Peripheral vision

The other day got on a Jubilee Line train in rush hour. It was very crowded and I had to squeeze in to the space just inside the door. I quickly looked around the carriage to see if there was any space to stand in and noticed plenty of it in the space between the seats. I excused myself as I squeezed through the crowd to the empty space and rather expected one or two people to follow me, but they didn't. They didn't even look round, they just remained crushed up against each other in the space between the two sets of doors. There was easily space for three people in the space beside me, but no one was inquisitive enough to notice. 

I can't help seeing this as indicative of current attitudes in general: people are so desperate to hang on to their miserable little bit of existence that they don't even look round to see if there is a simple alternative that will be better for everyone, themselves included. 

It also shows that I'm the kind of idiot who thinks society is for observing rather than engaging with. 

Posits

The annual Long Layer talk this year between Brian Eno and David Graeber was a sporadically interesting affair. If Eno had spent a little less time auditioning for 'Grumpy Old Men' it might have been more consistently interesting. David Graeber on the other hand was that rarest of modern personages: someone trying to posit solutions. It is a workplace cliché to say "I don't want problems I want solutions", but actual solutions are fairly thin on the ground. Since the financial crisis of 2008, I have heard lots of blame apportioned and lots of assertions that it cannot be allowed to happen again, but no concrete ideas about how we might fix a clearly very dysfunctional system. There has been endless tinkering around the edges: introducing watered down laws to reduce bankers' bonuses or marginally change lending criteria. There has been plenty of blame ascribed to governments and institutions and of course bankers. At the height of the crisis some people even tried to blame Robert Peston for drawing our attention to the black hole in our financial system in the first place. Blame is great because it is always someone else's fault and therefore always someone else's problem. So the fundamental flaws in our system have been 'addressed' by assigning blame to certain groups of people and then almost arbitrarily restricting some aspect of their financial interactions. 

Perhaps I am being too cynical or too quick to judge, perhaps it is inevitable that in the immediate aftermath of a financial crisis of such magnitude there is bound to be a protracted period of hand wringing and mud slinging before people finally calm down enough to look properly at the problem, its causes and potential solutions. On Analysis on Radio 4 last week, Robert Peston presented a program about the ideas of two American economists concerning the causes of the 2008 crisis and the structural changes required to prevent them happening again. Refreshingly, they pointed out that everyone was to blame: irresponsible mortgage lenders, the banks who bought packaged debt from them and the individuals who borrowed amounts of money they couldn't afford to repay. More interestingly, they posited a change in the current system that could ensure that this couldn't just happen again. Largely this was to be achieved by switching the risk of default away from the borrower by allowing mortgage payments to decrease if the value of the mortgaged property falls. In return for the lender taking on more debt, they are guaranteed 5% of any increase in value of the property when it is sold. This is not necessarily a complete solution to all our problems, but on analysis it was heralded as radical and potentially controversial. To me this only seems to highlight the very limited set of parameters within which we consider sensible or even possible to operate our economy. An almost all pervasive conservatism has left us with little else to do but moan about a situation we daren't consider actually attempting to change. 

Because of this pervasive conservative orthodoxy, people like Graeber are considered so outlandish as to barely be considered at all. One of the interesting points Graeber made at the talk was the fact that as soon as it became apparent that the Occupy movement was not going to form a political party and join the established and manageable political process, the media quickly lost interest and decided that this was too radical to be reported on basically within mainstream media. Which speaks volumes the kind of commercial media we have now: concerned with appealing to as broader base of their 'constituents' as possible, scared that unorthodox ideas might scare them off. 

In the postwar period, the media presented the unorthodox to us as something we might want to consider, something we might want to discuss, even something we might get very upset about, but fundamentally something that was worth consideration. At some point around the end of the century, the media (along with the rest of us) were convinced that unorthodoxy was the preserve of the mentally unsound (or the poor, who are basically the same thing in this orthodoxy). So why would anyone, much less journalists who could otherwise get genuine access to the corridors of power be interested in such ephemera?

We are, as a society these days, entirely defined by our relationship to the epicentre of the mainstream. Teenagers are no longer able to have tribes that exist entirely apart from their peers or their guardians, and so are unable to experience the taste of truly independent thought. Everything we do is in relation to an ill defined but entirely conservative epicentre (and yes I do mean that I terms of the dictionary definition - Google it). 100 years ago, your average intellectual would have many friends with whom s/he disagreed entirely, yet they were able to form a friendship based largely on debate. These days, we form our wider social networks solely out of people we agree with entirely, and we wonder why our society gets steadily more crap. If we are not prepared to even countenance the (few) voices of genuine change in our world, then we deserve entirely the future that even the prophets of the orthodoxy have predicted for us. 

Posture

Given the Lisfrac fracture sustained playing my annual cricket match last year, I decided it might be more sensible just to umpire this year. This really wasn't much of a sacrifice for me; as I have explained before, much as I love to watch, I'm not sure I actually like playing cricket. Indeed I think I probably enjoyed umpiring more, although I think this is largely because it afforded me more control over the game than my sub-mediocre batting or bowling ever could. What became apparent throughout the course of the match though was that certain things common to all competitive sports will never fail to irritate the crap out of me and all of these things appear to manifest themselves in one particular player who has attended our match every year it's been played. He's not a bad person, I've been for a beer with him and he is perfectly affable, but once he gets on a cricket pitch, he really wants to win. And it really matters to him. Really. When he was run out last year, he stropped off round the world. Literally. In fairness, I don't think his decision to go travelling was entirely driven by being run out in a sub-Sunday league quality cricket match, but I think it helped. Anyway, my problem is that winning means so much to this guy that he spends and otherwise pleasant Saturday afternoon knock about in the park relentlessly sledging everyone in sight, badgering the umpire and time-wasting. It worked too: his side won in the gloom of a long summer dusk (although I think some of them even got sick of him criticising their bowling). 

So it's clear that I don't care as much as this guy about winning a cricket match, so why should it bother me? I guess it goes to the heart of one of my biggest beefs with the world in general: if you want to succeed, it pays to be a complete tool. By that I mean that the guides to success that encourage you to be single-minded, selfish and ruthless are right. All of those things will help you to be successful by a very limited meassure of success. Unfortunately, that particular very limited measure of success is the one that remains most popular in modern society; look at obituaries of 'great' people, and more often than not, they will find a way of saying 'he was a complete tool, but he made lots of money, so well done him'. I guess this is no surprise; people whose only motivation is money are likely to make more money than those who have other priorities, and equally they are likely to have less time to be nice to people. Of course the fact that that so much is made of the correlation between being a dick and making lots of money that many people think that the two are interdependent and therefore that they ought to be a dick if they are going to be successful. 

As the title of this blog suggests, I'm usually dealing with the temptations of the modern world and how I might avoid them (although less of that than perhaps I'd like - I need to be more solution oriented), however in this instance I have no problem resisting temptation. Not that I'm bragging about what a nice guy I am - I'm sure I can be as much of a dick as anyone else - but the impact of my actions on others concerns me. It is not unknown for me to wake up (admittedly usually when this coincides with a hangover) and worry about the consequences of something that I said or did several years ago. Granted, this is largely a symptom of the hangover shame spiral, but it is an affliction that I assume never affects those titans of industry who have brushed aside countless sensitive souls and bruiseable egos to get to where they are today. Perhaps I am wrong in this, perhaps they wake up every morning wracked with guilt over those they crushed on their way to the top. If so, why do they do it? Does the money and acclaim compensate for the waves of guilt and shame? It's possible, but it's also possible that it is the only compensation available for those with too little imagination to come up with an alternative. It's possible that these people even assume that the guilt is just a natural state of affairs, that all people feel like this all the time and that the world is a horrible place full of pain that deserves to be treated with disdain and exploited ruthlessly. 

Whether these people deal with their guilt through rationalisation or whether they don't feel guilt at all doesn't point to a particularly stable psychology, so why do we lionise them? If they weren't rich, they might well be considered worthy of psychological assessment, but because they are, they get to set an agenda based on their warped ideals. They have managed to create an orthodoxy.    where the only acceptable goal is winning, whether through the accumulation of more money than other people or by the accumulation of other arbitrary quantifiers, such as points. There is no defined end point at which you have won, you just keep accumulating more to continue winning. It is an ideology of present and immediate future only; if all your 'achievements' are in the past, then you have either passed on to deity status where you may sit atop your accumulation and pass judgement on the efforts of those still attempting to accumulate, or you have lost. Equally it is a wasteful and destructive ideal because there is no gain in genuine efficiency. The only efficiency considered of value to accumulators is one that creates a surplus that can be siphoned off and added to the pile of winnings. It is a cynical, miserable and destructive ideology, and it is the basis of almost all the world's current societies. And it is bizarrely alluring, because we all like to win. I get annoyed by the guy who has to win because he makes it harder for me to win, and I might not care that much, but I still want to win. It is this that I need saving from: from the desire to achieve something to the detriment of my fellow humans (for that is what winning is). I don't think it'd stop me being bothered by the guy who really wants to win, because for that to happen he has to stop caring about it too. We all do. 

Parliamental

Whilst David Camerron and chums decide how to play politics with our constitution and Ed Milliband dithers over a non-issue (only two governments since the war have relied on Scottish MPs for their majority), I thought I'd add my two pence worth. I think we should have a federal UK Parliament in Leeds and regional assemblies for each of the 'nations' that make up the UK. This solves a number of problems:

1. Overcrowding - Westminster is too small to be a practical UK parliament. If all MPs attend the House of Commons (a very rare occurrence), many of them have to stand and the Lords isn't much better. If Westminster only has to house English MPs, there would be plenty of room. 

2. No jurisdictional uncertainty - we wouldn't have a situation where non-English MPs have to be asked not to come into the chamber or being turned away from the lobbies because they won't physically be in the English Parliament. 

3. Less London-centric power structure - Leeds is geographically in the centre of the country, but perhaps more importantly is in the centre of a swathe of northern cities that are essential to the long term socioeconomic wellbeing of the UK. Moving the nation's governmental centre there would go some way to rebalancing the current imbalance in England and the UK generally. Admittedly some improvements to infrastructure would also be required, such as a high speed rail link from Liverpool to Newcastle via Manchester and Leeds, but this is required anyway. 

4. Modernisation - Westminster is steeped in history and constrained by it. A modern democracy needs an open and accessible parliament. The modern communications infrastructure required for this could not easily be retrofitted into a building so utterly wracked with listings as the Palace of Westminster. It would be easier and cheaper to build a new parliament building, fit for purpose in the 21st century.

Anyway, that's my proposal. People will say it lacks detail - what powers and responsibilities would the UK parliament have for example - but unlike David Cameron I don't think it's my place to impose an entirely revised constitution on the people of the UK. I simply wanted to posit the idea of an alternative to the bickered fudge that the current establishment will end up dumping on us for Christmas. 

Pejorative

I've previously written in this blog about the disappointment of following your 'heroes' on Twitter. As a result of this, the rationalised list of sports 'personalities' that I follow is effectively reduced to one man: Michael Vaughn. I follow the former England captain mainly because he is unintentionally very funny. For a man approaching 40 who has lived much of his life in the public eye, he is startlingly and endearingly naive. Whilst this usually leads to much thoroughly entertaining tweeting, it is easy to get depressed by humanity if one is to read the responses to many of his tweets. A number of his recent tweets about the England vs India Test series have elicited strings of badly spelled tirades littered with effing, c-bombs and insults about his mother. I realise that this is nothing compared to the sort of unbelievably threatening and sexually violent abuse directed at pretty much any feminist in the public eye, but I would suggest that it comes from a similar place. Based on the thoroughly unscientific evidence of my experience, a little extrapolation and a dash of presumption, I am fairly certain that the vast majority of this abuse comes from men. The modern narrative (and indeed the excuse that many of the perpetrators of the more extreme misogynist abuse) is that in a world where women are beginning to get some equality, men are increasingly unsure of their position and therefore feel the need to lash out agressively. My response to this 'excuse' is the same as my response to anyone who is having a strop because they can't have everything their own way: grow up.  

Of course Michael Vaughn's response to the abusive comments he gets on Twitter seems to be largely to shrug them off, baffled that people from other countries can't take 'a bit of banter'. Unfortunately, it would appear that many of them can't, which is perhaps an indicator of the vast cultural divides still extant between countries that many view to have a shared (if partially imposed) cultural heritage. I am generally not a fan of banter; as far as I can tell it is simply a term used to excuse oneself from causing massive offence by insulting another. In too many instances 'banter' is used to excuse the inexcusable by those who think freedom of speech means freedom to give offence. However, in many contexts, banter could be interpreted as a form of progress in western male social behaviour. If banter allows contentious concepts to be discussed without the risk of actual physical conflict then it may be (partially) viewed as a progressive force. 

Unfortunately for those on a global stage, the mitigating effects of labelling a statement 'banter' are not universal. In many countries, male concepts of 'honour' mean that people will take 'banter' seriously and respond in an extreme and (in the eyes of western observers at least) disproportionate manner. It would be an oversimplification to argue that the countries where men 'can't take a bit of banter' are those where other problematic concepts of masculine honour exist, leading to so-called 'honour' killings and rape, but a correlation could be made. Much of the 'traditional' concepts of male honour are tied up with a man's power over others, much of which manifests as, or is interpreted as sexual power over women. If a man believes in such a 'code' of 'honour' and feels his 'honour' threatened, questioned or undermined, he will respond initially with threats and ultimately with acts of violence. The fact that the violence is likely to be sexual violence if its target is female simply ties in with a logic that equates sexual dominance with honour. 

In this context, anything that bursts the bubble of dangerous hubris that surrounds such logic must be counted as a good thing. Applied and accepted in the spirit it was intended, banter can undermine the dangerous conventions that have established themselves around masculine pride, but it is a blunt instrument. As Michael Vaughn and others have perhaps discovered, it does not magically wipe away all offence, which is most notable when that offence is unpardonable. Indeed, it is what is counted as unpardonable offence that perhaps differs from one country to the next. In the UK, many men will question their friend's sexuality and it will be considered 'just a bit of banter' (I'm not saying it isn't offensive, especially where the inference is that one form of sexuality is inferior), but threatening a woman sexually is not ever considered acceptable, even if someone tries to excuse it as 'banter'. That us not to say that it doesn't happen in the UK, just that it is not considered acceptable by the moral majority. 

The last two sentences were the first written after I became aware of a furore over a selection of offensive texts written by some football person* being incorrectly classified as banter. The list of subjects of those texts (gender, race, sexuality) pretty much read as a definition of what is not allowed to be termed 'banter' in modern British society, yet in some countries would be accepted without so much as a raised eyebrow. 

Reading over everything I have written so far, I realise that I've slightly missed the point. The broader cultural differences that allowed me to notice the different contexts in which 'banter' will or won't be accepted, blinded me to the fact that the perceived acceptability of any 'banter' is entirely contextual. OK, maybe 'blinded me' is a bit much, but I did think that the context was limited to national or cultural boundaries when it is not at all. With banter, the audience is everything: if it is between a few mates (who are all equally misogynist, racist or whatever) then it is banter; if it is between a broader sweep of society then it is more likely to be offensive. In this sense both Michael Vaughn and the Malky Mackay (the football guy) suffer from a similar problem: Vaughn doesn't understand the breadth of his audience, while Mackay never intended his words to reach a wider audience. Obviously I am not drawing direct parallels between the two men; to my knowledge, Vaughn has never said anything that could be construed as racist, sexist or homophobic, and he has (rightly in my opinion) never had cause to apologise for his tweets, but there can be no doubt that there are those who take considerable offence at some of what he writes in jest. However, in both cases, it is 'banter' that reveals the prejudices of the speaker and listener. Whilst Mackay denies his texts were banter, I'm fairly sure their definition only changed after they came into the public domain. If they had stayed private (and assuming they had only been shared with friends with similar prejudices) everyone involved would have viewed them as banter and gone about their lives with their prejudices intact. Of course Mackay argues that he has none of these prejudices, in which case, the defence of 'banter' would have best been held on to. Part of the purpose of banter appears to be to ride the limit of what the other finds acceptable and it is clearly easier to push that limit with a small group of friends one knows well than with a national or global audience. This appears to lead people to say things when they believe they are amongst friends that they would not countenance in public life, it apparently encourages people to make racist, sexist or homophobic remarks simply because they are taboo, but in the process poses the risk of normalising such language. The more we give voice to a concept without being challenged or asked to justify it, the more legitimate it appears to us, especially if we view it as a piece of harmless fun. So if we need to think about our audience before saying something, should we be saying it at all? The defence of banter is no defence. As Michael Vaughn has discovered, even when it is 'harmless banter', someone still finds it offensive. 

* can you tell I'm not really a football person? 

Partition

On the day I started writing this post (it can take me a while) it was reported that Islamic extremists had taken the Iraqi city of Mosul and one of the Republican Party's most senior figures had lost a primary to a TEA Party challenger. In many ways just another day in the 21st century, but I worry what that means: both these events were illustrations of polarisation in societies. The received wisdom is that, tired of the perceived ineffectiveness of moderation, people around the world turn to extremes in the hope of radical change, yet in neither situation is this entirely the case. In Iraq, the Sunni insurgents have found little resistance partly due to the sectarian machinations of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, which have sought to exclude the the Sunni minority from any involvement in government and wider society. As a marginalised and partially vilified population, the Sunni are likely to welcome an armed rebellion that at least recognises their existence. It is likely that a similar sentiment drives many people involved with the TEA Party movement: the idea that their government doesn't represent them and so they need to sweep it away completely. Embarrisngly, in the UK this sentiment has found its focus around a corduroy wearing idiot who presents himself as a man of the people by spending too much time in the pub.  

Regardless of how it manifests itself, the sense of alienation from mainstream politics and the resulting minority factions that are formed are common across the world at the moment. These anti-establishment movements gain significant traction in seemingly short spaces of time, but we have no way of knowing what would happen if they achieve their ends, as none has yet done so. Historically, extremes are either assimilated into the mainstream as politicians address their concerns and/or economic conditions improve, or the situation becomes so intractable that it deteriorates into civil or international war. Of course we take such a suggestion and happily assume it could never happen in the west, but that is historically because a relatively centralised media has ultimately fostered a consensus of compromise. In the internet age, information and potential consensus is disseminated in a much more focused manner, resulting partly in the kind of sentiment we see amongst these minority factions going entirely unquestioned. Indeed in the self-reflective silos of modern social media, the overwhelming impression is one of incomprehension that anyone could not be of the same opinion. When you don't encounter an opposing viewpoint, you become even more convinced of the rationality of your own beliefs. 

The number of 'popular' uprisings in recent times seems to be another symptom of this attitude of self-confirming rectitude. Whilst in cases like the Arab Spring, it is easy to see how the all-enveloping blanket of social media feedback encouraged the protesters to remain strong in the face of the brutal dictatorships that they opposed, the same blanket allows others to believe in the overwhelming popularity of their cause despite evidence to the contrary in the form of democratic elections. Several times recently, groups of people unable to accept the outcome of elections have decided to change that outcome to something more to their liking, either by attempting to redefine their place outside of their current state, or by attempting to overthrow the government. Of course these situations are rarely clear-cut; democratic legitimacy is claimed by both sides in almost all cases and hard to establish in most. Not so, you would hope in the defender of world democracy, and perhaps that (and the memory of the last one) is what stops it descending into civil war. It seems almost ludicrous even mentioning civil war with reference to the modern USA, but then I'm sure that thirty years ago, most Republicans would consider it ludicrous that members of their party would shut down the government over non-negotiable principles, or ditch their party leader because of his record on compromise. The whole ethos of the TEA Party and those like them is that reasoning with those of a different viewpoint is losing. In these new orthodoxies deviation from or dilution of the message is heresy. Unbelievers are branded fanatics and dehumised so that their opinions need not be given any credence. You may think that in many conflict situations it ever was thus, and this is certainly the case (take Israel/Palestine for example), but the rhetoric of uncompromise is much wider than the war zones of the world's intractable conflicts these days. 

I worry that we are genuinely losing the ability to debate with each other; we spend all of our time listening to those who agree with us or shouting to drown out the sound of those who don't. As a species, we have many vast problems to try and overcome - some of which count as existential threats - and we will need to work together to overcome them. Working together requires agreement, which requires compromise, which requires genuine debate based on the understanding that other points of view have validity. The certanties that the World Wide Web allows us to affirm with others of the same opinion are largely illusory and only serve as a barrier to the greater understanding of others that we need if we are to maintain any sort of functioning wider society. If we keep believing we (and solely those who agree with us) have exclusive access to the truth, then we can only look forward to a world defined by conflict, fragmentation and partition. 

Patriotic

I've largely stayed out of debate on the EU lately, as the whole thing is just too depressing to even attempt to engage with. Chief amongst my disappointments is the fact that millions of people are still stupid enough to believe that any one politician is different from the rest simply because he says he is. Didn't we already see the folly of that one with Nick Clegg? Politicians are fundamentally all the same: they are looking for your approval and they will go to pretty much any lengths to get it. Saying that they are not really a politician is clearly just another thing that politicians say; it would only be accurate if they weren't on the TV or radio telling you that you should vote for them. 

My last post was about the hope that we can finally move away from the politics of oversimplified broad agendas of the past and on to voting for issues that we actually care about. I see UKIP as the last gasp of that old fashioned politics: people aren't voting for UKIP because Nigel Farage has presented a series of well reasoned solutions to the myriad issues this country faces, but because he's told them that the source of all their problems is the EU and leaving it will solve all their problems. Somehow he has managed to present this action as policy, which is something that even Alex Salmond has been unable to achieve: not even the most ferverent supporter of Scottish independence believes that that action of leaving the UK will suddenly, magically solve all their country's problems. It is a shame therefore that so many (mainly English people) seem to see Farage's playground politics as some sort of ideology that they can broadly agree with. This is, of course, because it isn't an ideology at all; it is single issue politics disguised as ideology. Hopefully it is just a transitional anomaly caused by the transition from the party-based system to an issues-based representational one, resulting in the worst of both worlds. Voting for UKIP is voting on a single issue that they will have no power to affect, whilst they actually absent themselves from representing you on every other issue that actually might affect you. In many ways, voting for UKIP is equivalent to not voting at all, but then it is likely that a lot of people are voting UKIP as they wouldn't vote at all otherwise, so perhaps they will get the level of representation that they crave. 

This is rapidly turning into the rant that I hoped it wouldn't, so I should probably wrap it up, but before I do, I'd like to quickly look language surrounding this election. For some strange reason, the right-wing press has allocated sole rights to the claim of patriotism to those of the Euroskeptic persuasion. It's as if being patriotic is the same thing as being myopic. I thought being a patriot meant you were willing to go abroad and fight for your country; certainly that's what our grandparents thought. For some reason, the understanding of patriotism has been redefined to mean that you are willng to stay at home and ignore what is happening abroad regardless of the cost to your country of this course of action. As the 70th anniversary of D-Day approaches, I think I'll stick with the old definition of patriotism and engage with Europe in a way that will help my country.