The Aardvark Blog

Damn you, Constable!
2/03/2025

I have spent no small time since November pondering the American election result, and thinking of the political situation both at home and in Europe.

There are many reasons that such a clear majority of people voted for DJT, and the simple and obvious reasons are probably not to blame.

I do not believe that people are stupid, and if somebody tells you that they can make your groceries cheaper, you know in your heart that they are lying to you. If you accept that lie, knowing that it is a lie, then in truth you are merely making up seemingly logical reasons for doing what you have made up your mind to do anyway.

And this is how we get back to our old friend Constable.

Because at heart I believe that the November decision was not about food costs or racism, but about another equally deeply rooted fear: fear of change. We are so frightened of change, or rather of change happening to us that we can't control, that we will do almost anything to avoid it and will make almost any mental projection to oppose it.

And Constable, and Turner and Monet and Vaughan Williams, and Elgar,- or if you are American - Winslow Homer, Hopper, Thoreau, Whitman and yes even Hank Williams-  they feed one's belief that there is an older time, when man and nature were in harmony and if we can only return to it, all will be well.

The intoxicating rotting honey smell of destructive nostalgia.

Last year Ethel and I endured an horrendous journey to the Frankfurt Book Fair, made bearable by sitting next to a fascinating young woman who was teaching AI at Birmingham University. She was on her way to a conference on AI that was being held in, of all places, Santiago de Compostela. We talked about AI and the changes that are coming and those that have already arrived. She came from a family background of trade unionism and her opinion was that we needed to develop a 'new ludditism'. The original Luddites she believed had been misunderstood. It was not about breaking up machines, but about the representatives of capitalism coming to an equable arrangement with workers to allow for change not to be purely destructive. As we have seen in America over the last few weeks, you can move fast and break things, but it is much harder to mend them once you have broken them. If you cancel a bunch of programmes, you may end up, as they did, cancelling vital work to suppress Ebola or confusing Gaza in the Middle East with Gaza in Mozambique.

So perhaps if we are going to ever to be able to move away from a cycle of political disappointment, we need to give up on our love of artists and art forms that play on our need to return to a pastoral world that never existed. My ancestors spent their lives amongst Blake's dark satanic mills in Lancashire, not in the rolling pretty country of Bawden's Sussex or Gainsborough's Suffolk. And I am betting that your ancestors probably had a similar experience.

We need our creative talents to help us to create a new nostalgia. A nostalgia for a future that allows the picturesque and the practical to complement each other. In which even if we cannot learn to embrace and welcome change, we find a way to make it human enough to be bearable. There are no golden ages, but perhaps if we harness technology rather than allowing our lives to be circumscribed by it, we can create an age that reflects enough light into the darkness of our lives to be bearable. Or it could just be a train at the end of that tunnel. I am optimistic, but ever the realist.