Which is exactly how my house got so messy in the first place. Who has time to clean when there's so much to think about?
Not that cleaning is in any way antithetical to thinking. But when you specifically want to do some heavy lifting about the state of the world as reflected through the oeuvre of a single artist, it's better to be at a keyboard than a sink. You know?
OK, so J.G. Ballard recently died. Johann Hari wrote this essay asking nervously whether Ballard's dystopian vision--grounded in his childhood imprisonment by the Japanese--was elegiac or prophetic.
Specifically, Hari asks, "How thin is the skin of civilization?" More precisely, how much--or how little--will it take to make us all go irredeemably Lord of the Flies?
"Ballard’s vision hangs like black smoke over my instinctive liberalism and rationality, as a constant, nagging doubt. His novels present a world where people will not – cannot – be persuaded by facts and evidence and reason for long. Our frontal lobes are too weak; our adrenal glands are too big. ...Take away our next certain meal and our cool sky and we stop using our frontal lobes. ...In several of Ballard’s later novels, human beings destroy their climate, and soon numbly lose the ability to even understand what they have done.
"In ‘Kingdom Come’, he makes an even bleaker suggestion: that some suppressed part of us wants this to happen. It opens with the narrator saying: 'The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world…'"
What makes this worrisome to Hari is that it's not just something Ballard made up. It comes out of his traumatic childhood experience of being captured by the Japanese in World War II:
"His family was interred in a detention camp, and he scavenged and starved in suddenly abandoned mansions – a story told in the Spielberg film ‘Empire of the Sun.’
"Ballard said about the experience years later: 'It’s like walking away from a plane crash; the world changes for you. One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality is a stage set. It can be dismantled literally overnight… Nothing is as secure as we like to think it is.'"
So, Hari wonders, does that mean we're doomed? As the mercury and the waters creep ever upward, and the media willfully stares at drunken starlets instead?
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This is about trauma. I have a family member who could go toe-to-toe with Ballard in the Childhood Trauma department (not that it's ever valid to compare two people's pain), so I have a lot of experience dealing with their frequent apocalyptic pronouncements.
The short answer is: They are right...but they're also wrong.
Deeply traumatized people have an authority which the non-traumatized do not. In many ways, they see more clearly, just as do the various shades of the mad. But what they gain in focus they lose in breadth. This is particularly true of those whose wounds come in childhood. Like my family member, Ballard experienced the striking of his "stage set" when he was very young.
He accurately perceived and remembered what happened to him--but, necessarily, he lacked context for it, and thus, a crucial aspect of understanding.
Civilization did not collapse in the catastrophes that befell China. In a way, that's the scariest thing. The outbreaks of barbarism were temporary. Both China and Japan, in fact, recovered astonishingly fast from their cataclysms. (China's recovery was admittedly not what you'd call pretty or healthy, but it had serious problems going back long before the Japanese invasion, and in general, basic society did start working again pretty soon.)
And the engine of the cataclysm was itself not a lack of civilization, but one of its engines--the war machine. The cataclysm itself was technological, rational, planned.
This is why Theodor Adorno blamed the Second World War on the Enlightenment and turned away from the notion of human progress. I think Adorno was wrong, but only because this is a homeopathic, hair-of-the-dog situation. Just as the best remedy for bad speech is more speech, the remedy for misuse of civilization is more civilization.
Nothing is for sure or forever...but that includes collapse.
J.G. Ballard, tormented prophet, close your eyes at last. Go in peace.
