Alternative Editorial: Busy Being Born
Last week we asked if you were easily scared. The question was prompted by the multiple potentially catastrophic events constantly hanging over our collective heads. This week we are asking "are you tired?" By which we mean tired of the constant repetition of tried and failed solutions our politicians keep bringing to the table. Exhausted even, by the mental fortitude required to keep hoping for something better.
This was a week where MPs tabled several motions to recognise the wider public demand for a cease-fire in Gaza, but not an inch was given. In contrast to the clear-headed motion proposed by Humza Yousaf, First Minister of Scotland (see here) neither of the two major party leaders in England could move on from their zero-sum position.
Maybe it's because they are so locked into their oppositional chambers that any concession to one side - of any kind - looks like a de facto loss to the other. So the bombing of innocent people - children, women, men - continues in the name of punishing a small group of terrorists.
Maybe the worst part of this justification is that the stated goal cannot be achieved. As history has shown repeatedly, the intention to kill terrorists (who readily die for their cause) only succeeds in breeding more of the same. The sight of extreme suffering in Gaza is likely to radicalise young men all over the world. Aren't young men everywhere brought up to fight for the unprotected?
In the UK these tired (and tiring) repetitions moved from the banal to the ridiculous. The Prime Minister, having sacked his Home Secretary, tried nevertheless to save her policies. Maybe he hadn't noticed that she had earned the nickname of Cruella and the Conservatives were slipping fast down the slope towards 'nasty party' again.
In a 'show of strength', Sunak threatened to ignore the rulings of the Supreme Court, forgetting that these are the checks and balances that guarantee our democracy. Does his multi-millionaire status condition him to see himself as above the law?
This all-too-familiar failure to address - in a fair and insightful way - the problems facing the country, was demonstrated again when the PM offered to deal with local potholes in our streets (until now, the responsibility of local councils) instead of extending the HS2 railway to Manchester. As if deciding against opening up the North to vital infrastructure, connectivity and hence socio-economic flourishing can be compensated for by making sure you have a smooth ride to the shops. Sigh.
To crown it all, in a bid to cover up the crater caused by the sacking of the Home Secretary, PM Sunak used his reshuffle to bring back the former Prime Minister - now the unelected Lord Cameron - to take the role of Foreign Minister. Did this prompt fresh thinking on peace in the the Middle East? No. Instead Cameron used his suddenly acquired powers to travel straight to meet President Zelensky and assure him that military support for Ukraine would never stop. After all, our economy depends upon the military industrial complex.
This lack of capacity for big-picture or complex thinking (such as peace and ecology require), is more than a lack of imagination or a paucity of ideas from individuals, or the ideologies that steer them. After all, the signs of that paucity show up right across all the parties in Westminster. It's the basic wiring of the whole socio-economic-political system that was designed - step by step - by small, elite groups of men from antiquity onwards. And we are tired of them.
But tired does not mean we are going to rest somewhere - it means we are determined to find the fresh energy of creativity we know humans are truly capable of. Our tiredness comes more from our bodies on bad diets, our wage-labour for a machine-like existence. Incremental improvements to that system might only serve to keep it going longer than it was designed for.
Shifting to an alternative begins with moving to a regenerative mind set. When we see that life itself - living things of all kinds - are prone to re-birth, then we wonder why we feel obliged to stick with structures within systems that are clearly failing? Of course the answer lies within the question - it's because we are not aware of the structural and systemic nature of our current reality.
We imagine ourselves free to choose something better - whereas that option has not yet been built. To step out of well-defined daily habits and routines, serving the culture we know as ours, is hard to do. To renew our lives, when faced by institutions that lay claim to our resources and energies - from party politics to the NHS to Amazon and Netflix - is nigh impossible.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975) spent her life exploring and defining the concept of 'natality' - what she described as the human capacity for new beginnings. For those who are fans, her writings are deep, difficult and rewarding.
Hope, she says, is not enough and can be the enemy of action. To help anyone reading who is not already familiar with her work, we asked ChatGPT (4.0) to give us an instant summary of the concept of natality. Take this as an opening towards the 'real thing' which is worth pursuing if you haven't already:
1. Birth as a New Beginning: Arendt emphasizes that every human birth represents a new beginning, bringing something uniquely new into the world. This idea challenges traditional philosophical focus on mortality and death as defining human experiences.
2. Potential for Change: Natality underscores the human ability to initiate change and act in unexpected ways. It’s closely related to her concept of action in the public sphere, which she discusses in her work “The Human Condition.”
3. Foundation of Freedom and Politics: For Arendt, natality is the foundation of human freedom and political action. It implies that every generation has the capacity to bring about change, making history and politics unpredictable and open-ended.
4. Contrast with Heidegger’s Emphasis on Mortality: Arendt’s focus on birth and new beginnings is often seen as a response to Martin Heidegger’s focus on mortality and being-towards-death. While Heidegger saw human existence as defined by an awareness of death, Arendt saw it as defined by the potential for newness and action.
5. Response to Totalitarianism: In the context of her work on totalitarianism, natality represents the human capacity to resist and renew in the face of oppressive systems that seek to eliminate individuality and unpredictability.
6. Educational Implications: Arendt also applied the concept of natality to education, seeing each new generation of students as a new beginning, with the potential to renew and reshape the world.
In summary, Arendt’s concept of natality emphasizes the importance of birth and new beginnings in human life, highlighting the potential for innovation, change, and action inherent in each individual. This concept forms a crucial part of her broader philosophical and political theory, offering an optimistic view of human potential.
While we, at The Alternative Global, have been offering new socio-political thinking for nearly seven years, we realise that many of our readers and co-creators are hoping for a better version of the current system. Or maybe only better leaders, overseeing the recognisable if fragile democracy, with better policies. Why not? Better is always preferable to the current state of affairs.
However natality points at something quite different, in the same way that a newborn child can be. Firstly, the child will be a combination of their parents - not either one. More importantly, however hard the parents try to make the child emulate - or reverse - their own childhood (depending on how good a memory), they cannot replicate those conditions. The context of the times they were born into will be culturally, technologically and socially different, with different access to resources and power, for better or worse. One generation cannot know what reality feels like for the next - which is why the generation gap is always full-on disagreement.
This quality of originality is not limited to newborns. It’s a way of symbolising how small is the pool of thinking and intelligence that our political classes are currently drawn from. And it confirms that any one of us not already deeply implied in this political culture could come up with a socio-political-economic systemic vision quite different from the prevailing one.
While we are encultured to follow the establishment, our human creativity - once alert to the mind-forged manacles of the mainstream media - is capable of starting afresh with new energy almost every minute of the day. Whether we are talking about the hippy revolution of the 1960s or the more recent Occupy movement of the early noughties, alternative new world orders have made their mark.
What's missing however, has been the society-wide architecture for participation that would enable a new idea to take hold and embed itself more seriously into the current system. For those who are genuinely seeking alternatives to our age of crises (whether poly-, perma- or meta-), novel initiatives get too easily swept away by the tides of financial growth and destruction, intent on their own momentum no matter what the consequences.
If natality speaks to you, help us to find and keep building anew the containers in which these serial births can be safely incubated. Be an actor and holder of space from which fresh energy can light up the sky, draw people from miles around, and generate a new world.
