November 9, 2011
Why I’m Not At The Protest
Big student protests in London today, against fee rises and the perceived “privatisation” of Britain’s university system.
I’m not going. Two reasons.
1. This afternoon I have a crucial cup fixture to play in. My first loyalty is to King’s Men’s First XI, only secondarily to the future of education and the good society.
2. I often do stupid, impulsive things. I get caught up in the moment. And I’ll be honest, riot and disorder situations are exciting – heightening the chances of my doing something stupid. But I don’t want to be arrested on charges of violent disorder, for something as minor as throwing a smoke bomb, then ending up in prison for 18 months with the rest of my life in tatters.
I also don’t want to be shot at with rubber bullets. Similarly, I was charged by police horses last December, and frankly it wasn’t a very pleasant experience.
So congratulations, government, police force and judiciary (or if you like ‘The Establishment’). With me at least, it worked. Wonder how many others will chicken out?
November 2, 2011
CALL FOR PAPERS
Oikonomia, Economy and War: 2012 Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History
University of Cambridge
19-20 March 2012
Paper proposals are invited for the fifth Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History, to be held on 19-20 March 2012 at the University of Cambridge. The theme of the 2012 conference will be “Oikonomia, Economy and War”, and papers dealing with any period and tradition in the history of political thought from antiquity to the present will be considered. Papers which bring an historical perspective to bear on problems of contemporary political theory are welcome. A keynote address will be given by Professor Andrew Gamble of the Cambridge Department of Politics and International Studies
The conference theme should be interpreted broadly; papers relating to any aspect of “oikonomia” “economy” or “war” will be considered. Up to eight papers will be accepted. Panels will be led by a discussant from Cambridge, who will offer comments on each paper before general discussion with Cambridge faculty and conference participants. The aim of the conference is to provide an opportunity for outstanding graduate students to present and discuss their work in a collegial and supportive atmosphere. Accommodation will be provided for speakers from outside Cambridge.
Abstracts of up to 500 words are requested by 5 December 2011, with accepted papers to follow in full by 5 March 2012. Please submit abstracts, along with your name and a brief academic C.V., to ptihconf@hermes.cam.ac.uk.
Registration will close on 27 February 2012; those wishing to attend the conference without presenting a paper should write to the above address with their name and institutional affiliation before that date.
2012 Conference committee:
Jared Holley
Dom O’Mahony
Paul Sagar
Tara-Jane Westover
Waseem Yaqoob
June 12, 2011
On Writing, and Myself.
“And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.” – Montaigne, Essays
I’ve often thought about trying to write about depression. But when you’re depressed, there’s no point in writing about it. Everything, after all, is pointless. Most especially your own meditations on your own pointlessness. And when you’re not depressed, well, you don’t want to write about being depressed. It’s depressing.
So I’m not going to write about being depressed. I’m going to write about not wanting to write. In which I am of course being slightly dishonest. Because if I really didn’t want to write, I wouldn’t be writing at all. (Though actually everything turns on what you take by “really”. And the way you take to – or reject – various putative paradoxes in human psychology and the philosophy of mind. But I’m not going to write about those.)
I used to love writing. It was my hobby. Even before I started blogging,* I used to adore producing vast reams of turgid, tedious, self-involved prose. Most of it was crap, even by the standards of whatever age I was then. But it served a purpose beyond the GCSE/A-Level/Degree study I was officially engaged in. It was in itself therapeutic. Challenging. Entertaining. And quite often actively fun. I used to write for fun. And that made studying all the easier – and guaranteed that deadlines were never a problem for me.
But now I don’t love writing. Now I (almost) hate it. I get anxious before I have to do any. I dislike the process when I’m doing it. I’m dissatisfied with the end products. All of it bores me. And it’s not fun. It’s not exciting. It’s not even a good mental work-out anymore.
What happened? I’m not really sure.
I stopped enjoying writing sometime last March. I know it was around March, because in February I wrote 13,000 words on the interminable bore and 3rd rate moral philosopher, Francis Hutcheson (yes, he of the weird chicken fetish).
I detest Hutcheson’s writings, but regardless I wrote that piece at nobody’s behest and for nobody’s benefit (though what the hell, here’s an upload). The thing is, I still enjoyed writing it. It allowed me to work out a few conceptual moves, and in terms of keeping track of Hutcheson’s “arguments” (I use the term loosely), it was more efficient than a series of notes that, if unearthed in two years, would mean nothing.
Right now the prospect of doing anything like that again fills me with horror. Indeed I thought about writing a review of Jonathan Wolff’s new book Ethics and Public Policy for this blog. It’s quite a good book. Accessible to beginners, but cleverly addressing more interesting philosophical issues as it goes along. But frankly, I can’t face telling you anything more about it. The prospect appalls me.
So OK. I don’t like writing anymore. Boo hoo for me. So what?
Well this is my party, and I’ll gaze at my reflection in the glittering pool if I so choose.
Number one: if I’m going to be an academic, not liking writing is something of a problem. Writing is going to be a big part of my job. Career-satisfaction does not appear to loom. Nasty.
Number two: this apathy and dissatisfaction is worrying. What is wrong with me? Have I permanently changed? Can people even change that dramatically and suddenly? Is this symptomatic of a wider, growing apathy with intellectual pursuits more generally? I don’t know, and I don’t like it. But I don’t really give enough of a fuck to write to you about it.
Number three: bringing together the above considerations, if I don’t write, will I get stupid? All the cleverest people write all the time, even if it’s just in vast piles of unpublished notebooks. When I used to write regularly, I stayed sharp. Literally, a sort of mental workout. Does giving it up mean a one-way ticket to cognitive obesity?
Dear readers, I’d like to explore this further. Except I wouldn’t, because as I said, I can’t be fucked. I started with a quote from Montaigne – prolific writer that he was, the bastard – so I’ll end with one too. “Everyone thinks his own fart smells as sweet as apples”.
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* Some 4 years ago now, though the early efforts have thankfully been dispatched into the abyss.
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June 5, 2011
Telly Don University
So Telly Don University – or the New College of Humanities – has been unveiled. Professor A.C. Grayling is the mastermind, and apparently the head honcho too. “Top” academics have been recruited to the cause. Proper academics, predictably, don’t like it.
Now don’t get me wrong, TDU definitely suggests some unpleasant prospects. As Chris Bertram has pointed out to me, an institution charging £18K a year will give other university Vice Chancellors a pre-text to both bust open the new £9K fee cap, and maybe even privatise in a bid to “compete”.
Personally, however, I see TDU as being – at most – a catalyst. My sense is that the flood gates are open on fees (not least as the maths was done so badly that the Treasury is going to have to fork out loads under the current regime anyway), and that universities not receiving significant state support may opt to privatise anyway. After all, why put up with the constant government interference if you’re not even getting the money any more?
In any case, what’s happening to British higher education looks like part of a much bigger process. Namely, the systematic marketisation of publicly provided services, coupled with a belief that in the brave new world this is the only option. Meaning that assaults on state-provided services are seen as both status quo, and as inevitable developments, by the politicians carrying them out. Thus drastically reducing any room for alternatives to find a voice, or for policies to be reconsidered and reversed.
In sum, I think that British higher education is undergoing a sea change that started (at least) with New Labour when it bought the basically pro-market vision of politics which reduces the state to the fawning provider of safe-habitats for business,whilst abandoning anything that can’t make a profit to die in the cold. I don’t know what will happen to Britain’s university system over the next 20 years, and I’m not optimistic. But I doubt Telly Don University alone is going to make that much of a difference.
Accordingly, we might like to do a spot of pointing and laughing to cheer ourselves up. TDU bills itself as attempting to rival Oxbridge (a boast Mary Beard has already queried). Its main claim to this appears to be two-fold: 1) that Famous People will do some teaching, and 2) students won’t just do arts subjects they will also have “science literacy” and business-type awareness programmes to boot.
Both of these things make me chortle. Let’s first consider some of the Famous People who will allegedly be teaching at TDU:
- Richard Dawkins: loud-mouthed pop-biologist, who writes exceptionally bad books about religion and who would fail any decent undergraduate philosophy first year course.
- Steven Pinker: pop-psychologist, generally not taken seriously by large sections of the psychology research community because he allegedly ignores and manipulates data that doesn’t fit his story-book narratives. [If anyone genuinely qualified on this subject could say one way or the other, it would be good to hear from you - this is just reporting what I've heard from people in the field.]
- Niall Ferguson: telly-don extraordinaire, who will apparently be teaching economics, even though he is not an economist. He is in fact a pop historian (who hasn’t done any serious work for donkey’s years), who has appointed himself a finance expert following his success in the oh-so-tricky world of making money in hedge funds. (Amusingly, rival telly don Tristram Hunt claims that Ferguson’s successful book on the history of money and finance – later a TV series, of course – manages to hardly mention Marx and Engels at all. So a rounded education can no doubt be expected from a man who is certainly anything but a right-wing ideologue.)
- A.C. Grayling: telly-don philosopher, who is mostly famous for writing a lot of books. The reason he writes so many books, so quickly, is of course that none of them are any good.
- Ronald Dworkin: actually a serious academic with an incredibly illustrious publishing history, who had an enormous impact upon both political and legal philosophy over the past 50 years. But still notorious at Oxford – about 30 years after he left – for being the laziest and most unhelpful supervisor imaginable (I was warned not to expect any contact with Dworkin at all if I went to NYU for a masters degree, whatever it said on their website.)
Also a huge hypocrite, given that he spent most of his career writing about egalitarianism, and is now a flagship academic at an institution which is anything but.
You get the picture. Big famous names are not the same as good, serious educators of university minds. If you go to TDU thinking you’ll get a good education just because some famous people are there, you’re a fool. As anyone who’s actually been taught well at university level knows, the best teachers are not the big public names (even if they are famous within the academy). But given that TDU will charge £18K a year, you’re a rich fool if you go there. So more fool you, as at least hopefully this will free up some places for serious young thinkers at Britains’ other, proper, universities. Who can hopefully be drawn from the state sector thanks to some reduction in competition from brats who just want a primer course for the City.
As for the second alleged benefit – science literacy and business awareness – this is highly amusing. If you want “science literacy” you can read Ben Goldacr’s book Bad Science, and then bother with some of Stephen Jay Gould’s wonderful output. If you want more than mere science “literacy”, then you have to do a science degree and become a scientist. Sorry about that, but the human mind is limited and specialization is required if you want to acquire a serious understanding of any contemporary field. TDU can’t undo the complexities and advances of modern day academic divisions of labour, whatever else it may claim.
Regarding “business awareness”, or whatever, this is also silly. You don’t get good at “real world” thinking by “studying the real world”. You get it by training your brain to think sharply and analytically, applying these skills elsewhere as and when it is fit to do so. Some people never learn to transfer these skills, and some people have them without being any good at academia. Either way, it actually turns out that the best education for business is not a business education. (You may be surprised to learn this, but apparently it’s actually philosophy.) So you’d be just fine at normal, proper university.
So overall I’m inclined to laugh at Telly Dons University. It looks like a big con, taking the money of rich people silly enough to think they can buy a proper education, at premium rates, simply because there’s some Famous People on the tin.
But, sadly, that’s not the end of the story. Because TDU is plainly responding to a certain sort of demand, and a wider and ever more entrenched expectation of what universities should be, and what they should provide. And if TDU is successful – which it may very well be – it’s exactly what Vice Chancellors and politicians will point to as the model for the rest to adopt.
Hence, we should laugh and be merry this evening, for in the morrow the hangover is coming. And it’s going to be a nasty one indeed. Even if TDU is only one small part of the bigger mess.
UPDATE: I see that Peter Singer and Simon Blackburn are also members of the Telly Don 14.
Peter Singer: Philosophical charlatan par excellence. A disseminater of complete nonsense, from a man who couldn’t think his way out of a wet paper bag. Even if he did do exceedingly well for himself by generally just being controversial and annoying.
Simon Blackburn: Actually one of the most distinguished and sharp-thinking philosophers of the past 30 years. A seriously impressive mind (even if he’s spent the last decade saying the same thing over and over again). However, by all accounts a close rival to Dworkin for Laziest and Least Helpful Teacher On Offer. At least judging by the reports of his supervisees. Whose testimony can be effectively summarised as: “He doesn’t read your work. Even if you’re his PhD student”.
What a stellar teching line up the TDU has on offer!
March 27, 2011
On Violence and Recent Protest
As previously noted, I have no problem per se with political violence. Its use and justification must be assessed on a case-by-case basis, with reference to myriad factors such as likelihood to succeed, ability to justify harm to victims, long-term advantages gained, greater evils averted, and so on. Use and justification of violence – like any other tool of politics – depends on firstly the judgement of those who deploy it, and at a later stage the judgement of those (if different) who must assess it (and quite possibly, sentence it). As a general rule, it is wise to hope for better judgement than worse, and from all concerned.
Some situations allow for more judgement, particularly with regards to strategy, than others. The leaders of the ANC, or the ETA, or Hamas, typically control the means of violence in hierarchical command structures. A few men will decide when and where to use violence, and dictate orders to subordinates. In such cases, judgement (including strategic planning) is in the hands of specific individuals with relatively high degrees of control. In turn, moral judgement by other parties as to the justified or unjustified use of that violence will in large measure focus on the decisions of the commanding individuals. The same, incidentally, goes for the aparatus of the modern state – though for complex and important reasons we tend to shy away from recognising the deeply and necessarily coercive natures of the states we find ourselves in and under.
But certainly not all instances of political violence fit this model. When the so-called “Black Bloc” of anarchist militants attacked stores on Oxford Street yesterday they were not part of a (para)military organised hierarchy with a leadership exercising strategic-tactical judgement – still less the militant wing of the 250,000 peaceful marchers congregating in Hyde Park. When UK Uncut protestors launched their non-violent direct action against Fortnum and Mason, they can hardly be held responsible for the spontaneous vandalism that enthusiasts in the assembled crowd promptly launched.
In these latter cases the problem with considering the use of political violence from the perspective of strategic judgement in particular is that it quite simply doesn’t apply. Before Saturday’s outbursts of violent direct action no hierarchy of command could exercise the sort of command and control upon which strategic judgement is predicated. Yet after the violence talk of strategic judgement seems largely besides the point. Insofar as there was any, it was exercised by individuals or small groups in loosely organised ways, in a situation of mass happenings over which nobody had meaningful control.
In turn, this makes the task of passing retrospective moral judgement over the uses of political violence on Saturday a nuanced affair. For a start, we must distinguish between the actions of opportunistic vandals, committed anarchists, young enthusiasts caught up in the moment, and those goaded and provoked by police tactics (if any of the above indeed turn out to apply).
Nonetheless, it remains possible to assume a third-party perspective in order to analyse yesterday’s events. Specifically, we can adopt a position of hypothetical strategic judgement. It is quite sensible to ask: if I had absolute control over what actions people did and did not take yesterday, which would I permit? Personally, I would have preferred an entirely peaceful protest. Not because I’m opposed to all political violence (I’m not), but because yesterday’s outbursts were unambiguously counter-productive, and predictably so.
By contrast, my strong sense is that if the student movement had remained entirely peaceful at the end of last year, it would certainly have achieved absolutely nothing. The broken windows at Millbank and the riots in Westminster attracted levels of attention that peaceful marching never could have. And importantly, I believe that the student violence did not lead to the same outcomes that purely peaceful protest would have (failed to) achieve.
Certainly, the Parliamentary vote was passed and in that sense the student protests failed. Yet the carnage witnessed in Parliament Square – chronciled by myself, Jeremy Gilbert and others in Fight Back! – will have sent a shiver down many Coalition MPs’ spines. Lib Dems in particular must know that the ferocity of student anger means that particular constituency is lost for the very foreseeable future. Tory MPs must know deep down that if things can get that bad that quickly before the cuts have even started to bite, the next 4 years will contain some very difficult fights. Perhaps this will only make the present Government even more determined and bullish – but my sense is that it will quietly make key decision-makers more wary, and Lib Dems more skittish. And even if all of that is wrong, I still think that the student protests stood a better chance the way they actually happened than any peaceful alternative could have offered.
By contrast, Saturday’s march needed something entirely different. It needed the other face of protest: the face of hundreds of thousands of ordinary, reasonable and respectable people calmly registering their disapproval. As Paul Mason has noted, if you can get your entire workforce out to a Saturday demonstration, this means something. The scale of yesterday’s protest, quite obviously not made up of the “usual suspects”, would have been very powerful just because of its sheer size. If only it had been the main news story.
Instead, much coverage was given over to actions initially started by the “Black Bloc” idiots. I call them idiots because that is exactly what they are. Either they like to smash things just for the thrill (in which case they are Basic Idiots), or they are so politically deluded they think throwing paint bombs at TopShop will light the fuse of revolutionary explosion (in which case they are Advanced level Über-Idiots). Whichever camp of idiots yesterday’s Black Bloc thugs fell into, they did the anti-cuts campaign huge damage. By distracting attention to the loudly spectacular and meaningless away from the quietly awesome and meaningful they ruined it for everyone. Except the Tory Party.
Yet, crucially, there is more to say. For although the actions of the Black Bloc started the trouble – as Ryan Gallagher has noted – it is undeniable that many others quickly joined the violence without premeditation. Likewise the kids who stuck it out in Trafalgar Square, or who angrily confronted police outside Fortnum and Mason, cannot be dismissed as merely extended members of the Black Bloc.
Rather, they were the people who don’t any longer see the point of maintaining peaceful protest if the opportunity to descend into confrontation arises. And at a certain level they have my sympathy, for two reasons. Firstly, my generation learned quite spectacularly in 2003 that even enormous peaceful demonstrations of over a million people can make precisely zero difference. Tony Blair invaded Iraq, and didn’t give a flying damn what any of us thought.
Secondly, anybody who has been on even a handful of protests – especially in London – knows full well that the police do not hesitate to use violence, and frequently instigate aggressive confrontational situations amidst previously jovial and peaceful atmospheres. At the G20 protests in 2009, trouble only started when the police moved in – and it is probably significant that following that experience increasing numbers of protestors are drawing the obvious conclusion: if you know the boys in blue will baton you regardless, why wait around passively for them to do it?
It is significant and telling that so many recent protests have seen flare-ups of violence. The Black Bloc has been around a long while now and they cannot alone explain this. A better explanation is that many people – especially the young – are angry, justifiably untrusting of the police, and contemptuous of the old (failed) channels of political expression. As the cuts really start to bite, their numbers must surely increase.
So whilst I regret yesterday’s violence – if I could have had my way, there would have been none at all – I can understand why these outbursts of wider political violence are happening. And they do not make me optimistic about the future.
February 6, 2011
Notice to Serve
If there’s one thing more boring than blogging, it’s blogging about blogging. Nonetheless, I will try and say something interesting.
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My self-imposed blogging sabbatical is not entirely due to a lack of time. I’ve been busy in the past, and that has never stopped me before. There are two, more fundamental reasons I’ve opted to cut back – or perhaps, two facets of one more fundamental problem.
Firstly, blogging about politics – for that is what this website has been dedicated to for over two years – increasingly bores me. At one level, this is because daily politics – and the bulk of blogging reaction to it – is boring.
Each day and week brings a superficially fresh piece of outrage perpetrated by the Conservative Party/the DailyMail/some idiot celebrity/the Government/some idiot rightwing blogger or commentator/the police/whatever [substitute leftwing alternatives to suit preference]. On the surface at least, the issue prompting comment is usually in some way different to whatever happened the week before (“selling off the woodlands”/ “destroying the NHS”/ “being a horrible bigot” / “lying and abusing positions of power”). But the game of political blogging is tiresomely repetitive.
The predictable daily reaction is to get into an outraged indignant lather of denunciation. Or to sarcastically mock with varying degrees of cynicism. Or to dissect at tedious length in predictable detail why The Enemy is wrong (and usually evil). All these reactions share a common feature: total practical impotence and wider irrelevance. No doubt, for a couple of years this has sustained me, and I’ve found it interesting to watch others do the same. Increasingly I feel I’m living in electronic groundhog day.
What I’m really complaining about is quite simply most political bloggers’ hobby. People go on and on, expressing the same outrage and indignation at the Daily Mail/Tory Party/Richard Liddle-Phillips [substitute left-wing alternatives to suite preference] day-in-day out, because they enjoy it. Rather like many people enjoy campaigning for a political party, or going to big political conferences. It’s about tribalism, and the fun of political group-think and purported engagement. But it bores me more and more with each passing day.
Quite self-consciously, this blog has attempted to do something a bit different for at least the past 18 months. Namely, to analyse political events through the filter of an academic training I’m lucky enough to still be receiving. For a while this has served at least two purposes. One, it helped me get clearer on my own ideas by applying them. Two, I liked to think of it as public-service pedagogy; the dissemination of interesting ideas for those who might be interested in them but who lack my privileged background.
But I only have so much in my repertoire, and the last few months have seen me falling into the trap of repetition. This bores me, to the point whereby it outweighs the appeal of offering any free pedagogical service. Not least because I have to question the extent to which this is really about sharing interesting ideas. Or about wanting people to think I’m clever, whilst advancing my career in various ways.
Which brings me to the second set of general considerations.
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I’ve also decided to cut back blogging because it has begun to feel like a duty, an obligation. Rather than writing just for pleasure, or to share ideas, or seek critical reaction, I increasingly write to secure my “status”, as an ever-more-popular blogger [see the sidebar]. That, and because I’ve been trying to build this blog as a personal tool of complementary professional development for so long that to abandon it feels like a major wasted investment.
And I really don’t like this situation. I am extremely adverse to the role of duty and obligation in most human life, in what philosophers narrowly define as “moral theory” and beyond. For most of the good outcomes secured by imposing duties on people can be achieved by alternative means: for example, by encouraging dispositions in people such that they want to do some action from their own volition, rather than feeling they must do so because they are beholden to some external power, sanction, condemnation or failure.
Duty is an unhealthy concept to be beholden to, a sort of moral pathology. Things should be done because they are in themselves good things to do, not because they are your “duty”. The concept and experience of duty creates and fosters a psyche of meekness, dependency, constraint and subjection to overbearing command. It also opens the door for the extraction of fulfilment. This can be done by others: those who perceive your failure of “duty” and coercively extract compliance, or inflict “justified” punishment. Or it can be done by your own self: the mechanisms of repression, guilt and self-loathing so easily generated in complex human animals. Nietzsche saw something very profound when he noted that Kant’s categorical imperative “stinks of cruelty”.
Morality and life is, of course, about other people. But morality and life is also about yourself. The criterion of how to live might be primarily ordered around the question “what is good for others?” – but the question “what is healthy for me?” should never leave the picture. And if we can secure the first by healthier means with regard to the second, then that ought to be done. It may be a fact about us that we cannot do without duty entirely. But that is no reason not to do without duty as much as possible.
To retreat from philosophy and come back to the manner at hand; for this blog – which started as a source of pleasure and enjoyment – to transmutate into a source of duty and obligation is something I’ve decided not to continue tolerating. Perhaps this will mean I’ve wasted two years of investment. But as they say to smokers, it’s never too late to quit.
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Not, actually, that I’m going to stop blogging. For despite the above, regular writing has a particularly important function in my life: it is a form of exercise.
I’ve decided I’m going to try and live off of my brain. And being ambitious, I’ve decided I’m going to go as far as that can possibly take me. So my brain needs exercise. You wouldn’t try and become a top athlete without regular training; the same goes for anyone serious about thinking.
Of course, most serious thinkers simply keep their written thoughts to themselves. And there’s much to be said for that – not least the face it saves. But I enjoy and benefit from (some of) the critical engagement frequent public writing receives. I also think there’s something interesting in the possibility of a fairly open and visible process of intellectual development, insofar as not many people have tried (or for contingent historical reasons, been able to try) this. And anyway, my amour propre outweighs my sense of shame; so why not see what happens?
What I need is a change of direction. If blogging about politics – or at least, blogging about politics in the way I and many others have been doing for the past couple of years – bores me, then I should blog about something else, or in a different way. Obviously, I won’t stop writing about politics tout court. But it’s time to see what else I can do.
The new status badges added to the side of this website indicate a statement of intent. I’ll mostly be trying to read things in those three domains, and to write accordingly. Of course, I wasn’t lying when I said I was busy. And I’m still on sabbatical for the foreseeable future. But let’s just see what happens, even if that turns out to be a healthy nothing.
January 25, 2011
Drugs, Religion and the Usefulness of History
There’s currently a rather silly series airing on BBC3. How Drugs Work ostensibly “combines real life stories and computer graphics to explore inside the brain and the body” to find out, er, how drugs work.
Yet the cannabis episode is interesting, if only for one minor reason: the show’s repeated attempts to inject a sense of justification for marijuana’s prohibition. Despite being mostly an hour-long demonstration that illegality is largely pointless and unnecessary, deference to the norm of social prohibition has to be maintained. So we’re breathlessly told that after smoking a joint your chances of a heart attack increase by 50% - without it being noted that because most people are not at risk of having imminent heart attacks, this is largely irrelevant.* And so forth.
Those – like me – who favour moves to drug decriminalisation, and eventually controlled legalisation, often despair at the apparent impossibility of change. After all, the long-haired hippies of the swinging sixties grew up with drugs all around them…and proceeded to cut their hair, before become MPs, journalists and voters who largely favour continued criminalisation.
Yet social attitudes do change, and far bigger things than drug prohibition bear testament to this. Consider the case of Thomas Aikenhead, who on January 8th 1697 was executed for blasphemy in Edinburgh, after allegedly railing against the Holy Trinity. His was the last execution in Britain for this “crime”, and he was indicted as follows:
“That … the prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra’s fables, in profane allusion to Esop’s Fables; That he railed on Christ, saying, he had learned magick in Egypt, which enabled him to perform those pranks which were called miracles: That he called the New Testament the history of the imposter Christ; That he said Moses was the better artist and the better politician; and he preferred Mahomet to Christ: That the Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them: That he rejected the mystery of the Trinity as unworthy of refutation; and scoffed at the incarnation of Christ.”
By merely reproducing this text and stating that I heartily approve of Aikenhead’s antics, I thereby demonstrate that British society has changed profoundly. Yet before the 18th century, not only was blasphemy a capital crime, but the proposition that a society of atheists was even possible was treated by many as plainly ridiculous.
During the 18th century, the spectre of atheism and non-conformity gradually dwindled, as coerced adherence to approved religious dogma faded from the forefront of social anxiety. (If you want to understand some of this fascinating story from an intellectual history perspective, read this excellent book.)
Indeed, my hero David Hume is a case in point here. Born in 1711, he notoriously “cut off the nobler parts” of his 1739 magnum opus A Treatise of Human Nature, partly for fear that his irreligious positions might earn him Aikenhead’s fate. Yet by 1748, Hume instigated a devastating attack on natural religion in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. And although it was ultimately published only posthumously, his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion put the nail in the coffin of a host of religious arguments, without its publisher being indicted.
In less than a hundred years, British official public attitudes to the necessity of some level of religious conformity altered dramatically. Sadly, the reasons for this are far too complicated to expound here. Though it has something to do with the end of feudalism, the development of what we would now call capitalism, and the emergence of the modern coercive state apparatus. Plus the sheer variety of forms of religion and dissent growing ever exponentially after the protestant reformation, and the continued need in Britain to discover a via media between competing faiths (not least Catholicism) so as to avoid social breakdown.
If you think that attitudes towards the need for drug criminalisation today are deeply entrenched, they are as nothing compared to the importance of basic tenets of shared religion in early modern societies. After all, questions of religion reach into questions about the very nature, being and purpose of human existence, as well as the more pressing question of the ability of human beings to live together in peace.
What this nicely goes to show, therefore, is how history can help us gain some perspective. What may look to us, here and now, as necessary and fixed, may in fact prove to be contingent and transitory. A knowledge of the past thus has unexpected and indirect uses in the present, even if only to improve self-awareness.
Of course, philistine dunderheads fail to see this, usually whilst maintaining that only market-recognised “practical skills” have true value. On which point I note that the study of history is coming under the Coalition axe, as 80% cuts to University arts and humanities teaching budgets take effect. A well-known aphorism goes: those who don’t learn history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them. More generally, I would say: those who don’t value the past are quite likely to fuck up the future.
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* My favourite example of silly TV science about drugs was broadcast a few years ago. “Scientists” got some mice high on marijuana, and compared how long it took them to get out of a bowl of water vis-à-vis more sober mice. The glaring flaw in this “experiment”, however, is surely that it had no way of controlling for whether stoned mice just really love swimming.
January 18, 2011
Coalition Lies and the Corrosion of Politics
The sheer scale and breadth of the present government’s pre-election lying and post-election u-turning is quite something to behold. Let’s trot through the big ones, that we actually know about.
First and foremost, the stupendous Lib Dem betrayal on tuition fees. From categorical pledges to oppose all fee rises, to backing a lifting of the cap to £9,000 a year. Quite spectacular, and utterly impossible to hide.
Further down the list and marginally less egregious: Cameron denouncing as “Labour lies” any suggestion that the Tories would restrict bus passes for the elderly, cut the Winter Fuel allowance, or get rid of the pension credit. After promising to protect all these things on national television, the Coalition has done the exact opposite.
There’s also the general category of systematic dishonesty about the NHS. The Tories explicitly promised not to touch “frontline services” and to protect the NHS before the election. They are now instigating massive back-door changes. Changes described by “seriously concerned” leading healthcare experts as “unnecessary risks” which are “damaging” and “potentially disastrous”.
Less enormous (but by no means less important) lies that may have escaped your attention include: pledges from Cameron and Clegg to end child detention for those seeking asylum in Britain which have been totally reneged on, and the recent joke of the departure of Control Orders by the front door and their immediate return via the side window.
Oh, and the emergence of a video showing Cameron claiming he wouldn’t cut EMAs. And pledges to protect school funding from cuts, but instead playing jiggery-pokery with the accounts to disguise reduced funding beneath the veneer of a hollowed-out pupil premium. And Tory promises to protect child benefit. And the building of a massive snooping database both Liberals and Conservatives promised they wouldn’t pursue.
Well, you get the picture. Those are really just the ones that came most quickly to hand. I’m sure there’s plenty more.
But don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with some sop that it Pains Me Dearly to see such dishonesty and untruth in our political class. The magical optimism fairy didn’t pay me a visit last night; I’m still as cynical as ever. Politicians lie (often by unavoidable necessity), and being a Tory/Tory-lite Coalition, this bunch lied even more than usual in order to get their paws on power.
What concerns me, however, is the sheer scale and audacity of the Coalition’s reneging on earlier promises. I know the standard line is that none of this is done joyfully, but is the necessary price to pay for “Labour’s deficit”. (Or even more ludicrously, that this is all the outcome of “coalition policy” produced by party compromise, thus wholly divorced from any pre-election pledges.) But fewer and fewer ordinary voters will believe this (if any still do), and such justification will increasingly have traction only with the already-converted.
The real problem is that systematic large-scale dishonesty in politics is corrosive. The present government’s flagrant disregard for its own promises threatens to undermine even the minimal levels of trust Britons place in their political system. If this goes too far, there’s the very real risk that lying and dishonesty will become normalised. And that spells trouble.
Because if voters conclude that all politicians are lying mendacious bastards who just say one thing and do the other, then it eventually becomes acceptable for politicians to be lying mendacious bastards who just say one thing and do the other. As voters become disillusioned and resigned, all political sides play the same dirty game because only suckers remain honest. It’s a downward trajectory from there. And where do you end up? Well, basically, you end up in Italy. Which is not a good place to be.
So whilst I’m not surprised that Nick and Dave are presiding over a pack of lies dealt by a pack of liars, I do wish they would lie a little less – or at least, a little less obviously.
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Thanks to Guy and Paul for helping to assemble and source the compilation of lies in under 30 minutes.
December 20, 2010
The Conservative Party and Britain’s Universities
When the Browne Review was greeted by the Conservative-led government as a welcome model for higher education reform, it was possible to believe it wasn’t anything personal against Britain’s universities.
Sure, Lord Browne knew nothing about higher education before being appointed. (Though he had been forced to quit as boss of BP after, er, lying in court.) And the rest of the committee consisted of two policy wonks, a journo-turned-economist, a banker and two vice-chancellors…but no student or working academic representatives.
Yet this was a Labour-appointed committee. And if a Labour-appointed committee argued for the tripling of tuition fees and the thorough marketisation of higher education, it was surely harmless co-incidence that such proposals fitted the ideological preferences of the Tory Party like a glass slipper.
When the Conservative immigration cap kicked-in – causing administrative chaos at British universities – it was natural to assume that the Tories just hated foreigners. (“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”) Indeed, when the Home Office website recently appealed for ideas on how to prevent foreign students entering the UK – even though foreign students pay vastly more in fees, and contribute enormously to academic research – this conclusion looked pretty certain.
And when the Browne Review fee-hike was recently passed, it could be similarly concluded that this Government just dislikes the poor. That whilst lecturing us on the unfairness of passing debt to future generations, the ConDems could nonetheless square a cabinet of millionaires (who received their university educations for free) saddling tomorrow’s students with £40,000 of financial obligation.
Thus, the willingness to introduce this headline figure of debt (despite the prospects of dettering those from lower income backgrounds) could be explained under the mechanisms of good, old-fashioned, top-down class war, as waged by the traditional party of privilege.
But when it was revealed that universities would be facing overall cuts of 40% – with 80% cuts to most teaching budgets – it became harder to keep believing that the present government is simply motivated by a ferocious ideological preference for marketisation, plus a desire to kick foreigners and disregard the poor.
Indeed, with the latest announcement that University funding is to be slashed several months before the fee-hike kicks in – leading to a massive shortfall in funding, and some institutions warning they will face bankruptcy – the obvious conclusion seems increasingly unavoidable.
That despite offering fantastic value for money, being consistently rated amongst the top institutions in the world, and playing host to no less than the top-ranked bastion of learning on the face of the planet, this Conservative-led government simply hates Britain’s universities. And quite possibly wants to destroy them.
Or is there some other, more irrational explanation? One perhaps better-fitted to the manic character of this most unconservative Conservative party.
December 14, 2010
EMAs and Real Politics
I am increasingly drawn to the view that politics is not – and can never be – an exercise in “applied ethics”. That means having something like the following views:
By necessity politics is about horse-trading between political actors, and the juggling of competing interests. In particular, “competing interests” will relate both to groups who directly support one’s cause or position (e.g. by voting for, or funding, it), as well as those who oppose it but who nonetheless possess power to be reckoned with now and in the future. Achieving any kind of political decision or action means mediating between competing interest groups, to reach compromises that look nothing like what individual groups would have chosen in an ideal world of directly-applying their preferred outcomes.
What makes things even more difficult is that competing groups will at some level not share the same ethical priorities, commitments or beliefs. After all, if they did share (all) such things, we wouldn’t have any politics in the first place – politics being, by definition, the phenomenon of groups who hold different values attempting to triumph over each other (sometimes by force).
Further, individual political actors by necessity each bring personal histories to the negotiating table (or street rally). As a result, whatever individual actors say and demand is refracted through the prism of their past actions, and judged accordingly by other political agents. For example, if Tony Blair tomorrow called for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and for Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders, other political actors would not interpret this as a simple application of politically-worked out principle, but as a suspicious u-turn out of step with Blair’s previous commitments and actions.
Given these factors – and more – politics is not, and can never be, the simple application of ethical principles. It is inherently about the struggle of irreconciled values, powers and interests, and then of the search for compromise which (in western democracy at least) stops short of dominating violence.
Within the academy, such considerations are increasingly used to urge a re-thinking of political philosophy, which has for the past 40 years predominantly been conducted as though its core purpose is to distil essential abstract “values”, regardless of whether they can or cannot be applied to the currently existing “facts” of the real world. (See, for example, some of the late work of G.A. Cohen, as well as the vast industry of Rawlsiana). Against this, recent political “realists” claim that if political philosophy is actually to be about politics at all, it would do better to theorise about the process of politics as it actually occurs, not just as some would like it to, in an ideal world.
Of course that doesn’t mean somehow abandoning value assessments. That would be very odd – arguably impossible – and also defeat the point of any political theory that aspires to the name. But it does mean moving away from an emphasis on “ideal theory”, and the formulation of ethical propositions which (purposefully?) bare no relation to the realities of practical politics as it occurs on a daily basis.
Interestingly, the latest findings of the Institute for Fiscal Studies – and my anticipation of the Coalition Government’s response – push me further into this “realist” camp.
The IFS has slammed Coalition plans to remove the Education Maintenance Allowance from Britain’s poorest kids. In brief: the EMA is good value for money, it’s removal is likely to have adverse affects on the attainment and schooling rates of the poorest kids in society, and even if it doesn’t improve educational standards for the worse-off it nonetheless represents a valuable redistributive measure from rich to poor.
I anticipate, however, that the Coalition will respond to this awkward IFS finding the way it’s responded to other reports criticising the regressive and unfair economic policies emerging from the Treasury. Namely, by either ignoring the IFS, or by dispatching Nick Clegg to redefine “fairness”, or “progressivity”, or whatever other word needs to have its meaning re-arranged, so as to save the Coalition (and particularly the LibDems) some face.
And it’s not hard to see why this will (probably) happen. If the Government were to back down on EMAs, it would arguably look weak. After going through the fire of recent protests – which, after all, turned rather violent – the Government is unlikely to want to appear as though it lacks resolve. It is also unlikely to want to appear as though its policy terms are dictated by some poxy little think-tank. And in particular, the men who lead this Government – proud egomaniacs all, as by necessity politicians generally must be – are unlikely to want to admit that they have gotten a big, controversial policy decision wrong – especially at this late stage of the game.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Most (and I stress “most”) Conservative and LibDem MPs are not out to intentionally hurt the poor. It’s just that they have very specific ideas about how best to help the poor (ideas which are usually wrong – but that’s another story). And it happens that for whatever reasons (multiple cognitive biases not withstanding) many have already decided that scrapping EMAs is compatible with these pre-existing ideas of how to help the poor.
Unfortunately, this means that the IFS report is not going to change anything – even though it shows that if politicians do want to help the poor they should keep EMAs.* The reality of politics as it happens in practice is thus that even when ethical principles (“help the poor”) are agreed upon, it does not mean policies which promote those principles are actually enacted (or in this case, kept). Other principles – including (especially) power-considerations and demands of strategy and positioning – trump ethical principle.
If that’s not a demonstration of how politics quite quickly and easily becomes anything but “applied ethics”, then I don’t know what is. Of course, it doesn’t follow that there will be no value in formulating principles of abstract ethical value in the academy. But it may well bear on the question of whether the formulating of such abstract values has anything to do with politics, and thus whether such an activity can really be called political philosophy.
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* And as a general rule, if the IFS says something, it’s a much better guide to reality than any political party’s approved policy documents.
