Saturday 12 June 2010

Sampling Reality

I've been writing a book, tentatively called "Mind Out Of Matter" which puts the case for a revived materialist philosophy and sociology, taking in the latest findings of neuroscience and information theory, together with some outside-the-mainstream ideas from philosophers such as Spinoza and Santayana. My goal is to help "legitimise" the emotions as essential, biological and inescapable components of reason - that is, to rescue them from being treated with suspicion by rationalists and fetishised by romantics. The whole work, in two parts, is still under revision, and I'm having a tough time finding a paper publisher given the book's uncategorizable nature. 



I've therefore decided to release the earlier part, which covers some new ideas about information theory and neurophyisiology, as a separate work via the web, free of charge, just to get the ideas out there. You can download this abridged work, called "Sampling Reality" under a Creative Commons licence, from Scribd here.

Sunday 6 June 2010

An Algebra of Xenophobia

I start from the paradoxical axiom, that:

    "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who believe there's only one kind of people in the world".
   
The proposition is then that I belong to both kinds.
   
OK, it's a variation on a very old logician's joke, but playing with it for a while can illuminate a few political truths. People of the second kind might be humanists who believe that we are all of the same species and all have the same rights, regardless of skin colour, religion, culture and so on. The people who wrote the UN Charter of Human Rights were believers of  this sort (but so also were the Jacobins). However people of the second kind might equally be religious or secular pessimists who believe that all humans without exception are greedy, violent, egotistical, thoroughly bad lots: they long for the end of the world or the extinction of our species like a few Deep Greens or extreme Protestant sects.

In short, people of the second kind are either nice people or nasty people, who both have a fixed view of human nature, that everyone is basically like themselves. In political terms both positions could be characterised as "adolescent", and both lead inevitably toward forcing everyone to fit your view of human nature: nice people want everyone to be nice, and legislate appropriately; nasty people know everyone is nasty and punish severely.    

So what about people of the first kind, who believe there are two kinds of people in the world? Do they think these kinds  are "us" and "them". No, that's too simple and would require far more than two kinds. People of this first kind know very well that not everyone is like themselves. If they're nice people they know that, unlike themselves, many people hate others on grounds of skin colour, religion, nationality, sexuality, political views, wealth and so on.  They may pursue explanations of why people become this way, in terms of psychology, emotional development, fear, insecurity, bad upbringing and so on. But that's far too many "thems" to fit my axiom. If on the other hand they're nasty people, they know that the world also contains nice people (whom they believe to be deluded).

Both these positions, the first of which might be called "liberal" and the second "conservative", have "fallen" in the original Christian sense of that word: they've been ejected from any utopias that would require everyone to be like themselves and they accept the fact of difference. However they still legislate and punish more or less like the second kind, in the interest of maintaining balance and order.

No, my first kind actually refers people who are prepared to live at peace with the fact that not everyone is like themselves, versus people who experience that as a problem to be solved. The former position means living with many things you abhor and knowing there are many things about which you can do nothing. This position might be called "realist", "pluralist", or "grown up". A sad fact about the way the world has turned out is that this position doesn't really offer much help in formulating legislation, or choosing whom to punish.

And so from algebra to the real world: given Ed Ball's admission yesterday that New Labour "got it wrong over immigration", has the Labour Party moved from "adolescent" to "fallen", or from "fallen" to "grown up"? How could we tell? Will it last? Is it cause for celebration or for mourning? I'm afraid I can't help you with that one...

Tuesday 25 May 2010

To Avoid Confusion

It's come to my attention, thanks to the wonder of Google, that there's another site called Caustic Comments out there on the interweb, and what's more it's a fundamentalist Protestant site connected with Dr Ian Paisley. Now I don't intend to change the name of my blog, but to avoid any confusion, mine is the one that's just as rude about Protestants as Catholics. No Popery (or potpourri)! John Knox was a numpty!

Sunday 23 May 2010

Koan for Cocker

A throw-away line of Jarvis Cocker's in a Guardian interview, "I would like to believe in an afterlife; it makes things more palatable. But I'm not banking on it" struck me as neatly encoding a fundamental linguistic/philosophical truth. Take Cocker's observation and replace the word "afterlife" with anything at all and the sentence retains its sense: 

I would like to believe in an orange bluebell.
I would like to believe in an effective mayor of London.
I would like to believe in intelligent life on another planet.
I would like to believe in a free market. 
I would like to believe in a Lib/Lab coalition.

We're all free to believe in any of these things, and we would all be wise not to "bank" (unfortunate word perhaps) on their existence. Precisely because there is no afterlife IT DOESN'T MATTER IN THE END, or to put it another way IT'S ALL MATTER IN THE END. 

Wednesday 19 May 2010

Cool Rulers?

"The Blair government has embarked on a more radical program of reform of British institutions than many expected, but it is a program that seeks to cut out  dead wood from both the left and the right; welfare dependency as well as hereditary peers, entrenched anti-business attitudes as well as social exclusion. To the extent that the New Labour project involves demolishing the legacy of World War Two and the post-war consensus, Cool might seem to be an appropriate ‘branding’ for the party. Certainly the Tories appear to think so, and their choice of a new spin-doctor  suggests that the main priority for Tory strategists is not currently to produce vote-winning policies, but to rebrand  themselves as the ‘Naturally Cool Party’. This is not quite as daft as it sounds, since a Tory party with softened social policies might be able to attack New Labour from a libertarian direction - perhaps even by promising to legalise drugs, though we wish lots of luck to the person who first tries that out on the ladies of the Tory conference."
I wrote those words a over decade ago in "Cool Rules" (Reaktion Books, 2000), the book I wrote with the late David Robins. We'd decided to write the book because Tony Blair was at the height of his popularity and the media were full of banal drivel about Cool Britannia: we wanted to point out that on our understanding of the phenomenon of Cool, it was profoundly antithetical to Blair's (and indeed Old Labour's) deeply moralistic project. At that time, when the Tory party was still in the hands of frothing, thwarted Thatcherites, it felt quite daring to suggest that the party might one day outflank Labour on the libertarian wing, but it has come to pass - though not entirely voluntarily, and requiring the assistance of the Lib Dems. (And those ladies of the Tory conference still have to be faced...) This morning I watched Theresa May, the new Home Secretary, on TV news addressing the Police Federation's conference in Bournemouth, and waited in vain for the usual Law 'n Order rhetoric to come pouring out. On the contrary she sounded admirably reasonable and in many respects, yes, to the libertarian left of recent Labour Home Secretaries. 

We consulted many other writers and theorists when we were writing "Cool Rules", and one of those who most influenced our conclusions was Mark Lilla,  Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, New York, via an article in the New York Review of Books (14th May 1998) called "A Tale of Two Reactions". Lilla pointed out a curious state of affairs in the USA whereby the generation who grew up in the 1960s were turning out to be right-wing economically but socially liberal, a combination that American politics at that time was not really capable of dealing with. He posed this as:
"...a question for which neither Tocqueville, nor Marx, nor Weber has prepared us: What principle in the American creed has simultaneously made possible these seemingly contradictory revolutions? How have our notions of equality and individualism been transformed to support a morally lax yet economically successful capitalist society?"
We, obviously, proposed that the attitude we were calling Cool was that glue Lilla was looking for to stick these contradictory revolutions together. Now in the latest New York Review ( 27th May 2010) Lilla has revisited this problem, in a scintillating article called "The Tea Party Jacobins", in which he analyses the mentality of the new US populist Right. You really should try to read the whole of this article if possible, as it is the most lucid account I've found yet of the terrible danger facing Western democracies. He sees the Tea Party/Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck/Fox News axis as a symptom of a complete loss of trust in government in the USA, so profound that it threatens to render the country ungovernable (one only has to look across the Mexican border to see the worst case scenario):
"A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.
Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob."
The article is actually a review of five recent books on the US Right, including ones by Glenn Beck and Max Blumenthal. Lilla concludes thus:
"If either Beck or Blumenthal is right about the new populism, then it’s not worth taking seriously. My own view is that we need to take it even more seriously than they do; we need to see it as a manifestation of deeper social and even psychological changes that the country has undergone in the past half-century. Quite apart from the movement’s effect on the balance of party power, which should be short-lived, it has given us a new political type: the antipolitical Jacobin. The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers. [...]

Survey after survey confirms that trust in government is dissolving in all advanced democratic societies, and for the same reason: as voters have become more autonomous, less attracted to parties and familiar ideologies, it has become harder for political institutions to represent them collectively. This is not a peculiarity of the United States and no one party or scandal is to blame. Representative democracy is a tricky system; it must first give citizens voice as individuals, and then echo their collective voice back to them in policies they approve of. That is getting harder today because the mediating ideas and institutions we have traditionally relied on to make this work are collapsing."
 I share Lilla's sense of urgency about this problem, but I'm perhaps less anxious than he is because I've just witnessed a remarkably mature and dignified transfer of power in our own democratic system. We are not nearly so deep in the mire yet as the US, but who knows whether that will remain true after five years of serious austerity?

Monday 17 May 2010

Left for Dead

I don't believe that the LibDem/Conservative coalition is a sham, and that Cameron will shortly cast off his mask and emerge as a blood-thirsty tyrant. The bad news is that even so, next week's package of emergency cuts will mark the final demise of the British Left.

We have just lived through a once in a lifetime opportunity for the Left, with neo-liberalism revealed as completely bankrupt, banks and "market forces" universally detested and a feeling in the air that structural change  was finally possible. Yet the Left has failed so comprehensively to grasp this opportunity that the Right's agenda of devastating cuts predominantly loaded onto the public sector has prevailed. Everyone talks as if the deficit is the only important problem, that immediate cuts are necessary. I feel desperately sorry for the BA cabin staff who are set to be the first victims. Any sort of halfway sensible Left could have told them that now is not the time for a showdown, but instead they've been allowed to wander like helpless children into Willy Wonka's elephant trap.

The reason for these failures is not hard to relate, New Labour's incapacitating infatuation with neo-liberal economics which persisted right up until the end and prevented them from saying or doing any of the things that might have effected change - like a Tobin Tax on finance, using its ownership of several huge banks as a battering ram, aggressively threatening the barrow-boys of the markets with default instead of rolling over to them.

Labour will elect a new leader, and he or she may or may not press more radical policies onto the party, but it's too late, because the British public will never forgive the party for flunking this one-off opportunity. As the welfare state is demolished in a gradual and utterly civilised manner over the next five or ten years, they will not be turning back to Labour.

Sunday 16 May 2010

Beckenstein

The most amusing episode of the post-election limbo days was that spat between Alistair Campbell and Adam Boulton of Sky News. Who'd have thought that I'd ever be rooting for Alistair Campbell to pick a fist fight... and win it. That Peter Capaldi would definitely have clocked him. The less amusing side of the affair is that it made me wonder whether Sky News is revving itself up to become a Fox News for the UK. 

Coalition looks like it might prevent the Tory Right from fulfilling its revenge fantasies, so it would be quite convenient for them to have a malign goblin chattering from the sidelines whenever any LibDem-tainted compromise comes before parliament.  I'm sure they're constructing a Glenn Beck replica somewhere in an attic, perhaps using stem cells from Norman Tebbit and Play Dough. Just need to wait for a thunderstorm... Igor, fetch the jump leads. 

GILT BY ASSOCIATION

I don’t have any special credentials as a commentator on geopolitics, but occasionally, like now, I feel obliged to have a stab at it. The c...