Everyone is doin' it

So I might as well too.

This magnificent quote comes from Scottish Wholesale Co-operative Republic - a northerly outpost of Kropotkin. Hakmao has posted it as has Will in comments. Personally, I think that groups of people should band together, chant it in unison, the rhythm marked by the ting of finger cymbals, with incense burning and crystals waving. They should seek out New Age lunatics and infiltrate their minds through the power of ritual and thereby save them from a life of dowsing.

Michael Bywater in his book Lost Worlds, on 'The Wisdom of the Ancients.'

"The Ancients knew little and understood less. They scratched a living and died like dogs. Gripped by an uncomprehending egocentricity, they believed that the world had been made for them, and they believed that by a crude process of extrapolation: when they needed something, they made it. Finding themselves in a world which suited them to a remarkable degree, they assumed that it had been made for them; obviously, by someone much like them, but much bigger. Unable to understand any laws other than the law of will, they assumed that when something happened in nature, it happened because Nature commanded it. The river dried up because they had offended it; the volcano erupted because the Volcano Giants had not been placated; the harvest failed because someone--this is a bit of a leap of faith, but it leads eventually to Christianity, so it's all okay in the end--had not had his heart torn out and then been ripped limb from limb and his blood poured onto the soil.

In short, the Ancients spent what thinking time they had trying to make phenomenological bricks without ontological straw. They were wrong about almost everything, hopelessly confused sequence and causation, left the scantiest record of their thinking, and croaked in short order.

So why do a significant number of people, even now, believe not only in the bits of the Wisdom of the Ancients that we know about (like astrology) but also that there is a huge corpus of lost wisdom which, if only we could find it, would guarantee us a future of bliss, with no wars or sadness or cancer ever again, a world of birdsong and crystal and......In our dreams. Specifically, in our dream that the world was created perfect, and has been drifting away from perfection ever since. The silver swan unlocks her silent throat--the initiates will spot Orlando Gibbons' great madrigal, the others get a pretty image, everyone's happy. Those who believe in the Wisdom of the Ancients disbelieve in any progress in human understanding.......In truth, it is not the Wisdom of the Ancients that we have lost; it's any fathoming of their true Ignorance."

Solidarity

“It was a symbolic and practical gesture which shows them that the world hasn’t forgotten them. We’ll do all we can to help them serve their communities and get some proper independent unions in place to protect themselves.”

The Fire Brigades Union not only donated two fire engines to the Iraqi fire service but six volunteers drove them there. The full story can be downloaded as a colourful pdf here. It is a wonderful read. Trade Unionism at its very best.

(via the Drink Soaked Trots with thanks to Scribbles)

Judes still in obscurity

I don’t think that there is any mystery about education. I hate the phrase “ability to benefit” that is often used in discussions on widening participation. Most people can get a degree if they really want to. But, as in many other walks of life, you occasionally meet people whose academic ability is striking. Often they are older students, though I suppose that will always be the case if you work in adult education. They are usually different. I have been talking to someone just like that tonight. You get the same sense of desire and ambition mixed with intellect and sometimes a little insecurity. Increasingly what you find is another emotion – frustration. Tonight’s conversation was typical. “Why don’t you do a PhD?” I’d love to but can’t afford it”.

I share the same frustration that this talent is being lost. We need the unusual, original, and passionate voices that are excluded. Most mature students have other commitments that mean that they cannot study full time, but what about part-time study? It is increasingly more expensive and there is little in the way of support available. If part-time postgraduate learning prices out the self-funding and, particularly, the working class student, academia will be the loser and the risk is that the excellent and exceptional will be left outside, thinking of what might have been.

Art and religion – part 2

In the post below I discussed the intersection of religion, art and politics. The topic came up again this Monday in a Guardian profile of John Tavener by Charlotte Higgins. The word that I would have used to describe his music up until now was 'uninteresting'. Then I read this.

Tavener, though, is fantastically disarming. When he starts talking about his music being written through divine agency and having visions brought on by chatting to Apache medicine men and what a bad idea the Enlightenment was, part of you wants to snort with derision. The other part realises that, however batty it all sounds, he means it, and it's real for him.

Don’t come over all post-modern Charlotte, all of you should snort with derision. It may be real to him, but this does not mean that it is real. It doesn’t sound batty, it is batty. However, thanks to your article I now have a new word for his music – and it isn’t batty – it is Traditionalist.

Traditionalism is not well known as an ideology but its influences crop up now and then. Tavener is quite explicit about the link when he is quoted as saying that he “had a kind of vision from the Sufi Frithjof Schuon”. Schuon was an important Traditionalist figure who, in his later years, was obsessed with native Americans, mixing their customs with his bizarre version of Sufi Islam. Tavener also talks of “a visionary to whom the Virgin Mary would appear, always naked”, reflective of Schuon’s Maryamiyya cult and his 'primordial gatherings' when women would dance naked in front of him!

All this might sound like depressing, if harmless, New Age drivel or hippy ramblings, but Traditionalism is an ideology with deep roots and a far more dubious history. Though it is not exclusively right wing, it has had links with the far right, especially Italian Neo-Fascist terrorism, and with fringe Islamist movements. If you want to read more about it there is a super book by Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, which I reviewed for Democratiya here. Sedgwick runs a good web site on Traditionalism too.

Rather than just finding the music tedious, I now understand that there is something sinister underpinning it and my dislike is political as much as artistic.

Democratiya

Democratiya 9 is out. There is a short piece of mine in there but the item I am most looking forward to reading is Nick Cohen on George Orwell. Once again it all looks superb.

Motivational management

From a leaked memo

“So Lead me, Follow me or Get out of my way; Success is how we bounce when we are on the bottom.”

And there is more. Deeply, deeply embarrassing ...

This is my excuse anyway

Normblog's writer's choice feature this week is a brilliant little piece on Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle by Frank Cottrell Boyce. I particularly liked this:

What the journal describes is a clever young man with time to kill in an amazing place, a brilliant mind at play. In an age of attainment targets, critical paths and self-assessment, it's a radiant reminder of the profound importance of idleness and irresponsibility.

Oh well, back to work.

Human rights and wrongs

Eric Hobsbawm published an extract from his forthcoming book, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism, in the Observer on Sunday. It is copyright protected so is not on line.

Slipped into a long essay on the decline of empire, I found the following deeply depressing paragraph:

... the historical experience of Nazi Germany has eliminated racial/ethnic claims to superiority from polite discourse. However, the tacit Western claim of superiority remains and finds expression in the conviction that our values and institutions are superior to others and may, or even should, be imposed on them to their benefit, if necessary by force of arms.

Once again, the same limp arguments are implied; democracy and human rights are linked through guilt by association with imperialism and fascism, humanitarian intervention and international law are described as Western impositions. What always strikes me about this lazy discourse are the missing voices. You will find it repeated by Western critics, by the leaders of conservative movements, and by dictators and their apologists. But do the people of Zimbabwe reject democracy as a Western imposition, do gays in Iran resent the idea of social equality, do persecuted minorities reject the liberal value of tolerance, and do women the world over refuse female emancipation?

Until the voices of the poor, the marginalised and the oppressed are heard, this casual rejection for others of what we are fortunate enough to take for granted for ourselves will continue to be voiced and will influence the ideas of those who should know better.

Art and religion

There has been a nice debate over at the Drink Soaked Trots on religion, started by Shuggy’s open letter to Christopher Hitchens. In some of the comments, most notably the one from George Szirtes, the relationship between religion and art was brought up. My very personal take is that where religion and art meet there is a triangular relationship between theology, aesthetics, and politics. And great art, for me, is subversive, not ironic.

This doesn’t mean that I do not appreciate the music of Richard Strauss or even Wagner, though I tend to agree with Thomas Beecham that Wagner “has his moments. But then again he also has his half hours”. Subversion is a way of making you question the world. In this broad sense of the term, engagement with art changes your way of thinking, often in subtle ways. As a political animal and an atheist, my attention is drawn to the political ethic of the theology expressed by religious art and my appreciation and enjoyment is often strongly related to this. So Bryan Ferry, there is no worthwhile Nazi art! And as for Damien Hirst’s revolting celebration of plutocracy …

Two musical examples spring to mind. There can be nothing as rooted in superstitious wishful thinking than the idea of the afterlife. Elgar is currently much in vogue as it is the 150^th anniversary of his birth. I like much of his music but his oratorio on the journey of a soul after death, The Dream of Gerontius, leaves me cold. I can admire the beauty of the music; it is just that the theology expresses a deeply conservative Anglo-Catholicism based on submission to, and judgement by, an all powerful supernatural God, which I find abhorrent. At times it even seems unconsciously comical – all those souls moaning in purgatory. In contrast, I love Mahler’s second symphony, The Resurrection. Mahler takes us through pained, banal, and exquisite music to lead us, with ever approaching tension, to the last judgement. The trumpets sound, the dead rise and then … there is no judgement. There are no saved, no damned just an eternal universal love, affirmed by the joyous choral ending. The music is beautiful and so is the theology, it is against authority, intrinsically egalitarian, and it certainly is subversive.

In literature, Oscar Wilde is a prime example of this triangular relationship. The most neglected aspect of his work, to my mind, is his libertarian communism. He writes directly about this is his essay, The Soul of Man under Socialism, which advocates the liberation of humanity from property and the artist from the constraints of convention. However, I think that he was a miniaturist at heart and he reaches near perfection in his short stories. His children’s tales are touching and, with their moral clarity and emotional beauty, profoundly moving. The Selfish Giant is a perfect fable of Christian communism. (I one heard it read on Radio 4 as I drove back to Hull, they announced that it would be preceded by a documentary explaining its context. As the story is about a garden, they ran a programme on Victorian garden plants! Dumbing down or historical ignorance – take your pick.) However much the story moves me, it will never convert me to Christianity, or Communism for that matter, but I can empathise with an ethic that is fundamentally subversive to the established order and is undeniably rooted in virtue.

These examples support part of what Shuggy was saying. I am an atheist, I find the concept of God faintly ludicrous, the non-existence of a deity is the one certain part of my moral outlook. Organised religion, either through established churches or through cults, can vary from a form of totalitarianism to a theatre of the absurd. Yet religious belief can inspire supreme acts of virtue and courage and sublime art. I would argue that it can only do that when it directly addresses our own experiences of love and loss, and, more importantly, our sense of compassion and social justice. When religion speaks for the poor and powerless, in whatever form it takes, it can be a force for good. When it questions orthodoxy and engages with complexity it can be a vehicle for great art. When it is the authorised code of the powerful or the simplistic and literal agency of a cult of violence, it can be evil.

The generation game

The last of my aunts died this week. As a late child of a second marriage, my parents’ generation would be the grandparents of most people my age. Schooled in Edwardian England and scarred by war, they were a powerful presence, but now they have finally slipped into history.

And what of us, the perpetually ungrateful privileged? We have lived through unprecedented peace and prosperity, a liberal peace built from war and shaped by social democracy and labour movements, as much as by liberal capitalism. Whilst it helps to have been white, male and middle class (and we could have done without Thatcher) these have been good times.

It is obvious that our liberal peace is worth promoting and defending against those that would kill in order to plunge us into some imagined past or bright new future. But there is something more important than that. This world can only survive as something other than a gated community. It has to be shared and so the cornerstone of belief for those of us who identify with the left must be in the promotion of a growing, and global, social and economic equality, something that we are in danger of carelessly throwing away in an expression of the selfishness of the lucky generation.

Universities and Israel

The Universities and Colleges' Union have issued a 'clarification' of the vote at yesterday's congress. The main web page states

The motion passed at UCU congress on Wednesday 30 May calls for a process of providing information and engaging in dialogue. It does not call directly for an academic boycott of any Israeli institutions. The National Executive Committee will in the near future be considering what action it should take in relation to all the motions passed at congress.

You can read the main statement by using the link in the first sentence. I am not sure that I am much the wiser, but the following does make sense:

'Today's motion on boycott means all branches now have a responsibility to consult all of their members on the issue and I believe that every member should have the opportunity to have their say. The earlier motion means that any future calls for a boycott must pass key tests before a boycott can implemented.'

So I guess that means that those who oppose the boycott, as I do, now have the chance to lobby their own branch and I have written to my branch officers today. With this fudge I would hope that the boycott is dead, but only if enough people make their views known!

UPDATE
Reading the text of the motions on Engage, this is hardly a disinterested campaign.

Congress instructs the NEC to
* circulate the full text of the Palestinian boycott call to all branches/Las for information and discussion;
* encourage members to consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions;
* organise a UK wide campus tour for Palestinian academic/educational trade unionists;
* issue guidance to members on appropriate forms of action

Members please vote.

FURTHER UPDATE

Shalom Lappin provides a detailed response to the boycott motion and urges a tactic of resignation and organisation. His piece is on Normblog here. It is worth reading and careful consideration. I think my initial thoughts were too optimistic.

Peace

The Hull Peace Conference on Friday was certainly stimulating. One of the frustrations of my job is that the administrative demands tend to squeeze out academic work and so attending a conference like this was a joy. (I really regret that a teaching commitment will prevent me getting to London for this week’s Euston Manifesto Conference, I hope that some who read this blog will be there.)

The theme of the conference was democratic peace and much of it was about democracy promotion. There were a number of thoughtful papers which all rested on the strong correlation between peace and democracy. The star speaker though had to be Johan Galtung. He is founder and director of TRANSCEND and the Peace Research Institute amongst others. Now in his seventies he is still involved in speaking, publishing, and active conflict mediation. I am sorry that there is no text to link to, so this is a report based on my notes alone. I am wholly responsible for any errors and, of course, the opinions expressed are solely my own

I have used Galtung’s writings, particularly those on violence, in my teaching for many years. By developing the idea of structural violence he draws the boundaries widely and develops the idea of positive peace as being something that confronts violence in all its manifestations, including social injustice. It is a powerful analysis. On the day, he was charismatic, talked with authority and humour, and, blessed relief, did not use PowerPoint. And I thought what he had to say was terrible.

He started well enough by saying that we tend to use a fallacious concept of conflict prevention and that we can’t prevent conflict, only violence. Conflict, for Galtung, is a 'fantastic challenge' and it finds its resolution in the creation of a 'new reality' that 'transcends and transforms' the situation. It demands creativity and imagination, something most politicians and bureaucrats are completely lacking in. But then I could see where we were heading when he said that there was no solution to conflict 'in exporting your own society'. My worst suspicions were confirmed, he was going to argue against democratisation.

He next discussed mediation, which he argued is a process based on equity between the parties and a recognition of the validity of the other. The essence of peace is some type of equity, it is the 'process and the solution'. This is an obvious and important principle where an intrinsic equity exists. However, Western policy was, he said, based on arrogance, self righteousness, inequity, and imposition. Though he stringently opposed democracy prevention and felt that the slogan of the anti-war movement should have been, 'no to war and yes to democracy in Iraq', he took pertinent criticisms of the oligarchic tendencies of democracy into a realm inhabited by the followers of Noam Chomsky, that democracy and human rights are the ideological premises of the CPLD club – Christian – Protestant – Liberal – Democratic.

He then came out with what I felt were dubious assertions, dodgy statistics, and even flirted with conspiracy theory, suggesting that the real reason for the Iraq war was to secure oil and materials for the coming war with China! There was so much I could fisk on but I will concentrate on a few examples, ones where he used some of the rhetorical tricks of the politicians he professed to despise.

The first ploy is a neat one, most of his talk rested on it. He kept stressing that the two essential parts of a process of peaceful conflict resolution are that the parties approach each other with equity and that each recognises the validity of the other. If you say that the position of one party to the conflict is one that does not recognise the validity of the other, you have defined them as illegitimate. As a result, equity and mutual recognition are used to create inequity and illegitimacy. Hmm… clever.

Now here comes the crunch. According to Galtung, the West’s thinking is dominated by a self righteousness that undermines that equity and respect. 'Hard readings of the Abrahamic religions' have, apparently, given us a concept of good and evil and we are in the grip of this. It makes us unbearably self-righteous and we are, therefore, incapable of recognising the validity of the other. Instead we try and impose a model of our own society. Thus the West is inescapably in the wrong unless it can undergo a profound cultural change.

Hold on. So this concept of good and evil doesn’t exist anywhere else? It doesn’t come from human moral conscience? Surely, a distinction between good and bad is an essential part of the process of building any society. Galtung was certainly judgemental about the USA and Britain. Must democracy approach violent and repressive totalitarianism as an equal without making a judgement? Are all morals relative? Surely we have to make a judgement over when equity and mutual recognition are appropriate and when they are absurd.

By using this trick he also plays games with moral agency. Galtung entered the familiar territory of seeing 9/11 as an ‘unsurprising’ response to American actions rather than a horrendous act of arbitrary mass murder of innocent people inspired by a lunatic, fascistic ideology. It is a position that I find preposterous. Whatever the level of conflict faced, is a sane response the slaughter of civilians going about their daily routine? Are there indeed ‘no innocents’? I can find no justifications and I would call it evil, but then is that merely my self-righteousness speaking?

The import of all this is that we may not say that murder is wrong, that torture is wrong, that fascism is wrong, that theocracy is wrong, that genocide is wrong and that action must be taken as this is arrogant and a result of our hard Abrahamism. I refuse to see human rights as an imposed ideology. I view them as an expression of our common humanity, of our compassion for others and as the unity that binds, rather than as an instrument of the governments that divide.

The next tricks he used were in his adept ways of deflecting questions. One woman asked about real dilemmas caused by the challenge of Islamism, his answer was words to the effect, ‘that is the argument of the establishment’. Indeed, but what about the substance of the question? It was left unanswered. Of course, the provenance of an argument may have some bearing on its interpretation, but it does not alter its substance. Just because it is the argument of the establishment does not mean, on this occasion, that it is not right.

Then I asked a question. Mine was about an earlier comment about the Versailles Treaty. He had played another trick. Using the point that he made about the need to always see something good in the opposition, even Hitler, he said that if the Versailles treaty had been renegotiated in 1932, Hitler would not have come to power in 1933. First, it is impossible to prove or disprove a counterfactual so we cannot know whether he is right or not. However, the Versailles Treaty seems to have had less bearing on Weimar elections than economics. The rise of the Nazis rested on an economic crisis and mass unemployment in the wake of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, leading to a loss of faith in democratic politics by a substantial part of the electorate. So, a revision of Versailles may or may not have affected the popularity of the Nazis. Unprovable assertions, of course, make a weak basis for an argument and another of his devices was the habitual use of counterfactuals throughout the talk.

He then stated that, as a consequence, ‘Hitler was elected to power in a coalition with 52% of the votes’. This is not true. The Nazi party stood as a single party and not as part of a coalition and had lost two million votes in the second election of 1932. It seemed that they had missed their chance. Although still the largest party, they gained only a third of the votes. It was at that point that Franz von Papen made his fateful mistake. He tried to negotiate a coalition with Hitler and then persuade President Hindenburg that he could deliver a majority in the Reichstag. Hitler would not go into any coalition unless he was offered the Chancellorship and all the mainstream party leaders would not countenance the fact. Kurt von Schleicher could have continued as Chancellor with a minority government supported by the President’s emergency powers. Papen broke ranks to serve his own ambitions and offered Hitler the deal that he could be Chancellor and that Papen would be Vice-Chancellor. He then sold the package to Hindenburg on the basis that Hitler would be powerless and that he would control him from the Vice Chancellorship. Hitler was not elected to power; he was placed there by an elite coup.

So, Galtung’s history was wrong (and it is very basic history indeed) but it made his case stronger. And it played yet another trick. The example he used was to explain something good in the opposition’s case, even Hitler’s. But that was not what he was talking about. He was suggesting a way to stop Hitler coming to power. This is where my question came in. I asked what happens if the attempt fails and Fascism comes to power with a desire for war? This was a bit tricky because, of course, Britain did precisely what Galtung suggested. It renegotiated Versailles in a process of appeasement, thereby strengthening fascism and enabling Hitler to dominate central Europe and dismember democratic Czechoslovakia against the wishes of its government and people. The result was the Second World War. This was hardly a howling success for peace and reconciliation.

So how did he deal with my question? He didn’t, he dodged it. He answered on the United States, saying, in an ironic tone, that it was probably not the example I had expected. Dead right it wasn’t, I had asked about Hitler! Once again, he had played a trick. He had diverted the discussion away from an area that was weak in his argument (this took some cheek when he had earlier emphasised the necessity to honestly acknowledge error). However, he did something else. He played the guilt by association card by morally equating the USA with Nazi Germany (and he used some spurious statistics on combat deaths to actually imply that America was worse). This is ridiculous by any standard, whatever the failings of the US government.

He followed this up by pointing out that there were good things about Saddam. He mentioned three positives. I can only remember two as my notes are incomplete; one was the creation of a welfare state and the other was improved women’s rights. Both are true though both were the creation of the Ba’ath party before Saddam came to power as part of a process of totalitarian mobilisation and secular modernisation. Arguably, Saddam’s disastrous rule actually weakened them. But even if it was true that Saddam was Iraq’s Beveridge, surely the development of a reign of terror, systematic torture, mass executions, collective punishments, purges modelled on his hero Stalin, the launching of an unprovoked and bloody war against Iran which ruined the country, the invasion of Kuwait, the systematic murder and ethnic cleansing of the Kurds, the slaughter of the southern Shi’a, the draining of the marshes, the endemic corruption and cult of personality and the creation of a regime whose rationale was the practice of systematic violence against its people might just outweigh the benefits of a welfare state? I notice too that welfare did not extend to the bullets that were used in executions; the victim’s families were billed for the cost.

If Galtung was saying that these strengths should form the basis of a post-Saddam settlement then we are in complete agreement. If they are really a version of ‘at least he made the trains run on time’ or a way of legitimating his power then we are ardent opponents.

There was so much else that was dubious on Israel/Palestine, Iran, Algeria, etc.. He was deeply one sided. But let’s get back to his central point. That conflict resolution rests on equity.

I am certainly no Blairite, but I vehemently refute that there is any equity between contemporary Britain and the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, the genocidal and psychopathic regimes in the world – the Pol Pots, Hitlers, Stalins, Saddams, Amins and, moving only a notch down the scale, the grotesque Mugabes. It is intellectually shabby to equate America, for all its failings, with the Nazis. The people who suffer under such tyrannies yearn for liberation and long for our flawed democracies. They do not care about what Galtung denounces; they want the killing stopped, by force if necessary. As I listened I felt that Galtung was betraying the principles his work was founded on and especially his theories of violence and of positive peace. He used to be right. The work of peace movements is to resist and end violence, not conflict, nor even war. Now he wants to resist the use of war to end violence. To his credit, Galtung is an interventionist, though one based on peaceful mediation. However, I cannot see how we can mediate between people and psychopaths without prolonging and legitimating their rule.

In questions and interjections, Galtung repeatedly asked how we would end Britain’s ‘belligerence’. OK it is my turn to be unfairly selective, but this piece in Saturday’s Guardian is from one of the countries where this belligerence imposed our values, Sierra Leone.

Augustus Kamara, a news editor for the state news agency, spent much of the conflict in hiding. Even today, he sobs when he relives the stress of trying to keep his family alive. "I would not be here speaking to you [if not for] all these risks Tony Blair took, because it was a political risk intervening where you know some of your troops will die," he said.

When his wife gave birth to a boy in 2001, Mr Kamara named him after his hero. Tony-Blair Kamara is six years old.

Would Galtung deny young Tony-Blair Kamara his life and liberty?

UPDATE
Pamela Bone gets all Abrahamic in really nice piece on the universality of human rights here . (via Norm)

Norm Geras is my hero

Why? Not for his excellent blog, nor for his recommendations for Jazz CDs and books, nor for his academic output, not even for his role in the Euston Manifesto. No, what matters to a person of a certain shape is food. The bank holiday weekend meant that I could venture out for a curry on Sunday. He had mentioned the Great Kathmandu on Burton Road in his blog so it was time to cross the canal into South Manchester and see for myself. The meal was magnificent and I am salivating at the memory. Wonderful. I am forever in his debt.

Reading

In between the marking there have been some gems to read this week. Pride of place goes to the paper Norm delivered as an excuse to miss one of the most unwatchable Cup Finals I can remember. It is important because it is part of the process of addressing the perceptive lament in Nick Cohen's latest column.

However far it is from achieving power, a serious political ideology has to have a positive programme to live. For example, it is perfectly possible to imagine what a green government would do, while realising that the greens cannot conceivably win an election. By contrast, the Labour left talked at length about what it wouldn't do - keep British troops in Iraq or Afghanistan - but had no coherent principles, no guiding programme.

I hope to comment on the paper when I have had longer to study it.

I also finished reading a rather splendid little book on the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey following the Lausanne Treaty in the 1920's. Twice a Stranger is not an academic text and, as a result, is a gripping read with some nice bits of oral history. It concludes with a discussion of the problems of homogeneous ethnic nationalism as an organising principle and the rediscovery of multi-ethnicity, especially in the EU. It is also critical of both the official and romanticised versions of Greek and Turkish history. In that sense it is more than a popular history but a reflection on interesting themes.

Tomorrow it is the first Hull Peace Conference on the theme of democracy and peace. One of the speakers is Johan Galtung. It will be interesting to see the positions that are taken. No doubt I shall blog on it, watch this space.

A sense of achievement

I have only just found this -

Critics say modern philosophy is a useless waste of time. They are wrong. At its best, modern philosophy tells us how to waste time usefully.

This is all down to "constructive procrastination", which is

... an amazing strategy ... that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish, and the good use they make of time.

Apparently,

The procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Hmm ... I still think that I better get back to my marking

The battle for liberal secularism

News from the front line -

From Sweden

From England

Spot the difference.

'Tis the season ...

... to do marking. So posting will be light. Apologies

It's all going to the dogs ...

I know it is only one of those hackneyed 'what foreigners think of us' pieces, but I liked this observation by Tim Dowling:

Despite its comparative cosiness, Britain has an unshakable view of itself as a nation that is forever falling to pieces. If you watch the television you see a crumbling health service, falling educational standards, rampant gun crime, infrastructural chaos, economic meltdown and a fractured civilisation well beyond repair. Look out the window, and you see someone throwing a stick for a dog. This might not seem like such a great advertisement for a country, unless you have lived some place where it's the other way round.

We are lucky in many ways. Shame about the weather.

"... an anarchy of many different voices"

That is Norm's description of the blogosphere in this excellent, reflective post. He concludes,

"Long may this great and noisy multitude flourish".

Here, here Norm.

Bye, bye

The papers are full of Tony Blair's impending departure. Retrospectives abound. Most are either tendentious or reverential, some are stupid, all are tedious. The arguments for and against have been rehearsed and are stale. The long wait for historical assessment begins.

I do not intend to add to this guff. Instead, I would like to simply record my deep sense of loss, even grief, over the death of John Smith.

Rugby League – and decency

Swinton finally found some form today, demolishing Gateshead by 58 points to 12. The nicest part of the day though was off the pitch. Every year supporters, led by the redoubtable and spectacularly loyal John Spellman, do a sponsored walk in aid of leukaemia research in memory of Ian Skeetch, a player who died from the disease at an age when he should still have been playing.

Today the cheque was presented to the charity by Mike Gregory, the Warrington and Great Britain loose forward, who coached Swinton briefly before moving on to Wigan. He seemed on the brink of a great coaching career until his own tragedy struck. An insect bite caused a mysterious disease and today he is nearly totally paralysed.

Rugby League doesn't have the pretensions of football, players and officials mingle quite happily with the fans and Gregory watched the match in his wheelchair, with his family around him, at the front of the stand a couple of rows away. RL people have turned out to support him and here he was supporting leukaemia research.

It brought back my finest memory of him, a length of the field try in the Sydney Football Stadium as Great Britain broke a long duck against the Aussies. You can see it here, the last of a medley of vintage tries from the 80's. Great moments and wonderful skills from people who are not living in Cheshire mansions and who have never forgotten their roots.

“It’s all about life and death …”

... the countryside, that is. This was one of the themes of The Lie of the Land on Channel 4 tonight. It turned out to be a stunning, morally complex, film.

I actually came to Hull on the back of working in rural adult education to run a project in North Yorkshire and have written both on the project and on rural social exclusion. Gradually, I have been sucked back into the urban environment but three things this week reminded me of why rurality is a pressing political topic, and one that is mostly ignored by the mainstream media.

Molly Dineen’s fine film showed agriculture squeezed by profit-hungry supermarkets' retail monopoly and the new policy of a Labour government that curiously “favours the landowner over the farmer”. It was a lament for what was being lost; independent farmers – natural Tories in many ways – self-reliant and being strangled by an arcane bureaucratic subsidy system, which gives large amounts of cash to the biggest landowners at the expense of the food producer. Apparently unconcerned with food security, Britain is now content to be a food importer.

I have also supervised a dissertation this year from our Scarborough campus about the decline in the Scarborough fishing industry. One of the best sections is a description of the culture clash between DEFRA officials and the small, independent fishermen and their families at a ‘consultation’ meeting. Once again, strangled by quotas that do nothing for conservation, small-scale fisheries have collapsed.

Both showed people with an intimate knowledge of their trades being confronted with a bureaucracy that controls their lives, speaks a different language, and knows little of what they do. And when power is invested in the ignorant, the knowledgeable lose.

The third thing was Dispatches on Channel 4 this Monday. It looked at the losers from the process of the massive economic growth underway in India. Despite an annoyingly upbeat conclusion, it showed graphically that, unsurprisingly, it is the poor who benefit least. What was most striking was the loss of livelihood, apparently deliberate, of small independent, subsistence farmers. They are being squeezed by debt, land loss to industry, and a policy of commercialisation of agriculture. Government ministers talked blithely of moving hundreds of millions into industrial employment. The reality is that they will end up semi-destitute in the slums and shanties that surround the great cities.

All these are symptoms of a global rural crisis that dispossesses the poor and bankrupts the small producer. As more and more agricultural land is taken out of production and turned into industrial estates, housing or simply picturesque leisure parks for affluent urbanites, a question looms; what are we to eat?

Do you want to be a star?

The daughter of my good friends in Greece has started a new internet venture showcasing international talent. Will melonate.com be the next internet success story? If so, remember you heard it here first.

P.S. I liked the juggler

Hacking Democracy again

Simon Ardizzone writes in the Guardian of the dangers of electronic voting, currently being piloted in local elections. He argues that, "the technology being used is fundamentally insecure and unreliable".

The idea that the political problem of low turnout is susceptible to a technological fix is facile in the extreme and his conclusion is impeccable:

But what is really bizarre about these pilots is that they invert the normal use of secrecy and openness in elections. You can vote in public using a phone or the internet, where anyone can see your choice and may buy your vote or even tell you how to vote. And yet when it comes to counting, instead of laying the ballots out on a table where everyone can see them, the votes will be counted inside a computer protected by commercial secrecy laws. Imagine a trial where the evidence was heard in secret, but the jury deliberated in public.

Without the privacy of the vote and the openness of a public count, we have no way of knowing if the results really are the will of the people. And without that knowledge, we cannot be certain that we really do have a democracy.

Depression

Celtic Crusaders 82 - Swinton 4. Need I say more?

There is one consolation, I didn't go.

I suppose it could be worse. A friend of mine has a season ticket at Manchester City. He has worked out that it has cost him £60 per goal.

Sporting obsessions are strange.

UPDATE

And now Milan ...

Pride

Hacking Democracy, my nephew’s documentary about electronic voting machines and the possibility of electoral fraud in the USA is now showing at the ICA in London. The DVD is also released in the USA. Check out the film's web site for more details.

It has picked up reviews too; The Telegraph (scroll down), The Observer (scroll down), The Guardian, Time Out, and Channel 4. There are more.

Catch it if you can. It is an important, gripping documentary.

UPDATE

I have just read Terry Glavin's superb review article on Michael Moore. If anyone wonders about the backhanded compliments of the Guardian review, it is because Simon consciously rejects the self-promoting, flashy and dishonest approach of that type of documentary film. Hacking Democracy honestly puts the subject in the foreground making it compelling viewing.

Libertarianism and history

Shuggy has an interesting post on libertarianism, prompted by Chris Dillow's assertion that Marxism and Libertarianism are in agreement on education. It raises several themes but seems to concentrate on what he sees as a tendency towards an atomistic individualism, which his liberal humanism deplores.

I suppose I have an advantage. Unlike Shuggy, I do know a libertarian and he is also an historian, so they do exist. He supervised my PhD. What a great bloke too. Good fun, helpful and excellent company over a beer or several. So my experience is positive and personal. I also have an historical viewpoint and so I decided to respond to Shuggy with this post.

My doctorate is on the history of Anarchist ideas in 19th and early 20th century Britain and I see the meeting place between Marxism and Libertarianism in the origins of both, much more than in any current manifestations. Both emerged from critical responses to early industrialism. They drew on radical liberalism, and both had a class analysis based on the division between the ‘productive and unproductive classes’ - in other words, between owners and workers. Not only that, but they both saw the relationship between workers and their employers as a servile one, a form of modern slavery. The idle lived off the produce of those who actually did the work and, as all wealth was the product of labour, this was an act of robbery with violence.

The main accomplice in this larceny was the State. The State was the agent that protected a legal ‘artificial right of property’, ownership by the ‘unproductive classes’, against the ‘natural right of property’, the right of workers to own the means and products of their own labour. But it was here that a divergence occurred. Marxists and State Socialists felt that this could be resolved through collective ownership by the State if it was, in turn, controlled by the ‘productive classes’, even if the State would eventually wither away to leave a free and property-less society. Anarchists rejected the State and so Anarchist Communists talked of the immediate revolutionary abolition of property as well as the State. However, Individualist Anarchism came to a different conclusion and the origin of Libertarianism is to be found here.

The main tenets of Individualist Anarchism were, firstly, that the ‘natural right of property’ is precisely that and that it can never be alienated. State ownership would rip off the workers in the same way that capitalists would and the relationship would be just as servile. As a result, the Individualists argued that workers had to maintain direct ownership of their labour and their own means of production, both to preserve their independence and to protect their right of property in the products of their work. If the workers were also owners, then systems of equitable exchange were as important as the ownership of the means of production. There were a huge range of notions of exchange from Proudhon’s Mutualism to the widespread ideas of the currency reformers who wished to break the State monopoly of money.

Secondly, this led on to the idea that the real enemy of the people is monopoly. Monopoly was seen as the source of exploitation through rent, interest, profit, taxes, and the wage system, all of which were devices by which monopolists extract the wealth produced by others. Again, the answer the Individualists gave to overcome these evils was not to create a single State monopoly but to develop extensive property rights that effectively abolished monopolistic exploitation of others by an ‘unproductive class’.

The other major factor to bear in mind is that both production and exchange were not seen as the actions of atomistic individuals but as intensely social acts. The market brings people together rather than divides them. However, collaboration has to be voluntary rather than forced, hence the idea of contract replacing law and the argument that exchange has to be just and rooted in social equality.

This is a really sketchy summary of the political economy of Individualist Anarchism and it doesn’t touch on their feminism and social libertarianism, both rooted in hostility to the imposition of male middle class values on women and the working class. One thing is clear though, that even if the roots of many of their assumptions are to be found here, this is not modern Libertarianism.

There are many variants of Libertarianism, but the crucial difference is that the Individualist Anarchists were free-market anti-capitalists. They also opposed the limited liability company and the rise of the corporation. Instead, they favoured forms of universal self-employment. Today, Libertarians have made their peace with capitalism. They share Marx’s sense that capitalism is a hugely progressive force but absolutely reject the idea that it is doomed to collapse due to its internal contradictions. Instead they see it as the only vehicle for creating universal prosperity, a position bolstered by the failure of the Stalinist model. They have, just as Shuggy suggests, ‘surrendered the anarchist position very grudgingly’ apropos the State, but have enthusiastically embraced laissez-faire capitalism.

This is where I depart from some of their arguments. I am quite happy with their social liberalism; co-operation, collaboration, friendship and morality cannot be forced but are the result of voluntary, free and equal relationships. I do not think that one can simply wish away the market as a system of exchange, as Anarchist Communists did, however I think that there is a problem with the relationship between markets and centres of power. For example, the modern corporation is an exemplar of collective power par excellence and the market can be an instrument for the exercise of that power over others where access to the market is unequal. The growth of inequality does more than engender relative deprivation; it marks a profound shift in power. Thus, I would always argue that free enterprise cannot be a force for universal prosperity unless it is balanced by forms of collective action. For example, I can only see the withdrawal of the welfare state under current economic conditions as nothing short of an act of violence against the poor.

It is here that I am in total agreement with Shuggy when he writes, ‘their analysis is for me so heart-breakingly monist’. Absolutely. Take the issue of property. I am an individual property owner, I own my own home (nearly – not long to go on the mortgage). I view this as a positive. However, my house would be bloody useless if it wasn’t for the collective property that surrounds it. Yes, streets. They enable me to go to the state-funded institution that pays me a comfortable living for, amongst other things, teaching courses on Anarchism. Collective and individual property are contingent on each other.

Collective action is necessary for security, it is also necessary to resist oppression, and to counter the potentially overwhelming power of others in many spheres of life. There are intriguing debates about how far that collective action should be through the State or through autonomous organisations but there is no doubting its necessity.

So, although I dislike authoritarianism, I would always view myself as a left libertarian and though I find Individualist Anarchism interesting and neglected, I do not see it as practicable. However, I do find it, and aspects of Libertarianism, insightful and pertinent. This is especially true over the nature of property and exchange and particularly so over the role of the State.

Take one example, State ownership of collective property. Working in Adult Education leads one to have an acute sense of vulnerability to the whims of government funding. Yet the origins of Adult Education lie outside the State, in working class 'self-improvement' associations, Trade Unions, political clubs, churches, universities, the Workers Educational Association and the Mechanics Institutes. It was adopted and funded by government and for a time it flourished. Now the commitment is no longer there as government becomes gripped by a narrower educational philosophy. The result is that the efforts of past generations and the sunk investments that built up Adult Education are being thrown away. The people who matter most, the students, have an acute sense of ownership of their provision, but it is a chimera, they are in reality powerless to prevent its loss. Would it have flourished if it had remained independent? It is hard to say. But it is a question worth asking. One thing is sure, that if staff and students had directly owned the services they used no one could have taken them away. Ownership too is a question of power and needs to be addressed if we are to defend the commons as well as the individual.

Blogging – and Burke?

Oliver Kamm’s reply to criticism about his post on political blogging is unexceptional and I still can’t agree with his conclusions. Whilst some political blogs are the most unmitigated tosh, I have had enormous pleasure from others and have learnt much. Without political blogging, arguably there would be no Euston Manifesto, no Democratiya and none of the other developments that brought an anti-totalitarian left into the mainstream. Anyone is capable of discrimination and choice and those who choose to read rubbish would do so anyway in other media. The only difference with blogging is that it allows an easier entry into the market place. It certainly does not guarantee readership, let alone any appreciable market share.

I think that too much fuss is being made over the blogosphere, which, like any form of communication, can be used for good or ill, and I didn’t think it was worth a post until one revealing statement made me jump. He wrote,

Bloggers ought not to be listened to, but, like any other lobby (my emphasis), politely discounted.

Wow! Any other lobby? Environmental Scientists? The BMA? Trade Unions? There is a superficial attractiveness to this proposition when we have a government that passes power over policy to focus groups in suburban living rooms, but it is hardly a realistic description of a modern pluralist democracy.

However, it suddenly made everything clear. I can now see where he is coming from. Kamm is advocating a Burkeian notion of disinterested representation. And surely his views on political blogging are not far from Burke’s famous statement that, “Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude”.

Burke is a more interesting thinker than he is often given credit for, but on this I am with the populist Thomas Spence. His periodical, Pigs’ Meat, was, in some ways, a political blog of its day, so called because it was food for the swinish multitude. This ideological difference would always prevent Kamm and I agreeing. So, all I can say is, “Up the Bloggers!”

Headline of the day

CAMERON FINGERED OVER DYKE

(From the Wrap, 'Guardian Unlimited's digest of the best of the day's papers'.)

And I just thought I was bored ...

I have never used PowerPoint, now I can feel self-righteous about the fact. The Telegraph reports on a new study,

The study, at the University of New South Wales, branded PowerPoint presentations a disaster and called for them to be scrapped.

Prof John Sweller said there was a scientific explanation for a room full of PowerPoint viewers yawning and looking at their watches after a couple of minutes.

He said: "If you have ever wondered why your eyes start glazing over as you read those dot points on the screen, at the same time words are being spoken, it is because it is difficult to process information if it is coming in the written and spoken form at the same time."

This is a little unfair as I have actually seen it used quite well and creatively but it is rare. Most of the time it is little more than a prop which slows and distracts, rather than enhances what is being said. What is rarer still is to go to a presentation that does not use it; it is now ubiquitous. What would the orators of the past, who relied purely on the power of language, think?

(Just a thought, the Chartists might have liked it. The six points, all nicely bulleted with little graphics with each one, sliding across a big screen on Kersal Moor - perhaps not.)

Going up ...

One of the things I feel intensely irritated about is the constant lazy propaganda designed to support the abolition of automatic promotion and relegation in Rugby League. The gap between the National Leagues and the Super League is a big one, but the obvious answer, to invest in raising the standard in the lower leagues, is often overlooked in favour of freezing the top divisions or operating a franchise system.

According to its advocates, notably Sky's Stevo, this is supposed to increase the quality and intensity of our game and allow for long-term planning, but how reducing the matches in the bottom half of the table to a series of meaningless friendlies is going to help is beyond me. What it would also do is to end the hopes, purpose and long-term planning of the lower league sides, some of them former greats in the history of Rugby League.

And this is where the propaganda comes in. I bristle with indignation, not just as a supporter of a lower league side, but as an empirical historian. One classic argument is that promotion has failed. A typical example is drawn from Neill Morrow's report on Bradford's defeat of Hull KR at the weekend.

"Hull KR's coach Justin Morgan is now in no doubt as to the scale of his task if his team are to avoid the traditional fate of the promoted side: relegation at first attempt".

The "traditional fate"! This is the 12th season of Super League. How many promoted teams have been relegated at the first attempt? TWO; Leigh, who were woefully under prepared when they went up, and Castleford, who should have stayed up last season but relaxed when they looked safe, only to be caught by a resurgent Wakefield and dramatically beaten in the deciding game before the biggest crowd Belle Vue has seen in many a year. What's more, the crowds have stayed on, with Wakefield using that final day thriller to promote the club. If there was no relegation then that would have been a meaningless match in front of a tiny crowd and there would have been nothing to build on. Also, both last year's losing Grand Finalists and Challenge Cup Finalists, Hull and Huddersfield, were sides that had been promoted. Where would they be now without that opportunity?

The theatre of sport lies in the contest on the field – it is that contest that should determine in which division a club plays.

The nightingales arrived last night

But I have to leave tomorrow.

It doesn't get any easier and isn't helped when you meet someone from Salford in a local taverna who is the same age as you, retired four years ago, bought a plot of land and is building a house on it to live here, and looks at least ten years younger than you do. Maybe it is time for a change of lifestyle.

I did indeed eat all the pies

Having just finished a very nice spinach and feta pie for lunch, I turned to my email and in the Wrap (the Guardian's news alert service) is one of those stunning scientific discoveries that tells you what you always knew to be the case anyway. Guess what, some people have a tendency to put on weight and some don't. It really is in our genes.

How long it has taken them to work out the blindingly obvious is unknown, but it is welcome after enduring the mass of body fascist propaganda that being plump is a punishment for your sinful existence. But watch it, old habits die hard, the fascists are still lurking. The Mail indulges in disgusting eugenics - "One day, couples could even choose to have babies free of ‘fat’ genes". – and then chunters on about how all us fatties are going to die horribly and cost the NHS a bomb. But I still like their final statement of the obvious, "The research comes in the wake of the world’s largest study of weight loss, which showed that diets do not work for the vast majority of slimmers - and may even put lives at risk". No doubt this will not stop the wealthy peddlers of diet fads from feeding off the unnecessary guilt of the stout.

The Times is more sober in its assessment.

Πολύ ωραία

Ecstatically watching Manchester United's stunning 7-1 win over Roma in Sakis' taverna, to a Greek commentary with a vaguely indifferent Greek audience, I was struck by a strange thought. I was taken to see my first United match at Easter in 1967 – 40 years ago. 40 years, where have they gone? And Best's goal, at the near post from an acute angle, is still fresh in my mind, whereas countless of others I have witnessed since have faded from view.

I'm bewildered

Oliver Kamm writes,

The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted - overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.

So why does he blog?

I am reminded of the Victorian Individualist Anarchist, Henry Seymour, who wrote,

If there are, in this world, any consistent Malthusians, any individuals who really conscientiously believe that there are too many people, let them commit suicide.

UPDATE

Norm, as ever, provides an excellent counter argument

The Resurrection – ten minutes late

It was in Milina anyway. The Papas' timing was out and even though firecrackers were exploding in all the surrounding villages we had to hang on outside the church whilst he raced through the liturgy to declare 'Christus anesti' some ten minutes after midnight. The locals grumbled but soon fireworks, flares and bangers were let off haphazardly and after fifteen minutes of mayhem everyone drifted home, trying to keep their candles alight for good luck.

Even as an atheist outsider it is still possible to share the Sunday celebrations as families and friends gather for feasting

and dancing

Totalitarian aunts

Oliver Kamm plays a neat trick on an affectionate piece by Jeremy Paxman about his partner's 94-year old aunt. By substituting fascism for communism as the aunt's lifelong commitment, she appears in a totally different light. Kamm has a good point to make about how Communists clung to their beliefs, despite historical experience, and of how our perceptions of totalitarianism differ. However, when reading his blog I am sometimes made uncomfortable by his lack of generosity towards those he opposes. There are some that thoroughly deserve his scorn but there are others that seem mistaken rather than malicious and this strikes me as a good example. Kamm continues, "Doubtless some of my readers will see a substantial moral difference between the reality and the thought experiment; I don't". Indeed, and I am one of those readers.

If there is one thing about Fascism, it does at least have a sort of honesty about it. It celebrates a world of struggle, sacrifice and war. It openly worships power, heaps scorn on private pleasure and demands unquestioning loyalty to a totalitarian state. It is full of contemptuous hatred for others and solicits their mass murder. It is an unconcealed picture of violence and misery that would remake the world as a prison.

Communism, on the other hand, offers a world of social equality, peace, harmony and unity. It presented the prospect of an end to racism, class distinction and war. The writer Milan Kundera described the dream as an "idyll for all" and that is why he claimed that it attracted the best of his generation. It was an illusion. The dishonesty of Communism is that it still hid behind that mask of justice even as it perpetrated the crimes of the gulags. Perhaps this is why many still cling to the dream that a new world can be remade through the actions of a Leninist vanguard party and state collectivism (two concepts that I utterly reject) despite the crushing weight of historical evidence to the contrary.

It is hard to lose our dreams when confronted with reality. So, rather than being as Kamm suggests, "a woman of scant imagination at best", the aged aunt is the opposite. She is an example of those whose imagination can overcome all invasions of reality in their desire for a better world.

Paternalism

Norm tries to be bashful (and fails) about his daughter, Sophie Hannah. He shouldn't. I only discovered her poetry through Normblog and it has become favourite reading for myself and friends. Brag about it Norm, because you will be doing a big favour to those of us who go out and buy her books as a result. She is a fine writer.

Public discontent

Nick Cohen's piece in the Observer last Sunday is a highly pertinent one about unrest in the public sector.

Labour ministers … won't be smiling if they read the best of today's political books. What ought to alarm them is that they are not about the second Iraq war or the selling of peerages, but by the workers in and users of the public services, who ought to be grateful for the extraordinary increase in funding Labour has presided over. Whitehall has managed to combine the insulation from competition that characterises the worst of the public sector with the greed, audit culture and unaccountability that characterises the worst of the private.

It is worth pointing out that the spending increases have only applied in some sectors; my own field of adult education is currently in a state of crisis, outside of those seeking to obtain level 2 skills. However, I think the real issue facing public sector workers is the curious disappearance of democracy, which is in no way compensated for by a spurious notion of 'choice'.

The NHS may be a post-war creation but other services were part of an earlier municipalisation, a proud product of an assertive local government. Local democracies proved to be a potent instrument of social reform. Though imperfect, councils are at least elected and are vulnerable to the disapproval of voters. Look at the situation now. Instead of democratic bodies, we have government targets imposed by a proliferation of appointed and unaccountable quangos. For example, the once great Local Education Authorities are rumps, having lost most of their power in post-16 education to the Learning and Skills Councils.

Not only that, but the latest fashion now seems to be a cult of 'leadership', resulting in an escalating pay gap between management and other public sector workers and less collegial and democratic structures within institutions. Much of the sense of discontent stems from a sense powerlessness by people who once felt their dedication and judgement to be valued and central to the running of their services.

Democracy, in the sense of ownership, control and accountability, should be central to the institutions that are supposed to ensure our collective well-being and security. However, just when it is most needed it has gone missing, displaced by a creeping authoritarianism.

This must seem a terrible whinge from someone privileged enough to be luxuriating in a Greek spring in his second home, but affluence does not always compensate for stress, exhaustion, and frustration amongst those who work in the public sector. Labour was overwhelmingly our party, for it to lose our support would be alarming indeed.

Pain

If there is one thing that reminds me of what an unhealthy sedentary life I lead, feeling constantly tired without any real physical exertion, it is the way my muscles hurt today after lifting and sawing firewood and a bout of heavy weeding of a pathetically small area of garden. Even the simple task of putting a new seat on the Parthenon (unbelievably it's a make of toilet) made the stiff back and arms creak this morning.

How the locals put me to shame. At the age of ninety-six, Eleni from the little cottage next door has now gone to live with her son, but remained independent until she was ninety-five (though she pretended she was only ninety-two). Iannis, a retired quarry worker who now keeps sheep, and his wife Chrysanthi, who gardens and tends goats, chickens and turkeys, never stop even though they are now well into their sixties. They take the fruit from the garden but, in return, there are small kindnesses. This time they had decided there was not enough shade and so I arrived to find that two new fig trees have been planted in just the right spot to cast a shadow on the patio.

Inactivity and privacy at home is not the same. Despite the pain, I feel so well. Sometimes early retirement tempts.

Trap 3

I got the chance to watch the final part of The Trap before I went away and at last I could make out what Curtis was trying to get at. One the one hand it is nice to see something on television that actually dealt with ideas, but on the other, I was also acutely aware of the limitations of the medium. Inevitably, it leads to simplifications, and often misreadings, and this was all too evident throughout the programmes.

Ultimately, though I had areas of agreement, it disappointed. This was partly because the programme again used foreign policy as the ultimate instrument of its critique. My sharp differences with the contemporary political consensus, and New Labour in particular, are with domestic political economy, especially with the alarming growth in inequality, aspects of social policy, which I find cautious, narrow, and authoritarian, and its managerialism, which has helped create a bureaucracy that British culture finds impossible to treat with anything but a deadly earnestness. (Let alone the violence with which Blairites have assaulted the English Language, especially the use of weapons of mass cliché and a serious attempt at verbicide.) However, I have never had a problem with a departure from the hypocrisies and brutalities of a 'realist' foreign policy, but then for the middle classes to focus their fury on that, rather than the inequalities from which they benefit at the margins, is far more comfortable.

There are three areas in which I think The Trap went wrong. The first is the attempt to reduce everything to concepts of liberty. Curtis' concentration on Isaiah Berlin limited his scope on the discussion of liberty, leading to a neglect of more modern writers. It is part of an overall tendency he has to erect straw men. Were any of his theorists as sinisterly influential as he implied? Personally, I am rarely a monist. I dislike reductionism and it is the same with liberty. I do not see two mutually exclusive concepts; instead, I feel that both the positive and negative variants of liberty are contingent on each other. The nature of the society we live in relies on the constant interaction between the two. Whilst I wholeheartedly endorse his concluding remark, "not all attempts to change the world for the better end in tyranny", they will without the presence of negative liberty.

I thought Curtis' point about being drawn into a paradoxical use of authoritarianism to protect negative liberty was silly. What is being attempted is to stop more shattered human corpses littering the London Underground. There is a real threat, as the people of New York, Madrid and Bali can equally attest to, and it has to be addressed. Governments are engaged in a pragmatic calculation on liberties, based on self-defence. But there is more to current politics than liberty, just as there have been more influential way of seeing the world than Game Theory.

This leads to my second objection, by attempting to bring everything back to liberty, he ignores the impact of ideologies, which have a broader intellectual base and show a remarkable persistence through many historical eras. To give just one example, Fanon, whose chapters on violence I read with a sense of revulsion, owes far more to the death cults that Paul Berman has so ably written about in Terror and Liberalism, than positive liberty. To me, Fanon is more Sorel than Sartre. I too cannot share in the romanticisation of violence and the sophistry that seeks to make it intellectually respectable and although I subscribe to just war theory it is only with a deep reluctance. However, I do not see political violence as simply the product of positive liberty. It has deeper and more problematic roots.

Finally, though he is absolutely right to mention the failings of a restricted notion of democracy as a mere method of representation, he is incorrect to see it emerging solely from the idea of negative liberty. He has more of a case with his description of 'neo-liberal' economics, but that too, as an operational ideology, has a number of other sources, not least the rationalisation of self-interest. I feel that a move away from a discussion of liberty towards one of democracy as a form of liberation would have been enormously helpful. Democracy acts as liberation only as an extensive concept.

An extensive form of democracy does not limit itself to simply an arrangement of political institutions; it has to be both a social and economic concept as well. A democratic society is permeated by enlightenment values, social equality and the full acceptance of universal human rights. In economic terms, it requires, for me, both individual independence and property rights, but these are meaningless without collective action to ensure unconditional economic security for all .

Such a concept has carried many names in the past and has spawned a number of variants. One of these was Democratic Socialism; now what has happened to that these days?

Arrival

It is early spring here, some trees have yet to find their leaves and the weather is still cool. The birdsong is more limited and the nightingales are yet to arrive from Skiathos. However, the blossom is out on most fruit trees, bright yellow broom is starting to invade the roads and the Judas Trees are beginning to burst into an extravagant deep pink. The light is brighter, the air cleaner, and the gardening not too daunting. And, as I write this, outside my window two butterflies have landed on some cherry blossom. The Romantics did have a point.

Ready for some negative liberty

... which will feel immensely positive. Just shutting down and completing some final tasks as I head off for Easter in Greece. Spring is absolutely gorgeous there with cold nights and warm days, fresh green leaves and wild flowers everywhere. Two weeks of freedom - to read, walk, drink copious quantities of loose wine, eat at Sakis and Soula's taverna, and share an Easter feast with friends. Fantasy beats reality hands down. Posting may be infrequent.

If ...

Blood and Treasure asks what would have happened if New Labour had been in power in 1807:

Naturally, things can’t be allowed to go on as before. But we must not be tempted by the simplistic solutions embraced by extremists on the other side. No. What we need to do here is bring all the stakeholders together and set out a course that is both radical and realistic. What we need is a one stop shop for slave regulation. ...

Read the rest here.

(Via Tim Worstall with thanks to Steve)

History and modern Greece

Norm has linked to an article by Andrew Apostolou about the failure of the Greek state to recognise the actions of collaborators during the dispossession, deportation and eventual murder of the ancient Jewish community of Thessaloniki.

Apostolou makes a comparison with Belgium and its panel of enquiry into war-time collaboration and the Holocaust, which reported this year. This is not altogether fair as post-war Greece did not relapse into peaceful prosperity at the centre of the European Union, but bloody civil war and the triumph of the right, to be followed by a period of military dictatorship, democracy only being restored in 1974. Modern Greek history is troubled by more than the occupation. However, the point is an important one for a country that now has a secure democracy.

I cannot read Greek so the only sources available to me are ones in English but I think that the signs are positive, not least due to Apostolou's own research. There is an awakening of interest in the period of Turkish rule and any study of Ottoman Greece must include the Jewish community. I am currently reading, and thoroughly enjoying, Mark Mazower's superb history, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, a study that spreads from the Byzantines to the 1950's. And, as I type this, I can look up and see in my CD collection the brilliant recording of Sephardic Ladino folk songs by the wonderful Greek singer Savina Yannatou, Spring in Salonika (Άνοιζη στι Σαλονίκι), celebrating the lost Jewish culture and language (available for download, though I recommend searching out the CD with its multi-lingual booklet).

I am an optimist, and I feel that once historians and artists tread a path, journalists, politicians and the public will eventually follow.

Shock!

Earlier tonight I watched Dispatches on Channel 4 and I actually agreed with Peter Hitchens.

Yes, I too believe that the Tory party should not be led by a media savvy opportunist who might get elected. He is right; they should be led by an unelectable right wing ideologue. I think I need a drink to recover.

Churchill and anti-Semitism - yet again

Thanks are due to Dr Hiding Pup for drawing my attention to Richard Toye's detailed defence of the provenance of the anti-Semitic article supposedly written by Winston Churchill, which I posted on earlier. Toye is the author of a new book, Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness. His major critic is Martin Gilbert, not only the official biographer of Churchill but author of several books on Jewish history and of the forthcoming Churchill and the Jews. The Churchill bibliographer, Richard M Langworth, has also written to defend Gilbert's position, that Churchill refuted and prevented the publication of the article, the product of a ghostwriter, Adam Marshall Diston, whom most of the press reports link to Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. This is disingenuous as Diston stood as a candidate for Mosley's ill-fated New Party, rather than the BUF. The New Party was formed by Mosley as a Keynesian opposition to MacDonald's economic orthodoxy and was disbanded by him when he converted to Fascism after a visit to Mussolini's Italy.

The Mosley connection is a convenient way of discrediting Diston and shifting the attention from Churchill, but regardless of the provenance of the document, which I am in no way in a position to speculate on, I am still uneasy at its use. A single document like this may provide an insight into anti-Semitic discourses, but it is hard to see how it could counter a much longer record of pro-Zionism, Jewish friendships and opposition to anti-Semitism. A single article, however contentious, should not distract from a broader historical record.

History is complex and casual anti-Semitism was ubiquitous amongst elite circles and was inevitably reflected in a range of contemporary discourses. That Churchill was capable of echoing the prejudices of his class is unsurprising. That these isolated instances amounted to anything significant is dubious, but they certainly make for an interesting spat.

Between a rock and a hard place

If you doubt the corrosive effect of simplistic ‘anti-imperialist’ rhetoric read this,

“Angola will do everything in its power to help the Zimbabwe police force and will not allow western imperialism to take over Zimbabwe”

And if you doubt the corrosive effect of appeasing racism at home read this,

When Tendayi Goneso fled Zimbabwe fearing death at the hands of Robert Mugabe's brutal henchmen, he thought Britain would offer him sanctuary from the violence tearing his country apart.

He grieved alone when his wife was murdered by the regime, and has endured four years apart from his three children.

In exile the 34-year-old accountant, who is recovering from lung cancer, has become a leading campaigner for democracy and the overthrow of Mr Mugabe.

But as the political situation in Zimbabwe has spiralled toward chaos, the British government has withdrawn his benefits and left him with the threat of deportation hanging over his head.

(via The Wrap)

The great Torygraph swindle

Just back from Hull's Old Town. A friend had, in a fit of insanity and a determination to get a bargain, been reading the Telegraph. They have a promotion on, vouchers with £1 off pints of real ale in selected pubs. So off we trotted, vouchers in hand. The trouble is, the pubs had either not heard of the scheme or hadn't been sent the wherewithal to redeem the vouchers.

We were left with no option but to drink several pints of excellent beer in some of the most historic pubs in the country.

The Olde White Hart

and the Black Boy

Tragic - I know you will feel for us.

(With thanks to Doll for the idea for the post)

Now that's what I call a CV

For anyone out there who gets tired of false modesty, try this from Prospect magazine,

New York university requires all applicants from high school to answer the following question: "Are there any significant experiences you've had, or accomplishments you have realised, that have helped to define you as a person?" ... the reply of one applicant found its way into cyberspace, where, in the US, it has now acquired a mini-cult status:

"I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees. I write award winning operas. I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row. I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing. I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook 30-minute brownies in 20 minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru. Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello. ...

Read the rest here

(Thanks to Steve)

Blessed relief

I am delighted to able to report that it has now been proved that disposable nappies are not the work of the devil. There are a few more dodgy products out there though. Read more here.

What a waste of money?

Whilst we are on the subject of numbers, The Observer reports,

A damning report by the highly respected health think-tank, the King's Fund, reveals that productivity in the health service has actually declined, despite the huge injection of cash. …

The author of the King's Fund study, economist John Appleby, said the figures showed why hopes had been dashed that tens of billions of extra NHS spending would mean major improvements in frontline care. … productivity levels among GPs, consultants and nurses have nowhere near matched the scale of the increase in the NHS's funding in England.

There is a lot that jars in this report. It assumes all improvements in staff conditions and numbers were a waste, diverting money from patient care. What struck me most were the comments about productivity. Surely if we want to improve the quality of service we need to reduce productivity. Smaller class sizes reduce the productivity of teachers; if GPs see fewer patients in the same time, they are giving each patient more attention; lower case loads help social workers do a better job and may save lives. Reducing productivity can actually mean a far better experience for those that use services. What on earth is the benefit of stressed-out front-line staff dealing with more and more people, with insufficient time to do the job properly? Let those of us in the public sector fight for lower productivity to make more jobs and to serve the public better.

The Trap – 2

I thought that the second part of the latest Adam Curtis effort improved. It still conflated too many disparate things and used annoying presentation that took a long time to say very little.

However, it dealt adequately with the failure of targets as the latest management fad, inadequately with genetics, passably with the growth of inequality and simplistically with market theory. He even gave Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments a fleeting mention, a glimpse that there is more to the story than Game Theory and a mistaken attempt to increase human liberty. A false dawn? I shall now watch next week’s with a little less scorn.

Bialyshtok and Bloo-oom

I have to confess. I don’t like musicals. A perfectly reasonable drama gets under way only to be ruined when someone starts singing a trite song. Friends have taken me to them promising that this time I would like it. I frown disapprovingly through them all. Friday night saw the latest attempt. I went to see The Producers at the Palace Theatre in Manchester. This was even more unpromising as I love the 1968 film it was based on and have seen it dozens of times.

After two and a half hours of exuberant lunacy, I was laughing all the way home and can’t get the songs out of my head. To paraphrase one of the numbers, where did it go right? It was a parody of a parody and an even bigger parody of all the musicals in the world I have tried to dislike. It was bold, energetic, over the top, loud and brassy. Its humour was wild, anarchic, incorrect and unceasing. The dialogue that was lifted from the film did disappoint; no one could match Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder after all, but the songs were hilarious and the dance routines spectacular in their absurdity. Even the miscast Peter Kay camped it up to marvellous effect. My favourite moments were the singing Nazi pigeons and the tap dancing routine by the little old ladies with Zimmer frames.

Nothing is good unless there is a serious heart to it. Mel Brooks has often talked of humour as one way to combat evil with the joy of humanity. OK this is probably pretentious garbage but I have to find an excuse for enjoying a musical. Now I can truly say that I only hate musicals that take themselves too seriously.