Thirty glorious years?

Warning: politics ahead

The French call the decades in which I grew up ‘les trente glorieuses’ – the thirty glorious years, harking back to (another) lost golden age, in this case of unparalleled economic growth and prosperity as their country, along with others, gradually recovered from the nightmare of the Second World War, in an era of relative peace, security and a real welfare state. And no, I haven’t forgotten that this was the era of the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis; I do feel somehow, though, that saner heads were in control then, than are now. Then, both sides were almost too afraid to do anything really risky, and we did all survive the risks of nuclear annihilation.

Those decades were also the years when the European project was hatched and developed, bonding nations ever more closely in the effort to ensure that the nineteen thirties and forties were never repeated; so far they haven’t been. Looking back on those years now long ago, I’m quite happy to have grown up during them; yes, I know I would say that, wouldn’t I? But they were relatively prosperous, carefree and stress-free times, compared with today.

Something happened at the cusp of the seventies and eighties which began to throw everything out of kilter. Reagan and Thatcher came to power in the West and unleashed a wilder form of capitalism based on selfishness and unrestrained individualism – perhaps an inevitable outcome of the urge for individual self-expression and fulfilment seen in the sixties and seventies, but definitely driven by people with a much harder-nosed agenda than the blissful hippies that some of us once were… and there was the determination, too, to destroy the Soviet bloc by out-spending it, which ultimately succeeded. Having family who lived behind the Iron Curtain, I know how much they craved our freedom and prosperity, and yet it’s now evident that not everyone saw 1989 as an unalloyed blessing.

All the cards were thrown up in the air, and the extremely wealthy, those inveterate gamblers with other people’s lives and money, have never been happier, or wealthier.

And in my declining years I have a sense of living in a far more perilous world than the one of my youth. Terrorism and extremism of all kinds are widespread. The environment – seas and climate – is in serious danger, and there seems to be little sense of urgency about dealing with looming disasters. People have lost faith and trust in politicians to serve their countries and societies, electing the likes of Trump, voting for Brexit, allowing demagogues like Erdogan, Orban, Le Pen and others to make the running and set the agenda. I am also quite aware that the world I have been writing about is the West, where I live, and which I know, and that the experience of much of the rest of the world has been very different.

I have not chosen to be a political activist myself; in my career as a teacher I always strove to make future citizens think carefully about the world they lived in and the effects of choices they might make, and to beware of anyone who offered easy and simple answers to the worlds’ problems. And I cannot put my finger on what has gone wrong, but I do not feel optimistic about the future of the planet or the species. The generations who lived through the world wars and who used to warn us have died, and left us to unravel the lessons of history ourselves. Fail.

On contradictions

Warning: politics ahead

As I grow older – perhaps wiser, though I have yet to be convinced about this – I do find myself increasingly aware of a number of contradictions about our lives and they way we conduct them. Some of these I list below, in no particular order.

We live in the late capitalist era, under an economic system which depends for its existence on our continuing to buy more stuff. At the same time, in this country, houses are being built of ever smaller capacity; the number of “secure self-storage facilities” (lock-up sheds) is increasing rapidly.

In our country we have always wanted cheap food. Cheap food is cheap because it is full of fat and sugar (both of which are cheap). Fat and sugar are not healthy; they eventually make us ill, with ailments like diabetes and obesity.

Healthy food like fruit and vegetables can be relatively cheap if we use cheap immigrant labour to harvest them; many people do not want to let immigrants in to the country. Who will harvest our fruit and veg, those (relatively) cheap and healthier parts of our diet?

We claim to worry about pollution and the environment, and yet love the convenience of tonnes of plastic, fretting about relatively little things like straws and carrier bags. Poor air quality due to exhaust products from vehicles will shorten the lives of many, and affects the youngest most, yet the number of SUVs continues to increase and their use is particularly noticeable on school runs… because we have an education system which does not encourage people to use their local school.

We think electric cars will be the answer, while nobody takes account of the pollution involved in the production of the batteries or the extra electricity. We worry about global warming but we love the cheap flights and the cloud storage.

We want the police to keep us safe, schools to educate our children, hospitals to care for us when we are ill, social care when we are old, but we don’t want to have to pay for it all.

We fear terrorism yet sell weapons to everyone we can, interfere in the internal affairs of other countries and start and fight wars in them, too, unable to see why people might want to flee from all that.

Two years ago the British people (well, some of them) made a decision which will have major effects on the employment and travel prospects for younger citizens and limit their citizenship rights. These younger citizens did not get a vote on their future while large numbers of retired and elderly citizens who will be far less affected did, and largely voted to remove the rights of the younger ones…

It was not a sudden urge to be more democratic that gave us that vote; a political party felt that the vote was the only way to prevent itself exploding under its internal contradictions…

Increasingly I find myself wondering whether we never really were that intelligent a species, or whether the system under which we live is infantilising us, or whether we are just wilfully blind.

On war

I bought another of Nobel award-winning Svetlana Alexievich‘s books recently: this one is about women’s experience of war. And I’ve found myself thinking: why do I read so much about war – novels, history and so on, why do I visit so many historical sites connected with wars? You have only to look back through the archives of this blog: isn’t there something slightly obsessive, unhealthy about this? I do wonder, sometimes.

We know there have been wars ever since humans have existed on the planet: somewhere I read once that in the last two or three thousand years of history there have only been about a hundred and fifty years where the world has been at peace – whatever that means.

Reading about war has shown me what an utterly vile species we are in terms of how we are prepared to treat each other. And yet, I have also come across countless accounts of astonishing acts of bravery and altruism. One might rather crassly argue that these two extremes cancel each other out; equally I might argue that without war, neither would occur, and that would surely be better for us.

Reading about war has made me profoundly grateful that I’ve never been called on to be tested in any of the ways I have read about; even more, I recognise how very fortunate I am to have grown up in a time of peace (at least, in the sense that my country has not been involved in a war which means attacks on our territory putting me and my family at risk… actually, writing a sentence like that one so as to be completely correct and accurate is impossible, but I’m sure you get my drift).

Having grown up during the ‘Cold War‘ (don’t politicians and the military love euphemisms!) made me realise at quite a young age that a war between Britain as a member of NATO and the Warsaw Pact would mean that ‘our’ side would be attacking countries where member of my family lived, and that ‘their’ side would be likewise attempting to kill us… and made me decide that I would never take part in such craziness. As I said above, I’m very grateful never to have been put to the test.

The more I’ve read and thought, the more I have come to think how utterly utopian it is to expect that things will ever be any different. I don’t think that war can be eliminated from our world without some kind of world government, and somehow I don’t see that happening in the near future. Neither can war be eliminated while the capitalist system persists, and I don’t foresee any end to that in short order. And the human ingenuity that has invented all sorts of gruesome weapons will continue, too, and what has been invented cannot be uninvented…

To look at today’s world briefly: many in the West are alarmed at the numbers of refugees flocking to our shores: it seems blindingly obvious to me that one way to address this would be to stop destroying their countries in the first place! We are very good at fighting proxy wars everywhere, and war is really good for business; although ISIS and Al-Qaeda have sprung from the fundamentalist Saudi Arabian variety of Islam, our leaders continue to buy enormous amounts of oil from that country and to sell it phenomenal amounts of weapons. And our leaders and businessmen are much safer from the random acts of terrorism that continue to afflict us, than ordinary people are.

Back to my first thought about being obsessed by war: I think it’s part of my quest to understand why the world is as it is, and to imagine how it might be different – one day, perhaps, long after I’ve left it…