Gaia Community: TimP's Blog

Closure

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 19:32:12 GMT

[ It is always rude to leave without saying goodbye. Pressure of work and other commitments will mean that there are no more entries to be made for a while though I may return. For business-linked and political blogging, go to http://asithappens.tppr.info . So, goodbye and thanks to the nice people I have met through Zaadz and to Zaadz itself. Tim P. ]

Tags: Goodbye

Stephen Pinker and Magical Thinking

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 10:49:25 GMT

I make it a rule never to write (except for money or mineral rights) during August so this will be the last posting until September ... or I might stop completely. After all, the whole point of the annual pause is to ask whether something of value is becoming a mere habit. Time is a commodity like any other and it is good to halt once in a while and ask - is this the best use of it? ...

Stephen Pinker, the scientist and commentator, has an interesting article in the Chicago Sun-Times on 'dangerous ideas' - http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/469317,CST-CONT-danger15.article - and he offers a tentative dig at the prevailing and patronising ideology of political correctness amongst the educated Hilary-Clintonesque Anglo-Saxon 'educated' middle class. But this is largely America's problem not mine. I was merely diverted by two connected sentences:

Only children and madmen engage in "magical thinking," the fallacy that good things can come true by believing in them or bad things will disappear by ignoring them or wishing them away. Rational adults want to know the truth, because any action based on false premises will not have the effects they desire.

Pinker's Throwaway Lines

Pinker is a Professor in Psychology at Harvard. These two throwaway lines tell us a great deal about the stranglehold of positivism and scientism on all matters to do with the mind. It is immature or insane (it is asserted) to believe that matter (things, though we must allow that things may include social relations) can be changed by the exercise of mind as belief or denial. Further, it is assumed that there is something called truth which is defined, along traditional American pragmatic lines, as that which has desired effects.

Pinker sweeps over these assertions in his effort to make his intelligent if not particularly sophisticated popularising points about academic freedom and responsibility, all (despite his aura of courage) well within the mainstream of American ideology. The level of 'courage' may be deduced from the fact that, despite being the most obvious example of ideological pressure on academic freedom this year, the lengthy article does not deal with the debate over the influence of the Zionist lobby, yet finds time to mention Torquemada and Larry Summers.

Although not threatened with incarceration in a mental asylum (but only with loss of revenue, reputation-bashing and difficulty in getting published), the liberal academic and intellectual is being placed under increasing ideological pressure, much as any Brezhnev-era Soviet intellectual might have been. It is a sign of intellectual decadence in the world's greatest power that matches the concurrent rise of primitivist neo-conservatism - two camps twisting reality for political purposes.

Managing 'Socially Harmful Information'

The creepy argument from certain self-appointed secular priests that there is a "logic ... for keeping socially harmful information out of the public sphere" is the very essence of the new liberal totalitarianism in which we, the people, are regarded as too stupid to know our own interest.

The sinister Mr, Plato, having been at the birth of so many murderous essentialist utopianisms, is now in at the birth of a new form of culturicide - a mental rather than physical enslavement of the many by the few. Thus, once again, frightened middle class liberals, often over-rating their own intellectual abilities, conspire somewhat incoherently with the neo-conservative impulse to manage us in our own alleged interest. Enough already!

If you take Pinker's passing excoriation of 'magical thinking' and add to it the idea of "keeping socially harmful information out of the public sphere", it might then become perfectly "logical" to ban some dangerous ideas that might actually be quite liberating for the mass of the population, a popular liberation from the rule of experts whose own knowledge of micro-effects is often expanded, without just cause, into macro-policy affecting the daily lives of millions. You can see the existential panic amongst scientists - if the masses deny the scientific assessment of micro-effects (or merely consider them irrelevant), then liberal-positivist legitimation of its command of macro-policy may collapse. But this is just panic ...

Some Alternate Propositions

Let us try some alternate propositions on thinking ...

* Observable effects on matter (science) should be strictly assessed as technology - the information's only pragmatic value is how it can be used for personal or social ends

* Non-useful science should be considered as narrative and should not be privileged (or diminished) over other narratives - if it cannot be used, then it is merely interesting

* Non-scientific thinking or narrative that effects perceptual change may be said to affect social relations (since social relations are based on perception) which, in turn, affects the uses and ends of technology - and, therefore, the limits and value of science

* Individuals and communities generally (though not always) know what is good for their own survival and their real problem is lack of information (including lack of scientific information) so the free flow of all information is essential to individual and social decision-making - free cultural and technological education remains the foundation of the good society

* Apparently irrational belief-systems have social advantages and communities may legitimately choose to deny the use of technology or scientific narrative or use other narratives (art, religion, magick) to express what they are and what they wish to be

* Those who do this are neither immature nor insane, just different

* Boundaries against harm (child abuse, denial of medical care, exploitation, or whatever) need to be negotiated as general values applying to all narrative choices: these boundaries have a relationship with technology and psychology (which, as we will see, must include 'magic') but have little to do with particular narratives - they are the arena of 'good politics'

* Truth may be no more than that which demonstrates desired effects in the American pragmatic tradition, but self-constructed ways of thinking to shift perception and make oneself whole (or as whole as anyone can expect to be) can involve a great deal more than applying reason to that 'which is not reasonable' (i.e. the essence of being human)

* No social policy that involves values can do more than hold the ring between varying responses to Wittgenstein's 'that of which nothing can be spoken', whether it be the response of denial that such a zone matters from a positivist mind-set, the Christian's belief in the mysterium tremendum or the anarchic mentality of the Chaos practitioner.

In this context, bad mouthing those outside the prevailing positive orthodoxy as immature or insane sounds like the act of a dominant class seeking to maintain its hegemony over truth. If something works, then it works and people will use it because it works, but the ends for which technologies are used are why the fact that it works is important. There is no 'truth' as such in these workings, only in the ends and scientists have a somewhat disturbing moral record to date in this area.

There are, of course, legitimate fears over social order (from the right) and exploitation (from the left) but these are best handled through a rules-based general political debate and not by prescription on values from an anxious and weakening positivist academic caste. There is certainly no justification in replacing a theocracy with a liberal meritocracy where the rules have inappropriately fixed who will be a member of the caste and who will not.

The fear of this meritocratic liberal caste is that their (liberal and open) absolute values will be displaced by someone else's absolute values. But this very resistance to other ways of thinking tends to strengthen the fundamentalists on the other side. The proper response is to place both one's own and other's absolute (or even nihilistic) values beneath the rule of fair play, law applicable to all and my oft-quoted democratic socialist principle of exploitation as a wrong-in-itself. Boundaries can then be regarded as simply a matter of political struggle between interests instead of struggles between value-systems.

The Awkward Case Of Magick

Which brings me to the particularly awkward case of Magick - that odd minority practice that (despite claims of antiquity) emerged amongst the British haute bourgeoisie at the peak of Empire and was accompanied or succeeded by a number of neo-pagan religions (Druidism, Wicca and Heathenism). These have all spread and taken root in American soil much to the consternation of Christian and scientific fundamentalists alike. Is the Magickal tradition of Crowley (represented in America by different and darker strands from Parsons through to the avowed Satanist LaVey) immature or insane - or are they merely exploitative of the immature by cynical opportunists? Or is it something else or all of these and more?

There are few reliable sources but a new book, The History of British Magick After Crowley, by Paul Evans, an academic historian, tries to bring some objectivity to what this odd little minority are engaged in because they are, by their very existence, clearly a standing challenge to Pinkerism - especially when you find out that its contemporary practitioners include a significant proportion of science graduates and that some of them actively use the wilder shores of science, as Pinker would understand the term, for their practices and researches.

Unfortunately, Evans' book is not well edited (it is published outside the mainstream by Hidden Publishing), it rambles and it sometimes assumes too much knowledge and then repeats itself on things that we all know anyway as part of our common culture. But it is engagingly honest about the prejudices Evans experienced in the Academy for even taking on the issue, for his determination to uncover the truth about leading figures and for his own description of 'anthropological' participation in rituals and their effect on him - and his struggle (which clearly exercises him more than the reader) to remain 'objective'.

Some Findings

The bottom line of 400-odd pages that should be 270 but remains a valuable source is three-fold. First, the obfuscation of Magickal language and technique from Crowley onwards hides a genuine attempt to find a way into that world of 'that of which nothing can be spoken' which we all know lies at the limits of science and logic and which is also dealt with by art and religion - and through the sheer exercise of imagination. Poetry and ritual are methods to an end as much as scientific hypotheses and experimentation can be in the search for useful technologies - positivists may not like that conclusion but these people are neither immature nor insane, just different.

Second, this world does attract the immature and probably the insane, so there is an issue of exploitation. Evans' book does not try to justify the antics of Kenneth Grant or Amado Crowley as some might do as merely the antics of Loki or some other Trickster god. These figures that lie between Crowley and the Chaos magicians are deeply flawed, just how flawed requires a reading of the book because I am not going to put myself or Zaadz at the risk of a British libel suit.

I can see (from other sources) that a tendency to charlatanism and trickery is becoming self-corrected in the next generation (giving way, in turn, to a fourth generation of socially committed 'magical' eco-thinkers), but Pinker and others are both justified in caution if perhaps more forgiving of historic charlatanism in the sciences when it had had neither a strong culture nor an institutional base to support it. Alchemical thinking opened the doors to more serious work in chemistry and we ordinary folk have had to put up with some pretty daft theories and vile inventions from scientists, pimping themselves to power, over the last 300 years.

Life-Affirmation as Ends

But, third, the actual experience of Magick is clearly life-affirming and powerful for that tiny minority of practitioners (estimated at less than 50,000 or around 0.1% of the British population) who engage with it. The 'scientific question' is - does it work? And the proper answer is - for the purposes of many of these people, yes it does.  The scientist must then ask (assuming he does not dismiss such people as merely deluded and hand them over to the clinician) - how does it do this?

It seems to do this by a practitioner taking command of how the world is perceived in order to effect change in oneself that then enables one to change social relations (definable as 'matter' in some respects). This, in turn, affects the purpose and use of technology if not the laws of physics. It is about self-empowerment through controlled 'transgression' but there is no evidence to suggest that such people are more or less psychopathic, 'insane' or even manipulative than other groups of people. My daily life is spent in business, politics and public relations and, believe me, if you want psychopathy, manipulation and attempts to bend reality to will, try my world!

This does leave the claim of some Magick practitioners (and Wiccans and Druids) that ritual or will can change matter or the laws of physics. This claim is not metaphor but based on a reading at the cutting edge of physics that the mind and matter can operate at micro-levels 'under will' (I oversimplify) so that greater change can be effected through the oft-quoted 'butterfly effect'. The implication is that will can direct change.

Scepticism About Scepticism

Not so many years ago, I would have rejected this out of hand and am still suspicious that a psychological pudding is being overegged, but now I think, while the claims are unproven, seem unlikely and may never be provable, relations between mind and matter (given that both may be broadly the same substance whether to materialists or radical gnostics and, if not, there is still no clear account of how one works on the other within the body other than the circular explanations of neuro-science) are not known truly to scientists any more than 'magical thinkers'. This void creates a gap for surmise and imagination. The attempt by one narrative [science] unwarrantedly to seek to expand into the void as lebensraum, by abandoning its own methodological rigour in order to exclude another which it finds uncomfortable, strikes me as unethical.

Similarly, at the margins, there is room for doubt about strict radical techno-materialism. The much-despised para-psychological profession within the academy is finding 'anomalies', the power of ritual and words to effect psychological change quickly is being shown to be true if only in the middle management fix of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and a variety of 'new religions' seem to give pastoral care to the new 'damned of the earth' deep within our own liberal culture (the trailer boys sucked into overseas military adventures, the sex working single mothers).

These self-taught techniques for psychological regeneration seem to be a helluva lot cheaper and more focused on reality than the inordinately expensive and lengthy talking cure much preferred by the tormented liberal middle classes of the East Coast.  In short, the 'does it work' test is not only subjectively passed by the group but there may be objective hints of why it works and what its social role and rational economic value may be.

So, Professor ...

A little less science and a little more Magick might result in more fun and more safe sex at home for a lot of over-intellectualised graduate couples. Who is going to be a happier soul - Woody Allen or someone dressing up in a wolf's costume (apparently not a real skin because of eco-morality ,so political correctness cannot be escaped even here), getting drunk, in the middle of the night, in woodland and calling on Herne to bless a couple before they go off to hit the sack?

Thinking too much can be terribly depressing. Especially when thinking (for most people) actually changes very little in one's life and reaches a point of diminishing returns. To play with Pinker's second sentence - "Rational adults find what passes for truth as irrelevant, because any action based on true premises will still not have the effects they desire".

Why should the vast mass of the population, trapped in dead-end jobs and tired relationships with limited resources, sustain a thinking culture that does not work for them just to buttress the amour-propre of professional thinkers? If thinking will not change that job, get more money and reinvigorate one's marriage, why not try something else - and, by the way, have some fun! And, before the moralists get their teeth into this, it is the thinking culture that has the high divorce rate, not a magical one per se.

So, Professor Pinker, I know you mean well but don't be so po-faced about 'magical thinking'. It may not be the way to run a nuclear power station or a train service but 'imaginative' thinking (if you dislike magical) is not immature nor is it insane. It can change the conditions of matter by changing the person and social relations. It can get that person out of the hands of an office bully without going through 'procedures' (yawn!) that change nothing fundamentally. It can force a marriage to put up or shut up on mutual respect. It may (and minds should remain open on this) even change matter at the margins - we do not know. In short, in some cases, it can empower where liberals can only pontificate.

... And Back to Dangerous Ideas

And, perhaps more uncomfortably, outside the simple truths of proven cause and effect, there are many other truths. No narrative has yet mastered, nor can it plausibly ever master, 'that of which nothing can be spoken', whether it be God, deity in general or (as I believe) simple raw unknowable Existence. Science is rightly master of technology and of the means to new technology. It is a describer of how Existence (or God) manifests itself but it says nothing about ends and little, in the long run, about what it is to be and feel human. In that wider territory, it merely constrains the theories underpinning other narratives but it does not displace them.  It forces them on to new ground but it can never wipe them from that core territory of 'meaning'.

Which brings us back to the original article and 'dangerous ideas'. For Professor Pinker, a dangerous idea is one that science develops through its method but which then has a potentially negative social consequence. It may become propaganda fuel for racists or fascists - the Holocaust lurks behind every American liberal's picture of the universe as something that happens when science goes bad. But this mis-explains the atrocity and is bad history. Jews died not because of bad science but because of bad politics. And, until we get our heads around that, people will continue to die before their time.

We remain in denial about the importance of free political struggle under conditions of full information. Germans in 1933 did not, as a majority, vote in global war, mass murder and a terrible dictatorship. A truly strong egalitarian democracy, with loyal militia and multiple sources of information available to the public would have strangled Hitler. The science would have poddled along, eventually discovering that there was no basis to his potty racial theories. As always, it was the elite who betrayed their own nation out of conformity and that time-serving mentality of people who think they have a little bit of power to play with and can use it well ... as if!

The liberal-totalitarian instinct is to try and hold a dangerous idea close and limit its use to the caste that can be trusted to handle it responsibly. I would argue that this is patronising and that it privileges a caste with no rights to speak for the rest of us. PInker quotes Brandeis approvingly - Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Let him and other liberals hold that thought.

The long term solution is for science to place itself under the jurisdiction of the community, for all information to be given to the community and for the community to be trusted to develop an appropriate policy based on values that are derived from squaring all the narratives - from the materialist (economic welfare) to the numinous. It is called liberal democracy and it is becoming plain stupid now to let the particular bloody events in a mid-European country three quarters of a century ago dictate how we treat and trust our own peoples. Now that is immature and on the very borders of insane ...

Tags: Stephen Pinker, Magick, Liberalism, Science, Chaos, Paul Evans

The Dark and the Light: What A German Secret Society Can Teach Us

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 20:18:33 GMT

It may seem like cheating to take a pre-existing item (much of this has already appeared in my LiveJournal) and then re-apply it to the Zaadz blog. But the virtue of blog-plundering is that you can have a second bite at an earlier cherry and see if the thoughts of one week stand up to scrutiny in the next.

What is Truth, Said the Roman

I have a very unconventional view of truth. Facts change, new thoughts come, and the world changes accordingly. Better to accept this and anticipate it than to become rigid in pure principle. Universalism is, I am afraid, the beginning of the end of human creativity and progress.

After all, if any of us had lived a hundred years ago, we would probably have accepted such truths as self-evident as that : eugenics was a reasonable proposition in ensuring the progress of the human species; that women were the weaker sex and needed guidance from men; that tribal peoples were inherently inferior and required a Christian mission to make them whole; and that a member of a trades union was, by very definition, a dangerous agitator.

I like to think that I plough dangerous ground sometimes in trying to think ahead, perhaps to what might be normal in a hundred years. My earlier thoughts on sexual honesty and the web (since re-published in Social Computing magazine, which shows that Zaadz is read out there in Normal Land) were of this type. My opinion that any society made rigid by the thoughts and plans of a group of benign eighteenth century gentlemen is bound to show signs of tension and collapse after a period of time - yes, I am talking about your much-loved Constitution - is another 'future thought'. Another theme of this blog is that the minority religions and irrationalisms emerging in the margins of late capitalist society are as pregnant with meaning as was Christianity in the Age of Augustus.

The Strength of Irrational Feeling

I attended a lecture recently by a leading Heathen (representing a serious minority attempt to reconstruct what the pre-Roman tribal peoples of Europe felt and believed). What has struck me is the profound depth of feeling amongst those who have engaged deeply with these new 'reconstructed' pagan religions.  I may not share their views, but I must recognise that their peculiar brands of irrationalism, no less so than the Catholic or the Jewish,are powerful enough to motivate actions that might, one day, be those of the martyr or, the Deity forbid, a Crusade or should we say an Ankhade or (after Thor) a Hammerade.

Two days later, at the same venue, an articulate young German from public service stock, gave a very coherent and stimulating account of a pagan German secret society from the second post-Nietzchean wave of German romanticism (1870s). This had been forced underground successively by racial politics and then by the taint of association of romantic irrationalism with national socialism in post-war Germany. The society has been revived and no doubt partially transformed in a model that was clearly one part Germanic by philosophy (idealist rather than existentialist), one part Germanic by cultural heritage, with talk of Ragnarok and Frigg, and one part gnostic-hermetic with all the expected debt to Jung and Ascona.

This was 'aristocracy of the soul' stuff and is part of a new trend to rediscover roots in the defeated powers of '45 that is as inevitable as it was once feared. In my view, it is a necessary part of the healing of '45. I would have few concerns if all those involved were as intelligent and self-aware as the speaker. But I do have concerns and I think we need to be aware of what is happening more widely in global culture.

Traditionalism As Revenge

The racial and imperialist aspects of both German and Japanese culture have perhaps dissipated, but the culture suppressed in 1945 by the combined force of Western rational liberalism and Marxist scientific materialism went underground - it was never crushed completely. It is not merely returning at the margins as a transformed 'spirituality' in these countries. We also see those who 'collaborated' against both the West and Communism in other countries re-emerge - in a revived Hindu nationalism, in the re-emergence of the European Right in The Low Countries, France, Spain and Italy (and elsewhere) and, paradoxically, in the many East European petty nationalisms and fascisms. Poland's current bout of irrationalism is a resurgence of Catholic authoritarianism but it is of the same type - the suppressed rage of a nationalism crushed by two forces with more guns and more men.

We even see traces of it in the development of that post-Baathist 'Caliphate' traditionalism that, owing some debt to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, has emerged as 'Al-Qaeda'. In short, the irrational politics of tradition, identity and the soul - and of blut and kultur however defined - is back with a vengeance. A relatively few 'souls' can now wreak destructive power far beyond anything such irregulars could have done fifty years ago, while troubled elites increasingly see traditionalist ideas as a means of capturing and retaining power.

So, something culturally significant is happening. Much of it comes down to frustration with both traditional religion and with the Enlightenment - and the hole on the Left left by the failures of both Marxism and secular liberation movements. Just as Baathism was the twin brother of Zionism, so 'Caliphate' Islamism is arising out of the ashes of the failures of the secular leftist liberation strategies of the PLO and of the more sensible pre-Saddamite versions of Baathism.

The Attraction of the Coherently Irrational

What interested me was that (although I am of the Left) I could see that the ideas of this spiritual and non-political secret society was reaching out to something lost in people's souls - that very drive for the coherent irrational that is always going to be more holy and more meaningful than the politically correct nonsense forced on us by both market democracy in the West and by a world of all-too-appropriate behaviour, rights, duties and citizenship.

One person of German descent at the event (in conversation afterwards) was clearly attracted by that aspect of David's talk that was 'tribal' - it reached down to the roots of her personal Yggdrasil. The British audience was (as is our way) more pragmatic about all this and rather unnerved by some of the highly conservative gender implications, but many people outside the liberal heartlands of the West are ready for something that roots them in their ancestors and their place - in blut und boden.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with this if it can develop within a classic secular liberal culture, the law is obeyed and no-one is forced to make temple blood sacrifices or mount revenge raids on the next street ... but my concern is where this desperate need to belong and to believe may be taken by less scrupulous and more manipulative operators.

Rudgley on the Odinic Experiment

A recent popular book on paganism [Richard Rudgley, Pagan Resurrection: A Force for Evil or the Future of Western Spirituality, 2006] raises some of the issues, albeit without much sophistication and exaggerating the political potential of what he calls the Second Odinic Experiment (essentially the post-war appropriation of Odin by the Westen Radical Right). Nevertheless, he is raising some serious issues that are being completely ignored by the mainstream media. It is highly probable that some of these developments are being monitored by the security services and simultaneously studiously ignored, or becoming a matter of denial, by the politicians they serve. Much like the Minister of Magic studiously ignores the return of Lord Valdemort until the bugger is presented to his own eyesight in the current Harry Potter movie.

The relevance of minority religion thinking to this may seem distant. Ridgley's book is unsatisfying precisely because he is sympathetic to pagan thought and yet his story tells of its systematic appropriation by the extreme Right. He cannot bring himself to criticise Odinic thinking nor its darker aspects.

In fact, much of what passes for paganism is not so much paganism as traditionalism - there is not only state-sponsored Shinto in Japan to deal with but there is (not uncoincidentally) those Arab writers from the era of the Mongol invasions who are emerging as the ideologists of 'Caliphate' Islam. It seems not accidental that Polish neo-fascists in government, Islamic extremists and 'divine wind' Japanese nationalists can all centre their narratives ultimately on national resistance to the Mongol horde. But, today, the West in all its manifestations, including Communist [scientific materialist] China, is the Mongol Horde to many middling nations under threat from rapid global change.

Good People & Dark Forces

The German secret society is not sinister at all - its narrative myth is attractive, even sexy in its way. I loved it - as noble fantasy. Wiccans and most neo-pagans, too, love nature and the rest of humanity in a way that is wholly benign. Jewish and Islamic cultures have rich magical aspects that are only now being explored in any depth in the West. I could go on - neo-paganism is largely a positive and benign force in the world. But we have to be on guard ... because traditionalism and paganism are not the same thing. The attempted appropriation of the latter by the former when it switches out of Judaeo-Christian mode is something to be very wary of in the covens and moots of the world.

Out there, there are people that are frightened. They see their identity under threat. They see changes that they cannot adapt to. They are looking for crutches. Whether it be the 'leaderless resistance' strategies of terrorism migrating from Christian Identity to extremist Odinist circles and on to Al-Qaeda or the national manipulation of folk religions like Shinto, we have to stop being naive about the connexion between religion and politics in general and the possibility of the manipulation of new religious thinking in particular.

These new religions are emerging because of anxiety and the failure of the old religions. Scientism, Dawkins' aggressive atheism, liberalism and the Enlightenment are not meeting their needs. It is a small step to the politicisation of this rage and anxiety by unscrupulous politicians.

The Warning from History

Even the history of the secret society is its own warning from history - romantic pagan-inclined men of good faith were displaced by the appropriation of German culture by something that even Hitler considered absurd, the potty neo-paganism of Guido von List, of Karl von Wiligut, of the Ahnenerbe and of Heinrich Himmler. Once that madness and its equally mad pseudo-science was discredited, two generations of Germans dared not explore the dissident ideas at the very heart of this and other societies. To talk of Ragnarok was to imply that such thinkers wanted to bring it on rather than see it as an alchemical metaphor.

What is troubling is who might be rehabilitated and who might not as we go deeper into the current century. This could be the world of Savitri Devi, of Julius Evola and Miguel Serrano. Athough some of these thinkers (notably Evola) may have things of value to impart if only in stimulating debate, they can be potentially very dangerous thinkers indeed in free societies - if they remain unchallenged.  If the Wiccan world of Gerald Gardner, currently the home of liberals, greens and feminists, is ever captured by the world of Evola, many good and honourable people will be moths burnt in the flames - especially if those attracted to the spirituality of faux-tradition are sucked into the politics of resistance to the modern world. We must all consider ourselves on watch ...

Tags: Irrationalism, Paganism, Germany, Traditionalism, Heathen, Harry Potter

On Evil ...

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 18:34:21 GMT

[ A version of this first appeared on LiveJournal at http://timlondon.livejournal.com/ ]

I was pulled up short the other day by a science fiction book. I referred to the Scots science fiction writer Ken Macleod in my April 6th posting [ Macleod and '300' - Two Responses to the Darkness ] so it was interesting to discover a new writer, Charles Stross, recommended by Macleod, who has many similarities in style and sensibility. There is a sudden rush of his books on the market, all very recent and published first in America (although he is a Brit). I picked up what I believe is his second to be written and the first to be published here (The Atrocity Archive) and it is an enjoyable pulp read [see http://www.antipope.org/charlie/index.html for more on Stross]

Anyway this isn't a book review. The book has many flaws but if you think in terms of a mix of H. P. Lovecraft, Len Deighton and Neal Stephenson (his assessment) and then add in a mix of hacker techno-nerdiness and BBC Sci-Fi humour (my assessment), you get somewhere close to what Graham Greene might politely call an 'entertainment'. It is very much in the vein of Mick Carey's much-loved (by my family) Felix Castor novels - http://www.mikecarey.net/ - which have the sexiest demon-incubus you have never ever wanted to meet.

These novels are part of a wry contemporary English horror/sci fi style made up of cynicism, dark humour, nerdy manners and tributes to American and British genre pulp that seems to go down well in a reading culture that is at much at home with Marvel Comics as it is with Conan Doyle. Think of the peculiar but stimulating world-view of Alan Moore [from V for Vendetta through to Promethea] and you see the culture of an angry radicalism that has been bent to market needs.

No, I am not offering a book review but a single observation. I am not giving the story away by saying that one of the key conceits of the book is that the mass murder of the Jews in the Second World War was the ritual sacrifice of millions to gain sufficient psychic energy from pain to call on an occult power, not unlike one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, to ensure a national socialist victory. I am told that this is not the first use of this trope and someone is already out there searching Robert Anton Wilson for an earlier use of it - but its casual use in a popular novel on the shelves now is worth thinking about.

The conceit pulls you up short - has the very real suffering of millions under a vicious regime now become mere fodder for a rather tasteless foray into alternative history? Has it moved from the transgressive (if Anton Wilson did use the idea) to the mainstream? Is this the point where the Holocaust has become finally released from lived experience (after being, for a few decades after 1945, 'that of which nothing may be spoken") in order that it might become the plaything of creative artists?

If so, it has been creeping in that direction for some time. The evil of the Holocaust has become steadily detached, first, from greed and power and, then, from ill-will and human malice to become the subject of occult forces beyond time and space? How different is this, in terms of the potential for a psychological denial of the truth, from the works of David Irving - not that I would ban either? Not at all if we know how to distinguish between fact and fantasy but perhaps the remaking of fact into fantasy does have a moral dimension of sorts.

The point is that, at a certain time after an act has taken place, it seems that the act can move into a world where it is disconnected from reality and becomes fodder for fantasy. This can happen in our private lives where we redraft reality to suit our current condition as a matter of course. I met an old girlfriend from nearly twenty years ago by chance not so long ago and it was amusing to see how we had entirely different narratives about how and why we parted - as Maurice Chevalier sang, 'Ah, how I remember it well!'

The conservative philosopher John Kekes [The Roots of Evil, Cornell, 2005] does us a service in his book by returning to some of the great crimes of the past, not excluding the realpolitik of the Cathar Crusade, to lodge evil acts back where they should be lodged - at the heart of the human condition. There comes a time perhaps, having redrafted history repeatedly, that we do have to go back and moralise on what happened as if would could make a contemporary judgement based on clear if primitive moral absolutes of the 'eating people is wrong' type. While I cannot entirely dismiss the environmental roots of evil, as Kekes seems to want to do by implication, he is persuasive that not all evil can be optimistically wished away as something that is purely a matter of condition and that there is no evidence that, with improvement of condition, evil will be automatically banished from the world.

The Catholic Church has a concept in which there are sins of commission and sins of omission. This is useful here. To wilfully order the murder of millions is a sin of commission. To participate for careerist reasons in such a murder and go into denial about what is happening as one does so may be a sin of omission. Forgetting an evil later because it is convenient to do so is also part of the evil. Himmler's descendant who married a Jew and who has a half-Jewish child with the Himmler bloodline (a cosmic irony of noble proportions) investigated the Himmler brothers and found that their claims to have stepped away from their brother's romantic hogwash was so much - hogwash. They had been complicit not as believers but as opportunists, taking every advantage of the family name when it gave them a bit of an edge in a cruel and unforgiving world.

Our culture tends to punish the commission of an act far more than complicity through omission and yet there would be no large-scale evil (it would be mere vicious local gangsterdom or individual rapine and murder) if it were not for this complicity by the grey men and their wives who do their duty. Charles Manson is rightfully incarcerated for life for his actions, yet Robert McNamara, the grey civil servant, continued to teach and write and speak (albeit admitting error) as if nothing had happened to civilians while he was working in national security - much like German lawyers who practised before and after the Gotterdamerung of '45.

McNamara's war (and I do not really want to single him out as much worse than thousands of such grey men in history, not forgetting our own British imperial crimes and misdemeanours), in which he participated 'with good intent', cost the Vietnamese people an estimated 666 times (an interesting number in itself) the number of people who died in the 9/11 incident. A suicide bomber is rightfully condemned, but the act of war that has lead to the murderousness of contemporary Iraq is treated by our establishment as if it were merely an honest mistake by well-meaning buffoons rather than as an act of irresponsible evil. Those who have done their duty as military men or civil servants drive blame upwards to the 'buffone' yet refuse to accept their own moral complicity in carrying out their duty. Fascinating! Something in the human, perhaps the Western, condition allows for good intent as an excuse for having paved the road to Hell in skulls.

But a sin of stupidity or denial that is complicit in the deaths of lots of people or creates widespread misery should be much less forgivable than our culture allows. If vicious things result from good intent, should we be so prepared to forgive the perpetrator? This certainly seems to be very culturally useful for our middle classes, but philosophically it does not stand up well - and not just from a utilitarian perspective either. After all, if existentially we must take responsibility for our actions, then we must take some responsibility for the consequences of our actions. It is not only that we do evil in actually undertaking some act, but that we do evil when we fail to question what we do and when we fail to question what we have done after we have done it. We do evil when we stop thinking.

Real evil lies not so much in making the error in a sin of commission, but in persisting in the error after the costs and consequences have become clear. Perhaps this is because, in the group-think of 'grey man evil', the alternative is always justified as worse. But this is mere displacement and denial. Perhaps the idea that Communists would overrun all of South East Asia (which did not happen and never was going to happen) justified in the minds of some men, supported at home by their wives, the massive use of terror tactics and of brutal methods simply because such tactics and methods are (using another, more malignly self-deluding, Catholic concept) the 'lesser evil'. But then we all probably underestimate just how damned stupid, rather than evil, our ruling classes are?

This may seem like a round-the-houses way of linking a popular novel to the thinking of the architects of death in our global elites. Poor old Stross (and I certainly do not want to single him out at all) is just another writer reflecting his times, but there is a quiet potential evil in taking any real suffering and reifying it without thought into something abstract and unconnected to the fact of lots of very individual specific sufferings that actually took place at a specific place and time - whether this reification be through the appropriation of the suffering by Zionists to justify state creation, liberals to justify political correctness or authors to justify a story. But the error is as great with a person as with a tribe - would it be right for a novelist to construct Diana Windsor (or any other public person) in ways that detach the person loved by William and Harry Windsor from their remembrance? How much should reality be fodder for fantasy?

The best memorial to those murdered under the conditions of, say, the Holocaust (since nothing can ever bring them back, memory is no substitute for life really lived and their property has merely been restituted through occasionally tenuous bloodlines to 'make a point') is never ever to think about people in the way that their murderers did, as objects for use and manipulation.

Of course, a novelist apparently has the right to do this - at the end of the day, I cannot really condemn Stross for reflecting our culture so accurately in his work. Far from it - I very much recommend his book as a jolly entertaining travel read (if you can get through the bursts of Stephensonian techno-babble). But actors in the real world certainly do not have this right: if it is true that fantasy should never be limited in either its light or dark aspects, reality is another matter altogether. Or is that thought too heavy for the lightweight brains of our oh-so-well-educated grey men?

Tags: evil, charles stross, ken macleod, holocaust, vietnam, john kekes, diana, himmler, alan moore

Bread and Circuses - Tunbridge Wells & The Tour de France

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 14:22:07 GMT

Do you remember that mantra - act local, think global? It was supposed to have some 'butterfly wings beating' effect on, say, climate change, as if putting our bottles in the right green bin was ever really going to have any tangible effect on Chinese industrialisation? Still, it all seems to have made a lot of people feel better about themselves and not believe that they had to engage in the much more onerous task of getting involved in political organisation in order to change anything truly material in the world. Sweet, though.

Well, there is another version of the mantra - think local, act global. Perhaps no more effective but worth considering. Action to change the world might be more effective if we thought more clearly about the origins and effects of things that are happening to us as individuals and communities. We might start to understand how we are managed and manipulated and just what little power we have to effect global change - unless, that is, we work with others collaboratively and collectively to do so.

So I make no excuse for taking a very parochial event in my world and seeing what it says about the arrogance of power and the powerlessness of 'we the people' who are expected to be spectators in a spectacle in which we are the spectated of ourselves (how very French of me!).

Under Community Arrest - Where's The Disaster?

Tomorrow, up to 50 streets in my area (Tunbridge Wells) are being closed off for several hours. The 'natives' are under community arrest unable to move their vehicles. A massive influx of people is being encouraged without any residential parking facilities in the inner town. Some of the 'resident natives' will have their cars removed if they do not accede to a government order that they should not be on particular streets at a particular time. Meanwhile, the local Press reports that we will see the largest ever police mobilisation in our County (Kent).

Ah, I hear you say (especially in America), this must be a response to the terrorist attacks on our country or perhaps this is a massive exercise to ensure that we can respond well to a natural disaster. Do they expect the nearby Dungeness nuclear power station to go fizz or do they need to prepare for an outbreak of bird influenza? Perhaps, given the Government's unpreparedness for the recent floods in our North Country, it is an exercise to help prepare us for some natural disaster like a major hurricane - our town is way above sea level.

No, none of these. No act of war and no natural disaster. It is a man-made local 'disaster' - the Tour de France which, as the 'biggest annual sporting event in the world', has been routed through our town without any local consultation whatsoever and with minimal direct contact with the very many residents affected. In effect, a decision was made by Government to collaborate with a commercial organisation to hand over resources and freedoms for unproven economic benefits. And thus we are under community arrest (in effect) for a day and our reward is to be the provision of panem et circenses (bread and circuses).

On the Decadence of Late Capitalism ...

How like the Roman Empire we are becoming - our legions fight in barbarian territory (and Iraq is merely an extended Teutoberg Forest), reality television is our gladiatorial blood sport and any spectacle that diverts the people from actually doing anything is promoted by Government as a substitute for real engagement in life. The Tour de France is merely a passing phase in a long cycle of spectacular politics - the ridiculously expensive and round-the-houses East London regeneration project called Olympics 2012 is going to be a vastly more disruptive circus that will make the fons et origo of the politics of spectacle, the Millennium Dome, look like the mere bagatelle of idiocy that it was.

The argument for these spectacles is always economic but it is an odd sort of economic argument, an argument largely derived from a failure of power. Instead of doing what Government should do, which is to identify a need and then, focusing on that need, either fulfil it itself or pay others (through tax incentive or straight subsidy) to do the job, economic politics in the UK has become an elaborate charade. The game is to get the private sector to trickle down alleged community benefits through projects that are actually subsidised indirectly by consumers (through sponsorship and marketing budgets) and by tax payers (through the still-unpublicised cost of service provision such as the necessary police presence) rather than managed honestly and directly through tax.

The community arrest of the people in around fifty streets in one Borough for a day is simply a by-product of this sort of farrago. Local people are treated like troublesome and awkward units of disruption, making it almost impossible for them to do anything else but make the event a 'success'. This is because they are left with no alternative but to run away for the day or end up standing in a crowd to watch a bunch of cyclists in whom they have no intrinsic interest hurtle past without any of the information or commentary that they would get on the telly. This is the sort of crowd mobilisation that you would expect in Pyongyang, admittedly done through a very different and less sophisticated form of manipulation.

But What Of the Economic Benefits to Our Town?

But if this local Government of Tory Councillors is behaving like that of North Korean communists, perhaps we should take at face value some of the 'economic benefits'. Well, it is still unclear who precisely is paying for police overtime or the security arrangements across Kent and in London (made slightly more critical lately by the discovery that 'Al-Qaeda' appears to have infiltrated our public services).

London can bear the cost but we seriously doubt whether Kent can, let alone our cash-starved local Council. Kent County Council is certainly paying for the costs of closing the roads 'and making the route safe' [i.e. the massive police presence]. As for economic benefits, these appear to be going to the organisers and the sponsors but not necessarily to local small traders. Here are two quotations from Tunbridge Wells Borough Council's guidance notes on the Tour:-

* There are strict rules about advertising along the route of the Tour since official sponsors pay many thousands of pounds for the highly-valued privilege of being associated with the race. No other commercial concern is able to attach its own brand to the Tour de France or any of its logos. An advance party of Tour personnel travels ahead of the race and will take down any advertising material that breaches these rules.

* (To businesses who have to close on the day because of the disruption) Compensation is not payable in cases like this.

So, there we are - if you are a small trader, no one can park near your shop, you cannot show support for the TV cameras without having the 'sponsor police' on your back, crowds of people are going to be blocking the street outside your shop (good for newsagents and eateries, bad for everyone else) and there is no compensation for lost trade.

To rub salt in the wound, it seems that the village of High Halden near Tenterden may be under community arrest for longer than elsewhere 'dependent upon requirements for [the] VIP area'. Oh, can't you just see the local dignitaries and corporate executives sweeping in and out slightly the worse for wear after a good day out in their Zil limousines? So like our dear departed Soviet bloc where Moscow motorists would wait behind traffic lights to let the Second Assistant Deputy Commissar for Light Bulbs through. Plus ca change.

Back to Panem et Circenses

We are told that a 'huge' publicity caravan precedes the riders, giving out sweets (so much for the newsagents benefiting), hats, toys and other souvenirs to the people lining the route - the panem required to fuel the circus. This is, in short, private/public partnership community fascismo. But there is a much more serious aspect to the case. Globalisation has created massive transnational sporting and cultural events, many of which have grown organically from quite small regional bases.

For example, the economic value surrounding a community football club has quietly increased so that, as a club becomes an international force, its economic power begins to dictate how a locality will be structured for its ends. Every traditional football fan knows that this economic power is double-edged. The fans don't 'own' what they think they once owned. An unwritten understanding that the club is a community/private sector hybrid is shown to be not worth the paper on which it has failed to be printed. The club moves on and up to a level where it is a private sector player demanding collaboration with Government from a position of relative strength.

The scandal over frequent strip changes in order to create a planned obsolescence in each generation of school kids is yesterday's news, but massive televised football hides the reality of a national spectacular sports culture designed to fuel the media's insatiable demand for content. And so we see an increase in Western obesity as community sports decline in favour of passive spectacle. As facilities are made available for 'development', we switch to a world where citizens and subjects become passive objects outside the spectacle (watching) instead of active participants inside the spectacle (doing). At least North Korean mass callisthenics keeps the poor buggers fit.

Local Government as Standing Joke

The local Council in this case ('think local') is pretty well a standing joke (just look at the abandoned Odeon site in the dead centre of town as the cyclists whizz past). In some respects it is worse than others (the Audit Commission has been crawling over it for some time) but in other respects it is pretty well typical of the collapse of strong representative government in Middle England.

There is a malign conjunction across Southern England of good old boy Councillors with no incentive to exist as other than as big carp in tiny garden ponds, second rate Officers starved of resources and with appalling morale, and a tax-cutting mentality in which serious problems in the inner towns are overwhelmed by the refusal of middle class people in villages and suburbs to contemplate anything that digs into their retirement income.

And so we end up with weak leaders endorsing a commercial spectacle at our expense and at cost to our freedoms and with no proven local benefit other than a bit of freebie entertainment and an extra burst to day's shopping revenue for the multiple retailers - entertainment, that is, if a few tawdry street giveaways and the chance to watch a bunch of cyclists go by is to be classed as entertainment.

The answer, of course, lies in strong elected mayors who are responsive and accountable to the people and who are checked by smaller and tougher groups of councillors elected under STV [Single Transferable Vote].

We need people who can stand up to Central Government, The Mayor of London (the main source of patronage in this saga), the Council Officers and predatory commercial interests in support of our people. If an accountable elected mayor had signed off on a deal, I would have grinned and borne the inconvenience knowing that the electorate could have judged him or her on their decision at election time ... and that the benefits would not merely be theoretical but would more likely to have been proven and concrete. Our public spaces, if it is in our interest to do so, should be sold (and not given away) to these commercial interests with the full consent of the people. If they do not buy access to public property in the community benefit, they can go elsewhere ...

Tags: Tunbridge Wells, Tour de France, Elected Mayors, Tenterden, Panem et Circenses

On The Limits of Transparency

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 10:17:08 GMT

If I have a political philosophy, it is one of radical democracy, popular accountability and a moderate consensual socialism. Part of that mix is transparency - that things done are generally done openly. But what are the limits to the right to know and the duty to tell.

I am not impressed by the Kantian philosophy of rights and duties. It is arrogantly assumed by many on the centre-left that, to be 'one of us', you have to be a Kantian or a Rawlsian (since Marxism got ditched unceremoniously over a decade ago). Nonsense!   The whole Enlightenment approach has always struck me as an after-the-fact attempt to rationalise what should not need to be rationalised - but even an existentialist like me has to draw some boundaries or else accept the label of nihilist.

The classic-contemporary formulation of liberal demands in this area is that of Vaclav Havel - that we 'live in truth'. But the ideology of truth is like the ideology of faith or of beauty, the privileging of just one virtue' over many others. Life is always more complicated than that. Somewhere along the line, there has to be judgement, an existential judgement, about what is best in any situation. Rigid assessments of rights and duties and the politics of the absolute generally result in bad decisions, wrong paths taken and perhaps (in politics) bodies laid out in neat rows by the side of the street.

I looked at transparency in the very particular area of 'net sexuality' in my posting on May 26th [Sexual Honesty and Web 2.0]. Similarly, I take it as axiomatic that a liberal society is based on law. Both legal considerations and the trust required in trade require that rules on commercial disclosure and confidentiality are accepted as necessary and equally binding.

On the other hand, baring one's soul in public because of some petty crisis is generally boring unless there is a narrative that interests or it is part of the deal between a group of like-minded people: too much emotion, expressed in bad poetry and cliche, may be cheaper than hiring a psychotherapist but few people out there will get to the end of the posting.

On four occasions this week, I have come up against case studies on responsibility in the matter of accountability. They have all reinforced the importance of private judgement in the areas of personal development, intellectual freedom, commerce and public policy. Each reminds me that life is a case-by-case matter operating within a general moral framework and is not an exercise in legalism or about allegiance to moral absolutes.

The Experiment

It will not be difficult to deduce from my postings that I am interested in inner space more than outer space and that I have an open mind about what the mind is and what it is capable of. I experiment (with a critical eye) in issues of faith, of virtual reality and of magic. This is just my way.

One area of new interest is 'lucid dreaming'.  I have in mind a 'thought experiment' involving dreams and virtual reality that depends on those involved being aware of the experiment but not of the actual persons involved in the experiment. The likelihood of success is minimal. The project probably marginally insane. The whole matter is a shared lie to investigate the truth. When it is over, the truth may or may not emerge but the lies will remain. The nature of the lies, though, is no lie and that is a first boundary - that, like the practice of commerce, experiments in relationships should be based on the expectation that the rules exist on the assumption that there must be lies for the system to work.

This, in itself, is worrying to the liberal imagination but, just as half-truths are necessary in politics and business for both to function, so are half-truths in human relationships. It is not the lie that is the problem, it is the motivation behind the lie and the purpose of the project in which the lie takes place. This is part of the lesson behind Esther Perel's book referred to on April 15th [Better Than Sex - Good Works].

Back to Terror

I wrote on terror and insurgency last week [Jean-Paul Sartre & Insurgency] but it was historic and general comment. In the last few days, we have had two near-misses in London and one strike at Glasgow airport by car bombers. My profession as political analyst involves providing reports to clients on events like this to assess various forms of risk and make general predictions. Needless to say, alongside notes on the Blair-Brown transition, the implications of the car bombing was written up and circulated to a smalll group of people who would see the context of what I wrote.

But my analysis also included details of the ideology behind much contemporary terrorist thinking and this ideology contains the seeds of its own transmission in its own description. To describe that ideology on the internet (though it is freely available elsewhere on the web) would be to do what the theorists of contemporary terror want - to give the ideas critical mass through repetition. Since I strongly disapprove of social censorship because its net effects are far worse than any benefit, I made the judgement that I would self-censor - that is, to restrict the description of the ideology to educated persons with a background knowledge of the issues.

This is another boundary. Expert knowledge taken out of context can be dangerous (another example might be the healthcare panics caused by snippets of medical research). It is reasonable to enter it into society through intermediaries who must take responsibility for ensuring context at the next stage. A self-denying ordinance on some facts and theory is not censorship.  It is the equivalent in society of not blurting out a statement that hurts feelings and creates resentment but waiting until the quiet moment to tell a truth that may still hurt but which then changes behaviour. You might say that it is etiquette and is something that would be understood by readers of Jane Austen.

The Deal

The third was a pure case of commercial confidentiality - a potentially exciting development involving multiple actors who are all having to act on trust. Choosing what may be said and what may not be said involves no lies but it certainly involves half-truths and things not said that must be said later - but that is the very heart of commercial and political negotiation and the very reason for the injunction 'caveat emptor'.

Sensitive souls, especially those for whom Truth is an absolute value, hate this sort of thing. It is why academics and intellectuals so often make bad businessmen and worse politicians. But it has to be admitted that, as a game between equal players that is played within rules, it is enormous fun. These games are at the heart of innovation in business and of adaptability in politics.

The moral dimension kicks in when excessive inequality or monopoly skew the game entirely in favour of the rich, the powerful or the psychopathic. Even a degree of inequality within the game is useful in educating participants in the arts of negotiation. This is only another argument for personal judgement being given greater authority within shared general principles rather than for the ever-expanding extension of rules into every part of the game of life. Less prescriptive law certainly means more risk and pain but it also means more personal development, flexibility and innovation and a lot more fun.

Public Policy

This leads to a case that is irritating the British establishment a great deal but contains another lesson in the boundaries of transparency. There is a long and complicated dispute on 'corruption' which has crystallised into a direct clash between the US Department of Justice and the sovereign rights of the United Kingdom and, indeed, of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is no point in going into the detail - clients have received no less than four briefing notes on the matter in the last three weeks. The ultimate issue of principle is whether a US Department of State has the right to demand of a company domiciled overseas but trading in the US not merely to abide by US regulation in the US but in its dealings outside the US. Can a US Department of State demand that documents related to a 'deal' between free sovereign nations (basically, state secrets) be forced into the open to meet US legal requirements?

When non-Americans talk about US imperialism, they do not only mean the usual Left-wing stuff about oil and markets and airbases, they also mean the attempt by over-eager American regulators to impose the US' legal and moral standards across the world in a way that we all know is designed to create or restore competitive advantage to US business. This drive for material advantage is generally cloaked in the sort of moral progressive language that trips so easily off the tongue of any East Coast Democrat and grates on many European nerves. The current struggle in this particular case, set alongside new extradition treaties, information sharing in the 'war on terror' and so many other examples of extraterritoriality, is a direct and deliberate assault in the name of liberal values (but actually for national advantage) on another set of values - that of national sovereign rights.

The transparency issue is whether the United Kingdom should be forced to reveal details of a deal struck many years ago entered into (rightly or wrongly) on the basis of commercial confidentiality. This brings up a discussion of more boundaries - those of retrospectivity and of domain. If a deal was legal at the time and undertaken on certain understandings, it should be respected on those terms. If it was concluded between two sovereign parties, it is for one of those parties to breach the agreement and then take the consequences in law and not for a third party to force them to do so - unless we all now agree that the original sovereign parties are no longer sovereign! Some of us Brits will not take kindly to our Government conceding still more after the final removal of the latest Washington puppet.

But the public policy issue is more profound than this. If reform in any country is forced through by third parties from outside - whether by regulation or armed force (which appears to be the current American way) - then resistance will build. The process neuters the moral authority of domestic liberal reformers. It places idealistic legalism and rule by moral absolutes without any existential base ahead of the political struggle for reform within countries and well ahead of representative sovereign democracy. It makes allies into dependents. It moves radical thinking away from indigenous reform into strategies of national independence. Above all, it disgraces local elites - whether Blair or Karzai, such men are increasingly seen as puppets by their own people. One of them has already fallen from power.

Concluding Thoughts

So, in all these areas,information cannot simply be presented as Truth which we all have a right to access willy-nilly. Some information (in the personal development and commercial cases) must remain mysterious or there is no game to play and without the game, life is no longer worth living. Some information, taken out of context, can be destructive because it is foolish to assume that all men and women are equal when it comes to assessing the meaning or value of information.

And some information is none of your business - it comes from matters entered into in good faith with someone else. In these cases, you will be interfering in my freedom to meet some end that you have dictated as universal but which is only that of some interest group that nobbled the rulemakers before I could get to them.

Tags: Information, Truth, BAE Systems, Dreams, Virtual Reality, Business, Saudi Arabia

Jean-Paul Sartre and Insurgency

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 19:48:55 GMT

I missed a week! Sometimes it's good to do that. If writing becomes routine, then it's no fun, for me or for you. Anyway, my writing was getting more and more po-faced as the weeks went by - not only here but elsewhere. The last straw was some relatively turgid postings on Syrian-British relations and heroes of the Labour Movement on Virtual Journal last week. Best take a deep breath and stop when that happens.

**********

On the other hand, I am a rather serious-minded person. You cannot change your true nature.  So, this week, I'll cover ... terrorism .... or rather how we have forgotten just how violent life could once be for intellectuals when they got engaged in serious politics at times of crisis. And how we can learn from history to try and avoid terrorism in the first place.

The Complexity of the Terrorist Impulse

I refuse to write too much on the current so-called 'war on terror'. I prefer to call it a post-imperialist insurgency. Most coverage is horribly over-simplified by all those with an axe to grind or who have to meet a news deadline. There probably is a serious future threat from Islamist radicals but the Oklahoma bombing and the recent calling off of the cease fire in the Basque Country by ETA suggest that radical political violence is a much more complex phenomen than all that effort applied to demonising 'Islamo-Fascism' might imply.

Indeed, if you analyse the information on 2006 arrests, inquiries and incidents from Europol (a rather weak European proto-FBI) then, while the French and British have been merrily picking up Muslims to trawl for intelligence, most of the actual incidents were from regional separatist organisations in Spain and France. Ah, France! For it is France that maintained a fearful obsession with domestic political violence, while the rest of us were busy bombing the doo-doo out of small third world countries in the certain knowledge (as we thought) that such activities could never blow back on our blithely ignorant electorates. When 9/11 took place, French security intellectuals were jumping up and down crying, 'told you so! told you so! should have listened to us'.

There are sound reasons for this French obsession - but it is not Corsica or the Basques (or potentially the Bretons or the Gascons) who unnerve Paris so much as the remembrance of the peculiar quasi-civil war and brutalities of Algerian de-colonisation. Algeria is France's Ireland - a mass of people from a different religion and culture who were once treated as a pariah by colonisers, who then wondered why, after failures to provide some sort of home rule, the colonised turned to the gun and to the bomb. Morality tends to be dictated by those in power. The ethics surrounding resistance are little different in this respect. Those ruled are always expected to see such a rule as a benefit merely because it preserves order.

Algeria was the struggle of a people against a centralised power that would not offer democracy. Indeed, in the early 1990s, France encouraged opposition to a 'dangerous' democracy in the successor state - it was as if London were to have encouraged a military coup in Ireland against the Catholic countryside in the run-up to the Second World War to maintain security on its border. The current tension between Fatah and Hamas in Palestine is a small-scale re-run of the recent history of Algeria - the same struggle between secular liberation nationalism and Islamist democracy.  In both cases, the West chose to tip the balance in favour of the secular party against an unpalatable democracy. The current struggle in Turkey between military and Islamist politicians may conceivably result in similar alignments with similar violent effects. We never learn.

Jean-Paul Sartre and the Psychology of Insurgency

These thoughts arose from reading a very old and rather pedestrian biography of Jean Paul Sartre by Ronald Hayman [Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre, London 1986]. This was the story of another world, that of the Cold War and decolonisation. The years 1961 and 1962 saw an upsurge of 'terrorism' in which Frenchmen tried to murder other Frenchmen simply because they disagreed on a foreign policy issue, albeit one that affected the economic livelihood of tens of thousands and cut deep into the self-identity of the French nationalist Right. And, of course, it was not a foreign policy but a domestic policy issue to half of France.

In this vicious environment, Jean-Paul Sartre, the pre-eminent philosopher of the French Left at that time, was a direct target of terror - perhaps not entirely without reason. He had split with others on the French Left (those, like Camus, who were more like our 'liberals') in order to assert the right of oppressed peoples to kill their oppressors if necessary for national liberation. One of the greatest philosophers of our time was thus both approving of terrorism and, as we shall see, the subject of terrorist attacks - he was simultaneously villain and hero, complicit in crime and victim.

Sartre publicly identified the Algerian FLN with the Resistance to the Nazis and it was Le Temps Modernes, the intellectual journal associated with his circle, that led the field in exposing the use of torture by the French military much as Sartre's role in the Russell Tribunal exposed US war crimes in Vietnam before My Lai had brought the matter to the American public's attention.

Both sides, the OAS [Organisation de l'Armee Secrete] and FLN were terrorists in the current use of the term, that is they indiscriminately targeted civilians. The practice of the French State came to be not much better in its desperate attempts to maintain order. The OAS moved on to assassinating Muslim and European FLN sympathisers as 1960 turned into 1961. There was an attempted coup by the army in Algiers, defeated by the courage of De Gaulle and ordinary national servicemen who listened to their President when he ordered them to disobey their Officers' orders. Nothing like this has ever quite happened in the Anglo-Saxon world - at least not since the Curragh Mutiny in Ireland.

Sartre in the Firing Line

The OAS went ever deeper underground. Sartre received threatening letters in May 1961.  He moved his mother into a hotel for safety. A small plastic bomb exploded in the entrance hall of his flat at 42 Rue Bonaparte. Sartre provoked further attack in agreeing to write the Preface to Frantz Fanon's seminal Les Damnes de la Terre and Fanon's first chapter on violence was published in the June Edition of Les Temps Modernes.

I recall passing a copy of Fanon's remarkable and dark book to a former South African Special Forces operative (wholly cured of any lingering racism) to demonstrate how the 'other side' thought under colonisation and how violence might seen as a cathartic expression for impotence. He empathised. He could see what men could be driven to. Sartre wrote in the Preface to his countrymen: " ... you pretend to forget you have colonies and that massacres are carried out in your name." Familiar stuff to Anglo-Saxons today.

Sartre was out of Paris over the summer of 1961 but nothing had improved by his return - September saw an attempt to assassinate De Gaulle. Bombings increased in both Algeria and France - there were six hundred explosions by the end of that year. We have seen only two in London since 9/11, though much larger than the typical small plastic bomb of the period. This rather puts things into perspective. There were serious police atrocities in the very streets of Paris. A plastic bomb harmlessly exploded at a rally that Sartre spoke at in November. He was, by now, moving towards overt support for the Algerian rebels.

He tried to move for safety only to find that hoteliers were nervous, eventually finding a furnished flat. A bomb nearby in January 1962 was not intended for him but another bomb blew out 42 Rue Bonaparte three days later. There was some weak daytime police protection: bombs went off periodically in the neighbourhood. They moved on. You get the picture ... it got worse, though for others and not for Sartre and his longtime partner Simone De Beauvoir.

So Why Is This Interesting?

What is the point of this tale from over forty years ago? Only that, with due respect to Salman Rushdie who is doing from the Right what Sartre did from the Left in terms of 'provocation' and whom we wish every success in eluding those who would target him, conditions for the Western European public intellectual of forty -five years ago were far worse than they are today.   The intensity of France's tussle with its own imperial withdrawal scarred the heartland's psyche and has made it an unreliable judge of best practice in defeating insurgency.

The very real horrors in the early 1960s with an Iraq-type situation close to emerging on the very borders of a key Western State created a paranoia and hysteria in security circles about the insurgent question that lasts to this day.  Algeria brought violence to the very streets of the capital. One million may have marched against the war in London in 2002 but no-one was killed and no bombs went off until 7/7. This is an important qualitative difference - especially when we consider that in 1968 student and workers forced the departure of that same De Gaulle who had stood up to his own Generals.

There is not space to go into whether Sartre was right or wrong. My view is that he was right to expose the implicit racism and thuggery of a declining French State, but that he was wrong to 'go native' and espouse revolutionary violence (though neither his nor Fanon's arguments were necessarily wholy evil ones on closer examination). European intellectuals have a tendency to strut like revolutionary cocks for a universalist ideal and never think about the rotting bodies and orphans that are left behind. If you really want to have your hair stand on end, then you should read Slavoj Zizek's Preface to a Selection of Robespierre's writings [Verso, 2007] which reminds one of the importance of never ever letting an intellectual near the levers of power.

What we have to do is learn something from this history - that 'terrorism' is not new, that determinedly resisting the aspirations of peoples is the real provocation to terror and that terrorism lies not only in the evil that men do but in the way that policy has driven such men to undertake such desperate acts. Finally, that frustration with the way of the world eventually leads fine minds into the abyss of complicity with murder. This appreciation of the need to compromise with the rage of the 'other' is counter-intuitive to much Western morality but we, in the West, must accept some responsibility for the effects on others of our ancestors' actions.

Analysing Algeria for Today

Algeria did something to a whole generation in France much as Vietnam did something different to the same generation in America - the political Left (never a national majority in any Western country) shifted at this time from class war within the West to an interest in class war between the West and the rest. In America, the political left moved from collective organisation and discipline towards free-spirited individualism. This is where we are now.

This new thinking in Europe underpinned secular, often Marxist, third world nationalisms. Its collapse and its failure to change the terms of political trade under globalisation has subsequently made space for new movements like Islamism or Chavez' or Subcommandante Marcos' populism.

If the Western Left is splitting now, (and we believe it is), it is doing so on these same basic lines but under new conditions, between those who recognise the reality of imperialism's effects on the rest of the world (and give a damn) and those who do not. Part of the tragedy of the situation for America today is that significant elements in the Third World were once persuaded that the US was anti-imperialist and this held the line against Communism - since 2003, that argument has become much harder to sustain.

So, French culture briefly accepted as 'normal' (probably inured by the horrors of the second world war) that two warring sides within a country could engage in extreme political violence. The student revolt of 1968 took place not long afterwards. Both Germany and Italy then saw outbreaks of similar violence, albeit that the German version involved State rather than radical Right terror through draconian use of legal instruments. In other words, democratic Western Europe saw an extended period of extreme violence (to which we might add Northern Ireland) that may now have settled down (or degenerated into regionalism and organised crime) but which has never quite disappeared entirely. The experience burned itself into the institutional memory of national security and intelligence communities across Europe. For this reason alone, politicians should be wary of their advice.

**********

For me, the seminal document on the Algiers War, and indeed on insurgency in general, remains Pontecorvo's masterful near-contemporary film, The Battle of Algiers. I have been told that it was not easy to get hold off in France for many years and the biography of Sartre referred to above is an eye-opener on the ability of the French middle classes to do anything to avoid having their sensibilities upset. However, it is easily available, certainly as a DVD in London (probably in France now), was shown very recently in a run at the ICA and (as you will see if you take the time) it cannot be called propaganda for either side.

What it does do (and this makes it essential viewing for anyone interested in the 'war on terror') is explain how the two sides perceived matters and why, unless the military is permitted absolute power with no domestic constraints (in a Spartan or Roman approach) or moderates are detached with material concessions, the insurgents will win in the end. And in that analysis, we have the essence of the strategic policy war within the West - do we crush them with maximum force and silence dissent at home? or do we concede ground from the beginning and engage half the enemy in partnership to eliminate the other half? History will say that the dumbest thing we ever did was to try to resist Islamist democracy and turn it over to the extremists ...

Tags: Sartre, France, Algeria, Temps Modernes, FLN, OAS, Pontecorvo, Algiers, Paris

In Sympathy With Paris Hilton - No, Really!

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 13:15:23 GMT

Poor Paris Hilton! Well, not so poor ... she is an heiress. The natural instinct is to distance ourselves from such gilded butterflies and feel little compassion when they get pinned to the board of life by the public's insatiable demand for entertainment. After all, she is in her mid-twenties and not some vulnerable teenager - and she brought it on herself. And yet the nasty little incident surrounding Paris might be considered to be much more serious in its implications than we think. Let us recap with the facts.

Paris Hilton (who needs no introduction) broke the law. Perhaps she thought she was above it - or just has a brain that can't remember things like a reckless driving sentence. Reckless driving is a serious matter. It is not just that she is at risk herself but she could kill someone else. The laws have a purpose. The law had every right to demand that the punishment go to the next stage beyond probation, education and a small fine to something more salutory. Even the harsh 45 days is not what it seems - a state good behaviour law means that it should be 23 days if she keeps her nose clean.

But the circus surrounding her case has been disturbing, not for the usual reason given that it shows a celebrity culture out of control but because it has taken a celebrity's apparently a-social behaviour to show what a sink-pit we have in the Western prison system. The British system is not much better than the US. We close our eyes to these overcrowded abominations much as we close our eyes to the abattoir, the crematorium, the sink housing estate, the true nature of war, the conditions of asylum seekers, many of our care homes and so much else that is not glamorous.

So, glamour now enters the sink pit. Now we see the sink pit for what it is - thanks, in the UK, to the somewhat graphic account by the BBC of what the Century Regional Detention Centre is actually like. Let us see what this girl went through, according to the reputable Forbes magazine - http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/06/10/ap3805741.html She is clearly in a state of extreme distress: "Hilton, in tears and screaming for her mother, was taken to the downtown Twin Towers facility Friday afternoon ..." The local Sheriff had referred to an an "unspecified medical condition" which was clearly interpreted as "psychological". He added that "she had arrived at her original jail with a condition he hadn't been apprised of and that it immediately began to deteriorate to the point that he feared for her safety". She is, in short, highly vulnerable.

Reading between the lines, the Hilton team are desperately trying to get this unhappy and disturbed girl into conditions that are far more humane than the dreadful human pig pen that we have seen on television. Hilton herself (apparently) asks (quite reasonably) 'that the public and media focus on "more important things like the men and women serving our country in Iraq". This rather suggests that the lawyers have worked out that the greatest blocks to that move are the political opinions of the authoritarian republican Right. Now she is "at a maximum-security detention center, where she was believed to be undergoing medical and psychiatric evaluations to determine the best jail to keep her in as she serves the rest of her sentence."

And this is where it gets really disturbing. Even if we accept that the woman has done wrong and that the community must take action to express its concern, deter and correct (if not punish), it is clear that she is psychologically vulnerable. The prison process, on the other hand, seems to depend on creating high levels of psychological stress. We see levels of cruelty that may be acceptable in the nation that turns a blind eye to Guantanamo Bay but levels that should be deemed ethically unacceptable in any truly civilised society.

Because she is a 'celebrity' (more than because she is rich), she now has entire teams of people worrying about how to 'triangulate' traditional American righteousness with the fact that the whole world is seeing this cruelty played out in public. The problem is that poor Paris is not alone - thousands of young males and females, who have lost their bearings, breach laws that are randomly policed and where policing is targeted at the under-class. American egalitarianism dare not say that these thousands are less valued than Paris Hilton yet they have been treated like social prisoners of war rather than as troubled fellow citizens for decades. Now that a gilded beauty has been captured for the killing bottle, the system is briefly open to public gaze.

Western prisons are often vile and unsanitary, the atmosphere inside them cruel and brutal, the professionals overworked and increasingly cynical - the dustbins of massive social failure across the West. This poor girl is now in a lose/lose situation. If the system fails to recognise her misery (the level of cruelty seems now to far exceed the requirements of the reckless driving crime), it is because to do so might require a re-think on cruelty perpetrated daily on thousands of young people that society cannot otherwise control. The system cannot afford to admit that it is involved in a crime to defeat crime. If so, she is stuck in hell for another three weeks or so.

But if the system treats her exceptionally, even by recognising her 'mental illness' as a special case, a sort of 'depression brought on by adverse conditions in the context of wealth and high status', then it is tantamount to saying that good lawyers and money can always buy a way out of a system fixed against the poor. Of course, the system usually arranges a 'fudge' in these cases - she will be incarcerated but the mental condition will be used as an excuse for the sort of round the clock care that no one from the underclass would dream of getting. In the end, like a latter day Winston Smith, Paris admits her guilt, pledges to reform and the system will claim that justice works - as in 1984, there will be no one around to say otherwise.

What no American commentator seems capable of asking is what sort of culture is it that thinks that freedom for the many can only be bought at the expense of a systematic programme of cruelty directed at the most vulnerable in society - whether rich or poor. This is not a class point. Paris needs care too - in fact, at some time in our lives, we all do.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am no bleeding heart liberal. I am persuaded that prison works in the sense that there are hardened communities of criminality that are taken off the streets through the prison system. However, effective social control (let's call it what it is) also requires reducing the pool in which criminality can swim, not only through sensible security but through investment (yes, that is the word) in marginal and vulnerable communities. It also means not taking vulnerable kids who are repeat offenders and then assuming that they are criminals, offering them nothing but cruelty in debased conditions.

The Western prison system is an abattoir for the human spirit - a growing social gulag designed to deal with the consequences of our inability to think in terms of the communal and the collective. This social collapse has more to do with material conditions than the moral rot much preferred by the right-wing as analysis. No, I am not at all saying that criminality is necessarily a matter of poverty (any more than terrorism) but that is another analysis for another day. I am only saying that criminality expands with social anomie and social anomie is linked to the way our material culture is structured.

This Autumn, I understand, a campaign is on the way to raise mental health and 'happiness' higher up the British political agenda. It is led from the New Labour centre-right and it is to the discredit of those to their Left that they failed to lead in this area. However, if anyone thinks that greater happiness will come from yet more moral exhortation and rhetoric in the New Labour tradition, then they are deluding themselves. It is not for the State to promote happiness but it is for the State to enter into the process of reducing misery - dealing with poor material conditions and exploitation, providing access to mental healthcare services and maintaining a much more aggressive approach to improving and limiting the scope of our mental abattoirs.

So, I really do feel compassion for Paris Hilton. If she was bright and compassionate enough herself and could get away from the grip of her lawyers, the experience should turn her into a socialist. It probably won't, of course. She'll probably do something similar to what Naomi Campbell and Emily Parr and all the other 'celebrity' victims of the public's righteous indignation have done - adjust to prevailing public opinion, express regret, intend to turn over a new leaf, be watched like a hawk by the minders, use the publicity to re-build public awareness, trade on the notoreity, have fun to make up for the bad times. And why not? That is how it works now. Best of luck to them.

Meanwhile, deep inside the sink pit, I bet there are other young women, somewhere between 18 and 30, in a state of extreme distress "in tears and screaming for [their] mother" with an "unspecified medical condition" who will not get the attention of specialists and who will be left to bleed out their souls unnoticed and uncared for by a callous public and a cynical judicial system. Don't sleep easy at night until you know just how wrong this is ...

Tags: Paris Hilton, prison, happiness, criminality, evil, America, justice, media

The Contemporary Social Conservative - Roger Scruton at the LSE

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 13:23:12 GMT

The LSE holds a surprising number of open lectures that are free to the public - www.lse.ac.uk/events  It is currently one lecture into a five lecture series (and conference) on Secularism. This week saw the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton give his view on 'morality and public space' where he drew a distinction between the emergence of the territorially-based Christian-Enlightenment concept of public space and the faith-based law of religious community, much to the disadvantage of the latter.

What Scruton Teaches Us

Scruton is like the Curate's Egg, good and bad in places, and it becomes clear why this is so as he lectures. He is the most articulate and (in my view) intelligent conservative philosopher of our time. Anyone on the centre-left side of the political spectrum has to engage with his ideas on consensus and tradition, on the nation, on the rights of the mass to their illiberal conventions and on threats to liberalism from outside. He is a standing challenge to elite liberal manipulation of the public agenda, to the pretensions of internationalism and to 'political correctness'. A debate between him and Peter Singer on what 'rights' animals may hold would be high entertainment indeed.

Above all, although he almost threw the point away, the optimistic liberal has yet to come to terms with the social reality of the predator whose ever-presence is always lurking in the corner of the eye of the true conservative. True socialists see the predator in terms of economic exploitation but even this very sound critique of capitalism misses out the problem of the minority of individuals whose activities are psycho- or socio-pathic and who can emerge to rule political movements, businesses and street gangs as much as to abuse children or vulnerable women.

Some think that this can be dealt with through an assertion of State authority but the wise man knows that the only true restraint on the predator is the community that is vigilant about its leaders and of its own members in equal proportion It is in this area, with his interest in custom and tradition and in the 'existential' (his phrase) values of the members of an organic community, that Scruton should challenge those of us on the liberal side of the values game.

What Scruton Misses ...

Unfortunately (although to his credit he does not hide this aspect of himself), he is also a public intellectual whose exposition elides into what can only be termed 'ideology'. He is a partisan for causes. His position on hunting and Europe (which I happen to agree with from a different reasoning) may have been philosophically cogent but it was presented as wisecracks that detracted from the rest of his presentation. His reasonable point (well taken) was about New Labour's reassertion, in a one-sided way, of public morality in legislation.

Instead of wisecracks, he should have been debating (I believe) the extent to which the political use of morality is instrumental. He seems to have no clear theory of power, class or exploitation (even conservatives can consider these matters). There appears to be no zone in which (on the basis of this lecture) conservative intellectuals can truly engage with their socialist opponents - both sides are engaged in an almost collusive conspiracy of silence about awkward truths in order not to open themselves up to too deep a scrutiny of their various refusals to recognise what humans are really like (the problem of the Left) or how power is actually managed (the problem of the Right). The one cannot cope with 'original sin', the other with 'entrenched incompetencies'.

Scruton's account of public space in the West also omitted any reference to the deliberate construction of identity by those in authority ['national myth-making'], to the multiple identities currently emerging as social and political facts, to identity as technologically as well as geographically and faith-mediated or to identities of social resistance as formative in the initial creation both of public spaces and of conventional morality. There are few people more socially conservative than political revolutionaries and po-faced social reformers. 'Reformers' have often twisted the libertarian moral climate of one era to impose a more restrictive one that Scruton appears to assume to be 'normal' or 'traditional' when it is merely the latest in sight. It could be argued that his current conservative consensus in the community is the creation of do-gooding reformers from another age.

Above all, he seems not to contend with the probability that the de-moralisation of public space is partly a function of battles over time between different moral positions (whether as in a classic full-scale kulturkampf or as in the debate over the veils) taken by political, social and economic groups seeking other advantages than the moral. In other words, with the use of the ethical high ground as a political tool. He certainly seems to have no notion that 'struggle' can be creative in itself or of the importance of allowing 'moral interventions' to test the durability of the system and mobilise argument. There is much more that could be said on this, but it requires a more sceptical reading of history than the one received in school.

The Problem of the Contemporary Conservative

Scruton is a social conservative with decidedly negative views about modern libertarian culture.  As a public intellectual, when he slips over the edge from clear exposition to position-taking, you also, as listener, have to realise that a learning experience must now be treated partially as an entertainment. Although he has an admirable understanding of the complexity and confusion that makes up existence as it really is lived, he seems not to live in that confusion himself except as observer. He is clearly not excited by the possibilities of transgression (say) or of shifting identity as a creative act - both normal and safe considerations to many educated persons in the generations below his.

This is his business but it means that his conservatism is as much a product of who he is as what he thinks - as it is for all of us despite all our pretensions to objectivity. He fails, and he is not alone in this amongst intellectuals, in understanding how society and politics shift and move in a way that makes the categories of traditional political philosophy and even ethics increasingly contingent, often mere tools themselves for political, factional or special interest advantage. This statement would probably horrify him because shifting sands are not to be marked and managed but to be concreted over in moral philosophy.

For Scruton, (based on his ruminations on Turkey during questions) the strong mildly unjust state is still preferable to any democratic justice system that is faith-based (a reasonable if debatable position). He prefers a sclerotic order over creative chaos, worries about the angst of the unchallenged ordinary person, and seeks (perhaps like Wyndham Lewis) to teach us all the 'art of being ruled' rather than to resist poor rule. An important thinker but perhaps one of the last of his line, though with a late flowering as we work through the current short burst of existential authoritarian angst appearing within the Western bourgeoisie. The thinking middle classes are currently in one of their periodic states of panic at the world - in this case about the world that their global free market has created - but this will subside. Nevertheless, Scruton is (and is going to be) an important influence on the language in which that panic is expressed.

The Death of 'Auctoritas'

However, one thing has gone that will never come back and on which Scruton's conservatism depends - the belief in an apparently competent elite. That lie has been exposed. It needs more than the man on the white horse or the exhortation of 'leaders' to be restored as a truth. 'Auctoritas' as Augustus Caesar would have understood it is no longer viable in a highly developed technological society. It can only return with economic breakdown and as a reaction to true anarchy.

In this way, one suspects that hardline communists and High Tories with their penchant for pessimism almost hope for the crisis that will either bring the brave new dawn or a return to traditional values. Lurking at the corner of society are the Reds and the Blacks (though I hasten to add that Scruton's own liberal democratic values cannot be questioned). But, until that day when auctoritas becomes necessary for the many instead of desired by the few, these people who rule us will actually have to buckle down and learn how to meet the needs of a nation as people and not a nation as state. Mr. Blair and Mr. Sarkozy's interest in 'values' and 'gloire' is the long drawn-out swan song of Western imperial aspirations - and the West, far from decaying, will be stronger for their passing.

Scruton's social conservatism may have a part to play in that process because his wisest uncovering is that of the fact of existential angst in populations under pressure from modernisation. So far liberal elites have managed to drive through modernisation faster than resistance can grow. Much to Scruton's chagrin, I suspect that the libertarian agenda has reached such critical mass in the West that it is unbeatable in the long term and that resistance will take the form of community self-organisation, often on faith-based lines, well within the liberal public space. Muslims, for example, will become voters within European liberal democracy and not proponents of a separate but equal Sharia law. Eventually, the new technologies will reach the limit of innovation and new social patterns will emerge that may have conservative characteristics but not on lines recognisable to the High Tory.

Foreign Policy Implications

Where existential angst is most politically interesting is where modernisation is moving too fast for the elites to manage it - where the economies are still mid-twentieth century in structure or where feudal elites are trying to hold on to power in a service-led world. The former are going to manage modernisation through 'guided' democracy as in Iran, China and Russia while the jury is out on the survivability of the latter.   Is social conservatism (the existential yearning of the masses for what they know) or public space the more important value? This is a question that is going to be played out across the world in the coming decades. It is the real question - not the 'clash of civilisations'. It is bad news for liberal internationalists.

Scruton is a social conservative who empathises with the masses but who comes down firmly in favour of the Western model of public space. This works in the West - after all faith-based groups can infuence matters in the US and UK without imposing their standards on private life - but in the developing world, whether in relation to homosexuals in Africa or Russia or women's rights in the Islamic World, matters are not so simple. Democracy in these worlds will mean that the liberal element in the elite will be overwhelmed by demands for protection of cultural identity. The choice (for the Western liberal) is supporting liberal dictators or colonels or accepting such concepts as Islamic Democracy or Chavezism as legitimate.

In the end, Scruton chooses Ataturk over the Islamic Democrats - his conservative instincts place the organic State and the rule of law far above the resolution of the existential angst of the Muslims. He is consistent - although a social conservative, he does not resent that the conservative moral position has been placed to one side as irrelevant by the liberal implications of the concept of public space in the West but only that the ‘other side' has begun to use public morality arguments to whittle away the very concept that was used to advance their cause to hegemony. This strikes him as just plain unfair - and I agree!

But, though he is right that liberalism is going too far in its claims in the UK and that the preservation of public space is prior to moral claims in the West (partly because it advances liberalism), he is wrong (in my opinion) about the situations in other countries. He cannot have it both ways - both respect for national organic conceptions of public space that emerge through struggle to protect the citizen and support for top-down elite public spaces trying to emulate the West against the tide of popular resentment of modernization. Top-down management and organic cultural development are in tension and can only be resolved through democratic and, in extremis, street struggle.  Liberalism that privileges the role of vanguard elites is interpreted in the outside world not (as we would like to see it) as a universalist desire for good but as an imperialist attempt to hold on to territory informally whether as market or as cultural hinterland.

An Alternative Stance

I would argue that a more tolerant attitude in the West to third world socialisms, to Islamic democratic models and to various nationalisms would have caused different problems but would not have left us with the current danger of a growing insurgency against us and our ‘allies' - nor seen certain states harden their position as ‘rogues'. Just as Stalin could seize power on the credible determination that the West was a threat, so extremism in the third world thrives on the so-called war on terror. The West would do better to strengthen democracy and public space in its own zone of direct influence, give economic advantage to similar democrats as they emerge in the third world and place radical democracy ahead of liberalism (for at least a period) as an emerging world value.

Of course, this will mean a plethora of socialisms, populisms and Islamisms but, over time, unthreatened, internal demands, the natural emergence of reformers within these countries (unhampered by an association with Western interference), open debate and pragmatic concerns to ensure trade and economic development will combine to liberalise these countries. It will move them towards a tolerable version of public space. It will take longer but it will be more certain. It will still mean suffering for many in a minority situation and relative disadvantage for women in some parts of the world, but less deaths and poverty and a more realistic hope that the next generation of women and minorities overseas will have a much more secure hold on their lives, freedoms and property than they have ever had in the past.

Tags: Conservatism, Roger Scruton, LSE, Political Philosophy, Auctoritas

On Sexual Honesty & Web 2.0

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sat, 26 May 2007 12:33:55 GMT

There is a remarkable article from Regina Lynn at Wired News that raises interesting issues about what the new world of Web 2.0 is doing to the human psyche - http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/sexdrive/2007/05/sexdrive_0525 .  Lynn gives a lucid account of how, in a safe fantasy setting, she 'transgressed' into a new sexual identity that had no necessary day-to-day link to her persona in 'real life'. She neither denies the transgression nor tries to make it anything more than an insight into herself that might shift her perceptions but not her essential nature. How she 'plays' is not to be assumed to be 'who she is'.

What is remarkable to anyone over a certain age is the honesty of the piece. The taboo that is broken here is not so much that of being or feeling to be something different from 'normal' (that seems to have been installed as a possibility somewhere in the 1970s) but in saying or doing something transgressive and then not feeling obliged to make what has been said or done integral to identity.

The Internet & Identity

Internet culture now allows someone to express an 'abnormal' part of themselves (often a very minor part) without being obliged to include it in the self-identity that is designed to accomodate social or community expectations.  Although early days, this new sense of the possibilities arising from 'irresponsible play' could herald the beginning of the end of identity politics and the arrival of complexity and of multiple identity as factors in public life.

The liberal revolution of the 1970s is now accepted even by most modernising conservatives. It has allowed transgressive identities such as 'being gay' to be expressed as integral to persons on their own terms.   It ended an atmosphere of repression, prejudice and stereotyping. The price, however, was that anyone with (say) gay inclinations came under increasing pressure to make a choice between being gay, being not gay or choosing some third identity (such as bisexual). A whole range of new sexual identities emerged in a constant attempt to 'fix' complexity.

Similar processes of defining identity took place in other areas of formerly forbidden discourse - in alternative religion, in gender politics and in 'race'. But, in the real world of ordinary folk, few people actually belong to any fixed single category for very long. So, this was only relative liberation, of the dominant part of a person at the expense of the whole person, freeing individuals only on condition that they chose a category of their own instead of a category chosen by society.

What Lynn implies in her own experience of some rather innocent cyber-sex is that people, taken out of their normal social context and left free to be themselves with minimal risk, are immensely fluid and have complex sexual drives and multiple identities.  If allowed to do so, people will shift their behaviour quite radically in different contexts. Research on 'evil' increasingly indicates that context is vitally important in determining when a person will do an 'evil' act in the real world.

Web 2.0 permits the construction of personal identity at different levels of 'personal privacy'. The feed-back of experience from one level transforms, I would say revolutionises, morality and behaviour at another. Necessary conformities in the office or even in the family are at one extreme (exemplified ultimately in the fixed public persona of the politician or celebrity). But there are other levels of self exposure within the internet open to people who are (say) not in public life, are self-employed or are single to varying degrees. The deepest level is reached where aspects of self that are frustrated in real life can develop in secrecy, not so much as as private fantasy but as shared psychotherapeutic play in chat rooms, on forums and in interactive games. And any of us can now visit this deepest level that was once limited to dream states, private fantasy or the risky business of entering into a 'deviant 'sub-culture.

Bourgeois Panic

This is very disturbing to many in the expert class.  We see a snobbish horror of ordinary people expressing emotion when they do not have the writing skills or sensibilities of regular readers of The New Yorker. How many times do we hear that weary complaint about cliche on the sexual web as if everyone should be expected to write like John Cleland or Pauline Reage? There is moral panic about the sexual or emotional fantasies of the masses - probably because 'intellectuals' refuse to deal with theirs except through high literature and art. This current wave of comment about dumbing down, of fears about what happens to youngsters when their youthful indiscretions are seen by potential employers or husbands, and the growing paranoia about the retention of data, all miss the point.

Tens of thousands of people, with a very wide range of intellectual and educational accomplishment, are now engaged in a growing revolution in the collective mind. These (mostly under 40) are the many. The 'scared educated' (mostly over 30) are becoming the few. Society will inevitably bend in the direction of the many over time despite periodic authoritarian attempts to break the back of the revolution through scare tactics and regulation. Kids who display their sex life in public now will probably be thought no less of in twenty years. Their honesty will be seen for what it is, an important developmental phase creating wiser, more rounded people in their middle years than their ancestors were at the same age.

As for the 'experts', for most purposes beyond the requirements of high technology such as the running of a railway system or a nuclear power plant, they are now surplus to requirements and will have to live with the new egalitarianism. But this revolution does raise many ethical and social questions - too many for this posting. One is the negotiation of lies and honesty.

Challenging Western Culture

The arrival of free secret play as a social norm is a direct challenge to the moral rigidities of Anglo-Saxon liberal culture. Assessing hypocrisy and lying are central to its self-identity: they are bad things in an absolute sense and not, more wisely, in a relative or contextual sense.  Yet lying and hypocrisy are central to creative play. Some Anglo-Saxon liberals are now moving sharply towards authoritarianism and to the moralistic neo-conservative Right in horror at a new fluid world where nothing is fixed and where they have no role as natural arbiters of taste and morality. They do not like irrational exuberance. They do not like playfulness.

Europeans (in general) would not divorce their partner because of an online sexual game, and very often not over a mistress, but Anglo-Saxons are very likely to do so - and, if not, make their partner's life hell if they find out.  The standard Anglo-Saxon attitude to sexuality implies that the partner is there as an add-on to personality 'for life' instead of a person in their own right. with changing needs and opinions.  Anglos expect exclusivity and fidelity not merely in RL ['real life'] but deep inside the mind of the 'other'. This is clearly, an absurd, totalitarian attempt to police another's brain.

The internet now complicates matters further, especially as its effects are first felt within this same traditional Anglo-Saxon culture. Personality becomes diffused without being fragmented. The 'explorer' may unravel some of what he or she is through 'play' and then may ask just how much of this expanded self should be repressed in a world where time passes and life is short. Sometimes self-repression is accepted, sometimes changes are instituted without radical disruption, sometimes a person discovers that RL has been the 'dream' and the web-world reality and chooses to wake up.

Where a couple will choose to split or get divorced within this unfolding of playfulness can be a very different line drawn in different cultures but we can safely predict that Anglo-Saxon liberal culture is not really very well fitted to cope with the fluidities of individual self-development. So, we are probably going to see a period of reactive moral panic and authoritarianism, ironically more from so-called progressives unable to cope with the reality of mass liberation than faith-based conservatives. After all, faith can be rediscovered on the internet too.

The more and the earlier that someone discovers who they are before they make choices that dictate their RL persona and station in life the better. The best thing that we can do for the generations coming up is to enable them to play safely. This may not suit employers, priests and government (or insecure wives and husbands wanting to lock in their partner to their needs) but it is my betting that the kids who go through this process may be more anarchic but a lot more intrinsically tolerant, free and moral than their parents. Their personal relationships, in turn, will be more rounded and more loving - and their kids will benefit too. Society should understand, embrace, facilitate and guide this revolution rather than try to resist it - we should leave strategies of resistance to the Islamists and the Chinese Communist Party!

How Honest Should We Be?

So how honest should one be on the internet in the classic areas of sex, politics and religion?  Web 2.0 enables ever greater levels of self-expression and honesty at a mass level but discretion and RL functionality still dictate (and will always dictate) that boundaries are drawn. The three rules of tact and discretion are mere glosses on the neo-pagan, "Do what thou wilt and harm no-one" (including yourself, of course): i) be aware of the effect of what you are writing on the feelings of others; ii) take responsibility for the effects on yourself; and iii) expect what you write to be read by anyone.

If you think on these basic rules of conduct, they come down to having a morality of regard for those around you, developing a sensible life plan and only doing in RL what actually works for you as you are and not as others would have you be. But it also suggests that where you do have a secret side that cannot fit into this model, then there is nothing wrong with accepting it and developing a persona that can 'play' out its private magic with others in a way that harms no-one. If all know the rules, no one can be accused of deception and those who are 'hurt' in the game can learn from the 'hurt' without physical or community harm.

Though the morality of all this should not be accepted without question, I would guess that most 'games players' will enter into a private world only for a while, transform and move on - and that the addictive or truly deviant personality has other issues in RL that they or society just won't face. What should not be acceptable is excessive intervention by panicking authorities into what is really no more than the linking up of private minds. Government's role must remain the policing of wrongful conduct rather than 'wrongful' thoughts. If there is a line to be drawn it is when a private fantasy becomes a conspiracy to do actual harm in the real world - then, and only then, this becomes a police matter.

Tags: Regina Lynn, Wired News, sex, sexuality, honesty, transgression, internet, Web 2.0

On Crime and the British Bobby

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sat, 19 May 2007 14:33:02 GMT

There could be so much to write about this week - the shenanigans over the New Labour leadership and deputy leadership struggle, Will Hutton and Mark Leonard debating China at the ICA or a fascinating account of Islamic Magic [ruqia] and the djinn from the Jordanian-British academic Liana Siaf at Treadwells.

But it is the experience of being a victim of theft at our local smart hotel and consequent new insights into British policing that have to take priority as a suitable follow-up to our experience of being 'intelligence-policed' earlier in May [see posting of April 27th]. The hotel is opposite the local police station so it should have been an easy matter to drop over, call in a copper and report the crime - especially as this station had been announced only a few months ago as the centre of a fully manned police presence in the town (wholly coincidentally before the local elections). Less than three weeks after those elections, we found three or four empty police cars in a row outside a shut door with a piece of paper saying that the station was shut 'due to unforeseen circumstances' - no doubt all our local constabulary had been called out on emergency 'intelligence-based' policing.

It got funnier - and you have to larf, don't you - when my wife (whose bag was snatched) rang to report the crime and was offered 'victim support' ("no, I want you to catch the criminal") and support for any media contact she might want ("no, I don't need to talk to a journalist, I want you to catch the criminal").

What was particularly galling was that she was carrying full identity only because the police had stopped us a few weeks before and whined about her not carrying a driving licence. The subsequent 'good citizen' attempt to comply with police demands now meant that both car and house keys were now linked to addresses and car number plates, so that, in addition to unravelling credit cards and cheque books, there was the expense of new car, house and office keys. Oh, and improved opportunities for identity theft. In other words, carrying identity for 'intelligence-based policing' purposes had made life infinitely easier for the criminal, placed us at more risk and cost us more money in the form of a stealth tax in favour of locksmiths.

It gets better. The probable perpetrator was identifiable and almost certainly part of a gang of petty criminals who dress smartly (we are told that they are usually women rather than men) and go into smarter bars and lobbies to grab bags for both identity and cash purposes. If I saw a certain person again, I would recognise a suspect but there was no quick police action to check local CCTV. One credit card was used quickly on an ATM presumably covered by a CCTV. Has anyone asked me to view a CCTV picture or been in touch on identification? No, of course not , there are no resources for this. The probable thief (or person who should be eliminated from enquiries) sat in full view of me for a long time, observing us with care, because they knew they had nothing to fear once they got out of the room.

This is not a rant from a 'liberal who has been mugged'. It was irritating and a night's sleep and a bit of money was lost as we sorted locksmiths, but it was not much more damaging than that. Selfish low lifes who party until late with the windows wide open are a greater problem. We've been meaning to change the locks for some time and now we are as safe as Fort Knox so, on balance, the thief may have done us a favour of sorts.

No, not a rant, just a laugh - we have a Potemkin police presence in Middle England with a criminal fraternity who are now so confident that we should perhaps just regard them as a natural phenomenon and a budgeted cost, a sort of additional tax. It might even be that we will be introduced to someone at a dinner party as the local burglar and snobbishly hope he or she (we must remain correct about this) is a classy jewel thief with the style of Cary Grant rather than a drug-fueled bagsnatcher.

I won't name the Hotel because they were responsive and helpful and should not be labelled as a risk but, if you are British or coming to the UK, be suspicious of lone persons hovering in smart bars who look uncomfortable in a suit or smart dress. But I will name the police force as that of our decaying little town - Tunbridge Wells - and I will say that the ordinary copper is not the problem.

These poor buggers are snowed under with Home Office theory and paper work, political correctness, victim support and media friendliness. Private conversations with coppers have made it clear that they are as frustrated as the rest of us - but, be cheered, forms are being filled in more meticulously than ever. No, the problem lies with a Department of State, the Home Office, already characterised as 'not fit for purpose' by its latest incumbent, John Reid (currently scuttling to the backbenches), and with Chief Constables who are under-resourced, who are under constant political pressure from the centre and from the media and who are driven by theory instead of basic practice. What we need are Chief Constables who stand up for the community and for their own bobbies against the centre!

******

For an amusing picture of the traditional British bobby, the Will Hay comedy Ask a Policeman of 1939 is a must-see alongside Carry On Constable of 1960. The affectionately regarded classic of old-style policing is, of course, The Blue Lamp of 1949 - http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/447704/index.html Unlike in most other countries, we Brits rather love our police and it is so sad to see what has been done to them by theoreticians and bureaucrats.

For a view from the frontline of British policing, the blog of PC David Copperfield (a pseudonym) is serious fun - http://coppersblog.blogspot.com/ - but the linked blogs are also worth reading. The tension between the police and the underclass is on the edge of war and you 'smell' a sort of reactive angry proto-fascism in the air of some blogs. A good Guardian view on the Copperfield blog is at:
http://society.guardian.co.uk/futureforpublicservices/story/0,,2053823,00.html

At the end of the day, I am still a liberal (in US terms). The violent underclass is the direct result of market-driven changes over the last thirty years that can only be cured by investment, redistribution, a degree of labour market preference for the indigenous working class and community trust (not 'intelligence-based' policing which is just 'after the fact' sticking plaster stuff). 'Banging 'em up' is not sufficient, though probably necessary. In this context, some of the best ideas on rebuilding community and relational (also referred to as restorative) justice come from the Christian-based think tank, the Relationships Foundation - http://www.relationshipsfoundation.org/index.php

Tags: Tunbridge Wells, policing, police, John Reid, Copperfield, Will Hay, Relationships Foundation

Five New Things

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sat, 12 May 2007 20:22:40 GMT

Sometimes there is no one big thing that happens in a week. We move forward in incremental ways. Here are five things that moved me forward in the last seven days.

A Political Change of Scene

At last, Tony Blair has told us that he is going on June 27th. Hooray, hooray, hooray! Many people overseas are puzzled that we British dispose of our 'heroes' - Churchill in 1945, Thatcher in 1990 and now Tony Blair - so readily, but we are the ones who have to live under their conviction politics. While history may be kinder to all of them than the electorate, there comes a time when we should have what we want and not what they want for us.

My views on the Blair legacy are being published elsewhere. It is time to look forward and not back. Within the next two months, we should have a clear picture of what a Gordon Brown administration would look like. Despite the irritation expressed in the last posting, I think he is the man for the country and I hope he says and does things that enable me to vote for his team with enthusiasm ... we'll see.

Philosophy Never Stops

I discovered the existentialist thinkers - Kierkegaard, Nietzche, Heidegger and even dear old Sartre - in my late teenage but, instead of growing up and out of them, I kept worrying at what they had to say about the human condition. I have found nothing better to describe what it is that we are and how we relate to whatever it is that is out there.

So, it was a pleasure to find a book [Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger, London & New York, 2005] that promised to provide the fruits of recent scholarship for the moderately intelligent layman. It seems that only 50% of the man's complete works have actually been published so there will be future revisions to come, but de Beistegui can inform us of what new can be said as a result of the publication within the last decade of critical works from the 1930s.

Memory

Not really a great book, but not the fault of the author. Douwe Draaisma's Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older [in English: Cambridge, 2004] is a gallant first attempt at bringing together into one place the basics of what we know about 'autobiographical memory'. He is an early explorer of uncharted territory.

Like Psi [see below] and the nature of existence, how we remember things is not really susceptible to true scientific investigation. We have to make do with the scientist prepared to accept that anecdote and forensic investigation are going to be more useful than number-crunching. Number crunching in life merely stops us from believing untruths but it does not necessarily tell us any truth that really matters.

The book may frustrate but only because it is the first step in a long journey of re-thinking who we are in the light of what is laid down in our brains as truth from memory. The chapter on holocaust memory alone should change how you think about the possibility of justice and what role chance and necessity play in the performance of evil. It is definitely worth reading.

Spells and Prayers

The world of neo-paganism fascinates. As you will have gathered from earlier posts, I tend to see it positively as the re-assertion of ethical and spiritual values against the cold logic of technologism, reason and the market - indeed, of number-crunching.

Do I believe in it myself?  I am too good an existentialist to believe in the literal truth - much as rational man disposed of the literal truth of the Bible a long time ago. But just as a man may believe in the 'saving grace of jesus christ' at another level beyond reason (the 'mysterium tremendum'), so the moral values of neo-paganism offer a very real solution to at least some of the manifestations of modern social breakdown. They are worthy of belief and have their own 'mysterium tremendum'. This thought arose from a simple act of possibly 'useless' (to sceptics) compassion but one that, even if 'useless', is noble - and is not proven not to be useful, as far as I am concerned

A little girl was kidnapped a few days ago in Portugal. Rationally nothing can be done but leave it to the Police. But many people are deeply affected by it and feel they must do what they can. A man of wealth has offered a substantial reward. A group of Wiccans simply did what a group of Christians would do - the latter are offering up prayers to God for her safe recovery, the former offered up a long distance project of co-ordinating ritual and psychic energy.

A sceptic would despise both - but compassion, a virtue well known to Buddhists on Zaadz, shown in this way to one little girl and her family, no matter how 'useless' it may seem, is also a compassion shown to the world at large. I see little compassion in those trying to pull down edifices of belief with their cold scientific rationalism.

A good intimate Wiccan Forum of extremely nice people with members in the UK and the US can be found at http://www.wiccanmoon.co.uk/   To maintain the balance between faiths, this week saw the 10th Anniversary of the Three Faiths Forum, on whose Advisory Board I once sat. This pulls Christians, Muslims and Jews together for dialogue - http://www.threefaithsforum.org.uk/   There are an awful lot of decent people out there!

And Good and Bad Writing

I feel quite bad sometimes about my boredom with Henry James and Marcel Proust. So often, the writing down of every detail of the lives of privileged people seems to cry out for the response to both writer and reader - get a life?

No, give me a rollicking good story which creates pictures in my head. Give me Guy de Maupassant and Robert Louis Stephenson.

Until next week, toodle-pip from London.

Tags: Blair, Gordon Brown, Wiccan, Faith, Memory, Heidegger, Beistegui, Draaisma, Three Faiths Forum, Mysterium Tremendum

Psi and Spooky Things

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sat, 05 May 2007 12:06:37 GMT

I might have written about a moment of calm, sitting on a tourist boat on The Thames, moving slowly past the remarkable waterfront of the regenerated Docklands with a bright blue sky above - or the anxiety of discovering that the April family budget was over by 15%, with Gordon Brown's recent mild mismanagement of the economy (yes, I am a contrarian on this point) a contributing factor. Inflation and interest rates, don'tcha know!

But moments of calm and anxiety are incidental - mostly we just chug along. Which brings me to my subject - Psi, the complex of phenomena that goes under the general headings of 'sixth sense' or extra-sensory perception.

I have never had a problem with Psi but 'coming out' (that one has a bit of Psi oneself) is always going to be almost as traumatic as it might be for someone coming out as gay or wiccan or whatever else is not regarded by the unenlightened as not quite normal. In fact, research seems to be showing that Psi not merely exists but fits a general model that most of us who have actually got a bit of it can understand - something residual and not nearly as scary or dramatic as those who do not have it might think. There are three aspects to the matter - why is it denied, what actually is it and does it mean anything?

The denial bit is easy. What passes for Psi (and I'll define it unacademically in a moment) would not be a surprise in most pre-modern cultures. It was bound up in folk magic but also in narratives of credulity and exploitation. It is understandable that the scientific thinkers who found rationality and analysis much more useful as tools for changing the world than an indistinct facility of the human mind might throw the baby out with the bath water in the struggle for enlightenment. It is only now that the scientists have had their time in the sun, and have sometimes proved wanting, that we can turn to other aspects of being human with an open and constructively critical mind.

Part of the problem with the scientific mentality is that it is a surprisingly closed system. It is one thing to say that if something cannot be tested according to scientific method then it is not scientifically useful and probably not technologically useful either. It is another to say that if something cannot be analysed into terms, mathematically calculated and rationally presented, then it does not exist. at all Although it maybe 'something of which nothing can be said scientifically', it neither follows that nothing can be said, that the non-sense is in fact nonsense or that it does not exist.

Alongside this is the fear factor. The rational mind cannot help extrapolating from the particular to the general - what if we were all telepathic or could all move objects at will? Few are happy at the idea that some people may have powers that invade their privacy or reduce their security. This why Magneto in the X-Men stories is such an awesome villain. If you fear, you deny. A more appropriate response is to realise that Psi is highly limited in its abilities (as we will see) and generally far more dangerous to the owner than the person outside.

Not only the actual experience of persons of having Psi or witnessing Psi but the simple fact of a variety of observable instinctive animal abilities outside the main five senses, the revolution in thought caused by quantum physics and increasing if controversial experimental evidence all shift the balance of probability to something being there. But what?

Psi is (we are told) a matter of acting upon the world or receiving. The 'acting upon' is psychokinesis. The phenomenon of the poltergeist and its link to hormonal teenagers is fairly well established. I have performed one act of rather dramatic unintended psychokinesis myself later in life than teenage in front of a witness: it happened, it was seen to happen and that was a fact.

The other side of Psi covers information being received in the mind that defies the normal expectations of space and time. The 'crisis apparation' - classically when someone with whom there is a close emotional bond appears to provide a message, often before a 'real time' message can get through - is so common as to be scarcely worth commenting upon. Again, this has happened to me and happened to my mother, both in extreme circumstances and both witnessed by others. But the category also includes precognition and all forms of telepathic communication.

I would add a third category not recognised by the academics - the 'zen moment' when the subconscious mind takes over and performs an act without emotion, in a state that feels as if one is beyond space and time, either in a crisis or simply as a matter of unwilled will. This is most normally seen in cases of people in great danger but it need not be - on at least two (possibly three) remembered occasions, this has happened to me simply because it was convenient. The state of mind is both remarkable - inexpressible - and unremarkable in its very ordinariness.

But what does it mean? This is where we have to keep our feet on the ground. The fear of those who do not appear to have it and of those who see it as a challenge to their enlightenment ideology both manage, paradoxically, to privilege it far beyond what it can bear. There may be exceptions among us with Magneto-like powers (and perhaps charisma in politicians is a fourth aspect of Psi which I certainly do not possess) but this is what can generally be said about Psi from anecdote, from experience and from what little can be gleaned by the scientific method ....

1. It may be present but it cannot be commanded, It expresses some 'true will' driven by the body, in effect the subconscious, but it operates at a level where a decision to employ it just simply will not work. Indeed, there is evidence that those with Psi can perform 'before the cameras' only when they are told that the cameras are off.

2. It works best when between emotionally bonded persons and probably (though evidence is less clear) family members - and it is possible (I think, probable, because of family experience) that there is some genetic component to its expression.

3. It is neutral in terms of its effects on the person. In other words, a strong and integral personality would appear to find it beneficial whereas a weak or shattered personality might find it destructive. This would tie in with the theory that it is derived from the subconscious and the body. If there is anger or hurt or anxiety inside, then the subconscious will might direct it on those terms. Again anecdotally, I see this neutrality in my own experience with the caveat that the very expression of Psi has an enormously calming effect - there is a material and qualitative difference between being before and being after the event.

All this may be bad news for prayer in congregations and magick in covens of non-lovers but may be good news for family prayer, solitary witches and practitioners of Sex Magick. But whether it is good news or bad news may depend on the degree to which the subconscious can be accessed in a way in which some sort of will is involved and how much a person can face looking inward in what may involve a degree of commitment to personal transformation analogous to psychotherapy. Such a process may be more powerful and so more dangerous than 'rational' practices of psychotherapy because it is either solitary (and so not communicable) or it makes a virtue of transference between emotionally bonded persons, a dangerous procedure fraught with possibilities for abuse.

In this sense, the personal management of Psi (even if possible) might be closer to mystical religious practice than anything else - or to systems of magick. Certainly, it implies transgression from the norm, although not necessarily acts that are immoral or evil by any means.

The alternative is just smiling acceptance. It is there and it comes and it goes, with long stretches in between identifiable events - less with age and with awareness. It gets covered with layers of bourgeois respectability and the job of ensuring that the temporary 15% over-spend is covered with 20% more revenue or 15% less expenditure. But it is not a gift that I would have liked to have been born without.

And, in fact, in one sense, I have tamed Psi for my own use. As a political analyst or general adviser tracking events over long stretches of time or coming to instant judgements in a crisis, I have adopted a technique of letting rational analysis be the servant of an instinctive inner process of evaluation - loading the data and letting an inward judgement make assessments. Over time, I have learnt that the 'zen' judgement based on instinct, whether on my own behalf or that of clients, is always far more likely to be right than a tormented questioning search for truth along rational lines - neither politics nor culture can be usefully understood through the scientific approach. My track record of prediction has been pretty good as a result, although I have still not dreamt the winner of the 3.30 at Newmarket. But that is another story.

******

This posting is another fruit of the amazing lecture series put together by Dr. Christina Oakley Harrington at Treadwells - http://www.treadwells-london.com/

On this occasion, I owe a great deal to the presentation given by David Luke, the academic para-psychologist, of the University of Northampton on April 30th and the vigorous and intelligent discussion that took place afterwards. Needless to say, he should not be regarded as agreeing with anything that I have written - these are my own thoughts on a subject which suffers from lack of funding for academic research and which accordingly allows us amateurs their say.

For an interesting account of the part of the brain that probably comes into play at the moment when spatial sense is lost, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1847442.stm The mind-body issues associated with meditation are not the same as those associated with the mind working outside the body or working the body in some way to act as a receiver of other minds or act in the world subconsciously. The mystical perception quoted at the end of the article is, however, very close to what happens at the moment when the body operates apparently of its own volition. It has been suggested that military and sports training also relies on reproducing a version of this state: external circumstances, in these cases, dictate how a person behaves without permitting conscious thought to get in the way of performance. But, again, training, is not Psi any more than Psi is meditation.

Tags: Psi, Magneto, parapsychology, scientific, zen, Treadwells, David Luke, crisis management

How Scared Should We Be?

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 19:46:24 GMT

In my fifty or so years on this planet, I have had very little to do with the British police. I once enjoyed lunch at the house of mutual friend with the head of Scotland Yard's Serious Murder Squad, a delightful and intelligent man. On another occasion, I found myself chatting amicably to two past heads of SIS [MI6] while defending the reputation elsewhere of an Arab gentleman wrongly accused of being complicit in terrorism. They both knew the accusations were baseless, smiled at the absurdity of the political class and our conversation moved on to the more interesting business at hand.

Otherwise, the police and the security services have been on the fringes of my existence. They pop up at the house every few years to deal with the aftermath of some local incident and then they depart. I rather like it that way. As no doubt do they.

Last Monday night, we had the novel experience of being drawn into the brave new world of intelligence policing. This is the theory that takes the police out of the community, except as narks reporting on the coming and going of a mobile, probably unmanageable, population. Day to day, we hardly ever see a copper, despite a police station being within walking distance of our house. We certainly never see them appear as the drunks go singing merrily down our street at two in the morning. Yet here were four of our local finest flagging down cars on a Tunbridge Wells back street and asking a lot of questions.

Coming back from some schlock horror film about Satanists in the Deep South, eager to get home, there we were, free-born Britons, held up with a number of others, to be asked questions about our vehicle, ordered to present documents within seven days and getting the obligatory damn fool question about ethnicity. This, we were told, was, indeed, 'intelligence-based policing' and was apparently related to car theft in the area. My wife's suspicion was that this sort of exercise was really about getting us used to having to produce some sort of identity card. The Government dearly wants to introduce such a card and knows that most of us inwardly can only see the point of them for the criminals and not for us.

In fact, the police were, to remind ourselves of an ancient excuse, only obeying orders in inconveniencing both us and our fellow motorists. Most coppers are probably getting fairly world-weary about the continual state of panic in the Home Office (our Interior Ministry) and its madcap schemes for trying to bring order to a collapsing social infrastructure. Generally, they do their job, we accept that they do it in good faith and we middle classes then try to get on with our lives.

But my wife's instinctive comment is interesting, especially as, within the following week, the Head of UK Counter-Terrorism lost his temper in public with the manipulation of the news agenda by unnamed persons widely assumed to be from within the Government. He appeared to suggest that the spin doctors and policy wonks at the centre of government were undermining public trust in legitimate authority internally, much as they had done in the good faith of Government foreign policy.

The issue of trust is important because, without trust ,authority soon loses legitimacy. Paranoia about the state and its intentions is growing and it is hard to know whether it is justified or not. Unlike the US, the UK has a political structure that permits a strong Leader with a complete hold over the legislature through the party machine not only to command and control a highly centralised executive but to pass laws that would bind the judiciary. The Crown has limited means of resisting such a determined leader and the British public has no access to the weaponry and skills that would permit the sort of insurgency against tyranny that we might expect in the US Mid-West or Switzerland in the event of an attempted 'fascist' takeover.

In practice, only tradition and custom stop tyranny in the UK so the intentions of politicians become of vital importance in a way that would not apply in the US. President Bush might be regarded by some as intending bad things but, in fact, Congress, the Supreme Court and the right to bear arms are all material limits on his domestic power.

So should we Brits be alarmed? Well, it seems that, despite these constitutional truths, some Americans are more alarmed than we are. The radical chic Naomi Wolf produced an extensive article in the Guardian on April 24th in which she outlined 'ten steps to a fascist America' - http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2063979,00.html I will not outline the ten steps, which were academically sound enough if somewhat alarmist, because you now have the reference to the article and you can read it yourself.

What I am interested in is whether her ten steps can be used as a guide in assessing not only whether the US but also other Western liberal countries are slowly sliding down the road to dictatorship. After all, before we get complacent, we should remind ourselves that in 1928 Germany was a liberal democracy and only six years later it was a dictatorship in which all the dissenting leadership were either murdered or in concentration camps.

So, I looked at her ten steps and counted each as ten points of 'tyranny value' in a wholly unscientific way in order that I might get to a 'percentage of tyranny' figure. I also made the calculation situational - that is, how do things stack up in April 2007 in the UK, with a Government smashed to a bedrock of popular support but still with complete executive control of the State machinery (and indeed of its own Party machine).

Well, there were a full nine points out of ten on 'invoking a terrifying and external enemy". Fortunately, the British public do not believe a word of Government propaganda on this score but the administration clearly believes the nonsense that it spouts so a high score is in order.

As for the creation of a gulag, the British are merely complicit in the world of extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay. Although liberal public opinion has forced it to back track somewhat, this did not come from the heart - so, call it five points.

But despite some nasty bits of work lurking inside our Special Branch (our proto-political police), we cannot be said to have a 'thug caste' (so just two points to cover the Specials). On the other hand, intelligence policing, alongside the massive introduction of CCTV, ASBOs and the planned introduction of identity cards, is clearly a move towards an internal surveillance system - five points at this point in history and rising.

Are UK citizen's groups harassed in the UK? In general, no. The anti-war movement is broadly left free to protest so we suggest one point to cover the occasional attempts to ban the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir and to open up unnecessary populist debates about the hijab.

And what of arbitrary detention and release? No, the rule of law seems to still stand but dissident Islamists are being returned to regimes with a poor record on torture and the Blairite eagerness to please the Americans on extradition is sending free-born Englishmen across the water to suffer serious incarceration in the sink-pit of the US prison system - three points.

Are key individuals being targeted? Well, yes, they are although still at a low level. There was an attempt to take out George Galloway politically and there has been a truly vengeful approach to dissident opinion within both the Labour Party and the State - two points.

Is the Press controlled? Well, of course it is not controlled. But the attempted manipulation of the news agenda is clearly intended and extensive - so we suggest a significant four points (although two of these points are down to the weakness of an editorial class whose inability to see what might come matches that of German trades unionists and churchmen in the late-1920s).

But there is no evidence that dissent in the UK (except at the very margin) is in any way credibly regarded as treason and the rule of law is not suspended (on the contrary, the judges are proving important checks on executive ambition) - no points for tyranny here.

So, on our assessment of Naomi Wolf's ten points, we came up with 31 points out of our hundred for the UK in April 2007. We are nearly one third of the way to dictatorship compared to the situation before 9/11 and certainly before Tony Blair came to power but we are not in a worse position than that.

Fortunately, the second two thirds are going to be a tough game for any proto-Mosleys to drive forward. The British do not panic under attack, racism is never going to go mainstream, the argument against migration is rationally conducted and British bloody-mindedness may not extend to insurgency but it does extend to a libertarian preparedness to ignore authority when it is inconvenient.

This is why the next few months are rather critical. A discredited administration is about to see a major change in leadership. The situation is likely to be fixed at a 'one third tyranny' so long as New Labour retains power. The worry must be that we will go all French on ourselves and accept a degree of tyranny as normal. Perhaps this is what it means to become European - to permit the State a role in our lives far in excess of what we would accept customarily.

But wiser, perhaps more conservative, counsel (and bear in mind that I write from the centre-left) will have worked out that dealing with organised crime and terrorism requires public trust and that trust never comes from fear. The success of intelligence-based policing depends on our rolling back the tyranny quotient to at least half its current level - and you can pick any fifteen out of the thirty one points to do this!

Given the profile of tyranny that we have identified, much of the problem would be solved simply by removing the panicky belief that we are engaged in a war on terror instead of a global police action and reasserting the rule of law in international affairs (where the Europeans are way ahead of the Anglo-Saxons.) An editorial class that started asking more questions about how it is being manipulated would be helpful too.

When policemen stop you in the middle of the night nowadays, the natural instinct is to see them ambiguously - half our ally in the fight against crime and half the arm of the state in keeping us under control. So, if they want us to trust them fully again, let us both see which way the political wind blows in the months to come.

Tags: Serious Murder Squad, MI6, SIS, Special Branch, Blair, Naomi Wolf, extradition, Guantanamo, Police

New Religions and Our Civilisation

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 13:36:57 GMT

I have an interest in the 'new religions' - not as a practitioner but as a sympathetic observer.  These faiths are growing quite fast amongst teenagers and socially marginalised groups but also amongst solid stable ordinary folk  who find they say something important about how life might be lived. Fear of ridicule and a certain paranoia about public reaction means that the extent of pagan belief in Western society is probably significantly underestimated because people are still reluctant to 'come out' about an often misunderstood set of views about the world.

One starting point for anyone who might share this interest is Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999). It cannot be recommended enough.

A surprising result of the book - which made it clear that claims of an ancient origin to the new religions (with the exception of course of induction by consent into traditional shamanism) were just so much bunkum - is the degree to which Wiccans in particular have taken Hutton to their heart. The 'newness' of these faiths, including the consciously reconstructed Heathenism of Asatruar, is fully accepted as a fact in terms of form and origin in order to preserve a 'timeless' content in terms of belief.   Wiccan and pagan forum members on the internet will often be highly critical of attempts to over-estimate the deaths in the 'burning times' (the European witch hunts), the unwarranted feminist claims of historians like Gimbutas and, above all, the ridiculous claims of continuity between modern reconstructions and the ancient religions from which they are being reconstructed.

This maturity - far from the caricature of outsiders - positions these religions as intimately linked to modernity. They look less and less like reversions to the traditional as time and study progresses. Even their interest in folk tradition centres on their being grounded in the contemporary community as local healers or earth magicians. This flexibility of practice is in marked contrast to what happens when authority gets its grubby little paws on paganism to bend it to its own purpose. The fate of Shinto under the Meiji restoration is an object lesson in cynical inauthenticity for the purpose of nation-building with tragic consequences.

These thoughts were occasioned by another contribution in the Hutton tradition of critical analysis of belief - Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic and Liberation in Modern Esotericism by Hugh Urban of Ohio State University (University of California Press, 2006). I do not intend a book review. Suffice it to say that Urban takes the key points in the history of 'sex magick' as separate and successive components of alternative cultural practice.  In my view, he demonstrates how what was highly transgressive at each stage of its existence, fully in defiance of conventional mores, eventually became pulled into the prurient and commercialised mainstream. A culture of individual resistance to community culture came to shadow each stage of the development of consumer capitalism. With no intention to do so on either side, radical individual liberation and the market converged, becoming the Western society that we live in today.

This is, of course, my over simplification - read the book. But the seven case-types he introduces: the sexual magic of the mixed race American Paschley Randolph in the Post-Bellum era; the discovery of Tantra; the influence of Crowley; the Nietzchean impulse of Julius Evola; the arrival of Wiccan ideas and its links to feminism; the Satanic 'christian heresy' of La Vey; Chaos Magic with its shattering of all points of reference: all these lead (in Urban's analysis) to the 'magical logic of late capitalism'.

But what next - with all barriers down and nowhere further to go. Any belief, any practice seems to be permitted. Authoritarian personalities are anxious. This is not good, they say. The British military is worried, no kidding!

'An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2053021,00.html

It is almost as if they are willing order to return and, fearing Mussolini and Stalin, want us all to accept their order in its place. Well, British intelligence has not had the best of records lately. On this matter, its position on the future may be no different from its position on yellowcake from Niger or the presence of weapons of mass destruction in faraway countries. Authority may be very worried about its loss of authority but there is no reason why we should be. In fact, so long as authority does not intefere, observation of what is actually happening on the internet seems to indicate that a degree of self-correction within society is already taking place.

There is certainly now no turning back from the ideology of personal liberation that is dominant in the West, unless it be through the executive imposition of social conservatism. Such a 'cure' would be far worse than the disease unless society were to break down altogether under pressure of war, disease or famine. Indeed, some radical liberation activists (notably the gay and feminist elements) may even be becoming the New Right in the context of the alleged clash of cultures. Many liberal Europeans are coming to define themselves as Western against (say) Islamism simply on the basis of a radicalised view of freedom that has no place at all for custom or tradition. This is the mentality that underpins the world-view that I reviewed in the posting on 300 below.

No, the self correction is taking place from below and is based on two concerns - an awareness of predators in the system and of exploitation as intrinsic to the market system. It is no accident that, while the founders of the alternative religions tended to be from the libertarian individualist right, their latter-day followers have tended to be liberal and to the left. Once removed from being a rich man's hobby or from the pleasures of the Hellfire Club, alternative lifestyles and transgression are about resistance to, and the freedom of persons and communities from, oppressive authority. Some tasks still need doing that good government does well but our current governments do not do very much of at all - such as protecting the public. The infrastructure of religion in such times of instinctively authoritarian but limited government builds up community for protection. The new religions are no exception.

As time goes by, these new religions - which emphasise individualism, ritual and tolerance rather than dogma and organisation - are creating a social morality involving prison visits, mutual aid and assistance and self-policing against predatory persons that mimics early Christianity. Just as Christianity was the religion of slaves and women - much to the later disgust of the Nietzcheans - some paganisms are the natural religion of many sex workers (the exploited of our time) and of those under greatest personal pressure from modernity.

Of course, these new religions may be growing fast but they are still small. The religions of the book are also growing massively in the emerging world on the basis of their role as bulwarks that protect many from the full force of modernity. But, in the West, traditional authority cannot be squared very easily with the facts of personal liberation. These new religions, when you look into them more deeply, with their eclectism, tolerance and playfulness, are quietly combining the widespread acceptance of liberty as a precondition for being 'in and of the West' with a framework for making the world more comprehensible and for developing an ethical stance that actually works for its practitioners and for society.

One final thought. Urban in his Preface refers to the prejudice and fear surounding his taking up (even in an academic and objective way) the subject of 'sex magick' as a topic for serious study. He points out the odd combination in our culture of prurience and sniggering and a massive availability of sexual imagery in almost every context. I would call Western culture adolescent if it was not an insult to teenagers.  If the new religions unravel attitudes more suitable to a peasant society before birth control and bring maturity to our civilisation, then this may be no bad thing. It would not be the first time (we think of Jesus) that the margins of an empire have proved its salvation.

****

For evidence of the construction of a social presence for paganism in a UK context, with specific reference to prison visits - http://www.paganfed.org/

Tags: pagan, paganism, wicca, wiccan, Ronald Hutton, Hugh Urban, religion, shinto

Better than Sex - Good Works

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 13:18:35 GMT

Having indirectly covered two subjects that you are not supposed to discuss at polite dinner parties, politics on April 6th and religion on March 16th, I had thought that it might be good to go for the big one - sex. But something more important turned up last night.

Well, let's get the sex out of the way. I was going to recommend a book: Esther Perel's Mating in Captivity: Sex, Lies, and Domestic Bliss, published by Hodder as a paperback in the UK but available in the US.  In barest summary, it is by far the most intelligent account of what is wrong with attitudes to sex in Anglo-Saxon culture and it should be read before you go into a long term relationship, within five years of the first kid coming and then, once again, when the last kid is becoming a teenager. Above all, it oozes with positive energy but make sure that, if you read it, your partner reads it too or the point will be lost. Sorry to be mysterious. I would love to give you a short review but there is a more important story to be told. I can come back to Perel some other day.

Last night, I was invited to the Karim Rida Said Foundation Dinner in London. I know a couple of the Trustees but I generally get overwhelmed by the NGO and charitable circuit in London. A certain compassion-lag can set in. Sometimes NGO people think that they can get away with sloppy thinking and incompetence just because they are 'doing good'. This irritates not only me but others from a business background. One of our own companies does what it can to support International Health Partners (UK) precisely because it is so well run and disciplined - http://www.ihpuk.org

But last night was an inspiration. The Foundation arose from the reaction of two parents to the death of their son many years ago. The Chairman is Wafic Said, a European-based businessman of Syrian origin, who has had his moments of controversy in the UK Press but, in my view, is a perfect example of how a business mind of undoubted intelligence can effectively contribute to the resolution of social issues through charitable works - and let me make it clear that neither I nor my businesses have knowingly taken one penny from this gentleman.

The charity can be viewed at http://www.krsf.org and the facts are there. I am used to 'big men' from the Arab world employing charity to enhance reputation and I am aware of the role of 'zakat' (charitable giving) in Muslim culture - a tradition that often produces social welfare results closer to the European Social Democrat tradition than the free-booting charitable ways of North America. But, listening to Wafic Said speak last night, I was convinced that I was observing something more strategic in play that might offer us Westerners a lesson in avoiding the utter silliness of a 'clash of cultures'.

The bulk of the charity's work is directed at support for disadvantaged children in the Middle East, but a scholars programme brings around 30 middle class post-graduates to the West for further education. And this is where it gets interesting. I met an environmental designer, a performance artist, a media and communications specialist and an IT consultant - all skill sets associated with the more advanced components of Western service culture. This was not a set of mechanics and managers being set up to handle the outsourcing of Western industry while the West got on with the interesting bits of the global economy. These students were at the cutting edge of key creative sectors.

Each of these students easily matched the abilities of any American or European counterpart and, frankly, they had levels of personal motivation far higher than those counterparts. This 'will to do' is a phenomenon I have seen in South Asian students. I think we can assume that Chinese students in the West are not much different.

Wafic Said, as he gave awards of seed corn money to the top three scholars of the year (one of whom, a woman, wore full Islamic dress), made the telling point that the Foundation wanted students to get involved in Western culture not in order to lose their own culture but to understand the West better and then take from it what might enhance the prosperity and self-respect of their own world. It was a moment of revelation. These are only 30 or so students a year but there are other such Foundations and a whole new cadre of bright youngsters in the emerging world may be emerging. It was once reckoned that a revolution can be effected if there are just 500 people with a common ideology prepared to make change happen.

Such students are not the same as the rich kids who get an MBA from the West, live in London and Dubai, rely on Daddy's friends for contacts and just make the Western system work better. Getting a woman or an Asian into the top job at some private equity house may seem like progress (certainly to the sad old '68 generation), but it is mere tokenism if the global balance of power remains as it is. Instead, bright working and middle class young people should be learning new skill sets from the West and re-applying them to their own communities from within. In short, after learning, they must go home and practice and not simply be employed pawns in the great game of international capitalism. If they get it right at home, then they can export their creativity but as principals and entrepreneurs and not as agents and managers.

This is what the Foundation appears to be encouraging. Other aspects of the Foundation's work concentrate on practical help for the weakest in society and in raising awareness of social issues such as, say, child abuse. This is the other side of the coin - social welfare and cohesion alongside wealth creation.  This is a balance that the West never seems to get right, lurching back and forth from the worst sort of military-industrial or socialist planning to a libertarian anarchy that leaves thousands scared, homeless, obese, sick and exhausted.

It would be sad if the wealthy founders of these and other projects were left alone to pursue their dreams. They have set up the seed corn funds, often substantial, to fund a corner of a better society but their programmes still need other donors and the co-operation of Governments.  But does the West really want a stable Middle East? If so, then it will stop prescribing universal solutions imposed from outside and it will certainly stop instant moralising about those private individuals who are trying to move things forward. Above all, it will encourage reformers and philantropists from the emerging world to 'do it their way'.

You can perhaps understand now why dinner last night seemed more important than sex. (well, on that Saturday night in London, anyway). Good things were being done, unknown to much of the wider world. It seemed the least that I could do would be to draw Zaadsters attention to a small bright star peeking through the fog that is the Middle East.

Tags: Sex, Perel, Karim Rida Said Foundation, NGO, International Health Partners, Wafic Said, Middle East

Macleod and '300' - Two Responses to the Darkness

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 10:42:59 GMT

I try to see at least one film and read one book in a week. Time and ease of access usually means that the film comes from California and that the book is as likely to be the contemporary equivalent of pulp fiction as something more 'worthy'.

Not that dedication to popular culture should be confused with understanding community culture. The vast bulk of the material provided to us is produced by creatives and accountants with one main aim - to get us to buy the product. There are two corollaries of this. The first is that producers have to meet us more than half way and match our prejudices, fears, moods and desires. The second is that producers and creatives can slip in their own ideological prejudices - usually but not always to sustain the system that enables production.

Occasionally, a truly subversive creative can slip in a message against the system if the accountants think enough profits can be made by meeting the mood of the time. The remarkable and anarchic V for Vendetta is proof both of the freedom of Western culture and of the essential uselessness of that freedom in bridging the gap betwen thought and action to effect change. The graffiti of Banksy is another subversive act being appropriated by the mainstream. Thus must it be.

Real community culture is usually folkish, repetitive, traditional and often second rate in execution. Occasionally, a substantial creative talent emerges from below - like the vigorous youth cultures of urban environments - and then gets appropriated into the market system quite quickly. So, when a film or a book strikes a chord, it is striking that chord at the boundary between many individuals' emotional response to events and the management of that response by those cultural high priests who can get enough offerings from the money men.

This week I saw the film 300 and read the book The Execution Channel by the Scottish writer Ken Macleod. Both were responses to the war on terror. They represented distillations of two opposite ideological positions that are emerging to replace the left/right split of the Cold War. These two responses are expressing the break-up of traditional allegiances. At the risk of oversimplification, it may be worth unpicking the unspoken politics to be found in these two units of creative production that have been offered to attract our bank notes.

300 is the easiest because you can see it readily enough and it is only two hours long. Its iconography is comic book but also both fascistic and gay - not as incompatible a connection in some extreme circles - and certainly morally and sexually ambiguous. It tells the story, known to all British schoolboys until classical education was eliminated as part of the national curriculum, of the self-sacrificing stand of 300 highly trained Spartan warriors at the pass of Thermopylae. It was always a symbol of what well trained dedicated soldiers might do to protect their own and is poignant in the week that a senior RAF Officer is said to have asked whether his men would consider suicide defence against an incoming terror attack and British naval captives seemed to collude in an Iranian propaganda victory.

But, putting aside how our culture actually handles conflict, 300 is about how conflict should be viewed. Liberty is made abstract as homeland (women are second class and the economy is based on slavery), war is seen as a testosterone-fuelled glorious enterprise in which fame in the future is superior to a grey life in the present and the enemy is seen as imperial, decadent, compromising, ill-trained for service and polyglot. Ironically, the mise-en-scene could easily be reversed and the 'resistance' to Imperial America be cast in these terms but this film at this time from this place introduces a language of the West versus the Rest that makes it clear that no such interpretation is possible.

Meanwhile, Ken Macleod, hitherto known for imaginative and wry sci fi space operas that are certainly fun but cannot be called works of Dante-like status, has turned his hand to a hybrid political and espionage thriller (with sci fi characteristics and a homage to James Blish) that is on the very edge of genius. The Execution Channel (Orbit, 2007) is a natural outgrowth of his earlier work - his readers will recognise strong female protagonists, the centrality of Scotland and a fascination with the rhetoric of hard-line Communism. There is a new fact around page 100 that shifts it sharply back from the world of John Le Carre to the world of Philip K. Dick. But the distancing of the reader, similar to the distancing through graphics and formal rhetoric in 300, brings into focus the core ideology that Macleod, wittingly or unwittingly, is drawing out of the early years of the war on terror.

Place these two bits of popular culture alongside each other and patterns begin to emerge. The core of 300, if you strip away the stylistic accretions and pretend you know no history, is brutally simple - that the West exists and is under threat, that few realise the extent of the threat, that we need to be awakened and that the necessary response is to move forward, engage with the enemy and turn back the tide. Moreover, there are enemies within. The tone is one of heroes with a weak mass that needs leading.

The Execution Channel is very different. More muddied, like real life. There are no simple bad guys. If there is a villain, then it lies within that generic class of Great Powers whose less-than-competent and paranoid leaders bring us to the brink of disaster through secrecy and manipulation. The book can be compared to that great dystopian British science fiction masterpiece of the 1970s Fugue for a Darkening Island. It represents that sense of things being out of control because of forces we will not control. An oddly sympathetic if fundamentally cynical attitude to Chinese communism will puzzle American readers but it represents a preference, found lurking in many places outside the US, for community order over the murderous anarchy created by competing amoral elites.

In fact, Macleod is far from anti-American. All Westerners are much of a muchness - confused and blundering and a bit dim about the big picture. The Europeans and British officials are not much better and no-one seems to be particularly sadistic though sadistic things happen. The clue to the anger not only in the book, but also outside America about America, lies in an almost throwaway comment from Roisin, the woman it will be hard not to identify as the voice we are supposed to identify with. One of the contemporary themes in the book is the world of extraordinary rendition and of Guantanamo Bay that disturb Europeans far more than most Americans may understand:-

"Tears sprang to her eyes, as they always did when the thought struck her that particular prerogative was back: the right of the sovereign to condemn, to put to the question, without due process and for reasons of state; that on that sore point all the Revolutions in Britain and America had been for nothing, That America had been for nothing: that dismayed her."

Dismay - what a British understatement! So this film and this book, appearing at the same time, express, in popular cultural terms, the great split that is taking place within the Western Enlightenment. On the one side there is a new defensive aggression, the fear that the Enlightenment is under siege from dark forces and that the forces of Light must learn to be hard and do what is necessary against the forces of Darkness. On the other side is a deep sadness and 'ressentiment' that the Enlightenment is going into reverse and that the little people are becoming pawns once again in the battles between self-seeking and self-interested elites.

It might be interesting to speculate on how these two attitudes will develop as political movements within the West in the coming decades - we have our theories and our suspicions - but Zaadz is not a place for politics. My interest here was only in the place where cinema and popular literature are expressing deeper shifts in culture. These two trends - of defensive aggression ['Festung West'] and of individual and community resistance ['neo-socialism', if you like] - are becoming established across Europe, and even within US domestic politics, as alternative reactions to the stresses of the post-Soviet era. It is well worth keeping an eye on the balance of power within the networks that will decide what we watch and what we read.

*****

300 is on general release and is strongly recommended. The trailer gives a flavour of the film and can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDiUG52ZyHQ but the film is only for those with a strong stomach.

Ken Macleod has a blogspot at http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/ that contains items that make the content of his books clearer. His understanding of international affairs is remarkable in someone who is primarily a creative writer. Although fantasy, The Execution Channel contains elements that are only too real and whose significance is clearly passing by many of those 'literary giants' who lurch from party to party down in London and who are still trying to reproduce the taste and smell of a Proustian teacake.

Tags: 300, Ken Macleod, Popular Culture, Christopher Priest, Enlightenment, Liberty

An Ordinary Week

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 16:05:16 GMT

Not every week can have extraordinary events. And there is no point in making an ordinary week extraordinary by making up stories.

This week, though, saw another interesting event at Treadwell's - http://www.treadwells-london.com/ (see the posting earlier in March). Dr. Stephen Alexander of Warwick University closed his series of lectures on the grey zone between being human and being animal with a demanding but surprisingly lucid account of what the French philosophers D&G (Deleuze & Gattari, not, as he noted, Dolce & Gabbana) had written on the matter. Perhaps they are the only philosophers to take werewolves and vampires as a legitimate subject of enquiry.

I am not even going to try and attempt to reproduce his dense argument, especially as I hold to a more 'classically' existentialist view that a great deal of French continental philosophy represents a back door attempt to rescue essentialism rather than face, head-on, any of the tough choices that raw existence presents us with. In this case, D&G were trying to make Heraclitus, who believed that all things were in constant flux and there was no permanence, 'work'.

But, having said this, if we see this sort of philosophy as a branch of art, weaving words to express the ineffable, making us think and provoking us, then there is no real need to get angry or irritated with it. It is good just to sit back and let the occasional insanities roll over you and realise that some of those culturally self-referential daftnesses can be wiser guides on how one might conduct one's life than the rational logic of grey analysts who run our lives so clumsily and inhumanely.

There was one thought that Alexander provoked, probably unintentionally, that was liberating and troubling. He explored the Nietzchean interest (expressed in literature by DH Lawrence) in reviving the animal in us - not as a silly Rousseau-esque idyll or as a reversion to barbarism and cruelty but as the construction of the 'post-human' or 'ubermensch'. This moves beyond the human to re-connect with our animal natures in terms of something new and beyond nature. There is a lot of daft fearful talk about the inherent fascism or Nazi element in philosophers like Nietzche or Heidegger, yet there is something disturbing to liberal rationality about the cold hard use of reason to privilege the life lived unreasonably or 'authentically'.

Liberal intellectuals often see the Holocaust as the fruit of these illiberal thinkers. The existentialists are more likely to see it as the epitome of rational technologism, with its camps, trains, gases and management discipline, all representative of an inhuman system that was itself based on a hypertrophied use of reason and analysis to meet ends justified by reference to a now-discredited 'science' of eugenics. Communist 'scientific materialism' was no more intelligent.

The implication of the post-human is that, far from reverting to the natural, technology gives the human endless possibilities to go beyond nature and become (not evolve into) a new breed of animal for new conditions. If the technology is not commanded by persons who are stronger than it, then weak humans with all their fears, desires and prejudices intact will be taken over by the possibilities that the technology offers. And so we have death camps, nuclear weaponry, military-industrial complexes and environmental degradation. Scary stuff!

The Eastern religions were very influential on the late-Germanic branch of Western philosophy that critiqued reason through the use of reason - the paradox in this is in itself classically Eastern. Already, in the Zaadz universe, we see the strong dominance of Buddhist thinking in creative tension with more existentialist , liberal or pagan models. Buddhist philosophical instincts continually move around concepts of nothingness, paradox, unknowability and the relative unimportance of rationality except as tool. American pragmatism is perhaps the only branch of traditional analytic philosophy that recognises the hole at the centre of thinking but makes this a strength by seeing 'thinking' as a tool for other purposes.

Wittgenstein eventually ditched the use of value of the use of language and thinking at the point that it touches the ineffable. He notes that there is that about which nothing can be said - at least not in the analytical language of 'true' statements. Yet, to the irritation of the analytical mind, we continue to say these things. This appears to be a great divide amongst us humans - between those who live on either side of the boundary that Wittgenstein identified.

This brings us back to the liminal world of humans and animals. Is it possible that personal liberation does not just involve using rational tools for private and public ends? Are many of us not also engaged in a twin search for transcendance in the future (the search for nirvana or the state of post-human being) and for reproducing the one thing that animals seem to have that we do not - the ability to live briefly in the moment without past or future?

Some with rational analytical minds often seem terribly scared of the strength of emotions like desire and fear and of this loss of self in the moment. They avoid the Dionysian moment of intoxication with the 'animal'. Perhaps they fear where they might go - that Srebenica, Satanism or BDSM are just around the corner.

They will also use their reason to argue away the big questions of Being so as not to face them directly, perhaps so as not to face the fearful fact that these questions cannot be answered except through leaps of irrational faith. Accepting even one small leap into the unknown might chip away insidiously at all liberal reason with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Often they will analyse and research moments of transcendance in others but never really let go when they participate themselves - they will not stand up and hold a crowd in a political meeting, or lose themselves in orgasm, or lose space and time for a brief moment in ritual magic or religious practice and certainly never experience the creative 'madness' that William Blake once enjoyed in a Soho street. Politics, sex and religion are so often subjects of such earnestness for the Western liberal middle class that they are in danger of losing all sense of joy in life.

Maybe this is what being post-human will look like when the last earnest bourgeois has moved on - a final isolation of functioning reason to its rightful role as hand-maiden of the ineffable, the joyful and the irrational. Scary stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze - for Deleuze
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_Guattari - for Guattari

Tags: Deleuze & Gattari, Heraclitus, Lawrence, Nietzche, Heidegger, Blake

Art and Place

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 10:52:49 GMT

Tate Modern's largest ever retrospective of living artists covers the occasionally scatological, no-holds-barred work of Gilbert & George. If you are visiting London, you have until May 7th to see it. In the past I might have said that you should not take anyone who might be easily shocked, but we live in a culture where shock is no longer shocking. My teenage kids have the usual contemporary kid reaction to attempts by liberal parents to broaden their minds - to them, artistic shock is now merely embarrassing. You can see the liberal pendulum swinging back to conservatism before your very eyes.

But what struck me was not the artistic endeavour or the remarkable continuity of vision over five decades so much as something that I have noticed elsewhere - the role of place in a work of art. Can any art rooted in place be fully appreciated by someone who has not shared that sense of place to some degree with the artist? You look at the labels and see Gilbert & George's extremely large works on loan from private collections all over Europe, presumably only able to fit inside the large houses of the Euro-rich. How can a wealthy collector understand the references to the East End street? Do they need to care?

A Duccio madonna and child cannot be understood without thinking about how it fitted into its church environment. Students of art spend lifetimes in trying to recreate the symbolism or the cultural, social, economic and even political context of a work of art but what cannot be reproduced is the felt sense of being in a place and time shared by the artist.

All the perceptions, the gestalt of place, may be partly reproducible in living memory but not conveyed through the art itself to a 'stranger'. A work of art might fix some aspect of place but only so that other aspects are crowded out. The whole draft that we call reality will then be rewritten by the observers to fit their own needs. Art is, self-evidently, never precisely what it represents and there are plenty of French philosophers to tell us more if we really need to have all this confirmed for us.

Two artists bring out this reaction in me because I know the places which contributed to their art (though I would not be so presumptuous as to believe that I understood their art any better than anyone else and certainly no better than the artists themselves). Gilbert & George (counted as one artist) produce their work within a few streets of East London and Tracy Emin was born (as I was) and raised (as I was not) in Margate.

Those streets of Gilbert & George's are very familiar to me. London's cultural shifts and changes are expressed almost precisely in work after work. An entire cultural experience over five decades is reproduced, in admittedly simplified terms, to someone who has lived through them without always comprehending what was going on at the time. This sense of place lived in and then fixed as a 'memory of sentiment' must be impossible for many owners of these works to understand, so something else is driving them to buy and appreciate. But the evocation of a specific time and place is still core to the art and it will be lost when people like me and others in my generation die.

The same with Emin. Neither her work nor G&G's can be reduced to this evocation of place but anyone who grew up in the depressed culture of an English seaside town (mine was the neighbouring town of Ramsgate) can see in her graphic work direct reference, perhaps unconscious, to the primitive graffiti and seedy culture of an economy that lived hand-to-mouth on seasonal visitors who sometimes never turned up and, if they did, had little to spend. Her autobiographical reactions to the culture of desperation and abuse and her reconstruction of herself through art could have taken place in any zone of deprivation - even in an abusive wealthy context - but the visuals and textures of her work evoke a particular time and place to someone who also participated in it. That aspect of her work will also die as her generation of observers die.

Does this link matter, between the artist's possibly unconscious drawing down from place and the minority of people who may not appreciate what should be appreciated in the art but who still see these unconscious references to a shared world? Probably not to the artist or the collector or the art market or the critic or the historian, but this evocation of experience provides a surprising link between watcher and watched. The two sides do not have to like each other but they share an admittedly attenuated sense of being 'distant family'. And like a 'family' that shares childhood memories but, otherwise, has nothing in common in adult life, this bond can still draw some people back in a crisis to the art - as a family gets called to a funeral, a wedding or to survival in a war.

This brings us to Gilbert & George once again. The very first room of the retrospective shows early work very different from the rest of the Exhibition except in scale. It shows a rural idyll of sorts with Gilbert & George apparently celebrating the same sort of English sense of place that dominates Tate Britain. There is an essay to be written on how English art moves from celebrating ownership of land [Gainsborough] to becoming integrated with the land as a national ideal, especially in the context of wartime experience and subsequent reactions to postwar changes in society.

Gilbert & George's sharp shift to specific place from generalised national place in the 1970s and Tracey Emin's reversion to the personal in a revolt against place (yet never entirely leaving it behind) and so many other examples of trying to fix or avoid memory or fix and move on from place seem to indicate that 'English' artists are engaged in a continuous troubled process of coming to terms with the fragmentation of national identity. This is especially clear in the very last rooms of the retrospective where the arrival of Islamic culture in the East London streets is recorded with the same aggression as the arrival of AIDS. One of the 'enfants terribles' was born in Italy and Emin is of Turkish descent with continuing Turkish links and it may be that this enables them to see or feel or express what the indigenous English have long felt - that there is a profound disconnect between what our inherited national culture claims for us and what is experienced in the streets.

Not that most of us care any more. The English now believe with LP Hartley that the 'past is another country'. But the shift from the culture of the 1940s and 1950s to the urban multicultural sexualised culture of the 1990s and 2000s has shattered the old sense of place and nationhood. It has replaced it (in many cases) with a stronger sense of specific place, such as that of being a Londoner, and of personal rather than collective memory. Our artists may, with that genius for the semi-conscious articulation of hidden truths, be chronicling this cultural revolution in which a world of rootless transient communities has emerged, where there is no longer any shared institutional authority and where memory is unstable because it is not easily reinforced by community norms as a national 'myth'. A real war might change that, of course - but not the phoney war on terror.

Whether a wealthy collector in Luxembourg or Liechtenstein really comprehends any of this - any more than a nineteenth century British imperial collector of Italian altarpieces could understand a late-medieval small town Catholic sensibility - is another matter. But I am sure that the collectors are making some very sound investments.

Tags: art, gilbert & george, tracy emin, duccio, london, margate, england, tate

Poetry, Chaos Magick and Virtual Worlds

http://timinlondon.gaia.com — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 09:02:11 GMT

The first of near-weekly blog entries will set the pattern ... an account of something that happened in the week before that is a little out of the ordinary run of things.

Treadwell's is an esoteric bookshop in Tavistock Street (Covent Garden) that has a tradition of holding lectures and events surrounding the by-ways of belief and literature.

This Wednesday saw a poetry reading that conceded nothing to modernism. The aged but sprightly occultist Zachary Cox read from his own work (much of it comical parody), from a tradition now out of fashion (Poe, Swinburne, Chesterton) and from the Dragon Ritual, a Crowleian occult ritual that owed as much to Anne McCaffrey's Dragons of Pern as to the 'wickedest man in the world'.

My business partner, of course, 'worries about me' (with a smile) because I give time to these things - as I did to earlier lectures on H.P. Lovecraft and will do to a forthcoming one on 'demonhunters of Japan' but this is a community of exploration of ideas that is far from po-faced, can sometimes laugh at itself and, even if my own approach remains horribly rational, is still trying to dig out the ineffable from the mundane where the rest of us have long given up.

More to the point, these cultural interludes spark creative ideas and innovative use of language in one's own world - and my income sometimes comes from making connections that others cannot make for themselves. The 'use-value' of Treadwell's events is not the point, of course, but it is nice to find a 'use-value' if only not to be unnecessarily defensive with business colleagues. There is an odd mainstream prejudice against radical intellectual experimentation - as if the system as a whole depends on us all conforming to certain shared ideas to such an extent that any breach in that belief system might bring the whole thing tumbling down. It suggests that we might be holding on to many of our beliefs out of fear for own survival if things were to change.

One final point - sometimes insights into new phenomena can come from surprising places. We have scarcely touched the surface of what virtual worlds might do to our culture and personal development. There is no precedent - unless it be some of the risky experimentation of the distinctly off-the-message-board practitioners of Chaos Magick. This is not to accept the latter's version of the world but only to see that this closed world with its links to role play may have things to teach the wider culture about coping with changes that will partly detach mind from body through technology and then do so without restraint of geography and with a changed sense of time (which is one of the most remarkable subjective effects of entry into a virtual world).

For those interested in Zachary Cox, Treadwell's have released an Mp3 download of the recital at http://www.treadwells-london.com/downloads.asp

Tags: esoteric, dragon, occultist, chaos, RP, virtual world, Zachary Cox