The Imaginary Bus: Khalo Who Foresaw His Own Death in a Dream — Volume One
For a few moments, silence settled between us.
The woman in red laid the book on her knees and asked:
— You said that before thinking about your destination, you think about the place you were driven from. Is that part of your materialist view too?
— Everything is connected to everything else, I said. — That is the first thing I understand about dialectics. You cannot separate anything from its relationship with the world. Exile is more than a body moving away from a patch of earth. It is the outcome of politics, power, repression, resistance, fear and human choices.
She thought for a moment.
— But I still don’t know exactly what dialectical materialism is.
— Don’t be frightened by the name. Some words put on a formal suit so nobody dares ask them a question. Take the suit off and the idea isn’t so complicated.
— Then put it simply.
— The first part says that the material world exists independently of our thoughts and wishes. A mountain was there before we called it a mountain. Rain doesn’t wait for us to believe or disbelieve before it falls. Our bodies are part of nature too, and consciousness arises from the activity of those bodies, our brains and our social lives.
— So if you can’t see something, you say it doesn’t exist?
— No. There are plenty of things we can’t see directly, but we can see their effects and investigate them. I can’t see air, but I wouldn’t survive a few minutes without it. The question isn’t whether the eye can see something. It’s whether we have evidence and reasons for our claims.
— Then how do you explain God?
— I’m not trying to take the God inside you away from you. I simply begin my explanation of the world with what we can investigate, test and question. If I don’t know the answer, I say I don’t know. For me, ignorance is no disgrace. Inventing a certain answer to conceal it is more dangerous.
— But how did this world come into being?
— I haven’t got a ready answer for every detail. Human beings are still learning about the world, and what we know changes. The difference between my approach and a metaphysical answer is that I don’t immediately fill every gap in our knowledge with an invisible being. I leave the gap open, so the question can stay alive.
She pointed at the rain on the window.
— Can’t you see all this order? Rain, earth, plants, people. How can you say there is no design?
— Nature isn’t only the order we like to see. There is birth, but there is death too; flowers, but storms too; healthy bodies, but illness too. What we call order arises from nature’s own relationships and laws. We tend to choose the lovely bits and draw a general conclusion from them. Nature, though, is neither kind nor cruel. We humans are the ones who know kindness and cruelty.
Coco lifted his head and watched the rain for a moment.
— For Coco, I said, — this rain is probably neither a sign of order in the universe nor a sign of disorder. It just means his next walk will be wet.
The woman smiled.
— And what becomes of feeling, love and beauty? Surely you can’t reduce them all to matter?
— Something being material doesn’t make it worthless. Our brains are material, yet they can fall in love, make music, preserve memories and ache for someone we’ve lost. An instrument is made of wood and strings, but its music isn’t just an inventory of wood and strings. Music comes from their relationship and movement. Consciousness, too, arises from matter, but has qualities of its own.
— And the soul?
— What you call the soul, I call consciousness, memory, feeling and personality. They are real, but I can’t imagine them apart from the body, the brain, language and a person’s relationships with others. A child who doesn’t grow up among people will even develop a different language for thought. The world inside us isn’t separate from the world outside.
— Now tell me about the dialectical part.
— Dialectics means not seeing the world as fixed, isolated and finished. Everything is becoming something. A bus isn’t merely a collection of metal and glass. It acquires its meaning in relation to its driver, its passengers, the road and its destination. Leave it in a car park for thirty years and it will slowly rust, changing from a bus into a heap of metal. Even apparent stillness contains change.
— So nothing is stable?
— Some things remain stable for a while, but stability doesn’t last for ever. A mountain looks fixed to us, yet wind and rain reshape it. A society may look the same for decades, while discontent, hope, fear and new forces gather beneath the surface.
— And what do you mean by contradiction?
— Every situation contains different forces and tendencies. In society, some people want things to stay as they are because they benefit from them. Others want change because they live under the pressure of those same arrangements. The struggle between them moves society.
— Does that make every disagreement a contradiction?
— No. If I want tea and you want coffee, that isn’t necessarily a social contradiction. Contradictions matter when the interests, positions and chances of living of different groups come into conflict. Someone who owns ten buses and someone who drives for twelve hours a day may both be perfectly decent people. But their relationship isn’t governed by personal character alone. One makes decisions about profit; the other works for a wage.
The donkey brayed from the back seat.
— I suspect he wants to know who owns the hay, I said.
The woman in red laughed.
— So you think all rich people are bad and all poor people are good?
— No. This isn’t about sorting people into good and bad. A poor person can be cruel, and a rich one can be kind. It’s about the arrangements that give one person the power to make decisions and force another to sell their labour in order to live. Personal morality matters, but it can’t take the place of understanding the structure.
— How does change happen?
— Sometimes small changes build up until they produce something new. Heat water: at first it is still water. Raise the temperature and it may not look very different. Then it reaches a point where it boils and becomes steam. In society, pressures, protests and experiences can accumulate for years before a new situation emerges.
— So you see revolution as natural?
— I see it as the result of unresolved contradictions, not as something a handful of people invent from outside. But a great change doesn’t necessarily lead to freedom. If people aren’t informed, organised and watchful of the new holders of power, names can change while the old relationships return in fresh clothes.
— So history doesn’t always move forwards?
— No. History isn’t a straight line. People move forwards, get pushed back, and sometimes begin again with new experience after a defeat. No victory lasts for ever, and no defeat is necessarily the end.
— If social conditions shape a person’s consciousness, where does that leave choice? Are we puppets of circumstance?
— We are born into circumstances we didn’t choose: our family, social class, language, country and time. But we make choices within them. Freedom doesn’t mean having no limits. It means recognising those limits and acting to change them.
— So circumstances shape people, and people shape circumstances?
— Exactly. We are both products of the world and part of the force that changes it. Workers build a factory through their labour, but the factory and the way work is organised shape their habits, their time and even their bodies. People make society, and society makes people in turn.
— What part do ideas play? If everything is material, why should thought matter?
— Ideas aren’t separate from material life, but once they exist, they can affect it. A drawing of a bridge isn’t a bridge, yet perhaps the bridge would never be built without it. An idea can bring people together or set them against one another. We have to ask which circumstances produced it and whose interests it serves.
The woman in red said:
— Then do you see religion only as a tool of power?
— No. For some people it has been a refuge, a source of hope and a shared language; for others, a means of protesting against injustice. But those in power have also used it, time and again, to justify obedience and the endurance of suffering. You can’t judge an idea by its claims alone. You have to see what it does in real life.
— If there is no God, who decides what is right and wrong?
— Through living together, people have learnt that hunger, torture, humiliation and killing destroy lives, while cooperation, freedom, justice and love make more life possible. To me, morality isn’t a command from outside the world. It grows out of our need to live together and our experience of one another’s pain and joy.
— But without fear of punishment, what stops people committing crimes?
— Someone who refrains from a crime only because they fear punishment hasn’t become moral. They’ve become frightened. Morality begins when you can understand another person’s pain and cannot separate your own freedom from theirs.
The woman in red was quiet for a while.
Then she asked:
— How do you know this view is right?
— A theory doesn’t become true just because someone puts it beautifully. You have to test it against reality. If reality contradicts what I think, it isn’t reality’s job to change. I have to correct my thinking. Truth isn’t decided by a vote, by faith or by somebody’s rank.
The woman in red closed the book.
— So even your own thinking isn’t the final truth?
— If an idea exempts itself from questions and criticism, it stops being a way of understanding things and becomes a creed. A dialectical view must be able to criticise itself too. The world changes, and our knowledge is never complete.
The rain had eased, but fog still covered the street.
The woman asked:
— Now I have a simpler question.
— Go on.
— If the world has no predetermined plan for you, if no justice in heaven is guaranteed, and if this is the only life we have, how do you find peace when times are hard?
I eased my foot off the accelerator.
— That isn’t a philosopher asking what the world is like. That’s a human being asking how to live in it.
— Are the two separate?
I looked out at the foggy street.
— They aren’t separate. But the answer will need another stop.
To be continued.
Naser Kamali
Rainy London, around three o’clock, in my cosy little room, undated.
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