Holiday weeks: 0/DETECTING while interrailing
Running to discover a city. Continental Europe functions, imperfectly, but better than UK. Aging, and caring, and dying. Putting legacies of colonialism at the centre
Introduction
For three weeks in August I was inter-railing around Europe with my two teenagers. This post gives some of the non-family themes of our trip, under the broad heading of 0/DETECTING, the zeroth stage of the Atelier of What's Next work-in-progress approach.
We went from London to Paris, where we stayed in an AirBnB just north of the Gare du Nord. On to a small village outside of Geneva, where we stayed with old friends and their teenagers. Train to Zurich, to stay with an old friend and his teenagers. Then to Vienna (/Wien, as they insist on calling it), staying in a central AirBnB, and on to Berlin, where we stayed with the family of a former au pair. Our final stop was Amsterdam, staying in a hotel.
For those who don't know, my wife died in April 2021, 4 months after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. It has been a very difficult time for us all, magnified by lockdowns and then further sudden deaths in the family. This summer holiday was intended to be different from just being a home, and a threshold between the academic year just gone (which had difficulties I won't describe here) and the academic year to come.
I won't be describing the 'fun' of travelling with teenagers, or of booking many trains and AirBnBs, or of many stairs with heavy bags, or the other annoyances of travel. Nor, indeed, of the pleasures and joys. You'll just have to guess at those.
The remainder of this post covers the themes which came up through the weeks, which at least relate to the Atelier of What's Next question of 'What's needed? What's ready? What can we do? What next?' with respect to a sustainable world. There’s quite a lot (!), organised under these headings:
Running to discover a city.
Continental Europe functions, imperfectly, but better than UK.
Aging, and caring, and dying.
Putting legacies of colonialism at the centre.
Atelier WeekNotes will return…next week, for w/c 11 Sep 2023.
Running to discover a city
It turns out that running is a great way to experience a city, to see how it joins together, to get a feel for at least the part you are located in.
[Sidebar. I've been running since January 2021. I took it up as the second big lockdown stopped pretty much all other physical activity. There was an advert for a 10km Winter Race, to raise money for Cancer Research. I got into a training regime of 3 times a week, got the endorphine rush of runing, noticed myself getting fitter and decided to keep going. I've kept up my training and have done the Cancer Research Winter Run each year since (though I'm still short of my goal of a 50min 10km).]
Paris to the north of Gare du Nord starts off as a West African markets, but quickly becomes lived-in streets and post-industrial infrastructure. There was a burnt-out car, a remnant of the recent riots. The famous St Martin Canal is pretty, and the avenues there lined with trees and laptop friendly cafes. But this was not the Casablanca Paris of romance, nor the La Haine Paris of dischord. The grey, functional Paris of Robert de Niro's Ronin.
Outside of Geneva, my friend's village is on the last plateau, up from Lake Geneva to the Jura mountains. I found a flat route, between the cowsheds, meadows, hay bales and golf courses. Along narrow paths, laid out for walkers (who I overtook) and cyclists (who overtook me). The views of morning sun over Mont Blanc and the lake were lovely, as was the whole sense of order, and resources available to maintain order.
Zurich, it turns out, is a small centre with suburbs reach out either side of the lake. My friend lived in one of those, and I set off on the lakeside road. This as, thankfully, flat (unlike every other road or path in the area) but also set back from the lake side itself. That is for people who can afford the houses along the shoreline, with only occasional parks pushing in. The further I ran from Zurich, the more industrial zones were there, relying on the railway.
We were staying on the edge of inner Vienna. My route took me around the centre, through the Museum Quarter, through imperial palace gardens, along wide streets with trams, train stations and cathedrals. Vienna felt like a city built to impress, to be commandingly beautiful and glorious.
Berlin was much more lived in, especially Tempelhof, the former airport which is now a huge field for recreation, circuses, graffiti, experimentation and refugees. There were people cycling in the cycle lanes with their children, and a sense that they were just being who they wanted to be (rather than trying to impress like Vienna).
Finally, Amsterdam, always has one more surprise. Mainly, when you cross the road, there is always one more mode of transport to watch out for, a bike, a tram, a car, a bus, oh look! a bike again. Also, with each corner a new park, a new block of lovely flats, a new canal with amazing reflection of the sky or with houseboats. Just an amazing city, which feels great to be in.
In this, each place was wearing its history differently. Many sustainability books and thinkers write as if all the West is of one mindset, one culture and one economic system. But that super-abstract level washes out important context and differences, even among places which do have some shared heritage and language (Zurich, Vienna and Berlin, for instance).
There are the physical specifics of how a place was established and grew, the dynamics which meant it endured and then succeeded as a place, plus the arbitrary events in history.
WHAT NEXT.
Keep running as a way to experience a place (and so also change my routes in London).
Keep the nuance of differences. Be wary of super-abstractions.
Continental Europe functions, imperfectly, but better than UK.
People complained to us because Deutsche Bahn was getting worse. Trains were more likely to be delayed than before. Can you imagine?
Well, yes, I can imagine because I live in the UK. And the UK is suffering a stagnant economy after many decades of under-investment in private innovation, public infrastructure, and basic services.
While we were on holiday there was the 'worse than Missisippi' charts from the FT -- plus this excellent podcast from Adam Tooze which used thoss charts as a chance to riff on the UK economic situation. And any number of articles from journalists who came back from European holidays to rant at how far the UK is falling behind.
I am wary of super-abstractions (see above about how context matters) but, even so, I can confirm their reports for the cities I visited.
It is not that all is going well in Europe. One person I stayed with was in an anti-Far Right protest group, needed because certain groups in society feel let down, left behind and left out (much as some groups did in the UK, and so voted for Brexit). The cost of living in Zurich is very high (a simple cafe lunch for 3 came in at £150). Germany profited from Russian gas over the last decades, but is unwilling to lose the extra economic wealth to help Ukraine. France has riots driven by questions of marginalisation, equality of opportunity and immigration. There are huge questions on how on Europe's role in a multi-polar world, where we can no longer rely on the US for security cover or economic heft.
But I'd rather have their problems than the UK's.
Aging, and caring, and dying
Every family we stayed had some situation with an elderly relative, whether living nearby with serious health problems, or living abroad with no physical health problems but completely isolated, or living in the house with the family.
Our modern lives are just not set up for intergenerational care. Our houses don't have enough bedrooms. The bills need two wage-earners, which leaves no time for caring. We imagine our lives will be our own to live, not the small remanent in the day left after the kids have been dealt with, the elderly cared for, and the paid-for work done. Plus some people need more care than a someone without training can provide.
Some countries do provide pretty good in-home social care at an affordable extra cost to the household. Other countries haven't reached that point. (The UK, of course, keeps kicking long-term care into the long grass -- for instance, here in 2015. Oh, and again here again in 2022. Frankly, whatever hopes I might have for a Labour government after an election, I won't be holding my breath.)
I spoke with people pulled between in many directions: their duty, what was possible (physically, financially, legally), and their own ambitions for their lives. I spoke with people whose own health had struggled from the needs of caring (especially during lockdown). People who wanted to spend all the time they could with their elderly relative, who could only be with them for short chunks of time because of a tangled family history. Who loved their elderly relative. Who knew there might little of that person left to reach. Who knew there was not great way forward, just tough choices with trade-offs.
Part of personal challenge is the open-ended nature. Will someone need care for weeks, months, years -- or decades? Will there be a long plateau or a sudden change -- to a new, lower, plateau? Given all that, can there even be a return to the same normal as before?
In many ways, this is a challenge which often exceeds the capacity of an individual (or household). If your national government hasn't stepped up with some public provision, what choices do you have?
Which made me think of the three experiences I've had of older people choosing to end their lives. A relative of mine took their own life, partly as the route they saw to guaranteeing they kept their independence to the end. A friend of a friend went through the thorough Dignitas process. A friend's father used the Canada's voluntary euthanasia law, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).
Actually, it might be better to think that this person abused that legislation -- see this harrowingly honest piece. As my friend says:
"MAiD, in my experience, at least as currently formulated and legislated, unforgivably misunderstands, mis-approves, and often failingly provides death, and thus misses those infinitely precious, sacred, opportunities for life. To even begin to understand a death, it is necessary to understand a life."
Soon after my relative's suicide, I was often surprised by the response I got from older people I spoke to. Often they said: yes, I understand. Pretty much all the older men say: yes, I'd do the same in his position. (One person, who I had met 5 minutes previously, went straight to: "That's what you get for not having a proper euthanasia service in this country!")
To some extent, I have been insulated from all this. Both my parents died in my 30s (aged 58 and 66). Both my parents-in-law died last year, without need for long-term care. So, the situation might be obvious to folks who are living this every day. I experienced it in a concentrated burst.
I don't really have any answers. It is clear European societies have got nowhere close to addressing this issue. We will have to find a way of working through questions of aging, and caring, and dying at multiple levels: as individuals, as households, as families, as communities, as cultures, as public service providers and as governments.
WHAT NEXT
Personally: sympathy and support for friends as they have to go into this terrain.
Professionally: not sure.
Putting legacies of colonialism at the centre
One of the highlights for me was the Humboldt Forum. It is was opened in 2021, based from two previous museums (the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the Museum of Asian Art) plus the state museum of Berlin and Humboldt University. What made it a highlight was how it explicitly engaged with European colonialism -- how Europeans controlled other countries and cultures for their own purposes.
Museums were often part of the practice of control, by studying on (rather than with) people, by taking items (often in, at best, legally-questionable ways ) which were important to the functioning of a culture, by reinforcing racist notions of superiority-inferiority.
When we were in Paris, of course we went to The Louvre (and, of course, the Mona Lisa was...disappointing). Most of the rooms and displays project great confidence in the objects (or objets) and, also, in the project of the Louvre and France. There was only one which referred to 'restitution of cultural property'. You can read about that in media coverage here but not, as far as I can see, anywhere on the Louvre website itself.
In contrast, Humboldt Forum had these front and centre.
For instance, the Benin Bronzes which "hold a special position in the debate about the decolonisation of museums. In 1897 British troops conquered the Kingdom of Benin, sacked the royal palace and exiled Oba Ovonramwen, the last independent king, to Calabar. After the invasion, thousands of objects were shipped to London as looted items and sold there." After talks with Nigerian partners, the ownership of 500 Bronzes has been shifted to the state of Nigeria. About a third are on loan display in Berlin for ten years. (The kingdom of Benin was located in what is now Edo State, Nigeria.)
There were a series of talking head videos, with Nigerian experts plus some German luminaries. These rather movingly talked through the double symbolism of the Bronzes. First, as objects which were used in ceremonies and so had great meaning in the kingdom. A bit like the British Crown Jewels: beautiful of themselves, but hugely more valuable because of their role in the life of the place.
Second, the looting as continuous proof of defeat and humiliation. That the Bronzes were abroad was a continual reminder that the kingdom had been conquered, and its people had lost control of their sovereignty. It made me think about how British people would feel if the Crown Jewels had been stolen.
So, the returning of the Bronzes was a source of celebration for the Nigerian speakers, and of reparation (my word) by the German ones.
Of course, this is difficult, involving real trade-offs, and controversial in various ways. When I posted about this on Facebook, one friend posted a link to a Spectator piece by Robert Tombs headlined: 'The trouble with returning the Benin Bronzes', which focuses on a similar effort in Cambridge.
His main troubles: it was a summary decision, based on a narrative which was economical with the truth. It didn't properly value the pieces (and so cost the university millions). The security and access to the returned art might not be good enough. There is no legal duty to return the pieces, and the moral obligation is dubious because the kingdom of Benin "itself was a violent, slave-holding and slave–raiding society".
Well, takes one to know one. The British Empire did have something to do with transatlantic slave trade, if memory serves. Would that have justified another country had taken the British Crown Jewels in, say, 1750, in a way that was legal to that country?
Also, it is a tiny bit rich of Tombs (a loud Brexit supporter) to be complain about be economical with the truth, especially in the Spectator (which is regularly...economic with the truth on climate change, amongst other things).
Looking at the substance of his arguments, I am struck by how much they rest on a conservative mindset. His argument presumes that any change that has flaws is making the world worse. The proposed change has to meet an impossibly high standard; the existing present has to meet no standard at all. The unstated assumes is that the status quo is fine.
And, of course, it is fine for him. He is a beneficiary of how things turned out. But for others the status quo has a legacy of injustice embedded deeply within it. The status quo is not fine for many others. Returning the Bronzes, though hardly perfect, unpicks some of those deep injustices.
He isn't aware that he has a white frame of reference and a white worldview.
Overall, I found the Humbolt Forum very sobering. I reflected on how the success of Europe relied, at crucial times, on having colonies to exploit. Our knowledge system was orientated to justify that state of affairs, partly by claiming only European knowledge production created universal truths. Museums and universities were places to reinforce that status quo.
Historically, those who have pointed this out have been pushed to the margin. Of course, many of those were themselves indigenous people, and were partly arguing that their culture's knowledge systems had their own validities (of a different kind to Western academic truth-claims). Many Forum exhibitions put those people in the centre, the efforts of First People ethnographers to bridge between European academia and their culture's knowledge.
It also reminded me of my trip to Aoteroa New Zealand last year as an Edmund Hillary Fellow. I heard stories from Maori elders of the oppression they faced. One woman spoke of her father being ordered to dismantle their house in the name of the Crown, so they were forced to move away from their historic lands. All to eradicate their culture.
Also, last year I read Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (also known as Dr Vanessa Andreotti), and the Nutmeg's Curse by Amitav Ghosh. He has a particularly memorable story of some British people passing on a blanket they knew was infested with smallpox over to an indigenous people, to clear the land for European-style farming.
One of my reflections then was just how little of this — the damaging side of empire — we are actually taught in school or in our memorials. The default is to say, yes, there was some bad stuff, but we were gentlemen, with fair play, democracy, cricket and railways!
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves become ourselves. If those stories omit crucial features of the past, then our present and future will also have a hollow ring.
There's more to say than I can unpack here. But there is a lot of colonial legacy embedded as deep injustices in our status quo. I agree with Andrew Hurell, that, medium-term, I don't think success comes from a pure switch: previously centering the West’s experience, now centering de-colonialism. That stills ends up reinforcing the colonialism frame (just like ‘post-X’ is still defining itself in terms of X). I suspect we will need to find a way of describing the future direction which lives with, but is not captured by, the past.
But we, people in rich countries, need to engage with our colonial legacies, from which we have benefited. Paul van Zyl (who helped run the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission) has suggested a similar thing for the British Empire (from 9:25 in this interview).
WHAT NEXT
The legacies of colonialism are rising in the sustainability world. So, a watching brief.