The Doubter's Companion (40 page)

12. Centre of the greatest empire in the history of the world.

UNIVERSITY
   A place in which a civilization's knowledge is divided up into exclusive territories.

The principal occupation of the academic community is to invent dialects sufficiently hermetic to prevent knowledge from passing between territories. By maintaining a constant flow of written material among the specialists of each group they are able to assert the acceptable technique of communication intended to prevent communications. This in turn establishes a standard which allows them to dismiss those who seek to communicate through generally accessible language as dilettantes, deformers or popularizers. See:
ACADEMIC CONSULTANTS
and
SCHOLASTICISM.

URBAN RICH
   People for whom society means dressing up to go to balls for fatal diseases.

URBANE WEATHER PATTERNS

RAIN IN JUNE.

Terrible for June brides.

RAIN IN JULY, AUGUST.

Terrible for summer holidays.

RAIN IN SEPTEMBER, OCTOBER.

Terrible for the
vendange.

RAIN IN NOVEMBER.

It rains everywhere in November, except South Africa, where the climate was perfect before the political problems began.

RAIN IN DECEMBER THROUGH APRIL.

Terrible for skiing.

RAIN IN MAY.

Makes the mosquitoes impossible during the summer.

RAIN AND LACK OF RAIN IN AGRICULTURE.

Farmers complain about everything. Besides, they're subsidized.

SNOW

Terrible except in ski resorts.

SUN

Causes skin cancer on beaches.

WIND

Causes headaches and sometimes suicide unless you own a sailboat.

V

VENEREAL
   From Venus, the goddess of love, this word refers to the reality of desire. With the rise of Protestantism and science the word “disease” was tacked on in a revealing combination of categorization and moralizing.

“Which disease?” “The disease of love.”

VENICE
   The original model of modern dictatorship, in which commercial power finds its cultural expression in painting, architecture and music. Anything, that is, except language.

The merchant princes of the Venetian Republic feared that debate, whether in the cultural or the political form, would undermine the state's commercial imperative. They used their power and money to build palaces and churches. To decorate them with painting and statuary. To fill them with the most glorious music. The lists of great Venetian artists and composers are endless. So long as the Republic remained an aggressive economic power, the list of writers was an empty page. The power of language was limited to commercial paper or gossip so that it could not interfere with the corporatist dictatorship.

Words didn't gain a larger, more important role in Venice until the plays of Carlo Goldoni began to examine and mock society's structures in the eighteenth century. By then the Republic's power had slipped away and the hard-edged,
nouveau riche
forms of the city were mutating into a harmless romantic shell. See:
CAPITALISM.

VICO, GIAMBATTISTA
   Neapolitan philosopher of the early eighteenth century. Perhaps the first modern humanist thinker to be buried alive beneath the propaganda of the rational absolutists.

Vico criticized the vaunting of judgement without context; that is, of rational abstractions applied piecemeal without reference to reality or history. His was an inclusive approach opposed to what he saw as rational exclusion or exclusivity. Above all, he reintroduced the role of time and space, which humanists regularly return to, in order to argue that problems cannot simply be isolated and solved. They belong to civilization in all its senses. Whether “solved” or left alone, they will reverberate well beyond their small space. Vico's was an argument of equilibrium or
BALANCE.

VIRGINITY
   Our tendency to confuse chastity with goodness has been replaced by other confusions. But the equation of personal physical purity and public ethical virtue remains.

This is a long-standing
non sequitur
in Western civilization, predating even Christianity. It is an area in which we could learn a great deal from the clarity of the Buddhist tradition. There virginity and general physical virtue has a role. It indicates that the individual is withdrawing from any contact with the day-to-day activities of the world in order to concentrate on his own salvation. Monks don't fornicate, but neither do they garden.

The rest of the populace, who are unwilling to make this great effort, must live as best they can knowing they run the long-term risks of reincarnation. There is lots of room for them to do good, either through practical actions or by feeding the helpless monks. Virginity and physical puritanism are there if they want to embrace them, but this is unlikely to affect whether they are reborn as a slug or a king.

VISION
   A state of honesty which is often misrepresented as a divine purpose.

At the end of Euripides'
The Bacchae
, Agavë holds the dripping, lacerated head of her son, whom she has herself killed and ripped to pieces while caught up in a vision. Her father, Cadmus, says: “And whose head is that you are holding in your arms?”

Agavë:A lion's—so the women said who hunted it.

Cadmus: Then look straight at it. Come, to look is no great task.

Agavë looks; and suddenly screams.

Agavë:What am I looking at? What is this?

Cadmus: Look at it steadily; come closer to the truth.

Agavë:I see—O gods, what horror! Oh, what misery!
¹

Visions of redemption or infinite wealth or superior destinies for a particular racial group are among the thousands of false visions in whose face we fear to look, and so believe that we are hunting lions.

Yet Shiva Naipaul has quite rightly pointed out that: “a people without a vision must inevitably perish.”
²
People who are panicked by the temporary nature of their own lives, insist that vision involves subservience to structure. They reassure themselves by believing that humans can have no purpose unless it is grand enough to make the individual a servant of some rational or universal system. In such a case, a flawed methodology such as the market-place or centralized management or free trade—each of which can be useful if treated as a practical method and balanced with others—is happily mistaken for a vision.

But an honest vision is a matter of seeing; at best of seeing ourselves. When we cannot, we slip into a life of pretence where our existence is dependent on those who can see on our behalf. These religious or political or economic visionaries encourage us to wallow in comforts which we shall know only by reflection and promise.

To see is to come to terms with ourselves. For a community or a nation, an honest vision is a shared internal agreement on the nature of the relationship between the individuals. Although this is a practical rather than an abstract relationship, it is not principally one of self-interest or of contract. It is a matter of seeing the shared interest.

VOLTAIRE

“That nasty man who did so much good.”

Paul Valéry

Is it because Voltaire wasn't afraid to be nasty that he did so much good? Almost certainly. There is no convincing evidence that writers can do their job by being nice.

And why should they be nice? To be asked to dinner? To be part of a corporation of writers, which like all corporate groups rewards discretion? To be rewarded with money, prizes and titles?

Nice writers are usually working for someone or senile or in the wrong business. Those who have done the most good, as Voltaire pointed out, have “mostly been persecuted.”
³
The nasty sort continue to be persecuted in most countries. In the West they have to deal with more sophisticated assaults such as bankrupting lawsuits and job loss. Worst of all—in this society of expensive communication systems—they are threatened by irrelevance.

What about their messy personal lives, their greed, their jealousies, their hypocrisy? Who cares? Voltaire himself had a more than average number of flaws and contradictions. He still created the language which ended a regime.

Writers aren't supposed to be life models or religious prophets, clean of mind, clean of body. Nor are they supposed to be loved.

Their only job is to make language work for the reader. That is the basis of free speech. Whatever the vested interests of the day may be, they invariably favour an obscure language of insider's dialects and received wisdom. So the writer turns nasty. It's a public service.

W

WAR
   Children love war, especially civil war.

In peacetime parents think children can be told what to do. Civil wars are wonderful because suddenly children can be grown-ups. It's an opportunity to get rid of their parents, sometimes permanently. Instead of being bribed with toy guns and games, they can shoot real people. They can shoot each other.

WAR ON DRUGS
   A type of war which is redeclared every few months by Western government leaders without intervening victories or defeats.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on police work, sophisticated anti-drug technology, special helicopters, detection equipment, border controls, spraying jungle areas from the air and undercover campaigns, both local and international. The result is periodic drug busts which are publicized as big or enormous or horrifying or exciting. These are accompanied by celebratory photo sessions for the press, involving bags of drugs and piles of captured weapons.

However, the authorities have never managed to intercept more than 10 per cent of the drugs sold each year.

These powders are virtually undetectable. They flow like water across all governmental barriers seeking out the inevitable openings the way floods flow to the lowest ground. There are thousands of smuggling networks at any one time. Yet the police may spend years uncovering a small group. Within a few weeks a new network will have replaced the one which was “smashed,” as the headlines announced. The reality is that drugs can only be dealt with at the stage of production or that of consumption. Everything in between—which is where we put all our efforts—is a waste of time.

The causes of production and consumption are the same. They involve some combination of poverty, despair, social instability, lack of education and lack of economic alternatives. If governments were serious about drugs they would spend their money not on combative reactive technology but on removing the causes.

This would mean integrating the problem of heroin and cocaine production into the forefront of foreign policy, which is never done. Although drugs represent the single largest nefarious influence in international finance, they are not considered a sufficiently dignified matter to balance against strategic concerns or trade competition.

As for consumption, Western countries continue to find themselves too short of cash to do other than let the social infrastructures of the poor stagnate. Even a reform-minded American government finds itself scrambling to find funds for education and health care. In the United States alone, two billion dollars a year could be recuperated from the government's subsidies of drug wars lost, in advance.

WEATHER FORECASTERS
   Experts who never apologize for being wrong.

The concept of expertise seems to negate that of accountability. Thus, while there is nothing remarkable about being wrong, it is astonishing to speak to the same audience the next day without either an apology or some sort of explanation. Since for the purposes of argument it must be assumed that neither speaker nor listener has received a blow to the head during the intervening hours, there is a suggestion that either the expert or the expert-worshipper cannot bear the admission of error and therefore of a flawed past and therefore of memory. Like sunshine and rain, expertise always resides in the future.

WESTERN CIVILIZATION
   This phenomenon is particularly aggressive about its superiority. Even among themselves Westerners are constantly asserting that they have the best religion, language, method of government or production. They can't wait to tell people everywhere in the world how to dress, pray, raise their children and organize their cities.

Non-Westerners are at first charmed, then paralyzed by our insistent self-assurance. And when, a decade later, our reorganization of cities such as Bangkok has led to disaster or of most African economies to famine and urban poverty, they find themselves pressured to take Western advice on how to get out of their mess.

What makes us such know-it-all busybodies? Christianity? The deformation of Christianity? The Reformation? The fall of Christianity? These are just four among the dozens of standard and contradictory explanations.

It may simply be that we have not got over being the Barbarians. Indeed our problem has never been the fall of the Roman Empire but, with a few Italian exceptions, that we are not the Romans, who felt the same way about not being the Greeks.

Western history harps on about the growing reliance of the degenerate Romans upon the virile Barbarians to man their armies. So virile that we eventually sacked Rome and took it over. This interpretation leaves the impression that Rome was filled with overweight people lying about in a drunken stupor or fornicating. We tend to skip over the high and, from a Christian point of view, positive civilization into which Rome had evolved. Even a glance at the fifth-century mosaics of Ravenna shows a level of artistic skill which we, the Barbarians, saw, admired, but were unable to absorb. And so it was lost for a thousand years. We may have conquered Rome, but we remained bumpkins. As documents of the time indicate, we were treated as such by the élites of the Empire.

Charlemagne was not simply claiming historic legitimacy when he had himself crowned Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in St. Peter's on Christmas Day of the year 800. He was giving in to his own colonial emotions by claiming the status of those who had been superior to his people. As with the classic
nouveau riche
, he had succeeded in his own terms but felt obliged to wrap himself in the trappings of the thing he could never be. Charlemagne was the great king of a large but backward tribe called the Franks (see: PROGRESS). He wasn't a Roman emperor. He was a Barbarian.