God’s only excuse
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 8: People like Us
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Robyn Williams
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Robyn Williams' biography and other articles by this writer
Those who can induce you to believe absurdities can induce you to commit atrocities.
– Voltaire
“He's Party, I'm sure." My mother was reading the newspaper and drinking her 10th cup of tea
of the morning. Tea was made by dripping hot water from the kettle onto leaves in a strainer. The kettle was always almost boiling, quietly grumbling on the stove, making little bangs
over a minuscule flame. The parsimonious habits of austerity persisted despite our newly
found comfort.
She pointed at the picture of a Hollywood star; it may have been John Garfield. "He's been Party for ages."
I didn't think about it then (I was far too young) that "Party" should have a capital P and lack the definite article. Mr Garfield wasn't just "in the party" – meaning the Communist Party. He was Party: One Of Us.
My father concurred. He and my mother were not often in agreement. Even on the wetness of water or the nature of pink. But knowing who was Party was of the essence.
I was eight. We were living in Vienna not long after the War (another capital word). It was the city of Harry Lime, occupying forces and strange tides of allegiance. We were Working Class but living in a swank apartment near the famous Prater, a glorious park with the Big Wheel and a spectacular fun fair from which vast stretches of woodland and horse-chestnut avenues reached as far as the Old Danube, and with two servants, Gertrude and Trudi, to do our bidding.
Vienna was a city seething with officials from newly placed international organisations. It rivalled Geneva. My parents were in the World Federation of Trade Unions. I knew little about it then and had heard nothing since, until, strangely, I came across a mention of it in John le Carré's latest novel, Absolute Friends. The WFTU was headquartered in a palace in the centre of Vienna. It's remarkable how well Party People
took to palaces. The staircases were marble and the chandeliers enormous, but being Party, it turned out, wasn't a sufficient qualification.
My parents often did a bit of a triage on their comrades. I didn't understand the subtlety of these judgements.
Drinkwater, for example, was definitely Party, but not up to speed. Once at a cocktail do in one of the vast reception areas where archdukes had cavorted, Drinkwater languidly asked me to fetch him a canapé. "You took your time, boy," he remarked on my return, lounging in his couch. I replied: "My father says you're too slow to catch a cold."
It just came out. He stared at me. His companions froze. My mother, nearby, began a qualifying sentence but gave up, for once at a loss. There's a quality of silence, Barry Jones once told me, that you learn to recognise.
At home I wasn't punished, much to my amazement. No beating. The moment was allowed to pass. But I became eternally confused. How could someone be one of us, Party, yet still on the outer. Not really one of us at all! Could I ever cope with the intricacies of being grown up?
And why was "us" important? What about "them"? As I got older I met people I liked who turned out to be them. Sometimes I was made to drop them. This was a pity because they were often more fun than us. Party people were the opposite of what they sounded like. No bells and whistles, silly hats or tangos. Instead, grim-faced, they were always making references to "discipline" and "struggle". Like Presbyterians at a wake. I would picture struggle as a Houdini-like figure wriggling in a straitjacket and forever failing to escape. Not the wellspring of social spontaneity, this Party. Even with its new-found comforts.
I WASN'T VERY GOOD AT BEING US. One afternoon I was taken to a Young Pioneer group whose members met in some dark rooms in the basement of a large apartment building along the Danube Canal. The Pioneers were correct-line scouts, campers with agitprop, nurseries for Party. Vast portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin loomed over our small heads. The youth in charge talked for hours about what seemed to be rules and procedures. I was, from the very start, bad at rules, worse at catechism. Especially when handed down in the presence of frowning men with beards (OK, Stalin had only a moustache, but it sat like a wild animal under his nose). I never went back.
How did my parents, decent people of considerable culture, a Welsh miner and an East London linguist, become ensnared as small actors in a le Carré landscape with its codes, certainties and exclusions? The answer is simple: 75 years ago in Europe you chose; you were either for the fascists or against them. There was no in between. Only fools or drunks or the terminally bewildered allowed themselves to sidestep history.
My parents also saw themselves and their friends as idealists. Unlike fascists, they did not wish to rid the world of a race of humans. Sub-humans. They were nothing like the Nazis about whom Martin Amis ( whose father Kingsley was also Party in the 1940s) agonises in Korba the Dread (Vintage, 2002). Why do we not see supporters of Stalin as so obviously evil and culpable as we see the supporters of Hitler? he asks. Stalin's numbers were as bad. Worse. At that time it was because the left, the ordinary socialists, saw "us" as the grassroots. What my father called the body politic. Us was not the men in suits (like Drinkwater) nor the moustachioed generalissimos with their Cro-Magnon-brows and festoons of medallions, enough to make Idi Amin look modest.
My father's heroes were, ultimately, the miners and their families he had grown up with in South Wales and with whom he'd toiled underground from the age of 14. They were the enslaved gold miners of South Africa whom he went to help, quixotically, in the 1950s, with the likes of Mandela. His heroes were not the square-shouldered tyrants reviewing parades of tanks in Red Square. They were the hollow-eyed, near-starved workers without work who somehow kept their communities alive and for whom the word "struggle" was more than a comrade's slogan. Before he died, when I was 18, I saw my father hunched in front of a BBC documentary about Stalin. He was whispering something repeatedly. I crept closer and heard the words, "You ruthless bastard!"
Were us different from them? That is a judgement for history. What is as significant is how close they could have been to merging. The ingredients were there. Harsh social circumstances, the call for absolute discipline to face a common enemy, an elaborate ideology, a dogma, men with beards (or moustaches) laying down the law. "Communism is just fascism with a human face," wrote Susan Sontag. Under such circumstances, ultimately, you can make people do anything.
ANYTHING. THAT'S THE INCUBUS OF MANKIND. Beslan, Auschwitz, Kokoda, Culloden, Rwanda, My Lai – no outrage is beyond us. And we can do evil casually, almost without feeling. With banality.
The big question is whether this is an intrinsic quality or whether first we need to be pushed to extremes. Do we behave despicably in ordinary times because we're bored, stupid or just intrinsically nasty? Or does it take crisis to make us evil? Watching the news in the past year it has been easy to assume the first, that we are, according to Harvard professor Richard Wrangham, demonic.
Evolutionary science seems to give some credibility to this, but not quite. It takes a lot of energy and resources to be vicious. Peacefulness costs less. We may need to belong but must this mean that we have to despise those who don't?
A strong commitment to family and friends is obviously vital. Otherwise babies would perish and communities crumble. Even in extremis we persevere altruistically in the cause of us. Anthropologist Colin Turnbull's 1970s contrary example of the Ik tribe of Uganda, who allowed their children to waste away in time of famine, has been vigorously disputed. Most of us go to enormous lengths to care for our own. Similarly, we seem to be enraptured with the landscape. Our Country. Where we belong. Harvard biologist Ed Wilson calls this biophilia. It makes sense to assume we have a strong feeling for who we are and where we come from.
The trouble arises when populations become larger and wealth accumulates. We need more social glue. By then we can afford priests and shamans to make it for us. Religion is apparently universal among human beings everywhere. Its purpose may be to console for loss and disaster and prepare us for the inevitability of death. Above all, it gives us a badge, a totem, a definition of us. It is a unifier. It is also a powerful means of control.
But religion doesn't necessarily come with an ethical code. Jared Diamond writes of many tribal people, such as those in Papua New Guinea, whose robust religious paraphernalia provides not a whit of Thou Shalt. We do not need magic or messiahs to help us live decently, to provide an ethical code. David Sloane Wilson, author of Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society (University of Chicago Press, 2002) sums up the binding role of belief: "Something as elaborate – as time-, energy-, and thought-consuming – as religion would not exist if it didn't have secular utility. Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone. The mechanisms that enable religious groups to function as adaptive units include the very beliefs and practices that make religion appear enigmatic to so many people who stand outside them."
Religions, in those circumstances, are adaptive. Even the scouring, the ritual asceticism, the sacrifice are, paradoxically, reinforcers. Suffering seems a much more likely qualifier for belonging than sweet self-indulgence. Some religions do offer promiscuous sex and sensual massage as part of the deal but they tend not to last as long as those religions demanding celibacy, flagellation and staying mute. They keep us under control.
Another part of the deal is that the leader in tandem with his priest has a special line to the deity. Diamond poses the essential question succinctly: "But how does the chief get the peasants to tolerate what is basically the theft of their food by classes of social parasites?"
His answer: "The solution devised by every known chiefdom and early state society – from ancient Egypt to Polynesian Hawaii to the Inca Empire – was to proclaim an organised religion with the following tenets: the chief or king is related to the gods; he or she can intercede with the gods on behalf of the peasants (eg to send rain or ensure a good harvest). In return for those services, the peasants should feed the chief and his priests and tax collectors. Standardised rituals, carried out at standardised temples, serve to teach these religious tenets to the peasants so that they will obey the chief and his lackeys."
Should the peasants become restless, Diamond might have added, we can stir up some loathing of those folk over the mountain who may look like us but worship Goz instead of Zog. Non-Party. Them. Nothing like an external enemy to pacify the populous. All this was clearly adaptive, in the main, because human societies survived and grew and are now covering the planet. The creative role of conflict is crucial. More on that later.
But religions differ from most human systems of ideas in that they are absolute. Few gods can be sent back, except in ancient Greece, because they've got it wrong. Gods Know. It is we who get things wrong by misinterpreting God's intentions. Or Stalin's. The failure is always ours. Even a sophisticated god, such as the Christian one, cannot be blamed for Auschwitz (and all those other geographical horrors listed above) because it's up to us. We are free to choose concentration camps. And to murder children in Beslan. Or to blow up a school bus shouting "God is great!" Religion flourishes as democracy fades. Religion is in the ascendant in America today. When policies fail, God is invoked. He threatens to overwhelm politics in Africa and Asia.
Back to Wrangham's Demonic Males (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), a book about killer chimpanzees. Are they really wired to attack, mutilate and kill outsiders? Pictures of this being done by our closest relative are as compelling as they are disturbing. Why torture a stranger and his brothers in this way? Is it just how they are? How we are? Is there a biological original sin in our genes that makes us turn into Stalin, Pol Pot or their faithful servants?
Jane Goodall and other ethologists, while recognising the vicious treatment of those outsiders, point to the chaotic and deprived state of the habitat where this is done. Gombe National Park, Tanzania, where she famously studied wild chimpanzees, is being logged and poached. The forest home is disappearing. Chimp society is being subjected to the same upheavals as Rwandan and Bosnian human society was – and is. Under such circumstances us-and-they differences can easily become the basis for genocide.