Of Walt Benjamin, Titanic metaphors, gallows humour etc – End of Days diaries 11 and 12

Apologies to my thousand of readers who hang on my every word. Yesterday, I got lost in feeding moorhens. And I could and should have done my doom diary then, but I didn’t have anything to say (when has that ever stopped me before??). And then I spent a long time moving piles of books hither and thither. Because Dr. Wifey and I have taken a major step, a mere 20 years, (minus a few weeks) into our relationship, a step that makes over-educated people like us shudder. Yes, we are … consolidating our different libraries,

There will be a certain amount of overlap in some of our fiction, less so in our nonfiction. This process involves a lot of weeding and moving and creating piles here and there, because we never really organized particularly well in our old house. And when we moved, we moved like rank amateurs, because we were. The theory this time is that if we get everything in one place, we can shed any duplicates. There won’t be that many and be better prepared for the next time. If, God forbid, there is one. 

So on moving libraries, well there’s famously the essay by Walt Benjamin. And there’s a lovely essay in the James W. Hall collection. I just read, about what books do for you. And there’s also a subplot in the third Bourne book by Robert Ludlum. The Bourne Ultimatum in which –  spoilers here but Carlos the Jackal’s “agent” if you will, can’t bear to leave his books behind when he does a runner and Carlos is therefore able to kill him. This will not happen to me. 

The main observation I would make is it a great number of the nonfiction books are variations on “the cat should wear a bell,” explaining in painful detail how the world is unfair and needs to be unfucked.

And very few of these books – I have a collection that dates really from the 70s onwards – do a great deal of reflecting about why previous generations either didn’t try to unfuck the world or were unsuccessful in unfucking the world.

Perhaps there was still in the 70s too much enthusiasm, or faith in the “un” ie the UN (see what I did there?) But we more recent people surely can have no excuse for this. And I think it comes back to not being willing to admit how frail we are, and how being the good guys and having, “the truth”, on your side, doesn’t actually count for much. As a Danish friend of mine said in 1994 “pah, you can’t use the truth for anything.” 

And I will continue to move these books around I will read and reread some probably donate others. But it very largely amounts to cat belling. Now, of course, [of course, is one of my verbal tics as I have realized], if you spend a lot of time explaining that the key question is who will bell the cat,  – people who have made a nice career of saying “the cat should wear a bell” will be pissed off at you because you are interfering in their grift. And the people who claim to have been belling the cat with more or less success will be pissed off with you, because you are highlighting that they haven’t actually been very successful. So you won’t have a big fan club.  And one of the first things they will do is say “well show us what you’ve done.” And I’m realizing that I have very, very little to point to in ways of success. As recently as two years ago, I would have rattled off X, Y and Zed. But x y and Zed turn out to be illusions and fantasies that don’t survive – well you can say sunlight, you could say other things. 

So that was yesterday; polished off with strawberries from the garden and two episodes of Netflix’s Godless which I would recommend including – spoilers – the letter from Jim Goode to Roy Goode about the importance of reading.

Today has been about meeting up with my dearest and cleverest friend who is also, to confuse matters, called Marv and just “shooting the shit” as they used to say. (I don’t know what the young people say anymore). But there we were, shooting the shit and fixing all the world’s problems only to watch them revert questions around why we perceive the world the way we do, what keeps us perceiving in some ways, what rewards there are in the systems for continuing to see it one way as opposed to others –  “who are going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” and the disciplinary functions of economics, politics, religion, culture, you name it. It’s safer to be wrong. The same way that everyone else is wrong than to be right and alone. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” 

And therefore we need is a kind of collective intellectual self defense program – which of course will be dismissed as indoctrination, brainwashing whatever. And we talked about what would be on that syllabus. What you would do encourage people to read, watch, listen to perform and how you would get it to play out?

We talked about the enormous capacity humans have for deluding themselves and telling comforting stories of righteousness and salvation. We talked about antinomianism, which is essentially the belief that “I’m a good person. God says so. And therefore I can do anything I like, because God gives me a hall pass. And I had good intentions.” I first encountered this in reading a 2004 essay by Geoffrey Wheatcroft called “The Tragedy of Tony Blair.” 

And we as a species, or at least we as Western civilization, seem to have rather a large and I would say healthy –  but it’s actually extremely unhealthy – dose of antinomianism. We seem to believe that because we have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of information, (which were fought for by the bourgeoisie, and the working class against the aristocrats) somehow makes us more civilized and more, well, worthy of using up the infinitesimally small carbon budget. Because we will derive more enjoyment or goodness in inverted commas than all those well, other people, who don’t speak English, who don’t have their eyes on a Tesla who are simply not as good or as important as us. Who don’t have well, the Imperial Way of Living. And we can deny it till we’re blue in the face. But ultimately, look at what we do, what we spend money on –  on weapons and trinkets rather than cures for what ails everyone, e it diseases, poverty, over reliance on fossil fuels, or wood stoves, or whatever. 

By our misdeeds, you shall know us. 

And when it comes to “Judgment Day” [ just to be fully clear, there isn’t going to be one] we will tell St Peter that we had good intentions, that any mistakes we made were not of evil but of a lack of information, possibly occasionally a lack of focus. 

There isn’t really any difference between Tony Blair and Boris Johnson. Both treated the British establishment as infinitely malleable to their will. Blair kind of sort of got away with it. Johnson, for once discovered that he could not. And this is something else that we talked about – unearned privilege, –  privilege removed feels like oppression. 

And so if you think about it, Boris Johnson lived his entire life being able to fail upwards. He was sacked by Max Hastings. He was sacked by Michael Howard. He failed in every job he had. But there were no consequences. He failed upwards, He was able to bluster and bluff and blag his way through, because no one would stand up to him because he was amusing to some, and because he was useful, (we’ll come back to that in a sec.) But finally,  he – the irresistible force – crashed up against the immovable object. He was unable to brazen out the Privileges Committee. And it feels to him like he’s been hard done by because frankly, this has never happened to him before. 

Whereas Blair – well, the Chilcot Inquiry. And all the rest of it didn’t touch them in quite the same way. Except, of course, as I’ve said, repeatedly, Blair could cure cancer and fix climate change but he knows that his obituary would still begin, “Tony Blair, one of the primary architects of the catastrophic war in Iraq, that left a million Iraqis dead, has died.” That’s priced in.

The other thing that I wanted to say, because I was reading a bit of the Chilcott stuff, because it pops up in a later, 2016, Geoffrey Wheatcroft article is that every few years, there is a another “independent” inquiry into some policy disaster, which has left 1000s 10s of 1000s millions dead, I mean, these are all disposable people, really, because they’re only, you know, hemophiliacs, or Irish, or old, or brown, or whatever, you know, they’re not really people who “matter.”  And there is always the scathing critique of individuals and how bits of the civil service or the intelligence services of the military or the media were “asleep at the wheel,”  or not doing their job, et cetera, et cetera. 

And then there’s a few days of hand-wringing and self-laceration. And then the punishment ritual has been completed, and normal services can resume. And the topics of the reports change, it might be sanctions-busting deliveries of oil to Rhodesia, it might be arms to Iraq, it might be tainted blood. It might be surgeons being allowed to operate who are too old, too slow. It might be the war in Iraq and the eve-so-oddly missing weapons of mass destruction. It might be the COVID one. It might be where we have new airports, not how we prepare for imminent climate collapse. 

But these are soothing rituals that allow middle-class people to participate in improving the system from “within,” and feel that they’ve done their bit as citizens. If the big picture pattern is really mentioned, it’s only ever done so in passing and no one ever really interrogate “Why this shit keeps happening and what would be required to change it?”  Which is not better MPs, but civil society that could actually be uncivil when it needed to be,  that refused to be and was capable of not being co-opted, captured, repressed. Civil society is far broader, of course, and social movements…

All of this is a fantasy. What I’m describing is a simulacrum of social democracy in the 1950s and 60s, only “better.” And look, the conditions that gave us social democracy in the 50s and 60s, were a very specific part of the post-war technological and demographic boom. And wishing that we could have a “do over,” in the third decade of the 21st century is idle in the extreme. But these, sadly, are the limits of my personal imagination around what a proper collective response to the systemic challenges of climate, pandemics, nitrogen, ocean acidification, immiseration, etc, would look like, I don’t have an answer to what the social movements and civil society outfits are supposed to get “the state” to do. 

You could to use the Titanic metaphor. After the Titanic has hit the iceberg you can storm the bridge and you can strip Captain Smith of his epaulettes and his job. But you’re still left with the fact that the Titanic doesn’t have enough lifeboats, even if you apportion them with maximum efficiency, and you overcome your fear and panic and terror of the icy depths, you are still a long way from the Carpathia and the other ship, whatever it was. And a lot of people are still going to die. And I suppose we just have to accept that, that a lot of people are going to die. The system has always been chill with that, after all.

Last point I’d make is that Marc and I were talking about, well, you know, could you engineer depopulation, but if you did it with smallpox or whatever, a lot of the people who died would be the ones who are keeping the nuclear power plants and the chemical weapons dumps and all the other nasties from going tits up quickly. Now, we have left those infrastructures as extremely unpleasant “Easter Eggs” for future generations. They’re going to blow up in someone’s face. And I guess the plan or expectation was that it wouldn’t be till the 22nd or 23rd century by which time somehow I don’t know we’re supposed to have dug up all the nasty shit and fired it into the sun or something. I don’t know. But it looks to me as if all of this nastiness is gonna cascade at us. Quick, quicker than I thought

We were talking a lot about food riots and the price of bread, literally the price of bread. And what that means, generally, although we will mostly talking about the most depressing and fear-inducing stuff that you can imagine, because neither of us is directly affected by it yet. We’re able to do it with totally unwarranted insane jollity and levity, or resignation.

And this is the other thing about living when we do, and this is well into the double entry Doom diary for today it’s trying to capture this notion that intellect I mentioned it with the “Zed for Zachariah” anecdote from a few days ago –  intellectually there is no denial but emotionally we resile from it. We need to do gallows humor. We need to think that maybe it won’t happen. We act as if we think but our knowledge and our semi-non-participation “the system” will somehow be recognized and rewarded by the universe. Intellectually we know this is utter bollocks. The universe doesn’t give a flying fuck. billions upon billions of galaxies each galaxy with billions of stars –  we just sentient meat as per that science fiction short story…

Still, fun while it lasted