Counterculture, postscript

Some serious readers might have been curious about why I was taking so long to write that third part I had promised, the part where I was going to talk about the kind of positive spin-offs that could arise out of mankind abjuring the high life in favour of what I – and a lot of other people – call the ‘good’ life. 

Well, the fact is, I have been thinking, and reading those last two blogposts again, and I have begun to have the feeling that it’s not much use talking in this vein for much longer, really. Those who have already been persuaded do not need more persuasion; those who have not will never really be persuaded – much greater men than I have tried and failed – because they are determined not to be, so more talk will be a serious waste of breath.

However, since I promised something, and I do not like to renege on promises, here are a few bits and pieces:

1. There are some hints in the last posts already. There will be an end to (or at least a great amelioration of) problems like poverty and environmental degradation and corruption and excessively-stressed lifestyles and war only when mankind decides once and for all that it is essential to abjure the high life. Without that major global change in tastes and outlook, all talk of solving such problems is futile, and all time spent on criticizing or lamenting over them is a waste. Once upon a time, not too long ago, a global cataclysm called the Second World War forced a lot of people in high places to agree on this: that is why the UNO was founded (tellingly, the UNESCO Charter says that ‘since war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences against war must be constructed’). The world has since forgotten, and gone back to its old ways. I belong to those who worry that another titanic cataclysm might be necessary – and looming – to jerk mankind back to its senses. History certainly tends to repeat itself if we don’t learn lessons from it: the current worldwide recession brought back eerie echoes of the Great Depression of the 1930s (and the Great Depression played a very provocative role in causing the World War!)

2. All mankind’s problems do not have technical fixes. This is because, among other things, every new technology throws up a host of new problems even as it ‘solves’ some older ones. Those who depend on technology to see us through all our woes are fundamentally childish, no matter how clever they may be with words and numbers. We have to change our ways. I am writing this on the birthday of a man who never tired of insisting that the world has enough for man’s needs, but not enough for man’s greed. Again, uncannily enough, a lot of very clever people who never called themselves Gandhian, such as Albert Einstein and T. S. Eliot and Charlie Chaplin and G.K. Chesterton and Ernest Hemingway and Erich Fromm and J.K. Galbraith and E. F. Schumacher have agreed on this. That is why I keep saying that those who refuse to listen are living in denial… the biggest problems of this century do not belong to the realm of physics or mathematics or even biology any more.

3. The greatest economist of the 20^th century, John Maynard Keynes, who was an economist only by accident (as geniuses usually are), had dreamt wistfully in a little essay called Economic prospects for our grandchildren (that meant my father’s generation, actually!) that a time might come when ‘the economic problem would be solved’, meaning that thanks to the progress of skill, technology and organization, the world would soon be producing enough material goods to satisfy the basic needs of all human beings (assuming the world’s produce were fairly distributed), and then men could turn their attention to living the good life at last – the kind of life that the sanest and best of men have always wanted to live, the life lived in pursuit of all the higher things that only humans are capable of pursuing, knowledge for its own sake (rather than knowledge for power, or merely making a living), art, music, justice, good health both physical and mental, friendship and willing cooperation among all men and nations to achieve such ends that cannot be accomplished by men single-handedly, and cultivating the highest faculties of the mind, which are necessarily not just intellectual and aesthetic but ultimately spiritual. That is the kind of pursuit that only the bravest of men have been able to aspire to in the world so far, only those who were willing not only to live the hardest of lives but even to die ghastly and untimely deaths, such as being nailed to the cross. Sadly, brilliant as he was, Keynes did not anticipate two utterly horrible developments in the post-war world that have nearly put paid to his dream and set the clock back: the population explosion and the greed explosion. Either of them could be disastrous yet; combined, they are guaranteed to lead us to our doom. 

Am I hopeful that things will change for the better? Well, yes and no. I want to believe that they can; what I see all around me, barring little sparks of light in the engulfing dark, prevents me from being too optimistic. Right now, indeed, the tide of global culture is strong in the opposite direction – China and India, which between them account for forty percent of the world’s population, are hell-bent on achieving per-capita consumption levels equal to that of the US, convinced beyond all persuasion that that is the only meaning of progress, and praying that it can be achieved without blowing up the whole world! Men in the mass do not learn easily, even if that learning is good for them, and these days there are lots of clever and ‘educated’ men around to keep assuring them that whatever they are doing is all right, and even good and necessary (such as a particular – common – brand of economist justifying every ill of the consumerist culture by claiming that it is indispensable for the world economy). I keep telling my daughter it is a very nasty world she is growing up in, much nastier in many ways, in fact, than the world I was born into despite all the vaunted ‘progress’ made in these nearly five decades, so like everybody else, she’ll have to learn to cope. But she, too, cannot afford to lose hope, or stop trying to contribute her mite to making things ever so slightly better.