DISCUSSION OR INSISTANCE?
The market place of ideas or the battlefield?
CLASSISM AND RACISM
I spent years documenting people’s lives, concentrating on those who were once called working class, and the children and grandchildren of the Empire Windrush generation. I have shown what happened to people, but not why it happened. I witnessed their everyday struggles to become who they may have dreamt they could have been, as their hopes were chipped away by working conditions in which they continually had to seem to be obedient to the managers, the bosses and for many black people, the cops on the streets. Being poorly paid eroded not just the choices they could make, but also how they were excluded from the richer culture enjoyed by the middle classes.
Although I began my professional career as a freelance photojournalist, I came to recognise that the empathy I felt and the images I made revealing the humanity of my chosen subjects were inconsistent with the art director's, editor’s and publisher’s attitudes towards their fellow citizens, and often more so towards people of other races. This is where and how I became aware of the deep pit of classism and racism in the UK.
As I had been involved in the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movements in the US, racism was not a surprise to me, but the depth of classism was. The personal cost for me was to sacrifice my career as a photojournalist, but not my dedication to the ideas of egalitarianism, freedom and justice. As a day job, I veered off to commercial photography and films, but by the end of the last century, having made over 900 commercials for TV, I was fed up with the utter, despairing meaninglessness of what I was doing.*
WHAT ABOUT HISTORY?
It occurred to me that it was time to consider the social, political, economic and cultural forces that shape our lives. I have always read history, politics, culture and over the last few years, economics. Once I began to recognise the mendacious nature of our present neoliberal rulers, those known as the .01%; I began to see some of their system’s working parts, and their many contradictions to our social wellbeing.
I know that there are many bright people who serve the .01%. Perhaps 10% of the population are loyal acolytes to, or members of this Establishment. They carry the responsibility of keeping the rest of us in order (obedient via culture and education, quiescent as wage slaves). Many of us now recognise that the neoliberal ruling class in Britain, Europe, the US and in much of the rest of the world, have constructed a system riddled with poverty, hunger, disease, plagues, and all the curses of the climate and energy crisis. Occasionally we get a glimpse into their backrooms, infused with moral and financial corruption.
This rot emits so strong an odour that even without knowledge of what I have read, I would have sensed that we as individuals, as citizens or subjects of various nation states, as member of this or that race or religion, and members of our troubled species, are neither learning from nor responding to history. Consequently, we are headed towards hell, and we are condemning our children and grandchildren to worse.
WISDOM
I recently had a conversation with Darren Abrahams**, a dear wise friend who is a trauma specialist and trainer. We spoke about what could be deeper root causes of our inability to learn from history. He wrote, “…I fully believe that our collective myopia and “just in time” thinking comes from various survival mechanisms inherent in the structure of the brain under threat. I’m in Jerusalem, and yesterday watched a dramatization of the Roman sack of the city in AD70 - all the same themes of wealth inequality, oppression and creeping threat appeared as they do today in our attitude towards climate change, global conflict etc. We’re slow to learn these lessons because we’re basically still emerging from a relatively recent past as hunter gatherers.”
I believe this suggests that epoch by epoch we stumble and occasional leap or dance forward, enlarging the bounds and bonds of our humanity. We do this because we can and therefore we must. Our explorations of the stars are no different than our discoveries of musical harmonies, of our wondering about why we are here, about coming to embrace all the universe into ourselves and all of ourselves into all others. We know that there is beauty in knowledge, love, truth and kindness.
We also know that some amongst us are truly monstrous*** individuals – those who only value power and wealth. These are the narcissistic socio and psychopathic wreakers, those who relentlessly seek the controlling levers of corporations or of the state, those who turn us upon ourselves, who appeal to our basest instincts, those who will have us forget the word ‘we’ and will entice us into hating each other to secure their own excesses
PLURALITY or WAR
Many people would prefer to be in an Agora (a marketplace of ideas), where the plurality of contending thoughts can be openly and safely discussed in peace. But there is a problem: we cannot negotiate with monsters and we cannot compromise with evil.
The nature of the Agora is horizontal; power flows between competitive ideas on the basis of the strength of the argument and its presentation; whereas in the state of Agon, (conflict), control is organized vertically, where the most powerful and most wealthy thugs rule from the top.
Abraham Lincoln said, "Democracy is a rule of the people, for the people and by the people". He understood that the people are the justifiable owners of the earth and of our democracies, and that the monsters understand they are threatened the moment we say to a stranger, “we must share the little food we have”, “we must travel together to be safer”, “we must support each other and believe in each other to secure a better future”. History has proven and the monsters know that once we demand a minimal change which they push back on, our demands increase. The moment we say “turn your back on the super-rich and their bureaucrats and their corporate thugs”, and shout together at them, “No”, or “let us together strike against them”, the thugs are overcome with terror. They know that two people or a thousand people joining hands are more assured, less hesitant and better prepared to forever become disobedient and to eventually emancipate themselves from arbitrary controls.
It has been said that once a person has tasted freedom, it is a flavour never forgotten.
NOTES
*I have tried to address these questions regarding culture and the arts in many of the other essays on this platform and in a much longer and more detailed set of essays, perhaps to be published next year, called WHY? An Anatomy of Oppression
**darrenabrahams.com
thehumanhive.org
instagram @abrahamsdarren
*** Is ‘monstrous’ a vulgar overly emotional exaggeration?
•For me it is monstrous that, it was known (according to UK government statistics in 2019) that as a consequence of neoliberal austerity policies, over four million children went to bed every night, improperly fed and/or hungry; and now it is thought that there are more.
•For me it is monstrous that we allow our government to use our taxes to help the Saudi’s maim and kill non-combatants in Somalia every day.
•For me it is monstrous that we allow oil and food corporations to day-by-day destroy the earths delicate ecosystems, condemning our grandchildren to a horrible future.
•For me it is monstrous that CEOs who sell powered milk products to illiterate mothers in the global south causing over 200,000 infant’s deaths yearly, are not brought to justice.
…and so on.