The Doubter's Companion (9 page)

This would not prevent the academics employed there from preaching their essentially anti-social and amoral doctrines. They would be gathered up with delight by the hundreds of imitation Chicago Schools. The purpose of closure would be simply to disentangle a tendentious ideology from its unassailable position within contemporary power structures. The same sort of liberating shock treatment was applied to European civilization in 1723 when the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was disbanded. The effect was to set free the ideas of the Enlightenment. See:
BRETTON WOODS, DEPRESSION, FREE TRADE, GROWTH
and
REGULATION.

CHILDREN
   See:
FACTORIES
and
WAR.

CITIZEN
   The individual is essentially a citizen.

This is a reality inherited from Athens. We have little choice but to accept it since democracy cannot function in any other way. It is possible to hop along in a one-legged manner with citizens voting from time to time but refusing to participate and being denied most of their obligations. The result is a superficial, even dishonest, system and a population constantly dissatisfied with itself.

If the individual is not first a citizen, then the obligations and privileges which go with that status are effectively lost and the person ceases, to all intents and purposes, to be an individual. See:
SOCRATES.

CIVILIZATION
   The single and shortest definition of civilization may be the word
LANGUAGE.

This is not to suggest that images or music are of lesser importance. It is simply that they have more to do with the unconscious. They are somehow part of metaphysics and religion. Civilization, if it means something concrete, is the conscious but unprogrammed mechanism by which humans communicate. And through communication they live with each other, think, create and act. See:
DOUBT.

CLASS
   Although class has never existed in North America and is a thing of the past in Europe, there are large numbers of exclusive travel agencies which organize paying weekends in English country houses as guests of the baronet and rent out
piani nobile
in Italian
palazzi
. These and the profusion of romantic chateau hotels remind us that in an egalitarian society today's duchess is tomorrow's landlady. And as Mrs. Simpson demonstrated, today's landlady may well be tomorrow's duchess. Everyone has an equal right to inequality. The basic rule for men seeking social promotion through marriage is to ignore titles, manners and houses until they have established clearly whether the lady is sweeping her way down the stairs or up.

CLAUSEWITZ, CARL VON
   Clausewitz is to military strategy what DESCARTES is to philosophy—an excuse for those who hold power to treat as inevitable that which mediocrity and received wisdom cannot overcome.

This nineteenth-century strategist is often blamed by twentieth-century generals and military commentators both for the advent of total war and of war used as a continuation of civil policy. That Clausewitz recommended neither would seem to suggest that they feel the need for a scapegoat to justify strategies which, in the absence of purpose and shape, have mistaken administrative structures, technology and prolonged violence for resolution.

CNN
   A privately owned reincarnation of the Voice of America, except that government funding and an official foreign policy commitment have been replaced by a brilliantly simple financing system.

The CNN formula is to report on public affairs in the manner of a local American commercial television station and to broadcast it around the world. This means choosing a few high-profile international events, which are then reduced to a visual form resembling that of tabloid headliners, all reported from the U.S. point of view. These suggestions of internationalism are then interspersed with soft documentaries on minor topics, such as the closure of a naval base in South Dakota or the spread of a new venereal disease among blind drivers in California.

The secret to CNN's success is the marriage of satellite technology with the power of the American myth—in other words, modern
PROPAGANDA.
And propaganda can be profitable as well as useful.

The Voice of America was not entirely without merit and neither is CNN. In a single moment of journalistic glory during the Iraq War, CNN surprised the international news-gathering community when it left a journalist in Baghdad, thus providing the only counterpoint of information in the most controlled war story of modern times.

By 1993 it had sunk back down to its natural level. This meant covering the parliamentary revolt in Moscow with portentous declarations of its own importance, but mainly without leaving their studio. Their message to the world was a faithful reflection of the American president's.

COLLECTORS
   In 1983 a junior Paris bank employee failed to turn up at his office. The police forced the door of his apartment only to find it blocked by what turned out to be a solid mass of garbage, which filled the entire apartment to within less than a metre of the ceiling. They found the bank employee lying under a blanket in a little dip on top. He had died in his sleep.

What they publicly categorized as garbage was actually old shoes, old clothes, abandoned suitcases, rags, empty bottles and scrap-paper. The apartment was so full that the collector was obliged to eat, bathe and change elsewhere. To get out the door he had to shift a whole section.

Each item had been cleaned, washed and brushed before being added to the collection. He was forty-nine and died of undetermined natural causes. It may have been gasses emanating from his clothes and newspapers.

To collect objects is an obsession which can either be positive or negative. The positive collector believes that he or she is doing it for pleasure—his own or that of others. The negative personality mistakes his collection for immortality and thus for power.

There is an infectious joy in positive collectors. In an almost childish way they often give their lives over to the pursuit of beauty, like Nabokov with his butterflies. In this obsession they are not creators but detectives, and they know that yet more wonderful objects are to be found hiding somewhere ahead; hiding because everyday life can be cruel to beauty and so it is often lost or forgotten. These collectors are the agents of our collective memory. Their weapon is not money (although they often need it). They work with intuition and a good eye. They are the true creators of our public collections.

Museum curators are sometimes collectors. But more often they are the technocrats and accountants of creativity. Not obsessed by beauty, but by identifying precise styles. One of their principal jobs is to seduce aging negative collectors and then convince them to will their objects in the right direction. This is a macabre profession which involves soliciting old men incontinent in bed with their best objects hidden underneath as if they can be carried with them through death, and old women in apartments they rarely leave, surrounded by their debris of historic beauty.

These collectors and curators clarify the past. By exposing the sense and pleasure of creations they can make history useful. But their museums play an increasingly confused role—larger and larger, basements and warehouses stacked high with objects never put on show, curators battling for ever more pieces. André Malraux pointed out that the very idea of the museum is only two centuries old; that they have served to separate art from its function and so to free beauty.

But is it free without function? Can beauty even exist without function?

The practical effect of our emphasis on treating objects as something to be appreciated is that our society spends far more on collecting, cleaning, restoring and identifying than it does on creating. Those fascinated by new technology are more likely to be interested in the archaeology of beauty than in the creation of it. To hand so much of our aesthetic sense over to collectors and curators—scavengers and pathologists—seems to indicate that we are confused about what beauty can mean if it doesn't have a purpose.

COMEDY
   The least controllable use of language and therefore the most threatening to people in power.

In class-based societies a great deal is made of accents and linguistic formulae. Civilization is then defined as the verbal elegance needed to avoid engaging with other people. Language in such cases is designed to glance off the edges of all important subjects. Comedy is reduced to the harmless elegance of deft and amusing wit.

In contemporary society, respectability is tied to expertise. Subjects are controlled by those who know how to talk about them properly. These
DIALECTS
of expertise are both obscure and
SERIOUS.
They require the gravity of the insider. The effect on public debate is to transform any levity into irresponsibility. Almost everyone then feels they must use responsible language when they talk about public questions. Individuals far from power and from specialized language try to mouth the formulae of the economists when they talk about debt, as if they were all Cabinet advisers.

In this atmosphere comedy is excluded and reduced to base entertainment intended to distract the non-expert. Television situation comedies are examples of this. Comedy is converted into moralizing belly laughs which reinforce the authority of the controlled, serious, specialized language.

Real comedy doesn't give a damn about respectability. It belongs neither to a class nor to an interest group and expects to mock power and those who hold it.

Intelligent mediaeval kings kept court fools to remind them of the natural limits on their unlimited power, but also to prevent the swirling clouds of courtiers from binding them up with obscure servility. The novel first found its role as the most effective device for questioning established power, truths and language through satire, which was often wicked and vicious. Swift, Voltaire, Cervantes, Rabelais and Fielding refused to engage according to the rules. Instead they mocked the established order by removing its protective armour of dignity.

Salman Rushdie has said that the worst thing about the conundrum in which he finds himself is that everyone has forgotten
The Satanic Verses
is a comic novel. Being taken seriously is the kiss of death. He also points out that when Mohammed captured Mecca in 630 after fleeing eight years before, he was remarkably forgiving. Few people were punished and only two writers were executed. However, both of them were satirists.
⁶

In classical thought people imagined confrontations between the wise man and the tyrant. Often the wise man used satire and wit to keep his life while speaking out.

But how could contemporary philosophers play that role, locked as they are in obscure SCHOLASTIC studies? The profession has never recovered from the heavy hand of Immanuel Kant.

Part of their role has been picked up by burlesque comics. Some of them carry sharp social knives, but most seem isolated from the mechanisms of power. And the men of power have themselves discovered comedy. Stalin and Mussolini were great practical jokers of a deadly sort. The false Heroes of modern politics have discovered their jokester privileges. The president of the United States is always presenting funny hats to senators or having himself tackled on football fields by entire teams of courtiers. This is comic PR—a return to the humour of royal
noblesse oblige
. It stands comedy on its head by making it serve the interests of power.

But how can comedy have any power in a technocratic society? The drabness of modern intellectual discourse and the insistence on specialist knowledge are the barriers which writers must penetrate in order to liberate language and with it our ability to communicate. Comedy remains one of the last weapons we have. Above all, the writer has to resist the seductive call of respectability which dresses itself in myriad forms from professorships to prizes, honorific titles, medals and the siren call of art for its own sake, which leads us to take ourselves so seriously.

If writers and readers feel they must act in a respectable manner, then comedy is dead. And what is true for the writer is true for the citizenry. There is no reason why all of us—except perhaps the head of government and those in charge of financial policies—should worry about sounding responsible every time we open our mouths. Gravity is a lot less useful than irresponsible inquiry. See:
EXISTENTIALISM
and
SERIOUS.

COMPETITION
   An event in which there are more losers than winners. Otherwise it's not a competition. A society based on competition is therefore primarily a society of losers.

Competition is, of course, a very good thing. We cannot live in a complex society without it. On the other hand, if the principal relationship between citizens is based on competition, what has society and, for that matter, civilization been reduced to? The purpose of competition is to establish which is the best. The best may be defined as any number of things: the fastest, the cheapest, the largest quantity. It may even be the highest quality. Unfortunately the more competition is unleashed, the more it tends to eliminate quality as something too complex to be competitive.

The point of competition, if it is left to set its own standards, is that only the winners benefit. This is as true in economics as it is in sport. And a society which treats competition as a religious value will gradually reduce most of the population to the role of spectators. Democracy is impossible in such a situation; so is middle-class stability. That is why the return to increasingly unregulated competition over the last two decades has led to growing instability and an increasing gap between an ever-richer élite and an ever-larger poorer population.

We appear unable to decide what sort of competition we are referring to when we treat it as a religious truth (see:
HOLY TRINITY—LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY).
After all, competition must be a relative term. Everyone means something different when they talk of it.