The Delusion Of Dawkins' Dangerous Religion

I Just watched the first part of Richard Dawkins' Age of Reason series. The title is a brilliant steal from Thomas Paine, and as usual very entertaining to watch. It has struck me for some time now that Dawkins himself, in his style if not his conclusions, is a parallel not only with Paine, for his brilliant polemic style in energising his own side, but also with Socrates. This might seem like too high a praise, I'm sure he would reject the characterisation, but watching his methods you cannot fail to see the parallels. Socrates never wrote, what we have from him are dialogues recorded by Plato, and although of course Dawkins does he also has also has something of a penchant for documentaries including discursive interviews. It's two things mainly.

First they are/were both exquisite at humiliating people with well placed questions. This is not only very amusing, a subtler point in philosophy but actually very important, but reflects a radical rejection of the idea that deeply held beliefs on any subject should be respected. What this does in both cases is switch the focus of the debate to the bare propositions, if what you say is stupid and ludicrous then no amount of justification by what that belief means to you can command respect for it. As Nietzche was fond of saying, 'A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.' and I always find it profitable to remember this point. Secondly the occasional unacknowledged quotes. On this particular occasion using the same Socratic argument about conflicts between figures of authority to justify their method. In Socrates it is disagreement between the gods on the nature of the good. Dawkins makes do with the rather more mundane example of adults disagreeing about things, but then he is talking to 6 year olds, the principle is the same. 

In general however I have gone rather cooler on Dawkins than in the past. At the time I first read The God Delusion I shared the good professor's alarm about, as well as views on, religion. It felt like a pressing danger, a threat to the scientific ideals of the enlightenment and everything I believed in. A while back though I started to notice something about the way these great adversaries of reason talked about themselves and their beliefs, something that made them seem a lot less dangerous. In essence the kind of religion that exists today frames itself purely in the terms of a positivist world view and standards of proof and evidence that in never did before. It also treats the individual in a completely different way, seeing people as noble, rational and flawed but not fundamentally so. Finally it confines itself in a way that it could never have accepted before, compartmentalising itself to the sphere of ethics and morality, saying only what should be and ceasing to try to explain what is. We underestimate the extent to which modern religion, in the west at the very least, has been totally hamstrung by the prevailing discourse. This is only natural, when all of the things that make life so liveable for us, from Tesco to the IPhone, are explained to us scientifically we are bound to find that more compelling than religious discourse that we only hear when we are being told about the things that make life worse.

Leviathan, Lucca and Libertas! :)

There is written on the turrets of the city of Lucca in great characters at this day, the word LIBERTAS; yet no man can thence infer that a particular man has more liberty, or immunity from service of the commonwealth, there than in Constantinople. Not my words but those of Thomas Hobbes in chapter 21 of his Leviathan. It is, so the story goes, one of the greatest ironies of political philosophy that the arch defender of absolute sovereign power, who went so far as to say that by definition the sovereign can never act unjustly, was also in possession of an extremely advanced theory of liberty. Although of course it's not ironic at all, it's perfectly logical, because thinkers like Hobbes don't contradict themselves lightly - and a contradiction is not how he saw it.

The reason that I bring it up is that the point he was making about Lucca and Constantinople is the bit that we miss out far too easily today from our ideas of freedom. Hobbes was a proponent of what Isaiah Berlin would later call negative freedom, defined as the absence of external constraints, and we would all recognise (wouldn't we?) the value of this aspect of freedom. But our intuition about how this liberty is attained is completely wrong, just as it was when Hobbes wrote, because we have conflated it with something else.

In short we have taken our ownership and participation in the government as a guarantor of liberty, and conversely the lack of ownership and participation in other regimes as a sign of oppression, when in fact there is no necessary connexion. Consequently when we look to a regime, say modern day china, where government is not established by the choice of the people we necessarily deem them less free. What we are assuming is that a say in our collective government makes any essential difference to the liberty that we as individuals are allotted at any one time. If in Britain a democratic government instituted national service, with the blessing of a majority, and in China the State Council simultaneously abolished it for it's citizens? Who then, treated at the individual level, is more free, those living in a democracy or a dictatorship?

We have also made the mistake, which again Hobbes pointed out to the proponents of popular sovereignty in his day, of counting up all of the things that we could do and calling that our liberty, in contrast to a smaller variety elsewhere. But how are we constrained by laws that we would never want to contest? The government has no law against rotating clockwise on every full moon, or any number of pointless and (as of yet) unfavoured activities - but we are unused to calling this our liberty. So in what sense can we say that all the people of the PRC (to pick on China again) are 'not free' if most simply do not ask for what they are not allowed.

I'm not apologist for the Chinese government, I'm fairly reluctant to grant to them even the virtues that are probably due, nor am I saying that democratic states do not have a greater call on their citizen's time and effort. But I do think, much as Isaiah Berlin did, a more nuanced view of freedom would do us good, if only as a way of understanding the way we are living our lives - never mind changing them (that's another story).

Machiavellians With Double Standards

I posted a while back about David Cameron's comments on Pakistan's (alleged) dual attitude to the problem of violent islamism. As I noted it attracted quite some flack but comparatively little about the accuracy of the comments. It seems, at the very least, I was right about the popular feeling aspect of this.

'on the recent controversy over David Cameron’s comments on Pakistan the public agreed with what Cameron actually said about Pakistan and the export of terror by 66% to 15%. However, they also had negative view about Cameron’s abilities as a statesman – 30% thought he was a good statesman, 43% thought he wasn’t (compare that to his overall approval ratings which remain positive).' - UK Polling Report

What I didn't think about at the time was that the Pakistanis are not the only ones whose double standards are on display in this affair. This can be explained as just simple cognitive polyphasia (a much better term for double standards), a well know phenomenon in political polling and nothing particularly remarkable in this case. What this reflects is only that people's image of Cameron as a statesman is not in fact informed by any of diplomatic activities - this is just how people think about politics.

But in this case there is a way out of the usual indictment of public opinion. Alternatively we can explain this by saying that the public genuinely view diplomacy and statesmanship as an exercise in deception and lying. Tell the truth in the wrong circumstances and you have done the wrong thing, regardless of the facts. Nothing new in that either, that doctrine has been ever present in politics since Machiavelli, and a very mature attitude for the public to take (if that isn't too pejorative). Except that when you put it like that it starts to look like double standards and polyphasia again. Imagine the reaction if a British politician admitted having lied about domestic matters in the same way. I defy anyone to find an example of press or popular criticism of a minister for being excessively truthful about the domestic situation. Could you really see those headlines? 'Minister Admits Crime Is Rising, Should He Have Hushed It Up?' or 'PM Should Have Lied Over Economic Figures'. Lying to johnny foreigner = good, lying to Brits = bad.

The good news is that on balance I don't think this is about racism. It isn't really British people that we object to dishonesty toward, it's to us personally, but it is far easier to express it this way (it gives you a few more allies). Even though we are rarely as patriarchal as to exclaim on a regular basis 'You can't handle the truth!' we all do hold the view (don't we?) that there are at least some truths that some people really can't, or perhaps more to express it more sympathetically - shouldn't be made to, handle. And this is what is really at work, not some mistrust of other collectives, just a simple mistrust of every other person on earth! So what is to be done? If you will excuse the pun. Simple, we just have to stop trusting ourselves and what we can and can't 'handle' so that next time when we are told that there are some things that we can't or shouldn't know, for our own good, we might just believe them and be better off for it.

Why Watching The Oposition Could Tell You More Than Watching The Government...

It might just be that the Labour Party, in spite of being out of power since May, will tell us more about British politics in the next few years than the coalition will - even though they will be the ones dictating the focus of the national conversation and agenda (this is after all what liberal government really consists in, yes?). The reason for this is the litmus test it will provide for political reactions. Reactions are not quite the same as opinions. An opinion is pretty easy to measure, you just ask, but a reaction is much harder to gauge. You can ask people (How would your opinion change if x happened?) but people are very bad at knowing how their opinion would change. There are probably a number of reasons for this, not least the fact that people rarely find the actuality of something the same as they had envisaged it and so take a less favourable attitude once a thing has actually come to pass, but it clearly happens. One of the best examples is the fate of the Conservative Party in 2005.

Polling at that time, much as now, showed that people were uneasy and unhappy about the levels of immigration to the UK. The Conservatives took a harder line than Labour but were rewarded with yet another defeat. The stock explanation for this was that while people may have agreed with the Conservatives on this issue Labour had one the 'big arguments' and so were, taking everything into account, preferred by voters. But the Polling had also shown that Immigration was the most mentioned issue when people were asked what the 'most important issue' facing the country was, with 42% also identifying the conservatives as the best party to deal with it. This seems totally absurd, what was going on? The best explanation is probably that while people thought that they would feel inclined to vote for an anti-immigration conservative the reacted to the reality in a way that they didn't expect or predict - they voted Labour instead. On that occasion what we learned about at least one section the British people was that, although they were opposed to immigration, they were not prepared to identify with a party that, because it took an anti-immigration line, came to be seen as unsympathetic and heartless (the 'nasty party' to borrow Theresa May's phrase).

What we stand to learn from Labour now is even more interesting. Labour are determined to do the difficult thing, at least what they perceive as the difficult thing. I'll let David Milliband explain...


'There are two ways of defining the task for Labour. One blames election defeat on public boredom after 13 years in government, a leader who was a great thinker but not a good communicator, the recession and expenses scandal, and voter anger about immigration. This is a comfortable analysis, but wrong. While the points are true, there is something more fundamental. The second view instead argues that we lost and lost badly because we did not occupy the ground of progressive reform.'



I think that more or less sums up the view of most of the contenders in the ongoing leadership race. Of course what progressive reform means, to slightly over-generalise, is a move to the left. This is because there is no 'hard lesson' for labour in this message. Sections of the party have been aching do dump what remained of the the Blairite reform agenda from the party program. They thought that labour had 'lost touch' even when they were winning - so it seems fairly clear that a move to the left is coming. What this move will tell us is whether people will, in spite of being opposed to excessive wealth and growing inequality, will actually react against a party that promises it, just as they did with the Conservative Party over immigration in 2005. This will be hugely revealing about what socialism means to people in the 21st century, and attitudes to wealth more broadly. Perhaps people will react positively, this would be just as interesting, it may depend on exactly the way in which it was done. In any case it may well end up shaping the paradigm of politics far more than the coalition, which by it's nature may end up being more pragmatic than ideological.

What Exactly Are We Doing In Afghanistan?

'We are certain that we are winning. Why should we talk if we have the upper hand, and the foreign troops are considering withdrawal, and there are differences in the ranks of our enemies?' - Zabiullah Mujahedd (Taliban spokesman)

The Afghan Taliban think that they have time, as well as god, on their side. This would be far easier to dismiss if it wasn't for the fact that we seem to agree with them (about the time, not god). Of course we don't say this directly, but all the talk of deadlines has exactly the same effect. This isn't the same as admitting defeat, the idea is that one more push can buy us one last chance to change the trajectory the future, and so for now the war goes on. The message however is clear, the weight of history is against us and thus we have to be 'realistic'. But is there far more danger in this than we realise? We only have to look back at what is usually taken as proof of the intractability of the Afghan problem - the Soviet occupation - to see one suggestion in this direction. 


'Afghanistan didn't just defeat the Soviet army. It reached out and corrupted and corroded the Soviet Union's faith in itself. Above all it destroyed what was left of the dream that communism was the future universal model for the world. The fascinating question now is whether Afghanistan is beginning to do the same to us in the West. Bit by bit, as we accept torture, corruption and rigged democracy, is our faith in the universalism of our European idea of democracy beginning to falter? And with it our power.' - Adam Curtis

In terms of domestic politics this is almost impossible to evaluate. Even though it is true that the majority of people on both sides of the pond think that the war is going badly, and is being mismanaged by political leaders, there are so many other factors that affect people's faith in their government it is extremely difficult to know if this precisely is what has undermined our faith in our political institutions of late. But it does highlight the extent to which we do appear to have given up on transplanting our idea of the best political institutions to Afghanistan. The crucial question now is, why?

There are, to my mind, three answers to this. Firstly we can simply deny that we have in fact done so, all our realism in this case means is that we have rejected the naive idea that any radical transformation like the one we are trying to effect can happen overnight. Even the deadlines reflect only the recognition that the process cannot be completed by ISAF and NATO but only once Afghan security is handled entirely by forces under the control of a sovereign Afghan authority - this is part of democratic accountability and nationhood.

I find this very problematic. Sovereignty and central government control, even when democratically accountable, does not mean that the positive (so we see it) values of freedom, meritocracy, and maximum possible individual self-determination will flourish. We have surely learned by now that democracy and western values are not identical, even if they are often coextensive. And so, as so often seems to happen, we have a Catch 22 situation. If we are to justify pulling out as part of the process of transformation then we need to appeal to the popular sovereignty issue, but when we do this we give up our only way of ensuring that our other transformative aims are achieved - which was the only way we could justify pulling out in the first place.

Secondly we could answer that we have indeed taken a pragmatic decision to abandon the aim of a pure liberal-democratic Afghanistan. This was only ever a secondary aim anyway, the primary aim was national security and reprisal for the 9/11 attacks. An illiberal democratic government is still preferable to the old 1990's Taliban regime, even if the modern Taliban have to be cut into a post war settlement. So long as Afghanistan doesn't provide haven for terrorism or export too much opium then the country's domestic arrangements are not for us to dictate. It would be both arrogant and futile to try to tell Afghan's how to live, it is simply not sensible to rule out a solution that comes from inside of Afghan culture because it doesn't accord with how we would ideally want it. This seems to be about what the current paradigm is, and what was behind Liam Fox's poorly judged recent comments.

Again though I find this problematic. The national security benefits of the war are extremely spurious. We heard Eliza Manningham-Buller (former head of MI5) state fairly unequivocally at the Iraq inquiry that that war, which was admittedly even more unpopular, greatly increased radicalisation of British Muslims. I think it is reasonable to assume that Afghanistan is not much different, especially given it's proximity to the geographic origin of a large portion of Britain's Muslims in Pakistan. At this point someone usually quotes that statistic about how many of the terrorist plots against Britain had a connection to the Afghan-Pakistan tribal areas. However they rarely ever stop to wonder whether this is only because of the the destabilising and motivating effect of the war, as seems more likely to me - I'll go into why in another post. As for the second point, that we are simply not in principle able to bring about substantive change, why? Are Afghans somehow psychologically or biologically unable to adopt non-traditional lifestyles? This seems unlikely, we managed it (more or less). Moreover it is even more patronising than imposing change on them, thereby voiding the moral argument at the very least.

Third, and I think this is the honest truth, we find ourselves on the current unambitious course because we are fighting for, and over, nothing - simply because we can't think of a good reason to leave. The problem we face is that in spite of our inability to find a reason to fully justify continued fighting, like a really strong belief in liberal-democratic regime change (A Bush Doctrine), this does not seem to be an adequate reason for a pull out, like a really strong anti-interventionism (A Ron Paul Doctrine). In other words what we have found is that while staying in and pulling out might seem like two options in the same decision they are in fact two separate possible events that must be independently argued for, or more precisely that can be independently argued against. Thus when we find ourselves unable to make a convincing case for either we end up muddling through. In the mean time we deploy any old argument, national security, education, Pakistani stability, women's rights, Iran, until at some point in the future, when it feels like the right time, we can make a convincing argument to ourselves to justify leaving.

When we leave finally leave Afghanistan i suspect that the war will not be over. The war will in fact go on but with the key distinction that only Afghans, and maybe the odd aid worker, are being killed. As the Afghan government continues to fight the Taliban we will begin to see the war as just another global conflict - terrible and tragic yes, but also contained and manageable, something that does not demand that it is addressed directly (as our intimate involvement does now). What follows from that is impossible for me, with my limited knowledge, to predict - but what is certain is that we will not really care. The issue of Afghanistan in popular thought will simply be finished without a conclusion to the real questions ever being reached - hence we will learn nothing.

What Does Set Thoery Tells Us About Ethnic and Political Conflict? And Why Organic Muesli, M&S and a Toyota Prius Is The Answer...

Bear with me on this one... Today a friend of mine attempted to explain to me how, mathematically speaking, you can make something out of nothing. It's called set theory. Not sure I entirely understood it but it think it went something like this... Take any number, say four, it can't be defined as four of something - because we could conceivably have four of anything, making the pure number four the only common element. It also can't be defined mathematically, as 2 + 2 for example, because then we have exactly the same problem for 2. What we need to say is what 4 is because this will allow us to then say why 2 + 2 = 4.

Fascinatingly this can apparently be done by grouping nothing in a certain way. A mathematical group is called a set (hence set theory), for example multiple's of 2 (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12) or prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13), and there is one particular set called, somewhat ominously, the 'empty set'. Perhaps predictably the empty set is a set with nothing in it, it is actually not strictly nothing, but it does contain nothing. Think of it like a bag. What becomes apparent is that these bags don't need to contain some object to be distinct from each other. If I take two bags (sets), putting one bag inside the first and another and another bag inside that, but put only one bag inside the the second then, in spite of the fact that there is nothing that isn't a bag (set) inside of them, I can still tell which one is which if they were jumbled up.

So what the hell does that mean? Mathematically I have no idea, I'm not sure I really understood, but as usual my mind flicked to politics and what struck me is how similar political identity can be to this idea of mathematical identity. Political disputes, particularly ideological or nationalist ones - which usually boil down to identity (prescriptive in the former case and descriptive in the latter), often seem to lack content. The conflict seems so pointless, and it is impossible to discern exactly what is motivating either side.

The upcoming elections in Rwanda remind us of a perfect example of this, the substantial difference between hutu and tutsi essentially comprising a twelve centimetre average height disparity and a tolerance for milk. This is clearly no reason for killing 800,000 people, so we tend to explain it in terms of how the two sides are the same. We say, though often tacitly, that there is a universal human tendency to commit vile and horrific acts for very spurious reasons, and this explains it. The fact that the Tutsi RPF (now the governing party) started the Rwandan Civil War, and possibly assassinated the president by shooting down his jet, leading eventually to the genocide is usually a good place to start when trying to prove this.

I think this is wrong for two reasons. Firstly it leads to a phenomenon that the brilliant documentary maker Adam Curtis calls 'Oh-Dearism', essentially the tendency for us to give up and stop trying when we think that problems are happening for no reason and are therefore intractable. Secondly it may simply be wrong, and I think set theory can help explain why (if only as a good analogy). The problem is that we are looking for a difference in content to explain the reason for a conflict (and failing, like looking for an explanation for 4 in 2 + 2), when we actually don't need one.

The real reason for politically or ethnically tribal conflict may in fact be down to the clarity and distribution of boundaries and borders and not the political or ethnic characteristics that the argument is ostensibly about. In other words it is more important when fighting an enemy to know that you are different than to know how. When the boundary between you, your group, the people 'like you' and the other individual or group is of the right kind then conflict becomes almost inevitable (given the appropriate means). That probably sounds like a long way of saying the same thing as the old 'look at what you have in common, not what separates you' line that is so popular in modern multicultural politics. In some sense it is, but it doesn't go far enough because it fails to deal with the areas of division, it simply tells people to ignore them in the hope that (because there is no substance) they will disappear, even though there is no reason to think that they necessarily will.

What is the message then? Should we try to eliminate all distinction between people in an attempt to end conflict? This is certainly what the Soviet Union tried in response to the hugely problematic issue of ethnic conflict in the former Russian Empire. But, as that example should show, this kind of policy rarely has a happy outcome (although to come back to Rwanda this seems to be what they are trying now, even if they have avoided persecution and mass deportation as tools so far). So we are back to Oh-Dearism then? Not quite, because in politics, unlike in mathematics, we can make use of those sweet shades of grey. As I have said it is borders, not substantive differences, itself that are the problem - and this is key. The problem is greatly lessened, if not eradicated, by the clear commonly recognised existence of positions (political, ethnic, economic, cultural) between you and your erstwhile opposite. The cause of conflict is not difference, but polarisation of those differences around two implacable opposites that cannot be mixed. Common ground simply in other areas (as per 'focus on what unites, not divides') simply will not do.

This is of course not at all new. Aristotle said something similar, and his version reveals the disturbing fact that the cure in this case might just be worse than the disease. What is needed, so he said, was a middle group to sit in the middle on the issues that would otherwise polarise society and cause damaging division - a group of middle income, middle culture, well tempered sort of individuals. A group of people who have both conservative and progressive tendencies (my words not his) that will bring stability simply by existing between the extremes. Yes that's right folks - It's the middle class. So next time you see a Toyota Hybrid 4x4, crammed full of organic, sustainably produced whole-foods, dropping Julian and Artemis off at that CofE school that they got into by moving house, even though they don't really agree with religious education - but the discipline must be good and it's last ofstead report was just marvellous! Before heading off to John Lewis to pick up some nick-naks for the kitchen. Just bite the back of your hand and remember - they are holding society together!

A Model Citizen

Watching Naomi Campbell questioned in the Special Court for Sierra Leone this morning was fascinating. It was an amazing juxtaposition, the super-model at the super-court. She looked truly out of place. It is hard to imagine a more serious, less frivolous, thing than a war crimes trial - Ms Campbell (and her profession) is of course the exact opposite of this. The popular idea of the courtroom as a dramatic place is not a difficult thing to dispel, 10 minutes in a real court will do, and the diligent thoroughness of analytic questioning from legal professionals clashes violently with the way the entertainment industry likes it's questions - sensational, chatty and on message for whatever they are pushing you to buy this week. It's also hard not to see the parallels between her and the other beautiful, glittering, utterly useless objects at the centre of this trial - the blood diamonds. The juxtaposition of these dazzling rocks with the awful brutality they fuelled, the terrible atrocities that the prosecutors who called Campbell are now trying to hold Taylor accountable for, is every bit as stark.

Of course there is one difference between the rocks and the model - It can't testify to it's activities, whereas she just didn't want to. Moreover she didn't seem to see why it was important, which is incredible. Charles Taylor was brutal even by the standards of African warlords and his greedy actions encouraged some of the worst bloodshed that Africa has ever seen. Here's a quick list... First Liberian Civil war - 200,000 dead, Sierra Leone Civil War - 50,000 dead, Second Liberian Civil War - 150,000 dead, 1,000,000 displaced, countless more mutilated, raped, enslaved, traumatised. I'm not going to list the specific offences, but 'sadistic' doesn't nearly cover it. So, Naomi Campbell's response to a request for her help in convicting Taylor? Refusal to testify voluntarily (necessitating a subpoena), non-co-operation with the prosecution, and when asked if she was nervous (because she had been impatiently answering questions before the prosecutor was finished talking) her response was cold callous and indifferent. 'No, well, I didn't really want to be here. I was made to be here,' she answered. 'So, obviously I'm just like wanting to get this over with and get on with my life. This is a big inconvenience for me.'.

Of course no one can be compelled to care about something, and attempts to do so in the past have not gone well. Perhaps it is too much to ask people to care about this case in particular - because I suspect many would say, in Campbell's words, 'I don't know anything about Charles Taylor. Never heard of him before, never heard of the country Liberia before. I never heard of the term 'blood diamonds' before.'. That said, perhaps the biggest irony of this affair is that now many more people will have heard of Liberia, and Charles Taylor. I'm sure Naomi Campbell considers herself a friend of Africa (she certainly considers herself a friend of Nelson Mandela!) for all her 'charity' work. This is the first time that she has ever been called upon to really sacrifice for the continent. I don't for a moment deny that testifying is potentially dangerous, earlier in the trial the chief prosecutor alleged that a key insider witness who testified against Taylor went into hiding after being threatened. But Ms Campbell has definitely tried as hard as possible not to help, if you believe the prosecutor she could still have said more if she had chosen to. This is perhaps defensible, you can't command courage either, but the callous indifference is probably only more offensive if it was only done out of guilt and shame.

The Problem With Philanthropy

Today forty US billionaires pledged at least 50% of their wealth to charity. The list includes some instantly recognisable names, they are not only some of the biggest names in business but also in culture. A magnanimous, caring, elite who choose, without any compulsion, to use their talents, and the wealth it has helped them to accrue, entirely in the service of others. This is surely the ultimate demonstration of modern humane capitalism. Capitalism works, so the argument goes, because people want the best for themselves but also for others. It is both right and natural to simply let them do so. Trying to force them or staking some claim to what they do not want to give will simply be counter-productive, both economically and socially, as well as being totally unnecessary. This is how inequality corrects itself at the end of history. Except it doesn't work that way...

The problem is not, as some cynical voices might note, that this group represents only around 10% of US billionaires, or that for most/all of them their remaining wealth still far exceeds what the vast majority of people will earn in a lifetime, that many of these pledges will only be fulfilled after they die, or even the suspicion that they are in fact just buying honour, acclaim and a place in history for themselves - not really caring if they actually help anyone or not. No, no, these are just the easy targets. The real problem is that they aren't achieving what we, or they, think that they are. Ask your average billionaire philanthropist why they do it and my guess would be that the answer is something to do with 'I want to make a difference'. I'm not going to dispute this, it seems pretty likely.

The really pertinent question is not about sincerity but about knowledge. Namely, how do you know what kind of difference to make? The aim should of course be to do good, but good doesn't come with a ready definition, so we all do it for ourselves, and we all do it differently. Fortunately there is a method for resolving this, for quite a while now people have usually called it democracy, though people have also said the social contract, government by consent, the general will, its all the same stuff - a binding collective choice, a common aim and a shared means to achieve it. Philanthropy on the other hand requires that the rich individual decides exactly where the money goes, that is the whole point. Of course they will take advice, but they do not have to. They have to act within the law, but at the very least they have hobson's choice - they can simply choose not to give instead. They are the only ones who make the choice. So we have a kind of catch twenty-two, if they make a difference then we are entrusting them with the power to decide what is a good worthy cause, even if we disagree - so we have a kind of oligarchy, and if they don't then they are pointlessly squandering their wealth, which we (and they) obviously don't want. The only thing I can conclude whenever I see Bill Gates or Warren Buffet signing over a check for anything, even if i happen to agree, is that philanthropy is either useless or downright anti-democratic, either way it scarcely deserves the praise heaped on those who practise it regularly.

A Question Of Purpose

I sometimes think that a big part of finding a reason for life is a just matter of finding a job the right size for us. A task that fits us as people, something to do with the time, a purpose. Preferences differ - some like a task that is exclusively their own, something only they are working on. Others pick a task that must be cooperative, impossible to do alone. In either case they will either want to see it finished in a their lifetime, or long after, or even not at all - like the perpetual maintenance of a garden, why should we need our great works to end? It sounds so simple doesn't it, even if you disagree? There is just so much to do, and any given person is usually such a capable animal - given the chance. With such a choice, who could fail to find what they were looking for?

And yet it doesn't seem to work that way, at least for some of us. It isn't that we don't see the problems, or care about the solutions - we might even have some idea about what they are, but they seem to be on a different scale and the wrong shape for us to interact with them. But perhaps this is just a combination of those old excuses about one man/woman not being able to make a difference and that detestably aloof attitude that some problems are just beneath your efforts to solve them, draped in a pseudo-philosophical smokescreen. I'm not honest or introspective enough to know which.

A Few Good Men, Well.. Just Two Actually

I finally got round to watching Nick Robinson's documentary on the formation of the coalition agreement over five days last may. It's worth reflecting on what a remarkable achievement that really was.As ever it's the biggest events, the ones that define everything that comes after them - if only because they form part of the filter we use to see the world, that we forget were not always going to happen. This is probably because we don't just see the future differently but also the past. It's a worrying thought, the idea that we can't look back with certainty, and it's one of the reasons I decided to start writing a blog (although I'm keenly aware that this only goes some way to alleviating the problem). But anyway, in this case, it seems that we can make a case for the events of those days in may being, if not obvious and inevitable, more likely than many at the time thought (including myself).

The reason for this seems chiefly to be personal rather than political (to use that word 'political' in a sense that means, if we are being honest 'ideological'). Of course this might be a reflection of Nick Robinson's remarkable ability to perceive the human terrain of a political battle, if he has a fault it would be overplaying it's significance from time to time, but on this occasion it really does seem the best, if not only, explanation. It Hopefully also explains the pictures (right and below to the left) because I speak, of course, when I say personal of the extraordinary relationship between David Cameron and Nick Clegg. It would be too much of a stretch to say that they make the coalition work, as it would of any government (single or multi party), but they do seem to have made it happen. The reason is as simple as, and I think Nick Robinson has said as much, trust. Trust is that basis of all other relationships, which are at least partially defined by the level of trust required. As such it is also incredibly hard to build from scratch, the higher the stakes the more this is true.

So how did they do it? How did the eerie premonition on my right (the London 2012 mascots) turn to reality so quickly, allowing adversaries to become friends? The short answer is that they didn't and it didn't, and that is because thinking about it that way it really would have been impossible, if you follow me. This situation wasn't created overnight, election night or otherwise. The truth, if you will take my word for it, is that trust comes from common experience - that's why even adversarial politics works best when those involved have similar spheres of experience. When Thomas Hobbes theorised that free men under no law but nature would inevitably conflict it was becuase there could be no trust, and this was because his epistemological view committed him to the idea that there could be no genuine common experience. I would guess that most people do think that common experience is possible, if not I can offer a little in the way of proof, but I doubt this will be needed. Cameron and Clegg have common experience by the bucket-load, They are both affluent, privately educated young men (born less than a year apart), one studied at Oxford and the other at Cambridge. They entered parliament only 4 years apart and for both the 2010 election was their first as leader. Politically importantly they both won the leadership of their respective parties by being bold, with a mandate for change. Need I go on? Without wanting to overplay the obligatory marriage metaphors the phrase 'made for each other' occurs. Of course this has all been said, better, but it never hurts to labour a good and important point, lest we forget that it might have been otherwise!

Why Should We Want Srong Individuals?

I posted yesterday about how pathetic we seem to feel individuals are that they need such optimal conditions to bloom. Of course the biggest underlying assumption was that we should feel that strong individualism is something that we want to preserve. Then I remembered something I had written about this before, something about Alighiero Boetti. Boetti was part of the artistic avant-garde movement that emerged during 1960s radicalism in Italy. If he was right then I was wrong to worry about the sheepishness of modern individualism - it might actually be a good thing.

Boetti felt that self-expression, far from being in opposition to capitalism, was actually driving it forward by its obsession with creation. My personal favourite way of thinking about his argument is by looking at ‘the American dream’ – and it’s relevant to Boetti because his work really starts to get going from the time when it was turning a little sour in the mid to late 1960s. The dream is a lifestyle full of individualism, which for lack of a better definition right now means a life of free choices from as wide a range as possible. Your Job, your relationships, where you live, how you live and ultimately (perhaps a little grandiose) the kind of person you want to be are all theoretically, but also importantly under law, down to Individuals. The American dream is also one full of objects. Left off that last list are your choice of house, car, furniture, clothes, pet, TV, newspaper and all the other half-utilitarian half-symbolic fixtures of a modern life are all down to yours truly.

Radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s is defined by the emphatic rejection of the latter list. Their idea, rarely significantly changed since then, is that any objects bought and sold in the market are not in fact about the individual needs and desires of those who buy them but are actually about the profit of the few who sell them. Capitalism, on this view, is in fact held up by the ideological domination of politics, education, work and family relationships and ultimately the psychological life of citizens. One slogan of the New Left at that time that I think expresses this nicely, ‘There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed’. That really is another story (a totally fascinating one) but the point is that Boetti went much further.

The real problem, so he thought, lay in the requirement, both social and psychological, to choose anything at all. This is because in the self expression that comes from those choices we are holding ourselves and others up to unrealistic standards of the degree of control and insight in our creations. In other words we believe that the world really can be shaped by the plans of inspired individuals. The upshot of this is that not only do the objects that were previously thought to free us become grotesque limitations, as the new left thought, but so do our attempts to control and shape our own lives. Living your life to some kind of narrative, to have a plan, to ‘know what you want from life’ is in fact a prison.

I’m perfectly willing to admit that I have no idea how to live a life like that, even if I wanted to, and it was perhaps for that reason that Boetti was a conceptual artist and not a philosopher. A major tool of his experiments was chance and randomness. He would send letters to his friends with deliberately wrong addresses using random combinations of stamps which would circle the postal system and occasionally return- at which point he would exhibit them. Even stranger though was where he eventually found a society that he thought expressed his thesis best – Afghanistan. He set up a Hotel there in 1971.

Afghanistan was a country free of created objects...

"Afghan homes, for example, are empty: no furniture therefore no objects commonly placed on furniture. There are only a few carpets and mattresses on which people lie down, drink, smoke and eat. I also like the fact that Afghans wear the same clothes at day and at night. Nothing has been added to the landscape. Rocks are moved and used to build cube houses. The resistance with which Afghans oppose our civilisation has always amazed me." - Alighiero Boetti

Leaving aside that the situation he found was at least in part due to simply poverty, the idea that something about the Afghan way of life is intrinsically resistant to grand inspired political narratives and large scale transformative schemes, for the same reason as their rejection of conventional object creation, certainly puts a new spin on the ‘progress’ we are attempting to bring to that country now.

At any rate Afghanistan had a hand in the creation of his series of works called ‘Mappa’. Mappa were a series of embroidered maps of the world. The landmass of each country was covered by that countries current flag. The significance of this was that although he commissioned the work all of its features were, in actuality, totally beyond his control. The work was carried out by multiple afghan craftswomen and the design was down in essence to the geopolitics that formed the shape and colour (because of the flags) of the landmasses (which in turn are a feature of geology).

"For me the work of the embroidered Mappa is the maximum of beauty. For that work I did nothing, chose nothing, in the sense that: the world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them; in short I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges everything else requires no choosing." - Alighiero e Boetti, 1974

Excuses, Excuses...

‘I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.’ — Marilyn Monroe.

If that is not the best excuse I have ever heard not to even try to change yourself then the better ones are so good that I haven’t even noticed them yet, and they still look like good reasons. I came across this psychological hook of a phrase, once again, on Facebook - and when I say came across what I mean is it was thrust at me by the news feed. I suspect it won’t be the last time I see it and it isn't hard to see why. What it speaks to is the idea that people can absolve themselves of the fully confessed negative aspects of their life and personality so long as they can find enough things that they think are good to weigh them out. In other words, a total abdication of responsibility.

This attitude is widespread and easy to recognise, bring up something critical about someone and more often than not the defence will include a statement about some good or righteous act that they have done, no disputation of the negatives, just a simple ‘but also...’. You will hear that same justifying argument from glib battlefield generals of the ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ school, or from terrorist groups (just look at the RAF in post war Germany), and religious apologists who go on endlessly about charity work. What we often forget to ask is how on earth these things are relevant. Are they connected in some necessary way? Is collateral damage somehow compulsory in even just war?  Does glorious revolution simply mean horrific violence? Do we have to tolerate the odd holy war if we want the YMCA? It would be a brave man who answers yes to all of these. Not that he would be necessarily wrong, and Friedrich Nietzsche did indeed argue for something similar to this. Certainly however I don't think that this is what people mean when they thoughtlessly blurt out the quote that started this thought.

Moreover, even if they do, they crucially differ from Nietzsche in motivation. People use this as a reason not to try, so long as they are good enough, and this is surely misguided - because the only way to really find out whether you can't have the good without the bad is to actually try. Easy example; before I wrote this I thought that in a literal sense you couldn't make an omelette without making eggs, and it turns out I was wrong!

Flimsy Individuals

If you dislike capitalism then it is a fair enough bet that your analysis of the problem has something to do individualism. Everyone knows this sort of argument, it's been around forever, and shows no signs of disappearing in the near future. Here is one I lifted of someone's formspring page...

'It can feel hard to justify passion about expression in a society that openly disregards the individual and works more towards it's self-created idea of economic greatness, and the individual stops being a remarkable mind with ideas and feelings and becomes a pawn in a machine, going through the motions and appreciating very little of the already tiny amount of what is really real.'

Of course the irony of this has always been, for the last 5 or 6 decades at the very least, that the other side (you know, the ones who write books about the road to serfdom, the enemies of the open society and how there are two concepts of liberty) have always made exactly the same claim about the alternatives. Look again at the quote above, swap out 'economic greatness' for 'socialist utopia' and it could be the opposite argument, just as eloquently put, now given in support of Margaret Thatcher's 'vision' in the 1975 conference speech of...

'A man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master - these are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free economy... and on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.'

The obvious initial response it that this can only mean one thing, someone is wrong (well that was mine anyway). I'm not discounting that possibility, but I'm also not going to get into it now because I don't have the space, or the patience, or inclination, or the first clue about how to conclusively do so. So what am I trying to say? This is of course the old totalitarian horseshoe theory. Leaving aside it's academic merits it is a masterpiece of cold war politics. Bending the political spectrum to show that communists and fascists are basically pretty similar, smearing the soviets, and with the happy side effect of demonstrating maximum freedomee goodness consists in a happy blend of left and right wing politics, a middle of the road, mediocre, middle class western polity - in other words. But the difference is that for both sides now the thing attacked now is not Marxist-Lenninism, it's democratic socialism - just look to Obama's troubles with the tea party, and it's not a capitalism that even comes close to recognising William Sumner's famous remark that 'the drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be' - just look at David Cameron's progressive conservatism.

So now the question raised by these critiques seems to be not what kind of thing is bad for individuals but, rather, what on earth is not heavy enough (left or right) that it crushes all individualism? Apparently we can now only dare to express ourselves under the absolute prime conditions now. The slightest hint of disapproval or malice towards us causes people to simply give up and go with the whatever we perceive to be what we ought to do, communist or capitalist, no matter how much we dislike it? Just a little depressing...

Liberals, Power and Poetic Analogies

Friedrich Nietzsche used to say that he tried to express in one page what most people couldn't manage in an entire book. The obvious advantage to this style being that most people are far more likely to get to the end of your page than to the end of your book. Today it seems that a sentence is a more appropriate length for a complete reading, how else can we possibly explain the tremendous popularity of Twitter. Although in general i would add my voice to the 'If 135 characters is enough to express yourself, you shouldn't bother' brigade I'm making an exception today for a comment by Simon Titley, the editor of Liberator (aka 'Liberal Democrats' grassroots trouble-makers' - Michael Crick). He writes that the liberal democrats mood, reflecting on the coalition that they have found themselves in, 'resembles that of first-time clients in a high-class brothel; feeling gratified but somewhat soiled, and unsure who's been screwing whom'. No amount of characters can express the brilliance of this statement. As a pure statement of analogy for Liberal Democrat feeling it is fantastic enough, but better than that it speaks to something about power in a general sense (something that I'm sure Nietzsche, as the supreme theorist of power, would have certainly approved of).

The Liberals have found themselves experiencing the kind of  power thrill that they must surely have always discounted as a real possibility, even if they would have never admitted it. No explanation should be needed of why they should, must and do relish this chance. But for them, Lord Acton's party - who have always held more or less to his most famous remark, they have become their own mythical antagonist. A good liberal never acts, even for the good, until they know that their power to do so is exercised legitimately. Many would say however, and I would add my voice to them, that this can seem almost impossible in government. Socialists and conservatives can make their excuses- most commonly that the means can be justified by the ends in the former, and that ultimately government cannot rule much at all out in the latter. For liberals though this must surely generate what Titley describes as the 'soiled' feeling, what I would call guilt.

Perhaps though I'm being grandiose and over-philosophical, it wouldn't be the first time, and instead of all this talk of brothels and Nietzsche a simpler analogical explanation will do. Reshaping the the world according to our own vision is a thrill that anyone who has ever succeeded at some kind of DIY task will recognise. But the problem with putting up those shelves yourself is that you will always notice, more than anyone else, the corner that you accidentally chipped off with the claw hammer. Maybe in the end it's the disappointments in the results, perhaps an even more inevitable side effect of government, that will eat at Lib Dem consciences. This will probably relate to the Tory measures they have to put through, but it might be as much at their own bit of the coalition agreement- they will have higher hopes for it after all. I wish the coalition well, not least because they haven't yet raised my tuition fee's but these unavoidable strains must surely spell trouble.

Cameron Direct... But Does Anoyone Think He's wrong?

A few days ago David Cameron, self styled strait talking British Prime minister (since his civil partnership with a Mr N. Clegg brought him to power) made some rather rude remarks about Pakistan. As picking the right audience goes this was a master-stroke, he was speaking in India, but the morning after the night before brought the reaction from less receptive audiences. Being undiplomatic can be a virtue in the right circumstances, but not usually when the activity is in fact diplomacy. Certainly when David Milliband appears to have bested you as an example of an experienced elder statesman you must have done or said something terribly wrong. Yes?

Well Maybe... Two thoughts strike, firstly when someone says you are being undiplomatic that is usually a way of disapproving without having to say that the claims, allegations, mud thrown ect is, in base of fact, incorrect. I should probably declare that I'm not an expert on Pakistan, or anything for that matter, so i'll have to make a general comment suffice (as opposed to some detailed factual accusation against the ISI pulled from Wikileaks). By way of that I would point out that this is by no means the first time that Pakistan has been accused of 'looking both ways' (to borrow a phrase) and that if this is a convenient fiction of the generic 'west' or the media then they have also done a bloody good job of finding Pakistanis who seem to agree.With this in mind the fact that most critical voices on Cameron's comments have sought to show more how they were 'unhelpful' or didn't 'reflect the full picture', and not that it is simply in error regarding it's central assertion, must tell us something about the central paradigmatic assumption in this debate. Namely that, while 'our' view of the problem focuses on (and I always find it impossible to find the right word in these sentences but I will grit my teeth and go for...) violent Islamists wherever they reside, Pakistan's strategic vision is uncomfortably concious of borders. For us the word key word Taleban, but in Islamabad it really matters whether it is preceded by the word Afghan or Pakistani, and this will always make us justifiably nervous. Can we really blame Cameron for daring to mention this tension so explicitly?

Secondly even in the likely event that what I have written above is total bollocks I feel bound to come back to my point about the India. We of course want to secure, if possible, excellent relations with both India and Pakistan. But what if we had to choose? In strait Machiavellian terms - whom does Britain value more? Mired in an Afghan war that we seem unable to extract ourselves from, at least in what most people would recognise as the short term, it would be easy to say Pakistan. I won't list now the various problems that a hostile Pakistan would cause but, euphemistically simply, it wouldn't help. Again however, two thoughts... Firstly there is a huge gulf between a nauseatingly friendly, heavily supportive relationship that we lose our minds looking for and 'hostile' in the traditional sense. It's easy, and probably fair, to spout out that line that goes 'anything that makes the job of our brave troops harder is unacceptable...' but it still seems totally illegitimate to then trot out everything Pakistan does for us as being at risk because of the slightest slur. Secondly if we can extricate ourselves by the not so dead 2015 deadline, which there is surely reason to think we can (even if we can find plenty more to say we can't), what will Pakistan mean to us then? We have seen that radical insurgent Islamism can survive war, or a crusade at the very least, but in the past it has been much worse at peace. We could indeed find in around a decade that we have a uselessly strong bilateral relationship with Pakistan at the expense of an extremely useful one with the world class power of India next door. If we accept this argument then even if Cameron was wrong he could in fact have been right to say it, if we take the long view.

My personal view on this is utterly clouded by the usual warm fuzzy feeling inside whenever someone says something wonderfully unexpected, off script, that reflects their real view and not what we have heard them quote off a script far too often before. I find the more I accept that the latter is what politics does and must consist of the more I really enjoy it when this breaks down. In spite of this I think I can comfortably reject the idea that this is anything remotely close to open and shut.

The First Post

It is disturbingly easy to get a blog. Ten minutes ago this blog would have been best described as a vague notion, and now it occupies it's only little piece of Google's prime virtual real estate (physical location - no idea but I would guess it's well cooled). Contemplating this disturbing notion I have at least the solace that it will probably never be read. With that in mind the mission statement of this virtual backwater will be to record a selection of my views and observations in the sure knowledge that I can disown them as necessary - because in all probability only I will ever have read them!