Spring

The sun is warm, the air cool. Bird song mingles with the sound of chainsaws on the breeze. And the quince trees are in bloom.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
    Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

Obedience and its discontents

Having spent nearly thirty years in what is often known as 'second-chance adult education', though sometimes I wondered about whether the nominal first chance ever really existed, Suzanne Moore's column rang a bell. She wrote,

I just hated school. Education policy is made by those who loved it, and this is a fundamental mistake. People who never regarded school as a moronic prison full of inane rules should not be in charge of them. This is why, instead of looking to the future, the current fashion in education is to look only backwards. 

Of course Moore was an adult returner herself. I wonder if she had a tutor who dished out the same big speech that I used to give to those often brilliant school failures that turned up to my classes. All of them had fragile self-confidence when it came to education; so I used to point out to them that failure was an intelligent response to schools, that they reward conformism rather than talent and that only the unimaginative do well. Maybe someone did, it may also have been a convenient excuse, or perhaps it is just screamingly obvious as you begin to succeed despite all those institutions having done their best to tell you that you were worthless, but she certainly thinks the same, writing here that,

Intelligence, the ability to connect and create ideas, the so-called thinking outside the box – these things are hardly likely when the box itself is idolised.

Though it was a good device for dealing with insecurities, it is a bit of a truism. All organisations require a degree of conformism to function. I know some great teachers who worked in tough areas and all would emphasise the importance of a functioning, structured institution to enabling kids to achieve. What then matters is less the matter of conformism, but the quality and nature of the institution to which people are asked to conform. Football fans will have had the perfect example this weekend. Scholes or Balotelli?

But this still leaves us with a problem, just where are those institutions that harness talent and foster creativity? And even more so, how are they to survive the bureaucratic stranglehold and funding regimes that constrict modern education as tightly as an Edwardian corset? Because now we are looking at the forward march of managerialism, the triumph of jargon-laden orthodoxy and self-perpetuating power structures. Everywhere there is a demand for subservience and the idea of management as a process of command and obedience is ubiquitous. Not only that, in a class society that is becoming more rigid, limited economic mobility is only realistically possible through a narrow conformism.

The sheer mediocrity of the managerial elites demands the same of us all. It certainly infects politics. Moore again:

Our political class is indeed the pinnacle of smug regurgitation. Many are the products of the very best education, and what do they desire? Only to replicate what they know, not to transform the world. As our access to information widens, our education system could open up. Instead, it narrows itself to certainties that anyone with half a brain would have questioned a long time ago. Go to school, get a good job, don't ask what it's for. Freedom does not come from thinking by rote. Whatever they tell you.

So now I look back on a teaching career slowly coming towards its end, a career record unblemished by a single promotion, and comfort myself that it is is only dull conformists who climb the ladder. That is my excuse. And I'm sticking to it.

Back to Greece

I flew in to Volos last Sunday before promptly falling victim to a stomach bug and I am only just regaining normality. And the scene in Volos city centre when I arrived was certainly normal. Warm spring sunshine, the Argonafton bustling, the restaurants full.

The crisis? People still enjoy themselves and, though austerity is casting its net widely, we are not all in it together. Funny how this is the one net where the bigger the fish, the easier it is to wriggle free.

A retired pharmacist brought economics back to the headlines in Athens by blowing his brains out near the national parliament building. And Jon Henley's reflections on the suicide highlight the impact of austerity on living standards.

Certainly, many Greeks are in desperate straits. In its fifth straight year of recession, Greece has seen its GDP shrink by a crushing 17%. Unemployment currently stands at 21%. Wages have fallen by a third since 2009 and are set to slide a further 15% in the next three years. Pensions, as Christoulas dramatically demonstrated, have been slashed.
The austerity measures imposed by the IMF and EU as a condition of Greece's successive bailouts have seen one in 11 people in greater Athens reduced to using soup kitchens daily, stocks of half the country's most prescribed medicines running out.
On my trip I met a secondary school teacher whose pay, which stood at €1,200 a month in 2010 and was cut to €850 last year, is set to fall to €600 from next month (his rent and bills remain €400), and a child psychologist who has not been paid at all since December; she and her two small sons have had to move in with her mother.

Whilst policy makers seem to ignore the architecture of monetary union, others are certainly raising the question of the future of the Euro. This year's Wolfson Prize for economics is being awarded on the basis of the best plan to break up the Eurozone. In a profile by Zoe Williams, the BBC economics editor, Stephanie Flanders, put the significance of the Euro crisis succinctly:

It's more than a disaster, I think it's a tragedy. It was quite an ambitious project, which had pros and cons, but it was basically mis-sold to everybody. So the Germans were sold it as a way of spreading a German approach to economics, and German stability, across the eurozone; but they were told that it would come without any obligations on them, there would be no bailouts. At the same time, the others were told this was a quick ticket to German stability, and they would get low interest rates and low inflation, and they weren't told: there's one catch – you have to be as competitive as Germany for ever. And if you do have any problems, all the usual tools you'd use to get out of them won't be available to you. For many of these countries, the implication is years more austerity, which has a big sign on it saying, 'Brought to you by the euro.'

I suppose the clearest message against economic orthodoxy, even more poignant given Christoulas' suicide, came from South Korea. I have often argued that individual human liberty cannot be extended to its fullest in anything other than conditions of the maximum possible security.  Ha-Joon Chang makes the same point, but implicitly asks what the point of an economy is in the first place. If it is to make people happy, then we are on the wrong road.

The sad tale of my country should serve as a salutary warning to Britain and other European countries that are embarking on major cuts to welfare. They believe that such cuts will reduce budget deficits and make their economies more productive by making people compete more vigorously. However, the Korean story shows that insecurity actually makes people less, not more, productive, and also desperately unhappy. Surely, that is not what they want.

***

And finally ...

The bit that took me most by surprise was reading that Stephanie Flanders is the daughter of Michael Flanders, one half of the comic song partnership, Flanders and Swann. You will have to be of a certain age to remember them, but they were part of the background music of my childhood. So to continue with the Greek theme, what better to finish on than with their version of To Kokoraki.

Today is ...

... National Cleavage Day. In the true spirit of equal opportunities, I think that us blokes should be allowed to join in too.

Lest we forget

"Bradford Spring"? A sick joke.

Two nice places

The sun shone on Hull as I was there for a couple of days this week, seeing old friends and missing many more whom I would have loved to have seen.

Not all was well. As the Hull Daily Mail reports, a major adult education programme, the one I used to run, is facing closure. One of our students commented,

"I passionately believe the university and the chances it can offer should be for everybody, not just for the few."

She is right and all the staff thought likewise. I shared quite a few drinks last night with some very able, committed and downright frustrated people.

Even with this poignant loss, Hull is still a lovely place. And it is beginning to flaunt itself a bit.  When I first went there it marked its heritage with the fish pavement - a set of plaques in the pavement with engravings of fish on them to lead people on a guided walk around the sites of the old fishing industry. Now there are iconic buildings such as The Deep, innovative ones like ARC, the Museums Quarter and recently the promotion of Philip Larkin, with a fine statue at the station and slate plates with some verses of his poetry set in the station concourse. This last is rather ironic; if Hull now celebrates Larkin, Larkin did anything but celebrate Hull.

The great virtue of the beautification of the city is that it has not been accompanied by gentrification. The place remains resolutely down-to-earth and a joy to visit.

And tomorrow I am on my way to Greece again, where the problems facing Hull are nothing as to the economic crisis there. Yet, in contrast to the apocalyptic reportage with their projection of Mad Max scenarios around the streets of Athens, Jon Henley continues to tell of the consequent growth of social solidarity in the face of adversity, rather than the social breakdown being predicted by the dystopian pessimists.

There is, among many Greeks, still intense anger at what they are living through, as well as almost complete disillusionment with politicians, not to say politics. But in Choupis's words, many are "moving beyond anger": instead of lashing out, coming together.
In Volos, a waiter in the taverna by the ferry terminal, told me that "in the years of cheap money and easy credit, we just lost sight of what matters, you know? It's sad that it's taken a crisis to do it, but we're rediscovering our values."

Watch his video report here.

All of which suggests that Thomas Hobbes is not always the best guide to human behaviour, even if the outcome of the crisis is far from clear. And nice places remain nice places, despite the worst efforts of unimpressive governing elites to try and ruin them.

Three on Greece

First up is a longish piece in the London Review of Books. It has carries the stamp of LRB fashionable pesimism, although there is, of course, much to be pessimistic about. John Marakis looks at the political causes of the Greek crisis, laments the loss of sovereignty and charts the impact of austerity being imposed by the 'troika' of lenders. With elections looming he concludes:

A coalition of the same parties in parliament rubber-stamps the measures the troika demands while proposing to compete for a ‘fresh mandate’ in elections planned for April. Recent opinion polls show that more than 60 per cent of the electorate wish a plague on both their houses. The choice could hardly be less appealing: vote for the same crew, or don’t vote at all – an incitement to violence if ever there was one.

Then here comes the optimists, this in a review in the Financial Times of a new documentary by two young Greek film makers, Krisis. They are absolutely clear about the social impact of the crisis, but then they see some hope.

“There is not a single conversation I had with a person who didn’t see the bright side,” said Katsaounis. “Greece has been through a lot of shit. Compared to the second world war, the civil war, the dictatorship, this is a bump in the road.” 

Finally, the realists.  Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu write about the impact of the partial Greek default on the financial system and reckon that it has been minimal. They conclude that the all-pervading apocalyptic prognosis of total financial collapse which would be the result of any policy that didn't impoverish the Greek people to avoid default was not analysis, but special pleading by those who stood to lose as a consequence of their bad investments. And this capture of the policy making elites by the financial ones is deemed to be one of the reasons why the EU leaders have "mismanaged their way into a deep crisis".  They conclude,

The Greek default has turned out to be the proverbial dog that didn’t bark. The lesson for Europe – and for the US – is clear: it is time to stop listening to what banks say, and start focusing on what they do. We must re-evaluate the distorted political economy of the financial sector, before the excessive power of the few imposes even larger costs on everyone else.

All three are worth reading in full.

Choosing to learn

What annoys me about the new system for funding higher education in England is not so much the proposals themselves, regressive though they are, it is the hysterical misconceptions of some of the opposition. The latest is in the line is this piece, which says that:

"Student choice is a myth, and a dangerous one at that."

His tortuous argument concludes with this decidedly strange statement:

... the emphasis on student choice is actually immoral. It loads upon immature participants (note the assumption of immaturity - all students are not young and not all young students are immature) all the responsibility and risks of making the wrong choice, a choice that is hard to unravel once made. Surely it is the academic community that should take the responsibility for ensuring that whatever and wherever a student wishes to study (er, isn't this a choice?), they will receive a worthwhile higher education.

What world is he living in? The best people to tell you if a course is crap or not are the students. They are quite capable of judgement. Should it really be this mythical 'academic community' that directs the poor innocents and tells them that what they think is piss poor is actually the best that can possibly be dreamt up by these fine minds? And hasn't he noticed that universities have always been in a market, which might explain why they spend so much on big marketing departments? Every time an applicant fills in a UCAS form, they are making a choice. Every course with options invites students to make a choice. Student choice is, and has always been, integral to higher education.

Of course total customer sovereignty would be crazy - after all, customers are frequently wrong - but so is an authoritarian diktat. The best education has always been a mutualist exchange. Yet he hits the nail on the head when he writes about the risk of making a wrong choice, before moving on to continue bludgeoning his thumb.

Because this is where the real damage is being done, second chance learning. You cannot prevent people making a choice that is wrong for them at the time, or one that may turn out to have been wrong later in life. But by removing teaching grant and putting the full burden of funding on fees alone, the cost threshold for returning to do something different has been raised for those who find themselves ineligible for government loan funding, whilst institutions have no incentive to offer anything other than the orthodox.

The result is that second chance learning has collapsed other than through employer sponsorship, as have broader university missions like the engagement of local communities through adult education and subsidised short courses. Any free market allows for experimentation and learning through mistakes - 'those cornflakes were disgusting', 'that builder is a cowboy', 'I am never using that garage again' - choosing the wrong subject at the wrong time is common. The ability to rectify that mistake is now much more costly and, for many, prohibitively so.

The new funding system is a mess. At the heart of its incoherence is a narrow concept of what a university is for. Locked into an orthodox view of the student as a school leaver taking a full-time degree, the possibilities of a more imaginative and flexible vision of universities as centres of lifelong learning has been lost. And, amongst the self-serving wringing of academic hands, that argument is seldom heard.

Anarchy

But where Anarchist practice really triumphs is in the course of everyday life among common people who would not be able to endure their dreadful struggle for existence if they did not engage in spontaneous mutual aid, putting aside differences and conflicts of interest. When one of them falls ill, other poor people take in his children, feeding them, sharing the meagre sustenance of the week, seeking to make ends meet by doubling their hours of work. A sort of communism is instituted among neighbors through lending, in which there is a constant coming and going of household implements and provisions. Poverty unites the unfortunate in a fraternal league. Together they are hungry; together they are satisfied …

A miniscule society that is anarchistic and truly humane is thus created, even though everything in the larger world seems to be in league to prevent its being born – laws, regulations, bad examples, and public immorality.

Elisée Reclus (1894)

Papadopoulos, who spent 17 years abroad with MSF and returned to her native Greece three years ago, sees hope among the rubble. "What keeps me going is an increasingly strong sense of solidarity among the Greek people," she said. "Donations to MSF, for example, have of course gone down with the crisis, but donors keep giving, they remain active."

She sees a refreshing new phenomenon of self-organisation and social action. "In the past year of this crisis I have seen really encouraging, really exciting things happening – people are seeing the power of organising themselves. We have to support them."

 Jon Henley, this from the latest in a series of illuminating reports on the social impact of the crisis in Greece.

Here is just one example of why Greece is still a great place and why you should go there and spend your money, despite all the negativity in the press. But it is also a reminder that, whilst the financial markets are settling into the warm glow of complacency with the conclusion of the latest deal, the crisis is far from over and that none of the major economic contradictions have been addressed. Even though EU leaders think that they have successfully quarantined Greece (a policy that is the antithesis of solidarity), Portugal, Italy, Spain and Ireland are waiting in the shadows and even the Netherlands can't meet the terms of the extraordinarily restrictive fiscal rules that they so assiduously helped to impose. There is no resolution, events are merely pausing for breath.

Cat blogging

If in doubt, fall back on cats.

Visit the web site here.  There is an interview here as well.

Full fat blogging

Here is a post from Norm that I thought I couldn't fault, until ... the link.

Hummus is indeed divine, but Waitrose 'reduced fat houmous' (sic)?  For a man of a certain shape with a profile to maintain, an inbuilt distrust of the words 'reduced fat' is to be expected. But when that fat is provided solely by olive oil and crushed sesame seeds, even the virtuous must side with the stout.

If you want really addictive, totally scrumptious hummus, make your own. It is incredibly easy and all the quantities can be varied according to taste. This is how I do it.

Use dried chick peas, rinse and soak overnight. Half a packet will make a huge bowl of the glorious stuff, enough for a family of addicts. Drain and rinse the chick peas and then you can either simmer them for a couple of hours in salted water, or do what I do and use a pressure cooker so that they only take twenty minutes to be nice and soft, but not mushy. I suppose you can cut corners with tinned chick peas, but they aren't as nice and I would sulk.

This is the important bit. Don't throw away the cooking liquid. You are going to use some for blending.

Use a blender (you can be authentic if you like and spend god knows how long beating them up in a pestle and mortar, but only if you are mad, precious or a columnist for a posh paper).

First, put two or three large peeled cloves of garlic in the blender (vary to taste but NEVER omit), add the juice of a lemon (again this can be half a lemon for a milder flavour or even two if you like that sharp lemony tang), pour in a good quantity of quality olive oil. Blend until the garlic has disintegrated. Spoon in some tahini - again vary according to taste - a dessert spoon or a tablespoon full, though don't overdo it. A good tip is to stir the tahini first so that any of the oil that has separated out is mixed back in with the sesame pulp. I then give it another whizz in the blender.

Now for the crucial bit. Add some of the chick peas with a little of the cooking water and blend with the oil, garlic and lemon, preferably on a low setting (I like mine coarse not smooth). This is the trick. If it is too sloppy add more chick peas to thicken it, if it is too solid add more cooking water. Continue until you have blended the lot, then you can throw the rest of the cooking water away. Beware, you can thin down hummus easily, but you can't thicken it up again if you have run out of chick peas. It doesn't take a lot of water to turn it into a thin, liquid mess. That is why you do it in stages.

Spoon it into a bowl and give it a good stir with a fork so that everything is evenly mixed, cover and set aside for a bit for the flavours to merge.

To serve, pour over more olive oil so that there is a layer of it on the surface, sprinkle on a little paprika and decorate with lemon wedges. Get yourself some pitta bread, plain flat bread or a nice, fresh baked white loaf and dig in (OK spoon some on your plate if you insist on being refined).

Continue until sated, in this case it means when you have had too much, lie back, close your eyes and think of Nigella Lawson. Bliss.

Sheffield spring

Not just a beautiful day, but another step on the revival of Sheffield Eagles, now playing out of both the Don Valley Stadium and Bramall Lane. Sadly, the latest step was taken at the expense of Swinton. This promotion lark is not going to be easy.

A tribute

I meant to post this a few weeks ago but forgot, though I don't know how. So in a slow blogging week, I thought I would put up this heart-rending tribute. Here is Star Turn on 45 Pints performing as the inimitable Whitley Houston.

For good or ill?

Norm has put up a link to a review of a new book on William Wilberforce and has commented on Wilberforce's evangelical Christianity, pointing out that:

He doesn't sound like providing much evidence for the proposition that the effects of religion are thoroughly bad. I wonder if there might be something wrong with that proposition.

I have written before that I agree with Norm that there is sufficient empirical evidence to question any notion that religion is necessarily a force for evil, however, Wilberforce is a great example of the double-edged-sword of high minded religiosity.  On the one hand we have his leadership of the campaign against the slave trade, for which he is rightly famous, even if he was no enemy of wage slavery at home. On the other, we have his role in founding, in 1802, one of the nastiest organisations of the early nineteenth century, one that was a direct emanation of his evangelical beliefs, The Society for the Suppression of Vice (SSV).

Wilberforce had previously spoken in favour of legislation against adultery, which he saw as being "of much more importance than any question about peace and war" and was the prime mover behind George III issuing a proclamation against vice in 1787, becoming vice-president of the resulting, and wholly ineffective, Proclamation Society. The SSV was more active and was known mainly for its network of spies reporting people for trading on Sundays (as well as a corruption scandal), leading to a string of prosecutions of shopkeepers and publicans. The Society's activists also targeted the book trade, looking for salacious popular literature. The aim was to remove the temptations open to the working class to use their one free day for pleasure instead of religious observance.

I think that the most pernicious activity of the Society was its determination to suppress free speech and freedom of thought in religion. As a result of its actions, the radical secularist, Richard Carlile, ended up spending a total of nine years in prison. In 1819, after being attacked by the SSV, Carlile was convicted of the crime of blasphemy for re-publishing Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. He was sentenced to three years, extended to six, as he could not pay the additional fine of £1,500. He was not alone, others were prosecuted, including eight of his shop-workers.

So we are left with a far more complex picture of the legacy of Wilberforce's Christianity. His religious beliefs led him both to oppose slavery and to directly champion deeply illiberal and oppressive causes. It was as if Martin Luther King and Rick Santorum were the same person. And this is the problem for any historian not willing to embrace ambiguity. Whilst religion has been a cause of discord, violence and mass murder, it has inspired acts of courage and virtue. I suppose much depends on whether the religious pick out from the morass of conflicting doctrines the morals that compel acts of justice and compassion, or whether they cleave to identity politics and self-righteousness, seeing religion to be a dogma to be imposed on others. The problem with Wilberforce is that he did both.

UPDATE:

See the comments section below. The author of Wilberforce: Family and Friends, Anne Stott, has pointed out that Wilberforce was not the founder of the SSV. She has suggested the following as the most authoritative source on the founding of the Society:
M. D. J. Roberts, 'The Society for the Suppression of Vice and its Early Critics, 1802-1812', Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 159-76.

Corruption

More on Greece. One long-running scandal is coming to an end. A settlement is in sight after the exposure of bribery to gain contracts by a company based in a nation whose head of state has just been forced to resign due to corruption. Yes, we are talking about Germany.

The company is Siemens and its actions in Greece are said the have cost the country some €2 billion. For a brief summary see here and here. A proposed settlement has been reported though not finalised.

Kathimerini daily said the accord would include cash, a pledge to invest in crisis-hit Greece, a settlement of unpaid Greek bills worth 80 million euros and the provision of technology know-how.

As the current Greek crisis unfolds, there is a dominant narrative that is based on a morality play of sin and virtue. The Greeks play the role of the profligate Mediterranean sinners whilst the Germans are thrifty, industrious models of virtue. Human relations are not like this, neither are economic systems. Moralistic, and frankly racist, discourses do nothing to help the people of any beleaguered nation. The Siemens crisis opens a small crack in the edifice and gives us a glimpse of a less simplistic world. It may not be that significant in the context of the crisis, but, after the battering the reputation of Greece has taken, Greeks can be forgiven for wallowing in a sentiment with a fine German name - schadenfreude.

If ...

... Britain were Greece

Kalo mina.

Ranting the night away

Peter Morici explaining why William Hague was talking "crap" about Greece.



Whilst the Cheshire Cat has a good old go at much greater length here.

Thanks to Harry Barnes for the sound clip

Science and anti-science

As part of my current research I have been reading about the popular working class campaign against compulsory vaccination for smallpox in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today we would see it as a moral panic of the kind stirred up over MMR. It would be easy to see the campaign as little more than an historical curiosity and a reflection of popular ignorance, especially given the successful eradication of this fatal and disfiguring disease. But we have to beware of anachronism; in the nineteenth century there were rational grounds for opposition. True there were propagandistic scare stories and the tendency of campaigners to claim that most infant mortality was down to vaccination. However, the practice of vaccination was different, consisting of the insertion of lymph in a wound created with a lancet and using arm-to-arm vaccination, both of which had the potential for cross infection and carried risks in their own right. With no understanding of the working of the immune system, the procedure was based on observation rather than explanation, it was open to objection and criticism in the light the of common, though wrong, medical assumptions of the day.

But this was not all. There were political reasons for resistance as well. This was mainly due to opposition to compulsion. Libertarian sentiment was strong in Victorian Britain, the state was mistrusted as a hostile instrument class rule, the accumulation of fines for non compliance was crippling and the campaign eventually wrung a conscientious objection provision out of the government that began to defuse the opposition. If the campaign was to show one thing, it was that co-option rather than compulsion was necessary for an effective public health policy.

The other main reason for opposition was a distrust of the medical profession as a vested interest that gained financially from the state enforcement of vaccination. Victorian and Edwardian attitudes to the medical profession were profoundly suspicious. Not only were doctors seen as the partners of an oppressive state, they were thought to be malevolent practitioners of dubious remedies and gruesome practices. Popular preference was for folk medicine and quack cures, again not as irrational a choice given the state of medical knowledge of the time, though still ineffective. Reading on, I was struck by how this attitude has persisted, even today when medical knowledge has been transformed. And this same Victorian sentiment is at the heart of a modern, and politically potent, anti-science movement that is growing, paradoxically, at a time when scientific knowledge is securely empirically grounded after more than a century of research and technological progress.

At the heart of anti-science is distrust, particularly of experts (the word is frequently enclosed within scare quotes), with all the the nineteenth century prejudices manifesting themselves. History is repeating itself as farce, certainly, but one tinged with tragedy.

Though this sentiment has persisted in relatively harmless, if exasperating, ways with New Age lunacies and those depressing promoters of 'ancient wisdoms' on the fringes of the Green movement, it is now being used with increasing success by wealthy and powerful interests. It is one of the extraordinary phenomena of our times that people who become multi-millionaires by selling bogus 'therapies' that are not only completely ineffective, but can also be positively dangerous, are more trusted by some than the modern medical profession. As this superb report makes clear, pseudo-science, like HIV denial, kills.

The same happens with climate change denial where the result of sixty years of careful scientific research is being challenged by an elaborate fiction. As is well documented, even more so since the story about leaked documents from the Heartlands Institute broke, this fiction is being maintained by lavish funding from major corporations. This is not surprising. What is frankly astonishing is that they are getting away with pretending that modestly paid academics are the vested interest that have to be challenged, not big business. This campaign is so successful that climate scientists now regularly receive hate mail, personal threats and attacks on their professional standing. Fear is seeping in and, unless this is vigorously challenged, may begin to close down free discussion.

At the same time, religious fundamentalism is not content with its increasingly violent culture wars and profession of offence, it is following the same tactics as the climate deniers to spread doubt about evolution. Creationism is on the march and trying to gain a place within school curricula, though thankfully the resistance to this is strong.

Part of the problem is that anti-science has appropriated the language of radicals. Yet, this time, whilst portraying themselves as courageous iconoclasts speaking truth to power in a determined attempt to advance human knowledge, we have wealthy and powerful interests speaking lies to an increasingly bewildered truth in pursuit of their own profits. This is not popular resistance, it is the manipulation of sentiment by wealthy, powerful and power seeking interests. Posing as sceptics, they seek to replace the open debate of science with dogma. They speak with an authoritarian voice.

Of course they know what they are doing, this is a highly professional campaign. In a world built on the division of labour, the main thing that binds us together is trust, trust in the expertise of others. The exercise that is being carried out by anti-science is an attempt to transfer trust from one group of people to another in the pursuit of profit and power.

The quack healer, the climate change denier, the creationist are all like the cowboy builder who comes round to your house, sucks air between his teeth and then shakes his head sadly whilst criticising everyone else for not knowing what they were doing. Flattering you for your wisdom in finding him, he gives you a lower quote though always seems to find a way to say that because of unforeseen difficulties it will cost a little bit more than he first thought. Of course he will be found out when the work begins to fall apart, but by then he has your money. And when you try and chase him up, he can't be found. Although your trust has gone, so has he.

This coalition exploits our fears, promotes doubt where there is none and pretends to champion the ordinary person against 'the system' that, in reality, is not their enemy. It works by undermining trust and promoting ignorance. A sentiment that was the reflection of popular concerns in the nineteenth century has been transformed in the twenty-first into an instrument to persuade people to support causes that will enrich others at their expense.

So aids patients die, thinking that they have done something clever by coming off their medication, global warming continues, whilst climate scientists are harried by obsessives, and reason dies a little until we have to face reality. And genuine alternatives, the ones that we need so desperately, are sidelined as Victorian fears, rational enough in their day, are resurrected as profitable wishful thinking in a world that needs truth. We should not abandon genuine scepticism or questioning, after all that is the cornerstone of science itself, but there are times that we need to remember that 'experts' are called experts simply because they are.

Attitude

A great, angry piece by Suzanne Moore picks up on the assumptions about work and unemployment being promoted by the insufferably earnest Ian Duncan Smith (aka IDS - or in a moment of supreme lunacy when he was briefly a disastrous leader of the Conservative Party, "the quiet man").

...right now we have an elite telling lazy scroungers to buck up. Yes, clean toilets, pick cabbages, move towns, sit in call-centre barns, smile enough to make Mary Portas types think you care. In short, deliver the service, that those who have never served, demand. Know your place.

I guess IDS knew his place at Sandhurst just as I once knew mine. Until I realised that most menial work leads to more menial work. The idea that this is the stepping stone is as much of a fantasy as The X Factor. The stepping stone is education. That's what makes you free, not work.

In each previous period of large-scale unemployment we saw a rapid growth in enrolment in adult education. Now, the service is decimated and, probably due to the contradictions and confusions in the new funding regime for higher education, there is a sharp decline in applications to universities from mature students. Without an opportunity for second (or even third, fourth or fifth) chance education, what hope is there other than a life drifting from crap job to crap job?

Adult education was, amongst so many other things, an engine for social mobility and, if you are into supply-side economics, by helping to produce a skilled, critical and articulate workforce could be seen as a driver of economic growth. But here is the problem. Articulate? Critical? In a managerialist workplace? Oh no we can't be having that. Much better to send them to that nice multi-millionaire who has been stuffed with large wads of government cash for ... well not a lot it now seems. She gives them what they really need; servility training. After all, servility is the new assertiveness.

Beauty

I love my Kindle, but somehow Amazon's web site just doesn't have the same appeal as these - twenty of the most beautiful bookshops in the world.

Ancient

Modern

And Greek

One reason why the book will always be with us.

Thanks to Mieke

Sexy music

Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy was a fitting climax to Friday's BBC Philharmonic concert. It's finale, an orgasmic orchestral crescendo, accompanied by the the thundering of the Bridgewater Hall's organ, left one emotionally spent.

This is especially so as it followed the languorous sensuality of Claude Debussy's Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un Faune, based on Mallarmé's erotic and savage poem*.

Of stifling heat that suffocates the morning
Save from my flute, no waters murmuring

I adore you, wrath of virgins - fierce delight
Of the sacred burden's writhing naked flight
From the fiery lightning of my lips that flash
With the secret terror of the thirsting flesh

The concert was recorded and will be broadcast on Radio 3. There is no date yet; listen out for it. The earth might move for you too.

*Click on page 38 for the full English translation next to the original French text.

Making sense

It has taken me a long time to get around to mentioning this intriguing blog post by the anarchist anthropologist and activist, David Graeber.  Though there is much more of interest packed in a short piece, his main purpose, apart from plugging his new book, is to discuss "how to write a book that would still be scholarly, but not academic", one that addresses big questions for a wider audience. Having suffered frustration and tedium whilst wincing at the pain inflicted on the English language by academic writing, I am in full sympathy with him. But he also manages to pinpoint what can go wrong with much that it is produced for a wider readership.

At least in the English-speaking world, there have been two dominant approaches taken by scholars trying to reach a broader audience. One might be deemed the Pop Mode ... In Pop Mode, one affects an accessible and breezy style, much easier to understand than ordinary academic prose, but, rather than seriously challenging one’s audiences’ assumptions, essentially provides them with reasons they never would have thought of to continue to believe what they already assume to be true... The alternative is the exact opposite. I’ll dub it the Delphic or Oracular mode ... Here the aim is usually to challenge as many common-sense assumptions as possible, but also, to do it in a style even more obscure than ordinary academic writing—so obscure, in fact, that its very obscurity generates a kind of charismatic authority, as devotees spend untold hours of their lives arguing with one another about what their favorite Great Thinker might have actually been on about.

Instead, Graeber tried to tackle the problem by writing something accessible that did challenge assumptions and by doing so he identified three good tips for any aspiring writer: "be an even more conscientious scholar, don’t waste time arguing with other academics unless there’s a reason to, and entertaining digressions are okay, especially, if clearly marked as such".

But it was this line that really caught my attention:

Good scholarship is more appreciated by popular audiences than academic ones. This is a bit scandalous but I have found it to be true.

All this brought me back to my days in adult education. The style of writing that he describes is precisely the way we tried to teach. Though we aimed to be accessible, however difficult the subject matter (in the humanities and social sciences anyway) the first and most important thing we always had to remember was that we must never patronise our students. They want the real thing, not some watered down content delivered in childish tones. They would not let you get away with second-rate tosh. What this means is that your material has to be academically impeccable, well organised so that it is presented logically and, most importantly, explained and discussed in such a way as to make it intelligible to everyone. Clarity of explanation is the key to demystification; popularisation is not dumbing down.

When I worked at Hull University's Centre for Lifelong Learning, we had a corny slogan using the Centre's acronym; CLL - Changing Learners Lives. It was rather effective as a marketing tool because it told the truth. Good adult education is subversive in the broadest sense of the word. This is because it questions conventional wisdom and actually that was half the fun of it. So yes we challenged too.

As for anecdotes, well I often though that there was a narrow dividing line between my teaching style and stand-up. Funny stories have been the mainstay of many of my classes. I used to justify this by saying, "if they laugh, they learn". I have a horrible feeling that the real reason may have been less about altruism and more to do with the pleasures of performing.

So Graeber has given me some personal affirmation, right at the moment when I face the scary task of turning my doctoral research into something that people might actually want to read and even pay for. What's more, the commonality of our approaches could point to a more subversive notion; conventional academia itself may act as a barrier to popular education, one that us adult educators kept trying to breach. Seen by this light, widening participation is not a question of admissions procedures or, using the patronising phrase that always grated, of 'raising aspirations', it is about the culture of the academy and its inability to communicate beyond the walls of its closed world. Adult education is in sad retreat, we are a beaten and much diminished bunch. But we will return. The demand is always there and it keeps re-emerging, sometimes in the least expected circumstances. And if it challenges, makes people think, can speak in ways that can reach out beyond the selective demands of the modern diploma factory and, yes, even make people laugh, it will succeed in transforming the lives of future generations.

It's official

I have a book contract.

Now to write it

Greece

... what's really at stake here is not Greece's identity but Europe's. All eyes are fixed on Athens, but the way out of the crisis requires a choice about what kind of Europe we want. The one we have now, with its deep structural inequalities and its rigid adherence to a failed economic ideology, protects neither democracy nor human rights. Stiff-necked and punitive, it prefers to eat its children.

Maria Margaronis

Clarity

This piece by Colin Shindler about the fluctuating historic relationship between the left and Israel is well worth reading. The conclusion is superb, comparing contemporary leftist positions with the one taken by Jean-Paul Sartre, even if I wish that Sartre's Arab sympathies had been formed as much by the Palestinian experience as they were by Algeria.

Jean-Paul Sartre bypassed the psychological maelstrom. He remembered the round-up of Parisian Jews in 1942 and their deportation to the east. For that reason, he was pro-Israel. He also remembered the struggle of Algeria's FLN against the French colons. For that reason, he was pro-Arab. This double legacy, he argued, meant that the responsibility of the left was to create space for dialogue and to facilitate negotiations between the two sides.

Sartre’s plea has been forgotten, to be replaced by an ideological checklist to determine which sort of Israeli a pro-Palestinian leftist can speak to. Talk not to your opponents, only to your fellow-travellers. It is an impoverishing regression. 

Impoverished. A perfect summation of the repetitive sterility of most left commentary on Israel/Palestine.

Academia

So much to answer for.

The world turned upside down

For good left-wing views on current affairs there is only one place. Er ... The Daily Telegraph??

First, some trenchant opposition to neoliberalism that the mainstream left is signally failing to articulate, especially when commenting on Cameron's stance in the EU.

Very quickly: some of you will have seen that Greece’s tax revenue from VAT collapsed by 18.7pc in January from a year earlier.
Nobody can seriously blame tax evasion for this. It has happened because 60,000 small firms and family businesses have gone bankrupt since the summer.
The VAT rate for food and drink rose from 13pc to 23pc in September to comply with EU-IMF Troika demands. The revenue effect has been overwhelmed by the contraction of the economy.
Overall tax receipts fell 7pc year-on-year.
This is a damning indictment of the EU-imposed strategy. Greece is chasing its tail. The budget deficit is stuck near 8pc to 9pc of GDP because the economic base is shrinking so fast.

Secondly, a forensic dissection and comprehensive demolition of the latest drivel from Seumas Milne on Syria.

But Milne’s suffocating “anti-imperialist” worldview leads to a deeply unpleasant moral equivalence between a reluctantly militarising opposition and unyielding regime. This leads to some absurd conclusions. Such as the idea that poor, misunderstood Russia is simply protecting itself from Western depredations. “Russian officials have privately assured opposition leaders that the quarrel is with the US, not them,” Milne tells us. That’s a relief, then. Those being slaughtered in Homs don't know how lucky they are.

Supporting revolutions, opposing neoliberalism; that's the Telegraph for you. Really.

A new low

Russia vetoes the UN resolution condemning Syria. At the same time it is arming Assad and mounting its own dodgy mission to the regime, whilst there is no let up in the shelling of Homs. As anti-Putin protests continue at home after accusations of widespread electoral fraud, the St Petersburg parliament is trying to pass a law "that will make it illegal for any person to write a book, publish an article or speak in public about being gay, lesbian, bi or transgender". 

Every dedicated Guardian reader will know what is coming next. Yes, you got it. An article from Vladimir Putin about building Russian democracy.

Society went through a difficult process of development. And this enabled us all, working together, to drag the country out of the mire, to revive the state, and restore the sovereignty of the people, which is the basis of true democracy.

 Good grief.

Comment here from 1898.

Priestley thoughts

It may be a bit corny and the favourite of every regional rep and local amateur dramatic society, but I had never seen J B Priestley's An Inspector Calls until last night. As it was touring, I though I had to go.

The play is a bit didactic, though the socialist subversion of the whodunnit genre is clever and is carried along by the gripping quality of Priestley's writing. The National Theatre's revival, with its inventive set and effects, is terrific. It enhanced rather than imposed on the original. It was a stark and atmospheric evocation of the whole theme of class conflict.

What the play hangs on is that, even when confronted with the full evidence of the human cost of their exploitation, the bourgeoisie will invent reasons to ignore it, find nice little justifications to continue enjoying their privileged, destructive lives and hide from the looming consequences of war and revolution. And, of course, by doing so, they seal their own fate.

And here also hangs the irony. The première of the play was held in Moscow in 1945; in the charnel house of Stalinism at its height. And here too is the evidence of how some of the left intelligentsia, motivated by anger at injustices at home, blocked their ears and averted their eyes from the purges, the camps, the torture chambers, the brutal exploitation of the Russian working class in their own name and the gathering clouds of a new wave of anti-Semitism, aimed at "rootless cosmopolitans". They too found reasons why they could ignore it, continue with their earnest activism and not face the realities of a world they idolised.

None of this detracts from the quality of the play, nor of its analysis that the comforts of bourgeois existence rested on economic and personal exploitation, coupled with a callous disregard for workers, all informed by an individualist philosophy that masked their own class collaboration. Instead it points to an ongoing human and political dilemma, a capacity for self-delusion and an ability to avoid inconvenient truths and their possible consequences.

And as I write this on my Apple Mac computer, I can click on a tab that brings up an article describing the real lives of the real people who made it in China and swiftly pass over to the next web page, the Apple Store, where I will consider purchasing my next shining new toy.

Interesting times

They have their 'Fiscal Compact' now, imposing and enforcing strict budgetary disciplines on the signatories, though Britain and the Czech Republic have stayed out. Mind you, the ratification process has yet to begin and I doubt whether it will be plain sailing as events continue to threaten storms.

The whole Euro crisis has prompted a debate about there being a democratic deficit within the European Union. The usual talking points are around the unelected technocrats leading the Greek and Italian governments and the issue of national sovereignty. But this treaty shows where the main threat to democratic government lies. Democracy is more than a process of swapping the people or parties in power. It is about changing public policy and priorities and, above all, about alternative political economies. The response to the Euro crisis is not just a question of dealing with the technicalities of trade imbalances, sovereign debt and the institutional architecture of monetary union; it is ideological, in the sense that the attempts to resolve the crisis are informed by a particular model of political economy. And a single model is now to be legally embedded as the only one permissible. Where then is the possibility of democratic change?

You hear the cry everywhere, 'they are all the same'. This treaty means that they have to be. A blanket of orthodoxy has been thrown over the continent of Europe and, even if it is smothering the people, international institutions are doing their best to fasten it in place. The trouble with sameness when people are crying out for difference, is that it opens the door to those that really are different, if eerily familiar to anyone who knows about the dark corners of the 20th Century.

And in that way, the real European crisis is not taking place in Greece, Ireland, Spain or Portugal - yet. It is in Hungary. And if you need to be convinced of the ugliness of the events there, watch this video, think back to those earlier, faded photographs of people dressed in black shirts, wearing those same thuggish smiles, and remember what they brought to an earlier Europe, one that was also facing an economic crisis.

Thanks to George for the Hungarian links, keep an eye his blog for more links and updates.

Surrealism

What to make of this?

The German government wants Greece to cede sovereignty over tax and spending decisions to a eurozone “budget commissioner” to secure a second €130bn bail-out, according to a copy of the proposal obtained by the Financial Times. 

In what would amount to an extraordinary extension of European Union control over a member state, the new commissioner would have the power to veto budget decisions taken by the Greek government if they were not in line with targets set by international lenders. The new administrator, appointed by other eurozone finance ministers, would take responsibility for overseeing “all major blocks of expenditure” by the Greek government. 

... Athens would also be forced to adopt a law permanently committing state revenues to debt service “first and foremost”.

What next? Gunboats?

Hat tip Shuggy

A loss

The film director Thodoros Angelopoulos has died after being hit by a motor cycle in Athens. Those who haven't come across his languorous, elegiac films on Greek life and history should seek them out. You will be in for a treat.

Outrageous

This is a nice piece by Kenan Malik on the free market in outrage, prompted by the latest threat to Salman Rushdie and his resultant non-appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

The consequence of all this has been the creation not of a less conflicted world, but of one that is more sectarian, fragmented and tribal.  As the novelist Monica Ali has put it, ‘If you set up a marketplace of outrage you have to expect everyone to enter it. Everyone now wants to say, “My feelings are more hurt than yours”.’ The more that policy makers give licence for people to be offended, the more that people will seize the opportunity to feel offended. It leads to the encouragement of interest groups and the growth of sectarian conflict.

The whole article is a fine defence of free speech, but I wonder about he way he handles outrage. It is a weird concept. I blame my age, but these days I am outraged by nearly everything. That doesn't mean I want to shoot the outrageous (oh, hang on a second, sometimes it is a bit too attractive an idea for comfort - never mind I can usually manage to control it by some fantasies when I'm cutting firewood with a chainsaw; marvellous therapy, I recommend it). Actually, what we are talking about here is only religion. I have never quite understood why religion outranks world poverty, genocide, mass starvation and the like in the outrage stakes, but apparently it does. Then this isn't really about feeling hurt and offended, it is about power. The manufacture of outrage is how groups wangle themselves into a position where they can 'represent' their communities, seemingly united into a single identity group against their wills, mobilise others and make a play for power. This is a political tactic. And we are blind to it as we would rather it all just went away.

So this is good.

The avoidance of cultural pain has, therefore, come to be regarded as more important than the abstract right to freedom of expression.  As the British sociologist Tariq Modood has put it, ‘If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism.’ What the anti-Baals of today most fear is starting arguments. What they most want is for the world to go to sleep.

Ah yes, sleep. We do sleep. And while we sleep others act. This is very reminiscent of Orwell at the end of Homage to Catalonia, "... the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs". It is all so middle class, so respectable; the stifling politeness of conventional life and the fear of being seen insensitive, racist even. Then there is the nervous embarrassment at the thought of saying something controversial and the submerged fear of violence that leads us to betray those who would rather not be yoked to the heavy burden of outrage.

And who better than the English to succumb - after all, we are always anxious to avoid offence.

Come from the Shadows

There are two things that will strike any reader of Come from the Shadows, Terry Glavin's new book on Afghanistan. The first is his optimism about the future of the country, though only if the Taliban are defeated and the international intervention maintained until they are. The second is his affection and respect for the Afghan people and his desire to give them a voice. Both combine to make this an impressive book, angry, passionate and partisan. And it is wholly convincing.

Terry's main literary device is to show how the conventional wisdom on Afghanistan describes another place, a fictional Absurdistan. As a picture of the real country, it is wrong in almost every respect. Afghanistan is not a mediaeval, ungovernable throwback, it is a modern developing country wrecked by war and only just recovering from an imposed, ultra-violent theocracy. Nor is the Taliban some form of anti-imperialist resistance movement. It is a psychotic organisation, with little internal support, trying to regain power through uninhibited violence with the help of external powers pursuing their own agendas.

To counter the media mood music of quagmires and unwinnable wars, Terry blitzes us with history, including the extraordinary tale of the links between Pashtun chauvinism and Nazi Aryan fantasies, demolishes myths, shows patronising and racist assumptions about Afghanistan's people for what they are and, most important of all, allows Afghans to speak for themselves. And what stories they have to tell.

Looking at what has been achieved since the fall of the Taliban, one gets a glimpse of what is beginning to emerge. This is not simply a political, institutional democracy, certainly compromised by Karzai's corruption though still an achievement, but a democratic society, in which ordinary people are starting to take control of their own lives and reshape their culture, rejecting oppression and embracing freedom.

Yet there is more to it than this.  As I read on, I became more and more convinced that the struggle for a democratic Afghanistan is also our struggle.  The problems are deeper, the violence more extreme, yet the underlying themes Terry explores have something universal about them, something shared. And this is what I want to look at here. I want to highlight the lessons we can take from the book. God knows, we need to know more about Afghanistan, but there is also much that we can learn from it.

My starting point is where we actually have a difference of emphasis. Terry asks serious questions about the ubiquity of the Absurdistan analysis amongst the political left and the damage it has done in Canadian politics. The phenomenon he describes is of an unthinking, reflexive left that sees surrender as 'peace' and wishes to abandon the Afghan people to whatever emerges through a deal with the Taliban. He writes of a left that has the inability to see that in a fight between their own country and fascists, their own side might be in the right for once and of one that is deaf to the urgent appeals of the Afghan people themselves.

There are two broad models of explanation for why this might be so. The first is 'left betrayal', the idea that something went terribly wrong during the post-war period and caused the left to abandon its principles and break with an honourable past. The other sees all the currents of apologism, relativism, anti-Semitism and frank admiration for tyrannies as things that have always existed within the left. From this perspective, Afghanistan is symbolic of a broader intellectual struggle that has always needed to be fought. I come from the longer, historical view (neatly described by Norm Geras here and here). Terry predominantly argues that there was a breach with earlier socialist and social democratic discourses; that the left abandoned class organisation in favour of 'counterculture'.

Terry's exasperation with counterculture is not confined to dippy hippy pacifism, he also includes paranoid leftist 'anti-imperialism', fashionable cynicism and a self-indulgent, narcissistic and, ironically, heavily commercialised and conformist 'alternative society' in his catalogue of despair. Who could demur? Yet reading his book also convinced me of the importance of countercultural action and the need to rescue the term. After all, the social change that it has brought in my lifetime is pretty dramatic and wholly welcome.

Two reasons why we should not casually discard the notion stand out. The first is that counterculture stands in direct opposition to cultural relativism. Relativism is a conservative doctrine. It urges acceptance of other cultures as they are, often asserts that they are unchangeable, eternal and somehow 'authentic' and refuses to pass judgement on even the grossest cultural practice. Counterculture argues that culture can and must change if people are to be free from the tyranny of convention.

Secondly, countercultural action is an explicit recognition that political and economic liberation can still leave sections of a society entrapped in webs of prejudice, enslaved by gender and oppressed due to their sexuality. The right have recognised that culture is a critical battlefield, from Islamism, through the Tea Party to the Fidesz government in Hungary today. The left needs to do so as well and to fight back.

Counterculture may be hip in western democracies, outside them it can be dangerous, involving what Christopher Hitchens has called, "living 'as if'".

Vaclav Havel, then working as a marginal playwright and poet in a society and state that truly merited the title of Absurd, realised that "resistance" in its original insurgent and militant sense was impossible in the central Europe of the day. He therefore proposed living "as if" he were a citizen of a free society, "as if" lying and cowardice were not mandatory patriotic duties … In the late Victorian period, Oscar Wilde - master of the pose but not a mere poseur - decided to live and act "as if" moral hypocrisy were not regnant. In the deep south in the early 1960s, Rosa Parks decided to act "as if" a hardworking black woman could sit down on a bus at the end of the day's labour. In Moscow in the 1970s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn resolved to write "as if" an individual scholar could investigate the history of his own country and publish his findings.

Now read about the Afghan women whose stories Terry tells. In the days of the Taliban they tried to live 'as if' they were not in a dystopian misogyny and today, after the end of Taliban rule, they are determined to live 'as if' their new freedoms were not fragile and constrained by cultural conservatism. Take a woman like Shamisa Sharifi who ran an underground organisation under the Taliban teaching poor women to read and write. Now her new organisation, Negeen, has combined women's literacy with craft skills, rights education, textile workshops and micro-banking. It is still hard and risky work. It still means living and working 'as if'. Women's education, organisation, political activity and even taking part in sport are examples of the counterculture we should be promoting. After all, as Terry puts it, "in Afghanistan, if you're a girl, to play soccer is a revolutionary act".

Whatever its sources, it has to be said that the alliance of parts of the left with a deeply reactionary totalitarianism is pretty weird, probably the strangest thing since, well, the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Ultimately, I can only see it as a colossal moral failure and an historic misjudgement. The Afghan Hazara Lacanian, Buddah Ahmedy, whom Terry met on his travels, best summed it up:

… it comes from the tragic incapacity at the core of liberalism itself to comprehend what we used to call "evil".

I find this embrace well nigh unforgiveable. But a general acceptance of the Absurdistan myth is more understandable; it is couched in progressive language, uses nice words like 'peace', recoils against what Wilfred Owen called "the pity of war" and is suspicious of American intentions. For those who grew up in the left, it is a position that need not disturb our universe. To reject it means a re-examination of beliefs held for decades. It is a difficult thing to do. I know. I have done it; too slowly and too late. But the purposeful maintenance of the myth is more contemptible. It relies on constant reinforcement by a flow of lazy, selective reporting and dubious opinion pieces, often by people who have access to far better information. And this points to the second universal point that Terry makes; the need to confront prejudice with truth. And the only real way to do this in Afghanistan is to let the Afghan people speak.  Even so, this isn't enough on its own. People also have to listen.

A perfect example of wilful deafness is the story of Code Pink, an American feminist 'peace' organisation that makes the fashionable call for troops out.  They went on a sponsored visit to Afghanistan, met with women activists who universally said that it was essential for women that the troops remain. After this, they returned the USA to write a report calling for the troops to be withdrawn. Why did they bother?

And you have to be discriminating about who you listen to as well. There are plenty of apologists and pessimists out there. Absurdistan has its much-touted champions like Malalai Joya, whom, Terry writes, is remembered in Afghanistan by "human rights activists and women's rights leaders … with a mix of pity and contempt". Terry is unapologetic about choosing sides rather than producing a book that aims to strike a spurious balance. As he writes, "I've written this book as a partisan in the cause of Afghanistan's democrats. That's my bias."  It's also the bias of the left, of liberty, of our common cause.

Terry noticed something else too, 

"… the greater emancipation was occurring with the help of projects that were diffuse, small-scale and nimble … At that level, when Afghan women were running their own show, you could pretty well sit back and watch them change the world before your eyes." 

This will sound familiar to anyone who has ever worked in community development. Rather than indulge in the expensive temptation to impose grandiose schemes, often informed by fashion rather than expertise, development is far more effective if it is shaped and run by the people themselves, those who have been at the sharp end of oppression and poverty. They are the experts. And Terry shows just how well this can work in Afghanistan, giving us moving accounts of community action; organisations such as Aschiana, a children's outreach programme and its associated Children's Development Bank, small-scale agricultural developments such as the Garden Gate project, through to the Afghan women's football team; another blow to the condescension of the cynics.

These examples of people building their own lives and communities through direct action could not have happened if the social space had not been opened for them by the defeat of the Taliban. This leads us to the final lesson of Afghanistan. Freedom cannot be exercised without security. In the developed world we tend to think of this as the need for economic security, in Afghanistan it is something more visceral. It is security from being kidnapped, beheaded, dismembered by a suicide bomb, raped and beaten by religious extremists, mutilated with acid for the crime of seeking an education and all the myriad horrors that can be invented by disturbed minds and malign ideologies. In this case, security can only come from one source; troops.

Reading this book, one is struck by the extraordinary institutionalised sadism of the Taliban, the systematic cruelty of their war and of their targets, women especially but also their attempt to eradicate education. Terry points out that "between May 2007 and February 2008 the Taliban attacked and burnt 98 schools, killing 147 teachers and students". Now the provision and demand for education is booming, yet all that stands between it and its destruction is the military force that is deployed to protect the country from the return of the Taliban.

All the Afghan democrats are united on two points: it will be a disaster if the troops leave and a deal with the Taliban would be a catastrophe for the future of the country:

Maboob Shah – "People who say the foreign soldiers should go away, they do not know what they are saying". Shamsia Sharifi – "We need to have the troops in Afghanistan. If the Taliban come back, the target will be us again." Fawzia Koofi – "There is a lack of proper communication in your country about Afghanistan. They don't see all the progress. For me, the hope is for the younger generation. Young men are voting for women. The society is under a big transformation, and there are people who don't want to see this." Amrullah Saleh – "The human cost in this country [of a deal with the Taliban] will easily be up to two million people killed, at least. It will not be big news for Afghanistan. We are used to tragedies, throughout our history. But the cost for you will be bigger".

Still the noises emanating from both governments and the commentariat say the same thing; there needs to be an exit strategy based not on the defeat of the Taliban, but on their accommodation.

Come from The Shadows begins with the Battle of Marefat High School, a fully co-educational school with an intellectually open curriculum, elected class councils and an independent student parliament. The Taliban hated it and rioters tried to smash it. They were beaten back by students who would not run away. They were not about to relinquish their future to a bunch of marauding bigots.

And there in a single example are both the hopes and fears of a nation. Self-help and education; the need to defend every gain, by force if necessary, as it so often is; direct action to change a misogynist culture; and, above all, the lesson the west needs to learn most, to listen to the people, to hear their voices and to choose to stand with them in an act of principled internationalism.

And this applies not only to Afghanistan. Think of how the poor, for example, are to come from the shadows in any European country, how other than by listening to their voices are they to escape the stigma of the word 'scrounger' or the more respectable condescension bestowed by the concept of 'dependency culture', think of how they too can build their own communities, organise and, when necessary, protest. Yes, Afghanistan is our struggle too.

I am certain that Terry would have loved to have written a celebratory book, one that looked forward to a new country being created by the fall of the Taliban and one that heralded the triumph of an Afghan democracy, forged by some remarkable people. Instead the book is troubled. Courage and hope are offset by anger and anxiety at the prospect of a looming betrayal. Come from the Shadows should be a milestone on the road to the creation of a free Afghan nation, let us hope that it does not stand as its epitaph.

Something rotten

I know little about Hungary and coverage of recent events is hardly flooding the media. But news is seeping through, as is the unmistakable, nauseous stench of fascism. In teaching history I spend much time explaining and analysing what fascism is and where it comes from, but this isn't to know it. It is something that assaults the senses. The mixture of tawdry stupidity, sadism, utterly humourless self-importance and an attitude that despises the intellect and revels in kitsch, is the same wherever it is to be found. All the while it insinuates that this or that group of people are inferior and, despite their sub-humanity, are surely dangerous and must be eradicated. The highest virtue is cruelty and the deepest pleasure is the creation of misery. It stinks and by that you will always know it.

George Szirtes has been posting information on recent events both on his blog and on Facebook. Here are a few links to read, all of which came from him:

The excellent site Hungarian Watch; reports on European action here and here; student protests; an interesting independent blog; three more posts by George.

And finally here, the poet Orbán in translation by George. The concluding lines:

the spirit’s armour is new, but it’s the same old method
as is the outcome
corpses everywhere, orange peel, dogshit, pages of burned books.

Don't turn your back or avert your eyes, you will still smell it.