Sunday, August 21, 2011

Liberal Society - Conservative Community

Sensitive Souls


The August 2011 riots that swept first through London, then Britain's other major cities, were a tremendous shock and a severe psychological blow to much of the population. They were not, after all, 'riots', in the political sense. They were in fact simply orgies of looting similar to what we saw on our televisions occuring in Bagdad in 2003.

In 2011 we watched and were transfixed by scenes occurring within our own country, faithfully recorded by the CCTV cameras that we'd installed for our security, as groups of hooded and masked youths rampaged through the streets with impunity, smashing, looting and setting fire to shops. We stared as they humiliated, robbed and beat anonymous citizens, all without protection or recourse to the law. And we watched the mobs rally and organize, coordinated by twitter, facebook and blackberry, with youths on bikes scouting out for opportunities.

And oh how we watched. For the the biggest psychological hit of the whole affair was the fact that it went on day after day, night after night, morphing from a weekend dust up into something that did not seem to want to end.

That was the biggest shock to the country. The fact that it lasted four days.

It was amusing to watch many of the liberals in the BBC or commentating in the Guardian change their tone as the chaos spread. The majority of journalists of course live and work in London, and thus it was more of a shock for them to see smashed glass and flames engulf streets that they recognised. It was dangerously close to the Latte-serving cafes that they patronised. And even more of a shock to them was to witness the Police, whom they had criticised for decades for their brutality, trying to police the mobs in a nicer, more consensual way, as they had been ordered to do so many times. And the mob just taunted them, threw things at them and looted shops in front of them. And the police simply 'held the line', rather than go in swinging their batons.
'The police must do everything in their power to restore order to the streets' the liberals cried, throwing their civil liberties arguments out of the window as they watched the mobs spread through their favourite city. They soon forgot their social justice arguments too as the youths were described first as 'the underclass', then simply 'yobs', and finally as 'vile scum'. For fear had started to take hold in places it had not been seen before.

And we who watched agreed with them. For most of us are liberals too, even those who claim (erroneously) to be conservatives, for we all believe in the sanctity of the individual, and the fear we felt was the fear of the individual, alone before the mob - and possibly its next victim.

And that is the problem of the liberal individual - extreme sensitivity. For the individual is alone, so of course one will be sensitive to one's own fears. They will be sensitive to the power of the State and the Police, in case that power is directed at one. And they will also be sensitive to the power of the mob (or the yob). And there is no paradox. Until you require one to protect you from the other.


Softness

Although Liberalism is a recognised philosophy, most people simply don't understand it or take its main tenets for granted, for liberalism has become, in the UK, the mainstream. The term 'liberal' has also become a euphemism for 'softness'. But the truth is, we have all become soft. Softness too is mainstream. And this is natural.

This is a prosperous society, and a liberal one. Prosperity and urbanization lead naturally to liberalism, for it gifts us with the chance to be free from small community norms and the culture of the twitching net curtain. We don't need to identify ourselves according to what group we belong to. The ties that bind us to our neighbours are loosened, giving us greater personal freedom. That is what liberalism means - freedom.

We embrace the prosperity and urbanization because it gives us pleasures. And the State protects our freedom to be consumers, to be single, to be gay, to be whatever we want. And while this does not always work out the way we want, it nevertheless leads to us being more able to relax. It leads to softness, for softness, mark you, is actually a sign of success.

It is the aim of any civilization to rise up to the stage where it can actually be soft, for softness is pleasant, whereas hardness is not.


Community

 And herein lies the problem with a soft, liberal, atomized society. The majority of people watched or suffered in the riots without really knowing what to do. They were helpless. Softness was going up in smoke.

The Turkish, Kurd, Sikh and Muslim communities of London however knew exactly what to do. They didn't need 'social media' to organise. Their neighbours are right next door, and a phone call was sufficient to contact extended family members. Temples and Mosques served as simple rallying points. While other people flapped about, leaderless, shocked and struggling to comprehend, the asian ethnic communities - the only real communities in the UK today - were out in front of their shops and businesses with knives, baseball bats, hockey sticks and swords. They felt no sympathy for the 'underclass' and their social justice problems or their underpriviliged backgrounds. And they certainly did not suffer from guilt at the fact that most of the rioters were black.
No, the message from these tightknit communities was a simple one - 'If you come down here then we don't care whether you're a gora or a kalay, we'll break your legs.'

And in that strange week when it all happened, they received much praise for doing precisely that.


Assimilation

Over the years there has been much talk about immigrant communities not 'assimilating'. These stubborn people have held onto their beliefs, their cohesiveness and their suspicious disdain of liberalism. Their children are still pressured to conform to (small) society norms. Their girls are still under pressure to marry, and marry within the community or religion. The libertine freedoms that are not only celebrated, but actually encouraged and taught, in Britain are scratching against the conservative walls of these communities, eroding them but not yet overwhelming them.

During the riots however there turned out to be many people who were glad they hadn't assimilated. When the shit hit the fan, suddenly these kinds of people were needed.


What does this say about the UK today?

Are we really liberal? Or are we just soft? If liberalism means simply wanting things to be 'nice', is it really a 'value' any more?

If softness means that we don't actually consider any value worth being 'hard' about, then are we doomed to always hand over the mandate for our protection to whoever happens to be passing as soon as things become unpleasant?

If so, do we treasure softness and pleasure so much that we are prepared to barter liberal freedoms for protection? Are we not caught therefore in a dreadful paradox?

Is this the paradox that all successful civilizations encounter?

Are we Romans handing over first the leadership, then the republic, to the Germanic tribes?

Sunday, June 19, 2011

'I'm also very aware why very masculine men are not represented in academe. Very masculine men cannot sit still long enough. And so all the ideology of feminism is coming out of these women who are married to wordsmith men, who are not that combative or confrontational to begin with, because the really masculine men, the high-testosterone men, are so restless they can hardly sit still in class.

'People of the white upper-middle-class professional elite have very little direct contact with working-class men, even though the working-class men are everywhere around them and are keeping everything going. They are the ones who are the janitors, the construction workers, the plumbers, the police and firemen, and so on. It's everywhere.
But the world that those men have created works so well, they maintain it so assiduously, that there has been a contempt on the part of these complacent, pampered, coddled upper-middle-class people who are spouting a lot of this rhetoric. There's this arrogance that masculinity isn't something that we need anymore--this is the Gloria Steinem line: Masculinity is something that is pernicious and is the cause of all wars and destruction and violence and battering against women, and slowly we're going to be programming it out of our youth.

'I said it in the Playboy interview: All it takes is one natural disaster for that entire artificial world to come crumbling down, and suddenly everyone will be screaming and yelling for the plumbers and the construction workers. Only masculine men of the working class will hold the civilization together.

'I'm very, very worried about this new kind of bourgeois imperialism which predicates the ultimate human type as someone who is good at sitting still at a desk.'
Camille Paglia
'Leftism should be about the people. That's how it began. Instead, what it has become in the last 20 years is a white upper-middle-class elitism which preaches to the people and says, "Oh, you don't agree with us? You're homophobic, you're so uneducated. You're in the darkness. You need us to bring light and truth to you."'

Camille Paglia

Friday, June 10, 2011

The Greens

The Green instruction to 'lower your carbon footprint' is an exhortation to heat less, consume less, travel less, spend less. This is how the poor live. Green exhortations therefore are for wealthy people to live like the poor - by choice.

It's a nice idea, but I don't think it will catch on. Jesus preached something like this, as did Buddha. Confucius did too. Religions have, for millennia, tried to get humans to live within limits - moral limits, limits to hubris, to ego, to extravagance. Considering all the effort that went into these religions, holding back natural human impulses is clearly hard work, like a child trying to hold back a 600 pound rhino.


Saturday, March 19, 2011

Libya - Lies, damned lies and our own Media.

I've got an itch that, no matter how I scratch it, just won't stop itching.

Libya - an open and shut case, right? A brutal dictator unleashes his forces upon his own people, besieging rebels in their last stronghold. The international community fears a massacre and calls for a ceasefire and a no-fly zone, and then decisively enforces it. To save innocent lives.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Call it Liberal Interventionism if you like.

Maybe it's all about oil - no small thing since it actually underpins all modern civilizations. Rome fought for Grain, Spain fought for Silver, we fight for Oil. Business as usual, since even the most sentimental liberal needs it for their cosmopolitan, urban lifestyle. Tofu won't power ipads.

Or call it empathy. We can't just stand by and do nothing while a dictator suppresses freedom.

Media commentators of all stripes have had fun with all of the above. And yet too many details are still being missed.

  • Politicians now over-use the phrase 'protecting civilians'. Yet the rebels are armed combatants, albeit incompetent ones. And the 'opposition' is not one opposition and has no apparent leader. Robert Fisk of The Independent has already identified the Benghazi rebels as warriors from the Senoussi Tribe.
  • Gaddafi is said to have broken the ceasefire, thus warranting immediate military action. But the aircraft that was shot down graphically over Benghazi has been identified by The Guardian and Al Jazeera as a rebel plane. It is not clear who shot it down, but it is clear that the rebels, who called for and then cheered the no-fly zone yesterday, breached that no-fly zone today. But western forces have begun attacking Gaddafi's forces.
  • French aircraft have already destroyed four Libyan government tanks. But France is not neutral in this - it has formally recognised the Benghazi 'opposition' as a defacto government. France is thus not enforcing a ceasefire - it is aggressively flying top cover for a recognised client. And it was France that led the charge to have this brought before the UN Security Council.
  • Fears of a massacre by Gaddafi's forces have been cited as a motivation for protecting Benghazi. Yet Gaddafi's forces have already overrun several 'rebel held' towns, and yet nobody has even hinted at any massacres, ethnic cleansing or fleeing columns of refugees from those towns. And Benghazi is a big city, while Gaddafi's 'beseiging' forces are barely Brigade sized. Nor, according to footage so far, are they particularly well equipped, disciplined or anything like what one expects a militaristic dictator's army to look like. In fact, they don't look that much different from the rebels themselves.
  • Aircraft and cruise missiles have already hit numerous targets all over Libya, including Tripoli. A curiously zealous way to protect a ceasefire in Benghazi, with little evidence of a ceasefire breach to prompt such haste. Serbia was given far more time to pull back before NATO was unleashed in Bosnia and Kosovo.
  • The Arab nations have apparently given their assent to this. Yet where are they? Egypt has funnelled arms to the rebels, but will not take part in the enforcement of the no-fly zone. Egypt, among others, has benefited from billions of dollars of US advanced aircraft, Abrams tanks and training. Why so coy about enforcing a UN resolution right next door? Why is France so keen to jump in when it dragged its feet so famously over Iraq? Iraq had oil too.
  • If it is about oil, why not let Gaddafi do what he has always done, and then just continue to buy the oil from him, just as we have always done? If it is about supporting democratic revolution, then who are the budding democratic parties and why have they not been more clearly lauded? If it's about civilian lives, why have we so clearly taken one side in what may be a tribal war and begun a 'Shock and Awe' air and missile campaign, with its attendant risks of collateral damage?


What is really going on, and if the majority of our media is truly not being so mendacious, doesn't that instead just make them look stunningly incompetent? We pride ourselves in the West on our free press on the assumption that it is more likely to tell the truth. But is it really impartial or even worth a damn?

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Liberalism is the freeing of the individual from the tyranny of tribe, class, caste or community.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Science Fiction is big on evolution, namely the evolution of humanity - either from long term exposure to the freakiness of space, or conscious evolution by tampering with genes. Either way it's seen as the ultimate solution to the secular version of original sin (how terribly nasty we humans can be), or the inevitability of the ongoing march of science.

So, will space change humans? Unlikely, simply because of our passion for technology. Humans have always used technology. Clothing is a form of technology - it is not natural, it is a deliberate manipulation of nature. The Naked Ape set out from Africa for colder regions long ago and, via the invention of clothing, took its environment with it, keeping its body at the same required temperature. Astronauts also take their environment with them - via spacesuits, oxygen tanks and, as will be likely, centrifugal gravity habs. All this negates the need to biologically adapt to the environment. Did the Inuit evolve hairy bodies like the polar bear, or blubbery skin like the walrus? No, they developed suitable clothing and, after thousands of years, remain recognizably human in all their traits and features. When Europeans encountered them after millennia of separation, they did not encounter aliens. Hereditary changes have been negligable and we remain, as a species, unchanged.

What about conscious evolution then? Will we, with the technology that, supposedly, will soon be within our grasp, change ourselves into post-humans? Well, the problem with this thesis is that humans have been able to alter biological features for thousands of years - pre-dating even civilization. We did it with selective breeding - of dogs, cattle and wheat grains. No lab coats were necessary for this, yet we've never done it to ourselves. And it's not because we've been too humane or moral to do it either. Humans have routinely slaughtered, enslaved and eaten other humans. Infanticide was a common method of birth control. So why have we never bred or created 'new' human types from slaves or unwanted children, the way we've done with dogs? Clearly there has to be a reason, an enduring reason that has lasted thousands of years. What that reason is, I do not know. But it's not an idle question and until we can answer it, we cannot take the idea of conscious evolution for granted.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

"Civilization emerges with complexity, exists because of it, and disappears when complexity does.

Complexity is the base of civilization, and civilization, by definition here, can disappear only when complexity vanishes. It may be true that specific polities can rise and fall within a civilization, but political complexity itself must disintegrate for civilization to disappear.

For this reason the study of rising and falling complexity serves as a monitor of the phenomenon termed civilization..."

Joseph Tainter - The Collapse of Complex Societies.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Enlightenment humanists have maintained, and continue to maintain, that social affairs can be managed with the same rational tools that are used in science. Reason, enlightened by education, can better manage human affairs than the manipulative, irrational fumblings of history's ancient regimes.

The problem is that this has all been tried before, and Reason was found wanting. Kennedy's presidency was famed for its administration of the 'best and the brightest' - highly educated specialists applying 'modern' methods of analysis to the complex problems of foreign policy. Reason and rational analysis were applied with full force to the war in Vietnam. Computer programs were unleashed for diagnosis, with streams of incoming data updating the picture day by day and fresh orders being sent to Generals and Aid programs. And it all failed spectacularly.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks too thought that the application of scientific reason could be applied to modernise the State, with an emphasis on education, careful central planning and staged five year plans. The Jacobins sought to use cold rationality to mould the State when they unleashed The Terror during the French Revolution - Mao sought to do the same with the Cultural Revolution. Pol pot went even further with the concept of Year Zero. And neoconservative planners predicted what they thought would be a rational outcome to the 'liberation' of Iraq.

What all these ideologues had in common was that they sought to simplify complexity. Reason is thought to be the device by which complexity can be understood, reduced and tamed. But complexity, which is to say Reality, cannot be so easily pinned down. It defies simplification. It makes a mockery of even the most elaborate of human ideologies.

Human beings are products of nature, and nature is not reasonable. Human reason is really just a parochial delusion. It is a tool, not a key. A specialised yet limited tool.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

"Society, that it may live better, creates the State as an instrument. Then the State gets the upper hand and society has to begin to live for the State."

Ortega y Gasset, 1930.

Monday, February 14, 2011

"Just look at all the money that has been spent on the problem - all the laws we have put in place, all the educational programs we have implemented, all the police operations that have swept through our inner cities. And yet all we have succeeded in doing, apart from creating a self serving bureaucracy dedicated to the problem, is to have imprisoned thousands without really solving the problem at all. In fact, all we have achieved is the criminalisation  and marginalisation of the poorer sections of our society. Surely we should admit now that the solution to the problem lies in not trying to solve it at all. We should legalise it, and thus regulate it. That, to me, appears to be common sense."

Alfredo E. Nonexisto. Chairman of the Campaign to Legalise Violence.
City of Arsoles, 2035.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

On the subject of Egypt's uprising, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I put it to you that the fawning and narcissistic gushing of the western media on the subject have fallen short of reality, and that indeed they have overlooked some vital pieces of evidence.
Exhibit A: Many young demonstrators carried or painted on themselves the national flag of Egypt. Not America. Not Anarchism inc. Not trade union banners. These people are very, very patriotic. And Egypt has a young population, with a sizable proportion of young males. Patriotic young males.
Exhibit B: Egypt's economy was in the doldrums before the demonstrations and is in tatters now. The anger at Mubarak was stimulated by increasing poverty, the rising price of food and by the unemployment of a large number of young people. And this in a regime that already heavily subsidises bread and other vital foodstuffs. Being able to vote and air dissent in a free press does not in itself produce agricultural abundance and jobs. Freedom does not automatically produce prosperity.
Exhibit C: Egypt has no oil. Egypt is heavily reliant on aid. Egypt has a large deficit. Egypt has very little in the way of a manufacturing base. No democratic regime can conjure away the problems associated with these things, no matter how nice they are. Niceness produces neither competence nor wealth. It only pleases tender bourgeois hearts who watch from the comfort of their living rooms.
Exhibit D: The price of food is shooting up. The price of oil is going up. The price of metals is skyrocketing. Inflation stalks the world - because of population boom, a growing Chinese middle class, the US treasury's second round of quantitative easing and this year's droughts in Asia.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I put it to you that, while the Islamic Brotherhood may indeed be as tame and toothless as many claim, there are still other dangers surrounding the creation of a democratic government in a country that has never had a true democracy.
We may not see an Islamic Republic in Egypt.
But we may indeed see a Weimar Republic.

Friday, February 11, 2011

There are a surprising number of avowed Marxists and Socialists in Science Fiction writing. Presumably, since they couldn't make their ideologies work in the real world, they figure they can make it work in the imaginary world instead. Science Fiction has attracted a lot of Libertarians for exactly the same reason.
Fantasy writer Michael Moorcock has described the novel the Lord of the Rings as effluence. But if the Lord of the Rings is effluence then surely Michael Moorcock's work is diarrhoea of the most liquid kind. It poured out at a prodigious rate and it was pretty thin stuff.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

"I used to be amused by Utopians. With life experience, I have grown to fear them. The great failing of Utopians is that they can never accept that someone else might not want to be a part of their Utopian vision. Like ill-mannered tourists, they assume that if you don't agree with them, it must be because they're not explaining it simply enough, or often enough, or loudly enough, or ultimately, because you're stupid.
Utopians always think achieving Utopia is simply a matter of education—and then re-education—and then coercion, legislation, litigation medication conditioning threats book-burnings eugenics surgical modifications hunting down the counter-revolutionaries killing the reactionaries genetic engineering—and ultimately all Utopians, no matter how nobly they begin, always end up at the same conclusion: that the only thing that keeps Man from building a secular heaven here on Earth is the nature of Man, therefore we must build a New and Better Man."
Bruce Bethke, Final Afterthoughts

Monday, February 7, 2011

It is said that modern technology like the Internet has the capacity to bring the people of this world closer together, just as it was claimed during the Industrial Revolution that canals and trains would bring people closer together by breaking down the barriers of distance, and therefore of estrangement. Mass distributed technology however does not make the masses more humanist, more reasonable or more cooperative - it simply amplifies what is already there, and that includes the animal and the base, as well as the noble. Mass technology and mass society brings humans out into sharp relief, and it is an image that will increasingly overload the senses with a combination of admiration and revulsion.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

"It is the sneering contempt in which white working class people who have socially conservative views and attitudes are treated by the great liberal commentariat. Their preferences in culture, sport, clothes, places to go on holday, celebrities, and a hundred other things are regarded with such unbridled contempt as to have practically begged for a reaction.
How often over the past say 30 years have you seen a TV interview with a group of 'inarticulate' local people who are not thrilled at the idea that their neighbourhood is now peopled by those from a distant land whose language they do not understand and a smug, self righteous, smooth faced reporter showing us all how nasty these pathetic little people are?
I have and worked in countries all over the world and there is practically none other where the liberal bougeoisie has a greater sense of alienation from their fellow citizens who have to wear blue overalls at their workplace."
Guardian comment by Chesire Salt

Friday, February 4, 2011

"The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints."
Burke commenting on the French Revolution.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

"Ours is an era in which political ideology, liberal as much as Marxist, has a rapidly dwindling leverage on events, and more ancient, more primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian, are contesting with each other."
John Gray, 1989.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Pagans lived with tragedy and consoled themselves with the idea of fate.
Christians lived with tragedy and consoled themselves with the idea of heaven.
Secular Humanism has no mechanism for dealing with tragedy and concerns itself instead with its elimination.

Friday, January 28, 2011

It is scarcity that engenders manners between people within small communities. Manners are a form of social insurance that becomes habit.
Religion and tradition takes these tribal manners and uses them as morality to ritualise acceptable behaviour in larger societies.
Abundance and individualism is the death of these things. Secularism that has no traditions breaks the links of mutual dependence between people in larger societies. Abundance means that other people no longer matter - social insurance is not required.

The culture of the wealthy is therefore toxic when given to the poor - which is why slums and the underclass lose their moralities and squabble, even while still poor. The communal culture has been eclipsed by a consumer culture that's in their faces - even though it should never have been applied to them.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Love with passion, but do not expect to be loved.
Fight with determination, but do not expect to win.
Live well, but do not expect to live forever.

Stoicism - you know it makes sense in a crazy world.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

War in Afghanistan

For all the talk about the war in Afghanistan, it is important to understand that there are actually three wars in Afghanistan.
The first war is the Humanitarian war. This is the war to create stability, democracy, greater women's rights, strong economy, etc. This is the most visible of the three wars.
The second war is the War on Terror war. This is the war that hits the Taliban and conducts raids and drone strikes into Pakistan. This war is less visible and only mentioned when there are casualties.
The third war is the Bases war. This is the firm staking out of military bases to increase US influence and leverage in Central Asia. This war is all but invisible to the media, as it is the most complex but the least interesting to the casual viewer.

The Humanitarian war has already been lost. As an attempt at enlightened Liberal Imperialism it has foundered upon intractable realities and has absorbed billions to little effect. This war will soon be abandoned, taking most of the media journalists with it.
The War on Terror war failed in its initial aim of eliminating the Taliban, thus paving the way for victory in the first war. It now only aims to weaken the Taliban in order to preserve an imperfect pro-western regime. This will be scaled down to a Special Forces and Drone war and will become far less visible.
The Bases war is so far a success. Remote bases are easy to defend and only require the permission of the host government, whoever they are. They can also project future power when necessary, and serve as bases for Special Forces, Intelligence assets and cash outflows to bribe warlords and, if necessary, Taliban to allow gas pipelines going west to be left in peace. They serve as a strategic bargaining chip in The Great Game with China, India and Russia. They will remain largely invisible to a public who don't really care where their troops are stationed in the world, provided they're not dying.
Idealistic aims will give way to realpolitik and the original 'War in Afghanistan' will be forgotten.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Feminism is not really about equality. In its post-war form it emerged from the Left's view of class consciousness - sex consciousness if you like. It is, therefore, a form of sectarianism.

Monday, January 24, 2011

A better society? What outcome do you desire? If you wish there to be peace, declare a dictatorship and rule with an iron will, so that none dare transgress the State or their own neighbours. If you wish for individual liberty, disband the dictatorship and allow everyone to do what they will, to themselves and to each other. If you wish for greater meaning in life, disband the State and break it down into simpler groups where life is poor but tribal identity is palpable and sweet. Which will you choose? Or do you think there is no incompatibility between the modes, and therefore no paradox? Do you really think there is a better society? Better for whom?