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.