We observe people and try to get what they have, thinking it will make us feel as they appear to feel, writes JOHN WATERS
RETURNING FROM Italy last Saturday, I took the bus into Dublin and had an opportunity to study the city from a more elevated position than usual. I was shocked by the decrepitude and dilapidation of the inner city: littered, shabby, unpainted, unloved, more like a shantytown of a third world dependency than the capital of a modern democracy after 15 years of prosperity.
A friend of mine says, "We are a family of knackers who won the Lotto", and, although an Irish Timescolumnist could never endorse such a mode of expression, I have to grant him his point.
There is an unmistakable gloom about Ireland now that exceeds anything you encounter elsewhere, even places with comparable or worse problems. If it is possible for societies to suffer from what is called depression, I think we might do worse than submit to such a diagnosis, thus opening up some possibility of treatment.
Whenever I turn on the radio since coming home, I hear about nothing but Nama and swine flu. Indeed, I was on the Aer Lingus plane in Bologna for just a few minutes when a stewardess came on the intercom telling me how to sneeze. I was immediately visited by a sense of crisis that now refuses to leave me. One of the few positive spirits I encountered since I returned was a health shop owner who, in response to a polite question, told me that at the moment business is not great, but he is looking forward to the swine flu epidemic in November.
For more than a year we have been ranting about developers and bankers – grievances now conveniently drawn under one heading: Nama.
But the problem here is not fundamentally about banking or building – it is about our screwed-up sense of how human beings should live and of the role of the public realm in creating the right conditions. The unmentioned original wrong is that almost everyone involved in politics, banking, developing and building thought it a bonny idea to build several hundred thousand shoeboxes for people to live in. No thought was given to the humanity of the putative inhabitants of these shoeboxes. This is what we need to talk about.
We congratulate ourselves on the quality of our “debate”. Yet, although everyone except the potential beneficiaries thinks Nama a disastrous idea, we know in our bones that Nama will happen, that it will be the disaster almost everyone predicts, and that none of those responsible will admit the truth.
But there is no point in blaming politicians or bankers for following the only logic they have been proffered, when we cannot conceive of any other instructions we might give them.
We are doomed to endless complaint without purpose or effect. Our true problem is not to do with economics or politics, but that we have no sense of the humanly desirable, of how we might develop a sense that civic society exists to make people happier, to improve their lives, rather than to burden them with taxes so that other people may be paid by the State to experience a slightly different unfulfilment.
We do not think publicly about happiness, about making our public spaces zones of contentment, about creating civilised structures and rituals to make people feel better. We do not think politically about beauty and how it might be coaxed before the gazes of our citizens as they go about their business.
By and large, our understandings of human happiness are imported: enviously, we observe other peoples and try to get what they have, thinking it will make us feel as they appear to feel, but without really understanding anything. Money is our sole means of apprehending value.
I spent the last week of August at the Meeting of Rimini, a gigantic annual festival of knowledge and culture in which the whole of the human condition is up for discussion. I heard no talk about economics or swine flu, only about life and passion and beauty and the unknowable.
All week, people were coming up to me and saying things like, “Did you see the exhibition on Galileo? It’s so beautiful!”; or, “What did you think about what Tony Blair said about mystery?”
Back home, I must grow accustomed again to people approaching me with a sneer or a rant. I met a man the other day so disproportionately exercised about the Lisbon Treaty that I wanted to ask him what was really the matter, what was he really angry about?
Twice this week, two different young women I spoke to about all this have made the point that, unlike children in other European societies, our children do not learn philosophy at school. Perhaps this is indeed why our culture has no means of imagining what humanity is about, why we are here, what keeps us going, and what has long ago been learned about the nature of human desire.
We behave as if these were non-questions, already decided but in a way that is opaque or irrelevant to the present moment. Everything is obvious, is it not? All that matters is to make enough money to get what we imagine we want.