[ It is always rude to leave without saying goodbye.  Pressure of work and other commitments will mean that there are no more entries to be made for a while though I may return.  For business-linked and political blogging, go to http://asithappens.tppr.info .  So, goodbye and thanks to the nice people I have met through Zaadz and to Zaadz itself.  Tim P. ]

I make it a rule never to write (except for money or mineral rights) during August so this will be the last posting until September ... or I might stop completely.  After all, the whole point of the annual pause is to ask whether something of value is becoming a mere habit.  Time is a commodity like any other and it is good to halt once in a while and ask - is this the best use of it? ...

Stephen Pinker, the scientist and commentator, has an interesting article in the Chicago Sun-Times on 'dangerous ideas' - http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/469317,CST-CONT-danger15.article - and he offers a tentative dig at the prevailing and patronising ideology of political correctness amongst the educated Hilary-Clintonesque Anglo-Saxon 'educated' middle class.  But this is largely America's problem not mine.  I was merely diverted by two connected sentences:

Only children and madmen engage in "magical thinking," the fallacy that good things can come true by believing in them or bad things will disappear by ignoring them or wishing them away. Rational adults want to know the truth, because any action based on false premises will not have the effects they desire.

Pinker's Throwaway Lines

Pinker is a Professor in Psychology at Harvard. These two throwaway lines tell us a great deal about the stranglehold of positivism and scientism on all matters to do with the mind.  It is immature or insane (it is asserted) to believe that matter (things, though we must allow that things may include social relations) can be changed by the exercise of mind as belief or denial.  Further, it is assumed that there is something called truth which is defined, along traditional American pragmatic lines, as that which has desired effects.

Pinker sweeps over these assertions in his effort to make his intelligent if not particularly sophisticated popularising points about academic freedom and responsibility, all (despite his aura of courage) well within the mainstream of American ideology. The level of 'courage' may be deduced from the fact that, despite being the most obvious example of ideological pressure on academic freedom this year, the lengthy article does not deal with the debate over the influence of the Zionist lobby, yet finds time to mention Torquemada and Larry Summers. 

Although not threatened with incarceration in a mental asylum (but only with loss of revenue, reputation-bashing and difficulty in getting published), the liberal academic and intellectual is being placed under increasing ideological pressure, much as any Brezhnev-era Soviet intellectual might have been.  It is a sign of intellectual decadence in the world's greatest power that matches the concurrent rise of primitivist neo-conservatism - two camps twisting reality for political purposes.

Managing 'Socially Harmful Information'

The creepy argument from certain self-appointed secular priests that there is a "logic ... for keeping socially harmful information out of the public sphere" is the very essence of the new liberal totalitarianism in which we, the people, are regarded as too stupid to know our own interest. 

The sinister Mr, Plato, having been at the birth of so many murderous essentialist utopianisms, is now in at the birth of a new form of culturicide - a mental rather than physical enslavement of the many by the few.  Thus, once again, frightened middle class liberals, often over-rating their own intellectual abilities, conspire somewhat incoherently with the neo-conservative impulse to manage us in our own alleged interest.  Enough already!

If you take Pinker's passing excoriation of 'magical thinking' and add to it the idea of "keeping socially harmful information out of the public sphere", it might then become perfectly "logical" to ban some dangerous ideas that might actually be quite liberating for the mass of the population, a popular liberation from the rule of experts whose own knowledge of micro-effects is often expanded, without just cause, into macro-policy affecting the daily lives of millions.  You can see the existential panic amongst scientists - if the masses deny the scientific assessment of micro-effects (or merely consider them irrelevant), then liberal-positivist legitimation of its command of macro-policy may collapse.  But this is just panic ...

Some Alternate Propositions

Let us try some alternate propositions on thinking ...

* Observable effects on matter (science) should be strictly assessed as technology - the information's only pragmatic value is how it can be used for personal or social ends

* Non-useful science should be considered as narrative and should not be privileged (or diminished) over other narratives - if it cannot be used, then it is merely interesting

* Non-scientific thinking or narrative that effects perceptual change may be said to affect social relations (since social relations are based on perception) which, in turn, affects the uses and ends of technology - and, therefore, the limits and value of science

* Individuals and communities generally (though not always) know what is good for their own survival and their real problem is lack of information (including lack of scientific information) so the free flow of all information is essential to individual and social decision-making - free cultural and technological education remains the foundation of the good society

* Apparently irrational belief-systems have social advantages and communities may legitimately choose to deny the use of technology or scientific narrative or use other narratives (art, religion, magick) to express what they are and what they wish to be

* Those who do this are neither immature nor insane, just different

* Boundaries against harm (child abuse, denial of medical care, exploitation, or whatever) need to be negotiated as general values applying to all narrative choices: these boundaries have a relationship with technology and psychology (which, as we will see, must include 'magic') but have little to do with particular narratives - they are the arena of 'good politics'

* Truth may be no more than that which demonstrates desired effects in the American pragmatic tradition, but self-constructed ways of thinking to shift perception and make oneself whole (or as whole as anyone can expect to be) can involve a great deal more than applying reason to that 'which is not reasonable' (i.e. the essence of being human)

* No social policy that involves values can do more than hold the ring between varying responses to Wittgenstein's 'that of which nothing can be spoken', whether it be the response of denial that such a zone matters from a positivist mind-set, the Christian's belief in the mysterium tremendum or the anarchic mentality of the Chaos practitioner.

In this context, bad mouthing those outside the prevailing positive orthodoxy as immature or insane sounds like the act of a dominant class seeking to maintain its hegemony over truth. If something works, then it works and people will use it because it works, but the ends for which technologies are used are why the fact that it works is important.  There is no 'truth' as such in these workings, only in the ends and scientists have a somewhat disturbing moral record to date in this area. 

There are, of course, legitimate fears over social order (from the right) and exploitation (from the left) but these are best handled through a rules-based general political debate and not by prescription on values from an anxious and weakening positivist academic caste.  There is certainly no justification in replacing a theocracy with a liberal meritocracy where the rules have inappropriately fixed who will be a member of the caste and who will not.

The fear of this meritocratic liberal caste is that their (liberal and open) absolute values will be displaced by someone else's absolute values.  But this very resistance to other ways of thinking tends to strengthen the fundamentalists on the other side.  The proper response is to place both one's own and other's absolute (or even nihilistic) values beneath the rule of fair play, law applicable to all and my oft-quoted democratic socialist principle of exploitation as a wrong-in-itself.  Boundaries can then be regarded as simply a matter of political struggle between interests instead of struggles between value-systems.

The Awkward Case Of Magick

Which brings me to the particularly awkward case of Magick - that odd minority practice that (despite claims of antiquity) emerged amongst the British haute bourgeoisie at the peak of Empire and was accompanied or succeeded by a number of neo-pagan religions (Druidism, Wicca and Heathenism).  These have all spread and taken root in American soil much to the consternation of Christian and scientific fundamentalists alike.  Is the Magickal tradition of Crowley (represented in America by different and darker strands from Parsons through to the avowed Satanist LaVey) immature or insane - or are they merely exploitative of the immature by cynical opportunists?  Or is it something else or all of these and more?

There are few reliable sources but a new book, The History of British Magick After Crowley, by Paul Evans, an academic historian, tries to bring some objectivity to what this odd little minority are engaged in because they are, by their very existence, clearly a standing challenge to Pinkerism - especially when you find out that its contemporary practitioners include a significant proportion of science graduates and that some of them actively use the wilder shores of science, as Pinker would understand the term, for their practices and researches.

Unfortunately, Evans' book is not well edited (it is published outside the mainstream by Hidden Publishing), it rambles and it sometimes assumes too much knowledge and then repeats itself on things that we all know anyway as part of our common culture.  But it is engagingly honest about the prejudices Evans experienced in the Academy for even taking on the issue, for his determination to uncover the truth about leading figures and for his own description of 'anthropological' participation in rituals and their effect on him - and his struggle (which clearly exercises him more than the reader) to remain 'objective'.

Some Findings

The bottom line of 400-odd pages that should be 270 but remains a valuable source is three-fold.  First, the obfuscation of Magickal language and technique from Crowley onwards hides a genuine attempt to find a way into that world of 'that of which nothing can be spoken' which we all know lies at the limits of science and logic and which is also dealt with by art and religion - and through the sheer exercise of imagination.  Poetry and ritual are methods to an end as much as scientific hypotheses and experimentation can be in the search for useful technologies - positivists may not like that conclusion but these people are neither immature nor insane, just different.

Second, this world does attract the immature and probably the insane, so there is an issue of exploitation.  Evans' book does not try to justify the antics of Kenneth Grant or Amado Crowley as some might do as merely the antics of Loki or some other Trickster god.  These figures that lie between Crowley and the Chaos magicians are deeply flawed, just how flawed requires a reading of the book because I am not going to put myself or Zaadz at the risk of a British libel suit. 

I can see (from other sources) that a tendency to charlatanism and trickery is becoming self-corrected in the next generation (giving way, in turn, to a fourth generation of socially committed 'magical' eco-thinkers), but Pinker and others are both justified in caution if perhaps more forgiving of historic charlatanism in the sciences when it had had neither a strong culture nor an institutional base to support it.  Alchemical thinking opened the doors to more serious work in chemistry and we ordinary folk have had to put up with some pretty daft theories and vile inventions from scientists, pimping themselves to power, over the last 300 years.

Life-Affirmation as Ends

But, third, the actual experience of Magick is clearly life-affirming and powerful for that tiny minority of practitioners (estimated at less than 50,000 or around 0.1% of the British population) who engage with it.  The 'scientific question' is - does it work?  And the proper answer is - for the purposes of many of these people, yes it does.  The scientist must then ask (assuming he does not dismiss such people as merely deluded and hand them over to the clinician) - how does it do this? 

It seems to do this by a practitioner taking command of how the world is perceived in order to effect change in oneself that then enables one to change social relations (definable as 'matter' in some respects).  This, in turn, affects the purpose and use of technology if not the laws of physics.  It is about self-empowerment through controlled 'transgression' but there is no evidence to suggest that such people are more or less psychopathic, 'insane' or even manipulative than other groups of people.  My daily life is spent in business, politics and public relations and, believe me, if you want psychopathy, manipulation and attempts to bend reality to will, try my world!

This does leave the claim of some Magick practitioners (and Wiccans and Druids) that ritual or will can change matter or the laws of physics.  This claim is not metaphor but based on a reading at the cutting edge of physics that the mind and matter can operate at micro-levels 'under will' (I oversimplify) so that greater change can be effected through the oft-quoted 'butterfly effect'.  The implication is that will can direct change.

Scepticism About Scepticism

Not so many years ago, I would have rejected this out of hand and am still suspicious that a psychological pudding is being overegged, but now I think, while the claims are unproven, seem unlikely and may never be provable, relations between mind and matter (given that both may be broadly the same substance whether to materialists or radical gnostics and, if not, there is still no clear account of how one works on the other within the body other than the circular explanations of neuro-science) are not known truly to scientists any more than 'magical thinkers'.  This void creates a gap for surmise and imagination. The attempt by one narrative [science] unwarrantedly to seek to expand into the void as lebensraum, by abandoning its own methodological rigour in order to exclude another which it finds uncomfortable, strikes me as unethical.

Similarly, at the margins, there is room for doubt about strict radical techno-materialism.  The much-despised para-psychological profession within the academy is finding 'anomalies', the power of ritual and words to effect psychological change quickly is being shown to be true if only in the middle management fix of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and a variety of 'new religions' seem to give pastoral care to the new 'damned of the earth' deep within our own liberal culture (the trailer boys sucked into overseas military adventures, the sex working single mothers).

These self-taught techniques for psychological regeneration seem to be a helluva lot cheaper and more focused on reality than the inordinately expensive and lengthy talking cure much preferred by the tormented liberal middle classes of the East Coast.  In short, the 'does it work' test is not only subjectively passed by the group but there may be objective hints of why it works and what its social role and rational economic value may be.

So, Professor ...

A little less science and a little more Magick might result in more fun and more safe sex at home for a lot of over-intellectualised graduate couples.  Who is going to be a happier soul - Woody Allen or someone dressing up in a wolf's costume (apparently not a real skin because of eco-morality ,so political correctness cannot be escaped even here), getting drunk, in the middle of the night, in woodland and calling on Herne to bless a couple before they go off to hit the sack? 

Thinking too much can be terribly depressing.  Especially when thinking (for most people) actually changes very little in one's life and reaches a point of diminishing returns.  To play with Pinker's second sentence - "Rational adults find what passes for truth as irrelevant, because any action based on true premises will still not have the effects they desire".

Why should the vast mass of the population, trapped in dead-end jobs and tired relationships with limited resources, sustain a thinking culture that does not work for them just to buttress the amour-propre of professional thinkers?  If thinking will not change that job, get more money and reinvigorate one's marriage, why not try something else - and, by the way, have some fun!  And, before the moralists get their teeth into this, it is the thinking culture that has the high divorce rate, not a magical one per se.

So, Professor Pinker, I know you mean well but don't be so po-faced about 'magical thinking'.  It may not be the way to run a nuclear power station or a train service but 'imaginative' thinking (if you dislike magical) is not immature nor is it insane.  It can change the conditions of matter by changing the person and social relations.  It can get that person out of the hands of an office bully without going through 'procedures' (yawn!) that change nothing fundamentally.  It can force a marriage to put up or shut up on mutual respect.  It may (and minds should remain open on this) even change matter at the margins - we do not know.  In short, in some cases, it can empower where liberals can only pontificate.

... And Back to Dangerous Ideas

And, perhaps more uncomfortably, outside the simple truths of proven cause and effect, there are many other truths.  No narrative has yet mastered, nor can it plausibly ever master, 'that of which nothing can be spoken', whether it be God, deity in general or (as I believe) simple raw unknowable Existence.  Science is rightly master of technology and of the means to new technology.  It is a describer of how Existence (or God) manifests itself but it says nothing about ends and little, in the long run, about what it is to be and feel human.  In that wider territory, it merely constrains the theories underpinning other narratives but it does not displace them.  It forces them on to new ground but it can never wipe them from that core territory of 'meaning'.

Which brings us back to the original article and 'dangerous ideas'.  For Professor Pinker, a dangerous idea is one that science develops through its method but which then has a potentially negative social consequence.  It may become propaganda fuel for racists or fascists - the Holocaust lurks behind every American liberal's picture of the universe as something that happens when science goes bad.  But this mis-explains the atrocity and is bad history.  Jews died not because of bad science but because of bad politics.  And, until we get our heads around that, people will continue to die before their time. 

We remain in denial about the importance of free political struggle under conditions of full information. Germans in 1933 did not, as a majority, vote in global war, mass murder and a terrible dictatorship.  A truly strong egalitarian democracy, with loyal militia and multiple sources of information available to the public would have strangled Hitler.  The science would have poddled along, eventually discovering that there was no basis to his potty racial theories.  As always, it was the elite who betrayed their own nation out of conformity and that time-serving mentality of people who think they have a little bit of power to play with and can use it well ... as if!

The liberal-totalitarian instinct is to try and hold a dangerous idea close and limit its use to the caste that can be trusted to handle it responsibly.  I would argue that this is patronising and that it privileges a caste with no rights to speak for the rest of us.  PInker quotes Brandeis approvingly - Sunlight is the best disinfectant.  Let him and other liberals hold that thought.

The long term solution is for science to place itself under the jurisdiction of the community, for all information to be given to the community and for the community to be trusted to develop an appropriate policy based on values that are derived from squaring all the narratives - from the materialist (economic welfare) to the numinous.  It is called liberal democracy and it is becoming plain stupid now to let the particular bloody events in a mid-European country three quarters of a century ago dictate how we treat and trust our own peoples.  Now that is immature and on the very borders of insane ...

It may seem like cheating to take a pre-existing item (much of this has already appeared in my LiveJournal) and then re-apply it to the Zaadz blog.  But the virtue of blog-plundering is that you can have a second bite at an earlier cherry and see if the thoughts of one week stand up to scrutiny in the next.

What is Truth, Said the Roman

I have a very unconventional view of truth.  Facts change, new thoughts come, and the world changes accordingly.  Better to accept this and anticipate it than to become rigid in pure principle.  Universalism is, I am afraid, the beginning of the end of human creativity and progress.

After all, if any of us had lived a hundred years ago, we would probably have accepted such truths as self-evident as that : eugenics was a reasonable proposition in ensuring the progress of the human species; that women were the weaker sex and needed guidance from men; that tribal peoples were inherently inferior and required a Christian mission to make them whole; and that a member of a trades union was, by very definition, a dangerous agitator.

I like to think that I plough dangerous ground sometimes in trying to think ahead, perhaps to what might be normal in a hundred years.  My earlier thoughts on sexual honesty and the web (since re-published in Social Computing magazine, which shows that Zaadz is read out there in Normal Land) were of this type.  My opinion that any society made rigid by the thoughts and plans of a group of benign eighteenth century gentlemen is bound to show signs of tension and collapse after a period of time - yes, I am talking about your much-loved Constitution - is another 'future thought'.  Another theme of this blog is that the minority religions and irrationalisms emerging in the margins of late capitalist society are as pregnant with meaning as was Christianity in the Age of Augustus.

The Strength of Irrational Feeling

I attended a lecture recently by a leading Heathen (representing a serious minority attempt to reconstruct what the pre-Roman tribal peoples of Europe felt and believed).  What has struck me is the profound depth of feeling amongst those who have engaged deeply with these new 'reconstructed' pagan religions.  I may not share their views, but I must recognise that their peculiar brands of irrationalism, no less so than the Catholic or the Jewish,are powerful enough to motivate actions that might, one day, be those of the martyr or, the Deity forbid, a Crusade or should we say an Ankhade or (after Thor) a Hammerade.

Two days later, at the same venue, an articulate young German from public service stock, gave a very coherent and stimulating account of a pagan German secret society from the second post-Nietzchean wave of German romanticism (1870s). This had been forced underground successively by racial politics and then by the taint of association of romantic irrationalism with national socialism in post-war Germany.  The society has been revived and no doubt partially transformed in a model that was clearly one part Germanic by philosophy (idealist rather than existentialist), one part Germanic by cultural heritage, with talk of Ragnarok and Frigg, and one part gnostic-hermetic with all the expected debt to Jung and Ascona.

This was 'aristocracy of the soul' stuff and is part of a new trend to rediscover roots in the defeated powers of '45 that is as inevitable as it was once feared.  In my view, it is a necessary part of the healing of '45.  I would have few concerns if all those involved were as intelligent and self-aware as the speaker. But I do have concerns and I think we need to be aware of what is happening more widely in global culture.

Traditionalism As Revenge

The racial and imperialist aspects of both German and Japanese culture have perhaps dissipated, but the culture suppressed in 1945 by the combined force of Western rational liberalism and Marxist scientific materialism went underground - it was never crushed completely.  It is not merely returning at the margins as a transformed 'spirituality' in these countries.  We also see those who 'collaborated' against both the West and Communism in other countries re-emerge - in a revived Hindu nationalism, in the re-emergence of the European Right in The Low Countries, France, Spain and Italy (and elsewhere) and, paradoxically, in the many East European petty nationalisms and fascisms.  Poland's current bout of irrationalism is a resurgence of Catholic authoritarianism but it is of the same type - the suppressed rage of a nationalism crushed by two forces with more guns and more men.

We even see traces of it in the development of that post-Baathist 'Caliphate' traditionalism that, owing some debt to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, has emerged as 'Al-Qaeda'.  In short, the irrational politics of tradition, identity and the soul - and of blut and kultur however defined - is back with a vengeance.  A relatively few 'souls' can now wreak destructive power far beyond anything such irregulars could have done fifty years ago, while troubled elites increasingly see traditionalist ideas as a means of capturing and retaining power.

So, something culturally significant is happening.  Much of it comes down to frustration with both traditional religion and with the Enlightenment - and the hole on the Left left by the failures of both Marxism and secular liberation movements.  Just as Baathism was the twin brother of Zionism, so 'Caliphate' Islamism is arising out of the ashes of the failures of the secular leftist liberation strategies of the PLO and of the more sensible pre-Saddamite versions of Baathism.

The Attraction of the Coherently Irrational

What interested me was that (although I am of the Left) I could see that the ideas of this spiritual and non-political secret society was reaching out to something lost in people's souls - that very drive for the coherent irrational that is always going to be more holy and more meaningful than the politically correct nonsense forced on us by both market democracy in the West and by a world of all-too-appropriate behaviour, rights, duties and citizenship. 

One person of German descent at the event (in conversation afterwards) was clearly attracted by that aspect of David's talk that was 'tribal' - it reached down to the roots of her personal Yggdrasil.  The British audience was (as is our way) more pragmatic about all this and rather unnerved by some of the highly conservative gender implications, but many people outside the liberal heartlands of the West are ready for something that roots them in their ancestors and their place - in blut und boden.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with this if it can develop within a classic secular liberal culture, the law is obeyed and no-one is forced to make temple blood sacrifices or mount revenge raids on the next street ... but my concern is where this desperate need to belong and to believe may be taken by less scrupulous and more manipulative operators.

Rudgley on the Odinic Experiment

A recent popular book on paganism [Richard Rudgley, Pagan Resurrection: A Force for Evil or the Future of Western Spirituality, 2006] raises some of the issues, albeit without much sophistication and exaggerating the political potential of what he calls the Second Odinic Experiment (essentially the post-war appropriation of Odin by the Westen Radical Right).  Nevertheless, he is raising some serious issues that are being completely ignored by the mainstream media. It is highly probable that some of these developments are being monitored by the security services and simultaneously studiously ignored, or becoming a matter of denial, by the politicians they serve.  Much like the Minister of Magic studiously ignores the return of Lord Valdemort until the bugger is presented to his own eyesight in the current Harry Potter movie.

The relevance of minority religion thinking to this may seem distant.  Ridgley's book is unsatisfying precisely because he is sympathetic to pagan thought and yet his story tells of its systematic appropriation by the extreme Right.  He cannot bring himself to criticise Odinic thinking nor its darker aspects. 

In fact, much of what passes for paganism is not so much paganism as traditionalism - there is not only state-sponsored Shinto in Japan to deal with but there is (not uncoincidentally) those Arab writers from the era of the Mongol invasions who are emerging as the ideologists of 'Caliphate' Islam.  It seems not accidental that Polish neo-fascists in government, Islamic extremists and 'divine wind' Japanese nationalists can all centre their narratives ultimately on national resistance to the Mongol horde.  But, today, the West in all its manifestations, including Communist [scientific materialist] China, is the Mongol Horde to many middling nations under threat from rapid global change.

Good People & Dark Forces

The German secret society is not sinister at all - its narrative myth is attractive, even sexy in its way.  I loved it - as noble fantasy.  Wiccans and most neo-pagans, too, love nature and the rest of humanity in a way that is wholly benign.  Jewish and Islamic cultures have rich magical aspects that are only now being explored in any depth in the West.  I could go on - neo-paganism is largely a positive and benign force in the world.  But we have to be on guard ... because traditionalism and paganism are not the same thing.  The attempted appropriation of the latter by the former when it switches out of Judaeo-Christian mode is something to be very wary of in the covens and moots of the world.

Out there, there are people that are frightened.  They see their identity under threat.  They see changes that they cannot adapt to.  They are looking for crutches.  Whether it be the 'leaderless resistance' strategies of terrorism migrating from Christian Identity to extremist Odinist circles and on to Al-Qaeda or the national manipulation of folk religions like Shinto, we have to stop being naive about the connexion between religion and politics in general and the possibility of the manipulation of new religious thinking in particular.  

These new religions are emerging because of anxiety and the failure of the old religions.  Scientism, Dawkins' aggressive atheism, liberalism and the Enlightenment are not meeting their needs.  It is a small step to the politicisation of this rage and anxiety by unscrupulous politicians.

The Warning from History

Even the history of the secret society is its own warning from history - romantic pagan-inclined men of good faith were displaced by the appropriation of German culture by something that even Hitler considered absurd, the potty neo-paganism of Guido von List, of Karl von Wiligut, of the Ahnenerbe and of Heinrich Himmler.  Once that madness and its equally mad pseudo-science was discredited, two generations of Germans dared not explore the dissident ideas at the very heart of this and other societies.  To talk of Ragnarok was to imply that such thinkers wanted to bring it on rather than see it as an alchemical metaphor.

What is troubling is who might be rehabilitated and who might not as we go deeper into the current century.  This could be the world of Savitri Devi, of Julius Evola and Miguel Serrano.  Athough some of these thinkers (notably Evola) may have things of value to impart if only in stimulating debate, they can be potentially very dangerous thinkers indeed in free societies - if they remain unchallenged.  If the Wiccan world of Gerald Gardner, currently the home of liberals, greens and feminists, is ever captured by the world of Evola, many good and honourable people will be moths burnt in the flames - especially if those attracted to the spirituality of faux-tradition are sucked into the politics of resistance to the modern world.  We must all consider ourselves on watch ...

[ A version of this first appeared on LiveJournal at http://timlondon.livejournal.com/ ]

I was pulled up short the other day by a science fiction book. I referred to the Scots science fiction writer Ken Macleod in my April 6th posting [ Macleod and '300' - Two Responses to the Darkness ] so it was interesting to discover a new writer, Charles Stross, recommended by Macleod, who has many similarities in style and sensibility.  There is a sudden rush of his books on the market, all very recent and published first in America (although he is a Brit). I picked up what I believe is his second to be written and the first to be published here (The Atrocity Archive) and it is an enjoyable pulp read [see http://www.antipope.org/charlie/index.html for more on Stross]

Anyway this isn't a book review. The book has many flaws but if you think in terms of a mix of H. P. Lovecraft, Len Deighton and Neal Stephenson (his assessment) and then add in a mix of hacker techno-nerdiness and BBC Sci-Fi humour (my assessment), you get somewhere close to what Graham Greene might politely call an 'entertainment'. It is very much in the vein of Mick Carey's much-loved (by my family) Felix Castor novels - http://www.mikecarey.net/ - which have the sexiest demon-incubus you have never ever wanted to meet.

These novels are part of a wry contemporary English horror/sci fi style made up of cynicism, dark humour, nerdy manners and tributes to American and British genre pulp that seems to go down well in a reading culture that is at much at home with Marvel Comics as it is with Conan Doyle. Think of the peculiar but stimulating world-view of Alan Moore [from V for Vendetta through to Promethea] and you see the culture of an angry radicalism that has been bent to market needs.

No, I am not offering a book review but a single observation. I am not giving the story away by saying that one of the key conceits of the book is that the mass murder of the Jews in the Second World War was the ritual sacrifice of millions to gain sufficient psychic energy from pain to call on an occult power, not unlike one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, to ensure a national socialist victory.  I am told that this is not the first use of this trope and someone is already out there searching Robert Anton Wilson for an earlier use of it - but its casual use in a popular novel on the shelves now is worth thinking about.

The conceit pulls you up short - has the very real suffering of millions under a vicious regime now become mere fodder for a rather tasteless foray into alternative history? Has it moved from the transgressive (if Anton Wilson did use the idea) to the mainstream?  Is this the point where the Holocaust has become finally released from lived experience (after being, for a few decades after 1945, 'that of which nothing may be spoken") in order that it might become the plaything of creative artists?

If so, it has been creeping in that direction for some time. The evil of the Holocaust has become steadily detached, first, from greed and power and, then, from ill-will and human malice to become the subject of occult forces beyond time and space? How different is this, in terms of the potential for a psychological denial of the truth, from the works of David Irving - not that I would ban either?  Not at all if we know how to distinguish between fact and fantasy but perhaps the remaking of fact into fantasy does have a moral dimension of sorts.

The point is that, at a certain time after an act has taken place, it seems that the act can move into a world where it is disconnected from reality and becomes fodder for fantasy.  This can happen in our private lives where we redraft reality to suit our current condition as a matter of course.  I met an old girlfriend from nearly twenty years ago by chance not so long ago and it was amusing to see how we had entirely different narratives about how and why we parted - as Maurice Chevalier sang, 'Ah, how I remember it well!'

The conservative philosopher John Kekes [The Roots of Evil, Cornell, 2005] does us a service in his book by returning to some of the great crimes of the past, not excluding the realpolitik of the Cathar Crusade, to lodge evil acts back where they should be lodged - at the heart of the human condition.  There comes a time perhaps, having redrafted history repeatedly, that we do have to go back and moralise on what happened as if would could make a contemporary judgement based on clear if primitive moral absolutes of the 'eating people is wrong' type.  While I cannot entirely dismiss the environmental roots of evil, as Kekes seems to want to do by implication, he is persuasive that not all evil can be optimistically wished away as something that is purely a matter of condition and that there is no evidence that, with improvement of condition, evil will be automatically banished from the world.

The Catholic Church has a concept in which there are sins of commission and sins of omission. This is useful here. To wilfully order the murder of millions is a sin of commission. To participate for careerist reasons in such a murder and go into denial about what is happening as one does so may be a sin of omission.  Forgetting an evil later because it is convenient to do so is also part of the evil.  Himmler's descendant who married a Jew and who has a half-Jewish child with the Himmler bloodline (a cosmic irony of noble proportions) investigated the Himmler brothers and found that their claims to have stepped away from their brother's romantic hogwash was so much - hogwash.  They had been complicit not as believers but as opportunists, taking every advantage of the family name when it gave them a bit of an edge in a cruel and unforgiving world.

Our culture tends to punish the commission of an act far more than complicity through omission and yet there would be no large-scale evil (it would be mere vicious local gangsterdom or individual rapine and murder) if it were not for this complicity by the grey men and their wives who do their duty. Charles Manson is rightfully incarcerated for life for his actions, yet Robert McNamara, the grey civil servant, continued to teach and write and speak (albeit admitting error) as if nothing had happened to civilians while he was working in national security - much like German lawyers who practised before and after the Gotterdamerung of '45.

McNamara's war (and I do not really want to single him out as much worse than thousands of such grey men in history, not forgetting our own British imperial crimes and misdemeanours), in which he participated 'with good intent', cost the Vietnamese people an estimated 666 times (an interesting number in itself) the number of people who died in the 9/11 incident. A suicide bomber is rightfully condemned, but the act of war that has lead to the murderousness of contemporary Iraq is treated by our establishment as if it were merely an honest mistake by well-meaning buffoons rather than as an act of irresponsible evil.   Those who have done their duty as military men or civil servants drive blame upwards to the 'buffone' yet refuse to accept their own moral complicity in carrying out their duty. Fascinating!  Something in the human, perhaps the Western, condition allows for good intent as an excuse for having paved the road to Hell in skulls.

But a sin of stupidity or denial that is complicit in the deaths of lots of people or creates widespread misery should be much less forgivable than our culture allows.  If vicious things result from good intent, should we be so prepared to forgive the perpetrator? This certainly seems to be very culturally useful for our middle classes, but philosophically it does not stand up well - and not just from a utilitarian perspective either. After all, if existentially we must take responsibility for our actions, then we must take some responsibility for the consequences of our actions. It is not only that we do evil in actually undertaking some act, but that we do evil when we fail to question what we do and when we fail to question what we have done after we have done it.  We do evil when we stop thinking.

Real evil lies not so much in making the error in a sin of commission, but in persisting in the error after the costs and consequences have become clear. Perhaps this is because, in the group-think of 'grey man evil', the alternative is always justified as worse. But this is mere displacement and denial. Perhaps the idea that Communists would overrun all of South East Asia (which did not happen and never was going to happen) justified in the minds of some men, supported at home by their wives, the massive use of terror tactics and of brutal methods simply because such tactics and methods are (using another, more malignly self-deluding, Catholic concept) the 'lesser evil'.  But then we all probably underestimate just how damned stupid, rather than evil, our ruling classes are?

This may seem like a round-the-houses way of linking a popular novel to the thinking of the architects of death in our global elites. Poor old Stross (and I certainly do not want to single him out at all) is just another writer reflecting his times, but there is a quiet potential evil in taking any real suffering and reifying it without thought into something abstract and unconnected to the fact of lots of very individual specific sufferings that actually took place at a specific place and time - whether this reification be through the appropriation of the suffering by Zionists to justify state creation, liberals to justify political correctness or authors to justify a story.  But the error is as great with a person as with a tribe - would it be right for a novelist to construct Diana Windsor (or any other public person) in ways that detach the person loved by William and Harry Windsor from their remembrance?  How much should reality be fodder for fantasy?

The best memorial to those murdered under the conditions of, say, the Holocaust (since nothing can ever bring them back, memory is no substitute for life really lived and their property has merely been restituted through occasionally tenuous bloodlines to 'make a point') is never ever to think about people in the way that their murderers did, as objects for use and manipulation.

Of course, a novelist apparently has the right to do this - at the end of the day, I cannot really condemn Stross for reflecting our culture so accurately in his work. Far from it - I very much recommend his book as a jolly entertaining travel read (if you can get through the bursts of Stephensonian techno-babble).  But actors in the real world certainly do not have this right: if it is true that fantasy should never be limited in either its light or dark aspects, reality is another matter altogether. Or is that thought too heavy for the lightweight brains of our oh-so-well-educated grey men?

Do you remember that mantra - act local, think global?  It was supposed to have some 'butterfly wings beating' effect on, say, climate change, as if putting our bottles in the right green bin was ever really going to have any tangible effect on Chinese industrialisation? Still, it all seems to have made a lot of people feel better about themselves and not believe that they had to engage in the much more onerous task of getting involved in political organisation in order to change anything truly material in the world.  Sweet, though.

Well, there is another version of the mantra - think local, act global.  Perhaps no more effective but worth considering.  Action to change the world might be more effective if we thought more clearly about the origins and effects of things that are happening to us as individuals and communities.  We might start to understand how we are managed and manipulated and just what little power we have to effect global change - unless, that is, we work with others collaboratively and collectively to do so.

So I make no excuse for taking a very parochial event in my world and seeing what it says about the arrogance of power and the powerlessness of 'we the people' who are expected to be spectators in a spectacle in which we are the spectated of ourselves (how very French of me!).

Under Community Arrest - Where's The Disaster?

Tomorrow, up to 50 streets in my area (Tunbridge Wells) are being closed off for several hours.  The 'natives' are under community arrest unable to move their vehicles.  A massive influx of people is being encouraged without any residential parking facilities in the inner town.  Some of the 'resident natives' will have their cars removed if they do not accede to a government order that they should not be on particular streets at a particular time.  Meanwhile, the local Press reports that we will see the largest ever police mobilisation in our County (Kent).

Ah, I hear you say (especially in America), this must be a response to the terrorist attacks on our country or perhaps this is a massive exercise to ensure that we can respond well to a natural disaster.  Do they expect the nearby Dungeness nuclear power station to go fizz or do they need to prepare for an outbreak of bird influenza?  Perhaps, given the Government's unpreparedness for the recent floods in our North Country, it is an exercise to help prepare us for some natural disaster like a major hurricane - our town is way above sea level.

No, none of these.  No act of war and no natural disaster.  It is a man-made local 'disaster' - the Tour de France which, as the 'biggest annual sporting event in the world', has been routed through our town without any local consultation whatsoever and with minimal direct contact with the very many residents affected.  In effect, a decision was made by Government to collaborate with a commercial organisation to hand over resources and freedoms for unproven economic benefits.  And thus we are under community arrest (in effect) for a day and our reward is to be the provision of panem et circenses (bread and circuses).

On the Decadence of Late Capitalism ...

How like the Roman Empire we are becoming - our legions fight in barbarian territory (and Iraq is merely an extended Teutoberg Forest), reality television is our gladiatorial blood sport and any spectacle that diverts the people from actually doing anything is promoted by Government as a substitute for real engagement in life.  The Tour de France is merely a passing phase in a long cycle of spectacular politics - the ridiculously expensive and round-the-houses East London regeneration project called Olympics 2012 is going to be a vastly more disruptive circus that will make the fons et origo of the politics of spectacle, the Millennium Dome, look like the mere bagatelle of idiocy that it was.

The argument for these spectacles is always economic but it is an odd sort of economic argument, an argument largely derived from a failure of power.  Instead of doing what Government should do, which is to identify a need and then, focusing on that need, either fulfil it itself or pay others (through tax incentive or straight subsidy) to do the job, economic politics in the UK has become an elaborate charade.  The game is to get the private sector to trickle down alleged community benefits through projects that are actually subsidised indirectly by consumers (through sponsorship and marketing budgets) and by tax payers (through the still-unpublicised cost of service provision such as the necessary police presence) rather than managed honestly and directly through tax.

The community arrest of the people in around fifty streets in one Borough for a day is simply a by-product of this sort of farrago.  Local people are treated like troublesome and awkward units of disruption, making it almost impossible for them to do anything else but make the event a 'success'.  This is because they are left with no alternative but to run away for the day or end up standing in a crowd to watch a bunch of cyclists in whom they have no intrinsic interest hurtle past without any of the information or commentary that they would get on the telly.  This is the sort of crowd mobilisation that you would expect in Pyongyang, admittedly done through a very different and less sophisticated form of manipulation.

But What Of the Economic Benefits to Our Town?

But if this local Government of Tory Councillors is behaving like that of North Korean communists, perhaps we should take at face value some of the 'economic benefits'.  Well, it is still unclear who precisely is paying for police overtime or the security arrangements across Kent and in London (made slightly more critical lately by the discovery that 'Al-Qaeda' appears to have infiltrated our public services). 

London can bear the cost but we seriously doubt whether Kent can, let alone our cash-starved local Council.  Kent County Council is certainly paying for the costs of closing the roads 'and making the route safe' [i.e. the massive police presence].  As for economic benefits, these appear to be going to the organisers and the sponsors but not necessarily to local small traders.  Here are two quotations from Tunbridge Wells Borough Council's guidance notes on the Tour:-

* There are strict rules about advertising along the route of the Tour since official sponsors pay many thousands of pounds for the highly-valued privilege of being associated with the race.  No other commercial concern is able to attach its own brand to the Tour de France or any of its logos.  An advance party of Tour personnel travels ahead of the race and will take down any advertising material that breaches these rules.

* (To businesses who have to close on the day because of the disruption)  Compensation is not payable in cases like this.

So, there we are - if you are a small trader, no one can park near your shop, you cannot show support for the TV cameras without having the 'sponsor police' on your back, crowds of people are going to be blocking the street outside your shop (good for newsagents and eateries, bad for everyone else) and there is no compensation for lost trade.

To rub salt in the wound, it seems that the village of High Halden near Tenterden may be under community arrest for longer than elsewhere 'dependent upon requirements for [the] VIP area'.  Oh, can't you just see the local dignitaries and corporate executives sweeping in and out slightly the worse for wear after a good day out in their Zil limousines?  So like our dear departed Soviet bloc where Moscow motorists would wait behind traffic lights to let the Second Assistant Deputy Commissar for Light Bulbs through.  Plus ca change.

Back to Panem et Circenses

We are told that a 'huge' publicity caravan precedes the riders, giving out sweets (so much for the newsagents benefiting), hats, toys and other souvenirs to the people lining the route - the panem required to fuel the circus.  This is, in short, private/public partnership community fascismo.  But there is a much more serious aspect to the case.  Globalisation has created massive transnational sporting and cultural events, many of which have grown organically from quite small regional bases. 

For example, the economic value surrounding a community football club has quietly increased so that, as a club becomes an international force, its economic power begins to dictate how a locality will be structured for its ends.   Every traditional football fan knows that this economic power is double-edged.  The fans don't 'own' what they think they once owned.  An unwritten understanding that the club is a community/private sector hybrid is shown to be not worth the paper on which it has failed to be printed.  The club moves on and up to a level where it is a private sector player demanding collaboration with Government from a position of relative strength.  

The scandal over frequent strip changes in order to create a planned obsolescence in each generation of school kids is yesterday's news, but massive televised football hides the reality of a national spectacular sports culture designed to fuel the media's insatiable demand for content.  And so we see an increase in Western obesity as community sports decline in favour of passive spectacle.  As facilities are made available for 'development', we switch to a world where citizens and subjects become passive objects outside the spectacle (watching) instead of active participants inside the spectacle (doing).  At least North Korean mass callisthenics keeps the poor buggers fit.

Local Government as Standing Joke

The local Council in this case ('think local') is pretty well a standing joke (just look at the abandoned Odeon site in the dead centre of town as the cyclists whizz past).  In some respects it is worse than others (the Audit Commission has been crawling over it for some time) but in other respects it is pretty well typical of the collapse of strong representative government in Middle England. 

There is a malign conjunction across Southern England of good old boy Councillors with no incentive to exist as other than as big carp in tiny garden ponds, second rate Officers starved of resources and with appalling morale, and a tax-cutting mentality in which serious problems in the inner towns are overwhelmed by the refusal of middle class people in villages and suburbs to contemplate anything that digs into their retirement income. 

And so we end up with weak leaders endorsing a commercial spectacle at our expense and at cost to our freedoms and with no proven local benefit other than a bit of freebie entertainment and an extra burst to day's shopping revenue for the multiple retailers - entertainment, that is, if a few tawdry street giveaways and the chance to watch a bunch of cyclists go by is to be classed as entertainment. 

The answer, of course, lies in strong elected mayors who are responsive and accountable to the people and who are checked by smaller and tougher groups of councillors elected under STV  [Single Transferable Vote]. 

We need people who can stand up to Central Government, The Mayor of London (the main source of patronage in this saga), the Council Officers and predatory commercial interests in support of our people.  If an accountable elected mayor had signed off on a deal, I would have grinned and borne the inconvenience knowing that the electorate could have judged him or her on their decision at election time ... and that the benefits would not merely be theoretical but would more likely to have been proven and concrete.  Our public spaces, if it is in our interest to do so, should be sold (and not given away) to these commercial interests with the full consent of the people.  If they do not buy access to public property in the community benefit, they can go elsewhere ...

If I have a political philosophy, it is one of radical democracy, popular accountability and a moderate consensual socialism.  Part of that mix is transparency - that things done are generally done openly.  But what are the limits to the right to know and the duty to tell. 

I am not impressed by the Kantian philosophy of rights and duties.  It is arrogantly assumed by many on the centre-left that, to be 'one of us', you have to be a Kantian or a Rawlsian (since Marxism got ditched unceremoniously over a decade ago).  Nonsense!   The whole Enlightenment approach has always struck me as an after-the-fact attempt to rationalise what should not need to be rationalised - but even an existentialist like me has to draw some boundaries or else accept the label of nihilist.

The classic-contemporary formulation of liberal demands in this area is that of Vaclav Havel - that we 'live in truth'.  But the ideology of truth is like the ideology of faith or of beauty, the privileging of just one virtue' over many others.  Life is always more complicated than that.  Somewhere along the line, there has to be judgement, an existential judgement, about what is best in any situation.  Rigid assessments of rights and duties and the politics of the absolute generally result in bad decisions, wrong paths taken and perhaps (in politics) bodies laid out in neat rows by the side of the street. 

I looked at transparency in the very particular area of 'net sexuality' in my posting on May 26th [Sexual Honesty and Web 2.0].  Similarly, I take it as axiomatic that a liberal society is based on law.  Both legal considerations and the trust required in trade require that rules on commercial disclosure and confidentiality are accepted as necessary  and equally binding. 

On the other hand, baring one's soul in public because of some petty crisis is generally boring unless there is a narrative that interests or it is part of the deal between a group of like-minded people: too much emotion, expressed in bad poetry and cliche, may be cheaper than hiring a psychotherapist but few people out there will get to the end of the posting.

On four occasions this week, I have come up against case studies on responsibility in the matter of accountability.  They have all reinforced the importance of private judgement in the areas of personal development, intellectual freedom, commerce and public policy.  Each reminds me that life is a case-by-case matter operating within a general moral framework and is not an exercise in legalism or about allegiance to moral absolutes. 

The Experiment

It will not be difficult to deduce from my postings that I am interested in inner space more than outer space and that I have an open mind about what the mind is and what it is capable of.  I experiment (with a critical eye) in issues of faith, of virtual reality and of magic.  This is just my way.

One area of new interest is 'lucid dreaming'.  I have in mind a 'thought experiment' involving dreams and virtual reality that depends on those involved being aware of the experiment but not of the actual persons involved in the experiment.  The likelihood of success is minimal.  The project probably marginally insane.  The whole matter is a shared lie to investigate the truth.  When it is over, the truth may or may not emerge but the lies will remain.  The nature of the lies, though, is no lie and that is a first boundary - that, like the practice of commerce, experiments in relationships should be based on the expectation that the rules exist on the assumption that there must be lies for the system to work.

This, in itself, is worrying to the liberal imagination but, just as half-truths are necessary in politics and business for both to function, so are half-truths in human relationships.  It is not the lie that is the problem, it is the motivation behind the lie and the purpose of the project in which the lie takes place.  This is part of the lesson behind Esther Perel's book referred to on April 15th [Better Than Sex - Good Works].

Back to Terror

I wrote on terror and insurgency last week [Jean-Paul Sartre & Insurgency] but it was historic and general comment.  In the last few days, we have had two near-misses in London and one strike at Glasgow airport by car bombers.  My profession as political analyst involves providing reports to clients on events like this to assess various forms of risk and make general predictions.  Needless to say, alongside notes on the Blair-Brown transition, the implications of the car bombing was written up and circulated to a smalll group of people who would see the context of what I wrote.

But my analysis also included details of the ideology behind much contemporary terrorist thinking and this ideology contains the seeds of its own transmission in its own description.  To describe that ideology on the internet (though it is freely available elsewhere on the web) would be to do what the theorists of contemporary terror want - to give the ideas critical mass through repetition.  Since I strongly disapprove of social censorship because its net effects are far worse than any benefit, I made the judgement that I would self-censor - that is, to restrict the description of the ideology to educated persons with a background knowledge of the issues.

This is another boundary.  Expert knowledge taken out of context can be dangerous (another example might be the healthcare panics caused by snippets of medical research).  It is reasonable to enter it into society through intermediaries who must take responsibility for ensuring context at the next stage.  A self-denying ordinance on some facts and theory is not censorship.  It is the equivalent in society of not blurting out a statement that hurts feelings and creates resentment but waiting until the quiet moment to tell a truth that may still hurt but which then changes behaviour.  You might say that it is etiquette and is something that would be understood by readers of Jane Austen.

The Deal

The third was a pure case of commercial confidentiality - a potentially exciting development involving multiple actors who are all having to act on trust.  Choosing what may be said and what may not be said involves no lies but it certainly involves half-truths and things not said that must be said later - but that is the very heart of commercial and political negotiation and the very reason for the injunction 'caveat emptor'. 

Sensitive souls, especially those for whom Truth is an absolute value, hate this sort of thing.  It is why academics and intellectuals so often make bad businessmen and worse politicians.  But it has to be admitted that, as a game between equal players that is played within rules, it is enormous fun. These games are at the heart of innovation in business and of adaptability in politics. 

The moral dimension kicks in when excessive inequality or monopoly skew the game entirely in favour of the rich, the powerful or the psychopathic.  Even a degree of inequality within the game is useful in educating participants in the arts of negotiation.  This is only another argument for personal judgement being given greater authority within shared general principles rather than for the ever-expanding extension of rules into every part of the game of life.  Less prescriptive law certainly means more risk and pain but it also means more personal development, flexibility and innovation and a lot more fun. 

Public Policy

This leads to a case that is irritating the British establishment a great deal but contains another lesson in the boundaries of transparency.  There is a long and complicated dispute on 'corruption' which has crystallised into a direct clash between the US Department of Justice and the sovereign rights of the United Kingdom and, indeed, of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  There is no point in going into the detail - clients have received no less than four briefing notes on the matter in the last three weeks.  The ultimate issue of principle is whether a US Department of State has the right to demand of a company domiciled overseas but trading in the US not merely to abide by US regulation in the US but in its dealings outside the US.  Can a US Department of State demand that documents related to a 'deal' between free sovereign nations (basically, state secrets) be forced into the open to meet US legal requirements?

When non-Americans talk about US imperialism, they do not only mean the usual Left-wing stuff about oil and markets and airbases, they also mean the attempt by over-eager American regulators to impose the US' legal and moral standards across the world in a way that we all know is designed to create or restore competitive advantage to US business.  This drive for material advantage is generally cloaked in the sort of moral progressive language that trips so easily off the tongue of any East Coast Democrat and grates on many European nerves.  The current struggle in this particular case, set alongside new extradition treaties, information sharing in the 'war on terror' and so many other examples of extraterritoriality, is a direct and deliberate assault in the name of liberal values (but actually for national advantage) on another set of values - that of national sovereign rights.

The transparency issue is whether the United Kingdom should be forced to reveal details of a deal struck many years ago entered into (rightly or wrongly) on the basis of commercial confidentiality.  This brings up a discussion of more boundaries - those of retrospectivity and of domain.  If a deal was legal at the time and undertaken on certain understandings, it should be respected on those terms.  If it was concluded between two sovereign parties, it is for one of those parties to breach the agreement and then take the consequences in law and not for a third party to force them to do so - unless we all now agree that the original sovereign parties are no longer sovereign!  Some of us Brits will not take kindly to our Government conceding still more after the final removal of the latest Washington puppet.

But the public policy issue is more profound than this.  If reform in any country is forced through by third parties from outside - whether by regulation or armed force (which appears to be the current American way) - then resistance will build.  The process neuters the moral authority of domestic liberal reformers.  It places idealistic legalism and rule by moral absolutes without any existential base ahead of the political struggle for reform within countries and well ahead of representative sovereign democracy.  It makes allies into dependents.  It moves radical thinking away from indigenous reform into strategies of national independence.  Above all, it disgraces local elites - whether Blair or Karzai, such men are increasingly seen as puppets by their own people.  One of them has already fallen from power.

Concluding Thoughts

So, in all these areas,information cannot simply be presented as Truth which we all have a right to access willy-nilly.  Some information (in the personal development and commercial cases) must remain mysterious or there is no game to play and without the game, life is no longer worth living.  Some information, taken out of context, can be destructive because it is foolish to assume that all men and women are equal when it comes to assessing the meaning or value of information. 

And some information is none of your business - it comes from matters entered into in good faith with someone else.  In these cases, you will be interfering in my freedom to meet some end that you have dictated as universal but which is only that of some interest group that nobbled the rulemakers before I could get to them.

I missed a week!  Sometimes it's good to do that.  If writing becomes routine, then it's no fun, for me or for you.   Anyway, my writing was getting more and more po-faced as the weeks went by - not only here but elsewhere. The last straw was some relatively turgid postings on Syrian-British relations and heroes of the Labour Movement on Virtual Journal last week.  Best take a deep breath and stop when that happens.

**********

On the other hand, I am a rather serious-minded person. You cannot change your true nature.  So, this week, I'll cover ... terrorism .... or rather how we have forgotten just how violent life could once be for intellectuals when they got engaged in serious politics at times of crisis.  And how we can learn from history to try and avoid terrorism in the first place.

The Complexity of the Terrorist Impulse

I refuse to write too much on the current so-called 'war on terror'.  I prefer to call it a post-imperialist insurgency.  Most coverage is horribly over-simplified by all those with an axe to grind or who have to meet a news deadline.  There probably is a serious future threat from Islamist radicals but the Oklahoma bombing and the recent calling off of the cease fire in the Basque Country by ETA suggest that radical political violence is a much more complex phenomen than all that effort applied to demonising 'Islamo-Fascism' might imply.  

Indeed, if you analyse the information on 2006 arrests, inquiries and incidents from Europol (a rather weak European proto-FBI) then, while the French and British have been merrily picking up Muslims to trawl for intelligence, most of the actual incidents were from regional separatist organisations in Spain and France.  Ah, France!  For it is France that maintained a fearful obsession with domestic political violence, while the rest of us were busy bombing the doo-doo out of small third world countries in the certain knowledge (as we thought) that such activities could never blow back on our blithely ignorant electorates.  When 9/11 took place, French security intellectuals were jumping up and down crying, 'told you so! told you so! should have listened to us'.

There are sound reasons for this French obsession - but it is not Corsica or the Basques (or potentially the Bretons or the Gascons) who unnerve Paris so much as the remembrance of the peculiar quasi-civil war and brutalities of Algerian de-colonisation.  Algeria is France's Ireland - a mass of people from a different religion and culture who were once treated as a pariah by colonisers, who then wondered why, after failures to provide some sort of home rule, the colonised turned to the gun and to the bomb.  Morality tends to be dictated by those in power. The ethics surrounding resistance are little different in this respect.  Those ruled are always expected to see such a rule as a benefit merely because it preserves order.

Algeria was the struggle of a people against a centralised power that would not offer democracy. Indeed, in the early 1990s, France encouraged opposition to a 'dangerous' democracy in the successor state - it was as if London were to have encouraged a military coup in Ireland against the Catholic countryside in the run-up to the Second World War to maintain security on its border. The current tension between Fatah and Hamas in Palestine is a small-scale re-run of the recent history of Algeria - the same struggle between secular liberation nationalism and Islamist democracy.  In both cases, the West chose to tip the balance in favour of the secular party against an unpalatable democracy.  The current struggle in Turkey between military and Islamist politicians may conceivably result in similar alignments with similar violent effects.  We never learn.

Jean-Paul Sartre and the Psychology of Insurgency

These thoughts arose from reading a very old and rather pedestrian biography of Jean Paul Sartre by Ronald Hayman [Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre, London 1986]. This was the story of another world, that of the Cold War and decolonisation.  The years 1961 and 1962 saw an upsurge of 'terrorism' in which Frenchmen tried to murder other Frenchmen simply because they disagreed on a foreign policy issue, albeit one that affected the economic livelihood of tens of thousands and cut deep into the self-identity of the French nationalist Right.  And, of course, it was not a foreign policy but a domestic policy issue to half of France.

In this vicious environment, Jean-Paul Sartre, the pre-eminent philosopher of the French Left at that time, was a direct target of terror - perhaps not entirely without reason.  He had split with others on the French Left (those, like Camus, who were more like our 'liberals') in order to assert the right of oppressed peoples to kill their oppressors if necessary for national liberation. One of the greatest philosophers of our time was thus both approving of terrorism and, as we shall see, the subject of terrorist attacks - he was simultaneously villain and hero, complicit in crime and victim.

Sartre publicly identified the Algerian FLN with the Resistance to the Nazis and it was Le Temps Modernes, the intellectual journal associated with his circle, that led the field in exposing the use of torture by the French military much as Sartre's role in the Russell Tribunal exposed US war crimes in Vietnam before My Lai had brought the matter to the American public's attention. 

Both sides, the OAS [Organisation de l'Armee Secrete] and FLN were terrorists in the current use of the term, that is they indiscriminately targeted civilians.  The practice of the French State came to be not much better in its desperate attempts to maintain order.  The OAS moved on to assassinating Muslim and European FLN sympathisers as 1960 turned into 1961.  There was an attempted coup by the army in Algiers, defeated by the courage of De Gaulle and ordinary national servicemen who listened to their President when he ordered them to disobey their Officers' orders.  Nothing like this has ever quite happened in the Anglo-Saxon world - at least not since the Curragh Mutiny in Ireland.

Sartre in the Firing Line

The OAS went ever deeper underground.  Sartre received threatening letters in May 1961.  He moved his mother into a hotel for safety.  A small plastic bomb exploded in the entrance hall of his flat at 42 Rue Bonaparte.  Sartre provoked further attack in agreeing to write the Preface to Frantz Fanon's seminal Les Damnes de la Terre and Fanon's first chapter on violence was published in the June Edition of Les Temps Modernes. 

I recall passing a copy of Fanon's remarkable and dark book to a former South African Special Forces operative (wholly cured of any lingering racism) to demonstrate how the 'other side' thought under colonisation and how violence might seen as a cathartic expression for impotence.  He empathised.  He could see what men could be driven to.  Sartre wrote in the Preface to his countrymen: " ... you pretend to forget you have colonies and that massacres are carried out in your name."  Familiar stuff to Anglo-Saxons today.

Sartre was out of Paris over the summer of 1961 but nothing had improved by his return - September saw an attempt to assassinate De Gaulle.  Bombings increased in both Algeria and France - there were six hundred explosions by the end of that year.  We have seen only two in London since 9/11, though much larger than the typical small plastic bomb of the period.  This rather puts things into perspective.  There were serious police atrocities in the very streets of Paris.  A plastic bomb harmlessly exploded at a rally that Sartre spoke at in November.  He was, by now, moving towards overt support for the Algerian rebels. 

He tried to move for safety only to find that hoteliers were nervous, eventually finding a furnished flat.  A bomb nearby in January 1962 was not intended for him but another bomb blew out 42 Rue Bonaparte three days later.  There was some weak daytime police protection: bombs went off periodically in the neighbourhood.  They moved on.  You get the picture ... it got worse, though for others and not for Sartre and his longtime partner Simone De Beauvoir.

So Why Is This Interesting?

What is the point of this tale from over forty years ago?  Only that, with due respect to Salman Rushdie who is doing from the Right what Sartre did from the Left in terms of 'provocation' and whom we wish every success in eluding those who would target him, conditions for the Western European public intellectual of forty -five years ago were far worse than they are today.   The intensity of France's tussle with its own imperial withdrawal scarred the heartland's psyche and has made it an unreliable judge of best practice in defeating insurgency. 

The very real horrors in the early 1960s with an Iraq-type situation close to emerging on the very borders of a key Western State created a paranoia and hysteria in security circles about the insurgent question that lasts to this day.  Algeria brought violence to the very streets of the capital.  One million may have marched against the war in London in 2002 but no-one was killed and no bombs went off until 7/7.  This is an important qualitative difference - especially when we consider that in 1968 student and workers forced the departure of that same De Gaulle who had stood up to his own Generals.

There is not space to go into whether Sartre was right or wrong.  My view is that he was right to expose the implicit racism and thuggery of a declining French State, but that he was wrong to 'go native' and espouse revolutionary violence (though neither his nor Fanon's arguments were necessarily wholy evil ones on closer examination).  European intellectuals have a tendency to strut like revolutionary cocks for a universalist ideal and never think about the rotting bodies and orphans that are left behind.  If you really want to have your hair stand on end, then you should read Slavoj Zizek's Preface to a Selection of Robespierre's writings [Verso, 2007] which reminds one of the importance of never ever letting an intellectual near the levers of power. 

What we have to do is learn something from this history - that 'terrorism' is not new, that determinedly resisting the aspirations of peoples is the real provocation to terror and that terrorism lies not only in the evil that men do but in the way that policy has driven such men to undertake such desperate acts.  Finally, that frustration with the way of the world eventually leads fine minds into the abyss of complicity with murder.  This appreciation of the need to compromise with the rage of the 'other' is counter-intuitive to much Western morality but we, in the West, must accept some responsibility for the effects on others of our ancestors' actions.

Analysing Algeria for Today

Algeria did something to a whole generation in France much as Vietnam did something different to the same generation in America - the political Left (never a national majority in any Western country) shifted at this time from class war within the West to an interest in class war between the West and the rest.  In America, the political left moved from collective organisation and discipline towards free-spirited individualism.  This is where we are now.

This new thinking in Europe underpinned secular, often Marxist, third world nationalisms.  Its collapse and its failure to change the terms of political trade under globalisation has subsequently made space for new movements like Islamism or Chavez' or Subcommandante Marcos' populism. 

If the Western Left is splitting now, (and we believe it is), it is doing so on these same basic lines but under new conditions, between those who recognise the reality of imperialism's effects on the rest of the world (and give a damn) and those who do not.  Part of the tragedy of the situation for America today is that significant elements in the Third World were once persuaded that the US was anti-imperialist and this held the line against Communism - since 2003, that argument has become much harder to sustain.

So, French culture briefly accepted as 'normal' (probably inured by the horrors of the second world war) that two warring sides within a country could engage in extreme political violence. The student revolt of 1968 took place not long afterwards.  Both Germany and Italy then saw outbreaks of similar violence, albeit that the German version involved State rather than radical Right terror through draconian use of legal instruments. In other words, democratic Western Europe saw an extended period of extreme violence (to which we might add Northern Ireland) that may now have settled down (or degenerated into regionalism and organised crime) but which has never quite disappeared entirely.  The experience burned itself into the institutional memory of national security and intelligence communities across Europe.  For this reason alone, politicians should be wary of their advice.

**********

For me, the seminal document on the Algiers War, and indeed on insurgency in general, remains Pontecorvo's masterful near-contemporary film, The Battle of Algiers.  I have been told that it was not easy to get hold off in France for many years and the biography of Sartre referred to above is an eye-opener on the ability of the French middle classes to do anything to avoid having their sensibilities upset.  However, it is easily available, certainly as a DVD in London (probably in France now), was shown very recently in a run at the ICA and (as you will see if you take the time) it cannot be called propaganda for either side. 

What it does do (and this makes it essential viewing for anyone interested in the 'war on terror') is explain how the two sides perceived matters and why, unless the military is permitted absolute power with no domestic constraints (in a Spartan or Roman approach) or moderates are detached with material concessions, the insurgents will win in the end.  And in that analysis, we have the essence of the strategic policy war within the West - do we crush them with maximum force and silence dissent at home? or do we concede ground from the beginning and engage half the enemy in partnership to eliminate the other half?  History will say that the dumbest thing we ever did was to try to resist Islamist democracy and turn it over to the extremists ...

Poor Paris Hilton!  Well, not so poor ... she is an heiress.  The natural instinct is to distance ourselves from such gilded butterflies and feel little compassion when they get pinned to the board of life by the public's insatiable demand for entertainment.  After all, she is in her mid-twenties and not some vulnerable teenager - and she brought it on herself.  And yet the nasty little incident surrounding Paris might be considered to be much more serious in its implications than we think.  Let us recap with the facts.

Paris Hilton (who needs no introduction) broke the law.  Perhaps she thought she was above it - or just has a brain that can't remember things like a reckless driving sentence.  Reckless driving is a serious matter.  It is not just that she is at risk herself but she could kill someone else.  The laws have a purpose.  The law had every right to demand that the punishment go to the next stage beyond probation, education and a small fine to something more salutory.  Even the harsh 45 days is not what it seems - a state good behaviour law means that it should be 23 days if she keeps her nose clean.

But the circus surrounding her case has been disturbing, not for the usual reason given that it shows a celebrity culture out of control but because it has taken a celebrity's apparently a-social behaviour to show what a sink-pit we have in the Western prison system.  The British system is not much better than the US.  We close our eyes to these overcrowded abominations much as we close our eyes to the abattoir, the crematorium, the sink housing estate, the true nature of war, the conditions of asylum seekers, many of our care homes and so much else that is not glamorous.

So, glamour now enters the sink pit.  Now we see the sink pit for what it is - thanks, in the UK, to the somewhat graphic account by the BBC of what the Century Regional Detention Centre is actually like.  Let us see what this girl went through, according to the reputable Forbes magazine - http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/06/10/ap3805741.html  She is clearly in a state of extreme distress: "Hilton, in tears and screaming for her mother, was taken to the downtown Twin Towers facility Friday afternoon ..."  The local Sheriff had referred to an an "unspecified medical condition" which was clearly interpreted as "psychological".  He added that "she had arrived at her original jail with a condition he hadn't been apprised of and that it immediately began to deteriorate to the point that he feared for her safety".  She is, in short, highly vulnerable.

Reading between the lines, the Hilton team are desperately trying to get this unhappy and disturbed girl into conditions that are far more humane than the dreadful human pig pen that we have seen on television. Hilton herself (apparently) asks (quite reasonably) 'that the public and media focus on "more important things like the men and women serving our country in Iraq".  This rather suggests that the lawyers have worked out that the greatest blocks to that move are the political opinions of the authoritarian republican Right.  Now she is "at a maximum-security detention center, where she was believed to be undergoing medical and psychiatric evaluations to determine the best jail to keep her in as she serves the rest of her sentence."

And this is where it gets really disturbing.  Even if we accept that the woman has done wrong and that the community must take action to express its concern, deter and correct (if not punish), it is clear that she is psychologically vulnerable.  The prison process, on the other hand, seems to depend on creating high levels of psychological stress.  We see levels of cruelty that may be acceptable in the nation that turns a blind eye to Guantanamo Bay but levels that should be deemed ethically unacceptable in any truly civilised society.

Because she is a 'celebrity' (more than because she is rich), she now has entire teams of people worrying about how to 'triangulate' traditional American righteousness with the fact that the whole world is seeing this cruelty played out in public.  The problem is that poor Paris is not alone - thousands of young males and females, who have lost their bearings, breach laws that are randomly policed and where policing is targeted at the under-class.  American egalitarianism dare not say that these thousands are less valued than Paris Hilton yet they have been treated like social prisoners of war rather than as troubled fellow citizens for decades.  Now that a gilded beauty has been captured for the killing bottle, the system is briefly open to public gaze. 

Western prisons are often vile and unsanitary, the atmosphere inside them cruel and brutal, the professionals overworked and increasingly cynical - the dustbins of massive social failure across the West.  This poor girl is now in a lose/lose situation.  If the system fails to recognise her misery (the level of cruelty seems now to far exceed the requirements of the reckless driving crime), it is because to do so might require a re-think on cruelty perpetrated daily on thousands of young people that society cannot otherwise control.  The system cannot afford to admit that it is involved in a crime to defeat crime.  If so, she is stuck in hell for another three weeks or so. 

But if the system treats her exceptionally, even by recognising her 'mental illness' as a special case, a sort of 'depression brought on by adverse conditions in the context of wealth and high status', then it is tantamount to saying that good lawyers and money can always buy a way out of a system fixed against the poor.  Of course, the system usually arranges a 'fudge' in these cases - she will be incarcerated but the mental condition will be used as an excuse for the sort of round the clock care that no one from the underclass would dream of getting.  In the end, like a latter day Winston Smith, Paris admits her guilt, pledges to reform and the system will claim that justice works - as in 1984, there will be no one around to say otherwise.

What no American commentator seems capable of asking is what sort of culture is it that thinks that freedom for the many can only be bought at the expense of a systematic programme of cruelty directed at the most vulnerable in society - whether rich or poor.  This is not a class point.  Paris needs care too - in fact, at some time in our lives, we all do.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I am no bleeding heart liberal.  I am persuaded that prison works in the sense that there are hardened communities of criminality that are taken off the streets through the prison system.  However, effective social control (let's call it what it is) also requires reducing the pool in which criminality can swim, not only through sensible security but through investment (yes, that is the word) in marginal and vulnerable communities.  It also means not taking vulnerable kids who are repeat offenders and then assuming that they are criminals, offering them nothing but cruelty in debased conditions.

The Western prison system is an abattoir for the human spirit - a growing social gulag designed to deal with the consequences of our inability to think in terms of the communal and the collective.  This social collapse has more to do with material conditions than the moral rot much preferred by the right-wing as analysis.  No, I am not at all saying that criminality is necessarily a matter of poverty (any more than terrorism) but that is another analysis for another day.  I am only saying that criminality expands with social anomie and social anomie is linked to the way our material culture is structured.

This Autumn, I understand, a campaign is on the way to raise mental health and 'happiness' higher up the British political agenda.  It is led from the New Labour centre-right and it is to the discredit of those to their Left that they failed to lead in this area.  However, if anyone thinks that greater happiness will come from yet more moral exhortation and rhetoric in the New Labour tradition, then they are deluding themselves.  It is not for the State to promote happiness but it is for the State to enter into the process of reducing misery - dealing with poor material conditions and exploitation, providing access to mental healthcare services and maintaining a much more aggressive approach to improving and limiting the scope of our mental abattoirs.

So, I really do feel compassion for Paris Hilton.  If she was bright and compassionate enough herself and could get away from the grip of her lawyers, the experience should turn her into a socialist.  It probably won't, of course.  She'll probably do something similar to what Naomi Campbell and Emily Parr and all the other 'celebrity' victims of the public's righteous indignation have done - adjust to prevailing public opinion, express regret, intend to turn over a new leaf, be watched like a hawk by the minders, use the publicity to re-build public awareness, trade on the notoreity, have fun to make up for the bad times.  And why not?  That is how it works now.  Best of luck to them.

Meanwhile, deep inside the sink pit, I bet there are other young women, somewhere between 18 and 30, in a state of extreme distress "in tears and screaming for [their] mother" with an "unspecified medical condition" who will not get the attention of specialists and who will be left to bleed out their souls unnoticed and uncared for by a callous public and a cynical judicial system.  Don't sleep easy at night until you know just how wrong this is ...

The LSE holds a surprising number of open lectures that are fre