Art Garfunkle brought me a line from “Waters of March” (Jobim). It conjured an image now preserved in an enduring memory of a particular place and time.
Early one sultry summer morning, some fifty years ago in up-state Mississippi, a young man with a back-pack climbed down from a Greyhound Scenicruiser. . . There’s no one else around; the door closes, the diesel churns, fades into the distance and folds into silence; the dust settles, the air’s close and heavy. Some short way ahead a heavily loaded pickup emerges from a road on the left, the driver’s sleeve rolled up, arm resting on the door. It pauses then, with an easy muffled rumble, slowly crosses and is gone. Round the bend on a cinder patch a couple of trucks and a patrol car are scattered in front of a diner. The young fellow takes his place at the counter, sips the coffee and keeps himself to himself. And that’s all; I don’t remember what may have followed but those images are burned in and that pickup remains forever my “truckload of bricks in the soft morning light”.
The memory is still clear and comforting; the warm glow of clay in the early morning sunshine, the quiet easing in of a new day, a small moment from an older America retained and fondly revisited. But not that long ago I realised there was a flaw. The driver’s arm rests on the right hand door.
Yes, I stepped off that bus, sat in the diner, felt the early morning calm as the truck passed by but maybe not just then and there. My “memory” had been assigned its narrative by a subconscious with a partisan indifference for detail – we drive on the left in England.
I’m not about to relinquish the recollection – I couldn’t if I wanted to and I don’t want to. But it’s not a reliable evocation – they don’t drive on the left in Mississippi. That’s the issue; we humans seem to be defined by an uneasy tension between a more or less rational conscious self and the less biddable subconscious.
It’s that freewheeling autopilot that gets us into trouble but without it we would neither function nor know ourselves. Accommodating the dichotomy is the challenge. The inaccessible self does the housekeeping, spins the memories and holds a sense of identity with assumption and bias resistant to critical exposure. The rational party can make for an uncompromising partner but it’s in the extent to which the one accommodates the other and in negotiating this pact that we find ourselves.
Unfortunately though, it’s the unreliable accomplice that tends to call the tune with reason often relegated to no more than supportive rhetoric. Thomas Paine likened “arguing with a man who has renounced reason” to “administering medicine to the dead”. A couple of centuries later Kennedy spoke of the “myth” and “prefabricated set of interpretations” with which we “enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought”. Hardly surprising since reason, in challenging beliefs, can erode a vital sense of self – witness those lying in hospital beds, on a ventilator, but still in denial as to the source of their predicament,
And of course there might be considered a certain irony in the Kennedy aphorism – he identified as a Catholic after all and I speak from some experience. My education was, for a while, consigned to the Jesuits – although their dogmatic indoctrination ensured that they didn’t retain the man. . .
There’s no knowing the extent to which his Catholicism may have informed Kennedy’s presidency but this does serve to illuminate the apparent disjunction which burdens all endeavour. I’m not about to scrap my truckload of bricks but I’ll keep it parked up in the background. It’s part of the flavour and nuance that characterises my existence. But it’s in the accountable rationale that we’re offered an insurance against the vagaries of arbitrary conditioning. Here is the common currency that brings an opportunity for universality. The insight to contain and manage uncertain instinct. The tool to review investment in a dubious identity.
Behaviours run the gamut from a form of Socratic ideal with truth and purpose to be sought in rational inquiry and dialogue while, at the other extreme, lies a Trumpian disregard for any independent measure of integrity, with behaviours dictated by a pre-eminent commitment to a ragbag of capricious compulsions.
Mostly, though, we inhabit a hinterland of cultural norms, navigating a course between the two poles but largely “following procedure”. It’s safer and more comfortable to fit in. Undoubtedly procedure has its place but blind conformity, with a reluctance to challenge, hinders enlightenment and invites frustration and failure.
Some years ago I was living in a recently designated “conservation area”. The local authority embarked on a programme of replacing street furniture and surfaces with “heritage” products. Stone flags bedded in sand, granite setts in pitch for vehicular access with cobbles to line pedestrian ways. The work was beautifully executed by a small team. So it remained for several months before being ripped up to renew the water main with individual spurs replacing the lead to every property. The paving was subsequently reinstated with broken flags patched with cement, now missing flags replaced by tarmac and disturbed setts bedded in and daubed with slurry.
On that occasion I rang the Authority:
“I live in . . . , we’ve just had the water main renewed, how often does this happen?”
“Oh once every hundred years or so,” came the cheery reply.
“In that case, might it not have been an idea to investigate the possibility of any imminent works before the conservation improvements?”
Less cheery this time: “Who are you?”
“I’m a resident.”
“What’s your address?”
“I’m a resident.”
“What business is it of yours? We followed procedure.”
Somewhat defensive, a small matter and perhaps a simplistic illustration for a more pervasive ill. In a culture that likes to apportion blame and find scapegoats, “following procedure” affords a tick-box discharge of responsibility. Permission to avoid the “discomfort of thought”.
The overseas visitor with a hire car, accustomed to driving on the right sets off on the wrong side, or maybe looks the wrong way at a junction, and causes an accident. I doubt there are many who, in driving abroad, have not made a similar error. Much of the responsibility is necessarily left to a subconscious conditioned to driving on a particular side. Accepting that there might be additional factors to consider it seems otherwise short sighted to attempt to wrap things up with just the inevitable motoring conviction. We both expect too much of that errant self and aren’t really addressing the issue.
Far better to acknowledge the limits of human behaviour. It would take little to require all vehicles hired to drivers from relevant countries be equipped with software that issued warnings at pinch points and when aberrant positioning was detected. I imagine most current vehicles would easily lend themselves to the necessary adjustments.
Human fallibility is part of the deal. The task is to recognise and accommodate; not pretend otherwise. To build and maintain institutions that are up to the task and hold them properly accountable and open to challenge. Then we might better manage that peculiar diversity of behaviours that makes us what we are. We’re all burdened with our personal collections of acquired prejudice, needs and drives and only through impartial rationality can we expect to accommodate the disparity and perhaps mitigate the impact of extreme encumbrance.
It is, therefore, particularly troubling when those institutions are seen to bend to the needs of the individual and functionaries neglect their duty to transcend the unreliable self. The politician more interested in party and career progression, the lawyer serving client success ahead of justice. Indeed, those who simply don’t have the capacity to acknowledge or investigate an inconvenient reality.
And here grows the frustration and disquiet that led me to embark on these ramblings. As I say, no expertise, just an attempt to develop some understanding and perhaps to find some catharsis. I take the view that any solution lies in a vigilant oversight of those mechanisms by which we regulate ourselves. Institutions designed and administered with true accountability, insight and compassion and an ability to see beyond the specious sanction of normality.
The fact is, though, that our capacity for rationality remains hopelessly encumbered by the familiar. Public discourse often affects a trade in reason whilst offering little other than a subtext to pervasive predisposition. There’s a certain irony for example – and I’ve no axe to grind here – in that the purveyors of addictive substances can find their efforts recognised by anything from The Queen’s Award, to a vacation at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. . .
I’ve already touched briefly on the apparent shortcomings within the provision for civil justice. In my next post I shall address another area, probably of interest to many, that seems to labour under a notable shortfall of sensible reflection.
Outing The Pathology 