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?

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...

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.

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…