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.