food for thot

Excerpts from a Nadine gordimer interview that appeared in Businessworld:

You sound more pragmatic and less optimistic than in the past. You used to be more of an idealist. You said once in the early 1990s that even though Communism failed, there were still some ideals society could keep from it, namely the desire to change the world and make it a better place. Is there any space left for ideals?

Let’s look at the good aspects. To do so, you have got to go back to other revolutions, to the French Revolution, to 1848, to 1917. There are terrible disappointments about what happened. But some ideas, some changes from each revolution, have remained to change the world: the rights of workers and women’s rights have all been furthered to some extent. But at the terrible expense of such suffering.
Many people of my generation still believed that the great hope for one, just world was indeed Communism or Socialism. We’ve seen it fail horribly, leading to the illusion that capitalism is the right thing. But we’ve seen capitalism fail and failing every day with such poverty and inequality!
We always look or hope for something that will change the world and make it, in a sense, one world. Not that we will lose our individualities, or our languages, or our cultural customs and religions. But there should be a common sense of humanity so we don’t just kill each other.
We have got this lovely term globalisation. But, so far, globalisation is just another big trade pact — the big nations looking to improve trade among one another. We are too preoccupied with materialism. We praise materialism at one moment, and then we speak against it! It is not that I am a pessimist, but optimism in old age is very realistic. Where does all this lead?
It seems that materialism has conquered all. We are urged every day to buy and to see our own image in terms of what kind of car we drive. In the developing countries, this is particularly disastrous. In South Africa, it has led some of our most principal people who were heroes in liberation to make a fool of themselves. Once they are in big positions, they become corrupt because their wives have got to have a Mercedes

How does a self-declared atheist like you cope with the global resurgence of religion in recent years?

Religion is a great source of violence. That's why Amartya Sen’s book Identity and Violence is so important. In a word, we’re put into boxes. You are told you are a Muslim or a Jew, I am told I am a Christian, and this is our identity. Sen points out that there is no such thing as a single identity. Each of us has many identities.
Religion tells you what you are, but it does not define what I am or what you are. We are many things. We must allow society to see and to understand that we cannot be boxed into a single identity. Boxing an individual's identity contradicts the spirit of modernity. And that goes for race or ethnicity as well.

Journalists like to ask older and wiser people what they’ve learned from life. May I pose that question?

Now that I’m alone with my own old age — my husband of 47 years died six years ago — I find to my amazement it’s like adolescence all over again, in terms of questioning everything, of looking at how you react to other people and the expectations you have from them.
(There’s) this lovely myth that I have heard that old age is kind of a beautiful plateau of calm and acceptance of the world, full of wisdom. Well, there is no wisdom at old age. It is the same old questioning at yourself and everybody else as it was when I was 15. This peace of old age, I am afraid, has not come to me.