Escapism or disengagement? - We can’t sing Abba songs all of the time

The Scot Alexander Graham Bell, the great-grandfather of Facebook and Snapchat, is remembered in the term used to measure volume — decibel.

The American seismologist Charles F Richter is invoked every time an earthquake strikes. He designed the metric to record an earthquake’s severity. Francis Beaufort, born in Navan in 1774, established a convention for measuring wind speed still in use.

It may be time to formalise another scale, one to reflect the ratio between the grimness of the day and our need for escapism.

This scale could, all too obviously, be the Trump Scale — that might be flawed as even whispering that name might skew the measure’s reliability by making nearly any form of escapism attractive. No, a better name might be the Abba Scale, honouring that great fountain of joy and escapism.

Apart from a brief, private reunion in January, the group has not performed since 1982, yet a second film based on its music — Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again — is Ireland’s smash-hit of 2018. It has taken nearly €1m at the box office every week and is secure at the top of cinema charts.

Like all of the films in Ireland’s 2018 top ten, it is pure, unabashed escapism. It is a joyous, sun-soaked romance populated by hopelessly beautiful people and is, as we all know, as far removed from our mortgaged lives as the bank balances of Björn, Benny, Agnetha, and Anni-Frid.

It doesn’t really matter whether you regard Abba’s work as escapism turned into art — high art even — or art turned into escapism, what seems significant is our insatiable appetite for escapism, our need to pull the curtains on the humdrum even if only for the one hour and 54 minutes’ running time of Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again.

But at what point does the cure become worse than the disease?

At what point does escaping become shirking? At what point does looking away facilitate the very things we wish we did not see? Mother and baby homes anyone? Housing? Fantasy Garda drink-driving figures? Brexit? Climate change?

Even if asking those questions seems a killjoy they deserve an answer, especially as looking away has, largely, taken the participatory principle out of our democracy.

That looking away nearly always ends in a victory for intransigence and extremism must sound alarm bells. Those toxins are the defining characteristics of the indulgent stasis rendering Stormont redundant.

Looking away is behind the lifeboat idea that Fianna Fáil and the SDLP — the latter moderates emasculated as we looked away — might merge.

On a grander scale, it is behind the hollowing out of social democracy and the rise of autocracy, nativist strongmen — some of whom mask themselves as pioneering social media barons.

Before long, plans to mark the centenary of our independence will accelerate so it seems fair to ask, what will we be celebrating if we continue to look away?

If we continue to, for whatever reason, leave active politics to a shrinking minority, are we making best use of the independence?

Sadly, if we continue to shirk participatory politics, those celebrations will be little more than a carnival-green-tinged escapism — without a wonderfully joyous Abba soundtrack.