Is Asian capitalism different?

What I hope is a last word on derivatives. Apparently in 2000 Gao Xiqing, an adviser to the then Chinese premier, said that:

if you look at every one of these [derivative] products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bullshit. They are crap. They serve to cheat people.

[Quoted in an article by Kishore Mahbubani in today's FT.]

On a somewhat wider stage, however, Mahbubani's piece claims - quite rightly for the moment, perhaps - that there are various distinctively Asian versions of capitalism, all of which are a good deal more conservative than the ‘western’ model. For example, Asian societies have much higher levels of savings, since the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 have restored a degree of government regulation, they have learned to ignore the IMF’s market fantasies, and so on.

Which is very sensible indeed. But how sustainable is it? As Mahbubani notes, the high savings level is the product of centuries of economic and social uncertainty. But the same might be said of westerners, whose personal prudence in these matters was once legendary. Indeed, some economic historians have claimed that our high ‘propensity to save’ was one of the foundation stones for capitalism itself. Likewise for regulation: it is not so very long ago that no one in the West would have dreamed of deregulating our economies to anything like the extent that we have.

But things change. Once consumerism – rapidly emerging in the east as in the west – takes command, the vast marketing machines will make sure that savings are quickly eroded. There will come a time when Asian economists will recommend the deregulation of markets, and there will come a time when Asian governments will be so exposed to global economic pressures that they will be unable to resist. That’s how capitalismworks – not western capitalism or Asian capitalism - just capitalism. After all, what we have in the west is not a specifically western model at all – it is simply capitalism completely let off the leash. When it is let off the leash in Asia too, they can fully expect the same tribulations.

And plainly Asian capitalism can be fooled into playing along with the western model, because for a long while they did. In 1997-8 they learned better – but to what extent did even that happen because there are at least two major global players in Asia – India and China – neither of which has really been absorbed not the global capitalist network at every level of society? They are both heading – indeed, sprinting – that way, so why should we expect them not to succumb to the 'western' model?

There is an answer. It's a combination of peak oil, climate change and the ecological devastation that is already making itself felt all across Asia. But Asian capitalism? No, I doubt very much that that can resist effectively on its own. Why should it? 'Western' capitalism didn't, even though philosophers and historians and politicians and pundits of every stripe claimed the same virtues for the west as Mahbubani does for Asia.

I'm a PC - and I think I'm going to be sick

A few months back I was confronted with what was indisputably the most sickening advert I have ever seen. It was from Nescafé (of Third World baby notoriety) and it simply said ‘It’s all about you’.

Yuck.

But I let it pass – hopefully an aberration of narcissism you have to expect from advertisers from time to time.

But then just the other day I came across two at once: Armani’s ‘You make me feel’ and, the worst yet, an advert for Windows, with the strap-line ‘And it’s all about me’.

Yuck and double yuck. And deeply creepy.

Whoever wrote this nauseating line, please go away, read Naomi Klein’s No Logo, and think about your life. Because you need a new one – this one isn’t working.

Celebrities - so what?

Hard to find much to say about a couple of grubby boys on TV.

All celebrities remind me of the end of The Truman Show – although everyone’s completely enthralled while it’s on, the moment he walks away they just change channels and watch something else. That’s the difference between being a celebrity and someone who matters (such as my doctor, children’s teachers, even my dentist).

What worries me rather more us that there is a constant supply of celebrities to be enthralled by, though – it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep a hold on real life.

New York expresses its solidatory with the beleaguered banking community

New Olympic sports

Normally it’s quite hard to think of the Olympics without laughing, but alas we now enter that quadrennial nightmare when there’s nothing else in the media but sport, and particularly stupid sports at that. So I already hate the 2008 Olympics, and they haven’t even started. In the spirit of ridiculing the ridiculous, I suggest that the following new sports have exactly the same claim to inclusion as any others.

We have the 100m sprint. This is completely pointless, so what about replacing it with the more useful ‘Typing 100 words really quickly’?

No? Then what about adding to dressage and surreally ludicrous synchronised swimming (but sadly not the equally pointless wushu) the widely practiced sport of ‘ironing and putting your hankies away neatly’?

No? Well, what about pandering to the fantastically stupid tradition of allowing each host country to introduce a sport that they are guaranteed to win forever (e.g., the USA and basketball), and allowing China to introduce ‘crushing all resistance’, 'devastating your own environment while threatening to bring the world to the edge of ecological collapse' and (in honour of their acquisition of Hong Kong) 'shopping’? Of course, they would face competition in the latter from Japan, but the Japanese might be a bit distracted by their struggle with Italy for the ‘Political corruption’ gold.

No, it’s not clever to spend your life pushing a talent for running really, really fast to extremes or being able to shoot a gnat between the eyes. It’s not an accomplishment to he able to sail better than anyone else in the world or lift more weight. It is clever and it is an accomplishment to be a teacher, run a refugee camp, bring up a family in adversity, write music, be generous, cook well, fight for what you believe in or even (god help me) be an accountant, and to do any of these things to the best of your ability is an excellent thing.

But why should I admire someone whose sole achievement is to perfect the ability to do something that is completely and utterly selfish and useless? If they put a tenth of the effort and devotion that goes into their sport into being socially useful, they might be - well, socially useful. Instead of a bunch of self-aggrandising jerks whose physical achievements are no more admirable than stamp collecting or building sand castles.

In any other sphere these people would be regarded as a waste of space and in need of a good talking to. Why is it different with sport?

(Howefver, if you want a real sport to add to the Olympics, how about free running/parcour?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!