15 September 2020
IS IT time, in a mood of some despair, to go back to bed, to play the piano (as my next-door neighbour has just been doing, very prettily) or to do some transcendental meditation?
Not the first, quite possibly the second and certainly – because of the deep relaxation it will very likely impart – the third.
The question is prompted after reading a piece by John Harris in yesterday’s Guardian. The headline serves as a warning: Disruption and destruction: the new way of ruling Britain.
If that sends a chill through your prefrontal cortex, read no further. If on the other hand your subgenus anterior cingulate cortex – that region of the brain associated with conquest of fears – authorises you to proceed, see what you think.
So Harris quotes the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, from his book Intimations of Postmodernity, in which Bauman summarises the French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s “portrayal of a culture in which ‘images represent nothing but themselves, information does not inform, [and] desires turn into their own objectives’.”
This, Harris says, shines a penetrating light on the politics of today. “If a policy provokes, that may be its only point; when anything triggers anger and upset, the outrage will quickly drift away from what caused it, and itself become the focus of the argument. There is little point looking for anything more solid or certain.”
Tellingly, Baudrillard wrote, in 1981, long, long before we were open to being saturated by internet-borne data: “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
Harris observes: “The social media age surely proves him right: as the online US magazine Vox recently put it, the ‘sheer volume of content, the dizzying number of narratives and counter-narratives, and the pace of the news cycle are too much for anyone to process’ ”.
As he says, this is why, amidst endless crises, the people at the heart of the UK government are unbowed. “Old conventions about probity can now safely be ignored, so Dominic Cummings and Gavin Williamson did not have to resign over lockdown trips or A-level chaos. Brexit grows more terrifying by the day, but if it all goes wrong, the government will be able to raise the flag and frame dire consequences as a moment of national destiny. Even if the UK itself might be breaking apart, there is no sign of a foot anywhere near the brake.”
The answer, however, can’t be to capitulate to the anarchic madness peddled with such glee and coldness by Cummings, Johnson and their confederates.
Part of the response must be to realise the value and the power of our microworlds and the strength of their innate defences against the macro-ravagers represented, in the UK’s case, by Downing Street and their supporters, both real and sycophantic.
Sit in a pub or a café. The conversations around you are extremely unlikely to be about politics, or even about Covid-19 (although the rarity of discussions about the origins of the latter is a bit of a shame).
But that doesn’t mean people have discarded their political antennae. By and large, they get on with their lives quite happily with, probably, in semi-conscious acts of self-defence, less and less reference to the fraught worlds beyond their own. Subliminally, however, they are perfectly alert, and at some point they – notably EU leave voters – will put their foot down. The hope must be that that moment is not very much longer delayed.
As for the Vox verdict: well, don’t gorge on all the stuff available, just try being very selective.
Bronterre News 