Notes on a Change of Heart
Let’s not make the lonely men more lonely still. Let’s make them feel listened to, even if we struggle to love them.
There are lots of ways in which one can fail to reach an audience. Chief among them would be to needlessly piss them off. I don't want to do that.
Unpissed-off readers are the minimum sought-for result of an attempt to communicate something one cares deeply about. Pissed off readers don’t read to the end, and sometimes, if you are writing carefully, that will be where the heart of the matter you are thinking about hard is going to be found.
So I have had a change of heart.
I still feel very strongly that a lot of the terms casually tossed about and sprayed on today’s political discourse do not further ends on which most of us can otherwise readily agree.
That is the weakness of clever slogans and pithy calls to action - concision often comes at the price of precision. It has always been that way, but things feel worse than before: as if the tonal palette of normal conversation now permits fewer shades of grey than ever before.
Less room for well-intended humour, too: things are ‘not a laughing matter', even though laughter and irony are the first things humans reach for when confronted with what we fear the most. We are neurologically wired to laugh in the face of adversity - journalists, soldiers, surgeons, the emergency services all use black humour to protect themselves from the grimness of their daily work - but it seems harder to do so today. The weightiness of the world’s problems apparently rules out a less po-faced approach to life’s frustrations.
[Vienna, 1945. Yevgeny Khaldei]
Most of us would like to see a planet on which at least our grandchildren might live without this much fear - fear of an increasingly inhospitable climate, or the outcome of politics we know are increasingly polarised and therefore dangerous; or fear of ‘smart’ weapons that might soon choose targets autonomously, and of the sophisticated but easily distorted means we have of communicating with one another. And fear of the certainty that the consequences of getting all this wrong are getting more costly. It’s a very bad time to double down on dogma. There’s a lot going on.
Our aims, broadly, we hold in common. Where it seems we struggle to agree is on the means by which they can meaningfully, sustainably, and where possible measurably, be achieved. But if we want the common good, and want it in good faith, we have no choice but to choose scrupulous words to discover the method.
It feels that calling into question the new terminology, catch-all phrases that obscure as much as they shed light, generated to support disputable ideologies, is quite unwelcome. A reasoned doubting of method is often taken to be evidence that the questioner doubts the value of goals the method purports to be advancing. This is an unproductive conflation, at best.
It can also easily set the goals back. That is not progressive but regressive, and wholly beyond the repair of fine intentions when the method was faulty in the first place, and could have been shown to be so before it caused harm if only we were more tolerant of dissenting voices. It seems such voices are now the outliers, and the risk-takers, rather than the new prophets who are no longer crying in the desert but comfortably established in the mainstream. Dissenting voices cannot by definition ‘stay in their lane’ and we won’t get far if we tune them out of the global talk show.
Politics is all about method: how might we collectively prevent harm in future, reduce suffering in the present, and attempt to learn from the compromised efforts of those who in good faith yet hampered by the imperfect ideas of the day, were diligently working on the Big Questions of Life as they were perceived in the past. Knowing that they didn’t get everything right doesn’t mean we are more likely to. It surely means we should assume that we probably won’t either.
It is human to wish to end, or at least circumscribe to a minimum, the injustices that are a part of the cruel reality of a short life on earth. It is also human to defend to the hilt positions in which we have become emotionally invested - even in the teeth of the respectful query and compelling new evidence.
Much of our ‘reasoning’ is utterly irrational, and very often a post hoc ‘rationalisation’ of the very passions that get in the way of examining method and therefore pose the biggest obstacle to achieving our goals.
The risk is that in our exasperation with those who refuse to share our cherished method, we become tempted to write them off as ‘on the wrong side of history’ at best; at worst, as born stupid, and perhaps therefore unworthy of attention and being taken seriously in the first place. That risks dehumanising them and discarding their rights. And once we do that, when we no longer have to worry about reasoning with those who disagree with us, because they are less than us, the next step is to write them off, or describe them as an enemy to be defeated, rather than a friend to be patient with.
It makes us feel a lot better about this lonely life to be a beloved member of a tribe. But feeling strongly attached to our tribe can get firmly in the way of reasoning with the other tribe. If the survival of both tribes depends on their careful cooperation - neither is going to make it alone, let’s be honest about that - we really need a better method when it comes to… finding the right method.
In ‘Manic Depression’, Jimi Hendrix sang “I know what I want, but I just don't know
how to go about getting it.” I think we all might strive for Jimi’s self-knowledge.
Compromise and humility are tiring. A silver bullet is much to be desired, but wanting it won’t magically cause it to appear. We should believe those who seek the truth and mistrust those who say they have found it - that’s how André Gide put it, and I think he was spot on.
Dogged insistence that one has found the answers, and that therefore further questions are redundant or a waste of society’s scarce time, can lead to irreparable harm. Sometimes to reputations, which are nearly impossible to correct in a digital world, and very often to entire lives.
We have to learn to tolerate uncertainty, however uncomfortable it makes us feel: there is no other method. Some psychological distress is evidence that you are being a good human: you know there’s a lot you can’t be sure of.
That was the problem with a different set of dogmas a career in the former Soviet Union showed me the consequences of: Scientific Marxism-Leninism. The problem was the ideology was anything but scientific. True scientific method takes for granted that your conclusions can and must be called into question, and that all ‘knowledge’ is provisional.
Our dearly wished-for goals may well be universal and timeless. But we have spent millennia trying to attain them without conspicuous success. Often because in seeking the comfort of political ‘life hacks’, and having no truck with compromise, we have increased the distance between ourselves and the very thing we say we are yearning for.
Take also ‘Socialist Realist’ art - an oxymoron that most of us laugh at (now that it is no longer dangerous to do so). Most can agree that it was a frightening attempt by a self-appointed elite to change the nature of things by changing the way society had to talk about them. I am certain most Soviet citizens knew it was all a nonsense. I didn’t come across many cheerful busty tractor drivers making their way through a five-year plan with a grin on their face. But everyone had to keep their opinions to themselves, and insist that the Emperor was not scantily dressed, but in full regalia. Otherwise, one would live in fear of a knock at the door and a quick ‘off with his head’ with zero right of appeal. Or punitive psychiatry. Millions suffered or were killed. Russia, and its neighbours, are still suffering and a great many are being killed. And punitive psychiatry is also making a comeback as the go-to means of shutting up the stubbornly resistant.
I worry that modern political discourse is making the same sort of mistake. Convinced we have discovered the roots of injustices, we leap to the conclusion that we have ipso facto discovered the means of their eradication. But what if we get it wrong? The smallest overlooked flaw in intricate mechanisms can have catastrophic consequences. (Change less than one percent of my gene code and you get a chimp.)
That was the thought behind the original title of this blog. I intended a gentle irony that hinted at what I take to be a blindingly clear injustice: that on the basis of someone’s sex, skin colour, education, accidents of birth, current income level, sexual preferences and the state of his central nervous system - things that are impossible or very difficult to do much about - you can draw sure-fire conclusions about his or her character, virtue, usefulness in collaborative effort, ability to perceive and solve complex problems in good faith, and be able to make a reasoned assessment of the muddles of history that are more or less opaque to every one of us because we are living after the events in question.
I have white skin and I am a man. I studied (pauses for breath) PPE at Oxford. I am demonstrably Male ‘n’ Pale. I have also spent 20 years in psychiatric care and have witnessed a lot of traumatic events and the human suffering that ensued from them. I would happily ‘check my privilege’ but I can’t work out the algorithm for doing so to good effect (so perhaps instead I will plod on with trying to love my neighbour, and hope it does the trick).
But I don’t think any of those characteristics fully characterise me, or that they tell you the most important thing about me, or the degree to which my voice is worth listening to in the general clamour for attention in the ‘What Is To Be Done?’ stakes.
There are lots of lonely men out there, some of them white, but the salient characteristic they share is that they are lonely - and such men in the end pick up arms or kills themselves, in my experience. Let’s not make the lonely men more so. Let’s make them feel loved, or if that’s too hard, listened to.
Our time on earth is limited, and even the most youthful among us are running out of it. Let’s listen more carefully to each other, and more generously, and with a lot more forgiveness, however hard it comes to us, in order to waste less of that precious time and get on with a pressing to-do list.
For some of the those who read my posts, the earlier title of the Substack meant they instantly clicked away. And that doesn’t further my ends one bit. I can be upset, call them literal-minded, wish they were more tolerant, more willing to suspend the urge to censure or switch off. Call them out and write them off. But that won’t change things for the better. It’s the shabbiest of methods if I truly care about my ends.
The new title is pretty bland, pretty vanilla. I am disappointed the old title didn’t land the way I hoped for a few readers - the ones I most want to reach, in fact. So it goes.
But 'No man (or woman) left behind’ as a more sympathetic Marine Corps motto might have it. The first rule of good communications is that it’s not about the words I so want to use, but about the words an audience is ready and able to hear. My best intentions turned out to be insufficient on this score. Hence a change of tack.
As for the photo above, I have an original of it framed and hanging at home. It was a gift from Yevgeny Khaldei himself, more famous for this photograph, whom I met in 1995 when compiling a report on the 50th anniversary of the end of WW2. He was a lovely old man, living in a one-room apartment in a Moscow suburb, and despite his evident impoverishment, generous with an archive of prints which competed for space with a single bed, a table, and a chair.
‘Choose a photo to take home, if you like. I can write something on it. What shall I write?’
I thought about taking the Soviet Flag over the Reichstag one, which might be quite valuable today, but chose the tired men helping their wounded comrade shuffle through the unspeakable. The aftermath of what happens when we stop talking.
W.H. Auden said ‘we must love one another or die.’
Do keep reading. I am very grateful for your attention and I don’t take it for granted. I am trying hard to listen.
Very best wishes,
Chris