Friday, 17 November 2023
We’ve never warmed to the impersonal
‘It’s so accidental, the whole business,’ she remarked, branching off to another aspect of the case in order to mask the confusion caused by the sincere flattery in his voice. ‘It was only by chance that Milly had that particular part at all. Suppose she hadn’t had it. What then?’
‘Everything’s accidental,’ he replied. ‘Everything that ever happened is accidental, in a way — in another it isn’t. If you look at your own life, for instance, you’ll find it’s been simply a series of coincidences. I’m sure mine has been. Sheer chance from beginning to end.’
Arnold Bennett - The Old Wives' Tale (1908)
It’s strange how something so familiar yet so mysterious is intimately woven into all of our lives. It’s one of those old and impossible questions – how much of my life was accidental? How much could have been otherwise? Begin totting it up and the answer becomes impossibly daunting.
My known history could begin in the nineteenth century with my great grandfather moving from Leicestershire to Derby to work on the railway. Or my great grandmother moving from Ulverston to Derby for unknown reasons. Before that – who knows? In the seventeenth century, maybe a young Jedidiah first glanced at Mary in church, seated in a nearby pew. But for that conjectural glance I’d never have existed.
Any life is an impossibly complex matrix of events which could have been different with different outcomes. How different we’ll never know because myriad lost possibilities didn’t happen. Chance meetings, major decisions, catching the wrong train, applying for the wrong job, applying for the right job, meeting the wrong person or staying at home a rainy day. Petty incidents, a few of which may have major personal consequences.
A hundred petty crimes or petty accidents will not strike the imagination of crowds in the least, whereas a single great crime or a single great accident will profoundly impress them, even though the results be infinitely less disastrous than those of the hundred small accidents put together.
Gustave Le Bon - The Crowd; study of the popular mind (1895)
Stir in genetic speculation and it becomes even more complex. Yet it isn’t necessary to wander through the futilities of a free will debate to see the issue clearly and personally because we are all extremely familiar with it.
An overweight young woman orders a coffee shop frappé. Listed as 400 calories but maybe she has what we call a sweet tooth. Her companion is a slim young woman who orders a skinny latte. Is this two dispositions from two genetic histories reacting to commercial temptation?
A school classroom, the pupils are bored by a teacher who cannot instil even a spark of enthusiasm which might at least benefit some. Why is he there, why is he a teacher? He drifted into it because… well his father was a teacher…
Lives governed by histories and controlling influences, we see them every day, but what do we do about it? Look the other way and keep it autonomous seems to be one answer. We’ve never warmed to the impersonal.
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5 comments:
The wisdom of folksongs:
When I gae till the kirk on Sunday,
Mony's the bonnie lass I see,
Sitting yonder by her faither,
And winking ower the pews at me.
We have never warmed to the impersonal - which is why the Civil Service was meant to be impersonal and therefore unbiased.
You could argue that Tony Blair (amongst others) wanted to bend the Civil Service to his will and so he politicised them making them passionate (and therefore biased).
But politicisation is easy... undoing passionate views is much more difficult.
dearieme - very apt, almost as if that's what churches were for.
DJ - yes and one problem is that people with passionate views have been persuaded that passion is a virtue. We see it all over the place. "We're passionate about what we do" they say, but all we need is for it to be done well.
As if, on a long trek you look across a valley and think: had I taken that other track I could have been over there. But what do you know of that other path? Were other ways just as steep and hard? How does your path looked viewed from over there?
djc - and you can never take the other track instead. Take it tomorrow and there are tiny or not so tiny differences such as the weather. Nothing in life can be repeated exactly.
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