If media attention is the measure, some civilian deaths are less tragic than others. Six years on and the three thousand killed in the attacks on the world trade centre continue to generate more breast-beating than the million subsequent deaths in Iraq. While many commentators still shoulder unspeakable pain and indignation about the former event, little is said about this far larger human catastrophe.
No doubt many would retort that the deaths in Iraq are not the responsibility of the invaders but of the same Islamic fundamentalists that perpetrated 911. Regardless of the curiosity of this claim it still doesn’t answer for the disparity of remorse. If both 911 and the million dead in Iraq really are the fault of Islamic militants why is the second toll less shocking and less worthy of comment than the first?
It could just be racism – most mainstream commentators don’t empathise with these foreigners like they do with the American kind. But things are probably more complex. I suspect the key difference is that they still see the invasion of Iraq as a righteous act. Whereas the slaughter in the twin towers was plain evil, the ongoing slaughter in Iraq is an unfortunate consequence of good intent. Even with a death-toll three-hundred-times greater than 911 the motive behind the invasion renders it the lesser of the two evils.
It’s a bizarre view but not unfamiliar. As educated westerners we are trained to suspend the humanity of certain humans when a supposedly higher cause is at stake: We had to shoot one passenger to save the others (even when it’s the wrong man); Bombing Hiroshima and Dresden actually saved lives in the long run; Flattening Cambodia was necessary to free Asia from communism.
Aside from of the veracity of these claims it is interesting to note the transformation they bring about in the victim. It’s as though a switch is thrown, transforming them from human to statistic, person to unperson. All the joy, sadness, ambition, hope, birth, marriage and death that make up a normal human life are snuffed-out by the higher motive.
While a nod to the tragic side of such deaths is permitted, it must remain a nod. Any sustained attempt to resurrect the lives of those transformed from humans into gaming chips will be attacked as treachery. You can describe the suffering in Coventry or the East-end of London in fine detail. Every midnight stroll to the bomb-shelter, every anecdote about rationing or discovery of a neighbour’s disembodied head – all can be combined to create real humans, true people capable of suffering. No external references necessary, context would be perverse. Just real people enduring perpetual fear, death and destruction, none of it of their own making.
But try the same with the civilians of Dresden or Berlin you will swiftly find yourself driven from the subject. You’ll find yourself referred to Auschwitz, Dunkirk and the treachery at Munich. With enemy dead context is everything, their lives nothing. Such people must be switched off if you are to remain a patriot. They can only be allowed to exist as data.
Second part in progress…
Thursday 27 December 2007
Tuesday 27 November 2007
The Natural Excuse
Celebrity trivia is only natural, some would have us believe. Humans have an innate urge to gossip and there’s no better subject than the great and good. Hello! and OK! are the modern woman’s way of gossiping within a mass society, just as her ancestors did in their smaller hunter-gatherer groups.
In fact a good deal of respectable opinion does support this view, at least at root. Gossip is seen by many evolutionary theorists as an adaptation, a feature of the human condition. As social beings our lives are built on trust. Reputation is vital and there are few better ways to assess the reputation of others than by discussing them in their absence. Gossip serves us by keeping us abreast of who is and who isn’t trustworthy.
But of course gossip often exceeds the useful and fair, and veers into the gratuitous. This can also have informational benefits. Excessive gossiping indicates lack of integrity. It’s a fair bet that anyone who always has muck to rake does so behind the back of supposed confidants. People who win the shabby name of ‘gossip’ send a signal to others not to trust them.
In other respects however gratuitous gossip is clearly a vice. Dishing dirt for its own sake is degrading to all concerned. That dished out by the women’s weeklies certainly falls into this category – pure tittle-tattle. Celebrities are venerated and spat upon in rotation, often within the same editions – build them up just to knock them down.
Even if there was a trace of honesty or sincerity in these ‘stories’ their use in the evolutionary sense would be nil. There is no social connection between the subject of the gossip and the audience, bar the gossip itself. The average office worker of London or Los Angeles will never meet Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. There is nothing to be gained from a deeper understanding of their relationship or their sincerity as individuals. This is not beneficial gossip, the sort that might help us better understand those we actually encounter.
While the readership of OK! And Hello! is almost exclusively female, a similar case can be found in such men’s magazines as Penthouse and Asian Babes. Once again criticism is frequently deflected using the ‘natural’ excuse. I recall one of Britain’s leading pornographers justifying his products along these lines: Sex is natural, people want sex, and porn is just sex.
As with gossip there is some truth here. It’s certainly true that sexual desire is something natural and that this natural desire creates the market for porn. However, desire is pretty much the limit of the connection. The alluring gaze of a naked woman really isn’t the same on a page as in the flesh. It might send similar signals and provoke similar reactions in the viewer, but that’s the end of it. It is not the prelude to love or sex or procreation, it’s just a wind-up.
While human nature is undeniable the reflexive use of ‘natural’ is usually just a means of excusing a behaviour. The key is to cherry-pick those aspects that suit your argument and ignore everything else. Pete Stringfellow once justified his legendary womanising in this way. It was, he explained, simply a man’s nature to stroll casually from female to female, like a male lion servicing the savannah.
But of all animals, why did he pick the lion? There are a multitude of different reproductive strategies in the animal kingdom. Some species pair bond, some lead solitary lives, some have multiple partners. Some of our closest relatives live perpetually two minutes from an orgy. To varying degrees all of these behaviours can be found in different humans – so who can say which is our nature?
Like pornographers and gossip magazine publishers (interestingly enough, one and the same in the Daily Express owner Richard Desmond) Stringfellow was only interested in those aspects of nature that suited his argument. He simply picked the animal he wanted to be. He didn’t fancy the monogamy of a swan but even he would blanch at the promiscuousness of the bonobo. Lions were the goldilocks option, appropriately enough.
The diversity of nature provides a wide spectrum of behaviours which we can transform into our own ‘nature’ should it suit our view of humanity. Warring chimps and rapist dolphins for the pessimists, vegetarian gorillas and meerkat cooperatives for the hopeful. Whatever your view of human nature there will always be some analogue in the natural world. Whether the comparison is an appropriate one is quite another matter.
In fact a good deal of respectable opinion does support this view, at least at root. Gossip is seen by many evolutionary theorists as an adaptation, a feature of the human condition. As social beings our lives are built on trust. Reputation is vital and there are few better ways to assess the reputation of others than by discussing them in their absence. Gossip serves us by keeping us abreast of who is and who isn’t trustworthy.
But of course gossip often exceeds the useful and fair, and veers into the gratuitous. This can also have informational benefits. Excessive gossiping indicates lack of integrity. It’s a fair bet that anyone who always has muck to rake does so behind the back of supposed confidants. People who win the shabby name of ‘gossip’ send a signal to others not to trust them.
In other respects however gratuitous gossip is clearly a vice. Dishing dirt for its own sake is degrading to all concerned. That dished out by the women’s weeklies certainly falls into this category – pure tittle-tattle. Celebrities are venerated and spat upon in rotation, often within the same editions – build them up just to knock them down.
Even if there was a trace of honesty or sincerity in these ‘stories’ their use in the evolutionary sense would be nil. There is no social connection between the subject of the gossip and the audience, bar the gossip itself. The average office worker of London or Los Angeles will never meet Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. There is nothing to be gained from a deeper understanding of their relationship or their sincerity as individuals. This is not beneficial gossip, the sort that might help us better understand those we actually encounter.
While the readership of OK! And Hello! is almost exclusively female, a similar case can be found in such men’s magazines as Penthouse and Asian Babes. Once again criticism is frequently deflected using the ‘natural’ excuse. I recall one of Britain’s leading pornographers justifying his products along these lines: Sex is natural, people want sex, and porn is just sex.
As with gossip there is some truth here. It’s certainly true that sexual desire is something natural and that this natural desire creates the market for porn. However, desire is pretty much the limit of the connection. The alluring gaze of a naked woman really isn’t the same on a page as in the flesh. It might send similar signals and provoke similar reactions in the viewer, but that’s the end of it. It is not the prelude to love or sex or procreation, it’s just a wind-up.
While human nature is undeniable the reflexive use of ‘natural’ is usually just a means of excusing a behaviour. The key is to cherry-pick those aspects that suit your argument and ignore everything else. Pete Stringfellow once justified his legendary womanising in this way. It was, he explained, simply a man’s nature to stroll casually from female to female, like a male lion servicing the savannah.
But of all animals, why did he pick the lion? There are a multitude of different reproductive strategies in the animal kingdom. Some species pair bond, some lead solitary lives, some have multiple partners. Some of our closest relatives live perpetually two minutes from an orgy. To varying degrees all of these behaviours can be found in different humans – so who can say which is our nature?
Like pornographers and gossip magazine publishers (interestingly enough, one and the same in the Daily Express owner Richard Desmond) Stringfellow was only interested in those aspects of nature that suited his argument. He simply picked the animal he wanted to be. He didn’t fancy the monogamy of a swan but even he would blanch at the promiscuousness of the bonobo. Lions were the goldilocks option, appropriately enough.
The diversity of nature provides a wide spectrum of behaviours which we can transform into our own ‘nature’ should it suit our view of humanity. Warring chimps and rapist dolphins for the pessimists, vegetarian gorillas and meerkat cooperatives for the hopeful. Whatever your view of human nature there will always be some analogue in the natural world. Whether the comparison is an appropriate one is quite another matter.
Saturday 3 November 2007
New racism, old uses
Global inequality demands explanation. Regardless of political outlook, we all have some theory of why the world is so materially imbalanced – some explanation for the profound differences in wealth between different lands and people.
Not long ago biological explanations were quite acceptable. Those who conquered and carved up the nineteenth century felt free to claim it was their racial destiny to do so. Bolstered by a dire misreading of Darwin, Europeans imagined it was their biological superiority that underwrote their global dominance. Verbal accounts of European ministers, officers and troops are shamelessly racist, deep into the twentieth century. Empire was clearly a God-given right, the natural dominion of the superior over the inferior. There was a moral obligation to ‘intervene’ in the affairs of ‘lesser’ peoples, to save them from themselves.
Of course such views are far from dead, often lurking only inches below the surface of more politically correct verbiage. Now however it simply doesn’t do to attribute inequality to biology. Since science disproved such explanations, and Nazism discredited them, different reasons have had to be found to justify global inequality. The current rendering is that it is the culture of the poor that holds them back, in this great meritocratic game of life. While different races may be endowed with the same capabilities biologically, some social groups remain culturally stunted: Tribal loyalty, voodoo, medieval Islamism, ingrained respect for demagogues, Gansta Rap – these are the new acceptable reasons to blame the poor for being poor.
This new claim of western culturally supremacy is justified using the very same tautology employed by the old-school racists: The west must be best because the west has won. Nothing more needed. If it isn’t the case that non-Europeans are biologically inferior then they must be culturally inadequate – how else would they have come out of things so badly?
Before accepting this conclusion however a vital question has to be asked – was the competition a fair one? Firstly, did each competitor have an equal start, or did external factors favour the chances of some parties? Secondly, whatever the game, some rules of conduct must apply. Few would accept the victory of a football team that resorted to using firearms on the pitch or took to kidnapping and torturing its opponents, whatever the final score.
Unless the great game of life is simply a slugging match there must be some rules of play. Bullying and forming alliances with tyrants must be ruled-out before one can justly claim that merit won the day. Indeed this surely is the concept of superiority the new supremacists would like to claim for the west. While many quietly admire the ‘order’ brought to society by fascism, generally such tactics are scorned. The ‘might is right’ of Rome and Nuremberg is not the path to honourable victory, victory on merit. The patriotism that puffs western chests is the thought that success came from superior planning and a superior moral outlook, rather than rape and pillage.
Regarding head-starts there is little doubt. Prehistorically, each human group simply did not start out with equal external opportunities. As Jared Diamond spells out in Guns Germs and Steel the geographical location each race found itself in 11,000 years ago varied massively in terms of opportunity for growth, sharing of technology and eventual dominance and exploitation of other peoples. Climate, crops, livestock, the very shape and axis-orientation of the different continents – such factors biased the world in the favour of the humans of Eurasia, rather than Africa and the Americas.
And once the ball was rolling in Europe’s favour other factors followed in turn. The first mass societies of Eurasia experienced the first mass epidemics of disease. Although devastating at the time, surviving generations had far greater immunity to such disorders. More than guns and bayonets, this was the most lethal weapon in the white-man’s arsenal. Mere contact with the invaders was enough to devastate the populations of the Americas, and any other isolated populations they encountered.
And of course technology begets technology. Once you have steel you are that much closer to steam, and bayonets, and bombers – should you choose. A small head start can quickly be consolidated, particularly if its advantages are ruthlessly seized.
Which brings us to the second test of fairness: Did the west play by the rules? Did it win on merit? By any meaningful standard, clearly not. To this day every attempt by poorer nations to compete fairly has been met with an iron fist. Every effort has been made to smash democracy and self-determination in the developing world. From Saud to Saddam, Somoza to Suharto, the west has maintained its dominance through brutality, not cunning.
It would be hard to find firmer proof than the treatment afforded Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah during his state visit last week. The very same British government that blames Islam for the state of the world then bows and scrapes before this Wahhabist autocrat, and arms his regime to the teeth. As Iran discovered in 1953, the last thing the west wants is democracy near its oilfields.
Global inequality is perfectly explicable without recourse to biological or cultural inadequacy. The claim of cultural inadequacy is just a means for supposed progressives to support old style imperialism. The main factors that ensure western dominance today are the same as in the nineteenth century – military superiority and alliance with the most brutal elements within client states. The west is not so much standing proud on the winner’s podium as scrabbling up a greasy pole, only staying on top by kicking the heads of those below. It is not superior culture but clinically applied barbarism that keeps western capital in control of the world.
Not long ago biological explanations were quite acceptable. Those who conquered and carved up the nineteenth century felt free to claim it was their racial destiny to do so. Bolstered by a dire misreading of Darwin, Europeans imagined it was their biological superiority that underwrote their global dominance. Verbal accounts of European ministers, officers and troops are shamelessly racist, deep into the twentieth century. Empire was clearly a God-given right, the natural dominion of the superior over the inferior. There was a moral obligation to ‘intervene’ in the affairs of ‘lesser’ peoples, to save them from themselves.
Of course such views are far from dead, often lurking only inches below the surface of more politically correct verbiage. Now however it simply doesn’t do to attribute inequality to biology. Since science disproved such explanations, and Nazism discredited them, different reasons have had to be found to justify global inequality. The current rendering is that it is the culture of the poor that holds them back, in this great meritocratic game of life. While different races may be endowed with the same capabilities biologically, some social groups remain culturally stunted: Tribal loyalty, voodoo, medieval Islamism, ingrained respect for demagogues, Gansta Rap – these are the new acceptable reasons to blame the poor for being poor.
This new claim of western culturally supremacy is justified using the very same tautology employed by the old-school racists: The west must be best because the west has won. Nothing more needed. If it isn’t the case that non-Europeans are biologically inferior then they must be culturally inadequate – how else would they have come out of things so badly?
Before accepting this conclusion however a vital question has to be asked – was the competition a fair one? Firstly, did each competitor have an equal start, or did external factors favour the chances of some parties? Secondly, whatever the game, some rules of conduct must apply. Few would accept the victory of a football team that resorted to using firearms on the pitch or took to kidnapping and torturing its opponents, whatever the final score.
Unless the great game of life is simply a slugging match there must be some rules of play. Bullying and forming alliances with tyrants must be ruled-out before one can justly claim that merit won the day. Indeed this surely is the concept of superiority the new supremacists would like to claim for the west. While many quietly admire the ‘order’ brought to society by fascism, generally such tactics are scorned. The ‘might is right’ of Rome and Nuremberg is not the path to honourable victory, victory on merit. The patriotism that puffs western chests is the thought that success came from superior planning and a superior moral outlook, rather than rape and pillage.
Regarding head-starts there is little doubt. Prehistorically, each human group simply did not start out with equal external opportunities. As Jared Diamond spells out in Guns Germs and Steel the geographical location each race found itself in 11,000 years ago varied massively in terms of opportunity for growth, sharing of technology and eventual dominance and exploitation of other peoples. Climate, crops, livestock, the very shape and axis-orientation of the different continents – such factors biased the world in the favour of the humans of Eurasia, rather than Africa and the Americas.
And once the ball was rolling in Europe’s favour other factors followed in turn. The first mass societies of Eurasia experienced the first mass epidemics of disease. Although devastating at the time, surviving generations had far greater immunity to such disorders. More than guns and bayonets, this was the most lethal weapon in the white-man’s arsenal. Mere contact with the invaders was enough to devastate the populations of the Americas, and any other isolated populations they encountered.
And of course technology begets technology. Once you have steel you are that much closer to steam, and bayonets, and bombers – should you choose. A small head start can quickly be consolidated, particularly if its advantages are ruthlessly seized.
Which brings us to the second test of fairness: Did the west play by the rules? Did it win on merit? By any meaningful standard, clearly not. To this day every attempt by poorer nations to compete fairly has been met with an iron fist. Every effort has been made to smash democracy and self-determination in the developing world. From Saud to Saddam, Somoza to Suharto, the west has maintained its dominance through brutality, not cunning.
It would be hard to find firmer proof than the treatment afforded Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah during his state visit last week. The very same British government that blames Islam for the state of the world then bows and scrapes before this Wahhabist autocrat, and arms his regime to the teeth. As Iran discovered in 1953, the last thing the west wants is democracy near its oilfields.
Global inequality is perfectly explicable without recourse to biological or cultural inadequacy. The claim of cultural inadequacy is just a means for supposed progressives to support old style imperialism. The main factors that ensure western dominance today are the same as in the nineteenth century – military superiority and alliance with the most brutal elements within client states. The west is not so much standing proud on the winner’s podium as scrabbling up a greasy pole, only staying on top by kicking the heads of those below. It is not superior culture but clinically applied barbarism that keeps western capital in control of the world.
Sunday 9 September 2007
Against Heaven II
The Problem with Heaven
The problem with heaven is that it’s an important fallacy – a false belief about something very important. The fact that there will be no second chances is vital information, something that should ground every human deed. If these few earthly decades really are all we get we should concentrate our efforts on them, and on the earthly decades that follow. The last thing we can afford to do is take our eyes of the ball and start musing and fretting about a non-existent other world.
It’s difficult to know who to blame, but easy to see who benefits. In a sense you can blame the idea itself. It’s the definitive viral meme – an idea which gets itself propagated to the detriment of its host. Its origins lost in time it spreads by mouth, or lurks in books, poised to skew the outlook of subsequent generations. With no basis in fact, and a handful of threats, heaven infects billions of minds.
Over the centuries it has picked-up some robust self-righting mechanisms, should rationality flip it on its back. Like a chain-letter, heaven dares us not to believe: Doubt its existence and you definitely won’t get in – you’ll surely go to hell. This is a great one for keeping hedge-betters on board: What’s to lose by believing? At least you stand a chance of getting-in if it does turn-out to exist.
In truth there’s a lot to lose. Such a fundamental flaw in perspective leaves one open to all sorts of abuse. Which brings us to a second set of beneficiaries – certain humans. Not everyone loses out from heaven belief, not economically anyway. The Church of England and the Church of Rome have grown fat on the promise of heaven and the threat of hell, as have the Bakers and the Moons.
Heaven is one of the grand deceits employed by the rich to control the poor. Even when the preacher truly believes the consequences are the same. The have-nots are persuaded to care less about the inequality of this world on the promise of a pay-back in the next. The wealthy and powerful gain a more submissive workforce; the church gains an effective means of blackmailing and milking its congregation.
Rather than an eternal holiday-camp heaven is just a lever humans use on each other, in the here and now. It’s a means by which some people get other people to do things for them, often unspeakable things. The most fashionable example is suicide bombing. While any fair critic can see that social and political injustice is the primary motive for such deeds, the role played by religion is equally clear. To whatever degree such acts are coaxed by the promise of heavenly reward this is a stark example of one group of individuals using the myth of an afterlife to get another group to do something appalling. Less fashionably, how many Christians seek comfort in the prospect of heaven as they risk their lives bombing the residents of Baghdad, Kosovo, Dresden or Coventry? God is on their side, after all.
The “moral-worth” defence of heaven evaporates under the light of such examples. Indeed, morally the whole scheme seems to be missing the point. As intelligent moral agents we already know that trust, honesty and good conduct are vital to a functioning society. We know that violent and selfish behaviour are things to be discouraged. Of course you shouldn’t cheat or steal or rape or murder, not because you’ll go to hell but because you’ll create hell in the here and now. These are basic moral truths, ones that all responsible parents drum into their offspring. We reward and punish to instil these values, and condemn those parents that don't.
The morality wielded by heaven and hell is just an extension of these eternal human truths, an exaggeration of the nice and nasty here on Earth. Heaven is just an exaggeration of a pleasant life born of pleasant behaviour; Hell is just a celestially intensified Earthly misery, born of misconduct.
Rules of compassion and fair play are part of our make-up as social beings, predating all metaphysical threats and incentives. Ignored and abused as they are they are the cornerstones of human society. We make our own heaven and hell here on earth, through our moral conduct, here on Earth.
Heaven is a special and especially dubious kind of belief – the lie that’s supposedly good for you. Rather than a necessary myth it’s a corruption of a universal moral principle: Act unpleasantly and you will create an unpleasant future – plain and simple. Add-on mystical incentives and penalties are at best superfluous and more often an opportunity to corrupt this basic principle. Don’t do it because you’ll be in trouble after you die? Don’t kill because of what God will do to you? Is that really what should concern us?
It seems odd then that a life without heaven-belief is so often dismissed as ‘meaningless’. Surely there is more meaning to a life that strives to connect conduct to outcome, rather than to a meaningless, non-existent afterlife? Why divorce behaviour and consequence from reality? Why not ground them in the here and now – what could be more meaningful than that?
The problem with heaven is that it’s an important fallacy – a false belief about something very important. The fact that there will be no second chances is vital information, something that should ground every human deed. If these few earthly decades really are all we get we should concentrate our efforts on them, and on the earthly decades that follow. The last thing we can afford to do is take our eyes of the ball and start musing and fretting about a non-existent other world.
It’s difficult to know who to blame, but easy to see who benefits. In a sense you can blame the idea itself. It’s the definitive viral meme – an idea which gets itself propagated to the detriment of its host. Its origins lost in time it spreads by mouth, or lurks in books, poised to skew the outlook of subsequent generations. With no basis in fact, and a handful of threats, heaven infects billions of minds.
Over the centuries it has picked-up some robust self-righting mechanisms, should rationality flip it on its back. Like a chain-letter, heaven dares us not to believe: Doubt its existence and you definitely won’t get in – you’ll surely go to hell. This is a great one for keeping hedge-betters on board: What’s to lose by believing? At least you stand a chance of getting-in if it does turn-out to exist.
In truth there’s a lot to lose. Such a fundamental flaw in perspective leaves one open to all sorts of abuse. Which brings us to a second set of beneficiaries – certain humans. Not everyone loses out from heaven belief, not economically anyway. The Church of England and the Church of Rome have grown fat on the promise of heaven and the threat of hell, as have the Bakers and the Moons.
Heaven is one of the grand deceits employed by the rich to control the poor. Even when the preacher truly believes the consequences are the same. The have-nots are persuaded to care less about the inequality of this world on the promise of a pay-back in the next. The wealthy and powerful gain a more submissive workforce; the church gains an effective means of blackmailing and milking its congregation.
Rather than an eternal holiday-camp heaven is just a lever humans use on each other, in the here and now. It’s a means by which some people get other people to do things for them, often unspeakable things. The most fashionable example is suicide bombing. While any fair critic can see that social and political injustice is the primary motive for such deeds, the role played by religion is equally clear. To whatever degree such acts are coaxed by the promise of heavenly reward this is a stark example of one group of individuals using the myth of an afterlife to get another group to do something appalling. Less fashionably, how many Christians seek comfort in the prospect of heaven as they risk their lives bombing the residents of Baghdad, Kosovo, Dresden or Coventry? God is on their side, after all.
The “moral-worth” defence of heaven evaporates under the light of such examples. Indeed, morally the whole scheme seems to be missing the point. As intelligent moral agents we already know that trust, honesty and good conduct are vital to a functioning society. We know that violent and selfish behaviour are things to be discouraged. Of course you shouldn’t cheat or steal or rape or murder, not because you’ll go to hell but because you’ll create hell in the here and now. These are basic moral truths, ones that all responsible parents drum into their offspring. We reward and punish to instil these values, and condemn those parents that don't.
The morality wielded by heaven and hell is just an extension of these eternal human truths, an exaggeration of the nice and nasty here on Earth. Heaven is just an exaggeration of a pleasant life born of pleasant behaviour; Hell is just a celestially intensified Earthly misery, born of misconduct.
Rules of compassion and fair play are part of our make-up as social beings, predating all metaphysical threats and incentives. Ignored and abused as they are they are the cornerstones of human society. We make our own heaven and hell here on earth, through our moral conduct, here on Earth.
Heaven is a special and especially dubious kind of belief – the lie that’s supposedly good for you. Rather than a necessary myth it’s a corruption of a universal moral principle: Act unpleasantly and you will create an unpleasant future – plain and simple. Add-on mystical incentives and penalties are at best superfluous and more often an opportunity to corrupt this basic principle. Don’t do it because you’ll be in trouble after you die? Don’t kill because of what God will do to you? Is that really what should concern us?
It seems odd then that a life without heaven-belief is so often dismissed as ‘meaningless’. Surely there is more meaning to a life that strives to connect conduct to outcome, rather than to a meaningless, non-existent afterlife? Why divorce behaviour and consequence from reality? Why not ground them in the here and now – what could be more meaningful than that?
Friday 20 July 2007
Against Heaven
Heaven is the place the worthy go to after death, rather than to hell. Heaven is a land of eternal pleasure and happiness, hell is eternal agony and fear.
Of course ‘worthy’ is open to interpretation. It often just means faithful, a true believer. Any amount of bad behaviour can be atoned if you really believe. More importantly you can’t get into heaven by being good on its own. A selfless life is but a ‘filthy rag’ in God’s eye if it isn’t accompanied by blind faith. No matter how kind and compassionate you are, you won’t get through heaven's gate if you don’t believe in it.
Whether I like it or not, my idea of heaven is intricate and complex. Something I categorically do not believe-in is rich in detail. It’s the result of being raised in a culture steeped in Christianity. While I can’t pretend to be greatly influenced by it I still resent the fact that such patent nonsense holds such a prominent position in my worldview.
Many otherwise shrewd people become uncomfortable at this point, and try to deflect the argument onto one of definitions: It all depends what you mean by heaven. Can’t heaven be a place on earth?...and so on, so for clarity I’ll pose it this way – Is there any evidence to suggest that another world follows this one, be it a western heaven or eastern reincarnation?
The answer of course is no. There’s far more evidence to suggest that our sentience dies along with our bodies, sometimes sooner. A product of the flesh, it rots with the flesh. Senility is the precise analogue of bodily decay, the mind following in the body’s wake. Far from eternal our sense-of-self is very much an earth-bound entity, with but a short time to live. There really isn’t much else to account for, certainly no grounds to wheel-in an afterlife.
So then the question of heaven becomes purely pragmatic: Is there any earthly justification for perpetuating myths about an afterlife? Clearly some think so. Some argue that the heaven myth provides strength and comfort to the living, notably the bereaved. People derive comfort from the idea that loved ones are alive and well in another dimension, possibly to be reacquainted upon death.
But of course this cuts both ways. Just because some derive comfort doesn’t mean all do. Perhaps some feel angry and indignant that their God took their child or lover away, rather than sad chance. Perhaps others worry the loved one didn’t make it into heaven at all, or might even return to haunt them – hardly comforting beliefs.
Moreover is it always a good thing to be comforted? While heaven might help some to get back to the business of living, presumably other recoveries are retarded by it. Perhaps some feel such loyalty to the spirit of the dead that they forego seeking a new lover or new child. While they dream opportunity slips by.
After comfort, the next defence is the supposed moral usefulness of heaven: Even if heaven and hell don’t exist we still need to believe in them if we are to act morally on Earth. Without the threat of hellfire, and the reward of heaven, we would will rape and pillage and invade each others countries.
But of course these things do happen and heaven-believers are often the worst culprits. As with comfort, there isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that those who believe in hellfire are less likely to create it on Earth, and reams of examples to the contrary.
There is no reason to assume the net effect of heaven belief is an increase in human happiness. There is no reason to believe it is a force for good in general. When you look at all the things your mind has to sacrifice in order to believe in heaven its value seems dubious in any sense.
Part II in progress...
Of course ‘worthy’ is open to interpretation. It often just means faithful, a true believer. Any amount of bad behaviour can be atoned if you really believe. More importantly you can’t get into heaven by being good on its own. A selfless life is but a ‘filthy rag’ in God’s eye if it isn’t accompanied by blind faith. No matter how kind and compassionate you are, you won’t get through heaven's gate if you don’t believe in it.
Whether I like it or not, my idea of heaven is intricate and complex. Something I categorically do not believe-in is rich in detail. It’s the result of being raised in a culture steeped in Christianity. While I can’t pretend to be greatly influenced by it I still resent the fact that such patent nonsense holds such a prominent position in my worldview.
Many otherwise shrewd people become uncomfortable at this point, and try to deflect the argument onto one of definitions: It all depends what you mean by heaven. Can’t heaven be a place on earth?...and so on, so for clarity I’ll pose it this way – Is there any evidence to suggest that another world follows this one, be it a western heaven or eastern reincarnation?
The answer of course is no. There’s far more evidence to suggest that our sentience dies along with our bodies, sometimes sooner. A product of the flesh, it rots with the flesh. Senility is the precise analogue of bodily decay, the mind following in the body’s wake. Far from eternal our sense-of-self is very much an earth-bound entity, with but a short time to live. There really isn’t much else to account for, certainly no grounds to wheel-in an afterlife.
So then the question of heaven becomes purely pragmatic: Is there any earthly justification for perpetuating myths about an afterlife? Clearly some think so. Some argue that the heaven myth provides strength and comfort to the living, notably the bereaved. People derive comfort from the idea that loved ones are alive and well in another dimension, possibly to be reacquainted upon death.
But of course this cuts both ways. Just because some derive comfort doesn’t mean all do. Perhaps some feel angry and indignant that their God took their child or lover away, rather than sad chance. Perhaps others worry the loved one didn’t make it into heaven at all, or might even return to haunt them – hardly comforting beliefs.
Moreover is it always a good thing to be comforted? While heaven might help some to get back to the business of living, presumably other recoveries are retarded by it. Perhaps some feel such loyalty to the spirit of the dead that they forego seeking a new lover or new child. While they dream opportunity slips by.
After comfort, the next defence is the supposed moral usefulness of heaven: Even if heaven and hell don’t exist we still need to believe in them if we are to act morally on Earth. Without the threat of hellfire, and the reward of heaven, we would will rape and pillage and invade each others countries.
But of course these things do happen and heaven-believers are often the worst culprits. As with comfort, there isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that those who believe in hellfire are less likely to create it on Earth, and reams of examples to the contrary.
There is no reason to assume the net effect of heaven belief is an increase in human happiness. There is no reason to believe it is a force for good in general. When you look at all the things your mind has to sacrifice in order to believe in heaven its value seems dubious in any sense.
Part II in progress...
Monday 11 June 2007
The New Easter Islanders
“Now you see it and it’s up to you to choose.
It sure looks funny for a new dinosaur to be in an old dinosaur’s shoes.”
(Captain Beefheart - “The Smithsonian Institute Blues”)
Like anyone stuck out on a cold remote rock, the Easter islanders needed trees for timber and firewood. But they also needed them to roll and drag those huge stone heads about on, and they kept carving and rolling those damn heads until the last tree had been chopped down and the last bit of topsoil had washed off.
Jared Diamond’s Collapse is subtitled How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. It documents the likely causes of the decline of Norse Greenland, the Maya, the Anasazi and those enigmatic ancients of Easter. It then draws parallels with our own plight.
In the above account the Easter people sound barking but of course from a similar distance so would we: Both clans seem intent on destroying their own habitat. Rather than reduce production as catastrophe approaches they swing more axes, step harder on the gas.
But of course it doesn’t look like that on the ground. Collective madness doesn’t require mental illness or stupidity. The fact that a society becomes addicted to an insane idea doesn’t demand insanity on the part any given individual. The tragedy of Easter society and modern society is their mutual adherence to a suicidal logic, or rather something that grew into a suicidal logic. For one reason or another, the imperative to keep living in a certain manner came to override basic survival.
Blind faith is a madness that frequently afflicts the sane. Presumably the Easter people earnestly believed that however bad things got they would only get worse if they stopped carving and dragging the statues, and offended the spirits of the ancestors they represented. Better to cut the last tree than offend the god is a sensible dictum for any true believer.
The western economic religions of monetarism and consumerism are turning out similarly suicidal. Presumably, twenty years ago, some people really did believe that selling-off public utilities and mutual assets would produce a world of happy shareowners – but that wasn’t the way things panned out. Whatever the original intention the fact is three decades of privatisation have left global corporations in control of human destiny. We run our lives to suit corporate logic and corporate logic is to maintain profits at any cost, whatever the consequences. You don’t have to be mad to labour-away night and day for global catastrophe, you just have to be a good CEO. That’s what the bonuses are for.
Consumerism is a related god, brandishing a similarly destructive set of commandments:
Worry you haven’t enough possessions.
Worry your current possessions are outdated.
Throw away perfectly good things when new versions are released.
Fear what people will think of you if you don’t own the latest things.
– this is the logic that drives Asia’s twin miracles of industrial slavery and global-destruction.
Again it sounds like lunacy, but it’s more an induced bewilderment. The fraction of humanity wealthy enough to actually practice consumerism is subject to relentless propaganda. Advertisers strive to sow insecurities into our minds, encourage us to think we can’t be happy without the product.
In truth consuming doesn’t make us happier; shopping trips to New York don’t make us happier, children are no happier for owning flashy toys. Going out is actually less fun with mobile telephones. Imelda Marcos’s shoes certainly didn’t make her happy, why would a content person continue to worry so much about footwear? If she’d acquired every style on earth she still wouldn’t have been happy, she’d probably just have moved onto handbags.
Of course we’re not all unquestioning believers. To varying degrees at different times, every clan has its dissenters. During lean times particularly doubters and challengers arise to question the strategy of the leaders, even question the power of the gods.
On Easter there must have been people who appreciated the damage and the impending danger and even some who dared to call for a halt, particularly towards the end. But then as now it was rare that anyone in power held this view – they were more likely in cahoots with the parties organising the destruction. Whatever the exact details, clearly the pressure to plough-on outweighed the pressure to turn back. The plough-on brigade won the day – and lost the world.
At the moment too the plough-ons prevail. Certainly there’s lots of oppositional discourse, but it’s greatly outweighed by the positive propaganda, and the temptation to look away. The luxury of cars and flights has a compelling hold over many of us. Add the fact that corporations actively want us to over-consume and the outlook does look bleak. ‘No party will ever get elected on that ticket’; ‘You can’t expect people to stop flying and get rid of their cars’ – these are the most chilling mantras of the anti-environmentalists, left and right.
When all the trees were chopped, the soil gone, and the forty species of seabird all eaten, they started on each other:
“Oral traditions of the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was ‘The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth’.”
Although global cannibalism seems unlikely in the near future, our current trajectory is leading to equally desperate social relations. In the race to exploit the planet billions are being trampled underfoot. If the plunder continues we can only expect more suffering and insecurity to follow.
Diamond shows us that we are all still just animals, squabbling over limited resources – it doesn’t matter if it’s ten thousand on an island or six million on a globe, there’s only so much useful land and sea to go round, and a constant temptation to over-exploit it. This much will never change.
But he also shows us how we differ from the other animals. He shows how some ancient and some modern societies responded intelligently to environmental crises, and ended up safeguarding their future. As much as it was ingenuity that got us into this mess it remains our only means of escape – should we choose to use it.
It sure looks funny for a new dinosaur to be in an old dinosaur’s shoes.”
(Captain Beefheart - “The Smithsonian Institute Blues”)
Like anyone stuck out on a cold remote rock, the Easter islanders needed trees for timber and firewood. But they also needed them to roll and drag those huge stone heads about on, and they kept carving and rolling those damn heads until the last tree had been chopped down and the last bit of topsoil had washed off.
Jared Diamond’s Collapse is subtitled How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. It documents the likely causes of the decline of Norse Greenland, the Maya, the Anasazi and those enigmatic ancients of Easter. It then draws parallels with our own plight.
In the above account the Easter people sound barking but of course from a similar distance so would we: Both clans seem intent on destroying their own habitat. Rather than reduce production as catastrophe approaches they swing more axes, step harder on the gas.
But of course it doesn’t look like that on the ground. Collective madness doesn’t require mental illness or stupidity. The fact that a society becomes addicted to an insane idea doesn’t demand insanity on the part any given individual. The tragedy of Easter society and modern society is their mutual adherence to a suicidal logic, or rather something that grew into a suicidal logic. For one reason or another, the imperative to keep living in a certain manner came to override basic survival.
Blind faith is a madness that frequently afflicts the sane. Presumably the Easter people earnestly believed that however bad things got they would only get worse if they stopped carving and dragging the statues, and offended the spirits of the ancestors they represented. Better to cut the last tree than offend the god is a sensible dictum for any true believer.
The western economic religions of monetarism and consumerism are turning out similarly suicidal. Presumably, twenty years ago, some people really did believe that selling-off public utilities and mutual assets would produce a world of happy shareowners – but that wasn’t the way things panned out. Whatever the original intention the fact is three decades of privatisation have left global corporations in control of human destiny. We run our lives to suit corporate logic and corporate logic is to maintain profits at any cost, whatever the consequences. You don’t have to be mad to labour-away night and day for global catastrophe, you just have to be a good CEO. That’s what the bonuses are for.
Consumerism is a related god, brandishing a similarly destructive set of commandments:
Worry you haven’t enough possessions.
Worry your current possessions are outdated.
Throw away perfectly good things when new versions are released.
Fear what people will think of you if you don’t own the latest things.
– this is the logic that drives Asia’s twin miracles of industrial slavery and global-destruction.
Again it sounds like lunacy, but it’s more an induced bewilderment. The fraction of humanity wealthy enough to actually practice consumerism is subject to relentless propaganda. Advertisers strive to sow insecurities into our minds, encourage us to think we can’t be happy without the product.
In truth consuming doesn’t make us happier; shopping trips to New York don’t make us happier, children are no happier for owning flashy toys. Going out is actually less fun with mobile telephones. Imelda Marcos’s shoes certainly didn’t make her happy, why would a content person continue to worry so much about footwear? If she’d acquired every style on earth she still wouldn’t have been happy, she’d probably just have moved onto handbags.
Of course we’re not all unquestioning believers. To varying degrees at different times, every clan has its dissenters. During lean times particularly doubters and challengers arise to question the strategy of the leaders, even question the power of the gods.
On Easter there must have been people who appreciated the damage and the impending danger and even some who dared to call for a halt, particularly towards the end. But then as now it was rare that anyone in power held this view – they were more likely in cahoots with the parties organising the destruction. Whatever the exact details, clearly the pressure to plough-on outweighed the pressure to turn back. The plough-on brigade won the day – and lost the world.
At the moment too the plough-ons prevail. Certainly there’s lots of oppositional discourse, but it’s greatly outweighed by the positive propaganda, and the temptation to look away. The luxury of cars and flights has a compelling hold over many of us. Add the fact that corporations actively want us to over-consume and the outlook does look bleak. ‘No party will ever get elected on that ticket’; ‘You can’t expect people to stop flying and get rid of their cars’ – these are the most chilling mantras of the anti-environmentalists, left and right.
When all the trees were chopped, the soil gone, and the forty species of seabird all eaten, they started on each other:
“Oral traditions of the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was ‘The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth’.”
Although global cannibalism seems unlikely in the near future, our current trajectory is leading to equally desperate social relations. In the race to exploit the planet billions are being trampled underfoot. If the plunder continues we can only expect more suffering and insecurity to follow.
Diamond shows us that we are all still just animals, squabbling over limited resources – it doesn’t matter if it’s ten thousand on an island or six million on a globe, there’s only so much useful land and sea to go round, and a constant temptation to over-exploit it. This much will never change.
But he also shows us how we differ from the other animals. He shows how some ancient and some modern societies responded intelligently to environmental crises, and ended up safeguarding their future. As much as it was ingenuity that got us into this mess it remains our only means of escape – should we choose to use it.
Monday 7 May 2007
Why is Radio Two like the Daily Mail?
He loves Radio 2, and his show, where he mixes cultural debate with the likes of Richard Dawkins and Salman Rushdie alongside phone-ins on Daily Mail staples like teenage tearaways and the NHS.
(Jayne Thynny interviewing Jeremy Vine in The Independent)
It might sound harsh but there’s actually quite a lot of Daily Mail about Radio Two. While much of it is politically inert – pop music, pop culture – its news and talk content shares a great deal with the Rothermere’s ugly child. Both are pitched at similar demographics. Both conceive of a large swell of moralistic, patriotic, but politically shallow viewers and listeners, and each does its best to cater to it.
There is rarely anything deep in the Mail. While it covers the most important topics its contribution to understanding is worse than useless – all hysterics and no substance. Rather than teaching it functions by triggering existing beliefs and bigotries. It’s really all just sermons on the same few commandments: Wealthy people and wealthy countries deserve their wealth (apart from a few bad apples); the poor deserve to be poor; car-owners are an oppressed class; foreigners are morally and culturally inferior and perhaps genetically inferior too.
Although far less hysterical, Radio Two news is every bit as conservative and shallow. Like in the Mail, the righteousness of Britain and America goes unquestioned – our military remain heroes whatever the evidence, our leaders remain honest, regardless of past performance. Every report of our crimes is written in disappearing ink, each new day a clean sheet.
Like the Mail, Radio Two is desperately parochial. Foreign lives are simply not worth a jot, not unless they happen to be pawns in some grander western plan. The only rationale for running international stories at all is how events might affect British people – thousands of foreign deaths can be dismissed in a sentence, but only after a heartfelt analysis of our own cuts and bruises.
Like every national paper (bar the FT) Radio Two’s news-content is celebrity obsessed. Any known face elevates any old nonsense to the top of the hour. Indeed if you are one of destitute of Africa or Asia about the only chance of a mention on Two is from a chance encounter with royalty or a pop star (or heaven upon heaven, one of the BBC’s own stable of personalities. Then you might get your own series.)
Another way is feel-good patriotism. If you can get your plight highlighted in a way that shines warmly on British people and British character you might earn a mention on Two. As with the Asian Tsunami, and poor Ali Abbas, the central story is always British generosity, our rising to the challenge. The suffering of foreigners is really just a muse for our magnanimous spirit to play to.
One might wonder then, as licence payers, why this should be. Why should state-funded broadcasting stoop to emulate a commercial tabloid, particularly such a noxious one? The Mail is critically regarded as a sick joke, Private Eye can’t compete for parody. From health scares to politics, no more consistency of argument than the National Enquirer, Winston Smith would have trouble keeping up with it.
But of course the Mail sells, and that in itself is the BBC’s reason for wandering down this dark path. The BBC and especially Radio Two have a contractual debt to popularity. Every channel is committed to netting a certain size of audience and Radio Two is duty-bound to land the biggest catch of all. The whole purpose of our nationwide, advert free ‘adult orientated pop music’ station is to attract a huge number of listeners.
Why popularity should signal a right-wing news-agenda is another matter. The implications are not pleasant however you look at it. Either there really is a large swell of politically shallow people with a taste for fascist phone-ins, or it’s just that the BBC thinks that there is and is attempting to cater to it. Alternatively, perhaps BBC thinks the average listener is far more politically sophisticated than the average caller and only tunes-in for the fun of it, the voyeurism – you don’t have to be as stupid as a cockerel to enjoy a good cock-fight.
Like I say, not pleasant implications. Either we truly are shallow, or the BBC thinks we’re shallow, or it thinks we’re political sophisticates who get a self-righteous kick out of laughing at bigots.
I suppose all three posses some truth. We’ve all met Alf Garnett and Peter Cook’s cabdriver and Catherine Tate’s gran. There really are people who don’t pay any deep attention to political history but nonetheless feel qualified to explain to every stranger exactly what is wrong with the world and what needs to be done to correct it (and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak.)
But mere existence doesn’t mean mass existence. The fact that such people exist tells us nothing of their prevalence. Indeed certain factors act to skew the BBC’s portrait of the ‘average’ listener in this direction.
For one thing people who ‘know everything’ are far more likely to bother to phone-in in the first place. Alf Garnett would be far more likely to pontificate down the phone to Jeremy Vine than a left-liberal type like Warren Mitchell himself. Moreover the fact that conservative-minded loudmouths can be relied upon to say controversial things without saying anything controversial about the powerful (Gawd bless ‘em) also makes them much more likely to be the callers chosen by producers and DJs – the last thing they want is some leftie blurting the truth about Iraq across the airwaves and getting them into trouble with their managers, and getting their managers into trouble with the government.
The fact that the BBC anticipates a politically shallow general public is undeniable. It’s executives have spent the past two decades openly trying to think up ways of make lite of everything. There’s an ongoing campaign to dumb programming down, and hopefully dumb down our expectations in turn. As for people tuning-in just to laugh at other people’s opinions, and their manner of expressing themselves, well anyone who has ever listened to Two in a busy workplace knows the answer to that!
Which is why it is odd that any attempt to address these questions is usually dismissed as ‘patronising’, whatever stance you take. You are either patronising people by suggesting they are stupid, or patronising people by criticising things that they like, or patronising people by suggesting that they can be influenced by the media at all.
Odd when, as I say, the executives who produce radio and television have no qualms about theorising about us. They are at liberty to gather in boardrooms to discuss ways in which make culture more stupid so as to meet corporate demands, but we are being patronising if we try to recognise what they think of us, how they target us, what they are trying to do to us.
Alf Garnett exists but we shouldn’t all be tarred with his opinions, or feel obliged to cater to his appetites. The mere existence of a social group doesn’t make it a legitimate market for a state-funded broadcaster to target. This is not an affront to democracy or freedom. I defend the right of bigots to air their views, but I don’t defend the right of broadcasters to use bigots to skew public opinion in corporate-friendly, power-friendly directions. That, alas, is the worst consequence of Radio Two being like the Daily Mail.
(Jayne Thynny interviewing Jeremy Vine in The Independent)
It might sound harsh but there’s actually quite a lot of Daily Mail about Radio Two. While much of it is politically inert – pop music, pop culture – its news and talk content shares a great deal with the Rothermere’s ugly child. Both are pitched at similar demographics. Both conceive of a large swell of moralistic, patriotic, but politically shallow viewers and listeners, and each does its best to cater to it.
There is rarely anything deep in the Mail. While it covers the most important topics its contribution to understanding is worse than useless – all hysterics and no substance. Rather than teaching it functions by triggering existing beliefs and bigotries. It’s really all just sermons on the same few commandments: Wealthy people and wealthy countries deserve their wealth (apart from a few bad apples); the poor deserve to be poor; car-owners are an oppressed class; foreigners are morally and culturally inferior and perhaps genetically inferior too.
Although far less hysterical, Radio Two news is every bit as conservative and shallow. Like in the Mail, the righteousness of Britain and America goes unquestioned – our military remain heroes whatever the evidence, our leaders remain honest, regardless of past performance. Every report of our crimes is written in disappearing ink, each new day a clean sheet.
Like the Mail, Radio Two is desperately parochial. Foreign lives are simply not worth a jot, not unless they happen to be pawns in some grander western plan. The only rationale for running international stories at all is how events might affect British people – thousands of foreign deaths can be dismissed in a sentence, but only after a heartfelt analysis of our own cuts and bruises.
Like every national paper (bar the FT) Radio Two’s news-content is celebrity obsessed. Any known face elevates any old nonsense to the top of the hour. Indeed if you are one of destitute of Africa or Asia about the only chance of a mention on Two is from a chance encounter with royalty or a pop star (or heaven upon heaven, one of the BBC’s own stable of personalities. Then you might get your own series.)
Another way is feel-good patriotism. If you can get your plight highlighted in a way that shines warmly on British people and British character you might earn a mention on Two. As with the Asian Tsunami, and poor Ali Abbas, the central story is always British generosity, our rising to the challenge. The suffering of foreigners is really just a muse for our magnanimous spirit to play to.
One might wonder then, as licence payers, why this should be. Why should state-funded broadcasting stoop to emulate a commercial tabloid, particularly such a noxious one? The Mail is critically regarded as a sick joke, Private Eye can’t compete for parody. From health scares to politics, no more consistency of argument than the National Enquirer, Winston Smith would have trouble keeping up with it.
But of course the Mail sells, and that in itself is the BBC’s reason for wandering down this dark path. The BBC and especially Radio Two have a contractual debt to popularity. Every channel is committed to netting a certain size of audience and Radio Two is duty-bound to land the biggest catch of all. The whole purpose of our nationwide, advert free ‘adult orientated pop music’ station is to attract a huge number of listeners.
Why popularity should signal a right-wing news-agenda is another matter. The implications are not pleasant however you look at it. Either there really is a large swell of politically shallow people with a taste for fascist phone-ins, or it’s just that the BBC thinks that there is and is attempting to cater to it. Alternatively, perhaps BBC thinks the average listener is far more politically sophisticated than the average caller and only tunes-in for the fun of it, the voyeurism – you don’t have to be as stupid as a cockerel to enjoy a good cock-fight.
Like I say, not pleasant implications. Either we truly are shallow, or the BBC thinks we’re shallow, or it thinks we’re political sophisticates who get a self-righteous kick out of laughing at bigots.
I suppose all three posses some truth. We’ve all met Alf Garnett and Peter Cook’s cabdriver and Catherine Tate’s gran. There really are people who don’t pay any deep attention to political history but nonetheless feel qualified to explain to every stranger exactly what is wrong with the world and what needs to be done to correct it (and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak.)
But mere existence doesn’t mean mass existence. The fact that such people exist tells us nothing of their prevalence. Indeed certain factors act to skew the BBC’s portrait of the ‘average’ listener in this direction.
For one thing people who ‘know everything’ are far more likely to bother to phone-in in the first place. Alf Garnett would be far more likely to pontificate down the phone to Jeremy Vine than a left-liberal type like Warren Mitchell himself. Moreover the fact that conservative-minded loudmouths can be relied upon to say controversial things without saying anything controversial about the powerful (Gawd bless ‘em) also makes them much more likely to be the callers chosen by producers and DJs – the last thing they want is some leftie blurting the truth about Iraq across the airwaves and getting them into trouble with their managers, and getting their managers into trouble with the government.
The fact that the BBC anticipates a politically shallow general public is undeniable. It’s executives have spent the past two decades openly trying to think up ways of make lite of everything. There’s an ongoing campaign to dumb programming down, and hopefully dumb down our expectations in turn. As for people tuning-in just to laugh at other people’s opinions, and their manner of expressing themselves, well anyone who has ever listened to Two in a busy workplace knows the answer to that!
Which is why it is odd that any attempt to address these questions is usually dismissed as ‘patronising’, whatever stance you take. You are either patronising people by suggesting they are stupid, or patronising people by criticising things that they like, or patronising people by suggesting that they can be influenced by the media at all.
Odd when, as I say, the executives who produce radio and television have no qualms about theorising about us. They are at liberty to gather in boardrooms to discuss ways in which make culture more stupid so as to meet corporate demands, but we are being patronising if we try to recognise what they think of us, how they target us, what they are trying to do to us.
Alf Garnett exists but we shouldn’t all be tarred with his opinions, or feel obliged to cater to his appetites. The mere existence of a social group doesn’t make it a legitimate market for a state-funded broadcaster to target. This is not an affront to democracy or freedom. I defend the right of bigots to air their views, but I don’t defend the right of broadcasters to use bigots to skew public opinion in corporate-friendly, power-friendly directions. That, alas, is the worst consequence of Radio Two being like the Daily Mail.
Thursday 29 March 2007
Political Pole-Reversal II
No one likes to be called a turncoat. In politics as elsewhere, it’s sometimes easier to imagine that the world changed while you yourself maintained your original position. To the untrained eye it might look like certain leftist writers swapped political poles in the wake of 911 – but according to them in fact it was the rest of the left that moved. What looked like their rapid shift right-wards was just relative motion.
The logic runs: By forming alliances with Muslim groups the anti-war left has fallen into the hands of the far-right, or rather has itself become right-wing. The old left has leapfrogged straight over neo-conservatism and into the arms of ‘Islamofacism’.
In consequence the only option for a true left-winger is to ally with the neo-cons, now situated to the left of the old left. Rather than fight American militarism, a true leftie should support it, as the best hope of achieving traditional leftwing goals. Only when radical Islam is defeated can true leftists then get back on with the job of tackling capitalism.
Tortuous as this is – ally with the right to support the left – there’s a more fundamental reason not to take it at face value. Marxist or not there’s one tenet of Marxism that seems essential to anyone bothering to call themselves left-wing: Power boils down to economics not belief. Material wherewithal trumps any ideology.
This is only to say that is decidedly un-leftwing to find yourself siding with capital. It clashes with a fundamental leftist belief: Whatever the political situation, the rich are to blame not the poor. This is not just class stubbornness, but a rational observation. If anyone has the opportunity to bring an awful situation to a happy end it has to be the players with the economic advantage. You may have to pan out a little to see it, but the rich and powerful are always the ones ultimately wielding the power.
Accordingly, Britain was the only player capable of bringing liberty to India and Ireland; Indonesia and the US were the only people who could stop the slaughter in East Timor; Israel and the US are the only players capable of bringing peace to Palestine. It’s written into the military and economic imbalance.
Of course opposition movements are vital players but any changes they secure can only be concessions. Whether by fair means or foul, the disadvantaged can make no greater mark on the world than the material power they manage to attain or influence. For the poor and the oppressed political victory always takes the form of an act by the wealthy and powerful. It’s always the wealthy that have to start doing something, or stop doing something, if things are to get better.
Ownership overrules desire. Whatever you might want for the world it won’t happen if you don’t have the material clout. You can threaten human existence in speeches and writing, but your reach will never be greater than the extent of your material back-up. However frenzied some Islamists might seem, clearly they are ants next to the western military-corporate elephant. That power imbalance in itself should be enough to make any real leftie suspicious of this argument.
Of course the cruise-missile ‘left’ might counter that Nazism was ‘only’ a set of ideas and yet it grew to wield huge and terrible power. This only proves the point. All those neat uniforms and kinky boots didn’t pay for themselves. Cleary there was big money poured into that party and that movement. Whatever connections they might have in the oil industry no Islamic terror cell can commission and requisition large sectors of industry. They can’t befriend Raytheon and Boeing as Hitler befriended Messerschmitt and Heinkel.
Some mainstream commentators have taken to calling Islamic killers ‘dusty nuts’ and ‘rag-heads’, so they at least seem to acknowledge the point. Unlike Hitler, Osama doesn’t have a mass contract with Hugo Boss.
So eventually the whole Islamic threat to humanity boils down to, “They’ll get a nuke from an enemy state and use it on us because they’re just plain nuts/because they want to blackmail the world into converting to Islam. It’s the absurd end of an absurd position. No further theory or evidence needed, all complexity reduced to a classic red scare: Pure evil is poised to savage us, it will listen to no reason.
Rather than some exotic new left-ism this is quite conventional talk for those drifting to the right: The world really did change after X, these new devils really are devils, the IRA and Communists and Celts were schoolboys by comparison. For the first time in history, ideas so malevolent they can overcome a colossal material imbalance. Meanwhile oil – the centrepiece of any traditional left-wing analysis – slips off the radar. The material commodity at the heart of global production is outshone by unprecedented evil.
If upon examining the world you reach the conclusion that the wealthy and powerful are our best hope, fair enough, you are not on your own – but in so doing you forfeit any meaningful connection with the left. If experience leads you to believe that prayers and sermons and speeches can usurp Raytheon and Citibank any claim on the left evaporates. You might call yourself a liberal of some sort, and you certainly fit the bill for a classic right-winger, but you have no place on this cloud.
The logic runs: By forming alliances with Muslim groups the anti-war left has fallen into the hands of the far-right, or rather has itself become right-wing. The old left has leapfrogged straight over neo-conservatism and into the arms of ‘Islamofacism’.
In consequence the only option for a true left-winger is to ally with the neo-cons, now situated to the left of the old left. Rather than fight American militarism, a true leftie should support it, as the best hope of achieving traditional leftwing goals. Only when radical Islam is defeated can true leftists then get back on with the job of tackling capitalism.
Tortuous as this is – ally with the right to support the left – there’s a more fundamental reason not to take it at face value. Marxist or not there’s one tenet of Marxism that seems essential to anyone bothering to call themselves left-wing: Power boils down to economics not belief. Material wherewithal trumps any ideology.
This is only to say that is decidedly un-leftwing to find yourself siding with capital. It clashes with a fundamental leftist belief: Whatever the political situation, the rich are to blame not the poor. This is not just class stubbornness, but a rational observation. If anyone has the opportunity to bring an awful situation to a happy end it has to be the players with the economic advantage. You may have to pan out a little to see it, but the rich and powerful are always the ones ultimately wielding the power.
Accordingly, Britain was the only player capable of bringing liberty to India and Ireland; Indonesia and the US were the only people who could stop the slaughter in East Timor; Israel and the US are the only players capable of bringing peace to Palestine. It’s written into the military and economic imbalance.
Of course opposition movements are vital players but any changes they secure can only be concessions. Whether by fair means or foul, the disadvantaged can make no greater mark on the world than the material power they manage to attain or influence. For the poor and the oppressed political victory always takes the form of an act by the wealthy and powerful. It’s always the wealthy that have to start doing something, or stop doing something, if things are to get better.
Ownership overrules desire. Whatever you might want for the world it won’t happen if you don’t have the material clout. You can threaten human existence in speeches and writing, but your reach will never be greater than the extent of your material back-up. However frenzied some Islamists might seem, clearly they are ants next to the western military-corporate elephant. That power imbalance in itself should be enough to make any real leftie suspicious of this argument.
Of course the cruise-missile ‘left’ might counter that Nazism was ‘only’ a set of ideas and yet it grew to wield huge and terrible power. This only proves the point. All those neat uniforms and kinky boots didn’t pay for themselves. Cleary there was big money poured into that party and that movement. Whatever connections they might have in the oil industry no Islamic terror cell can commission and requisition large sectors of industry. They can’t befriend Raytheon and Boeing as Hitler befriended Messerschmitt and Heinkel.
Some mainstream commentators have taken to calling Islamic killers ‘dusty nuts’ and ‘rag-heads’, so they at least seem to acknowledge the point. Unlike Hitler, Osama doesn’t have a mass contract with Hugo Boss.
So eventually the whole Islamic threat to humanity boils down to, “They’ll get a nuke from an enemy state and use it on us because they’re just plain nuts/because they want to blackmail the world into converting to Islam. It’s the absurd end of an absurd position. No further theory or evidence needed, all complexity reduced to a classic red scare: Pure evil is poised to savage us, it will listen to no reason.
Rather than some exotic new left-ism this is quite conventional talk for those drifting to the right: The world really did change after X, these new devils really are devils, the IRA and Communists and Celts were schoolboys by comparison. For the first time in history, ideas so malevolent they can overcome a colossal material imbalance. Meanwhile oil – the centrepiece of any traditional left-wing analysis – slips off the radar. The material commodity at the heart of global production is outshone by unprecedented evil.
If upon examining the world you reach the conclusion that the wealthy and powerful are our best hope, fair enough, you are not on your own – but in so doing you forfeit any meaningful connection with the left. If experience leads you to believe that prayers and sermons and speeches can usurp Raytheon and Citibank any claim on the left evaporates. You might call yourself a liberal of some sort, and you certainly fit the bill for a classic right-winger, but you have no place on this cloud.
Sunday 4 March 2007
Political Pole-Reversal
Only a fool or a cynic would blame a Brazilian street urchin for its plight. It’s a terrible start in life, and quite understandable that it frequently ends up terrible too. Given a good home who knows? Some of yesterday’s barrio children might have become today’s concert pianists or physicists, only opportunity never knocked.
Conversely we all acknowledge the responsibility of the individual, to some degree. We all have the gut feeling that subsidising truly slack behaviour does no one any favours. Child, co-worker or politician, we should never bankroll shameless shiftlessness – it only encourages them.
But while we all have these capacities, for sympathy and its polar opposite, scorn, we vary greatly in who we apply them to. Some blow a gasket over insider dealing but speak-up for welfare claimants. Some bang on about sickness benefit but rush to defend the poor downtrodden CEOs. One person’s slacker is another’s victim of circumstance. One person’s welfare scrounger is another’s victim of de-industrialisation, one person’s corporate tax dodger is another’s victimised captain of industry.
Political belief is intimately related to this question – who do you blame for the state of things? Among us, who is it who drags us down, and who that offers us the chance to ascend? Both left and right agree that the central purpose of politics is to empower the worthy and deflate the cynical and the idle, it’s just that we differ over who is who.
Or to put it the other way round, we apportion blame and praise in accordance with our political beliefs. Our politics dictate whether we sympathise with an individual or social group or condemn them as the cause of their own woes.
Although there are no hard and fast rules it seems fair to say that the conservative mind tends to see the materially disadvantaged as responsible for their own condition. Likewise, they tend to see the wealthy as the agents of their own good fortune. It’s unavoidable if you are to maintain the core conservative assumption: The justice of the existing order. Conservatism must in some sense entail the desire to conserve things as they are, in the belief that the current system is fundamentally fair, just and meritocratic.
It can only follow then that domestic and global inequalities are a reflection of ability, rather than tyranny: The poor of Glasgow and New Orleans make their own beds. The governments of Ethiopia and Bangladesh are responsible for their own starving masses, and those starving masses should be ashamed for not ousting such corrupt leaders. To the ‘right’-minded it would be foolish to subsidise such indolence, as wrong as it would be to subsidise a teenager’s drug habit.
Obviously anyone bothering to call themselves left-wing would likely to reject all this and offer up different candidates for blame – the owners of production, western capital, the arms industry – they would more likely see the poor as the victim of the rich.
I say likely because as I said before there are no hard and fast rules. Humans can be very contrary beasts. Many supposed leftists care passionately about domestic living standards but remain quite indifferent to the welfare of foreigners. Nevertheless, certain arguments and world-views do tend to gravitate towards to the same sort of people. Certain views and theories mesh more neatly with our existing ones, reinforce them. Sympathise with the ‘war on terror’ and you’ll most likely also sympathise with Israel but scorn Chavez. Scorn the Bush camp and you’ll probably tend to sympathise with the Palestinians and the Bolivarians but scorn NATO.
Political beliefs accrete over a lifetime, but the ones we glean are the ones that appeal to our existing political outlook. It’s a bit like electrolysis. We each set out with a left and a right terminal, each biased to attract a certain type of belief and argument. By middle life one terminal has often grown much fatter than the other. We might have laid down a thousand reasons to commend Tony Blair, or a thousand to condemn him.
Of course people do change, sometimes violently. Overnight they reject the whole basis of their previous beliefs, a whole lifetime of observations. When right turns to left – the usual direction – all manner of previous convictions find themselves abandoned or reversed. Old sympathies turn to scorn, or are swept under the carpet; people and organisations previously vilified find themselves re-appraised, even commended. It’s like a sudden reversing of polarity. Deep seated beliefs strip off one terminal and rush to form incongruous lumps on the other.
To whatever degree they are aware of it, Aaronovitch, Cohen and Hitchens are currently undergoing this tiresome process – perpetual revision of previous beliefs, writings, conversations, alliances. The saints they spent the first half of their lives defending, suddenly morphed into sinners. Years of criticism and analysis reduced to embarrassment - something to argue away, or revise out of all recognition, rather than utilise.
Meanwhile on the right terminal a new sort of argument starts to accumulate; layer on layer, thicker each day.
Conversely we all acknowledge the responsibility of the individual, to some degree. We all have the gut feeling that subsidising truly slack behaviour does no one any favours. Child, co-worker or politician, we should never bankroll shameless shiftlessness – it only encourages them.
But while we all have these capacities, for sympathy and its polar opposite, scorn, we vary greatly in who we apply them to. Some blow a gasket over insider dealing but speak-up for welfare claimants. Some bang on about sickness benefit but rush to defend the poor downtrodden CEOs. One person’s slacker is another’s victim of circumstance. One person’s welfare scrounger is another’s victim of de-industrialisation, one person’s corporate tax dodger is another’s victimised captain of industry.
Political belief is intimately related to this question – who do you blame for the state of things? Among us, who is it who drags us down, and who that offers us the chance to ascend? Both left and right agree that the central purpose of politics is to empower the worthy and deflate the cynical and the idle, it’s just that we differ over who is who.
Or to put it the other way round, we apportion blame and praise in accordance with our political beliefs. Our politics dictate whether we sympathise with an individual or social group or condemn them as the cause of their own woes.
Although there are no hard and fast rules it seems fair to say that the conservative mind tends to see the materially disadvantaged as responsible for their own condition. Likewise, they tend to see the wealthy as the agents of their own good fortune. It’s unavoidable if you are to maintain the core conservative assumption: The justice of the existing order. Conservatism must in some sense entail the desire to conserve things as they are, in the belief that the current system is fundamentally fair, just and meritocratic.
It can only follow then that domestic and global inequalities are a reflection of ability, rather than tyranny: The poor of Glasgow and New Orleans make their own beds. The governments of Ethiopia and Bangladesh are responsible for their own starving masses, and those starving masses should be ashamed for not ousting such corrupt leaders. To the ‘right’-minded it would be foolish to subsidise such indolence, as wrong as it would be to subsidise a teenager’s drug habit.
Obviously anyone bothering to call themselves left-wing would likely to reject all this and offer up different candidates for blame – the owners of production, western capital, the arms industry – they would more likely see the poor as the victim of the rich.
I say likely because as I said before there are no hard and fast rules. Humans can be very contrary beasts. Many supposed leftists care passionately about domestic living standards but remain quite indifferent to the welfare of foreigners. Nevertheless, certain arguments and world-views do tend to gravitate towards to the same sort of people. Certain views and theories mesh more neatly with our existing ones, reinforce them. Sympathise with the ‘war on terror’ and you’ll most likely also sympathise with Israel but scorn Chavez. Scorn the Bush camp and you’ll probably tend to sympathise with the Palestinians and the Bolivarians but scorn NATO.
Political beliefs accrete over a lifetime, but the ones we glean are the ones that appeal to our existing political outlook. It’s a bit like electrolysis. We each set out with a left and a right terminal, each biased to attract a certain type of belief and argument. By middle life one terminal has often grown much fatter than the other. We might have laid down a thousand reasons to commend Tony Blair, or a thousand to condemn him.
Of course people do change, sometimes violently. Overnight they reject the whole basis of their previous beliefs, a whole lifetime of observations. When right turns to left – the usual direction – all manner of previous convictions find themselves abandoned or reversed. Old sympathies turn to scorn, or are swept under the carpet; people and organisations previously vilified find themselves re-appraised, even commended. It’s like a sudden reversing of polarity. Deep seated beliefs strip off one terminal and rush to form incongruous lumps on the other.
To whatever degree they are aware of it, Aaronovitch, Cohen and Hitchens are currently undergoing this tiresome process – perpetual revision of previous beliefs, writings, conversations, alliances. The saints they spent the first half of their lives defending, suddenly morphed into sinners. Years of criticism and analysis reduced to embarrassment - something to argue away, or revise out of all recognition, rather than utilise.
Meanwhile on the right terminal a new sort of argument starts to accumulate; layer on layer, thicker each day.
Wednesday 17 January 2007
Labour and Empire
A close friend finds my outright condemnation of the New Labour project infuriating, quite unfair. She stresses the good work they have carried out in her own community: Well-thought-out schemes and wisely targeted cash leading to palpable improvements in people's lives.
To be honest, I don’t even know how true this. Such is my bitterness with New Labour I don’t keep up with such bread and butter issues. If there is anything to it, such successes may be one reason so many one-time left-wingers have stayed loyal to Mr Blair.
But regardless of how true it might be, for anyone who claims to hold universal democratic ideals it really isn’t good enough. Socialism paid for by the misery and enslavement of foreigners isn’t socialism at all, it’s just more tribalism – putting the welfare of your own lot before others. It’s hard to take comfort from domestic improvements when they’re clearly being bankrolled by the blood and tears of those elsewhere.
There are endless debates about whether the current world order is or isn’t imperialist, but in a most important sense it definitely is. However you go about it, imperialism is characterised by the exploitation of other peoples. It matters little whether you actually administer a colony, the important question is do you turn it to your own benefit? Do you encourage it work to your own advantage, rather than to its own? Do you cause it to suffer to bring wealth back to your own shores?
All five Labour Prime Ministers have been keen imperialists in this sense. Ramsay Macdonald’s brief flirtations with power were imperialist in every sense, the globe was at its pinkest. He certainly wasn’t voted into office to dismantle that empire, he was elected to distribute the spoils more equitably.
Of course it may not have of seemed like that at the time. Those who fought for public welfare simply wanted a fairer slice of the pie. But while the working classes might have shifted towards to the living standards of the middle classes in England, for those slaving away in Asia nothing changed, it often worsened.
Although Atlee oversaw the initial dismantling of the formal empire, there was certainly no parallel drive to improve the living standards and liberty of colonial subjects. If you were an African digging diamonds or copper you still got paid peanuts. The great share of the wealth still went back to Europe, only now some of it went on to fund social welfare programs.
This is not to suggest that successful domestic welfare requires foreign exploitation. Cuba achieves great healthcare without needing to bleed other countries to fund it. Whatever complaint you make about Cuba’s internal politics, you can’t accuse her of impoverishing her neighbours for her own gain. (There’s another candidate in the hemisphere.)
But in the case of the Parliamentry Labour party it has always been the case. From Cape Town to Baghdad to Jakarta, Wilson and Callaghan supplied arms to anyone prepared to protect British business interests, prepared to keep life miserable and wages low. Like every other modern British government, they inherited a highly unfair world order and stopped at nothing to keep it that way.
Blair’s foreign policy is nothing new to Labour, this is the history of Labour in power. It’s a horrible irony, but for all the sincere effort of some party members, and some excellent domestic gains, Labour has been a terrible, selfish player in world affairs. To the alien eye, rather than an asset the British welfare state could be mistaken for another means by which the outside world was kept unequal. A little trickledown at home to keep the natives quiet, and the empire unchallenged.
Britain’s ‘favourable’ global business connections have paid huge premiums to our domestic welfare, often at the most testing times. Like North Sea oil, ‘favourable’ foreign investments wrote many of the dole-cheques that limited the eighties’ riots. Like tax breaks and extra policemen, they were another strategy to weather the storm.
Foreign exploitation still generates a great deal of Britain’s income, and part of that goes toward our relatively lavish welfare. It pays for schools and social services, highly-skilled paramedics to scrape binge drinkers off pavements, artificial hip joints and machines to keep us alive into our nineties – unimaginable services in many of the countries Britain invests in, and extracts from.
As I said before, it doesn’t have to be this way – welfare doesn’t have to be based on imperialism – it’s just that in Britain it always has been.
To be honest, I don’t even know how true this. Such is my bitterness with New Labour I don’t keep up with such bread and butter issues. If there is anything to it, such successes may be one reason so many one-time left-wingers have stayed loyal to Mr Blair.
But regardless of how true it might be, for anyone who claims to hold universal democratic ideals it really isn’t good enough. Socialism paid for by the misery and enslavement of foreigners isn’t socialism at all, it’s just more tribalism – putting the welfare of your own lot before others. It’s hard to take comfort from domestic improvements when they’re clearly being bankrolled by the blood and tears of those elsewhere.
There are endless debates about whether the current world order is or isn’t imperialist, but in a most important sense it definitely is. However you go about it, imperialism is characterised by the exploitation of other peoples. It matters little whether you actually administer a colony, the important question is do you turn it to your own benefit? Do you encourage it work to your own advantage, rather than to its own? Do you cause it to suffer to bring wealth back to your own shores?
All five Labour Prime Ministers have been keen imperialists in this sense. Ramsay Macdonald’s brief flirtations with power were imperialist in every sense, the globe was at its pinkest. He certainly wasn’t voted into office to dismantle that empire, he was elected to distribute the spoils more equitably.
Of course it may not have of seemed like that at the time. Those who fought for public welfare simply wanted a fairer slice of the pie. But while the working classes might have shifted towards to the living standards of the middle classes in England, for those slaving away in Asia nothing changed, it often worsened.
Although Atlee oversaw the initial dismantling of the formal empire, there was certainly no parallel drive to improve the living standards and liberty of colonial subjects. If you were an African digging diamonds or copper you still got paid peanuts. The great share of the wealth still went back to Europe, only now some of it went on to fund social welfare programs.
This is not to suggest that successful domestic welfare requires foreign exploitation. Cuba achieves great healthcare without needing to bleed other countries to fund it. Whatever complaint you make about Cuba’s internal politics, you can’t accuse her of impoverishing her neighbours for her own gain. (There’s another candidate in the hemisphere.)
But in the case of the Parliamentry Labour party it has always been the case. From Cape Town to Baghdad to Jakarta, Wilson and Callaghan supplied arms to anyone prepared to protect British business interests, prepared to keep life miserable and wages low. Like every other modern British government, they inherited a highly unfair world order and stopped at nothing to keep it that way.
Blair’s foreign policy is nothing new to Labour, this is the history of Labour in power. It’s a horrible irony, but for all the sincere effort of some party members, and some excellent domestic gains, Labour has been a terrible, selfish player in world affairs. To the alien eye, rather than an asset the British welfare state could be mistaken for another means by which the outside world was kept unequal. A little trickledown at home to keep the natives quiet, and the empire unchallenged.
Britain’s ‘favourable’ global business connections have paid huge premiums to our domestic welfare, often at the most testing times. Like North Sea oil, ‘favourable’ foreign investments wrote many of the dole-cheques that limited the eighties’ riots. Like tax breaks and extra policemen, they were another strategy to weather the storm.
Foreign exploitation still generates a great deal of Britain’s income, and part of that goes toward our relatively lavish welfare. It pays for schools and social services, highly-skilled paramedics to scrape binge drinkers off pavements, artificial hip joints and machines to keep us alive into our nineties – unimaginable services in many of the countries Britain invests in, and extracts from.
As I said before, it doesn’t have to be this way – welfare doesn’t have to be based on imperialism – it’s just that in Britain it always has been.
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