Bad Times

The Seventies were a grim time. They were a decade of hangover from the Sixties. I gather the Fifties were awful too: soulless scientism and suburban sprawl. And a collapse of sexual morality. Everyone would surely say the same of the Dirty Thirties: mass unemployment and the rise of Fascism.

The twenty-teens seem to me to have emerged as similarly bad. 

The Fifties: artistically kind of sucky.

I wonder if we are in some regular twenty-year cycle?

The nineties may have been another depressed decade—the Clinton/Blair/Chretien years. I do not have a good fix on it; I mostly sat out the nineties in Asia. But that may be itself an indication: I needed to get out. It was too depressing in the West.

By “bad,” I mean depressed in the spiritual, not the economic, sense. These decades have been times in which North American and European society seemed to have lost their sense of purpose and direction. These were times adrift. Economic depression tends to come with this, but it is the sideshow, not the main event; and, I suspect, not cause but effect. Jimmy Carter sensed it, in the latter seventies, when he spoke of a social “malaise.” Kissinger expressed it when he spoke of himself as a modern Metternich, in the service of a declining empire.

The smiling face of the Seventies.

I suppose, being now in such a time, the useful thing to ponder is what in the past has pulled us out of such torpor. The mention of Jimmy Carter reminds us that, in the 80’s, it seems to have been new leadership. It was the strangely almost-simultaneous appearance of several strong leader figures, each in their way promising a new direction and a new beginning: Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Gorbachev, Deng Xiao Ping.

In the Sixties, it was more an artistic and cultural revival: the “counterculture” promised a new beginning, an Age of Aquarius. Rock/pop music, pop art, the Whole Earth Catalog, zines, and so on and on.

Suitable for colouring while on acid.

In the Forties, it was the unity and sense of purpose imposed by the need to take on the monstrous Nazis and their allies. Secondarily, this too led to the appearance of some inspiring leaders: Churchill, De Gaulle, Tito. Note that the major Fascist leaders emerged in the 20s and 30s. They were part of the malaise; they were not inspiring in the proper sense.

After the triangulation and fudgy “Third Way” if the nineties, the oughts restored clarity for a time with the need to respond to 9/11 and the rise of Islamist terror. The seeping of hi-tech into everyday life probably also generated some excitement about the future. That period of relative unity and optimism has now clearly dissipated.

What will pull things back into focus this time? Strong leaders with vision? Thatcher and Reagan, after all, were already visible in the wings in 1979; Churchill was long well-known in the 1930s.

Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, whatever else they represent, do not seem to offer any coherent and inspiring new vision. They are comic figures, only declaring the nonsensical nature of what is. I do not compare them with Hitler or Mussolini, as others do, but they still seem part of the malaise, not of the new morning.

Sanders and his like on the left? Perhaps I am unjustly prejudiced; I thought Reagan too was dangerously wrong with his “voodoo economics” before he rose to power. But apart from their pre-K understanding of economics, I do not think there is anything there, because there is no spiritual element or appeal. With successful revivals, there always is. For it is the spirit that must be moved.

I think Mad Max Bernier here in Canada is one figure who might have this inspirational dimension; but that is not yet clear. The “Mad” label is to his credit in this regard. The appeal would not be conventionally religious: rather to a cultural ideal. I think Tulsi Gabbard has potential in the current Democratic crop. Nobody notices, but her commitment to non-violence is obviously informed by her Hinduism. But such figures are for now on the fringes.

So what about religion as the source of our revival? What about the arts? It was the arts in the 60s. John Paul II may have been the one necessary ingredient to the Eighties revival, and just as possibly, John XXIII and his Vatican II was the critical factor that kicked off the 1960s.

Pope St. John XXIII

The Catholic Church, sadly, is currently in chaos. This is most troubling, because it is the single strongest religious voice in the world, let alone in the West. But Pope Francis gives no clear leadership.

Is there a figure in the Protestant tradition, or beyond? A Jonathan Edwards, a John Wesley, a Martin Luther King Jr.? Perhaps: I have one eye on William Lane Craig. To hear him tell it, something is percolating in Departments of Theology and Philosophy.

William Lane Craig

The arts, too, seem moribund. But there is probably something bubbling under the surface, struggling to break free. The arts are currently, as periodically happens, under the iron grip of “The Academy,” the art critics and academics, which do not understand the arts, and enforce conformity and mediocrity. But when this goes on long enough, there tends to be an eruption. An eruption seems overdue. I expected it in the 20-oughts. I expected it in the eighties.

The stuff in the galleries is obviously garbage. No sense of the beautiful, no sense of symbolism or vision or emotional connection, painfully clichéd and predictable. Decor. Generally making some obvious and tedious political statement.

Yet the stuff in the galleries is not representative of contemporary art. It is just the art that bureaucrats like; for bureaucrats control galleries. I follow a Facebook group of struggling visual artists. These folks in the artistic underground are inspiringly good. With the growth of social media, they are bound to break through soon.

So too with writing. I went last weekend to the Toronto Festival of Authors. It was not what it was when I left Toronto in the early nineties. Then, I could hope to see and hear someone I had actually read and enjoyed: Brian Moore, Ken Kesey, Timothy Findlay. There are no longer such figures. One reads new writing any more, it seems, out of a sense of obligation.

I attended the launch of The Best Canadian Poetry of 2019.  Decades ago, I was myself featured in the equivalent volume. It was about as much fun as a trip to the dentist. Several selected poets read their selected works. Each was less a poem than a gimmick: “conceptual art.” And even as gimmicks, painfully predictable. The first poem sounded like a dairy entry by an ordinary person on a perfectly ordinary day. Dull as daily life inevitably is; and that turned out to be the point. The final line was something like “just breathing in and out.” This is anti-art. This is just what art is meant to rescue us from.

The next poem was done as a flow chart. Vaguely interesting the first time I saw it done--back at Expo 67.

The next poem was a reflection on how incongruous it is to be thinking of Virgil in modern Toronto. The only point seemed to be to promote the poet as someone so sophisticated as to have read Virgil.

The poetry was so unpoetical that at one point, when this poet was reading an introduction to his poem, I thought it was the poem.

And the last poem was something intentionally incoherent in which every fifth word or so was replaced by the word “unknown”; sometimes in the plural. This, the poet explained beforehand, was a protest against torture and waterboarding. The target was apparently Donald Rumsfield, and his famous phrase about “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.”

Leaving aside the fact that the poet completely missed Rumsfield’s point, which could have been an interesting one to consider, the poem was as obviously stale as a newspaper hot off the presses seventeen years ago.

But then, in despair for the state of poetry, I picked up a copy of the West Coast lit mag Geist, available free at the entrance. And it was solid. Subscribe and read.

It is not that the arts are dead; it is that they are suppressed. Something is liable soon to burst free.

And our sight may again be 2020.