Barbeques And Ballgames

I'm moving house today, typing this while waiting for the removal van to arrive. I was away till late yesterday and had done at most a couple of hours packing before going, but I was still able to take a very leisurely pace getting everything into boxes and suitcases today. This somehow seems wrong. In Michael Mann's great film Heat, Robert De Niro's character, a resourceful, charming and incredibly self-contained career criminal, has a maxim about having nothing you can't leave in 30 seconds flat. I'm not quite there, but still. I never wanted to be a career criminal though. I'd have liked to have had the self-possession, the confidence of being in command, but I'm not really equipped that way; I don't have the nerves, let alone the stamina or the stomach, for it. And of course Heat is the story of a man increasingly unable to walk away from the loyalties that despite himself he can't help but accumulate, in the end forced to choose between them and survival. So you wonder. I turned 30 while I was away. How is it I've got to 30 with a life that can be packed up in a few hours and could probably be walked out of considerably quicker than that? Where are my traces?

On Lacking Balls

Twice in the last week I have listened to people provide straightforwardly racist analyses of the riots and looting in the earlier part of the week. One began with a critique of the looters' unwillingness to put in the hard graft necessary to get what you want which quickly became a critique of black peoples' unwillingness to put in the hard graft necessary to get what you want. Obviously, there are a number of problems with this, but it was quite striking how quickly the looters became black people in general. The second was more hyperbolic, less a piece of standard Tory excuse-making for being a prejudiced prick and more a kind of hysteria . The person in question complained that since the looting they saw was committed only by black people, a claim I am sceptical about, they felt that they were the object of race hate because of it. This was though they had no actual interactions with the looters and certainly had nothing stolen. It was also after they'd said that the looters' targets seemed to be chosen without any interest in race and mainly focused on getting desirable consumption goods rather than violence, which they admitted had been more or less totally absent. One of the cheering things about it all has been the relative absence of this sort of thing from the coverage I've seen by professional news organisations, but you wonder how many conversations around the country have been marked by it, how acceptable it is or is becoming to characterise looting as a problem of a racial enemy within. You also wonder how many people hearing it were, like me, prepared to let it pass, to at least avoid contradicting them.

The Fruit Of An Excess Of Corruption

One thing that I've noticed about the looting over the last couple of days is how stratified it shows consumption patterns in the UK are. I think I've once been into a Footlocker - to buy a pair of football boots - yet the theft and destruction seems to have always picked out sportswear shops. On the other hand, bookshops, where I spend considerably more of my time, seem to have been left untouched. I'd imagine that's not an unusual difference between someone of my class and someone of the class typical of the looters. It'd be strange if it was only consumption patterns and not, say, attitudes towards the legitimacy of other's property rights, which differed like that. Thomas Jones points out here that the borough of London which is all started in, Haringey, is the most unequal, and it's worth noting that Clapham Junction sits between a series of large highrise housing estates off Falcon Road and up St Johns Hill and the Victorian and extremely expensive terraces between Clapham and Wandsworth Commons. As Rousseau put it when pouring vituperation on the hierarchies of eighteenth century Europe and the conspicuous consumption that fuelled them, "subjects having no law but the will of their master, and their master no restraint but his passions, all notions of good and all principles of equity... vanish".

Not The Colour Of Television, Tuned To A Dead Channel

Although I didn't quite get the madeleine rush I'd expected from listening to the original Dr Who theme music, the British Library's science fiction exhibition, Out of this World, was otherwise excellent - particularly as respite from my landlord's insistence that I have quite unreasonably inconvenienced him by refusing to voluntarily make myself homeless for a fortnight and demanding instead to continue to pay rent to live in his flat. It's hardly revolutionary in that it thematically connects various movements in and around sci-fi to various perennial human concerns, only made more vivid by the expanded scope of technology, both real and imagined. It doesn't need to be though, since it has such a wonderful range of material to play with: Cthulthu toys in the same display as novels by a Booker winner; artists' imaginings of H. G. Wells' Martians along with the 18th century's visions of the 20th; musings about the origins of steampunk across the aisle from a copy of short story in which the term cyberspace was first used; a typed and annotated draft of The Day of the Triffids and Gallileo's speculations about the possibility of life on the moon. Quite enough madeleine rushes even without the Dr Who theme music, I suppose.

Wapping Year Zero

Bent coppers, bent journalists, unsolved murders, the manufacture of evidence, the well-connected raising walls of silence that can't be breached: it's like we're all living in a David Peace novel. So far at least we retain the hope that some of the right people will get their comeuppance, though we all know what happens to those hopes in Peace's novels. You do have to wonder though what the hell News International thinks all the journalists who were until yesterday working on the News of the Screws are going to do now.

I Told You To Bury It At The Crossroads

So, apparently Blue Labour is not, despite my efforts, dead (pdf). The question is whether that means it's alive. Since its critique of the allegedly left-liberal mainstream in the Labour Party seems to consist of a rather poorly warmed-over version of the communitarianism that had finally collapsed under the problem of not actually having read the people it was trying to criticize some time in the mid-nineties, I think not. They're even invoking Alisdair MacIntyre now, who may be a very good moral philosopher but whose discussion towards the end of After Virtue of how what he says relates to contemporary political theory is rather marred by the fact he is quite obviously uninterested in how any of the actual details of what it says might interfere with his moral grandstanding in favour of whatever it is he thinks he can coherently get out marrying the traditions of Thomist Catholicism with those of Red Clydeside.

Let's just remind ourselves briefly what was wrong with communitarianism the last time round so as to be able to deal with its shambling zombie cousin. Communitarians say that communities, traditions and relationships give our lives purpose and meaning, enable us to act together to achieve common goods and the like. So far, so motherhood and apple pie. The worrying move is when they start describe liberals as unable to understand the unavoidably social nature of our lives because of the way their stance depends on abstract values which cannot but fail to capture the distinctive character of the groups we actually live our lives out in. What's worrying about this is that the abstract values they have in mind are things like whether you are able to leave these groups, whether you have an equal share of power within them, and whether they treat you with basic human dignity.

None of these are abstract values. It's pretty concretely awful when you are trapped within a group which systematically deprives you of a right to a say in what it does and predictably denies you a fair share of what it cooperatively produces. Concretely awful in the way that the lives of people who weren't straight white men were in the period that Maurice Glasman evokes as exemplifying the ideal he wants to return to - along of course with the lives of many straight white men who had limited access to healthcare and education and depended on often dangerous work in order to be able to live. Jon Wilson even goes so far as to slag off Tom Paine's demand for equal rights as demonstrating the pitiful way he'd become alienated from the communities he should have been making his home in. Why not call him a rootless cosmopolitan and be done with it? Glasman after all has already said that EDL supporters are "falsely stereotyped as racist, sexist, nationalist", so slurring other members of your political community as insufficiently enculturated into its exclusive and oppressive norms of conduct is surely only a small step away.

What Blue Labour and other communitarians fail to understand is that what liberals are interested in is ensuring that communities and traditions treat their members decently and that relationships are not abusive or exploitative. This is why we care about rights to exit, for example, since the right to leave means that people do not have to be trapped in relationships they hate. Either Blue Labour don't care about people being trapped in abusive, exploitative and oppressive relationships, communities and traditions, or it is entirely unclear what their complaint about liberalism is, since, other than saying things in favour of class, gender and racial hierarchies, that complaint seems to be more or less entirely constituted by some hand-waving in the general direction of some obscure complaints about abstraction. It is notable, for example, that Jon Wilson's discussion of the value of groups before slagging off Tom Paine says nothing about the importance of rights of exit or other rights to control the terms on which you interact with others.

Given that, more or less everyone I am aware of has been far too conciliatory to an intellectual movement whose sole distinctive contribution seems to be the valorization of various kinds of racism, sexism and ideologies of self-help entirely inadequate for ensuring that people can live their lives out without being at the mercy of others and impersonal forces beyond their control. Rather than trying to carefully explain why we disagree with their oh-so-careful, thoughtful analysis, as Stuart White does here for example, the appropriate stance is, I'd presumably rather predictably argue, one of outright and uncompromising hostility - which is of course only a difference of strategy with Stuart. When they start talking about working class traditions of self-help, our response should be, so you want to abolish the NHS? When they start talking about the importance of community, we should say, communities like the ones where marital rape was legal whereas sex between consenting adults of the same gender wasn't? This is zombie communitarianism, and rather than treating it like a respectable intellectual interlocutor with whom we can have a reasonable conversation, we have to just go straight and hard at the head before it cracks open ours and begins feasting on brains.

Laying Traps For Troubadors

(NSFW)