Gove, creationism and the war on reason

Sometimes in politics a line is crossed in a way that is particularly chilling.  The announcement that Education Secretary Michael Gove has allowed advocates of creationism to set up three free schools is one of those moments.  Not that it should come as any surprise – the seeds of this particular development were sown when Tony Blair as Prime Minister famously failed to condemn the teaching of creationism, and in New Labour’s adoption of the principle of academies, dealing state comprehensive education what looks increasingly like a fatal blow.

As the Guardian report I’ve linked to above is at pains to point out, creationism cannot be taught in science lessons.  But, honestly, who really believes that this is a safeguard?  Does anyone really believe that teaching it in religious education lessons instead will mean that children will place it in that context.  Having myself been educated in an Anglo-Catholic prep school suffused with ideal of hot sweet piety (by a school chaplain who is now serving a prison sentence for interfering with his charges) I find it hard to believe that such boundaries will be observed.  After all, why do creationist groups go into the provision of schools?

Why does this matter? It is because the apparent tolerance of creationsm – because it is a belief system held by some people who have wealth and power  - as a potential alternative to evolution, which has more than a century of rational underpinning and scientific method behind it, is antithetic to the very idea of education.  If the purpose of education is to allow people to grow up as informed, critical thinkers, then this can only be a deeply retrograde move.  And it is so obviously one that reflects political power – evangelical Christianity good, mudassars bad.  Would free schools run by homeopaths, scientologists and eugenecists (to pick three random forms of intellectual twaddle) be given anything like the same sort of free run as evangelical Christian schools?  Do we believe that climate change deniers should be given the right to use schools to preach their anti-science (provided of course that they only do it outside formal “science” lessons)?  But, despite their well-funded lobbying, they do not exercise the emotional power of organised religion.

But, leaving aside for a moment this debasing of intellectual standards, there is I think a deeper issue, one which is all of a piece with the way in which our political discourse generally is increasingly detached from a rational base.  Why – leaving aside issues of cultural dominance – are Christians given a free run?  Why do we accord religious convictions a special status?

There are some serious issues about freedom and society here.  I am certainly not going to argue that those with religious belief should not be allowed to practice those beliefs – but there is obviously a real issue when those beliefs influence wider society.  Look at the  good old Anglican church – where a liberal wing that is accepting of sexual diversity is locked in a permanent battle with an evangelical wing whose homophobia exhibits a hatred that we in a secular society find difficult to comprehend.  Ultimately this is a debate about faith and the revealed word of God through prayer and that personal relationship with the divine that suffuses religioius faith, and the unfounded dogma that the much-translated Bible is the definitive word of God.  These are private things, and – to use the Popperian phrase – unfalsifiable things.  Resort to these things and you have destroyed public discourse.

Related to this is the cult of sincerity.  Mainstream media tend to use phrases like “deeply-held” as a term of honour; there is a cult of emotionalism which seems to confer legitimacy on solipsism.  A functioning society has to be empathetic; it has to respect diversity and recognise that people have differing beliefs, but a civil society has to distinguish between private and public and needs to find a common language in which to express that distinction.  In Western society, evidence and rationalism largely provide that  language and allow us to find a balance between private and public.

But we are living through what looks like a time when rationalism has been abandoned in public discourse – instead we are living in a time of narratives, with the neoliberal myth as the most potent irrationalism of all.  We see speeches by Cameron – on welfare, for example, or immigration – in which a shallow emotionalism is substituted for a consideration of evidence; the discipline of evidence is disappearing and, with it, empathy disappears too.  There is no more telling example of this than the way in which the Con Dems have demonised the disabled and others on benefits.  The attack on empathy may have started with Margaret Thatcher, but she was a rank amateur compared with the unholy trinity of Cameron, Clegg and Murdoch, or the lies and evasions of Tony Blair.  Ultimately, the priest undermining the self-worth of the vulnerable girl discovering her sexuality is no different from the DWP spin doctor anonymously spreading lies about disability benefit fraud – both are indulging a politics of hate. Emotionalism and the denigration of empathy; in extreme circumstances the building blocks of totalitarianism, and if Britain remains for the most part an open and secular society it is because we continue to resist those things.

And this is why the admission of creationists into the academy is so dangerous.  Schools are public places, where we learn to develop the language and boundaries that make a society possible. By placing education into the hands of people whose methods  - indeed whose specific aim – is to replace discourse with faith, we are flirting with the destruction of the open society.  There is no place for the priest in the classroom.

The triumph of the commons: why Elinor Ostrom matters

The death of Elinor Ostrom, economist, radical and first woman to win the Nobel Economics Prize, seems to have passed largely unnoticed in the Anglo-Saxon world; a look at the #ostrom hashtag on Twitter in the hours following the announcement of her passing showed tributes in many languages, for once English not in the majority.  Yet Ostrom’s work remains an inspiration to those on the Green left and, I’d argue, is supremely important in developing a counter-narrative as the failure of the Anglo-Saxon model of free market economics becomes clearer by the day.

Why does Ostrom matter?  To answer this, you need to go back to one of the most influential texts of free market economics – Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968.  The heart of Hardin’s argument can be found in these paragraphs:

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of -1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

In other words, Hardin argues that collective control of a resource is impossible.  The answer to this tragedy – private ownership (Hardin goes on to compare the use of commons to bank robbery). It is a hugely influential text, one that has been used over and again to argue that common ownership is impossible.  Hardin argues that common ownership will lead to environmental degradation; ultimately he concludes that the answer lies in preventing the populace from breeding.  It’s important to note that, not only is this argument fundamentally anti-democratic, but it is firmly rooted in the social Darwinism that informs so much American socio-political discourse (the irony that this unsupportable bastard offspring of Darwinism holds sway in a society in which millions reject the central, scientifically-supported tenets of evolution is of course vast and obvious).

The failures in the metaphor are obvious.  Most obviously, Hardin offers no evidence at all that the commons are doomed to fail; the actual historical evidence shows that in many societies at many periods, land has been managed as a commons, sustainably and to the benefit of all, according to common rules.   Hardin argues that private ownership will do better; he offers no evidence to support this claim.  Also, the image of the rational being painted by Hardin is clearly one-dimensional; the rational actor is the one who seeks immediate gratification without thought to the collective consequence.  But it’s a straw man; while those attributes look very much like the actor in models of market economics, the simple fact is that not only do people do not necessarily think like that, but in almost all the interactions of life we actually do completely the opposite.  These are ideologically-based assumptions that pay no heed to the empirical world.  I refute Hardin’s psychological assumptions every time I put my scraps on my compost heap. The use of pseudo-mathematics in Hardin’s example is really just a form of obfuscation.

Most importantly, in spite of all these flaws, this unsupported concept of humanity provides a ready rationale for the appropriation and privatisation of common assets – or, more generally, of natural resources.  It’s actually a deep expression of pessimism about the human race – a set of assumptions that Hobbes would have recognised.

The importance of Elinor Ostrom’s work is that it provides a refutation of this world view.  And significantly – at a time when academic economics has retreated increasingly into the refining of mathematical models, leaving the relationship of economic theory to the real world increasingly unexamined, Ostrom was a thinker who worked in the field; her work was informed by a range of projects looking at issues as diverse as water associations in Los Angeles, police departments in Indiana and irrigation in Nepal.  It’s an economics that is grounded in experience. She drew on history and empirical research to show that in reality people are not just selfish actors, but do consider the wider consequences of their actions for those around them and the environment in which those actions are carried out.

At the heart of Ostrom’s contribution is a set of rules for the commons:

1. Clearly defined boundaries (effective exclusion of external un-entitled parties);
2. Rules regarding the appropriation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local conditions;
3. Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process;
4. Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators;
5. A scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules;
6. Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access;
7. Self-determination of the community recognized by higher-level authorities;
8. In the case of larger common-pool resources,organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local units at the base level.

These are of course high-level principles – there is no magic wand being waved here; governing the commons, like any democratic exercise, may well in practice be messy and difficult – and involve a lot of activity that those who only measure achievement in terms of cash output will regard as wasteful and bureaucratic – but the fact is that it can be done, and done democratically and sustainably.  In that it contrasts powerfully with  the central conceit of market economics that there is, in Margaret Thatcher’s phrase, no alternative.  Market economics posits a set of pseudo-psychological statements about how individuals behave – of which Hardin’s comment is one; Ostrom’s work on the commons shows that human activity is far richer and more diverse than the market theorists would allow, and is above all democratic – it’s a basis for how equal human beings can resolve key issues about the management of resources without the coercion of ownership, or, crucially, the appropriation of resources

What does Ostrom tell us about the current world financial crisis?

Ostrom’s theory of the commons can be seen as providing a powerful alternative to the conceits and fallacies at the heart of the current world economic crisis.  The current crisis looks in many ways very much like Marx’s crisis of capital accumulation – corporate interests hoarding vast cash piles, while demand slumps, in the face of the capital’s need to accumulate to survive.  It’s a scenario that moved Keynes – whose mission was always to save capitalism from the idiocies of its practitioners – to formulate the need to stimulate demand, to kick-start the normal process that kept capitalism working (and, one might add with the hindsight of today,  to escape the cycle of crises that increasingly appears to characterise raw unregulated capitalism).

Commons thinking addresses two key elements of the way in which capital has continued to accumulate.  The first is through accumulation and price inflation of assets like land – the latest crisis, like every financial crisis since 1973, was precipitated by the collapse of a property bubble.  The second is through the monetisation and effective privatisation of assets held in common but which have sat outside the traditional purview of exchange.  This includes such things as the appropriation and exploitation of land belonging to indigenous people (or colonialism, as we used to call it) and the turning of subsistence economies into cash-based suppliers for the wealthier parts of the world; it also includes the monetisation of natural resources like air and water or even  life itself (for example in the case of the appraisal mechanisms for new roads, where the safety benefits of new roads are calculated on the basis of a “value of life” number generated through stated preference techniques);  exchanges that have traditionally been free acquire a cash value that can be factored into GDP numbers that feed capital’s voracious need for compound growth.  It means that economic activity – and increasingly what we would traditionally think of as non-economic activity – is carried on according to structures of value dictated by capital’s need for voracious expansion.  And many would argue that it is that expansion, based on paper values of intangible assets rather than the needs and aspirations of the majority, that is at the root of the current crisis.  Moreover, the inexorable pressure of capital accumulation – especially in times of crisis – is towards short-term gain; an economy which is based on the short-term realisation of paper gain in relation to monetised assets is the very opposite of sustainable.

Commons thinking offers us a way to counteract this. It challenges the belief that the only measure of wealth is the generation of asset numbers on paper; it reminds us that real wealth often has little or nothing to do with economic activity, and it places democratic decision-making at the heart of the generation of real value (it actually means that we decide democratically what has value, rather than leaving that decision to owners of capital and their tame accountants, or to politicians in a representative democracy in which those who do not share the prevailing ideology have little or no voice).  It’s a challenge to the fatalism of market economics – notably to the belief that millions of people are not permitted to have a view on what matters.  It emphatically does not offer easy solutions – in that sense it is way more honest than the neoliberal view that suggests we just have to make markets work more efficiently to ensure prosperity for all.  It recognises the messiness of life, the fact that the world is full of conflicting interests that have to be resolved, far more effectively than a system based on the single imperative of maximising paper asset value in the long-term.

In summary: the commons, and Ostrom’s work, offer a starting-point for an economic and political discourse that is more humane, nuanced, grounded and sustainable than the dominant neoliberal ideology.  At a time when neoliberalism is failing and the reaction to that appears increasingly to be an abandonment of democratic principles, the work of Elinor Ostrom is desperately important.

Remembering Thomas Paine

For reasons too complicated to go into here, I found myself in Lewes this lunchtime with an hour to spare.  Moved by the displays of Jubilee tat that seemed to occupy every shop window, I thought I’d spend a little while in search of Lewes’ most celebrated son – Thomas Paine, the intellectual moving spirit behind the American and French revolutions, and thus one of the most influential men in modern history.

Paine was not born in Lewes, but spent the years before he went to America here. It was in the radical clubs of Lewes that Paine, staymaker, tobacconist and (by all accounts notably unsuccesful) exciseman, formulated his revolutionary doctrines and expounded his ideas, railing against monarchy, against property, and calling for democracy  - ideas that resound through Common Sense and Rights of Man, books that changed the world.

Finding Paine is not easy. His memorials are tucked away in quiet corners of the town; there is a Thomas Paine trail if you look hard enough but Lewes does not make a big thing out of him. Most obvious is Bull House in the High Street, where Paine lodged at the home of the tobacconist Samuel Ollive, whose daughter he eventually married (and whose business he so catastrophically mismanaged).

Further down the street is the crudely painted memorial at the Clock Tower – itself a Victorian replacement for the tower that Paine would have known.  Incongruously enough, today Paine looked down on a cup-cake stall as part of Lewes’ friday morning market.  It’s a poor painting – but the unchained crown at the bottom spoke volumes about an obsession which we have yet to grow out of.

Finally, to the statue unveiled by Tony Benn last year.  Again, it’s tucked away – in front of the library (of which one imagines Paine would have approved) and behind the Quaker Meeting House (reminding us that Paine came from a family of Friends).

It’s a strange juxtaposition – a prosperous, often quite twee and very English market town, with views of the South Downs, and yet one where this great radical figure lurks, as it were, around quiet corners and twittens offering shade in the enervating heat.

Does Paine still matter today?  Just across the road from the Clock Tower I found this:

I think the answer must be that we have never needed Paine so badly as we do now.

Still no such thing as society?

Watching the coalition take an electoral thrashing is very gratifying.  Two parties who have executed a feral neoliberal programme for which they have no electoral mandate getting a tanking at the ballot box is good to see – and it emphasises their lack of any mandate – but the story is not really that rosy.

Most commentators have reflected on the record low turnout.  Part of this is because local government simply matters less than it did – funding decisions are taken by central Government and Eric Pickles’ localism agenda is really about the emasculation of local authorities, turning them from actively functioning government into commissioning bodies.  More people, surely, would vote if they were confident that doing so would make a difference in their communities.  And it’s clear that city mayors – rejected on low turnouts in cities like Nottingham – are a busted flush; it’s not so much that people reject the undemocratic nature of the project – itsel a symptom of the atomisation of political debate in its underpinning assumption that a powerful individual governs more effectively than a collective elected authority – that they just don’t care.

Lack of confidence in the state as an agent of progressive change runs through the warp and weft of our society.  On the anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, it’s easy to see that as her most poisonous legacy – a poison that continues to affect all three main Westminster parties.  Of the three, Labour remains deeply conflicted – its active members often taking a very different line from its largely neoliberal leadership – but the fact remains that a narrative that emphasises the collective, that talks about society and the need for collective institutions, is largely absent from mainstream political debate. Instead we have hollow claims about big societies and all being in it together, and expressed through grand-projet patriotic elite extravaganzas like the Olympics and the Jubilee.  We remain a society in which the National Health Service – long portrayed as Britain’s best-loved institution – has been effectively dismembered with no effective opposition, and in which the demonisation of the poor and vulnerable as scroungers responsible for national decline is seen as both clever and acceptable.  Blaming the poor – how far have we really progressed as a political culture?

Richard Murphy’s book The Courageous State proposes a powerful analogy for society – the cappuccino cup, in which the strong black coffee is the state while the frothy milk above it is the private sector.  It’s a potent reminder that for all the rhetoric about individualism, it is collective institutions that make the expression of individualism possible; and that it is the state which allows decisions to be made democratically that control the licence of those with wealth and power.  But without a strong democracy, in all the meanings of that word, the strong black coffee becomes rancid and poisonous; it’s simply a measure of social control.  It’s a cumulative process; when 65% of the electorate stays at home, that poison is clearly at work, and allows the ideological narrative that the financial interests of the few – dressed up as the operations of the market – trumps democracy to take hold.  Who voted for the coalition’s neoliberal agenda?  Nobody.  But democratic apathy allows them to dress up neoliberalism as something to which there is no alternative.

Yesterday’s vote – I am writing this before the result of London’s X-Factor mayoral election is known – sends a powerful message within the political system.  Those who turn out to vote are rejecting an ideological agenda that has no electoral mandate in the first place.  But defeating what I regard as the toxic, anti-democratic fiction of neoliberalism needs far more than this.  It needs a real engagement, a sustained political and social movement that refuses to accept the Westminster consensus and learns how to participate again.  Democratic renewal is an atrocious cliché; but, yes, that’s what we need.  A popular, democratic – and, yes, courageous – state has to be the last best hope of getting out of this mess.

The Curse of PPE

There has been quite a lot of debate recently about how the British political class is dominated by Oxbridge.  And I read quite often  – especially on Twitter – comments along the lines of “If Cameron has a first in PPE at Oxford, how come he’s so ignorant about …” or “If Cameron got a First in PPE it doesn’t say much for the Oxbridge system …”

It’s an understandable sentiment.  The Oxford degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics has long been seen as the prime qualification for a career in British party politics.  As it happens, thirty years ago I was reading PPE at Oxford; the more I reflect on the course I pursued the more it seems to be a key part of the British political malaise.

To be fair, a glance at the Oxford University website suggests that the course has broadened a bit since then. However, the course structure I followed is likely to have been what those at the peak of the British political elite will have read, and on reflection what characterises the course from those days is how little you could get away with learning.

In the 1980s the core politics course was all about institutions in Britain, the US and France and British political history; philosophy was about the British empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) with a cursory nod towards logical positivism, and moral philosophy; economics was a bit of theory and the organisation of the British economy.  If you were doing all three subjects, these subjects accounted for six out of your eight final papers.

The implication was that you could get a First in PPE without reading a word of Marx or Kant or Plato, or studying any politics of developing nations (or the economics of development), or without reading any continental philosophy apart from Descartes, or without doing any political or sociological theory, or studying philosophical method (a series of worries about the basis of economic theory led me to do an optional paper in social scientific theory – I think in my year the number of entrants in this fascinating and fundamental area barely reached double figures).  Of course for those who wanted to do something more rigorous and worthwhile there was a big range of options, but the fact remained that you could get away with doing what with hindsight looks very much like the sort of broad-based and superficial curriculum that resembles one of those general-studies A level courses that Russell Group universities are quick to point out don’t really count. And it’s a consensual and safe curriculum – it’s one that enables the ambitious but intellectually incurious to spend three years without having their assumptions really challenged.

And not just with hindsight – I had a vacation job working alongside a colleague who was studying philosophy at what was then Staffordshire Polytechnic, and it very quickly emerged that she was doing a more rigorous, stimulating and comprehensive course than I was at Oxford. And I recall the raised eyebrows when, having been awarded a College prize in Philosophy in my final year, I chose to spend the book tokens that came with it on, inter alia, a copy of Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies – a key political and philosophical text of the twentieth century, but one that Oxford ignored. My own experience is that such understanding of politics and economics as I possess now derives overwhelmingly from my reading since leaving Oxford, not what I learned there.

In other words, PPE – certainly as it was when the current British political class was studying it – is not remotely a gold standard for intellectual rigour.  Oxbridge is itself a problem – it remains a reminder that the hierarchy of academic achievement in Britain is every bit as much about class and privilege as it is about academic ability, continuing to draw on a minority of the intensively-coached privileged for a proportion of its intake that has remained broadly unchanged in thirty years.  But the idea that PPE gives one the intellectual grounding to deal with the problems facing our society seems to me to be entirely false.

And a society with the depth and nature of the problems that we have cannot afford to indulge in this sort of lazy intellectual idolatry.

Clegg: making a Popper fool of himself

Nick Clegg has made a speech to Demos and the Open Society Foundation on his vision of the open society. Entitled The Open Society and its Enemies, he is obviously channelling Popper’s vast and influential work.  Like so much of Clegg’s utterances, it’s a bizarre mix of the delusional and the misguided.  In many respects, one of the best ways to understand the neoliberal project – of which Clegg is undoubtedly a part – is to get a handle on its delusions and evasions.  Clegg’s speech is as good a way as any to get into that process.

It’s worth though taking a moment to reflect on the significance of Popper.  Written in exile in wartime New Zealand, Popper’s great work The Open Society and its Enemies is both a tome for its times and a work that has acquired totemic value in some rather unlikely circles.  It is at one level a counterblast for empiricism against ideology – but in the 1980s, with the active encouragement of the older Popper himself, it became associated with free-market liberalism.  Popper was a stauch supporter of Margaret Thatcher, who reciprocated the admiration.  But it’s quite obvious that the method Popper deploys against Plato, Marx and Hegel can also be turned on neoliberalism – which, even more so than in the 1980s, appears to have lost all sense of empirical grounding.

Clegg writes:

We British are an open-spirited people. But we are hobbled by closed institutions. By instinct we believe in fair play and giving everyone a fair chance in life.
But our politics and economy are distorted by unaccountable hoards of power, wealth and influence: media moguls; dodgy lobbyists corrupting our politics; irresponsible bankers taking us for a ride and then helping themselves to massive bonuses; boardrooms closed against the interests of shareholders and workers. The values of the hoarders are increasingly out of touch with the spirit of openness alive in the UK.
It is not often you’ll hear me say this, but I agree with Tony Blair. In his words “the big difference is no longer between left and right, it is between open and closed”.
So what is an open society?

It is a society where powerful citizens are free to shape their own lives. It has five vital features:

i) social mobility, so that all are free to rise;

ii) dispersed power in politics, the media and the economy;

iii) transparency, and the sharing of knowledge and information;

iv) a fair distribution of wealth and property; and

v) an internationalist outlook

By contrast a closed society is one in which:

i) a child’s opportunities are decided by the circumstances of their birth

ii) power is hoarded by the elite

iii) information is jealously guarded

iv) wealth accumulates in the hands of the few, not the many; and

v) narrow nationalism trumps enlightened internationalism

Closed societies – opaque, hierarchical, insular – are the sorts of society my party has opposed for over a hundred and fifty years.

The obvious question, of course, is just what planet Clegg thinks he’s living on. If you wanted to list the essential political agenda of the coalition of which he is a (admittedly not very influential) part, it would look awfully like those five characteristics of the closed society. Whether Clegg is simply delusional, or now so impotent in Government that the only outlet he has for his beliefs is making sideswipes at Tories in obscure lectures to think-tanks, is not something I could judge.  But it is obvious that by almost every test that Clegg sets for the open society, the coalition is failing.  We are becoming less equal, social mobility has undoubtedly fallen (the man who has perhaps done more than anyone to keep able children from poorer backgrounds to get a higher education touches dizzying heights of hypocrisy in this passage), wealth has been ruthlessly redistributed from poor to rich, and Clegg’s government has in eighteen months probably done more to damage Britain’s relations with Europe than a decade of Thatcher’s relentless handbagging.  And at every stage Liberal Democrat MPs and Peers have meekly trooped through the lobbies to vote the Tory agenda.  Whatever you may think of Popper’s writing, he was a courageous and outspoken individual in a way that Clegg and his party simply could not begin to comprehend.

But one issue that Clegg ignores is that of empiricism.  This Government has done more than any in recent history to take Government away from an evidential to an ideological base.  In every sphere this has been the case – look at the recent committment to increase motorway speed limits – but most of all it has been true in the economic sense.  At the heart of the Coalition agenda is an economic policy that is built on delusion and faith – the faith that reducing public expenditure  will encourage prosperity.  It is a statement for which there is absolutely no empirical evidence, and is based on pure ideology and faith in the confidence fairy.  Social policy is based on ideological tropes about the family and morality that simply do not stand up to empirical scrutiny.  And party politics is based on three parties slugging it out across an ideological consensus that is increasingly detached from the daily realities of life for the vast majority of the population.

Popper feared the triumph of ideology.  The government of which Clegg is nominally a leading member is delivering exactly that.

Adam Curtis, loving machines and the dog that didn’t bark

The third film of Adam Curtis’ series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace was as astonishing as the first two – visually arresting, compelling, throwing ideas at the viewer, sometimes brilliant, sometimes just plain wrong.  Television is a tabloid medium and the ideas could not be developed in this framework, but the questions were asked, to be considered at leisure.  The final bleak conclusion – that we have fooled ourselves into thinking that we are lumps of failing hardware destined to perpetuate a software of genetic code, in order to excuse our failures – was compelling, the more so for being intoned against a backdrop of commuters on a tube escalator.

The debates could – and will – go on for a long time.  But for me there was one dog that didn’t bark.  There is one essential area in which we are prepared to abjure responsibility and rely on a model of a self-stabilising system in which the best outcomes are deemed to emerge if the workings of that system are left alone – the dominant myth of the age, individualistic free market economics. The ruling ideology of our time is the belief that free markets will allow the setting of an intelligent price which will allocate scarce resources in the best possible way.  In the neo-classical economics that mysterious power is anthropormorphised in the person of the Walrasian Auctioneer, the mythic being used by the economist Leon Walras to explain the beneficent power of the market to move into a mutually satisfying equilibrium.

And, in many ways, the market follows Curtis’ formulation – it provides an illusion that masks a reality about power and the way in which the wealthy and powerful hold on to it.  As market ideology and neoliberalism have become entrenched in the last thirty years the economic outcomes for all but the rich minority have worsened, growth has slowed, inequalities have widened, wages have fallen consistently as a proportion of total income.  Yet the myth remains potent and – in Britain at least – is being perpetuated by the ruling coalition with disastrous vigour.

However valid the often extraordinary links and conclusions drawn by Curtis, it seems to me that the economics of the market could have provided a powerful and cogent illustration of his argument that to trust to mythical, self-regulating systems, abdicating the political, leads to disaster and failure.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace – hippies and hegemony

The second part of Adam Curtis’ documentary was another sensory attack.  Britten, Bartok, ecosystems, a hole in the side of a bison. Some commentators see it as a work of art rather than a straight documentary and you could see their point.  Here are some quick thoughts.

Put very simply, Curtis described how in the 1960s, influenced by ideas of nature as a self-regulating system and the growth of cybernetics, counter-cultures emerged which rejected political structures.  But this was futile – research showed that nature could not be modelled as a self-regulating system, and the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine showed that non-hieararchical networks break down.

It was uneven and unencumbered by hard evidence.  On Georgia and Ukraine he was simply wrong – the internet may have spread the word at the time of revolution, but the causes are much more complex and owe far more to geopolitics than Curtis allowed.  Again, the fatal flaw was to look at the machines, not the motives behind the people using and manipulating them.

At the heart of this is a crucial and important idea – one that Curtis here, as in his first film, hinted at but never quite nailed.  This is that the non-political is a myth.  Power is present, and drives the creation of networks and, through the ownership of internet service providers and social networking systems, the means of delivery.  The illusion of the non-political and the atomisation of society into individuals is the tool of hegemony – in this case allowing power and wealth to remain in the hands of those who already wield it.  Based on such an assumption, a counter-culture as described by Curtis that claims to be non-political is inevitably doomed, because it can never challenge power.

The idea of self-regulating networks of course massively predates computers – it is at the centre of seventeenth century cosmology.  And we find it at the heart of neo-liberal economics, in which individuals are consumers or factors of production, in a model in which solidarity is absent.  It is at the heart of arguments for markets and privatisation, which tell us that somehow, through the miracle of the freely-operating network, and outcome that is beneficial to all will be achieved.

But we know it’s nonsense – history tells us that.  I don’t know what Curtis will argue in his final film, but it seems that whatever one thinks about the coherence of his thesis, the comparison with market economics is inevitable.

A (nine) grand day out

Well, it was massive – up to 50,000 students marching through London. From where I was the march was peaceful, good-spiritied but noisy (I’ve never been up close to a vuvuzela before). I know there’s been trouble outside Tory Party HQ, which is a pity – the media will now focus on the behaviour of the few, not the tens of thousands who made their point forcefully but peacefully.

Many of the placards were brilliant. My favourite – obviously from a philosophy student:

But there were plenty of others

The anger against the Lib Dems was palpable. A party whose Parliamentary strength lies in University towns has got a real problem:

A great day for democracy:

Ayn Rand and the appeal of pseudo-philosophy

The appeal of the writing of Ayn Rand persists – two new biographies are reviewed at length by Corey Robin here in the Nation, reflecting an upsurge in interest this writer, especially in the United States, following the economic crash in 2008.

The Nation review’s title – Garbage and Gravitas – seems to be as good a three-word summary of Rand’s output as one is likely to find, and the review is substantial and challenging. It indicates clearly Rand’s massive egotism and grandiosity, the poverty of her scholarship, her lack of intellectual rigour, her kinship with Fascism – based on a vulgarised reading of Nietzsche. And Robin seeks to answer the crucial questions – why Ayn Rand?  And why now?

Corey argues crucially that Rand’s work is not, as some claim, about the conflict between the individual and the masses, but between the born leader and the little, unproductive people – bureaucrats, intellectuals – that stand between the great man and the masses. To that extent it’s a deeply fascistic vision but one, she argues, that is very typical of the neo-con right.

For me, there’s a fascinating irony at work in Rand’s post-2008 crash revival.

Atlas Shrugged is about individualism, and sets out the Rand philosophy most fully. It describes a society in which the “men of the mind” – really a euphemism for entrepreneurs – withdraw from a society which is intent on bleeding them dry with regulations and taxes into their own mountain fastness. The world descends into a mire of war and bureaucracy, until those same bureaucrats beg the entrepreneurs’ leader to bring them back out of exile.

So, what’s the appeal today?

One explanation is that there is a similarity to what has happened in the last couple of years, with vast handouts to failed bankers at the expense of the prudent. And there’s always been a tendency for the Right in the United States to hitch itself to any ideology which legitimises the refusal to pay taxes and condemns public altruism; Corey Robin quotes a Hollywood actress as claiming that Rand taught her you don’t have to be nice to everyone. More generally this is a body of work which is uniquely useful to anyone who wants to legitimise private greed and avoid any guilt about those whom society leaves behind.

But I think the issue goes a bit deeper than that. One of the really interesting things about this work becoming more popular now is that what is happened in the real world is the complete antithesis of what Rand predicted. The current crisis is above all the creation of the “men of the mind” who have increasingly been let of the leash; who have pursued their version of entrepreneurship without the petty burden of regulation, in an environment in which the ruling ideology has been that their enrichment of themselves has been beneficial to society. Rational self-interest on Rand’s model has proved to be irrational and destructive.

So where does this leave us? I think Atlas Shrugged is the security blanket of the neocons, a desperate attempt to find some vestige of legitimacy amid the chaos they have created.