Mr Hobbes: Nipping infernos in the bud

“‘Mr Hobbes, the Atheist,’ the perpetrator of The Leviathan, like most people who insist on thinking straight, is usually classed as saying the opposite of what he meant.

He wanted peace. He wanted to call his soul his own, and to leave other men to do the same. He understood the conditions which, in this imperfect world, alone make liberty possible. He worked out the technique of defending it against three of its chief enemies, the champions of divine right, the champions of social and political privilege, and the fanatics of conscience.

He had no use for mass-murder or for suicide or for the doctrines which hallow them. He shared with St. Augustine, with Shakespeare (when he was being serious) and with Confucius the notion that there are no good and no bad men, but only men who often want, and sometimes manage, to behave better than they might.

He knew that one child with a stomach-ache in a nursery, one man in a bar with a grievance, one prig in an argument with a scruple, one girl at a picnic without one, can turn a game or a talk into a free fight, a social group into an inferno of suspicion, jealousy and hate. This was why he believed in having someone in the Chair at every social unit’s meeting who could be relied on to nip infernos in the bud.”

"Civilisation and War" (review by Kenneth Bell of Ranyard West, Conscience and Society) in The New Statesman and Society, 31 October 1942, 294. Paragraph breaks added.

Full English Brexit

...comes, perhaps, one step closer.

Indeed, as Britain's conservative government is rapidly approaching a red line, it looks from Berlin as though Cameron is neither willing nor able to apply the brakes. Should Cameron move to establish numerical limits on immigration from EU member states, "there will be no going back," say sources in Berlin. First, they say, Cameron's proposal would be torpedoed in Brussels by Germany and several other EU countries and then he would return home and lose the referendum on Britain's exit from the EU.

Switch it off

Although I'm someone who once had (cautiously) high hopes for the Internet becoming a force for creating a better informed, better connected and more tolerant global public sphere, I have been becoming increasingly aware--like a lot of us--that it's about as likely to be a tool for pervasive surveillance, tendentious propaganda and unhinged misinformation.

And although I participate in various forms of social media (because--at least so far--its benefits seem to outweigh its costs for me personally), I've found it, over the last five years or so, to be increasingly a source of frustration and even despair.

Peter Pomerantsev's excellent "Diary" at the London Review of Books crystallises a lot of what I've been thinking along these lines with reference to recent events in Ukraine.

As the conflict over Ukraine intensified my social media feeds became more and more unsettling. Acquaintances from Moscow, the ‘creatives’ who make up the semi-mythical Russian middle class – that normally apolitical but vaguely anti-Putin iPhone crowd who’d joined the protests in 2011 and 2012 – were suddenly frothing with patriotic passion. I imagined myself in some downmarket horror movie where you wake to find your neighbours are vampires, with little ultra-patriotic bite marks on their necks.

I was talking to a work colleague just today about a very similar trend that she had noticed among Russian and Ukrainian friends on Facebook.

More generally, this is good to remember:

A common myth about social media is that it’s a priori a tool of liberation, taking publishing out of the hands of power. But Facebook and Twitter are a perfect vehicle for postmodern authoritarian regimes that focus on opposition narratives instead of simply suppressing them. You can switch off the TV, but you can’t stop a political technologist getting inside social media and generating memes from within.

This is also true for radical Islamism.

For myself, I've certainly been aghast (though not surprised) by Russian propaganda; what has disturbed me more has been the number of Western journalists willing to echo it.

Pomerantsev is eloquent here on this "strange complicity with the Kremlin's cause":

When she wasn’t repeating news from Brighton Beach my New Jersey cousin was sending me links to the Guardian. Comment is Free has become well known for its references to the Ukrainian fascist takeover. My Kiev friends began to message me, looking for an explanation: ‘Is Seumas Milne in the pay of the Kremlin?’ they would ask. Probably not, I said. ‘It all fits into a larger pattern of English racism towards Eastern Europeans,’ Oksana Forostyna, executive editor of the Ukrainian cultural magazine Krytyka, told me. She too spoke of the Ukrainians as ‘the new Untermenschen who get called whores and fascists. All those English jokes and novels about Ukrainian sluts; the weird fixation you had during Euro 2012 that Ukraine was full of neo-Nazi hooligans – there was even a BBC documentary warning football fans not to come – when in truth there are fewer racist attacks in Ukraine than in Britain … Now Putin can play on those prejudices.’

(Germany, has a very similar problem.)

Finally, I can't say that I disagree with this entirely:

‘The only thing to do if you want to stay sane in this war is quit social media,’ Alexey said when I Skyped him.

On related points, I would recommend that people read Evgeny Morozov's insightful book The Net Delusion.

See you online.

Would you like some tea with your Kulturpessimismus?

I think that Fareed Zakaria is a tad too optimistic about the likelihood of a certain breed of American right-winger deciding to abandon his fears of the impending liberal-socialist apocalypse.

But he makes some perceptive comments about the pre-history of the Tea Party phenomenon and its role as a bearer of a distinctive kind of cultural pessimism. 

Modern American conservatism was founded on a diet of despair. In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr. began the movement with a famous first editorial in National Review declaring that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” John Boehner tries to tie into this tradition of opposition when he says in exasperation, “The federal government has spent more than what it has brought in in 55 of the last 60 years!”

But what has been the result over these past 60 years? The United States has grown mightily, destroyed the Soviet Union, spread capitalism across the globe and lifted its citizens to astonishingly high standards of living and income. Over the past 60 years, America has built highways and universities, funded science and space research, and — along the way — ushered in the rise of the most productive and powerful private sector the world has ever known.

At the end of the 1961 speech that launched his political career, Ronald Reagan said, “If I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” But the menace Reagan warned about — Medicare — was enacted. It has provided security to the elderly. There have been problems regarding cost, but that’s hardly the same as killing freedom.

For most Americans, even most conservatives, yesterday’s deepest causes are often quietly forgotten. Consider that by Reagan’s definition, all other industrial democracies are tyrannies. Yet every year, the right-wing Heritage Foundation ranks several of these countries — such as Switzerland — as “more free” than the United States, despite the fact that they have universal health care. 

One might also stipulate that Zakaria is a bit too one-sidedly triumphalist about all things bright and beautiful in post-war America. 


Still, he makes an important point. 

But do I think that reasonable arguments like this will matter to the true-believers? For an answer, I offer some comments from Bruce Sterling on the Tea Party that I posted last year (which somehow seems like an eternity ago):

It's always "the worse, the better" with these Trotsky-style fanatics. Every failure, rejection and common-sense setback galvanizes them to new extremes of faith-based ideological weirdness. As someone who hangs out in Europe, I'm used to bizarre political movements, but the Tea Party is truly impressively strange by anybody's standards. Acidheads have had more coherent thinking than these Creationist Randite gold-bar-eating pro-coal zillionaire market fundie people. They lost the American election, but winning one and governing a superpower never seemed to be on their agenda. That hasn't discouraged them, though. They've got ladder notches and fallback positions all the way to the prepper graveyard.

Of course, this kind of paranoid fear-mongering isn't historically unique to the US: in 1945 the Daily Express was warning readers against a Labour Party victory in 1945 with editorials under titles such as 'Gestapo in Britain if Socialists win'. More recently, your average reader of the Daily Mail (which I could definitely imagine using that 'Gestapo' headline during the next British elections) has also decided that the only good things about Britain exist in the dimly remembered past.

Nor, naturally, is cultural pessimism exclusively the property of the political right.

But it is not encouraging -- as I happened to be saying to a colleague earlier today -- that a mere five years after he left office George W. Bush seems, in retrospect, so...moderate.  

The really interesting development in Washington, I think, is not the conflict between the Tea Party and the Democrats -- which, as loud and fun as it is, makes for pretty predictable theatre -- but rather the signals that the grown-up business types of the sort that used to dominate the Republican Party I remember in my youth just might be getting a bit nervous about what one of them calls 'the Taliban minority'.

I mean, American politics has now become a distant spectator sport for me. I live in a country where the main conservative party has its eye firmly on the nation's economic interests and where a laughable figure like Ted Cruz would have little chance of being taken seriously as a Kanzlerkandidat.

Believe me: I am thankful -- every day -- for the generally boring sensibility of German politics. 

And, hey, even the Germans are showing the odd sign of optimism these days...

It's a funny old world.

The present is a foreign country

I haven't been reading too much in detail about UKIP -- because, well, really, who wants to spend time thinking about these people? -- but the relative success of the anti-EU, anti-immigration party in Britain's local elections last week has brought forth a new round of attention to them.

Via Max Dunbar, I discovered Andrew Rawnsley's analysis of the UKIP phenomenon, which concludes with these striking passages:

All the main parties have cause to be anxious about Ukip and so all have been trying to understand the rise of the Farageists. One way they do this is to put together focus groups of voters who have switched to Ukip to try to fathom why these people are attracted to Nigel Farage's gang. One senior party strategist says he listened in some wonderment as his focus group of Ukip voters spent an entire 90-minute session wailing and gnashing their teeth about the state of Britain. Not a good word did they have to say about the country today. At the end of the session, he thanked them for their time, and said he had one more question. Was there anything about Britain that made them feel proud? There was a silence. Then one man leant forward and said: "The past." The rest of the group nodded in agreement.

The Ukip manifesto is a nonsense of contradictions. David Cameron, Nick Clegg or Ed Miliband would be torn to shreds by the media if they ever tried to offer anything similar. Mr Farage promises tax cuts for everyone and spending increases on just about everything from building more prisons to restoring the student grant to more generous pensions. But strategists from the main parties tell me that they get nowhere when they try to discuss policy with sample groups of Ukip voters. Even when they agree that the Ukip prospectus doesn't make sense, reports one party pollster: "They just don't care about that."

A Ukip vote is not mainly, if at all, about making a choice based on an assessment of policy. More than anything, it is about expressing an emotion – usually a feeling of intense rage about how Britain has changed and how they are served by the established political parties. It is a howl against the modern world, a scream against the establishment. There's no arguing with that. Or, if there is a way of dealing with it, none of the main parties has yet discovered what it is.

The politics of Kulturpessimismus have a long and not very encouraging history.

Dunbar, by way of addressing a claim made by Dan Hodges at the Telegraph that the results disprove the existence of a 'progressive majority' in the UK, himself points to grounds for a different kind of pessimism: that about finding an effective response to Farageism:

In fact, there are plenty of progressives in this country. They’re just not in politics. As I’ve argued recently, British politics is not a place for reasonable people anymore. Smart progressives who want to make a difference don’t go into politics, they go into public policy or advocacy or journalism or law or the police or the Royal Marines. Because smart people are leaving politics, the field is left clear for maniacs, illiterates, thieves, neo-Nazis and toytown power merchants. This is particularly true at local level.

And it’s not true, by the way, that UKIP represent an ‘anti-politics party’. UKIP are more pro politics than anyone. They encourage huge unrealistic expectations of what politics can deliver. Vote for me and I’ll give you everything you want or need, your darkest fear, your fondest dream.

I don't know enough about the contemporary British political scene to make any deeply reasoned judgements about the above claims.

But I must say, I'm not feeling very optimistic.

Gloom and doom?

As someone who had indeed spent a fair amount of time researching and writing about the darker side of human life, I thought there was much to think about in Mark Mazower's FT review of David Cannadine's new book. (Though I've not read the book yet and can't say whether Mazower is fair to it or not.)

Such as this:

It is true that many historians will find themselves occasionally pondering why they spend so much time describing human nastiness and so little on virtue or beauty. Yet the best example we have of a genuinely cosmopolitan history with an ameliorist agenda – Unesco’s History of Humanity – hardly constitutes strong evidence of its intellectual viability. On the contrary, it was way back in 1965 that historian Jack Plumb described one of the volumes in that series as having the effect of “an encyclopaedia gone berserk, or re-sorted by a deficient computer”. As for the European Union’s own efforts to fund cheerleading histories in the spirit of e pluribus unum, they have been a complete waste of money and certainly don’t seem to have furthered the cause of integration.

The Plumb quote alone is worth the price of admission; however, the rest is definitely worth reading as well, even if there is a substantial amount of history being written that emphasises 'virtue and beauty' and stresses some (at least long-term) good news about the human race.

Historians aren't really all that grim a bunch.

Honest. 

Lost at sea

Charlie Stross considers some of the likely results should Britain decide to actually leave the EU.

It's not a pretty thought.

The overall picture, then, is dismal: a flight by the investment banking sector, probable currency speculation directed against the (isolated and vulnerable) sterling market, re-emergence of tariff barriers hampering UK exports to Europe, a collapse in trade with the Commonwealth (at least, on terms favourable to the UK), and the final collapse of UK diplomatic/military power to second- or even third-rank status on a global scale.

But, on the upside I suppose, at last their cucumbers could be a crooked as they wanted them to be.

I can almost taste the liberty already. 

A holiday gift idea for the Cassandras on your Christmas list

Noted in the ‘Gramophone Notes’ section of a British political magazine:

With Europe in its present state one should not be surprised by the plethora of Cassandras that have arisen; yet that the Columbia company should be found among them is rather astonishing. No doubt the Handel centenary (still dragging out its weary length) is mainly responsible for our being reminded that “The Lord is a Man of War” (Israel in Egypt); but was it a mere coincidence that the same company has also given us a new recording of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique?

For this work, written just over a hundred years ago under the influence of Alfred de Musset’s extraordinary translation of De Quincey’s “Opium-Eater,” is in fact a perfect picture of the European scene to-day, down to the Hell’s kitchen with which it ends—shrieks of the Sabbath and heavy undertone of the Dies Irae menacing us with an untimely end.

‘Gramophone notes’, The New Statesman and Nation, 20 April 1935, p. 564. 

I tend to find my 'shrieks of the Sabbath' and menaces of 'an untimely end' in various forms of extreme metal music, but this Berlioz guy sounds pretty heavy.

Perhaps he's worth a listen in these troubling times.

We'll definitely have to get our hands on a gramophone.

Learning: or, 'hacking your way through the jungle of unintelligibility'

I'm not an expert on British education policy, though having been an employee of an institution of higher education on that blessed isle for going on six years now, I have had had more than a little experience with its coal face (at least with regard to research).

Stefan Collini has a lengthy article critical of recent British educational reforms. I can't comment on all the details, but this passage hit the right note:

The paradox of real learning is that you don’t get what you ‘want’ – and you certainly can’t buy it. The really vital aspects of the experience of studying something (a condition very different from ‘the student experience’) are bafflement and effort. Hacking your way through the jungle of unintelligibility to a few small clearings of partial intelligibility is a demanding and not always enjoyable process. It isn’t much like wallowing in fluffy towels. And it helps if you trust your guides rather than assuming they will skimp on the job unless they’re kept up to the mark by constant monitoring of their performance indicators.

Translating this into 'policy', I know, is not easy.

But I would largely agree with Collini that perhaps too much is being tinkered with in a system that, in its previous state, hasn't been doing all that badly.

Not to be forgotten...

Very much liked Shuggy's comment on the (so far solely) English riots:

Why do people go on the rampage? Really have to insist that the right doesn't get a monopoly on having a pessimistic view of the human condition. People do this sort of thing because they are arseholes and because they can. As Chris says, you need structures where the the costs of rioting outweigh the benefits. The difference between left and right is the former traditionally does not see the costs solely in terms of putative criminal justice. But the left has traditionally seen a role for criminal justice and it's a tradition worth maintaining. Or alternatively you could pretend a bunch of feral scumbags stealing DVD players are at the vanguard of the English revolution - if you want to go on looking like a complete tit, that it.

(And speaking of looking like (or rather sounding like) a complete tit.)

Norm, too, had a (rather more cautiously worded) comment worth reading.

Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?

Sometime during my primary schooling in the late 1970s or early 1980s I became aware of something called 'The Dark Ages'. The term, as well as the period that stood behind it, always appealed to me greatly since it 1) seemed to involve a lot of things that were sinister and, well, dark and 2) featured a large quantity of swords and bloodshed, things of which I was unduly fond of daydreaming about in that rather warped period of my mental development.

(I suppose I sort of imagined the Dark Ages to be roughly like the covers of Robert E. Howard's 'Conan the Barbarian' books that I was reading avidly at the time.*)

With regard to its name, I think we have to admit that this rather murkily defined era between the Collapse of the Roman Empire to some later time during the Middle Ages when Things Got A Bit Better, had done rather well in terms of what we might call 'general badassness'.

Of course, 'general badassness' is (sadly) not a recognised scholarly criterion.

In any case, as my education continued and I reached university, I discovered that the term 'The Dark Ages' had fallen quite out of fashion based largely on the boringly sensible argument that the period was not, in fact, completely dominated by moody swordsmen and relentless slaughter. More generally, evaluating particular societies or ages as 'better' or 'more civilised' had become not so much the Done Thing.

Thus, in accordance with such principles, out went one allegedly misleading -- if adolescently appealing -- term of art.

As I've focused on the 'modern' period (subject to its own set of sometimes-sensible-sometimes-silly battles around naming and periodisation) it hasn't subsequently really been much of an issue.  

Nonetheless, I was pleased to read Tom Shippey's review of Robin Fleming's Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 in the current (or last, can't recall now) London Review of Books. It's behind the subscriber wall, but just a few short excerpts may give you an idea of why my adolescent heart leapt for joy.

First, Shippey confirms the tendency to reject the old label:

In every TV programme about Anglo-Saxon England someone is always wheeled on to say, in effect: ‘Dark Ages? How can anyone call these the Dark Ages? Just look at the amazing jewellery/magnificent artwork/superb illumination.’

Shippey, partly based on Fleming's book, gives a number of reasons to doubt this more optimistic perspective. Such as the fact that, as Fleming notes, 'Levels of trade in second-century Britain, then firmly under Roman imperial rule, were not reached again for 1500 years.'

Which sounds amazing, but remains a bit of an abstraction. Happily more details are at hand. As Roman society waned, everyday life became a bit grimmer:

Villas were not maintained; principal rooms were converted into barns or corn-dryers; the Oxfordshire kilns and the Wealden ironworks stopped producing; the Roman sewers of Canterbury clogged up and were not fixed; in Cirencester the forum was kept clean but the stone flooring, which had worn paper-thin, was not replaced.

And:

The hobnailed boots which Romano-British peasants had worn – and often been buried in – disappeared. No nails for boots, or for coffins, and so ‘the British slipped in the mud and buried the people they loved directly in the cold, hard ground.’ As pottery disappeared, teeth got worse with people chewing grit picked up from open hearths. In the fifth century the inhabitants of Cadbury in Somerset were scavenging cremation urns from 200-year-old cemeteries to cook with.

And:

Bone lesions in the skull and round the eyes indicate childhood anaemia; lines on tooth enamel come from malnutrition or parasite infection; lines of increased bone density show that a child stopped growing for a while; bone plaques on the shin go with leg ulcers, a result of injury or infection. Yet another sign of post-Roman decline was the replacement, in urban centres like York, of brick and tile by thatch and timber, much harder to keep free of fleas and lice and dangerous micro-organisms.

One striking thing about this story -- among many -- is the apparent disappearance of knowledge and technology that was common beforehand. And this, not as the result of a single overwhelming apocalyptic catastrophe but rather what seems in retrospect as a gradual, but determined, slow-motion collapse.

Turning back to the 'How can anyone call this a Dark Age?' question noted earlier, Shippey writes:

It’s true that the jewellery at Sutton Hoo would cost megabucks if you asked a modern jeweller to duplicate it. But less commonly noted is the pottery flask found in the same burial. It was a high-status item for the time, wheel-turned and so probably imported, but the finish is rough and the material porous: three centuries earlier a Roman villa-owner wouldn’t have had it in the house, and even one of his workmen would have thought it unremarkable. Nails, pots, tiles, bronze and copper coins: it’s the absence of useful low-cost items in bulk that make a Dark Age, and their loss is not compensated by the ability to manufacture elite bling. [Emphasis added.]

And, as the review also notes, there was no shortage of blood-letting and invasion. 

Apart from all the various insights I've gained from the review, two things have become clear.

First, I've never thought about hit this way, but I never want to live in a society that has lost the ability to make clay pots and forge iron nails. That, dear reader, is the absolute minimum that I am willing to accept.

Second, I am going to go back to using the term 'Dark Ages'. There are worse ways to relive one's youth.

Now, where did I leave those Conan books....


*I am, of course, aware that Conan's various adventures took place in the Hyborian Age, but as an adolescent I didn't go in so much for attending to such pedantic details.

With death and destruction coming through

Heard today on the Autobahn between Bonn and Home:



Jarvis Cocker, 'Heavy Weather'

And heard in my dreams last night:



Pulp 'Do You Remember the First Time'

[UPDATE] Like this one too.

Yesterday's News

A striking passage from Orwell's diary, 19 October 1940:

The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.

Gave me a bit of a shiver, and not just because it's turned right nippy here in the last week.

A bit black over Bill's mother's

I am, I freely admit, perhaps the last person whose political instincts you should trust.

When I became a German citizen last year, it was just in time to vote in the September federal elections. Given my political leanings, I had two options: the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens.

(I must say in passing that I feel fortunate, as there are two mainstream parties in this country that -- despite various frustrations and discontents with each of them -- I can vote for, with at least some degree of conviction and enthusiasm.)

Anyway, I was, in the end, convinced to give both my votes to the SPD because: 1) I thought they hadn't done nearly as bad a job of governing as the general opinion held (so, they had my sympathies) 2) I wanted to ensure that the Liberals (FDP) didn't make into government 3) I sought to strengthen the SPD against the competition they were facing from further left (Die Linke) and 4) I felt satisfaction in voting -- for the first time in my life -- for a genuinely social democratic party with a tradition reaching back into the nineteenth century whose history, all-in-all, I think holds up quite well.

The result of that election: the SPD had its lowest vote ever in a federal election and the FDP and Die Linke had their highest.

I am truly someone with his finger on the pulse of German political opinion.

Still, in retrospect I feel a certain sense of vindication, partly since the government that did come into power has, largely because of the FDP, become a bit of a (bad) joke. But it is also partly down to the (perhaps sentimental) feeling of having 'voted my conscience', since, to be honest, I hadn't really studied the pros and cons of any major party's policies on pensions or health insurance reform.

These somewhat random thoughts are inspired by another election, one taking place today across the sleeve.

My connection to the British political world is, in one sense, rather abstract, since I don't live there but merely work there. (And, as things are looking, this connection may soon become more abstract still.)

Nonetheless, I've been paying attention to this short but intense campaign (the one main virtue of British elections is that they are mercifully brief): this has partly been because of getting swept up in the issue 'on location' from my various regular haunts in London and partly out of the usual mixture of personal and professional motivations that keep my attention glued to that oddly compelling little North Sea archipelago.

(Moreover as someone who -- in a former job -- sought vainly to explain to German law students the intricacies of the 'unwritten' (or, more precisely, partly-written) British constitution, I'm as fascinated as anyone to see how it holds up if it should come to that situation described by the wonderful phrase 'a hung parliament'.)

And I've also been paying attention to the opinions of friends and of the fellow bloggers I regularly read on the election.

It's a bit of a mixed bag.

I've found that one (somewhat older) friend in London will be voting Tory for the first time in his life as a result of a fairly unhinged rage at New Labour that, to be honest, I find a bit hard to comprehend (not the anger, but rather the intensity and consequences). I've heard a couple of others say that they're leaning toward the Liberals now that it looks like that vote won't be a complete waste. Norm is supporting Labour, on the basis of social justice. Ken McLeod sides with Labour as 'Labour is still the only party that the British working class has come up with.' Geoff thinks the Liberal Democrats deserve a chance. Francis offers some thoughtful and personal perspective the issue and urges, with the aim of electoral reform, a strong vote for the Lib Dems.

It is that issue (along with their, by British standards, remarkably unconstipated view of 'Europe') that, in my view, makes the Lib Dems certainly appealing.

Still....

At a conference in Belgium recently, a conversation with a dear friend and colleague turned to politics. Somewhat wearily, he admitted that his political commitments had cooled somewhat over the years. If I recall correctly, he said he had essentially boiled them down to the relatively straightforward principle that he will vote for that party which will likely, however slightly, move Britain's level of inequality closer to that of Sweden and further away from that of Brazil.

I've been thinking about this ever since, in the context of considering my own declining political expectations, and I find this a perfectly sensible position. It (along with my irrational and sentimental attachment to family history) tends to move my support, however virtual, slightly toward Labour.

But I think that Francis may have it right when he concludes:

I have every confidence that the people of Britain will following this general election get the government they deserve. And it will at best be mediocre.

It's a very gloomy day here on our bit of the Rhine. I hope it's a bit more cheerful on the Thames, Mersey, Humber and Tyne (and wherever else) for those of you off to the polling stations.

Given the problems we (as in we Europeans and human beings) face, I think we're going to need all the cheering up we can find.

(Title reference)

[UPDATE] It seems I may have somewhat misrepresented Francis's argument. Which he explains clearly here.

'Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?'

I have finally gotten around to reading an essay by Tony Judt that was referenced in a recent (and rather harrowing) article about the New York University historian's ordeal with motor neurone disease.

The piece, 'What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?' appears in the New York Review of Books.

I think it's well worth reading.

It's quite a lengthy excursion across the subject suggested by the title, and--among other topics--Judt considers differences between the political language of western Europe and the United States, the lingering relevance of nearly century-old economic debates and the difficult necessity of recovering a sense of common social purpose and belonging.

Much of it is not really earth-shattering, and there are some bits where I'm not really convinced.

But I was most struck positively by the parts of his essay in which he discusses, first, the past accomplishments of social democracy and, second, the need for it--if it wishes to maintain its success in the future--of reminding people about the reasons it emerged in the first place.

As to the past:

The welfare state had remarkable achievements to its credit. [...] The common theme and universal accomplishment of the neo-Keynesian governments of the postwar era was their remarkable success in curbing inequality. If you compare the gap separating rich and poor, whether by income or assets, in all continental European countries along with Great Britain and the US, you will see that it shrinks dramatically in the generation following 1945.

With greater equality there came other benefits. Over time, the fear of a return to extremist politics—the politics of desperation, the politics of envy, the politics of insecurity—abated. The Western industrialized world entered a halcyon era of prosperous security: a bubble, perhaps, but a comforting bubble in which most people did far better than they could ever have hoped in the past and had good reason to anticipate the future with confidence.

The paradox of the welfare state, and indeed of all the social democratic (and Christian Democratic) states of Europe, was quite simply that their success would over time undermine their appeal. The generation that remembered the 1930s was understandably the most committed to preserving institutions and systems of taxation, social service, and public provision that they saw as bulwarks against a return to the horrors of the past. But their successors—even in Sweden—began to forget why they had sought such security in the first place.

As to the future:

The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

That these accomplishments were no more than partial should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing those same improvements: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?

Well, are we?

I've spent a certain amount of time over recent years trying to figure out the processes that have made relatively decent societies and those that have seen them unravel.

I'm still not entirely sure; however, I think that being very aware that they can unravel is a healthy corrective to complacency.

And that's, perhaps, a start.

Does not compute

When confronted with stories like this...


...you find your comfort where you can.

Take me back to dear old blighty...

I happen to be headed to Britain (for a short while) tomorrow from Germany.

Momus has just done the same: and it sounds a bit grim over there.

Same as it ever was....

'We were the cool guys'

Just to continue (briefly this time) the thoughts I expressed a couple of days ago about the international financial crisis (and there were a few more signs yesterday and today -- in Britain, Iceland and Germany for example -- about just how international this is becoming): An article at the New York Times led me to an excellent episode of 'This American Life', a radio programme produced by Chicago public radio.

'The Giant Pool of Money' was broadcast back in May, but it offers one of the few clear explanations that I've seen of the various factors that came together over the last several years to give us all the wonderful spectacle of the shit hitting the financial fan.

(The original broadcast can be downloaded for a small fee, but -- perhaps for the more credit-crunched among you -- a free transcript is also available. That is the source of the quotes that follow.)

One of the strengths of the show is that it is largely based on interviews with actual people at all levels in the long chain of financial relationships that led to this crisis.

We meet, for instance, Clarence, who received a $540,000 loan against his house:

Alex Blumberg: And you basically borrowed that from the bank and they didn’t check your income?

Clarence Nathan: Right. It’s a no-income verification loan. They don't do that. It's almost like you pass a guy in the street and say: lend me 540,000 dollars? He says, what do you do? Hey, I got a job. OK. It seems that casual even though there are a lot of papers that get filled out and stuff flies all over with the faxed and emails. Essentially, that's ... that the process.

Alex Blumberg: Would you have loaned you the money?

Clarence Nathan: I wouldn't have loaned me the money. And nobody that I know would have loaned me the money. I know guys who are criminals who wouldn't loan me that and they break your knee-caps. I don’t know why the bank did it. I’m serious ... 540 thousand dollars to a person with bad credit.

The show also introduces us to an enormous pile of money -- about $70 trillion worldwide -- that was desperately looking for something to do and was bored with piddling returns on US Treasury bonds.

Now, how this incomprehensible sum of money led to Clarence getting a loan he had no business being anywhere near is a long story and involves meeting a few other people.

Like Glen, for example, who -- fresh out of college -- was making about $75-100,000 a month buying and selling these toxic mortgages.

And, apparently, spending it as fast as he could make it:

We ordered 3, 4 bottles of Cristal at $1000 per bottle. They bring it out, you know hey're walking through the crowd, they're holding the bottles over their heads. There's fire crackers , sparklers. You know, the little cocktail waitresses. You know so you order 3 or 4 bottles of those and they’re walking through the crowd and everyone’s like: Whoa, who's the cool guys? We were the cool guys.

Oh yes, absolutely. Very cool. Can I eat lunch at the cool kids table too, Glen? Oh, I'm sorry, you're not allowed to sit there yourself any more, are you?

Alex Blumberg: So give me your situation now. Can you pay all your bills now?

Glen Pizzolorusso: Not really. I borrowed some money from friends...from dad. Living in my house right now, we’re working with the bank to try to avoid foreclosure. At this point I’m dealing with an attorney. Trying to figure out if it just makes sense for me to walk away from the house.

Alex Blumberg: And have you made mortgage payments?

Glen Pizzolorusso: No. No.

That's right: after making millions dealing in mortgages of questionable value, Glen can't pay his own mortgage any more.

Anyway, Clarence and Glen obviously lived in different worlds, and they never met each other.

But the show's makers deserve a great deal of credit for managing to explain how people like them -- at different points in a long chain of responsibility -- made it extremely likely that the world economy is going to become a chilly place for at least the medium-term future.

How chilly?

In summing up, Blumberg downplays the more horrifying visions of a return to a 1930s-style depression:

That talk seems to have faded and there's more talk that the next few years will feel like the 1970s. There are lots of technical differences between this crisis and Jimmy Carter's malaise. But for the average person, it could feel the same. It's not an out-and-out depression. Everything's just kind of crappy. And not just in housing or banking but for the economy as a whole. It’s barely growing. There aren't a lot of new businesses, new jobs. Unemployment keeps creeping up. We're just sort of stuck, in neutral, for a while.

Anyone under, say, 45 probably doesn't remember that 1970's malaise too well. Anyone under 30 has barely known a US economy that wasn't growing. Now there's a decent chance we'll all get to see what life felt like in the '70s. Which isn't great. It's pretty bad, actually. Unless you're comparing it to the 1930’s.

And it maybe tells you a lot about the situation (or maybe just something about me) that 'everything's just kind of crappy' sounds somehow encouraging.

Till you remember that the report was completed back in May.

And things seem to have gotten worse since then.

Needing to say something, though not sure, really, what to say

I have so far refrained from commenting on the war between Russia and Georgia. And I note that most of the blogs I read regularly have also been somewhat reticent on the matter.

I'm not sure why that is, though I suspect it's not that they've all been so mesmerised by watching Olympic synchronised diving that the Conflict in the Caucasus (we don't have TV -- long story -- but I presume CNN has some kind of snappy slogan like that....tell me, do they have theme music already?) has slipped their minds.

In my case, it's partly been because I don't really know all that much about the conflict's background, though I've trying to read up over the last few days. (Worthwhile comments available at the NYT, LG&M and Fistful of Euros).

Secondly, I've been silent since I'm not sure of what, exactly, to make of this war. My sympathies lie with Georgia, which has a few things going for it. It is at least a nascent democracy (though a deeply imperfect one.) It is oriented politically and economically toward the West. It is, additionally, not Russia.

And it is also -- it seems -- having the shit kicked out of it by a vastly superior neighbour in a way that exceeds any of the expressed legitimations issuing from Moscow.

On the other hand, it also seems that the Georgian leadership was unwise (to understate by several orders of magnitude) to try to launch an offensive to recapture the disputed territory of South Ossetia. The latter has had, as I understand it, de facto independence for some time now, and it is largely composed of people who do not want to be part of Georgia. (And there have been some allegations that the Georgian offensive was accompanied by atrocities. I have no idea how many of these sorts of things are true and how much are rumour. On either side.)

It may be that the Georgians, in turn, had been provoked by Russian 'peacekeepers' or local irregular forces for some time. And the Russians, it seems clear, have long been angling to regain control over Georgia. Seeing as though their military operations now appear to have gone beyond securing the disputed territories of South Ossetia or Abkhazia -- or even just reducing or humiliating the US equipped and trained Georgian military -- to what may be an attempt to bring down the government, this suspicion seems confirmed.

The third reason for avoiding this topic has been witnessing the discussion it has provoked at a few other places, which seems to have disintegrated even more quickly than most into name calling (some version of 'Western stooges' vs. 'Russian apologists') and appears -- to me anyway -- to tend toward scoring points on other issues (Kosovo and Iraq mostly) rather than in fairly examining the war at hand. I am really not interested in that.

It felt a bit weird, though, not commenting at all on the rather large elephant in the room, and now that I've brought it up, I'm happy for pointers to worthwhile reading material on the subject that is -- please -- at least reasonably clear-sighted and not too tendentious.

Short conclusion: I can't see this ending well for anyone except for Vladimir Putin and his pals. And that is not a happy thought.

I suppose the only comforting thought was offered by Charlie Whitaker at A Fistful of Euros, in the context of commenting on Russia's less-than-cutting-edge military equipment:

The consequences are still with Russia today, and can be seen at various levels and in various applications, including military applications. For example, shells fired from a Leopard 2 will likely pass clean through the hull of a T-80, but not vice versa.

Not that this helps the Georgians, but writing from here in Germany (home of the Leopard 2) that is -- if true -- vaguely comforting.

If only in a long-term, future-oriented sense.

The glass: half full or half empty?

A long way to go.

Still, I hadn't expected to be this optimistic at the halfway mark.

Weiter so!