Solstice

Ancient people watched the dwindling of the days each year as the winter solstice approached. They wondered if this time the light would continue to wane until they were deprived of it entirely and consigned to eternal darkness, or if the pattern their ancestors had observed and communicated to them would be repeated once again, and the world would be saved, and light restored.

For without knowing the mechanism by which the days began to lengthen, the restoration of the light each year was not guaranteed, and the first dawn after the solstice on which they could discern that the sun rose earlier than it did the day before may have provoked rejoicing but did not signal redemption, did nothing to allay the fear that one year the sun might fail to find its way back to us from the depths of winter. The darkness remained, as an ever present threat, a prototype of evil, destructive and inscrutable, unamenable to any bargain, consuming worlds not out of hunger, but out of boredom and caprice, in an age before we invented the devil.

This palpitation of the seasons was ensnared at last within the shaman's feverish delirium at the back of the cave. And from his trance the first truths were given. The terror of the dark was curtailed and attenuated by insights extracted from his ravings, narratives teased like a thread from the general simultaneity of experience tangled up in priest's hypoxic convulsions, to become camp fire tales of zodiacal heroes endowed with superhuman strength and divine gifts pevailing in contests set by gods over champion monstrosities whelped in a cave by Echidna, Mother of Monsters. And so we began to feel reassured, and slept the first human sleep, and enjoyed depths of slumber unknown to animals still tormented by constant threat.  

Within the safety afforded to the precincts of our dreams we built shining cities, like cascades of glass tumbling down through the sparkling cataracts of falling empire, and in the glistening procession of millennia in these shining cities some among us at last discerned the workings of the world, and the dark at last was shrunk to fit the sleeve of science.

Astronomers and musicians taught us about position and quantity and change. Truth swung so low in Her orbit Her necklace hung within the astronomer's grasp. And as the musician sought solitude in the forest he found She strayed so tame and unstartled across the forest tracks and lingered so long within earshot that Her song was overheard and learned by heart. Those who discovered this experience were the first musicians.

And so astronomers and musicians taught the rest of us everything we needed to know to describe the world.

But the dark was not defeated. Within our marrow we remembered it.

Last Winter the solstice came again. We met it with expectations whose fulfilment had grown so tedious that any other sequence of events was inconceivable. But the instead of returning, the light continued to spiral down night's dark drain. Assumptions that had stood the test of generations suddenly seemed naive and idealistic as the natural order was suspended and the solstice asserted itself as an irresistible pole to which we were drawn and where we were devoured by strident new solipsisms.

“Darkness is good ... Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power ... [it] will be as exciting as the 1930s," claimed Steve Bannon, US President-Elect Donald J. Trump's chief strategist.

The project commenced to stall the solstice, to seize this point around which the year is slung back out of shadow, and take it captive, until all of 2016 became one long continuation of the solstice in which long forgotten fears were restored to unhappy prominence.

2016 was the year when things changed. The extended solstice of the mind became our contemporary solipsism. Thought was afflicted by a paralysis, and the sense of superiority that accrues from being "in the know" took priority over actually being well-informed. Accuracy became irrelevant. Tribe trumped Truth - the self-identified digital alt-right tribes of the "woke" who shunned information in preference to confirmation of any conspiracy they can then claim to have seen through to claim a place round the totems that have replaced Truth.

The fascists were winning because while no-one was watching they had thoroughly rehearsed their tactics in a series of limited theatres of discourse that did not attract widespread attention. The practice of dismissive labelling; the assembly of massive edifices of falsehood too detailed and elaborate to ever be fully refuted before antagonists had to confront the next; the presentation of every favourable decision or development that goes their way as final and definite, that goes against them as provisional and temporary: they had practised and perfected their tactics in theatres such as climate change denial and Gamergate. Trump did not happen by chance. He was the vanguard of a well prepared blitzkrieg. 2016 was merely the year they showed their hand.

We missed it because we didn't take them seriously. There were always more important political rivals to defeat. Rather than unite in opposition to fascism, rather than finding common cause in its overthrow, we jostled among ourselves for position and influence, harnessing logic and evidence to prove our points and achieve our objectives. There is always a more important political rival than the fascists right up until there are no rivals anymore.

But they grew strong because they did not rely on such effete, decadent contrivances as reason. They adopted an approach that did not require them to be consistent. They forged alliances as a matter of temporary expedient rather than alignment of ideas, and discarded allies as quickly as they found them if they ceased to be useful. And so they grew strong unseen without being restricted by the constraints we observed as a matter of course to preserve the validity of our assertions. They had no such need, finding no fascination in Truth, finding fascination instead in nothing other than the darkness.  

And so people started using statements that resembled expressions of information or knowledge in every formal sense but one. They no longer required that these statements were accurate. They used them as a way of belonging, rather than knowing. The statements were not listened to in order to find out about the world or what someone else believed about it, or spoken in order to communicate what you had found out to others. Explanations were no longer descriptions of reality but shibboleths, noises, like the call of an animal, passwords that conferred on the speaker and the listener membership of a privileged group of people. Being "in the know" was more important than actually knowing something. Truth was replaced by conspiracy theories that served as totems to gather round. Since this was the only requirement of the fascist statement, these statements became truth-proof: they could be contradicted over and over again without losing any of their power to convince, because they were never supposed to be accurate in the first place.

In this way the people could be redeemed. People made desperate during the hours between approval of the payday loan and the chance to lose it in an online poker game could be saved and made "great again." People made homeless and jobless by remote forces manipulated by global elites could "take back control." Steve Bannon denied being a "white nationalist." Instead, he claimed he was an "economic nationalist," concerned with exploiting conditions created by the macroeconomic catastrophes that befell his predecessors over the previous decade, such as low interest rates, to undertake massive investment as the basis of restoring job security to his constituents.

The only problem was that this approach had been tried before. Hjalmar Schacht had generated an economic miracle for the Nazis in Germany during those 1930s that excited Bannon so much, before he ended up in a concentration camp. And the use of statements to define groups to belong to rather than to accurately describe the world they found themselves in had disastrous consequences but three score years previously as well. The justification had been the same: the redemption of man by means that put his self-appointed redeemers in the dock in Nuremberg.

And so the world was distilled into competing paradigms while all the actual data were discarded. People gathered each around their own isolated camp fires of burning books as the cold night descended, and told tales of how the others gathered around some other camp fire visible nearby were their enemies. Their priests told them the Sun was a myth that had been used to enslave them, making them toil together at all the tasks that are possible during the day, and that they had been set free by the darkness and that this night that the priests had summoned would now last forever.

Huddled around their camp fires they whispered rumours of distant wars, of unimaginable evils stacked up on top of each other over and over, until they could be propped up supporting each other on the shelf where all our competing histories justify and condemn each other, where all our accusations embrace each other like exhausted boxers, while in the dark beyond the light of the camp fire, beyond the flickering familiarities to which people clung in its unreliable light, the solstice prowls in the dark, its sable pelt velvet and invisible, unknowable, waiting to consume them.

Everyone felt a new kind of fear penetrate their marrow to prepare it for the spasms and paralysis of death. And when a lone voice was raised declaring the new constellations of this distorted astronomy to be false, it was ignored, or ostracised, and truth was now a solitary rather that shared experience, known only to the outcast, if it was known at all, a kind of knowledge approached through mysticism. Science was dead. Those whose ambitions never rose above the basest and most materialistic agendas could not comprehend the motivation of those who pursued a higher purpose, and so scientists stood accused of all the crimes of which their accusers were most guilty.

Winter solstice approached again and the hope grew that the season would not fail this time and 2016 would merely be a hiatus from which we would recover. But the fear remained that 2017 would only prove to be worse.