ertain
cultures (e.g. Japan)
seem to produce charming, attractive women as naturally as a rose bush produces
roses. Others (e.g. Hong Kong) produce mainly
stinging nettles. A particularly dangerous plant is found in the Philippines. Though
its flowers are often gorgeous, its thorns are poisonous and can inflict fatal wounds.
It is a current truism that men are
reticent and tongue-tied (does no one read poetry these days?) while women
freely express their emotions. I have not found this to be so.
Beautiful women are notoriously high-handed
towards men. It is surprising how much more tolerant of them they become as
they grow older.
A woman who feels herself intellectually
inferior to the man she is involved with – though not many do – generally resents
him bitterly. Sooner or later, she will strike hard at him. This is so even if
she has no pretensions to intellectuality herself and he is recognized as
outstanding. Many women prefer stupid men, for then they can both manipulate
and despise them – an irresistible combination. Men, of course, have always
preferred to marry good-looking bimbos. Luckily there is more than enough stupidity
to go round for all of us.
Men seldom marry women cleverer than
themselves, for they are frightened of them. If they do, they are either quite
unaware of it or else almost childishly proud of their wives.
“Women love men for their defects,’
said Wilde. They do so for two reasons. Firstly, they hope to reform them;
secondly, they feel superior to the poor idiots.
David once stupidly asked his first
wife why she had never told him she loved him. Surprised, she replied that it
had never occurred to her to do so. Indeed, she could not see the point of it.
He learnt later that she reserved such confessions for her lovers. She had a
view of marriage reminiscent of Restoration comedy. “Husband! Odious word!
Pray, never mention it.”
Many women prefer men younger than
themselves. It helps them to regain the illusion of youth. This is true even of
women in their twenties.
A brilliant medical scientist in his
late thirties hates his mother because she neglected him shamefully when young,
even consigning him to an orphanage. He treats his numerous girl friends
brutally, especially those who try to mother him. The only women he respects
are those who treat him even more brutally than he treats them. He is thus
unconsciously honouring his mother.
Some men dwell constantly on their
former lovers, like an oyster turning grit into a pearl. Women almost never do
so, for they are more practical and less sentimental than men, knowing there is
no point in crying over split milk, especially if they have split it
themselves. No woman could ever have written A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. The nearest feminine counterpart to
this is Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook,
a comparatively minor work. (The night after writing this, I saw Lessing on TV
mentioning this very book! She said it was a historical statement,
misinterpreted as a feminist tract.)
A young man does not realize that
often, if he wants to keep his girlfriend, he should be charmingly attentive to
her mother. Sometimes, however, he does so because, subconsciously, it is the
mother he wants and not her daughter. He then marries the wrong woman – and his
mother-in-law, subconsciously, never forgives him for it.
A young man of my acquaintance was
judged and found wanting by his first loves’ steely-eyed mother. The daughter
therefore rejected him, only to inflict disgrace upon her strait-laced family a
year later by bearing an illegitimate child to a plausible Lothario whom the
mother had approved of. This was, perhaps, the daughter’s unconscious revenge
upon her mother. The daughter died young, as though to apologize to her mother –
or to punish her further. The mother buried her daughter alongside her own
three husbands and lived well into her nineties. This is not a world for the
sensitive or the faint-hearted.
Some men are compelled to transfer
their entire libido from their mother to their first love. This is fatal,
because not only will they turn against their mothers, but when their first
love rejects them – as she is almost certain to do, given the Oedipal intensity
of their passion – they will spend the rest of their lives hating her, often
without realizing it. Like a piece of iron placed next to a compass, this
Oedipal derangement will send them off course irrevocably.
Some men are so obtuse and conceited
that they frequently believe that a woman is fond of them or even in love with
them, when actually she dislikes or despises them. Women never make such a
mistake about men.
The rarest of women is the
spiritually intellectual. At one time, this species was confided almost
entirely to the Continent, especially to France
and Italy.
One thinks of Maria Ardinghelli, Emilie du Chatelet, Laura Bassi, Maria Agnesi and
others. Even rarer is the beautiful, multi-talented, spiritually intellectual.
While I was still in my early fifties, one of my
wife’s friends used to enquire with false solicitude about my mental health. “Is
he senile yet?” she would ask my wife, hopefully. She herself was only six
years younger than I. This woman could never conceal her contempt for, and
dislike of, men. Her own husband, not surprisingly, died in his fifties,
perhaps because he was tired of hearing her make the same enquiry about him.
She is still flourishing, though slightly senile.
An elderly divorcee of my
acquaintance used to exclaim “Men!” whenever anyone of that sex did anything to
displease her – and she was easily displeased. She had, she implied, through a lifetime
of diligent research, single-handedly uncovered the cause of all the evils in
the world.
Women are supposed to be sensitive,
gentle and caring. On the whole, I have not found them so, though there are
some rare exceptions. My mother was highly intelligent and sadistic, with a vinegarish
disposition and a tongue like a serpent’s. This
should have prepared me for my later relationships with women. My very first
girlfriend spent her time putting me down, often publicly. A devout Catholic,
she informed me at least once a week that I was destined for hell-fire, which,
oddly, did nothing to cool my ardour. Built like a pocket battle-ship, she was
an ardent sportswoman. Once, when I was not playing singles tennis to a
standard high enough for her satisfaction, she simply walked off the court,
leaving me red-faced and discomfited before my amused friends. At fifteen, this
can scar. Why did I associate with such an athletic virago? Presumably, because
she exuded an effortless superiority, founded on the flimsiest of foundations,
which I must have somehow admired, mistaking it for genuine worth. Why did she
associate with a bookish boy like me, a year her junior? I can see now that it
was because (a) I did most of her homework and (b) she enjoyed humiliating me.
I heard she eventually married someone who did not play tennis at all. I occasionally
wonder how her husband is faring, only to remind myself that he has by now
almost certainly run away, divorced her, or died.
David had a teenage girlfriend,
Barbara, who always called him ‘Stupe’, though she herself, expensively
schooled, was near the bottom of her class, while he had topped his State in
his HSC and was doing brilliantly at Cambridge.
She came up to Cambridge
to see him and was sulky about his being there, for she disliked being outdone in
anything. One the eve of his twenty-first birthday, she sent him a pencilled
note written on a torn-off page – the sort of thing one might leave for the
milkman – saying, “I’m ending this relationship. Goodbye!” The fact that she
had scrawled such a missive (and in pencil!) angered him, for it implied that
he was not even worth a letter. Though he did not realise it at the time, he
was lucky to escape from such an accomplished young sadist. David told me
ruefully that he had richly deserved the nickname that Barbara had bestowed on
him, for he should have dumped her the moment she began calling him a fool.
Relationships cannot thrive without intellectual parity and mutual respect, yet
few of us when young are interested in the former, which sooner or later lead
inevitably to the loss of the latter.
arzan
comes home and says to Jane, ‘I’ve had a rough day. It’s a jungle out there!’ I
like this joke because I feel it’s true. The jokes we appreciate most, those we
remember best, are often indicators of how we feel about life. Sometimes, of
course, we remember them for other reasons, such as their being brilliantly
witty. But the latter are rare.
Bette Davis said of a woman she
detested: ‘She’s the original good time who’s been had by all’. This witticism
was later attributed to Kenneth Tynan, in a slightly amended form. Wit is
often, like a cash cheque, easy to pass off as one’s own. Who knows whether the
above gem really originated with Bette Davis or with someone else? Who cares?
How many of Groucho Marx’s witticisms, for example, really emanated from him
and not from his script writer?
Our favourite jokes, those we
remember and tell to others, reveal so much about us that we should really not
tell them at all. This applies particularly to jokes about sex.
A recent poll revealed that
Australian women prize a sense of humour in a man more highly than they prize
wealth, though not as highly as they prize a well-developed body. I am quite
sure there were very fee Chinese or South-East Asian women included in this
poll. As a Philippine acquaintance of ours remarked, ‘As soon as I learnt he
was rich, I fell head over heals in love with him’. The frightening thing was,
she was telling the truth.
ravel broadens the mind – provided one has a mind
and not just a random collection of opinions and prejudices. Otherwise it may
simply reinforce what is already there. Travel is then called ‘tourism’, the
uneducable gawking at the unintelligible.
I
first saw Europe just after the war, when rebuilding had scarcely begun, for
the Marshall Plan dollars, generously provided by the United States,
had only just begun to trickle in. Without this aid, Stalin would probably have
succeeded in his plan to incorporate the Western democracies into his empire. Germany was the
worst – her cities still a vast sea of ruins, stretching to the horizon, with
hollow-cheeked scarecrows, most of whom were head-scarfed women, gaunt children
or tremulous old men, creeping out from caves under the rubble to star at us or
beg. Cigarettes were the ubiquitous currency, along with chocolate, among
people who were sometimes on the verge of starvation. Morality had collapsed so
completely that an attractive young woman would sell herself for a couple of
bars of chocolate or a packet of cigarettes. As one hard-eyed, blond teenager
remarked to me, when I remonstrated with her for ‘fraternizing’ with a couple
of soldiers in the British zone, “What’s it to you, anyway? I’ve got to make a
living. And your soldiers pay well, not like the Russkis who paid me nothing
when they raped me.”
Rape had been endemic in
the territory seized by the Russians. Towards the end of the war there was a
saying current among German women, ‘Better a Russki on your belly than an Ami
on your head,’ meaning it was better to be raped than blown to bits by American
bombs. It seemed inconceivable at the time that anything could be done to
resurrect this shattered culture. Yet when I next returned, nearly forty years
later, not a trace of the devastation remained in any of the prosperous cities
I visited, all swarming with self-confident, overweight people. Only in the
eyes of some of the older generation could I fancy I glimpsed traces of past
defeats and arrogant triumphs. In the past, when civilizations fell, they did
not recover. Now, such is the power of technology, they can be rebuilt in a
generation. The exception is the former USSR, where the devastation was so
tremendous, the loss of life so great (27 million killed) and the technology so
rudimentary compared with the West that even today the physical and psychic
scars are still dreadfully evident. The collapse of Soviet Communism in 1990-91
was in part due to the face that Marxist economics had singularly failed to
make good the gargantuan damage inflicted on the USSR by WWII.
After devastated Germany, France was a delight. Though many
bridges were still down and the fields were still littered with the debris of
war, especially burnt-out tanks and trucks, her cities were largely untouched
and her people alert, confident and happy. Only the sombre plaques that adorned
every city, country town and village, recording the long lists of hostages shot
by the Germans (Fusillés par les
Allemands), bore bitter testimony to what the French had endured. French
food, in particular, was a revelation to one coming from an England where
tasteless stodge, tough meat and tired vegetables boiled in bicarbonate soda
masquerading as cooking, was ubiquitous. I vividly recall the first meal I had
in a French family restaurant in Paris;
I had never tasted such ambrosia in my life. Elizabeth David had experienced
the same exhilaration some years before, memories of which drove her to write
her first cookery book when suffering the turgid horrors of English hotel food
in 1947. The only thing in short supply was good coffee. Paradoxically, this
was readily available in England,
among Sir Stafford Cripps’s austerities and rationing, because my countrymen
preferred tea. I took kilos of fresh coffee beans into France in my haversack and sold
them when I ran short of money or else gave them to my French friends.
How was it that France, defeated and under Nazi occupation for
over four years, was able to recover so quickly from the war while England
continued to endure fourteen years of rationing and drabness? I suspect the
answer has something to do with the fact that France
was still an agricultural country and therefore able to produce food in
abundance, while England
was still importing food. But it was also due to England’s being fundamentally
a Puritan country, where enjoyment of any sort – even of the pleasures of the
table – was seen as obscurely sinful, whereas the French had never succumbed to
this spiritual blight and were quick to start enjoying themselves again. The
French expulsion of the Calvinistic Huguenots had ensured that the country kept
its capacity for joie-de vivre. The
dour-faced Sir Stafford Cripps, incidentally, was the very personification of
Puritanism. It was said that he rose at four every morning, even during the
Arctic winter of 1947, and took a bracing ice-cold bath before settling down to
his usual fifteen hour day. With such a hair-shirted example of asceticism ever
before us, how dared we even think of having fun?
Along with food, the
greatest delight in France
was the southern sun of the Midi. I have never
forgotten my first glimpse of the Mediterranean, when after hitchhiking from Paris to Marseilles,
I first saw the golden-red sun rise triumphantly over its blue and glittering
expanse. It had been a difficult journey, since the roads were in bad repair
after the war and traffic still relatively scarce. The longest leg of the trip,
from Auxerre to Marseilles
was spent in the company of a haggard truck-driver with a strong Parisian
accent who picked me up on condition that I talked to him throughout the night
to keep him awake. I felt I was undergoing a nightmarishly unending French oral
examination, with a remorseless examiner who would exclaim “Parle! Parle!” if I stopped talking even
for a moment. On the rare occasions when I paused for breath, he would promptly
fall asleep and swerve wildly across the road, while I grabbed the wheel of his
ancient camion, which looked as
though it had seen service in WWI, and shouted “Attention, mon pote!” in a stentorian bellow. I had therefore the
strongest incentive to carry on talking – sudden death if I didn’t.
In the long hours of
darkness that followed a blindingly hot afternoon, I narrated in excruciating
detail my life history and then the biographies of my entire family and
friends; I discussed philosophy, especially the then fashionable
existentialism; French, English, Welsh and European history; education, current
politics, geography, physics, cosmology, zoology, horticulture, women; Latin,
French and English literature; Dante, the Russian novel, and, of course, the
recent war. The latter was the only subject to which he actually responded, for
he had been a prisoner of war before escaping and joining the Maquis and had
undergone some horrendous experiences. (The first question he had asked me when
he stopped to pick me up was if I was German. I had the feeling that if I had
told him I was, he would have run me over immediately and the reversed to do it
again). Every hour or so, we would stop at an estaminet where he topped himself up with a bon coup de rouge, while I drank black coffee to keep awake. To my
consternation, he refused to drink coffee, explaining that it put him to sleep.
Only red wine, vin ordinaire, he assured
me, swilled down in copious draughts, enabled him to drive. What his blood
alcohol reading must have been I am afraid to guess. As we sped on through the
night, along twisting potholed roads, I kept thinking of a doleful English
billboard seen beside every major highway in the UK at that time, featuring a
mournful widow veiled in Gothic black, adorned with the lugubrious message,
‘Keep death off the road!’ At times, indeed, I fancied I saw this ominous,
sable lady perched on the bonnet, staring at the sand running through her
hour-glass and muttering ‘Courage, mon
vieux! We’ll be together soon.’
Finally, as dawn was
breaking, my drunken companion stopped the truck on a level crossing, muttered,
‘Putain! J’en ai marre’ and
immediately fell asleep with his head slumped on the wheel. I broke off the
French infantry marching songs which I had been hoarsely and obscenely singing,
for I had run out of narrative somewhere around Avignon, rubbed my eyes and
then nearly leapt through the windscreen in fright at what I saw in the grey
light of dawn, expecting the Paris-Marseilles express to hurtle out of a nearby
tunnel at any moment and demolish us. Sweating with fear, I tried unavailingly
to wake him, dragged him from the wheel, frantically started the engine and
somehow – for I could not drive – managed to send the truck jumping along until
we were well off the crossing – mistake, presumably, for a lay-by for trucks –
where he had sleepily decided to await his Maker. He was still snoring away
when I grabbed my haversack and clambered down shakily from the truck. Ten
minutes later, while I was waiting for a bus to take me to nearby Marseilles, a train did
rush out of the tunnel, making the earth tremble with the speed of its passing.
I was left with the feeling that Providence
sometimes looks after drunks and English hitchhikers and that I had definitely
earned my passage to Marseilles.
A couple of hours later,
watching the blazing sun soar into a sky of unbelievable crystalline blue while
I lay on a deserted beach and dried out after my swim in the warmest water I
had ever encountered, I had never felt so glad to be alive. I felt profoundly
sorry for my benefactor and hoped he was still sleeping soundly. I did not see
how he could possibly survive many more trips of that nature, undertaken, so he
assured me, only because he had a wife and five children and the more of those
nightmarish trips he made, the more he earned. This was not just my first
encounter with the southern sun; it was also my first encounter with the world
of a brutalized, exploited working-class, whose whole life was one long
struggle for survival in often desperate circumstances. Little wonder that the
French Communist party was so powerful, even under the doubtful leadership of
Maurice Thorez.
It was the quality of
the light that so enchanted me in Provence.
Until then, I had never realized that in England, even in what passed for
summer, I had been seeing the sky through a misty haze. No wonder so many
artists had made Provence
their home. “In England,”
I muttered to myself, “winter slowly mellows into winter. But here…” I made up
my mind that at the first opportunity I would leave England for a country where I could
bask in this marvellous, crystalline radiance for the rest of my life. It was this
desire to escape from the grey skies, rain, yellow fogs, mist and Stygian gloom
that eventually led me to Australia,
via the Middle East, as soon as I had come down from Cambridge. After seven years spend in the Fens enduring the coldest, dankest weather in a cold,
dank island, I was yearning for the sun. Although I did not realize it at the
time, I was suffering from mild depression, which we now know can be remedied
by exposure to intense light. The euphoria I experienced for the first time in
the Midi was due, not only to the excellent
food and wine, but also to the brilliant sunlight which flooded my whole being
from dawn till dusk. I drank it in voraciously, as a man on the verge of dying
of thirst will drink draught after draught of life-giving water, watching my
slug-white English skin slowly turn a healthy brown as the days went by.
Ironically, towards the
end of my life, I now find that the sun has become too dangerous for me to
submit myself to its full rays. The thinning of the ozone layer and the
consequent sharp increase in ultra-violet ionising radiation has meant that I
can only enjoy the sun in the morning and late evening. I have seen too much of
the ravages of skin cancer, especially melanoma, for me to soak myself in
sunshine as I did then. Fifty years on, I find myself living in a strange and
often sinister world - one which I could not possible had foreseen in those
far-off days.
From the French Riviera,
still scarred by the battles fought there after the Allied landing in 1944, I
made my way to North Africa, where I took a job as Assistant in a French lycee in
Oran. When the
summer term ended, I stayed on to work in a colonie
de vacances run by the headmaster, whose Communist sympathies drove him to
devote his summer vacations to the welfare of some of the poorest children of
the colony, most of them Arabs. A few years later, the Algerians rose in revolt
against their French colonisers in a bitter, bloody struggle that lasted for
eight years. Many of my colleagues and – almost certainly – a high percentage
of the children I was caring for, especially the boys, must have died or been
wounded in that long and cruel war. I know for certain that two of them were
killed early on in the struggle. Yet during my stay I never heard anyone express
the slightest misgivings about the future, even though I myself, from the
vantage point of an outsider, could see clearly that the regime was in its
death-throes. Such wilful blindness affects us all at times, especially when we
are most threatened. When we most need to see clearly, we cannot.
I arrived in Baghdad in October 1956, to take up a post as Lecturer in
English Literature in the newly founded University of Baghdad.
I had chosen an inopportune time, for in November the British and the French
invaded the Suez, provoking a violent reaction
in Iraq
which led to the evacuation of most British and French nationals. I had not
bothered to register with the British embassy, so remained behind, largely
unaware of what was going on. My first real intimation of the seriousness of
the situation came when the bus on which I was riding stopped suddenly in Al
Rashid Street, the main thoroughfare, while everybody fled from it, including
the conductor and driver, leaving me sitting there wondering what was going on.
Puzzled, I left the bus and took refuge in a near-by bookshop, only to be
bundled out unceremoniously as the owner began to pull down the steel riot
shutters. As I stood on the pavement, wondering how I was going to get home
again, I heard a loud chanting, turned and saw a mob some two hundred metres
away, advancing rapidly towards me. An exultant cry arose when they saw me, a
solitary Englishman, provocatively loitering in a deserted street.
Enlightenment dawned. I turned and ran towards Bab El Sherji, with the mob in
hot pursuit, like a fox pursued by a pack of hounds, reaching the Sindbad Hotel
just in time to slide under the riot shutters which the management had
thoughtfully raised for me.
“That was a close one,” said the manager,
cheerfully, as I recovered my breath. “We were having bets on whether you’d
make it or not.”
“And if I hadn’t?” I asked.
“Oh, then you’d have ended up like the Frenchman
they killed yesterday. They cut his head off and carried it round on a pole.”
This was my first lesson in Middle Eastern
politics, a game that is played for keeps by both sides.
Less
than two years later, during the revolution, the mob stopped an army truck in
the same street. It was carrying a couple of dozen Swiss and German businessmen
to the Ministry of Defense for their protection. They had been abroad a flight
that had landed just before the airport was seized by revolutionaries and had
not been allowed to leave. The mob, ignorant of bloodthirsty as always, mistook
them for hated Jordanians, who they had heard were being evacuated from the
Jordanian Embassy, hauled them out and beheaded the lot of them there and then.
Such are the hazards of Middle Eastern travel. One moment you are sipping
champagne in business class; the next you are watching your screaming
companions being decapitated in a welter of blood in a filthy Baghdad street,
knowing you will follow them in a few minutes time.
Since
the university was closed, to forestall riots, I spent most of the next three
months closeted in my house, with an armed guard at the gate for some of the
time, learning Arabic while I waited for things to quieten down. It was
disconcerting to be told by shopkeepers, on the rare occasions when I went out,
that I would have to hide myself in a dark place, should the pro-British
government be overthrown. In May 1957, as I was preparing to leave Iraq for Australia, my students gave me a
farewell party. “We are quite fond of you, sir” said their spokesman politely,
as he handed me a going-away present, “But we are glad you are leaving, because
if you stayed we should have to cut your throat.” My other students, neatly
clad in dark suits, white shirts and highly polished shoes, all smiled in
agreement. Nothing personal, of course, for they were well aware that my sympathies
lay with them. It was all routine kill-or-be-killed politics.
My
students had warned me, repeatedly, for several months that I should leave Baghdad as soon as
possible, for my own safety, since there was going to be a revolution which
would sweep away the detested regime of Nuri-el-Sa’id. Even my neighbour’s
houseboy, whose brother was in an armoured regiment, had told me that there was
to be a military coup that summer. Yet when I attended dinner parties or
Embassy receptions, nobody wanted to know the truth, dismissing my warnings as
‘bazaar rumours’. The fact was that I knew what was going one because I mixed
with students, who, in Arab countries are always among the chief instigators of
such uprisings, along with their relatives in the military, whereas the
business community, like the diplomatic set, were cocooned in their own cosy
world, cut off from the people.
In
July 1958, only three weeks after I had quitted Baghdad
for Canberra, a
military coup took place. The entire royal family and their courtiers were
machine gunned, the bodies hastily wrapped in rugs and interred in the grounds
of the palace. The Prime Minister and all his cabinet except one [1] were brutally murdered and dismembered, their bodies being dragged through the
streets behind cars until they disintegrated, along with those of many other
politicians opposed to the Ba’ath party, which had planned the coup. The
British Embassy, where I had attended decorous garden parties and sipped
luke-warm sherry, was burnt to the ground and three of the staff murdered. The
Ambassador, Sir Michael Wright, along with Lady Wrights and other members of
the corps diplomatique, narrowly
escaped death by hiding in the cellars until they were rescued. Insularity and
smugness often come at a price, as in Algeria four years earlier.
Among
the university students who rampaged murderously through the streets in the
slaughter that followed was a certain budding lawyer named Saddam Hussein, who
later became a hit man for the faction that eventually overthrew the new
regime, replacing it with one even more extreme. Iraq
had begun its slide down the long, blood-drenched slope that led through
further revolution, the war with Iran and the Gulf War, to the
starvation, destruction and misery that grip the country today. These events
reinforced the lesson which I had learnt when shattered my childish world
forever in September 1939. I realized afresh that no society – not even Australia – is
either as safe or as stable as we delude ourselves into believing it is. To me
at least, later events, such as those of September 11, 2001, came as no great
surprise. We all wander, blindly, along the brink of a bottomless abyss.
[1] Dr Fadhil Jamali, the Foreign Minister, with whom
I was personally acquainted, survived his imprisonment and was subsequently
released into exile.
ranshumanists
believe that the homo sapiens sapiens is
rapidly becoming obsolete and that within a century or so our species will have
been replaced by homo robotiensi, [1] for we shall have gradually melded with computers, discarding our present flesh
and blood bodies in favour of metal ones.
Sir Roger Penrose, a distinguished Oxford mathematician, has
written two impressive books vigorously combating the idea that a machine can
ever attain consciousness [2].
I have read and admired both of them, but must reluctantly disagree. Even the
Dalai Lama, whom I rank among the wisest of men, has admitted that there is no
bar in Buddhist philosophy to our reincarnating in silicon. I believe the
argument will be settled once and for all some thirty or so years from now,
when we follow Penrose’s suggestion and ask a robot: ‘What does it feel like to
be a computer?’ to hear it answer, ‘Generally, pretty good. But today, I’m a
bit off colour and rather depressed. Could you take a look at my neural
circuits?’
‘Most
of the human race is now obsolete,’ is a transhumanist dictum.
Transhumanists argue our brains are no longer adequate to deal with the major
problems that confront the world today. One solution is to implant computers in
our brains; this will increase our intelligence while also giving us far more
control over our destructive emotions. Since only a relatively small percentage
of the world’s population will be able or willing to afford such implants, this
will eventually lead to the dominance of an elite, drawn largely from the
present developed countries, who will be far above the rest of the human race,
both physically and intellectually. Furthermore, genetic engineering – a costly
process – must surely lead to the breeding of children with enhanced physical
and intellectual powers, as in that prophetic film, Gattaca (1997). Since both computer implants and genetic
engineering will be unaffordable for most people in the Third
World, the prospects for the majority look grim. Furthermore, the
rapid development of robots means the uneducated and unintelligent will be
surplus to requirements. Compulsory sterilization on a vast scale for the
world’s poor maybe in the offing, unthinkable as it may seem to us now.
Countries that refuse to do this on moral grounds will find themselves unable
to compete with countries that have not had such scruples.
The average human brain can perform
twenty million billion operations per second (twenty MOPS). If computers
continue to improve according to Moore’s
law, doubling their performance every twelve months [3],
they should be performing as efficiently as a human brain by 2020. By 2030, the
average desk computer, performing 10>19 operations per second, should be a
thousand times more powerful than the best human brain and also possess what we
term ‘consciousness’. The implications of this are so disturbing that it is not
surprising so few people are prepared to consider them coolly.
[1] Ray Kurzweil. 1999. The Age of Spiritual Machines, London, and Hans Moravec. 1988. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human
Intelligence, CambridgeMA, are excellent introductions
to transhumanistic thought.
[2] Roger Penrose. 1989. The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford,
and 1995. Shadows of the Mind. Oxford.
[3] Formerly, every eighteen months; this figure has
now been revised downwards.
gainst stupidity, even the gods themselves struggle
in vain,” said Aeschylus, a sentiment later voiced by Friedrich von Schiller
(1759-1805), who appears to have passed it off as his own (Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens). For Aeschylus,
this verse is not just a condemnation of humanity, but also a sly thrust at the
gods themselves. One has only to read Homer or the classical Greek dramatists
to see how stupid even the gods can be. If even those who rule us are stupid,
then what hope is there for us? Then I recall that we are actually lambs ruled
by wolves – and wolves are cunning, not stupid. (Orwell described us as
“rabbits ruled by stoats”, which comes to the same thing).
In
An Enemy of the People, Ibsen says, “I think we must
agree that the fools are in a terrible, overwhelming majority the whole world
over. But damn it, it should surely never be right that the stupid should rule
over the clever” (Act 4). Ibsen comes close to the truth here. Fools are
certainly in a majority, but it is generally not the stupid who rule over the
clever, but the cunning and unscrupulous; wolves are not averse to having a
fool as a figurehead pack leader.
“Those
who believe absurdities will commit atrocities,” said Voltaire. One has only
think of Marxism and Fascism to realise he was right.
Confucius
encountered a woman who had seen her three sons devoured by tigers. When he
asked her why she did not leave this remote region, she told him that there, at
least, she was safe from governmental misrule. Confucius then pointed out to
his disciples that bad government was worse than a tiger. He could have added
that, of all the forms of bad government, stupid government was one of the
commonest and the worst.
The
Arabs say, “When Allah gave you a fool’s mind, luckily for you, he also gave
you a fool’s face”. This is brilliantly insulting, for it implies that since
people can tell you are feeble-minded simply by looking at you, nobody will
expect you to act otherwise.
“When the Americans landed men on the moon, Brezhnev called in the
Soviet astronauts and informed them that he was going to go one better and out
them on the sun.
‘But Comrade Brezhnev,
we shall be incinerated!’ they cried, aghast.
Brezhnev was angry. ‘Do
you take me for a fool? Naturally, we shall land you there at night.’”
During
the latter years of the Soviet period, Soviet underground humour – the oral
equivalent of samizdat literature –
abounded in such jokes about the asinine stupidity of their leaders. This was a
sure sign that the regime was withering. Nobody ever joked about Stalin and
lived. Yet Stalin’s stupidities far exceeded Brezhnev’s. The enormity of the
catastrophes that befell the USSR
during Stalin’s rule, above all the catastrophe of the German invasion, can be
laid directly at Stalin’s door. For instance, had Stalin not removed all of the
thirty-mile deep Soviet border defences (the Stalin Line) as a preliminary to
his own projected invasion of the Third Reich, scheduled for late July 1941,
Hitler would probably never have dared to launch Operation Barbarossa in June
that year. Stalin’s stupidity killed around twenty-seven million Soviet
citizens and laid much of the country to waste.
People
did joke about Hitler’s stupidity, but only at the beginning of his reign. By
1939, there were no more jokes, for all those who had made them were either
dead or in concentration camps. This is an effective of ensuring that everyone
agrees you are intelligent, though it leads you to believe you are infallible. However,
Hitler was not stupid, but ignorant, as shown by his vacuous table-talk.
Intelligence
tests given to the Nazi leaders on trail at Nuremberg revealed that all of them were well
above average intelligence, with Hjalmar Schacht (Stanford-Binet 144) leading
the field. This goes some way to proving my earlier point about our being ruled
by wolves, not by fools. Schacht was intelligent enough never to have become
too incriminatingly involved with the Nazis. As a result, he was acquitted.
In
spite of being given endless warnings and good advice, my wife’s elderly and
pious aunt has spent her whole life throwing meat to her wolfish relatives, in
the vain hope that they will leave her sled alone. Once a rich woman, she is
now impoverished, but the wolves will not give up the chase until they have
stripped the very flesh from her bones. This is real stupidity, disguised as
‘turning the other cheek’ and ‘giving your cloak away as well as your jacket,’
as the New Testament advises. Christ
was not stupid, however; he was simply advising his followers on the only
feasible way to deal with their brutal Roman masters, hoping that they would
avoid the terrible fate he foresaw for them and the whole Jewish people.
Unfortunately, his sound counsel was misinterpreted as a general rule of
behaviour. In fact, such conduct can only be justified in exceptional
circumstances, like a Nazi or Roman occupation. Normally, it is suicidal. ‘An
eye for an eye,’ is much wiser advice, as game-theory has conclusively
demonstrated.
The
Taliban must surely go down as one of the stupidest ruling groups ever to have
existed, stupider even than those puritans who ruled Calvin’s Geneva and
Cromwell’s England, because more extreme and life-denying. To antagonize about
eighty percent of the population one is oppressing, including all the women, is
the height of idiocy. Notice that here, as always, stupidity allied itself
closely with megalomania – Afghanistan
was seen as invincible because protected by Allah – and cruelty.
The
new regime in Afghanistan
recently announced (December 2001) that it would not rule with the cruelty
shown by the Taliban. For example, those stoned to death for adultery would
henceforth be pelted with smaller stones, while the bodies of executed
criminals would be displayed in public for only fifteen minutes, not four days.
This announcement surely disproves the saying that one should be grateful for
small mercies. I expect the next decree will be that the starving who have
their hands cut off for stealing bread, as prescribed by Sharia law, will only
have to run ninety-five meters to a waiting doctor, not the usual one hundred.
Pol
Pot’s regime also combined stupidity with megalomania and cruelty. The central
aim of the Khmer Rouge was to reduce Cambodia
– renamed Kampuchea
– to a Marxist state with a medieval, peasant economy. “We are a model for the
whole world. Is there any other country that would have dared abolish money and
markets as we have?” boasted one Khmer Rouge cadre. They succeeded, thus
facilitating their own speedy overthrow by the modernizing Vietnamese.
The
megalomania of Pol Pot is well documented. His brother-in-law, Ieng Sary, said,
“Pol Pot thought he was an incomparable genius in military and economic
affairs, in hygiene, in song-writing, in music and dance, in cookery, in
fashion, and in everything else, even in the art of lying….Pol Pot though that
he was above everyone else on the planet. He was a god on earth." [1]
Hitler, Stalin and Mao harboured much the same illusions about themselves.
When
the Khmer Rouge came to power on 17 April 1975 (‘a day that should live in
infamy’), a Cambodian student of my acquaintance told me he was planning to
return to Democratic Kampuchea immediately, along with his wife and two
children, “to take part in the revolution”. Nothing I said could dissuade him
from his insane plan, especially since no one else in the university seemed to
think there was anything wrong with it. He dismissed all my warnings about the
Khmer Rouge as “capitalist propaganda”. Year later, I learnt that he and his
family had been sent to the Bung Tra Beck camp for “a study session” the day he
arrived in Cambodia. None of them survived, thanks to this man’s idealistic
stupidity.
Of
all the stupid actions of the Khmer Rouge, the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh was the
stupidest. Out of a total city population of some three million, 41.9 percent
perished. It was this evacuation that brought home the realities of the regime,
and turned public opinion, world-wide, against it.
The
Khmer Rouge had a mystical belief in the power of rice, which they saw as
almost sacred. Yet such was their incompetence, rice production fell so
drastically that, only one year after their seizing power, people were rationed
to four teaspoons of rice a day, if they could get it. By the time the regime
fell, at least 700,000 had starved to death. This brings to mind the bitter
Soviet joke: “What would happen if our
government took over the Sahara? Nothing, for
ten years. Then there’d be a shortage of sand.”
Some
academics in Western universities – notably in the USA,
Britain and, of course, in
France (the Khmer Rouge leaders had studied in Paris [2])
– were among the most vociferous supporters of the regime. I was not sure
whether to place this item under ‘Academia’ or ‘Stupidity’, before deciding
that it really did not make much difference either way. The Khmer Rouge
take-over came just in time to revive the hopes of these ideological idiots for
a real ‘people’s revolution’ for by 1975, after the horrors of the Cultural
Revolution, much of the glamour was beginning to wear off the Maoism they had
so fervently embraced. Anyone who questioned their glowing praise of the regime
was shouted down as a ‘fascist reactionary’. After all, they argued, as the
Dean mentioned earlier remarked to me, “Mass killing is necessary sometimes." [3]
This
century, the crown and sceptre of the realm of stupidity among leaders must go
to Mao, China’s
‘Great Helmsman’, who came close to destroying China, especially during the years
of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Some forty million
people paid with their lives for this man’s cruelty and stupidity, even while a
couple of billion others, in the West as well as in China, were stupidly extolling his
genius.
Were
the butcher generals of the First World War really as stupid as they are often
made out to be? I do not believe so, especially when one considers the German
generals, though a case might be made out for Haig. They were merely completely
indifferent to human life. “Every position must be held to the last man…”
ordered Haig, in 1918, and then was driven back to his chateau, caviar and
champagne.
I
long wanted to write a book about stupidity in history. However, I abandoned
the project in my thirties, realising that I would have to devote the rest of
my life to the subject, and even then would only have scratched the surface. I
never even considered writing a book on cruelty in history. Even in my teens I
knew that was a lifetime project for a large team of hard-working historians.
Like
the Kennedy assassination, the September 11 attack on the WTC and the Pentagon
has left many questions unanswered. How was it, for example, that only one of
the planes’ eight black boxes (two to each plane) were recovered, though they
are so designed as to be virtually indestructible? Why was the tail of Flight
93 found eight miles away from the crash site, when the plane was supposed to
have dived into the ground after a group of passengers diverted it from its
target? No crash could fling a tail eight miles! How could a passport of one of
the terrorists have miraculously survived the crash, to be found a couple of
blocks away from the WTC? Why did Bush tell us he saw the first plane crash into the tower on TV, when there is no TV record
of the impact? Why did Bush go on reading a story to primary school children
for twenty minutes after he was
informed of the attack? These and many other questions have never been
answered. It is only the stupidity and apathy of the general public that
permits the authorities to get away with an account that clearly bristles with
serious anomalies.
The
quintessential bureaucrat is surely the legendary official who set up a placard
on a Yorkshire moor, which read:
It is strictly forbidden to throw things at this
Notice.
Penalty 20 pounds.
By order.
This is a work of bureaucratic genius, masquerading
as stupidity. I like to imagine that it has been translated into 211 languages
and bureaucrats now come from all over the world to admire it. There may even
be talk of converting it into a shrine, under the little-known Council By-law
3196, section 14, subsection F, para. 3 (D). A cartload of stones, places
beside the notice for the benefit of natural anarchists, was used up in a
single Bank Holiday weekend last year, to the delight of the Council treasurer.
The
stupider people are, the more intelligent they believe themselves to be. The
same applies to the ugly, the incompetent and the malicious. Most of them
firmly believe they are the opposite of what they are in reality. Psychologists
have verified this unpalatable truth. All of us should find this sobering.
“I
have no enemies,” a clever young student told me once. “I get on well with
everyone”. In fact, James was heartily disliked – even hated – by most of his
classmates for his arrogance, competitiveness and ostentatious brilliance. Few
women of his age would ever have been naïve enough to believe they had no
enemies. Even highly intelligent men are often fools where human relations are
concerned.
Stupidity
is no bar to success, especially if one is a pop-star, a profession for which
one needs only a modicum of talent, since most popular music is now composed
and arranged by computers. George Harrison, whose recent death was treated like
the demise of the Pope or an American president, only composed one memorable
song [4]
(Something) in his life. He appears
to have been of subnormal intelligence, for he was not allowed to sit for his
GCSE, having gained zero in all subjects in his preliminary examination, except
for English in which his score was two per cent. Nevertheless, he was worth
over 200 million dollars when he died.
When truth conflicts
with intellectual fashion, truth loses. Fashion, not truth, rules the world and
fashions are set by idiots, as George Crabbe (1754-1832) observed in The Library:
Fashion, though Folly’s
child, and guide of fools,
Rules e’en the wisest,
and in learning rules.
[1]Phnom Penh Post, 2/9/96, p.7. Quoted in S.
Courtois et al. 1999. The Black Book of
Communism, CambridgeMass. And London, Harvard University Press, p.809.
[2] See Jerome Steinbach and Jocelyne Steinbach, 1976,
Cambodge, l’autre sourire, Paris, Editions Sociales.
[3] The facts were readily available by 1978, even to
those who did not read French, with the publication of Francois Ponchaud’s
devastating expose, Cambodia: Year Zero,
Harmondsworth, Penguin.
[4]My Sweet
Lord, though deservedly praised, seems to have been derived, unconsciously
or not, from another song, She’s So Fine.
A court case resulted in Harrison’s having to
pay costs and damages to the composers for plagiarism.
he
postmodern world is obsessed with sex. This obsession, ironically, springs
directly from modernism’s insistence on abolishing sexual repression. To have
replaced repression with obsession is hardly the liberation we were so
enthusiastically promised. There was, however, a reason for such obsession. In
a desacralized world, sex had become our
only hope for salvation. Sex was the Tao and the Tao was nothing but sex [1].
According to the Holy Writ proclaimed by Reich and others, only the Orgasm
could save us.
As Foucault has demonstrated [2],
Modernity’s preoccupation with sex as liberation goes back to the Romantics.
This is one of the reasons we may view modernism as ‘spilt Romanticism’. The
preceding Enlightenment had viewed sex quite differently, seeing the libido as
a flood which could at any time overwhelm the dikes which civilisation had
built to hold it in check.
So the eighteenth century
trivialised sex to disempower it, forgetting that Venus “toute entiere a sa
proie attachee,” will not be mocked and that orgasm (la petite mort) and death are closely linked. The goddess took her
revenge through the French Revolution. The statue of the Goddess of Reason
worshipped in Notre Dame was in reality that of Venus, who has dominated us
ever since.
“Love is just a system for getting
someone to call you darling after sex” (Julian Barnes). Still, it’s interesting
that after so many years of the sexual revolution, people should still want to
reserve the illusion of affection, even after a one-night stand.
It is said that Sophocles (c.496-406
BCE), when asked about his sex-life, reported that he was glad to be rid of it,
“as though he had escaped from a mad and savage master”. We should remember,
however, that this supposed conversation was reported by Plato (429-347 BCE) in
his Republic, (1, 329b), and Plato
has never struck anyone as being particularly interested in Eros. My own bet is
that Sophocles, who lived to at least ninety, would almost certainly have taken
Viagra, had it been available to him. The sexual drive is not so easily
mastered. Nor does old age much diminish its insistence.
Deficiencies in lexis reveal a lot
about a culture. For instance, English has only a medical term denoting the
clitoris. There is no common term for it, though within the last forty years or
so the word has come into more frequent use and so been abbreviated to ‘clit’.
In this deficiency, English differs from all other languages with which I am
acquainted. In French, for example, the slang term la praline (‘almond’) is in common use. There exists an English
term in the anti-language used by prostitutes (‘the man in the boat’), but this
clumsy metaphor could not have been used much or a simpler term would have been
devised. I have only once heard the latter expression used and that was on that
notoriously deviant show, South Park,
which specialises in breaking taboos. There is no trace of any term for
clitoris in Partridge’s monumental Dictionary
of the Underworld. No wonder the French though the English sexually clumsy
and naïve.
“Sex and drugs and rock and roll”,
to quote the title of a once popular
song (1977) by Ian Dury, have been the preoccupation of the young since the
sixties. Prior to that it was sex and alcohol and inanely lachrymose pop songs.
Plus ca change… The real difference
is that efficient contraception has made young women far readier to have sex,
generally with multiple partners. Drugs and rock and roll are often merely
preliminaries and subsidiaries to intercourse. The result is a welcome
lessening of sexual neurosis and a sharp rise in sexual diseases, from AIDS to
gonorrhea, syphilis, genital herpes and the now almost universal chlamydia. As
antibiotics lose their efficacy, we may yet return to a more puritanical era,
out of fear.
The puritanism and hypocrisy of
English society, even after the war, is almost unbelievable nowadays. In 1949,
on leave from my regiment and wearing uniform, I was ejected from a London city cinema for
refusing to take my arm from around my girlfriend’s shoulder. This was at a
time when prostitutes hung around outside such cinemas, with the tacit approval
of the management, who got a cut from their earnings. As William Empson
remarked, after reading of a similar incident, “It takes a lot of cold nerve to
live in a country like this”. Repression was still fighting a strong rearguard
action in England
until the sixties.
English Puritanism, however, was as
nothing compared with that of the Irish. In a Dublin dominated by priests and nuns you
would be unceremoniously thrown out of a pub full of uproarious drunks – some
of them priests – if your wife dared to sit on your knee because there were no
chairs available. Drunkenness was acceptable to the Church, while anything even
vaguely suggestive of sex, married or not, was anathema. A priest might vomit,
but never fornicate.
Ignorance of sex was widespread
among well-brought up young women, especially Roman Catholics, even in post-war
Britain.
In the late forties, an eighteen year old Catholic girl of my acquaintance
believed that babies were born through the navel, though how they got there she
did not know, except that it had something unmentionable to do with sin.
Presumably her honeymoon would have been spent like that of the Victorian
bride, who was found half-naked and hysterical on top of the wardrobe in her
hotel suite, screaming “Help me! My husband has gone raving mad!”
Today we have swung to the other
extreme. My fifteen-year-old-niece, a pupil at a prestigious private school,
told me the other day that her class had spent a boring afternoon fitting
flavoured condoms onto carrots in a sex education class. It was perhaps one of
her classmates, a well-groomed young lady sitting at the next table to me in a
smart beach café, who was wearing a tee shirt bearing the slogan, ‘A stork brings babies; a swallow brings no
babies’. Fifty years ago she could also have displayed this enlightening
message without fear of censure, for only a prostitute would have understood
it.
In the space of thirty years or so,
attitudes to sex have changed dramatically throughout Europe, but especially in
Britain.
A survey of December 2001 revealed that over twenty-fiver percent of British
women had sex regularly in cars, while one in three had enjoyed intercourse in
the back of taxis. Such behaviour is not confined to Britain. Over thirty per cent of
Swedes revealed that their favourite place for sex was in public places or on
public transport. European society is reverting to types of sexual behaviour
not seen since the eighteenth century, though in that era the women involved
were almost invariable prostitutes. Boswell’s London Journal (1753) has some graphic entries describing his
encounters with “shilling girls” in the alleys and back streets of London. During the French
Revolution, especially in its early years, sexual license became extreme, as it
generally does in societies menaced by mass death. Contemporary observers
commented on both the revealing nature of women’s fashions, which utilized
transparent or semi-transparent materials, and the abandoned sexual behaviour
apparent in all classes. It could be that, subconsciously, people feel that we
too are moving inexorably towards some sort of cataclysm and are changing their
sexual habits accordingly.
The cataclysm itself may well be
sexual. Pandemics of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) invariably accompany
sexual license. In the space of twenty years, AIDS has now become the fourth
largest cause of mortality, worldwide, with over forty million people infected
by the end of 2001, one third of whom are aged between fifteen and twenty-four.
In the third world, heterosexual sex has no become the main means of
transmission, in contrast to the industrialized nations where homosexual sex is
the predominant vector. Africa is by far the
worst affected region, for Africans account for almost seventy-five percent of
all cases of AIDS. Elsewhere, AIDS is also growing exponentially, especially in
China, India and countries of the former Soviet Union. The miniscule strip of RNA that constitutes
this virus has a tropism about one thousand times greater than the influenza
virus, which means that it is almost impossible to control it, let alone
destroy it, since it mutates so rapidly. Since we can barely keep up with the
mutations of the latter, how can we hope to keep up with the mutations of the
former? AIDS is turning out to be the most deadly killer the human race has
encountered, with the possible exception of malaria, which has killed about one
person in four, so it is estimated, since the emergence of our species. Should
it eventually mutate to an aerosol form – which is not impossible – it might
well exterminate the whole human race. In spite of this, there is still
widespread apathy about AIDS. In the majority of countries, it is not even a
notifiable disease. As a species, we have still not learnt to think globally,
still less think exponentially, in the face of looming threats to our
existence. Our collective inability to do so may yet bring about the end.
I still wince when I hear teenage
girls using language which was once employed only by drunken servicemen and
whores. In 1949, I recall attending a dinner party at my girlfriend’s, hosted
by her primly conventional parents, in the course of which her sixteen year old
younger sister, Jacinta, told me that someone had scrawled a four-letter word
on the walls of her convent school. “What does ‘Fuck’ mean?” she asked,
curiously. I broke the Arctic silence that followed by explaining that this was
a dialect form of ‘yuck’, probably scrawled there by bowler-hatted and
belligerent Orangemen to express their distaste for Papists. I was just
silently congratulating myself on my ingenuity when the Irish maid brought in
the second course.
“Oh,
fuck!” exclaimed Jacinta. “I hate broccoli!”
The
crash of china as the horrified maid dropped the tureen helped cover the
resulting confusion. It was a long time before I was invited to dinner again.
[1] Oddly, this doctrine had been
proclaimed in China, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries of our era, by
a sect which read the Dao De Jing as
a treatise on sexual hygiene. The close connections between sex and Taoism are
well documented.
[2] See M. Foucault, 1978, The History of Sexuality, vol.1, N.Y:
Random House.
