In The Observer, Nick Cohen is reminded of WH Auden’s description of Brueghel’s painting of the fall of Icarus. All Brueghel shows of Icarus is a small pair of thrashing legs disappearing into a vast sea. Farmers on a cliff top carry on ploughing the fields and watching their sheep as if nothing had happened. A ship sails by the drowning hero, its crew unaware of Icarus’s suffering. In Brueghel’s vision of tragedy, says Auden:
“Everything turns away.
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry
But for him it was not an important failure.”
According to Nick Cohen “Enough of keeping calm and carrying on”. He believes that nearly everyone who is not directly suffering from the crisis is a ploughman today because we keep our eyes down, we concentrate on our work, we behave as if times were normal, or if we cannot manage that pretence, we act as if times will soon return to normal.
As we turn to the festive season and in the still rich regions of Britain, Nick Cohen remarks on pubs and bars full of Christmas drinkers talking about “following their dreams”, “realising their ambitions” or “finding themselves” as if they were still in the bubble and the money that dreams were built on had not gone. In a bland and pessimistic article, Cohen observes that the human species has psychological defences that protect us from despair. People bounce back after appalling suffering and block out bad news that might paralyse them. A desire to keep going as if nothing has changed allows us to pull ourselves together and get on with life. In many circumstances it is an admirable and necessary strategy. But it also allows complacency and self-delusion. Today’s mediocre generation of political leaders appears so small, so unable to respond to the severity of events, because they cannot recognise that the old world has gone and carrying on is no longer an option.
Cohen is embarrassed because he believes that we are naive fools because we didn’t imagine the severity of the crisis or the scope of necessary banking reform. Instead, we have chosen to believe in the fanciful notion that if we cut public spending that private spending will increase as if by some magical balancing process.
According to Cohen, with leaders providing no guide to the future the public has decided to keep their heads down and plough their own furrows and with support for tax increases to improve public services is diving, half the public thinks that unemployment benefits are too high and many more say that if children are poor that is because their parents do not want to work, not because they cannot find work. The suffering of others, the hundreds and thousands whose hopes are falling faster than Icarus from the heavens, no longer concern them.
In a darkly written article expressing no hope, Nick Cohen suggests that we give up pretending that electorates and prime ministers can control the world. Bolt the doors, lock the windows, yank the curtains shut and hope that when disaster comes it will hit your neighbours and leave you and yours alone.
There is no encouraging last one liner that points to hope. Let’s hope that we can prove Nick wrong….
