Politics
Now then, are we getting anywhere?
Published 20 December 1999
New Statesman Millennium - For most of history, people thought it had been downhill all the way since the Trojan wars. Then 18th-century philosophers invented progress. James Buchan asks if this has turned out well
The sight of Emmanuel Petit or Patrick Vieira playing football in gloves never fails to cause in me a faint tremor of annoyance. This small disturbance in the pleasure I take from watching football arises not from the gloves themselves, but from my objection to them. I fear I may have come to resent all progress or innovation in sport, like one of those old chaps in blazers: have become, if only in sport, conservative.
For that reason, I have subjected my mental attitudes to the most scrupulous analysis.
My objection is not to those players' Frenchness or Arsenalness or tendency to feel the London cold. I do not believe they are a fall from some British footballing grace, epigones of Danny Blanchflower or Nobby Stiles, who wouldn't know what gloves were. I do not mind the self-consciousness of modern life, which has created in our easy age not so much the division of labour that so fascinated the 18th century, but a division of leisure so that every skateboarder or weekend gymnast must wear emblems of his sporting allegiance as garish as the coat-facings of the Beaufort Hunt. People dress for sport with the professional decorum once reserved for the undertaker.
Nor is it that, in drawing the attention of the fans and television to their hands, those players are parading a limb that, for the purposes of football, has no legitimate existence and anyway lies athwart the true tendency of the pastime, like a blank in Russian roulette.
No, I object to the gloves because football is a game and therefore has rules that are supposed to be timeless, unhistorical and, because they are rigid, brittle; so that each innovation of a fashionable character - long hair, short hair, gloves, tights, booze, cocaine, sarongs - threatens the survival of the game; and one day it'll end up like a children's kickabout in the park on Sunday, when one of the children, who is tired or out of sorts, sits down on the ball.
It is in the nature of a conservative to see society as rigid and vulnerable and any alteration in it to be catastrophic. The penalty shoot-out is introduced, the parliamentary rights of hereditary peers are abolished, the conservative screws up his eyes and shuts his ears. A minute passes and then another. He opens his eyes and unbinds his ears. The familiar world, minus tied matches and lords, smiles back at him. The progressive, in contrast, sees society as robust and just waiting to be pushed and pulled about at will. If one is timid, the other is rash.
Those political stances correspond roughly to the psychological conditions known as pessimism and optimism. Writing this, in the first cold weather of the last year of the last century of the second millennium from the incarnation, in a mood of mild pessimism, I try to summon enthusiasm for the next item in each of those series and to believe that humanity has something to show for its years. I want to know if there is such a thing as progress, if we are getting anywhere.
Except to the Christian, the millennium is no sort of anniversary. It commemorates not so much the incarnation, about which few people in this country appear to care, but the calendar now in general use. In this vacuum of significance, the least trivial item is the millennium or Y2K bug. Immanent, transcendent, quite beyond the control of individuals, it reveals the triumph of the English-language computer programmer and the Gregorian calendar. A content-free succession of ones and zeroes has conquered the lands of Islam and the obstinate heathen where Christianity failed. The bug is thus one of those modern inventions, like Coca-Cola or Windows, whose very lack of content permits its dominion over palm and pine.
Speaking simply, there are two ways of looking at history: as progress or decay. Antiquity saw history as a degeneration from the Saturnian golden age, where men and women lived in conditions of primordial felicity. This progress of ruin is presented with a melancholy delight in the greatest work of literary criticism in antiquity, known in English as Longinus's On the Sublime. This book, which was popular in the 18th century, sketches a sort of big-bang theory of both literature and human conduct.
Humanity was at its peak in those passages of the Iliad when heroes fought their combats around the walls of Troy, and it's been downhill all the way since then. Since few people read Homer, let alone On the Sublime, this argument is not much heard nowadays. Likewise the Christian notion that we have fallen from grace with God. Both attitudes, however, survive as a phantom or vestige, for they appeal to the pessimist.
In their place is a cast of mind that developed in the 17th century in which mankind is seen to be evolving into higher stages of culture and organisation in a sort of spiritual or theological vacuum. By the following century, and particularly in Scotland, philosophers had worked out elaborate stadial theories of human progress in which what they called commercial society supersedes stages of agriculture and pastoralism. The clash and resolution of individual selfish interests and a few tested institutions make both God and virtue superfluous.
This philosophic history, which is best known nowadays from the opening sections of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, was never intended to be taken as factual. The chief voice in dissent was Adam Ferguson's, who believed that modern Europe had no monopoly of virtue or happiness, and that every age has "its consolations, as well as its sufferings". Neither his criticism, nor the Romantic reaction, could prevent these theories of advance from gaining ground. In our times, they have if anything reinforced their hold on a western mind that has come to value ignorance and censoriousness.
In my lifetime, there has been a revolution in our thinking in which the equality of humanity and of the sexes, hitherto a strong prejudice, has taken on the character of certainty. The rivers of forgetting that separate us from antiquity and Christianity - ignorance of Greek, disbelief in God - are swelled by a third, which separates us from all unemancipated ages, including the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The past is not only dead and gone, it is also bad. It has become what Ferguson feared: "A simple negation of our virtues."
We are now more censorious than the Victorians. Years from now our literary critics will appear less broad-minded than Bowdler, our art historians less scrupulous than Viollet-Le-Duc. Our chief aesthetic pleasure is the infantile anachronism of Shakespeare in Love or the costume dramas on television.
No doubt there has been progress. Our generation has a much more complex view of the universe and of its history, although it would be rash to mistake quantum mechanics and cold, dark matter as more than ingenious mental pictures: as Adam Smith was always reminding himself, philosophic systems - that is, scientific theories - are works of the imagination and should not be confounded with "the real chains which Nature makes use of to bind together her several operations".
The prestige enjoyed at present by natural scientists is perhaps the gloomiest portent for the future. Meanwhile, anything of the remotest interest is deemed metaphysical and beyond the reach of knowledge.
There are more of us than in previous ages, with more possessions, in better health (except in Africa and Russia) and living longer (except ditto). Whether that is progress is matter for debate, but in truth none of us really believes in progress, for our own experience, as individuals, is not of progress but of loss.
Each human being senses that his own life is a falling away from a childhood of freshness and affection, from a youth of vigour and scope to a disillusioned middle age. There is thus a contradiction in our attitudes between our conception of what we ourselves are doing and what the species is up to, between humanity's sprightly stride upwards into sunlit hills and our own glide or stumble to the grave. The trouble with time is that it is counted out in lifetimes.
Contradiction of this sort is repugnant to our orderly minds and each of us seeks to resolve it. One solution might be that only we are miserable, and that the rest of humanity is doing quite well, thank you. Such a notion would not survive a glance up at the faces in a Tube carriage or a bulletin of television news. A second solution is that, yes, we are each going to hell in a bucket but that our deterioration is all for the good of the species, and we are like the litter on the forest floor from which the future timber is made. That is, as they say, nice to know. The third is that happiness is not about, as it were, being happy or having fun or pleasure or anything like that but about occupation and decency (as Ferguson thought) or just getting through life in a dignified sort of way. My guess, for what it is worth, is that we experience happiness only when it has passed into regret.
I suspect that is why, even when we detect progress in the public arena and applaud the end of the cold war, the advent of e-mail, anti-cholesterol medicines, electronic shopping and all those useful inventions capitalism gives us, we are ourselves engaged in a frantic search for relics of an anterior contentment.
In the natural world, which corresponds roughly to what is called the country, oak leaves and blackbirds are substantially the same as what they were when we were children, though only the optimist would regard them as timeless or in any way privileged. (On a beach near me at this time of year, you see Russian songbirds blown off course by the east wind. To the inexperienced eye, Yeltsin himself shambling down the sands could not look more exotic.)
Even in the artificial world, which roughly corresponds to the city, one comes across survivals from the past whose persistence unaltered through the wreck of change is all but inexplicable: circuses, candyfloss, dentist drills, claw hammers, neckties and those foods (bacon, cheese, smoked salmon) whose very purpose the refrigerator has rendered obsolete and yet survive on the force of their own inertia. It would be possible to recover from this commercial and mechanical debris a vision of happiness in the city, and many people do so. This nostalgia for commercial objects of an unaltered style and function is particularly strong in the United States, where otherwise sober men and women fall into a reverie at the sight or taste of Oreos or Twinkies. I suspect that the generation now growing up will be the last to regard the past and future as distinct mental experiences, one of knowledge, the other of wish and fear. Both past and future will be objects of yearning.
Proust's solution was simply to abolish time. (My selection of Proust is not a piece of fogeyism but a sincere belief that our century did its work in its first 20 years - Picasso's blue period, Rilke, the theories of relativity and so on - and we have needed the next 80 to figure out what they were up to.) In the passage of the last book of Remembrance of Things Past, entitled "An afternoon party at the house of the Princesse de Guermantes", Proust proposed that there are certain rare sensations in a person's existence that are separated or withdrawn from time. It is a passage I go back to often, as a murderer might to a scene of his crime, for in reading it I have the fleeting sense that Proust has managed to square my particular circle of footballers' gloves and Adam Ferguson, of progress and loss: "The truth surely was that the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions, had enjoyed them because they had something that was common to a day long past and to now, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when, through one of those identifications of the present with the past, it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time. This explained why it was that my anxiety on the subject of my death had ceased."
For a moment, waiting in the ante-room for the afternoon concert to finish, the reader senses that Proust may really have cracked the riddle. Yet one has only to copy out the passage to cease to believe in it, and in any triumph over time and death, except within the covers of a novel.
The century thus ends as it began, with us dejected and utterly baffled, and no doubt that is the source of our ingenuity and our achievements, and the cause of progress in human affairs.
James Buchan's novel "A Good Place to Die" has just been published by Harvill Press
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