The Horribly Obvious Link

No observer, however keen, could have guessed his thoughts; he had acquired sufficient knowledge of the art of life to hide his opinions even when he was alone; nay, more than that, he was afraid of coming to a clear understanding with himself.

August Strindberg - The Red Room (1879)


The Horribly Obvious Link sounds like an Enid Blyton story doesn’t it? Oh well –

There is a horribly obvious link between ideological virtue and the cowardly evasion of consequences. We see it now in political leaders, hiding behind political virtue, promoting political causes, hiding from real world effects, afraid of coming to a clear understanding.

The link is there, the cowardice inevitable, it isn’t an Enid Blyton story.

They did not know how to attend

They were impossible pupils, and did not know how to attend. He thought they were obstinate. The truth was they lacked the will-power to become attentive. Such boys are wrongly regarded as stupid. They are, on the contrary, wide awake. Their thoughts are concerned with realities, and they seem already to have seen through the absurdity of the subjects they are taught. Many of them became useful citizens when they grew up, and many more would have become so if they had not been compelled by their parents to do violence to their natures and to continue their studies.

August Strindberg – The Son of a Servant (1886 - 1909)


Perhaps political rhetoric is now too boring for the majority to be paying attention to current affairs. Ed Davey is one piece of evidence for this. He manages to be boring even when he’s making a fool of himself with his stunts.

Sir Keir Thingy is another piece of evidence, a political persona obviously designed to be excruciatingly boring. Nothing about him demands attention. He never says anything which attracts attention, never does anything, never is anything. It’s deliberate too, he obviously went to a Taylor Swift binge in order to polish his boredom credentials.

Can’t remember the other chap – Rishi Starmak? Is he still Prime Minister? I think so.

Maybe that’s why the establishment loathes Nigel Farage – he isn't playing the game properly, he isn’t boring.

A cosmic playwright

About this time much interest was aroused in what has been called the "woman question." The famous Norwegian male blue-stocking had written a play on the subject, and all feeble minds were obsessed by a perfect mania of finding oppressed women everywhere.

August Strindberg - The Confession of a Fool (1893)


It is still mildly surprising to be reminded of a cultural fad which is not a fad at all, but much older than a fad ought to be. A chap could easily go on to imagine that somewhere out there in the mysterious depths of the Unknown there is a cosmic playwright recycling old plays for us to perform.

Old plays with new titles perhaps, but old plots, old characters with new names and plenty of cheaply updated scenery. Apart from that it’s the same old plays where even the script is merely an updated version of the original.

Now I know who you are

You blaspheme! Now I know who you are! The apple does not fall far from the tree! Now I understand the whole craft of Satan. You build the Lord a house for a brothel as an offering to a harlot! You play wizard and magician to get people to fall down and worship the denier.

August Strindberg - On the Seaboard (1890)

Depending on social and political circumstances, in Strindberg’s day a denier was perilously close to a blasphemer. Something similar could be said today as the term ‘denier’ has been appropriated by secular puritans. Woke culture defines the world narrowly in terms of what can and cannot be said without attracting the pointing finger of secular puritanism.

It goes further of course, as puritanical fanaticism often does. Woke culture demands not only the avoidance of secular blasphemy but witch-hunts in pursuit of blasphemous backsliding. Even a lack of enthusiasm for Woke doctrines may be construed as denial, plus any hint of being out of touch with the latest nuances.

It is possible that this level of puritanical fanaticism will fade into joyless obscurity, but it is also possible that it has not yet peaked. It would be unwise to assume that anything so inhumanly shrill is about to collapse. It more likely to morph into something equally inhuman, equally shrill.

Inhumanly shrill is a recurring feature of political reality. Every now and then it flaps its ghastly wings as it lurches from the old cause to the new. and the screeching begins yet again.

Coming Ready Or Not

No observer, however keen, could have guessed his thoughts; he had acquired sufficient knowledge of the art of life to hide his opinions even when he was alone; nay, more than that, he was afraid of coming to a clear understanding with himself.

August Strindberg - The Red Room (1879)


The underlying weirdness of COP26 and the whole climate game seems to be exactly as Strindberg described over 140 years ago - he was afraid of coming to a clear understanding with himself.

As if the whole aim of the climate narrative is not to bring about a desirable state of affairs at all, but to encourage voters to hide from an undesirable one where people are free to do things. To hide from a state of affairs where people are free to build futures where there is no paternal hand to keep everyone in line.

There is a powerful juvenile streak here, but many of those in the climate driving seat do not share it. The drivers drive and know where they personally are going. They go along with the rhetoric and the madness, they see how many middle class people are easily manipulated by juvenile fears so they take advantage of those fears. Malthusian fears, not new ones.

But this way lies madness. We cannot hide from what we have built here in the developed world, from our absolute need to understand where we are, how we arrived here. We cannot hide from a need to adapt, move on and be free to tackle whatever turns up.

We cannot push aside people with the ability to take us forward. There is no alternative direction other than serious decline. We cannot reject capable people, silence them and hope that totalitarian politics will somehow arrange our lives in our favour.

What’s this madness? Nothing but taking just one step further — the step that takes you into a country where every sound, every movement, every smell, every tiny action means only one thing. It’s the ordinary normal world suddenly turned completely to one purpose. Something or someone must be stopped, put out of the way, silenced. That done, all will be right again.

Hugh Walpole - The Sea Tower (1939)


That done, all will be right again. But of course it won’t. We see that already.

As long as he crawled

Well he knew that in love, man must give, must let himself be fooled and that the only way to approach a woman was on all fours. And he had crawled at intervals, and as long as he crawled everything had gone well, but when he had finally straightened up, that was the end of it, always with a multitude of reproaches that he had been false, that he had dissembled submission, that he had never loved, and so on.

August Strindberg - On the Seaboard (1890)

A change had occurred

A change had occurred, something new had intervened. He could no longer evolve the great feeling of solitude, where he had felt as though alone before nature and humanity, for somebody stood at his side or behind him. The isolation was abolished, and he was soldered to the little banal life, threads had been spun round his soul, considerations began to bind his thoughts, and the cowardly fear of harboring other thoughts than those his friends harbored clutched him.

August Strindberg – On the Seaboard (1913)

As I write this blog post and publish it online, the act of writing and publishing it changes me slightly. Not much and not in any quantitative sense, but there is a change because I made choices I’ve never made before about words and ideas I’ve never before thought or written in exactly this way. At least I hope that’s the case. I’ve made similar choices in the past, but not exactly the same choices.

If you choose to read the post then you will be changed too. If you choose to leave a comment that’s another change which reflects back on readers who read your comment.

Yet it isn’t easy to accept that we constantly change in ways which are never repeated. An aspect of this is that people vary in their attitude to the essential dynamism of life. Some wish it wasn’t so and look to various authorities willing to delude that it isn’t so. Hence the main political division between political and apolitical. Left and right are part of the illusion.

We see it all the time throughout the coronavirus debacle, the illusion that we can prevent change. Yet ironically these attempts have almost certainly created greater and more damaging changes than if we had been more pragmatic.

In for a flogging?

But he learned some social lessons. The Clara School was a school for the children of the better classes, for the people of the district were well off. The boy wore leather breeches and greased leather boots which smelt of train-oil and blacking. Therefore, those who had velvet jackets did not like sitting near him. He also noticed that the poorly dressed boys got more floggings than the well-dressed ones, and that pretty boys were let off altogether. If he had at that time studied psychology and æsthetics, he would have understood this, but he did not then.

August Strindberg – The Son of a Servant (1886 - 1909)

I have a suspicion that this little episode is a pointer towards the origin of Jeremy Corbyn’s entire political philosophy. Not so much his social background but his sense of inferiority rooted in a well below par school performance. He has always known why the other boys would never copy his homework.

He isn’t well-dressed either, and certainly isn’t pretty, so does that mean he’s in for an election  flogging? I do hope so.

Happy New Year

That I was born a man is an accident. I might almost say a pity, for it's very nearly a crime to be a man now-a-days, but it isn't my fault. The devil take him who has stirred up the two halves of humanity, one against the other! He has much to answer for.

August Strindberg - Getting Married (1884)  

Maybe this suggests a mantra for 2019 - very little is really new.

Happy New Year to all those who happen to find their way here and linger, if only for a while.

The shadow of cholera

For many nights he lies in bed, without getting up by day. He is tired and sleepy. A harsh-voiced man comes to the bed, and says that he must not lay his hands outside the coverlet. They give him evil-tasting stuff with a spoon; he eats nothing. There is whispering in the room, and his mother weeps. Then he sits again at the window in the bedroom. Bells are tolling the whole day long.

Green biers are carried over the churchyard. Sometimes a dark mass of people stand round a black chest. Gravediggers with their spades keep coming and going. He has to wear a copper plate suspended by a blue silk ribbon on his breast, and chew all day at a root. That is the cholera epidemic of 1854.

August Strindberg – The Son of a Servant (1886 - 1909)

A quote taken from Strindberg's autobiographical novel. In 1854 he would have been five years old. It opens up a chink of light on a world without modern medical science and what a grim world it must have been. Dickens’ world, Jane Austen’s world and yet this is just one of the shadows under which they lived. Also in 1854 there was the Broad Street cholera outbreak in London.

This outbreak, which killed 616 people, is best known for the physician John Snow's study of its causes and his hypothesis that contaminated water, not air, was the source of cholera.

To my mind the most difficult aspect is trying to imagine what it must have felt like to be familiar with the dangers of cholera yet ignorant of its root cause. We often seem to take knowledge for granted yet hard-won knowledge is the gulf between now and then.

A few inches of modesty

source

He recognised the gardener's daughter, a girl who had been confirmed last Easter and had just begun to wear long skirts. To-night, however, she was dressed in one of her old dresses which barely reached to her ankles.

August Strindberg - Married (1884)

Strewth, what’s the distance between enticing ankle and modest floor? I’ll get my tape measure...

...about four inches I’d say, including the heel of my shoe. No wonder Freud was invented.

A great common interest

A great common interest had welded these souls together, while they overheated themselves at the great fire of love, and worked themselves up to an overflowing omni-benevolence towards every living thing, pressed each other's hands and separated with blessings and congratulations that fate had brought together three good people, who would work unanimously for the good of humanity.

August Strindberg - On the Seaboard (1913)

Provincials

Let us welcome foreign influence which is cosmopolitan; but not Norwegian, for that is provincial, and we have plenty of the same kind ourselves.

August Strindberg - The Growth of a Soul (1913)

Alternatively we might adapt Strindberg's words and say.

Let us welcome foreign influence which is cosmopolitan; but not from the EU, for that is provincial, and we have plenty of the same kind ourselves.

To my mind this is one Brexit argument which could have been made during the recent EU referendum debate but wasn’t. Instead the Leave camp was successfully painted as lacking cosmopolitan sophistication and derided as narrow-minded and inward-looking. In a word – provincial.

Yet the Remain camp always seemed provincial to me and still does. The EU is not chic, worldly or cosmopolitan but tired, elitist, and corrupt. A haven for spiteful political poseurs and third-rate bureaucrats. A holiday destination for those who prefer familiar surroundings and faded glories. Irredeemably provincial in a world which is moving on.

Second thoughts.

Is it worse than that? Is the entire world becoming provincial?

The new malady of culture

This absorption in self, or the new malady of culture, of which much is written nowadays, has been common with all men who have not worked with their bodies. The brain is only an organ for imparting movement to the muscles. Now when in a civilised man the brain cannot act upon the muscles, nor bring its power into play, there results a disturbance of equilibrium.

The brain begins to dream; too full of juices which cannot be absorbed by muscular activity, it converts them involuntarily into systems, into thought-combinations, into the hallucinations which haunt painters, sculptors and poets. If no outlet can be found, there follows stagnation, violent outbreaks, depression, and at last madness.

Schools which are often vestibules for asylums, have recourse to gymnastics, but with what result? There is no connection between the pupil's cerebral activity and the muscular activity called into play by gymnastics; the latter is only directed by another's will through the word of command.

August Strindberg - The Growth of a Soul (1913)

A modern problem is plainly visible through Strindberg’s older perspective. We evolved to reproduce, make tools, adapt to a wide range of environmental niches, assess risks, alter strategies and tactics accordingly. All this is intimately linked with muscular activity of one form or another.

To a greater and greater degree we are now influenced by social realities rather than older physical realities which still require significant muscular activity. Some people rarely go outside in winter because they no longer need to. Yet this avoidance of physical stimuli and muscular activity is comparatively recent, even more so in Strindberg's time.

Unfortunately we may not have evolved a corresponding ability to sit around thinking up useful abstractions. Presumably this is why we aren’t much good at it. In which case, if we base our society and economy on the intellectual fruits of sitting around we are not likely to build a saner and more rationally reflective world.

Ho hum – that’s enough blogging for now. It’s time to get up off my backside and make the tea.

Fat chance

One cannot command sympathies and antipathies, and for the lower class to demand love and self-sacrifice from the upper class is mere idealism.

August Strindberg - The Growth of a Soul (1913)

Modern political life is based on the notion that democracy will be respected by the elite classes who will offer love and self-sacrifice in their efforts to improve our lives. Okay so the elite don’t love us and we'd much rather they didn't anyway. Yuk. But our democracy tacitly assumes they at least like us enough to make personal sacrifices on our behalf.

Of course no sane person believes even that and if asked about our political expectations, most of us would be pretty restrained and somewhat cynical about the ability and desire of the political classes to deliver even the most limited aspirations. We'd be cynical about their motives too.

Yet millions vote for the most unlikely promises and the most improbable aspirations as if the elite classes really do intend to put themselves out for our comfort and convenience. The idea is ludicrous and we know it. The elite don’t care what happens to us and it’s time we voted accordingly.

How? Dunno.

A God, unknown

A God, unknown at present, seems to be developing, growing, and revealing Himself from time to time. In the intervals, so it seems, He leaves the world to itself, like the farmer, who lets the tares and wheat grow together till the harvest. Each epoch of revelation shows Him animated with new ideas, and practically improving His methods. Thus Religion will return, but under new aspects, for a compromise with the old religions seems impossible. We do not await an epoch of reaction, nor a return to out-worn ideals, but an advance towards something new. But of what sort? Let us wait!

August Strindberg - The Inferno (1897)

The Inferno was written during a period when Strindberg appeared to suffer from depression or some other mental ailment, although he may also have exaggerated his problems for dramatic effect. He was also drinking heavily, particularly absinthe, although he may have exaggerated that too.

Did he foresee a genuine social trend though? It is difficult to say with any confidence, because if his new god was unknown in Strindberg’s day, then it also seems to be unknown today. Yet there are many clues suggesting that our usual distinction between politics and religion is misleading. In both cases people take belief beyond the evidence and into the realms of political control.

Other clues are to be found in the righteous nature of modern progressive attitudes to social norms; in attitudes to the environment, equality, economics, race, immigration, education, social uniformity and moral behaviour. Political correctness sums up much of it, but is there a god lurking in the righteous recesses of political correctness? A cult perhaps - but a god?

Suppose we go with cult for now. 

Suppose we take hold of the idea that a global cult is evolving within the shallow souls of susceptible social progressives. To begin with the cult could be called socialism even though at first sight socialism may have too much historical baggage to serve as a peg on which to hang this particular shroud.

Yet socialism has always had a strongly righteous air beyond a natural desire to correct social wrongs. These righteous overtones are significant enough to warrant treating socialism as political cult if we are to understand the modern world. We see frequent associations between socialist politics and the incremental enforcement of uniform behaviour using propaganda, harassment, ostracism and legal restrictions on free speech.

It may be going a little too far to paint socialism as a secular religion but there are interesting parallels once we focus on behavioural control and blur the distinction between politics and religion. Socialism has its priesthood, evangelists, taboos and possibly sacred texts. The Communist Manifesto for example. It may not be a church but it has a collection plate where even the unrighteous have to cough up their compulsory donations, compulsion being essential to progressive ideas.

As a somewhat entertaining example we also seem to have a home-grown socialist saint in Jeremy Corbyn. Since his elevation to the Labour leadership, the cult name ‘socialism’ is allowed to circulate again. Clearly the name is seen as important to believers, totemic even.

During the dark and unenlightened days of Tony Blair the name of socialism was suppressed in the pursuit of secular respectability. Since St Jeremy cleverly isolated the wicked majority of Labour MPs, believers are now free to use the sacred name once more.

Maybe Strindberg was right in one sense at least. We seem to have a progressive socialist cult and perhaps we have a god to go with it. If socialism is worth defining as a secular political cult then maybe its god is a cloud of somewhat nebulous ideals with Marx as an important prophet. The religious parallels are certainly there.

Religions may disappear, but religious feelings will always create new ones, even with the help of science.

Emile Zola - Rome (1896)

The death of the individual

The great striving of our time: division of labour benefits the species but sentences the individual to death.

August Strindberg - The Red Room (1879)

A chilling quote. If any shred of optimism is to survive, one is compelled to dismiss it and hope for the best. Or perhaps we will adapt to life without individuality. After all, it seems to be what globalisation has in store for us. Not all of us of course.  

It is not only division of labour, but the concomitant rise of process and process-driven people who devote their lives to chipping away at what we like to think is our individuality. Standards are not necessarily our friends.

Yet the world is evolving a maniacal preference for the standard, for people as reasonably well-defined economic and political entities living lives which are reasonably well-defined economic and political processes. It doesn’t feel exciting somehow. If feels like... yes Strindberg was right... it feels like death.

Spurious signals

One of the pleasures of modern language is the invention of particularly apt, powerfully descriptive phrases such as ‘virtue signalling’. This seems to be a recent one. According to Google Trends it first appeared as a blip in 2009 then rose from obscurity in 2015. In spite of claims by James Bartholomew it probably originated within signalling theory. Google Ngram Viewer isn’t aware of it at all.

Virtue signalling is the expression or promotion of viewpoints that are especially valued within a social group, especially when this is done primarily to enhance the social standing of the speaker. For example, expressing a hatred of the conservative newspaper Daily Mail might be an example of virtue signalling on the British left. The term is chiefly used by commentators to criticize the platitudinous and empty or superficial support of socially progressive views on social media, but has also been used to describe analogous behaviour in other groups, such as pro-gun rights grandstanding among the American right, and by signalling theorists to discuss conspicuous piety among the religious faithful as well as agnostics and atheists.

A real stonker of a phrase, it is extraordinarily powerful as a concise term for vast swathes of unedifying human behaviour. Yet the idea of signalling is hardly new - Strindberg saw it in art.

...for my art was incapable of expressing a single idea; at the most it could represent the body in a position expressing an emotion accompanying a thought—or, in other words, express a thought at third hand. It is like signalling, meaningless to all who cannot read the signals. I only see a red flag, but the soldier sees the word of command: Advance!

August Strindberg – The Red Room (1879)

In which case and given that it is now so obvious that virtue signalling is a vital aspect of human behaviour, what prevented us from describing it in such a powerfully accessible way before? Perhaps it is because, as we well know, forceful phrases soon become overused, lose their vigour and slip off into the land of cliché.

Which would be handy for those who rely on virtue signalling because it cuts so deeply into the social fabric. It exposes the manipulative mechanisms of power, the screen behind which personal interests hide.

Celebrity culture, mainstream journalism, drama, political allegiances, the EU, the UN, major charities, environmental drama, major sporting events and international businesses all lean heavily on virtue signalling. They cannot say so or folk might expect some genuine virtues instead of being caught up in the nonsense themselves. We can’t have that can we?

The greatest discovery

In the days which are now called the good days, although in reality they were very bad ones for a good many people, the greatest discovery of a great century was made, namely, that one could live more cheaply and better on other people's money than on the results of one's own efforts.

August Strindberg – The Red Room (1879)

Perhaps the history of such a momentous discovery could be part of our national curriculum.