Peeking Behind Potemkin

My last piece banged away at the inadequacy of the academic mind when confronted with literature. Such minds, lest we forget, educate the young, leading them astray.1 Lars von Trier has his own ideas. In a major work of moral philosophy he investigates the effects of a pedagogy that teaches the innocent to believe that ideas are as natural and as simple as pears and plums. We watch Leopold bite into a piece of concrete….

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He is our Don Quixote. Although this hidalgo hasn’t read the medieval romances. Our knight having other dreams to feed on; different kinds of fairy tale in which to believe; there is the American Dream, as retailed by Hollywood. The story of innocence, who always wins the hundred yard dash, to wave and smile at film’s end, while we retreat to the exit ignoring the credits with thoughts of home. In the multiplexes evil is portrayed as a few bad men easily defeated by the hero; his superhuman qualities, plus those gifts of kindness and justice, touching ordinary people, simple, good-hearted souls.2 Life essentially beneficent, if only the bad chaps, wholly responsible for the evils of society, are taken out of the picture. Show kindness. Be gentle. Act with humane strength and a gentle authority. Have courage. And be resilient when facing the brutal and the violent. These platitudes play each week in our towns and cities. You enjoyed a few last night, I shouldn’t wonder.

Leopold believes these clichés; having watched thousands on the silver screen. It will do him down. For few such films exhibit intelligence. A rare example is the crazed professor, lost in the penthouse of his mind; hardly a model for practical application. This lacuna is to cost Leopold his life. Oh Leopold, you really shouldn’t think these Germans innocents. Nor believe that you will help them become good again! You are a daft sod. Let us find the…appropriate metaphor for your…ah yes, here it is. Some pairs of dirty knickers have to be thrown out; the stain not to be removed by a pocketful of powder and a rinse in the washing machine. You haven’t grasped my kitchen sink lingo? Oh, alright. In some situations evil is endemic; the cure an informed but cruel justice.

The good person creates the good, which grows around him, like trees in an orchard; this is the conception, though with the biblical connotation long excised. It is the problem of metaphor, when traded in polite society: the meanings core cut out when too sour for the palate. Leopold travels to Germany to save a people brutalised by war, yet he is to treat them as helpless victims of somebody else’s savagery. Of course he will lose his way. I blame the movie-house managers, who preferred to show sentimental trash rather than The Marriage of Maria Braun; that treatise on post-war perils essential for the idealistic mind. Every town needs its art cinema.

We too are callow. It is a great danger. This film to put our simple ideas under enormous strain, causing immense psychic stress. But Lars is kind. To protect us against its outlandish honesty he asks Max von Sydow to hypnotise the audience.

A game, or a Freudian journey into the deep recesses of the mind? The answer depends upon our seriousness. Europa does play with cinema, although unlike the Nouvelle Vague, where the references express a joie de vivre, here the cinematic antics convey a mind in meltdown. Here, the fictions, fed by Hollywood’s bombast, bleed into real life, which, as the true horror of this life is revealed, metamorphoses into a grotesque fantasy. The set of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari becoming our hero’s reality as overwhelmed by the conflict between his ideas and his actions he suffers a complete mental collapse.

Are we safe against these revelations? Do we fool ourselves that Europa isn’t real? That once outside the auditorium all will be forgotten; this movie as ephemeral as the popcorn we consumed while watching it? I look around for answers. I find still more questions. When Max counts us back to life will we reclaim our innocence? This question a nervous giggle…and I giggle some more…Lars is in the entertainment business, isn’t he; his shockers made to slip rapidly from the memory? Do I believe this? Europa is just a movie, right? Lars smiles, and walks away. Lars! Lars! I shout, and look desperately around the foyer; the staff and the punters turning away, to mutter quietly to themselves and the wall, on which classic posters - Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, Solaris - wink and smile down sardonically. Suddenly I feel like Scottie on the top of that building, the camera swooshing up and down…. Such questions turn us vulnerable. For we want the certainties of illusion. The security of a fairy tale. We do not need the vertigo of art. Ah Lars, there you are…he comes back and pats me on the shoulder, and whispers into my ear - everything will be all right Schloss, trust me. Under that hypnotist’s spell you’ll have no problem accepting these realities. The truths will be horrific, but sealed in a dream they’ll quickly fade on waking up. Such charm; I almost believe him.

The bravura opening offers many interpretations. We apply one to Leopold. For he too is being hypnotised; the good doctor - it is Lars - making the hero look behind the adverts that sell the American Dream, to free him from its dangerous and repressive fantasies. Although as with many Freudian retrieval operations - this director knows his Karl Kraus - the cure is worse than the disease; the horror brought to the surface is to spread wildly and kill.3

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’, what is ‘good’ and what is ‘evil’. I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of ‘morality’ seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work…. [W]hen we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. (Joan Didion, Morality, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem)

We are in Germany in October 1945. It could be America, anytime in the 20th century.

Under the pressure of reality the dream disintegrates; though as with all such dreams it takes a long time to die. Leopold helps two children, by allowing them onto the train. He thinks he’s giving succour to the weak and the helpless; for no child - do I have to say it? - is evil. It is unthinkable that these kids are cold-blooded assassins…. Oh Leopold. You live on the surface of life, where words are believed the same as intent, and ideas are conceived as identical to actions; existence just another Hollywood movie. Alas, there are real bullets in those guns. Yes, the big American studios are not interested in sociology. While the surface tells us nothing about what goes on underneath. And then language itself so easily deceives. As for those ideals: they are but crude and cheap stories, not to be taken seriously. Wittgenstein is needed in these cinema seats.

In dreams the world is turned upside down; the loveliest things become revolting; victims are masters, while two boys shoot the mayor dead. In this dream the Jews are in control; the Americans are fascists; and it is the Nazis who are fighting for freedom and dignity. It seems too outrageous to be real. Though a different film is running inside Leopold’s head; one so lovely we would like it to be true. Convinced of the goodness of the defeated, and thinking to save these wretched folk, Leopold draws down the blinds of his faith upon the thuggery and murder outside the train’s windows. It is so comfortable on this train. Though once the blind does furl up: when these thugs touch Kate, his inamorata. No problem! He will do anything to save her; becoming a true hero at last.

Oh Lars; Lars, your irony is almost too rich: Germany’s saviour is a trainee sleeping-car attendant! Travelling the country, where he learns to serve the dreams of others. To live inside a film made by cynics, terrorists and army chiefs.

Europa is not a simple entertainment. It is art, whose fictions illuminate truths which smash a young American’s simple-minded beliefs against the buffers of German history. We watch this man suffer a mental train crash. Like a real-life accident it is experienced in slow-motion. First, the cognitive dissonance, as the ideas, working ever harder to maintain the fracturing beliefs, colonise his entire mind forcing the body into frenzied action. Wild, increasingly unreal, the ideas turn the everyday into two-dimensional images, transforming this world into a hideous fantasy; a pack of movie stills, shuffled by a maniac. His reality evacuated of substance, all starts to look artificial and unstable.4

His hold on reality weakening Leopold clings to what he thinks is real: Katharina Hartmann. Beautiful, clever, seductive Kate. A femme fatale out of film noir; another clutch of movies not playing in Leopold’s local Odeon. Our hero is bewitched. And then Kate says…ich bin Werewolf: I belong to a Nazi terror group. Does he believe her? To be sure Kate immediately qualifies her confession: I have left them, it was a mistake; it is over now. Leopold is in love. He is also a simpleton. There will be no questions to trouble the obvious. And so the affair begins. They marry, and enjoy a few idyllic few weeks of sentimentality and romance. Then Kate is captured by the Werewolves, who blackmail Leopold into blowing up his train.

Love defeats any abstract belief in humanity. Leopold accepts the bomb, sets it, and jumps off the train. Hundreds of people are going to die, for a selfish passion. So simple is this hero that he cannot see the flaws in his feelings. For him love is the supreme emotion, the embodiment of the Good. Here is the danger of big ideas upon silly minds. In arguing for the small loyalties to family and friends over large moral abstractions Joan Didion is assuming a common decency and an informed wisdom that tempers feeling with a humane responsibility that looks beyond one’s own limited emotions. Her argument ignores simpletons like Leopold; a common type, who believes in vacuous abstractions and is consumed by the illusions of love; both eviscerating the intelligence.

The portentousness of the music is used with devastating satirical effect. An antique train is pulled across the screen as if Cleopatra on a pharaonic float, her locomotion ten thousand slaves. The soundtrack to the clichés of the American fairy tale, as narrated by its movies and playing forever inside Leopold’s head. Our hero wants to believe in the beautiful idea that young America is to save old Europe. Yet his colonel looks like some fossilised reptile. This Germany is equally antediluvian; for with order and civility gone these people are reduced to a bare survival in a world where sadists and psychopaths are at liberty. To understand this Europe, where every situation is threaded with thick skeins of moral ambiguity, we must apply “just reason to delicate sentiment”;5  it is literature not pulp fiction that will help us grasp such a complex reality. Only the desperate or the sophisticated can survive here. The naive and the foolish to suffer the fate of Scottie; whose soundtrack accompanies Leopold’s tumble into the mind’s vertiginous abyss. To fall in love with a mirage. To create a nightmare. And that final accidental plunge… Leopold is repeating Scottie’s folly and reliving his madness. It is a typological defect. Hollywood’s heroes cannot grow, and therefore change; instead they break down, when their ideas are revealed as paste.

This candy-floss hero turns his life into a bad movie; its end fated to be melodrama. Though because this is Europe Hollywood’s rules do not apply: this pure soul, both helpless and a danger to others, goes down to his grief with no transcendent reward. To succeed in ordinary times we need a modicum of intelligence, while having the good sense to let dreams gather dust in the mind’s attic.6 In extraordinary times - here, in Germany, in 1945 - we must be sharper and more resilient to navigate the ruins of a societal collapse; we have to be wise or extremely cunning.

We should avoid the risks of love. Love, in creating its own fantastic tales, scrambles all values. Kill a thousand people for Kate? Tell me the date and time, sir. Leopold, driven only by the force of his feelings, has lost all sense of moral measure. It is the core problem of melodrama; for it contains no sociology, and leaves history on the cutting-room floor. Leopold protests at my obscurities. Ok, I shall be clear. You never reflect on what it means for the Hartmann family to have run the railway network during the war. The railways. To you they are little more than the model train set upon which Kate removes your virginity. That these people have a history, and how that history conditions them…nah; it is the first day of a new world the day you arrive on German territory. Each moment an empty page, upon which to write your kitsch.

To be truly heroic, rather than just nice (which is to think too well of the self) we need a touch of hardness and cruelty, sacrificing our feelings for an abstract justice that weighs the Good of what we know and can assimilate. Goodness is close to wisdom, although, unlike Socrates, I am reluctant to make them synonymous.7 To be good is to think with judgement and tact, weighing the unique lives of individuals against the scales of an abstract value, while always trying to get the balance right. This far more difficult than is usually thought, because it is no simple question of numbers, but requires the measuring  of individual sensibilities, together with their life histories, against the general idea of the Just and the Good; and where cultural context - the grounds of the possible - is wisely considered.8 Again and again Leopold, with his blind faith in the idea and his mindless love, gets it wrong. The middle register, where ideas and feelings are judged against social reality, and whose causes and their effects are seen and understood, does not exist for this man.9 Leopold is no politician or thinker. This is no hero. Certainly not a saint (the latter often the devil in fancy dress).10 Believer. Lover. Nincompoop. A conceptual sybarite, who wants to take the first class compartment through the country of thought; his mind to always travel on the soft cushions of his ideals. In fact, to judge situations is hard work, and requires insight, acquired through years of experience. Too often the young and the idiotic think to cut short such apprenticeships. They want change now! Will save the world tomorrow! Which encourages the tendency to speak in slogans and talk the language of Hollywood trailers;11 as if words alone can make the world their replica.12 We recall Joan Didion: she is right to be sceptical of all moral language; when not ignorance or the source of evil it is mere self-indulgence. Leopold an exemplary case.

In the night I am a Werewolf. I watch my father losing his honour, as he collaborates with the Americans. I see him humiliated, and I want him to die. In the night he is my enemy, and I write those evil letters. During the day I am human again, and I want to take back my terrible words; I love my father, and hate what I have done.

It is an amazing scene, one of the greatest in cinema. Kate is in handcuffs. She sits opposite Leopold and confesses her part in the plot to blow up the train. Leopold is dumbstruck. But this numbed sanity is merely prelude. Kate now adds the coup de grâce: it is you, Leopold, who is the criminal; she says. This man’s black and white movie explodes into the colours of epiphany. It is too much. The touch of reality sends Leopold insane.

I did love you. Yet Kate also loves her country, and the family it has nurtured; her duty to protect them from the Americans, who are cruel and callous: “it is just Germans killing Germans” is the colonel’s comment on the murders that surround them. Our heroine is a Nazi. This is true. Kant’s “human affairs…in which nearly everything is paradoxical” echoes down the corridors of this train. Yes, our heroine is a Nazi. For Kate believes in an idea and measures it against her loyalties to family and her love for Leopold, a brief infatuation. I hear your protest - no Nazi can be a hero. You misunderstand me. To be a hero is to be…a hero. A simple tautology. There is no one moral ideal against which to measure heroic conduct. Rather, there are a plethora of ideals, many of which we may find morally repugnant, but will nevertheless inspire valiant action and self-sacrifice.13 Some of them even Nazi. Though we have to be careful; it is a precarious path we are tiptoeing along. So, for example, I do not consider the SS officer in Come and See a hero, even though he sacrifices his life to his ideas.14 He is a fanatic, a quite distinct species. His sadism and barbarity, his delight in death and torture for their own sake, go beyond the bare minimum of a universal morality which grounds all cultures and their moral codes. No sadist can plea-bargain ideology. Kate is different. Her support for the old regime is a defence of its moral values and the civility she experienced; these rich civilians, lest we forget, insulated from the violence and vulgarity of the Nazi thugs.15 We condemn her, as we must, for believing in the Nazi illusion; but this is more epistemological error than ethical sin. We must also consider the limits to her understanding. And the immense difficulties in casting off a culture and its system of ideas.16 Then there is the nature of the social animal. To judge situations we rely on our personal experiences; the measure of moral conduct how we see other individuals behave in our presence. And if the officers of the state are humane to us, and appear respectable in public, and while all around there is sophistication and politesse…. What about Der Stürmer? you ask. It’s a point; but do you read the Daily Star?

You are the criminal… Leopold rages through the sleeping-car like a wounded hare. Insane with his own stupidity. Oh Leopold, you are a hick. Of course these Europeans have outwitted you.17 Even now, when in handcuffs, and the plot revealed, Kate will have you blow up this train.

Kate is right. Leopold is the criminal. To act for the Good when you are ignorant of it is not only foolish but dangerous, for it risks, as here, the releasing of evil.18 Events, so complex, ever shifting, the decisive bits so small we hardly see them, is what determines the actions of participants, who are always struggling through the din and confusion. An event a cognitive war, an ethical battlefield, which in trying to understand we judge as best as we can; mistakes inevitable. We accept such fallibility. With one proviso: to act without any thought is a moral crime. There are those two child assassins… Leopold is a fool, who, unable to learn from his errors, and thus acquire a mature judgement, is condemned to recycle his silliness.… It would be so easy to blow up this train. For hasn’t each one betrayed somebody? No one is innocent. They are liars, spies, murderers, so why not kill them all? Kate is playing on Leopold’s simple nature, his inability to see that most of us occupy a no-man’s land between the two extremes of Good and Evil, which touch us but occasionally. Kate works on him. To destroy his belief in the Sinner and the Saint - he has no retreat to the ambiguities of daily life and common sense - is to send Leopold insane; the train’s destruction the likely consequence. Kate plays the seductress; death the awaited orgasm. To blow up this train, in a moment of madness. Blow up the train. He almost did it for love. Now he’ll do it when crazy. His mind breaking up Leopold feels the world disintegrating. He knows not what he does. Not even aware that he is connecting the leads….

Hollywood detonates the world in an absence of mind.

In most fields, theory is more congenial, less frustrating than application. Ethics is no different. Many hesitate to grapple with concrete ethical problems, intertwined as they are with psychological and political strands rendering choice so difficult. Why tackle such choice when there are so many abstract questions of meaning and definition, of classification and structure, which remain to challenge the imagination?19

In film, as in life, it is the details of human action, and their manifestation in the social, that have to be understood; our own behaviour to be grounded on that understanding. Leopold is too stupid to perceive this truth. Instead, he tries to impose his own idealistic faith onto these Germans who do not want it. Naturally they resist. They have their own ideas and feelings, which they want respected. Most idealists do not have the sympathy and insight to comprehend such a response. The idealist, consumed by his own ego, that preens itself in the mirror of his ideals, lacks the humility to grasp what is abhorred.20 Instead, they prefer to destroy what they dislike. Education, which tries to replace experience with ideas, exacerbates this reflex.21 For it is through experience that we learn the complexities of a world where ideas break down under the pressure of the present, which, with its own history and moral codes, resists its own destruction. If wise with experience Leopold would have been more circumspect; less quick at accepting those kids on the train; more skeptical about Kate’s kidnapping; he wouldn’t have put that bomb under the train. He is not wise. This man is naive and does not think. It is why hundreds are to die for his Freedom and his Love.

Leopold looks into Kate’s eyes and is mesmerised. Kate talks about the evil people on this train. Kate says how easy it is to kill every one of them. You will be a hero; if you blow up all these bad Germans…Kate talks on and on, in her slow, deep, seductive voice. Innocent to the last Leopold doesn't see he is being hypnotised. He is to leave Kate in a mad trance.

The ending is a tragedy. Before it was farce. The first time he planted the bomb Leopold jumped to safety and lay on the grass dreaming of Kate. As he reflects upon his wonderful deed he looks up at the stars and has a revelation: they are the souls of those passengers, whom he has sent to Heaven. Harold Lloyd leaps up, and runs after the train, which he…miraculously catches! to dismantle the bomb, while harassed by the inspectorate who examine him for his certificate as a sleeping-car attendant. The passengers oblivious to the drama going on around them.

For Leopold the world and his ideas about the world run along separate tracks. They come together only under the intense pressure of a social earthquake or psychological collapse; when they are fused into a single mangled heap. His life has to be broken for Leopold to recognise the real. By then he is insane.

In the night I hated my father; I wrote those evil letters; but you…in Europe Leopold may live the American dream, but life is playing a very different kind of movie….you are the criminal. Who have you betrayed Leopold? No-one. It is a devastating criticism. To be morally pure is to detach oneself from other humans. To be pure is not to take sides; a terrible crime, generating indifference, the greatest of evils.22 A truly moral person will commit themselves to others; to a movement; to a nation; a cause.23 We must belong; only then can the tentacles of sympathy and understanding grow and wrap themselves around the objects and persons of our affection. In doing so we lose our innocence. For to belong is to be corrupted by that belonging; such corruption a prerequisite for intelligent engagement. Purity, with its worship of the ideal, wrecks such relationships, by devaluing all the links - emotional, intellectual and habitual - that bind us each to each. No human being is pure; the pure itself a moral void. Evil is a terrible emptiness.24

Leopold, having failed the moral test, collapses into madness. Now he is carried out into the ocean; less a dead body than a drowned dream - he floats into the seas of Solaris. Tarkovsky believed in the holiness of artifice, as deployed in religion and art. Lars takes a different view. Knowing the dangers when religion falls into ideology and art becomes mass entertainment, inspiring holy fools to live out their mad fairy tales, he shows the result. Boom! The bridge buckles. A train plummets into the river.

And we…we are saved by Max von Sydow, who returns us to the waking light.

(Review: Europa)

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1. Today’s universities breed monstrous illusions in their charges. An insight into these fantasies, and their effects on the young, can be glimpsed through David Graeber’s Bullsh*t Jobs. These young adults have been educated to believe that work should be interesting and meaningful. Entering the workforce to find it boring and pointless many cannot cope; even the author has his difficulties….

Which includes his inability to grasp the nature of office life; an environment he looks at through the comedy spectacles of a clever adolescent; thus his belief that “hierarchies” automatically produce bullying, whose acceptance by staff he puts down to “sadomasochistic theory”. Poor Graeber! This outlandish theory - it may sound good in the classroom - only highlights his incomprehension about places he doesn’t know. Years spent inside such “hierarchies” have shown me how ineffective they are in controlling the activities of individuals. It is experience richly supported by the work of Richard Sennett, who shows how numerous layers of middle management create resistances and misunderstandings that operate as a barrier between the chief executive and the office menials, giving the latter a space to be free. The causes of most bullying due to individual temperaments and the specific office culture they generate; a small cooperative enterprise - and I have worked in these - as likely to oppress as a multinational corporation.

Reading between the lines of the testimony given in Graeber’s book - they read like those old Christian spiritual biographies, where after years of struggle the narrator reaches Jerusalem - I discern two inter-related issues for these young under-employed workers: boredom and a lack of human contact. Boredom is a perennial problem. What is odd is why these “kids” make such a big deal about it. One reason is education and the expectations it breeds: the young are promised a fake corporate paradise that is quickly exposed as fake when entered into. More important is the lack of human contact. In the old office, with telephones, typing pools, the post room, and all the manual labour that clerical workers performed, there was both physical activity and lots of interaction with other people. Typing into a screen all day removes much of that activity, and the sensory stimulation it provides. These young people, who, through school and university, have become addicted to their own kind have suddenly to go cold turkey: alone at a desk eight hours a day. Naturally they find this difficult. An allied reason, which is certainly not to Graeber’s taste, is the lack of management. A manager is the organisation’s glue, binding individuals to each other and to the organisation; such connection giving form, purpose and some drive to teams and departments. The problem in large companies is that lowly managers lose all autonomy; and unable to act like leaders begin to think and act just like their own staff; which increases feelings of atomisation, disconnect and lack of meaning. Ah, you say,  this wouldn’t be the case with small businesses… Well, all depends upon the quality of those who run these businesses: I suggest you read the section on Renaissance guilds in Sennett’s The Craftsman.

An odd aspect of Graeber’s book is its outrageous snobbery. He argues that his work is interesting, creative and meaningful, while many (most?) other jobs are bullshit. But is this really so? This book suggests, with its preference for collecting ideas and quotations rather than interrogating them, academic decline. When reading the book I was reminded of Michael Billig’s reference to “salami slicing”; it is where a few ideas are sliced thin so as to fit into many different academic articles - to bump up the size of an author’s CV. This book - not without insight and some good ideas - feels like an article expanded beyond its range; thus the repetition of similar material and the addition of a great deal of extraneous matter, most of it under-analysed. It is book written to fulfil somebody else’s purpose, a product of the very corporate culture the author attacks. To use Graeber’s own phraseology: it is a bullsh*t book.

2. In his memoir John Carey dismisses Cervantes’ masterpiece; calling it a horrid work, because a mad character is tormented by his sadistic author. Carey, whose literary sensibility is weak - I say this, knowing his august status - has no feel for the book. However, I suspect the core reason for his disgust is the novel’s portrayal of the cruelties of ordinary people; an anathema to the egalitarianism of the scholarship boy. 

3. Lar’s Epidemic, where the story becomes the infection, is a wonderful metaphor for not only Freudian psychoanalysis but the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that so dominated the 20th century, from Marx to Foucault, picking up Hayek and the hippies along the way. We invent truths, ugly and terminal, which we then force upon the world, which then becomes our reality.

4. What the outsider sees - the paste and cardboard nature of the belief - is at last revealed to the person themselves. For the original theory of cognitive dissonance read When Prophecy Fails, by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, Stanley Schachter. 

What gives these ideas their electrifying charge is the belief that the world will be saved; although that many millions of people will die as a result of the preceding apocalypse does not appear to worry anybody. Most striking to this reader is just how ordinary and homely are the believers’ ideas: flying saucers, spacemen, aliens could just as easily be the sheriff’s car and day-trippers from out of town. Saturated in this stuff - the detritus of popular culture - these people accept it as others imbibe the worldview of The Sun or BBC News. This small cult is odd only because of their actions; they foregrounded these beliefs and acted upon them, rather than leaving them in the shadow-filled background of their individual minds.

5. David Hume, as quoted in Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia.

6. The mistake of Frank Wheeler in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road was to bring those moth-eaten illusions - the fables of post-war Paris - down into the living room.

7. Because the good are often foolish. The outstanding example is Simone Weil, dissected in Reason’s Virgin.

8. A simple example, usually overlooked by radicals, is the core problem of economic justice: to take things away from people is a very hard thing to do. Depriving the rich of their property is quite different from giving that same property to the poor. The pain caused by removing this wealth is not balanced by the happiness of those who receive it; as most people adapt to their environment, and find comfort in it, the poor especially so. Yet, when radicals talk of redistribution they conceive of it merely as a form of accounting, where the emotional attachments (in one case) and the indifference (in the other) are overlooked.

9. He shares these attributes with Adolf Hitler, although he lacks Hitler’s intelligence. Hitler had no middle register; intoxicated with ‘cosmic’ ideas he had, however, an extraordinary memory for detail; he was also a politician of genius. See Alan Bullock’s psychologically acute portrait in his Parallel Lives.

To get inside such a mind we can either pick up Mein Kampf - not to be recommended - or read Emmanuel Carrère’s biography of Philip K Dick; who the author accurately defines as a philistine and an “unintelligent intellectual”. The world of ideas for Dick, as it was for Hitler, is a tourist trip where one collects plastic concepts rather than ethnic trinkets. These concepts, treated as facts - a kind of object - are amassed in huge collections, but they are not thought about, analysed or truly understood. The mind become a cabinet case of conceptual knick-knacks and the mutilated remains of a few classical authors; which when looked at en masse produce an impression of junk and triviality. To watch Dick reading the popular science magazines and perusing his encyclopaedias is to think of the Saturday morning crowd down Portobello Road. The result is an enervating kitsch; which Dick could sometimes transcend in his fiction.

10. Especially to those closest to them, who have little value when measured against the immense numbers of a country or a continent. Sonya Tolstaya forever losing out when compared with all the peasants of Russia. Rosamund Bartlett’s biography is a fascinating glimpse into the egoism of sainthood. Egoism! Yes. People marvelled at Tolstoy's willingness to give his possessions and literary genius away, so that he could be a holy fool. What isn’t considered is that for Tolstoy this was no sacrifice. They forget that for Tolstoy the mind and its ideas are vastly more important than material things. It would have be a greater sacrifice, and he would have endured real hardship, if he had given up his ideas for Sonya’s domestic concerns. Tolstoy lived wholly inside his mind; and not a single one of its ideas would he compromise. This is the ultimate egoist. To suffer physical inconvenience is nothing when you can always think and speak as you find; and have a coterie who believe in you and act on your words. Tolstoy did good works, I will not deny that. But he wasn’t humane. To show humanity is to balance the needs of society against those closest to us, each given its proper weight. This is difficult and endlessly frustrating, as we fine tune ourselves to another’s concerns. Every day we bring out the measuring jug.

11. A radical mind likes to speak of truth, and is keen to expose the myths and fantasies of others. This creates its own blindnesses. Overlooked is how their own ideas - large abstract concepts yet to be tested by the quotidian - are even greater fictions than those that they decry. 

A scintillating discussion of myth, when the ‘prose’ of the everyday gives way to the ‘poetry’ of revolution, and where the present wears the stage costumes of the past, can be found in Harold Rosenberg’s The Resurrected Romans (in The Tradition of the New). A wonderful interpretation of Marx it at the same time wrongly accepts Marx’s theory of history; thus the essay’s false premise that the 20th century had embarked on a new historical course. Alas, although full of marvellous insights, Marx’s theory of history was flawed at its core: there is no grand theory; history an endless war, where ideas, historical trends, the logic of the situation, contingency, institutions, movements and individuals fight it out in an endless series of battles. Rosenberg acknowledges this fact for the 20th century; his error to accept as true Marx’s analysis of the 19th; a period when history was read as a novel, with its own plot, supra-human hero - the bourgeoise - and cataclysmic end.

12. In Philip K. Dick we are inside a psyche prone to look at the world in just these intellectual terms, but which yet has the occasional glimpse of a world outside them. His fictions are of a madman who sees flashes of ordinary existence; though being mad he reverses the polarity: what for him is illusion and fantasy - the commonplace details of American life - is what is actual and true. The source of such craziness, together with the insights it produced, is Dick’s “unintelligent” intellectualism; his mind not subtle enough to recognise that ideas, existing in their own sphere, have their own unique quality, which must be understood on their own terms. Coarse and mechanical Dick’s tendency was to incorporate his ideas into everyday existence, and treat them as if no different from household objects or everyday chat. There was also the problem of a mindless syncretism; a trashy article on inter-planetary kidnappers given the same weight as a scholarly work on medieval theology. There is no judgement or taste here; no feel for the different levels of intellectual inquiry. A typical product of semi-educated America Dick made the mistake of believing in the popular culture of the time, giving it an actuality that came to displace the culture of the public realm and the habits of daily living. A similar thing happened to Mrs Keech and her small band of followers, though her ideas about flying saucers and spacemen seeped seamlessly into the rest of her life until the prophecy failed.

13. Think of Homer and the Greeks. Bernard Williams’ Shame and Necessity is a brilliant analysis.

14. The Tyranny of the Concept.

15.  This is nicely caught in Edgar Reitz’s Die Zweite Heimat. We remember Herman’s shock when Elisabeth Cerphal talks about nice Nazis.

16. For related discussion but with a different emphasis see Mahmood Mamdani’s penetrating essay on The Nuremberg Trials. He makes the crucial point that these trials conflated criminal with political justice. Then goes on to question the efficacy of criminal justice in political events, such as civil wars (South Africa is his test case). In crimes there are no ambiguities: one is either guilty or innocent. It is not so in politics, where people often act in good faith, when adhering to their beliefs. Should we treat politics as a crime? So easy to say yes, overlooking the consequences - that beliefs can quickly become a prison sentence. For Mamdani, to convict good faith as criminal behaviour can make it harder to end conflicts, as the potential losers are less likely to submit to what it is in effect a victor’s court. The result: the belief that there should be justice for yesterday’s victims - or what he calls “survivor’s justice” - comes before the actual lives of people still living through a continuing conflict.

To make politics a crime is to turn society into a courtroom; the dangers of which are nicely summarised by Alan Macfarlane in his lecture on witch-hunts. Though there is a paradox here: the process begins when politics defines itself as criminal.

17. Leopold should have read his Henry James (I suggest The Ambassadors). A comprehensive account of American-European literary encounters, which places James in a shifting pattern of cross-Atlantic moral perspectives, can be found in Malcolm Bradbury’s Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies And the Novel. 

18. This is nicely caught by the eponymous piece in Joan Didion’s Slouching to Bethlehem. In a San Francisco park a group of white radicals pick on some black kids, hoping to stir up racial hatred; part of a wider strategy of using a race war to bring ‘The System’ down. The response of the young hippy bystanders is fascinating: oh, it’s only ‘street theatre’ they say when pressed by the author. This reaction, in both its stupidity and its indifference, highlights the risks inherent in an innocence that wilfully ignores the immorality of these thugs, whose latent racism is disguised by their revolutionary rhetoric. If we wish to change the world we have a duty to first understand it. Alas, this is rarely recognised.

Didion’s essay gives the background to some of the mad ideas of Charles Manson, described in Christian Lorentzen’s The way out of a room is not through the door. Manson another effect of acting on wild beliefs about peace and love. Amongst any group of hippies there is likely to be one psychopath; their innocence both an attraction - it’s his hunting ground - and a protection: his victims blind to his evil will try to save him.

19. Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. It is an excellent quotation, though her book makes the mistake of trying to solve those “concrete ethical problems” by imposing upon them an ideal abstraction: this author a colleague of Kant rather than a friend of later Wittgenstein. For Bok lying is a universal evil. She thus exaggerates the badness of her bête noire - lying - while extolling an ideal - truth - that rarely exists outside a university seminar. This author not sufficiently aware of the oddness of truth, and how difficult it is to maintain in social (and especially political) life.

20. When Joan Didion writes of her love affair with John Wayne we wonder how many of the Sixties radicals were acting out the heroics of 1950s Hollywood; many of whose films - all those Westerns - portrayed values they now believed abhorrent. Or was it the Indians they were copying….

21. A good education should give rise to a tempered doubt and an informed faith. In the real world it tends to lead to an unthinking scepticism and crude beliefs (because the overwhelming majority lack the skill, will and time to apply themselves inside the knowledge factory). The world of Mrs Keech and Doctor Armstrong is the product of a typical American education, where people are educated just enough to read the newspapers and follow the TV. Because the focus of the book is very precise - the effects of belief failure on that belief - Festinger et al.’s study of the flying saucer group doesn't spend much time with Doctor Armstrong, its real leader - without his enthusiasm and organisation Mrs Keech would not have created this tiny cult. It is Doctor Armstrong’s higher educational attainments that encourages him to turn Mrs Keech’s strange ideas into social action. Education, rather than clarifying the differences tends to blur the boundary between the world of ideas and social behaviour; and then the odd individual comes along who tries to squash these two worlds into one.

22. This is the great insight of middle period Chabrol.

23. This film forces us to re-evaluate the fashionable existentialism of the period. If commitment itself is the good then Kate is a moral person; because she commits herself to the cause, whose content is of no intrinsic importance (Nazism as good as Communism, both the equal of flying-saucerism). The need to disguise the pusillanimity of much French activity during the war allowed such an obvious fact to be overlooked: better the comforting illusion that given a crisis we will choose to act, and this act - by some moral miracle - will be benevolent.

Sartre and de Beauvoir talked in universal terms yet their philosophy justified the most egregious sectarianism (see Tony Judt’s Imperfect Past). It is the common lot of intellectuals who put the idea before life. The idea, having a purity denied living things, creates believers, who must choose between the idea and the non-idea, defined as the pure and the impure, which quickly turns the human race into sinners (those who don’t believe) and saints (those who do). How intellectuals love to create barbarians! No matter how abstract the idea a part of nature always exists outside it. In social theory the ideas being smaller the moral squeeze is harder and tighter…a majority will always exist to be condemned.

24. The argument of Mary Midgley, in Wickedness.