May 31, 2010
Away (and blog theme)
I’m away in France for two weeks, except zero blogging. Compulsive life-, work- and relationship-destroying blogging and iPhone addiction to resume thereafter.
In the meantime, I’m aware that I’m still supposed to have picked a blog theme tune. Now seems as good a time as any, though I don’t pretend to attain such heights of musical horror as this.
In case you’re interested:
Donald wept through the proceedings.
His tears soaked through the canvas that cloaked his twisted face
And they stained his orange jumpsuit
Where with such rare distinction he once displayed
The evidence of his outstanding contributions to the maintenance of a kingdom come.
But those days are gone.
He’s nothing more than a number on a docket thick
With shareholders, engineers, PR firms, politicians: war-profiteers.
“How the fuck did I end up here?
This just isn’t fair.
Ain’t no place for a millionaire”.
He searches for the words to stop this table in mid-turn,
Like “we are but old men”
And “we only did what we were told”.
But the laughter from the gallery drowns out these vestiges
Of a profession’s oldest defense.
“The court will direct the record to reflect
Compliments from the bench;
You sir, are central casting’s crowning achievement.
And for your outstanding performance in a comedic role,
I’d like to dedicate the findings of the jury to the dead”.
But how can one man ever repay a debt so appalling?
Can’t gouge 10,000 eyes from a single head so I
Think we should observe a sentence that will serve
To satisfy both a sense of function and poetry:
So you will spend the rest
Of your days drenched in sweat,
With your face drawn in a rictus of terror as you remove
Another buried land mine fuse.
Meanwhile, 100 yards back
Behind the sandbags,
A legless foreman pulls the trigger on a red megaphone.
Squelching feedback.
Drunken laughter.
Broken English.
His dead daughter’s picture.
Time and tide,
No one can anticipate the inevitable waves of change.
May 29, 2010
David Laws and Gay Equality
Upon the recommendation of Sunder Katwala, I’m blogging this small observation about the resignation of David Laws.
Sunder has a good analysis up here (and longer version here). He covers a lot of important points about the way we now view homosexuality in politics. But I feel he has missed the most striking – and significant – aspect of this entire debacle.
When it first emerged that David Laws was at the centre of a financial scandal, his response – apparently backed by both his party and their Conservative coalition partners – was to claim that he’d used £40,000 of taxpayer money to rent a room from his partner with the aim of hiding the fact that his partner was his partner. In other words, Laws appealed to his own desire for privacy – not wanting to be a publicly known gay figure – as a mitigating factor for his financial impropriety.
What’s striking – and pleasing – is the fundamental acceptance of this line of reasoning. Even though it wasn’t considered enough, and Laws has consequently had to resign, the point is that Laws’ hiding his homosexuality was indeed accepted as a mitigating factor and not a further revelation doubling the scandal.
It’s hard to imagine that this would have been the case even 15-20 years ago. The first openly gay MP – Labour’s Chris Smith – only came out in 1984, and Laws would have been the first openly gay Lib Dem if he’d come out before being elected in 2001. As Sunder notes, newspapers like The Sun until relatively recently ran stories about Britain being run by a “gay mafia”. Not so long ago national newspapers – and indeed, Governing parties – frequently implied that homosexuality equaled pedophilia.
Although this is a disaster for Laws’ personal career, and many gay rights advocates might feel dejected that in 2010 a top politician still feels the need to hide his sexuality, the big-picture story here is a positive one. As I noted when David Cameron stumbled through his Gay Times interview, these are in fact signs of progress.
Of course we’re not yet at the level of full gay equality. That would be a world in which sexuality is as irrelevant as having brown eyes. But when a national politician can plausibly claim that he committed financial impropriety to hide his sexuality, and this is viewed with a degree of sympathy rather than further disapprobation, things are getting better.
Having said that, you can’t be helping Boy George wield the axe and slashing public services after you’ve claimed £40,000 of taxpayer money against the rules.* On balance, Laws had to go. The interesting question now is what Cameron’s right-wing backbench loons make of all this – and whether they use it as a stick to beat the Coalition leaders and undermine this centerist LibCon arrangement.
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* Although the irony here is that Laws would have personally profitted if he had stuck to the rules.
May 28, 2010
Fail does Filosophy
Julian Baggini has a little piece on the Daily Mail website naming the 10 greatest philosophical principles (h/t).
Clearly the Fail decided its readers wouldn’t be able to get through 10 short paragraphs of thinking without some helpful pictures. Unfortunately, some of the illustrations they have opted for appear to violate the second principle Baggini draws attention to.
Anyone who can tell me what Gulliver’s Travels has to do with Mill’s Harm Principle earns my enduring love and respect:
Whilst this one just makes me feel cynically suspicious, coming as it does after a summary of the “ought implies can” principle:
Ignorant Sensible Voters?
Political scientists, political theorists and political nerds – i.e. most reading this blog – may find the ordinary electorate’s attitudes and voting patterns frustrating and perplexing. For people who spend their lives thinking and talking about politics, voters can seem shockingly ignorant and complacent:
“[when] asked to name which party had proposed eight key pledges [voters] wrongly identified four: reducing the increase in national insurance contributions (naming Labour not the Tories); allowing unsuccessful schools, hospitals and the police to be taken over (the Tories, not Labour); tightening up takeover rules (the Tories not Labour); and requiring foreign workers employed in public services to speak fluent English (the Tories not Labour).”
Further, they can appear downright incoherent (and possibly just stupid). For example, voters thought Brown and Darling were more trustworthy on the economy than Cameron and Osborne, and yet the Tory Leader enjoyed the biggest personal lead, with an approval rating consistently above that of his party. Despite the last election being fought in the shadow of the biggest economic downturn for 80 years, and it being widely known that tough economic choices would define the next Parliament.
Put bluntly: voters preferred economic light-weight Cameron to tried-and-tested Brown, and they (marginally) backed the Tory Party despite not trusting the bulk of the membership, because they liked the smooth-talking figurehead.
At this point it is usual to wonder-aloud whether the electorate acts “rationally”. I’m personally against that sort of talk, because David Hume showed in the 1740s that reason alone can’t motivate human beings to action, hence talk of whether people are being “rational” gets off on totally the wrong foot. (For an updated version of Hume’s argument this fantastic essay by Simon Blackburn is compulsory reading).
So I’m much more in favour of talking about whether people employ “sensible policies” when going about their daily business. And – contrary to what us political nerds might initially suppose – I’m starting to think that most voters do employ a sensible policy if they opt for the leader they like best without paying much attention to actual policy, supporting party or tested expertise.
For most people have fairly limited knowledge about parties, policies and the machinations of national politics. Furthermore, most people have little time – due to work and family pressures, and finding their leisure elsewhere – to become informed about politics at more than a fairly superficial level. However, they know that politicians have power over their lives and that political decisions will affect them, even if only in some limited way (and regardless of whether voters are underestimating the true impact of national politics on their lives).
Consequently by opting for the bloke they like most and who seems least distrustful, most voters are acting sensibly. After all: if you’re going to choose somebody to have power over your life, it makes sense to pick the bloke who seems the nicest.
Which has ramifications for the Labour leadership contest. Labour members – if themselves pursuing a sensible policy – shouldn’t just plumb for the candidate whose personal politics they like best. They should pick the candidate they think the electorate would be most happy to be ruled by – which will likely require somebody with the charismatic ability to inspire. Which perhaps rules-out Diane Abbott and Ed Miliband, nice as they are.
Of course what Labour members must really want is somebody about whom electorate will think “they’re a pretty straight sort of guy” – but who will (secretly?) do all the left-wing things that Labour members want, but the electorate perhaps doesn’t.
Maybe that’s just another way that politics makes hypocrites of us all. But it may also be a chance for Blair’s protegé to be the thing many leftists and Labour members perhaps once vainly hoped* Blair himself to be: a sheep in wolf’s clothing, rather than the teflon wolf par excellence.
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*That’s speculation; I’m too young to remember.
May 27, 2010
The Digital Front?
Today I received a most bizarre email.
It was from a woman called Elizabeth A. Lawton, who is apparently Research and Editorial Assistant at the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies, George Washington University. The email was sent to the address available on this site, and therefore looked like it was targeted. I.e. somebody has obtained my email deliberately, and then attached it to a large mail out (recipients are hidden, indicating a large BCC-d email list, I suppose).
Attached to Lawton’s email is a PDF article, which I’m making available here. Lawton summarises the argument helpfully in her email to me:
“Bombing Iran’s non-nuclear military facilities is suggested by an article in a new issue of Military Review, an official publication of the U.S. Army. The author, GWU University Professor Amitai Etzioni acknowledges the futility and risks of attacking the nuclear sites. But he argues that instead of such attempts at “capacity reduction,” one can motivate Iran to engage in “behavior change.” This he argues can be achieved by bombing sites such as the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard, air defenses, various military encampments, airports and railroad centers. These attacks would be slowly ratcheted up, until Iran agrees to live up to its international commitments—that is, allows full inspection of its nuclear facilities and the dismantling of any that are designed to produce the material needed to make nuclear bombs, and the bombs themselves. Etzioni compares such causing of “pain” to the effects of sanctions, which also aim to change behavior, but which are much less potent. He adds that by warning the populations when such attacks are imminent, one can greatly reduce the number of civilian casualties.”
What on earth is going on? This blog doesn’t really deal with foreign policy issues, and I’ve only ever written about the middle east tangentially. So why am I being targeted by GWU staff, pushing a hawk bomb-Iran line?
To be honest, I don’t know. But I suppose one obvious possibility is that American military hawks in favour of launching an attack on Iran are attempting to a) raise the profile of a possible bombing campaign, b) advocate in favour of that possibility, and that c) they think a good way of doing this is by targeting political bloggers, even those in the UK who don’t write about the middle east of foreign policy.
Somebody with money has authorised this sort of (presumably) time-consuming exercise. So, is this the digital (home) front in 21st Century military propaganda?
Ideas welcome. I’d love to know if any other bloggers have received this weird mail out.
But for the record: I am not in favour of bombing Iran, and indeed think that launching another war in the middle east would be in all likelihood disastrous.
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Thought: I don’t think they can have gotten my email via WordPress, as the email address I was contacted on isn’t the email address that the blog is registered to.
May 26, 2010
A Speculative Fiction
THERE was shock and outrage throughout Britain yesterday as it emerged that national leaders had backed down in the face of a powerful vested interest minority group with the potential to hold the country to ransom.
News that David Cameron had lost an early struggle with the 1922 Committee sent markets into panic at the prospect of a small group within Britain blocking crucial reforms, dictating government policy, and destabilising the attempt to find a new social settlement.
Critics of Cameron’s decision to back down say the 1922 Committee has been emboldened to resist necessary government reforms to our politics and economy. A leading Somebody said: “These are troubling times. The old political settlement is over and Britain is the sick man of Europe. What we need is strong leadership that can instigate a restructuring of our political landscape and ensure that the democratically elected coalition government has the power – not a minority-grouping advancing its own interests and holding the rest of the country to ransom.”
Apologists for the 1922 Committee have replied that their MPs possess a responsibility to protect the large detached houses, Suzuki 4×4 Rhino Killers and off-shore trust funds that the people of Surrey, Bedfordshire and South Suffolk depend upon to maintain the social status required to attend regular dinner parties. They accepted that there may be future conflict with the government, but denied that they were destabilising any political resettlement. They claimed: “what is good for the South is good for Britain; the professional classes and financial services keep this country alive and by protecting them the 1922 Committee fights for all of Britain.”
Political scientists have disagreed, however. Professor Whatshisname from Leading University stated: “Britain is in a terrible political mess. We need an urgent redefining of the political landscape, and that requires a prime minister and government able to take-on and unseat the 1922 Committee, which unjustifiably holds the cards when it comes to government decision-making. The old post-Falklands Consensus is over, and we need a strong leader who can give Britain the bitter but necessary medicine she needs.”
Leading Labour politicians have rubbished Cameron’s attempts to work with the 1922 Committee, calling instead for the government to get its house in order or launch a “slash and burn” attack on the Home Counties.
Spokesmen for local Tory councils and MPs offices have warned this could lead to devastation, with entire communities in the south being deprived of Ugg Boots, leather boat shoes and Land Rover Discoverys. A Conservative Council spokesperson warned: “if Cameron’s reforms had gone through the devastation to Southern communities could have lasted for generations with persistent lack of consumer goods and status symbols, ruining the lives of established generations and blighting the futures of the young, who might have had to go to state schools.”
Whilst the ’22ers claim they are democratically elected, their critics note that the 118 MPs who rebelled against Cameron’s reform proposals represent less than 20% of all elected MPs, and are themselves members of a party that secured a mere 32.3% of the popular vote. Furthermore, many of the 1922 Committee are ensconced in “safe seats”, meaning they effectively have jobs for life and there is little realistic prospect of their being removed.
Labour leaders last night denied that they were expressing a vindictive desire to revenge themselves for the humiliation of the financier class-induced 2008 economic crash that eventually saw Gordon Brown ousted from government. They deny that if returned to power they would seek to punish the 1922 Committee – and the class interest it represents – by laying waste to the south of England whilst systematically curtailing the democratic rights of conservatives and their ability to organise and represent themselves. Reports that heavy-handed police enforcement (or rather, brutality) and MI5 smear-operations would be used to “teach the South a lesson about who runs this country” have also been vaguely denied.
May 25, 2010
Reading List
As noted, I am off on my travels next week. Holidays are good for one thing: reading lots of books you don’t normally have time to read.
So, suggestions please. Fact and fiction welcome, though bear in mind size constraints (backpack already has to fit Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Quentin Skinner’s inexcusably heavy Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, and Leviathan and the Air Pump by Shapin and Schaffer).
Actually I’ve been especially negligent of fiction recently so suggestions on that front most welcome. Indeed, I’m supposed to be practicing my French, so good novels in French (which are shockingly hard to find in my limited exprience) especially welcome. Indeed, anyone who can find me a French novel that’s not shot through with rampant misogyny gets a prize.*
Don’t worry about whether or not I’ve read something; assume complete ignorance and that way no accidental oversights will occur.
Toodles.
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* there is no prize
May 24, 2010
Summer Break
It’s going to be a bit quiet around here for at least the next three weeks. For the next week there might be a few odd posts, but I’m busy and a bit out of ideas. After that I’m in France for two weeks, when there should probably be no posts at all.
Normal service to resume sometime in June. Enjoy the sunshine.
May 21, 2010
Abortion and the Ethic of Ultimate Ends
“But even herewith the problem is not yet exhausted. No ethics in the world can dodge the fact that in numerous instances the attainment of ‘good’ ends is bound to the fact that one must be willing to pay the price of using morally dubious means or at least dangerous ones – and facing the possibility or even the probability of evil ramifications.”
- Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation
That’s right folks, it’s another post about Weber. Though this time not regarding the glories of charismatic leadership, which some friends have expressed concern about my interest in. Today I want to consider Weber’s conception of “the ethic of ultimate ends”.
For Weber, this meant the having of deep-seated, thorough-going moral principles that direct and inform one’s actions. Despite the slightly misleading terminology, Weber was not referring to simple “consequentialism”; that one must seek to bring about certain specific states of affairs. Rather the ethic of ultimate ends can apply just as much as somebody upholding the maxim fiat justitia ruat caelum – let justice be done though the heavens fall. The point is to have genuine ethical commitments that one truly believes in and lives by.
It is essential to possess such an ethic, Weber thought, or else one turns into a faceless bureaucrat or a mindless machine politician, carrying out orders but with no sense of value or purpose. And that, if unchecked, leads to nihilism and mass social emptyness and horror. Yet an ethic of ultimate ends is not enough: because “the decisive means for politics is violence”, one must confront the truth that whenever one seeks to advance an ethic of ultimate ends, one will be forced at some stage to use violent (or violence-inducing) means.
This is the demonic truth of politics, and indeed all attempts to direct social action which affects the lives of others. The truly mature ethical agent, for Weber, realises this tragedy and accordingly approaches political life with the utmost gravitas and care.
Yesterday Laurie Penny wrote an excellent piece at CiF regarding the attitude of the anti-abortion lobby and its righteous anger at the launch of adverts for an abortion advice helpline. One thing that Laurie notes is that anti-abortionists appear blind to the observed fact that making abortion illegal or inaccessible simply does not lead to women not having abortions. What it leads to are back-street abortions and desperate attempts to do the job alone, often leading to women sustaining horrific injuries. An estimated 20million illegal – and unsafe – abortions a year, and 80,000 female deaths, are the actual results of making abortion inaccessible to women.
Laurie and I will disagree with the anti-abortionists about the moral status of abortion itself, of course. We think a woman’s right to control her own fertility and body vastly outweigh considerations given to non-sentient clusters of cells. But that’s not what I’m interested in today.
What I’m interested in is how groups that describe themselves as pro-life ignore-away 80,000 female deaths a year, and reconcile that with the fact that making abortion illegal (or effectively illegal) does not actually stop women having abortions. The answer, it seems, is that they possess an ethic of ultimate ends – abortion is wrong and therefore the state should outlaw it – without an ethic of responsibility – that making abortion illegal is but the taking of a moral stand whilst disregarding the deaths and suffering that follow.
And here’s what Weber thought about that sort of thing:
“Surely, politics is made with the head, but it is certainly not made with the head alone. In this the proponents of an ethic of ultimate ends are right. One cannot prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility, or when the one and when the other. One can say only this much: If in these times, which, in your opinion, are not times of ‘sterile’ excitation – excitation is not, after all, genuine passion – if now suddenly the Weltanschauungs-politicians crop up en masse and pass the watchword, ‘The world is stupid and base, not I’, ‘The responsibility for the consequences does not fall upon me but upon the others whom I serve and whose stupidity or baseness I shall eradicate’, then I declare frankly that I would first inquire into the degree of inner poise backing this ethic of ultimate ends. I am under the impression that in nine out of ten cases I deal with windbags who do not fully realise what they take upon themselves but who intoxicate themselves with romantic sensation. From a human point of view this is not very interesting to me, nor does it move me profoundly. However, it is immensely moving when a mature man – no matter whether old or young in years – is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere he reaches the point where he says: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other.’ That is something genuinely human and moving. And every one of us who is not spiritually dead inside must realise the possibility of finding himself at some point in that position.”
May 20, 2010
The Truth About Oxbridge Admissions: A Reply To Dave Osler
Dave Osler just wrote a piece attacking the “Oxbridge Mafia”. I thought I’d take it upon myself to offer The Family’s response. So, cards on table: I graduated from Oxford in 2008 with (horror of horrors) a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics – the very same degree that Dave singles out for particular disapprobation. But for the record, I was also educated at a normal state comp and attended the local state sixth form college.*
Firstly, I’d like to note something odd about one of Dave’s initial concerns: that the top level of politics is over-represented by people with Oxbridge degrees. This is often put forward as a self-evident problem. But I’m not sure that it is. Oxbridge has the toughest admission standards (high grades, written tests, plus at least two interviews in most cases) and has built its standing on giving people the very best education available (hence, when my mates at other Unis were doing three essays a term, I was doing two a week). It’s thus not altogether surprising that people who are educated at Oxbridge end up at the top. And it may not be obviously undesirable, either; I’ll proceed to make myself no new friends and question whether it really would be better if 70% of the cabinet had degrees in Events Studies and Sports Tech from Popleton Met.
However, Dave Osler is right to point out that there is a problem with Oxbridge: the admissions are heavily skewed towards the privately educated. 93% of UK schoolchildren are state educated, yet they accounted for just 53% of Oxford and 57.6% of Cambridge students in 2008. There is most definitely a problem here. But what exactly is it, and what’s the solution? Dave thinks we need positive discrimination, targeted at the Oxbridge end. I beg to differ.
Let’s be clear: Oxbridge accepts, roughly, the same proportion of state school applicants as apply. The problem therefore is that not enough bright state school kids are applying, not that they are being discriminated against once the UCAS forms are in. Although there may be some crusty old dons favouring the privately educated, most tutors doing admissions are simply looking for the brightest, most hardworking applicants (not least because they’ll have to teach the buggers for three years). And most tutors make allowances for the fact that a state education is (to be blunt) generally worse than a private one.
After all, rich mummies and daddies shell out small fortunes to get their sprogs taught privately for a reason: they get a better education. And that’s not even to mention the marked decline at the top end of the state sector over the past 20 or so years. But this means the quality of students at interview is unlikely to reflect true potential as oppose to where applicants were educated. Consequently tutors look for potential, and accordingly correct for the fact that students from state backgrounds may be unfairly disadvantaged.
But there is another major problem: vast ignorance in the state system about Oxbridge, and an ingrained prejudice against applying. As an undergraduate I did outreach work, going to state schools and trying to encourage bright kids to just apply. The two most common experiences were bright kids from modest backgrounds saying “people like me don’t belong in a place like that”, and teachers – yes teachers – putting-off bright kids with similar (false) memes, or simply giving them insane advice about applications, which usually stemmed from basic ignorance about the applications system.
The net result? Not enough bright kids from the state sector apply to Oxbridge hence not enough bright state kids get in to Oxbridge. It really is as simple as that. So stop taking pot-shots at the Universities and start asking why the Government isn’t doing more to sort out the state sector.
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* Christ the King Catholic High School, Southport and King George V Sixth Form College, Southport, for those who are into conspiracy theories.
