This has been a hectic ‘back to school’ week, with many people wanting to hold the first meetings since before the summer holidays. It’s an evocative season anyway. With them mental imprint so many years as a student behind me, nervously buying crisp new notebooks and sharpening pencils, not to mention the autumnal weather here in London, no wonder I’ve been feeling rather reflective. And of course the 10th anniversary of the New York terror attacks makes this a poignant anniversary year as well.
Much has been published on the lasting effects of 9/11, and on the Middle East more widely, to coincide with the anniversary. Jason Burke’s [amazon_link id=”1846142741″ target=”_blank” ]The 9/11 Wars[/amazon_link] has been particularly well reviewed. There have also been favourable reviews of Johnny West’s [amazon_link id=”0857389947″ target=”_blank” ]Karama! Journeys Through the Arab Spring[/amazon_link] (not to mention an excellent BBC programme on this subject by Mishal Husain). There were round-ups last weekend (eg in The Guardian) and no doubt more to come this weekend. Much more tangentially, I just happened to be reading a recent book of essays by Alberto Manguel, [amazon_link id=”0300172087″ target=”_blank” ]A Reader on Reading[/amazon_link]. One of the essays, The Perseverance of Truth, is about the ultimate inability of terror to silence truth.
The essay – which takes as its staring point the 2007 murder by an extremist nationalist of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul – discusses the ‘perseverance of memory’, a psychological phenomenon whereby the force of hearing certain information is so strong that we continue to believe it even when confronted with evidence that it is untrue. It sounds like the concept of ‘false consciousness’, a collective phenomenon. The psychology of terrorists must involve some similar inability to see the world from a different perspective. Conrad’s [amazon_link id=”019953635X” target=”_blank” ]The Secret Agent [/amazon_link] surely remains the best exploration of the way an individual becomes trapped in a particular, deformed world-view.
However, Manguel argues that every person has a responsibility to truth:
“Every decision we make, every opinion we give as private citizens, has political consequences. Politics is, by definition, a political activity in which a few occupy the seats of power and the rest of us the remaining myriad roles. No citizen is dispensable, no voice useless, in the continuing struggle to render our societies less false in their pretences and more true to themselves.”
So he concludes that what he calls the ‘perseverance of truth’ is equally powerful. Although at great cost – often death – to some individuals, Manguel writes: “Even though the seeker of truth may be silenced, his sincerity (from the Latin sincerus meaning ‘clean’ or ‘pure’) will eventually do away with the lie.”
The more troubled the times – whether the geopolitics or the economic situation – the greater the onus on each of us to reflect on the true state of the world. And this is certainly the week for doing it.
[amazon_image id=”0300172087″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]A Reader on Reading[/amazon_image]