Tsunami Days E-Book

John Barnie

• Herausgeber: Cinnamon Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 226

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

"We need more writers with bite. We have lived in the flatlands too long," writes John Barnie in one of his 'observations' ('Art in the Flatlands'). And bite he delivers. Ranging across politics, history, culture, ecological disaster, the meaning of truth, poetry, what we mean by identity and more… Barnie shares a window onto the world that is both erudite and particular. Leaning towards pessimism in a darkening world, these observations are often provocative, not from any bullish desire to antagonise, but as the result of mining a rationalist line of thought with an honesty and consistency that is applied as much to the author as to his subjects. There is a clarity here that some may find uncomfortable, but the aim is always dialogue above agreement; intellectual engagement above cheap solutions and sentimentality. Barnie asks us to think, consider and dig deeper, but most of all he asks that we "…live richly among our secondary self-created meanings, while recognising them for what they are. To face without flinching the nullity of the great void." ('Varieties of Meaning') Tsunami Days is a vital collection of essays for those prepared to engage with its unflinching observations.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

By the same author

Epigram

Half Title

Foreword

Delight in Killing

Against Great Men

The Elephant in the Room

Canute the Environmentalist

The Pattern in the Leaf

What Do We Really Feel About Nature?

A New Dark Age

Lying in Politics

The Attraction of War

The Problem of Religion

Poetry on Trial

Contempt for Truth

Would-Be Dictators

Revolution’s Allure

Weepy Culture

Religion of Blood and Delusion

Centres and Peripheries

Democracy Betrayed

Tribulations of a Meat-Eater

Footprints in the Snow

The White Man as Burden

Where Do We Go Next?

Escape into Technology

Truth v. ‘Truth’

Art in the Flatlands

The Masters of Infinity

Poetry as Fly-Fishing

Where Is My Nation?

The Relentless Cycle

Money and Power

Varieties of Meaning

Sauve Qui Peut

Embracing Delusions

Collapse

The False Shepherd

Down Among the Struldbrugs

The War-Making Species

No Bribes Here

Facing the Bottleneck

Cinema of Dreams

The Island

Dance of the Mayflies

Life in New Eden

Mr Zimmerman and Mr Jones

White Power/White Justice

Defeat and Lies

The Flaw

Learning from Conrad

The Meaning of a Book

The Freedom of Being Someone Else

The Monk and the Rag-and-Bone Man

Negative Capability

Appropriate Anger

Varieties of Criticism

Cloud Shadows

Men of Destiny

The Twisted Tree

On the Brink

The Real Rogue State

War Crimes and Lies

What is a War Crime?

Near the Limits

What Should the Study of Literature Mean?

Approaching the Bottleneck

Strangers

The Future is Mega

A Brief History of Reading

Don’t Be Fooled

Afterword

Tsunami Days

observations

John Barnie

Published by Leaf by Leaf an imprint of Cinnamon Press,

Office 49019, PO Box 92, Cardiff, CF11 1NB

www.cinnamonpress.com

The right of John Barnie to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. © 2023 John Barnie

Print Edition ISBN 978-1-78864-985-8

Ebook ISBN 978-1-78864-898-1

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, hired out, resold or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

Designed and typeset by Cinnamon Press.

Cover design by Adam Craig © Adam Craig.

Picture credits: ice cube: unalozmen/istockphoto; noise: Sohl/istockphoto

Cinnamon Press is represented by Inpress.

Acknowledgements

Some of these observations first appeared in The New Welsh Review and O’r Pedwar Gwynt, and on the Sustainable Wales website.

By the same author

War in Medieval Society (1974)

Borderland (1984)

Lightning Country (1987)

The King of Ashes (1989)

Clay (1989)

The Confirmation (1992)

Y Felan a Finnau (1992)

The City (1993)

Heroes (1996)

No Hiding Place (1996)

Abergavenny (1997)

The Wine Bird (1998)

Ice (2001)

At the Salt Hotel (2003)

Sea Lilies: Selected Poems 1984-2003 (2006)

The Green Buoy (2006)

Trouble in Heaven (2007)

Tales of the Shopocracy (2009)

West Jutland Suite/Vestjysk Suite (2009)

The Forest Under the Sea (2010)

Fire Drill: Notes on the Twenty-First Century (2010)

A Year of Flowers (2011)

The Roaring Boys (2012)

Footfalls in the Silence (2014)

Wind Playing with a Man’s Hat (2016)

Departure Lounge (2018)

Sherpas (2018)

Sunglasses (2020)

Afterlives (2021)

A Report to Alpha Centauri (2021)

Everything has changed except our way of thinking

Albert Einstein

Tsunami Days

Foreword

These short essays are an attempt to understand what is happening to humanity and the Earth amid the huge confusion of our times. It seems to me that we cannot do this adequately without knowing something of the way our species evolved within the deeper structure of the genus Homo over the past two million years. 

We need to understand the limitations evolution has placed on the human brain, remarkable though it is, if we are to formulate an adequate response to the multiple and interconnected global catastrophes we have inadvertently set in motion. We can formulate responses to this at an intellectual level; the great and pressing question is whether our brain is sufficiently advanced to allow us to transform perception into practice, to change radically our way of living, not in twenty, thirty, or forty years, but now, and to do this co-operatively on a global scale.

This is one thread in these ‘observations’ which are interspersed with personal reflections and comment on more specific aspects of culture and society. 

My view is pessimistic, because the situation is far worse than most people are willing to believe. As a consequence, there will be readers who won’t like what I say; who will object that ‘human ingenuity will always find a way’. 

Perhaps they are right, but if they are wrong and I am right, what then?

Delight in Killing

In a recent issue of the NYRB there is a review of a book of Martha Gellhorn’s letters. Accompanying it is a photograph of Gellhorn wading through a vast acreage of wheat in Idaho, taken in 1940. She is cradling a double-barrelled shotgun and looks defiantly, so it seems, toward the camera—the great chronicler of the horror and pity of war setting out to shoot whatever creatures she can find crouched in the wheat. 

I have another cutting of the Eagle Hunt Club, taken in a forest clearing in Poland. A dozen burley men, shotguns shouldered, are walking away from a wooden cart on which they have dumped five hares and a fox, back legs tied together.

Early humans hunted of necessity for food, as remnant populations of hunter-gatherers do today, but it is no longer a necessity for the majority. Hunting endures, however, as an atavistic desire to see a creature flushed up into the sky or running helter-skelter across a field to be brought down, crack-crack, flailing out of the air on useless wings or bucking and jumping in a last paroxysm of nerves to lie still with its beautiful glazed eyes.

Not all men are like this. Most, on the surface, are not. But the urge is there, lurking in the mind, a violence turned outward on the natural world, and with monotonous regularity turned inward on ourselves, when we call it war. In the first twenty years of this century there have been wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Congo, Nagorno-Karabakh, and most recently Ukraine. Millions of people have lost their lives or been displaced, whole cities obliterated, societies brought to such ruin they will take generations to recover. As it is now so it was in the twentieth and nineteenth centuries and as far back as there are records of the species. In the Middle Ages, my professor of medieval studies, Geoffrey Shepherd, used to say, peace was an interlude between wars. And when each war is over, through conquest or exhaustion, the victors are left as ‘masters of the smoking ruins’, as General Sir Edward Hamley wrote of the allies at Sebastopol at the end of the Crimean War.

This is something environmental campaigners never take into account when they project imagined solutions onto the great wave of natural disasters gathering to overwhelm us. It is a fatal flaw. We must start with what we are, and what we are reaches back to the way we evolved two hundred thousand years ago when anatomically modern humans first appear in the fossil record. Perhaps, even, we should go back 1.8 million years to the emergence of Homo erectus, the ancestor to Homo ergaster, humanity’s own immediate forebear.

Advances in weaponry and the control of fire were key developments, leading to an increased diet of meat. This in turn enabled larger brains in relation to body weight to evolve, until today here we are, the last species of the genus and the most dominant and violent animal on Earth. Linnaeus indulgently named us Homo sapiens in his great classification of life, though Homo destructor would have been better, because however wise we are, or capable of being wise, the deep, dark side of our brain persists—Gellhorn with a gun.

Against Great Men

When Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, met Napoleon in 1813, he taxed the Emperor with what he had done (as quoted in the LRB): ‘In ordinary times armies are formed of only a small part of the population. Today it is the whole people that you have called to arms.’ Metternich suggests that this is a disaster because so many of the very young died in the Russian campaign that it will affect future generations. Napoleon replied: ‘You are no soldier and you do not know what goes on in the soul of a soldier. I was brought up in military camps, and a man such as I am does not give a fuck about the lives of a million men.’ The reviewer calls this answer ‘extraordinary’ but it is not extraordinary at all. Napoleon was one of history’s ‘great men’, and this is how great men think and how they behave.

Henry Fielding understood this when he wrote in the preface to Jonathan Wild, ‘Greatness consists of bringing all manner of mischief on mankind, and Goodness in removing it… In the histories of Alexander and Caesar, we are frequently, and indeed impertinently, reminded of their benevolence and generosity, of their clemency and kindness. When the former had with fire and sword overrun a vast empire, had destroyed the lives of an immense number of innocent wretches, and had scattered ruin and desolation like a whirlwind,—we are told, as an example of his clemency, that he did not cut the throat of an old woman, and ravish her daughters, but was content with only undoing them.’

No one should be surprised by Napoleon’s reply to Metternich, nor should anyone exalt him. He belongs in a grim gallery of portraits: Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Kahn, Tamburlaine, along with those who succeeded him, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and more will come, great men who intoxicate the people, leading them to terrible acts of conquest, slaughter, destruction, pillage, rape, until the tide turns and the same horrors are inflicted on them in turn. 

Make America Great Again, put the Great back in Great Britain. Trump and Johnson are Lilliputians standing on tiptoe on the steps leading to a rostrum where before long the next great man will appear.

The Elephant in the Room

The problem with schemes run up by environmentalists and governments to curb global warming is that they confuse an effect with its cause, in this case human overpopulation. In the last hundred years the human population has grown exponentially: 1930, 2 billion; 1960, 3 billion; 2020, 8 billion, finally levelling out, demographers think, at 9.8 billion in 2050. How many humans can the Earth sustain? Techno-optimists claim that genetic modification will produce a revolution in agriculture which will be able to feed 10 billion. But 10 billion people will need more than food. They will need housing, fresh water, energy, roads, railways, the infrastructure of complex industrialised societies. They will need more of the finite resources of the planet like rare earth metals. They will also need more land, as farmed land succumbs to desertification, as the demand for water for irrigation exhausts the aquifers, reduces the flow of rivers. New land will be seized by people who are desperate, or will be appropriated by agri-business, as is happening in the Brazilian rainforest. 

But even if an agricultural revolution is achieved, there are likely to be billions left behind, as now, in poverty and below poverty. There is a finite supply of fresh water, and already too many in the world are without an adequate supply. Moreover, even if the last great forests of the Earth are felled, and the land farmed, it will only be a temporary solution. Cleared of its canopy of trees, the sparse earth of the great tropical forests is liable to serious erosion; the clearance, too, changes the climate, making it drier, destroying the sink for carbon, creating a positive feedback loop for global warming.

All this is without considering the pollution which 10 billion people will create. It is without considering the mass extinction of species which is already well under way, and which many biologists and ecologists think will reach the scale of the one 65 million years ago at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, when something like 63 percent of all species then living became extinct. Some scientists argue that we need to prevent this on utilitarian grounds. There are still so many species that have not been described and named by science which may be a source for all kinds of drugs and other agents which might benefit humanity. This is no doubt true, but it does not seem to me the best argument for trying to halt this terrible process. 

Most of us think of ourselves and ourselves alone. We are species-centric. But our genus, Homo, evolved over 2 million years, during most of which time we were only a part of something greater, the ever-changing self-renewing natural world. If we continue our destruction of the species with whom we share this world, we will destroy something in ourselves, will wound ourselves and carry the grief of it within us, even in the teeming megacities, whether we are aware of it or not.

Canute the Environmentalist

Recently, some scientists have proposed a new epoch for the period we live in—though this is not yet generally accepted—labelling it the Anthropocene, the Epoch of Man. For the first time in the 3.8-billion-year history of life, it is argued, one species has come to dominate the planet to such an extent that we have altered almost every aspect of it. Instead of being part of life on Earth, we have become the owners of it, and the promise of God in Genesis—‘let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’—has come to pass. Some well-meaning people argue that we should think of ourselves as the ‘custodians’ of other life on the planet—a kind of liberal interpretation of God’s will in Genesis, but ‘God’ knew what he was doing, it is dominion that humans have always striven after, domesticating animals and plants that are useful to our survival, while eradicating everything that gets in our way. 

Some would demur. What about the great national parks, organisations like the World Wide Fund for Nature dedicated to the preservation of the last wildernesses and the life they contain? They exist, it is true, but they haven’t saved the Amazon rainforest or prevented species after species being added to the Red List. It is good that they exist and there have been successes—species brought back from the brink, wild places saved from loggers, mining corporations and other big exploiters. But it is one step forward, two steps back. Conservationists are engaged in a fighting retreat.

The Pattern in the Leaf

The sense of beauty in humans must derive from the natural world, within which we evolved—where else could it have come from? Beauty is concerned with balance and symmetry of the kind found in a butterfly’s wings or the pattern of veins in a leaf. Art is not a copy of nature, not even the most ‘realistic’ or ‘naturalistic’ art, but an interpretation of it, a borrowing from it, a celebration of how we found ourselves where we are. Emil Nolde’s flower paintings which are vivid splashes of colour, or Van Gogh’s violent quivering portraits and landscapes are what they are, artefacts, but they make us see the world around us with a fresh intensity. Once you have looked at Nolde’s Grosser Mohn, a seemingly hastily painted impression of large tousled red poppies, the painting superimposes itself on poppies in the external world, one interpreting the other, back and forth in the mind of the beholder.

It is tempting to say that a sense of beauty is innate in human beings, because it is something all cultures throughout history have admired and aspired toward in art. It is there in the great mosques of Islam, in the cathedrals of Europe, illustrated Celtic manuscripts, Chinese calligraphy, Japanese landscape paintings, the bark paintings of Australian Aborigines. 

That this sense is derived from nature, and is even inherent in the laws of nature, is suggested by the beauty of aeroplanes like jet fighters and Concorde. Aeronautical designers and engineers did not set out to create something beautiful, they wanted the optimum design for supersonic flight. For this they had to understand the principles of aerodynamics and apply them to the machines they were designing. The result was a scaled-back purity of form which the eye perceives as beautiful. The mind can rebel against this. The purpose of a fighter is to deliver destruction and death (forget ‘precision bombing’), while Concorde was a joint vanity product between Britain and France, flying across the Atlantic in a couple of hours at great environmental expense so the wealthy could conquer time. All the same, it is hard not to perceive them as beautiful forms in themselves. Some years ago, the Australian poet Les Murray told me he felt the same.

The problem of evil and beauty which the supersonic fighter encapsulates is hard to resolve. Totalitarian states like those of Stalin and Hitler rarely produce beauty. They present the iron mask of tyranny, reducing art to the utilitarian function of supporting and praising the regime. Those who refuse are denied access to publishing houses, galleries, concert halls, or they are imprisoned in gulags, exiled, even killed. So it was for Boris Pasternak and Victor Serge, for Kurt Weill and Thomas Mann.

But then there are artists who compromise in various degrees, who create great works of art in the interstices, as it were, of repression and terror, like Dmitri Shostakovich. And others, like Emil Nolde who was a Nazi sympathiser and remained so even after he fell foul of Hitler, when his art was condemned as ‘degenerate’ and he was forbidden to paint. How do we view his work, including the marvellous free-flowing watercolours of flowers that he produced in secret at his house in Seebüll after the prohibition? It would be easy to see them as tainted, and the righteous might say they should be destroyed. But when I visited Nolde’s house, now a museum, on the German-Danish border, a room full of these ‘illegal’ paintings filled me with a sense of gladness and liberation which only great art can inspire. I reject Nolde’s politics but I would not be without his paintings which are greater than the man.

So far as we know, only humans have a sense of beauty, though this may be the result of ignorance, of our inability to communicate with other species and so understand their perceptions of the world. If you believe in the truth of Iron Age creation myths like Genesis, the human sense of beauty is a gift from God. If you do not, then you have to say that beauty is a function of our brains, which are large in relation to body weight—large enough to respond to patterns in the universe which are innate in the functioning of matter, which are impersonal in themselves, but which the human mind delights in to such an extent that it plays with them in the art we create ourselves.

What Do We Really Feel About Nature?

Do humans have an innate affinity with the natural world? In 1984 the great entomologist and evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson published a book, Biophilia, subtitled The Human Bond with Other Species,in which he argued that this was indeed the case. It is an enticing proposition, and one which I would like to believe in. There is also superficial evidence for it in Western culture. We lavish great affection on dogs and cats, the animals we have domesticated as pets, and which give every sign that they respond to that affection. People surround themselves with other animals, too, from snakes and lizards, to budgerigars and lovebirds, and there is scarcely a house without pot plants of one kind or another. Carefully tended flower gardens are not as common as they were in my childhood, they nonetheless exist, and every city has its park where people like to stroll. 

In 1993 Wilson followed up Biophilia with The Biophilia Hypothesis, a collection of essays co-edited with Stephen R. Gellert, in which leading biologists considered various aspects of his original idea. There was general agreement on the validity of the hypothesis, with one dissenting voice, that of Jared Diamond. Diamond had visited the New Guinea highlands periodically over thirty years, studying the birdlife, and living among the people. Highlanders had names for an impressive array of plants and animals which were of use to them economically, and revealed an intense interest in their natural surroundings, but they were less observant of species they had no use for. So the Foré, who Jared Diamond knew well, had only one word for ‘butterfly’ which served for all the species to be found in their territory.

Diamond also observed how Foré tribesmen treated the wild animals they captured. He describes what seems to us unspeakable cruelty—the breaking of a live animal’s legs, for example, to make it easier for transport, and much worse. The Foré appeared to be indifferent to suffering. At other times they tortured captured animals for entertainment. 

We might like to think we are different, but there are enough men who delight in badger-baiting and many more of us who turn a blind eye to the suffering of animals in the slaughterhouse before they appear as shrink-wrapped pieces of meat in the supermarket. 

While I write, someone is shooting with a 12-bore on the outskirts of the village, killing crows and rooks, I suppose, because wildlife has dwindled to very little round here. The fields are all given over to grass for sheep. There are no grain crops, so the rooks and crows do no harm. But they are wild, and alive, and among the last creatures men can hunt for the joy of killing.

As I write, too, a small fly has become trapped in a spider’s web strung across the outside of the windowpane. It struggles feebly, the vibrating strands of the web alerting the spider who runs swiftly from its hiding place, swaddles the fly, and carries it back alive to devour at leisure.

It cannot be said that nature is cruel. Nature simply is. But at life’s inception some 3.8 billion years ago the adamantine rules were laid down. Every creature must eat to live, and every creature must breed. This applies to humans too, though thanks to our extraordinary brains, humans can make a choice which may be unique to our species. We can choose to break the circle. We can choose not to breed. The life force is strong, though, and few choose the even bleaker way of breaking the circle by killing themselves.

Biophilia exists in humans, in certain cultures at certain times, but biophobia exists too—a kind of war on the natural world which humans have fought for millennia, and which we still wage in spite of, or perhaps because of, our current temporary dominance.

A New Dark Age

We are living in a New Dark Age. How can this be? In a Dark Age, the physical infrastructure of a complex society collapses, leaving aftercomers to wonder at the ruins. One Anglo-Saxon poet, contemplating the ruins of an abandoned Roman fortress speculated that it must have been the work of giants. To think like this is to think of Dark Ages past, especially the collapse of the Roman Empire and the culture it sustained. What we have now is a different kind of collapse. We inhabit a world with a very sophisticated and ever-expanding superstructure, while our culture is exhausted and hollowed out.

There are many aspects to this and they may seem paradoxical. On the one hand, we have unprecedented access to knowledge through Wikipedia, through digital versions of our great libraries. Many archives, too, can be accessed online, and most magazines and journals have digital ‘libraries’ where you can consult back issues; films past and present are available online; there are virtual art galleries; hundreds of thousands of blogs, interviews, discussions, with some of the finest minds of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If you want a recipe—any recipe—you will find it online. Flower identification, birdsong identification, the fauna and flora of the Galapagos islands, what happened on Easter Island—it is all there. Moreover, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Skype, Zoom, we can communicate instantly with friends anywhere in the world; high-definition photographs can be snapped on iPhones; and there will be more and more as information technology expands its domain.

Such abundance should herald a Golden Age, but in fact it creates an overload of information as the mind flits from site to site grazing rather than patiently assimilating. One result is that memory becomes atrophied because you cannot process so much and such varied information, and in any case, you can always access it again via Google. We even have a verb for this, ‘to google’. 

This in turn affects our attention span. We no longer have time to read at leisure and at length. Newspaper articles rarely exceed 800 words and even once serious papers like The Times and The Independent have adopted a tabloid format with a dominance of image over text. A few serious cultural journals like The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and in Wales O’r Pedwar Gwynt and Planet, still exist, but their readers are on the Red List of endangered species.

It can be argued that informed discussion of politics and cultural issues has moved to the Net. There is some truth to this. The problem is that serious engagement with these issues has to compete with millions of other voices all demanding to be heard at the same time, with everyone’s opinion as good as everyone else’s. It is an attitude which revels in ignorance under cover of a subversive populism, enabling demagogues like Trump and Johnson, ignorant themselves, to rise to political dominance.

The proliferation of ‘social media’ has played a large role in this. During his four years in office in the White House, Trump almost governed by Twitter; campaigns of disinformation for political ends abound, whether homegrown or the work of foreign powers like Putin’s Russia; websites of far-right groups foment class and race hatred. Public service broadcasters such as the BBC are under constant threat, accused of bias by successive Conservative and Labour governments. Powerful media owners like Rupert Murdoch and Tory newspapers like The Daily Mail