Maggie's Farm

The reason for these outcroppings of inconsistency is obvious. When there is a determining infrastructure it brings everything into line. If kinship underpins everything, as it does in tribal societies, or religion in Hinduism and Islam, or politics in Communism and Fascism, or the market in extreme forms of neo-liberal American thought, then everything can be read off from it. There is consistency because there is a common base, or lowest common denominator. The cost, of course, is that it leads to the loss of liberty, oppression, the imprisonment of the soul and the mind. The world of Brave New World or 1984 are at least internally consistent.

On the other hand, the essence of the modern world is that there is no defining infrastructure. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is not loosed upon the world, but certainly chaos and confusion is often there. Basically the four spheres of our life are constantly in productive tension – politics, religion, economy and society. So there is an everlasting struggle, with no sphere triumphant.

In such a situation adults have to live in a world of endless compromise, of endless situations where the best is the enemy of the good, in an Einsteinian world of relativity where all principles can be bent by some other force. It is a Dirac or Schrödinger quantum world where a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. It is a world perfectly caught by the Oxford mathematician Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) when he took a child, full of absolutes, into the magical world down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass.