The Dark Mountain Blog
A force that gives us meaning
posted by Paul Kingsnorth
31st March, 2010
In an interesting piece over at the US website Truthdig, former war correspondent Chris Hedges wonders whether America is ‘yearning for fascism’. It’s worth a read. Hedges wrote a book a few years back which I can recommend, entitled War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. As the title suggests, Hedges built on his decades of experience in war zones to ask questions about humanity’s proclivity for conflict, and provide answers which looked beyond the usual pieties about war being A Bad Thing to the reasons (‘war is the most potent narcotic invented by humankind’) why it starts.
In this latest piece, Hedges does the same job of asking uncomfortable questions. Though he’s writing for a website which, in the main, is a straight-down-the-line mouthpiece of the American liberal left, Hedges challenges the accepted views and values of his audience more than he challenges the Tea Partyers and angry Sarah Palin fans. Instead of simply condemning them, or laughing at them, he wants instead to listen to them.
This interests me a great deal, because I have seen, and written about, a similar kind of liberal blindness here in the UK, particularly in regards to the rise of the BNP over the last year. We are experiencing, in the UK as well as in the US (though in different forms – ours is both more ineffective and strangely more genteel) a rise in disaffection and alienation, which is birthing a new kind of ‘far right’ politics. I put ‘far right’ in quotation marks, because this kind of notation is increasingly misleading. The BNP, for example, is like many of its European sister parties in that it combines the kind of statist economic policies associated with the old manifestation of the Labour party with a racist authoritarianism. This recent interview with Nick Griffin is quite revealing on this score (as well as being amusing, to his detriment).
Situations like this are always specific, but at the root all of this, it seems to me, is the historical big picture of the decline of the West. Our economies are tanking and our populations are ageing. Immigration is changing the face of nations, political parties are increasingly identikit and ineffectual, and post-banking crisis it is apparent to more people than ever that in any case the people who run politics are not the same people who run the economy. Flexible labour markets and demographic changes shear people away from places, hyper-capitalism sets the terms of engagement by which we live, and states become increasingly authoritarian in order to deal with the challenges posed by atomised populations.
Add all this up and you get a deep insecurity which manifests itself as a fury aimed at anyone seen to be part of an ‘elite’ which is screwing people: politicians, most obviously, and bankers, but also journalists, civil servants, businesspeople – anyone who seems to be lording it over ‘us.’ This anti-elitism manifests itself in support for the BNP here, the Tea Party in the US and far right parties across Europe – they are surfing a wave of unfocused, popular anger which is only going to grow.
What confuses the liberals and the left is that this anger is also directed at them. For a socialist, anti-elitism is supposed to lead to disaffection with capitalism and rising support for the radical left, even for revolution. For a liberal, it’s supposed to lead for a support for leftish political parties which will enact ‘reforms’ to the constitution and the economy to make things fairer for everyone. What’s happening instead is that the comfy liberal establishment is being targeted by the anti-elitists just as much as the bankers and the fat cats. This is in part due to the fact that the left has no popular base anymore, which in turn is due to the fact that it has no clear programme after the failure of both statist Marxism and capitalist democracy.
But it’s also because the liberal left, in particular, is unwilling or unable to listen to those who express grievances it doesn’t agree with. ‘Our educated elite,’ writes Hedges, ‘wallowing in self-righteousness, wasted its time in the boutique activism of political correctness as tens of millions of workers lost their jobs.’ This is certainly the impression one gets in Europe today. Complain about homophobia or racism and you’ll get onto the front page of the Guardian. Complain about street crime, immigration, unemployment or the collapse of ‘family values’ and you’ll be written off as dinosaurs or worse. But there are a lot of dinosaurs out there now, and the demagogues know how to speak their language in a way that metrovincial progressives don’t. Witnessing the bemusement of the liberal establishment here at the rise of the BNP was grimly amusing. They really had no idea what was going on, and still don’t. It seems the same is happening in America. If you don’t listen, you won’t understand – and those who do listen will end up winning.
Where Hedges falls down, for me, is in his apparent attachment to the idea that ‘radicals’ (the Green Party, say) have any useful answers to this paralysis, or that ‘the system’ can respond to what he thinks ‘needs’ to be done (how, for example, is a near-bankrupt US expected to ‘immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt’?) What is telling about these times is that no-one seems to have a programme – and that includes the far right and the populists, who know what they hate but not what to do about it (except in cartoon terms – see that Griffin interview again). This is why it’s important to be cautious about comparisons with what happened in the 1930s, when the failure of liberal democracies to deal with a crisis of capitalism led to the first wave of fascism. Fascism like that could never happen again, for the simple reason that it happened then: it’s a stark warning. Don’t expect to see jackboots and flags. On the other hand, don’t expect this to go away either.
There is plenty of time, after all, for authoritarian anti-elitists to develop a programme, and plenty of reason for them to do so. Back in the 1930s, quotes Hedges, there was ‘a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.’ Perhaps we are again seeing a worrying yearning for something which is not yet clear but could become so, to the detriment of all of us. Clinging to daddy is a natural reaction to a fear of the dark; it may also be the reaction of many to the converging crises we face.
Those crises will only become clearer. To the decline of the West, a historical arc from which there is no escape, we need to add the decline of the fossil fuels which support our lifestyles, converging ecological disasters, a rising population, growing economic inequality and a failure of our old cultural narratives. We could also throw in a wild card: collapse in the East too. The fashionable narrative at present is that China and India are ‘rising’ as the West falls. But they are rising by following the same fossil-fuelled development path as we did, and that goes nowhere, fast.
We are already seeing a steady ramping-up of authoritarian rhetoric and a steady tightening of authoritarian politics in many ‘developed’ countries. In the UK, with our recent slew of anti-terrorist legislation, police brutality, ID cards and security cameras, this is already advanced, and I expect it to continue (and if Gordon Brown remains prime minister even after losing our forthcoming general election, we could see an explosion of popular fury: it would top even MPs’ expenses as a focus for hatred of ‘them’.) I have long believed that the authoritarianism of the right is likely to be increasingly popular as our descent becomes increasingly obvious.
Six years ago, at the height of the economic boom, I remember attending a session at the European Social Forum on ‘life after capitalism.’ It was full of hopeful young Turks planning the revolution and the utopia which would follow. Up on the stage, though, a sober note was sounded by the brilliant economist Susan George who, at 70 years old, had seen more of the world than most of us. I can quote what she said because I wrote it down; it seemed so obviously worth listening to even in those halcyon days:
There is a serious possibility that this unstable global economy could actually collapse. We could then be faced with a Weimar-type situation. We could experience war, dictatorship, instability and military takeover. Remember that life after capitalism could be worse than what we have now.
I don’t think many people took this on board at the time, but today it seems prescient. We are in a period of global narrative failure: nobody’s stories have convincing plots, and none of them knows how they end. Marxism, conservatism, liberalism, neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, environmentalism – none of them has legs. New stories will come, because new stories are needed. In the short term, though, I’m not sure we’re going to like what they have to tell us.
Posted by Paul Kingsnorth on 31 March, 10
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Paul,
It’s amazing how quickly this is shaping up. Then again, not surprising, the Wiemar parallel is so compelling.
Your analysis that what is coming is a “yearning for…” – in this case a new form of fascism – is right on target. Also that we are all looking for new stories, even those of us who don’t expect any new “program” to “work.”
I find this a time when even the concept of answers has begun to lose its hold.
I keep coming back to looking for ways to connect with our yearnings as a way to create new answers, even as the evidence of the depth of our predicament mounts ever more alarmingly. To counteract the kind of yearning which is no more than wishfulness, a wish for the exercise of will in the case of the Right – this is the basis of authoritarian populism – with a yearning for truth, an evolving assessment of our situation and the limits of intervention – a “stomach” for tragedy?
Humanity is the most dangerous creature, not only destructive of the natural world but of each other. If no one is able to come up with a new synthesis that does open up a new course between the yearning for will – control – and the yearning for utopia – the equally dangerous discounted myth of the Left – then there is little chance of anything meaningful surviving this collapse.
Superb analysis, Paul. Resonated obliquely with the recent interviews with James Lovelock, always an interesting character because he’s never in the traditional/conventional eco-camps: he understands that there are no easy solutions and doesn’t espouse overly simplistic ‘packages’ of ideas that absolutely must go together and without which you can’t possibly be ecologically aware. This interview in The Guardian was especially interesting (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock-climate-change): ‘”I don’t think we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change,” said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview since the theft of the UEA emails last November. “The inertia of humans is so huge that you can’t really do anything meaningful.”
One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is “modern democracy”, he added. “Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”‘
Sorry if I’m being thick here Paul but can you explain “In the UK, with our recent slew of anti-terrorist legislation, police brutality, ID cards and security cameras, this is already advanced, and I expect it to continue (if Gordon Brown remains prime minister after losing our forthcoming general election, all bets are off!)” Given that we have this situation with GB at the helm, why do you expect it to change if he stays?
Sharon’s quote of Lovelock’s comment about democracy is very relevant I think – when I used to give talk on Peak Oil I used to say that I didn’t think that “democracy as it’s currently constituted will survive it.” Throw Climate Change into the mix and it’s even more the case.
You’re not being thick Stephen; I worded that badly. In fact, I will go and reword it now. I actually meant that if Brown remains PM despite not winning, as is currently being suggested as a possibility, it will seem in the eyes of many to be the ultimate ‘elite’ stitch-up, and things may move even faster than they otherwise may.
Democracy certainly does not seem able to deal with climate change, or peak oil. Of course, there’s no obvious reason why autocracy could either – look at China. I think state-based liberal democracy in its current form is certainly doomed. Rather than collapsing, though, I think it is already mutating gradually into something much harder. This is happening in stages, and consequently seems much less threatening than a sudden change would. Autocracy disguised as democracy may turn out to be the perfect system for ruling interests, just as monopoly capitalism disguised as consumer choice is currently proving to be.
Incidentally, I notice that today sees the first crown court trial for over 300 years in the UK which has reached a judgement without use of a jury. I wouldn’t expect it to be the last.
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I recently heard an on-radio conversation between a tea party activist who had called liberal talk show host Thom Hartman. What was so interesting was that the tea party activist’s concerns were classic “liberal” concerns about economic unfairness. She also was quite reasonable and open to dialog. However, the only narrative she had to make sense of things was the junk fed to her by the Republican party.
The thing is, had her and Thom, or myself, or any liberal, had a chance to sit down with her over coffee for an hour or two and really get at things, I think her viewpoint might have been radically altered. The problem is no one sits down and talks to each other anymore. Instead we have an official “conversation” conducted by the media via pundits, politicians, and Fox news charlatans. It’s an impersonal, unreal meta-dialog that is more like an advertising narrative than the real world.
The place to change the story is accross backyard fences and in local community forums. That’s not easy. It means getting personal. It means getting out from behind our computers.
As for the earth, if we could rescue “God” from “his” imprisonment in “heaven” and return divinity to life-in-all-forms, many of our “environmental problems” would dissappear on their own.
We have to get to the fundementals. A tall order, of course. But when all else seems to be failing…
Excellent stuff Paul, and judging by the interesting comments, just the sort of thing that DM needs to be talking about. The standard environmental/anti-civilisation/pseudo-spiritual ‘arguments’ that pervade the conversations centering on the collapse of the west are shown up by genuinely insightful writing like yours.
Propaganda too is something we should all be aware (and wary) of. Reading Jacques Ellul’s ‘Propaganda’ of 1965 today, it is abundantly clear that he is more relevant now than ever. His theme that when new technology encompasses any culture or society, the result is propaganda; and that propaganda is pehaps the most serious threat to humanity operating in the modern world, is genuinely terrifying. Really it is. Perhaps because it is so difficult for many people to see it. Is not the media onslaught over climate change a form of propaganda? Are not the dangers of our loss of democracy and freedoms that could result from regulations due to climate change made possible by propaganda?
Ellul says that propaganda creates myths that take ‘possession of a man’s mind so completely that his life is consecrated to it’. By myth he means an ‘all-encompassng, activating image: a sort of vision of desirable objectives that have lost their material, practical character and have become strongly colored, over-whelming, all-encompassing, and which displace from the conscious all that is not related to it. Such an image pushes man to action precisely because it includes all all that he feels is good, just, and true.’
A little later he distinguishes between social myths and social presuppositions, which are, as I understand him, above myths, and allow myths to be created in service to the presuppositions. Presuppositions are ‘a collection of feelings, beliefs, images by which one unconsciously judges events and things without questioning them, or even noticing them….they are provided for us by the surrounding milieu and carry us along in the sociological current. They are what keeps us in harmony with our environment.’ Read: control us to conform to the norms of western civilisation.
The four great collective sociological presuppositions of the modern technological world, of both bourgeois and proletarian, are: that man’s aim in life is happiness, that man is naturally good, that history develops in endless progress, and that everything is matter.
Readers can judge for themselves how true they think this is. But the thesis he develops in the book is frightening, and is more apt now than in 1965, and, I reckon, likely to get worse. As things start to go awry, might will need to be conjoined with powerful propaganda to subjugate both mind and body.
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“a new synthesis that does open up a new course between …”
“rescue “God” from “his” imprisonment in “heaven” and return divinity to life-in-all-forms …”
The aberrance of this society, more and more apparently incapable of correction, probably goes back all the way up to the present cycle of history beginning with Sumer, 7000-5000 years ago.
Before that there was the long-time ancient philosophy, of middle way between materialism and spiritualism, and centered around a figure of celestial presence infusing the living world, but apparently the ancients progressively lost to the new aggressive civilization(s), notably due to their peacefulness and deep philosophy.
The narrative of prehistory itself remains unsatisfactory and incomplete, and prehistorians are obviously not ready to consider the ancient narrative.
Maybe the destiny of the present civilization is indeed to crumble and fail abjectly, as a deeply sick branch of mankind, to prove its error even to and beyond those who have no eyes to see, and serve as an established negative reference for a next cycle that might decide to (re)build on the ancient foundation.
Chris Hedges is an interesting figure.
In his deeply flawed ‘Empire of Illusion’ he talks of the academic elite and the exclusivity of the language they use:
“By any standard comprehensible within the tradition of Western civilization, as John Ralston Saul points out, these people are illiterate. They cannot recognize the vital relationship between power and morality. They have forgotten, or never knew, that moral traditions are a product of civilization. They have little or no knowledge of their own civilization and do not know, therefore, how to maintain it.”
But he ends his book with hopeful words: “What were the teachings of Jesus to the Roman consuls or the sayings of Buddha to the feudal warlords? Whose words, decades later, do we heed: the pompous and grandiose rants of the dictator and politician, or the gentle reminders that call us back to the human.”
His argument, overall, is weak, but it’s definitely worth reading for the power of his writing, and his enthusiasm.
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“…the problem is no one sits down and talks to each other anymore. Instead we have an official “conversation” conducted by the media via pundits, politicians, and Fox news charlatans. It’s an impersonal, unreal meta-dialog that is more like an advertising narrative than the real world…” – Rob Lewis
Sounds like the classic argument from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone that took off a good few years back, that nobody meets up with different social groups etc., and that social pursuits have increasingly become individual pursuits. This always sounded plausible to me, and I too often get the sense now that decommunilsation – the breaking up of traditional centres of community – has become not only the unintended consequence of the pursuit of a post-Friedman neo-liberal economics, but the avowed goal of many regressive forces in our society. Increasingly people sit at home drinking, ordering in pizzas, and chatting and updating their Facebook accounts on-line. Ostensibly, this may be socialising, though the mediation through a public (monitorable, searchable and potentially permanent) medium detracts from the purity of this, but whilst ad-hoc communities may be constructed this way and previously could not have existed, these are often entirely self-selected. This allows for much in the way of individual self-expression and development, and perhaps avoids many of the negatives many social thinkers refuse to acknowledge in traditional community – the judgements and negative as well as positive social pressures, the busybody factor and restrictive inertia of it – this very agency removes the rubbing-up-against-life-ness of it, to coin a particularly clumsy phrase which I would choose above a Germanic compound word any day, and fractures entirely any organic link to community. For this reason when we can link up with people like ourselves at any time of the day or night, we may have to be careful that we are not ourselves becoming part of the problem. I can define myself as a Dark Mountain type of person, the same as I could define myself as a pro self-harm bisexual Emo, can encourage other Dark Mountain type people to gather from all over the globe and descend on a given geographical location for a moment of time, and this is great and it is an expression of who I am and what my experiences have made of me, and I’m socialising by doing so. But if we too exclusively meet others who too closely match our own definitions of ourselves, then our experiences may not take us much further. That is, when Fox news viewers hang out with Fox news viewers from a dispersed geographical area, Dark Mountain folk hang out with Dark Mountain folk and pro self-harm bisexual Emos with other pro self-harm bisexial Emos then perhaps we are all part of the problem. I live in a community, North Wales, that is in many ways moribund because of these very freedoms.
It was always axiomatic for my generation that you can choose our friends but you can’t choose your families, but I was never sure of this. Friends were selected for us, to a greater or lesser extent, by a series of arbitrary factors. Sometimes that is galling, but though I have lost touch with many friends who are less like me, and could have chosen to “dump” more, making newer friends as I go through life, I have gained a lot from keeping close to a handful of people from the different stages of my life, each of them different to me in sometimes striking ways.
Certainly I see in the younger generations who have the capacity to group together any way they want from an early age, a lack of this something that comes from that sweet spot of having a little freedom, but not too much, that sweet spot between lightness and weight in the false dichotomy Kundera took on, that they are damaged by this freedom, fail to thrive morally, intellectually, temperamentally, and, paradoxically, socially.
That’s what I think. Whether it’s anything to do with anything is another matter..
Now, where did I put that Lucas magneto? Damn damn and damn again!
Prof,
You been drinking again?
Your magneto’s in the fridge. Your gluten-free granola bar is in your toolbox. Marcus Aurelius is howling at the moon on Moel Siabod as far as I can work out and missy gb says as you’ve been walking around with odd shoes on again. Get some sleep!
Belcher!
I am trying to make a serious point about… I may not have read the article. I may not have read all the comments, but I am trying to make a serious point. My Tractatus, as you call it, is not progressing so quickly as you have implied to me before but I may attempt, may I not, to adumbrate my..
But what does it matter. What does any of it matter with you. I could make a sterling point about decommunalisation – though I know I here have not – and for you and all of you other students it would matter not a jot if my tie were twisted in its know, I pronounce two syllabubs traversed in an amusing fashion or set my mortar board alight. It is all style over substance. “To cuff link or not to cuff link” as the Guardian had it of the election.
Belcher please, you have a brain and ought perhaps to use it to your best ability. If I amuse you with my musings, well. Well..
Fridge you say? Good.
Peckish I am.
Moel Siabod. Pest! Pest! Is there no end to it..
knot knot knot!!! Knot I meant. Confounded language. To the hills!
Just saying.
Fine. Some observations then.
America yearning for Fascism? Absolutely. And are we, and is America far less stable and secure as a polity and society than we like to assume. Certainly.
Neurodevelopmental disorders. Close to my heart, maybe, but I’m not mistaken in seeing a rise in autism spectrum conditions and ADHD, depression and conditions involving impaired empathetic faculty. All such conditions arise from the fact that empathy, settled temperament, ability to concentrate, comunicate, change and adjust focus with volition etc., are emergent properties of more basic functions of the brain, which must first be supported by countless developmental conditions and requisites etc. One such is nutrition and absence of neurotoxins and chemicals. The industrialisation of food over the last sixty years has meant that this condition is one that is much more rarely met. A Glimpse at a typical school group, of any age, particularly those from provincial urban areas, will see a number of pale, “zombie-like” kids, and other hyperactives. In adulthood, some of these problems will manifest themselves in criminal behaviour, but also as failures to contribute to society.
These problems will be of particular severity in the very areas that the Guardian and Socialist elites pay no mind to. When they do, it is usually by taking a trip to the latest race riots to shove a dictaphone in a young man’s face, get a suitably offensive quote, and by-line it “Josh, labourer” or, “Dave, unemployed”, thus abrogating the necessity of serious comment.
Josh, Dave, et al, have indeed witnessed an extraordinary change in the societies around them. Tony Harrison’s V, written back in 1985, had his father “squeezed by the unfamiliar” in Beeston Leeds. Twenty years later, and three of the four London suicide bombers were born and raised there. Much talk of that, but how much of the old men, or even the younger men who might have reason – not initially racism or bigotry – to regret changes in the communities around them, reasons of nostalgia (which of us doesn’t know that for the places we were born and raised), romanticism, simple sentiment. Illogical feelings. But feelings are illogical, and why ought we be logical about the places we grow up.
I live now in North Wales. Driving back home to the midlands, and then into the centre of Birmingham, was a horrendous trip. Most people in the midlands, on coming back from holiday, describe such places as like Beiruit. I’ve not been to Beiruit. But you don’t have to be John Major to have an image in your mind of England which is radically different to those streets I drove through for as little time as possible with locked doors.
And yet this is taboo. This unease is not racism. It is a belief, perhaps, in the values of Britain. And if British values solely meant being open to all other values, as people on Question Time are liable to blandly assert, then that is no values at all. And I don’t mean that what they are is the values a Kipling might have in mind, or an Eliot, a G K Chesterton or the Daily Mail. I don’t even know that I know what they are. But I can still feel a sense of their absence when I go abroad. Sometimes they are missing in a way that is not disturbing. Prague and Central and Eastern Europe can be like this. Values are different in some ineffable way. Still more I can feel when they are absent when I am abroad in my own country, as I felt last week, in Birmingham.
I can drive back to North Wales and I can interrogate myself about what such feelings, however briefly felt, may mean. Some people are not so able to do that. But certainly, if you have people feeling like this for too long, and then dismiss their right to talk about it, or, worse, abuse them for feeling it, and for expressing it to people they had naively or hopefully believed might be in a position to help, then you will of course only aggravate them and send them into the willing arms of buffoons like the BNP. (And look at them, they are no more than buffoons, we can consider ourselves fortunate to acknowledge. If we had more serious fascists, which we soon may well do, how much harm we could have done to our already broken societies in pushing people to them.)
Me, Prof, sorry, I do tend to be downcast and disillusioned. I don’t dismiss what you say because you wear your tie inside out or odd shoes, or fumble over your words, but because I can’t always bear to take all this on, because I don’t see a way out of it. When I take it seriously, I feel pretty depressed about it. Maybe I’m not courageous enough. Maybe I’m too realistic. I can’t decide.
And so, I go on woodwork courses, as I am tomorrow and Sunday. I move out of the horrendous connurbation (a future Detroit) where I was born and where so much of the decline of our society is so evident, to the hills of North Wales. I take up running, climbing, walking. I try to write fiction. Try to get a diagnosis for a condition I’m not sure I believe in (it feels like a bankrupt country conforming to type before getting help from the IMF). And occasionally I wax facetious on a forum/comments board like this.
Does America yearn for fascism?
Could Britain become a Weimar?
Look around you.
And incidentally, Prof, I’d worry about the world more, not less, if you always turned out with your dog attached to your lead, your pipe the right way up, and the same shoes…
Learning to carve a green man tomorrow. Is this the way we save the world?
Gav Belch
Quote from the LRB “Presumably the crappiness of Stoke is part of the point behind the BNP’s decision to confer on the city the honour of hosting its manifesto launch.”
Crappiness?! What does that make of its citizens?
I don’t dispute the LRB’s findings as it happens, and would stretch the adjective across the whole West Midlands connurbation, but I once read a review in the Guardian Guide of the exhibition of Crap Towns, saying, essentially, go and see it, and be glad you left your home town.
Some people didn’t. Are they expected to vote for one of three interchangeable twits?
Besides, is the crappiness of Blackpool the point when party conferences take part there? Is Blackpool any less crappy than Stoke? Or is the term only used to sneer at the people who might consider voting for the BNP?
Anti-elitism is inevitable with such sneering, London-centric media. I’ve got some distance, but the chip on my shoulder hasn’t gone away however long I’ve been out of the crap town I was born in, and I can only, like Tony Harrison, and many of the correspondents to the LRB on the subject of John Venables recently, look back and wonder how I could have been if I had been stuck there.
Liberal blindness is right. If they had a clue what they were walking into!
Belcher!
I am trying to make a serious point about… I may not have read the article. I may not have read all the comments, but I am trying to make a serious point. My Tractatus, as you call it, is not progressing so quickly as you have implied to me before but I may attempt, may I not, to adumbrate my..
But what does it matter. What does any of it matter with you. I could make a sterling point about decommunalisation – though I know I here have not – and for you and all of you other students it would matter not a jot if my tie were twisted in its know, I pronounce two syllabubs traversed in an amusing fashion or set my mortar board alight. It is all style over substance. “To cuff link or not to cuff link” as the Guardian had it of the election.
Belcher please, you have a brain and ought perhaps to use it to your best ability. If I amuse you with my musings, well. Well..
Fridge you say? Good.
Peckish I am.
Moel Siabod. Pest! Pest! Is there no end to it..
Chris Hedges is an interesting figure.
In his deeply flawed ‘Empire of Illusion’ he talks of the academic elite and the exclusivity of the language they use:
“By any standard comprehensible within the tradition of Western civilization, as John Ralston Saul points out, these people are illiterate. They cannot recognize the vital relationship between power and morality. They have forgotten, or never knew, that moral traditions are a product of civilization. They have little or no knowledge of their own civilization and do not know, therefore, how to maintain it.”
But he ends his book with hopeful words: “What were the teachings of Jesus to the Roman consuls or the sayings of Buddha to the feudal warlords? Whose words, decades later, do we heed: the pompous and grandiose rants of the dictator and politician, or the gentle reminders that call us back to the human.”
His argument, overall, is weak, but it’s definitely worth reading for the power of his writing, and his enthusiasm.