Reasons to be cheerful: yes, there are
As the new year begins we all need a swift dose of optimism
It might seem perverse to begin by mentioning Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour epic about the complex, conflicted man who was dubbed the ‘father’ of the atomic bomb. The film ends with his apocalyptic dream of global destruction but, and here’s the point, it hasn’t happened, eighty years on, despite a few extreme close calls. It’s an astonishing film that takes its time, but never loses its grip or focus on an intense, intelligently defined and difficult subject with all the moral dilemmas that is contained within it.
Oppenheimer, the man, was flawed, egotistical, bloody-minded, a casual womaniser but one of the greatest scientific geniuses of the past 500 years. His contemporaries and colleagues included Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein and Teller. He predicted black holes out of purely theoretical physics, long before astronomers confirmed them. He mastered dozens of languages, including Sanskrit (hence his quote from the Bhagavad Gita, on the successful detonation of Trinity: ‘I am become Death, destroyer of worlds’).
Today, we are on the edge of another kind of apocalypse, global climate melt-down (literally). We have the slimmest of chances still to avert that. It really is in our hands, as so much to do with the future of this astonishingly beautiful planet has been ever since the industrial revolution, three hundred years ago.
So, here is how I think we can increase our levels of happiness in the next year – and optimism – in four simple steps.
First, consume less of everything that contributes to our planetary woes: holidays involving air travel; cars that are massively too large (yes, those ubiquitous, ugly, unnecessary four by fours); food which you either shouldn’t eat, or don’t need to; clothes you know you hardly will wear; stuff in general (particularly for children); any redundant electronic gadgetry that uses yet more electricity, or energy of any kind beyond the barest minimum you need. Most of all never go near crypto-currencies which achieve their theoretical value solely by burning immense quantities of electricity.
Second, get healthier by using mechanical transport (other than bicycles) far less. Walk, run (on soft ground, please, to save the NHS those knee and hip replacements), cycle, swim, manage your garden (and grow as many vegetables as possible). Have real adventures involving actual peril (but not thoughtless danger), not the confected offers by travel companies who encourage you, for example, to trash the few remaining wild places on earth. Scare yourself – it helps your immune system – a few times, like getting seriously lost in a forest or on a moor. Then recover by using a map and compass (which you’ve sensibly packed along with just enough water, and a bag of nuts and raisins to assuage hunger).
Stay intellectually alive: curiosity about everything and everyone. It is as powerful an aphrodisiac as sex (they’re connected, by the way). Listen as much as you speak; better, listen more, but always analyse what is being said. Careless acquiescence in carelessly expressed unsupported opinion leads to complacent acceptance of dangerous thought, as deadly, and similar in transmission, as any virus.
Third, think every day how you might help others, by simple acts of kindness, connecting you to other people (strangers or friends and family). It usually costs nothing and it might well involve no more than smiling at people you pass in the street. Seek out news of similar acts in the media (not in the toxic environment of anti-social media, which we all need to eschew, preferably in its vicious entirety).
Fourth: fight the cynicism – admittedly all too often justified – that has taken over the world in so many respects. I know all about how hard that is – I’ve been a journalist, still a vital and honourable profession, for over half a century. Even so, the good outdoes the bad should you care to look. We’re just so inured to reading, hearing and watching the egregiously bad (sadly, it sells more).
We’ve allowed ourselves to become isolated. It’s the shibboleth of neo-liberalism that we are all, as it were, sole traders in an insane market (in fact, a casino where the chips are always stacked against the small player). This false and dangerous myth – human anomie and alienation – was amply demonstrated – in the 1970s film, Taxi Driver. Alone among random customers, marooned far from civic institutions, obliged to work nights and holidays, Bickle is no accident. He is his society’s creation.
Our current society – the society of Uber, Deliveroo and vast warehouses of cheap goods packed and posted by low-paid temporary workers on zero-hours contracts – is creating far more citizens as isolated as Bickle. Long before Covid, Britons already knew in their bones what it meant to be socially distant. Meanwhile, supermarkets conspire, in the name of profit, to make things far worse by eliminating check-out staff in favour of surveillance kitted ‘fast’ (that’s a joke) electronic versions.
And yet, and yet: as a species, we’re born optimists – and also, in small groups, highly gregarious. We are social primates, like our closest cousins, the apes, bonobos and chimpanzees. In our long slow evolution, it has only been very recently that cultural concepts like original sin arose like a bad dream suggesting a probable ultimate doom, unless we conformed to a human-devised and imposed set of rules. This single idea, that we’re all born in some way evil, is so daft (but too often believed, even long after the age of enlightenment) as to invite – after a gale of laughter – instant dismissal.
We’d never have moved, as we did, from the fertile valleys of east Africa, 70 000 years ago, to spread out across the globe, had we not carried within our genetic code, the critical seed of hope, not a supernatural gift, but rooted in our very essence.
Our individual time is limited and we waste it on so many things – and thoughts – that cannot bring anything other than a materialistic dead end.
So, pass all this on, not least to the children. And, remember, hope dies last.
Enjoy the coming year. And, by the way, as a footnote of utmost triviality, this household, for one, will not be Puritanically ‘dry’ in January: the deep winter month needs all the good cheer one can muster (and drink): slàinte mhath.
This week: Tim watched Barbie, the perfect Christmas film because it manages to combine satire, feminism and the daftest of plots in a gleeful exploration of what it is to be human. And, honestly, any film that ends with the word gynaecologist (we assume a female one) – apparently causing huge embarrassment among parents having taken their young to see an ostensibly children’s movie – when it assuredly is not, gets my vote (as well as plenty of laugh-out loud moments of sheer joyful, ridiculously couched comedy).