An Act of Faith

The blurb to the BFI’s reissue of Winstanley is leading us to where we want to go: a kindly commune facing the “crushing hostility” of a local population. Already we are thinking of nice people up against the wicked and narrow-minded (who, we are to discover, have been brainwashed by the neighbourhood’s bourgeoisie). An audience likes its innocents to be doomed and defeated. We swoon at the eponymous hero…

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Psst… Psst… Yes! Yes you. Come closer; closer closer. I need to whisper this to you… Look over there, at the screen. Do you see it? No? You’re unsure… It is not quite… Sorry. I am so so sorry. No! Do not read the booklet. It may mislead you. Intention and result, you know, often distinctly even remarkably different; we begin as Elizabeth I but our end is Mary Queen of Scots. You see now. Yes?

It is the politics of the unpolitical. It is the Weltanschauung of the rich, who, knowing only of themselves, project the privileges of wealth upon the tough mundanities of ordinary lives. Life, for the majority in times of strife and poverty, is that of survival; many are the ways the poor are forced to protect themselves against those who’d take the little they have; to own land is to put a fence around it, the title deeds safely buried underground. The soft-cheeks of a Cambridge undergraduate - we think of aerated ice-cream - shake at this absurdity. These lives are too small, far too banal, for the rich idealist, who never knowing scarcity, has experienced little resistance to his whims and fantasies; in his life theft is rare and of trivial things, easily replaced rarely mourned. For a rich radical the solution to a peasant’s existence is simple: an open field where the whole village works together, the result an agricultural orchestra with its lieder and symphonies (he sits on a fence enjoying the show).1 Give these men freedom! And they will be good, tolerant and cooperative; as if the weak could hold off the strong without the protection of the law and its officials. Yet this rich young fellow - so keen for these country folks (such strong decent chaps) to give up their autonomy - has never seen the title deeds to his father’s estate; the layers of the law that protect his elysium - legislation, legal documents, custom and the forces of order - are carefully kept from his gaze, it will be many years before he is old enough to see them. He has never had to bargain, demand, defend, forcibly take. People are just not like that, he would say, if we had the incivility to challenge him. Our young man strolls in the garden, to enjoy a nature that exists only for his pleasure and ease. Here there are no worries about the future, tomorrow as safe as yesterday. He asks. A servant provides. We are all extremely polite.

Can we create a world where everybody is a servant? Remove Kings and Queens. Abolish ranks. Defrock the parson whose property squashes out the Christian spirit (saints should occupy our churches not wealthy commissars, we insist and cogently argue). Start again. Build the world anew from the very beginning. With everything held in common the village shall be a community of equals; this will bring innocence to our kingdom. This is what we want! To love each other as friends and brothers. There will be peace. We shall all enjoy a wonderful prosperity, as exploitation becoming extinct inequality fades into myth and legend. On these fields an orchestra where the ploughman and pickers are their own audience. This is not work, it is play.

A wonderful day-dream whose dreamers, alas, have poor memories. They forget that in the Garden of Eden God was always in the background, looking after his creations. Only when he turned his back did things go wrong. Suckered by his offspring’s childish innocence - and never having created people before - God made the mistake of projecting his own beneficent being on those very different from himself. Of course they took more than they should. His response - the children have never forgiven him - was extreme, it was overdone; their expulsion closer to revenge than justice. We suspect such wrath arose from the anger at his own credulity that would allow such innocents their liberty. A less charitable critic would say that God grew tired of his authority, that he wanted a rest; and was later to chastise others for his own laziness. We’ll leave it to the pedants to work that one out.

Once outside the garden of childhood we are apt to find someone else to create innocence and enforce harmony; no collection of humans able to co-exist without at least some authority.2 A Jesus Christ always pops up. A mad young thing who mistakes the ideas inside his head for the real lives of people in the fields and cottages. And Jesus, being young, smart and busy, gets things done. His vital energy attracting others, especially in desperate times when hope is essential and fantasies are mistaken for realities.3 Jesus never disappoints. He injects a sharp shock of optimism into this community’s backside. Whoopee!  We jump into the air, shouting our future is assured, it will be bloody lovely, I tell you now, bloody lovely. Jesus gets us doing things, that solvent of apathy, melancholia and despair. He restores our pride. And we feel the cosy power of an extended family, more sympathetic than the old one. He gives us belief, and with it comes the joy of salvation, that sense of privilege: we are aristocrats of the spirit. We are part of a group with its own identity and life-force which fills up every individual with vitality and meaning; each man and woman stronger and more powerful than when alone. Through his talent and dexterity Jesus has knitted a tangled mass of wool into a coarse but serviceable jumper; it keeps us warm; and we feel the honour of a renewed respectability. These poor people are content. This hillside settlement a delightful place, proving our prophet’s words true. The camp prospers, even when attacked by the local parson and his village hooligans. That parson again. What does he hate more: the cutting down of the commons wood or the religious message, which undermines his Christian monopoly? He’s a boor. Let’s ignore him. God has saved these men and women! Once again he has sent his son to earth. His name is Gerrard Winstanley.

This film beatifies its hero. To us he could be on drugs: the influence of the 1960s overwhelming the evident Christian inspiration behind these actions of the late 1640s. Yet it is the Bible we must consider - not Timothy Leary or Karl Marx - if we are to understand what is going on here. Winstanley has religiously read the Gospels, which informs his (mild) antinomianism. 

We suspect a gentleman’s education; one that either failed to remove his naivety - that faith in ideas - or was too weak to resist the religious enthusiasm of the civil war; a time when an entire society became intoxicated with Heaven’s words. A friend adds a more banal explanation for such innocence: our hero needs a fairy tale to cope with his collapse of status, its attendant poverty and social exclusion. Exiled by his compeers by the misfortunes of war and its aftermath - peace no friend of a wartime idealist - Winstanley can survive only if he dreams a way out of his present situation. This man lives on ideas. Always risky… And sure enough, the inevitable happens: he has a revelation: the poor can live on the commons! It is a dream that he insists will become reality. Jesus once more to take his people to the Promised Land. 

But wasn't Moses…? I nod in slow silent agreement. It is the problem of the semi-… But Moses, you ask peremptorily (you are keen to keep me on the straight path of this paragraph). Oh yes Moses. Moses offers a real place for his followers to live in peace and plenty. Jesus can only offer parables, a different kind of world that exists only inside the mind; too austere for the majority. Winstanley, and here he is typical of his ilk, conflates these two characters; Jesus - the metaphysical storyteller - mistaken for a prophet who did lead his people to a habitable country. It is the problem of the semi-educated and their tendency to believe in simple solutions, while also mixing up many incompatible things; contradiction and incoherence the consequence. They are usually of a particular personality. A sort of permanent adolescence where a hyper-articulateness is married to a general ignorance; words replace thoughts, producing an outrageous confidence, which is conveyed to the disciples. We become intoxicated with ideas, which we try to turn into social action. Yet we are oblivious to the actual nature of ideas, their radical difference from life. We do not see that in bringing these two together we invite tension and conflict as life, with its habits and its histories, protects itself against our alien invasion; those ideas and the people who carry them.

Such ignorance is a vital force. Ideas generate beliefs that unleash an energy that galvanises people and overwhelms institutions, suffusing them with its spirit. The believer, that eternal Quixote - replacing the real with the fantastic - works on the imagination, that most powerful of human faculties, so that we too believe that the fantasy is possible: the Diggers will prosper upon the commons. They do, for a time.

Winstanley overlooks the obvious. The actual existence of human beings which, grounded in experience and bounded by routine, and fixed by ritual, limits thought and puts the breaks on action.4 A man isn’t simply an empty receptacle waiting to be filled. A bag of tea won’t go into a jar full of coffee. Good good but… Not quite to the mark? Exactly! A friend suggests changing the metaphor: a carpenter can’t put down his saw and pick up a doctor’s stethoscope… Change can be excruciatingly difficult. Every individual belongs to a social landscape which has moulded them. Down in the valley we have followed its paths, ran across the fields, swam in the river, enjoyed ourselves amongst the trees and ferns: boo-hoo! come and find me! What a joy that day was… It is not easy to leave such memories behind, which we recall each time we visit that wood. We grow accustomed to the valley’s contours, and adjust to its ways; which we change slightly and often: our house recognisably different from our neighbours; if you look closely enough, my dear fellow. To adapt, so essential for the good life, is to erect the very obstacles that prevent change; always we are building the high walls that keep us inside our own past. To others this garden is a prison yard. This is not so. This is a comfortable home, which to leave is both a torture and a crime;5 to ourselves, to our friends, to this very place that has shaped us; that most intimate of relationships.6

This comfort does strange things. It erects a high fence between the imagination and everyday life; so that the world no longer impinging upon it our imagination is set free; the mind becoming its own Elysium, where we dream fairy tales of escape and liberty. Such dreams are not meant to be realised.7 It this dichotomy - our imagination divided from our actions by an invisible but impenetrable border - that makes for a contented life: we never have to act out - to face the struggle - of our wildest dream, which remains harmless and beautiful.8 Always there is the prospect of some extraordinary future; a hope never to be lost if never attempted. And why risk this pleasure, which one has spent a lifetime accruing, for a tomorrow that resides only in some stranger’s fancy?9 A person’s history, its accumulation of concrete things, its tests of experience - of what works, what fails - offers far greater security than a future that exists only in another person’s words. Swap this two bedroom house for a palace… Most people - but especially the poor10- don’t want to take such chances, to experiment with this extreme change: it risks too much of the little they have.11

Circumstances have made Winstanley’s experiment possible. A lot of people have nowhere to go. They need a miracle, even to survive. It is why they are prepared to believe that one person’s dream can become their reality. So they accept the dangers, ride the risks, and keep returning to the camp even after it has been repeatedly attacked. They live the dream because they have nothing to lose. These are desperate souls.

The locals feel threatened. That this camp and its message, by threatening the local rich and their surrounding dependants, will produce a violent reaction is something Winstanley has not considered. This man, obtuse to the feelings of those who resist himself, cannot see the likely effects of his crusade. The aggression and violence blamed on evil people and corrupt ways - the parson and this lack of Christian charity.

A moral idealist suspends the workings of cause and effect. What Winstanley wishes happens; the evil consequences arising not from the situation itself - the conflict between opposing forces - but from an evil spirit that descends upon those led astray by bad men and hard times. It is the Devil’s mark. That odd kind of miracle. The camp is attacked on many occasions, some are wounded and a boy is killed. Our Jesus attributes these events to a corrupt society, which will be cleansed, he thinks, by a reading of the Gospels. Stand in the shower and let the evangelists pour their holy water over you…. 

This lack of understanding is to be the sect’s undoing. Winstanley’s mistake is thinking of humans as atoms that exist independently of time and space; that we are in essence identical and malleable individualists who can be persuaded to live in equality with those (that is everyone) who are similar to ourselves. There is no history here, no collective memory; no acknowledgement that identities are formed as much by the agglomeration of people as by the individuals themselves; as if one can be Welsh without Wales, a football player without a football team. Once formed we are not easy to change. While there is a core to the human character that cannot be changed at all. Past a certain age life becomes fixed and routine; it can be transformed only by an external force, under the influence of some cataclysm (personal, social, physical). The Diggers have been compelled to become Christian revolutionaries by the circumstances of the time. Of this Winstanley seems unaware: for him the beneficent results are enough. He doesn't grasp that a sect is very different from a village, the latter far looser and more stable that a religious collective held together by a concept and the leader’s charisma. He also overlooks the alienness of a Christian community in a land of pagans, and how this breeds resentment and hatred; a sect’s strange fanaticism found repellent and oppressive because - by its very existence, its presence in their midst - it forces itself on those who want to remain free of its moral and intellectual confinements. 

Winstanley thinks of evil as a thing, rather than the outcome of social processes. It is one sermon he has never read; that acts of evil arise out of the clash in situations when we try to impose our own beliefs and interests upon another community. We generate evil by our actions, when they encroach on the lives of others. Winstanley is obtuse to a truth that the educated should know instinctively: to make the Gospels live on earth is to invite misfortune.12 Forcing his beliefs onto those who have something to lose - the squire, the landowners, the local population - he impels them to protect their own thoughts; of course they will fight back to safeguard what they know. A saint is oblivious to such resistance. He cannot see that his own goodness must result in evil. Any attempt to change the geography of St. George's Hill will affect the local inhabitants, who will defend themselves, sometimes violently. Winstanley is no Moses leading his people to an empty land. There are too many humans in Britain for this Christian cult to prosper; the villages and towns obstruct Christ’s dominion on earth. It is to America they must go if they want to be free; there the natives sparser, weaker and more easily overcome; it is only in America that the land can be made empty again. Change society, you say! Make it more plastic, tolerant, nicer… I am sorry, I see you are no anthropologist. Large agglomerations of people produce complex societies that give rise to social hierarchies and huge disparities of wealth, which then require institutions (and their officials) to manage them. Once leave the hunter-gathers behind there will always be rulers and ruled. The size of the social formation gives it its form, creating obstacles to radical change and revolutionary transformation. Try to overcome them and there will be resistance, for change is hard and painful, and there is much to lose: we will fight to protect what we own. If Winstanley succeeds the parson must surrender his authority; the power accruing from office transferred to that which resides in the charismatic; Winstanley to be the new lord around here. Who willingly makes of themselves a servant? Those who have nothing to lose. Or the fanatics of the idea. Most will try to defend themselves. This is beyond Winstanley’s comprehension. He is blind to how he creates resistance in others. A man innocent of human nature.

Our minds are but a single island in a vast archipelago. The mistake is to think they can all be joined together in a single landmass; under our own island’s dominion, naturally. Winstanley just one of a millennia of believers who have mistook their own thoughts for the world, so going sadly awry; and we are lucky they do so; the world cannot live long under a saviour - they are too egotistical and erratic.13

I suggest that these perennial attempts to revert to a primitive existence - under some charismatic head - is primordial in us; the last remnant of our species’ origins, that retains a vestige deep within the psyche. Alas, there can be no return. Too many humans have been born for us to treat the world as one communal field. Today we’d trample all over it.14

The failure to recognise the realities of society, and so adapt to its limits, together with the belief that these limits can either be ignored or overborne by the acting out of some very simple idea, these are the ways of the religious mystic and saint.15 For these simple ideas are not merely conceptual tools; they also carry a strong moral charge, an idea supposed not just to change society but to purify it as well. The saint and the mystic have little to do with politics, the management of the society in a perpetual present. Politics, because it deals with people, and has to work inside history, is necessarily corrupt; the weakness of the human character seeping into the very institutions that would order and control it. Turn politics into moral enlightenment and it becomes an inhuman activity; the Bolsheviks and the Nazis what happens when we try to cleanse the political realm, by organising it around some governing idea. The corruption of politics is essential to its humanity. Lenin. Hitler. If only they’d remained the leaders of tiny religious cults. Alas no. Historical accidents gave them their chance. For when a society collapses the cult is perfectly placed for a coup d'état; its organisation and belief - that centripetal energy - overcoming the mass of atomic individuals, who are isolated and therefore powerless. During times of anarchy a sect can capture the kingdom. In a crisis belief attracts the desperate, who seek in the sect’s ideas the means of their own survival. It is now that the idea wins out, carried alight by the charismatic leader who is held aloft by the group’s administrative officers. If the times are propitious the sect triumphs. Now begins the rule of saints, a ghastly time for the majority who are not saintly. In ordinary times, when society is strong, the social structure stable, its institutions inviolable, the cult is harmless, a collection of cranks ruled over by a nutcase. We can let them be.

Just such a sidelining produced one of the great books of political commentary: The Provincial Letters by Blaise Pascal.16 Pascal attacked the Jesuits because they were politicians, adapting religious doctrine to the ignorance and indifference of a public that had little interest in Christianity, save that it made them feel good about their unChristian lives. He preferred the ideas of his faith to the material happiness of everybody else; the integrity of the concept more important than the frailties of human beings. And don’t we love Pascal! His fanaticism thankfully imprisoned in prose, making it benign so giving us joy. History’s cruel irony.

Winstanley chose the wrong time to set up his Christian community. A few years earlier, at the height of the civil war, establishing himself amongst the interstices of the kingdom’s collapse, was his best chance for success. Though once established the sect would have grown (as this one grows, pilgrims taking Winstanley’s message to the rest of England) so changing its nature. The war’s aftermath has left poverty and social destruction, opening up the need - and the means - for cultic faiths; although the society has regrouped sufficiently to contain those sects that do arise. Later, when the forces of authority become even stronger, as they must when the peace lengthens, these religious communities will be snuffed out, the authorities too strong, the social need much weaker, to sustain them as living entities. To survive we have to compromise with the social realm; and in recognising both its power and its validity we protect ourselves against its legitimacy, the strongest force of all. Winstanley refuses to do this. He elevates wishes over practical reasoning; faith to come before the ordinary diplomacies; he therefore pits weakness against strength, ensuring the community’s ultimate demise. And yet, for a while, for a few months, a couple of years, the cult can survive even prosper, the shared faith, together with the leader’s charisma, that magical presence, binding these people into a group whose communal belief gives them the power to overcome what in ordinary times would be insuperable crises. It cannot last. The antagonism of the locals - their attacks, the crop burnings, and that final crippling trade ban - wears these people out. In desperation, and against Winstanley’s advice, who foresees the consequences, the Diggers march on the town to force the local traders to give them credit. It is a jail sentence. Provoked beyond endurance into just the kind of criminal behaviour the local justices have sought, they will now be removed from the hill. A dream has died. It is over.

Christopher Hill, cited as contributor to this film, confirms its historical accuracy. We are thus allowed to see how archaic are Winstanley’s ideas. No proto-Bolshevik this, attacking the burgeoning capitalist system, but a Christian saint seeking inspiration from the Gospels, and Christ’s own life. For sure there are references to the money economy and private property; but what this man desires is a sanctuary where Christ’s words are given a human reality. This is a religious quest. No politics here, the reason he fails. There are no deserts in England.

The religious mystic, thrusting himself into the world, reveals all the weaknesses of religious idealism. Critically, Winstanley cannot discriminate between an idea in the abstract and its social use; for him they both exist on the same intellectual level. It’s why he lets the Ranters stay, despite their mad behaviour that unnerves the community and provides proof for the parson’s prejudices. True, a modus operandi is achieved, but their unpredictable behaviour remains a threat to the community - as when the lead Ranter steals a goose -; it also turns away would-be supporters, who are alienated by their wild anarchy. A politically astute leader would exclude such characters. If the Bolsheviks had allowed a bunch of Hippies to sit on its central executive they would not occupy so many pages in today’s history books… Consider Winstanley’s relations with the parson’s wife. A politician would realise her political usefulness as an advocate outside the group. Out in the world, amongst the middle and higher ranks, she could use her position to protect and promote this sect; her idealism infectious amongst rich innocents like herself. She is no use here; her high social status is an unsettling influence, while her sensitivities and intelligence, bred of her wealth, alienates her from this coarse life. She is used to being heard: a well-born woman has power and expects to rule, her household a mini-society. Winstanley, something of a patriarch, despite his gentle manners, is unaware that class crosses gender lines, so refuses to listen to this woman’s intelligent criticisms; he ignores her - beatifically - of course. The Ranters scare her. And so she rushes back to husband, confessing her mistake, spreading the most awful slanders; we hear of orgies we have never witnessed, and are not likely to have occurred. This was predictable. Winstanley has made a catastrophic error of judgment, turning an influential friend into a powerful enemy, who will prove, from her own experience, that he is a friend of Satan.

Her experience is a comment on the fallacy of Winstanley’s quest. She has confused the words on the page with the facts of everyday living; two realms - one belonging to the mind, the other to the body - that are not only distinct but, when brought together, actually conflict, degrading the original idea, which loses its lustre; a ballgown will not survive a battlefield. Her lovely dream has become a dirty nightmare. Be careful of books, madam!

To survive the Diggers need the support of a high authority; they are fortunate that it belongs to Fairfax, a clever and moral man. Fairfax proves, both in his personalty and his actions, that Winstanley’s big idea - the beneficence of a Christian commonwealth - is an error. It is hierarchies that produce a wise justice; the man at the top, insulated from the petty concerns of the middle ranks and the desperate poverty of the poor, able to reflect coolly on this dispute; his social and intellectual distance enabling him to act with reason and a Christian spirit. Civilisation resides in the highest realms. We see it with the local lord and his lady, especially his lady; the cleverest person in the film, and very civilised. We are glad to have this scene - this movie is no crude tract - that reminds us of the long history of female education in England.17 Riches bring culture and civilisation to the world, making it a humane place. The social problem is to be the found in the middle and lower-middle ranks, with those who, having acquired enough property and education to oppress their inferiors, lack the culture to transcend these material and ideological interests; the tale continuing to this day. Too little education - a university degree alone will not do: learning is a lifelong activity - apt to make us small-minded; the parson an exemplary case.

Education is the big problem of this movie. Evil lies in a mind that, taken over by what it has learnt, is squeezed into intolerance by the pressure of ideas that it cannot overcome. The idea in charge, it now issues its commands, dictates its orders, reduces the human to a conceptual slave, who encourages, enjoins, demands that others join him in his captivity.18 The parson is the model for these half-educated individuals. He uses Christ’s words not to understand the world but to feed his greed; the meaning of the Gospels do not extend beyond his own desires and selfish habits. A truly despicable person. He knows the surface of what he has been taught - forcing his daughter to learn the Bible by rote suggests his own shallowness - but he has no understanding of its inner spirit. This man is not wise. He can copy the words, learn the ideas, and he can expound them; but that is all. There is little thought here. The ability to engage with an idea as part of a living tradition that is both separate from oneself and intimate with it - a never-ending flux of influence, insight, creativity and refinement - is lacking.19 The parson is not really interested ideas. They are assets only. Education has given him the tools to protect himself and to oppress the less educated: the Bible is his castle from which he raids the surrounding villages, his congregation. There can be no transcendence here. Once acquired at the tender adolescent age (when the mind absorbs as wax and retains like marble)20 our ideas are accepted as true and inviolable, a natural part of the landscape. Such obduracy inevitably oppresses others: we who have not learnt these concepts, or those who come much later, when a new set of ideas have conquered the academic household.21

Winstanley suggests a different educational problem. Clever, charismatic, and practical, Winstanley is yet not clever enough - he lacks a civilised culture - to see both the complexity of ideas and how society will alter them. For him ideas are essentially things, as real and concrete as a horse or an acre of land. Ideas are real for sure, but they do not have the same reality as material objects; they are more like a human being, upon whom they depend for their life and propagation.22 Winstanley hasn’t grasped their complex and ambiguous nature; independent of each individual yet entwined with every one of their thoughts; the idea not a thing but an organic form, subject to influence, adaptation, even metamorphosis.23 Hey, you up there!… You! Yes you! Oh, Lem, what you’re doing down  there amongst the footnotes? Yes?... Yes?... Oh, you want to… But of course, of course.…

I went closer, and when the next wave came I held out my hand. What followed was a faithful reproduction of a phenomenon which had been analysed a century before: the wave hesitated, recoiled, then enveloped my hand without touching it, so that a thin covering of ‘air’ separated my glove inside a cavity which had been fluid a moment previously, and now had a fleshy consistency. I raised my hand slowly, and the wave, or rather an outcrop of the wave, rose at the same time, enfolding my hand in a translucent cyst with greenish reflections. I stood up, so as to raise my hand still higher, and the gelatinous substance stretched like a rope, but did not break. The main body of the wave remained motionless on the shore, surrounding my feet without touching them, like some strange beast patiently waiting for the experiment to finish. A flower had grown out of the ocean, and its calyx was moulded to my finger. I stepped back. The stem trembled, stirred uncertainly and fell back into the wave, which gathered it and receded.

Has the meeting of man and idea, and the culture from which the idea emerges, ever been better evoked? Ideas - such beautiful delicate plants - wither once removed from their metaphysical hothouse. They are not robust enough to deal with ordinary life. We batter and bruise them with the job, the home, the boss and the customers, and our kids demanding attention and stuff now! We cannot grow ideas in such a hostile environment. Only by finding some safe place free of intrusion - there is the zone (it is the Russian solution); the wood, a boat beyond the sea shore - will we nurture such fragile flowers.

Winstanley is a mystic who has become a politician. Seeing the beauty of the idea his mistake is to think that it can be brought down to earth; it would be as if Lem’s narrator really did believe that the Rheya of his imagination, standing here before him in the space station, is the same as dead Rheya, the once human being. Winstanley hasn’t grasped the fragile nature of ideas; their easy contamination by banality and power. He doesn't realise just how fatal to an idea is politics, once the politicians gain their grip; an idea’s force has only a short life span, a hundred yard dash to the marathon that is political action. It is not that ideas cannot affect politics, it is rather they must used as the parson uses them, as instruments for utilitarian purposes. They are are not a transformative aesthetics that will turn the world into a work of art; the illusion of last century’s avant-garde, whose most famous offspring is an Austrian called Adolf Hitler.24 To act politically - and the colonisation of the commons is a political act - Winstanley would have to turn his religious belief into a loose bag of conceptual tools, to be used flexibly and for practical ends. At best only a part of their value - most of their substance surrendered in argument - to remain after the inevitable compromises. Alas, it is not to be. Like too many educated men Winstanley believes in the concrete - the material - reality of ideas: wholesome apples to be picked from the tree (was God so wrong to banish Adam and Eve…). To believe that ideas, with their purity and perfection, can be transferred wholesale into the social arena is the dream of all idealists ignorant of their nature. After its first entry, when the idea explodes onto the world, a shell-shocked society returns to slowly smother it. Winstanley should have compromised. He was too good for that. So that only disaster can prove him wrong. He falls before the rigidity of his own conceptions; a good idea becoming a silly one when held too inflexibly. The Lord’s wife, playing with the idea of charity, exposes this foolishness; but of course he will not listen to such sophistication, suspect to a man like himself.

Fairfax shows what it is to have true responsibility; his life a succession of difficult compromises, where justice is forever threatened and corrupted, and occasionally upheld.25 The moral order depends upon the quality of its highest leaders, whose wealth and position have bred civility, giving them an understanding of man in his relation to society. These leaders are not saints. At best they are wise people, who know the limits of ideas and the risks of action.26  

Winstanley is an offcut from this class. Socially superior to the rest of his group it is his civility, and his use of ideas as spiritual inspiration and social glue, that turns them into a sect, making it a success. Like so many before (and after) him Winstanley is the good middle class boy who, intoxicated with the moral values of his education, has come to save his inferiors, the poor sad people. He brings to this quest all the naivety we associate with a comfortable upbringing; for like most of these middle class adults he once lived in a paradise. Forced to leave this Garden of Eden he is forever seeking to return. An eternal adolescent amongst a transient mass of men.

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 1. See Alan Macfarlane’s interview with the anthropologist David Brokensha. A persistent myth of Third World development is that peasants are naturally cooperative. It is not true. Nevertheless, this idea is the source of many failed experiments in developmental projects; the idea too strong to be overcome by experience. The idea, buttressed by the esteem of a university system that gives it legitimacy, impregnable to empirical evidence; thus the profound resistance, noted by Brokensha, to the local knowledge of the natives. This myth is buried deep within the educated classes. It goes back to Socialism, and its source in Christianity. Though my suspicion is that the idea of cooperation is genetically encoded into education itself: we can only truly learn when we freely cooperate with others (I thank my willing collaborators for this piece).

2.  If we believe that humans are defined by their biological origins then our natural life style is to be hunter-gathers; strongly independent individuals who live in groups hardly larger than the family. No Christian communes these. 

The idea of going back to the biological source - it takes various guises - can only produce social collapse, for the reality of human life has changed over the last ten thousand years; the hunter-gathering past dependent on vast under-populated territories where tiny bands of humans could live in largely isolated existences. For excellent discussion see Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf’s Morals and Merit.

3.  Such characters are powerful influences in adolescence - see my Left Behind.

4.  Miraculously conveyed in Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle; a parable about that eternal clash between freedom and history; what the novel’s heroine calls the bird and the tree.

A big theme of 1950s fiction is the desire for escape, and the pain and unhappiness this causes. We sense a society aware of its insularity, dreaming to get out, but afraid of the consequences, the discontent that invariably arises; for rarely is freedom easily achieved, simply celebrated. The rebels who would free us tend to be anti-heroes, a touch of the malign or rakish about them. Rain, in Murdoch’s The Sandcastle, is that rare character: the good heroine (her innocence giving her a fairy tale quality). Yet such goodness makes her even more dangerous to the settled society, which can barely hold itself together under her impact; it survives but is badly broken.

5.  A superb allegory is the underground bunker in Joseph Losey’s “These Are The Damned”. Its occupants chafe at the restrictions, but at the same time they have created a free space, where they can exist outside the constant surveillance of the authorities up above. This independence allows them to live an ordinary existence under abnormal conditions. However, to an outsider - to Joan and Simon - such a life is clearly unjust; it is a concentration camp, from which they must be freed. But these outsiders do not understand such lives - the children being radioactive they cannot quit the bunker. And in trying to free them - which is impossible: there can be no ordinary life in England’s towns and villages - Simon and Joan will condemn these children to eternal misery; for the attempt - which must fail -  leaves them knowing they are captives, whereas before they were thought themselves explorers to a distant planet.

6.  Beautifully evoked by Cesare Pavese in The Moon and the Bonfire.

7.  Once the Church legitimated these dreams; but this is no more; the reason, perhaps, for our current malaise. It began in the 1960s, when the churches of England went into rapid decline. The decade beginning with a promise of a heaven to be found on earth. “These Are The Damned”, we now see, a warning about such unbounded dreams; they will leave behind only death and disillusionment.

8.  To act out this dream is to generate terrible conflict and tension; the worst effect an inability to decide between two incommensurables: the past and the future, with the present a kind of no-man’s land, where one suffers the indescribable torture of indecision. It’s there in The Sandcastle.

9.  For the horrible anarchy that can result from such dreams see my Mad Places. The sensible person knows the risks and worries over them; it is why Mor, in The Sandcastle, is constantly wanting to secure a future - by making it safe and concrete - that can only exist in the mind.

10.  There is a good discussion in Joan C. Williams’ article Metro vs retro.

11.  This dilemma is the central theme of The Sandcastle. Yet Rain - until forced to do so by circumstance - doesn't recognise that it is a dilemma. She is unaware that an entire world must be uprooted if Mor is to be free; which suggests a difference between the generations; Rain hardly more than a teenager, Mor solidly middle-aged. 

Murdoch is here interested in the artist and their sudden eruption into an ordinary bourgeois life; but this work has a wider resonance. For what we see in this novel is the eternal conflict between those who live in the mind with those who are dominated by the body, with its commitment to the quotidian and its strong links to the past; most strongly represented in the novel by Nan, Mor’s wife. Rain is marvellously attractive. But most of us must be robust enough to resist her; for such a free spirit will only cause pain to those who are not destined to be free.

12.  See my The Zone.

13.  See my Cult Crazy for the strengths and weaknesses of the charismatic leader: wonderfully alive, terribly unstable.

14.  Is Genesis are early tract on birth control… God not wanting too many humans overrunning his beautiful garden?

15.  A sad example is Dominic Frisby in this interview with Paul Kingsnorth. He believes he has found the secret to society’s ills: money, regulation and a lack of land. Today’s Libertarians yesteryear’s Muggletonians and Fifth Monarchy Men: in the “Free” Market they find God’s mystic grace. Why sad? It is the naivety of thinking a simple idea can be The Answer to a society’s problems. My idea will save the world! Oh dear oh dear. The children will have their say. Tomorrow will be a tabula rasa… We pity them. Life’s difficulties. The odd nature of the idea. The idea’s complex relationship to society. The past. None of these exist for the simple idealist. It creates a terrible ignorance. And some comedy. The very thing here attacked - the corporate economy - the product of his very ideas; the origins of today’s Neo-liberalism in the market mysticism of the New Right and its numerous sects (see Richard Cockett’s useful if shallow Thinking the Unthinkable). Ideas give us a child-like faith, which is more powerful than thought. 

16.  See my An Article of Faith for further discussion. Pascal’s book can be adapted to any number of realms: art, craft, education… 

The moment a vocation is institutionalised the pressure is to expand that institution. At first there is a tension between the “elite” needs of the craft and the bureaucratic drive of the organisation, with its innate egalitarianism. Gradually the bureaucracy wins out, its goal - and its will to power - perpetual growth. As the institution grows the bureaucrats come to dominate it - the administrators of the Church more powerful than its clerics - until they set the tone of the place and determine what is taught, which becomes the new belief. The church no longer about saving souls - difficult, arduous and uncertain - its purpose to get as many people inside the walls as possible, a far less onerous task. 

A fascinating article by Mary Frances Wilson - see especially the accompanying video - suggests that today’s universities have been taken over by Jesuits. They await their Pascal.

17.  For a revelatory account of the position of women in English society see Alan Macfarlane’s Love and Marriage in England 1300-1840.

18.  A typical example is Leni Zumas in her TLS article Born This Way? So extreme is the conceptual pressure - this need to handcuff herself to a concept - that the review (unusual for this staid journal) splutters into contradiction and incoherence. It is a horrible pleasure, an exhilarating torture, to place oneself inside the prison cell of an idea. We can only hope she survives sound in mind and body. On the sidelines, bemused by so much passion, and worried a little by that hate, we calmly note that our New Puritans have once again made nature a sin.

19.  It is the ocean in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.

20.  Partrick Leigh Fermor.

21.  For a sense of this conflict between the ideas of different generations, and how a once radical idea becomes old and oppressive, leading to the scorn and revolt of the young and the new, read Richard Foster Jones’ Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in 17th Century England.

Outside the hard sciences so much of academic life is a game of politics between the already established and the recently qualified; moments of crisis - like today - or moments of rapid expansion - the 1960s - the times when a mere tension, to be resolved through the passage of time, becomes a total war, as both the young and the old fight over the same territory. 

Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider describes a particularly vicious generational war, which was to see the youth gravitate towards the Nazis, that most extreme of revolutionary forces.

22.  The beautiful Rheya in Solaris. For a believer - for the narrator in Lem’s novel - the idea is more attractive than the real thing (Rheya when she was a human being).

23.  Such is the richness of Solaris that its central symbol suggests as many meanings as its own manifold life. We add one more: the ocean represents the Idea, in all its metaphysical plasticity.

24.  No use calling his output kitsch. It is the inspiration we have to consider. Think of The House That Jack Built, a masterly disquisition on the disastrous effects of art on a sensibility not subtle enough to handle it.

25.  Stuart Hampshire’s Innocence and Experience draws the contrast between the moral worlds of the thinker (innocence) and politician (experience). He pithily describes the differences:

A successful political leader is always rather loose in his thinking, flexible, not bound by principles or by theories, not bound even by his own intentions. He is more like a burglar who is ready to change direction when he runs up against an obstacle in the dark.

26.  For an excellent discussion of Eden in the psychology of social life see Innocence and Experience.