Monday, October 29, 2007

Two more cheers for Michael Moore

The other day I saw Michael Moore’s Sicko. Much like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911: very telling, very sympathetic, very funny, very good at generating anger – and then it stops. I enjoyed it while it was on, but it still left me feeling impotent.

I suppose this is the dilemma of the American Left. Even by the wretched standards of the European Left, the complete absence of any serious analysis of the underlying problem undermines any organised action by the very mass of people to whom Moore rightly appeals. So how does he do it? Having kicked off his documentary by pointing the finger at exactly the right people – corporate capitalism, the fundamental contradiction between the interests of a vast, uncontrolled businesses and the health of the very people they allegedly serve, and a government that still believes the fantasy that what is good for business is good for America, he concludes with a sentimental appeal to Americans’ better natures. ‘What sort of people are we? Do we want to be like this?’ and so on and so forth.

Perhaps it is a necessary step, given the poverty of American politics. Or perhaps it shows how the American Left is fundamentally flawed. I wish it were the former, but I suspect it is not.

But in what sense is the European Left any better?

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Speak roughly to your little boy

I see that the UK government is again vacillating absurdly on the topic of corporal punishment. Apparently Brown and co. are happy for children to be beaten by their parents. As the father of two teenagers, I can well appreciate this problem: sometimes I think beating children should be not so much permissible as compulsory.

But the paradox for supporters of violence against children remains obvious: one day our offspring are so threatening and so inured to reason that only physical violence will stop them running amok, and the next day they can vote. It is hardly a sensible state of affairs.

So what should we do about it? The answer seems obvious: stop limiting the people we can beat to children. If any reasonable person (e.g., the person who wants to beat them) would conclude that someone who is too weak and vulnerable to resist deserved a good beating, let them have it!

Of course, these things need to introduced progressively. So let us, say, raise the age at which a child may be beaten to 30. Individuals who are able to defend themselves may require special treatment – e.g., manacles, gang assaults, and so on – but I am sure that the police (or perhaps S+M club - just enquire at your local Conservative Association) would be happy to assist here.

Then we could restore the much neglected right of a man to physically chastise his wife (perhaps with a taser). Then once that has been restored, the right of employers to beat their employees should likewise be reaffirmed.

And then people with exactly zero moral status and no mandate whatsoever should be allowed to invade countries on the far side of the world that even their own intelligence agencies tell them have no connection with the problem they are allegedly trying to solve, bring about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and still get re-elected.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Rosa Parks 1, Ku Klux Klan 0

A little snippet from Durham Herald-Sun columnist Carl Daniels-Kinney:

I'm sure many of you are aware that about two weeks ago, the US Supreme Court ruled that the State of Missouri cannot discriminate against the Ku Klux Klan when it comes to groups that want to participate in the adopt-a-highway program. Of course, while the name of the Klan is aesthetically disgusting, we'd all agree that this decision is a victory for free speech and equal protection under the law, right?

Well, the DOT in Missouri has gotten their revenge, and boy is it sweet. Sure, they can't remove the KKK's adopt-the-highway sign, but few would dispute the state's ability to name the highway itself. The KKK is now cleaning up a stretch of the newly-christened Rosa Parks Freeway.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Saturday, October 13, 2007

YouTube for socialists

My daughter descends from her bedroom and announces that the end of the world is nigh because neither of her favourite programmes – Mock the Week and That IT Crowd – is currently running, so no one is pirating them for YouTube. Woe is she. And why, she goes on, are they so stupid as to broadcast them at the same time, so she cannot have one while the other is off-air?

Ah, I reply sagely, what you’ve got her is the difference between capitalist and socialist programming. Capitalists really care nothing for you listening pleasure: their real purpose is to prevent you watching the competition. So all the best shows air simultaneously. In a socialist broadcasting universe, I go on, the toiling masses would strive to ensure that everyone could watch everything. So they’d put Mock the Week and That IT Crowd on at different times.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

The most important event in history. And Diana's dead too.

Today is the anniversary of the most important event in history: the day humanity took its first step towards living in the universe rather than just on this planet. On October 4 1957, human beings launched the Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Within 12 years we were walking around the surface of our celestial next-door neighbour. Two wonderful moments.

If the flight of Sputnik represents the most important event in history, the death of Princess Diana continues to be treated as though it was pretty vital too. And as it happens, the 50th anniversary of Sputnik happen to coincide with the start of Princess Diana’s inquest.

Like most people, I'm not very interested in dead princesses. Although the media would have you believe otherwise, practically no one I knew thought that Diana's death was anything but a tragic but, from any impersonal point of view, relatively inconsequential event. True, Radio 4 went completely gaga for a week, with literally not a single non-Diana programme for days on end. The other media were almost equally deranged. Collectively they managed to create the impression that the world had gone into shock, whereas I knew only a single person who thought there was anything special going on.

So why the furore all those years ago, and the continuing media fascination? To which I reply, what furore?

Here is some simple arithmetic. Suppose that when Diana died there were a little less than 60 million people in Britain. Suppose also that about 2% of them were much affected by her death. That’s about 1,200,000 people – quite a number, but a tiny fraction of the population as a whole. Assume also that 5% of those affected individuals bothered to express their feelings in some public way. That’s still 60,000 people. I don’t know how many wreaths and crosses were laid for Diana, but 60,000 sounds about right.

So 0.1% of the population of Britain were affected enough to do something about it? Why would anyone imagine that this was the earth-shaking historical event it was reported as? Evidently a million people marching against war in Iraq wasn't significant enough for the government to notice it, so why should 60,000 be taken as so much more seriously?

But there is another lesson to be learned from these events, which is tied directly to the discrepancy between the public image and the numerical facts. This is that, although the death of The People's Princess was nothing special from the point of view of history, it was a fabulous story. And the media are interested not in what is important but what sells copy and puts bums of seats. And so are politicians, starting with the buffoon who invented that ludicrous soubriquet.

On the other hand, if there is a competition for the most boring media event in history, then surely one very powerful contender would be that climactic event of the First Space Age, the first Moon landing.

I sat there that night, expecting to be enthralled, but in reality it turned into five or more hours of grainy images and nothing happening, waiting while they got ready to open the door. It was a complete drag, as we used to say. I was even tempted to go to bed (though I resisted – just).

So I have always felt that there was a strange paradoxical tie between Princess Diana and Neil Armstrong’s respective entries into history. Armstrong’s was assuredly one that will be remembered for centuries, yet it was excruciatingly tiresome to observe and of no obvious significance in itself, while Diana’s will be forgotten by everyone but cultural historians in due course, but has been amazing (or, I should say, appalling) to witness.

Which only goes to prove that great history and a great story are only tangentially related phenomena. And that we generally don’t give a damn about the for history, while a good story has quite a few people gaga too.

So where are the social systems that help us to appreciate the history through which we are living? Certainly not the media or our education systems. And there is no folk history worth the name any more. And what is the fate of those who are ignorant of history?

Monday, October 01, 2007

Whatever happened to Welsh rugby?

With the Rugby World Cup upon us, I asked my son what he thought of rugby, which he is currently having to play at school. 'It's like one long organised fight' he replied. That pretty much chimes with my own recollection of this game for thugs played by thugs, which I was also forced to play at school.

In my day, international rugby was all Gareth Edwards and Barry John performing what can only be described as physical opera, as Wales demonstrated that even this extraordinarily brutish game can be a truly beautiful spectacle.

Pity about the modern Welsh team, of course, though they gave the Dublin School for the Blind a good thrashing the other day, so maybe things are looking up. However, I had not realised what the ultimate cause of the tragic decline of Welsh rugby really was until I googled 'Sospan fach' (which is pretty much Welsh rugby's national anthem). This is what the first verse translates to in English:

My sweet Mary Ann's hurt her finger,
And David the servant's feeling weak;
And the baby's crying now in its cradle,
The cat's scratching Johnny on
the cheek
Sospan fach is boiling on the fire,
Sospan fawr boils over on
the floor,
The cat's scratching Johnny on the cheek.
David's a soldier,
David's a soldier.
His shirttail's hanging out.

Suddenly the union of subtle dialectic and English perfidy was revealed. All that proud Welsh nationalism, fired by so many wonderful humblings of English rugby teams, and which the wicked London Parliament gratified by encouraging the teaching of Welsh in Welsh schools a couple of decades back, has led only to the sudden realisation in the Valleys that this wonderful anthem - blasted out with such passion, drama and sheer musicality, is in fact a lot of tosh. Slightly below the calibre of a bad nursery rhyme. And once they had all learned Welsh at last, they could suddenly see what twaddle they had been singing so proudly for all those years. It is as though the Red Army had adopted Mary Mary Quite Contrary as their battle song.

And 'Sospan Fach' itself? It means ‘Little Saucepan'.

Oh dear. How are the mighty fallen.

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Snake and ladders out of the Garden of Eden

I grew up in the English Home Counties, that bastion of middle class politeness and rectitude. Despite this, and despite going to a good grammar school and receiving the usual lessons in religious studies, I never managed to work out exactly what it was that was supposed to make the Bible – or religion generally – so important.

A lot of the problem seemed to me to be that these were very ordinary tales that someone thought were desperately significant, but I really could not see it. For example, if there’s one person who seems to get a rough deal in the Old Testament, it’s surely the snake in the Garden of Eden. What is his crime? To teach Adam and Eve the difference between right and wrong. What were they before that point? A pair of complete moral non-entities who just did as they were told. Only obeying orders, perhaps. And giving them knowledge of right and wrong was a crime?

And what is God’s reaction to this first ever act of moral enlightenment? To punish the messenger.

“And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life..." (Genesis 3:14)

In other words, one individual performs an act the local boss disapproves and not only are they punished vilely but so are all their descendants for all eternity. Well that seems fair.

I don’t know about you, but all this seems to tell me is that the very first moral tale in the entire Bible – a book that is supposed to be the basis for Christian moral life - is to punish the one individual who makes moral life possible. And this happens not because of God’s love for humanity but despite it.

On the other hand, what happens to human beings for becoming moral agents? They are expelled from Eden. But if remaining as moral non-entities was the price of staying, was this expulsion from Eden – or rising above it?

So let’s hear it for the snake – the only person ever to enter the Garden of Eden with honest intentions.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Metallica, Mozart, one of that crowd

A friend kindly lent me a copy of Metallica’s aptly named ‘S+M’ album yesterday. It features the heavy metal band and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. I listened to it all the way home. I thought it sounded like a detuned concrete mixer on speed.

I recounted my reaction this morning. We managed to discuss the matter like gentlemen, if only because we actually seem to have not too dissimilar reactions to it (other than that he loves it and I hate it). Essentially we love the idea of a classical/rock crossover, with the promise of mixing the greatest music ever written with the electric guitar, which is surely the twentieth century’s great contribution to music.

The only trouble is, where is that crossover taking place? There are some pretty excruciating banalisations of both perpetrated by the likes of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and every now and then a band like the Nice (great idea, rapid collapse into pretentious drivel) or Yngwie Malmsteen (pretty good playing, brain-dead backing band) will come up with a pretty good synthesis. There are some pretty great rock versions of Pachelbel’s Canon in D currently floating about YouTube.

But the counterpart of Miles Davis’ or Frank Zappa’s wonderful and sustained rock/jazz crossovers are conspicuous only by their absence.

Why is this?

A slogan for Britain? Why not - one good fiction deserves another

Gordon Brown (who sanctimoniousness grates ever more) wants a slogan for Britain. The good ones, such as Liberty Equality Fraternity, having been taken, and the really British ones such as "Mustn't grumble" having been suggested elsewhere, how about "Please form an orderly queue"?

But what is this really about? Why does Britain need a slogan? Because, in fact, Britain is so lacking in inherent unity that we are forced to resort to a marketing ploy so make people believe in it. A British slogan might just as well invoke our collective faith in phlogiston as in 'the nation'. As far as I can tell, patriotism is a scarce commodity in this country, not only in the positive sense but also in the sense that quite a few people feel very uneasy at the tricks that are currently being played by politicians, the media and other still murkier forces under the guise of ‘national identity’. Or as Michael Flanders put it almost 50 years back, regarding patriotic songs:

There'll always be an England. Well that's not saying much, is it? I mean, there'll always be a North Pole - if some dangerous clown doesn't go and melt it.

Indeed.

Nor is this a peculiarly British problem. The fact is, it is hopelessly unhistorical to regard countries - or more precisely nation states - as natural expressions of human social relationships, and equally absurd to suggest that it is a deadly threat to society when an outside organisation takes over some control or an internal forces threaten to break the nation up. The issue is not of any threat to our ‘national identity, or ‘British values’ but of whether such changes takes place democratically. From a historical viewpoint the nation state is a recent phenomenon. What is more, many states are the products of a series of not very rational accidents, many of the problems in society could probably be solved by ignoring state boundaries, and there is no reason to believe that states will last very much longer as the many body for decision-making.

In fact nation states are always being redefined or even totally invented, and it is hard to identify any nation states that are more than three centuries old or one that still corresponds at all closely to a real social unit. Indeed, many never have.

For example:

  • Many major European nation states were created through accidental rights of succession, such as the UK and Spain.
  • Belgium was created as a buffer state between France and the Netherlands in 1830 and even now suffers spasms of internal division between the Flemish and the Walloons.
  • Italy came into existence in 1860 as a result of internal revolution.
  • Germany emerged in 1870 as a result of Prussia forcing union on various German states, was divided again in 1945 as a result of conquest (i.e. the ‘iron curtain’) and was then reunited in 1989. In addition, had Prussia not defeated Austria at Sadowa in 1866, huge areas of what is now southern Germany might have remained completely aloof, and ‘Germany’ would probably not have become the politico-economic powerhouse of the eight decades after that.
  • As a result of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War many states came into existence, with Yugoslavia being a particularly artificial invention, as it was deliberately structured to finally put a stop to the ‘balkanisation’ of the Balkans.

Not is this a uniquely European phenomenon.

  • Most of the countries in South America came into existence as a result of local revolutions against the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the first half of the nineteenth century.
    Many Asian countries had their first taste of national identity as a result of resistance to European imperialism.
  • Dozens of countries were likewise created for the first time by post war decolonisation in Africa and Asia.
  • Finally, all the successor states to the Soviet Union were only formed in 1991 when more than a dozen new states were created, and Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia each divided as part of the same post-Soviet collapse.

Furthermore, if the nation state is defined as a political unit with the powers of the modern state, including a central administration, sovereign authority, territory with borders, all members becoming citizens at birth, a constitution, monopoly of the means of violence and so on, then there were no nation states at all before the fifteenth century. For example, even up until the rule of Elizabeth I, the Percy dukes of Northumberland were often more powerful in terms of military might than the monarch who at the time was recognised as the sovereign head, and attempts to oust them by Plantagenet monarchs came to grief on local allegiance to the Percy name.

As for what is probably the current bastion of unqualified patriotic enthusiasm, the USA came into existence in 1776 as a result of the American War of Independence.

  • At first, the thirteen original states seriously considered setting themselves up as individual countries.
  • Later, when Louisiana, a territory with little previous involvement with the US, was bought in 1804 from Napoleon, the United States doubled in size. However, had Napoleon not been forced to sell, and Britain not been distracted by her wars in Europe, the US frontier would probably stand only a little west of Chicago and the USA would probably be no more powerful than, say, Germany or Japan. On the other hand, an independent Republic of Louisiana, created perhaps by a fleeing Napoleon, is a fascinating historical 'what-if'.
  • Meanwhile, the 'real' USA grew again in 1867 when Alaska, which does not even have a geographical connection with the rest of the US, was bought from the Russians. Finally, the USA very nearly became two separate nation states as a result of the Civil War of 1861 to 1865. Is this the history of a natural social unit?

Nation states are often thought of as representing a particular group of people who share a common identity and culture and live together more or less as a unit. But in reality many nation states were created by a series of not very rational accidents. For example, when the British left their colonies in Africa it was convenient for them to draw lines on a map dividing the land up into Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, without considering the groups of people living in that area. As a result one the largest tribes in East Africa, the Kikuyu, found their territory divided and their identity ignored. This made them a minority in each state, causing massive problems for them and their neighbours alike. Likewise the decolonisation in the Middle East left the Kurds separated into Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran, with disastrous consequences in all these countries including extensive terrorism and repression.

On the other hand, because nation states don’t always correspond to natural social units they frequently have major problems built into them, often expressed by separatist movements or endemic conflict, as with the IRA in Northern Ireland, the Kurds, the Basques and the Catalans in Spain, or the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda. Many of these problems could probably be solved by overriding the powers of nation states. This has already been reflected in policies of subsidiarity (delegating power to the lowest appropriate levels) and the creation of supranational bodies such as the EU (conceding sovereignty to a higher level entity). In many cases, multinational bodies have also been involved in mediating between nation states and their regions. For example, African Union troops and United Nations negotiators are helping in Darfur in Sudan.

Assuming then that nation states came into existence because of political reasons at the time, then changing political reasons are likely to mean that, even if the nation state does not disappear in the near future, it will no longer be the basis for most important decisions. Supranational organisations like the EU and UN will become more powerful, as will regional government. The last real nation states are likely to be those such as the USA and Russia whose pre-eminence (global or local) allows them to act as independent powers long after this ceases to be a viable strategy for most of their neighbours, or those too marginal to provide grist to any significant historical process.

Nation states made sense for a while. They genuinely were the basic social structures for a huge number of people living in industrial societies over the last couple of centuries. But before, say, 1650? Or even 1750? How many genuine nations, where people’s genuine sense of identity resided in a nation state, were there even in Europe? And with progressive (if that is the word) globalisation, especially in the industrial/capitalist world, how much of our identity resides there still, leaving aside the trivia of international sport and the fictions of modern politics?

Not a whole lot, I suspect.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Dying - and killing - for a cigarette

I gather that the health benefits of banning smoking in Scotland are proving to be pretty unequivocal. I do feel that this situation should be compensated for (in the interests of ‘balance’, perhaps) by someone’s health being substantially lessened.

How about the cigarette manufacturers – and how about a couple of decades in gaol for each of their directors? After all, they have known for decades that they were killing their customers, but carried on regardless. As we have had laws against knowingly killing people for quite a while now, exactly why are any of these venial, callous, inhuman monsters is still walking the streets?

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Here we go (or maybe don't go) again

I have just heard an American politician argue that it was the precipitateness of the US withdrawal from Vietnam that caused the dire sequels, notably the massacres in Cambodia and the hundreds of thousands of ‘boat people’. A mugger might as rightly argue that they had to keep clubbing their victim because if they woke up they might act like they were in terrible pain.

The fact is, it was the American treatment of south east Asia more than anything else that created the catastrophic conditions in Vietnam (a victorious dictatorship) and Cambodia (complete social breakdown) in which disastrous reactions were inevitable as soon as the US removed the layer of state violence that kept the underlying mass of festering conflicts and chaos in check. In the case of Iraq, US policy has not only removed the very resources that would have prevented the simultaneous anti-US resistance, the anti-al Qaeda hostility and the Sunni-Shiite civil war but also both caused and justified these very reactions.

Heck of a job, Bushy.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

And now, Richard Dawkins and Simon Schama arm-wrestling

I see that this week the Observer newspaper has a huge advert trailing its 'exclusive' interview with David Beckham. This really is celebrity gone a bit off its trolley. David Beckham has, as they say, a very educated right foot, but that's about the limit. Who on earth cares what he thinks about things? One might as well trumpet an exclusive video of Andre Previn playing tennis or the finance editor of the Wall Street Journal playing canasta.

Get a grip!

Friday, June 29, 2007

Ladders to nowhere

A lot of talk at the moment about the fact that Britain has the lowest social mobility of any developed country. It is quite a comment on the legacy of Thatcher and Blair that they have accomplished this, despite the fact that both were fulsomely committed to the opposite and both argued that their policies would achieve the opposite. It does not take much to answer the question of why mobility is shrinking, at least from the point of view of government policy.

But there are far more radical and important questions that need to be asked. The first is, why is there a 'ladder' at all? What is the ladder? The fact is that we neither recognise nor care how society really works, and that the mere existence of any ladders means that there will always be someone at the bottom. Does there need to be? If this the natural order? If it is, then it doesn't sit well with the fact that for 90% of human history we managed to have classless, non-stratified social systems.

Of course, the scale and complexity of modern societies, especially after the rise of industrialism, amplifies the problems to a fantastic degree. But these revolutions also gave the tools, intellectual, social and political, to solve the problem. So why don't we - even to the point that we don't even recognise that the problem - the problem of the ladder itself rather than the rate of movement up and down it - exists any more?

Are we now wholly incapable of envisaging a world of practical equality? Evidently so.

Saturday, June 09, 2007

Poor Ms Hilton

I got my haircut this morning. My hairdresser (a rather nice lady called Sue) and I chatted about politicians and Big Brother and things like that. And naturally we talked about poor Ms Hilton. Our conversation confirmed the consensus I had identified during the week: as far as I can tell, not only is a 100% majority in favour of Paris Hilton being in jail, but exactly the same percentage want her in jail regardless of whether she has actually done anything illegal.

Yet, now that I am back from the hairdressers and looking quite ginchy, am I alone in feeling a twinge of guilt about all this? Isn’t this singling out just this one rather worthless individual actually abhorrent in the extreme? Doesn’t this persecution of this one silly person not violate the principal of equity on which our legal systems so proudly – and rightly – insist? There are after all many other bogus celebrities, and even quite genuinely powerful people, who are just as worth as Ms Hilton of a spell in jail, so why should she alone be treated this way?

This brings me to an idea that came to me many years ago, while fantasising about having Margaret Thatcher, Mary Whitehouse and Barbara Cartland wrestling together in Wembley Stadium, fighting to the death nude in fresh fish before an audience of 100,000 miners? Yes, that does rather date it doesn’t it? When were there last 100,000 miners in this country? But anyway, the idea was simple enough: that a referendum would be held once a month, and everyone in the country could vote for the person they would most want to be thrown into jail for a month.

Actually I think my original idea was that they should be exposed to some kind of very public humiliation, probably involving a chimpanzee, a dildo and a global TV audience, but you get my drift.

Personally I find the prospect quite enticing. What editor of the Sun, what particularly tiresome government toady, what ludicrously self-important celebrity would be immune to the public wrath? Or should be, for that matter. Although the right to privacy should be sacrosanct for any normal human being, the kind of person who courts public attention with the egomania that currently parades itself across our media has surely foregone any such right.

But perhaps this would be redundant. After all, who is currently a better case for treatment than – well, Paris Hilton?

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Goodbye Mr Tony

A strange experience: watching Tony Blair announce his retirement as Prime Minister and leader of the Labour party the other evening, I felt quite sorry for him. I have distrusted him since the day I clapped eyes on him, and my opinion of him has only fallen since. Yet, watching him make his little speech, he seemed to be feeling genuine contrition and to finally recognise that we really don’t like him. As Mark Steel put it several years back, if he is the most popular Prime Minister we have ever had, then he must be the most unpopular most popular Prime Minister we have ever had too.

Yet we should not be too easy on him even now. I thought Margaret Thatcher raised the untrustworthiness of British governments to new heights, but New labour, with its interminable spinning, disingenuousness, image control, endless announcements of the same resources as though they were new each time, and utter lack of either genuine political vision or intellectual substance has discredited the political process to the point where I simply do not believe a word they are saying. What worse thing, short of a coup, capability they have done to what limited democracy our ludicrous Parliamentary offers?

And Mr Tony’s legendary (or is that ‘imaginary’) sincerity only made things worse. After five years with Thatcher I was literally unable to hear her vile voice without turning off the radio, and Blair came quite close. Still, he looked genuine enough the other night. Or perhaps I just couldn’t think of anything he could be lying about. What a dreadful epitaph.

And what comes next? Gordon Brown. Oh dear. Six months ago I really thought Labour could not elect such a person, but it looks all but inevitable. I wonder how soon it will be before I am reduced to voting Liberal Democrat? Can Gordon imagine what it costs me to say that?

Friday, April 27, 2007

How doth the little crocodile

One detail of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland I have always liked is Carroll’s poem, ‘How doth the little crocodile’:

‘How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

‘How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!’

Carroll was parodying a typical Victorian homily entitled ‘Against Idleness and Mischief’, written by the English theologian Isaac Watts:

‘How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!’

And so on for three more sickly verses.

Last night my daughter Beany, a voracious reader, mentioned that one of the characters in R.C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End recites Carroll’s poem. If you have not seen it, Journey’s End is a play about life in the trenches in World War One. I do not know what Sherriff meant by inserting this detail, but a contemporary resonance struck me straight away.

The war in Iraq – as previously in Vietnam, Aden, Cyprus and a hundred post-colonial wars – has always been accompanied by shrill nonsense about defending this or that value or principle. Like Vietnam, Iraq is meant to be a ‘shining hour’ for freedom and democracy. But once more such ideals are being dragged in the dust by ignoble individuals like the US and British leaderships, and it is impossible to imagine that the cause of liberty will be advanced one inch by this awful disaster. On the contrary, the very idea of democracy has already been debased so far that in Arab discourse 'damakrata' translates as the forced imposition of western ideas.

But what should one expect when the West is led by arrogant and self-serving fools like Bush, Cheney, Blair and Rumsfeld, who imagine that abstractions like ‘freedom’ have any meaning at all in a country we spent a decade blockading and bombing, causing perhaps a million deaths, all in the name of these self-same ‘principles’. What were they expecting? To be welcomed with open arms? Their own experts had told them that they would be anything but welcome. But Blair’s abstractions told him better, and as the Americans managed to demonstrate almost immediately, the only thing they would do with any efficiency was sell the country’s assets to American corporations.

And the military? Having been promised that they would be welcome with open arms, they find that the peaceful cultivation of the beehive they were promised by our ‘leaders’ has turned into fighting with crocodiles. We have so obviously lost that we should get out immediately. Western governments and armies cannot save Iraq from the disaster they have created – they are the disaster. To persist out of sheer arrogance and fear of failure is to condemn tens of thousands more Iraqis, and many soldiers too, to pointless suffering and death.

After World War One they put up statues to Field Marshal Haig, Prime Minister Lloyd George and all the rest, whereas they should have hanged the lot of them. Meanwhile, shortly after the character in Journey’s End recites ‘How doth the little crocodile’, he is killed in a raid. Is that going to be the outcome in Iraq too – until, we finally admit that, in our arrogance and idealism, we are the problem, not the solution?

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Mud, mud...

The UK government has this wonderful fantasy that they can define Britishness. As I argued in my posting on Identity and Equality, it is almost certainy a self-defeating enterprise. However, if they are looking for something decidedly British, let me suggest that no one should be considered for citizenship who doesn't find utter delight in any and all of the following:

  • Flanders and Swan's Hippopotamus Song (especially the version sung with a live audience on At the Drop of a Hat)
  • Eddie Izzard's 'Cake or death' sketch
  • Monty Python's Batley Townswomens' Guild presents the Battle of Pearl Harbour

It won't work, of course. I can believe that some of the Cabinet have a sense of humour, but somehow not the po-faced Blair. Besides, I would feel quite ill if I thought I shared a sense of humour with him.

A final thought. How about depriving existing citizens of their citizenship if they don't have a suitably British sense of humour. Starting at the very top, perhaps...

Friday, April 13, 2007

Cristiano Ronaldo and the magic of market economics

Today,the BBC website tells me, Cristiano Ronaldo signed a new five-year contract with Manchester United. The BBC news told me that he will 'earn' at least £25 million over the next few years - and that's just from Man U.

Words fail me. In what sense could any human being 'earn' that much money? In what sense could they possibly earn the equivalent of 200 times the average UK wage? I would agree that the man is going to acquire £25 million by legal means, but earn it? Never.

And don't get me started on Bill Gates - a man who is 'worth' more than many small countries. If I were looking for an icon for the absurdity of market economics and unbridled private property, he would be it.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Identity and equality: an impossible choice?

Increasingly much of many western countries’ domestic policy seems to be absorbed in reconciling the relationship between a unified nation state and minorities of various kinds, especially where the minority in question imports a different set of social and cultural practices and values. That is, after all, why the large black and Asian populations within the UK stand in such different relationships to the wider population: while groups of West Indian and (to a lesser extent) African origin share a good deal of the pre-existing British culture, the Islamic and Hindu groups from the Indian sub-continent and east Africa not only bring quite different religions and cultures but also social institutions such as banks and commercial networks that made it quite unnecessary to participate in a great deal of the host society.

The latter point is crucial. Anyone with the least knowledge of, say, West Indian family structure recognises that it resembles conventional British systems very little. However, whatever the implications of this fact, they can at least expect to be lived and acted out within the context of British society as a whole, and any conflict between the two sides is likely to find both expression and (eventually) resolution. But where more strongly organised groups enter (and that may be by migration or internal development, of course), part of their organisation will consist of mechanisms for isolating the sub-culture from the indigenous culture and often for actively resisting any such accommodation. Furthermore, this is likely to be especially strong once the in-coming group recognises that its initial aspirations are unlikely to be met and the host society declines to treat them decently.

The crucial problem this creates for the ‘host’ societies (I must admit, I am unhappy about all this terminology of ‘indigenous’, ‘sub-culture’, ‘hosts’, ‘migrants’, and so on) seems to be to create a way of managing societies in such a way that everyone can express their own cultural identity, yet co-exist on equal terms within a single framework for society as a whole. This is the classic problem of ‘civil society’.

This in turn generates two problems for would-be policy-makers. Firstly, if you don’t clearly separate identity from equality, you will almost guarantee conflict. Secondly, if you do manage to separate them from one another, you will find that they are irreconcilable.

If you don’t clearly separate identity from equality, you will almost guarantee conflict. Everyone involved in policy-making, implementation and enforcement is a member of a particular culture. My impression is that, by and large, politicians, judges, policemen, civil servants, social workers, teachers, editors, journalists, media magnates and other mediators of social relationships are overwhelmingly members of the same culture, and, I am afraid, pretty unreflective about values, be it their own or others’. So even where they are keen to avoid imposing any particular identity, I can’t see how they will avoid imposing their own. Imagine that in a country whose largest-selling newspapers are the Daily Mail and the Sun

But even if you do manage to create systems that allow you to distinguish between identity and equality in principle, you will soon find that they are irreconcilable. For as far as I am aware, no major culture of any substance limits its prescriptions to what its own members should do. All define either what all people should do, and so find (literal or metaphorical) non-believers culpable in their non-belief, or define their members as inherently superior to non-members, or at least define an asymmetric relationship between members and non-members. In other words, whatever exponents of civil society may think, the notion of identity simply cannot be extricated from that of equality or from any of the major structures and processes of a contemporary nation state.

For example, Christian and Islamic fundamentalists share the belief that law has already been ordained by God, and that the only role of legal establishments is to interpret and implement that law. Whether the source is Leviticus or the Koran, it is wholly inappropriate for human beings to be inventing laws by themselves, other than within the very narrow bounds set by revelation. So that’s democracy dead, then. In many cases, membership of the approved sub-culture is regarded as prerequisite to membership of the decision-making process. George Bush Snr once remarked that ‘I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots . This is one nation under God’ [here]. He apparently wasn’t keen to go much further, but it’s an illuminating statement. Not too far from that to disenfranchising anyone the state deems an unbeliever. So that's equality before the law out the window too.

I have no idea what the answer to this conundrum is. I suspect that there isn’t one, or rather that the solution will emerge in the usual dialectical (and potentially violent) manner. But in such a situation, surely the last thing you should do is make any attempt to solve the first problem in any formal manner. As soon as you do, one of two things will happen: either you will find yourself imposing one particular identity or you will make the second problem absolutely unavoidable.

In the former case you may well have persuaded yourself that certain key values can be legitimately generalised, because ‘surely’ everyone (‘every right-thinking individual’?) would subscribe to such values, but that would be fatal. But what are these true universals? A belief in democracy? Individual rights? Respect for the right of others to practice their beliefs in peace? But which of these is compatible with fundamentalism of any kind – Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu – or even secular?

On the other hand, the people who are taking it upon themselves to solve it are perhaps the least qualified to do so: politicians like Tony Blair whose sensibilities are limited to an extraordinarily narrow (and rigidly a priori) conception of how the world should work. If you are waiting for a solution, don’t hold your breath…

Friday, March 30, 2007

Latest position on Iraq

I don't normally distribute propaganda from the US State Department, but...

YouTube - MADtv - iRack (including blooper in the end)

Personal beliefs and democratic representation

I see that part of Tony Blair’s recent charm offensive (was there ever a more appropriate phrase?) with Ian Paisley was a regular exchange of religious books and thoughts. Given the explicitly religious basis of Paisley’s politics, then from his point of view this is understandable. But in Blair’s case, one must ask oneself what influence his religious beliefs have over his own actions and decisions. If he was simply adapting to Paisley’s preferred language, then so be it.

If, however, he was allowing his private religious beliefs (which he has never been willing to explain in public) to interfere with his political judgement, then I can barely express how enraged I am at the idea that political power in this country is in any way under the control of individuals whose true beliefs are not open to explicit democratic scrutiny.

Like any other closet belief, this is quite unacceptable in the leadership of a democratic society. How can I possibly anticipate the kinds of decision they might make, and so decide whether I can trust them with political power? Although both freedom and privacy of belief is fundamental in a free society, this does not extent to those who seek office. How would he feel about discovering that a member of his Cabinet was a closet communist or Nazi? It is not that I would dream of equating most religious belief with totalitarianism, but from the point of view of the non-religious, basing political decision-making on a religious basis is simply irrational, which is pretty much the next best thing.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

From The Economist: A moment of unaccustomed modesty

I see that The Economist's advertisement on the New York Times site quotes the lovely Larry Ellison to the effect that "I used to think. Now I read The Economist".

So there we have it: The Economist is now actively promoting itself as the journal for people who have given up thinking. Nice to see conservatives coming clean about what the rest of us have suspected for a while now.

Monday, March 05, 2007

House of Lords reform: Part 94

Yet again British politicians are arguing about replacing the House of Lords. The main bone of contention seems to be just how elected it should be: 0%? 20%? 50%? 80%?

Maybe I’m not understanding something here. We are allegedly a democracy, if only of the rather stunted ‘representative’ or ‘parliamentary’ kind. So what exactly is the case for anything less than 100% elected? Beats me.

After all, there’s nothing to stop any government asking ‘Lord’ Putnam or ‘Lord’ Bragg (why aren’t these people embarrassed at the very thought of a title?) for their opinion about an issue if they really want to hear it. But putting them into Parliament with the right to make law, especially without any possibility of democratic recall, is completely barking.

These people do not represent anyone, have no right to govern anyone, have no right to tell me how I must behave, and cannot be given that right by anyone, even if they are the government. Full stop.

Monday, February 26, 2007

Private health and education: a proposal

Here's a suggestion for getting politicians and civil servants to focus urgently on what the rest of us really value. We should prohibit all members of all governments and all senior civil servants from sending their children to private schools or themselves and their families from using private health care. Perhaps they should be compelled to live in average state-provided housing too - not the usual grace-and-favour mansions!

Monday, February 19, 2007

A little militant atheism wouldn't come amiss

My wife tells me that this one is going to get me a fatwa from the Archbishop of Canterbury, but here goes anyway.

Religion is absurdly privileged in our society. Just the other day the Catholic primate of England (the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor) claimed that Catholic adoption agencies should be exempted from a law requiring agencies to consider gay couples as adoptive parents. The reason he gave was that “The rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well-meaning”. This was promptly supported by the primates of the church of England.

Of course, they did not really mean it. Or rather, they did not mean that the rights of conscience in general cannot be made subject to legislation. After all, there are plenty of positions held most conscientiously by other members of society that I suspect that the leaders of the Christian church would indeed want to have subjected to legislation. Or do the leaders of the Catholic and Anglican churches think that the beliefs of Nazis, racists and others, which are just as sincerely and conscientiously held as their own, should also be given free rein? How about a Nazi adoption agency that refused to allow Jews or blacks to adopt white children?

In fact what they really meant was that religious beliefs should be privileged. Why this should be so apparently goes without saying. But what special merit is there in religious belief? I cannot think of any, though I can think of many reasons for being deeply suspicious of any belief that announces that it is the will of God.

One of the sillier expressions of pro-religious prejudice is the widespread view that religion is the only basis for morality. The opposite is closer to the truth: morality based on (revealed) religion is quite amoral, as it seems to consist of accepting someone else’s morality (i.e., God’s) regardless of whether one actually believes it oneself.

It would be reassuring if all religious people who came up with the morally repulsive notion that we should obey the will of God merely because it is the will of God really meant that one should analyse what we (supposedly) know of that will and its moral implications, decide whether it did indeed provide a valid moral framework, and only if it did, then adopt it as our own. But then it would be our will, not that of God, and if (as becomes evident when comparing the Old and New Testaments) God changes his mind, we would persist with our own beliefs until shown that they were wrong.

But what do we actually get? A series of beliefs of no obvious moral merit, including some fantastically vicious and bloody threats in the Old Testament. Most of it reminds me of Dr Johnson’s famous (but apparently apocryphal) book review – ‘Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good’. Insofar as it is morally acceptable (or even intelligible), it could have been dreamed up by pretty much anyone, and to the extent that it is not, then it is not, and should be ignored or even actively resisted.

And that is the point. There is no reason society as a whole should privilege a system of ideas whose starting pont is outside the universe, and indeed outside all possible knowledge and experience, and then presumes to pronounce on the world at large, even when it is completely ignorant about most of it. There are plenty of ways of responding to people who think like that. One of the most effective is to increase their dose.

Speaking of bodily functions...

What does it tell us about the English that we have no words for bodily functions that are not either coy, childish, clinical or obscene?

I discussed this with my Spanish brother-in-law some years ago, and he literally could not believe that such a language existed. Certainly there is something repressed about English attitudes to the body, but I would have thought we were not much different from other Europeans in that respect.

It may be an interesting measure of whether we are actually finally getting over this perverse attitude if such words start to enter the language. Certainly it is much easier to talk about sex, defecation and all the rest now than when I was a child, but relatively few of the words seem to have changed their register. Perhaps ‘gay’ is a good counter-example, but I can’t think of many others.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

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Only obeying orders

I wish someone would explain to me the moral difference between ‘I was obeying the will of God’ and ‘I was only obeying orders’.

Let me start by assuming that those who favour the view that the world and human beings were created by a divine force are right. Let me also assume that a defining quality of human beings is our capacity for moral responsibility. A cat can slaughter a rat but it is not an immoral action. It would not even be an immoral action if it slaughtered another cat, or a human being. A human being, by contrast, must consider the moral dimension of all its actions, no matter how trivial, because every action potentially has a moral aspect, and we are morally responsible.

One thing we have discovered in the last half-century (starting with the Nuremburg trials of 1946) is that I cannot absolve myself of my moral responsibilities by simply claiming that I was ordered to do this or that by a higher authority. It is still my action, and the only moral effect of my having been ordered to carry it out by someone else is that they are implicated in it too. But their responsibility in no way lessens my own. This is not a zero-sum game in which the more responsibility they have the less I can be blamed.

And that is, as far as I can see, part of the religious message, at least as far as the ‘revealed’ religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism are concerned. Obeying God is justification enough, and disobeying God inherently wicked.

But why should I obey the will of God? Or rather, why should I obey it unless I also agree with it? Conversely, if I do not agree with it, am I not a hypocrite? It doesn’t make any difference that it is the will of God – I am still responsible for my own actions, regardless of who put me up to them. How is this different from ‘only obeying orders’?

Indeed, in what sense is obeying the will of God a moral stance of any kind? How can I just follow anyone’s orders without being guilty of abdicating my responsibility to evaluate their merits? But abdication is simply amoral. In fact I’m not sure it’s even that!

Monday, February 05, 2007

Measuring corporate greenness

Nice to see that Wal-Mart are putting more emphasis on environmental issues. Or at least, it may be nice. Who knows what they are really up to? Like any big company, their primary interest is in profit, and anything that deflects them from that goal needs to be corroborated thoroughly before it can be confidently accepted as a socially or environmentally responsible action.

For example, it is perfectly clear that the great bulk of Wal-Mart’s supposedly green initiatives will actually reduce their costs. Cost-cutting has always played a major part in Wal-Mart’s strategy, and although it may benefit the environment is some ways, in others it does not. For example, reducing packaging is often a good thing, but pressurising suppliers to cut prices is not, in itself, good, either for the environment or for society as a whole. But it is undoubtedly good for Wal-Mart’s bottom line.

So how can you tell when a big company is really contributing to improving the environment? From the point of view of individual actions, probably you can’t. Who knows what is in their financial interest, what is done for the sake of marketing their ‘good neighbour’ image, and what is really done for the sake of the environment?

But taking their actions as a whole, I would suggest a sequence of levels of credibility:


  1. They deny either that there is an environmental problem, that they are in any way a cause of that problem, or that they are responsible for doing anything about it.
  2. All those initiatives they are doing ‘for the environment’ are in their own interest anyway, are prioritised according to how much they benefit them financially. In other words, business as usual, re-sprayed green.
  3. Environmental benefits start to appear at the top of their list of initiatives because they are environmental. They are still in the company's own corporate interests, but their environmental impact takes priority over at least short-term financial gain.
  4. They start shouldering the costs of environmental improvement without insisting that this must have a payback for their company. Some things require sacrifice, and this is a sacrifice they are willing to make.
There’s a lot of grey in this sort of approach, but I for one would like to see a simple league table of companies based on something this simple and direct. I would be interested to hear about any company that made it to the highest level without a shareholder revolt and a huge amount of fudging.

If, on the other hand, Wal-Mart and the rest are just trying to build up their green credentials for marketing reasons or to deflect the prospect of regulatory intervention (hardly likely under the current US administration, of course, but who knows what lies around the corner?), then they are not simply manipulating the public. By creating the illusion that the biggest companies in the world – which is also to say, the some of the biggest economic forces – are taking action when they are really nothing but pursue the same agendas that got us where we are today, they are actually making the environmental situation worse.

If, on the other hand, Wal-Mart and the rest are just trying to build up their green credentials for marketing reasons or to deflect the prospect of regulatory intervention (hardly likely under the current US administration, of course, but who knows what lies around the corner?), then they are not simply manipulating the public. By creating the illusion that the biggest companies in the world – which is also to say, the Great Powers of industrial capitalism – are taking action when they are really doing nothing but pursuing the same agendas that got us where we are today, they are actually making the environmental situation worse.

This possibility raises the next question. What should we do about companies that refuse to accept their responsibility for their impact on the environment, for the current environmental crisis and for its remediation? It does not require cynicism to expect that quite a few (most?) companies will be either too laggard or too unable to look beyond their shareholders’ profits to take responsible action.

So what do we do about the socially irresponsible corporation? Exactly the same as we do about the socially irresponsible individual. As with individuals, it would be absurd to expect them to do everything immediately, but those who do nothing – or who actively plan to make the situation worse – invite society’s contempt, anger, and ultimately constraint. If corporations wish to continue to operate within society, they must prove that they are good citizens. If they are not, then that is why we have a political system.

Friday, February 02, 2007

Oil not very slick

Oil companies go out of their way to make themselves seem greedy and irresponsible. Well, maybe not seem greedy and irresponsible - more like prove it.

It’s not as if they are inherently easy to criticise – after all, they may make a lot of mess, but they do it in an industry that a) is inherently messy, and b) makes products (petrol plastics, and so on) we could do without only if we gave up most of the modern world. It’s appalling that Shell’s CO2 emissions exceed those of 150 countries, but it sounds decidedly ‘holier than thou’ to complain about it when there is little evidence that the issue has really been taken to heart by the population as a whole.

So you have to admire their determination to make the worst of a bad job. Here are a few facts reported in today’s Guardian (a leading UK liberal paper):

  • Shell made $25 billion in profits in 2006 – a 21% increase on 2005.
  • They claim “it would be ‘pointless’ to say how much of Shell’s $23 billion capital expenditure is going into renewable energy schemes” (p28-29). CEO Jeroen van der Veer “indicated that the investment in renewables was small, saying it would be ‘throwing money away’ to invest in alternative energy projects that were uncommercial and people could not afford to buy. ‘We have to put more into research and get a value proposition’”
  • Meanwhile, on p.29, a US Government environmental agency has reported that there are still more than 26,ooo gallons of oil from the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster - the worst single pollution incident in history - in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and the spillage is shrinking by a neglegible 4% each year. Exxon Mobil's profits last topped $39 billion - the largest of any company, anywhere, ever. According to Exxon Mobil, "there is nothing newsworthy or significant in the report that had not already been addressed... The existence... of oil on two tenths of 1% of the shore of the sound is not a surprise, is not disputed and was fully anticipated". Yes, and the melting of the Greenland icecaps is fully 'anticipated' too, but that doesn't mean you do nothing. I live next to a small town park, and two tenths of 1% of that would be a very big mess indeed. Perhaps the CEO of Exxon Mobil would be happy if someone covered two tenths of 1% of his home with oil. And that's only one Exxon's spills.
  • Meanwhile, the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank) Kenneth P. Green and Stephen F. Hayward “have launched a major project to review and critique the report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to be issued in 2007” (AEI Annual Report: 10). The AEI, which has received about $1.6 million from Exxon Mobile, was on the Guardian’s front page for be offering $10,000 to scientists to rubbish the IPPC report, which estimates that it is 90% likely that major climate change is being caused by human actions. Not least the results of oil extraction, refining, distribution and use.

We all need to take action on climate change and the amount of oil we use, and that will almost certainly demand serious sacrifice. But companies that make vast profits out of this process bear an equally vast responsibility. If they want to be left alone, they have to act out that responsibly and invest a great deal more of their almost unimaginably huge profits in research – not just to create “value propositions” but to alter the fundamental balance of human beings and the environment.

Perhaps oil executives everywhere need to be reminded of the words of the American millionaire who said that he did not mind that the American public took 50% of his money in tax, given that he got 100% of his money from them.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Who owns your planet?

Yesterday my son asked me which was the biggest company in the world. I only had a vague idea, so we looked up the Forbes 2000 for 2006. I have a pretty jaundiced view of big business, but even I was shocked by the results. Here are some highlights (I have uploaded a spreadsheet to here):

  • Companies that make their money out of handling your money – banks, insurance companies, investment houses, and so on – make up 44 of the Top 100 and 13 of the Top 25. Only 12 of the Top 100 are oil and gas companies, though 6 are in the Top 25.
  • Although the money companies make only about a third of the Top 100’s total sales and profits – meaning that they are a little less profitable than average – they control 82% of all the Top 100’s total assets. I’m not sure how this is calculated, given that a lot of these assets are going to be shares in other companies, but this is an astonishing stranglehold on our collective wealth.
  • Of the Top 100, 35 are from the USA, 7 from Japan, 50 from Western Europe, 3 from China, 2 from Canada, and one each from Australia, Russia, Brazil and Korea. In other words, with the exception of the sole Brazilian representative, if a major company is not from a core industrial capitalist country, it is from a profoundly undemocratic country. In other words, the vast majority of the people in the world are completely unrepresented even in the most indirect sense that their governments might intervene.
  • The highest ranking company that is not from the USA, the European Union, Switzerland or Japan is Samsung Electronics, from South Korea. It comes 48th. It is also the only company not from USA, Western Europe or Japan that is not either in money or oil.

What bothers me about this is the sheer concentration of power and unity of interests. Companies of this magnitude are comparable to whole countries in the rest of the world, and with the backing of their respect governments, a lot more powerful. They are also concentrated in two particular sectors. Oil and gas are among of the most socially and environmentally destructive industries in the world. In the case of the US companies, George W. Bush’s Cabinet is currently awash with their representatives, and the Bush administration’s record on the environment is unutterably dire.

And the money industries are concerned solely with, well, money. They have neither goals nor measures nor interests that are more human than that. Perhaps I should not be so pessimistic. Just this evening I heard an representative of Lehman Brothers (themselves major players in capital markets and in investment banking and management) saying that they would now recommend companies that face up to the implications of global warming and other environmental threats. As I have argued elsewhere, even capitalism can be persuaded to take issues like technical efficiency, human need, environmental impact and even ethical obligation into account when it makes more money than the waste, pollution, incompetence, cheating and murder.

It’s not that capitalists personally prefer either – it’s just that, if they aren't constantly proving their economic value, then they lose their livelihood. Like you and me, really. However, the only measure businesses really apply is their profitability. At the same time, the higher up you go in business the more effectively you are insulated from the problems your company creates or from any version of reality in which the realities of technical efficiency, human need, environmental impact or ethical obligation are visible in terms other than profit.

On the other hand, today McKinsey published a survey of US CEOs,who say that 'a comprehensive understanding of public issues and a strong network of peers with a similar interest make it easier for them to play a leadership role, while time constraints keep them from playing an even larger role'. Should we be pleased? As the Forbes data shows, these people exercise immense power, so perhaps we should welcome their greater involvement in wider spheres.

But two things should make us pause at such a prospect. Firstly, who voted for them? Even by the minimal standards of representative democracy, they represent no one but their shareholders, who in turn are often other companies whose interests are represented by other CEOs - so it's not only absurdly narrow but also conveniently self-serving. And secondly, what do they represent? Society as a whole? The interests of the population at large? Anything but.

To quote Adam Smith - the first and greatest prophet of business - the captains of industry are 'an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who generally have an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it'.

I don't mind hearing their 'technical' advice about how to run a capitalist business. But the very idea that they should have any more say in the government of society - or receive any more respect - than anyone else makes my skin crawl. Meanwhile, here in England the government hands out peerages - which is to say, the right to participate directly in the government of this country - to individuals whose main contribution to the political process is to have bribed the right party.

Opium of the people

Some time ago the listeners of one of BBC Radio 4’s flagship intellectual programmes, In Our Time, voted Karl Marx, by an ‘electoral tidal wave’, the greatest philosopher of all time.

Speaking as an unreconstructed leftie, it was an extremely satisfying moment. Right there in their greatest bastion, Britain’s middle classes were voting for the very nemesis of their world. Plainly they either don’t understand what Marx actually said or they are none too happy about the world they live in. A bit of both, I suspect.

It was especially pleasing to hear the programme’s presenter, Melvyn Bragg, stutter and sway as he tried to come to terms with this appalling denouement to his pet project. But he failed. All through the special programme on Marx that followed he seemed to be unable to come to terms with – or even allow much discussion of – the idea that Marx might still be so utterly relevant to his audience’s lives. As one of the great symbols of Tony Blair’s far more appalling New Labour project, in which even England’s peculiarly pale and uninteresting excuse for a socialist political party has finally been put to sleep, it was a pleasure to hear Melvyn Bragg so far out of his comfort zone - not to mention his intellectual depth.

But this enthusiasm for Marx was by no means a flash in the pan. I can’t cite any evidence, but I distinctly recall hearing a year or so back that the most popular courses at London University were on Marx and Marxism. More budding In Our Time listeners in the pipeline, no doubt. Watch out, Melvyn.

But what exactly is it they are looking for right now? Indeed, what does the average member of England’s middle classes know about Karl Marx that they would vote for him? What does the average student know about him that would actually drive them into the lecture theatres?

Having done my bachelor’s degree (1976-1979) in psychology and sociology, Marx was an unavoidable item on the agenda. But as this was the 70’s and I had had the good sense to be 16 in 1968, I already knew a little about him. And of course he was regarded as an entirely contemporary thinker, though usually for all the wrong reasons. Most of the Marxists I knew had vaguely pro-Soviet leanings. I even knew one couple who were outright Stalinists, and spoke in that strange mechanical lingo of ‘dialectical materialism’ that is so unlike Marx himself. He could be a pig to read, but there are whole chapters of Capital that read like magical incantations: an immanent power flows through them like a terrible force. You read them and your skin tingles and your heart leaps. Really.

But only a tiny fraction of Karl Marx’s immense outpourings on history, capitalism, calculus, the Tsarist Secret Service and so on has entered into popular consciousness. Given the man’s impact on the world, this is hard to explain. Perhaps it is the often extreme tedium of his literary style - Volume II of Capital is excruciating - or perhaps it is the fact that, in many circles, quoting Marx has about the same respectability as quoting the Devil. At the very least you find yourself being looked at as though you’ve just made a joke in very poor taste.

However, Marx had many moments of sheer literary genius, so it is inevitable that some small nuggets should have crept into everyday rhetoric. Unfortunately, most of these prove to be fools’ gold, at least for would-be Marxologists, being either unoriginal to Marx or fundamentally misunderstood. In fact it is hard to identify any one remark with any one writer, given that the era all but breathed revolutionary rhetoric. Marx himself attributed ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat’ to August Blanqui (1805-1881), ‘workers of the world, unite!’ is a thoroughly un-Marxist translation of Marx's actual words, and ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ is very likely borrowed from the anarchist Michael Bakunin (1814-1876). Finally, ‘The workers have nothing to lose... but their chains’ was probably original, but co-authored with Engels (altogether more readable than Marx, though intellectually much less brilliant). It is also from the Communist Manifesto, which is probably the worst piece of Marxism Marx ever wrote, so Karl might have been grateful if history had consigned it to ‘the gnawing criticism of the mice’, as he did the much better German Ideology.

Still, it is especially ironic that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is so well known, since it always seems to have been understood in a sense which is almost the opposite of Marx’s original intentions. But then I suppose a dialectician must expect his best phrases to be turned on their heads. Nowadays it is taken as a straightforward denunciation of religion, whereas Marx was surely trying to express the equivocal relationship between religion and human existence. To put this famous remark back into context:

Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call them to give up their illusions about their condition is call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. (From the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.)

This brilliant, terse, pungent summary of the materialist view of religion is typical of Marx at his best. The method it uses is also typical of Marxism in its mature form: a revelation of the dynamism of history and consciousness, sweeping up everything in its path, both driven and undermined by the inexhaustible tension between moral consolation and political action. Writing like this, Marx has a startling way of showing that fireworks and analysis can go hand in hand. Which only makes it all the greater shame that, at his worst, Marx is stunningly dull and obscure. However, in this case it is clear that the object of Marx’s criticisms is not religion as such. For him religion was mainly a symptom of underlying structures and processes that produced the things he really did abhor - oppression, ignorance, fear, alienation. He sympathises with the underlying need, even if he does deplores the way religion fulfils it.

Perhaps it is just as well that Marxism can only be comprehended by going beyond the rhetoric and into serious research. Perhaps this shields it from the toy Marxism of so much modern day revolutionism, which takes the title of socialist even while depriving socialism of all humanity. In fact, along with ‘democracy’ and 'nationalism', ‘socialism’ spent most of the 20th century as little but a substitute for ‘true religion’ as the indispensable rhetorical device of Western politics. Where a century or two ago the crucial justification of revolution (or reaction) was that it would refurbish the faith to its ancient purity, today it promises the rule of the people in some form. What then does it matter that Marx is misquoted, any more than that the Sermon on the Mount is subverted by hypocritical churches? It's not as though the people who misquote him would be any more likely to institute a socialist society if they got the words right.

What did I personally find in Marx? A while ago an old friend of mine asked me whether spending two decades in business had altered my assessment of Marx. Yes, I said, it had. I am now even more convinced he was right than ever. What I found in Marx is the greatest and most fearless theorist of human freedom of all time. No, Melvyn, not the greatest philosopher of all time (at least among Westerners, I think that one goes to Hegel), because philosophers sit in university libraries and think deep thoughts. Marx did all that and then took it out of the library (the British Library in his case) and into working class politics, newspapers and dozens of great political tracts.

That’s what I want to do when I grow up.

What’s in a name?

What a silly line, even if it is Romeo and Juliet (Act II, ii, 43).Still, I’ve had my doubts about Shakespeare ever since I discovered Hamlet wasn’t a farce. Like ‘Fine feathers... ’, which sometimes do make fine birds, names can be critical. Imagine being blessed with one of the following:

  • Mrs Belcher Wack Wack
  • Newton Hooton
  • Goody P. Creep (undertaker)
  • Preserved Fish, Jr
  • Mrs Screech (singing teacher)
  • Larry, Harry and Jerry Derryberry (not, alas, brothers)
  • Gaston J. Feeblebunny
  • I. O. Silver
  • Zezozose Zadfrack
  • Mr Vice (890 arrests, 421 convictions)
  • Cardinal Sin (Catholic Primate of the Philippines)
  • Virginia May Sweatt Strong
  • T. Hee
  • B. Brooklyn Bridge
  • Concerto Macaroni
  • Cigar Stubbs
  • I.C. Shivers (ice man)

– all recorded and authenticated in John Train’s Remarkable Names of Real People. And some choice names from my own (mostly unauthenticated) records: Brain (... ) and Head (1861-1940) were eminent neurologists. The head of the Motor Industry Research Establishment used to be a Mr Morris. One of my sisters was at school with a Miles Inigo Gapper and his sister Flavia, and one of my children’s cookery teachers is called Mrs Eatwell. Really. (I also have a colleague named Max Loosli who wanted to name his consultancy business Loosli Managed Projects, but that's a little contrived.)

It’s hard to imagine going through life with this sort of burden and getting out alive. Anyone named Quasimodo is surely destined for bell ringing and bad posture. Mr Train also reports that the early Puritans favoured names such as Fly Fornication, though he does not say whether this was intended as an exhortation to rectitude or the most ambitious perversion ever conceived. Anyway, eat your heart out, Charles Dickens.

Just as bad are names that sound like a prize-winning petunia.

But it’s not all negative - names may have the most tonic effects. As Mr Train points out,

General Ulysses Grant... what panache! Led by a Hiram - the General did in fact start life as Hiram - the boys in blue would have cracked; Gettysburg would have gone the other way. Under President Oscar Lincoln the Union would have sundered.


Maurice Bonaparte? Melvin Churchill? However, that is not to deny that whenever names are deliberately manipulated, the intention and the consequences are almost always bad. Of course, if I’d been born Marion Morrison or Archibald Cox, I dare say I’d have changed it to John Wayne or Cary Grant. But more than mere aesthetics, these are ideological names ‑ WASP names. Issur Danielovich Demsky changed his name not to some other Lithuanian Jewish name more manageable to Hollywood tongues, but to Kirk Douglas.

All in all, parents should be licensed before being allowed to name their offspring.

Campaign for the Rectification of Names (or Telling It Like It Is, as we used to say around 1972). Why don’t we have one? See Fung’s history of Chinese philosophy.

Ministry of Defence. Peace keeping. Military intelligence. Airline food. Free enterprise.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be

The trouble with this familiar old saw not that it is misquoted or misunderstood, but that it is such dangerous advice. Nor is it improved, as many quotations are, by being restored to its original context:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;For loan oft loses both itself and friend,And
borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act I, scene
iii)
In an economic system like capitalism, unsated by the most extravagant waste and debt, this would be unorthodox advice to say the least. But then, most proverbial wisdom on this topic has a wonderful irrelevance in the modern world. For example, ‘waste not, want not’. Debt is the drug of system too, and a mortgage on the future. OK on the individual level, but it mortgages the whole of future society too – under capitalism. Planned obsolescence as conquest of time by making it effectively pass faster. Fashion as socially approved form of whim. Conspicuous consumption.

The successive crises of over-production of the kind to which capitalism is so prone are only exacerbated by beggaring our children. Brave New World homilies to waste as fundamental truths of consumer capitalism. It expands the basis of production, and thus of sales and profit. But it adds nothing to our objective well-being. Individual indebtedness in Britain.Indebtedness of the Third World. Debt as basis of power over Third World and quiescence at home.

The gap (and indifference) between profit, technical excellence and human need.

Elementary, my dear Watson

It's strange where lessons in management can be gleaned from.

Having recently read all the Sherlock Holmes stories (not for the last time, I suspect), I can assure the reader that Holmes never utters the words, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’. ‘Elementary’ sometimes, and ‘My dear Watson’ often, but never together. Conan Doyle's son used it in an attempt to prolong Holmes’ career, though not to any enduring effect.

Of course, that should not stop anyone ‘quoting’ Holmes/Conan Doyle to that effect. It is a very good phrase. In John Lennon’s case, it has even been embellished - twice:

Harrybelafonte, my dear Whopper
and

Ellafitzgerald my dear Whopper (both from A Spaniard in the Works, Jonathan Cape, 1965)
As Umberto Eco has observed, William of Ockham (c. 1285-1349) was clearly an ancestor of Sherlock Holmes (fl. 1887-1927). When the famous detective asserted that:

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four)
… he was only reiterating his philosophical forebear’s famous dictum that one should always prefer the hypothesis which calls for the least number of assumptions. Or, in Ockham’s own words:
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
- which is to say, entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. It’s an attractively simple, all-purpose principle, a sort of intellectual Swiss Army knife, and it’s interesting that such otherwise dissimilar figures as Holmes and Ockham should agree on this issue. Not only did they live six centuries apart but, as nominalist philosopher/amateur coiffeur and consulting detective/cocaine addict respectively, their experience could scarcely have been more different.

At first sight it seems that this most striking convergence must surely betoken a profound truth. Surely such a preposterous yet consonant mésalliance can only rest on a deeper meaning? But does their agreement indicate a verity spanning half a millennium and more, or merely a prejudice so commonplace that only the most foolhardy - or the most brilliant - would think to challenge it? Mere endurance is not evidence, one way or the other. After all, slavery was considered the natural order for millennia.

What should we do when ‘impossible’ turns out to be only the name of that part of reality for which our prejudices have no place, to sustain which we therefore have to introduce ever more - and ever more incredible - assumptions? Should we be whipping out that Swiss Army knife again when the situation really calls for is an intellectual linear accelerator? Is the principle of parsimony merely a principle of false economy?

For example, there is the question of cosmology. Leaving aside the obvious facts that the Earth is flat, stands still, and the Sun rotates around it once a day (to which either may have subscribed), Holmes and Ockham would both have taken a dim view of Copernicus. In fact according to Watson, Holmes was unaware that the Copernican revolution had ever taken place, so their intellectual alliance is obviously all the closer. And one cannot help but feel that Ockham would have felt much the same, if not about a heliocentric universe as such then certainly about the rather radical re-jigging of the cosmos Copernicus was proposing.

In assessing the change wrought by Copernicus, it is important to recognise why his theory was so appealing. First and foremost, Copernicus’ solar system did not work any better than Ptolemy’s, and indeed was in most respects an attempt to save the Copernican fundamentals such as a closed space, the circle as the perfect form of celestial motion, the epicycle and the eccentric as basic explanatory tools, and so on. Indeed, Copernicus’ account predicted the position of the stars rather worse than Ptolemy's. Nor was it more economical: not only did it call for exactly the same suite of spheres and epicycles but now there were 48 of the latter instead of just 40.

In fact, the only major difference was that the solar system was now centred on the Sun rather than the Earth. No basic change in the fabric of the heavens, no shift of method. Only a change in the arrangement of things. Of course this was pretty reasonable, given the appalling implications of a truly unbounded space combined with the lack of stellar parallax. In other words, there were almost no additional ‘entities’ or assumptions, yet what was needed was the complete re-conceiving of the universe - something which both Ockham and Holmes would have reviled.

Thus, the entire history of astronomy between Ptolemy’s atlas of the Heavens and Copernicus setting to with a chain saw consisted precisely of the kind of minimalist thinking Ockham called for - the same structure exactly, only with more or less epicycles. The problem is that possible/impossible is not the only dimension of knowledge. It might be so, if we already knew all the dimensions of reality, and could therefore derive every possible truth from first principles. But we don’t, so we must respect Holmes’ and Ockham’s right to believe what they please, but concur with Aristotle that:
A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. (Poetics, 24, 1460).
For, as an only marginally less prominent philosophical figure has explained:
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something which works in all respects than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, ‘Yes, but he or she simply wouldn’t do that. ’... The [impossible] merely supposes that there is something we don’t know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The [improbable], however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and its specious rationality... If it could not possibly be done, then obviously it had been done impossibly. The question is how? (Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, p. 132)
As usual, fiction is so much more truthful than mere fact (leaving aside the debatable conclusion...). ‘The facts’ are so often little more than a rag-bag, picked over now and then as circumstances dictate; great fiction, on the other hand, is deduced with geometric precision from a central truth, a overriding vision of the inexorable logic which underpins the merely correct.

And from time to time a revolution occurs that reminds us that, beneath the seeming self-evidence of the possible and the impossible there is a more or less hidden framework of concepts which determine what can even exist for us while thinking and reasoning in that mode. And there is no guarantee that the Universe is confined by the concepts which currently confine our minds. Thus, Copernicus’s universe was not merely unknown to Ptolemy; he might well have found it inconceivable. Likewise the relationship between Newton and Einstein and, I suspect, Darwin and quite a few eminent neo-Darwinians.

In short, intellectual history is the history not of intellectual accumulation but of intellectual struggle. And that struggle is not only a struggle to wrest truth from the Universe, but also a struggle to prise the beams from our eyes. Hence the transmutation not only of one scientific method into another, but also of base common sense into science - and, perhaps, science into some form of reason for which science and morality, politics and art are all one. Same for cognitive development.

Now what has all this to do with management? It really comes down to the all but universal management mantra that ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. I suspect that this really originates from Lord Kelvin, who once write that:
When you can measure what you are talking about and can express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
Ah, Kelvin. The man who used the latest thinking in physics to prove that Darwinism was impossible. But what is wrong with his emphasis on measurement? Well, as John Maynard Keynes put it:
Am I right in thinking that ... the statistical method ... essentially depends on ... having furnished, not merely a list of the significant causes, which is correct so far as it goes, but a complete list?

For example, suppose three factors are taken into account, it is not enough that these should be in fact verae causae; there must be no other significant factor. If there is a further factor, not taken account of, then the method is not able to discover the relative quantitative importance of the first three.

If so, this means that the method is only applicable where [one] is able to provide beforehand a correct and indubitably complete analysis of the significant factors. The method is neither one of discovery nor of criticism.
In other words, Kelvin is assuming what he should be proving, namely that he knows what he is measuring, rather than using measurement to decide what he is looking at. And that is exactly the fallacy of “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” – the view that we already know how things work, and measurement will only add to the precision of our knowledge. And indeed it will – but it won’t add anything to its accuracy unless we understand the things we are measuring. Which is precisely what we think we are using measurement to do...

Sunday, January 21, 2007

A judgment of Solomon

Where better to begin a study of proverbial wisdom than with the man who seemingly had it all? Here's the text (from 1 Kings iii, 16-28):

Then came there two women... unto the king... And the one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house. And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also... And this woman's child died in the night; because she overlaid it. And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me ...and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom. And when I rose in the morning to give my child suck, behold, it was dead: but when I had considered it in the morning, behold, it was not my son, which I did bear.

And the other woman said, Nay; but the living is my son, and the dead is thy son. And this said, No; but the dead is thy son, and, the living is my son...

Then said the king, ...Bring me a sword... Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other.

Then spake the woman whose the living child was, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it.

Then the king ... said, Give her the living child, ... she is the mother thereof.

And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the king: for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him, to do judgment."

You can't help feeling that Solomon would have cut an unforgettable figure as a social worker. Had the women between whom he judged expressed their love of their child in any way but as His Majesty’s view of mother-love dictated, the child would have been chopped in two. But of course that is precisely what proves Solomon’s wisdom - the fact that he was right. However, if that is the case, I can only hope that he was not so much wise as infallible.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Undo undo...

Am I alone in pressing a mental Ctrl-Z or Esc key when something goes wrong in everyday life? I don't mean metaphorically - I really do press the key in my head in order to fix breakages, undo something I just did, and so on – even when I break a glass or say something I shouldn’t have.

It's beginning to worry me. Does anyone else out there have this problem?

Monday, January 15, 2007

Suffering fools gladly

Of course, the norm is not to suffer fools gladly. It is even the subject of boasts and admiration - we often have at least a sneaking regard for those who do not suffer fools gladly. After all, fools are fools. However, the Bible, where the phrase originated, looked at it quite differently:

For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing you yourselves are wise. (Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, xi, 19)

Perhaps Paul was being ironic, although humour was never his strong suit. Of course, folly is not always what it appears. When the Earl of Rochester proposed the following (premature) epitaph for Charles II:
Here lies a great and mighty king,
Whose promise none relies on;
He never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one
His Majesty replied,
This is very true, for my words are my own and my actions are my ministers

But there are still more telling reasons for seeming folly. Zen masters’ method with madness in it. It appears foolish because it is we who are too sophisticated - or rather, too primitive - to appreciate its utter logic.

Altogether more dangerous is method with madness in it - economic apologetics, scientism, etc.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

My country, right or wrong

This bizarre, odious and possibly insane sentiment originated with a slightly more innocuous toast by Stephen Decatur (1779-1820), an American patriot of the post-Revolutionary period (when it no doubt seemed very sound). In 1816 he proposed thus:

Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be right; but our country, right or wrong. (Quoted in A. S. Mackenzie, Life of Decatur, ch. 14)

Carl Schurz [?] made a better stab at it:
Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.

But ‘my country, right or wrong’ (only the other side of vox populi, vox dei) is all that has come down to popular consciousness, and to provide countless little reactionaries with a rhetorical flourish to their vulgarity, in response to which GK Chesterton replied:
"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober".

Nor do all Americans share Decatur's views:
You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it. (Malcolm X)

And in general, to a European ear, so much of American ideals and ideology is barely intelligible. As GK Chesterton also said:
There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.(New York Times, 1st February, 1931)

The ideal American certainly seems to live on a very different planet from most real Europeans. He (and the ideal American is a he) still believes in Old Glory, the unity (more or less) of his country (E pluribus unum) and that no Presidential candidate is worth a vote unless they can command an occasional tête à tête with the Almighty:
It is inconceivable to me that anyone would think that he could do this job, the Presidency, if he couldn’t call on God for help and have faith that he’d be granted that help. (Ronald Reagan, Time, 15th May, 1976)
To which the Almighty replied (through his amanuensis, Edward Sorel):
Go figure it!? The devil gets H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, Sam Clemens, Billie Holliday, Gershwin, Porter, Schubert... and... and I... I keep getting dreck like this!!! (From Superpen: The Cartoons and Caricatures of Edward Sorel)


[Add Sorel cartoon of US Presidents talking to God.]

Such sentiments seem more than a little bizarre this side of the Pond. Still, the mere fact that Americans believe amazing things is not the only reason Europeans are so prone to discount and patronise American culture and thinking. On this side of the Atlantic, anti-Americanism is the acceptable face of racism. In any case, the Old World seethes with equally reactionary sentiments; we are simply too sophisticated, if that is the word, to say what we mean. After all, it is only a decade or so since Anthony Blunt was pilloried for preferring to work for a country in whose future he sincerely believed - the Soviet Union - rather than an ugly and decadent Britain busy appeasing Hitler. Of course, he would have fared at least as badly in the United States, not only as an enemy agent but also as a ‘premature anti-fascist’, as they used to say at the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Apparently you can object to mass murder too soon for the US Congress.

Americans despise Europeans because they have no money. Europeans despise Americans because they have no culture.

[Johnson and Bierce on patriotism.]