Rifkin in thought...

Today and tomorrow the Committee is hosting a conference, jointly organised with, among others, the Council of Europe, on the theme of ‘Cultures and the Policies of Change’. The keynote speech this afternoon was delivered by Jeremy Rifkin, President of the Foundation on Economic Trends and author of a number of ‘zeitgeist’ books, including The European Dream. As one fairly frequent speaker watching another, I could only admire his delivery, keeping an audience’s attention for over an hour, speaking authoritatively and in a perfectly structured fashion without consulting any notes. His basic thesis, a worrying one, is that humankind is probably on the verge of a steep decline because it is so dependent on finite and dwindling energy sources. The combination of over-priced oil and the increasing effects of climate change could tip our civilisation into inexorable decline and, ultimately, oblivion. All, however, is not lost. We are empathetic animals by nature, he argues, and the time has come to switch from geopolitical consciousness to ‘biosphere consciousness’. This switch must be accompanied by a new global cultural discussion and narrative for the human race together with a five pillar approach to energy in the developed world: renewables, local energy production through intelligent buildings, energy storage, the democratisation of energy through an ‘intergrid’, and a switch to electric transport. This was a sort of An Inconvenient Truth with knobs on! Rifkin provided much food for thought, in any case. It was an intellectually-challenging way to start the week.

We spent the weekend in London, where one of my cousins on my late mother’s side of the family was getting married. Over the past five years the family has suffered a number of bereavements, as my parents’ generation has gradually grown old and dwindled away. There are just two representatives of that generation left now, though, thankfully, both are in fine fettle. But it was a wonderful change for the cousins to be meeting up for the joyous occasion of a wedding, rather than the sad series of funerals that have punctuated recent years. Getting the cousins together is a major logistical exercise, with various branches travelling from San Francisco, Cape Town, Prague, Brussels and the Isle of Skye. (Only ill health prevented the Australian contingent from attending.) So we were determined to make the very best of the occasion. It was good to see second cousins (the generation beneath us) getting on so well and the evening’s celebrations included a great live band in which two cousins performed brilliantly. The formal part of the proceedings took place in Islington Town Hall and the festivities in what used to be Finsbury Town Hall. I am always interested by civic architecture and here were two fine examples. There was a plaque in the Finsbury Town Hall commemorating Dadabhai Naoroji, the first British Indian MP. He refused to take his oath on the Bible, preferring the Zoroastrian Avesta. You can read about him here; a fascinating example of a politician straddling two countries and two systems.

Somerset House before the Embankment was built

This morning we visited the Courtald Institute in Somerset House. Both are well worth the visit and it would be easy to spend a morning sitting watching the 55 dancing fountains in the elegant courtyard. The Courtald is, quite simply, a gem. A small, eclectic collection, it boasts a number of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings – Cezanne, Degas, Gaugin, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, Seurat, Van Gogh – that would be recognised worldwide (Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere, for example). But the collection ranges from the 14th to the 21st century and houses some exquisite lesser-known works. We were particularly taken by a sublime Gothic polychrome sculpture of a Madonna, the Lady’s alabaster cheeks slightly flushed, as though she were a little bit embarrassed by all the attention. To close, here’s a throwaway fact, taken from the programme notes for Picasso’s Yellow Irises (1901). That year Picasso was commissioned to provide 64 paintings for an exhibition of his work and so he painted three pictures day, day after day, including the Yellow Irises. I wonder what we would make of an artist and his output if he or she were to do that today…

Early this evening we went to the ever-excellent Goethe Institute to watch a screening of ‘Sergio‘ to celebrate World Humanitarian Day. The 2009 documentary film is based on Pulitzer Prize-winner Samantha Power’s biography, Sergio: One Man’s Fight to Save the World, and revolves around the story of United Nations diplomat, Sergio Viera de Mello, who worked for the UN for more than 34 years and was ultimately killed in the Canal Hotel Bombing in Iraq on August 19, 2003. It’s an immensely touching account of the extraordinary career of a gifted, charismatic, committed example of all that is best about the United Nations. Juxtaposed and interspliced with this is a sadly chilling account of the bombing and of Viera de Mello’s lingering death, entombed in the ruins. One of the film’s revelations is that Viera de Mello, normally a cheerful, smiling man, was in a pensive state that day for the reason that he was about to make several speeches criticising the US occupiers in Iraq for being too brutal. Although the UN Mission and de Mello himself were there with the blessing of President Bush, he felt that they would otherwise risk seeming complicit, rather than maintaining the UN’s honourable traditional stance as objective and honest broker. What a terrible irony, then, that he should have been assassinated by a movement that saw no distinction between the US and the UN. The other interesting facet of de Mello’s philosophy is that, although he had a long spoon, he was prepared to sup with the devil. Samantha Power gave an eloquent justification of this approach in a TED talk you can see here. This echoes the views of Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s one-time special adviser and a key player in the Northern Ireland peace process, that, no matter how repugnant, if you want to find peace you must sooner or later open communication channels with your enemy.

Before...

Back to work this morning (well, all right, I admit it; I came in over the weekend to clear my desk) and it felt, in all honesty, like getting into a modern, efficient car; the machinery is there, and it works well. Colleagues were rested and refreshed and, despite the grim, grey, wet, cold weather outside, there was an afterglow of summer sun in the corridors and the meeting rooms. Most reassuringly, the ceiling crisis that I described in my 9 August post has been managed and resolved with exemplary professionalism. Thinking about it, I see a number of reasons as to why what could have been a messy and prolonged affair was handled so well. The first was the existence of a good Business Continuity Plan (something that both I and my counterpart in the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, have been working to establish). The second was the presence in Brussels of an excellent Director and his team and other colleagues able to implement the Plan and negotiate with the many different construction companies, insurance companies, etc involved with good will and efficiency. The third was the mutual confidence of the two Committees and of their Secretaries General (buildings and logistics are something our two institutions share) and, thanks to modern technology, the constant accessibility and availability of both SGs when their authorisation or direction was required. If you were to walk into the building today, you could hardly notice that many false ceilings in the meeting rooms elsewhere had been checked and, where necessary, repaired. I think the administrations of both Committees should give themselves a warm pat on the back.

A full-page analysis of climate change issues in today’s Financial Times, ‘Lingering Clouds’, caught my eye. ‘Consensus on dangers,’ says the sub-title, ‘but scientists face a hard task in accounting for margins of error.’ In July I wrote several posts about an extreme weather event that occurred in Belgium and the destruction it caused in the Famennes town of Ciney in particular. Whilst we were on holiday in northern Italy, there were headlines about a ‘mini-hurricane’ that occurred in Como, causing extensive flooding and quite a lot of damage. On our way back up to Belgium on Saturday we stopped for petrol in a Lorraine petrol station and the following headline in the day’s edition of Le Républicain Lorrain leapt out at me: ‘Une tornade balaie le sud de la Moselle.’ An inside article provided an account of the tornado’s path and a series of graphic images showing the damage it had caused. The tornado struck at around midnight and must have been very scary. Just on the basis of these three events – I won’t mention the unseasonal August weather throughout much of Europe nor the Russian and Finnish heat waves nor the floods in Pakistan in China – it seems that something is happening in good old Europe. There are several possibilities. Maybe we use the vocabulary of ‘tornados’ and ‘hurricanes’ more loosely; maybe, just maybe, events like this were always occurring but previously would have been described as ‘violent’ or ‘freak’ storms. Maybe there is a trend to report such events more; maybe, just maybe, they were previously occurring, but not even regional newspapers bothered to report them. But for my money there has been a steady increase in such events, whatever we wish to call them. Since such an increase in extreme weather events was one of the phenomena that climate scientists predicted would occur as a consequence of climate change, maybe we ought to listen more closely to the rest of what they have to say.

I love a good counter-intuitive thesis. The Sunday newspapers today carry reviews of a book entitled 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang that is definitely on my reading list. Ha-Joon Chang is a critic of capitalism, but he is not opposed to it. On the other hand, he is fiercely critical of the way economics has been, as he puts it ‘positively harmful for people for the past three decades.’ Chang’s reported intention is to show how capitalism actually operates, rather than as it is pictured by economists and politicians. So I come to that counter-intuitive thesis; according to Chang, the washing machine changed the world far more than the internet.  I did a double-take when I first read that but the more I think about it the more I see that it could be true; the washing machine, that is, together with disposable nappies… ‘Discuss,’ as they say.

Mark Strand

I have had two occasional companions this summer, one musical and one poetical. The musical companion, a birthday present (thank you ED) was a double-disc recording of David Bowie’s 2003-4 Reality Tour. The album, of thirty songs, was recorded over two nights in Dublin in November 2003. Bowie was at his stupendous best and I just wish I could have been there. The range of the tracks is in itself a graphic illustration of why Bowie has been so influential in so many different genres and to so many different generations. Whilst performing on that same tour, in Scheessel, Germany, in June 2004, Bowie suffered a chest pain which was soon diagnosed as an acutely blocked artery. He underwent an emergency angioplasty in Hamburg and the rest of the tour was cancelled. Bowie has since made a few musical appearances, but there have been no more concerts, no more tours and no more albums. He is not a total recluse (he was recently spotted at a Jeff Beck concert in New York) but his creative output has dwindled to next to nothing. Those who got to see Bowie at his prime on his Reality Tour could not have imagined how privileged they were. The poetic companion was Mark Strand‘s New Selected Poems. I was introduced to Strand by an American friend (thank you, LE) whose favourite poem is the wonderful ‘Our Masterpiece is The Private Life’. Strand is excellent on relationships. To give just one example (from ‘Coming to This’); ‘We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry of each other…’ The heavy industry of each other; it takes a poet to sum up in six words the key to long-lasting relationships! Brilliant stuff.

We got up at dawn this morning and walked and scrambled up to the summit of Monte Bregagno (2,107 metres). This was an altogether stiffer proposition than last Monday’s Monte Berlinghera. There is no reliable map, there are plenty of well-used goat-trails, and there are no signs to indicate the correct path. Indeed, sometimes there is no path and the walker has to aim roughly up the mountain’s scrubby and screedy flanks. The summit remained obstinately stuck in cloud but we enjoyed some stupendous views on the way up. We also saw two big wild boar within spitting distance and, for some added spice, watched a noisy rockfall not far from us. We were constantly and agiley accompanied by half-wild goats but saw not another living soul from beginning to end of our six hour adventure. A lot of the paths in this region are prehistoric and when the cloud closes in and deadens the clatter of boots on rocks there is a palpable sense of something ancient about such places.

Next on my summer reading list was Joseph Campbell‘s Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal (I am warmly grateful to Andreas for the present). This is a rich feast of a book. Campbell (1904-1987), a professor of comparative mythology, is now primarily renowned for his inspirational 1949 work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. A nonprofit Foundation was set up after his death to continue exploring the fields of mythology and comparative religion and in 2003 the Foundation published this selection of edited transcripts of Campbell’s lectures. Collectively, they represent a wonderful comparative introduction to Eastern myth and religion. There are too many fascinating observations and insights for me to start quoting from them here. Rather, I would like to quote four food-for-thought passages which illustrate Campbell’s underlying philosophy. (1) ‘I think what happens here in the West is that the mythological archetypal symbols have come to be interpreted as facts. Jesus was born of a virgin. Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Jesus went to heaven by ascension. Unfortunately, in our age of scientific skepticism we know these things did not actually happen, and so the mythic forms are called falsehoods. The word myth now means falsehood, and so we have lost the symbols and the mysterious world of which they speak.’ (2) ‘At present, our culture has rejected this world of symbology. It has gone into an economic and political phase, where spiritual principles are completely disregarded. You may have practical ethics and that kind of thing, but there is no spirituality in any aspect of our contemporary Western civilization. Our religious life is ethical, not mystical. The mystery has gone…’ (3) ‘The mythology of a people presents a grandiose poetic image, and like all poetic images, it refers past itself to principles that are mysterious and ineffable.’ (4) ‘In these traditions, mythology was not an account of pseudo-historical facts that are supposed to have happened somewhere else, long ago; rather, each myth is a poetic revelation of the mystery…’ In effect, Campbell was an extremely learned student of poetry.