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Date Published: 22/03/2001
Author: Jeremy Seabrook We cannot understand the true nature of today’s world if we use dead language to describe it, says Jeremy Seabrook. |
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Will the American economy make a soft or a hard landing? Is there a level playing field between the poor countries and the rich? Is the subject of race a political football? Is immigration a hot potato? Are Labour’s chickens coming home to roost? Which politician has shot himself in the foot? Who has kicked a contentious issue into the long grass? Are the markets on a rollercoaster? When America sneezes does Europe catch cold? Are we stuck between a rock and a hard place? Are we robbing Peter to pay Paul? Will tax cuts be the icing on the cake?
Who will make a last-ditch stand in defence of the pound? Should some dictator be made to eat humble pie? Is the economy leaner and fitter? Has someone run a coach and horses through government policy? Did some warring country get a bloody nose? Are we opening a can of worms? Should we use the carrot or the stick? Will the election be a shoo-in? Does the economy need a kick-start? Has there been a rash of initiatives over crime or health? Does child protection need root and branch reform? Will the government deliver the goods? Can we go the extra mile?
As globalisation proceeds, and interdependence increases, our way of looking at the world shrinks. It has long been clear that public interest in news from distant places has waned and, ever responsive to the market, the media have retreated into an agreeable Toytown parochialism. Just look at the unthinking familiarity of the phrases above – all of which are taken from the British media in the first two months of this year. What a cosy, easy place the world is, how pleasantly full of the familiar activities of suburban comprehensibility! Political discourse has been reduced to a handful of clichés, based on an insular and archaic imagery of the natural world, sporting activity, health, domestic labour and simple technology.
What is happening to us can be understood only within the constraints of a few comforting images: these effectively domesticate the complexity of global integration, and make it appear unthreatening, even welcome. Our ability to classify everything satisfactorily in ready-made, off-the-peg expressions, gives us a feeling that we understand everything, and are therefore in control. This is no doubt all very proper in a democracy: it turns out the whole world is only a golf-house, a rugby pavilion, a farmyard or a parlour after all. And thank goodness; after all, the perils of rocking the boat are well known; we wouldn’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, would we? Perhaps we have, after all, put all our eggs into one basket; in which case, crying over spilt milk would make no sense whatever. Whatever we do, we mustn’t frighten the horses.
Are these friendly and rustic images calculated to conceal the epic uprootings of humanity, the driven change transforming whole societies – including our own – compelling ancient cultures on unchosen pathways? Maybe the pictures of barnyard, countryside and the chase help us adjust to the reality of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the poisoning and adulteration of our daily bread, the genetically modified foods, the toxins and alien substances in our sustenance. Perhaps the verbal innocence numbs the pain, and justifies the willed unknowing of the time. The faux-naif iconography of a rural idyll represents the structuring of a world so simple, artless and beguiling that no one in his or her right mind could possibly wish to dissent from it. There can be no opposition to the end of history.
It is extraordinary that we should reach for so many pre-industrial words and phrases, evoking the life of a countryside now largely inert and lifeless beneath its freight of chemicals, toxins and additives. At the very moment when the resource-base of the Earth is terminally threatened, we resuscitate archaic and exhausted forms of expression to reassure ourselves that nothing has changed, and that our lives are a form of unspoiled fête champêtre; a celebration of a rural simplicity long since extinguished.
Despite the reductive nature of the imagery in which our dilemmas, problems and anxieties are expressed, it should not surprise us if more and more people say that they do not understand politics, that they turn off the news, that they are not interested, that it has nothing to do with them. How right they are – how are they to recognise the stress, fear and anxiety for the future in the nursery stories, the congealed folk-wisdom, the empty metaphors, which speak of a vanished world? How can this be reconciled with the market-driven, high-octane, modernising spirit of the new millennium?
We should be grateful to the media, whose incomparable command of a dead language furnishes us with such an easy grasp of reality. Even when alarm-bells are ringing, signals are passed at red, and storm clouds are gathering, nothing disturbs our national somnolence. There have been many recent incidents which government ministers have said should serve as ‘a wake-up call’: a railway accident; catastrophic floods; the death of a child. To what effect? Even the wake-up calls fall on sleepy ears made deaf by the cotton wool of media platitudes.
Jeremy Seabrook is a writer and journalist.
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