Where are we? Are we lost? There were those months following September 1939 that came to be known as the phoney war. Could that phrase describe our present predicament? Dave ‘Pinky’ Cameron and his chums have laid down the gauntlet; they are afire with enthusiastic bombast to destroy the few remains of the post-war consensual social-democratic vision of social justice based on inclusivity, a partnership of state and private enterprise with safeguards in place to protect us from the ravaging monsters of unfettered capitalism.
The gauntlet is laid down for all of us to see, but maybe we don’t want to see it. We hope that it will all be OK – we’ll muddle through as usual. Or is it that we are waiting for a new way forward to be revealed.
How does culture change work? Here we are, trapped in the dead carapace of monetarist ideology, but somewhere “out there” or “in here” are the seeds of a re-formation, a reformulation, a revisioning of how to frame the economy, or perhaps the political-economy would be more to the point. How to re-frame without those crafty politicians framing us? Are we straining towards a future or longing for some tarted up version of the past?
What sort of world do we want to live in? What are the values shared by the vast majority of us?
And then we have the news from Libya this week of what looks like the last death struggles of Gaddafi and his regime as many Libyans seek to find a way to a democratic future; 'We want what you’ve got'. But we are also seeking a way forward, examining the tension between unfettered individual freedom and solidarity. We seek a life that does not demonise others or exclude them – but where are the limits?
There is no capital-T Truth (see Gianni Vatimo's, A Farewell to Truth) but there remains a need for an orientation which will always be a weird mixture of the material and the spiritual, the collective and the individual. Oh yeah! It looks like a life of dialogue and negotiating – the great army known as the human race, slouching on, running and jumping – a carnivalesque ragtag army telling each other our stories.
And not forgetting, of course the next stanza from Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But, I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.