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
May 8, 2011
A Reply to My Critics?
I’ve not much time for blogging these days, as on balance I find reading novels and cycling are far better ways to waste my life.
Nonetheless, it has come to my attention that I am rather unpopular with some sections of the Cambridge activist community. Apparently I have the wrong views about political violence, the nature of capitalism, the inevitable proletarian-student revolution, or something.
I thought I might do a post drawing on some of the finer thinkers of the 18th century. Specifically David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and the problem of political “enthusiasm”. Or as we would now call it, fanaticism.
The manner in which self-righteous, self-assured political conviction so easily takes hold over people’s minds. And then drives them to do terrible, murderous, destructive, and often outright evil things. Because enthusiasts are convinced that they have all the answers. And that everyone else is either too blind, or too morally twisted, to see their truths.
Or as Max Weber put it, describing a very similar thing:
“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 realize what they take upon themselves but who intoxicate themselves with romantic sensations.”
But I have neither the time nor the heart for such exertions. And indeed, political philosophy is perhaps an unfruitful place to start. I gather that English Literature is the modern revolutionary’s Oxbridge degree of choice. Several thousand years of cumulative wisdom – helpfully captured in books now available at paperback prices – from the most intelligent people to have walked the earth, is all irrelevant. Art and deconstruction will fuel the revolution, which is itself unquestionably a good thing. Or so I’m told.
So let’s instead start from some putative common ground. Philip Roth is surely one of the great literary figures of the 20th century, and perhaps America’s finest novelist in the post-war era. For what it’s worth (basically nothing), I think that if we’re going to be political litterateurs, then we should begin with Roth’s blindingly brilliant I Married a Communist.
Here’s a short passage, from the culmination of a genuinely profound work:
“You control betrayal on one side and you wind up betraying somewhere else. Because it’s not a static system. Because it’s alive. Because everything that lives is in movement. Because purity is petrification. Because purity is a lie. Because unless you’re an ascetic paragon like Johnny O’Day and Jesus Christ, you’re urged on by five hundred things. Because without the iron pole of righteousness with which the Grants clubbed their way to success, without the big lie of righteousness to tell you why you do what you do, you have to ask yourself, all along the way, “Why do I do what I do?” And you have to endure yourself without knowing.”
If you don’t understand what that short passage is saying, the rest of the book will explain. I would recommend it as seriously worthwhile reading for anybody who is particularly sure of their convictions.
April 29, 2011
From Rap Battles to Libertarian Myopia
Following that brilliant first instalment, Keynes versus Hayek Round II is here:
There’s no denying this is greatly entertaining stuff. But as with the first video, I find the pro-Hayek message rather irritating (well I would, wouldn’t I?)
To pick up on one specific thing, however, I’m frustrated by the Hayek character appropriating some words of Adam Smith about human beings not being mere pieces on a chessboard.
The original Smith quote, from his Theory of Moral Sentiments, runs thus:
“The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”
Smith’s point is simple but extremely important. However ingenious and complex a plan or system may be, it can never match the complexity of the world upon which it is unleashed. Each action sets off incalculable further reactions. Each human agent affected by these actions and reactions will in turn be propelled by his or her own “principle of motion” in ways that cannot be predicted or controlled. No plan or system ever works out the way “the men of system” hope. As Smith, in his typically understated way implies, failing to see this can lead to social, political and economic disaster.
Libertarians (and “classical liberals”, Austrian economists and whoever else is on the wagon this week) are fond of quoting this passage. Over at CafeHayek it is proffered as advice for “would-be czars and other experts to remember”. Yet libertarians (et al) rarely realise that Smith’s reflections apply – with devastating force – to their own state-minimalist politics.
Even in the world of minimal-state libertarian fantasy, there will inevitably be economic recessions.* Eventually, at least one of these will be severe. In recessions people suffer; that’s what unemployment and poverty entail, especially under the minimal state where there is presumably no welfare support. When people suffer, however, they do not sit around idly and wait for the market to fix itself – whenever that might be. They take action to alleviate their sufferings as soon as possible.
Under such circumstances, large-scale collective action will be taken by individuals seeking relief from suffering. Action of this sort is known as “politics”. In this “politics”, human beings mobilise so as to put the levers of power into the hands of those who will (or at least promise to) alleviate their sufferings. In modern societies this is done via the state apparatus. Hence even if (magically) we start out with libertarian state minimalism, we will not stay there. The power of the state will eventually be deployed so as to interfere with the market forces currently failing to alleviate the sufferings of ordinary people.
Two things follow. First, and with especial irony, the libertarian minimal state can only be sustained by coercive state force. When ordinary citizens mobilize to demand state action to alleviate suffering, the politicians they select, and the movements that propel them to power, must be repressed in order to preserve the minimal state which refuses to interfere in the economy or to provide state support. Minimal state libertarianism either organically gives way to state interventionism, or resists this organic development by becoming an anti-democratic tyranny. At a conceptual level, this basically means minimal state libertarianism tears itself apart upon any contact with the constraints of reality.
Secondly, with such considerations in place we can return to the real world and look at the alarming historical record. During the 20th century, when economic situations became sufficiently dire for sufficiently long, it was not mildly interventionist Keynesians who took power. It was murderous Fascist, National Socialist and Bolshevik regimes, who either wrested control of the state by force or were selected by desperate populations via popular vote.
Hayekians (or whatever) are being extremely myopic when they denounce Keynesians and other interventionists who broadly support market-economic systems whilst attempting to actively mitigate their worst failings. For the Hayekians fail to see that Keynesianism and other economic interventionist programmes take place against a complex real world background. A real world in which attempts at basic economic management (i.e the alleviation and prevention of suffering) are a bulwark against disaster. A bulwark against the sorts of regimes that are deeply and murderously antithetical to individual and economic liberty in ways economic-interventionist capitalist democracies have never been, nor ever will be.
Libertarian state-minimalism and attendant Austrian laissez-faire economics are fine for fantasists pining to live in a fantasy world. But for those of us preoccupied with the perils, dangers and constraints of this real world, they and their loud-mouthed proponents are usually little more than a nuisance.
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* The really nutty crowd, of course, claim that without government there would never be any market failure, recession or depression. This piece of deliberately self-serving wishful naivety is best treated by simply being ignored.
March 9, 2011
That Egypt Thing
During the Egyptian uprising, I didn’t have much to say. Far too much was being said already, and little of it well-informed. I was, of course, struck by the fervent optimism and passionate belief espoused by almost all on the Left. For this uprising – we were assured by many – was a truly democratic revolution, by a people yearning to be free. These were Democrats In Waiting, slaving beneath the Yoke of Tyranny. We had only to wait for The People to cast off Their shackles and a New Age of Democratic Freedom* would dawn.
Amidst the excitement and hubristic proclamation, it seemed to me consistently unwise to pass any judgements during the heat of the moment. For three considerations in particular seemed, if anything, to tell in the direction of pessimism about Egypt’s prospects.
Firstly, that the entire Middle East sits atop a pile of what Flying Rodent so aptly labels “democracy kryptonite”, aka oil. Given this particularly pressing truth, the long arm of America was never likely to withdraw its hand. After half a century of careful investment and planning, the US was hardly going to let things go all Venezuela in a key military and economic hotspot. At least, not if it could help it – and so on into the future.
Secondly, and closely connectedly, even the most cursory glance at the political situation during the Egyptian uprising revealed that the army always held the final balance of power. It was clearly with the support of the army that Mubarak would stand, or fall. In the end he fell. And now the army’s ruling council runs Egypt, following what was technically a military coup d’etat. Of course, it is quite possible that the army will cede power following elections in September. But it’s actually unclear whether there will be any elections in September. And as there has been no effective opposition in Egypt for decades, it’s also unclear whether will be any viable political alternatives on offer even if the ballots go ahead.
Furthermore, a kindergarten knowledge of history reminds us that never, ever, anywhere, has a ruling section of society willingly and freely given up power to those beneath it. Political revolutions – by which I mean proper revolutions, not eventualities which see nasty Mr Mubarak go to Sharm el Sheikh and his generals simply take over the running of affairs – are achieved by the forceful and bloody seizure of power by one group from another. The army is highly unlikely to let power go to any whom it does not approve of. Now at this point, note that democracies tend not to flourish when the military is the primary political power within a state. Now further note that for decades the primary source of American leverage over Egypt has come in the form of military aid. Things, to put it mildly, do not point in the direction of Hope and Change.
Thirdly, given that Egypt has no history or tradition or functioning democratic governance, the transition to any such regime is likely to be precarious. This is a country without democratic norms; a country where ordinary people have not yet had time to adapt to a political system which involves putting enormous amounts of trust and responsibility into the hands of parties whom one did not vote for. (Because the logic of democracy is that nobody’s favoured candidates can win every election, every time.) It is a country in which those who hold the strings of power, patronage and influence have not yet evolved the mechanisms of reciprocal deferred trust when out of power. The arrangements whereby electoral losers amongst the elite abstain from recourse to violence and thuggery, on the guarantee that their interests will not suffer too much in the short term and that they’ll get another meaningful shot at power shortly.
All of which is not to say that Egyptians – or Arabs, or Muslims – “cannot do democracy”. That is a piece of crass racism, against which we recall that less than a century ago respectable British individuals in respectable British newspapers urged the folly of democratic systems. Men who called for the imperative of strong rule; the clarity and good governance provided by Messrs Hitler and Mussolini during times of straightened economic woe. But it is to say that democracy is a difficult, complicated thing. It takes time to emerge, and requires favourable historical, geographical, social, economic and political settings. At present, Egypt appears to have none of these – albeit in significant part thanks to the grubby paws of The Land of the Free.
But then blaming everything on America just won’t do, either. For bound-up in the over-excited and premature rhetoric of Democracy and Freedom for Egypt was often the assumption that here was a democratic people simply yearning to be free. The implicit assumption being that They (what, all of them? young and old? rich and poor? muslim and christian?) were really just like Us. And that when They were given power, They would behave just like Us – a situation happily dovetailing with their new Democratic Freedom.**
But recent reports show that this is all a little too lazy. With dead Coptic Christians following religious clashes with sections of the majority Muslim population, this appears to be a society which hasn’t had the good fortune (and placatory economic development) to get beyond the bloody religious frenzies that our own blessed Isles used to play such sanguinary host to. And then there’s the International Women’s Day march in Tahir Square, which saw angry men charging the marchers, dragging them to the floor, beating and sexually harassing them, as police and army watched from the sidelines.
Certainly, these events are too isolated to tell us anything about “Arab culture” (or if you like, “Muslim mores”). Societies, religions, peoples and cultures are complex (and there’s plenty of violent hatred against women in the UK too, let’s not forget). To infer anything from the above in terms of positive substantive content would, again, be crass racism or outright stupidigy. But these happenings are nontheless enough to put the lie to the naively optimistic (and self-servingly convenient) assumption that They are just like Us, sharing Our Values, the outward political expression of which will necessarily be Democracy and Freedom.***
Those whom this piece is primarily aimed at will likely mistake the above for a sort of petty schadenfreude. They will think that I am indifferent about the sufferings and poor prospects of ordinary Egyptians, in service of some wider self-satisfied political cynicism. But that is wrong. I would genuinely like for it to be the case that Egypt could enjoy the prosperity, security and advantage of a nation like Britain (for all its faults). It sincerely saddens me that so many people’s lives must be made abject by forces beyond their control (such as the profitability of the British arms and oil industries). The point, however, is that just because I would like it to be otherwise, it does not mean that it is otherwise. And I adapt my assessments accordingly. I have this funny idea that other people should do the same.
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*notice the marriage of two complex concepts, introduced unexplained and unsubstantiated as though nothing in the world could be more obvious.
** that conjunction again.
*** in for the third, whatever it actually means.
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 28, 2011
Gray and Keys vs. the New Social Legitimacy
Andy Gray and Richard Keys have been removed from their positions at Sky Sports. This follows their sexist remarks about (assistant) referee Sian Massey, the emergence of derogatory off-camera “banter”, and a frankly bizarre rant by Keys on TalkSport radio.
The first thing to note is that nobody forced Sky Sports to get rid of these two. Neither did anybody threaten to coerce Sky physically, economically, or via the power of the state. Rather, we now live in a society which (finally) deems it unacceptable for public figures to speak in such outrageously derogatory terms about women. Public figures caught doing so are exposed to extreme normative disdain, and this can in turn lead to purposeful abandonment by their backing-organisations or institutions.
This shows the power of values and legitimacy in collective human life and interaction. Sufficient collective moral disapproval can alone be enough to stimulate decisive action. Keys and Gray went beyond the bounds of contemporary “normative legitimacy”, and have paid the price.
This affair is likely to sit very ill with the right-wing commentariat, especially hysterical “opinion” spouters like Mad Mel and Richard Littlejohn, but also the less manically deranged. The angry (and nuttier) right typically reacts to such events by bemoaning the power of “sinister” interest “lobbies” that are “taking over” our society. More specifically, such “lobbies” are controlling even our very language and public morality. We can no longer say what we want – some words themselves are off-limits.
Now as it happens in some measure I agree with these rightwing commentators. Because it is true that our very language and public morality has undergone profound change with regards to the status of women in particular. As a result, certain people can no longer say whatever the hell they like without expecting serious repercussion. Some words themselves are, indeed, now off-limits (in public).
Where I differ from the right – aside from disdaining the naively simplistic view that profound social change is orchestrated by “sinister lobbies” – is in thinking that with regards to women’s equality, this is actually a jolly good thing. For the alternative is one that we know well from recent – and indeed, long-standing – historical precedent.
Certainly, there’s still a long way to go before genuine female equality is achieved in this country. But I would much rather live in a world where it is at least the publicly stated goal and norm. A world where ignorant bigoted male patriarchs cannot throw their weight around as part of a process that keeps half the population in the position of chastised, marginalised, denigrated second-class citizens.
Equally, I would much rather live in a world where offensive, degrading, intimidating, dismissive, undermining nastiness cannot be shrugged off as “just banter”. Because as anybody who has ever met a bully knows, the excuse that verbal intimidation is “just a joke” is one of the most effective means to marginalize and undermine a victim. Whether Gray and Keys realise it or not, when they claim that “it’s only banter”, they choke-off the voice of protest and close-down the means of escape for those objecting to what they are being subjected to, in turn manipulating them into accepting what they rightfully wish to resist.
So I welcome the new (and it is very new – well within my short lifetime) social norm of something like gender equality. A social norm that draws the bounds of legitimacy far narrower than what fat old Jurassic boors can cope with. And I make no qualms about that: because if the bounds of legitimacy weren’t being redrawn this way, the winners would be people like Keys and Gray. And frankly, I see no reason to prefer that world than the one we’re moving towards.
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 21, 2011
Blair’s Heirs
The other day I noted the sheer scale and audacity of Coalition lies and u-turns. My intended point was that the volume of dishonesty is staggering, and has potentially corrosive impacts upon our politics in the long term.
My piece was cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy. Sadly, LibCon is no longer a place for reasoned exchange. The fate of any highly successful blog is (almost) inevitably an exponential increase in morons until sensible debate is suffocated.
Still, amidst the whataboutery and “Labour also lied; two wrongs make a right!” lines of “argument”, something vaguely sensible was being articulated. Namely, that even if I’m right that the scale of Coalition dishonesty is astonishing, this isn’t wholly new. So it’s worth asking: where did it come from?
By sheer co-incidence, Tony Blair has again been up before the pointless farce of the Chilcot Inquiry. Aside from giving him the opportunity to intone about the threat of Iran – whilst straight-facedly denying that invading their immediate neighbours to the west and east has made that worse! – we also know that:
Summing up the contents of the statements, [Blair] said he had told Mr Bush: “You can count on us, we are going to be with you in tackling this, but here are the difficulties.”
The message he wanted to get across, he added, was “whatever the political heat, if I think this is the right thing to do I am going to be with you, I am not going to back out if the going gets tough. On the other hand, here are the difficulties and the UN route is the right way to go”.
One reason Chilcot is a farce is, precisely, that any remotely impartial spectator already knows Blair lied about Iraq. And whatever Chilcot determines, there will be no consequences for Tony.
Regardless of retrospective justifications offered by the Iraq conflict’s apologists, never forget that what clinched the Parliamentary vote for war was the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and was an immediate and dangerous threat. But that was complete baloney.
Blair lied about the evidence. He had already promised Bush that Britain was committed to an invasion, regardless. Blair was never going to pull out. Even when the Americans continued to make unilateral decisions with total disregard for British action or interest.
Blair misled Parliament to secure British backing for America. He has never shown an ounce of remorse. He still acts as though his declarations of unfailing moral vision are all the justification he ever needs. He shows us a putative sincerity, against a clear backdrop of dishonesty. He expects that to be enough – and in a lot of ways, it is. For blair and Labour were re-elected in 2005. He walks the streets a free – and very rich – man.
Now recall the ascensions of David Cameron and Nick Clegg to their respective party leaderships. Cameron – a moderniser despised by much of his own party – beat the favourite David Davis largely because many Tories thought they had finally found their answer to “Teflon Tony”. As for Clegg, he too was a Blair clone if also with a dash of Dave. (The Liberals picked the more rightwing contender, because the country’s mood was at that point moving towards the Conservatives.)
Tony Blair, along with Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, initiated an era in British politics where the truth was a worthless commodity. One easily traded for pious intonations, technical get-outs, and straight-faced declarations of hollow sincerity. Iraq was the apotheosis of this, not least because all those responsible got away with it.
By the sheer scale of their recent dishonesties, Cameron and Clegg may simply be confirming that they are, indeed, Blair’s heirs. But perhaps not in the ways their parties originally hoped.
January 19, 2011
Book Review: Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature – An Introduction
Book Review – Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature An Introduction by John P. Wright, pp. 316, Cambridge, £16.99
This is a noteworthy book from a noteworthy author, to mutually reinforcing effect. John P. Wright is that rare thing: a scholar with a sophisticated grasp of the complexity of philosophical argument who is also a serious historian of philosophy (with an emphasis on “historian”). These two things have here combined to produce a beginner’s guide which doubles as a valuable scholarly contribution for more advanced readers.
Wright has succeeded in capturing the complexity of Hume’s arguments in the Treatise whilst maintaining a prose style which makes the material accessible, without disguising that readers must work hard to keep up. Particularly pleasing is the seriousness with which Wright treats Hume’s positions. Whereas many “introductions” give-in to the temptation to pass (usually dismissive) judgement on Hume’s arguments, Wright instead notes common objections before providing the more sophisticated Humean response, leaving readers to decide where to go from there. He is also scrupulously honest in making clear when he is taking sides in any interpretative debate (and in Hume scholarship, this is no infrequent thing). This is best exemplified in his meticulous discussion of Hume’s account of causation in the Treatise.
Wright correctly notes that the bulk of the “problem” of causation for Hume is epistemological – the issue of how we can come to “know” of causal connections in the external world. Providing an admirably thorough and accurate exposition, Wright follows Hume’s argument to the letter. Illustrating the powerful nature of the sophisticated epistemological scepticism in play, Wright explains the sheer intellectual force of the reasoning which leads Hume to suppose that our only basis for a belief in causal necessity resides in our own minds. Yet Wright notes that there is also an outstanding corollary debate in this area: that whilst Hume was intractably sceptical as to our ability to “know” of mind-independent causal connections, there remains the issue of whether he nonetheless thought causal connections obtained “out there” in an underlying reality, to which we do not actually have access.
On this “ontological” question Wright’s commitments are “realist”. That Hume believed there are necessary causal connections built into the fabric of existence, even if we can’t have direct access to them. Personally, this is far too quasi-Kantian a conclusion to deduce for my liking. My preferred reading is that Hume is thoroughly sceptical here, too: that whilst there might be causal necessity built into the fabric of existence, equally there might not. As we don’t know (and will never have any way of knowing), the correct position is not ontological “realism”, but simple, healthy, sceptical agnosticism. Wright, however, is quite open about his own commitments and the alternatives available, and his footnotes provide ready ammunition for opponents.
Of particular interest to more historically-minded readers will be both Wright’s lengthy and detailed introduction, and his constant endeavour to situate Hume’s arguments against a background of contemporary debate. Whereas many beginner’s guides simply regurgitate basic biographical platitudes, Wright has taken the trouble not only to provide a detailed over-view of Hume’s early life but also to stress the possible connections between the young man and the later philosophy (if only slight later: Hume finished the Treatise when he was just 27 years old).
Of particular interest here is Wright’s suggestion that Hume’s early psychological breakdown – before his new “scene of thought” which inspired the penning of his masterpiece – was induced by a rigorous attempt to conform his life to the stoic moral teachings of Francis Hutcheson and Lord Shaftesbury, two extremely prominent moral theorists of the early 18th century. Basing this claim not in idle speculation but in Hume’s correspondence, Wright thus makes an important historical contention about the possible motivations for – and our interpretations of – Hume’s repudiation of the stoic “moral sense” theories in favour of an epicureanism that placed pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance at the centre of human psychology. For those who wish to combine philosophy with history to good effect, Wright’s is no trivial suggestion.
Indeed historical sensitivity is one of the most pleasing things about this volume, where intellectual context of Hume’s arguments is always sketched. This is not only interesting in itself, but also helps both to illustrate Hume’s own rival commitments as well as guiding the reader towards interpretations that avoid retrospective conceptual anachronism. This is particularly important when Wright comes to discuss Hume’s moral and political commitments in the final sections of the book.
On one level, by locating Hume’s intervention as a complex response to (amongst others) Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville, John Locke and Samuel Clarke, this book happily avoids the trap of becoming a narrow, tired discussion of Hume’s arguments against ethical rationalism to the exclusion of all else. Whilst handling Hume’s rejection of any moral realism derived from a faculty of reason with aplomb, Wright is also wholly alive to the fact that Hume’s real targets in the Treatise were the “moral sense” realisms of Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, and the non-naturalistic sceptical moral irrealism of Bernard Mandeville. Accordingly, it is the responses to these authors which command the bulk of Wright’s treatment – which is exactly how it should be, for that is how it is in Hume.
In doing so, however, Wright also makes a subtle yet important scholarly intervention as to the extent of influence upon Hume. The great student of Hume’s thought, Norman Kemp Smith, famously claimed that Hume entered philosophy through the “gateway of morals” and that his moral and political thought were essentially an extension of Hutcheson’s. This interpretation has been followed in recent years by David Fate-Norton in particular, but Wright here aligns himself with scholars such as James Moore and Luigi Turco who emphasise the radical discontinuity between Hume and Hutcheson, with the Treatise constituting a thorough-going repudiation of the Glasgow professor. For what it’s worth, Wright further convinces me that the Kemp Smith interpretation must indeed be rejected.
Insofar as a beginner’s guide can be a tour de force, it is fair to describe Wright’s volume as such. It is, to my knowledge, the best introduction to Hume’s Treatise – and by extension, Hume’s thought – on the market. If you teach a course on Hume, or 18th century philosophy, or ethics, it should be on your reading list. For those just looking for a helpful place to start exploring one of the greatest works of genius ever produced, here it is. This is a book for all, and it deserves attention.
January 17, 2011
Wikileaks, Switzerland and Nazis
Wikileaks has been handed confidential information by banker Rudolf Elmer, which threatens to reveal Swiss banking complicity in tax evasion and other criminal activity. Accordingly, Elmer is to go on criminal trial for breaking Swiss bank secrecy laws.
One thing you can expect to hear around the build-up to this case is that Swiss banking secrecy was enacted to protect Jewish assets from the Nazis during the 1930s. This was the line repeatedly deployed in 2008, when US authorities unveiled systematic complicity from Swiss bank UBS in assisting American tax avoidance.
It would be nice for the Swiss if it were true; providing some sort of vague moral justification for the systematic undermining of the laws and revenue authorities of other states. But it’s not true.
From Treasure Islands, the new book by Nick Shaxson you should all read:
“A pervasive story now exists that Switzerland put bank secrecy into place to protect German Jewish money from the Nazis. This myth dates back to a bulletin in 1966 from the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (today’s Credit Suisse), and Swiss bankers have wielded it to great effect ever since. American officials negotiating a new tax treaty with Switzerland at that time lodged an official complaint after being frequently lectured about the supposed origins of bank secrecy as protection for Jewish money. A Swiss Federal Council report in March 1970 officially endorsed the story, and this was backed up in 1977 by a lurid book by a former Geneva newspaper editor outlining the fabulous story of Gestapo agents infiltrating Switzerland to worm out Jewish bank details. The problem with the story is that it’s not true
Amid the Great Depression, Swiss farmers’ and workers’ movements began in 1931 to clamour for more control over the banks. Bankers feared state inspection of their hitherto closely controlled financial domain would risk secrets leaking out, and they pressed fiercely for a new law, to make it a crime to violate Swiss bank secrecy. By August 1931, the highly-influential right-wing daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung was attacking government oversight of the banks, and in February 1932 a top banker sent the government draft legislation with a clause making it a crime to violate bank secrecy. It was the French scandal [revelations that up to 4 billion francs were being lost to Swiss-facilitated tax evasion schemes] that October, however, which really spurred government into action. A new banking law was prepared and an official draft was ready by February 1933, just eighteen days after Hitler came to power and long before he had consolidated his grip on the German state or even gained control of all of Germany’s intelligence services. The Swiss law finally adopted in 1934 for the first time made it a criminal offence punishable by fines and prison to violate bank secrecy, and was almost unchanged from the original draft. In Germany the death penalty for having foreign accounts undeclared to the Third Reich only appeared in 1936. Even the Swiss Bankers’ Association has no records of the supposed activities of Gestapo agents coming to Switzerland to squirrel out information about Jewish money.”
Of course, even if it were true that Swiss banking secrecy was originally adopted to protect Jewish assets (which it wasn’t), that wouldn’t justify the facilitation of tax avoidance and evasion today. Instead, using of the legacy of the holocaust to provide cover for illicit financial skullduggery simply compounds the distasteful nature of what the Swiss tax haven operation involves.
Incidentally, Treasure Islands continues to pick up excellent reviews. Having started it over the weekend, I can confirm that it’s a cracking read. You should buy it.
