It is the season of resolutions - and already I am seeing the usual op-ed pieces about a new year and a new you. Just as certain magazines are filled with the standard-issue January articles on crash diets and dealing with post-Christmas gloom. As I said on my January 1st posting I have no resolutions this year. Because I know I will just frustrate myself by setting out a shopping list of what I need to change about moi-meme. Just as I have no time for the sort of psychobabble which tells someone in crisis - wanting to leave a spouse or partner, for example - to draw up a list of all the reasons to stay and to go. Even if the reasons to go far outnumber the reasons to remain, we all know how wildly hard it is to break up a relationship of considerable standing... or even a short-term one where there is already much emotionally at stake. I am always a little cautious when encountering someone who seems to have all the definitive answers to the mess that is life. It’s like a mother I know who would always proclaim that ‘family is everything’, but act in the most narcissistically destructive way possible towards her children. Or a fellow who once proclaimed to me that anyone who cheated on their spouse was beyond despicable, and began to condemn Bill Clinton for being the lowest of the low... making me ask him where and when he earned the right to sound like a Puritan Hanging Judge in Boston circa 1645 (and yes, this guy got caught having an affair some months later) Of course if you dare disagree with someone who holds such a Manichean world view he or she usually goes on the attack. Modern political debate is, for the most part, so shrill, so lacking in intellectual rigour and nuance, so grounded in stirring up populist and nationalist fears, and so counter-cerebral (a word I’ve just invented). And with the BBC under threat from the Tories, with once social democratic European governments slashing arts and education budgets (you could fund every orchestra in Europe for ten years for the price of one Cruise missle), and with the rampant anti-intellectualism that underscores so much of the Republican Party in my own country... I truly find myself thinking: we are denuding education and a quality of cultural life that is so essential for all societies, and allowing the plutocratic, hyper-mercantilism of our time to set the entire social agenda... and we are going to find ourselves, unless it is checked, back in a quasi-Victorian vision of society that is even more Socially Darwinistic and so profoundly unfair. And I know that, by articulating such views, certain people will call me a well-heeled socialist. Actually I do believe in the free market - but one which is tempered by social democracy and which puts education (in all its academic and cultural guises) at the forefront. Am I being alarmist? Absolutely. Because I do think there is growing cause for alarm in an increasingly shrill, fractious, ever-nationalist world.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 04:39:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015