting one another’s gods, with himself setting the example by wedding a Persian princess and wearing Persian clothes. But one man could not change ancestral traditions.