Infinite Imagining – Gerald Murnane’s The Plains

Gerald Murnane’s The Plains is perhaps nothing more than a collection of possibilities. A filmmaker goes to the central plains of Australia to make a film for the inhabitants on the country’s populated coastal edges. He is hired by one of the great families of the plains and he stays in the man’s house for twenty years. As for the film, it is never produced. This is all the plot there is to it. But we read through the novel as we walk through a field in the summer, stopping constantly to wonder at everything that eludes our gaze from afar. We learn of the religions of the plainsmen, of their obsessions with emblems and symbols, of their love affairs, and their wars.

The plains have little in common with the real plains of Australia. Instead, this is a highly philosophical book. But not in the sense that it puts forward arguments about the nature of things intending to convince us of some view or other. Instead, it offers us suggestions for interpreting the world that together form not a worldview but rather reflect the fruits of a certain vision of things. The novel shows us not how to live but what a certain life can look like. It is a life of the imagination, of the infinite possibilities of meaning-making latent within us. And reading the novel, we find that this emphasis on the imagination and its limitless potential has a far more practical, human value than we might otherwise guess.

What Does a Plain Mean?

“Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.”

What is a plain? What does the thought of it do to us? A patch of flatland, with the occasional tree or stream. It is not a complex image. On a piece of paper, we could represent a plain with a single horizontal line. And yet the more we consider a plain, the more Murnane’s novel makes us consider it, we realise just what possibilities are contained within that line, behind it, above it, beyond it. The central event of the novel’s first part is a meeting with the great landowners of the plains at the saloon of the town where the filmmaker is staying. A great many people have gathered at the place to offer their services to those rich men who with a single gesture could offer them work for the rest of their lives.

One man offers a way of representing the great families’ histories on graphs, and for hours they sit with coloured pencils drawing. Others come to offer religions, or emblems, to the landowners. They are constantly reinventing themselves, and always in need of the new visions that such outsiders can provide. Another man talks of a musical concert where the instruments are so far away from each other that we can only hear one or two at the same time, forcing us to imagine the harmonies that would be possible to hear if we were located in some invisible other point.

Many of the ideas and thoughts of The Plains suggest a space that must be filled by the imagination, like the concert/ stage. The philosophies that the plainsmen prefer never answer everything, always leaving space for interpretation. The plainsmen prefer to keep to their own understanding of the plains, rather than suggest that they are limited by common ground. We learn of relationships where after a single meeting two lovers promise never to meet again because the strength of the promise of that meeting is so great that no future reality could ever compare to it- better to fantasise than to live in disappointment. These are people whose imagination can replace a life of experiences but not in a way that seems sad to us. The sheer richness of the thoughts that Murnane describes makes it seem that we are the ones who are missing out on a full life.

Plains of the Soul

Reflection, the journey into another plain – the plain of the self – is the natural mode of these plainsmen. “The plainsman’s heroes, in life and in art, were such as the man who went home every afternoon for thirty years to an unexceptional house with neat lawns and listless shrubs and sat late into the night deciding on the route of a journey that he might have followed for thirty years only to arrive at the place where he sat”. There is a poem of the plains whose thousands of lines only describe the space around a woman seen from afar, but in so doing plant such seeds for the imagination that no description of her could ever compare.

We learn of the infinite plains of the soul. That “each man in his heart is a traveller in a boundless landscape. But even the plainsmen (who should have learned not to fear hugeness of horizons) looked for landmarks and signposts in the disquieting terrain of the spirit” – this is the view of one philosopher of the plains. The mansion where the narrator spends his years is filled with notes and diaries of the place’s previous occupants, and we soon realise that it takes far more than a lifetime to cross the plains of another’s world. The man barely talks to his patron’s wife or daughter, but he creates a plain for them in his mind.

We learn of a war between two factions. The Horizonites and the Haremen grew out of squabbling groups of artists. The former saw the infinite distances bespoken by the far distance as the greatest source of inspiration, while the latter saw the infinite variety of what lies before us as something still richer. Their disagreement bubbled for many years before suddenly disappearing without the armed conflict that seemed inevitable. As with the rest of the action of The Plains, it seemed that the imagination was the best space for carrying out the war.

Meaning-Making

“The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” Milton wrote in Paradise Lost. Murnane’s novel shows the imagination making a heaven out of a space that we might imagine leading only to boredom. The Plains is not a novel that aims to answer our questions. Murnane’s narrator even notes that plains are “simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings”. Yet if we are to create our own meanings, we must know how to. We must train ourselves to look upon the world in a way that sees the potential for meaning-making lying in everyday things.

I love The Plains because I find this thought dizzyingly exciting. We know of those poets like Rilke who can entertain themselves with contemplating a single object, but Murnane seems to go further – he does not find beauty alone in single-minded contemplation, but a realm of infinite meanings and possibilities.

The Hidden Humanism of The Plains

Our capacity to imagine is perhaps the most extraordinary of human faculties. To see its sharpened form and feel our own be sharpened, as we do in Murnane’s novel, ultimately has a decidedly humanistic effect that seems surprising when we consider that The Plains has very little to do with those aspects of novels that normally make them seem human to us – plots and people. The American philosopher, Thomas Nagel, whom I’ve also been reading recently, notes in his essay “Death” that what makes death bad are “hopes which may or may not be fulfilled or possibilities which may or may not be realized”. In dying we lose possibilities, and the earlier and more unexpectedly we die the greater that loss is.

Death has little to do with Murnane’s novel, but it too is a plain that all of us must cross. More importantly, though, Murnane’s novel provides another way of looking at what Nagel talks about when he refersto lost possibilities. Now, this may seem silly. After all, we know what possibilities a young man at war may lose when a bomb explodes nearby – a sweetheart left unmarried, an unfounded family, an empty seat at the table where his friends sit and break bread. What good is a novel about imagination next to these realities, we might ask?

Only this – that Murnane’s novel reveals a layer of possibilities and riches lying even beyond that which comes to mind most obviously as having the potential to be lost. The novel is like the explorer it at one point describes whose task “is to postulate the existence of a land beyond the known land.” This land is the land of the imagination, and we come to feel by the end of The Plains just how infinite it is. If we die, we do not only lose the infinite world without us, but also the infinite world within us. Newly aware of the depth, death becomes more terrible, and life becomes still more wondrous, vital, and worth holding on to with all the strength we have.

Anyway, it is the kind of book that opens up a world. Just for that reason, it is well worth reading. 

I previously looked at Murnane’s Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, which I was less impressed by, here. The Plains, which I have now read twice, is a much better book.

“Cold Autumn” by Ivan Bunin – translation

That year in June he came to stay at our estate. We had always thought of him as one of the family – his late father had been a close friend and neighbour to my own. On the fifteenth of June Ferdinand was killed in Sarajevo. On the morning of the sixteenth, the newspapers arrived from the post office. My father left his study with one of the evening papers in his hands and came into the dining room where I, my mother, and my love were still sitting drinking tea, and said:

“Well, my friends, it’s war! The Austrian crown prince has been killed in Sarajevo. It’s war!”

As it was my father’s Saint’s Day, on St Peter’s Day all sorts of people were coming by, and after lunch, he was declared my betrothed. But on the nineteenth of July Germany declared war on Russia…

In September he came to us, just for twenty-four hours. He wanted to say goodbye before he left for the front. At that point we still thought that the war would not last long; our wedding was simply postponed to the spring. And so, we had our farewell evening. As usual, once supper was over, we put the samovar on. My father looked at the window as it filled up with steam and said:

“Autumn is surprisingly early and cold this year!”

That evening we sat quietly, only occasionally exchanging the most meaningless of words with an exaggerated calm, hiding our true and secret thoughts and feelings. Even my father had spoken about the autumn with forced, false easiness. I went to the French windows and wiped the glass with my shawl. In the garden, against the black sky, the icy stars shone sharp and bright and clear. My father leaned back deep in his armchair and smoked, occasionally glancing uneasily at the lamp burning above the table; my mother, in her glasses, was assiduously stitching up a little silk bag – we all knew which – under its light. It was touching and terrifying all at once. My father asked:

“So, are you sure that you want to go first thing in the morning instead of waiting for breakfast?”

“Yes, if you will allow me to, I must go first thing,” he said. “It’s sad, but I still need to get my things in order at home.”

My father gave a heavy sigh.

“Well, as you wish, my dear. But in that case, we old folks must be getting to bed if we are to see you off tomorrow…”

My mother rose and crossed her future son – he bent towards her hand, and then to my father’s. Alone now, we stayed seated in the dining room a little longer – I had thought to lay out some cards for a game of patience. Meanwhile, he paced the room silently. Finally, he asked:

“Well, would you like to get some fresh air?”

In my heart, everything grew still heavier, but I answered indifferently: “I don’t mind.”

He was still deep in thought about something while we were getting dressed in the front room. With a cute smile he mentioned Fet’s poem:

“Oh, just how cold is this autumn! / Put on your bonnet and shawl.”

“I don’t have a bonnet,” I said. “How does the next part go?”

“I can’t remember. I think it’s something like: “Look how between blackening pines / A fire appears to be rising…””

“What’s the fire?”

“It’s the moon coming up, of course. There’s something wondrously autumnal in all that. “Put on your bonnet and shawl…” The days of our grandfathers and grandmothers… Oh, oh god! Oh God!”

“What?”

“It’s nothing, my friend. But still, I’m sad. Sad and yet, this is all so good too. I really, really love you…”

Once we had finished getting changed, we went through the dining room and out into the garden. At first, it was so dark that I had to hold onto his sleeve. But then I began to make out in the night sky the black branches of trees, showered in the light of the stars. He stopped and turned towards the house.

“Look, how completely different, how autumnal the windows are. So long as I live, I will always remember this evening.”

I looked, and he embraced me and my Swiss wrap. I took my feather scarf from my face and turned my head a little so that he could kiss me. Afterwards, he looked into my face.

“How your eyes shine,” he said. “Are you cold? The air is worthy of winter. If they kill me, you really won’t forget about me at once?”

I thought to myself: “And what if they really do kill him? And would I really forget him in a short while? Like we forget everything in the end…?” And I hurried to answer him, terrified of my thought:

“Don’t talk like that! I would never recover if you died!”

He was silent at first, but then he spoke slowly:

“Well, and so what if I die. I will wait for you there. As for you, just live, find what joy you can, and then come to me.”

And I cried bitter tears…

In the morning he left. My mother gave him that fatal bag, the one she had been stitching the evening before. In it, there was a gold ikon, the one that my father and grandfather had carried with them when they too went to war. We crossed him with a kind of despair. We stood on the wing looking after him, in that kind of dumbness that always follows when you see someone off for a long time and can only feel the surprising inappropriateness of the joy that still surrounds us – the sun, the shining frost on the morning grass. Once we had finished, we went into an empty house. I went through the rooms, with my hands behind my back, not knowing anymore what I was supposed to do with myself, whether it would be better to weep or to sing with all my voice…

He was killed – what a strange word! – a month later, in Galicia. And since that time thirty long years have passed. And so much, so much has happened in those years, years which seemed so long, when you think about them. So much magic, so much incomprehensibility, so much confusion – all that we call the Past, and which lies beyond the powers of both mind and heart. In the spring of ’18, when my mother and father were already buried, I was living in Moscow in a basement belonging to a saleswoman at the Smolensk Market. She used to laugh at me: “Well, your highness, how are your circumstances?” I too was a trader of sorts. I sold, like so many others did then, whatever I had left to the soldiers in their papakhas and their overcoats – a little ring, a cross, a fur collar eaten away by moths, and then one day, while I was at work, I made the acquaintance of a person with a rare and beautiful soul – an old soldier who had already retired. Soon I had married him and in April we went together down to Ekaterinodar. We travelled with his nephew, a boy of about seventeen who was also heading to join the volunteer forces. The journey took almost two weeks – me, an old woman, in my bast shoes; my husband, with a greying black beard, was wearing his worn-out Cossack’s caftan. We stayed around the Don and Kuban for over two years. In the winter, in a storm, alongside countless other refugees from Novorossia, we set out across the sea towards Turkey, and on the way, my husband died of typhus. After this, I had only three people left to me upon the earth: my husband’s nephew and his young wife, and their child, a seven-month-old girl. But husband and wife returned later to Crimea to join Wrangel, leaving their child with me. I don’t know what happened to them – they simply disappeared. And so, I lived in Constantinople for some time, earning what I could for myself and the little girl, breaking my back illegally working in awful conditions. Then, as did so many others, I left – and with the girl went almost everywhere. Bulgaria, Serbia, the Czech lands, Belgium, Paris, Nice… The girl grew up a long time ago and decided to stay in Paris. She is a real Frenchwoman now – she’s very beautiful and completely indifferent towards me. She was working in a chocolate shop near the Madeleine, putting together little boxes in coloured paper and then tying them up with gold lace. Her hands are manicured, and her nails are silver. As for me, I still live in Nice by God’s grace… The first time I was in Nice was in 1912… and in those days I could never even begin to have imagined what would happen with me…

And so, I lived, and I survived his death, even though I had once said that I never would. But, when I remember everything that has happened since then, I always ask myself: well, what was really in your life? And I answer: only that cold autumn evening. Did it really happen? Yes, it did. And everything else that I lived through was just a waste, a useless dream. And I believe, I believe with a faith like a fire, that he is waiting for me there – with the same love, the same youth, as on that evening. “Just live, find what joy you can, and then come to me…” I have lived, I have had some joy, and now already it is time for me to come.

3 May 1944

This piece is one of the most famous short stories of Ivan Bunin. Bunin was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1933, but much of his prose reflects that of an earlier period. Not for nothing is he known as the last representative of aristocratic prose – he was born on the family estate in 1870, befriended Tolstoy, and had a disdain for all that is crass and base. This poise generally means that we either like him or dislike him. To some, he is a dreamy wishy-washy fool, a representative of a class that rightly died out (read – was systematically murdered by the Bolsheviks). He repeatedly writes about love, which is rather tedious after a while. And I have read criticism suggesting he never moved on from the loss of his country in the Revolutions, a bit like Kipling after the first World War.

“Cold Autumn” I think at least counters this final complaint. It is a story precisely about the tragedy and loss of a world, rather than about a refusal to come to terms with it. The narrator has lived, she has existed. We have two paragraphs without her beloved, but they are solid and lengthy. Something lively has exited the prose itself. And how can we blame the narrator, when that autumn eve remains so much more significant in her mind? Whether we like it or not, our memories are incomplete – a part of us decides for ourselves which moments are worthy of remembrance. And that person who cannot find a moment that is seared within their brain has perhaps not truly lived.

The story is stained with death. The beloved, the husband, the nephew and his wife, the narrator’s mother and father – and even, at the at the beginning, the beloved’s father. Not only is the old world destroyed by the coming of the Bolsheviks, but it is also literally killed off and with it its memories. Like Bunin himself, the narrator works as a living receptacle of a lost world. The Frenchwoman of the next generation is already lost to it.

The beloved quotes Fet – perhaps my favourite Russian poet. But Fet is the poet of haybales and sunsets, a very accessible poet whose main sources of inspiration are love and nature and whose corpus is tainted with a certain proud, aristocratic melancholy – he was the first to translate Schopenhauer into Russian, whence he passed to Fet’s friend Tolstoy. Fet is not a poet for the horrors of the 20th century. By quoting him, the beloved shows that his world is not the one he actually lives in, foreshadowing his swift death later. I particularly like the use of the little bag with the ikon in it too. We expect these items, which have protected previous generations, to offer the same protection now. They do not. The superstitions of the past do not have power anymore either.

Faced with a lost world, we have a choice. Either we succumb to our memories, or we build a new one. I do not think, with the memories that she has and the realities that she has to live in, the narrator of Bunin’s story is worthy of much condemnation. Instead, her faith and at least some of that aristocratic worldview, prove deserving of a certain grudging admiration.

Famine and Affluence; Fathers and Children

The idea of this piece is to compare the radicalism Turgenev portrays in Fathers and Sons with Peter Singer’s ideas about charity as discussed in his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. The comparison is in some sense arbitrary, but I hope to use it to make the claim that what Singer suggests – essentially, that we in the developed world ought to give a large part of our income away to aid those less fortunate than ourselves – is not particularly radical at all, while Bazarov’s “nihilism”, the demand to “deny” everything, to take nothing on faith, remains a call that most of us would struggle to answer.

I am writing this piece in part for myself. The conclusion, that we probably ought to listen to Singer and give a non-trivial amount of our income away to charity, appears to me to be manifestly correct. But at the same time, I am not doing it and do not see myself doing it in the near future. I cannot argue against him – I am not a philosopher and my ability to reason my way out of abstract arguments is limited. But perhaps by throwing down onto the page what I think about him I may find a handhold by which I may begin to pull myself out of the prison cell of my own guilt at my failure not to act.

I will leave you to judge. First, we will summarise Singer, then we’ll go through Turgenev, and finally, we will attempt to bash the two of them together.

Famine, Affluence, and Morality

Peter Singer’s essay was written in 1971, during the Bangladeshi War of Independence. A large part of that country’s population was living and dying in terrible conditions caused by the war. Rich nations were sending aid, but Singer notes that the aid was not substantial. Britain sent little over 5% of the amount it had then spent on developing the Concorde airplane, while Australia’s contribution amounted to less than a twelfth of the cost of the Sydney opera house. Singer denies neither the value of culture nor rapid intercontinental air travel, but he notes that we would probably consider human life more valuable than either of those things. At least in theory.

Singer does not only criticise the response of states. He notes that people have failed too – “people have not given large sum to relief funds; they have not written to their parliamentary representatives demanding increased government assistance; they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing the refugees with the means to satisfy their essential needs.” While there were exceptions, the average citizen’s response was inaction. And the scale of the famine and its coverage in the media meant that inaction could not have been from ignorance.

Singer argues that such inaction is unjustified. His argument in the short essay, which can be read here, is that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” He gives the famous example of a drowning child:

“If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.”

If we agree with the principle about preventing bad things from happening, distance should be of no importance, nor should whether we alone can help or whether many can – either way, we should do something. In centuries past, I would scarce have known about suffering on a different continent, let alone how to avert it. But – and Singer is writing in 1971, recalling – “instant communication and swift transportation have changed the situation.” We may say that we are better able to judge who needs the help when we help those closest to us, such as the local homeless. But even this is a somewhat leaky defence. Experts are able to assess the effectiveness of charities, providing reassurance that our money would be put to good use. We do not need to judge, and in fact, we probably lack the tools to judge as effectively as someone whose work has had them spend years honing their judgement.

What this means is that our excuses are inadequate. This leads Singer on to his next point, namely that we have an idea of charity that is wrong. Western societies think of charity as something extra, rather than as a duty. (Whereas it is one of Islam’s five pillars). Because it is something extra, we do not expect people to do it, though we may praise them if they do. However, if we spend our money on fast cars instead of helping those who are literally dying in ways that could be prevented by that same money, we are – according to the premises of Singer’s argument – in some sense guilty. We should give and take action, and we should condemn those who do neither. Giving is not “supererogatory” – it is not something above and beyond goodness, but a constituent component of goodness itself.

That human beings are selfish is not really a good reason not to accept the argument. That nobody else gives is also not a good reason – that is merely a form of cowardice.

And so, Singer draws his rather simple conclusion: “a great change in our way of life is required.” He presents a strong and a weak version of his argument. The former: that we should “prevent bad things from happening unless in doing so we would be sacrificing something of comparable moral significance”, and the latter: “We should prevent bad occurrences unless, to do so, we had to sacrifice something morally significant.” To use an example that has been beaten to death already, the loss of a cup of coffee at one’s local chain is certainly not “something morally significant”. But one could put that money to a good cause and achieve thereby something that truly is morally significant. You know, malaria nets or whatever the charitable flavour-of-the-week is.

In a couple of places, Singer has suggested that giving 5% of our income is a reasonable starting point for answering the question of how much we should give. This is all part of the big Effective Altruism movement and is not worth us fussing over now. For the purposes of this piece, we can summarise Singer’s argument as being that we ought to give more and sacrifice things that do not really matter in comparison with what that money could achieve.

Fathers and Children

Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, was published in 1862. Russia had suffered a crushing defeat in the Crimean War, with the result that the Empire was taking a long look at itself. The serfs were emancipated in 1861, but with terms that left them still very much shackled to their old masters. Localised revolts caused by peasants who could not read and had been too optimistic in their interpretation of the Tsar’s proclamation were punished with the usual state-sanctioned murder. At the same time, angry with the government’s unwillingness to take further steps to advance Russia into at least the 18th century, young men – and women – became increasingly radicalised. In the same year that the serfs were emancipated the Land and Liberty League was founded, whose most famous act was the murder of the chief of police. Tsar Alexander II himself, who had started his reign with such reforming vigour and then very quickly forgotten all about it, would be blown to pieces a few years after that.

This is all after the novel’s publication, but the best literature tends to identify nascent themes of an age before they become generally apparent, and Fathers and Sons is no exception. It dramatizes a shift in the idea of progressive politics between the older generation, particularly in the figure of Pavel Kirsanov, and the younger, in the figure of Bazarov. The book’s original epigraph gives an idea of the shift we are dealing with:

“Young Man to Middle-Aged Man: “You had content but no force.” Middle-Aged Man to Young Man: “And you have force but no content” – From a contemporary conversation

The older generation in real life had such illustrious figures as Alexander Herzen, whom I’ve written about previously, but it managed to achieve precious little in practice. The new generation was impatient and wanted change now. The anarchist Bakunin (famous phrase, “a destructive urge is also a creative one”) was the most famous member of the older generation to “cross-over”. The young people themselves do not provide many heroic examples. The first one who comes to mind is Sergei Nechaev, who is the model for Pyotr Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky’s Demons, having murdered an innocent man for the sake of trying to improve his revolutionary cell’s cohesion (it did not work).

Pavel Kirsanov, like Dmitry Rudin in Turgenev’s earlier novel of that name, was something of a revolutionary in his youth – both of them fought at the barricades in a France witnessing a revolution. Such action is, funnily enough, reactionary, or at least reactive. They joined a revolution, rather than trying to foment it. The narodniki (this later generation) actually went around the peasants, attempting to stir them into revolt. In practice, the peasants were just as conservative as the Tsars, and most attempts at getting them to revolt failed. Alexander Etkind has noted that the young revolutionaries often followed a particular pattern – “fascination with texts led to fascination with sects; disillusionment with sects led to violence”. Young men from seminaries saw Russia’s long tradition of religious dissent as being the secret to organising political dissent, not realising that the sects simply wanted to be left alone. Disillusioned, they turned to violence.

Within the novel, Bazarov enacts “going to the people”, as it was later called, in miniature. He speaks to the peasants on the Kirsanov estate, where much of the story takes place. But when he actually tries to discuss politics with them, they are bemused and think of him “as a kind of holy fool”. Still, Bazarov’s failure as a revolutionary is not the reason that he has become one of the most well-known characters in Russian literature. Instead, it is his passionately held beliefs that are responsible. He declares that we must deny “everything”. Whereas the other characters are wet and wishy-washy sops who like poetry and music, Bazarov’s language early in the novel is declarative, clear, and forceful.

And what does he suggest, apart from denial? Well, that’s the problem. “We clear the ground”, he says – the most important thing is to destroy. Everything that exists must be subjected to rational criticism as if it is a theory in a book, and if its foundations are unstable, it must be toppled. Religion, the Empire itself – these are things that at that time could certainly have done with a healthy dose of criticism. But Bazarov offers nothing in their place, only the promise that rationality will sort everything out.

Bazarov’s forceful character is in its way inspiring. But that same character disintegrates over the course of Turgenev’s novel. Bazarov falls apart when he falls in love. After all his declarative sentences suddenly it’s all mush with him. And then he dies. Turgenev, who was accused by both conservatives and progressives for his novel, ultimately considered himself a rather boring moderate. “I am, and have always been, a “gradualist”, an old-fashioned liberal in the English dynastic sense, a man expecting reform only from above.” This quote comes from a letter written to a newspaper, but even so, it’s hard to find much in Turgenev’s writing that contradicts it. He dislikes everything that diminishes human life, whether it be authoritarian or radical. But he admires the radicals of the new generation all the same.

Fathers and Sons ends with Bazarov buried and two weddings having taken place. The first of these is between Bazarov’s friend Arkady and Katya, the sister of the woman Bazarov falls in love with; the second is between Arkady’s father and his mistress, a peasant girl. There are few events better reflective of compromise and cohesion than a wedding. Whereas Bazarov’s love for an interesting woman fails, Arkady’s love for a boring girl who gives him an heir is more successful. At the same time, the ending suggests a certain amount of progress, for the second marriage shows that rigid social hierarchies do need to be adjusted from time to time. 

Comparison

We may consider both Singer and Bazarov to present radical ideas, but there is a great difference of degree. Singer asks us to reconsider our idea of duty, whereas Bazarov demands the complete reconfiguration of societies’ fundaments. Although there is an honest desire to improve the lot of the peasant in Bazarov’s views, or at least in the views he is supposed to represent, there is also something horrible. I can’t remember now who said it, and it may be that nobody knows, but one of the nihilists (Pisarev?) once said that a cobbler was worth more than Pushkin. This is blatantly false – it assumes an unbelievably limited view of human nature, one where art has no place. A cobbler is practically valuable, but Pushkin has had a far greater impact than even the best cobbler – he reaches to the soul.

When we go around destroying things, we soon discover that it’s much easier to break than to build. We might agree that religion is generally bad, and most would agree that an Empire is not the best political structure. But we are unlikely to agree about what to replace them with, and Russia’s experience has been that every time they break something, filled with hope, they have replaced it with something worse. Turgenev’s gradualism, as with any gradualism, is something of a cop-out. Martin Luther King Jr’s comments that the greatest enemy of black emancipation is the white moderate are pertinent here. Moderation all-too-easily becomes inaction. And many of the issues people face do cry out for action, not twiddling our thumbs.  

Emotionless Bazarov leads a life that can hardly be called rich. Those emotions that he does have are very much linked to the very structures that he would like to critique – family, love, and so on. I do not think that we cannot love without society, but it would certainly be different, and perhaps not nearly as nice. Perhaps that’s why I found the ending to E.M. Forster’s Maurice so unsatisfying. In that novel, the main character ends up in a relationship with a lower-class man with whom he has nothing in common except their shared homosexuality. This is not a healthy base for a relationship; instead, society needs to be changed so that they can experience full lives within it.

Singer does not say that we need to change society. Or rather, he does not demand the destruction of our values in the same way that Bazarov does. Instead, he asks merely that we readjust our idea of charity and give a little more away. Society, and indeed the world, would be very different if we all started giving to good causes. But our values would not be much changed, though we would almost certainly be better people for it. Bazarov’s ideas retain their radicalism today because they reflect a fundamental impatience to improve things. There are many problems with modern society that I think are in need of urgent redress – wealth inequality, various societal divisions, global warming, mental health, political and institutional distrust, etc etc – but I am not entirely convinced that we are capable of solving them as quickly as their severity demands. Probably we’d make things worse.

Taken over time, everyone giving to charities that actually work to improve people’s lives would actually improve people’s lives. Richer, happier people would build better institutions and feel more engaged in their societies, solving a whole host of problems. Engaging in charitable work will build social cohesion within developed countries too, and deal with some of our own many and varied problems. In short, in a boring way, Singer’s view can be considered gradualist. Our own world is arguably getting better already (I mean discounting climate change and growing wealth inequality, generally we are becoming richer and better educated worldwide). Redistributionist charitable giving (because any giving is redistributional, after all) will only speed things up.

And yet I know that there are Bazarovs among us. One of the main criticisms of Singer’s work is that it reinforces existing systems, rather than proposing new ones. In this view the reason we are all depressed and in unequal circumstances on a burning planet is because our current economic paradigm (capitalism) has brought us to this, and unless we change things up, it will continue to do so. Giving money away doesn’t help this. I am not sure how far I can agree with this view. I like to blame capitalism for everything as much as the next person, but it’s hard to deny the concrete good that charitable giving can achieve. Ideally, we should probably both aim to change the system while supporting people within it.

I myself have an instinctive preference towards local solutions, but it’s hard to defend this view without saying I care more about the people around me than those further away. If we work to engage with the local community, we build strong structures of the sort that can’t quite be quantified – things like trust. We make places better to live in for ourselves and others. And if everyone acted like this, we would all be happier. This is essentially what someone like Wendell Berry is all about. But the difficulty I see with this is that we cannot focus on the local issues without being aware of the global ones. Global news and global charities mean that Pandora’s box has been opened – now we humans have considerably more power, and alas, more responsibility. Too much, in fact, which is why we have failed, and Peter Singer and others yell at us.

Conclusion

Which brings us to the problem. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” doesn’t really ask that much of us, but it asks more of us than we are probably willing to do. It does not ask us to give up all luxuries (at least the weak form of the argument, which is already asking enough), it still allows us art and music and friendship and fun. But it would deny us much that we have grown used to and think we cannot live without.

A society where we all give, even a little, is clearly a better and more moral society than one where we do not. It is a more responsible one too. We can argue that giving doesn’t work because it doesn’t correctly deal with pernicious systems, or that a local approach is better – but there is one way that we cannot, I think, argue. We cannot say that doing nothing is morally alright. One can try, of course. But it seems that we must, if we are to go to sleep guiltlessly, act.

The things that make life worth living – our friends, our families, our communities, our learning, our experiencing this rich and wondrous world – are not lost by giving. If anything, the loss of excess luxuries, of things we can go without, would only strengthen them all. With fewer distractions we would have a better, more direct, appreciation for friends and partners, have more time for communities and art. It is not a great ask, but at the same time, it is almost impossible. For I am a selfish one: I want to save and invest, I think already about my own descendants, about my own future. I think about all this even though I know I will have a roof over my head whatever happens, whereas the same cannot be said of those who today go to sleep hungry.

I want grand, heroic, solutions – if blowing up a pipeline or two would save the world, I’d be there planting the C4. But I don’t even appear capable of the unflashy and easy solution right in front of me – siphoning off a little of my large-enough pay check.

The world is a mess, but it is our mess, and I am desperately fond of it really. But it can be better. And Singer’s piece offers a clear guide on how to make it so. I cannot despise it for that. We must have things to hope for, and ways of making that hope come to pass.

And perhaps I should be fairer to myself too. All told, I have received my salary twice, and given the job has required me to move abroad, my getting-started expenses have been quite high. Perhaps it’s too early to say whether I will fail to do Singer proud. Time will tell, and one day this blog will shiftily or proudly display the answer.

As for you, readers, how do you sleep at night? Do you give, do you volunteer? If not, what can you say to undermine Singer’s argument?