“I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason,” wrote Stefan Zweig in his memoir The World of Yesterday. He was writing in 1940, comparing the horrifying growth of Nazism and the beginning of the war with his memories of growing up in the comfort and cultured reassurance of belle époque Vienna.
Zweig was an Austrian Jew, so he had good cause to be aware of how dangerously the world was changing; but also of how events from around the world were suddenly projected into our lives and insistently preoccupied us, usually to our reluctance.
Since then, however, that colonisation of our minds against our will has continued at a pace which would have shocked Zweig. That was long before anyone could have imagined how small and, when things go wrong, potentially terrifying, the world can seem.
Bewildered at apocalyptic floods
Yesterday two women stood talking over the fence in the farmyard next door. The subject was the floods in Valencia. They were shocked, but they were also bewildered. They had watched the apocalyptic scenes on television, aghast, and television had brought all that tragedy and devastation into their own living rooms. Whether they liked it or not, that devastation felt partly their own, because in Valencia it had come out of the blue. As it could here. Suddenly, all our everyday certainties are under threat.
The conversation went on to include other floods, the one in Barcelona, scenes from the war in Gaza, and then leapt to the US presidential elections. The two women were by no means your typical bleeding-heart liberals: they were stoic country women at that moment preoccupied with grooming their horses. But they visibly recoiled at the prospect of a Trump victory, and then one of them added: “They’re really dishing it out to us at the moment, aren’t they”.
The Fates, weaving their tragedies
Because the conversation hadn’t really been about floods, or Trump, but how terrifying events on the other side of the world could creep into our living rooms, just as the flood might. How our everyday lives are made, every day, seemingly just a little less safe.
So who are “they”? Who is it that the woman thought are “really dishing it out to us”? The TV news editors? Russian bots? Or less prosaically the Fates, up there spinning their yarn, weaving our tragedies? Whoever they are, they have hacked into our TVs and social media and hacked into our deepest fears. And we seem to have no means of defending ourselves from whatever modern-day bogey men most frighten us.
Primitive fears of witches and devils
In this, our fears – whether of floods or Donald Trump – replicate those oldest fears of witches and devils and anything we can’t explain. Because we can’t explain how all that everyday mundanity we took for granted is suddenly apparently under threat. We revert to some of our most primitive fears.
Comparing ourselves to the tragedies of others is natural, it’s part of our nature, but the real bogey man here is our reliance for information and stimulation on TV and social media, which lives and breathes on the stuff of tabloid headlines. When we heard all our news from gossip at the local shop, it was unlikely to concern much beyond the next village. The worst we could encounter from that source was that the milkman’s horse had gone lame.
How do we rescue reason from the irrational?
It is irrational that we almost seem to want to absorb the stories that frighten us, like those quoted. They can impact us, of course, but we need to think rationally about that. It is reason which ought to warn us of the growing incidence of floods and natural disasters, and the steps we should be taking to avoid them. But we don’t. Instead, we invent bogeymen to scare ourselves, look on with horror at the bodies being discovered in flooded Valenica, and do nothing to prevent them happening here.
Trump’s election will affect us, but the immediate tragedy is America’s, not ours. We choose to borrow it, to scare ourselves and – if you like – our liberal consciences.
So, how do we translate the irrational scares into the rational, which we could understand and act upon? Or is the answer to give up trying to reason with people on climate change, for instance, and instead scare them?
“Let us withdraw, and meet the time as it seeks us,” says Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. An early appeal for mindfulness? Or perhaps, the way to take back our sanity and defend ourselves from those intrusions, is not to listen to them. Turn off the telly, give up social media, and wait for the only too real bogeyman of climate change to get us.
