Fitzgerald’s Cave
My English Traits, Chapter 33
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Doubt is uncomfortable, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire
We choose our facts to fit our feelings. We always did. The difference between now and, say, The Age of Enlightenment, is only that we have a lot more facts to choose from. And our feelings are running high.
Yes, we’ve come a long way since 1687 and Isaac Newton.
It seems sweet and rather sad, in retrospect, that their could have been a time when we placed our faith in the verifiable and indisputable truths of science, mathematics, chemistry and physics, and that we assumed from the verifiable nature of the truths they produced that the methodologies of reason and logic we used to confirm them could be applied with equal success to the disciplines that sought to make the best of all possible worlds out of this one.
The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centred on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as natural law, liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.
Wikipedia
How charming. How exquisitely naïve. The impoverished world before the luxuries of alternative facts.
The BBC has been very interested in South Africa recently. They took a brief break from telling us about ducks and Philip Schofield to send a well-briefed Stephen Sackur to the rainbowless nation to squeeze the soundbite they wanted out of Fikile Mbalula, the Secretary General of the ANC:
“Failed state.”
I don’t want to get too hysterically apocalyptic about this, but since the so-called BRIC countries of Brazil, India, China and South Africa appear determined to maintain a neutral stance with regard to the tragically bloody dispute between Ukraine and their fellow-BRIC nation, Russia — and since the fate of the world and quite possibly the existence of the human species appears to hinge on whether or not what’s left in our rapidly evaporating well of common sense can be diverted thence-wards in time to prevent the nuclear oblivion of WW3; and since South Africa appears to be a crucial cog in turning the geopolitical wheel of the BRIC nations towards throwing in their lot with one side or the other; and since South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, consequently appears to be facing an existential choice between siding with Ukraine or condemning his country to many more decades of pre-Edisonian darkness, this seems like as good a time as any to tell you he fucked my girlfriend.
And that men actually do think with their dicks.
Sex-related cues have been found to make men more prone to take risks while playing blackjack, to discount the future when making economic decisions and to spend on conspicuous luxury items (but not on mundane expenses). Typically, the effects are strongest in single men. By contrast, these studies uniformly report that cues about males have no such effects on women.
Robert Sapolsky, The Cheerleader Effect: What Men Do to Impress, as reported in the Wall Street Journal of December 19, 2013.
We knew it, intuitively, always to have been true. But in watching this whopping dick-swinging competition between the notional Western Alliance and the BRIC nations, politely described as international diplomacy, it takes on a chilling new significance.
And makes me miss Angela Merkel, Nicola Sturgeon and Jacinda Arden more than I did already.
And makes me hope my all-too-intimate knowledge of Cyril’s size and prowess turns out to be have been well-founded.
But, as W.H. Auden said, “Grub first, then ethics.”
The ethics will come. The grub at hand is a hastily assembled stew of facts and feelings leavened by only the tiniest pinch of fiction.
I have to believe that white, liberal English-speaking South Africans of my generation, whose understanding of world affairs began with their grandparents’ memories of WW1 and ended with their parents’ memories of WW2, can be excused for being confused about, well, Russia.
In the absence of television and Wikipedia, and with no more to go on than the scantiest anecdotes gleaned from nods and whispers at the dinner table, or from drunken shouts and roars of laughter overhead in the parking lot of the Highwayman where we shivered ourselves to sleep in the luggage compartment of the Opel Kadett, we were led to understand that Russia had teamed up with France and Britain to fight the Kaiser in the First World War, and that the Ruskies had put on a jolly good show in helping to defeat Hitler in the Second.
To the tune, it turned out, of some forty million men, women and children — a couple of million more than the current population of Canada.
It wasn’t something that could easily be gleaned from Biggles Goes Alone (1962), or from our Lion and Tiger comics, but we vaguely remembered Russia being on our side.
Our?
At some point in the later sixties, coinciding more or less with hearing Let the Sunshine In for the first time on LM Radio, it began to dawn on us that apartheid wasn’t as popular around the world as we thought it might be.
By the end of 1969, with not much more to go on than what we could decode from the roar of shortwave static emanating from the BBC World Service, we were finally forced to face up to the existentially blinding revelation that we, as beneficiaries of one of the cruellest social experiments since the Vikings, the Celts, the Zulus and maybe the Confederacy, were indisputably on the wrong side of history.
The shock was morally, religiously, philosophically, culturally and practically confusing.
Weren’t we nice, white people who knew not to put our elbows on the table or slurp our soup? Didn’t we more or less believe in Jesus? Weren’t we kind to animals, cripples and the piccanins who begged for a slice of bread outside the kitchen door?
No. Despite our very Protestant protestations, the world had finally drawn the line.
Which turned out to be not quite true. The line had actually been drawn in 1962 when the United Nations General Assembly, “...in response to the racist policies of apartheid established by the South African Government”, had passed Resolution 1761 deeming apartheid “...to be a violation of South Africa's obligations under the UN Charter and a threat to international peace and security.”
We just hadn’t heard about it yet.
And it was about to get a lot more confusing, geopolitically-and-personally speaking.
If it were indeed true that apartheid represented “...a threat to international peace and security”, wouldn’t it necessarily follow that the tacit supporters of apartheid, which is to say those countries and corporations with whom we continued to do a roaring trade in everything from Frosties to fissionable uranium, were actively aiding and abetting that threat?
In terms of the somewhat binary notion of morality we drew from the appropriately black-and-white Lone Ranger episodes that prefaced the “Main Feature” at the Mooi River cinema in those days, they would then be the bad guys in black hats who were cruel to crippled children, Red Indians and women.
It followed too, by definition, that the countries and corporations most vehemently opposed to apartheid would be the good guys in the white hats who saved the crippled children, Red Indians and women from fates worse than death.
So those of us who had taken the words of Resolution 1761 as seriously as we had taken to heart the sentiments of The Age of Aquarius, were disconcerted and not a little anxious to discover that, at the age of eighteen, it would become our patriotic duty to take up arms against the good guys.
Or, as it was phrased to us then, against Soviet Russia’s baby-eating, communist proxies like the ANC, the PAC, the Angolan MPLA and Mozambique’s Frelimo.
The same Russia which, in the form of the Soviet Union, was one of only a precious few countries to withdraw their ambassadors from South Africa after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960…
For the duration of the thirty-four years between Sharpeville in 1960 and South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, apartheid became — for me and for many of my generation — a kind of moral touchstone upon which to judge where individuals and nations stood on the political spectrum between the Social Darwinists on the Right and the Bleeding-Heart Woke Liberals on the Left.
Like apartheid itself, it was crude but effective. Like apartheid itself, it was perfectly binary. Like apartheid itself, it admitted no shades of grey.
Yes, you would hear mealy-mouthed moralisers and apologists saying, “It’s not all bad. It’s just the way it’s implemented.”
And other variations on the theme of, “It’s a good idea in principle, if only…”
There were plenty of crocodile tears. But very few fence-sitters. Apartheid was a barbed-wire barrier between the defensible and the indefensible.
I was five years younger than apartheid. I was forty-one when it ended. The years in between were, let’s say, formative.
It would form and inform my ideas about everything. It still does. It will until the lights go out. Which seems appropriately binary right now.
It made me quick to judge and hard to please. It dictated my views on what I read, what I saw, what I heard, who I met and how they looked and what they said. It made me less tolerant but more forgiving. There’s a difference between people who won’t know and people who don’t know.
I can forgive the latter.
It long ago ceased to be a theory, an ideology or a philosophical choice. It had become part of my body, an additional sense, an instinctive measure of all things good, bad and in-between. It became an autonomic divining rod, an intuition, a sensibility, a sieve, a screen, a smell, a revulsion, a hormone; a somatic radar capable of detecting the faintest hint of the hypocritical cant of apartheid apologists that might lie hidden deep beneath the smooth and silky surface of their dinner party patter. In Wimbledon, for instance.
It hardly needs saying, but it became easier to identify them later when they all voted for Brexit.
Like a Covid test-kit, my instinct wasn’t infallible. It could make false positives out of true negatives. It could be thoughtless, temperamental, rash, impulsive and careless.
It could be. I could be. I can be.
It coloured my view. In black and white, as it were.
It became part of my body when my mind could no longer process, explain or understand how so many apparently nice, apparently smart, apparently warm, kind and considerate people could reach such stupid, such hateful, blind, absurd and contradictory views about themselves and their fellow human beings.
I gave up trying.
I retreated to the darkness of Fitzgerald’s cave.
I don’t know what other people use to form their opinions on the rights and wrongs of the world around them. The teachings of Jesus, maybe. Or of Buddha, or Wittgenstein; of Spinoza, St Augustine, Donald Trump, David Hume, Ayn Rand, Adam Smith, Mao Zedong, Nietzsche, Nelson Mandela, Nigel Farage, Descartes, Karl Marx, Carrie Bradshaw, Thomas Carlyle, Emily Dickinson, Plato, Harold Bloom, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Eliot, their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, uncles or aunts; someone they saw on TV or someone they heard down the pub; or any one of the 330 million gods of Hinduism.
Or nothing at all but the greed of the gut and the ache of too much testosterone or too little testosterone; or angiotensinogen, cortisone or thyroxine.
Heartlessness suggests a somatic explanation.
I remember arriving in England in 1974. It was my first trip overseas. Abroad meant something else in those days.
I was star-struck by the black cabs, the green meadows, the fabled drizzle, the names of the streets and the sounds and the sights and the smells. By the whole Mary Poppins of it. By the accent of the cab driver speaking from the side of his mouth where the fag wasn’t: “So, mate, you’re a South African then..?”
In reply to which, in a failed attempt to not to sound too much like the stereotypical parody of one, I uttered awkwardly : “Yees.”
Then, a mile or or two down the M4: “You’ve got the right idea about what to do with them blacks.”
My body tells me all of this started with that.
Just one last little fact.
In 2013 Russia's Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation offered to build eight nuclear reactors in South Africa in a $50-billion strategic partnership between the two countries. They would have come on line in 2023.
[cf~https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Putin-offers-help-to-South-African-nuclear-industry]
I don’t know what happened. Now the South African state, by its own inadvertent admission, is on the brink of failure. My random guess is that it wasn’t fucked by the fickle finger of fate.
Whatever. The lights would have been on at home tonight.
Onwards to Middlemarch. And how I got the measure of Cyril.
Remaining-hours-to-oblivion permitting.
Been counting the remaining hours to oblivion!