Valedictory

I have refrained from uploading the third part of The Tragedy of the Commons mainly because I needed to think.

The consequence of this thinking is that I have decided to close this blog for an indefinite period.  The reason for doing this is that what I am writing about is past its sell-by date.  The world has changed in the seven years since I began the first series of blogs, especially over the last period.

We have entered a time when matters will be decided on the political and other stages, rather than through debate.  History is on the move and tends daily to outstrip anything we might write about it.  Indeed, I think, we are standing on the edge of a precipice and it will be some time until those who survive the fall can dust themselves off and begin again.

Faced with a storm at sea, the proper reaction is to batten down the hatches.  This is what needs to be done now from the lowest level up—individually, communally, even nationally, if in the latter case such a thing is any longer possible.  And all for purposes merely of survival.

Things are spiralling out of control.  There are periods in history when failure is the inevitable consequence of every effort, even the best-intentioned; when it is no longer possible to do right for doing wrong.  I think we’re facing such a period now.

Events are going to drive history for the time being, not blogs, not words.

 All the best.

'The Tragedy of the Commons' (2)

Michael Viney of The Irish Times described the effects of overgrazing in the Sheeffry mountains in Mayo in a 2014 article.  Referring back to a visit made in 1994, he said: ‘For most of an hour’s hike, this bog is a desert of black slime, pricked here and there by a miserable stubble . . . The bog’s final break-up into black mush is a shocking thing to see.’  Speaking of an aerial survey done in Connemara around the same time, he wrote: ‘One remote valley in the Twelve Bens, in Connemara, was a great, dark wound, skinned and suppurating with surface water and covering hundreds of hectares . . .’

It was something like this, but on a macro-economic scale, that Garrett Hardin was forecasting for the world economy should population continue to grow on an exponential scale.  As discussed in the previous mailing, this projection was questioned by Lin Ostrom on the basis of her study of commonage systems.

Yet it is worth examining how Hardin’s contention might fare in the context of a limited but stable commonage system, such as tends to occur here and there in Ireland.

Now at this point, it is worth saying that the situation described by Michael Viney was a consequence of greed on the part of the farmers involved, based upon, in his words, ‘the folly of EU policy in paying hill farmers per head of sheep without considering the kind of land they were grazing.’

But leaving that aside, what other circumstances might lead to a similar outcome?  The only one that comes to mind is if the farmers with rights to the commonage became slack in their stewardship and were to allow others who had no rights to take advantage of the grazing.

Now I am speaking here of the logic of the situation, not the law, which is generally a more complicating factor.

The reality of such a notional Irish commonage system is that access to grazing is confined to those who have land adjoining it.  This is not primarily a legal arrangement, but a practical one, in that these farmers control physical access to the common grazing—no one else can get to it without crossing their land.  The evolution of commonage rights is not a question of legal or constitutional enactment, though such things may well reinforce it after the event, but primarily a reflection of how things actually are on the ground.

Now as long as the farmers involved are intent on policing their rights, then the situation, leaving aside the circumstances mentioned above by Michael Viney, is potentially stable.  But should, say, the farmers grow lax and tolerate someone who has no rights accessing the grazing, then logically, and probably legally too, anybody can come along and claim the same freedom to put their animals on the commonage.  And this inevitably, in line with Hardin’s prediction, is likely on a local level to lead, as Tim Harford was to paraphrase it in the Financial Times, ‘inescapably to ecological disaster and the [at least temporary] collapse of the commons’.

Hardin’s broader argument seems assume that there is some sort of world community already in existence—or at least that the world is heading that way.  A world community with equal access for all to the commonage of the means of subsistence and production—for in such a situation there can no longer be any basis for ‘them’ and ‘us’.  Everybody enjoys the same rights—or, which is much the same thing, nobody enjoys any rights.

Ostrom’s argument, whether she meant it to be taken in this way or not, was effectively that this was not the case.  Communities exist within the framework of the human race and implicitly are expressions of an exceptionalism that separates each off from the rest of its fellows. Rather like climbing the steps of a stair, she viewed the future as resulting from the slow creative process of working to solve everyday problems as they arose, rather than jumping ahead and embracing notional views of the future, whether apocalyptic or rose-coloured, and trying to shape strategies to fit.

And, in this, I tend to agree with her.  In terms of current discourse, ‘we are where we are’.  And that is where we must start from—from the realities of life as they exist; and not some sentimental or ideological pipedream about how things allegedly should be.

More about this next time.

'The Tragedy of the Commons' (1)

In 1968, the ecologist Garrett Hardin published an article in Science magazine entitled The Tragedy of the Commons.  Basically, it was an abstract argument intended to show how all forms of communal organisation of property eventually ended in chaos.  The word ‘commons’ comes into the title because Hardin used the idea of rural commonage—land not individually owned to which everyone had access for grazing—as the basis of his argument.

The fundamental flaw in Hardin’s reasoning was identified by Lin Ostrom, later a Nobel prizewinning economist, who had a special interest in the field of communal property and its management.  She argued that Hardin’s assumption that commonage or communal property was property that anybody could take advantage of was in reality flawed.  From her own experience, communal property systems were tightly organised and controlled, access to them being confined to an agreed group of people who alone had a right to take advantage of them.  Hardin’s formulation of a communal system to which anybody and anybody had access had no roots in reality, and any theory built on the foundation of such an assumption was therefore flawed.

And, of course, she was right—insofar as it went.

Most Irish people, especially those living in rural districts will be familiar with the idea of commonage.  For example, in mountainy areas marginal land tends often to be farmed in such a way.  Rights to the mountain are confined to those farmers who have land abutting it, and usually there are stocking restrictions depending upon the extent of each one’s borderage.

However, the system survives only to the extent that qualifying farmers jealously preserve such rights, especially with regard to preventing those who have no bordering land from grazing animals on the commonage.

It is at this point that Hardin’s argument takes on a renewed relevance.  It was his contention that if there is open access to such commonage then inevitably it will become overgrazed and the ecosystem underlying it will collapse.  His theory became increasingly controversial to the extent that he believed it had a wider human application and that uncontrolled population growth was likely—indeed, certain—to lead to wider economic and environmental disaster.

My  reason for raising this matter at all is that there are further important implication arising from it, which I will be exploring over the next couple of mailings.

'4am show that caused pub raid . . .'

From The Daily Telegraph of 19/6/2012:

‘Council officials and police stormed a village pub believing it was holding an unlicensed late-night show, only to discover that 4am was the  name of a band, not the time of the event.

‘Three licensing officers and two policemen raided The Feathers in Laleham, Surrey, after seeing an advertisement promising “music from 4am”.

‘They soon discovered that 4am referred to a soul-funk duo, who were on stage at a far more sociable time.

‘Kate Dillon, the pub’s landlord, said she was “amazed” at the operation by Spelthorne borough council, which took place at 10pm . . .

‘Simon Freeman, who was in the audience, added: “these two police officers came in with these three guys from the council  and they were very confrontational.  You should have seen their faces when they realised that the name of the band was 4am, not the time of the gig . . .”’

                                                          ---------

The mind boggles.

Not alone did the sign advertise ‘from 4am’, but the very fact of the event being advertised might surely be expected to raise doubts in the mind of anyone of ordinary intelligence, prompting them to ask questions, before raiding the pub, all guns blazing, with ‘plod’ in tow.  Yet what we are dealing with here are seemingly not your average village idiots, but rather three council officials who might be expected under normal circumstances to have some level of cop-on.

How is this to be explained?

One possible answer is that there has been an upwards seepage of the stupid into levels of employment previously out-of-bounds to them.  Perhaps a general tendency, given that there were three officials involved, and possibly reflective also of the general dumbing down in society that seems to have occurred over these past forty or so years.

But equally likely—or possibly jointly likely—is that this was a case of literalism, of the inability to see anything in any colours other than black or white.  Like modern Henry Fords, we seem to have a generation of people in positions of authority who are increasingly unable to distinguish any nuances of meaning beyond that of ‘the bleeding obvious’.

Or rather than unable, it may reflect more a question of being unwilling, in a world grown hysterical about transparency and accountability.  In such a situation, where every decision made or action taken is liable to come under a usually hostile scrutiny, it must be a natural reaction to retreat back against the wall of the law and the literal as a protection against having things blow up in your face.  What one might call the Dun Aengus defence.

Possibly, just possibly, this is what may have happened in the case to hand.  In a world where packets of peanuts have to have a printed warning that ‘this product contains nuts’, it is obviously dangerous to ignore the patently obvious in any field, no matter how silly it may seem, and with no way of knowing how it may come back to bite you.

As I say, possibly, just possibly . . . though I don’t believe that for a moment.

By way of correction . . .

I have been a bit unfair to Donald Trump in some of my recent mailings, downgrading the importance of his personal role in the election.  The fact is that without Trump there is unlikely to have been an upheaval against the liberal establishment.  It was Trump who gave the silent opposition to liberalism permission to speak.

Carl Jung said of Adolf Hitler: ‘He is the first man to tell every German what he [the German] has been thinking and feeling all along in his unconscious . . .’

Nor am I comparing Trump to Hitler—I am using the quotation by way of analogy.

It was Trump who uniquely allowed/inspired the unexpressed resentments and anger of the average American to rise to expression after years of being repressed under a rampant political correctness.

Speaking of Hitler’s gift in this regard, Jung also described it as being ‘not political; it is magic’.

Now I’m not at all suggesting that Trump is a magician.

Anything but!

'Noblesse' without the 'oblige'.

Over thirty years ago, I went to a stamp fair in the Imperial Hotel with one of my sons, who was interested in that sort of thing.  They advertised that they were doing free appraisals, so by way of curiosity I dug up an old stamp album from my younger days and took it along with me.  I presented it to someone at one of the exhibition stands—a pup of a fellow from Dublin in his early twenties with an arrogant air—and without even opening it he immediately dropped it into a waste bin.  I made him retrieve it and have it still somewhere in a drawer.

Now the fellow in question, I am convinced, knew little or nothing about stamps, he was there simply as a salesman, and the whole charade of dumping the album was an attempt to establish psychological dominance.  His attitude was meant to make one feel small and stupid, and therefore ready for the plucking.  Except in this case it didn’t work.

The reason for mentioning it is that it is symptomatic of the attitude adopted down the years by the liberal elite and its minions to ordinary people—and which has now blown up in their faces.  It involved a form of negative programming.  There was no question of persuasion or argument, but rather a form of psychological undermining aimed at making people feel unsure of themselves, and therefore susceptible to being talked down to and patronised and ultimately controlled.

There was seldom any cleverness involved, certainly at ground level, but rather a box of tricks, like that of the salesman, designed to achieve the desired political end.  The sneer, the mock look of horror, the air of bored impatience . . . all with the ultimate intention of, in the American argot, ‘selling you a bill of goods’.

Now there has been unending debate in the media over the victory of Trump in America.  It was because he lied, ran scare stories . . . because of a sense among sections of the population of being economically left behind etc. etc.  All of which are true.  Yet at the root of the victory, and nothing at all to do with Trump, is, I believe, a popular reaction against the sense of being contemptuously taken for granted by the liberal elite and the ‘useful idiots’ who front for them, even as at the same time they are engaged in cutting your throat.

It’s great to see it.

Blind Samsons

Despite the decisive nature of the Trump victory, the defeat of liberalism is far from certain, especially as it still maintains almost complete control of the news media, television and the Web.  The almost unanimous media reaction to the Trump victory has been along the lines of ‘We wuz robbed!’

There is some fat bastard currently advertising his forthcoming TV chat show on the death of American democracy, or some such description.  I don’t know who he is, never heard of him.  But I suspect that he is one of these alternative liberal agitators posing as comedians.  As Ken Dodd said: ‘I have nothing against alternative comedians as long as they don’t start telling jokes!’

What is going on now is analogous to the complaint of the German Army at the end of WWI that they had been ‘stabbed in the back’, though the Germans had rather more justification for saying it than the Clintonistas have.  And we know as well where that particular German stream of consciousness was to lead.

The post-election reaction is confirming of the description I’ve already given of the modern nature of liberal democracy.  It is not about votes, it’s about the program.  You can have all the votes or super-delegates that you want, but if you don’t deliver the liberal agenda in its entirety, then they will disallow the result, and set about doing everything they can to pull it down.

Neo-con philosophy lies at the root of modern American liberal thinking.  But it is not really a new conservatism, but rather a new liberalism; not so much neo-con as neo-liberal.   What it resembles most is a modern inversion of the ‘muscular Christianity’ that helped supply the sinews of British imperialism in the late-nineteenth century.

No more liberal wishy-washiness here: if things don’t go as you want, then the answer is to put the boot in.

Pause for thought . . .

Thomas Malthus (1776-1834) was one of the early theorists of the effects of population growth.  His theory, summed up in his own words, is that “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of earth to produce subsistence for man”.

The growth in economic development and agricultural production since his time has been used as a major argument against the correctness of the theory.  But there are various streams of thought on this, and it is still a matter of academic and popular contention.

But as our population soars ever upwards towards seven billion—it was calculated as being only one billion in 1804, during Malthus’s lifetime—one thing is clear, the economic structure of societies, and indeed the world economy itself, has become ever more complex, dangerously so, to the extent that it has come to have something of the intricacy of a mechanical clock: stick a screwdriver into its workings at any random point, and the chances are that the whole thing may come to a halt.

Ireland is overall a net exporter of food, so that should some crisis of upheaval affect, say, the Eurozone, then Ireland should still be comfortably self-sufficient.  But is this necessarily true?

Writing of the effects of the collapse of the Austrian currency in the early 1920s, and quoting from Adam Fergusson’s 1975 book, When Money Dies, the economics correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote several years ago:


“Near civil war between town and country was a pervasive feature of this break-down in social order. Large mobs of half-starved and vindictive townsmen descended on villages to seize food from farmers accused of hoarding. The diary of one young woman described the scene at her cousin’s farm.

“In the cart I saw three slaughtered pigs. The cowshed was drenched in blood. One cow had been slaughtered where it stood and the meat torn from its bones. The monsters had slit the udder of the finest milch cow, so that she had to be put out of her misery immediately. In the granary, a rag soaked with petrol was still smouldering to show what these beasts had intended,’ she wrote.”

As I say, Ireland might be expected to be self-sufficient in food in the event of any crisis—but only if the type of panic described above was avoided, otherwise the very basis of a continuous agriculture could be put at risk.

Some twenty or so years ago, an article appeared in one of the newspapers explaining that supermarkets in general held only a three days stock of food.  If that is the case, then any interference, for whatever reason, in the complex organisation of food distribution, in this or any country, could see the cities and towns descend into chaos in a matter of a week, or even less.

Now none of these scenarios are necessarily connected—yet taken together they are sufficient to give one pause for thought.

[This was originally written in June 2014.]

Whatever did I do with my crystal ball?

I mentioned the film 300 in my last mailing, and it brought to mind something else that I had written about it some ten years ago, and that has a certain current relevance.  I submit an extract from it.

 ". . . One of the unconsciously funniest moments in it—and there are several—is the final battle scene where the Spartan contingent of a united Greek army move against the Persians under the battle-cry of ‘We rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny!’  Leaving aside the historical implausibility of it, there is also the purely human implausibility.  Individuals may sometimes be moved by the call of reason, but armies, I would suggest, seldom are.  What moves armies is a mixture of the more primitive emotions, for example, hate, fear, greed, or the desire to protect one’s homeland.  One cannot envisage an army moving forward with any enthusiasm under such a slogan, no more than if its leader cried ‘Forward for the cube root of nine!’ or ‘Charge in the name of Darwinism!’

 

The dilemma of the modern liberal was most sharply defined by easily the best film of the last twelve months, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto.  The fact that it was nominated for only a minor Oscar (which it failed to win) reflects perhaps more the reaction to Gibson’s anti-Semitic outburst in Hollywood than any generalised liberal response.  After all, the general liberal consensus now is one of covert anti-Semitism under the guise of being anti-Israel.  Yet all the liberal film-reviewers suffered a sort of schizophrenia in dealing with this film.  Compelled on the one hand to admit that it was a brilliant cinematic achievement, they sought to compensate by nitpicking and disparaging the director.  Even while forced to praise it, Sukdhu Sandhu, film critic of the British Daily Telegraph, felt the need to comment that Mel Gibson was ‘one of the stupidest of front-line contemporary directors’.  The reason for this lies in the underlying message of Gibson’s film.

 

The secret of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto lies in the quotation from Will Durrant with which he prefaces it: ‘A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within!’  There is also no doubt that Gibson is drawing parallels between the collapse of the Mayan Empire and the situation of our own civilization in modern times.  In plain language what he is saying to the left-liberals is that their out-of-control agenda of extreme anti-sexism, anti-racism, anti-homophobia, and anti-whatever-else-you-might-have, is not the harbinger of some new millennium in human affairs but rather a symptom of the decay of the existing order.  Rather than being part of the solution, current left-liberalism is part of the problem.  Like the mass of spectators in the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the ruling social junta of liberalism, degenerate socialism, militant feminism, and militant homosexuality cannot see, and cannot allow itself to see, that it is caught in the tailspin of a declining historical epoch.

 

Let us imagine a scene perhaps not too many years down the line.  Despite continuous secular liberal bleating and wishful thinking, Europe nevertheless finds itself confronted by a massive and hostile challenge from, say, the east or the south.  Under what battle-flag might Europe then mobilise its forces?  Against mysticism and for reason?  For the liberal agenda?  In defence of the woman’s right to choose?  For gay marriage?  I don’t think so.  It would be a very ragged army that would line up under such slogans—if any army at all.

 

In the course of the fall of the Roman Empire and its aftermath, it was Christianity that provided the mainspring of resistance to the barbarian invasions—not nostalgia for Roman plumbing or urban planning or Latin culture, no matter how beneficial in themselves (and equally threatened) these things might have been.  The causes that move people best have always a touch of transcendence about them that raises them to a higher level—something that the self-indulgent program of modern liberalism is by its very nature incapable of achieving.

 

Trotsky wrote of the Czarist army that it was an ideal weapon for the suppression of internal dissent, but once it was faced by external challenge then it proved useless.  So be it with the trendy modern left-liberal conspiracy: it rules through its internal power of destroying lives and reputations by means of character assassination, mockery and victimisation.  In academia positions are being lost and careers ruined through a failure to bow deeply enough to the prevailing orthodoxy.  There is a rational case to be made against the theoretical underpinnings of all the various –isms.  Except that those who should be making it are either running scared or compromising out of self-interest.  There’s a religious case that could be made as well.  But even the priests, it seems, are heading for the hills.

 

The problem is that in the failure of either religious or rational opinion to take on the left-liberal ideological junta the way is left open for those who press the more emotional and visceral human bells.  Failure to stand up to the militant feminists and their dogsbodies leaves the way open for a renewed Nazism in whatever guise it might take.  And this is potentially the most dreadful scenario, pregnant as it is with the possibility of destruction of what it is that makes us human, not to mention the possibility of actual world destruction.  Films such as 300 are, I suggest, harbingers of the way things are going."

Responding to the Trump-et call . . .

The truth is that Trump frightens me to death.

Had I been an American I would certainly not have voted for Clinton, but at the same time I would have found it very hard to vote for Trump.  Trump won the presidency not because of the fact that he was Trump, but despite it.

I see him as a sort of Frankenstein’s monster, compounded out of the organised intolerance of the modern leftwing liberal movement and the derogation of duty by those whose job it was, and still is, to oppose it.

Toleration doesn’t mean approval.  It means the—sometimes reluctant—acceptance of the other’s right to exist or to behave in a particular way.  In most cases, it is a form of compassion.  But equally toleration demands the same treatment in return.

Now the people who promoted and continue to promote the liberal agenda, and those who benefited from it from the 1990s onwards, are as vocal as ever on the matter of tolerance, except that it is now a purely one-sided tolerance, meant to apply solely to themselves and the causes they support.  They are not opposed to intolerance in principle.

To some extent this is due to the invasion of their territory by the Left.  The famous ‘no free speech for fascists’ has now morphed into ‘no free speech for anyone who disagrees with us on anything’.

Nor is it merely a passive prescription, a matter of simply covering one’s ears and refusing to listen. It is focused, dynamic and aggressive.  If one has opinions out of sync with theirs then they will do everything in their power to cut you off at the knees.  Nothing is beyond them—especially with the internet as a weapon.

Their aim is an ostensible ‘equality’, but, as in all these things, the closer one approaches to this notional equality, the more the temptation grows to go the whole hog to overall control.  The ‘new decency’ demands a new humanity; and this is to be achieved not through argument or persuasion, but rather through an underhand process of making people feel uncomfortable about themselves and socially out of step.

Rather like Pavlov’s experiments with dogs, but somewhat more sophisticated, for decades now film, television, newspapers, fashion, books, education have been engaged in the process of pouring poison into the ears of what was taken to be a sleeping population.

Yet as the recent American presidential election showed, there is still a large proportion of the population resistant to the process.  For years they had been hunkered down under the unceasing barrage of liberal conditioning, afraid to open their mouths lest they be ridiculed as Neanderthals or bigots, or lose their careers or businesses through on-line vigilantism.

The sad part of the thing is that it took Trump to galvanise them.  What he was saying in his garbled way was what those of influence, who could see what was happening and disagreed with it, should have been years ago saying.  Except that they were too busy hiding along with the rest.

Trump was the beneficiary of this conservative cowardice, which presented him also with a huge wellspring of frustrated public resentment to exploit.  It was all a matter of who drew first.  And fair play to Trump, he alone had the chutzpah to go for it.

But in the circumstances, one imagines that even ‘Mr Ed’, had he been capable of making the appropriate noises, would .have been a shoo-in.

Crystal ball not included . . .

I remember some ten or so years ago being in a hotel in Donegal on a Sunday morning, and a guy going ballistic at the desk over his stuff being stolen.  He was a participant in a psychic fair that was being held in the hotel, and during the night someone had broken in and pocketed his wares.  And the first thing that struck me at the time was: ‘Why did he not see it coming?’

Now the modern liberal movement, which has its roots primarily in the French Revolutionary period, with the latter’s deification of the goddess ‘Reason’, has something of the same problem.  The motto of modern liberalism, indeed, of all liberalism, is perhaps best summed up in the ridiculous battle cry from that ridiculous film 300: ‘This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine.’

That being the case, and given the enormous claims being made for Reason, one has to ask the question: How do they manage to still get things wrong?  For example, why do they lose elections, if everything is calculated on the basis of strict and unarguable reasoning?

The reason of course lies in the assumptions on which each process of reasoning is based.  Every process of reasoning has to have a starting point, a belief about the world from which one argues forward.  And it is these beliefs, these assumptions, which provide the Achilles heel of the whole rationalist movement.

Processes of reason are merely tools, effective only to the extent that they are in any particular instance rooted in reality.  And the fact is there is very little, if anything, that can be said about the world that is and must be true in any and every circumstance.  At best, it is a matter of percentages.

In the main, at the root of individual logical processes one finds assumptions that, especially in the case of liberals etc., are fundamentally emotional.  Rather than embracing what they believe to be a scientific view of the world, people are in fact feeding an emotional hunger in themselves. At the start of each chain of reasoning there is an emotional attachment, whether realised or not, and more often than not it is not realised.  Then reason is introduced as a trellis to help train the weak plant up.

A good indication of this is the TV coverage of tears flowing in the Clinton camp in wake of the defeat, and also the childish rioting and demonstrating that came after it.  No evidence of rationality or scientific detachment here—something which would have factored in the possibility of defeat in advance—but rather the expression of disappointed hopes.  Much like a football fan after a losing derby.

The New Imperialism

It is an amazing sight, the arch-propagandists for democracy taking to the streets in the wake of losing the Brexit referendum in the UK and the Trump victory in America.

But it does make clear a necessary characteristic of democracy without which it cannot function.  Democracy demands a certain confluence of interests among the opposing sides, a certain implicitly agreed perimeter within which all agree to abide, and which allows the losing side, even if only with gritted teeth, accept the right of the winning side to implement its program.

Yet the fact is that this idea of a shared ground of basic values is being progressively blown apart.  In the matter of, for example, abortion, there are people who will never accept its legalisation even if 90% of the electorate voted for it.  And vice versa, too.

The reality is that the ideological gaps in society have become so great as to make the compact that should underlie democracy increasingly fragile.

The world is now full of ultras, insistent on implementing their full program, no matter what the cost.  It is a practice especially favoured by those, on both the right and on the left, whose secret aim is to bring democracy down.

On the liberal side, the definition of democracy is progressively being tweaked.   Democracy is no longer simply a matter of getting the most votes.  A democracy is now a democracy only to the extent that it entails what Hilary Clinton has described as ‘the new decency’.  That is to the extent that it implements the liberal agenda on women’s rights and gay rights and minority rights etc etc etc . . . . and whatever other new rights may be waiting in the wings to be wheeled on.

Should a government fall on this front, then no matter how many votes it may have got, it is not to be counted a democracy and can be subjected to economic and political pressures to bring it to heel.

This is the nature of the new imperialism of the modern liberal world.  And it is not simply a political program, it is a matter of faith, of belief, of emotion, of something to be embraced no matter what the cost.  It is the secular equivalent of a religion.

It is also something that in a certain roundabout way lies at the root of the debacle of Iraq and the collapse of the Middle East . . .

But that is for another day.

Does it really make that much of a difference . . .?

I’m not convinced about the hype and spin in the wake of the American election.  After all, if your car is burning oil, you don’t fix it by simply changing the driver.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s great to see Clinton and the international liberal establishment get such an enormous kick up the arse.  But the real question is whether this makes really that much of a difference in terms of the overall problems facing us.

The major problem is that we are in the terminal stage of a collapsing civilisation which cannot be rescued.  There will be ups and downs and momentary blips on the political cardiac monitor, but the fact is that the overall direction is inexorably down.

Now I may be wrong.  The Trump victory will inevitably galvanise traditionalist forces all over the world.  The liberal agenda-ists will be compelled, too, to retreat to their corner and lick their wounds—that is if they do not, like with Brexit, set about trying to dismantle the result through the courts.  One way or another, they will not go away—they are much too ideologically committed and relentless for that.

But, as I say, what is going on at the moment is, in my belief anyway, merely a lesser cycle within the greater overall cycle of the downwards spiral of Western civilisation.

By all means, enjoy things for the moment.  But try not to lose sight of the bigger picture.

Like a space lab being dragged out of orbit and into the grip of a full-on gravity, the liberal activism of the past two plus centuries, and especially of the past fifty or so years, has damaged things to the extent that they are unrepairable.

Things are going to change as a result of this—but in a fundamentally uncontrollable way.

[This mailing was written on November 9th, but couldn't be uploaded at the time because of apparent overloading of the site.]

Some points on the evolution of bureaucracy

I said in the last mailing that I wanted to deal with the question of bureaucracy.  On second thoughts, I really don’t.  There is nothing much that hasn’t already been said about it, even if only in passing.  To go into it again in specific detail would be simply a matter of tautology.

Yet there are one or two points that need to be made, as way of background.

Bureaucracy is a necessary thing.  It is, for example, the general staff of an army, whose job it is to translate the commands of its leader into effective action, without which otherwise those commands would remain no more than wishful thinking.  Most organisations require a bureaucracy to some degree or other, otherwise they couldn’t work.

The problem is that bureaucracy, left to its own devices, tends to become self-serving to the extent that it often squeezes the life out of the purpose it was meant to serve.  Rather like a parasite taking over its host.

When I speak here about bureaucracy, I have in mind a sort of mutation that, especially in modern times, can occur in organisations and is self-propelling and expansionary.  Whatever its ostensible purpose of existence, its true purpose in the end is self-aggrandisement and keeping itself alive.

The classic example of this, to my mind, is the whole Health and Safety phenomenon.

Now, like a bush taking root way up on the front of a building, bureaucratic off-shoots can seed themselves and flourish in the most unlikely of places.  It is less a matter of planning than of chance.  Individuals of a bureaucratic mindset are constantly scanning for the accidental thing that may promise a shortcut to promotions and the building of their own little empires, provided they are quick enough to identify it and get in first.

There are certain requirements for this to be successful.  Firstly, one must find a seemingly unarguable justification for what one is proposing.  After all, how easy is it going to be in the current environment to resist proposals based on grounds of health and safety, or child protection, or any of the myriad aspects of the equality agenda, no matter how off-the wall such proposals may seem to be?  The degree of public hysteria or concern one can tap into always provides an inestimable source of leverage.

Now I mentioned the matter of Health and Safety as a classic example of this sort of bureaucracy.  One reason I can say this is because I saw the process in its infancy and watched individuals’ eyes light up at the possibility of advantage in it.  After all, as I’ve already said, who’s going to argue against health and safety . . . ?  It was like being handed a blank cheque!

Now don’t get me wrong.  Safety in the workplace is important—and in some workplaces more than others.  And I have no doubt too that the process was, and continues to be, in many circumstances valuable—for I am sure that there were and still are many places with poor safety standards.  But primarily what I felt I was seeing at the time were people anxious to build a nest for themselves and puzzling over how to justify it.  For the fact is that once one has got beyond the commonplace problems, the circumstances requiring a dedicated safety input tend to get rather thin.  In that situation, if you are an ambitious  health and safety bureaucrat, you are left with emphasising and reemphasising what Basil Fawlty once famously described as ‘the bleeding obvious’.

I can remember quite a few years later, back in the early 2000s, being shown the schedule for a health and safety conference that was being held in a well-known regional hotel.  This involved people from various employments from all over Ireland.  It also involved a large fee being levied on the bodies sending attendees.  But what was really startling was the nature of the seminars being presented.  Not the ‘bleeding obvious’ but rather the ‘bleeding, bleeding obvious’.  It was sufficient to make one cringe.

Of course, there was a certain collusion of interests involved.  The people attending were enjoying an all-expenses-paid freebie; while the organisers were getting extremely well rewarded.  No reason for anyone to rock the boat.

Another aspect, of course, is that where even the ‘bleeding obvious’ threatens to peter out, one can still spin the idea of ever new dangers that need protecting against, no matter how far fetched.  The managers of bureaucracies being what they are, the first instinct is always to cover one’s arse, so that the likely reaction is to roll over and go along with it, in case by some chance an asteroid might really hit the earth.  If one is clever enough with words, there is nothing than cannot be spun into a potential danger.

The truth is that the original Health and Safety impetus has morphed into a great and many-tentacled bureaucracy.  It has also carried out the trick of transferring the burden of implementing its regulations on to the shoulders of those compelled to use the system.  And the fact also is that it is has begun to gum up the normal workings of the economy, especially at the lower level, where smaller firms are finding it too expensive and onerous to deal with the paperwork involved in even the smallest of tenders.

I will come back to this again at some stage.

More of the same . . .

Years ago, on the Late Late Show, there was a segment one night where various small enterprises were given an opportunity to sell themselves and what they were doing to the public.  One particular entrepeneur stood up and said: ‘My name is ----- ----- and I am a job creator’.  No doubt true enough as far as it went.  But the fact was that the creation of jobs was ancillary to the main purpose of setting up his business, which was to make money.  Indeed, if he could have made more money by laying workers off, he probably would have done so.  And one couldn’t complain about it, that’s the logic of the system.

As far as whistleblowing is concerned, no doubt there are people of principle involved.  But the problem is that once you start creating a profile of whistleblowing as being something heroic and praiseworthy and glamorous, then, as is often the case with charity or humanitarian work, you run the risk of attracting those for whom the matter of principle is more or less ancillary.

And if you go even further and create some sort of official category of whistleblowing, including safeguards against suffering any negative consequences from one’s informing—indeed, perhaps even gaining from it—then you are really opening a Pandora’s Box. All the old innate evils of the human condition will then come into play: greed, begrudgery, vengeance etc. etc.

How soon before you have people before the employment tribunals or the courts claiming they were denied benefits or promotions because they were whistleblowers?  And, knowing the way companies and organisations tend to run away from such controversies, arguably opening up informing as a potentially royal road to advancement?

There is also the question of opening up another avenue for the growth of the cancer of bureaucracy: something that will be dealt with in the next mailing.

The Art of Blowing the Whistle

We used to have whistleblowers in the place where I worked.  Everywhere has them.  Except that we used call them ‘hangmen’.  But the world seems to have moved on from then and suddenly they are being promoted as moral heroes.

Now let me say I am not speaking of any specific case, for really I don’t know very much about the various examples in the public eye at the moment.  All I know about them is what I read in the newspaper headlines, which is generally all I read of any article.  But I am fascinated by the logic of the situation and where it seems likely to lead.

There will always be situations where there is a compelling need to speak up.  But the first thing to be said is that there are ways of doing this that do not involve one having to step into the spotlight.  Also there are cases that involve the risk of it nonetheless happening.

There is the famous case of Kurt Gerstein, an Obersturmbannführer (equivalent of a Lieutenant-Colonel) in the SS, who sought to inform the world via the Swedish diplomatic service and the Vatican and various other channels about the extermination of the Jews.  He tried to do so privately, because had he been caught he would have been killed.  Nonetheless he felt morally compelled to take that chance.

The heroic essence of his action is that in doing it he was putting his neck on the line, there was no reward or praise or enhanced public profile for him—certainly not in wartime Germany.  And that is the essence of true ‘whistleblowing’—it has to involve a potential cost that one is nonetheless prepared to risk.

If ‘whistleblowing’ is made too easy then every sneak in the country can reinvent himself as a whistleblower, and things that were done formerly behind the secrecy of closed doors can now be done in the full light of day, and one can expect to be rewarded and praised and lionised for it, too.

The idea that people who inform in this way (I hate using the word ‘whistleblower’; I think it is a ridiculous term) should not be negatively affected in the slightest by their actions is to devalue the moral value of ‘whistleblowing’.  The seriousness or otherwise of the matter being reported can be calculated purely to the extent that people are prepared to risk their employment or promotion prospects or the disapproval of their fellow workers, or even of the world, in order to make it known.  If there is no such risk involved then it cannot be a matter of any great importance.

Remove this conditional and the long-term consequence is less likely to be ‘openness’ than chaos.

City on a Hill

What is one to make of the candidates for the American presidency?

Trump reminds me of Colm McCarthy’s reported remark on the Irish Financial Regulator’s television performance at the time of the economic collapse, where he ‘stammered rote answers to questions he had not been asked, and ignored the ones he had been asked’.   Basically a flim-flam man, he’s not out of place in the political arena.

Clinton, by contrast, is not a natural politician.  She is a typical ideologue, convinced she knows what’s best for everyone and intent on giving it to them, irrespective of whether they want it or not.  But she lacks the necessary footwork for the public side of things.

America has since its founding prided itself on being ‘as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us’.  In other words, certainly from the point of view of many of the founding fathers, an example to the world of what was possible in a society organised primarily on the basis of reason and secularism.

Some city . . . some hill!

Ostland

Ostland, a book by David Thomas, published in 2013, is a strange amalgam of fact and fiction.  It is at the same time the most penetrating psychological study of the mindset of the hands-on functionaries of the killing squads of the Holocaust that I have ever come across.  There is nothing particularly new in it, yet the way in which it knits together existing evidence and insights into a consistent picture is absolutely fascinating.  It is also a totally harrowing read.

The main and most interesting point it deals with is the way in which the practitioners sought to insulate themselves from the reality and psychological consequences of what they were doing.  They did this by clinging to the idea of duty as being the thing most paramount.  And duty meant obedience to orders.

And there is an element in the German makeup that seems inured to obedience.  Anybody who has stood at a pedestrian crossing in Germany or Austria, with no traffic coming for hundreds of yards in either direction, and watched as the natives wait patiently for the lights to change, would have an inkling of this.  It is an element that predates the Nazis, although they laid a special emphasis on it.

For the officers and men of the killing squads, save where they were by nature sadists and psychopaths, this extreme concept of duty became the justification, both during and after the war, for all they did.  It was the comfort blanket that they used to hide from themselves the knowledge of their personal weakness.

I use the term ‘weakness’ in a selective sense.  It is not a weakness unique to those who became mass murderers, but is common to us all.  The Nazi’s developed several psychological techniques to make possible the killing regime that they desired.  The SS were trained in hardness and duty with a view to carrying out tasks that in general were as yet unexplained to them.  But it was discovered that, despite all the training, when men were informed in advance of what was expected of them many of them demurred.

Gitta Sereny, in her biography of Albert Speer, writes: ‘There was a three-week SS orientation course in Pretzsch near Leipzig in May 1941, at the end of which a number of officers who had been appointed leaders of the Einsatzgruppen destined for Barbarossa, horrified by what they had learned, managed to get themselves transferred.’

The answer to this for the leadership, as least as far as the intermediate ranks were concerned, was often to keep them in ignorance until the last possible moment, when suddenly they found themselves, a bottle of vodka in one hand and a revolver in the other, standing behind a row of naked people in the killing line.

Rather like lobsters poised above a pot of boiling water, they found themselves suddenly confronted by a situation that, no matter how they reacted to it, was certain, even through just the knowledge of it, to change them forever.  All their automatically imbibed assumptions about themselves and their society and human nature and decency and religion and God would in those first few moments be burned away.  Even if they turned their backs and ran away from it, they could not escape, nonetheless, being unutterably changed.  In such a situation, it might be argued, the easiest reaction was to just shoot.  And in the fact of firing that first shot, they were forever caught.

It is no wonder that such men clung so fervently to the idea of duty as a way of justifying themselves and as an attempt to protect themselves against the psychological and spiritual consequences of what they were doing.  Some were deliberately ostentatious in their attempts to underline the fact that they were only doing their duty, a duty that otherwise was personally unpleasant to them, signalling this (and this really is the absurdity of it all) through taking strong exception to any gratuitous extra cruelties being inflicted on those about to be killed.

The other side of the coin was the necessity to shore up the idea of duty as an iron law, as the iron law which must be obeyed before any other.  This was to be done by a deliberate denial of mercy.  Even the most emotionally debilitating killings had to be endured, for to show mercy, to make exceptions, was to undermine the concept of duty as the law that had to be obeyed above all others, and at the same time rob the perpetrators of the fig-leaf of self-justification that they clung so fiercely to.

In my earlier blogs I quoted from Himmler’s speech to the Gauleiters in Posnan in 1943:

 ‘The hard decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the face of the earth.  For the organisation which had to carry out this order, it was the most difficult one we were ever given. . . . I think I can say that it has been carried out without damaging the minds or spirits of our men and our leaders.  The danger was great and ever present.  For the difference between the two possibilities . . . to become cruel and heartless and no longer to respect human life, or to become soft and succumb to weakness and nervous breakdowns . . . the way between Scylla and Charybdis is appallingly narrow.’

Yet the fact is that this ideologically contrived version of duty proved inadequate to the purpose of protecting men against the consequences of their actions.  One of the main reasons for the building of the extermination camps was the evidence of the psychological toll that the direct killing of men, women and children was having on the perpetrators.  Indeed, the Nazis sought to describe the creation of the gas chambers as a ‘humanitarian’ measure, except it was a humanitarianism intended to benefit, not the victims, but the killers in the field.

The central character of Thomas’s book is Georg Hauser, a real life perpetrator, who had previously been a decorated police detective.  Hauser, like so many of the others who survived the war—indeed he himself became a policeman again after the war, and ended up a chief of police—clung to the end to the idea that he had only been doing his duty.

And this is understandable.  It was the single fragile wall that stood between him and the certainty of total psychological and moral collapse.  Yet the effort of maintaining it must have been an agony, the reality constantly slopping over and around it in nightmares and in those moments of letting his self-discipline slip.

He had been presented, no matter how difficult the circumstances, with a choice, and rather than strength had found only weakness.  It is a terrible self-judgement to have to live with.

Hell or High Water

Went the other night to see the film Hell or High Water, the very unoriginality of whose title tells you a lot about it in advance.  It is possible to see a lot of influences in it, whether they are actually there or not.  From Hud, The Last Picture Show, Paris, Texas, No Country for Old Men to Killing them Softly (though not nearly as bad as that particular turkey).

The former influences are best seen in its lingering camerawork taking in the Llano Estacado landscape of West Texas, and the small flyblown towns that inhabit the area.  Yet though atmospherically photographed, the cinematography seems less to support the story than the story to support the cinematography.  Unlike the first four movies mentioned earlier, the two aspects don’t appear to seamlessly meld.  In places, it comes perilously close to being a sort of still-life with incidental action, as in the scene where the two brothers act out a bit of redundant horseplay against the main canvas of a huge and horizonless Texas evening sky.

Overall it gives one the impression almost of a painting by numbers effort.  Let’s throw in a bit of the cinematography of The Last Picture Show, Paris Texas, etc.  And while we’re at it, let’s borrow aspects of the character of the sheriff in No Country for Old Men.  Finally, let’s try add a bit of social significance, though not in the embarrassingly clunking manner it was larded into Killing Them Softly.

Here the facts of economic collapse and unemployment and the ruthless predatoriness of banks are central to the story.  Yet in a certain obscure sense it doesn’t really convince—there is a sense almost of observing life from a distance, of rehearsing the liberal stereotypes that in Hollywood tend to take the place of actual lived experience.

It is a film that from its opening scenes gives the impression of throwing shapes—yes, really, that is the best description of it.  Throwing shapes!  There is nothing in it that is not borrowed, consciously or unconsciously, from somewhere else.  It is a film not reflecting life so much as reflecting other films.  It has nothing new to say.

As well, there is what comes across as a totally hamfisted attempt to deal with the matter of racial banter, so untrue to life and so incompetently handled as to make one almost go down on one’s knees to political correctness.

That being said, it is not a bad film.  What’s done in it tends to be well done.  But it is not a film deserving of the four of five stars that have been awarded to it by so many critics.

Two, maybe two and a half.

Well, that’s my opinion.