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?

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

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.

"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.

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.

"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.

"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.