Together

10 Choices For A Better Now

Ece Temelkuran

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780008393823
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A book that defines our new political story, the one that will shape the way we see the world, the way we think of our politicians, and the way we shape the future.

For the last few decades we have been fed the idea that if we are not optimistic, then that automatically makes us pessimistic. Neoliberal politics, the absurd moral values that seem to act as its wingman, and the imposed zeitgeist of “don’t be a killjoy”, have all made us forget that in the wide gap between optimism and pessimism there is realism. Dichotomies are for children and we have been infantilized in our perception of the self and the world for a long time.

All this is to say, ‘Let’s get real.’

Here’s some reality for you: almost everything is shit and, in accordance with that general shittiness, we are generally feeling like shit. Even the lucky few who have the means to hide in ashrams or ivory towers lose their above-ness as soon as they step into the street or click through to their social media account and are inevitably confronted by mundane reality.

This is not a book about how and why we fucked things up, and how we were allured to do so (although I’ll get that out of the way in the introduction). This book will instead focus on what we do now, and how we start to actually build a new political narrative (as opposed to just talking about how we need to find one). It’s a book that looks at the view point ‘I want things to change but I don’t know how’ and says ‘enough’. It’s a book that says here’s what we need to do going forward: 10 choices we can make about how to be, and what to do, for a future that puts our humanity first. Well, actually 9 choice, but I’ll come to that…

1

Choose faith over hope

In 2019, my irritation at the ever-present question ‘So where, then, is hope?’ became so self-destructive that by the end of the year I was reacting to it sarcastically. I fantasised about handing the next person who dared ask me the question a menu for Restaurant Hope. I pictured a quaint brasserie serving a main course of Back to Our Senses Stew. Diners would be offered a bowl of Democracy served in a rich sauce of Sensible, Grown-up Politicians, with all the Global Turmoil evaporated off. But, of course, where there is sarcasm there is always a wrongly healed heartbreak.

It is already common knowledge: My country, Turkey, is a difficult place to be. For years, only a small number of people have managed to do enough to change the bloody course of events. And during those long years, the rest of Turkey has been asking for hope. I have heard the word too many times from those who did not do nearly enough, so many times that the word itself started to sound to me like an emotional crutch for those who just didn’t dare to stand tall.

Today, the Western world that has claimed, since the eighteenth century, to be a safe haven for the individual, the free thinker, is also becoming a difficult place to be. Europeans and Americans are learning to feel not so much like individuals protected by laws and moral codes, but more like guinea pigs in a massive experiment to measure our capacity to endure unending political and moral challenges. The West is also experiencing how paralysing it is to witness tragedies when they are mixed with absurdities, served with ruthless lies by clownish and at times Darth Vader-like political figures. We all know now the numbing effect of being bombarded with shamelessness from the upper echelons of politics and how it energises ruthlessness in daily life. Immorality wraps itself in a cultural and a political identity, baptising itself as ‘the free choice of real people’. And as we witnessed during the pandemic in 2020, this insanity can cost hundreds of thousands of human lives.

The only upside of this worldwide political and moral maze is that now we are in it together, no country is spared, and so we must hold onto one another as we look for the exit. But my heart aches whenever I hear people in other countries, newly introduced to the maze, making the exact same mistakes while asking about hope.

However, there is a much bigger problem than my irritation. Since these confusing times provide us with the ugliest and lowest representations of humankind, a dangerous thought sooner or later comes to the surface: ‘Are humans essentially rotten?’ As this virulent question becomes more common, it starts damaging our essential reason to exist and to act. It is like the scene in Luc Besson’s film The Fifth Element when Leeloo, who is supposed to save the world, learns about the brutality of humans and decides they don’t deserve saving. And in our case a passionate kiss from Bruce Willis may not be enough to convince us otherwise. A new generation is growing up questioning whether humans deserve to exist as much as other species do. And it is not easy to persuade them of the opposite when the immoral representatives of humankind and their frantic devotees are plumbing the depths of what we can morally bear.

During a talk at the Edinburgh Festival, I tried my best to do some of this persuading. After telling the audience that hope was too weak a word to do the job and that only our inherent determination to create beauty would save us, I thought I was done. Yet a woman with beautiful grey hair approached me after the talk. A cross was hanging from her neck.

‘Don’t be impatient with them when they ask for hope,’ she said. She did not waste time exchanging niceties as writers and readers normally do. She jumped right in. So I did the same.

‘I am …’ I said, ‘Actually, the whole world is crumbling and we can do more than ask for hope. And what if there is no hope? Do we just lie down and accept our fate? Or, a more dangerous question: what if there is hope? Are they ready to do what it takes?’

She gently caught my hand in the air, compassionately but firmly, as if rescuing a bird that has flown indoors. She looked like one of those rare women who had earned the lines on her face. ‘They mean something else when they speak of hope.’ She laid my hand on the table as if trusting me with a secret: ‘Think about faith.’ She must have seen me looking at her cross with a know-it-all smirk, so she added with a forgiving smile, ‘Not the religious kind.’

So I did.

‘OK, this is what we do. We stand in the middle of the terminal and we spin around on the spot with our eyes closed. Once we stop, we’ll open our eyes, and whichever city we see on the adverts in front of us, we are going there.’

This was a dare that I came up with in the central bus station in Ankara, the Turkish capital, in the spring of 1991 with a group of friends all equally bored of our law training. The challenge would be to make it back home from wherever we ended up. We only had enough money to reach the destination; the rest was up to our survival skills, fed by our limitless self-confidence. After our fateful spinning, our destination was set: Trabzon, a town on the Black Sea close to the border with the Soviet Union, which had collapsed that very year. And like that, less than twelve hours from the moment we started to spin, we were wandering idly through a hastily erected new flea market that the locals called the ‘Russian Bazaar’. This was where a fallen regime turned the everyday items of a people into souvenirs of failed Socialism.

Since the fall of the USSR, the medals that people had died and killed for had become cool accessories for university students’ coats – and God knows what happened to all those old gas masks. In between the bulky thermometers, rugged furs and military belts there were ceramic earrings missing a pair, decorated teapots with tea leaves still inside and saucers without cups. The turn of history was so sudden there hadn’t even been time to wash the dishes. The bazaar was unusually silent, not only because the sellers were still new to the free-market economy, but also because they were now tasked with simply selling their lives.

A too-close breath tickled the back of my neck:

‘Hey Natasha, sex?’

The greasy whisper of a young man made me want to rub my ear clean. Meeting his lusty eyes, I jumped back and answered in haste, ‘I am not Russian.’ The apology was as quick, ‘Oh, sorry sister.’ Natasha was a common name for Russian women on sale, and I was lucky enough to be the daughter of a still officially viable ideology – Capitalism. I was off-market. I was safe.

The women in the market suddenly became inseparable from the items laid out on the tables, and their price tags were now visible. The silence turned from melancholic to disgusting. While ‘Socialism is dead’ carnivals were getting under way among Western think-tanks, and some business-minded bandits were turning themselves into fledgling Russian oligarchs, there were also men at markets like this one, in the countries surrounding the former USSR, who sold nothing more than a single little box of caviar and a bottle of Russian vodka. Eyes totally blank, they smoked cheap cigarettes, and wore Marxist moustaches that had turned overnight into period drama make-up. Those who witnessed these days would remember that the one thing more devastating than the Death of a Salesman was his forced premature birth.

‘Capitalism needs a reset,’ declared the front page of the Financial Times.

The paper was almost pleading with those negligent deities in charge of the money. Although the wise men of the free-market economy have been talking about Capitalism hitting a dead end for years in their closed summits, the public announcement was still earth-shaking. As if by speaking the very word ‘Capitalism’, the paper was admitting that it was only a finite economic and political model, not the natural state of the world. It sounded like a confession from Capitalism itself: there is life beyond the model, or at least beyond this savage version of it.

Today, although more and more people realise that we are witnessing the collapse of an economic model, the question might still sound surreal. But what would a flea market of collapsed Capitalism look like? Alongside the billions of utterly unnecessary items, I bet there would be piles of self-help books on individual success and equally big piles of books saying it is OK to fail. The two biggest piles, though, would be of books attempting to reinvent hope, and ones on hopeless dystopias. In my mind’s eye, I can see us smiling in despair while looking at these two heaps of souvenirs that almost cancel each other out. And we, the people, would look like – well, pretty much how we look today: the victims of a failed project, lost and confused. Maybe only our Instagram filters would keep us looking better than those former USSR citizens in Russian bazaars. But sooner or later we would have to recognise that what turns humans to rags and tatters is the loss of direction, and our ability to believe that we are competent enough to find a new one. It is the very thing that today makes us ask ‘Are humans rotten and therefore redundant?’ That makes us lose our faith in humankind.

Faith is the only word that can at once accommodate all those concepts that seem to be in pieces: self-esteem, confidence, trust. The word faith, however, requires us to walk the line between poetry and the foggy realm of theology. Both fields require a different vocabulary than this little book of mine can offer. Faith sounds religious because for thousands of years it has been the custom to make God or gods the North Star of our ability to believe. It has been easier to allow mysticism to monopolise the concept of faith, because our talent for believing is too terrifying to be placed in the mundane. The word itself has a dangerous, almost explosive potential. It has therefore always been safer to wrap this limitless power of ours in the divine and remove the source of it somewhere outside our mortal selves.

The Left has often kept itself distant from the concept, even sneered at it as I did at that woman’s cross in Edinburgh, because – besides any philosophical reasons – the word faith has a habit of getting out of hand. It creates a dangerous relationship among mortals, turning them into blind followers and – not rarely – beasts of cruelty. Only when we acknowledge the idea of God as our own invention – that is, something impossible to contaminate and therefore the safest intermediary between ourselves and others in this heartless world – might we manage to accommodate faith into this mundane reality of ours.

I will leave God in the realm of poetry and theology and, instead, provide something closer to the annoying shake we give someone falling asleep in the snow of cynicism and depression that feels so warm. Here’s another dare to test these deliberations on faith in the human, this time in a holy place. It is the Basilica Palatina di Santa Barbara, in the ancient Italian town of Mantua.

It is almost impossible for anyone coming from the Sunni Muslim world to imagine giving a speech about a political book in a holy place. If you are a woman who is supposed to enter the mosque from a side door, trying to hide yourself from the male-dominated congregation, it is an especially strange feeling to enter a church and be welcomed at the altar. Yet here I am, in this sixteenth-century basilica, dazed by the echo of my voice when I say ‘I believe not in God, but in humans.’

Even when I say we don’t need religion to have faith and trust in each other, the resonance wraps my words in a certain air of divinity. The silence turns from that of the ordinary curiosity of listeners to the joyful oneness of a congregation as I mention the words ‘faith in humankind’ and ‘the beauty of the human’. I hear sighs of relief.

It is Italy, after all: when the rest of the Western world did not have a clue about political and moral insanity, the Italians had Silvio Berlusconi, who was more entertaining than Boris Johnson and far more dangerous than Donald Trump. They were the first nation in Europe to experience the sharp turn of history, while the rest of the Western world thought it was a temporary Mediterranean craziness. They are tired of the shame of being represented by the worst of them – which, despite their cooler climates, is now also the case for the most mature democracies and most economically formidable countries.

Tear-filled eyes and full smiles meet me when I come down from the altar, which for an instant makes me feel like an impostor televangelist. But as my cynicism fades, I realise that this is what happens when words are used as a cardiac massage to reactivate the human heart that thousands of years ago invented gods – and before that, faith itself. This is the only human mechanism that can cure our deep sense of failure and the self-hate that follows. Because it is there, still ticking, even after hundreds of disasters and thousands of tyrants, whenever it has seemed as though our humanity has been abandoned. It is not a directionless ‘Yes, we can’, but rather a reminder to people of their ability to find a new direction – and the necessity to have faith in their own power. The convenience of the word ‘faith’ comes from the fact that we know it already, and that it requires no proof and cannot be refuted.

‘Do you have hope for your country?’ a journalist asked the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani while her homeland was once again resisting Islamic totalitarianism.

For a split second she fell silent, as if the question annoyed her. Then she said, ‘I don’t have hope for fire to burn. I don’t have hope for water to flow. Human nature is to be free. Iran will be free.’

It is understandable that such a brave woman, who left her country in order to realise her passion, should think that freedom is an integral part of the human character. However, if you see a wide enough variety of people, you realise that it is in fact difficult to prove that humans have such high merits. Once it is based on such elevated expectations, faith in humankind becomes a shaky theory. It is not the radical evil that hibernates in humankind that makes me say this; it is our ability so often to be maddeningly banal, to be blank and meek. Our understanding of human nature cannot be limited to actual humans, whether they are maddeningly ordinary or amazingly inspiring. ‘There must be something else,’ says my need to believe in the human, and therefore to believe in you.

‘Oh, it’s one of the most popular attractions in the city.’ The lovely volunteer at the bookstall at the Festival of Ideas tells me about a tour called ‘Unbuilt Bristol’. She gives me a flyer that reads, ‘Join local historian Eugene Byrne for a walking tour of things that aren’t there.’ Byrne, who wrote a book with the same title, takes you around the city to tell you about all the projects that never came to fruition. So you spend a day looking at things that don’t exist. The flyer advises you to wear sensible shoes and to bring your imagination.

The question is not ‘what is there to see when there is nothing?’ but whether the unbuilt city is non-existent any more if you are able to go for a walk in it. If we adapt the question to the wider world, are we supposed to judge humankind only by her recorded achievements and failures? Or would it be more fair to include her aspirations?

The fact that many of them are unrealised projects does not make human aspirations any less real, as long as we recognise them. If one were to organise an ‘Unbuilt World Walk’ through human history, it would require more than sensible shoes and simple imagination. For our eyes to see the human determination to create beauty, we would need compassion and moral conviction. Such a stance would be extremely helpful and supportive for today’s human, for despite all her ostentatious cynicism, she desperately, yet secretly, still has faith. It is not easy for her to admit this. She is not so different to me, fighting with the word hope, resisting her need to believe.

A group of New Yorkers trying to erase swastikas from the tube windows one early morning; an illiterate old man who carries firewood to a children’s library of his own making in a tiny Anatolian town; Lebanese protestors singing ‘Baby Shark’ in their thousands to send a baby who had been stuck in the traffic off to sleep; residents of Hong Kong taking their friends from the hands of heavily armed police; Chilean women standing up to police brutality through dance; Irish school kids organising to stop the deportation of their Nigerian friend. These are only a few moments from hundreds that people have shared on social media in recent years. We share them because we want to believe in the human, and to refresh our faith by witnessing its determination to create beauty. As if trying to cure the media of its obsession with the absurdities and tragedies that fill it, we share posts in which random people are doing the right thing. The popularity of such posts and the aching joy we feel when sharing such moments are only one piece of evidence of our eternal need and ability to believe in the human.

One might think that the hardest part of such faith is to have a formidable moral conviction, or to forgive people more than the pious forgive God. But among several other challenges the most difficult one actually occurs in a seemingly less significant place. You. Here’s the biggest dare of all.

‘Sit autem puero huic incredibili conscious, sine fine amore et roboris habitat. Sit huic puero nisi obviam populo …’

I am standing in the middle of my Zagreb apartment reading in Latin from a piece of paper. Baby Valentino is in the centre of the room. He is held by his father Victor, who is Spanish, and his mother, my close friend Burcak, and they are both giggling. There, at the heart of our silly ritual, sits a serious commitment: I am becoming Valentino’s secular godmother. And these are the words that bind us:

May Valentino bring only joy, prosperity and good fortune wherever he goes. May he see the whole world and understand humanity better than his ancestors. Today, my child, with the permission of your mother and father, I become your secular godmother. Hereby I promise to be your protector, your guide and your companion for the rest of my life.

With a ‘what the fuck!’ expression on his face, nine-month-old Valentino cries towards the end of the ceremony, because of my scary churchy tones that imitate baptism scenes from the movies. And as cruel adults we laugh even harder at his sad frown.

But in truth, there is nothing to laugh about. Because it is tragic for us, people who want to believe in the human, to lack the structured, non-religious rituals that might seal our promises to one another. It is a serious business to promise a ...