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.

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.

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?

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.