In praise of prose

Near the end of his mammoth 6-volume Oxford History of Western Music (which, I must confess, I haven't read all the way through), Richard Taruskin suggests that musical notation may now have outlived its usefulness. Notation emerged in order to preserve and transmit music, to enable other people to play something far beyond the context it was originally composed in. But when I can upload my latest composition straight onto YouTube (be warned), why bother writing it down?

A few years ago, the top Facebook execs apparently decided that prose was going the way of musical notation, if not necessarily the dodo. Their thinking was similar to Taruskin's. Now that we can just speak into a camera and upload the video onto the world-wide web (as they're calling it), why would anyone go to the trouble of writing their thoughts down? 

The huge shift to video on social media that the tech execs anticipated hasn't quite materialized (at least not yet). There are a lot more videos online, and YouTube has become a venue for spoken commentary and argumentation (what the Greeks would have called rhetoric) from ordinary citizens in a way that was never quite possible in the world of TV, with its relatively few channels overseen by hierarchical corporations. And yet, people are also still writing a lot of prose.

I think that's a good thing. The written word, you see, still has its advantages.

The main one is that it allows both writer and reader to take things at their own pace. That means you can wait till you're really sure of what you're saying to write it down. You can look up everything you can find bearing for or against your argument and include it in a footnote. You can even change your mind and write a completely different sentence to the one you thought you'd be writing. And your reader can go back and puzzle out what you've written if they don't quite get it the first time round. They can pause for a while to ponder what you've said before moving on to the next paragraph.

Writing also has some plus points when compared to conversation. Now, I'm aware we're all intensely aware of the joys of in-the-flesh interaction at the moment, after weeks if not months of lockdown. In-person conversation has its plus points too (not least of which is that we seem to find it inherently enjoyable). But we're also all aware, I think, that there are things we choose not to say to people's faces. Often that's a very good thing. Often it's a result of an apparently natural tendency to want to be kind to each other. At other times it can be a result of hierarchy or outright intimidation. That means it can often be easier to state what we really think in the privacy of our own rooms (or, at least,  behind the partial screen of a laptop screen).

Of course, many people are retreating to their rooms to voice their thoughts - they're just doing so into a camera rather than on a page. They're obviously free to do so - I'll defend their right to that to the death, even if Voltaire might not really. But what shift to video there has been has brought with it its own issues. We're rarely intimidated in front of someone talking to us on YouTube in the way we might be in real life, and (as comment sections attest) we usually feel free to reply in ways we wouldn't in person (sometimes even to a pathological degree). But videos do transmit things about a person - like passion and attractiveness - in a way that often distracts us from the tough but necessary work of evaluating claims on their merits. Since the types of charisma that videos transmit aren't equably distributed, it can also exacerbate various forms of privilege.

All that, obviously, is why I've written this entry. 

Bow, wow

My first Greek teacher at school was one of those wizened, old-school schoolmasters they don't seem to make anymore. He was a deeply civilized man - he played the cello and the piano to concert standard as well as being able to talk more entertainingly about Cicero (an advanced skill in itself). He was usually kindly and often humorous, but he also had a stern side. I remember him leaning over my friend (who had just farted in class), his face inches away, pronouncing, very distinctly, 'Let nothing get in the way of learning!' It was rumoured he'd been in the SAS. When we got too rowdy supporting the First XV he would simply walk along the touchline and we'd all go quiet.

It was the same walk as he had in chapel. Somehow he was always the last one in, though I don't think that was an official role. We'd all be fidgeting, gossiping, poking each other with compasses, that sort of thing. He would walk down the aisle, his clipping shoes sealing up the silence behind him like he was zipping up the door of a tent. And when he got to the end, he would bow his head to the altar.

It was interesting to me partly because he was usually so upright. Later I encountered the same oscillation between bowing and upright posture at the San Francisco Zen Centre. It took me years of experience with different Buddhist groups before I could put aside my distaste for bowing to Buddha statues. Whether it was a Western egalitarianism or a Protestant distaste for idols, I didn't like it. Part of me still doesn't. And - something it's taken me years to admit to myself - part of me does.

The rationale for the formal postures they have at Western Zen centres tends to focus on mindfulness. Bowing and then standing upright and so on at different times certainly does require a certain alertness, but there's also something else going on. Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the SF centre, apparently tripled the number of bows there because he thought Westerners needed to 'get their heads down.' The Tibetans who do full protestations have a phrase about that practice as a way to 'turn the cup upside down.' Bowing is, in other words, a way of practising and cultivating humility.

But it can also go deeper. Pack animals that have clear hierarchies in the wild - dogs, for example - seem to feel more secure in the presence of a undisputed top dog (a role human owners have stepped into). We may have something of this in ourselves. Bowing to Christ or the Buddha may be as much about handing over responsibility to them as anything else. And surrendering responsibility over ourselves is something we seem to find strangely comforting. There's something of this in the erotic sphere too, with a whole subculture of people who enjoy putting themselves in subordinate positions. Kneeling as part of oral sex and as part of religious ritual may not be as far apart as we like to think (a similarity that's been noted by generations of poets).

An increase in humility in one person is often accompanied by a growth in pride somewhere else, though, and humility can sit dangerously close to humiliation. That's what used to give me the willies about bowing, and still does occasionally. The Kings of Persia used to demand a full prostration from their vassals, something the Greeks called proskynesis. (Earlier, Kings of Assyria had required the same form of obeisance; below is the black obelisk of Shalmeneser III, who is standing over the defeated Jehu of Israel). When Alexander the Great started demanding similar treatment, his Greek and Macedonian peers took it as a sign of a slide towards tyranny. Forcing people into head-down positions and onto the ground can be elements of torture, featured from medieval heresy trials to the prisons at Abu Ghraib.

The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's ritual of 'taking a knee' in protest against perceived injustice has now been more widely adopted as part of the 'Black Lives Matter' movement. The posture is uncannily similar to the way Catholics genuflect to the altar. That, of course, isn't necessarily to the discredit either of the protests or of Catholicism. As we've seen, bowing clearly has deep roots in human psychology as an expression of devotion. It's a central part of the human palette of gestures, as much as hugging someone or jumping for joy.

As the same time, given its potential for abuse it's easy to see why some (like the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab) have refused to take a knee, seeing it as a symbol of submission. That it clearly is, though perhaps what's really going on in such cases isn't a distaste for submission in any context, but simply for submission to that particular cause (and Raab did indicate that he would bend the knee for the Queen). My old Greek master bowed to his idea of God, but apparently not for much else. This might be part of the point of religious types of bowing, to find a way of satisfying the human urge for submission in a way that nonetheless preserves our independence. Whether that works out in practice will depend partly on your idea of God.

Others will particularize their acts of submission, holding their heads up high in everyday life while choosing not to in certain contexts. But it might make sense to always remain a little on guard wherever we choose to bow our heads. I know it's possible to get too hung up on this; after all, bowing is a very common way simply of greeting other people across the Far East. But when it comes to more ritualized bowing, the kind of bowing that turns your heart upside down, it might be worth choosing your masters wisely. Be careful, in other words, what you bow to.

Lockdowns and liberalism

For all the different forms the debate over the lockdowns has taken, it's the absence of one argument that's surprised me the most. At least until recently (as the lockdowns have dragged on), I was aware of very few people, at least in mainstream media, emphasizing that the lockdowns were a violation of our civil liberties.

That's surprising, because they clearly did restrict our liberties to a degree that's probably not been paralleled since the Second World War. Putting the whole population under house arrest is quite a serious move, not only virtually cancelling freedom of movement, but also related rights (some of which are constitutionally enshrined in the US) like freedom of assembly - at least until the 'Black Lives Matter' protests.

Come to think of it, though, maybe the reason the civil liberties argument hasn't had much of an airing is simple: it wouldn't be particularly convincing in the context of a global pandemic. That's because a pandemic is a situation in which my freedom clearly impacts others. My going about the place risks spreading a disease to others, and thus doing them harm.

In other words, it violates John Stuart Mill's 'harm principle,' perhaps the essential principle of liberalism. The idea is that people should be free to do as they like as long as they don't harm others. The only problem with this famous principle is that it's no help at all.

Everything we do harms others in some way; even if all we do is sit at home and meditate we're using up space and resources that might have gone to somewhere else. And besides, someone might find my sitting at home and meditating annoying and hence (so the complaint might run) psychologically harmful. So where do we draw the line?

As an objection to Mill's principle as a philosophical principle this seems pretty devastating. But it may retain its usefulness as pragmatic principle or as a rule of thumb. Most liberal democratic societies have in fact operated more or less on the principle that people shouldn't do things which clearly cause others serious harm (on a reasonable definition of 'harm'). Who decides what clearly constitutes harm on a reasonable definition? We do, through our democratically-enacted laws.

This isn't the blog post where I tell you whether I think the lockdowns did more good than harm. At least not at any length: my sense at this point is that, while Covid-19 is clearly dangerous (killing something in the region of 0.1% of people it infects), it's significantly less dangerous than some thought (this widely-read article depended on a 3-4% fatality rate, for example). Against this danger we have to stack all the negative health effects of the lockdown.

Part of those will flow from the economic downturn caused by the lockdowns. But part of them will flow from the suspension of our freedoms. And they'll do so in a way which sheds light on the value of those freedoms.

Simply put, freedom isn't simply a matter of the consequences of what are sometimes taken to be natural entitlements. Besides its moral claims, it also has pragmatic ones. One of these is that it allows decisions about individual lives to be made by the people who know the most about those lives - those individuals themselves.

The lockdowns effectively prevented people from making decisions in reaction to the circumstances of their own lives. My own parents are an example: my father suffers from a medical condition that benefits from him going to the gym, something that also helps release my mother from the strain of being a care-giver for a time. But the British government decided that it would be best for them to stay cooped up at home.

This is a version of a problem Joanna Williams touched on in her piece on domestic violence and the lockdown. She concluded that that problem could easily have been eased if the government had simply decided to trust those who needed 'to take a second walk or go and sit on a park bench for half an hour.'

The point is that liberalism doesn't just function as a system of moral entitlements. It's also partly a solution to problems of information. How do we know who needs to go sit on a park bench, get out and exercise, or whatever? The government could try to gather all that information itself, but it's far simpler just to let individuals make their own choices. They know their own circumstances better than anyone else, and they're more motivated to take care of themselves.

This is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the points at which we can see liberalism and democracy intersect or overlap. Democracy, too, can be seen as the consequence of moral entitlements (the idea that people should be political equal). But it can also be seen as a way of gathering individual preferences in the most efficient way - by allowing people to express them, and then counting them up.

Of course, one of the things people have long seemed to want is a stable state that can ensure a basic level of order. That usually involves imposing some minimal rules. But there's a danger of the state overstepping its bounds, like a clumsy Gulliver, keen to help, who ends up squashing whole footprints of Lilliputians. The trouble is precisely that he's too big, and too far away, to see what the the smaller people are up to, or to hear everything they are trying to say to him.

There are obviously only two solutions: Gulliver knows his place, or he's replaced by a more nimble giant composed entirely of Lilliputians, a millions-strong Megazord. This is something we will come back to. In the meantime, a well-meaning Gulliver is stalking the earth - lovingly and crushingly.