DISSOLVING TOWERS

       “At midnight East Germany's rulers gave permission for gates along the Wall to be opened. Ecstatic crowds immediately began to hack large chunks out of the 45-kilometre barrier.” (BBC News, 9 Nov 1989.) And of course, within less than a year every single Communist régime in Eastern Europe had fallen, including the most intractably authoritarian such as Romania and Albanian  to be followed soon after by the Soviet Union itself.

       Most people in the West were taken by utter surprise; we’d grown up with this division of the continent and of the world itself into two armed and opposing blocs, and it was unthinkable – far more unthinkable than all-out nuclear war – that one of them should simply crumble. It’s not surprising that the Western reaction for quite a few years afterwards was euphoric: freedom, democracy, the human spirit or entrepreneurial individualism (take your pick) had triumphed, authenticating a narrative of ever-onward-and upward evolution. Not to mention the vindication of Western more or less social-democratic capitalism as the most advanced form of social organisation on the planet, destined to triumph over all in the long run.

       But if what actually happened in 1989 was not the end but the start of a process which is continuing and accelerating today? What if it was the first major sign of the loosening of the structures which underpin all our societies and economies – the harbinger of a coming age of instability? Just under 12 years later another utterly unexpected and unthinkable event took place – this one not at all welcomed in the West at least. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere would probably never have happened without 9/11 – and even Dick Cheney would find it hard to assert that they've made the world safer or more stable.

       And since then further towers (metaphorically) have collapsed or are in the process of collapsing. The European Union – guarantor of peace and freedom in Europe, benevolent guardian spirit of a post-nationalist, post-conflictual continent – is degenerating into a protection racket for the richer nations’ bankers, and national mistrust and resentment are at levels not seen since World War 2. Apparently monolithic régimes in the Arab world have crumbled or are crumbling – positive of course in terms of increased individual freedom, but again significantly increasing global instability.

       And the greatest source of instability of all, the one we scarcely dare to think about, is climate change. How many more hurricanes like Sandy or worse, how many more catastrophic droughts; how many more ruined harvests and flooded cities? Will the world as we know it still be habitable with a 4°C rise in global temperature? (it won’t).

       People’s instinctive reaction faced with collapsing structures is to try to shore them up: the purpose of Gorbachev’s reforms was to ensure the survival of Communism, not to destroy it; Angela Merkel, Mario Draghi and fellows are desperate to preserve the EU and the euro. Our need for structure goes back to our earliest years; as children we’re dependent on a stable family not only for our physical maintenance but for our emotional security and even our sense of our own selves – the children of disrupted and turbulent families generally grow into adults with serious behavioural and emotional problems. Even in work most people would rather be employees of stable, even static, predictable organisations than launch out on their own personal journeys.

       Yet unfortunately the one universal generalisation which can be made about human structures is that they don’t last: empires, dynasties and social and economic systems all pass away in the end. As the I Ching puts it: “Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos.”

       Order and chaos are twin poles, or attractors in modern scientific terminology, between which all systems oscillate; when they near one extreme rebounding towards the other, like a pendulum.

       We might well prefer to live at the point where the pendulum is swinging towards increasing order, but we don’t; and we’re going to have to live with ever-greater social and geophysical disorder – to what point before the pendulum swings back no one knows. We’d better be prepared to cultivate flexibility of mind, non-attachment, and the long view. Eventually even the pendulum of the earth’s climate will swing back again – perhaps in 100, perhaps in 10,000 years’ time; perhaps with and perhaps without the human race. These times are an invitation to grow beyond the childish attachment to structures, to learn to embrace the formlessness from which all forms are born.

REMEMBRANCE

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? 
Only the monstrous anger of the guns ...
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells,
And bugles calling from sad shires. (Wilfred Owen)

What or who is it that we remember on Remembrance Day – those 95% of us who have no personal experience of being at war; those of us for whom ‘total war’ belongs to the lives of dimly remembered grandparents or great-grandparents, as remote from our own lives as the narrow, black-and-white, stiffly dressed world in which they grew up?

It’s not the wars of my own lifetime that I think about – Afghanistan, Iraq, or the Falklands – nor even the Second World War which shaped my own childhood and created the world I grew up in. The war which haunts my imagination – and of so many other people – is WWI: the war to whose remembrance this day was first consecrated, in 1919.

My only personal link is a tiny photo of a grandfather who died when I was a small child; he's seated on a camel in Egypt, only his uniform dating and locating the event. Those who had fought in the war (my friends’ grandparents) were already elderly by the time I was old enough to ask them about it – and I never wanted to. Yet what they experienced has passed into my imagination, has changed me, has changed us all. We can't forget, even what we never directly knew:

- Passchandaele: July-November 1917. 850,000 men died. It rained for a month without stopping and thousands  drowned in the mud.
- Verdun: February-December 1916. Almost 1,000,000 died. The battle started with a terrifying ten-hour artillery bombardment which could be heard 150 km away.
- The Somme: July-November 1916. Over 1,200,000 died. On the British side alone average losses were 2,930 a day.

In the end, numbers numb – a good reason to call them by that name. It’s above all the words of those who were there that still echo in our hearts and in our minds:

They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud.
O Jesus, make it stop! (Siegfried Sassoon)

No one really ‘won’ the First World War. Among the Allies, supposedly victors, the survivors went home, many of them physically or mentally broken, to a world with not enough jobs for them (even in Britain, unemployment never fell below 10% throughout the 1920s) – despite the war’s scything through the ranks of working-age men.

In other countries the devastation was even worse. Travel around rural France and count the names on the war memorials in every small town and tiny village: a generation of men wiped out, a generation of women left to mourn their lost loves or never to know love at all for the rest of their lives in those rigid and closed communities. Meanwhile in Germany the revenge inflicted by the victors at Versailles was leading to the triumph of Nazism, and less than 15 years after the end of the war Hitler was elected Chancellor.

I believe that some collective experiences are so intensely traumatic that they come to rest in the consciousness of all humanity or at least a whole nation: the Holocaust is just such a case, and for China the Cultural Revolution. So was the First World War; something important remains behind, and it’s right that we should remember – not because they died to save our freedom, but for a much simpler reason.

As Wilfred Owen wrote shortly before he died, in the preface to a planned collection of his poems:
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. All a poet can do today is warn.

We who were never there and who can scarcely begin to imagine what it was like can still feel the pity he spoke about. When all else has gone, that remains.