Brexit, Incommensurable World Views and the Failure of the Left

The articulate cases put in our major newspapers by various Tory Ministers on both sides of the European Referendum Leave/Stay debate seem to come down to two incommensurable world views. Either one is a 'homo economicus' (a member of a nation of shopkeepers as Napoleon put it) or we are 'free born Englishmen and women' (the Celts having sold the pass a long time ago).

In the latter case, it is accepted that the defence of freedom and democracy may have 'costs' (though even this is, as yet, unproven). The first [Stay] tries to present the second [Leave] as irrational but the second could equally present the first as short term thinkers who do not understand the degree to which long term prosperity depends on freedom and democracy.

Leave tries to present Stay as deeply limited in its world view (which is not difficult to do) but perhaps has not understood that people are concerned with economic issues because they feel vulnerable. They want 'protection'. They will often prefer to be happy slaves than struggling free peoples. Cameron is playing all this up by linking the economic arguments with highly spurious national security arguments - his pitch is fear in a population who have had no political education since the days of Wilson. Fear is not second to pride as a motivation for political action.

My own instinct is that, partly because of the depressing cowardice of the new Labour Leadership in this matter (which otherwise I support) and the opportunism of Liberals and the Labour Right, the argument for freedom will be lost in a frightened and dangerous run to the new 'mummy' in Brussels.

We Leave people might despise this cowardice and ignorance but our side have to take responsibility for not offering sufficient arguments for security well in advance. In fact, nothing could be more insecure than the floundering European Empire and nothing will be more costly than the bailouts and bribes we will be finagled into once the vote is secured.

Nearly everything Cameron has negotiated is highly contingent, Almost everything could be whittled away without recourse after a Stay vote. The majority of the English working class could certainly find themselves having been sold down the river by their own middle classes and the non-English elements in society, creating the opportunity for populist enmity in the future. For, be in no doubt, the passionate concern for national sovereign identity will not go away but will turn further to the Right after a lost vote and wait until the first economic crisis that has European origins to make its move.

The Official Left's role in this is most disturbing. With sterling exceptions (CAEF, some trades unions and MPs and Labour Leave), it has placed dreamy idealistic notions of a potential Social Europe ahead of the evidenced harsh reality of a proto-super state that will always be run by middle class Germans and their allies - as the fate of Greece demonstrated. Greek Leftists were naive and so are ours. Forgetting what happened in Greece so soon is a staggering amnesia.

Worse, the Left once represented radical democracy and the freedom to struggle for radical change (as Tony Benn often adumbrated) but it is as if it has just given up completely on popular struggle and has turned to well meaning bureaucrats and activists to deliver social reforms. That is exceptionally naive about power and turns the Left into little more than courtiers at the modern Versailles. Or is it kneeling peasants calling for justice from Confucian Mandarins?
 
It is the stupidity of the Official Left combined with its utter pusillanimity in the face of capital that strikes me as the most dreadful legacy of the Blairite years. With a Stay vote, the Labour Party may soon have no other purpose than that of fiddling at the margins of politics to ensure reforms beneficial to its current rump voters and activists rather than the people of Britain as a whole. It would be the final stage of its transformation into a weak version of the American Democrat Party and all the more tragic that it should take place under the watch of the so-called Hard Left.

Robotics, AI, Sexuality & Power - A Brave New World

In a somewhat breathless report in the Financial Times on February 14th, Moshe Vardi, computer science professor at Rice University in Texas, is quoted as saying that “We are approaching the time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. Society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?"

There may be a dash of panic emerging about the emergence of robotics and AI - after all, scientists and engineers have form when it comes to doing the 'chicken licken' thing as they move into the public sphere. It is as if these professions have a deep psychological problem in understanding social and system complexity, adaptability and unpredictability. We have certainly seen this with climate change much as we once saw it with scientific panic about racial degradation!

Nevertheless, AI and robotics are set to make an impact similar to that of the introduction of machinery in the early agricultural phase of the industrial revolution. This pushed masses of peasants out of traditional jobs into the cities as cheap labour. This lead to the next round of applications of machinery to industrial processes as urban labour started to become more expensive. Administrative, clerical and skilled labour are now expensive enough to drive the next set of applications of machine intelligence.

Robotics probably will eliminate many skilled manufacturing jobs. AI will certainly eliminate many clerical and even professional jobs. Robotics plus AI will eliminate many unskilled jobs. On past form, new jobs of a different nature to meet new needs eventually get created. Human existence and experience, after a painful disruption, then improves significantly yet the disruption could be politically and socially dangerous.

In the earlier cycles, there was no democracy so we had riots, then revolutions and then the formation of new political parties constructing the democracy and other radical forms of governance that allowed society to engage in the internal Darwinian struggle that led to the triumph of a rather weak form of welfarist liberal democracy.  This may have frustrated Nietzsche who saw the 'weak' collectivising to become strong and it is true that this collectivisation could de-humanise as much as the machines did but the outcomes were, on balance, more beneficial than not in terms of creating the conditions for at least the possibility of personal empowerment and individuation.

The next cycle looks as if it will be expressed through populist upsurges. We are now into new territory, so we may as well enjoy the ride ... but the one thing we can be sure of is that this new system like the old will be managed by self-reinforcing elites periodically replaced by more suitable self-reinforcing elites.

This is the nature of power - it cannot be held by everyone at the same time although the powerful are just as controlled by those over whom they exercise formal power, in subtle and devious ways, as they control those who have no formal power. Foucault was good on the complexity of all this, If so, the first 'new' elite will only be the cleverer elements of the old elite seeking to manage the new populism. It is when that fails that the fun and games begin ...

But before we get over-excited here is an example of hype that needs treating with care, The FT again: "Prof Vardi said it would be hard to think of any jobs that would not be vulnerable to robotics and AI — even sex workers. “Are you going to bet against sex robots?” he asked. “I’m not.”" As usual in our rather sexually anxious culture, the Professor uses sexuality to heighten the air of tension. We really do need to grow up about sex but that is not why I raise it.

If you think about Vardi's comment, it begs the question of what sort of sex worker - we are speaking of the oldest profession, one that deserves being taken seriously and respected in our otherwise sex-negative society. There is the aspect of 'relief' and of 'fetish' whose demands might be relieved by autonomous robots with no personality (the problem of robots with personality and consciousness is one for science fiction and very far into the future but still one eventually to be taken seriously).

But there is the very separate aspect of human need for contact with other humans, as opposed to the autistic but perfectly reasonable human need to have no contact with other human beings, where the elimination of the exhaustion of work and our daily scrabbling for 'time-resource' (an overhang from the industrial era) might actually create a positive need for a huge range of erotic services for all sorts for very different people in safe and psychologically healthy ways.

Perhaps the female interest in the performance art of burlesque or the turning of pole-dancing into a form of athletic prowess are just the beginning of this vast range of human-to-human interactions which will involve 'trade' and extend to all other forms of experience - ambience, performance, fashion, play, aesthetics, humour, dance and movement, fragrance, seduction, ritualised safe violence (which is what much sport is at heart), magical belief and the invention of cults, psychotherapies and philosophies, new ways of constructing family and community, new politics (against the reactionary politics of Iron Age religiosity and industrial age bureaucracy), safe altered states and new forms of economic organisation.

All that will then be needed is a limited framework for protecting the person (and the animal and eventually the conscious robot) from unwarranted unequal exploitation and physical and (within reason because all conscious creatures create themselves out of risk and struggle) mental harm. The State should, ideally, as Marx expected, 'wither away' except that there will long be a need for something to construct and set the limits for the massive infrastructural investments that will help create that limited framework's potentialities.

Professor Vardi chooses sex workers as a trope because our culture is still hung up on sexuality. A socially conservative puritanism is re-emerging in this context as the last reactionaries hope to use the coming crisis to reintroduce their worn out values - hence the explosion of Islamism, Papal energy, Super-Federalism, Neo-Cold War idiocies, counter-terrorism strategies, surveillance, prohibitionisms and engineered anxieties and panics.

The choice of sexuality as the primary point of excitement itself suggests the problem - a deep cultural issue with the normality of sexual response and the ancient fear of it in a context of limited resources, the need by elites to control humans as property (which still carries on in those states that conscript their young) and the danger to order of emotions in closed spaces.

The new technology opens up spaces, no longer permits humans to be treated as property (which is very scary to people who find security in being slaves) and increases resources - suddenly, there is no excuse at the educated and intelligent end of society for savage authoritarian mores other than the existence of the disturbed personality type of the authoritarian.

We have often noted that the struggle between freedom and authority or power, often generational, is far more central to the human condition even than class or gender or ethnic conflict. The problem then becomes one of the fear of ancient ways dissolving and releasing the mob into chaos (which is the current terror that permits social conservatism to be tolerated).

The AI/robotics revolution may be scary for the disruption in employment and community (but what positive change in society is not) but it is also scary for another reason - it will terrify Authority faced with the loss of their elite control over the distribution of resources, over cultural space and over the disposition of labour value.

The most frightened will be the 'educated' (education not being the same as usefulness or intelligence) who have believed that they rule by divine right because they have ruled, at least culturally, for over half a millennium in some form or another, whether liberal-bureaucratic, pseudo-socialist, progressive, corporatist or fascist.

So, for the rest of us who embrace the future while thinking it reasonable for new elites to arise who will mitigate bad effects on humans and who will prepare for the day when the descendants of the AI/robots will be our conscious equals (and one hopes our friends), it is a case of watchfulness against the claw-back of power by the losing classes, the exploitation of fear and anxiety to impose restrictions on our freedom and the crass over-claims of excitable scientists and engineers. Avanti!

Lessons from The Exaro Panel Debate - January 27th, 2016

Some were expecting, given the raw emotions and polarisation surrounding alleged VIP child abuse, that Exaro's Panel Debate last Wednesday would be stormy and hard to chair. In fact, it went off quite quietly because this was an audience that responded thoughtfully to some measured and evidence-based contributions from the panellists. It was extended in time considerably because the audience was evidently keen to continue an insightful discussion. 

Esther Baker, speaking for those who have 'survived', perhaps had least to say because she was constrained by the legal requirements of her own situation but she was a valuable corrective to the prejudiced idea that a 'survivor' had to be mentally wonky because of their experiences - far from it in her case. I met one or two other people in her position at the after party who struck me as being perfectly sane and rational after seriously troubling experiences. Robert Montagu, now an author and family therapist, spoke honestly about his own abuse by his 'VIP' father and how child abuse had been embedded as a tolerable norm unquestioned in British elite society. His testimony confirmed me in thinking that, while the particular cases are important, they may be less important than the cultural and public policy problem I have already identified - deferential authority and failure not only at the elite level but throughout our welfare society and within our institutional structures in general.

The two leading journalists, Meirion Jones (formerly a BBC investigative producer on both Newsnight and Panorama) and Paul Connew (a former senior tabloid editor) made it clear that, as experienced investigators, the British libel system and the intervention of big wigs into the law enforcement structure had halted serious investigation in the past. Indeed, what was offered was a picture of a hierarchical structure where those at the top could still undertake acts of impunity in the grey areas of the law and be protected by a legal system that placed the reputation of the few above the experience of the many. The level of historic police 'corruption' (if by corruption we do not mean money and benefits exchanging hands but influence being exerted) in this area was staggering. 

The Savile case was discussed at length. There was damning material - that he was protected as early as 1973, that he would be interviewed by police officers as if he was a minor deity, that he appeared to have had South Yorkshire Police in his pocket (it was claimed that they had even intervened to stop a Surrey Police investigation) and that the early media interest in VIP child abusers came as much from angry whistleblowers upset by the action of their superiors within the system as from victims themselves. The frustration of 'good coppers', contained by libel laws, fears about careers and pensions, undue influence and the misused Official Secrets Act, represent an opportunity for reform but also a problem in terms of their enforced silence that has almost certainly not gone away. This how the system works - using fear and persuasion to keep the 'goodfellas' in line.

The media were not so much complicit in this (though no doubt some at the 'posh end' were) but could not proceed because of lack of evidence. In one case, it was alleged, key files would be 'disappeared' so that a libel action would fail on attempts at disclosure. That was a lot of time and money for a newspaper which is not a charity. We may reasonably accuse newspapers of rank cowardice when faced by serious harms caused to children and teenagers but the libel system protected and protects (less so now) major figures with sufficient resources. At the end of the day, newspapers and broadcasters would have had their reputations damaged when claims would have to have been withdrawn because of lack of evidence with no help for the victims. 

There would have been 'questions in the house', a 'house' whose supine approach to criminality and the protection of its own has become clear with the Janner case. The Whip's Offices are second only to the Churches in remaining ring-fenced from scrutiny. The libel laws were certainly a major and costly deterrent but not the only means of stopping an investigation. Establishment figures (including, allegedly, an attorney general, in one case, writing an untruth to try and stop an investigation) would try to place direct pressure. I say allegedly throughout not out of fear of libel or defamation but because the nature of this system means that, despite the mounting circumstantial evidence of a system protecting itself at the expense of its charges, the way evidence can be managed and manipulated from the top means that it is always hard to say whether any particular claim is true or false. This is why the involvement of independent police investigators is vital - we cannot know what is right or wrong: it is a matter for claimants and those they make claims against and, in law, a police force that takes its job seriously and the DPP and then a court of law. What media pressure has done in recent years is merely help the police to do their job by getting the influence-peddlers off their back and, even then, not entirely. Detaching the police entirely from the political class and the security state should be the number one mission of all of us who care for justice.

So, I am not going to comment on specific cases, past or present. I am told that the entire Debate will be on YouTube eventually so you can make your own mind up (I hope to post the link as a note to this posting in due course) but some general comments can be made. My own conclusion is that this scandal, one that seems to go back deep into history and involve widespread abuse at every level of society, is not so much a case of some major organised paedophile conspiracy (though I am sure we do have self-assisting micro-networks of cruelty and abuse to deal with). What we see instead is a non-paedophile establishment covering up its bad eggs in order to preserve the mystique and power of their institutions and of a wider authoritarian culture in which elite figures (mostly males but also alpha females who have entered the system subsequently) could act with impunity by a form of assumed institutional 'divine right'. 

It is a cultural attitude to authority that is embedded in Judaeo-Christian and Roman values at the heart of our much vaunted but really rather second rate Western culture. Patriarchal is far too simple a term. It misdirects us into gender politics since female higher level executives within the system are just as likely as males to follow this culture of 'omerta' and defensiveness. The older term 'authoritarian' is good enough - not fascist and as liable to be taken up by people who claim to be Left as much as those who claim to be Right. Labour Administrations have behaved just as shoddily as Tory Administrations and we must not forget that the reforming impulse is coming under a post-New Labour Government. The point is that whenever individuals stepped over a moral line, they would have the system coalesce around them to protect the institution represented by the person. The persons in systems simply do not matter. What matters is the system and the person has status and reputation according to the function that he or she performs - the priest is honoured as the representative of God in the parish not as Father X with a penchant for little boys. The system that represents God in parishes across the civilised world will do what it can to protect the priest because that is what Father X has become. The Catholic Church did not come up on Wednesday but this authoritarian mentality derives from its ideology, derived in turn from its deal with the Roman Empire, ultimately translated into Western culture as a whole, into the traditional family and through the feudal prerogatives of the Crown.

It is all a matter of delegated authority being sacrosanct. The subjects of that authority are regarded as problems if they are not willing to accept being tools of authority or if they question authority when it exceeds its apparent moral bounds. Montagu claimed that a past Headmaster at a famous public school beat kids in the nude and that no one would have dreamt of challenging his right to do so. I cannot vouch for that but I do recall a 'master' (there we have it in a word!) at my perfectably respectable day grammar school beating up a 13 or 14 year old before the whole class (and my eyes) and there being no consequences. 'In loco parentis' meant the right to continue the abuse in family life (still, most abuse takes place within dysfunctional families, an intractable public policy issue) as abuse in institutional life - school, chapel, army, workplace bullying.  An elite's authoritarian education inculcated not only the normality of abuse but perpetuated it - no education on how to say no to authority, no commitment to the autonomy of the child and so the adult, no restraints on bad conduct, no one to listen to the victim, no means of redress. The welfare state too, administered by that same elite, was built on authoritarian principles derived from the culture as a whole. Child abuse (possibly endemic in society in any case) was based on an imperial cultural model that was not challenged by but was integrated into the new 'socialist' model as something to be 'covered up' as an inconvenient truth.

The good news is that, while the police were historically an often cowardly enforcement operation for this system in the past, it has since been transformed into a tough agent for independent evidence-based investigation. Other elite institutions, notably the public schools, are also slowly being transformed - the ones, that is, that are not stuck in managerialist targets. There was significant praise onthe panel for both the Staffordshire and Metropolitan Police operations into VIP child abuse currently being undertaken. The rage of the Old Establishment at losing the absolute and unquestioning protection of the police strikes me as at the very root of vicious and provenly false (in the case of Esther Baker) claims about 'survivors' and of the nasty campaigning against those seeking to find the truth (not prove a case) in a mainstream media that has gone into reverse trajectory to the police. The media are (in David Hencke's words) 'schizophrenic', simultaneously lapping up every sleazy tale about noted celebrities and sharing the public outrage at failures of the welfare system yet posturing in defence of individuals already well protected by their own status in society and targeting and diminishing claimants regardless of best legal practice and fairness.

Once we had an investigative media that was interested in exposing bad behaviour but constrained by libel laws and interventions. There was no other outlet (such as social media) at the time for allegations. Now this weak but still willing Press has been replaced by a media that has become supine in relation to the needs of the institutional structures on which it has become a parasite, easily manipulated by skilled establishment lobbyists as well as careless of evidence-based investigation and the needs of justice in regard to claimant protection. When this is all over, the most damaged element in society may not be the 'establishment' (which has the ability if it wills it to reform itself) or the police who may well come out of this with respect and trust renewed. The damaged elements will be those who have not acted or are still hiding in fear of their tattered 'reputations' - the churches (though for some reason, these are still treated with kid gloves) whose moral authority may never fully recover, the welfare system which has let down its most vulnerable charges and the mainstream media which may look increasingly foolish.

In the recent culture wars, the mainstream media required a supine law enforcement system to give way under pressure (as once the police did in the opposite direction), Unfortunately for the media establishment, the police are clearly no longer supine and have no intention of giving up on their investigation though the pressure is on, with the Police Commissioner being given only a year more of his term, partly to get the matter through the May Elections and partly perhaps to set the conditions for closing the thing down if it goes on too long. In fact, the Tory candidate in London Zac Goldsmith has shown interest in VIP child abuse and, though silent now, may prove to be minded to continue the investigation wherever it may lead as a Tory reformer. The position of the Labour candidate seems to be unclear. Indeed, the depressing conclusion may be that the future of the investigation may rest on a Tory reformer defending the rights of the abused over and against a Labour candidate from the Party that is supposed to be concerned about such things according to our political mythologies.

Meanwhile, we see signs that this issue is slowly being politicised as claimants begin to find their voice and may learn to organise. These people tend to be the least educated in society but not entirely - middle class educated victims like Montagu are emerging and there was a call from the floor of the debate for more political action. There is a legislative cause emerging in Compulsory Reporting of Child Abuse (though I remain a little cautious about the pendulum swinging too far in the direction of state intrusion into private life with an ideological agenda attached). It was also clear that the Parliamentary attempt to cover up for Janner, those who did so and (eventually) the role of the Whips Office in covering up vile behaviour amongst Parliamentarians in general is now on the agenda.

This has ceased to be like the Belgian Dutroux case - a worrying single case exposing a probable single network of vicious abusers inside the system - or about the PIE network or about Kincora and the security state in the 1970s and has become a simmering cultural confrontation between Power and those who have some basic moral concerns about the use of that Power, including significant parts of the Establishment itself. This is a classic split in the ruling order. The old guard are attempting very hard to stop discontent amongst the 'elite moralists' spreading into the general population, a population which is, to say the least, confused. Confused in part because some claims will be false and some individuals will be wrongly investigated on weak evidence.

The Establishment (which is simply to be defined as those with delegated state authority or who have the money or networks to influence the State) still has the power to appeal to authoritarian and trusting tendencies in the population, especially the authoritarian working class and the metropolitan 'liberal' middle class who tend to prefer social democratic order to justice for the vulnerable. The case of the BBC is becoming the type case - a case where a trusted institution comes to look frayed at its edges because it cannot understand that trying to delay reports for institutional reasons, trying to mitigate the reporting of its own behaviour and engaging in 'corrective' behaviours that contradict the wider evidence and challenge the process of justice are not things that any institution can get away with easily now. Much of the PR strategy used by the Corporation is out of time and out of place - 1990s strategies for the age when the Sunday Times actually mattered and a certain leading PR could define reputation as 'what they are saying in the dinner parties of London'. The BBC is badly wounded and it can only cling on to Woman's Hour, The Archers, Radio 3, Strictly Come Dancing, Tony Blackburn and Richard Attenborough as its fleet of old dreadnoughts against the inevitable - enforced reform. It actually needs a revolution at the top.

[Disclaimer: I am a Founding Director of Exaro News but one with no influence over editorial policy. The views above and the interpretation of the Panel Debate are entirely my own. When it appears, readers are recommended to watch the debate themselves and come to a view.]