Enough is Enough - When You Are In An 'Ole, Stop Digging ...

I have been weighing up whether the Labour Party is worth the candle after around nine months of re-engagement, having, once again, observed it from the inside. I decided to try and be as objective as possible - does it match what I believe and is it good for the people of this country? These are the only two considerations for me. There is another consideration: is it good for my petty personal interest but, frankly, I would probably never have been a Labour Party supporter if that was so. Politics is about interest but it is also about values and I place values before interest while others (which is their right) do the opposite. Let us weigh up the evidence.

FOR THE LABOUR PARTY

1. There is no other party that at least purports to protect the interests of the most vulnerable in our society although a) the least worst is perhaps not the best, b) the record of Labour in office under Blair was chequered to say the least with its distracted interest in international issues, and c) there are 'conservative' forces that are equally evidentially concerned with the causes of poverty and with solutions (represented within the Labour Party by the increasingly isolated Frank Field).

2. A significant element in the leadership including the Leader represent the forces of peace and redistribution although a) the rest of the leading networks in the Party seem determined to oust it by fair means or foul and b) this values-driven element (of which I approve) seem to be consistently politically inept and naive.

3, It still represents the bulk of the Labour Movement although a) the trades unions seem no longer to be concerned about society as a whole but only with their special interests and b) the trades union movement is now largely associated (with exceptions such as the sterling work done in the transport, construction, retail, banking and manufacturing sectors) with a defensive strategy to maintain a large and often inefficient state sector as producers rather than having much concern with the services to be supplied.

AGAINST THE LABOUR PARTY

1. It is not organisationally fit for purpose. It has hollowed out in the North. It has lost Scotland and is under pressure in Wales. In the South, it has become dominated by naive cultural activists of the liberal-left in a state of alternating outrage and despair. In some urban areas, its structures are controlled by ethnic feudal elites. Its elected representatives are narcissists and out of control. Its leadership is weak, though not always a weakness of its own making. The party apparat (the professionals) have far too much influence and control within a supposedly democratic party. It is collapsing from within.

2. It has become dominated by cultural and identity politics for short term urban electoral reasons at the expense of class and national interest politics. Its European policy - thrust upon it by the apparat - alienates much of its working class base and is deeply flawed in its analysis of the nature of the European Project, aligning it further with the international liberal economic system. It has allowed itself to become distracted by urban culture wars between ethnic groups. It has also aligned itself with the movement to control thought and language and avoid free debate ('liberal totalitarianism') and it connives in the rewriting of history for political purposes. It has refused to face the very real problems created by global flows of migrants and tried to suppress all debate on the matter. Parts of its apparat have been taken over by sectional identity elements, most notably radical feminism (which is not to be confused with the commitment to social and economic equality between persons of all genders).

3. It has totally neglected any form of political education nor has it encouraged critical thinking and open debate (although the Leader has made moves in this direction on Trident and other matters though signally not on Europe). It has confused political organisation and building a party with issues campaigning as if it was little more than a giant NGO. It has acted as claque for the campaigning of NGOs that collude with other political interests. If its policies are coherent (which is to be doubted), they are poorly communicated.

In short, on the debit side, the democratic socialist and labour party of the early twentieth century has turned into a chaotic and naive liberal-left party that floats on the tide of history instead of creating it. It became little more than a mass of aging tribal loyalists supporting a small number of paid opportunists and cynics (amidst which men and women of integrity are undoubtedly to be found), all of limited horizon and education, but also without or with decreasing experience of mass social and political organisation.

The 'Corbyn revolution' merely brought all this out into the open - within a party that has been rotting for decades - by introducing a new and unstable force of passionate and inexperienced people who contain within their cohort ideologues as their most active element, an element even further disconnected from those in the working class whose livelihoods do not depend on the public sector.

From being a national working class party, the Labour Party has become an inchoate coalition of sectional special interest groups including urban ethnic groups and ideologues with increasingly little to say to a people who are suffering not only from austerity in the short term but neo-liberalism in the long term. The commitment to a subsumption under a European ameliorative neo-liberal project should be the last straw for many natural supporters of a genuine class and community-based democratic socialism.

The positives for the Party would be enhanced if a) it ceased its trajectory towards a civil war organised from the Right and unified itself around a national redistributive and democratic programme that eschewed culture wars and identity politics and offered a viable anti-austerity strategy or b) it was simply destroyed and replaced by a national democratic socialist party that could undertake this programme more effectively.

To recover ground would require a) the re-imposition of party discipline at every level around a programme that mediated between the party members and the general public where the party apparat and elected representatives were subject to the authority of a Leader elected by the members, b) the intellectal content of the party's programme to be radically upgraded to rely on only evidence-based solutions to value-driven problems instead of rhetorical and cultural position-taking c) the trades union movement either returned to a socialist position or partially sidelined as a special interest group and d) the liberal internationalist programme to become secondary to a pragmatic national democratic and redistributive programme.

None of these changes seem likely. To maintain and vote for the Party in its current condition is irresponsible. Placing values to one side, the national interest would not be served by having a Government of half-baked thinkers with ill-thought out policies and a propensity to legislate in the direction of thought and language control, let alone behaviour control. Worse, this Party would have half its eye on the absurd dream of transforming the European Union into a socialist paradise and be subject to the whims and fancies of whichever faction demanded some life-denying ideological policy to maintain a Parliamentary majority.

So, as Lenin, put it - 'What Is To Be Done?'. First, when one is in an hole, the first rule is to stop digging. This mess is not something that ordinary members can possibly have any control over. There is no sign that the Party Leadership has a grip on things and can make the necessary changes. Across the Party and the Labour Movement, the ruling elite are like ferrets in a sack or large rats fighting over a small cake. There is nothing to be done within the Party. It is degenerate in the most fundamental sense.

All the ordinary person can do who has the values that should have been expressed by a strong Labour Party is to stand back and not only let it implode but hope it implodes quickly so that something can take its place or that, perhaps, one or other of the 'civil war' wings of the party can be transformed into something that can represent the aspirations of the mass of the population while not being led by some maniacal cuckoo in the nest like the unlamented Tony Blair, the Conan of the Middle East.

The argument that anything is better than the Tories does not stand up any more. Idealism is not enough. Politics is about power and that means the competent control of a powerful and dangerous State, including the deep state aspects of it. It does not mean getting office in order to be taken over by the State as happened under the last Labour Government. Whoever is incompetent at controlling the State leaves the Deep State to control us. A competent democratic force that challenges the State is always preferable to an incompetent one that is the creature of the State. The Tories need to be challenged by something far more competent than they are, tougher, disciplined, even brutal in its support for core values of redistribution, democracy, community and individual freedom, including the freedom to dissent.

The Labour Party has become a waste of the space given to a radical, progressive, democratic force in this country. It will cease to have my membership. It will cease to have my support until it deals with the key issues of organisation and discipline, cultural and identity politics and values-deriven political education. None of these changes are likely and so I await something new that can do practical things for our poorest and most vulnerable, ensure maximum freedom and opportunity for the majority, maintain our national identity along progressive lines and control and limit the State and other institutional forces. I look forward to seeing pigs arrive at Terminal 1 Heathrow ...

My text of my resignation letter to the Party will follow in due course. This farrago was not what I signed up for.

An Update on the Brexit Debate - The Creation of Democratic Left Network

It is time for a report back on our limited involvement in the struggle for British national self-determination and democracy which will reach its climax yet not conclude with the vote on Brexit on June 23rd, 2016. The last campaign report was the text of the Speech given at the TEAM EU Counter-Summit given in November of last year - this is now available as a YouTube video courtesy of PaxVista TV (see below).

One of the major themes of that talk was the need for Right and Left to collaborate on an issue of massive importance to the general population of the country. A secondary result of our discussions in November was the realisation of thedegree to which the Labour Party had been appropriated by a 'soft left' Euro-socialist machine dependent on Brussels and, on this issue, by the Old Labour Right.

My own experience and that of others of being dismissed, of falsehoods about our position and even something close to bullying of dissent within the Party has led some of us to (in effect) suspend our engagement with the Party until June 24th and concentrate on the issue of Brexit. This issue is existential as far as this country and its democracy are concerned and it trumps mere party advantage.

Previous posts on this blog have supplied some of the reasoning behind a commitment to Brexit from a Left perspective but it was quickly recognised by myself and others that something more was required than individual protest. The issues raised by the rise of a pseudo-democratic European Left were far bigger than Brexit alone.

Earlier last month, a number of activists, all Labour Party members, combined to create the Democratic Left Network [DLN] which now has its own web site, blog, twitter account and Facebook Page after herculean efforts by dedicated members of the younger generation with real world jobs to hold down. This in turn has been nurtured and supported by the non-partisan Democracy Movement although DLN is wholly independent.

Although I have stuck to my guns in being distanced from direct activism in Leave.EU, I made a point of attending the last Advisory Board Meeting to explain what the Democratic Left Network was, how it would work and how it would collaborate with older Labour Movement organisations such as the Campaign Against Euro-Federalism [CAEF] and the Trades Unions Against The European Union [TUAEU]. We found an atmosphere of collaboration and support on all sides.

Our ideas have been tested in public meeting since and have not been found wanting. Liberal-left and democratic socialist opinion is confused, feels led by the nose and is beginning to ask some serious questions about where we are heading if we Stay in the European Union. In fact, DLN, whose Editorial Board will be confirmed on April 14th, does not exist solely to fight for Brexit from the Left. It exists to fight for improved political education and for democratic socialism on the Left.

The DLN intends to continue to exist and to grow stronger after June 23rd regardless of the result. Its position on the European Union has emerged logically out of a democratic socialist position that stands against the capture of the Labour Party and Labour Movement by a failed liberal-left on the one hand and by pseudo-democratic rightists on the other. Democracy and socialism are seen here as equal parts of the same whole in defiance of both Liberal Democrats and latter-day Bolsheviks alike.

Our concern is two-fold in the current debate. The first to raise the status of political education and free and open debate and to stand up and show those overwhelmed by propaganda but who have doubts about the technocratic neo-liberal and barely competent European Project that they are not alone and that they should feel free to speak out and raise issues of concern. The second is to expose the absurdity inherent in the posture of Varoufakis and his muddled associates that Britons should vote to stay in the European Union on the dubious grounds that it can be democratised and socialised - as DLN has pointed out in robust terms.

Varoufakis himself describes the crisis of the proto-State in devastating terms. It is puzzling that he continues to believe that his band of idealists could persuade the middle classes of Northern Europe to vote for their own demise when the most logical outcome for Europe, if it survives the crisis, is to become an integrated empire where its citizens are reduced to fodder for the neo-liberal project.

Our view is that the vote on June 23rd is an opportunity to transform not only Britain but also Europe by showing Europeans that they can escape from the machinery of liberal federalism and neo-liberal economics through national self-determination and internationalism in preference to supranationalism. In understanding this, they can then escape from a deep pessimism about the possibility of social change within the United Kingdom, one that seems to have affected depressive left-wing intellectuals and made them give up on the project of empowering the people to take command of their own destiny.

Modern Mythologies and the Social

Joseph Campbell in his Occidental Mythology wrote that

"In the long view of the history of mankind, four essential functions of mythology can be discerned. The first and most distinctive – vitalizing all – is that of eliciting and supporting a sense of awe before the mystery of being. ... The second function of mythology is to render a cosmology, an image of the universe that will support and be supported by this sense of awe before the mystery of the presence and the presence of a mystery. ... A third function of mythology is to support the current social order, to integrate the individual organically with his group ... The fourth function of mythology is to initiate the individual into the order of realities of his own psyche, guiding him toward his own spiritual enrichment and realization."

The unknowability of Being, the invention of meaning around this core of unknowability, the maintenance of social order and personal individuation are 'mythologised' in integral societies. Conservatives pine for this. They think we were both better and happier when these functions were integrated despite the probability that each whole system was inevitably built on invention. There was a disconnect between the actual nature of material reality, society and the individual in their relation to Reality (or Being) as soon as anyone began to think about what was going on. Deep thought does not work well for serious traditionalists. Mythical societies were static societies, not necessarily, despite the claims of the ideologies making use of myths, very ordered or mentally healthy. Trying to construct a myth to restore total order - to the material world, society and the person in an integrated way - may be the dream state of the conservative and it may be true that our species clings to irrational pseudo-order out of fear and anxiety but it is not necessarily true that the species needs to cling to anything that extensive at all.

In our contemporary world, the, four functions have separated out and then fragmented within themselves. It may be that the fragmentation within the functions is the problem rather than the disconnect between the functions. It may be that the disconnection of function is, in fact, a healthy state of affairs and that it is the fragmentation within each function that makes us 'unhealthy'. The attempt, by conservatives and the religious, to integrate forcibly the four functions misses this essential point - that we can live well enough by seeing each function as having a separate purpose but still yearn to have each function function well which it cannot do if it is not coherent in itself.

The contemporary world has an opportunity to accept this situation instead of fighting it. Our mythology of awe is now either simple existentialism or the choice by individuals from a smorgasbord of 'faith-based' choices that can be insulated from the other functions if we wish - New Age beliefs if we insist, Our cosmology can be that of science - the most coherent mythology now on offer even if some may choose incoherent ones existentially - even as, in our heart of hearts, we know that this, at its furthest reaches when it leaves the world of technology and demonstration, has its faith-based aspects. Our current mythology of social order is most in disarray because atomised individuals now know that they cannot easily trust to the competence let alone benignity of their priestly and warrior castes (if ever they could) while the mythology of the person, the narrative that helps construct our individuality, might be talked up by psychotherapists but is, in fact, simply the story we tell ourselves to navigate a society that is fluid and unnerving. 

It is possible to create a myth of non-meaning, trust blindly in science and construct a personal mythology that permits the first two and live well. The problem child in Campbell's short litany is the lack of a viable myth of the social since it is not easy to live well if society is unstable or works against individuation (as most conservative spiritual, religious and social mythologies work against it for many people). In a world that permits the possibility of existentialism (alongside faith-based essentialism), science and psychotherapy and free choice, it is the social that has become problematic. It is the failure of the social to reconstruct itself without God, with Science and yet respectful of 'human rights' that is the crisis of our time. The social does not need the mythologies in the other three areas to be in accord with its own necessary mythology any more than any of those other mythologies require any of the others to function effectively. The revolutions provided by the Enlightenment, Nietzsche and Freud (discredited though he is in detail) provided, eventually, a new coherence but the opportunities provided by Marx were squandered by the Marxists, leaving little behind.

So, this is the next stage - having established that there are things we cannot know and which must be faced with pagan equanimity, that there is no God but only Science as our Faith and that we are captains of our own souls until we die, we now need to establish some kind of social order that requires no deities, can make use of science and technology and respects autonomous individuals but yet has its own independent mythology that can hold it together for the next stage in human development. A mythological 'faith' in the good society is the last of the four corner stones to be put in place before we can move forward as a species. After the current time of troubles, our species will probably construct this new myth once ideological liberalism has gone the way of communism and fascism ... but not before.

The Naive and the Cruel - The Ideological Struggle for the Heart of Europe

Part of the pro-European Union pitch relies on the promotion, mostly from Marxist intellectuals and fellow-travellers in the Academy, of a naïve anti-Atlanticist economic model which is designed to appeal to the younger generation. Needless to say, both the Atlanticist neo-liberal and this neo-socialist European model are deeply flawed but the latter is naïve where the former is cruel. Because the former is cruel, the latter becomes attractive and so it must be ripped apart by serious democratic socialists before it gets traction.

The two key issues neither side are addressing are a) the massive impending flow of refugees this year and possibly in subsequent years and b) the economic instability of the Eurozone in the context of a global slowdown not only in Europe but also in China and the US.

These people are not getting it – a perfect storm of an economic system on the edge and massive population shifts for which there has been no preparation does not lead to democratic socialism but to authoritarianism and national populism. And eventually to violence which can only be handled by the surveillance society (and not that either).

The only real solution is the restoration of flexible and responsive national democracies in a framework of internationalism (not supra-nationalism) in which democratic socialists (not neo-socialist liberals) restrain the forces of reaction and maintain ‘civilisation’ before returning to effective long term power and the rebuilding of the welfare commonwealth - and then perhaps returning to the construction of a new collaborative Europe from the ground up.

The economic projects of the European neo-socialists are doomed on massive welfare costs and the revolt of the Middle European middle classes from the taxation and inflation required. A system built on the assumption of constant high economic growth relying on cheap labour and minimal infrastructural investment has been called out by history. Eight years after the 2008 Crash, the reliance on the 'inevitable' up-turn looks more futile than ever. There will eventually be a massive structural up-turn on technological innovation (biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI/robotics) but it will be fiercesomely disruptive and our elites are simple not competent enough to handle it.

Even if they get into power, like the French Popular Front in 1936, our backwards-looking soft Left will be out of it within a year or two. The logic that destroyed Tsipras still exists within the European Project and Varoufakis can appear on TED as many times as he likes with his 'alternative strategy' but it is little more than the same old intellectual failure re-packaged for dim-witted liberals.

Worse, this is not the way to help the refugees or the working population most threatened by break down. Both deserve better - they deserve realists and not idealists, a political class prepared to get stuck in and bring peace to troubled regions, fund reconstruction for destroyed territories, turning camps into viable townships where return is not possible. We must match migration aspirations to labour shortages and not rely on spurious human rights claims and the demand for ever cheaper labour to feed the maw of late capitalism. Liberal internationalist idealism (as opposed to democratic socialist internationalism), the deontological impulse of the cultural studies departments, is at the very root of the murder and mayhem we see across the peripheries of the West.

The liberal idealists who now sit, like Cnut before the waves, at the leading edge of European 'socialism' are worse than simply naive, they are potentially destructive in that naivete, part of a failed elite instead of the vanguard of a new democratic socialist political elite (there I have said it) that will transform the condition of the people under conditions of democracy, technological innovation and socio-economic redistribution within an internationalism of free democratic welfare states.

Labour In Europe - Re-framing Internationalism as Liberal Imperialism

Much could be said about the framing of the Brexit Debate. Perhaps I will come back to this again later - especially on the deliberate confusion of being pro-European and pro-European Union - but in this posting I want to look at the reframing of internationalism by Labour In Europe.

Labour in Europe frames itself as internationalist and anti-nationalist and then associates resistance to the Project as radical nationalist and so fascist. In my earlier posting, I pointed out that this resulted in a strongly implied slur on me at one point in one of their local party presentations - only partially withdrawn, This is disgraceful but to be expected and, as I say there, not helped by some of the idiotic rhetoric of right-wing troglodytes.

In fact, democratic socialist internationalism presupposes the existence of free democratic nation states which collaborate INTER-nationally. What pseudo-democratic Leftists have done is to re-frame the debate so that supra-nationalism (that is something ABOVE nations, creating a SUPER-NATION) becomes, falsely, internationalism.

This is lie and a blatant one. A world of giant imperial SUPERSTATES (the US, the EU, Russia, China and India) is not a world of free democratic nations but is a world of competing empires in which the nations within them act within rules set by the imperial elites in their own interest. The result is the paradox that such supra-nationalism encourages nationalism as we see in the rise of the Scottish Nationalist Party in the United Kingdom and of various forms of national populism within the European Union (or should we say Empire). Those elites are always trying to manage the aspirations of the population instead of understanding them and, then, through engagement and political education, sharing in their fulfilment.

In this context, much is at stake for the British people - that is, to whom we will be subject. The last vestiges of a British Empire small enough to be reformed radically by the exercise of our own democratic political will or a massive European Empire whose very complexity strengthens the hold of its imperial elite over the levers of power.

We should not be surprised that the representatives of these imperial elites at the European level would use any means to retain and expand their power through half-truths, yes, but also through threats such as those we are currently receiving from President Hollande of France. Even an old Etonian like Darius Guppy has castigated Boris Johnson in the Spectator for not seeing that this struggle is one of national self-determination in the face of international capital. If one of the old elite can get it, surely Leftists can!

I would like to think that not all British Leftists are so pusillanimous that they will not question the claims of Labour in Europe and come to their own conclusions based on a careful analysis of the actual consequences to democracy and the economy of the Stay proposal. Recent experience has made me ... pessimistic.

The Labour Party and Its Culture of Pessimism

I saw a smidgeon, but only a smidgeon, of what Iain Duncan Smith has recently been talking about (‘bullying and threats’ from the anti-Brexit campaign) at our local Labour Party this week. I do not want to get this out of proportion. Our local Party is represented by a really decent and civilised group of people who generally treat each other with respect and courtesy. The 'bullying' (such as it was) came from an outsider. It should also be said that some of the grassroots supporters of Brexit on the Right are far more vicious in their own presentation of their case than their opponents and that these Brexit Tweeters lose votes every time they lift their malign little fingers. However, I would have expected far more from the official representative of Labour's campaign to remain within Europe.

I am not interested in naming names. It may just have been an 'off night' but the pro-European Union speaker (there was no representative of the countervailing case) directed comments at the only eurosceptic in the village (me!) which overtly associated my position with that of fascists like Nick Griffin. This was unacceptable and recognised to be unacceptable (he apologised for the 'offence' but not the misrepresenting claim) but a lot of half-truths and claims remained unchallenged and on the record. That's fine up to a point - after all, the party apparat is using a conference decision to claim priority for the pro-European case. This gives it carte blanche, one supposes, to walk all over those of us with a more nuanced vision of democratic socialism and a healthy distrust of Delorsian promises that have not been delivered, are not being delivering and will not be delivered.

It was conveniently not mentioned that the speaker might as equally be associated with Goldman Sachs as I am apparently associated with extreme nationalists but let that pass. Although (to his credit) he came clean about his presumably paid position at The European Parliament, it would also have been nice to have someone represent the Stay Campaign who did not have such an obvious professional interest in the result.

Regardless of all that, my political position was redundant. Not only was there no speaker for the alternative case (which is fine), I was not given the chance to respond to the implied slurs on my character (which was not). I did not expect to be allowed to challenge the misrepresentation and half-truths of the campaign itself and indeed had made that clear but I did think it reasonable that the specific charge of association with nationalistic fascism be refuted (the Chair failed at this point). Whatever! The membership seem totally sold on the European Project regardless of anything that I might have said in any reasoned way. Further intervention on my part would have been useless. I just disliked being treated like that by a 'comrade' who had been placed in a superior position by the decision of the Executive Committee ... if I was not such a tough nut, I think I might reasonably call that 'bullying'. Nor am I alone in this from reports in other parts of the country. It may raise questions for many people whether this liberal internationalist and European Socialist Party is really their natural home but I think that assessment comes later.

I walked away that evening very much more aware of the determination and resources of the soft left machine behind Stay within the Labour Party (with its very glossy and well produced brochure), of the risks that the Party is taking in its potential alienation from its historic working class base (not only on this matter but on the refugee crisis), of the dominance of the left-liberal (rather than democratic socialist) component of the Party and of the lack of fairness and tolerance towards other voices on this issue on the grounds that it was 'party policy'. This reproduces the mentality of past Labour top-down authoritarianism if worn with a relatively velvet glove.

Further reflection has also made realise just how much the party machine is broken in terms of its responsiveness to the twin needs of mobilising and engaging new members and creating a machinery for political education that can act as a transmission belt between the wider population and the 'avant-garde' of party thinking. Again, do not get me wrong - the local Party is friendly, vigorous in its own way, and making serious attempts to professionalise its approach to the electorate. There was an excellent local election policy statement developed by a leading member, albeit one that threatened to be turned into a curate's egg by its need to satisfy the standard liberal-left posturing on some issues.

But rules (which, of course, members can do nothing about) that mean that a member only gets a CLP vote when they go through the palaver of attending a branch meeting and getting elected as a 'delegate', and the way that these delegates are forced into supporting branch resolutions created in meetings which they could not attend, means that many new members sit at the CLP as observers rather than participants, delegates lose an important degree of autonomy in discussing policy and the processes are excessively manipulable by the sort of activist who can give up time at the convenience of the party calendar.  Small branches can also be out-manouevred by the effective organisation of large branches instead of being in the position of persuading the members as a whole on the merits of a case.  Surely members themselves should feel free in their own right to bring up resolutions if they can get sufficient support from other members.

Of course, to be fair, the branch activists are also the ones who organise the machinery that gets candidates into office and so perhaps should have some additional rights but the balance strikes me as wrong. The sort of party reform that has been batted around since the mid-1990s is long over due. It is good to hear that Tom Watson, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, is looking into this and, indeed, according to reports, is giving special attention to the digital issue which includes the particular problem of the possible disenfranchisement of those who do not have digital access. These are complex issues with no easy answers but at least there seems to be some intent to grapple with them under the new Leadership team.

In my own case, as a result of the manner in which the meeting was held this week, I came to a decision that I could not face our local electorate (as requested) in May under conditions where I might be misrepresented as supportive of the European Project simply by virtue of being a Labour candidate and so I withdrew.  Six months of engagement in the Party has started to make me feel uncomfortable on other grounds. The bottom line was that I could see that taking on UKIP in a strongly working class area would be almost impossible under such circumstances making me, suddenly, a pessimist which is not what I want to be - and life is short!

The Party's own aggressive stance on Europe had simply made me more determined than ever to stand for non-fascist and non-racist democratic socialists' argument for Leave and to give that struggle absolute priority, to the exclusion of every other political project, over the next four months. The national pessimism about May seems to have become infectious. I have caught the disease so that saving the nation from supra-nationalism in the greater interests of its working people in the long run suddenly seems so much more important than maintaining the illusory dreams of the jobsworths in the European Parliament. This does not mean that the Labour Party and Labour Movement are not to be supported as the primary voice for progressive politics in the United Kingdom (quite the contrary - they are, sadly, the only voice left!) but it does mean that the support should not be as unconditional as it once was in the days of tribal politics.

As I see it, the Labour Party at the moment has become mired in a 'culture of pessimism' as a result of the disastrous Blair-Brown legacy, the failure in the 2015 Election and the prospect of losing millions of pounds because of some particularly self-interested and vicious Tory legislation. Spend time with any activists working at a national level and they are excessively pessimistic about the prospects for their own Party. They are excessively pessimistic about their own Leadership in many cases. They are certainly ridiculously pessimistic about the opportunities to continue the democratisation and transformation of our own nation. As a result, this culture of pessimism has grabbed hold of an utterly undemocratic belief (for it is a belief) that a Social Europe can do the job that the Party cannot do domestically. This is added to a romantic idealism in which internationalism is reframed as supranationalism, democracy as platonic bureaucratism and the genuine cultural concerns of the working class as proto-fascism.  In other words, these liberal idealists would prefer a bureaucratic Europe to impose their values on the British people rather than persuade the British people to adopt those values itself.  That is not the democratic way and yet what has distinguished the Left in Britain since the days of the Chartists has been its commitment to democracy.

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.] 

Omniscience and Big Data as New Religion

One of the persistent delusions of humanity (taken as the default, though not the inevitable, position of most people who think that they are thinking) is that the universe is not only knowable but that knowability is a necessary good. It might be better for us to draw a distinction between knowing all that we can know and all that there is in our world. The drive to know all that we can reasonably know is the progressive mentality that expands our horizons through science and philosophy but the illusion that that we can know all that is in the world is the basis of religion and absurdity. Where reasonable knowledge intersects with the belief that all can be known or that what is known actually accords with reality is the point that divides the useful from the useless, even counter-productive.

The ancient method of dealing with the problem of total knowledge - the necessity for omniscience - was to displace this knowledge on to an invention - God. God knew everything. We could partake of this knowing indirectly by knowing Him. We, of course, did not and could not know everything but we 'knew' that He knew everything for us and so we felt comforted. The comfort came from believing that Something knew everything and if Something knew everything, then we were relieved of the pressure of absolute knowing but could yet believe that absolute knowing was possible. Belief in an omniscient God would bind the world into a coherent and safe whole no matter what happened to us as individuals. Our priests would know enough to interpret - to stand between Omniscience and our limited knowledge of the world. We could remain relatively ignorant knowing that we only had to strive to know ourselves, know our neighbours or know God through our priests or direct revelation.

If God is dead (though this proposition presumes that there was something there in the first place 'to die'), the inherent human demand that Absolute Knowing be present does not easily die with God. So how does it survive? It survives in sets of belief that have the cover of secular rationalism but which are no less absurd than the belief in a Knowing Subject outside of ourselves of which we can become a part directly or indirectly. Today's grand absurdity is the belief that the totality of information in the world (with all of materiality being presented conceptually and imaginatively as information) might be computed and understood ultimately in mathematical terms. Instead of us individual humans entering into a relationship with the Omniscient God, we are to be able to access this new evolving omniscience through our relationship with the potential total knowledge of 'cyberia', not just the internet and the accumulated knowledge of our current priestly class (the scientific community) but perhaps the evolved mind that will emerge out of the internet and quantum computers. In fact, few scientists would make these claims easily but that will not stop those who are ideologically committed to science and technology.

There has emerged an hysterical tendency in contemporary culture for God not to have been removed but merely to have been displaced into speculative science and fiction. These neo-religious believers, with their own texts, are often highly intelligent but only in the sense that Augustine and Aquinas were intelligent - formally capable of manipulating ideas and facts to come up with creative models of reality that suit their needs not advanced intellectually very far from the medieval scholastic. Just as the medieval scholastic could not critique the base belief whose proven inadequacy would undermine all the rest of his system - the belief in God - so the modern neo-scholastic of technologism cannot critique his belief in the relevance and 'reality' (for really existing humans) of the technological potential for total information. The theoretical constructs of God and Total Information, not being provable, stand together alongside many other absurd human beliefs, telling us that our species (in the mass) finds it difficult not to believe in something even when it purports to rationality.

This is closely related to magical thinking about numbers. That numbers are in themselves containers of meaning beyond quantity and inherently logical calculation is another ancient inheritance, the world of gematria, correspondences and Bible codes. Of course, the use of numbers in association with logic and reason has created an immensely valuable tool for the investigation of reality but that is very different from saying that it is reality or that the radical extension of calculation to its limits necessarily has any relation to any reality meaningful to humanity. If it works and it makes things of use to the human, it has value and may contribute to the manipulation of material reality and the construction of social reality. But meanings constructed out of numbers that are not usable are of no greater status than meanings constructed out of belief. Belief in God may not have had much effect on material reality but they certainly did on social reality - does that alone make God existent? That people believe in Him. For some, then, Thor and the Jedi are real if that is so.

A number that builds a spacecraft or calculates radiation levels in star systems has at least some potential use but a number that postulates an untestable belief about the death of the universe that relies solely on the logic of mathematics does not. Reality elides from Newton's dropping apple to the world of speculative science, the partner of speculative fiction. Exactly where the buck stops and the useful becomes the poetic or magical is always a matter for debate but it is important to know that the elision is taking place. Just because facts at one end of the scale are 'true' (useful and testable), this does not mean that the 'facts' (useless and untestable) at the other end should ever be accorded the same status. There are thus things ('facts') that are actually not formally knowable not only by us but by any total thinking machine since the very idea of a total thinking machine falls into the category of radical speculative science and the totality of all things is not knowable by a part of the whole unless it becomes the whole (the totality of knowledge).  Religion enters by the back door because this final postulated omniscient thing is ... God. God has become (as Tipler suggests) a thing of total information encompassing all things in all time.

But let us come down to earth since the social sciences are also chasing the ghost of total information, albeit not within the universe but within society. We have to ask now whether this particular Emperor has been naked for a very long time. The beginnings of social science are to be found in relatively simpler industrial societies working on data within fairly closed conservative societies that were also within bounded nation states. They told us things we did not before - or rather they revealed ourselves to ourselves in terms of simple narratives that might not tell us all but told us something more than no information would have given us. Today the social sciences continue to tell us something about ourselves but less and less with time because we have become more self-reflexive as subjects of research, societies have lost their conservative character and boundaries have collapsed. The volume of data required to make even simple statements has increased, is highly complex and its components will become redundant quite quickly in time. Yet the number of social scientists and their implicit claims on public policy have grown in proportion to the degree that they can no longer tell us anything decisive about ourselves.

What does the research into British working class life in the 1950s tell us now that is useful for public policy? What actually did it tell us then that was useful to society in the long run? Is working class life better today than it was in the 1950s because of social science research or are working people living in an entirely different world unpredicted by the academics and with unintended negative as well as intended positive consequences of their influence on public policy? Economics is notoriously slippery in telling us anything useful about reality as Paul Ormerod has repeatedly shown us. This is not to say that it is not useful only that it is contingently useful in a restricted way.

Policy that relies on the findings of social science is likely to be intrinsically flawed because it cannot aspire to total information (unless Big Data really does work), is quickly outdated by events, cannot take account of the many things that are going on outside the research and because the research itself is a factor affecting the actions of people themselves as well as those acting on people. Perhaps we can know some big things (more from observing history than from scientific method) and lots of little things (like the sub culture of Goths in Milwaukee over three years). Perhaps we can surmise something useful from meta-analysing lots of little things or contextualising our lives within the big things but the idea that we can know (rather than model inadequately) our actually existing social reality along any lines that are not closer to the traditional humanities rather than 'science' is becoming increasingly threadbare.

The massive interest in 'Big Data' as driver for social policy decisions strikes me as based on a belief system (that internet-based knowledge can provide a good and useful approximation of reality) that is no more reliable than any other belief system (that is, it sort of works when everyone believes nonsense but collapses when even a relatively few question the belief). And there is the self interest of those who propose it and of the social scientists, basically the interest in the system of those who expect to profit from it or, more negatively, fear that they will lose livelihoods and resources if they do not believe in the prevailing wisdom. In this, they will be true heirs to the Churchmen of the Late Middle Ages.

One suspects that we are about to go into another cycle where a plausible belief system has an apparent coherence because no one will critique the core assumptions (like a belief in God or the inevitable withering away other State or the inevitability of a struggle for survival between races). It will create the sea in which the fish of society can swim but which does not accord with reality and which must eventually collapse on its own internal contradictions. Above all, it must collapse eventually on the fact that the claims derived from the ostensible central fact (the core assumption) must collapse because the core assumptions are wrong, in this case that the accumulation of big data can be a true reflection of social reality and that the big data can be successfully analysed to provide meaning that is useful and not part of the problem that it is trying to resolve. This is not to say that Big Data may not have some use but we have to be careful to be critical of it and how it is used and especially how it is used by the new priests of technology - the political class, the academy, the security and policy bureaucracies and the marketeers and accountants - to dictate reality to us. Just because the numbers say the world is thus will not mean it is thus - we alone decide our own reality as self-reflexive humans. If we want to be sheep, we just have to sit back and allow ourselves to be defined as sheep. 

Sherlock and the Kulturkampf in the West

Is it just me or are the establishment media somewhat overdoing the feminist, multicultural, 'green' and minority messaging in popular culture at the moment? The high (or is it low) point was the ridiculous drug-induced fantasy about a secret society of avenging put-upon women faced with Victorian patriarchy in BBC's flagship Sherlock on New Years Day.

The programme was saved by the excellent scripting, directing and action but, bluntly, it was intellectually ridiculous at so many levels (in retrospect, the idea that Holmes took so long to solve it in itself was absurd), a pandering to the sort of person who likes persecuting male scientists and actually is deluded enough to think that we live in a 'rape culture' in modern Britain. The worst aspect is the number of creative men who are colluding in the misrepresentation of history, the rewriting of our culture along ideological lines and the falsification of actually existing gender relations then (the Victorian age) and now.

Why do so many men so self-hate that they have to promote a false image of reality for ideological reasons? Do women or minorities really think that being pandered to in this way by the elite actually changes anything much in terms of power relations? Where is the analysis? Of course, one welcomes the new openness to black actors and I suppose it is decent to allow 'colour blindness' to have Olde England populated now with feisty women and gentlemen of colour where such things would be more than unlikely at the time.

Dickens' world was a largely white world as was King Arthur's though this is not to gainsay the too-easily forgotten contribution of black Britons to the creation of the 'nation'. But going to the next stage and re-inventing history, albeit as Sherlock's fantasy, to pander to parts of the audience is going too far, apart from the implicit approval of terrorism and murder in the plot which Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot (let alone Conan Doyle) would never have countenanced. It is part of a trend - the BBC's Merlin made a go of recreating an entertaining middle brow version of Arthurian Britain but its Atlantis not merely failed to be about the legend of Atlantis but presented the youth of Britain with a complete travesty of Graeco-Roman mythology, confusing names and attributes in the worst sort of mash up.

One suspects here that, across a wider front, a bunch of middle grade minds have just accessed the power to promote their academically-derived ideology (are they people who have come out of the cultural and creative studies departments of the New Labour era and now are in a position to undertake the commissioning of our lighter popular culture?). On the one hand, they want to 'message' us. On the other they want to be 'post-modern' and treat all the artefacts of culture as simply memes to be shuffled in a tombola. They seem intent on posturing their rectitude and their wide but shallow reading to each other and over us like children in a sweet shop with no supervision and far too much pocket money.

The rest of the population have long since already 'got it' certainly in relatively civilised and rather lazy Britain (the genders are equal, society is complex and should be tolerant and minorities are part of our national family). As the voting figures for the National Front have shown, Britons are genuinely far too easy-going and lazy to be seduced by continental fascisms. They are looking for nothing more than a bit of entertainment or some reliable information and not underhand cultural manipulation from third rate Gramscians who are creating a Ministry of Information out of thin air.

The real skill for modern creatives is to create a viable 'universe', one that is clearly fictional but can be endlessly reinvented and expanded (as Marvel has done repeatedly right up to Jennifer Jones and DC have done with the excellent Gotham) that still remains coherent and relates to some solid framework. The BBC has a problem with this. Even Dr Who is beginning to drift again (although the last series developed its intellectual cohesion for those who were patient with it).  The debate about having a black or a woman or black woman Dr. Who is part of the rot. Yes, 'he' could shift gender or skin colour (and why not? though he seems to be quite keen on being Scottish) but this should be because it works naturally and not because it is buggin's turn for another identity group. And better would be a strong female fantasy figure with their own franchise from the beginning instead of being given a hand-me-down to please those who get excited about having women on bank notes.

So long as the actual writing and performing is still good, these ideologues will get away with it but I suspect 2016 may be the year when the massive wave of 'creative' genre TV (much of it surging eastwards from the US) may finally crash into the shore as the right-on repetition of themes ebbs into public irritation. Since people just want to be entertained, many are just going to be switching off if the preaching becomes as unsubtle as New Year's Day's little performance ... worse, it actually fuels the populist revolt and there are signs of this in the US already.

With nowhere else to go, the irritated will be happy to have people like Trump offer a counter-ideology that is closer to their actual experience of life. I am a Leftie but my teeth start to grit now when I hear one of the left-wing wits on Radio 4 ceasing to be witty and just offering me a 'right on' and unfunny lecture from the circuit. Once again, an own goal results from metropolitan liberals being not quite so bright as they think they are and not seeing that the 'great unwashed' will only take so much cultural manipulation before they start getting angry. They do not need the Daily Mail to point it out to them. People generally hate to be lied to, patronised, preached at or treated like idiots - and the 'creatives' who dominate popular culture are getting close to being far too obvious about doing all of these.

The BBC is becoming a joke in this respect with intense messaging directed at the population from Radio 4 onwards. Woman's Hour seems particularly stuck in the past but BBC radio drama is becoming tiresome with its endless earnest problem plays and the Right does have a point with the leeway given to those 'comedians' (see above) who have moved from satire and humour to intense rants about the world. It is becoming a spoken version of the Guardian which is as bad as if our national broadcaster had become the spoken version of the Daily Mail or the Times.

The scripting of BBC television drama often falls into the same category. Much of this drama is superb. Stellan Skarsgard's visit to London for River was a message drama about tolerance for people who 'hear voices' set in a classic police procedural but the scripting, direction and acting (notably by Adeel Akhtar but by the whole crew) made it work. It was 'subtle'. Channel 4 seems to do things even better nowadays - Humans was full of ideas introducing the impact of AI and robotics to the general population. It did what good drama should do - raise questions and make people think for themselves rather than confirm prejudices and provide propaganda fuel.

The BBC loses credibility as soon as the messaging shifts beyond the decent business of giving strong roles to women and to non-white Britons (many of whom are superb actors worthy of playing more than Jane Austen heroines and Othello) and ceases to be subtle. Worse, it is insulting to those actors and actresses where it confuses their colour-blind talent in well crafted drama with the need to make points heavily and repeatedly about (say) global warming (yawn!) or equality (snore!) that are unsubtle. Remember Bob Peck in Edge of Darkness? Now that was well drawn messaging about an environmental issue that made you think because it was carefully contextualised in the politics of the day.

With American drama, we play a domestic game where we class a film or a series as a 'Democrat' or 'Republican' drama. We have rather enjoyed the arrival of entertaining patriotic democratic shows like Sleepy Hollow and Falling Skies despite the positioning of we Brits as exemplars of the enemy, a positioning which we do not take too seriously. But both are inferior to the more subtle and ideology-free but thought-provoking Fringe. This holiday the mash-up and creative Jekyll & Hyde from ITV was the high point simply because it played the interwar period dead straight with due homage to the pulp literature of the period and still gave strong and plausible roles to women.

Gender politics should be worn lightly, ethnic actors should not be patronised, messaging should be indirect and subtle and the historical context respected without being slavishly followed. We expect the BBC to respect us intellectually and culturally because we pay for it and not have it foist on us the plot nonsense of New Year's Day under cover of a fantasy that was out of character for Sherlock Holmes but in character for the cultural studies academics of the last thirty years. Enough already!

On 'Original Sin'

There are four 'scientific' claims that original sin exists and they are worth noting [1]:-

* The Selfish Gene hypothesis states that "a predominant quality" in a successful surviving gene is "ruthless selfishness." ... "this gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior."

* Psychologists who find a "selfish" trait in children from birth, a trait that expresses itself in actions that are "blatantly selfish." [Horreur!]

* Sociologists who claim that "fraud, corruption, ignorance, selfishness, and all the other vices of human nature." One such, Sumner, enumerates "the vices and passions of human nature" as "cupidity, lust, vindictiveness, ambition, and vanity." He finds such human nature to be universal: in all people, in all places and in all stations in society.

* Then there is the psychiatrist Thomas Anthony Harris who observes that "sin, or badness, or evil, or 'human nature', whatever we call the flaw in our species, is apparent in every person." Harris calls this condition "intrinsic badness" or "original sin."

Well, think about the assumption at the root of this. It is that 'being selfish' is a bad thing and 'being self-sacrificing to the community' is a good thing but this does not stand up once you abstract yourself from the pre-set valuations of the Judaeo-Christian West.

On the contrary, a righteous self-centredness is the basis not of 'sin' but of 'virtue' (an older pagan idea). An intelligent self-centredness, however, understands that the self is served better by a well ordered society and by co-operation than it is either by solipsism (which simply results in isolation) or by submitting to the power relations of other selfish individuals who just happen to have seized the commanding heights of culture and society.

The Christian obsession with sin simply cuts the ground from under those who would challenge the order of things by asserting their own rights and being against the claims of those who are in control of the definitions of good and evil. Let us look at the absurd language of these scientists, psychologists, sociologists and psychiatrists - all representatives of the commanding order.

Is not gene 'selfishness' the evolutionary order of things that scientifically cannot be valued as good or bad in itself but simply as a fact on the ground. Evolution has contructed a being that can undertake compassionate and altruistic acts, define itself and do 'good' things because it chooses to do 'good things'. In other words, far from being 'original sin', the 'selfish gene' is the basis for all that is termed 'good' in the world as well as 'bad'. Its existence requires no attempt to derive the good from outside materiality and the evolutionary process.

And that children are 'blatantly selfish'?! Excellent! So they should be. They have to struggle for their existence as the future. They cannot rely on the competence or concentration of 'nice' parents or other kids. They learn by doing and usually learn co-operation and 'goodness' in doing so. We should worry if they were not starting out as selfish little beasts. An unselfish small child is an evolutionary dead-end.

As for our sociologist, he speaks only of the variation in our evolutionary state that includes examples of all these things that are apparently 'bad' but also examples of everything that is apparently 'good'. There is no flaw in our species that is not a flaw in materiality itself. That materiality is flawed is the most absurd of essentialist propositions once you have eliminated the magical thinking of absolute idealism. The whole language of flaws is sloppy thinking, an external imaginative imposition on the complexity of material reality.

What we see is not original sin against which we must struggle to create some idealistic perfection but a complex and fluid evolutionary reality with maximum variation in which we all have to struggle and live. It contains neither good nor evil in itself or better, given our human perspective, contains all forms of good and evil now and in the future.

This is not 'sin' unless all reality is 'sin. While it is perfectly permissible to take that Gnostic line, any analysis that sees reality and materiality as merely 'sin-based' and our magical thinking as somehow redemption from 'sin' is sending us way up the garden path of anxiety-driven and cowardly evasion.

We are not intrinsically bad or intrinsically good. The desperation in certain personality types to define our species in these terms speaks more to personal neuroses and fears than it does to our reality. The point is that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people not because of original sin but because we are disordered and have not ordered ourselves internally and externally.We have not progressed rather than that we have 'fallen'.

Instead of understanding our nature and creating systems of order that are based on diminishing harms from a close observation of 'what works' (a technology of living in the world), we think that the exhortations of the propertied and powerful on the frightened will somehow change reality itself into something better. When it does not do this, we whine and moan that it is all 'not fair' instead of doing something about it or recognising an occasional truth - that we cannot do anything about it. It is not good or evil but just life. We alone are responsible for our own failures in managing the technology of power to protect ourselves and those we care about. And protecting ourselves and those we love is not 'original sin' but who and what we are.

So, away with this talk of 'original sin' and the attempt to find 'scientific proofs' for our intrinsic 'badness' or 'goodness'. We are neither. We are what we are. In general, it is best for us to do what we will as a balanced self-centredness and harm no one because we have no need to do so. The bulk of us can then organise ourselves to deal with those whose nature is to do harm and perhaps, equally usefully, restrain those who are under the illusion that it is their task, because of their nature, to go around doing unwanted 'good'. 

[1] The original citations for these views are at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature