Distorting Demand (Part I)
To state the obvious, advertisements are out to get you to buy things. They are a means employed by producers to modify consumer demand in their favour. Less obvious are the sacrifices entailed elsewhere. By its ubiquity advertising does a grand job convincing people of its innocence and even its economic and creative worth. Each of the following pieces challenges a different assumption regarding the supposed benign or beneficial aspects of advertising.
Advertising as a natural extension of market freedom
One common-sense defence of advertising is that it is something natural in a market economy. To some point this seems true enough. In a healthy economy producers need a means of promoting their products. Likewise consumers need information about products if they are to make informed choices.
It’s unavoidable. As long as people buy and sell there’ll always be some role for presentation and promotion. It’s only natural to buff the vase the day before auction, or shout, “Forty pence yer bananas!” in a louder or more charismatic manner than the next stall-holder. Every street-traders right. Advertising, the argument runs, is just a logical extension of this freedom.
All quite true. Promotion is bound to play some part in retail. But there are clear lines to be drawn. The sort of promotion that enhances producer and consumer freedom must at least be honest. Telling lies about products doesn’t benefit the consumer, and it’s also unfair competition. Similarly, the fact that some producers can afford colossal advertising budgets is no aid to market freedom. The ability to drown out the voices of other producers does the consumer no favour, and again it’s unfair competition.
Psychological abuse
I’ve a photograph of the forecourt of Kemptown railway station (long since an industrial estate.) Behind the Zephyrs and Corsairs, one wing of the stationhouse bears the sign:
LENS TEAS
And, just in case any drivers were confused:
PULL UP FOR TEA.
Undeniably this is advertising. It meets all the modern criteria and motives. Although I doubt he thought about it in such terms, Len definitely did paint the sign in an attempt to skew the market in his favour. Anyone who pulled up for tea upon seeing his sign was having their demand managed by his promotional scheme. If it worked, alternative transport cafes and teashops lost money in consequence. Perhaps some went bust.
However, while this certainly is advertising it’s a world away from the methods of the Saachis. It’s one thing to announce, “I have hot tea to sell” but quite another to associate your tea with Yorkshire firesides, or, God help us, sex. Such associations are patently false, deliberately out to mislead. Nothing to do with the reality of the product. Certainly not included with the product. That sort of advertising can’t be defended as a freedom. Lying and brainwashing are not the friend of a free market, they’re its enemy.
That difference, the difference between truth and falsehood, is one key test as to whether an advert can be considered just. After a lifetime’s exposure it can be hard to see the difference. This abuse crept up on us slowly, advertising industry included.
A glance at older ad campaigns brings us back to earth. Not so long ago adverts concentrated on the use value or quality of the product itself. Tellingly, there was a time when it was still deemed necessary to include a verb in an advert. “Smoke Regal”, “Take Courage” “Drink Coca-Cola”. Although all these campaigns were out to skew markets at least they remain close to the reality of the product. (Mind you, the illegitimate association of tobacco with royalty, and ale with bravery, hints where all this will lead.)
Since then some sort of sea change occurred. It no longer mattered what you did with the product, just that the name and some associated concepts entered you consciousness. Welcome to Marlboro country. Don’t think of petrol think of tigers. Don’t think of crumbly chocolate bars, think of blow-jobs. Don’t think of smoking and coughing and dying, think of prairies and jack-rabbits.
My father was loathing of advertising to the extent that he fixed our TV to only receive the BBC. Not a man to hold much of a theory of ideology, he claimed commercial television led to ‘Worms on the brain!’. Though the image fits, if anything it downplays the severity of what commercials do. Rather than writhing, maggot-like in our brains, adverts alter them, wholesale. When they succeed they make us feel differently about the world and all its contents, not just the one product.
Like all propaganda, adverts work by restructuring minds in a manner beneficial to those who sponsor them. This could just mean honest product information, but it can also mean extreme cynicism and abuse. At the moment the culture seems pretty much anything goes. Advertisers would have us think anything if they thought it would move more units.
When we finally did get ITV I was delighted and revelled in the commercials. Nothing difficult, just great jokes and jingles and special effects and animation, and all of lavish quality compared to the programmes. Me and my sister were so spellbound we’d shout, “Ads!!!” up the stairs to each other each time they came on (I think the old man would have smashed the damn thing up on the spot if he’d ever heard that!)
And what good did it do? Thanks to advertising a mass of the concepts that make up my consciousness are stupid lies about the world. To my shame, thirty years on I can still sing the Tetley tea-folk song, recite the punch-lines to PG Tips adverts (“Can you ride tandem?”) and the catch-phrase for Quick Brew (“It’s me little perforations!”). Junk memes nailed into my head firmer than Shakespeare or trigonometry ever will be.
Worse still, it’s never a neutral waste of brain-space. Invariably, adverts work by inducing anxiety in the consumer. In the long run the aim is to make money, but more often than not the means is by making people feel bad about themselves, envious of what others supposedly have. Amongst all the excitement I also remember a glum feeling of jealousy during jeans adverts. Levi’s and Wrangler and Lee Cooper, everybody strutting around cool and sexy. Didn’t look much like me and my friends, even with the jeans. Still bought a pair, of course, to be on the safe side.
Inducing consumer anxiety is a cruel but lucrative trade. Again it’s difficult to recognise how unpleasant it is when you’ve lived in it so long. It’s easier to see it when its being done to another culture for the first time. A few years back I saw a familiar looking advert on Moroccan TV. A beautiful brown mother twirling a beautiful brown baby overhead, all gurgles, blue skies, and impossibly white cotton. Handsome father smiles on from the veranda. It was the start of the big wind-up. Morocco’s first chance to share the delights of whiter than whites. Now they can learn to worry about all the important things we’ve been worrying about for the past fifty years. Worry that their neighbours might live more cleanly than their own family, might be more happy generally. All to shift more units of soap powder. Happy with your wash? What about deep down?
Love your enemy
Some campaigns are more subtle, but as often as not they serve to convince us of greater and more terrible falsehoods. Advertising is, after all, just a branch of PR. It’s the branch that deals with getting us to think more about shopping than we otherwise would. Whereas PR is about distorting public perception in general, advertising specifically distorts demand for goods. However, these boundaries are not set in stone. Advertising is frequently used as a medium for full-blown political PR, or propaganda as it used to be known.
For example, it is political benefit BP and Exxon gain from much of their advertising and sponsorship deals. Such campaigns are out to baffle our critical abilities, soften our hearts towards these titans, make it harder for us to be angry with them when we hear what they’ve been up to, again. If the brand name ‘Shell’ is generally encountered in the context of wildlife preservation or arts funding the company’s human rights record and its true impact on the environment is obscured. It’s harder to form a critical opinion of an environmental and social abuser when you’re bombarded with lavish exaggerations of their occasional charity work. These ads are still about selling oil, but indirectly. They’re about making the world seem different in such a way that it facilitates further plunder.
Rather than extolling the virtues of a product much of modern advertising aims to radically restructure consumer minds, i.e. people's minds. Here’s another that worked on me: A few years back Lloyds bank ran a campaign featuring huge lumbering Jim Henson-style trolls. Seemed very odd at the time. An international bank buying thirty seconds of prime time advertising to bring us cuddly monsters hitting each other with massive rubber clubs. What were they thinking of?
Although there was the pretence of a money-related narrative, (about how wise trolls invested their gold pieces, or some such) it’s clear that wasn’t the thrust of the campaign. The chief intention was to change peoples minds about banks, specifically this bank. The subliminal message was, ‘Everything you ever believed about banks, wooden panelling, stuffy time-served counter staff, “Capt. Mainwaring will see you now!”..…all that’s gone. Don’t take us so seriously. We’re really all about FUN!’
It was a clear case of brain-washing. Fight it though I might, my notion of banks changed forever. To this day they still seem less stuffy and intimidating. That strange campaign successfully modified my mind in Lloyds favour. (The Egg credit card, a front for the stuffy old Prudential, takes this approach to its ridiculous conclusion: Running up debt is so wacky!)
It’s quite a price pay. Advertising has us running in circles, worrying about nonsense, chasing rubbish. It paints corporate abusers as saviours and makes environmentalists seem like cranks. It encourages us to eat high-fat food then makes a fetish out of being thin. It goads children into pestering money out of parents, and leaves parents feeling guilty if they can’t provide. Instead of compassion towards others it promotes endless concern with the self. It turns neighbours and strangers and friends into people to compete with, people to worry about. It makes last year’s cool into this year’s joke. Better get the new one.
I won’t be offering any other prescriptions regarding adverts, but there is one: Stop watching them. Don’t engage with them. Turn over or just kill the sound. That’s the real liberating power of the remote control. Adverts are out to make you anxious. Logically then, avoiding them can make you less anxious, happier, something no soap-powder will ever do. Like any other rogue on the doorstep don’t let them in. Just watch the programs and let the sponsors pay.
Part Two now posted above.
Wednesday 20 April 2005
Tuesday 19 April 2005
BBC Vacancies
BBC Vacancies
I don’t say you’re self-censoring – I’m sure you believe everything you’ve said; but what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.
(Noam Chomsky to the BBC’s Andrew Marr, then of The Independent.)
When your brand image is neutrality it’s not nice to be called biased. While workers at Fox news probably laugh at the accusation, then agree, many at the BBC take offence: No one is pulling their strings. They just report what they see, as they see it.
In an important sense they are absolutely right. Simply by being the kind of people they are, it is possible for them to convey propaganda yet still feel like impartial correspondents. As Chomsky suggests to Marr, like all job vacancies media vacancies are strictly circumscribed. They’re not for just anyone. They are certain shaped holes that can only accommodate a certain shape of person. And while many of the more overt criteria are skill-based (being as pretty, clever, knowledgeable, specialist, annoying, funny or vacuous as required) every bit as important is the political shape of the candidate. If you don’t meet that criteria you won’t get the job.
To start with a fairly uncontroversial example, BBC Radio Two’s breakfast show is never going to be offered to an outspoken Marxist. Social commentary, when it does arise, will more likely be restricted to the horrors of traffic cones, or the difficulty of finding a parking space (and then somebody steals it!)
The reflex reaction to this of course is that the BBC wouldn’t employ anyone politically outspoken in such a role. The BBC must remain ‘neutral’ on such matters. But of course this is completely circular. Neutrality is in the eye of the beholder. If the type of people who already govern and run the BBC get to choose what constitutes neutrality then the acceptable candidate is simply the one who sounds neutral to the ears of that elite. The job selection process becomes nothing more than a mechanism for selecting politically like-minded people.
And it shows. It is BBC ‘neutrality’ that dictates that non-fatal storms in Cornwall or (even more tellingly) Florida will find their way to the top of the news the same day a hundred drown in Bangladesh. Likewise, one British athlete failing to complete her event can take up the first ten minutes of the evening news on the same day that more US/UK war crimes go unreported.
If that’s balanced reporting then forgive me for becoming unbalanced. That such a perverse worldview can be touted as impartial speaks volumes about the mind-set of those making the most important decisions at the BBC. As such it pervades, even outside the news room, even on lightweight Radio Two. There, it is perfectly acceptable to speak in hushed tones about retail terrorism, but any mention of Western atrocities will have you back on Radio Norwich by the weekend.
No fear. The unconscious vetting process works. Phrases like ‘US sponsored terrorism’ are simply not in Steve Wright’s or Terry Wogan’s vernacular. They’re not those sort of blokes. Conversely, phrases like ‘The terrible events of September the eleventh’ drip from their mouths like honey. No risk of impartiality if you only mourn for ‘our’ dead. While the majority of Earth’s inhabitants would find the first phrase every bit as justifiable and chilling as the second, any likely Radio Two DJ would be incredulous. The right man or woman for that job simply wouldn’t be the type to think, let alone talk, in those terms. It’s a vital, but unspoken, part of the job description. No need for a bullet-point.
Radio Two neutrality takes motoring, package holidays, love of football and national pride as simple apolitical reality. Being on the receiving end of lust for oil is not a valid perspective. The reality pushed by Radio Two is owning a car and worrying about pension funds, and those blessed EU bureaucrats messing with the Great British banger. If such a perspective doesn’t come naturally to you, don’t bother applying. Like the dyslexic enquiring about the vacancy as proof reader, you’ll be politely refused.
Just the same, if you don’t think the world starts and ends with Hollywood movies, products, pop stars, soap operas and celebrity gossip, don’t apply to be a daytime Radio One DJ. Don’t apply to work at the BBC’s history department unless you are obsessed with one six year period of British stoicism during a whole century of imperial misadventure. And whatever you do, don’t apply to be a presenter of the BBC’s ‘Top Gear’ if you plan to use it as platform to voice your concerns about global warming. The very essence of Top Gear is being rich and selfish and paying no attention to the consequences of you actions. That’s the job.
Instead you should apply to be a presenter on…er?
When it comes to assessing the most ‘liberal’ end of the BBC’s potential vacancies it’s easy to miss the wood for the trees. The fact that, very occasionally, Newsnight presenters do pose the right questions, obscures some thunderingly obvious limitations on political impartiality.
Here’s one little conflict of interest: Newsnight ‘anchors’ earn millions. Kirsty Wark, Jeremy Paxman and Gavin Esler are paid millions, literally. That one fact renders a whole range of important questions out of bounds. If you think extreme material inequality is the central problem facing the world, what chance do you have of these people arguing your case? How fiercely can Paxman hold a minister to account over the corporate asset stripping of the British media when he himself is enjoying such a large slice of the spoils? How critical can he be of the dumbing-down and commercialisation of TV when his own standard of living is one of it’s consequences?
Many of today’s most famous journalists probably railed against Margaret Thatcher during the eighties. Perhaps some still speak bitterly of her in private. Nonetheless, it is the world she created that paved the way for their extraordinarily well remunerated jobs. Before Thatcher and Reagan no newsreader expected to find a million in their pay packet. Robert Dougal would have had a heart attack. Thatcher set out to smash dissent and increase corporate parasitism in the BBC, and she did a thorough job. The political ‘shape’ of current BBC vacancies is a direct consequence of that strategy.
The next standard response to all this is “So what would you do instead?”. But of course that’s a different question, and to ask it signals agreement. (Presumably, a more democratic society would foster a more democratic media, but that’s no great theory.) Suffice to say, the current structure of the BBC and it’s complex connections with state and capital ensure strict limits on the political perspective of its output. It can only afford to employ people prepared to observe those boundaries.
Thanks, in part, to a lifetime’s exposure to the BBC’s output, there are many among us who can meet that criteria, without even being conscious of doing so. That’s the real howler in Marr’s quip about having his ‘organs of opinion’ removed when he joined the BBC. It was those very organs that got him the job.
I don’t say you’re self-censoring – I’m sure you believe everything you’ve said; but what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.
(Noam Chomsky to the BBC’s Andrew Marr, then of The Independent.)
When your brand image is neutrality it’s not nice to be called biased. While workers at Fox news probably laugh at the accusation, then agree, many at the BBC take offence: No one is pulling their strings. They just report what they see, as they see it.
In an important sense they are absolutely right. Simply by being the kind of people they are, it is possible for them to convey propaganda yet still feel like impartial correspondents. As Chomsky suggests to Marr, like all job vacancies media vacancies are strictly circumscribed. They’re not for just anyone. They are certain shaped holes that can only accommodate a certain shape of person. And while many of the more overt criteria are skill-based (being as pretty, clever, knowledgeable, specialist, annoying, funny or vacuous as required) every bit as important is the political shape of the candidate. If you don’t meet that criteria you won’t get the job.
To start with a fairly uncontroversial example, BBC Radio Two’s breakfast show is never going to be offered to an outspoken Marxist. Social commentary, when it does arise, will more likely be restricted to the horrors of traffic cones, or the difficulty of finding a parking space (and then somebody steals it!)
The reflex reaction to this of course is that the BBC wouldn’t employ anyone politically outspoken in such a role. The BBC must remain ‘neutral’ on such matters. But of course this is completely circular. Neutrality is in the eye of the beholder. If the type of people who already govern and run the BBC get to choose what constitutes neutrality then the acceptable candidate is simply the one who sounds neutral to the ears of that elite. The job selection process becomes nothing more than a mechanism for selecting politically like-minded people.
And it shows. It is BBC ‘neutrality’ that dictates that non-fatal storms in Cornwall or (even more tellingly) Florida will find their way to the top of the news the same day a hundred drown in Bangladesh. Likewise, one British athlete failing to complete her event can take up the first ten minutes of the evening news on the same day that more US/UK war crimes go unreported.
If that’s balanced reporting then forgive me for becoming unbalanced. That such a perverse worldview can be touted as impartial speaks volumes about the mind-set of those making the most important decisions at the BBC. As such it pervades, even outside the news room, even on lightweight Radio Two. There, it is perfectly acceptable to speak in hushed tones about retail terrorism, but any mention of Western atrocities will have you back on Radio Norwich by the weekend.
No fear. The unconscious vetting process works. Phrases like ‘US sponsored terrorism’ are simply not in Steve Wright’s or Terry Wogan’s vernacular. They’re not those sort of blokes. Conversely, phrases like ‘The terrible events of September the eleventh’ drip from their mouths like honey. No risk of impartiality if you only mourn for ‘our’ dead. While the majority of Earth’s inhabitants would find the first phrase every bit as justifiable and chilling as the second, any likely Radio Two DJ would be incredulous. The right man or woman for that job simply wouldn’t be the type to think, let alone talk, in those terms. It’s a vital, but unspoken, part of the job description. No need for a bullet-point.
Radio Two neutrality takes motoring, package holidays, love of football and national pride as simple apolitical reality. Being on the receiving end of lust for oil is not a valid perspective. The reality pushed by Radio Two is owning a car and worrying about pension funds, and those blessed EU bureaucrats messing with the Great British banger. If such a perspective doesn’t come naturally to you, don’t bother applying. Like the dyslexic enquiring about the vacancy as proof reader, you’ll be politely refused.
Just the same, if you don’t think the world starts and ends with Hollywood movies, products, pop stars, soap operas and celebrity gossip, don’t apply to be a daytime Radio One DJ. Don’t apply to work at the BBC’s history department unless you are obsessed with one six year period of British stoicism during a whole century of imperial misadventure. And whatever you do, don’t apply to be a presenter of the BBC’s ‘Top Gear’ if you plan to use it as platform to voice your concerns about global warming. The very essence of Top Gear is being rich and selfish and paying no attention to the consequences of you actions. That’s the job.
Instead you should apply to be a presenter on…er?
When it comes to assessing the most ‘liberal’ end of the BBC’s potential vacancies it’s easy to miss the wood for the trees. The fact that, very occasionally, Newsnight presenters do pose the right questions, obscures some thunderingly obvious limitations on political impartiality.
Here’s one little conflict of interest: Newsnight ‘anchors’ earn millions. Kirsty Wark, Jeremy Paxman and Gavin Esler are paid millions, literally. That one fact renders a whole range of important questions out of bounds. If you think extreme material inequality is the central problem facing the world, what chance do you have of these people arguing your case? How fiercely can Paxman hold a minister to account over the corporate asset stripping of the British media when he himself is enjoying such a large slice of the spoils? How critical can he be of the dumbing-down and commercialisation of TV when his own standard of living is one of it’s consequences?
Many of today’s most famous journalists probably railed against Margaret Thatcher during the eighties. Perhaps some still speak bitterly of her in private. Nonetheless, it is the world she created that paved the way for their extraordinarily well remunerated jobs. Before Thatcher and Reagan no newsreader expected to find a million in their pay packet. Robert Dougal would have had a heart attack. Thatcher set out to smash dissent and increase corporate parasitism in the BBC, and she did a thorough job. The political ‘shape’ of current BBC vacancies is a direct consequence of that strategy.
The next standard response to all this is “So what would you do instead?”. But of course that’s a different question, and to ask it signals agreement. (Presumably, a more democratic society would foster a more democratic media, but that’s no great theory.) Suffice to say, the current structure of the BBC and it’s complex connections with state and capital ensure strict limits on the political perspective of its output. It can only afford to employ people prepared to observe those boundaries.
Thanks, in part, to a lifetime’s exposure to the BBC’s output, there are many among us who can meet that criteria, without even being conscious of doing so. That’s the real howler in Marr’s quip about having his ‘organs of opinion’ removed when he joined the BBC. It was those very organs that got him the job.
911 v Hiroshima
911 v Hiroshima
For many Westerners the attacks of 911 were the most appalling act they had ever witnessed. Amongst popular broadcasters the sense of shock and awe was uniform and profound. Not since the death of Diana had Radio 2 disc jockeys spoken with such an air of gravity, the same chilling footage playing over and again in their minds.
Over the days that followed many attempts were made to rationalise what had happened. For those with scant appreciation of the West’s role in the world one conclusion stood out. Clearly such an act of barbarity could not have been committed by civilised Westerners – atheists, Christians and Jews. Only ‘medieval’ Islam could supply a perverse enough world-view to drive humans to commit such an act of depravity.
In a sane world this nonsense could be countered with one word: Hiroshima. Similar method of delivery to 911, bar the suicides, but with a payload that extinguished a full 75,000 innocent lives. Twenty-five 911s in one hit, perpetrated by well-fed well-heeled western heroes. End of argument?
The fact that it rarely is demonstrates the lengths some go to maintain contradictory beliefs. At first asking, those who ‘blame Islam’ often argue with conviction that the slaughter of three thousand innocents in ANY situation is deeply and transparently wrong. Morally unjustifiable regardless of the context. My stance entirely.
However, as soon as you mention Hiroshima many back-pedal from this moral obviousness. Suddenly circumstances do matter:
“You can’t compare those two situations!”
“We were in the middle of a war!”
“Those bombs saved lives. They brought the war to a close more quickly.”
Forgetting that all these excuses could equally have come from Al-Qaeda, the moral shift is seismic. Suddenly it’s not that there’s something intrinsically wrong with killing three thousand civvies. The problem is doing it without ‘good reason’. Presumably, if your reasons are valid you should feel free, indeed morally obliged, to slaughter 75,000. Who knows, maybe more?
Revising your moral stance to that of pragmatic advocate of mass-murder comes at a price. It’s a schizophrenic state, doggedly insisting that there are appropriate times to slaughter children when you know in your gut that there can’t be. It makes people defensive. Others who dare to maintain their opposition to all such acts will soon find themselves on the receiving end of that most heinous charge, pacifism. All the old chestnuts roll out, the sort of questions employed by wily schoolchildren and moral philosophers alike, when they want to torture each other:
“So if you knew that the only way to prevent two million people from nuclear annihilation was to press a button that would itself kill one million people, you still wouldn’t do it?”
True, as it stands, out of context, it’s a near impossible question to answer. But so what? Neither 911 nor Hiroshima nor any other colossal act of barbarity has happened out of context. Let’s forget for a moment that the standard justifications for Hiroshima are complete baloney. Even if bombing Hiroshima did save lives in the long run, what justification is there to ever consider it as a stand alone event?: History starts here. Press or don’t press?
In reality, there has to be a suitably insane context before such insane quandaries can arise. Two imperial powers squabbling over whose right it was to rape the pacific. Two governments terrorising their own populations with tales of the depravity and sub-human nature of the other side. Two armies brainwashed to treat each other with no mercy. That’s the lunatic terrain upon which such calm, ‘rational’ choices as whether or not to raze a city arise. With mass-murder context is everything. If you really want to understand why it happens you can’t boil it down to single choices.
Mention of Hiroshima is a good way to counter those who prefer to demonise Islam than study history. Either they must concede that Islam is not a special case and condemn Western crimes with equal intensity (game over), or they must slide down the moral hill to pragmatic approval of such acts, in which case you can refer them to history. No one can hold both positions and remain rational however much they might want to. Establish which and hold them to it.
For many Westerners the attacks of 911 were the most appalling act they had ever witnessed. Amongst popular broadcasters the sense of shock and awe was uniform and profound. Not since the death of Diana had Radio 2 disc jockeys spoken with such an air of gravity, the same chilling footage playing over and again in their minds.
Over the days that followed many attempts were made to rationalise what had happened. For those with scant appreciation of the West’s role in the world one conclusion stood out. Clearly such an act of barbarity could not have been committed by civilised Westerners – atheists, Christians and Jews. Only ‘medieval’ Islam could supply a perverse enough world-view to drive humans to commit such an act of depravity.
In a sane world this nonsense could be countered with one word: Hiroshima. Similar method of delivery to 911, bar the suicides, but with a payload that extinguished a full 75,000 innocent lives. Twenty-five 911s in one hit, perpetrated by well-fed well-heeled western heroes. End of argument?
The fact that it rarely is demonstrates the lengths some go to maintain contradictory beliefs. At first asking, those who ‘blame Islam’ often argue with conviction that the slaughter of three thousand innocents in ANY situation is deeply and transparently wrong. Morally unjustifiable regardless of the context. My stance entirely.
However, as soon as you mention Hiroshima many back-pedal from this moral obviousness. Suddenly circumstances do matter:
“You can’t compare those two situations!”
“We were in the middle of a war!”
“Those bombs saved lives. They brought the war to a close more quickly.”
Forgetting that all these excuses could equally have come from Al-Qaeda, the moral shift is seismic. Suddenly it’s not that there’s something intrinsically wrong with killing three thousand civvies. The problem is doing it without ‘good reason’. Presumably, if your reasons are valid you should feel free, indeed morally obliged, to slaughter 75,000. Who knows, maybe more?
Revising your moral stance to that of pragmatic advocate of mass-murder comes at a price. It’s a schizophrenic state, doggedly insisting that there are appropriate times to slaughter children when you know in your gut that there can’t be. It makes people defensive. Others who dare to maintain their opposition to all such acts will soon find themselves on the receiving end of that most heinous charge, pacifism. All the old chestnuts roll out, the sort of questions employed by wily schoolchildren and moral philosophers alike, when they want to torture each other:
“So if you knew that the only way to prevent two million people from nuclear annihilation was to press a button that would itself kill one million people, you still wouldn’t do it?”
True, as it stands, out of context, it’s a near impossible question to answer. But so what? Neither 911 nor Hiroshima nor any other colossal act of barbarity has happened out of context. Let’s forget for a moment that the standard justifications for Hiroshima are complete baloney. Even if bombing Hiroshima did save lives in the long run, what justification is there to ever consider it as a stand alone event?: History starts here. Press or don’t press?
In reality, there has to be a suitably insane context before such insane quandaries can arise. Two imperial powers squabbling over whose right it was to rape the pacific. Two governments terrorising their own populations with tales of the depravity and sub-human nature of the other side. Two armies brainwashed to treat each other with no mercy. That’s the lunatic terrain upon which such calm, ‘rational’ choices as whether or not to raze a city arise. With mass-murder context is everything. If you really want to understand why it happens you can’t boil it down to single choices.
Mention of Hiroshima is a good way to counter those who prefer to demonise Islam than study history. Either they must concede that Islam is not a special case and condemn Western crimes with equal intensity (game over), or they must slide down the moral hill to pragmatic approval of such acts, in which case you can refer them to history. No one can hold both positions and remain rational however much they might want to. Establish which and hold them to it.
Truth is coherent
Truth is coherent
I’m a hopeless liar. Not to say I do it a lot, but the opposite. I’m so hopeless at the game of lying I have to avoid it. Unless I have a moral reason to lie (‘No commandant, Anne Frank is not hiding in my attic’ or less seriously, ‘Yes, you look fantastic!’) I find it much easier not to. Just in practical terms, lies require a lot more maintenance than truth. If pressed, you can’t rely on actuality to fill in the detail. You have to produce other supporting lies and these may not cohere with other aspects of reality, causing you to generate even more lies of increasing feebleness, with increasing dry-mouth – ugh!
Stick to the truth on the other hand, and you have the whole state of the world to support you. You don’t need to make anything else up because you never made anything up in the first place. When asked, ‘Where were you at six-thirty last night?’ you can reply with confidence, ‘On the bus’. When questioned further, ‘Did anyone else see you on the bus?’ you can reply, ‘Yes, my friend Stan’. You can say this and feel comfortable that they may contact Stan for corroboration. You don’t have to slip-off and phone Stan to prime him because he actually was on the bus with you. Worst thing that you might be in such circumstances is mistaken, but if you have been acting in good faith then at least you can explain how you came to be mistaken, hand on heart.
I can’t be sure whether Aaronovitch, Cohen and Hari actually believe their own writing or if they are card carrying mercenaries like Paul Johnson or Roger Scruton. In an important sense it really doesn’t matter. Their own opinion of what they write has no bearing on its actual truthfulness. Reality is independent of opinion and whatever they might think the world-views they espouse simply don’t tally with reality. They’re grossly incoherent. You can’t oppose terrorism AND support the ‘war on terror’. To any rational and informed mind the two are mutually exclusive.
Take one huge lie, one all serious historians will be cacking themselves laughing-at in years to come: The invasion of Iraq of was not motivated by oil but by moral concern for the people of Iraq.
Given the Bush family’s connections with oil, US support for Saddam during his most violent excesses, subsequent US sanctions specifically targeting the people of Iraq, Rice and Chevron, the PNAC, the breaching of Kyoto, and every previous post-war US president being a war criminal (I would go on, but you’ve heard it all before) it takes a lot of effort to keep this whopper afloat. The bare faced, often self-confessed cynicism of the invasion is just plain obvious, a truth easily grasped by Chomsky’s ‘fairly intelligent adolescent’ should the poor child ever get told about it. Ask any stranger at a bus stop, right-wing or left wing, anywhere in the world outside the USA, ‘Are the Americans in there for the oil?’ Hundred to one, we all know what answer we’ll get.
A lie of such proportions takes some spinning. Every other aspect of reality is screaming, ‘Not so!’ For whatever reasons the above named have decided to take on the job. Of course, given the complexity of history, there’s no need to actually make anything up. Those who wield Occam’s mallet beat-out distraction, evasion and omission. Good start, reduce everything to one loaded question, “So you’d prefer it if Saddam was still in power?”. And of course condescension. Everything is so much more complex than we mere mortals could understand. We need their guidance to see that black really is white.
Growing up in the seventies, watching BBC news, I felt rather dumb for not understanding ‘the situation in the middle-east’ or ‘the situation in Northern Ireland’. At the time I put it all down to my own inability to grasp complex ideas. These events were being explained in detail, night after night, yet I just couldn’t get a handle on them, silly me.
Now of course the problem is clear. You can’t expect to understand a story when you’re only told half of it. At the time only Republican acts of violence counted as news. What was being done to Catholics was all but omitted from the picture. If mentioned at all it was in the (now eerily familiar) reframe of ‘the continuing cycle of violence’.
Aside from the moral implications of such omission it’s no wonder so many say they find the news boring and confusing and unsatisfying. It’s no wonder so many of us don’t ‘get it’ when there’s no consistent ‘it’ being offered for us to get. As long as so many key aspects of reality are ruled out before the explanations even begin there’s no chance of creating a coherent picture, one which you could argue from. All you’re left with is, ‘Bad people have been bad again. They usually are in that part of the world’.
So you give up. The Irish are obsessed with religion and violence and the IRA are the most appalling example. But don’t ask me to explain it.
The first time you encounter Chomsky or Said on Palestine or Tim Pat Coogan on Ireland it’s surprising how easy it is to understand. Aside from occasional bouts of nausea it’s extremely satisfying to have all that missing data finally stream in. The human misery that prompted the miserable act finally has a chance to enter the picture, and a more coherent pattern of cause and effect emerges, one you can use to draw future judgements from.
Call me a victim of left-wing propaganda all you like. All I know is that after several decades of immersion in mainstream news I was quite incapable of discussing either of these subjects, way out of my depth. I’m no expert now, but I’d happily argue the fundamentals with anyone. Armed with truth, as in a balanced picture of events, at least I have a chance of discussing these situations.
And soon after you start to notice how it’s done. You notice how it’s always Palestinians doing the attacking and Israelis doing the retaliating. You notice how individual acts of terror using primitive weapons are far more horrific and barbaric than the perpetual hi-tec hell unleashed by the West and its clients. You notice that violent threats to the lives of Africans are only newsworthy if the threatened Africans are white. This is the real danger that prompts all the vitriol. The real threat of Chomsky and Herman and Zinn is the threat of a thinking public, one that can analyse and participate in politics instead of giving up and blaming it all on evil people. And blaming their own inability to get to grips with the subject on their own intellectual inadequacy.
All of which leads to a rather upbeat conclusion. Although those who promote ‘necessary illusions’ have the mass of media to support them, they haven’t got the coherent qualities of truth to back them up. Their huge, flabby, apologies can’t be defended by reference to reality other than excruciatingly feeble exceptions, ones that beg as many questions as they answer. This is why it’s so easy to argue with Daily Mail readers. Their knowledge of world politics, as mediated, is paper thin. You don’t have to identify many contradictions in their arguments before they either smile embarrassed and agree with you, or more likely run-off screaming with their fingers in their ears.
Dissent is always going to be a hard game but at least it can be approached honestly, and that’s a real asset. If you refuse to tolerate inconsistencies in your own beliefs, even the comforting ones, you may never have to lie again. And you’ll always have reality waiting to back you up.
M.
I’m a hopeless liar. Not to say I do it a lot, but the opposite. I’m so hopeless at the game of lying I have to avoid it. Unless I have a moral reason to lie (‘No commandant, Anne Frank is not hiding in my attic’ or less seriously, ‘Yes, you look fantastic!’) I find it much easier not to. Just in practical terms, lies require a lot more maintenance than truth. If pressed, you can’t rely on actuality to fill in the detail. You have to produce other supporting lies and these may not cohere with other aspects of reality, causing you to generate even more lies of increasing feebleness, with increasing dry-mouth – ugh!
Stick to the truth on the other hand, and you have the whole state of the world to support you. You don’t need to make anything else up because you never made anything up in the first place. When asked, ‘Where were you at six-thirty last night?’ you can reply with confidence, ‘On the bus’. When questioned further, ‘Did anyone else see you on the bus?’ you can reply, ‘Yes, my friend Stan’. You can say this and feel comfortable that they may contact Stan for corroboration. You don’t have to slip-off and phone Stan to prime him because he actually was on the bus with you. Worst thing that you might be in such circumstances is mistaken, but if you have been acting in good faith then at least you can explain how you came to be mistaken, hand on heart.
I can’t be sure whether Aaronovitch, Cohen and Hari actually believe their own writing or if they are card carrying mercenaries like Paul Johnson or Roger Scruton. In an important sense it really doesn’t matter. Their own opinion of what they write has no bearing on its actual truthfulness. Reality is independent of opinion and whatever they might think the world-views they espouse simply don’t tally with reality. They’re grossly incoherent. You can’t oppose terrorism AND support the ‘war on terror’. To any rational and informed mind the two are mutually exclusive.
Take one huge lie, one all serious historians will be cacking themselves laughing-at in years to come: The invasion of Iraq of was not motivated by oil but by moral concern for the people of Iraq.
Given the Bush family’s connections with oil, US support for Saddam during his most violent excesses, subsequent US sanctions specifically targeting the people of Iraq, Rice and Chevron, the PNAC, the breaching of Kyoto, and every previous post-war US president being a war criminal (I would go on, but you’ve heard it all before) it takes a lot of effort to keep this whopper afloat. The bare faced, often self-confessed cynicism of the invasion is just plain obvious, a truth easily grasped by Chomsky’s ‘fairly intelligent adolescent’ should the poor child ever get told about it. Ask any stranger at a bus stop, right-wing or left wing, anywhere in the world outside the USA, ‘Are the Americans in there for the oil?’ Hundred to one, we all know what answer we’ll get.
A lie of such proportions takes some spinning. Every other aspect of reality is screaming, ‘Not so!’ For whatever reasons the above named have decided to take on the job. Of course, given the complexity of history, there’s no need to actually make anything up. Those who wield Occam’s mallet beat-out distraction, evasion and omission. Good start, reduce everything to one loaded question, “So you’d prefer it if Saddam was still in power?”. And of course condescension. Everything is so much more complex than we mere mortals could understand. We need their guidance to see that black really is white.
Growing up in the seventies, watching BBC news, I felt rather dumb for not understanding ‘the situation in the middle-east’ or ‘the situation in Northern Ireland’. At the time I put it all down to my own inability to grasp complex ideas. These events were being explained in detail, night after night, yet I just couldn’t get a handle on them, silly me.
Now of course the problem is clear. You can’t expect to understand a story when you’re only told half of it. At the time only Republican acts of violence counted as news. What was being done to Catholics was all but omitted from the picture. If mentioned at all it was in the (now eerily familiar) reframe of ‘the continuing cycle of violence’.
Aside from the moral implications of such omission it’s no wonder so many say they find the news boring and confusing and unsatisfying. It’s no wonder so many of us don’t ‘get it’ when there’s no consistent ‘it’ being offered for us to get. As long as so many key aspects of reality are ruled out before the explanations even begin there’s no chance of creating a coherent picture, one which you could argue from. All you’re left with is, ‘Bad people have been bad again. They usually are in that part of the world’.
So you give up. The Irish are obsessed with religion and violence and the IRA are the most appalling example. But don’t ask me to explain it.
The first time you encounter Chomsky or Said on Palestine or Tim Pat Coogan on Ireland it’s surprising how easy it is to understand. Aside from occasional bouts of nausea it’s extremely satisfying to have all that missing data finally stream in. The human misery that prompted the miserable act finally has a chance to enter the picture, and a more coherent pattern of cause and effect emerges, one you can use to draw future judgements from.
Call me a victim of left-wing propaganda all you like. All I know is that after several decades of immersion in mainstream news I was quite incapable of discussing either of these subjects, way out of my depth. I’m no expert now, but I’d happily argue the fundamentals with anyone. Armed with truth, as in a balanced picture of events, at least I have a chance of discussing these situations.
And soon after you start to notice how it’s done. You notice how it’s always Palestinians doing the attacking and Israelis doing the retaliating. You notice how individual acts of terror using primitive weapons are far more horrific and barbaric than the perpetual hi-tec hell unleashed by the West and its clients. You notice that violent threats to the lives of Africans are only newsworthy if the threatened Africans are white. This is the real danger that prompts all the vitriol. The real threat of Chomsky and Herman and Zinn is the threat of a thinking public, one that can analyse and participate in politics instead of giving up and blaming it all on evil people. And blaming their own inability to get to grips with the subject on their own intellectual inadequacy.
All of which leads to a rather upbeat conclusion. Although those who promote ‘necessary illusions’ have the mass of media to support them, they haven’t got the coherent qualities of truth to back them up. Their huge, flabby, apologies can’t be defended by reference to reality other than excruciatingly feeble exceptions, ones that beg as many questions as they answer. This is why it’s so easy to argue with Daily Mail readers. Their knowledge of world politics, as mediated, is paper thin. You don’t have to identify many contradictions in their arguments before they either smile embarrassed and agree with you, or more likely run-off screaming with their fingers in their ears.
Dissent is always going to be a hard game but at least it can be approached honestly, and that’s a real asset. If you refuse to tolerate inconsistencies in your own beliefs, even the comforting ones, you may never have to lie again. And you’ll always have reality waiting to back you up.
M.
Offence is not the Issue
Offence is not the Issue
CLIVE: Same thing happened with, er, you remember ‘Andy Pandy’?
DEREK: Yeah.
CLIVE: He used to come on. As soon as that was on I used to get in a glove. I used to jump in a glove and rush down the road and, you know, the power it has over people.
DEREK: Mmm.
(Derek and Clive on the dangerous influence of television)
When racist comments are condemned in the media too often the charge is that such views are offensive. Someone might feel insulted or threatened. This is of course a huge oversimplification. The problem isn’t people getting upset as much as bigotry being socially divisive in general. Bigotry fosters ignorance and vice versa, and that’s far more serious than momentary hurt feelings.
I’m suspicious that the reason “causing offence” has become the media’s condemnation-term of choice is that any more sophisticated analysis would be an admission of the effect the media has on us in general.
Big media players have no desire to open that can of worms. Instead such claims are dismissed as patronising, eg: Jon Snow’s recent reply to the editors of Medialens:
"people are not as ignorant as you make them out to be..dont underestimate the viewer!"
This is wilful oversimplification, and only a stone’s throw from Pete and Dud, in the above sketch. Of course, bar the occasional freak incident (playing TARDIS in an old fridge, etc) the masses don’t feel compelled to copycat dangerous behaviour. But who said the political influence of news and fiction works to such simple patterns of cause and effect? One single uncritical appraisal of the Reagan years might not fool the public on its own, but it’s not on it’s own. It’s part of a week long media blitz, in the wake of two decades of omission. The true and important stories, the ones about bombing Tripoli and terrorising Nicaragua are the ones in the wilderness, the ones that have no chance of ‘fooling’ the public.
Ideology, the stuff that succeeds in making most Britons think that the occupied territories are under Palestinian occupation, comes at us in drips. A slow but relentless saturation. The public may not feel compelled to jump in a glove, but they can be made to completely invert complex historical events if enough of the right detail is left out, day after day, year after year. This conclusion is not insulting or patronising. It’s something we should all recognise in ourselves.
An extreme but by no means improbable example: Some pensioners live quite alone. Their last twenty years in the company of a television. Say during this time a sizeable immigrant population was sucked into the country, like West Indians into Britain in the fifties, or Hong Kong Chinese into Vancouver in the nineties. Without any direct contact with members of this ethnic group, where would one of these pensioners learn about the attitudes and habits of this new racial group? You can say with virtual certainty that it has to come from the telly and the papers (and perhaps a bit from Dolly at 42, who also lives with a telly). Every opinion our recluse has about that group must have been mediated by the mass media.
In turn, the opinions and actions of that pensioner may vary greatly depending on the stories the media decides to tell: Are these people here to help with a labour shortage or to sponge off our welfare system? Are they a proud diligent people, keen to abide by our customs, or just here to plant bombs and sell our children crack? Will our pensioner be happy to ask one of these people for help at the laundry, or limp-off down a back-alley in terror? All will be dictated by the narratives the mass media has tied to the group.
Like it or not, there’s something of this pensioner in all of us. My own opinion of what Indian people are like, or rather how they might differ from me, can be no more sophisticated than the memes about Indians I’ve obtained from the mass media, plus my personal encounters and acquaintances with Indians, which as it happens are quite numerous. But when it comes to, say, Maori’s, I’m little better than a lonesome pensioner. Everything I know of them is media memes, and it’s a very sparse jigsaw: Showing posterior to British royalty, obviously commendable, and “Once Were Warriors” which is obviously very frightening. Pity the poor Maori who gets stuck on the bus next to me. Imagine the questions I’d ask.
Of course I’m exaggerating, but not much. We can’t expect our opinions of strangers or of distant conflicts to be any more sophisticated than the facts and fictions we’ve been exposed to. Such patterns of cause and effect may be difficult to chart but it’s all still just cause and effect. Just because you can’t summarise it in a sentence (without sounding absurd) doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
CLIVE: Same thing happened with, er, you remember ‘Andy Pandy’?
DEREK: Yeah.
CLIVE: He used to come on. As soon as that was on I used to get in a glove. I used to jump in a glove and rush down the road and, you know, the power it has over people.
DEREK: Mmm.
(Derek and Clive on the dangerous influence of television)
When racist comments are condemned in the media too often the charge is that such views are offensive. Someone might feel insulted or threatened. This is of course a huge oversimplification. The problem isn’t people getting upset as much as bigotry being socially divisive in general. Bigotry fosters ignorance and vice versa, and that’s far more serious than momentary hurt feelings.
I’m suspicious that the reason “causing offence” has become the media’s condemnation-term of choice is that any more sophisticated analysis would be an admission of the effect the media has on us in general.
Big media players have no desire to open that can of worms. Instead such claims are dismissed as patronising, eg: Jon Snow’s recent reply to the editors of Medialens:
"people are not as ignorant as you make them out to be..dont underestimate the viewer!"
This is wilful oversimplification, and only a stone’s throw from Pete and Dud, in the above sketch. Of course, bar the occasional freak incident (playing TARDIS in an old fridge, etc) the masses don’t feel compelled to copycat dangerous behaviour. But who said the political influence of news and fiction works to such simple patterns of cause and effect? One single uncritical appraisal of the Reagan years might not fool the public on its own, but it’s not on it’s own. It’s part of a week long media blitz, in the wake of two decades of omission. The true and important stories, the ones about bombing Tripoli and terrorising Nicaragua are the ones in the wilderness, the ones that have no chance of ‘fooling’ the public.
Ideology, the stuff that succeeds in making most Britons think that the occupied territories are under Palestinian occupation, comes at us in drips. A slow but relentless saturation. The public may not feel compelled to jump in a glove, but they can be made to completely invert complex historical events if enough of the right detail is left out, day after day, year after year. This conclusion is not insulting or patronising. It’s something we should all recognise in ourselves.
An extreme but by no means improbable example: Some pensioners live quite alone. Their last twenty years in the company of a television. Say during this time a sizeable immigrant population was sucked into the country, like West Indians into Britain in the fifties, or Hong Kong Chinese into Vancouver in the nineties. Without any direct contact with members of this ethnic group, where would one of these pensioners learn about the attitudes and habits of this new racial group? You can say with virtual certainty that it has to come from the telly and the papers (and perhaps a bit from Dolly at 42, who also lives with a telly). Every opinion our recluse has about that group must have been mediated by the mass media.
In turn, the opinions and actions of that pensioner may vary greatly depending on the stories the media decides to tell: Are these people here to help with a labour shortage or to sponge off our welfare system? Are they a proud diligent people, keen to abide by our customs, or just here to plant bombs and sell our children crack? Will our pensioner be happy to ask one of these people for help at the laundry, or limp-off down a back-alley in terror? All will be dictated by the narratives the mass media has tied to the group.
Like it or not, there’s something of this pensioner in all of us. My own opinion of what Indian people are like, or rather how they might differ from me, can be no more sophisticated than the memes about Indians I’ve obtained from the mass media, plus my personal encounters and acquaintances with Indians, which as it happens are quite numerous. But when it comes to, say, Maori’s, I’m little better than a lonesome pensioner. Everything I know of them is media memes, and it’s a very sparse jigsaw: Showing posterior to British royalty, obviously commendable, and “Once Were Warriors” which is obviously very frightening. Pity the poor Maori who gets stuck on the bus next to me. Imagine the questions I’d ask.
Of course I’m exaggerating, but not much. We can’t expect our opinions of strangers or of distant conflicts to be any more sophisticated than the facts and fictions we’ve been exposed to. Such patterns of cause and effect may be difficult to chart but it’s all still just cause and effect. Just because you can’t summarise it in a sentence (without sounding absurd) doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Insatiable Desires
Insatiable Desires
………and they all lived happily ever after.
Whether it’s parents, clergy or advertisers spinning the yarn, there’s something fishy about eternal happiness. From a Darwinian perspective pleasurable sensations can only be fleeting. Functionally speaking, they’re an incentive, a reward for certain kinds of behaviour, not something to wallow in indefinitely. Limitless food, love, sex, drugs, wealth and prestige might sound nice(!) but it all wears thin, eventually. Pleasure arose because it kept us on our toes, not our backsides.
The model of the mind popularised by Stephen Pinker is modular, and to some degree genetically pre-programmed. Rather than a blank slate upon which environment sketches a personality, each mind comprises specific modules or ‘organs’ that have evolved in response to specific selection pressures.
To some extent this seems undeniable. Without any conscious intervention all normal humans develop capacities of hunger, thirst, and sexual desire. Whatever our upbringing, our brains seem pre-programmed to exhibit these drives. In Darwinian terms it’s not hard to imagine why. Those of our animal ancestors with a strong genetic disposition to pursue those goals passed on those genes. Those with lesser urges reproduced proportionally less. No surprise, we are the horny born of the horny, and the hungry born of the hungry.
More controversially, the model can be extended, positing an innate basis to more subtle psychological traits. The desire for prestige or kudos, for example, could be an innate feature of the human mind. Prestige can get you more food and more partners, so it too may have established a genetic basis, on the back of its own replication-enhancing effects. Similarly, the desire for material wealth, be it possessions or territory, seems a likely candidate for an evolved, rather than purely learned urge.
Although these organs are common to us all their strengths are not uniform, from person to person. Each of us suffer a different level of effect from each of our standard array of mental modules. To put it crudely, the master volume control on each organ may be set higher or lower, from person to person. Indeed, the noise from some can be so great as to almost drown the others out. Some of us seem innately more food-hungry, or sex-hungry, or power-hungry than the next (and some of us all three.) In as much as biology does dictate mental behaviour, human personality could be seen as the summation of the effects of these organs. In combination, their various outputs form the innate component of the psychological makeup of a given individual.
At which point the arguments spiral, even among those who agree in principle. Naturally, as the number of possible variables increases so does the uncertainty: How can we be sure that a specific behaviour is the consequence of a particular mental organ, rather than a learned trait? Which supposed module, drives which identified urge? Is envy a true organ of the mind, selected for it’s reproductive worth, or is it just a symptom of an unsatisfied prestige module? Is romantic love an innate capacity, or just the conjunction of a satisfied companionship module and an overheated lust organ?
For all the disagreement some version of the model seems only reasonable. However difficult it might be to map the landscape of the inborn component of human psychology, few can doubt that some such landscape exists. Indeed some of its features are quite clear and can provide useful landmarks while attempting to survey the surrounding terrain.
Which brings us back to pleasure. Rather than a drive in itself, pleasure can be seen as one of the means by which our drives compel us. Much as pains avert, pleasures encourage. In the main, we feel pleased when we get what we want, when we satisfy the urges our mind-organs foist upon us. True, sex, food, comfort and security don’t guarantee happiness, but equally true their absence tends to make us unhappy. We keep chasing them for the pleasure we hope they’ll bring.
Now it becomes plain why our capacity for sustained pleasure is so limited. Clearly there would be no replicative advantage in a feeling of pleasure that continued long after the period of reproductive advantage had passed. Pleasure wouldn’t help you to pass on your genes if it stayed with you long after a particular meal had been fully digested, when you could be concentrating on ensuring the next; or satisfaction regarding last night’s comfy bed when you haven’t worked out where you’ll be sleeping tonight; or fond memories of the sex you had last week when you could be fulfilling that urge again that evening.
Happiness is of no use in replication terms if it continues long after the act or event that prompted it. Indeed, a disproportionately prolonged high would be positively harmful to our chances of procreation. Like the committed heroin user, we could bask in the warm glow of pleasure while our lives fell about around us. The everlasting orgasm might sound attractive, but it won’t help you to reproduce, or get the housework done. At some appropriate point the anxiety has to kick back in, to get us up and chasing life again.
Clear as this might be, it’s not the easiest thing to remember when you’re clattering through the anxieties and insecurities of real life. When you’re suffering from an absence of a certain form of pleasure it can become all too easy to imagine that fulfilling that one desire would make you whole, happy and complete. If you haven’t had sex for a long time it can come to seem like it’s the only thing that matters, as if its fulfilment would obliterate all other anxieties. And of course it might, for a while. Indeed, that one moment of joy might leave you in a better position to handle all the other problems as they slide back into view. Nevertheless, there’s no long-term escape. At some point they will slide back into view. It’s how we’re built.
Just as sure, though often just as difficult to see, is the insatiable character of our desire for material provision. Of all human needs, this is the most fundamental, even overruling sexual desire when necessary. Everything has to take second place to food and shelter. The pleasure we derive from attaining such essentials (and the anxiety induced by their absence) is a reflection of their fundamental importance.
Given this vital role it’s understandable that many of us crave material excess. Throughout our evolution abundance has always been a rarity, too rare to make a dent in the evolved component of our psyche. In our entire history, scant few have led lives where basic material provision wasn’t a principal anxiety. For the great mass of modern humanity this is still very much the case. For those who still scrape a living it is difficult to imagine anything better than endless material abundance. When your own material provision is uncertain extreme wealth can look like a perfect state of being.
In truth though, there’s no escape. Not even for the wealthy. Anxiety doesn’t depart as riches arrive. You only have to look at the rich. If there’s one truly valuable thing to be learned from celebrity gossip it’s that the rich and famous aren’t any more satisfied than the rest of us. Wealth operates strictly to the law of diminishing returns. Beyond basic material security, and a certain level of luxury, every further penny buys less and less contentment.
Some won’t take the hint. They hope another Ferrari will make things right. But how many Ferraris can you own? If you already own three, how much happier can the fourth really make you, seriously? How many houses can you own, how many banquets can you attend, how many drugs can you take? As difficult as it is for us less wealthy to appreciate, the opulent are still just chasing their tails.
And of course material provision is only one human urge. Money alone can’t shut the others up: Lack of acclaim. Lack of critical acclaim. Critical acclaim but from the wrong quarters. Not having sex with the person you want to. Having sex with the person you want to but they look like they don’t mean it (perhaps they’re just after your money?) Children you’ve given the world to (materially) who now resent you, and take your wealth for granted.
Then there’s one form of material abundance that even the poor of the West can afford to be fooled by. One that also has us chasing our tails, and chasing ourselves to the grave. As with wealth in general, our genes have been little altered by food surpluses. In the main we’ve benefited from every calorie we could get our hands on. Accordingly, fatty, sugary food can be very comforting, in a chilly world. The chronic obesity that currently stalks the West bears testament. Like the fourth Ferrari, the fourth Big Mac won’t satisfy for long. The comfort soon passes and the angst is sucked back in, if anything enhanced by increased feelings of queasiness, ugliness and self-loathing.
None of which is to deny than we can engineer happiness, in the short-term. We do a fine job of subverting our urges. Contraception is a clear case of us cheating the functional aspect of sex and snatching the pleasure: Human Autonomy 1, DNA 0. But the overriding rule still stands. Even the best sex has to end. At some point the other drives loose patience, and start screaming for attention.
Similarly, drink and drugs can cause ecstatic sensations, feelings our bodies were keeping safe for moments of genuine achievement. With the right chemicals we can tap into the pleasures normally reserved for when we genuinely win the race, have the baby, feel appreciated, make a friend, improve the world, get the beloved. But as always it can’t go on indefinitely. At some point the high must end and the hangover begin.
For all its illogicality, the idea of enduring happiness continues to be a useful tool for the powerful. Whatever purpose the myth of heaven might currently serve, its history is littered with abuse. For centuries it’s been a successful means of suppressing the discontent of the poor: Accept your miserable station in life, for eternal happiness awaits. Fat chance. No more plausibly, advertisers promise heaven in the here and now. Lasting contentment is in fact attainable through the right kind of chocolate or car or soap powder. Just look at the ecstatic people in the adverts. Happy with your wash?
Any questioning of material excess is prone to the accusation of sour grapes. It’s difficult to criticise the lives of rich people without it sounding like jealousy (and to be sure, it’s in there somewhere.) But that doesn’t alter the fact of the matter. The notion of eternal joy is a myth, something we thumb-sucking humans couldn’t resist inventing. At best, this is always going to be a roller-coaster ride. No human has ever earned enough money, eaten enough food, or had enough sex to permanently escape the anxiety of simply being here. “Things still aren’t right, I still need something” is instinctive, built in, with us to the end.
………and they all lived happily ever after.
Whether it’s parents, clergy or advertisers spinning the yarn, there’s something fishy about eternal happiness. From a Darwinian perspective pleasurable sensations can only be fleeting. Functionally speaking, they’re an incentive, a reward for certain kinds of behaviour, not something to wallow in indefinitely. Limitless food, love, sex, drugs, wealth and prestige might sound nice(!) but it all wears thin, eventually. Pleasure arose because it kept us on our toes, not our backsides.
The model of the mind popularised by Stephen Pinker is modular, and to some degree genetically pre-programmed. Rather than a blank slate upon which environment sketches a personality, each mind comprises specific modules or ‘organs’ that have evolved in response to specific selection pressures.
To some extent this seems undeniable. Without any conscious intervention all normal humans develop capacities of hunger, thirst, and sexual desire. Whatever our upbringing, our brains seem pre-programmed to exhibit these drives. In Darwinian terms it’s not hard to imagine why. Those of our animal ancestors with a strong genetic disposition to pursue those goals passed on those genes. Those with lesser urges reproduced proportionally less. No surprise, we are the horny born of the horny, and the hungry born of the hungry.
More controversially, the model can be extended, positing an innate basis to more subtle psychological traits. The desire for prestige or kudos, for example, could be an innate feature of the human mind. Prestige can get you more food and more partners, so it too may have established a genetic basis, on the back of its own replication-enhancing effects. Similarly, the desire for material wealth, be it possessions or territory, seems a likely candidate for an evolved, rather than purely learned urge.
Although these organs are common to us all their strengths are not uniform, from person to person. Each of us suffer a different level of effect from each of our standard array of mental modules. To put it crudely, the master volume control on each organ may be set higher or lower, from person to person. Indeed, the noise from some can be so great as to almost drown the others out. Some of us seem innately more food-hungry, or sex-hungry, or power-hungry than the next (and some of us all three.) In as much as biology does dictate mental behaviour, human personality could be seen as the summation of the effects of these organs. In combination, their various outputs form the innate component of the psychological makeup of a given individual.
At which point the arguments spiral, even among those who agree in principle. Naturally, as the number of possible variables increases so does the uncertainty: How can we be sure that a specific behaviour is the consequence of a particular mental organ, rather than a learned trait? Which supposed module, drives which identified urge? Is envy a true organ of the mind, selected for it’s reproductive worth, or is it just a symptom of an unsatisfied prestige module? Is romantic love an innate capacity, or just the conjunction of a satisfied companionship module and an overheated lust organ?
For all the disagreement some version of the model seems only reasonable. However difficult it might be to map the landscape of the inborn component of human psychology, few can doubt that some such landscape exists. Indeed some of its features are quite clear and can provide useful landmarks while attempting to survey the surrounding terrain.
Which brings us back to pleasure. Rather than a drive in itself, pleasure can be seen as one of the means by which our drives compel us. Much as pains avert, pleasures encourage. In the main, we feel pleased when we get what we want, when we satisfy the urges our mind-organs foist upon us. True, sex, food, comfort and security don’t guarantee happiness, but equally true their absence tends to make us unhappy. We keep chasing them for the pleasure we hope they’ll bring.
Now it becomes plain why our capacity for sustained pleasure is so limited. Clearly there would be no replicative advantage in a feeling of pleasure that continued long after the period of reproductive advantage had passed. Pleasure wouldn’t help you to pass on your genes if it stayed with you long after a particular meal had been fully digested, when you could be concentrating on ensuring the next; or satisfaction regarding last night’s comfy bed when you haven’t worked out where you’ll be sleeping tonight; or fond memories of the sex you had last week when you could be fulfilling that urge again that evening.
Happiness is of no use in replication terms if it continues long after the act or event that prompted it. Indeed, a disproportionately prolonged high would be positively harmful to our chances of procreation. Like the committed heroin user, we could bask in the warm glow of pleasure while our lives fell about around us. The everlasting orgasm might sound attractive, but it won’t help you to reproduce, or get the housework done. At some appropriate point the anxiety has to kick back in, to get us up and chasing life again.
Clear as this might be, it’s not the easiest thing to remember when you’re clattering through the anxieties and insecurities of real life. When you’re suffering from an absence of a certain form of pleasure it can become all too easy to imagine that fulfilling that one desire would make you whole, happy and complete. If you haven’t had sex for a long time it can come to seem like it’s the only thing that matters, as if its fulfilment would obliterate all other anxieties. And of course it might, for a while. Indeed, that one moment of joy might leave you in a better position to handle all the other problems as they slide back into view. Nevertheless, there’s no long-term escape. At some point they will slide back into view. It’s how we’re built.
Just as sure, though often just as difficult to see, is the insatiable character of our desire for material provision. Of all human needs, this is the most fundamental, even overruling sexual desire when necessary. Everything has to take second place to food and shelter. The pleasure we derive from attaining such essentials (and the anxiety induced by their absence) is a reflection of their fundamental importance.
Given this vital role it’s understandable that many of us crave material excess. Throughout our evolution abundance has always been a rarity, too rare to make a dent in the evolved component of our psyche. In our entire history, scant few have led lives where basic material provision wasn’t a principal anxiety. For the great mass of modern humanity this is still very much the case. For those who still scrape a living it is difficult to imagine anything better than endless material abundance. When your own material provision is uncertain extreme wealth can look like a perfect state of being.
In truth though, there’s no escape. Not even for the wealthy. Anxiety doesn’t depart as riches arrive. You only have to look at the rich. If there’s one truly valuable thing to be learned from celebrity gossip it’s that the rich and famous aren’t any more satisfied than the rest of us. Wealth operates strictly to the law of diminishing returns. Beyond basic material security, and a certain level of luxury, every further penny buys less and less contentment.
Some won’t take the hint. They hope another Ferrari will make things right. But how many Ferraris can you own? If you already own three, how much happier can the fourth really make you, seriously? How many houses can you own, how many banquets can you attend, how many drugs can you take? As difficult as it is for us less wealthy to appreciate, the opulent are still just chasing their tails.
And of course material provision is only one human urge. Money alone can’t shut the others up: Lack of acclaim. Lack of critical acclaim. Critical acclaim but from the wrong quarters. Not having sex with the person you want to. Having sex with the person you want to but they look like they don’t mean it (perhaps they’re just after your money?) Children you’ve given the world to (materially) who now resent you, and take your wealth for granted.
Then there’s one form of material abundance that even the poor of the West can afford to be fooled by. One that also has us chasing our tails, and chasing ourselves to the grave. As with wealth in general, our genes have been little altered by food surpluses. In the main we’ve benefited from every calorie we could get our hands on. Accordingly, fatty, sugary food can be very comforting, in a chilly world. The chronic obesity that currently stalks the West bears testament. Like the fourth Ferrari, the fourth Big Mac won’t satisfy for long. The comfort soon passes and the angst is sucked back in, if anything enhanced by increased feelings of queasiness, ugliness and self-loathing.
None of which is to deny than we can engineer happiness, in the short-term. We do a fine job of subverting our urges. Contraception is a clear case of us cheating the functional aspect of sex and snatching the pleasure: Human Autonomy 1, DNA 0. But the overriding rule still stands. Even the best sex has to end. At some point the other drives loose patience, and start screaming for attention.
Similarly, drink and drugs can cause ecstatic sensations, feelings our bodies were keeping safe for moments of genuine achievement. With the right chemicals we can tap into the pleasures normally reserved for when we genuinely win the race, have the baby, feel appreciated, make a friend, improve the world, get the beloved. But as always it can’t go on indefinitely. At some point the high must end and the hangover begin.
For all its illogicality, the idea of enduring happiness continues to be a useful tool for the powerful. Whatever purpose the myth of heaven might currently serve, its history is littered with abuse. For centuries it’s been a successful means of suppressing the discontent of the poor: Accept your miserable station in life, for eternal happiness awaits. Fat chance. No more plausibly, advertisers promise heaven in the here and now. Lasting contentment is in fact attainable through the right kind of chocolate or car or soap powder. Just look at the ecstatic people in the adverts. Happy with your wash?
Any questioning of material excess is prone to the accusation of sour grapes. It’s difficult to criticise the lives of rich people without it sounding like jealousy (and to be sure, it’s in there somewhere.) But that doesn’t alter the fact of the matter. The notion of eternal joy is a myth, something we thumb-sucking humans couldn’t resist inventing. At best, this is always going to be a roller-coaster ride. No human has ever earned enough money, eaten enough food, or had enough sex to permanently escape the anxiety of simply being here. “Things still aren’t right, I still need something” is instinctive, built in, with us to the end.
The greatest love of all?
The greatest love of all?
One morning last summer, on my way to work, a woman jumped on the bus and started screaming “You cut me up!” at the driver. She just kept repeating “You cut me up! You cut me up! Where was I supposed to go?” over and over and over and over. Double figures, perhaps triple, all condensed into two minutes, all before an audience of two full decks. Eventually she called the driver a c**t and he rose to his feet. She backed off to her car, still screaming, “I’ve got your number!” and of course, “He cut me up!” for the benefit of passers-by.
Whatever the rights, wrongs and even danger surrounding the driving incident, her outburst was pure self-righteous indignation. She, the all-important human, out in her all-important Ford Escort, had been treated disrespectfully by another road user. The effrontery! Her family name in tatters! She must be avenged.
In excess, self-respect becomes a rod for your own back. With less of it there’d be less room for all that indignation. She could’ve just called him what she called him in her own privacy, and got on with her day. Instead she probably festered on it for weeks. Perhaps she got her old man onto him? He’s a builder, you know?
Pride, and what is fashionably termed ‘anti-social behaviour’ go hand in hand. Whether it’s children or adults boasting of their violent escapades, it’s nearly always justified by excessive pride and self-respect: “Nobody does that to me!” “So I said, you looking at me?” “You can’t turn around and say that to me!” Me, me, always bloody me.
Although the desire for a certain level of self-respect seems to be an innate yearning we live in times that milk that yearning for all it’s worth. Like sex, selfishness sells.
Advertising endlessly appeals to the all important you, and the you-betterment the product promises to deliver. Strategies like, “You will be cool if you own this” or more likely, “You must be pitiful if you don’t” can only work on those frightened of not being cool. All the crap about owning the right trainers would dissolve without this excessive self-respect. “I must be seen using the right mobile” would mean nothing if the “I” hadn’t elevated itself to such an unsustainable level of importance in the first place.
Through much of pop culture, anything other than unbridled self-worship is painted as a dangerous heresy. The platitudes come thick and fast. To question them is to flirt with self-destruction: “Whatever else, remember: you’re number one.” “You’ve got to respect yourself, without that you’re nothing!” (Copyright, every soap-opera ever). A whole vein of popular music, from country to soul to rap is dedicated to driving home these essential values. All together now….
“Learning to love yourself……is the greatest love of all!”
“Did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die? Oh no not I, I will survive!”
“Pride! (a deeper love!) Pride! (a deeper love!)”
“The record shows! I took the blows! and did it myyyyyyyyyyyyy way!”
Truth is, it’s horses for courses. If you’re a dirt-poor black American, immersed in a culture of drugs and guns, then perhaps self-respect is an important survival strategy. Likewise if you’re the housewife who’s decided she won’t take her husband’s beating any more, it might be valuable to take stock of your virtues, your strengths and stoicism. Luckily though, most of the people buying these records and following these fictions simply are not. If you’re just another well-fed kid who’s never encountered hardship, or been held back by social prejudice, then perhaps such goals aren’t the way forward. In fact, perhaps it’s your current glut of self-respect and self-importance that’s making you miserable in the first place.
Arthur Smith recently spoke some sense on this subject, on Grumpy Old Men. He noted the value pop-culture places on possessing something called ‘attitude’. As far as he could see ‘attitude’ was simply being snotty, being rude and self-absorbed. Being boring and selfish, really. He had an equal contempt for the current cult of self-respect: “So what if some people don’t respect me. F**k ‘em!”
Quite right, but I don’t think I’d even go that far. I’m more, “So what if some people don’t respect me, they’re probably right not to”, which is not self-deprecation but a statement of fact. I’ve never done anything that might garner anyone’s respect. So what!
Apologies if this is starting to sound like “Thought for the day” but I need to spit it out. Until embarrassingly recently I often referred to myself as a depressive. Thanks largely to the editors of this site (Medialens, for it was they) I have come to see that all I really am is a bit of a whiner (some would say wiener!). It was only because I took my own problems, my own existence, so seriously, and dwelled upon it so much, that it was possible to regularly feel bad about my lot.
The way out, of course, is to consider the plight of those worse-off than yourself. If you take time to deliberately force your own life out of your mind, and instead concentrate solely on the misery others face (plenty to choose from) you can buy yourself a reprieve from you own nagging. The rope slackens, and you can breath again. You realise it was you yanking at it all along.
Works at all levels. When you miss a green light, or someone pushes into the queue ahead of you, or a train pulls off just as you race onto the platform, it’s very easy to go into “Why me?” mode, or snarl “Typical!” (when it’s no more typical for yourself than anyone else.) At such times a thought for those with genuine problems can be most calming, humbling.
At the other extreme, even legitimate personal grief can be mitigated with a moment’s thought for those worse off. However painful, even a death in the family is not as tragic as the death of all your family and the loss of your entire means of material subsistence – sad to say, an everyday occurrence in the countries we ‘liberate’ and bring to ‘democracy’. A few minutes concern for them is a chance to escape your own loss, and then return to it in a more placid and capable state.
At first it might sound callous, trying to benefit from the suffering of others, but in fact everybody wins. You belittle your own problems and simultaneously increase your comprehension of the problems of others. Who knows, it might spur you on to act selflessly too.
Although there is good evidence that some people’s genetic constitution makes them susceptible to depression it’s hard not to wonder how many of today’s Prozac poppers are unwittingly manufacturing their own depression. Didn’t used to need this stuff. It makes me wince to think how many doctors and shrinks and councillors are telling depressed patients to love themselves more if they want to get better, when that self-love may well be the root cause of their misery.
One morning last summer, on my way to work, a woman jumped on the bus and started screaming “You cut me up!” at the driver. She just kept repeating “You cut me up! You cut me up! Where was I supposed to go?” over and over and over and over. Double figures, perhaps triple, all condensed into two minutes, all before an audience of two full decks. Eventually she called the driver a c**t and he rose to his feet. She backed off to her car, still screaming, “I’ve got your number!” and of course, “He cut me up!” for the benefit of passers-by.
Whatever the rights, wrongs and even danger surrounding the driving incident, her outburst was pure self-righteous indignation. She, the all-important human, out in her all-important Ford Escort, had been treated disrespectfully by another road user. The effrontery! Her family name in tatters! She must be avenged.
In excess, self-respect becomes a rod for your own back. With less of it there’d be less room for all that indignation. She could’ve just called him what she called him in her own privacy, and got on with her day. Instead she probably festered on it for weeks. Perhaps she got her old man onto him? He’s a builder, you know?
Pride, and what is fashionably termed ‘anti-social behaviour’ go hand in hand. Whether it’s children or adults boasting of their violent escapades, it’s nearly always justified by excessive pride and self-respect: “Nobody does that to me!” “So I said, you looking at me?” “You can’t turn around and say that to me!” Me, me, always bloody me.
Although the desire for a certain level of self-respect seems to be an innate yearning we live in times that milk that yearning for all it’s worth. Like sex, selfishness sells.
Advertising endlessly appeals to the all important you, and the you-betterment the product promises to deliver. Strategies like, “You will be cool if you own this” or more likely, “You must be pitiful if you don’t” can only work on those frightened of not being cool. All the crap about owning the right trainers would dissolve without this excessive self-respect. “I must be seen using the right mobile” would mean nothing if the “I” hadn’t elevated itself to such an unsustainable level of importance in the first place.
Through much of pop culture, anything other than unbridled self-worship is painted as a dangerous heresy. The platitudes come thick and fast. To question them is to flirt with self-destruction: “Whatever else, remember: you’re number one.” “You’ve got to respect yourself, without that you’re nothing!” (Copyright, every soap-opera ever). A whole vein of popular music, from country to soul to rap is dedicated to driving home these essential values. All together now….
“Learning to love yourself……is the greatest love of all!”
“Did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die? Oh no not I, I will survive!”
“Pride! (a deeper love!) Pride! (a deeper love!)”
“The record shows! I took the blows! and did it myyyyyyyyyyyyy way!”
Truth is, it’s horses for courses. If you’re a dirt-poor black American, immersed in a culture of drugs and guns, then perhaps self-respect is an important survival strategy. Likewise if you’re the housewife who’s decided she won’t take her husband’s beating any more, it might be valuable to take stock of your virtues, your strengths and stoicism. Luckily though, most of the people buying these records and following these fictions simply are not. If you’re just another well-fed kid who’s never encountered hardship, or been held back by social prejudice, then perhaps such goals aren’t the way forward. In fact, perhaps it’s your current glut of self-respect and self-importance that’s making you miserable in the first place.
Arthur Smith recently spoke some sense on this subject, on Grumpy Old Men. He noted the value pop-culture places on possessing something called ‘attitude’. As far as he could see ‘attitude’ was simply being snotty, being rude and self-absorbed. Being boring and selfish, really. He had an equal contempt for the current cult of self-respect: “So what if some people don’t respect me. F**k ‘em!”
Quite right, but I don’t think I’d even go that far. I’m more, “So what if some people don’t respect me, they’re probably right not to”, which is not self-deprecation but a statement of fact. I’ve never done anything that might garner anyone’s respect. So what!
Apologies if this is starting to sound like “Thought for the day” but I need to spit it out. Until embarrassingly recently I often referred to myself as a depressive. Thanks largely to the editors of this site (Medialens, for it was they) I have come to see that all I really am is a bit of a whiner (some would say wiener!). It was only because I took my own problems, my own existence, so seriously, and dwelled upon it so much, that it was possible to regularly feel bad about my lot.
The way out, of course, is to consider the plight of those worse-off than yourself. If you take time to deliberately force your own life out of your mind, and instead concentrate solely on the misery others face (plenty to choose from) you can buy yourself a reprieve from you own nagging. The rope slackens, and you can breath again. You realise it was you yanking at it all along.
Works at all levels. When you miss a green light, or someone pushes into the queue ahead of you, or a train pulls off just as you race onto the platform, it’s very easy to go into “Why me?” mode, or snarl “Typical!” (when it’s no more typical for yourself than anyone else.) At such times a thought for those with genuine problems can be most calming, humbling.
At the other extreme, even legitimate personal grief can be mitigated with a moment’s thought for those worse off. However painful, even a death in the family is not as tragic as the death of all your family and the loss of your entire means of material subsistence – sad to say, an everyday occurrence in the countries we ‘liberate’ and bring to ‘democracy’. A few minutes concern for them is a chance to escape your own loss, and then return to it in a more placid and capable state.
At first it might sound callous, trying to benefit from the suffering of others, but in fact everybody wins. You belittle your own problems and simultaneously increase your comprehension of the problems of others. Who knows, it might spur you on to act selflessly too.
Although there is good evidence that some people’s genetic constitution makes them susceptible to depression it’s hard not to wonder how many of today’s Prozac poppers are unwittingly manufacturing their own depression. Didn’t used to need this stuff. It makes me wince to think how many doctors and shrinks and councillors are telling depressed patients to love themselves more if they want to get better, when that self-love may well be the root cause of their misery.
Flags
Flags
Some scary looking boys from a notorious estate staggered by my house at the weekend, waving ‘the’ flag and shouting “En-ger-land” and making every effort to intimidate passers by. Went on for ages. So drunk they moved very, very slowly. Horrible hectoring voices trailing-off for about a quarter of an hour.
When I mention such incidents to my flag waving colleagues (nice people, etc) they condemn it but then bang on Tony Parsons-like about there being nothing wrong with national pride, just a few idiots spoiling the flag for the rest of us, and so on. I don’t think this is good enough. I think that there is something malignant at the heart of all patriotism, however sophisticated the flag wavers might consider themselves (and yes I include George Orwell’s patriotism in this!)
At the risk of being called a snob or a fascist, why is it that the most insane flag bearers at present are those who are commonly stereotyped as politically ignorant (cab drivers, building workers, Sun readers, etc) or people who for one reason or another aren’t getting much creative or material satisfaction from this world, like my scary neighbours?
I think the answer’s obvious. For certain kinds of frustration, patriotism is a comfort. If you don’t feel you’ve achieved much in life or done much to feel proud about, or if international politics comes across as a huge confusing mess (as the BBC does its best to make it) flags are a dummy to suck on. They’re a means of associating yourself with the ‘good works’ of others without having to undergo the messy business of doing something worthwhile yourself. Without actually being at Dunkirk in 1940 or actually being Geoff Hurst in 1966 you can associate yourself with these celebrated events by waiving a piece of cloth about.
Not that I’m claiming immunity. I drew a great deal of comfort from patriotism as a child. The fact that a British television programme had done well internationally (or, holy of holy, done well in the US) was enough to send shivers down my spine. Although I had achieved nothing I was getting-off on the buzz of others’ deeds. Later in the eighties when nationalism became less vogue I transferred the association onto other prized aspects of culture. I would drive around in my mum’s Mini Metro playing Joy Division loudly, subconsciously hoping that women would associate me with such groovyness (no wonder I never got laid!).
It’s much the same with the punk/goth band T-shirts of today. By wearing a Slipknot T-shirt teens hope some of the band’s dubious groovyness will rub off onto them: “I’m almost them, so love me like you love them”. Similarly, people who deliberately mouth the words of songs while dancing seem to be saying to onlookers, “See how familiar I am with this culture. See me as part of it.”
I don’t think anyone of any political hue can deny that the thrill of seeing England win is a misappropriated feeling of having done something good oneself. And yet, when the game is up, who are you again? Even if England win the whole damn tournament the fans still won’t have achieved anything that could be attributed to their own bravery, agility or creativity. For many it’s back to the daily drudge of low-pay low-skill work or welfare or neither. Nothing for comfort but those nice cigarettes the health minister pushes. As for supposed political progressives? All they have to show for it is weakened critical powers. After spending the rest of the year chastising others for blindly accepting official history they themselves cultivate such ignorance. For a few weeks they actively choose to see the flag and the country as something to be proud of, regardless of what they know about the world. It seems extremely naïve to imagine that that mentality simply evaporates as soon as the tournament ends.
Tony Parsons was a trail blazing champion of the invasion of Iraq. Once the cynicism of that invasion was beyond question (obvious to all but the wilfully ignorant before it started) he claimed shock and a limited sense of shame. Yet within a matter of weeks he was banging on about flags and the harmlessness of English pride. After an imperial conquest that would have been impossible to pull off without the blinding effect of patriotism he recommended an even more ignorant, passive, unquestioning allegiance. Pull the flag over your eyes, stuff it into your ears if necessary. England’s great and I’m from England so just shut up with the reality!
I don’t think anyone of genuine political conviction would condone his behaviour. But I also think that any lefties who still insist that there’s nothing wrong with certain forms of patriotism should question their own motives a little more thoroughly. The last thing the world needs right now is British (or US) progressives feeling good about their country’s position in the world, how ever comforting it might be in the short term.
Some scary looking boys from a notorious estate staggered by my house at the weekend, waving ‘the’ flag and shouting “En-ger-land” and making every effort to intimidate passers by. Went on for ages. So drunk they moved very, very slowly. Horrible hectoring voices trailing-off for about a quarter of an hour.
When I mention such incidents to my flag waving colleagues (nice people, etc) they condemn it but then bang on Tony Parsons-like about there being nothing wrong with national pride, just a few idiots spoiling the flag for the rest of us, and so on. I don’t think this is good enough. I think that there is something malignant at the heart of all patriotism, however sophisticated the flag wavers might consider themselves (and yes I include George Orwell’s patriotism in this!)
At the risk of being called a snob or a fascist, why is it that the most insane flag bearers at present are those who are commonly stereotyped as politically ignorant (cab drivers, building workers, Sun readers, etc) or people who for one reason or another aren’t getting much creative or material satisfaction from this world, like my scary neighbours?
I think the answer’s obvious. For certain kinds of frustration, patriotism is a comfort. If you don’t feel you’ve achieved much in life or done much to feel proud about, or if international politics comes across as a huge confusing mess (as the BBC does its best to make it) flags are a dummy to suck on. They’re a means of associating yourself with the ‘good works’ of others without having to undergo the messy business of doing something worthwhile yourself. Without actually being at Dunkirk in 1940 or actually being Geoff Hurst in 1966 you can associate yourself with these celebrated events by waiving a piece of cloth about.
Not that I’m claiming immunity. I drew a great deal of comfort from patriotism as a child. The fact that a British television programme had done well internationally (or, holy of holy, done well in the US) was enough to send shivers down my spine. Although I had achieved nothing I was getting-off on the buzz of others’ deeds. Later in the eighties when nationalism became less vogue I transferred the association onto other prized aspects of culture. I would drive around in my mum’s Mini Metro playing Joy Division loudly, subconsciously hoping that women would associate me with such groovyness (no wonder I never got laid!).
It’s much the same with the punk/goth band T-shirts of today. By wearing a Slipknot T-shirt teens hope some of the band’s dubious groovyness will rub off onto them: “I’m almost them, so love me like you love them”. Similarly, people who deliberately mouth the words of songs while dancing seem to be saying to onlookers, “See how familiar I am with this culture. See me as part of it.”
I don’t think anyone of any political hue can deny that the thrill of seeing England win is a misappropriated feeling of having done something good oneself. And yet, when the game is up, who are you again? Even if England win the whole damn tournament the fans still won’t have achieved anything that could be attributed to their own bravery, agility or creativity. For many it’s back to the daily drudge of low-pay low-skill work or welfare or neither. Nothing for comfort but those nice cigarettes the health minister pushes. As for supposed political progressives? All they have to show for it is weakened critical powers. After spending the rest of the year chastising others for blindly accepting official history they themselves cultivate such ignorance. For a few weeks they actively choose to see the flag and the country as something to be proud of, regardless of what they know about the world. It seems extremely naïve to imagine that that mentality simply evaporates as soon as the tournament ends.
Tony Parsons was a trail blazing champion of the invasion of Iraq. Once the cynicism of that invasion was beyond question (obvious to all but the wilfully ignorant before it started) he claimed shock and a limited sense of shame. Yet within a matter of weeks he was banging on about flags and the harmlessness of English pride. After an imperial conquest that would have been impossible to pull off without the blinding effect of patriotism he recommended an even more ignorant, passive, unquestioning allegiance. Pull the flag over your eyes, stuff it into your ears if necessary. England’s great and I’m from England so just shut up with the reality!
I don’t think anyone of genuine political conviction would condone his behaviour. But I also think that any lefties who still insist that there’s nothing wrong with certain forms of patriotism should question their own motives a little more thoroughly. The last thing the world needs right now is British (or US) progressives feeling good about their country’s position in the world, how ever comforting it might be in the short term.
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