Given to us – perhaps once in a lifetime – is the chance, the responsibility, to see the world with fresh eyes. George Orwell described the fleeting, deceptive intoxication of such a moment in Barcelona in 1937. More recently, the people of Bolivia may well have felt it with the election of Evo Morales in 2005. There could even have been a trace of it after Barack Obama’s victory in 2008. On any given day, in a city or village somewhere in the world, people are probably experiencing something very similar for themselves. But never in my lifetime has everyone been forced to witness together the same spectacle – the meltdown of the world’s financial ‘architecture’, the prison walls it built around us, the open space it leaves in front of us.
When jobs are being trashed and lives ruined, this may not be the most seemly moment to suggest that the meltdown might eventually prove to have been a good thing. But then, machines for the emission of carbon dioxide are rusting pointlessly on airfields, and there’s a chance for the skilful people who made them to make something much better – better, surely, than no job. The meltdown, rather than interminable conferences, might actually be cutting carbon emissions – in this crucial respect, the old regime worked only when it failed. Homes are becoming more affordable, just as people who need them are being kicked out of them. Some people now find the growth of vital things like food more satisfying than ‘economic growth’ or losing oneself in a vacuous computer screen. A renewed sense of sufficiency, of the public interest and the common good, is being restored a little closer to its right place.
