We need radical change
After reading A world divided (16 December), one can only say, “Don’t blame Donald”. He may be a sort of human gum boil, but electoral choices are only a symptom of deeper deficiencies. When people across the world vote the wrong way it is blamed on populism and post-truth – apparently if the poor really understood politics they would vote for a status quo that continues to see them suffer a loss of income and jobs, the dismantling of social services and grotesque overcrowding.
Globalisation has removed many restrictions on the movement of labour, allowing wages to be forced down; as national consciousness is lost, environmental protections are diminished and vast multinational corporations are becoming de facto governments. Income inequality is a major issue across the western world, but the greatest threat of all was barely mentioned in this edition: climate change.
The brutal realities are that capitalism doesn’t work, globalisation equals exploitation, and virtually nothing is being done to address the underlying problems that are making whole countries almost uninhabitable. The people have realised that millions of unfortunate refugees are on a one-way ticket out their own homelands and will take jobs, housing and space.
Unless we all become activists, the next 20 years will see vast numbers of people crammed into the diminishing temperate zones of the world, consuming our resource base. The best of your Christmas edition was a comment on the Reply page: “It is a radical change in our behaviour that is required”. The challenge is to create a post-combustion society.
Philippa Morris
Gravesend, NSW, Australia
• George Monbiot says that, given the bankruptcy of our political systems, “we must rethink the world from first principles” (30 December). If we are serious about this, then we must cease looking for them among the plethora of issues that confront us and turn our attention instead to something far more radical.
Surely the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev was nearer the mark when he insisted that only personality – the highest spiritual value – is capable of solving social problems. This highest spiritual value is to be found in the depths of our own subjectivity – and nowhere else. It is a deepest inwardness that reaches out towards others and is in continual communion with them.
Failing a breakthrough to this highest value, it is all too lamentably predictable that our social problems will only go on getting worse. The time has come when nothing less than real first principles will do. No more bogus ersatz versions of what it is to be human. We are deep, infinitely deep. And we have to bring ourselves in all our spiritual inwardness to the outer questions that press upon us and menace us.
A David
Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia
Climate change is key threat
It is indeed hard to be an optimist, but there are other possible grounds for hope about global warming (30 December). This is our greatest danger but also a challenge that confronts the whole globe, that is caused by all humanity and whose mitigation needs the cooperative efforts of everyone. There is some evidence that a growing awareness of this is beginning to counter the national and ethnic mistrust, prejudice and disintegration that is also increasingly afflicting global society.
In 2015 America and China agreed to act together on climate threats, despite their growing conflict in the South China Sea. They combined with many other countries to pass the unprecedented (if still inadequate) Paris climate accords. In November 2016, in Morocco, this agreement was ratified by over 100 countries and signatories also confirmed that their commitment would continue, even if the US were to withdraw.
As the catastrophic effects of climate change become increasingly evident, might we feel some hope that global cooperation might counteract conflict and hatred?
Constance Lever-Tracy
Adelaide, South Australia
• The cataclysmic damage to the Arctic ecosystem described by Damian Carrington should logically lead to a hard scientific examination of the bizarre primate responsible. Time magazine’s selection for their Person of the Year, ie our species’ most influential member, is a US tycoon who has all but renounced sapience, while the leading runner-up is known as a murderous, multi-billionaire political despot. Both are prominent for regarding nature as little more than an opponent to be conquered. As it does in our incredibly vicious intra-specific conflicts, our conflicts with nature seem to bring out the most childish and irrational selfishness in us.
John Hayward
Weegena, Tasmania, Australia
The perils of complexity
John Harris’s article on the perils of complexity (6 January) is a little too complex. While I agree that we see in the Brexit vote and in Donald Trump’s ascendancy a rejection of globalisation, it is drawing too long a bow to interpret this as an indication of the end of civilisation. The clear message from both events is: the system’s broke, let’s just smash it. With the first part I agree: the second is sheer Luddism, but without the redeeming virtue of that movement – a belief in a better, more equal society.
Harris is accurate in his assessment of Tainter’s book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. The parallels are evident. But that is where the comparisons come up against one irrefutable fact: the globalisation of data that has the potential to transform not just our own particular version of civilisation but the mindset of everyone concerned.
Civilisation, as Gandhi is reputed to have said, would be a good idea: let’s try for a multi-faceted global version rather than writing off the entire concept just because we’ve failed to get it quite right.
Noel Bird
Boreen Point, Queensland, Australia
Trudeau’s pretty words
So Justin Trudeau is proud that he is able to both “get” and to allay people’s fears about globalisation (30 December). But what has he actually done? He may have lessened fear. But has he solved the problem?
As far as I can see, with the signing of Ceta and with the expansion of tar-sand operations, Trudeau is going “full out” for free-trade and for the most environmentally damaging form of globalisation. This may provide some jobs in the oil fields but others will haemorrhage away and Canada will be left with oil-residue devastating its pristine forests. But no matter: people’s fears have been “allayed”. Bravo!
So what do we want? Ogres like Donald Trump who storm around like a bull in a china shop? Or sweet-talkers like Trudeau who dress free-market dogma up in pretty words? I don’t know which is worse.
Alan Mitcham
Cologne, Germany
Trump’s effective lies
Jonathan Freedland is undoubtedly correct about Trump being a “serial, if not compulsive liar” (16 December). Unfortunately the most dangerous liars are the most articulate ones. Added to that is the extraordinary situation where Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been able to establish a deranged Republican as a puppet president for the United States.
Americans are also going to have to come to terms with how this occurred in spite of the fact that nearly 3 million more people voted for the Democrat than for the Republican.
Peter Hornsby
Mitcham, South Australia
Briefly
• Our older son, who turns 40 this year, had his own word for hygge (9 December) when he was about eight years old: “cornery” (as in sitting cosily in a corner).
Margaret J Moore
Picton, Ontario, Canada
• Regarding body art among dancers (30 December), Sarah Kaufman discusses the vicissitudes of tattooing. This reminded me of being taught, when in training as a psychiatrist, to always ask a new patient with body art about the personal meaning of the designs. Of many responses, one that I clearly remember was, “I was really stupid when I was 16.”
Jaime Smith
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
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