Blog, books, stories.
Nice piece by Tom Holland here reviewing ‘An Atheist’s history of belief’.
I find the black and white way in which religion is currently discussed really depressing. (For instances of what I mean see some of the comments below the piece).
There are so many more options, for Christ’s sake*, than ‘It’s all complete bollocks’ and ‘It’s all literally true’. And both of those two are so dull.
*Or for Dawkin’s sake, if you prefer to swear by a new messiah.
While the political class still appear to give a very low priority to the problems that will be caused by climate change, the military are already planning for them. The following quotation, cited in this book, is from a federally funded study called National Security and Climate Change, published in 2007. Retired generals and admirals from all four of America’s armed services were invited to comment on the the security aspects of climate change. This observation is from a Marine Corps general:
We will pay for this one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives.
Conflicts occur when different groups of people are competing for scarce resources. As climate change plays out, areas of the world that can now feed themselves will no longer be able to do so, in some cases because of flooding (for example Bangladesh) in others because of low rainfall (southern Europe and much of Africa, China and central America), in some cases because the loss of mountain glaciers mean that rivers will run dry in the summer (Pakistan and California are both dependant on glacial meltwater to irrigate their farms.) This will lead to pressure on land (China, for instance, might resurrect land claims in Siberia), and disputes over water. (What would Egypt do if countries upstream were to divert the waters of the Nile? What would happen if India diverted more water from the Indus, on which Pakistan depends?) It will also lead to huge migrations across the world in which the still relatively viable countries will either have to seal off their borders, or face an influx of climate refugges. (How will the people of Africa react when they are starving and the North won’t let them in, even though it caused the problem in the first place?)
One of the strengths of Dyer’s book (the second book with this same title that I’ve recently read) is that he offers scenarios set at various dates in the twentieth century that illustrate the kinds of conflicts that would occur. Another is the clear, bold way it’s written, interspersed with interview material that is woven into the overall narrative. It is a fairly grim read but a very engaging one nevertheless.
Dyer makes a number of arresting points. One of these is that as conflict increases, the chances of collective global action to address the underlying cause will dwindle to zero. Another is that climate change is itself only one of a series of global challenges that lie ahead of us for the forseeable future: the size of the human population, and its expectations, are pushing the planet’s resources to their limits, and there’s no longer any slack.
Dyer’s concluding message, one that he knows is controversial, is that we aren’t going to be able to cut carbon emissions in time – we’ve simply left it too late – and that, in the short term at least, there are going to have to be some technical fixes which will either extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth.
There are two reasons why this is controversial. One is that it involves tinkering with some very fundamental things that we don’t fully understand. (Dyer’s answer is that it’s a bit late to start worrying about that now. We’ve already tinkered massively, and we’ve long since passed the point where we can simply hand the controls of spaceship Earth back to Mother Nature.) The other is that it presents a moral hazard: as soon as we get a whiff of a technical fix we’ll stop even trying to address the real underlying problem. Dyer acknowledges this danger – he’s already argued earlier in the book that human beings always push things to their limits – but what he seems to be saying is that, if we want to avoid the tipping point where negative feedback loops will send global warming spiralling upwards, we really don’t have much choice.
I very much enjoyed the documentary film Searching for Sugar Man. It’s about a Detroit singer-songwriter called called Sixto Rodriguez who records a couple of albums which fail to sell, and moves onto other things, completely unaware that within a strange cultural bubble on another continent, young white liberalish apartheid-era South Africans have come to regard him as an iconic musical figure.
Within that bubble everyone has his records, everyone plays his music at parties, everyone knows his name, and, just as he is unaware of them, they themselves are unaware that their enthusiasm is a purely local thing and assume that he is up there with Bob Dylan, James Taylor or Joni Mitchell. As to why he only made two records, his South African fans believe that he committed suicide in a very spectacular way, in front of a concert audience.
Assuming it’s true that he really had no idea of his South African following, Rodriguez must have been badly ripped off. I sometimes find out that my stories have been translated and printed without my permission in various small magazines, and that’s annoying, but I’d be very angry indeed if I discovered that my actual books were selling well in a country where I didn’t even know they’d been published. Rodriguez, however, came over as untroubled by this side of things and seemed unwilling to express any regret at all about the life that he’d actually lived, not as a famous musician but a worker in the construction industry.
When finally put in touch with his South African fans, he was clearly pleased to have large audiences filling up concert halls for him across South Africa, but what came over was pleasure that people wanted to listen to him, rather than excitement at stardom and fame. As a writer I know that need to be heard – I think it’s quite distinct from the desire to be lauded – and I found this part of the film extremely moving.
But I found it interesting too to think about what this movie told us, partly intentionally and partly not, about how ‘true stories’ are made. One ‘true story’, the lurid story about Rodrigues’ on-stage suicide, was clearly completely false – the man is alive to this day – but why did it gain currency in the first place? A Darwinian process must surely occur in which many rumours are generated and a few take root and become accepted as true when they meet some kind of need – in this case a need to resolve a puzzle – rather as some new variant of finch might find itself occupying some as-yet unfilled niche.
The other ‘true story’ is the film itself. I see (from Wikipedia, which will probably prevent a story quite like this from ever happening again) that some quite important facts were missed out of it. Rodriguez was actually also popular in Australia and he did two tours of the country in 1979 and 1981. I can see why this wasn’t included. Something must be left out in order to make a 2 hour movie out of a life, and to fit that life into some more universal story (in this case the one where we imagine we are alone and then find we are loved and cared about) which a movie audience will enjoy and relate to.
But justifiable though it may be, its ommission represents another manifestation of the same Darwinian process whereby stories are shaped and changed to meet the needs of their listeners and their tellers.
I’m always troubled by the music videos I have to watch on my annual visit to the gym. They seem to be simultaneously pornographic and narcissistic: ‘I am an object of immense desire,’ the performers seem to pout, ‘and that single fact utterly absorbs and obsesses me’. This is true of the semi-naked female performers, but it’s true in another way of the supercool male gangster types with their impassive faces, so sure of their own power that nothing can move or impress them.
This article speaks of ‘pornification’ in connection with music videos, and it’s a good word for it (in my novel Marcher I actually invented a musical genre called pornopop to try and capture the same phenomenon), but I suggest pornification is a part of an even wider process which you might call burgerisation.
A McDonalds-type burger, it seems to me, is a food from which everything has been stripped except the things that we actively crave for. Never mind subtle flavour or variety, the burger homes ruthlessly in on the basic ingredients which our evolutionary history has wired us up to find irrestistible, notably salt and fat. For why bother with the irrelevant detail? Not only will it put up the production costs but it will dangerously delay the moment of gratification for fickle consumers, who are always in danger of wandering off to other less challenging sources of pleasure.
And so with the music videos. Stories of tenderness and romance have been stripped away and the message pared down until it as close as possible to the primitive templates of desire – desire for sex and for control – that are hardwired into our brains. Why bother with anything that actually has to be listened to? Why bother with anything that deals with the messiness of actual human relationships?
Even the gym itself, in a way, represents a kind of burgerisation, for it provides pure exercise from which everything else has been clinically removed: the pleasures of productive physical work, the joys of the open air, the sights and sounds you experience when you go for a run, or a walk, or ride a bike. My son once pointed out to me a glass-fronted gym where the exercise machines on the first floor (with their dials and heart rate monitors) were accessed via an escalator, presumably to save the few seconds of unscheduled exercise that would be involved in using stairs.
That really is the essence of burgerisation. Like a call centre which has refined all possible queries to just six options, a burgerised product is quite deliberately isolated from the world’s richness, and from its own origins, in order to meet a few basic core objectives with the maximum efficiency and the minimum of unnecessary cost.
No wonder I stay away from that gym.
This is the completely new and I think very beautiful cover for the US edition of Dark Eden, to be published on April 1st 2014 by Broadway (part of Random House). Further details, preorders etc here.
A while ago on the radio I heard a speech by the President of Sierra Leone, announcing the end of civil war. He began the speech in English:
‘The war is over!’
And then he said the same thing in Krio, the English-based creole which is the country’s lingua franca.
‘Wah done gone!’*
Every part of the English-speaking world has its own version of English, but in most cases these haven’t diverged from one another so much as to become actual separate languages. On the contrary, the prestige and utility of Standard English, with its stabilised grammar and spelling, mean that the various regional versions of the language tend to converge towards the standard form rather than flow away from it. This has happened with the regional dialects of England, and it may well happen in Sierra Leone too. A standardised official language is like a deep channel dug through a river delta where the waters have broken up into many small streams.
But if the channel silts up, or access to it is lost, then new streams form. Under the Romans, Latin was a deep channel across a wide swathe of Europe, in many places completely replacing the indigenous languages. But after the empire broke up, so did the language, splintering into countless Romance tongues, a few which became new national languages.
As the world is at the moment, I guess this sort of divergence is only likely to happen with English in a place like Sierra Leone, where literacy and exposure to Standard English would have been comparatively low while Krio was evolving. But it could happen in the future in any part of the English-speaking world, whether as a result of limited exposure to the main English-speaking community, a reduction in the prestige of the parent language, or a need for a separate language for purposes of group identity. If you listen to Krio being spoken it’s a fascinating glimpse of the kinds of language that would emerge: still recognisable as part of the same family and still partly comprensible, but no more similar to standard English than Romance languages are to one another.
The complete isolation of the people in Dark Eden and their very limited literacy would have undoubtedly have resulted in their language diverging from Standard English. (Their isolation is obviously far greater than that of Krio-speakers in Sierra Leone. On the other hand, Standard English was spoken by their forebears, which is not the case with creole languages).
I tried to give a small sense of this divergence with the small variations in grammar and vocabulary that everyone notices in the book. One of the drivers for this divergence, I thought, would be the fact that, at the beginning, the population would have consisted of two parents and their children, which I felt would result in simplified childish forms becoming established, without a wider adult world to ‘correct’ them. (In a similar kind of way, Afrikaans is thought to have evolved a grammar that is radically simpler than that of its parent language, when Dutch settlers found themselves speaking on a daily basis to servants and slaves with only a limited understanding of Dutch.)
Rather pleasingly, I’ve since found that the most obvious distinguishing feature of Eden English is actually present in at least one variant of English found on the planet Earth:
It is common in Guyanese Creole to repeat adjectives for emphasis (as if saying, very or extremely). For example, “Dis wata de col col” translates into “This water is very cold”. “Come now now” translates into “Come right now.”
(Wikipedia entry on Guyanese Creole.)
*This probably isn’t the correct spelling.
At a place we stayed over the summer, some bats were roosting in an empty barn. There were six or seven of them dangling from the ceiling in a little cluster: little fluffy creatures, about the size of mice, in various shades of brown, with pointy ears, tiny faces, and alert little beady eyes.
I’ve always found bats fascinating. They are one of a number of miscellaneous phenomena that for some reason strike me as slightly implausible, so that I almost have to pinch myself to remind myself that they exist. (No really! Little furry mammals with ears, teeth – and wings!) I went into that barn many times just to stand and watch them.
They were not equally enchanted with me. As their fierce little faces glared down at me, they squirmed with agitation, and sooner or later one or more of them would drop into the air and zoom round and round the room until they found another roosting place further away.
I never managed to see how they did that trick of somehow getting hold with their feet of something above them while they were still flying, but I did see that when one bat came to rest too close to another, the offended party would wriggle, show its teeth and hiss, until the offender moved further away. I imagine this involved some squeaking also, but I’m past the age when people can hear the sounds of bats.
I believe they were pipistrelles. As I watched them, it struck me that this was a Romance word which probably originally meant something like ‘little pipers’. I found this thought curiously pleasing.
Fierce little pipers, with pipes so shrill that only youthful ears can even hear them!
This is George Bush in Air Force One, flying back from Texas to Washington. He’s requested that the plane divert over New Orleans, and he has invited the press to come through from their section of the plane to photograph him looking down concernedly at the city whose lower parts have now been flooded for two days, since Hurricane Katrina broke the levees. If any single image captures the mediocrity of this man, this is surely it. This was not a leader, but a dull little rich kid whose daddy’s friends had fixed him up with a job, and provided him with helpers to do the difficult parts. In this case, even the helpers screwed up.
‘You’re doing a great job, Brownie!’ Bush told the Director of FEMA, the federal agency responsible, but of course as we all know the agency’s performance was very far from a great job. In a curiously telling detail, Douglas Brinkley observes that Brownie was not in fact a nickname that anyone actually used. The dull little rich kid was trying to suggest a level of engagement that did not in fact exist.
The Great Deluge is an account of what actually lies below him as he gazes down for the cameras: a devastated city, where bloated corpses are floating in the streets, sick and elderly people are dying alone in flooded houses, and thousands are crammed into a sports stadium without adequate food, water or medical attention, waiting for an evacuation which, for no obvious reason, has still not arrived.
There is lawlessness. Some of the local police have simply abandoned their posts and run. Women waiting for rescue have been raped. Looters raid shops not only to steal but in some strange attavistic ritual (of revenge? of triumph?) to defecate on cash registers and on goods that they can’t carry away. But the lawlessness has been taken by many of those who should be helping the survivors as a reason for treating them all as criminals. (Another telling moment: a new general arrives in New Orleans to get a grip on the military efforts, and one of his first acts is to instruct is to instruct National Guardsman not to point their guns at people when they’re talking to them.)
The very boundary between lawful and unlawful has in any case been blurred. Is it really looting to break into a store for bottles of clean water, when the only other option is drinking polluted flood-water in which human and animal corpses are floating? (Is it even exactly looting, I wonder, to steal a TV or some other valuable piece of hardware, when you’ve lost your home and have no savings to fall back on?) In the Morial Convention Centre, some gangsters are taking it upon themselves to provide protection for the vulnerable in the absence of any formal forces of law. Other are just terrorising the weak.
The fact that nearly all the people trapped in New Orleans are black and poor almost certainly doesn’t help. Police officers and Guardsmen frequently treat them with undisguised contempt, and suggest that it is their own stupid fault that they stayed in the city after warnings were given that they should move. But where would you go, if everyone you know lives in the streets around you, you have no money to pay for accomodation elsewhere and the government, though it can afford to pay for wars on the far side of the world, has provided nothing? Some people who try to leave on foot are stopped at gunpoint by police from neighbouring areas which don’t want to take them in.
It’s outside the scope of this book but we know too that other communities which did initially respond generously were quickly to grow tired of the burden of caring for the incomers, and to begin to stigmatise them as lazy and undeserving of help. In another book I read recently*, a woman relocated to Austin, Texas, describes her children being bullied and stigmatised at school because they are ‘people from the storm’.
I wasn’t completely enamoured of the way The Great Deluge was written – I could have done without some of the long, folksy biographies of various characters with which the account is punctuated, and the numerous quotations from songs and literature which never seemed quite as apt as the author seemed to think they were – but it provides a detailed and vivid overview nevertheless of what actually happened during that dreadful time, as well as of the things that one would expect to happen in the world’s wealthiest country but in fact did not. I was left with a powerful sense of how quickly we human beings can shut down compassion when it asks too much of us, simply by relabelling our fellow humans as something other than ourselves.
Any one seriously interested in writing or thinking about the future should be reading this book, and books like it. The way things are going, there are going many more flooded cities before this century is out, many more people who don’t have access to food or water, a lot more ‘people from the storm’.
*Community Lost: the State, Civil Society, and Displaced Survivors of Hurricane Katrina, by Ronald J Angel, Holly Bell, Julie Beausoleil and Laura Lein.
My sister lives in Australia, and a few years ago we visited her there, spending part of the time in Victoria where she lives, and part of the time travelling round the South Island of New Zealand. Both Victoria and South Island famously contain some rich and unique landscapes, but in both countries I was struck by the way that, in many places, native vegetation had been entirely stripped away to leave a monoculture of grass and sheep. There was a kind of dreary banality about these smooth shaven hills. When you have also seen some of the strange rich bush and forest that would have existed in these places beforehand, it is difficult not to feel that you are looking at the aftermath of an act of vandalism.
But of course the hills of Britain have been stripped bare in just the same way. As George Monbiot recently pointed out, the bare hills of the Lake District which we’ve learnt to revere so much, and to see as a kind of wilderness, would be covered in forest if they had not been deliberately cleared for sheep farming many centuries ago, and had not been kept clear ever since by grazing. We might see these landscapes as a place to escape to from the more obviously managed landscapes of lowland Britain (such as the Fens of Cambridgeshire, where I live, which are only dry land as a result of water being constantly pumped off them into the dyked and canalised rivers), but they – the Lake District, Snowdonia, the Scottish Highlands – are actually equally articifial creations.
I spent last week in the Yorkshire Dales. The hilltops are bare moors grazed by sheep and managed for grouse shooting, and the dales are entirely given over to pasture for sheep and cattle, criss-crossed by those famous grey dry stone walls, and dotted by barns built in the same grey stone, each one almost identical to all the others. I enjoy the spectacle, and I don’t take the view that there is necessarily anything intrinsically superior about a landscape untouched by humans to one that humans have shaped. (We are, after all, part of nature). But I found myself noticing, in a way that I hadn’t before, that this is a landscape that has been plucked and shaven almost bald, just like the landscapes I disliked in Australia and New Zealand.
Our next door neighbours have a little boy of 3 called Marlowe.
The other day I saw him with his dad in the street and he showed me his plastic toy smartphone. I held it to my ear and said ‘Hello, is that Marlowe?’
He shook his head.
‘Say it’s Ben calling,’ he corrected me in a stage whisper, ‘and ask me if I want to speak to him. Then I’ll tell you I’m too busy.’
I held the phone to my ear again.
‘Hello is that you Ben? Do you want to speak to Marlowe?’
I held out the phone to Marlowe.
‘Marlowe, it’s Ben for you.’
‘Tell him I’m too busy,’ Marlowe said.
