November 25, 2009
Groundhog Days (Inside The Iron Cage)
I’ve recently observed that debates on political economy from the 18th Century appear not-at-all dissimilar to those of today in some ways, that “progress” in politics is a suspect notion, that the contemporary left is broadly economically illiterate and overly fond of meaningless platitude and grand-sounding rhetoric.
So it’s interesting to see Max Weber writing the following in 1917:
“Today, some people even expect that the economic organisations of the future, which will be mainly governed by considerations of finance and currency policy, will slay the dragon of ‘capitalism‘, the father of everything evil and the source of all unrest. Some people are childish enough to imagine that the ‘communal economy’, and such-like slogans, which emerged during the war and from the compulsory organisations to which it gave rise, will be the forerunners of a fundamental change of ‘economic principle’ in the future that will resurrect the lost ‘economic morality’ of the past at some higher, ‘organic’ state of development. What makes anyone who is familiar with the reality of these matters so impatient with these literateurs is, above all, their profound ignorance of the nature of capitalism. The least offensive example of this is their failure, in their blissful ignorance, to see any difference between the war profits of the Krupp concern and those of some little black-marketeer in malt, since both, as they say, are products of ‘capitalism’ after all. Much more significant is the fact that they have not the faintest idea of the gulf of difference separating the kind of capitalism which lives from some momentary, purely political conjuncture – from government contracts, financing wars, black-market profiteering, from all the opportunities for profit and robbery, the gains and risks involved in adventurism, all of which increased enormously during the war – and the calculation of profitability that is characteristic of the bourgeois rational conduct of business in peacetime. As far as the litterateurs are concerned, what actually happens in the accounts of office of this type of business is a book with seven seals. They do not know that the underlying ‘principles’ – or ‘ethics’, if this term is preferred – of these two different types of capitalism are as mutually opposed as it is possible for two mental and moral forces to be. They have not the slightest inkling that one of them, the ‘robber capitalism’ tied completely to politics, is as ancient as all the military states known to us, and the other is a specific product of modern European man.”
We must allow for the contextual location of this passage. Weber is responding to a very specific situation of a powerful nation ravaged (and about to be defeated) in war, whilst also taking aim at the theories and followers of Durkheim in particular. But even so, there’s a diagnosis and complaint here that should have resonance for the contemporary left and those observing it. Times change – but how much does politics?
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The passage is taken from “Suffrage and Democracy in Germany”, page 89 of the Cambridge Edition of “Weber – Political Writings“
November 24, 2009
Economics, Democracy and the Death of the Left?
After my tirade against the left’s economic illiteracy, I’ve been contemplating aspects of the modern political-economic interface. I want to sketch a tentative thesis: that modern economics is fundamentally undemocratic in a number of important ways, and that this is worse news for “the left” than “the right”.
Let’s begin by noting that the vast majority of people engaged in political campaigning, activism or discussion want to make the world a better place. Of course, enormous disagreement arises about both the means adopted (state intervention vs. markets) and especially the ends (greater equality vs. merit; fairness vs. competition, and other such helpful caricatures). Virtually nobody wants to make the world a worse place. Although a tiny minority – National Front knuckleheads, sociopathic xenophobes – may want to make it a worse place for some people, that’s usually in order to make it better for others. However, most people want to make the world a better place for everybody. Salus populi suprema lex esto the Romans used to say, and almost everyone agrees.
Of course how we go about making the world a better place is the million dollar question. In modern representative democracy what usually happens is that rival groups form political parties, which seek to advance the means and ends their members and supporters favour. At general elections one party garners enough of a popular vote to assume the power of the state and begin legislating as the government. In theory, when it becomes the government, the party legislates so as to enact the means, which will bring about the ends, which together promote the values of the people who form and staff the party, as well as all those who voted for it. (Of course, we know that in practice it’s never that simple. But that seems to be the basic rationale underlying modern representative democracy).
Now a spanner enters the works. Let’s suppose that a party is elected to govern on a wave of popular support. Imagine it promised (e.g.) “more jobs”, or “lower taxes”, or “new hospitals” or “better support for our troops” or “great equality” or “less red tape”, or whatever. It will inevitably turn out that when getting down to the nitty gritty of how to make good on these stated goals, the politicians in question are going to have to make decisions relating to economic policy.
Economics is at the heart of our politics and society. Pretty much everything that a government does or changes will have economic ramifications, and I think it’s fair to say that a great many – and possibly the vast majority – will only be achievable through economic means. We want more schools and hospitals! How you gonna pay for them? We want lower taxes! Where you gonna make the cuts, who are they going to affect, and what impact will that have upon your spending commitments? We want lower unemployment! You’re going to increase spending to create jobs and induce harmful inflation then? And so on.
Economics is at the heart of all the big political decisions. Fact of life. Problem: very few politicians are economists. Take the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his predecessor-turned Prime Minister. What did they study at University? History. (Economic history in the case of the latter, but as anyone who has studied even undergraduate level economics will confirm, that’s really not the same). This is unsurprising, of course. Politicians are politicians. They spend their lives kissing babies, knocking on doors, selling their souls to party whips and lying (and don’t begrudge them for that, it’s just the job and somebody’s gotta do it). The result is that politicians are, naturally, reliant upon experts who are economists. People who know the theories, the models, the trends and who understand the complicated data and variables and stuff. People who can make it all comprehensible for the Rt. Hon. Mr Bloggs who of course did PPE, but spent his 3 years hacking at the union (or if he did do his reading, that was 30 years ago, only piffy undergraduate level and anyway everything’s changed now).
Recap: economics is essential to all political decision-making; politicians are not economists; economic advisers are indispensible.
Troubling thought number one: economics – or rather, modern, highly-technical, mathematically-driven economics – is innately undemocratic in its nature, and the non-democratic concerns get worse when economics interacts with politics.
Political debate and discourse is fundamentally democratic in a way that economics isn’t. By “democratic” I mean something quite specific: that ordinary people can understand, engage with and contest the basic building blocks of political discourse. Due to intelligence limits, not everybody can assess the competing virtues of esoteric formulations of the values of different conceptions of equality and how they interact with merit and opportunity. Nonetheless, pretty much every normal adult human being is able to take a stand on whether they would like a society with more equality (be that in terms of wealth, income, opportunity or whatever) or not, and can at some level (however confused, however based on misunderstanding) argue and debate that with others. After doing so, they can go into a voting booth in local and national elections, and cast a ballot accordingly for whichever party they think best reflects, or aspires to promote, their opinions and values. (Likewise, the intricacies of concepts like state involvement in private enterprise, or the market in the NHS, or the way we structure our tax regimes may, at some level, become accessible only to the highly intelligent. But at root, these concepts can be accessed and debated by ordinary people, and voted on accordingly).
Modern economics is different. It is so highly conceptualised, so mathematically driven and so technical that to get to the stage where one understands the principles of – say – macro economics (to the point of understanding the principles and intricacies of how government involvement will affect the balance of outcomes and probabilities, in a world of unknown and unforeseen possibilities) requires a level of training, intelligence and (given the structure of the modern discipline) mathematical aptitude that is beyond the reach (and means) of the vast majority of people. It was certainly beyond my reach, I’ll admit. I tried, but I just didn’t have the maths.
So it seems fair to describe modern economics as “undemocratic” in this straightforward sense: it is inaccessible to the vast majority of people, by its constituent nature.
You might ask why this matters. There have always been things which are so complicated – advanced quantum physics, say – that only a tiny minority can access them. So what’s my beef with the dull science? The difference, obviously, is that quantum mechanics isn’t at the heart of political decision-making. Economics is. And that has further undemocratic ramifications.
Consider: a government gets elected with popular support to (say) increase employment and decrease inequality. But the politicians have no economic expertise, so they rely upon their specialist economic advisers – who tell them, in sombre tones, that it’s simply not possible to achieve these things because the economic situation is XYZ.
It might look like I’m complaining about a stupid thing here. If a government was elected upon a mandate to turn the entire population of Britain into singing pink squirrels, and leading biological experts informed the scientifically-challenged politicians that this was simply impossible, I wouldn’t complain that there was something “undemocratic” going on.
But the mistake here is to assume that economics is like science (a mistake fuelled by the frequent economists’ pretension that it is). Economics is not an exact science – in fact, it is nothing like one. It is a lot of conjecture, often based upon much good reasoning and modelling, yet which must ultimately apply theory and deduction from observed variables and conceptual formula to a world which is unpredictable and where the unexpected (and previously unknown or misunderstood) has a habit of messing with everything.
All the best experts in the world can do is tell politicians what they think will happen. But OK (you say) that just delineates some limitations inherent in economics. Surely it’s not undemocratic to exhibit limitations?!
But perhaps it is if the theories and models that the economic advisers and experts are using are loaded with value-judgements and political preferences (some that perhaps the advisers and experts themselves don’t even realise are present). In such a case, we could imagine a government being elected to bring about X, but being told solemnly by its economic advisers that X is impossible. But perhaps X is in fact not impossible, but only ruled out by the models and theories of the economists, that embody anti-X assumptions and conclusions but which are themselves flawed. However, as the politicians are not economists, and must take the experts and adviser’s words for it, X gets abandoned. Even though X was what the government was democratically mandated to do. Now that to me looks undemocratic. And worrying.
The example of “X” is highly conceptualised (and oversimplified). Do I have any sort of proof that such a thing goes on; that economic orthodoxies are latent with political and value-judgements assumptions which may be deeply contested? Perhaps. The following is a little foray into economic intellectual history, which I’m happy to be corrected upon by those who know better.
Around the later 1960s/early 1970s, a theory began to emerge – one that was championed especially by Milton Friedman and the “Chicago School” of economics – that claimed unemployment in a national economy tended towards a “natural” rate. The previous view – broadly labelled “Keynesian” – was that unemployment was a function of “aggregate demand” (very roughly: the level of economic activity in an economy). Therefore, if aggregate demand was high, unemployment would be low, and vice versa. Accordingly, government could stimulate aggregate demand and thus lower unemployment. The “natural rate” view of unemployment, by contrast, claimed that because the level of joblessness tended to an “equilibrium” rate, any efforts to move it away from that rate – say by government interference – could only do so at the expense of creating disruption in other parts of the economy. For example (and to caricature) that government efforts to artificially lower unemployment below its “natural” rate led to inflation (a terrible evil due to the havoc it wreaks upon economic stability). The best thing to do was to let unemployment find its “natural” rate, stop interfering, and reap the benefits of lower, stable levels of inflation.
The Friedmanite “monetarists” largely carried the day. Unfortunately, the theory didn’t pan out so well. Here’s an interesting graph, which I’ve remarked upon before:
From the period 1979 (when Thatcher roughly began to move away from “Keynesian” policies and to accept the Monetarist “natural rate” view), we see that UK unemployment has clearly not tended to a natural rate equilibrium. It has moved about all over the place. With an interesting consequence: it wasn’t until 2004 that unemployment levels fell to being at level of the highest rate they had been during all the turmoil of the 1970s. For the post 1979 period, the UK experienced (and tolerated) higher rates of joblessness – with all the personal and social evils that brings – than for that bleak decade scarred so indelibly onto our collective political memories.
Now I can feel myself getting to deep waters, and I don’t have armbands. Hence I’d rather not labour this example, for fear of making daft mistakes. What I simply want to suggest is that the “natural rate” view of unemployment – which appears to have been wrong – was used to justify economic policies which in turn had profound political effects (not least upon the lives of all those blighted by unemployment personally or in their families).
My example may well be faulty. But it suggests nonetheless that economic models and theories – which can turn out to be wrong – can have profound effects upon our politics. And this must be undemocratic because the people who understand, interpret and advocate the models and theories are not our democratically elected, revocable and replaceable representatives, but experts and advisers who do the intellectual graft and inform the decision making of our broadly economically illiterate political classes, yet may be insisting upon the primacy of theory which contains values and assumptions which are antithetical to those of an electorate which mandated a government to act in its name.
Of course, it wouldn’t be so bad if one political party could just chuck out the others’ advisers when it won, and bring in its own. Except here perhaps “the left” has a real problem that “the right” doesn’t.
When I wrote that the left is broadly speaking “economically illiterate” and “devoid of ideas”, Chris Dillow noted that this wasn’t strictly true; that there are actually quite a lot of leftist economists out there. And he’s right of course. But I’m focusing on a more general level. It seems to me (and of course I could very well be wrong) that the broad consensus of economic theory is off to the right of centre, and that the majority of economic experts in and around governments are either rightists themselves, or have imbibed rightist assumptions embedded in the theory and practice of modern economics (which may have been increasingly disguised by the conviction that the discipline is an “objective” “science”). It’s a crass term, usually employed as a slur, but call it “neoliberal consensus”, if you like. The problem for me (or rather, for the left) deepens when it becomes increasingly apparent that there doesn’t look like much of an alternative, and certainly not beyond tinkering around the edges. What are the big ideas? What are these mythical “new models for growth” which we hear whispered at conferences and on blogs? And as Giles Wilkes pointed out to me, how are these vague things to be enacted without any fiscal resources?
There’s been lots of excited talk recently about a possible resurgence of the left in Britain after the aberration of New Labour. I’m not so sure. I’ve recently been pondering the possibility of whether New Labour represented the death throes of the British left, with the hegemony of anti-democratic economics as the silent euthaniser.
That the future is cold, unknown and a shade of permanent blue.
November 22, 2009
Some Ways to Think About Democracy
Over at Stumbling and Mumbling, Chris Dillow has recently been expressing various degrees of scepticism about the virtues and values of democracy. For example yesterday he wrote that:
“Of course, in a democracy irrational and illiberal preferences have as much weight as rational ones. Which, for some of us, is another argument against democracy.”
Now, I’m not sure to what extent Chris is being tongue in cheek in his expressed dissatisfactions with democracy. But I get the feeling that in these sorts of short closing remarks an awful lot of complicated stuff about what democracy is and why it might have value gets neglected. And that seems to me not only an intellectual shame, but slightly troubling. So this is primarily for you, Chris. But it’s also for everyone else who uses this very strange word “democracy”, to make many big points about many difficult things – whether you realise you’re making such points or not.
Let’s begin by recalling with John Dunn - as expressed in his excellent little book Setting the People Free - that democracy typically refers to at least two things. Firstly it’s a system of government, which has a decision-making procedure embedded within it. (Notice straight away that we’re into complications: what kind of system of government? America is rather different to the UK in institutional respects, after all. And how are “democratic” decisions made? Typically: by representative agents, selected by an enfranchised group that usually covers the majority of the adult population of a given territory. But what about referenda?).
Secondly, “democracy” also refers to a value. Democracy is generally treated – in political sloganeering, impassioned discourse and expansionist American foreign policy - as the only legitimate form of government in the world. But more than that, people frequently want to say that “democracy” has value; that a system, or procedure, or consequence which is “democratic” is better than one which is ”undemocratic” (a word typically employed, it’s worth noting, as a slur).
So, when we chuck around the term “democracy”, we’re chucking around references to at least two broad categories of things, which are themselves immensely complicated. Oh, and there’s also a little historical puzzle to consider too: apart from a brief, intermittent 100 year experiment in Ancient Athens from (very roughly) 440-322 BC, for all of history until 1789 AD (the year of the French Revolution), almost nobody thought democracy was a good idea. Indeed, even the authors of that great founding text of modern American Government - The Federalist Papers – were explicit in that work that they were certainly not founding a “democracy”, but a “republic” (from which to construct an “American empire”). Yet nowadays “democracy” is the only legitimate dog in town. A strange story indeed, you might think. But that’s a tale for another day.
Anyway, another man who thought democracy meant at least two things (and quite possibly more) was my personal intellectual hero, Alexis de Tocqueville. After travelling to America in the early 19th Century on a compare and contrast mission to discover if American democracy could ever be emulated in post-Revolution, post-Napoleon, total-mess-of-a-country France, Tocqueville wrote the splendidly enormous book Democracy in America. In that he noticed that democracy seemed to be not just a form of government – Americans voting in their presidential elections, for their state representatives, attending their local town hall meetings etc - but also about a social condition of society. American democracy was all about “equality of conditions”; that in the USA there was no “aristocratic” class, deemed to be intrinsically superior to the masses and bestowed with legal privilege accordingly. Rather, everyone was equal in legal – and crucially, social* – status. Democracy was intimately bound up with notions of equality and American people themselves were thoroughly conditioned by this belief in pervasive egalitarianism (even if the egalitarian picture got much messier the deeper one delved).
It’s worth mentioning Tocqueville not just to highlight that “democracy” may be a much trickier concept than typically assumed, but because his reflections serve as an entry point for my first comment upon why “democracy” might be a desirable thing to have. Tocqueville – you must understand – didn’t particularly like democracy. He thought it produced mediocre men who lived in mediocre times, (the grand aristocratical endeavours of the ancient world, for example, were finished – and that was to be lamented). Having said that, Tocqueville could see that democracy brought some considerably and important benefits, albeit strangely paradoxical ones.
There was no doubt for Tocqueville that democracy returned politicians of poor quality, who tended to enact laws of likewise poor substance. Looked at in isolation, this appeared a mark against the democratic system. But Tocqueville observed that the great upshot of democratic mediocrity was that it likewise didn’t produce terrible politicians who enacted terrible laws (or if it did, such politicians were quickly kicked out, and the laws quickly repealed). Under democracy, there would be no Napoleons conquering their neighbours in great flourishing sweeps of military grandeur - but likewise, there would be no catastrophic retreat from Moscow, and humiliating defeat of the state, with thousands of dead soldiers and innocents strewn across a continent.
For Tocqueville, this was the great paradox of democracy: a crappy system returning crappy politicians making crappy laws, which somehow managed to be the best system because when summed together all that crappiness worked. It worked, especially, to the best advantages of all the ordinary people, living under the equality of conditions. Whilst creating many mediocre men and perhaps no great ones, democracy ensured the former weren’t sacrificed in their thousands to the mad-cap schemes of the unrestrained latter.
In this sense Tocqueville’s observation (which is much more detailed and nuanced in his text than I’ve been able to render it here) is not a million miles away from Winston Churchill’s remark that:
“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried”
Churchill’s observation should ring especially true in the early 21st Century, as we look back not just upon the feudal and aristocratic systems that preceded modern democracy, but upon the very fresh graves of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism of the last century. So, substantive ethical point to think about number one: democracy (whatever that may actually mean), appears to be much better at not ruining the lives of the people who have to live under it than any other form of social-political organisation yet tried.
If you’re having thoughts about “enlightened dictators” who could avoid the worst excesses of tyranny and deliver us from the incompetence of democracy, well here’s another substantive point: your thoughts pertain to the fantasy of an unspecificed system never known, tested or tried. Democracy, on the other hand, has shown that whilst it can produce Richard Nixons and George Bushes, it doesn’t seem to produce Joseph Stalins. And that really does matter, as Tocqueville was able to observe even before the horrors of the 20th Century gave us pause for thought.
Switching focus, here’s some other things to consider. Democracy – if it is to be such – only really works when certain things are granted to the democratic population. I’m here thinking of certain “rights” which look like a pretty necessary prerequisites of genuine democratic society (in terms of government and social arrangements, again conveniently ignoring the complications). For example, it seems fairly obvious that for a “democracy” to exist, we need free and fair elections. This means that amongst other things, the government cannot control all the media in a given nation state, or prevent the population from associating and organising politically. Free and fair elections require freedom of the press, and freedom of association. These freedoms – and rights of the citizen body to exercise them – are built into the framework of functioning democracies. Of course, there will always be imperfections, failures, limitations and complications. No system is perfect. But if you value freedom of speech, press and association, then you really ought to value democracy – or at least think about the fact that no other system known or tried by humanity has ever managed to deliver these things.
So far, however, our thoughts have all been “instrumental”: about how democracy (whatever it might be) is valuable because it leads to other things we value being brought about. But is it possible that democracy is just good in itself, and not because of the consequences it creates or promotes?
It looks likely that the answer is yes. For consider, if a democracy is to be such, it seems like something pretty fundamental is going to have to obtain with regards to the citizen class of that democracy: they must all have equal rights to participate in the political process. This seems to be just a fact about democracy. If you exclude a portion of the population from the right to participate, on some arbitrary grounds (e.g. race, sex, religion), then that doesn’t look like a democratic government or society, even if some sections of the population are considered (full) citizens and allowed to participate, e.g. by voting or standing for election. (So yes, I don’t think Britain was properly a democracy until women were granted the suffrage, and yes, the example of Ancient Athens with it’s male-only suffrage and slave class raises very interesting questions).
Of course, some limits on who can participate will have to be imposed – under 18s, say, or maybe criminals. But the exclusions are the exceptions, and made with stated justifications; the default is that every citizen has equal right to participation, in lieu of countervailing considerations. And that to me looks like an intrinsically good thing about democracy. That it is ethically desirable for a state to extent equal rights to all citizen members, simply on the basis of their being citizens.
If equality doesn’t rock your boat, that’s not so big a problem. Think about this: democracies typically extend equal rights to everyone, and enshrine them in law. This means that everybody under democracy is treated equally before the law (at least in theory, though sadly often not in practice). The result is that democracy operates upon the principle that citizens have intrinsic equal worth vis-a-vis each other, and also vis-a-vis the institutions of the state, at least as far as the application of laws is concerned. Because of equality before the law, under democracy the state must consider all citizens as equal when exerting its power and influence over them or adjudicating between them, meaning that all citizens are deemed to have equal intrinsic worth.
If you’re an egalitarian, the equality bit is an extra bonus. But even if you’re not, you may think that a system of government that enshrines the intrinsic worth of all individuals, based simply on their being born a human citizen (and not, say, because of their race or religion) has a great intrinsic value. And this point still stands even if we enumerate all the ways in which existing democracies often fail to enshrine or uphold the intrinsic (equal) worth of all citizens: democracy does a damn better job on this score than any other system of governmental-social arrangement every witnessed or tried. And again, that counts for a lot.
Don’t get me wrong, I know I’ve brushed aside a whole heap of contradictions and difficulties. I’m not trying to say that democracy is perfect (we all know it isn’t!), or that everything I’ve said is uncontroversial or can’t be refined or challenged (almost all of it is and can). What I’ve tried to do is sketch some basic reasons why democracy is complicated, and why some of its potential values need to be considered carefully.
Want more? Well you could do a lot worse than buy the second edition of Adam Swift’s excellent little book Political Philosophy, A Beginners Guide for Students and Politicians. (You must buy the second edition, as the democracy chapter is absent from the first).
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* Ok, Ok, it’ a bit more complicated than that. But this is just an intro sketch.
November 20, 2009
The Left, The Right, and Advertising
I’ve edited this post slightly to make it tighter, and to incorporate an aspect of Giles’s comment below the original.
There are two adverts currently doing the rounds that really get on my nerves.
The first is for Clover, or Utterly Butterly, or one of those other butter-substitute spread things. You’ll have seen it, the posters are everywhere. They have a picture of some twit in a van holding a crumpet, and the words “Now With 70% Less Fat*” emblazoned in giant letters above him.
The things is, if you follow the asterisk and read the tiny print at the bottom of the poster, you will see that it says “When compared to ordinary butter”. I don’t think you’d be a fool for assuming that the claim of a 70% reduction related to the fat content of the same product but as formerly produced, not to ordinary butter generally. But then, you’d be wrong. Personally, I think this is misleading to the point of near-absurdity.
The other advert (or series of adverts) that irritates me is the T-Mobile “what would you do with free texts for life?” nonsense. Specifically, I’m annoyed by the bloke who is allegedly starting a “superband” now that he’s got free texts for life. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m fairly sure that what was stopping him from forming a superband was never the cost of sending inane chatter to people he knew (he’d surely heard of Twitter).
The whole T-Mobile advertising campaign is simply daft. Right? Then again, T-Mobile must have done extensive market and advertising research before ploughing huge sums of money into this campaign. So they must think it will work. Which leads me to wonder: are people really so stupid that this sort of campaign, rather than causing them to scoff at the ridiculous premise, will actually encourage them to switch phone companies?
Perhaps many people are that dumb. Or perhaps advertising makes them that way. That and the cold, cynical manipulation of Simon Cowell et al.
Which leads me to my substantive point. I hate advertising. A quick summary of why: it inculcates pointless desires in people, encouraging them to buy crap they don’t need (cf. JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society). This in itself would probably be no great disadvantage (indeed, it does lead to useful economic activity and create demand in the economy, so right now could have lots of advantages). But for me advertising becomes troubling when you take note of the status-anxiety and unhappiness that is fostered in people (especially women, heavily targeted by e.g. cosmetics advertising) who come to believe that they cannot live happy or fulfilled lives without the junk that advertising shoves down our throats all day every day.
Furthermore, because so much advertising is based on distortion, misrepresentation and outright lying, the general effect is the successful and pervasive dissemination of bullshit, dishonesty and manipulation. And I think we are significantly the worse for that.
And this is a point where I think people on “the left” can broadly be said to part company with “the right”. The former will tend to think there is something both intrinsically dubious in the practices of modern advertising, and undesirable in its effects. The latter will tend to think this is a bit silly: advertising is (on one conception) simply the process of rational economic actors seeking to maximise their utility by making other rational economic actors aware, or desirous, of their products. It thus prompts mutually beneficial exchanges, with create likewise beneficial effects for wider society. Or (on a related but different conception), that advertising is just something that human beings left to their own devices as free individuals will end up engaged in, and not something to be unduly concerned about – or at least, not so concerned as to think people’s lives are negatively impacted to the extent that the civil and market freedoms of advertisers ought to be curtailed in the name of any individual or social good.
If that’s right, an interesting consequence seems to follow. Insofar as the strength of hostility towards modern advertising does roughly track left-right divisions, this implies that being on “the left” is about more than simply having a preference for greater equality within societies (which tends to be how it’s delineated). Instead, thoughts about what kinds of practices we should be concerned about, and how those practices influence people’s psychology and well-being (and whether they have significant influences at all) seem pertinent too.
The first is for Clover, or Utterly Butterly, or one of those other butter-substitute spread things. You’ll have seen it, the posters are everywhere. They have a picture of some twit in a van holding a crumpet, and the words “Now With 70% Less Fat*” emblazoned in giant letters above him.
The things is, if you follow the asterisk and read the tiny print at the bottom of the poster, you will see that it says “When compared to ordinary butter”. I don’t think you’d be a fool for assuming that the claim of a 70% reduction related to the fat content of the same product but as formerly produced, not to ordinary butter generally. But then, you’d be wrong. Personally, I think this is misleading to the point of near-absurdity.
The other advert (or series of adverts) that irritates me is the T-Mobile “what would you do with free texts for life?” nonsense. Specifically, I’m annoyed by the bloke who is allegedly starting a “superband” now that he’s got free texts for life. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m fairly sure that what was stopping him from forming a superband was never the cost of sending inane chatter to people he knew (he’d surely heard of Twitter).
The whole T-Mobile advertising campaign is simply daft. Right? Then again, T-Mobile must have done extensive market and advertising research before ploughing huge sums of money into this campaign. So they must think it will work. Which leads me to wonder: are people really so stupid that this sort of campaign, rather than causing them to scoff at the ridiculous premise, will actually encourage them to switch phone companies?
Perhaps many people are that dumb. Or perhaps advertising makes them that way. That and the cold, cynical manipulation of Simon Cowell et al.
Which leads me to my substantive point. I hate advertising. A quick summary of why: it inculcates pointless desires in people, encouraging them to buy crap they don’t need (cf. JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society). This in itself would probably be no great disadvantage (indeed, it does lead to useful economic activity and create demand in the economy, so right now could have lots of advantages). But for me advertising becomes troubling when you take note of the status-anxiety and unhappiness that is fostered in people (especially women, heavily targeted by e.g. cosmetics advertising) who come to believe that they cannot live happy or fulfilled lives without the junk that advertising shoves down our throats all day every day.
Furthermore, because so much advertising is based on distortion, misrepresentation and outright lying, the general effect is the successful and pervasive dissemination of bullshit, dishonesty and manipulation. And I think we are significantly the worse for that.
And this is a point where I think people on “the left” can broadly be said to part company with “the right”. The former will tend to think there is something both intrinsically dubious in the practices of modern advertising, and undesirable in its effects. The latter will tend to think this is a bit silly: advertising is (on one conception) simply the process of rational economic actors seeking to maximise their utility by making other rational economic actors aware, or desirous, of their products. It thus prompts mutually beneficial exchanges, with create likewise beneficial effects for wider society. Or (on a related but different conception), that advertising is just something that human beings left to their own devices as free individuals will end up engaged in, and not something to be unduly concerned about – or at least, not so concerned as to think people’s lives are negatively impacted to the extent that the civil and market freedoms of advertisers ought to be curtailed in the name of any individual or social good.
If that’s right, an interesting consequence seems to follow. Insofar as the strength of hostility towards modern advertising does roughly track left-right divisions, this implies that being on “the left” is about more than simply having a preference for greater equality within societies (which tends to be how it’s delineated). Instead, thoughts about what kinds of practices we should be concerned about, and how those practices influence people’s psychology and well-being (and whether they have significant influences at all) seem pertinent too.
November 19, 2009
Regarding the PCC and Blogs
On Tuesday I asked people to (e-)sign a letter directed to the Press Complaints Commission regarding the proposal to include blogs in its remit of (so-called) “regulation”.
Rob Jubb of Consider Phlebas left the following interesting comment, which raises points that need to be addressed:
I’m really not sure that, as a political tactic, writing to an organisation that’s thinking about regulating you telling it that it’s shit at regulating what it already regulates and so you think you’re better off without it is very sensible. It seems likely to antagonise the organisation and hardly, given that presumably it knows that what it does already, likely to change its mind. Presumably, since the PCC is a voluntary organisation, the sensible thing to do would be publicly advise bloggers not to sign up to it. If it’s thought that there’s a risk of government requiring PCC membership, then the government, not the PCC, are the people to write to. Actually, this seems to me typical of Unity’s somewhat twitchily passive-aggressive style, but eh, let many flowers bloom and all that.
Here’s where I stand.
It’s true that Unity’s letter to the PCC is likely to antagonise it. Is that a sensible political tactic? I think maybe it is.
The PCC is a voluntary body which supposedly self-regulates the media industry. There are two main ways to interpret the grumblings about regulating blogs. The first is to see this as vacuous politicised nonesense; regulating blogs in practice would be virtually impossible, bloggers would have to have “representatives” on the PCC for this to make sense and that seems fairly unworkable, and ultimately the PCC is a joke which doesn’t enforce order in its own house, so has little prospect of achieving anything outside of that.
If this turns out to be the case, I think it’s still worthwhile sending an antagonistic letter. For the simple reason that an antagonistic letter signed by hundreds of bloggers is likely to get picked up by some parts of the press, and in turn can be used to highlight the gross failings of the PCC, and the comparative virtues of much of the (genuinely self-regulating) “blogosphere”. And that’s a good thing, as far as I’m concerned.
There’s another interpretation though, and it’s the one I allude to in my suggested ammendment at comment [7] under Unity’s original lette: that this be viewed as a potential PCC land-grab, whereby vested interests in the so-called Main Stream Media stake an early claim to be able to “regulate” independent blogs. Which effectively cashes-out in terms of having the power to shut blogs down. Think this is paranoid? Well, Rupert Murdoch is going to war with Google and the BBC, because he sees them as undercutting News International. In time, I think some blogs will come to challenge the predominance of important sections of the MSM (Huffington Post in the United States is arguably halfway there already). When that happens, the MSM outlets will react to the competition violently. If the precedent has been established that the PCC can regulate blogs…well it doesn’t take a genius to imagine how the MSM interests in the PCC will operate. Even if the PCC has some nominal representatives from “bloggers”, I doubt this would be an off-set to the vested interests in a PCC which might suddenly discover it has teeth.
If this is the case, then I think an antagonistic response from bloggers is fairly appropriate. Being nicey-nicey towards the PCC seems to me rather pointless. Better to be vocally and unambiguously opposed from day one.
As for Rob’s point that this should be a matter directed towards the government, I think pointing out that Unity’s letter will be CC’d to Ben Bradshaw MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and John Whittingdale MP, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, pretty much covers it.
And there’s also the matter of principle, frankly. After all, who do the PCC think they are, threatening to regulate blogs when their own house is such a horrible mess?
So whilst I think Rob makes good points that need to be addressed, my inclination is that belligerence is the best default position to take on this issue. Frankly I don’t see what’s to gain by being nicey-nicey with a PCC which is either proposing something vacuous or unworkable, or laying the grounds for a land-grab.
November 17, 2009
Sign up
Quick request for everybody to head over to Liberal Conspiracy and sign Unity’s letter to the Press Complaints Commission, objecting to its proposed regulation of UK blogs.
Unity sets out some solid reasons why this is a very unwelcome proposal. I add my further thoughts at comment 7, asking for these to be incorporated into the letter.
If you blog, and haven’t yet signed the letter, please do so now.
November 16, 2009
On EDMs
A lot of really silly things go on in the British Parliament. There are corridors you can’t walk down unless you’re an MP. Many (male) members of staff have to wear stockings and bow-ties as though they’ve just stepped out of a BBC period drama. There are systems of etiquette by which it is acceptable for grown adults to bay, scream and jab their fingers at other grown adults whilst they are attempting not simply to speak, but to debate our national legislation.
One of the silliest, however, is the continued existence of the Early Day Motion (EDM). What’s an EDM? This is a fair summary: a pointless and ineffectual statement by a group of MPs, pronouncing judgement upon some event, or calling for some course of action, which other MPs are invited to add their signatures to.
EDMs achieve absolutely nothing. They are vitually never debated on the House floor or in committee, and they do not lead to legislation being drafted, or even influenced.
So why do they continue to exist?
Well, if you’re an MP in a marginal constituency, and you get a lot of people writing in to demand that “something must be done about [insert personal hobby horse / mass-orchestrated campaign by pressure group]!” you can swiftly reply: “I completely agree! That’s why I have signed EDM Number 1245!” (or whichever), safe in the knowledge that this commits you to absolutely nothing of substance, whilst making it appear that you have done something worthwhile.
Trebles all round, eh?
It’s for this reason that MPs in safe seats generally tend not to bother signing EDMs at all. They know it achieves nothing, and they know they don’t need to massage the constituency vote. So EDMs are pointless to them, and viewed as a waste of time.
But what’s the harm, I hear you ask? Well, because Parliament is an anachronistic madhouse, all EDMs in every Parliamentary session are printed out, with vast numbers of copies scattered around the Parliamentary estate so that MPs, Lords and their staff can peruse them at leisure. Except, every time somebody adds their signature to an EDM, the entire EDM list has to be printed out again, and all the old copies thrown away. And that means a lot of copies being printed out and thrown away.
According to the Parliament website, the estimated average cost of each EDM in the 2005-6 session was £290. Sounds a tad expensive? It gets a lot worse when it’s recalled that in the 2007-8 session, there were a whopping 2727 EDMs.
Now I know these figures are for different years, but neither year was exceptional. So for a ballpark estimate: £290 x 2727 = £790,830.
I make that over three-quarter of a million quid spent on something which is completely pointless. (I don’t count helping marginal seat MPs pretend they are doing something when they aren’t as constituting a worthwhile use of tax money). And that’s not even factoring-in all the trees that have to be turned into EDM paper, the ink that’s wasted, and the electricity used in the whole process of reprinting the damn things every day. (And I don’t even want to think about the total of wasted paper, ink and electricity in a Parliament where every piece of official documentation, from what I could tell when working there, is printed out every single day, and updated EDM-style for every tiny alteration and change).
This is absurd. In the 21st Century, everything can and should be available electronically, with only exceptional cases needing to be printed off as a mater of course. With current technology there is simply no reason why EDMs need to be printed off at all. Everything can be put online, accessed by computer, iPhone and Blackberry. (Or for the older, less-techy and more exploitative Members, unpaid intern).
Even dark-age Tories are starting to wake up to the fact that as a society we need to change the way we live; sustainability, cost-cutting and waste reduction are the future. The least that Parliament could do is to set a good example.
Who knows, maybe the Tories could champion the “Paperless Parliament” to distract attention from the troglodyte misogynists littering their back benches?
November 15, 2009
Depth on Screen
Just a quick blog, partly to move my somewhat confused (and confusing) thoughts about Jon Cruddas’ communitarianism further down the home page.
Last night I watched Blade Runner for the umpteenth time. Now, I’ve long suspected that this film manages to capture and explore some pretty profound themes, in a way that escapes all but the greatest literature and stage drama. Most people would scoff at that, but I really think their wrong.
In particular, the character Roy Batty’s final lines (which I think can almost be considered as soliloquy) always strike me as not only deeply moving, but as relaying something truly significant and insightful about the nature of life and death:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire off the Shoulder of Orion
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain.
Time to die.”
Rendering this to text alone loses a great deal from the actual delivery by Rutger Hauer. So you really should watch it for yourselves (and not just on YouTube; you won’t understand the full impact unless you’ve watched the whole film first).
However, until last night I could never put my thoughts together about why Blade Runner managed to achieve something quite special, or how to explain that it constitutes so much more than “just a film”. Then I remembered Stephen Mulhall did an excellent podcast about the philosophy of Blade Runner, so I went a-Googling to see if he’d written anything more substantive about it.
And it turns out he has. This is compulsory reading, not just for anybody who actually wants to understand why Blade Runner is up there with the greatest literature and drama, but for anybody who would like to find better ways to think about what it is to be human, and what it is to live and die.
To bad you won’t live. But then again, who does?
November 14, 2009
Cruddas’ Communitarianism
Jon Cruddas MP put in an appearance at today’s Compass AGM. Say what you like about Cruddas (and I prefer to say that I like), he’s a damn good public speaker who exhibits rare qualities in a modern politician: heart-felt commitment, passionate belief, and a healthy disregard for spin, sanitisation and calculated presentation.
But I don’t agree with everything he says, and aspects of his leftwing communitarianism make me uncomfortable.
Cruddas relayed an anecdote-cum-metaphor, describing an old lady he’d met whilst canvasing one of his wards. 86 and living alone, this old lady didn’t get out much and her view onto the outside world was restricted – physically, but in large measure conceptually – to the street outside her front door. The man living opposite her had, however, dumped a mattress in his front garden which has been festering away for weeks. This rotting mattress came to dominate the old lady’s view of everything; as Cruddas put it, her whole world became filtered “through the prism of the mattress”.
This symbol of decay and degeneration was put to good use by Cruddas as a metaphor for wider political crisis and general feelings of helplessness – and they’re solution. He recounted how he and his colleagues had asked the man responsible for the mattress to remove it, but the man refused and ignored them (despite their offering a number to call which would mean the council taking it away for free). Spurred on by this, Cruddas and Co. organised a “No Eye Sore” campaign for the ward, and established petitions so that residents who felt neighbours were bringing down the aesthetic of the neighbourhood could campaign to request nuisance litterers to stop, and if they didn’t stop (despite being offered free council help), the council could step in and fine them the equivalent of the cost of sorting out the mess.
Cruddas hailed this as a great success. Not only did the ward start to become much nicer looking, but this effect reverberated into the political; because people were taking pride in their environment and feeling better about it, they felt enfranchised, connected and like they were making their lives better. Furthermore, by working together to achieve a common goal, a sense of solidarity and achievement was fostered which was genuinely good for the residents who before had felt atomised, cut-off, powerless and surrounded by decay. Cruddas generalised this metaphor to wider society: that we need to create a spirit of collective endeavour, fraternal solidarity, and community empowerment to end the “atomisation” of much of present society (especially amongst the poor working classes).
So what’s my problem with this explicitly communitarian view of people coming together and reclaiming a public space (or a public thing, a Res Publica, maybe?), working together and experiencing a rejuvenation of the political through communal action?
Well it’s not a stereotypical (and naive) “liberal” thought that people should have unfettered rights (spheres of non-interference, if you like) to dump things in their front gardens (i’m here going to focus on Cruddas’ micro example as a way of building up to macro points). I think that front gardens, and their disuse and lack of upkeep, can sufficiently be considered public spaces to the extent that other people have rights over them too, even if they don’t own them. That is, whilst Joe Bloggs has a right to dump things in his (privately owned) front garden, the rest of the individuals in the street may well have rights not to have parts of their environment turned into a wasteheap, which makes them depressed, apathetic, disconnected and frustrated. (And I don’t think that’s an exaggeration; the aesthetics of one’s environment have a significant impact upon one’s happiness and well-being, hence people should surely have rights over their environment and how it looks). So i’m not against a group of residents launching a “No Eye Sore” campaign and pitting their rights to live in a nice environment against the rights of some individuals to ruin their little chunks of that environment, when ruining those chunks impact upon the lives of others.
So I can back a Cruddas-style campaign.
What bothered me, however, was Cruddas’ reaction to a question from the floor. A very insightful and articulate man behind me asked Cruddas what happened to the bloke who wouldn’t get rid of his mattress. Cruddas laughed and joked that it was “only a metaphor”, but when pressed on this issue he came out with: “look, that guy, he was a bad man. He’s gone now. We don’t need to worry about him.” And that’s the point that set my alarm bells ringing.
Although Cruddas was partly joking, the fact that he thought this was just a joke is instructive, I think. On Cruddas’ conception of the political, there is the community, those who want to work as part of it to achieve common goals, and those who stand in the way and must be defeated. Now I can buy all of that. Politics is about conflict, as we should all know by now. But where I differ from Cruddas is that I am not prepared to just dismiss the outsider, the troublemaker, the recalcitrant mattress-dumper as a bad man, even as an off-the-cuff joke. I want to say he’s a man with rights, albeit rights which in this case we are going to over-rule in the name of the rights of others. I want to admit that there is an important value conflict here, and confess that this is important and difficult, and its resolution may in some ways be unpleasant. I do not want to dismiss the recalcitrant as merely bad men, as though that closed the issue and uncomfortable ethical questions about how we use power over people in political society are thereby disolved into the ether of community.
It’s that dissolution of ethical conflict which I find troubling about Cruddas’ communitarianism, and which i’ve picked up on before, but never been able to discern as clearly as I did today. Community and civic engagement is important, yes: but other things matter too, and if you want to attack “neoliberalism” for its atomisation, there’s a real danger of throwing some ethical babies out with the conceptual bathwater.
However that’s not the end of the story. Cruddas is, in general, offering a left-wing communitarian critique of what he sees as the failings of a modern, capitalist-driven, atomised broadly liberal society. Personally, I believe that the best way to critique that society is from a broadly liberal perspective that pays more attention to things like equality of income, wealth and opportunity than simple non-interference and freedom for the market, but which also allows for the kind of community-driven fraternal political “actualisation” that Cruddas favours within the context of recognising the limits of communities and the rights people need to have (even if ultimately over-ruled) vis-a-vis those communities.
Thus, I don’t see my views as necessarily completely incompatible with Cruddas’, even though aspects of his communitarianism trouble me. And I can tell you one thing for definite: I sure as hell would prefer a world where Cruddas’ style communitarian leftism was driving the agenda (hopefully tempered by thoughts from my camp) than the world of David Cameron, his Old Etonian set, and the Thatcherite anti-societal market liberalism that lurks behind the respectable facade painted for the nasty party.
This is important. The left is almost defined by historical faction and schism; by bickering over unimportant and insignificant differences in ideology or practice, whilst the right takes and holds power. So I agreed with Neal Lawson, Compass chair, that the left (I refuse to use the stupid “progressive” word) needs to put aside its differences and find common ground to both counteract the political right, and find new strategies and ideals in a post-New Labour world. Compass, for example, needs to be prepared to back not just Labour, but where appropriate, the Lib Dems and the Greens too, as well as smaller factions, parties, NGOs and civil society groups. Labour has no monopoly on wisdom, and it’s foolish in the extreme to freeze people out simply because they don’t carry rose-adorned cards.
So I’m going to take Lawson’s thoughts, and defy the history of the broad tribe to which I attach myself: Jon Cruddas, there are things about your communitarianism I don’t like, but at the end of the day we’re on the same side. I’ll work with you, if you’ll work with me*.
–
* Metaphorically…unless you want to help me write a half-sensible thesis proposal about David Hume’s theory of obligation, which I am conspicuously failing to do a good job of by myself.
