November 7, 2011
The Ethics of Derren Brown
Over the past decade the illusionist, magician and psychological manipulator Derren Brown has produced some of the most consistently entertaining and provocative television available. But my appreciation extends beyond mere entertainment, and well into the professional.
A large part of my research consists in understanding the foundations of the major western schools of moral philosophy. To simplify rather a lot, probably the two most influential and important approaches to moral philosophy in the modern Anglophone tradition are as follows. First, that which locates our moral commitments and beliefs in the operations of sentiment and emotion and relegates reason to the role of handmaiden. Second, that which privileges reason and makes rationality foundational.
David Hume remains the great proponent of the first, “sentimentalist” tradition. For Hume, “reason is, and ought only ever to be, the slave of the passions”. Moral codes are built on patterns of emotional reaction to our peers, developed over time, and heavily influenced by custom as we sympathetically identify with each other to build bonds of psychological commitment. Our moral judgements originate in our inner sentiments. They are brought by us to the world we experience and which we “gild and stain” with the passions; they are not found there by some faculty, or revealed to us by the operations of reason alone.
The alternative, rationalist, view receives its most sophisticated formulation in the work of Immanuel Kant. Simplifying terribly: Kant proposed that each rational agent could discern universal moral laws founded in the operations of reason by applying a test of universalizability to any proposed action. In essence, a highly sophisticated extrapolation of the principle that you should not do to others what you would not have done to yourself, but now on pain of fundamental contradiction as an agent engaged in practical reasoning, inviting moral failure by the transcendent and immutable standards of reason and logic. (It is a not-insignificant fact that Hume preceded Kant, and that the apparent limitations of the Scotsman’s project were a motivation to that of the East Prussian’s. And although Kant wasn’t Anglophone, his influence on English-speaking philosophers has been enormous.)
Derren Brown’s output surely lends support to some species of the Humean position (though it may generate a darker view than the great optimist Hume himself entertained). Take Brown’s latest series, “The Experiments”. In week two, a crowd thinking they were taking part in a comedy game show systematically voted, by clear majorities, to inflict ever more unpleasant events on a hapless, unwitting target. From having this unsuspecting man falsely accused of sexual assault in a bar, they then framed him for shoplifting, ordered somebody to enter his flat and smash his TV, then voted for him to be kidnapped by a masked gang and thrown into the back of an unmarked van. All in under an hour.
The power of reason was conspicuously lacking there, as the passions of mob-mentality rapidly took over. In previous series, Derren has performed a range of stunts, from manipulating ordinary people into committing armed robberies, to directing them to pick seemingly random objects and “predicting” this in advance, to getting strangers in the street to hand over their wallets and keys just by being asked. Brown’s work consistently shows just how malleable we are; not only in our behaviors, but in our reactions to each other and in particular to figures in authority.
Of course, proponents of Kantian positions will say that this is all besides the point: “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”, as Isaiah Berlin famously embellished. That human beings are in fact prone to manipulation, and that reason is frequently over-ridden by their passions, is allegedly irrelevant to the question of what they should do, and whether a more fundamental moral law does exist. Maybe so. Though perhaps one might wonder what the point of such a law is, if it seems to easily ignored, assuming it’s ever even discovered by any human being in the first place.
Rgardless, the implications for politics (as distinct from abstract moral theory) are surely different. Politics absolutely is about what will happen, and not merely what it would be nice in an ideal world. Yet the evidence from Brown, handily available online at 4OD, is that rationality and reason are just about the last things governing most of us. Not only are we buffeted about by our passions, but more worryingly, those who understand how to manipulate those passions can buffet us in directions they choose. This was something well known to Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, and now variously credited with the invention of both modern political propaganda and mass consumer advertising.
Kantian political philosophies that emphasise the rationality of citizens as the primary loci for discussions of (for example) what more just and equal societies might look like, may thus be barking up two wrong trees simultaneously. Firstly, if rationality is not be the primary matter of political action and reaction, taking it as one’s starting point may well doom one’s conclusions to parochialism and irrelevance. Secondly, waxing hypothetical about what a more just or equal society would look like risks missing what really matters in politics: working out who controls who, how they do it, and making sure they do it in ways that are less nasty than others. To spell the point out: the symbiotic relationship between Fox News and the Tea Party, with the specter of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election now firmly on the horizon, surely does not reflect well on the dominant trend for rationalist political philosophy in many North American and British universities.
In these respects, Derren Brown offers important materials for thinking about both moral and political philosophy, at least for those willing to accept that dusty tomes and wise authorities do not have a monopoly on insight. Of course, it may be replied that there’s nothing in Derren Brown that can’t be found in the properly peer-reviewed experimental psychology literature. Don’t we know all of this from Milgram and the Stanford Prison experiments? Actually, this simply raises another host of questions. Because in his latest series, Brown has been conducing “experiments” that would never pass a modern academic experimental ethics committee.
Take his latest offering: The Guilt Trip. In this special feature, Brown systematically manipulated a totally unsuspecting man, Jody, into feelings of guilt, whilst inducing situations which caused him to repeatedly doubt his own memory. Over the course of a weekend, Brown – working behind the scenes – used systematic deception and manipulation to maneuver Jody into confessing to a murder he did not commit. Jody was subjected to increasing stress over a series of days, and his every move was filmed without his knowledge (including the use of cameras in his hotel bedroom). During his first interview with the “police”, and in the interval between this interview and his walking to the local police station to hand himself in for a murder he did not commit, Jody exhibited high levels of stress, confusion and panic. He consented to none of this. Given how uncomfortable this was as viewing “entertainment”, one can easily imagine how it felt to be Jody. And to know one would not like it.
I say that this “experiment’” would not have passed an academic ethics committee. How do we know? Because by the standards of modern experimental ethics committees, no academic department would now permit the Milgram or Stanford Prison experiments. (Indeed it was partly because of these experiments that the rules on what you could and could not do to volunteers were dramatically tightened). Yet, arguably at least, judging by the standards of prolonged distress and acute anxiety – not to mention systematic manipulation, deception and unwitting surveillance – what Brown did to Jody was worse than, say, what Milgram had his subjects think they were doing to other people.
But does this simply mean that vital psychological experimentation can now only be conducted outside of the academy? Brown’s results in his latest series – pace any discrediting hidden trickery – are fascinating. Getting a hypnotized man to think he’s shot Stephen Fry; directing a masked television audience into advocating the kidnap of an unsuspecting man; manipulating an innocent into confessing to a murder he did not commit. These “experiments” stand to tell us not just about our psychologies as individuals and groups, but about the moral and political philosophies compatible with those internal workings. Has academic science now become so restricted that truly important work has to be done in the intellectual wild west of television?
That’s a difficult question. But it wasn’t the one that bothered me the most when watching a traumatised Jody agonise about whether he had been capable of murdering a man with a croquet hammer, and not even remembering he’d done it. What most truly disturbed me was the feeling that Brown had simply gone too far this time. My sympathetic identification with Jody ensured I spent most of the hour wanting this “experiment” to stop. Here was a man being put through hell, and not primarily in the name of science (let’s be honest), but for mass entertainment.
When it comes to science, questions of the benefit some potentially harmful experiments might yield versus the rights and welfare of the individuals affected are notoriously difficult to settle. Was the insight gleaned from Stanford sufficient to justify the abuse the “prisoners” went through at the hands of their “guards”? Do utilitarian benefits trump some of the rights of some individuals? Given the value of scientific and intellectual advance, those are genuinely difficult questions. What seems more clear cut is that framing a man for shoplifting (with corresponding “arrest” by “police”), or getting another to think they have killed another human being in cold blood, simply in the name of Friday-night-fun, is not acceptable.
But then, Brown has a strong reputation for looking after the psychological wellbeing of his subject (victims?) after the show is over. And in the case of Jody, several minutes were dedicated to his personally enthusing after the event about how great the experiment had been. Cue numerous shots of Jody immediately seeing the funny side of it all, laughing along with not-a-little relief. By pulling the emotional heartstrings so adeptly, Brown dramatically lessened the sense of viewer guilt that what had been done to this man was wrong. All’s well that ends well. Right? And who’s to say whether Brown was wrong to so manipulate us viewers – isn’t that part of what you accept when you tune in to this sort of show? And if – and it’s a big ‘if’ – we actually learn from Brown’s “experiment”, does that make it OK? Even when bearing in mind that what he ultimately gets paid for is the provision of our entertainment?
October 27, 2011
Occupy (my attention)
A friend – who happens to be both left-leaning and employed in City finance – sent me a text:
“Not that I’m against it, but what is the stated reason for the St Paul’s protests? Just awareness or do they want something specific? Normally there’s a reason – Uni fees a very valid one – but this just seems like a bit of a moan. The timing seems odd, even if it is jumping on the Occupy Wall Street bandwagon. It’s been two weeks though, who has that much time?”
I sympathise.
Recently, I’ve become utterly bored by day-to-day politics. Paradoxically, this has afforded me some insights.
I don’t really know what Occupy London Stock Exchange (OLX) is about. I haven’t had the time or inclination to find out. Because I don’t really care. Because I am uninterested in the repetition and tedium of daily political debate and exchange. I’m interested in politics (hence why I’m doing a PhD in it), but then I increasingly think that’s really something else. What I’m certainly not interested in is the daily outrages and accusations; the ranting; the tribalism; the he-said, she-said; the bla bla bla ad nauseam .
Which itself wouldn’t actually be so bad, if people were quietly conscious that they were being hypocrites and opportunists in pointing out the hypocrisies and opportunisms of their enemies. What I have no time for is the pathetic sincerity of the daily outrage. “Oh, my political enemy has done something nasty and underhand! How outrageous! How shocking! I am so appalled! Something Must Be Done!”
Yawn.
I don’t really know what OLX is about. It seems a bit silly. And that’s an interesting perspective coming from me, given that a year ago I was involved in the Cambridge student occupation, attended quite a lot of demos, and was generally Pretty Interested In Daily Politics.
But it may be instructive, for precisely that past, to observe just how off-the-radar OLX is to me. Somebody busy with their research (which is not much like having a real job). With teaching commitments. With Friday nights. With the football season. With time on my hands. With left-wing views. With a tendency to read the news.
If I don’t register OLX, how much do you think it gets through to people working 40+ hour weeks? With kids? With bills and mortgages to pay? Worried about job security and inflation? Who don’t have time to read the paper? Who aren’t particularly left-wing?
Of my friend’s text, however, what really stands out is his closing line: “It’s been two weeks though, who has that much time?”
When I used to box at a gym in Southport, a post-training discussion once turned to the TV series Big Brother. The general conclusion was that not only were all the contestants freaks, but they were Not Like Ordinary People. Why? Precisely because they could swan off for 10 weeks without worrying about work. For most in the discussion, that was enough to discredit each and every contestant. The BB housemates weren’t from the real world. The world where kids and mortgages ruled out such summer sojourns. And that bred both a fairly obvious contempt, but also an underlying if mild resentment.
Leftist activists might endorse OLX with passion. Many of them are out there right now, proudly taking part, braced against the cold by the sincerity of their views. But activists should remember that goldfish bowls create visual distortions, in both directions. And like it or not, dissimilarity quickly breeds contempt.
August 10, 2011
Riot of a Time
Very quick thoughts on the recent riots.
1. Clearly it is true that poverty, alienation, deepdisgruntlement with the police and lack of opportunity are important background facts that any serious attempt at understanding will have to take into account.
2. But these alone cannot explain what was clearly, in many cases, opportunistic theft and glee in destruction.
3. So where do we go from there?
4. I take these to be true and important components of any description of modern British politics and society: that it promotes self-interested greed, materialism, the possession of ostensive goods for status, immediate gratification, and a toleration (even encouragement) of ruthless competitiveness with a deep disregard for the welfare of others. (Call this the “no-such-thing-as-society society”, if you like.)
5. Putting 1 and 2 together with 4, and adding in conditions of spontaneity, anticipated impunity and evident opportunity, a basic yet broadly sufficient explanation appears to emerge.
6. Note that the things described in 4 above constitute the core tenets of the political ideology broadly known as ‘Thatcherism’ (or if you want to bring things up to date post-1997, ‘neo-liberalism’).
7. Also note that the conditions described in 1. have been massively and continuously exacerbated by Thatcherism (or ‘neo-liberalism’), especially if enormous inequality and its debilitating effects on individual well-being and self-respect are included too.
8. So actually this may not be such a mystery after all. If you constantly tell people to be selfish, ruthless, competitive, greedy and disregarding of the welfare of others, then you can’t really be surprised when they behave as they are told they fundamentally are and must be (even if they forget about the bits to do with obeying the law).
9. However, if you happen to be the prime minister just invoke some vacuous covering fluff about ‘moral responsibility’. Continue to condemn loudly, and then get back to promoting the elements in 4. on a daily basis. Without wondering about which ways the knife may cut.
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 30, 2011
A Matter of Perspective
Imagine a private security firm whose agents shoot an innocent man 7 times on a crowded tube, at close range and without warning. Imagine this security firm systematically lies, attempting to cover-up what really happened. Imagine no agent ever stands trial for what happened.
Imagine the same security firm instigates a riot situation at an otherwise peaceful demonstration, its agents concealing their identities with premeditated intent. During the ensuing trouble, imagine one of the firm’s agents pushes a man to the ground, from behind, for no reason. He dies within the hour. The firm then lies to the media, and hires a tame pathologist (already scheduled to face misconduct hearing) who returns favourable results and destroys key evidence. Imagine the security firm’s agent never stands trial for this unprovoked attack – revealed after private footage is released to The Guardian - and at a later inquest his colleagues smear the victim, claiming he was drunk.
Imagine the same firm sends officers into deep cover, infiltrating activist groups. They act as agent provocateurs, conducting sexual relations with activists. One even gets married to an activist and has a child – whilst under cover.
Imagine this same firm is put in charge of policing another mass demonstration (despite its appalling earlier failures). Imagine the firm “kettles” the protest on Whitehall, keeping 15 and 16 year old children out in literally freezing conditions until midnight. Imagine the firm needlessly charges the kettled protestors with horses.
Imagine the same firm is yet again put in charge of managing another mass demonstration. When this protest turns violent, the firm again pointlessly charges demonstrators with horses – despite protestors having nowhere to go, because they’ve been kettled. At the same time, a student is batoned over the head and nearly dies from internal bleeding. The security firm attempts to prevent him being admitted to “their” hospital.
At this same demonstration, evidently peaceful protestors are prevented from leaving the riot zone. Security agents systematically lie to them about being able to go home. As the cold December night stretches on, packed-in demonstrators are advanced upon by horses, before being herded onto a bridge where space is so scarce many fear for their lives.
Imagine this same security firm is again put in charge of yet another demonstration. When activists proceed to stage an entirely non-violent protest inside a luxury department store, security agents promise them they can leave shortly without fear of being detained. That they are being kept inside purely for their own safety. But it’s a ruse: the security firm is simply taking the time to set up a kettle and detain nearly 200 activists they’ve just freely admitted on camera to be peaceful.
*
Any private security company with such a record to its name would surely be unsuitable for rehire by the state. If such a firm did exist, it seems unimaginable there would not be widespread outrage about its receipt of public funds. But none of the above actually need to be “imagined”. I’ve simply described the recent record of the Metropolitan Police Force.
If you don’t go on protests, and you’ve never had bad experiences with the police, it can seem bizarre that the boys in blue arouse such hostility from some of my generation, and political activists in particular. You may think “if you’ve got nothing to hide, why conceal your face?” You may think “the police are fundamentally decent – you can trust them even if there are a few bad apples”.
But if the above press fairly strongly on your political awareness – because you’ve been on a lot of protests, or been on the receiving end of police trickery and force – then it all looks very different.
Increasing numbers in this country hold the justified opinion that the Met is a fundamentally mendacious and violent outfit. That it is untrustworthy and deceitful – and sometimes dangerous to the point of lethality. Is it surprising that increasing numbers see no point in trying to play by the rules that London’s Finest themselves so egregiously flaunt? This is a dangerous dance. But if your instinct is to side automatically with the police, remember that it takes two to tango.
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.
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.
March 1, 2011
Gew-gaws
For reasons I’m not entirely sure of, I’m subscribed to the emails of the “Yes to Fairer Votes” campaign. I tend to delete messages on sight, because if I want ill thought out tub-thumping, I can just log-on to the Compass website or read something by the nef.
But I’ve been trying to put my finger on what exactly it is about the upcoming referendum on voting reform that at best leaves me cold, and at worst makes me frustrated and angry. And I think I’ve worked out what it is.
A friend who knows about these things assures me that the political science literature indicates that moves towards proportional systems correlate with marginal increases in social democracy. Which, of course, is lovely. At least in and of itself. As a good leftist, I’m all for more social democracy.
But the important word in that paragraph is marginal. Because any improvements to our political system – and to our ever more unequal and unjust society – derived from voting reform are indeed going to be marginal. Especially given the way things appear to be going in terms of long-term political and economic direction. (And don’t forget that AV isn’t actually a proportional system, it’s just a marginally – that word again – less worse system than first-past-the-post).
So excuse me for not giving a fig about whether we get AV or not. Because in case you haven’t noticed, the wolves are at the door.
We live in a world in which national elected governments are increasingly unable – or unwilling (and therefore, in effect, unable) – to set economic and social policies as they would choose. Instead, tax rates, labour laws, redistributive policies, investment decisions, employment levels and decisions regarding national borrowing are increasingly subordinate both to the direct and indirect demands of global economic actors that do not answer either to electorates or their representatives.
What the great crash of 2008 taught multinational capitalist behemoths was that they can do whatever they want, and nation-states will bail them out if they fail. Indeed if they do fail, they can just keep doing whatever they want. Including leaning on national governments (directly or indirectly) to uphold and enforce domestic economic arrangements that benefit ever more detached sections of well-off individuals and private corporate actors.
What the great bail-out of 2008 has revealed is that it is certainly not multi-national corporate entities who will pay for the great mess. It is the little people whose collective will has less and less impact upon the determination of available economic – and thereby, social – futures. So because global financial capitalism collapsed under the weight of its own hubris, the British health service must be destroyed, British education must become a socially exclusive and divisive good, inequality must grow, unemployment must rise, care for the vulnerable must be taken away, the social safety net must be removed and millions of people’s lives must suffer.
Amidst all this destruction, the financial behemoths – in whose name your health service is being taken away, your social settlement renegotiated beyond your control – see fit to pay their privileged and favoured sons and daughters bonuses which could keep some families fed and sheltered for several years. Indeed, the terms of our new economic and social settlement are so unjust, so grotesque ,and so deeply unequal that this unashamed self-aggrandisement is simply the unreflective norm for its perpetrators. And rapidly it is becoming the unreflectinve norm – last gasp editorial outrage aside – for the rest of us, too.
It is usually false when people say that it makes no difference which party is in power. British society tends to be a somewhat fairer and less unjust place under Labour than Tories (recent obsessions with spying on everybody and dropping bombs on brown people not withstanding). But when it comes to caring about whether we have, in five years’ time, FPTP or AV to elect a marginally preferable centre-right Labour leadership to replace a vociferously destructive Coalition of right-wing ideologues, seems to me gloriously irrelevant.
And indeed for many its irrelevance may be precisely its attraction. Focusing on the gewgaws and shiny baubles of polling results, campaign tactics and collective enemy-hating serves as a far more enjoyable political pastime than staring into the abyss of what the present bunch of elected representatives is actually doing. It also puts to one side the frankly terrifying promise of a world in which it is increasingly irrelevant which bunch of bastards are elected to rule, and how they are elected, because their room for manoeuvre is so drastically – and increasingly – limited by the realities and dominant conceptions of the ever more global new economic order.
But having said all that, there is perhaps one reason to care about the AV referendum. Which is that a loss would be a terrible blow to the Lib Dems, and would indeed be a fine poke in the eye for Nick Clegg. Clegg. That scion of immense privilege; that craven political bastard-child. The man who under the guise of a Liberal party has enabled and assisted the reversal of a welfare state the likes of which his political forbearers dreamt of, and fought to make reality.
And suddenly, the AV vote acquires a certain sort of meaning – even if only a human, all-too-human one.
January 27, 2011
BMJ Slams Coalition NHS Reforms
I am disgustingly busy at the moment, and for the next two months. So apologies for simply copying and pasting – but this deserves attention.
The British Medical Journal is currently running an editorial about NHS reform, called “Dr Lansley’s Monster”. It is accompanied by a picture of Frankenstein’s laboratory. Here are some passsages:
What do you call a government that embarks on the biggest upheaval of the NHS in its 63 year history, at breakneck speed, while simultaneously trying to make unprecedented financial savings? The politically correct answer has got to be: mad.
The scale of ambition should ring alarm bells. Sir David Nicholson, the NHS chief executive, has described the proposals as the biggest change management programme in the world—the only one so large “that you can actually see it from space.” (More ominously, he added that one of the lessons of change management is that “most big change management systems fail.”) Of the annual 4% efficiency savings expected of the NHS over the next four years, the Commons health select committee said, “The scale of this is without precedent in NHS history; and there is no known example of such a feat being achieved by any other healthcare system in the world.” To pull off either of these challenges would therefore be breathtaking; to believe that you could manage both of them at once is deluded.
Like all the other structural reorganisations of the NHS, this one aims to improve health outcomes. What’s lacking is any coherent account of how these particular reforms will produce the desired effects, a point only underlined by the prime minister’s attempts to justify the reforms earlier this week.
On GP commissioning:
Whatever the eventual outcome, such radical reorganisations adversely affect service performance. As Kieran Walshe wrote, they are “a huge distraction from the real mission of the NHS—to deliver and improve the quality of healthcare” that can absorb a massive amount of managerial and clinical time and effort. Even the earliest days of the transition have proved disruptive, with employees of the doomed primary care trusts and strategic health authorities choosing to jump ship rather than to go down with it.
With an estimated one billion pounds of redundancy money in their pockets, many of the survivors are likely to be employed by the new GP consortiums in much their same roles. It raises the question: if GP commissioning turns out to be simply primary care trust commissioning done by GPs, aren’t there less disruptive routes to this destination?
It ends:
Given their scale, securing these efficiency savings should take priority over the massive upheaval proposed in the new bill. For the time being, we agree with the King’s Fund that those GPs who are successfully involved in practice based commissioning should be given real rather than indicative budgets for some services and their performance monitored closely. All other proposals should be kept on hold, pending an evaluation of whether this iteration of GP commissioning can bear the responsibility that the new bill seeks to place on it. If it turns out that it can, then the full introduction of the government’s ambitious health reforms will have been delayed a few years. If it can’t, then the country—and its government—will have got off lightly.
When what is essentially the official mouthpiece for British doctors is expressing this kind of alarm at government policy, it indicates that a dispositionally conservative body is very out of step with the present administration. Which reinforces a point I’ve already made: that this is a government of radicals, led by some most unconservative Conservatives.
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(Hat-tip to Stuart White, on Facebook).
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.
