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.