Former British POW Col John Lawrence to Japanese POW, about to be executed, Sgt Gengo Hara: “You are the victim of men who think they are right... Just as one day you and captain Yunoi believed absolutely that you were right. And the truth is of course that nobody is right.”
– Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, 1983
THOSE of us who habitually approach things in an uncertain, cautious or sceptical way often get stick for it – for sitting on the fence, for not throwing ourselves into a cause, for being cynical, downbeat or negative when harassed by go-getting motivational pressure. But, while as a modern human being I accept that I am a mess of flaws, failings and dysfunctions, I do not count this tendency as one of them. It is clearly linked to some of my less appealing qualities – it doesn’t exactly spur me on to grasp opportunities to the full and make my voice heard above all others – but I will defend it.
Steel shutters
When I was a kid in the 1980s, there was often anger and strife in the media and in the world around me, just as there is today. The troubles in Northern Ireland, the cold war, Thatcherism, strikes, general moral outrage from the likes of Mary Whitehouse. Always a little off in my own quiet world (what’s changed?) I was baffled and distressed by it all – of course I was, I was a child, with no hope of understanding then what it was all about, nor any hope of having any input into whatever shitstorm I was witnessing – but I at least had a vague grasp that there was something heavy, something wrong, that had caused the disagreement.
But there were some cases where anger and strife turned into something else – something terrifying and utterly alien to me. That moment where you realise the person working themselves into a lather is not simply getting emotional or showing assertive resolve – no, they have completely switched into another mode. A mode where communication is only one way, where they are so utterly, utterly convinced that they are right – and righteous – that nothing anyone says will get past the steel shutters they have pulled down around themselves, and they may as well not be in a dialogue at all. Inside those steel shutters is more steel – brutal, rigid, utterly black and white, serious as hell and all-consuming. Outside almost everything is THE ENEMY, contemptible and not worth engaging with, except in open warfare.
I was probably about 12 when I decided that that mindset – no matter what the cause or argument – was nothing less than a vision of evil. When those kind of people start throwing their weight around, ugliness, tragedy and horror is likely to follow.
Of course I was naive – as I grew up and realised the intractable complexity of the world and its politics, I thought perhaps it was me being a little rigid and extreme in that view – I didn’t then understand the very real grievances that make people act like that, and that those “kind of people” surely don’t think and act like that all the time. Maybe that behaviour is all just down to the heat of the moment after all. But I still think I was onto something – perhaps it’s not about a “kind of” person, but rather a state of being that people can get into. Whatever, seeing someone in that state is something I still recoil from in extreme distress, suspicion and horror, still no matter what the cause.
THOSE of us who habitually approach things in an uncertain, cautious or sceptical way often get stick for it – for sitting on the fence, for not throwing ourselves into a cause, for being cynical, downbeat or negative when harassed by go-getting motivational pressure. But, while as a modern human being I accept that I am a mess of flaws, failings and dysfunctions, I do not count this tendency as one of them. It is clearly linked to some of my less appealing qualities – it doesn’t exactly spur me on to grasp opportunities to the full and make my voice heard above all others – but I will defend it.
Steel shutters
When I was a kid in the 1980s, there was often anger and strife in the media and in the world around me, just as there is today. The troubles in Northern Ireland, the cold war, Thatcherism, strikes, general moral outrage from the likes of Mary Whitehouse. Always a little off in my own quiet world (what’s changed?) I was baffled and distressed by it all – of course I was, I was a child, with no hope of understanding then what it was all about, nor any hope of having any input into whatever shitstorm I was witnessing – but I at least had a vague grasp that there was something heavy, something wrong, that had caused the disagreement.
But there were some cases where anger and strife turned into something else – something terrifying and utterly alien to me. That moment where you realise the person working themselves into a lather is not simply getting emotional or showing assertive resolve – no, they have completely switched into another mode. A mode where communication is only one way, where they are so utterly, utterly convinced that they are right – and righteous – that nothing anyone says will get past the steel shutters they have pulled down around themselves, and they may as well not be in a dialogue at all. Inside those steel shutters is more steel – brutal, rigid, utterly black and white, serious as hell and all-consuming. Outside almost everything is THE ENEMY, contemptible and not worth engaging with, except in open warfare.
I was probably about 12 when I decided that that mindset – no matter what the cause or argument – was nothing less than a vision of evil. When those kind of people start throwing their weight around, ugliness, tragedy and horror is likely to follow.
Of course I was naive – as I grew up and realised the intractable complexity of the world and its politics, I thought perhaps it was me being a little rigid and extreme in that view – I didn’t then understand the very real grievances that make people act like that, and that those “kind of people” surely don’t think and act like that all the time. Maybe that behaviour is all just down to the heat of the moment after all. But I still think I was onto something – perhaps it’s not about a “kind of” person, but rather a state of being that people can get into. Whatever, seeing someone in that state is something I still recoil from in extreme distress, suspicion and horror, still no matter what the cause.
Righteous rage
In my student years it would even turn me off causes I had a natural affinity with to see them hijacked by people working themselves into a shrill, shouty, righteous rage about them – whether in print, in music or at demonstrations. Good grief, I’d think, we’re supposed to be the good guys, we’re supposed to be better than this. Why are we putting our fists in the air in salute and chanting jingoistic slogans like brainless drones? I guess, I thought dejectedly, because subtle, reasoned debate doesn’t get heard. What a shit for humanity.
The most salient and obvious examples of this kind of behaviour are the terrifying proponents of extreme ideologies – in which category I’d put totalitarian dictators, patriotic warmongers, violent terrorists and agitators, race-hate thugs, fire-and-brimstone religious extremists or anyone, really, calling for intolerance and death on a perceived demographic. They are essentially putting an ideal of “their people” and how they want the world to be above actual people and how the world actually is.
But aside from those noisy and threatening examples, you come into contact with smaller scale versions every day, from soap-box Nimbyism to puffed-up in-group jingoism, to them-and-us thinking and po-faced bluster in general. To me it undermines someone’s credibility immediately to see them acting in such a hysterical, inflexible way – I don’t give two shits about their “passion” and their “strength”, it’s not something to be admired.
Because this sort of outlook is at once too narrow – everything is judged and distorted by an obsession with one issue, there is no appreciation of the wider context, or an honest approach to dealing with the complexity of the arguments; but on the other hand it is too general – it pays no attention to the subtleties of the situation or variety of opinion, instead preferring to caricature, vilify and over-simplify, which makes things much easier if you want to appear unambiguously right and call people to arms.
Humour and humanity
And a key indicator is the lack of humour - a healthy irreverence, sense of irony and the absurd is, for me, a sign of intelligence and humanity. It’s all too often mistaken for simple sneering or piss-taking, but there is a difference between cynicism for the sake of it – bitter, bullying and condescending – and the more gentle but persistent pricking of grand pomposity and po-faced pretension, the humanising reality check. The latter acts as a buffer against getting caught up in such ever-so-earnest, unquestioning idealism, and means you never stop seeing people as just people.
A sense of humour about serious issues is not a sign you’re not taking them seriously – it’s a sign you recognise no one is infallible, life is never perfect, and there is always some shoddiness and absurdity inherent in everything and everybody – including yourself. Forget that and we are left in a world where everything is serious and angry and what follows is intolerance and brutality.
But it’s important to criticise the attitude, the behaviour, not simply the people displaying it. I say that not for touchy-feely namby-pamby reasons, but because it’s crucial to my argument – the whole problem as I see it lies in not treating others as rounded human beings. The hallmark of this kind of behaviour is removing yourself from genuine, everyday one-on-one human interaction and instead treating those you disagree with as either a faceless “them” or exaggerated monsters in the case of individuals. And it’s precisely in the gap between the complex reality of everyone’s various lives, troubles, wants and needs and the single-issue “just crusade” that any hope of understanding and empathy is lost.
A wonderful case where the opposite happened is at the York mosque in 2013, where angry EDL demonstrators were served tea and biscuits and invited inside for a game of football by the faithful. It was an instant diffuser, short-circuiting the puffed-up self-righteous urge of the protesters – if they had met them instead with a similarly self-righteous, angry response it would have done nothing but escalate the situation and no one would have gone home happier or wiser. Nothing would have been resolved. Of course, a game of football is not going to make the underlying issues or dispute go away, but at least it opens a channel for calm communication and a foot in the door for reason and understanding.
Rip the piss
We need people of conviction, yes. If all of us were cautious, sceptical, irreverent, fence-sitters nothing would ever get done, no one would ever show leadership, no fight would ever be won. But we need the cautious and irreverent also, to keep those convinced they are right in check, to add intelligence and nuance to the gung-ho drive, to ground them in reality, cool them down and make them see beyond their single-minded obsessions – to humanise them.
People who are convinced they are right – who will not laugh at themselves, will not meet you half way, will not recognise any other opinion or way than their own, on their terms... don’t tolerate them. Respond with the pinch of salt, the open ear and the calm cup of tea. And if they still don’t lighten the f*** up, rip the piss out of those po-faced f***ers mercilessly.
In my student years it would even turn me off causes I had a natural affinity with to see them hijacked by people working themselves into a shrill, shouty, righteous rage about them – whether in print, in music or at demonstrations. Good grief, I’d think, we’re supposed to be the good guys, we’re supposed to be better than this. Why are we putting our fists in the air in salute and chanting jingoistic slogans like brainless drones? I guess, I thought dejectedly, because subtle, reasoned debate doesn’t get heard. What a shit for humanity.
The most salient and obvious examples of this kind of behaviour are the terrifying proponents of extreme ideologies – in which category I’d put totalitarian dictators, patriotic warmongers, violent terrorists and agitators, race-hate thugs, fire-and-brimstone religious extremists or anyone, really, calling for intolerance and death on a perceived demographic. They are essentially putting an ideal of “their people” and how they want the world to be above actual people and how the world actually is.
But aside from those noisy and threatening examples, you come into contact with smaller scale versions every day, from soap-box Nimbyism to puffed-up in-group jingoism, to them-and-us thinking and po-faced bluster in general. To me it undermines someone’s credibility immediately to see them acting in such a hysterical, inflexible way – I don’t give two shits about their “passion” and their “strength”, it’s not something to be admired.
Because this sort of outlook is at once too narrow – everything is judged and distorted by an obsession with one issue, there is no appreciation of the wider context, or an honest approach to dealing with the complexity of the arguments; but on the other hand it is too general – it pays no attention to the subtleties of the situation or variety of opinion, instead preferring to caricature, vilify and over-simplify, which makes things much easier if you want to appear unambiguously right and call people to arms.
Humour and humanity
And a key indicator is the lack of humour - a healthy irreverence, sense of irony and the absurd is, for me, a sign of intelligence and humanity. It’s all too often mistaken for simple sneering or piss-taking, but there is a difference between cynicism for the sake of it – bitter, bullying and condescending – and the more gentle but persistent pricking of grand pomposity and po-faced pretension, the humanising reality check. The latter acts as a buffer against getting caught up in such ever-so-earnest, unquestioning idealism, and means you never stop seeing people as just people.
A sense of humour about serious issues is not a sign you’re not taking them seriously – it’s a sign you recognise no one is infallible, life is never perfect, and there is always some shoddiness and absurdity inherent in everything and everybody – including yourself. Forget that and we are left in a world where everything is serious and angry and what follows is intolerance and brutality.
But it’s important to criticise the attitude, the behaviour, not simply the people displaying it. I say that not for touchy-feely namby-pamby reasons, but because it’s crucial to my argument – the whole problem as I see it lies in not treating others as rounded human beings. The hallmark of this kind of behaviour is removing yourself from genuine, everyday one-on-one human interaction and instead treating those you disagree with as either a faceless “them” or exaggerated monsters in the case of individuals. And it’s precisely in the gap between the complex reality of everyone’s various lives, troubles, wants and needs and the single-issue “just crusade” that any hope of understanding and empathy is lost.
A wonderful case where the opposite happened is at the York mosque in 2013, where angry EDL demonstrators were served tea and biscuits and invited inside for a game of football by the faithful. It was an instant diffuser, short-circuiting the puffed-up self-righteous urge of the protesters – if they had met them instead with a similarly self-righteous, angry response it would have done nothing but escalate the situation and no one would have gone home happier or wiser. Nothing would have been resolved. Of course, a game of football is not going to make the underlying issues or dispute go away, but at least it opens a channel for calm communication and a foot in the door for reason and understanding.
Rip the piss
We need people of conviction, yes. If all of us were cautious, sceptical, irreverent, fence-sitters nothing would ever get done, no one would ever show leadership, no fight would ever be won. But we need the cautious and irreverent also, to keep those convinced they are right in check, to add intelligence and nuance to the gung-ho drive, to ground them in reality, cool them down and make them see beyond their single-minded obsessions – to humanise them.
People who are convinced they are right – who will not laugh at themselves, will not meet you half way, will not recognise any other opinion or way than their own, on their terms... don’t tolerate them. Respond with the pinch of salt, the open ear and the calm cup of tea. And if they still don’t lighten the f*** up, rip the piss out of those po-faced f***ers mercilessly.
