Should I Apologise For This Posting? Sex & Power in the Modern World

One of the weirder aspects of our current culture is the ritual abasement of alleged wrong-doers, usually in the form of a forced apology on the advice of 'PR consultants'. My interest relates to something Jordan Peterson has raised. I am not an enormous fan of his total vision which is, in my opinion, flawed in several respects - the stoicism, the concentration on judaeo-christian values, Jungian archetypes and an over-deterministic biologism create the very model of an ideology, a trait that he claims to abhor in others. Or am I unjust and that these traits are those of his followers who have managed to miss his point about ideology? Wherever his new-found popularity leads, he is a reasoned debater with a thoughtful stance on life and he undoubtedly has insights on gender relations which are 'controversial' but none the less on the right side of the game.

His thesis (which is most observable at the point where a new cultural hegemony emerges and displaces another) is that politics is an expression of personality traits. Because sexual difference results in the emphasis of different personality traits (so much, so scientific) in the genders, shifts in the power between genders mean that the personality traits associated with the rising gender began to be valued and then affect discourse and practice under the new order and at the expense of the falling gender.

The narrative of psychopathy (where psychopathy is culturally widened to include a lot of normal male behaviour that does no harm) being 'bad' and empathy (even where an excess of empathy can be as harmful as full-on sociopathy in terms of adequate social functioning) is just one signifier of a cultural change that can be traced to a recent shift of values from the falling masculine to the rising feminine. This has been happening with gathering pace over the last three decades or so, reaching its crescendo in aggressive reaction of now-hegemonic liberals to the insurgency of democratic populism.

All talk of Jungian archetypes here is so much displacement although it is a useful poetic tool for describing what is happening. For actual causes, we have to turn back to a brute materialism. The bottom line lies not only in that women are now voters conscious of being voters as women (though this is exaggerated in its effects) but in the far more important fact that most purchasing decisions for most consumer goods, especially repeat purchases, under late liberal capitalism, are made by women,  Women also take an important role in many male purchasing decisions. Male-dominated corporations have recognised this. They have realised that the huge increase in educated women allows them to tap into this economy more effectively and that single women are also very likely to throw their energies into their work as expression of meaning far more than most men for whom the work is likely to be 'just a job'.

New centres of power have emerged in the corporate sector for women - notably human resources and marketing - just at that point when a particular form of education has introduced an ideology of empowerment for women (feminism). Peterson himself points out in addition that men have withdrawn from the universities and media relative to women so that we can see how the high ground of culture, combined with the entry of women into politics, has created a new female cultural domination where the next stage is a demand for 'gender equality' - which really means a demand that educated middle class women dominate the institutions that hire them in such numbers.

These are just facts on the ground. Economic change has not only shifted political power increasingly towards women (even if this is not yet fully equalised) but it has shifted cultural power in such a way this cultural change is working at a faster pace than the political change that will follow. In general men are giving up on politics but also on culture, the universities and the media where culture is manufactured. The fact of democracy is their last bastion against the possibility of total manipulation by a new administrative elite made up of educated women and the male elements in the 'capitalist' and 'managerial' classes who understand the profit in this revolution or who simply go with the flow of history. The dislike of democracy in liberal circles lately is perhaps a recognition of democracy's 'last fortress status' against ideology.

It is as a result of all this that the personality traits associated with women are becoming culturally dominant. Peterson's concerns are not that these personality traits are not good (rather they are just facts on the ground that come with any increase in power for women) but that we are replacing one imbalanced cultural arrangement with another (male personality trait dominance with female personality trait dominance), that this is creating the potential for the same sort of violent tensions that the first imbalance did - and that this has triggered a populist revolt which also happens to appeal to many 'conservative' women.

For this is an important point, the educated middle class feminism of the new world is deeply presumptuous in its claim to represent all women much as many men are linked by interest and sentiment to the new world of empowered middle class women. This is not a line that separates one gender from another in reality but one that separates two types of personality trait with different expressions in men and women (and which inter-mix with many other traits and histories which ultimately result in all individuals being unique even if they insist on then recombining into tribes and ideologies).

These thoughts were initially triggered by an article in the most recent British Psychological Society's Digest, "Flowers, Apologies, Food or Sex? Men's and Women's Views on The Most Effective Ways To Make Up". This article has one line that tells us that there may be a connection between general female personality traits (though we must make the central point here that these are general traits that differ considerably between women and may be part of the personality type of many men as well) and the emergence of female cultural power in the West - "... women thought their partner apologising or crying would be more a more effective way for their partner to make up than did the men."

Now, observe what happens in a scandal today and then compare it with 50 years - the insistence on apologies and the showing of remorse. The male instinct is that when something is done that is wrong, then apologies and emotion are relatively irrelevant - what is necessary is change in actual behaviour and restitution or recompense with what the wronged person wants (usually sexual relations in the case of men apparently, and there is nothing wrong with that if it is just a desire and there is no question of anything other than consent).

The female instinct is to ignore all that and demand an emotional submission and a change in language (which is symbolic for an expected if unverifiable change in thought). Showing emotion while using submissive language is a near-guarantor that the change of heart is 'sincere'. What the man thinks is important to most women whereas what the woman thinks is less important than what she does to most men. One trait finds security in knowing other minds (which can tend to household totalitarianism) whereas the other trait finds security in 'obedience' and 'compliance'. Again, this is not necessarily reflective what women and men actually do or think but is only what 'gender norms' imply as personality traits become dominant or submissive in society.

If some women might find a sexual act to be a demeaning as a means of recompense, bluntly many men consider a forced apology to be equally demeaning. In both cases, if freely given out of love and respect, there is no issue but if forced out of an imbalance of power or some form of household act of terror (such as 'not speaking'), then there is broadly an equivalence of distaste for what is being forced on the 'loser'. Sexual coercion for women and psychological coercion for men are pretty equivalent in terms of their damage to personal autonomy. The wife-beater and the persistent nag are actually perfectly equivalent when one takes into account of the nature of the victim of the act. Our society tends to recognise the first as problematic (which it is) yet willfully ignore the second as equally problematic.

The female instinct is encapsulated in the Catholic confessional where absolution comes from a verbal formula and then a 'change of heart' yet public policy at the same period of male 'dominance' through the institution of clerical power in society was rarely interested in such things. The paradox of priestly male dominance is that this interlocutor with God is, in effect, a eunuch - cruelly one might say, like many urban liberal middle class males. 'Patriarchal culture' co-existed with 'matriarchal culture' (a fact conveniently forgotten by feminists) but was not formally ideological or totalitarian (although matriarchal culture could be totalitarian within the household as patriarchal culture could be within the court). Male culture just wanted material compensation and simple submission to superior power by dint of language and acts without emotion. The formal act of obeisance is not an apology but something else.

Male dominance strategy was more interested in brute power relations rather than (primarily) control of culture even if Power did control culture through the court. Instead of a celebrity apologising for an abusive act in order to placate female consumers of entertainment products and then be obliged to show emotional regret in order to continue to be able to work, the traditional  'male' response would be to bring that person to justice for a crime but ignore the act if it was not a crime. This latter stance is, of course, now unacceptable - a wrong act is now deemed wrong, whether a crime or not, in a return to a modern version of clerical moralism. Shame (and guilt) are policing methods that are embedded in the community because they have been imposed from outside by the agents of the dominant culture.

The community itself rarely polices these issues today. It has become a matter of public discourse through newspapers, broadcasters and social media. Since the funeral of Princess Diana and Blair's calculated use of emotion to appeal to feminine and media sentiment, emotional responses to events have been manufactured from above as weapons or tools in cultural warfare by ideologically-motivated groups. The vigils surrounding the death of Jo Cox, MP were a perfect example of such manipulation, closer to Goebbels' distasteful (even to Hitler) manipulation of the killing of Horst Wessel than to any reasoned consideration of what to do about rare cases of lone fascist fanatics.

Charlie Brooker's 'Black Mirror' series has several excellent satires on this culture of manipulation but he still looks at it from within his own class, blaming the lumpen mass for its reactions and weakness rather than investigating the ideological manipulation of emotion in a competition between factions within elite groups. All elite groups now engage in this use of emotion as communications tool or weapon and not just the cultural Left. The cultural Left is perhaps simply more adept at it because they have an ideological framework for it.

Ignoring a wrong is, of course, unforgivable (perfectly reasonably) for women where the structures of power have not created the means for 'bringing to justice'. This may be the core of the problem here. After all, many solutions to alleged female abuse would require a legal system that was so intrusive on normal male behaviour (in order to catch truly errant male conduct) that men would live under a regime similar to that of 'The Handmaid's Tale' but under female domination. What is required is a balance of interest between the genders that lets individuals flourish as they are and has rules on lack of consent and bullying but creates a grey air of private life where individuals are allowed to congregate with those that are like them without wider community intrusion. The new warrior liberalism is like the old conservative authoritarianism in that it constantly expands its territory to fill a vacuum, like any empire. It is, in this respect, culturally oppressive even as it raises issues that must be raised - especially regarding the ignorant behaviour of some men to some women.

Western society resolved this in the past through somewhat hypocritical 'codes' outside the law, using shame (or guilt) but these are no longer possible and in any case were oppressive towards those women who were not 'inside the code system' by choice or lack of resources. The Irish Catholic Church's treatment of women 'outside the codes' is a lesson in pure evil. We have not found the way forward yet but it probably lies in 'values paganism' re-instituting 'codes' that permit autonomy and free speech, rewards those who show respect to others in the context of an ideology of self respect and punishes all forms of coercion (ideally, including unlawful state coercion).

We are moving here towards wanting a culture of 'good manners' for private life within a framework of law that punishes severely evidenced wrong-doing (essentially any form of unlawful coercion of the individual). Needless to say, this must include tools for the gathering of evidence and strong and impartial law enforcement. The DPP's recent behaviour in relation to alleged male rape trials was a moral disgrace but women are right to want a debate on the boundaries that dictate the correct behaviour between men and women - a debate which, if undertaken openly and reasonably, might come up with some uncomfortable conclusions for both genders as to their conduct 'in the field' and the necessity for creating social rather than legal solutions to the problem of consent.

This strategic difference between a society in which either male or female personality traits shift from private life to public policy and dominate the whole is fascinating. The shift to female personality trait dominance explains our new cultural elite's determined drive for apologies and that industry of PR people who trot out the need to apologise (rather than make restitution and be subject to material containment) in order to 'salvage' reputation. The person who apologises then has to go into the wilderness and claw their way back if they can (without any real attempt at justice), perhaps on their knees in penance for crimes that may or may not have been evidenced. The new argument that the 'victim' must be believed throws out of the window not only certain standards of jurisprudence but disallows both malice and false recollection in good faith. And yet we all know that, just as some claims are false, other claims are true and cannot be proven so that a moral injustice has been done when nothing can be done.

Social change is thus not effected by a reasoned consideration of how to change laws and regulations to deal with moral injustice but by 'exemplars' - much as medieval Churchmen dealt in exemplars to guide their flock. Regulation and law try to follow, usually finding that things are a lot more complicated than the ideologists think. Alleged wrong-doers are judged not by judges in accordance with the law but by a sort of Salem-like community of social media and mainstream media witches who are uninterested in investigation of the actual truth of claims or with context. This is dark stuff.

'Justice' is offered as a form of communitarian assault on the errant individual but it is increasingly based not on cool and fair assessment of the equality of the genders in their rights to self discovery and self creation but, in fact, on one simple truth - female voters and consumers can dictate terms to the mostly male elites who run the productive end of capitalism and who probably know their days are numbered. However, let us be clear, when this goes wrong, this is not all women judging some men but some women, the educated liberal middle class elite component of the gender, seeking out some men and judging them as representative of all men. This is no different from a minority of male priests seeking out and judging a few women and making claims about the whole sex - which is what happened 500 years ago, more recently in backwaters like Ireland.

Justice as the rational business of formal complaint to enforcement authorities involving courage on the part of the complainant and then the necessary procedures to judge truth or falsehood on the evidence is abandoned as (in effect) 'patriarchal'. The problem is that 'male' courage is socially created - courageous women obviously exist and most men are cowed by power but it has been historically far harder for women to adopt the risks of a courageous stance. Woman are thus often disadvantaged by the ideology of courage as are all vulnerable people in certain social conditions. Justice is not justice if it is not just and there are justifiable reasons for concern that our legal and regulatory systems lag our understanding of the primacy of networked human autonomy in a culture of equals rather than as a hierarchical structure of competing elites embedded in the past.

Those who feel wronged are probably right that they have to fight to get noticed in a society that ignores them until they get noisy and emotional - child abuse victims are the obvious recent example - but they are playing a flawed game in a flawed system. The real requirement here is to unravel the hierarchical elite-based system and replace it with something that starts with a reasoned understanding of what we are really like and not what ideologists think we should be.

There are reasonable arguments that 'justice' has not caught up with the needs of women but it has also not caught up with the needs of fathers or polyamorists so the problem is more widespread than feminist theorists think - it is a problem of the inappropriate parts of Iron Age ideology and industrial social structures being retained while the appropriate parts have been jettisoned. It is a problem of society not being in tune with the actually existing human condition.

This is a new world that is coming and yet it has now spawned its own resistance because not all women share a belief in the necessary extension of the traits attributed to them (such as the apology and grovel being sufficient) into the public domain (while wishing to retain them in the private domain). These 'conservative' women match in numbers the 'liberal' men who have calculated on moral and pragmatic grounds that 'equality' just means that the old order is dead and that they have to find a place in the new order.

We all chuckle when some liberal metropolitan male supporting the new order gets caught out as an 'abuser' (even if this means little more than some crass language or a blundering touch) just as we have always chuckled when some Southern Baptist Minister gets caught out in 'cheating' but both breeds of men have allowed ideology to conquer the reality of their condition which is as creatures of ideology. Both men are often subject to disproportionate witch hunts as exemplars of wrong-doing within their community. All men become 'rapists' to their critics in one world and all churchmen are hypocrites to their critics in the other world - both propositions are absurd. A better truth is that neither sets of men have the courage to be who they are and yet show the rest of the world respect. They have become stupid because they are cowards, unable to live their lives as the persons that they are because history and ideology have dictated personae that drown their true selves. The same has applied to women stuck in households and then humiliated when they escape release in a love affair.

The point is that the human condition (and society is just the public expression of the human condition) requires respect for all human traits, for difference and for variability (which is incidentally another sound point made by Peterson) This includes many other traits, whether libertarianism or authoritarianism or empathetic or (non socially harmful) psychopathic traits, as much as the traits that tend to show difference between men and women because of their biochemistry and brain structures (a difference which science accepts as partially true without drawing any valuation conclusions in relation to the principle of equality).

Our society is rapidly spinning into another round of disaster to match that when male personality traits dominated over female personality traits. You cannot exterminate the 'other'. The key issue here is a fundamental respect for personal autonomy. Autonomy emerges out of each individual's very particular model of perception, cognition and biochemistry as well as history. The uniqueness of the individual is our starting point. From there, comes respect for others and (which is where brute males fall down but also authoritarian female household matriarchs) consent. Indeed if two people want to do anything, no matter how distasteful to others, in private, or to speak of it (since free speech and struggle between persons through robust persuasion are central to the good society) then it is no one's business but their own.

So back to the apology. There is nothing wrong with the apology as either sincere expression of regret or perhaps as tactical tool to end a fruitless squabble while considering one's position (yet is it ever really healthy to apologise for something that you feel you have no need to apologise for?!). But there is a lot wrong with the public institutionalisation of the apology to meet communitarian needs that have nothing to do with the job in hand and force people into modes of submission which actually change nothing, Indeed, the public apology is often little more than cover for a decision not to resign and not to make recompense. It is not embedded within a culture of honour as in Japan where both apology and resignation are carefully encoded within a shame culture with a long history.

An apology in Western culture is simply a response to an assault, an act of obeisance on feminine lines. All an apology of this sort may do in our culture is to trigger the imposition of yet more oppressive rules and regulations that may benefit a certain type of woman in a certain situation but which may limit the lives and opportunities of other women and degrade relations between the sexes. There is no thinking-through of the problem that was demonstrated by the act that required the apology.

We should have more considered explanations to hand, more justice (evidence-based dealing with claims), more resignations, better laws and better law enforcement and fewer apologies and far fewer restrictions on free speech and normal human interaction. We should have more honour and good manners. We should pre-empt the bitter onslaught of an insane social media-driven witch hunt with better education on consent and respect. Our entire culture is in danger of becoming supine before just one personality trait and just one ideology (feminism) just as, in the 1930s, it became supine before another personality trait and another ideology (fascism).

A Very Personal Conclusion About Recent Events

Position Reserved, at various times, has been an outlet for exploring a variety of cultural and political issues of interest to me as well as a means of putting my case and the facts in controversial areas where the mainstream media have failed to 'get it right'. I am, with perhaps just very rare future interventions 'for the record', reducing activity, not only because of pressure of work but also because I may have run out of things to say in public. This posting says most of what I have left to say until the world changes again: then my opinions may have to change in response. From now on, you are likely to get only very rare personal ruminations as the mood takes me, maybe odd discussions of obscure academic papers that don't fit with my Goodreads account or anywhere else and, of course, statements of fact if some malign media half-wit decides to have another go at me.

There are three great lessons learned from several years of writing these posts.

First, that search for some special meaning in the world is pretty futile. The world is as it is. It should be understood just as it is. This is not simply a matter of having a prejudice towards science but having an essential scepticism towards all human narratives. The questions have always to be - who invented the narrative and for what purpose and who is using the narrative and why as well as whether a narrative is true. Truth is a sticky issue. Many facts are not recoverable. All facts are interpretable. A moderate scepticism about all stories we tell ourselves, while understanding that narratives are still necessary for society to function, is the way forward.

The end game is thus detachment but with a degree of compassion for peoples' need to tell stories and a decision somewhere along the line to construct a workable but flexible story for oneself that best accords with the facts of one's condition in life. In my case, my narrative is rather workaday. Having exhausted most evenues surrounding the magical and the spiritual and the ideological, I am really perfectly happy just to go with the flow now and maintain an ethic of civilised survival. My core values are what they always were - a mish-mash of existentialism, libertarianism and basic compassion for the weakest and most troubled.

Second, the melange of social narratives criss-crossing our culture and competing with each other have now gone beyond a joke. It is easy to condemn the dreamers and ideologues as stupid but even the most formally intelligent seem to have extended their psychological flaws and preferences into complex systems and structures that seek to bend reality to their will. There is nothing more deviantly sinister than the human ego that denies that it is an ego. Again, detachment and a determination to stand one's ground with one's own story, while being questioning about its own validity against the facts, is easily the best stance. Social existence is a brutal struggle within a framework of accepted conventions and order and it should be seen as such. It cannot be otherwise and those looking for reason and perfection are doomed to disappointment.  Two areas of recent life brought this into focus.

The Exaro experience, whether good or bad in the sum, demonstrated the degree to which power manipulates narrative. The conduct of the mainstream media in this matter made me understand, without condoning, the resistance of populists to the claim that their propagandistic fake news was actually any worse than the constant devious manipulation of the MSM. It often struck me that the MSM's real gripe with Trump was that he was exposing their monopoly of falsehoods by simply making what they do subtly be done more crassly.

Fortunately the internet permits the individual to challenge the MSM on the record (which is what I have done on several occasions) knowing that, while the exercise is rather futile, the bulk of MSM coverage is equally transient and distrusted by anyone with half a brain. At least there are now many voices telling half-truths and porkie pies rather than just a few with presumed authority - that is progress of a sort since the detached observer can now compare far more narratives and then use their judgment to come up with some rough approximation of reality.Admittedly, most apparently highly educated people seem to have a problem with their judging faculty but, hey (as Tony Blair used to say), you can't have everything.

The second area of interest was and remains transhumanism which I intend to remain involved with, albeit in my classically detached way. This is a school of thought of considerable importance in translating the coming technological revolution into sets of questions that need asking and which still pass most politicians by. This community has produced creative ideas around the application of innovation like cryptocurrencies and technologies like automation. It has promoted ideas that are now being looked at by policy-makers such as Universal Basic Income. It has also created, however, some insanely apocalyptic thinking about existential risk and a quasi-religious narrative that can make practical men like me cringe with embarrassment.

And why? Because too many of the enthusiastic nerds and engineers involved still read too much science fiction and find themselves driven by their own extrapolations and weak understanding of 'really existing humans' rather by any understanding of social and political reality. Still, although the hysteria surrounding these communities and their often shambolic organisation is a bit depressing at times, nevertheless, these are the people throwing up all the ideas now about the possibilities for humanity, ideas that correct our stupid belief in certainties. Square the flaccid complacent folk culture of the establishment with the trans-human lunacies and you might yet get to see a pathway to understanding future probabilities.

Finally, there is politics. Oh my God, politics! This has become the art of posturing one's story as if your powerlessness mattered, at least as far as most social media discourse is concerned. Most people simply do not understand the nature of power and how to use it. They cannot accept that simply having strong opinions is too often just posturing that expresses psychological anxieties or is a primitive demand for respect in the ape-like world of social competition yet moves the world not one jot forward. We all have opinions but few of us truly understand where power actually lies, when and where we can make some small difference and how acquiring more power by its very nature shapes us into the victims of our own wielding of it if we are not aware of what is happening to us. We all need to make positive decisions on how to use the little power that we have effectively and with full understanding of probable consequences.

I have come to the view that politics must be treated either as a cynical game played by moral inadequates (which is not to my taste) or be considered as an expression of core sentiments and values, beyond conventional morality, where one chooses rationally to see through the expression of our prejudices according to the power that one actually has. There are people out there who we should not want to have any power because of their intrinsic irrationalities and cruelties. Representative national democracy still strikes me as the best means of keeping these wolves off our backs even if our representatives are deeply flawed and not always the sharpest tools in the box.

Most people's values are rarely thought about, contradictory and situational but they do make up who we are and democracy squares millions of confused world views into something broadly consensual. Reforming the machinery of it all (as liberal nerds want to do) is less important than reforming the informations flows and education that enable people to make better judgments in their own interest and according to their own values. Even sociopaths have rights in this respect if only to balance out those dangerous radical empaths who think so much of themselves. To cut the posturing, I certainly put the economic and personal survival of myself and my immediate family first and anyone who doesn't do the same is already probably someone who needs to be kept an eye on.

Beyond that, I have a hierarchy of values which include the general sanctity of life (a Catholic upbringing), a loathing of bullying and sympathy for the underdog, a gut patriotism for soil though not blood, a distaste for people who break promises without clear explanation, a distaste for the use of secrecy to gain advantage and a prejudice against all forms of abstract universalism. There is also a belief in the benefit of pragmatic non-ideological flexibility that permits opinions and actions to change easily with new information. Part of that pragmatism is that you cannot take on the burdens of the world ... concern should start with the self and work outwards through concentric circles lest one become the sort of humanitarian Napoleon who destroys the world in order to save it. Much liberal universalism strikes me as being derived from immaturity and anxiety in weakly formed selves who are unable to build an independent existence outside the group-think of the ideologically like-minded.

I also seem to have been surrounded, through Brexit and recent political events, by many people who have taken what values they have out of their mental box but then constructed rigid systems from them that seem not only completely out of kilter with the facts but drives them to believe that things could be as they never can be. This is the idiotic politics of naive idealism, wide-eyed hope that almost always presages great cruelties and incompetencies. It is compounded by the hysteria of the media whose interpretative and analytical skills are barely existent in the drive to tell stories thoroughly detached from reality. Reading the FT on Brexit is watching a sort of cultural oozalum bird in full flight. Watching the BBC is like watching a rather confused old dear try to deal with the i-phone someone gave them for Christmas. Reading the Daily Mail is like being cornered by a perpectually snarling mad dog.

Over the last few years, I have decided that I don't really like people who don't have clear values (I have no problem with people whose core values are not mine) and who cover up their feelings with ideology and pretence. I have removed them quietly and without rancour from my social circle as intrinsically rather stupid and boring. Those who cover their class interest or personal interest with a coating of emotional idealism, whether it be their stake in the NGO industry or their interest in cheap labour to keep their fluffy businesses going, are perhaps the ones who most exhibit 'mauvaise faux'. Unfashionably, I still have an admiration for people who can put personal material interest second to personal values and I always prefer the ruthless materialist who knows that he is a ruthless materialist to the self-deluding clown who pretends they are not.

My own ideological positions are simple, pragmatic and contingent - for Brexit, for an intelligent democratic socialism (which, in my opinion, is only possible under conditions where sovereign democratic nation states can be abstracted from regulatory empires) and then for strong national defence directed at peace. War should be the ruthless defence of the homeland and never more. But even these are flexible positions. Brexit is a necessity for example but I see no reason why it should require a primitive and inflexible nationalism. I would go with the Corbyn-McDonnell approach if I trusted the Labour Party more, while I see no inflexible nationalism in the Johnson-Gove position. In other words, once Brexit is decided (as it has been), there is every reason to go with the flow of national consensus (which actually there is, despite the whining of Remoaners and the posturing of the Populists) and then and only then engage in struggle over whether it is to be a Brexit for Labour or a Brexit for Capital. The behaviour of Remainers is now a national embarrassment.

The same apples to democratic socialism. My heart is very much with Corbyn and McDonnell and I find myself cheering much of their speeches but then I look at the detail and sometimes blanch. The aspirations are great - they are mostly my aspirations - but then I look at my own experience in international affairs and the market and I see that the populist promises currently under offer, combined with the failed ideological liberalism of the still dominant soft Left of the Party, create reasons for serious concern. Will we see a twentieth century welfarism, shorn of warfarism, that still fails to understand the massive import of the coming technological revolution, fails to lead it and misses the boat just as Globalisation 2.0 takes hold as a mix of anarcho-capitalism, strong nation states and decaying authoritarian empires? Quite possibly.

At the moment, I see little more than platitudes reminsicent of Harold Wilson's 'white heat' and a weak sub-Marxist understanding of power. At the time of writing, I feel disinclined to renew my Party Membership in September. It would be better to become, once again, truly independent and observe with my customary detachment, employing what tiny power I have very carefully in the direction of understanding and managing Globalisation 2.0 rather than granting it to a mass party of semi-educated enthusiasts whose programme seems doomed to disappoint. Once Brexit is done, one might reconsider one's position.

However, all in all, I know what I want. I want a smooth Brexit broadly along the current Government's lines. Accordingly and logically, I want a stable Tory minority Government until that is completed precisely because the PLP and Labour activist membership cannot be trusted on the issue. This does not seem compatible with Labour Party membership for the next two years or so. And then, two or three years on, I want to see a strong and stable, radicalised and intelligent Labour Party come to power with a working majority of 50 or so to implement a programme of democratic socialism better than the one we saw in the catch-all 'package of measures' Manifesto of a few weeks ago. Brexit first, a credible democratic socialism second, Globalisation 2.0 third. 

On Pole Dancers and Others ...

My last blog posting on the May 13th Conway Hall Debate on Sex Work reminded me of a piece I wrote for Facebook connections five years ago and not published more widely at the time. I reproduce it here with my usual technique of adding notes where I have something to add or I have changed my mind.

May Day 2010

Some weeks ago, there was a thread debate on feminism and I was asked to reproduce, in a more considered format, the general thrust of my argument. The origin was a difference of opinion, largely amongst women, on sex-positivity and its role in liberating women - some might say from the historic dominance of men and others might say from their own self-imposed and inherited limitations in the face of the world.

Could a pole dancer be more fulfilled than a woman who had taken up the law? Not a silly question when a political lawyer, Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of New Labour, has declared war, according to the Times of September 18th, [1] on the culture of corporate entertainment linked to lapdancing clubs.

Pole Dancing & Physical Intelligence

Even a cursory review of the 2010 US Pole Dancing championship's video shows women at the peak of physical performance to the extent that we might say that these women were showing levels of physical intelligence that easily matched the legal intelligence of Ms. Harman. [2]  One female respondent [3] noted that pole dancing itself isn't very sensual --- but I am in awe of the strength and control these dancers have over their bodies. Precisely. I was just immensely impressed with the strength and assuredness ... She added:

I arranged for a group of my girlfriends to do a pole dancing workshop a few weeks back (all of us self-described feminists - and most actively involved with woman's rights movements ... and they all found it an incredibly enriching (albeit somewhat painful) and liberating experience. I think the assumption is that its done by women for men. False. Unless of course that is your choice. It certainly wasn't any of ours."

It is not just poledancing that has been taken up by sex-positive women. There is also the capture of burlesque by arty girly girls for girls and the global girl power of belly dancing.

Progressive Feminists Just Don't Get It

But some progressive feminists just don't get it - you take what was a male demand and subvert it into female choice and empowerment and, above all, sheer fun. The splits, of course, are something that no man can do safely and not end up with a squeaky voice. All men are astonished and not a little envious at this ability ... c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas sexe. But even if it was 'sex' - what is really so very wrong with that if it is consensual and non-exploitative or at least no more exploitative than any other activity in late capitalist society. If men and women mutually enjoy and play with forms of 'objectification', then why not?

Impressive in skill terms, pole dancing always get this faint sense of censoriousness from some feminists ... someone has 'issues' and it ain't me or my sex-positive female friends. It is always a woman's right to choose and that, in my view, includes a choice between stacking shelves in a supermarket and expressing physical intelligence before an appreciative audience ... the progressive feminist aesthetic must not be imposed on others, men or women.

The Psychology Of The Industry

Now, let's take the view of another woman on the thread ...

... you'd be surprised how many of those panty stuffing bills can add up by end of the night. You won't get rich, but you'll make more than you would answering some dentist's phone and filing his insurance claims. And you get to drink and stare at hot naked chicks all night. lol I've had far worse McJobs ...

Something to consider: there is a difference between athletic displays of pole dancing in a "non-sexualized" context outside of a stripclub environment [...] and how it's rendered in a club.

In a club, there is a lot more raw sexuality being generated from the dancers and the patrons. These currents are both harmonious and chaotic, given that so many different psychologies are bringing their lot to the table. It keeps things interesting.

There is also tons of pseudo sexual posturing and sheer hubris, in place of (or along with) technical skill. When it's done properly, by reasonably well integrated people, it's sensual and 'sexual'.... And if anyone is left feeling a bit sheepish, it's usually the onlookers. ;)

'Progressives' always look for the worst cases of exploitation and then extrapolate backwards to limit freedoms for the rest of society ... like the prohibitionists in America worked back from the drunkeness and corruption of Tammany Hall in New York and banning drink for everyone, resulting, unintentionally in the creation of American organised crime as a political force.

More Positive Approaches

Referring to, say, conditions in, say, Uzbekistan [4] is no help in referring to conditions in London or San Francisco. On the contrary, the Uzbek case also argues for economic development, regulation and normalisation, certainly the end of stigmatisation within the sex industry. The positive policy aim should be to ensure that maximum labour value is transferred to performers/workers rather than the capitalists and that the supply of sexual services (and drugs and risk games such as gambling) is in the hands of legitimate business and not organised crime.

Apart from anything else, the 'respectable' (actually rather self-centred) middle class' refusal to understand how human drives and wants must and can be met legitimately permits the large-scale accumulation of capital by organised crime. This eventually destabilises their sweet cosy world of armchair disapproval. Mexico, for example, is about to plunge into an anarcho-criminal civil war for precisely this reason [5]. I would not fancy being a 'respectable' bourgeois when that happens.

My objection to aggressive policy progressives (especially a certain sort of feminist who claims to speak without authority for all women) is that they are not merely unpleasant and authoritarian but profoundly and deeply stupid.

The Real Rights Of Non-Respectable Women

Men often hold back from comment out of a culturally determined fear of feminist reproach (I do not) and it is women themselves who come slugging back to assert their rights to make their own choices and exploit legitimately the drives and wants of men. In this context, it is women who are being deprived of the right to do what male-dominated business does in exploiting the desire and wants of women for retail therapy and cosmetic improvement. The 1970s feminists rightly demanded that women's desire to look good should not be dictated by male requirements.

Economic liberation has, nevertheless, increased fashionable and cosmetic expenditure because it is women who want to look and feel good for themselves and each other (men really don't notice quite as much as they would think). Same with sexuality - 'progressive' feminists consider all sexual objectification and performance as patriarchal. They are idiots.

Sexual Game Play

Many women, maybe most women when liberated, love sexual objectification and performance (by men for their pleasure as well) so long as they are in control of the image and the play, including games of submission and domination that are safe, equal and consensual. Many feminists are thus not feminists at all, just a-sexual or repressed or ideologically tormented or filled with 'ressentiment' or unable to play the game and don't want others to either. But it is still their right to be as they are.

My only objection is the role that they play in public policy as 'respectable' but ignorant oppressors of others, male and female, in close alliance with male moralists [6] and, dare I say it, sexual neurotics and wimps.  Most educated men have more than adapted to this new game play - the best of them play as equals, the weakest simply act as pawns shelling out their cash for temporary if necessary gratification.

The liberatory process now requires that men and women understand and respect each other's natures and adapt without abuse or exploitation in their personal relations and, if necessary, accepting mutual exploitation on equal terms with full information. Here is the place to refer to Elizabeth Pisani's TED lecture on sexuality and health care - a brilliant exposition of a scientific approach to human rationality - the brief interview with the Indonesian transgender prostitute captures the point perfectly. Sexual services are rational on all sides.

The analysis by my friend (above) of what actually goes on in a Western 'establishment' is spot on. There is a sort of controlled sub-Dionysiac erotic tension that is just play-acting in which both sides get something out of the exchange. Included in this exchange is a powerful sense of domination from the performing side over men in a position of unfulfilled desire - the classic 'tease', only controlled and within bounds. Burlesque once had the same function.

There is a type of person who cannot comprehend the powerful cathartic effect on this play-acting which is certainly not orgiastic, is a game between moral equals, is carefully calibrated and which ends when the performance ends. Men are still often pigs but in real life far more than in the theatre. Personally, I don't get it 'in situ' but then the theatre to me is a relatively uninteresting experience. I am not one ever to suspend disbelief. My reaction is the simple pleasure of observation without any sense of power or control on either side, an erotic voyeurism best appreciated without the audience.

I much prefer a conversation with the person and, if it leads to consensual pleasures, they are, for me, non-commercial. I sell only my alleged charm and genuine interest. I buy with that currency only appreciation and the sensuality towards which a conversation may lead. I truly love and like women even when they mystify and confuse me. I would rather spend my evenings listening to women talk than getting my pleasures from a gang of men watching but not participating in sports or the strip. But then I always was a bit different :-)

The Criminalisation of Pleasure

Some women once earned substantial sums and gained significant social respect in underworld societies through the sex industry before progressives and fundamentalists began to undermine the economic base of that community in the 1920s and 1930s in America. Although this began with Comstock and was represented by the Hays Code's deadening effect in a later period, puritanism just drove women underground, lowering pay levels and increasing abuse and exploitation and control of the 'trade' by larger-scale criminal enterprises.

The war on sexuality is a sociopathic war, an exploitative war against the human spirit and, above all, a war on the weak by the 'respectable'. Our biggest child abuse scandal is not in lap-dancing clubs but inside the Roman Catholic Church amongst 'Christians'. Since the 1970s, the emergence of soft visual 'porn', the feminisation of burlesque, stripping as a legitimate business and pole and lap dancing has created a middle way. Good business ensures [7] that the girls are protected (and not as well as they would be if they were recognised and unionised instead of stigmatised) as the best means of getting some men to pay for the yachts of other men through indulging their pleasures and weakness.

The 'harder' end of the industry has a much tougher time now as a result - the internet 'gives away' much material and the new 'soft' industries give outlets for beautiful women with no other prospects the chance to make money without actually selling use of body. Of course, they may choose to sell direct sex and there are still serious issues to do with exploitation but those who do know what they are doing can do so at higher prices with more protection.

The Price of Stigma

Intelligent regulation and enforcement would help stabilise wages but only where the industry is not stigmatised, staffed with migrants and pushed underground under the patronage of criminals corruptly suborning law enforcement, all thanks to the 'respectable' society of feminism and christian moralism. Again, the problem is one of economics, stigma and idiocy ... there is a lot of research that is inconvenient to progressives and feminists on this. There is not only Pisani's common sense approach.  Laura Maria Augustin's book on 'Sex at the Margins' looks set to demonstrate what most researchers know - that the sex trade represents rational choice in a world of globalisation and poverty.

Other British research is conveniently never referred to by organisations like the Fawcett Society when they slip from campaigning (rightly) on equal pay and rights into feminist ideology on matters of sexuality. My sex-positive friend added in my defence as the thread progressed that:

I think Tim (and I know I can say this for myself) would like to see women and men culturally and socially situated where they are being nurtured in all ways that will produce the healthiest and happiest people ...

...who are truly free to make the choices that will please them, armed with the basics of educations, options for earning decent livings.

I agree with her. She added that we were in a time of radical cultural flux:

People are experimenting with different religions than the ones they were raised, or not raised to adhere to. The sexual revolution has it's most recent incarnation in the gay rights movement, which is in full swing, and is no small challenge.

Communication has provided the means for "regular" people to conduct intelligence gathering, which has resulted in the Catholic Church, for instance, being cornered on their numerous, planet wide, long standing pattern of child abuse.

[...] In any thriving society, the able help the able to thrive and conquer. That which is crumbling and falling is in that condition for a reason, and (under many circumstances) should be allowed to continue to deteriorate. I do not mean people. I mean conditions.

[...] on the subject of exploitation. Some of the women you would meet in that industry who have the biggest personal problems would not argue the case that they were being exploited.

In fact, they'd very proudly tell you that they were the exploiters, and having been closer to some of them than I'd ever like to be again, I can confirm that some deeply antisocial personalities who, like other criminal types, are outcast by personality default from "normal' society, wind up in sex work.

So much for the myth of the "sad, forlorn hooker with a heart of gold." I've never met one. They are survivors. And survivors tend to be grazing at the low end of the human spectrum.

They are not living in any sort of constructive way, and they don't want anyone else to be either. Soul crushed people. They get fired a lot, even from strip clubs. ;)

A Hard Realism Required

That hard realism is part of the point. The 'survivor' has a distinctive psychology, one that passes by the armchair ideologist and the theoretician, incomprehensible to the comfortable lives of the middle class winner whose own resentments underpin an essential cruelty towards those struggling below them. The question [8] often is: what are we going to do with the sociopath?. The authoritarian instinct is to contain or militarise, the progressive is to pretend that they do not exist or that they can be 'reformed'.

But there is no evidence that sociopathy can be fully contained or reformed out of society (it even has species-survival benefits) - and it certainly needs to be recognised. This fact really upsets liberals who persist in thinking that 'bad behaviour' can be corrected through imposed love and education. Sociopathy and other inconvenient behaviours (like sexual enthusiasm, gambling, addiction, drugs and so on) need to be noticed as real (the first failing of 'nice' society) and then engaged with and socialised.

Only then can we contain harm, not through idiot prohibitionism or burdensome and moralising regulation but through practical and rational incentive-based policy, much as Pisani suggests. This seems to be impossible for the limited brains of politicians, churchmen or liberal ideologists to comprehend. The middle class liberal often cannot face the extremity of evil to be found in the world. So they cannot punish serious harm. Serious sociopathy is just 'understood' and killers roam the streets within a few years of acts that cripple and destroy the lives of others.

It is axiomatic, for example, to these 'wets' that the death penalty is always and absolutely wrong. Those on the margin have no such illusions. They know there are tolerance boundaries and they set them firmly. For the liberal, there is no margin because of the silly belief in absolute equality and in redemption - stupid inheritances from Christian theory - and a genuine fear of 'struggle', the necessity for persons to make mistakes, take risks, gamble, to get out of Hell and into the 'Community'.

Most people's experience of Hell is romanticised and mediatised through film and television. It is sanitised through the portrayal of extreme horrors when the reality is far more grinding than anything these 'nice' people can contemplate. The high point of this romanticisation of Hell is that filmic work of genius Sin City where the heroisation of Hell is cathartic and given an almost Soviet realist feel by the end. It is not like that.

It is about hundreds of thousands of people living in mental states that require drugs, who seek transcendence through risk and where sexuality is part currency, part creation of identity. My point is terribly simple - these people are people. They are not objects [9]. Their struggle has to be respected. They also have to be shown routes that they can take out of Hell. They need protection from their own worst cases - the exploiters, the abusers, the killers, the authorities' own corrupt agents in the field. It is not sexual objectification that is the crime but liberal objectification of persons!

What Is To Be Done

The first stage is to remove stigma, accept a greater degree of risk in society, integrate. The second stage is to regulate, educate and guide. But the second stage is dependent on the first - it depends on risky and sociopathic behaviour being out in the open, observed, with boundaries drawn that are realistic and not based on the latest idiot contribution of anal obsessives in the health and safety culture. If it was good enough for Christ to include hookers in his Heaven, it is good enough for us to have a drink with a lap-dancing single mum who is making a rational economic choice in working in a club.

Furthermore, she might get to enjoy her work and turn a necessity into an art, an affirmation that she can do some things well on her terms and can accumulate her small bit of capital to open up her own shop, cafe or dance school (as one bright lapdancer I met clearly intended). This woman (so she said) went to a major charitable trust(perhaps naively) and asked for the same sort of help that they give freely to young toughs in Lewisham but was rejected. Why? Was it because it was helping a young woman move from lapdancing to owning a dance studio, making best use of her physical intelligence (and a lot more intelligence than that, much more than I have experienced amongst the cliche-spouting university-educated hausfrauen of Middle Islington)?

Maybe not. Perhaps the Business Plan was just not good enough. But I suspect that she was stigmatised - our whole culture is stigmatising the rational choices of working class and vulnerable women because it cannot face the truth that, out there, life is not only not perfect, it is not perfectible.

Standing Up To The Bien-Pensants

If 'progressives' were truly serious about climate change, they would raise petrol and airline ticket prices to astronomical levels. If they were serious about 'exploitation' they would undertake a massive tax-based redistribution of capital. Instead they tinker at the people's expense. Life is a struggle but struggle is good and many of these strugglers do, eventually, not end up in the gutter but with good and productive lives. There is the instructive tale of the Russ Meyer starlet who became a grade school teacher and spent her life fearing that her past would be exposed. When it was, it was no great deal - she was a good teacher. That's all we need to know in common humanity.

So why make it so difficult for these people? Why not encourage them to see their lives as way stations to something better instead of marginalised holding pens for those who have no voice. Where were these 'liberals' and churchmen when they were first abused? Nowhere. They have no right to judge. Only these women have rights. Any decent feminist would respect them and their choices - and only seek to get them out on their terms from under the heel of their own pasts and the gang bosses that the establishment effectively hires though neglect to run these inconvenient industries. I have nothing but a profound contempt for the feminist hausfrau's obvious disdain for the most vulnerable simply because they use their few assets to give themselves a decent living.

Our first commentator above noted that ...trying to oversimplify the sex industry and paint everybody's experience as the same is extremely myopic Indeed - so you must remove the stigma AND the abuse: two sides of the same coin. And you do this through the integration of this community into society and economy and improving the conditions of 'white trash' (as they are sneeringly considered even as they are being 'reformed') instead of leaving them to fend for themselves. 'White trash' are people too. They have rights to free choice.

To summarise, sex positive approaches to feminism are not substitutes for economic equality or basic rights but they are a corrective in two directions against the tendency of progressives to drive essentialist feminist ideology in directions that are, bluntly, anti-human. At one level, sex positive feminism permits women to make their own choices about pleasure and objectification that best suit their economic conditions as they really are. It allows them to make rational economic choices without stigma.

At another level, sex work helps many of the poorest and most vulnerable in society to find routes out of social and economic marginalisation through making use of their limited assets, ultimately accumulating sufficient capital or connections to become the social equivalent of the grade school teacher. In the former, we are talking about mental, social and emotional liberation against the preconceptions and demands of mother and big sister as much as, probably more than, those of men. Getting it right about sex-positivity is also about self-confidence and getting it right about family and marriage.

In the latter, we are talking about removing the block on mobility from below created by an excessive reliance on education and 'respectability' and an opportunity to help the process of turning back the tide of social misery that progressivism and churches have done nothing to reverse. Sex-positive feminism is not the be-all or end-all of human liberation but it is an important component of it, one in which women themselves decide what is acceptable in the use of their own bodies at the time when they hold maximum market value in an imperfect world.

I suspect that women will feel very free to respond and with some vigour but I hope that this time we get a few brave men to say something intelligent and not behave like fearful self-censoring liberal whiteys at a black power meeting.

Notes

[1] This would presumably be September 18th, 2009, when New Labour was still the Government of the country. This now seems like aeons ago. We breathe easier in many ways despite the excesses of Theresa May. 

[2] In the original there was a link to a remarkable performance on YouTube. Some copyright troll appears to have taken exception to the music and the world is now deprived of the experience ... the effect of copyright trolls on simple pleasures over the last half decade is incalculable. Naturally, subsequent references to the video have been removed. 

[3] This refers to those women commenting on the hidden Facebook thread and they are not named because they do not have their consent to be named.  However, it is I who am being discreet, not they. They were frank and open and I admire them for that.

[4] This perhaps obscure reference has sex work in Uzbekistan stand for all emerging world sex work as different from sex work in the West because of the different social conditions. I count pole dancing as a form of sex work not in order to diminish it but, on the contrary, to describe it. It is the use of sexual allure or attraction to part others from their cash. Much of Hollywood's acting is sex work in this sense. 

[6] Mexico still teeters but has not yet fallen. Meanwhile we have a quasi-organised crime state in Islamic State and Europe is being destabilised by the mergence of organised criminal smuggling rackets out of Africa and through the Balkans. Add the emergence of similar racketeering corrupting the South East Asian states and we see the situation is getting worse on a global scale without actually tipping over yet to system collapse in the West - but maybe it is just a matter of time.

[6] The links between contemporary ideological feminism and faith-based religious fundamentalism are particularly disturbing and were raised at the Debate on May 13th. 

[7] I should have written 'should ensure' - it cannot be 'good business' at this present time because it remains stigmatised and unregulated.  

[8] I was not, of course, meaning to suggest that pole dancers or, indeed, sex workers are sociopaths. What I was trying to say is that sociopathic behaviours as defined by conventional morality are often rational situational responses to social conditions and that moralising about them is meaningless since many moralists would behave in precisely the same way if they found themselves in those same conditions. In some ways, I approve of sociopathic responses in some extreme conditions of socially generated poverty and exploitation as necessary checks and balances on those who turn a blind eye to such conditions. The organism must survive and reproduce ... it is possibly the only human right that is not invented. 

[9] One of my frustrations is that feminist objectification theory is selective and false in two senses. First, that it fails to recognise the normality and 'rightness' of general objectification as a general means of surviving in the world (which I have discussed elsewhere). Second, that the anti-objectification camp themselves treat their enemies - males and sex-positive or vulnerable females - as objects. The first is stupidity and the second is hypocrisy.

The Only Right Left Standing - The Autonomous Individual Potentiating

Last week, we wrote on 'rights' which we think of as little more than demands and claims which cannot speak their name but must be cloaked in evasive language because the prevailing hegemonic system - whatever it may be - has pre-appropriated moral language for its own historically defined ends. Our view remains that demands and claims should be made in the name of autonomous individuals and of groups that would do no harm to others and that these demands and claims can be made without requiring any of the customary fluff and bluff of unjustifiable moral assertions from half-crazed activists.

Perhaps one 'right' (that is, demand) seems to be completely forgotten amongst the comical plethora of rights to cover every attribute that a person may have or not have. This is the 'right' simply to be a person - or rather to exist as who you are and not as you should be in the eyes of others. A person, above all, should have the right to live in accordance with their own biochemistry and to make private choices about attempts to change that biochemistry by any means at their disposal - carefully cultivated 'poisons', sexually, risk-taking, playfulness, transformation or whatever. The 'right' is associated with a very simple responsibility - the only responsibility - which is to take personal responsibility for harms to oneself and others. Even their death is the business of persons alone although my own prejudice is entirely towards the impulse to a life well lived.

The only reasonable exceptions are when the rights of others are diminished on the same terms as they are claimed - violence against the person springs to mind. The only sanctionable obligation should be to nurture one's offspring and, secondarily, all the young of the species, because these are persons in the making who need help to become persons. A nation of greedy self-regarding narcissistic pensioners piling debt on the young is an obscenity and the political liars who created this state of affairs beneath contempt. This commitment to the future and disregard for the dead weight of the past and 'tradition' makes me unusual amongst those who have come from a Left tradition in feeling deeply uncomfortable about abortion (as denied potentiality) while accepting, pragmatically, that the balance of interest directs us to a woman's claim to choose.

But, once born, there is nothing lower 'morally' than the person who abandons or mistreats a child. So perhaps one right - the right to autonomous development - can be salvaged from the absurd moralistic mess of contemporary liberal nonsense. I have to face the fact that this ends up with a core moral position not entirely alien to the Catholic Church albeit without the necessity of God or the flummery of the Church. This is the full acceptance of the 'right' or claim (or demand from the life force) of each person to be an autonomous individual to meet their full potential and not to be killed, injured or have the resources required to make choices removed from them - if the Left had consistently held to this principle some of the nastier brutalities of history might have been avoided.

Each person also as a subsidiary 'right', or claim or evident demand, arising out of this autonomy to be met, that is, to engage in precisely the levels of intimacy and commitment that suit them and no one else.  Of course, this is where our world view really does part company with the Iron Age restrictions of Catholicism. But, however we try to salvage them, all rights are a fiction other than this right of autonomy because only the autonomous right arises from the simple fact of a consciousness aware of itself in the world, an emergent right to be treated as the essence of a whole person's relation to Being, one who is always more than their attributes (thereby damning all forms of identity and essentialist politics) and who has an integrity of body and mind for which they can take responsibility themselves if permitted by social conditions. The Leftist aspect, of course, is thus not the evasions of rights ideology - that repulsive faux-left thinking of the petit-bourgeois graduate - but the commitment to create social conditions that give equal chances to all persons to be highly self-potentiating autonomous individuals in their own 'right'.

For Discussion - Ten Preliminary Propositions for Living Decently

I have never liked commandments, never accepted the claims of authority but only those of evidence-based persuasion or my own assessment of the situation but, given that we are unconsciously fixed in our social condition by commandments created in the Iron Age for an Iron Age order, what alternative suggestions might we have.

These ten suggestions are here for discussion only - not provided on high by a charismatic man with horns on his head but simply as attempts at creating codes of common decency to challenge those of inherited traditionalist oppression whether by Popes or Kings.

1. Your rights exist only to the degree that you respect the rights of others. Rights are for all or for none. Otherwise, a demand for rights is no more than a tool or a weapon in a struggle for power. The primary right is always the right to autonomy and self-determination. The good society merely attempts to give meaning to the equalisation for all of that primary right.

2. Live beyond inherited or socially given constructions of identity based on gender, sexual orientation, claimed ethnicity, social status or class. It is not that all are equal or can be made equal within the commonwealth but the first choice of who you are should be yours and not others. To accept a fixed identity that was not freely chosen by yourself with full information to hand is to oppress oneself.

3. A child is your responsibility if you make one. This means their health, their education and their happiness. If you bring a child into your household by whatever means or join a household with children, you take on this duty for them as if they were your own. This duty extends to the maintenance of the household with others with the same duty of care but it does not mean submission to them.You have not abandoned the primary right and can withdraw if your good will is abused.

4. No-one is a burden to society. Everyone is society whether they like it or not. This does not mean society cannot have some practical expectations - that it does not pay for the free rider or expect that each person does his or her utmost to be a strong and free agent - but the starting point is that a person cannot be bullied into freedom but only encouraged or even, in hard cases, managed into freedom.

5. No belief justifies violating the rights of others and if it does, then you are an enemy of the commonwealth. This applies to every organised religion, ideology or personal opinion. Since the primary right is the right to autonomy and self determination, all authoritarians are enemies of the people. This is not an argument against freely chosen traditionalism within a free society but it is an argument against imposing traditionalism on others - including and especially children.

6. Live life to the full on this earth but with sincerity in words, deeds and love against the unwarranted claims of others so that heaven is made potential, if rarely actual, in each day of a life lived fully. Expect nothing after death.

7. Try and avoid becoming part of the mass unless for brief communal pleasures. The theatre, the football match and the orgy are one thing, immersion into movements, belief systems and totalising communities are another. Neither peers nor the deciders of fashion can tell you who you are and your uniqueness is your greatest contribution to the social.

8. Defend yourself and your property but leave justice and punishment to the commonwealth. If the commonwealth is unjust, make sure you participate in making it just by giving a strong opinion and organising to remove injustice when it becomes intolerable. The magistrates rule by no right other than our agreement to their administration of justice and may be disposed of if they fail at any time. This right of resistance is absolute no matter what the forms or claims of the governing class - the question is only whether resistance can succeed or not against often superior forces.

9. If you cannot treat the social with respect even if it is weak or inadequate, walk away from it but don't despise it. It has its reasons and its purposes - to maintain order without which freedom cannot exist, to defend against predators and so on. To despise the social is to despise humanity - which is fine except that none of us can escape being human ... tragically perhaps but that is how it is.

10. Do everything you desire but harm no-one in doing it. There is no need to be over-protective of others at one's own expense but any strategy that constrains their self-creation or takes no account of their vulnerabilities as much as your self creation and vulnerabilities is an evil strategy. All relationships are constant negotiations between free individuals so society's interest is limited to creating the conditions for freedom and restoring balance when an evident oppression takes place. Let love drive us but a love beholden to science, reason and respect for the unconscious animal within us all.

You might class this as a conservative libertarianism with social-radical characteristics in the implicit call for active social intervention to equalise the primary right to autonomy and explicit acceptance of the right of resistance to incompetent and malicious authority.

Understanding Americans - Some Key Texts

The cultured English mind, until recently, could be defined as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan, the Romantic Poets, the English Novel and the War Poets with Kipling, Sherlock Holmes and HG Wells added to taste. But Americans are not Englishman. Although there is a common linguistic culture and both cultures are being transformed radically by the internet-driven shift from word to image, there is a cultural continuity in liberal America that outsiders need to understand before they accept or contest it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

There are key texts that emerged from within American culture and took hold of the American imagination in a way that helped define this curious half-idealistic empire. Political texts such as the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address and general journalism and propaganda (which is the origin of the Federalist Papers) are taken as read. Similarly, we are speaking mostly of language although we include three films in our mini-canon.

Like all cultures, American culture is multi-faceted. Every generation produces its unique masterpieces and its defining forms but what we are interested in are the pivotal points where an entire culture shifts direction rather than sanctify some text which liberates or changes just a component of it. In that context, I suggest that there are three key phases in the formation of the American liberal mind which must be seen in the context both of official ideology (the political texts) and an equally important 'intellectual silence' from the conservative Right, seen as anti-intellectual by liberals but also representative of a small town and conservative culture of doing and believing.

The First Phase: The 1850s - Setting the Texts for the Cultural War Against The South

The surge of creative writing in this period (we must not forget the genre-creating work earlier of Poe) may now be seen as a concentrated revolt against puritan authority that was inherited from, but out of time with, English mores of 150 years previously - not in the direction of European materialism (Marx) and existentialism (Kierkegaard) but towards transcendentalism.

This is the point at which the Northern (but not the Southern) culture of the United States moves from being a dialectical variant of European culture into something new and distinctive. It is the point at which American idealism and commitment to absolute moral values turns from aspirational political theory into cultural reality.We may take the major texts, read in schools later, as these five:

• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter (1850): Questions are raised about communitarian authority.
• Herman Melville - Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851): The intensity of questions of good and evil.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe - Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852): Sentimentalism in the cause of the good.
• Henry David Thoreau - Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854): American individualism bonds with the land and with the ideal.
• Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass (1855): The poetic lauding of American earthiness

This immense flourishing of literature on the US East Coast in scarcely half a decade represented an America that was still an offshoot of British culture but that now asserted a distinctive urban liberal and democratic mentality that, in parts, and mostly unintended, helped to fuel the moral fervour behind a bloody war of conquest that was to be touted as a war of liberation after the fact.

This culture was later to invert itself somewhat into philosophical pragmatism as a result of horror at that war (as ably outlined by Louis Menand in 'The Metaphysical Club') and react against populist enthusiasm for moral absolutes but both the belief in force as agent of moral right and a measured antinomian belief in justice and rights over the forms of law has been a persistent value that drives American political action at home and overseas even today.

The Second Phase - From The Late Nineteenth Century to The Mid-Twentieth Century - Understanding & Reforming The Imperium

The first phase was a concentrated burst of generational energy based on an idealistic response to imposed authority from above. It ended in a brutal war that was pursued, albeit not always idealistically in practice, increasingly for 'moral' ends as it moved forward.

Henry James

The next phase is a coming to terms with the expansionary but increasingly anomic ever-expanding federal state that emerged from the crisis. It consisted of two  parts - a mainstream concern with American exceptionalism and how to make it moral, increasingly through a progressive discourse, and an attempt in relation to the South to include a still-alien culture in the whole.

Again, the critiques of capitalism in America are wholly unlike that in Europe. In Europe, there is a war against capitalism as a fundamental socially organising concept from both the Catholic or Fascist Right and the Socialist Left but, in the US, progressives are not arguing against capitalism but against 'bad' capitalism, against monopolies and for smallholders and the 'little man'. The attitude is more one of observation for reform than rage for revolution.

The texts to be read in schools today tell us that, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the US is not all that it could be in the eyes of thinking liberal men.

It is flawed but it is exceptional and it could be better by returning to its original intentions, the intentions, in a strange piece of patriarchal conservatism, of the Founding Fathers or the free-born settler. This is a liberalism that might be considered very conservative and nostalgic in Europe:

• Henry James - Works (1871-1911): Anglo-American subtleties and differences
• Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Fin (1884): A nostalgia for freedom
• Frank Norris - The Octopus (1901): The progressive critique of big business
• Sinclair Lewis - Main Street (1921): The dead weight of small town America
• F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925): The corruption under the glitter
• Norman Mailer - The Naked & The Dead (1948): Americans at war

The Southern Response

The 'Southern Response' is not so much a response by the South, which is a cultural back-water, but about the South. A choice is made in the early twentieth century not to integrate the black people who live there and in the Northern cities but to mythologise the culture romantically as a lost cause, a cavalier planter culture beaten (as they should have been even in Marxist theory) by kinder bourgeois roundheads. In doing so, the South is pickled in aspic in order to be integrated into Yankeedom while remaining segregated at home:

• Film - The Birth of A Nation (1915)
• William Faulkner - Works (1926-1962): The mythologising of the Deep South
• Film - Gone With The Wind (1939)

It is no accident that the process is book-ended by two major block-busting films. The first rewrites the civil war as a war of resistance on the lines of other doomed tales of resistance much loved by Anglo-Saxons - from Hereward the Wake onwards - and the second shows the romantic but wrong culture of the feudal South as ultimately ill-fitted to the modern world: 'frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!'

Distracted first by war and reconstruction, the nation-creating liberal texts of this middle phase displace resentments in the defeated South and divert a troubled national liberal culture, confused by its own victories at times, into hand-maiden to a State that could ambiguously be an agent for or against the people.

The Third Phase - The Sixties - The Creation of the New Liberal Mind: Fear, Anger & Guilt

The final phase is the one most of us are familiar with. Like the 1850s, it represents a point of concentrated energy that shifts the ground within the culture, creating the Democrat Party of today and the resentments of small-town conservatism that fuel Republican revolts. The texts below cover the three key psychological developments that rule liberal thinking today - environmentalism, feminism and a passion for indigenous movements as somehow more pure than urban man. These are three centres of contemporary radical thinking in politics and the media.

Notice that the works of sexual and 'negro' liberation - though important to those communities - are not on the list because these were primarily matters of direct action and not texts, though the texts were many. And we have two women on the list for the first time - third phase liberalism is increasingly driven by women and women's values to the extent that the crisis of support emerging today lies in the alienation of working class men who could be taken for granted in the first two phases as supportive of their bourgeois betters' aspirations for rights and reform.

Rachel Carson

And there is one film on the list that has almost been forgotten now but, at the time, brought the message of Dee Brown about forgotten history into exceptionally gory focus for a mass population:

• Rachel Carson - Silent Spring (1962): An environmentalist ur-text
• Betty Friedan - The Feminist Mystique (1963): Hardline quasi-Marxist introduction to feminism
• Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968): Existential panic over scarce resources
• Dee Brown - Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (1970): Guilt at the genocide of the indigenes
• Film - Soldier Blue (1970)

The sixties are rightly regarded as a cultural watershed. These types of text and film helped to create a new liberal ideology of rights (especially for women and then for a range of other identity groups based on gender and orientation), imperial guilt and existential fear that drove the babyboomer political project and the opposing conservative communitarian reaction to contest each other right up until the age of the internet.

For those who have not spent time in the American school system (as I have) and are puzzled by the American liberal response to the world, a world which such liberals persist in not trying to understand in its complexity, these three phases may help comprehension of what they are dealing with.

The first phase gives us a genuinely liberal moral absolutism and sentimentality that the world is not what it should be and can be put right by individual endeavour and sentimental good will.

The second long phase shows a determined commitment to mythologising history in order to make things right, a progressive optimism that struggle will return the world to what it should have been if there had been no 'fall' and periodic, latterly apocalyptic, despair at the world as it is.

The last phase focuses on the moral wrongs that are to be found everywhere - in the world as a whole and not just the american world - and that our environment, equality and protection of the vulnerable are 'causes' where, perhaps, facts are not the issue but the will to change things ... which brings us back to the impetus behind the transcendentalism of the 1850s.

And the rest, as they say, is history ...

Psychopathy, Good and Evil - A Primer

The psychologist James Fallon's account of his self proclaimed psychopathy in this article (October 6th, 2014) is highly plausible. We can summarise its content by reproducing one paragraph although I recommend that you read the full interview for yourself:

In 2006, Fallon was studying the brain scans of psychopathic killers when he happened to compare them to a scan of his own brain. The characteristic deactivation of emotional regions was unmistakable. He discovered for himself what friends and family had been insisting for years: Fallon was a psychopath—albeit a “pro-social” one, as he likes to say. The 66-year-old father of three is happily married, highly successful in his field, and has no criminal record

His Buddhist comment is suggestive, sounds intuitively right and rather chimes with our own criticism of the creed with its detachment and 'death instinct'. The path to zen/chan thinking has many of the attributes of what the Western liberal mind might call 'psychopathy':

You know, there’s one psychiatrist I spent time with in India. She goes, “Jim, you’re actually a natural Buddhist. The type of empathy you have is not for people, but for mankind. That’s very Buddhist.” I think if I had been brought up in the Buddhist system, it might’ve been even easier.

Despite the obviously and possibly deliberately manipulative aspects of an interview designed to sell a book, there is the meat of some important thinking in here about our species, about the balance of skills within the species necessary for survival and about empathy as equal to and not superior to psychopathy in that context.

There is also some reason to think further here about the mis-diagnosing of Hitler and the SS as psychopaths and of Gandhi and Mandela as empaths (because it suits the liberal mind to have false links between good and evil on the one hand and these diagnostic attributes on the other) and about the 'feminisation' (I refer to cultural norms of the feminine and not actual female behaviour here and the distinction is important) of the West.

And about how moral codes are inculcated and chosen - his remnant catholicism is familiar to me as a 'recovering Catholic' as is the idea that a strict code can switch into a denial of the source and meaning of the code and yet become, nevertheless, existentially central to the person and about the importance to this sort of mind of manipulative intention and dislike of illusion, and of the dangers (in my view) of becoming lost in unnecessary intellectual mind games just for the sport of it.

In his case, this competitve sporting aspect is perhaps most interesting. Fallon has denied himself and others free will because he seems to be driven by the need to play a game within codes he likes to think are absolute. This need for the absolute is perhaps a hidden need for absolution for simply being alive and this has led him to see that this is formally 'psychopathic' (I think he is right). Psychopathy in his case may simply be a despairing death instinct, a form of hidden depression about life.

Nietzsche's 'beyond good and evil' is thus not psychopathic but the possible cure for both psychopathy and dysfunctional empathy insofar as it is also 'beyond the necessity to play a game' - and beyond the need for absolutes and so beyond the need for absolution. Fallon has not escaped the game and so he has not worked or cannot work through his apparent psychopathy to where it should lead - that point most liberal minds are terrified of, incorrectly in my opinion, despite the fact that it results in a more functional inability to do evil.

Ceasing to play the game on terms that loosen all the structures that seem both to hold the alleged psychopath to account and to institutionalise the language (though less certainly the practice) of empathy is not merely a potential liberation but a potential exorcism of the 'evil' associated with the sociopathic and a stripping away of the illusory good that lies in the pain and presumption of the self declared 'empath'.

The outrage and irrationalities of the empath and the encoded gaming mentality of the psychopath remain anxious, either willing the world to be not what it is and descending into fantasy or accepting what is given too readily in order to 'game it'. This is a point beyond the Christ or the Buddha where the zen or chan master may also lead but to which there are many other paths.

'Beyond good and evil' is thus being beyond both the wilful denial of the brute nature of men and the enforced cultural codes of the empath, certainly beyond the exploitative game-playing without real purpose except the game (the mentality of the football fan), into something where the world is taken as it is - not as it must be - and as it could be through effective positive manipulation.

The world 'as it must be' is always a dynamic projection of the individual with all his or her anxieties and insecurities. The individual is better off dealing with the world 'as it is' on their own terms and not on the terms of some inherited and habituated absurd game. Such an attitude is beyond empathy and psychopathy but contains elements of both. It has to see into the souls of others and read the signs in order to truly understand the world yet become detached in relation to the ebb and flow of neuroses and hysteria that is at the core of the world of souls.

Detachment is thus recovered as a 'good' but is redirected from the Buddhist 'death instinct' to the flow of life in the world and with a decent mindfulness of the likeness and well as difference of others from oneself, the desire to 'do no evil' simply emerges, not from some anxious troubled empathy but from the facts of the matter. The 'doing of no evil' soon becomes the 'doing of sufficient good'.