Buffon opened the doors of curiosity and imagination wider than Linnaeus, but only to a limited degree. He was ‘a man of the world’, and for him women’s role was still off-stage. Though absorbed by the search for happiness, he lamented that ‘we are unhappy as soon as we desire to be happier’, and at the age of forty-five he married a girl of twenty, saying that love was an animal passion that gave pleasure to the body but not happiness to the soul. His biographer summed him up thus: ‘He loved money and became rich. He loved power and frequented those in power . . . He loved women, and not just for their beautiful souls.’ He deserves an inextinguishable place in history for having made the Paris Jardin des Plantes into a great centre of research, but though he observed animals in his zoo with great attention, he did not listen much to women, and learnt nothing from them. His central preoccupation was not human relationships. He did not apply his vast knowledge to the way he conducted his private life. It is this inability to link up the public and the private that has been one of the greatest obstacles in the way of mutual understanding. So for all the culture and learning and charm of this great Enlightenment figure, the barren conclusion of his studies was that the earth would eventually, one day, freeze up and die. The war of the sexes could only be concealed, and no more than interrupted, by a smokescreen of politeness.
The third kind of fog that has made it difficult for humans to recognise one another is the belief that private life is something quite separate from public life and cannot make much difference to it. Narcyza Zmichowska (1819–1876) deserves to be remembered for beginning the shattering of this illusion. She was the daughter of a clerk in a Polish salt mine, and briefly governess to a Polish prince in Paris, until she was sacked for showing too much independence by going to the National Library to read Kant, Leibnitz, Schlegel and Fichte. Her first novel, Paganka (meaning the pagan or heathen, the outsider, the rebel, which is what she felt herself to be) is a series of barely fictionalised portraits of each of her friends, who called themselves ‘The Enthusiasts’. She dissected the predicaments and emotions of men as well as women with extraordinary acuteness, while insisting that ‘there was no way we could understand one another. Each has a different experience of love.’ And of almost everything else too. Determined to liberate women, and men also, from all stereotypes, she took care not to replace old clichés with new male or female ‘identities’, which she believed would isolate them each in a ‘ghetto’. Men did not benefit from being idealised, she believed, though she found infinite reassurance from their friendship. Men’s dedication to political solutions had ended in failure too often; too many had been locked up in prison or exiled. So women needed to find another way, in alliance with men, but aware that there would be no consensus among them or among women either. Women could now ask ‘more audacious questions’ and ‘risk impossible experiments’, rejecting the abstractions of masculine philosophies. Her group was ‘free of all dogmatic thinking . . . it never occurred to any of them to tie themselves to the shared dogma of some creed. They were united by sincere friendship . . . and by quite contradictory understandings, by opposite principles.’ Friendship was what she valued most; friendship was her solution. As an orphan, she understood loneliness, and prized the creation of hybrid links to replace or supplement what families did not provide.
Friendship, she argued, needed to be sought beyond its normal confines, beyond the safety of the literary clique in which writers lived, and to reach out to artisans and people of every kind, but without preaching. ‘Have I really got to tell them what they lack? No, don’t tell them – the fruits of someone else’s morals quickly go rotten; only truth found through one’s own searching cures and gives succour, enriches and enlightens.’ In her eyes, each individual was a potential artist. One became an artist if one used one’s anxiety and curiosity to search for opportunities to serve others. Was not her friend Jadwige ‘a real poet?’, she asked. ‘Oh! I tell you she was, though not everyone guessed it because she spoke little . . . and has never written a single couplet of verse. She had a strong exterior and only sometimes, sometimes did her soul flicker sincerely in her eyes, through her fiery glance . . . She finds my opinion of her very offensive, but, believe me, she has within her so many of the elements needed to make a real poet that she should share them out among the whole bunch of Warsaw literati.’ Zmichowska’s passion for finding the artist in others involved getting away from the normal boring conversation topics with which families anaesthetised themselves, ‘about crops, vodka, poultry and waxing floors’.
Her novels have no climax, no resolution, and each one is a completely different kind of novel, their aim being to discover different angles from which to penetrate into the minds of others. Of course, she never reached her ideal. ‘In the hierarchy of human achievements, the book occupies the lowest place; whole volumes of burning utterances are not worth a single spark that warms a living heart; the wisest systems are not worth one noble deed’. She never escaped from her own frustration and sense of failure. That is the challenge she bequeathed. Zmichowska was jailed for a time on suspicion of fomenting a conspiracy, even though she was opposed to political activism, and imprisonment permanently damaged her health. She has been called Poland’s ‘most accomplished female author’, but one ‘whose potential was never fulfilled’. She illustrates another big obstacle in the way of men and women getting on better, which is that, despite the marvels of education and technology, they have had enormous trouble communicating.
Today, it may seem that science is redirecting attention back to what traditionally was more important than anything else: who one’s parents and ancestors were, and the names in one’s genealogical tree. The discoveries of genetics have encouraged the conviction that the most useful way to think about the diversity of animals and plants is to understand their descent and common origins. But science is also doing something much more original: focusing attention on minute details whose very existence no-one suspected. Both Linnaeus and Buffon confined themselves to species, and ignored individuals. Now it is not only individuals, but the smallest detectable ingredients inside them, that are being given names, and producing ideas and puzzles hitherto unforeseen. Humanity’s thinking about what is most significant in the relation between the sexes has yet to catch up with this. The quality of relationships, though influenced by outside forces, is felt by each person with individual nuances, vulnerable to the most microscopic variations. It is at this nano level that it is possible to imagine a different approach. The war of the sexes cannot be ended by a universal cease-fire, because it is a war with no high command. The example of the heroines of the women’s movements is most inspiring when to it is added the intimate history of the endless trials and errors that each person pursues in private life. Every record of such endeavours is like another candle lit to illuminate the truth as it is actually lived.
Oscar Wilde wrote, claiming to sum up the wisdom of the ages: ‘Between men and women, there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.’ That is historically false. There have been times and places when such inhibitions were overcome, though not very often. Friendship is an art that people are supposed to discover for themselves, and it is no wonder chaos rules about how to set about it. So long as women were regarded as property, friendship with men was out of the question; and it was one of humanity’s most radical innovations for husband and wife to see each other as their best friend. Though some theologians interpreted religion to mean that men and women must not look each other in the eye because that creates ‘temptation’, the Prophet Muhammad said of his wife Zainab, ‘She who makes the heart flutter strengthens mine.’ The intoxication of romantic love has never guaranteed that friendship will grow out of it, any more than out of sexual intercourse. Many ancient interpretations of friendship still survive, involving superficial alliances built on expediency, opportunism or even fear, while modern networking is more often about competitive advantage rather than moral renewal.
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br /> When I attended the inaugural meeting of the British Women’s Liberation Movement, held in Ruskin College Oxford in 1970, inspired by the friendships and conversations with women that had shaped much of my life, friendship was not on the agenda because other goals seemed to be more practical and urgent. The feminist movement focused on the power of men rather than on their vulnerabilities, so what men and women can achieve together, in mutually sustaining friendship, has yet to be explored. When I was asked to contribute a volume on France to the Oxford History of Modern Europe, and to the consternation of its editors produced A History of French Passions, with long chapters on friendship and love and women, no-one had ever thought of including such supposedly private topics in a university syllabus. Since then, however, public opinion polls have repeatedly shown friendship to be a top priority, very close to love. The internet is a parade of friends one has never met and it is now even possible to hire ‘friends’ for the day, but these imitation friendships have not reduced the demand for real ones. Many women complain that many men do not listen. Friendship is built on listening. I translate the war of the sexes as a war of silences. The world is kept rigid by its silences.
In friendship, disagreement does not imply hostility and it can be avowed without losing face or losing interest. The historical importance of friendship between men and women is that it offers an alternative to the age-old idea that war and other forms of competition provide the most convincing proofs of manliness. Consensus is revealed as not being the only glue that can hold civilisation together, and the most inspiring exchanges as those where there are no victories.
Liberation for one sex only is futile. The war between men and women cannot be ended by little concessions, nor by a truce, nor by piecemeal negotiations for minor modifications to professional and social customs that no longer please either men or women. Men are waiting for many forms of liberation too.
[18]
What can replace the shortage of soul-mates?
IS IT BECOMING MORE DIFFICULT for people to like one another? Are there too many who pride themselves on having an independent mind, or who see themselves as very complicated, or unconventional, or jokers, or mavericks? Has finding a soul-mate who is a perfect partner, and will remain so, become too laborious?
Being different once meant being in a minority, but the story of Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803–1870) leads to other conclusions. His ancestors had landed in New England in 1624, and prospered, but he was determined to become richer still, and moved to Texas, taking with him forty-five slaves and twenty horses. There he became a legend because he refused to brand his cattle, when everyone else did.
Why did he not conform? Some said it was because he thought branding was cruel, others that he was craftily intending to claim that all unbranded cattle belonged to him. Or perhaps being mayor of San Antonio and a state senator, widely rumoured to be the largest landowner in the world after the Tsar of Russia, gave him the confidence to ignore custom. His celebrity resulted in the word ‘maverick’ entering the American language, meaning an unbranded yearling. Then the word was applied to politicians who were unbranded by any party label. In 1886 a San Francisco newspaper, the California Maverick, defined ‘a person who holds maverick views as one untainted by partisanship’. In 1905 a politician stood for office in Massachusetts as a ‘maverick’, saying, ‘I have no man’s brand upon me.’ Recently, an American writer concluded: ‘The maverick is now being hailed as representing the American ideal, a person who goes his or her own way. A loner [the word first appeared in the language in 1907] may be loony, but a maverick is an independent thinker.’
In real life, Sam Maverick was a reserved and prudent lawyer, simple in his dress and manner, and it might seem strange that he should become the symbol of waywardness. He excelled in the business of buying and selling land, eventually accumulating an estate of over 300,000 acres.
His wife, fifteen years his junior, was no revolutionary either; she wrote, ‘I do not understand why knowledge and science is forbidden to women – but I am glad to live in the time-honoured custom, to love, honour and obey.’ However, they both talked of themselves as ‘adventurers’. He saw himself as a man of the frontier, who delighted in his ‘rambling adventurous life’, his ‘land-loving fury’, his bargaining with immigrants and the challenge of the unknown. She also was proud that ‘we find ourselves a family of adventurers . . . going to the extreme limits where it is possible for Americans to go’, though for her adventure meant turning to religion as a first step out of her domestic role, and regarding the world as ‘a large home’ in need of women’s moral and spiritual involvement. In their intimate letters, there is a sense of collaboration between them ‘in the direction in which we both wish to go’, though they never made that precise. ‘I fear nothing,’ he said. Contempt for fear, or at least for certain kinds of fear, allowed him to be partly nonconformist. The staid and the adventurous co-existed in him. Maverick showed how just a small mutation, or a spark of courage in a single branch of life, could make someone apparently ‘normal’ in most respects appear to be a model of independence. And conversely, people who have regarded themselves as nonconformists have conformed in many aspects of their lives.
Since Maverick’s time, the whole notion of being different has been jeopardised by scientists realising that what distinguishes living organisms from lifeless objects is that each one is different. ‘Every grain of salt is identical with every other, but every organism is a novelty.’ You and I are 99.9 per cent identical, ‘we differ by only one letter in a thousand in our genomes . . . but out of a genome of three billion letters, that one in a thousand difference means there are three million differences between us.’ Even individuals with identical endowments differ from each other because they combine these endowments in unique ways. Each immune system rejects intrusions, however similar, as foreign bodies (with a very few exceptions). Humans diverge so much that some require twice as much energy as others, just to keep alive. Every human brain is slightly different, with every experience making it more different still. There is no normal genome sequence: ‘We are all mutants.’ The mutations associated with cancer do not appear identically in different cancer patients. Medicine, which traditionally placed individuals in categories as fellow-sufferers from ailments shared with others, now regards individual variability as the great mystery. No remedy is expected to suit everyone. The individuality of fingerprints has been known since Babylonian times, and now computers have established that a hundred different portions of the human face can each vary in a hundred identifiable ways. Even identical twins have been found to develop epigenetic changes so that they cease to be perfectly identical physically. Normality is taking on a new meaning: each individual is different, and it is abnormal to resemble anyone else too closely.
Everyone today is forced to be a nonconformist of sorts, at least in some part of their life, because it is more difficult to know to what exactly one should conform. Social classes and categories of many kinds are no longer so clearly defined. Even the institutions originally established to develop consensus are encouraging independence of mind, and undermining the respectability of conformity. Families, which used to regard the accumulation of property and prestige as a priority, are giving more importance to the nourishment of autonomy and sensibility. Teachers are attempting to stimulate a critical spirit as an expression of individual talent and self-reliance, and they no longer preach the sanctity of discipline. At work, individual initiative is demanded as much as obedience. The majority of wage-earners in prosperous countries dream of being self-employed and not having to lick their master’s boots, even if in real life they succumb to the attraction of regular pay cheques. Individual spirituality is increasingly valued above the mere performance of ritual. Independent thinkers are no longer burned at the stake, and powerful business people now pay large sums to be trained to ‘think out of the box’.
This may seem to be a conclusion applicable only to the West, contrasting with
the subordination of individuality to family and community which is regarded as characterising the East. But the ancient Chinese were just as interested by individuality as the ancient Greeks. The appreciation of individual character is supposed to have begun with the book on the subject by Theophrastus (371–287 B.C.), Aristotle’s successor as head of Plato’s Academy, who asked ‘Why is it that, while all Greece lies under the same sky and all the Greeks are educated alike, it has befallen us to have characters so variously constituted?’; but the answer he gave was superficial, little more than a series of amusing sketches of bores, flatterers, gossips and idiots. The Athenians produced some wonderfully independent minds, but they also wanted citizens to be virtuous and rational, and they devoted much energy to defining what that meant, condemning Socrates for being too individualistic in his ideas, and denying citizenship to most of the inhabitants of the city, who they thought did not have the necessary qualities.
In China, already in the sixth century B.C., a royal text stated that ‘men’s hearts are no more alike than their faces’; and in the fourth century a protest declared that ‘we should follow our inclinations’ or it would be ‘like being in a prison, shackled by irons’. Between the first and fourth centuries A.D., after a long period of compliance with Confucian orthodoxy, a movement of rebellion by the young, supported by the frustrated of all ages, denounced the collective social norms as ‘unnatural’, and resulted in some people actually trying to live with greater individuality and saying of themselves that they ‘competed to be strange and excellent, each wanted to surpass others with his unique behaviour’. The New Account of the Tales of the World (A.D. 430) described over 600 historical figures in terms of their peculiarities and their ‘petty talk’. Petty talk was what Confucius had condemned as frivolous chatter, but now it was seen as the key to understanding what made each person special: how people actually spoke, and how they showed rudeness, extravagance, anger, infatuation, meanness and a multitude of other qualities, each of which was worthy of being carefully observed. Whereas previous generations had reserved their admiration for moral behaviour, or, in times of crisis, for practical organisational skill and courage, now aesthetic and psychological traits were found more interesting. What made this change even more original was that the decisive criterion became the ability to express one’s attitudes and feelings in a forthright way, to genuinely reveal oneself to others, to be open with strangers, treating them as though they were old friends, to be spontaneous, ‘as spontaneous as nature itself’. Instead of treating personalities as static, and focusing on abstract virtues or faults, this book, which has remained endlessly popular throughout the centuries and been frequently imitated, described individuals in relentless conversation and confrontation with others, showing interest not only in ‘inner qualities’ but also in responses to the outside world, and in looking at the whole person from many angles. Previously, individual character was considered mainly from the point of view of suitability for recruitment into positions of power, but now the gentry class became interested in its complexities and regarded understanding these as central to the art of living.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 21