As old as politics . . .

There is a current furore over what is called ‘false news’, as though this was something that hadn’t existed from time both memorial and immemorial.

The historian Adrian Goldsworthy writes in In the Name of Rome (2003) of Julius Caesar: ‘Rumour persisted that during his service in the east he had had a homosexual affair with the aging King Nicomedes of Bythinia, so that he was dubbed “a husband to women and a wife to men”.  Such crude invective was the common coin of Roman politics, making it very difficult to know whether the story had a basis in truth, but Caesar’s womanising was certainly both frequent and blatant’.

In the 12^th century, as John Julius Norwich reports in The Popes, the foremost candidate to replace the dying Honorius II as pope was ‘Cardinal Pietro Pierleoni who, after studying in Paris with the great Peter Abelard, had spent several years as a monk at Cluny before being appointed Papal Legate, first in France and then in England.  His genuine piety and irreproachable Cluniac background had made him a staunch upholder of [Church] reform . . .’  All of which, however, was insufficient to save him from attack.

As Norwich goes on to relate in a footnote: ‘Accusations were from time to time made against him by such robust prelates as Manfred of Mantua and Arnulf of Lisieux (who actually wrote a book [against Pierleoni] called Invectives) to the effect that he seduced nuns, slept with his sister, and so on; but these can be discounted as being the normal, healthy Church polemic to be expected at times of schism’.

Leonie Frieda, in her biography of Catherine de Medici, wife of Henry II of France, speaks of the avalanche of slander and abuse that beset her from her religious and political enemies, in the course of the Reformation: ‘Published in 1576, the most notable and virulent attack upon Catherine [appeared] . . . . Written by someone with an intimate knowledge of Court life cleverly blending fact with fiction, this slim volume was a huge success throughout the country and underwent several reprints.  It accused the Queen Mother of every lurid and horrible crime imaginable.  She had not only killed every person whose death had been convenient to her, orchestrated the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, seduced her sons into lives of fecklessness and debauchery so that she might usurp their rights, but her whole life was also so motivated by greed, hatred and a lust for power that no crime was too vicious for her provided that she kept her position as the de facto ruler of France.  Catherine reacted with amused interest; the charges were so exaggerated that she laughed and encouraged her ladies to read it to her aloud.  The only pity, she commented, was “that the author had not previously applied to me for information . . . he evidently knew nothing of the events he pretended to discuss”.  Besides, she laughed, he had left so much out!’

Marie Antoinette, too, suffered all during her marriage from a bad press to do with frivolity and extravagance, culminating after the imprisonment of the monarchy in ‘a lively commerce in libellous books.  A two-volume Private Life of the Queen, complete with obscene drawings, was selling well’ (Caroline Moorhead: Dancing to the Precipice).

There is nothing new about ‘fake news’, it is as old as humanity, or certainly as old as politics.  The illustrations given above could be multiplied a thousandfold, if one had the time.

The difference in reaction now to ‘fake news’, it seems to me, lies partially in the ‘democratisation’ of the means of communication, whereby anyone with a connection to the internet can empty their pisspot of angst and bile on whoever’s head they choose.

Back around 1990—pre-internet days—I wrote a futuristic short story that involved people socialising over distance by means of holograph, and it seemed to me even then that a consequence of any such development would be to embolden those who in ordinary circumstances wouldn’t say boo to a goose.  ‘Little dogs with suddenly big tails’ was, I think, how I described it at the time.

Now there are two implications for the art of political character assassination in the current situation.  On the one hand, the proliferation of abuse on-line allows the clever operators to hide within the herd and ramp up their campaigns in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.  On the other hand, it handicaps them, too, in that the effect of their message runs the risk of being drowned out in the sheer tsunami of omni-directed spleen that exists on the internet.

And I suspect it is this second that is the main driving force behind the whole ‘fake news’ hysteria—the fear that, in the shootout that is social media, the targeted message of the professional assassin is likely become less effective; indeed, that it might even become counterproductive through blowback.

            It is interesting that the whole nonsense over ‘fake news’ has only manifested itself in the wake of Trump’s win and the Brexit vote in Britain. 

‘You’ll get pie in the sky when you die . . .’

The above is the origin of the phrase ‘pie in the sky’ and comes from a song by Joe Hill, an early American labour organiser, subject of the more famous song ‘Joe Hill’ (‘I dreamt I saw Joe Hill last night . . .etc. etc.’).  The implication of it is quite clear: better happiness in this life than in the context of some uncertain future.  And given the often terrible circumstances of the times in which he lived, it is also quite understandable.

Yet it also encapsulates the overall Marxist and secular liberal ideological position on things pertaining to life and death and the circumstances that may or may not exist beyond death.  The Marxist etc. position is a strictly materialist one: there is only this one life and nothing beyond it, and if you want pie you better be sure and get it in the here and now.  The question that arises is what happens if you are not able to supply that pie.

An ancillary aspect of religion has always been the resilience it creates in people—that increased ability to bear up under hardship, and even to find meaning in it.  Undermine this capacity to endure and what is left?  In this increasingly secular world, the natural reaction to scarcity or hardship is not one of patience, but rather of aggression.  We want what we want and we’ll have it, no matter what we have to do to get it, and no matter who has to pay for it!

In this era of untrammelled rights and expectations, we have crises on all fronts.  In health and policing and housing and education and whatever else you care to look at.  And the basis of these crises is not some temporary shortfall in funding that over time will correct itself.  We have instead allowed to develop social structures that are outstripping our normal capacity to fund them.  In a very real sense, we are, along with most advanced liberal economies, fundamentally, if not technically, bankrupt.  The ship sails on to the extent that we are still able to borrow money.  And should that capacity to borrow ever dry up, or our creditors come knocking at the door for their money back, then . . . ?

Mirabeau, one of the early and most moderate of leaders of the French Revolution, who died prematurely in 1791, left a prescient warning as to what was to later happen: ‘The people have been promised more than can be promised; they have been given hopes that will be impossible to realise . . .’

Either ‘Newspeak’ or ‘don’t speak’ . . .

The Catholic activist Carlo Carretto, who spent ten years of his life living as a hermit in the North African desert, wrote of the implicit problem for the secular do-gooder (though, of course, he wouldn’t and didn’t express it in those terms) of the moment of potential disillusionment when coming face to face with the ‘egoism, arrogance, and capacity for betrayal’ that is central to man.

The labour activist Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993, and who spent his adult life organising the immigrant grape pickers of California, said something similar.  ‘I learned quickly that there is no appreciation . . . whatever you do, you do it because you want to see it done . . . I know good organisers who were destroyed, washed out, because they expected people to appreciate what they’d done.  Anyone who comes in with the idea that farmworkers are free of sin and that the growers are all bastards is an idealist of the first water’.

When he speaks of idealism here, he is speaking of people seeing what they want to see, rather than the reality, and genuflecting before it.

Even Jesus, if you read the Gospels carefully, had no illusions about human nature.  In John, for example, ‘But Jesus himself did not entrust himself to them, because he knew them all, and he knew that he had no need for anyone to tell him about man, for he himself knew what was in man.’

The main thing that encompasses the three individuals mentioned is their ability to realistically apprehend what man is and yet at the same time express a compassion for him that transcends, or even includes, the negative characteristics.  Carretto describes this as ‘Love’, though, of course, this description suffers from being already burdened with so many alternative meanings.

More akin to ‘love’, in the romantic sense, is Chavez’s description of the disappointed organisers who couldn’t quite cut it and became burnt out.  What he is clearly saying is that beneath their activism lay an obscure personal motivation, an unconscious itch that they sought to scratch through their labour involvement.  Like your average romantic, they were engaged in chasing an illusion, which, if they were unlucky enough to catch up with, was as likely to prove as much a disappointment as a fulfilment.

Yet there is a version of compassion abroad today that is very much along the lines of a fashion statement, something to be paraded whenever possible to show how caring one is.  It is an ersatz compassion, a selective compassion, an emotional attachment to some touchy-feely cause, generally accompanied by a visceral hatred of anyone or anything that disagrees with it.  It is not a true compassion, in any sense of the word, but rather a trojan horse for an ideology whose ultimate aims are anything but compassionate.

Yet the fact is that it has managed to capture the ears of the world, primarily because it controls, or has infested, like plaques in the interstices of an Alzheimer patient’s brain, the means of information.

And in a related sense, too, what are we to make of the current furore over homelessness, the state standing condemned for its apparent failure to future plan?

How come nobody ever mentions the word ‘immigration’?

How is one to square the notion of democracy with a society where those who should be asking the questions seem too afraid to ask even the obvious ones?

The way things are now . . .

As opposed to latterday Marxists, most of whom at least pretend to espouse democracy, Marx himself had little time for it, considering what he called ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be the ideal vehicle of capitalist political control.  Of course, most modern Marxists, despite their protestations to the contrary, don’t really believe in it either.  Revolution having failed, they see it instead as an alternative means of achieving their ends, which haven’t at all changed in the meantime, other than to become infected more and more with crazy liberal sexual politics.

The program is by hook or crook to get a political majority, and then, usually using the courts, to go full belt to implement the full Marxist-cum-Leninist programme, irrespective of the consequences that may ensue.

The fact is that democracy, certainly as we practice it, can only work to the extent that there is at root some shared foundation plinth of values, or at least restraints, among the different parties.  Rather like in snooker—an analogy I have used in a different context before—parties can twist themselves into whatever configuration they like, so long as they continue to keep at least a toe on the ground of those shared principles.  Should this common ground be allowed disappear, then democracy becomes impossible.

And such is the situation we find ourselves increasingly in today, to the extent that I really believe we are—and I am speaking here of the West in general—in the preliminary stages of civil war, for there seems no way for any former working basis of agreement to be glued back together.

Rather than the ‘preliminary stages of civil war’, perhaps I should speak instead of the ‘talking stages’; though the talking consists mainly of shouting, and that coming generally from the one side.

In such a situation, the temptation is often to retreat back into private life, until such time as the storm blows over, and things hopefully resume, equally hopefully, more or less as they were before.

But such, at the present juncture, is unlikely to be the case.

The following extracts are from The Philosophy Steamer, an excellent book by Leslie Chamberlain, published in 2006, and dealing with the enforced exodus of the liberal—and, strangely enough, the religiously motivated liberal—intelligentsia from Russia, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.

“No non-Russian reader and no reader in the twenty-first century should misunderstand what this offensive against religion, superficially justified as an attack on superstition, actually meant.  One of the key aims of Bolshevism was to destroy religion in Russia, both in terms of the Church as an autonomous institution and in terms of Christianity as a source of popular authority.  To this, Marxist-Leninist philosophy added an objection to religious faith because it sanctioned an ‘inwardness’ which in turn allowed for freedom of thought.  Soviet totalitarianism meant denying individuals the possibility of a discrete ‘inner’ life.  Everything had to be rendered to Caesar. . . . Lenin defined the modern effectively as totalitarian, and the result was the banishment of inwardness not only from philosophy but from life itself.  It became the task of propaganda and the political police in Russia to disallow individuality and privacy – the sources of imagination – in daily life and in the political lives of individuals. Under the Soviet version of totalitarianism there was no such thing as private thoughts; no possibility of an inner space in which a man might commune with himself.”

Looking at this, is it possible to avoid the conclusion that one is looking at the blueprint for what was to come to pass for socialism in, say, today’s North Korea?  It is a tradition in the revolutionary left to blame it all on Stalin; if he hadn’t gained control, then everything would have been different.  Yet reading here, it is impossible to disallow the idea that, Stalin or no Stalin, the end result was already written into the DNA of the communist movement from the very beginning.

The word ‘discrete’ in the quotation means basically ‘separate’; but equally its homophone ‘discreet’ could just as well apply.

Change of Direction . . .

“The urge to community seems to be inherent in society.  In mediaeval society the urge to simpler forms of community expressed itself in the cities and towns by a subdivision into rival districts and quarters called wards, where, as one description of it goes, ‘The ward is a social unit where people meet, congregate, celebrate, and gossip.  It is a true neighbourhood, where everyone knows each other, where people vouch for each other, and where people perform their everyday routine’.

Dundalk was at one stage divided into four wards, which seem to survive solely as vague memories.  Modern day Siena continues to have seventeen contrade or city wards, all of them still active and passionate, and which add a spice to life at odds with the otherwise drab uniformity of urbanisation.

Like a plant cut-back and cut-back, yet still struggling to grow, there seems to be a basic and hidden longing within humanity for a more limited and local identity than simply that of citizen.

Yet the atomisation of modern society makes it harder and harder to express this longing in any practical form.  To the extent that people are aware of this, it is as a vague dissatisfaction, an itch that can’t be scratched . . .”

The above represents the beginning of my third mailing to do with community, but even as I wrote it, I found myself diverting away from my original purpose in writing it.  My intention was to try and offer a rough template for the rescue of the better and more important elements of traditional community.  But the more I tried to do so, the more presumptuous it began to seem, and the more pointless.  At best one would be proposing starting again from scratch, something that would be quite impossible.

At most it would resemble those monkey compounds in the better zoos, where all sorts of climbing and swinging and self-hiding devices are provided in an effort to mimic the natural habitat of the animal, without ever at all being able to recreate the actuality of what really has been lost.

The ancients had a much simpler and deeper idea of what was involved in community building.  In the 5^th century BC, the Athenians undertook the task of re-establishing the southern Italian city of Sybaris, which had previously been destroyed in local conflicts.  And one of the first things they did was to create twelve separate tribes to inhabit it, and, it would seem, to give it an internal vibrancy—rather like adding yeast to dough—that would cause it to flourish, even as it presented a united outwards face to the world.

Rather like looking into the workings of a watch, the overall purpose would be achieved by creating an interior system of competition and divided communal allegiances and the various contradictory processes arising from the same.  In some sense, it would resemble a living body, full of circulation and movement.

Yet the fact is that nowadays we are way beyond that stage.  The ancient way was organic, a sort of ‘not by bread alone’ approach, as opposed to the twentieth century insistence on creating huge undifferentiated wodges of local government and other housing, on the patronising assumption that all people required was a roof over their heads and sufficient to eat in order to feel fulfilled.

It should also be recognised that the process of dividing ancient and mediaeval urban settlements into smaller internal communal areas, wards, or tribes, had the effect of recognising, however inchoately, the limits seemingly imposed by nature on the optimum size of community, something discussed in previous mailings.

It was in the bigger cities, such as Athens, where the system eventually broke down under sheer weight of numbers, resulting in the most fearsome of class warfare, leading eventually to the emergence of modern political democracy as we know it.

I considered deleting the previous two mailings, as a result of the change in direction of my thinking.  Nonetheless, I decided to lead them stand, in that they contain, I think, certain small things of value within them.

The matter requires a lot more thought . . .

I may return to it in time.

Until later  . . .

The third part of the most recent mailing will, along with other mailings, be held back for the next fortnight or so, due to other unavoidable commitments.  But it will appear.

Continuing on from the last day . . .

The difference between community, in the traditional sense in which I have described it, and what passes nowadays for community—the accident of people happening to live in a particular location—is that if confronted with a threat the traditional community might be expected to react together in the face of it.  As opposed to the probable reaction of its modern ersatz equivalent, which would be to shatter under impact, like a glass vase dropped on a concrete floor, and scatter in its shards into the mythical security of self-sufficiency.

I have known of instances where a handful of people have come together within a community, of their own volition, to help look after a sick or elderly individual, not for reward or praise, but simply because it was the right, and to them natural, thing to do.  In the instances I am talking off, it would have been animated by a sense of organic connection with the individual concerned, whom they would have known as part of their community from earliest childhood.

Yet such a thing, such a sense of ongoing connection, is becoming so much rarer in our days, as signalled in the onward march of the ‘home help’.

Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto of how the rise of capitalism ‘left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”’.  One might equally say the same of modern social development, and the way it has undermined the traditional bonds and affections of community.

The people I mentioned earlier would have carried out much of the duties of ‘home helps’, and had they been of necessity pressed to it, probably of ‘carers’, too.  They would have seen it as their responsibility, a responsibility alloyed with a certain sense of affection too.

Now I’m not being critical of ‘home helps’.  Their existence is simply a reflection of the way society has gone.  Most of them, no doubt, do a very good job; and most of them would have some degree of feeling for those they deal with.  Yet the fact is that when you need to replace something that in previous times would have been the natural and unforced expression of communal solidarity with something that needs instead the incentive of cash payment, then a significant and ongoing social change has to be involved.

Now I have to hold my hands up here and say that, whatever about kin, I certainly have no skin in the game.  Personally, I would be most reluctant to being looked after in my dotage by anyone, volunteer or otherwise.  Nor would I be necessarily in the forefront of the rush to help, should such a thing be required.  But that’s the way I am.  Rather, as I said in a much earlier context, I am casting myself in the role of observer, rather like the guy in the stands who may have a much clearer idea of what’s going on down on the pitch, than those actually playing.  But then, again, maybe not.

What engages me is the belief that we need urgently to rescue whatever can be rescued from the old structures of community.  And not just in terms of looking after the elderly or the sick either, which is something I will come to in the third and final part of this mailing, whenever I get to it.

In the meantime, I was pleasantly surprised to see an article in last week’s Sunday Times about a charity—despite my innate suspicion of anything bearing the term ‘charity’—in Britain called HelpForce, that would have certain similarities to what I am in the process of outlining.  Though there would be differences, too, especially in relation as to how it would fit in with the optimum size of communities, as discussed in my previous mailing.

In any event, I will try to bring the strings together in my next and final mailing in the topic—as I say, whenever I get around to it.

The loss of the organic . . .

Ernest Hemingway wrote that a man on his own has no chance.  So isolating oneself in expectation of disaster is never going to work.  It is like survivalists in America, building retreats in the woods in face of some anticipated apocalypse.  They might as well put up signposts saying ‘here be food and guns’.  Because really that is what they are doing, stockpiling things for others much tougher—and there’s always someone tougher—to take off them.

And yet we live in a world beset by war and rumours of war and the threat of all sorts of economic, ecological and other disasters.

So what is one supposed to do, other than hide one’s head under the blankets?

For a long, long time now, I have believed that communities need to deliberately foster a local resilience, not necessarily in expectation of disaster, yet that will stand them in good stead should disaster in any event come.  It is more than simply a matter of community spirit, though such a thing is important in itself; it is rather a deliberate policy of looking at things in terms of the community as a whole and seeing what needs to be and what can be done on a practical level to insure the ongoing health and survivability of the social organism.

Now when I talk of community here, I am talking of localities and the people who live in them—and not in the nowadays fashionable terms of communities of this and communities of that—the gay community, the immigrant community, the journalistic community, the faith community and all other such neologisms.

For the fact is that real communities have traditionally been at the the root of healthy societies.  Neglect such roots and the whole social structure is quite likely to come down, not immediately, but perhaps suddenly, when placed under challenge, like a rotten tree in a storm.

In the same sense as studies have shown that the most effective committees occur within the range of 4 to 8 members—above or below that and efficiency begins immediately to taper off—so also there seem to be parameters for community.  These parameters suggest that the upper and lower limits for effective communities lies between 100 and 250 individuals, with the optimum number set around 150. And there seems to be historical evidence as well as scientific evidence to underline these conclusions.

It seems also that these figures refer only to adult acquaintances, so that the numbers can be inflated upwards by allowing for children.

The same research tends to show that the individual human being can really only organically integrate with others within these same parameters.  And it is these parameters that control the possibility of forming true communities: communities which act like mutual-aid and mutual-defence societies, where everyone knows everyone else, and each can depend on the backing of the rest in the general vicissitudes of life, as they effect the community.

It is exactly such circumstances that allow for the development of community-based institutions that involve a high degree of trust, such as credit unions.  Where credit unions stray beyond the boundaries of such long-accumulated local knowledge and experience, they often tend to run into trouble.

Yet the fact is that the existence of such communities is becoming less and less a reality—what with ease of transport and immigration and town-to-country and country-to-town migration.  It would be comparatively rare to find a community nowadays that has been allowed enjoy its own slow process of natural fermentation undisturbed by at least some of the factors mentioned above.

Yet at the same time one can’t turn back the clock, no matter how much is being lost in this process of, if you like, social and cultural ‘globalisation’.  The best that can be done is, like shipwrecked sailors, to try and rescue what can be rescued from the disaster.  Especially in a world, the way it is, that may not allow for very much time.

More anon . . .

Waiting for the ‘Off’!

Paganism didn’t just shrivel and die in the face of a victorious Christianity in 4^th century Rome.  Exhausted as it was, it still required a sequence of state edicts to finally put it out of its misery.  A significant additional element was the upsurge of Christian mobs intent on enforcing the decrees by violence.

But what goes around comes around; and it would seem nowadays that Christianity, and especially the Catholic Church, is facing a similar fate.  Certainly, the mob seems to be already there and primed; it just hasn’t turned to direct violence yet.

The only real difference between mobs is the accident of their motivations, the particular targets that animate them.

Clausewitz, in the process of cataloguing the different human types, speaks of ‘those who are very easily roused, whose feelings blaze up quickly and violently like gunpowder, but do not last.’

Frustrated, angry, unthinking, reactive, and as unconsciously aggregative as those headcases you see milling outside courthouses during high-profile arraignments.  Easily influenceable, too.

Farmed salmon are not naturally red; the colour is artificially created by means of dyes added to their food.  So also with the excitables, who are tuned into all the channels, and draw their nourishment from them; their programming, too.

‘The longest suicide note in history . . .’

There has been a hiatus of over a week since my last mailing.  It is not that here has been nothing to say, for there always is, but rather that there has been nothing that demanded immediate saying.  And that is the way it is going to be ongoing.  There will be periods of intermittent silence; and periods of a more regular mailing.

In the meantime, just some rules of thumb.

Don’t look at situations in isolation, stand back and look at them in terms of their potential consequences.  These various campaigns we are inflicted with nowadays always try to pass themselves off as ‘stand-alone issues’, things that need to be addressed for ostensible reasons of justice or compassion or just a warm, muzzy sense of fellow feeling.  But if the past few years should have taught us anything, it is that this is never actually the case.  Each cause won immediately spawns a new one, or new ones.  Each successful campaign always carries a stinger.

The strategists behind such campaigns piece-feed the public in such a way as to get them to accept piece-by-piece things which otherwise presented in their totality they would rebel against.

The second thing to realise is that no one ever fights for equality.  They may say they do, they may even believe it, but only up to the moment they enter the winning straight, at which stage thoughts begin to turn to establishing control and overall mastery—or in the case of at least one of the battle fronts facing us, ‘mistressy’.

In the famous words of the 1983 British election campaign, quoted in the title of this mailing, our tendency to fold for whatever reason in the face of the relentless onslaught of progressivist liberalism is representative, not of a march towards some secularist New Jerusalem, but rather to somewhere much more questionable.

And such has always been the case.

Another from the vaults . . .

[This is something I wrote in March 2016, and I publish it now simply because it has, in part, a certain current relevance with regards to the American economic blockade of Iran, though you will have to go down a fair piece in what is a rather long article to find the relevant bit.]

Cormac Lucey, a lecturer in finance at UCD, a former special advisor to Michael McDowell during the latter’s time in government, and a regular Irish columnist in the Business Section of the Sunday Times, wrote on the 28^th February 2016.

‘Consider recent remarks from Peter Sutherland, a former attorney-general, EU commissioner and chairman of AIB and Goldman Sachs International.  He has stated, regarding the current refugee crisis: “The United States, or Australia and New Zealand, are migrant societies and therefore they accommodate more readily those from other backgrounds than we do ourselves, who still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others.  And that’s precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine.”

‘Sutherland suggests the EU should undermine nationality and any sense of nationality.  No wonder the Brits think about leaving.  The wonder is that more aren’t considering joining them.  And the wonder is that we don’t harbour greater resentments against the EU for its authoritarian rejection of democratic referendum results here—see the treaties of Nice and Lisbon.’

There is nothing surprising in this.  One would need to be blind not to see the way things have been heading over many years, certainly since the European Charter on Human Rights was made legally binding in the EU in 2009 under the Treaty of Lisbon, and indeed much earlier.  The Treaty of Lisbon, as noted above, was one of those treaties that the EU insisted on bringing back before the electorate until they got the ‘yes’ that they wanted.

I have been intending for a while now to write something on this, especially as there is a very interesting historical precedent, as it were, to what is going on now.  I have been reading around the issue, purely by accident, these past two years, and it really just a matter of collating the different notes that I’ve made, whenever I get around to it.

The point I am trying to deal with here is somewhat different, though related.  Part of my reading over the past two years has involved rereading The Iliad, in the course of which one particular sentence pulled me up short.  It is where Priam, the king of Troy, comes in secret to beg the body of his dead son Hector from Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors.

Achilles was the only son of Peleus.  And Priam says to him of his father back in Greece: ‘No doubt the countrymen roundabout plague him, with no one there to defend him, beat away disaster’.  And it immediately fills in a picture of the Heroic Age in Greece, where one’s power and one’s possessions depended purely on one’s ability to hang on to them, to the extent that even the father of the great Achilles, in his son’s absence, and in the absence of any other sons, wasn’t likely to be safe.

Francis Parkman, in The Oregon Trail, the story of his life among the Indians in the 1840s, tells an analogous story.  He lived among the Oglala Sioux, and writes that ‘Courage, address [stature, appearance] and enterprise may raise any warrior to the highest honour, especially if he be the son of a former chief, or a member of a numerous family, to support and avenge his quarrels . . . Very seldom does it happen, at least among these western tribes, that a chief attains to much power, unless he is the head of a numerous family.’

Parkman recounts the career of one chief, who had thirty sons, and who ruled the village like a tyrant.  ‘His will was law . . . When he had resolved on any course of conduct, he would pay to the warriors the compliment of calling them together to deliberate upon it, and when their debates were over, quietly state his own opinion, which no one ever disputed.  It fared hard with those who incurred his displeasure.  He would strike them or stab them on the spot; and this act, which if attempted by any other chief would have cost him his life, the awe inspired by his name [and by the number of his sons] enabled him to repeat again and again with impunity.’

He was succeeded by his son, the possessor now of twenty-nine brothers, not to mention other close kinsmen, who acted with much the same impunity.  ‘Out of several dozen squaws he had stolen, he could boast that he had never paid for one, but snapping his fingers in the face of the injured husband, had defied the extremity of his indignation, and no one had yet dared to lay the finger of violence upon him . . . His enemies did not forget that he was one of thirty warlike brethren, all growing up to manhood.  Should they wreak their anger upon him, many keen eyes would be ever upon them, and many fierce hearts thirst for their blood.  The avenger would dog their footsteps everywhere.  To kill Mahto-Tatonka would be an act of suicide.’

I quote this not so much to show the power of the large family as to show the inherent weakness and potential humiliation of the small one.
And so it would appear was the case also among the Greeks of the Heroic Age, the difference being that the Greeks had advanced to the stage of the ownership of farms and estates.  But equally so, the securing and the possession of such estates became, it seems, dependent on sexual fertility and the weight of numbers.  The idea of title or deed or right, even if such things existed, seems to have carried little weight.

Arguably the redress for this situation came with democracy and the development of law and of the state.  Now the possibility existed of people being confirmed in the title to their property.  And the state provided the muscle to make its rulings stick.

But still, one must imagine, the old hunger for mastery and possession, no matter how constrained, continued to exist within the human heart.   Indeed, it seems innate to humanity.

I remember when we were in Turkey, talking to an old doctor who had retired home from America, and asking him about the farmlands of the Anatolian plain.  You could see it from the train.  Miles after miles of flat land, as far as the eye could see, without fence or ditch or marker, and here and there, in the dawn light, some old fellow in a djellaba, tending a herd of goats.  And I asked the doctor how one knew his land from the other.  And his reply was, ‘They know, they know!’

And the secret struggle for mastery continues on in a subdued form even under our noses.  The fellow who strings a fence impinging a couple of inches into his neighbours land.  The amount of land is negligible, but what is important is the gaining of the psychological upper hand.  If you get away with it this time, then you might get away with a bit more the next.  Especially in the legal context of precedence, where if you get away with a thing unchallenged on one occasion, you can often claim it as a justification for the next.

And this brings us to the nub of the matter.  The desire for mastery and possession and putting one’s foot on the other’s neck hasn’t disappeared.  It has just changed its form—and all the more so it seems these past few years.  Kavanagh wrote in Tarry Flynn about Tarry going into a bookshop, and while he bought a book of poems, his companion Eusebius bought an ordinance survey map, and the result of it is that Tarry’s family ends up losing a field.  Now it doesn’t make sense—but that’s the way Kavanagh chose to tell it.  But it is indicative of what it is that I’m trying to say.

The very thing that helped curb predatoriness in ancient times has now become the vehicle of a new breed of predator.  Not guys fit for violence and with big families backing them up, but generally more wimpy types of characters backed up by an adventurous knowledge of the law.  As the law has exponentially swelled and grown ever more complex, the more so it has allowed the clever and the greedy and the unscrupulous to use it as a weapon of aggrandisement.  As Woody Guthrie wrote in The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd, ‘Some will rob you with a six-gun/Some with a fountain pen.’

Armed with an intricate knowledge of the law, whether their own or expensively bought, there is a whole cohort of people out there intent on using it without conscience as a way of getting even richer than they already are.

There are what are called ‘activist shareholders’ who force themselves onto the boards of public companies with the sole intention of maximising the share of profits going to shareholders, no matter what otherwise the consequences may be.

When the Argentinian economy collapsed in the early 2000s, the government did a deal with bondholders that involved them taking a haircut of up to 70%.  American vulture funds which had bought up some of this debt cheaply used American law to force the Argentinian state to pay full dollar on the bonds, on pain of the country being effectively shut out of world financial markets.

It is clear too that the American state has been milking the European banks for alleged breaches of American law with swingeing fines, which the banks have no option but to pay or else lose their licence to trade in US dollars and effectively go out of business.

Jeremy Warner, writing in the Daily Telegraph in 2015:  ‘America, land of the free and all that, is at heart a deeply protectionist nation, which as UK banks have discovered to their cost operates a rotten, asphyxiating legal system that often practises little short of outright extortion.  Certainly, it is hard to call it justice.  If you want to do business in the US, expect to get whacked at some stage, and if you are fool enough not to take your punishment with a smile and fawning thanks for the privilege, they will simply close you down.’

Of course, it is hard to have sympathy for banks, yet it is nonetheless the case that the slurry-tank nozzle reaches down via them into the most ordinary of pockets.  Indeed, the activity of the predators exists at all levels of the pond—from the rarified level of high finance down to the bottom-feeding process of extorting directly from mortgage holders and people who have found themselves in hock to the banks and whose debts have been sold on.

And it stretches to more than just the financial system.  Modern financial imperialism—especially, it seems, American financial imperialism—hides in the guise of a new definition of democracy—what Hilary Clinton calls the ‘new decency’—as its preferred mode of dress.  It is something that it seems to find, for whatever reason, particularly appropriate.  This is a democracy that is no longer primarily about gaining a majority of votes, but instead about delivering the liberal agenda and the cosmopolitan lifestyle.

A sort of: ‘One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them/One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them’.  You can have all the votes you want, but if you do not go along with the legal and lifestyle changes required then you will not be accounted a democracy.  You may not as yet be bombed, but you will certainly be subject to economic and financial pressures sufficient to make you yield.

Marx wrote of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto of 1848: ‘The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.  It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves.  In one word, it creates a world in its own image.’

It would be possible to adapt this for the modern age: ‘The global financial stranglehold is the heavy artillery with which it batters down the Chinese and other walls, with which it forces the barbarians intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.  It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the liberal Western cosmopolitan way of life; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become liberal and cosmopolitan themselves.  In other words, it creates a world in its own image.’

One from the vaults . . .

[This was written by me, as will become obvious at the bottom, some three and a half years ago.  I can’t remember what exact circumstances gave rise to it.  In any event, I have decided to use it anyway as filler.]

Many ancient Greeks, including Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides, had great difficulties with the manner of the development of democracy in Athens.  Despite significant changes in the traditional structures of power, it was the attitude of the democrats—or some of them anyway—a perceived attitude of arrogance and insolence—that seems to have rankled most of all.

Nothing surprising here.  Ruling elites have always tended to resent incursions by the lower orders into their traditional areas of power; and this resentment has often focused on incidentals such as the uncouthness and lack of manners etc. of the new arrivals.

At the same time, it is also recognised that sudden rises in status can often cause people to lose the run of themselves.  Indeed, it is arguably an inherent human trait.  Think of certain people who have won the Lotto, for instance.  A succinct and modern take on the political side of the problem is provided in a cameo scene in David Mamet’s 1991 film Homicide.

The old saying about ‘beggars on horseback’ has a special reference here.  Indeed, it is a saying that, in one form or another, might have a provenance going back as far as ancient times, the matter of having or not having a horse being a dividing line between the gentleman and the commoner.  Eli Sagan, the American sociologist, described how any sudden release of social repression was likely to lead to a splurge of pent up frustration on the part of those previously repressed, which might well cause them to ‘ride to the devil’ in celebration of their new found freedoms.

Something like this happened in Italy in the aftermath of the First World War.  Italy had entered the war belatedly, hoping to gain territorial advantage from it; and although they ended up on the side of the victors, the experience of the army was, like a foretaste of its fate-to-be in the next war, one of defeat, frantic retreats and mass desertions.  The traditional right-wing parties and the extreme left-wing parties (including Mussolini) had supported Italy’s entry into the war.  The main opponents had been the Socialist Party.

In the wake of the war the socialists turned on the army, especially on the officer corps.  It was naked class aggression, the officers being mainly representative of the upper classes.  Officers in uniform were attacked, spat upon, had to be rescued from hostile crowds, had their medals torn from their chests etc. etc.  One consequence of it was to drive them to a great extent into the ranks of the fascists—though logically most of them would probably have ended up there anyway.

Yet the reaction of the socialists—or the more vociferous of them anyway—represented less a protest against the war than what might be seen as a premature celebration of victory.  Rather like St Paul in the aftermath of Jesus, the socialists expected with absolute certainty the imminent arrival of the revolution.  Russia had lit the powder keg and it was only a matter of time—and a very short time at that—before it detonated in Italy.  By the election of 1919 the socialists had increased their share of the national vote to 32% and tripled their number of deputies, seeing, in the words of one historian, ‘parliament mainly as a forum for barracking and abuse ahead of the anticipated revolution.’

As it turned out, of course, they were wrong.  They had become victims of their own propaganda.  Rather than the future being red, it was decidedly black.

There is another old saying: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick!’  On the face of it, it is somewhat opaque.  But really the ‘big stick’ means power—and the proof of having power is that you don’t need to advertise the fact.  It is the people who speak loudest who generally have the least power, and are trying to compensate for it by making the most noise.  Not only are they trying to convince the world that they have ‘stick’, they are all the more desperately trying to convince themselves.

This may have a relevance to current events in Ireland.

20 February 2015

Following on from a previous mailing . . .

Purely and genuinely fortuitously, in the course of reading a novel, The Unburied by Charles Palliser, I came across the following quotation.

The reason I reprint it here is that it is so apposite to what I was talking about in the early mailings of this latest tranche of articles—the scientific confirmation of an inbuilt moral compass within human beings.  And specifically to the matter dealt with in the mailing of July 23rd headed, ‘Now we come to the interesting part . . .’

I won’t go into any further description because the matter is self-explanatory in terms of that earlier mailing.

                                                .  .  .

“‘I don’t know why you use that word,’ the old gentleman said.  ‘Freeth was not murdered—he was executed.  His death was necessary in order to prevent a greater loss of life.’

‘It can never be right to assess a man’s life so pragmatically,’ I protested, looking at Austin for support.  He merely shook his head as if declining to give a view.

‘That is a religious position which deals in moral absolutes,’ the old man replied with complete dispassion.  ‘I take the humanistic view that there is always a calculus of human interests in which the benefit of many may be purchased at the expense of the few.’

‘I call myself a humanist,’ I said indignantly.  ‘But I reject absolutely that point of view.  Human life is sacred.’

‘Sacred?’ the old man sneered.  ‘You can use that word and claim to be a humanist?’”

First we take Manhattan . . .

We are all designed to a greater or lesser extent to be conformists.  One imagines, as with other things, that some sort of continuum exists, stretching from those who are little affected to those who are excessively affected.

[With regard to individuality, Gurdjieff—and those who don’t know of him can google him—always claimed that his Armenian grandmother educated him to go against the crowd and never to do the same as others.  A lesson he included in his own later teachings.]

Now there is nothing wrong in principle with conformism—at least, with normal levels of it.  Without it social life would be impossible, and what you would have instead with be a never-ending conflict of the egos—something like the current UKIP, except on speed.

Another thing about conformism is that it is automatically functioning.  It represents an eternally watchful instinct to stay on-side of the prevailing social consensus.  Like a species of chameleon, we are unconsciously sensitive to any alteration in the social backdrop and are subject to an inner pressure to change colour in sympathy with it.

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you can gain control of the backdrop projector then you can turn people any colour you want.

And this, effectively, is the situation we find ourselves in.  The means of influencing social opinion nowadays is via the media and the media is irretrievably in liberal hands.  To adapt from Leonard Cohen: ‘The liberals have got their channels in the bedrooms of the proles . . .’

And more than the proles, the self-defining middle class is worse.

Political or philosophical argument is no longer necessary, all you need do is present the fashion conscious with the merest hint of being out of step with ‘sophisticated’ opinion and they will do the rest for themselves.

And ‘hinting’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.  In the softening-up period leading to the gay marriage, TV shows, such as The Good Wife, began to filter in gay characters, generally charming and inoffensive, and totally unlike the search-and-destroy mobs of maenads patrolling the media in search of any counter-opinion.

Indeed, the most prominent anti-marriage voices in the Irish media leading up to the referendum often appeared to be those of homosexuals horrified by the idea.  Most other people, it would seem, had been frightened into a cautious silence.  Scarcely surprising, since the same media seemed to be involved in imposing a full-body-press in favour of the proposal.  I can remember one edition of the Sunday Business Post in which I counted five separate mentions of gay marriage, all inherently positive.

Nor, as I say, was there any great debate of principle involved.  Rather it was along the pathetic lines of ‘everyone should be free to express their love’.  Now what that had to do with marriage, I don’t know.  There are thousands of people in love, who have never been married, and thousands married who’ve never been in love.  Love, at best, is something ancillary to marriage; not some necessary precondition.

What we got instead was a sentimentalised and trivialised pap, designed to be fed like sugar water to the masses, and intent on disguising the fact that what was involved was not simply some natural extension of marriage, like a concrete screed finding level within the shuttering of the existing institution, but rather a complete recasting of it, with little discussion at all as to logical consequence.

The reward that was being offered for voting yes was the temporary satisfaction of seeming to belong to some wider constituency involving the ‘great and good’ of Hollywood and the entertainment industry etc. etc. which of course never really was the case.

And now for something entirely different . . .

In a book entitled British Security Coordination, published in 1998, which was an internal history of the British intelligence campaign during the Second World War against German influence in the Americas, the following statement appears: ‘As WS learned, there was little doubt that Gallup deliberately adjusted his figures in Dewey’s favour in the hope of stampeding the electorate thereby . . .’

The WS was William Stephenson, a Canadian, and head of the BSC (British Security Coordination), and himself the subject of a later book, A Man Called Intrepid.  The Gallup mentioned was George Gallup, founder and director of the famous political polling organisation.  The Dewey was Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican candidate in the 1944 election against Roosevelt.

Whether true or not, the above statement was of no great surprise to me, who had always believed in the dubiousness of opinion polling.

There are several ways in which logically polls could be skewed.

One is through deliberate interference from the top, as is suggested in the case of Gallup, though nowadays, one imagines, it would be much more difficult to achieve.

Another can occur at the interview level, especially nowadays when so many young people—and the ground-level pollsters tend in general to be young—are ideologically committed.  In the two most recent Irish referendums, one could make a pretty accurate guess as to how people were likely to vote simply by looking at them, and choosing one’s interviewees accordingly.

A third way lies in the framing of the questions and the supplied range of readymade answers.

As well, of course, we all tend to be somewhat vague in our opinions, and, when effectively door-stepped by a questioner, tend to reach for the most convenient answer in order to hide our ignorance.

But the really interesting part of the quotation above is the belief that a poll could have the effect of ‘stampeding the electorate’ to vote for a particular candidate or party.  Although if such was the case with regard to Dewey, it was a failure, because he lost quite substantially to Roosevelt.

Yet the suggestion is that a poll can be more than simply a reflection of opinion at a certain point in time; it can, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, actually help bring about the outcome it is predicting.  Is this true?  I have always thought so, even long before the matter of Gallup ever arose.  Yet why should this be the case?

The best answer I can come up with is reflected in the Grand National.  Imagine someone who has 50p each way on the winner—and there are usually plenty of them.  Their winnings tend to be paltry, yet the fact is that they are still generally over the moon.  And this is because they have picked the winner, especially when they can see loads of their friends and acquaintances who haven’t.  In other words, they receive a psychological boost from it, some sense of increased status vis a vis the rest of the world.

And I really do think that this is something inherent in the human heart, this desire to be associated with winners, even if only forecast winners, in whatever field it may be.  And especially so in the context of referendums and elections, where unless you have firm convictions, which many people tend not to have, you are wide open to suggestion and to being swayed.

Which is why for a very long time I have been opposed to the idea of the publication of polls in the weeks or months before voting, especially where political parties etc. tend to commission a selection of polls, publishing only those that give them the most positive profile.

Indeed, I tend to be suspicious of polling in general.

The psychological mechanism that makes people vulnerable to manipulation can be viewed in different ways.  Certainly ‘authority’ seems to be a factor in it.  It is generally recognised by behavioural scientists now that there in an inbuilt tendency in humans to obey authority.  This is something individually and socially variable in its effect, reflected no doubt in the fact that Germans always seem to come top of the various surveys.

The question is what constitutes ‘authority’; and who possesses it?