Arodnap

I have been listening to John Coltrane.  More particularly, I have been watching a studio performance by his Quintet from 1961, of his interpretation of the song, “My Favorite Things”, written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein a couple of years earlier. There is much to admire in this old black and white archive recording, including a delightful piano solo by McCoy Tyner, who died last month, and some under-stated yet compelling percussion by Elvin Jones.  Then there is Coltrane himself, the great saxophonist, finding ample scope for virtuosic improvisation within the formal structure of the verses, drawing out many shades of colour and contrast around the melodic line that – seemingly – he alone knew might be hiding there.  Listening to him play is better than eating schnitzel with noodles. 

The song was written for the musical, The Sound of Music, which in the mid-sixties moved from stage to screen, making famous the story of the von Trapp family, who left Austria in the late 1930s and ended up living in Vermont.  (Back in 2001, on a trip to the US, I stayed at the von Trapp family lodge for a couple of days, now converted into a conference centre, where there are displays of photographs, costumes, and other memorabilia from their days in Austria.)  The song, like the play and film, is about the overcoming of mishaps.  The banal list of items that constitute the singer’s ‘favorite things’ are there to remind us to be cheerful even when some of life’s modest problems occur: a dog bite, a bee sting, or a feeling of sadness, might all be trumped by recalling raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, and suchlike.  These pleasant memories were not much help, however, when in 1938 the Germans annexed Austria into their Nazi empire. 

Sometimes singing just does not work.  Escaping over the mountains is the better option. Although the film ends on a positive note, it does not shy away from the harsher aspects of human existence: of rivalry and betrayal, of the intrusion of politics into domestic life, of exile as the only means of preserving dignity and personal values.  The happiness associated with families, romance, and the beautiful alpine scenery are all evident to the viewer, but so too their fragility.  These good things are hard won and easily lost. 

There is another, much older tale of human happiness destroyed by the of the deliberate misdeeds of the powerful.  In Works and Days, Hesiod tells the story of Pandora and her jar.  Zeus, king of the gods, is furious that Prometheus, a mere mortal, has tricked him: first by taking the best meat of the animals killed for sacrifice leaving for the gods only the fat and the bones, and then by stealing fire from heaven.  To punish humankind for these impertinences, Zeus instructed his fellow gods to make a woman from clay, dress her in beautiful clothes, and then fill her mind and heart with bad attitudes.  Pandora was sent, with a huge jar full of woe, to Epimetheus who, forgetting his brother Prometheus’s warning not to accept any gifts from the gods, welcomed her.  She opened her jar and all the many ills and troubles of the world, previously unknown to men and women, escaped to create havoc and ruin.  Only hope remained behind in the jar, trapped by Pandora when she refastened the lid. 

It makes for a compelling storyline: idyllic early human society, ruined by the scheming of the jealous gods; or, similarly, Adam and Eve expelled from Eden into a world of sin and death; or, in its modern version, the flight from Austria to Vermont via Switzerland, while brown paper packages tied up with string are crushed beneath Nazi jackboots. 

Except that this is not the whole story.  On the contrary, it is a massive distortion of a true picture of the world.   The idea that human society was once in a steady state of near perfection, but is now on a downward spiral of decline, makes no sense of the evidence – the plentiful evidence – that our life on earth is longer, richer, and more secure than it ever has been.  The human race continues to grow in number, and on average we are taller, stronger, and live longer than our ancestors, because we are better fed, live less dangerous lives, and have better health and medical services to assist us.  We also have more free time and resources than ever before to devote to sports, the arts, leisure, and entertainment.  It is certainly true that not all the good things in life are evenly distributed, and some people have much harder lives than others.  But overall, we are better off quantitatively and qualitatively than ever before.  If there were such a thing as a golden age of humankind, then it lies in the future rather than the distant past. 

A couple of years ago, I gave up watching television and reading a daily paper.  I still look at some sports games, from time to time, streamed to my computer screen, and most days I take a quick look at the headlines online, but I avoid spending too much time following the news cycle.  This decision was not taken due to a lack of interest in what is going on in the world, but rather reflects my desire to understand better what is happening by attending less to trivia and more to the long-term forces that truly shape our world.  In other words, it is consequent on my attempt to distinguish what is material from what is merely epiphenomenal. 

This represents a major change in life habits for me.  When I worked in the financial services industry, for several years I sat at a desk in front of several screens full of data, some of which updated every second.  I followed changes in the market prices of various asset classes and read and discussed the market commentary of policy makers, economists, elected politicians and unelected commentators.  If a senior official at the Federal Reserve or the Bundesbank said something about the markets, or monetary policy, I knew about it straight away and had a view about its relevance for the pricing of stocks, bonds, and currencies.  If a major report was published about the current state of the global property market, or a major new discovery of oil reserves, or a change in the investment strategy of a leading sovereign wealth fund, I was interested.  Sometimes, I read newspaper columns by authors whose opinions I had no respect for, on subjects I considered unworthy of serious consideration, only because the next day I would attend a meeting with an important client, who might ask me what I thought about the current price of gold or the FT’s latest editorial about banking reform.  I was a news junkie.  It was part of my job, but I enjoyed the sense of floating midstream amidst the global flood of information, attuned to all the minor and major variations in what was being said, by whom, about the things that really mattered.

Thanks to my earlier training in political philosophy, I knew that lasting social change was not dependent upon fluctuations in asset valuations, and that what is reported one moment – on the television or on the market news services – is forgotten the next.  The only people who believe that journalism is the first draft of history are journalists themselves.  Historians tend to take a more critical view.  It is only from the vantage point of distance, which the passage of time and the disinterestedness of scholarship afford us, that we can judge not just the causes of significant events, but which events will come to count as significant.  Immersing oneself in the glut of instant information has its pleasures but gaining a clear perspective on what really matters is not one of them.

There are plenty of bad things that happen in our world every day, not all of which are reported in the papers or on the television news.  But the sample that the daily media presents to its audience is biased to the bad and skewed to what can be captured on film.  An event’s newsworthiness increases significantly if there is blood spilled and pictures taken.   In one sense we all understand this, but we find it hard to retain any clear sense about all the other events that also happened yesterday that were not reported.  I do not wish to hide away from the reality of bad news, but I do want to maintain some sense of balance about what it represents, about its proportionality, about the context in which we live our lives.

The message of “My Favorite Things” is that we can distract ourselves from small harms by focusing on simple pleasures.  Bad day at the office?  Then, why not listen to some John Coltrane.  You will feel a whole lot better.  It is hard to disagree.  When confronted with major harms, however, this strategy no longer works.  If your country embraces authoritarianism, regrettably exile is the more sensible option.  But the dark days of authoritarianism do not last forever.  Crises come and go – so too panics and pandemics – but hope has not been trapped within the shut jar.  Human history is not a story of decline and despoilation.  All around us there is evidence of beneficial change, the slowly accumulating improvements in physical, social, and cultural well-being of our race.  

If Hesiod had spent less time reading the newspapers, he might have gained a better perspective on life and he would have told us a different story, instead of getting Pandora back to front.