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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 13, 2010
Backward, ho!
We have quoted before the credo of Delhi's three-wheel drivers -- "a path will emerge" -- and given the pessimist tone in many of our recent effusions, we are perhaps overdue to lob something from the side of hope."We" in the sense of "I," naturally. The droll-royal pose is meant to emphasize that I speak for a committee of one. (And just because I am a little hopeful, is no reason my reader should be!) Why, judging from e-mail, I am hardly alone in my belief that the whole world is progressing towards catastrophe on overlapping fronts: pretty much everything, except global warming. My column last Wednesday mentioned a plausible timeline for the American economic meltdown, and I tried to relate this to dangers abroad. The country that has long been the "captain of the West" is floundering, itself under the leadership of a demagogue who is innocent of knowledge about how the world works, and whose own allies in party and media are rapidly turning against him -- for all the wrong reasons, but then what else is new? And, while that president is consulting with advisers to decide "whose ass to kick" (over a mere oil leak), America's posterior is being displaced in every single East-West encounter. More generally, we (truly, we) are watching the collapse of the Nanny State, into bankruptcy and soon perhaps hyperinflation, not only in Greece but everywhere, at a time when the same Nanny State, or rather her evaporating military-industrial complex, is the only thing standing between us and some real, armed monsters. Although history never repeats itself, except awkwardly and approximately, we are in the metaphorical sense back in the 1930s. Which is to say, flat broke, getting fiscally dust-bowled, and not yet even half aware of the war clouds on the horizon. And this despite enemies that make no secret of their desire that we should become extinct. (And are progressing now towards making Israel extinct, by way of clarifying their position. And while we are washing our hands like Pilate.) Which is where I look for hope: to the clouds. For if it is beginning to rain tarnish, they must have a silver lining. A merciful God allows us to suffer the consequences of our stupidities, including especially our moral stupidities, even in this world. It does not always seem merciful at the time. But just as nature has a way of rectifying her imbalances -- painfully, perhaps, but effectively all the same -- so human nature contains the seeds of recovery. Disaster can be our friend. Europeans, outside the Nazi-Fascist Axis, and North Americans were as utterly unprepared for the horsemen of the apocalypse riding their way in the 1930s, as we are today. In fact, they were materially less well-prepared, though spiritually perhaps rather sounder. Nevertheless, the spirit of denial, which includes the desire to focus on problems that aren't real, to avoid staring at the real ones, was so alive in our predecessors that their naiveté has become our cliché. But I think the tests we face from abroad may, this time around, be matched by the tests we face domestically. And for those I think we are even less prepared. A friend, stranded in Barcelona recently by the spoutings of a volcano in Iceland, made observations that did not surprise me. She described the way in which all the cool young smug people were freaking out, because their flights were cancelled. Money they still had, and alternative arrangements easily available, and yet they could not cope. Their dependency on the artificial space into which they had wired themselves was on open display. We are going to see a lot of this. Ditto, anywhere. I see this on view every day, because I am a walker and do not drive a car. I find myself immersed in an urban street life that many of my contemporaries only pass through, on their way to and from their parking spaces. I am made constantly aware that, thanks to cellphones and the like, even the poorest of my neighbours have been living "elsewhere." That is to say, we are living out lives in which the focus of our attention is constantly displaced from the here and now, towards any number of fidgeting external distractions, in a "virtual reality" that disappears in the first moment of a power failure. So that, when something happens in the here and now, transcending the technological order, and muting all sources of external entertainment, we are at a loss. Yet on the bright side, we live in bodies with brains that are themselves hard-wired for responding to present place and time. The trick of coping with reality can return, fairly quickly, when one is continuously exposed to it. Illusions pass, and we are entering a time in which our own illusions are shattering nicely. In worldly terms, this is my reason to hope -- that things will finally improve, as all our post-modern trends start reversing. For all trends are reversible, and backwards is the direction of hope, for people caught up a blind alley. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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