Busy Going Nowhere

Lately, I haven’t been anywhere that is more than twenty minutes walk from base-camp. But don’t panic, I tell myself. Remember that eccentric chap you met in the Student Union bar when you were twenty? You were all fired up with excited anticipation of your forthcoming year of Voluntary Service Overseas in some exotic, faraway place (it turned out to be Sudan) and he maintained that going to distant places was a waste of time: the only valid form of travel was the exploration of the mind, he said, and that could be accomplished from your armchair. Bearing this in mind, my week of staying put has not been so dull.

Coincidentally, an old friend from those VSO days in Sudan has been in town and we spent some time together at the Whitworth gallery, where we were enchanted by William Kentridge’s video work Second Hand Reading, despite neither of us being fans of the genre. The fast-paced moving images tell a story that is hard to pin down, but the evocation of South African culture and politics was evident – even though I have never been to that part of the world. I am sure the distinctive accompanying music also wrought its magic. Later, we lunched at a nearby Yemeni café, where the Arabic spoken reminded us of our Sudanese experience. But what struck me was the fact that ordinary day-to-day activity goes on for these people, despite the carnage of war that is ravaging their homeland. Yemen is another place I have never been to, though my father was stationed there during the time of the British garrison and it is his description of the place that lingers, despite current events.

And I have been drawn, as usual, to the cinema. Tempted by the ‘Steve McQueen hype’ (and the availability of cheap tickets) I went to see Widows which, despite the director’s pedigree, is a run-of-the-mill heist movie with an unconvincing plot and very little to challenge the imagination – except that it is set in present-day Chicago, a place that I have not visited but which is on my wish-list. Much more rewarding is the movie Wildlife, by Paul Dano. The action – such as it is – takes place in a small town that sits below a glowering mountain range somewhere in Montana. The time is 1960 and the 14 year-old Joe shares with me not only a name but also a birthdate, so the music, the fashions and the attitudes of the period resonate nostalgically. Montana itself is unfamiliar territory for me but the story told in Wildlife is not. It is a good example of William Faulkner’s notion that only the “human heart in conflict with itself... is worth writing about”.

But the most significant mind-travel this week came on the centenary of Armistice Day. Standing with the crowd around the city’s cenotaph was, I thought, the best way to pay tribute to those who fought and died in what they were led to believe was a just and necessary war. The military parade set the scene, but it was the plaintive strains of The Last Post and the contemplative two-minute silence that evoked an emotional response akin to empathy for those who suffered. Yet it was the cinema that managed the feat of transporting me back to the time and place of WWI. Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old is a remarkable work that takes old film footage of the front line and transforms it into a more lifelike, modern cinematographic experience, one with real power to help you imagine being there – not that you would have wanted to be.

So, it’s been a busy and, at times, intense week of going nowhere. Nevertheless, my appetite for real, passport-flourishing travel is unabated. London and, later, the island of Crete beckon.

The Peterloo Pivot Point

It was in a Sicilian lemon grove that I learned the surprising fact that citrus fruits were cultivated, originally, in China. I mean, it’s obvious where Japanese knotweed comes from but oranges and lemons, those quintessential fruits of the Mediterranean, must surely be indigenous? Not so. I suppose there may be a clue in the name of the variety called ‘mandarin’ but it had never occurred to me to query it, any more than I had ‘tangerine’ or ‘clementine’. My assumption was based on limited knowledge.

It’s not unreasonable to draw conclusions from scant perceptions, especially if we have limited access to learning and education, but we all benefit from bathing in the pool of knowledge. My former impression that the only fruit to have come from China was the lychee has been banished and so it should be, given its shallow foundation. And, despite the saying “a little learning is a dangerous thing” (which I suspect was coined by the gatekeepers of academia to dissuade the hoards from assailing their ivory towers), I certainly feel better knowing that there is much I do not know and for observing that learning is incremental, not absolute.

For those who don’t know, ‘Peterloo’ was an event that took place in Manchester in 1819 and the eponymous film has just been released. It recounts the violent reaction of the authorities to a peaceful assembly of thousands who had gathered to hear orators state the case for enfranchisement. The eventual outcome of that day was the recognition that the right to vote belongs not just to property-owners but to all citizens. According to the director, Mike Leigh, his motivation in making the film was to educate rather than entertain, in which case (assuming its historical authenticity) it should be included in the relevant history curriculum for schools as an adjunct – or even as an alternative – to textbooks. What better way to get a flavour of the past than via intelligent cinematography? (And if this proposition raises the spectre of propaganda films, such as those used by dictatorial regimes, then the same wariness should apply to currently adopted textbooks.) Historical perspective is fundamental to making sense of current affairs. In the case of Peterloo, for example, how many more voters would turn out at election time if seeing the film made them aware that enfranchisement had not been granted to them by a beneficent ruling class, but hard-won from a grudging, greedy elite determined to cling to wealth and power?

Even so, knowledge is not the only thing that will improve our condition. Peterloo highlights the eternal conflict between two human traits: selfishness and selflessness – the instinct for individual survival versus the logic of acting for collective survival. Recent advances in DNA recognition have enabled scientists to deduce that immigration to Britain began 10,000 years ago: we are all immigrants or descendants of immigrants. In Darwinian terms, this is a good thing, since it provides a bigger gene pool for the purpose of evolution. Yet still we resist newcomers: we are not convinced by the argument that they will enrich our lives in the long term. Perhaps because, in the long term, we are dead and, meanwhile, we must survive.

This defensive strategy also translates into corporate behaviour. For example, companies that promote harmful drugs such as alcohol and tobacco have spent money lobbying and conniving to maximise profits, when their money could have been employed in a forward-looking strategy of developing product less harmful to society. They are slow to adapt but, now that cannabis is becoming more acceptable, there are signs that they may be moving into that trade. Not that it’s a new market: there is DNA evidence that cannabis was being used 5,000 years ago – in China.

Good News Bulletin

Here is the news: the world is getting happier. Now, I wouldn’t blame you if you were to scoff – what with that ‘fake news’ controversy raging – or if you were to say it doesn’t feel like it (we all have our worries) but, from my point of view, the argument certainly holds up. I have spent some days during these autumnal weeks hiking in classically picturesque English countryside and among orchards of “mellow fruitfulness” on crisp sunny days, when Nature’s colours reflect the light so brightly that every vista is a classic photo-op – a temptation to indulge Excessive Instagram Syndrome.

You would be right, of course, to object that my evidence of universal well-being is a) anecdotal and b) personal, so perhaps we should stick to measurable statistics. The World Happiness Report 2016 demonstrates a continuous upward trend in happiness, in so far as it correlates rising incomes with measures of life-satisfaction: as countries get richer over time, their people get happier. Happyologists (those who work in this sector of social science) face a degree of scepticism, rightly so, as they are dealing with a slippery concept. One line of lyric from Ken Dodd’s enduringly popular song sums up the difficulty of framing the questionnaire: “I’ve got no silver and I’ve got no gold but I’ve got happiness in my soul”. He is right: happiness depends on much more than wealth. Many factors affect the way we feel – and these are duly recognised and enumerated by researchers – nevertheless, wealth does play a fundamental part, the old refrain “we were poor but we were happy” notwithstanding . Subsistence, let’s face it, cannot be a joyful experience.

The fact that, country-by-country, people are becoming wealthier and happier is a good-news story, though it is not one that the media are inclined to headline. It goes against their tendency to be anxiogenic – inducing anxiety – and to foster alarm. It is said that pessimists sound like they are trying to help you, but optimists sound like they are trying to sell you something, in which case a daily dose of pessimism is a neat way to hook your public. That said, editors often make an effort to include a cheerful story in their content, so as to introduce balance and offer us hope that not all the world is doomed. From a consumer’s point of view, it would be nice to take this further and to have a distinct choice between optimistic and pessimistic news channels, so that we could reassure ourselves either that things are going well or badly depending on our disposition. Even then, however, there is another issue: that of the disjointed presentation of random facts. Heart-warming or despair-inducing, we would still be consuming a day-to-day account of a string of incidents that do not coalesce into a bigger story – the equivalent of a play-by-play sports commentary. For a better understanding of the changing state of the world and the direction in which it is heading, we could use more stories along the lines of “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 137,000 since yesterday, every day for the last 25 years”  brought to us exclusively by the Long-Term Good-News Channel.

One more thing that the happyologists’ findings suggest is that absolute income, not relative income, is what matters most for happiness. The Joneses may have more money than us but that does not necessarily make them happier than us. And I must say, as one who can afford simply to spend time hiking in fine weather, in good boots and in good company, I have no argument with that proposition either.