A Postcard From The Far Side of Despair.

Or, a meditation on bloody-mindedness for Ash Wednesday.

These essays will always be free, but you can support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing essays on to others, and to other sites that you frequent. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️

Thanks to those who continue to provide translations. Versions in Spanish are available here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting some Italian translations, and has set up a dedicated website for them here.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of years, or you are a member of the Inner Party of the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC), you will be familiar with the atmosphere of doom and gloom that increasingly permeates the lives of ordinary people these days. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before: a sour, disillusioned, almost nihilistic attitude, that extends well beyond anger with our broken political class. In my observation, in several countries, people have mostly just given up. They are beyond anger, and most of all beyond hope. There is no belief in even the possibility of a turn for the better, and a pervasive sense that we are near the end, and that things are falling apart now quite quickly. As I’ve suggested on a number of occasions, this decline goes beyond just government, to encompass the private sector, the media, education, and just about anything else that requires a bit of organisation and a dash of competence. So as somebody put it to me this week: “everything is shit and nothing works.”

Anger, for all that it is a dubious emotion, does sometimes imply the idea, or at least the wish, that things could get better. For most people, that possibility no longer exists. You may have read about recent protests by farmers throughout Europe, driving their tractors into city centres. But protests is all they are: an outpouring of anger and resentment. So complex are the issues, so long has the destruction of small-scale European agriculture been going on, that even a frightened government that wanted to solve the problems, or some of them, wouldn’t know where to start. Most people understand this, and they realise that forty years of economic and social vandalism cannot now be reversed, and that things have gone beyond the point of no return. At least you can say that my generation, born after WW2, did know a period when societies functioned properly and life was tolerable. But I really feel sorry for the generations born after, say, 1975, whose entire conscious life has been spent in a world where things just get worse all the time, and nobody expects that to change.

Not only that, the Inner Party is blithely unconscious of all this anger: it actively blames ordinary people for, on the one hand not realising just how wonderful life is today, and on the other not becoming CEOs of their own lives and working harder and showing more initiative to survive. The farmers’ protests have been dismissed because of alleged links with the “extreme Right” as though that were an argument. Public anger, resentment and protests have been handily pigeon-holed as “populism,” manipulated by “authoritarians,” as though “populism” was not another name for “democracy,” and existing western governments were not authoritarian themselves.

But it is not my purpose here to add to the litany of complaint or the groundswell of anger. Both seem to me to be pointless, no matter the strength of the endorphin rush they may produce for a few seconds. The problem with the system is less that it won’t change, than it cannot change. Its leaders are not very bright, they are saturated with their own ideology, and they are so incompetent that if they did miraculously understand the need for change, it would be impossible for them to use the enfeebled machinery that remains to actually get anything done.

So, no hope then? Do we all fall into a state of despair and give up? Do we adopt the popular motto of these days: if at first you don’t succeed, give up, and find someone to blame? The rest of this essay is about that question, and I argue that we need to cultivate a way of living without hope, but also without despair, and that this is not, in fact, an impossible paradox. Now it’s true, of course, that philosophers and theologians have been grappling with this issue for a very long time. You may dimly recall that traditionally, the Christian Church saw despair as an unforgivable sin, because it denied the possibility of Grace, and hence salvation. But with all due respect to those professions, I’m going to leave them to one side, and talk more about how people have dealt with the temptation to despair in life and in literature. For despair is not the same as feeling helpless, it’s a state of paralysis and quiescence, of passive acceptance of our situation, not because we are literally helpless, necessarily, but because we simply cannot summon up any enthusiasm or energy to do anything. It’s thus analogous to certain states of clinical depression. But my argument is that lack of hope does not have to lead to a numb quiescence, and passive acceptance of what the world throws at us. I will call a number of witnesses in support of this argument.

The first may surprise you: Henry Miller, the American writer of Tropic of Cancer, a novel recounting his years in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. ToC was banned for thirty years in the Anglo-Saxon world because it used what were considered naughty words then, and it’s been in disfavour more recently, because it used what are considered naughty words now. Irrespective of its place in this argument, it’s a book you should read anyway, and I’ll quickly explain why. (If you aren’t interested, I’ll meet you in the next paragraph.) Briefly, it is an evocation of a vanished Paris in which ordinary people lived, a Paris of the early 1930s that seems as distant from today’s city— half internationalised, overpriced open-air museum, half transit camp for the wretched—as does the Paris of the thirteenth century. He writes not as an intellectual, but in Jonson’s “language such as men do use,” yet provides some of the most hallucinatorily vivid and precise descriptions of Paris you will ever find. His cast of characters, including “Henry Miller,” is a collection of the goodish, the baddish and the totally weird. It incudes penniless artists, penniless would-be artists, tricksters and hustlers of all types, rich and poor expatriates from all over the western world, disadvantaged refugees, prostitutes, self-styled princesses, owners of dubious establishments, owners of even more dubious establishments, and many others, including (probably) the writer Anais Nin. It is a Paris where ordinary people, rather than tourists photographing each other, could eat in the Coupole or the Dôme in Montparnasse. It is a Paris of working-class districts, cheap restaurants, cheap bars, cheap rooms, no-star hotels, some used for dubious purposes, all of which has now disappeared, in favour of Starbucks, Gap and co-working spaces. And it is a book which, in spite of the poverty and insecurity it describes, is ultimately joyful and full of life.

Resuming the argument, then, Miller describes a life full of insecurity: he is often homeless, often penniless, frequently hungry. But precisely because he does not actively hope for anything better, he is happy. This is not the happiness of ascetic withdrawal: he indulges all of his appetites with gusto when he has money. Nor is it a happiness resulting from a facile optimism that something will turn up. He is happy when life gives him something, but has no expectation, or even hope, that it necessarily will. But it is a happiness which comes precisely from not confusing a lack of hope with simple despair, a distinction which Miller makes explicitly in the novel. Abandoning hope does not mean abandoning life, and he never for a moment shows unhappiness or resentment about his situation.

This distinction between loss of hope on the one hand, and a refusal to despair on the other, is a theme a number of writers have treated, but I don’t have a lot of space to go into that. However, let’s just name-check TS Eliot who, improbably, seems to have admired Miller’s writing, and in Ash Wednesday, published at about the same time as ToC, dealt explicitly with the same issues of hope and despair. (It’s Ash Wednesday today, of course.) After the initial, repeated assertions that “I do not hope”, the poet mounts a symbolic stair (recalling his beloved Dante), from which he sees behind him the

“devil of the stairs who wears

The deceitful face of hope and of despair.”

Both temptations are to avoided, therefore. And finally the poet discovers a “strength beyond hope and despair:” the strength of Grace. Which is actually not that different from the conclusion of Miller’s novel, where the narrator, with some money for once, takes a taxi to the outskirts of the city, and just sits and contemplates the Seine.

OK, that’s enough Lit Crit. Does this way of thinking have a practical application? Can we abandon hope without falling into despair? Perhaps that’s not quite the right question, though. It’s not so much abandoning hope, as deciding how to deal with a situation where there doesn’t seem to be any. This is a subtle but very important distinction, because the first is a state of mind, whereas the second is an empirical judgement. One leads to despair, the other doesn’t have to. I think there are a number of real-life examples that help to illustrate my point, but I’ll limit myself to two: one of which has been an interest of mine all my life, the other where I was fortunate to be granted a brief personal glimpse of the reality.

A few years after Miller’s book and Eliot’s poem were published, and after Miller had returned to the US, war broke out. The sudden and apparently inexplicable surrender of the French forces in 1940 after barely six weeks of fighting, the Army’s insistence that they could not fight on, even if a large part of their forces was intact, the scuttle of the political class to Bordeaux, the vote by elected parliamentarians to give “full powers” to Marshal Pétain the hero of Verdun, the division of the country into two, the establishment of a reactionary regime in Vichy … all these things were confusing and traumatic in themselves, but the fact that they happened at such breakneck speed was too much to absorb. A spirit of shock and cold despair settled over the country. France was disarmed and half-occupied, millions of French soldiers were prisoners, and all that remained was an obscure General in London with no army. The British, anticipating invasion themselves, had not made any friends by destroying the French fleet in Oran to prevent it falling into the hands of the Germans.

Yet slowly people began to resist: this was not The Resistance (that came later) but rather an awkward, cussed, typically French attempt to emmerder the occupiers. Giving false directions to Germans, scribbling slogans on walls, overcharging German soldiers in shops: it wasn’t much, but it was something. Slowly, an underground intellectual resistance began, publishing clandestine books, poems and tracts. Jean Bruller, the co-founder of the clandestine publisher Éditions de Minuit (“The Midnight Press,” which still exists), published his masterpiece Le Silence de la Mer (“The Silence of the Sea”). The simple plot tells how an elderly man and his niece wage a silent struggle against a Wehrmacht officer billeted on them. He is a cultured and sophisticated man who genuinely hopes for Franco-German amity, and admires French culture. But the old man and his niece refuse to speak to him the whole time he is there. Finally, on leave in Paris, the officer falls in with some convinced Nazis, who tell him what the actual German plans for France are. Appalled and in despair, the officer goes off to fight, and probably die, on the Eastern Front.

The book was a huge success clandestinely, and was later reissued with several more stories, one of which was set among a group of French officers taken prisoner, suffering from the cold, bleak despair that gripped so much of France at this time. Then one day they happen to see a group of ducklings walking in line. The smallest, evidently with some problem, falls over every half-dozen steps, but determinedly gets up and keeps walking. The officers find this so amusing and admirable that they bust out laughing, and find their mood beginning to lift. The title of the story is “Despair is dead.” (Désespoir est mort.)

Slowly, ordinary French people began to realise that, even if there was no obvious hope, there was also no reason to fall into despair. Resistance groups began to form, often based around institutions, political groups and workplaces, and small numbers of individuals braved the long, difficult and dangerous journey to London to join De Gaulle. One such was Jean Moulin, a brilliant young civil servant and Prefect: one of the local representatives of central government, and the only one to refuse to support Vichy. After an episode of despair and depression where he tried to take his own life, he left for London. De Gaulle recognised in him a unique combination of personal courage and charisma, dedication and administrative ability, and asked him to go back to France to organise the Resistance into a single movement. He achieved this, before being betrayed, arrested and tortured to death by the Gestapo in 1943, without even revealing his real name.

Other résistants had very different experiences. Some at least of the faction linked to the Communist Party wanted to provoke a mass uprising by carrying out armed attacks, and accepting the mass reprisals that followed. Other parts of the Resistance concentrated on intelligence-gathering, stockpiling arms and weapons and waiting for the day when they could rise up and take the Germans from the rear. Somehow, the coalition assembled by Moulin held together, and the Resistance saved the honour of France, if nothing else, taking control of towns and cities before the Allies arrived, and actually defeating the Germans in Paris in August 1944, in a conflict in which thousands died. But what these groups had in common was a life (often short), of fear, insecurity and isolation, unable to trust anyone, and with the prospect of liberation a distant and uncertain one. Thousands were shot out of hand by the Germans or died in combat, tens of thousands more were sent to concentration camps where barely half survived. In all, historians reckon that over 40,000 French men and women died in one form of resistance or other. A surprising number of them were Christians who died sure in their faith. A large number were Communists who died secure in theirs. But in any event, the last words recorded of most of those who were executed were Vive la France! for all that that must sound unacceptably xenophobic today. It’s not too much to say that at least some of these people died in a state of Grace.

But why? After all, nothing could be done directly to free the country, and any actions against the Germans simply provoked atrocities against innocent civilians. Liberation by outside powers seemed a distant possibility: arrest, torture and death, on the other hand, seemed very close. To join De Gaulle in his quixotic struggle was to expose families to reprisals. And yet. Perhaps the simple answer is that resistance came from people who refused to despair, who refused to give up, who were bloody-minded and stubborn. The mentality is well summed up in a song composed by two wartime exiles in London, known in French as La Complainte du Partisan. Here is the original sung by Anna Marly, who wrote the music. You are more likely to have come across it in an English version popularised by Leonard Cohen, which keeps some of the original, but substantially changes the meaning. The text is stark and laconic, almost without emotion. It begins:

“Les Allemands étaient chez moi

On m'a dit "Résigne-toi"

Mais je n'ai pas pu.”

The Germans were at my house. They said “give up.” But I could not do this. I could not do this. If you want the sprit of resistance, it’s incarnated there. This is the sprit of genuine resistance: not posing with sunglasses and firearms, not signing online petitions or gluing yourself to paintings. This is not a carefully considered political position tried out on focus groups, it is a gut reaction: this is wrong, I’m not putting up with it. And so, J’ai repris mon arme. I picked up my gun again.

But that’s only half of it. The résistant fights because the cause is just, because fighting is the right thing to do, without hope of reward, or even recognition. The song ends thus:

“Le vent souffle sur les tombes

La liberté reviendra

On nous oubliera

Nous rentrerons dans l’ombre.”

The wind blows through the tombs. Freedom will return. We will be forgotten. We will go back to obscurity. And this is pretty much what happened. Whilst many Resistance leaders did go into politics and government to help rebuild the country, most ordinary résistants dispersed quietly at the end of the war, their job done. Talk to most French people whose parents or grandparents were in the Resistance, and you get the same comment: “they never talked about it.” A whole generation only discovered that their parents had been in the Resistance long after the war, usually sorting through their effects after their death. For many who had been imprisoned or in the camps, talking about it was impossible anyway. Jorge Semprun, the Franco-Spanish writer whom I’ve mentioned before, taken prisoner, sent to Buchenwald, his life saved by the stroke of a pen, spent twenty years doing other things before he could bring himself to write about his experiences. One of his books was called Writing or Life: you couldn’t have both.

In the end, the Resistance was not entirely forgotten, though its relationship with the Gaullists (and for that matter the Communist Party) were always sensitive issues. De Gaulle’s healing myth of “forty million résistants,” politically essential as it was, tended to downplay the role of those who had actually done the fighting and dying. The Resistance is still remembered today, children learn about it in school in sanitised form, and even Mr Macron has been known to say a few words about it through gritted teeth. But then most of those who fought didn’t expect anything for themselves anyway. Duty done, time to go home.

There’s a critical difference between fighting for a difficult cause, and fighting for one which appears to be hopeless. The westernised educated elites who led the anti-colonial wars in Africa, for example, were fighting to take power for themselves, and believed from the start that they had a good chance of winning. This was not the case with South Africa, which is the other example I want to talk about, specifically the role of white South Africans in the anti-apartheid struggle. For this, a small amount of background is necessary.

The struggle was against a particular regime, not a colonial or occupying power. The colonial regime, insofar as there’d been one, was Britain, which had given the country independent Dominion status in 1910. The British were hated in the country less by the African population than by the Afrikaners, and the 1948 election which narrowly returned an Afrikaner Nationalist government to power was largely won by mobilising resentment against the English-speaking minority, mostly recent immigrants, who dominated politics, business and the public sector. The first act of the Nationalists was to purge English-speakers from all positions of responsibility the country. Not the least of the charges against the previous government of Jan Smuts was that it had allowed volunteers to join the British Army fighting the Germans, in the Western Desert and then in Italy, thus taking the side of the colonial power responsible for so much Afrikaner suffering during the Boer War.

The Afrikaners did not see themselves as colonists except in the Greek sense of the term. They saw themselves rather as victims, religious refugees fleeing persecution in Europe, arriving in an empty country given to them by God, in furtherance of promises they had found in the Bible. Fierce Protestants, mostly Calvinists, they saw themselves an Elect, the real and only true inhabitants of the country, but threatened by English-speaking immigrants, and the international Communist conspiracy to overthrow “the only democracy in Africa,” and replace it with an atheist Communist dictatorship after bloodily slaughtering the Afrikaner population. All political dissent, all international pressure and isolation, were simply part of a Total Assault directed from Moscow, which in turn required  a Total Strategy to combat it.

In the circumstances, the whites who joined in the anti-apartheid struggle were therefore mostly from the English-speaking community. A significant number were Jews from Eastern Europe, who recognised repression when they saw it. The organisation and politics of not just the African National Congress, but the anti-apartheid movement as a whole, in the country, in Africa and in Europe, are far too complex to go into here, but I want to touch on just a couple of points.

The first was the refusal to despair. On the face of it, there was a lot to despair about. When I first met white South African exiles in the 1970s, things seemed about as despairing as they could possibly be. The regime was firmly in power, protected geographically by friendly regimes in Mozambique, Angola and Rhodesia, and directly controlling Namibia. International attention was focused on the Vietnam War, the Middle East and later on Iran. Western governments were not overly attracted to the apartheid regime, but treated it as a de facto ally in the struggle against Soviet influence in Africa. Above all, South Africa was a regional militiary hegemon, and the regime was in total control of the country. Even in the 1980s, when the glacis had cracked after Mozambique, Angola and Rhodesia had become independent, the regime still dominated the region militarily, and still kept an iron grip on the country. Even the most optimistic interpretation of events saw only a slow descent of the country into chaos and anarchy.

And yet, large numbers of white South Africans went into exile, not just to leave the country, but to work actively against its regime. Some were involved in anti-anti-apartheid activism, some in garnering international support for the ANC, many in the intelligence services both of the ANC itself and its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), where their greater education made them invaluable to the ANC leadership. Quite a few fought and died in guerrilla units or in Angola.

But the life of exiles, whether elsewhere in Africa (in Lusaka, for example where the ANC had its headquarters) or in Europe, was particularly hard. Unlike the European exiles in London in WW2, or anti-Communist exiles in the West during the Cold War, they had no funding and little political sympathy. The best they could look forward to, apart from the possibility of military and intelligence training in the Soviet Union, Cuba and East Germany, was poverty, insecurity, the constant threat of death from apartheid’s assassination squads, and the vague hope that one day they would be able to leave behind the cold evenings and the rainy skies of Europe, and see the sunshine of Africa again.

In many ways this made no sense at all. After all, even with the violence and the international isolation, ordinary middle-class whites in South Africa had a way of life among the most attractive in the whole world. Leaving your job as a university lecturer, your large house in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, with a swimming pool, a car, a nice garden, good health care and trips to game parks, to go into exile just seemed insane to many people. Anyway, what could you do against the vast edifice of the apartheid state? Why not limit yourself to signing petitions, hosting dinner parties where everybody complained about the government, and making sure you paid your native servants properly, and treated them well? If you didn’t openly challenge the government, they would probably leave you alone. And unless you made an effort to find out about it, apartheid was semi-hidden. As one sympathetic Afrikaner said to me, “you could drive all the way from Joburg to Cape Town and never see a black face.” Indeed, when I was first in the country, there were no road signs pointing to Soweto, because whites, who owned the vast majority of cars, had no reason to go there.

Yet many did leave, and devoted their lives to what seemed a hopeless cause. Once more, there was little careful analysis involved. Among the people I met, the predominant feeling was: I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t do that. The moral compromises involved in living a privileged life-style in a theocratic, authoritaran country built on black servant labour were simply unsupportable to many. For a smaller number, the need to try to do something about it was absolute. There was no careful estimate of the chances of success, no thoughtful analysis of options. People left the country because “I couldn’t stay” and joined the Underground because “it was the right thing to do.”

The second point is that these people did not seek, and did not particularly want, recognition and rewards. Most of them hoped to live to see the installation of a democratic regime, and a number did so. Some went into politics, government and the military, some tried to take up the careers they had once wanted to pursue. Many others retained influence with the new ANC government, because of their previous contacts. But in all cases, their position was, as I frequently heard people say, “in the past I had the right skin and the wrong politics. Now I’ve got the wrong skin and the right politics,” or something similar. It’s not easy to give up decades of an enviable  lifestyle, the chance of a decent career, marriage and a family, and come back to find your contemporaries, whose most heroic act was once going on a campus demonstration, have had all these things while you’ve been away. Maybe you wind up working for one of them. Yet though I met plenty of returning exiles destroyed by the experience, I didn’t encounter much bitterness or regret. As with the Resistance, it was a case of doing what needed to be done, when it was impossible to act otherwise. For the new government, the activities of MK, including bombings and sabotage, became an embarrassment. When I first went round the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg fifteen years ago, I was surprised at the almost total lack of reference to the armed struggle.

What links these two cases is the refusal to despair. As I said at the beginning, there’s a significant difference between the pragmatic acknowledgement that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of hope on one hand, and the descent into depression, immobility and despair on the other. True courage, I often feel, is evaluated by how you behave when there is no hope. And when there is no hope, and you avoid despair, all you have left is the possibility of Grace, either personal or collective. .

And in many ways, that’s what happened. The Resistance did not, and could not, drive the Germans out of their country. That only happened because the campaign in the Soviet Union sucked most of the German Army away to the East, and allowed the British, Americans and Canadians to land in Normandy and drive the Germans out. Yet the Resistance played an important role in the background, not only in helping to prepare for the invasion and liberate the country, but more importantly creating a complete shadow government reporting to De Gaulle, which took control of the country and stopped it falling into conflict and chaos. And the Programme of the National Resistance Council, established by Jean Moulin, was the foundation of the rebuilding of France after the War. So it cannot be said that all the sacrifices were in vain. Likewise, the ANC did not bring down apartheid. The end of the Cold War, the cost and unpopularity of the war in Angola and the riots and violence in the country, persuaded the regime to take the risk of making some token concessions, which led to them ultimately giving up nearly everything. Because the anti-apartheid struggle was a multiracial effort from the start, because the ANC leaders were far-sighted enough to realise that they needed the expertise of the white population, and because they had taken good care to be “the best-prepared revolutionary movement in history” the transfer of power in 1994 went much more easily than apocalyptic pundits had predicted. So it cannot be said that all the sacrifices were in vain there, either.

Which is to say, finally, that Hope is perhaps overrated as a necessary criterion for action. On the other hand, it very much depends which kind of action you are talking about. As I’ve suggested, nihilism, blind protest, the urge to smash and destroy, are not of any value and indeed make the situation worse. It’s fundamentally a question of identifying what we can do that might actually be productive and helpful, and getting on with it, even if it’s not very glamorous. This is very hard for people to understand in a world where performative self-publicity rules. People don’t want to go back to obscurity or be forgotten. They don’t want to sacrifice any of their personal happiness or wealth in pursuit of a political struggle: indeed, they want to make money out of it. They want media headlines and profitable channels on YouTube.

Which is a shame because we are living in a world today in which there genuinely is not much hope. As I suggested at the beginning, the West, at least, is run by an incompetent and ideologically saturated ruling class, and the mechanisms that might provide us with theoretical solutions, if they could be used properly, no longer work well, and in may cases have disappeared entirely. “Fighting” against such developments may make you feel better briefly, but isn’t going to alter the underlying reality.

In the absence of hope, we have to choose between despair and action, but action in the genuinely useful sense, not the performative one. We have to look around and see what we can do, and do it. I am personally convinced that the major political and economic structures of the West are past saving. To that degree, there is no point in “fighting” against something which is already falling apart. We need to look rather into our own lives, to resist what we can resist, to undermine what we can undermine, but most of all to create what we can create. Acting in ways not demanded by current neoliberal ideology, acting with kindness, understanding, and genuine tolerance, are a form of resistance in themselves. Giving money to a homeless person is an act of resistance in a way that writing a political blog isn’t.

The issue is not, therefore, whether we can avoid the coming crash, but how we survive it, both practically and ethically, as individuals and as a society. Sartre, you will remember, talked of life beginning on “the far side of despair,” and despair is the one thing we absolutely must overcome. The rules for living through the next few decades are simple enough, in my view, and amount to:

• Find what needs to be done that is within your power to do.

• Do it.

• Go home.

The system under which we live is busy cutting its own throat. Perhaps it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as is sometimes suggested, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen, or that much of the associated neoliberal architecture isn’t going to come crashing down with it. Perhaps Grace will supply the outcome that decades of political action have failed to provide, but what happens after that is up to us. That’s not a bad way to finish an essay on Ash Wednesday.