Chris Beckett's Fiction

I observed in a recent post that, for people on different sides of a political argument, “‘their’ views are always based on ignorance, fear, self-interest, or a refusal to face reality, while ‘ours’ are always based on wisdom, courage, decency and deep understanding of the world.”

‘Always’ is an exaggeration I admit, but if you look at the incredibly abusive and ill-tempered political debates that happen online, where the normal veneer of politeness is stripped away, ‘people who don’t agree with me are just ignorant shits’ does seem to be a pretty prevalent view.

This article here (about working class people being more right-wing than middle class people) caught my eye a while ago.   I found it interesting.  But look at the comment thread underneath it.  So much of the argument consists of applying ugly labels to people, in order to define them as ‘other’, and therefore not worth considering.

For example, one post reflects as follows on why working class people are (according to the poll under discussion) more opposed to immigration than middle class ones: ‘Perhaps the working classes don’t care for a few million new workers competing for a diminishing pool of work’.  The next post retorts: ‘I guess the BNP is your party of choice’ and ‘Pretend you aren’t a nazi if it makes you feel better.’

If you’re going to call someone a Nazi for thinking that working class people may be worried about immigrants taking their jobs, what word have you got left to describe someone who thinks (just for instance) that Jews should be exterminated and Aryans should take over the world?

But then again, calling someone a Nazi (or a bullshitter, or whatever),  is a very quick way of not engaging with what they have to say at all.   Yes, and let’s at all costs stick to two camps, ‘us’ and ‘them’, rather than deal with the anxiety of not always being certain that we’re right.

I was sitting the other day in an underground train in London, surrounded by strangers.

Books and films often turn underground trains into symbols of urban alienation and loneliness, as in the Eurythmics song ‘This city never sleeps.’  And, if I think about it at all, that’s how I tend to see them: machines hurtling through dark tunnels, people who don’t know each other avoiding eye contact or interaction of any kind.

But it struck me on this occasion that there was entirely different way to see it.  How amazing that so many people can coexist so peacefully in such close proximity, feeling so unthreatened that they can peacefully read, listen to music, play with their smartphones, until the point where the path of their individual lives diverges from the route of the train, when they join other peaceful streams of people, on moving stairways, streets, buses, and continue on their way. Why call this alienation, why not call it a remarkable ability to respect each other’s space? I suddenly found the scene incredibly reassuring and benign.  Cram this many chimpanzees into a space this size and they’d go crazy with aggression and fear.

Why go for the gloomier image, the darker story, when there is more than one alternative?  David Brin raises a related question here, when he wonders why books and films routinely portay society and its institutions as stupid, dangerous and malign when, after all, they are also what delivers the food to our plates, the power to our plugs, the roads we travel on, the ambulances that pick us up when we fall…

I think we rather like the fantasy of being surrounded by darkness and danger. It allows us to imagine we aren’t the tame and domesticated creatures that most of us really are.

I was nauseated on sight by a new ad from Oxfam: “Let’s make Africa famous for its epic landscapes, not hunger,” it said.  And then “Help end hunger”.

It struck me as pretty patronising to suggest that Africa isn’t known for anything other than either beautiful scenery or starving people.  And what arrogance, to suggest that somehow foreign NGOs could ‘end hunger’ in Africa.    Do African people themselves have no agency?  Might as well talk about ‘benighted heathens’ or ‘the dark continent’ or the ‘white man’s burden’.

It seems I wasn’t the only one to react this way.  See this piece for instance.

Meanwhile here’s a picture of a street scene in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso.  Neither beautiful scenery nor starving children, just people getting on with things, the same as anywhere.

Street scene Ougadougou, Burkina Faso.

From Wikipedia.  Photo by Helge Fahrnberger.  Full credits and copyright details here

There is my wife, my two daughters and my son, and then there is a fifth family member who they all know but I have never met.

Oh I know what he looks like, at least in the sense that I can identity him in a picture, but if I hear a recording of his voice it’s the voice of a stranger, and if I see a video of him, his mannerisms and body language are quite different from those I’d expect.  I’ve very rarely seen what he looks like when he doesn’t know he’s being observed, only momentary glimpses in the background of pictures of other people.

I’ve been told many things about him: the things he characteristically does do and the things he characteristically doesn’t.   As I grow older, these stories add up in my mind into a somewhat more rounded picture than I used to have, but I’m still capable of being completely surprised, and there are still some characteristics which baffle me, even though I’ve been told about them so often that I know they must be real.

I wonder if I’d really have any sense of him at all, if it wasn’t for these reports from others.  It’s true that I have access to lots of information about him that no one else has, but it would be such a strange and limited picture if I had to rely on that information alone, like that odd remote view you get of the sky and the outside world from underwater, looking up through the silvered undersides of waves.

Although I obviously take violent exception to his description of ‘the Adam and Eve fable’ as ‘one of the most despised modes’ of the SF genre, I was interested by this article by Adam Roberts in which he argues that atheism is, as it were, ‘the new Christianity’.

‘Moses brought 10 commandments; Jesus replaces them with two — to love God, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself,’ Roberts writes.  The stripping away of rules and structures and outward forms is a constant theme of the Jesus of the New Testament, and this does indeed make it rather ironic that Christianity has crystalised into a religion of ‘beliefs’.  (And of course a religion which has put many, many people to horrible deaths for not having exactly the right ‘beliefs’.)

Roberts is particularly interesting here on this thing called ‘belief’, which means something entirely different in a religious context from what it means in everyday life.  And he concludes with a paradoxical argument that actually makes some sense to me, which is that ‘believing’ in God actually has the effect of putting distance between a person and God.

Supporting evidence for this, I think, is contained in the article by Ken MacLeod in the same magazine, which I discussed here.   He describes how as a child he didn’t recognise a spiritual experience when it hit him smack in the face (my words not his), because, although he accepted the ‘beliefs’ inculcated  in him by his religious upbringing, they had led him to think of entities like God as being something remote and out there, ‘like Australia.’

*  *  *

It’s interesting how selective ‘belief’ is.  All this fuss about about women bishops and gay priests, when the gospels contain no instructions on either matter (but do clearly set out the above general principle that there are no commandments other than loving one’s neighbour and God).   And yet the actual sayings of Jesus about the need to give up material wealth in order to enter the kingdom of heaven seem not to be taken seriously at all!

We had a trendy young chaplain in our school for a while.  I found myself thinking about him the other day.  It was the 1970s, and he wore a beard, jeans, sandals and woolly jumpers.  His name was Mr Gorringe, and he liked to be called Tim.  He was perhaps a little too keen on ‘getting down with the kids’ (hard not to be, I guess, when you’re not so very much older than the kids yourself) but he was an interesting teacher.  What came into my mind was an essay he once set us entitled ‘Why is there anything at all?  Why is there not just nothing?’

I suppose everyone has tried it, probably first when they were still a little child: imagining the absolute absence of anything at all.  Not just the absence of matter – anyone can imagine a space with nothing in it – but the absence of space itself, and time, and your own mind doing the imagining.  It’s impossible to imagine, and of course it’s also impossible as a matter of fact, because, while we may well be completely mistaken as to the nature of what exists, it’s indisputable that something does.

But why?

Well, cosmologists may be able to calculate what happened a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, but they can’t say why it occurred, or what it emerged from, so that, at the end of a long journey, the science bus simply stops. (‘That’s as far as we go, people, thanks for your company and don’t forget to show your appreciation to the driver.’)

At this point, the religious tour companies rush excitedly forward, claiming to be able to take you further with their notion of a being that existed before all of this.  But when someone asks how the creator got there, it turns out that this bus stops as well, for the answer is that he’s just always been there. (‘Thanks for choosing God Tours everyone.  Mind the step on the way out.’)

Science tends to present the world as a machine, with the scientist standing outside, studying it and explaining it to the rest of us.  It is an external view.  Subjectivity is not denied, but it is looked in at from the wide end of the telescope.

But religion is also an external view.  It presents the world’s mystery as a story written long ago, in which we must be instructed by those who’ve been taught to understand it correctly.  I was very amused by Ken MacLeod’s account here of a strange childhood experience, involving a mysterious sense of  ‘presence’ in a rocky glen.  He is a minister’s son who went through the entire Bible every year as a child, but here he writes that he ‘had not even the most childish spirituality. I believed what I was told, but as far I was concerned it was all facts about some reality of which I had no personal experience, like Australia.’ So he had what most people would describe as a spiritual or mystical experience, and yet it didn’t even occur to him for a moment to relate it to what he had read and been taught, even though every year he would have rehearsed all those stories about encounters with God on mountaintops!

I sort of wonder whether it’s this external view, this sense of being an outsider, a bystander, that makes ‘why is there not just nothing’ into a question that even requires an answer.  I say this because, whatever that something is that just can’t help but exist, it isn’t separate from us.  It’s not some inanimate stuff out there or some remote person-like being.  It’s what looks out of our eyes.  And perhaps the nearest thing to an answer isn’t to be found either in an old book, or by interrogating the fabric of the material universe, but simply by trying to imagine ‘just nothing’, without time or space or anything doing the imagining, realising it can’t be done, and noticing what is in fact there.

*  *  *

Schoolboy metaphysics, I know, but it was these thoughts that made me create the character Jeff Redlantern in Dark Eden, who likes to remind himself from time to time that ‘We are here.  We really are here.’

In the sequel, Gela’s Ring (which I’m pleased to say I’ve now written a good part of), Jeff Redlantern is long dead, but followers of his in a little island community still remind themselves every day (or rather every waking, this being sunless Eden) that they are really here.   My protagonist, Starlight, is surprised to discover other cultures that don’t do this, and actively discourage or forbid this way of thinking.  They are more dynamic than her own, and she recognises this, but they have built into them a kind of loneliness  and alienation.  They cut people off from their essential selves.

My wife and I were having an argument about something or other, and I was getting quite annoyed.

‘Well, I shouldn’t get too upset about it,’ she said. ‘After all, this is only a dream.’

This took me aback.

‘Really?  So where will we be when we wake up?’

She laughed.

‘Well that’s one thing you can never know in advance.’

I pondered this for a while.

And I got to wondering, if this was a dream, whose dream was it?  I couldn’t quite remember how these things worked, but it seemed to me there was something problematic about two people sharing the same dream.

Then I remembered I was away from home, spending the night in a B & B.

But at that point, of course, I was no longer dreaming.

I know worse things happen in the world, but I feel very angry about the six Italian seismologists who’ve just been sentenced to six years in jail for manslaughter, for failing to predict the L’Aquila Earthquake.  Six years.  My father was a scientist.  Such a thing would have utterly broken him.

(a) There was obviously no malicious intent on their part (what possible motive could they have for failing to warn of an earthquake if they thought it was going to happen?)

(b) Seismologists around the world confirm that earthquakes are impossible to predict.  (Yes, you can identify areas where they are likely to happen, no, you can’t say when.)   According to this article here, one of the six did say something that wasn’t accurate, which is bad, but this doesn’t mean that he would have predicted the earthquake if he’d got that particular fact right.

What this story seems to me to highlight is the deeply immature attitude – adolescent even – that our society has towards science.  These men are criminalised for failing to warn about a danger that they judged, not to be impossible, but pretty unlikely.   But when climate scientists warn about a danger that they judge to be not absolutely certain, but very likely, they are dismissed as alarmists and asked to present incontrovertible proof.

It surely isn’t that hard to grasp that many things in life cannot be predicted with absolute certainty, but may still be more or less likely.

Speaking of people who are afraid of the world, and those who go out into it.  Here is someone really brave.

(Picture from Guardian article here.)

I was thinking about this article by Howard Jacobson, in which he talks about the enduring appeal of bad guys in fiction.  And I was thinking about our dogs and cat.

*  *  *

People often describe other people as behaving like animals (i.e. like non-human animals) when they behave badly.  This has always struck me as a bit unfair to animals.  Animals don’t rape or commit genocide or engage in torture.

But living in a house with animals it strikes me that certain kinds of crime really are very animal indeed: crimes like shoplifting, burglary, picking pockets, mugging, looting, opportunistic, amoral crimes, crimes motivated by nothing more complicated than ‘I’ll have that.’   The hitmen in films like Looper or Pulp Fiction, who kill for a living, without malice or anger, and without regret, strike me as being quite animal.  When Amundsen was travelling to the South Pole, he killed dogs that were no longer needed and fed them to the others.  I’m sure they tucked in without worry or remorse.

Animals (or at least the ones I’m acquainted with) take things opportunistically and without compunction, and they defend what they’ve taken as long as they think they can win the fight.   They are capable of being delightfully and genuinely friendly, but incapable of being kind.  They are capable of being horribly aggressive, but incapable of being cruel.  If one of them picks up a thorny twig to play with, he’ll bash it against your legs without a thought as he runs by, not out of inconsiderateness, but because he simply doesn’t do that kind of consideration.

They’ve never eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

*  *  *

Sometimes morality is portrayed as being the opposite to the pleasure principle, but that’s just silly.  What point does life have without pleasure?  (To help others?  To help them to do what?)  Pleasure is simply the sum total of things that make life worthwhile, and it just doesn’t make any sense to say that life could have an additional purpose.

Genuine morality is the pleasure principle, but with the rest of the world factored in: other people, other creatures, our future selves.   It doesn’t tell us to forego pleasure per se, but it might tell us to forego pleasures that will lead to harm elsewhere, or later on.  It doesn’t tell us to pursue suffering, but it might tell us to be willing to suffer here and now for the sake of pleasure elsewhere, or later on.

It’s morally wrong to behave as if you were the centre of the universe, because it’s factually wrong.  As a matter of fact, you’re not.

Animals don’t know that, though.  They act as if they themselves at this moment were all that mattered.  And this works perfectly well for them, because evolution has provided them with appetites and drives that will allow the simple pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain to address longer term or wider needs without them having to even think about it.

But we do know it, and so we do have to think about it.  We can only not think about it by lying to ourselves.  And that does damage to us, because it requires us to build partitions across our minds.

*  *  *

And yet there’s a huge price to pay for this knowledge.  This awareness that we should think about things beyond our immediate selves and our present impulses, adds layers of calculation and anxiety to every choice we make.  It takes away spontaneity.

I think that’s why bad guys are fun to watch.  They appeal to us not because they are wicked and knowing per se, but, oddly enough, because of their innocence.    They remind us of a kind of innocence and simplicity that animals have and we have lost for good.  They remind us of what we had to give up when we ate that bloody fruit.