Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

In the mind and spirit, the values and actions of Erasmus, God is paramount.

While taking the great risk of criticising and castigating as a departure from that faith the outward pomp of church practices, Erasmus’s concept of the relation of the ruler to the ruled is measured by the founding religious principle of the power of ultimate morality coming from on high. That authority is Christianity, of course, through God’s endowment of Christ to the world. Erasmus’s enterprise was the regeneration of Christendom. Neither Erasmus nor his direct opponent in the view of human conduct, Machiavelli, considers the power of other faiths over the human condition. Here, neither the man of transcendent religious values nor the cynical pragmatist offers much relevance to the world we are attempting to create now, where the validity of many different faiths, held by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and others, has to be recognised as an absolute human right, honoured and respected equally if there is to be survival of anything like what we call civilisation. As I write of civilisation, this morning, comes the news of attacks on the underground transport system that takes the people of London to work every day. So far, about forty reported dead and over seven hundred injured. There is immediate debate of whether the source of this savage show of destructive power is religious fervour against Britain’s involvement with the United States’ war in Iraq and its aftermath, or whether it is directed at the G8 summit as a ghastly alternative form of protest to that of concerts demonstrating with music and song the failure of the rich countries to ‘make poverty history’. Either/or; there is a connection in the state of our present human condition.

‘How one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live.’

If Machiavelli confronts us with some home truths about how we live in our own times, Erasmus offers the possibility of how we ought to live. It is natural to be drawn to him on the positive side of the relevance of these thinkers to our times. Machiavelli determined it was the foremost duty of princes to make war. Erasmus determined it was the foremost duty of princes to avoid war. We know there is no question of which is the only future for humankind in our era, since we have means of destruction unknown to past ages.

Erasmus was so brilliant that it is difficult to single out one quality, one advocation from another in his grasp of the moral complexity of human affairs. That he was virtually the inventor of the concept of arbitration is perhaps, for us, his most relevant. Whether domestically in a trade union dispute with the bosses or the conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, the solution we look to, strive for now in desperate pursuit of peace and justice is arbitration. His presence surely sits with sessions at the UN, with the commissions on human rights. We share with him in our time his restless preoccupation with the welfare of society, measure this against the professed ideals of those responsible for it.

Erasmus’s lifelong great enterprise in the regeneration of Christendom was not, is not, fundamentalism in the sense we know and fear it today. His early support for the young Luther ended significantly in his rejection of Luther on grounds of the need for a humanistic intellectual culture as well as, and within, return to the basic faith of Christ’s life and teaching. How relevant to our age when we experience that vital movements for change we support can become in turn oppressive.

His belief in a humanistic culture included educational methods we’re still trying to advance today — he would applaud computer competency for the young, but as a writer who saw literature as a basic component of humanist culture would deplore the decline of reading. In an age of specialisation such as ours, his intellectual sweep is challenging. He was not content to be the subject of academic debate; his dazzling use of satire ( In Praise of Folly ) as a non-violent cauterising of hypocrisy made him a best-seller centuries before ours. The great scholar and philologist didn’t refrain, either, from controversial opinions on such apparently diverse matters as the correct pronunciation of Greek, ‘abstinence from meat’, and sharp observation on Christian marriage.

About the latter, he of the glorious open mind might just have been biased, as a homosexual. But that’s an aside.

Machiavelli and Erasmus, contentious beings — aren’t they both men of our time?

2005

HORROR was written on the sun.

William Plomer, Turbott Wolfe

The prophetic words of the poet William Plomer.

The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were part of the unspeakable horrors of a past war. The world has come to coexist in, witness the horrors of Twin Towers New York, Madrid bombings, London Underground train explosions, the dead in Afghanistan, Rwanda, Darfur, Sri Lanka … the list does not close.

What place, task, meaning will literature have in witness to disasters without precedence in the manner in which these destroy deliberately and pitilessly; the entire world become the front line of any and every conflict?

Place. Task. Meaning.

To apportion these for us, the world’s writers, I believe we have first to define what witness is.

No simple term.

I go to the Oxford English Dictionary and find that definitions fill more than a small-print column. Witness : attestation of a fact, event, or statement, testimony, evidence; one who is or was present and is able to testify from personal observation.

Television crews, photographers, are pre-eminent witnesses in these senses of the word, when it comes to catastrophe, staggeringly visual. No need for words to describe it; no possibility words could .

First-hand newsprint, elaborately descriptive journalism becomes essentially a pallid after-image. Television made ‘personal observation’, ‘attestation of a fact, event’ a qualification of witness not only for those thousands who stood mind-blown aghast on the scenes of disaster but everyone worldwide who saw them all happening on television.

The place and task of attesting the fact, event, or statement testimony, evidence — the qualification of one who is or was present and is able to testify — this is that of the media. Analysis of the disaster follows in political, sociological terms, by various ideological, national, special or populist schemas, some claiming that elusive reductive state, objectivity. And to the contexts — political, sociological — in this case, according to the dictionary there must be added analysis in religious terms. For number eight in the list of definitions cites: ‘One who testifies for Christ or the Christian faith, especially by death, a martyr.’ The Oxford English Dictionary , conditioned by Western Christian culture, naturally makes the curious semantic decision to confine this definition of the term witness to one faith only. But the perpetrators of terrorist acts often testify as witness, in this sense, to another faith — a faith which the arrogance of the dictionary does not recognise: to the faith of Islam, by death and martyrdom.

Such attacks may be against an individual; one was threatened against Salman Rushdie. One almost took the life of the great writer in whose name we have the honour of gathering today — Naguib Mahfouz.

Harold Pinter in his Nobel Prize speech 2005 spoke these words:

A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable almost naked activity … The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds … You are out on your own, on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection — unless you lie — in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.