Two weeks ago, another deadline passed, and nothing happened. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland remains a member of the European Union. For the third time this year my country failed in the task it has set itself. We will try again next January. In the meantime, we will have a general election. One of my American friends reminds me of some lines from a famous song from the late seventies: “You can check out any time you like/ But you can never leave.” Hotel Brussels doesn’t quite capture the glamour associated with the original lyrics, but the message of the song continues to resonate: wanting is not the same as getting.
General Specific
When I was a teenager, one day during a history lesson my teacher quoted Lord Acton, the nineteenth century British historian: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I was of an impressionable age and this was exactly the sort of epigram that appealed to me: short and poetic in form, but deep and insightful in meaning. I made a mental note to remember and apply it in my thinking. For someone disposed to play the intellectual rebel – as I was then and am now – the quotation has much to offer, since the authority figures who disapproved of my free-thinking could now be dismissed by me not just as reactionaries, but as corrupt reactionaries. Fathers, teachers, ministers of religion: all are men of power and, drawing on Acton’s sharp observation, it was easy for me to assert that to the degree that they were powerful they were also corrupt.
A year or so later, I saw a paperback copy of Acton’s essays in a second-hand bookshop, which I bought (obviously: the habits of a lifetime, by definition, start when we are young), brought home, and then started to read. I was surprised, indeed disturbed to discover that I had been seriously misled by my teacher. What Acton had written – in a letter, as it happens, the text of which was included in the book of essays – was this: power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He had qualified the abrupt and striking claim in the first half of his sentence by two words that significantly changed its meaning. Not power corrupts but power tends to corrupt.
A tendency is not an inevitability; the universal cannot be presumed but requires reference to the particularity. In future, before dismissing the utterances of the powerful as the voice of corruption, I would have to assemble some actual evidence for such a claim: it might tend to be true in general but was it also true in this specific case? Knowledge, I had discovered, is not the same as pithiness. A good lesson to learn young, for sure, but one that is not always ready at hand, not always the mind’s preferred approach, because the world is easier to deal with when it can be described in simple terms, using straightforward intellectual constructions that can be applied – lazily, if we are being honest – to any and every example that comes to mind.
We are readily disposed to make use of general categories into which we can gather all cases. It is instinctive; perhaps an instinct cultivated by our determination to survive. In a recent conversation, driving north from Boston (MA) to Scarborough (ME), Peter mentioned Stephen Jay Gould, the famous Harvard palaeontologist, who wrote many popular books about evolutionary biology. I once heard him give a public lecture in London (UK) on the question, Is there such a thing as human nature? His answer: the human brain has evolved to deal well with type-type recognition (“she ate red berries and was buried; these berries are red so I better not eat them”) but deals poorly with statistical analysis (“of the twenty types of red berry in our local habitat, only one is poisonous to humans; so most red berries, including this one, are unlikely to harm me”). Thus, he concluded, while it is not clear that there is such a thing as human nature, it is clear why humans are predisposed to think that there is: we tend to think in types.
Whether or not we have an evolutionarily acquired disposition to classify everything and everyone into groups, at the very least it seems clear that in our speech we are prone to adopt the short-form unqualified generalization. In part, this is because the rhetorical force of brief, bold statements is much greater than longer, subtle ones. Slogans are better able to mobilise minds, both for the personal and the political. Benjamin Franklin – also of Boston (MA) – was adept at crafting pithy sayings, which are easily remembered because they pay no account of the occasions on which they don’t apply: an investment in knowledge always pays the best interest sounds so much better than an investment in knowledge of certain kinds, will likely provide a better return than many other forms of spending, but not in all cases and not over all time periods, despite the fact that the latter is true and the former is not. Likewise, the claim that the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it could be made much more accurate through further elaboration but would almost certainly lose its appeal and become less memorable in the clarifying process.
I am tempted to say, “always avoid unqualified generalizations”, except that this warning is itself an unqualified generalization, and thus to be avoided. Instead, I recommend acknowledgment that, “carefully qualified statements about specific cases are more likely to be true (and, therefore, more likely to be helpful) than unqualified statements about general cases; although this is not always the case, because every general rule has important exceptions, thus demonstrating that rules are mostly derived from statistical norms rather than universal truths, except in those very rare cases when they are universally true”. I hope that is clear.
To summarise, as pithily as I am able: error tends to brevity, but accuracy tends to prolixity. But please note well, as Acton did, the important qualifying role of tendency.
My recent visit to the US provided two illustrations of this point. What might the weather be like in New York City during the fourth week in September? Nowadays that’s an easy question to answer, since the Internet is awash with meteorological data. A brief search provided me not only with the average temperatures, both highs and lows, plus daily rainfall (all very useful information) but also data on the range of cases that might be encountered. In other words, not just the mean for heat and precipitation, but also how far the extremes in both directions might stray from that mean. I could therefore predict not just what was likely but what was possible. All very interesting as a summary of general weather history for the city, but for me, visiting specifically during the fourth week of September in the year 2019, and wondering what to pack – should I bring sun-glasses and sun-cream, or a raincoat and a hat? – the more pertinent question was, What will the weather be like in NYC next week? That the mean temperature ranges between 16 and 25 Celsius is interesting, but not what I most cared about, for which I needed an accurate weather forecast, rather than rich data on historical averages. (As it happens, the city enjoyed higher than average temperatures, closer to 30 than 25 most days that week.)
En route to New York, as Peter drove us from Scarborough (ME) to Boston (MA) to catch the Amtrak train to Penn Station (NY), we talked about our time working together at the investment management subsidiary of a global financial firm, back at the start of this century. It was a pleasure to reminisce. Later that day, staring out of the train window at the New England countryside, I thought about my last couple of years of employment there, when I was asked by the CEO to set up and then chair a Diversity Committee for the European office. As part of this process, I interviewed the (mostly male) members of the Senior Management Team, to solicit their thoughts about the current state of diversity within the firm (very simply: dire) and what should be done about it (very disappointingly: not much).
I remember well a conversation with one senior manager, who told me, with no hint of embarrassment, that the reason why there were no women in his investment team (to be clear, none at all: not just fewer than 50%, but actually 0%) was because to be in his team required a high level of competence in mathematics and – alas! – women were just not as good at maths as men. This from a Managing Director of a firm which insisted that all its investment strategies should be thoroughly evidenced by data and implemented with care, to achieve good performance and avoid the concentration of risk. In other words, his team only bought assets for our clients after they had taken account – at great expense of research time – of the detailed characteristics of each asset, its likely performance and how it would help to diversity the existing portfolio. When we hired staff for our business, however, the firm paid almost no attention to well-documented evidence of skill acquisition and learning potential, relying instead on the intuitive judgments (also known as the prejudices) of the senior managers. Rather than ensuring that new hires brought diversity to the existing team, as a matter of deliberate choice we concentrated our risk by repeatedly hiring in our own image.
This story is neither unusual nor surprising: it reflects how the finance industry was, and in many cases still is. For all its sense of being at the cusp of innovation and change, it remains – mostly – a place of conservatism and embedded privilege. As Stephen Jay Gould explained, we tend to think in particular ways, because as a species we have evolved to give precedence to type-type recognition ahead of a rigorous statistical examination of the data. We tend to think in ways that proved very successful at an earlier stage of our evolution, but which might not be so helpful for our next survival challenge; and we find it hard to abandon what worked well last time around. However easy this is to understand, it is impossible to excuse. Sloppy thinking is sloppy, irrespective of its evolutionary pedigree. And not just sloppy, but also dangerous, wrong and unjust. Knowing the average tells us nothing about the individual. The mean is not the best.
We need to remind ourselves regularly that many red berries are edible and that some are delicious; we need to acknowledge that some women are not just good at mathematics, but better than most men; and, based on recent experience, I can assure my readers that sometimes the last week in September is the perfect time to visit NYC, when the sky is bright blue and the sun is warm, and Manhattan becomes – as Ella sang – an isle of joy.
Across the border
Two days ago, I flew from London to Belfast, which takes just over an hour, traversing the Irish Sea but remaining at all time within the airspace of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This is not so unusual: flying from Melbourne to Hobart takes around the same time and – likewise – crosses a sea but not a national boundary; and the flight I took in December 2017 from Oakland to Kona took five and a half hours, travelling over a large expanse of the Pacific Ocean and across three time-zones, just to move from one of the fifty constituents of the United States to another.
Later that day, driving from Belfast to Co Donegal, on the west coast of the island of Ireland, took close to three hours. At one point in the journey – as I crossed the River Foyle, by the bridge that connects Strabane and Lifford – the road signs began to announce the speed limits in kilometres rather than miles per hour. Another helpful notice reminded me – in English, French and German – that I should drive on the left-hand side of the road, as both the British and the Irish have always done. These signs drew my attention to the fact that I had just crossed the border: I was now in the Republic of Ireland.
Here, the dark line on the map runs along the river, where it was drawn nearly one hundred years ago. What the line represents – for the past, the present and the future – is hotly contested on both sides. Like the water that flows down from the Sperrin Hills, into the Foyle estuary and out to the North Atlantic Ocean, the meanings that attach to the line are in constant flux and flow: you never cross the same border twice, as O’Heraclitus said. Drawing a line on a map and calling it a border is a simple solution to complex problem, merely delaying the need to find a better, more lasting resolution, and at the price of making this patch of ground (or riverbed) the focal point for seemingly endless conflict. Which side of the line you come from is supposed, by many, to determine which side you will find yourself in other disputes and disagreements.
The line on the map that now separates Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland was initially intended to create two self-governing provinces (one primarily Protestant and one primarily Catholic) on the island of Ireland, both of which would remain part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Now, one hundred years later, it seems as if it might soon become the hard border between the United Kingdom and the European Union, a barrier designed to control and restrict free trade and free movement. The boundary has therefore become economic rather than theological, but this has improved neither the quality of the debate, nor the level of responsibility for the consequence of their actions, among politicians about why a line might be needed and how it should be managed. Each century has its own dogmas, which attract the energies and enthusiasms of the dogmatists. Times change, waters flow, intransigence remains.
Drawing a line on a map, to segregate people according to their religion, became the standard British approach in the twentieth century, allowing us to abdicate responsibility for the social and economic consequences of imperialism, and to re-assert our “greatness” in world affairs, all other evidence to the contrary. The planned partition of Palestine, where Britain had been granted a mandate to govern after the collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1918, failed in the 1940s leading to war and seventy years of displacement and exile for the Palestinian people. The partition of Punjab and Bengal, to carve West and East Pakistan out of the Empire of India in 1947, precipitated mass migrations, murder, rape and abductions, and in due course a civil war. (The British judge, who drew those two lines, around 3,800 miles in length, spent six weeks on the task having never previously visited India).
This is not to say that before these border lines were drawn, everyone in Ireland, Palestine and India lived peaceably with their neighbours. There have always been arguments between and within communities, sometimes based on religious differences, but often on other grounds too. Building peace and prosperity is a multi-dimensional project, which takes time, skill and resource. It is a task for us all, not one that can be delegated to the cartographers. Lines on maps do not change the way people feel about their neighbours, but merely give them a highly visible objects to fight over with their neighbours: the line concentrates the mind, accentuates the differences, focuses the anger.
Later today, I will fly into City Airport in East London. When the plane touches down I will feel that I am back home: not because I have re-entered the United Kingdom (an event that will take place hours earlier when I cross from Co Donegal to Co Londonderry) but because, however much I enjoy spending time on the island of Ireland, it is in East London that I feel most myself; where I feel I belong. Why? Because London it is not a nation but a city; not full of one sort of people, but of many; not a holy shrine, but a secular metropolis; not the place I come from but the one I chose to move to. It is a home that I share with many others who want to create their own sense of who they are, rather than inherit to it; to live in the present rather than inhabit the past; to be defined by character and not by location.
This cosmopolitanism ideal is not new. It dates to the Stoics, one of the early schools of Athenian and Roman philosophy, many of whose leading thinkers were originally neither from Athens nor Rome, but who travelled to those cities because that was where the intellectual life of the ancient Western world was primarily conducted. One theme of Stoic thought emphasizes that the truly ethical life can be lived anywhere, and everywhere; it is not where you are from, nor your current status in society that matters; rather how you choose to live you life, how you choose to develop your character. The Stoics were the original citizens of the world, for whom the person, not the place, matters most. Of course, it helps to live in a place where there are many others who share this belief: cosmopolitanism is not an easy choice when surrounded by those who believe in blood and soil.
Later this week I will board another plane to fly again across the water, this time to Boston, coincidentally a city with some strong Irish connections. There I will be met by Peter, and driven to his home in Maine, close to the border between Canada and the United States of America, a line drawn on a map, between two former British colonies, which has turned out to be less contentious than most. There we will be joined by Viktoria and one or two others, for a weekend of conversation alongside the sharing of food and wine. We all come from different places – different nations, cultures, languages, education and employment – and yet our lives have intersected in somewhat random ways, and we have discovered common interests and attitudes, shared values and ideals. We will make a mini-community – just a few of us for just a few days – but we will not need to draw lines on a map to do so.
I understand that out ability to meet as friends is premised upon our enjoyment of privileges – money, time, education, employment opportunities – that are not evenly shared around the world. I also know that many of those who are most determined to draw lines on maps, and to assert the importance of these boundaries, are themselves privileged people. Borders are generally not the work of the poor, but devices constructed by the rich and powerful, who want to keep what they have and not to share with others, whose wealth is measured by the quantity of what they own rather than the quality of who they are. Enclosed lands are the product of enclosed minds, another reason for wanting to pull down the fences.
While I am lucky enough to be able to cross the border, I will continue do so.
Happily, ever after
A few nights ago, I went to my local theatre to see a production of a recently composed opera, based on an old Italian fairy tale. The libretto was both light- and warm-hearted, the singing and playing were both competent, and while the evening was enjoyable, nonetheless I left the theatre dissatisfied. The narrative structure in Act One hinted at Greek tragedy, but the concluding Scene in Act Two was pure Hollywood. Reflecting on my disappointment, I concluded that there is good reason why fairy tales tend not to work well as the source material for opera. In the best opera, most, if not all the principals lie dead on the stage by the time the curtain falls. By contrast, the best fairy tales conclude with the narrator’s assurance that the main characters will now live “happily, ever after”.
I do not intend to say more about opera, at least not in this text. Instead I want to write about living happily ever after: what would that be like?
I remember a poem by C P Cavafy, titled “Monotony”, written in 1908 and here translated from modern Greek by Aliki Barnstone:
From one monotonous day, another day
follows, identically monotonous. The same
things will happen. They will happen again.
The same moments find us and leave us.
A month passes and brings in another month.
We easily guess what is to come:
the same boring things from yesterday.
Then tomorrow no longer looks like tomorrow.
One reason I like this poem is for the way Cavafy generates tension between form and content: there is repetition as day follows day, month follows month, and the same things happen again and again. But he is careful to tell us that the days are monotonous, and that the things are boring. It is not their repetition that is the problem but their intrinsic uninterestingness. Boredom is a feature of the events themselves not their repeated recurrence. From which we might infer that a life of repetition could potentially be an interesting life – a happy life, a life in which tomorrow truly looks like tomorrow – even though this particular exemplar, the life about which Cavafy writes, is neither interesting nor happy because what is endlessly repeated is by nature dull.
Many of the moments of our lives, which find us and leave us, do so daily. For most of the days of the rest of my life, however long that is, I will eat: which means that I will also buy ingredients, cook food and clear away the utensils after consuming what I have prepared. For most of the days of the rest of my life, however long that is, I will go to sleep: which means that I will also brush my teeth, wash my face and make the bed after rising in the morning. For most of the days of the rest of my life, however long that is, I will read: which means that I will also browse my shelves for material, sit for an hour or more in my chair and return my glasses to their case after perusing the chosen book or magazine. For most days of the rest of my life – not the unusual days, the extraordinary days, but the normal days – it is these habitual activities that will determine whether my life is lived happily, ever after.
(I take it that “ever after” in this context means “for a good while”, and not “for time without end”. For immortals, the problem of monotony will be harder to resolve).
One part of the secret to living a happy life comes from avoiding war, famine, or the premature deaths of those we love, but success in these cases mostly remains beyond our control. We cannot always avoid adversity, however much we try, and unluckiness can surely be the enemy of happiness. Finding satisfaction in the quotidian is, I think, another part of the secret: if we can adjust our sense of pleasure to focus on the enjoyment of the everyday, we increase the likelihood of a happy life. Many facets of our daily lives can be thought of as tiresome chores which distract us from greater, more meaningful activities, but I suspect that thinking in this way makes the achievement of greater things less likely.
Which brings to my mind another poem, titled “I Want” and written in 1933 by Ricardo Reis, one of the anonyms of Fernando Pessoa, here translated from the Portuguese by Jonathan Griffin:
I want – unknown, and calm
Because unknown, and my own
Because calm – to fill my days
With wanting no more than them.
Those whom wealth touches – their skin
Itches with the gold rash.
Those who fame breathes upon –
Their life tarnishes.
To those for whom happiness is
Their sun, night comes around.
But to one who hopes for nothing
All that comes is grateful.
Chasing after wealth and fame is foolish, for all the obvious reasons, but so too is chasing happiness as an end-in-itself. Enjoying what we have, what is given to us – the daily repetitions that structure our lives – can bring pleasure enough, and anything additional should be treated as a gift. Reis (Pessoa) wants no more from life than his days of life: they suffice; living itself is good enough.
Pessoa’s poem echoes the writings of Benedict Spinoza, whose Jewish ancestors had left Portugal for Holland, rather than accept forced conversion to the Christian faith. Spinoza was himself expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam for refusing to abjure his radical theological views. He was a man denied the security afforded by membership of a strong national or religious community, a man who depended on the kindness and discretion of a small group of like-minded friends, themselves at the margins of Europe’s emergent Republic of Letters. He was a man who, though he might think as he pleased, needed to be very careful about saying what he thought; he was a writer whose caution led him to remain unpublished in his lifetime. Yet, he was also by all accounts a happy man.
At the start of his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (written in the late 1650s), Spinoza writes that experience had taught him that “all the things which regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile”. This might be taken as a wholesale rejection of my suggestion that happiness can be found in the enjoyment of the quotidian. But while he dismisses the pursuit of wealth, honour or sensual pleasure for their own sake as routes to happiness, Spinoza is careful to note that these three need not be obstacles to happiness, so long as they are considered only means to a greater end. That end – true happiness – he describes as “the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of Nature”. To understand what Spinoza means by this enigmatic statement would require extensive commentary on his great philosophical treatise, The Ethics (published in 1677, shortly after his death). However, for my present purposes I want only to draw attention to a claim that he makes – emphatically – in the fourth chapter (paragraph 42), where he writes that “cheerfulness cannot be excessive, but is always good”; or, as another translation puts it, “there cannot be too much joy”. Spinoza is sometimes portrayed as a man who lived an austere life and developed an austere philosophy. On the contrary: he was a man who found great joy in both his life and his thought.
Whether we find the things that regularly occur in ordinary life to be empty and futile, depends less on their intrinsic nature and more on the way we think about them. If we chase wealth, fame or pleasure as our goals, we are likely to find the daily routine to be no more than a daily grind. By contrast, if we take pleasure in small, repeated actions – the daily making of coffee, a weekly swim, tending a garden through the seasons – our happiness can be founded upon these well-loved routines. Should some wealth, fame or pleasure appear in our lives – by effort, merit, or accident – they may bring us supernumerary joy. But we are more likely to be happy if we do not depend on the extraordinary as the source of our happiness.
Which is another way of saying that whether we are happy – or not – is consequent more on how we think about our lives and less on what happens to us during our lives. If we understand, as Spinoza did, the union of the mind with the natural world, or if we learn, as Pessoa did, to hope for nothing, then we can enjoy the routines of daily life cheerfully because such a life can be lived with joy. What once were considered obstacles can, in practice, become vehicles to true happiness, if only we adapt our minds to the reality of the world.
I do not mean by this that happiness if only to be found by withdrawal from the world, escaping into a sheltered, scholarly or poetic renunciation of public life. Spinoza spent much time thinking and writing about politics and science: his retreat into domesticity was forced upon him by the lack of intellectual and social freedom of his time. And he is the most materialist of all philosophers, denying the existence of a separate realm of spirit, mind or ideas, distinct from the physical universe. His approach to happiness is not founded on an abandonment of the material world, but on the whole-hearted embrace of it. And for him, as for most of us, for most of the time, this embrace is centred on the repetitive daily tasks that form the bones of our lives, the skeleton upon which all else we do hangs.
In classic fairy tales, the hero and heroine live happily, ever after, once the dragon has been slain, or the wicked witch/wizard has been defeated, or the enemy’s attacks have been thwarted, allowing the protagonists to enjoy many, many days in peace and quiet. Happily, ever after, implies a time of calm, a time of wanting no more than the days themselves. Does this sound monotonous? Maybe so, but only if we choose to find days of peace and quiet to be dull. If we learn to take pleasure in them and their sufficiency, we need not think of them as empty and futile. And, in addition to the great pleasure we obtain from eating, sleeping and reading – over and over, time and again – we can also go to the opera once in a while, to enjoy the spectacle of der Lieberstod, content that it is others, not us, who chose death in ecstasy over repetitious daily life.
Fools rush in …
When my daughter was about eighteen months old, we bought her some painted bricks to play with. Cubic in shape – around 5cm long in each dimension – and numbering just over thirty in total, they were sufficient to build a tall tower, or two or three smaller towers. Coloured red, green, blue and yellow, they were ideal for constructions that were aesthetically appealing for someone – like me – more attracted to the Bauhaus than the Gothic. Made of wood, they were pleasingly tactile in the hand and when they fell to the floor, they produced a mellow marimba-tone that no plastic brick could hope to emulate.
They were the source of much fun. I would build towers, of different sizes, colours and architectural designs, which my daughter would delight in knocking to the floor. I would re-build and she would re-knock. Build-up, knock-down; build-up, knock-down, build-up, knock-down; repeat ad infinitum. I came to understand that there were two reasons why she preferred to destroy my carefully constructed towers rather than build with me. First, the manual dexterity required to stack small cubic bricks is harder for a child than an adult, so for her the building process was much more like work than play. Second, there is pleasure – great pleasure – to be had in the immediacy of a simple act of destruction. What took me several minutes to build up, she could knock down in one second. Thus, our division of labour became institutionalised: I would build-up, she would knock-down: work for me, pleasure for her.
As we grow up, our motor functions become more controlled and our architectural sensibilities more refined, increasing our willingness to take on the role of the builder in such games. Our sense of time also changes, and we come to attach value to our expected future states as well as our actual present state. We become capable of taking pleasure in construction as well as destruction, because we learn to be patient, taking satisfaction from the achievements of slow and steady work, not just the thrill of instant impact. At least that’s the theory. Personally, I have always been wary of the value of patience, suspicious of its status as a virtue, sceptical of the need to cultivate it as part of my character. If something needs to be done, do it now and do it fast is my default philosophy. Patience is often an excuse for dissembling, procrastination and general inefficiency in life.
Which brings me to a famous story about Alexander of Macedon, a figure from ancient history to whom I feel a bond, of sorts, since my middle name is Alexander, although I doubt we have much else in common, as I am neither Greek nor Great. I draw my story from Flavius Arrianus Xenophon – known to posterity as Arrian – whose history, The Campaigns of Alexander is one of the principal sources for our contemporary knowledge of the adventures and achievements of the young imperialist. In Book II, Arrian tells the story of the “untying” of the Gordian Knot. Gordius was a poor man, but his son Midas became king of the Phrygians. (It’s not a long story, but irrelevant to my purposes in this text, for which reason I pass on without comment.) As a thank-offering to Zeus, Gordius’s wagon was parked on the local acropolis, its yoke tied to the wagon by a cord made from the bark of the cornel tree. The Knot which kept the yoke in place was so designed that no one could see where it began or ended. It was considered near impossible for the yoke to be untied: indeed, local myth suggested that he who managed to undo the Knot would become the ruler of the Persian Empire.
When Alexander arrived in Gordium at the start of his military expedition, it was clearly incumbent upon him to try to solve the puzzle of the Knot, in order to demonstrate his credentials as a conquering hero. Arrian reports two different accounts of what Alexander did, when confronted by the refractory cornel bark. One story says that he removed the wooden peg that held the shaft of the wagon to the yoke, around which the knot was tied; another story says that he cut through the knot with his sword. Either way, as Arrian notes, “when he and his attendants left the palace where the wagon stood, the general feeling was that the oracle about the untying of the knot had been fulfilled”. Now Alexander was ready to conquer Persia; and then India. His solution to the problem of Gordian Knot – don’t procrastinate by trying to find the elusive solution to a complex problem, rather act speedily and decisively, thereby showing the problem to be misconceived – has long seemed to me a vindication of my distrust of the so-called virtue of patience.
Except, of course, that not all problems have a “quick” solution that can be revealed by a dash of élan and a rhetorical flourish; not all Gordian Knots can be unravelled by sleight of hand, or slash of sword. Alexander’s impatience –or rather, his impetuosity – did not work out so well in the long-run, however impressed his immediate audience on the acropolis might have been by his audacity. Knocking brings easy pleasure, but it requires that someone else is willing to rebuild, otherwise all that remains is rubble. Defeating the enemy in battle is one thing, governing a newly won kingdom effectively is quite another.
Speaking of which, I write this text after a bizarre week in British politics, during which the smallish electorate that comprises the paid-up membership of the Conservative Party– mostly old, white and wealthy – have selected a new leader for their party, who – by quirk of constitutional tradition – also becomes the new Prime Minister. For reasons known only to themselves, they have selected a man renowned for his laziness, dishonesty, irresponsibility and shamelessness; a man who, like me, disparages patience, but, unlike me, thinks the current challenges of British politics can be dealt with as if they were knots of cornel.
Two of the three principal challenges facing Boris the Great are shared by all developed democratic societies: first, how to design an electorally acceptable fiscal policy that provides sustainable funding streams to pay for the ever-growing demands on public services that support our aging populations; second, how to persuade the public to adjust their lifestyles by making significant changes to energy and food consumption, necessitated by global climate change. Neither of these two challenges will be easy; not least because very few politicians are willing publicly to acknowledge the scale and urgency of the remedies that are required; not least because a central element of the solutions to both problems involves immigration into developed democratic societies on a significant scale, which is poorly understood and widely disliked. I think it is reasonable to predict that Boris will make little if any progress towards serious solutions to either of these challenges, although in this regard, his record will be no more dismal than that of most of his contemporaries in other states.
His third challenge – in one sense more immediate, given treaty deadlines, but ultimately far less urgent, because it is wholly avoidable, what one might call a “fake challenge” – is to deal with the problem of how to exit the EU while not admitting to the electorate what is obvious to most dispassionate observers, namely that the economic and social costs of this foolish policy are enormous and will last for a generation; maybe longer. As a leading proponent of “Brexit” it is highly unlikely that Boris will ever acknowledge publicly the amount of harm that the policy has already caused and will continue to cause for years to come. But that cost is now likely to rise significantly, and to become much more obvious to the electorate, because of his propensity to treat the problem of disentanglement as if it were a knot to be sliced through. Rather than concede that there is a high price to be paid for the gradual untying of relationships between Britain and the EU, Boris appears to believe that it would be clever for him to mimic Alexander at Gordium.
He is wrong – very wrong – as we are all soon going to discover. Brexit only become a problem because some people insisted on the need to find a solution. If we were to stop the frantic search for a way to untie the knot that yokes Britain to Europe, we might give ourselves the space to see that we are tied not by cornel bark, but by shared history, culture, genetics and economics. Much as I dislike monarchy, both in its substantive and its decorative formats, it is sobering to remember that for the past two thousand years (approximately), since we rid ourselves of Roman (i.e. cosmopolitan Mediterranean) rule, British monarchs have come from Spain (Celts), Germany (Anglo-Saxons), Denmark (King Knut etc.), France ( William the Conqueror), Wales (Tudors), Scotland (Stuarts), Holland (House of Orange) and various German principalities (including Hanover and Saxe-Coburg). The idea that we are different (and special) compared with continental Europe is ridiculous; the idea that our history demonstrates our separate identity is a preposterous self-delusion. But it is one that Boris has nurtured.
It is impossible to unravel the Brexit Knot and it is irresponsible to try. We are not cutting through bark, but flesh: we are kin with the rest of Europe. We are not severing cumbersome and restrictive commercial ties that constrain our growth, but the very blood vessels of our economy. For the past three years we have been engaged in a protracted bout of national self-harm: we are a country that should be on suicide watch. How many pointless sword slashes will it take before Boris understands this? It’s hard to say, but I predict that it won’t be a small number. He is committed to knocking-down not building-up and he intends to hit an artificial deadline for no reason other than to try to disguise his own character weaknesses: namely, his laziness, dishonesty, irresponsibility and shamelessness.
As I have grown older, I have come to understand that some tasks take much longer to complete than others. But when the task is long and complex then, I want to say, loudly and clearly, let’s start straight away and make progress as quickly as we can. The harder the problem the more our tendency to hesitate, and every day of delay makes it harder to achieve a favourable outcome. We have not improved our ability to adapt to climate change by waiting years to adjust our consumption of fossil fuels, nor have we made the funding of public services easier by piling up sovereign debt, the interest on which needs to be serviced out of current revenues. The longer we wait the worse the problems have become.
By contrast, at other times, inactivity is the secret to success. There is a segment of British society that dislikes the EU and dislikes immigration. Their voices are loud, but they have no credible plan for managing an economy that is disconnected from its major trading partners and running short of labour. Boris is committed to cutting the Brexit Knot, but has no clue what to do once the wagon and yoke are separated. He offers a cure that is worse than the disease. Like a small child, he will delight in knocking-down, but as yet, there is no-one ready at hand to start re-building work. In times like these, the best policy is to do nothing, to stick with the status quo, to learn to live with the problem rather than try to solve it, to not rush in like a fool when an angel would fear to tread. It might not be a virtue – I am still convinced that it is regularly an excuse – but I am now old and wise enough to know that sometimes patience is the best policy.