Moby Dick and The Fallacy of 'Killing the Magic'

One of the ideas I encounter all the time is the strange notion that analysis ruins the experience of creative works. It most often crops up when I'm taking a student through film analysis, as film is usually the medium they also engage with voluntarily in ordinary life. I'll be talking them through various film making techniques and explaining how each element is designed to evoke either specific or varied reactions, and they'll almost always ask, "But doesn't knowing all this stuff kind of kill the effect?". It's a question I get asked so frequently, and so reliably, that I have to conclude that it's a widely held belief.

I think it stems from the kinds of magical thinking we generally foist on children in schools as part of the effort to tame and socialise the human animal. God can see what you're up to. Santa will reward your virtuous behaviour. Imagination exists in a separate and alternate universe to reality, so no, it doesn't work if you just imagine you're wearing pants. And that's the essence of it - the quarantining of imagination away from reality creates the superstition that the analysis of imagination's products will somehow drag them into the 'real' universe, thus destroying their impact and wonder. I call this a 'superstition' advisedly. It's emphatically not true on any level. Imagination and reality are not clearly demarcated. They're not, in fact, even securely defined, understood, or satisfactorily proven to exist. Given that, one of the most important duties of an educator of older children is to repair the crude scars of earlier and necessary cognitive training - to re-knit the internal and external worlds of human consciousness once the child has become 'reasonable' enough to make independent (if necessarily arbitrary) distinctions between reality and unreality.

As a part of this attempt, I usually use Moby Dick as an exemplar. Melville's astonishing, enormous epic is usually first encountered as monolithic, intimidating, and practically incomprehensible. Rather like the bible, it hits the reading mind as a gigantic, towering edifice made from whole cloth, impossible to ever completely understand. For some, this is sufficient to make it unreadable, whereas others read it over and over again, trying to parse the deeper hidden messaging which they know, with absolute certainty, must be contained within it. And there is where it usually stops. The outline or shape of the primary concepts of the novel sit in a sort of fuzzy pool in the vague mnemo-cognate we use to have and store vague impressions. To my mind, this is a goddamned tragedy.

When we come to analyse Moby Dick, one of the very first things which happens is that we lose the idea of the text as monolithic - a single object. Its vast scope and incomprehensibly broad range is discovered for what it really is: not a singular vision, but rather a set of deeply fractured and inchoate explorations of distinct ideas. Basically, just like the bible, or a chance-met stranger, closer examination erases the illusion of a consistent and coherent entity. At this point, someone usually interjects with a kind of QED: "See! You've revealed its flaws, which kills it as an experience!", which is of course entirely wrong. Getting to know a text is like getting to know a person (mainly because that's exactly what it is). The better we know someone, the more inconsistencies, blind spots, flaws, and failings we discover. Thing is, though, when it's the right person, these apparent blemishes actually enrich and enliven the experience of that individual. In the same way, understanding Moby Dick's serious structural and conceptual flaws simultaneously reduces it to a manageable size, while elevating it into a pure act of communion. From an intimidating monolith, the story of the white whale becomes a conversation with a human mind. Flawed, certainly, but real and alive. An abstract interlocutor who asks us questions, tells us what it sees, thinks, and feels, and invites us to contemplate the human condition in all its frailty and majesty through the mythical lens of a failed (or not) monster hunt, and a Gilgamesh/Enkidu style platonic love affair.

And then it all becomes stark staringly obvious, in a way. The very famous first line, "Call me Ishmael," tells us straight out that Melville has created a persona with whom the reading mind is invited to converse. About the tenuous frameworks of society, identity, religion, sanity. About the grand narratives of humanity and its troubled relationship with truth and the rest of nature. About whale penises and tobacco smoking. About anything and everything, really. Its greatest flaw is its greatest strength - there really isn't any requirement to experience this text either sequentially or completely. It's discrete sections stand alone in a way that would make a modern publisher despair, and which make the work such an enduringly rewarding companion. In the case of Moby Dick, as in almost all cases, deeper, analytical knowledge does not in any way destroy its 'magic'. What it does do, however, is create the kind of knowledge which is necessary for all genuine bonding with ideas, images, thoughts, and people.

Blackjack And Politics

The best time to grind out a few hands of Blackjack at the casino is a Monday afternoon. This isn't about maths, but people. Blackjack is one of the few games where, with careful play, it's possible to take advantage of a very slight swing in favour of the player. In order for this to happen, however, all players need to co-operate intelligently against the bank. Players who are selfish, ignorant, or both, will make decisions which swing the advantage back to the bank. A good example is when the dealer draws a six or less. In this situation, it's vitally important not to draw picture cards from the deck, as these are needed to help maximise the probability that the dealer will bust. Of course, it's necessary to hedge oneself a little, so it's allowable to hit oneself up to ten, but the common good requires that players do no more than this. Ignoring the table and going for an individual win will usually result in every other player at the table losing. And this in a situation where proper co-operative play would have most likely resulted in everybody winning against the house. This is why Monday afternoons are best - none but seasoned, dedicated players hit the casino on a Monday afternoon.

In western democracies, politics is a game that's quite similar to Blackjack. Sure, the odds seem to be stacked against us, with big money interests and aggressive lobby groups poised to use up all the available oxygen, and legislative systems so opaque that the whole game seems irretrievably rigged in favour of the house. But we see again and again that united popular will can and does beat the bank. Thing is, this can only happen when it's more or less united. When we have a situation where the people are mired in useless garbage - semantic disputes, arguments over statues and holidays, mutual name-calling, and idiotic recrimination - the house will always win. So just like Blackjack, where a responsible player always follows the probability matrix, there are ways to swing the balance of politics back into our favour.

• Ignorant participation allows interest groups to tailor the narrative to their own narrow requirements. If you're not across an issue, either get across it or shut up. Economics is a good example - hardly anyone understands it, but our insane insistence on talking about it anyway allows governments to fight elections around issues we do not comprehend.
• Play the long game - sure, it's about self interest, but if we let our neighbour's house catch fire today, there's a good chance ours will go up tomorrow.
• Default to the equal treatment of all people. Giving groups more rights doesn't destroy functional societies - it's taking them away which does that. 
• Fear is never the answer. The project of civilisation is inherently unsafe, which means that its survival is dependant on our individual and collective courage.
• Tribalism is the enemy of democracy. Any political view which isolates any group based on who they are rather than what they do, is almost certainly invalid. 
• Think. How we feel about something is not a reliable guide to what is right, or even to what is relevant. Politics is neither a sporting fixture nor a soap opera - it's a real life process in which we are duty bound to participate as intelligently and responsibly as we can.
• No-one can live in a world tailor made for them and them alone. Grow up and make room for other views.
• Find common ground. Demagogues love division. When the people are polarised, the popular will is atomised, and the bank will always be able to have it all its own way. 

Great experiments of connectivity have always been a bit bamboozling for humanity. It's worth noting that great collapses and wars have tended to happen at our periods of closest interconnection. 1177 BCE, 576, 1913 - moments of broad connection seem to act as the tipping points of history. The internet has created another one right now, and the confronting realisation that the vast majority of people can neither ratiocinate, articulate, or spell, seems to be causing us to shrink from each other - to fragment and fracture apart as quickly as we possibly can. Which is the surest and speediest way to ensure that the house will always, always win.

The Sudden Awareness of Statues

I'm used to being the only person who notices statues. Usually I'll be out in a public park somewhere, generally very late at night, and while everyone else is finding places to throw up or urinate, I'll be reading plaques and saying things like, "Who the hell is John Adamson, and why should anyone care?". I still don't know, but what I do know is that nobody I've ever encountered a statue with has ever had the first clue as to who it's for, or why people pay for statues to be put up in the first place.

What this means is that, as usual, the sudden emergence of this 'hot button issue' has caught big sections of the population entirely unprepared. And it's into this gap of understanding that the usual bigots and loonies have flocked, attempting to cast (no pun) the issue as stuff it is emphatically not. From the conservative 'destruction of history' nonsense, to the progressive grievance factory's 'endorsement of crime' polemics, the issue of statues is set to become another battleground for the nation's political soul, only this time potentially without the toxic scrutiny of innocent citizens' lives which comes with the Marriage Equality 'debate'.

So why do statues go up? And how, after a snappy five thousand years of living with and participating in the practice, can we still be as confused about this as we so patently are? The conservatives are right in that the central motivation is a kind of 'public history'. Prominent or otherwise significant figures in the formation of thought or the nation, or whatever, are commemorated in more or less random locations around the city, with little plaques curtly explaining who they are and why we should care. This is indeed a form of concrete (again, no pun) collective memory. But the progressives are also correct in saying that there is an element of morality in memorialisation. The strong implication of a statue is that its subject is someone to be admired - figuratively (because literally) placed on a pedestal. But there are statues of Bligh, Boudica, Napoleon, and other far from unambiguously admirable people, erected much more because the individual in question is considered to be important, rather than actually good. 

And this is really the essence of it. By far the most salient consideration when erecting statues is significance. The nature of the medium is such that fine shades of meaning, complex modes of communication, and so on, are basically impossible. I'm not saying they're not present - the statue of Bligh, for example, is deliberately stumpy, ugly, and truculent in stance. But this kind of fine symbolism is generally lost on the vast majority of the statue-ignoring public, and creators of public monuments must be aware of this general insensibility when it comes to their works. So statues are principally designed to memorialise the 'great' as distinct from the good. And, apart from a few notable exceptions (like Confederate memorials erected at the height of the Civil Rights Movement), in a largely neutral way.

Which brings us to the issue at hand. Should statues of colonialist, racist, or otherwise morally ambiguous figures be allowed to stand? I vote that we ask the children of Syria, or Yemen, or the citizens of Venezuela, or the women of Saudi Arabia - all the people most likely to give us the sensible answer, which is, "Who really gives a toss?". But, failing that, I think it isn't too hard to figure it out for ourselves. If statues are memory and a more or less tacit acceptance of certain values, then we should probably just leave them alone. Because we are generally pretty crap at remembering our past, and as a nation we are, by and large, tacitly accepting of our racist, murderous past. So until and unless those things change, I'd suggest that our current crop of statues is actually exactly representative of who we are. Pulling them down won't erase our deep-seated moral failings. It will only render them invisible.

The Buddha, And Why We Can't Have Nice Things

The middle of the first millennium BCE was an amazing period in human history. For reasons nobody can satisfactorily explain, revolutionary advances in ontological and ethical thought suddenly occurred more or less simultaneously all over the world. Socrates in Greece, Confucius in China, and Siddartha Gautama in India, are all examples of this sudden flowering of radical intellectual growth. Some historians push hard for a kind of networked theory, contending that this simultaneity must imply much stronger global connections than current thinking presumes, whereas others ascribe causation to a whole range of historical, personal, and spiritual forces.

Whatever the truth might be, the important thing is that, for whatever reason, this period is characterised by serious and unusually productive contemplation of the perennial question of what it is to be a human, and what might be the best and most ethical way of manifesting this being. For the Buddha, the problem was characteristically simple, but not. The question, as he saw it, was the problem of 'suffering' - how to explain it, how to deal with it, and how to transcend it. It's difficult not to connect this to much later early mediaeval thinking about the problem of evil, and the inescapable conclusion is that the Buddha was in fact contemplating exactly that.

The Buddha's solution was elegant, appealing, and, unsurprisingly, still strongly resonant today. Suffering comes from desire, he says, and the control of desire, coupled with a focus on understanding higher truths, is the only real way to overcome the lacrimae rerum which is the human condition. What really makes the Buddha stand out for me, however, is the fact that essential to this framework was a kind of higher atheism. 'Have and worship no Gods,' says the Buddha on repeated occasions. As I understand it, what he was saying was that dependence on ritual relationships, worship, and the community of religion, were all more or less insidious forms of attachment. In order to transcend suffering, we must also transcend our dependence on supernatural agents, not only as intercessants on our behalf, but as explanation for our plight. Complete intellectual and spiritual independence seems to have been the Buddha's recipe for true connection with a world he very much saw as immanent, and as containing solution and meaning in and of itself.

I'm painfully aware that this is a very complex idea, and that I've possibly made a pig's breakfast of attempting to explain it in a short paragraph. Thing is, though, I'm pretty sure I understand it, regardless of how clumsily I might be expressing it. What's very clear to me, on the other hand, is that practically none of the Buddha's immediate or early followers can say as much.

There are many conflicting and complementary traditions of the Buddha's death, but they all tend to agree on the major points. The great man was dying and, in a manner hauntingly reminiscent of Socrates, used his own personal death as an object lesson in philosophy. He showed them the transcience of the flesh by baring his own withered body. He counselled them yet again to fight their attachment to his person, and to instead listen to his ideas. He forbade them from deifying, enshrining, or worshipping him in any other way. On these points, all the traditions seem to agree. Interestingly, most of them also agree that his last meal was pork. But that's beside the point. The point is that the Buddha was insistent, in his dying moments, that no religion be established around his identity. 'Become a lamp unto yourself,' he is said to have advised.

I imagine his followers nodded sagely, made solemn promises, did their kind best to comfort him in his final moments, this man who neither needed nor wanted comfort. What I know is that everybody knows where the Buddha died because a shrine was almost immediately set up on the spot, and that everyone knows who the Buddha is because of the massive global religion which has been established around his identity. It seems that his ideas were simply a bridge too far. Be kind to others? Certainly. Live a virtuous and moderate life? No problems at all, boss. Transcend suffering and evil by striving constantly for complete mental and spiritual freedom? Um... say again?

It's one of my favourite ironies that the reason I know about the Buddha's atheism and aversion to formal religion, is the de facto deification of his memory by the formal religions created by his followers. For me, this is emblematic of humanity en masse. We are constantly limited by the slowest and silliest among us. No sooner do one or a few of us reach incredible depths of understanding, the very act of communicating those understandings corrupts, dilutes, and normalises them. From Buddhism to Christianity, revolutionary, transcendent ideas have been cut and watered down until they fit the shapes of the societies which adopt them, generally becoming practically unrecognisable in the process. Perhaps there's some comfort in the possibility of this representing a process of incremental progress, but I doubt it. What it most probably represents is the basic impossibility of fracturing permanently away from the community of humanity - a thought which is simultaneously heartening and deeply frustrating.

Moral Courage

Hemingway is an author who seems to attract equal parts love and hate. The hatred of Americans I can understand - schoolchildren of both Canada and the US are repeatedly and consistently bludgeoned with his Nobel Prize winning status, his tortured soul, the luminaries of the Parisian milieu with whom he associated, and, if they're really unlucky, with the technicalities of his theories on the art of writing.

For others, this ambivalence seems to arise from the atavistic masculinity which he projected without necessarily possessing. And it is this question - the conundrum of Hemingway's real character, which concerns me today. Let's leave aside the fact that his writing advice could be copied and pasted into a Lee Child or James Paterson style manual without causing a single comment. That his weird modernistic obsession with form and structure was so easily co-opted by cynical purveyors of trash. That the worshippers at his shrine are made up almost exclusively of people who struggle to conceive of a single original idea, or to construct the shortest of viable sentences. Or the fact that he, like Peter Carey, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and Graham Greene, smashed into my forming literary consciousness like a revelation of divine grace. Let's leave all that aside and focus on the myth of Hemingway and its feet of clay.

One of Hemingway's biographers pointed to an incident involving, if memory serves, Evelyn Waugh. If not him, then some other writer who saw actual war service, rather than receiving a medal for being randomly shelled at a politically expedient time. This writer, who I'm certain was British, penned an open letter to the great man asserting that, machismo aside, Hemingway lacked that most important of the types of bravery - moral courage. Hemingway, possibly drunk, or possibly simply not understanding, replied with a long letter listing multiple instances of his physical courage. And it's this which leads me to my point.

Moral courage does not consist in doing what is 'right'. Doing what is visibly, palpably, uncontroversially right, basically amounts to that tricky, vainglorious quality we call 'honour'. And honour is a doddle. All we need do to be honourable is to follow a course of publicly approved, widely popular external measures for rectitude, and then spend the rest of our days sneering superciliously at those lesser mortals who have had the misfortune to acquaint themselves with failure. This is emphatically not the essence of moral courage. Moral courage is about doing that which does not publicly or immediately seem to be right, but which we know to be anyway. It's about following through on abstract, and often counterintuitive principles. It's about seeing the picture which lies beyond our individual wants, vanities, and dignity, and doing what is best according to rules which have little or nothing to do with personal satisfaction in one's own virtue.

This is where the grand tourist Hemingway failed. He was incapable of separating real courage from the histrionics of his own personal code. There is a feeling, trembling on the edge of a theory, that the day he put that shotgun under his chin was the day he finally realised the hollowness - the cheap externality - of his own conception of honour. "I can't believe they fell for The Old Man and the Sea," he was reported to have said of his masterpiece. I don't believe there is anything particularly wrong with that book. Except, perhaps, for the self conscious bid for external moral approval which infests almost every sentence. That sense of a man laboriously doing good according to someone else's lights and not his own. The essence, in fact, of the opposite of moral courage.

I am reminded of a story about a sword master who, on being confronted by bandits, was forced to crawl through their legs while being pelted with stones to avoid being killed. After this incident, his students asked him why he had submitted to this humiliation and he said, "I gave them their lives." As a young and angry man, I had always dismissed this story as a tale of cowardice justified through sophistry. It's only recently that I've come to realise that what this story is about is the essence of exactly that kind of courage which Hemingway never managed to achieve.

Almost invariably, the appreciation of moral courage is retrospective. Because the essence of this kind of courage is not in the doing of what is acceptable, but of what is right in spite of all, including the popular, casual, or - most importantly - facile perception of 'right'.

Race, Representation, and White Saviours

This picture of Fagin is a silent comment on the 'progress' made in discussions about inclusion.

Inclusive writing appears to be all the rage these days. All sorts of advice is available to the aspiring or established author as to how to represent people from different races, sexual orientations, and socio-economic brackets, in a 'sensitive' and 'inclusive' manner. I suppose this reflects the recent discussions around cultural appropriation and controversies surrounding various authors presuming to write, with greater or lesser success, from within a skin colour which was not their own.

As an ethnic Chinese in a majority white country, I have personal experience of the impact of representation and inclusion, having been brought up in the long, long shadow of Bruce Lee, Fu Man Chu, and Charlie Chan. So why is it, then, that the idea of creators making deliberate efforts to include me makes me so uncomfortable? Sticking with the idea of the representation of ethnic Chinese, there are a few aspects of this whole culture of affirmative action which are highly distasteful.

First of all, the whole idea underpinning the concept is fundamentally racist. The assumption that my skin colour dictates the shape and nature of my mind is no different, in essence, to the kind of social Darwinism which informed much of the racial hatred and prejudice of the twentieth century. The idea that Chinese people exist in some kind of ethno-cultural quarantine zone which can only be explored with special sensitivity training strikes me as a rather stupid and counter-productive inversion of the whole concept of pluralism. The point of a pluralistic society is that difference of any kind, while interesting and potentially productive of corporate advantage, should be largely irrelevant. For difference to be elevated to the status of some kind of sacred cow is simply moronic - it misses the entire point and purpose of key liberal values.

I'm aware that much of the model for 'sensitivity' and 'inclusiveness' is driven by ethnic minorities themselves, but this is, if anything, even more offensive. The belief in some sort of yellow, black, orange, or rainbow privilege speaks to a belief in the fundamental difference of these people, which is all kinds of wrong. Common courtesy dictates that we not deliberately offend each other, but common sense equally dictates that packing a given segment of society in victim grade cotton wool is offensive in itself.

And then there's the whole idea of patronage. The strong implication of all of this effort is that I should be somehow grateful. Look at all the effort those lovely white people are making to ensure that I feel included. Which is also deeply unintelligent - whether it's positive or negative, division is division. Also, anyone who's ever been picked for a team because the teacher has insisted that the fat and the uncoordinated should also be given a go, understands exactly what this kind of treatment feels like. My ethnicity is not a disability, and even if it were, simple courtesy demands that I not have it thrown in my face in a patronising manner.

I was once asked whether I included 'diverse' characters in my writing, and whether I thought this was a good thing to do. My response was that people, and types of people, occur in my work for the simple reason that they occur in the real world. Because all fiction, regardless of the height of its brow, depends for its validity in the reflection of some sort of truth. If any author is unable to understand a person as a person, regardless of their ethnicity or their walk of life, they simply have no business writing them. This isn't political, it's a fundamental principle of art.

Pericles and the Loneliness of Logic

Roughly two and a half thousand years ago, the Aegean and Mediterranean worlds were wracked by the Peloponnesian wars. Arguably, the long term effects of these wars ripple down to us today. Without the defeat of Athens and the depletion of Sparta, Philip of Macedon could not have conquered the Greek world, thus paving the way for his mercurial son Alexander to Hellenise the Persian Empire, creating routes for the flow of ideas, merchandise, disease, and conflict which continue to shape the world we live in today.

It makes sense, then, that the causes of these wars are hotly contested in the mainstream of historical discourse to this day. Thucydides and the war he chronicled are justly taken as the fons et origo of modern historical inquiry, and we devote as much time to unpicking his methodologies and motives as we do to understanding the events he chronicled.

There are many theories of the root cause, but possibly one of the most disturbing is Kagan's. He contends (very convincingly) that the fundamental error on the part of Pericles, official and de facto first citizen of Athens, was to overestimate the rationality of his opponents. Faced with a complex and existentially perilous set of circumstances, Pericles conducted a linear and cool-headed appraisal of the situation and, largely through the force of his personality, embarked Athens on a policy exactly rationally matched to his circumstances. Kagan's contention is that if Sparta, Corinth and Corcyra had been equally rational, they would have seen Pericles' plan for minimal deterrence for what it was, and maintained the balance of power and the peace, thus avoiding the war that arguably destroyed the classical Greek world. Unsurprisingly, however, Pericles was alone in his rationality, and his policies were sadly out of place and ineffective in the face of the reactionary fear and anger manifested by the other great powers.

This argument is particularly well evidenced, but the most compelling factor for me is its familiarity. Its plausibility is rooted in its deep resonance with that we already know about how people work. The age of the internet is an eavesdropper's paradise in that the vast majority of online material consists essentially of conversations overheard, usually in the form of dispute. An analysis of the progress of these 'arguments' makes it very clear that the vast majority of people simply do not know how to think in a linear fashion, and those few who do, seem incapable of pointing that line in any reasonable direction.

Mental acrobats like Edward De Bono contend that we naturally think in a linear fashion, but I would argue that this is a thought only possible for someone who lives in an academic and intellectual bubble. It is painfully obvious to me that the default mode of thinking for the bulk of humanity is free association. We see something, it reminds us of something else, which reminds us of another thing, ad infinitum. And this woolly and unreliable process really only serves for the rationalisation of emotion. Or, put more simply, our natural mode of thinking is highly effective for justifying our knee-jerk reactions to ourselves and others - a vital evolutionary development, but also a highly specialised one. This kind of thinking allows us to very effectively understand social dynamics and short range, simple, or repetitive phenomena, but what it is emphatically not useful for is the parsing of large scale and abstract complexity.

What is required for the understanding of such complexity, or the balancing of non-binary and potentially perpetual problems, is a kind of thinking which can only be developed through rigorous mental exercise and ceaselessly vigilant metacognition. It's important to remember, however, that anyone who embarks on such a process is likely to be quite the rara avis, adrift and alone in a sea of muddle-headed sentimentality and reactionary outrage. I'm willing to bet everyone reading this is inwardly nodding and congratulating themselves on being exactly such an island of rationality, but I'd suggest that this reaction is an indication of peril. The essence of this kind of thinking is in the constant doubt of one's own thought processes, and vigilant attention to the processes of others - precisely the two areas in which Pericles, rational as he was, failed.

The simplest test of rationality runs thusly:

Qaere: 'Am I utterly convinced my thinking is rational?'

If the answer is 'yes', it's time to rip down the entire framework and start again.