Saturday 4 December 2010

Veblen, Lasch, Debord: The 20th Century's Three Most Cogent Social Critics

Today is the first anniversary of the death of Nina Fishman, political historian, activist and a very dear friend of mine. Nina's personality and energy was a bonding force for a whole group of friends: through various campaigns, through numerous dinners at her home, Wigmore concerts and operas, and through the political Supper Club she inaugurated which continued successfully for over a decade. 

Nina loved politics, music, art, food and most of all people, which is to say that she was a humanist in the oldest and most generic sense of that term. That means, in short, she believed that despite the vast diversity of character and opinion, we have sufficient in common to be able to claim solidarity with all humans. Nina was not especially interested in that narrow and rather desiccated humanism that exists solely to combat religion and promote secularism (she was fairly relaxed about religion), nor was she much moved by a legalistic humanism that consists solely of identifying and defining human "rights". However she felt, as I do, with a great urgency that humanism in the current world is not merely moribund but actively under attack, and not just from religious fundamentalists but from many of those on the Left whose interest it should properly be to preserve it. That strain of Left theory which claims descent from Nietzsche and post-structuralist philosophy (Althusser, Derrida) declares itself to be anti-humanist, while certain strands of the libertarian Left go further into nihilistic Sadean misanthropy, conceived as somehow revolutionary. 

For a while we planned to write a paper together that would attempt to define a new style of humanism, purged of that Methodist earnestness whose musty odour permeates even the most secular of modern humanisms. And that was the only time Nina and I actually fell out. We were discussing the paper in the Lord Palmerston pub when I mentioned that I'd just read Adam Philips' "Darwins Worms" and was impressed by his prologue which lucidly expounded Freud's ideas about death, and in particular the central importance of the knowledge of its inevitability to human cultures. Nina exploded, vehemently denying the importance of fear of death and rejecting Freud and all his works, even the existence of an unconscious mind. Her humanism was founded on an older, more rationalistic and realist view of human nature, as espoused by Marx and by most socialists since. I could certainly sympathise with her distrust because Nina was born and raised in the USA in the 1950s, just when Freudianism was conquering liberal opinion and fuelling a newly-confident and intrusive advertising industry. Nevertheless, we never wrote that paper.

Freud, as commonly understood, undermined the notion of a common human nature by claiming that much of our behaviour is unconsciously determined and therefore beyond our control. I'm far from being an uncritical Freudian, but such objections as I have to psychoanalysis depend on facts and ideas that have emerged since Freud's time, and I believe there can be no going back before his insights (any more than economics could go back before Keynes or Marx). Freud himself was aware that his terminology – ego, id, libido, cathexis and so on – was a mythology, and he predicted that one day neurophysiology would advance to a point where such terms could be replaced by more scientific ones. We're almost at that day now, but research into affective neuroscience (the biochemical and neurological mechanism of emotions) suggests that the driving forces of our behaviour – our instincts, if you will – are more diverse than Freud could know, so that no theory based on only one or two conflicting instincts could be adequate.

I started researching my own paper on a new humanism, setting out from my favourite statement of faith, by Anton Chekhov: 

"My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom – freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves." 

 Chekhov claims a pair of negative human rights, the right not to be lied to and the right not to be brutalised, and the only positive right he proposes is to be allowed to flourish in the absence of those two evils, in the manner of classic liberalism. However Hegel and Marx showed us that human nature is socially and historically determined, and that therefore setting idealistic goals is not enough. You need to propose social institutions that might lead towards those goals. Nina believed, as I do, that the only form of social organisation that can ensure such rights is not liberalism but social democracy: a limited solidarity across class boundaries, without ultra-egalitarian illusions of total equality, and subject to constraint by electoral democracy. 


I tried to combine insights from modern affective neuroscience with key ideas from information and complexity theory, trying to shake out the idealist illusions inherited from German Romantic philosophy. I discovered the almost-ignored philosophical works of George Santayana, a trenchant critic of Romantic Egotism, who advocated a kind of post-humanism that fully recognises our natural limitations and unconscious motivations. I re-read Christopher Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism" (1974), a work more relevant today than when it was written – and marvelled at his prescience in predicting the rise of the cult of celebrity and the consequent erosion of community. Finally I rediscovered the work of Thorstein Veblen, that eccentric and radical economist who wrote "The Theory of the Leisure Class" and coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption". On mentioning him to Nina she brightly told me "Oh, my dad [the late Professor Les Fishman, Marxist economist] was very interested in Veblen, he contributed to a volume of essays on Veblen back in the 1950s". With the help of the indispensible Abebooks I located a lone copy of "Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal" (Cornell University 1958) and was astonished by the profundity of his ideas, briefly revisited by a few American Leftists in the 1950s and then dropped almost without trace. 

Veblen's theory, if you can penetrate his irritating style of delivery, is as quite as central to any analysis of modern consumer capitalism as is Lasch's Narcissism or Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle". It's a fundamentally anthropological and psychological theory of what he loosely called the "instincts" that underlie our economic behaviour. Veblen suggested that the invention of agriculture during the Stone Age 10,000 years ago precipitated not merely a division of labour between hunters and tillers, but lead gradually to a split in human nature itself into "predatory" and "workmanlike" instincts. He wasn't too concerned about the precise mechanism of this split and certainly didn't suggest that it was physical (like H.G. Wells' Morlocks and Eloi), nor genetically transmitted. Rather the division of labour lead to socio-economic hierarchy, to classes who lived without laboring on the surplus generated by others (as in Marx), which in turn stratified institutions including the institutions of child-rearing, which might provide a sufficient transmission route.

Hunters take what they want from nature through personal prowess and force: the "predatory instinct" becomes associated with superstition (luck) and ritual (propitiating the game spirits) thanks to the uncertainties of the hunt, hence also with sport and gambling and with pomp and pageantry (celebration of success). Eventually it becomes the mindset of aristocracies, monarchies and organised religions. 
Tillers on the other hand have to transform nature through toil in order to grow food crops, and they need to cooperate to do so. His "workmanlike" instinct therefore becomes associated not merely with routine tedious labour and cooperation rather than individual prowess, but with the observation of nature in order better to explain and hence exploit it – it eventually points toward medicine, engineering, industry and science. 

Veblen suggested that while this split runs between castes, classes and professions within each society (and to some extent between the genders too) it also runs within each individual psyche: both instincts are at work in all of us, with a different balance in different individuals, and they steer our decisions. He was careful not to moralise his "instincts" by branding one or the other good or bad, nor did he suggest that they're mutually exclusive. The predatory is also the playful, and hunters need craft in addition to prowess. In fact most human endeavours involve some degree of both behaviours, most obviously in the arts where some degree of craftsmanship is typically required for success, but where most artists are "predatory" in the sense that their living is uncertain and demands a constant "hunt" for patrons. Picasso and Jackson Pollock were as predatory as they were craftsmanlike. (Actually the movement away from craft values and toward conceptual art that’s typified the last 20 years could be seen as part of a larger, post-1960s movement back toward the predatory). But modern finance capital is the most obvious vector of the instinct of predation - banker/gamblers, on the prowl for profit.

Veblen never clearly discussed the relationship of these "instincts" to Freud's, neither did he bother to claim that they are of the same kind or depth. As with Freud, it's best to regard them as suggestive and fertile metaphors. From a neurophysiological viewpoint Veblen's instincts would constitute a different and orthogonal axis to Freud's life/death axis, and neither axis could be fundamental, both being complex composite effects of multiple emotion centres in the brain. What's more relevant to today's world is the economic result Veblen predicted these instincts would produce, which is where he departs drastically from Marx but looks rather closer to the bulls-eye. Veblen was a leading thinker of the Progressive Era in the USA, writing in 1899 at the time of Standard Oil, the Rockefellers and the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts. He predicted the eventual dominance of those wings of capitalism – finance (making money from money) and extractive industries like oil and coal – that are predatory in character. More pertinently still, he analysed the economics of display and ostentation that’s associated with wealth, celebrity and predation.

His concept of "conspicuous consumption" proposed a pricing mechanism wholly at odds with the notion of rational choice raised by Adam Smith and adopted almost unchanged by Marx. So-called "Veblen goods" consumed by the rich aren't priced as cheaply as possible but rather as expensively as possible to exclude the lower orders and act as signifiers of wealth. But Krug, Petrus, caviar, Patek Philippe, Rolls Royce don't merely signify the celebrity of their consumers, they actually confer it, and to make them cheaper would quite defeat their purpose. This style of pricing was confined to a more or less private elite for much of the 20th century, during which the mass-production culture pioneered by Henry Ford transformed the living standards of Western populations. However it returned in a big way in recent decades, during the economic bubbles spawned by the IT, media and financial industries. Think footballer's wives, Top Gear, the cult of Ferrari and Lamborghini.

The difference this time around is that, thanks largely to the confidence inculcated by three decades of de facto social democracy following WWII, a sizeable fraction of middle-class Western consumers now feel entitled to consume such Veblen goods too, and so our accommodating and inventive banking classes saw fit to provide them with endless credit with which to do so – in the process perhaps bankrupting the whole world economy. A Veblenian view of the contemporary world situation might counterpose these predatory innovators of finance – investment banks, hedge funds, private equity – to the workmanlike innovations of the technology sector – computers, internet and mobile communications. Or if you like, Goldman Sachs versus Google, AIG versus Apple. But of course in practice such protagonists need and collaborate with each other: the question is who gets the last say. Or viewed from a more global perspective, you might counterpose the predatory West, which manufactures less and less, to the workmanlike East which makes more and more (with a similar proviso about mutual interdependency).

It seems to me that Veblen's notion of the predatory is at least as rich as, and complementary to, Guy Debord's concept of the spectacular society and Christopher Lasch's narcissistic individualism. Debord's notion of The Spectacle was an extension of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, required by the vast expansion of the mass media and the coming of image as mass commodity. Published in Paris in 1967, his thesis, to condense it rather brutally, was that the worlds of capitalism and Soviet communism were converging toward similar systems in which advertising or propaganda colonize the very human imagination, producing an ahistorical world in which appearance dominates reality: everything authentic in human life is replaced by its representation so that citizens become spectators of their own lives, which are lived vicariously through a worship of celebrity and self-definition via brandnames. It wasn't a conspiracy theory, because although The Spectacle might serve the interests of capitalists and bureaucrats by absorbing dissent, they are as much mesmerised by it as everyone else.

Lasch's concept of narcissism overlaps in many ways with Debord's vision, though he was a more conservative figure than Debord. He believed that competitive individualism was once a strength of American society but that "in its decadence [it] has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self." Influenced by Freud, C. Wright Mills and Richard Hofstadter, Lasch saw changes in child-rearing practices during the 20th century as leading to the dominance of a new personality type, characterised by manipulative charm, pseudo-awareness of one's own condition, promiscuous pan-sexuality, fascination with oral sex, hypochondria, protective emotional shallowness, fear of dependence and commitment, inability to mourn, admiration for fame and celebrity and a dread of old age and death. The result is a proliferation of therapy and health movements that invade all aspects of life, along with a degradation of community and the healthy sort of sporting competition that he saw as a virtue. In Veblen's terms, Lasch was describing the gradual conquest of the predatory over the workmanlike instinct. Indeed all three men were talking about the same phenomenon - falling in love with our own images - but from different angles, the economic, the sociological and the psychological. They all recognised that our visual sense is coming to dominate all the others due to our all-pervasive mass media, so that in a curious way modern hi-tech society is succumbing to the age-old sin of idolatry.

However, as a critical method I believe that Veblen's theory has the advantage over the other two, because its twin poles render it capable of generating practical politics as well as social criticism. Puritanical campaigns against the consumption of commodities can gain little purchase either in the hedonistic West or the wannabe-hedonistic East, while refusal to participate in The Spectacle is a recipe for political impotence in the modern world, as Debord himself realised and acknowledged by dissolving the Situationist International in 1972. But a Veblenian analysis points toward concrete agitation in favour of an effective social democratic state that can regulate predatory financiers and maintain the necessary balance in favour of craft and public good, while also eschewing Chekhov's twin vices of violence and lies.

If this sounds reminiscent of the values of the non-revolutionary wing of the 1960s counter-culture, nothing could be further from the truth. It's becoming more and more clear that the counter-culture, with its promotion of hedonism, individualism and libertarianism was in practice a revolt against the bureaucratic social democracy of the post-war settlement, in both the USA and the UK. Its ultimate outcome, far from a proletarian revolution, was precisely the new "cool capitalism" that we've been living with for the last 30 years. If it was a revolution of sorts, it was against the tattered remains of the Protestant Work Ethic rather than against capitalism per se, easing the transition from a society based on making things to a society based on consuming things. Or in Veblen's terms, away from workmanship and toward predation. The orgiastic lifestyles of 1960s rock stars, massively enriched by burgeoning new electronic distribution channels, set the template for a get-rich-quick, spend-without-fear culture, soon to be amplified by the DotCom boom and the following property boom. (One fascinating irony is that the US libertarian Right, which gets so het up about the decline in traditional values wrought by the '60s "boomer" generation, is unable to accept that it's their beloved liberty that underlies this decline).

Veblen's theory also brightly illuminates that growing anti-humanism which so worried Nina. Current popular culture, along with certain strands of the far Left, has thrown in its lot with the predators rather the toilers. Graphic depiction of horror and violence has been a weapon of satire against the ruling classes since Goya and before, and when the Situationists lauded the works of De Sade and Lautreamont they were continuing a proud tradition of French anti-clericalism and épater les bourgeois – a romantic refusal of the complacency and prudence of 1950s affluent society. But their context was a continuing belief in the possibility of proletarian revolution. When that revolution failed to materialise, succeeding generations of sub-Situ and post-modernist social critics have been drawn deeper and deeper into the fantastic violence of those dark authors, and into a nihilistic rejection of capitalist society. Those masses who have failed to make the revolution are corrupted by commodity fetishism, addicted, zombified, yes let's say it, they are somewhat less than human.

The kitsch emotionalism of so much of current popular culture disgusts these critics to the extent that they recoil from empathy itself, retreating into wounded solipsism. Such a nihilistic anti-humanism can be sensed behind the novels of J.G. Ballard, James Ellroy, Michel Houellebecq, Tom McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis (several of whom I'll confess to having enjoyed) and scores of pierced post-punk pundits. It's equally visible in the evolution of ever-more explicit horror movies and computer games, often featuring zombies and vampires. George Romero, doyen of horror directors claims that he used zombies to "criticize real-world social ills – such as government ineptitude, bioengineering, slavery, greed and exploitation – while indulging our post-apocalyptic fantasies". But isn't it just as likely that young viewers actually see zombies as symbolising the brainwashed masses (of whom they're not themselves a part of course), or their parents' greedy generation, or even at a deeper level themselves as dangerous predators in the grip of uncontrollable lusts. Such nihilism has ramifications far beyond popular culture though: it's manifest in deadly form in those death cults of suicide bombing promoted by Islamist terror groups, which Ian Buruma has so ably analysed. Far from pointing to any kind of liberation, it points toward a new sort of fascism.

So what would a humanism that turns away from the predatory and favours life over death look like? It would have to rebuild solidarity between all those who are willing to reciprocate, regardless of race, class and religion. Applied to politics it would have to exploit such solidarity to tackle those urgent environmental threats that face the whole planet and therefore any prospects of continued human flourishing. However it couldn't do that by preaching any ascetic morality: on the contrary it should revel in the human craft that produces great art, music, food, wine, but with the intention of sharing such pleasures and educating about their existence, rather than flaunting them to exclude others and aggrandise one's own ego. For example it would resist the relentless degradation and emblandening influence of the fast food industry, in the manner of Italy's Slow Food movement.

It would refuse to employ lying as routine political practice (a vicious innovation from the Right since the 1970s that New Labour found itself unable to resist), and it would refuse to employ unilateral aggression even to achieve "progressive" ends (New Labour, Iraq) but confine itself to robust defence against international predators.
Very importantly, it would eschew the propagation of fear as a tool of social manipulation, a practice which has reached debilitating levels in recent decades. This vice is by no means confined to politicians, but on the contrary was pioneered by the advertising industry (think Domestos and germs), while in the computer industry it warrants its very own acronym, FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) - the stuff you spread about a competitor's product to slow them down until you can catch up.

It most certainly would be less bashful about regulating the worst excesses of predatory capitalism than either New Labour or the Obama administration, and it would support and subsidise employment in socially useful industries. It fact, applied to politics it would look a lot like the muscular social democracy advocated by James K. Galbraith in his 2008 book "The Predator State", which is the work that originally sent me scurrying back to re-read Thorstein Veblen. This quotation will give a flavour of its deeply unfashionable tone:

"You want higher wages. Raise them. You want more and better jobs. Create them. You want safer food, cleaner air, fewer carbon emissions. Pass laws and establish agencies to achieve this. Enforce the laws, staff the agencies, give them budgets and mandates… Politics may stand in the way, but economics does not. And there is nothing really to lose, except ‘free-market’ illusions."

We're much further from any such prospect today than at any time since 1997, when Blair and Brown had a mandate that might have allowed them to make a start on something of this sort. Unfortunately Blair was never any kind of social democrat and Brown never escaped the dark and depressive shadow of Thatcherism. It's a fair question whether such a vision is achievable at all, and perhaps the future is a slow descent into chaos, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth examining these ideas (universal suffrage must have once looked equally hopeless, but people carried on pursuing it anyway). Nina Fishman was too busy finishing her monumental biography of miners' leader Arthur Horner during the last year of her life to read Galbraith or Veblen (though she did read the first part of my manuscript and pronounced these ideas "useful", high praise from her). I bitterly regret that she is no longer among us to argue over these ideas, to stimulate and to organise in her inimitable way.

[Contribution towards a proposed festschrift for Nina Fishman (1946-2009)]

Friday 19 November 2010

Cat Out Of Bag

Lord Young did us all a favour by telling a bald truth about the current economic situation in his recent comments to the Daily Telegraph, where he claimed:

 "For the vast majority of people in the country today they have never had it so good ever since this recession – this so-called recession – started, because anybody, most people with a mortgage who were paying a lot of money each month, suddenly started paying very little each month. That could make three, four, five, six hundred pounds a month difference, free of tax. That is why the retail sales have kept very good all the way through."
This revealing revamp of Harold Macmillan's famous boast of 1957 infuriated David Cameron because it punches a hole right through his stealth strategy. The brutal truth that Young let out of the bag is that this is now indeed two nations: those who have jobs and own their homes, versus those who rent, are in low paid jobs or are not employed. This glaring inequality is not, as so many on the Left persist in believing, merely the legacy of that "Thatcherism" for which Lord Young was once a spokesman, but more so of New Labour's "intense relaxation" about income inequality.

We're not a nation split exactly in half - perhaps 66% live in Lord Young's "never so good" part while 33% languish outside it. But although Young's statement may be true of the current situation, with historically low interest rates, that doesn't mean we've reached a sustainable prosperity, any more than we had under Gordon Brown's credit boom. Take a look at the statistics for home ownership throughout Europe and the picture is blood-curdling. The countries with higher ownership than the UK are Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Hungary and Romania, all countries in desperate straits and hardly models we'd wish to copy. The countries with lower ownership include Germany, Holland, Sweden and France, all of which are in far better shape than us in almost every way. So just how good do we have it?

Young has indeed let the predatory cat out of the bag - he also admitted that Osborne lied about the severity of the deficit to protect the pound. Under a disguise of social liberalism this is a goverment of economic predation, intent on rolling back state expenditure to further the interests of the 66% at the expense of the 33%. From a utilitarian point of view - and that's the vote winning point of view nowadays - that might be seen as a rational course, but I doubt the 33% will see it that way. There may be a lot more fire extinguishers thrown from a lot more roofs before this is over. 

Friday 15 October 2010

The Enragés of the Right

Following a link from the Open Democracy website to a Roger Scruton article about "the political class" lead me to the American Spectator site, a truly fascinating expedition that I would never otherwise have made. Scruton's article started out fairly interesting, in a Weberian sort of way, but abruptly degenerated towards the end into a shameless pandering to the Tea Party public. But the really fascinating part was reading the comments, some of which verge on the deranged.

My first experience of America was in 1970, staying with friends on New York's upper west side, where they introduced me to two utterly crucial books - Norman Cohn's "The Pursuit of the Millenium" and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". Both books are more relevant today than when first published, but I fear that much today's audience is too dumbed-down to get much benefit from either. If you want empirical evidence that the paranoid style is now in the ascendant, the comments on American Spectator offer a mere nibble: there are thousands of websites with far stronger stuff, up to and including bomb-throwing fascism.

In a country where a principal health problem is obesity and where a significant slice of the world's energy reserves are consumed to drive air-conditioning, it's faintly surreal to read comments from citizens complaining that they are "unable to breath" because of the weight of Washington tyranny bearing down upon their backs. This hysterical exaggeration is of course metaphorical, but it's also suspiciously familiar. That's because it closely mirrors the overheated rhetoric of the Left in the 1960s, on which much of it is - consciously or not - based. It's both paranoid and millenarian, which makes reading those two books I mentioned more relevant than ever.

As I noted in a review of a compendium of neo-conservative essays a couple of years ago:

"The neocons are conspicuously more erudite and cosmopolitan than traditional right-wing thinkers and delight in head-to-head combat with liberal orthodoxies. [...] many of the essays share this same clarity, intensity and suave (even glib) assurance that was once a strength of writing from the Left, but has been notably absent from it in recent decades. These are not people out to conserve anything, but rather out to overthrow an existing order that they detest, only they've substituted the Declaration Of Independence for the Communist Manifesto. And as in older revolutionary tracts there's a certain reticence about real outcomes: jobs lost, people thrown off welfare or taken out by air-strikes. Beneath the muscular, hard-headed prose there lurks a thread of purest Idealism, and like all Idealisms it's destined to be brought low eventually by the diversity and perversity of human nature."

All I would change in that is perhaps to substitute Jacobins for Bolsheviks in that last comparison, which would then make Tea Partiers into the "sans-culottes", or perhaps the "taille-élastique-culottes", de nos jours.

Wednesday 13 October 2010

Chile Leads the Way?

The successful rescue of the trapped Chilean miners generated a most extraordinarily rich set of messages: technical, political-economic, historical, ideological, symbolic and simply dramatic. No one who watched TV coverage of the first breakthrough of the pilot shaft or the emergence of the first rescued miner from the Phoenix capsule could fail to be moved by stoic calm of the trapped miners nor the joy of the waiting relatives. The technical message is not unlike that of the first moon landing, that our technology, when applied with sufficient dedication and resolve can overcome the most extreme hostile environments.

The political-economic message is profoundly appropriate to our current world situation, namely that there's still a vital role for the State and that market forces mustn't be allowed always to prevail. It surely must have been more cost-effective for the mine's owners not even to search for those trapped by the collapse and simply to pay compensation to their relatives, but to my knowledge this was never even considered (the rescue costs will probably bankrupt the company). Circumstances created a human solidarity that overrode all considerations of price, a reminder that's particularly poignant in Chile, which under General Pinochet became a testbed for heartless Chicago-school monetarism. That the miners survived those first horrible foodless, lightless 17 days, and then 50 days of anguished waiting for the drilling to complete is also a remarkable tribute to their discipline and solidarity, a nostalgic reminder for us in de-industrialised Britain.

But of course there has to be a downside, and that's the religious aspect. The BBC 24 reporters covering the events were almost salivating over miner Sepulveda's talk about "meeting God and the Devil" in the mine, tripping over themselves to inform us that the miners in this part of Chile are deeply pious - in other words, eager to drown out all those truly positive messages with a superstitious narrative of divine intervention and miracles. This sort of creepy BBC God-bothering seems to me to be on the increase recently, though I suspect its underlying rationale is merely opportunistic tabloid sensationalism rather than any concerted attack on the secular status of the corporation.

Even so it's hard for me to shake off a feeling that this heroic rescue might mark a turning point back toward social-democratic sanity, and emergence from  a dark epoch that was inaugurated also in Chile by the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende's government.

Thursday 23 September 2010

Tea Party with Cable Guy

I haven't posted here for a while, largely because the world is getting too weird for rational commentary and I've been hiding out in the Appenines trying to pretend it doesn't exist. The Republican Party appears to have been taken over by ex-hippy, proto-fascist witches but no-one knows whether that will help or hinder it in the coming mid-term elections - that depends on what proportion of the Great American Public are proto-fascist ex-hippies.

In the UK it appears that there are only two people left standing with the cojones to say bad things about the business culture of the City and predatory finance capital - and one of them is Governor of the Bank of England! If either he or Vince Cable should fall under a bus over the next few weeks, a Kennedy-strength investigation and cover-up will be required....

Actually there are three people currently talking sense - David Marquand's article in the latest issue of Renewal is a very lucid account of where we're stuck. And for a glimpse of the absurd, Anthony Barnett's amusing piece about the Coalition's grooming habits is worth a read at Open Democracy

Saturday 12 June 2010

Sampling Reality

I've been writing a book, tentatively called "Mind Out Of Matter" which puts the case for a revived materialist philosophy and sociology, taking in the latest findings of neuroscience and information theory, together with some outside-the-mainstream ideas from philosophers such as Spinoza and Santayana. My goal is to help "legitimise" the emotions as essential, biological and inescapable components of reason - that is, to rescue them from being treated with suspicion by rationalists and fetishised by romantics. The whole work, in two parts, is still under revision, and I'm having a tough time finding a paper publisher given the book's uncategorizable nature. 



I've therefore decided to release the earlier part, which covers some new ideas about information theory and neurophyisiology, as a separate work via the web, free of charge, just to get the ideas out there. You can download this abridged work, called "Sampling Reality" under a Creative Commons licence, from Scribd here.

Sunday 6 June 2010

An Algebra of Xenophobia

I start from the paradoxical axiom, that:

    "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who believe there's only one kind of people in the world".
   
The proposition is then that I belong to both kinds.
   
OK, it's a variation on a very old logician's joke, but playing with it for a while can illuminate a few political truths. People of the second kind might be humanists who believe that we are all of the same species and all have the same rights, regardless of skin colour, religion, culture and so on. The people who wrote the UN Charter of Human Rights were believers of  this sort (but so also were the Jacobins). However people of the second kind might equally be religious or secular pessimists who believe that all humans without exception are greedy, violent, egotistical, thoroughly bad lots: they long for the end of the world or the extinction of our species like a few Deep Greens or extreme Protestant sects.

In short, people of the second kind are either nice people or nasty people, who both have a fixed view of human nature, that everyone is basically like themselves. In political terms both positions could be characterised as "adolescent", and both lead inevitably toward forcing everyone to fit your view of human nature: nice people want everyone to be nice, and legislate appropriately; nasty people know everyone is nasty and punish severely.    

So what about people of the first kind, who believe there are two kinds of people in the world? Do they think these kinds  are "us" and "them". No, that's too simple and would require far more than two kinds. People of this first kind know very well that not everyone is like themselves. If they're nice people they know that, unlike themselves, many people hate others on grounds of skin colour, religion, nationality, sexuality, political views, wealth and so on.  They may pursue explanations of why people become this way, in terms of psychology, emotional development, fear, insecurity, bad upbringing and so on. But that's far too many "thems" to fit my axiom. If on the other hand they're nasty people, they know that the world also contains nice people (whom they believe to be deluded).

Both these positions, the first of which might be called "liberal" and the second "conservative", have "fallen" in the original Christian sense of that word: they've been ejected from any utopias that would require everyone to be like themselves and they accept the fact of difference. However they still legislate and punish more or less like the second kind, in the interest of maintaining balance and order.

No, my first kind actually refers people who are prepared to live at peace with the fact that not everyone is like themselves, versus people who experience that as a problem to be solved. The former position means living with many things you abhor and knowing there are many things about which you can do nothing. This position might be called "realist", "pluralist", or "grown up". A sad fact about the way the world has turned out is that this position doesn't really offer much help in formulating legislation, or choosing whom to punish.

And so from algebra to the real world: given Ed Ball's admission yesterday that New Labour "got it wrong over immigration", has the Labour Party moved from "adolescent" to "fallen", or from "fallen" to "grown up"? How could we tell? Will it last? Is it cause for celebration or for mourning? I'm afraid I can't help you with that one...

Tuesday 25 May 2010

To Avoid Confusion

It's come to my attention, thanks to the wonder of Google, that there's another site called Caustic Comments out there on the interweb, and what's more it's a fundamentalist Protestant site connected with Dr Ian Paisley. Now I don't intend to change the name of my blog, but to avoid any confusion, mine is the one that's just as rude about Protestants as Catholics. No Popery (or potpourri)! John Knox was a numpty!

Sunday 23 May 2010

Koan for Cocker

A throw-away line of Jarvis Cocker's in a Guardian interview, "I would like to believe in an afterlife; it makes things more palatable. But I'm not banking on it" struck me as neatly encoding a fundamental linguistic/philosophical truth. Take Cocker's observation and replace the word "afterlife" with anything at all and the sentence retains its sense: 

I would like to believe in an orange bluebell.
I would like to believe in an effective mayor of London.
I would like to believe in intelligent life on another planet.
I would like to believe in a free market. 
I would like to believe in a Lib/Lab coalition.

We're all free to believe in any of these things, and we would all be wise not to "bank" (unfortunate word perhaps) on their existence. Precisely because there is no afterlife IT DOESN'T MATTER IN THE END, or to put it another way IT'S ALL MATTER IN THE END. 

Wednesday 19 May 2010

Cool Rulers?

"The Blair government has embarked on a more radical program of reform of British institutions than many expected, but it is a program that seeks to cut out  dead wood from both the left and the right; welfare dependency as well as hereditary peers, entrenched anti-business attitudes as well as social exclusion. To the extent that the New Labour project involves demolishing the legacy of World War Two and the post-war consensus, Cool might seem to be an appropriate ‘branding’ for the party. Certainly the Tories appear to think so, and their choice of a new spin-doctor  suggests that the main priority for Tory strategists is not currently to produce vote-winning policies, but to rebrand  themselves as the ‘Naturally Cool Party’. This is not quite as daft as it sounds, since a Tory party with softened social policies might be able to attack New Labour from a libertarian direction - perhaps even by promising to legalise drugs, though we wish lots of luck to the person who first tries that out on the ladies of the Tory conference."
I wrote those words a over decade ago in "Cool Rules" (Reaktion Books, 2000), the book I wrote with the late David Robins. We'd decided to write the book because Tony Blair was at the height of his popularity and the media were full of banal drivel about Cool Britannia: we wanted to point out that on our understanding of the phenomenon of Cool, it was profoundly antithetical to Blair's (and indeed Old Labour's) deeply moralistic project. At that time, when the Tory party was still in the hands of frothing, thwarted Thatcherites, it felt quite daring to suggest that the party might one day outflank Labour on the libertarian wing, but it has come to pass - though not entirely voluntarily, and requiring the assistance of the Lib Dems. (And those ladies of the Tory conference still have to be faced...) This morning I watched Theresa May, the new Home Secretary, on TV news addressing the Police Federation's conference in Bournemouth, and waited in vain for the usual Law 'n Order rhetoric to come pouring out. On the contrary she sounded admirably reasonable and in many respects, yes, to the libertarian left of recent Labour Home Secretaries. 

We consulted many other writers and theorists when we were writing "Cool Rules", and one of those who most influenced our conclusions was Mark Lilla,  Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, New York, via an article in the New York Review of Books (14th May 1998) called "A Tale of Two Reactions". Lilla pointed out a curious state of affairs in the USA whereby the generation who grew up in the 1960s were turning out to be right-wing economically but socially liberal, a combination that American politics at that time was not really capable of dealing with. He posed this as:
"...a question for which neither Tocqueville, nor Marx, nor Weber has prepared us: What principle in the American creed has simultaneously made possible these seemingly contradictory revolutions? How have our notions of equality and individualism been transformed to support a morally lax yet economically successful capitalist society?"
We, obviously, proposed that the attitude we were calling Cool was that glue Lilla was looking for to stick these contradictory revolutions together. Now in the latest New York Review ( 27th May 2010) Lilla has revisited this problem, in a scintillating article called "The Tea Party Jacobins", in which he analyses the mentality of the new US populist Right. You really should try to read the whole of this article if possible, as it is the most lucid account I've found yet of the terrible danger facing Western democracies. He sees the Tea Party/Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck/Fox News axis as a symptom of a complete loss of trust in government in the USA, so profound that it threatens to render the country ungovernable (one only has to look across the Mexican border to see the worst case scenario):
"A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.
Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob."
The article is actually a review of five recent books on the US Right, including ones by Glenn Beck and Max Blumenthal. Lilla concludes thus:
"If either Beck or Blumenthal is right about the new populism, then it’s not worth taking seriously. My own view is that we need to take it even more seriously than they do; we need to see it as a manifestation of deeper social and even psychological changes that the country has undergone in the past half-century. Quite apart from the movement’s effect on the balance of party power, which should be short-lived, it has given us a new political type: the antipolitical Jacobin. The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers. [...]

Survey after survey confirms that trust in government is dissolving in all advanced democratic societies, and for the same reason: as voters have become more autonomous, less attracted to parties and familiar ideologies, it has become harder for political institutions to represent them collectively. This is not a peculiarity of the United States and no one party or scandal is to blame. Representative democracy is a tricky system; it must first give citizens voice as individuals, and then echo their collective voice back to them in policies they approve of. That is getting harder today because the mediating ideas and institutions we have traditionally relied on to make this work are collapsing."
 I share Lilla's sense of urgency about this problem, but I'm perhaps less anxious than he is because I've just witnessed a remarkably mature and dignified transfer of power in our own democratic system. We are not nearly so deep in the mire yet as the US, but who knows whether that will remain true after five years of serious austerity?

Monday 17 May 2010

Left for Dead

I don't believe that the LibDem/Conservative coalition is a sham, and that Cameron will shortly cast off his mask and emerge as a blood-thirsty tyrant. The bad news is that even so, next week's package of emergency cuts will mark the final demise of the British Left.

We have just lived through a once in a lifetime opportunity for the Left, with neo-liberalism revealed as completely bankrupt, banks and "market forces" universally detested and a feeling in the air that structural change  was finally possible. Yet the Left has failed so comprehensively to grasp this opportunity that the Right's agenda of devastating cuts predominantly loaded onto the public sector has prevailed. Everyone talks as if the deficit is the only important problem, that immediate cuts are necessary. I feel desperately sorry for the BA cabin staff who are set to be the first victims. Any sort of halfway sensible Left could have told them that now is not the time for a showdown, but instead they've been allowed to wander like helpless children into Willy Wonka's elephant trap.

The reason for these failures is not hard to relate, New Labour's incapacitating infatuation with neo-liberal economics which persisted right up until the end and prevented them from saying or doing any of the things that might have effected change - like a Tobin Tax on finance, using its ownership of several huge banks as a battering ram, aggressively threatening the barrow-boys of the markets with default instead of rolling over to them.

Labour will elect a new leader, and he or she may or may not press more radical policies onto the party, but it's too late, because the British public will never forgive the party for flunking this one-off opportunity. As the welfare state is demolished in a gradual and utterly civilised manner over the next five or ten years, they will not be turning back to Labour.

Sunday 16 May 2010

Beckenstein

The most amusing episode of the post-election limbo days was that spat between Alistair Campbell and Adam Boulton of Sky News. Who'd have thought that I'd ever be rooting for Alistair Campbell to pick a fist fight... and win it. That Peter Capaldi would definitely have clocked him. The less amusing side of the affair is that it made me wonder whether Sky News is revving itself up to become a Fox News for the UK. 

Coalition looks like it might prevent the Tory Right from fulfilling its revenge fantasies, so it would be quite convenient for them to have a malign goblin chattering from the sidelines whenever any LibDem-tainted compromise comes before parliament.  I'm sure they're constructing a Glenn Beck replica somewhere in an attic, perhaps using stem cells from Norman Tebbit and Play Dough. Just need to wait for a thunderstorm... Igor, fetch the jump leads. 

Saturday 24 April 2010

The Vatican's Travails

I recently finished Henri Lefebvre's "Critique of Everyday Life", the 1991 Michel Trebitsch translation of which has just been republished in three paperback volumes by Verso. I'd been aware of this work's reputation since the '60s when it was a major influence on Guy Debord, but had never until now read it, and I was quite bowled over. Parts of it read badly now, as overly-pious Marxist rhetoric (it was first published in 1947) but there are other parts that display a brilliance unmatched by any current social critic. Most surprising of all is the lucid and poetic prose in which much of it's written, and nowhere more than in the odd essay that concludes Vol 1 called "Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside". In it Lefebvre describes his relationship to the Catholicism of his youth, provoked by a visit to a small country church. You really should read it all, but I'm quoting a few of the more powerful passages here as my modest contribution to the current debate over the behaviour of certain Catholic priests:
Should a sacrilege be committed (ah! the stories they tell in their pious conversations and their parish newspapers, of the host bleeding and speaking, of sudden deaths and unexpected conversions . . .), should a sacrilege be committed, the world might collapse into nothingness! The firmament, that solid vault which supports the stars, might crumble. Fearful angels would trump forth the end of Time. For if God does not accomplish all that He is perfectly capable of as cosmic Father, vain, vindictive Creator, Lord of heaven, Master of good and evil, Throne of glory built upon azure, gold and banknotes, it is because He is also the Son, controlling Himself, checking His Justice and His Wrath, and showing Himself to be equally and at one and the same time very good, very mild, very brotherly towards the little human families which crawl along in this vale of tears. [...]

How naïve people were to believe that they could get rid of you with a few sacrilegious protests. How holy men must have laughed at the ‘freethinkers’ (while pretending to be deeply shocked and making sure to retaliate at the earliest opportunity). Now I can see the fearful depths, the fearful reality of human alienation! O Holy Church, for centuries you have tapped and accumulated every illusion, every fiction, every vain hope, every frustration. You have garnered them in your houses like some precious harvest, and each generation, each era, each age of man adds something new to them. And now before my very eyes I see the terrors of human childhood, the worries of adolescence, the hopes and misgivings which greet adulthood, even the terrors and despair of old age, for it costs you nothing to say that the evening of the world is nigh and that Man is already old and will perish without realizing his potential!

There are men who withdraw slightly from life so as to control it, using skills amassed by over more than twenty centuries of experience. And precisely because they have sacrificed themselves to the utmost, these men appear to be sacred; many of them believe they are sacred, and perhaps in a sense some of them are indeed sacred. From the newborn babe’s first breath to the dying man’s last sigh they are there, ministering to questioning children, frightened virgins and tormented adolescents, to the anxieties of the destitute and even to the sufferings of the powerful; whenever man experiences a moment of weakness, there they are. For their old, ever-more-skilful tactics, for the ‘spiritual’ body of the Church, everything is grist to the mill - including doubts and heresies, and even attacks. [...]

You have served Roman emperors, feudal lords, absolute monarchs, a triumphant bourgeoisie. You were always on the side of the strongest (not without some craftily reticent manoeuvres to prove how independent and superior you were), but by appearing to stand up for the weak you ended up being the strongest of all. And now you have the gall to take up the cause of Man, promising to turn yesterday’s slave into tomorrow’s master! No. The trick is too obvious, and above all the task is too great. Until now the Holy Church has always been able to digest everything, but for the first time her mighty stomach may prove not strong enough. And she knows it. And she is afraid. [...]

Anyone who criticizes ‘Catholic dogmatism’ in the name of freethinking and independent individuality is being ridiculously naïve. This movement taps human weakness and helplessness; to be absolutely exact, it ‘capitalizes’ on them [...]

Past religion and past moral doctrines (which deep down are always religious) tell us what we must do (according to them) in an everyday life which seems all the more derelict, uncertain and humiliated for the fact that the life of the mind, of knowledge, of art, of the State, is getting more and more vast, more ‘elevated’ and more ritualized.
picture: dick_pountain on Flickr

Monday 19 April 2010

Ghost in the Party Machine

I just read a thought-provoking review of Roman Polanski's "The Ghost" by Michael Wood in the LRB. Wood didn't think it was a  great movie, though he believes as I do that Polanski is a great director. What set me to thinking were two throwaway lines in his review: the first was that "Polanski has said that he is not interested in politics, and I believe him"; the second, about the movie's principal character Adam Lang (a Tony Blair figure) was that unlike everyone else he feels at home on the grim island because "he is a politician, he is indifferent to places: he brings himself along, so what more could he want?"

This triggered queries as to what politics means nowadays, and what it means not to be interested in it. Perhaps there are now three totally disjoint populations in the land:

1) those who are not interested in politics, which means in practice that they are only interested at worst in themselves, or at best in their families and friends too. Private citizens.
2) politicians who are only interested in themselves.
3) a smallish minority, including a very few politicians, who are interested in politics. This means that they cannot help but see the larger picture, beyond their own immediate family interests, and that they might even do or support things that are not in their own immediate interest. They risk attack by ordinary private citizens for being hopeless idealists or even fanatics.

I'm also in the middle of reviewing a book called "Cool Capitalism" by Jim McGuigan (Pluto Press), whose basic conclusion supports precisely this picture of modern life: we've entered a fourth, perhaps final, perhaps perpetual phase of capitalism in which the private life of consumption has expelled politics from everyday life and relegated it to a niche for professionals (who unfortunately can't be trusted).

Friday 16 April 2010

Inequality Drives You Mad

Having watched the Election 2010 debate on TV last night, there remains no doubt in my mind that all three of the major UK parties are still wedded to economically illiterate neo-liberal policies - from which they can only be briefly and reluctantly budged, and to which they will revert as soon as the threat of economic armageddon recedes far enough for them to turn on the feel-good rhetoric again. In an extract from his new book "Ill Fares the Land" in the latest New York Review of Books, Tony Judt accuses the Left of a total failure of nerve on both sides of the Atlantic:
"Social democrats today are defensive and apologetic. Critics who claim that the European model is too expensive or economically inefficient have been allowed to pass unchallenged. And yet, the welfare state is as popular as ever with its beneficiaries: nowhere in Europe is there a constituency for abolishing public health services, ending free or subsidized education, or reducing public provision of transport and other essential services."   
The whole article is well worth reading (like everything Judt writes), but what struck me most forcibly was a sequence of graphs that accompany the piece. Assuming that you can read a graph, these will tell you everything you need to know about the evil effects of free-market dogma on crime, general and mental health, with the USA wallowing deep down in the mud and the UK poised to join them. Read them and weep:

Saturday 10 April 2010

Election 2010

My initial enthusiasm for New Labour after they drubbed the Tories in 1997 didn't last very long: it suffered a deep wound over the Bernie Ecclestone affair and then a took a fatal head shot from Blair's promotion of the Iraq invasion (I don't take the attitude that he was Bush's poodle: he pushed rather than followed Bush). Since then I've remained in a state of quiet fury as the party proved entirely incapable or unwilling to throw off the ideological mantle of Thatcherism that it donned in order to be returned to power.

Again, I don't take the orthodox Left line that New Labour entirely wasted its term in office. As I ride the 29 bus, free thanks to my Freedom Pass, past the eye-catching green tower of the new University College Hospital it would be deeply dishonest to claim that New Labour wasted all my tax pounds. No, what has infuriated me for the last 10 years is that while spending on worthwhile projects like these, the party has absolutely refused to properly explain its belief in the positive power of the state, to promote social democratic values, and exploit such projects to extend and entrench its support in the country. New Labour still suffers from an almost psychotic dread of the social democrat label, at a time when those free market nutters who deploy the label as a term of abuse are themselves utterly discredited, having in effect looted and crippled the world economy.

I'm a radical social democrat, pretty much along Scandinavian lines: I believe in a mixed economy in which those things most efficiently delivered by the state (medicine, heavy infrastructure etc) are left to the state, everything else is left to private enterprise, but  regulation is applied to mitigate the most unfair outcomes and to maintain public safety. Free marketeers are right, by and large, about the unintended and undesirable effects of intervening in markets - ergo, if some good like medical care (or even housing) is too important to leave to market forces then it must be removed in part or whole from the market.  

I also believe in shrinking the influence of finance capital with a Tobin Tax along with many equally draconian measures. I've read all the free marketeers' arguments about why social democracy is no longer affordable and I don't accept any of them. Social democracy is the only form of social organisation that might just get us through terrible times ahead, and we must make it affordable.

Big business and conservative politicians gave up the practice of free markets years ago in favour of looting and pillaging ("bonuses" being the respectable term) but they still find the rhetoric politically useful. Barely a year after the world narrowly escaped total financial meltdown (dead ATM machines, empty supermarket shelves, fighting in the streets over dead cat carcasses) these morons are already attacking the Keynesian rescue measures that Alistair Darling - one of the less hapless New Labour figures - applied to save it, and it would be a disaster were their allies to be returned to power. None of the three main parties at this election is standing on a social democratic platform but what I do know is that for all its face-lifts the Conservative Party remains the sworn enemy of social democracy. I'll be voting Labour without enthusiasm as I live in a safe Labour seat, and I urge everyone to vote for the party - Labour, Lib Dem, Plaid or whoever - that stands most chance of stopping Cameron in their seat.

Sunday 4 April 2010

Cox on the Box

I'm feeling an addict's first twinges of withdrawal now that Brian Cox's excellent BBC 2 science series Wonders of the Solar System has finished. I'll admit that I didn't warm to the series as soon as I should have, put off by press descriptions of Cox as the "Rock-Star Professor". His Jamie-Oliver-like elfin cuteness put my back up at first sight too, portending a torrent of Disney-fied gush and wonder, and I expected that the content would be a rehash of every other astronomy series of the past 20 years. I couldn't have been more wrong. 


Slowly but surely throughout the series Cox used the existence of the other bodies in our solar system as a framework on which to integrate all the latest findings in terrestrial geology, geography and biology, but in such a subtle fashion that you hardly noticed him doing it. He did plenty of whizzing around the world in helicopters, jet fighters and submarines to keep the Top Gear crowd watching, but never for the thrills alone, always to show us how thin the blue layer of our atmosphere is, the enormous gap ripped by a post-Ice Age flood into the Scablands of Washington State, or the sulphur-eating inhabitants of a deep ocean smoker. Cox had sufficient taste to let magnificent film of the real planet do the talking instead of indulging the now-obligatory expensive CGI effects. 


Gradually two themes emerged: first of all a tutorial in energetics, and depending upon that a tutorial in the conditions that support life. Physics tells us that nothing  can happen without a source of energy to drive it, how to identify and measure such sources of energy, and once one has grasped its principles energetic analysis wonderfully clarifies judgment about the real world - you can accept or dismiss all kinds of stories about phenomena on energetic grounds alone. It's an aspect of science that's poorly taught in schools and of which most lay people (including politicians) are almost entirely ignorant, with disastrous consequences for the quality of debate about, for example, climate change and transport policy. 


Cox has a natural gift for making energetics sound so easy that it didn't even feel like a lesson, as he enthused over the sulphur volcanoes of Io, the ice-geysers of Enceladus and the way that Mars is now dead because, in effect, its battery ran out. In the last episode of the series it all came together in the most satisfying way as Cox inquired into the probability of life in other parts of the solar system, deploying a variety of extreme environments on Earth - from deep ocean to glacier to Atacama Desert - as clues. All a long way from the slightly creepy search for intelligent life performed by SETI, this was, er, down to earth biology concerning the possibility of slime bacteria living in caves under the Martian surface. 


Cox showed us the way life evolved on our planet and might be doing so on others in a fully cosmic context, with no agonising about whether evolution is a fact: he took that for granted, as intelligent lifeforms were able to do back in the 1960s before evangelical cretinism threw sand in the works. In the last minutes of the program he gave the most unaffected and touching defence of a higher humanism that I've heard for years: we're likely to be the most complex lifeform that has so far emerged and that now makes us responsible toward other life-forms rather than in dominion over them as believers in Divine Providence would have it. Fitting compensation for all the dumbed-down Horizons we've suffered recently, and well worth the licence fee.  

Friday 19 March 2010

In Memoriam: Charlie Gillett

Charlie Gillett, a great musicologist, DJ and evangelist for grown-up popular music has died at the age of 68 of a rare auto-immune disorder. I knew Charlie briefly in the early 1970s when we both wrote for Bob Houston's short-lived but excellent music magazine Cream - we shared a taste for obscure rockabilly, free jazz and US soul music of the "golden age" (before the accursed Philly Sound).  His book on rhythm and blues, The Sound of The City is still the definitive explanation of the roots of the post-war revolution in popular music. 
But Charlie meant more still to me for his radio show "Honky Tonk" which ran every Sunday from 1972 through 1978 on  BBC Radio London. I looked forward to that show throughout the week, and the sheer quality and originality of his choices helped to keep me sane during the depressing and disillusioned days of the early '70s. I first heard Elvis Costello and Ian Dury thanks to Charlie, whose role as a pre-punk prophet has yet to be fully acknowledged. As we plunge into another of those cyclic infantilisations of the popular music scene, his absence will be hard to bear. Even in these days of instant access to all the music through Spotify or iTunes, we still need people of taste to dig up the gems, and Charlie was one of the best.

Sunday 7 March 2010

Photo Shopping

By chance I caught a BBC Radio 4 programme that I'd never heard of called "You and Yours" yesterday (listen here) and it covered the most extraordinary story. The seaside town of Whitley Bay, Northumbria, has a blighted town-centre typical of the area in which 49 shops are currently derelict. However an enterprising estate agent there had the brilliant idea of pasting a life-sized photograph of a luxury delicatessen over one of the shop windows, and it's been so well received that others will soon follow. People say it makes the place less depressing, and it may even slow the crumbling of property prices.

You could hardly make this story up - the "Society of the Spectacle" reveals its actuality, and completely without embarassment. Perhaps we should carry on further down this road, pasting photographs of palaces and hospitals onto derelict warehouse, and all of us going around in smiling Johnny Depp masks. Modern digital photo technologies should keep such a scheme within even the tight public expenditure budgets hinted at by Cameron and Osborne.

Sunday 28 February 2010

Facing Up to the Falklands

In today's Observer Nick Cohen offers a lucid and dignified confession (here) that most of the British Left, himself included, were wrong in 1982 to oppose Thatcher's military expedition to liberate the Falkland Islands from Argentine invasion. He goes on to discuss the US neocons' support for Argentina in that conflict, and explains clearly how the Left bamboozled itself with an anti-imperialist rhetoric that had more to do with visceral hatred of Thatcher than with common sense (what was the Argentine junta doing if not imperialism?) The Left has never recovered from the political damage it suffered then.

The main point of his article is that the current spat over Falklands oil is unlikely to lead to war, but that if it does the Left should support Britain, and that he believes that this time the Obama administration would too. I applaud this display of realism but must confess to one nagging suspicion. His entirely-correct line of reasoning vis a vis the Falklands campaign could by extension be brought to bear to justify support for the Iraq War, which Cohen has never renounced. It's at this point one needs to bring up the vital distinction between idealism and pragmatism. The same moral argument does indeed apply to removing Saddam Hussein as did to removing Galtieri's troops from the Falklands. However the pragmatic realities on the ground were entirely different, namely:

1) The level of military force involved was orders of magnitude less: Britain could and did achieve a rapid victory on its own using a small taskforce (which is not to diminish the courage and effort of those who had to fight there). 

2) The territory was tiny, homogeneously British, there were no adversary national groups present who needed to be kept apart, and no new nation needed to be constructed after victory.

3)  They didn't completely demolish the infrastructure of the Falklands during the fighting because there barely was any in that thinly-populated, bleak moorland sheep-rearing community. 

4) It wasn't necessary to lie to Parliament or to the British public to justify launching the Falklands campaign because they both supported it already.

In fact this comparison might make an excellent textbook example of the limits of idealism in real politics.

Sunday 21 February 2010

Predator: the Next Installment

In a previous post here I expressed my admiration for James K Galbraith's 2008 book "The Predator State", in which the US economist describes the way a cabal of politicians, bankers, businessmen, bent union officials and downright gangsters hijacked the social democratic state institutions created in the aftermath of World War II. The levers that Roosevelt's New Deal invented with which to regulate the economy, in these corrupt hands became shovels with with to loot the public purse.


When I reviewed this book for Political Quarterly (Volume 80 Issue 3, pp443-5, July 2009), for an instant I wondered whether its argument represents some sort of paranoid conspiracy theory, perhaps because I'd just been reading James Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy. However Galbraith's sober and lucid arguments, illustrated with impeccably sourced statistics, soon convinced me otherwise. Events since then (only a year ago) have further reinforced that conviction, that Galbraith is the only commentator who comes close to grasping what is actually going.


First we had our own little scandal here in the UK - over MPs fiddling their expenses - which as I opined in that same earlier post is pretty small beer as these affairs go. Then this January came the "devastating" ruling of the US Supreme Court which threw out all limits on corporate and union political spending, enabling those with unlimited funds to buy political influence with impunity (see Ronald Dworkin's summary of this affair in the New York Review).


In the aftermath of the bank collapses, credit crunch and recession that many sensible people believed must lead to more regulation and responsible government, it's becoming clear that nothing of the sort is going to happen: the predators are still firmly entrenched, still cocky, still confident that nothing that Obama (still less New Labour) is going to do will hurt them.


In the latest London Review of Books there's a thought-provoking review by Peter Mair of Martin Bell's book on the MPs expenses scandal, "A Very British Revolution". Mair uses Bell's book as a launching pad for an extended essay on the moral degeneration of the political classes, a topic which he's well placed to observe living as he does in Berlusconi's Italy and being of Irish descent. He quotes plenty of examples of outright corruption from around the world, with figures, to which public opinion has become more or less blind - he deploys the corruption rankings compiled by Transparency International to amusing effect throughout (New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore are the least corrupt, the UK squats at number 17, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are the bottom-feeders at 71). Charles Haughey's Fianna Fail rule in Ireland was in effect the rule of the Irish building industry; Gerhard Schröder passed straight from Germany's chancellor to the board of a Gazprom subsidiary, three months after signing a deal with Putin for a gas pipeline; the whole Russian Gazprom/Yukos business might provide a juicy future plot for Ellroy, were he not so provincially American.  


Mair draws attention to some of the more familiar factors - the steep decline in prestige of the political profession in recent decades, and the *relative* underpayment of MPs, not relative to the rest of us but to the super-rich financiers and businessmen with whom they eat, drink and negotiate every day. He points up the growth of populist parties throughout Europe, as citizens recoil from the political process altogether. But he is more interested in structural factors, like the cost of running a political party which is no longer a mass party, and hence no longer commands an army of unpaid canvassers and organizers. All those pollsters, marketing gurus and consultants charge predatory fees for their advice, and the advice typically costs millions more to implement (eg. TV advert time).


He claims that wealthy individuals and corporations have tired of corrupting existing political parties and seek to "cut out the middle-man" by setting up parties of their own. Berlusconi is the paradigm case: he set up Forza Italia as an extension of his media empire having tired of suborning Craxi's socialist party throughout the 1980s. Organised crime sponsors political parties throughout the former-soviet republics and, particularly the cocaine syndicates, in Latin America.


The lesson to be learned from all this is that our political classes have almost seceded from society at large to become a parasitic caste, but the solution is not to be found in preaching anarchism or anti-state libertarianism. Technology makes modern industrial economies extremely productive but also extremely fragile: we constantly live barely 72 hours away from the chaos of a Haiti, should our electricity, water and food distribution systems be disrupted in any significant way (we saw an inkling of this during the tanker driver's strike, when submerged panic was visible in Tony Blair's eyes on the evening news). Not only can we not do without the state, but the state is the only institution that can defend us against unfettered predation by the hard men - assuming, that is, we can wake up and wrest it back from the predators who are eating it from within.


The fact that Gordon Brown has recently started to remember some of the vocabulary of social democracy forces me to say, against all previous experience and my better judgment, that the next election matters a lot and that a Labour/Lib Dem coalition might be the least disastrous result... In the meantime, please, please read "The Predator State".

Sunday 14 February 2010

meshes

This is my favourite among the photographs I've taken so far this year. As always it was the light - strong winter sun, low in the sky - that made it happen, rather than anything that I or the camera did.

It appears here only to test the blog-posting feature of Flickr, not because I propose to use this blog as a gallery


meshes, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.

GILT BY ASSOCIATION

I don’t have any special credentials as a commentator on geopolitics, but occasionally, like now, I feel obliged to have a stab at it. The c...