Mick Hartley

It's a commonplace among literary critics - or at least it used to be in those happy days pre-post-modernism - that in our godless age writers have taken over from the clergy as the voice of our conscience. In this opinion piece in the Times today, novelist Ben Okri not only puts himself forward as a new moral voice for these troubled times, he even manages to echo that peculiarly pious yet vacuous style that I remember from Anglican clergymen in the pulpit, back in the days of my youth when I was regularly dragged off to church:

The crisis affecting the economy is a crisis of our civilisation. The values that we hold dear are the very same that got us to this point. The meltdown in the economy is a harsh metaphor of the meltdown of some of our value systems. A house is on fire; we see flames coming through the windows on the second floor and we think that that is where the fire is raging. In fact it is raging elsewhere.

For decades poets and artists have been crying in the wilderness about the wasteland, the debacle, the apocalypse. But apparent economic triumph has deafened us to these warnings. Now it is necessary to look at this crisis as a symptom of things gone wrong in our culture.

Individualism has been raised almost to a religion, appearance made more important than substance. Success justifies greed, and greed justifies indifference to fellow human beings. We thought that our actions affected only our own sphere but the way that appalling decisions made in America have set off a domino effect makes it necessary to bring new ideas to the forefront of our civilisation. The most important is that we are more connected than we suspected. A visible and invisible mesh links economies and cultures around the globe to the great military and economic centres.

The only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the values that we have lived by in the past 30 years. It wouldn't do just to improve the banking system – we need to redesign the whole edifice.

There ought to be great cries in the land, great anger. But there is a strange silence. Why? Because we are all implicated. We have drifted to this dark unacceptable place together. We took the success of our economy as proof of the rightness of its underlying philosophy. We are now at a crossroad. Our future depends not on whether we get through this, but on how deeply and truthfully we examine its causes.

And so it goes on….and on, and on. We need a new vision apparently, though what it should be remains unclear. Will Okri provide it for us? (And what were those "appalling decisions made in America"?) 

If we need a new vision for our times, what might it be? A vision that arises from necessity or one that orientates us towards a new future? I favour the latter. It is too late to react only from necessity. One of our much neglected qualities is our creative ability to reshape our world. Our planet is under threat. We need a new one-planet thinking.

Could you perhaps be a little more specific?

We must bring back into society a deeper sense of the purpose of living. The unhappiness in so many lives ought to tell us that success alone is not enough. Material success has brought us to a strange spiritual and moral bankruptcy….

We can enter a new future only by reconnecting what is best in us, and adapting it to our times. Education ought to be more global; we need to restore the pre-eminence of character over show, and wisdom over cleverness. We need to be more a people of the world.

Wise words indeed. But will Okri, like so many prophets of the past, be merely a voice crying in the wilderness? Or will we listen to him, and learn to reconnect with what is best in us? Will we bring back into society a deeper sense of the purpose of living, engage in some one-planet thinking, make education more global, restore the pre-eminence of character over show and wisdom over cleverness, and cherish a vision that orientates us towards a new future? Look deep into your hearts, for there you will find the answer – the answer that our planet so desperately needs.

<!–
function pictureGalleryPopup(pubUrl,articleId) {
var newWin = window.open(pubUrl+'template/2.0-0/element/pictureGalleryPopup.jsp?id='+articleId+'&&offset=0&&sectionName=ColumnistsGuestContributors','mywindow','menubar=0,resizable=0,width=1000,height=711');
}
//–>

And now, hymn 234, "Lead Kindly Light"….