1.
We think of ourselves as creatures with willpower and rights of self-assertion, but it is surprisingly hard to think for oneself.
Original thought always involves non-compliance with precedent, and in a systematic society and economy that is tricky, both practically, because it is for example hard to run one’s life offline, without the various permissions of web-based administration, and emotionally, because it’s a way of saying no to authority. Refusing the known produces feelings of uncertainty, the possibility of disappointing others or being disappointed by them. It’s an old problem to do with hierarchy and the individual. Explicit examples, in narrative literature, are Abrahamic myth, The Tempest, and 1984. But even Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion qualify. Austen’s novels are not about romantic love; they are stories about the practical and emotional obstacles in the path of truth-seeking, and the way families and riches do not take kindly to daughters who disappoint them.
Creative ability is always a move beyond, or rather into, uncertainty and the fear of unforeseeable consequences. It’s always an act of refusal or of resistance to something already established, even if you are adding to it. Extension is an outward trajectory; it involves a move away from security. In logic and mathematics, it involves accepting the profound consequences of inconsistency and incompleteness, the true propositions that cannot be proved from the axioms; in art, it requires the painstaking undermining of preconceptions, including the idea that writing a book or a poem is about deciding to write a book or a poem rather than discovering the form as you go. Scientific method and artistic construction are both matters of formal experiment and experimenting with form. (It still amazes me how few scientists and artists point this out.)
Ability is also resistance to oneself, what one has already done, one’s effortful CV, one’s “skills”, the carefully curated evidence of a thing called identity, as if identity were a set of emotional and behavioural cues on a plinth in a museum, or indeed a university staff card. It’s in this sense of extension and resistance that I understand George Orwell when he says, in his 1946 essay, Why I Write, that literature is driven both by powerful personal motives, “ingrained likes and dislikes”, and by the constant struggle “to efface the personality” in pursuit of the truth.
What, then, is the “ingrained” component of ability? In her excellently clear book, Heart and Mind (1981), the philosopher Mary Midgley makes a case for the existence of innate gifts, not as quantities of intelligence feeding entitlement or its opposite, but as “personal repertoires” of “tastes and powers which can often startle both ourselves and those around us, which may find no path in our culture”. Her defence of the personal repertoire perhaps relies too heavily on unprecedented geniuses like the Indian mathematician Ramanujan, who had very little education. You can’t infer a general truth about innate ability from such examples. We are not commonly exceptional. Yes, of course, we are different; but by degree, I suggest. If that were not so, we would be condemned to lead solipsistic lives, and others’ abilities would be inappreciably mysterious to us.
I also think that innatism by itself is not enough to explain our changes in life, our adoption of trades, practices and activities that run counter to an apparent inheritance. This is more than adaptability; it’s the will to change ourselves and the world by refusing something given. We may have a predisposition to draw or paint or calculate and yet object to doing so on emotional grounds (our parents did it!). What we later find, typically, is that the draughtsman’s gift is re-expressed in another direction, mathematically or musically or paleontologically. As a species, we have learnt to do many things. Most animals do the same thing, but we specialise within the group, and even as we specialise we diversify: there are many tasks to be done and we can learn to do each other’s tasks, up to a point (though always get a good plumber). What this doesn’t alter is the idea of an underlying subjective disposition – including the ability to have a go at various things in accordance with our temperament or in defiance of it.
Midgley is quiet about this second possibility. She discusses abilities rather as if they were unique-to-user applications, whereas I see them as conscious variables inclining, over time, to expressions of personality. This takes us away from innatism or biological programming to something more intriguing: the ability to educate ourselves, building not just on clear aptitude – the thing that comes naturally – but on what we can’t do so easily, but might, with the right teacher, find interesting.
The word “education” has two Latin roots: educare, which means to train, and educere, to lead or draw out. The second of these is the one that tends to be forgotten. Drawing out presupposes the ingrained or innate; it also suggests the hidden, submerged, and contrary. We’re not just drawing out an obvious talent. Thwarting ourselves, steering away from what comes easily, is often at the heart of a breakthrough. The tussle is itself the expression of something. In this sense, the gift of an ability is difficult to pin down. It’s often counter-intuitive, a kind of Turing-esque or Gödelian problem, in which unprovable truths are at the heart of defined processes, in which it is simultaneously true that I can write novels and that I dread so doing, or that my attempts to avoid writing are themselves a kind of preparatory activity. Keats famously called this state of resistance Negative Capability, “that is, when a man is capable [my italics] of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason”. Orwell is all irritable reaching by comparison, but his relationship with a talent that expresses itself uncertainly as the inverse of ability – debility, indeed – is one Keats would have recognised. “Writing a book”, he says, “is like having a long, horrible illness.”
2.
Ability is both innate and shaped, determined and acquired, but it is in all cases the property of a conscious entity. That education appears now to be mandating acquisition of something off a menu called “skill” over any real feeling for the experiential uncertainties of art, music, language, or indeed scientific method, is something that should concern us. The concomitant problem is not so much that machines will acquire conscious abilities, but that we are already some way along the road to forfeiting ours.
It is possible, just, to say no to systems like exams and SATS and phone upgrades and the tiers of administration in workplaces, but they are now firmly, normatively embedded in our lives, and by and large we do not stop to question them. We don’t feel that we can. Technological systems owned by private corporations (in California, mostly) are essentially dominance hierarchies, like religions, or powerful families, and like those other institutions they greatly elevate the notion of control as a force for good. We are leading better lives by compliance, they say. We are in control by allowing ourselves to be controlled. We need this upgrade. Everything is easier if we just say yes. In such a long-lived protocol of submissiveness – Julius Caesar, Elizabeth I and Stalin would all have recognised its utility – requests from an almost numinous electrical authority are to be understood as commands, and no command in practice may be refused. If you don’t say yes, there will be consequences. You will be locked out of your bank account, you will not be able to order your medication, you will not get onto your degree course or be able to graduate. Notice in all cases, that the content of the account, the nature of the need, and the substance of your work and argument, your ability, are utterly irrelevant. It is simply non-compliance that signifies. Notice, too, that whoever is at the head of the hierarchy is usually exempt from these consequences.
In his Gifford lecture on “The Religious Experience”, the sceptical cosmologist Carl Sagan has this to say about codes of submission: “Consider how we bow our heads in prayer, making a gesture that can be found in many other animals as they defer to the alpha male [. . .] We’re enjoined in the Bible not to look God in the face, or else we will die instantly. In the court of Louis XIV, as the king passed, he was preceded by courtiers crying ‘Avertez les yeux! Avert the eyes. Don’t look up.’” I confess I’ve thought much the same as Sagan in various seminars, when no one looks up, or when I’m walking down the street, and I see students, everyone, myself included, bowing to the phone light.
It takes about three years to get the fear of God out of my students. To help them to see that getting a few low marks doesn’t matter, that the fear of losing their place in the hierarchy of grades is an anxiety about power and influence deliberately fostered by one model of economics among many, that they are more than their earning capacity, and that the point of literature, as Auden said in his introduction to Poems of Freedom, is not to make us more efficient, but to make us more aware of ourselves.
The technological climate, in which capacity and influence are so important, has confused freedom to develop the person you already are with the acquisition of power and status. Students want jobs; I hope they get them. They have loans to repay. But they also want to be successful; they tell me in their essays that they know they’re smart, but that they’re struggling to see the point of a second-class degree; and I worry that this generation, more than any other, sees recognised achievement – success granted by an authority, often an absent and quasi-religious electronic one – as the goal of learning. That is what they are being told, after all. That is what Nicky Morgan, the former Secretary of State for Education, meant when she said that studying the arts holds pupils back. (Never mind that the creative industries are worth more than £80 billion a year to the UK economy. Never mind that the whole Renaissance humanist project – without which no rationalism, no economics, no Bacon, no Newton – was enshrined by the study of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and philosophy.) She meant that there is no development without competition and, it is implied, reward.
It is the materialist-individualist creed, of course, and like every iteration of that delusion in every age, it never asks, simply and logically, what individuals will do with their reward, and how they expect it to shelter them from misfortune or make them happy – what relationship it has, finally, to the conscious inner life.
This is the point. Human ability is conscious and therefore intentional: it grasps meaning and has a felt, as well as reasoned, relation to the world in which it operates. It values what is being done as it is done: look at a toddler clapping its hands when one brick stays on top of another. It is not merely attributed or assigned relative to an observer, like a message “sent” by Outlook; it is experienced, and experienced both by the persons with the ability and the people around them. It is the fact that we experience a great singer for ourselves that makes his or her ability so moving. If it were merely a matter of manifesting technique, there would be no need to involve a conscious audience. But in practice, and in all cases, ability, whether we choose to do anything with ours or not, is potentially communicative and reflective as well as personal: in someone else’s unique gifts – let us at last call it their sensibility – we experience the emotional echo, and the limit, of our own, and that sense of frustrating limit is important in defining who we are. “We are looking for freedom, not omnipotence,” Midgeley reminds us, and freedom – the ability to be ourselves – has mortal limits. “Real gifts, in their nature, are limited.”
A talk first given on September 25, 2020 at CODEX: Leonardo at 500, Royal Society, and first published in Broken Consort (CB Editions), 2020.