Revisiting Ill Fares the Land — Part 1

I want to use a re-reading of Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land to clarify some of my thoughts on the political miasma in which we find ourselves. Miasma seems to me the right word because it conveys something both unpleasant and hard to see through. It is both obfuscating and repellent at the same time. My Shorter OED defines it as “an infectious or noxious vapour, esp. from putrescent organic matter”. I’ll leave you to come up with your own idea of what that putrescent organic matter might be.

Seeing through things is exactly what is required if we are to recapture democracy. Seeing through lies, of course. Seeing through the way in which we are forced to accept the illiberal and undemocratic as the normal state of things. Seeing through the deliberate forgetting of history — and of many other branches of knowledge — by means of undervaluing education and research. Seeing through the undermining of science and the creeping resurgence of magical thinking in the form of twisted versions of religious teachings.

That’s just for starters. Democracy has become almost a dirty word because of its use to justify the singularly undemocratic actions of those who would subvert it. It faces attacks from the corporate elite who fear its efficacy as a brake on their greed and from the far right who sneer at it as something weak and a crutch for the undeserving.