I normally write about environmental science and technology but I can’t help but notice when governments and economies behave like damaged environmental systems or unstable high voltage oscillators. Global economies have taxed future generations via inflationary policies and amplified the gap between wealth and poverty. The hot smell of ozone should warn us that a fuse is about to blow.
Donald Trump, the cults of violence, the treatment of refugees, unnecessary wars and Thursday’s Brexit vote demonstrate that even the wealthiest, most stable, well-educated and sensible countries can choose a self-destructive path as described in W.B. Yeat’s poem, “The Second Coming”, written in the grim aftermath of World War I:
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…
Charts, reports and spreadsheets can illuminate the logical side of our brain but they don’t burn at the core of our soul in the way that art, poetry and music can. The Brexit vote painted British artists into a corner along with other residents of the UK. But as free-willed thinkers, artists can counter-balance the madness of crowds and reconnect citizens of the world to one another and to a brighter future.
Anne Frank and Studio Syria defy our one-dimensional stereotypes of refugees. Picasso illustrates the horrors of war in Guernica. Kubric and Kusterica show us its madness. In his Trois couleurs trilogy, director Krzysztof Kieślowski explores the three pillars of democracy. Composer Zbigniew Preisner gives us a powerful vision of hope, love and peace in his Song for the Unification of Europe, crucial dimensions of the European Union that many seem to have forgotten.
Artists can help us re-balance our stories of hope and fear. In the tragedy that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a whale sunk The Essex. The captain and crew considered sailing their lifeboats to nearby Tahiti, but rumors of cannibals grew into a large and well-defined fear in their minds. They ignored the more abstract fear of starvation and sailed thousands of miles to the coast of South America, and they themselves resorted to cannibalism, eight survivors having consumed seven of their mates.
This is much like the way our fear of terrorism trumps the more likely but hard to imagine risks of climate change, pollution and environmental destruction.
In a reflection of the tale of the Essex castaways, the English county of Essex had one of the highest Brexit leave votes. The imagined fear of immigrants and refugees made for a better story than the undefined fear of what happens when the UK sets itself adrift.
Photo of Nicola Telsa via Wikipedia. Tesla expressed no fear of high voltage electricity. But he was deathly afraid of pearls.
Author: Brian Nitz
Brian remembers when a single tear dredged up a nation's guilt. The tear belonged to an Italian-American actor known as Iron-Eyes Cody, the guilt was displaced from centuries of Native American mistreatment and redirected into a new environmental awareness. A 10-year-old Brian wondered, 'What are they... No, what are we doing to this country?' From a family of engineers, farmers and tinkerers Brian's father was a physics teacher. He remembers the day his father drove up to watch a coal power plant's new scrubbers turn smoke from dirty grey-back to steamy white. Surely technology would solve every problem. But then he noticed that breathing was difficult when the wind blew a certain way. While sailing, he often saw a yellow-brown line on the horizon. The stars were beginning to disappear. Gas mileage peaked when Reagan was still president. Solar panels installed in the 1970s were torn from roofs as they were no longer cost-effective to maintain. Racism, public policy and low oil prices transformed suburban life and cities began to sprawl out and absorb farmland. Brian only began to understand the root causes of "doughnut cities" when he moved to Ireland in 2001 and watched history repeat itself. Brian doesn't...
The Brits opened Pandora’s Box with this one. Even if they were to hold another referendum it may be too late to go back to what was. What was is gone forever.
Yes they did. To be fair, most democracies would make the same mistake under similar circumstances. “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” — H.L. Mencken. The story that “Once upon a time everything was wonderful, until THOSE people came.” is easy to tell, plausible, and wrong.
Great article Brian. Thanks for sharing. It’s not going to be an easy sail mirroring it in Arabic as idiomatically as it deserves. Especially that Yeats poem. But I’ll try.
I look forward to reading more posts of your.
Thanks Basel. Wow, Yeats in Arabic, you’ve taken on quite a challenge. I wish I was fluent to be able to read it!
If you’re against global economies, why do you consider it self-destructive when the UK opts for a more local economy?
Good question, I’m not against global economies, I’m against the way they are managed to suck resources and money out of the poor in order to increase the wealth of the wealthy. Connect a partially-inflated balloon to a fully inflated one and you’ll see this happen. But humans are rational and can defy this natural tendency. In the long-run, inequality hurts the wealthy as much as it hurts the poor.
The UK already opted for a more local economy by keeping their own currency and central bank separate from the E.U. Ireland, Greece, Spain and Italy don’t have the option of deflating their currency or manipulating interest rates to match their economic output. The UK had the sweetest deal in the EU and they decided to walk away from it.