February 28, 2010
Listen up, Barbara
I long ago gave up reading Barbara Ellen’s weekly column. Her eternal whining about how hard it is to bring up teenagers, or her inability to understand that feminism is not the same as worshipping Cheryl Cole, are frankly tedious, and I’ve never understood why she’s been allowed to go on for so long.
However I’ve had my attention drawn to her latest ignorant, smug and (as usual) point-missing comments which (once again) look like they were churned-out late last night to meet the final deadline.
Ellen is complaining about interns. Specifically, she’s complaining about the website Interns Anonymous, for which I’ve written a few times. She seems to think that IA is simply a place where interns go to whine. Without doubt, there’s an element of venting that goes on there. But above all the website is a campaigning one, run by two dedicated individuals who have recognised that something is rotten with modern career opportunities and – despite themselves being able to deal with the rot – think it’s unfair and wrong. Accordingly, they are taking a stand on behalf of those less fortunate than themselves.
As I previously argued for The Guardian website, unpaid internships are wrong because they exclude those who cannot afford to live and work for free for lengthy periods, usually in London (the nations’ most expensive city). In short, they exclude all but the upper middle classes and above. Yet as unpaid internships are now a pre-requisite of most well-paid professional careers this is an enormous block to genuine social mobility and equality of opportunity. In short, unpaid internships make a mockery of the idea that in Britain so long as you are talented and work hard you can make it. In truth, you need rich parents as well.
This isn’t how Babs sees it. She thinks that interns’ complaints are simple self-interested whining, and that anyway exploitation of unpaid labour is OK because, y’know, it’s always been around. Oh, and non-interns are suffering too, so interns should just shut up and make the coffee:
“Maybe the new generation don’t realise this – they think intern-abuse, the brutal siphoning off of youth and energy by ruthless tea-demanding overlords, is a terrible new thing that just happened, probably because of the economy. They’re seething at the photocopier (or in front of their laptop in Caffé Nero, as unpaid “virtual interns”), blaming Gordon Brown. Perhaps they could take comfort in the fact that interns always got the brown smelly end of the stick. If anything has changed, it is that there are now far fewer opportunities for people who want to be treated quite this badly.”
This is offensive enough in itself. But it’s topped-off by Babs’ complete failure to grasp the very issue that Interns Anonymous are campaigning on:
“There lies the real scandal of internships – they are gold dust, and therefore pretty much exclusive to the well off.
[...]
Indeed, the vast majority of internships are only doable by middle-class children with what are politely termed “connections’, or at least financial support, and some form of parental roof over their heads. And while no one begrudges these kids, with their poorer contemporaries probably prepared to chew their own arms off at the elbow for a tenth of their opportunities, one draws the line at feeling sorry for them.”
Now listen carefully, Barbara. This is precisely the point Interns Anonymous are making. They are not asking you to feel sorry for them. They are campaigning that the law be changed so that fair opportunities are available to all.
Oh wait, there’s more:
“If anything, one feels rather bemused by them. We seem to have bred a new generation who sincerely expect the world of work to be Hollyoaks crossed with The Apprentice. Non-stop glamour, excitement, great salary, posh flat, cars, all arriving pretty much instantly. Little wonder that these spoiled, deluded innocents find the unwritten laws of the internship, the traditional exchange of slave labour for the holy grail of experience, a strange and chilling concept.”
No, Babara. You have bred a generation that demands social justice and equal opportunity, regardless of class background and family connections. In short, a generation with a better sense of right and wrong than you evidently possess.
More than Maths
From today’s Observer editorial:
“It is true that not enough school leavers enter those fields [science, engineering, maths]. But while it is desirable that Britain is economically and commercially competitive, it does not follow that all Britons should learn just economics and commerce. The study of history, philosophy, languages and literature broadens horizons and animates minds that go on to enrich society in many ways. The advantages that flow from research into the creative output of humanity might not be obviously financial, but they are incalculable.”
And of course, one of the main ways in which arts and humanities graduates enrich society is…by writing for and editing national newspapers!
But of course I agree with the sentiment. And the following is a fairly good diagnosis of the present (and likely future) Government’s philistine and short-termist attitude to what has “worth” and therefore deserves to be funded:
“But government’s unerring tendency is to calculate, especially when money is scarce. That leads to silly exercises in evaluating the “impact” of different departments’ research in terms of economic utility. In that game the dice are loaded against the humanities. The virtues of poetry do not fit neatly in a spreadsheet.”
Certainly, the obsession with “impact” is becoming worrying for arts and humanities departments. It’s somewhat difficult to demonstrate what your department’s economic “impact” has been when it might take 20 years for your history or English or philosophy graduates to have their economic influence, directly or indirectly. And furthermore, you’ll likely never know for sure what their “impact” was without observing a world in which there aren’t any such graduates, in order to be able to compare and contrast. A price which most sane people would consider hardly worth paying.
But overall, for my money Simon Blackburn makes the best case as to why the Government’s approach to this issue is very, very stupid.
February 27, 2010
Pop Quiz
Which American politician previously uttered these lines before being elected?
“I was always dreaming about very powerful people, dictators and things like that. I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years, or even, like Jesus, be for thousands of years remembered.”
“If you want to be a champion you can’t have any kind of outside negative coming in to affect you. So I trained myself for that. To be totally cold and not have things going through my mind. And it was a sad story when my father died. Because my mother called me on the phone and she said, “You know, your dad died.” And this was exactly two months before a contest. “Are you coming home for the funeral?” She said. I said: “No. It’s too late. He’s dead and nothing can be done. I’m sorry I can’t come.” And I didn’t explain the reasons why, because how do you explain to a mother whose husband died, you just can’t be bothered now because of a contest?”
And of course:
“It’s as satisfying to me as, uh, cuming is, you know? As, ah, having sex with a woman and cuming. And so can you believe how much I am in heaven? I am like, uh, getting the feeling of cuming in a gym, I’m getting the feeling of cuming at home, I’m getting the feeling of cuming backstage when I pump up, when I pose in front of 5,000 people, I get the same feeling, so I am cuming day and night. I mean, it’s terrific. Right? So you know, I am in heaven.”
There can, of course, be only one answer. Ladies and Gentlemen, the 6-times Mr Olympia champion, the present Governor of California, Mr Arnold Schwarzenegger!
As quoted in the 1977 film Pumping Iron.
Incidentally, anyone inclined to dismiss Schwarzenegger as a moron simply because he was a body builder and played a ruthless cybernetic killing machine in two of the greatest films ever made ought to watch Pumping Iron and think again. Unhinged Arnie may be, but stupid he ain’t.
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I promise to resume proper posting shortly, I’m just really busy at the moment.
February 26, 2010
Pathbreaker
Somehow I’ve managed to find myself in an academic history faculty, despite having specialised as an undergraduate in philosophy and political theory, and spent a fair amount of time complaining about lackadaisical historians.
Nonetheless, now that I’m here I feel that I ought to establish myself by founding a new historical discipline.
Many will have heard of the now defunct “Whig History” approach. This postulated history as progressing, inexorably and inevitably, towards a greater state of liberty, enlightenment and freedom. Liberty, enlightenment and freedom which all looked suspiciously like that achieved by British liberal constitutionalism which simultaneously accommodated monarchy.
Nobody really believes in Whig History anymore, mostly because of Herbert Butterfield’s attack on it in his The Whig Interpretation of History. That Butterfield invented the term “Whig History” in order to condemn it is a matter of significance I’ll leave for others to decide.
Anyway, I now propose a new categorisation: Tory History.
Whereas Whig History read into the past the inevitable march of progress, Tory History reads into it basic right-wing prejudice, a glorification of hierarchy, and frequent attempts to legitimise whichever contemporary status quo is perceived as being under threat. This is done, in part, by assigning conservative values or objects of sympathy a long pedigree, thereby implying their value and right to continue existing.
Favourite topics for Tory Historians therefore include the glorification of fox hunting and mindless patriotism, claiming that the Empire was a jolly good thing because the natives got railways and anyway the Japs were much nastier, and that Henry VIII was a bloody great lad for putting all his uppity wives in their places and how sad it is that society has now become “feminised”.
Leading Tory Historians may therefore be said to include Linda “Phwoar, Men in Uniform!” Colley, Niall “I can do economics me” Ferguson, and David “That annoying one off the telly” Starkey.
And, like Herbet Butterfield, I have no desire to be included as a member of the tradition I identify. No matter how much it pays to write columns in the FT, or do thunderously hyperbolic segments for the odious Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics.
February 25, 2010
Liddle and the Bounds of Legitimacy
It’s been amusing to watch the Rod Liddle apologists in the commentariat descend into incoherence. Left Outside has correctly pointed out that Tim Luckhurst’s accusations that grassroots organisations exercising free speech and freedom of association are somehow illiberal “falls short of anything approaching coherence”.
When Catherine Bennett cried solemn tears for Liddle (her dinner party chum), she denounced the reactionary “mob” that was ranged against him. Sunny Hundal hit back with a devastating reply, pointing out that “Bennett’s piss-poor defence of her old pal Liddle misses the fundamental point: that criticism is not the same as censorship”.
Liddle’s apologists have screamed “it’s against free speech!” and “it’s illiberal!” to protest the organised use of free speech and liberal rights by ordinary people. Liddle himself takes a similar tack, but he prefers to play the big one: that online campaigns are undemocratic.
In the stalking horse piece about internet campaigners that I recently flagged up, Liddle uses the following choice lines:
“The new electronic media might make the world a better-informed and more democratic place, but it also allows the splenetically dunderheaded to impose their will upon others, in a spectacularly uninformed and undemocratic manner.”
[Ignore the blatant, hilarious contradiction] and:
“ [I]t was a defeat for democracy and a victory for those crepuscular cyber-warriors, holed up in their dank bedsits, who cannot bear other people to hold opinions which differ from their own and demand that their minority views must prevail.”
How can online campaigning be anti-democratic?
There’s one sense in which it obviously isn’t so: online campaigners do not overthrow, or control, or bypass democratically elected governments. They may bring pressure to bear – as is their democratic right in a free society extending freedom of speech and association to its citizens – but they do not subvert the mechanisms of electoral democracy or government.
Perhaps Liddle has something else in mind: the “tyranny of the majority” that so worried 19th Century liberal thinkers like J.S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. It’s possible that something like this is at play. Certainly, in the case of the school teacher who was sacked after an online campaign (the ostensible focus of Liddle’s piece), this seems a relevant concern. When a bunch of loud, ill-informed, angry over-enthusiasts who have no connection to the school in question agitate to have a woman removed from her job, it looks like something very undesirable has happened. Whether it’s something anti-democratic is rather more complex.
On the face of things, it looks potentially democratic. Lots of people have gotten together and made a decision happen that they wanted more than other people. Then again, maybe they were just a vocal few who imposed their will on others – the tyranny of the minority, perhaps? The point is that the relationship between vocal public campaigning and democracy is a complex one.
In the case of the campaign against Liddle, it seems hard to construe this as in any way anti-democratic. Many people coming together, campaigning to stop Liddle becoming editor of a newspaper they read – and promising to stop reading it if he is appointed – looks like a case of people using the paradigmatic rights guaranteed by democratic regimes: free speech and free association. As Left Outside noted, the campaigners did not threaten violence, nor ask the state to ban Liddle’s appointment. They made themselves heard, and in the end their case beat the case for appointing Liddle. What’s undemocratic about that?
Of course, Rod Liddle isn’t seriously interested in the technicalities of democracy. Similarly for Bennet and Luckhurst when they denounce the “illiberal twitter mob”. What is going on here is an attempt to set what political philosophers often call “the bounds of legitimate discourse”.
As I’ve remarked before, in politics an awful lot is decided by what people think they can get away with. Equally, if a certain kind of activity is tarred with the brush of collective unacceptability, this can act as a powerful disincentive for certain kinds of action. It’s because of the achievements of feminism and anti-racist movements over the last four decades that it would be political suicide for any serious politician to make overtly sexist or racist remarks in public: that sort of thing simply isn’t tolerated anymore – it’s outside the bounds of legitimate discourse.
Liddle and his apologists are playing the game of deligitimising those who criticise them, by tarring them with the brush of illiberalism (implication: fascism), “mob-rule” (implication: brute and out of control) and of being anti-democratic (implication: committing the worst sin in a society built around the glorification of democracy as the cardinal political virtue).
Of course, this is a game others can play too…albeit it coming from the opposite angle and attempting to legitimise themselves. Here’s BNP leader Nick Griffin addressing former Ku Klux Klan activists:
“There’s a difference between selling out your ideas and selling your ideas. The BNP isn’t about selling out it’s ideas, which are your ideas too, but we are determined now to sell them. And that means using the sale-able words. ‘Freedom”, ’security’, ‘identity’, ‘democracy’. Nobody can criticise them. Nobody can come at you and attack you on those ideas – they are sale-able
Perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say ‘yeah, yeah every last [non-white person] must go’ … but if you hold that up as your sole aim to start with you’re going to get absolutely nowhere. So instead of talking about ‘racial purity we talk about ‘identity’.”
February 24, 2010
Apologising for the Leviathan
Today Gordon Brown will make an apology to thousands of people who were forcibly deported to other Commonwealth countries whilst growing up in care from the 1920s to the 1960s. Many were abused and ended up in institutions, or as slave labourers on farms.
There are at least two possible reactions to Gordon Brown’s deciding to issue such an apology.
The first is to object that it is meaningless. The complaint might run as follows: “Gordon Brown did not authorise any of the decisions to send those people to Canada and Australia. Indeed, he wasn’t even in government, let alone the cabinet, at the time. In fact, nobody presently in the British executive had anything to do with those decisions, so how can they apologise for something they did not do? Indeed, isn’t this apology insulting to the victims? Given that Brown and Co. bear no responsibility for this, their apology can only be a piece of crowd-pleasing populism, turning the victims into means for political ends. Brown should say he is sorry that the deportations happened – but it is nonsensical for him to issue an apology for something he didn’t do”.
I used to think this was the correct position to take. But it’s worth noting that not many people appear to share it. I doubt there will be outrage from victim support groups, or the people who were themselves deported, condemning Brown’s “phony apology”. Instead, it will likely be welcomed. Why?
A plausible explanation is that Brown is commonly understood not to be apologising on behalf of himself, or on behalf of his cabinet or even government, but on behalf of the British state. That is, we appear to accept the notion of an entity standing behind the government of the day, which is not identical with it – and indeed which precedes and succeeds each individual government and prime minister. When Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair was the Prime Minister, we did not say that either of them was the British state, and neither were their governments. The state is something more monolithic, more powerful, more immortal.
So when Brown issues his apology, it appears that he is apologising not for the actions of himself or his government, but of the past actions of the British state. Perhaps this should be a very bizarre idea, given the logic of what exactly it is Brown is apologising for. But it nonetheless strikes most of us as perfectly normal.
Yet it’s worth noting that this conception of Brown apologising “for the state” isn’t illuminated by the famous definition of the state that Max Weber supplied, and that I’m fond of quoting. That:
“the state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” [emphasis original]
Even if that’s a good description of what the state is in terms of its functional powers, it hardly captures the distinction between the state and the government. After all, Brown’s government is presently a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within Great Britain. Yet we’ve established that we’re not happy simply saying that Brown’s government is the state. Quite the opposite.
To see where the idea of Brown apologising “for” the state – but by definition not being the state – comes from, we need to go further back. We need to go to Thomas Hobbes:
“For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength; salus populi (the people’s safety) its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death.”
“This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence.”
The idea that the government of the day merely represents – and speaks and acts for – a more powerful entity existing behind it, possessed of ultimate sovereignty which the Prime Minister of the day happens to wield but does not ultimately possess, comes from Hobbes. When Brown apologises to the deportees today, he apologises not for his own actions, but for that of the Mortal God, the Leviathan, which Brown presently speaks for.
That the apology will be widely welcomed, and that its bizarre logic will go largely unremarked, indicates the extent to which that artificial man called Commonwealth, or State (in Latin, Civitas) is now an integral part of all our lives. Again, how ironic that the central ideas of history’s greatest proponent of absolutism should come to have shaped the intellectual framework that we who call ourselves democrats, liberals, republicans or libertarians think within.
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The Weber quote is taken from his 1919 lecture that became the essay Politics as a Vocation. The Hobbes quotes are taken from the introduction and Chapter 15 of Leviathan respectively.
February 23, 2010
Change of Plan
It was pointed out to me that having a bunch of pictures exclusively of old white men sat fairly badly with the content I put up here.
Which seems true. So they’re gone now.
February 22, 2010
Racist Lies
In this video, via Liberal Conspiracy (via North of Westminster), an angry white man claims that the BNP/National Front are being unfairly discriminated against because they are being legally forced to abandon their bans on non-white members.
Specifically, Angry White Man claims that this is discriminatory because the National Black Police Association is allowed to ban non-black police officers.
But as I’ve pointed out before this is nonsense. It is a lie spread by the far right to perpetrate their “we’re being unfairly persecuted by the multicultural liberal elite and their darky allies!” myth.
You do not have to be black to join the National Black Police Association. Anyone can join.Whether non-black police officers would want to, and hence why there are (to my knowledge) only black members, is a totally different question.
Rawnsley Was Right To Do It Now
So The Observer really rained on New Labour’s parade, deflecting attention away from Saturday’s policy launch and onto whether Gordon Brown is a dominating, paranoid, near-psychopathic bully.
Let’s assume – on the grounds that Andrew Rawnsley is a serious journalist and The Obs continues to keep up the pretence of being a serious newspaper – that the allegations are broadly true. (For many they hardly came as a surprise. Rumours that Gordon throws mobile phones at people’s heads during times of tantrum have been doing the rounds for a long time).
There is of course the lurking issues of Rawnsley looking to flog his book and The Obs having relaunched itself today in a shiny new format. But we’ll come back to that in a minute.
Dave Semple reckons that if the allegations are true, Gordon Brown is not fit to be Prime Minister. Dave correctly points out that many women would not (and no woman should have to) put up with aggressive domineering behaviour from an ordinary boss. Trades union members would likewise not put up with such actions from their bosses, and would rightly complain to their unions – most of whom pay subs to the Labour Party.
Dave thinks that Rawnsley should have made his accusations public a long time ago. After all, it’s been 3 years since Brown was elected PM. Dave – and I think many others – suspiciously see this as cynical political manoeuvring by partisan interests.
I don’t disagree that there’s cynical political maneuvering gone on here. Nor that there are partisan interests at play. But nonetheless, it seems that if these allegations are true then now had to be the right time to bring them out.
This is because a significant difference exists between the office of the Prime Minister and ordinary bosses. Namely, a normal supervisor or manager can be sacked for their unacceptable bullying of staff, or an employer taken to court over a lengthy period on harassment charges. Often the process isn’t ideal, but it’s there.
The situation is significantly different with the Prime Minister. We elect our governments, and the PM is the leader of the majority party. It is simply unfeasible and highly undesirable to have extra-party mechanisms for removing Prime Ministers on the grounds that they are, well, horrible bastards.
If the Party wants to sack its PM on the grounds that she or he is a liability and judged unfit to run the country, then the party may do that. But for other agents – civil servants individually, “independent” bodies, opposition parties and so forth – to be vested with the power to remove sitting Prime Ministers on the basis that they are “unsuitable” is a recipe for disaster and an invitation to an anti-democratic coup-fest.
In a representative democracy, the only acceptable way for a healthy, functioning PM to be removed on the grounds that he or she is unsuitable is for the electorate to vote them out.
If Brown is the short-fused megalomaniac Rawnsley’s accusations say he is, then the electorate needs to know, and it needed to know now. Telling the electorate a year ago would have allowed the Labour spin machine to initiate damage control and ensure that the impact of the accusations was downplayed to the maximum. But that would not have been in the interests of the people of this country. When going to the polls, it’s right that voters are immediately aware of whether or not the present PM is unfit for the job.
I don’t want to be naive and say that Rawnsley and The Obs editorial board acted out of a pure patriotic duty and love for democracy. Self-interest no doubt played its role. But sometimes bad intentions yield just consequences.
It pains me to say this, of course. I am, all other things being equal, opposed to anything that makes a Cameron government more likely. But in this case, all other things are not equal.
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However, there’s always more to these things than meet the eye. On the extent to which the “Gordon is a bully” meme can be trusted, it’s worth reading what Tory Troll has to say about the “charity” at the heart of the bullying accusations.
February 21, 2010
Sunday Reading
My torture piece from the other day has been receiving a bit of attention, so I thought I’d pursue it.
I wanted to jump into the “are Amnesty International a bunch of relativists who abandoned a true commitment to human rights in order to suck up to Osama bin Laden and rag on America?” debate, but thankfully I don’t need to. Flying Rodent has covered it here.
Then I was going to say something more about torture and philosophy. But there’s probably no point as thanks to James I can link you to this superb article by Jeremy Waldron. Waldron is a master of the art, so read what he has to say.
Finally for anyone with a continued taste for torture as it ends up being applied in the real world, two more articles suggested by Jimmy Hill and Peter in previous comments are worth a read: here and here.
I’ll try and have something to say for myself later today, or tomorrow. Until then, happy clicking.
