Rise Like Lambs

In a wonderful piece in The Guardian writer Neal Ascherson likens our state of being in pandemic lockdown to cure de sommeil – the sleep cure:

Yet a great emergency, like this shared time of pestilence, leaves people sensing their own power, aware that they can act without waiting for yesterday’s leaders. When we finally wake up from the long sleep cure, there is a chance to make those “never agains” more than a fading dream. A chance – but lasting only for a few months of creative confusion as we all stand up again and look around. “Rise like lions after slumber,” said Shelley. There is plenty to do, but we have to do it fast.

Ascherson’s analogy obviously relies on it being possible for us to awaken to a new reality (and thereby be cured). Otherwise of course it’s just sleep. 

As it happens, Ascherson has been talking about us being on the verge of an awakening for a while now, long before the pandemic.  Herewith 2017: “[h]elplessness, not independence, is the false dream, the “sleep, wonderful sleep” now tempting Scotland again. But the alarm is going off.”

The alarm has been going off for a while now and yet we are still asleep. As Ascherson puts it, 2020 now: “for most people life is on hold. A trance descends, soothed by birdsong, a dog barking, an ambulance in the distance.”

To be fair to Ascherson the analogy between pandemic lockdown and a spiritual and cultural slumber seems almost to draw itself. With the lifting of the lockdown representing the possibility of (spiritual and cultural) awakening.

So apt perhaps that it may seem more than just an analogy but it is an analogy. In reality, when our eyes open – when lockdown is lifted – there won’t be any more buildings than there were or fewer mountains; the sky will still be blue and the grass green. The suffering will certainly still have happened. The slate will not be clean. Above all, the dead will not have risen.  

So transformation won’t follow naturally, as day follows night. On what basis then will we rise like lions and not lambs after slumber?

The temptation is to see what’s required to be above all a matter of resolve, resolution, will. Perhaps above all political will: the will for things to change and change for the better. 

We can perhaps see something of this in the narrative of renewal in the Scottish Government’s COVID-19: A Framework for Decision Making: “When things come apart, there is always the opportunity to put them back together differently.”

This document speaks of the political will to put in place the conditions needed for us to think and act differently. Ultimately we will have the chance to be differently, a redemption of sorts.

I don’t exactly deny that will is important; we will indeed need to will things differently after lockdown if we want them to be different.  

But here’s a thought: what if will and willing are in fact the issue?

What if underlying our most troubling issues, our obsession with possession and the consumerist nightmare that follows, along with our desire for absolute dominion over nature and the climate emergency that follows, and so on, there lies a corrupting and ultimately catastrophic conception of will and willing?

Maybe then the awakening Ascherson talks about – the sense of our power – is precisely not grounded in our capacity to will into being a new reality even one that is “better” (economically, socially, politically) but something altogether different, deeper.

What if we were to awaken to see as if for the first time? What if what mattered here was seeing not willing?

I am not the slightest bit religious but I cannot help but think exactly here of Corinthians 15:52: in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.

And we shall be changed. In the twinkling of an eye.

The COVID pandemic has created a crisis in our conceptual lives. We are experiencing the kind of conceptual emergency that Graham Leicester and Maureen O’Hara claim accompanies all real emergencies, including pandemics.

Not everyone will cope, not everyone will wake from this nightmare changed. Those who can Leicester and O’Hara call persons of tomorrow, persons who have the competences and literacies to meet the complex and ambiguous world with creativity and transgression, growth and transformation. 

Persons of tomorrow are the people who Ascherson claims will rise like lions from slumber, who will act without waiting for yesterday’s leaders.

This claim takes a familiar shape.  It’s worth just highlighting a couple of concerns that help us position the claim.

First, Leicester and O’Hara consider these competences and literacies to be innate which matters not just because that makes them natural but because it thereby seeks to disrupt any elitist or aristocratic reading of their claims. 

They recognise, I think, that persons of tomorrow cannot be the chosen few; but are potentially any of us. There is work to be done nonetheless to ensure that our material situation does not stand in the way of fulfilling that potential. Otherwise class and power will defeat their egalitarian intentions. That’s something for exploration elsewhere.

We must also not see persons of tomorrow as those simply with the strongest will and resolve. That is the source not of power but ruin. 

That’s the thought I want to pursue in the rest of what follows.

The idea that those who might lead us into a new tomorrow are distinctively strong-willed seems almost inevitable.  They possess the will both to create and to resist the temptations of the fallen world; the will to grow and transform.  And so on.

This is a tenacious picture. It is deeply rooted. Indeed it seems almost a tautology, a conceptual truth: leadership is resolution, resolve. 

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says: “A picture held us captive”. He had in mind a particular conception of language which takes words to be names and sentences to be combinations of such names. But the point holds generally about certain deeply ingrained assumptions (“pictures”) that lie before and to some extent outside rational critique.

I think that the conception of leadership which effectively indexes human excellence to strength of will is just such a picture.

Just as Wittgenstein sought to free us from the spell of a certain view of language so we must free ourselves from the spell of a certain view of human will if we are to awaken into anything resembling a new reality.

For me the beginning of wisdom here is to follow not Wittgenstein but one of the generation of philosophers that followed him: Iris Murdoch. 

Iris Murdoch has described the conceptual emergency Leicester and O’Hara identify more lucidly than anyone before or since.

For Murdoch the picture of leadership or human excellence as resolution, resolve is grounded in “far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality”. 

Speaking clearly from within the conceptual emergency, Murdoch says:

What have we lost here? And what have we perhaps never had? We have suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary. We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we have substituted a facile idea of sincerity.

So what awakening amounts to is not a move toward greater scientific clarity and insight – as if we just need our concepts to be sharper – nor indeed to a superficial new political settlement – as if all we need is for our concepts to be more powerful and persuasive. 

As Murdoch puts it, we must avoid “the dry symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole.” Instead we must awaken to “the real impenetrable human being”: “substantial, impenetrable, individual, indefinable, and valuable”.

The point is to use the experience of the pandemic to reflect soberly on the sense in which our conception of ourselves – as bare naked wills – has been driven by a fantasy, a fantastical sense of fulfilment and progress, of consumption and dominion. 

In this denuded state of lockdown, reflecting on what we have lost, we open the possibility of discovering that what is lost was never really what it seemed to be, and was, in certain critical regards, not only not valuable at all but positively damaging. 

As Ascherson says, “[t]he fantasies and anxieties are already with us. And here one comparison with wartime does work. The longer the virus emergency lasts, the more the memory of the pre-virus world begins to grow unreal, unconvincing.”

For “unconvincing” read “shallow and flimsy”.

What then is the alternative? Murdoch in turn turns to the incomparable Simone Weil: will is obedience not resolution.  

The ideal situation . . . is rather to be represented as a kind of ‘necessity’. This is something of which saints speak and which any artist will readily understand. The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like ‘obedience’.

When Ascherson says that we need to stand up and look around, the “look” here is not an active exercise of will and resolution, a taking and grasping. That is at the very heart of our definition of conceptualising, of applying our concepts – bringing things under categories and definitions, one thing rather than another. This reduction of the many to one has even been described as a form of violence.

But let us think of Ascherson’s standing up and looking instead as Murdoch’s “patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation”.  Let us look as a saint might on the suffering of others. Let us look as the artist might on the world around us. If we do then much of what ails us becomes not merely undesirable, as if it still requires us to choose or consent to not have it, but impossible. 

It is not clear that there is anything resembling an argument here. The best that one might do would be to canvass views on the following claim: murder is impossible. 

If one understands how such a claim might be true, despite murder being all too possible, one has perhaps begun to understand what Murdoch is saying here when she talks of the necessary obedience of saints and artists.

Murdoch has long since given us the prospectus for our awakening:

We need more concepts than our philosophies have furnished us with. We need to be enabled to think in terms of degrees of freedom, and to picture, in a non-metaphysical, non-totalitarian and non-religious sense, the transcendence of reality. A simple-minded faith in science, together with the assumption that we are all rational and totally free, engenders a dangerous lack of curiosity about the real world, a failure to appreciate the difficulties of knowing it. We need to return from the self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility; whereas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place. Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention, not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention.

Leicester and O’Hara talk about the threshold or foundational competence of persons of tomorrow being our ability to read ourselves, our culture and our world. We might instead say, a new tomorrow depends on our ability to attend to ourselves, our culture and our world with a patient, loving regard.

A vision then of leadership and human excellence that is based more on a vocabulary of attention rather than of control.

If so, I wonder then whether (contra Ascherson and Shelley) we might not after all prefer to rise like lambs after slumber?