AMENDS

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Play it again, Sam

G21 Essayist KEVIN CAREY has been with the magazine for three years now. He has provided some of the most erudite reflections I've had the pleasure to edit and present. Over the course of those years, some readers have complained (much as they do with some of my own writing) about the need to consult their dictionaries. When I told Kevin about those complaints, he took them as compliments.

I laughed.

That is why, with this edition, I sadly introduce the last of his 10-part Valedictory "Essays on Culture." I have considered it a privilege and an honor to have worked with Kevin Carey over these years and I shall miss his insights, his love of our common language, and his (often) contrarian take on Popular Culture as we present it at the dawn of the 21st Century.

At university, I once had a sign on my dorm room door which read: "Herein Time is measured by the beat of horses' hooves rather than the pulsing of engines..." I believe that this is a sentiment that Kevin Carey would have understood. He will be missed. --- Rod Amis

Kevin Carey

Never have we been able to communicate more freely, quickly and inclusively, yet we are losing our ability to conduct public discourse and we are apt to resort to blame.

Although we profoundly believe in individualism we tend to conform to an alarming degree in spite of the growth of university education.

We are safe, sophisticated but frightened. We have lost cultural confidence as we descend into the silence of night and we are in need of quietness, collaboration and belief. This is the point I have reached after nine weeks of travelling.

I immediately own that the journey has largely been through unfavourable territory, that I might easily be charged with the sin of unbalanced negativity with which I frequently charge others but it has not all been gloom and I hereby make amends.

New technology presents us with amazing opportunities for collaboration. This is wonderful because I think that it goes with the grain of our economy and our culture. Our icon should not be the novel written alone in the garret but the movie which involves thousands of people. In spite of tension we are slowly learning to behave better with people different from ourselves and international collaboration is another area which presents us with immense opportunities, as long as these are not selfishly wrecked by the Bush administration. The European Union began as a purely economic entity but has now developed some important social functions. In short, we might be passing into a new era of working together in ways that were not possible before the explosion in micro technology.

Another, great, unfulfilled potential lies in education. If we cannot bring ourselves to redistribute income and wealth to the poor then the absolute minimum public provision must be a totally open, equal, high class education system for all. There are areas in which it is almost bound to fail -- our culture has lost self confidence, for example, in its ability to discriminate between the artist and the charlatan -- but there is still massive scope for improving us, individually and collectively, through the development of skills, perception, tolerance and balance.

We may not get back to making great pronouncements on the literary canon but we may at least learn to consider more than one perspective before we pass judgment. In terms of the high culture of Shakespeare, Dante, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Beethoven and Mozart, we are living in a silver age which started near the end of the 19th Century, with roots that go back as far as Martin Luther, but for most of written history most people have not been lucky enough to live in anything like a silver age and golden ages have been very short and both geographically and demographically confined.

This, then, is no cause for complaint and it may be that as our new technical and cultural means develop there will be a synthesis that, to borrow old Hegelian language, generates a metamorphosis which puts us on a new plane of endeavour and achievement.

My third, broad conclusion is that we may be venal but we are not stupid.

It has taken us much too long to grasp the ecological consequences of our collective greed but once we grasp this fully, viscerally, we will act. It is only to be hoped that we reach our conclusions early enough to limit the irreversible damage and to use our great breadth and depth of scientific knowledge to make the planet viable for most of its people.

Where the 'green' factions have failed is in their dissection of responsibility. We may be thoughtless in accepting superfluous packaging and adding to the ever greater problem of waste disposal but the chief polluters are producers not consumers and as most of us are more the latter than the former we should not allow ourselves to be misled. Sound ecological policies will no doubt raise consumer prices but in exchange we will get a better quality of life for ourselves and for our children. Air and water, rivers and mountains, sunshine and flowers, birds and beasts, are and should remain a common good. It is those who pollute who can afford to find all these things in remote parts of the world when we are left behind in the smog. The indicators for positive action are all pointing in the right direction but it is the speed which is in question. On this issue, George W. Bush is profoundly wrong and deeply corrupt.

Because we live in an age of extremes where the spectra of income, wealth, education and life span are all lengthening one of our chief social problems is comparison. This is a great improvement on the class system -- and let no American say that it has not and has never had a class system -- but aspiration can too easily turn to envy and victimhood.

We shall never all become rich and famous (even if we want to) but this should not stop us developing our capacity for equal concern and respect.

Those institutions we built to develop national and civic pride and to show concern through great public works have not been properly adapted to our new conditions. We are not so much short of goodwill as of tools. Strange for an age of such inventiveness that most of our political framework ought to be in a museum. We might be experimenting at the international level but inside Western democracies the political machinery is rusting.

Finally, the ethical problems that confront us in such matters as stem cell research have demonstrated that our biology is not keeping up with our technology. Many of our most basic urges are exaggerated by our peace and plenty. At least we recognise much of what is weak in our culture. We are properly frightened of our propensity for violence; we recognise that being cultured and cultivated is no bar to cruelty; and more of us than admit it publicly need a meaning for our lives outside the biologically driven fight for individual survival and the collective survival of the race.

The 20th Century was one long obituary for organised religion. When we were not digging our own moral grave there were always a great many willing helpers prepared to step into the breach but, like so many other forms of protest against the immutable, belief in the immanent has simply changed its shape, become less rigid. I fear that the very lack of shape makes belief more difficult but for many people that is how it has to be.

Were I an adherent of new age spiritualism I just think I would be more lonely than I am; and, past a slight frisson of self perception, where is the virtue or beauty in that? Perhaps, as a final thought, we are harder on ourselves than our behaviour justifies. Most of us are not patrician or paternalist moralisers and our good deeds are more often more voluntary than those of our forebears who were so often 'good' under duress. However slight our achievements and our self regard, in spite of our urge to conform on the narrow ground of conventional belief and behaviour, there is more to us as a society than there was a century ago as we emerged painfully from industrial feudalism.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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