The Vatican's Travails

I recently finished Henri Lefebvre's "Critique of Everyday Life", the 1991 Michel Trebitsch translation of which has just been republished in three paperback volumes by Verso. I'd been aware of this work's reputation since the '60s when it was a major influence on Guy Debord, but had never until now read it, and I was quite bowled over. Parts of it read badly now, as overly-pious Marxist rhetoric (it was first published in 1947) but there are other parts that display a brilliance unmatched by any current social critic. Most surprising of all is the lucid and poetic prose in which much of it's written, and nowhere more than in the odd essay that concludes Vol 1 called "Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside". In it Lefebvre describes his relationship to the Catholicism of his youth, provoked by a visit to a small country church. You really should read it all, but I'm quoting a few of the more powerful passages here as my modest contribution to the current debate over the behaviour of certain Catholic priests:

Should a sacrilege be committed (ah! the stories they tell in their pious conversations and their parish newspapers, of the host bleeding and speaking, of sudden deaths and unexpected conversions . . .), should a sacrilege be committed, the world might collapse into nothingness! The firmament, that solid vault which supports the stars, might crumble. Fearful angels would trump forth the end of Time. For if God does not accomplish all that He is perfectly capable of as cosmic Father, vain, vindictive Creator, Lord of heaven, Master of good and evil, Throne of glory built upon azure, gold and banknotes, it is because He is also the Son, controlling Himself, checking His Justice and His Wrath, and showing Himself to be equally and at one and the same time very good, very mild, very brotherly towards the little human families which crawl along in this vale of tears. [...]

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

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

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

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

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

picture: dick_pountain on Flickr

Ghost in the Party Machine

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

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

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

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

Inequality Drives You Mad

Having watched the Election 2010 debate on TV last night, there remains no doubt in my mind that all three of the major UK parties are still wedded to economically illiterate neo-liberal policies - from which they can only be briefly and reluctantly budged, and to which they will revert as soon as the threat of economic armageddon recedes far enough for them to turn on the feel-good rhetoric again. In an extract from his new book "Ill Fares the Land" in the latest New York Review of Books, Tony Judt accuses the Left of a total failure of nerve on both sides of the Atlantic:

"Social democrats today are defensive and apologetic. Critics who claim that the European model is too expensive or economically inefficient have been allowed to pass unchallenged. And yet, the welfare state is as popular as ever with its beneficiaries: nowhere in Europe is there a constituency for abolishing public health services, ending free or subsidized education, or reducing public provision of transport and other essential services."   

The whole article is well worth reading (like everything Judt writes), but what struck me most forcibly was a sequence of graphs that accompany the piece. Assuming that you can read a graph, these will tell you everything you need to know about the evil effects of free-market dogma on crime, general and mental health, with the USA wallowing deep down in the mud and the UK poised to join them. Read them and weep:

Systematically distorted communication

Systematically distorted communication, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.

To celebrate our forthcoming election fun

Election 2010

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

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

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

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

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

Cox on the Box

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

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


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


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


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