Any other business

The bipolarity of science and the humanities has always been a false and inhibiting distinction. Now the enmity between what C.P. Snow called ‘the Two Cultures’ is coming to an end. It has lasted 200 years. Before that, knowledge was seen as a whole, a continuum. A seer like Newton probed into all subjects, albeit physics interested him most. His friend Christopher Wren was a mathematician-scientist before he concentrated on architecture. Their colleagues in the Royal Society discussed all topics. When Diderot was compiling his Encyclopédie, he drew no frontiers between arts and sciences.

Why do people insist on leading such terrible lives? Why do they choose misery when contentment is so easily within their grasp? Why is complete disaster so attractive, and modest success so repellent? This, surely, is the question that any unprejudiced observer of British life must ask himself. Personally, I think that soap operas have a lot to answer for. As is well known, each episode ends with a crisis, and since an episode lasts only 30 minutes, the impression is given that an interesting life, that is to say one worthy of portrayal on the little screen, must be nothing but a succession of sordid crises. I don’t propose this as the whole answer to the puzzle, of course.

To someone of my age, who has seen the world and now wants only repose and beauty, Lake Como is the perfect place. I do not know how many times I have visited it in the last two decades, but over 100 watercolours (not counting the ones I have given away or sold) testify to its hold on my affections. Twice a day I walk up from the castle to my painting-tower, whence the whole stupendous panorama of the lake can be seen, pointing to St Moritz mountain in the north, and to the south to Como itself, city of silk. It is quiet up there. You hear, of course, the tinkling of bells round the necks of the semi-tame mountain goats. But they have a cunning way of creeping about when near me, so that their bells do not sound, and silently purloining one of my brushes, spread about on the grass.

An intellectual is someone who thinks ideas matter more than people. If people get in the way of ideas they must be swept aside and, if necessary, put in concentration camps or killed. To intellectuals, individuals as such are not interesting and do not matter. Indeed individualism is a hindrance to the pursuit of ideals in an absolute sense. The individual, with his quirks and quiddities, his mixture of good and bad, intelligence and stupidity, longing for justice but anxiety to promote his own selfish interests, does not fit into a utopian community. Hence utopians, if they are in earnest, tend to become terrorists. A significant case was Robespierre, who invented both utopianism and terrorism in their modern forms.

Nr Pézenas, Departement de L’Hérault Random thoughts from mid-August abroad; not that they should be all that random. Now that BBC News 24, Sky and CNN can be viewed in the deepest Midi, where we are, and several British newspapers print ‘same day’ editions in Marseilles, which are on sale at 8.30 a.m. in our nearest village, most of us should be as in touch with events as we would be in London. But somehow, in deepest August, in Mediterranean lands, we cannot be. The sun and the wine make us think we are out of touch, that they know more in London. ‘Just ringing to find out what’s happening about [say] Ken Clarke reneging on the euro after all his years as a Brussels agent,’ we tell some London answering machine.

Lying is a terrible thing in any circumstances. When politicians and governments lie, it is a sin against society as a whole, against justice and civilisation. In Ray Monk’s admirable life of Wittgenstein, I learn that at the age of eight he asked himself the question: ‘Why should one tell the truth, if it’s to one’s advantage to tell a lie?’ This was the first time he posed a philosophical query. His answer was a kind of Kantian categorical imperative: ‘One must be truthful, and that is the end of the matter. The “Why?” is inappropriate and cannot be answered.’ He concluded, quite young, that one had an inviolable duty to be true to oneself, and part of this duty was to be truthful to others.

To put the lunatics in charge of the asylum makes admirable sense. They are the market for its services. They know where the straitjacket pinches. The Commissioner in Lunacy may think that he knows better, but the sum total of their knowledge must be more than he, cocooned in some distant office, could conceivably deploy. The Treasury pays lip service to these principles, but it always expects to know best, and better, certainly, than the two million customers for its tax credits who seem to have been sent the wrong amount of money. These credits were Gordon Brown’s invention, based on an idea that his factotum, Ed Balls, had brought back from America. The tax system, they believed, could be operated like a two-way vacuum cleaner, adapted so that it could blow as well as suck.

There are times when I think that a great bridge is the noblest work of man. I recently had the thrilling experience of travelling under the famous Forth Rail Bridge on a 52,000-ton ocean liner. I was up on the top deck before 7 a.m. to see this remarkable event, which had to be timed exactly to coincide with the right tide. At high tide the clearance of the bridge is 44 metres, and as the liner’s mainmast is 46 metres, its captain has to come in on mid- or low tide. Even so, the clearance is only a few feet, and the magic moment when the vast ship moves into the steel jaws of the structure is vertiginous; the distortions of perspective make you certain a horrible crunch is bound to occur.

In these pages recently Elisabeth Anderson wrote about, but declined to give the name of, a website that gives the price of any property sold in England and Wales during the past five years. Actually, it’s called www.nethouseprices.com, and a quick nose around the site reveals that flats up Liz’s way, Marylebone, are selling for anything between £200,000 and £500,000. But the website isn’t good just for being nosy about your friends and colleagues; it gives property buyers the wonderful advantage of being able to catch out estate agents and developers.