Interesting times – but who’s listening?

I think it was Bobby Kennedy who evoked the Chinese curse about living in interesting times during a speech to a reform movement in Cape Town more than 50 years ago.

Kennedy was speaking at a time of institutionalised apartheid in South Africa, the Cold War, and the growing quagmire of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam — enough for him to describe it as an “era of danger and uncertainty”.

He would have blanched at the state of the world today.

A journalist is murdered and his body dismembered on a routine visit to his own country’s consulate; thousands of refugees, representatives of millions of displaced people around the world are being threatened with military force as they approach the US border, where a President notorious for his abusive and vulgar utterances is attacking the media for a lack of civility.

In China there may be as many as a million people in ‘re-education camps’ because the State objects to their religious beliefs; pipe bombs delivered through the mail cause chaos in American cities; billions of dollars are being wiped off the value of stocks and shares as markets around the world slump, and the Middle East is once again at melting point in Israel’s seemingly endless dispute with the Palestinians. 

Stories that would have struck horror a decade ago get just a scant reference: Famine in Africa and bombings in Yemen forced onto the back-burner by trade wars and the posturing of potentates.

When did things start to go rotten? I guess we all have different answers, but for me it was the 2016 vote for Britain to leave the European Union.

In a globalising world, beset with problems that can only be addressed by increasingly close international cooperation, that plunge back into 19^th century nationalism was incomprehensible. Voting to stay in the EU was a no-brainer.

Throughout the campaign, the Remain camp put out reasoned and responsible arguments about the advantages of EU membership and the dangers inherent in leaving. In the end not enough people could be bothered to listen.

Instead it was the glib, essentially meaningless slogans like “give us our nation back”; a hard border in Northern Ireland – oh that will never happen, and glittering fibs, such as the huge financial benefits leaving would bring, that won the day.

Then along came Donald Trump in the same populist tradition, giving simple answers to complex questions which in the end were no answers at all, but still good enough for a lazy, disengaged electorate.        

My greatest fear is that just when it is so important to look outward, mankind is doing the reverse, switching off from the important questions of the day and giving free reign to whoever says “leave it to me, I can manage it for you”.

So Trump, or Xi, or Putin, or the burgeoning numbers of petty dictators ready to demonise someone else for the ills they have no way of curing are getting a free rein.

History shows there is nothing new here. It is what a lot of decent, humane Germans must have done as the Nazi atrocities began to mount in the 1930s.

Unfortunately history is long and the human attention span is short.