The celebration of Life – yet ‘hear often-times the still sad music of humanity’
The actress Tilda Swinton is due to appear in a film apocalyptically called “The End” which is due to be released at the end of March. Its theme is about a billionaire family taking shelter in a luxury bunker as the rest of the world burns down around them. Ms Swinton played the mother of the family.
She is both a compelling actor and, to judge from her address to the Berlin Berlinale Film Awards in February for her ‘Golden Bear’ Award, a very astute and critical observer/commentator on what is happening around us in the world. The full speech can be heard on You Tube for those interested (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fqol-1nTp_U if occasionally interspersed by a few banal advertisements).
She doesn’t pull any punches about the world beyond the protected ‘free and inclusive creative space’ of the world of film production.
It is, she says,
“It’s so very, very good for us to wonder at the world
And to be surprised by admiration for each other
Rather than shocked speechless by our cavalier mean spiritedness and cruelty
To notice our myriad variations and unite in celebrating them
Rather than resign ourselves to a submission to entitled domination and the astonishing savagery of spite
State perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder is
Currently actively terrorising more than one part of our world
Currently condemned by the very bodies specifically set up by humans to monitor things on Earth unacceptable to human society
These are facts
They need to be faced”
I doubt any peace-seeker would dissent from any part of Tilda Swinton’s analysis, nor from her lyrical invocation of empathic connection to existence and the creativity and impact of good film making for enhancing it.
“The growing possibility of seeing more than one side of things
The sensation of feeling yourself change :
Feeling yourself challenged, tested, feeling yourself safer, braver,
Taking your values between finger and thumb and examining them there, recognitions and wheels turning underwater and deep bells ringing
Because there’s:
The magic of detail suspended in space available to all humans
The miracle of timelessness available to all humans
The unbeatable beauty of the Earth
The actual value of spoken language
The actual value of unspoken language
The grace and power of the unwatched face
The vulnerability and valiance of human life being lived – always and everywhere and everywhen”
But back to the reality of our increasing bellicose world where the ‘sounds and furies’ of war in Europe, the Middle East and more widely seem to be growing. This confounds most of us of the immediate post WW2 world, who find it almost inconceivable that History could repeat itself!
“What” we say in a private dialogue that few others hear “can the madness and nightmare of the possibility of total War really be happening again?” “How has this come to be?”
“We thought we’d created enough understanding, international law and protective alliances against it and yet the Doomsday Clock is set at 89 seconds to Midnight?”
There are many reasons for this, none of them especially comforting.
The first is that we are a naturally aggressive species, worse than any member of the animal kingdom. We do share some traits in common with them – protective aggression to defend our territory or ‘home’; we kill to eat to survive; we find the frisson and playful sport of aggressive encounters tension releasing. Ethologists like Nikolaas Tinbergen have demonstrated that even when animals fight one another ferociously, once it is clear one has the upper hand he/she will let the defeated one go without a kill. The triumph of victory, it seems, is enough.
Our species however can kill one another for a whole host of different aspects – for beliefs, attitudes, ideological, religious, cultural, national, racial, class or gender differences. It may be an unpremeditated, on ‘the spur of the moment’ act but once quickly done (as Macbeth famously soliloquises) it cannot be undone, easily or at all. The moral and psychological damage is incalculable and feeds a circle that cannot be easily unbroken (as the State of Israel and Russia are finding now/will find in the future).
The other big factor besides revenge/payback/restitution from the act of destruction and harm to both person and a community is that of FEAR.
As we know there are many diverse fears that beset us and those who we love and thus desire to protect. Disease, disablement, disfigurement and the absoluteness of death (the ‘4 Disastrous Ds’ !). There are several real life-existential features a collection of potential losses that generate fear (or at least) anxieties. These are poverty, break-up of relationship, homelessness, unemployment, loss of status and social position, social humiliation. You can probably generate your own examples.
Fear and anxiety eat at the soul and spirit of a person-or social group. They are difficult to free oneself from their entrapment and generate what is often termed “existential dis-ease” or “life meaninglessness” that comes from a deep, gnawing and seemingly unbridgeable void within the person. The human arts articulate this emptiness which – as Tilda Swinson says – can have the effect of creating solidarity and joining through arts which convey and relieve the ‘human condition’ from engaging the performance.
Psychotherapy seeks to do the same; as do spiritual and religious systems. They seek to give meaning, belonging and hope to ease the pain and anguish the person or group experiences.
What is disastrous – and we are witness to the replay of this script – is where so called “strong men” (and it is usually a male characteristic and prompting) set themselves up as ‘saviours/healers/rescuers/change-makers’ who will retrieve a ‘bad situation’ and make it better.
This is a very universal and child-like (and childish) wishfulness which engaged us as children some of the time and continue to engage that unreleased aspect of ourselves. We are therefore suckers for the shyster who promises us “better times ahead” and that they are the powerful agents of such possibilities. Some of these may be harmless; some may be inspired peacemakers and political enablers; many are psychological incomplete people with a dangerous manipulativeness to their narcissism. They want to be admired, adulated, trusted but above all, followed obediently and with obeisance.
Many psychological studies of this personality type have been written, especially of the toxic hypnotical power of a dangerously murderous tyrant like Adolf Hitler. Some of the best of these were written in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s by the Jewish Marxist Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. They are highly readable and jargon free. His “Fear of Freedom” , the “Sane Society” and “the Art of Loving” are surely enduring classics of universal spiritual humanism.
I doubt you will find copies on the bookshelf of any of our ‘Peace loving friends’ Messrs Trump, Putin and Netanyahu (amongst a clutch of other autocratic anti-democrats).
But who knows – as that leading eighteenth century Catholic poet and satirist Alexander Pope wrote in 1734 (in his “Essay on Man”):-
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never Is, but always To be blest”
John Hills,
March 2025