The Freedom of Yesterday (French Motorcycle Blog, Autumn 2020)

“Development can be seen, it is argued here, as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy. Focusing on human freedoms contrasts with a narrower view of development, such as identifying development with the growth of gross national product, or with the rise in personal incomes, or with industrialization, or with technological advance, or with social modernization. Growth of GNP or of individual incomes can, of course, be very important as means to expanding the freedoms enjoyed by members of the society. But freedoms depend also on other determinants, such as social and economic arrangements (for example, facilities for education and health care) as well as political and civil rights (for example, the liberty to participate in public discussions and scrutiny.)”

Quote from Amartya Sen ‘Development as Freedom’ (1999)

“Reading books – and talking about them – can entertain, amuse, excite and engage us in every kind of involvement. Books also help us to argue with each other. And nothing, I believe, is as important as the opportunity to argue about matters on which we can possibly disagree. Unfortunately, as Immanuel Kant noted, the opportunity to argue is often curtailed by society – sometimes very severely. As the great philosopher put it: “But I hear on all sides the cry: Don’t argue! The officer says: Don’t argue, get on the parade! The tax-official: Don’t argue, pay! The clergyman: Don’t argue, believe! All this means restrictions of freedom everywhere.” Kant discussed why it is so important to argue. We can make sense of our lives by examining what makes them worthwhile. When freedom of speech is curtailed and people are penalised for speaking their mind, we can experience serious harm in the lives we can lead.”

Quote from A Sen’s Speech Upon Receipt of Prize of German Book Association at Frankfurt Book Fair (20 October 2020)

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Southern France & Warsaw/Poland, October 2020/an

It would be doing a disservice to a writer and intellectual that was formative in my youth and whom I continue to hold in high esteem - Stefan Zweig - to even allude to comparing our current pandemic affliction with a historic situation of such tragic dimensions as that which saw the confluence of genocidal national socialism, totalitarian bolshevism, forced emigration, and global war -- these being the catastrophic components of the setting in which Zweig wrote his 'end-of-epoch' masterpiece “Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europaers“ (The World of Yesterday. (1942)). Having started writing it in 1934, the day after he sent the final manuscript to his editor in 1942, he and his wife committed joint suicide in a provincial Brazilian town, inconsolable about the loss of their life-as-they-knew-it and the vanquishing of their beloved tolerant pre-WW2 European civilisation.

And I hope that I am wrong in thinking that future historians will classify our century into a pre-Covid and post-Covid world, and that the accelerating 2nd wave that we are now witnessing in Europe will not be the kind of watershed that will give rise to future generations speaking of a pre-Covid world, a ‘Welt von Gestern’.   To those of us who have not experienced the horrors and deprivation of war or forced (e-)migration or the like, we grapple to come up with a reference set to describe the emotions and experiences that this pandemic has forced upon us, not once but now a second time.

As I sit on my reflecting chair, i.e., my Yamaha FJR 1300 with her sheer unlimited power of 145 horse power and pain-soothing acceleration, and as I look at the yellow autumnal sun light illuminating glittering French coastlines and gorgeous landscapes as if nothing had changed from my previous trips over the last 17 years on the Mediterranean between my adopted homelands of Italy and Spain, the headlines from Spain -- where Madrid is now closed off like a medieval city afflicted by the Black Death --  from France -- where the nine biggest cities now have nightly curfews (the first time since WW2) --  and from Germany -- where despite sound crisis management the second wave is also gaining strength -- speak a different, stark language.  The Yamaha feels like a bolting horse, trying to escape her stables on fire with a set of doors in front of her threatening to shut before she can wriggle through -- throttle fully open and her rider’s heart racing with a mix of anxiety and hope, torn between resigning himself to the prescription of ordained self-isolation and loneliness and the eternal instinct to seek out far-flung friends, and to breathe the wondrous air of distant lands to-be-explored and re-discovered; between indulging in romantic dreams and nostalgic memories and the cold hard facts of pandemic containment; between hoping that an imminent vaccine may restore the beloved status quo ante, and a premonition that all the Cassandras with their crystal balls predicting the curses of a not-so-brave-new-world are unlikely to be completely wrong.

During the last spinning class at my Warsaw gym before it was shut down in compliance with the new Covid-induced restrictions in Poland, the coach played a soundtrack of Italian evergreens, including Nessun’ Dorma' by deceased Italian star tenor Pavarotti, from Puccini’s Turandot opera.  During my 1990 Erasmus semester at Rome's Luiss university, I had heard him (and the other two star tenors of the time, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras) sing this at Rome's Terme di Caracalla on a balmy Roman evening, tens of thousands of people sitting in front of the Circus Maximus race track from Roman Times to listen to a great spectacle.    The torment of the tenor ends in the optimistic final tunes, delivered as only Pavarotti could: 

Dilegua, o notte!                                         Vanish, o night!
Tramontate, stelle!                                     Fade, you stars!
Tramontate, stelle!                                     Fade, you stars!
All'alba, vincerò!                                        At dawn, I will win!
Vincerò! Vincerò!                                       I will win! I will win!

And my thoughts circle back to my current university experience at LSE, at my master of economic history classes.  All of us sitting on zoom, like chicken in a chicken coop, neatly in our boxes, line above line, muted and intently looking at the camera, making all the effort of studying and learning, and yet ... it has no relation to what my memories of proper university studies are like. 

Not that an Italian tenor has to show up every day, but some backslapping and joking and spilling of lattes onto notebooks as you squeeze through coming late to a lecture, some banter and joking, some half-eaten breakfasts, socialising, laughing, some unruliness, the odd paper planes, some flirting, meeting-up, interacting, being a mammal - that would be nice ... just being intellectual and focused and disciplined and learned, what a bore!  Maybe the vaccine will bring all that back, inshallah!

In the old days, the lecturer would look up irritated under his/her glasses at the latecomer(s) streaming into the lecture hall, squeezing down the aisles; come to think of it, all my lecturers now are female whereas in the old days that would have been the exception – progress! (Prof. Janet Hunter was one of the few - the culprit for me pursing this Master of Econ Hist.!)  After lectures we would drop by the eternal coffee place (‘Wright’s Bar’) next to the LSE Old Building on Houghton Street and have a greasy sandwich washed down with a watery coffee - no Starbucks nor Costa nor Coffee Nero chains back then.  I wonder if the proprietors of the coffee shop also read the two academic papers on nutritional insults (= deficiencies) during the Industrial Revolution on last week’s reading list, which I trawled through during an insomniac Camargue night after sampling some oysters for dinner.  Did they take a leaf out of that literature in coming up with their wares?  (Back then we did not mind, mostly living off cheap frozen hamburgers in an era that saw mad cow disease take off … did Boris also have a hamburger or two too many?!)

Now when someone comes late, he just slips in at the end of the 100+ zoom chain, screen 3 on the computer, video switched off, still pajama-clad, unkempt, hair a mess. ‘Unshaven!’ - Dad would have said, disapprovingly; unfit to meet the day, to meet the world - not to speak of an attractive woman.

This past week we studied the anthropometric effects of the Industrial Revolution.  I.e., how despite urbanisation and the growth of industry in 18th and 19th century Britain, which should have brought about higher incomes and better nutrition, it led to a decline of growth among the population due to what economic historians call 'disamenities'; e.g. pollution, congestion, excessive workloads, unclean and overly dense living quarters; lack of sewers and fresh water; etc.  If one reads Charles Dickens (or Marx and Engels), this should not come as a surprise. 

If one rationalises from a modern economic perspective, unfettered capitalism, where there was no prohibition of child labour, no unions, working days of 10+ hours, no urban zoning laws, no anti-pollution protection in factories, no public intervention to correct market failures -- well it cannot be all that surprising that labour was exploited, that living conditions were abhorrent, that wages stayed near subsistence levels, that up to half of all children aged 10-12 were already working (1790-1850), and that stature and human growth was 'stunted', i.e. lower than would otherwise have been the case; wellbeing declined despite the onset of modern growth and many productivity-enhancing inventions that would pave the path towards take-off of growth and well-being over time (real wages rose 13x between 1850 and 2000 in Britain).  

For the last 17 years (since getting my motorcycle license and my first 2nd-hand Yamaha Fazer 600), I had taken my ability to maximise an adrenaline-kick-seeking motorcyclist’s wellbeing function as an inherent freedom, subject to several obvious constraints, such as

a)       Safety;

b)      Availability;

c)       Cost coverage; and

d)      Suitable weather.

Letting the wind blow in your hair. Widening your nostrils to take in Provençal flavours.  Revving it up to start the overture.   Tightening your grip as the bike accelerates away.  Feeling your heartbeat jump through your throat as you flip it in and out of fast corners.  Singing under your helmet as your spirit rises skywards. Humming Nino Rota’s Godfather tune on ever loop.

And one can picture that future economic historians will look at the Covid pandemic and measure the stunting of different cohorts:  infected and uninfected; asymptomatic and symptomatic; OECD populations with universal healthcare, and inhabitants of developing economies with poor health systems; etc.  Not to speak of the obese after months of lockdowns …

Obviously, health and sufficient income as well as adequate ‘social indicators’ (family, friends, education, love, etc.) are key measures of well-being – just as taught in classes and as represented by the annually published UNDP’s Human Development Index, co-developed by one of my LSE gurus of old times, Prof. Lord Meghnad Desai, now (unfortunately) emeritus.  (He always had a joke to crack, and the irreverence of a Karl-Marx-Lookalike to go with that.)

But so are freedom (and agency).  A globetrotting motorcyclist’s freedom would be a function of:

         i.            The ability to travel;

       ii.            The frequency of travel;

     iii.            The range/reach of such travel;

     iv.            The number of friends seen along the way; and

       v.            The historic, natural, architectural and human beauty experienced along the way.

And so I mutter under my helmet: ‘good riddance!’ and get on my bike, despite it all.  Freedom.  Freedom! (and I turn my back on my beloved Barcelona, fighting to stave off a misfortune like Madrid)

Pictures from Barcelona (click on pictures to move across gallery)

Freedom, as was pointed out throughout his Nobel-prize-winning work by Amartya Sen, a philosopher and economist, is one of the most important aspect of development, of civilizational growth; not what you can consume, but what you are able to do with your life, say, think, express, disagree with.  See the quote above from his 1999 book, and from his speech last week against the increasing trend for autocracy upon his award of the Prize of the German book fair; click here for his full acceptance speech.

So how do we zoom out in these times?  How do we do what mammals do, touch and feel? How do we have sex in social distancing mode?  Just when people need social contact most, when the confluence of health and economic crisis and being cooped up like chicken for months on end makes social contact, exchange, support, laughter, tactile senses, relief most important, we force each other into more isolation.  How can we possibly cope with all that and come out unharmed at the other end? Assuming there is another end?

Imagine the animals of the Camargue trying to comply with the zoom regime? You can just about picture the white flamingoes, fishing for crustaceans in the aigues-mortes to turn their feathers pink, lining up gracefully and carry on fishing, head down. But what about the white wild horses with their irrepressible instinct to move?  Not to mention the intrepid black bulls with their menacing white horns pointed skyward, feigning indifference as I zoom past on my otherworldly beast? Conform to that?  Fuck no!  Hooves stirring …

After a tempestuous night at the sea in St Marie de la Mer, the Yamaha is covered in sand blown across from the hotel-facing beach; hopefully not too much got into the transmission, or else ...

Pictures from the Camargue (click on pictures to move across gallery)

While one’s mood turns easily blue these days, Provence has different ideas today.  Like an ageing lady with too much make-up and a coiffeur’s blowout job that aggrandizes her slightly thinning and strained hair, she throws everything at me on this autumn day: golden sunlight; gusty winds striking the bamboos and ferns along the routes; the evergreen of the cypresses and olive trees contrasting with the amber and brown of the endless symmetrical avenues of ever-present plane trees, and the red and yellow of the wine leaves - the grapes have long gone but their promise is retained.  The lavender has lost its favourite purple colour and its intoxicating perfume - hopefully not forever. Even with the season over, the old lady oozes charm that engulfs you and lifts your spirits; there are still degrees of freedom left here.  And while some impressive graffiti on an ageing agricultural plant along the route thematically suggest a ‘paradise lost’, the mind refuses to accept it.

Pictures from Provence (click on pictures to move across gallery)

In the distance the Mont Ventoux raises its bald head; our old friend, the bete noir of every self-respecting cyclist, the leg-sapping femme fatale of every mountain conqueror. Like the Gorges du Verdon, I owe my knowledge of and fascination for these southern French landmarks to my late father and cycling aficionado.  He is riding on my pillion seat and gives me a nudge in the ribs whenever I get too exhilarated by the beauty and acceleration around us.

Everybody knows the Grand Canyon.   The Gorges du Verdon, some 180km NW from Nice, on the other hand, is one of Europe’s best-kept scenic secrets.  Deep gorges, breathtaking vistas, curvy roads to die for, re-settled vultures circling above in case you do, and 360-degree autumn foliage like you haven’t seen since John Irving’s New Hampshire days.  Ending up in the beautiful provincial town of Castellane, home to handsome French roughnecks that help tourists navigate the mountains tracks and white-water rafting adventures on offer her.

Pictures from Castellane (click on pictures to move across gallery)

And this is before you get to the Route Napoleon. If in these troubling times full of doubts and setbacks, you need an inspiration, you need a demonstration of what human will power is capable of, of the loyalty and motivation that inspired leadership is capable of, you could do worse than to set foot (or a motorcycle tire or two) on the Route Napoleon.

This small general with a winning military knack and a lasting imprint on European civilization (see Civil Code etc.), having lost most of La Grande Armee in the disastrous 1812 campaign in Russia (on which I can recommend the excellent historical novel by Adam Zamoyski ‘1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow’), and having been shipped off to exile on Italian Elba in 1814, returned with a growing army of loyal soldiers coming up from Cannes via Castellane near the Gorges du Verdon to Paris in March 1815.  The Route Napoleon is today a well-travelled south-north tourist route along the French Alpes Maritimes/Hautes Alpes, with gorgeous landscapes to reward the traveler. 

Balzac wrote of the moment when Napoleon arrived back in Paris for his last fling with power and history:  'once again, France gave herself to Napoleon, just as a pretty girl abandons herself to a Lancer'.  Well, we all know that ended at Waterloo some 100 days later, where a British general famously remarked:  “I wish it were night or the Prussians arrived ...” (you wonder what Boris Johnson hopes for these days as the curtain falls on Brexit; back then Bluecher did bail out Wellington; will Angela do the same for Boris now?) 

[It was not just the arrival of the Prussians that turned the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. As that same Stefan Zweig beautifully re-told in one of his historical miniatures “Sternstunden der Menschheit”, Napoleon had sent a loyal but uncreative general to chase in the direction where the Prussians were expected - he failed to return to the main army in time ... and the rest is history as they say; his name is not present in everybody’s memory, such as those of Wellington and Bluecher; a tragic figure by the name of Marshal Grouchy (who had to emigrate to the US to escape the ignominy of it all.)]

So - if Napoleon could conquer such adversity - will we give in to this pandemic? Will we??  Hell no!

Pictures from Route Napoloen (click on pictures to move across gallery)

After that uplifting historical reminder, the precarious mood dips again, and the minds start brooding anew.  The virus knows no borders. But anti-pandemic policy is largely national.  Borders are again what they were in the 19th century and during wartime.  Shut.  Visa-shuttered.  Quarantine-delayed.  Test-conditioned.  Impermeable.  Trumpian-bullshit-wall-like.  Although I am travelling at speed to my heart’s delight in delicious France, the mind reverts to the sense of being restrained, locked-down, to the image of the bird in the not-so-golden cage.

What if your life depends on you being able to travel for work frequently to Bogotá, to London, to Shenzhen?  What if maintaining and cultivating your friendships depends on you being able to spend weekends not just in Warsaw, but also in Barcelona and London, in Rome and Berlin, in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Mexico City and New York City; bond with the boys abord a motorboat in the calas of Menorca (‘ultimo maricon!’); or chase the boys and girls down the slopes of exhilarating white in the Alps before sampling local wines with your in-house sommelier?  What if sustaining and supporting the spirits of your ageing mother requires your regular presence in Germany?   What if your daughters are dispersed on both sides of the English Channel, and you want to stay a meaningful presence in all their lives?  What if your fanciful ‘mid-career’ studies take you to London, but your center of life and livelihood stay in Warsaw?  What if all of that is just incompatible? What remains of you?  How long can you sustain it?

A bird with clipped wings cannot fly. And how shall his soul soar when his head hangs low?  There are thousands of such birds now. What may give them hope and sustenance?  -- Nature comes to the rescue.  One cannot be sad when such beauty is all around.  The Hautes Provence melds into the Hautes Alps, and how can the spirits be low when everything around you is ‘Haute’.  The foliage.  The beauty.  The mountains.  The wind nearly blowing you off the road. 

Pictures from Hautes Alpes (click on pictures to move across gallery)

Time to stop philosophizing and to revv that bike to get into a safe town before nightfall.  Friends await on the other side of the Swiss Alps.  More reunions.  More joy.  More reasons to wake up the next morning and greet the rising sun with a smile.

              PS:  The Covid test after returning to Warsaw showed a negative result.  Thankfully.  LSE Track and Trace still wants to have a word …

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