Like Pots That Gods Have Made

Earlier this year I had the good fortune to be able to go on holiday, not something I can afford to do very often! I travelled to near Bordeaux in France and managed to practice some wonderfully horrific French on the locals. It turned out that I was a little south of where I thought Bordeaux was on the map and I found that we were in the French part of the Basque country.

Aside from a rather nice local type of Basque pie on arrival and the symbol of the Basque country adorning most public buildings, doorways (and even the top of the pie!) there was not much sign of any sort of cultural friction that I could see. As part of this trip I also travelled down into the Spanish part of the Basque country, where, again, I could not see a great deal of surface level tension, though I did actually hear people speaking Basque and all signs and public signage were bilingual.

It turns out that there are approximately 500,000 Spanish Basque speakers as opposed to 50,000 or so in France.  France, as part of its development as a modern state, has developed the French language as being central to its national identity whereas Spain has a much more recent history of internal conflict and a highly federalised system of government to account for all of the linguistic and cultural diversity present in the country.

I should add at this point that this is not meant as a nuanced, culturally particular ethnography comparing different approaches to affirmation of cultural identity within the nation state between two countries. Such work exists and is highly valuable but I was just a tourist. My observations serve to illustrate general principles which at the current time appear to be rather important.

As part of my Spanish excursions I went to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, which though in itself is a fascinating artwork, houses some gorgeous exhibitions. One exhibit looked like giant broken pots, as if made by the hands of some great god and dropped. In the same way that many mountains look like the teeth from some immense beast long since deceased.

The museum also displayed an exhibition by Yoko Ono which showed a range of interesting work though two particular points stood out at me, one piece which emphasised the universality of water and its essential role in our survival and a quote of Yoko’s;

“We as viewers are thus assigned a much more important role than we are used to. We have to become active for the actual work only takes place when we start using our imagination”

The idea of the universality of water and its essential role in our lives and of becoming active in a work made me thing of the issues of resource distribution and political representation. We all have universal needs for basic resources that provide for human needs and we all need to consider how such resources are distributed so that we all have reasonable and equitable access to them.

‘Resources’ can be taken to mean a range of different things from obvious basic necessities such as food, air and water to things that we would very much like to have and, quite reasonably, treat as rights, such as various sorts of political and monetary resources, a pension when we retire, a right to political representation etc.

We live in an era of constraints on resources across the board from peak oil to peak water to peak population, and (some might argue) peak economic growth.  I have met plenty of people who contest different aspects of this; from neoliberal economists who don’t appear to understand the laws of basic physics (the second law of thermodynamics and a planet of finite size) to those on the left of the political spectrum who regard aspects of environmentalism as conservatism in a new blanket which is counterproductive to improving the lives of the majority.

I have sympathy with both points of view, the seductive idea of endless growth and progress from the point of view of your regular economist and utopian and the irritation that the hypocrisy of rich comfortable white people harping on about saving resources whilst flying on holiday as billions of people barely have enough to eat. 

I personally am an open minded sceptical type, I think that a range of ways of looking at something could be constructive but I would like to see your working and plenty of evidence!

I don’t think that it is impossible to raise the living standards of most of the human race to a comfortable level without destroying our habitat, nor do I think it is impossible for everyone to get along in a way that is truly democratic without the looming threat of social violence as a motivator. 

Heck, call me a utopian, I’ve not quite got as far as being a broken hearted idealist just yet.

In order to achieve such wonderful outcomes though there are certain ways of going about things that are much more conducive to success than others. For example, militarising the planet to calm your own paranoid fears of your own shadow are not going to make the world a better place. Nor is using up all of the world’s non-replenishible resources as quickly as possible to make your national bank balance look better temporarily.

Going back to my Spanish travels, I have visited the country once before, to the bottom of the country near Sierra Nevada. A number of things struck me, in addition to the warmth of the people. What I noticed was how parched the landscape was even relatively early in the year, though impressively there were large hydroelectric dams, part of Spain’s concerted push towards renewable electricity generation. I also got the general impression that more housing had been built than was strictly necessary!

None of these things have been exclusive to Spain, many European countries have made a strong push into the use of renewables and other countries such as Ireland have had large property bubbles.  These are all symptoms of the effects of the large scale political and economic trends that have been developing in Europe over the past decade or so. As are the recent spate of increased calls for economic decentralisation and independence movements that are taking root across the continent.

A very constructive and healthy pooling of common assets and economic integration in the wake of the mass insanity and retributions of the 20^th century developed in the form of the European Coal and Steel community, then the European Economic Community and now the European Union. This expanding organisation has developed cooperation and economic integration between once warring peoples across a continent and this is truly something to celebrate. However, I do worry that we have over the past few years entered potentially ruinous territory..

FEAR NOT… This is not where I then go off on some sort of paranoid rant about how Brussels is the antichrist and that immigrants are somehow responsible for the budget deficit, late trains and sleet.

What has occurred is that a common currency across a number of nations has forced a pooling of risk between very different economies and led to very large scale distortions in the amounts of money that people have been able to borrow and lend to each other. This has led to innumerable, briefly profitable, promises being made to other countries that cannot be kept. The results, so far, have been large scale housing booms and busts, rapidly rising levels of unemployment in southern Europe, spiraling national debts and rising social unrest. The whole thing went too far too fast and we are all now in a bind, there is not enough money on earth to bail out Europe, not that anyone will tell you that..

Other parts of the world such as China and the United States are having their own similar problems from over-leverage, kicking problems into the long grass and pretending everything is fine when it is clearly not. This is all part of a wider picture of reaching limits to resources, post WW2, and the mass industrialisation that it spawned we have undergone, as a planet, what has been termed ‘the great expansion’, a massive ramping up of usage of resources, population growth etc. Now after many decades, we are reaching the limits of what the earth can sustain ecologically on a range of fronts – this need not be an insurmountable problem.

Large scale political institutions and increasing centralisation of resource allocation does not appear to be the most constructive way to deal with such issues. They are currently wildly massive levels of inequality within and between countries. If the fundamental issue of the equitable sharing of resources, economic, political and environmental are not solved in a rational manner the end result,  if you are not careful, involves lamposts, rope and pitchforks. 

  

Decentralisation seems the most sane way to diffuse this potential bomb.

This where we come back to Spain, as well as the long term issue of the autonomy/independence of the Basque region there are other groups who would like to run their own affairs. The Catalan region is currently attempting to hold a referendum on independence, with increasingly authoritarian responses from the central government. Both groups have understandable points of view, the central government, after having got through the Spanish civil war, the despotism of Franco and now having a decentralised country want to keep everything together and try to focus on recovering the economy (however impossible that may be at the current time). The Catalans largely want to run their own affairs and be left be, don’t we all!

I currently reside in Scotland where we have recently been asked (and answered) the question as to whether we want to go our own way. That the vote did not lead to independence is not necessarily the only outcome of the vote to consider. Voter turnout was higher than it has been in any vote since just after the Second World War, 97% of the eligible populace registered to vote! The Scottish referendum seized the imagination of the nation as for once the electorate were actually allowed to become active and were assigned an important role.

In being allowed a voice, and an authorised platform in which to air their grievances, the people have been able to articulate their points of view and a more federal, decentralised structure for the entire UK is the likely outcome which can serve the interests of everyone well considering the wider context.

In the urge to consolidate political power and sustain the unsustainable political leaders such as Rajoy of Spain risk waking the monsters we left to sleep in the past and undoing the good work of recent decades.

Will our civilisation come to resemble those celestial pots, too large for their use, crashing to the ground in a thousand pieces, leaving their remains like broken teeth?

Let us hope that the ideals displayed at the Guggenheim shine through and that the populace are given the chance to engage with the piece before it falls apart under its own weight.