I’ve been reading a fair bit of William James of late, and greatly enjoying it—partly due to the topics under discussion, but also in no small part due to the period style.

(Those among you who have noticed a turn for the somewhat Victorian in my diction may therefore wish to clap yourselves on the back; that’s a sharp eye you have there.)

As for the topics, it’s amusing—and, to some extent, a source of something close to relief—to observe how many of the debates of the present moment were very much present in the discourse of the very beginnings of the C20th. This passage from Pragmatism, for example, is incredibly contemporary in its content, if not in its form:

“… one may even fear that the being of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, almost divine creative functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bathtub, who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off.”

Admittedly we’re now rather more concerned with the filth that promises to gurgle back up into the bathtub from the drains than we are with the water of wealth… but nonetheless, what a fine and concise simile!

What comfort is there in observing the perreniality of certain of our civilisational complaints, however? After all, if such have not been banished by all the “progress” that has supposedly been made since James’s time, that does not bode well for a present moment characterised by myopia, nihilism and greed… and if we think of what was coming down the historical pipe over the subsequent few decades for James and his peers, as he wrote Pragmatism in 1907, comfort is likely not the very first feeling that scuttles down one’s spine.

Nonetheless: “same as it ever was”, in the words of David Byrne.

Some days it feels like everything happening now is a reflected echo of something that has happened before, often many times over—and the result is a sort of muddy mush of sound, like you might get in a dead spot at the far back end of a music venue, where all the reverberations pool together into a sullen, bassy mess. The older I get, the more convinced I am that we are very little changed from the way were when we were making paintings of wild animals on the walls of caves; all the trappings of civilisation—whatever that capacious and contentious word might be taken to mean—are little more than stage dressing.

However, it’s not so much that we have a “fixed nature as an organism”, per James; rather, it’s that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Admittedly, the capacity of our Jamesean bathtub to down us is perhaps vastly greater than it ever has been previously—and I can assure you I have not made some sort of pivot to the Pangloss position. I think it’s more a matter of coming to accept that whatever happens, almost all of it is entirely beyond both my control and my responsibility.

Perhaps most people are far younger than I was when they realise that they’re never going to change the world—if, indeed, they were ever so conceited as to have begun to assume they might. But, well: better late than never.

And while surrendering to the river of time surely means giving up your destiny as a dam, it frees one up instead to be a fish—to swim with the waters, rather than stand against them.

Is this a dereliction of duty? Perhaps so. Well, then: non serviam.