The restaurant on the top floor of the National Portrait Gallery is as good a place as any for an epiphany, I should think. A slice of jerusalem artichoke speared by my fork, my eyes unfocused on the Whitehall rooftops, I'm thinking about coherence (because X, my lunch companion, is a distinguished philosopher of science whose central proposition, that the scientific method must be underpinned by a coherent system of induction, changed my life's direction entirely) and the tumble of thoughts arrive in their unordered, instant, torrent: Why do you care about coherence with regard to statistical inference but not political thinking? I wonder if X wants to see the Gay Icons exhibition? Do I really like jerusalem artichoke? - which last point brings me back to coherence; I have the epiphanetic insight and smile, as X asks:
- Do you want to see the Gay Icons exhibition?
I laugh and - Oh, OK, go on.
We descend to the ground floor and buy our tickets and join the hushed crowd in the Icon room. The idea is that a bunch of gay celebridees each chose six icons, gay or straight, and you look at a picture of the icon, and feel - well, what, I'm not sure. I get off to a bad start because the exhibition was put together by Sandi Toksvig (not a fan, to put it mildly) and the first set of subjects were chosen by Waheed Alli, the Labour peer, whose selection of icons (the Village People, Lily Savage, etc) I find banal and predictable and basically rubbish. I hiss at X - For goodness' sake, what's the point of this, why didn't they ask someone like a proper writer? and a woman standing next to me walks away in tutting disapproval, for, indeed, the next set of icons were selected by one of our greatest novelists, Alan Hollinghurst. - I love him, I say - Have you read The Swimming Pool Library?
Too late I remember that the subject matter of Hollinghurst's work, for X, is not the prelapsarian fiction which it is for me. He says - I find him too painful to read. I started one but I had to stop. And I'm back in Italy, more than ten years ago, opening the letter from X, reading and re-reading the contents, trying to take in the message, that X's partner, an inspirational teacher at my alma mater, had died, suddenly, without warning. Iris Murdoch (whose image ought to be on every wall in this exhibition) wrote: Demons, like viruses, live in every human organism, but in some happy lives never become active (aptly, the quotation is from The Philosopher's Pupil). There's a moment of silence as the absence of the man who died is felt. Life comes in from outside, as it always does - a bustle of other exhibition visitors - and we move on to the next room.
*
I want to write about my friend, but I haven't asked his permission, so must do so obliquely. What would you do if you were a solid Conservative voter, it's the early 1970s, right, and you've just started teaching at a distinguished university, and you realise that you're gay, and it's only fifteen years since the state hounded Alan Turing (he's in the exhibition, of course, correctly so) to his death, and one day you come across an anonymous leaflet on a canteen table, inviting you to attend a meeting to discuss homosexual equality? Would you go? Imagine if you did - a respectable Conservative voter of impeccable middle-class background - and you discover yourself a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front, a group that makes Peter Tatchell look like the Archbishop of Canterbury, a group of avowedly leftwing principle, dedicated to smashing the patriarchy, whatever that means, a group which Trotskyists target, as they always do, as a vehicle for their callow, malicious views.
What would you do, Graeme, if it were you making that choice? Your entire adult life owes practically everything to the efforts of the maligned and ultimately disbanded GLF - the sine qua non for the easy, comfortable existence you now enjoy - the first brave people who stood up and said I don't require your permission for my existence. I hope I'd do what X did, and become a vocal supporter. Even though many of the aims of the group would be in conflict with many other of my political beliefs. Even if that leads to a charge of incoherence. A human being is the sum of his beliefs, in a certain sense; but there's no need for those beliefs to be at all times coherent with one another. Such misalignment does not cause the human being to wink out of existence, or to be diminished as a moral engine. Socialism is coherent. Toryism should not be (it should be empirical, in a way I want to define in another article). The internal dialectic between propositions which arise from different, competing, potentially contradictory beliefs (eg I am a Conservative who believes that the family is the bedrock of a good society vs I am a gay man who by definition will not create what others mean by 'family') can, with luck and time and examination, lead to a synthesis that is more progressive than either of the original propositions (It is important to love and be loved, and, in the end, all our failures are failures of love - both points made by Iris Murdoch, of course).
If I were a Christian ... I feel that a Christian would be able to round this off with a good message about integrity and treating others as you wish to be treated. I hope they don't mind if I borrow and subscribe to the concept.
*
The epiphanetic thought, by the way, was expressed in those previous passages. Coherence between your statements and your sense of self is more important (in the production of a politics of some integrity) than coherence between your statements and a finite set of historical, external doctrines.
My icon, therefore, will be the Jerusalem Artichoke, with its sunflower beauty and its fibrous root, the root I'm never quite sure if I want to eat, or not.