However relaxed and psychologically prepared he felt for the lunch, he nevertheless drank two very large glasses of whisky in a pub on the way to the restaurant, just to ensure that he would effortlessly appear cheerful and amiable. He wanted to dull the wits of his critical self—and had actually invited him to take the afternoon off, even to stay in the pub if he wished—and be simply the kind, gentle and jocular Victor whom he liked best. It is so much better to love the others than to judge them, he told himself as he paid up for his drinks.
There were twenty or so people gathered in the lunch room. He had a talent for physiognomy, and, casting his eyes rapidly around the room as he took off his coat, he instantly recognized one of them after the other, though hardly any of their names. His professional life had led him into a thousand cocktail parties, lunches and dinners, more often than not with strangers, and he, like many others (he could now spot them easily), had often felt discomfort, unease, even shame. Standing alone and useless in the middle of a room full of people engaged in conversation with each other and knowing no one was one of life’s most commonly suffered torments, he was sure of it. Eventually, however, as with most of the painful character deficiencies with which he had been afflicted at one time or another, Victor had overcome this shortcoming too. He had made it his ambition to save other people from self-immolation and in the process solved his own problem. He would pick the most lonely-looking and—this was important—most unattractive person in the crowd and thrust himself upon him or her with enthusiasm, gushing with absolute nonsense. The relief of the objects of his attention was almost palpable, and none of them appeared, in their silent but evident gratitude, to realize that his motive had been to save himself. In time, of course, he had finally wrested himself from his shame to be standing alone. It was a mystery to him why it had taken so long, but he had eventually become aware that not only did he not appear to the others as unprepossessing and without interest as he imagined himself, but that apart from a handful of people whose self-confidence protected them from any such feelings, the vast majority were themselves simply thankful to have escaped a similar predicament and weren’t paying any attention to him at all. He gave the credit, with thanks, to his objective self for forcing him to understand this, for obliging him to confront the simple truth. If only I had given him his full voice at a younger age, had listened to him more attentively, had articulated his evident suspicions about me, I could have saved myself a lot of grief, he thought.
Out of nostalgia for his past suffering, Victor still cast his life belt to the marooned and today went immediately to the rescue of an elderly, fragile woman leaning on a cane in the corner of the room, alone. After a little idle banter, she suddenly challenged him: “You don’t remember me, do you, Victor?” “Of course I do!” he replied. “I’m just not very good at names, that’s all. Quite hopeless, actually. Even my friends and family can’t count on my remembering their names,” he laughed. The old woman looked at him sceptically, though without rebuke, he felt. “You don’t remember, do you?” She’s already asked me that, he thought. Maybe she’s losing it. “Please, do remind me,” he said. “No, try and remember,” she replied, looking at him intently.
Their conversation was cut short by a clap of hands, as one of the women called for their attention. It was she who had been the initiator of the reunion and everyone was eager to hear her. The woman explained that she and another colleague had kept in touch when the organization had closed down, a full twenty-five years before, and that they had jointly decided that to get the whole crowd together again would be fun. The other colleague had fortunately kept the list of personnel and their home addresses, and many of them were living still in the same places. Others they had tracked down through the Internet, and only a few had disappeared without any trace at all that they could find. She invited them to sit around the lunch table and said that she would resume her speech once their meal was underway.
Victor saw that he had no choice where to put himself, since place cards had been set around the table. One did not bother with such cards if their disposition was arbitrary, he thought. So, even now, thirty years later, the conveners of this lunch had retained an idea of affinities, real or supposed, perhaps of perceived rank, perhaps also of clans or antipathies. In those days, as for the rest of his career, he had kept well away from office politics and dissent and had never taken sides in any disputes, nor followed rumors and gossip, in which he had never felt the slightest interest. So he guessed that his own placing, at least, had been random. He saw that the nameless woman he had spoken to before the lunch was more or less opposite him; next to him, on one side, he found an even older man, whom he remembered having liked for his simplicity and honesty; on the other side was another man, a complete stranger, who, he deduced, had worked for the organization before or after him.
After the first lunch course and a round of introductions from which Victor gleaned several names anew, the woman who had spoken first stood up and resumed, as promised, her speech. She recalled the brief history of their organization and paid tribute to former colleagues who were dead and “cannot be here today,” as she put it. Not to mention those who died and came anyhow, thought Victor, smiling amiably as he looked round the table and counted three or four of them. As he did so, he tried to superimpose his visual memories of each of the guests upon the visages he saw today. It’s true, he told them silently, some of you have clearly moved on elsewhere, to that sad land populated only by human shadows. And it has nothing to do with your age, he remarked. There were sprightly and vivacious people at the table far older than some of those whose life force had been extinguished. Their buoyancy lay not necessarily in their movements and words but certainly in their eyes. He had only to look at the old woman across the table, who said little but whose eyes sparkled with humor, intelligence and tenderness. What had happened to the shadows, he wondered? One could not, of course, exclude that they had lived through tragedies, loss, defeated hopes and dreams. The common lot of most humans by a certain age. But he didn’t feel that this was the whole explanation. As he looked again, one by one, at these living dead eating their lamb chops, he was convinced beyond doubt that they had simply stopped, or had never begun, truly thinking. Thinking in its most literal sense. Not the passive receipt of one’s own or the others words and ideas, but the permanent confrontation of these words and ideas with the extraordinary mechanism with which evolution had finally blessed or cursed us: objectivity, the capacity—even obligation—to distance ourselves from our subjective postures, to understand them for what they were, to judge them kindly or unkindly, but never to be fooled or cheated by them, nor provoked to use them as a pretext for anger and violence.
Victor asked himself, as he did often when he was among people: are any of the others here watching themselves, calling themselves to account? With as much distance and as dispassionately as they might watch and judge each other? Sufficient distance to observe their own behavior, to listen to and censure their own thoughts and feelings and words, to scrutinize their own gestures, as keenly as they might pay attention to those of the others, and with as much impartiality? Personally, I could as well be sitting on the other side of the table looking sceptically across at myself. Not as my double, the sinister dark side of literary invention, but as an integral dimension of what makes me this man, conscious at each instant of myself, of my thoughts, of my words and acts, alternately condemning or agreeing with them but never letting this awareness slip from my grip.
When, in a conversation with Helen, he had alluded vaguely to such things, taking care to disguise the gravity of his personal case, she had said that there was nothing unusual about self-awareness. We all possessed it. It was a fundamental quality of the human condition. As too often, unfortunately, he couldn’t agree with her. He thought it quite a rare phenomenon. He supposed that she was talking about people who were merely conscious of what they knew and believed, which was not the whole story, far from it. Of course, most pe
ople knew what they thought and knew how they reacted and behaved, even if largely in backward glances. But did they, for all that, know why it was thus and not otherwise and the extent to which there were other ways of being and thinking? Only the chosen few analyzed themselves to that degree, he felt, sought the origin, sought the source, sought the reasons for their beliefs and relentlessly tested themselves on their truthfulness, relentlessly judged themselves in the court of the pure mind and pure spirit, setting aside their tainted personal histories, the individual characteristics that nature had given them. And even then, Victor had told her, he believed that he saw men and women everywhere in whom even the most modest self-awareness and self-judgment were completely absent. Take an extreme case—criminals—he had invited her, against her protests. While many—most of the top Nazis, for example—were seemingly unable to condemn or judge themselves right to the bitter end, a tiny minority did become aware of the heinous nature of their crimes, but only well after they had perpetrated them, sometimes after months and years alone in prison cells, with only their own voices to listen to.
“Back to your obsession with criminals, then,” Helen had said to put a close to the discussion.
I still accept Helen’s conviction that men cannot ‘know’ each other, cannot invite themselves into the minds of others and take stock of them, Victor said to himself. Simple logic demands that I admit this. Every man is an island, as my friend Yorick might say—and now says a hundred times a day, in fact. But there are signs. Unmistakable signs. Alert eyes which review and fix the others without relent. Modesty, humility, irony. An uncommon sense of empathy. An unfailing, tolerant, patient ear for others. The impossibility of anger. A penchant for self-ridicule. Homo conscius may not be recognized by others, but he will instantly identify his brothers and sisters and, for the time being at least, they will salute each other in silence. Having come to terms with and accepted ourselves, having understood our every word and action, we shall find the others child’s play, thought Victor. And not a single one of them shall be harmed, not by us, at least.
As the lunch drew to its close, with the exhaustion of stories about their shared working life, Victor suddenly remembered, with a pang of guilt, why the old woman across the table from him had challenged his memory about her. He nodded to her silently, closing his eyes in confession. She smiled and inclined her head too. They had briefly been lovers.
Hitler’s Testicles
Harry had said on the phone that he would bring a friend to the pub. He would like Victor to meet him. What a bore, thought Victor. Not only had they no need of anyone to liven up their drinking sessions, but he knew that their natural complicity would inevitably suffer in the presence of an interloper.
Victor found the two men in a corner of the pub hunched over glasses of beer, and to all appearances whispering.
“Victor!” boomed Harry with uncustomary and, thought Victor, rather artificial gusto, interrupting whatever conversation was going on at the table. “Sit down old chap. This is my mate Ron.”
He shook hands with Ron, finding his grip a little too insistent and thinking in the instant that he looked like a disheveled truck driver.
Ron went off to get them a new round of drinks. Victor eyed Harry quizzically, expecting an explanation, but his friend simply smiled and said: “Good bloke, you’ll like him.” Fat chance, thought Victor, who hadn’t the slightest confidence in Harry’s judgment of men and even less in his judgment of whom Victor might or might not like.
“We were just chatting about psychology,” said Harry when Ron brought back their drinks and sat down at the table.
“Really?” smiled Victor. “I didn’t think that was your thing, Harry.”
“But Harry tells me that you are interested in such matters,” intervened Ron.
Before Victor had the opportunity to respond to this surprising statement, Harry chipped in to add: “It’s Ron’s thing as well. That’s why I thought that the two of you should meet.”
Ron waved his hands around his head in a peculiar gesture of denial, and in common embarrassment they all grabbed their glasses and drank. After a moment of silence, Harry spoke up again.
“Don’t be so modest, Ron. When I talked to you about Victor’s theories, you showed real interest, enthusiasm even.”
Bloody hell, thought Victor. My ‘theories’? Has Harry been going around spouting off about all that? Jesus. The last thing I need is to have to justify myself to a truck driver with a vague interest in the workings of the mind.
“It’s actually his business.”
It gets worse and worse, thought Victor. Surely Harry doesn’t frequent psychiatrists or whatever?
“How’s that, your business?” said Victor, fixing an unfriendly look on Ron.
“Well, Harry exaggerates, as usual,” said Ron. “It’s a peripheral interest in my service, just something we try and keep an eye on.”
“Service?” queried Victor.
“Vauxhall Cross,” Harry chipped in.
“You’re a spy, then?”
Ron put a finger across his lips, shook his head and sniggered.
“No, no,” he said, “no cloak and dagger stuff for me. Let’s say ‘intelligence’, ‘information’. Keeping abreast of what’s going on. You know.”
“Well, in this case I can’t say I really do,” said Victor.
Ron sighed, clearly sensing Victor’s irritation.
“Let me be explicit, then, and get straight to the point. I guess it’s not a scoop if I tell you that these days our biggest concern is terrorism. And as I imagine you know—it’s public knowledge—our counter-terrorism strategy aims, first and foremost, to stop people from becoming terrorists and to prevent or dissuade them from supporting violent extremism. To do that supposes that we understand something about, well, the way people’s minds work, their psychology. To give ourselves a chance to identify those moving in this direction. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” said Victor. “But before we go any further, could you tell me what Harry thinks he understands about my views or, rather, what you understood about what he thinks I think?”
Ron cast an anxious look at Harry, who was now yawning ostentatiously and staring into his beer glass. He was clearly not going to get any help in that direction.
“I would rather that you told me, but let me give it a try. Harry gives me to understand that you might have found a key or two to grasping why some men give vent to their anger, resentment, ideology or whatever through violence, while others assume their emotions and opinions and wouldn’t dream of inflicting harm on anyone. Just between you, me and that barstool, we have a lot of people working on these kinds of question, but we don’t really seem to be moving forward towards any useful conclusions. The specialists can usually identify psychopaths, of course, but so can you, me and the barmaid. Even Harry!”
Harry took this as a compliment and grinned.
“But the fact is,” continued Ron, “the kind of people we’re, um, looking at aren’t stark-raving mad as far as we can tell, not visibly anyhow, and they don’t look particularly murderous, to tell the truth. And when I say ‘we’, I include the shrinks of various persuasion whom we have advising us and who do nothing but contradict each other and confuse the matter. It would be a lot easier if only the insane, or at least psychopaths, took to blowing up buildings or hijacking airplanes and killing men, women and children. But it isn’t the case. We regularly encounter people who are apparently as ordinary and sane as the three of us here and who yet develop, rapidly in some cases, into religious or political dévots and killers.”
Despite himself, Victor was beginning to get interested. He wondered if the ‘service’ consulted anthropologists too.
“Harry tells me that you think you have located the root of violence, or at least an explanation as to why men fail to contain it and turn on others, fueled by this, that or the other ideology. You can imagine how much that interests us when we try and divide the harmless and those wit
h ‘terrorist tendencies’, let’s say.”
Victor was astonished that Harry had understood that much and that he was even listening when he mumbled about these things.
“What have you learned from those you know, whom you arrest and interrogate, after the fact, after they’ve actually done something?” asked Victor.
“Not a lot, frankly. They tend to have similar sociological and educational profiles and we can usually establish how they were indoctrinated, how they came to their opinions. Some of them are frustrated individuals with anarchistic or nihilistic tendencies, but on the whole they are rather ordinary people who didn’t give any advance signs of their violent intentions. Which brings me to our interest in talking to you.”
“Our?” thought Victor. What did he mean by that? Were others concerned, briefed? Jesus.
“I certainly haven’t ‘located the root of violence’, as you say,” said Victor. “If I have any view of that question at all, I would hazard a guess that all of us have violence in us to a greater or lesser degree—and not only violence, but passion of diverse kinds and even passion, in some, rare cases, directed rather to love than hatred—and that we are born with this instinct for violence, which we subsequently contain. Most of us, anyhow. Just look at any group of children. Monsters of selfishness, of subjectivity, for the most part, who would poke your eye out, given half a chance. ‘Me, me, me’. Some—most perhaps—change, faced with others, opposed and sometimes even spiritually crippled by them. Others, hardly at all.”
Homo Conscius Page 16