GASi President
What is Present?
How to plan events at a time when the future seems particularly uncertain?
The future always is, and was, uncertain; but now it is as though there has been a shift from an era when we could, for example, look forward from one GASi symposium to the next, and say to one another, ‘See you next time, in Barcelona,’ without a deep sense of doubt about that reunion.
Having written this, I become aware that the relative security, which some of us felt in the past, was not shared equally amongst us; it was a privilege enjoyed more by some than by others. We are experiencing a redistribution of insecurity.
Does this mean that we are now closer to an everyday encounter with our mortality; is this pressing invasion of uncertainty a shared brush with that reality, which Ernest Becker suggested, much of our daily effort is directed towards denying?
Our preoccupation with the pandemic threat, and our arguments about what constitute rational responses to it, have distracted attention from the far greater threat of climate and environmental catastrophe. If any threat is universal, this must surely be it. Yet even this objective menace is met with familiar defences, fantasies that the fate will befall others; like familiar images of famine and war, the fires and floods – signals of global forces – are strangers’ fate.
When planning our symposium in Belgrade, discussions often turn to speculation about whether participants will be able, or will wish, to travel in order to participate in person. The longing to re-build the large group together, to combine together in a lively critical audience hungry for new ideas, to meet in dozens of parallel small groups and workshops, and to roam freely in coffee breaks rubbing shoulders with friends and yet-to-be friends is intense. ‘But,’ we say, ‘will people be ready to travel again; what will have happened to the virus?’ The disturbing factor is always that which emanates from COVID; we seldom dwell on climate change.
Why is it so difficult to absorb and think about the threat against which there is no vaccination?
During lockdown, we have come, first to rely upon, then often to celebrate, technologies that seem to extend our ability to communicate across geographical and political obstacles. These technologies, owned and operated by unaccountable powers, do indeed lend us powers of ghostly interaction. At the same time, they are increasingly insulating us from something that we might call ‘the environment’, insidiously feeding fears that are always attached to the bodily world, the realm of our mortality.
Fantasies of recovering past securities complicate the process of planning our future meetings. For how long will we be able to allow ourselves to make planes an integral element of our plans?
David Glyn
gasipresident@gmail.com