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Ray Robertson is the author of nine novels, five collections of non-fiction, and a book of poetry. His sixteenth book, Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars), will be published in October.
I wear my apoliticism proudly. That was one of the things that were so appealing about the idea of being an artist when I was young: Only the art had to be good, not the person. Not the life. What a revelation. What a relief. Given what I had to work with personality-wise, and what I could make out about the world around me, it seemed like a sensible choice.
Studying philosophy as an undergraduate, it wasn’t surprising to learn that others had thought something along the same lines. Which is one of the reasons we read, particularly the illustrious dead: to discover that we share a common human nature and that our peeves and passions aren’t ours to suffer or celebrate alone. Although I was interested in moral philosophy and why and how human beings behave as we do, there was Hobbes’ Leviathan, where he argued that “politics have no relation to morals” and George Orwell, who wrote that “politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” That didn’t require too much contemplation to ring true. If philosophy was about the pursuit of “truth” – whatever its questionable track record (here we are, asking the same basic questions Plato posed 2,500 years earlier) – politics was about the pursuit of power (those who have it, hoping to hold on to it; those lacking it, aspiring to gain it), each side often employing whatever mendacity or misinformation necessary to get the job done. As for politicians themselves, “We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office,” Aesop maintained in his Fables. Turn on the TV or scan the news or pick up a history book and that one seems pretty much on the money as well. In the end, the pre-Socratic Epicurus seemed to get it right: “We must release ourselves from the prison of affairs and politics.” And so I did – and do.
Not that I didn’t – and don’t – act politically, or at least attempt to as far as the limitations of personal laziness and bad habits allow. “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics,’” Orwell noted in his essay, Politics and the English Language, as mandatory a piece of polemic as there is. So, yeah, I don’t eat pigs or cows or lambs or goats. I also avoid big box stores and don’t drink my water out of plastic bottles, and in our will, my wife and I have left instructions that upon our deaths all of our money is to be divided between the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Toronto Humane Society. Not that I’m claiming ethical immunity. Far from it.
Reasoning that if you don’t pet it, it’s okay to eat it, I do occasionally consume birds and fish, something my vegan friends are willing to tolerate until I wise up and come around to see the moral error of my flesh-eating ways. We use, on average, one plastic bag a day for our dog’s daily dump. That’s 365 bags a year, and we’ve had dogs for 30 years, so that’s about ten and a half thousand bags. Ten and a half thousand plastic bags. Of course, there are biodegradable dog waste bags you can buy – which we have bought in the past and use from time to time – but my wife’s parents are always offering us their Sealtest milk bags, and they’re free, and we’re on a budget, so … Better than some, not as good as others, so it goes: This is who I am and what I do and what I don’t.
Much of the rest of the time, I read and write books and listen to music and watch old movies and walk the dog and attempt to be a better friend and son and husband than I was last year, and generally try my best to avoid being a fully functioning, contributing member of society. “To be a useful person has always appeared to me something particularly horrible,” Baudelaire wrote in his Intimate Journals. Especially for someone coming from a working-class background – and whose entire life was preprogrammed to consist of, in the following order of utilitarian necessity: school, work, procreation, death – this was a liberating sentence to come across as a twenty-something. Liberating and inspiring. I’ve worked on my uselessness. I’ve put thought into it. As much as possible – because life does have a way of getting in the way of life – I’ve made it a priority to make the time to do what I want, when I want to do it. Time to read and write, time to walk and wonder, time to marvel at how there’s so little time.
It’s unclear when it became compulsory during my lifetime for artists – scratch that: for people – to be ostentatiously virtuous, stridently complying members of society, and that everyone needs to be on the same side and careful about what they say and do and think. I’m not a sociologist or a political theorist, so I can’t say. I do think it’s undeniable that something changed in regards to the world of popular music, at least, when rock and roll was invited inside the family home. Music videos were the Trojan horse that sneaked respectability and coiffed congeniality into the music industry for good. It wasn’t enough any more to move people’s souls. Now you also had to be good-looking and likeable or at least relatable, which automatically disqualifies 90 per cent of most legitimate artists. Most people become artists because they’re not good-looking or likeable or relatable. I’ve got a feeling that Phil Collins had something to do with it as well, although I’m not quite sure how.
Then there was Rock Against Racism and Rock the Vote. I’m still waiting for Rock Against Responsibility. I don’t want my musicians bothering with being nice people. Artists are absolved from having to finish their vegetables or practice acts of random kindness. Being an artist is hard enough work. For most of us – artists or not – sometimes just being yourself every day is difficult enough.
Increasingly, though, it seems as if moral certainty and intellectual omniscience have become compulsory attributes that every citizen is expected to possess. Which doesn’t make much sense, at least not in the world I live. I’m old enough to remember being pretty certain that putting your pop can and your plastic pudding cup in the garbage pail was the single most important ecological thing one could do, and that litterers were mother earth’s number one nemesis. Looking back, one’s ethical track record is akin to the photo albums of our youth, where the evidence would tend to indicate that we really did believe we were rocking that mullet and those leg warmers.
As for incontestable “truths” – whether moral, political, aesthetic, or metaphysical – history tells us that these can often mean different things at different times to different people. And we don’t need to turn to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, where he asserts that “The universe is transformation, life is opinion,” to recognize this fact. For many years I believed that I wasn’t getting fatter, only that my clothes were constantly shrinking in the dryer. Turns out I was wrong. Again. To err is human, particularly when one is discussing what’s morally “true” and what’s “false” or when frozen pizzas are on sale at the grocery store. And that’s okay.
What’s not okay – even to me, somebody who tends to stay on society’s sidelines – is someone impairing someone else’s ability to say or to think something, whether by shouting them down or attempting to censor them or otherwise. “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” Voltaire famously wrote – or didn’t; the source appears to be untraceable; not, “I will defend your right to say something, but only if I happen to agree with you.” What’s not okay is someone impairing someone else’s ability to say or to think something even when they’re wrong. Especially when they’re wrong, since this would appear to be a fairly common human occurrence, at least around my house, and is often a necessary step along the way to changing one’s mind and being right or at least a little less wrong. What’s not okay is the ever-more-fundamentalist tenor of our times that both espouses and encourages the kind of simple-minded oppositional thinking (left versus right, good people versus bad people, et cetera) that is the blight of contemporary politics and most public discourse (and, not so incidentally, anathema to all good art), and pronounces as sacrosanct the à la mode orthodoxies that must never be ignored, mocked, or even questioned.
Sanctimonious certainty is not only deleterious to potential personal or collective change and growth (or even simple acknowledgment of uncomfortable facts or contradictions, the necessary precondition to any prospective shift in point of view), it’s also one of the most intoxicating, addictive, destructive drugs there is. In his novel Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley has one of his characters say:
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
It’s also a drug whose us-versus-them allure none of us is ever entirely impervious to. Which is why, thankfully, we have sports. Anyone who doubts the deep-rooted reality of this human compulsion toward us-versus-themness has never sat with my parents and me during a televised Detroit Red Wings-Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game, when the Red Wings never receive a penalty they deserve and rarely get any of the lucky breaks, and loud, profanity-laced braying directed against the Maple Leafs’ top players is neither uncommon nor discouraged. I’ve also been known to unwittingly employ almost every form of logical fallacy all on my own – ad hominem attacks, circular arguments, hasty generalizations – when sufficiently engaged or goaded. Not that I can remember any of the reasons why I temporarily lost my logical marbles, but I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. It usually does.
And as anyone who’s ever logged on or signed in knows, the plague of social media only encourages this unthinking, reactionary tendency, virtually demanding that one make one’s opinion known instantaneously and unequivocally on whatever topic happens to be trending at the moment. Until the next important topic comes along 10 minutes later. Regardless, if you own a smart phone, it’s imperative that you have an opinion on, say, what’s going on in Syria this week, even if you couldn’t locate it on a map. Apathy is not an option and ignorance is not an impediment if you’ve got a phone and a strong WiFi signal.
“Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies,” Nietzsche declared in Human, All Too Human, and the ends always justify the means when you’re right (or left) and they’re wrong and the “truth” must win out; just ask whoever’s in charge this week of banning books at the local library for the moral good of the community. Fundamentalism knows no single political persuasion or particular ideological viewpoint; religious or secular, born-again Baptist or the recently Woken, their narrative is the only narrative, and to ignore it or to question it is tantamount to treason and to risk censure or ostracism or worse. And this, I believe, is wrong.
“These are my humors and opinions”; Montaigne wrote. “I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed.” Ending with a quotation from Montaigne is fitting. He’s one of the sanest writers we have, and living as we are on an environmentally moribund planet and in an increasingly fundamentalist, ideationally intolerant world, we need all the sanity we can get.
“We dignify our stupidities when we put them in print.”
Montaigne wrote that too.