Talking of Which, 31.07.24
Talking of Which, 31.07.24
It’s All for Sonning
I offer a ten-minute collection of observations, recollections, sketches and the like every month. First half (much longer this month) is for all, while the second half, containing all the litigable slander, celebrity gossip and photographs of my lunch, is for paying guests.
Dapper Façade
Just as ‘well-educated’ means having learnt to conceal from yourself and others how thick you are, so ‘dapper’ means to wear clothes more interesting than yourself. To be well dressed means to wear clothes that express a handsome character. To be ‘dapper’ means to wear clothes that compensate for lack of character. Think of a crowned peasant. One enters the palace all agog, only to find that the king of the realm is eating cheerios, wearing a tracksuit and watching The Only Way is Essex.
And clothes are the least of it. One can dress oneself in an ideology, a hobby, a lifestyle or even a partner that is more interesting than oneself. Thus the phenomena of the dapper philosopher-monk, the dapper anarcho-taoist, the dapper deerskin leather-worker, the dapper alpine climber, the dapper pansexual furry. Remove the dapper excrescence, and a less interesting sight greets the eye.
‘Make a good first impression’ they say, and it’s not bad advice, but is anything easier? Cheaper? (perhaps the word ‘sorry’). Many people are entirely built of dapper (as many are of the word ‘sorry’). They’re like a film-set boulevard, all façade. Walk through the dapper door and there’s nothing but plywood and a few technicians. The art is to learn to see which buildings have a third dimension before you step through the door.
It’s All for Sonning
Sonning-on-Thames is a little village an hour and a half’s walk up the river from me. It was described by Jerome K. Jerome as a ‘the most fairy-like little nook on the whole river’, and indeed it is, oh, a beautiful little village, so beautiful that George Clooney lives there (said good morning to him once — he was walking his dogs), as do two of the most famous little old ladies in England, Teresa May and the guitarist out of Led Zeppelin, forget her name, who owns a castle there. It is, in short, a gilded land, of immeasurable wealth.
I was there the other day, having lunch in a charming little inn, and, looking around at the skeletal elites in the restaurant garden, I got the very strong impression that everyone in charge of the country lives here, in Sonning, and that everything they do, every public act, is to protect Sonning. Every boardroom decision, every vote in the House of Lords, every backroom deal, every petition and policy, is weighed up according to this one standard. Which decision will protect Sonning? Keep it the way it is?
So if you’re wondering why things are as they are. Why we moved all our factories to China, for example, or why we’re helping Israel annihilate Palestine, or why our culture is dying, or why our waterways are literally full of shit, or why our cities are packed to the roofs with desperate immigrants, or why trillions of pounds of funny money are written into existence every second, or why nobody knows how to do anything practical any more; the answer is very simple: it’s to protect Sonning. It’s all for Sonning.
Rene Girard’s Limits
You may have heard of this increasingly influential thinker. His ideas are subtle, and I cannot pretend to have engaged with them thoroughly, so I shall risk misrepresenting them in a capsule summary, but essentially they are that there is a difference between simple, natural instinct — for water, for example, when I thirst — and desire — to own a mineral water company, for example. Desire is, says Girard, mimetic, in that its value is founded on what other people want. One does not simply copy others, and might, for example, fall in love with a woman because she is fertile and healthy, or even because she is a unique flower, but the social value of having her (and mutatis mutandis of much observable desire in the world) is founded on the fact that everyone else wants her.
This brings violence into the world, because pursuing the same end as another inevitably brings one into conflict with him or her. There are only so many sceptres, staffs, gavels and good-looking young folk to go round. Thus human beings developed the idea of the scapegoat, a sacrificial victim which could be blamed for all the violence inherent in the group, and the need for religion, a practical activity designed to manage, through sacrifice (and then through ritualistic representations of sacrifice) the group’s troublesome desires.
I’m sure you can recognise much here which fits the facts of life — better than, say Voltaire’s view that religion is just a priestly scam, or Bakunin’s that they satisfy perverse blood-lusts — and which feels intuitively correct. It nicely explains, for example, the strangely similar pattern that societies in conflict seem to follow, it explains the fact that people very often end up hating those they collaborate most closely with, why great artists who share the same pedestal so often inexplicably bicker on it, and why groups of people are often so desperate for an enemy to blame for their own problems, that they will literally choose a goat to do so.1
There are two serious problems with Girard’s analysis however. One is that it is founded entirely on fallen societies. He references tribal sacrifices in Africa, Mesoamerican ritual and Greek mythology — but no word (as far as I can find) on simple hunter-gatherer societies for which ritual sacrifice plays no significant role. And this leads to the second, more serious weakness in a philosophy which views the value of desired objects as founded on a need to do what others do. What then of Rembrandt’s desire to paint masterpieces in his old age, when he had no hope of fame? What then of Marc Dutroux imprisoning and raping two teenage girls and burying them alive? What then of my desire to write these words? What then of your desire to read them (or to give up reading)?
Are these all the same kind of desire? Is the selfishness of a one-year-old the same as the selfishness of a fifty-one-year old? Is desire for sex the same as the desire for love? Are men and women’s desires the same kind of thing? Obviously not. Girard is surely correct in pointing out that even uniquely conscious desires are enmeshed in a social framework of mimetic desire, but is it not our task to free ourselves of the oppressive demands of such a society? Isn’t it that which I want, and which only I can want, that makes me fully human? Not my compromise with the suffocating democratic avalanche of what everyone is mimetically after? Is this not what art teaches us, finally? That I am desireless, alone and burning with joy because of it?
The truth is that selfless desire, and selfish desire, are radically different and only the latter can be said to be even partially constitutive of Girard’s mimesis, which in the lived reality of desire may not figure at all. Girard can’t explain desire that comes from anything deeper than animal instinct, or a compulsion to acquire value through imitation, because he doesn’t understand that selfish desire appeared with the rise of egoic society — from which his analysis begins — nor that the desire of pre-fallen people, while often selfish, was subordinate to an irrational selflessness which, although corrupted by the modern ego, transcends it; as the conscious individual can discover for himself in sweet solitude. The truth of desire is not visible to Girard, and so he has to focus on secondary concerns.
(I invite readers better versed in Girard to write in and point out my errors here, to guide me to passages where he writes incisively on genuinely pre-fallen / simple hunter-gatherer societies or extensively on the unique, irreplicable desire of the conscious individual.)