Robert Golden’s opening talk for Art Youth and A Shared Peace
June 23 2025
I am delighted to see you here
…it is no small thing you decided to come;
it’s a sign of your curiosity and openness
and believe me, you are very welcome.
I’m offering some ideas for these coming days….
To begin with I will quote a mentor of my intellect and my soul:
Albert Camus, French novelist, and existential philosopher wrote :
“For us Europe is a home of the spirit
where for the last twenty centuries
the most amazing adventure of the human spirit has been occurring.
It is a privileged arena
in which Western people struggle against the world,
against the gods,
and against ourselves, which today is reaching its climax.”
I have a short story for you.
Years ago an acquaintance of mine and his fiancée
were standing on a hillside in Scotland
looking at a beautiful mountain lake sitting in a cup of forested hills.
An old man with a crook and a kilt appeared next to them and asked,
“How many greens on yonder hill?”
The young couple studied the hill for a moment, whispered to each other,
turned to him and one of them said “there are 7 greens on yonder hill.”
“Ach” said the old man, “there are 37 greens on yonder hill.”
And then he walked away.
Besides the modest humour of the story,
it addresses an important point for all of us…
which is the need to not only see and hear,
which are sensory functions of the body
but to look and listen to the people around us.
These are intellectual and creative acts;
not just sensorial acts
which gives us insights into the world we share.
For many years I have photographed and filmed the social, political,
economic and cultural aspects of our shared world
but now as I view this descent into authoritarianism,
endless wars, heartless cruelty
and the climate crisis
I think that perhaps all the discussions about left and right,
this or that political party,
this or that ideology
seem to have been a somewhat fruitless journey for me.
Perhaps I should have been thinking more broadly –
that is, I should have been thinking about the nature of our species.
Now what do I see?
In the vast middle of our complex societies,
including the middle classes,
there are masses of people too poor, too exhausted, too uneducated,
too ill informed, too hungry or too oppressed to care about
or even to think about the conditions of their and other’s lives,
or they are too indoctrinated by their oppressor’s propaganda to think beyond it.
Then there are small percentage of humankind,
whom I think of as deviant psychopaths
who continually seek increased power and wealth…
who hold irrational grudges against others;
narcissists who love their own reflection,
those who make no connection between their actions
and the tragic consequences of their actions…
those who only seek to line their pockets rather than to serve the people.
And then there are us,
we who care not only for our loved-ones and ourselves
but also for strangers, all strangers:
regardless of nationality, race, religion, gender, abilities
or whatever other differences there may be between us.
We embrace them because we understand they are us.
With that in mind
I want you to imagine with me the 3 acts of our current historical drama…
the one we are living through.
in the FIRST act:
we come to understand how power and wealth assault us day by day
and what that does to our consciousness or may I say,
to our perceived truths.
This makes our struggle for truth central to our beings.
I’ll now jump to the third act:
in which we have imagined
the social political cultural structures of the future.
We will have to decided whether it will be for profits or people,
for conformity or curiosity,
and we need to determine whether it will demand obedience or freedom.
and now back to the SECOND act:
We need to ask, how do we get from Act One, our understanding of today
to our hoped for dream of Act 3?
We need to imagine that journey,
we need to give that imagined journey form and substance
through intellectual and creative actions.
How do we describe that future for others?
How do we confront and overwhelm the propaganda and media control
of the status quo?
How do we live lives that are an example of that better world?
We need to ignite a flame of clarity, truth
and especially hope for the future..
A better future hides within us …
let me propose a starting point for our journeys
by coming to recognise this:
There is no democracy without equality;
there is no equality without justice;
there is no justice without freedom;
there is no freedom without truth;
there is no truth without knowledge;
there is no knowledge without curiosity;
there is no curiosity without empathy;
there is no empathy without kindness.
I propose that to create a better world
the cornerstone of that new society
must be kindness.
Albert Camus understood that “in recognising the potential dignity of life
through people’s unstoppable struggle for freedom,
one can overcome life’s inherently absurd and tragic nature.”
And as Ellie Shafak, the wonderful Anglo-Turkish writer said:
“there are endless facts around us every day,
when we think of what they mean we may develop knowledge,
and then, when we consider that knowledge combined with our life experiences we may find wisdom.”
And now, having said all the above,
there are a number of questions we could begin to discuss.
1 Why do you believe what you believe to be true is true?
2 If you understand that you did not invent the building blocks
of your own truths, who did?
3 What is the intention of those who created those buildings blocks?
4 How do you confront them?
5 Do you believe that engaging in creative thoughts or actions
you can enlarge your understanding of social life
and of existential concerns?
6 If so, do you accept that in order to focus your life and work,
if you wish to help build a better kinder world
you need to imagine and articulate what that world will be like
and you need to imagine the journey
and your role within that journey?
7 Do you recognise the role of storytelling in these processes?
8 if so you need to ask What is a story?
9 why do we need stories?
10 and whose voice do you have when telling stories?
