Train Stations and Petrol Stations

The mysteries of nature are nothing compared with the mysteries of the city. Not the least is the insoluble riddle of the petrol station. It is the culmination of one vast chain of evolution, that stretches back to the first lumpish cairns that our distant ancestors called home. It is the polished product, the masterpiece, of expedient ugliness. For any serious thinker who has time to spare from visiting the orphan and the widow, and so forth, it is the amongst the most momentous moral crises imaginable.

I hesitate to call the average petrol station ugly without qualification – and that for two reasons. In the first place, it is not positively ugly. It lacks all beauty; provided it is not too run down, that is its only aesthetic fault. It is far in arrears of the obscenities that modern sculpture has proven itself capable of. It is not, like an ancient toad, so ugly as to cause extasies of delight. It may be nothing more offensive than a concrete slab, with a rectangular canopy, and a worn down block of a building brimming from inside with plastic wrappers, plastic items, and ill-coordinated advertisements.

This last part is promising. In an old bookshop, or a record room, the abundance of random, disorganised, even clashing material may produce something akin to beauty. In all things human unstudied opulence produces a grand effect. But not in the petrol station: except in the smallest specimens, there is just enough room to deflate the energy of the superabundance of cheap materials.

What is worse: there is nothing venerable or grandiose in a petrol station. There were people who said, a hundred years ago, that a steam train, or a railway station, was ugly. And yet, there is a savage majesty in what Chesterton called the ‘shrieking steeds of flood and fire’. The truth is, whatever you think of the old smoke-belching burner school of industrialism, it was not wholly without poetic value. Even Tolkien put it to good use, if only in Isengard. But then, the old industrialism really did have something impressive about it: flashing lights, fire and coal, billowing smoke worthy of the fisherman’s genie, and noise like the demons in hell! These the petrol station does not have – except the coloured lights; and without the accompanying stage effects, these tend to seem fairly naked and bare. In the railway station there was nature in a thousand disguised forms – brown bricks and cavernous shadows, besides all the elemental chaos of the train itself. The very rust on the beams was like the crown of age. It is hard to find the parallels in a petrol station.

We are subjecting the poor petrol station to a thorough patdown now, I am afraid, but we have started and must continue. Replace the concrete slab with a grassy meadow, and at once you have something to work with. The pumps, the canopy, the little box-office booth, take on a new and alien aspect. Or put steel vaulting in the canopy, let it suggest the roof of a cathedral, only rusty and riveted: the battling forces add dignity to the whole construction. Let the booth be made of bricks – or fill it with paper wrappers and warm lighting – or top it with a triangular roof – any of these things would relieve the sterile artificiality of the petrol station.

Here then is the dilemma. Some time ago we used to build rough little huts of rocks, and they doubtless were not the prettiest things in their surroundings. I imagine the curmudgeonly old cavemen in those days used to criticise the disgusting fad for squares and rectangles, that found no parallel in the natural world. But love for humanity triumphed; now even the crude cottage is beautiful to us. A little later on our powers over nature increased. We learnt how to abstract it, twist it to new purposes. Perhaps this started with bronze casting. For while chipped rocks may be found everywhere you turn your eyes, and even weaving of a sort may be found in birds’ nests, bronze statues really have no parallel in nature. Wherever it started, it ended in iron girders and belching kilns, and once again, humanity protested, but humanity also came to love it. There were luddites who smashed machines, but there were also those who loved even bleak London itself as home and as human. But now we have passed on from there; we are able not only to transform nature, but even to eliminate it. I believe the turning point this time was the invention of plastic; but for the most part it is simply improvement of the previous stage that makes the difference. The difference made, for instance, by replacing cobbles with paving, windows with whole walls of glass, by eliminating dados and wallpapers and arches and façades, by replacing beige and brown with pure white, is critical. And critical too are we, or a fair few of us, at any rate. But perhaps here too our love of all that is human – our love of all that is artificial – could triumph again. Perhaps the true mark of a great and humane soul today is that it feels a thrill of pleasure at the sight of a petrol station.

Latin and its Champions

How I ended up being cornered in a schoolyard by a teacher over that formidable fossil Latin, is a strange tale, and not one I intend to tell; suffice to say I undertook to defend that antiquity in the capacity of a bystander, not being properly a Latin teacher myself, but honoured to have taught a moderate minting of Latin these past few years; and suffice it to say that I was interrogated in the capacity of precisely that office I lay no claim to, that of a Latin teacher. Nevertheless my antagonist discovering that I might be buttonholed by that name proceeded to buttonhole me roundly and tactlessly, to the tune of, ‘Oh, Latin… but what will they – do with it?’

To which question there are any number of well-bruited answers, so that one would begin to wonder why people still ask it, were not those answers invariably rather poor. They dry in the mouth; I lay at their door half the antics of the anti-antiquarians of the world. Indeed, I believe any standard reason to learn Latin is as good as a reason not to trust Latinists. Hence I begin my explanation of ‘What They Will Do With It’ with a little polite altercation against the champions of Latin themselves.

The truth is they are so very amiable and concessive that they begin their defence with a frank admission that Latin is indefensible. They make it clear from the outset that no one would learn Latin if it did not help them with a thousand other things, like music and maths and science and sociology, which they readily allow, in keeping with their preposterous politeness, need no justification. Of course everyone ought to learn maths – such is their supposal; and as Latin will help them on their way, they might as well learn it too. But why it is more useful to learn maths than to learn Latin remains a mystery to me.

They have reached a truly precipitous angle of argument by the time they suggest that if you learn Latin you will find it easier to learn Italian; as if anyone could choke down the idea that it is easier to learn two languages than one. However good that tried and tested operation might be, the argument is a bad one; and to bang into a bad argument before the door is half open is a sure sign that all the good arguments are out to stroll. Things are desperate if one of the leading reasons to learn a particular language is that it might help you with another language. But that is how the defendants of Latin argue; though no Italian enthusiast would rush to assure us that the study of Italian is the most excellent preparation for the study of Latin. The golden rule of Latinism is that Latin must be taught so that the poor students can learn anything and everything but Latin itself.

What is remarkable is that the teachers of French and Japanese do not fiddle such a saltarello. Even teachers of drama and art are not so disoriented. And especially not the teachers of physics and maths, who would rebuff any inquiry into the value of their subjects out of hand. And yet it would perfectly satisfy the cannons of logic and learning for the Latin teacher to respond, ‘Why, they will do with Latin exactly the same thing as they will do with drama and with physics. But pray, do remind me what that is?’

As is, there is an incumbency upon the Latin teacher to come up with some absurd scaffolding of motives that has nothing to do with Latin; you must say something silly in its defence simply to satisfy expectations. Latin, you must say, is good training for your brain. It improves the precision of the mind and trains one to think analytically. It expands one’s knowledge of English, teaching all sorts of elephantine words of erudition that will significantly increase one’s employability. Latin is the ancestor of the French, Romanian, and Spanish languages, so if you have any intention of learning them you ought to learn Latin; and it will help you to understand musical terms. – And these arguments all stumble on the selfsame block. It is far easier to learn Spanish and French than to learn Spanish, French, and Latin; and it is far, far easier to learn musical terminology than to learn Latin. What is most absurd is that it is all quite beside the point, off cue, and entirely unrelated to the topic in hand. We are not discussing brain-training or approaches to music; we are discussing Latin. Now call in the home ec. teacher; wind them the same way. “How could you doubt that cooking is a most useful skill to learn? It teaches innumerable invaluable life skills! Where to start! It teaches patience and precision, caution and creativity, ensuring beyond a shadow of doubt employment in a high-paying profession. It is the surest gateway to a deeper study of chemistry and minerology, and how could you approach the biology of beef without knowing how to cook it?”

But of course the truth is they taught us cooking for only one reason – so that we could cook. And I would venture to suggest that amidst all the innumerable absurdities of Latin apologetics, there really is one good reason why a child might be taught Latin – so that they can understand Latin. Dispel, please, any illusions about cooking being an essential life skill, and Latin not. Cooking is an art, and Latin is no less. But if you want a more even comparison, French will do. People do not learn French because they will ever need it, but because they are interested to know it; because it is natural for people to be curious. The only reason we see Latin in a different light from French is that somewhere down the line someone decided that French is ‘a good thing’ and did a much better job at persuading the world than did the purveyors of Latin.

Thus it comes to pass that this feeling of doubt about the value of Latin is no less common amongst those who learnt it than it is amongst those who praise… no one – that they were spared that. Which is a grievous issue; for they have something valuable without knowing that it is valuable. And all the while it requires no profound revolution to overturn this doubt – just the modest claim that Latin is itself something good.

Which we claim. And for that very reason we defy the world to prove that it is useful. For here is a strange and hoary truth: the good and the useful are opposite and incompatible. God is good; for that very reason it is the rankest irreverence to assert that God is useful. Something is useful if it helps you get to something good, but if something is truly good it ought to be appreciated in its own right, not for what it gets you. And though we sometimes call things ‘good’ when we simply mean they are useful, it would be senseless to call something ‘useful’ if we truly believed it was good. As soon as they start explaining that it is useful to learn Latin they insinuate that Latin is not worth learning for its own sake. And this is not merely a matter of misevaluation. It is fatal to any genuine understanding of Latin.

It is like when people offer reasons for reading story books by explaining how reading stories is good for you. At best, if they succeed, they will cause an unwilling reader to sit down with a book in an exceptionally unfavourable state of mind to try and gain profit from something they should  be instinctively enjoying or ignoring altogether. The defenders of fiction betray their cause from the outset, for no amount of morality and psychology really justifies reading stories, since stories should need no justification. If someone suggests to me that we should stop telling stories or reading them, I do not argue with them: I simply smile and ask them why. We are in different worlds; there can be no real argument. Again, if someone were to tell me that music is unprofitable or that it is a drain on the economy or that it fosters gross sentimentalism, why would I argue with them? They could prove their point as comprehensively as possible, and they would not have scathed my interest in music in the slightest. Now there is just as much reason to learn Latin as there is to read stories or to play the cello.

To stand on the balcony and cry out that Latin is useful is to guarantee that you do not think it is good absolutely, and that you have little interest in it in its own right. This is not scholastic logic-chopping; it is an issue as live as our twelve-year olds. For our whole educational system is built on the assumption that skill or knowledge of any kind is good; and our generation, not stopping even  to question whether skill and knowledge are good, have rushed straight to the extreme of asserting on a case by case basis that they are useful. The axe is laid to the beanstalk; and as smoke follows fire the giant must come down.

This is the kind of issue one takes a stand on; and many have. It turns out that in select circles you are not expected to promenade any rickety reasonings in defence of the Roman cause. You may simply remind the dear sectarians that knowledge is not power, it is pleasure and dignity, valuable in and of itself. There are even writers with the good sense to declare that it is democratic to spread such useless knowledge amongst the masses, and oligarchic to feed them only what serves their prospects and pockets. This attitude I consider admirable and sound; except on one small count – that I would not go so far as to say that knowledge is invariably good.

Not, that is, that there are things it is bad to know; but there are priorities. A kindly fool might very nobly provide for their own ignorance for fear of becoming a know-it-all; and a knave might search out all the secrets of science in the interests of self-aggrandisement. I prefer the fool. There is one absolute, and everything else below takes its station on Jacob’s ladder: and on it character ranks higher than knowledge. It might be a very fine thing to know a lot – if in knowing a lot I am also a very fine person. The chief and head of my quarrel with both the critics and defenders of Latin is that they are not interested in Latin for its own sake; and the reason is that care more about success than about character. The one says ‘what will they do with Latin?’ and the other says, ‘they will do many great marvels with their Latin, and become very successful’. The critics do not say, ‘They will learn Latin and become pompous imperialists’ – would that they did. Would that they said, ‘At all costs they must not learn Latin: it will convert them to Christianity’. Then at least they would be dealing with the real issue at stake: the issue of character. As is, they are cut from the cloth of the world, concerned primarily with efficiency and business. And the defenders of Latin, who should be monkish medievalists talking about nothing but virtue and tradition, are all too happy to skip across the Lethe and meet them on their own ground. I myself would answer those pinstripe pragmatists whose only thought is their spreadsheets in this manner:

“You, sir, believe in the romance of success. You think the finest thing in life is to be a millionaire, and live every minute of your materialistic life in the public eye. Or maybe I have mistaken you; maybe you merely think that to own a large house and drink beers around a barbeque is the closest modern approximation of the earthly paradise. I admire you for that; you are like a character from a story – though I am afraid to say, not likely the hero. I too would like to be a character in a story, but a different one: Nestor, who had seen two generations come and go and now ruled over a third; or Gandalf, or a book-learned sage. I would much rather be the man with the wisdom of the years who can give good counsel and a seasonable word. And today my seasonable word is that learning Latin does not make a man successful like you, and I would be a truant and a villain to pretend that it does. It does not make a man smarter or richer or even wiser, though a wise man might fall in love with it. If you are asking why you should learn Latin, then I suppose you should not. If you are asking why I think everyone should learn Latin, I assure you that I do not. But some people should; and they should need no other justification than that such is the sort of person they want to be. Such knowledge is like art: we seek to know things because it is adventurous and romantic to be wise. Yes – it is as a romantic that I prize my knowledge of Latin. The romantic in me loves to converse on equal terms with all those dazzling generals and cruel emperors and saints and poets from ages long past. The romantic in me loves to poke my nose into the monasteries and castles of the Middle Age. That is why I am mortified at the thought of answering you on your own terms; not for anything would I sink so low as to explain to you the intellectual or social advantages of learning Latin. I would rather down-sell it, alas: one day I fear I will be caught desperately assuring you that learning Latin reduces one’s employability to practically nothing and plunges one into certain poverty, just to prove that there doesn’t need to be the slightest sliver of a practical reason for learning it. It is perfectly right and healthy to want to be wise, if that means knowing the jokes that the old Kings of France used to crack with their courtiers or roaring out the glorious pomp of the old Latin hymns; and it is perfectly wicked to stunt the development of that desire. I admit, I must (regrettably) confess that learning Latin has stood me in good stead and brought me many tangible benefits. But with joy I may reassure you that it has also taught me to prize that a poor pittance in the scheme of things.”

Those would be my reasons for promoting Latin. And yet, when I talk of wisdom and knowledge I do not mean to imply that to choose to learn Latin is to choose to be an intellectual. If we assume that it is we are once again guilty of giving special treatment to the poor antiquity. Every other language is quite reasonably viewed as an induction into a culture; while Latin is supposed to be an induction into college. This is rather silly; to learn Latin is to Romanise oneself, and once you have leapt the hurdle of learning Latin you may be as anti-intellectual as you like and still be a Roman. You may be a Latin laundryman as easily as a English laundryman.

Now it is a peculiar circumstance that for the last fifteen hundred years nearly no one has been born Roman. It is the one culture that is entirely composed of proselytes. For the Roman Empire was so powerful that it managed to outlive itself and reach its acme after its own demise. Most of the greatest Romans came onto the scene when the Romans were no more. That is why, incidentally, it misses the mark so widely to say that Latin is a dead language, for what we call ‘dead’ is the very definition of life for Latin. And this shows, for however ‘dead’ Latin may be it is continually putting  a word in; and the more dead it is the more boomingly audible its words are. Vast multitudes who do not understand more than a couple of phrases in Latin understand Latin itself; even if they understand only that it is the language of ceremonious Catholicism, that it is a gaudy and pompous language, and that it wears robes and crosses. And they understand that it is dead – which makes it very much alive. Most people don’t realise that Hurrian and Urartic and Syriac are dead.

This is very peculiar; but part of the pact for posthumous languages is that they must be taught, or they really will die. There is no such sense of urgency in the teaching of French; no one feels that if Australians and Americans stopped learning French the French millions would evaporate and France would be no more. But the question of Latin on the curriculum genuinely is a question of cultural genocide; and what we are really asking is, do we have a reason to want to preserve Roman culture, or should we give it the slip and let it go the way of all flesh?

Naturally the first to stand up in its defence will be the Latinists themselves. They need have no other motive than patriotism. We would despise a Spaniard or Russian who was willing to watch the demise of his nation without lifting a finger, and there is every reason why we should champion a Latinist who will not take the decline of Latin lying down. The Spaniard and the Russian pass their culture on to their children, the Latinists to theirs. The peculiarity that Spain and Russia are bred in the blood and tell in the hair and eyes, while Latin is taught in schools and universities instead, does not affect that principle. That people do not think of the matter in these terms may be justly blamed on the intellectualist approach of the advocates and adversaries of Latin, who would rather argue about the intellectual effects of learning the language, than the moral effects of entering the culture. But we ought to be wise enough to realise that this is broad humour at best; for from a worldfull of languages we know that it is absurd to judge a language primarily on its intellectual effects, and Latin is a language. Have you ever weighed the intellectual (not cultural) effects of learning Chinese against the intellectual effects of learning Arabic? That is not how these things work. Everyone knows that.

I take issue with those, whether Latinists or not, who march around trumpeting that Latin is a perfect language, or that it is composed of grammar triple-concentrate, or that it is more useful than Arabic and more intellectual than Chinese. None of these things are true; it remains the case that Latin is our language and we will fight to defend it.

Besides the patriotism of Latinists, it is my hope that, so to speak, the new world will come to the aid of the old. A candid generosity in me hopes that, were the old foe France on the brink of extinction, England would find in her some steel nerve of magnanimity and snatch her from the fire. Or that were England herself in mortal peril, she might plead with Scotland, and for all her crimes be not refused. For if England perished the whole world would feel it; and Scotland most of all. We hate our neighbours most nearly; but unbeknown sometimes even to ourselves we also love them most nearly. And it is a fact that the culture of the Roman tongue, in its way a global subculture, has been the nearest neighbour to, at the very least, every Western nation, for well over a thousand years. If there is still an ounce of nobility in them they would at the least be sorry to see her go.

These are reasons I think the world ought to defend Latin if it is in danger. But happily I can conclude by saying that Latin is not in danger; that it is still taught in schools and colleges, still spoken, if only in Rome and Oxford, and still honoured and abused as much as any living language in the world. We are not yet desperate enough to hedge it with any scrap of sophistry. But we must understand properly what it stands for, and that, we must take the effort to learn it.

Art – A Fable.

Once upon a time there was a well-dressed and intellectually cultivated civil servant named M. Mortimer. He lived a comfortable life, and was well provided with every luxury the modern world affords to people disinclined to question the ethicality of aristocracy. He was remarkable for two things; which were, his unremarkable life, and the astonishing circumstances of his death.

You see, it is a peculiarity of the uppermost echelons of society that they flatten a man’s personality in equal measure as they round his physique; and M. Mortimer was indeed very round, so it stands to reason that he was also very flat. He delighted to let his tongue run away with him at elegant soirées, and would discourse upon every subject under the sun in such a way that everyone quickly came to recon him eminent and distinguished, and no one remembered a word he had said. His loquacity was unbounded; and still I regret to inform you that I cannot remember so much as the topic or tone of a single one of his declamations – always excepting one unforgettable incident which I shall return to soon. But I can speculate. I imagine he talked about the comparative merits of nuclear energy and wind turbines. I imagine he talked about finances and fiscal integrity. I imagine he talked about liberalism and conservatism, and the president of the United States, and about wars in the Middle East, and the evident evils of socialism, and the evident merits of capitalism, and the unhappiness of our own capitalist society. On any one of these topics, he would have expressed a thousand pretty sentiments and perfect distinctions that you have heard so many times that they would go straight over your head for sheer predictability. I assume these must have been the kinds of things he talked about; because it was a similarly stale topic that he was talking about the one time his conversation rose from mere cold perfection to true memorability. It was in the crystalline living room of Madame N., a faux-French marchioness who claimed to have come over as a refugée from the Revolution – the chronology of her story is confessedly muddled; it is after all the 21st century – though she had somehow risen to the pinnacle of material splendour since. She lived in a palace of a house in H–––shire: everything in it was exquisitely expensive. The door knocker was made of solid gold – frequently stolen and frequently replaced – the door of ebony, the windows were stained with subtle patterns and blendings, the window ledges were made of marble. Her coffee table must have been two hundred years old, golden, enameled, dazzling: her floor was a dizzying tangle of Mozarabic lacework: the ceiling rose in fathomless arches and vaulted above the heads of the guests in a most dizzying manner. The very tea seemed to glitter; and altogether it was the seventh heaven of human achievement. To this palatial abode Madame N. had invited everyone of note in England, including government ministers and millionaires and distinguished foreigners of all kinds. She had even invited the king, though he had declined to attend. And there in the midst stood M. Mortimer, surrounded by a ring of guests under an indescribable chandelier that hung over his head as India hangs over the empty oceans; and I need not tell you what he was doing. “Art!” he cried – though even on this instance, his words were not entirely memorable: I merely approximate – “Art!” (He swung his majestic jowl across the room, glancing passionately at the phials and astrolabes and fretwork and finery that surrounded him on every side) “Art! What is it? Since the dawn of time men have been asking this question. Since first our simian ancestors swung low from their arboreal mounts to grace the earth we hold so dear, this postulation has been posed, and this query has been questioned. For art is something mysterious; it is something ineffable; it is something inexpressible; it is something supreme and sublime. For what is art, after all, but a spark of divinity lighted upon a humble speck of dust, blossoming into beauty? What is art, I say, but the breath of an archangel wafting unexpectedly through the minds of mortals? What is art, but-” Here he was distracted by a oily looking Romanian guest, who cut in quietly, with a thick accent, “Eh, bot what this, this ‘ard’?” At once M. Mortimer’s face lit up and his mouth gaped with promise – for a moment; then it faltered, and the glow in his cheeks dissipated, and his eloquence was gone. “Why, it’s just a word for – why, everyone knows what ‘art’ means; I was just explaining what it’s like. For to what shall I compare it? Shall I –” But if he had hoped to resume his ecstatic expostulations, he was disappointed, for as it so happened, there were six Romanian guests, huddled over what appeared to be the remnants of an antique toaster – they were perhaps the oddest element of this otherwise high-brow assemblage; and the remaining five, taking courage from their companion, chorused implacably, “No, what this mean, what ‘art’ mean?” And M. Mortimer, with a sinking feeling, saw that five hundred pairs of eyes were glued on him, big with expectation and determined to see how he would answer his Romanian antagonists. There was no getting around it. “Well,” he began, beads of sweat already forming on his ample brow as in his mind he threw up clouds of words in search of a simple answer to the question – “art is of course the act of creating something…”

Here one of the Romanians cried out with gleeful relief, “Oh, that me, I make toaster! I make lots toaster for everyone!” and, to everyone’s surprise, began pulling greasy toasters of all sizes and states of completion out of his voluminous travelling cloak, lining them up on the golden coffee table and even holding them up for the admiration of the other guests. No one had expected this: they would surely have been offended had they not been so thrown by it.

 “…creatively!” boomed M. Mortimer, who sensed that he was beginning to lose the attention of his audience. “It must be done with originality; and it must be done for no other purpose than pleasure and delight,” but the audience had begun to sense the humour of his position, and one pert young lady cut in, “Ah, so I suppose this simple table here is not art; it was made to keep our cups off the floor.”

Everyone laughed. M. Mortimer went a shade redder. “W-well no, it’s not that simple; there is an aesthetic dimension to the table too; and anyhow, it is art because it is beautiful, anything beautiful is art – beauty is art” (he was trying to regain conviction with these lapidic apothegms.) But in came another impertinent interloper with his hand swinging out the window into the cool night air, “Say, but is that cloud out there art?” With considerable difficulty, M. Mortimer lumbered through the crowd to the window and stuck his head out. There was a pause, and then a muffled voice of cold precision came back over his shoulder – “It’s… a cloud.”

“Well I think it’s exquisite.”

“I think it’s fair to say that it is a distinctly unremarkable cloud.”

“You think so? Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

“This is silly. If you want. If you think it’s beautiful call it art.”

“Then I say, in my eyes those toasters are -“

“NOT ART!” boomed M. Mortimer, wrestling valiantly with the marbled window frame before extracting himself with an almighty sound of cracking marble and a cataclysm of fragmented glass.

 “Well why not?”

“BECAUSE THEY’RE BLUMIN’ TOASTERS!”

“And why should that matter?”

“BECAUSE…. BECAUSE…” His face was now as red as a Bolshevik flag, and no less menacing. He seemed to rise into the air in a rage, and unclear clarificatory words began to spill from his mouth like foam from the jaws of a rabid dog. The guests surged back from around him, as though he were about to explode. He seemed to swell and rise high into the air, until – the bubble burst, and he collapsed with an terrifying howl of, “Holy saint Isidore, pray for meeeeee!”

At once he melted into a puddle of flesh on the floor, his cry trailing off into a wail, until it broke upon a sob. For the first time that stupendous soul had stumbled upon a topic that no one really understands, and had been argued out of countenance. It had ruined him utterly.

How that soirée ended I do quite remember. Everyone was somewhat dazed; we must have slowly filtered out. For the next few days we heard nothing about M. Mortimer. We did not know even whether he was dead or alive. We got on with our business, and tried not to think when the next big event might be. The soirée was on Saturday. On Thursday a rumour flew through the market places and halls that M. Mortimer, that most respectable and worldly of bulks, had become a monk. A grosser absurdity could not be imagined: no one believed it, of course, but everyone repeated it. The most surprising thing, however, was that two days later, the news was actually confirmed, by an utterly indubitable witness. It was no joke; the man really was fasting and praying in a little stone cell over in the next village. The word reached every ear in town in no time, and people who had no business in the market began to appear without a word of explanation. By mid-afternoon everyone in the town was in the public square, murmuring to each other in whispers, with the kind of gloomy expressions and sombre silence that precede or follow an important funeral. We set out, en masse, at about four o’clock – no one needed to ask where we were going. At about seven, after three hours of walking, we found the monastery, and were let in, all two hundred, by the shell-shocked abbot. We walked tersely through the stone corridors until we found the right door. Those of us who were lucky enough to squeeze our heads into it saw what can only be described as the wreckage of a colossus. A cold, stone room, with nothing but a stone bed and an unglazed window for furbishings; and him in the midst. This was high society itself, abject and in horsehair. Seven days had done much to alter him. He who was the veriest bullfrog of a gentleman was now as lean as a rake; his cloths hung limp from his emaciated clavicles and cascaded from his too distinct spine. His cheeks were so sunken you could see down to purgatory through them, and his famous jowl was now nothing more than a cavity above the angular line of his jawbone. All about him were strewn open books, of all shapes and sizes, all colours and descriptions. They were dictionaries. And every one of them was opened to the same page: somewhere towards the end of the letter ‘A’; and every one of them was covered in red crosses and strikethroughs and interminable footnotes. M. Mortimer did not seem to notice us as we entered. He was kneeling in an awkward stoop with his eyes closed praying; and  his lips moving faintly and painfully, as though he had not drunk water for many days. His breathing was rough, and his skin of his face was deathly pale and grievously contorted. So little life was left in him a solemnity seemed to sanctify the whole room; and for a while it completely escaped my mind that two hundred people were crowded behind me. We stood there and watched, and God knows what each man felt in his own heart. The sun set and no one saw it. Still he struggled through his silent prayer. Some time later his lips stopped moving altogether; and though he did not slump or jerk, we all knew that the soul had left this penitent son of the world for good. Many hours later we quietly dispersed.

In our village we tell this story seldom, and to very few. But whenever we tell it we always confess, as thought it were an article of faith, that that last harrowed breath that left those lips carried with it on silent wings to the winds one single, deafening monosyllable – Art.

History and Historians

I have discovered a lurking monster in the minds of the semi-academic people who popularise history. The assumption is so enormous and so absurd that I cannot describe it as anything else; for when one cannot make a head or tail of something, it may have a hundred heads and a thousand tails. Indeed, its great bellowing vaunt is that it does have a thousand tales; and the only reason I am bold enough to oppose it is that I know of a monster that has a Thousand and One. The assumption is this: that history is about people. You will see the veneer of plausibility that has lured the best minds of our age to their ideological destruction. It is true that occasionally, when the moon is blue and restless seas foam against far cliffs, an individual will rise from the dark like an omen and stride mysteriously across the page of history. It is true that these moments often seem to be the most exciting moments; and even the most important. Likewise there come upon us inexplicable moods where it seems for all the world as though people were the most important thing in the present. For a moment one is ready to gamble the stars for the face of a man or a woman. The whole universe seems slighter than a hair on a human head, and nothing that has happened in the past matters the slightest bit when compared to the people it happened to. This mood, confirmed and preserved, represents the basic assumption of the popular historians of our day. Like all who write for the common folk, they are mystics. And every human being on the planet is a mystic – including the person who said to me but of late, ‘I do not believe in dreams’ – so I myself cannot reply on any but mystical grounds. For it seems to me that there is one thing in the universe that is, on any reasonable philosophy, more important than people: and that is other people. I too would toss away galaxies and nebulae for the sake of a person, if I could; but I would cast off at least one particular person’s soul for the sake of other people’s souls. Let me lord it over creation, which in all its immensity is but a puppet theatre for my imagination; but as soon as the merest stranger drops something, I will prostrate myself to pick it up. Were I the fiercest democrat, who would rather yield my head than tip it to a king, I would bow without blinking before a clumsy bumbler. I will annihilate the most vividly present personality I know for the sake of another person I do not know. They are a heartless individual who would never do the same; and yet even them, we tolerate, because they fall under that sacred category of ‘other people’. To say that altruism is more important than individuals perhaps allows too much to the treacherous Latin language; but at any rate it is more important to be personable than to be a person, or to be selfless than to be a self.

This is a matter of high philosophy, and I shall have to leave it there. With regard to the present, one thing is more important than people, and that is the love of people. But with regard to history, we can take it further, and say that there are so many things more important than people that people are but the smallest part. One day someone will prove this by writing a biography that is strictly and entirely biographical: that is, it says nothing that is not directly and entirely about its hero. I envisage it as a kind of narrative medical report, detailing all the vicissitudes of the protagonist’s material fortunes, and, if the author is of a speculative cast, some guesses at their introspective reflections too. Every inch of height, every case of the flu, every exertion, would be carefully catalogued, until, with laconic triumph, the writer writes, ‘Then Abraham Lincoln died’. Then they will quietly shelve their pen. What this exercise would prove, I suppose, is that the life of Abraham Lincoln is about as relevant to Abraham Lincoln as the price of peas. Until the biographer starts wandering into the topics of liberty and valour and America, or at the very least finance and fighting, the Life of Abraham Lincoln is dead. It is senseless to write a book entirely about Abraham Lincoln, when Abraham Lincoln was entirely about politics and powers and the policies he pursued. The point is general: history cannot be entirely about people when people are entirely about everything else. The proposition that history is all about people collapses in on itself – and great is its implosion. If it is true, then history is as much about people’s ideals and ideas and dreams and nightmares as about their lives. Their lives pale in comparison with their speculations and imaginations. Heaven and hell can scarce contain all the vast heavens and hells than have sprung from the mind of man. Thus my gripe against the popular historians – against whom I have nothing else, for my shelves are full of their work – is that they have sold us short by giving us nothing but the small talk of history; who won what battle and whether the Romans ate fish. They will tell us all about the people who did not find El Dorado, and what they wore and how they felt when they set out and how they felt when they returned; but they will not tell us about the El Dorado people did not find. All this is about as good as the Morte D’Arthur without the Holy Grail. El Dorado is the truth of the matter: the people, by their own account, are the mere accidents of history. For though, on the deck of the Atlantic ship, or in the fatal chaos of a final battle, a conquistador might think of his career, what he did of good and ill, what he achieved or failed to achieve, that is but the froth of the matter. When in the darkness of the forest, by their lonely fire, their eyes glowed red with the greed of gold, and the spectre of shimmering walls and blinding streams rose up before them, they hit the heart of the matter. Their disappointment was not half so vast as their dream: and if it was, it must have been far more vast than themselves. The feverish dignity of believing in El Dorado alone almost justifies whatever pains they endured to find it.

It seems like romantic nonsense to say that history is full of dragons and elves and gods and demons. But if they do not belong to history, where do they belong? And what is history without them? What distinguishes a Persian magus from an English gleeman? Is it not as much as anything that one told stories about the garden of Paradise and the other told stories about the meadhall of Heorot? And would it not be infinitely more enlightening to know whether his dread majesty Pharaoh Nectanebo II ever had the discourtesy to snigger at the goddess Taweret, who was, after all, a pregnant hippopotamus in a wig – than to know everything we do know about the rocky careen of his reign? Recently I saw an extravagant example of the topsy-turvy ‘small-talk’ approach to history. I cite it, in part, lest I get too carried away with my convictions – for it has its positive side. It was full and lengthy description of Aristotle, which detailed everything from his unprepossessing appearance to his pretentious sartorial habits – I read it through, to my astonishment it taught me a great deal I had never thought to ask. Almost incidentally it grazed the surface of his philosophy with a few quotes. I do not think the author understood what Aristotle stood for. For all I know they had never asked, just as I had never asked what kind of shoes he wore – I confess it to my shame; but I feel it is only reasonable to add that Aristotle’s philosophy was somewhat important to him, and, perhaps for different reasons, to all those poor Macedonian striplings who had to sit exams for him. Without preferencing one or the other of these two weighty matters, how Aristotle curled his moustache, and to what philosophical end he grew a moustache in the first place, I assert that the latter has as much right to be regarded as history as the former. And by extension the historian who occasionally takes an afternoon off to muse on the futility of earthly empire might with equal respectability spend that afternoon meditating on the flaming hair of the seraphim in that splendid little lyric of the tenth century that begins with the inimitable words ‘Angelic plebeians.’

There is a further consideration. It seems to me that there is enough to feed the grisliest dreams of hell in the political annals of, say, the Persian empire, that the better thoughts of history must be recognised too, if only make it digestible. The small talk of history by itself is saddening. The general approach is to justify and mitigate; to explain the motives and culture of those in power, and brighten the picture that way. It is effective, for those who do not stop to think too deeply about what they read. In truth almost all the princes of the world are traitors to their cultures, for few of them leave their cultures unstained. Seldom does a dream come true in history except as a dark or dreary reality in the hands of those who carry it out. When history is about people, too often it is about error and evil. But that is only half the story. There are always many more uncrowned heads than crowned ones. The contents of the least of those heads is far greater than the girth of the crown; and what is more, it is far and away more historic.

Proceedings of the Pain Debate

There is an advantage to asking silly questions: they never have simple answers. How we solve the problem of suffering is a prime example, for the question is almost impossible to interpret. But as I sat in the corner of a packed lecture hall, listening to the idle clatter of a philosophical combat that veered and tacked every which way around this fraught topic, I think I finally understood the question: I understood that it is unintelligible.

The problem of suffering is that it is unproblematic. We know too much about it, it is too sneeringly matter of fact. You lose a limb, and your nerves object; you lose a loved one, and your heart objects. When children have broken bones, we know that it results from an injury; when the abused have broken spirits, we know that it results from abuse. We know how to deal with it too, when it can be dealt with, and we know that it cannot always be dealt with. Everyone is agreed that the best thing for a long wait is a particular discipline called patience, and most people could tell you a thing or two about how this discipline is achieved. Everyone is agreed that the best thing for a cut is to cover it, and the best thing for a grievance is to air it. Everyone knows that one solution to the pain of losing friends is to have no friends, and that another is to take your mind off it until it takes itself off your mind. If a Buddhist tells you that the first solution is better, and a Stoic tells you that the second is, it is not because there is a ‘problem of pain’. The pain is the unproblematic part. What they disagree over is the problem of probity, which is quite a different matter: philosophers tell you, not what can be done, but what they believe ought to be done.

As a result, I believe many in the lecture hall were confused by the question in hand, ‘whether Christianity or Secularism better explains suffering.’ What kind of an explanation does suffering need? Everyone knows where suffering comes from – as the Secularists were quick to point out, it comes from our needs and desires being thwarted. How we ought to deal with suffering? That depends on whether you believe in the Christian worldview or the secular worldview – which is another question entirely. Which worldview removes suffering? Neither claims to. Which offers better solutions to suffer? The solutions are all on the table: there are band-aids in both worldviews, there are consolations in both.

The debaters, with a truly chivalrous determination to keep the audience entertained, seized upon the bare scrap of philosophy remaining, the question of which worldview allows us to bear suffering more easily. It was, of course, a purely academic question, and had very little effect on anyone’s beliefs, since no one wants to simply take the easy way out, but it did the trick, it filled three hours. The Christians at once insist that their faith solves the problem better, because it provides hope. Immediately, like absentminded walkers who find that they have stumbled into a locomotive unawares, they find themselves shooting off in their panegyrics of Christian hope and protestations against secular hopelessness. And not a word of it to the point; and not a word of it helps their case. If it is a mere matter of who has hope, no one can claim that secularists do not: one does not have to be a Christian to be an optimist. The secularists were not noticeably sadder than the Christians, even if the Christians were notably joyous. There are other hopes than heaven. There are also forms of despair familiar to Christians and unknown to secularists.

But more importantly, the secularist usually finds in the hopes that Christianity affords far less attraction even than they say they do. For when they say they find it attractive, they mean they like the idea, but not that they are drawn to it. I, for one, quite like the idea of a pie: but if the pie is in the sky, I confess with sadness it would not attract me powerfully enough to get my feet off the ground. And so it is with Christianity: so long as one thinks it all pie in the sky, one will not move an inch towards it. One might even move several inches away from it, on the grounds that it is a cowardly proposition; that to face the facts as they are is far nobler than to grasp at doubtful hopes. Even by Christian standards that would be a reasonable response, for Christians are not cowards. To many in our time it seems as fitting for Christians to be apologetic for believing in heaven as they are for believing in hell. Indeed I think that the fuliginous sect that proclaims the damnation of all and the malice of God would receive a readier hearing in our world than the one that proclaims the salvation of some and the damnation of others. The world does not think that there is pie in the sky. But it is sure that if there is a pie in the sky, it had better be perfect and unimpeachable: though the world still won’t believe in it, because it seems unnecessarily, almost disgustingly good. Even the idea of heaven accompanied, as in the blighted Christian version, with a hell, is too good to be true. No one wants to solve ‘problem of pain’ in that style, by thinking up the best of all possible worlds, and insisting that it is real. People feel ashamed to insist, in the face of ghastly sufferings we cannot even imagine, that things are better than they appear. But the Christians assert that things are better than they appear; and they invented apologetics for the sole purpose of persuading people that they have good reason for taking such an unthinkable position. For many Christian hope is not the first hook that draws them to the faith, but the last hurdle before they are willing to accept the faith.

While the Christians are condescending to portray Christianity as a kind of temptation, for the sake of answering this embarrassingly academic question, the secularists are also tangled in their shoelaces. They have (doubt it not) already started on the injustice of God, in allowing suffering; and the cruelty of God, in ordaining suffering; and the caprice of God, in ending suffering only for some, and only after letting a good deal of it through. They think this will secure the debate for them; they shall go away satisfied that no sane person could believe in God. Once again, not a word of it is to the point. For a Christian – no, rather, anyone who affirms the goodness of the gods – has already considered these things, and decided they are no object. They have suffered like everyone else, and seen sufferings in others, and concluded that they can still believe in God. The most dashheady businessman in the world is compelled to sleep; the most pessimistic person in the world might feel compelled to believe in God. As for that avalanche of an entrepreneur, we might snag him by the sleeve as he cascades from the threshold of Meeting Room 73A, and explain to him that if he is to achieve maximum efficiency, and become the force of nature he boasts of being, he ought to drive from his head the crazy notion of lolling insensible on a featherbed for six hours every evening. We would expostulate on the absurdity and underline his error and drive home our moral with a thousand blows – that sleep is fundamentally opposed to action. But he will not listen. He will sweat and temporise and fall back on the fact that nature demands he believe in sleep as well as work. And in the final agony of desperation, when he is trammelled and cooped like a bear in a corner, he will savage us with a statistic about the effects of good rest. For though the poor man has not had the leisure to understand the science behind sleep, he cannot get around the practical effects. And in the same way, the theist might be hammered and hounded with the inconsistency between an evil world and a good God, and they will perspire and backtrack and trip over their words, and chime to high heaven that nature demands they believe in God – and when they are driven to the brink of doom, they will savage us with a statistic about the myriads of sane and suffering people that have believed in God. They might not be deep enough philosophers to offer a solution, but that does not mean there is no solution. Even the knottiest riddles are not always insoluble.

Theists are quite aware that their assertions are paradoxical, and none are more paradoxical than the Christians. The secularists are those who started from the Christian position of the West, and, swept along by a fanatical passion to affirm nothing paradoxical, have ended by affirming nothing at all. The fact of pain, and the practical solutions to it, which are agreed upon by all, are enough for them. Short of a miracle their position is impregnable. The only thing that can be said against it is that it is also unsatisfying. And if they are satisfied with it, nothing can move them.

The Christians, on the other hand, say a great deal more about suffering than anyone else. If you are to find fault with them, the only fault to be found is extravagance. They say that suffering is evil, that it exists in spite of the ancient and deep-seated goodness of all things, but also that it perfects all things. They say that there is one being who is beyond suffering, but that he deemed it better to get around this limitation. They say that God does not like pain, but chooses that it should exist: they believe that a resurrection is something grand, so they believe that death is worthwhile. They believe in pain that is punishment, pain that rebukes or threatens: but they also believe in pain that is a purification, and that the perfect person is the one who suffers the most. They believe in justice, and that all sorrows will be recompensed; but they also believe in injustice, and that many sorrows are undeserved. They view suffering under almost every light imaginable: they talk, like the East, of ‘the evil that is in the world because of desire’; they talk, like the Ancients, of the petulance of ‘the Ruler of this Age’; they talk, like the Muslims, of the will of God; and they talk, like the Germans, of the death of God. At the end of the day, their gospel is the end of all pain, but their emblem is a gibbet.

The secularists pride themselves on saying nothing metaphysical about pain; the Christians pride themselves on having the best and broadest metaphysics of pain; and from a purely physical perspective each of them ‘explains suffering’ in basically the same way. The Christians think that on this issue the secularists are flippant, and the secularists think that the Christians are mad. I have learnt one thing from the debate: that each party believes that they provide the easy way out, in the matter of pain, and that no one cares for the easy way out. We cannot shake our absurd, impractical and inexplicable passion for courage and for truth.

The Progressive Primate

There is a great deal to be said for stepping aside to see the oddity of the things we most insistently assert. It is so healthy for the mind that it can even cause laughter. But it is an unsettling approach, and not many are comfortable with it. If a scientist or an historian tells us something, a large portion of the population will accept it uncritically, another large portion of the population will call it a conspiracy, and only the tiniest sliver of the sophisticated nations of our day will allow themselves to accept it with incredulity, or believe it and laugh at themselves for doing so. But it is precisely the historians and the scientists who say the most unbelievable things, and if they say much that is incredible they say more that is implausible, and there is a great deal to be said for the liberty to laugh at it all. Not to deny it all: but at least to be careful not to forget the natural response to the paradoxes these estimable intellectuals propound. I have an example, but to show it in the clearest possible light you must imagine the kinds of context in which you will meet it. So let us visit a laboratory first.

Doubtless an image comes readily enough – it is white, and cubic, and sterile, and immaculately clean. Deck it out, if you will – the dissection table, the display cabinets, the tubes of flowing fluid, the greyish vats containing human remains. One of these latter, we are not told, was Geofrey Splitliver, and another was perhaps Emily Eldrich, both generous donors. But they are to be considered in the purest abstraction, as if they were something more akin to Platonic Ideas than slabs of flesh – for that is what science means, and we are in the temple of science. The exhibits have little plaques, to remind us that they are not there purely to upset the stomach, but rather to expand the intellect. For the scientist himself, you will not go far wrong if you start by picturing a poor dress-up attempt at a saint’s garb. Err on the side of plastic, and despair of the halo. But we know the real meaning of his crinkly white robe: they are the livery of science, and they are the aspiration of the best and brightest of our age. He really is a saint, in a way. He is certainly the highest production the universe has achieved to date, from a cerebral point of view.

Now, to state briefly and bluntly the burden of our inquiry, we want to know what he thinks of us. Why come all the way here for that? Because only he can tell us what he thinks of us, and, besides, he professes to be a professional on the matter. So we ask, and this walking antithesis of all brutishness will tell us something like this: ‘The human species is most similar to the ape, biologically; but even there there are some important distinctions, which I would be more than happy to explain, if you have the time.’

Scientists have their ways. Historians do too. Let us go to the museum: it is not too far a leap, after all. Darken the colour palate, exchange the anthropoid exhibits for animals and bones and rocks, dispense with the liquid and the tubes, and you have already done most of the work. The plaques may be a little more poetic, with that kind of crude poetry that consists in heaping up years by the millions and writing ‘roamed the earth’ for ‘existed’. Some vaguely realistic, but highly speculative, representations of ancient human beings, to fill in the unfortunately inadequate picture presented by the skeletal remains, would not be out of place; and they must be consistent with the received idea that barbers of the neolithic were not what they are today. In these hallowed halls of history we will find the historian, and he will be vested in the paradoxically parochial attire of his era: a button up shirt, a tie, trousers and a blazer. For all we know he ardently desires to be decked with a cape and hood, but then he might be confused with his subjects, and that would not do. The bones and bricks and pendants represent the real thing, and he represents the theoretical side of it. When we ask him our question, what he thinks of us, we may expect a response in this strenuous and emphatic vein: ‘Our species is unique in many ways – indeed remarkable, in many ways – and the real adventure in studying the palaeolithic era is that here, for the first time, we see human beings distinguishing themselves from their mammalian cousins.’

It is strange how similar the historian and the scientist have become. They are even amusing for the same reasons. I am no scientist, and my history does not go back further than the Pharaohs, so I shall confine myself to stating the obvious. I really have no academic quarrel with the opinions of these gentlemen, but the irony of their assertions must be evident even to them. The scientist, when, in his scientific getup, in his scientific setting, he is as far from the ape as imaginable, tells us that we differ in some small ways from apes. The historian, for all his refinement and modernity, manifests a fraternal sympathy for the half-brutal creature he has deduced we once were. Every lover of mankind knows how rich and uproarious the joke is; and that though the intelligentsia might be quite within their rights calling human kind a ‘species’ or referring to it as an unusually developed animal, they ought to allow a lull for the audience to laugh afterwards. It might be correct, but it is certainly funny. And equally bizarre, absurd, and mind-boggling are the various inferences we are pleased to draw from the idea that we are a kind of animal. It hardly matters that most of them are false. They are all stated in so serious a tone, with such assurance of their sophistication, that one wonders whether the people who say them have fully realised the audacity of the idea. When someone says that mankind is the only animal that makes tools, they are almost correct: but that they do not smile at the thought of themselves as animals is astonishing. Take the following two examples of an even more extensive irony.

1) “Human beings are the only animal that specialises.” – Says an engineer, or a baker, with some taste for abstract thought, as he reclines on a couch in a mood of conspicuously unspecialised reflection. The statement is surprisingly common. But as a matter of fact, one of the most remarkable circumstances attendant on the human race is its curious lack of specialisation. Many of us are good at one thing, and bad at others – much as the drone is good at one thing, and the queen bee at another, and the lion and the lioness tend to divide the work between them. I will not press the point, though I think there are a number of other examples of specialisation in the animal world. But I am sure that specialisation is not the mark of the human race, because the human race is the least specialised of all species. Whatever individual bevers may specialise at, beaverkind specialises at doing beaverish stuff: which means swimming and building dams and so forth. Whatever individual cheetahs may specialise at, cheetahs in general specialise at being cheetahs: running fast and eating meat and all that. But we, we must have our finger in every pie; we must swim and build dams and run fast and eat meat; and also eat plants and fly and move slow and make canals; as well as doing whatever it is that Homo Sapiens is supposed to do: and we insist on one-upping the animals in every art. Our planes must soar higher than the birds, our music must be better than theirs. While the every department of the animal kingdom sticks to its own traditions, content to contemplate the impossibility of eating their cakes and having them too, we have decided to eat every cake – and while we’re at it have them too. A good argument could be mounted that human beings are not animals because our species does not specialise, as other animals do: and meanwhile the most sophisticated human beings happily theorise that human beings are the only animal that does specialise.

2) “Man is a political animal.” It was the master of them that know said this: give him a little grace. He lived in an era much like our own, when politics was identity and religion, though in those days unlike ours they allowed that religion could be somewhat more than just politics, and that politics might be a matter of chance not choice. You might be born Athenian and be, as a result, an Athenian animal, and your opinion of Athens was expected to follow from that. Furthermore, we must bear in mind that we are translating, and much may be lost in the misalignment of languages. His word ‘animal’ as easily suggests that man is something spiritual, as the bear is spiritual and the whale is spiritual; our word ‘animal’ suggests that man is something natural, as the bear is natural and the whale is natural. And the word ‘political’ is an even looser translation of the Greek, though certainly a closer transcription; and what Aristotle meant by it, you will have to consult Aristotle to discover. For the moment what concerns us is that the statement taken at face value is shockingly counterintuitive, and were it not for what we know about Aristotle’s style, we might assume he was not fully serious. For if man is an animal, he is almost the least political of them all. The locus classicus on this matter is The Once and Future King, which is almost the crowning glory of the Arthurian tradition. There you will find an unanswerable case for the political advancement of ants, fish, birds, and the like. A bee, as Mr White shows, is a political animal, not only because its politics is more successful than human politics, but also because its politics is purely animal instinct. Animals are politicians: it is humans who are anarchists. It is humans who get so distracted from pure politics as to be intolerant on moral or ideological matters; it is humans who are so resentful of politics as to institute tolerance on such matters. Animals are realists, only humans are idealists; so animals believe in politics, and humans disbelieve in it. If you meet ten people in the road and ask each of them what their views are, you will find that most of them think that politics is not what keeps the world in order, but what keeps it out of order. If you take ten random people from the last ten centuries, you would be lucky to find that five of them had any interest in being mixed up in the ruinous stageplay called politics. If man really is a political animal, he is an animal that desperately wishes he was not political – and in that regard, at least, he is not an animal. There are no democratic bees trying to undermine the ancient hierarchy of the hive, and there are no gentle-souled wolves striking in conscientious objection to the violence of the system. With us, on the other hand, all our best ideals are anti-political ideals: world peace, individual liberty, and equality; and what we fear in the encroachment of politics on our individual rights, is the prospecting of becoming nothing more than a herd – if I may, becoming political animals.

My point, in all this, is not that these statements are false, and certainly not that they are indefensible. My point is that they are exceedingly improbable, counterintuitive and paradoxical. I am even willing to grant that the most paradoxical part of it all is also the most probably correct: that human beings are in some sense analogous with animals. A scientist or an historian might be compelled to talk that way, because scientists and historians are compelled to say a great many strange and unbelievable things. But so far as I can tell, they do not for the most part realise the whimsicality of the idea. Let them see it though the eyes of a philosopher, and they will understand how it seems to an ordinary person.

Where will we find a philosopher? Not in the white cube of a laboratory; not in the dark cube of a museum. You are more likely to find him in a kind of literary cavern: dim the lights, set up a fire (Descartes talks of a fireplace in his Meditations), introduce an upholstered armchair, and some cushions, and bury the walls in books. Without disrespect, we might consider this arrangement somewhat more evocative of the primitive conditions of our kind, who, sure, had no books, but probably had fairly rough walls; and, if they no fireplace, probably had a fire, and certainly had no electric lighting; and might not have had cushions, but certainly had chairs and carpets and tapestries. I will not call the philosopher primitive. But he is at least, by the demands of his trade, simple and forthright. If we ask him what he thinks of us, he will tell us, without any of the ironies or mystifications of the scholars, what we are.

He will allow that Homo Sapiens is a ‘tool-making animal,’ but in much the same way as a mountain is a ‘rooted vertebrate,’ or the Loch-Ness Monster is a particularly advanced specimen of the spotted toadstool. Both are possible, but only with a little taxonomical sleight of hand. Animals being, in common parlance, the sentient spawn of the earth, human beings are, to all intents and purposes, completely alien to the earth. They may never have lived elsewhere; but that is a trifling technicality, compared with the more salient facts of the case. Here is one. Every animal is at home on earth: Homo Sapiens is not. Animals are comfortable to live on earth and forget about it: not so with us. In almost every regard we make it plain that we are not natives but tourists. How else do you explain the universal human practice of carving out pockets of space that bear no resemblance to the ordinary lodgings provided by planet Earth? Even the philosopher in his gloomy antre cannot be said to have deliberately dressed his home to resemble a cave; and even the most advanced environmentalists do not disguise their offices as forests. We plaster and paint and square and insulate our homes. We are so bent on removing nature from our sight that we cannot bear the dust of our feet on the floor. And then – when we have secured ourselves from the least intrusion of anything earthly, we begin to allow ourselves brief forays into ‘nature,’ as a tourist, having located their hotel and deposited their belongings, begins by fits and starts to explore a city. Even then, we do not venture forth without a whole foreign apparatus – clothing, at least, and backpacks and cell-phones and other prodigies of a completely unearthly cast. In moments of dark reflection we realise that this is not normal. ‘Naked I came into the world, and naked shall I leave it,’ we remind ourselves; this is not how animals speak, for the simple reason that animals remain naked, and quite content to accept the conditions nature imposes on them. We prefer to ease our way through our brief stay with frequent reminders of whatever strange place we came from. We wear clothes on earth for the same motives that might move a Japanese person to wear a kimono in Erfurt. Homo Sapiens are so much the tourists that we would expect them at any moment to whip out cameras and start snapping photos of earth for postcards and family gatherings – but that is exactly what they already do!

I have addressed myself so far (says the philosopher) only to the most grossly material aspects of the case. The more striking side of the matter is the intellectual side, and it can be most clearly seen in those who most neglect the material side. There are smaller sects of more naturalised – in that regard more advanced – human beings who live on earth as though they belonged to earth. But they have not naturalised themselves to live like animals, and that is the crucial point. Even if they do not make homes, they make art. If they do not talk of scientific progress they talk of ancient deities. The city-folk see the natural world as something exotic because they see it so seldom, the indigenous tribesfolk see it all the time, and persist in viewing it as something exotic, and full of gods. They have seen snakes and frogs, but they have never seen the Rainbow Serpent or Tiddalik, spiritual ideas, not natural. Animals do not see the need for art, or religious ritual, or science, or indeed anything that is not strictly logical, and strictly earthly. The only acceptable philosophy for an animal is a kind of instinctual hedonism, and the animal that refuses to obey its instincts is the one that holds up the pack and is charged with sybaritic self-indulgence. Human beings will have beliefs, and ideals, and taboos, and traditions, which they did not get from here, or at any rate, they got them from somewhere animals can’t get to. And we pride ourselves on this. The very existence of the word ‘nature’ implies that we are sure we are something different from the rest of the world. Animals do not talk about ‘nature.’ They have nothing to contrast it with. If a tiger were to inform me that she was going on ‘a nature-walk,’ instead of just ‘a walk,’ I would be sure to commend her to the psychiatric ward before commending myself to the same.

The scientists, the ones with the penchant for this little jest about Homo Sapiens and the Kingdom Mammalia, would lead the laughter if a politician were to mount the podium and declare that certain inborn instincts are urging him toward socialism, and the crowd ought to follow; or if they solemnly suggested that evolution has conditioned us to reduce fossil fuels, and this alone is reason enough to do so. Politicians will talk all sorts of unearthly quaff, invoking justice and liberty and happiness and duty, talking of rebellion and suffering and compassion, much as a Londoner in Madrid speaks wistfully of Big Ben and St Paul’s Cathedral. In short, there is nothing natural about the way human beings live, act, think or talk; and it is in the nature of an animal to be natural.

So speaks the philosopher. And isn’t there something in it? Is it not strange how easily the truths of science have made us forget the natural instincts of our intellects? If the whole affair were approached with a little more levity we would have a better assurance of the sanity of society. I do not despair of hearing, one day, at some naturalists’ soirée, a man of wit and learning will raise his glass and begin a speech as so: ‘Ladies and gentlemen! I am about to make some piercingly rational remarks such as we admire in the scientific world. But lest you feel intimidated by my intelligence, I shall begin by showing that we, too, can be whimsical, and say, Homo Sapiens the only animal…’ – (laughter from the audience) – ‘Suspend your disbelief, please! We are about the great imaginative adventure of science, at present. Now, as I was saying – Homo Sapiens is the only animal that drinks champagne.’

A Consideration on Comedy

There are two kinds of laughter: one is the most beautiful sound under heaven, the other the most cruel. This fact is generally recognised. We talk about laughing at someone and laughing with someone; one is nasty, one is nice. The extremes are worlds apart: the difference between the harsh echo in an ancient despot’s throat and the babbling of a baby cannot be overstated. It is too weak to say they are apples and oranges; they are more like apples and orangutangs. It would be polite to say they are chalk and cheese, but it would be truer to say they are chalk and charred bones. The same difference separates a woodfire from a wildfire; or a pulse from a pool. One is a saint in heaven, the other a stench from hell. We do not generally set the matter in such extreme terms; but we all understand the principle.

It is true that ancient despots are extinct, and modern despots (to their infinite satisfaction) are increasingly rare. But to see this as the end of the issue is a little simplistic. Indeed it is barely the beginning. For if I define the difference between the two kinds of laughter, I find it has nothing to do with despotism or tyranny; it even has nothing to do with deliberate wickedness – for many an evil philosophy has lodged in the most innocent minds. Diabolism aside, the diabolical variety of laughter is still present and prevalent; like the majority of mankind it is often well-intentioned and still far from harmless. It is the laughter that the strong laugh at the weak, and the smart laugh at the stupid. It contemns things because they are contemptible, and ridicules them because they are ridiculous. If you will, it is the sin of laughing at something because it is laughable; which is the same as striking a man when he’s down. And that is not a symptom of despotism, but a symptom of pride; which is like saying a symptom of sinister humanity.

To bring the issue to a point, let me set before you the funniest thing in the world, the one thing that most deserves to be laughed at; in the opinion of many, because it is the most contemptible, and in the opinion of others, because it is the most noble. I mean the glorious featherless biped. For in the stillest air, on the calmest day, an individual perfectly compos-mentis may be seen swept away by a squall of laughter, for no other reason – not the whimsicality of world, which may be as bleak as a saltpan, and in cities often is – than that they happen to be human. No hilarity is so hilarious as the hilarity of humanity. We are on the whole so hilarious that we must allow our humour to spill over onto other more incidental subjects, but like bread on the water it always comes back to us. Hence you will find that though a great deal of amusement may be had from the habits of cats and cattle, there are no great traditions of cat mockery or cattle jokes. The tradition of comedy, which is as old as the hills, and older than some, is properly the tradition of the mockery of man. What do they laugh at in Aristophanes? They laugh at superstition, sex, politics and poetry: in short, everything that is distinctly human. What do they laugh at in Terence? The love-lorn dreamer, the pompous flunkey, the greedy capitalist – in short, they laugh at people.

Indeed, is it not remarkable that a joke, which we are told goes stale quicker than anything, is the one thing that never goes stale at all? It is, I believe, a point of literary orthodoxy that poetry lasts forever, but the world has become so unpoetic as to need special training to appreciate Shakespeare. Wisdom is supposed to be eternal, but I am told the best place to find it is in the most up-to-date business books. Ethical principles are supposed to be unchanging – or rather, they were. But what you will find, if you read an ancient comedy – provided the translation is faithful – is that the ancient peoples were apparently exactly like ourselves, and their jokes exactly like ours. To some it seems uncanny. As soon as they start jesting, they become modern. (Even the famous statesmen are no exception: their jokes are as flat as our politicians.) As soon as they start speaking nonsense, they become intelligible. I grant that, strictly speaking, the reason is that our modern sense of humour remains pristinely primitive; but more important is the fact that the subjects of our modern humour are primitive, or rather the one subject: for the only thing we have ever deeply wanted to laugh at is ourselves.

Take, by way of contrast, what seems to me the second funniest category in existence, which in the absence of a better term I call by the trying word ‘technology’. If I am not gravely misled, it should have us in stitches to visualise an enormous lump of mishappen metal wafting across the air with ease and even agility; but we watch it happening regularly, and quickly tire of laughing at it. Airplanes are much funnier in theory than in reality. It is the idea, not the appearance, that cracks us up. As with microwaves; for the idea of plastic cube that spins things magically until they are warm is quite tickling; but our laughter becomes all too polite once we have greeted the glowing box a dozen times or so. Use your own words, if you prefer: in any case, the concepts really are funny, because concepts are human; we laugh at the imaginations of our species, not because the things imagined are absurd, but because the imagination that comes up with them is. With the exception of the pareidolia of an automobile (with its headlight eyes and bumper mouth), it is the character, not the appearance, of a work of human absurdity that has power to amuse; because the character reminds us of human temerity. To make the point clearer: while even the thought of a steel sausage that flies around full of people is not lastingly funny, the thought of a person who flies around in a steel sausage is; and thought a piece of plastic that heats vegetables is not quite enough for the theme of a comedy, but the vegetable that is stirred to the heart with the depths of warmth and fervour by a piece of plastic might just do. Why? Because you have made the vegetable into something far more bizarre than a microwave; you have personified it.

Thus the world is full of laughable things, but of all of them the most laughable is the one that laughs. I venture it is because there is scarcely anything else grave enough to laugh at; but the more blackguardly philosophy we have touched on holds that it is because there is nothing else so irredeemable. I maintain that we should laugh at ourselves and our friends for the joy of existence and friendship; others believe we should laugh in spite of the joy of existence. It must have been some such person who in the distant, etymological past first called something that caused laughter a butt, as if it were something despicable. Perhaps it was Diogenes the Cynic. In the end, it is of the utmost importance how we laugh, whether in derision or in delight; for that is all the difference between the satisfied and the cynical, even between the jolly and the genocidal. In the one camp are the mirthful who laugh at people because they love them; in the other the murderous, who laugh at people and hate them. This is the only real justification for calling dirty humour dirty – not because we are Victorian prudes (which would be wildly inappropriate in the 21st century), but because dirty jokes cast dirt on all that is valuable. The principle has already  been realised with regard to racial jokes, for there is today a party of the purest puritans on that matter, who realise how filthy it is to cast dirt on someone’s nation. But we are not so civilised as to apply it to the better part of our humour. We are not yet afraid of offending our bodies or space or time or God, though at least one of these has the right to object to dirt.

These are murky waters, and I should make it clear at once that my point is not moral, but philosophical. I am not attacking obscenity and sacrilege, which, after all, are reasonable at certain times in all reasonable worldviews, and all the time in some reasonable worldviews. But a wight will laugh at the weightiest matters, either in joy or in jeering, in grievance or gaudiation, with love or loathing, and I know which I prefer. I would be ready at the barricades with a stave in my hand if it came to it. The difference between the parties is not that the one is cheerful and the other sullen, for they are both cheerful, and they are both laughing. Really the difference is that one party thinks the world is meaningless and, really, despicable, while the other believes that it is holy: a vasty vaulted temple, as Cicero thought.  The redcoats – for I believe this is the official view today, at least so far as jokesmithery goes – think that God is a hoax for the gullible, that the witless are worthless, that the weak are wretched, that sex is mere animal indignity, and that death is a bit like spit. They mock. The rebels – so they must be termed – think that heaven itself laughs at the thirty Irishmen with their electrics; not in derision, but because, by a delicious irony, something more splendid than the Seraphim stands at its post in each of them, and something more splendid than the Seraphim is fumbling with a simple lightbulb.

Most people, as people are in this iron age of ours, are not so loyal to a principle that they belong entirely to one camp. I should like to meet one who did, for I imagine they must be striking and peculiar. The rest of us jeer at one moment and grin the next; we are not so drunk on the joy of life that we do not slip imperceptibly into sobriety and that worst form of cynicism, cynical high spirits. But I do not doubt that when St Paul, himself so often ecstatic, forbade ‘wittiness’, he was referring to this very thing: this cynical hilarity, this poisonous pleasure of smiling scorn. And though Scripture speaks in spiritual terms and gives counsel for the health of the soul before God, I think the preference may be extended to the literary sphere. For I believe that even in the most profane literature, it is the mark of a great comedian that they jest out of selfless delight, and not with a sense of superiority. I have been reading Molière’s Misanthrope; where indeed the characters can be petty, and the author indeed shakes his head at them; but the most comic characters are given the dignity of either nobility or innocence. We find them funny, in fact, because to our surprise we find we are fond of them.

Between the Seasons

Spring is already upon us. The winds and rains have battered the lands in earnest, and now satisfied those of us who feel an almost religious awe for the force of nature’s frown. It was the season of pensive melancholy, the season of originality – for winter has not yet become a cliché. Spring has: spring is the season of rebirth, the time when the birds start to sing, the air is perfumed, the warmth creeps in – and I have read enough books to extend the list ad infinitum – but not yet so withering as the high solstice. It is the season of activity, and of all human activities the one that suits it best is walking. Surely one of the most flagrantly indolent activities there is; though I am ready to confess that – if out of season, and more often in the steeper shadow of the year – I am myself rather actively indolent. Even in this season, I too ramble in the hills and waft through the outer suburbs. I have even, on occasion, and mainly metaphorically, stopped to smell the roses – though, it is only fair to add, I am quite sure I have often mistaken, and not all of them were roses. Still, someone of my limited intelligence and unromantic bent cannot rightly be held to have wasted their time smelling flowers under such misguided assumptions, unless it be by the true opponents of indolence, who object primarily to the misguided assumption that the sense of smell should be used at all, when it is plainly irrelevant to the efficient execution of affairs. With such people I have least have some common ground – the common ground of an argument – since they at least have a philosophy, though it is the opposite of mine. With the others, who are so pedantic as to inform me that what I spent in the character of a rose is actually a lavender, I can but sigh my deepest regret. They have no philosophy with which to attack me; only knowledge. On both counts we have nothing in common.

As one of the latter bouts of the real violence of the elements hit us in Victoria and deferred our first hopes of an early Spring, I sat reading Vergil and Shelley in the shelter of various far-flung haunts listing to the sound of death outdoors, and it occurred to me that this – my ignorance, or my philosophy – has perhaps, in an accidental way, saved me from one disaster that has befallen the people of our times, the inability to read nature poetry. The whole culture of such poetry is a culture of triumphant misunderstanding, but the whole world assumes it is a culture of tedious cleverness. In fact poetry is written for the ignorant, the layman, but the laymen now think it is too intellectual for them. It is true, poetry is intelligent; but it is a mistake to think it is intellectually intelligent. On the whole poetry is addressed to the part of the mind that specialises in insightful errors – the part shared by even the most avowedly uneducated – like myself, who cannot rightly disentangle an elm from an ash, and have barely grasped the subtlety that distinguishes an oak from an acorn.

Shelley, for instance, describes a glade in a forest as ‘One vast mass of mingling shade, A brown magnificence’. These words are pure poetry, and an excellent example of what we are about, but they are none of them very sensible: they are quite clever and quite wrong. Shade does not mingle. The idea of overlapping shadows is strictly absurd. Nor does it make much sense to speak of a mass of shade. And as for the ‘brown magnificence’, that is pure aural oxymoron – like a ‘grey splendour’ or ‘the Battle of Pinkie’. The point is that they convey something quite vivid to us; we understand, it makes sense to imagine the shade mingling, or call the forest a ‘mass of shade’, and one feels a certain pleasure in rebellious intuition when one recognises and agrees that such a scene might be called a ‘brown magnificence’. It is, if we are happy to split hairs like this, all very clever, but not exactly intelligent: it is the way ingenuity goes when it refuses the aid of the intellect. In the same way we understand at once when Shelly confides that he has slept in charnel houses amongst the dead, hoping to meet a ghost who might ‘render up the tale of What We Are.’ It is silly – still, it makes you shudder. It is nothing wore than a slight exaggeration to say that nature poetry is never about nature, but about the illusions nature creates and the things that nature suggests. Here only we may say we subdue nature; civilisation, technology and cultivation merely drive it back.

In Vergil I read of the anise and the privet and the cyclamen, and I still do not know what they are; but, beyond the delights of confusion and speculation, I still found a great deal of delight in the Georgics. He tells me of taking his shoes off to soak his shins in the grape press – I wish I had been there. It is just the kind of amusement my imagination likes when Shelley describes how ‘The red volcano overcanopies Its fields of snow and pinnacle of ice With burning smoke.’ And it is just the kind of amusement that pleases my simple brain, which I inherited through a long lineage from primitive ancestors, to decipher the odd word when I am told that ‘the boat fled on with unrelaxing speed’. This is real poetry; and while it has its faults – perhaps it gives me too much satisfaction for such a trifle as it is – it cannot be accused of being intellectual.

Now besides the terrible slander that only smart people read poetry, there is another that says that nature poetry is florid. I used to think that, for there is such a thing as florid nature poetry, and I am not fond of it myself. But it is not this. Why then does all poetry seem florid to some? I suppose because they read all poetry in a soporific and florid lilt.  There are few things in the world easier than to kill averse, and the method is to remove the meaning. You might kill this without stirring a finger: ‘At midnight The moon arise: and lo! the ethereal cliffs Of Caucasus…’ – A thousand brains would cloud; it is not the cliffs that are ethereal, but the verse, and that not in a nice sense; be it as sublime as the stratosphere, it is at any rate as empty – and as suffocating. That, of course, is because the readers have not read it. They have not pause to consider that the operative word, ethereal, means ‘up in the ether,’ and in this case is really quite alarming. The ether is just where cliffs should not be. It means – but here is Shelley:

‘…the ethereal cliffs

Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone

Among the stars like sunlight.’

It means that the cliffs are an astronomical menace. It means that they have the most awful case of geological gigantism. Whatever you call this – fabulous, untenable, outlandish, alarming – it is not soporific; and the only thing that can be called florid in it is the word ‘lo! where we would prefer the less lazy ‘look!’

But for every one person who, having read any really good long poems, has turned away with genuine distaste, there must be a thousand who have been turned off by misguided humility. It is the great vice of our age. Here is the proof: there is nothing more typical of a humungous humility than to constantly accuse itself of arrogance, and there is nothing our age specialises in more than the self-suspicion of arrogance. We think that knowledge is power and that we have so much knowledge that it has gone to our heads. We think that we have replaced God with ourselves. We think that we have superseded morality and forged our own fate. We think that we are the tragic hero of history, and that our tragic flaw was hubris. Nothing raises such a clamour but paranoid modesty. Nothing is so certain of its pridefulness as humility.

For amidst all this talk of human pride and the successes of science, the one great popular defect of our age is a radical and ruinous humility, or even self-humiliation. It lies behind the fact that we do not presume to believe that our own worldviews are right, and others’ wrong, though every blighter to tread the earth till now has. It lies behind the equally alarming fact that so many go about insisting that they waste their time, without doing anything about it.

The portentous idea that the majority in our society could waste the majority of their spare time on things they consider valueless is strange enough; I myself do not know whether it is a ridiculous misapprehension or an alarming insight, for it could well be either. It does not trouble me at all that others’ delights are different to mine, and I share my classical verse with a choice minority. I am sure I am not smart enough to keep up with current events, though in my graver moments I fear that might be wrong; others are sure they are not smart enough to read literature, and at all moments I insist they are certainly wrong. But I do not insist that they should, if they do not want to. I am not concerned that they don’t; I do not think they are wasting their time, and I am sure I waste enough of mine anyway. But that they believe they are wasting their time – that some can talk of doom-scrolling, and feel they are doomed to do it – that is another matter. That is a tragedy of abasement; that is why  modern humility is such a pressing danger. Were I Saint George I am sure I would elect it for my first dragon. Not so were the peasants of old, except if they were drunken; the peasant knew they lived as peasants should, and only the drunkards regretted that they spilt and squandered and spoilt their time. Now, we all think of ourselves as drunken peasants. The gluttonous layabouts of the aristocracy used to complain of ennui, but that was because they were gluttonous layabouts; now wea re all ready to equate ourselves with those gluttonous layabouts.

It seems to me that this is not a matter of indifference – that either we extirpate the ways we waste time, or (perhaps it is more apropos) abolish the concept of wasted time. If it seems to me that this might rightly be the rally-call of some revolution today , it is because everything I value hangs off it, and at the moment is hung because of it. Unless one has the dignity to choose one’s passtimes because one believes they are noble, one will never stop long enough to warm to good literature, or to form an opinion on whether roses should be smelt or smelted, or sustain a truth in the face of the world. Meanwhile I cannot even defy the practice of doomscrolling, though I’m sure there must be solid philosophical reasons against it, so long as I pity the people who call it doomscrolling, as if it were an ineluctable curse. Let them approve it, until then I have no heart to oppose it! Better they be defiant malefactors than flimsy fatalists!

Meanwhile the old poets have far fewer worthy readers than they might, because the populace thinks it is not smart enough to read them. The case is quite the contrary. If only clever people write poetry, only silly people can read it, people who have the capacity to be constantly taken unawares, and have not yet seen enough to be bored of life. The smart set cannot appreciate poetry as much, except so far as they, too, being human, are a little unintelligent like the rest of us. But the smart set are usually too caught up with criticism and philology to stop to really appreciate a poem. And if the smart set are too smart to read, and the silly think they are too silly, who will read? So longas to the rest of us literature is idealised, it is idle: we ruin it by raising it. The general gist of poetry is to be popular, and if it is not popular it has no right to exist. A textbook has professional interest to a professor in its field, but poetry is meant to have a professional interest to all who profess humanity. Anyone who has enjoyed a walk in the country ought to see the appeal of a poem about the country, which might show them a thousand things they had not noticed, but will notice the next time. Anyone who has fought in a battle, or dreamed of or feared a war, ought to have some interest in an epic, where a million impressions might correct or contribute to their own. Hence the one sure rule in poetry is that it must not be too intelligent, because it must above all be intelligible. The arbiter of taste is the world and the individual: they are free to dislike whatever they like and like whatever they decide. But for the sake of dignity, and for the love of literature, let them not say poetry is for smart people.

The Architecture of Society

If I understand rightly – it can be difficult to disentangle the multitudinous dissatisfactions of the world – there are two current complaints about the educational system of our day that make any claim to novelty. Education has always been considered a great bore, and generally quite fruitless; it has always appealed to a minority, and been applied to another minority that does not want it. These are old grievances, and for reasons I cannot pretend to fully understand, they have not weakened our insistence that children pay this terrible penalty for that last relic of original sin, illiteracy. Beyond these, though, there are two new grievances; and because they are new, the proposed solution is not liberation from the past, but rather a return to ‘the good old days’. For while it is an age-old tradition to decry the useless knowledge school fills our children’s head with, the fashion of our day is to complain that school fails to fill our children’s heads with any knowledge at all. It used to be a mark of the severest cultivation to declaim prettily on the vanity of school-learning: now it is considered far finer to dismiss the very idea of school-learning. People seem to lend credence to the idea that the gruelling slog our students go through really produces no result at all.

The second complaint or quarrel that can really claim to be new, is that there is a peculiar kind of bureaucracy, that apparently forces the bulk of the population into unemployment by preventing anyone without a degree from working. And if a job does not require a piece of paper, I am told, it requires several. Forests, apparently, have been levelled like this; and the cogs of society are completely jammed by this deluge of certificates. The idea seems to bee that while there is too little learning at the schools, there is too much schooling required; books are in decline and certificates are on the rise – the paper is simply reallocated. The premise of the system seems to be that each certificate means so little, that it takes a lot of them together to mean anything.

I do not know how much justice there is in these claims. It is hard to find which way is up in such matters. The ideal modern education is too elusive, since no one is quite clear what education is any more. It seems to be almost the nature of modernity to be too smart for education: education being the attempt to instil a few narrow ideals, and modernity being too tolerant or circumspect to have any narrow ideals. In the West, for instance, they used to teach wretched minors Classical Latin and Greek, because they were learned languages, though admittedly they were both dead; but that is antithetical to the modern attitude. Why learn Latin and Greek instead of Japanese? Why learn even Japanese instead of Arabic? Why not learn Spanish? Why not learn Chinese or Indonesian? We have, after so many centuries of darkness, rediscovered the great childish secret that schooling has always striven to drive from our ductile minds: the invincible question, ‘but why?’ No language, or subject, or tract of space or time has learnt to cope with that kind of examination. Ideally, one would learn Japanese and Arabic and Spanish and Chinese and Indonesian, with Greek and Latin to boot, and every other language on earth; but as young children seem to find such feats of comprehension difficult, the only solution is to sigh and teach them something at random. Let them learn Occitan. For good or for ill that is what modernity means: ambitions beyond huge, and results that are simply random. For example, our ancestors used to carve up rocks and call them gods, so that every nation had its own rock and claimed its rock had created all the other rocks; we have dispensed with all such rocks and replaced them with, not a boulder, but comparative biology. The same thing has happened in education. Once upon a time, education was purely practical, narrow, and in a sense cynical. It had one end in view, and that was to allow a man to keep up with the thoughts and ideas of other educated men. You learnt the whatever language your people held learned and plumbed the principles of their religion, so that you were on the same page as everyone else, and could get on with the practicalities of the learned life. By contrast a modern education is the most avowedly impractical of educations, the most vague and mysterious. It will not teach you to communicate with the community of the learned, who will all speak different languages and have learnt different subjects. It will teach you a number of disparate scraps of knowledge so that you have a finger in every pie and a tooth in none. Its only justification is the notion that, for some strange and spiritual reason that no one can clearly explain, so long as something is learnt about each subject, it doesn’t matter what.

Is this a good system, or is the old arbitrary dogmatism better? This, I believe, is the real matter at stake in the discussion of education – and I am really unfit to pronounce upon it. My own education, if it can be called that at all, was unorthodox enough that I cannot speak for others.  The new system has a real, modern logic behind it, though like all good logic its results are at best paradoxical and at worst wearisome. The old system was too down to earth to be logical, and its results were comfortable but inadequate. Which is worse is hard to say.

On another matter I feel myself fitter to pronounce, as the most amateur of Egyptologists, and a student of the Arts. The matter is the silly old slander of the pyramid scheme. I believe the idea is that a certain amount of discomfort can be aroused by telling a BA who projects a PhD that their degree is ‘simply a pyramid scheme’, because the idea of a degree that ideally produces teachers of the same is ridiculous. The injustice done to Arts students by this attempt on their comfort can be easily passed over. To that I can turn the other cheek, and the sneering tone can be ignored and forgiven; it does not hit home at its intended mark anyway. Far greater is the insult to pyramids, and that I cannot ignore.

An insulting comparison always hits two targets. When a duellist calls his opponent a dog he insults both his opponent and dogs. He assumes one would not want to be a dog. When a farmer calls his assistant a clod he does wrong by the assistant and the earth. He assumes one would not want to be a clod. And when someone calls Arts degrees a pyramid scheme, they insult pyramids as well as Arts degrees. This might have been fair enough, if we were talking in purely abstract terms: simplicity, even of the geometrical variety, is not widely considered desirable. But we are not talking in purely abstract terms. Like any other geometrical solid found in a textbook, pyramids may be found in the real world too. As a matter of fact, they may be found all over the world, on just about every continent, like clods, and dogs. Only, clods and dogs are not meant to be grand, but pyramids are.

For example: the Great Pyramids of Giza are not generally referred to as ‘simply pyramids’. Wherever the idea came from – their size may have a little to do with it – they are even considered somewhat impressive, in their own way. Tourists are expected to be at least a little amazed, and if there is something more than mere politeness there, so much the better. It was not entirely a matter of form that they are considered a wonder of the world. And oddly enough, no one has yet attempted to divest them of their triangularity in order to increase their appeal. It could be done. A flourish could be added to Khufu without incongruity: an Egyptian headdress, say, or a giant ibis. Khafra could be embedded in a sphere like an enormous illustration of Euclid. But no one has; it seems at least respectable to be a pyramid. Indeed, it is a notable fact that there are no Great Cubes of Cuba or Great Cylinders of Kuwait: the closest rival, so far as geometrical chutzpa goes, is the more prosaic Pentagon. Even the Parthenon is not quite a prism, though it is plain enough, and the Kaaba, though it is indeed a cube, is admired as something other than architecture. Every other great monument is complex, only the pyramids pull off simplicity. And there is a general feeling that the pyramids by their very ponderous plainness can speak, while the buttresses and balustrades of a cathedral can only stare down in grand silence. At any rate, even cathedrals have to make concessions to the pyramid to preach their sermons, for a spire is but an appended pyramid. Only pyramids convey plainly the only clear and frank message any building ever conveyed: that all human constructions point to heaven.

Henceforth, out of respect for the pyramid, I shall insult arts degrees by calling them triangle schemes. I shall explain that what a molehill is to a pyramid, a triangle is to an orchestra. My new metaphor will lay stress on the pettiness of the arts, while sparing the good name of pyramids. I shall declare that pyramids point to the stars, but the arts, like triangles, point nowhere. Perhaps I shall carry a brass triangle in my pocket for the occasion, and when met by some such honourable bachelor as may have studied arts, I shall tinkle it at his nose, to symbolise the puerility of a degree so far from attaining the distinction of a pyramid. If one day I teach the arts, I shall be sure to discover to my pupils my scorn by bestowing upon each of them a little silver triangle, and explaining them that it will remind them each day that they have entered upon a triangle scheme.

But if, in a less flippant mood, someone tells me that Arts degrees are a mere pyramid scheme, I will answer him so. ‘With all due respect for your dubious intent and for learning of any kind,’ I will say, ‘it is for the other sciences to envy that they are not pyramid schemes. As Yorkminster’s biggest boast is that for all its elaboration it too contains something of the pyramid, so the sciences’ greatest boast is that they contain something of the pyramid. The honour we pay to the Professor of IT testifies to this: we honour him because he has contrived a pyramid scheme from a degree that was not originally meant to be one. And while every other science tries to dignify itself by decking itself out with career opportunities, only the Arts has the colossal self-assurance to dispense with these trinkets. The arts are so idealisitic as to aim primarily at the creation of students so good that they can teach; the practical degrees, supposedly all the finer for the non-triangular figure they cut, confess that their highest hope, in the majority of cases, is to produce workers. Which is more necessary is not open to dispute. Society is built and buoyed by workers, it is merely decorated by teachers. But which is more ambitious should not be doubtful either. To talk of the arts as “a mere pyramid scheme” is a contradiction in terms. It is like saying Alexander merely tried to conquer the world, on the grounds that he was not so articulate as to set aside certain portions for conquest and leave the rest aside. If it is a fault for the arts to be a pyramid scheme, the fault is not futility but rather hubris. Young historians should not be blamed for their idleness but for their ambition. Philosophers should be compared, not to vain theorisers and indolent dreamers, but rather to the most cutthroat political schemers.

‘In point of fact, though, I do think this kind of aspiration is so damaging. Because of its uncompromising idealism, the Arts degree leaves its traces all over the world; for thousands of students never reach the pinnacle of the pyramid, and follow some other path with their learning. They do not find other paths closed to them. They have wasted time roughly in the same sense that a tourist wastes time, and have probably not lost half so much money in proportion to time, and doubtless learnt much more. So they pick up their bags and head of into the “real world,” wherever their fancy takes them. The average person who has done a medical degree or an engineering degree has no such luxury. They are expected to continue to the top, be it lower or higher, and told that a failure to do so is equivalent to so much wasted time and money. They are never turned out on “the real world” to find a new profession. If they are not studious, they content themselves with some form of drudgery in their field; if they are studious, they may land themselves precisely where they want – in their field. I have no objections to this system; I even consent that it is an ideal system. But if it is taken to shed bad light on our “pyramid scheme” degrees, then we can easily return fire. It is these “practical” degrees that close off employment opportunities, since while propping open one door they close all others. The pyramid scheme may open nothing more than one very high and narrow door, but at least it does not shut the others.

‘All this is basically besides the point, since no one nowadays is so patient of their life as to sweat a degree without immediate renumeration in the way of employment (which our pyramid schemes do not generally offer.) An exception is generally made for what may be described as Burj Khalifa schemes, because they are considered vital to society. I am not picky on the point of professional opportunities. If the Arts really were a proper pyramid scheme, and once committed to a Bachelor you were committed to a Doctorate and a fellowship, they would be not less, but more significant. For being more essentially and emphatically a pyramid, they would have a finer point. All who pursued it would pursue it for its own sake; to undertake a Bachelor of Arts would be as bold a declaration as becoming a monk. For anything pursued for its own sake is a moral trumpet. The fact that professors, people who have done this, are not without honour in the world – although they are without leisure, money, or any of the usual equipage of honour – gives a very clear indication of what we as a society value. If that value is bad, there is nothing better than that the pyramid be demolished as quickly as possibly convenient. If it is good, it must be supported by every means we can spare. Either way, it is shortsighted to jeer at it for being a pyramid and not a dodecahedron. We are either sending out seven youths and maidens a year as fodder for a minotaur, or we are sending out as many to be servants of Athena. A little leaven leavens the whole lump: if the pyramid points to wisdom, the mere presence of professors in society does it good: if the pyramid symbolises pedantry, the honour accorded to it is a mark of our naïveté or decadence. Whichever way, the proposition that the Arts are nothing more than a pyramid scheme is mere blather: for even to the notably limited extent that they are a pyramid scheme, they are something greater than other sciences and studies. We might teach medicine for no other reason than that we have a basic desire for health, we might teach engineering because it is a necessity, and IT because we depend on it: but we teach Arts because we want to. A pyramid is a monolith. It is precisely because academia is a pyramid that it cannot be ignored. Let it stand for superstition or scepticism, for fastidiousness or generalisation, or for knowledge, or for gnosticism, or for bookish withdrawal and monkery – whatever the case, if it is a pyramid scheme, it can’t stand for nothing.’

Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Conclusion: On History

Humour me a little history as I begin to conclude. This whole extended essay on that English knight, Thomas Browne, has been about history, and remarkably few historical facts have been mentioned. I have written at length about modernity in the abstract, an abstract I would not venture to assert exists, though I am certain many think it does, which is why it is so important; and I have hinted at antiquity, though no writer can summarise antiquity, for antiquity is everything, as everything is ancient. But now it is time to mention a few facts of biography, in the interests of reiterating my point, that Sir Thomas Browne was modern, but not too modern. I grant, I even maintain, that ‘biography’ is the part of a famous person that is irrelevant to them as a famous person. It is not what makes, say, Churchill great, but what makes him like someone who might not have been great, that makes up his biography. The following facts of biography, however, are more irrelevant to the honourable subject than most biographical facts are; it is not only not about Browne when he was being a great author, it is about Browne when he was scarcely even being Browne: when he was instead being born. For around the time when he was making his first infantile acquaintance with such scientific curiosities as the taste of his fingers and the sound that air makes when rapidly expulsed from the lungs, a number of oddly representative events were occurring in England. They gather like a zodiac above the Jacobean age; they serve as an omen on earth, as if Thomas Browne was born in the ascendant influence of this terrestrial constellation. They seem to box in the contents of the age. They events are the kind of thing we generally take, rightly or wrongly, for the making of modernity.

At this time Merry England was in a fervour of activity. Here sad Lear first trod the boards, and said such things as never a man has since said so well. There the papists were packing gunpowder in under parliament, and the crowned head of England tottered above, and the whole protestant church with him. In another part the presses rolled off the great manifesto of the great revolution, a pamphlet called The Advancement of Learning.

A better historian than myself might give his learned comment on all these events; to us who stand in the dark only the shadows of their significance can be divined. That Shakespeare should be at his apogee when Browne was born – and, mind you, Milton, three years later – is typical of the paradox of time: what is youngest is always oldest, the youth of the world is now many thousands of years old. And in fact, Shakespeare represents that youthful quality that burst from English soil in the age of Elizabeth, carrying with it all that went before, the Greek and the Roman and the Romantic, the last efflorescence of the middle ages, and then was seen no more. King Lear is a strange and fitting representative. It is the most hopeless of Shakespeare’s plays, darker even than Hamlet or Macbeth; for they are acted against the blood-red backdrop of a ghastly sunset, but before King Lear has started, the moonless night has already set in. Lear opens the play with his plans to ‘creep unburthened to the grave.’ All that is spiritual, all the makings of meaning, are cruelly purged from the play. For all that, it is in the end a fairytale: what we have here is the moral epyllion of ‘The King and his Three Daughters.’ And it is Elizabethan, lyrical and fluent, full of funereal foolery and theatrical flourishes. King Lear is not the Shakespeare’s modern end, the trembling realism he fell into in his sager years. It was written before, not after, the extravaganza of The Tempest. It is not a sign that the Elizabethan age was waning, or ripening, or over; it is rather a display of how deep the Elizabethan mode could cut.

But this was not to last. The Elizabethan age ended with Shakespeare, and in a sense all that Marlowe and Chapman, Daniel and Drayton, Sidney and Spenser were is carried into exile of the shoulders of the agèd king Lear. The spirit of romance, that had clung at last to Spenser and Mallory – Roland and the Paladins of Charlemagne, chivalry and dragons and crusades – all of these were on their way out. Though much more, the Elizabethan age is the last flowering of medieval merriment, and the last fruiting of medieval ignorance. They would return; but the Romantics and Preraphaelites were still a long way off, and not the same. For now it was to be the pulleys and levers of the metaphysicals, the seriocomic satires of the restoration, the drawing-room dramas of the regency – good literature, but not romances. Henceforth literature is modern; and only self-conscious revolutionaries can make it romantic. Within a few decades of King Lear the fact would be sealed and stamped, that Shakespeare was unquestionably of an age. For all time, maybe; but not from just any time. Shakespeare is an Elizabethan; in the seventeenth century, Shakespeare is a survival.

But Bacon is a prophet. Not long before or after the staging of King Lear, he published his best book, The Advancement of Learning. The idea, a defence of the profit to be had from learning, is not original; but it is thorough, and it was written at a perfect juncture in time, and for that it is remembered. Learning advanced. A good many of the common prejudices against the choices of Solomon that he dismembers in it are now of an unfamiliar vintage; which is as good as to say, he succeeded. But the time was yet to come when the universities would advance science, and the populace would embrace it; the poets still cried in dismay,

            ‘And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,

The Element of fire is quite put out;

The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit

Can well direct him where to look for it.’

New learning stills struck fear: ‘’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;’ Pope’s exultation is still some way off – ‘God said, Let Newton be, and all was light.’

Let us leave the literati, and turn to the sober politicians. They are, as usual, neatly divided into parties, and operating (in this case quite literally) at different levels. Up above, we have the new king and his parliament – he, a Scotsmen, they, not yet fully apprised of their significance; their policy is Protestant England, and the peace and prosperity of the realm. Down below, we have the Catholics with a quantity of gunpowder, doing exactly what one does with a quantity of gunpowder; their policy is Catholic England, and the peace and prosperity of the realm. As is usual, chance and treachery carried the election, and on this occasion the Catholics fell afoul of it, the King escaped unharmed, the Catholics felt his wrath. The moral? Politics was then, as it had always been and is still today, an incendiary thing. The peace of the realm is pendent on the precarious survival, and equally precarious benignity, of those in power. On the narrower stage of the seventeenth century, though, conspiracy carries with it an irony too. For though the Papists failed to kill the king for being too much a Protestant, the Protestants soon succeeded in killing the king for being too much a Papist. But that was decades later, around the time that Browne was publishing (somewhat against his will) his little self-portrait. That would be a proper revolution, a civil war and a government overthrown: it would be all that the conspirators off 1605 had wished for, but in a far different cause.

Each of these events – the play, the plot, and the publication – suggests something of the age. Shakespeare represents something that was on its way out, Bacon represents something that was on its way in, and the gunpowder plot represents something that is common to all ages. They set Browne not quite in, but on the cusp of the world we live in today. Let these events stand for the background against which Browne placed himself; they are nearly comprehensive, but they miss something, and he himself is captured by none of them. If the decline of romance and the rise of science, with all the political turmoil that accompanied them, make up modernity as Browne knew it, then he is not quite modern. If he is not behind his time he is ahead of it.

How modern he is of course matters very little, and we are probably still too modern ourselves to judge whether he was ahead of or behind modernity. What matters is how he stands in relation to certain conceptions of modernity, and what he makes of them. This is how we always judge historical characters: not by how they relate to history, but by how they receive the ideas and ideals of their corner of history. In a similar way, it hardly matters how Roman Caesar was, or even what he thought of Rome; what matters is what he thought of the Roman idea of Rome. He doubtless understood as well as we that Rome was a complicated reality, but he had opinions on the Roman idea that Rome was a republic, and it was these opinions that made him Caesar, and these opinions that had him ushered offstage. Sir Thomas Browne likewise knew a thing or two about the modern world, and knew enough to know that the modern world was much more than a thing or two. But he knew there were certain ideals and generalisations regarding what it means to be modern – for instance that romance was dying and science was taking its place, and that Papists and Puritans had a spiritual urge to extrapolate each other materially with a theology of gunpowder. It is his opinions on these ideals and reactions to these generalisations that interest us most.

More particularly, he had opinions on the ideal of the modern intellect. I speak of it as an ‘ideal:’ as I have observed above, it was in his day not considered ideal. At that time, modernity was really new – nowadays there is nothing so worm-eaten and fusty as modernity – new enough to be viewed with hostility. But the picture is the same, if the colours are different: the sceptical scientist, the agnostic empiricist, accompanied by reason far out of earshot of anything mysterious or inexplicable, far beyond the reach of mysticism (which he despises) or religion (which he has no need for). This hypothetical figure, which some had supposed to be a sketch of Browne himself, is the antagonist in Religio Medici. It is Browne’s projected self, the Thomas he is trying to dispel from the minds of his friends: doubting Thomas, to borrow the name that has unfortunately attached itself to trusting Thomas, who doubted indeed, but took up faith when he saw and believed. But some that had seen that Browne was ‘modern’ in some respects had assumed he must be ‘modern’ in all respects; and as they knew him for a scientist, they had picked him for a sceptic.

That this kind of assumption is still common today is reason enough for us to find Browne’s response interesting. On that ground alone it is genuinely worth considering. There is also another, and a better ground. Perhaps – if we are for a moment unduly cynical about the capacity of our kind – perhaps no one has ever really reached this pitch of prosaic enlightenment. Never mind; the idea is good enough to consider, even if just as a myth. It is an extravagant extrapolation of rationalism, and an extravagant extrapolation is always worth considering. That is what it means to philosophise.

Certainly, it is a just charge against that philosophy, that it deals in unrealistic and even irrelevant abstractions. I am willing to concede that, but I am forced to confess it does not bother me. All that is poetic in philosophy springs form its cavalier attitude towards plausibility. It might be dull to debate for hours whether we ought to doubt the freshness of a loaf of bread, when a bite could resolve the issue instantaneously; but it is not dull to debate for hours whether we should or can doubt everything. The loaf of bread may be real, the idea of an uninhibited doubter impossible, but that does not matter. Indeed, the sense of freedom, the real discovery to be had in the exploration of imaginary worlds adds to the excitement. And at the end of the day, the debate on doubt is likely to have a more lasting impact on my character than the debate on the bread. Still, that discussion won’t be worth a groat if I am fully out of sympathy with the doubter, any more than if I were fully decided that the doubter must never be doubted. There has to be a real question; even if both options are bad, there must be no easy and obvious way out. In this regard we profit from one great similarity between the seventeenth century and our own century: that to us as to Browne’s contemporaries, the idea of enlightenment – in the sense of a purely scientific worldview – seems as though it could be necessary, yet it is not wholly satisfactory. More of them inclined to reject it, more of us incline to accept it, but all of us are capable of questioning and qualifying even our own extreme. Whether or not each of us thinks they have found a happy medium, we can feel the tension, and therefore find some interest in the way this antique knight resolves the difficulty. This dispute provides the argument of Religio Medici. And, if only incidentally, it is the omnipresent theme of his scientific works. Just as important as what he says in relation to the elusive enlightened modern, is what he is in relation to it. He practice as much as his preaching is what wins him readers. Hence I have taken it as the theme of this introduction: in the first chapter I have attempted to give some indication of his approach to science, and in the second I have attempted to give some indication of his attitude towards scepticism.

One of the most significant implications of his personality that we have had occasion to reflect on his the he makes proper agnostic or atheistic scepticism unnecessary. The myth for him was in most respects the same as it is for us: the enlightened man, following a career in science, not too vociferous on moral matters, tolerant and open minded, cool and collected, and decisively dissociated from anything religious. But Browne, while emphatically claiming for himself a dogmatic, primitive Galilean religion, is all these things, not in spite of, but because of, his refusal to be a sceptic. He is so successful that he puts sells scepticism off the market. He is a scientist, because he thinks he owes that to God. He is enlightened, because in God there is no darkness. He is not cantankerous or bigoted, because he believes that would be a breach of Christian ethics. He is open minded, because his faith opens his mind. In short, when we ‘see and examine all,’ we find that he is ‘obliged to the principles of grace,’ for everything for which a sceptic feels he is obliged to his scepticism.

Browne’s ideological successes do not answer whatever philosophical questions the idea of cold enlightenment poses. After all, offering solutions to questions is not the same as definitively answering them. It does suggest something about the myth, though, even for those who are not willing to follow Browne along his path. It is a perfect picture of the crime of scepticism: the old spiritual crime of simony. Scepticism seeks to purchase the offices of God with material wealth. While the physician can find reason for his values in his Christianity, the sceptics, doubting everything relating to values and the metaphysical, still confidently expects to find them, though they leave themselves nowhere to find them. Rejecting out of hand everything that is spiritual is hardly the way to establish things so spiritual as the value of universal tolerance or intellectual honesty. An extreme scepticism might create a kind of makeshift, a sincere apathy, and that would serve well enough, since apathy doubtless makes one very tolerant and removes every motive for deception. But it also removes every motive for insisting that others should be apathetic. An real apathetic sceptic is so tolerant that they are ready to tolerate intolerance: it simply does not matter to them.

The idea that scientific enlightenment produced modern ethics is absurd; if anything, scientific enlightenment produced only modern existentialism. The attempt to derive ethical principles from scientific principles is a kind of alchemy that makes the old alchemists look childish. They thought, not without justice, that under the right conditions, it was possible to turn one metal into another, a fact that succeeding centuries has confirmed. The ideal enlightened modern would have us believe that, given sufficient data, it is possible to transform any or all metals (and whatever else remains to bulk out the periodic table) into the most spiritual of all substances, morality. And morality has not increased. Thus the failing centuries have proven that either this is not possible, or not enough enlightened people are interested in doing so.

Browne, like most scientific men of his generation, cannot be wholly acquitted of the charge of material alchemy, but he never attempted an alchemy like that. He did go this far, however: if not to transmute matter into morality, at least to find his morality confirmed and instructed by science. ‘What smattering I have of the philosopher’s stone,’ he says, referring to science, ‘has taught me a great deal of divinity.’ And he is right enough. If you have a religion, science might inform it; if you have none, science cannot create it. If you have a religion, it makes sense to call science ‘the philosopher’s stone,’ for it is a ladder whose end is in Heaven; but if there is no Heaven for if to end in, it is something like ideological witchery to try to make it that.

Now the whole history of the modern mindset lies in a little unfortunate fumbling about that issue of science and the philosopher’s stone. It can be half seen in Browne’s ‘sceptic,’ but at that time it had not yet fully run its course. What happened was not simple that philosophy became a science, and people stopped believing things they couldn’t scientifically prove. That is what they thought happened; that is what the great enlightenment thinkers thought they were doing; but it has not happened yet. People still believe plenty of things they cannot prove, and a good argument could be made that there is as yet no such thing as scientific philosophy. The truly important fact is that science ceased to be philosophy before philosophy started to become scientific. People stopped thinking like Thomas Browne before they started thinking like Richard Dawkins. They stopped thinking like Pascal and Bacon and Newton and Descartes, who are all largely at one with Browne in their worldviews, before they started thinking how we moderns think all scientists should think. They took God out of science before they subjected God to the ruthless razor of science. What the world would look like today if the order of events had been reversed, I do not know. Perhaps that would not have been possible. Certainly, though, there is a modern tendency to try to treat science as if it were a philosophy, a worldview, and jars against another tendency, the modern tradition of treating philosophy as if it had to be a science, and no irrational leaps must be made. For science to be a worldview there must be a kind of godlessness of the gaps, those colossal leaps of inference that rest on nothing and underprop the secular worldview; and that is wholly at odds with the idea that philosophy must operate with scientific rationality. Something needs to change, we feel; the postmodern solution is to treat philosophy unscientifically, and believe what you will; but I’ll wager it’s safer to treat science philosophically, as I think the Jacobean physician does.

What stops us is too great a respect for history. Not, mind you, too great a respect for science: most modern people probably don’t respect science enough. But history we trust unstintingly. Conveniently, this can be measured by a simple barometric scale: our attitude towards history majors. We are so far beyond the point of respecting them that we disrespect them. So prodigious is our reverence for history that it has been generally decided that an Arts degree is a waste of time. For we are not satisfied with the imperfect revelations of history books, or the squabbles of the history school; we would rather set up a shrine for history’s magnum opus, the Present, and take it for the infallible word of God. Whether or not we like the past, we trust it; we admire and revere the productions of history so much that it hardly seems right to question whether history went the right way when it reached the present; we have terms for those heretics who believe we would be better off in the past, or in an alternate universe. We call them escapists, and their heresy wishful thinking. What history has done must be accepted; what it has undone must never be revived. ‘Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it,’ we say: heaven forfend we should so far disrespect the progress history of history as to repeat the past! So infectious is this cult of history that it is endemic even within the history school itself, where it takes the form of a strange apothegm I have heard now many times: that the chief value of history as a study is to show us how we got to be where we are today. That is, history’s final word is the pinnacle; it is the most worthy part of the past.

The great thing is to have a healthy suspicion of ‘history,’ but to admire what is admirable within history. We should study the past because there are lot of good things that bumbling and blustering history has stamped out or mangled or sidelined as it went. The instance we have in hand is the philosophy of a renaissance doctor. If I dote on history I must quench my admiration for his way of thinking, with the cold reality that time has moved on; if I, like a good student of the arts, am haughty enough to question history, I might resolve to learn a thing or two from him. I won’t – I can’t – agree with everything he says, for two reasons: the first, and less important, that a great deal has been said and done between Browne’s day and my own; the main reason, that I seldom agree wholly and unqualifiedly with anyone on everything. But I can at least go so far as to suggest that the solution to a decadent and declining culture is not necessarily the invention of a new culture, but may be the revival of an old one. And the solution to a fractured or stale worldview is not necessarily the invention of a new worldview, but may well be the restoration of those that have for the moment fallen afoul of the petulance of history. Let us not be so simple as to suppose history has never taken a wrong turn.

As regards Sir Thomas Browne, this is the whole substance of my argument: that he is not just a clever writer, or a notable eccentric, that his philosophy really is quite deep, deep enough that four hundred years have not submerged it. Its particulars are too many to discuss; I have confined myself to describing and characterising a few of them, with the sympathy that any candid reader of any decent book ought to strive for. For his philosophy taken collectively is as cogent as any on the market. Like any philosophy, if it is not correct, it is a simple matter of gargantuan delusion; but should that be the case, those who go insane with him, their heads full of Christianity and nobility and charity and science, have certainly not gone too far wrong. They are like another knight of Browne’s day, whose birth may stand as the fourth great event that closes the box of 1605, whose birth coincided with Browne’s. For the year that brought this ingenious gentleman of England into the world, to pursue the gallant career of a medicus, also brought forth, to the gallant career of chivalry, the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha.