Doomsday scenario. Was there ever a time in human history when there wasn’t a doomsday scenario? Persons of pensionable age, born either during or shortly after one of the most lethal wars in history, and brought up in the era of the Cold War era, will recall being chilled by the threat of Armageddon and spooked by the fear of nuclear holocaust. Just as now a younger generation is transfixed (chilled would clearly be the wrong word) by the prospect of climate change, global warming and environmental degradation.
These observations are thrown out not to discount the existence of impediments in the way of the human project, or to suggest that people are unduly susceptible to fancied dangers, but in order to put those anxieties in context. Man is a worrying animal. Woamn perhaps even more so. Whether they worry any more or less than members of the so-called brute creation is a moot point. Domestic animals and beasts of the field obviously have feelings, and can suffer stress and even communicable panic, but it’s not clear that they are subject to the same sort of chronic, existential worry that we do. Or many of us do.
Nowadays we don’t go in for animal fables as much as they used to, which is perhaps not entirely a bad thing – there is something patronizing in bestowing human attributes upon animals simply in order to illustrate and dramatise human ethics. Theriophily is a different matter - meditation on the apparent superiority of the non-human animal condition over that of the human species. Montaigne famously mused on the matter as he looked his cat in the eye, Swift noted that horses were devoid of hubris, and Walt Whitman wrote some memorable lines celebrating animals in general:
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied - not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.
Animals are evidently not the worrying kind, but worry seems to go with the territory of being human. Without it, indeed, our species would not have enjoyed the success and dominance that it does. Unless hazards, problems and impending catastrophes are conceived as likely to occur, then they are unlikely to be addressed. The number of human casualties on the roads is still pretty awful (3000 per annum in the UK?) but it pales into insignificance compared to the figures for rabbits, hedgehogs, foxes and badgers. Will they never learn? In fact some of these creatures do seem to learn from the adrenalin rush of escaping at the last moment, but learning from collective, transmitted experience as applied to a chronic, perceived hazard comes more readily to human beings than to those with four legs. Dogs occupy an intermediate position – some can be taught road safety (guide dogs being the outstanding example) – others are completely clueless.
Not quite sure where this argument is heading, but the initial pebble in the pond was an uneasy feeling of getting hooked on socio-economic worrying aka soothsaying and gloomsaying, particularly as expounded in highly articulate online forums such as Common Dreams, Information Clearing House, ZeroHedge etc etc, in intelligent blogs like that of David Malone (aka Golem XIV) and in quality newspapers such as the Guardian, a Saturday dose of which suffices, if not to give the proverbial aspirin a headache, then at least to keep the reader in low spirits for a week. And no, the self-serving whimsy of Simon Hoggart’s ostensibly humorous column only serves to confirm morosity, rather than dispel it.
That there is much to be gloomy about is not in doubt, and especially in the financial sphere. Global recession and a spiralling debt crisis, coupled with continuing population growth and finite resources, is not a happy scenario. But whether we are on the verge of a huge upheaval on the lines of the French Revolution - a kind of culbute generale, as the Marquis Mirabeau termed it – is open to question. Post quatorze juillet, revolutionary rhetoric is in favour at the moment; Polly Toynbee in Saturday’s Guardian writes “Rejoice! Bring on the tumbrils as another News Corporation head rolls.” Max Keiser (of the Keiser Report) is an engaging commentator on current woes, but perhaps got carried away by retrospective Francophilia when, interviewed in Paris the other day, he declared that the punishment for crimes against capital should be capital punishment! Calm down, Max! Actually, it’s not just greedy bankers – or banksters as they are now dubbed – that have an interest in maintaining the status quo, but an awful lot of people of more modest means. As for the 25 or so million “of haggard faces”, the starving peasants referred to by Carlyle in his classic study, they are absent from the present equation – at least as it affects the West.
The elephant in the room is what is to replace the current capitalist system, and all the admittedly deplorable fraud, racketeering, greed, hype, spin and media manipulation that have come to be associated with it. On va voir.
In conclusion, a couple of further quotes from Carlyle that provide food for thought:
- It is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly.
- The fool says in his heart, How shall not tomorrow be as yesterday; as all days, - which were once tomorrows? The wise man, looking on this France, moral, intellectual, economical, sees, ‘in short, all the symptoms he has ever met with in history’ – unabateable by soothing Edicts.
