Chris Beckett's Blog, page 10

Belief

If you subscribe to a belief, certain thoughts become unthinkable. So, for instance, if you subscribe to a belief in socialism, and you are presented with the various historical examples of socialism failing to deliver, you have to conclude that it just wasn’t done right, or was done in the wrong circumstances, and needs to be tried again, because the conclusion that socialism doesn’t work isn’t available to you. (Feel free to substitute laissez faire capitalism in that example: it is equally applicable). In the same way, if you believe that a loving and omnipotent god created the world, you have somehow to find ways of explaining the existence of (for example) agonising and degrading diseases that are consistent with such a god, because the much simpler explanations available to an atheist aren’t on your list of options.

Belief results in a certain inflexibility, in other words.

But belief is nevertheless essential to life. For one thing, we have to make decisions all the time in situations where there isn’t enough exact information to be certain of what the outcomes will be (this is true of almost all political decisions and all but trivial personal ones), or where the judgement to be made involves values and not facts (again true of most political and personal decisions). Without beliefs we’d have nothing to guide us.

And to be able to think about ourselves as coherent human individuals, and not just a bundle of impulses, we have to ‘keep faith’ with decisions already made. Marriage, for instance, involves keeping faith with the idea that you love someone and belong with them, even through times when you don’t actually feel love and aren’t enjoying being together. In other words you have to believe that what you felt in the past was real, even when it doesn’t seem so now, and you have to believe that you will feel it again. And the same applies to other kinds of commitments: an example in my case would be the writing of a book, which would never get done if I didn’t force myself to keep plugging on through long periods when I felt almost certain that the whole project was worthless, and that I nothing left to say.

Faith, in this sense, is a kind of belief that allows us to tie together the past, the present and the future, even though all we can ever actually directly know is the present. I think of it as a kind of human chain, such as might be used to rescue people from a shipwreck, except that this chain is made up, not of different individuals, but of different iterations of the same individual. For someone prone to self-doubt and mood swings, such as myself, holding hands with your past and future selves can be pretty challenging. (My wife would vouch that I can easily move in a single day between cheerful optimism to existential despair, and sometimes find it hard to give any credence to my former self of only a few hours ago.)

I hate to admit it, but I suppose what I’m talking about now is the kind of belief being referred to in a thousand cringy Hollywood movies when one character tells another ‘you’ve got to believe in yourself’ or ‘if only you believe in yourself anything is possible’. Clearly the latter is a lazy cliche and isn’t true. No amount of self-belief will make me (say) a premier league footballer (firstly, I’m just not built for it; secondly, I’m in my sixties). But it is true that you do need to believe in your ‘self’ in order to be able to achieve anything substantial, because unless you believe in a coherent self that is continuous over time, it is impossible to commit yourself to the work involved.

Your ‘self’ is, in fact, just a particular example of a whole class of entities that are necessary in order to function in society, but which owe their existence to belief. A nation is such an entity. Benedict Anderson famously described a nation as an ‘imagined community’. This is not the same thing as an imaginary community, because an imagined community really does exist. It’s just that it only functions because it is imagined. And imagination in this sense is closely related to belief. Believing in oneself and believing in a nation both entail being able to imagine a connection with a bunch of people you can’t actually see and can’t directly know: in one case these people are your future selves, in the other, compatriots you’ve never met.

Recent divisions in the UK are characterised by some as a rift between the blind belief of the ignorant and the rational evidence-based thinking of the educated (I’ve seen this thought expressed earlier today on social media). But actually both sides are sustained by beliefs in imagined communities. It’s just unfortunate that they aren’t the same ones. ‘I am a European first and foremost’ is resonant for some, ‘I am English [or British, or Scottish, etc] first and foremost’ is resonant for others. Some, I know, even combine both, but for many only one of these statements is real and the other is simply a fabrication. But these are all statements of belief, elements of the stories that we choose to live by, not facts that can be objectively verified.

Politics

Politics isn’t really about personalities. They’re just the puppet show. And the way I see it, politics isn’t really about ideas either, or not in the way some people seem to think. It’s about alliances. It’s about putting together coalitions of different classes or interest groups. Each group has its own ideas, its own story it tells itself, and the trick is to find some overarching idea or story which connects with enough of these different stories to allow a variety of groups to buy into it.

Historically in Britain, the Labour Party managed to be the titular party of the industrial working class but also the party of an important section of the professional middle classes, the delicado class as I have called them*. (The Democratic Party in America managed a similar alliance in the twentieth century, though it has presided over many different groupings in its two hundred year history). This is not to say that the delicados and the industrial working class see the world in the same way -they obviously don’t- or that they have the same priorities or the same values, but they had enough common interests and common enemies to make it possible to construct a story that both could buy into. It was a story, I suppose, about using the state to make society fairer, and to reduce the power of inherited privilege, which had an appeal to both these groups, though for different reasons.

I would say the last flowering of this alliance in the case of the Labour Party was the Blair era. Blair was able to draw in a substantial number of new middle class voters who had previously voted Tory, while still retaining the traditional industrial working class vote. (My feeling is that he didn’t actually earn the latter, but was able to benefit from historical loyalties, which had yet to fade.)

I think recent electoral politics in Britain have shown that this old alliance no longer holds. In Scotland, Labour has been displaced as the dominant party by the SNP (I do not know enough about Scotland to understand the alliance which this represents, but clearly it has drawn support from both of Labour’s traditional constituencies). In England, the Brexit vote and the recent election show that Labour can no longer take for granted the support of the voters it was originally set up to represent. The Conservatives have managed to find a story -and like the SNP’s, it is a story about nationhood and independence- which suits many of these voters better. A new alliance is forming between the non-delicado section of the middle class, and the old working class.

If we see politics as just being about ideas, and we are convinced that our idea is simply ‘right’ (as opposed to simply being the story our particular grouping prefers), we don’t respond effectively to the loss of an ally, because we conclude that our former ally is mistaken, or misled. And so we keep plugging away at the same idea, waiting for others to see the error of their ways, when the fact is that our story simply doesn’t appeal any more to our former allies. We need a new idea.

It seems to me that the political ‘right’ (I actually hate the lazy simplification that divides politics into ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’ but I’ll use it here for brevity), understands this at the moment better than the political ‘left’. You need to find out what different sections of the population want, not just in a practical sense (jobs, public services etc), important though that is, but in the sense of symbols and stories, and you have to deliver enough of what people want to make them feel like joining, or remaining part of, your alliance.

*See America City.

Behaving Badly to Prove you’re Good

The people of A, finding themselves easily able to dominate the people of B due to A’s considerably more advanced technology, realise that they could if they wanted enslave B people, bring them back to A, and make them work for nothing, thereby making life considerably more comfortable for A people.

However, A people do have some sense that treating other humans as possessions is wrong. (Indeed they have an uneasy feeling that treating other people as objects is the very definition of wrong.) This makes things very awkward, because the idea of enslaving B people, and getting all that unpleasant work done for nothing, really is very appealing, yet it is important to most As to think of themselves as good people who do the right thing.

Luckily, they find a way round the problem. They decide that actually it’s fine to enslave B people because B people aren’t fully human and therefore the usual rules don’t apply.

Some A people get so carried away by this thought that they declare that the enslavement of B people is actually in B people’s own interest, because in that way the Bs will be able to learn from the As what it means to really be human. Others decide that B people are so manifestly inferior that they should be treated with exceptional harshness and severity in order to contain their inherent wickedness. Their own cruelty is made thoroughly moral by their awareness of the cruelty they are thereby keeping in check.

However, for reasons irrelevant to the present story, a time nevertheless comes when the government of A decides to abolish slavery, and to grant citizenship to all the former slaves. In legal terms, B people are now the equal of A people. Indeed, legally speaking, they are A people. (By now, after all, few ‘B people’ have ever set eyes on B.)

But many A people refuse to accept that B people really are their equals. After all, if they were to admit that B people are as human as themselves, that would mean admitting that their behaviour towards Bs has been appallingly bad. Therefore they persist in their belief that B people are inferior, and continue to treat them harshly, so as to demonstrate that there was nothing wrong with their former behaviour, that they have nothing to be ashamed of, and that they can continue to think of themselves as good.

And since they continue to treat B people harshly, this means that, even a generation after the emancipation of the B people, many A people still cannot allow themselves to think of Bs as their equals, because that would mean admitting, not only that the former enslavement of B people was wrong (which actually wouldn’t be so hard to do, given that the current generation weren’t implicated in it), but that their behaviour since has also been wrong.

And so, for many generations, many A people persist in treating B people harshly and cruelly in order to prove themselves that they really are good people.

Good guys and bad guys

I was very pleased to be asked to take part in a conference at University College Dublin earlier this month called Alternative Realities: New Challenges for American Literature in the Era of Trump, and then to take part in a panel discussion at the Museum of Literature in Dublin with the other keynote speakers, Aleksandar Hemon and Karen Bender, and the conference organiser Dolores Resano. I had a great time.

The following is (more or less) the text of my keynote speech.

Good Guys and Bad Guys: a writer’s perspective.

My qualification for
being invited here is that I’ve written a novel about American politics in the near
future called America City, so I’ll start by telling you a bit about it.

The
original prototype for this novel was a short story I wrote in 2012 about an
American politician called Stephen Slaymaker. 
I wanted to write about global warming, and the context of the story was
an America in about a hundred years’ time, that was already almost completely
closed off to climate refugees from other parts of the world, but was facing
new stresses as a result of mass internal migrations caused by climate
change: Hundreds of thousands of people from south-eastern and south-western
parts of America were moving north to escape from flooding, fires, hurricanes
and droughts.  And northerners were
beginning to feel threatened by them and therefore to ‘other’ them, in the way that
migrants from overseas are othered now.  Just
as in the past, farmers fleeing from the dustbowl were derided as Okies, these
new migrants were called ‘dusties’ or ‘storm trash’, and northern states were beginning
to talk about building frontiers to keep them out.

The term ‘Storm trash’ was inspired by my reading of a couple of books about refugees from Hurricane Katrina: a real-life example of American refugees from an extreme weather event being briefly welcomed as fellow Americans in other parts of the country but then very quickly becoming the objects of resentment and hostility.  A detail that stuck in my mind was a mother from New Orleans who said her children were ostracised at school in Texas because, as she put it, they ‘came from the storm’.   

They came from the storm.  I felt this was a foretaste of things to come. Some people from New Orleans, made homeless by the hurricane and trying to leave, were stopped at gunpoint from entering neighbouring communities.  

My
character Slaymaker was not a bad man by his own lights, but his sense of moral
responsibility ended at the borders of his own country.  Later on, when I eventually wrote the novel, I’d
compare him to the king described at the beginning of Beowulf, King Scyld, of
whom the poet says ‘that was a good king’ because he is a ‘wrecker of
mead-benches’, and a ‘ring giver’ who looks after those who are loyal to him. 

A ‘ring giver’.  I’ve thought a lot about that notion and I explore it in the book. I’ve concluded that all political leaders are, of necessity, ring givers.  And even now, it seems to me, it tends to be the case that the flip side of being a ring giver to one bunch of people is being a wrecker of someone else’s mead halls.

Slaymaker
had no interest in opening the country’s external borders, but he was a patriot
and he hated the idea of America itself being divided.  He wanted to become President in order to
bind the country together again, north and south. 

* * *

As I say, I wrote the
short story in 2012, but I realised —as probably seems obvious— that this
wasn’t really a short story at all but rather the setup of a novel. 

So I began to plan a book.  In my plan I introduced, as the main viewpoint character, a bright, ambitious young British publicist named Holly Peacock, who has the idea of  winning the Presidency for Slaymaker by getting him to turn the focus of American people’s fear and resentment onto a neighbouring country instead of onto each other.  Holly also sees herself as a good person, and she defends the morality of what she does throughout the book.  Having grown up with impeccably right-on activist parents who seemed to care about everyone in the world but her, she’s drawn to the simplicity of Slaymaker’s Beowulf-style morality, which is based above all else on loyalty to your own.  

I
say a Beowulf-style morality, but I suppose you could equally well call it a
Homeric morality, or even an Old Testament one: a good king is a strong king
who looks after his own people and defeats their enemies.  Nowadays, we could also call it
right-wing. 

But
then we use the words left wing and right wing to mean many different
things. 

* * *

Anyway,
I decided to write this novel about President Slaymaker but I didn’t pursue the
idea for quite a while because I was working on other things.  It wasn’t really until four years later that
I settled down in earnest to write it. 

So there I was, in 2016, writing this book I’d been planning about an American presidential election being won by appealing to atavistic tribal loyalty and hostility towards a demonised ‘other’.  And meanwhile, out there in the real world… 

No one ever thinks about the problems all this rapid change is causing for writers of speculative fiction!   Sitting there at my laptop, writing America City, it sometimes felt to me as if reality was overtaking me. 

Of course I used this
turn of events to my advantage, borrowing ideas for the novel from the real election
as it unfolded, and from what had happened in Britain earlier that year.  I plagiarised reality.  But there were times too when reality seemed
to be plagiarising me.  For
instance, I came with the idea of AIs that collected data about individuals
from their phones (which by that point in the future are routinely monitoring
things like heartrate in order to understand the current mood of their owner).  These AIs worked out what mattered to each
individual and what they wanted to hear, then tailored bespoke electoral
messages accordingly, with no regard for factual accuracy, using fake social
media accounts that posed as regular human beings in order to deliver them.  I called these fake social media accounts ‘feeders’,
because when I invented them —and I kid you not— I had not yet heard the word ‘bot’. 

I’m
not in any way technical, but one thing I’ve learnt as a writer about the
future is that if you think about something that could plausibly happen
then very likely it will exist, and quite probably already does.

Incidentally,
though I do say it myself, my Stephen Slaymaker was a way more plausible
and better-drawn character than Donald Trump. 
If I’d come up with someone like Trump back in 2012, I’d have dismissed
him as a lazy one-dimensional stereotype, told myself to try harder, and
started again.  I still haven’t quite
come to terms with reality’s sloppy workmanship there.

You may be wondering, if you haven’t read the book, which other country Slaymaker makes an enemy of?  Well, I’ll just say that one thing that’s going to become highly desirable as the world heats up is empty Arctic territory.   You may remember that earlier this year —and very spookily from my point of view— PresidentTrump tried to buy Greenland from Denmark.

I’ll make you a prophesy: Greenland will belong to America one day.  (If it happens you’ll be impressed by my prescience at least.  If it doesn’t, you’ll forget I said it.)  But, though Greenland is as big as Mexico, it’s very small beer compared with the Arctic territories to its west.

*  *  *

Let me tell you something
about my personal approach to writing about the politics of the present
time.  And I’d like to start with some
thoughts from someone I admire. 

Natascha
Kampusch is an Austrian woman, now in her thirties, and her claim to fame is
that she was kidnapped at the age of 10 in 1998 by a man named Wolfgang
Priklopil who bundled her into his van when she was walking to school and then kept
her captive for the next eight years.  For
the first six months she was entirely confined to a tiny underground room.  At weekends, when Priklopil had his mother to
stay, ten-year-old Kampsuch was down there alone for three days at a
stretch.  One of her great fears was that
he would have a road accident and never return for her.

Gradually,
Priklopil began letting her out for limited periods, making her work for him,
and even taking her on trips outside the house. 
He kitted out her dungeon like a schoolgirl’s bedroom, with desk, a bunk
bed, a computer, and even fetched her books and magazines at her request.  But he also became increasingly violent
towards her, lashing out at her without warning with his fists and with hard
objects.  He shaved her head. He kept her
chronically weak with hunger.  He forbade
her from talking about her family.  He
abused her sexually. 

Yet
Kampusch to this day refuses to view Priklopil simply as a monster.  This refusal led to her being subjected to
abuse and hate mail in Austria, but she remained absolutely firm on it.  In particular she angrily rejects the idea
that her refusal to see Priklopil as evil is a symptom of the Stockholm
Syndrome, a label which, she says, victimises her all over again.

Naturally, when reading her book about her ordeal, one identifies with Kampusch.  And that’s a very disturbing experience: my relief when she finally escaped was so overwhelmingly cathartic that I often replay it in my mind even now, years after reading the book.  But of course it’s much more challenging to do as she asks and consider Priklopil not as something utterly ‘other’, but as a human being who is on the same continuum as the rest of us.  Priklopil, as Kampusch sees it,

…didn’t want anything more than anyone else: love, approval, warmth.  He wanted somebody for whom he himself was the most important person in the world.  He didn’t seem to see other way to achieve that than to abduct a shy, ten-year-old girl and cut her off from the outside world until she was psychologically so alienated that he could ‘create’ her anew.

Natascha Kampusch, 3,096 Days.

This idea that Priklopil was human like everyone else was too much for the many people who saw fit to direct hate mail at a woman who’d spent half her childhood in solitary confinement.  Presumably they just couldn’t bear the thought that what was inside him was inside them also.  (Yet their own behaviour demonstrated this to be true of course.  What strangers we are to ourselves!)

Anyway,
my thought is that, if Kampusch can manage to think about her captor and abuser
as a fellow human being, I really ought to be willing to do likewise about
people who actually aren’t locking me up, or beating me —shaving my head
obviously doesn’t come into it— but whose politics I hate.  In fact I think I see that as part of my task
as a novelist: to try not to ‘other’ people but instead to understand why
they think and feel as they do, both from the inside, as subjects, but also in
terms of the external forces to which they’ve been subjected and which have
shaped them.  

This
is not to ‘excuse’ bad behaviour —seeing Priklopil as human, motivated by the
same desires and fears as the rest of us, doesn’t mean it was okay to turn a
child into his personal slave, or that it was anything other than an utterly
vile thing to do— but, unlike those upright citizens who wrote hate mail to
Natascha Kampusch, for daring to suggest that Priklopil was anything like them,
 I don’t want to pretend that I can see
no trace of Priklopil inside my own head.

I agree with Solzhenitzyn that ‘the line between good and evil passes through every human heart.’  Whatever a hundred million outraged voices on Twitter might have you believe, it doesn’t run neatly between us and them.

*  *  *

Something I’ve been
thinking about a lot lately is the fact that most human beings think of
themselves as the ‘good guys’.  I suppose
there are a few people in the world who actually enjoy the idea of being
bad, but my guess is that even murderers and torturers usually have some sort of
story they tell themselves that allows them to feel justified in what they do,
like my characters Stephen Slaymaker and Holly Peacock (who by the way I
actually like.)

Most
of us think of ourselves as the good guys and those who threaten us as the ‘bad
guys’.  I’ve seen this happening in
Britain during the endless arguing over Brexit (which will incidentally be the
subject of my next
book): this tendency to demonise the other side, to assume the worst and
most unforgivable motives to them, and to attribute nothing but virtuous
motives to our own side.  Psychologists
call this the attribution bias: we see only the good in us and only the bad in
them.

But
how likely is it, actually, that we (whoever ‘we’ may be!) really are straightforwardly
the good guys, given that nearly everyone thinks they’re the good guys
and has some sort story to explain why it’s so? 
Many years ago, I visited Belfast, and had the strange experience of passing
through one neighbourhood whose inhabitants apparently all vociferously agreed
that one particular view of the constitutional situation in Northern Ireland
was the only one consistent with truth and justice, and then almost immediately
coming to another neighbourhood whose inhabitants apparently all believed the
opposite. 

I mean — what are the odds?

But
of course this isn’t just a massive coincidence.  It’s not the case that all the right-thinking
people have ended up in one street and all the wrong-thinking people in another,
as the result of some kind of colossal cosmic fluke.  The truth is that our political views — our
theological ones too for that matter—  are not just the result of individual choices we
make as free agents.  People’s beliefs,
opinions and loyalties are very powerfully shaped by their history, their
social context and their material circumstances, even if not completely
determined by them.

The
Brexit map of Britain illustrates that.  Just
as Belfast people know which areas are nationalist and which are unionist, and
can often tell which side someone comes from when they meet them, I’m guessing
most Brits have a pretty good sense of which areas are Leave and which Remain.  I don’t need to look it up, for instance, to
know that the fairly working-class Essex town of Harlow would have voted Leave,
or that the attractive seaside city of Brighton will have voted Remain.  On one level it seems surprising that Dover
voted Leave, given that it’s the most famous of our gateways to Europe, but on
another level, I don’t find it surprising at all because I’ve been there, and I
know it’s a Leave town just by looking at it. 
Regardless of economic self-interest, there is something about a place
like Dover that tends to make you Leavier.

As a matter of fact, Cambridge, where I live, is the Remainiest city in the entire UK. A wealthy, rapidly growing, university city with London-style property prices and booming IT and biotechnology industries, Cambridge was 75% remain.  But in the same county, and only an hour or so’s drive away, is the rural, dauntingly flat, and considerably less prosperous area called Fenland where the vote was 71% leave.  It just makes no sense to see these obviously demographic differences as purely individual choices.

So
I don’t have much patience with those whose account of Brexit (or Trump) is
just ‘some bad people did it.’  What kind
of explanation is that?   Certainly,
there are some pretty unimpressive people involved, but how did they manage to
get purchase on our politics?  How did
they manage to persuade people that they had their back?  Those are the interesting questions.

*  *  *

One of the things I did
when writing America City was to include some vignettes of ordinary people—people
involved in the great internal migration— and I tried to show how the sympathies
of these internal refugees, and their failures of sympathy, are shaped by their
own needs and circumstances, and change as those circumstances change.  (It’s a technique I used in an earlier book Mother
of Eden, in which among other things, I tried to explain to myself why poor
people often give their support to people who you’d think they’d see as their
exploiters.)

It seems to me that, if you feel you need something that someone else has got, you find a way of justifying the act of taking it from them — and if that means refusing to see things from their point of view, so be it.  And if you’ve got something that other people need —and let’s face it, the money that each one of us in this room spends each year on non-essential comforts could meet an awful lot of basic human need— you find ways of justifying hanging onto it, even if that means hardening your heart.  That’s only human —in fact I think it’s quite possible that this kind of manoeuvre is an inevitable part of being in the world— but we need to acknowledge it in ourselves before we rush to judgement about the lack of generosity of others. 

Otherwise
attribution bias does its work, and moral principles become tools, not for
making ourselves into better human beings, but for proving how much better we already
are than those other people.

*  *  *

So.  Holding up a mirror to the age of Trump, and
to all the other huge upheavals that are beginning to take place in the
Euro-American world as its old hegemony starts to crumble.  How do we do it?

I really hope we don’t see a lot of novels about the travails of comfortably off middle-class people whose lives have been made a little less comfortable by having to hear about Trump’s doings.  I am tired of people of my own class (the delicado class, as people call it in America City) acting like they’re the victims here. 

It
is important that the real victims’ experiences are brought into the
light —for instance the callous treatment of migrant children separated from
their parents— but we still need to be careful not to choose atrocities selectively
and self-servingly, to maintain a simplistic fairy tale about good guys and bad
guys.  Immigrant children weren’t necessarily
treated particularly well under Obama either, however much more charming his
manners were, and however much more he resembled the kind of president we would
like to be.  In fact immigration controls
are always ugly, but the most liberal of countries still have them and there’s
very little appetite, even among liberal-minded folk, for their complete
abolition.  (I wouldn’t advocate that
myself. Would you?)

One kind of novel about the rise of Trump would, I think, be one that looked under the skins of Trump voters.  I know it’s hard and perhaps some people here will think that they don’t even deserve to be understood.  But I think that’s looking at ‘understanding’ in completely the wrong way.  We shouldn’t think of understanding as some kind of reward to be given out only to people we like, or people we feel sorry for.  Natascha Kampusch needed to understand her kidnapper as a human being, not as a kindness to him, but in order to survive 8 years in which he was her only companion and the nearest thing she had to a friend— and also in order to be able to escape.     

In
the following short extract from America City, I am writing speculatively about
future events.  (I know that in many ways
that’s much easier to do than writing about now, but I like to think that, in
my own way, I am really writing about now.) 
What I am specifically trying to do in this passage is to show how
something as mundane and material as precipitation patterns in the mountains of
California can have consequences not just for human behaviour but for the cast
of human minds. And what I want to suggest to you is that what literature
in the age of Trump needs to do is to illuminate the similar chains of
consequences which lead in a series of steps from events in the material world —it
might, for instance, be something like a reduction in global demand for
American-made steel, or the invention of the internet— to changes in things
like the human capacity for tolerance and empathy.

The snow used to settle up there on the Sierras, many metres deep in places, and it would form drifts and glaciers whose meltwaters flowed all summer long down into the Central Valley and into the states to the east. Some of that snow was so deep that it lasted years. But now what snow still falls will all melt off in the spring, stripping bare the rocky peaks before summer has even reached its height. And rain just runs straight off, evaporating all the while back into the air.

 It’s no big thing as far as the planet is concerned. The mountains themselves are still the same huge shapes against the sky. Earth still follows the same old track round the sun. But living things depend on small contingencies. On the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, and down in the valleys, there are plants and animals that depend on streams flowing for such-and-such a time, farmers who depend on meltwater to irrigate their crops, towns that depend on water tables being replenished every year. There has only been a small change in the air, and only a small change in the way that water comes down the mountains, but an entire web of consequences are flowing out from it.

Trees die. Animals starve, or climb higher up the mountains, or wander north. And in the human world, farmers dig deeper wells, invest in costly water-saving devices, experiment with expensively engineered low-water crops, until a time comes when they can no longer borrow the money or no longer service their debts. And then they abandon everything and follow the animals north, becoming another stream, a human stream that branches and divides across America, a river of people with no money and no home, leaving crumbling buildings and rusting machinery and empty fields.

People in the north watch their arrival with suspicion and hostility. It’s dangerous to feel sorry for them, for that might mean feeling an obligation to help them, and to give up some part of the comfort blanket that everyone wraps around themselves against the frightening world. And isn’t that blanket always threadbare? Doesn’t it already feel too thin?  Yes, and if you were to look those new arrivals in the face and really acknowledge them for what they are, wouldn’t you also have to face the thing that follows behind them, the thing that has driven them north, the thing that everyone knows is moving north itself, coming closer and closer with every year?  And who in their right mind would want to do that?

Two Tribes

Due out in summer 2020. Most of the story takes place in the latter half of 2016 and the beginning of 2017, and is about a brief love affair between a man and a woman who come from opposite sides of the Brexit divide and from very different backgrounds. But the story is told by a future historian in the England of 2276, ruled by the Guiding Body.

My next book…!

This is my next book, due out in summer 2020. Most of the story takes place in the latter half of 2016 and the beginning of 2017, and is about a love affair between a man and a woman who come from opposite sides of the Brexit divide and from very different backgrounds. But the story is told by a future historian in the completely different England of 2276.

Building other worlds

I’ll be at Waterstones in Cambridge on Monday 25th November for this event, with Jane Rogers, Andrew Bannister and Tiffani Angus.

On 28th, I’ll also be doing a talk in Cambridge at Milton Road Library.

Wind Power

In the third quarter of 2019, for the first time ever, more electricity generated in the UK came from renewable sources than from fossil fuels. 20% of the total came from wind power. We ought to be celebrating this milestone.

Of course this is not enough, and of course electricity generation is only one of the sources of human-generated CO2 in the atmosphere. There is also transport to address, and deforestation, and meat production, and fossil fuel use for heating… And if there is to be any possibility in the long run of establishing some kind of equilibrium again, the human population of the Earth needs to stabilise.

But the growth of renewable power is something to celebrate all the same. Windpower was a hippy pipedream when I was young, but now it’s a giant industry that generates one fifth of the electricity we use in Britain. People say nothing is being done about global warming, but this isn’t true, and I don’t think it’s helpful to say it. It invites resignation. Some of the right things are already being done, and on a large scale too. They just need to be scaled up even more.

No longer a hippy pipedream! Wind turbine blades passing through Edenfield . Photo by Paul Anderson.

Telling the story of us and nature

I was very pleased to be asked to take part in the ‘writer’s rebel’ event last night as part of the Extinction Rebellion protest going on in London. The request was that I do a short reading of my own choice. Having agonised all week about what to read, I ended up sitting down and writing the following, a matter of hours before the event:

The fragile Earth…  The delicate web of life…  Nature as a wounded thing, desperately in need of our protection… 

The ecological crisis, it seems to me, has tended to be presented in those kinds of terms and I’m struck by the fact that this is really a new variation of an old story, a story in which ‘man’ is the master, and the rest of creation lies stretched out beneath ‘him’.  (I’m using the traditional gendered terms: it’s worth noting also that in many mythologies, Earth is personified as a woman.)

“God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and 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.”

Genesis, 1:26

Things have changed of course since that was written and in our new, ecological version of the story, humankind is not so much the imperious lord of creation, but rather its custodian or curator. But in the new version, as in the old, humans are powerful, humans are godlike, humans are strong, while nature is weak: a wounded animal by the roadside, perhaps, or a beggar holding out a bowl.  It is something vulnerable that needs us. 

One problem with this, it
seems to me, is that vulnerable things that need us can invite a tough response.
You can walk away from wounded animals and beggars and still carry on with your
life.  We all do it.  ‘I’ve got enough problems of my own to worry
about just now,’ we say to ourselves. 

And this after all, in
practice even if not in theory, is the response most people give to the
environmental crisis: ‘We’ve got enough problems to worry about already. The
environment will have to wait.’   You can
get a measure of the extent to which that’s true by imagining a world in which
the media and Parliament and the general public expended, lets say a tenth, or a
twentieth, or even one hundredth as much time and energy on the climate
crisis, as they are doing now on the actually rather trivial and local question
of Britain’s relationship with the European Union. 

And it’s not just Parliament or the media.  If I’m brutally honest, even for me, the climate crisis is quite a few rungs down from the top of the list of things I worry about most frequently.   Even people who are worried, even people who make some effort to speak out, aren’t anything like worried enough.

And I’m wondering if part of the problem is that we’ve been prone to think about this the wrong way round?  Wounded things that need us can be walked away from, but the idea of the rest of creation as being vulnerable and under our dominion is actually an infantile fantasy, like the fantasy of a little boy who plays at being big and fierce when really he depends on the care of others for everything he has. 

The Earth isn’t really fragile.  It’s five billion trillion tonnes of matter.  Drop a hydrogen bomb on it, and it just shrugs.  Life isn’t really that fragile either.  Life on Earth is getting on for four billion years old, and has survived asteroid strikes that completely blotted out the sun, and periods of cold so intense that almost the whole planet was covered in ice… As for ‘Nature’… well, nature is everything, and we’re inside it, totally and utterly subject to its laws. How can that be seen as weak? 

So perhaps the story we should be telling tell isn’t the story about fragile Earth and delicate nature, but the opposite?   We aren’t the masters of nature, nature is ours (or our mistress is you prefer to give Mother Nature her traditional gender).  But nature is far stricter than any human ruler.  It can’t be bargained with, or flattered, or coaxed, because it doesn’t listen to us, it doesn’t hear us at all, it just responds to what we do, applying its own rules with an unbending impartiality that makes even the hardest and most rigid of bureaucrats look like bleeding hearts.  ‘Do this and the Earth gets hotter, do that and it won’t,’ says Nature, stifling a yawn and looking at its watch as it leans back in its office chair. ‘Those are the rules. It’s entirely up to you.  I really don’t mind either way.’  

And it really doesn’t, any more than electricity minds whether or not you stick your fingers into a socket, or gravity cares if you jump off a cliff.

The truth is that we and
our loved ones, all our achievements, our societies, our cultures, our histories—
all of the things we value and treasure and that give our life meaning— are
just a small and recent outgrowth on the surface of a ball of rock that doesn’t
even know we’re there.  The question
isn’t ‘How do we help the poor fragile Earth?’ or ‘How do we mend the wounded
web of nature?’ because the Earth is fine and nature as ever is in perfect
health.  The real question is a much
simpler one: ‘Do we want to be here or not?’

Greenland

President Trump’s proposal to buy Greenland has been greeted with ridicule and cited as evidence of his mental instability and inability to govern. I’m not so sure. The very existence of America demonstrates that countries grow by acquiring territory from others, whether by conquest, manipulation or purchase. Alaska, at the time another very sparsely populated Arctic territory, was obtained by purchase, and Trump is not the first American president to propose buying Greenland as well: Truman suggested it in 1946.

Greenland was a strategic asset even then because of its position in the western Atlantic. And now it’s far more valuable. As the Arctic melts, new seaways are opening up to the North of Canada, for which Greenland would be a gateway; Greenland’s mineral wealth is becoming more accessible; and Greenland itself is a very substantial piece of real estate -at 2 million square kilometres it’s three times the size of Texas – with a tiny population (less than 60,000), and a small and distant mother country (Denmark). Farming is already possible in a small area of the country, and global warming will make more and more of its territory available for development and human settlement. As I tried to show in America City, as many parts of the world become uninhabitable due to global warming, Arctic territory is going to become a very valuable asset indeed.

The history of oil demonstrates that when big powers need something that’s in another country, they find ways of taking it. (So does the history of rubber, or spices, or gold…) I’m sure Trump has blurted something out that is being seriously discussed behind the scenes. And perhaps it’s not even a case of blurting it out, but rather of deliberately softening the ground. The more often a thing is spoken about, the more possible it seems.

Greenland would be laughably easy for America to acquire. I very much doubt if Trump will be the last President to talk of taking it, and my bet would be that Greenland will indeed be annexed to America at some point in the coming century.

Meanwhile the Amazon is burning. The politics of climate change are truly upon us. A time will soon come when obsessing about whether or not Britain should be part of a European bloc will look like the displacement activity it really is.