In Praise Of Just Not Being Arsed

My first couple of weeks on Twitter have been exhilarating. Having binged on following notable journalists, scientists, economists, radicals, comedians, theatres and friends, the opening few days represented a kind of sensory overload: buckets of links to interesting stuff speeding past at a rate of knots, debates spiralling out into the ether in tiny 140 character bubbles, the business of the day being consumed so fast that societal indigestion seemed a probable outcome, all punctuated by @big_ben_clock's helpful BONGS as suitably atmospheric background. What it brings into focus more than anything else, though, is just how little I can be arsed.

I'm a liberal left winger interested in inequality and education reform and foreign intervention and censorship and racial injustice and God knows what else. But I don't really do anything about any of it. I sign petitions occasionally, give money to certain causes, post hectoring statuses about things when I think my HectorQuotient is sufficiently replenished, but I am not as radical as I am being asked to be by the constant drumbeat presented to me by Facebook and Twitter. Everything clamours for our attention and it is simply not attention we can afford to give it to the exclusion of everything else. You could spend your entire life signing petitions for worthy causes shared online. Focus E15 are occupying a housing association in Newham. I agree that London is forcing out poor people, so, going by the amount of Twitterbadgering Josie Long is giving me, I should be sharing their story, donating to their cause, turning up to show solidarity. But I don't because I could also be protesting against further intervention in Iraq or against BP or the Catholic Church or others in the rogue's gallery.

My work is cut out picketing Dark Lords

Twitter contributes to the grand desensitisation to good causes that the social media age represents. Our conscience is pricked so frequently it starts to resemble a colander, and leaks out resolve accordingly. A week ago a Facebook friend of mine wrote an essay entitled The English Education System In The Age Of Neoliberalism, the thoughts of a Marxist on being a teacher today. Being not-a-Marxist myself, my natural instinct was to engage, to argue, to learn from it where I could, but eventually to oppose. And yet since I hadn't the time or the experience to bring a truly nuanced view to the whole thing, I sat it out. And I felt angry with myself for doing this.

I felt angry because what was being presented was the implicit jab that I didn't care enough. By writing that the entire education system was at risk of being drowned in market-orientated stupidity, the challenge is made to the reader to either present an alternative take or be responsible by inaction for watching the destruction of good, decent things. And this, I get the feeling, is where an awful lot of reactionary thinking comes from. Your average non-bleeding-heart liberal is confronted with a world of gigantic injustice and is asked to care about it all. There is racism and sexism, homophobia, inequality, human rights abuses, environmental degradation, and you have to Care about it all, or you're a Bad person. The easiest reaction to all this is to simply deny that any of these things exist. It's the liberals and the socialists and the radicals who are the reverse-racists, the true sexists, the real aristocrats.

The real polluters

Because deep down, none of us want to believe that we are a bad person. The use of "do-gooder" as an insult tells you something about the mindset of reactionary thinking: the dislike of those whose first instinct is to do good in all situations is a concealed fury that one's own largely blameless life is being implicitly called into question simply because you don't share that instinct. Political Correctness is so despised because it holds default behaviour and language to account; while all things being equal most people would see the logic in not using certain language in individual cases, as a lifestyle demand the need to hold yourself to a decent standard of liberal behaviour is grating enough that PCness itself is deemed ill-founded, an enemy to freedom and honest people everywhere.

I feel twinges of this fury when reading my Facebook or Twitter feeds. How can I possibly be expected to care about all this stuff with the attention it deserves? I feel under fire from everyone more radical than me, that I'm some kind of quisling for the establishment, simply because I'm not shouting as loudly as they are about every injustice under the sun. This is an illusion, but a telling one. I'm not as impressively feminist as some, not as forceful about racial stuff as some, not as left-wing as some. And all that makes me want to spend my time arguing with those people to validate myself, indeed probably taking deliberately more centrist opinions just to annoy those bastards implying I'm a bad person, rather than facing those powerful interests who are probably far more of a threat to my beliefs.

Anonymous board members being ironically harder to hate than Anonymous

But in the end I am happy just not giving as much of a shit as other people. And that, I think, is a perfectly defensible stance. Progressive change needs a large reserve force of people only marginally interested in every issue who aren't put off by feeling they should be more involved. These are the troops of attrition, the people who, for example, reject the homophobia of previous generations and so gradually outnumber and marginalise the forces of reaction without going on a single march.  If women's power and dignity is to move forward in the coming century, it will be because a vast number of otherwise moderate, uninterested people take up the cause of feminism by default, the sort of process that much as I hate to admit it  Emma Watson and Upworthy contribute to.

Radicals require the help of more moderate people like me because solidarity is how change happens. I am an ally of progressive forces, and I will do more than just sit on the sidelines, but I will do so on my own terms. My duty is not to be needled by the endless pin pricks to my ego that Twitter activism represents, but rather stand at a distance, respectfully disagreeing, but always remembering that overall I want them to win. We all have to not be arsed about quite a lot of stuff. The trick is ensuring that when someone tells you you can't be arsed, you don't get so annoyed you forget that they're probably right.

On Clubbing

A theme I seem to come back to a lot is the gap in the English cultural memory when it comes to our own heyday. As I said before, there was a time when the British were extremely capable at administrating large foreign populations, having supreme undemocratic power over a quarter of the world's people for many years. Yet that colossal power, matched in history only by the Romans, the Mongols and the Han, has not grafted itself onto the historical imagination in the way that the other great powers of history clearly have done. Walking down Whitehall today, you have to struggle to remind yourself that the men who once trudged to work in that square kilometre of buildings each day had power of life and death over the tea planter in Bengal, the diamond miner in Johannesburg, the fisherman in Newfoundland. It was a power exercised with little pomp and considerable deference to circumstance, but it was supreme power nonetheless.

Whitehall is not a good fit for the centrepiece of global empire. It tries to ape the grandest of European imperial neo-classicism and might, but almost seems to bottle out in a very English manner: the buildings are large, certainly, but none of them excessively so, the style impressive but never florid, even the course of the street is not straight like a Parisian boulevard but bends like all things to the awkwardness of English property rights. Strangely Washington DC would be better as the centre of such an Empire; there is a city that understands the grand gesture, the concealed fist inside the velvet glove of monument. London just can't give off the sense of threat that a good imperial city needs. No Forbidden City here, no Colosseum, no Carthaginian warship prows displayed as archaeological versions of heads on spikes (Mongols and Timurids didn't really need this kind of grand capital, on the basis that being able to build mountains of skulls was probably better imperial PR than anything you could build out of stone).

Hitler's proposed Berlin would have implied the mountains of skulls rather effectively

The British self-image never really found a way to incorporate the Empire in the same way the other great Empires of history found themselves irrevocably lashed to their own mythos: Rome could never go back to being a city-state after being an Empire any more than the Chinese knew what to do with an Empire that had been humiliated by a few mercantile gunboats that thousands of years had told them should be nothing more than barbaric irritations. But the British never really knew what to do with an Empire they could only justify retrospectively. Perhaps the reason for Britain's lacuna is suggested by Orwell:

 It was not possible that nineteenth-century England should produce a book like War and Peace, or like Tolstoy's minor stories of army life, such as Sebastopol or The Cossacks, not because the talent was necessarily lacking but because no one with sufficient sensitiveness to write such books would ever have made the appropriate contacts. Tolstoy lived in a great military empire in which it seemed natural for almost any young man of family to spend a few years in the army, whereas the British Empire was and still is demilitarized to a degree which continental observers find almost incredible. Civilized men do not readily move away from the centres of civilization, and in most languages there is a great dearth of what one might call colonial literature.

That is to say, the people who might have made something culturally significant of the Empire were in the gentlemen's Clubs of Pall Mall rather than experiencing the colonies first hand. Far easier to build a St Petersburg when you feel that ethnic Russians from across your vast Empire would come to and be awed by its splendour - there would be no point in making London feel like the city that ruled all of India, because how many Indians would ever see London?

All this is in my mind because I visited the Reform Club today as part of London Open House Weekend, and what shocked me was the insouciance of the power which once resided in old Clubland. Our guide was keen to tell us that everything inside was theatrical, essentially for show: Barry had created a strange mix of Italian Renaissance interiors with scagliola pillars and trompe l'oeil ceilings; a fantasy of decadence for gentlemen who had no shortage of it in their home lives but needed a different kind to escape to.

 The men who attended these clubs were stupendously powerful, not just in terms of the political power wielded over Imperial dominions but also in the movement of capital across the globe, and yet unlike other times at which so much power has concentrated in a single ruling class, no style emerges out of it other than the desire for a bit of comfort and decent tea. These weren't the immensely ritualised lives of Chang'an bureaucrats nor the aesthetically refined indulgence of Medici or Ottoman courts. Just enough wealth is conjured by the surroundings to show you're upper class, but it is as thick as a coat of paint. It certainly doesn't imply anyone rules over millions of lives, just as Buckingham Palace is little more than a modest townhouse compared to a Versailles or a Winter Palace.

One of the rooms I saw was a secret room off the main dining area, a small chamber hidden behind a fake wall for more minor gatherings. In here, I was told, Asquith's War Cabinet would frequently meet since they were all Liberals and this was their favourite club. The meaning of this only hit me after leaving. In that tiny room I had just stood in, decisions were made in such horribly convivial surrounding that sent a million men to their deaths on the barbed wire of Flanders. It is at the points where the actual might of Britain and its armed forces meets the silliness of so much of its aristocracy when true horror begins to seep in. When Churchill makes decisions through a fog of cigars, brandy and witticisms, or when Haig is agreed by men in a tiny room in the back of the Reform Club to be a decent sort whose inability to stop the working class being slaughtered doesn't suggest he is incapable.

As a symbol of its time period, then, Clubland is almost completely unsatisfying. To try and touch what made the British Empire the way it was, to find a connection to the period that defines our country today in so many ways is inevitably frustrating. The facts of Empire and the way it was run were so far divorced from each other that the connection between the two is completely unmade in the collective memory, which is why the crimes of colonialism are so apt to be forgot. The Reform Club was built with profits from the Hudson Bay Company, but nothing of Canada exists in the building. At least the Romans had the good grace to bring back bits of Carthaginian ship to remind everyone where the money to build the Forum had come from. But Empire is all but invisible in the heart of London, and the bowler-hatted mandarins doing silly walks remain able to commit atrocities without ever looking like they cared about more than the wax in their moustache.

I suppose that Pall Mall is the closest to the heart of the Empire you can get, and yet I am afraid that nothing really remains of this massive historical fact, since it wasn't real to the people who were involved. The memory of Empire, though, is vital. And my thoughts for some reason travelled, in that place, back to Iraq, and the memories of old empires there. Nothing concentrates the mind quite like the declaration of a new caliphate. Now there's an empire that remembers its own history. The Umayyad Empire is comparable in terms of world population conquered with the British, but it brought its culture with it. Muslims haven't forgotten the caliphate because the caliphate knew how to justify itself to itself; it took the Mongols to wipe out the last true caliph, some six hundred years after the first. 

Walking around that bizarre Disneyland of Italianate Victoriana, I couldn't help but think our Empire a flash in the pan in comparison, a tawdry little imitation Empire keen to forget itself. With China and India on the move and Islam fighting 7th century battles, the remnants of the 19th century West look increasingly prone to slide back into the backwaters of history, their sheepish glory and their buckets of blood and lucre forgiven by the default of cultural amnesia.

Back to Iraq

We're rolling out the guns again, hurrah, hurrah
We're rolling out the guns again, hurrah, hurrah
We're rolling out the guns again
To fight the evil ones again
But we're going to need your sons again
Johnny what's it to ya?

The Battle For The Soul Of Islam, And Other Things About Which I Know Nothing

Praise belongs to God, the Lord of all Being, 
The All-merciful, the All-compassionate, 
The Master of the Day of Doom.
Thee only we serve; to Thee alone we pray for succour. 
Guide us in the straight path, the path of those 
Whom Thou hast blessed, not of those against 
Whom Thou art wrathful, nor of those who are astray.

So begins the Quran, a document secular Westerners spend a lot of time talking about without ever actually reading. It's been sitting on my Kindle for ages resolutely unread, however many times I make the pledge to get started on it. I imagine I'm not alone in this. There is the desire to know but none of the dedication. So many conversations since 2001 have revolved around Islam and what they actually believe, but a familiar hesitancy creeps into the voice of anyone who isn't either a scholar or a bigot as the conversation continues. Doesn't it condone beheading? Aren't there seventy-two virgins in there somewhere? I remember reading something somewhere... never mind. Because none of us have a clue what's in it. Of course we don't - none of us can be arsed to read it.

We should have long ago, as a country, had a "let's all read the Quran" month, or two or three or however long it took. We should have all just bitten the bullet and got it done, because there seems little sign we're going to stop the conversation any time soon, what with a new birth of Salafi butchery in Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Nigeria stalking our headlines, not to mention Rotherham and assorted other Muslim-related problem areas. We ought to have those lines inscribed in our head as firmly as "In the beginning God created the heavens..." because it is considerably more relevant to our current debates.

"Yeah, but the thing about the hadiths regarding zakat is..."

The fact is that Islam is having a pretty tough time of it right now, and only Muslims themselves know the way out. However much the opinion of the average Daily Mail (and Guardian) online commenter holds that the entire religion is at the root of the problem, it is of course irrelevant as far as solutions go - Muslims are not going to give up their religion because they've seen the worst excesses of it any more than the Siege of Munster was going to convince Protestants that the whole Reformation thing was not worth the effort. Almost all talk about the current jihadi problem talks around the issue - it's either about the wisdom or lack thereof of Western intervention in the Levant, or it's about how Saudi Arabia is to blame for the whole thing, or it's about immigration policy in the UK. Seeing as you can't bomb people into moderation (whatever Netanyahu believes) and you can't kill every militant, this problem only ends when jihadi recruitment from a young male population across the world dries up.

And the reason we don't talk about that is that we don't know anything about what that would look like. We don't know what the average British Muslim's life looks like. We might hear the routine condemnations of what's going on from Muslim communities, but the nightly news never gives them space to say anything more than "not in my name". My suspicion is that the process of migration over the last half century has led to a vast number of sub-par imams - the settlement into new areas gives imams extra authority as guardians of the "traditional" way leading to poorly-educated clerics from rural Pakistan, say, who aren't capable of dealing with the demands of their young charges. This seems to be common-sense - but how would I know what a good imam looks like? I could tell you what I think a good priest might be like, but I have no starting context for the Muslim equivalent because I have no Muslim acquaintances.

Isn't that extraordinary? A full five percent of the English population, and a greater percentage than that in my age group, and not a soul to be found in my contact list. I don't know who is to blame for this - there are certainly not enough British Pakistani students at Cambridge, for one thing, and I went to a private school where that demographic is even scarcer on the ground. I'm not going to blame myself for not going and actively looking for Muslim friends - it is no one's responsibility to create heterogeneous social groups, only to not resist them. 

According to stock photos, that's not hard.

In any case I'm not alone in having little to no actual contact with Islam on anything more than a cursory basis - plenty of people might have Muslim co-workers and friends, but the fear of getting into hot water prevents us from enquiring too far about the practices, let alone the scripture and belief. There is no mainstream depiction of Muslim life on TV, no adept media spokesmen who have any time to do anything but blurt condemnations of atrocities, no niche in the cultural sphere for a character like Omid Djalili's Mahmud in The Infidel, coasting in the comfortable contradictions of going to mosque, listening to rock music and occasionally having a beer. I actually think a country in which we could make more jokes about Islam would be a better one, because as Dara O'Briain says, the reason we don't is because no one knows a sodding thing about Islam.  

And because we are so totally ignorant of our countrymen's way of life, we can't talk about radicalisation properly. How can we if we don't know what moderation looks like? And the cliché that "moderates" need to win out in the Muslim communities is for the same reason pretty meaningless. A week or so ago a Guardian commenter called MalikIsmir as far as I can tell coined this rather useful aphorism: "A fundamentalist will kill you. A moderate will watch you die". We don't need moderate Islam to win. We need liberal Islam to win.

Hurrah, boys, hurrah.

Liberals get a rough press in the West because they've won most of their battles, so now they come across as hand-wringing and spineless. But the essential truth they fought for  - that no one race, class, religion or creed has such authority that it deserves us to unquestioningly kill for it rather than argue for it - took slaughter from the Wars of Religion to the First World War to drum into the public conciousness. Liberalism is hard. And Liberal Islam faces an almost unimaginably tough task in the parlous state of the Muslim world today. Wars and insurgencies almost unbroken from Nigeria to Indonesia should have shown us by now that we are facing a massive generational cataclysm, the result of the failure of Arab liberalism, Arab nationalism, Arab autocracy, and Arab economic policy over a century. Western policy has been harmful but not instrumental; believing that these wars will end due to a change in our stance is naive.

In fifty years' time, the Islamic State or its successors will either still be going strong or will have ceased to exist as a significant threat to global peace. If it has failed, it will not be because the current generation ever gave up the fight (they are true believers) and it won't be because they were all killed by drones (if the full force of the world's strongest military cannot defeat an insurgency over a decade in one country what chance has it against twenty?). It will have failed because the recruits dried up. It will fail because it ceased to appeal to young men because it was supplanted by something more attractive. Salafism has had all the momentum in Islamic discourse for decades now. That is not to say it commands anything near a majority of Muslim opinion, but simply that it "mainstream Islam", whatever that is, is largely inert and reactive, a vacuum leaking young hearts to its more confident wild-eyed cousin.

The old Beltway line "if you're explaining you're losing" extends to religion as much as it does to politics. The various imams who have placed a fatwa on ISIS are playing catchup, unable to provide a compelling vision of their own religion that allows them to do anything more than condemn the jihadis as "unIslamic". But the new caliph would say the same of them, of course. And anyone who's been in a message war of any kind knows that when it's one person's word against another, the more dynamic one wins.

What does a dynamic, attractive, liberal Islam that appeals to the young and can outpace Salafism and its cohorts look like? Will a form of ijtihadi thinking gain a sheen equivalent to that of the American evangelicals of the past fifty years? Will something closer to Sufism eventually appeal to a youth weary of the bloodshed and the endless calls for more struggle? I don't know. I have no idea. None of us non-Muslims do. But simply because we don't know anything about Islam doesn't mean we can't acknowledge that that is the central issue in resolving this crisis. There is a generational war to be fought, and we have to sit on the sidelines. Nevertheless, it might still be helpful to read the Quran at some point. We're going to be talking about it for a while longer. 

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

You'd be entirely within your rights to complain I pivot too frequently off Andrew Sullivan to get my posts going - I guess his style just sparks my thoughts more than anyone else. Go figure, as our American cousins would say. Anyway, his most recent critique of "The Great Unravelling" is pretty solid stuff, and reminds us all that history doesn't do convenient narratives so much as it does grinding, repetitive nastiness. Here's the bit that gets me:

...maybe American amnesia will take hold again – and the Jacksonian impulse will once again trump every rational attempt at a foreign policy that isn’t always doomed to repeat the errors of the past. From the way things are going, it’s America’s own history of Jacksonian violence against outsiders that will prevail. We believe we are immune from history – that it can be erased, that what matters is just the latest news cycle and the political spin that can be applied to it. But history will have – and is having – the last word.  

Andrew Jackson doesn't get talked about enough nowadays, which is why Sullivan's mentioning of him surprised me a bit when talking about contemporary foreign policy. But it was the nudge that gets the needle into the right groove, since the more I think about it, the more important Jacksonian America becomes when understanding the paradox of America in the world today.

I've been reading James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom recently, and to be honest I hadn't really appreciated what the Democratic Party actually meant in Jackson's day. Defined very broadly, I would now say that it represented the interests of those people who were not doing very well out of the arrival of High Capitalism in America: the farmers, the new factory labourers, a large number of the slave owners, and the generally down-at-heel. Not a particularly stable coalition of course, as the later decades would prove, but for Jackson's populism it certainly served its purpose of ushering in the second great era of American democracy: when the Jeffersonian republicanism of the hardy independent farmer gave way to the new reality of a land with the class structure of a capitalist country and the need to serve its underclass.

There were plenty in the country at the time who decried Jackson as nothing more than a rabble-rouser, "King Mob", and who believed that his populism was directly in opposition to republican values. What is certainly true is that after General Jackson became president, America was a considerably more aggressive nation than it had been. Jefferson had bought the American expansion with the Louisiana Purchase and not a drop of blood spilt; but for Jackson expansion meant the Trail of Tears. Under his disciple Polk it meant Manifest Destiny, it meant the Mexican War, it meant the threat with war against Britain over Oregon. Is populism to blame for this particular mindset? Possibly. The impulse to find a foreign enemy and denounce it and believe America was strong enough to defeat it has long been a motivating factor in American democracy, despite Washington's reprimand that America should not "go in search of monsters to slay". Jacksonian democracy shows a betrayal of that creed barely before the country was out of its cradle.

America was founded by men with a keen sense of history, possibly the greatest of any group of learned men in the Western world in their day. The dreadful irony is that their founding of a country with a constitution designed to protect from the excesses history had taught them about led to a country that thought, at times, it had escaped history. The American story is a powerful one, but we must always remember that stories were, in the first instance, told to get us to go to sleep. The American public today is not so different than Jackson's. There may be no Indian frontier to point to offering riches for the common man, but there is a darkness at the edge of the American sphere into which its soldiers can march, as they did into Mexico and Cuba and Normandy, to confront the evil of the old world and demonstrate that America would not only exist outside it but trump it every time the two came into contact.

I am almost impressed by the speed of Jacksonian amnesia as it works its magic on a war-weary American public. ISIS, like the Mexicans of Polk's day before them, have shown clear provocation to America which can't be ignored. If the founding principles of America are anti-imperialistic, are isolationist, are republican and resist a strong military establishment, too bad. They never lasted that long anyway. Democracy at its heart means populism, and populism means Fox News and the allure of the military band and the forbidden thrill of watching jihadists incinerated by drones on the nightly news. The merry ghost of Andrew Jackson leads America behind him, piping his seductive tunes of endless struggle with the surrounding dark.

Schrödinger's Flirty Cat

I am yet to write about dating on this blog for the simple reason that I'm not very good at it and it would in any case threaten to devolve into me complaining that short guys can't catch a break in this gender-normative world (I once went on a Tinder date in which the woman's face literally dropped within nanoseconds of discovering I'm 5'4". It would have been hilarious if didn't also etch itself in pain on my memory). Nevertheless, it always was going to be impossible to resist writing about something so completely stupid, so sublimely ridiculous as dating forever. There's just too much farcical humanity in watching the English desperately fumbling around with an activity they all at some level suspect of being inherently American.

Ha ha, I have no idea what I'm doing

Anyway, I wanted to get down an idea more concerned with flirting in general than dating per se, because it has arisen several times in conversation with friends and I can't find any reference to it on the internet so far, so I smell millennial gold. I have named the concept Schrödinger's Flirty Cat, or SFC, and it describes just about every flirtatious encounter to some degree. 

To recap the concept of Schrödinger's Cat, at least as far as it pertains here, if you stick a cat in a box with a vial of poison that could be randomly released at any time and then seal the box, you have before you a cat that in observational terms is both alive and dead at the same time (Terry Pratchett tells us that there is a third possible category, Bloody Furious). According to various interpretations of quantum mechanics, both the universe in which the cat is alive and the one in which it is dead exist simultaneously until one of those universes is killed off for good by the opening of the box and the observation of the cat.

Pictured: a bastard

Now the Flirty Cat operates on a similar principle, except that she represents your chances of getting off with someone on a given evening. In Schrodinger's thought experiment, the poison vial was triggered by the decay of radioactive material, that is a random event that couldn't be predicted or observed from outside the box but determines the state of the cat. In the version in which you are, say, chatting with someone attractive at a house party, while you have methods of varying reliability to check how successful you will be if you lunge in for a snog (apparently playing with hair is a good sign?) the fog of war (or more likely a mix of alcohol, terror, self-loathing and occasional heroically misinformed confidence) means there is no solid observational evidence that you won't make a fool of yourself.

This is because the workings of someone else's mind are as unreadable as the decay of an atom inside a locked box to you. There are various guesses you can make, but most people are terrible at this and even if they aren't it will still be a guess. Much like the moment the poison vial breaks, the moment a mind is made up to go home with you is known exclusively to that person and cannot be deduced. So two universes have to exist simultaneously for our hero leaning against the stairs with a warm can of Red Stripe and what he hopes is a good line in nonchalant but sexy witticisms. In one universe all this arm-touching and coy glances are leading somewhere and he will spend a good portion of the rest of his night intimately acquainted with someone else's tonsils. In the other he has totally misread the situation and this lovely girl is humouring him and is just about to recognise someone over the other side of the room who can get her out of there. At the point when one of them either makes a move or says "no thank you" one of those universes collapses.

"I just have to dance over here for a bit"

Now, the interesting bit is the way social propriety requires us to actively cultivate both those universes at once - to simultaneously believe you are interested and not interested, that the Flirty Cat is alive and dead. After all, if you don't succeed with someone you will want plausible deniability that you were never interested in them because a. rejection is humiliating b. you might get another chance and c. you might just want to be friends afterwards. So a flirter must pursue a line where retrospectively he or she can never be said to openly chirpsing right up until the point where their mouths have collided. It doesn't take Erwin Schrödinger to work out that this kind of thinking is going to cruelly sabotage anyone's game even if it is rational for each party (and at each party).

The basic problem is that no one can telegraph their intentions straight out, for obvious reasons. We're left with a pantomime of trying to give vague, deniable signals and read them back and then make a gamble, and for some people, myself included, this is all a bit much. I know some people who resolve this problem with the quintessentially British solution of self-referential irony: giving very clear signals by clearly pointing out that they are flirting, look at me, aren't I ridiculous. This method cunningly succeeds in verifying whether the Flirty Cat is alive or dead without ruining the social situation - at least this way if you don't succeed it is at least deniable that you were trying particularly hard, and you can retain your dignity and the possibility of further conversation. But it seems a bit of a ridiculous farce to go through every time.

What is so damaging to people's chances is attempting to flirt in situations where ostensibly everyone is just being friendly. It was just a given to me as a teenager that you got with people at parties or on nights out; I never stopped to question why we were meant to do this on occasions when the default setting was friends having fun with each other. The potential for miscommunication is terrific - yes there are some people who navigate it well, but also a vast number who are simply going to get it wrong most of the time. The English are a bunch who have almost made a national mythology out of fucking this stuff up, and we relish it even as it kills off the self-esteem of many thousands of our countrymen. 

A true Englishman in the tradition of Cardigan and Haig

This is why I am such a fan of Tinder and the arrival of large-scale tech-driven dating on these shores. Tinder or OKCupid or what have you cannot entirely resolve the SFC paradox - you still need to maintain a universe in which the date goes badly but you retain some dignity - but it removes a large quantity of the unknowns, since you have both turned up knowing you are specifically on a date. I am heartened to see many of my friends discovering the ease of this scenario relative to what they thought their flirting abilities were. It's neither rocket science nor quantum physics, but clearly it is working for a whole bunch of people. 

And if you feel you're lacking in confidence when flirting with people, just think of Schrödinger's Flirty Cat. It may not help you come up with clever lines or give off a charming demeanour, but it will make you think "I am the destroyer of universes", and that can only help.

Exhibit B: The Case For The Defence

Exhibit B has been causing some fuss recently, and I for one am shocked, shocked to find out that an art exhibit which features "live zoo" and "black people standing motionless in cages" in its description has been controversial. Read about it here and here for context.

Now, my wading into issues of race normally proceeds something along the lines of a happy child bounding gleefully into the ocean only to discover that it is made of boiling oil and there's a strong current, and I'll admit I was originally drawn in to the discussion because I was annoyed that I had actually seen the damn thing while apparently no one suggesting a boycott had. Whether it's the Daily Mail or liberal types, I get equally annoyed by anyone suggesting something cultural be stopped because it SOUNDS TERRIBLE and therefore SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED.

Upon entering into discussions of race

This then leads to me having to defend to the hilt something that while pretty good was hardly the best thing I saw at the Fringe. On top of this, points raised about the representation of black people in the arts are generally pretty unarguable; Africans as the victims sitting there passively is hardly new to any of us and there's a ton of contemporary African art that never reaches London. By opposing the campaign I'm essentially denying a whole ton of legitimate and complex issues, and the complexity of it all tends to drag any attempted reasonable conversation down into the semantics and questions of agency and power relations familiar to anyone who talks about this stuff regularly, and it all gets rather heavy.

So I'd like to simplify it a bit, if possible. The reason I think Exhibit B should be seen is because I don't actually give a damn about the people in those exhibits. I don't really think the exhibition is about them. The title is Exhibit B and reference is made in the programme notes to evidence in a trial. Fine. In a trial setting our question should not be about the victim. It is about the perpetrator. And that is why Exhibit B is essential, because the crimes represented there are part of my heritage and my culture as a white Englishman. There is a reason that Schubert's Ave Maria contends in the exhibition hall with sung Xhosa. What we are watching is the absolute nadir of barbarism at the rotten heart of what the perpetrators considered civilised society.

I would refer you to Ta-Nehisi Coates' wonderful The Myth of Western Civilisation here, at least in the sense that barbarism never left Europe. The strongest exhibit is that of a series of decapitated heads. A black woman like Selina Thompson (who actually did see it) might react to the singing severed heads like this:

Seeing black history presented as though it began and will end with Colonialism – i.e. when white people come into the picture, is NOTHING NEW. It is not radical, it does not challenge me – actually, it doesn’t challenge anyone really, because it feeds into a cultural narrative that is all too common. One in which pain and persecution is the only way in which we can understand the experience of blackness, one in which we fetishize the black experience as abject, and I am so done. So done.

And this is perfectly true. But my response was this:

Who decapitates people?

Some years ago a Pakistani friend quite casually related to me how a second cousin had been decapitated publicly by Taliban insurgents in the Swat Valley. My response then was, I think, a human one: Who the hell decapitates people? And now, with the media in thrall to the propaganda antics of ISIS, the question comes again, who the hell decapitates people? In the dark recesses of our cultural memories, we all hold in common that sense of what taking the head means; the ancient gesture of holding up your enemy's head for all to see; total and utter domination. What terrifying, alien, medieval power do we now face in this new caliphate? Are the armies of Khalid ibn Walid poised to arise from their graves and storm across the Levant once more?

And yet there, in front of me, was the proof that Europeans barely more than a century ago had decapitated many hundreds of their subjects in a show of power. There is the answer. We decapitate people. The evidence for the prosecution is pretty clear in Exhibit B, whether in suppression of Mau Mau or that of an asylum seeker suffocated on a plane in 2010 - the white Europeans have committed atrocities. I would have committed atrocities, perhaps.

Do I feel guilty? No, as I have written before. But this is part of my history. Every effort, though, will be made to forget. Coates quotes Tony Judt:

Evil, above all evil on the scale practiced by Nazi Germany, can never be satisfactorily remembered. The very enormity of the crime renders all memorialisation incomplete. Its inherent implausibility—the sheer difficulty of conceiving of it in calm retrospect—opens the door to diminution and even denial. Impossible to remember as it truly was, it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn’t. Against this challenge memory itself is helpless.

By presenting this memory in trial form, we cannot hide from it. It is a good way of remembering. And I am a passionate English patriot - my heritage, my culture must be remembered, all of it, especially that which we will try to forget.

Now, that doesn't invalidate the criticisms. Why use living black actors? Well, for one thing, it would be impossible and insulting to remove black people entirely from the picture. By involving them in passive form only, the onus is on the spectator to question their complicity, because this is the story of the spectator, not the spectated. Their story must be told too, it is true. Again, I want more plays like Season in the Congo to be put on. The problem is that it is impossible to be entirely fair when one culture's story touches another. One side will inevitably be taken. Are the white stories told more often? Absolutely. But they still need to be told.

Lastly, there is the question of the medium itself. The human zoo existed for a long time, and has been all but obliterated from cultural memory, understandably. But that obliteration is an act, however well-intentioned, of cultural treachery. I would draw the parallel to The Scottsboro Boys, which I write about here. There I argue that the true power of that show comes from resurrecting a cultural form, the minstrel show, so utterly horrible that merely to look at it comes with a twinge of guilt for even enjoying the choreography or the singing. I would imagine that the sentence "two rich white guys write all-black musical in the form of a minstrel show" would have had a few Twitter activists baying for blood if it had been marketed that way.

Phenomenally offensive

And yet minstrel shows happened. Human zoos happened. We can visit war memorials and death camps. We understand our place in relation to them. But how can we remember culture? Shows that people like us attended with a smile on our face? The act of remembering is wrenchingly hard. What is our position as a member of a minstrel show audience? Who are we when we walk around Exhibit B? In The History Boys, Hector is appalled that school trips visit Auschwitz, and must therefore eat packed lunches there: "Nothing is appropriate". No, nothing is appropriate when remembering barbarism. The critics of this exhibit are quite right to say it isn't appropriate. The one hope, then, is subversion: to take this human zoo and turn it into evidence for the prosecution of the culture that could have created it. It's an incredibly risky and fraught idea. Whether it works or not is really up to the viewer. Do you think it's about the people in the exhibit or the people who watch them?

When Disney Leaves You Cold

It's annoying me that the song Let It Go from the Disney movie Frozen seems to have been crowned an instant classic. Various parodies and cover versions have been making their way across my Facebook feed for months now and show no signs of stopping. Just look at the sheer number and popularity of Let It Go covers on YouTube and you'll see that we're looking at a cultural moment that will be remembered by minor comedians in decade-summarising clip shows yet unpitched in eras hence. And yet, despite backlashism being built into the fabric of contemporary online memified culture, I can't seem to find anyone willing to stand up and point out the obvious: that the song isn't any good.

Now, I haven't seen the movie, so perhaps it gains a massive deal of substance and insight and intelligence in context, but it seems pretty hard to believe. Look at some sample lyrics: 

It's funny how some distance
Makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me
Can't get to me at all

Let it go, let it go
I am one with the wind and sky
Let it go, let it go
You'll never see me cry
Here I stand
And here I'll stay
Let the storm rage on

Eugh. Inane, self-help boosterism of the most obvious order. I blame Wicked for this. When a song of such undemanding, ear melting boringness as Defying Gravity becomes known as Broadway classic bawled out out by musical theatre geeks as if it's Tonight at closing time, you know somehting is definitely up. There is a proudly "sub" sub-culture of self-proclaimed musical geeks who've had quite the boost in the last decade with Glee and High School Musical, a crowd I think of as the "pro-musical crowd". I say this because they seem very partisan about musical theatre, usually rigidly uncritical on the basis that musicals are not so much an artform as an identity for sensitive misfits and any criticism of blandness and schmaltz must be an attack on the whole community. The more the identity becomes defined, the tighter the wagons are circled. Ironic Disney-loving melts into fanaticism and sentimentality and crap chord structures seep in, forming the kind of endless brainless group-hug that allows Let It Go to masquerade as a masterpiece when it is in fact really, really dull.

This would be fine if Disney musicals didn't have such excellent pedigree. Having listened to other of Frozen's musical numbers, despite being written by actual Broadway composers of standing, it is clear that the days of Ashman and Menken might as well never have happened. These were the people behind Beauty and the Beast, a film with such extraordinarily clever songs Mozart and Da Ponte would struggle to keep up with all the tricks being used. Let's recap:

• In the first song, Belle, we establish the setting, the time period, the protagonist, her character, her origin, her interests, her goals, her frustration, the townspeople, their attitude to life, their attitude to the protagonist, the antagonist, his character, his goals, his values, the town's attitude to the antagonist, and still have time to fit in a great heap of foreshadowing, all in under five minutes and plenty of puns and lovely rhyming. That's basically taking the screenwriting handbook and showing you can do it all blindfolded while conducting Beethoven's Ninth.

• In the song Gaston, we have some of the greatest examples of lyrical brilliance in musical theatre history. The line "As a specimen yes I'm intimidating" is so perfectly internally rhymed it would make Cole Porter weep.
• Be Our Guest, a song with such scorching lyrics it withstands comparison to its Simpsons parody.
• They even manage an actual Cole Porter reference in the mob song: "Here we come, we're fifty strong/ and fifty Frenchmen can't be wrong" which doubles as a lovely encapsulation of Terry Pratchett's rule of mobs.

Ashman's lyrics aside (and they carry a lot of extra social weight as a gay man dying of AIDS in the Reagan era) Menken's music here and in his other Disney music is brilliantly literate as well as catchy - look at his use of leitmotifs in the score of Hunchback of Notre Dame for proof. Frankly, more praise of the Disney golden age of animation is a little redundant, although it is fun to go back as an adult and look at just how clever those songs were (like Prince Ali, with his forty fakirs, his cooks, his bakers / his birds that warble on key). The point is that I suspect that my generation is losing the tradition of musicals in the Cole Porter mode, and accepting a bland, witless, edgeless soup of pap in its place.

The problem comes, ironically, from a new confidence in liking musicals: by accepting that the Disney of our youth is something we can still enjoy, we've grouped everything "Disney" in our heads (I include Wicked and Les Mis here), forgetting that there's a massive difference between the Menken/Ashman Disney films and what came later. Since Frozen is a kid's movie, we feel we can demand less, whereas the genius of musicals is that they can be incredibly well-made and still appeal to kids. Enough with the glorification of everything melismatic, cheesy, boring, Gleeked out and inane. It isn't good enough. Musicals are far better than that, and their fans have forgotten.

Render Unto Caesar The Gay Wedding That Is Caesar's

Last night Governor Jan Brewer vetoed the Arizona law proposed to protect people's religious freedom to not offer goods and services if they felt doing so would violate a "sincerely held" religious belief. Now, plenty has been said about this and other such measures elsewhere on the blogosphere, and obviously I agree with the outraged opposition (among the more salient criticisms: Since Jesus tells us that any remarriage is adultery, surely this would allow people to refuse service to second marriages, too? Does this absolve Quakers from paying taxes for the military? Does it allow for sharia law?). I won't jump on the bandwagon, but it does raise a point I think is rather neat considering that the same people advocating this law are the biggest boosters of free market capitalism.

One of the fundamentals of capitalism, it seems to me, is doing business with people you despise. The growth of first mercantilism and then early capitalism runs concurrent with the growth of toleration for exactly this reason. The Court Jews, as they were known, were required by the nations of early modern Europe for their service of usury, underwriting much of the growth in that period in trading ventures and very early industry. This during a time of little to no official or social toleration for them at all. Even the viciously antisemitic Russian Tsardom would occasionally free up movement in the Pale of Settlement in order to get Jewish capital moving around a stagnant Empire. Did it violate the religious conscience of European anti-semites to do business with those they saw as Christ-killers, child murderers, heretics? Of course it did. But they frequently had no choice, and the laws of capitalism saw to it that those who engaged their services prospered while others did not. Protestants and Catholics, Westerners and Japanese, Capitalist and Communist - where others see an untouchable, the canny see a business opportunity.

The increasing interconnectedness of the world has made it increasingly difficult to avoid doing business with people we don't like. It was assumed by many before the outbreak of war in 1914 that however much Germany and France disliked each other, their economies were too interdependent for them to fight again. It turned out to be wrong, of course, but now it seems like it might just be true for the contemporary balance of power - Chinese exports are so dependent on the manufacturing base of other countries that they are exporting components of iPhones that require the processes of fifteen other countries to complete. The USA is in a similar position, which means that however much the two nations make each other uncomfortable, indeed feel their consciences violated by their business with the sweatshop-runner or the imperialist, they are unable to pull out of the deal. This leads to general peace. Margins around the world are simply too tight to be picky about who one does business with.

Now, this doesn't demonstrate that a devout Christian should be happy to offer their services to practices that offend them. But it does suggest that capitalism is hard, and that if you live in a capitalist system, you should be prepared for it to be hard. Your business is not entirely your own; it is the way in which you interact with the world, and your right to refuse goods and services is limited not just to protect others from discrimination, though that would be a good enough reason on its own. Rather, it is severely limited because a capitalist system cannot well function when the free flow of commerce is complicated by the individual consciences of the actors involved. This is not a prescriptive law but rather a descriptive one; it is an argument not from human rights but rather pointing out to those behind the current wave of legislation that capitalism has never allowed for conscience, and that isn't about to be changed by tawdry bills in a couple of US statehouses.

Regardless of piecemeal legislation here and there, in the long term a Christian can no more choose to do business in a way that perfectly suits their conscience than I can avoid participating in a system of oppression whichever pair of shoes I buy: we live in a capitalist world, and capitalism is immoral, or at least amoral. If you cannot handle the "immorality" of providing services for a gay wedding, you should not be in the wedding business. If you can't stand having gay men share a room in your bed and breakfast, you should find another career. That is a freedom capitalism gives you, but it comes at the cost of being forced to engage in the muckiness that comes with the territory, and if that for you includes homosexuality, tough.

When Jesus told his followers to render unto Caesar, he was characteristically vague and unhelpful as to the limits of his command, but I would offer this interpretation: separate out your civil and spiritual lives. In a capitalist system, your civil life includes your mode of work; it is the being-in-the-world part of you every bit as much as paying taxes to a government you may or may not agree with. Jesus also said that following him would be tough, and this is ample proof of it - in order to live in the world, you must make compromises. If you want to avoid being eaten alive by the world, you must play by the world's rules, and that means your conscience must be sometimes subsumed in order to deal with your customers. The customer must be, for the worldly Christian, always right.

Democratic Thuggery And Its Discontents

It is a strange paradox that despite being portrayed as noble and forthright, the bedrock of democracy is capitulation. If you care about something you'll fight for it, but democracy requires that if you lose the vote you will lay down your metaphorical arms and accept the legitimacy of your opponents. It is the hardest thing in the world to do, so hard that the world's oldest democracies haven't yet mastered the discipline: whether it is the British Left questioning the democratic legitimacy of a coalition representing 59% of the vote or the American Right taking war measures against a law passed by a twice-elected President with a Senate majority, House popular majority and the approval of the Supreme Court. As John Stewart said after Obama's election as Glenn Beck began his rabble rousing: "The opposition won an election and now they're doing things you don't like - I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing... that's not tyranny, that's democracy". Yet despite the friction and hypocrisy and idiocy frequently displayed by those living under the rule of those they hate, on a deeper level we do, in fact, accept it. The proof of this is becoming ever more clear over the last couple of years, as a series of foreign crises have demonstrated that by comparison we're doing rather well.

Quite what history will name these flare-ups I don't know, but I think canny historians will group them, because there are certain common elements that say something about the state of democracy outside the West. I can list Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, Thailand, Iran, Venezuela, and others amongst those countries who have dealt with protests of varying scale and success over the last few years. What they have in common is that they take place in highly compromised democracies in which the protesters were outnumbered at the polls. It is important to remember that Morsi won a presidential election fairly, that Erdoğan enjoys wide support, that Yanukovych was duly elected president in 2010, and so on. What we are seeing, I think, is a new post-ideological world order in which a number of middle-ranking powers test out what I would call "democratic thuggery". The key exponent of this is Putin, but Berlusconi, Erdoğan and Zuma amongst many others practise it to varying degrees. It entails, broadly, the brute facts of democracy without any of the attendant supporting infrastructure - free press, strong courts, civil society etc, backed up by strong nationalism, religious renewal, strong-man posturing and a cronyistic kleptocracy. It is, in other words, an ideology of power, retaining just the tiniest hint of respectability enough to balance all the other interests solidly on the side of the current ruler for as long as possible. It usually requires the majority support of a conservative countryside, a majority that forms one side in the democracy-as-cold-civil-war model that these autocrats use.

It is not sustainable, and right now the semi-democracies are beginning to tear themselves apart. And at the heart of the democratic thuggery problem is that of populaces unwilling to accept thugs who win elections. The Egyptian counter-revolution of the military in 2013 was achieved because the Muslim Brotherhood's vast support in the countryside didn't translate to the urban populaces who hated them. Those populaces would rather ignore a fair vote than suffer the rule of people they don't like, and sure enough the Egyptian people ousted a fairly elected leader. This is justified only in the case that Morsi was dismantling democracy at the time, the jury is out on that question. Otherwise the opposition should have waited until the next election to vote him out. The Ukrainians should have waited to oust Yanukovych democratically, and the Thais have no mandate to remove Shinawatra from power. I say this despite supporting the protesters' causes in each case. The problem is that the western media can all too easily play up the revolution angle while dismissing the discomfort of the largely rural support base of the thug in question. Many Russians were appalled by what Pussy Riot did, and many Iranians think of their urban liberal cousins as shameful. Their voices carry democratic weight. The world is not divided into a fight between just liberty and tyranny, but rather between people who frankly can't stand to live in the same country as one another, and it is this hatred that allows new thugs to rise and play factions off against each other. Sisi is the terrifying example - adored by the liberals of Egypt as a scourge against Islamism, his nascent autocracy is for them the lesser than the evil of actually sharing a democracy with Egypt's conservatives.

So what is the hope that the developing world can learn a discipline of submission that even two-century old democracy is uncomfortable with? Small at the moment. We will see a lot of this over the next fifty years, but my advice will always be the same: continue protesting, petition your leaders peacefully with grievances and build, however slowly, a winning coalition within the country for proper democracy. An endless ding-dong between cities and countryside will not advance the cause of liberty. Any revolution that has to deal with an opposition that could credibly win an election will not lead to a happy nation. The work of democracy is hard, and Ukraine is going to have a hell of a time of it. Let us hope they learn the virtues of patience and the importance of Enlightenment institutions as the immovable scaffolding of true democracy.

Arming For Peace, Me Boys

I have no say in the Scottish Referendum, quite rightly. But I do get a plea. In the case of the English Left in the shadow of a new generation of Tory rule, Billy Bragg's line sums it up:

Sweet moderation, heart of this nation / desert us not, we are between the wars.

Killer Rabbit Republicans

When our gallant heroes in Monty Python and the Holy Grail are contemplating how to defeat the vicious and extremely deadly Killer Rabbit, Sir Galahad pipes up: "Let us taunt it. It may become so cross, it will make a mistake." Of which King Arthur sensibly asks, "Like what?" I am put in mind of this scene by the familiar sinking feeling I get preparing for another long year of watching another probable Republican mid-term victory creep inexorably toward us. A consistent theme of progressive blogs over the Obama era has been that the "Republican fever will eventually break". The endearingly consistent faith that if we just kept them angry long enough, they'd get so angry that they'd do something incredibly stupid. They'd make a mistake that would finally show the American people how lost they were, and allow the remaining cooler heads to prevail and at last turn the GOP back into a party of reasonable government. We must now accept that this isn't going to happen.

I understand where the impulse comes from. Watching the American Right go crazy in 2009, you felt there had to be a downside to it all. All that undirected rage, all that resentment, the increasingly cloistered thinking and the propagation of insane conspiracy theories: it had to be leading to a monumental fall, right? And there is a great satisfaction at watching an opponent get angry, as long as they're at arm's length. As long as they're angry they can't make informed decisions as to how they're going to get you. It was something of a staple of the kind of adventure books I read as a kid that the plucky young hero would be held captive by the arch nemesis only to goad him through his arrogance into a rage filled-decision to, I don't know, fight Young Hero hand to hand and expose his weakness or fire wildly bringing down the shark tank on his head or whatever. It's a trope Monty Python plays with, but as Arthur points out, there's not much of a mistake a psychotic bloodthirsty rabbit can make. And the same is true of the American Right.

The big mistake they were meant to have made was the government shutdown hostage crisis. Republicans received most of the blame for that and liberals came away smug enough to have felt they had won. The fools had, if not walked into a trap, then at least done exactly what their crazed groupthink would logically lead them to do when led by Ted Cruz on his noble resentment crusade: do something so crazy nobody would trust them again. And yet here we are with polls predicting a Republican takeover of the Senate and holding onto the House. The public, it seems, doesn't much care how ridiculously out-there the Republicans are. They don't really like the Democrats either, so they'll happily plump for the opposition as long as they just keep opposing. A killer rabbit guarding a cave can't make a mistake, and neither can an insane party guarding one side of a two party system. Everything is just too easily forgotten.

That leaves us with a situation where the Republicans, far from being ultimately hobbled by their anger as every liberal pundit has assumed from day one of the Obama administration, can indulge it to an unlimited degree and forever gain strength from it. There was an idea, fuzzy and half-formed in the liberal mind, that while a black president would piss off a great number of people at first, a combination of the failures of the instinctive kneejerk reactions (of which the shutdown was one) and the inuring power of time would inoculate the old white guard to a black man in charge and eventually achieve great progress for the country on racial issues. Again, the illness analogy. That is how liberal America sees its conservative cousin, as suffering from a malady in need of a cure. But the fact is that raging conservatism can froth and fester for as long as it wants, as hot as it wants, and only get stronger.

I and many others have looked on the current era of Tea Party crazy as an aberration, condescendingly believing that once the child has had its tantrum it will calm down and go to bed as told. We must now face what increasingly looks like the case: things aren't going back to how they were. The Eisenhower or Nixon Republican is not coming back. There will be no purge of the crazy, and eventually the crazies will be in government again. Instead of being so taunted by a black president that they make a terrible mistake, they have fed on the energy he gives them. The smug meme of commenters on progressive blogs when Republicans do something tub-thumpingly hubristic and crass has become "please proceed", a la Barack Obama in his debate with Romney. What they don't see is that jujitsu is pretty ineffective against an oncoming train.

 If they proceed to the Senate and then the Presidency, there is no telling where they might take America now that their media systems have locked in the doctrine of "right wing good, more right wing better". US politics may end up representing another Monty Python sketch, one dealing with the pitfalls of two-party government. And it won't be very funny.

Work Ethics And The Ethics Of Work

Francis of Assisi and Alexander the Great, virtuous men of previous ages. But hard workers? 

Someone, who I remember as Ruskin but can't find evidence of this, said that every age defines its virtues in a manner incomprehensible to the others. The moderns (by which I believe he means Protestant, Anglo Saxon moderns) value above all else industry, so that there is nothing you say better about a man than "he's a hard worker". To the ancient Greeks, for example, this would make no sense - work is for slaves, not free men, and so the defining virtue of the ancients is a boldness and exceptionalness of spirit as would be attributed to an Alexander. Neither would it make sense to the medieval mind, for whom all work is merely another aspect of life in the shadow of an all-important God and thus piety was the chief virtue of the age.

It's a convincing enough thesis, as it goes: we today almost exclusively define our lives by the work we do in them. Almost from birth you are taught to do well at school and university so that you might get a good job, and the chief measure of a man's success is the quality of his job and his quality at it. It is interesting to me that unlike the other two eras I mentioned, today's virtue has not caught the imagination of our novelists and poets to the same degree. With the notable and poisonous exception of Ayn Rand, the virtue of amassing wealth and sweating at the foundry hasn't mattered as much to writers as heroism mattered to Homer and piety to Dante. If work is our defining value, it is a tawdry one.

We should be alive, then, to the possibility that the work ethic we have inherited from an industrial and high-capitalist past will not remain in place forever, and that work will no longer define either our lives or our moral sense of ourselves. We've had high unemployment for nearly six years now and there's been plenty about how it's affecting people's self esteem in the long term, because we think of ourselves as workers first and foremost. However, with the increase in automation and productivity and the rise of the global South to be able to contribute to the developed workforce, there may simply just not be enough work to do. Keynes, brilliant as ever, kinda saw this one coming: in 1930 he predicted almost correctly the productivity increases in the next century and came to the conclusion that everybody would therefore probably be working only 15 hours a week. What he didn't predict was that we would be so consumed with the need to work that our working weeks would actually get longer, not shorter. We would invent more things to consume and work longer to pay for them. We would invent new kinds of work so far removed from producing anything tangible it becomes almost parodic: lawyers for the advertising companies that market banks that invest money in management consultancies that tell people how to better sell $900 handbags.

Because fuck taste, and fuck sense. 

There are many economic reasons why Keynes was wrong, and books by very clever economists debate why. But it's also a more general question we should be asking ourselves. Conservative Andrew Sullivan worries about the failure of the Protestant work ethic in America here, and it seems to me several interesting points are raised. Firstly, that a lot of discourse around the welfare state is based on a fear of loss of work ethic -  the conservative critique that we'll all get fat and lazy if the state is there to provide for us. The implication is that we all need to have not only the threat of absolute terror of bankruptcy and destruction hanging over our heads at all times to motivate us but that there should be actual examples of this clear to see around us to stop us getting comfortable. This is the tacit implication of US arguments against Obamacare, and it is frankly borderline psychotic. I find it hard to believe there are many Englishmen who feel they can slack off at work because the NHS will be there to catch them if they ever get ill. Sullivan is slightly blindsided by this. On the one hand, he says for him "the American Dream remains not only intact but inspiring. I believe in work". But on the other hand as an HIV sufferer the new insurance landscape give him a new freedom:

I feel empowered by the ACA not to work if I choose to and have the savings to take a break. There are a zillion different scenarios in which the guarantee of health insurance removes the absolute necessity of working if you have some savings to fall back on.

He accepts that the lessening of the work incentive might be worth the trade-off, which I think is putting it extremely mildly, but then I would. Not all conservatives would even accept that, and you only need look at the benefits debate in this country to see a massive segment of the population willing to come down firmly on one side of the incentive/security trade-off every single time. In any case it's certainly not a debate we have openly.

The other point brought up is I think one of the reasons for this., and Sullivan only touches on it very briefly:

One strong thread in the opposition is the fear that we’ll all stay on the couch, binge-watch Netflix and sleep in late, while the Chinese eat our lunch...  Isn’t there an obvious, if unstated, cultural fear here that Latino culture is less work-obsessed than white Protestant culture (despite the staggering work ethic of so many Latino immigrants)?

Yes, the racial aspect of this is very much there in both the US and UK. One the one hand you have the "lazy" races, the immigrants from Mexico or Africa or poorer parts of the world, and on the other hand you have the distant Oriental races, disciplined and uniform, innumerable, working 14 hour days and outscoring our kids on every test. These discourses are very old and built into our civilisation, not to go all Edward Said on you. The point is to form a mirror image of our own society to define ourselves against, and since the discourse was largely formed in an era when we were very good at going around the world and making money, much of it has to do with work. We Northern white people are good at working and making money, unlike the feckless Catholic South or the barbaric Africans. But we are creative and wholesome in our work, too, not like the unquestioning Chinaman or the dishonest Jew.

The goddess Ayn Rand in her British form 

There is a split here between the US and the UK which would be worth exploring if we had time, but it is interesting to me that the British have actually rarely venerated work all that much given our self-image. Something about that land-owning aristocracy at the top in full sight of everyone dampened it down a bit. Nor has the British self-image ever been about being good businessmen, thought that is often how the world has seen us. A nation of shopkeepers, Napoleon called us, but strangely we've never had much of an affection for the excellent businessman as have the Americans, in whose culture the snake-oil salesman is a character of almost grudging respect, the Lyle Lanley who can swoop into town and sell a pointless monorail with a song-and-dance number. If I were to believe in the concept of national greatness I would point out the conquest of one of the world's oldest and most populous civilisations with nothing but a bunch of tradesmen and a joint-stock company as Britain's most extraordinary hour, equal to the campaigns of the Mongols and the expansion of the first Arab caliphates. The fact is, despite our fond self-image as bumbling amateurs, there must have been a time when we were, extremely, extremely efficient at buying and selling and building and expanding. Yet the hard-work and up-by-the-bootstraps and commercial genius narratives don't figure much in the national imagination. We clearly never truly felt that work ethics were, well, ethical.

Only now, with the threat of being overtaken by China, has hard work been lifted onto its pedestal. And we will fear being outworked more and more as time goes on. We're in the global race after all, which means misery for our schoolchildren and declining expectations for the rest of us. Work will be the god that saves us now we've lost our faith in God. And yet what is the point of working harder when so many jobs are done by machines, by our massive interconnectedness, by Big Data and what have you? Why do we need to win these races? There is no changing the fact that our work can now be outsourced. So let's reduce the amount of work we do. Enough with growth. Thomas Piketty (about whom I shall say more in a later post) has demonstrated in his new book Capital in the Twenty First Century that absent a massive global tax on wealth the gains from future growth will almost entirely go to the top 1%, which to me sounds as good as pointless. Let us be happy with low growth then. Let us stop our worship at the temple of work. Let's work fifteen hours a week, get overtaken by China and find some new virtues.

I'll finish with a last paragraph from Sullivan:

With wages stagnant for most Americans since the mid 1970s, and hard, often back-breaking work failing to provide real gains in income, doesn’t the logic of the work ethic get attenuated? Isn’t it also affected by your knowledge that many people at the very top of the pyramid rake in unimaginable dough for working far less hard than your average teacher or healthcare worker? And isn’t the vast accumulation of wealth among so few itself a contributor to the decline in the work ethic, since it provides so many dependents with such easy, unearned cash? It’s not just the left that has created these disincentives. Global capitalism has done its part as well.

He is right, but as befits a conservative, he understates the case. Work in the 21st Century will not be what it used to. Incentive, the absolute bedrock of every right-wing bromide against the welfare state, incentive, the mighty idol of the free market true-believers, may well become a memory in the face of secular stagnation and the uselessness of so much work that makes so much money for so few. We may find ourselves having to reconsider our values, redefine our virtues, decide on what purpose our life is being lived for. And that will be very hard work indeed.