Poverty Safari, page 22
Rather than allowing the facts of the matter to be held hostage by false belief and personal bias, informed by a cascade of self-delusion, prejudice and lingering resentment masquerading as communitarian concern, I simply held my hands up and said: ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong.’ Instead of attempting to reorder reality around my own petty emotional impulses while presenting myself as a virtuous and rational observer, I decided to turn my critical eye inward.
Who’d have thought that, believing myself to be of clear mind, I was behaving vindictively? Who would have known that my desire to bring clarity to an issue was really obscuring my view of it? And this wasn’t just any issue. This was an issue that was fundamental to my own development as a human being. This was an issue that I specialised in and that had come to define my life. Yet here I was, on a wild goose chase of my own making, believing myself to be firmly in the driver’s seat. Such a lack of insight into my own nature undermined any claim I had to know anything at all, let alone how to understand and solve the complex litany of problems facing our society.
Perhaps none of this seems relevant to a discussion about poverty. Perhaps, when you identify as a ‘poor person’ or some other form of injured party or oppressed or marginalised group, then you shouldn’t be expected to scrutinise your own thinking and behaviour. But it strikes me that much of my thinking and reasoning throughout the years has been peppered with similar hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, where I absolved myself of responsibility for behaving the same way as those I criticised, while wondering why dialogue was so frustrating and disheartening. At the root of my motivation, in this intervention, lay a deep resentment about class. A resentment that was validated and legitimised by my politics – politics which I had inherited by pure chance and weaponised at the earliest opportunity as an extension of my own personal resentments.
Again, I’m sure you have no idea what I’m talking about.
A few weeks after the Glasgow Effect scandal died down, I was invited to take part in a panel discussion with Ellie. When I arrived at the venue I immediately noticed her at the front door wearing a lollipop lady’s jacket. The air of pretension I assumed she would emit was actually an air of self-deprecation; she clearly didn’t take herself as seriously as I took myself. My heart rate quickened, as I had been anticipating the moment we would first speak and suddenly found myself thrust into her path unexpectedly. Fortunately, she was swamped by fans keen to hear about her experience, so I made my way into the venue, having dodged a bullet, and composed myself. It was my intention to apologise to Ellie before the public discussion took place, but now in the venue, it was too busy to give it the attention it deserved.
I sat down with a friend who’d written one of the many responses to my intervention that had forced me to reflect on my actions. To my right, Ellie was meeting and greeting friends and audience members. Being in the room with her, I could now get a sense of the immense strain Ellie had clearly been under since the outrage earlier in the year. She looked nervous, shell-shocked and exhausted. The reality of what it must be like to be the one the social media hounds are chasing began to hit me; Ellie had been through a horrendous personal ordeal. The backlash had lasted for weeks, made worse by the fact her funders and employers had to get involved to clarify publicly certain details about her job and application. This had led to even more scrutiny and speculation of her personal life. Ellie had not only been on the receiving end of robust mainstream media criticism, but scrolls and scrolls of vile, misogynistic hate-filled vitriol. Everything from her career to her personal appearance and sexuality had become fair game, as thousands of armchair critics joined the pile-on – a pile-on I had helped to create. As I sat there, rather awkwardly, reflecting on my part in all of this, another of Ellie’s friends arrived.
They hugged, the embrace lasting a little longer than a simple hello. I wondered if perhaps they been reunited after a long period of time or that maybe this was the first time they’d crossed paths since Ellie became public enemy number one?
Then, despite the noise all around me, I heard gentle sobbing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ellie’s head rise and fall as she leaned into her friend’s chest. When confronted with the reality of this woman, as opposed to the caricature I had created, it was a little harder to retain the beliefs I had entertained previously. Here was a decent, fragile human being who had acted with good intentions, sobbing her heart out. A woman who was almost broken. The self-justification about class, culture and ‘punching-up’ suddenly felt hollow, self-serving and delusional. Yes, her approach was misguided, clumsy and poorly conceived. Yes, her assumptions about life in working class communities deserved to be challenged. Yes, there were important questions that had to be answered about why so many people felt politically excluded and culturally misrepresented and sometimes anger and rage was justified – even necessary. But as she wiped her eyes, and I pretended not to notice, it suddenly became apparent how destructive my class politics had really become. I was so consumed by my own anger and moral certainty, it had blinded me to the fact that Ellie Harrison, in all her middle class glory, was not an enemy, but an ally in the war I’d been fighting all my life. It then occurred to me, grudgingly, that should I ever feel like ‘punching-up’ again in future, I might want to double-check who I’m hitting first.
32
Rules For Radicals
‘IT’S NOT THAT we have a short time to live but that we waste much of it’, wrote the Stoic Seneca nearly 2,000 years ago, in what proved to be a prescient chin-stroking session in Ancient Rome. One suspects he was not the first person to ponder the dilemma of how best to live a life but I’m sure we’re all glad he managed to jot the thought down before forgetting it. It’s immensely comforting to know that even back then, when human life was considerably briefer – around 40 years – that people were still pissing away perfectly serviceable afternoons considering the intractable problems of their existence. I wonder what Seneca would have said had he known that two millennia later, with twice the time on our hands, that we’d still be none the wiser.
As a by-product of this ruminating, thinkers like Seneca created much of the intellectual scaffolding on which many of our own thoughts and opinions hang; the layers and levels of understanding, the gradient at which we enter discussions and the trajectory of our inquiries through them. These habits of thinking did not always come as naturally as they seem to. They were achieved through difficult debate, much of it provoking outrage and discomfort, that subsequently produced a vast, patchwork map for living. A map with which we’ve become so accustomed we now view merely as cliché.
Think of every unremarkable proverb you know and reimagine it being uttered for the first time. We take these little nuggets of wisdom for granted. But like many of the beliefs we attribute to our own virtue, we did almost nothing to obtain them. Proverbs, and most of the other knowledge we trade as currency, are the product of someone else’s leg-work. We are all copycats, frauds and tricksters, lying about the books we’ve read. Our wandering minds are full of memes uploaded by the people who came before us, to whom we rarely give credit or pay tribute, unless it’s to signal our own intelligence. But these truths, distilled by others and later reclaimed by us mere mortals, attempt to cut to the heart of the matter by tearing through the hubris of the era, with little regard for the pretensions of the day. And there are few clichés as simple or ubiquitous as ‘Life’s too short’ which, it would appear, is what Seneca the Younger was grappling with in his essay ‘The Shortness of Life’.
‘Life is long enough,’ he wrote, ‘and it’s been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested. But when life is squandered through soft and careless living, and when it’s spent on no worthwhile pursuit, death finally presses and we realise that the life which we didn’t notice passing has passed away.’
Much of my own life has been squandered in years of careless or misdirected thinking. The replaying of old arguments and perceived victories, the simulation of rich fantasies that go beyond the mundane and into the absurd or extreme. Too much of this for too long made me deeply unhappy. Unable to ascertain why, I adopted false beliefs that appeared to explain it.
I’d cast my mind over the past, believing I was trying to uncover the truth of the matter, but my real intention, when conducting this pretence at inquiry, was rarely to find the truth, or to locate my own part in some conflict or confusion; rather, my intent was always to absolve myself of blame – while generously apportioning it to others. If only I had given the people I resented as much leeway as I was willing to give myself, what then? Perhaps it’s natural to cast yourself as the protagonist of your own story. To only see life from your own perspective. But just because it’s natural does not mean it’s right. Even now, I am still clearing up the wreckage of a life that was based on little else other than doing whatever felt good at the time. I chose to ignore the wisdom of those who came before me and I paid a heavy price.
For many people, nothing is more frustrating or perplexing than the wisdom of their own parents. But those days are now in the past and my relationship with my father has improved over the years as I’ve grown. Time is a great healer, to use another wonderful cliché, and is often helped along when a little distance is thrown in for good measure. When stress tears your family apart, setting everyone on their own little collision course with life, then sometimes the only thing you can do is get out of one another’s way. In doing so, you create an opportunity for reflection and growth and in the case of my dad and me, a bit of physical distance has created the potential for compassion and understanding.
Life seems to click back into place when harmony breaks out between the warring factions of a family. You realise the futility of fighting and learn to avoid it. For some, that means biting their tongue, for others, only visiting occasionally. And while it isn’t always easy, sometimes the only solution is to forgive and forget. Anything less will make you ill, no matter how justified you are in your anger. It’s usually the case that those who wronged us were, themselves, wronged at some point too, just as it’s likely that those of us who have been harmed by others will repay the favour countless times throughout the course of our lives. We are all, to some extent, victims and abusers at different stages of our lives, but we tend only to recall those times when we were harmed. That might be natural, but it’s not always the truth.
In the case of my mother, she didn’t have much of a chance. Having been raped at a young age and rejected by her mother for revealing it, she pursued connection through sex, alcohol, drugs and, later, children. But every attempt at connection failed along with her coping strategies. As her parents succumbed to their own addictions and her narrowing circle of friends and siblings either got sober or were found dead with needles in their arms, she grew more isolated from reality. My mum never got the chance to gain insight into how abnormal her life was; that there was another way of thinking and of being. She never had anything else to compare it to. Just as I felt self-conscious and anxious whenever I mixed with people I perceived as higher class than me, she recoiled from the most basic human interactions unless she was intoxicated. Even from her own children. That’s how low an opinion she had of herself. In my mother’s eyes, where I once saw only hatred I now see pain, trauma and a deep frustration at longing to feel connected but not knowing how. In her eyes, I see myself. In her short life, I see my alternative future, should I be tempted back into that world of smoke and mirrors. The older I get, the more I begin to appreciate how hard it must have been for my parents, kids themselves when I was born, and in their clichés I now see kernels of wisdom.
As I continue to recover from the past and become adjusted to life’s often less than ideal rhythms, the old resentments, rooted in youthful ideals, have made way for a new pragmatism. This tendency away from self-centeredness and desire to set the past aside is not completely altruistic, despite being beneficial to others. It’s based on an uncomfortable truth: the longer I’m alive, the higher likelihood there is of making similar missteps to those I’ve spent much of my life resentfully condemning.
As a child, I condemned my mother’s drinking and hated her for being an absent member of our family. But by my teens, I was incapable of being around family unless I was drunk. I couldn’t understand how she could leave us and not wonder how we were or what we were doing. But by the time I started drinking, I rarely took an interest in the lives of my siblings unless they came to one of my parties. Of course, like all of my misgivings and indiscretions, it was always different when I did it. There was always some twist of reasoning, some acrobatic feat of self-justification that meant I didn’t have to forsake my permanent place on the moral high ground, but deep down I always knew I was a hypocrite and a fraud and a liar. I’ve learned to temper and examine my indignation at other people’s behaviour, particularly my parents’, because my experience tells me I am doomed to repeat the things I once condemned – if I’m not careful.
As it happens, much of the world view I am now beginning to claim as my own really came from my dad; my values, attitudes and beliefs as well as my flaws, pet peeves and eccentricities. At some point in my life – probably when I was kicked out before my mum died – I began to view my dad as the villain of my story. But that was merely part of the delusion. I was ungrateful, and hadn’t matured enough to acknowledge this. Evidence of my dishonest thinking can be found in my willingness to attribute my failures and problems to my parents, while taking sole credit for any successes I may have had, and the rather juvenile idea that should I break free from the gravity of poverty, it would be in spite of my mother and father, rather than because of them.
I believe I then mapped this delusion onto society itself.
My arrogance and naivety blinded me to the fact that my father’s influence was all-pervasive in my life – right down to the fact I chose to become an artist. Like the thinkers of the Ancient World, who did all the heavy lifting for us, I minimised and discarded my father’s wisdom as outdated and unfashionable when, in truth, it provided me with the firmest possible footing. Within a year of leaving home and finding myself able to indulge in the things my dad had placed strict limitations on, such as drinking, junk food and cigarettes, my life had spun hopelessly out of control.
My dad always placed an emphasis on taking responsibility financially and respecting people’s wishes and property. But as soon as I was out the door, I became an irresponsible, impulsive confusion of mounting excess. He did his best to encourage me to eat well and exercise regularly, making sure we all had working bicycles and taking us all swimming once a week. Above all, he always said that I should never, under any circumstances, settle for a job I didn’t like if I had dreams of being a writer.
The virtues he tried to instil in me would probably have saved me many years of misery and stress had I been wise enough to live by them sooner. But I vilified him, omitting his wisdom from my thinking completely, choosing instead to absorb the wisdom of fairweather friends and manipulative drinking buddies, who told me whatever half-truths I wanted to hear. I shudder to think how little I knew, precisely at those moments when I thought I knew it all, and how vulnerable such a lack of insight really made me. Which is why I doubt I’ll ever be truly certain of anything again – perhaps other than my own capacity to be stunningly wrong.
Today is the day I finally finish this book. If I’d known writing it was going to be so hard, I’d have stuck to just trying to read one. It’s mid-morning and I’m sitting in Starbucks, overlooking the foyer at the Silverburn, nearly nine years to the day since it opened. It’s safe to say, this isn’t where I imagined I’d be when I started on this journey. For years, I’ve been rolling my eyes at the mention of this place and throwing up middle fingers whenever I passed it. The Silverburn, like so many other things, became an icon that seemed to encapsulate everything that was wrong with my world. But things change and so have I. Sometimes I worry that I’m not changing for the better. That I’ve grown too distant from my roots or that I am being absorbed by the very system I’ve spent my life railing against. Other times, I feel I had no choice but to change and that the problem, if there is one, lies with those who’ve insisted on remaining the same despite all that has transpired. I guess I’ll never really know if this change I’m going through is because I have forsaken my principles or because I’ve gained a deeper insight into life and moved forward as a result. Whichever it is, thankfully I no longer have time to ponder such matters.
Next to me stands a bright orange buggy, with its hood pulled up. Tucked inside, purring loudly, deep in his mid-morning nap, is a one-year-old boy called Daniel. He is my son. It was on the first day of an honest attempt to stop smoking that I received news I would become a father in the spring of 2016. The news was particularly frightening, not least because I had spent my 20s privately pondering just how bad a father I would be should a child have the misfortune of finding itself under my wing. For years, negative self-talk convinced me that I was unfit to be a parent. In fact, I internalised the rather grandiose notion that my greatest gift to the world would be to never reproduce, thus withholding my DNA, which I’d long considered defective. Deep down, my biggest fear about becoming a father was that I might pass my false beliefs onto my child, plaguing his life with needless pain, conflict and disorientating self-doubt. When he was born he didn’t look like a baby. I remember what resembled a small purple alien, contained in a see-through bag. My only experience of childbirth up until that point was watching medical dramas as a kid, my grandparents awkwardly coughing over the bits where doctors referred to ‘vaginas’. For this reason, I expected my son to arrive fully formed in a high chair wearing a Jungle Book onesie. The reality was far more startling. There was a lot of blood and my partner was both delirious with pain and fully aware the baby wasn’t making any noise. Those first few seconds of silence were the longest, as I began to physically convulse at the thought something might be wrong.
