The Zone

We must go into the zone. But first let's meet some people. You ask who they are. Have I to describe them? Come come, you know these characters. They’re really good people, nice people like you and…well, me! Come on. Come on. It’s time to say hello.

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We love the People, especially when they are helpless. A victim arrives and Wow! we grab him, kiss him and squeeze him close to death; our solicitude suffocating this poor sad soul. Gorgeous. Succulent. Yum yum yum. An orange almost too ripe to eat, its tart juices running down our chin. 

It’s no new phenomenon. We can’t blame the Summer of Love, and its toxic aftermath, the decades long wasteland of hippies, hipsters and Prosecco Girl for our contemporary predicament. The saints have always been with us, at least since Christianity came to rule our lives.

The embrace of the Church, in all its saving forgiveness and healing, and vaunted egalitarianism and freedom from prejudice (‘There shall be neither Jew nor Greek, bond not free’ etc.), could not tolerate those who refused conversion, who did not want to yield to its warm hold…

Marina Warner is describing the medieval Church, yet she makes a timeless observation: a price is always paid for salvation. Though Warner doesn't get the tone quite right, Christianity is egalitarian1 and free from prejudice; a heretic cannot have the same rights as the saved; the views of the Devil are falsehoods, no reasonable person to wilfully follow error, especially when grievous and fateful. The Church didn’t “vaunt” its liberal credentials it believed in them sincerely and absolutely. Absolutely… Exactly.

The good are intolerant. They have to be. They cannot tolerate the bad and risk infection.2  To be good is to know what makes us so…This is a little strong.3 We do not define but assume our own goodness. We are Nice People by self-definition (“nice” a woolly modern nomenclature, not like that old-fashioned and solid “saint”, too redolent of the bad times of the past). Knowing ourselves good we believe ourselves right; goodness and truth born of the same deity are twins.4 This is when the problems begin. To believe we are right is to think others mistaken, their disagreeable opinions not accepted on equal terms. The result? The true and the false war fight each other, with no middle ground between.5 How is this resolved? Very easily! Believing we are right - ah! if only that were so - we try to convince our opponents they are wrong. It is a terrible mistake. No one likes resistance. It frustrates us, makes us angry. Before long we are thinking those who oppose us bad. The good so clear, a child could see it; they, therefore, must be wilful, stubborn, dense...; the qualities of the idea rubbing off onto the person who holds it. A second mistake and a real problem. The good, unforgiving towards the falsehoods they perceive, now associate the bad ideas with their opponent’s character; error conceived as a moral debility.6 Not just wrong they’re sinners.

The Bad Person can be defined in many ways: Dead White Male, Smoker, Brexiteer, Radical Feminist, a Roger Scruton enthusiast is the currently popular line-up; although it is more often used as a general term for the unenlightened and openly stupid, the loud mouth and the reactionary. Strangely, the Bad People are usually content in their badness, unable to see why things should change, becoming difficult only when their beliefs are put under pressure. Go on love, have a smoke; I mean, what’s wrong with a fag in those fingers, go on, I've got one right here, and a gin, you know, in your hand; real smart you’d look. Don’t be a sausage silly. Right nice you’d be lookin' with the smoke risin’ up, like an actress in the old movies; real gorgeous they were in the black and white, hid all the blemishes didn't it? Look at me! I’ve got the hips for it, go on have a butchers… What do think of those thighs? I’d ask you to take a feel, but you know what the hubby’s like; get the big idea won’t he? Right thick they are; perfect for the old man’s head; a real snug fit he is; I clamp him down and I've got my beef burger for a Saturday night… Fancy them meself, I would, if I were a bloke. Just need the dress, you know, long, silk and slinky, and two smashing great cannon balls… Go on love, go and try one, go on go on.

Already we see how the argument has shifted. The bad not just an interlocutor with a different opinion but a particular kind of person with a distinct set of ideas and values. These concepts are exceedingly slippery. So easy to slide from a discussion about abstract ideas and their relationships into talking about an idea embodied in a concrete and particular context with all the moral connotations that then arise; Socrates made his career out of their conflation and subsequent confusions.

The Nice Person is someone who believes they know the good and wants others to have it too; the good believed both true and beneficial, the bad made virtuous, competent and satisfied by our opinions. It’s nice to be Nice. Here the ideas of good and bad are no longer the relations between two characters, they embody a content that itself is believed true and desirable; once upon a time Margaret Thatcher was a Nice Person, she believed we’d all be happy competing each against the other7 (she hadn’t read her Durkheim).8 

I’m scaring you now, aren't I? Margaret Thatcher a Nice Person… True, I am stretching it, but that is because the Nice People - the radicals, the progressives, the do-gooders in all their guises - can only ever think of themselves as being nice and doing good: of course cooperation is the way to solve all society’s ills, they might say (rather too smugly, it has to be said) as if holding a virtuous idea makes them virtuous. Yet Thatcher believed that the imposition of an idea - competition - was the way to virtue; the evidence showing her not wholly wrong. Blindness to the goodness of others is a Nice Person’s most regrettable trait.

Even when I try to define the content, context and relations butt in. The best I can do is to sketch a vague and unsatisfactory description: the Nice People wish to change others, and through the habits of history they have been thought of as Left-Leaning liberals and radicals trying to improve the society along what are essentially Christian lines: everybody to be free, equal and friendly. You’re not happy with this attempt? Ok. Let us be crude: the Nice People want everybody to be like themselves: nice! Here you go, we can even squeeze Friedman, Hayek and Keith Joseph into that one, while always remembering the bias towards the progressive and the do-gooder; ideas as much about tone as meaning.

Rarely does the Bad Person force their badness onto others: I would not put Scruton’s Modern Culture into your pocket; I wouldn’t even give it as a gift: he’s a bad bod and I know you would not like him. The bad understand the good and are usually content to leave them alone (except for the really malign, but they’re not interested in changing you, just to rob and beat you up). The Bad Person wants to be left to live their life, to shout and stomp and mingle with their own kind. The Good cannot understand this. They must be changed! Doesn't everybody want to be sensible and pettable? They do, of course they do! They just don’ know it yet. They will be good! We’ll make them so. After our work is done they’ll be better, healthier and a lot more intelligent; they’ll be getting degrees, and working in offices, they might even find work in the City; The Guardian calls….

One source of the Nice Person’s fanaticism is their inability to grasp the nature of their opponent, conceived as a mirror image of themselves. It is almost impossible for the clever to comprehend the stupid; the good to understand the bad; the latter having a different set of values, a way of living and, yes, often, a different range of intellectual skills, while all the time retaining their humanity; the Bad Person usually a civilised human being under their conceptual carapace. Impossible! say the Nice People. How can bad be good? No no no no. We must save these poor souls. This is the trouble with The Nice: trapped by their own small version of the good. 

The good a prejudice! But how this is possible? Because the good has been confused with an idea itself thought to have moral value. The good person confuses the robes of the priest with the person who wears them. Ideas are not the same as moral action. There is a vast difference between preaching the idea of universal tolerance and acting it out; thus the paradox of the good person abusing a political opponent they believe extreme. The good can be bad too! The Nice often nasty. 

The Devil shows up. He never fails to appear. The moment we believe the idea is good we see Hell around every corner… We watch as a Nice Person beats an elderly person to death. I go too far. But not that far: Ian McEwan happy to see 1.5 million of his political opponents dead. Today the Nice People hide their intolerance under a single word: fascism. We disguise our own bigotry by throwing acid into the opponent’s face. 

The Devil jumps up and down in drunken glee. Once again he has won. The Nice People putting the idea before the human being, elevating words above actions, are trying to save their fellow man; yet they forget, or simply do not know, that an idea of the good quickly turns into an evil act when it is imposed against another’s will; independence an attribute to which Bad People seem particularly attached. It drives the reformer insane. Soon he is on a demo with the Devil and his demons.9 The “warm hold” of the Nice has become the foulest abuse; you’re a fascist, our phrase for heretic, atheist and those not quite like us.10 

How can a teacher pass the child who has failed her exam? This is the problem of the Bad, seen as inadequate, a failure, ignorant and wrong. They cannot be left in error! A student not allowed to leave school thinking Naples the capital of Spain. We are close to our conclusion. The Nice People put too much faith in knowledge, about whose nature they have little understanding: knowledge (and truth and concepts generally) are intrinsically dogmatic; it takes a virtuoso to keep them open and flexible, uncontaminated by the commonplaces of everyday life.11 Alas. Too many of the nice and the good think like secondary school teachers: the world a vast classroom their fate to educate. And if the bad - the sinners, the heretics, the deprived, the fascists - refuse to be taught? Thank god there are no torture chambers and labour camps today; the pedagogues not allowed to cane their recalcitrant pupils. Instead, well, let us leave it to J.C.:

…online shaming and scapegoating, Twitter mobs, campus no-platforming, cultural appropriation, the negation of critical judgement by identity politics, censorship of incorrect ideas.

Is it possible to separate out an idea from its moral connotations; can we see the priest naked? Yes. But to do so we must leave our safely insulated lives behind and go into the zone, a dangerous place, where to go astray is easy.

Today, as in Tarkovsky’s time, the vast majority have no need for the zone.12 We are happy and free without it; the modern world makes us comfortable; the scientists inventing solutions to every problem; the corporations satisfying each desire; while writers and film stars can make everybody feel like a king or queen. But there are a few… The zone! You’re talking nonsense man, only lunatics, only Stalker, goes there. Oh, you want to get out? It might be too late….

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1.  Denys Hay, Annalists & Historians: Western Historiography from the VIIIth to XVIIIth century.

2.  The paradoxes of the relations between good and bad are fruitfully set out in Plato’s Lysis (in Early Socratic Dialogues. All future references are to this volume.) 

In the introduction to Lysis a learned gentleman argues that Plato has confused two kinds of friendship, a passive one - of being friends - with an active one - erotic desire - making the dialogue incoherent. Yet the dialogue’s purpose is for Socrates to become friends with Lysis; an essential attribute of friendship its active qualities, most prominent in those first meetings which turn two strangers into intimates. The dialogue acts out the nature of friendship, while the actors fail to define it properly. We come to understand friendship through the drama, but realise that our own ideas about its essence are hopelessly confused. This distinction, between action and idea, so vital to an understanding of concepts, is often overlooked by intellectuals, of whom Euthydemus is the classic expression (and when you read that dialogue think of the anecdote about Gilles Deleuze, ready to give an answer on any topic his students raised in his seminars).

3.  Socrates quite rightly shows that we are ignorant of the good. His Socratic questioning the means to expose the over-confidence inherent in our knowledge and beliefs. The early dialogues are especially concerned with the self-confidence of those who believe themselves good because of some exceptional attribute like bravery, self-control or cleverness.

4.  We are all children of Socrates now.

5.  In his introduction to Lysis Trevor J. Saunders writes that Socrates’ great invention was to show that there is an intermediary stage between good and bad. It is a supremely important discovery that is hardly ever used in common discourse; moral neutrality an extremely odd concept to most ears.

6.  Socrates recognises the problem but his ultimate solution - a good that is independent and eternal - seems to be no solution at all. This good, whose essence is metaphysical, requires an entirely different kind of existence from ordinary living: it demands hard intellectual effort: we leave the city for the monastery; exit normal life and enter Tarkovsky’s zone, a strange and - pace Socrates - unstable place. Can we all be Stalkers? Stalker himself didn't think so.

7.  Unlike her guru Hayek, who was a sophisticated pessimist (Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty by Andrew Gamble).

8.  In The Division of Labour in Society Durkheim argues that humans will seek to avoid competition with its heavy psychological strains. Qualifying this idea with Rupert Thomson’s insight - in Divided Kingdom - that the choleric personality thrives on conflict, we gain a clear view of Thatcher and her ilk: believing that everybody, at heart, was just like herself she projected her own character onto the whole of humanity, then sought to turn us all into her exact copy; the resistance that followed welcomed not eluded. This is the authoritarian strain in every radical: they cannot live with the difference of others. They love a fight.

9.  We attend closely to the Devil's words:

Truly, Brexit has stirred something not heroic or celebratory or generous in the nation, but instead has coaxed into the light from some dark, damp places the lowest human impulses, from the small-minded to the mean-spirited to the murderous.

Unlike McEwan I know a lot of Leavers, none are as he describes. He knows nothing about them! Instead, he projects his own murderous impulses - that glee over that million and a half freshly dug graves - onto those who voted against him.

You didn't miss it, did you? Surely not. How could you!… 

A gang of angry old men, irritable even in victory, are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth…

Isn’t McEwan himself a very angry man? His mates seem to think so; these old geezers glorying in their hate: 

The musician and activist Bob Geldof said: “I loved [McEwan’s] rejectionism. Anger is a great animus. I heard too much reasoned debate this morning. I resent those who voted leave. There is too much hubris that infects the political class. Fuck them.” (Poor Bob, he must be getting old: he rambles and appears confused: are all those Leavers really members of the political class?)

It could not be plainer. The Nice People may think they are looking out of the window into the street below, but…oh dear not all: they at staring into the mirror while shouting at themselves. And the Leavers? I remember a woman dancing for joy on the streets of Hoxton. It could have been the Summer of Love all over again. No hate there. No anger. She loved everybody. She was having a fantastic time!

10.  This sudden transmutation of debate into insult is dramatised wonderfully in Plato’s Euthydemus.

11.  Few are as agile as Socrates. And look what happened to him! 

In Hippias Major Socrates makes a seriously important quip: when talking to experts I feel myself ignorant, he says. The Nice People are our experts. They, just like the Greeks of old, conflate their knowledge with morality, what they know assumed to be a holy good. The confidence and pomposity (as well as the undoubted knowledge) of Hippias is typical of such characters. Socrates’ task to expose the confusion between a limited expertise and a universal morality. No surprise, then, that it should be the experts who got Socrates in the end.

12.  The Nice People in the Soviet Union were the professionals, officials and lower and middle-ranking bureaucrats; this wonderfully evoked and brilliantly elucidated in Svetlana Alexievich’s extraordinary Second-Hand Time.