A Sceptical European

I've been thinking a bit lately about the debate about the EU referendum.
My impression, for what it's worth is that the Labour and Liberal leaders are at a something of a disadvantage in the debate because, frankly, it's not terribly important either to them or their constituents, but they can't say that. On the whole I suspect, like me, they'd rather stay in but it's not exactly top of the agenda. But if they say it like that they'll be accused of being weak on Europe or whatever, and they can't have that, because the other side - UKIP and some of the Tories, are just so absolutely and completely incensed by the subject.

A lot of what I hear on the subject is economics - whether we'd be better off as a nation in or out, but I don't think that's the point. I really don't think it's about economics. For those of us who do feel at all strongly about Europe it's more a deep intuitive or instinctive reaction, both to the idea of being European, and to being British (or English). The people I know best actually sort of like the idea of being part of Europe. It makes us feel just a bit more cosmopolitan and sophisticated and broad-minded. We like the idea of being able to move freely about this huge area with it's languages and histories and cultures and to feel comfortable there and share in it. The Eurosceptics on the other hand (you'll have to excuse this if it seems like a caricature - I don't know many and find them hard to relate to. I'll try and be as even-handed as possible) have this deep commitment and loyalty above all to being British (or English). Our history and independent place in the world strikes some deep chord in them and merely being a part of Europe, they feel, dilutes or undermines that. To us Europhiles that feels a bit arrogant and insular, while to them, we look a bit effete and utopian. Does that seem fair? Eurosceptics don't necessarily dislike foreigners, but they do like them in their place.

The economics is vague to say the least. I'm no economist and I have to take the experts' word for it. My impression, not only about this, but about all the economic debates going on (most obviously how to deal with the financial crisis) is that you invariably have two equally well qualified, equally intelligent and equally convincing pundits coming out with two equally convincing but opposing arguments and offering two opposite plans of action (generally more public spending or less public spending). I suppose it might be like the climate change debate where the overwhelming consensus is for man-made climate change but the BBC just have to get a contrarian in for balance, but I don't think so. I liken it to my days of studying ecology.

Economics, like ecology (and psychology too) is what's known by some as a 'soft science'. That doesn't mean it's just so woolly that anyone can say anything they like and get away with it. It means that the factors involved are so many and varied that it is almost impossible to fully understand what's really going on, let alone make predictions. You can do statistics and try to work out some probabilities and trends, but that's about it. As ecologists we had to be extremely circumspect in our pronouncements. If you ask an ecologist to predict what will happen if, for example, you release a foreign species into the wild, or wipe out large numbers of a native species (badgers for example) most ecologists would be extremely chary of making any sort of prediction at all. And so it is with economists, except they have to make predictions. It's their job. And being in the businesses they are (finance and politics most obviously, where perception and confidence are everything) they have to sound like they know what they are talking about.
My impressions about listening to economists was confirmed by what I take to be the one reliable source of Truth available to the average layman on this kind of thing, that is More Or Less - a Radio 4 programme (backed by the Open University) about the use and abuse of statistics. They told us last week that in fact nobody really knows whether the UK (or England) would be better or worse off out of the EU. There are so many different factors to take into account. I take it from that that there's probably not a lot in it. Hence my feeling about The Opposition being relatively unmoved by the issue (compared to, say, unemployment, the NHS, or the tax evasion). It probably doesn't make that much difference.

Of course there are other reasons for being sceptical about Europe, and in some respects I share this scepticism. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be worrying about the implications of Big Government. It's bad enough having to be being ruled by our own local government, but the European version is much larger and at least seems a lot more remote and a lot less easy to influence. Eurosceptics point to the waste and corruption, and what about all those idiotic regulations 'handed down from Brussels' (square bananas etc)? I suppose my first thought is to wonder if our own government is any better. I'm sure you could make up an equally ridiculous list of judgements passed by any government. This is one thing I definitely take issue with Eurosceptics over. They do seem to assume that without Brussels, the British government on its own would handle things so much better. Perhaps it's part of the pro European mindset I outlined at the beginning that I doubt this, but I suspect that even Eurosceptics would have to concede that the British government leaves a lot to be desired. 'They might be incompetent' they might say, 'but they're our incompetents.'
I think there's more to it than this though, because I think we pro-Europeans actually quite like European legislation, even if a lot of it is no better than our own government manages. We like the fact that when environmental issues, or human rights or employment law for example, come up, we're more likely to hear the kind of  things we like from Brussels or Strasburg than from London (which doesn't seem to be interested in anything but economics). And of course, those are exactly the kinds of things the Torys and UKIP don't want to hear so that's another reason for ditching the EU in their book. Too much woolly lefty thinking.

If I have one real concern about how the EU is run it is this perceived lack of democracy. This is certainly partly our fault. We do get to vote in European elections but most of us don't take much of an interest. I don't know who my MEP is or what he/she stands for. I should find out. But ok, maybe the EU should be more democratic. Fair enough. But again, this is not what the Eurosceptic wants to hear. I'm not saying the EU is perfect (how ludicrous would that be?) but I deep down I think it's basically a good idea, so my plan of action, as a member of the opposition (after I'd dealt with all the other, more pressing issues) would be to make it better. But the Eurosceptic won't have that. The EU is rotten to the core. It was a bad idea from the start. There is no point in trying to fix it.
So anyway, in the referendum, should it ever happen, I'll be voting to stay in.

10:80:10

Human Nature... Hmmm. Dare I?
I was intrigued with something Vincent said in a comment following my last post -
"She (Margaret Thatcher) assumed that if people had more freedom (were no longer stifled by the State, or repressive trade unions) they would naturally work for good."
This is actually a kind of an Anarchist/ Libertarian assumption isn't it? I'm not saying that's a bad thing but to many it will seem almost unbelievably naive.

I'm a little sorry that Libertarianism has become a synonym for US far right politics, and of course Anarchy is synonymous for chaos and terror - a throw-back to a time when the Anarchists were the Al Quaeda of their day and before the Communists took over as the main purveyors of bombings and assassinations around the world. This of course was well over 100 years ago, but the connotation has stuck. My experience of anarchists is that they are among the most peaceable (if not Pacifist) people I ever met. They dressed in black, wore big boots and did odd things to their hair, sure, but they were nothing if not polite. This was in the 80s. I never found their politics especially convincing but their conviction that, to put it simply, people would be better off without government or judiciary was based on a profound conviction that, left to their own devices, given the chance, people are basically good. Likewise, the Libertarians I've come across believe, more or less, that people are better off without an imposed moral code, that 'Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law', and 'If it feels good, do it'. But the Libertarians I've met have been among the most humane, insightful and generous of people, and their proposal has mostly been to be free to take drugs and have sex with anyone, and in whatever manner (as long as it is among consenting adults) as they see fit, because after all, it does no harm to anyone else and is no one else's business. Their assumption was that, genuinely free, people would not feel the need to abuse their freedom, and humanity would be a more fulfilled and harmonious thing.

The objections are too obvious and numerous to go into in detail here, but the most basic is that of course people just aren't like that. Given those freedoms, free from government and law, custom and convention, it'll be a battle of all against all - dog eat dog - survival of the fittest. Not a pretty sight. I think this view of humanity is there underneath maybe the majority's ideas about their fellow men. Scrape away at the surface they say, and there it is, the beast within. Every man has his price. This thin veneer of civilisation masks a human nature, red in tooth and claw, and a life nasty, brutish and short. The noble savage is a myth. And so we impose law from above, with force if necessary, for the common good.

It's a very polarised debate, as these things tend to be. The human brain it seems does not deal easily in nuance.
The former view seems hopelessly idealistic - a dream of children and drug-addled hippies and hardly worthy of serious comment.
The latter seems almost too obvious to be worth demonstrating, because look at us - every chance we get - ripping each other off and taking the piss, looking out for number one, always out for some small advantage - some way of getting just that little bit further ahead.

Well speak for yourself Sunshine. I look around me at the people I know, and the people I've met here and abroad (yes, even in Paris) and I just don't recognise that description. Sure I remember some crappy moments, but actually, not many. Mostly people were friendly and helpful, and no, not because I was going to give them some money or because a policeman was watching them. There are of course people doing all sorts of hideous things in the world, but most of the time, in normal every-day life? Is it just that thin veneer holding us all back from throttling each other? Or is it some sort of confused Kin Selection, as the evolutionary psychologists would have us believe? Do I live in some rarefied middle class rural bubble where nobody is ever mean to anyone? Is it just me? Have I somehow passed through life oblivious and immune?

I've thought about this a lot. I'm not some starry-eyed do-gooder who just luvs everyone. I'm actually not the most trusting of people. I don't want to talk about it right now but I actually have a lot of trouble with people. I'm not particularly comfortable with social situations and I'm easily put off spending time with some people. I'm easily upset. Often, it's just too difficult. And yet... I still have a lot of hope for humanity. Although I personally have trouble with people for whatever reason, I don't think that's because people are bad. I don't dislike them. It's just a problem for me.

What I'm left with is this: Clearly people sometimes behave appallingly to each other (but see my posting here on whether everything is getting worse these days) but usually they don't and sometimes they are downright heroic.
So which is it to be? Are we basically Good or Bad, or is it just the wrong question?
Actually I think it's a bit of both, which sounds like an anti-climax, and a mealy-mouthed cop-out at that but actually it's not.
I came up with this 10:80:10 rule a while back. Basically what it says is that real evil is actually quite rare. A small percentage of us do it a lot and probably all of us do it sometimes - say 10%. Likewise real saintly good is pretty uncommon too - really going out of ones way to make things better. Probably most of us do it occasionally and a few of us make a life-style of it. Again, say 10%.
Most of us though, most of the time (the remaining 80%), and here's the point, just live our lives, doing what's normal, going along with what everyone else is doing, anything for a quiet life. Sometimes we're a bit mean and not entirely honest but there are limits. We may not really approve of you or want to spend a lot of time with you, but we won't give you a hard time unless we feel very provoked, and often, if you're in difficulties, we'll give you a hand if it's not too much trouble. That's the kind of people we are. I think this is pretty much true of most people the world over. Obviously if we are very provoked we might get very aggressive indeed - if we fear violence or starvation or having our livelihoods taken away from us for example but I have the perhaps perverse opinion that people should not be judged by what they do when they are desperate. Likewise, we might be tempted to do questionable things by extraordinary rewards, but if anything this is an argument against extraordinary temptations (eg huge bonuses) rather than for the inherent corruption of the human spirit. (I'm very aware of the need here for a deeper discussion on the meaning of Evil but I want to save that for another time. For the time being I'm going to take it that we know it when we see it.)

The glaring trouble here is how Evil can become normal in some societies, such as in late 1930s Germany, or Rwanda in 1994, or perhaps Syria at the moment and I think the answer is in that phrase "doing what's normal, going along with what everyone else is doing", and the fact that Evil is often so much easier than Good. Think how much easier it is to knock something down that it is to build something up and you can see that even nature (in the form of entropy) is on the side of Evil. That 10% has a hugely disproportionate effect on the outcome. What is a wonder is that it doesn't dominate everything most of the time. Just one person in a community who favours violence over peaceful coexistence, collecting a few sociopathic henchmen along the way, can very quickly force the community to take sides and start making decisions about who to blame and before you know it our peaceful hypothetical community is polarised and suspicious. Oppression can quickly become normal. This, in a sense is what is 'Evil' about human nature - not that it is inherent and pervasive in all of us except on very rare occasions, but that a small amount seems to be able to take hold of so much power so easily.

So I think this is the problem with the Libertarian and Anarchist views we started out with - that even if most of us could live reasonably amicably without laws and norms being imposed on us from above (and wouldn't that be great?) it only takes a few individuals who are prepared to take advantage of the situation to impose their own norms and laws and society is taken over by them. And this is also true of a genuinely free market economy, which is not the spirit of free enterprise Utopia some economists and politicians seem to imagine, but instead a Dystopia where everything people can have or do - not just the fripperies, but their health care, education, work and leisure, is determined by what money they can make, which is in turn determined by a very few very powerful business interests.
I think it is up to all of us to do our 10%, but as those Business Interests get fewer and bigger (as they inevitably will, the Free Market being what it is), the only thing big enough to stand up to them, I believe, will be our old friends Democratic Government and The Rule of Law.

Interestingly, one of the main platforms of the Libertarian Right in the USA is always 'Small Government' - a demand I find completely uncontroversial.Government should always be as small as possible.
Is anyone seriously demanding more government than necessary?
The only real question is - How much government is necessary?

Speaking Ill of the Dead

What the heck - I'm going to do a bit about Margaret Thatcher, and the main thing I want to say is that I believe she was a weak and stupid leader.
What the hell am I on about?
Weak, because all she did was go along with what was happening naturally at the time and took the credit for it. Stupid because all she had was this one simple idea and she stuck to it, no matter what anyone else said.

What was happening? I was too young at the time to really understand it, but my childhood included The Winter of Discontent, the Three Day Week, and The Sick Man of Europe. My dad was a shop steward at the Brighton B power station and I remember the strikes and works-to-rule. I grew up in one of those peculiarly pre 70s phenomena - the working-class conservative family (though my dad always voted Labour) which despite our relatively humble status, believed that people shouldn't depend on others for anything, that you get off your arse (and onto your bike presumably) and you take whatever job is offered and you are grateful and anyone who doesn't is a skiver and a scrounger. I grew up among mini Thatchers and Tebbits - most obviously my Auntie Roz and Auntie Eileen on the one hand and Granddad Joe and Uncle Bob on the other. None of them were monsters, and I was fond of (almost) all of them, but they were known for being somewhat rigid and contrarian - some might say bigoted. You wouldn't want to cross them but luckily you didn't have to take them too seriously either. Nevertheless they, and thousands like them, had the vote, and in 1979 they got into power.

Uncle Bob at least seemed interested in discussing it with me. I was in my teens at the time and not a lot of good at marshalling my arguments. Still, I had this deep conviction that there was something wrong with what he said. It was something to do with his preoccupation with money. Basically, for him, all that really counted was whether what you did made money. All the things I valued - my woolly ideals about human rights and freedom, and my worries about the environment simply didn't figure in his thinking unless somebody was making money out of it. In particular, the very vague ideas I had about my future, in ecology or art perhaps (I really had no idea) were completely 'unrealistic', if not actually laughable.
I think for him, underneath it all was a conviction that income = goodness. If you had a lot of money it had to be because you deserved it. If you were good you would succeed. Those without enough to live on were, ipso facto, bad. They must be doing something wrong. (I'm sure he would have made an exception for criminals who made their money illegally, but it was a simple and unambiguous distinction; Legal = Right.)
And I don't think it was about wealth exactly. Getting rich would have been getting above your station. No, it was about having a safe and secure job; making a living, not a profit. None of us was so much as self-employed, let alone 'A Businessman'. Thatcher's millionaire barrow boys I suspect were from a completely different kind of working class - living hand to mouth, ducking and diving, buying and selling, a bit on the side, cash in hand (Know what I mean?) They had less to lose and everything to gain. We, 'Respectable' working class, on the other hand, were risk-averse to say the least.

So in 1979, Margaret Thatcher's rather simplistic (but nonetheless 'Realistic') view of the world was put into practice. Everybody was sick of what the Unions had done to the country (because of course it was simply all their fault) and now it was time for a change.
And it worked. Things changed. What Thatcher and her government wanted to happen, happened. Whatever you say about the Tory government, they did what they said they'd do, unlike almost any more left-wing government you can point to. My point is that this is not because what the Tories did was right or good, but because it was easy.

A lot of right-wing thinkers I've spoken to think that one of the most important parts of their argument is that it goes along with human nature. Competition is natural. The accumulation of wealth and power by the few is Natural, whilst the rest of us strive and the shirkers starve. Altruism and cooperation, The Welfare State and Comprehensive Education are Unnatural. This is Pragmatism, Libertarianism and Social Darwinism, and the place that The Selfish Gene fell right into at about that time. It is simple, natural, automatic, and therefore Right. All you need to do is take away the brakes - the restrictions, the regulations and let it happen.

And Thatcher took away the dam and said 'Lo I have made water run downhill' and it was so. 
And the populace stood in awe and said 'Verily. She said the water would run down hill and look, it does. She is a genius and our saviour and there is no alternative.'

The lesson, if it still needs pointing out, is that what is Natural is not necessarily Right. Sometimes it is, but not always. And doing what is unnatural, is almost inevitably Not Easy. This is why the more left-wing administrations always look so confused and compromised.
It isn't Easy to do The Right Thing, and it often ends in chaos and corruption, but to just give up and do the wrong thing just because it's easy is unforgivable. And that's what she did, and what my family allowed her to do, and I'm deeply embarrassed for the lot of us.

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.

An awful lot of hot air. Not much light.

Half listening to Start The Week earlier today I heard someone ranting on about how silly people are to 'believe in' Global Warming. I assumed it must be Nigel Lawson but when I checked the website it turned out it was Peter Hitchens. I then went and had a look at what Hitchens has been saying on the blog he writes for the Mail on Sunday and found that - Lord above,  I agree with him. He's raging against the 'cult' of Global Warming and he's irate at being shouted down by 'fanatics' and being called a 'climate change denier' as he should be (irate that is). He lambasts the purveyors of sensationalist stories of polar bears on melting ice flows. He makes a big deal of his 'doubts' about climate change and being a sceptic, faced with so called scientific 'truths'. All of which is fair enough. Fanatical adherence to any belief system, especially if it means shouting down and insulting people who disagree with you is never an acceptable way to conduct a debate. Journalists shouldn't use misleading or distorted material just to sell papers. And he's right - any scientist who claims to have no doubts about 'The Truth', not just on this subject but on any area of research is an idiot. Of course there is doubt. There is always uncertainty. There is always disagreement. There is always more evidence and new ways to analyse it. That's why science, properly carried out, is not a cult, or even I would argue, a belief system.
I expect you can tell where this is going. To me, his disbelief in Global Warming seems to constitute something of a fanaticism in its own right, and if anyone is shouting anyone down here it's Hitchens, albeit in print. It's hard to imagine him treating any kind of uncertainty on anyone else's part as anything other than a contemptible capitulation. And as for complaining that journalists use misleading and overly-emotive pictures and stories to further a cause - he works for The Mail for Christ's sake!
Let's lay my cards on the table - I think he's wrong. There are a few 'facts' he quotes that I think are just plain wrong. For example, if I understand it correctly, the world was not warmer during medieval times than it is now. Europe was warmer, but not the whole world, and it's the global average that matters of course, not the regional variations, which is why our current spell of cold winters don't necessarily mean anything. Still - I claim no particular authority on the subject. I raise this canard simply to get the climate change believers and unbelievers going:
"But what about this study?"
"That study was flawed..."
"But Smith & Jones 1996 said..."
"Their sample size wasn't big enough."
"That was allowed for in a later model"
"which failed to incorporate the Kwrptzki effect"
"the Kwrptzki effect was minimal in the 1990s"
and so on and so forth.
But the fact is - I'm not sure I do understand it correctly. I'm not an expert and I am not in a position to assess the evidence, and without some years of single-minded study I am not ever likely to be. But neither is Hitchens. Neither are most of us. Most of us perhaps have at best a science A level or perhaps a BSc but that doesn't count for much. It's not the sort of thing you can work out from personal experience or 'common sense' or by applying your A level physics . It's a lot more complicated than that. So how are we supposed to form an opinion? Ultimately we have to take someone's word for it - someone who does know what they're talking about, assuming of course that it's possible to identify such people. With that in mind I'd like to take the unlikely step of putting in a word for Climate Scientists.

The thing that probably got me most about Hitchens this morning was his derision of us silly climate change 'believers'. How stupid are we to think that perhaps all these climate scientists might be onto something. Ok, there's not total agreement among them - it's science, as I said above. There's always doubt - as there should be. There are uncertainties, mistakes and even downright lies, but another thing that Hitchens is wrong about is that there is any serious disagreement among the majority of climate scientists about whether the earth will warm as a result of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions (and other pollutants). There are disagreements about all sorts of parts of this idea (not to mention the ramifications) but the basic idea seems pretty much accepted. Truth though is not a matter of democracy. The truth is true even if no one knows it. Its perfectly possible that the majority of scientists is wrong. It is, I suppose, just about conceivable that a few renegade climatologists are being silenced by the scientific establishment. Indeed a conspiracy theorist friend of mine pretty much takes it as read that a scientist being ignored by the majority makes him all the more worth listening to. The idea that he might be being ignored because he's incompetent or nuts is inadmissible (Another unfalsifiable for my list.) The fact is, I hope they are wrong, because the way things are going we're unlikely to get it together to limit carbon emissions in any meaningful way so let's hope they're wrong. But I doubt it.

One thing I can speak about with some authority here is scientists. I may not be a climate scientist but I know scientists. I was one for a bit as a Phd student. I lived in the belly of the beast (and did not fare well) and one thing I do know is that it is not possible for all these hundreds of scientists around the world to be corralled into claiming that something is true when they know it's not. It's even less possible for someone to have fooled them all into believing that something is true when it's not. Science doesn't work that way, or at least, non commercial science doesn't. Labs in private industry are a different matter. Who knows what goes on there? And of course, in order to get funding university labs and other independent research institutions are not immune to corruption, but they all have to publish. That's the important thing here - publication.

This is the thing I think a lot of non-scientists don't get. In most industries, publishing an article in a professional journal is something you do alongside your job, if you have time and have something interesting to say, or want the publicity, or whatever. In science, publishing is your job. Every piece of research you undertake as a scientist is about getting an article published in a learned journal. This is not about getting media attention or raising your profile or getting funding (although it's that too) - it's about getting your work out there into the hands of other scientists. Commercial research (into the latest cancer drug, or motor technology or shampoo) has maybe lead us to imagine that it's all about secrecy - intellectual property rights and commercial espionage, but real science is the opposite. Scientists might not want to publish until they are sure they know what they're talking about but then everything has to be published, or everything relevant. Everything that was done as a part of the study has to be laid out in full. Any other information that the study depends upon has to be cited from other equally learned articles in other journals. Anything that is not fully accounted for is not allowable in a scientific article. In other words, you can't just say what you like, or what you'd like to believe. Every claim you make has to be either demonstrated in your study or you have to be able to say where you got it from.
How is this enforced? Lay-people speak laughingly of 'peer review'. It sounds like the old boy network nodding stuff through on a wink and a brown envelope, but it's not. Peer review in any case is just the preliminary checking - to make sure you haven't said anything you can't back up, or made some other stupid mistake. Then there's proof reading and further checking by the publisher of course. Obviously this is a fallible process but those involved take it extremely seriously because of the next part of the process, where the article goes out and is read by every other scientist in the world who has any interest whatsoever in the subject, and they are not your friends. In fact they're up against you. If they can discredit or call into question anything you've said you can be sure they will, and if it's bad enough your career is more or less crippled, and likewise that of the publishers and peer-reviewers, your supervisors and co-workers, and last but not least, your funding.
I'm not saying it's perfect but as systems go it's about as hard to fiddle as is humanly possible. (You can perhaps see now why I'm so sceptical about commercial research*) The idea that all those hundreds of climate scientists, not mention the thousands of associated mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, computer technicians, oceanographers, ecologists, palaeontologists, and all the rest are somehow either being kept quiet or in the dark is just... I have no words. It would take a conspiracy so vast, so powerful...

All I'm saying then, Peter Hitchens (and Nigel Lawson), in an entirely sceptical, non-fanatical way, is that, yes, you might be right. I sincerely hope you are, for all our sakes. I'm not a climate scientist and they might have got something wrong and everything will turn out ok, but it seems unlikely. In the mean time, just in case, wouldn't it make sense to try and be a bit careful? Modify our behaviour? Rein ourselves in a bit? Oh I see - that's the bit you don't like. You just don't like being told what to do, do you. Well none of us do, but sometimes you just have to stop shouting and put up with it.

*But wait - all these climate scientists are in effect doing commercial research for the vastly powerful multi billion dollar renewable energy corporations aren't they? Not like those poor impoverished researchers into fossil fuels, always struggling for funding, always having to bang on about sustainability and sacrifice, being ignored by the US government...
Oh no, hang on...

Good Fortune

A while back, a friend suggested I write something about Fruition - something about clarifying the purpose of the book, or my intentions, or something. Anyway, here goes.

First up - Fruition is all about that classic question –
'If you could live your life over again, knowing what you know now, what would you change?'
I've thought about that a lot. Unlike Piaf I think I can honestly say I regret almost everything. One period in my life especially that I've wished and wished I could go back to and do again is my late teens and early twenties. What a mess!
It’s a period that still haunts me. I could so easily have become one of those sad individuals in his thirties, still living with his parents, with his fish tanks or his model soldiers, unemployable and spurned by women. But I am aware that, under slightly different circumstances, with a less tolerant family, things could have been much worse. I don't think I would ever have killed myself (I didn't have the will and I was always oddly hopeful) but events could have spiralled. I was never into dangerous behaviour, drink or drugs, but I could have just let things fall apart. I could have had an accident, or, without a home to go back to, I could have simply failed to hold down a job, to make friends, to pay the rent. I could imagine that happening to me. In Fruition, this is where Gabriel Fortune’s story starts.
One thing I didn't want the book to be was autobiographical. If I found myself trying to faithfully describe something that actually happened, or a place or person that actually existed, I'd have to chuck in some occurrence or characteristic from somewhere else, just to force myself to create something new. Trying to describe what actually happened to me sounds like an awful chore and what I've written above about it is as far as I want to go with that here. The themes though - of how a person can get into such a mess without resorting to the predictable narrative devices of violence or addiction interests me. It happens all the time - people simply fail to thrive. Without any dramatic gestures they simply fall away and hardly anyone even notices they’re gone. I was very influenced in this by a book called Stuart: A Life Backwards - not so much because of the character (who's life included plenty of violence and addiction) but because its reverse narrative put his earliest experiences (and hence the explanations for what happened) at the end of the book and hence provide a thrilling conclusion. I'm not sure how well I've achieved it, but a question I'd like the reader to be asking almost from the beginning is How on earth does a person end up like this? What has happened to him? The usual suspects - childhood neglect and abuse are hinted at from early on but again I wanted to avoid the usual. Sometimes it is something far less obvious - something that seems ordinary, or at least unexceptional, but which, under certain circumstances can contaminate everything. The full explanation, in as far as there ever is such a thing, is not revealed until book 4.

Books 1 and 2 are basically alternative versions of the same lost life. Books 3 and 4 are about how he changes that. The overall story is not about perfectibility but about the possibility of change. In many ways it is a long meditation on another classic question – ‘What is The Good Life?’ This inevitably (to me) raises all sorts of exciting philosophical and political questions and I give Gabriel plenty of opportunity to debate with the various characters he meets, especially on the boat. On the other hand I’ve (perhaps surprisingly) hardly touched on questions of God and spirituality. The fact that when they die everyone suddenly discovers that the afterlife is nothing like what they expected makes the whole subject somewhat moot and that’s quite subversive enough in my opinion. Ultimately though, Gabriel’s real preoccupations are far less cerebral. Mainly he wants to know how to make a living without selling out (the quaint old 20th Century notion that doing as well as possible and making as much money as possible aren't the same thing), and in particular he wants to find a woman to love. Fruition is very much a love story, although this doesn’t become obvious until book 2 and it is not resolved until the very end. Childhood and parenting are also major themes throughout the book. Remaining anti-autobiographical though, the events in his early life - the descriptions of his family and home, are completely different to mine. I wanted to see what it would be like to have sisters instead of a brother, and to be much younger than everybody else in the family (an unplanned late pregnancy) as my mother was in her family. I couldn't resist using the house we lived in though because it was just such an amazingly ugly old place. Gabriel wants to become a painter where I wanted to be an ecologist. We both like gardening though.

My warped idea of reincarnation is of course just a narrative device, not a belief system of mine (although it seems no less plausible than the alternatives. Who's to tell?) I'm always intrigued by the things people come to believe in and I made this system up partly as a sort of mischievous 'See? I can play that game too'. I also wanted The Afterlife to be a whole huge other world – one that would involve an immense journey overland, alone or with just a few companions. This had two purposes - one was to provide a place where Gabriel could think about and talk about his lives through a sort of quasi-therapeutic conversation. (I like books that use therapy as a device to tell us what our hero thinks is going on.) The other purpose was to give Gabriel an enormous and extraordinary landscape to travel through – and one that doesn't work by the usual rules. Having this apparently limitless new world to play with meant I could set my characters in the landscapes I'd had swimming about in my brain for decades - places I'd been to and stories I'd told myself to stop the 'real world' colonising my mind completely. As Gabriel says in book 1:
“Everybody said I ... was always ‘off in my own little world’, but they were wrong. It wasn’t a little world at all. It was enormous. There were landscapes and characters they wouldn’t even have come across in their weirdest dreams. I spent a lot of time getting it all down on paper – writing about it or drawing and painting. I did some huge scenes – part map, part landscape, with gargantuan shaggy beasts and archaic birds, engaged in incomprehensible behaviours among misshapen trees and alien fungi. Offshore, vast dead-eyed fish and primitive whales turned among forests of coral and kelp. I don’t know where it all came from. Nobody ever asked me about it. Dad and mum just shook their heads and tutted and went away. In my world there were settlements too, some of exquisite architecture and peopled by gentle and tolerant souls. Others bristled with armaments and dripped with pollution. And always there was a woman, and she looked past all the crap and saw me as I really was, and we’d be happy together.”
It’s difficult to pin-point any direct literary influences here but one unlikely source was Peter Jackson’s three films of The Lord of the Rings (I find the books unreadable.) They have just this sense of the tiny figure moving through a huge and ancient landscape. There’s a lot of ecology in Fruition too. The animals and plants we find there are all real or plausible, though they might not appear so to the non-biologist.

At the same time I hope my book doesn’t fall into the standard genres of 'fantasy' or 'science fiction' or 'horror'. I have trouble with these sorts of books because often they don't seem to feel the need to be even a bit rooted in real experiences and emotions, hence they can have anything happen and I’m left not caring. To really feel the otherness of these strange places, I think we need to be regularly reminded of what it’s like to live in normal everyday life. I always liked the wardrobe device in the Narnia books but I felt they should have gone back and forth more, to refresh the feeling of wonder. Doctor Who seems to amaze someone with the Tardis every other episode.
On the other hand, I find the entirely 'realistic' novel - historical or contemporary, just too pedestrian for words. They say that the difference between fact and fiction is that fiction must make sense, but I’m not so sure. Life does not always make sense, and fiction should be able to reflect that. I hope any books I write (I have two more on the way - one almost complete, the other still in my head) will always feel as if they could be partly dreamed or hallucinated but always set alongside everyday life. The novelist should not feel the need to explain every incongruity. Children's books don't seem to feel this need to tie up every loose end. (I sometimes like to think of Fruition as a children’s book for adults. Is it just me or do modern authors seem very reluctant to make stuff up?) ‘Magic realism’ always seemed too self-consciously clever. Something’s missing... Perhaps I don't read as much as writers are supposed to but I so rarely find anything I want to read these days, unless you count non-fiction, which I read a lot. That feels like a terrible thing to have to admit. Mind you, I don't like most of the music I come across either but I can usually find something new to listen to. Perhaps I'm just out of the loop.
I think I'm a very 'visual' person, and very affected by music too - Fruition seems very connected in my mind to the Fauré Requiem (which will definitely be the record I'll be running into the waves to save when they have me on Desert Island Discs. Gabriel Fortune - Gabriel Faure? I hadn't noticed that before. How curious.) TV and film seem more free to invent things without going all post-modern on us (I particularly like the work of Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, and Jos Whedon.) On reflection, I think the books that have had the most (subconscious) influence on Fruition would probably be Cider With Rosie, The Time Traveller's Wife and Moominland Midwinter.

I've also become discouraged from reading other people’s books by the fact that so many seem to have such a knowing, world-weary take on the human condition, where nobody really seems to like anyone very much and there's nothing anyone can do to change anything. (I'd love some recommendations to prove me wrong on all this by the way.) I really wanted to give Gabriel not exactly a happy ending, but something hopeful – something redemptive. I wanted him to find himself among friends in a way he never did in life. Although personally I’ve always found people difficult I do believe in generosity and humanity when I think a lot of writers don’t. Apart from anything I actually don’t think their pessimism is very realistic. It feels lazy and smug – why bother to try when everything will probably go badly anyway? Better to just enjoy the spectacle. So I also wanted to avoid what I suspect would be the normal cynical ending where he would find that no matter how he tries to change, something new inevitably springs up to thwart him. How drab. How very predictable. At the same time of course there can be no simple, clean happy-ever-after, but those aren't the only two options.
In short, what I wanted to write was the book that I’d always wanted to read but could never find.

So there came a time when my embryonic career in ecology was aborted and I was about forty years old and I had all this in my head. I looked at my life and realised that although I wasn't exactly old, I really was at the end of my main attempt at life. I didn't know what I was going to do next - I was single, homeless and unemployed again.  Although I guessed it was some way off I had a very strong sense of the end of my life being out there somewhere. It wasn't a bad feeling. I just knew it was there in a way that I hadn't before. So this book is also about death, but not in a morbid way (or only in the literal sense.) I don't believe in any Afterlife but I'd quite like to think that when death comes I'll find myself in a sleeping bag in a deck chair on a boat heading out into a frozen ocean...

The closet homophobe

I suppose we're all watching in trepidation what's happening in the USA at the moment - with the Republican nominations under way. Santorum scares me particularly but it did occur to me that perhaps, if the Republicans choose a genuinely insane candidate, perhaps the majority of (I fully believe) sane Americans (especially the Black and the Hispanic) will come out on polling day and tell them where to get off. That would leave us with Obama again, who is, in my opinion, probably unfairly vilified, but that's another post altogether.
What particularly spurs me to write today is the content of some of the more extreme Republicans' oratory and why the heck it seems so damned attractive to so many people - I'm thinking of course of their preoccupation with all things sexual - homosexuality and abortion most obviously, but also, if Santorum is to be taken notice of, contraception and sex outside marriage too.