‘Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’
Shakespeare: MacBeth.
We’re
drowning in noise, a babble of opinions ricocheting off each other like steel
pinballs, fuelled by self-righteousness. Everyone has their own beef, a woeful
tale of unfairness, which seeks to take precedence over other injustices or
demands to be added to the mountainous pile of ‘things we must all worry
about.’
I’m all for
passionate activism, but my head (or is it my heart?) hasn’t the capacity to
cram them all in. The narrowness of them
also bothers me. Obesity is bad, so is fat-shaming, so is flaunting skeletal
models on catwalks. Which way am I supposed to look? Sexual harassment is a
free trip to jail or public ruin; while the falsely accused tug us in the
opposite direction. Hunt saboteurs and
anti-abortion campaigners devote their time to protecting life as they see it,
but seem unbothered by a world of starving and abused children.
What it
needs is a mediator with exceptional negotiating skills to persuade the zealots
to take off their blinkers and admit there could – sometimes - be a wider
viewpoint. In shrink-speak it’s known as complex thinking. People aren’t all
good or all bad; most of the time they are both. Any human situation is
multi-faceted; and one segment doesn’t negate the others. 
But have
you ever tried to persuade an opinionated one to change their minds? Head against a brick wall time. Throw evidence to the contrary at them and
they’ll cherry-pick what confirms their stance and be deaf to all the rest.
Their aggressive defence of their rightness hints at desperation, as if letting
in even a sliver of an opposing view would annihilate them. Perhaps they also
feed off the excitement of a gladiatorial contest. The battle of wills is an
end in itself.
Some causes
need to be fought – racism and sexual harassment amongst them. But changing
mindsets is not a quick n’ easy, one-off event – it’s a long drawn-out, brutal
process, with the risk of reverses along the way. As Max Planck, the physicist
said in another context. "A new ….. truth does not triumph by convincing
its opponents and making them see the light but rather because its opponents
eventually die, a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Oddly
enough, a pendulum swing to the worser is often what is needed to provoke a
backlash, which leads ultimately to progressive reform. As Jill Abramson
pointed out this week the horror of Trump has galvanised more women to seek
political office in the US than ever before, more probably than would have been
the case if Hillary Clinton had won; and blown open the debate about race in a
way that Obama’s presidency did not.
During the
1990s the escalating denial of child sexual abuse fomented a wealth of
invaluable new research in the field of psychology, blowing outdated theories
out of the water, which likely would not have occurred without provocation.
The path
to progress is never straight – for individuals or societies. Facts aren’t
enough. Radical change requires crisis to collapse the old, outdated mindsets.
What is needed to rebuild a better future out of the chaos is a new narrative.
Drumroll for the entrance of fiction, stage and screenplay writers. 
They are
already hard at work on screen dramatising a multi-ethnic world as the
norm - causing die-hard dinosaurs to
foam at the mouth over the latest Star Wars. There’s still too much rape and
violence, but #metoo will start making inroads into that, hopefully without
excising sex altogether since it makes the world go round. Your average Joe/Jospephine won’t listen to
philosophical debates but if it streams into their sitting room, cinema or
kindle wrapped up in a human story they will sit up and take note.
This
week’s blog was supposed to be about how to fill a blank page. As it happens my
next novel-in-process has fair winds blowing behind it (for now, cross
fingers). One virtue of writing crime novels is that they are always going
somewhere so a total block is less likely, though head-fog obscuring the right
word or expression is a constant risk.
Back to
work.
Read my other blogs: on Embracing the Paranormal, A
Paradoxical Life of Writing: Do I Contradict Myself? Novelists Can Be
Whistleblowers, Fictional characters who live on, Memory, Books Better
Comforters than Parents, Choosing Names, How to cook up a successful novel -
joke. Subscribe above for regular
updates on my blog.
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BUY my new crime thriller BY the LIGHT of a
LIE at: www.marjorieorr.com
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