There is a notable tendency amongst intellectuals in the United States to simultaneously bound and ground their discussion of any field with reference, vague or otherwise, towards transcendence, whether intellectual, moral, or aesthetic. This feature on average distinguishes American writers from their British counterparts, who are much less likely than American authors to invoke such absolutes when pulling their punches and blunting their knives, or at least British writers do this with much less conviction. The English in particular only indicate the absolute in a casual manner if at all, and over their shoulders, resentfully as it were, rather than hailing it as an authoritative justification for the otherwise arbitrary limit to their analysis.

This phenomenon is evident in many areas, and I have been reminded of it recently by resuming my reading of evolutionary biology, where even in Britain and in rather hard-headed writers such as Dawkins, the will to transcendence is by no means absent. But hardly anywhere is it so full-throated as in American authors, for example those asserting the significance of emergence, discontinuity and holism. Gould is of course the obvious type specimen.

The variation is, in my judgment, real without doubt; but the fact is perhaps surprising and its origins certainly obscure. The US, you might think, is at least closely related to the British tradition. Why are they now so different, in such a crucial locus? No one should dismiss the creative pressures of recent, local social dynamics in the US, but the character of nineteenth century American writing, which is already vastly more strident in its assertion of the Absolute, suggests that the divergence is of long-standing. We have no Emerson, thankfully, or at least not one we talk about.

Two candidate explanations suggest themselves: those leaving England in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not a random sample from the population. Their religious and their political views were unusually strong, and unusually hostile to the world, to flesh and the devil. This must have had some relevance, and has perhaps left a lasting mark. But it seems to me inadequate in its strength, and inappropriate in the strong individualism of its character. Something else must have been added to result in the present state of American transcendentalism, which has more collectivism than is typical, I think, of British protestantism. Instead, we should look, perhaps, to those parts of European thinking where the supervenient is combined with a belief in its ubiquity and omnipresence, namely in the philosophy of spirit, as manifested in idealism, particularly German idealism, and in Roman Catholicism, both of which were established in the US during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by immigration from central Europe, from Scandinavia, from the Mediterranean, from Ireland and from Scotland, amongst other relevant locations.

As a result, American literature, construed in the broad sense which includes history, fiction, belles lettres, journalism, verse and philosophy, is much more European than the English expect it to be on the basis of the bare historical outline and the matter of an apparently shared linguistic instrument. Churchill's shallow witticism - "two nations divided by a common language" - does not recognize that the language in common, and by the way not all of it is, is used, frequently enough and on average, to articulate views that are rooted in almost antithetical traditions. This may account for the striking and I think incontestable fact that American writers never seem entirely comfortable or satisfied with their own articulations, frequently reaching for neologisms or, and this is for me a giveaway, the quote, particularly the quoted epigraph, which pared of context has a less focused, sublunary field of reference. – It gestures beyond itself, as A.C. Bradley once acutely remarked of successful poetry. Perhaps as important is the possibility that, protected by a famous name, Dostoevsky as it might be, the epigraph carries its sententious burden without exposing the quoter to direct criticism. English is not as a literary and linguistic tradition of discourse well adjusted to the expression of transcendental views. In England, if we start to talk of the "The All", in a rich Emersonian dialect, we feel that the medium itself, to say nothing of the society around us, is laughing and laughing very unkindly at our naivety. The society does not laugh in the United States, it is very serious about these things, but the language resists and the resonance of its semantic hinterland returns a hollow and mocking echo. No wonder that American writers seem determined to reinvent the whole thing. However, it might be quicker just to learn French, or German.

Listening to a recording of Helen Vendler speaking about psychoanalysis and Robert Lowell's scepticism on that subject after learning that his own illness was not susceptible to the "talking cure" but could be treated with lithium carbonate, the great weakness of Freud became clearly apparent to me. He is an idolator of language.

It is one thing, and still an arrogant thing, to believe that the verbal utterance of a patient is a good symptom, but it is quite astonishing to think that more words may effect a cure. Assuming that he actually believed his own claims, was Freud justified in thinking this. Perhaps, since it seemed to work; and after we have found sign systems of great power in other parts of our lives, so there is good reason to suppose that they may help us in relation to mental health. But Lacan's once famous utterance – "The unconscious is structured like a language" – is a stage further, and crosses the border of stupidity, unless we take take the remark as being a slight, and modest metaphorical comparison, in which case it becomes negligible. Otherwise, it must presume, as Freud clearly does, that psychological disorders are, or can be treated as, faults in the auto-interpretation of a system of linguistic signs. These are no mere spelling and grammatical errors, they are major errors in reading and self-undertanding. But this to turn our thinking about minds into literary criticism, which is suspiciously convenient for analyst, and in any case absurd since it must presume that minds have not other aspects apart from their languages, a claim that we know is false.

Experience shows me that I write
More like the Bible when I'm tight,
And Providence has seen that wine
Rhymes, chimes and puns well with Divine.

That little poem that you read
Had much more in it than I said,
For it was written when in booze,
And not intended to amuse.

I thought that when I talked of flies
(Did it really make you grin?)
You'd see I mean to moralize
On Age and Death, on Souls and Sin.

Those insects were memento mori,
The deeper meaning of my story.
I'm shocked and sad to find that you
Of all the critics missed a clue.

I offered you an allegory,
Of Dirt and Soap, of Wheat and Chaff;
It's clear we never shall agree
While Saintly fables make you laugh.

Cruelly far, the miles between
  Stretch out and lengthen into night,
And all the happiness we've seen
Can't telescope the luscious green
  Or make the separation slight.

Across the chill and blank of space
  I feel your heart's hot, glowing beat,
While mine in sympathetic race
Drums out this triumph over place
  And all our hopes of time's defeat.

Excellence in an artist is as much to do with inhibitions and incapacities as it is with abilities.

The difference between maxims such as those of Wilde and those Nietzsche is this: one offers his remarks to a divided audience, the mockers and the mocked; those present, those absent; those up with us, thos far behind. Because of this divisive policy such remarks fail to be truly public. Nietzsche, in contrast, speaks to one listener, or, we could say, to none. The imagined reader is so little characterised that anyone may imagine themselves addressed. This is a triumph of manners beyond anything that Wilde imagined, and yet it is a weakness, and a temptation to misuse.

Everyone should be made to read a little philosophy at school and university. – It would be a shame to go through life in awe of such a thing.

We often say that socialist societies are epistemologically deficient, and thus their economies stagnate because they cannot create growth. This is not a false point, but it obscures the equally plausible observation that socialist societies and their governments cannot manage growth, or co-exist with growth, and thus react by attempting to constrain it.

They cannot manage growth because it disturbs the status arrangements that are the principal desideratum of socialist policy. But growth is not uncommon in socialist societies, in spite of poor policies, largely because people neither do what they are told, nor what they say they want. While people support and even applaud stable status arrangements, they behave otherwise, engaging in contractual relationships to increase their own wellbeing. When this occurs, the socialist administration reacts to the threat of disruptions to the status order by actively discouraging further growth, by dissipating the energy of growth in malivestment. It must do this because other than maintenance of the status order it has no other functions.

Put another way, we think of socialist failings too frequently in terms of the inability to deliver wealth, but there is also a definite and necessary hostility.

Politics is inherently unstable in the short term, and as seen from within and nearby, because it is the outcome of a compromise between those interests of an individual which are in conflict with the interests of others, a fairly well understood and very large set, and those interests which coincide or overlap in some part with the interests of others, a set of uncertain size and membership. Individuals necessarily approach both classes of interests in a probabilistic fashion, since they can do no better, but all their behaviour is encompassed by this description, and it is unobservant to claim otherwise. Politics is the attempt to optimise results in both categories.

The instability arises because:

1. Interest, both purely individual, and that overlapping with the interests of others, is uncertain and dynamic. The boundaries between common and selfish interest shift continually in fact, depending on circumstances, and also in our estimation as information alters in quantity or weight. Thus, the compromise fixed in our political systems and in our laws is always obsolete, and only approximate at best. Discontent is inevitable.

2. In order to serve the common interest it is necessary to devolve and depute some power to a subset of the population, the police, the government in general, loosely the civil and military services of the state, or The Crown. But these people are self-interested people like any other, and will inevitably and even if only fractionally and subtly abuse their power, overstating the degree of the sacrifice that the general population must make to secure the common interest. Equally, the rest of the population will, individuall, underestimate the sacrifice and seek to benefit without contribution.

This tension is inevitable, but note that the civil and military services are co-ordinated and well-armed, by virtue of the legitimate tasks that they must perform, and have indeed a common-interest in exploiting the mass of individuals, whose those individuals themselves are poorly armed or co-ordinated, except at time of rebellion, and have only a weak common interest, partly because of the cost of co-ordination, which the civil and military powers have as a free gift of their work, and partly individuals in rebellion are very unevenly exposed to hazard in revealing and prosecuting resistance.

From these points flows the ebb and flow of political history, with individuals ever dissatisfied with the extent and character of their government, whether in the person of kings, civil servants, soldiers, politicians, and clergy. It really is that simple.

There has been and still is a strong tendency to see monotheism as a superior, refined, certainly a developed form of religion. This is unlikely to be true. The projection of a single individual as a causal force seems almost certainly the most unreflective explanation for the world, the least sensitive to the great variety of causal forces in the observed universe, where a plurality of material substances have a multiplicity of properties and even properties emergent on their further combination.

The projection of multiple persons into the deosphere, perhaps even an infinitude of such persons, as found in pantheism, is doubtless foolish – there is no need at all to personalize an of these facts – but at lest it is responsive to the evident plurality of the facts. Monotheism, bu contrast, is absurdly selfish, denying all evidence except the single fact of solipsistic consciousness, and seeing it reflected it in the universe is a grotesque act of self-worship, capped by the further delight that other adherents in a monotheistic religion seem to worship this reflection as devoutly as you do yourself. Everybody is deluded, but delightfully so. No wonder then that the co-religionists of monotheistic cults are bound so tightly together; their kind of faith gratifies the self as no other religion does.