How to Feed A Tourist

Do you, like me, immediately think of hospitals, nurseries and geriatric wards whenever you are presented with one of these disgusting platters of pre-peeled fruit at the end of your meal at almost any Sri Lankan ‘tourist hotel’?

Baby’s Woke Again

 

I shared this video of dogs coming down some kind of playground chute or slide on Facebook. The dogs all look very happy at the bottom and some even try to climb back up for a second ride. Still, a few people looked at the video and wondered if the dogs had been frightened and not wanted to go. Had they been forced down the chute – pushed into it – against their will? It didn't matter to these people that the dogs had had a great experience and were happy at the bottom. They were focused on the fear the animals might have felt at the top. They were concerned that cruelty and trauma might have been involved. I suppose you might say they were woke.

These people made me wonder whether I should feel bad for having shared the video. But I couldn’t. The dogs were unharmed and obviously happy. It seemed to me that they were better off after going down the chute than they had been before. 

Then it came to me that those dogs being put through a chute were a metaphor for things like education, hard work and the duties we all owe to community and society.

Not many people enjoy being educated, or working hard, or having to obey laws and rules and conventions. Social duties like voting are a real chore, as is everything else we need to do to play our part in a complex modern society – paying taxes, going on jury duty, wearing a mask during a pandemic, obeying road rules, etc. These things are difficult, tedious, sometimes painful, always more or less unpleasant. Not as bad as going to the dentist, true, but no fun.

Yet when we've done them, the benefits are clear to us. We’re personally empowered, have added to our own resources and feel good about ourselves. Often we find that we've enjoyed the ride despite ourselves, just like the dogs in the video. And everyone around us (i.e. society) has benefited too

But since these things don't seem like fun (and even daunting or scary at first), we often have to be coerced into them – ‘trained’, if you like, or ‘traumatized’ and ‘brainwashed’ if you prefer. Much of this is done to us as children, but it continues into adulthood – difficult and unpleasant things that we do or endure in order to improve our own lives, and the lives of others, in the long run.

Wise folk have no problem with this. Others resent it and often push back. The rebels used to be ignored or suffer general rebuke for as long as people accepted that some irritations and inconveniences are necessary in life. But they don’t any more. They think they don’t need to. And so the rebellion spreads.

That is only possible because the world, compared to how it was (say) fifty years ago, is richer, healthier, better developed and – in the places where most of us live, at least – cleaner. Life, most of the time, is not that hard. And for all the worry about growing authoritarianism, people today have many more choices than they did back then, which makes them, by definition, more free. 

All this is great – progress! But something else was happening too, silently and without many people noticing, while we were beating back poverty around the world, destroying Communism on the left and old elites on the right, and establishing our interconnected, mediated consumer society. We slipped our tether to reality, and we didn’t even realize that we were now adrift.

Life today, even for modest working folk in most parts of the world, has a lot in common with the old dream of living in Aladdin's cave. Everything is available at the touch of a screen (to be lusted after and yearned for even if we can’t afford it); household chores and most jobs are easy and safe, wars and revolutions are rare (except when, and where, they aren't) and everything is about aspiration: getting better, doing great, cutting away all the stuff that keeps you from ‘ascending’ – materially, socially, spiritually. But along the way, we became distanced from and largely forgot about the real, dirty, complex, difficult processes that deliver to us the necessities and luxuries of life – the factories, farms, roads and bridges and other infrastructure, the legal systems, bureaucracies and governments needed to manage and regulate it, the social conventions that keep us from one another’s throats. We have even learnt to look away from the huge amounts of hard labour and misery that are still needed to make our everyone-an-island consumer society work. We can do this because everything now comes and goes through a media-devised interface – a simulation of the world that is partly designed to help you escape from ugly reality into a paradise of artificial entertainment, but mainly designed to encourage you to consume – by making you anxious and envious and discontented, because that’s the way you get people to want things. Trust me on this: I was an advertising and public relations man for 35 years, and I've sold everything from antacids to education reform. I know how people are made to want things: by appealing to their lowest instincts.

Lost in this consumerist simulation of reality, we – the bourgeoisie, the striving classes (once known as the working class but now including clerical, sales – ‘and marketing’ – and mid-level executive workers), even some of the upper classes – have come to ignore or take for granted the contract that we are all party to – the mutual agreement that props up the real world. Forgetting our commitments, we have come to think that all the things we enjoy so easily nowadays – every one of which is a privilege – are ours by right. We have forgotten that life is difficult and dangerous, that it demands labour and sacrifice and growing a thicker skin. We have become infantilized: spoilt brats who don't see why they have to go through the chute. We don't just want it all and want it now; we want it our way, too, without any sacrifice on our own part.

Few any longer enjoy the happiness and peace of mind that comes from having gone through the chute, of being a fully equipped, adequately educated and emotionally mature adult. Few people derive any satisfaction from doing the right thing in life, or in doing their part to help make the world go round. And society, bereft of their participation, becomes a little less functional, a bit less effective. Slowly, it begins to crumble. 

In some places, like the unhappy, brutalized, communalist state that has displaced my native country of Ceylon, society is at the point of collapse. In the West and the technocratic East, despite all the weeping and wailing, it’s still pretty strong; but it won’t be if this goes on for much longer. Consumer capitalism has become a victim of its own success. It has become disconnected from reality, and it has no place left to go but down.

Move Along, There

Restless Creatures
by Matt Wilkinson

Matt Wilkinson proposes that locomotion – getting from place to place – is the primary driver of evolution in all living things including, perhaps surprisingly, plants. It makes sense if you think about it. Getting from one place to another isn’t absolutely essential for survival or reproduction, but it does offer compelling selective advantages.

The book is divided into ten chapters. Nine of them trace the evolution of movement backward through time, beginning with human locomotion (walking and running) and ending with the transport mechanisms of prokaryotes – the famous bacterial flagella and the more primitive method of mucus excretion, or pooping yourself along. The final chapter deals with the impact of locomotion on cognition, and why humans need to return to a more legwork-powered lifestyle.

All this is enormously interesting but I am not sure that Wilkinson explains it as effectively as he might. It’s a difficult task he’s taken on and he discharges it quite well, but I often found myself having to re-read passages with close attention and trace obsessively the accompanying diagrams before I understood what was going on. I have an education in the (physical) sciences; I’m not sure how readers without that advantage will fare.

In Wilkinson’s defence, some of the phenomena he describes are very complex and still quite poorly understood. It is only this century, for example, that we have really come to understand how the movements fish make with their tails and bodies propel them through the water. The construction, operation and evolution of bacterial cilia is also, he makes us understand, an ongoing field of biological research.

I enjoyed reading the book and found it very instructive, but I could not avoid the feeling that Richard Dawkins or Matt Ridley would have made a better fist of the subject.

Stinking Poor

Orwell writes brilliant prose even when he is trying to nauseate you.

This he succeeds in doing very effectively here through his description of life as a plongeur or dishwasher at a couple of Paris restaurants. Even though times have changed (and I don’t live in Paris anyway), I shall certainly remember this book next time I eat out. You will too, if you read it, and we shall both consume nothing but bottled mineral water that day as a result.

If the dishwashing chapters don’t make you spew, the chapters on bedding down in the ‘casual wards’ (dosshouses) of London and Kent surely will.

So, dear reader, consider yourself warned. If, in spite of my words, you still go ahead and read this book, good for you. You should; I should have read it ages ago myself. Besides, you will love it, even if at times you find it hard to go on.

Stay the course! Don’t let yourself be put off by the utopian-socialist analyses of the lives and sufferings of tramps and plongeurs. Despite the lucidity and honesty of his writing, Orwell was a man who thought with his heart not his brain. The politics he espoused – his sturdy opposition to totalitarianism excepted – was nonsense. His one great insight was that Communist Russia was an evil, oppressive tyranny, not the workers’ Paradise his fellow Socialists in Britain thought it was. That isn’t relevant here, of course. But the batty socioeconomics interleaved among the pages of perceptive and courageous prose fiction or journalism is the price one pays for loving Orwell.

Jumping the God Shark

Fields of Blood

Religion & the History of Violence

by Karen Armstrong

A REVIEW OF THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS BOOK

Theology is, of course, mostly concerned with the distortion and obfuscation of truth. The simple ‘truths’ of religion cannot bear dispassionate scrutiny, so they have to be cloaked in layers of sophisticated misdirection to protect them from the light. Such is the purpose of theology.

But I read and write history, and it is hard to do this without encountering some theology along the way. When I was younger, I found these excursions enjoyable. Over time, though, my critical faculties grew keener and I became less willing to waste good reading and thinking time on nonsense.

Such is the perspective from which I read the introduction to Karen Armstrong’s book about religion and violence, Fields of Blood. I had meant to read the whole book, but found this impossible.

Armstrong, commendably, wastes no time introducing her thesis: it is presented in the very first paragraph of the introduction, in the shape of another writer’s observation that religion has been made a scapegoat for the human predisposition to violence.

Ah, so. A history book with a theological proposition – which is to say, an attempt to hide the hairy, smelly truths of human motive and action under petticoats of elaborate fabrication. Having stated her thesis, Armstrong next constructs a straw-man definition of religion ‘as seen in the West’ that no person of faith could possibly accept for an instant. This definition deserves to be quoted in full.

A coherent system of obligatory beliefs, institutions and rituals, centring on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and sealed off from all ‘secular’ activities.

What rubbish. That's a description of the trees, not the wood, and a pretty bad one at that. But Armstrong tells us this is what ‘we in the West’ (I’m not from the West) think religion is, and then proceeds to tell us why we’re wrong.

Other cultures, she tells us, have different, more expansive definitions. As an example she gives us Debuisson’s description of the Sanskrit term dharma,: ‘a “total” concept, untranslatable, that covers law, justice, morals and social life.’

Oh what precious twaddle. Dharma is very easily translated as ‘applied moral philosophy’. But yes, of course, religion is Protean. It’s like money – one of those consensual illusions on which human society and culture are founded, but which elude definition. So? All this palaver with definitions is clearly a setup for sleights of hand to come, allowing the author to include and exclude facts and points of view as suits her case without alerting the reader. It was at this point that I realized there was no value in continuing with this book.

I thought I would at least finish the introduction, but three pages on I came to a digression on the chemistry of the brain in which Ms Armstrong makes a complete fool of herself, getting serotonin all wrong. I could see no reason to read further.

For what it’s worth, I agree with the thesis that religion is not to blame for the violence perpetrated in its name. No more is money the root of all evil. These things are conduits for the potential to do evil that exists, pent up, in all of us, but if we didn’t have them, we would simply find other ways to express it. It is ourselves, not our institutions, that are to blame.

But Armstrong’s approach to the proposition is simply untenable. It is not the study of history but the study of evolutionary psychology that will, perhaps, one day exonerate religion – as the common man understands it – from blame for all the atrocities perpetrated in its name.

I have enjoyed and been enlightened by Karen Armstrong’s work in the past, when she was in a more sceptical mode and had interesting things to say about, for instance, fundamentalism. That era is now long gone. She has become a book factory, reliably churning out another god-bothering tome every year, to the undoubted delight of her fans, her publishers and her bank manager, but with nothing of substance left to say. A sad if somewhat unusual case of the commercialization of religion.

Fool’s Testament

Herzog
by Saul Bellow

This is literature, the work of a great novelist aiming for the stars, though perhaps not quite reaching them. In an age of constant bite-sized distractions from the internet and elsewhere, though, it’s hard to give this kind of writing the attention it deserves.

Stylistically exquisite, heart-tuggingly insightful, encyclopaedically informed, Herzog is largely a rendition of its protagonist’s internal monologue, sprinkled with a light salting of action and description. Moses Herzog conducts his compulsive monologue in the form of letters to others – friends, relatives, colleagues, fellow authors, publishers, contemporary politicians, etc. – which he invariably fails to complete and never mails. Not an easy read by any means.

Herzog is a high-flown incompetent, a former academic and historian who is in the throes of a nervous breakdown – a mild psychotic episode, you might call it. He suffers, he remembers, he writes his letters; he takes trips across the country for reasons he is not quite clear about himself, only to turn round and come back home. He has a bit of sex – the one thing he seems to be good at is attracting women – but he doesn’t seem to know how to make the women happy or let them make him happy. Eventually he returns to the place where his unhappiness began and is cured of his temporary insanity, although there is no promise that his apparently lifelong run of failure will end.

I experienced a curious sensation while reading this book – that of finding myself bored and impatient with Herzog and his endless, meandering, futile ruminations, yet eager to read on and find out what happens to him – and yet again being unable to hurry because the prose is so gorgeous and dense with flavour and nutrients. This queasy, ambiguous fascination is an effect that can only be achieved by a great author – an Updike or a Nabokov, or a Bellow.

At times, though, the book I was most reminded of was Portnoy’s Complaint, which is considerably more lowbrow (groin level, in fact, most of the time). Which raises an interesting question: since we already had Saul Bellow, was it really necessary to invent Philip Roth?

Little England & the ’Flu

Population trend for Sri Lanka showing population loss due to

the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919.

Some years ago, I wrote a short story called ‘Little England’, set in the tea-planting districts of Ceylon not long after Independence. These districts lie high among the central hills of Lanka; in pre-colonial times they were barely settled. The British ‘opened them up’, chopping down the ancient cloud-forests that clothed the mountains and planting coffee in their place. Later, when coffee succumbed to a blight, they turned to tea, which ended up being even more successful.

The planters lived in palatial isolation in their estate ‘bungalows’ among the hills. Although they were furnished with every convenience and luxury colonial civilization could provide, access was difficult. There was only one railway line, running from Kandy to Badulla, and the roads that connected the plantations, which were often privately built and maintained, were narrow, winding and terribly dangerous. Since these roads were always climbing up and down steep hills, one verge was usually bordered by a cliffside while the other gave, unfenced, upon an abyss. Mist and fog often made visibility poor, even by day; at night it was worse, and so many planters died on the way home after a boozy evening at ‘the club’ that the fraternity had a term for it: ‘he went into the tea.’ Other hazards included frequent landslides (‘earthslips’) and rockfalls. A breakdown meant exposure to leeches and poisonous snakes, and some districts were home to bears or leopards. Help, if one needed it, was usually available at the nearest estate factory or bungalow – but that, more often than not, would be miles away.

This was just how the planters liked it. Up in their mountain fastnesses, they were largely insulated from the grubby realities of life in the populous Crown Colony of Ceylon. Since their plantations were worked by resident indentured labourers originally imported from South India and their business dealings were entirely with other Europeans, they rarely had occasion for intercourse with the ‘real’ natives of Ceylon – the Sinhalese, Tamils and other races who had inhabited the island for centuries or millennia. The ‘Indian Tamil’ labourers employed on their estates – whose freedom of movement was severely curtailed and whom the native population shunned in any case – were just as isolated. And conversely, few native Ceylonese ever had occasion to visit the hill country beyond the purlieus of Kandy and the Kelani Valley, where numerous Sinhalese and Muslim villages had existed since pre-colonial times.

Thus a strange, artificially self-sufficient society grew up among the hills of Ceylon – a world that some called ‘Little England’. It had absolutely nothing in common with the rest of the island. Its tiny towns (essentially hamlets glorified by the presence of a government administrative office or kaccheri) featured European-style houses set in European-looking gardens, stone churches in Gothic Revival style and picturesque shops and post offices that might have been transported wholesale from a village high street in the Cotswolds. In contrast to the rest of Ceylon, which was populous, hot and insanitary, Little England was cool, sparsely inhabited and spotless. The tea-plantations were neat and trim, while the factory buildings, ‘coolie lines’ and bungalows exhibited that peculiar appearance common to colonial commercial enterprises, an odd combination of domestic cosiness and quasi-military spit and polish.

The capital of Little England was Nuwara Eliya, a high-altitude resort with golf links, a scenic artificial lake and becks stocked with imported trout for the delectation of British anglers and gourmets. In the late nineteenth century the government would move there during the hot season, just as the Imperial Indian government would move to Simla. ‘Newralia’, together with a few isolated clubs among the tea-bushes, supplied the planters and their long-suffering wives with all the human intercourse they permitted themselves; apart from a few expeditions to Colombo during the Christmas and racing seasons, they tended to stay put on their plantations.

So much is common knowledge to all Ceylonese and even a few Sri Lankans, but few now recall just how isolated this plantocratic Elysium was in the days of its pomp. This was brought home to me afresh while reading, recently, a scientific paper about the spread of influenza in Ceylon during the great worldwide epidemic of the disease that followed the First World War.

In their paper The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 in Sri Lanka: its Demographic Cost, Timing, and Propagation, S. Chandra and D. Sarathchandra note that the spread of influenza through Ceylon after its first appearance was not ‘wave-like’ and uniform as in other countries. Instead, the disease spread across the whole island except for the tea-growing districts of Little England. It was only after a second vector of infection arrived, apparently not through the Port of Colombo like the first but via Talaimannar, the port at which indentured labourers from India were landed in Ceylon, that the epidemic reached the hill country. 

The analysis of peak mortality also reveals a penomenon that is distinctive for Sri Lanka. That is, while the epidemic in the north and south of the island peaked in the autumn of 1918, it was not until a few months later, in the spring of 1919, that a number of districts in the central part of the island experienced their peak mortality. This point, which is noted by Langford and Storey, suggests a relative isolation of populations in the central districts of the island from the north and the south, as well as the isolation of the north and the south from each other. This is in stark contrast with the pattern observed elsewhere, where the disease moved wavelike across entire countries. 

In other words, Little England was so isolated that its inhabitants were practically living in quarantine.

By the 1960s, the period in which my short story is set, this isolation was less rigid than it had been, and perhaps half the planters on the estates were Ceylonese – usually members of the Anglophone colonial elite who modelled their manners, views and attitudes on their British predecessors and looked upon national independence as on a tragedy – but the hills of Ceylon were still Little England. Travelling into the tea districts, one left behind the chaos, poverty and deprivation of independent Ceylon; it was like going back in time. Of course, that past time, the colonial era, was one of subjugation and frustration for Ceylonese and cruel exploitation and misery for ‘Indian’ estate workers; the gentility and bucolic prettiness of the tea districts were a façade behind which a great deal of ugliness lay hidden. For all that, the charms of Little England are undeniable: thousands of present-day Sri Lankans still travel to the hill country on holiday or excursion every year, seeking to recapture some of the atmosphere of the past. More often than not, they schedule their journeys for the same season as did the British governors of yore. 

What they encounter scarcely resembles the Little England of my own boyhood, let alone that of the days before independence. The hill country is no longer a world apart. The picture-postcard towns have been modernized and uglified, the tea factories are decrepit, the tea-bushes overgrown and unkempt. But since most people’s idea of the past comprises a fantastic collage of present-day media images and a few half-forgotten nuggets of history learned in school, they are more or less satisfied. They fit what they see into the myths they believe, and are content.