"Consistency will turn any good cause into a bad one"

I should like to point out some of the advantages and even joys of inconsistency. I do not claim that inconsistency, in itself, is a virtue. There is something neutral and rather unassuming about it, and I dare say that it can be abused. I am not advocating incoherent babble, and I rather like rational discourse. Besides, the case of inconsistency cannot be made consistently without inviting a logical conundrum.

    Instead, I would suggest that we owe our lives to vacillation, indecision, and unprincipled action. You would not now be in a position to mind what I am saying, or agree with it, if it were not for the late Mr. Khrushchev, who behaved, as we all know, like a disgraceful opportunist in 1962. Did he not back out with his rockets? Wasn't he simply yellow, as they say? Did he not throw overboard the most sacrosanct principles of Marxism-Leninism? And no one in the whole Kremlin had the guts to stand up and say that selling out to imperialism is bad. No, all those old militants just had one thing on their minds; they wanted to save their own skins, and in the process they happened to save our skins as well. Consistency would have dictated quite a different course of action. It generally does. Let me mention just a few examples:

Take any economic doctrine whatsoever, apply it, proceed logically with your project, and you will eventually destroy the very economy you had set out to save. 

Act out the fundamental tenets of capitalism to their ultimate consequences, and you will end up with a state of civil war and/or a Fascist dictatorship.

Attack the social system you live in by any means at your disposal, and you have terrorism; defend it by any means, and you have a Gestapo running the place.

Be a rigorous ecologist and defend nature against man with no holds barred, and you will end up leading a Stone Age existence.

Build communism, be uncompromising about it, and your militancy will take you straight into what is rightly known as the socialist camp.

Pursue economic growth at any price and you will destroy the biosphere.

Join the arms race, be consistent about it, and you will blow yourself to pieces.

Et cetera.

In this sort of situation, which has become quite frequent, principle isn't what it used to be. For those who are still looking around for a maxim to follow, I would suggest this: Consistency will turn any good cause into a bad one. It is a luxury we can no longer afford. For philosophers who are interested in keeping their thinking as straight as possible, this must be an unwelcome thought, but for people at large it will not come as a surprise. In our parts of the world, a vast if not vociferous majority of citizens has come to realize, I believe, that their only chance of survival is based not on one or two Big Ideas but on a constantly changing set of marginal options. They are quite prepared to face a lengthy and contradictory process of muddling through, of trial and error.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Second Thoughts on Consistency

Fist

When my brother put his fist through a window
on New Year’s Eve, no one noticed until a cold draft
cooled our bodies dancing. There was rainbow light
from a disco ball, silver tinsel round the pictures.
My brother held his arm out to us, palm
upturned, a foot high spray of blood.
This was Ilford, Essex, 1993, nearly midnight,
us all smashed on booze and Ecstasy and Danny,
6 foot 5, folding at the knee, a shiny fin of glass
wedged in his wrist. We walked him to
the kitchen, the good arm slung on someone’s neck,
Gary shouting Danny, Darren phoning for
an ambulance, the blood was everywhere. I pressed
a towel across the wound, around
the glass and led him by the hand into the
garden, he stumbled down into the snow,
slurring leave it out and I’m ok  A girl was crying in
the doorway, the music carried on, the bass line
thumping as we stood around my brother, Gary talking
gently saying easy fella,  Darren draining Stella in one
hand and in the other, holding up my brother’s arm,
wet and red, the veins stood out like branches. I thought
that he was dying, out there in the snow and I
got down, I knelt there on the ice
and held my brother, who I never touched, and never told
I loved, and even then I couldn’t say it
so I listened to the incantation easy fella
and my brother’s breathing,
felt him rolling forward, all that weight, Darren
throwing down his can and yelling Danny, don’t you dare
and shaking him. My brother’s face was grey,
his lips were loose and pale and I
was praying. Somewhere in the street, there was
a siren, there was a girl inside who blamed
herself,  there were men with blankets
and a tourniquet, they stopped my brother bleeding,
as the New Year turned, they saved him,
the snow was falling hard, they saved us all.

Hannah Lowe

Curing the Blues

I have no doubt that all my readers from time to time get the "blues". They come to everybody.

It is usually difficult to say what is wrong. We feel heavy and depressed, life looks black, and sometimes it seems as if it were hardly worth living.

The "blues" is a nasty, irritating complaint. But there is a cure for it as there is for most ailments.

In nine cases out of ten such depression is the result of too much thought on one subject, usually a problem or a difficulty that refuses to be solved.

Even the healthiest person is liable to this mental sickness, when the brain goes dizzily round and round a stubborn problem, getting no nearer to a way out.

And as mental states are quickly reflected in bodily feelings, we usually end up by feeling tired and listless.

Doctors are fond of recommending a change for bodily ills. Try a complete mental change for mental ills.

When you get the "blues" don't go on thinking. Switch your mind to something else; and the more cheerful and different it is the better.

Go out and play a hard game of tennis, for instance. If you play properly you will be so absorbed in the game that you will have no time to mope.

Brains, like bodies, get tired. And for a tired brain there is nothing like fresh air, sunshine, cheerful companionship, and absorption in something that, for once, does not matter.

You will return from such a change with invigorated mental powers. You will see fresh points of view, and you will be pleasantly surprised to find that you have left the "blues" behind you.

E. R. Thompson, The Human Machine (1925)

Mid-Term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying -
He had always taken funerals in his stride -
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble,'
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

Seamus Heaney

Why I Like England

I like living in England because everywhere else is foreign and strange. The only language I speak is English: I dropped French at school and took up hurdling with the athletic team instead. Even now, in later years, my instinctive reaction on hearing French is to jerk one leg in the air and propel myself towards low garden walls. But I wouldn’t like anyone to think that I don’t like Abroad. I do. Abroad means adventure and the possibility of danger and delicious food, but abroad is also tiring and confusing and full of foreigners who tell you that the bank is open when it’s not.

Being an atheist I am naturally interested in English churches, and being a town dweller I passionately love the English countryside. Though I will concede that it looks better on the telly than it does in real life, as a child new to the countryside said to me once on a Social Service outing.

I only fully appreciated the varied nature of the English countryside after driving for two days through a Swedish pine forest. By the morning of the second day, desperate for novelty, I started counting the dead reindeer that littered the verges. By the afternoon I’d stopped feeling sorry for the reindeer, and by late evening I’d also stopped feeling guilty about owning two pine dressers. In fact my first thought on seeing the oak dressers appearing in Habitat’s window was that Terence Conran must have been to Sweden on a motoring holiday, and on returning to England had issued a terse memo: Pine is out, oak is in!

I like English weather; like the countryside it’s constantly drawing attention to itself. I started this article in a room filled with piercing sunlight, but now a strong wind has materialised and the room is full of gloom.

I like the reserve of English people, because I don’t particularly want to talk to strangers in trains either, unless of course there is a crisis such as a cow on the line causing an hour’s delay. In which case my fellow passengers and I will happily spill out our life stories to anybody we can get to listen.

I like the way in which the English cope with disasters: cut our water off and we will cheerfully queue at a standpipe in the snow. Throw us into rat-infested foreign jails and we will emerge blinking in the daylight to claim that our brutal-looking jailers were decent sorts who treated us well. I bet somewhere, pinned onto a filthy prison wall, is a Christmas card: “To my friend and captor, Pedro, from Jim Wilkinson of cell 14.”

The England I love best is, of course, the England of childhood; when children could play in the street without the neighbours getting up a petition. When children lisp “Tell us about the olden days” I romanticise about the fields and hedgerows, and about the time when a car coming down the unadopted road brought us out of our prefabs to gawp and speculate. I’m happy to live in a country that produces important things: wonderful plays, books, literature, heart surgeons, gardeners and Private Eye. I asked a friend of mine where, given the choice and enough money, he would choose to live. He replied gloomily, “There isn’t anywhere else.” Another friend when asked if she’d ever go on a world cruise said, “No, I’d rather go somewhere else.”

Given the choice between death and exile I’d choose exile every time, but I’d be very, very unhappy at having to leave the club.

Sue Townsend, True Confessions of Susan Lilian Townsend (1989)

Views of a Park

A child as big as a pebble
Went skipping through the park
Looking at every flower
That once was me

A girl as bright as summer
Went wandering through the park
In a world of wooded contentment
That once was me

A girl lost in a dream world
Went strolling through the park
All she wanted was quiet and a young man
That once was me

A woman struggling with luggage
Went slowly through the park
All she knew was noise and children
That once was me

An old woman in thoughtless mood
Is sitting in the park
All she asks is a bench and stillness
That now is me

Celia Ann Glover

Getting the Goat

In her magazine column for September 9, 1990, Marilyn vos Savant answered a well-known brain teaser submitted by one of her readers. You’re on a game show and you’re given the choice of three doors. Behind one is a car, behind the other two are goats. You choose, say, door 1, and the host, who knows where the car is, opens another door, behind which is a goat. He now gives you the choice of sticking with door 1 or switching to the other door. What should you do?

This was the so-called Monty Hall dilemma faced by guests on Monty Hall’s classic TV game show ‘Let’s Make a Deal’, only the consolation prizes weren’t goats. Vos Savant advised her correspondent to switch doors. Sticking with the first choice gives a one-third chance of winning, she said, but switching doubles the odds to two-thirds. To convince her readers, she asked them to imagine a million doors. “You pick door number 1,” she said, “then the host, who knows what’s behind the doors and will always avoid the one with the prize, opens all the rest of them except door number 777777. You’d switch to that door pretty fast, wouldn’t you?

Evidently not. No sooner had her column appeared than she was besieged by mail from readers who disagreed, including many mathematicians. They maintained the odds were only fifty-fifty, not two-thirds, in favor of switching. The thousands of letters she received were running nine to one against her and included rebukes from a statistician at the National Institutes of Health and the deputy director of the Center for Defense Information. The letters had gotten shrill, with suggestions that she was the goat and that women look at mathematical problems differently from men. “You are utterly incorrect about the game-show question,” wrote E Ray Bobo, a PhD at Georgetown, “and I hope this controversy will call some public attention to the serious national crisis in mathematical education. If you can admit your error, you will have contributed constructively toward the solution to a deplorable situation. How many irate mathematicians are needed to get you to change your mind?”

“When reality clashes so violently with intuition,” vos Savant responded in her column, “people are shaken.” This time she tried another tack. Imagine, she said, that just after the host opened the door, revealing a goat, a UFO lands on the game-show stage, and a little green woman emerges. Without knowing what door you originally chose, she is asked to choose one of the two unopened doors. The odds that she’ll randomly choose the car are fifty-fifty. “But that’s because she lacks the advantage the original contestant had - the help of the host. If the prize is behind no. 2, the host shows you no. 3; and if the prize is behind no. 3, the host shows you number 2. So when you switch, you win if the prize is behind no. 2 or no.3. You win either way! But if you don’t switch, you win only if the prize is behind door no. 1.” Vos Savant was completely correct, as mathematicians with egg on their faces ultimately had to admit.

Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers