SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE 14 - Gaslighting

I'm well aware that the women I get into 'debates' with on social media might not be representative of women in general. I've known plenty of women in real life who do not share some of their more extreme views, and many of them seem to even quite like men. Strange but true. 

There are though some basic assumptions that almost all women seem to share - the most pervasive being that we men are all powerful, confident, strong, and generally at ease in what they see as a 'man's world'. Bad things do not really happen to men - or if they do, it's their own silly fault. If something goes wrong in a relationship it's generally assumed to be the man's fault. If the woman does something obviously wrong (violence or infidelity) then the man must have driven her to it. In contrast, women are ever the powerless, blameless victims. This means that, in disagreements between men and women, the men's point of view is worse than worthless - it's an impertinence. A man explaining his perspective on the subject is simply 'mansplaining'. Only the woman's perspective is valid. 

The usual explanation for this is that we've heard enough of men telling us what's what and it’s time to listen to the women 'for a change'. The problem with that is that although men wrote all those big books, they're very rarely about ordinary men's every-day lives - what your ordinary man in the street feels, thinks or wants. They're writers, academics, priests and politicians pontificating on the world at large, generally avoiding the subject of what men actually feel on a day-to-day basis. This is the opposite of 'women's literature' which has covered every possible aspect of women's lives - work, relationships, parenting, sex and just generally coping with life. I used to read quite a lot of fiction but tended to avoid men's writing because I just couldn't relate to it. I preferred women's writing because it tackled the ordinary everyday events and feelings they have to deal with. I confess I still don't really know enough about how men think or feel, because they just won't talk about it - even in literature - unless they're some kind of criminal or outsider. An editor told me that novels simply shouldn't be about the kind of experiences I wrote about - insecurities and anxieties and failures and embarrassments. The facade must be maintained - even if we injure ourselves and others maintaining it. 

Many women seem to think the same thing - they believe in the man as powerful, confident, strong, and generally at ease in the world, and see men who show their feelings as needy, creepy or weak. It's odd to me that modern feminism seems to have swallowed traditional gender roles so uncritically. There was a time, back in the 80s, when sensitive, feminine men were considered cool, we were all 'new men', ‘in touch with our feminine side’. In the 90s we were 'metrosexual'. Now young men who are not traditionally masculine must identify as gay, queer or trans in order to be acceptable at all. Other (cishet) men, not surprisingly, have to go to the other extreme. There is no in-between anymore. I've never been very masculine myself, but I've never been much interested in how I look, or wanted to have sex with men, so frankly, if I were young now, I don't know where I'd fit in. 

The problem here is that women think they do know what it's like to be a man - better than men do in many cases. I've been accused of mansplaining when I'm talking about how the man feels in an interaction between a man and a woman. Apparently only the woman's opinion is relevant. Despite the fact that there are two people involved, only one of them gets a voice. The woman explains how the woman feels and also, how the man feels. When I've disagreed with the woman's assertions about what a man thinks, feels or wants, I've been dismissed - because what would I know? I'm just a man and women know better. I've recounted occasions when my intentions were misunderstood, ignored and derided because they didn't fit in with what women assume men are like and been told that the woman was right and I was wrong. When I've pushed my point of view, women have posted laugh emojis - because obviously I don't really know what's going on inside my own head. That or I'm lying. This is actually a pre-feminist view of men and women - I remember it well as a child - men not understanding what's really going on, being naive and childish and simple-minded, and we don't help ourselves. 

Traditional masculinity forbids introspection ('navel-gazing'), showing or talking about our feelings, or going for help, so it's a fact that many men genuinely don't know what they really feel - they just won't go there, but I know for a fact that any man who is not scared to look at his own mind is as capable of understanding what's really going on as anyone. I'm one of those people and can honestly report that woman have very often misinterpreted what I think or feel, though they insist they haven't. They are absolutely sure they know what's going on in my head better than I do. It's very discouraging.

The basis for a lot of their assumptions about men is in that simple characterisation I started with - that men are powerful, confident, strong, and generally at ease in a man's world. In many ways it's the underlying bedrock of feminism, and yet it's just so obviously wrong. Modern progressive politics is riddled, and I would say, corrupted, by the embarrassingly simplistic belief that you can tell who has the power in a relationship simply by knowing their sex. It's a weird sort of biological determinism. Men are powerful and to blame for everything that goes wrong in the world. Women are powerless and innocent. I have come across this idiotic belief even among otherwise intelligent, educated, compassionate people. It's ok as an average - men are on average better off and have more power than women, but as I've explained many times here, that's because the average is skewed by a small minority of very wealthy powerful men at the top. It simply doesn't apply to the vast majority of men, who have about the same amount of wealth or power as women. There is, as I've said many times before, also a minority of men who get what they want by violence, and that gives them a kind of power too, but the vast majority of men are not among them. Most of us view violent men with fear and contempt. Some women have claimed that all men somehow benefit from the fact that most people at the top are also men, but I've seen no evidence for this - there is no patriarchal trickle-down effect that I can detect (though there is an old boy network but the men at the top view the rest of us with suspicion and contempt.) I've also heard it said that "All men benefit from rape" but I can't see how I benefit in any way from half the population not trusting me. How does that help me? I have no idea.

Still this presumption persists. Arguably, the whole feminist edifice stands on the idea that everything men do is about dominating women, and can be interpreted in that light. The fact that I know, as a man, that that is simply not true holds less than no weight. Apparently I'm deluding myself. It is very strange to have other people tell me that my mind does not work the way I know it does - hence the title of this essay. 

An obvious example is 'mansplaining'. This assumes that if a man is telling a woman something she already knows or hasn't asked to be told, that he is doing it to dominate her. My own experience is that most 'mansplaining' stems from a genuine wish to be helpful, or someone whittering on about his pet subject. In what sad world are either of those bad things? It might be annoying or boring, but it is not domineering, and of course, women do them too. Of course, sometimes it is genuinely belittling, but I've seen women do this at least as much as men - often as a response to their perception that they are being talked down to. A particularly brazen example happened recently when we were visiting Petworth House. A group of women were standing among the lowest branches of a tulip tree (Liriodendron) admiring the flowers. We went over and looked at them too. I probably told my partner something about it because it is an amazing thing and she is not a gardener, but just then a woman came over and very pointedly told me all about it, as if to put me in my place. Then, point made, she strode back to her husband and left. And no - she was not one of the guides. Me and my partner looked at each other bemused. The fact is though that I really love explaining things. (I nearly became a teacher - realising just in time that I have no idea how to talk to children.) For me though, sharing the things I've learned - finding a way to explain them as well as possible - is a real pleasure. It's the main reason why I write. I have so much stuff in my head - the idea of never using it or giving it to other people seems like a terrible waste. For a species whose crucial adaptation for survival is the passing on of knowledge, this does seem like one hell of a handicap. And yet some people are offended by iat. They assume I'm trying to put them down somehow, and for some women that definitely comes from feminist theory telling them that men are always somehow trying to dominate women - that we always see them as somehow lesser people needing extra help. That doesn't fit my experience of being a man at all, and yet if I say that, I'm mansplaining. Telling a woman what it's really like to be a man, apparently, is mansplaining. 

I also heard a woman complain that a man at work was putting her down by asking her questions about her taste in music, maybe as a sort of test, but what she didn't seem to realise was that men do this sort of thing to each other all the time, and he was treating her as an equal. Certainly this sort of one-upmanship can be tedious - I don't really like it - but the idea that men only do it to woman in order to put them down is ludicrous. Some women tend to assume that men don't respect women as much as men, and cite all sorts of minor transgressions, but never check to see if men do the same to other men or not (or indeed whther women do it to each other - I have it on good authority that they do). All-male and especially working-class environments can be tough, noisy, competitive, and down-right rude, but a woman in that situation can't be complaining of sexism if she's being treated as one of the lads. If she wants to be treated differently she's perpetuating the traditional gender roles that tell us that women are the weaker sex and need to be treated with kid-gloves. Surely that's not what feminism is about? In any case it's certainly not been my experience of women.

'Objectification' is another one - the idea that men typically view women as nothing more than objects to do sex to. I'm not saying that no men are like this, but I've rarely met them. It's certainly true that many men get a lot of pleasure from looking at women - I mean we really do - whether it's in real life - in the street or at a party, or in a picture or video - we absolutely love looking at women. I don't know if there is a female equivalent - women's attraction to men is often taken to be deeper and more meaningful somehow, but again this probably rests on the idea that men's attraction to women is not deep or meaningful - that it's just sex. Once again of course, most men are rubbish at talking about their finer feelings, but that doesn't mean they don't have them. The problem with the theory of objectification is that it asserts that men only look at women in a sexual way, or that if they look at a woman sexually, they can't appreciate anything else about her. Both these things are wrong. Me being sexually attracted to a woman does not prevent me appreciating other things about her at all - often the opposite. There used to be a myth that sexy women are dim, but I don't know anyone who thinks that anymore. This is also where feminism gets tied up with prudishness – the idea that men having sexual thoughts about a woman is somehow intrinsically wrong. The bottom line is that men have all sorts of complicated feelings about women - just as women do about men, but in my experience, domination isn't high among them. 

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE 1 : The Casting Couch

There was a post on Facebook about women being expected to have sex with men to get on in life. I commented that "many men would 100% sleep their way to the top if they could, but it's not an option generally available to men". It was meant to be a quip but as usual it was not taken lightly. As always, me being me, I try to think of male equivalents and a moment's thought made it obvious that men also have to jump through some hoops to get ahead - the main one being violence. Men often have to accept that they could be seriously injured or killed at work. 

Accidents at work are much higher among men than women (ONS). Some of it is part of the job but a lot is about taking unnecessary risks to prove yourself man enough. Roofing, scaffolding, tree-work, road work and working around heavy machinery are common examples. Some is just filthy degrading work with garbage or sewage. Men work in mines and on the trawlers, and of course they go to war. Accepting this inevitably leads to a certain hardness which can easily lead to cruelty. Women are not expected to put up with any of this. My dad worked at the Shoreham B power station in the 70s and was expected to crawl around in the still hot turbines breathing coal-dust, asbestos, heavy metals and random hydrocarbons. He died at 60 of a tumour in his brain stem. 

Being a soft lad, I largely avoided hard manual labour. I mostly did care work when I was a young man which was less well-paid but also less terrifying. My worst experience was when I was about 21 working for a landscaper in the Sussex countryside. I had a place at Askham Bryan agricultural college conditional on me getting a year's work experience in horticulture. Landscaping is not like gardening - it's all concrete and power-tools. Plants are generally an after-thought. It was a hot summer day - we were cutting a field hedge off the back of a farm trailer with hand-held hedge-cutters. It was sweaty and crippling and dangerous. The boss wouldn't let me work in shorts and tee-shirt - I had to wear the company overalls - to look professional and I was sweating profusely and no water was available. I didn't normally get hay-fever, but I was sneezing uncontrollably, and my nose was bleeding all over my face. I kept having to stop to mop up. Later he got so angry with me he dragged me out of the van by my hair. It was unacceptable behaviour of course but I was young and felt it was my fault so didn't tell anyone. This was what I had to do to get on at work. As it was I left the firm and didn't go to college. Probably it was a lucky escape given that college's reputation.

Women will say this is not the same of course - because for women the 'hoops' are sexual - ie. dirty and shameful, which they claim is worse. I spoke to one woman who told me being raped is worse than being killed - literally 'a fate worse than death' - but I'm pretty sure most women would submit to sexual assault if threatened with violence. Those women are very clear about which is worse. UK crime stats (ONS) show that men are as likely to be the victims of male violence and twice as likely to be murdered as women. I understand this is true throughout the western world. 

I was listening to interviews with victims of Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed on BBC Radio 4 recently. Their experiences sounded miserable to be sure but all of them said that they submitted because they wanted to keep their jobs. They'd made their choice - if they wanted to work at Harrods, or other high-end London retail outlets, submitting to Al-Fayed was the price they had to pay. That was what they had to do to get what they wanted so they did it. 

It's not a good choice I agree - the whole capitalist edifice is based on poor people having to submit to scary degrading treatment by more powerful people if they want to get on - but that's true of men and women. The women's price is perhaps more psychological - shame and humiliation - than the men's but one mustn't underestimate the trauma involved in being victimised by hard men, or the terror of a life-threatening injury. The only difference is that traditionally, we take crimes against women more seriously than those against men. That's just how it is - it's deep in the culture. Sexual and domestic violence are taken more seriously because they tend to be the crimes women are victims of. Being killed or maimed by some stranger in a public place - which is what usually happens to men - just isn't that important. Plus men talk about it less than women - we keep it to ourselves and we certainly don't ask for help. 

Good News is No News

Celebrating election results in Burma

Like most of you I suspect, I've been watching developments in Syria becoming more and more distressing, feeling more and more powerless and hopeless with every new horror. In particular I wonder how it is possible for individual Syrian soldiers to justify to themselves the torture and murder of the entire families of those suspected of taking part in the movement against Assad. The Arab Spring has dealt us hope and despair in equal measure. No doubt even in the more successful revolutions, such as in Libya and Egypt, there will be a period of adjustment where scores are settled more or less brutally, before some semblance of true democracy and law assert themselves. But then it seems the newly liberated weaponry from Libya is finding its way down into neighbouring (and previously relatively calm) countries like Niger and Mali and into the hands of people who want Islamic states in those places.

They seem to have not been so much in the news lately, but I assume that the horrors we hear about in the Congo and Sudan, Liberia and Sierra Leone are still going on. Somalia and Yemen are still in a state of brutal anarchy, home to pirates and terrorists of various kinds, and there's The Lord's Resistance Army still in action, though not so much in Uganda apparently, but still in neighbouring territories.

It goes on. Iraq and Iran of course, the situation in and around Palestine, and what is going on now with the Kurds? Human rights violations, genocide, crimes against ethnic minorities, women and gays. Is there still conflict in the Caucasus or is it quiet there for the time being? Pakistan and Afghanistan, Kazakhstan... And in the background of course, the influence of greater powers; China, Russia, the EU, the US, selling arms, occupying, spying, meddling, manipulating... The threat of terror around the world, totalitarian regimes - Zimbabwe, Burma and North Korea most obviously and other administrations of 'questionable legitimacy'. Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Venezuela, Haiti, Colombia, Malawi, Russia, Mexico... Preventable disease, malnutrition, homelessness, joblessness, statelessness and crime. And these are just examples that spring to mind. There's loads more of course. I get the news mainly from BBC Radio 4 and pick up bits from The Times and The Guardian, plus postings by helpful Friends on Facebook, and there's always more going on behind the scenes that we never hear about, or not unless you do a lot more delving than I have time for. Actually I don't spend too much time on it because the sense of helplessness in the face of so much cruelty, cynicism and just plain stupidity is too overwhelming. I know it goes on but I mostly feel there's nothing I can do about it. The minutiae do not intrigue me. I only have the one life. I grow plants. I cook. I lie in bed and watch DVDs. I know I'm lucky. My life is a breeze by any standards. But I know how bad it is out there. I don't need reminding. And in a way it's hardly even worth saying. We all know what it's like 'out there'. We all have our own personal pet examples probably but we all broadly agree that there are terrible things going on in the world (and I haven’t even mentioned the environment yet) and we're all horrified and we'd all like to see things being done differently somehow. Where I suspect though that we might part company is about whether things are getting worse. I'm not convinced. In fact in spite of all of the above I am quietly, guardedly, perversely, optimistic about the future. 

How about that?

It's an odd position to be in. I've contributed to a couple of debates on Facebook recently – one with Paul about Bankers’ pay, one with Dominic about Afghanistan – nothing very unusual about either of those topics you might think, but in both cases I seem to have been exposed as some sort of heretic. There seems to be this thing that I’m just not really supposed to say. I get derision and outrage, but mostly I get, well, silence. End of debate.

My heresy is that, despite everything I've said above, things are in many ways a lot better than they used to be. I'm not talking about all the fun you can have with your new gadgets or on the internet or the fact that I can buy decent coffee in my local supermarket (although that last one is very important). I mean big things, important things, things about war and poverty and justice. I’m saying that in many ways things are substantially better now than they used to be.

Why is that so hard to countenance?

For a start, moaning is fun. I’m pretty sure it was R.D.Laing’s book 'Knots' that had a chapter called 'Ain’t It Awful'. It goes like this - Put any two people together long enough and sooner or later they’ll start playing ‘Ain’t it Awful’. Someone will say something about the state of the world these days – how frightening it all is, how useless, how much worse than it used to be, and they’ll be sighing and tutting and shaking their heads – it’s one of those conversational dances we get into – ‘setting the world to rights’ as we say around here. The regulars at the bar do it, the students in the refectory, the old geezer at the bus stop, Friends on Facebook, me and my Bro. We’ve all done it. It’s sort of satisfying and agonising at the same time. Right-wingers are as guilty as Left. Old-style Conservatives tend to talk about how things used to be so much better at some point in the past, Lefties like to talk about how things should be so much better by now. (New-style Conservatives don't care as long as they make money out of it.) But it's all talk. We’re not planning on actually doing anything about it. Basically we’re just enjoying having a good old bitch about things, and, in the case of the left-wingers, showing off how well-informed we are into the bargain.

So, about these debates on Facebook – these can actually get quite involved, usually stemming from someone posting some news article or other, and the people are generally quite well-informed, coherent thinkers, but in these cases the debate quickly turned to pessimism, misanthropy, cynicism, hopelessness, bitterness even, and I had to ask - If you don’t think anything can ever change, why on earth are you bothering to post these articles? What’s the point? Isn’t it just one big game of Ain’t It Awful? (And isn’t your silence just a reaction to my not playing by the rules?)

One response from Dominic, to his credit, was “As much as my own work may be pissing in the wind, I will continue to piss into that wind so long as I have piss to piss.” The situation may be hopeless but he has to try. I can respect that, but I’m not so defeatist. Paul said I was just navel-gazing.

My position, my heresy then, has been to suggest, as politely as possible, that things are not so hopeless, and that things can be changed, or, more importantly, that things have been changed for the better – that we have changed things. Us humans have changed things for the better. 

More precisely, my point would be that to know whether something is possible, it’s useful to know whether anything like it has been done in the past. You need a precedent. If not then you really are a navel-gazer. So do such precedents exist? Or am I totally deluded?

That little fragment – ‘these days’ is crucial to the game. I hear it not just from my Friends but also in the media, where supposedly expert commentators tell us repeatedly how dangerous the world is these days. ‘In this dangerous world we live in...’ they say as if it’s just taken for granted that this is an unusually scary period to live through. ‘Compared to what?’ I shout. What other time in history are you thinking of that was better than now? Have you done any history whatsoever? 

Admittedly up until recently this was a rather subjective assessment, based only on my layman’s understanding of history, but it seemed to me that you didn’t actually have to know a lot about history to appreciate how unrelievedly horrible the world has been to appreciate the way things are now, even including the contemporary horrors mentioned at the top. The way things are now in Afghanistan and Syria, Sudan and Somalia are the way things used to be everywhere, all the time, but most places aren’t like that any more. That much seems obvious to me.

Even just in my own lifetime the whole of Eastern Europe and much of Asia belonged to Russia to do with as it pleased. Russia at the time was in a nuclear stand-off with the USA and its allies, the failure of which could have cost the entire world its life. South-East Asia and Latin America were by-words in revolution and military dictatorship. Africa was a continent of warring nations, some armed by the USSR, some by the USA, and its crowning glory was the apartheid regime. China was like North Korea is now. Nobody went back-packing in Cambodia or Chile. Nobody went to China or Czechoslovakia to make money. Only that vast block of land from central Asia, south through the Middle East and into northern Africa remains in pretty much the same state it was in then, give or take. And before the Cold War there were the World Wars, and before them the Imperial wars and the religious wars, and the wars of conquest and pillage through the middle ages and back and back into prehistory. And it must be remembered that the nations that were conquered and enslaved by the Europeans were not peaceful indigenous kittens before we so rudely interrupted. The Noble Savage is a myth.

Through most of human history it has been taken for granted that the vanquished peoples in any war would be massacred, raped, tortured or sold into slavery – all of them- women and children and farm animals too. Within societies, religious, racial and sexual minorities could be abused with impunity most of the time, and misfits imprisoned, tortured and executed on the slightest pretext, often for public amusement. Women belonged to their men folk to do with pretty much as they pleased. Child abuse was pretty much a fact of life. Of course all these things still go on but hardly anywhere are they considered normal or acceptable, even where they are still common. These days human rights, civil rights, women’s rights, democracy and a just and dependable legal system are things most people throughout the world expect or aspire to. No matter how badly applied those principals are, or how powerful the fundamentalist or totalitarian backlash, it is completely new in the history of humanity that these principals are so widely considered to be the things to aim for.

Up until recently I’d have had to admit that this was very much a personal impression. I’m not a historian and have only a rather patchy knowledge of what has gone on. Recently though I’ve come across a couple of books that have made me think that I might be onto something – The Angels of our Better Nature by Steven Pinker and Why the West Rules (for now) by Ian Morris. Both have their flaws but one thing that one can’t fail to be impressed by is the sheer magnitude of the horror described in both. Up until recently I don’t think I’d quite grasped the sheer intensity or the immensity of the brutality, or its frequency, in conquests, crusades, civil wars, invasions, inquisitions, and just as a routine part of life.

Pinker’s book is no gratuitous gore-fest though (although I found some of his chapters unfinishable*). His central point is that the quantity of brutality and death in the world has steadily declined over time. This may seem preposterous when we think of the carnage of the First World War or the Holocaust, Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China, but taking into account the sizes of the populations involved, Pinker claims that there are any number of genocides, wars, invasions and persecutions, going right back to the beginnings of recorded history, that far outrank them. If Pinker is even mostly right then that would be a remarkable claim. There are all sorts of objections to Pinker’s methods of course – whether one tenth of the population of Europe (numbering in the millions) being killed in the Second World War can be compared with an entire nation (numbering in the thousands) being wiped out in some battle four thousand years ago for example, but I think the basic premise holds. When we talk about how dreadful the world is these days, we really don’t know what we’re talking about.

The point in any case is not to belittle the sufferings of those who are killed and tortured today but instead to not underestimate the terrible experiences of all those people in the past. I know it doesn’t help to tell someone being tortured in Syria today that there are in fact far fewer in her position than there have been at any other period in history, any more than it helps to tell a woman who has just lost a child that infant mortality is way down. In fact it seems like adding insult to injury (Why haven't I benefited from this improvement?) but it is still worth knowing. It means something. It means there is hope for the world. Why wouldn’t a person want to know that?

My guess is that you are still squirming. Maybe you think my view of the past vs. the present is simply wrong. Well as I said I am not a historian and I can’t justify taking up any more space here with what I have learned of the subject, but I suspect there may be other, more subjective reasons for your resistance and these need clearing away before you decide that it’s simply my understanding of history that is at fault.

Your first impulse might be to question my motives. Perhaps you assume I must be very naïve, or complacent or cynical. I hope what I’ve said at the start deals with the accusation of naivety and previous postings here should tell you how complacent I am about the way the world is run (and if you still think I’m complacent skip ahead to the penultimate paragraph - the one that begins ' But to end on a darker note...') Remember, I’m the one arguing for change here. I'm not the one throwing up his hands and saying nothing can be done.

But I can see that it would suit business to draw attention away from oppression and exploitation in countries where they want to trade. Probably trade does to some extent promote peace, but however businessmen and politicians might like things to appear, that doesn’t change the way things actually are. If things genuinely are better I’m not going to deny it just because I don’t like capitalism. I might want to refine my definition of ‘better’ (see that penultimate para.) but Less Violence does seem 'better' to me, by any definition.

In any case, ‘The West’ isn’t a small part of the world any more, and it’s not the only place women work and have the vote, where children are not just cheap labour and people are not just routinely picked up off the streets for speaking out. It's not perfect - of course it's not perfect. It never will be. It's more like crime fighting, or medicine - always having to deal with the next thing, never winning outright. But it's also about knowing that if we give in, then things certainly will get worse. 

For those among you who have not given up, the activists and the radicals, your main objection will probably be that people are best motivated by rage, and any good news is bound to, to some extent, defuse that rage and make us complacent; as if the only way to motivate people is to feed them an unremitting diet of misery, without ever conceding that anything good can happen.

Well, maybe it’s a matter of temperament but I find that knowing about past successes gives me courage. Good news makes me more likely to try, not less.

Something that certainly makes me gag, as a Leftie, is conceding that any genuine good can come from capitalism or party politics. We want change to come in a truly popular movement. Any suspicion that businessmen or politicians have had any part whatsoever in reform (or worse, stand to gain from it) is taken to compromise or even invalidate those reforms. I’m as suspicious of the free market as anyone, but the idea that true reform has to be totally untainted by vested interests or politics is probably very naïve. There’s a certain brand of revisionist history here that dismisses all past reforms as only those which suited the Market or the government. Certainly capitalism has a way of cashing in regardless, and obviously trade is easier where there is no unrest, but I’m not at all convinced that women’s rights or the abolition of slavery happened only because it was good for the market. Legislation on child labour, environmental standards and working conditions for example, are not at all popular with businessmen. The changes have been made, I think, to a large extent because people believed that change was right, and also that it was realistic. I don’t care too much if the bosses and the politicians want to take some of the credit when things get done, as long as they get done.

But to end on a darker note...

My real fear for the future is not about violence or oppression.

My guess is that the world will get progressively less violent, less oppressive, less dangerous, as it has done (I think Pinker is right here) consistently since the beginnings of human history. I think what some of you disparagingly consider ‘Western’ comforts (democracy, the rule of law, women’s rights, labour regulations, environmental regulations and so on and so forth) will spread. What’s happening in that broad swathe of brutality that runs south from Kazakhstan through the Middle East to Central Africa, where despots rule over countries with violence and fear will come to seem very archaic. Likewise the idea that foreign governments might think it a good plan to go in and try to run those countries for their own ends by force will also come to seem very strange.

What I fear might happen in this newly pacified world is that corporations will continue to become larger in size and fewer in number and quite quickly become too big to be much bothered by governments. It’s already happening. Their impossibly rich managing directors and chief executives will be beyond democracy and national laws and they will be able to do whatever suits them. Government will become a technocratic appendage at best, organising those things it is not profitable enough for the free market to bother with. Eventually everything that does not produce the maximum possible return will stop happening altogether. In the mean time most of our descendents won’t even notice. They’ll work long hours doing mindless jobs but they’ll have their entertainments and their gadgets to keep them quiet. There will perhaps be a kind of intrinsic Third World in each region - trailer parks and slum estates, providing cheap labour, as there are in the USA now. Government and indeed the concept of the nation-state will come to seem like a very quaint anachronism.

I always thought Brave New World was a more plausible dystopia than 1984. The idea of Big Government running the world is already coming to seem very 20th Century.

So that’s what I think we’re really up against. Anyway we need to remember that kings do not rule by divine right any more, and it is not normal to own slaves or to have dissenters disembowelled in the town square. That’s true not because of something the government said – it’s because people decided not to live that way any more.

And if I am wrong about the history? Well, in the words of a good friend of mine:
‘Naïve then, but really, I just can’t bear the idea that we’re just going to go on as we have, the human race I mean, contaminating the place, torturing each other, for ever. I can’t. I just have to believe we can do better than that. I suppose it is like an article of faith with me. I have to believe in it.’ 

* I don’t usually like to recommend Further Reading in my blog because I like to think I can get the salient points across without it but in this case (and whatever you may think of other things he has said) I can entirely recommend having a look at at least the first few chapters of Pinker’s book http://www.stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature. (I actually had to return it to the library before I’d finished it so I don’t know what his conclusions will be, but that doesn’t alter the power of those first few chapters.) Morris’s book http://ianmorris.org/whythewestrules.html is also problematic in its method but I don’t know of another book that provides quite such a huge perspective on the history of both ends of Eurasia simultaneously.