Through a Darwinian line it also encompasses a kind of evolutionary
Through a Darwinian line, it also encompasses a kind of evolutionary psychology.
Jacques Rebi?, whose mother is lost to the mists of his early infancy, is the brilliant son of a miserly Breton father, just out of the peasantry. Geographically, the book spans England, France, Austria and Africa, with a foray to America’s west coast. Intellectually, it attempts a history of the mind sciences and madness, starting with the outcast’s hovel, chains and straw, then moving through the custodial and therapeutic asylums, the birth of psychiatry and something which seems to be – though, oddly, under a different name – psychoanalysis. It begins in 1870, when his two heroes are 16, and moves through the First World War. Love, loyalty, courage, compassion, goodness, the meaning that can be wrested from life, even, or perhaps particularly, in great adversity: these are the poles around which his always skillful storytelling revolves
Human Traces is his most ambitious novel yet. Sebastian Faulks’s fictional imagination has always been driven by history and the big human themes which seem to sit more securely in the past than in our irony-inflected present. People in high places truly believe that Christ will soon be back, and the world will end, so there is no point in thinking about the future.
Bush may think he is the messiah; Blair and Brown seem content as disciples.Those who feel that humanity should continue must circumvent these people with their narrow vision Analysis is needed, and practical suggestions. The necessary literature is building up apace, and Kennedy and Kunstler are key contributors. If you give a damn, you should read these books.Colin Tudge’s book ‘So Shall We Reap’ is published by Penguin. Our own role in world affairs under Blair and Brown is as an irritant, minor but perhaps crucial, supporting all the forces that are squandering resources, consolidating power in the hands of the few, and undermining the alternatives – a more civilised Europe, agriculture as a whole.America’s style of Protestantism has given rise to fundamentalism which, so Kennedy tells us, has created an apocalyptic mentality. But we also need new forms of governance to ensure that we don’t go on creating the same old dreary hierarchies.
We need to design mechanisms of government that can pre-empt the rise of gangsters – in short, to make democracy work.There are jokers in the pack which neither author spends much time on. Kunstler suggests that the hawks in a post-corporate, post-oil world may well manifest as new-born feudal barons, with the newly poor stranded suburbanites obliged to be their serfs.As humanity moves into the post-oil world we need new ways of living. Another, more immediate joker, is the present economic shift.Will China stand by while America decays? Will it put the boot in, or strive to prop it up? Or will its own economy collapse as global warming bites and the oil runs out? Before too many decades China’s own Manhattan skylines, in Beijing and Shanghai, will surely seem just as forlorn as Manhattan’s are going to.Great Britain is a kind of joker. This should seriously modify the isolationism of traditional economies.
One is the rise of IT, which in principle puts everyone in touch with everyone else. Energy may be too dear to ferry people and goods around the world, but we could run the global internet on solar power. He recognises that the future, like the past, must be primarily agrarian if humanity and the world are to survive.Kunstler sees the end of the global corporations: “Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target, Home Depot are all going to wither and die” He is surely right. But will the mentality that gave rise to them die as well? To some extent it must. Globalisation and hence the transnationals must peter out as the oil disappears and mass rapid transport becomes unsupportable.But the old ways of thinking will persist.
