Plan C for humanity

While politicians earnestly debate whether to carry on with the belt-tightening Plan A which many say has flopped, or move to a neo-Keynesian Plan B, which might involve temporarily borrowing more to kick-start the growth which has failed to materialise, I propose Plan C. Actually it might be better to call it Plan Psi, or some other letter from an ancient alphabet that does not feature on my computer keyboard. Or perhaps even better, name it after a Chinese character: then it would not just be one in a series of abstract, intrinsically meaningless symbols, but a picture, in some sense a poetic image.

Plan C does not involve such arcane financial engineering as quantitative easing or creating eurobonds. In fact, Plan C does not consist of doing very much in an active way at all. Plan C consists of pausing, thinking, reflecting, reading, especially reading poetry, listening to music, going for walks, certainly not driving too fast (another bizarre way of kick-starting the economy proposed by the increasingly peculiar British government).

Now you might say this will get us nowhere. But Plan B, unless we are careful, could just return us to where we were before the crisis struck, that is to another debt-fuelled and essentially hollow binge of consumption. And the place we are heading for under Plan A looks less and less desirable, as we experience the rapid evaporation of social solidarity. According to the latest British Social Attitudes survey, Britons are responding to economic hardship by becoming more selfish. Or perhaps it is simply that they are taking their cue from those who created the crisis in the first place.

There are circumstances in which human beings can quite quickly – simply, in fact, by failing to question propaganda and following the wrong leaders – be reduced to a condition in which there is nothing human about them at all.

I’ve been reminded of that by reading Chil Rajchman’s short, almost unbearable memoir called Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory (MacLehose Press), which includes an essay on that “vast executioner’s block” by Vasily Grossman. The cruelty and barbarity inflicted on hundreds of thousands of Jews and others there was performed by individuals who had the appearance of humans, and who prided themselves on their efficiency. But they had lost whatever it is that constitutes humanity. Part of that is, obviously, feeling; that is to say, fellow-feeling, the ability to empathise with the sufferings and joys of others. My Plan C is a plan for feeling, for restoring full human feeling. If you asked me why we need the arts, I would answer first and foremost because we constantly need to be reminded of what it is to feel, fully and humanly; of course, that would not be an answer to why we need the art of certain contemporary artists who want either to shock, which is a kind of numbing, or nihilistically to deny the possibility of human feelings.

In the midst of all the gloomy, not to mention incomprehensible, talk of big bazookas and tighter fiscal union (which does not sound like a joyous, conjugal embrace), I’ve been stopped in my tracks quite a few times in the last month by music-making of heart-opening power and beauty. There was the Northern Irish pianist Barry Douglas getting to the nub of a Beethoven sonata that had always seemed one of his least interesting, or least revolutionary: the one in B flat Opus 22. But Douglas, with a wonderful variety of tone and touch, with going for truth rather than superficial beauty, with a spellbinding inwardness in the adagio con molta espressione, showed that emotional profundity and relative conventionality are not incompatible. And Mitsuko Uchida only had to play the first chord of Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto to carry the listener into a luminous new realm of feeling, where every utterance was full of a meaning and consolation beyond words. This was profundity achieved through translucency.

Plan C involves depth. I have the sense we need to go a bit more deeply into things; that means into ourselves as well as what is around us. When we discern depth in a work of art, we must also be recognising it in ourselves. Appreciating art isn’t just about looking or listening with the clever brain, spotting surface connections, influences, iconography and so on. It is also about feeling, about a deep resonance and consonance. The work, whether it’s a Beethoven sonata or concerto, a poem by Hopkins or Lorca, a self-portrait by Rembrandt or Auerbach, can only resonate in the right, receptive chamber.

All this talk of depth, and especially emotional depth, no doubt goes against the cultural grain. Addicted to the apotheosis of banality, the glorification of the talentless, we are not so much the hollow men and women as the shallow ones. But I have a feeling that the retreat into shallowness is not just annoying but can have tragic consequences.

harry.eyres@ft.com

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