I’ve believed for a while that this country, if not the world, has been in a second dark age since the last of the empires fell in the 1990s. The gradual fragmentation of our society, the poverty of new ideas and the shrinking of our culture in both national and international terms, are all symptoms that have their parallels over a thousand years ago.
I saw Brexit as the culmination of a narrowing of traditional British values like tolerance and reason - values we once believed in but have thrown away in exchange for barriers and prejudices. I didn’t think things could actually get worse.
But I was wrong; now we’re living with that ultimate dark age fear – the monster in the darkness. It’s come out of the mists of the past, accelerated by our imperfect knowledge of older pestilences, the Black Death, the Great Plague of London and Spanish influenza. In our imaginations, Covid-19 is ten times more deadly – even though it isn’t.
It seems as though we’ve become the Martians in The War of the Worlds; defeated by a simple virus. Apparently, all our great scientific progress is counting for nothing and there’s no cure except by isolation. Which didn’t work for the Martians either.
And some people have been tempted to think along Malthusian lines. With an aging population society is unwilling to afford, they claim perhaps this plague is a necessary evil. But as the son of aged Ps, I think they can shove that particular viewpoint right up their fundamentals.
In an era of newspaper hyperbole, our reactions have been typically dark age. We’re being encouraged to fear ‘the other’; to keep away from outsiders, to hoard our precious toilet rolls and pasta and to lock our doors against our physical neighbours.
Social and political walls are being built around our homesteads. Soon we’ll be digging ditches and sharpening our pitchforks.
However, during the dark ages, there was one thread of continuity that prevented our society from returning to the cave and that was the presence of religion. Monks and priests kept literacy alive and strove to educate and improve the remnants left behind after the Roman Empire collapsed. In our modern world, we have the internet.
Like the wise-woman of the village, the worldly web is our go-to place for information and we can still access news as well as our history and achievements. We can still talk to each other. While our doors might be closed, our ability to communicate remains open. Perhaps this will be a good opportunity to reflect on what we’ve done to our world and how we would like it to be in the future.
As capitalism collapses around us, is there a better way of living? As the environment improves by our absence, by the grounding of our aeroplanes and by the closing of our polluting factories, can we do things differently once the plague is gone?
The myth of King Arthur began in the last dark age, a warrior defending his kingdom, which has been elaborated on for centuries to include dragons, knights and a round table, and turned into films and television in our own era – all with the basic premise that one day, he will return and rescue Albion from disaster. Might be waiting a while though.
But the dark ages were also the time of Alfred the Great, a legendary rather than a mythical character, who brought governance back to Britain and put learning at the top of his agenda (along with thrashing Vikings). I suspect there’s no individual ready to step into his shoes (I can’t imagine the current queen or future king wielding the sword of righteousness on our behalf) and certainly none of our present politicians are remotely selfless enough to steer the nation forwards. But that doesn’t mean we can’t guide ourselves towards a brighter future.
HG Wells believed there would have to be a catastrophe before mankind improved as a species. In The Shape of Things to Come, for instance, he talks about ‘the raid of the germs’, a ‘variety of influenzas’ and a ‘lowering of vitality … more important than the actual mortality’. He even identifies the disease as coming from animals in captivity (baboons rather than pangolins).
He also compares the collapse of modern society with the fall of the Roman Empire. He said:
The tempo of human affairs increases continually, and the main difference between the decline and fall of the Roman system and the decline and fall of the world rule of private-profit capitalism in the Twentieth Century lies in the far more rapid onset and development of the later collapse. A second important difference is the much livelier understanding of what was happening on the part of the masses involved. Each of these two great depressions in the record of human well-being was primarily a monetary breakdown, due to the casual development of financial and proprietary law and practice without any reference to a comprehensive well-being, and to the lag in political and educational adaptation which left the whole system at last completely without guidance. But while the former débâcle went to the pace of the horse on the paved road and of the written and spoken word, the phases of the new downfall flashed about the globe instantaneously and evoked a body of thought and reaction out of all comparison greater than the Roman precedent.
The Shape of Things to Come (1933)
In the Wellsian version we’re all saved by clever men flying in and rescuing mankind through a second renaissance based on a well-constructed plan. I think we might have to wait for a while for that bit to happen too but in his doom-laden view of our present, I don’t think he was far wrong.
We have all the pieces. We know what’s good for us, for society and for the planet. We’re more knowledgeable about these things than any of our ancestors, including HG Wells. It must be possible, during this time of reflection, to design and live a better way.
However, as Douglas Adams said, “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”
Although, perhaps ‘One is never alone with a rubber duck’ might be more useful and encouraging at this moment.
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