Autopsies of 2020 were complete long before the year’s end. Only war could have made it worse, then I remembered it began with the United States and Iran on the verge of open conflict, after a drone strike killed an Iranian general.
Meanwhile, Covid-19 has been detrimental to the extent the
United Nations Development Programme, on Tuesday 15th December, said
it threatened human progress, publishing a report detailing how a global lurch
from one crisis to the next could reverse gains in health, education and social
freedoms. There is nowhere left for us to go but upwards.
The signs are good. The United States will soon have a President
who favours diplomacy over disruption, and while on its way out of the European
Union, the United Kingdom has somehow managed to make a deal with the union on
trade that was achieved using negotiation and compromise – the protectionism,
nationalism and sovereignty ingrained in politics in the last few years has
made the announcement of the Brexit deal more of a surprise than it really
should have been.
The lesson I learnt from 2020 is that the truth is bigger
than you are. This has come from the overwhelming number of times that opinions
have had to change in the world due to uncovered, emerging and overriding
opinion. You cannot ignore coronavirus, you cannot dispel climate change, and
you cannot decide that evidence for either doesn’t exist just because you don’t
personally believe it, or that a conspiracy theory puts those facts in a more
acceptable order. You cannot wish away disease and death. (I am doing my best
not to mention Donald Trump, but after all the rubbish he talked about
coronavirus, I was just waiting for him
to contract it himself, and he did.)
In an already notorious speech given by Liz Truss, Minister for
Women and Equalities on Thursday 17th December, she mischaracterised
postmodernist philosophy as having led, in the 1980s, to Leeds City Council prioritising
equality legislation in schools over learning to read and write: “These ideas
have their roots in post-modernist philosophy – pioneered by [Michel] Foucault
– that put societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their
endeavours. In this school of thought, there is no space for evidence, as there
is no objective view – truth and morality are all relative.”
Did Liz Truss intend to take what sounded like the truth,
and present it as fact?
I describe myself is a postmodernist, because ideas about “grand
narratives,” deconstruction and relativism prove useful in my processes for
understanding the world, especially when it comes to writing about different
subjects, but I don’t get out of bed in the morning because I feel like it. If
I don’t do it, I won’t achieve anything, and I know this to be objectively
true, even if saying this makes it sound like I had given something so obvious
even a moment’s thought. My understanding of coronavirus has been shaped by the
Government’s representation of scientific evidence, and I have taken their word
on it because the information provided – the evidence - has proven to be reliable
enough to prevent death. I have objectively chosen to live. No-one chooses to
live on edge either.
I am tired of 2020 as you are. See you in 2021.