Svend Brinkmann - Standpoints: 10 Old Ideas in a New World

Svend Brinkmann

Translated by Tam McTurk

polity

First published in Danish as Ststeder: 10 gamle ideer til en ny verden Svend Brinkmann & Gyldendal, Copenhagen 2016. Published by agreement with Gyldendal Group Agency.

This English edition Polity Press, 2018

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2376-4

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To my mother and father

It is up to the reader to decide whether Standpoints works on its own, as a follow-up to Stand Firm (2017), or as both. At any rate, the book began to take shape while I was working on a radio series in Denmark. Stand Firm was wilfully humorous and adopted a sceptical approach to a number of contemporary social trends, in particular the constant demands for personal development and flexibility. But it left unanswered questions. If we are to stand firm and not bend with the wind, on what is it worth standing firm? And, if doing our duty instead of always just doing what is best for us and our self-development has some form of intrinsic value, then of what does duty consist? Standpoints is an attempt to answer these questions in a more constructive and edifying manner than was possible in Stand Firm, while remaining true to my critique of contemporary culture.

I should like to thank my editor Anne Weinkouff, whose help has been invaluable throughout the writing process. Following up on the widespread and surprising popularity of Stand Firm both in Denmark and abroad was a slightly daunting task, and Anne has been wonderfully supportive throughout. I should also like to thank the Danish Broadcasting Corporation and the Rosenkjr Committee, in particular the Chair, Anders Kinch-Jensen, for awarding me the prestigious science communication prize in 2015. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with various people at the Corporation. Huge thanks are also due to Ester Holte Kofod, Mikka Nielsen, Rasmus Birk, Anders Petersen and Thomas Aastrup Rmer for reading the manuscript and providing extremely helpful feedback. I should also like to thank Louise Knight of Polity Press and Tam McTurk, the translator, for all of their hard and excellent work on the English-language version. However, as always, my biggest thanks go to my wife, Signe Winther Brinkmann, sine qua non.

The book is dedicated to my parents, from whom I derive most of the standpoints on which I, personally, choose to stand firm.

Randers, Denmark
May 2017

In 2014, at a press conference for his film Magic in the Moonlight, Woody Allen spoke in his customary pithy manner about the meaning of life:

I firmly believe and I dont say this as a criticism that life is meaningless. Im not saying that one should opt to kill oneself. But the truth of the matter is, when you think of it, every 100 years, theres a big flush, and everybody in the world is gone. And theres a new group of people. And that gets flushed, and theres a new group of people. And this goes on and on interminably and I dont want to upset you toward no particular end, no rhyme or reason. And the universe, as you know from the best of physicists, is coming apart, and eventually there will be nothing, absolutely nothing. All the great works of Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Da Vinci, all that will be gone. Now, not for a long time, but shorter than you think, really, because the Sun is going to burn out much earlier than the universe vanishes.

As a result, Allen went on, he has no interest in making political films, because while they do have current critical importance, in the large scheme of things, only the big questions matter, and the answers to those big questions are very, very depressing. What I would recommend this is the solution that Ive come up with is distraction.

The interview is full of the mixture of gravitas and humour for which Allen is so well known, but there is little doubt that he means what he says. And it is, of course, with a glint in his eye that the filmmaker extraordinaire recommends distractions say, going to the cinema, for example as a solution to lifes dismal lack of meaning. The question is, however, whether Allen is right. Is life really meaningless? To justify his conviction that life has no meaning, he draws on physics arguably the most objective of scientific perspectives and one far removed from everyday human concerns. He talks of the Sun as a star that will burn out, and about the creation and ultimate destruction of the whole universe. If we remove ourselves completely from the hurly-burly of day-to-day life and adopt a cosmological view, it should come as no surprise that it is impossible to detect any meaning in life. Everything just becomes physical material in motion, which seems a tad depressing. The famous psychologist William James (18421910), who was widely credited with introducing psychology to the United States (and, incidentally, brother to the author Henry James), thought that the depression he suffered in his youth had been triggered by studying science, which had taught him that the universe lacks meaning and humankind lacks free will. James pragmatic solution was to choose to believe in free will and thus that individuals are capable of infusing their own lives with meaning. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will, he wrote in his diary on 30 April 1870. James was convinced that this is what brought him out of his depression.

Not everyone possesses that level of mental fortitude. Most of us would shudder a little at Allens words. Most of us are probably incapable of bestowing meaning and freedom on ourselves and our lives simply by willing it to be so. Instead, we might question whether it is actually reasonable to seek meaning in a sphere so far removed from day-to-day life, as Allen appears to do. What happens if we step into life to explore it from the inside, instead of stepping out of it to view it from an astronomical distance? The answer is that meaning becomes less problematic than Allen claims. For example, Allens own words have meaning whether or not we agree with them and hopefully as a reader you will find this book quite meaningful. Perhaps meaning is a phenomenon only understood from the inside, and not from the outside, e.g. from the perspective of the physicist. After all, it goes without saying that the meaning of a poem is not grasped by weighing a poetry book or analysing the chemical composition of the ink on its pages.