When did you become you?
It’s hard to tell really. Is there even a “you” for you to have become? Your bloodstream is full of oxygen you have just breathed, your muscles are currently using the protein you recently consumed to build or repair muscle. The “stuff” that makes you up today is not exactly the same as the “stuff” that made you up yesterday. We could define ourselves as objects which trace out a single, continuous path through space, but since babies do not yet come equipped with a tracker (a problem parents find particularly acute once their little darlings learn to walk), that does not get us very far.
To satisfy the continuity we appear to crave, we turn ourselves into stories. “I am the person who did x”, “I am the person who went to y” (most quiz show contestants introduce themselves with a story which translates as “I once went on holiday”) and so on. New events become extensions of the existing narrative, not fundamental alterations of the experiencing character who is, of course, the hero.
Stories, even doorstop Victorian novels, require editing. Significant details make literature (according to my English teacher), insignificant ones are a waste of space. So with our selves, we remember the big things and forget what we had for dinner five years ago. To edit is to choose, however, the mass of initial ideas needing to be bashed into a coherent narrative that says what we want it to say. As much as we crave continuity, we desire to think well of ourselves, so the less praiseworthy things we did, the things which didn’t really work get crumpled up and thrown in the wastebasket.
What remains is a story of a good person doing good things which turn out well. If disaster appears at all, it is only as a prelude to an inevitable triumph, there being little more impressive than conquering fearsome odds to pull the irons out of the fire. Narrative continuity domesticates personal change – the person who did x becomes the person who does y. They change, they develop, they grow. A story which had no change would not be a story, it would be a balance sheet.
We judge ourselves by our intentions, it is said, and others by their actions. Pithy, but not strictly true. Our “circle of trust” extends beyond whatever it is exactly that we are. Parents treat their offspring’s mishaps as accidents, not evidence of flawed character, spouses give their spouses the benefit of the doubt, friends cut friends some slack. Those we like can be victims of bad luck or flawed execution, those we do not, always know what they are doing.
A similar thing happens with stories. We only grant them to those we like.
Take Keir Starmer: he once called for the monarchy to be abolished. He now insists on “God Save the King” being played at party conference. He has changed, he has learned, he has moved on from his “youthful indiscretions”. Take Wes Streeting: in a tweet in 2010, he talked about setting up his own “vigilante org to push nasty people under trains.” He was, he later said, a student activist at the time (he was 26 or 27) and “he would never respond in the same way today.” He too has changed, and he too has learned.
Take Nigel Farage. He may or he may not have said some unpleasant things at school. He denies it, some old schoolmates back him up, others don’t. We will never, absent the invention of a time machine (for which we really could find better uses), know. He is 61 (a year younger than Brad Pitt it regularly delights the internet to rediscover). No matter, to some in the media, the comments of a schoolboy reflect on the fitness for office of a man not miles off pension age.
The child may be the father of the man, but we generally refuse to visit the sins of the father on their children. They are different people. Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting are different people to those who committed their infelicities. Farage, by contrast, is exactly the same at 61 as he was at 16, preserved in the aspic which formed such a large part of the dinner parties of the time. They are characters with arcs, with narratives. He is a point, unchanging. What was, is and what is, no doubt, will be.
At roughly the same time as Farage was going the full Donald Trump on the BBC, a friendlier journalist was foisting himself on the good people of Merthyr Tydfil for a day of vox-popping (ever popular since the invention of outside broadcast technology and the discovery that those not in the media have an endearing habit of not reading the script – never work with children, animals or old-age pensioners…).
It is always good, Patrick Christys tweeted, to meet “real, working people way outside the Westminster bubble.” “Real” is a word GBNews likes. A sitting Reform MP presents a programme entitled “Lee Anderson’s Real World”. For a channel which calls itself “Britain’s News Channel”, it appears strangely reluctant to grant physical existence to large swathes of the country.
“Real”, in this context, does not, of course, mean “real” in any real sense. It is a tribal marker. Real people are people who resemble or agree with Patrick Christys, the real world is the one with which Lee Anderson is familiar. There may be more things in Heaven and Earth, but to the tribunes of Britain’s people, they don’t really matter. They can be written off as phantasms, existence, proper existence, depending on politics and background.
If Nigel Farage re-appears in Chapter 40 of The Guardian or Channel 4’s novel just as he was in the Introduction, their journalists and the like get GBNews’ red pen treatment, written out of the story entirely.
There is an arrogance here. An assumption of the right to decide who gets treated as fully human, and who gets reduced to some lower state. The Guardian and Channel 4 get to decide whether Farage is fully rounded person who grows, changes or develops, or a mute space probe, continuing in eternity on a pre-determined course. Christys and Anderson arrogate the right to judge on reality itself. These men are the measure of all things.
But they are not alone. For we are not just, as it is said, the stars in our own movies. We are the producers, directors and script doctors too (when the story needs a bit of “tidying up”). We decide who gets to share a billing with us, who might be worthy of a spin-off series and who plays third tree on the left – stand where we tell you and don’t look the star in the eyes. The barista exists purely to make us coffee, the train driver to get us to work on time. Props in our story.
To them of course, we are just consumers. Our money paying the wages that support them as they complete their art installation, wait for the audition to come through or save to take their children on holiday. We are not fully fledged characters like them, just bit players, part of their story, not our own, unchanging props in the narrative of their lives, at best given a line to tee up a witty comeback. They get to decide because they are in charge.
But that’s not a very comforting thought, so it’s a thought we don’t think.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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Don’t be so naive, the people mentioned have not learned anything except that to advance they need to pretend to publicly subscribe to things they once rejected. Such convictions are as robust as the hasty fake apologies for things that backfire and damage the “nice” credentials of the offending individual.