In his anti-Enlightenment rant last week (New York Times), Richard A. Shweder criticizes the supposedly "secular" west by painting it—us—as culturally intolerant and driven by anti-religious feeling. He says that “Instead of waging intellectual battles over the existence of god(s), those of us who live in secular society might profit by being slower to judge others”. He goes on to say that we should be more respectful of non-western cultures, not because doing so would be generous and tolerant, but rather because the very Enlightenment project that atheist rationalists like me (though perhaps not him) have long been in thrall to might turn out to be a paper tiger.
The good professor clearly doesn’t get it. He probably never got it. Perhaps he thinks it would be career-wrecking to admit it that he doesn't get it. I don’t know. Here’s what he doesn’t get:
"The West" is not nearly as secular as Mr Shweder suggests. Granted, we don't have a supreme Ayatollah auditing our legislation, but an awful lot of policy is set according to religious precepts.
You can, of course, be rationalist without being scientific. You can even be scientific without being secular. But you just can’t be a hardcore theist (by which I mean someone committed to the story of one particular sky-god or another) and a rationalist; that’s a contradiction. Either you’re committed to a truth, like the six days of creation, or you’re committed to a way of getting at the truth, like astrology or science. You can't have it both ways—a conclusion or a method—take your pick. Mr Shweder doesn't seem to realize that science is mostly a way of acquiring knowledge.
A generation ago the great American physicist Richard Feynman said “whatever way [nature] comes out . . . she’s going to come out the way she is, [so] we shouldn’t predecide what it is” (The Pleasure of Finding Things Out p23). In other words there's no point in deciding beforehand how things really are or came to be; the truth is what it is, and if nature turns out to be different from what we expect or believe, or even hope, then so be it. Without getting too Rumsfeldian about what we know and what we don't know, we should at least be intellectually honest.
Mr Shweder would probably call himself a social scientist, even though he seems to eschew much of the second part of that epithet. Pointing out that there are billions of religious believers in the world, he seems to imply that truth is sometimes more a matter of democracy (or perhaps Orwellian reality) than anything else. The fact that many religious beliefs are clearly incompatible with each other, as well as with science, are presumably insignificant details to him. But then the good professor also thinks that those of us who see religious belief as a kind of delusion may in fact be deluded ourselves. He wonders whether the recent flurry of books and articles critical of religion is more than just a response to the resurgence of religious fundamentalism that has rippled across the world in recent years, and that the atheists behind them are running scared. Fearful that the Enlightenment project might be about to collapse, he suggests we non-believers are now on the attack, so to speak, in a desperate attempt to shore up our crumbling citadel. According to him, it isn't religious believers who have their heads in the sand, it's evidence-demanding atheists like me!
Of course evidence-demanding atheists (like me) are just as capable of making mistakes as anyone else, and scientists can be horribly grandiose sometimes (they're only human, after all), but Mr Shweder couldn’t be more wrong. When murderers are caught decades after committing their crimes, thanks to compelling DNA evidence, it doesn't matter what culture the policeman, or the criminal, or the victim, comes from, or what god they pray to. The facts are the facts, and science is the best thing we've got for revealing them. It doesn't always work for the best, but that isn't the fault of science. Scientific knowledge gives us tremendous power; it's up to us what to do with it.
I wonder whether Mr Shweder is clinging so hard to some beliefs of his own that he is unable to accept the proposition that truth—the facts of the matter—simply aren’t a political construct. As the philosopher and polemicist Sam Harris puts it: "Useful delusions are not the same thing as true beliefs" (Ref). The number of people who subscribe to a belief—religious or not—does not affect its truth value. Believing that the sun goes round the earth doesn't make it so—not even if everyone believes it. “The testimony of many” as Galileo put it 400 years ago, “has little more value than that of few.” He continued:
If reasoning were like hauling I would agree that several reasoners would be worth more than one, just as several horses can haul more sacks of grain than one can. But reasoning is like racing, not hauling, and a single Barbary steed can outrun a hundred dray horses. (cited by Dava Sobel, 1999, Galileo’s Daughter)
In any case, secularists are not, as Mr Shweder claims, dedicated to “absolutely, positively establishing that the author [of a holy text] is a fraud.” And even if a few are, their zealotry hardly compares with that of religious believers, many of whom dedicate their lives to ring-fencing the absolute, inerrant, and divine truth of some ancient text or other. Indeed, the denial of major scientific theories—sometimes to the point of declaring them illegal—seems rather more "ideological" than anything in science. Zealots, it seems, come in all sorts of flavours, including cultural relativist.
What many rationalists are bothered about, however, is countering nonsense when it masquerades as truth, or goodness, or both. Scientists are much concerned with truth, obviously, but they seldom talk of proof. If you want proof, talk to a logician or a lawyer, or a creationist. Science deals in degrees of certainty, and creeps forward by piling up evidence, by ruling stories out, and above all through the vigorous exercise of doubt. Science is called “self correcting” precisely because those who practice it are required to doubt their forbears, and even their own assumptions. Science is like walking on thin ice: you have to test the ground before every step to make sure it will carry your weight—even if you're following in someone's footsteps.
Shweder’s sharpest needle, however, is a moral claim. He writes:
At the turn of the millennium it was pretty hard not to notice that the 20th century was probably the worst one yet, and that the big causes of all the death and destruction had rather little to do with religion.
Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, and other mass murderers were averred non-believers. In the face of such a dismal atheist record on death and destruction, what makes us think that an atheistic world would be better than a theistic one?
The answer to this old saw has been given repeatedly by people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, but it seems we’ll have to keep hammering it home for a a while yet: it’s not any specific religion that is the problem, it’s the craziness of faith—of any sort. The regimes of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao were in many ways more like wierd religious sects than recognizable political systems. And like religious sects, they required unswerving compliance—faith—in a particular doctrine, or leader, or both. Perceived enemies were demonized, dissenters and those who asked difficult questions were censured. Religion or politics—it's the unjustifiability of the beliefs that are the culprit, not the specific content of the belief. It seems to me that whether a throat is cut for saying something that displeases the authorities or for insulting a long-dead prophet, the madness behind it is much the same—the willingness to believe ridiculous claims on pathetic evidence. Sam Harris puts it nicely:
We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common, we call them ‘religious’; otherwise, they are likely to be called ‘mad,’ ‘psychotic’ or ‘delusional.’ . . . [To cite but one example:] Jesus Christ—who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death and rose bodily into the heavens—can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad? . . . [The danger of religious faith] is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.
(End of Faith)
We might include other kinds of craziness too; perhaps even the kind that goes by the name of cultural relativism. This is the kind of craziness that allows us to believe, as Mr Shweder apparently does, that the barbarity of female genital mutilation (so-called female circumcision) isn’t all bad. Indeed, he sees the international campaign to stop the butchery of girls’ genitals as a “flawed game whose rules have been fixed by the rich nations of the world.” (Ref. See also here and here)
Hiding behind this tired argument—that many of the worst crimes in history were committed by atheists—is the outrageous implication that Stalin and Pol Pot did the terrible things they did because they were atheists. In which case there are presumably armies of potential Maos, waiting for their chance, on most university campuses and in laboratories across the world. The Stanford and Milgram experiments notwithstanding, this doesn't seem very likely. No, craziness is the enemy, and since the fall of the Berlin Wall at least, religion has been the most visible and politically influential kind of craziness around. But what all kinds of craziness have in common, I repeat, is that they demand we believe things with insufficient evidence—usually on an authority figure's say-so. I submit that what history's appalling catalogue of death and suffering shows is that we collude with craziness at our peril.
But was the 20th century really the worst in any case? Sam Harris, again, says:
Religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it has been at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews vs. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians vs. Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians vs. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants vs. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims vs. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims vs. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims vs. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims vs. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists vs. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims vs. Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite vs. Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians vs. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis vs. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in recent decades. . . . The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism, or politics. (Ref)
We could go on: what of the millennia of slavery, and the genocides of previous centuries—recorded and unrecorded? Are ancient sufferings less dreadful than recent disasters? And weren’t all pre-20th century barbarities, without exception, religiously sanctioned? The body count of the 20th century was undoubtedly horrendous, powered as it was by the darker side of scientific progress, but what of the millions who were saved thanks to medical and agricultural science? Don’t they count? We should also take into account the fact that the world's population exploded during the 19th century; by 1900 there had never been so many people on earth (a problem that looks set to bite us in the ass at any moment—see graph here).
Lastly, perhaps the biggest problem I have with Mr Shweder's position is that he is emblematic of those who, to borrow another thought from Richard Feynman, delight in kicking up the dust and then complain that they cannot see. As he flies to conferences, I wonder what Mr Shweder thinks keeps him in the air: American technology? Anglo-Saxon engineering? Phallocentric physics? Perhaps aeroplanes fly for reasons we are unaware of? Perhaps the "science" behind aerodynamics and jet propulsion are merely (and astonishingly!) coincidental with whatever really keeps us up? I think not. As Richard Dawkins famously said, "Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite" (River out of Eden, also in: A Devil's Chaplain). As Dawkins says, it's cold hard science that keeps us aloft. Aeroplanes work, he says, because an army of scientifically trained engineers "have got their sums right" (ibid). The principles of aerodynamics, like the rest of science, are blind to cultural differences, and anyone is free to point out any deficiency or mistake in the science at any time. Disprove Bernoulli's equation and you'll win a Nobel Prize.
What would help is for people like Mr Shweder to acknowledge that religious ideas should be as open to scrutiny and criticism as any other kind of idea—scientific, artistic, or cultural. Tiptoeing around the beliefs of others so as not to offend their sensibilities is pusillanimous, and risks colluding with the very evils we all seek to banish.
As an addendum: Kids get a particularly rough deal from the obeisance we still show to religion (but to nothing else). They get no say in their upbringing; no choice in the informational environment in which they are immersed. The idea that religious belief is a respectable justification for things like the sexual exploitation of young girls (here) or the denial of children's education (e.g. Dawkins' The God Delusion, p329) maybe ludicrous, but it is also so commonplace as to be almost invisible. Bear in mind that no politician in America, and few in Europe, would dare to admit they are atheist, even though many of them must be.
For more on this watch some of the talks at the recent (and excellent) Beyond Belief Conference held in San Diego November 2006.
It’s odd; in the same month that two excellent books—Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion—are flying off the shelves, we are also being assailed by the raucous howls of busy-bodies obsessing about how many places should be reserved in faith schools for children who come from families outside a school’s particular faith.
All very interesting I’m sure, but what hardly anyone (aside from the redoubtable Secular Society) seems to be questioning is the whole notion of “faith schools” in the first place. What on earth are we doing funding religious institutions from the public purse—especially schools? I for one object to paying for what I see as the deliberate inculcation of delusion in children—what Richard Dawkins calls “mental child abuse”. I think it was the British comedian Jeremy Hardy who pointed out recently that religions much prefer to work on children (for political as well as sexual purposes), grown-ups are usually too difficult to convert.
Particularly alarming is the largely uncritical attitude of the media. In the United States the suggestion that religious schools should be publicly funded would cause an outcry—an astonishing irony given that religious observance, and education, in the US is so much more common than in Britain (and so much better funded too). Nevertheless, the British media seem happy to discuss the extent of religious education—especially in the public sector—while completely ignoring the question of whether there should be religious instruction in state schools in the first place. We might ask: which religions deserve funding? And why? As Matthew Parris says, how much longer before we see faith hospitals and faith bus companies?
The fact that many British faith schools (almost all are Christian) do much better in terms of academic results than their supposedly secular counterparts (in which, incidentally, “daily collective worship” remains compulsory) may be laudable, but is beside the point—stories of non-religious parents dutifully turning up to church on Sunday in order to secure a place for their kids in the local school are legion. Equally irrelevant is the argument as to how many places should be reserved in faith schools for pupils from other faiths or none (it seems this is to be a matter for individual schools to decide). As AA Gill puts it:
Religious education is an oxymoron, it’s a wicked thing. Not simply in the laughable sense of denying Darwin or the hours devoted to rote-learning holy books, but it’s the belief that there is one set of facts for us and another for the rest of you. . . . What is it that Catholic [Muslim, Jewish, etc] kids need to get taught that the rest of us can’t be told? What’s so delicate about their faith that it can’t go to school with everyone else?
Indeed. Those concerned about improving “community relations”—which is often no more than a euphemism for deep religious enmity, or even outright conflict—might want to think about scrapping the idea of religious education altogether. A glance at history—or current events—shows where it leads.
Why can't we leave people to choose their own religion, if they want to, when they are adults? Must we continue with the extraordinary charade of religious education?
My daily news trawls have turned up little mention of the wretched story of Pakistan’s latest, shameful, refusal to reform its brutal and stupid rape laws (e.g. here and here).
Thanks to Pakistan’s partial adoption of sharia law back in 1979, it seems rapists there enjoy an almost free hand. In Pakistan, as in other lands that operate under sharia law, if a woman wants to secure a conviction against her attacker, she must first produce four witnesses—male ones—in support of her claim. If she can’t, she risks being convicted of adultery herself—a “crime” that could easily get her killed. But even if an unfortunate victim can jump through all the necessary legal and religious hoops, her family may well abandon her or even murder her because of their perceived "shame". Such murders are examples of so-called honour killings—a practice mercifully banished from western society generations ago, along with the burning of witches and other such barbarities. Not so in Pakistan though, where it seems sexual violence is little short of endemic—so common that even the mind-numbing official statistics are assumed to be little more than a feeble hope. I quote from the London Independent:
According to a 2002 report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a woman is raped every two hours and gang raped every eight hours. However, because of social taboos, discriminatory laws and victimisation of victims by police, campaigners say that the scale of rape is almost certainly higher.
Is this not terror too—indeed an aspect of the same religiously sanctioned violence we are supposedly warring against? Lest we forget, god has never liked women. To twist a thought of Susan Sontag's: terrorism is a vice of men.
But despite such flagrant injustice, we are cheerfully asked to look the other way and buy an image of Pakistan as a forward-looking country bravely struggling to join the ranks of the first world, with all the sophistication and political tolerance that implies. Pakistan, after all, is a nuclear power; an occasional member of the commonwealth; above all, a front line cricketing nation. Yet Pakistan is also, bizarrely, both home to Osama Bin Laden, and America’s putative “ally” in the war on terror. The experts say it is "obvious" that the newly emboldened Taliban in Afghanistan draw most of their support from Pakistan (ref and ref)—where, incidentally, you would be locked up, or worse, for teaching evolution. Ho hum.
But while Pakistan is armed to the teeth with nuclear missiles and all sorts of the latest American hardware, it is not at all clear that the military government of General Musharraf—who overthrew the flawed but democratically elected regime of Mrs Benazir Bhutto—is either as pro-western in its ambitions, or as in control of its many religious fanatics, as it would like the world at large to believe: not only do religious groups exercise enormous influence in Pakistan (hence the refusal to lift sharia law), but various commentators have argued that the religiously demented Taliban of neighbouring Afghanistan would never have stood a chance of holding power as long as they did without Pakistani support. Worryingly, large parts of Pakistan—such as Waziristan—are not even under the government's control.
The fear in western capitals is that with the wrong kind of criticism or pressure, Pakistan might collapse into another Taliban-era Afghanistan—but this time one capable of blowing-up half the world. Accordingly, the approach taken by the west seems to be the old favourite: “they may be sons of bitches, but let’s make sure they remain our sons of bitches.” Which means keeping quiet about the revolting things that go on there, including the dreadful plight of women. We know the drill: don’t beat the hornets’ nest any harder than you have to—better that bad things happen to Pakistani women (Iranian women, Saudi women, etc.) than to American or British women.
Or so the argument goes. But this is specious. Our appeasement, indeed our active support of regimes that tolerate and sustain such abuses makes us less secure, not more so. As in the case of Darfur, where western talk of UN troops is pure bluster, our leaders demonstrate their preparedness to contradict themselves whenever it suits, with the result that their words are increasingly, and rightly, taken to be meaningless.
As Martin Luther King Jr. famously pointed out while he languished in Birmingham jail: “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And until we take the plight of the powerless seriously—whoever and wherever they are—and back up our fine words with good deeds, our problems can only increase.
Is it just me, or does this contradiction reveal just how neurotic we are when it comes to environmental ethics?
As I have lamented before (here and here), various countries are trying to avert what they see as the impending calamity of declining populations by offering financial inducements to their populations to reproduce—what we might call a “Cash for Kids” policy. The Italians, French, Australians and Russians, among others, all now provide generous tax breaks, parental benefits and all the rest, to try and boost their shrinking populations. Now the Germans have joined this dubious club too.
Never mind that such policies are blatantly racist—why pay people to breed when foreign (but usually darker-skinned) youngsters would happily come for free?—but they also run counter to that other, unavoidable and looming catastrophe: the problems we will soon face thanks to climate change (a new study published today paints a gloomier picture than ever).
Why are we not joining the dots here? These two headlines are intimately linked. Somehow or other, we have to find food and shelter and so on not just for the 6.5 billion people already here (or rather, for the one billion or so who can afford it), but also for the 76 million or so new arrivals every year.
Clearly, this can only go so far. Sovereign nations competing with each other—an arrangement we have become very used to—is ruining the world. We’re all competing for the same resources—which are vanishing fast.
Unless we—as a species—take drastic action in the very near future, our pollution and environmental destruction look set to change the world faster in a few decades than Nature typically manages in hundreds of thousands of years. The consequences for many of us—or rather for our children and grandchildren—as Thomas Malthus pointed out two centuries ago, will be swift and brutal.
Clearly, there are more than enough of us in the world. If there were less of us, we wouldn’t pollute so much. And if we didn’t pollute so much, we might stand a better chance of averting the all-too-real crisis we face. The trouble is, who is going to suggest that we breed less? Worse still, who is going to police whatever regulation we might implement? Any attempt at restricting our fertility would surely be doomed, so it may be that a bit of tough natural selection will have to do the job for us.
June 12
BP & Suicide Bombs
If you've ever stood there with your mouth open and thought "well, now I've heard it all," you'll understand when I say that today has been one of those days for me. Not only has Lord Browne—the boss of BP (one of the world's biggest oil companies)—authoritatively reassured us that oil will fall to less than $40 a barrel (Ref), but we also learn that the supposedly law-abiding and rational government of the United States of America believes that suicide—no bombs or anything, just suicide, of closely supervised prisoners if you please—isn't merely a clever wheeze employed by evil-doers engaged in "asymmetrical warfare", it is also—get this—"a good PR move." (Ref, Ref, Ref)
For goodness' sake, where do you start? Suicide—a good PR move? What tortured state of mind do you need to be in to see suicide as any kind of PR move, let alone a good one? The declaration that oil will hit $40 a barrel is a PR move—a very good one if it turns out to be true—but suicide, in any form, is surely only ever a desperate move.
Einstein thought that doing the same thing again and again while hoping for a different result is the definition of madness. In a similar sense, insisting on the rectitude of a view—especially a moral view—No Matter What, is perhaps the hallmark of the fanatical mind. Following the suicides of three inmates at Guantanamo Bay, senior US officials were yesterday spinning the line that because "they [the inmates] don't value their own lives" the usual protections of due process that have been waived for the last few years are obviously as redundant as they have been saying.
These detainees are people—remember?—people who have never been allowed their day in court. Some of them may well be dangerous, but some were also children when apprehended; some were abducted from the streets of third countries; and by all accounts some don't even know what they stand accused of—despite years in custody. Moreover, it seems some of them have also been tortured—either by the US authorities directly, or by other governments via the notorious "extraordinary rendition" program—so it is not entirely surprising that so many suicide attempts have been made. (Ref, Ref, Ref)
And we shouldn't be fooled by the Orwellian language either. Politicians hate to use concise, clear language. By nature and training they can't help but call a spade a horticultural digging implement. Suicide isn't a "tactic" anymore than "collateral damage" is, well, collateral, incidental, nothing to worry about. In both cases we're talking about the death of people who have no voice, no power, and in the case of suicides, people who feel they have reached the last option.
At least I'm not alone in feeling appalled at such disgraceful dissembling. It seems that many people read the State Department's Guantanamo suicides briefing as either a blatant (and ham-fisted) piece of arse-covering spin, or worse—and I'm afraid more likely—an indication of the deepening psychosis at the heart of the American government. (BBC) The old gag about the lunatics running the asylum was never more germane. Winston Churchill—hardly a progressive pacifist—said that the measure of a civilised society was how it treated its most hated members—its prisoners (Ref). By these lights we still have a long way to go.
As for Lord Browne's statement that the price of oil will tumble, this too strikes me as manufactured—although for less brutal reasons. If he really believes oil will fall to $40 a barrel, then we can dismiss him as a victim of his own wishful thinking. But if he doesn't believe this—and I don't think he does—then presumably he's only saying it to placate those who have nightmares about $100 a barrel, and who dread (or perhaps relish) the prospect of oil being traded in euro? Or perhaps Lord Browne is reflecting on the fact that while oil costs $70 a barrel, and his company is raking in some $20 billion a year in profit, governments all over might want some of that loot back. But even if he's right, and huge new reserves are somehow found, and consumption somehow remains stable, and the price somehow falls, even then, the future might well be worse, much worse, than if he's wrong and the price of oil goes stratospheric; for even if we find, and burn, some vast new ocean of oil, we will only be forcing climate change more severely than we already are, with potentially disastrous consequences for millions of species—including our own.
More realistically, in a world with ever more expensive oil, economies will slow, and even stall, unless a new source of cheap energy is found. Modern life—which depends on cheap and plentiful energy—would almost certainly enter new and unpredictable territory, with painful consequences for those who have most to lose (and utterly dire consequences, as usual, for those who have least). Lord Browne—who strikes me as a very decent man, and whose company has surprisingly green credentials—knows all this better than most, so I don't buy his $40-a-barrel fairytale at all. I think he's trying to be kind—mopping our brow in preparation for the fever he knows is imminent.
The logic is as clear as it is brutal: while we have sovereign countries, antithetical epistemologies, and competing capital markets, those who forgo short-term advantage, or who dissent from traditional orthodoxies, will simply be punished on the altars of the various temples. We're like a smoker who continues to puff away even as his lungs collapse.
What am I saying here? The price of oil is not unrelated to questions of justice and truth, and the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo is part of the same mindset that would see our children's world burn for the sake of today's share price. Never mind dark-skinned prisoners, it seems we don't care about our own children very much at all.
We're all a bit mad. Some of us are a lot mad. This is OK. Most madness is fairly harmless. Unfortunately some people are mad and dangerous—and manage to get themselves jobs where they send young men in expensive machines to kill people. This is worrying. Fortunately, the delightfully mad Molly Ivins (she must be mad—she's a thoughtful, funny humanitarian who lives in Texas) was talking about this recently. In particular she was talking about "crises"—of the politically driven, Wag the Dog kind—the kind that are really more about distracting our attention than alerting us to the end of the world as we know it—you know the sort of thing. She said:
Gay marriage, now there’s a crisis. Well, OK, so there isn’t much gay marriage going on here in Texas. None, in fact. First, we made it illegal. Then, we made it unconstitutional. But President Bush is still concerned about it, so I guess we have to alter the U.S. Constitution too.
Also of great concern to Republicans is God Almighty, who, rather to my surprise, has been elected chairman of the Texas Republican Party. That’s what they announced at the biannual convention in Fort Worth this week: “He is the chairman of the party.” Sheesh, the Democrats couldn’t even get Superman.
Also weighing down the nation with a heavy burden is the estate tax, which the Senate will try to repeal this week. The estate tax applies to around 1% of Americans, and I have yet to find any record of it costing anyone a family farm or business. It affects only very, very, very rich people, of whom you are probably not one. And the rich don’t, actually, need another tax break.
These are the things we are supposed to be worrying about, and you notice that it frees us of quite a few troubles we might otherwise fret about.
The war in Iraq? No sweat.
War with Iran? We’re carefree.
The economy? Hey, did you see that employment report? Well, ignore it.
Budget out of control, shipwreck ahead? Never mind—Bush doesn’t. Worst class divisions since the Gilded Age, rich so much more enormously richer than everybody else, country starting to get creepy? Don’t worry, be happy. Torture, massacre, extraordinary rendition, hidden gulag of prisons in foreign countries, Guantanamo and massive violations of international law, American law and the Constitution? Well, you can see that gay marriage is a far greater menace. (Ref)
She continues in this vein, encouraging us to understand why gay marriage is so much more important than such trivial issues as war, or the environment, or the price of oil—you get the drift. Unfortunately this is not old news.
Turning more to America's moral standing (as opposed to its moral obsessions) in the wider world, the New York Times, no less, yesterday sighed a similar lament:
For more than seven decades, civilized nations have adhered to minimum standards of decent behavior toward prisoners of war— agreed to in the Geneva Conventions. They were respected by 12 presidents and generations of military leaders because they reflected this nation's principles and gave Americans some protection if they were captured in wartime.
It took the Bush administration to make the world doubt Washington's fidelity to the rules. And The Los Angeles Times, reporting yesterday on a dispute over updating the Army rulebook known as the Field Manual, reminded us that there is good reason to worry.
At issue is Directive 2310 on the treatment and questioning of prisoners, an annex to the Field Manual. It has long contained a reference to Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which covers all prisoners, whether they meet the common definition of prisoners of war or are the sort of prisoners the administration classifies as "unlawful enemy combatants," like suspected members of the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
Article 3 prohibits the use of torture and other overt acts of violence. But Mr. Bush's civilian lawyers removed it from the military rulebook over the objections of diplomats and military lawyers. Mr. Bush has said he does not condone torture, but he has also said he would decide for himself when to follow the ban on torture imposed by Congress last year. Removing the Geneva Conventions from Army regulations gives the world more cause for doubt.
Article 3 also prohibits "outrages on personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." (Remember the hooded man, the pyramids of naked prisoners?) The Pentagon says the new rules require humane treatment, but that is not much comfort, since the Bush team has shown that it does not define humane treatment the way most people do.
There are other aspects of Article 3 that this administration probably finds inconvenient, like its requirement that governments holding prisoners subject them to actual courts "affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples." The hearings at Guantánamo Bay hardly meet that description.
It defies belief that this administration is still clinging to its benighted policies on prisoners after the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the killings at American camps in Afghanistan and the world's fresh outrage over what appears to have been the massacre of Iraqi men, women and children in the village of Haditha. (NYT)
Given the plight of women in Iraq, as an almost random example, it seems to me that there's quite a lot about the way we run the world that defies belief—not least our continued indulgence of our leaders, despite their evident mental health problems. As an aside—sort of—did you know that the origin of the word fundamentalism...
...dates to an early 20th Century American religious movement. The movement took its name from a compendium of twelve volumes published between 1910 and 1915 by a group of Protestant laymen entitled: The Fundamentals: A Testimony of the Truth. . . . the original Fundamentalist Movement was seen as a religious revival. It came to embody both principles of absolute religious orthodoxy and evangelical practice which called for believers to extended action beyond religion into political and social life. (Ref)
So then, madness. I'm thinking of the current residents of the White House, obviously, but much the same can be said of national and business leaders elsewhere. Talk about paranoia. Ask any psychiatrist and she'll tell you that it seldom goes well when you collude with someone who is both terrified and in the grip of a delusion. Add to this the personality disorders so common in those who seek power and you begin to see why, when it comes to buying clothes for Emperors, there's only one place to shop: Washington DC—the world's leading producer of psychotic raiment.
June 5 Goldilocks and the Changing Climate
Too hot? Too cold? An innocent abroad in a dangerous world? The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a wonderful metaphor for our planet's changing climate. Think of the themes: of contingency, of the slender "window of opportunity", and of the idea that things must be "just right" for us to prosper.
So precariously balanced is the issue of climate change in the Great Calculus of public opinion that if another hurricane flattens another American city this summer, or next, then I would say that Al Gore looks like a racing certainty for the White House in 2008. But if this summer's storms abate, or do their worst out in the open oceans—as they well might—then whoever stands up and flannels with the promise of cheaper fuel and ever more "security" will probably cruise into the White House with barely a mention of the environment. And if the ravages of nature (at least those that grab the headlines) hold off until 2008, then the rules of the game may well be very different, as we shall see in a moment.
The gods are a famously cruel and capricious bunch—as flies to wanton boys and all that. Given a kind year (in terms of natural disasters), the TV companies will doubtless revert to their equivalent of the party line and start questioning anew the scientific basis for climate change—as George Bush is still doing. But even as islands disappear, deserts encroach, droughts intensify, tides surge, and glaciers melt, most of us resolutely keep our heads wedged firmly below ground. It seems we'd rather not know. Only when the forces of nature strike a sudden blow, and thousands die at a stroke—as they did in New Orleans last year—only then do we howl. Disasters that take more than a day to do their work seldom make the front pages. As the sinking of the Titanic starkly demonstrated, we only sit up and take notice of preventable tragedies when a) something "serious" happens, b) it happens suddenly and dramatically, and c) it directly affects white, middle-class Americans. Fleets of ships sank (and countless people drowned) in the years before the Titanic went down in 1912, but not in a sufficiently spectacular way to change international safety regulations. A year or two after the Titanic disaster, ships everywhere were carrying enough lifeboats for everyone on board. James Carroll wrote beautifully about this recently.
But to get to my main Goldilocks-climate change point: as the philosopher Stephen Gardiner cleverly points out, if we're going to do anything about climate change (whether you believe it's being exacerbated by human activity or not), we first have to be sufficiently motivated to act, and right now we're not. Worse, we're very unlikely to be motivated to do anything if the perils that face us are either "too hot" or "too cold." Like the Three Bears' porridge, the temperature of the danger needs to be "just right"—serious enough to take seriously, but not so overwhelming, or imminent, that any response is futile. As Gardiner says, when problems are seen as too distant—in time or space—we tend to discount them, reassuring ourselves that "we'll cross those bridges when we come to them." On the other hand, if we see a problem as inescapable and unpreventable, no matter what we do, then we reason that there's little point in wasting resources trying to do anything about it; we may as well "emit, stink and be merry, for tomorrow we fry" as Peter Atterton memorably put it at a conference on the ethics of climate change recently.
So, are we fortunate enough to be tottering in a Goldilocks Moment, or is the threat already too severe? Thanks to a century and a half of flat-out pollution, it looks as if some climate change is now inevitable. The pressing question is: have we woken up to the threat in time, or have we already passed a critical point of no return—a tipping point—that will see millions of us starve no matter what? The only other alternative—to say that this is all overblown alarmism and that any climate problems are too big or too distant for us to worry about—seems ludicrous, even though a handful of fossil-fuel dinosaurs are still belting out exactly that message for all they're worth. What an irony it would be if that river in Egypt dried up.
Links
To see how much of the world's resources you use (your ecological footprint) click here
And to see what an impressive impact you—an individual—can make merely through what you eat—click here (Time Magazine), also here, and here
Who wloud hvae blveieed taht you cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd tihs wrniitg? Aoccdrnig to rcneet rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer msut be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig or waht? Wrods are pctieurs. And you awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
See how esay tihs gtes in jsut a few mntiues? Nveer ueredsnatimte the phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid!
Ntoe: Ron Chrisley, my old spervuoisr, has jsut iormenfd me taht tihs pnohmeoenn has been kwnon auobt for yares. Atpralpeny Graham Rawlinson [COGS Visiting Research Fellow at Sussex University], did his teishs on tihs bcak in 1796...
May 7 The end of the world might be nigher than we think...
I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s latest book Collapse—a brilliant, if terrifying picture of why and how civilizations crumble. This followed on the heels of Will Hutton’s recent Observer article on oil, and a conference I attended recently in San Diego on the Ethics of Global Climate Change.
It seems to me that the issues of environmental justice, poverty, and energy are all of a piece—connected as they are by the well-worn thread of blinkered psychology. As Peter Atterton put it at the climate change conference: if we aren’t moved to do anything about the very real suffering going on in the world today—and clearly we aren't—what makes us think the problems of future generations will spur us into action? If physical distance diminishes our sense of responsibility, adding a temporal distance will surely diminish it even further.
There is a Chinese proverb—an apocryphal one apparently—that advises against living in “interesting times”—which I assume means "times of upheaval and uncertainty"—as if we could do anything about that. Nevertheless, our times are interesting and look set to become even more so. According to some predictions life may soon be very different from the comfortable existence we in the west are used to. Consider a few of the world’s most pressing worries:
• According to Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, a child dies every fifteen seconds—usually for want of something ridiculous like clean water or a mosquito net—things which would be regarded by any first world nation as trivial in terms of cost. That's 5,700 tragedies every day—a death toll that is not expected to change.
The number of children who die every day for reasons that any sane person would call stupid is probably not a bad barometer of world health and wellbeing. What would be a good score? How many dead children can we put up with every morning? None? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands of children dying every day—as they are—is grim news by any standard, and it seems to me that with such a present the future cannot be set fair for some considerable time.
• Thanks to our appalling levels of consumption and pollution, the earth’s climate is changing—the only questions being by how much and who will take the hit—us, our children, or our grandchildren? (Ref) Ask an environmental scientist and she will tell you that because of the enormous amount of carbon humans have released into the atmosphere over the last century or so, a certain amount of climate change is now inevitable (the lead time for the processes involved being so very long). Quite how bad it will be, and exactly where and when the changes will occur, are the only variables. It may even be that more serious and irreversible changes are already in the pipeline and thus too late to prevent.
• The World Conservation Union has just listed 16,000 (sixteen thousand) species it considers at risk of extinction.
Like the inhabitants of Easter Island, who eventually cut down every last tree and thus doomed their civilization, we’re sawing off the branch we’re sitting on—pissing into our own well—pick your metaphor. And as the climate changes, and we strip more and more of the world’s timber, metals, and other resources, we also deplete the resources other life forms depend on—both through habitat destruction and environmental degradation. Many species of coral, for instance, that require seawater with a very specific temperature and pH value, are facing extinction as the oceans warm and become increasingly acidic. This hints at the unknown dangers we expose ourselves to: food chains are notoriously complex, and brittle, and it may be that a few key extinctions (that may at first seem unrelated to us) would lead to a domino effect of further extinctions and a rebalancing of natural food chains—a new natural order—that could well alter the world in ways that threaten our own existence. As biologists from Darwin onwards have discovered, we depend on nature in many more ways than we might think.
• The price of oil has gone from under $20 a barrel in 2002 to over $70 today. Will it hit $100 a barrel this year or next? Has the era of cheap energy passed? What happens to our society if we have to spend most of our income on energy? The potential for a severe depression—or worse—is obvious.
• The number of humans in the world is now in excess of six billion. A century ago the figure stood at about 1.7 billion. Almost all the boffins agree that the world cannot sustain 6 billion people for very long; sooner or later the Malthusian scythe must fall. We could decide to manage our numbers and reduce our population to a sustainable figure gently. As Jared Diamond says, we really should, because if we don't nature will certainly do it for us, and that certainly won't be pretty. There are no international measures to combat rising population, and all the predictions suggest that our numbers will rise substantially for many years to come.
• Despite all this, we spend something like US$1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars) on weaponry, of all things. Every year. (Actually, just over a trillion dollars this year—see here)
• We’re fucking mad.
Rocketing energy prices, choking pollution, rates of species extinction and climate change unseen for millions of years, and a human population the world can barely support—a few of whom spend ridiculous amounts of money on frippery and weaponry while thousands starve every day. No wonder the field of environmental ethics is booming! If you are at all familiar with either game theory or evolutionary theory, then you will recognize that these problems all follow from (or are examples of) Malthusian dynamics, and in particular what is known as the Tragedy of the Commons——the inevitable destruction of a finite resource in an unregulated market.
Meanwhile, the populations of many western countries are falling, or are about to. In Europe women are either bearing fewer children or increasingly not having any at all (in Russia people are simply dying, or leaving, in droves). Economists usually shriek at such news, pointing to the calamity that they say will eventually befall these countries as a result. In response, several governments—including France and water-strapped Australia—have begun offering their citizens financial incentives to have more children. Not only is this suspiciously racist (the same countries are increasingly hostile to immigrants from over-populated, and darker-skinned, parts of the world), but it obscures a deeper point: perhaps westerners are having fewer children because their intuition, if not their reason, is telling them that the future looks increasingly uncertain, or because the world seems increasingly to be going mad—"straight to hell in a handbasket" as a friend of mine put it to me the other day. Only a fool or an ideologue would choose to have children if they really believed the future would be worse than the past. Besides, with more than six billion people in the world already, how ethical is it to pay a few western women to have more babies while in other parts of the world women struggle to keep those they have?
Population, pollution, and poverty are global problems, and global problems need global solutions. We need to master our parochial, tribal instincts and think bigger—in space as well as time. When countries/tribes compete in a desperate, short-term effort to best one another by boosting their populations and encouraging ever higher consumption, this only hastens the Malthusian day of reckoning that we know must come. We are living way beyond our means—or rather, 10-15% of us are living so far beyond what is sustainable that we risk ruining the world we know, forever. What will our great-grandchildren, if we have any, think of us? Do we even care?
More of the stench. Where once we had cash for questions, now we have cash for gongs, or "loans for Lordships" as the press are calling them. But these "commercial" loans—made to political parties mind—are neither commercial nor in many cases even loans; they are often written off before repayment is due. In Labour's case these payments were so secret that not even the deputy Prime Minister or Party Treasurer knew about them. Worse, with all the brouhaha it looks as if the Labour Party will have to find millions of pounds it doesn't have within the next few months to repay some embarrassed, and angry, tycoons. The pus of double standards is oozing from every pore of the body politic. Of course ermine is for sale. The House of Lords was designed to run on Prime Ministerial patronage. Why on earth would anyone give millions to a political party instead of a charity or pressure group, if not for the opportunity to influence policy?
In America, some of the smelliest graft this season includes the grubby Abramoff affair, the ever-present pork mountain (obviously), and the President's fragrant assumption of a kind of Divine Right (or at least Divine Authorization)—a risky political fetish, but one it seems Mr Blair can't resist trying out over here. As a friend of mine once put it in response to some unrelated but no less blatant mendacity: it's enough to make oak sweat.
Max Hastings said the other day: "It is unreasonable to expect to be governed by saints, but it seems equally mistaken to tolerate the rule of a prime minister discredited in war and peace." Indeed. It is the Prime Minister who signs off on every peerage, and his decision to keep the payments secret suggests that there is reason for shame. Hastings's article is here
Amid the gloating and woe surrounding the Culture Secretary’s travails, several commentators have identified the malodorous problem underlying all the fuss—a problem that will continue to plague the government if it isn’t firmly smothered.
Corruption—the triumph of desire over duty—is not a new problem of course, nor is it confined to the greedy and gullible of the left. Politicians of the right, as recent events in Washington reveal all too clearly, are just as venal and narcissistic as their supposedly more progressive brethren. But like Swiss athletes at the winter Olympics, right-wingers are typically more in their element when it comes to money. This is not surprising: the desire for personal enrichment has been the philosophical touchstone of the right since Adam Smith. For them, the pursuit of profit isn't just a rational aim, it's a moral one too. Accordingly, right-wingers tend to be more practiced in the arts of making and wielding wealth without attracting censure or attention, and are thus more adept at navigating the perilous waters of financial impropriety. Sleaze is probably spread pretty evenly across the political landscape, but when it comes to slip-ups and scandals, right-wingers usually get caught with their trousers down, left-wingers with their hands in the till—in Britain at least.
Tessa Jowell is a cabinet minister in the UK government, and while she is a Blairite, I’m sure she wouldn't want to be called a right-wing politician. Indeed, she is a member of what is supposedly a left of centre, progressive administration dedicated to putting the interests of the disadvantaged first. Her husband, the already infamous David Mills, is facing bribery charges in Italy along with the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi—who allegedly paid Mills to give false testimony in another trial some years ago. Mills is a tax lawyer for the super rich—an "exceptionally clever man . . . employed in the ethically awkward and politically embarrassing business of assisting fabulously wealthy people to avoid paying tax" as Andrew Rawnsley put it last week. A predicament made more embarrassing for the government by the news that Britain still has more children living in poverty than almost any other European country. Rawnsley acidly continues:
What is it about New Labour and money? Though ministers are very well paid compared with most of their constituents, they still feel poor in relation to the exceedingly wealthy people they mix with.
Tellingly, he cites an insider’s view that ministers spend so much time being fluffed by tycoons and billionaires that they “argue themselves into believing that they deserve a similar level of lifestyle.”
And some people really do enjoy obscenely lavish lifestyles. The new Forbes list claims (conservatively, apparently) that the world’s richest 800 people (the world’s population of billionaires) are collectively worth as much as the entire United States' GDP! (more on the ) Just beneath this exalted circle are the merely super-rich. These are the top 0.1 % of taxpayers (about 145,000 people in the US) whose average yearly income, as the New York Times recently reported, was $3 million (in 2002, the last year for which records are available). And given that the wealth of the world's richest increased by a whopping 18% last year alone, that "average" income will be more like $5 million this year, $6 million next, and nearly $8 million in 2008. Nice work if you can get it. (More on the pornography of money and the unequal distribution of wealth here,here, and here)
Many of these people spend more in a day—every day—than most humans spend in their whole lives. This really is another world—a fantasy world of private jets, private islands, and private banking in which no one goes hungry, or repairs clothes, or ever thinks about such trifling things as bills. In this strange Wonderland, billions of pounds, dollars, and euros are forever set running—with the help of people like Mr Mills—in an endless game of international catch-me-if-you-can in which the tax collectors are hopelessly outgunned. It's a charade of course: the rules are rigged and the outcome is never in doubt: the super rich often pay little or no tax—in any jurisdiction. Rawnsley again:
The moolah sluices and gurgles through hedge funds, tax havens and secret accounts from the Virgin Islands to Gibraltar to Switzerland. . . . The world in which [these] huge sums slush around . . . is not just remote to traditional, Labour, working-class voters. It is a universe inhabited by the super-rich which is alien to the middle classes of Middle Britain as well.
And in what can only be described as a yellow card for the government, he warns:
The Jowell affair adds to the corrosive impression that leading luminaries of New Labour live in a different world to those they rule. Peter Mandelson's home loan, John Prescott's extraordinary failure to pay what he owed in council tax, David Blunkett's continuing enjoyment of a grace-and-favour home in Belgravia—they all suggest to voters that the rules that apply to them aren't observed by those who govern.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of wealth. A world full of rich people has got to be better than a world full of poor ones. What I'm not so sure about is a world in which a handful of people are so obscenely rich that they control almost everything while thousands of children die of the stupidest, preventable things every day.
It is no surprise that politicians—especially those of the left—are seduced by the glamour of lucre. Like teenage boys who have lucked into a night at the Playboy Mansion they are dazzled neophytes, virgins in the sexy world of the super-rich. They are the New Cinderellas—beautiful for one night only—keenly aware that their ephemeral powers will soon fade. Hypnotized by the luxury and opulence of it all, they are easily seduced. In other circumstances we'd call this rape.
Would an alternative government behave any better? Who knows? Maybe, for a while. The bigger question is: have we become so cynical that we think corruption and graft are now inevitable? To assume that most, if not all, politicians have their snouts in the trough, even if some guzzle and snort a little more discretely, or amusingly, is to assume the worst, so let's hope not.
With all the brouhaha surrounding those frankly awful Danish cartoons that satirize Mohammed, it seems everyone's treading very carefully when it comes to voicing opinion on religious intolerance and free speech, in public at least. It's a bit like driving in Texas after a road-rage shooting: everyone is super courteous for a couple of days, then the bad tempers start to reappear.
I'm reminded of another cartoon—a lovely As If strip by Sally Ann Lasson that was in the Independent a couple of years ago.
The gag works because of the way in which the man misses the point. He takes her remark so literally—as if any intellectual stimulation will do! But what really makes the joke fly is the irony: not only does the man fail to take the hint, but had he delivered his absurd question playfully and with a glint in his eye—a touch of Hugh Grant—it would have worked a treat. It might even work better the second time around.
Behind the humour, however, and what makes the strip relevant to the Denmark-blasphemy-imbroglio, is a frustrating reality that most of us are familiar with: the problem of being misunderstood. The cartoon trades on the reasons why we fail to understand each other so often, and so comprehensively. It isn't just ineptness, or missing empathy, or the effects of sexual or cultural dimorphism, because as the cartoon also implies, there's the matter of intellectual laziness too—what Nietzsche called a "lack of intellectual conscience." But there are also times when we simply don't have the time or energy—either to understand others or to make ourselves clear. Understanding can be hard work; getting others to understand us can be even harder—especially when we are reduced to juggling scarce resources.
Sometimes the gap between hilarity and offence, compliment and insult, even love and hate, is very small. At these moments harmless bad taste can easily collapse into cruelty, and cheap humour into humiliation. This is not to say that certain issues are, or should be, out of bounds as material for humour. As Roberto Benigni brilliantly and lovingly showed in his film Life is Beautiful, even the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp can be pressed into comedic service. It's all a question of attitude.
The lesson: intent is usually more important than content.
The brilliant Terry Eagleton on fundamentalism and sacred text—here
Jan 15th Women
A secret: I fancy Maureen Lipman. I have for years. Not surprising really: she's hilarious, hugely empathic, super-bright, and a lovely writer (see here for a recent, uplifting example). I see her as a kind of female Peter Ustinov, but with sex appeal—if you can imagine such a thing—one of those people you can't help but admire. I read one of her books—Thank You for Having Me—many years ago, and have remained oddly attuned to her ever since. Indeed, her cheerful refusal to take the absurdities of life at all seriously has long been something of a touchstone of sanity and good humour for me.
An embarrassing admission: I worry that I might be turning into one of those sad characters who fall for celebrities—and not just any old celebrities either: it seems my affections are reserved for National Treasures. No air-brushed supermodels or pouting film stars for me. Angelina Jolie might trigger tsunamis of hormones, but what does she care about? What does she think? Above all, would I laugh at her jokes? Pack me off to a desert island with Angelina for a weekend, by all means (she is the third most desirable woman in the world after all), but if I'm going to be cast away indefinitely I'll take Maureen for company every time. This is all in very bad taste, I know—the Scheherazade defence won't wash, and god knows what Angelina, or Maureen, would make of my jokes, or what passes for thought in my head—but there we are. I can only put my hands up and say: sorry, I'm a human being; I don't get to choose my desires.
Not that such yearnings are particularly odd or rare. By all accounts millions of us harbour feelings for people we don't know—feelings that are sometimes overwhelming. I once worked with a woman who had such a crush on George Michael that she would regularly fly all over the world in the hope of sharing a few words with him after a gig or TV show. She often traveled alone and even took a second job to pay for it all. To her husband's dismay, and everyone else's horror, George was far and away the main man in her life.
A disclaimer: I'd like to declare that although I am obviously a highly proficient fantasist (if Walter Mitty-style fantasizing was an Olympic event, I'd be bringing home the gold for England), I'm not one of those obsessives who gather and glean every detail of their inamorata's life. Save for a few prints by Kandinsky, Escher, and Klee, the only pictures emblazoned on my walls, phone, and desktop are either of, or were made by, my friends' kids.
A recollection: Many moons ago I went out with a girl who claimed to have bedded Andrew Rawnsley—who is arguably something of a National Treasure himself these days, although he was merely a Rising Star back then. I never doubted her, but for some reason the boast stung, and perhaps that was when the seeds of my celebrity fixation took root. In any event, my ex has since become one of the Great and Good herself, and doubtless moves in appropriately exalted circles these days.
Another admission: There is this other woman you see, on the telly this time. No names or anything, in case I meet her (a possibility that isn't quite as far-fetched as it might seem). Suffice it to say, she is a glamorous, gimlet-eyed boffin (of course) who has just won an award for Being Very Clever from some impeccable foundation or other. One of those people, like Maureen, who simply oozes warmth and intelligence and unaffected charm. She's quite a babe too—in a slightly clumsy, geeky, and utterly irresistible way.
A discovery: Google tells me that this woman's accomplishments are even more, er, accomplished, than I thought: as well as earning armfuls of degrees from some of the world's top schools, and landing high-powered jobs at several of the world's most prestigious addresses, it seems her dazzling intellect has also won her the ear of Presidents, Princes, and Potentates everywhere. Nor am I alone in my admiration of this woman; devotees even more neurotic than me are building shrines as I write, which if nothing else is one in the eye for those who claim that men only go for women they perceive as lower in status to themselves. Atavistic tosh.
Jan 4th 2006. Graft in politics
Happy New Year all.
A nasty, bitter rant today.
They say “Dog Bites Man” is not news; “Man Bites Dog” is news. Well, it looks as if the DC hounds have been chowing down, greedy and glib as usual, and they couldn't care less about leaving bite marks.
The "news" that a top lobbyist has been putting his hand in the till and fluffing Congressmen, for instance, or that the Vice President’s old company has been awarded billions of dollars' worth of government contracts in Iraq, are nothing more than lowly dog-bites-man stories—old ones at that—not worthy of much attention. “Not again” we tut, and roll our eyes. We've come to expect this kind of thing. After all, if our leaders have the brass neck to take us to war on a whim and a false prospectus, it’s hardly surprising that they (and their cronies) feather their nests too—and attempt to hide it all by pretending that national security is at stake. You can see the logic of it: if you've just nicked the Crown Jewels, no one's going to be interested in the car you stole while making your getaway.
It makes me wonder whether nest-feathering, of one sort or another, might have been the point of the war in the first place, and perhaps even the reason why people go into politics at all these days—as it long used to be the world over.
Call me cynical, but I simply don't buy the claim that corruption isn't systemic; that it's the mischief of a few—the inevitable “bad apples”; that it's at most an occasional and unintended side effect of an otherwise virtuous capitalist democracy. On the contrary, I think it's more accurate to say that corruption is built in to the very heart of the American political system, as it has long been in commerce. As Lord Acton famously put it in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Ominously, he went on: "Great men [by which I think he means those who want to be seen as Great Men] are almost always bad men." Given that politics has been dominated by commercial interests and Great Men for the last century, you have to admit such sour speculations aren’t entirely without merit.
As for the proximate cause of the current grubbiness, it's no use retreating to the old cliches—that there’s too much money sloshing about, or not enough, or that corporate influence in politics has never been as great, or even that we live in “complicated” times. The fact is, we've made a world such that anyone with the desire and stomach for a career in modern politics is probably not a person to trust. Or to borrow a thought from Groucho Marx: we shouldn't stoop to vote for anyone who would stoop to offering us favours to vote for him, or increasingly these days, her.
I harp on about this because the DeLay/Abramoff/Scanlon corruption scandal unfolding in Washington (here and here and here) confirms, yet again, what a murky business political lobbying is, and what a threat to disinterested government it is. Hot on the heels of a series of awkward White House faux pas, this sort of thing further sullies the reputation of an already damaged political system. You’d have thought that any decent politician would be arguing, loudly, for things like campaign finance reform (indeed reform of all political funding), better accountability, and much clearer separation between elected representatives, their advisors, and interest-group advocates. There is no clamour. [Mid Jan—OK, a few murmurs now. See here, and three cheers for Al Gore's recent speech—see here..... Feb: all quiet again—see here.... March: still quiet—see here]
There is no clamour because corruption—the triumph of desire over duty—doesn’t really matter any more; unless the rot reaches the very top we simply aren’t titillated enough and the story is deemed non-news. But even when the rot does reach the top, those of us who care about what’s going on often find ourselves comforted or enraged by media organisations that are often in cahoots with (and almost always in thrall to) the very system that is at issue—turkeys don’t vote for Christmas and all that. We are weary; we are too used to malfeasance in public life, as we have long been in corporate life, and not just in America. From Honolulu to Hornchurch, we have turned ourselves into a tribe of Adam Smith-worshipping cynics—Homo Hesperius. No wonder so few of us bother to vote.
So Long, Hydrocarbon Man...
Open University Climate Change
Polly Toynbee on the richness of the rich