The process of discovering sounds has always been an aspect of music I’ve been connected to, even when I wasn’t aware of its potential and possibilities. During childhood and adolescence, I experimented with instruments, recorded and improvised. It was a somewhat chaotic, intuitive process without pretensions.
In my early teens my parents offered me a classical guitar and a few weeks later a friend lent me an electric one. With these instruments, my conscious interest in music really began. I mostly listened to heavy metal bands.
I began subscribing to guitar magazines, mainly from Germany and the United States, with exercises by Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, and spent hours listening to the solos of Metallica and other bands I liked.
When I went to university to study civil engineering in Porto, Portugal, in addition to academic studies, I attended to the Porto Jazz School (electric guitar) and later the Conservatory of Music of Porto (Portuguese guitar – the instrument I play currently).
I completed the civil engineering course and worked for seven years in this sector. During this period, I was always connected to music, but the time came when I decided to reduce my engineering activity and dedicate myself fully to music.
I wanted to deepen my knowledge in composition. So I moved from Porto to Lisbon to study composition at the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa. During this time, I studied contemporary music during the day, and played Portuguese guitar in Fado houses at night. The musical scope was very wide, as these two musical universes have many differences. Sometimes I had difficulty dealing with it but on the other hand it was also an effective way of not being absorbed in the same music all the time.
After that I studied for a Master in composition in Switzerland with Isabel Mundry at the Zurich University of Arts, with a scholarship from the Fondation Nicati-de Luze, and in Germany with Stefan Prins and Mark André at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden.
I also had private classes and masterclasses with composers Toshio Hosokawa, Chaya Czernowin, Hans Tutschku, Dieter Ammann, Franck Bedrossian, Zigmunt Krauze, Åke Parmerud, Carola Bauckholt, Klaus Lang, Peter Ablinger, among others.
During my studies in composition, I investigated different forms of musical creation, their relationship with other arts, and had my works performed. It was a new and exciting world.
Currently, I’m working on contemporary music daily and methodically, which implies research, listening, reading and trans-disciplinarity. I’m based in Zurich (Switzerland) and Porto (Portugal), and travelling regularly around Europe to collaborate with musicians, ensembles, fine and visual artists performing and recording my works. I’m also researching on surrounding sounds: from figuration to deformation.
“Voices and Landscapes” is an album that includes five works, composed for different instrumentations, in which the voice is the common element, present in all the pieces.
The central theme of this album is the landscape, which led me to research diversified sounds ranging from nature to urban places, totally shaped by human action. I was also influenced by poems by Antero de Quental and Fernando Pessoa.
The work was supported by Ministry of Culture of Portugal, DGArtes, SPAutores and Antena 2 (Portuguese classical radio).
Programme Notes
‘Some Lines Mixing a Color’
for soprano, saxophone, accordion, viola and violoncello
performed by Síntese GMC
‘Some Lines Mixing a Color’ is a work that started from a photograph taken by the composer during a rigorous winter day, where the dense fog covered the shapes of nature. This piece addresses the influence of the invisible in relation to the human perception of the image. By mediating the image with the sound, dense lines and random structures were created, that coexist in the same space with fine lines and organized sound material, leading perception and memory to different places, in a dialogue of counterpoint, gestures, intuition and events, which shape time and form.
for flute, clarinet, percussion, harp, piano, mezzo-soprano, violin, viola and violoncello
Performed by Grupo de Música Contemporânea de Lisboa
Conducted by Pedro Neves
Based on the poem ‘Paisagens, Quero-as Comigo’ by Fernando Pessoa, this is a work composed for an ensemble of nine musicians. “Landscapes, I want them with me / Landscapes, pictures that are… / Waving wheat laurel, / Sun beacons that I follow, / Bad sky, reeds, solitude… / Some by the hand of God, / Others by the hands of fairies, / Others by chance of mine, / Others by memories given… / Landscapes… Memories, / Because even what you see / With first impressions / At some point was what it is, / In the cycle of sensations. / Landscapes… Anyway, the content / Of what is here is the street / Where the good sun of torpor / That insinuates in my soul / I don’t see anything better.” by Fernando Pessoa.
‘Sleeping Landscapes’ is a piece for choir inspired by excerpts from poems by Bernardo Soares, taken from Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet). It was composed in Tronco, a small village in the municipality of Chaves (Portugal), where contact with the natural landscape is permanent and, at times, because it feels so original, it seems to be asleep.
I came from prodigious lands, from landscapes more beautiful than life itself, but I never spoke of those lands, except to myself, and told no one of the landscapes glimpsed in dreams. … I see my dreamed landscapes as clearly as I see the real ones. When I lean over to look into my dreams, I am leaning over something real. When I see life passing, I am also dreaming something. Bernardo Soares.
Based on the poem ‘Oceano Nox’ by Antero de Quental, this is a work composed for a chamber group that includes soprano, bass flute, cello and piano, where gestures, timbre, the phenomenon of object/event and transformation of sound through resonance are the criteria that mediate the poem and the sound. “Beside the sea, which hoarsely sent its great / The tragic voice to landward, while the wind / It passed like the flight of a thought / Which seeks and hesitates, restless and intermittent, / Beside the sea I sate disconsolate, / Scanning the sullen sky with mist-clouds lined, / And, in my revery, questioned the lament / That rose from things, vaguely… / What restless whim disquiets you, / O forces obscure, and beings that begin to be? / What thought is that which moves you in your courses? / But from the vast horizon, where doth hide / Forever the Unconscious, comes to me / A roar, a distant plaint, and naught beside…” by Antero de Quental.
Performed by Hugo Vasco Reis and Choir of Native Speakers
‘Polyphonic Mass’ is a work of field recordings that aims to investigate and understand the properties of common sounds we hear in everyday life, which, in principle, are neglected, as they do not assume a major importance in our hearing. These field recordings are also an opportunity to create a distancing from traditional patterns, looking for a different plan to work the sound and make the collected material detach from a image or situation in particular, joining sounds that are apparently unrelated. The perception of neglected sounds creates a status quo phenomenon, as a criterion for the creation of this work, which goes from figuration to sound deformation. Thus, elements of a present time and a place, or several places, are combined, which convey the fragility of everyday situations, their ritualization, polyphony, impulse, density and prosody as elements of musical discourse.
In how many garrets and non-garrets of the world
Are self-convinced geniuses at this moment dreaming. Álvaro de Campos, ‘The Tobacco Shop’, 1928
In the early days of the Internet – end of the 1990s for me – while a history student in UCD, a friend took a passionate interest in a volatile political situation beyond Ireland’s shores. Although aroused by injustices perpetrated by both sides, the drama itself also seemed to be a source of entertainment. He participated, in a small way, by adopting email aliases that represented varying, even opposing, viewpoints.
In a time before the arrival of a fully-fledged ‘social’ media, friends might call into his smoke-filled non-garret room to find him participating in online fora. There, we might encounter bursts of laughter and guffaws – to the bemusement of anyone lacking an intimate understanding of his predilection.
These were not simply pseudonymous accounts. In creating and projecting characters that seemed to reflect his own uncertainties my friend had, unconsciously, adopted a version of a dramatic form of communication – the heteronym – invented, or at least fully realised, by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). This approach is of enduring interest given the extent to which multiple selves prevail in online communication, including in the common use of anonymous handles on Twitter that often depart from a primary, mild-mannered self, into a more transgressive, ‘other’ personality.
A new, ground-breaking biography of Fernando Pessoa in English by Richard Zenith, Pessoa: An Experimental Life (Allen Lane, London, 2021) brings into the mainstream – to the English-speaking world at least – a Portuguese poet, whose extraordinary capacity for invention, sensitivity to language, and, ultimately, attention to human liberation places him in the highest echelon of a discipline he recast in his own images.
Moreover, unlike other Modernist writers of his generation, Pessoa is profoundly accessible. As Zenith puts it: ‘We don’t need to look up words, hunt down references, or read up on some period of history or current of philosophy to follow his poetic trains of thought and feeling. (p.324)’ Indeed, Pessoa expressed reservation regarding the art of James Joyce, which he described in 1933 as ‘a literature on the brink of dawn’ that was ‘like that of Mallarmé… preoccupied with method. (p.831)’
Pessoa was inspired by aspects of the Irish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century, and even drafted a complimentary letter to W.B. Yeats, whose esoteric tastes he shared. However, as Zenith puts it, lacking Yeats’s ‘grand ambitions and conviction, Fernando Pessoa was more like a jazzman of higher, occult truth, improvising on standard doctrines of the esoteric repertoire and introducing his own variations, without staying in any one place for long. (p.849)’
It is the combination of Fernando Pessoa’s simplicity of expression and an apparently endless capacity for experimentation that make him such a valuable guide to our confused and uncertain time.
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.
The Heteronyms
The poet is a feigner
Who’s so good at his act
He even feigned the pain
Of pain he feels in fact Fernando Pessoa-Himself, ‘Autopsychography’, 1931
Distinguishing pseudonymous works from heteronymous works in 1928, Pessoa wrote that ‘Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs; heteronymous works are by the author outside his own person. They proceed from a full-fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write. (p.xviii)’
Pessoa wrote to a relatively small reading public in the early decades of the twentieth century – in 1910 up to 70% of Portuguese adults were illiterate (when it was just 2 percent in England p.291) and his work hardly reached Brazil or other parts of the Portuguese-speaking world. He completed just one book – a visionary work of poetry infused with Romantic nationalism called Mensagem (Message) in 1934 – in his lifetime. Now Zenith’s extensive autobiography, masterfully capturing the historical context, brings global attention to an author whose ‘literary dispersion faithfully mirrors our ontological instability and the absence of intrinsic unity in the world we inhabit. (p.xxvi)’
From his earliest days, Pessoa produced a bewildering array of heteronyms – often as a form of play – amounting to well over seventy throughout his life. Some hardly assumed a life at all, including a personal favourite, the contradictory Friar Maurice: ‘a mystic without God, a Christian without a creed. (p.254)’
These became, according to Zenith, ‘ingenious vehicles for producing literature,’ and ‘also paths to self-knowledge. (p.119)’ The self-fragmentation seemed to come at a serious cost to Pessoa himself, however. Towards the end of his life he remarked: ‘Today I have no personality: I have divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. (p.41)’
From the outset, Pessoa’s poetry was identified with fingimento, a difficult word to translate, which can mean a kind of ‘feigning,’ ‘faking,’ ‘pretending ’ or forging (which has the double entendre of making and counterfeiting). This extended into an apparent unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to ever consummate a love affair, including his courtship of the forlorn Ofélia Queiroz, his only girlfriend; or to act on apparent homosexual urges – ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ – that pepper his work.
Throughout his life, according to Zenith there was ‘no clear lines of demarcation between’ the heteronyms, or ‘between fiction and reality. (p.146)’ Perhaps, unsurprisingly alcohol featured prominently – he died aged forty-seven after a life of excess – although contemporaries insist he always maintained an appearance of sobriety, perhaps his greatest pretence of all.
According to Zenith, Pessoa was ‘monosexual, androgynously so. The heteronyms can be seen as the fruit of his self-fertilization. (p.871)’ Thus, ‘daunted by the expectation of the world all around him’, he ‘preferred to inhabit the story of his heteronym. (p.192)’
Notably also: ‘Pessoa’s communicators, on at least a couple of occasions, gave him not merely poetic metaphors but actual poems. They were his impromptu muses, vivid manifestations from the spiritual realm where – he liked to think – his poetry and his heteronyms originated. (p.516)’
Alentejo, Portugal, 2019.
Alberto Caeiro
I have no philosophy, I have senses …
If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is
But because I love it, and for that very reason,
Because those who love never know what they love
Or why they love, or what love is. Alberto Caeiro from The Keeper of Sheep, 1914.
In later years Pessoa revealed that Alberto Caeiro began life as a joke figure of ‘a rather complicated bucolic poet’. He claimed he wrote ‘thirty-some poems at one go, in a kind of ecstasy I’m unable to describe. (p.379)’ But Pessoa – ever the feigner – was an unreliable witness. Zenith reveals that a thorough examination of his archive revealed ‘a rather different literary genesis. (p.379)’
Nonetheless, the invention of Caeiro in 1914 brought a creative release for Pessoa; liberating him from what Zenith describes as the ‘chrysalis formed by so much learning’ which had, until that point, inhibited him from coming ‘into his own as an astonishingly original poet’. Albeit this was a status ‘he would never have attained without the chrysalis. (p.159)’ He certainly fully understood the forms and rules of poetry, before breaking them.
Having spent ten years of his life, and schooling, in Durban, South Africa where he gained fluency in English, Pessoa had been vacillating between writing in Portuguese or English. Zenith maintains that Pessoa ‘did not know how to intensely feel in English; his poetic diction in this language was, oddly enough, too “poetical” (p.148)’, although he did produce a chap book of verse that was reviewed favourably in the London Review of Books no less.
One can imagine Pessoa in South Africa as a slightly effete adolescent surpassing his peers in academic learning, but whose accent always marked him as an outsider, a status which he unconsciously absorbed, and which generated a lifelong antipathy to the British Empire.
Caeiro therefore represented a form of homecoming – a statement of ‘Portugueseness’ – for a cosmopolitan young man struggling to form an identity. In this sense, Pessoa may be likened to W.B. Yeats, who also spent many years of his development in a country, which he ultimately rejected for an Irish mistress in Cathleen Ni Houlihan.
Caeiro, according to Zenith was also ‘a reaction against Fernando Pessoa – against all learning and incessant intellectual wrangling (p.386)’, thus the heteronym writes: ‘I lie down on the grass / And forget all I was taught.’
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.
Ricardo Reis
Let us also make our lives one day,
Consciously forgetting there’s night, Lydia,
Before and after
The little we endure. Ricardo Reis, July, 1914
Richard Zenith observes of Ricardo Reis – the second of Pessoa’s three main heteronyms and fictional disciples of Alberto Caeiro – that he ‘espoused a revival of Greek moral, social, and aesthetic ideals, and the introduction of a new paganism, adapted to the contemporary mentality. (p.404)’
In part, Reis represents Pessoa’s view that ‘Religion is an emotional need of mankind (p.541)’, but also – having rejected doctrinaire Christianity, along with monarchy, in his youth – the imaginative possibilities of undogmatic polytheism, alongside a lifelong dedication to astrology and the occult.
Pessoa urged: ‘Let’s not leave out a single god! … Let’s be everything, in every way possible, for there can be no truth where something is lacking.’ Thus, according to Zenith, over the course of his life Pessoa, ‘groped like a blind man in maze of occult mysteries that, by definition, could never be fathomed. (p.541)’
The persona of Reis also represented a stoicism reconciled to the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. Acceptance of fate, and the remote tragedies we encounter in news reports, is memorably conveyed in ‘The Chess Players’ (1916), where two protagonists play a game while around them a city is ransacked by an invading army. This is a kind of acceptance of events we generally cannot control that we might do well to learn from Ricardo Reis.
Notably, Ricardo Reis attained a literary afterlife in Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago’s 1984 novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which the heteronym returns to Lisbon from Brazil in 1935 to meet his death alongside Fernando Pessoa. A film based on the book was released in 2020.
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.
Álvaro de Campos
Faint vertigo of confused things in my soul!
Shattered furies, tender feelings like spools of thread children play with,
Avalanche of imagination over the eyes of my senses,
Tears, useless tears,
Light breezes of contradiction grazing my soul … Álvaro de Campos ‘Maritime Ode’, 1915
The last and most important of Pessoa’s heteronyms, Álvaro Campos, was born, in Pessoa’s imagination at least, on Friedrich Nietzsche’s birthday. According to Zenith he represents ‘the Dionysian impulse – the intoxicating affirmation of life, felt in all its pains and pleasures. (p.397)’ In profound contrast to Pessoa, who regarded sex as dirty, Campos’s motto was to ‘To feel everything in every way possible. (p.521)’
The open-minded de Campos could be the liberated person Pessoa would never become: ‘Have fun with women if you like women’ he recommended, ‘have fun in another way, if you prefer another way. It’s all fine and good, since it pertains to the body of the one having fun … morality is the ignoble hypocrisy of envy” for “not being loved. (p.626)’
Yet the ghost of de Campos inhibited Pessoa, as ‘he’ attempted to get in the way of a relationship with the tragic Ofélia. ‘Today I’m not me, I’m my friend Álvaro de Campos, (p.589)’ he would warn his only meaningful girlfriend.
According to Zenith, Álvaro de Campos’s appetites in Freudian terms personified Pessoa’s id. Then perhaps the phlegmatic Ricardo Reis operated as ego, mediating the unrealistic id’s relationship to the world. These figures emerge under the tutelage of their acknowledged master, the Zen-like Alberto Caeiro – who was according to de Campos, ‘The Great Vaccine – the vaccine against the stupidity of the intelligent. (p.388)’
Thus, Caeiro can may be seen the superego, the ethical touchstone of a tripartite personality built around his universal Portuguese personality; similar to that constructed around the universal Russian character in Dostoyevsky’s Brother Karamazov that seemed to have informed Freud’s original understanding of these characteristics.
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.
The Book of Disquiet
Dead we’re born, dead we live, and already dead we enter death. Composed of cells living off their disintegration, we’re made of death.
The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares
Fernando Pessoa described the main author of The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares, as a semi-heteronym, or ‘mutilation (p.721)’ of his personality, and as such The Book of Disquiet served as a semi-factual autobiography. Of course, nothing is ever as it seems with Pessoa, so the character of Soares is an unremarkable bookkeeper who endeavours to avoid contact with the bustling world around him, while Pessoa himself was a relatively sociable bachelor.
Bernardo Soares he confided: ‘always appears when I am sleepy or drowsy, such that my qualities of inhibition and logical reasoning are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. (p.870)’
In a sense, The Book of Disquiet is a book of the night, if not of quite of dream time, then of solitary down time and retreat. According to Zenith the book, which took years for scholars to reassemble from often scrawled notes, ‘never ceased being an experiment in how far a man can be psychologically and affectively self-sufficient, living only off his dreams and imagination. (p.364)’
It is a book of ideas and self-analysis. Thus, Soares reveals: ‘We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept – our own selves – that we love,’ and also, of self-reliance in solitude, where the intellect rises above material limitations.
It displays a belief in the magical quality of words. At one point he remarks – triggered by Walter Pater’s description of Mona Lisa’s smile containing: ‘the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of Borgias’ – ‘How much more beautiful the Mona Lisa would be if we couldn’t see it. (p.670)’
In his imagination Soares/Pessoa is ‘the naked stage where various actors act out various plays.’ Thus, The Book of Disquiet, according to Zenith ’magnificently illustrates the uncertainty principle that runs throughout his written universe. (p.xxiii)’
Also, in a time when we are urged to fulfil our potential, as a Capitalist economy demands constant self-improvement, the Book of Disquiet reconciles us to anonymity and the inner life of the imagination that we may rely on in times of adversity.
Alentejo, Portugal, 2019.
Political Commentator
The dazzling beauty of graft and corruption,
Delicious financial and diplomatic scandals,
Politically motivated assaults on the streets,
And every now and then the comet of a regicide
Lighting up with Awe and Fanfare the usual
Clear skies of everyday Civilisation! Álvaro de Campos, ‘Triumphal Ode’, June, 1914,
Hired as a columnist for the newspaper O Jornal in 1925, Fernando Pessoa, writing as himself, proclaimed that ‘only superficial people have deep convictions.’ insisting that a modern intellectual ‘has the cerebral obligation to change opinion … several times in the same day.’ This person, presumably himself, might, for instance, be ‘a republican in the morning, and a royalist at dusk. (p p.450-51)’
Abiding by this injunction, Pessoa presented a dazzling array of viewpoints in the 1920s, having renounced Catholicism in his youth, and embraced republicanism prior to the Revolution of 1910. He also acquired a distaste for British imperialism while living in Durban, albeit not necessarily imperialism itself.
Pessoa was a roving provocateur, who, according to Zenith, ‘had a fondness for ardently defending a certain idea one day and then attacking it the next, with equally impassioned arguments. (p.340)’ Confrontationally, he opined in Nietzschean terms that the ‘plebeian class should be the instrument of the imperialists, the dominating class,’ and ‘linked to them through a community of national mysticism, such that it is voluntarily their slave. (p.453)’ The feigner’s tendency towards outlandish, objectionable views should be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the artist often played with literary tropes in political statements.
This applies to a frankly disturbing 1916 pronouncement that ‘Slavery is logical and legitimate; a Zulu or Landim [an indigenous Mozambican] represents nothing useful to the world. (p. p.533)’ Importantly, however, according to Zenith, who devotes considerable attention to the theme of race he never ‘publicly supported any racist ideology, (p.534)’ and in the 1920s remarked that ‘Mahatma Gandhi is the only truly great figure that exists in the world today, (p.78)’ while he was opposed to fascism from the beginning.
Until the 1930s Pessoa’s political views were in a chrysalis of café talk, untested by real authoritarianism, including censorship and a nascent police state under the dictator António Salazar.
Moreover, Pessoa was expressing his views during the chaotic first Portuguese Republic (1910-26), which experienced a series of political convulsions generating forty-four ministries and nine presidents, with frequent political assassinations. As Zenith puts it: ‘[t]he nation’s political centre, rather than being caught in a tug-of-war between ideological extremes, was caving in on itself. p.220)’
Pessoa was disgusted by the chaos, and rejected ‘the positivist project of certain republicans, who envisioned a science-based society of secular citizens illuminated by the twin virtues of order and progress. (p.424)’ ‘All radicalism fosters reaction,’ he warned, ‘since the informing spirit is the same. (p.312)’ In response, he developed his own reactionary idea an aristocratic republic. Progress, he argued, ‘could be achieved only through an aristocracy of superior individuals’ that, mercifully, have ‘nothing to do with blue blood or inherited privilege. (p.412)’
In 1928 he published The Interregnum: Defense and Justification of Military Dictatorship in Portugal where he argued that Portugal required a new political system but that this system had first to be discovered, and until then a military dictatorship was the best alternative. However, according to Zenith he ‘set himself apart from those who favoured a long-term authoritarian solution. (p.700)’
Only when put to the test would he display his true qualities, dismissing narrow appeals to national identity – proclaiming (as Bernando Soares) ‘My nation is the Portuguese language (p.791)’ – and defending individuals ‘whom he regarded as the true creators and only deserving beneficiaries of civilization. (p.742)’
Alentejo, Portugal, 2019.
Under Salazar
Ah, what a pleasure
To leave a task undone,
To have a book to read
And not event crack it!
Reading is a bore,
And studying isn’t anything. Fernando Pessoa-Himself ‘FREEDOM’, 1935
According to Zenith, Pessoa ‘smelled a rat in Mussolini (p.640).’ The Italian dictator had become a popular figure among the Portuguese intelligentsia of the period in search of a solution to the country’s catastrophic instability.
Zenith writes: ‘Pessoa continually oscillated between a Promethean impulse to help humanity, to be involved in the world, and a contrary inclination to retreat and seek perfection in the artistic space of a poem. (p.217)’ Confronting dictatorships across Europe in the 1930s he ceased feigning and honoured that Promethean impulse, at a significant cost to his career.
Pessoa opined, in the heteronym of Thomas Crosse, that Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Salazar were all ‘unbalanced characters,’ whose ‘limited vision of reality’ might, he acknowledged, make them effective but they shared the same ‘hatred of intelligence, because intelligence discusses.’ They were all, therefore, ‘enemies of liberty’, which if ‘not individual, is nothing,’ and saliently observed that, by nature, dictators ‘are unhumorous, because a sense of humour preserves a man from that maniac confidence in himself by which he promotes himself dictator (p.841).’
The priest-like – another lifelong bachelor – Salazar may have been a less monstrous character than other dictators of that era, but his “interregnum” would last almost fifty, stultifying years. A trained economist, who summarily banned gambling halls in Lisbon on taking power, before introducing austerity measures that appear suspiciously similar to those inflicted during our neoliberal era. A motto of ‘faith, moral guidance, and the spirit of sacrifice (p.705)’ is also reminiscent of public health exhortations under lockdown.
According to Zenith, Pessoa ‘instinctively bristled when he was expected to be a willing and even joyous participant in a mass movement, whatever it was. (p.293)’ Unsurprisingly, he reacted against propaganda projecting a ‘myth of a peaceful, bucolic Portugal where peasants joyfully hoed corn, tended cattle, picked grapes and wove baskets, while singing traditional songs and dancing in their spare time. (p.892)’
As a writer he was also infuriated by Salazar’s demand that literary works should observe ‘certain limitations,’ and embrace ‘certain guidelines’ defined by the New State’s ‘moral and patriotic principle.’ Salazar said that writers should be ‘creators of civic and moral energies’ rather than ‘nostalgic dreamers of despondency and decadence. (p.880)’ This remark seemed to have been aimed at Pessoa himself.
In response, he caustically observed that the word Salazar was made up of sal (salt) and azar (bad luck), and that rain had long ago dissolved the sal, leaving Portugal with nothing but azar (p.883). He would also write a sarcastic poem wishing that for once the radio announcer would tell listeners ‘what Salazar did not say (p.891).’
By the time of his death in 1935 Pessoa had come around ‘full circle’ according to Zenith ‘returning to the high-minded and large-hearted ambitions of his youth (p.903)’, arguing democratically that the nation is ‘worth the sum of its individuals (p.914).’
In response to Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1936, Pessoa would ask: ‘what are we all in the world if not Abyssinians?’ Between us and them he saw a ‘vast and broad human fraternity (p.915)’
In response to the censorship of an article he wrote condemning Mussolini’s invasion, as well as discrimination against openly gay poets such as António Botto and the banning of the Freemasons and other secret societies, he took the dramatic decision to quit publishing in Portugal. In return for this he received an unwelcome visit from Salazar’s secret police, although he was largely left to his own devices until his death aged just forty-seven.
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.
In History
No, I don’t want anything.
I already said I don’t want anything
Don’t come to me with conclusions!
Death is the only conclusion.
Don’t offer me aesthetics!
Don’t talk to me of morals!
Take metaphysics away from here!
Don’t try to sell me complete systems, don’t bore me with breakthroughs
Of science (of science, my God, of science!)–
Of science, of the arts, of modern civilization!
Álvaro de Campos ‘Lisbon Revisited’ (1923)
What to make of an artist such as Fernando Pessoa almost a century on from his death?
First, huge credit goes to his biographer Richard Zenith, who has assiduously assembled the parts of an extraordinarily complex life. Readers may feel daunted by such a weighty tome, but this represents a bible for English speakers, at least, conjuring a literary titan, deserving our attention alongside Shakespeare, and few others, such is his contribution to world literature.
Once suspects that Zenith himself must have struggled to maintain a coherent sense of self in the face of such a fecund imagination as Fernando Pessoa’s.
In the characters of the three heteronyms, the semi-heteronym and Pessoa as himself we find spiritual resources that may guide us – like Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy – through the labyrinth of an increasingly mediated age of increasing homogenisation and fake authenticity in the arts. And, like Virgil perhaps, he takes us to the gates of heaven, and no further.
With Alberto Caeiro – the vaccine against the stupidity of the intelligent – we may see nature in its glorious parts, at a remove from crippling intellectual conceits. Or we may dance with Ricardo Reis, maintaining order and composure in the face of chaos and deceit. That arch-sensualist, Álvaro de Campos, meanwhile, demands we appreciate all aspects of our journey through life, while taking aim at hypocrisy when required.
Then Bernardo Soares should be appreciated for his self-sufficiency and celebration of the interior world of the mind. Lastly, Fernando Pessoa as himself represents a narrative arc, wherein a true love of humanity, and human wellbeing, eventually asserts itself in the face of tyranny.
All these voices, and more, are what make Fernando Pessoa an essential poet for age.
Poetry translated by Richard Zenith, Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, Penguin Classics, London, 2006.
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Dante Alighieri
Religion is an emotional need of mankind. The rationalist may not want it, but he has to admit that other people may… Let’s not leave out a single god! […] Let’s be everything, in every way possible, for there can be no truth where something is lacking. Fernando Pessoa
The Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan came as a shock to Western consciousness. It was not merely that a U.S.-sponsored regime proved so fragile once the troops pulled out; but the apparent enduring appetite among Afghans for policies at least purporting to be Islamic flies in the face of a starry-eyed view of humanity steadily evolving towards a uniform set of customs and beliefs.
That is not to argue that common principles cannot be agreed by sovereign states – and peoples – but to expect uniformity in outlook across a global population living in starkly differing circumstances, and at varying historical junctures, appears naïve at best. Any globalisation project striving for homogeneity will surely fail.
In abandoning religious traditions – as many of us have done – it may be that we are losing ethical frameworks grounded in those traditions with profound consequences for relations among ourselves, and with Earth itself. It begs the question: at a critical juncture for humanity does faith, or transcendence, offer a path out of despair, and indeed a Theology of Hope? We may further ask whether, without this ethical grounding, if the direction of scientific research is guided by a reliable moral compass, or simply the exigencies of a Capitalist market?
Without subscribing to the banal equanimity of moral relativism disregarding gross human rights violations, we should question all military interventions in pursuit of peace. Saint Augustine in the City of God stated: ‘there is no man who does not wish for peace… even when men wish a present state of peace to be disturbed … they do so not because they hate peace but because they desire the present peace to be exchanged for one that suits their wishes.’ The Hippocratic Oath might be adapted in international relations whenever the invasion of another country is contemplated: ‘first do no harm.’
The idea of peace for eternity is an illusion. So Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) – where ‘the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism’ is ‘replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands’ – now seems an increasingly absurd notion, formulated in a moment of peak post-Cold War hubris.
Likewise, a Marxist assumption that History will simply end, thereby removing a requirement for politics, or for difficult choices to be decided is also, sadly, Utopian; this is notwithstanding the continued relevance of Marxist analysis to current economic relations, in particular a seemingly inexorable widening in the gap between rich and poor in an age of technology; and the idea of metabolic rift, meaning, broadly: the alienation of exploited workers from their environment.
Thus, both Liberals and Marxists have fallen prey to an assumption that we are bound for a Promised Land governed by Enlightenment Values. In fact, Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume called into question fundamental rights derived from an Aristotelian tradition, developed in Europe over centuries. Science only emerged as a distinct discipline in the 1830s, untethered from an ethical foundation in philosophy.
U.S. President Reagan meeting with Afghan mujahideen at the White House in 1983.
Religion in Global Diplomacy
The Taliban’s victory demonstrated that religious identity remains a galvanising force in politics, beyond even national identity, in the developing world especially. Although, it should be noted that the Taliban is largely drawn from the dominant Pashtun ethnic group. We may also safely assume a long Afghan tradition of resistance to foreign occupation remains an inspiration.
Nonetheless, as the case of ISIS also highlighted, and indeed the perseverance of the Religious Right in the U.S., we in Europe especially should reconcile ourselves to the endurance of belief systems other than our own dominant secularism. For, as the authors Philip McDonagh, Kishon Manocha, John Neary and Lucia Vázquez Medonza of a new work On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy (Routledge, London, 2020) point out, it is a fallacy to equate ‘modernisation’ with a decline of religious observance.
This work provides an important guide to negotiate challenges in a world where those professing no religion amount to just 16% of the population. Globally, atheism is a strictly a minority taste, a point its often evangelical advocates are wont to ignore. Thus, in the half century since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, we have witnessed a succession of political movements emerge shaped by religious identities – if not the humane insights contained within all traditions.
Show on the life of Jesus at Igreja da Cidade, affiliated to the Brazilian Baptist Convention, in São José dos Campos, Brazil, 2017
Religion as a Force for Good and Ill
Anyone advocating in favour of a place for religion in the public sphere must grapple with a strong tendency for this to be expressed in fundamentalist politics – a word, incidentally, deriving from the description of Protestant sects of the early twentieth century. All too often, where religion lies behind political formations it has brought harsh ordinances, generally to the detriment of women – in terms of their status relative to men – in a patriarchal order.
In power as such, we have witnessed the crushing of dissent, or heresies. Indeed, the approach of many rulers claiming faith-based authority resembles that of the Grand Inquisitor from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamoz, who Laurens van der Post described as ‘the visionary anticipation of Stalin and his kind.’ This tale or parable, which the character of Ivan Karamazov’s recounts in the novel, is set in post-Reformation Spain, where the all-powerful Inquisitor is visited by a resurrected Christ. The fearsome leader, however, dismisses the putative saviour, revealing that the Church has embraced the devil:
we have accepted from him what You had rejected with indignation, that last gift that he offered You, showing You all the kingdoms of the earth: we accepted Rome and the sword of Caesar from him, and we proclaimed ourselves the only kings on earth, the only true kings.
The Grand Inquisitor maintains that he is serving the common people, who will be lost if freedom of conscience is permitted. He thus banishes the saviour with the words: ‘we shall withhold the secret and, to keep them happy, we shall opiate them with promises of eternal reward in heaven.’[i]
Characteristics of the Grand Inquisitor’s approach were evident in the Irish Catholic Church after independence that opiated the people “with promises of eternal reward in heaven.” Thus, Ronan Sheehan describes a ‘Theology of Incarceration’ – associated in particular with the legacy of Matt Talbot in his visionary Dublin: Heart of the City (2016).
However, notwithstanding criminal actions of Catholic clergy, we may question whether contemporary Ireland is a more, or less, caring society. There are certainly greater opportunities for women – but in an increasingly two-tier society in housing, health and education it is a shrinking number that can avail of these.
In an increasingly neoliberal society political ambitions have given way to passivity. The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy remind us that twentieth century history witnessed resistance to National Socialism, and plans for the Welfare State ‘inspired to a large extent by leaders who were religious leaders.’ There are numerous examples of religious leaders and movements in developing countries, from Gandhi to Hamas, that have emphasised the importance of social programmes. The Catholic Church under Pope Francis is also now engaging seriously with many of the profound social and environmental questions of our age.
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822.
Poetic Origins
A more acceptably entry to the idea of religion – for a younger generation anyway – is perhaps through poetry. The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy locate religion in poetic inspiration, which has often arrived in response to tyranny, as in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s plea in ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (1819):
Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free–
Shelley wrote the first public argument for atheism in England as a young student in Oxford, but this may be considered an undergraduate flourish, designed to provoke. As his career developed, according to his wife Mary Shelley, he became a ‘disciple of the Immaterial Philosophy of Berkeley. This theory gave unity and grandeur to his ideas, while it opened a field for his imagination.’[ii]
Shelley’s work emphasised a divine inspiration, and believed a poet’s ‘impartial care for the birth of situations’ reaches towards goodness. Likewise, Osip Mandelstam said ‘the consciousness of our rightness is dearer to anything else in poetry.’
Many poets maintain, at least in private, that their inspiration, including that conveying moral ideas, is in a sense, god-given, or at least derived from an ‘other’ world. Thus, the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod describes a certain kind of judge, touched by the Muses, who ‘can put a quick and expert end even to a great quarrel.’ Viewed as such, religion may yet offer a poetic space for developing empathy, imagining a new world, and holding on to what remains sacred in a dying planet.
For the authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy, the formulation of ‘a more just arrangement of human affairs’ comes about not only through philosophical reasoning, but also in a Theology of Hope. Thus, the say ‘the meaning or pattern in events shines out in the perspective of eternity.’ This is the faith of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer who believed that ‘something new can be born that is not discernible in the alternatives of the present.
Therefore, the authors ‘do not argue for theocracy in any form,’ and instead ‘argue merely that to try to exclude God and religion from the conversation would be about our global future is to aim deliberately low.’
Everything is Permitted?
Does the negation of religion – however tenuous and abstract – leave us operating within a moral void, where, as in the words of Ivan Karamazov: ‘everything is permitted,’ including murder? This is not to say that all atheists operate without moral scruples, but ultimate justifications for “rightness” or “goodness” may prove elusive in the absence of faith or transcendence. Through the character of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky wonders what deeds we are capable of in the absence of divine judgment.
More broadly, we may ask whether a new species of evil develops in a value-less neoliberal setting, where callous murders are increasingly commonplace – not least in the gangland shootings we have grown accustomed to in Dublin in recent times? Is it simply fear of being caught in the act that holds back more of us from committing heinous crimes?
Contemporary alienation has been powerfully expressed by Michel Houellebecq the French author of Atomised (1998) and other novels. His latest offering, Serotonin (2019) again plumbs the depths. Here, we find a narrator contemplating the murder of the four-year-old son by another father of the love of his life, after coming to the conclusion the child would stand in the way of a successful revival of their relationship.
His mind returns to his own feelings as a young child after a New Year celebration. Adopting a neo-Darwinian, (scientific?) outlook, he observes:
it was as that memory came into my mind that I understood Camille’s son, that I was able to put myself in his place, and that identification gave me the right to kill him. To tell the truth, if I had been a stag or a Brazilian macaque, the question wouldn’t even have arisen: the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of her genotype. This attitude has been maintained for a long time in the human population.
He continues:
I don’t think that contrary forces, the forces that tried to keep me on track for murder, had much to do with morality; it was an anthropological matter, a matter of belonging to a late species, and of adhering to the code of that late species – a matter of conformity.
Overcoming “conformity”, ‘the rewards would not be immediate’ he says, ‘Camille would suffer, she would suffer enormously, I would have to wait at least six months before resuming contact. And then I would come back, and she would love me again.’[iii]
Houellebecq’s “contrary forces” represent an increasing loss of moral conviction. As the characters conformity diminishes, the “code” of our “late species” breaks down and the possibility of violence increases, as we see in the book’s characterisation of the violent response of farmers to a neoliberal order that is putting them out of business.
Ultimately, however, Houellebecq’s narrator proves incapable of pulling the trigger as he has intended, entering what he refers to as an endless night, ‘and yet’, he says:
deep within me, there remained something less than a hope, let’s say an uncertainty. One might also say that even when one has personally lost the game, when one has played one’s last card, for some people – not all, not all – the idea remains that something in heaven will pick up the hand, will arbitrarily decide to deal again, to throw the dice again, even when one has never at any moment in one’s life sensed the intervention or even the presence of any kind of deity, even when one is aware of not especially deserving the intervention of a favourable deity, and even when one realises, bearing in mind the accumulation of mistakes and errors that constitute one’s life, that one deserves it less than anyone.[iv]
Hope springs eternal it seems, even in a novelist-of-despair such as Houellebecq.
Moreover, if we refuse the temptation to pull the trigger and reset our lives; if we embrace an idea of hope; we may conceive the Earth itself to be sacred; a view shared by all religious traditions, which enjoin respect towards all life on the planet. One wonders whether a view of all life on Earth being sacred is shared by pure materialists. Moreover, untethered to any faith tradition is “everything permitted” in scientific research?
Niccolò Machiavelli 1469-1527.
The Political Craft
Contemporary politics often appears to operate within a moral vacuum, where warfare is conducted through drone strikes, and the planet reels under the impact of over-exploitation; while even in Advanced Economies, millions endure shocking poverty. New forms of propaganda have been unleashed via a social media that is removing agency, implanting ideas that distort politics. Most politicians claim to care, but as often as not they distract from the structural questions and emphasise issues of only peripheral relevance to the lives of ordinary people. In particular, identity politics has been used to divide and conquer, while the wealth of billionaires continues to accumulate.
The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy come down squarely against the statecraft associate with Niccolò Machiavelli, which now appears ascendant in a contemporary politics of spin – where September 11 was ‘a good day to bury bad news’. Here, according to the authors: ‘Deceit, and even cruelty, are justified by results – by their results as measured over time – which requires very sharp judgment by the Prince if his recourse to realpolitik is not to undermine the moral standards of ‘ordinary people.’’ Means cannot easily be distinguished from ends, while the body politic is contaminated by mendacious politicians.
They argue: ‘Not to tell lies or to make contradictory promises would seem to be a rule of peace-building that we should never set aside.’ Lies erode trust in institutions and tend to catch up with political actors. Tony Blair and his 45-minuteclaims before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is an obvious example, albeit one unmentioned in the book.
Image (c) Daniele Idini
Pandemic Response
A Populist wave emanating from the Americas has, thus far at least, failed to propel a European equivalent into power. Nonetheless, distrust in politicians and the media is probably at an all-time high, and with some justification. Moreover, all too often, scientists guiding government policy have adopted Machiavellian approaches that only fuel paranoia.
The origins of the pandemic itself are shrouded in mystery, amidst a growing suspicion that the COVID-19 virus is a product of so-called ‘gain of function’ research, involving US government agencies and China.
Attempts to supress this involvement – including by EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak, who jointly authored an article in The Lancet dismissing the idea out of hand at the beginning of the pandemic – generates serious concern. A recent slew of emails released under freedom of information: ‘indicate involvement by individuals with undisclosed conflicts of interest; limited peer-review; and a lack of even-handedness and transparency regarding the consideration of lab-origin theories within the scientific community.’
Would anyone who believes in the sacredness of life on Earth engage in work so fundamental to all life on Earth? It recalls the inventor of the Atomic Bomb Charles Oppenheimer’s quoting The Bhagavad Ghita: ‘I am death destroyer of worlds.’
Ethical debates in science would surely benefit from religious insights. As Laurens van der Post put it: ‘For me the passion of spirit we call ‘religion’, and the love of truth that impels the scientist, come from one indivisible source, and their separation in the time of my life was a singularly artificial and catastrophic amputation.’
Fauci speaks to the White House press corps on COVID-19 in April 2020.
Bioterror Czar
Damningly, in 2011, in the capacity of George Bush’s ‘bioterror czar’ the long-time Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President Anthony Fauci argued that the benefits of ‘engineered viruses’ made it a ‘risk worth taking.’
During the pandemic Fauci appeared as a rational antidote to the bleach-belching Trump, but is prone to an arrogance assuming he can do no wrong. This is epitomised by the remarkable statement: ‘A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.’ In other words, Le Science C’est Moi.
An early example of Fauci’s mendacity was his claim that he committed a ‘white lie’ in relation to the efficacy of masks. He said that he shaded the truth to avert a run on scarce equipment. Even if we take him at his word, why should the public believe what he is saying thereafter is not also a white lie? This is the attitude of a Grand Inquisitor who believes the little people cannot hope to understand the big questions. But this Machiavellian approach easily backfires.
In this testimony, as in much of his conduct over the past two years, Dr. Fauci was speaking “nothing but the truth.” Yet he was mindful of what Jesuits used to call a reservation.
A reservation, in this sense, is an unspoken qualification. The speaker telegraphs a public meaning, confident it will be misunderstood. He holds in reserve a private meaning whose release might damage a higher cause (a cause known to the speaker and God, of which God approves). For God, in this context, we should read: “US government institutions of scientific research.” Yet American support of catastrophically hazardous experimentation was by no means the only pertinent fact withheld from American citizens.
There are perhaps programmes that a government can justifiably occlude, but it enters dangerous territory in doing so. Fauci’s over-weening arrogance – tying his own fate to the credibility of science which is enshrined as the guiding light for humanity – appears to have led him to the moral failings of the Grand Inquisitors that we associate with religions in power.
Black Lives Matter Dublin Protest June 1st 2020.
A Point of Inflection
The authors of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy stress a need for preserving universal values, and institutions, while upholding a spirit of hopefulness in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges for humanity. History shows that democratic institutions alone cannot be trusted, given the extent to which opinions are moulded using increasingly sophisticated propaganda. This is one reason why we have constitutions that purport to contain immutable and even transcendent values.
As the authors stress, ‘we have reached a point of inflection in the global story’ and if they are to address forthcoming challenges religions ‘need to make themselves understood in the common language of reason.’
The input of the billions of religious should be welcomed in our public discourse, and not associated with ignorance in a one-track view of development. In particular, the idea of all life on planet Earth being sacred should be affirmed, although tendencies towards authoritarianism and mendacity among representatives of religions requires attention.
In an age of science, where humans act as gods, altering the building blocks of life we can draw on wisdom contained within religious traditions on the sacredness of life. In a world of mounting challenges, even those of us who have dismissed religion from our lives may benefit from consideration of core principles contained therein. In any case, we must navigate a path through a world where, like it or not, religious belief remains the norm.
Featured Image: The Thinker in the Gates at the Musée Rodin
[i] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Ignat Avsey, Oxford World Classics (1994), p. 322-325
[ii] Kenneth Neill Cameron ‘Philosophy, Religion and Ethics’ in Shelley: The Golden Years, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1971, p.151
[iii] Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin, translated by Shaun Whiteside, Penguin, London, 2019, p.265-266
Like errant flames from the dying embers of a once great fire, there is much fakery to be found emanating from a previously proud tradition of public intellectualism in the U.K., and elsewhere. The English philosopher John Gray (1948-) is at least not one of the self-help gurus, such as Jordan Peterson, that have gained public attention and earned ample remuneration in the process.
We do not find in Gray’s work the resigned intellectual play-acting evident in many books randomly grappling with our universe, and which provide the kind of quotable flourishes that play well at north London dinner parties. He is the doyenne and most garlanded of U.K. intellectuals today and so demands engagement.
Gray is no worshiper at the alter of the Enlightenment or the humanist tradition. He does not believe it provides us with the coping mechanisms for our current challenges. Ultimately, he has little faith in the ability of civilization, or rationality, to overcome the barbarism of a liberal experiment riveted by self-contradiction.
In short, he sees, both historically and now, the extent to which human irrationality governs actions. Thus he is decidedly anti-utopian, an empiricist and pragmatist. He holds out little hope for the realisation of lofty objectives, such as we find among technological evangelists or Bible-belt Christians. This is a theme he explores in some detail in his book Black Mass [2007].
In fact, all forms of demonist eschatology, chiliasm or end of day’s nonsense is parsed thoroughly in the text, from religious fundamentalism to neo-conservativism, to Marxism and Nazism. Quite correctly he identifies Tony Blair as a neo-conservative.
Thin Veneer
One suspects Gray would endorse Lon Fuller’s remark in a different context about legality and civility providing a thin veneer of civilization if the underlying culture is barbaric. This covering is growing thinner by the day I would argue.
And yet – although he may beg to differ – he displays a residual fractured humanism, and embraces certain conservative values. In effect, he is a Tory of the old school, with modest liberal leanings; the sort of person who, although he writes for the New Statesman, would equally happily associate with Tory grandees. His Disraeli-esque conservatism is one I would share some common ground with.
He has thus embarked on a voyage of passage from an earlier more doctrinaire, Thatcherite conservatism. He no longer venerates a laissez faire approach to the economy, and seems to have recognised that that approach went seriously awry. He is a fellow-traveller in a way with Jonathan Sumption, who has also arrived at a modified conservatism on his own intellectual pilgrimage.
Rather than seismic shifts – in that very British way – Gray argues that change should arrive incrementally, with allowance for the exercise of individual responsibility.
He also argues for a bridge between conservatism and the green or environmental agenda. He expresses a desire to create a Burkean ‘community of souls’, preserving that which is good and noble. But this seems a forlorn hope given how the Antarctica icebergs are on the brink of collapse, and international accords are torn apart with a pandemic upon us.
Covid-19
In a recent article for The New Statesman John Gray argued that the Covid-19 pandemic is a turning point in history, which will bring lasting changes to human behaviour. This will see online interaction rather than face-to-face communication becoming the norm, and a Hobbesian state becoming ever more intrusive, and with people increasingly accepting of this.[i]
In his view the populace will submit to the imposition of increased control, permitting a gradual and imperceptible erosion of civil liberties.
In effect we may be seeing the arrival of a new society of unfreedom, and the arrival of a technological serfdom evident in China, where Bentham’s Panopticon is writ large. But also in Western countries we are seeing surveillance from private and public bodies covering all of society.
One advantage, however, of the ‘Great Pause, of quarantine, as he points out, is that it could lead to a recalibration of ideas and fresh thinking. In silence new thinking may occur. But in order for this to happen we must escape from the distraction of what Frank Armstrong describes as the ‘Doomsday Machines’: the smart phones that prevent us from realising our true selves.
As Fernando Pessoa put it: ‘only by methodically, obsessively cultivating our abilities to dream, analyse and attract can we prevent our personality from dissolving into nothing or identical to all the others.’ It is certainly time for reflection but the path that lies ahead is shrouded in uncertainty.’[ii]
Gaia Hypothesis
John Gray is a convert to James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis that the Earth is a self-regulating organism which maintains the conditions for life on the planet. It is a word he invokes regularly, and without exclusively focusing on humans.
Indeed, Gray appears to have a uniformly negative view of human nature and human beings. In his seminal text Straw Dogs (2004) we are depicted as rapacious, destructive and transhumanist. I suspect he is even more of this view now. Yet he clings on to a belief in decency and the exercise of personal responsibility, and liberally urges for peaceful co-existence to prevail.
As a Green Conservative and an opponent of neo-liberalism, he cautions against what Greta Thunberg described as the fairy tale of growth-without-end, and recognises how this is destroying the planet, and making human lives impossible. The pursuit of profit for its own sake of profit has led human activities to spiral out of control.
While I warm to his Gaian sympathies, there are more disturbing aspects to his ideas that I take issue with. He appears to venerate a Malthusian liquidation or winnowing of the human population in the aforementioned New Statesman article. If there are too many of us I wonder does he regard himself as expendable and surplus to requirements?
In fairness it is ultimately a point about human progress having to be off set against scarcity. Yet it is easy to be sanguine – or even blasé – about meltdown when you sit atop the academic food chain. Stoical acceptance of human absurdity is not what is needed right now. It is a time for action after reflection.
Gray may have glimpsed the gorgon’s head of the dangers we confront, but seems to shrink from urging the radical responses required. I suspect donnish privilege has softened the attack and brought a modus vivendi with these circumstances. After all, his own life has been a success by most measures, so he can at least take refuge in haughty disapproval, or at least he could prior to the Corona-pocalypse.
But of course, in the interests of fairness, his prescience should be noted in pointing out that dwindling planetary resources, and wealth inequalities, are undermining what we cherish, and accelerating Malthusian dynamics.
Any invocation of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) nonetheless reminds me of Jonathan Swift’s indispensable ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729). Swift responds to the genesis of the ideas that Malthus would go on to articulate with withering satire, expressed with deadpan seriousness: he promotes the consumption of babies as a way of solving the problem of over-population.
Gray walks the same Swiftian line – though without quite the panache – in an essay on torture in which he mocks liberal values. Tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek, he argues torture potentially promotes human rights:
Self-evidently, there can be no right to attack basic human rights. therefore, once the proper legal procedures are in place, torturing terrorists cannot violate their rights. in fact in a truly liberal society, terrorists have an inalienable right to be tortured.[iii]
Religious Fundamentalism
I share Gray’s contempt for religious fundamentalism. He does not display the dogmatic atheism or extremism of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, but allows for Christian worship in a tolerant way, and merely warns against barbarism, and end-of-day’s eschatological chiliasm.
Yet the solution in his new book of jettisoning both the sweet poetry of Genesis and secular humanism engenders in Seven Types of Atheism(2018) a rather denatured Arcadian spirituality, which is neither flesh nor fowl or even a guide to a more meaningful existence for the varied lives he believes we should lead.
It’s almost an intellectual Flake commercial, which tastes like religion never tasted before; although it should be acknowledged that he is resolutely anti-consumerist, and critical of the manufacture of insatiable desires. At one level he is arguing for makeshift true grit or graft to cope with unbounded irrationality. We must, he suggests, develop new patterns of living to cope with the new disorders and challenges we face.
Intellectual flake commercial.
He says anyone can live in a variety of ways, and I suppose we all do need to slow down and embrace both distraction and silence. But I believe the finality of total silence is always to be resisted – ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light…’
The Good Life
There are many ways, Gray contends, of living well. Differing types of the good life, but he is insufficiently specific as to what these are.
With the changing world of work, and a lack of employment prospects for many, one suspects he has an overly optimistic understanding that whatever fulfils someone is what they ought to be doing, which is all well and good, but that doesn’t necessarily put supper on the table. I fear most of us will have to find different survival strategies to cope with our disposability in a world that cares for us less and less.
John Gray is reliably sceptical of junk science that is now crashing into us in ceaseless waves, most recently with Donald Trump’s proposal to inject disinfectant to prevent Covid-19.
A useful example Gray has provided is in the recrudescence of phrenology, where criminal patterns of future behaviour are derived from skull sizes, which feeds into racial stereotypes. Our criminal justice system, in allowing bad character admissions, has dangerous preludes of pre-crime and conviction by demonization.
It will take a brave leader, of men or opinion, in future to insist on civilized values. John Gray has intimated, and I agree, they will not matter.
In his esteem for silence to avoid distraction and enhance contemplation Gray comes across like the effete aristocrat in Turgenev’s Father and Sons, as the Bolsheviks steadily take control. But at least The New Statesman provide him with a platform, and the books continue to sell to a dwindling educated public.
Featured Image: Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, National Gallery, London.
[i] John Gray, ‘Why this crisis is a turning point in history’, New Statesman, April 1st, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/04/why-crisis-turning-point-history
[ii] Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, The Serpent’s Tail, London, 2017, p.107
[iii] John Gray, Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, Penguin, London, p.222
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film ‘Dr Strangelove’ dramatizes the still not-altogether-remote scenario of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It begins with a deranged U.S. Airforce General, Jack D. Ripper, overriding Executive Command and ordering a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The Russians, unbeknownst to the Americans, have developed a deterrent – the Doomsday Machine – that automatically detonates, with devastating global effect, if a nuclear device explodes in Soviet territory.
Kubrick masterfully conveys the absurd conformism of a military organisation obeying orders to a point of self-annihilation. In the end, Major T. J. ‘King’ Kong, the B-52 commander delivering its payload, straddles the bomb, whooping as he descends to his own, and humanity’s, demise. Despite its apocalyptic message, the film remains enduringly hilarious, reflecting its alternative title: ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.’
A recent viewing in Dublin’s Lighthouse Cinema left me wondering, though, whether Kubrick derives too much comedy from an appalling vista we still confront. Laughter remains a safety valve, permitting an audience to carry on with business-as-usual, while the ultimate stupidity of nuclear war remains a real possibility. Are we, unconsciously, making light of President Donald Trump’s recent euphemistic warning of an ‘official end’ to Iran?[i] As Friedrich Nietzsche puts it: ‘in laughter all evil is compacted, but pronounced holy and free by its own blissfulness.’[ii] Regular doses of humour are one of life’s balms, but sometimes we laugh along to the exclusion of more serious engagement. Fittingly perhaps, the serious work of producing Cassandra Voices generally occurs in a studio above a crowded comedy club in the heart of Dublin, from where laughter often wafts upstairs!
If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!
Millenarian doomsday scenarios have haunted humanity since time immemorial. A ‘Great Survey’ of England and Wales in 1086, used to ascertain the proportion of the national wealth owing to King William ‘the Conqueror’ (also less flatteringly known as ‘the Bastard’), was subsequently labelled the ‘Book of Domesday’ (Middle English for ‘Doomsday’). This accumulation of data in the hands of a monarchy had terrifying connotations at a time when many perceived the end of the world, and its Final Judgment, to be nigh.
Today humanity confronts varied doomsday scenarios – generally gleaned from scientific analysis rather than metaphysical speculation – with anthropogenic climate chaos, mass extinctions and the still unresolved danger of a nuclear Armageddon topping the list. We remain in many respects, in Carl Jung’s phrase, technological savages[iii], operating machinery with capacities far exceeding our wisdom as operators. It just takes one fat finger to push the button, or an unimpeded algorithm.
But perhaps it is not nuclear warheads, or even coal-powered stations, that represent the Doomsday Machines of our time. After all, humanity could quite easily seize control of its fate, elect reasonable leaders, bring about a Green New Deal and decommission nuclear weapons. So what is holding us back from taking the action required for the benefit of the great mass of our species, and the rest of the natural world? Another mechanism, operated by most adults in developed countries, is, I believe, befuddling our wits and deterring a collective shift in consciousness.
Developed simultaneously in the early 2000s by a number of manufacturers, the smart phone is replicating the Book of Domesday by tracking our movements and online preferences to the benefit of vested commercial interests, and shadowy state emanations.
Of greater concern, perhaps, than the hollowing out of our privacy is the addiction the vast majority of us have to the narcissistic, solipsistic and often pugilistic ‘social’ media of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Twitter, conveyed through apps on our smartphones. Staring into the void of communication-without-end from dawn-to-dusk, successive ‘hits’ are delivered, revealing who messages us, ‘likes’ our image or words, or offends us. Notably, Donald Trump is the acknowledged master of the soundbite Twitter update (maximum length two-hundred-and-eighty-characters), heralding the short-attention-span-politics evident in most countries.
Social media is the thief of time and an agent of homogenisation. Writing in the early twentieth century, the
Fernando Pessoa 1888-1935
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa seemed to anticipate the contemporary malaise. ‘Given the metallic, barbarous age we live in,’ he wrote, ‘only by methodically, obsessively cultivating our abilities to dream, analyse and attract can we prevent our personality from dissolving into nothing or identical to all the others.’[iv]
The smartphone provides a simulacrum of varied technologies, such as an automated camera providing the semblance of a real one, but where the necessary application to understand the apparatus is no longer needed. The capacity to share easily what we have created has overtaken the creative process. The necessary isolation of the artist has been abandoned in favour of the instant hit of validation from our peers.
Likewise, through digital attenuation, music is debased and choice diminished when we succumb to the algorithms of Spotify and YouTube that are carried with us everywhere we go on our Doomsday Machines.
Of particular concern is a generation of teenagers who know of no other life other than that mediated by the Doomsday Machines. What is missing from their lives is the crucial ingredient of tedium, which again according to Pessoa is ‘that profound sense of the emptiness of things, out of which frustrated aspirations struggle free, a sense of thwarted longing arises and in the soul is sown the seed from which is born the mystic or the saint.’[v] Being bored can have its advantages.
I would like to say I had the willpower to renounce my own device, but as is so often the case in life, the end of the affair occurred by accident. Fiddling with its AMAZING properties, for the umpteenth time that day, as I double-jobbed playing with my young nephew, the Machine slipped from my grasp and hit a hard stone floor. The glass did not shatter exactly, except in one corner which felt the full impact, and from which a few glittery shards crumbled away. But, faintly detectable, three deathly cracks ran up from where it had landed, strangely mirroring the lifelines on my hand. When I tried to switch it on, all I found was a faint blinking light, which soon lapsed. Still looking sleek and powerful, though now veiled in a black hood of inoperativeness, it appeared to me like the corpse of a young soldier, handsome features intact, save for a bullet wound to the neck.
I felt deflated, angry and increasingly tetchy. How was I going to survive without it after a decade-long reliance? Like any addict, I felt pangs for the addled communication, information-gathering and idle scrolling that had become my early morning ritual, as I lay prostrate in bed.
As it transpired there was still some life in the Machine — I had simply smashed the screen, which I replaced at a reasonable price in a shop on Capel Street. But the liberation of a few days had changed my perspective. I had an unmistakable feeling of a great weight being lifted off me. In the meantime, I had purchased a ‘brick’ phone for next to nothing and now alternate between the two, only using the Doomsday Machine, now shorn of most, though not all, social media apps, when strictly necessary. I am a work in progress.
I know many people, more sensible than I, who have deleted all social media apps from their smartphones save for WhatsApp. This is, however, the Gateway Drug that maintains the addiction, leaving the impression that you cannot live without the Doomsday Machine. In a sinister twist, WhatsApp cannot be used on a laptop, for example, without already being connected to a Doomsday Machine.
Facebook has become the lightning rod for much of the bad press around social media – those pesky Russians again – and its distorted algorithm is a distinct nuisance if one is attempting to share meaningful content, as the cutesy image will always win out. Used strategically, however, it has its advantages, especially as a means of staying in contact with a large number of people, and for the purpose of events. It only really becomes problematic as an app on a smartphone that sends out regular notifications, prompting idly scrolling. I can live with it on my laptop, although I have given up on the hope of using it as a conduit for radical journalism.
As regards the confessional nature of posting our thoughts, I was struck by further prescient words from Pessoa: ‘What could anyone confess that would be worth anything or serve any useful purpose? What has happened to us has either happened to everyone or to us alone; if the former, it has no novelty value and if the latter it will be incomprehensible.’[vi] I am coming to recognise that most of the online outbursts I am prone to are perhaps better left unsaid.
Instagram offers a good medium for photographers to display their work, but is overwhelmingly narcissistic, not only through that ultimate expression of Doomsday Machines, the selfie, but also via the look-at-my-beautiful-life imagery that abounds. Planet Instagram is full of beautiful people who overcome life challenges, reveal plenty of tanned flesh and speak in a patois of hashtags.
Selfie by name.
Pessoa would take an uncompromising view:
Man should not be able to see his own face. Nothing is more terrible that that. Nature gave him the gift of being unable either to see his face or to look into his own eyes … he could only see his face in the waters of rivers and lakes. Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to commit the ignominy of his seeing his own face … the creator of the mirror poisoned the human race.[vii]
There are times when access to the Internet while on the move is of great value. Google Maps makes travel immeasurably easier. But are we comfortable with all our movements being tracked? Smart-phone maps also reduce the sum total of our interactions with fellow human beings, and makes us less observant of the world around us.
A good rule of thumb is that, unless we are sitting upright, communication is unsatisfactory. The same applies to reading news sites – I had become all-too-prone to only partially reading articles. Indeed, the ‘most read’ articles on most sites tends to be prurient ‘click-bait.’
I suggest you forget about the hurried message and make time for real expression in communication. There is no point attempting to stay in touch with everyone, because it is impossible. Leave more time for reading books, making music, being present to friends and family, and allow space for the tedium that brings daydreaming.
The Internet can open new horizons of knowledge, bringing to fruition Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (d. 1716) dream of a bibliotheca universalis, a ‘universal library’, where expert insight is available to all, everywhere. It could lead us into thinking more globally. But this beast needs considerable taming. Its great potential may be more easily realised by abandoning Doomsday Machines altogether. The wider consequences of a less mediated society could be profound. If enough of us can escape the clutches of the Machines, perhaps we can eventually develop the focus required for collective action.
