Eleven Things so Far
“Although Kant’s Lutheran childhood in
Konigsberg was a hundred years before Kierkegaard’s Lutheran childhood in
Copenhagen the same inherited morality marked both men.”
‘After
Virtue’, Alasdair MacIntyre
1.
I don’t
know.
2.
Edward de Bono, the inventor of lateral
thinking, suggests a number of techniques for when you get stuck: one of them
involves finding a word or passage in a book ‘at random’ and working from
there. The psychogeographers
have similar games, while the I Ching
finds the idea of ‘at random’ vaguely amusing.
(Carl Jung’s
introduction to the I Ching puts ‘at random’ in (as Daniel Dennett ascribes them)
‘scare quotes’, so I’m merely following mystico-philosophical-show-off protocol.)
Three random
numbers – the nth book along the shelf, the nth page, the nth line – took me to
the quote at the top of the page. Is not
this as reasonable a place to start as any in this time of Covid-19?
From it we
could launch into the letter K, and thus to Calasso
on Kafka, and thus to the pure ambivalence of our sense of helplessness and
our urge for control, and thus to the myths, ritual and gestures of our world,
past, present and to come.
Or to the
idea of a century, and Sleeping
Beauty, and Eric
Hobsbawm, and how the future will look back on this time a hundred years
hence, as we look back on the Spanish ’flu of 1918.
Or to the
idea of ‘inherited morality’ and the question: just how much of what we think
we have worked out is, in fact, just stuff we inherited. All these words! All these metaphors! All these pontifications!
3.
Enough with
the guff. Real things are happening to
real people. Essays from people like Charles Eisenstein
are away with the fairies. (He reminds
me of Ken Wilber – “Ken
Wilber has long been hailed as one of the most influential thinkers of our
time” according to the blurb on the back of my copy of the modestly-titled ‘A
Theory of Everything’ – a man who thought he’d figured everything out and
deigned to explain it to us by means of a diagram of concentric circles of
consciousness, each of a different colour, for chrissakes.) They become surrounded by snow-blind
acolytes, subsumed by their own hype, muffled into gibberish by the flights of
their own fancy. (This is not an ad hominem attack; I merely compress for
concision.)
I would once
have said ‘These people need to get out a bit more’ but that’s clearly
inappropriate now. Instead I’ll try:
these people need to address the question put regularly and forcefully to me by
my great friend Lilian Greenwood
MP whenever I wax a little too lyrical about my fabulous insights about the
nature of an ‘economy of enough’ (because yes, I know, I may be one of ‘these
people’):
Well that’s great David, (she would say)
but what would you like me to tell my
constituents tomorrow?
And it’s
true, isn’t it? We in the ‘climate
change’ world or the ‘sustainability’ world or the ‘environmental’ world or the
‘academic’ world or whichever bloody insular pond we live in (smug reference to
the marvellous ‘On
Choosing the Right Pond’ by Robert Frank) find it far too easy to talk
amongst ourselves and end up somewhere between ignored and irrelevant. We fail to heed Illich’s warning in ‘Disabling
Professions’; we fail to learn from Clive James’s exposition of our duties
as set out in the astonishing ‘Cultural
Amnesia’.
And yes, I
know, I know, I’m making references and wearing my learning on display and my
mother will at this point be saying to herself: What is he on about?
Because
there are real things happening to real people.
Real people are really dying.
Real people really do live in shit housing with shit people of whom they
are afraid. Real children are really
hungry. Right now.
4.
“Though no one intended it, the effect [of
there being more than 17,000 Church of England clergymen in the middle of the
nineteenth century who had little to do] was to create a class of
well-educated, wealthy people who had immense amounts of time on their
hands. In consequence many of them
began, quite spontaneously, to do remarkable things. Never in history have a group of people
engaged in a broader range of creditable activities for which they were not in
any sense actually employed.”
Key word
here: ‘creditable’. Here’s a few of the
things Bryson tells us they got up to:
- George Bayldon compiled the world’s first dictionary of Icelandic
- Laurence Sterne wrote ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’
- Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom
- Jack Russell bred the terrier that bears his name
- William Buckland wrote the first scientific description of dinosaurs
- Thomas Malthus wrote ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ and effectively started the discipline of political economy
- William Greenwell was the founding father of modern archaeology and also invented ‘Greenwell’s Glory’, “the most beloved of trout flies”
- Octavius Pickard-Cambridge became the world’s leading authority on spiders
- William Shepherd wrote a history of dirty jokes
- John Clayton gave the first practical demonstration of gas lighting
- George Garrett invented the submarine
- Adam Buddle (of Essex!) gave his name to the buddleia
- John MacKenzie Bacon was the first aerial photographer
- Sabine Baring-Gould wrote ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and “more unexpectedly, the first novel featuring a werewolf”
- John Michell taught William Herschel how to build a telescope
- Thomas Bayes devised Bayes Theorem, a method for tackling complex problems in probability that had no practical use for almost two centuries until computers came along with the power actually to deploy it
OK, enough
already. Not one of these people
disappeared up their own arse in the belief that they had achieved some
over-privileged insight. And why?
Because at least once a week they had to stand up in front of a group of
perfectly ordinary people and talk to them in terms they understood. They were forced to stay grounded.
We
absolutely have to stay grounded. I
don’t necessarily propose that unless you regularly actually go out and talk
with ordinary people you should shut the fuck up; but, unless you regularly go
out and actually talk with ordinary people, you should shut the fuck up.
5.
The first
thing I think it’s shown us – and by ‘it’ I do of course mean ‘it’ – is the
difference between ‘needs’ and ‘wants’.
All that
stuff we used to do: buy clothes, fly on holiday, buy a new car, dream of a new
front door, hanker for a new sofa, order eggs benedict on artisanal toast…
And
now? Food. Is there enough?
Shelter. Does everyone have somewhere decent and safe
to stay?
Care. Does
everyone have someone looking out for them, making sure they’re ok?
Health. Do we have enough (healthy) healthcare
workers? Are there enough machines and
equipment?
Maintenance. Do we have enough drivers, cleaners,
shop-workers to keep the show on the road?
Is there power and water?
These are
our needs. These are everyone’s needs. (See Professor
Ian Gough.) These are the only bits
of an economy we really need. Everything else was… fluff. (This is the sort of thing that the Economics
of Enough is all about.)
6.
Here are
some limericks, in ascending order:
The virus
called Covid-19
is virulent,
nasty and mean.
To foster
resistance
maintain
social distance
and remember
to keep your hands clean.
A man who
once lived by the river
was
reflecting on life, with a shiver:
in the time
of corona
he’d become
quite a loner
and was
slowly destroying his liver.
There once
was an old academic
who
predicted a global pandemic
but the
morons in charge
(and the
public at large)
accused her of
misplaced polemic.
There once
was a man from El Paso
who thought
he would write an epistle
but rather
than ask us
he moved to
Damascus
and there he
became an apostle.
There once
was a limerick writer
who thought
that his scan should be a little bit tighter.
So too his
rhyme
(which was
charming, but fine)
but in the
end he decided he could best meet his needs in some other way so instead he
became a great painter.
7.
Talk has
begun of the ‘exit strategy’. And plenty
of people are also talking about all the things they want to see different
‘afterwards’.
Generally,
as far as I can tell, these plenty of people – all of whom are serious and
well-meaning – are asking for the same things they’ve always asked for: for
more trees, fewer evil corporations, an economy in the shape of a circle
or a doughnut or an éclair,
proper funding for this that or the other, an end to homelessness and hunger
and poverty. I’m seeing it being
written that, in order to get these (in general laudable) things, the policy
options need to be ‘oven ready’ or ‘on the table’ or some other metaphor
indicating that the idea has to be sitting there just waiting for the moment
when…
When what?
When a calm
and thoughtful politician decides it would be a good idea? When a high-impact think-tank puts it into a
paper which is well-received by an open-minded SPAD? When a courageous civil servant or a
parliamentary committee or an aspiring opposition leader indicates his or her
interest?
What is
happening right now is way, way outside the think tanks and the media bubbles
and the usual channels. What is
happening now is tens and hundreds and thousands of millions of people having
the most profound experience of their lives.
We are in the middle of the most profound flux. (I would contend it may be even more
disruptive than a full-on war – not in terms of total deaths, but in terms of
shaking fundamental personal, social and political assumptions. Wars are something we as a culture have had
lots of practice at – every nation on earth has a war myth close to its
national heart. Which means we have some
experience of what happens to us once we’ve had one. But this?
We have no experience. Where is
our ‘we survived a pandemic’ cultural myth?) (What would it even look like?))
Right now we
are inside a Rumsfeldian
vortex: we don’t even know what we don’t know about what is happening. (The first casualty of war is truth; the
first casualty of COVID is orientation.)
Talk about
afterwards if you want; but don’t expect it to mean much. After what?
We don’t even know what the what is yet.
8.
That which
happens next is a function of what has gone before. The economy is not some abstract entity: it
is the outcome of, and frame for, the millions of individual choices we make
and actions we take. Previous patterns
in those choices and actions provide the basis for economic abstractions, and
thus theories, and thus models.
Underlying all those choices and actions? Lives and thoughts, values and beliefs,
wishes and dreams.
So what
happens when the lives and thoughts and values and beliefs and wishes and
dreams are messed with?
In complex
systems, there is the notion of ‘path dependency’. The economy is not a machine that will or
even can return to some previous abstract state of ‘equilibrium’. It is a complex, open, evolving system. What happens ‘next’ is a function of what has
been going on recently. The path of its
evolution determines its future path. It
is ‘path dependent’.
Which means:
only when you have a good idea of what has been going on can you have any idea
at all about what might happen next.
And since we
don’t know what’s going on, we have no idea of the nature of the path on which
we shall at some point be dependent.
Plan for the
exit from lockdown, yes; proselytize on what the economy will be ‘like’ in a
year or more – no.
9.
Or maybe
not. Perhaps some things are already
clear. Perhaps some features of the
future are already crystallising; perhaps some elements of the path are
solidifying.
The NHS, for
example. I think it’s safe to say it’s
going to be much harder for any politician, of any stripe, to be seen jeopardising or threatening the NHS
for at least the next twenty years.
So there’s a
thread into the future. No future
economic or political solution for the UK will involve jeopardy to the NHS of
the kind that has characterised the past decade or two.
Which, if
accurate, will have implications for all sorts of things – not least tax.
But what about
– say – homelessness? Suddenly the State
has managed to house thousands of rough sleepers. Does that mean that the formerly-homeless can
expect to remain in re-purposed hotels for the rest of time? Seems less likely.
Pick any
feature of this surreal now and ask: stable into the future or not? Each element is a piece of the jigsaw, a
piece of the path upon which the future will walk. Look! Too much of it is fluid, mysterious,
unknowable.
10.
I watched an
interview with a man who had recently left hospital having recovered from being
severely unwell with COVID-19. He was
asked if he had been changed by the experience.
Many people
are indeed changed by a profound health experience. Most people who have survived cancer, for
example, see the world, and their life, differently afterwards. Their priorities change. Things that had previously seemed incidental,
or trivial, or that they had taken for granted, become dramatically more
important. I think of Clive James and
the poetry he produced in those last few years after his terminal illness was
diagnosed; or the entire works of Kurt Vonnegut, who survived the bombing of
Dresden by hiding in a refrigerator and for whom every subsequent minute of his
life was a gift.
Will we all
be changed by this mass experienced of sickness and death?
“It
certainly feels like that at the moment,” the man answered. “Ask me again in a year.”
11.
Where does
it end? It’s a messy, co-evolving,
complex open system, wriggling in the darkness.
There is no ‘end’.
But stop we
must. Stop I must. And I shall stop as I meant to begin, with
three random numbers, which take me to “Scientific Realism & Human
Emancipation” by Roy Bhaskar, page 94, first sentence:
“Constant conjunctions are not generally
spontaneously available in nature, but rather need to be worked for in the
laboratories of science; so that causal laws, together with the other objects
in the lexicon of scientific investigation, must, if that investigative
activity is to be rendered intelligible, be regarded as ontologically
irreducible to the pattern of events and the activities of human beings alike.”
And I’m sure
we can all agree with that.
Comments