Been wondering why it's almost been psychically impossible to post to this blog over the last few months (perhaps some smart post-grad is working on the 'psychology of blogging' somewhere, be delighted to read it...). Perhaps because the time I usually have to blog has been spent with my kids, with interviewing for my consultancy projects, with my music (all play).
But it's also been because it has seemed more important to think about being an informed global citizen, to allow my consciousness to be raised by Live8 and Make Poverty History, than to think about forms and phenomena of play. (Even though, from the music to the celebrity finger-clicks to the armbands, this has been a political movement utterly sensitive - and some would say over-sensitive - to the Northener's desire to 'be play-full' in their lives).
I sat at home on Sunday night watching the Murrayfield Live8 show on television, aware of all the audience passivity and celebrity-ego involved. I felt nevertheless that the pact between entertainment and political education had been worth making. Annie Lennox incandescent with her prepared speech on the systemic nature of poverty in Africa had tipped it for me. What greater aim for the generation of the Zero's than to make poverty history?
Then we all woke up the next morning, and found ourselves grappling with another new set of politicised numerals - 7/7. (My sincere condolences to the relatives of the dead and dying in London). All that I have to contribute, in terms of this blog, is a rueful quotation from the last pages of the Play Ethic book:
We no longer live in a world where the ‘developed West’ can presume that its gossamer webs of informationalism will remain intact. Nor that its powers to ‘rip, mix and burn’, to morph signs and simulate experiences, will always meet with global approval.
Play can only really flourish, whether at the level of the body or the body politic, if an appropriate level of security and sustainability can be guaranteed. A society where small ads now appear in newspapers for chemical-proof bunkers or anthrax-detection kits; where citizens walk the streets in surgical masks to protect themselves from the season’s lethal infection; where national leaders carefully orchestrate war fever against disobedient client states in order to tide them over to the next plebiscite... No, this is not a society that could readily support the vision of the play ethic: a vision that presumes mutual reciprocation, acceptance of difference and otherness, an open commons of resources and information.
On my last invitation to the Cabinet Office in London in 2003, I was happy to tell them that all their ‘institutional reforms’ would mean nothing if some angry young Middle-Eastern men finally got themselves organized enough to either irradiate or bioterrorize a major British conurbation within the next few years, and thus unravelled the social web of civility that still persists on these islands. British popular culture, in all its irreverent playfulness, is actually one of the few attractive melodies to be heard in the advancing cacophony of the ‘clash of civilizations’. It is difficult to imagine a mighty war between the ‘free West’ and ‘Islam as the new communism’ in Britain, for example, when the cinema halls are showing movies like East is East or Bend It Like Beckham, when the evening television runs comedies like The Kumars at Number 42, and the bookstalls are filled with capacious multicultural best-sellers like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.
This is a consciousness question more than it is a technology question: the real lethality lies in the intent to cause mass destruction, more than the capability to do so. The quality of the global conversation has to improve urgently. Governments who believe that force, might and violence prepare the way for democracy, civility and peace need to be reminded, by the imaginative activism of their citizens, that their logic is deeply flawed. If the play ethic enabled in Westerners and northerners a greater self-consciousness about the multiple truths that might pertain in a truly globalized world; if it encouraged us to be aware of diversity not as an act of tolerance but as an imaginative empathy that puts you in the shoes of the other, respecting their games and the integrity of their rules – then it might be more than a shuffle of the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, however fascinating, innovative, even preferable these rearrangments might be in the short-term.
If the play ethic can moderate the resurgence of the panicky, paranoid, commanding and controlling tendencies of Western societies post 9/11 by raising a steady voice for the rights of individuals to order their time, space and resources in a humane and generative manner, then it will have been more than a mere ‘media intervention’, a ‘cultural meme’, ‘this season’s talker’. It will have increased the peace, as the activists say. For all the exciting diversity of lifestyles, technologies and organizations both described and prescribed in the preceding pages, there could be no greater ambition.
I sit this morning, trembling on the brink of some clear attribution of blame of the London bombings to an Islamist extremist grouping, and recall these musings with no great joy. I hope that the 'imaginative activism' of the Live8 player-citizens can extend to the need to regard the deaths caused by a terrorist bomber in London, and the deaths caused by a stealth bomber in the middle East, as equally weighed and worthy, and act to address the fundamental causes of carnage (thank you, old lefties Mike Marqusee and Tony Benn). Our 'care' ethic needs to be as global and vigorous as our 'play' ethic.
