Politics

Not long into this essay I found myself wondering if it would have been published if the author were not Julian Barnes. I also wondered: would I have guessed the author’s identity if it had been withheld from me? Actually, it’s really five little essays, whose subjects are ‘Memories’, ‘Words’, ‘Politics’, ‘Books’, and ‘Age and Time’.

When Howard Amos first came to Russia, in 2007, it was a country you visited with interest, even enthusiasm. Modernisation, potentially a progressive development, was on the cards; America was getting ready to ‘reset’ US-Russian relations; foreigners were able to volunteer at Russian orphanages. That was what Amos did, working with disadvantaged children in Pskov Region. In the 2010s, he returned to Russia as a journalist and reported from places high and low. He draws on his experiences in this book’s 17 essays, centred on topics ranging from politics to poetry, religion to rural affairs. Inevitably, war is a recurring theme. One of Amos’s interviewees, Sergei, works for a German organisation set up to give fallen soldiers marked graves.

Our immiseration came swiftly and stealthily. At the start of the 21st century, Britain was a prosperous country. Ambitious people fought to come here. We trusted that, over time, we would become wealthier – an expectation that had been accurate for most of the previous two centuries. Since the millennium, Britain and western Europe have pretty much stopped growing – especially if we ignore the impact of immigration and calculate GDP per head. Reversing this slowdown should be the top issue at every election, but it is surprisingly under-discussed. In theory, almost all our politicians want growth. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves keep describing it, nasally and tautologically, as their ‘number one priority’.

Is this what it felt like in the months before August 1914? Or during the years leading up to September 1939? The discussion around artificial intelligence produces a deep foreboding that we are in the grip of forces largely beyond our control. Are we sleepwalking towards disaster? That is the feeling I have after reading Genesis, a collaboration by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, and Henry Kissinger, who died, aged 100, soon after completing this book. They have crafted a holistic analysis of the social, political, psychological and even spiritual impacts that a superior machine intelligence would have for humanity.  We are broadly familiar with AI’s current and future benefits.

One of the key charges made by the hard of thinking is that because the devastating accusation ‘racist’ has been thrown around so casually in these days of febrile public discourse, it no longer has meaning. Similarly, ever since Rik called Vyv (and a bank manager and the BBC) a fascist in The Young Ones, that insult has been devalued to the point of meaninglessness. Or has it? One can never truly know the heart of another person, so short of them lighting a crucifix on their front lawn and perpetrating violence exclusively against one racially designated group over another, we are compelled to only assume that if you often say things that sound a bit racist you might be legitimately given the identity of ‘a racist’.