‘Civil war? What does that mean? Is there a foreign war? Is not every war between men war between brothers?’
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
For different reasons, my attention is currently elsewhere, so I will continue to add some past work here, consolidating texts that have been scattered across obscure publications and websites.
Today’s was written for a conference in Brussels on 2 May 2017 organised by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen. Its title was ‘Beyond Us versus Them – The Role of Culture in a Divided Europe’ and that is what caught my attention. The idea of ‘Us and Them’ is central to A Selfless Art, albeit in a slightly different sense, because I’m think it’s at the heart of what’s going wrong not just in co-creation, but in every aspect of our social relations—and our relations with other species and the ecosystem on which we all depend. Re-reading my text, I was reassured to see the roots of ideas I’m now trying to organise into a more mature form, as well as their coherence with Susan Neiman’s important (and far more sophisticated) defence of universalism in Left Is Not Woke (2023).
Less happily, the major wars in Ukraine, Myanmar, Israel and Palestine, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mexico and elsewhere, show that these issues are even more urgent and further out of reach than they were six years ago. In times like these I try to remember that hope is a virtue, not a feeling—or perhaps a capability, that must be exercised.
‘Art is a space where we can still meet, especially when the other platforms for dialogue, such as politics, the media and the online world, have become so polarised that we can no longer hear – or tolerate – each other there. Art can be safe because it does not check our identity papers on entry. It does not separate us from them. Indeed, art welcomes difference, complexity, even conflict – within the protective licence of character, symbol, metaphor and non-reality.’
In defence of universalism, François Matarasso, 2017
The text appeared in a book published by the EU National Institutes of Culture, but the online version has vanished: you can download a copy of my part by clicking on this link.
The photo shows the Theatre of Dionysus, below the Acropolis in Athens; I took it in 2014, when I was speaking at another European conference,
François Matarasso 