Consider Phlebas

On Public Reason

2009-11-26T21:11:00.000Z

Let's just say, not of the Rawlsian kind.

With God On Our Side

2009-11-15T18:50:00.000Z

In 1997, in the aftermath of that year's Education White Paper, an Advisory Group on citizenship education was set up. In its report, published the next year, it approvingly quotes from a submission by the Hansard Society.

Programmes should be established to promote political discourse and understanding, as well as encouraging young people to engage in the political process. Further, they should encourage tolerance and respect for individuals and their property, irrespective of a person’s gender, race, culture or religion. They must also encourage young people to behave honourably and with integrity, as well as promote respect for the rule of law. Young people must be encouraged to develop leadership and team skills in order to promote self-discipline and self-motivation. They should be encouraged to take pride in themselves and the communities to which they belong, as well as to see themselves as citizens of the world.

Other than the last clause of the last sentence, which invokes a non-existent polity to imagine oneself a member of, after the first sentence I fail to see what any of this has to do with citizenship in particular at all. Citizenship is presumably to do with it is to be a citizen. What it is to be a citizen is presumably something to do with your relationship to political authority; in particular, to be a citizen is to have certain political foundational rights, including the right to have rights. Whether political power can rightly be exercised over me without any formal mechanism for me to hold it to account seems to me to have pretty much f*ck-all to do with whether I am capable of motivating myself or not. You don't get to be a citizen because you're a paragon of moral virtue; you get to be a citizen because your life is profoundly shaped by the political institutions you live under and so you have a right to hold it to account in certain ways.

Using the idea of citizenship as a convenient banner under which to gather everything that you might think would be desirable isn't just evidence of an inability to make fairly elementary distinctions, but also I think rather politically dangerous. For one thing, it disguises trade-offs. In a community which isn't tolerant of people irrespective of their gender, race, culture or religion, presumably it's quite difficult to be both tolerant in that way and proud of one's community. Which of the two goes? What if political participation requires me to make compromises damaging to my sense of self? Where's my integrity then? A policy programme which has ruled out, a priori as it were, the possibility of conflicts amongst its various ends by seeing them all as part of the same idea is going to fail because it cannot understand that sometimes it has to make choices between them. Either no choice gets taken at all and so resources are wasted pursuing competing ends, or, rather than publicly laying out their grounds for choosing some ends over others, officials choose on their own private and probably confused grounds, and political power is made a little less accountable - which is rather ironic in a programme designed to promote citizenship.

That's not all either. There are at least two other things wrong with this kind of project, centred around a notion of citizenship which fails to see that it is but one, rather specific, political relationship. First, it puts the onus for dealing with any structural political failings a system has on the average citizen, rather than on the political actors who are both familiar with and presumably benefitting from the failing system. If politicians are worried about the way in which the population at large seems ill-informed about and contemptuous of them, they might think about what they've done wrong rather than what the population at large has. Second, hand-waving in the general direction of citizenship seems to encourage all kinds of disturbingly illiberal communitarian claims about what's best for us. For example, quite apart from thinking that we should generally be proud of our communities, apparently without any consideration of what they or we are actually like, the report ends by endorsing remarks made by the then Lord Chancellor, in which he said that "[o]ur goal is to create a nation of able, informed and empowered citizens who... recognise that the path to greatest personal fulfilment lies through active involvement in strengthening their society". What if I don't like my society? What if what society wants to do to strengthen itself is something I find vile? What if I'd rather stay at home and read a book, or indeed, sit on the sofa, drink beer and watch football? Can I not achieve personal fulfilment like that? Will Kymlicka said of citizenship theory that it is mostly 'old wine in new bottles'; it seems more like vinegar to me.

141/117

2009-11-05T23:08:00.003Z

I'm reading Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah. I'd seen the film first, which I think is actually fairly faithful - at least to the sense of the book, if not quite the sequence or precise arrangement of the episodes it catalogues: the dilapidation of Scampia's concrete monstrosities; the inventive yet nonetheless cheap horror of the violence; the way in which a consciously fatalistic lust for power ends up seeming the only comprehensible reaction; and above all, the total integration into and indeed perfect service of the global economy. But one thing above any other struck me. Although it's quite shocking to think that Pelle Italiane and the other faux designer shops on the Seven Sisters Road are probably run by Camorristi, or to read reports of the blankness of adolescents in Naples' hinterland, the death toll really stops the breath. The Troubles, assuming Saviano and Wikipedia are to be trusted, did not manage to kill more people than intra-Camorra feuds from the mid-seventies onwards. Admittedly, Northern Ireland has a smaller population than the Province of Naples, but presumably a greater proportion of the killings took place in the Province of Naples. The average rate of Camorra killings alone is higher than the present homicide rate for any Western European state. In comparison, the total number of murders in London in the year to September was 128; that's 13 less than the average of organised crime killings over the twenty seven years to 2005 for an area with less than half population. If people must make comparisons to The Wire, then rundown areas of the UK seem not to be the place to start.

Like A Dog Not Walking On Its Hind Legs

2009-09-27T22:54:00.000+01:00

I suspect that I tend towards the more formal end of views about the appropriate standards of staff-student interactions at universities. This is probably partly because of the structure of teaching that I'm most used to; tutorials, sometimes with only one student, make particularly obvious how seedy Terence Kealey, vice chancellor of the University of Buckingham, is when he tries to claim that external regulation of exam grades has eliminated power differentials that would corrupt relationships between students and staff at universities here. Still, one would have to have a remarkably laissez-faire attitude to causal misogyny and leching to think that his attempt to legitimate patriarchal sleaziness through clever-clever irony and literary allusion was not rather exploitative, notwithstanding his willingness to blame if not the victim, at least the more vulnerable of the two parties. For one thing, if this is merely about the tributes that age pays to youth and vice versa, why is the relationship in question explicitly defined as one of male professors and female students? I'm not sure whether academia is any better or worse than society at large, but it certainly suffers from various gendered norms and on occasion outright sexism. No male graduate student of my acquaintance would dress more formally to teach, whereas I know women who do, just as no man I know has been harrassed by one of their colleagues. I suppose, though, if you're the kind of person who thinks that the relevant relationship in The History Man is one of acolyte and academic hero, rather than a gradual bullying into submission, and more, in a position to benefit from doing just that, then you would think that any unwillingness to accept that that sort of thing is really not OK was a bit humourless.

I Can Do No Other

2009-09-22T16:35:00.002+01:00

I was reading - in bed: devotion to the cause I tell you - one of the early, pre-A Theory of Justice Rawls papers last night, entitled 'The Sense of Justice', and was struck by its explanation of a sense of justice in terms of guilt. The idea is, perhaps more commonly than I'm aware, that it is our capacity to form relationship both with others and to principles where failures to live up to the terms of those relationships generates guilt that accounts for and makes sense of our idea of justice and so our inclusion in the scope of principles of justice. In the absence of a sense of justice, we wouldn't be able to have those relationships; we might be able to have relationships of a similar sort, but since those relationships are marked by the way in which we conceptualise our failures to live up to their terms, we wouldn't be able to have them. Now, what's interesting about this is its foundation in guilt. People have been criticizing Kantianism for secularising - more and less successfully - the fiercely self-directed and often self-critical religious sentiments of mid-to-late eighteenth century Prussia for some time; it's been a persistent theme of Alasdair MacIntyre's writings, for example. For a Kantianly-minded philosopher to begin from guilt though, is perhaps rare. It's also revealing, because it makes it clear how central an ethic of responsibility is to Kantians, or at least Rawls. Unlike shame, guilt is only an appropriate response to something you're responsible for, so to make the capacity for guilt central to being a subject of justice is to make one's sense of responsibility, of having to bear the costs of your actions, central to being a subject of justice.

On Blond Beasts

2009-09-14T17:02:00.003+01:00

Richard Layard apparently thinks that there is "no nobler ideal" than crude utilitarianism. Let us do him the charity of assuming that he actually means what he says. Presumably then he thinks it noble to discount the suffering caused by injustices, like say rape, against any pleasures that those who inflict them gain, or that if I could make myself happier by stupifying myself, doing so would be noble. Whatever one might say in favour of crude utilitarianism, the thought that treating all pleasures, regardless of what they are pleasures in, as equally significant would be noble is not usually one of them. Assuming that Richard Layard doesn't actually think that it's better if child molesters enjoy themselves whilst molesting children, perhaps he should leave doing philosophy to philosophers, rather than economists who are apparently neither familiar with the rather long history of philosophical critiques of crude utilitarianism nor capable of understanding the basic implications of positions they advocate.

I Know You Can't Know That

2009-08-24T23:27:00.000+01:00

A little puzzle I was offered today, which might perhaps be interesting. I will give what I think is the solution at the end of the week. A teacher says to their pupils, at some point this week I will give you a test, which you will not know is a test until I tell you afterwards. Given that if the test hasn't taken place in the last couple of minutes of Friday, the students will seemingly rightly think that it will take place then, and likewise for the couple of minutes before then, and so on, until the teacher is apparently compelled to say that the test has already been taken, can what the teacher says be true?

Outgrown Those Basic Feelings Anyway

2009-07-28T23:59:00.000+01:00

For the first time in 9 years - the first time since I moved here as an undergraduate - I'm leaving Oxford tomorrow without knowing if I'll be back for longer than a night or two here and there. Admittedly, I'll probably be back to teach - and hopefully play football - pretty regularily next academic year, but it's not really the same; even if I do find a spare bed or sofa, it'll only be for a night - I won't be settled here. I describe myself as a Londoner and, more, am quite prepared to attempt to police who gets to make that claim - the postcode plays a generally under-appreciated role: Richmond is, for example, not in the relevant sense in London - but in lots of important ways I was formed here and not there. That's not just because I first lived away from my parents here, and not so much because of the place in a general sense - this is a university town, and for 8 of the 9 years, I've been a student, so I've never really felt like I knew the town separately from being a student in it - but more because of people whom I've been close to: friends I made when I was an undergraduate and lived with when I was a masters student, various people in what I feel really is a community of political theorists, some others I've accumulated, more and less purposefully, along the way.

There was a time when I really wanted to leave, felt like I couldn't bear to be here any more, but even then, that was a fairly explicit piece of self-repudiation: what I thought I couldn't stand was the life I had made for myself here. Like it or not, here is a central piece of who I am: although surely other things underlie them, so much of what has shaped me into the person I am now happened here and in ways that I suspect are often would really only have happened in as a student - and perhaps particularly a postgraduate student - at an elite university in an otherwise rather nondescript provincial town. There are habits, even a habitus, that I've acquired here that it is difficult to imagine having acquired elsewhere; ways of thinking but also habits of mind in a broader sense, learned psycho-social behaviours. This isn't meant as a communitarian paean to the form of life I suppose I now know best - I hope I have the sense to be far more ambiguous about the value of that set of more and less conscious institutions and my way of negotiating them: after all, I did once want little more than to abandon them - but rather an acknowledgement that if I am to maintain a well-founded sense of integrity, of who and what I am and its significance, then I need to see Oxford's role in making me and how suited to it I am. I've not been away for more than 3 weeks for 6 years; it'll be odd to leave.

By The Japanese War Memorial

2009-07-14T17:55:00.001+01:00

From Geuss's 'Liberalism and its Discontents', Political Theory, 2002.

[I]f some of the deficiencies inherent in adopting a pure normative standpoint are visible even in a philosopher who has moved as far beyond Kant as Rawls has, this seems to me to give further weight to suspicions about the normative standpoint as a whole.

Setting aside the 'pure' for the time being, I think it's worth marvelling at just how perfect a piece of self-disembowelling this is. Our suspicions about the very idea of a normative standpoint and its deficiencies can have more and less weight; by what measures are we to establish this weight, and by what standards are we to judge these failings? Presumably not normative ones, since they ground suspicions about the very possibility of normativity, and so presumably not ones which are supposed to compel or even count in favour of agreement on them. I suppose anyone who disagrees with Geuss then has no reason to carry on reading him then.

Feel The Heat Around The Corner

2009-07-13T21:27:00.000+01:00

Both Heat and Public Enemies open with crimes that go wrong, in both cases because one of the criminals loses their rag and is more violent than they have to be; in the first, the inexorable unravelling of the lives the rest of the film seems to document rather than force is begun by that loss of control, whereas in the second, so far as the film is concerned, that act is basically consequenceless, forgotten after the first five minutes or so. This is the problem with most of Public Enemies: not quite, I think, as Peter Bradshaw claims, that Johnny Depp is too taciturn, insufficiently flamboyant; it's hardly like De Niro or even Pacino, admittedly better and crucially older actors than Depp, chew up the scenery in Heat; they instead exude calm, world-bitten menace. It's that it's mostly very easy for Depp: he breaks out of a prison with a bit of metal shaped into a vaguely gun-like form before driving away past tens of soldiers without a shot being fired, bribes the police and buys souped-cars seemingly at whim, even goes out on the town, casually revealing what he does to strangers. There's no tension: if anything goes wrong, it doesn't seem to matter - there's not even a sense of the scale on which things can go wrong: it's just Depp, being weirdly unemotional in a world he seems to move through without any real effort at all - and so no sense of inexorable failure of everything really begins to build until the last half hour or so. Compare and contrast the romance in Heat with that in Public Enemies: admittedly Eady's as much of a cipher as Flechette is, but at least living in a world in which things do not just fall into his lap, De Niro has had the space to seem justly self-confident, competent, charismatic; you can see what's attractive about him, whereas Depp, notwithstanding being rather handsome, is at best a little boorish. Alternatively, think of the slow-burning disaster in The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford: desperate hero worship gone sour and bitter in the face of what violence and mistrust will do to you in the end, and a much better film for it. There is one wonderful scene, where Depp is sitting in the cinema, watching Manhattan Melodrama, seemingly like he knows what he can't, that he'll die on the street outside when he leaves. And tension does build towards the end, as the mob refuses to provide support and he's left without a bolthole. Nonetheless, overall, flat and, from Mann, disappointing.

No Reason Not To Try

2009-07-09T10:59:00.002+01:00

Trying to do a careful analytical unpicking and undermining of Glen Newey's recent LRB piece on Raymond Geuss' new book would be mostly pretty tedious and anyway miss the point, which is its polemical character; I'm assuming, for example, that Newey doesn't really think that taking moralised stances about political arrangements makes one a supporter of the present Iranian state. More briefly, I note that even Bernard Williams, hardly friendly to Kantian-inspired liberalism, understood that the point of that liberalism is that it is about the conditions of the legitimate exercise of political power, so it can hardly be that it ignores the fact of the exercise of political power, since it is premised on it; that the presence of disagreement does not mean there is no right answer, and certainly not that there are not better and worse answers; and that if the problem is that ignoring the fact of political power generates undesirable results, then we better have something to say about the terms on which those results are undesirable. When one wants to say what political philosophy properly is, standards by which that properly can be assessed are necessary, and that pitches us right back into making evaluations of some sort or other; maybe not moral(ised) ones, but evaluations of some sort, and so the possibility of disagreement.

You Can't Whistle It Either

2009-07-07T22:26:00.000+01:00

From Ray Monk's 'How To Read Wittgenstein' - no, I haven't - discussing the later Wittgenstein's abandonment of the idea of "a single 'logical form' shared by thought, language and the world, which a philosopher might uncover and reveal":

During his first six months back in Cambridge in 1929... [Wittgenstein] fairly quickly came to the conclusion that the very notion of logical form had to be abandoned. In this, he was helped by conversations with Ramsey and, still more, by conversations with the Italian economist Piero Sraffa. In the preface to Philosophical Investigations that he wrote in 1945, Wittgenstein says that he is indebted to Sraffa for 'the most consequential ideas of this book'... Wittgenstein, soon after his return to Cambridge, was explaining his ideas to Sraffa and insisting - as he had insisted in Tractatus - that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same 'logical form'. To this, Sraffa made a Neapolitan gesture of brushing his chin with his fingertips, asking: 'What is the logical form of that?'

I'd describe the relevant gesture as more of a flick than a brush, but still; attention to life as it is lived, and in a wholly appropriate medium. In other news, I handed in two copies of my D.Phil to be sent off to examiners this afternoon; let us not ask about its logical form.

My Leg Measurements And The Size Of My Cock

2009-06-27T17:46:00.000+01:00

I know celebrity is odd, and I also know that lots of other people know that. Still, I hope it isn't only me that thinks that it's pretty bizarre if there's a real need for an eight-page supplement on the life of an only just cold musician who had made no new music of any note for well over a decade or that satisfying that alleged need is anything but a bafflingly vicarious exercise in sanctimonious intrusion. I suppose I can make sense of a regret that there'll be no more music, but the thought that there's anything more than a passive consumption of product, however wonderful that product was, to the relationship is quite alien to me. What otherwise unsatisfied need is being met by projecting the features of a real, mutual, in some way intimate, relationship on to the surely long-mad one-time purveyor of pop music whose genius after all lay in the way it was polished out of all reality? And if anyone mentions Diana, Obergruppenfurher of our hearts, I'll claw my own eyes out, or at least theirs.

Not Here And Not Now

2009-06-15T23:43:00.005+01:00

There was a time when I would have found this little local dispute a cue for immediate, confident, intervention. Partly I don't - except when applying for jobs - think of myself as a philosopher any more really: sometimes I think of myself as a political theorist, but more often as a Rawlsian, and more often even than that as a graduate student who's grant has run out and is about to submit and, in all probability, be more or less unemployed. Some hard-nosed and pithy, ideally Marxian, aphorism along the lines of not being able to live on bread alone telling you something important about bread, and its sources, would presumably be appropriate here. That's not all of it: political theorists are not wholly a subset of philosophers; our canon is different, which means we ask slightly different questions and expect answers to begin from slightly different places.

For what it's worth, I can find philosophers and the more philosophically inclined amongst political theorists quite annoying, but not because they present themselves in ways which I find rude, although some of them do tend towards distinctly socially awkward - which I'm hardly one to be casting aspersions on the basis of, I suppose - and like any discipline, philosophy has its share of shits. I find them annoying because - which may not be unconnected to the social awkwardness and the share of shits - I don't think asking highly abstracted questions about increasingly denatured cases is actually a particularly sensible way of going about answering questions, at least in moral and political philosophy. Who are those questions for? Perhaps philosophers qua philosophers, but less often, it seems to me, philosophers qua human beings with lives that go on in a world characterised not by questions about the precise character of the betterness of this state of affairs from some universal perspective but ones about considerably more situated and uncomfortable difficulties. Certainly not for ordinary people whom one would hope do not spend their time being crippled by agonising over the infinite varieties of trolley problem.

I went to a presentation a while ago by a friend who is - to my mind at least - a little too interested in right-libertarianism; here, one wants to paraphrase Linda Smith and say if not the oxygen of oxygen, at least the oxygen of academic respectability; a fellow attendee described right-libertarians as the gift that just keeps giving, which I think expresses just the right amount of scorn. Anyway, the friend argues - fairly convincingly to my mind, but that's not really the point - that right-libertarians need the first property-owners to have been individuals for their claims about individual rights to follow, and that all the evidence from anthropology indicates that that's not the case: actually, the first property-owners were almost certainly collectives of various sorts, who then passed over their property to individuals later on.

What's interesting about this is that this was well-known to, say, the Scottish Enlightenment, as was pointed out during the presentation, begging the question of how that richer, more humane, understanding of how we go about political philosophy in particular has disappeared. What presumably structural forces have caused us to forget that sort of knowledge? Bernard Williams had a view about this, contrasting the "intense moralism of much American political and indeed legal theory" with what he thought was its predictable counterpart, a concentration in American political science on "the coordination of private or group interests": "a Manichean dualism of soul and body, high-mindedness and the pork barrel... [where]... the existence of each explains how anyone could have accepted the other". He goes on to contrast that combination of piety and sordidness with a view in which conflict is central but contained; where what a political decision announces is not that someone is wrong, but "that they have lost", where of course that implies acceptance of some rules under which they lose.

Predictably, I find that view congenial, if wrong in its reading of Rawls. Whether it's generalizable I'm not sure. I tend to think so, although I've no real evidence to base that claim on. It seems to me that just as idealism lives under the shadow of Tamanay Hall and vice versa, the colonization of the social sciences in general by various forms of physics envy, with economics typically in the vanguard of this assault, will similarly generate attempts in philosophy to both distance oneself from and approximate those degrees of precision through abstraction. If that's true though, then it could well be the driving force explaining philosophers' apparent comparative failure at the grant stage and the general hostility of both humanists and social scientists to philosophers: social scientists because after all, philosophers end up behaving like their poor cousins, faffing about ineffectually with third-hand pieces of maths and no real sense of life as lived, and humanists because, really, they'd like them to be talking about actual people. Rudeness doesn't come into it: it's that they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing; illuminating, through careful conceptual analysis, the conditions of life as we have to live it without in doing so destroying the possibility of it. Eh; of course, that's over-general and, more, unkind, bitter. There'll always be exceptions; what's important though, is whether they are exceptions.

Their Predominant Colourings Would Be Melancholy And Gloom

2009-06-08T22:36:00.000+01:00

I would write about the European elections, and the fact that the good people of Lancashire and Cumbria and Yorkshire and Humberside have elected fascists, but what would I say? That when James Purnell is a major figure in the Labour Party this is hardly surprising? That if no major political party is prepared to say that "reasonable concerns of the (white) working class" are that they don't see their real incomes stagnate and even drop during a period of economic growth and not a euphemism for badly concealed racism, this is what you get? None of that is really very illuminating: it's a grindingly familiar story. I'm reminded of James Fenton's crepuscular journalism. It seems appropriate: formulated in response to the despondency and incompetence of South Vietnamese troops just before the fall of Saigon, it deals in the little defeats of the half-light, in shrugs, in guard posts no-one bothers to man and truths no-one tries to conceal any more. Its defining feature is its lack of bravado; appropriate for a government whose ministers can't even conduct a decent assassination on a leader so cripplingly useless that you wince each time he comes on television.

I Have Filled My Heart With Hate

2009-05-16T00:08:00.000+01:00

I have had a vague desire to see 300 since I saw trailers for it a couple of years ago; the photoshopped, crazed hyper-realism of it, a fetishism of gloriously bloody violence, all impossible slow motion decapitations and exquisite showers of carefully rendered drops of blood, seemed like it would be ridiculously entertaining. And indeed it was ridiculously entertaining: the sudden pull back to a carefully framed landscape view of the Spartan king, having just gravely intoned that this is not madness, but Sparta, planting his foot on the Persian emissary's chest and flicking him backwards into a perfectly circular large black hole, which lurks in the middle of a courtyard for no obvious reason, is quite beyond the idiotic in a really rather wonderful way.

Of course its politics are barely disguised fascism: anything that enjoyed violence quite that much could only avoid being hateful by placing itself in a world in which only relentless brutality could avoid abject subjection. The problem with Sin City, after all, was that it tried to locate itself in a world not totally distant from ours: where violence's victims are not just effectively nameless soldiers or evil beyond imagining, there is a way of getting along that means perfecting the art of killing is not the only way to live. If there was any other way of living a life, then a life which took all its meaning from the total destruction, the utter crushing, of other lives, would seem, as it is in reality, at best quite hopelessly gratuitous. When we cannot live together, then someone has to die, and their death may as well be glorious, whether that triumph is found in the killing or in the act of dying.

This is a vision of politics as a kind of impossibility, a negative-sum game where compromise means humiliation and if not enslavement, then a kind of betrayal. If political action is always and everywhere either submission or triumph, then that is what we are left with; a politics of rousing speeches and good deaths, of killings stylised out of reality and of honour become vengeance stretched into infinity. Its aesthetics may be wonderful - the glowing embers of the Spartans' cloaks, the sodium lamp sunrises, the snarling monochrome of the Immortals' masks, the sudden stop-motion of bodies flying away from and into sword and shield blows: it's all quite beautiful - but tragedy has always been heartarchingly beautiful from a distance and grindingly awful up close.

Putting Your Hand In The Next Man's Pocket

2009-05-11T23:24:00.002+01:00

Fiddling, whilst Rome burns. Which of these is supposed to be more scandalous, that some members of a fairly small group of people took a rather venal attitude to their expenses, or that in a period of economic growth, the real incomes of the poorest 10% of the population fell and those of the wealthiest 10% rose? What do we care more about, t he fact that MPs don't fully understand the ins and outs of virtue ethics, or that the 6 million poorest people in the UK on average lost 6% of their real income over the past three years whilst the 6 million richest gained on average 4% more? For all that some philosophers might like to make it so, politics is not a morality play, full of allegory and the opportunity to strike pious poses: it's what we do when we see that sainthood doesn't and couldn't, except at prohibitive cost to those who have to live under it, divide the spoils of not killing each other. So MPs skim a bit off the top; it's not very nice, but it's hardly the failure to arrest the enormous rise in inequality that occurred under Thatcher, or even to reverse the effects of the institutional changes which generated that rise and allow those who benefitted from them to continue to capture the lion's share of the benefits generated by economic growth. But no; we need to make sure, not that we redress the balance of power in the institutions we all live within and support which allows those with the most to systematically accrue more and more at greater and greater cost to those with least, but that everyone understands that what really matters is whether some MPs think they can get away with charging a couple of hundred quid to the taxpayer for broken toilet seats.

Update, 12/05/09: that some MPs were designating the same property as having different purposes under different sets of rules is now equivalent to a system of endemic patronage which had governed everything from the distribution of public works contracts to the formation of governments and whose end required a campaign in which, despite being guarded continually by members of the security forces, several members of the judiciary were assassinated.

A Tally

2009-04-26T11:33:00.002+01:00

Saves I'm proud of: 3
Saves I'm pleased by: 6
Balls I didn't get and probably should have: 1
Balls I didn't get and perhaps could have: 1
Opposition players satisfyingly and perfectly legally clattered: 2
Final score: 6-0 to them.

Sempre la solitaire.

Serendipity

2009-04-09T20:05:00.000+01:00

In my head, Charlie Mingus' programme for training cats to use the toilet rather than a litter tray (via Popbitch) and this article about the way in which the Telegraph legitimates and then re-markets American wingnut gossip too toxic to be touched in its original form (via the ever excellent Yorkshire Ranter;) should be linked. Unfortunately, I lack the native wit to do so; a straightforward analogy tricking your cat into shitting in the loo and tricking the American public into batshit lunacy seems to reflect badly on both cats, cat-owners, and the American public, and not be anything like hostile enough to the right-wing noise machine. Other attempts welcomed in comments.

Their Law

2009-04-07T23:14:00.001+01:00

So what initially was presented as a kind of tragic coincidence - with a little black propaganda thrown in: although presumably that's more or less automatic, like a Catholic crossing themselves as they walk into church - seems simply tragic now. Unfortunately, tragedies aren't always acts of blind fate. Med Hughes of ACPO was on the Today programme on Saturday claiming that “we’ve moved away from a historical period where simply the police service was, if you like, the arm of the executive and would prevent protest” (around 3.30 here; via Alex). As Stuart White points out here, kettling hardly seems like the considered democratic response by the agents of law and order to the threat of peaceful protest: it is suspicious of citizens attempting to do what democratic citizens ought to and civilly but firmly questionning the acts of their governors, and disrupts, seriously, their attempts to do so and to do so under conditions and at risks roughly of their own choosing. Disruption and suspicion are not prevention, so I suppose Hughes didn't tell an outright lie; on the other hand, if everytime a police officer tried to arrest anyone, groups of people surrounded them and wouldn't let them move from a restricted area, I imagine you'd hear from ACPO pretty quickly. Assaulting passers-by isn't prevention either, of course, just as describing it as disruption'd be fairly euphemistic. One wonders though, how far apart imprisoning, possibly illegally, large numbers of peacefully protesters, and getting a few kicks in when you have the chance are.

Update, 09/04/09: Sometimes tiny differences can make all the difference.

On Not Helping

2009-03-24T23:58:00.001Z

I've recently been reading this collection of Michael Walzer's essays. I'd not really read anything by him other than Just and Unjust Wars before, and it's quite fun: it's not as pithy or as astute when interested in something - there's nothing as good as Williams' reading of the torture scene in in 1984 in Truth and Truthfulness, for example - but it tends towards a Bernard Williams-esque valorization of the political, except with a kind of quite intriguing and probably distinctly American civic republican spin; if Williams had wanted to defend a principle of non-intervention, then one feels it would have been on the negative grounds of the tendency towards of disaster of interventions, rather than on the positive grounds of self-determination Walzer appeals to (in this paper).

Walzer appeals to an example where we could, by putting some chemical in the water supply, costlessly and permanently turn the post-independence Algerian government into Swedish-style social democrats. Presumably we feel there's something undesirable about this; at least I share Walzer's thought that something's gone wrong here, and plausibly something about self-determination. Williams, I think though - and this is probably a pure rhetorical device here: who really knows what Williams would have thought - would just ask what the moral evaluation of the acts of gods are supposed to tell us about what we, who are not gods, should do here and now. We can't costlessly lift a whole nation from the place history has brought it to so as to carefully put it down somewhere else instead; the point of politics is that we can't go round doing things like that. There are costs, and we have to work out whether they're ones we can bear, and ones we can impose. What should be done when there are no costs at all is a question for someone else entirely. It may be worth noting here that Walzer talked about a ticking bomb case in a paper in the early seventies.

Anyway, so Walzer wants non-intervention, including neutrality in civil wars, on grounds of self-determination. Even if we can partly set aside cases involving the total change of political, economic and cultural institutions and attitudes simply through an act of will, we cannot totally set them aside: even if we think that part of what has gone wrong in the case he uses is that gods shouldn't treat mere mortals like that, or that our moral reactions aren't supposed to be callibrated for those kinds of cases, it's still seems like a wrong against self-determination. So it looks like the pro-interventionist still has a case to answer: alright, this society is by any plausible standard less than fully just, but you can't make it fully just; properly, it is for its own people to do that. Walzer doesn't want to push that as far as it might go: he allows that in cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or mass enslavement, intervention is allowed. Other than those, though, he is prepared to require the citizens - better the inhabitants perhaps - of an unjust state to suck it up: it would be wrong for outsiders to help them make their state more just.

I think this is probably wrong, but I don't have to think it's wrong because self-determination doesn't matter: ecumenically, I might think it's wrong - and this is probably something that's been said before, but because of my unfamiliarity with the literature, I just don't know it's been said or by whom - because self-determination is not a zero-sum game. For Walzer to be right that self-determination rules out active interference, it has to be the case that active interference would always in some way infringe on self-determination: maybe not self-determination across all time, but at least self-determination in the roughly here and now. That, though, doesn't look plausible about other cases of self-determination, and is likely to be even less plausible about self-determination for groups.

Consider an individual who is in a domineering relationship. Although there might be a dispute about what counts as active interference, it seems to me we could fairly actively interfere with them and yet increase their self-determination, under certain conditions at least: encourage them and provide them with resources to leave or otherwise restructure that relationship, for example; if not that, at least give them the option of doing so. That looks like active interference, and certainly like the sorts of things Walzer wants to analogously rule out for societies: helping one side in a civil war by providing it with certain resources unavailable to the other; here, not encouraging the individual to stay in the domineering relationship. Yet that could certainly increase their self-determination in the roughly here and now: an abusive partner doesn't have to be beating you to within an inch of your life - presumably the analogue of Walzer's 'no intervention without genocide, ethnic cleansing, or mass enslavement' condition - for you to become more autonomous by leaving them.

More, note that individuals are singular, whereas societies are plural, and so the dispute about what counts as self-determination for a particular individual within that individual is unlikely to be as radical as the dispute about what counts as self-determination for a particular society within that society. Nor are parts of individuals able to silence other parts of individuals in ways that parts of societies are able to silence other parts of societies. A society where everyone is involved in the self-determination is more self-determining than a society in which only some are so involved. Then, though, there are trade-offs to be made: we might be able to raise the voices of some without lowering the voices of others quite as much, or even really at all. If self-determination's not a zero-sum game, then interference doesn't have to limit it, and Walzer's argument against interference fails, but it doesn't seem that self-determination is a zero-sum game, even for individuals and surely not for societies.

Not Chained To A Lamp-post

2009-03-24T14:11:00.002Z

Via William Gibson.

How Are You Never Going To Be Late?

2009-03-22T23:46:00.000Z

Early on in the first season of The Wire, Avon takes D'Angelo to see an older relative in hospital, a man who must have lived in the same violent world as the pair of cousins, the younger a lieutenant in the older's drug empire. We come to know that he must have lived in this world because just before the camera draws in to reveal a healed bullet wound on his forehead, Avon says that the comatose man frightens him because his fate shows that the world they inhabit cannot be lived in forever: you only need to be "a little slow, a little late" once. That's by way of explaining the post title; not much more.

On The Counterfactual

Deadening metaphysics are,
simply, and so no beginning.
Let them mock us then, and start there.

How little subtlety there is
in observing that time passes.
A brute fact, with a distinct lack
of alchemy, of a soft touch,
poppy-petal light, skin on skin.

It has instead a discipline
A brutal self-reliance, hard
like blows to the back of the skull.

Consider reaching beyond it;
Stepping in the same river twice
And the strange tyranny
Of its impossibility.
Yet how the prospect beguiles.

To bathe in last year’s ancient rains,
To have them drawn back from the sea
And so pass out of things’ passing.

Outside endurance, enchantment,
And inside enchantment, nowhere
Endlessly left to twist tighter,
Doubling back, and again,
Ever watching each thing's leaving.

Putting Away Childish Things

2009-03-09T22:42:00.003Z

One of the most annoying things about Bernard Williams was his deep suspicion of assertions of normativity which separate themselves from practice. For example, in the posthumously published In The Beginning Was The Deed, along with asking what the point of being Kant at the court of King Arthur might be, he quotes Habermas demanding that participants in the political process

drop the role of the private subject... The combination [of facticity and validity] requires a process of law-making in which the participatory citizens are not allowed to take part simply in the role of actors oriented to success

and himself goes on to say

But what is this "are not allowed to"? It cannot be blankly normative. Suppose, one is bound to say, that they do? It may be replied: it will defeat the point. But what if it does? And how can we be sure, in the light of the possibility, what the point really is?

Since this is in the course of making an argument about how political philosophers ought to theorize, this is in a certain sense a little bit rich. If we ignore that what political decisions do is not "announce that the other party was morally wrong or, indeed, wrong at all [but that] they have lost", then he had better think that there is a sense in which we have gone wrong, or else it is unclear what point he thinks he is making. In the sense that it is an interpretative point in favour of a refusal to admit certain kinds of normativity to politics, it is fairly elliptical, and in the sense that it is just a blunt refusal to admit that we might reasonably want things to go other than they do, it not only undermines his own position but is deeply unphilosophical.

On the other hand, one of the most wonderful things about Bernard Williams was his deep suspicion of assertions of normativity which separate themselves from practice. There's an early passage either in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy or Morality: An Introduction to Ethics where Williams pours utter scorn on the idea that what people are really like is the way that they would behave in a lifeboat which is sinking because it is overfull. The idea is that just as we would not expect to see what a tropical plant is like by placing it in the Antarctic, we hardly find out what humans are like by imagining them under conditions where cooperation and compromise are pretty likely to result in them dying. Similarly, the integrity objection to utilitarianism importantly relies on the thought that it matters to use what we as individuals do, rather than how the world ends up being once are acts and omissions are endlessly mediated through the agency of others. The thought seems to have been that philosophy is an account of what we do as humans, and if it stops being intelligible as such an account, then it has failed. Philosophy is a humanistic discipline, and the ones we really ought to hate are the reductionists, just as relativism - and I think this is probably my favourite of Williams' aphorisms - is either too early or too late; because either it answers the question, should we tolerate those people we have no straightforward way of persecuting, or because it does not answer the question, given that you and I have some practical disagreement about the moral status of some act, how do we and ought we to resolve that disagreement without bloodshed.

All this is by way of objecting to another way of understanding philosophy. One of my colleagues was talking a couple of weeks ago about some research which claims that children are much more philosophical than adults. Unlike adults, apparently children go round constantly questioning things; they're forever asking about the sources of authorities they encounter, demanding causal histories of events or explanations that they're given, and so on. They always want to know why, are resolutely independent, critical inquirers, whereas adults are in contrast dupes, with both the ability and the will to tear back the veil and see what lies beneath atrophied, beaten down by time and the need to get by in a world which has limited patience for a refusal to acquiesce in the way things are. Time and the need to get by in world which had limited patience for a refusal to acquiesce in the way things are, at least for some values of 'the way things are', though, are central features of human existence. The reason children don't (always: children don't go round asking why their parents love and care for them, or not usually at least, or, minimally, don't usually behave like they've been asking that question, for example; one should always ask which questions aren't being asked, what forms of life are being privileged) behave like beings which have got used to them is because they aren't beings which have got used to them. That, though, doesn't mean that no-one should have got used to them, that the presumption should be against having got used to them, that philosophy is constituted by not having got used to central features of (adult) human life. Who would this philosophy be for, which goes round always demanding why? What would it not demand why of? Would it demand why it wants to know why, and what answer would it accept to that question? Where would it begin from, and who would recognise the world the answers to its questions left?

Another way of expressing this worry is to wonder about the conditions which might fulfil what Williams called the Basic Legitimation Demand, which requires that political orders are intelligible to those who live under them as solutions to the problem of providing order - without themselves becoming a problem in precisely those terms. I spoke to another colleague about this some time last week, who was fairly insistent that the work that intelligibility was doing there was not just a black box in the general sense which Williams obviously intended it to be - so that we could be Lancelot at Camelot and John Rawls at Harvard - but similarly indeterminate in any concrete situation - who could tell whether we ought not to be Lancelot at Harvard and Rawls at Camelot? In particular, they wanted to insist that Robert Nozick's right-libertarianism was a viable answer to Williams' question; that if the sorts of political orders we have round here now could tell all those they exercise their coercion over that in some imagined state of nature, they would not be worse off, that in the midst of riches being in the same state as a hunter-gatherer is sufficient to legitimate (being coopted into ensuring) coercive denial of access to those riches. I saw the tail end of a BBC4 documentary on the Miner's Strike this evening: I would have liked to see someone walk up to a striking miner in 1984, and tell them that since they weren't yet starving to death, the political order they lived under was legitimate. It's hard to explain to a crying child, after all, and we shouldn't make people do it unless we have to.

On Not Speaking Italian

2009-02-22T18:39:00.000Z

After reading Peter Bradshaw's review, I decided against going to see The Reader: he articulates, how accurately I don't know, a worry that the film is unacceptably exculpatory of one of its main characters, a Nazi extermination camp guard; if not no poetry after Auschwitz, at least no poetry about Auschwitz. Having not seen the film, I suppose I'm in no position to judge whether that's fair or not; Bradshaw makes it sound fair, at least, and for all his predictable foibles, I think he's usually pretty good. Apparently a complaint in the same kind of area has been made about Waltz With Bashir, the thought being that the more or less total absence of the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacres or of the context in which those massacres took place makes the film's attempt at reconstructing the details of the narrator's (limited) participation in those massacres a denial of the wrongs done either in the massacres or in Israel's 1982 invasion more broadly. For example here, the film is described as first "an act not of limited self-reflection but self-justification" and then "striving towards working through qualms to restabilize the self as it is currently constituted... [and not] asking challenging questions that would destabilize that self".

I'm not quite sure about this kind of claim: although it's right that the film is not primarily about the suffering of the victims of the Israeli invasion, it seems to rely on that suffering and, more, the wrong of that suffering to generate its narrative force. If it couldn't have been wrong to do what the narrator did, then his attempts to understand and come to terms with it would be adolescent pieces of self-obsessed introspection, tedious and whiny. The absence of the Palestinian victims at Sabra and Shatila, although perhaps not always of the victims of the conflict more broadly, is then a presence looming over much of the film. The figure of the psychiatrist, for example, seems much more ambiguous than the piece linked to above suggests. As well as saying that memory takes us where we want to go, and hence positing a kind of therapeutic effect for the narrator's nightmares reliving his experiences in Beirut, he tells an ancedote about how easy it is to plant false memories: apparently, doctored photos of themselves as children are almost inevitably assimilated into their recollections of their childhood by adults. Memory then might be hiding something much worse than the mere lighting of flares. Similarly, the apparent self-absorption of the reference to 'the other camps' is hardly exculpatory: presumably the last thing an Israeli of all people wants to justly compared to is a Nazi.

That may not get the film off the hook as far as ignoring the rest of the conflict goes, although it's worth noting that the songs about bombing Beirut are accompanied by scenes of Israeli soldiers being bored and boorish; it's not like the film endorses that act. But then, films may choose their own subjects, and one can easily imagine that Israeli attempts to conceptualise what has been done in their name would be seen as patronising and self-serving. What absence, then, is doing in the film could even be seen as a kind of respect: a refusal to try to capture what something must have been like for someone else can be a tribute to their subjectivity, rather than a denial of it. The use of the real footage at the end of the film, rather than Othering the Palestinian victims, seems to me to bring the question at the heart of the film back into sharp focus: what the hell did we do to do this to someone? Everything else becomes a shadow-play, a kind of paper screen which is eventually ripped aside to reveal what was really going on, which was the creation of figures of almost pure grief. Arabic is notoriously difficult to learn, while most of us can become fluent in violence in just under a semester indeed.