Friday 19 November 2010

Cat Out Of Bag

Lord Young did us all a favour by telling a bald truth about the current economic situation in his recent comments to the Daily Telegraph, where he claimed:

 "For the vast majority of people in the country today they have never had it so good ever since this recession – this so-called recession – started, because anybody, most people with a mortgage who were paying a lot of money each month, suddenly started paying very little each month. That could make three, four, five, six hundred pounds a month difference, free of tax. That is why the retail sales have kept very good all the way through."
This revealing revamp of Harold Macmillan's famous boast of 1957 infuriated David Cameron because it punches a hole right through his stealth strategy. The brutal truth that Young let out of the bag is that this is now indeed two nations: those who have jobs and own their homes, versus those who rent, are in low paid jobs or are not employed. This glaring inequality is not, as so many on the Left persist in believing, merely the legacy of that "Thatcherism" for which Lord Young was once a spokesman, but more so of New Labour's "intense relaxation" about income inequality.

We're not a nation split exactly in half - perhaps 66% live in Lord Young's "never so good" part while 33% languish outside it. But although Young's statement may be true of the current situation, with historically low interest rates, that doesn't mean we've reached a sustainable prosperity, any more than we had under Gordon Brown's credit boom. Take a look at the statistics for home ownership throughout Europe and the picture is blood-curdling. The countries with higher ownership than the UK are Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Hungary and Romania, all countries in desperate straits and hardly models we'd wish to copy. The countries with lower ownership include Germany, Holland, Sweden and France, all of which are in far better shape than us in almost every way. So just how good do we have it?

Young has indeed let the predatory cat out of the bag - he also admitted that Osborne lied about the severity of the deficit to protect the pound. Under a disguise of social liberalism this is a goverment of economic predation, intent on rolling back state expenditure to further the interests of the 66% at the expense of the 33%. From a utilitarian point of view - and that's the vote winning point of view nowadays - that might be seen as a rational course, but I doubt the 33% will see it that way. There may be a lot more fire extinguishers thrown from a lot more roofs before this is over. 

Friday 15 October 2010

The Enragés of the Right

Following a link from the Open Democracy website to a Roger Scruton article about "the political class" lead me to the American Spectator site, a truly fascinating expedition that I would never otherwise have made. Scruton's article started out fairly interesting, in a Weberian sort of way, but abruptly degenerated towards the end into a shameless pandering to the Tea Party public. But the really fascinating part was reading the comments, some of which verge on the deranged.

My first experience of America was in 1970, staying with friends on New York's upper west side, where they introduced me to two utterly crucial books - Norman Cohn's "The Pursuit of the Millenium" and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". Both books are more relevant today than when first published, but I fear that much today's audience is too dumbed-down to get much benefit from either. If you want empirical evidence that the paranoid style is now in the ascendant, the comments on American Spectator offer a mere nibble: there are thousands of websites with far stronger stuff, up to and including bomb-throwing fascism.

In a country where a principal health problem is obesity and where a significant slice of the world's energy reserves are consumed to drive air-conditioning, it's faintly surreal to read comments from citizens complaining that they are "unable to breath" because of the weight of Washington tyranny bearing down upon their backs. This hysterical exaggeration is of course metaphorical, but it's also suspiciously familiar. That's because it closely mirrors the overheated rhetoric of the Left in the 1960s, on which much of it is - consciously or not - based. It's both paranoid and millenarian, which makes reading those two books I mentioned more relevant than ever.

As I noted in a review of a compendium of neo-conservative essays a couple of years ago:

"The neocons are conspicuously more erudite and cosmopolitan than traditional right-wing thinkers and delight in head-to-head combat with liberal orthodoxies. [...] many of the essays share this same clarity, intensity and suave (even glib) assurance that was once a strength of writing from the Left, but has been notably absent from it in recent decades. These are not people out to conserve anything, but rather out to overthrow an existing order that they detest, only they've substituted the Declaration Of Independence for the Communist Manifesto. And as in older revolutionary tracts there's a certain reticence about real outcomes: jobs lost, people thrown off welfare or taken out by air-strikes. Beneath the muscular, hard-headed prose there lurks a thread of purest Idealism, and like all Idealisms it's destined to be brought low eventually by the diversity and perversity of human nature."

All I would change in that is perhaps to substitute Jacobins for Bolsheviks in that last comparison, which would then make Tea Partiers into the "sans-culottes", or perhaps the "taille-élastique-culottes", de nos jours.

Wednesday 13 October 2010

Chile Leads the Way?

The successful rescue of the trapped Chilean miners generated a most extraordinarily rich set of messages: technical, political-economic, historical, ideological, symbolic and simply dramatic. No one who watched TV coverage of the first breakthrough of the pilot shaft or the emergence of the first rescued miner from the Phoenix capsule could fail to be moved by stoic calm of the trapped miners nor the joy of the waiting relatives. The technical message is not unlike that of the first moon landing, that our technology, when applied with sufficient dedication and resolve can overcome the most extreme hostile environments.

The political-economic message is profoundly appropriate to our current world situation, namely that there's still a vital role for the State and that market forces mustn't be allowed always to prevail. It surely must have been more cost-effective for the mine's owners not even to search for those trapped by the collapse and simply to pay compensation to their relatives, but to my knowledge this was never even considered (the rescue costs will probably bankrupt the company). Circumstances created a human solidarity that overrode all considerations of price, a reminder that's particularly poignant in Chile, which under General Pinochet became a testbed for heartless Chicago-school monetarism. That the miners survived those first horrible foodless, lightless 17 days, and then 50 days of anguished waiting for the drilling to complete is also a remarkable tribute to their discipline and solidarity, a nostalgic reminder for us in de-industrialised Britain.

But of course there has to be a downside, and that's the religious aspect. The BBC 24 reporters covering the events were almost salivating over miner Sepulveda's talk about "meeting God and the Devil" in the mine, tripping over themselves to inform us that the miners in this part of Chile are deeply pious - in other words, eager to drown out all those truly positive messages with a superstitious narrative of divine intervention and miracles. This sort of creepy BBC God-bothering seems to me to be on the increase recently, though I suspect its underlying rationale is merely opportunistic tabloid sensationalism rather than any concerted attack on the secular status of the corporation.

Even so it's hard for me to shake off a feeling that this heroic rescue might mark a turning point back toward social-democratic sanity, and emergence from  a dark epoch that was inaugurated also in Chile by the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende's government.

Thursday 23 September 2010

Tea Party with Cable Guy

I haven't posted here for a while, largely because the world is getting too weird for rational commentary and I've been hiding out in the Appenines trying to pretend it doesn't exist. The Republican Party appears to have been taken over by ex-hippy, proto-fascist witches but no-one knows whether that will help or hinder it in the coming mid-term elections - that depends on what proportion of the Great American Public are proto-fascist ex-hippies.

In the UK it appears that there are only two people left standing with the cojones to say bad things about the business culture of the City and predatory finance capital - and one of them is Governor of the Bank of England! If either he or Vince Cable should fall under a bus over the next few weeks, a Kennedy-strength investigation and cover-up will be required....

Actually there are three people currently talking sense - David Marquand's article in the latest issue of Renewal is a very lucid account of where we're stuck. And for a glimpse of the absurd, Anthony Barnett's amusing piece about the Coalition's grooming habits is worth a read at Open Democracy

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!

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...