Achilles Fights a River

Being in the midst of a Christian holiday, I feel it's incumbent upon me to talk about some pagan folks. First, I need to disclose that this post isn't really about the fight between Achilles and the Scamander. The episode's a bit comical, to my mind, and has already been very well analysed by all and sundry. For those who are interested in the full text, it can be found here in all its gory, chaotic glory.

The reason I chose it is because of the impact it had as a chapter heading, when first I undertook to read the Iliad. I'd basically been pummeled into a kind of trance by an endless succession of battle descriptions when I turned the page and saw:

"Book XXI: Achilles Fights a River"

This woke me with a start, as it was a present reminder of what had attracted me to the character of Achilles in the first place. It wasn't his glamour, or the (admittedly very cool) epithets, such as "killer of men", but rather the essential core of mindless, ungovernable hubris which animates his whole being. And the chapter title seemed, to me, to encapsulate the whole of that hubristic, driven aspect of humanity's general existence in the face of mortality.

For those familiar with the tragedic tradition (and all writers should be), hubris is always characterised as a fatal flaw. It is usually lamented, often criticised, and invariably penalised with the heaviest of divine punishments. As such, the word - the very idea - now has negative qualities in modern usage. Most often employed when discussing war and politics, hubris is frequently trotted out as the explanation for a politician's or regime's downfall. Tony Abbott and Muammar Gaddafi spring to mind as recent examples.

This ignores the fact, however, that our culture is saturated with paeans to hubris, by which I mean that it's not really possible to engage with creative endeavour in any form without coming across a protagonist who is riddled with it. The standard mythic construction of the western narrative tradition is, in fact, that of variously hubristic characters 'triumphing against all odds'. From John Wayne to Conan the Barbarian, Mr Chips to Erin Brockovich, we are presented again and again with the message that, far from being required to worship at the shrine of moderation, hubris is not a fatal, but an essential heroic quality. We are told, again and again, that in order to be a worthwhile hero we must unquestioningly stand against the established order, fate, and even the gods. This kind of hubris is at the very least analogous to Achilles' reflexive decision to fight even the gods of the landscape in his fury.

Is it any wonder, then, that our world is as cartoonish as it currently is? That we, collectively, seem incapable of seeing anything in any frame of reference besides as an epic battle between the forces of good and evil? And that so ingrained is this tendency that we are often unable to see the inherently ludicrous side of casting battles over language, terminology, political office, and ideology in those terms? Pop culture has taken the idea of hubris and run with it - natural enough given its obvious emotional appeal. But what seems to have been lost in translation is the very important truth of its price. In a world of infinite grey shades and mind-boggling complexity, heroes and monsters have little place or utility, and we would do very well to remember that if we insist on seeing the world in these ersatz 'mythical' terms, we are condemning ourselves to a state of perpetual ignorance and bewilderment.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Donne's Meditation XVII contains possibly one of the best known and most frequently misquoted passages in all of English literature. The line is usually rendered:

"Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

It should be:

"...and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

It's not really an earthshaking error, and I'm generally pretty relaxed about it. The highly grammatical English of past ages is always subject to truncation and simplification, this process being one of the perils and joys of using a living language. What does infuriate me, however, is the truncation of meaning.

It's typical of our solipsistic post-modern slackness that, knowing only this tiny fragment (and incorrectly at that), we so often interpret this to be entirely concerned with our own individual mortality. I remember being taught this passage in school, and being told with the firm authority of schoolteachers everywhere that it meant that death comes to us all, and nothing more.

This is egregiously, painfully, incorrect. When we consider the whole of the document from which this quote is so often cherry-picked, we find that its primary concern is not mortality, but the interconnectedness of all humanity. This is the same meditation in which we find the line:

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent; a part of the main."

Which was taught us as if it were an entirely separate thought, coming from a separate document. It is not. The meditation moves through a beautifully constructed line of argument, establishing humanity's interconnection through the church, and therefore god, and therefore in all our joys and afflictions. We are not to avoid sending for whom the bell tolls because it is we who are about to die. That's a possibility, of course, but it's not the point of the passage. The point is that the tolling of the bell should never feel like some remote occurrence - the affliction of the alien or other. When one part of humanity suffers and dies, so too does a part of ourselves. Far from being some sort of grim reflection on our own suffering, it is an exhortation to own the suffering of others - to cease the endless contemplation of our own navels and join the community of humanity by realising the depth and magnitude of our very real investment in it.

With or without god, the argument holds valid - whether we understand it or not, it is very much a corporate effort in which we are engaged. We in the west have been so successful at this effort that large groups of people are able to claim, with a straight face, that the artificial construct of individualism is, in fact, the natural state of our species, and should be legitimised through law and society. This is either profoundly stupid, or the product of a severe disconnection from reality and/or the past. Whether we directly see it or not, humans in society are like fish in a school. The least turning of one turns us all, and those who wish to scatter the school, believing in their own solitary power, are condemning each individual fish to the maw of the leviathan.

The Death of Leadership

I've attended many lectures on the subject of leadership. Almost all of them agree that the age of inspirational personal leadership has passed. War chiefs who directed their armies from the front, like Alexander, are said to have no place in our sophisticated modern age. The ideal leader today, according to the concensus amongst those con-men who choose to make a living delivering leadership seminars, is a kind of mongrel hybrid of technocrat and wetnurse.

I'm pretty certain that the current state of the western world gives this egregious quackery the lie. Inspirational leadership is more important than ever. In a world where the 'ruling class' has devolved into an insipid milieu of oddballs and eccentrics with no qualifications beyond political longevity, it's little wonder that even ersatz personalities like Trump can be seen as filling a yawning charisma gap at the top.

Regardless of what the ageing hipsters with their Venn Diagrams and anecdotal thought bubbles might have to say, the simple fact of the matter is that nobody can really get enthusiastic about following a 'competent manager'. Male or female, short, fat, thin, beautiful or hideous, what a leader needs to be is charismatic, inspiring, or both. There is no other way for an individual to push through a comprehensive agenda for the corporate good - only charisma and inspiration survive the necessary unpopular decisions and measures good leadership entails.

The Battle of Maldon is a fragmentary epic which may or may not describe a real battle under the reign of Aethelred the Unredy. I am neither qualified nor inclined to enter into the scholarly debates on the battle's date, location or participants, but what we have of the poem outlines a vision of leadership and, more importantly, of the kind of followership it inspired, that has become sadly alien in the modern world.

"Spirits must be the harder, hearts the keener, courage the greater, as our strength grows less.
Here lies our lord all hacked to pieces, a good man in the dust.
He will mourn evermore who thinks to turn back from this war-play now.
I’m an old man; I will not leave, but by the side of my lord – by such a beloved man – I intend to lie."

Such were the words said by a follower of the towering Earl Byrthnoth, an old man with a shock of white hair who, when presented with the opportunity to buy off the attack of a superior enemy, offered 'spears for your tribute, poison points and ancient swords', insisting that no marauder would so easily win his people's gold while he lived to protect their land.

It's easy to dismiss this as a piece of doomed foolhardiness from a forgotten age, and it's the tendency of leadership shonkies to do so. But I don't think we should. A good mental exercise would be to replace Byrthnoth with any one of our current leaders, and the speaker with ourselves. Unless you're very fortunate, the exercise will prove ludicrous - there really isn't any leadership worth that kind of devotion commonly existing in the world today.

Pollsters, pundits and other experts talk about 'trust deficits' and 'populism', but I think it's all much simpler than that. The idea that we are led by people who strive to be better than themselves, and who are willing to commit absolutely to right principles, is dead. And the sole reason it is dead is because we have somehow convinced ourselves that neither our current nor our future leaders need be held to this simple and essential standard. The tragedy of this is that, included in the pool of potential 'future leaders', is every single one of us.

The Downside of Adventure

It was two o'clock in the morning and a couple of decades ago when I responded to an infomercial advertising Private Investigation licenses. I called the 1800 number, got sent a bunch of course materials which I filled out basically at random, and received a license. What followed was a weird and disconnected set of adventures which taught me quite a bit of unpleasant stuff about human beings.

Most of it was me turning down surveillance jobs (I have always hated surveillance), or doing 'skip traces', which is where you find an address for somebody who's skipped out on rent or debts. But every now and then you'd get a weird one. I once got commissioned to find a girl who had disappeared from her family home. I initially recommended that they call the police, but they didn't want to for some reason. I mainly took the job because they cried at me a lot, and I was young and stupid back then.

It wasn't very hard. They gave me a list of phone numbers for her friends, and a couple of calls led me to a notorious heroin dealer who was known for his habit of building a harem of underage girls. I found his address by pretending to be a customer, visited to establish that she was there, put in my expenses, and made a report. The family then re-hired me to extract her, which was yet another job I should not have taken under any circumstances, but there was more crying, so I ignored my serious qualms about the parents' continuing refusal to call the police and took their money in advance. It's not much of an excuse, but I was also behind on my rent at this time.

So, I subcontracted a couple of my largest and angriest acquaintances and we lobbed up at the house only to find that this girl would basically go along with anyone who asked her to, and that the people in the house simply didn't give a toss. After a little while, she realised we were going to her family home and completely lost her mind. Turns out she had very firm reasons for leaving home. And that was us, on the horns of a dilemma.

I'd like to say that I did something virtuous and wise, but I didn't. I was young and dumb, so after politely refusing her offer to be a live-in girlfriend for one or all of us, we gave her all the loose money we had and dropped her off outside a bar somewhere, as per her request. As for her parents, I felt justified in taking their money and never speaking to them again.

The point of this grubby, depressing little story is that a life of adventure is not exactly a grand sweet song of new experiences and zany characters. I often encounter people who express varying degrees of envy for some of the stuff I've been and done, but I wonder if they're aware of just how much I'd prefer not to have filthy memories like this one. Or how much I envy their view of humanity, untainted as it is by real-life experience of the moral repugnance and evil that lies deep in the hearts of so many of us. And I wonder, as well, how I can so enjoy exactly the same qualities when filtered through the medium of Raymond Chandler prose, but not so much when it's happening in front of me in the real world.

Which leads me to a point which might seem completely random and unrelated, but bear with me. An aspect of this not very nice episode is the problem I have with reality television. Shows like Married at First Sight, or The Bachelor, are frankly disgusting to me, largely because I never lose sight of that line between fiction and reality. The fact of shows like this is that they allow people do delight in the suffering of others, to eviscerate, condemn, and judge, all through what seems to be a filter of entertainment, but isn't. These are real people. It's irrelevant that they volunteer - this fact should actually increase our compassion for their psychological frailty, but it doesn't for most. It's just another reason to sneer at them.

And worst of all, it's dishonest. The specious veil of 'television' provides sadistic thrills for the timid, bloodless violence for the squeamish, and psychosexual horror porn for those too cowardly to face the need for such in their own minds. Of course, that's not everyone. I suspect quite a lot of viewers are just too dim or too blinkered to see these shows as anything but some kind of amateur soap opera.

Well, it's not. All comedy and drama are the enjoyment of the trauma of others at a distance. That principle being true, the only morally acceptable comedy and drama are fictional.

At All Costs - Determination as an Absolute

It's weird, growing up with two mentalities. It's also very noticeable - one gets the sense that everybody else has a much better idea of who they are and what they think. This is obviously universal, but I suspect that it's of greater magnitude for some children of immigrants.

In the longer term, however, I think this initial dichotomy has some of the same mental advantages as bilingualism. One is forced to synthesise and rationalise across the yawning gulf between cultures, which can lead, I think, to a much better understanding of both worlds being straddled. Or, of course, to psychic self destruction, but let's try to keep it cheerful.

With that in mind, I've been thinking of one of the favourite precepts of my adolescence. It comes very much from the eastern side of my mental landscape, and even then at a bit of a remove, being yet another of the Japanese thoughts my master was so fond of.

"Even if one's head were to be suddenly cut off, he should still be able to perform one more action with certainty."

This has been lodged in my head for my entire adult life, and it's only recently I've begun to properly understand it. Initially, I absorbed it mainly for its machismo value. Whenever I found myself in a workplace which required or encouraged people to put up inspirational quotes, this was my first option. In retrospect, my first option should have been to tender my resignation. In any case, my superficial understanding of the idea at the time was that one should push through, Nike Just Do It style, through any and all obstacles, gung-ho, implacable, and invincible. Unsurprisingly, this proved quite toxic, as all impossible standards tend to when they are actually taken seriously.

What I had failed to understand was the underlying acceptance implied in this concept. Printing something like this on a T-shirt or coffee mug has vaguely uber-mensch-ian overtones, but the reality couldn't be further from that kind of garbage. It's about the context of determination. When one is determined to do something, that determination exists free from consequence or contingency and, more importantly, from purpose. Performing an action after being decapitated has startlingly exact parallels with Camus' views on the Sisyphean nature of life. When once we accept the absurdity of our existence in the face of mortality, freedom and power to act can and should result.

Which has me questioning how far that initial dichotomy actually existed beyond the superficial. It's unsurprising that a modern French author and philosopher and a mediaeval warrior cult should package their ideas differently, but it's surprising (to me, at least) just how similar their ideas actually are. This leads me to wonder about this supposed difference between east and west, and whether it's not all, in the end, simply a question of packaging.

Life as a Dead Person

I remember watching an episode of Band of Brothers in which an officer, counselling a private afflicted with crippling fear, advises him to act as if he were already dead. He informs the frightened private that the disease afflicting him is not cowardice, but hope - that his lingering hope of survival is the real malignance paralysing his body. Because in many ways, hope is like oxygen. It's essential to life but, taken in excess, it becomes corrosive. Hope is the harbinger of fear, and the precursor to despair.

It's unsurprising, in a way - every culture that has a warrior and/or comitatus structure (and every major civilisation does), from the Vikings to the Saxons, the Samurai to the Wudang - has a version of this idea. On one level, it's a relatively crude way to manage fear - accepting death as not just inevitable, but as having already occurred somewhere in time, makes it impossible to conceive of actions (or inaction) to avoid it. On another level, though, it's a sophisticated tool for navigating life.

What a philosophy based on this idea removes is the anxiety and fear arising from hope. This is not to say that its adherents live lives of despair, or have an existence devoid of goals or aspirations - far from it. What is missing is that desperate emotional attachment to outcomes which is associated with a hopeful outlook. The excision of this element is, somewhat counter-intuitively, a highly effective catalyst of personal power. Put simply, it is much, much easier to strive, risk and labour, when the eventual outcome is seen as irrelevant. And the balance and calm with which these labours are conducted ironically makes it far more likely that they will be successful.

There are obvious downsides, of course. A mentality such as this takes a great deal of mental and physical discipline to maintain. There's also the fact that sound, practical goals like financial security, or personal or physical comfort, often dwindle drastically in importance. And there is the constant, if low-level irritation of being consistently misunderstood by people who believe that they are very much alive. It's an open question how important any of this is, as indeed it is questionable how important anything at all can possibly be. Nevertheless, I would argue that such a philosophy is worth considering. The freedom to act, the purity of action which can become possible, and absolute freedom from the pettier varieties of fear, all strike me as being ample recompense.

The Onanistic Solipsism of "Opinion"

I was recently having a conversation about private schooling, and I made the far from original observation that private school life, at least in the kind where I went, was heavily militarised. My friend then asked me what percentage of private school graduates joined the military, to which I replied I did not know. He then asked me what my opinion on that might be. At which point I started swearing.

To be fair, my friend was really just trying to keep the discussion going, but he did touch on a point that's rather a sore one for me, and that is what passes for opinion in today's fraught public discussions. My opinion on an unknown statistic, well outside my area of competence or interest, is worth about as much as my bank account, which is twenty cents overdrawn.

And now we get to the term 'onanistic solipsism', which I must apologise for. It's just that it's difficult to sound intelligent when using the term 'self-deluded wankery', which is what I mean by it. I'd like to put it forward to describe the near-universal syndrome of believing that an opinion based on absolutely nothing at all is worth sharing, listening to, or considering.

Let's take the TPP as a case in point. What I know and understand about the TPP can be written on the head of a pin with a hammer and chisel, and I'm pretty sure that puts me in a very big club. This being the case, I keep my stupid head shut on the subject. I'm almost certain that George Carney, a factory worker from Galesburg, Illinois, is also a paid up member of this club. Why, then, does Mr Carney have an opinion on the trade deal? Or "Steve" from Ingleburn, who has written numerous letters to the editor on the subject. And just so you don't think I'm some elitist picking on the little guy, I also question why we should pay any attention to what some late night television comedian has to say on the matter either.

I'm pretty sure this speaks to a deeper malaise which can be traced back to the numerous corrosive effects of post-modernist theory in multiple areas of society, notably in education. Put simply, generation after generation of people have been taught that how they feel about something is at least as valid as what they know. That the ultimate test for validity lies not in objective confirmation, but in the very fact that their reaction originates within themselves. That's the "Solipsism" bit. Continuing to stridently contribute to a discussion well after it has become apparent that their ignorance on the subject is comparable to the estimated size of the universe - that's the "Onanism".

Don't make the mistake of thinking I rate all opinion as worthless. An informed or expert opinion is definitely worth weighing when considering an issue, and opinions derived from careful (and valid) thought are always worth at least listening to. It's the opinions which are based on absolutely nothing at all which are the target of my animus.

Politics and ethics has been been reduced to what basically amounts to barracking for a sports team, complex issues are drowning in the shrill pronouncements of idiots and conspiracy theorists and, in short, the popularity of onanistic solipsism as a mode of thought can and should be seen as a credible existential threat to our democracy. If we the people continue having absolutely nothing sensible to say, how can we complain when the business of government drifts inexorably into the hands of a smaller and smaller elite?