The War (for Children’s Minds)

The War (for Children’s Minds) by Stephen Law

{my review}

Many might recall Marx’s declaration that – up to his age – philosophers had sought only to understand or as he put it ‘describe’ the world, but the point was ‘to change it.’ This might be the kernel of many an activist but it is a quality not exclusive to socialism.

Many times in The Clarion I have argued that the way to truly change society is through education. But, in our time, education is the realm primarily of children. And this is why it is there that the battleground for reason is being fought.

Today’s teenagers are the ‘war on terror’ generation. They are borne of a war built on an impossible, unachievable abstract waged by fundamentalist positions of varying zeal from both Muslim and Christian traditions, charged with a bonus shot of Zionism. As Richard Dawkins warned in ‘The God Delusion’, the minds of these children will form the foot-soldiers of tomorrows’ war. Be this, as in the case of Palestinian teenagers for example, martyrdom (as so tragically documented in James Miller’s film ‘Death in Gaza’, which saw him shot and killed by the Israeli Defence Force) or the attack on reason in US schools. There 96% of Americans claim to believe in God and their authorities have banned books such as 1984 as well as, in some cases, the barest mention of scientific evolution, favouring instead what is righteous and good as dictated by the Bible.

All this, however, is wrapped in a paradox: while faith and irrationality might be at the root of more conflict now than in any time previous in the last century and a half, there is equally a decline at least in the Christian tradition in church-going and the role of faith in state affairs. And some would have it, therefore, a decline in morality. But does that really follow?

Welcome then teenage drop-out come post-man turned philosophy professor, Stephen Law and his ‘The War for Children’s Minds’.

Although primarily concerned with the issue of faith, it is not faith alone which Law sees as the problem – unlike Dawkins’ or Hitchens works have been characterised (although they’re more about reason) – but authority. And it is this difference in perspective which explains why obvious rebukes of the idea that only religion is synonymous with moral conduct don’t appear until page 158 (with the citing of Fukuyama).

Law’s book ‘Makes a case for a particular kind of liberal moral education, an education rooted in philosophy, not authority.’ That is, getting pupils to think independently, building arguments through rational persuasion at most.

Blair’s New Labour were (in)famous in providing the blue print for the Tories to encourage more faith schooling in the UK. But Law builds a steady case against the notion that faith has a monopoly on moral education. Instead he offers a list of skills the student might cultivate as opposed instead of deference to a higher authority just because they say so or it is written (where, for example, it is ordained that homosexuals or women are not to be treated as equals). Law recommends students be taught to…

• Reveal and question underlying assumptions,
• Figure out the perhaps unforeseen consequences of a moral decision or point of view
• Spot and diagnose faulty reasoning
• Weigh up evidence fairly and impartially
• Make a point clearly and concisely
• Take turns in a debate, and listen attentively without interrupting,
• Argue without personalising a dispute,
• Look at issues from the point of view of others, and
• Question the appropriateness of, or the appropriateness of acting on, one’s own feelings.

These are admirable qualities we could probably all use. And like most good advice, it is obvious and easy but I’d wager if we really adopted them well, we might just make the citizens of a shared world worthy of and for each other. And that’s probably why it hasn’t been universally applied, as it is not in the interests of the quiet authoritarians pulling the strings. Law reminds us that modern education only fulfils half its original intent – not to merely intellectualise – but also create good citizens. This just happens to be a view shared by those in favour of more authoritarian approaches; Law just disagrees on how that is achieved. And he offers a convincing case.

Law is concerned with many things, including the misunderstanding of Kant and the Enlightenment. He manages to stay just on the interesting side of argumentative pedantry but his simple, yet philosophical approach convincingly breaks down all the arguments of the authoritarians.

One problem is, of course, that authoritarians will never recognise themselves as such. Another is that they will misrepresent the liberal approach. But at Law points out ‘To say “You must judge what is right and wrong” is not to say “You must judge on a wholly shallow, materialistic, self-serving basis”.’ And yet this is the familiar argument against liberal education. Law refutes the claims that liberalism is relativism and encourages anarchy in the classroom. Indeed, how could that possibly deliver a structured approach to thinking? Law rejects authority which dictates what is to be believed, rather than instilling the means to think for oneself.

An oddity of many philosophic debates (as a visit to the Tintern Philosophy Circle (each 3rd Tuesday in the month at the Rose and Crown 7.30pm) will often testify), is that it isn’t long before the topic of Nazis turn up. And Law’s book is no exception. I guess this is because the Nazis are such a milestone in amoral conduct they off a good example of how supposedly rational beliefs become policies that can carry a whole country into mass extermination (and by, um, ‘authority’ no less).

Here Law rightly draws on Milgram’s 1950’s psychological tests which sought to understand how Nazi concentration camp guards qualified their actions by claiming ‘they were only following orders’ and – so Milgram thought – to prove that it could never happen in the USA. Instead, Milgram found that actually ‘65% of ordinary American citizens will electrocute another human being to death if told to so by a white-coated authority-figure’. Law argues that it is only, as Kant says, through ‘the courage to use one’s own reason’ we might question such authority.

In fact, from a socialist perspective, our history is rich with those who questioned the established authority and challenged them in order to change the world for better. What is somewhat lacking here though is that which Marx set out – the means to change the status quo. At the risk of sounding like one endorses Pol Pot’s Year Zero: revolutionary action – in this case the means to ignite Enlightenment for modernity.

A liberal approach to character education won’t emerge of itself. It needs to be policy won by evidential argument, or if not grown organically by educationalists themselves. But I say what better place to start, while we wait for policy-makers to catch up, than in the home?

For his part, Law suggests some training for specialised teachers. After building such a convincing case, this solution seems rather lightweight.

In his defence, however, Law does cite cases where philosophy in schools has not only drastically improved critical thinking skills and reasoning, but there’s also evidence of side-benefits too both in general educational improvement, as well as better behaviour and attitudes, particularly on moral issues like, say, bullying.

So my major political conundrum (the myth of the rational voter) isn’t yet solved, but at least the debate as to how to positively influence change has begun with this highly recommended, mindful book. Buy it, read it and then buy a copy for the Head of your local school.

Causing trouble again

Most if not all the campaigns and struggles that I have been involved with have failed. But as any seasoned fellow traveller will tell you, that alone is not a reason enough to give up the fight. It only begs that we fight harder.

One way to do this is to learn from our campaigns. Forest of Dean Against the Cuts spearheaded the local SOS Again campaign, seeking to keep local community health services within the NHS. It opposed the formation of Gloucestershire Care Services (GCS) as a non-NHS, non-public sector provider of local health services.

But it was the Forest of Dean & Wye Valley Morning Star group which kicked off local opposition against the savage cuts in public spending with UNISON’s Peter Short taking some of the lead. After a couple ofmonths we connected with a fledgling Forest of Dean group. Both sent coaches to the March 2011 march for Public Services in London, which was still seeing activists arrive at Hyde Park as the speeches came to a close at about 4pm that afternoon.

The Forest side of the Morning Star group joined what had now become Forest of Dean Against the Cuts. But the national movement faltered. For sure, UK-Uncut was doing good work with their bail-in’s against legal tax loop-holers like Vodafone, but it was Pete Stanway of the Forest group who brought to the local agenda the issue of community hospitals and health services that were under direct threat through the creation of GCS.

GCS had all the right acronyms: it was to be a CIC(Community Interest Company) created in the guidelines of the SET (Social Enterprise Trust). But, as we warned, GCS was not a charity, and it was not part of the NHS. And it was not in the public sector even, irrespective of how it classified its surplus, not for profit or otherwise.

FoD Against the Cuts bailed-in into Lydney Tesco to highlight the price of public sector cuts, which would, of course, affect the health budget. Meanwhile Tesco was named amongst the biggest legal tax avoiders. There was an almost weekly rant by the group’s activists in the letters pages of the local press, and gradually the profile of our opposition was steadily raised. We were aware, however, that we couldn’t fight a battle on two fronts. The national NHS reform bill and public sector cuts were an entirely different issue to the formation of GCS. What was happening locally was, instead, a warning of what would happen nationally under the reform bill. Either way, the GCS takeover would happen irrespective of whichever way Parliament would vote on the national issue.

So, the takeover of formerly NHS-run local community health services by GCS became the sole preoccupation of the group, which was guided by the 1st October 2011 go-live of the new company.

We believed that few people knew of this out-sourcing, and ever fewer had had the opportunity to voice their opposition to the most fundamental change to our local community NHS health services.

Out of this anxiety and tight deadline arose our first strategic error. In a rush to oppose the formation of GCS we were sloppy with our wording of the petition. It referred to the ‘privatisation of community services’ with specific reference to Lydney and the Dilke hospitals. In my opinion the word ‘privatised’ is publicly loaded with ‘profit’, and this is exactly as Harper read it, and rejected it. Thus when we presented the 2,000 or so signatures to Mark Harper MP, he discounted the claim out of hand and would not countenance any public debate precisely because of the petitions’ wording.

Granted, a Tory MP is unlikely to rebel against his own government on the national issue (of the NHS reform bill), but on the local issue of GCS we at least had Harper on the fact that he had come out in favour of the SOS campaign first time around, when he was in opposition. What should have been awkward and embarrassing for him was brushed aside because of his rejection of our petitions’ claim. No wonder he was happy to write and explain this personally to all 2,000 who had opposed the take-over.

We argued that the spirit of the petition revealed that there was a real fear among the public, that the overwhelming majority of those asked to sign did so gladly and had heard nothing of GCS and the changes –highlighting the lack of proper consultation. But while this enabled us to dissect his position, it still didn’t change the fact of the petition’s wording which is how he was obliged to accept it. Incidentally, when pushed on why he wouldn’t hold a public meeting and/or debate on the topic he simply declined saying ‘He didn’t have to,’ and ‘Didn’t want to.’

Our meeting with Harper wasn’t helped by a number of us seeking to oppose both the local issue and the national NHS reform bill at the same time. This presented a mish-mash of opposition based on ideology alone, not solid argument. He clearly thought we opposed what was happening by default and took none of our claims seriously. These two separate issues was used by Harper to belittle our concerns for attempting to mix them. Despite assurances that we knew they were separate we failed to present a coherent opposition at that meeting and had no solid demands of our MP. He was good enough to entertain our views for 45 minutes or so, but that was the extent of it. Otherwise we had handed him a useless petition which he would rebuff in his own letters to signatories, and without a voice for our argument.

Bruised but undeterred we sought to organise our own public meeting. We arranged good speakers from both the Royal College of Nursing and UNISON NHS.

But here again, we failed to present an entirely coherent front sending mixed messages over whether or not people should challenge GCS execs at a forthcoming presentation to the Dean Health Forum, for example.

We did, at least, have a letter prepared on the national issue and Diana Gash personally delivered the letters to Harper’s Westminster office on the day of the Bill’s next reading in Parliament. But Harper was undeterred and supported the Bill’s onward progress.

Someone in the audience that night raised what seemed like an odd question at the time, asking why hadn’t we done something before? October by that point was barely weeks away. This seemed obtuse – we are all voluntary activists trying to do what we can with what we have – but, on hindsight, it was a point well made, even if the questioner didn’t realise how pertinent their enquiry actually was.

In fact, the issue only came to light after we had repeatedly been fed by GCS and its allies that the decision to outsource the services was not made by GCS, but by the board of the Gloucestershire Primary Care Trust (PCT) and that we had to direct our questions and opposition to them.

In what I see as the last days of the local campaign, we finally got to the nub of the problem and it all began with New Labour. In reality we had missed the policy created by the former government which gave rise to GCS, and the legislation which sought to split commissioning of services with provision. The stark reality is that we had missed the point at which our opposition should have started.

The original SOS campaign had halted closures of our community hospitals, but in its wake the New Labour government had created the NHS Operating Framework (in2010). This sought to split PCT commissioning so that they couldn’t be providers and commissioners of their services at the same (you will recall the new NHS reform bill seeks to achieve this with GP commissioning and ‘any willing provider’). This has left the door wide open for what many see as creeping privatisation in the NHS.

All of this should have been uncovered at the start of our campaign. We had passion and anger in spades, but I feel we failed to take responsibility for our claims and for the detail. Of course, as a member of the group I too hold that responsibility and had failed.

We missed the boat and should have opposed the original policy and legislation first came into being. Perhaps it was – but I am unaware of any such local attempt to oppose it, and therefore any such attempt failed.

It was all too little too late. We had some victories, though. Ironically, the local Labour Party executive issued a statement against the formation of GCS, pushed by our lobbying of it.

As the countdown to the 1st October transfer finally came a last minute legal challenge seems to have postponed GCS at the last breath. This seeks to oppose the transfer based on irregularities of the tendering process. But in a letter issued to GCS staff on the back of the challenge, the PCT said: “If taken to its logical conclusion the challenge would mean that community services would be competitively tendered with the result that bodies both within and outside the NHS sector could respond.“

Well, YES, that was kind of OUR point, which is why we were worried. We don’t want private companies wading in. But you can be sure the PCT will hide behind the policy instruments. Even if we won that contest, we’d actually be bringing forward our worst fears. It is a risky strategy.

Perhaps a groundswell will enable us to oppose the national policy now – now that we can see the consequences of it. But I rather doubt we will get the Tories to reverse it when their national NHS reform bill seeks to put the GCS project example into legislation at best, ‘any willing provider’ at worst.

The lesson learned is that we came to the argument too late. For sure, we asked GCS some embarrassing questions in public meetings and got about 100 people to our own meeting at the Miner’s Welfare Hall. But the question really was spot on when it was asked ‘Why haven’t we done anything before?’

This is more philosophical than it first appears.

How is it possible for activists let alone concerned citizens to be aware of all policies, legislation and boardroom decisions and their ramifications all of the time? Whose duty is it to impart this information? How accessible is this information, both physically and intellectually? How can we hold governments and local public bodies to account, particularly when policies go across the floor from Parliament to Parliament even with a change of government?

Perhaps it is this powerlessness which is truly the best example of what it really means to be living in a ‘Broken Britain’.

Perhaps it is from this powerlessness that the ‘occupy’ movement is drawn. The anti-war march of 2003 proved that marching alone probably isn’t enough anymore.

This is a personal view and does NOT represent the views of Forest of Dean Against the Cuts, The Clarion or the SOS Again campaign. On the national NHS reform Bill, please ensure you write to as many Lords as you can to ensure they don’t allow the Bill to proceed.

Survivors

I am not a fan of sci-fi: never have been and probably never will be. Or so I thought.

Like every other boy of the 1970’s I loved love ‘Star Wars’ but it wasn’t until the early 80’s with the BBC’s adaptation of ‘The Day of theTriffids’, and then ‘Threads’ did a certain breed sci-fi come to affect my whole outlook on life. Frankly, at the time I thought we were doomed. Borne of these are the beginnings of a political awakening that took another decade to bear fruit.

Both were imaginings of terrible fictions. ‘Threads’ seemed all too real and hypothesized nuclear Armageddon, whereas the BBC’s updating of the John Wyndham’s novel presented a different side to social destruction –giant, man-killing plant aliens. The genre was known as post-apocalyptic, and is an awkward addendum to sci-fi genre. They were fictions based on supposedly scientific possibilities. Indeed, ‘Threads’ was the first mass understanding of the nuclear winter hypothesis which was a debate still raging at the time – making even surviving a nuclear holocaust so terrible as to warrant questioning the point of living.

But I was slightly too young to remember the silent killer at work in the BBC’s 1970’s post-apocalyptic series ‘Survivors’.

This time it was an invisible means of destruction: disease. Watching the 70’s series on DVD today, I can see now that had I been just a bit older when it aired, it would have marked me as indelibly as ‘Threads’ would later in the 80’s.

Written by TV sci-fi supremo Terry Nation (who also gave us Blake’s 7 and many a Dr. Who storyline) it supposes the very real threat of a deadly epidemic and the social decay and terrible anarchy that arises out of the entire destruction of the state. These are topics I have written about before in The Clarion with my review of ‘The Death of Grass’ (by John Christopher) and to a degree in my explorations of modern utopian writing (all share communes and different social codes among their defining features). Nation, however, was at pains to distance his new series from his sci-fi work stating that “Survivors has its roots in the future, as it were, but it’s not science-fiction. It’s not going into the realms of the impossible; it’s skating very close to the possible,” which I guess is why the series still holds my interest, despite Nation’s other portfolio.

Indeed, the Radio Times write-up for ‘Survivors’ (it was shown on BBC1 over 3 series from 1975) cites a line from the show which sums up perfectly its preoccupation: “Incredible, isn’t it? We are of the generation that landed a man on the moon and the best we can do is talk of making tools from stone.”

‘Survivors’ is at its best when it questions our assumptions about how stable our society really is. How civil we might truly be under great duress, and what happens when we peel away the froth of our consumerist lives? It pokes around in moral dilemmas not usually broadcast in BBC dramas at 8pm on a Wednesday night. Today or in the 70’s.

Jenny, Abby & Greg (L to R). The face Jenny is pulling is because they've just found the body of a man hanged for looting a supermarket.

Lucy Fleming is the likeable constant, but where as heroine ofseries one (Carolyn Seymour as Abby Grant) is admirably driven she remains fairly impenetrable and one dimensional. What is to be commended, particularly for the age – as this still happens too infrequently today – is that the producers accepted a female as the lead character in what was on the face of it an adventure series. Granted, ‘Charlie’s Angels’ was also around at the same time, but they were impeccably hair-sprayed icons drawn by men of what women heroes ought to be like (and with a male for their boss, no less). Even ‘Wonderwoman’ was busty and pouted silky lip-gloss. By contrast Abby Grant crops her hair as she sets out on the road into a post-apocalyptic British countryside, her dead husband sprayed across the lounge sofa.

The camera follows Abby in what could easily have turned outto be classic Twilight Zone territory (“Oh God, please don’t let me be the only one.”) only to reveal to the audience the parallel story of Jenny Richards (Fleming) and then separately again the incredibly annoying Jackanory-esque tramp-comes-good storyline of Tom Price (played in a ridiculously Dickensian turn by Talfryn Thomas). But once modern viewers adjust their grins at the tragic fashion and 70’s BBC acting, the strength of the stories and other characters comes to the fore.

My favourite, for example is that of super-bitch Anne Tranter and Vic who she leaves for dead in a quarry once she realises he cannot supply her with riches now that he’s tragically crippled by an accident. Then there’s the poetic child-killer in series two and capital punishment episode in series one, both of which feel like Amnesty International had a hand in the writing.

Of course, one of the recurring themes is the nature of community and the role of leadership, be it within our ragtag group or across the other surviving communities and bandits the characters stumble across. Alongside this is the pressure that “Our civilisation had the technology to land a man on the moon, but as individuals we don’t even have the skill to makean iron spearhead”. The realisation that scavenging will only last so long comes to the fore and without a sign of a state forming any time soon, there’sa quick return to self-sufficient agriculture, with all its pitfalls and trials. This is not ‘The Good Life’.

Upon completing production of the pilot episode, contracts were drawn up in January 1974 and the show commissioned around the theme: ‘Bubonic plagues sweeps the world, killing all but a handful of people who escape to the country with absolutely nothing and who start civilisation again from scratch.’ But the response to Nation’s series was mixed.

The Times was expecting classic sci-fi in the Dr. Who mould from Nation and was therefore rightly disappointed. The Guardian for its part was just underwhelmed (‘a perfectly passable pastime’). The Daily Mail, however,got it on the nail when it compared its greatest strength to HG Wells’ War ofthe Worlds in which ‘extraordinary events are set in actual, small-scale landscapes’ – which is why the work reminded me of ‘The Death of Grass’ (and toa degree, John Wyndham’s ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’) – all of which seem set in a comfy version of the British countryside which we’ve come to love through thelikes of Betjemen, the Hovis ad or ‘All Creatures Great and Small’. And that is why so much of it is so simple yet effective.

Some of this is owed to the ‘feel’ of the work. While the opening title theme is infectious (ahem) and the titles sequence explains all we need to know about the origin and spread of the disease, it is interesting to note that it wasn’t a clever directorial instruction to omit incidental music, but a BBC strike, which lead to a very tight production schedule and hence no budget or time for music. This probably inadvertently adds much to the silence of dead Britain. It obviously works, because there’s still no incidental music by the end of the final third series.

It is also with some interest then that I discovered that much of the farm the group settles in during series two is not far from Monmouth. In fact, there’s quite a local link. Series one saw shoots in Evesham, the Pitville Circus in Cheltenham, various locations around Ross-on-Wye, Llanarth Court in Monmouth but was mostly shot in Herefordshire’s Hampton Court. By series two Callow Hill Farm near Monmouth came the setting for the fixed commune.

Alan W. Turner’s biography of Nation lays the departure of the shows’ creator to a split with co-writer Jack Ronder. The two had differences over the series’ direction and once Nation had also fallen out with the producer, Nation withdrew from his own project altogether. Besides, by this point Brian Clemens, who Nation had worked with on shows like ‘The Avengers’, filed court proceedings stipulating ‘Survivors’ was his idea in the first place’. The project seemed diseased on every level.

Somehow it survived. A second series was commissioned and Nation penned a novelisation of his version of the story – now a collectors’ item. For TV, Series two (1976) sees the departure of Abby Grant and a change of setting and I think it is all the better for it. It does suffer from the problem in TV series where one remarkable thing has to happen after another for fear of losing audience interest (but that could also be said of ‘The Archers’, albeit on a slightly smaller scale and perhaps less deadly). This sadly misses the point, of course, that ordinary post-apocalyptic life had itself WAS extraordinary to us viewers watching from the lap of technological luxury and leisure.

Series three took the show to its conclusion (1977). It still had the essence of what Turner commented was Nation’s premise, a “western, the struggle against nature and the attempt to establish a morality in a lawless land.” But now it was more about adventure than character and smaller domestic struggles. The search for engineer Greg Preston becomes more than annoying and dampens the effect of the ‘Survivors’ as a whole.

Of course ‘Survivors’ received the inevitable modern BBC remake. And like many updates it revels in sensation, where remarkable things have to so exciting and bombastic as to be inane. Zombie-apocalypse movie and video games are now ten a penny and with them, the danger of something as benign as a disease just doesn’t cut it anymore.

In many ways, however, the real world is more frightening. Remember BSE, driving past foot-and-mouths bonfires, bird-flu? And the impending influenza epidemic we’re due?

Yes, ‘Survivors’ is old-fashioned. But it is a unique piece of British TV history, trapped in time in this vast DVD box set.

SOURCES: ‘Survivors’ the complete series on DVD; ‘The ManWho Invented the Daleks: the strange worlds of Terry Nation’ by A. W. Turner(Aurum Press, 2011); http://survivors-mad-dog.org.uk/

Through a Glass Darkly

Someone offered the phrase that we see moral thought ‘through a glass darkly’ and this was certainly true of those of us listening to Prof. Billington talk on ‘Absolutism vs Relativism’ under the influence of Thwaites’ dark and silky Crafty Devil beer.

Although I agreed with his position favouring relativism over absolutism, I felt cheated by the quality of the argument. X vs Y presupposes equal weight will be given to both sides. But it wasn’t. In fact I couldn’t recognise any difference in the presentation of absolutism from authoritarianism, but there was plenty of favour for relativism through the denigration of absolutism, particular in reference to the examples cited which were all based on a fundamentalist view of religious thought.

As an atheistic agnostic I have no time for supporting such views, but it wasn’t right to characterise all absolutism with that single brush.

Moreover, I felt – as is often the case I am finding – that the binary presentation of things was in itself at fault. And here’s why.

It is my opinion that we – as civil society – intuitively need the absolute rule of law just to get by. This is why we are, on the whole, happy to consent to it. That doesn’t mean all laws are right all of the time, but they offer a framework that applies to all fairly (putting the financial aspects of the role of lawyers aside). We want to live in a world where there’s some order which prevents others from stealing from our homes or endangering our loved ones etc.

So I contest some absolutes are accepted, not entirely and not always in all circumstances, but mostly. Another example would be the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You might feel they’re not worth the paper they’re written on. Perhaps, but with an ideal of what is shared as acceptable behaviour for individuals and states, then the building blocks of civil society is built on potentially immoral quick-sand. With the UDHR there’d probably be no Amnesty International and without Amnesty or Human Rights Watch more abusers might well get away with an awful lot more. Today’s moral ideals could shape tomorrow’s laws.

Of course, an absolute right might be the status quo the next one day, enshrined by law as with the suffragette moving or gay rights. These weren’t universally accepted as absolute rights and in some places still aren’t. But social and cultural advance sees the ideals of a few become the absolute rights of potentially all.

Having argued that some absolutes work well, I think ALL the rest is relative.

We can see this is many religious texts which have their commandments. These happen to coincide with many of the base ideals of what civil society should be based on – but don’t themselves mean all religous texts ought to form the abolutes themselves.

These absolutes are not absolute for all time, but they‘re also not entirely relative either. As Macke said ‘There are no objective values.’ I agree. A plurality of moral dilemmas and outcomes and circumstances (place, time, cultural heritage, education, moral intelligence and experience) all add up to one’s decision. Some of these decisions will be framed by ‘almost’ absolutes (let’s call them absolute-lite) such as the rule of law or the UDHR. But all others require that we consider the issue at hand ourselves based on our relative standing – the accumulation of our consciousness experiences.

Thinking along this line, I tried to trap Prof. Billington, asking in which camp would he place utilitarianism. Categorically he replied relativist. Regrettably we moved on to another question before I could counter whether he thought the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number was a good absolute.

Frankly, I don’t care because the answer IMO, if there is one, is that it is a bit of both – the plural.

I think it was wrong to give absolutism a reputation of purely being irrational authoritarianism, even if I believe that the vast majority of moral choices are relative. We ran out time before I could posit the thought experiment that if ‘one day we woke up and found all views on moral issues were good (not only of intent but outcome) but absolute – would he still favour relativism?’

On the face of it absolutism in its rawest form doesn’t make any sense. But absolutism-lite does. The two are different and the latter is not relativism.

‘Through a Glass Darkly’ happens also to be one of my favourite Ingmar Bergman movies. Now there’s a sentence you don’t see every day.

The next pub philosophy meet will be on November 15^th (usual time 7.30pm at the Rose & Crown in Tintern). Tim Cross is offering an ‘All you can eat’ buffet of modern philosophical thought, focusing mostly on his special areas of interest (conceptual philosophy and linguistics).

Adding the ‘th’ to ought

Another month, another philosophy circle meet. This time it was Prof. Ray Billington on the ‘Philosophy of Ought’.

His evening of ale, anecdote and debate focused less on logic and meta-ethics and more on the moral implications of the word. He offered 3 differing definitions of ‘ought’.

Firstly, ‘ought’ as the expression of expectation based on experience (derived from probability and suitability).

Secondly there was what one ought to do in terms of conduct, that is, a qualitative instruction normally offered in one’s interest, probably with the expectation of a positive outcome. This last definitive runs into the third, with ‘ought’ being a moral obligation inherited from some authority.

The latter begs the question from where does this moral obligation arise? On what authority is ‘ought’ assigned?

As usual God came up a lot. I guess that’s omnipotence in action. But as an atheist/agnostic, I put that aside, rejecting the very idea of a supernatural moral authority as a premise worthy of pursuit. There was, however, an interesting segment on whether one could logically arise ‘ought’ out of an ‘is’. For example: Jesus IS perfect and we therefore ‘ought’ to follow his example. Why? Or, just because God is our creator does not necessarily mean we ‘ought’ to follow his bidding.

No, ought, to me and a few other Darwinians (we shall call them, heathens they shall call us) in the room saw ‘ought’ as a manufactured expression of compulsion. It is an idea of what the self feels compelled by or what we feel should compel others.

I offered the example that although we could not know, it is highly unlikely that animals have a concept of ‘ought’, even those that are comparatively complex and intelligent, such as apes.  This would therefore show that is probably only something that we exhibit out of our own creation. As highly sophisticated animals, we have created the idea of ‘ought’ but it does not mean that ‘ought’ exists, in terms of a moral obligation. I felt pretty much the same about ‘time’ last month.

I used the brain in the vat example. Dave – our brain in the vat – wakes up each morning and says ‘Blimey, I really ought to do 50 push-ups each morning.’ Here we see the idea of the compulsion, but the inability for Dave to actually achieve it. But this makes the idea of what Dave ought to do no less compelling.

Some offered that ‘ought’ requires a capability and goal. That’s fine, but it is still only the expression of a compulsion, and – like most expressions – once the context of a self among many selves is added, the expression of the desire and ability to achieve it will differ from person to person to end up so internalised in one’s own reality as to be virtually meaningless.

Ayer says this kind of ‘ought’ all comes down to personal interest. And this is where the assertion of ‘ought’ might be, we Darwinians felt, a hang-over from our compulsion to merely survive. As usual, there was a rumble of discontent amongst our number and crass remarks about Richard Dawkins’ ‘Selfish Gene’, which he himself declared dissatisfaction with (as a title) in his Introduction to Robert Axelrod’s ‘The Evolution of Co-Operation’, which I still haven’t read – I guess I really ought to…

Anyway, IMO the issue came down to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Again. This is an expression of what drives man. The base needs are those required of survival: food, water, shelter etc. and as society becomes more advanced and affluent, we have the liberty of time and actualisation of self to start considering.  Historically, ‘ought’ may well have been tied up first with obligation to the group or clan, a higher need that pure self-survival, but this can still be interpreted as part of the wider survival mechanism.

Then, as man becomes more complex and starts on this thing we call civilisation we move up the needs chart to actualise abstract ideas based on our reflection of self and wider (society). Or, in social systems, the conduct inherited through the system itself.

With a nod to Ockham, this explains the misinterpreting of the compulsion quite well without having to magic-up a supernatural (or otherwise) higher authority on whose bidding we ought to follow. Don’t over-complicate things – the simplest answer is probably the most likely. If unpalatable as the Richard Dawkins’-bashers misunderstood.

My question to Ray was: ‘Who do we betray most if we ignore what we ought to do – the idea of ought or our free will?’

I never got a satisfactory answer (why would I possibly expect one from a Professor of Philosophy?) and as soon as we had thrown free will into the mix there was no discerning whether ‘ought’ fed into free will or arises in spite of it. At one point, however, someone from the floor reminded us that it was Kant who said (something like) ‘because we have a sense of ought, we have free will’. I am not sure I have enough understanding of his intensions here, but it does suggest that ‘ought’ feeds into free will and that Kant accepts ‘ought’ as an idea.

Trying to understand a moral meaning of ‘ought’ was, to me, as futile an exercise as asking ‘what is good?’ No wonder utilitarianism came into discussion at one point.  And the question of whether ought can arise from an IS, presupposes that ‘ought’ is itself a valid moral construct, which I cannot see it is. As Mark pointed out it is probably nothing more than a neurotic dilemma.

Oh, and just to be clear, I accept but am not entirely satisfied with the clumsy use of ought which can be used to express an expectation of the outcome of some test, as witnessed by some earlier evidence. But this is just a fuzzy version of IF / THEN logic. With morality being amongst the most fuzzy things in philosophy and, indeed, life – ‘ought’ of that kind belongs, IMO, in the dustbin marked ‘words surplus to requirement’.

Debate over. Now we really ought to move on to something else…

The next meet is our annual garden party, with the next regular meeting at 27^th September with Prof. John Clarke talking on Bertrand Russell and Francis Bacon, both of whom have a link with Tintern (with Russell being born just up the road) and thus the talk/meet will form part of the Tintern Festival. Meetings kick off at 7.30pm and normally take place in the Rose & Crown pub, in Tintern.

The Ontological nature of Time – or Time the sham

Last night’s pub philosophy meeting (of the Tintern Philosophy Circle) was a talk on ‘A brief history of thought on the subject of Time’ by Prof. Bob Clarke of the National Physics Laboratory.

For the first time, I left a philosophy meet with the same opinion I had when I arrived.

And that is: time is merely a tool we have created to comprehend space.

Moreover, accuracy in measurement is no reason to believe time exists in itself – it is merely an articulation of something else; it does not mean that it is a thing of its own. What IS, are events. We measure the motion of events with something we have called time.

Events occur in space. The space exists and events occur in the space. As I offered in the meeting  - when someone mentioned sub-conscious time and the necessity of a viewer to create time –  that Tintern existed before any of us did, was there with the dinosaurs and pre-organic life. We might measure the time from those events and we can do this by digging into the ground with archaeology, but the events exists nonetheless, it didn’t need us to observe time for it to happen.

Similarly, the space Tintern takes up – albeit currently on Earth – will experience events forever, event after Tintern and the Earth is gone. (Here I allude to the premise and my opinion that space is still space, not vacuum, at sub-atomic level there is still something, even if in our language and science we measure that something as something akin to nothing).

Space is measured in  three dimensions (H x W x L) – these together can form a fourth dimension; you can do this on a scrap of paper by drawing a line for height, then a connected line for width and finally its length. Join all these together and you end up with a 4^th dimension – the cube. IMO space is a bite out of an area where events take place. We didn’t have, um, time to go too much into space and time, focusing on the history of thought on time, but certainly when quantum mechanics came into being, I was starting to wish Ockham was in the room, to shout ‘time’ as a landlord does, not as a quantum mechanical physicist might.

Indeed, Bob offered us a bit of Kant which worked for me and that was that our rational understanding of the world is very limited, and often we stretch it beyond our capabilities (and reality perhaps?) and then Schrodinger’s equation in quantum mechanics appeared. The spirit of Ockham sighed with me and we took a long slurp of our Abbots Ale. But lo, along came the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to save us…

This supposition declares that the state of the universe does NOT evolve with time – time is absent (=0 instead of Schrodinger’s t at the end of his equation in quantum mechanics) from the equation; the universe never changes, as Parmenides stated a very, um, long time ago.

Great; this seems to add intellectual weight to my hunch that time is not fundamental to the universe and that, rather it is an emergent characteristic of it – something we have created to articulate a series of events. As much as there is no present (because it has gone before we’re able to place a flag on it) – it is just an articulation of the zeitgeist at best, something for our simple minds to cope with (and that works, which is fine, if untrue) – time itself is a fabrication.

As usual the questions segment started slowly. Because I agreed with what I think Bob felt was true about time not really being anything other that a handy tool for measurement, I decided to offer a question which backed up my opinion.

‘So, Bob – and I think we’re of one mind here on the topic of time as a useful means of measuring things – if we put aside that for one minute, that is, we accept that, what OTHER use is it?’

Bob’s answer wandered around measurements and sat navs for a while and trailed off to a place that seemed to acknowledge there was none. I thought this re-stated the case that it is nothing more than a means of measuring events.

Some of our number, however, were – as Bob pointed out with his remark about ‘time’ being the most commonly-written noun in the English language (with ‘year’ and ‘day’ being 3^rd and 5^th) – still struggling with the claim that seemed to be arising that time did not exist. Marie (I think it was) said that she saw it every morning when she looked in the mirror.

I responded that what you see is the events that make up the rush to death, not time. Time is what we measure it in (years), the events occur irrespective of the measure. Bob cited Newton and that time and space is immense and eternal and that it was God that created it (or did he say that was/is God? He lost me there as neither God nor time are concepts which exist to me). I agree that events will occur eternally and that space is endless (Buzz Lightyear’s ‘To infinity and beyond!’ comes to mind)  and that, again, it is our need to cope with that mind-bending reality which, as Kant suggest, is actually so beyond us, we create a language (in words, mathematical theory, cosmology and physics) to comprehend it. And we do so in error.

Furthermore, Bob suggested that, ironically, the more physicists knew about time, the more fuzzy and elusive it became. Which it naturally would do, if it doesn’t actually exist.  For example, his reading of the 2008 competition for the world’s leading theoretical physicists on ‘The Nature of Time’ saw a plurality of interesting possibilities, rather than a synergy of evidence and consolidation of post-Einsteinian theory.

Indeed, the most impressive opinion that Bob had all night, I thought, was when he said ‘Science (physics) needs philosophy.’ It might just give us cause to ponder the nature of the question, rather than seek purely the answer.

Ps. The next Tintern Philosophy Circle (pub philosophy) is on 19^th July (always the 3^rd Tuesday, except in August, when there’s a garden party) and is on ‘The meaning of ought (and on what authority do we say it and what do we mean?)’ with Prof. Ray Billington at 7.30pm. See you there.

Review: ‘All Quiet on the Orient Express’

by Magnus Mills

This remarkable novel deals with the love of labour. And it does so uniquely. Imagine William Morris writing Emmerdale, all wrapped up in with a Wickerman touch of paranoia.

All Quiet on the Orient Express takes as its main theme the efforts of one man seeking to employ himself creatively in spite his newly borne freedom. In this sense it is an existential work but in an incredibly banal yet paradoxically readable way. Apparently on his way to travel to India, our protagonist is diverted by one and then another job for Mr. Parker, owner of the campsite he happened to be staying on come end of season. The endlessness of the chores recall Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance, but this is a thoroughly English book and it is as interested in the value of work as it is in the absurdist, Kafkaesque situation.

In some senses the novel is a frank piece of rather old-fashioned social realism – imagine kitchen sink transposed to the twisty lanes and farmyard fronts of the Lake District a la Postman Pat or Whistle Down the Wind. But there’s a twist to this texture where on the surface of things nothing much happens at all. For example, one of the most dramatic moments is when our quiet antihero is painting a gate and a visiting milkman accidently knocks it over spilling its contents all over the roadway. He makes the best he can of a bad job by turning the splodge spillage into a green square and that’s just what this book is about: the struggle to be creative in one’s work despite the attempts (deliberate or otherwise) to disrupt the quiet peace of crafting an end-product. And, from a narrative perspective, the incident is an important one.

The mystery of local folk, especially Bryan in his cardboard crown and the various sidelines of Mr. Parker are both captivating, and the characterisation excellent.

The feel of its setting – the Lake District and, most notably its pubs – and of local, rural Britain is pervasive and, I’m sure for any British socialist, the book is contagious in its depiction of the leisure found in creative labour or being at rest while at work, as well as being at true rest (boat-rowing on the lakes or evenings at a warm pub playing darts with plenty of Topham’s Ex on tap).

On the other hand, the noise of interpersonal relationships and common misunderstandings disrupt this pleasure. Indeed, the coy politeness of our protagonist is the reason why he takes on so many tasks of which hold scant personal gain and it is this that often sees him exploited. These are things that spoil the beauty of the realm of physical, creative work. It is the labour itself that rewards the worker with a reduction of his world, personality and anxieties, no its capital value. It’s like gardening – the people’s art; a love of life through labour.

Interestingly, it wasn’t Marx, Morris nor Engels but a Cistercian Abbot (Andre Louf) who once wrote ‘We must work with some material substance that resists us, and against which we have to pit ourselves to reshape it.’ [1] Just as Magnus Mills has crafted a book of deceptively simple words and slender paragraphs, our protagonist labours before us fashioning a work of brilliant social realism, deadpan humour and life-enriching fiction. Indeed, I immediately sought out more Mills, which is as a reader has to be the best kind of recommendation.

[1 cited in Tobias Jones’ ‘Utopian Dreams’ (Faber & Faber, 2007)]

Misunderstanding Syd

It appears to me that perhaps our misunderstanding of Syd Barrett is symptomatic of our inability to cope with psychiatric issues writ large.

A precocious child, Syd was deeply affected by the sudden death of his father, at the age of 15. Since the age of 11 young Syd (Roger then) was a diary obsessive and never missed a day, until that day his father passed away. This is one aspect not usually discussed when reviewing Syd, with most reviews overwhelmingly presenting a single dimension to his madness: Syd – the acid casualty.

Musically Syd’s tastes were The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Booker T. & the MG’s. These are all obvious now, but in the early 60’s the reputation of each of this was not what it is today. Elvis was the biggest name on the pop scene, a scene which hadn’t long emerged from the base of simplistic Rock’n’Roll. Nevertheless, Syd’s Beatle obsession, in particular, meant he too wanted to be a pop star and, with a musical family, playing guitar in a band was a natural progression of that desire.

By mid-’67 Syd’s LSD consumption was ‘awesome[i]’ and it fuelled both his song-writing and improvisation, and the nightmarish backlash. By the time Floyd had released their second single (See Emily Play, the first being Arnold Layne) his own sister could see that the anti-psychotic drug had already got under his skin: ‘The next time I saw him he’d changed so much that I couldn’t reach him. The brother I knew had disappeared.’[ii]

EMI pressed for an album and the resultant long-player was The Piper At The Gates of Dawn, a title stolen from The Wind in the Willows. A strange album which both starts and practically finishes the brief neon glow of the British psychedelic scene, Piper also perfectly juxtaposes Syd’s penchant for surprisingly listenable folkish child-like ditties (Scarecrow, Bike and The Gnome, for example) with sonic evocations of the Floyd’s UFO appearances. Personally, my favourite is Lucifer Sam with its Bond-like rhythm and powerful drumming pushing along scratchy guitars, but Pete Townsend of The Who was not impressed: ‘I thought it {the album} was fucking awful…it was like bubblegum – Mickey Mouse music – and I thought the guy who produced it was a tosser’.

If the album was confused, it presented Syd perfectly. Or did it? Syd saw himself primarily as an artist and music had become just another media for him; at its essence it was the act of creating and improvising which interested him most. He loved freedom and loathed structure. We see this in his inability to cohere in both later live and studio settings. Indeed, he became obnoxiously impossible to work with and David Gilmour – originally brought in to stand-in for the useless Syd – became the band’s saviour, as well as Syd’s own creative executor/producer making the barest sense of insanity. We can hear this in Syd’s two moorish solo albums: Barrett and The Madcap Laughs.

We heard Syd’s world fall apart in the Floyd’s second LP closer (Jugband Blues) but it was swinging sixties pop model Lynsey Korner who felt its wrath, as his trips became increasing violent. His violence was only surpassed by his  reclusiveness and strange behaviour. Clearly, he needed psychiatric help. Yet when Syd died, his family said (see Wikipedia page for Syd for citation) that he had never received treatment or even a programme of therapy for his behaviour, even though he was admitted for respite care on a few occasions. Nevertheless, at the time he needed care and help the most, his actions had already lost him all the friends a person needs to help them through such a traumatic experience as a psychological breakdown. Instead, a steady stream of hangers-on and groupies kept him occupied, frustrated and fuelled with mandrax and LSD.

On the whole, though, Syd’s life is lamented by friends and colleagues in a positive light, remembering the Roger Keith Sydney Barrett who jumped for joy outside EMI on their signing a record deal. Gilmour said in 1982: “It’s just a sad, sad thing; a very nice and talented person who just disintegrated.”[iii] And, for sure, even though we hear him as he was when he was at his most objectionable to those friends and colleagues, we also are shaken by a rare fragile musical experience.

His surrealistic stream of consciousness writing – not equalled in my mind until Stephen Malkmus in both his Pavement and solo work – was more than just mere random jumbles; in every other phrase there was a vulnerability unique to his sadness and failure.

The desire for success and fame which Syd originally sought soon turned out to feed only the unrelenting addiction of a record company’s insistence on successive successful singles. Syd wasn’t prepared for that, couldn’t do that, and was still young when his mind gave up on him.

Fans’ desire to seek him out and be part of the myth also fed his anxieties. He retreated to solitude and painting. While they craved Syd’s return to the studio, Syd simply chain-smoked and watched TV, wanting to be forgotten and to forget.

Townsend got it right, I think, when he remarked that the story of Syd should ignore the myths and realise that, in fact, ‘Syd was someone with psychotic tendencies who by using too much LSD pushed himself over the edge.’ – by psychotic tendencies, he means personality disorder.

Syd when he turned up to Floyd's WISH YOU WERE HERE sessions

The human mind is a terribly romantic notion. Insanity gives us a glimpse of existential freedom so repulsively uncivilised, it enraptures our own, sane, imaginations. But once we admit this, we find that Syd’s story is really quite straightforward. And it is probably all the more tragic because of it.

A story comes out in 1990, published in The Guardian: “One day, not long ago, Syd visited his brother-in-law Paul Breen, who runs a Cambridge hotel. Sitting in the hotel office, Syd’s attention was drawn to his brother-in-law’s guitar lying in a corner of the room. At one point Mr Breen was called away. On his return he found Syd holding the guitar and gently strumming a tune. Realising he’d been caught red-handed, Syd dropped the instrument like a stone and turned away sheepishly…[iv]”

This story annoys the shit out of me as the book it featured in (which inspired this blog entry) has just set itself the task of putting to bed Syd myths and restraining Syd-spotters.  It ends instead with a rallying call for them. Anyone who has ever played even a bit of music will innately know that the instinctive nature of instruments is to lure you in. Playing music is irresistible. What Syd’s actions shows in this story is that the instinct is still there, even if he remained ashamed of his own professional musical career. The two are entirely different things.

Syd died in 2006 at the age of 60 from pancreatic cancer.

---

[i] ‘Crazy Diamond: Syd Barrett & the Dawn of Pink Floyd’ by M. Watkinson & P. Anderson (Omnibus Press, 1991)

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

East Germany & the Fall of Communism

Reflecting on the failure of the socialist dream people like his own communist parents had subscribed to, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg wrote in a 1994 poem [1] that ‘Research has shown Socialism to be a universal failure wherever practiced by secret police’.

This, to me, is at the nub of the problem with 20^th Century socialism.

Now, however, at the juncture of the greatest crises of capitalism since the Great Depression, is it time for communism to rehabilitate itself?

The best example for us in the West of the dream gone sour is that of the former GDR (DDR or East Germany) – the Soviet satellite that found itself the frontier of the Cold War, both on its border (with West Germany) and in its capital, Berlin – divided geographically and ideologically.

In the last decade there have been a number of examples that have shown us an East Germany shaped only by the Stasi. Works like ‘The Death of Lenin’ or ‘The Lives of Others’, both brilliant movies, but both pedalling only a single thread of the wider story that was day-to-day life in the GDR. Then there have been journalistic forays into a state held captive in both Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’ and even the BBC’s own ‘Lost World of Communism’. All these rightfully question the role of the state and the individual, and offer many cases of terrible injustice and oppression. But I feel the idea of an ideology in crisis is not explored. The examples merely qualify the statement I cited earlier from Ginsberg. Those works don’t widen the debate.

Other publications, like ‘Stasi Hell or Workers’ Paradise? Socialism in the German Democratic Republic – What Can We Learn from It?’ and the Stasi Museum’s own ‘GDR Guide’, give fuller examples of everyday life for quiet conformists. They offer a narrative that living in a police state was not actually the main experience of life for the overwhelming majority, even if the culture it bred created its framework. This is not to revise, forgive or ignore those state crimes but we must be mindful that we witness the GDR from a purely Western perspective.

I am also mindful, however, of Rowan Williams’ Easter address this April where he picked up on the point that life can be richer than material wealth. A clear admission, perhaps, that the basis of socialism is still a natural human desire for many people, though they’d never call it that.

And Rowan Williams isn’t the first man of faith to recognise our principles…

Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable utilization of the means of production. It is also concerned with the fate of the working classes–that is, the majority–as well as with the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and Marxism cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation.

…says the Dalai Lama [2]. It might be a bit strange for a Marxist to cite religious leaders, but what I am doing here is trying to highlight the universality of the basis of socialism.

I am not for a second suggesting that everyday life in a police state is better than today’s relative affluence. But following the most recent banking crisis and with public services sliding away from us only to build more profit for the powerful few, the desire for something more humane is widespread. So, I contest we might to do better than to gloat at the dubious humanity of capitalism’s triumph over the Soviet Union, asking of ourselves instead whether can socialism mean more than totalitarianism?

Of course it can.

Show me where the great British socialists William Morris, Engels or Marx even suggest the formation of a police state or the summary arrest of ordinary citizens. You can’t because it doesn’t exist.

The basic premise of socialism is our most precious principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. But even that can only be built on solid ground. The opening remarks of many a revolutionary tract is the need for freedom from our oppressors. Not the freedom to oppress others.

I share the analysis of philosopher (and incumbent International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London), Slavoj Žižek, that the time for the rehabilitation of communism is now. In my opinion, the most important means to achieve this is to publicly denounce the legacy of totalitarianism and divorce it from our own modern British programmes. We have nothing in common with the dictatorships of China or North Korea, though we have everything in common with its people. That seems a good place to start.

Two fundamental aspects of Marx I find lacking in the conduct of socialism are the most important checks that have never been served well by its executors. Firstly, that Marx clearly makes a case for analysing reality in its current context – that things move in struggle and it is only in our understanding of that struggle in its current place in time that we can hope to address it; that means we cannot use early 20^th Century revolutionary means to overthrow the capitalist state of today. But that does not mean the goal has moved but rather that we actively revise Marxist thinking for our own age.

Secondly, and to complement the first point is the issue of self-criticism within the current context. If only Mao had read Orwell’s 1984, then I’d rather think the Cultural Revolution would be one less shame laid erroneously at our door.

Žižek picks up on Lenin’s point [3] that sometimes it is ok to start-over. The road to revolution is not always best achieved from starting from where we left off the last time we had to abandon that road – this leads us only to misinterpret the failure and, ignoring history, repeat the mistakes for generation after generation. If we re-boot from the ground up then we build a new solution from outset in today’s context based on today’s analysis. That might sound like the road to Pol Pot’s year zero but hear me out – I cannot think of any philosopher or scientist worth listening to today who doesn’t see the education of our children as the best way to change the world for the better.

In post-war East Germany, the Soviet’s built up a youth movement to create great patriots of the Soviet. The terrible reality, however, was that, apart from the colour of their neck-ties, its members looked exactly like the Hitler Youth. It seems to me that the issue here is fear: fear of losing popular support. The need to force an ideology on citizens shows a fear that, perhaps, the ideology is not really up to the job of human civility.

I don’t think this is true. I think that if we truly believe in the power of socialism – and in particular our fundamental basis of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” – then its greatest asset is in its freedom to stand proud against the immoral basis of capitalism, and to stand up to scrutiny from our own, let alone our enemies.

A socialist state built by popular support is the true expression of this project we call ‘civilisation’.

The task now is to find a home from which we can build a movement. The ‘British Road to Socialism’ – the programme of the Communist Party of Britain – unlike its less mature SP and SWP programmes, seeks this home in the Labour Party and Trade Union movement. It is under no illusion of power, but it is a compelling reminder that – if we’re honest with ourselves – for the left and true Marxists who can see the job at hand, in its current context, there is only one true place for British socialists.

[1] from ‘Cosmopolitan Greetings’ by Allen Ginsberg (Penguin, 1994)

[2] http://hhdl.dharmakara.net/hhdlquotes1.html#marxism

[3] In his ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce’ (Verso, 2009)

Hume on the nature of our nature

Last night’s talk at the Tintern Pub Philosophy Circle was on the philosopher, David Hume who’s 3^rd centenary of birth is celebrated this year.

Prof. Ray Billington led with a picture of Hume’s life. An atheist or at least agnostic, Ray presented Hume as a man in despair at the conclusions of his life’s work in philosophy. His scepticism leads him to an almost existential crisis: philosophy had failed to explain the nature of man.

‘There is no God. There is no such thing as a soul.’ Were phrases that Ray used to paraphrase Hume’s spiritual position, but where his forbears  – like Berkeley – believed the mind of God gave us our thoughts, the new age of doubt (science, discovery and the reformation) led to a scepticism where the truth needed to be tested from sense experience. Newton presented a testable methodology of observation and experiment which could describe the external world; Hume, having banished the role of God wanted to do the same for the inner world of human nature.

His failure to find success in his philosophical exploration of human nature was the cause of this existential crisis, a crisis of wisdom no less.

My understanding of John Clarke’s presentation has me summarising the problem as…

Hume concluded that we cannot truly know reality, only our perception of it.

Dissatisfied, he only finally found peace of mind in the fact that the machine of nature itself enables us – as part of nature – to save ourselves from this scepticism.

The world of objects exists beyond us. Nature has endowed us with the means to accept causation in the world which cannot be truly proven. It is benign if not good. And it works as an acceptable consolation for philosophy’s failure to test reality.

Hume therefore is kind of a pre-Darwin Darwinian: nature has given us the natural instinct that the universe is regular – but philosophy can’t prove it – that is the nature of nature. And that’s something even we atheists can believe in.