Mustn't Grumble!

Compulsory optimism is an important feature of many social systems: in the Catholic church it's the "Hope" in Faith, Hope and Charity; in the army it's called "morale"; in the nation-state it's called patriotism. Its opposites are not mere intellectual pessimism but "despair" (a Deadly Sin), "defeatism" (a shooting offence under both Hitler and Stalin) and in more recent times "negativity". All of these formulations serve the same purpose, which is to quench criticism of the status quo. Until fairly recently however it hasn't been too prominent a feature of liberal democracies, precisely because a democracy must always remain open to critics. To be sure conservatives will often deploy terms like "moaning minny" as a straw-man when combating leftwing critics, but it's always remained a rhetorical device without any material sanction attached. That's why I was so fascinated by an excellent Short Cuts column in a recent London Review of Books (Vol. 35 No. 1, 3 January 2013) in which senior editor Paul Myerscough dissects the peculiar and disturbing case of the Pret A Manger sacking.

In brief, Andrej Stopa, a Czech student, was fired from the St Pancras branch of the fast-food chain Pret A Manger (in London's York Way) last September, ostensibly on the grounds of homophobic comments he's alleged to have made almost a year earlier to a work colleague. The fact that Stopa had been active, two weeks before his sacking, in setting up the independent Pret A Manger Staff Union (Pamsu) appears to be merely coincidental. Myerscough goes on to describe the work ethos at Pret A Manger, which has a distinctly New Age tinge to it:

Pret will have been disappointed to discover that any of its staff were unhappy enough in their work to have want of a union. Pret workers aren’t supposed to be unhappy. They are recruited precisely for their ‘personality’, in the sense that a talent show host might use the word. Job candidates must show that they have a natural flair for the ‘Pret Behaviours’ (these are listed on the website too). Among the 17 things they ‘Don’t Want to See’ is that someone is ‘moody or bad-tempered’, ‘annoys people’, ‘overcomplicates ideas’ or ‘is just here for the money’. The sorts of thing they ‘Do Want to See’ are that you can ‘work at pace’, ‘create a sense of fun’ and are ‘genuinely friendly’. The ‘Pret Perfect’ worker, a fully evolved species, ‘never gives up’, ‘goes out of their way to be helpful’ and ‘has presence’. After a day’s trial, your fellow workers vote on how well you fit the profile; if your performance lacks sparkle, you’re sent home with a few quid.

I was rather taken aback by such a blatant outbreak of compulsory optimism and so I dashed straight off to Pret's website to make sure Myerscough wasn't exaggerating. I drew a blank because, although the page "The Pret Behaviours" is still listed on the navigation menu, the page appears to have been removed (one wonders whether as a result of Myerscough's article). Further along in Myerscough's piece he explains the most unusual bonus system the company employs:

    To guard against the possibility of Pret workers allowing themselves to behave even for a moment as if they were ‘just here for the money’, the company maintains a panoptical regime of surveillance and assessment. Not only do workers watch each other, chivvying, cajoling, competing, high-fiving; they are also watched. Mystery shoppers visit every branch of Pret A Manger every week. If their reports are positive – more than 80 per cent of them are – the entire staff gets a bonus that week. Workers cited for ‘going the extra mile’ get a further £50 in cash, which they have to distribute among their colleagues. But if the mystery shopper happens to be served by someone momentarily off their game, who may be named and shamed in the report, no one gets rewarded. The bonus is significant, £1 per hour for the week’s work, upping the starting salary of £6.25 (just higher than the UK minimum wage of £6.19) by 16 per cent.

Now I've recently finished reading Daniel Kahneman's seminal work on economic psychology, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", and that trick of getting the bonus receivers to distribute their £50 among their colleagues sounds exactly like the sort of games that Kahneman devises in his lab when probing the human perception of fairness. Indeed Pret's personnel policy is impeccably modern in making maximum use of that most emetic of modern concepts, "emotional intelligence". It's the very model of David Cameron's socially-responsible capitalist company. Not only is it solicitous of the feelings of its customers, who must not be annoyed by moody or bad-tempered staff, but it demands that staff be happy themselves, which is best achieved by neither worrying about money nor dwelling on any "over-complicated" ideas (presumably ones like Keynesian economics or god forbid, Marxism).

This phenomenon, which is by no means confined to Pret A Manger, poses an interesting paradox for moaning minny social critics like me, because concern for the welfare of employees looks very like the sort of policy that the Left has always supported, and in many of its aspects it seems to be adhering to the strictures of Political Correctness (PC for short) which is usually supposed to be an agenda of the Left. Another odd symptom is that pseudo-PC attitudes have been professed from the political Right during several recent scandals, from the rape charges against Julian Assange and Dominique Strauss-Kahn to the recent call by a government minister, Lynne Featherstone, for the Observer to sack Julie Burchill for offending transsexuals.

Now analysing the origins and nature of the PC attitude has fascinated me for many years. When David Robins and I were writing Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude we were quite certain that PC and Cool shared some common origin, but were not able quite to analyse how they diverged into almost completely opposite attitudes. We had linked Cool firmly to consumption - it wholly aestheticises life by elevating taste and the possession of Cool artefacts into a supreme virtue. (A paradigm case is of course the recent history of the late Steve Jobs' Apple Corp and its shiny products, whose ascent to glory came just too late for our book). What if Political Correctness is merely the same psychic process but applied to production rather than consumption, the aestheticisation of the workplace by removing from it all the grit and friction (ie. class struggle)? The connecting concept between PC and Cool is perhaps Authenticity, the highest virtue of both. Paul Myerscough points up this connection in his article:

    ‘The authenticity of being happy is important,’ a Pret manager tells the Telegraph, ‘customers pick up on that.’ It isn’t clear which is the more demanding, authenticity or performance, being it or faking it, but in either case it’s difficult to believe that there isn’t something demoralising, for Pret workers perhaps more than most in the high street, not only in having their energies siphoned off by customers, but also in having to sustain the tension between the performance of relentless enthusiasm at work and the experience of straitened material circumstances outside it.

In other words, back in the bad old days workers could moan, gripe and fake it at work while reserving all their authenticity for life outside the workplace. Now service employers are demanding some of that authenticity for their own time, extracting a kind of value that's crucial for any service-oriented company, namely authentic (and hence believable) niceness toward the paying customers. In a service industry negativity actually reduces productivity and so it can be seen as a form of Thorstein Veblen's "sabotage", as I discussed in a recent post on this blog.

It's hardly surprising if compulsory optimism increasingly creeps out of the workplace and into everday life: I find myself encountering more and more people who wear its fixed manic smile, and become visibly uncomfortable with any negative or critical conversation. Depression has become the industrial disease of later consumer capitalism - affecting 8-12% of the population in any recent year according to The Office for National Statistics - and I think it's at least plausible that compulsory optimism may become also a personal tactic for holding it at bay. The way things are going it feels as though complaining might soon become a recklessly anti-social activity: after The Diggers and The Levellers, perhaps The Grumblers?

Why We Can't Solve Big Problems | MIT Technology Review

I highly recommend this thoughtful piece on technology by the editor-in-chief of the MIT Technology review. Its serious, concerned and informed tone is a very welcome antidote to the vacuous bullshit we're continually  showered with by the spin-doctors of the IT/Communications Complex, and by the frothing ranters of the Republican Billionaire Climate-Change Denier axis:

Why We Can't Solve Big Problems | MIT Technology Review

A New Age of Sabotage

I haven't posted much recently because every time I think of something to say, the extraordinary pace of events makes it sound lame by the next morning: New York under water, Obama re-elected, News International in the dock, rockets falling on Tel Aviv, and that's even before we reach the Mayan apocalypse on Dec 21. However I've finally plucked up courage to wade into the torrent of the miraculous-horrific thanks to a fortunate discovery on the web. In this previous post I confessed an increasing interest in the radical Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen, but that interest was quite narrowly based on reading only three of his works, namely The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Theory of Business Enterprise and his important essay The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx and His Followers. This wasn't just due to laziness but to the difficulty of obtaining many of Veblen's books, which have been out of print for a long time.

But I re-read Veblen's Wikipedia entry all the way to the bottom, and there found links to some recent online editions. The book I'd most wanted was The Engineers and the Price System of 1921, and sure enough there was a link to a free PDF from Batoche Books of Kitchener, Ontario, Canada dated 2001. Reading it was similar to my experience on first reading The Leisure Class — it felt like an important truth about the way society operates that has somehow been lost, obfuscated or concealed from popular consciousness. In Leisure Class that truth was the opposition between predatory and workmanlike economic attitudes, while in The Engineers it's a truth about "sabotage", which Veblen defined as follows:

    “Sabotage” is a derivative of 'sabot' which is French for a wooden shoe. It means going slow, with a dragging, clumsy movement, such as that manner of footgear may be expected to bring on. So it has come to describe any manoeuvre of slowing-down, inefficiency, bungling, obstruction.

[The Engineers and the Price System, p4]

Veblen isn't easy to read because of his repetitious style, his love of playing of devil's advocate which can confuse the unwary, and his straight-faced sarcasm which even extends to the terminology he employed ("sabotage" being a perfect example). He appropriates this familiar term and gives it a technical economic meaning broader than, though clearly connected to, its popular usage. He delighted in thus provoking the economic establishment by mocking and ironic use of terms like "idle curiosity" (science), "captains of industry" (business men) and "parental bent" (altruistic behaviour).

So, a partisan dynamiting a railway line, a striking worker who drops a spanner into his machine, or the ISP who throttles your internet feed because you've watched too many movies this month, are all committing sabotage in Veblen's terms. That is, they are deliberately reducing productivity to achieve some definite end. Veblen defined sabotage more succinctly as "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency" and always employed it in a non-pejorative sense, proposing that:

"...the common welfare in any community which is organized on the price system cannot be maintained without a salutary use of sabotage... such restriction of output as will maintain prices at a reasonably profitable level and so guard against business depression".

This amounts to a claim that the "free market", which neoliberals have managed to raise to the status of graven idol over recent decades, is a sham. Pricing has become a science that creates strange paradoxes: you might naively believe that maximum profit would be obtained by producing the largest amount of some highly-desirable commodity, but that's very far from the truth. Most often maximum profit can be achieved by somewhat restricting supply in order to raise its price.

The archetypal case is of course the De Beers family's rigid control over the world supply of diamonds, but the oil industry is a pretty good example too. For most of the 20th century there was always a large surplus of oil reserves, but oil companies wouldn't pump too much because that would lower the price too far. OPEC was set up for no other purpose than to restrict (ie. keep high) the price of oil. The drug pricing policies of the big pharmaceutical companies are equally instructive examples. Contrary to free-market dogma, companies not only do not enjoy competition but very large companies will go to great (sometimes too great) expense to avoid or subvert it. Sabotage is seen at its most blatant in the energy sector, and recently became a source of great embarassment to David Cameron's plucky little band of free-market adventurers, who can only wriggle and smoulder as the energy companies sabotage their chances of re-election through naked profiteering.

For Veblen the problem with using sabotage to control production is not that it's morally wrong, but that it creates unemployment and waste. Whenever you deliberately curtail production to raise prices you tend to thereby employ less labour:

"The mechanical industry of the new order is inordinately productive. So the rate and volume of output have to be regulated with a view to what the traffic will bear — that is to say, what will yield the largest net return in terms of price to the business men who manage the country's industrial system. Otherwise there will be 'overproduction', business depression, and consequent hard times all around. Overproduction means production in excess of what the market will carry off at a sufficiently profitable price. So it appears that the continued prosperity of the country from day to day hangs on a 'conscientious withdrawal of efficiency' by the business men who control the country's industrial output."

Marx thought that capitalism makes overproduction structurally inevitable, because the extraction of surplus value by owners guarantees that total wages paid will be insufficient to purchase all of the product. For Veblen sabotage is capitalism's mechanism for controlling overproduction, and Keynes later added to this that governments could intervene during crises of overproduction to sustain demand via public works and welfare payments — though he conceded that such measures would only delay the problem, which must periodically recur and drive the dreaded boom/bust cycle. Our current global economic crisis is ultimately caused by overproduction, and more particularly by the cheap credit that was freely ladled out to temporarily hold it at bay. The overselling in the USA of cheap mortgages (still too dear to be repaid) prior to 2007 lead directly to contamination of the world financial system by the resulting bad debt, cunningly concealed inside the sugared pills of complex and unfathomable financial derivatives. This contamination has not yet been removed — despite all the quantitative easing and other fiddles employed over the last five years — and can't be without imposing massive losses on banks, investors and bond holders that might sink the whole ship. With banks unwilling to lend and employers unwilling or unable to invest and hire, it would seem that sabotage is becoming the norm, just as it was in the mid-1930s. And the spread of debt contagion to states themselves, in the shape of sovereign debt, renders Keynesian intervention less and less feasible.

So how then could the current crisis be solved? One solution, advanced by some anarchists and Occupy communitarians is to abandon the pricing system altogether and make everything free. Experience teaches that this leads to massive overconsumption (the so-called "tragedy of the commons") and that eventually goods would ration themselves by some other means. Most of those means — like Mao and Stalin's famines, or our post-war rationing — are not nice, worse in fact than the problem. A similar (and equally doomed) illusion, embraced by almost all of the far Left and some of the far Right, is that this crisis will so impoverish the masses as to cause a renaissance of militancy and the eventual overthrow of capitalism, in favour of a planned socialist economy or corporate state. There's little evidence that this is about to happen in Europe or the USA: political involvement is everywhere in decline rather than rising, with all party memberships falling, while the democratic Right is already successfully pitting hard-pressed employed workers against the unemployed, for example by carefully juggling the levels of tax credits and welfare cuts. George Osborne's recent fable about working people going to work in the morning and seeing their lazy, dole-dependent neighbours sleep-in is a perfect example — it twangs the appropriate raw nerves and smothers Labour's attempts to revive an anachronistic class solidarity.   

A return to that semi-stable state of almost-full employment and fairish wages that prevailed for 30 years or so following WWII, by paying employees better within a market economy at the cost of some forgone profitability, might be the most desirable solution but there are reasons to doubt whether most people would actually welcome it. In our book Cool Rules David Robins and I anatomised the profound change of attitude created by the 1960s counterculture, a collapse of the Protestant Work Ethic to be displaced by an outlook based on individualism, hedonism and withdrawal of deference to authority. This collapse of previously prevailing mores applied just as much to the economy as to the rest of the "fabric of society" (the irrational exuberance and cocaine-fuelled greed of the recent financial boom was of a kind with the orgiastic lifestyles of rock and movie stars). Since the '60s the political Right has been seeking to restore older puritanical rules to society in the so-called "culture wars", but not to the economy, whereas the Left would like to restore them to the economy but not to society. It's hard to imagine that any such restoration is possible at all, but if it were then it would have to be for both.

A return to post-war social democracy in the UK seems unlikely then for at least three reasons:
1) It would require repeal of most of Thatcher's anti-union legislation and renewed agitation for higher wages on a massive scale, which no imaginable Labour government is likely to embrace.
2) The Tories' "anti-scrounger" assault proved quite effective at the last election and may too in the next. You may object that they failed to secure a majority and were forced into coalition, but had the crash been pushing popular sentiment to the Left they ought to have done far worse.  
3) Most crucially, it may be that younger generations are adapting to the current casino economy with all its gross inequalities. A most noteable feature of the last three decades' economy has been a decoupling of reward from effort, visible not only in bankers' bonuses and "fat-cat" managers' salaries but also in the lifestyle and remuneration of sportsmen, popular entertainers and other celebrities, lottery winners, not to mention drug dealers and gangsters. Slavoj Žižek analyses this phenomenon through the notion of a "surplus wage" entirely unrelated to productivity, which gets paid to insiders accepted into certain cliques and professions:

"Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for–some–intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc). The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability."

          ["Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie", London Review of Books, Vol 34 No 2, 26th Jan 2012]

It's therefore possible, depressingly, that our current economic stasis and austerity might become a permanent state of affairs. That post-war period of social democracy was a kind of semi-stable equilibrium in which relatively high wages and welfare provision maintained mass consumption and kept overproduction within bounds, but systems as complex as human economies typically exhibit more than one stable or quasi-stable state, at different levels of key parameters. It could be that we've flipped into such an alternative state, a low-wage, welfare-poor economy that's grossly unequal, with a small hyper-rich elite and a bare majority in poorly-paid and insecure employment, but in which many people are sustained by a slim hope of gaining entry to the privileged ranks of the surplus-waged, by hook or by crook, by luck or by nepotism (like winning the lottery, wangling a local government sinecure, starting an internet business or making it in football, writing a hit tune in their back-bedroom or being discovered as a model).

The world already contains many societies that display almost all these features, currently concealed behind robust growth through exporting to us the things we no longer make. I'm referring of course to the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) which many economists applaud and would have us emulate. There are already signs that stagnation in the Northern hemisphere is beginning to curtail their growth, and what remains will look far from pretty. The whole world economy appears to be converging toward a burned-out condition that in some ways resembles a modern feudalism, with huge local concentrations of wealth that foster corruption of the public and favour private fiefdom. (When a star has burned up all its hydrogen and helium it collapses to become a "Red Dwarf", an irony that might not be lost on ex-readers Black Dwarf and Red Mole).

If that hasn't depressed you too far to read any further, there remains the environmental question. Climate-change sceptics of both Right and Left want a resumption of economic growth — in the Right's case to carry on business as usual and in the Left's to repair the partly-dismantled welfare state — while climate-change believers demand zero growth (or less) to avoid catastrophic global warming. The latter might eventually be prepared to accept, even perhaps to welcome, the sort of static and enfeebled economy that is emerging, which would be an instance of sabotage so extreme it would have Thorstein Veblen spinning in his grave. On the bright side, that Mayan apocalypse probably won't happen.

All Downhill

WAGES AS PROPORTION OF GDP FROM 1955-2008

This graph, based on one printed in Stewart Lansley's excellent book "The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of the Super-Rich and the Economy" (Gibson Square 2011), tells you almost everything you need to know about the roots of our current crisis.

It depicts the percentage of UK GDP paid out as wages from 1955 to 2008. It starts around the ~59% level that prevailed almost from the end of WWII until the 1973 oil crisis, then shows the sharp spike up above 65% during the union militancy of the mid-70s (whose impact on prices and profits drove the country into the arms of Thatcher). In effect it's a graph of the British class struggle over that crucial half century.

A steady downward trend following 1979 as labour lost out more and more has taken it below 54%, a level at which demand in the economy is severely curtailed. The answer is not more QE to put cash into the banks, but to put cash in people's pockets, restore this measure to around 59% and restart the economy.

[Subscribers can read my review of Lansley's book in the next issue of The Political Quarterly, Volume 83, Issue 4 (not yet online), and my PQ reviews over two years old of other books are readable on my blog here]

Elders of Zion >> Zinoviev Letter >> Innocence of Muslims

Given the current febrile state of the world the temptation to succumb to conspiracy theories is very strong indeed. Nevertheless I can't restrain myself from saying this: doesn't this Arab rioting, and killing of the US ambassador to Libya, just two months before the US presidential election, smell of a provocation to anyone else? In the grand old tradition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Zinoviev Letter? Remembering what happened to unpopular Democratic president Jimmy Carter after the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1980? All the usual suspects are involved: petty criminals with pseudonyms, bogus consultants, mad evangelical pastors. But no connection to the Republican Party (yet). 

Higglety Pigglety Pop

Finally we have the answer to the nature of Matter, the Universe and Everything (and it isn't 42 after all). It's all a vast herd of quarks (some strange but many charming) milling around in Peter Higg's field until they get heavy. Now we know, can we please shut the fuck up about it and concentrate on the real problem, which is to prevent a tiny elite of greed-crazed rentiers from stealing our grandchildrens' lunch money.

A Sad Canticle

A Sad Canticle is a computer-generated tune I created using Ableton Live with a vocoder filter that gives a no-language/all-languages or Esperanto effect. Its punning title is deliberate, alluding to the horrors being perpetrated in Syria. Readers new to this blog might form the impression that I'm only interested in politics, but nothing could be further from the truth.

In particular I've been passionately interested in music for most of my life. I started listened to, then playing, black American music - blues, R&B and soul - in the early 1960s, progressed to jazz, particularly bop, post-bop and '60s free jazz, which lead me onto modern composers like Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartok . From there I explored backwards in time to absorb the classics from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to Wagner and Richard Strauss. I've spent many, many nights at the opera and concert hall and am a regular patron of the Wigmore. My tastes in popular music are highly eclectic and highly selective, stretching from rock, bluegrass and country to reggae, as a glance at my Spotify playlists will confirm.

I haven't bought many records or seen live performances of popular music for decades - I was once keen on new wave bands like Talking Heads and Pere Ubu, as well as dub reggae, but as for many people of my generation the era of hip-hop and dance music became a big turn-off: too old for raves and clubbing but the music not sufficiently interesting for me to just listen. However the last few years have seen a change in my attitude. Though popular music is now fragmented as never before and the extraordinary animus between fans of the myriad different genres is pretty off-putting, I recently find myself attracted to a lot of the experimental music being produced - it feels as though, bored with the blandness of commercial pop, young musicians are rediscovering for themselves the fascination with pure sound that was there in free jazz and other '60s modernisms. The technology of music production has also advanced enormously, so that they can now create on a laptop computer extraordinary sounds that once were the exclusive domain of the avant-gardists of Paris's IRCAM. Some of the sounds coming out of the dubstep scene and its million descendents, or from musicians like Beck, Jack White and Saint Vincent, are really very exciting indeed, recalling the spirit of Coltrane, Mingus, Coleman, Shepp and Albert Ayler.

As a keen practitioner of obscure computer programming languages I've also, since the early 1990s, been interested in computer composition (more about my efforts in algorithmic composition on my website here) it was pretty well inevitable then that I'd eventually buy myself a copy of Ableton Live (the tool of choice for much dance music) and start to produce electronic music of my own. I'm all too acutely aware of the potential for ridicule in the spectacle of old codgers getting "down wiv da kidz", and so I deliberately steer clear of attempting house, techno, dubstep and other beats-oriented genres. In any case I'm not really interested in getting people to dance as there's a surfeit of people doing that already.

I'm more interested in playing with sound and rhythm for their own sakes and to disturb various musical conventions. I've recently been experimenting with synthesised nonsense vocals that nevertheless, because they so resemble real human voices, have an emotional effect that's devoid of overt meaning: I suppose if a label is needed it would have to be "expressionist", because I constantly find myself creating tunes that remind me of my outrage at certain current political events. This music is rather a long way from easy-listening, but I do hope that people might at least be upset by it. (I have to warn that if you don't like either modernist music or free jazz, you're unlikely to enjoy this at all). I post my most successful compositions on the popular SoundCloud website, which is mostly frequented by young dance music composers, and here's a widget through which you can hear some of my pieces:    

Hemmed in by Language

Charles Rosen is one of a handful of living writers whose work I always look forward to reading, which for me mostly means articles on music that he writes for the New York review of Books. Rosen is a first-class pianist who had a professional career on the concert platform (his recording of the Goldberg variations is one of my favourite interpretations). He writes marvellous articles on the appreciation of composers like Chopin, Ravel and Liszt: since the arrival of Spotify I may sometimes spend a whole evening reading one of these pieces while concurrently listening to each of the performances he mentions (I hope music schools have discovered what a great resource Spotify is).

Rosen also has broader interests beyond music, and occasionally writes about philosophical matters and art theory, with a special interest in Romanticism. For example in the latest NYRB (May 10th 2012) he has a piece called "Freedom and Art" in which he typically digs far deeper than the guff one normally reads on this subject (Dada against the bourgeoisie, Constructivism for the revolution, Abstract Expressionism as Cold War weapon, Pop against elitism etc etc ad naus). In this article Rosen starts by discussing the constraints on freedom posed by fixed meanings and having to learn language, and comes out with this extraordinary sentence:

"Of all the constraints imposed on us that restrict our freedom—constraints of morality and decorum, constraints of class and finance—one of the earliest that is forced upon us is the constraint of a language that we are forced to learn so that others can talk to us and tell us things we do not wish to know."

It struck me that in this single sentence he summarises, in an arresting and comprehensible way, everything post-modern theorists have been banging on about in such deliberately exclusive jargon for the last 40 years.

PS As a postscript to this thought, my partner Marion's grandmother often professed a belief that monkeys could actually talk, but they didn't because they knew that if we found out we would make them work...

Thought Prompted by the Petrol Strike Debacle

"We are likely to find ourselves as intellectuals or political philosophers facing a situation in which our chief task is not to  imagine better worlds but rather to think how to prevent worse ones."
Tony Judt

In a week where cabinet ministers appear to be urging voters toward Buddhist-style self immolation, I thought that perhaps an automobile metaphor might be apposite. If you imagine society as a motor vehicle then the capitalist market is its engine and social democracy is its braking system. Hands up everyone who wants a car without brakes. OK, just Osborne and Clarkson then...

A Very British Coup?

David Cameron is likely to be questioned about his friendship with Mrs Brooks by Lord Justice Leveson as part of his inquiry into press ethics Photo: REUTERS/GETTY

 






In 100 years time the last week of February 2012 will be remembered as a turning point in UK history, for three events that don't seem all that remarkable at first sight.

The first event was the appearance of Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan police Sue Akers at the Leveson inquiry, where she claimed that there was a "culture of illegal payments" at the Sun newspaper, in which police officers and other civil servants were not merely paid for specific information but were in effect kept on retainer to leak regularly. Akers testimony coincided with James Murdoch finally resigning the chairmanship of News International, the Sun's holding company. 

The second event was the announcement that the West Midlands and Surrey police authorities have invited bids from G4S and other major security companies on behalf of all forces across England and Wales to take over the delivery of a wide range of services previously carried out by the police. A West Midlands spokesman said that "Combining with the business sector is aimed at totally transforming the way the force currently does business – improving the service provided to the public". Needless to say Home Secretary Teresa May is an enthusiastic promoter of this scheme, which she hopes to have in place by next spring.

The third event was Prime Minister David Cameron's admission that he had indeed repeatedly ridden a horse loaned to former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks by the Metropolitan Police.

Now to anyone with a modicum of political nous it should come as no surprise to learn that the so-called "ruling class" is nothing of the sort - it is not a class, nor is it singular, nor does it "rule" in any straightforward way. Complex social democracies like that of the UK are ruled by a collection of powerful institutions that pass around power and funds between them, not with much sense of solidarity but more like a Darwinian struggle for dominance. These three events shine a spotlight on three of the most powerful of the institutions, two public (the Tory government and the Metropolitan police) and one private (News International), but other equally powerful ones like parliament and the judiciary are currently involved in a titanic struggle that almost amounts to coup and counter-coup.

That News International has had a baleful influence on British politics for the last 30 years is scarcely news to any but a blinkered few. During its 18 wilderness years the Labour party developed such a debilitating fear of the Sun's power over its natural voter base that NI in effect controlled the mainfesto of New Labour, dictating a continuance of Thatcherite economics and a hands-off policy on the media regulation that might have set them free. However it is somewhat newsworthy to learn that Cameron's "detoxified" Tory party too is almost completely integrated with News International, socially as well as politically.

It appeared for a while that News International's hubris had actually brought it down - the flagrancy of its illegal and anti-democratic behaviour over phone hacking lead to public revulsion and a revolt by parliament and the judiciary: to the Leveson inquiry, the closing of News of the World and the downfall of both Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch. Last week Sue Akers testimony suggested that the Metropolitan Police, feeling the strength of the gale that's blowing, had changed sides in this struggle and decided to clean out the corruption, sever links with News International and start doing its job again. And then, POW!, we learn that the power of the police nationwide is to be dissipated by hiving off many of its activites to private sector security firms already known to be rapacious, inefficient and mired in corruption. What a coincidence.

I had a foretaste of what's to come when my motorbike was stolen a couple of years ago. The police found it, damaged and immobile, just outside London, but the officer who came to my door explained they could no longer return it themselves: instead it was being held by a private recovery company in Stevenage who charged £150 storage for every day I didn't reclaim it. On contacting my insurance company they were unfazed by this and having assessed my claim eventually paid some £900 storage fees (though of course I and everyone else ultimately pay in increased premiums). The bike was written-off rather than repaired as a result. This is the thoroughly British way of corruption, an insurance claim (whiplash, a "burned hearthrug", a privately-stored motorbike) rather than a handful of banknotes as in India or Latin America, or a newspaper parcel of home-grown cucumbers in the old Soviet Union.

This campaign poses the biggest threat to rule of law since Robert Peel first established a public police force. Combined with the concurrent assault on the NHS, it threatens to change entirely the nature of British society, driving it in the same dysfunctional and collapsing direction as the USA. Business interests will ensure News International eventually wriggles off the hook. Corruption will dominate everyday life as people strive to pay for their health-care and protection from crime. Private security firms will effectively become warlords in the poorer parts of the country. And all this is from the Detoxified Party of Law and Order. I think I preferred the toxic version, at least you knew where you were.

New Year message?

New Year message?, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.

These spent fireworks boxes seem to contain a not-so-subliminal message about the prospects for the world economy this year. I've devoted many posts on this blog to proclaiming my belief that social democracy is the only possible civilised form of government, and the one which most of the so-called 99% of the world's people would aspire to given the chance. It appears they are not to be given that chance - the workings of the neo-liberal economy and its hard-line ideologues conspire to bankrupt all the world's states and return us to a Hobbesian state of nature, while supine politicians are powerless to stop them.

Social democracy is in essence an armistice in the class war - labour agrees not to rise up and expropriate the owners of capital if those owners reciprocate with fair wages, good working conditions and paying taxes to support a welfare state. The benefit to both sides is that it minimises the need for coercion and makes possible the continuance of democratic freedoms. It's becoming hard to escape the conclusion that the 1% have broken that armistice and have no intention of renewing it. Reviving the world economy requires putting money back into the pockets of working people whose wages have been falling in real terms for several decades, but are now plummeting under the deficit-reducing policies of governments. It seems less and less likely that this can be achieved by democratic means, and after a century of social democratic experiment it might still come to a repudiation of all debt and the expropriation of private property. It didn't have to end this way: regulation of the sort devised by Keynes and Roosevelt might have been modernised and extended given the will, but that will is conspicuously lacking. This neat little video by David Harvey offers a reminder of those Marxist facts of life that never went away under social democracy.

There are crackpots on the extreme right who seem to believe that some kind of fascist/neo-feudal regime - under which the rich retire into gated communities and buy the protection of private armies and high-tech surveillance equipment - offers a possible resolution of the crisis. A moment's reflection will tell you that the extraordinary technological achievements of recent decades have only been made possible by mass-consumption and could never be supported solely as luxury goods (the economies of scale of silicon chip manufacture or lithium batteries are prime examples). The unfolding environmental crisis means that such mass-production is already problematic and requires regulation in the same way as finance capital, but that can never happen under "free market" conditions. The only alternative to a restoration of social democracy is slow decline into chaos as systems we've come to depend upon, like transport and the internet, begin to collapse. Meanwhile Ed Balls tells us that Labour will not reverse Osborne's cuts. Happy 2012!   

Now Cool really Rules - in Russia!

Back in 1999 when the late David Robins and I were writing Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude we reluctantly accepted that due to both space constraints and our intended popular audience, we wouldn't be offering an adequate definition of what sort of a thing "Cool" is. Instead, as the subtitle confirms, we confined ourselves to calling it an "attitude" - basically a collection of psychological characteristics - and suggested that we (and you) would recognise it when we saw it. We did go so far as to identify the major personality-forming components of this attitude, which we proposed are narcissism, hedonism and ironic detachment. In the last chapter of our book we discussed the geographical distribution and spread of the Cool phenomenon, and in particular we mentioned the prospect of the Cool attitude invading the ex-Soviet Union. After jokingly raising the question "Is Russia perhaps too cold (or too broke) to enjoy being Cool?" we went on to say:

        Cool even flourished as a dissident force under Soviet Communism, where western popular culture was prohibited and could only be seen via the black market; throughout Eastern Europe a Cool pose was recognised as a mark of passive resistance to communism. It is at least arguable that Cool helped eventually to bring down Communism, as it represents precisely those ‘decadent western values’ that the regime sought to exclude - the black market in Beatles albums and Levi jeans is what lost the hearts and minds of the whole post-war generation for Communism. In 1989 East German youths hoisted the MTV flag over the Berlin Wall as it was being pulled down. 

So is Cool destined to rule the world then? To ask that is the same as to ask whether consumer capitalism and parliamentary democracy are destined to rule the world, because if they do then Cool will surely follow."

Now fast forward to 2011. Two recently published articles have set me to thinking further about this question of what sort of thing Cool is, and also to realise that an actual Rule of Cool is coming about before our eyes, and in Russia of all places.

One of the most intelligent and stimulating political blogs around is OpenDemocracy, and one of its great strengths is its Russian section, oD Russia, which often contains articles that are penetrating and strikingly different in tone from the mainstream of UK commentary. (I remember in particular "Switch on, switch off: how law sustains the Russian system" by Kirill Rogov which details how Putin's regime, rather than merely flouting the law, has subverted and commercialised the law to maintain its own legitimacy). On 24th October 2011 oD Russia published a fascinating piece by the Russian artist Maxim Kantor called "Rise of the lumpen elite: is this really what we fought for?" in which he observes that:
     
          The first result of the policy of globalisation is the creation of an elite which belongs to no particular country and is dependent on no government or regime. It rises above history, culture and tradition. The lumpen proletariat represented danger from below, from the lower strata of society. The lumpen elite is isolated from society and is twice as dangerous. 

The lumpen upper class has come into being during the present crisis, which can be seen as a contemporary version of the classic 'collectivisation.' It bears all the hallmarks of the collectivisation of the 1930s. Both resulted in financial redistribution. Both involved the suppression of the the middle class, the very stratum that is the engine and culture medium of democracy. The rich have grown richer, the poor poorer, and common history and a common goal have ceased to exist. We keep on thinking we live in the same society as before. But we don't: the middle class has lost its rights and the ruling class has been lumpenized. The lumpenized class is the elite.

Around the same time the London Review of Books published a gripping article by Russian TV Producer Peter Pomerantsev called Putin's Rasputin. It's about one of president-to-be-again Vladimir Putin's most important eminences gris, the PR guru Vladislav Surkov, who is described as "the puppetmaster who privatised the Russian political system". Pomerantsev summarises Surkov's achievements so far thus:

         He is the man behind the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’, in which democratic institutions are maintained without any democratic freedoms, the man who has turned television into a kitsch Putin-worshipping propaganda machine and launched pro-Kremlin youth groups happy to compare themselves to the Hitler Youth, to beat up foreigners and opposition journalists, and burn ‘unpatriotic’ books on Red Square.

However Pomerantsev goes on to say:

       But this is only half the story. In his spare time Surkov writes essays on conceptual art and lyrics for rock groups. He’s an aficionado of gangsta rap: there’s a picture of Tupac on his desk, next to the picture of Putin. And he is the alleged author of a bestselling novel, Almost Zero. ‘Alleged’ because the novel was published (in 2009) under the pseudonym Natan Dubovitsky – Surkov’s wife is called Natalya Dubovitskaya. Officially Surkov is the author of the preface, where he denies being the author of the novel, then makes a point of contradicting himself: ‘The author of this novel is an unoriginal Hamlet-obsessed hack’; later, ‘this is the best book I have ever read.’ In interviews he has come close to admitting to being the author while always pulling back from a complete confession. Whether or not he actually wrote every word of it he has gone out of his way to associate himself with it.

and later on:

       In Soviet Russia you would have been forced to give up any notion of artistic freedom if you wanted a slice of the pie. In today’s Russia, if you’re talented and clever, you can have both. This makes for a unique fusion of primitive feudal poses and arch, postmodern irony. A property ad displayed all over central Moscow earlier this year captured the mood perfectly. Got up in the style of a Nazi poster, it showed two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan ‘Life Is Getting Better’. It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it’s not quite serious either. It’s sort of both. It’s saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we’re just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we’re making money playing it and won’t let anyone subvert its rules). A few months ago there was a huge ‘Putin party’ at Moscow’s most glamorous club. Strippers writhed around poles chanting: ‘I want you, prime minister.’ It’s the same logic. The sucking-up to the master is completely genuine, but as we’re all liberated 21st-century people who enjoy Coen brothers films, we’ll do our sucking up with an ironic grin while acknowledging that if we were ever to cross you we would quite quickly be dead... This is the world Surkov has created, a world of masks and poses, colourful but empty, with little at its core but power for power’s sake and the accumulation of vast wealth.

This account of Surkov's character and achievements chimes perfectly with our conception of ironic, apolitical Cool, and if I were to write a sequel to Cool Rules today it would have to take off from the present situation in Russia, where it appears that Cool finally has come to rule in the literal political sense. And if one accepts this then other examples - Berlusconi's "bunga bunga" parties, Sarkozy marrying Mick Jagger's ex - will crop up everywhere you look. What does this imply for defining the sort of a thing Cool is? Clearly a mere "attitude" will no longer do, unless we're also prepared to say that the Protestant Work Ethic "ruled" capitalist societies for the last 200+ years, which doesn't offer insight into anything much.

A more useful concept is that of a "justification". All human societies must continually justify themselves to their members, lest those members secede from the society to merely pursue their own selfish interests. I recently wrote a review for The Political Quarterly of Jim McGuigan's book "Cool Capitalism", which takes off from where we left things in Cool Rules and extends it into the domain of political economy. McGuigan's book offers a useful summary of recent developments in the sociology of labour, including the important work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello on justification. I don't have space here to fully explain Boltanski and Chiapello's ideas about "The New Spirit of Capitalism", but I will just offer this extract from my PQ review:

       The original spirit of capitalism as described by Max Weber was ascetic, entrepreneurial, politically liberal and organised by family dynasties, until this model fell into crisis during the first half of the 20th century under pressure from world war, economic crisis and socialism. It gradually gave way to what Boltanski and Chiapello call "organised capitalism" based on large corporations, strong trade unions and welfare benefits, a complex easily confused with social democracy (and still branded as such in neoliberal rhetoric). Its justificatory theme became security rather than moral probity, and it was this reformed capitalism that the '60s revolt undermined, the earlier laisser faire form surviving more in conservative fantasies than the real economy.

McGuigan then sketches the history of 'The Great Refusal', those oppositional art movements that rejected bourgeois mores, from the German Romantics through the French Realists, up to 20th-century Modernism, Dada and Surrealism. He traces the rise of the bohemian way of life, clearly distinguishing its romantic alienation from the social alienation described by Marx. Romantic refusal manifested itself in sexual liberty, unconventional personal appearance and a distaste for work, while on the aesthetic plane it created an ever-widening gulf between alienated elite taste and conformist popular taste. The 1960s witnessed the pinnacle of this romantic refusal with the French Marxists Henri Lefebvre and the Situationist International (major influences on the student revolt of May 1968) who called for revolution in everyday life and an end to alienated labour. But the 1960s also witnessed a revitalised advertising industry grasping that such extreme individualism, far from threatening capitalism, could be broken, harnessed and saddled to become its trusty steed – as analysed by Thomas Frank and dramatised in the excellent TV series 'Mad Men'. In place of political revolution arose a new cultural populism that ushered in the third epoch of "cool capitalism".

So in a nutshell, in answer to that question about what sort of a thing Cool is, I would now prefer to say that it's society's latest means of justifying itself to itself, which basically involves looking good, having fun and not getting entangled in uncool party politics (let the nerds deal with stuff like famines or global financial crises). The UK conservative media have not quite come out and accused Ed Milliband of being uncool, though they continually flirt with such an accusation. Let's hope that their jeers are on target, because it appears to me that the future of social democracy lies in combating rather than abetting the Rule of Cool, and that we'll need a non-ironic, Uncool Party with which to do that.

Tightening the Web

David Cameron has promised to “do whatever it takes to restore law and order and to rebuild our communities”, which may include a law to permit removal of face masks and plans to block access to social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry messaging. He said in Parliament:

    "Mr Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."

Facebook has already replied to Cameron by announcing that it has "already actively removed several 'credible threats of violence' related to the riots across England" but the major social networks are unlikely to comply fully until Cameron can introduce new legislation, which will expose him to widespread opposition on grounds of freedom of speech. At the time of the Wikileaks affair last year I wrote a PC Pro column predicting the imminence of such regulation, and I'm publishing an edited extract of its argument here, since I know that many of my political friends don't read that nerdy-but-excellent journal.

Adapted from the Idealog column in PC Pro issue 197 March 2011:

At the Web '10 conference in Paris this April, we heard European telecom companies demanding a levy on vendors of bandwidth-guzzling hardware and services like Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and Apple. These firms currently make mega-profits without contributing anything to the massive infrastructure upgrades needed to support the demand they create. Content providers at the conference responded "sure, as soon as you telcos start sharing your subscription revenues with us". It's shaping up to be an historic conflict of interest between giant industries, on a par with cattle versus sheep farmers or the pro and anti-Corn Law lobbies.

But of course there are more parties involved than just telcos versus web vendors. We users, for a start. Then there are the world's governments, and the content-providing media industries. In today's earnest debates about Whither The Webbed-Up Society, no two journalists seem to agree how many parties need to be considered, so I'll put in my own bid, which is five. 

My five categories of player are Users, Web Vendors, Governments, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Telecom Companies (Telcos), each of whose interests conflict with every other, thus connecting them in a "pentacle of conflict" so complex it defies easy predictions. The distinction is basically this: users own or create content and consume bandwidth; web vendors own storage (think Amazon servers and warehouses, Google datacenters) and consume bandwidth; telcos own wired and wireless fabrics and sell bandwidth; and poor old ISPs are the middle-men, brokering deals between the other four. 

Note that I lump in content providers, even huge ones like Murdoch's News International, among users, because they own no infrastructure and merely consume bandwidth. And they're already girded for war, for example in the various trademark law-suits against Google's AdWords. What will actually happen, as always in politics, depends on how these players team up against each other, and that's where it starts to look ominous. 

At exactly the same time as these arguments are surfacing, the Wikileaks affair has horrified all the world's governments and almost certainly tipped them over into seriously considering regulating the internet. Now it's one of the great clichés of net journalism that the net can't be regulated: it's self-organising, re-routes around obstacles etc, etc, blah, blah. However the fact is that governments can do more or less anything, up to and including dropping a hydrogen bomb on you (except where the Rule of Law has failed, where they can do nothing). For example they can impose taxes that completely alter the viability of business models, or else stringent licensing conditions, especially on vulnerable middle-men like the ISPs.

Before Wikileaks the US government saw a free Web as one more choice fruit in its basket of "goodies of democracy" to be flaunted in the face of authoritarian regimes like China. After Wikileaks, my bet is that there are plenty of folk in the US government who'd like to find out more about how China keeps the lid on. The EU is more concerned about monopolistic business practices and has a track record of wielding swingeing fines and taxes to adjust business models to its own moral perspective. 

All these factors point towards rapidly increasing pressure for effective regulation of the net over the next few years, and an end to the favourable conditions we presently enjoy where you can get most content for free if you know where to look, and can get free or non-volume-related net access too. The coming trade war could very well see telcos side with governments (they were after all best buddies for almost a century) against users and web vendors, extracting more money from both through some sort of two-tier Web that offers lots of bandwidth to good payers but a mere trickle to free riders. And ISPs are likely to get it in the neck from both sides, God help 'em. 

How VeryTaxing

photo: David Jones/PA from The Guardian Aug 11th

One grimly humorous moment in the London Riots was video footage by a journalist with a "well-bred" voice chasing along the street after a young girl who was carrying a huge flat-screen TV. Asked why she was doing it she said she was "taking back her taxes". Several people have accused her of hypocrisy since they're pretty sure she doesn't work or pay taxes. But of course in gang-speak "tax" means to steal:

URBAN DICTIONARY 

1. Tax
Verb. - To steal. Noun (Taxer) - Thief  "im going to tax that guys cash back in a sec" where'd you get that from "oh i just taxed it from some old lady"

She was quite literally carrying her taxes home. But the humour gets grimmer still once you recall that the US government has recently been reduced to impotence and near default by a group of Tea Party Republicans who actually share this young girl's attitude to tax - that it's simply theft. (Perhaps Sir Philip Green shares it too, though not in public). It seems the understanding that taxation is the price of civilisation is vanishing from all levels of society. A very modern form of barbarism, the proud result of the neo-liberal project to replace all social solidarity with market values.

David Robins and I caught a whiff of this attitude when we were writing Cool Rules back in 1999:

"Cool is an oppositional attitude, an expression of a belief that the mainstream mores of your society have no legitimacy and do not apply to you."

"Cool has a dangerously ambivalent attitude toward the rule of law and could accommodate to criminal neo-feudalism just as well as it does to consumer capitalism - the uncomfortable truth is that,compared to the excitements of the drug and gun culture, a prosperous, well-ordered society is boring . Fukuyama takes a rather Panglossian approach to such matters - so far as Cool is concerned history isn’t just over, it is the ultimate negative, something that is washed up, finished with, as in ‘Bang! You’re history’."

"Cool may once have been an expression of rebellion but it is surely not any longer. The real question is whether or not it can sustain the key elements, the rule of law and freedom of conscience, that make western democracy the least bad form of government ever invented. The picture is murky and contradictory: on the one hand Cool values personal freedom above all, it hates racism, it is egalitarian and hedonistic in temperament, on the other hand it is fascinated with violence, drugs and criminality, and mesmerised by the sight of naked power. "

More recently Will Davies, on his excellent Potlatch blog, has been developing the concept of the "criminal consumer", a type of individual whose presence is equally discomfiting to politicians of both Left and Right.  (Of course Proudhon was there long before all of us with his "Property is Theft!") 

The digital revolution has been eroding people's respect for property for several decades now because digital goods are weightless and stealing them might deprive their owner of revenue but not of the original article. However there's no indication that anyone has yet discovered a workable formula for living together in large groups without property, law and taxes. I fear the outcome will be a harsh authoritarian crackdown in which those who own much property privately hire the hardest and meanest to keep it out of the hands of the rest of us - dissatisfaction with the current police force (a public good as well as an instrument of control) is palpably spreading.  

POSTSCRIPT: The furore over David Starkey's supposedly "racist" remarks on Newsnight about white kids "becoming black" highlights a real problem for the Left. Starkey was quite correct in his analysis, which was cultural rather than racial. He deprecates gangsta culture, and quite rightly identifies it as a central factor in these riots. This is very inconvenient for liberals, and particularly for some Guardian writers, who have uncritically embraced this culture (which is perhaps the most important contemporary manifestation of the attitude we called Cool). 

Fashion Fascism and Malignant Self-esteem

An article on the John Galliano debacle in a recent New York Times sparked me off on a roundabout but productive train of thought. In this article, Professor Rhonda Garelick pointed out that Galliano's anti-semitic outburst was significant for far more than its racism, upon which the press has mostly concentrated (and for which he was sacked). Garelick notes that Galliano was behaving in perfect congruence with the profoundly anti-democratic aesthetic that underlies the fashion industry - an emphasis on bodily perfection, disgust with the common and ugly, extreme economic elitism  - and that the French fashion industry in particular collaborated enthusiastically with the Nazis during WWII. Here's a sample of her conclusions:

"Which brings us back to Mr. Galliano in the Paris bar. His was not a generic anti-Semitic tirade, but the self-conscious pronouncement of a world-class arbiter of taste (“I am John Galliano!”). Not only did he use ethnic slurs, he accused the woman of being unattractive and unfashionable, associating both with ethnicity, with being Jewish (which she happened not to be)... The link is clear: like a fascist demagogue of yore, he was declaring that she did not belong to the gilded group who wear the right boots, and from this Mr. Galliano slid effortlessly to a condemnation of her very flesh, and a wish for her death."

It was that phrase "arbiter of taste" that triggered the next link in my chain of associations. In the book Cool Rules that I wrote with my late friend David Robins, we devoted a whole early chapter to the "New Arbiters of Cool", that generation of young journalists who emerged from the punk scene of the late 1970s and who now by-and-large edit all the style and media sections of the UK and US press. It would be quite mad to accuse this whole generation of fashion fascism, especially since many of them embrace impeccably liberal and left-wing causes, but Garelick's article reminded me just to what degree a "mere" aesthetic can nullify rational political beliefs. The brutal fact is that this whole generation of style journalists is deeply in thrall to a Cool aesthetic, and the Cool aesthetic is deeply antagonistic to ugly, common, uncool social democracy.

While writing Cool Rules David and I agonised over how far to push this point, because it felt slightly nutty back then, and so we confined ourselves to pointing out Hitler's impeccable subcultural credentials (very distinctive haircut and trousers) and the attraction of extremely violent anti-heroes like the cast of Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas. On reflection I feel we perhaps downplayed it too far.

Now brace yourself for a very long jump in the argument. I've been watching Jamie's Dream School with horrified fascination over the last few weeks. I'll freely admit to a very unfashionable soft spot for Jamie Oliver, because though he studiously avoids overt politics (and may not even know it himself), he's a natural social democrat. He genuinely wants to induce his whole generation into eating better food, and as his school dinners project demonstrated he's prepared to lobby politicians and organise at the grass roots in a doomed attempt to achieve this. So it's depressingly inevitable that after only the briefest of flirtations the Arbiters of Cool would turn against Jamie in a big way, so that the mere mention of his name is enough to get you run out of Shoreditch on a rail.

Now with his Dream School project we see Jamie actually tackling the dragon in its den - he's taken it upon himself to rescue (Gladstone-style)  a bunch of schoolkids who have been rendered entirely uneducable by the prevailing youth culture of Cool, with sphincter-clenchingly awful results so far. Another topic over which David and I pulled our punches slightly in Cool Rules was the matter of self-esteem. Sociological orthodoxy has it that most of the troubles being experienced by the Yoof of Today are caused by low self-esteem, but David, who'd spent much of his adult life working with dissident youth, was of exactly the opposite opinion. He believed that the libertarian parenting practices of many of our own generation had had quite the opposite effect, instilling a malignant excess of self-esteem that verges on megalomania. The participants in Jamie's Dream School offer startling evidence for his thesis, and perhaps John Galliano had a touch of it too. Whatever, it doesn't bode too well for the future...

Humanism: An Exchange with Nina Fishman

In an earlier blog post, on the 1st anniversary of Nina Fishman’s death, I referred to a project that Nina and I conceived back in November 2002 to write a collaborative essay on the inadequacy of contemporary humanist defences against religious fundamentalism in the shadow of 9/11. In the end we never wrote the paper, but I’ve recently discovered, in an obscure folder on my hard disk, the notes that we exchanged at the start of the project. On reading them I was struck firstly by the remarkable quality of Nina’s contribution (which beautifully demonstrates her instinct for a historical approach to any problem), and secondly by regret that we didn’t persevere with the project and overcome our differences of approach. I’m therefore publishing both of our contributions here, starting with my notes: 

My First Try

If you believe George Bush, we are already engaged in a war that pits western values against an axis of evil forces led by the Islamic fundamentalists of Al Qaeda. Ignoring for the moment whether or not this is true, an immediate problem arises in defining what ‘western values’ actually are. Bush and Blair offer sound-bite-sized lists of ‘goods’ - democracy, the rule of law, freedom of conscience and of markets - but these do not easily cohere into an ideology that can be taught to children and, if necessary, would bolster a people’s will to defend them to the death.

Al Qaeda suffers from no such lack of focus – it is clear that it is fighting for the values of Salafi/Wahabite fundamentalist Islam, and equally clear that the enemy is the ‘Jewish-Crusader coalition’ that threatens those values. That they define their enemy using religious terminology is an instructive irony because the philosophy that comes closest describing the particular bundle of Western ‘goods’ is actually a wholly secular humanism. This essentially secular nature can be obscured, for example, by the loud proponents of Christian fundamentalism who are currently so influential on the US government, or by the European habit of calling social democracy ‘Christian Democracy’. However if we believe it’s necessary to defend, and even to spread, our common values, it’s crucial that we elaborate them in a more explicit form that stresses their secular nature.

This task could never be easy, but it’s made a hundredfold more difficult by the current state of popular and media culture which has taken a profoundly anti-humanist direction. Though the personal philosophy of most western consumers is still founded on a strong sense of individuality and personal sovereignty, this is beset on all sides by various contradictory anti-humanist critiques. For example:

• Free-Market fundamentalists stress the autonomous nature of markets, and that mere humans neither can (nor should fully) understand them or attempt to control them.

• Religious fundamentalists, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu or whatever, stress that humanity is sinful and cannot be redeemed in this world, only in the next.

• ‘Deep Green’ activists regard the human species as an aberrant one – a threat to the planet and to all the other species, whose activities must be severely curtailed (even eliminated in some of the most extreme versions).

• Post-modernist intellectuals stress the weakness and fallibility of humankind, the imperfection and unreliability of their communication, the darkness of their motives.

• Cyborg futurists stress the inadequate design of the human body and society and would like to replace its feeble bits with computers and bionic limbs, then fly us all off to colonise Mars.

It’s hard to deny that the Islamists are right to some extent when they identify weakness and decadence in western values - affluence has so diminished the struggle for everyday life in our countries that boredom and anxiety now figure larger than hunger and physical danger for many, perhaps most, people. This leaves them with vague feelings of dissatisfaction that they try to assuage by, for example, thrill-seeking through extreme sports, attempting to discover the sublime in Art, and pursuing various strains of self-improvement and ‘spirituality’ that remain purely personal and lack the force of a truly social ethic. Young people in particular feel this ethical emptiness and seek to fill it by taking up some critical stance – but typically it will be one based on those various anti-humanist positions summarized above.

What’s needed above all now is for someone to tell the secular humanist story with the same vigour and conviction that Al Qaeda tells the backward-looking story of Salafi Islam – with sufficient clarity that people when asked ‘what are you’ could without too much agonising reply ‘a humanist’.

What sort of Humanism?

Humanism is the philosophy that emphasises the importance, authority, powers and achievements of what we used to call the human race, but after Darwin we should call the human species. For the ancient Greeks it meant the study of society, politics and morals as opposed to logic, metaphysics and the cosmos; for the Renaissance it meant the sloughing off of medieval pietism to place humanity to the centre of interest (God remains prime creator but is no longer all-controlling); and since the scientific revolutions of the 19th century it has come to be applied to an atheist or agnostic, and more or less rationalist, philosophy that seeks to ground morality in the material world rather than divine authority. The British Humanist Association for example campaigns for the further secularisation of society and politics, and devises and promotes non-religious alternatives to the ceremonies of birth, adulthood, marriage and death.

This strain of humanism has to a large extent now been absorbed and overtaken by mainstream society and popular culture, but it has also proved to be inadequate in several important respects. Science is no longer held in such unequivocal respect as it was in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. The invention of nuclear weapons, environmental disasters, and a dawning of awareness that it can never totally eradicate diseases (cancer, AIDS, BSE/CJD) all sap any naïve belief in the inevitability of progress through science.

The growing knowledge that humans are not the wholly rational beings portrayed by Enlightenment thinkers, but are prey to hidden emotional and irrational forces has similarly sapped belief in the perfectibility of human nature through good nurture and education. The main defence mechanism that allows modern citizens to cope with these dark realizations is irony - always hovering close to its sibling cynicism - and such irony corrosively devours any wide-eyed homilies in favour of loving thy neighbour. It’s an enormous challenge, as Nietzsche first understood, to develop a humanism that can accept and transcend the knowledge of such limitations (and of course Nietzsche himself has been unfairly tainted by the misappropriation of his optimism for darker ends by the Nazis.)

Another problem for any traditional humanism is that it depends for much of its evidence on the achievements of classical ‘high culture’, whose appreciation was once widening but is now being stunted by a burgeoning but dumbing-down popular culture that’s continually being co-opted to serve market forces. Eminem puts more bums on seats than Shakespeare and that, for a market-fundamentalist, is the end of that. This leads to deep and crucial questions about elitism versus populism and propaganda versus entertainment that one can plausibly argue were, prior to September 11 2001, perhaps the most pressing that western society faced.

It’s possible to find fragments in the most unlikely places that point to what a new humanism might look like. Even a commercial Hollywood movie like the Coen brothers’ ‘Fargo’ can treat both dark and light sides of human society with a humour and wit that permits it to come down in favour of goodness without sounding preachy. Many writers too have found this tone of ‘non-illusioned humanism’: Isaac Babel, Joseph Roth, and supremely Chekhov, who uttered this little manifesto that is not a bad place to start from: "My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom: freedom from force and falseness in whatever form they express themselves”.

Dick Pountain – Wed 13th November 2002

Nina’s First Try

First Thoughts About Secular Humanism

1. Anthropologists concur in the view that groups of people (e.g. tribes) evolve their own moralities/self-images/worldviews. These are adapted to their environment (of course) and also to the particularities of homo sapiens.

2. We have neither the space or the expertise to investigate the variety of these. It is, however, probably worth noting that particular groups have perished because of not being able to adapt (for whatever reason) to exogenous or endogenous shocks. Exogenous: Europeans in the Americas with gunpowder and measles; endogenous: civil wars, feuds. It also worth noting that William H.McNeill observes that it is the ability of groups to recognise the need to and adapt to change which has conditioned their ability to survive.

3. The last epoch making change which peoples in Europe underwent was industrialisation beginning in second half of the 18th century and reaching its zenith ca. 1960, (if by zenith we mean the proportion of the population occupied in manufacturing). This change was epoch making because its necessities transformed the ways of life of the whole population (in a variety of ways). European peoples adapted to industrialisation by evolving and adapting institutions, moralities etc. Social democracy and Christian democracy were powerful means of adapting.

4. Western European Christianity (in contradistinction to the Byzantine orthodox Christianity and the middle east/north african variants), evolved from the 4th-5th century AD with a strong influence from Greco-Roman philosophy, (it is generally Augustine of Hippo, I think, who is credited with the innovation). This combination of Christianity/Greco-Roman philosophy is credited by historians (like Peter Gay and O'Neill) with providing the ground from which the Reformation and the Enlightenment then sprang. These two developments are important because they give rise to: a) the concept of the individual as a (N.B. not the) legitimate centre of consciousness; and b) the concept of reason as the principal determinant of judgement – of all kinds – scientific, aesthetic, political, moral. I think that one can take the development and dissemination of these two concepts as marking the boundaries between pre-modern and modern. (e.g. Kant's critiques of pure and applied reason; Locke's treatise on toleration; Luther's claims for the individual conscience).

5. There was a moment, no doubt, when philosophers and other intellectuals believed that reason would be sufficient glue to bind European peoples together. The early modern state (16th-17th century) was conceived as being of universal application. Early modern rulers and statecraft were hardly place-specific. Quite the contrary. They were part of the European-wide culture which had variants according to religion only. These variants (Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, etc.) can be viewed as non-qualitative, e.g. like the difference between social and Christian democracy.

6. However, the French Revolution showed that it was impossible to keep a European society together with merely the glue of reason. The evolution of modern national cultures begins with the revolutionary wars waged by France, and continued by Napoleon. As philosophers and intellectuals noted from 1789 onwards, it is the irrational elements of nationalism which make it so unpredictable and dangerous. Moreover, there was also a signficant element of nationalism in the American Revolution.

7. The essence of modern nationalism is its assertion that the particular Irish, Polish, French, Italian, Czech, English... way of seeing the world, doing things, justice system etc. is unique and qualitatively different than all others. Whilst in itself this assertion does not necessarily imply conflict with other nationalisms, it is often exclusive and therefore likely to precipitate conflict if not war at some time or other.

8. The events of 1933-45 had such a profound effect on western European societies that their nation-states have qualitatively diluted the nationalist components of their moralities/self-images/worldviews. It is likely that east central European societies will adopt the same course over the next half century.

9. Consequently, over the last half century, due to unforeseen circumstances, western European states have lost the two most potent sources of their moralities/self-images/worldviews – (a) the needs of an industrialised society for discipline, repetitive manual work, manual dexterity, minimum virtually universal levels of technical expertise, collective social organisation counterbalanced by habits of thrift, and respect for individual private property; and (b) the collective sense of unique nationhood with its particular cultural components (which, however, if empirically observed over western Europe as a whole were hardly unique or particular – being more or less evenly distributed). It is an historical accident, but poignant nonetheless, that the May Events in France in 1968 took place just as the national, industrialised conditions of European society were receding.

10. It is not surprising that western European societies have been beset by stress and strain. They have been faced with the need to adapt to qualitatively different and new conditions whose parameters are not yet clear. Nor is it yet clear whether western European societies will succeed in adapting.

11. It is relevant in this situation to re-assert the importance, indeed the centrality, of secular humanism for our morality/self-image/worldview. Though secular humanism certainly adapted well to the conditions of industrialised Europe and more or less co-existed with nationalism, its essential components emerged before either and do not depend upon them continuing.

12. Interestingly enough, the survival of secular humanism in western European societies today probably depends upon the ability of those philosophers/intellectuals/artists/politicians who are articulating it to make it more universal in its appeal. We need to be able to make it applicable to the large variety of societies, ethnicities, economies which exist today. This is not only because of global communications and economies, but also because of the increasing mobility of human beings and their own proclivity to move between states. In this sense, we are living in a world which is more similar to the western Europe of the early modern period, 16th- late 17th century.

13. Important new components of secular humanism need to be developed. This is because the conditions facing homo sapiens in the 21st century are, in the capitalist world, essentially different. These new components are: (a) the importance of situating individual sovereignty and sovereign will within a collective setting; and (b) the importance not merely of capital accumulation for future generations but also the prudent husbanding of natural resources for future generations; and (c) the need to construct a rational, prudent global state. These components are all contained within the earlier corpus of western European thought: (e.g. Kant's essay on perpetual peace). It is not a matter of invention, but rather of adaptation to change. And, of course, the biggest need of all: to adapt the successful modern state from nation to world. The first adaptation took place in the early modern period and then resulted in the nation-state (a concept entirely absent pre-1789).

14. At the individual, subjective level, the need to re-assert the individual's place in and responsibilities to the collective presents an interesting problem for consumerist cultures. In other cultures, e.g. rural Italy, southeast Asia etc., the difficulties are less severe.

15. I have not had time yet to address the problems of elite culture/elite formation and the relation between elite and the collective. I will tackle this next.

Nina Fishman – Sunday 10.11.02

Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen!

One of the more depressing trends of recent years has been the collapse of TV comedy, a field in which the UK once lead the world (think Monty Python, Blackadder, The Fast Show, Green Wing). It's not lack of volume but of quality and tone: ever since Little Britain the mental age of the comics has been following a roughly parabolic downward trajectory*. However rescue is at hand, and from the a unlikely direction - Horizon.

The much hyped episode What Is Reality? (shown on January 17th 2011) showed us a bunch of bleeding-edge particle physicists musing about what the universe really consists of, all of them in thrall to the now-over-familiar paradoxes generated by the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. We saw an Austrian gentleman with a magnificent beard perform the two-slit experiment yet again, and go into a swoon of confusion over "where is the photon now" that would have done credit to a three-card trickster in Oxford Street. It all got weirder and weirder, but in the phony way of those old Outer Limits programs of the '60s. Perhaps our 3D reality is actually a hologram pasted on the fence that surrounds the universe (I can't remember whether that was the one with the ponytail or not...) What Horizon really demonstrated wasn't so much the relationship between quantum theory and metaphysics as the relationship between TV commissioning editors and brainy men with ponytails. A million students in a million halls of residence passed the bong and gasped in awe.

Of course the highlight was another run through of the faintly ludicrous Many Worlds Hypothesis, in which every act of observation splits the universe so that both possibilities happen. This is the perfect physical underpinning for the spectacular consumer society: if you stare at the shirts in Ermenegildo Zegna's window, the universe splits into several worlds in each of which you're wearing a different one of them! Wow! There's another world in which the Coalition didn't win the election and isn't about to dismantle the National Health Service! Phew! The only problem is that our pathetic consciousness appears to remain stuck in just one of these worlds, though pharmacology has the potential to fix that once they legalise lysergic acid derivatives and tweak those molecules a bit.

I used to wonder when the physics community would finally dump the Copenhagen Interpretation and re-examine those wave models favoured by Einstein and Schrodinger. I now realise that can never happen because it would cut off their easy entrée into show business. 

* Peep Show is the exception that highlights the rule.