Lanark: a life in 4 books (81 page)

Weems sat down amid applause. Monboddo had been smiling down at the table with half-shut eyes. He arose and stood with one hand resting on the table, the other in his pocket, the smiling head tilted a little to one side. He waited until applause, faint conversation, coughs and stirrings sank into silence. As the silence continued his figure, casual yet unmoving, gained power and authority until the whole great ring of guests was like an audience of carved statues. Lanark was amazed that so many could make so complete a silence. It weighed on him like a crystal bubble filling the top of the tent and pressing down on his skull: he could shatter it any time by yelling a single obscenity, but bit his lips hard to stop that happening. Monboddo began to speak.

“Some men are born modest. Some achieve modesty. Some have modesty thrust upon them. I fear that Sir Trevor has firmly placed me in the last of these categories.”

Laughter went up, especially from Weems.

“Once I was an ambitious young department chief. I launched policies and had flashes of creative brilliance which, believe me, my friends, verged, I thought, upon genius! Well, ambition has met its nemesis. I now stand on the top tip of our vast pyramid and create nothing. I can only receive the brilliant proposals of younger, more actively placed colleagues and find ways to reconcile and promote them. I examine the options and discard, without emotions, those which do not fit our system. Such work uses a very
small
pan of human intelligence.”

“Oh, nonsense!” shouted Weems cheerfully.

“Not nonsense, no, my friend. I promise you that in three years all the limited skills of a council supremo will be embodied in the circuits of a Quantum-Cortexin humanoid, just as the skills of secretaries and special policemen are embodied. It may be my privilege to be the last of the fully human Lords Monboddo. The idea would flatter my very considerable vanity, were it not for the great improvement people will see in government business when the change takes place. Everything will suddenly go much faster.

Yes, today human government stands at a very delicate point of balance. But before opening the path ahead I must describe the steps which brought us here.

“So stand with me on the sun some six thousand years ago and consider, with sharper eyes than the eagle, the moist blue-green ball of the third planet. The deserts are smaller than now, the forest jungles much bigger, for where soil is thick, shrubberies clog the rivers and spread them out into swampland. There are no broad tracts of fenced field, no roads or towns. The only sign of men is where the globe’s western edge is rolling into the shadow of night. Some far-apart gleams are beginning on that dim curve, the fires of hunters in forest clearings, of fishers at river mouths, of wandering herdsmen and planters on the thin soil between desert and jungle, for we are too few to take good land from the trees. Our tiny tribal democracies have spread all over this world, yet we influence it less than our near relation the squirrel, who is important to the survival of certain hardwoods. We have been living here for half a million years, yet history, with its noisy collisions and divisions of code and property, has not yet started. No wonder the first historians thought men had been created a few centuries before themselves. No wonder later theorists called prehistoric men
childlike, savage, rude
, and thought they had wasted time in fighting and couplings even more ferocious than those of today.

“But big killings, like big buildings, need large populations to support them, and fewer people were born in 500,000 years of the stick-and-stone age than in the first 50 years of the twentieth century. Prehistoric men were too busy cooperating against famine, flood and frost to hate each other very much; yet they tamed fire and animals, mastered joinery, cooking, tailoring, painting, pottery and planting. These skills still keep most of us alive. Compared with the sowing and reaping of the first grain crop, our own biggest achievement (sending three men to and from a dead world in a self-firing bullet) is a marvellously extravagant baroque curlicue on the recentest page of human history.”

“That’s crap, Monboddo! And you know it!” yelled someone across the circle from Lanark. There was laughter from the darker-skinned delegates. Monboddo smirked at them before continuing:

“I still represent modern government, Mr. Kodac, do not worry. But the tools for harpooning other planets are still in the primitive phase, and it does no harm to admit that clever fellows like ourselves need not be ashamed of our ancestors. All the same, this petit-bourgeois world of gamekeepers and peasant craftmen bores me. Yes, it bores me. I thirst for the overweening exuberance of the Ziggurats and Zimbabwes, the Great Walls and Cathedrals. What is lacking from this prehistoric nature-park where sapient men have lived so long with such little effect? Surplus is lacking: that surplus of food, time and energy, that surplus of
men
we call wealth.

“So let a handful of centuries pass and look at the globe again. The biggest land mass is split into three continents by a complicated central sea. East of it, a wide river no longer meanders through swamps but flows in a distinct channel across a fertile geometry of fields and ditches. On the glittering surface boats and barges move upstream and down to unload their cargoes beside the cubes, cones and cylinders of the first city. A great house with a tower stands in the city centre. On the summit, high above the hazes of the river, the secretaries of the sky use the turning dome of heaven as a clock of light where sun, moon and galaxies tell the time to dig, reap and store. Under the tower the wealth of the state, the sacred grain surplus, is banked: sacred because a sack of it can keep a family alive for a month. This grain is stored life. Those who own it can command others. The great house belongs to modern men like ourselves, men, not skilful in growing and making things, but in managing those who do. There is a market beside the great house from which tracks radiate far across plain and forest. These tracks are beaten by tribesmen bringing fleeces, hides and whatever else can be exchanged for the life-giving grain. In time of famine they will sell their children for it. In time of war they can sell enemies captured in battle. The wealth of the city makes warfare profitable because the city managers know how to use cheap labour. More trees are felled, new canals widen the cultivated land. The city is growing.

“It grows because it is a living body, its arteries are the rivers and canals, its limbs are the trade routes grappling goods and men into its stomach, the market. We, whose state is an organization linking the cities of many lands, cannot know what sacred places the first cities seemed. Luckily the librarian of Babylon has described how they looked to a visiting tribesman:

He sees something he has never seen,
or has not seen … in such plenitude.
He sees the day and cypresses and marble. He sees a whole that is complex
and yet without disorder; he sees a city,
an organism composed of statues, temples, gardens, dwellings, stairways,
urns, capitals, of regular and open
spaces. None of these artifacts im
presses him (I know) as beautiful; they move him as we might be moved today
by a complex machine of whose purpose we are ignorant but in whose design we intuit an immortal intelligence
.

“Immortal intelligence, yes. That undying intelligence lives in the great house which is the brain of the city, which is the first home of institutional knowledge and modern government. In a few centuries it will divide into law court, university, temple, treasury, stock exchange and arsenal.”

“Here here!” shouted Weems unexpectedly, and there was some scattered applause.

“Bugger this,” muttered Odin. “He’s talked for ten minutes and only just reached the topic.”

“I find these large vague statements very soothing,” said Powys.

“Like being in school again.”

“But all tribesmen are not servile adorers of wealth [said Monboddo]. Many have skill and greed of their own. The lords of the first cities may have fallen before nomads driving the first wheeled chariots. No matter! The new masters of the grain may only keep it with help from the clever ones who rule land and time by rod and calendar, and can count and tax what others make. The great riverine cultures (soon there are five of them) absorb wave after wave of conquerors, who add to the power of the managers by giving them horsemen for companions. So the growth of cities speeds up. Their trade routes interlock and grapple, they compete with each other. Iron swords and ploughshares are forged, metals command the wealth of the grain. The seaside cities arise with their merchant and pirate navies.”

“He’s getting faster,” whispered Powys. “He’s covered twelve civilizations in six sentences.”

“Men increase. Wealth increases. War increases. Nowadays, when strong governments agree
there must not be
another big war, we can still applaud the old battles and invasions which blended the skills of conquerors and conquered. The are no villains in history. Pessimists point to Attila and Tamerlane, but these active men liquidated unprofitable states which
needed
a destroyer to release their assets. Wherever wealth has been used for mere self-maintenance it has always inspired vigorous people to grasp and fling it into the service of that onrushing history which the modern state commands. Pale pink people like myself have least reason to point the scorning finger. Poets tell us that for two millennia Europe was boisterous with energies released by the liquidation of Asiatic Troy. I quote the famous Lancastrian epic:

“Since the siege and assault was ceaséd
at Troy,

The burgh broken and burned to
brands and ashes,

It was Aeneas the Able and his high
kind

That since despoiled provinces and
patrons became

Wellnigh of all the wealth in the West
Isles;

For rich Romulus to Rome riches he
swipes,

With great bobbaunce that burgh he
builds upon first,

And names with his own name as now
it hath;

Ticius in Tuscany townships founds,
Langbeard in Lombardy lifts up homes,
And far over the French flood Felix
Brutus,

On many banks full broad Britain he
builds with his winnings,

Where war and wreck and wonder
By turns have waxed therein,
And oft both bliss and blunder
Have had their innings
.

“Bliss and blunder. The flow of wealth around the globe has involved much of both, but wealth itself has continued to grow because it is always served by the winners.”

“Pale pink people,” muttered Odin broodingly. “Pale pink people.”

“I don’t think the blackies and brownies are much amused,” said Powys. “Are you all right, Lanark?”

Monboddo’s strong quiet voice purred on like a stupefying wind.

“… so north Africa becomes a desert, with several useful consequences….”

“After the clean camaraderie of the steam bath-house, the new recruits notice that their parents stink….”

“… but machinists only work efficiently in a climate of hope, so slavery is replaced by debt and money becomes a promise to pay printed by the government….”

“… by the twentieth century, wealth has engrossed the whole globe, which now revolves in a tightening net of thought and transport woven round it by trade and science. The world is enclosed in a single living city, but its brain centres, the governments, do not notice this. Two world wars are fought in thirty years, wars the more bitter because they are between different parts of the same system. It would wrong the slaughtered millions to say these wars did no good. Old machines, old ideas were replaced at unusual speed. Science, business and government quickly became richer than ever before. We must thank the dead for that.”

Monboddo glanced at Weems, who stood up and said solemnly, “This is surely a good time to remember the dead. There are hardly any lands where men have not died this century fighting for what they thought best. I invite all delegates to stand with me for two minutes and remember the friends, relations and countrymen who suffered to make us what we are.”

“Bloody farce,” muttered Odin, gripping Lanark under the elbow to help him rise.

“Soon be over,” whispered Powys, helping at the other side. The whole great circle gradually rose to their feet except the black bloc, who stayed obstinately seated. There was silence for a while; than a distant trumpet sounded outside the tent and everyone sat murmuringly down.

“What’s the point of this speech?” said Odin. “It’s too Marxian for the Corporate Wealth gang and too approving for the Marxists.”

“He’s trying to please everyone,” said Powys.

“You can only do that with vague platitudes. He’s like all these Huns—too clever for his own good.”

“I thought he came from Languedoc,” said Powys.

“As I reach our present dangerous time [said Monboddo, sighing], I fear I have angered almost everyone here by a perhaps too cynical view of history. I have described it as a growing and spreading of wealth. Two styles of government command the modern world. One works to reconcile the different companies which employ their people, the other employs the people themselves. Defenders of the first style think great wealth the reward and necessary tool of those who serve mankind best; to the rest it is a method by which strong people bully weak ones. Can I define wealth in a way which lets both sides agree with me? Easily.

“At the start of my talk I said wealth was a surplus of men. I now say a wealthy state is one which orders its surplus men into great enterprises. In the past extra men were used to invade neighbours, plant colonies and destroy competitors. But the liquidation of unprofitable states by warfare is not practical now. We all know it, which is why this assembly has been a success:
not
because I have been a specially good chairman but because you, the delegates of states big and small, have agreed to order onrushing history, onrushing wealth, onrushing
men
by majority decisions reached through open and honest debate.”