It’s funny and disconcerting, watching the news; an odd and disorienting amalgam of the partially true and the wholly made up. Someone told me that they now find political ‘news’ impossible to watch because they feel they are being fed lies almost constantly. Politicians have turned plausible deceit into an art form. Malice, bad faith and contempt pulsate from the screen, like the primitive alien messages of conformity in the cult film They Live. The posh voices on the radio ring with complacency. Their message is clear: do not believe the evidence of your own senses – do not concern yourself with the man behind the curtain – this is the version of reality you should believe. And, by and large, we do. It’s hard not to.
The worst of it is knowing what is not being discussed, the things considered unthinkable or unsayable, the different versions of reality we are discouraged from entertaining. These parameters, artificially limiting our political discourse, give the impression that, however bad things are, there is no alternative and anyone who thinks things could be otherwise is just wasting their time. The country would be in as bad a state whoever was in power or whatever we did.
While the redistribution of wealth and resources from the poorest to the richest has been normalized – it has become the main business of our politics and politicians – redistribution from the rich to the poor is considered, at best, fantastical and, at worst, economically and socially harmful. Much of the UK remains convinced that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by Labour spending too much on schools and hospitals. They have happily drunk to the dregs the bad and unnecessary medicine of austerity and stand ready for more. Little wonder the current leader of the opposition feels that the only way he can get into power is by pretending to be almost as awful as the current government.
It is as though we are all complicit in a deliberate effort to conceal the truth from ourselves. Journalists pursue not fact but opinion. They are interested in perception, not truth, though not all perceptions are considered newsworthy. With notable exceptions, they are the keepers of the version – a sacred task, which is also, rather conveniently, an exceedingly lucrative one. But it would be wrong to suggest they do it for the money. Most are unaware of their role, and it is this that makes them so very good at it. They flatter the powerful and help them conceal their true loyalties. It doesn’t trouble them that the politician discussing the future of the National Health Service is funded by private health care. Or that the climate change sceptic is taking millions from the fossil fuel industry. They know what they can ask and what they can’t. They patrol the battlements of acceptable discourse. The main output of their work is therefore not truth, the oxygen of democratic society, but political hopelessness. It’s all so beside the point, so poisonously stupid and reactionary. A maddening circus. But what else can we do? We must take our medicine.
Thus, we veer miserably between sentimentality and self-deception, delusion and denial. For much recent human history, we thought progress inevitable. We know now not only that it is not but that it can also be reversed. The things that drive us turned out not to be benign after all. But by the time we realized, it was too late. We wanted to change. There were a few notable episodes. Windows were smashed. Cars were overturned. People set themselves on fire. But, for the most part, for most people, it was business as usual. And, as the neoliberal reaction took hold, overturning the gains of the first six decades of the twentieth century, we made ourselves comfortable, scrolling down our phones or watching the television. We got used to the loss of our rights and securities, accustomed ourselves to hopelessness. We bear it all – the hospital waiting lists, the broken schools and vanishing opportunity to do anything but work or prepare for work, the endless privatisations, the bottomless corruption, the millions of gallons of raw sewage pumped into our waterways so that greedy plutocrats can get even richer – and we keep smiling, even if, for some of us, it is with gritted teeth.
Yet, for all of this, we continue to talk about the future as though change were possible. Alternative realities are constructed in which the language of cooperation and solidarity has been resurrected and made meaningful. We imagine a world in which people are animated by a sense of the common good rather than by naked profiteering. We know that such a world is necessary. We cannot survive unless we change the way in which we organise our societies and the way in which wealth, power and ownership are distributed. But there is no roadmap for this journey and the truth is we have no idea how to get there. Anyone setting out earnestly on such a journey would quickly find themselves lost, unable to continue (the obstacles are immense and often uncharted) or, most likely, devoured by monsters. The mistake we make is to suppose that because something is necessary it is also possible.
‘The old dear stories of possibility. No-one wanted to hear them anymore, but nothing had replaced them.’ I came across this line while reading Joy Williams’ novel Harrow, which is so good it made me want to read everything else she had written. Her earlier book, The Quick and the Dead, struck me just as powerfully. As in Harrow, the action takes place in a desolate, parched, infected landscape teetering on the brink of disaster or oblivion or just beyond it. There is something satisfyingly real about the dislocation among the shifting cast of characters and the fragmented nature of the storytelling. I’ve lately found narrative coherence unconvincing, and in a way almost dishonest. Williams’ characters – three teenage girls united by the sudden loss of their mothers – are confused, unhappy, frustrated. They experience the harshness and unfairness of the world as violence. And their efforts to redress the wrongs they witness, to make good their losses, are partial, inept, foolish and certain to fail. Yet while the wider world either derides or ignores them, it is falling deeper and deeper into the abyss, staggering unsteadily towards the end of human life on this planet.
All of this, it seems to me and perhaps to Williams too, calls for a radical reappraisal of how we respond to the violence and oppression of everyday life, a kind of supercharged compassion that transcends human concerns and eschews human solutions, at least the ones we are used to. But it isn’t all that clear what this might mean either, though that is in a sense the point because we don’t know any more what works or if anything will. It is all different, all of a sudden and in all sorts of different ways, but we find ourselves too encumbered by our habits and all our other luggage to do anything different. To understand what the universe is saying to us we need not only to relearn its language but to forget our own. We cannot take our bags with us on such a journey. But all of this seems so silly said out loud and perhaps it is. There seems to be no sure way of navigating this confused landscape of poverty and instability and loss. But the only alternative to trying may be to vow, as does one of Williams’ characters, to ‘die slowly, day by meaningless day, unenchanted, bitterly meaninglessly aware’, or, as another refused to, to take part in an unending permanent vigil for everything that has been lost.
I sometimes feel that the only emotion one can authentically have in this moment is anger. Everything else involves a kind of denial of reality. But it may also be the case that in amongst the emotional debris, the fear and hate and dismay, there are other things worth holding on to and building or defending ourselves with. There is this concern and this willingness to care, and these things seem so important, but there is also the sense of the ‘uselessness of caring, the uselessness of love’, which Williams puts into the mouth of one of her more frightening characters. In these torn-up times, it is hard to know what to do, what is enough and what is insufficient. We can all work to deepen our connections with each other and with nature. What is less clear is how we get from there to a world in which this counts and makes a difference. What can hope look like in a world that is so unfair and unequal and so very far along a road that leads to more environmental destruction, more poverty and inequality, more abject despair. What could bring about the system change most humans want to see and the planet desperately needs? One thing is for sure. It will not be led by politicians, and you won’t hear about it on the news.
The Learning Age 