The last bonus

We are repeatedly told that those who run banks and other great enterprises require to be paid enormously because their jobs are so tremendously demanding and those who can do them are so few. I suspect that there are actually quite a number of people who could do them, and the evidence suggests that both the CEOs and the star traders often fail to perform above chance and that they can commit egregious errors, even when warned of their possibility.

Yet to pay such individuals truly exceptional amounts of money helps create the impression, to the impressionable, that they are truly, almost Platonically, exceptional people. For the rest of us, to fall in with this view of the world and to give the idea that we are all to be placed into the positions for which we are pre-eminently fitted, there has been created the panoply of ever-expanding competitive formal qualifications. In education and training, as in the economy, ranking and rating supplant judgement. Such a system favours those who can operate it, either as candidates or providers (witness the recent fuss here about our now privatised secondary education examining boards training teachers how to get the best out of their systems), but, beneath it, privilege and favouritism persist.

This is the new 'world-class' status to which we must all aspire (or, in the case of many labourers in the vineyard, sink) lest we perish. The result, amongst the people generally, is to detroy the hope of good fortune (a necessary element of social content always), the belief in an accommodating society (it is no accident that it is in supposedly meritocratic societies that social mobility has declined), and the faith in the nation as a legitimate and effective expression of collective choice (as para-governmental international agencies and trans-national corporations increasingly dictate terms to states). Across Europe the extremist tendencies flex their muscles in dark and disreputable corners, and Molotov cocktails are a growth industry.

Kill or cure

"American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials. ..."

Is there a similar panel for foreigners?

The recently late Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan and son

The as yet 'wonderful' Rick Santorum

War is the Health of the State

The growth of pervasive state control, so often a response to crisis and social, economic or national collapse, finds its ultimate, expression in the creation of state-sponsored groups outside the established mechanisms of government and democratic control. Its most sinister and rebarbative manifestation was seen in the elite groups of fascist European states, but something similar is found now in the unaccountable patriotic groupings of modern Russia or the shadow government of party and people's army in China.

The process is of course less hindered in any effectively one-party state (Does that include coalitions of previously bitterly opposed rival parties?), and where there exists a shadow institutional apparatus of power. No doubt many will see it as a grotesque loss of a sense of proportion to find something similar, in kind, if not scale or overt intention, in the proliferation in our own country now of 'partnerships', 'pathfinder' projects, fora, and all the coming apparatus of 'localism', that ersatz handing of power to the people that bypasses established forms of democratic accountability, which national governments have been so keen to erode at local level for decades, and passes effective control to energetic interest groups. For politicians, 'localism' comes out of a different phrasebook from 'nationalism'.

One Nation - No Sog

We need to be cautious when political leaders with substantial but minority support come to government in times of economic woe and danger, and of a popular sense of grievance and powerlessness, promising to unite the nation with resolute, bold measures, simultaneously warning that they need to overturn old ways and appealing to past glories and achievements.

Read the history, especially in Europe.

Atomisation 3

We are hearing much talk, post riots, of a 'feral underclass', with the two words linked seemingly inseparably together - "yoked by violence together", one might say. Yet many have pointed out that more glittering sections of our society are equally feral.

Underclass, overclass and in between, we're all feral now. Literally it means simply 'wild' or 'fierce', but we use it distinctively in the sense of having reverted to the wild - feral pigeons, feral cats, feral bankers. We certainly have a feral financial class; not just in their own undoubted (even if unaccountable) indulgence in fraud and criminality (especially, in banks, managerial fraud against shareholders as a class), but in their outright association, for straightforward material gain, with some of the heavier criminal classes at large, the drugs and arms dealers, the corrupt heads of state. The international rich are increasingly feral. Here in my village we already have a fully feral parish council and the ambitions, not just of Mr Pickles, but of Messrs Gove and Lansley promise to do much to promote the feral. One could make a good case for saying that our present government is feral, no longer feeling itself obliged to carry widespread electoral consent with it. The famous 'middle ground' is behind us all and well in the past. Internationally states have always been feral (see Randolph Bourne) and in modern times the scruples and the international moves towards regulation and restraint following two world wars in Europe now seem like a brief and fading interlude.

For all the dulcetly reasonable tones of our own Dame Liza Manningham-Buller's Reith Lectures (you could hardly hope for a greater concatenation of civilising, proper and gentilely British nouns than those six), the security services are as challenged against humane and honest norms as ever.

In this particular subject one could argue, only a little tendentiously, that the old official British refusal to recognise the existence of 'intelligence' agencies was an admission that their activities were never entirely justifiable (however occasionally - or more often - necessary), and that, once they were openly recognised and 'regulated', inevitably to some degree the unacceptable would become officially sanctioned and, in Orwellian processes, the lines of civilised behaviour become more blurred. It is an interesting speculation whether the 'security' services ('intelligence' services, 'security' agencies, 'defence' departments - we hardly even think of these terms as Orwellian) were not in practice more restrained and scrupled when they acted entirely in the shadows than they have been in recent years.

But I digress - and will again. In the face of the more open burgeoning of feral energy on all sides, the lumpen middle (high and low) of our society seems to be running out of energy fast. As I go around, on every side life seems to be running down like a clockwork toy running to a halt, entropy looms, from the state of the municipal flowerbeds to the demeanour of the people in the streets, to the quality of our higher journalism and broadcasting, to the popular participation in politics. In the last instance aided and abetted by our present government's intention to remove the compulsion on the public to co-operate with the electoral registration officer, to switch electoral registration from a household to an individual base, and to make it the Boundary Commission's sole responsibility to equalise the population size of constituencies, which, taken together, are expected to reduce electoral registration in this country from the present level of about 90 per cent to 60 or 65 per cent, so that the alien experience of the United States, where drives to increase voter registration are often the key to possible results in specific elections, will be, like so much else of which our new government is enamoured, transplanted across the Atlantic to these shores.

Yet we must not be too despondent. People still cultivate their gardens and sweep their paths (if they have any). Did we not learn a little while ago that Tesco was enforcing a dress code on its customers? No more midnight shopping in pyjamas.

In vain, in vain, — the all-composing Hour
Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow'r.
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primæval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
The sick'ning stars fade off th'ethereal plain;
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand opprest,
Clos'd one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heap'd o'er her head!
Philosophy, that lean'd on Heav'n before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor'd;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.

Alexander Pope The Dunciad Book IV
 

The end

State security

"A green paper being drawn up by the government will propose a new statute prohibiting any intelligence information in the hands of MI5 or MI6 ever being disclosed in court."

God in a box

Some thoughts on this topic have long been sinking to the bottom of my mental pending tray, but they were brought to the surface when I awoke on Saturday morning to a BBC World Service programme on science in the Vatican in which Professor Richard Dawkins was briefly interviewed. He summarised his objections to religion with the assertions that bad deeds have often been perpetrated in the name of religion (suicide bombers for example); that, although we did not know and perhaps could not know what happened in the first pica second after the moment of creation, it did not help our understanding to speculate about a personal god who answered our individual prayers (probably the white beard was not mentioned but we were in that territory); and that the proper, the profound reaction to the world in which we live was a sense of wonder.

Professor Dawkins ...

That reinforced my impression of Professor Dawkins as a man with no real curiosity about the nature of religious experience, an impoverished conception of art, and probably little understanding of political conflict and social organisation. That triple impression may have deterred me from giving Professor Dawkins’s ideas the attention they deserve, but, in the true spirit of the internet, I do not intend to let ignorance stand in the way of opinion.

... and acquaintance

To take the points in different order, I did once see a television programme with Professor Dawkins in discussion with like-minded people where he was at pains to explain that his atheistic belief (I think he actually, with intellectual nicety, characterised himself as an extreme agnostic) did not to any degree prevent him from appreciating religious art. He was, he said, capable of luxuriating in (perhaps it was wondering at, wonder seems to play a prominent role in his aesthetic and moral view) the beauty of a religious painting or piece of music (the B minor mass perhaps) without paying any attention to its inherent or explicit religious meaning – and then afterwards he came out of that reverie back to the real world, the world of evidence based understanding.

That idea of art is perhaps not so immediately seen as inadequate as it would have been in the time of F R Leavis, who formed (as some may guess, looking at the literary references on this blog) my approach to literature and art, but it plainly comes close to ‘art for art’s sake’, which is equally out of modern fashion, or, more interestingly, aligns Professor Dawkins somewhat with the judge in the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who, thinking apparently that such a book might be all very well in the gentleman’s library or club, asked the members of the jury to consider whether they would be content to have their ‘wives or servants’ come across it.

Would you, Professor Dawkins, be content for your wife (I ask entirely hypothetically: I do not even know whether the Professor is married) to listen to the B minor mass, or your servants (college servants perhaps)? Well perhaps not they, but the lumpen mass that you find so depressingly prone to believe in the gentleman with the long white beard – they might be persuaded to religious belief by it, or have their belief confirmed, as I am sure many have.

I used to find it rather cheap and facile to compare ‘militant atheists’ with religious enthusiasts, but I was struck forcibly in the television discussion by how closely Professor Dawkins and his colleagues resembled the enforcers of religious orthodoxy in both manner and apparent motivation: these god-believing people were, to Professor Dawkins, strangely and pathetically in error; both for their own good and for the good of society they must be made to recant.

It becomes a social project. The tools of the inquisition are not to hand, but there is the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science whose 'mission ... is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering' and those buses proclaiming ‘There is, probably, no god’, despite the scrupulous qualifier, are as importunate and environmentally dreary as any wayside pulpit, and as hopelessly ineffective.



Looking for the evidence

The picture heading the official website is strangely reminiscent of popular and proselytising religious imagery, eyes cast aloft to the clouds, if not the heavens. One is almost tempted, an an act of cyber graffiti, to add the flowing white beard.

It is strange that anyone who conceives they have a social or intellectual duty to argue against religious belief should concentrate on the question, does god exist? To someone engaged in religious inquiry that must appear almost the last question that matters – if it matters at all. Isn’t that what all the fuss was about with the former Bishop of Durham?

The concerns of religious enquiry must be, ‘What is the true nature of existence?’; ‘How do I as an individual relate to it?’ and ‘How should one conduct one’s life to enhance that relationship?’

As the central character in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead puts it, if one conceives of god as the author of existence, what does it mean to ask, does god exist? He also remarks that almost nothing of value can be said about belief in god from a defensive position. I take him to mean that religious enquiry is a quest for understanding of something that is never likely to be directly grasped. Yet to ask whether ‘god exists’ one must posit a distinct conception, and whatever one chooses is likely to be inadequate or illogical so that the answer to the question whether it exists will almost certainly be, no. That, however, hardly exhausts the question, and, in any case, people embarked on Professor Dawkins’s enterprise seldom bother to engage with belief in its most artistically or intellectually accomplished forms. The most publicised recent debate on religion (available through the Dawkins Foundation website) was held between Christopher Hitchens and none other than that deep religious thinker Tony Blair. I rest my case.

The charge remains that some terrible things have been done in the name of religion. Professor Dawkins conceded only that some people ‘may’ have done good in the name of religion. Such a concession seems grudging to the point of stupidity. Inevitably someone motivated by their religious belief quietly to tend the sick or the poor will get less attention than the suicide bomber killing by the dozen, but to entertain the possibility that none such exist – well, you may think that, Professor, but no sensible man could possibly believe it.

There is research to show that suicide bombers are usually not particularly religiously devout, even in Islamic conflicts, and of course it was the avowedly non-religious Tamil Tigers who first developed suicide bombing.

Professor Dawkins is, I think, a little disingenuous in blaming religious belief, of itself, for all the horrors committed in its name. Until historically recently (and to some extent even now) all societies and states have had an avowedly religious affiliation, and it is organised human societies that have a propensity to barbarism, oppression and aggression. Modern secular states scarcely have a better record. Randolph Bourne, the early twentieth-century American writer, about whom I have posted before, has much of interest to say on that subject in War is the health of the state.

So, Professor Dawkins leaves me more puzzled than persuaded, and I find it a relief that his ideas and programme receive less attention than a while ago. I wonder what Richard Steele of the eighteenth-century Tatler and those polite gentlemen in the coffee house would have made of it.

War is the health of the state

'It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States. War is a very artificial thing. It is not the naïve spontaneous outburst of herd pugnacity; it is no more primary than is formal religion. War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally joined. We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in its traditional form. The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated. If the State’s chief function is war, then the State must suck out of the nation a large part of its energy for its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression.
...
'What is the State essentially? The more closely we examine it, the more mystical and personal it becomes. On the Nation we can put our hand as a definite social group, with attitudes and qualities exact enough to mean something. On the Government we can put our hand as a certain organization of ruling functions, the machinery of lawmaking and law-enforcing. The Administration is a recognizable group of political functionaries, temporarily in charge of the government. But the State stands as an idea behind them all, eternal, sanctified, and from it Government and Administration conceive themselves to have the breath of life. Even the nation, especially in times of war — or at least, its significant classes — considers that it derives its authority and its purpose from the idea of the State.
...
'Nothing is more obvious, however, than that every one of us comes into society as into something in whose creation we had not the slightest hand. We have not even the advantage, like those little unborn souls in The Blue Bird, of consciousness before we take up our careers on earth. By the time we find ourselves here we are caught in a network of customs and attitudes, the major directions of our desires and interests have been stamped on our minds, and by the time we have emerged from tutelage and reached the years of discretion when we might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society and class we live in that we are scarcely aware of any distinction between ourselves as judging, desiring individuals and our social environment. We have been kneaded so successfully that we approve of what our society approves, desire what our society desires, and add to the group our own passionate inertia against change, against the effort of reason, and the adventure of beauty.

'Every one of us, without exception, is born into a society that is given, just as the fauna and flora of our environment are given. Society and its institutions are, to the individual who enters it, as much naturalistic phenomena as is the weather itself. There is, therefore, no natural sanctity in the State any more than there is in the weather. We may bow down before it, just as our ancestors bowed before the sun and moon, but it is only because something in us unregenerate finds satisfaction in such an attitude, not because there is anything inherently reverential in the institution worshiped. Once the State has begun to function, and a large class finds its interest and its expression of power in maintaining the State, this ruling class may compel obedience from any uninterested minority. The State thus becomes an instrument by which the power of the whole herd is wielded for the benefit of a class. The rulers soon learn to capitalize the reverence which the State produces in the majority, and turn it into a general resistance toward a lessening of their privileges. The sanctity of the State becomes identified with the sanctity of the ruling class, and the latter are permitted to remain in power under the impression that in obeying and serving them, we are obeying and serving society, the nation, the great collectivity of all of us. . . . '

War is the health of the state

RANDOLPH BOURNE 1918