Autumn thoughts from London

It’s been a longish time since I last posted, taken up with moving house and all the attendant challenges. After many years of voluntary exile (in France, China and the United States), I’ve now returned to my roots in North London – to write, to study, to think, to play and to work.

Like all great cities, London has its own texture – and most of it is pretty random, small-scale, even introverted. No one ever planned or designed or envisioned this city in the way that Pierre l’Enfant did for Washington, or Baron Haussmann for Paris. There’s no mathematical New York-style grid, and no freeways zoom all around it or up and down it, like Los Angeles or Shanghai. Even when much of the mediaeval city was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, the intellectual and collective effort of reconceptualising London for a changed world was beyond the grasp of the citizenry of the time – or perhaps just fundamentally out of kilter with the city’s spirit.

This is why still today the old centre of London (now of course the financial district) conserves the chaotic and jumbled street patterns of a city that disappeared over 300 years ago, together with wonderfully evocative street names like Crutched Friars and Seething Lane – even though nothing physically survives from those days except one or two churches.

All ancient cities are layered in this way, of course, some more obviously than others: Rome’s unique classical patrimony is visible everywhere, even as one drives in from the airport, while old Beijing clings on only in a few pockets among the skyscrapers and apartment blocks of a city which has totally remade itself over the past 20 years.

And yet all cities are also in some sense frozen in time – living snapshots of the days when they reached their greatest glory. For London that moment would be the mid to late 19th century: not only many of the city’s most famous monuments, like Tower Bridge and the Houses of Parliament but also much of its domestic architecture dates from that period.

To an extraordinary extent, London is a city of low-rise, often quite humble houses and offices built between about 1850 and 1920 – a city where people live if at all possible in their own single-family houses. Not even for affluent Londoners the magnificent apartment buildings lining the boulevards of Paris, or the palatial art deco 20-storey blocks of the Upper East Side – most of them want a house with a garden, or if that’s out of the question in a city where the starting price for the humblest such dwelling is half a million dollars, a flat carved out of one of those Victorian or Edwardian houses, preferably with its own balcony or roof terrace.

London’s “villages”, like the one where I’m living, are the unplanned and accidental result of the city’s massive growth during its glory years. Like a giant amoeba it spread over the surrounding countryside engulfing innumerable farms and hamlets, as speculative builders buried them beneath the streets and crescents where most Londoners still live today.

Fortunately for today’s inhabitants, the city fathers of this first modern megalopolis (London, now around no. 20 in total population, was the world’s largest city for about 100 years until overtaken by New York in the 1920s) saw the need to leaven its potentially toxic growth with plenty of parks and gardens. Thanks to their sparing of many fragments of countryside from development, 31% of the city’s surface area is green space, the highest proportion of any major world city, and few Londoners live more than 10 minutes’ walk away from a park large enough for a jog or a game of football. Moreover, the way that London grew, with relatively few high-rise buildings and apartment blocks, has left its population density among the lowest of all the world’s capitals.

But of course, the texture of a city reflects the predilections of its inhabitants, and Londoners, living in their little houses and flats in their “villages” and walking their dogs in parks which are like fragments of rural landscape magically translocated to the city, sometimes seem to be engaged in a massive collective denial of city life itself. It’s as if the city in some ways turns its back not only on the 21st century but on the 20th too – so unlike the unrestrained "Yes!" to urban life that one finds in New York (albeit frozen, perhaps, in its own glory days of the 1940s and 50s), or in the 21st-century megalopolises of Asia such as Shanghai, Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Personally, I find all this quite to my taste – if, as it seems, the city which once was the first to embrace technology and industrial civilisation has concluded that it was all a terrible mistake, and hankers after the world that it destroyed in doing so, this nostalgia suits my temperament. We have indeed lost something irreplaceable in our scramble for physical comfort and possessions, and the pre-industrial countryside is a perfect representation and embodiment of that. Of course, the English countryside was never an untamed wilderness, rather a co-creation of man and nature, and no doubt Londoners’ nostalgia for it is also due to the remoteness in time of the period when most people lived there – unlike the inhabitants of most developing world cities, for whom the harsh and precarious life of the peasantry is no more than a generation away.

But that’s not the whole story, or even the main story: many, if not most Londoners, subject to the same stresses as any other city-dwellers of crowded subway trains, alienating office work, and unrelenting economic pressure, find some equilibrium and peace of soul in these green oases and in these quiet streets of red-brick houses, trees and neat little gardens. London by and large doesn’t attempt to batter you into submission with its hugeness and opulence, or to remind you of your insignificance with looming towers and pinnacles.

It spreads itself out in endless vistas of streets and crescents, of small and mostly unmemorable little shopping centres, dotted with parks and gardens. You can make of it what you will – all very understated, and democratic, in perhaps a quintessentially British way

America, it's time for your meds

Student (a “normal”-looking 16-17-year-old): “I can’t study today, Miss. I didn’t take my medication”.
Teacher (flusters a bit, then gives in): “Uh, OK, you’d better sit this class out, I guess.”

This kind of scene is a common occurrence these days, according to a recent Washington Post article by high school teacher Nancy Schnog. Ms. Schnog works, incidentally, not in a crime-ravaged inner-city ghetto but in the ultra-upscale suburb of Potomac, home to many of the capital’s top lawyers and politicians. As a pragmatic and reality-based professional, she avoids an emotional response to the situation, preferring to sound out child guidance and medical experts before developing an ad hoc study strategies program for her charges – so I’ll take the liberty of providing the sense of outrage which is missing from her article.

The stress-inducing conditions that lead so many teenagers to be medicated turn out essentially to be the many “pressures on their lives” and “brain-unfriendly lifestyles structured by adults”. In short, welcome to the modern world: unfriendly indeed not only to brains but also to hearts and spirits. Yet to medicate oneself or one’s family in response is to eliminate any chance of a natural and spontaneous response – including rejection, indignation and a desire for change (is it any surprise that the movers and shakers of this world don’t encourage their offspring to rebel against it?) Adolescence is a time of conflict and dissonance anyway, whether we grow up in Potomac or in Anacostia (99% poor, 99% black, 9 miles away), in Zurich or in Nairobi; it’s the frontal impact of our childhood dream-world with the reality that actually surrounds us, the painful acknowledgement of our own and our parents’ limitations, and of the gap we suddenly can’t pretend away between who we’d like to be and who we really are. How we deal with this gap is both a measure of who we are and a marker for the people we’re going to become as adults – and medicating the problem away is an outstandingly bad start to the process of growing up, denying the pain and the challenge rather than responding to it.

And while we’re on the subject of denying reality, the news has been full recently of stories about the rise of the Tea Party Right and its new icons such as Christine O’Donnell, Republican candidate for Joe Biden’s former Senate seat in Delaware. Like her putative role-model Sarah Palin, this champion of fiscal probity and straight talking is trailing some troublesome baggage (in O’Donnell’s case, some $60K in unpaid tax bills and college tuition fees) – but to her followers those are merely the signs that she’s suffered like them, with them and for them. Anyway, since most of the Tea Partiers believe that President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim determined to turn the USA into another North Korea, the evidence threshold for them is clearly very low – it’s about who’s speaking, not the data they amass to support their case.

Here, by way of a bit of real data, is a chart depicting America’s headlong rush towards Socialism over the past 30 years. Interestingly similarly-shaped charts would show the decline of the nation’s transport and communications infrastructure, and of its advantage in secondary and higher education – both areas where the USA once led the world but is now trailing many European and Asian nations. All this bears witness to the New Right’s success in siphoning money away from public-benefit expenditure and into the pockets of the ultra-rich, while deregulating business to the further benefit of that top 1% (or, even more, the top 0.1%). That’s why, of course, right behind and firmly underpinning the supposedly spontaneous and “just plain folks” Tea Party we have massively corporate-backed interest groups such as Dick Armey’s Freedom Works and the Koch Brothers’ various front organizations, not to mention Fox News Corp.

The denial of reality that’s involved here is reminiscent not of adolescence but of a much earlier stage of development, namely toddlerhood, where the dissonance between the world we desire and the one we experience is simply too great to be borne and we opt for the former – until our parents drag us kicking and screaming back to theirs. Bill Clinton has several times warned of the corporate hand in the Tea Party glove, and of course President Obama (a parental figure if ever there was one) speaks repeatedly of the need for massive investment in infrastructure and education. But what use do toddlers have for bridges and trains, schools and universities? – they just want to be told that the candy jar is full, or if it all too obviously isn’t full, a nice simple story about who stole the candy. And provided that story comes from a trusted source like Sarah or Glenn, it doesn’t need to have the smallest element of truth in it, or of evidence to support it. That’s the great thing about toddlers: they may be darned stubborn at times, but they’re quickly and easily turned by a determined adult. They’re not seeking their own way in the world – they’re nowhere near ready yet – just flustered and unhappy and looking to be comforted.

It sometimes seems that much of the USA is afflicted with a debased form of the belief propagated by the book & movie “The Secret” (itself, as Marcus Anthony – http://22cplus.blogspot.com – has usefully and cogently pointed out, a distorted and debased version of the Law of Attraction). The idea – very toddler-like – is that I only have to want and believe hard enough for reality to become whatever I want it to be: secretive right-wing billionaires become defenders of the common people, official birth certificates become Photoshop fake-ups and vice versa, and, above all, everything that’s going wrong is the fault of the bad guys (liberals, immigrants, foreigners etc.) And if ever a glimpse of reality should still appear through the cracks; well, there are always the meds.

The main problem with denying reality or medicating it away isn’t moral but practical – why shouldn’t we all float away on a pink cloud of pharmaceutical and Fox News oblivion if there were no consequences? But there are serious consequences: it weakens one’s ability to overcome difficult circumstances, and makes one vulnerable to manipulation by anyone with a likely story and an ulterior motive. Toddlers don’t look behind the scenes to see who’s pulling the strings; they take the puppets as real and autonomous agents. An unhappy, confused and easily manipulated populace with no real agenda in search of comfort and/or vengeance are easy meat for the powerful corporate interests who aren’t confused, know exactly what they want, and have a very precise agenda.

And in this fairy story the wolf not only eats Grandma but convinces Little Red Riding-Hood that she is Grandma – complete with a spoonful of medication to help settle the little girl’s doubts. America, you’d better wake up; the beast’s appetite is far from sated yet.

GOT HOPE?

It may look like a piece of bargain-basement irony to be juxtaposing this headline with the notorious photo of Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi giving the Roman salute traditionally associated with (pre-WWII Fascist dictator) Mussolini. But the last thing I want to do is to provoke a cynical shrug of the shoulders: there’s a serious point applying right across the developed West, that views and ideas once seen as too loopy, extreme or simply toxic to be expressed in public are edging into the mainstream.

20-30 years ago it would have been instant political death for any Italian leader to be photographed giving the Fascist salute, as it would have been for an American politician to propose abolishing Social Security or public education, or for a French President to propose expelling citizens of a fellow-EU country from French soil, linking them to the crime and insecurity which he has made his favourite theme.

Pretty much everywhere the Right seems to be on the rampage, and leftists and progressives on the retreat – no longer believing in, or at least no longer arguing with any passion for their supposed ideals. Despite the economic crisis and the outrageous greed and irresponsibility displayed by financial élites, the political parties supported by or in the pockets of those élites are forging ahead.

So what’s going on? The discourse of the Right, of course, is that the progressives had their chances and blew them: the war is over and the tough guys won (like they always do). There is of course a serious conservative critique of progressivism, but I’m intentionally not reproducing it here: the followers of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party in the US or of Berlusconi in Italy don’t demand a rigorous analysis; they’re operating from emotions which the leaders in question are expert at arousing and manipulating. Mostly negative emotions at that: fear of losing what one has, and of foreigners and outsiders. In so far as the Left is offering an analysis of the crisis and of the root causes of terrorism and mass immigration, rather than an emotional response, the battle is lost before it’s engaged. In politics, emotion trumps reason every time, and economic insecurity provokes fear of change and a tendency to cling to authority (just ask anyone who was in Germany in the early 1930s).

But we’re not in the 1930s. Berlusconi isn’t Mussolini and Glenn Beck isn’t Hitler, or even George Wallace. The Italian philosopher Raffaele Simone, in a much-discussed recent book, distinguishes the modern Right from its antecedents of 70-80 years ago by describing it as a “soft monster”. For Simone, the “monster” imposes its increasingly uncontested rule through three absolute commandments:

i) Thou shalt consume. Citizenship and civic identity are defined through consumption, rather than through social participation and engagement. Society becomes fragmented, as people see themselves as exclusively individual rather than social agents, focussed on short-term personal gratification.

ii) Thou shalt have fun. Work becomes devalued as a source of meaning and gratification (conveniently enough, as unemployment continues to rise); the modern “consumizen” lives for Friday night, for the weekends, for the summer holidays – and for the celebrity-focused nonsense and other kinds of froth on TV. (It’s no accident that Berlusconi, who incarnates this tendency more than any other politician, uses the huge chunk of the Italian media which he owns and/or dominates to discourage and devalue discussion of social and political issues.) The “vision” is clear: an atomised society composed of disconnected and disengaged individuals, and offering them an infinity of ways to forget themselves – for money, of course.

iii) Thou shalt be (or look) young. Simone, who’s one of the 1968 generation, may have been feeling his age when he added this – and it’s paradoxical considering that the average age of the population is steadily rising, especially in Western Europe and Japan. But he’s also pointing to the narcissism that’s such a feature of contemporary culture – the gym-honed underwear models, the “Hello!” weddings, the love confessions of Z-list celebrities and all the other detritus I just referred to. And hats off to Berlusconi for pushing this envelope too: Botoxed and hair-implanted to the eyeballs, at 73 he boasts of his successes with girls young enough to be his grand-daughters – and the story of his prodigious feats during a night of passion with a 2000€-a-pop call girl, far from causing embarrassment, seems to have increased his supporters’ admiration. (Is it conceivable, by the way, that this story wasn’t manufactured and planted by the Berlusconi media apparatus?)

So far, so gloomy – and to add to the woes of the left, Simone points out how it’s never shaken off a fatal association with totalitarian Communism – not to mention the destructive political protests of the 60s, 70s and 80s. I was intermittently one of those protestors myself (though never violently), but I could never fully commit to a “movement” that maintained such an ambiguous attitude towards the “Socialist” dictatorships of the time – and anyway, how long would those long-haired, grass-smoking, rock music-listeners have survived in the Maoist China they claimed to admire so much?

What’s happened is that, of the two strands of social-cultural change which emerged from that epoch, the pursuit of individualist self-expression and self-realisation has totally swamped the accompanying urge for a renewed society and sense of community. As Simone goes on to point out, the Left has failed to come to terms with the hedonism and individualism fostered not only by modern capitalism but also by the huge technological changes of the past 25 years – atomizing society and leaving each individual enclosed in his or her own iBubble, as it were.

Simone goes on to argue, neither very originally nor very convincingly, for a “reinvention” of the Left, but that time has surely passed – the opposition of Left and Right, of “socialism” vs. “individualism”, has become a stale and destructive cliché, exploited by the various Tea Partiers and Berlusconis to discredit any form of idealism or collective action.

Out of the rubble of sterile and rigid ideologies must emerge – is emerging, hesitantly – a new progressivism which acknowledges, as the old Left never did, that social change necessarily starts with individual change. Changing structures without changed consciousnesses leads inevitably to dictatorship, while more evolved individuals inevitably and necessarily develop more evolved social structures – and the same technology which isolates “consumizens” from each other is also being used to build new communities and networks.

It’s still early, and the old structures still dominate, but there is hope – there’s always hope – that this new trans-ideological collective consciousness will gradually, sweetly and gently, overwhelm the countervailing forces.

Those Magificent Men

The next time you find yourself cursing air traffic control for a 30-minute delay in take-off or the airline for serving red wine straight out of the fridge, take a moment to think about Louis Blériot – who, in an improbable assemblage of wire, wood and canvas, with a sliver of polished wood for a seat, no cockpit or seat belts, and a 25 hp engine like that of a small powerboat, carried out the world’s first international and over-water flight, just over 100 years ago.

Barely five years after the Wright Brothers, Blériot was already taking air travel to its next stage, and literally into untested waters – his was a monoplane with a much smaller engine that the Wrights’, and of course he was exposing himself to an immense risk by flying over the sea, especially one as notoriously choppy and windy as the English Channel.

His plane can still be seen today, suspended by hooks and wires high above the ground in the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Paris; this seems like its best chance of either getting into the air or staying there, so unlikely and fragile a craft does it seem to our Airbus and Boeing-accustomed eyes. One can no more imagine taking to the air in it than crossing the Atlantic in a 100-foot sailing ship or riding in a covered wagon from Philadelphia to Utah under constant threat of attack from Indians – the world has changed too much, and the men and women who made those fantastically hazardous journeys were pioneers whose courage and vision we may ritually salute, but which we can’t conceive of exhibiting in our own lives.

When one looks into Bleriot’s life he turns out to have been less of a wild-eyed dreamer than one might imagine – an early and successful entrepreneur in portable flashlights, he turned to airplanes primarily as a business opportunity, and the #9 model with which he made his famous crossing was intended to be sold as a self-assembly kit. Blériot undertook the Channel flight not primarily for the prize of £1000 (equivalent to over $100,000 in today’s money) but by way of publicity for what he was convinced would become a huge money-spinner. (It wasn’t, of course – though Blériot went on to become a successful constructor of military aircraft in World War I.)

He could of course no more have foreseen or imagined the commoditization of air travel than its deleterious environmental effects. It would take 20 years before regular commercial flights between London and Paris started to convey the élite of the inter-war years, and a further 30 till the arrival of the jet plane made it the preferred means of travel for the middle classes, and if anyone – impossibly in 1909 – had raised the issue of CO2 emissions, Blériot could very reasonably have pointed at the massive clouds of toxic fumes belched out by the steam trains and boats which were the only other form of travel in those days. And while we’re about it, the huge and heavy high-speed trains which take us under the Channel today, though emission-free in themselves, consume prodigious amounts of electricity, much of it generated from burning fossil fuels.

It’s generally quite impossible for anyone to predict in detail the long-term consequences of their inventions and discoveries – Einstein in 1905 couldn’t foresee the H-bomb, nor Henry Ford the profound transformation of cities and communities which mass motorization would bring about. But that doesn’t mean that the direction in which social and technological innovations will take us can’t be glimpsed – at least by a few visionaries capable of looking beyond the immediate and everyday world which most of us inhabit.

While Blériot was experimenting with his different designs for planes, 2000 miles away in Russia the great writer Tolstoy was still leading his anarcho-Christian commune, based on the principles of self-sufficiency and equality. And of course the early Romantic poets like Blake and Wordsworth had warned about the effects of industrialization a full 100 years earlier, arguing that men were sacrificing their authentic selves, trading their souls for wealth and comfort – and blighting the landscape in the process with their factories, railways and industrial cities.

Going back still further in the history of Western culture, this idea links up with some of our deepest-rooted and most powerful myths: Dr. Faustus, who traded his immortal soul for knowledge and power, or Prometheus, who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to men, and was punished with eternal torment. Or, of course, the myth that the story of Blériot most directly recalls, namely that of Icarus, whose reckless and fatal flight on the wings his father had made for him took him too close to the sun – a warning against overreaching and over-reliance on technology which has served as a metaphor for innumerable vainglorious and unsuccessful ventures over the ages.

Yet how could Icarus not have wanted to experience the glory of those eagle-feathered wings – did he maybe even regard falling into the sea and drowning as a price worth paying for that incomparable soaring? How could Blériot not have wanted to fly across the Channel, knowing that it was within his grasp? – because of deep doubts about the soul-eroding effect of technology? Men like Blériot are hardly subject to such anxieties.

Faust, Prometheus and Icarus – and Blériot, Ford and Edison, Tolstoy, Blake and Wordsworth – remind us that we have choices, and that these choice are freighted with consequences, some of them very profound. Only small children believe that one can enjoy the one without the other; as adults we are obliged to keep the bargains that we have made – and if this means returning to Mephistopheles what’s due to him, or falling to our deaths in the limitless blue ocean, so be it.

Leaving the body behind

Another dispatch from a noted holiday spot: this is Annecy, Haute-Savoie, in the French Alps, with its steep green-clad mountains and immaculately clean deep blue lake – warm enough thanks to a constant Southern sun through spring and summer for the fussiest of urbanites to swim in. And in the winter there’s snow for skiing: from October through April, year in and year out – making this region a prime holiday destination for six months or more of the year.

It’s curious to reflect that the high Alps as little as 200 years ago were regarded with horror as quite beyond the pale by the cultivated upper classes of Paris, Lyons or Geneva.

The simple log houses, which nowadays have turned into million-dollar second homes, were in those days the dens of near-savages who masticated incomprehensible dialects, slept with their animals, and eked out the most pitifully basic of existences on the most inhospitable of territories.

To gain some perspective and stretch my legs I decided to hike up the steep but well-marked trail that leads from the village on the lake where I was staying to the mountain above – a fitness-challenging ascent of over 2000 feet in about two miles. I noted that none of the holiday-makers in the countless hotels, camping-sites and holiday villas were venturing the same trail – there were just a handful at the viewpoint itself who had driven up to a nearby parking lot from where it’s an easy 15-minute ramble.

And why should they? Ascending 2000 feet in two miles on a day when the temperature is in the 80s (high 20s °C) is seriously hard work, and in this respect perhaps we do have something in common with the pre-industrial Savoyards. They surely avoided expending unnecessary physical effort; no one would have climbed that peak except for the pressing reason that its name suggests: Col des Contrebandiers (Smugglers’ Pass).

It must once have been the most convenient (or least inconvenient) way to convey brandy, tobacco, or gold around the customs barriers that used to separate every small European province from its neighbours.

But of course, those (few) of us who walk those trails today, quite unlike the smugglers of 200-300 years ago, do so simply for pleasure and for exercise. We live in a world where the movement of people and goods is almost totally disconnected from physical effort: looking down on the lake I saw a water-skier, her movement sustained entirely by the rapid burning of large quantities of diesel fuel. In the days when most movements around the lake were by rowing boat, people would have had a healthy respect for its 20 km length and 3 km width; today a couple of liters of diesel will get you across it in barely five minutes.

Fossil fuels and the internal combustion and jet engines have “virtualized” distance and location; in a world where you can fly overnight from Hong Kong to New York with no more inconvenience than a sub-optimal choice of movies, the ten thousand miles that separate China from the United States have become almost meaningless. (In the days when you had to travel by ship, though there was no effort and little risk involved, you would at least have been aware of the distance.)

The disconnection from the physical body – considerably accentuated by the increasing amount of time we spend online – has many well-documented effects on people’s physical and psychological health and on their relationship with the natural world, and the comparison with our pre-industrial ancestors points to yet another effect. They could rely on the signals from their own bodies and from the world around them to assess any possible action or movement in terms of the effort or resources required. To survive the winter, snowbound in those high mountains, they gathered wood in the autumn, and they knew exactly how much was needed.
They didn’t stay up till 3:00 am to play cards, burning precious wood (and expensive candles), but rose and went in with the sun, to make the most of its warming rays before the long dark freezing nights set in. No one walked up and down those precipitate trails, or rowed a heavy wooden boat across the lake, without measuring very precisely (and almost instinctively) whether the eventual payoff justified the necessary physical effort.

The absence of that sort of immediate and natural feedback is surely one of the reasons why we don’t seem to be able to deal with the causes and consequences of global warming: why not water-ski across a lake if you can afford the fuel? Why not fly 2000 miles on a whim if you can pay the airfare; why not burn a few more liters of gas to drive up a mountain on a hot day, rather than expend the effort of walking up it? The signals of what this is doing to our planet are there, but they’re not immediate, not part of an instinctual and familiar response system like tired legs and arms, or a prematurely depleted woodpile.

Meanwhile and for now, Annecy and other places like it around the world are still there and still lovely – and for that let’s all give thanks. But I wonder what of all this my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be able to enjoy? Perhaps if they have no choice but legs and rowing-boats it might actually be the best outcome.

The solitary violinist in the Place des Vosges

Place des Vosges, Paris – in the last 20 years or so this ancient and once-neglected part of the city has become one of its most chic quartiers, and firmly on the map for every visiting tourist. And on this hot Sunday in early August there are thousands of them: sprawling on the grass in the square, thronging the surrounding boutiques and trendy cafés, and swarming up and down the stairs of the Victor Hugo house overlooking the gardens, admiring the great man’s taste in home furnishings. A randomly multinational and multilingual multitude, an invading army with no leaders, no strategy, no battle plan and no flag.

And there, under the arches by one of the four entrances to the square, is a busking violinist. In his 40s I’d guess, he’s wearing full-length cargo pants and a fashionable linen jacket – he certainly doesn’t look like any kind of a street person – and, apart from the violin case open to receive coins, he’s curiously detached from what he’s doing. He makes no eye contact with anyone and he doesn’t wish to be photographed, nor does he acknowledge me when I drop a euro into his case, or even when I mime applause before walking away. Because he plays sublimely – if one was paying 50€ to hear him at a recital rather than hearing him for free in the open air one wouldn’t be disappointed.

The piece is Bach’s Partita No. 3 for solo violin (you can see and hear it on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waxat-_tRH8), one of the pinnacles of the repertory, a piece which only top virtuosi can even attempt. As I stand there, transfixed by this incredible music which is being produced a couple of yards away from me, I observe that I seem to be almost the only person who’s even noticed the musician. Everyone else is bustling around and treating him with less attention than if he was an ice cream vendor – as if he was a piece of street furniture.

Not surprising perhaps – I was reminded of the incident a few years ago when the world-famous violinist Joshua Bell busked during the rush hour at a subway station in Washington DC, and only seven people stopped to watch him (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html). And of course the same point applies, about the desensitization effected by modern media, the endless and pointless busyness which prevents us from noticing what’s around us even when we’re on holiday.

But there’s more to it than that – why, I wondered, was the violinist so unwilling to engage with his “audience”? No doubt he’s not a habitual busker – and I noticed that there were few coins in his case, and those mostly low-value ones. Could he have felt ashamed in some way of what he was doing – and if so, then why? What could be a more generous and selfless act than to share his great gift with the crowds of visitors drawn on this glorious day to one of Paris’s most architecturally perfect monuments – and why should he not receive something from them in return?

But there’s a problem: we’re not living any more in a world where the exercise of an artistic talent might have been an end in itself, or where the artist’s income might be independent of any particular services rendered. In today’s world all commercial transactions are precisely delineated and fenced around by complex legal agreements; a brilliant violinist playing in a public square is stepping outside the commercial framework that we all live in and know so well, violating the pricing structure that governs all legitimate professional activity. (Imagine a ‘busking lawyer’ drawing up contracts in a public park for a few dollars flung into his hat.)

So the beauty goes by us, and we go by it – the spontaneity that might make someone just simply want to play Bach in the Place des Vosges on a sunny Sunday in August, for sheer joy, a thing of the remote past.

Except that it needn’t be. Need it?

A country with a mission statement

It’s an enormous advantage for a country, as it is for an individual, to have a cohesive sense of itself, especially if there’s some set of representative values around which citizens can coalesce when times are hard. Pre-eminent examples of this phenomenon would be France and the United States: both born of revolutions at around the same time, and both profoundly attached to the notion of “liberty” – though with interestingly different connotations; for the French it’s inseparable from equality and social justice, while for the Americans it means above all untrammeled individual self-expression and self-development.

Of course the existence of this sort of national mission statement in no way eliminates bitter, even fratricidal and sororicidal conflict over its translation into social and political reality, but a country without a mission statement that also lacks a unitary ethnic identity can very easily fall apart altogether. Belgium, like so many other countries a by-product of war and of the dissolution of empires, is an example – and one need only look to Africa to find many other similar ill-contrived ethnic mash-ups, arbitrarily carved up by departing colonial administrators.

But there are some countries that don’t fit neatly into either of these categories, and Italy, where I’m currently on vacation, is one of the most interesting, attractive and compelling ones. Even the origins of the modern state are a matter of controversy: a sort of revolution against the various colonial, ex-colonial and quasi-colonial powers then ruling over Italy’s regions which morphed into an effective take-over by the rulers of the North-Western region of Piemonte. The cultural and ethnic coherence of the country is also a matter of debate – economic development and income levels are very uneven, and until fairly recently a majority of citizens spoke one of the many mutually unintelligible dialects at home rather than standard Italian. And in recent years a political party has emerged in the North which argues for the separation of Italy into two States, North and South; far from being a despised minority of head-banging extremists, these people are actually in government, as a key element in Berlusconi’s coalition.

The question of what Italy stands for and what it represents has become one of great importance and centrality; it is after all one of the world’s leading industrial powers and a member of the G7, and this commercial success has ensured until recently a good standard of living for most citizens and high levels of investment in public transportation, health and other services. In recent years, however, as Italy’s predominately small and medium-sized businesses have been seriously challenged by lower-cost competitors from Eastern Europe and Asia, economic growth has fallen to well below the levels of its European neighbours – and an ineffectual and dishonest government which is tolerated by some and profoundly detested by many others has done nothing to improve national morale. Living standards for the majority are steadily falling, as the individual and collective wealth built up over the past 50 years is slowly dilapidated, and jobs become scarcer and scarcer: large numbers of people in their 30s still live with their parents, unable to find permanent jobs well enough paid to buy or rent their own homes.

So Italy poses in a particularly acute form the question which we all face at the moment, irrespective of the rate of economic growth where we happen to live – is economic growth really all that nationhood and government are about? Italy offers an alternative answer to the question, blessed as it is with a unique and precious cultural heritage, exceptionally beautiful landscapes and a near-perfect climate (all of them significantly damaged by the breakneck race for growth of the past 60 years). We’ve all of us become blind to the beauty that surrounds us, prepared to destroy the heritage of centuries or millennia in exchange for a few more gadgets, another tank full of gas, a more powerful air-conditioner. Like all addictions, it’s unsustainable but also unstoppable – and the profits which this addiction gifts to huge corporations add an additional layer of compulsiveness and apparent inevitability. When the process starts to unwind, or stops altogether – what’s left? If you’re fortunate enough to live in Italy, a lot is left – everything that really matters, in fact – for those who have the eyes to see and the heart to love.

Perhaps a new Renaissance could emerge from this troubled country, a movement affirming the values of natural and created beauty and human love, friendship and solidarity, bringing light to a world which has lost its way; there are perhaps enough people here who believe it, and enough of a heritage to support it. That would be a mission worth following.

How to boil frogs

According to the latest climate data, June 2010 was yet another record-breaker. This graph comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a division of the US Department of Commerce, and shows it to have been the hottest month since they started keeping records in the 1880s. For much of July the North-eastern United States and the Moscow region of Russia have been baking in unprecedentedly high temperatures (over 100°F in New York City), and the consumption of electricity for air-conditioning also hit a record.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate has just decided to reject any kind of legislation restricting CO₂ emissions, thanks to the opposition of the entire Republican block and of coal-state and “Blue Dog” Democrats. Oh yes, and China for the first time passed the USA as the world’s no. 1 consumer of fossil fuels and emitter of greenhouse gases, having reduced its overall fuel efficiency by 14% over the past year thanks to a massive spike in coal and oil usage. Bear in mind that ownership of cars in China, though rising fast, is currently at about 1 per 30 people, compared with one per 2 or 3 in the USA (depending on how you count them). As for air-conditioners, about 15% of dwellings in China are fitted with some kind of unit (usually relatively small), compared with nearly 90% in the United States. All this, of course, without looking at rising fuel and electricity consumption in other large developing countries like Brazil, India, etc.

The reluctance of politicians to do anything serious about the problem, especially in the US, is as much as anything because they’re worried about being punished at the polls for doing so. Judging from opinion polls, the public regard terrorism, for instance, as a much higher priority – even though there have been no terrorist attacks on US citizens outside war zones for many years now. In other words, although the temperature in the pan is rising faster and faster, most of the frogs are staying put and denying that there’s anything’s wrong – “it’s just pleasantly warm”, or “these are natural fluctuations”, or “there’s nothing we can about it anyway”.

This reaction seems puzzling and counter-intuitive, even when you take into account the massive power of the fossil fuel industry and of its many stooges in the media. Many observers thought that the scale and visibility of the Gulf oil spill would lead to a massive public repudiation of oil and greater support for alternatives to it. (It appears so far to have been roughly 10 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill – whose effects are still being felt 20 years later – and in a much harder environment to clean up.) Yet this hasn’t happened either on any noticeable scale – and this can’t just be because the oil industry has doubled its lobbying expenditures over the past three months.

I mentioned in an earlier post the evolutionist argument that it’s because we’re not “wired” to respond to collective and long-distance threats like this: while the threat of terrorism, for instance, presses our “gotta protect my family” buttons, global warming is a relatively distant, vague and above all collective danger. This would also explain why the determination to combat global warming appears to be so much stronger in more collectively minded nations like Germany and Japan than it is in a powerhouse of rugged individualism like the USA.

There’s probably something in this argument – but it’s very well-worn, and it can all too quickly lead to a tedious reiteration of the standard liberal rant about wicked oil companies, evil Republicans, and people who are so cruel about that nice Al Gore. Above all, it conceals the real mystery about global warming – which isn’t the fact that North Americans are doing less about it than Europeans, but that the human race as a whole is responding to it so ineffectively. Yes, European CO₂ emissions are set to remain pretty static over the next 20 years, while China’s especially will probably rise dramatically (see third graph), but so what? – we’re all boiling in the same pan. And, unlike the frogs in the (apparently untrue) story, we have no way of jumping out.

The planet seems to be headed for a very fundamental transformation, which it’s clearly too late to reverse totally, and may well be too late even to mitigate significantly – even if the Americans and others currently unwilling to pay 20¢ a gallon extra for their gas suddenly become bicycle-riding tree-huggers. Like the (closely related) massive overpopulation of the planet with its concomitant exhaustion or contamination of so many of the Earth’s resources, it follows directly from our culture, our lifestyle, our economy, our value system and pretty much every aspect of the way we live. And neither God, nor Nature, nor Gaia, have ever written any guarantees that we’ll be able to continue this indefinitely; we’ve gone way out on our own limb over this.

The great scientist James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, doubts that we have the capacity to implement any solutions that would work anyway: "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 ... the only thing that can save the Earth at this point is the Earth itself.”

The coming transformation looks more and more like a spiritual one, as the level of contradiction and dissonance rises, and our current culture, economy and lifestyle become more and more disconnected from the Earth and from any kind of sustenance or sustainability. Whoever – if anybody – is here to see it, the world of 2110 is likely to be much more radically different from today than our world is from that of 1910.

The Lord is in this place. Terrible is this place

The Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park region of Wyoming, where I’m currently on vacation, is widely acknowledged as one of the wonders of the world. It not only contains astonishing scenery, with its cloud-high snow-frosted peaks, its fast diamond-clear rivers, and its densely packed pine forests and endless plains that stretch farther than the eye can see, but also a huge number and incredible variety of hydrothermal phenomena. As well as the famous geysers, there are giant puddles of boiling mud, opalescent crystal-filled pools with water at 75°C, and dark caves that belch forth clouds of steam and fountains of boiling grey water.

And then, a yet further gift, there’s enough wilderness in its almost uninhabited 3500+ square miles to sustain the only significant populations of indigenous large wildlife left in the USA: herds of bison, elk and moose, plus black and grizzly bears in sufficient numbers for most visitors to catch sight of one.

Yellowstone also offers a unique practical lesson in mutability and impermanence: its apparent tranquillity and unchangingness are the results of incidences of unimaginable turbulence, some in the distant past, some quite recent.

The sharp and jagged peaks of the Tetons, a mere nine million years old and therefore among the youngest mountain ranges on the planet, were hurtled up when the earth cracked along a gigantic fault line which is still active and which will produce further earthquakes sooner or later.

And the geysers and mud basins of Yellowstone are the visible evidence of several massive volcanic eruptions, the most recent 640,000 years ago. One day – perhaps quite soon, perhaps in hundreds of thousands of years’ time – the entire Yellowstone caldera, over 50 miles wide, will blow again, bringing year-round winters to the whole Northern hemisphere. Meanwhile the constant pressure of the lakes of magma just below the surface remake the landscape almost from year to year; a entire hillside is baked and all the trees scalded to death; geysers of mud subside into sullen, churning pools, while new geysers suddenly appear as if from nowhere. Nothing in our technology or mastery over nature enables us to withstand, or even to predict, any of these phenomena – we’re as helpless before them as are the bison and the elk.

So, you might think, instant enlightenment for anyone visiting this extraordinary place. All you need to do is to be here, and the rest will follow naturally – no work or preparation needed. But it doesn’t quite work like that – there’s room for everything in Yellowstone except the human ego, the motive force behind so much of what we’ve constructed and what we live for, and which we carry around with us everywhere we go. To appreciate Yellowstone requires surrender – and that’s not a familiar concept to most of us. Surrender of our personal goals, our attitudes and beliefs, our agendas and attachments – this is what Yellowstone calls for, and it’s a harder and more unfamiliar challenge than scaling its peaks or even facing down a grizzly bear.

Coming here, I find it easier as a foreigner to understand one dimension of American patriotism and exceptionalism – the idea of America as uniquely blessed and gifted – but then it’s hard to see how one gets from there to 50% of the world’s military expenditure, and a propensity to invade other countries thousands of miles away, or the right to bear guns, or the right for 4% of the earth’s population to consume 25% of its resources. And here I could veer off into a rant of my own – indulging and inflating my own (virtuous, liberal, and progressive) ego, puffing myself up with polemical self-righteousness, quite forgetting where – and who – I am.

The politics of Wyoming is probably somewhat murky – after all, its most famous living scion is none other than Dick Cheney – but one doesn’t come here for the politics; the gift of this place is the chance it gives us to surrender to and to acknowledge a grandeur which isn’t of our making, and which is far greater than anything we could ever conceive of. And who am I to say how many of those visitors and locals who respond to and receive the grandeur of Yellowstone are loyal Republicans? Such considerations are as far beneath the notice of the surrendered mind as the wildflower-dotted plains are from the remote peak of the Grand Teton.

Worshipping the Leader

No one visiting Turkey, as I did recently, can fail to notice the omnipresent images of this man, who died over 70 years ago. There are photos of him in every hotel, public building, and school, as well as in most restaurants and bars, plus innumerable statues in parks and squares – and Istanbul’s airport is named after him, for good measure.

Mustapha Kemal, who chose for himself the name by which he’s generally known, Atatürk (“Father of the Turks”), belongs in that small group of national leaders who can claim not merely to have shaped but pretty much to have made their nations. And even compared with men like De Gaulle, Lenin or Mao Zedong, Atatürk’s achievement and lasting influence on his country was extraordinarily far-reaching.

He grew up in the final years of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, which had once ruled across great swathes of Eastern Europe and the Middle and Near East but which was by now reduced to an enfeebled rump within and around Turkey itself, as neighbouring powers such as Austria-Hungary and Russia picked off and annexed its former colonies. For proud and patriotic young army officers like Mustapha Kemal, Turkey, still ruled by the Sultan and under Islamic law as it had been hundreds of years previously, was an anachronism and an embarrassment in a world dominated by modern technocracies such as Great Britain and the United States.

In the chaos that followed the end of World War I, when the Sultan’s disastrous decision to ally Turkey with Germany led to the country’s occupation by the victorious British and French forces, Mustapha Kemal gradually emerged as the country’s uncontested leader, successfully fighting for and achieving full independence.

Over the next ten years he carried out some of the most far-reaching changes that any country has ever undergone in peacetime: the Sultanate was abolished and Turkey became a presidential republic, the language and writing system were changed from Arabic to Roman script, property and other rights for women were introduced to put them on a (nearly) equal footing with men, and the traditional fez (shown in this photo) and baggy trousers were abolished as both men and women were encouraged to wear modern Western clothing. And, most important of all, Islamic law was abolished and state and religion separated, as Turkey became the only formally secular state in the entire Muslim world – a status which it has rigorously conserved ever since.

It’s not surprising, then, that Turks should revere the memory of this extraordinary man, but what is perhaps surprising is the extent to which he has become sacred and untouchable. Criticizing or maligning Atatürk or his legacy is an offence potentially punishable by imprisonment (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jan/28/turkey.helenasmith), and Turkey recently joined the select ranks of countries that have banned YouTube when part of a documentary was posted referring to Atatürk’s heavy drinking. His relatively early death at the age of 57 was brought about by cirrhosis of the liver, but this could never be suggested in a book or newspaper published in Turkey. There are many rumours about his private life, that he was a womanizer, or even gay – his only marriage lasted a mere two years – but, again, such things are never discussed in Turkey itself.

So here’s the interesting question: is this phenomenon archaic, oppressive and undemocratic, or does it merely represent due respect for a man who towered above the rest of us as much as did Einstein or Beethoven? Especially for those of us who live in the English-speaking world, the very idea of a “great leader” is suspect, calling up images of the deluded and psychotic Kim Jong-Il. We relish stories about JFK’s philandering, and about how FDR concealed his disablement from the American public and was cuckolded by his wife. As far as we’re concerned, all our leaders have feet of clay and hands that stray, and we seem to take delight in demolishing them – some if not most of President Obama’s current difficulties derive from this by now well ingrained habit.

And yes, this is healthy to some extent – many of the worst atrocities of recent history have been committed by people blindly obeying their rulers – but it has its obverse too. It does seem to go with a widespread pettiness and meanness of spirit, an obsession with personal trivia, and a refusal to believe that anyone's eyes could be set on further or higher goals than instant self-gratification and self-aggrandisement. The status that Atatürk continues to enjoy in Turkey, for all the many anomalies it throws up, is an attempt to enshrine a belief in greatness of spirit and nobility of purpose in the fabric of the country’s daily life. After all, there are greater rights, and more important duties, than “taking the mick” and watching piano-playing cats on YouTube.

It is a beautiful game

In June 1969 a second hotly contested World Cup qualifying match between Honduras and El Salvador was played in near riot conditions, with violence between fans and players spilling on to the pitch. Shortly afterwards the Salvadorian armed forces started to strike targets within Honduras, and what’s often described as “The Football War” broke out.

This incident, which took place over 40 years ago, is often quoted as a counter-example when anyone argues that international football promotes peace and harmony among the nations – yet what’s striking about it is that it’s pretty much a one-off. While there have been innumerable near-riots and many ugly incidents of racial intolerance in club-level football, international games – especially those played between national teams – have been amazingly free of such incidents.

This fact is especially surprising when you consider that the purpose of these matches is to establish rankings among countries – and what is potentially more inflammatory for a thin-skinned patriot than to discover that his father/motherland has been eliminated by a traditional rival or hated neighbour? But that isn’t generally what happens, and the current World Cup provides many examples.

Walking past a bar in Paris yesterday during the France-South Africa match (in which les Bleus were playing for a last slim chance to stay in the competition) I heard a great cheer of triumph from the assembled TV-watchers. Assuming that France had at last taken the lead, I looked in at the screen to check my supposition, and was amazed to see that the goal they had been cheering was actually South Africa’s – the first of the match. This morning’s newspapers offered the explanation that the France team had been behaving so disgracefully and playing so poorly that the fans were hoping rather for a South African triumph which at least would have enabled the host nation to qualify for the next round.

In fact, the World Cup offers a chance for nations to experience themselves, and each other, in quite a different way from the usual economic and productivist perspective of the media. Tiny Slovenia suddenly becomes the equal of the United States, while South Africa sends France back home to lick their wounds. Even semi-pariah nations enjoy their moments of respect and glory: Serbia, the scars of the ruinous conflicts of the 1990s still far from healed, overcomes Germany, and North Korea is able for a moment at least to challenge mighty Brazil.

And for the first time in many years the rest of the world sees North Koreans as footballers like any others, with their families at home cheering them on and their hopes and fears, their challenges and disappointments – rather than as the figures of fun or horror which are usually presented.

The Ivory Coast, normally associated with an ongoing civil war and massive official corruption, meets Portugal, ten times more affluent even in the midst of its debt crisis, and they play a good-humored game which leaves them equal (0-0) in a way which in the “real world” they perhaps never will be.

Isn’t there a glimpse here of a world which might be but which we rarely experience, where people are valued for themselves, not for their material assets or their economic potential, and where passion, skill, teamwork and creativity are enough to extricate oneself from the most hopeless situation? If football is a metaphor for life it’s a very optimistic one, and everyone, winners and losers alike, will go home from South Africa with a little more faith in humanity.

To the children who never lived

Wandering around the green hills and valleys of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris’s busy and crowded 19th district (which I wrote about in an earlier post), one comes across this neat, slightly anonymous-looking green stele, with its troubling image of two hands reaching in vain for one another.
It’s a monument to the several hundred Jewish children of the district who were sent to their deaths in the concentration camps during the WW2 German occupation of France, and in particular to the 33 little ones who were too young even to have started school.

In fact, there are plaques and steles to these vanished children all around this area of Paris: they’re outside most of the schools and in many public squares. While the Nazi death machine – which became more frenetic as the war went on and as Germany’s eventual defeat became more certain – claimed French Jews from all walks of life, the inhabitants of North-East Paris were among the most vulnerable and defenceless. Recent immigrants or refugees, poor and already dispossessed, barely speaking French in many cases, what chance did they stand when even the wealthy and well-integrated Jews of the affluent western districts, French citizens for many generations, were stripped of their property and possessions and forced to wear the despised yellow star?

And what fragment of a chance did their children stand – the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, therefore the ones whom it’s our implicit duty as human beings to protect and defend – when this incomprehensible madness was raging all around them?

I don’t think we can enter into the mental world of people who are prepared to send not-yet-weaned children to be exterminated because of their racial origin, and I doubt that we should even try; it’s something which only a few writers have attempted, and with very patchy success. Perhaps the novelist E.M. Forster’s injunction to “only connect” doesn’t apply in this uniquely appalling case; perhaps the duty to oppose it in all its manifestations overrides any need to comprehend it, let alone to empathise.

Because this kind of mindset does continue to manifest itself, albeit usually in less extreme forms. I’m not referring merely to outbreaks of genocidal hatred such as those in Rwanda or former Yugoslavia, but to any and every time that an idea or ideology takes such possession of people’s minds as to override compassion, humility and even common sense. I’m talking, for instance, about the so-called “birthers” in the United States who are convinced despite all the evidence that President Obama was born in Kenya, and that he’s an alien interloper bent on imposing totalitarian socialism. Or the Chinese ideologues who claim that the Dalai Lama is an evil and power-mad plotter seeking to undermine the unity of the Chinese nation, or the followers of a religion whose very name means “peace” but who claim that it sanctifies random mass murder – and so many, many others.

Most of the misery that people have inflicted one each other stems from this unfortunate deformity of the human mind, whereby we can elevate an idea, a mere construct, above all the other impulses, emotions, experiences and impressions which go to shape our actions. It’s something which we all need to guard against.

Let’s pause a while to reflect and to shudder, and, in the moving words of the stele in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont: “Passer-by, read their names. Your memory is their only burial.”