30 September 2006

I’ve said that the design for revolution is shaping up in my mind, that it’s as good as ‘there’, but how to get it across to other minds is the problem. You (as in ‘I’ or ‘one’) can’t tell people, you really can’t. And you can’t do the other thing: show them, either, if what you want to show is rather obviously at this stage unreal, imaginary, and aspirational rather than actual. If it were fiction you’d be all right, because with fiction you can show what’s unreal and imaginary, because that’s actually what your reader is expecting.

‘Serial endosymbiosis theory’ (SET) is an important alternative – or complementary, if you like – theory of how the evolution of life came about. Endosymbiosis is benign parasitism, where one kind of life form lives inside another such that they are mutually dependent to such an extent that they become a new creature. It’s SET, probably, that has made possible the big leaps in evolutionary change, rather than the selection from slight random variations in a competitive environment that is the basis of the Darwinian model.

With SET for ideas, it’s more a matter of cooperation than of dialectic. And serendipity is involved. Things come together and you let them and see if they get on. The mind is like a dating agency for ideas, but you don’t let the parties draw up a spec for their ideal partner, or make the other kind of condition: only giving them a go with each other if they’re wackily different.

My jumping off point has been studying Rabindranath Tagore’s prose fiction, and the last paragraph of my dissertation illustrates what I’ve been saying – somewhat confusingly, perhaps, but in a good sense of ‘confusing’, meaning ‘flowing together’.

In the closing days of editing this essay, I read two books: Tagore’s The Religion of Man (1931),1 which I had not been drawn to because its title is off-putting to an atheist, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906).2 Tagore’s correspondence with Sinclair is referred to in Selected Letters, with the editors saying that ‘Tagore could never have adopted socialism as a creed’ but shared Sinclair’s ‘repugnance for commercialism and the dehumanising effect of machines.’3 Oddly enough, these two books by Tagore and Sinclair share a weakness, in that they are both rich, in their different ways, but uni-dimensional, so a reader must accept or reject them wholesale. In contrast, the power of Tagore’s prose fiction is its hidden depths, and insights one has sought out and found for oneself are life-changing, and have global implications.

The main title of my dissertation was ‘The Village and the World’, and I argued that Tagore’s political vision was of a world of self-governing village communities, with cooperation and sharing of information and expertise at local and global levels (maybe regionally too), but with no big cities or nation states ruling over things, or interfering in local direct democracy. That’s a very different idea of Tagore than the poet and seer revered by his Bengali compatriots, or the Eastern mystic and guru with a few devotees in the West. None of these versions of Tagore has much in common with Upton Sinclair, the socialist critic of American capitalism and wage slavery. So my ‘dating agency’ might try them together, and they’d chat amicable enough, but no evolution of ideas would take place. What I suppose I mean by that is really that no further evolution of my own ideas came out of that encounter, because I’d got what I came for and was ready to move on.

I read and studied about 150 books and articles in the course of that research; maybe I’ll put the bibliography up here some time because it’s a fascinating collection. But, moving on, what is needed is a mini-bibliography for the next stage, which is about how on earth Tagore’s vision – and he’s not the only one to have it – could possibly come about. So here that is, and what I get out of that little lot will arrive here is due course – in much less time than the nine months gestation of the Tagore insights. The first book, Ryan’s Darwin’s Blind Spot, leapt out of me on my first visit to my local library, after I’d thankfully heaved onto the counter the pile of ancient volumes from the County stack borrowed and much-renewed as I struggled to extract their essences. Ryan cited Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, and there was a copy in the invaluable County stack, which I reserved; the two other books I already owned.

Frank Ryan, Darwin’s Blind Spot: Evolution Beyond Natural Selection ( New York: Texere, 2003)

Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (London: Heinemann, 1910)

Clough Williams-Ellis, ed., Britain and the Beast (London: Dent, 1938)

Frederic Seebohm, The EnglishVillage Community: Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1884)

My need for these books, and for a bibliographical basis, derives from my recent experience of studying in an academic way. One is expected to build on what other, recognised, scholars have written. This is a good thing, because one is deterred from sounding off with one’s own ‘stuff’, but it is also inhibiting; one hardly dares say anything of one’s own. I am fighting this down-side at present...

1. Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man: Being the Hibbert Lectures for 1930 (Boston: Beacon, 1961)

2. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (London: Penguin, 1936) first published 1906.

3. Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.304-5.

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