Revolutionary

The texture of reality is always richer than our generalisations about events, even when those generalisations are genuinely useful in helping us towards some understanding of those events. A simple but useful generalisation about revolutions is that they begin in a kind of simple-minded, exciting optimism and then go wrong as human nature reveals its essential ugliness. Optimistic fervour turns into destructive fanaticism and revolutionary ideals are inevitably betrayed.

From a western perspective the course of the French Revolution serves as a template. All those poetic, philosophical types - your Blake, your Wordsworth, your Godwin - came to see, in varying degrees, the error of their ways, after their initial wild enthusiasm for events across the channel. Except it wasn't quite like that, as my reading of Caleb Williams impressed upon me. In truth, before I read it I was expecting something naïve in terms of dealing with the complexities of the use of power and the nature of tyranny, something with its heart in the right place but not necessarily its head. What I got was an extraordinarily insightful light into the psychology of power and resistance to power. These guys, I'm thinking also of Blake, knew the dark places of the soul intimately and had no illusions as to how those places manifested themselves in the fabric of history.

What is remarkable is that those with such insights (I'll exempt Wordsworth who, though a great poet was hardly a great thinker, hence his rather embarrassing later conservatism) never lost their sense of what might genuinely improve their society, despite the reality of some degree of disillusion.

I can't help thinking of this as the news comes out of Iran. It's difficult to believe that the complexities of that society are not obvious to all and sundry following the lead-up to the election and what has transpired since, but, despite that, I'm sure we'll continue to get the usual simple-minded platitudes and stereotypes from most sections of the media.