The misery of neoliberalism and the decline of poetry and imagination .. Nobel laureates pessimistic about the future of literature and economy

Imran Abdullah

The pessimistic comments about the future of mankind are not new to the Nobel Prize winners, and are not limited to a particular field, but are seen as a common feature of the winners of the World Prize in literature, economics and physics alike.

Swiss physicist Michel Mayor, who won this year's Nobel Prize in physics, recently expressed pessimism about the ability of humans to live on another planet despite fears about the viability of life on Earth. "It's time to stop dreaming and face reality to ensure a future," he said.

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiggles published a recent essay in which he expressed pessimism about the future of 'neoliberalism' and its negative effects on individuals and communities.On the other hand, a recent translation of an old essay by Nobel laureate Isaac Bachevis Singer showed his pessimism about the future of the novel and literary fiction.

Who needs literature and imagination?
From time to time Bachevis asks himself, "Who needs fiction?" What is meant by the value of imagination at a time when life and nature are full of strange events, as there is no consistency and accuracy similar to realistic history, no matter how the writer is experienced in fiction.

Pachevis, a Nobel laureate in 1987, argues that there can never be a complete or contradictory novel. Even Anna Karenina and Madame Boufari have their flaws and contradictions, and the writer believes that a newspaper report may concern him more than literary work, asking "why do we need psychological explanations when clarifying emotions, or why we care to prove a lie when the truth does not need it."

Polish-American writer fears that sooner or later the whole of humanity may be convinced of his conclusion that "reading the novel is a waste of time." However, the value of literary fiction, according to Bachevis, is not only his ability to entertain readers and teach them something, but also as a sport or intellectual challenge, and even if we can devise a machine that will accurately tell us all the experiences of Raskolnikov (the protagonist of crime and punishment) or Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, it will still be interesting to know if we can do this with paper and pen.

It is like our relentless pursuit of climbing Mount Everest, although it can be simply landed on a helicopter. Although readers know a lot about human psychology through psychology, they still read novels as well, yet all illusions of so-called "science fiction" diminish compared to footage filmed on the moon or other planets.

Born in 1904 near Warsaw, Poland, Pachevis compares what is happening with the novel to what happened with poetry that only poets now read and distribute to their friends, while the drama has not yet reached the sad state of poetry but is moving in the same direction.

The original Nobel Prize essay was published on 20 October 1963 in Yiddish, and it was translated into English more than half a century after it was written and recently published on the Larry Book Fair site.

Prose and drama
As for literary prose, he often feels good, as prose books are still bought in hundreds of thousands of copies. But when we look at it more deeply, we will notice that what we now call "literary fiction" has only its name, and works are often sold under the brand "novel" but in fact three-quarters or all of them are press.

Contemporary critics suffer from amnesia and "have forgotten the basic rules of literature," Bachevis said, while the boundaries between journalism and literature have become too thin and unclear in modern times. "It's easy to score big victories if the rules change with each round," he says.

According to Bachvis, the modern critic has only one criterion: the influence or uproar that literary work provokes among unknown readers, and the effect that this work itself can have when it is converted into a TV show or film.

According to Bachevis, modern literary works often contain amateur articles on psychology and psychoanalysis, a lot of press information that we can easily find in newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, all kinds of popular culture theories, false scientific facts, and so on.

For those who are genuinely interested in literature and its achievements, such works are a sign of the tragic decline of literature.``We have expanded definitions and distorted the rules so that everyone can play and everyone can win, '' while real talent and original works that adhere to the art of writing are scarce. Bachevis said literary chaos was only good for big publishers, their printers, television and Hollywood.

Economy .. Rebirth
In opposition to the idea of ​​political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who wrote about the "end of history" with the collapse of communism, the triumph of liberal democracy and a free market, the 2011 Nobel laureate in economics Stiggles recently published an article that monitors the decline of liberalism at a time when authoritarian and populist rulers are leading countries with populations over Half of humanity.

Stiggles, an American economist and professor at Columbia University, says Fukuyama's idea was "strange and naive," while the promises of neoliberalism that have undermined democracy for 40 years fail.

The academic, who also served as chief economist at the World Bank, argues that the liberal pattern of globalization has left individuals and societies "losing control of their destinies", citing his two recent books "A Return to Globalization and Its Implications, People, Power and Profits" in which he examined the effects of negative capital liberalization on citizens. Voters are scared among the harsh options, namely, withdrawing their money from emerging markets and facing a severe financial crisis or surrender to harsh capitalism.

Even in rich countries, neoliberal policies have led to faster economic growth, but workers have received lower wages, and everyone has had to accept the austerity plans of governments, both rich and poor, according to Project Syndicate.

Neoliberalism and our civilization
Stiggles says growth has slowed, the fruits have gone to very few and wages have fallen while the stock market has rebounded, in other words revolutions flowed up rather than down, and ordinary citizens felt victimized by fraud.

Today, we see the consequences of great deception in the form of mistrust in elites and in the same "economics" on which neoliberalism was based, which I consider to be evidence-based. Indeed, the neoliberal era was not liberal, imposing a doctrine on which its guardians were intolerant of its opposition, and economists protecting various unorthodox ideas were seen as heretics, according to Steeles.

Despite the exclusion of global crises, the "impossible" occurred in 2008 to make us realize that markets deregulated from the wrong thought and worsened the climate crisis, saying that neoliberalism "will destroy our civilization" and the only way to save our planet to "reborn history."

In a previous article by Stiggles, he wrote that there is no magic solution that can reverse the damage done in decades of neoliberalism, but that a solution can be found that includes the separation of economic power and political influence, the protection of workers from corporate domination, and the recognition that wealth is the result of scientific research and social organization. This means the need to activate the rule of law and prevent exploitation, and above all the need to restore balance between markets, the state and civil society, which he calls progressive capitalism or the third camp, according to an article for the British Guardian newspaper.