Picking Sides.
It’s not the case that the first casualty of war is truth, it’s nuance.
Conflict causes chaos but it creates clarity. Its as if all the pre-existing complexity gets thrown up and displaced by something starker, simpler.
You can fight with opposing answers but you cannot go into battle armed only with questions. You can’t fight to ensure the border of your state remains either somewhere between the river and the mountain also alternatively perhaps as far as the coast when viewed from a certain cultural or historical perspective. Doubt dies first. You cannot go to war to make something subtler.
This is not an inherently bad thing. If forced to answer the question “War, huh, what is it good for?” then along with the short term economic benefits and rising sense of social cohesion, I’d have to add that many things in human affairs benefit from clarity. If that clarity eventually has to be imposed or defended, that’s ok. I guess. I mean, I assume. At least, I’d like to believe that this was the case.
My instinct here highlights the limitations of my intellect. For instance, undefeated yet still humiliated, it’s easy to be repelled by the violence of Putin and to oppose him. However seeing President Zelenskyy embrace Boris Johnson in the way even Rishi wouldn’t, I bristle like a dog. Which of them was I wrong about?
Fanciful as the gorgeous accusations of Johnson of being a Russian spy surely were, they were also mentally comfortable for me as it placed him and Putin together, not a side I wanted to join. In this I find, horribly, that I am more comfortable making decisions not based on facts or even theories but by looking round to see who has taken which side already, an awful habit I’m sure you don’t share.
From a distance it’s easy to avoid this. Of course you can be against Putin and also still against the bad dealings of the British state. Just as it must be to be possible to be against Hamas and also against Likud, though holding that position probably means you are neither Israeli or Palestinian. The closer you get to a conflict the more clarity calls us to pick a side. You can cling to the idea that you’re above that, outside that, but in the end isn’t this idea for the Swiss? No matter how subtle your own thinking remains sooner or later you’re going to handle stolen gold.
To take a more frivolous example, this was what dismayed me about the film Tár, and if you imagine retelling a story spoils it, look away now.
Tár is a sublimely realised film that contains individual sequences where composition and performance are, for want of a better judgement, matchless. In form it favours nuance over clarity. Slow, often observational, refusing to cut, preferring mid or wide to close up, as if director Todd Field is urging us to make our own minds up about what we’re witnessing. Is Tár abusive in her showboating mockery of a young student? How about when she gives a brilliant and beautiful young cellist an incredible opportunity? Ostentatiously the film leaves it up to us grown-ups. But stolen gold runs through this argument. Never are we shown the real impact of her abusive behaviour. We never meet the grieving parents of the student whose suicide powers Tár’s spiralling collapse. We never see her actually attempt to force herself on the cellist, or anyone. The film signals wildly that it is offering a hot take about the dismerits of cancel culture but the real harm real abusers have caused is not an area it dares to explore.
It has picked a side in the culture war and such partizanship brings uncomfortable baggage. I don’t know how to read the conclusion except that Tár performing to an audience of Filipinos in fancy dress is a punishment, a shame, a tragedy, a lesser thing than her playing to an audience of rich white Germans in evening dress. How, why, does this beautifully made film lurch from challenging liberal cant to such narrow minded racism?
Recently the special vitriol inspired by the contested views of gender spilled out into the letters page of the London Review of Books where an anonymous voice complained that “left-leaning progressives” were being “branded as being ‘in league with the far right’” for the crime of holding “gender critical” views. Writer Arianne Shahvisi replied “if you don’t like the fact that you share a view with someone objectionable, consider revising that view.” Which is LRB for “go fuck yourself”.
It’s impossible to read that and not sigh whilst wishing both sides tried harder to listen, yet Shahvisi has a point. If you find yourself shoulder to shoulder with people you’d generally cross the road to wave placards and throw eggs at, perhaps, it’s you that has changed not them. Agreeing and disagreeing are tribal acts. You may start sure that you can retain the nuance of agreeing about this but not about that but how long can you protect the candle of your doubt? The brief history of the priapically named “intellectual dark web” is a case in point of how hard it is to challenge an orthodoxy without limply being co-opted by another. In the end even geniuses have to pick a side.
However the battle over the nature of gender is apposite. Surely this is a war over the right to uncertainty, the right to fluidity, the right not just to define yourself but also to find yourself undefined.
I seem to be shaming myself this week so I’ll confess I’m old enough to still struggle with they/them pronouns. I’m proud to support anyone wishing to define their gender and sexual identity in whatever way feels like home, it’s just those times when they/them makes an individual suddenly multiple. I can’t stop my brain seeing “they were at the protest” as describing a crowd rather than a person.
Yet, the more I sit with this problem, the more it too feels like home. Aren’t we? Don’t we all contain multitudes? Is the freedom of the individual simply the freedom of clarity, to be one person incapable of hypocrisy or change. Surely the freedom we have that authoritarian dictator’s despise is the freedom from clarity, the freedom to be many. Or is that just the thinking of a spy?
On Saturday 29th April I’m running “HOW TO HAVE AN IDEA”, a half day taster for my 9 week screenwriting course which returns in June and apparently is “a true masterclass in screenwriting” and a “transformative learning experience”. Information here.
This piece addresses themes and ideas I’ve looked at before. For instance this piece about the role of the trans debate in the Tory leadership election and this about the surprising vitality behind the logic of Trump’s post-truth.