Faithy-ism

I should really know better than to bother fisking Theo Hobson, but, well, he’s at it again:

Atheism is pretentious in the sense of claiming to know more than it does.

You mean, that there are no gods when actually there are? Nope:

It claims to know what belief in God entails, and what religion, in all its infinite variety, essentially is.

Um. I’ll come back to this.

And atheism is muddled because it cannot decide on what grounds it ultimately objects to religion. Does it oppose it on the grounds of its alleged falsity? Or does it oppose it on the grounds of its alleged harmfulness? Both, the atheists will doubtless reply: religion is false and therefore it is harmful.

You might think that a challenge that has a “doubtless” reply isn’t so much of a muddle. Oh well.

But this is to make an assumption about the relationship between rationality and moral progress that does not stand up.

It seems to me more an assumption about the relationship between falsity and harmfulness. And often it’s an explicit argument rather than an assumption.

Atheism is the belief that the demise of religion, and the rise of "rationality", will make the world a better place.

Does anyone mind if I just say “oh no it isn’t” here, so we can keep things moving along? Thanks.

Atheism therefore entails an account of history - a story of liberation from a harmful error called "religion".

If ‘the world would be better if there were less X’ entails ‘world history has involved (or henceforth will involve) a reduction in the amount of X’, then I’m very much mistaken about the nature of logic and/or history.

Some will quibble with the above definition. Atheism is just the rejection of God, of any supernatural power, they will say, it entails no necessary belief in historical progress. This is disingenuous. The militant atheists have a moral mission: to improve the world by working towards the eradication of religion.

Ah. So there’s something called ‘militant atheism’, which from the qualifier one might guess is something different from atheism per se. You know, if only there were some sort of word that meant disbelief in gods, then we could use it in articles and discussions without people wondering what the bloody hell we were on about.

What is this thing that the atheists hate so much? What is religion? Believe it or not, I don't know the answer. … If the atheist deigns to define religion at all, he is likely to do so briskly and conventionally, as belief in and worship of some species of supernatural power. It's a terribly inadequate definition.

Well, I don’t know if I can speak for atheists; I’m just someone who thinks there aren’t any supernatural beings. And what I hate is terrorism, malaria, jam jars that you can’t open, the excess of ad breaks on TV these days and waffly obscurantist third-rate sophistry.

In my terribly inadequate opinion, a religion is something that involves some sort of belief in the supernatural. Religion may also involve meetings, institutions, set texts, communal culture, architecture, arias, contemplation, charity and violence, but then you can have all of those things without religion. And I don’t really hate those things (except violence).

In reality, "religion" is far wider than a belief in a supernatural power. This is only one aspect of what we mean by "religion".

Agreed. And the supernatural aspect is that which is distinctive to religion; it’s what religion “essentially is”. And the belief that I’d like to but apparently can’t call atheism is distinctive for its rejection of a supernatural creator. Beyond this basic disagreement, there is indeed an “infinite variety” to the types of outlook held by religious believers – and the outlooks held by atheists.

The… relationship between religion, morality and politics is infinitely various and complex. The critic of religious abuses must be specific, particular. He must focus on particular practices, particular institutions, and explain why they have a detrimental effect on society. But the militant atheist cannot humbly limit himself to the realm of the particular; he necessarily lapses into sloppy generalisation. For he has to insist that religion in general is harmful, all of it, always.

Specificity is good for clarity. And everyone will agree that religions at times deserve specific criticisms. But acknowledging this doesn’t preclude the possibility of a general argument that the social effects of religion may be likely to be bad overall (no, not “all of it, always”).

I consider the atheist's desire to generalise about religion to be a case of intellectual cowardice. The intellectual coward is one who chooses simplicity over complexity and difficulty.

You might say the same about the desire to generalise about atheism. Is this guy being paid to satirise himself?

OK, fisking over. Undeserved substantive response follows.

There’s a Steven Weinberg quote that Richard Dawkins is fond of:

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

There’s some truth in this, but there are two things wrong with it. First, religion can indeed make good people do evil things – but certainly not in all cases. In many cases it can make evil people (and we should really say ‘nasty’ rather than ‘evil’, which is a bit all-or-nothing) do good things. In fact, religious belief systems, once acquired, have general motivational power: they can make people do all sorts of things they weren’t previously inclined to.

The second point is that this isn’t just true of religion. Any belief system can have motivational power, for good or for ill or for whatever. Secular political ideologies, if held with uncritical zealotry, and pursued with disregard to the consequences, can be monstrous and catastrophic. If held with a scepticism about means and a willingness to question ends, they can motivate great good.

So, what characteristics of a belief system could lead it to tending towards intolerant, fanatical, unthinking closed-mindedness, thus producing bad results? Here are a few suggestions:

• Being based around an authority (in the form of either a leader or a text); it may perhaps be acceptable to question the authority, but these questions are not permitted to lead to rejection.
• Favouring believers over unbelievers, saying that the latter are less deserving of good treatment in this world and/or that the former will be rewarded and the latter punished in a subsequent world.
• Relying on doctrines that resist empirical disproof.
• Encouraging or demanding assent without clearly reasoned supportive arguments.

Of course there are other risk factors (ethnic tribalism, sanctioning of violence), but the above, I think, are likely to be more common in supernaturally based belief systems – particularly more organised and institutional ones.

Happy ‘National British Day’ Day!

Sigh…

A national day to promote a stronger sense of British identity, and prevent communities from becoming more divided, has been suggested by two ministers. Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly and Immigration Minister Liam Byrne say it could be a new bank holiday. Ms Kelly told the BBC: "The point of it would be to celebrate the contribution that we all make to society."

It would be easy to mock an idea such as this. So easy, in fact, that it would make falling off a log look like the kind of skilled work that we’d have to recruit eastern European migrant workers to deal with. But instead, I shall do my patriotic best to suggest possible themes for the new national day.

Post-Imperial Day: Inspired by Dean Acheson’s remark that “Britain has lost an empire, but not yet found a role”, excited townsfolk will spend the day hunting for rolls that the local baker has hidden. On other people’s land.

The Initia-nativity: The nation celebrates the birth of another spur-of-the-moment politician’s hare-brained scheme by going out into the woods and braining a hare.

Yank Holiday: Fourth of July festivities to mark getting rid of America.

Hog Man, Eh?: A day to mark the national obesity crisis by sitting at home with several kilos of ice cream and pie, making pigs of ourselves.

Who Do You Think You Are Month: A BBC production crew dressed as policemen will burst into a celebrity’s house and interrogate him or her without charge for 28 days about possible terrorism-related identity fraud. Viewers will have their own personal celebrations by sending each other brightly coloured Identity Cards (available at all good stationers and newsagents) with endearing messages such as ‘I love you cos you’re British’ and ‘Fellow citizens 4 ever’.

Brand New Day: A solemn morning of contemplation and weeping to mark the unveiling of the London 2012 Olympic logo. In the afternoon, things move up a gear with the ritual burning of a branding consultant in a giant wicker torch. This idea may be one for the long term, as the contractors say the bunting won’t be ready until 2017.

Grumpily Mourning Mythical Past Day: The populace gathers together in village halls, pubs, post offices and asylum detention centres to moan about how life is so much worse than it was when they were younger. The staff of the Daily Mail will treat revellers to a rendition of ‘Things ain’t what they used to be’. Although last year the Mail on Sunday team was there as well, and there was a Victoria sponge cake race. But now Health and Safety says it’s not allowed.

Islam O’Faux Beer Weekend: Marking the contribution to national life of the British Muslim Community, the citizenry shall gather together in Irish theme pubs and swig pints together – alcohol-free, of course!! – until a moment of perfect cohesion is achieved.

Q-Day: Following the popular success of D-Day and VE Day, this continues the World War II theme by celebrating how people waited patiently in line with their ration books .

VD Day: Twenty-four hours of wanton, indiscriminate copulation to enhance public understanding of the growing spread of sexually transmitted infections.

TV Day: A dozen contestants are locked in a house where they will watch live reality footage of the remaining 60,776,225 members of the UK population (excluding Davina McCall) and send text messages to evict the least British.

Black Wednesday: To celebrate the UK’s racial diversity and leading role in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the nation will (ironically!) black up and congregate on the White Cliffs of Dover (also blacked up), where they will symbolically drop pound coins into the sea. Norman Lamont will lead a chorus of ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’.

Slack Monday: Tired, bored and slightly hung over from the weekend, a proud nation doesn’t get very much done at work.

Shallowe’en: A 15-minute televisual extravaganza to stifle awareness of how the media have dumbed down. In association with ITV Evening News. Will provoke silent contemplation about whether the ad break in the middle will be long enough for a trip to the loo, or whether we’ll all just have to soil ourselves on our stupid flat-pack sofas and then be able to blame it on the dog.

Eff Off Back Where You Came From Week: On the proven assumption that people can only properly integrate when they feel secure in their own historical culture, all people of foreign extraction will be deported so that they can get in touch with their roots. Everyone remaining in the country will spend the week having a giant British National Party, with little sausages on sticks, morris dancing and gay-bashing.

Make History Poverty: In this summer party, youngsters congregate in Hyde Park where rock stars will discourage them from understanding the past properly.

Di Another Day: Diana, Princess of Wales, will still no longer be alive.

Any better ideas?

Bartlett quits White House

Couldn’t resist it.

Religious motives in politics

Johann Hari wonders:

when there are so many Murdochian pressures on a British Prime Minister dragging them to the right, pressing him to fellate the rich, isn't it good to have a counterveiling pressure to help the poor - even a superstitious one? If religion drives Brown's best instincts and whittles down his worst, should we still condemn it?
Hmmm. Perhaps the more important question is - can we have this benign, pro-poor element of some of Jesus' teaching, without all the other abhorrent lessons his religion brings?

Chris Dillow is sceptical:

First, religious-based arguments don’t permit the possibility of persuasion. If a Christian says: “the Biblical prophets tell us to help the poor” an opponent could reply: “the Bible has no authority, as God doesn’t exist.” And the debate stops there.
Redistributive policies then become merely a way of the Christian imposing his private beliefs onto others.

While I’m as firmly an atheist as Chris (and Johann), I don’t agree. True, religiously based arguments aren’t going to carry weight with people not of that religion. But they will work on people who are of that religion, who will nonetheless have a range of political views. Look at the USA, where in recent years Christians have used religious arguments for intervention in Darfur, increasing development aid, fighting climate change, intervention in Iraq, restricting abortion rights, weakening science education… it’s a mixed bag.

But religion has persuasive power and, given that it won’t be disappearing any time soon, I don’t see why progressive atheists should eschew alliances with those who support progressive policies on religious grounds.

As for whether this is “the Christian imposing his private beliefs onto others”, you could equally say that a left-wing atheist would like to impose his private beliefs onto others by voting for redistributive policies. Fortunately, in a liberal democracy, we all (ideally) have equal impositional powers. We’d all like the world to be the way we’d like it to be. Persuade. Organise. Compromise. That’s politics.

Chris continues:

Secondly, religiously motivated arguments assume that one party has superior access to a “truth.” This surely is a strange thing for an egalitarian to believe.
Thirdly, religious appeals undersell equality, as there are countless secular ways to argue for it

I don’t agree with the second point, either: it’s not inegalitarian to say that knowledge is meritocratic. Some people just are better informed about some, or many, things.

On his third point, though, I quite agree (in fact, I think religious appeals undersell not just equality but morality in general, by subordinating it to a god). But if the aim is to persuade, then you have to push the buttons that work. Certainly, exclusively overtly religious campaigns won’t get you very far in the UK, at least). But it’s quite a jump to then conclude that it’s not good to ally with people who are motivated to share your policies on religious grounds, and who may be able to reach people that you cannot.

Chris adds:

In an egalitarian polity, in which people should be persuaded rationally of policies, religion should have no place – even if it is true. Religion might motivate political beliefs, but it shouldn’t, and needn’t, be the public justification for them.

Needn’t, certainly. Shouldn’t, ideally. But in a liberal democractic polity, people should be free to air their views and their reasons for holding those views – whether religious or not.

The trouble, though, comes when a group presents a religiously motivated policy not primarily to succeed in making that policy more popular so that it will be implemented, but with the aim of boosting a group identity. ‘Ra-worshippers for lower VAT’ might well try to get people to vote for VAT cuts. But they might also use the issue to establish their status as a politically important section of society – and in doing so, society may fragment that little bit more. And then it will be that little bit harder to have open, rational policy debates.

And then, of course, ‘Ra-worshippers for child labour’ might carry more clout next time round. If a religion is a mixed bag, then strengthening the people holding it may not turn out well.

(See also Norm Geras’s and Jonathan Derbyshire’s responses to Chris.)

Faulty epistemology in Sri Lanka

The debate about ‘multiculturalism’ takes on a particular urgency in Sri Lanka. Nira Wickramasinghe reports that the debate there is on whether Sri Lanka is “a multicultural country where all ‘ethnic identities’ should be equally recognised and protected” or “a Sinhala Buddhist country where other identities (principally the Tamil, though there is a significant Muslim population in the country too) are subsumed in this larger Buddhist culture and hence need only to be tolerated”.

She argues:

While I accept the need for respect and space for all forms of identity, I feel we should try to move away from an overtly cultural understanding of identities. The curse of multiculturalism is that while providing for more freedom and recognition to the group or community it is a closure in that it denies the contingency and ambiguity of every identity. Multiculturalism cannot help but essentialise the fragment. …
Much debate on how to resolve the ‘ethnic conflict’ in Sri Lanka is dominated by a faulty epistemology where it is assumed that each group ‘has’ some kind of culture and that the boundaries between these groups and the contours of their cultures - namely the Sinhalese and the Tamils - are specifiable and easy to depict.

So, essentialising the cultural fragments in individuals leads towards fragmenting the essence of the country.

People often complain that party-based democracy (despite its practical merits) provides too sparse and stale a choice of set menus. The same is true of community-based culture. Across the world, nations are diverse in their populations; people have to accept this. But we have to do so without neglecting the human diversity to be found within individuals.

‘Find x’

Daft exam answers.

Click. Read. Laugh.

Independence and resentment

The Institute for Public Policy Research has set up an ‘Independent Commission on National Security in the 21st Century’. Fair enough; should be interesting. But in the coverage of it, I read: “It will also publish an independent national security strategy.”

This phrase is taken from the IPPR press release, but doesn’t appear in the more detailed description [PDF] of the commission’s purpose – so I’d guess it’s just the product of an IPPR press officer.

Which is good, because this talk about being “independent” is a bit daft and can be kind of weaselly too. You can see it most clearly in the phrase “independent foreign policy”. You know exactly what this is getting at: Bush is bad and Blair’s been too close to him. (This mirrors right-wing talk about “national sovereignty” vis-à-vis the EU.)

But is it remotely possible for a country like the UK (or even, frankly, the US) to have an effective foreign policy that’s formulated and implemented independently of allies and international institutions? And is this a respectable position for people who think of themselves as internationalists and who deplore American unilateralism at every turn?

Do they want a ‘not-in-my-name’ foreign policy along the lines of the alternate sulking and posturing that Chirac so excelled at?

Furthermore, I doubt that anyone – Blair included – seriously imagines that UK foreign policy objectives should systematically be determined by what the White House (or the EU, the UN or anyone else in the world) wants.

It’s often remarked that Bush is stupid. What’s more interesting is that he has the power to stupefy others, particularly middle-class European lefties, into a furious knee-jerk defiance.

I think one of the key reasons that the Iraq war has been so unpopular in Britain – distinct from any complaints about honesty, competence, casualties, legality and the other fair points – is to do with the Blair-Bush connection.

Max Weber said in 1918:

“A nation forgives if its interests have been damaged, but no nation forgives if its honour has been offended, especially by a bigoted self-righteousness.”

So, we can accept failure but not humiliation. He was talking about a nation defeated in war being humiliated by its conquerors, but I believe this maxim applies to our situation from late 2003: a nation technically victorious in war, feeling humiliated by its leader and his ally. (Does “bigoted self-righteousness” ring any Texan bells?)

Voters can and do forgive bad judgements, particularly in foreign policy, and particularly when the economy is strong. There may not be forgiveness of deceit and ignoble motives, but after a period of protest there is often a grudging acceptance that this has always been part of politics; people ‘move on’ and focus on other issues.

The key to much of the enduring fury about Iraq is not just that people believe our leader made a mistake and told lies, but that they think he willingly chained himself, and his country, to someone else’s mistake and someone else’s lies – and a buffoonish cowboy, whose manner gets so under our skin, at that. Blair was seen to rob us of our independence and a lot of people cannot forgive him the humiliation.

Selection: “character, judgement and consistency”

I know I wrote about this last week, but the Tory row over grammar schools and selection acquires ever more twists and turns.

It was kicked off by David Willetts saying that the party wouldn’t create more grammars:

“We must break free from the belief that academic selection is any longer the way to transform the life chances of bright poor kids. …there is overwhelming evidence that such academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it.”

(Although he illogically added that “we will not get rid of those grammar schools that remain”.)

David Cameron seems to agree, saying that school reform should involve “a bar on academic selection”, making sure that it’s “pupils choosing schools rather than schools choosing pupils”.

Although Cameron’s reason for becoming anti-selection seem somewhat different: it is “deeply unpopular with parents” and “a pledge to build more grammar schools would be an electoral albatross”.

But he also maintains: “Of course, we fully support existing grammar schools.” Of course? Why? Why support the entrenchment of advantage? Is there an ideological thread that unites keeping the existing ones because they’re great and refusing to build new ones because they’re bad? Or is it just fear of too big an argument?

For a bit of perspective, Willetts’s predecessor as Tory education spokesman produced a plan in July 2005 a “plan to boost the educational opportunities of children from poorer backgrounds”, of which one vital plank was: “Give schools freedom to determine admissions.” This hapless hack (one D Cameron) insisted: “The abolition of grammar schools reduced social mobility”.

Precisely the opposite of the new line. But Cameron has now given us some insight into the thinking of his naïve, backward self of very nearly two years ago:

“It's completely delusional to talk about these things in the future when we didn't do them in the past. We are debating something that we didn't do, we weren't going to do and even if we did do it, would have been undone.”

So, back then he was delusional (as now are 71% of Tory voters and 73% of Tory members). Or else he just didn’t mean it. Or else he doesn’t mean any of it now.

But, to be fair to him for his U-turn, there has been some important research out since then:

The Times has learnt that Mr Willetts carried out focus group research earlier this year to test his message that there should be no return to the 11-plus. Aides insist that he and Mr Cameron were initially taken by surprise by the reaction.

You know where you stand with David Cameron:

“Real substance is about… sticking to your guns. It’s about character, judgement, and consistency.”

(And today, presumably for a bet, “David Willetts said that he wanted to make it easier for specialist schools to select pupils.”)

Smoking burns itself out

Evidence that the human body has some ironic defence mechanisms:

A man had been a heavy smoker for years. One day he suffered a stroke, almost certainly related to his habit. Upon recovery, he found that he no longer had any inclination to light up – but he insisted that this had nothing to do with wanting to turn over a new leaf (so to speak) after his health scare.

It turned out that the stroke had damaged his insula, a part of the brain known to be involved in addiction.

Poetic medicine?

Building and listening

Shuggy remarks:

“Politicians are always announcing their intention to build stuff. Not houses or anything as boringly tangible as that; it's usually more abstract things like 'trust', or 'communities', or even, when they're feeling ambitious, 'a new society' or something.”

True. And then they almost inevitably fail to get the trust built, which then results in a little more trust being demolished. This seems an endemic problem to politics. But there’s an obvious solution: contract out the building work as a PFI scheme.

If private companies could bid for the contract to build trust, or a fairer future, or a young country, then their entrepreneurial spirit would work wonders against the obstacles that so bedevil politician-led trust-building projects. There’d be a clear market incentive for the contractors to deliver (pause to shudder at that word, if you will) on time and on budget, as any risks would be borne by them: failure would mean they’d forego the payments due as the politicians then leased back the completed trust/caring society/culture of respect.

It is vital to rebuild people’s faith in politics. And what better way to do that than by commissioning a consortium led by Jarvis or Mowlem to rebuild it?

Paulie picks up on Shuggy’s comments about politicians who claim to want to ‘listen’:

“Of course politicians will always promise to listen, and always pretend to be doing it already. But if they actually *do* start listening, they will find themselves on a fools errand, because there isn't really much by way of a decent conversation going on anywhere (outside of the usual rarefied little circles - and even then, it's mostly poisoned by The Ideology of Applied Adolescence(tm)).”

Very often, when people say things like “I just want politicians to listen”, which sounds almost infinitely reasonable, they mean something else entirely.

I don’t think they really have in mind a situation where they sit down with the relevant minister, explain their views, go through some clarifying questions, and then have the minister say: “Well, I understand that you want us to change policy A for policy B on grounds of X, Y and Z, and I accept that X and Y are fair points (although I disagree about Z because of F and G), but we’ve been going with policy A on grounds of P, Q and R. So I see what you’re getting at and I’m glad we had this chance to talk, but in the end we may have to agree to disagree.”

What they often really want is not so much listening as obedience. So when politicians promise to listen, even if they’re not being vapidly disingenuous, they’re bound to let people down.

The only solution would be to set up 60 million government departments, and make each person in the country Minister for Bert Jabbermore of 47 Piffle Street, Frothington (or whatever). They’d then be uniquely and exclusively responsible for listening to themselves and implementing their own ideas.

This is the way to build a politics of obedient listening. Interested parties should submit tenders for this project to the usual address.

Perspective

This is what a solar eclipse looks like when what’s eclipsing the sun is Saturn.

A cracking good image from the Cassini-Huygens mission.

And if you look really closely, there’s a small speck visible through the rings. That’s us.

(Hat tip to Stephen Pinker at Edge.)

Willetts on school selection

David Willetts’s speech on education this week was characteristically intelligent and well-researched. It was entirely in keeping with the new Tory rebranding – in other words, it talked a lot about the disadvantaged but missed some key points and failed to grasp some tough nettles, and was less revolutionary in policy terms than it was spun as. He claims:

“We are all familiar with the lists of countries that have the boldest and most effective education reform - some American states, Holland and Sweden, for example. They all have more per capita funding and greater diversity of provision and without allowing providers to select who they teach. It is very important that we comply with this successful international model.”

This sounds like a commitment to abolish selection and increase spending. But no, he’s promising to keep the existing grammar schools. And one of his colleagues may have words to say about spending commitments.

Willetts cites research showing that poor children on free school meals do increasingly less well than other kids at every stage of education. But these figures show that three-quarters of the GCSE achievement gap is already in place before the start of secondary school, and two-thirds is set by the start of primary school. Yet he focuses his priorities on secondary school reform rather than pre-school nursery and childcare.

He discussed at length figures showing that grammars (as well as well-performing comprehensives) tend to have fewer pupils from poor families than in the general population in the areas they serve, showing that de facto social selection is going on. But he sees this as meaning that clever, pushy, middle-class parents are manouevring their way into the best schools.

What he entirely fails to consider – although he gets achingly close in saying that “in the rush to create more and more Academies before Gordon Brown becomes leader, there is a danger that they are becoming less distinctive” – is that ‘school quality’ isn’t something that exists prior to and independent of intake. One of the key determinants of a school’s exam results is the type of children (and, more importantly, parents) it can get. Nice middle-class parents like their children to go to nice chav-free middle-class schools, with which they can happily get involved. These schools then tend to do pretty well academically.

UCL’s Professor Richard Webber and colleagues published some important yet unsurprising research on this last year:

“The results show that the position of a school in published league tables… depends more on the social profile of its pupils than the quality of the teachers.”

Yes, you can do some good by concentrating resources and innovative ideas on schools in poorer areas. Labour already is, to a degree. But the elephant in the room is the one-sided drive to class segregation: some politicians ignore it because they don’t care; others try to avoid it for fear of being trampled.

Labour deputy hustings

Until last night, at the Institute of Education, I’d been almost completely unsure who to vote for as deputy leader. It was useful, but I’m still not quite decided. They’re mostly OK, and all have their merits, but I’m not really wild about any of them.

Partly this is because the role of the deputy is a bit indeterminate – presumably to be thrashed out by Gordon Brown (what exactly is he going to be doing for the next few weeks BTW?) and whomever wins. But it will likely involve three things: (1) mediating between the membership and the cabinet; (2) helping to build up and mobilise the party grass roots; and (3) being a general campaigner (‘minister for the Today programme’). The third is the most optional, depending on the winner’s media skills and public appeal. Whatever other governmental responsibilities the deputy might take up are entirely subject to negotiation.

I think I’d get the prize for the least effectively asked question of the night – apparently waiting for the microphone and then not getting talked over by the chair helps. It was: “How would you refresh the parts that Gordon Brown can’t reach?” It got a few laughs but no interesting answers (nobody fell into the ‘diss the next boss’ trap), and on reflection I’d have done better to ask about one of the first two (more important) aspects of the job listed above. There was some discussion of this, and all of them said reasonable things, but we didn’t get into enough detail (for me, at least) to see very clear distinctions.

In fact, a lot of the questions, mostly about policies, were perfectly interesting but not entirely relevant, because the deputy leader’s views on policy have no special status whatsoever. Five of the candidates obviously couldn’t go directly against the party line, but a few apparent differences did emerge.

Harriet Harman and Peter Hain seemed most sceptical of faith schools. Harman also questioned the merits of specialising at age 11, and Hain seemed least supportive of grammars (he has a record in Northern Ireland to draw on). Jon Cruddas was critical of city academies. Alan Johnson (education secretary) dismissed abolishing faith schools and grammars as electoral suicide.

On a possible Iraq inquiry, Hain, Johnson, Hazel Blears and Hilary Benn were sceptical that it’d be of much use, as people have their own firm preconceptions and would either use the outcome as ammunition or dismiss it. Cruddas thought that an inquiry could help to provide closure and spur national reconciliation (for the UK) over the issue, but most of the others took the view that inquiries (and calls for inquiries) in recent years have come to be a substitute for proper political argument. Harman thought there could be useful things to look into about the decision to go to war and in the (lack of) planning for afterwards.

On civil liberties vs security against terrorism, Hain and Harman seemed to lean more in a liberal direction, with Johnson and Blears tending the other way.

My estimation of how they line up politically from left to right goes: Cruddas, Hain, Harman, Benn, Johnson, Blears. If that matters. I don’t think any of them are really beyond the ideological pale,

Now some (utterly subjective) observations on how they came across:

Hain’s speaking tended towards the mid-range oratory. Good and articulate, but clearly a politician. In answering questions, he was sometimes waffly, verging on the evasive.

Harman spoke fluently and earnestly, but also obviously as a politician (albeit a talented, polished one). She veered from the engaging to the borderline touchy-feely to the dull.

Johnson spoke like an ordinary person; not only was he very direct, but he also came across as more thoughtful than I’d expected.

Blears had an almost constantly cheerful tone (genuine, rather than an act, I think). Her rhythms of speech sometimes felt as though she was addressing children, stressing simple points in a way designed to make them sound insightful. Certainly sounded chattier than most politicians, but in a way that suggested she’d be doing most of the chatting.

Benn came across as intelligent without being wonkish, passionate without being shouty, and morally concerned without being hand-wringing. He was also wittier than I’d expected.

Cruddas was down-to-earth and straight-talking, sometimes tending to laddishness, sometimes towards seeming maybe a bit of a wide boy.

There was thankfully little managerial jargon from any of them, and not too much sloganising either. It was all pretty good-natured.

One thought that crossed my mind is how I’d vote if they were the candidates for the leadership itself. No contest: Benn is by far the most prime ministerial. Harman and Hain might be passable; Johnson iffy; Cruddas and Blears just too lightweight. So that’s one way of looking at it, and probably not the best way. Who should be deputy?

I’m now pretty convinced that Benn should become foreign secretary, but I don’t really think I want him being distracted by the party deputy role. Hope he gets a decent showing, though.

Cruddas is dead right about the importance of reconnecting with the working-class voters who’ve drifted into abstention or towards the BNP, and if we ignore him on this we need out heads examined. But I don’t understand his aversion to having a target seat strategy. And I’m a little worried that his idea of representing members’ views to the leadership may end up a tad confrontational. During his campaign, he’s at least singed some of his bridges with the current government. Criticism is fair and often justified, but I could see the Tories throwing some Cruddas quotes in Brown’s face.

Harman has a fair point that there are merits in Brown having a woman deputy, but her repetition of this (and of the fact that she is indeed a woman) wore a little thin. The rest of her pitch didn’t seem to amount to much. She’s certainly talented and reasonably media-friendly (in light of Cameron) and deserves some sort of job – and doubtless Brown will have a number of prominent women in the cabinet – but I don’t know why warming the hearts of the party faithful should be the job for her.

Blears has some good points about local party involvement with community activities, and her enthusiasm shouldn’t really count as a minus (I can be a cynical old sod sometimes). She said she wanted to be a “campaigner-in-chief”, but whatever her party organisational abilities, I just can’t see her doing the public barnstorming role without starting to grate with anyone not already a big Labour fan.

I don’t really have any strong feelings about Hain. Like Harman, he’s an accomplished politician and if we want somebody who’s visibly leftish (by the standards of this government) but not a risk of becoming an internal dissident, he said he’d be “loyal but independent-minded”.

But I think perhaps Johnson (with his strong union background) might be better equipped to have a good relationship with the grass roots. He also seems to have his head firmly screwed on about electoral strategy, and – as I said – sounds like a normal human being. Then again, he’s not entirely fresh-faced, and he might be a tad rightish for some of the rank and file.

I’m not sure. Right now I could lean towards Johnson, which I wouldn’t have predicted a day ago. But I’ll see what they all say and do in the next few weeks. Some opinion polls of former Labour voters would be nice.

[Update: more write-ups of the hustings here and here.]

Relationships: prejudice and evidence

With all this leadership hoo-hah going on, a couple of government policy reviews have just been published to precious little attention. One’s on the role of the state (about which I may write once I’ve had a look) and one’s on the family.

Some excerpts from the latter (all italics mine):

“couples who are living together without being married are still more likely to break up than married couples. For example, among parents of children under three, when comparing couples of an equivalent age, income, education level, ethnic group and benefit status, an unmarried couple that is living together is around twice as likely as a married couple to break up. This may reflect, simply, that married couples may, on average, be more committed to one another.”

The controls and the final caveat are welcome, painting a far less simplistic picture of the causal power of rings on fingers than certain people have done. The review goes on:

“children generally benefit from being raised within a stable, two-parent family rather than a single-parent family.
“But this does not necessarily mean that the family type causes these outcomes. Rather it is the combination of factors [prosperity, education and strength of parental relationships]… that result in better or worse outcomes for children. This is illustrated by evidence that growing up in a lone-parent family as a result of bereavement or of donor insemination is not associated with the same negative outcomes as growing up in a lone-parent family resulting from divorce. Similarly, inter-parental anger and conflict are strong predictors of, and risk factors for, child maladjustment regardless of whether a child is living in a family that is intact, divorced or a step-family.”

Type of family structure is a poor proxy for quality of family relationships. Yes, good adult role models are essential – but bad ones are damaging, and they won’t be made good by getting them to stick around.

“the Government cannot create [relationship] commitment… where it does not already exist. … Similarly, policies that aim to provide incentives for couples to stay together when relationships have broken down do not help to reduce parental conflict, and may therefore not be in the best interest of children’s well-being or benefit those within the relationship. The Government should therefore not act to incentivise specific forms of relationship. …
“The children of less committed fathers seem to suffer more deprivation and show more behavioural problems than those whose fathers are more committed – the key factor is whether fathers are actively involved in their children’s upbringing. This applies to both one- and two-parent families.”

In the light of all this (there are plenty of footnotes citing research papers), there really is no honest reason for saying that children’s lives must be improved – particuarly those in poverty – and yet focusing overwhelmingly on the crude, facile, ineffective promotion of marriage.

Walzer on executing tyrants

Michael Walzer asks: “Is it possible to oppose the death penalty and still be in favor of killing tyrants?” (He means executing through legal process after an overthrow, rather than assassinating a reigning tyrant.)

He thinks the answer is yes, and is aware of the tension this position creates. After a brief discussion of the historical acceptance of executing deposed monarchs, he suggests that:

“kings were killed because ordinary criminals were also, routinely, being killed. In Iraq, Saddam was killed because the death penalty was legally established and widely accepted. So here is an easier position than the one that I began with: I want to abolish the death penalty, but I don’t want to mark the abolition by saving a tyrant. Let the first person saved by abolition be someone like you and me, who has never been all-powerful, who has never been a brutal and cruel ruler of millions. … And then, after [the tyrant] has been convicted, he is executed, because only execution makes for the definitive end of tyrannical rule. Only execution provides the closure that the political community needs.
“But now imagine that the death penalty were already abolished: would I still favor the execution of a tyrant? I don’t think that question will ever arise, because tyrants-as-we-know-them have never ruled without the death penalty. A tyrannical state is always in the killing business, so perhaps a state that is out of the killing business cannot be tyrannical. If that is right, then the execution of a tyrant should be the last execution.”

There are three things seriously wrong with this argument. The first is that it accepts the legal system that licenses execution – which has come into being under a brutal tyrant – as legitimate. The second is that it demands the execution of all relevant ‘ordinary’ criminals who happen to be convicted before the (doubtless lengthy) tyrant’s trial and appeals are concluded.

The third problem relates to the fact that opposition to capital punishment generally involves a belief in the inalienable value of each human life and that the state should not coolly, calmly, deliberately kill a now-defenceless individual. But Walzer’s case for executing tyrants is based on the wider good for society: providing “closure”. This consideration, though, could perfectly well be (and frequently is) applied to ‘ordinary’ murderers. The reason for the exception he makes has a logic that would lead to its becoming the rule, so I’m not sure on what grounds he can consistently oppose the death penalty in general.

The parable of Mark Oaten

While I wouldn’t vote for John McDonnell with a ten-foot barge pole, I’m pretty relaxed about his candidacy. Gordon Brown is bound to win by a mile anyway; a contest would dispel any nonsense about an illegitimate ‘coronation’ as well as making clear that’s Brown’s not an ‘old Labour’ throwback; and frankly, McDonnell does represent a significant strand of party thinking. The political differences between him and Brown are far realer than those between Brown and, say, Alan Milburn.

But here’s a cautionary tale.

Once upon a time, there was a little orange boy called Mark. He and his little orange friends wanted to make Orangeland more modern.

One day, the orange leadership was up for election. Mark stood, and all his friends cheered him on, as the only other candidates were a couple of boring oldies and a new kid whose name nobody could remember.

Then, disaster struck. Mark was disgraced and had to pull out. The orange modernisers were forlorn, and one of the boring oldies won.

Now, let me be very clear: I don’t think Gordon Brown has been seeing rent boys. In fact, I’d bet the public sector borrowing requirement against it.

But there are many types of bus that a political career can suddenly fall under. If (admittedly, a big if) something should emerge during the contest that sinks Brown, there’s no cushion to prevent McDonnell from becoming PM by default.

Just an idle thought.

The kind of stupid thing I worry about

A glimpse inside my brain:

‘…well, it’s only slightly raining, really not enough to justify putting my umbrella up – in fact, it’s kind of refreshing – but I do have a 25-minute walk ahead of me, and while I guess that at no moment will I feel excessively rained upon, it’s quite likely that by the end I will have accumulated enough droplet hits to make my clothing damper than I’d like, so maybe I should put my umbrella up, but on the other hand that really seems like an over-reaction to the current level of precipitation, so perhaps I should just carry on as I am for the moment and then reassess the situation if it gets heavier or if I start to notice moisture building up on my clothes…’

Tom Freeman – Man of Action.

The only thing that saved me from going the rest of the journey like that was overhearing a snippet of conversation, which completely distracted me from all thoughts of weather:

Woman 1: I really like that girl, but I can never remember how to say her name.
Woman 2: Is that Naomi?
Woman 1: Yeah, that’s her.

Tom Freeman – Not Quite the Stupidest Person in London.

Style over substance

I’ve just ‘upgraded’ my blog template (not that it’s a major change), and I have to say, it ain’t user-friendly. At least, not if you’re a moron, it isn’t. I’ll be tinkering some more over the next few days to get back all the nice things I used to have in my sidebar.

And I presume my feed’s still playing up.

(Maybe I should go back to sticking handwritten rants on lamp-posts…)

Stormy disenchantment, theatrical departure

I don’t really feel like adding to the torrent of obituaries for Tony Blair’s career. Almost everyone’s opinions of him have been fixed for a long time; any novel insights you can take where you find them. So here’s something completely different:

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

Right. What’s next?

Comparative government

So, that’s that, then. Or rather it will be in seven weeks.

Timothy Garton Ash makes a fair point:

“For all the problems that remain, you must ask yourself this question: who is better off? Britain after 10 years of Blair, France after 12 years of Jacques Chirac, Germany following eight years of Gerhard Schröder, or the US in the seventh year of George Bush?”

Or Italy after five years of Silvio Berlusconi, or Australia in its 12th year of John Howard… or Britain after seven years of John Major?

Labour: the past and the future

To the LSE, for a panel discussion on ten years of Labour. I wouldn’t dream of trying to précis it all, but I’ll give you two highlights.

Biggest laugh of the night was for Ed Miliband. He was talking about the social changes of the last decade, and said that before this government came to power, the idea that attitudes to gay rights, racism and poverty could shift as much as they have would have seemed “as outlandish as some of the stuff we had in our manifestos in the 1980s”.

Gentle chuckles. Then we remembered that Neil Kinnock was sitting next to him, and we started roaring. Then Miliband remembered.

Before yesterday, I’d only laid eyes on Neil once – briefly, in 1987. I’d never heard him speak in person.

He’s great. There was a Q&A where the five panellists were supposed to have about three minutes each, but the chair, Oona King (who seems to be possessed of remarkable yet down-to-earth charm – we have to get her back in parliament), wisely gave him free rein for what must have been a quarter of an hour.

You very obviously have to be there to appreciate the sheer electricity of Neil Kinnock when he gets going, but some of the substance I think merits even my clumsy paraphrase.

What Labour has to do, he said, is (among other things) to clearly link its achievements to its values. The improvements in health and education – which are real – and the falls in poverty and unemployment – which are real – are not just the natural way of things, not just a piece of good luck, not just a result of clever management. These things have happened because there’s a party in government that deeply believes in its soul that these things matter, and that will never tire of the constant effort that’s needed to make progress on social justice. These priorities are a matter of choice, driven by values – not tactical positioning, driven by expediency. A party whose instincts lie elsewhere will only exploit this agenda to betray it. (But, he warned from experience, if people think this is a matter of the poor versus everyone else, then the whole mission is doomed.)

I tend to think Neil was the best leader Labour’s had – perhaps not in terms of electoral success (although, unlike Blair, he did leave the party with higher ratings than he found it). His achievement, despite it taking longer than he’d hoped to really pay off, was to save British politics from collapsing into a Tory hegemony. He endured relentless media fire, he urged reasonable compromise when zealotry tempted, and he managed to keep Labour alive. He talked the party down from the ledge.

Last night I had a glimpse of how he did it.

Is something wrong with my feed?

I wish I was savvy enough to be able to answer this myself. Here’s the thing: on a couple of sites that aggregate lots of blogs, most postings appear with the post title and then a line or two of body text.

But lately my posts are being shown as title-only. I don’t think I’ve changed my settings.

Any bright ideas?

Oliver! (or ‘Please, Mr Letwin, we want some more’)

Oliver Letwin has been waving his brain around [PDF] about what the new Conservative political theory is. First he suggests the terms of debate:

“Politics – once econo-centric – must now become socio-centric. If the free market is a matter of consensus, the debate must change its nature. Instead of arguing about systems of economic management, we have to discuss how to make better lives out of the prosperity generated by the free market. Growth in well-being hasn't kept pace with growth in domestic product. ... Instead of being about economics, politics in a post-Marxist age is about the whole way we live our lives; it is about society. Politics today is socio-centric.”

Then he offers the Tory answer, in contrast to “the provision-theorists of Brownian New Labour [who] see the state as the proper provider of public services and of well-being through direction and control”:

“The framework theory of the modern state sees government as having two fundamental roles: to guarantee the stability and security upon which, by common consent, both the free market and well-being depend; and… to establish a framework of support and incentive which enables and induces individual citizens and organisations to act in ways that fulfil not merely their own self-interested ambitions but also their wider social responsibilities.”

Hmm. You could remark that given Brown’s record on growth and employment, it’s not surprising the Tories don’t want to talk about the economy. And you could also argue that Labour’s (including Brown’s) use of public-private partnerships, promotion of social enterprise and increasing involvement of the voluntary sector in public services suggests that they’re not the dogmatic ‘provision-theorists’ Letwin paints them as.

But what I want to pick up on is that despite Letwin’s undoubted intellect, this vision is a tad flimsy. Once you get down to the nitty-gritty, it amounts to either ‘shrink the state’ or (if you generously add in some sensible caveats that his speech curiously omits) ‘shrink the state where possible without hurting anyone’. Whichever of the two he means – and this doubt testifies to the lack of clarity – it’s either standard right-wingery or fluffy warm words (albeit polysyllabic ones).

Another clear hint that this political theory doesn’t amount to much is that he himself mischaracterises his own description of it. He says:

“The Cameron Conservative framework-theory of the state… takes the same place in the socio-centric political debate of the twenty-first century that free market theory once took before it triumphed in, and hence outdated, the econo-centric debate of the twentieth century.”

But it doesn’t. Free-market theory (not that Thatcher or anyone else ever really implemented such a thing) is, as the name suggests, about freedom. Prosperity is the motivating factor for private enterprise; government should merely ensure the enforcement of contract rights, property law and the such, and individuals and companies will be free to engage in economic activity as they see fit. The profit motive obviates any state-based system of incentives.

What Letwin is suggesting, however, is that the state should “establish a framework of support and incentive” to promote fulfilment of “wider social responsibilities”. In other words, the state will define how it thinks people should live and then use its top-down centralist levers to skew people’s motives in that direction (marriage bribes, for instance).

I’ve used somewhat ‘grumpy right-wing’ language in that last sentence to illustrate that this theory actually goes against the grain of the liberal wing of the Tories that Letwin apparently belongs to (ditto Cameron), using statist manipulation to promote somewhat authoritarian ends. Then again, you could also use this ‘framework theory’ to justify scrapping environmental and labour laws in favour of ‘inducements’ and cajolery (thus making the ‘free’ market that much freer and more dangerous).

It really seems that it’s the spin and PR makeover driving all this talk, rather than a clear, new policy analysis or philosophical outlook.

But one thing that I accept does accurately represent a core belief of Cameron Conservatism is in the suggestion that “we have to discuss how to make better lives out of the prosperity generated by the free market. Growth in well-being hasn't kept pace with growth in domestic product.”

This takes for granted that the nation’s prosperity (of which there’s quite a bit) is fine economically, and now that we’ve got that, we just need to think about how to use our money to make our lives better. It ignores the fact that the fruits of growth go mainly to those who are already well-off (although far less so than under the Tories [PDF; see p17 fig7]).

There’s not a hint about poverty or redistribution. All this talk of creating ‘frameworks’ to ‘enable and induce’ people to fulfil ‘social responsibilities’ neglects the fact that market-defined merit will leave plenty of people impoverished and that only direct state economic action can plug that gap. Under Cameron and Letwin the poor will always be with us – but they’ll be helped to be so much happier with their lot in life.

Moral logic and parliamentary arithmetic

The Scots have voted; now the manoeuvring for coalition partners begins.

Recap: the SNP leads with 47 seats, followed by Labour with 46, the Tories with 17, the Lib Dems with 13, the Greens with 2 and one other.

Alex Salmond argues that for a coalition to have “moral authority”, it would have to respect “the wishes of the electorate and the verdict of the people”. The principle he appears to be working from is: the larger the party’s representation, the more legitimate its place in government. Which sort of sounds reasonable.

(Unless, of course, he’s just saying such things to try to dissuade the Lib Dems from getting together with Labour again. But never mind that.)

This principle, however, logically has implications not just for who should be the senior coalition partner. There’s talk of either Labour or the SNP joining up with the Lib Dems and the Greens. But what moral authority do these minor parties have to form part of the government? The Tories, in third place, would surely have a better claim than either.

Indeed, on this logic the most morally legitimate coalition would be between the two largest parties: an SNP-Labour ‘dream ticket’. None of that unseemly mucking around with the minor parties – who are, by definition, the least popular.

No takers? Then you need a different moral logic.

Daftest post-election comment of the day

Yes, dafter than mine. It’s from Martin Kettle:

“There has been no pre-post-Blair bounce.”

Voting for paternalism

From the English local election results so far, Labour’s performance suggests that ‘drubbing’ rather than ‘wipeout’ will be cliché of the day. The party’s also fallen back in Wales, and Scotland (at time of writing) is too close to call, amid problems with ballot papers. How to make sense of the big picture?

At times like this, wise psephological eyes turn to the critical weathervane seat of Queen Edith’s ward in Cambridge.

This has been a safe Lib Dem seat for years, with the Tories consistenly in second place. But last night, the Labour candidate, Len Freeman, pulled off a stunning turnaround.

Not only did he fight off a tough Green Party challenge for third place, but his vote surged from last year, smashing through the psychologically important 8.5% barrier.

This is a great result, with obvious implications for the next general election. The Labour fightback starts here!

Snap!

Take a deep breath.

Pictures of People Who’ve Been Pictured in Magazines magazine has secured a legal ruling saying that it was wrong for People Who’ve Been Pictured in Magazines, Pictured magazine to print pictures of two people who’d often been pictured in magazines, given that they had agreed that Pictures of People Who’ve Been Pictured in Magazines magazine was going to print pictures of them that day.

I’d like to sneer, but sadly Freemania has just become Blog about News Reports about Legal Disputes between Magazines that Picture People Who’ve Been Pictured in Magazines, so I really don’t have a leg to stand on. Dammit.

Yawning at victory

Ten years ago today, I finally went to sleep at about noon.

Ten years and one day ago, after many hours of frantic running around with telling sheets and clipboards and ‘don’t forget to vote for Anne Campbell’ leaflets, I gathered with everyone else round the TV at 10p.m. and saw the exit polls putting us a billion points ahead.

This was a nice contrast with 9 April 1992, when I’d collapsed into a chair with despair at the exit polls. But even so, I (only partly for show) said “well, it’s still just a poll”. Then I got on my bike and went off to the count in the Cambridge Guildhall.

I don’t know why, but it took for ever. Ages to separate the general election ballots from the council ballots, then an interminable wait. Luckily I’d brought in a walkman with a radio, which allowed me, a bit before 1a.m., to yell “Basildon! 13,000!” with a grin a mile wide. There was also, we discovered later, a side room with a TV, where we entertained ourselves while trying not to be too beastly to the devastated, hard-working Tory activists.

After Portillo, the count proper got going and we swaggered/danced/slouched back into the hall and did our stuff. At various points I found myself whistling The Red Flag. The result finally came through at about 5a.m. Somehow, from somewhere, somebody produced champagne in plastic glasses.

By then the knees-up that the local Labour party had organised was long over, as I saw when I biked past the designated pub and went home. I slumped in front of the TV with first a beer, then a coffee, watching – I’m a bit hazy actually, but it may well have been Blair en route to the Palace, then to Downing Street; Major en route to Lord’s to watch the cricket; utterly redundant punditry…

My eyelids became heavy. After just a few hours, I’d grown tired of Labour.

I’m glad the Tories didn’t win a fifth term. I’m glad Hague didn’t bring them back to power in 2001. I’m glad Howard couldn’t make them rise from the dead in 2005. Britain is better for these three elections. Even with all the mistakes and failures, I’m glad. I’m proud.

Leaps of faith and self-belief

Stephen Law reports on a religious debate he took part in with (among others) Brian Smith, the Bishop of Edinburgh:

“In our quietest moments, he said, each one of us – yes, even a cynical atheist – is aware, deep down, of a light. It’s an awareness of something fundamentally good, of a yearning to be something better than we are. This something is... Jesus.”

His response is based on the well-documented malleable credulity that our species often displays. The Barefoot Bum offers another reply:

“Smith's position is fine, up until the very last word, which should be omitted and replaced with a question mark: ‘This something is...?’ What is this ‘light’? What is this awareness? I have my suspicions, but I don't know. Maybe it's trivial, maybe it's important. But if it really is important, we shouldn't just guess, we should know.”

And if, at the moment, we can’t know, then we should be cautiously sceptical.

This touches on something that I think is a significant part of any firmly held faith (some people’s faith, of course, is more modest and self-doubting).

The leap of faith from “This something is” to “Jesus” is really nothing more than a guess. A Buddhist monk might have a different view. So might a rabbi, an imam or a shaman. So might a neurologist or a psychologist. Some of these views might be supported in one way or another; others, less so.

To leap from a feeling – or even from an introspective reflection upon a feeling – to a theory of life, the universe and everything is completely unwarranted. It’s a guess, and an unnecessary one at that when the option of provisionally suspending belief is so readily available. But to take a leap of faith is to lose rational control over where one will land.

Is it so indisputably Jesus? Couldn’t it be a demon ingeniously disguised as Jesus? Or a moment of Bodhi? Or an idle tingling of the temporal lobe?

And what if one knows that there might be other explanations – some of which are guesses informed by some breed of received wisdom and others more open-minded attempts to investigate – but one still sticks firmly with one’s own guess? That’s when we get to the significant part of unshakeable faith.

Somebody who grows up in Italy to be a Catholic will interpret such a feeling differently from somebody who grows up in Iran to be a Shi’ite. It is to the credit or detriment of neither that they have happen to have acquired these ready-made narratives for labelling feelings. It is blind luck. And that’s what strong, undoubting faith is really in: not in this god or that one, but in oneself. The core article of such faith is that one’s own guess is right.

Novel word

Julian Gough, in a great essay on the modern novel, uses a cracking word I’ve not seen before.

He’s lamenting the way that university creative writing courses actually kill creativity by institutionalising it, and how graduates of these courses tend to focus their writing on the banality of their own academic lives. And he says this:

“Much of their fiction contains not so much tragedy as mere anxiety. Pushed to look for tragedy in lives that contain none, to generate suffering in order to be proper writers, they force themselves to frown rather than smile; and their work fills with a self-indulgent anxiety that could perhaps best be called ‘wangst.’”

On not sleeping alone

Haven’t really blogged much this week. Oh well. Try this:

A recent study by Oxford researchers published in the journal Sleep (yes, really) found that while the insomnia rate in the UK is an internationally high 22%, people tend not to seek medical treatment for it. Why not?

“The most commonly endorsed reasons for not seeking treatment were the perception of insomnia as benign, trivial, or a problem that one should be able to cope with alone.” The paper argues for “programs of public health awareness designed to reduce the perception of insomnia as trivial”.

Quite right too. Insomniacs of Britain, are you tired of suffering alone? Well, it’s time to wake up!

If you’ve been dreaming of a way to close this yawning gap in your life, then you need no longer be caught napping. If we join together, we can put this problem to bed.

We will not rest until everyone’s eyes have been opened.

(Plus other tired puns…)

‘Ask not what my policies are…’

Yesterday David Cameron gave a speech on ‘social responsibility’.

His line is that when government tries directly to make society better, not only does it usually fail but also it erodes the space in which ordinary people can act themselves to make society better; so, government should pull back and allow people to take more of this responsibility for themselves. In many ways it’s a presentational revamp of the ‘cut red tape/shrink the nanny state/support marriage’ outlook, phrased much more nicely than Peter Lilley ever put it.

He wants politicians to resist the (media-driven) urge to “do something” – which can be a very fair point. But at the same time as he’s trying to promote a more minimalist state, he can’t help reaching for state solutions here and there.

For instance, in terms of raising children, he argues that parents must understand “that it is their responsibility, not the school's responsibility, to bring their kids up with the right values”. He also criticises the previous Tory government for “the over-prescription of the national curriculum”. But he goes on to say that he is developing “plans for a national programme for all sixteen year-olds that helps teach them the responsibilities of adulthood”.

And on law and order, he complains about ASBOs but refuses to scrap them. He ridicules the idea of putting “a policeman on every bus” but says that the police should have less paperwork so they can spend more time “engag[ing] directly with the community they serve” and stopping people in the street.

Indeed, the logic of his argument, if taken seriously, points towards the position that any state enforcement of laws distorts people’s incentives, changing their behaviour from mutual civility into punishment-avoidance. But of course he doesn’t take it that far; there is, even though he doesn’t say so, a trade-off to be made. And because he keeps this quiet, he can claim on any given count that his approach is simply about “trusting people”.

The reason Cameron’s analysis fails (depsite several fair points dotted around the speech) can be seen here:

“What builds society, what encourages civility, is people taking responsibility. Putting each other before themselves.”

There’s a vast lacuna between the first and second sentences. Yes, putting each other first will encourage social civility. But “taking responsibility” isn’t the same as doing that. “Taking responsibility” doesn’t in itself mean anything without specifying what it is you’re responsible for (but the phrase sounds good, and it works as cover to justify any amount of state-shrinkage).

But what he seems to be saying is that society will be nicer if people take it upon themselves to be nicer. The thing is, though: being able to decide to be nice is not the same as being nice. And giving people more control over how nice they can be isn’t the same as getting people to be nicer.

As an example, he wants businesspeople to understand “that it is their responsibility, not just the government's responsibility, to think about the social and environmental consequences of what they do”. Which, at face value, means that working standards and environmental protection would best be advanced if the government resorted to gentle cajolery and hope rather than statutory compulsion.

At one stage he kicks away the apparent optimism that his vision stands on:

“I believe that government has a vital role to play in changing social behaviour. Not by trying to control it directly through initiative, regulation and law. But by creating a framework of incentives that encourages people and organisations to behave responsibly.”

Now, if incentives for responsible behaviour have to be created by government, then the faith that he likes to place in human nature would seem misguided. But whether this is true or not, he ignores (when it suits him) his own guidance on the insidious effects of state involvement in people’s personal lives.

He identifies the most important institution in society as the “strong family”, deserving of state financial support. (His concept of family strength – two married parents – remains wilfully simplistic.) But if he wants to subside marriage, that risks skewing incentives to get married away from love and towards money.

One of his early starting-points is that “target[ing] specific instances of bad behaviour with specific state interventions… is just treating the symptoms, not the cause”. But in bribing people down the altar, regardless of their personal qualities, he clumsily targets a specific instance of supposedly good behaviour – a symptom of responsibility – without making anyone more responsible.

(One final quibble. At one point, he cites the recent Unicef report [PDF] on children’s lives: “the only measure where we didn't come at or near the bottom was health and safety. We have miserable, badly behaved, badly educated children – but we keep them safe from cuts and bruises.”

It’s a cheap shot, and if he or his speech-writers had spent two minutes online, they’d know that the indicators the report used to create the “health and safety” rankings were: “number of infants dying before age 1 per 1,000 births; percentage of infants born with low birth weight (<2500g.); percentage of children age 12 to 23 months immunized against measles, DPT, and polio; deaths from accidents and injuries per 100,000 aged 0–19”. Are any of those things really worth the sneers?)

War and other people’s best interests

Tom Miller remarks that “progressive interventionism needs to be different to neoconservatism, which I despise. Democracy is a bottom up phenomenon, a flower that needs watering and weedkiller...”

I incline to agree (with the caveat that those two isms can be filled out in different ways). There’s a distinction (lost to the knee-jerk anti-West, anti-war crowd) worth maintaining between what Norm Geras has characterised as military action taken on ‘remedial’ grounds (to end a murderous tyranny) and that taken on ‘utopian’ grounds (to create a flourishing democracy).

This difference is why I signed the Euston Manifesto but don’t support the Henry Jackson Society.

The HJS campaigns for the spread of modern liberal democracy. While that’s a great and important principle, it seems to me that the HJS may be too uncritically single-minded in its pursuit of it. It supports:

“a ‘forward strategy’ to assist those countries that are not yet liberal and democratic to become so. This would involve the full spectrum of our ‘carrot’ capacities, be they diplomatic, economic, cultural or political, but also, when necessary, those ‘sticks’ of the military domain.”

It’s that “when necessary” that worries me. I can’t agree with the suggestion that any undemocratic regime should be deposed by force if peaceful methods fail. There are plenty of autocracies whose human rights records can hardly be called tyrannical. The idea of bombing Singapore, say, as a prelude to replacing its sham elections with genuine liberal democracy, is ridiculous, even if all other means of reform had failed. War is dangerous, and not all non-democracies are equally vile (just ask the North Koreans trying to flee to China).

Whether you call this ‘neoconservatism’ or not, it seems to be a step away from standing up for the downtrodden and towards pursuing an ideology (yes, based on a good ideal) for its own sake.

The EM is more selective about when force should be used:

“If in some minimal sense a state protects the common life of its people (if it does not torture, murder and slaughter its own civilians, and meets their most basic needs of life), then its sovereignty is to be respected. But if the state itself violates this common life in appalling ways, its claim to sovereignty is forfeited and there is a duty upon the international community of intervention and rescue. Once a threshold of inhumanity has been crossed, there is a ‘responsibility to protect’.”

While I’m on the subject, there’s a symposium in the new issue of Dissent on exporting democracy and lessons learned from Iraq. There seems to be a rough consensus that, as Thomas Cushman puts it, “war is not the best way to achieve democratization, although this does not mean that no value has come of this war”.

And Paul Berman argues that:

“democracy is not just a system of procedures and a matter of institutions. Democracy is, in addition, a worldview, and this worldview needs to be expounded: a worldview based on rationality, criticism, respect for individual rights, and so forth. Democracy, in short, requires liberalism, and liberalism is, after all, an ism, and isms need to be presented, clarified, popularized, and defended.”

Forcible democratisation is practically, conceptually and ethically fraught. Using force to stop mass brutality is less so.

Normblog profile

Norm Geras has posted a profile of me, if you’re interested.

(Incidentally, it was Norm who gave me my first break in the world of online ranting, so thanks twice.)

Shag doubt

“Students who took part in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not, according to a study ordered by Congress.”

Shocker. (Hat tip to Andrew.)

Yes, it’s true that not having sex is a pretty failsafe way of avoiding STIs or unwanted pregnancies. But government programmes to persuade teenagers not to have sex are not a good way to stop teenagers having sex.

The only reason for ignoring this distinction (other than wanting an excuse to moralise) would be a faith in the marvellous efficiency of the state. Which would be a pretty odd attitude for a bunch of conservatives to take.

Dirty politics

David Cameron’s latest ‘green’ photo-op has gone slightly wrong.

After being photographed cleaning up some rubbish in Kent, he was accused of “breaking election rules by posing with council workers and there were allegations that the Tories had deliberately placed the rubbish on the site for a publicity stunt”.

“Jeremy Kite, the [Tory] leader of the council, vigorously denied the suggestion that the rubbish had been planted, but admitted that council workers had collected rubbish from a 20m radius on the same site and piled it in a heap before Mr Cameron’s arrival. ‘But I can tell you 100 per cent that the rubbish was on that site and was not brought in,’ he said. ‘In fact, we left it there a day longer than it should have been because we knew Cameron was coming.’”

So, proper council work – cleaning up a fly-tipping site – was delayed for the benefit of a party stunt. That’s a defence?

The end of morality

Menzies Campbell surpassed himself on the Today programme this morning. John Humphrys broke with tradition and gave him a couple of critical questions on Iraq.

Humphrys: But we can’t cut and run because we’re losing soldiers, can we?

Campbell: … I think you have to be careful, if I may say so, about words like ‘cut and run’, because they are incredibly emotive. … It’s four years since the military action ceased, and in that time we have committed a lot of money, we’ve committed a lot of fine young men and women and we’ve lost more than 140 of them. There is a point at which we can no longer justify that degree of commitment.

Humphrys: But surely that point is not when the country is in the kind of chaos it is in.

Campbell: Well, just examine the logic of that proposition. Does that mean that so long as there is any threat or anxiety about disorder then we will continue to stay there?

Humphrys: You could argue yes, if it was our – I emphasise if it was our responsibility, what is happening there now, then yes we should stay. You could argue that, and it is argued.

Campbell: Well, I accepted, although I was someone wholly opposed to this, I accepted a moral obligation. But that moral obligation can’t be open-ended. And we have a moral obligation to our own young men and women.

There is an argument sometimes made that the US/UK presence in Iraq is doing more harm than good – that our troops’ presence serves to inspire sectarian violence and prevent a political accommodation based on the domestic balance of power.

But Campbell isn’t making that argument. He’s not urging withdrawal based on a judgement of what’s in the best interests of Iraqis. He’s saying that even though we did take on a moral responsibility for the security of Iraq, now that the going has got tough, we should do the expedient thing and quit.

Waste of space.

Life on Earth

If you liked Gene Hunt from Life on Mars, you’ll love this. Nice one, Paul.

News about Brown

The Tory attempt to embarrass Gordon Brown over his “pension theft” (a charge of debatable merit) seems to have failed. In fact, Brown had a far better day politically than on his Budget.

The Tories made two tactical blunders: (1) if you’re trying to paint someone as sneaky and stealthy, don’t give him a big public platform from which to make his case; (2) if you’re trying to damn someone for a policy decision, have something prepared other than empty wriggling when asked whether you’d reverse it.

Anyway. At the same time, David Miliband seems to be backing off from the possibility of standing against Brown for the leadership. I like Miliband, and I do think there’d be benefits to a contest both for Labour and for Brown, but I’m unconvinced that he’s PM material yet.

He has a lot of virtues, but the most salient one appears to be that the music happens to be stopping while he’s holding the small, battered ‘anti-Gordon candidate’ parcel – it having been passed round Blunkett, Milburn, Clarke, Reid, Johnson, Hutton and others.

Also yesterday: the biggest economic crisis of the Brown decade: inflation at 3.1%. Really puts two recessions and 3 million unemployed into perspective, eh?

Enslaving your own intellect

Scott Adams has a nice post about cognitive dissonance, the psychological discomfort that comes from holding conflicting thoughts, particularly when they relate to one’s self-image, such as ‘I’m a good husband’ and ‘I just cheated my wife’.

The mind tries hard to avoid dissonance and to avoid having illusions shattered, and so awkward facts can get rationalised away: ‘I was drunk, and I didn’t make the first move, so it doesn’t show what I’m really like’, ‘It was a mistake and won’t happen again’, ‘She’s been neglecting me lately so it’s hardly surprising’, ‘It was just sex and doesn’t mean anything’, ‘Woe is me; but my token guilt proves how much I love her really’, ‘I must keep this a secret to protect her from hurt’, etc.

To any reasonably impartial third party, such manoeuvres are pretty transparent. But from the inside, from the perspective of the person whose mind has quietly smoothed over the cracks, they’ll make perfect sense.

Scott says:

“The fascinating thing about cognitive dissonance is that it’s immune to intelligence. No matter how smart you are, you can’t think your way out of it. Once your actions and your self image get out of sync, the result is an absurd rationalization.”

It’s not just that this process is immune to intelligence – it actually feeds off it. The smarter you are, the more ingenious your rationalisations can be. When challenged by rogue mental states, a mindset or belief system will use whatever intellectual resources it can get its dendrites on to survive and maintain its integrity.

People are, in very many ways, not at all good at thinking logically. If you’re aware of the kind of biases you’re prone to, then you stand a chance of catching some of them (cognitive behavioural therapy basically trains people to beat their dysfunctional assumptions over the head with logic). But intelligence on its own won’t cut it, because its natural role is to keep the show on the road – which often means sacrificing accuracy to coherence.

Fortunes to hostages

I agree with pretty much everybody else, for pretty much the standard reasons, that the sailors and marines held by the Iranians shouldn’t have been allowed to sell their stories. But I see it as an minor, stupid misjudgement that warrants a couple of slapped wrists and red faces – it’s not a national scandal that merits all this shrieking about public inquiries and resignations.

Almost any policy can lead to controversy, and there’s always easy mileage in throwing around outraged blame. The media are a storm in search of a teacup.

I wonder what would have happened if the 15 had been prevented from going public…

Gagged By Iran, Then Gagged By The MoD
By our reporter Frank Blunt

What has this government got against our servicemen and women? First it sends them to the Middle East on a Texan fool’s errand – arming them with rifles that jam every other shot and forcing them to fork out for their own boots. Then it protects them so feebly that a bunch of third world fanatics can seize 15 of them without any comeback.

And now it refuses to let them tell their side of the story.

Sure, they can sit at a Ministry of Defence press conference, under the watchful eye of the government spin-masters, and accept the blame for themselves while they parrot the party line. But they’re not allowed to speak out freely.

Tory defence spokesman Hubert Blatherton is spot on when he asks what Labour has to hide: “We know some of the blunders that led to this public humiliation at the hands of Iran. But why does the government insist on keeping from us the full story? They should known by now that there’s a time to stop spinning and let the truth out.”

We’re told the sky would fall in if the freed hostages earned a few quid to add to their modest wages. But all the while, well-fed ministers – including the ones responsible for the state of our armed forces – are signing six-figure deals to dish the dirt in their memoirs.

As Faye Turney’s mother tells us in her exclusive interview (see pages 7–12), “My girl spent all that time in isolation, being forced to put her name to propaganda and lies. Now she’s back home, we can’t understand why she’s still not allowed to speak for herself.”

The continued gagging of these young men and woman, who risked their lives for their country (on the orders of Tony Blair), sends a terrible message to the world about Britain’s contempt for its service personnel. This air of secrecy and off-the-record briefings stands in stark contrast to the smiling images of President Ahmadinejad openly shaking hands and chatting with the 15.

Once again, Britain has been shamed by Blair’s control-freakery and obsession with spin. The sooner he’s out of a job, the better – and let’s lose the gormless, gutless Des Browne while we’re at it.

Oxfam and bombing reputations

Oxfam has published an interesting report (plus an article by director Barbara Stocking) on international human rights protection post-Iraq. The report argues:

“The danger is that, after Iraq, UK foreign policy could lurch to a much more cautious approach, turning away from trying to solve the world’s worst crises, with potentially catastrophic consequences for people in them.”

It suggests that Iraq may already have compromised the UK Government’s ability to act:

“In November 2006, Sudan’s president was able to deflect criticism, and denounce the plans for a UN force to protect civilians in Darfur, a proposal strongly backed by the UK. ‘The impact’, he said, ‘[would] be the same as what is happening in Iraq.’”

It’s certainly true that world opinion of the UK and US governments has fallen because of what’s happened in Iraq. But there are a few issues that are worth untangling here.

First, there is an inescapable point not made explicit: just because a military action is unpopular, that doesn’t make it wrong. The negative reaction to Iraq may well make future humanitarian intervention with major US-UK involvement a very hard sell. But this doesn’t mean it would be wrong. Unpopularity (of whatever origin) shouldn’t be a barrier to stopping genocide.

Second, nor should legality be a barrier. Security Council resolutions represent confluences of national interests, and the lack of one endorsing the bombing of Yugoslavia did not make that action wrong. To say, as the report rather comically does, that “The UN probably would have authorised NATO’s campaign, had it not been for Russia and China’s ability to veto such a resolution” is to miss any number of points.

Third, international relations have less to do with moral authority than we might like. The fact that the Security Council has been so lacklustre in dealing with Sudan owes more to Chinese (and Russian) economic interests there than reputational damage to George Bush and Tony Blair; it owes very little indeed to Omar al-Bashir’s ability to engage in moral posturing about potential casualties, which everyone knows to be rank hypocrisy.

If indeed it’s true that forcible UN intervention in Sudan would lead to chaos even bloodier than the current situation, then that’s a reason for finding other options – regardless of whether al-Bashir can effectively taunt the would-be interventionists, regardless of what’s happened in Iraq, and regardless of anyone’s opinion about Iraq.

But these are mostly points of emphasis. It’s a decent report, thinking seriously about how to deal with trouble spots in the changed international atmosphere, and resisting the temptation to crowd-please by subordinating every issue to a loathing of the Iraq war.

A clear focus on outcomes (and yes, that includes changes in world opinion, but not overwhelmingly so) is vital.

A parody of ‘A parody of democracy’

(With apologies – of debatable sincerity – to Oliver Kamm. If you’ve not read his piece, what follows will be pretty meaningless to you.)

Political voting has come of age. At least, that is the idea behind the UK’s forthcoming elections to local councils and devolved administrations. The supporters of these elections argue that voters provide more acute and independent political decisions than traditional autocracy, owing to the absence of a dictator detached from the concerns of ordinary people’s lives.

The BBC and other news outlets have screened a number of reports featuring these voters, many of whom deserve continual correction on points of fact. They thereby illustrate voting’s central characteristic danger. It is a democratic medium, allowing anyone to participate in political decision-making without an intermediary, at little or no cost. But it is a direct and not deliberative form of appointing national leaders. You need no competence to join in.

To some, that is a virtue. Democrats invoke the notion of the wisdom of crowds: rulers emerge in a collaborative process rather than seizing power themselves. But voters are not the required type of crowd. They are, by definition, a self-selecting group of the politically motivated who have time on their hands.

Elections are providers not of laws but of legislators. This would be a good thing if voting extended the range of available talent in the public sphere. But it does not; paradoxically, it narrows it. This happens because elections typically do not add to the available stock of expertise and opinion: they are purely parasitic on the names and faces of the traditional elite. If, say, Tony Blair or David Cameron did not exist, a significant part of the electorate (a grimly pretentious neologism) would have no purpose and nothing to react to.

The great innovation of public election campaigns is that voters may select minutely the party literature and broadcasts they read and watch. The corollary is that they may filter out views they find uncongenial. This is a problem for a healthy democracy, which depends on a forum for competing views.

In its paucity of knowledge and predictability of prejudices, the electorate provides a parody of democratic deliberation. But it gets worse. Politics, wrote the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, is a conversation, not an argument. The conversation candidates have with their target voters is more like an echo chamber, in which conclusions are pre-specified and targets selected. The outcome is horrifying. The intention of drawing voters into the conversation by means of a facility for expressing their opinion results in an immense volume of abusive material directed at public figures.

Electoral democracy, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted – overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.

(Less sarcastic responses to Kamm can be found here and here, and another slightly sarcastic one here.)

The problem of good

If you fancy a (long-ish) witty and inventive read, Stephen Law reports on a debate between theologians on the planet Eth:

BOOBLEFRIP: What a bizarre suggestion. It’s obvious our creator is very clearly evil! Take a look around you! Witness the horrendous suffering he inflicts upon us. The floods. The ethquakes. Cancer. The vile, rotting stench of God’s creation is overwhelming!
GIZIMOTH: Yes, our creator may do some evil. But it’s not clear he’s all-evil, is it? It’s certainly not obvious that his wickedness is infinite, that his malice and cruelty know no bounds. You’re deliberately ignoring a famous argument against the existence of God – the problem of good.

From the characters’ names, I suspect that Stephen is a Douglas Adams fan. He also has a brain the size of a planet (which one, I’m not sure…) But seriously: if you only read one extraterrestrial dialogue satirising the theistic responses to the problem of evil this week, make it this one!