A long time ago, when I was writing a daily newspaper column, a person phoned me to ask if I would share a cup of coffee with them. This person, a regular reader of my opinions, wanted to know how I coped. How I coped, that is, with having a particular – cynical – view of world affairs. Didn’t this world view cause me to be depressed? Evidently, they were finding things depressing, even at that stage.
I say “even at that stage” because this phone call and cup of coffee happened before such events as the Covid pandemic, the Global Financial Crisis, the Ukraine war, the Trump presidencies, Brexit and the climactic culmination of the Israeli right-wing’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in Palestine. I seem to recollect it was around the time of the attacks on Iraq, which I had deplored from the outset as a transparently lie-based geopolitical manouevre.
Anyway we met for a coffee near my office and this person put their question simply. Given my evidently cynical world view, how did I not become terminally depressed?
I’m still not a hundred per cent sure I know the answer to that question, but I think what I said was close to the truth. I said that when it all seemed overwhelming, I mentally “zoomed out” in perspective and reminded myself that this whole human enterprise of which we are part is really just a blip in space and time and soon enough will be over and done. Even while I am inextricably engaged in day to day living, and even though I care deeply about my family, other people and our lovely living planet, I also feel somehow detached from the clamour of “civilization”. I draw sustenance from nature – where I can find it – and am inspired with awe, admiration and wonder at the living universe. I recognise that I’m being swept along by powers infinitely beyond my understanding, with an interpretation of reality that owes itself to my limited senses and my limited mind. “Reality” – if there is such a thing in any complete or ultimate sense – is beyond me. So all this human striving and strife – the endless saga of wars and massacres that I find in history books and newspapers – is both beyond my control and also ultimately just “noise” in a gigantic, incomprehensible, kaleidoscopic creation.
I don’t think my answer helped my inquirer at the time. I hope they are OK, wherever they are, and that all the things that have happened since then have not made them too depressed. I think the person may have asked if my mindset and views made me feel lonely or isolated. A fair question, since my interpretations of many world events are usually nothing like the interpretations promoted by politicians or most of the media and this tends to make me an outlier with views not readily accepted.
On a mundane level I’ve learned that it doesn’t necessarily help to share my thoughts on current events with most people. I’ve been at gatherings of people drawn together by a notion that we may share similar opinions and ideas about the world. Usually I try to shut my mouth but food and alcohol open minds, and thoughts start to flood out over loosened tongues. On those occasions (too many of them) when I can’t resist sharing my scepticism about ideas received holus bolus from commentators and “opinion-makers” I wind up feeling like a pariah. Amused looks of disbelief are darted my way and generally after a few further queries designed to determine if I’m actually serious, the conversation is politely steered back to safer topics such as recipes, music and fashionable progressive causes. If that’s loneliness then yes, I experience loneliness. Fortunately my wife is as cynical and sceptical as I am, so that’s a great blessing.
Which brings me to now.
Remembering that person, long ago, who wanted to share a coffee, I know why they asked me their question. Because it really does hurt to look at the madness of the human world and to believe in your heart that it shouldn’t have to be this way: that things shouldn’t have to head in the direction they are heading. But knowing also that despite the best efforts of many good, determined, inspired and clear-sighted people, our species seems doomed to follow its well-worn paths to disaster. That’s a hard thing to see and realise – especially when you have brought children into the world just at the time when it all seems to be turning sour. But then, I’m a white male in a rich country and I’ve benefited from many privileges that go along with that status. For a lot of people in less fortunate positions around the world things went sour a long time ago.
In a way it’s yet another privilege to be able to watch what looks like a great unravelling from a vantage point on one of the upper storeys of our modern tower of Babel. Truly we have been standing on a pinnacle of inherited wealth, knowledge and capability that is practically miraculous. I don’t need to recap the marvels that industrial “civilisation” has made possible, nor the astonishing progress of those marvels in my short lifetime. But the view from the tower reveals a scene that resonates in my mind like the sight of a great crowded, sprawling city seen from a jetliner coming in to land. Everything about a modern city screams the fact of its unsustainability. No more sustainable is the great tower of industrial society as a whole. I feel the certainty that this tower cannot stand much longer in its present form. Its foundations are inadequate and shaky. And at the same time as the tower pushes its turrets further into previously impossible heights, great chunks of its structure are crumbling away. Its core is riddled with rot and nobody seems able to remember why our ancestors started building the thing in the first place.
More and more parts of the tower are being walled off and sealed by those inside, frightened of “intruders” making their way from the lower storeys. Meanwhile a glance from any window shows increasing numbers of people being pushed out and falling from the heights to land and starve in the decaying, burning or flooded hinterlands far, far below.
The tower is coming down. We can all feel it swaying.
In our hearts many of us feel conflicted. When the tower falls there will be untold misery. But we know it has to fall; it’s a rotten structure that augurs no good for the world it is consuming.
Gravity won’t be defied. What has gone up will come down. Look at it, honestly.
Most of the world’s leaders aren’t worthy of the positions they hold. They are catspaws for greed and nothing more. All they will bring is war, strife and misery, imagining they can keep the shaky tower standing for a few more decades for the benefit of their selfish, short-sighted masters. Maybe they can, but nothing, I think, can stop the rot now: it’s too far gone.
Depressing? Yes, it is a depressing vision.
That’s why I zoom out from the immediate view and remind myself again of the immense mystery of existence. I remind myself that what will be will be, because it must be, for reasons that aren’t mine to understand. Remembering this I feel something approaching inner peace, even as the walls and floor of my comfortable room in the tower start to buckle and sway.
And it is, after all, an extraordinary time to be alive.
