Do we live in a world where everyone pursues their pettiest interest without worrying about others? Do we remain insensitive to the pain of others? Do we feel comfortable in our isolation from those who are not like us?
These are questions suggested by the album The Wall by the British progressive rock band Pink Floyd. It is one of the milestones of contemporary culture. years after its publication its theme seems to be premonitory of where we were going. And where we are today.
Music philosopher Vladimir Jankélevich tells us has the power to CXB Directory evoke what would be impossible to communicate with words. It makes us see the invisible through sounds. It helps us perceive more clearly. To feel fully. Sometimes it hits us awake. It is a way of knowing deeper than any discourse.
This is The Wall . There are no explicit references to love. It is not an album to fall in love with in the usual banal sense. But it does force us to notice the barriers that separate us: the walls we build.
These walls erect fences that both protect us from an imagined enemy and imprison us in our fortress. Bonds of solidarity emotional bonds become impossible: in short love in the sense that the psychiatrist Erich Fromm gave it.
Walls for intolerance
Beyond ideals and utopias the so-called politics of “realities” incite us to intolerance. There will be physical walls. Also mental walls perhaps more harmful and pernicious. As we feel more vulnerable we add another brick to our wall of incomprehension as we hear in “The Thin Ice.”
They are the consequences of hatred of what is not like oneself of what is different when we lack solid anchors to hold on to. We live precariously. It is what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has called a liquid society.
This is the appropriate atmosphere for the germ of fascisms like those criticized in The Wall . And for what Pier Paolo Pasolini called the new fascism: consumerism as an ideal of life.
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