To the many, very kind readers who have written to inquire about the state of my health, mental and otherwise, I’m obliged to confess that while I’m thrivingly fit in body and spirit, I’m far from okay with the state of the world. And I’m far from okay with people who are okay with the state of the world.
You probably know that anyway, but thanks for taking the trouble to ask.
Really.
My problem is threefold:
The first is that I’m finding it difficult to make any kind of sense of it all because I don’t know what I don’t know and I know that I don’t.
The second is that there are writers, pundits and columnists out there who are far more qualified than I am to offer informed and sensible guides to understanding just what the fuck is going on outside these walls and windows that are making me feel more paranoid by the day, the hour and the minute.
For a provocative South African perspective I recommend Mike Hampton’s challenging and very spiky Same Shit, Different Government. For a UK point of view, David Aaronovitch’s Notes From the Underground are invariably as entertaining as they are informative. Listen to Ezra Klein’s brilliant podcasts. And follow Owen Jones.
I also strongly recommend turning off the BBC before your brain gets fried in its bubbling sauce of oleaginous cant.
The third is that these occasional disquisitions are called “My English Traits” for a reason. They were never intended to be anything other than occasional light-hearted reflections on the long and embarrassing journey I took to discover that I wasn’t as English as I thought I was. You can take a South African out of the bush, but you can’t take the bush out of a South African. Etc.
The great affairs of the world were of far less interest to me than the reasons behind the extraordinary decline and miserable death of The Great English Novel after the latter years of the 19th century. I was looking forward to concluding my thesis with an excoriating splutter of stinging expletives aimed at the coma-inducing complacency of English exceptionalism.
Then the great affairs of the world came knocking so violently on the door of my literary pretensions that I was obliged to open it. It still shames me to have to admit that I turned reflexively to Wordsworth, the most priggishly arrogant of all English literary pricks, to soothe my paranoid shivers. By sheer luck he happened to nail it.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
William Wordsworth, 1803
The poem didn’t mean much to me at university in Pietermaritzburg in 1973. Nor did it help to explain the baffling behaviour of the British in 2016. But now, reading it with different interests and more carefully than I would have done eight years ago, it more than fills the gap. Which obliges me to acknowledge that even the most arrogant of pompous assholes can have moments of sublime insight, even if only by accident.
Yes, we are out of tune with nature. Blame Blake’s “satanic mills”, technology, the internet, industrialization, postmodernism and the epistemic hurricane of the early 21st Century. Blame Google, WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. It hardly matters since there’s no turning back.
Worse still, Wordsworth brilliantly observes, we are out of tune with the myths and the mythologies that so expressively dramatized our ancient ethical codes.
…I’d rather be/A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn
This is as sharp as it gets in early 19th century England — an astonishing statement of despair at the country’s loss, not only of nature itself, but clearly also of the naturally human sympathies and empathies that were crushed, Wordsworth suggests, under the smothering weight of English protestant conformity.
The “Pagan suckled on a creed outworn” would have more heart, more imagination, finer aesthetic sensibilities and more fellow-feeling than a thousand congregations of lip-worshiping Anglicans.
Perhaps he was channeling Blake. Perhaps he was copying Blake. It was, nevertheless, an extraordinarily brave and deeply heartfelt confession from a poet whose political and philosophical introspections would soon, with growing fame, wither on the vine of his self-importance.
Apart from feeling desperately guilty about all the shit I did in my life, I’m not inclined to religion. It could be because I learned at an early age that the more fervent the Christian, the more tightly you needed to buckle the belt of your trousers. It could be because black people weren’t allowed into white churches when I was growing up in apartheid South Africa. It could be because, as I learned soon enough, the most egregious crimes of history were committed in the name of some god or other, typically a circumcised or uncircumcised version of the cruel, sadistic and relentlessly fascist Abrahamic species.
Perhaps it’s because the First Crusade (1096–1099) can also be viewed as the thin edge of the colonial wedge that would eventually lead my family to South Africa and the rest of us to where we are now, which is on the precarious brink of an abyss that divides the hopeless from the heartless, the god-forsaken from the godless — or, more specifically, Wordsworth’s fellow-feeling pagans from the real-estate agents laying waste to Gaza.
Most, if not all, of our 20th and 21st century ideas about how to make the world a better and happier place have their origins in the 19th century. Thomas Carlyles’s “great man” theory would give us Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet and the rest of them. Marx and Engels would give us communism and socialism, not necessarily in that order. Edmund Burke would give us conservatism. John Stuart Mill would build on the theories of Adam Smith and others to give us liberalism and capitalism. And so on and so forth the deeper you dig.
Rewind, then, to November 24, 1859, and the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
What Darwin gave us was the “survival of the fittest”, a demonstrably true scientific theory that finally freed the western world from all the stuffy constraints and moral obligations we had inherited from our long out-dated religious codes:
Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can be hardly denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories… I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine.
Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82
I remember agreeing with him when I first read this. Enthusiastically. At last there was someone who said out loud what no-one could murmur in Christian South Africa. That was before I realised, some twenty years later, that Hitler’s Social Darwinism had fathered the political Darwinism of the Chicago School of Economics that gave us Schumpeter’s Gale and the entirely amoral notion of “creative destruction”.
It became blindingly obvious from that point on that Jesus was on the ropes and bleeding profusely from a broken nose. But who cared? What had Jesus ever done for me or my fellow South Africans that hadn’t been achieved far more methodically by the pagan Nelson Mandela?
Rather than sitting on the sidelines and whinging about the inequities of it, I took off my moral undergarments and plunged headfirst into the middle of it. I was fit enough to survive and succeed for 25 years in advertising, probably the most Darwinian business in the world. It took me and my family to Mexico, and from there to London.
When a superior species finally turned up to make me redundant, I accepted it as naturally as a kudu accepts the superiority of a pack of jackals. But maybe, also, just as agonisingly.
Now this somewhat parochial metaphor has taken on a more sinister global turn. It’s not the godless communists or the bleeding-heart socialists who are bombing Gaza. It’s the Christian Darwinists fanning the flames of Schumpeter’s Gale. It’s the social Darwinist media on the sidelines cheering them on. And somewhere under the rubble, Jesus is breathing his last blood-choked breath.
Yeah, he gurgles, do unto others…
It was Nietzsche, inevitably, who predicted the fatal contradiction between religious ethics and godless capital more than a century ago: “Christianity is no more than the typical teaching of Socialists.”
I’ll leave the rest to Orwell, the most articulate pagan of the 20th century:
By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms— elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. ... Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial. ... Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.
And yes, William, little we see in nature that is ours. Except the survival of the most devious.
Happy Easter to you all.