'The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe', painted in 1890
by Georges-Pierre Seurat, from the National Gallery's
collection
Learn to love ambiguity
The need for structure and order is the root of evil
Janan Ganesh
To the After Impressionism show at the National Gallery. There is a
Georges Seurat landscape so hazy that I can't tell if I am looking
at sand or wheat. There is a Picasso portrait so fractured in
perspective that three-quarters of the sitter is lost. As for the
customary “Mont Sainte-Victoire”, Cézanne makes the kilometre-high
rock look as though it might blow away in the next breeze. Nothing
is certain here. Nothing is fixed.
And that, around the turn of the 20th century, is what so upset
audiences. It
seems there is a psychic need for structure and order in a
meaningless world. Not all of us feel it (more on that later). But
those who do can feel it to the nth degree.
This is the real root of evil, isn't it? Greed, yes, but for
clarity, not for cash. It drives people to embrace political dogma
rather than live with ambiguity. We are at the beginning of the end
of one such phenomenon. I think the cultural left peaked in 2020.
Listen to the derisive connotation of the word “woke” now. Look at
newspapers, once all-in on this stuff, edge back a bit. But don’t
cheer. Because it will be something else next. What “activists” of
the left were looking for wasn’t that dogma, but a dogma: a system
of thought that clarifies the farrago of real life into categories
(“patriarchy”) and rules (“do better”). Exactly which system meets
that demand at a given time is a matter of chance and
fashion.
Put it this way. Had Lenin been disabused of his revolutionary
socialism, he would have become an Austrian School free-market
crank or a clerical bully or even a diehard Czarist. There is no
scenario in which someone of such rigid cast of mind — such dread
of jumbled reality — ends up in the middle of the road. A somewhat
less world-historical example is Maajid Nawaz, the reformed
religious radical who, after a stint as a Liberal Democrat, ended
up on the conspiracist end of the Covid debate. All that hunger for
structure had to go somewhere.
After Impressionism covers 1880 to the Great War. In that era, or
thereabouts, Marxists and Freudians tried to bring the exactitude
of Newtonian physics to the clutter of human affairs. Historical
laws were “discovered”. Human behaviour was taxonomised. One of
these dogmas would go on to sweep about a third of the world. The
other, in the form of psychobabble, still has a grip on educated
urbanites in the west. It is there when someone tells you their
Myers-Briggs type. It is there when behaviours too banal to need
labelling are called “gaslighting”. This isn’t just upper middle
class boredom at work. It is a deeper-seated urge to impose order
on a world that has disturbingly little.
In the end, then, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists lost.
Yes, art was changed forever. But the world outside art remained
the same in its desperation for certainties: for clean lines of
thought, if not of paint. What happened to European politics in the
first half of the 20th century is the deadliest example. Others are
just frivolous. It is impossible to be single without noticing the
awesome persistence of astrology among otherwise rational
adults.
If I see this craving for certainty everywhere, it is because I am
so much the other way. My three favourite cities in the world —
London, Los Angeles, Bangkok — are defined by a lack of definition.
There is no master plan, no architectural coherence, no telling
from the look and atmosphere of one street what to brace for in the
next. Next to me as I write this is a bottle from Burgundy, my
favourite wine region not because it is the “best” but because it
is so internally varied.
As for politics, I had voted for Britain’s three main parties by my
mid-twenties. I still don’t know which way I’ll go next time. No
doubt, this is all proof of a timorous, milk-and-water character.
But ambiguity is its own kind of radicalism. It goes against the
human need for structure. And the inverse is also true. Radicals
aren’t all that radical. What I see in the many I have known over
the years is fear: of life, of the messiness of their own
species.
