The Informed Heart

It is easy to look at Weimar, with its seductive decadence and alluring freedoms, and feed our guilty anxiety that these very freedoms must inevitably lead to reaction-one accompanied by a search for a mythical moral purity.

But the real lesson of Weimar and Cabaret..may be that the ultimately depraving seductions are those of the right. Money, power and those simple solutions that lend themselves so well to propaganda...To defend a liberal democracy and insist on civil society against the easy moral hatreds of ideologues may be difficult. But it is essential. Once the press is curbed, once satire and laughter are banned and censorship has set in, it's too late.

---Lisa Appignanesi.

A fascinating book which I realise, to my horror, I never actually read to the end. Even worse: discovered that I'd left huge chunks out of Bettelheim's The Informed Heart; poor reading habits means you tried to eke out the ideas from the text whilst ignoring the actual lives, the stories, the anecdotes that were at its heart. But how else can one read anything of those lives and of those times? If you ever had the time you'd pick up Willet's book. But there is no time.

Peter Fuller: Ruskin and Morris: conservative radical and radical conservative. That appeals to you, of course. And for all the dark seduction of uninhibited freedom there's the niggling concern that life is also about finding or imposing a structure on anarchy, chaos ('law-lines': Dudley Young). Can there be freedom without constraints, resistances, the pull to the north of the future, or the weight of the past? Can there be creativity without Tradition, the deeply familiar, the repeated themes and images (the potter, aware that he's participating in a practice that is as old as humanity itself); preferences ordered or arranged by reason or values. And is there not a danger that for an unmoored person, someone who lacks roots, his mind can veer off into all sorts of fantastical illusions and directions? The unbounded imagination of the addict, the gambler, becomes 'hooked', 'fixated' in another way, becomes mechanical, like pornography...

In late capitalism, liquid modernity, is there the distinct possibility that all this freedom is morphing into the banal? Does the limitless extension of choice (or the promise of it) end up in so many trivial choices, and therefore in the destruction of our experience of responsible choice itself?

Yes, I guess so. But there's no going back-or all steps back are false ones. What is left, then? Disenchantment, for sure, and what Augustine would call a "lonely freedom". But if one is to err, then better that it should be on the side of freedom. And despite all the dark forebodings from the prophets of gloom, people hold on to their core values, find them expressed in ever-new ways. And let us not forget that most of the horrors of the last century have come from those not on the side of freedom but, rather, from those who have been able to organize violence: the state, institutional religion...