THE NECESSITY OF ART -Post Covid: 4
MIDNIGHT IN THE HOLOCENE
After this terrible plague, which is both medical and moral, people must insist that the Neoliberals retreat into some dark space (perhaps the cages where they are keeping children near the Mexican border) leaving us to heal the dying earth and our troubled brothers and sisters in Ukraine and Somalia, and those others of all hues and beliefs, in their troubled silences, as we wait for the insects to hum and birds to sing again.
Or will we allow the Neoliberals to again burn our forests, to again scar our earth with their toxins, to continue to carve away our mountain tops and to starve our children and kill other’s children while we play into distraction with their digital 5G trinkets?
Soon, when the first phase of this cruel plague recedes, we may discover the wisdom to see a crack in our Western Civilization, that crack, as Leonard Cohen wrote, “where the light gets in”, when we truly witness and bid farewell to the recent past’s cruelty, allowing the best of our souls to become mentors of kindness – willing to say, for the sake of our planet and for our civilization, “we the people will determine all economic, political, social and cultural life from the point of view which replaces wealth with fairness, inequality with justice and based in gratitude and love”.
Without these changes we will continue to live in unresolved sorrow, knowing that our actual deaths will mean little as they become an enervated after-event to what we will live through in the renewed Neoliberal/totalitarian climate hell on earth to come.
This will be midnight in the Holocene, when we will have extinguished the dawn in our children’s eyes before any meaningful life could be reprieved.
What is the silent measure few of us can but whisper in the long silence, as we wait to see if others rise to moral nobility? Surely, in the 21st century, it is no longer God, Yahweh or Allah. It must be, before all other measures: ‘kindness’.
The philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, wrote that the nature of social freedom and personal liberty relate to pluralism – the theory that reality contains more than one creditable set of truths. The implication of accepting multiple realities exist means that while a person may not believe those realities to be true or correct, they still have a right to exist. You can see in this definition that democracy will contain freedom if it is pluralistic. Within a pluralistic society individuals are able to make choices, and in doing so, can express their liberty. Berlin goes on to argue that this is ‘an inescapable requirment of the human condition. Having the ability to make choices doesn’t mean the choice will be gained, but only that the individual is free to imagine and make the choice that things could be different.’ That is to say, hope still exists.
Totalitarian and neoliberal brain washing (and also terror and poverty) destroy the individual’s ability to imagine change. These impositions reduce our capacity to be fully human and therefore to be fully free. The psychic exhaustion from terror or poverty, defeat the imagination. This could be why we have witnessed the inability of long-term impoverished individuals to not be willing to participate in their own potential liberties.
For artists to understand how to use their voice and indeed what their voice may be, they need to think more about their power and role in society in regard to continually offering other ways to imagine being and hope. One of these ways is to understand that producing work that offers individuals a glimmer into the validity of their pain, loves, kindness and perhaps their reasons to exist and to hope, is a way to embrace the souls of suffering people.
Next time: THE FUNCTIONS OF ART