We live in an age of deep incongruity. On the one hand, our public life is increasingly characterised by hubristic claims to be able to subject every facet of creation itself to our will – to master ‘artificial intelligence’ and create sentience; to defeat disease; to manage and control the climate; to transcend biology; to cheat death.
On the other, what we experience in our daily lives, as we encounter the world around us, is palpable decline and deterioration – a feeling that civilisation itself is becoming tattered and frayed.
We manage to ignore this odd mismatch between grandiosity and neglect most of the time. But there are moments when the border between the two starts to dissolve and we are able to glimpse some seepage. One such occasion took place for me the other day on a visit to the town centre of Birkenhead, near where I grew up.
How to best describe Birkenhead? It has always been a place with a
rough, gritty, seedy streak to it – presumably even when, long ago, it
had jobs (it was once a big shipbuilding centre and has a vast, now
largely desolate, dockland). I have never known a trip there not to have
a feeling of edginess to it; even when I was a teenager with a
part-time job at a shop in the main shopping precinct, it felt to me
like a place tinged with unease – imbued with an undercurrent of
unexpressed malevolence that felt as though it might at any moment erupt
into baleful life....<<<Read More>>>...
