Thoughts on the Thoughts
PERSONAL COLUMN ANTHONY BURGESS
I have at last discovered the ideal book for a journey. Yes, you're perfectly right: not Mar- cus Aurelius, Machiavelli, a Shakespeare play or one of Dante's eschatological locales, not Wodehouse or D. H. Lawrence's Daily Mail columns, but the distilled wisdom of Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Chinese press please copy, but don't go much beyond this first paragraph). The little red book of quotations from his Thoughts, published by the Foreign Languages Press in Peking, is strongly bound, clearly printed, and the perfect size for the pocket. Flying to and from Berlin a week or so ago, I carried the Englished Thoughts in my right-hand pocket, and the original Chinese ones in my left. Even if your knowledge of Chinese ideograms is as poor as mine you soon learn to pick out certain recurring symbols, and, having compared origi- nal with translation a few times, you can browse through the Chinese with as much profit as through the English—perhaps more. The latest kind of one-upmanship is, anyway, to be seen reading the original Mao with close attention: this goes down especially well with the young. In a little teenage place in West Berlin, called the Moby Dick, I succeeded—after twenty minutes of being ignored—in getting asked what I would like to drink, simply by immersing myself in Chairman Mao. On the other side of the Mauer, the little red book didn't go down quite so well: the youngsters in the institutiona- lised restaurant called the Espresso (on, I think, Unter den Linden) were vaguely contemptuous of my absorption in pre-revisionist Marxist theory. There's a moral here somewhere, but I can't find it.
The point about the Thoughts is their wholesome near-nullity, their decent harmless- ness, their mild boy scout values, their total evasion of the revolutionary, their pleonastic wilsonicity. You can read without being en- gaged : you don't have to knot your brow, as you do with Marx or Lenin, over metaphysical rugosities. It is like a series of sips, as many or as few as you like, of well-filtered warmish water. Here is one pleasant neutral mouthful: `In approaching a problem a Marxist should see the whole as well as the parts. A frog in a well says, "The sky is no bigger than the mouth of the well." That is untrue, for the sky is not just the size of the mouth of the well. If it said, "A part of the sky is the size of the mouth of a well", that would be true, for it tallies with the facts.'
I think we can all, Marxists or not, learn a great deal from that pensee. And surely the following might well be neatly copied out by British politicians, however right-wing their convictions, and kept hanging above the toilet:
`It is hard for any political party or person to avoid mistakes, but we should make as few as possible. Once a mistake is made, we should correct it, and the more quickly and thoroughly the better.•
How different British history might have been had this Thought but been formulated earlier by one of our own soi-disant Thinkers! Formulated, yes, but also taken to heart!
What, I feel, the great British public might best learn from Chairman Mao ('The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history'—Chairman Mao, 'On Coalition Government,' 24 April 1945) is his technique of formulation. After all, on 12 April 1944 he said, 'We must encourage our comrades to think, to learn the method of analysis and to cultivate the habit of analysis.' When Khrushchev was in power, many intellec- tuals used to play the game of making up Khrushchevian proverbs, like 'Sharpest knives cut the keenest' and 'That bright object in the sky is not a rouble but the sun' and 'Hydrogen bombs were not built for the mincing of sausage-meat.' The time has come for the worthier exercise of this imitative faculty, the creation of Mao-esque thoughts which only Mr Lin Pao will be able to tell from the real thing. I submit some examples: 'On Committees. A committee should have several members, though not too many, and its meetings should be conducted with such brevity and dispatch as is consistent with the thorough consideration of the items on its agenda. The chairman's and secretary's functions are distinct and not strictly interchangeable, and the chair- man should not attempt to take over the secre- tary's function, nor vice versa. The taste of a lychee is different from that of an orange, though both fruits may be admitted to the same dish.
On Being a Revolutionary. If a man is for the Revolution, then he has set his face against reaction, imperialism, and the running dogs of both. It is in the nature of the revolutionary atti- tude to find no good in the formulae of the counter-revolutionaries or revisionists. If a man is against the Revolution he cannot, in the nature of marxist-leninist thinking, be a supporter of it.
On Kinds of Tigers. There are living tigers, real tigers, iron tigers, and these can devour people. On the other hand, there are paper tigers, dead tigers, bean-curd tigers, and these could not gnash at a fly. We Communists should build our revolutionary strategic thinking on a clear con- ception of which tiger is which. Only thus can the forces of American• imperialism and all its running dogs be seen for what they are and engaged accordingly.
On Method. It is not enough to set tasks, we must also solve the problem of the methods for carrying them out. If our task is to cross a river, we cannot cross it without a bridge or a boat. Unless the bridge or boat problem is solved, it is idle to speak of crossing the river.•Unless the problem of method is solved, talk about the task is useless.'
Before members of the Chinese Embassy in London, if they read this periodical, accuse me of malicious parody, I had better warn them that one of these pensees is genuinely by Chairman Mao.
It is, when you come to think of it, remarkable (Chinese papers cease to copy) how Chairman Mao has managed to get away with all this. Of course, he is addressing a community to which this technique of pleonasm is a comparatively new thing. The wisdom of the ancients, like Confucius, Tzu Ssu, Mo Ti, Shang Yang, Kung- sun Lung and Hsun Ch'ing, was gnomically expressed, avoiding platitude, making great use of imagery, throwing raw materials into the cooking-pot of the mind and letting the imagina- tion heat it. But Mao Tse-tung is of our day, and he deals in the melting ice-lollies of thought. That is why he is so gratifying to read, especi- ally on a journey. No need for mastication, no burps or heartburn; only the virtuous sensation that one is working (i.e. reading) while one is really being lazy. This is true brain-washing. After Chairman Mao's tepid bath, one's mind leaps refreshed into something difficult, like Thne magazine or Professor McLuhan. Even the orations of Premier Wilson seem to be less tautological than usual. Long live Chairman Mao, philosophy's municipal drinking-fountain. Let us conclude with one more thought.
On Revolutionary Action. Revolutionary action should always be preceded by a clear notion of what the precir nature of the action is to be. There is no point in acting without thinking first. In fact, thought must always be the fore- runner of action. If we do not see clearly what it is that we propose to do, then what we do will be confused and ineffective.' (Introductory note to The Township Went Cooperative in Two Years, 1955.)
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