Best Laid Plans

No insights here, just a question - what are Marxists doing with themselves at the moment? I've come into contact with a few personally, shot the breeze with them, but never really asked them much about what they believe, because I don't really want to have very emotive discussions  with people who a. are basically on my side and b. use terminology I've never been entirely comfortable with about commodity and relations of production and labour value which may well be bullshit but is impossible to argue with because it exists in an economic theoretical universe outside my broadly Keynesian one. We may as well be talking Portugese to each other's shirt buttons.

Still, they're still around, keeping on keeping on, and why shouldn't they? It does seem a bit odd to be basing the fundamentals of your Weltanschauung on  a German intellectual who died more than a century ago who was critiquing a specific moment in capitalism's development. Surely times have changed now, and it all feels a bit theological to me. But capitalism remains horrible in many ways for many people, and Marx's analysis of it was probably the most important ever made, if flawed (It is a little embarrassing watching modern Marxists trying to fit everything into a class-struggle frame at a time when class solidarity is on its way out for many reasons). So it makes sense that people searching for the alternative still plump for the one that critiques the current system in the most lasting and fundamental way.

But having looked through a few blogs and websites of functioning modern Marxists, I can't find much of an alternative system being proposed. Apart from the obvious stuff, seizure of the means of production, nationalisation of everything, the abolition of the stock exchange and all that - but there doesn't seem to be any idea of what to do about allocation of resources.This was always the big problem (apart from totalitarian systems required to prop up the revolutionary state, as I have said before) with times when Marxism has been tried practically - planned economies just don't really work. Humans just are insufficiently capable of organising the complexities of something as massive as an economy. Because we're a bit shit in general.

This is the reason I'm still a capitalist - for all its faults, it does a fairly good job of getting resources to the right place. A well made tractor sells well, a bad one sells badly, and the profit motive ensures companies making bad tractors have to catch up, raising overall standards. The invisible hand of the market. In a planned economy, there is no equivalent mechanism foolproof enough to ensure standards are kept high across the board.

After the massive failures of the twentieth century socialist experiments (and I am not wholly scornful of the excuse that they mainly derived from what seems to me a bizarre, unfortunate historical fluke and suffered accordingly), shouldn't Marxists be focussed not on their critique of capitalism, which, after all, we basically get by now, but on fixing that one massive hole in their argument? I am happy to hear about the plan to make the socialist market responsive without the profit motive. But nothing presents itself to me right now.

And this suggests to me another problem with Marxism as it has stood all along. It still treats capitalism as an ideology. But it isn't. Capitalism is what happens when you have an absence of ideology, which usually ends up meaning the powerful aggregate power and use it to cement their advantage. But it also suggests that the unplanned method of exchange inherent in capitalism is just what humans do anyway. Marxism still hasn't accepted that there is no grand conspiracy to keep humans motivated by profit, commodity, surplus value and the rest. It's just what they do, and until they provide an alternative system that fits human behaviour as naturally as does capitalism, I'm going to retain my belief that the best we pretty shit humans can do is ameliorate the awfulness of it all. It's hardly the Internationale, but it'll have to do as a rallying cry.

Arise, the wretched of the earth! No, genuinely, you're all crap.

The Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up

On my Christmas wish list in my imagined life where I actually have time to read everything on my Christmas wish list (which stretches to just about everything in the Western canon before it begins to grapple with the publications of this decade) is Francis Spufford's Unapologetic: Why despite Everything Christianity Still Makes Surprising Emotional Sense. I'm not usually one for Christian apologia - being forced to read Mere Christianity (I take challenges from my Christian friends very seriously) aged 16 has left me with a bitter taste in my mouth, a taste brought back by the recent readings of the Screwtape Letters on Radio 4. CS Lewis is very, very annoying, and I might put my finger on why in a future post.

This isn't apologia, though, at least not conventionally. No argument here for why Christianity is true. More, it's an exploration of why Christianity touches on human truths that are just sort of there, and does so very effectively. It's something I've been thinking of with the departure of Mandela - it doesn't need adherence to the Bible to think of his ability to forgive an enemy as both morally superb and practically incisive. To me, Jesus wasn't God or possibly anything like what has come down to us in the Gospels, but whoever did write the words about forgiveness was expressing a radical and quite brilliant insight, one that deserves to have lasted the ages - to love one's enemies is a very good idea, because it breaks cycles of retribution. Assuming one's enemies don't manage to crush you, they gain no power from your riposte, which in conventional human conflict provides most of the momentum to keep fighting. If you can survive and stay in opposition to them, they have to give you slack. Not for nothing does this doctrine derive from an occupied part of the Roman Empire, historically very good at reaching compromises with the peoples it governed. I'm not in for bashing the New Atheists as is fashionable, but I wish they did allow for this rather excellent distinction of Christianity. If you treat it as a pretty good universal truth that Christianity happened to get to first, it's easier to bear.

Anyway, it's not forgiveness I'm thinking about with this book, but rather the phrase from the book which has been doing the rounds, The Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up. This is Spufford's new paraphrase of Original Sin, an idea which I've always viewed with a great deal of suspicion. OS is a doctrine which treats (or can treat, all too easily, if your pastor isn't very good) humans as shameful, human lusts and appetites and ambitions as things to be hated and rejected, and one's position in the universe as something to apologise for, forever attempting to expiate one's own lowliness with yet more grovelling before a far superior being. It is a self-loathing anti-humanism that at its best end makes teenagers feel ashamed of that handjob they got at Mike's party on Saturday and at its worst end leads to the death-worshipping jihadists for whom no murder is beyond the pale when human beings are of so little value anyway.

We're just not really up to much

I like humility, though. It's just that the Christian religion has so rarely done anything to balance that humility with self-belief. To me, the humanist motto is "I raise my head in humility" - that is to say, I am a tiny creature in a vast and unknowable universe, but while I am alive, I will be fiercely proud of who I am. It is a balance almost impossible to get right, but at least humanism sees (or should see) that balance as worth getting right. Self-belief is not something I hear Christians talk about much, because it will always require the intervention of a God somewhere along the line, which ultimately can never be true self-belief.

Now, the reason I like The Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up or HPtFTU is because it does not cast human falleness as a matter of shame as OS does. Rather than being still culpable of the sin of Adam and Eve (which as Pullman pointed out at length in His Dark Materials, was actually pretty wonderful - the pride to acquire knowledge, to explore, experiment and know), the fallen state of Man is recast as 7 billion klutzes pratfalling on a truly epic scale, an endless cosmic Mr Bean episode where getting a turkey stuck on the head is replaced by everything from snapping at Mum as she tries to tell you how to properly chop an onion to occasional genocide. The reason this works so well for me is that it is not condemnatory - we fail because we are human. We're all just a bit useless really. We're just fucking monkeys in shoes, as Tim Minchin has it.

The reason this is so important to me is that it finally fills a gap I feel in my own ideological makeup. I'm a secular liberal. But liberalism and leftism generally has always had the problem of utopianism built into it. The Whiggish view of history saw humans as on course for eventual perfectibility (few Whiggish historians post-date the Holocaust, unsurprisingly), Marxists see a wonderful communist method of exchange post revolution, and simple liberals seem to see us in the West as doing rather well now, an Enlightened bunch free from the silliness of racism and homophobia and all that nonsense. Thing is, despite my liberalism, I've always felt an affinity for the Burkean tragic view of humanity. I see the whole edifice of civilisation ready to collapse at any moment and mere anarchy just raring to be let out of its cage.

A shot from the inevitable gritty reboot of Mr Bean

This is probably why I read the Dish and other moderate conservative outlets - it is good to be reminded occasionally that humans don't really change much apart from in material circumstance. The Catholic view of Sin - that there is nothing new under the sun - appeals to me greatly. One of the rather endearing traits of the standard CiF poster is, despite their feigned cynicism, an actual surprise that leaders are corrupt and people do bad things. I've never got very outraged about the abuses of power because I expect them to happen. I just think that every gain should be celebrated as a surprise, since by definition liberals are fighting the most powerful interests in the world all the time.

Liberalism, I think, needs to rediscover its tragic sense of humanity. The gimlet-eyed impish moral certainty of Thomas Paine and Jeremy Bentham can't last for long in as multivalent a world as ours, and has degenerated into liberal smugness, which has turned a great many people off the progressive causes. I take for an example the man who says what he said can't possibly be racist, because he's a liberal. Racism is bad, and I'm enlightened. Or homophobia is bad, but I'm enlightened, so when I say something's "gay" obviously I mean it ironically. You get the idea.

The brilliance of an idea like HPtFTU is that it reminds us that we're all a bit crap, without diving into the God thing. The Avenue Q song "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" gets to the heart of the matter: yeah, you're probably racist. So am I. We need to be vigilant about it, so we need to accept it first. The liberal tragic view of humanity is that we're all constantly fighting our own demons, and all of us are at any moment liable to drop everything and be shit human beings again. The humility that comes with this is essential to convincing opponents of our righteousness. It would also prevent a great deal of the utopianism that leads to bad liberal governments that never see the obstacles coming *coughhealthcare.govcough* and the inability to see their own self-righteousness that makes left-wing activism, however valid, usually quite annoying. Jesus' insight about the beam in the eye is another pretty good one. A liberalism driven by that religious thought is bound to end up a stronger liberalism. Ironically.

On Intersectionality

Lola Okolosie writes in the Guardian today about intersectionality, one of those words my spellchecker dislikes and my inner Englishman distrusts. It sounds a bit academic, a bit foreign, possibly French. Doesn't sound very common-sense. You couldn't say it down the pub, and is therefore suspect.

It basically suffers, like a number of words that describe perfectly good things, from having been invented during an era of academia rather than being a salty, natural part of human conversation. It describes the fact that all oppression is related, and therefore we should see a black feminism, for example, as different to to the feminism of a middle class white woman. A complex interweaving of different oppressive structures isn't exactly the sort of thing Anglo Saxons were interested in when they were coming up with their lovely words like "carve" "elbow" and "cheese", that do exactly what is said on the also-Anglo-Saxon tin. The complicated nature of oppression is not served by our words "tyranny" "barbarism" or anything else we regularly use because they were invented by people facing a much less multipolar set of oppressions. It is left to people who have read Gramsci and Foucault to unlock this kind of stuff.

And that makes it very hard to explain to people. Worse, it makes it hard to explain just what people should do about it. You explain feminism to the man in the street, and hopefully he'll say "Blimey! I suppose we should get Page 3 out of The Sun and achieve parity of paternity and maternity leave!" (or something like that). Explain intersectionality, (which will take a longer time in any case) and he'll say "Right. So we should probably... look closely at how oppression is all related. And then... do something about it. I think."

Admittedly this is probably a street in Paris

Actually, Okolosie's piece was much better about it than I've seen before, and I felt like I was getting it more than usual:

White, middle-class and young women are often seen as the ones spearheading this new wave of activity. Their high-profile campaigns – to have women on banknotes, challenge online misogyny and banish Page 3, for example – though necessary and praiseworthy, do not reflect the most pressing needs of the majority of women, black and minority-ethnic women included. The problem is not that these campaigns exist, but that they are given a focus and attention that overshadows other work feminists are engaged with.

That seems very valid to me. It presents a bit of a problem though, because if we do create a bunch of "feminisms", as Okolosie's piece suggests, it leaves people like me with a bit of a quandry. I am not black, which assuming that part of the problem has been middle class white people hijacking feminism, means that most of what I can offer will be more of the same. I would feel very inauthentic volunteering for Women Asylum Seekers Together, for instance, because if I was doing so based on an intersectional insight I would also notice that the whole point was that the experience of actually being black or Pakistani and female counts. The further away the relevant identity drifts from me, the less I feel I can help.

What I can do, chiefly, is talk to my friends about things I know about, and that I know they have experience of. That's why the white middle class female experience figures largely in my feminist imagination. It's a jump for me to put myself in the woman's position, but one I am just about comfortable making. If, however, I were to reorientate my feminism intersectionally, I would be talking about the experience of South Asian women who live an immigrant life in Burnley, say. Not only would I be less authentic, but this would precisely defeat the point of actually seeing that someone else's experience is important.

That leaves me both quite clear of what Okolosie means and unsure of what she wants me to do. Keep quiet and let more important minority-concerned feminism speak louder by comparison would be the obvious thing, but I doubt she'd want that, and in any case, you can't rank the problems of the world in order of severity and solve them one at a time. You've got to do what you can, and I'm just not sure there's much I can do to be a good ally to a black feminism or a poor feminism or an Islamic feminism. I fear all this leads to People's Front of Judea territory, with a thousand different feminisms all clamouring for attention and not accepting each other's help.

Whatever happened to the holders-of-degrees-in-social-anthropology feminists anyway?

This is all very complex, and just writing about it makes my head ache. What do I actually mean? Chiefly, that I understand the need for intersectionality, but also not sure whether it will actually change anyone's behaviour. The maligned middle class feminists, even if convinced, will go on with their own campaigns for equality because its what they feel they can do best, since the black experience should be left to black feminism or risk being swamped by whitesplaining women. And given that they're the ones with the media influence, their story will continue to dominate.

All very difficult. Let's go back to first principles, then. How to communicate intersectionality? The way I would explain it down the pub is "If a fucker wants to fuck you over, they'll use everything they can about you to fuck you over. And then you're fucked in a whole bunch of different ways. And those ways add up to more than the sum of their fuck-parts" So, to coin a good Anglo-Saxon word for intersectionality, I suggest sumfuckery. It's worth a shot.

Why I'm Not Writing About Liberty And The Police

I'm a Liberal Democrat, though I detest this coalition. I'm on the liberal left - I accept the Labour critique of capitalism's excesses but dislike its authoritarianism. That means I oppose over-weaning spying powers, ID cards, 42 day detention, Trident, and the rest of it. What worries me though, is a niggling feeling I should be more concerned about these things. Given that it's the dividing line between myself and another strain of leftism, and is the main reason to keep supporting the party, shouldn't it be one of my main concerns?

I was genuinely disturbed though not shocked by the Snowden revelations. The recent news that Cambridgeshire police have been offering money to those willing to inform on "student uniony stuff" (the idea that CUSU does anything at all would surprise many Cantabs, let alone that they were doing criminal stuff) outraged me. And yet I still don't get very exercised by it except out of duty. Why not?

Primarily, I think, because I still feel safe. I have the provincial Englishman's faith in the police force that hasn't been shaken by a lifetime diet of left wing reading. Orwell sums this up rather nicely along with many other things about Englishness in The Lion and the Unicorn:

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like ‘They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong’, or ’They can’t do that; it’s against the law’, are part of the atmosphere of England...  Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered.

It is probably a blind spot of the British that they are insufficiently alive to the possibility of true corruption. They grumble about MPs being crooks and cheats, they tell us that they're all in it to fill their pockets or serve corporations or dictate their PC worldview. But it's rarely particularly heartfelt, which is probably something to do with hundreds of years of being ruled over by a corrupt aristocratic elite that was slowly losing its power anyway, so was only ever worth grumbling about. 

We've never had Nazis or Vichy or gulags or the mafia routinely murdering judges. The true possibility of power's corruption is largely unformed in our collective consciousness, except in those Englishmen who have immigrated from other less forgiving climes. The police force doesn't scare me because I see it as something relatable. A film like Hot Fuzz works because the implied power of an American policeman - sharp uniform, powerful cars, powerful guns - contrasts tellingly with a police force with a penchant for jumpers and hi vis jackets. We're basically you, says the English policeman, but we're in these silly clothes and we have a job to do and just behave, please? Then there are videos like this:  

All of which masks the truth that for many in the UK whose lives I have no contact with, relations with the police remain fraught and policemen do abuse their power. They are also corrupt enough to accept bribes from the press, possibly shoot innocent people, punch protesters in the face, spy on democratic activists, and have children with activists while spying on them.

The reason why I still fail to get annoyed with the police is because I can see how in large institutions things get out of hand. In any organisation where you need results, people do stupid things. Mass surveillance is very helpful to the police, and for one or two jobs, essential, and if you're in a position of power where your job is to stop something that's come to define your job, restraint on arbitrary grounds would indeed seem annoying. I have no idea why they keep going for activists. My left wing friends insist it's because they're the tool of corporate interests, but this doesn't really convince me. It seems more likely that there's a long standing suspicion of activists in the police refreshed every few years when they have to go and monitor a demonstration where people smash things. 

Should I be worried about this? I still find it hard to be. The fact is that police forces all over the world are considerably worse, and police trust even after the last few battering years is holding up well. So the rather uncomfortable position must be held between the authoritarians who see criminality everywhere and want to hit it and the anti-authoritarians for whom the police are and always will be the enemy. There has to be a place for people who see the police force as very easily corruptible, and will criticise it as such, but believe it's doing okayish just about.

That's probably the best I can do for now, but my concern for civil liberties will need a good kick up the arse by an actual large-scale and suitably impressive breach of liberty before I get on this horse again.

A Pope For The Whiskey Priests

I sent my thoughts on Francis and his particular brand of Catholicism to Andrew Sullivan's blog The Dish, they can be seen here.

Goodbye Mandela

Last night I attended a performance of The Magic Flute at the ENO, and sometime in the middle, while Mozart's music proclaimed the progress of humanity from darkness into enlightenment, Nelson Mandela passed on in a bed thousands of miles away. I found out because my companion's Facebook newsfeed, checked upon leaving the building, was full of the tributes we'd all been waiting to give all year. This is how we learn of momentous things now. I think it's quite nice.

We walked to Trafalgar Square to see if anyone was gathering at South Africa House, and sure enough, there was a group of people clustered around in the bitter December cold outside the gates. A nascent shrine was growing, only a few flowers and a photo so far. No one knew what they were doing there, just that they wanted to stand in silence with some other people somewhere significant. They had formed a semicircle, and a couple of South African ladies were tirelessly singing old standards from the resistance days. I wished I could have joined in, but in my time in South Africa I only managed to learn Shosholoza and Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika, and these words were unfamiliar to me. A couple of white people nearby were singing under their breath. These were joyful songs of celebration, not mourning, and Mandela's name was frequently interwoven, shouted as a gleeful cry at the stars to mark his passing. Eventually, the beat the women were tapping out was taken up by the other bystanders, and we started stamping, a modest little contribution from a bunch of freezing, stoic Englishmen as a mark of respect.

I cried, not to my surprise. I felt very lucky to have heard that snatch of sung Xhosa (or was it Zulu? I will never know), just enough to make it concrete. I have visited the famous prison cell, lived amongst South Africans, have family who even served in his cabinet. I knew that when the moment came I would want to cry, but was afraid that it would all be too distant. The shouts of defiance, and the murmured memories of those who had come to Trafalgar Square many years ago to protest the apartheid regime, who had thought this the best place to be that night - these gave life to the moment, thank God. It was never really about Mandela for me, perhaps, rather that indefinable pang of sadness and admiration and that meek, unbearable flicker of hope that you get when faced with the image of a human, anywhere, who is weak and opposing the mighty. Mandela was merely the most famous such image remaining, and his passing is gutting not because he is a loss, but because the whole fact of his life is gutting to anyone paying attention, really.

I wish I could have something to add. This and Gary Younge  sum up many of my thoughts: he was political and had edge to him, and that shouldn't be forgotten. A radical and not a revolutionary, well, that's what I'd like to be. Never giving in to the urge to overthrow and destroy, but never relenting in the fight against the powerful, always being a thorn in someone's side.

One thing does stick in my mind though. There's been plenty on Facebook today about how we shouldn't use this to score political points. Well, hopefully not, though we will absolutely point out hypocrisy, and the Left should absolutely be clear that they got the apartheid thing right where the Right got it wrong. That is essential to remembering the struggle. These are not political points, this is a matter of honesty. If Cameron was a good man, he would come out and say his mind has been changed, but he and the Tory Party weren't into Mandela at the time. As it is, weasel words must suffice.

The point is, if the Right is honest, it will never be that interested in injustice. That's not the point of the Right. When Cameron was my age, he went to Apartheid South Africa to meet politicians, paid for by an anti-sanctions lobbying group. Whatever else he thought, South Africa was not his primary concern in the world. That's fine. He did not see the world in terms of a struggle between the strong and the weak. Justice was not as important to him as order, tradition, stability, and the rest of it - that's the point of being conservative (Convenient for him that his own social class does really well out of those things, but hey).

The fact that someone like Mandela comes out of history rather well due to concern for justice is embarrassing to conservatism. Their continual hypocrisy reminds me I am probably on the right side. Justice, in the end, is much sexier.

Obama gave Mandela the subtle tribute that "now he belongs to the ages", the same words used by Edwin Stanton as Lincoln died in front of him. Like Lincoln, before long it will be impossible to imagine that you could have lived at the same time as Mandela and found him despicable or even a cause for indifference. Cameron and his crowd will have to live with that, as the cause of progress marches on into the distance, leaving them in its dusty wake.

Though in the grave the pilgrims find their resting,

Reward their virtue’s brave road,

And take them into your home.

The Terrible Truth About Education Reform

A question is briefly on my mind after the release of this year's PISA scores. This is an event I am glad attracts a decent round of media attention every year, even though the tests themselves are of course a very flawed measure of educational comparison. I like it because it draws attention to the idiocy of education policy debate in the UK being dominated by school "choice", whatever mixture of faith schools, free schools academies, grammars, private school vouchers or what have you that the current government is using to impress floating middle-class voters. What we talk about when compare ourselves in actual results with our competitors is the stuff that actually matters: what is being taught, how it is being taught, the qualifications of teachers, the school hours, class sizes - the basic facts around which education revolves, not the most appealing grabbag of trendy new school types that tempts the sharp-elbowed into thinking they can out-do their neighbours for little Johnny.

I don't claim to know much about education policy, and I should, but I intuitively feel that education reform must revolve around a few very basic metrics. Metrics at which Shanghai and South Korea are doing particularly well at - long school days, well-respected and largely higher-degree holding teachers, intense competition in everything, and very high targets for all pupils. Private tuition is rife. Any school reform in the UK, if it chooses to avoid these fundamentals, must at least admit it is attempting the unlikely  task of doing more with less. Instead of faffing about with talk of different curricula, exam types, schools and yet more interference, Gove should be hammering away at finding better teachers and giving them a better environment in which to teach, for all schools, not just the free or the academised. This seems to be the Finnish lesson. Not that they're doing so great now either, compared to those countries who are are just willing to go harder for longer for their children.

Here's the thing - do we want to go harder on our children? This is partly a moral and partly a pragmatic question. If the metrics by which education is improved can be raised simply by bashing away at the basic questions of classroom respect/discipline, class time, homework levels, and the rest, then we've got to be honest with ourselves. At some level, either we want to win the "global race" or we want to be kind to our children. The children of South Korea are famously the unhappiest in the developed world. This seems to be largely because they are not seeing their parents any more, packed off to yet more private tuition or piano lessons while their parents simply get lost in the insane work hours of the modern Korean economy. And yet East Asia continues to cement its educational advantage on the backs of its suffering children.

My question is this. Is there a measurable economic downside to having a generation of overworked, lonely children grow up? If we are looking at human life in the mercilessly competitive economically utilitarian way that "global race" rhetoric asks us, could we conclude that the future workforce of a South Korea or Hong Kong will be so hobbled by mental illness and suicide that its productivity gains from a world-beating education will be as good as neutralised? This is crucial. If we are honest with ourselves, we are not going to beat the countries that try harder at educating their kids on PISA scores. If we can make the argument that trying too hard would be in the long run unproductive anyway, we might be able to find a comfortable middle ground where we both accept that education reform is dependent on fundamentals and that we should not push those fundamentals too far. That seems to me a better compromise than our current political's system's tendency to run away from the fact that a truly competitive education reform would be very painful for our children.

So yes, let's talk about reducing summer holidays, increasing teacher rewards (and liability), more Sure Start, more special needs focus, smaller class sizes, better discipline, and what have you. Be tough, if necessary, on everyone. But let's agree we don't want it to go too far. Let's take into account the economic value of happy children. And also to remember the value of creativity in a future economy, and pray that the kind of open-minded flexible children will be able to out-compete their peers in the maths-and-results-driven East. If not, we're leaving them to the wolves, but we're making sure they're happy while they wait.

A New Grand Alliance

Have a look at what the Pope just said. This is probably the most eloquent and forthright exhortation of the social democratic ideal I've seen in mainstream recent society. If you can't be bothered to read the whole thing, let me excerpt you:

The dignity of each human person and the pursuit of the common good are concerns which ought to shape all economic policies

Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmes, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality

The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.


There's more like this. I won't claim that the previous Pope didn't inveigh against markets too, on occasion, but he did so almost reluctantly. This one has a dislike for the pure free market forged of fire and salt. He calls for a poor church, a church that is "bruised hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets". There's more like this - just skim it and you will see the theme thrown out again and again. The secular amongst us must now accept the seemingly impossible  - that heading the oldest religious body in the world, most famous for intractable opposition to the modern world and the dignity of the modern human, is a man bent against the powerful in the world on behalf of the weak. He is the one man with any large platform or authority calling for the end of the neoliberal age.

To be clear: I still can't really say I like Francis. When he removes the church's policy on condom use in Africa, when he embraces equal rights for the gay and transgendered in the world, when he orders full public inquisitions into the child abuse scandal, when he embraces the free moral choice of the mother in the case of abortion -  maybe I will start to warm to him. The fact that he is radically different to his predecessors does not change these facts. Nevertheless, he presents an extraordinary moment for the Left, and one we should not waste because he is an imperfect ally.

That's the thing about allies. If they were perfect, they'd be either working for you or in charge of you already.

The problem with the modern left, as I wanted to say in my terrible dissertation on William Blake, is that it has lost its sense of prophecy. By which I mean, that iron certainty that all the powers of the universe are working on a slow but inexorable path to righting the wrongs of the world. While the Right calls on the authority of religion and tradition, what does the left call on? It used to have prophecy in the form of the messianic Marx, which I feel is a shame, not only because his most fervent adherents ended up destroying the Left in our time, but because he has very little poetry to him.

There are very few great poets of the Left. Blake, of course, is my favourite, because he fulfilled what Orwell called the love of something ever-changing and yet mystically the same. The Jerusalem of Blake's vision is both England of the now and the not yet here. Universal  is the future, but it must be worked toward, sword unsleeping in hand. How many other poets have summoned that unquestionable, Old Testament devotion to progress? How many politicians on the Left can now talk with such certainty and poetic power?

The Pope can. The Pope can talk without any embarrassment about the "poor". He can talk about their dignity. He can talk about the supreme moral good in not just the welfare programmes supporting them but in projects to restructure entire economies to support them. He has no need to kowtow to focus groups and think tanks that seek to put an "aspirational" gloss on his words. He need not fear the New Labour trap of hollowing out one's concern for the disadvantaged by thinking he can have it both ways.

So complete is the triumph of Thatcher and Reagan that we cannot even talk about the poor anymore. They rarely enter our national conversation other than as freak shows. Where does their value derive from in a secular consumerist world? This Pope, if his language is echoed by the Left, can return concern for the poor into a noble thing. We can talk in unabashed terms about human dignity again.

Myself and my fellow secularists will have to swallow our pride now. We'll have to work with a Catholic church that we have long opposed. But an alliance of the international left and the Church has an opportunity to wrongfoot the neoliberal consensus that has long relied on the support of religion. We are running out of time to change the conversation before our long string of defeats are made permanent. By the grace of the God we do not believe in, we have been given a wonderful chance to turn things around.

Life As A Bonus Round

I remember that if you finished a particularly well-made game like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, there would be an extra secret level or two to unlock.

Once all the hard work's done, you get to test out your skills on a blank canvas, seeing how many orcs you can kill in as many different ways or as quickly as possible. It's great fun, and feels a proper reward for your achievements. Of, you know, killing lots of orcs. God talking about games sounds lame sometimes.

Anyway, bouncing off John Scalzi's famous quip that being a straight white male was playing life on easy mode, I thought I'd refine that - being a white straight male (or to list all my privileges *deep breath* a straight cis white able-bodied slim home counties privately-educated Oxbridge male from a loving stable two-parent wealthy book-filled household in a wealthy part of a wealthy country surrounded by lush green space) is like playing the bonus round.

Having by virtue of being born almost all the stuff that everybody else is working their way through the game to get, for their children if not even for themselves, playing to win seems to miss the point a bit. Anything short of Prime Minister is basically a disappointment. And even Cameron can't really look at himself in the mirror and be too impressed with an Etonian petty aristocrat having made it to No. 10.

I hereby pledge to treat my life as the bonus round of a videogame. That means doing something impressive, but impressive in the same way that achieving a triple Scourge of Mordor combo or jumping a motorbike off Liberty City's highest building is impressive. It doesn't mean attempting to make money or climb the career ladder. That shows quite a staggering lack of imagination to me. Any white straight privately educated male who sees all the extraordinary world laid out in front and thinks that money or prestige are the best things to gain in it has not been paying much attention. Those are the things to lust after when you're struggling, not when you're cruising.

So go and do some backflips in life. Go crazy. Go help people. The risk for you is so comparatively light it's almost insulting to everyone else not to. And there are plenty of people to whom I wish I could go back in time, to that Home Counties private school, the people who wanted to win all the rugby matches and come first in all the tests and see life as an endless competition and just put a hand on their shoulder and say "It's fine. It's OK. You've already won."

Because if more straight white males realised they'd already won, they'd be a lot happier, have a lot more fun, and probably sort out a lot more problems.

Or they could fill up the courtyard of a castle with watermelons. Whatever floats their boat.

Why I Am Pro-Choice

Since this blog is still new, I'm going to put down thoughts on the basic issues as a statement of values. It's good to revisit the basics - it hopefully prevents dogmatic thinking creeping in. It's also a useful record in case my opinions change.

It won't surprise anyone to find out I'm pro-choice, but it is surprising to me how long it took me to figure out why. I was a liberal, and liberals are pro-choice, therefore I'm pro-choice. We don't have to discuss it too much in England, so there it sat. I have a suspicion a lot of male liberals don't like to go near abortion for a number of reasons - they think it's not their domain, they think only women can speak about it with any authority, and simply they at some level find it distasteful or shameful, however much they support it as a right. More male conversation about abortion would definitely be a good thing. That however, is not quite my point.

My point is really directed to pro-choice people male and female. What has irked me for a long time about the debate is that the sides never engage with each other's argument. Much of the pro-life movement is based around the idea that an embryo or foetus is a human life and therefore to abort it is murder. This is a simple proposition from which, understandably if that is your position, incalculable amounts of righteous energy is derived. Now whenever I debate the issue with a pro-life person, my instinct is to directly debate on that point, since that seems to me the heart of it. Most pro-choice rhetoric, however, is based around women's control of their bodies. This is a good argument. But it is utterly useless in debate because you are being accused of murder, which supercedes pretty much anything you can say. Surely the important bit is: "I don't think abortion is murder". Everything else misses their point.

I would suggest out-christianing the Christians and loving your enemies. Take them seriously as people, not as men (and women) trying to wrest control of reproductive organs from free people. Rather, meet them on that first point. Is abortion murder?

The pro-choice movement, it seems to me, spends far too little time on the "when does life begin" question. This may be because it's an uncomfortable subject, because it divides adherents, or simply because they refuse to play on the pro-lifer's turf. But I think it is the single best place to fight the battle. Because I don't know when life begins. It's something I struggle with. Not something you want to admit in such an ideological and impassioned debate with people accusing you of sanctioning the slaughter of the innocent. I can't claim the abortion rate in China, for instance, doesn't give me the willies. I can't claim I'm comfortable with my current position that the development of the spinal cord constitutes the beginning of what I understand as human life. It seems so arbitrary. But so much of life requires arbitrary distinctions about gradual changes. A child does not gain the sudden ability to help govern a democracy on their 18th birthday. We don't know where the line is, so we make a guess and draw one.

I may not know where life begins. But nor does anyone. Oh, the religious might say they know life begins at conception because God plans each soul, but they have no evidence of this or that their God exists, and so can't expect to have any say on the law because of it. The decision about whether the termination of a ball of cells is different in kind to the continual destruction of billions of sperm and thousands of eggs is sufficiently complex that the law cannot intervene. That leaves the decision with the mother by default. I have many other opinions on the issue, but this is the rock bottom of my belief, and though I welcome challenge, I cannot see how it is ever to be overcome by opposing arguments.

I fear that when the pro-life movement runs away from the accusation of their opponents, it looks like weakness. They should charge at it head on, and we should all be discussing where we think life begins. It's an uneasy topic for anyone, but it is where the strongest argument and eventual victory lies.

On YouTube Poop

The internet is stuffed with almost unlimited really, really stupid stuff to take our mind off having to go on living. Sometimes it as if the whole of human history up to this point was merely a tedious prelude to the time when people could add dramatic music to a chipmunk turning around or reimagine The Lord of the Rings with Saruman being played by a singer from a Soviet-era light entertainment programme. It is tempting to think this nonsense is palatable only to the stupid and directionless, but after meeting many of the brightest Oxbridge students who also have a love of stupid videos, I've reluctantly accepted that the international conferences on Deontological Ethics of 2045 will be attended by people who have watched hours of cats popping water balloons.

With this in mind, I feel we may as well devote space to the appreciation of the utterly stupid, since it is now so irrevocably woven into our very culture. I'd like to cast a vote for the "YouTube Poop", a style of video in which old movies and cartoons are re-edited and mashed up within an inch of their recognisable life to find the unintentional comedy just waiting to burst out. In particular, I'd like to give analysis to this clip from Les Miserables, since we have recently touched on the baffling absurdity of Russell Crowe. You might say that there's not much point pricking his pomposity since his recent career seems devoted to doing that itself, but first, watch this.

You're quite welcome not to laugh at any of it. That's the point about stupid guilty pleasures; they're quite possibly mystifying and probably embarrassing to anyone else. But in the confessional spirit of the thinkpiece blogosphere, I will here list absolutely everything that I find wonderful about this video.

 

1. The stupid pointless increases in volume, the annoying dubstep, the pitch changes. They exist entirely to annoy the viewer, and I have a quiet affection for anything with that much contempt for its user.

2. Valjean's very long prisoner number 24602060451, of course, but most especially the furious emphasis Javert places on the five.

3.  "You're no-one. lol."

4.  The exchange of Valjean sniffling and Javert going "nnnn"

5. The beautiful non-sequitur "I stole a loaf of bread." "And I'm Javert."

6. Javert shouting "FIVE" in isolation.

7. "My sister's child was the child of Death". The possibility of a fascinating demonic parallel plot to Les Miserables is tantalisingly glimpsed.

8. "Unless you learn the meaning of narushnashnzzzh" "I know the meaning of ezhnazhnalOOOOOOR." Whip-smart dialogue.

9. "What? You're a dangerous nun."

10. "And I'm Jojvert."

Thus a single very self-serious scene is reimagined with nothing more than standard video editing tools to include a liaison between Valjean's sister and the Grim Reaper, an absurd Brazil-like bureaucratic dystopia with needlessly long prisoner numbers, Pinter-like cross-talk, the questioning of the meaning of language itself, and the ironic juxtaposition of frivolous internet slang and the forced removal of identity within a massive punitive institution. If I take this video exactly as seriously as I'm definitely not meant to.


There's a half serious point here, which is something to do with the cannibalisation of existing straight-faced culture being an interesting source of future comic innovation that can find new stories to tell and new angles on characters with great ease and accessibility for anyone with an editing suite. I would go further, but I've been distracted by this Postman Pat mashup.

Pat can break through your door. You really should lock your door.

How About Noah

Russell Crowe seems determined to turn himself into the most ridiculous self-parody on earth. How exactly do you follow playing a Robin Hood from everywhere, an Inspector Javert who could moonlight warning Paris of impending air raids and the god-like father of Superman himself? You play Noah, obviously. The actual Noah who has to build the actual Ark to survive the actual Flood.

Right. Once you've watched that, and finished the long pause that I hope will come between the word "Um" and the word "what?", I hope you'll join me in preordering the vast buckets of popcorn that this doubtless catastrophically awesome turkey will demand. This is it, folks, this is the Hollywood singularity: Darren Aronofsky directing Russell Crowe playing Noah with Ray Winstone epitomising all humanity's cockney evil and Emma Watson practically wearing a sign on her head instructing critics to refer to her as "more wooden than the ark she's standing on". This is going to be fun. A disaster of biblical scale. We like watching colossal  disasters, which is why they make so many disaster movies. It's also why there are so many disasters in the Bible.

The ancient myths we have inherited served many purposes, but let's not forget they had to entertain. The destruction of Troy, the flood of Gilgamesh, the freezing of the world at Ragnarok: these narratives at some level satisfy our ghoulish love of watching other human beings get slaughtered for no reason they can control. Quite why this is is a question for anthropologists and literary critics: I suspect it might be because it magnifies a thousandfold a suspicion we don't dare to face head-on, that life is random and cruel and pointless. Such a vast scale of unfair slaughter paradoxically makes it easier to bear, even delightful, like getting into fits of laughter at a funeral. I can absolutely see why these stories exist.

The problem is that not everyone thinks of them like I do as just stories. In fact, rather a lot of people have a deep abiding faith in the religion that has its roots in these Bronze Age texts, and given this fact it seems a rather odd choice of movie to make. Because the Noah story to me is one of the moral cruxes of the entire Bible, even though it is usually remembered as a way of teaching kids the names of animals and the alphabet at the same time if you're lucky. 

One of my favourite bits of TV ever, God on Trial, features an extraordinary closing monologue from Antony Sher as a rabbi in Auschwitz denouncing God for his crimes. When he gets to the Flood, he asks the blindingly obvious question: What could the people of the earth have done that was so bad as to warrant annihilation? It's a shocking question because it links deeds to punishment. Genesis tells us that the hearts of men were evil, and so God slew them. But that is not how we conceive of justice. Even if we believe in the death penalty, we do so only in the case of murder, and since every human by definition could not be a murderer, the deaths of them all and their innocent children would seem monstrous to us.

And then there's the method of extermination. God could simply stop the hearts of every living creature, but chooses to drown them. Drowning is a terrible way to die. As waters rose, the terrified evil mothers would have run with their new-born babies to higher ground, expending every effort until it became clear the waters would not stop rising and in their exhaustion they and their children would succumb to the slow suffocation of the water. This is not the justice of a merciful God, but one who wishes beings to suffer before they die.

Now, picking holes in the Old Testament is boring and done by boring atheists all over the internet. But this particular story fascinates me because it is the most mythological of the Bible - it is so bleak, absurd and nihilist that it clearly comes from some anguished folk impulse. Indeed the flood narrative is famously common to many cultures. That makes it the hardest to reconcile with the providential Christianity in the latter Testament, basically because they're coming from two different places but need retrospectively to claim to be part of an overarching scheme. This is quite doable as long as you don't focus on the pain and death of the wicked and do focus on the progressive redemption of the sinful, which in a sense begins with the rainbow covenant.

And that is why this film is such an oddity. If you have a hundred million dollars to make a Biblical film, why force attention onto the most ethically uncomfortable moment? Even if the entire human race was made up of gang boss Ray Winstones, all threatening unspeakable things to debtors, we would feel a bit uneasy about watching their complete obliteration. It is possible that there's a fascinating counter-argument to all this in the film itself. It will be interesting to see.

But am I the only one who feels that if you wanted to point out the true horror in the Old Testament to as many people as possible, the best way would be to make a massive Hollywood blockbuster that appeared to take itself very seriously? Fascinatingly, it is written by John Logan, who has impressive pedigree. Just how mischievous can a massive film get?

 Come for the implosion of Russell Crowe's credibility,

stay for the stone-cold exploration of genocide

The Scottsboro Boys: A Horrible Musical

The Scottsboro Boys is the final musical collaboration of Kander and Ebb, the composer/lyricist team famous for Cabaret and Chicago, about the trial and sentencing of 9 innocent black men in 1930s Alabama. It's currently playing at the Young Vic in transfer from New York, and it is stunning. If you can get a ticket, you should go. I'd just like to put a couple of thoughts straight in my head about it, while it's fresh, because I found it a distinctly unpleasant experience, and I'm not sure everyone else in the theatre did. Certainly the standing ovations suggested people felt that the finale, while moving, was also in some way rousing. I just sat back feeling pummelled and bruised. Not guilty, or angry, or uplifted, or purged. It felt like recovering from an illness. And that's not going to go on the poster, but it's the best recommendation I've given to a play in a while.

I think this must have something to do with the minstrel show aspect. To illustrate:

This is one of the opening numbers, "Everyone's a Minstrel Tonight". The whole show is a reverse minstrel act - the black actors impersonate white stereotypes, including Southern Sheriffs, floozies, Jewish lawyers, and do it with a viciousness and lack of subtlety quite shocking to modern eyes. Many of the musical numbers have them dance in the traditional minstrel cakewalk fashion, wide eyes, splayed hands and fixed grins, even as they sing about the wonder of dying by electric chair. It becomes clear by the end that the nine men have become a minstrel show for all America, a righteous personification of the evils of Jim Crow for liberal America to feel better about itself and a defiant symbol of Southern independence for the Alabamans trying to get them executed. They are just figures in blackface. In one extraordinary number, Kyle Scatliffe sings a song in his own words before translating into pidgin mintrelsy for the benefit of the court.

At this point I'd like to jump back to Cabaret, which this show for me surpasses. But the standout moment in that show was the point at which Herr Ludwig hijacks the Jewish Schultz's birthday party with a rendition of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me":

This, by the way, is an entirely invented Bavarian folk song. But it sounds genuinely Teutonic in idiom. It's also impressively catchy, and coming as it does at the end of the first act, the audience goes into the interval singing to themselves: "Oh Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign your children have waited to see..."

The feeling I get when humming that to myself is what Kander and Ebb revive, brutally and repeatedly, in The Scottsboro Boys. And here's the crucial difference: both the Nazi folk song and the minstrel musical number feel like relics of a bygone age of brutality. But where the Bavarian oompah band survives in some form untainted by Hitler's shadow, the minstrel show has been utterly destroyed. It exists only in the vaguest of folk memories now, a tawdry and wretched shard of a dark-mirror world now consigned to our nightmares. There is no society for the preservation of traditional minstrel techniques, no revival shows, no performances at village fêtes to keep it alive. The only way we will ever see anything like it is in a show like this, in which black men take on the role of white men. Even then, to be honest, I found it horribly offensive, but this is the point.

By showing us so directly an art-form that took as its very axiom the natural hilarity of a race, their reduction to a single punch-line, an amusing dialect and a silly walk, we are shown a truth of dehumanisation from a different angle. Any social justice-minded work must try to wrongfoot its complacent audience to show them how man abuses man in a way they hadn't thought about before. Black men being unjustly consigned to the chair, I can handle on stage - I read To Kill A Mockingbird when I was young, so I think I know what's coming. But to watch a dance routine that is simultaneously breathtaking and breathtakingly offensive to my very understanding of common humanity: that is a feeling I hadn't felt before.

When I say this will almost certainly be your only chance to see the resurrection of the minstrel show, that sounds like the worst condemnation. But you should see it. To understand what racism is, you cannot simply look at what it fears and hates and sneers. You also have to look at what it laughs at. And it will make you feel so ill, you may feel unable to stand and applaud.