The Second Time As Farce, Or, And A Pony Please

I'm reading The Hugo Young Papers, whose main feature thus far has been to make you realise how far the terms of political discourse have been shifted to the libertarian right since Young started his journalistic career: the idea of the Tories fighting an election over their right to impose a national incomes policy, as Heath did in '74, is unimaginable now. However, I've now just reached the early eighties and the formation of the SDP and then the Alliance. This is from the interview with Richard Holme in January 1982, who was later to be Lib Dem spokesman in the House of Lords but had then just finished a stint as President of the Liberals. Young asks about the prospect of the Alliance going into coalition with the Tories after the next election and, crucially, how to extract proportional representation from such an arrangement; "how to prevent getting a pledge to PR out of the Tory leader, and then this being ditched by Tory MPs - meanwhile the Alliance being locked into the government and looking stupid":

[G]ive support on the back benches for, say, eighteen months: which would mean that the Alliance would bring down the government, not itself be brought down by Tory backbenchers. This would put the government's survival on their commitment to PR being pushed through the HC - hence a much better tactic than joining the government on a condition not fulfilled.

On Being Pure Of Heart

About a week and a half before the election, I said I'd vote Lib Dem if I were voting where I grew up, in Battersea, and not where I live now. Martin Linton, the Labour incumbent, had been deeply unsatisfactory as an MP: a pretty craven piece of 1997 New Labour lobby fodder who'd not even had the decency to buy any real influence in exchange for more or less absolute loyalty. He was also 9th on the Tory hitlist, having scraped through two recounts last time, and was presumably looking enviously at a snowball's chances in hell. I know people who did vote Lib Dem in Battersea, although I'm fairly sure that had it come to it, I wouldn't have done. Although obviously I don't know all of them, I wonder how the 7,000-odd of them now feel about having unseated a Labour MP. Not only have they effectively put a Tory in, but they did so by voting in favour of a candidate who would have ended up being Tory lobby fodder anyway. Having voted in favour of more or less everything Blair and Brown have done is not great; voting in favour of everything David Cameron will do is going to be worse. Of course our voting system's not fair. Behaving as if it were will not make it so. Lib Dems may resist being described as yellow Tories, but if it walks the walk... I suspect that they are now about to be royally screwed by everyone, and I can't say that I'm particularly distressed by this.

On Fetishes

I think it is safe to say that I am generally of a fairly Kantian bent; I'm all for all that secularized puritanism - what's so bloody great about happiness anyway? So you'd have thought that I'd quite like Arthur Ripstein's Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy. I don't, and I think Ripstein may be a bit mad. Ripstein's reconstruction of Kant's view starts with an exploration of Kant's idea of innate right. I don't know whether Ripstein is right about the interpretation of the relevant bits of Kant, since I don't know the relevant bits of Kant, but what he says seems to me wrong, at least as claims about the coercively enforceable rights we have over our bodies. Ripstein's claim I think is that because we are entitled not to be subject to anyone else, we are entitled to set our own purposes, and that because we are entitled to set our own purposes, we are entitled to exclude others from any control over our own bodies. If others controlled our bodies at all, they would be setting our purposes by eliminating certain ways in which we could act and so making us unable to pursue certain ends.

Now, this, independently of anything else Ripstein says seems to me implausible. I do not lose my ability to act if you can choose whether to make my left ear twitch at five minutes intervals. I simply do not need full control rights over my body in order to be able to act as I please; some instances of control by others over my body are simply irrelevant to my ability to act, because there are many things my body does or can do which have no impact on my use of it to pursue any given project. If my left ear involuntarily twitches at five minutes intervals, this does not impact on my ability to act as I please and so it can hardly impact on it if you can choose whether it twitches or not. You may be using me as a means, but I can still set my own ends.

When added to other things that Ripstein says, it seems even more crazy. Ripstein apparently thinks that no-one else having control over your body is not only necessary but sufficient for you to be setting your own ends. If he did not, then he would not be able to restrict innate rights to rights against having your body controlled by others; indeed, he would have to admit some rights of others to control your body by requiring you to do provide others with control over objects other than their bodies necessary for them to act. Not only does Ripstein want to say that if I can make you twitch one ear, you are under my control, but also that I can set my own ends even if I am so crippingly hungry all I can think of is food. The distinction Ripstein draws between our capacity to act and the world in which we act in order to sustain this sort of claim clearly does exist - that I cannot achieve an end I set myself does not mean that I cannot set it - but it is either it is not as sharp as he imagines or not in the place he imagines. He says, for example, that although "[p]urposive beings that were unable to manipulate or modify physical objects could not have property in them, because those objects would not be available to them as means", such beings "would still have a right to their own person". What kind of right could this be? How could I have a right to a physical body that could not manipulate or modify physical objects? What could possibly explain or justify such a right?

Anthropologically Unjust

This is just wonderful (via Carl).

Grindingly Awful Up Close

In his foreword to a recent translation of parts of Garibaldi's memoirs, Tim Parks says of Garibaldi that he appreciated that "only complete singleness of mind could make anything happen... he sacrificed every other consideration for Italian unity". Parks clearly thinks this is a virtue in Garibaldi. I'm pretty sure it's not: as Parks acknowledges, what sacrificing every other consideration for Italian unity meant was not just sacrificing himself - and let's not forget that Garibaldi lived to see Italian unification - but "the lives of thousands upon thousands of others". Garibaldi's own view seems to have been that anyone who wasn't prepared to take ill-equipped and untrained young men off to fight guerilla campaigns in the firm belief that, despite the hostile attitude of the two nearest Great Powers, the sheer glory of being prepared to kill and be killed to be united under a tinpot monarchy would be enough to ensure victory. For example, when criticizing the behaviour of Cavour in allowing French interference during his attack on Naples in 1860, he says of some of his own followers who assisted Cavour that they were

swayed by the hypocritical, terrible pretext of necessity. The necessity of being cowards! The necessity of abasing oneself in the mud before some ephemeral image of power instead of heeding and understanding the vigorous, forceful, virile will of the people who wish to exist at any cost and are prepared to destroy these insect-eating icons and bury them back in the dung from which they sprang.

This is just batshit crazy. This is not, it's a gamble and maybe it won't come off, but that doesn't make it not worth trying; this is, because we want it enough, it will happen. Never mind the fact that the book is full of the refusal of peasants in what was still a predominantly rural society to assist Garibaldi's troops; never mind that if it was true that merely wanting it was enough to make it so, it'd be hard to explain how it hadn't happened yet, or indeed why it would be wrong to try and stop it happening; never mind the price that both sides pay for showing that you want it enough; Garibaldi has seen the virile will of the people, appointed himself its tribune, and thereby licensed himself to demand that all others yoke their will to his, to throw away their plans and commitments in the service of some greater glory. Parks ends his encomium to Garibaldi's ability to drive the campaign for Italian unification out of the murky shadows of high politics and out into bloody fields and mountainsides up and down the country with a discussion of Garibaldi's instructions for his funeral:

He wanted his body to be cremated in a red shirt. 'Plenty of wood for the pyre', is his last exhortation. The remark is emblematic of his personality. He consumed his whole life and the lives of thousands upon thousands of others in a conflagration that is still the most illuminating moment in modern Italian history. Very few of those warming their hands at the bonfire look well in the weird light it casts.

Perhaps those who outlived Garibaldi, who embody the tendencies that he struggled against - for the backroom deal rather than the barriacdes in the street, for compromise and often deceit and even betrayal rather than plain-speaking - are emblematic of the forces of reaction in Italian politics, as Parks clearly thinks. But they are not the forces of reaction because of their methods; they are the forces of reaction because of the use they put them to. This is what politics is like, and without it, as the corpses strewn over the Italian penisula in Garibaldi's crimson wake show, whatever glories we may be fortunate enough to find, they will be cold comfort when we're lying in the mud trying to hold our guts in.

Sometimes Only For Certain People

Tony Judt has a piece in a recent New York Review of Books called 'What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy', in which, along with ascribing neo-liberal dominance in part to the influence of lessons taken from the collapse of inter-war Austrian democracy, he asserts that the best way for social democrats to market themselves is in terms of a social democracy of fear. The idea is supposed to be analogous to Judith Shklar's liberalism of fear, the idea of which was to argue for various foundational liberal rights as protections as things everyone has reason to fear; centrally, political oppression. Likewise, Judt wants to say that everyone has reason to endorse government-run schemes of protection against sickness, unemployment and the like. This seems to me a mistake much like that which David Runciman points to in his review of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's Spirit Level for the LRB, in that it elides the difference between some property being held the average member of some group and it being held by all members of that group. It is almost certainly true that most Americans would be better off in a more equal society; it must be as true that some Americans would be worse off. A liberalism of fear works because anyone can be picked up by the secret police and tortured, because we all have our little pecadilloes, because we could all end up on the wrong end of some political decision. However, not everyone is plausibly going to run out of money to pay their medical bills, notwithstanding the fact that even if you might, you nonetheless might be better off pooling that risk on terms of your own choice than being required to do so with everyone. There's that old line about a liberal being the guy who won't take his own side in a knife-fight: arguing for a social democracy of fear seems to try to make it true, and in particular forgets that if in the end someone gets stabbed, usually at some point someone else was holding a knife.

Go Home Boys Or You're Going To Jail

As I am sure many of the readers of this blog are aware, reforms which HEFCE is currently proposing to its formula for distributing funds to British universities involve making 25% of the relevant funding depend on the demonstrable contribution of research produced by the relevant department to the general economic and social well-being of the country in the last five years. For various, quite obvious, reasons, not least of which is that it is an open invitation to bullshiting, I have signed petitions urging HEFCE not to do this. I suspect this is why I got an unsolicited email from a strange body called 'Educators for Reform' today, asking me to sign their petition opposing it. Initially, I thought this was just one of those things that happens when you sign petitions, but then I saw who it was from - Luke Tryl. That would be the same Luke Tryl who invited David "not saluting but drowning" Irving and Nick "let's deport Londoners too" Griffin to the Oxford Union as a piece of self-congratulatory, self-publicising, and frankly downright vile contrarianism, presumably. It turns out now he's working for Reform, a Tory think-tank, who are apparently trying to astro-turf support of the back of trade union sponsored petitions. The reference to crowding out private research should have given it away, I suppose, just as it shouldn't be a surprise that that's where you end up if you're a prick with the right connections. Well, they and he can both piss right off.

With God On Our Side

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

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

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

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

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

Like A Dog Not Walking On Its Hind Legs

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

On Blond Beasts

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

By The Japanese War Memorial

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

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

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

No Reason Not To Try

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

My Leg Measurements And The Size Of My Cock

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

Their Predominant Colourings Would Be Melancholy And Gloom

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

Putting Your Hand In The Next Man's Pocket

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

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

Serendipity

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

Their Law

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

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

Putting Away Childish Things

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

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

and himself goes on to say

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

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

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

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

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

On Being Hard

J. G. Ballard, in the more recent novels, I think made a living out of a kind of rather virulent reactionary politics: the recurrent thought seems to be that there is no political solution to the problem of violence, that any attempt to solve that problem simply displaces and even excerbates it. The plots take place against a backdrop of vaguely leftist concerns, it's true - the gated communities of a moneyed leisure class - but what is crucial is not that that shapes the members of that class: it rather liberates them, allows them to do what they've always (really: it's the really that gives it away) wanted to, which is experience the visceral thrill of exercising brutal, sadistic power. The insistence that humans are fallen, cannot but revert to bloody type is doubly obssessed with violence; both in that it insists that violence is inevitable, as if peaceful societies have never existed, and in its own self-image, as able to bear truths others dare not face, engaged in a kind of masochistic proof of its strength. As with Houellebecq, there must be a suspicion that there's an explanation in Ballard's personal history: a childhood in the cantonment in Shanghai and an internment camp must mark you in certain ways. What they don't do, as Ballard seems to think judging by his autobiography, is function as adequate models for what societies are generally like: contrary to what all kinds of saloon bar philosophers may think, people aren't really like what they're like under great stress; the whole point of being under great stress is that it's not how you normally are.

Not everyone is a psychopath, whatever Ballard may say: that's how we're able, in the end, to distinguish psychopaths from everyone else. Saying so might even border on the psychopathic itself: if the total failure of empathy is definitional of psychopathy, then an inability to see the motivations of others as other than brute data, as having a lived history which give them content and meaning, could be a kind of psychopathy. There's a kind of liberal piety which plays into this, though, where everything good is morally costless, where political conflict gets erased, and so generates the temptation to bring it back, bubbling up through the gaps all orders must leave somewhere. Regretting, as Obama's appointment to head to C.I.A. does here (via), that a majority of a given public do not believe in a absolutely exceptionless prohibition on torture, totally setting aside any questions about what tradeoffs you are prepared to make, does that. It invites the machismo of ticking bomb cases, when what you want is this (via), notes on the economy of torture, of its politics: thinking that the prohibition exists in a vacuum allows that exceptions to it might to, when our reasons for the prohibition are importantly to do with the fact that torture does not happen in a vacuum; it needs torturers, equipment, places and times for the equipment to be used, information that it confirms and that verifies it, and so on. I suppose then it is that kind of pious liberal that Ballard thought of himself educating in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, who thinks of goodness without a (real) history, as just how people are. Notice, though, that his posturing suffers from exactly the same flaw: it is stripped of its institutional context. People aren't usually evil because that's the way they're doomed to be; they're terrible because they ended up that way. Even Hobbes saw that; Ballard can't.

Like A Daydream, Or A Fever

Apparently the little author biographies of Justin Cartwright's novels used to contain a not-so subtle dig at his ex-wife: he lives in London, sometimes with his children. In The Song Before It Is Sung, he only lives in London, which is perhaps for the best. You can well imagine why his wife might have left him; the book concerns Conrad Senior, a somewhat self-absorbed man in early middle age who is using the bequest of an old professor's letters to a German friend executed by the Nazis as an excuse for doing not very much other than think rather vague thoughts about the grand sweep of history, swan about in London, and have pretty women - including his wife when she comes to divide up the marital goods having had quite enough of this extended adolescence - f*ck him at the drop of a hat. The women are ciphers, nagging shrews melting into his arms as he passive-aggressively refuses to engage with them or empty-headed wantons whose short skirts and drug use are indicative of their sexual licence. Even Senior himself is something of an empty vessel, not much more than a vehicle for the author's persistent equation of objectivity in morality with teleology in history: as if because we must give up on the idea of ineluctable progress we must give up on the idea of must.

Although the book has its moments - the scene where Senior meets the cameraman who filmed the execution of the German in Berlin is really rather well done, and there are some nicely catty asides - there are some passages which practically beg to be taken out and shot. There's a meditation on Grosz's remark that his work was a reaction to commanders in the field painting in blood that works itself up to the full height of imagining Hitler, the former art student, as the modern master of the genre. Or the observation, after a rather self-satisfied, condescending little list of the relevant features - illegal immigrant cabbies, hookers, greasy fast-food joints, and any number of stereotypes out of central casting - that metropolitan railway stations are a bit seedy; no shit, Sherlock. The prose is often just lazy: I suppose it thinks of itself as having the wonderful economy of someone like William Gibson, but it hasn't got anything like the self-control, the precision of Gibson's careful accumulation of exact detail; it just doesn't think carefully enough. This isn't just evidenced in the banal vignettes collapsing under the weight of meaning they're supposed to be bearing but in the theme: using a heroic good German to try and make a barely even sophomoric point about how Hegel said some crazy shit once and then, like magic, there were Nazis and everything else terrible in the world and so we should all be relativists, since what was so terrible about the Nazis was that they believed in objective morality and not that they started the bloodiest war the world has ever seen and murdered millions. Or something.

Anyway, don't bother. Or with Howard Jacobson: a less funny Philip Roth, with much more portension. What you should bother with is I Am Cuba, a hallucinatory, black and white propaganda film made by a Soviet director about the run-up to Castro's revolution in the mid-sixties. The white looks burned on to the camera, like anything not actually black the director pointed it at was sodium blazing away under an inevitably cloudless sky, so that sugar cane fields look like they're full of brilliant incandescent triffids and a crowd marching down monumental steps into water-cannon like innocents claiming their birthright and walking into heaven. That doesn't do it justice: it's full of mad, looping takes, framing characters from above and below, against hillsides, brightly-light shop windows, collonades, burning over-turned cars. It's so alive, so eager. I liked it much more than a kind of companion piece at least in subject matter, The Battle Of Algiers, which I saw a while ago but seemed to me to have no heart at all and to be very pleased with its achievement of that pitilessness, as if that was precisely the attitude one ought to adopt to violent rebellion. I Am Cuba was so much more human, was not just attempting to be a document of retrospective historical inevitability, if it was even attempting that, but to give life to those living through that inevitability.