Tag: Rebecca Solnit

How will they see us fifty years from now?

Impute a moral basis to society and you’re immediately on dangerous ground. If it’s hard to define morality in individuals how much harder is it to define morality in society. To keep the subject at a practical level I’m taking the UN declaration on human rights (see below) is a starting-point. But, as the issue of climate change exemplifies, it is only a starting-point. We have a responsibility to our own generations – but also to future generations.

American writer, Rebecca Solnit, in ‘Hope in the Dark’ (new edition 2016) asks ‘how human beings a half century or a century from now will view us … when climate change was recognised, and there was so much that could be done about it .. They may … see us as people who squandered their patrimony … regard us as people who rearranged the china when the house was on fire.’

She may be right, but new generations have always had the ability to adapt to their circumstances. Their world is the ‘new’ normal. Radicals will challenge it, as ever. And conservatives defend, as if the world had always been this way.

We must always beware complacency. Politics (not society as while) has over the last forty years lost its moral narrative. So many would argue. Some on the political right would counter that society shouldn’t have a moral narrative: the market, the free market, is the best determinant of human fortunes, and the state should interfere in only the most minimalist of ways. This also includes any attempt at world governance, so the United Nations and its various agencies, the WHO and the like, will always be suspect.

The Preamble to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a reminder of how moral purpose was defined in 1948 – and a marker against which we can judge our present society.

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, … Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations

(NB The Preamble refers to ‘peoples’, not ‘nations’.)

Steven Pinker (psychologist, and author of ‘Enlightenment Now’, published in 2018) might not dissent, but he has an optimism which many of us wouldn’t share. He sees the progress in reducing inequality around the world (primarily in China and developing countries) as proof that moral purpose is still embedded in our society. Looked at in numerical terms there’s also been a massive reduction in violence (see ‘The Better Angels  of Our Nature’, published in 2011). This, he’d argue, is the working out of reason, the highest Enlightenment ideal.

There are powerful counter-arguments against both positions.  Inequality, and indeed poverty, and violence are still deep-woven into our society. Natural or man-induced calamities could have catastrophic consequences.

Reason, for Pinker, underpins progress and progress is essential, and sustainable. Take the environment as an example. He sees the damage done by carbon emissions, but the answer, he argues, is not to rail against consumption. Consumption is tied to many human goods, not least keeping cool in summer, and warm in winter. To quote from Andrew Anthony’s 2018 interview with Pinker in The Guardian, ‘how do we get the most human benefit with the least human damage’.

Pinker is right. We need, all of us, to take great care in lambasting consumption. Most people might well agree in principle, but demur when it affects them. We cannot avoid in society as currently constituted the kind of focus on science and technology, working in a capitalist context, that Pinker would advocate.

But how does Pinker imagine we got to where we are now? He rests too comfortably in the present. His argument for reason of necessity plays down the role the passions have played in driving social progress over the more than 250 years since the ‘Encyclopedie’ was published in 1750s France.

The old working class has to a great degree been ‘brought into the community – as voters, as citizens, as participants’. (See ‘Ill Fares The Land’, by the historian, Tony Judt, 2010) We didn’t get there simply by the exercise of reason. We avoided revolution, in Western Europe, but not by much. Post-war society addressed the five wants (squalor, want, ignorance, disease, and idleness) highlighted in 1942 by William Beveridge head on. But we’re now faced with what Judt described as ‘the social consequences of technological change’, as the nature of work changes radically. Judt was prescient. The historian, Peter Hennessy, has recently put forward five wants for a post-Covid times: solving social care, social housing, technical education, climate change, artificial intelligence.

Finding answers will require passion and moral purpose, and the application of enlightened and far-sighted ideas. Consumption will not get us there. (Though high levels of consumption are imperative if we’re to keep the economy firing at the level it will need to do if goals are to be met. High ideals, in the old phrase, butter no parsnips.)

Yes, capitalism will drive the foreseeable future as it has the recent past. (How it might be reconstituted is a whole other subject.) But it will challenged by, and ultimately will have no choice but to come to terms with, crises of inequality, population, resource exploitation and climate which could spell the world’s demise.

Pinker is not wrong: we have made progress in the context of human values and living conditions. But we are also radically dis-connecting from the natural world, changing permanently our ways of communicating, and our environment. We are heading into territory we don’t understand. We may or may not have the wherewithal to deal with this new dispensation when we get there. Dis-connect is high risk. Having the wherewithal doesn’t mean it will in any sense be a good place.

Science in this sense cannot be morally neutral. And does sometimes get on a roll, and head in directions which are high risk.  The theory of evolution took on a life of its own. The splitting of the atom opened a Pandora’s box we have no way of closing. Neuroscience and AI are working in tandem toward higher forms of intelligence which may yet radically change who we are as human beings. *

Rebecca Solnit imagined an observer in fifty tears time who is very much a replica of a typical individual in our own time. But we may be moving into very different spaces by that time.

Back to the UN Charter and its focus on ‘the dignity and worth of human person’. We vest in them specific meanings which we cannot take for granted.

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* The Economist, referring to academics who worry about existential risk, which could be super-eruptions, climate collapse, geomagnetic storms and the like, comments that they ‘frequently apply a time-agnostic version of utilitarianism which sees “humanity’s long-term potential” as something far grander than the lives of billions on Earth today: trillions and trillions of happy lives of equal worth lived over countless millennia to come’.   The Economist is referring specifically to Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute.  We should indeed be engaged deeply  in such matters. But while doing so let’s never forget – the worth and the moral worth of each individual in the here and now has to be our starting-point.

Seize the day

‘And then every now and then, the possibilities explode. In these moments of rupture, people find themselves members of a ‘we’ that did not until then exist, at least not as an entity with agency and identity and potency; new possibilities suddenly emerge, or that old dream of a just society re-emerges and – at least for a little while – shines.’ (Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark, 3rd ed 2016)

We’ve had a week of protest in American cities following the murder of George Floyd. It’s at another level compared to anything I can remember – even compared to Chicago in 1968. Protests continue against police brutality and the wider issues connected with the Black Lives Matter movement. Coronavirus, fear on the one hand, jobs under threat, or already disappeared, on the other, is also a very real, and divisive, issue. And there’s Donald Trump, stoking the fires.

America has again that sense that change might be possible. In 2008, Obama just elected, we’d a sense of a vision which might be actualised. (And maybe it would rub off a little in the UK and Europe. ) Now it’s simply that the need for change must be more than recognised, it must be acted on. I don’t want to look at possible agendas for change. Americans can do that better than Brits. But what we as Brits, and Europeans, want to see is the USA coming together again. Politicians of different persuasions speaking to each other, devising common agendas.

And that is hard, just because the American hard right has pushed a defensive, free-market at all costs, and fundamentally anti-intellectual agenda. A white American agenda. Racism engrained, inherited wealth a sign of blessing, poverty the result of indolence. The courting of the ‘theo-cons’, the religious right, and their supposedly divinely-blessed socially-conservative agenda, with Trump picking up and bearing their standard in the most naked display of self-interest in American history.

What has suffered are ideas and argument and debate. As with all populist regimes, in Europe and the UK. Working in book publishing for the last few decades I saw it coming with the emergence of a new strand of avowedly right-wing publishing in the USA, a reaction to what was seen as a liberal consensus. The ‘problem’ with a liberal consensus is that it is about inclusion, about opportunity for all, and about safety nets, in the best Beveridge tradition, and indeed it seeks consensus. Trickle-down economics as a story gave Reaganite economics credibility for a while. Rising inequality has given the lie to that. In the UK as the USA. No more Peter Mandelson: ‘We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.’ (Though, to be fair, he did add, ‘as long as they pay their taxes.’ And that’s another big big issue.)

Argument and debate can in the current climate only get us so far. We now have a desire for change. Not just in the USA. But a wider desire, across countries and issues, as we come out of coronavirus much more aware of who really matters, and what really matters, in society. (We’ve a government which wants to get us back on to the same old rails, as soon as possible, though it’s looking possible, given their incompetence that they might go completely off the rails in the process.)

Status and pay for nurses and social care workers – and, for example, supermarket shelf-stackers, who are also taking risks, as key workers. This requires a new and radical activism. But street demos aren’t an option. Here at least. Only – not so. Thousands demonstrated yesterday in support of US demonstrators, and with their own ‘Black Lives Matter’, here in the UK as well, agenda. It may be that causes can combine, and a wider activism generate real hope and expectation for change. And renewed hope can in turn generate activism.

In this country we’ve also seen the despair, so under-reported, that’s resulted from austerity measures in recent years. However grand the current government’s spending plans are, restoring some of the more brutal austerity cuts hasn’t been been considered.

Now has to be the time to break out. To get active. Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Hope in the Dark’ was first published in 2004, and a primary focus was the anti-Iraq War movement of 2003. The war happened, with terrible consequences, but there have been many other instances where pressure from below, from outsiders, has seeded change. Solnit writes, ‘Activism can itself generate hope because it already constitutes an alternative and turns always from corruption at the centre to face the wild possibilities and the heroes at the edges on your side.’

Climate change already has its heroes. A wider activism will generate a few more. Who they will be in this country only time will tell. And we should include, not exclude. Hard practical agendas as well as wild possibilities. I’ve hopes Labour under Keir Starmer might take a lead. But let’s not exclude renegade Tories. At a street level, there will be new leaders and new movements. As the anti-war movement demonstrated they may get nowhere. But there is now an opportunity, of a kind we haven’t seen for quite a while.

The USA has at least an election coming up, focusing minds as almost never before. We are lumbered with our least-liberated government for a generation or two. But given evidence of an almost unprecedented level of incompetence, and a Brexit agenda radically unsuited to the times, who can tell where our politics might lead.

All we know is we have uncertain times, massively uncertain. And we should not them slip by without turning them to our advantage.