It's difficult

I am back from my travels in Australia. The Sydney Writers’ Festival is the best big-scale writer-fest on earth, as far as I am concerned. Ann Moffat and her team do an incredible job, and the good people of Sydney really put in the love and support. `I had a sell-out show at the Town Hall, as well as a fascinating AI event with Toby Walsh - a relatable and funny AI expert, whose latest book is well worth a read - if you are interested in these things - and we all need to be interested in these things, alas.

He even includes women! And trust me, mostly, they don’t….

What I love about festivals is the enthusiasm for ideas, for conversation, for putting the life of the mind ahead of consumerist distractions. The experiment to see if we can become nothing but online shoppers and browsers, fails every time there is a live cultural event. Arts festivals lay claim to the human.

That said, Toby and I disagreed about AI-generated ‘art’. He read out a long rambling piece by Nick Cave about human suffering and how only suffering generated real art. I said: ‘How do we know?’ By which I mean humans endless choose suffering when we need not. Look at the state of the world right now. The death-cult males in charge of us, love suffering - well, the suffering of others, and of the planet, and its creatures. No-one is starving the leaders of the death-cults to death or bombing their homes. Probably they are making money off armament sales.

I don’t think anyone suffering thinks ‘oh good now my art will be better that AI art.’

It’s wonderful and amazing that we make our suffering into things of beauty of strength. But what if we chose not to suffer? We have no idea who we would be or what we would create. That would be a different kind of experiment. We could try it.

Today, I am reading that my country, the UK, will increase defence spending to 3.5% of GDP, and that mainland Europe will be doing the same. I wrote earlier in the year, in my post; Now We Know, that all the head-shaking and hand-wringing from snivelling little climate-cowards about not being able to AFFORD to reverse climate breakdown, not being able to afford to phase out fossil fuels, was clearly untrue. A lie.

We can always afford a war.

And this is the worst of us. Genocidal, suicidal, savage, insane.

So when people say we will be wiped out by AI, I think to myself. We deserve it.

It’s difficult to live just now, even for those of us who are safe at home. The world is making me seasick. Nothing feels solid. A new and darker future threatens. And that’s why, when I go to festivals where people are happy to talk to strangers and make new friends, where women feel safe to go on their own, where everyone is welcoming and open, I remember what is the best of us.

We have choices. And governments around the world are making terrible choices. In the UK, the so-called Labour government is robotic, static, dull, conventional, without bravery. In the USA, well, we know what we have got there - and if you like information, as well as opinion, I encourage you to follow Paul Krugman on Substack. There are free posts and paid posts. He’s a Nobel Laureate in Economics. He doesn’t do bullshit. The posts don’t make for happy reading but they do counter the endless amount of economic disinformation coming out of the Trump administration. I am a fiction writer, so it makes me mad when people call lies ‘fiction’. Fiction is what gets us closer to the truth, not running in the opposite direction. Lies are there to confuse people. To make the truth hard to know.

I am all for people disagreeing with one another, that’s life, that’s fine, but we can’t disagree if we don’t have the facts to disagree over.

It’s difficult. A long time ago, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge told us that poetry exists to keep the heart alive to truth and beauty. Well, for some it’s poetry, and for others, music, or visual art, or fiction, or trips to the theatre, or it might be a reading group, where you find a much-needed other world. When we are so busy trying to get by, trying to keep up with the cost of living, protect our kids from social media perverts and racketeering, trying to get to work, get dinner on the table, it’s difficult to say, ‘oh I want to keep my heart alive to truth and beauty.’

Trust me. You do.

Summer is festival season. There’s plenty of activities out there and they all make space for little dudes in a family-friendly atmosphere. There’s no war on difference. No finding a new group to hate and blame for the difficulties we all experience now - unless of course, you are one of the people creating those difficulties. But then, you won’t be reading this.

I was in Sydney just at the start of the Vivid Festival - an incredible lightshow. But as I was going off to an opening party at Cafe Sydney, because the terrace has the best view, I walked out of my hotel and saw this. Just this. Others saw it too and people fell silent as the opera house lit up in gold without any fancy lasers, and it seemed like the perfect blessing of arts and nature. What we have been given, as humans, on this wonderful planet, and what we have made, as humans. The best of us.

The best of us is not a luxury.

So get out to some festivals this summer. Get something you need for your imagination. Be confident that it matters. Ignore the lies.