Blog - Notes from a cliff-edge

are millennials left-wing?

1/15/2023

1523 words: 8-minute read

It´s a well-known maxim that people grow more right-wing as they get older and there´s plenty of evidence for this. In a recent article, though, Guardian journalist Owen Jones claimed that millennials are bucking the trend: ´No other generation in recorded political history has retained such an entrenched rejection of rightwing politics as they’ve grown older´, he writes.

The unspoken assumption here is that millennials are left-wing and of course there´s a case to be made that they are; Jones refers to millennial commitments to anti-racism and LGBTQ+ rights for example. Most of us would agree that these are indeed progressive commitments and that they have their origins to the left of the political spectrum.

But what is striking about anti-racism and LGBTQ+ rights is how relatively readily they can be taken up by the right. Thinking only of the UK for now, David Cameron´s Conservative Party had little difficulty in adopting these causes, discursively at least, and much has been made of current Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak´s Afro-Indian descent and Hindu religion. This suggests that the progressive values and causes that Owen Jones deploys as evidence for his claim that millennials are hanging onto their left-wing identity are not so exclusively left-wing after all.

Of course there are elements of the right that continue to fight these practices tooth-and-nail (Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary is an example) but this doesn´t detract from the fact that mainstream right-wing parties have had relatively little trouble adopting what Jones implies are left-wing values and practices. So we must conclude either that mainstream right-wing parties are more left-wing that we thought they were, or that Jones´s criterion for ´left-wing-ism´ is less helpful than it might be. Let´s assume that today´s right-wing parties are indeed right-wing, and explore, instead, the thought that we need a better determinant of what it is to be left-wing than being anti-racist or pro-LGBTQ+.

Another possible litmus test would be to check the extent to which millennials cleave to a another left-wing value and objective: collective universalism. Ever since Enlightenment thinking tore into the apparently unassailable legitimacy of hereditary particularism - that there is a class ´born to rule´ - the left in all its guises has maintained a commitment to collective solutions rooted in universal values.

So how are millennials doing on the left-right spectrum if the touchstone is less a commitment to anti-racism, LGBTQ+ rights etc, and more to collective universalism? Millennials’ politics is driven by the idea of identity, which, however it is understood in any particular case, is inescapably a subset of the universal. It is true that identity-based demands are often expressed in terms of universal human rights, but there is an inevitable tension between the universalism of human rights and the particularism of identity-based claims.

At root this is because such claims are prone to what philosophers would call ‘epistemological solipsism’. This is the idea that knowledge of what it is like inhabit a given identity, a gay woman for example, is only available to possessors of that identity. As identities multiply and become more refined and fractured, knowledges of subjection and oppression follow suit and the possibility of expressing that knowledge in universal terms becomes more and more remote.

Identity-based politics has always been suspicious of universalism, and with good reason. This mistrust is rooted in the observation that universalism often masks a particularism, usually one that benefits those with economic, political and cultural power. A quotidian and telling example of this is the use of the word ‘man’ to denote ‘humanity’. This apparently innocuous linguistic turn can have profound real-world consequences, as Caroline Criado-Pérez documents in her book Invisible Women where she shows how using men as the stand-in for humanity, and therefore for women too, has had a pervasive - and sometimes disastrous - effect on women’s wellbeing.

Does this mean that millennials are right to double down on political particularism? One detrimental effect of doing so is that their campaigns can only ever be driven by particular interests, thereby missing the point that the injustices suffered by one identity might well be shared with others (men and women’s carceration is a good example). Particularism creates blind spots: as the trees come sharply into focus the wood goes missing.

Collective solutions - another hallmark of left-wing thinking and action - are hard to articulate under conditions of estrangement and separation. In addition, these very conditions militate against developing an over-arching programme that might bring fissiparous identities together in a common programme. I have written elsewhere about how ‘identity-based politics needs criteria drawn from outside any already-existing identity if the aspiration to ¨be human¨ is to be fulfilled’.

But where are these universal criteria to come from? Can we avoid falling into the universals-are-really-particulars trap described by identitarians and discussed above? Well yes, actually, and pretty easily too - in principle at least.

Try a thought experiment. Imagine you’re designing criteria for a society you want to live in. Imagine, further, that you’re thinking about these criteria without knowing who or what you are going to be in that society. You don’t know your gender, race, your social status, intelligence, wealth, religion, sexuality, or physical strength. There is a possibility, therefore, that you could end up as one the poorest, most discriminated -against members of society. So the rational thing for you to do is to design criteria that cater for that eventuality.

What you definitely won’t do is draw up criteria that systematically favour wealthy, white, middle-aged men. In other words we have avoided the universals-are-really-particulars trap.

Of course this is none other than American philosopher John Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’, a way of taking out all the contingent factors that could bias us when we think about the principles for a just and fair society. Over the past 50 years his ideas have come in for criticism from across the political spectrum, often with good reason. But the idea of a ‘veil of ignorance’ in an ‘original position’ when devising principles for the just society remains a powerfully suggestive way of avoiding the universals-are-really-particulars trap. And note: we arrive at universal principles by avoiding all knowledge of exactly the thing that animates much millennial politics: our particular identity.

Given that the veil of ignorance produces the kind of non-discriminatory outcomes that millennial politics supports, is there anything to stop millennials supporting the more economic egalitarian principles that can be derived from behind the veil? After all, if it’s possible that you’d end up at or near the bottom of the socio-economic pile you’d surely want, as a minimum, welfare measures to ensure the greatest possible security for yourself. You might even want principles that would establish a formal economic equality in society through, say, 20-to-1 pay ratios.

The key point is that Conservative or Christian Democrat parties would find these principles much harder to adopt than the identitarian ones that drive Owen Jones’s argument. Such a move would change these parties so radically that they’d no longer be the same right-wing parties.

There is indeed nothing to stop millennials endorsing socio-economic principles like this and no doubt many of them do. But, crucially, there is no necessary link between identitarian politics and economic egalitarianism. Indeed, data shows that while there has been a general improvement in LGBTI acceptance in 38 OECD countries over the past 40 years, the GINI coefficient in those same countries has gone up in a majority of them, indicating an increase in economic inequality*.

Without much more sophisticated work it is impossible to know if there is a causal link between the increase in equality for discriminated groups in OECD countries and a general decrease in economic equality in the same countries, but what is clear is the contrasting direction of these two trends. Anecdotal evidence is just that - anecdotal - but it is perhaps significant in this context to note two icons of gay rights, Martina Navratilova (tennis) and Megan Rapinoe (soccer), arguing forcefully - and successfully - for equal pay for men and women in their sports, without questioning whether the large sums men are earning (and with which women want parity) are themselves justifiable. It is hard to imagine Navratilova and Rapinoe behind the veil of ignorance arguing for special treatment for tennis and soccer players. After all, they might have ended up as ball girls or boot cleaners.

The upshot is that diversity is not the same thing as equality. As American academic Walter Benn Michaels has observed, 'a diversified elite is not made any less elite by its diversity'. For example, the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed the most ethnically diverse Cabinet ever in 2019, with Sajid Javid as Chancellor of the Exchequer; Priti Patel as Home Secretary, Alok Sharma as International Development Secretary, Rishi Sunak as Chief Secretary to Treasury, James Cleverley as Party chairman and Kwasi Kwarteng as Minister for business, energy and industrial strategy. Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Ministers represented 18% of that cabinet - more than the 14% of the population in England and Wales that came from ethnic minority backgrounds according to the 2011 census.

We'd be hard-pressed, though, to describe these cabinet appointments as a clarion call for greater equality. One of its members, Rishi Sunak, is now Prime Minister. He is the richest man in the House of Commons, owner of 4 houses worth £15m, and whose net worth is around £730m. His new swimming pool is said to cost £13,000 a year to heat while the local municipal pool in his constituency of Richmond is threatened with closure over soaring energy bills. This is the kind of cabinet whose members who can 'carelessly' forget to pay a £5m tax bill.

So is Owen Jones right to say that millennials are bucking the generational trend and sticking to left-wing politics rather than heading rightwards? If we’re happy to say that anti-racism and LGBTQ+ rights (for example) are exclusively left-wing then the answer may be yes. But I’ve argued that right-wing political formations find it relatively easy to to adopt these policies, discursively at least. A stiffer and more unequivocal test would be to ask for commitment to a collective universalism giving rise to a more equal distribution of income and wealth in society. Until and unless that happens, only two left-wing cheers for Owen Jones’s millennials.
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* GINI data is taken from either from Our World in Data (changes in income distribution 1990-2015) or Index Mundi (1986-2019), and LGBTI data from the Global Acceptance Index (GAI) for LGBTI people 1981-2020. GAI improved in 30 countries, stayed the same in 7, and got worse in one (Turkey). GINI showed increased economic inequality in 24 countries, increased equality in 11, and the same level of inequality in 3.

Space Snooker

11/14/2022

309 words: 3-minute read

Can I be the only one who wishes that our exercise in ‘space snooker’ had been a little less successful? The thought there is now a ten-thousand-kilometre-long dust cloud trailing behind asteroid Dimorphos where there wasn’t one before will delight some for the influence it shows we can have on the universe - and dismay others for the same reason.

Over thirty years ago Bill McKibben alerted us to the ‘end of nature’ in his eponymous book, arguing that global environmental change meant that ‘every inch and hour’ of the globe had the mark of the human on it. From now on, he wrote, a child born today will never know summer - only ‘summer’. With DART we’ve now proved ourselves capable of changing the dynamics of the universe itself, and I couldn’t help thinking as I looked up at the stars the other night that I was observing the ‘universe’, not the universe.

Call me over-sensitive, but we might have learned by now that overindulging the Promethean instinct can lead to less-than-ideal outcomes: climate change, biodiversity loss, the Covid pandemic. DART was an exercise in prophylactic Prometheanism, the side effect of which is to undergird the belief that we can protect ourselves from any eventuality rather than try to avoid it in the first place.

Here on Earth, prophylactic Prometheanism in the face of Covid led to untold numbers of collateral victims, a virtual absence of attention to its causes, and a handing over of emergency powers to the UK government which have - surprise, surprise - found their way into the draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and the Public Order Bill.

So yes, I rather wish our DART had missed, then Icarus could have a conversation with Prometheus and here on Earth we’d be talking more about prevention and less about cure.

where does gold come from?

7/6/2022

514 words: 4-minute read

I’m sitting here holding my mother’s wedding ring wondering where the gold came from. I don’t mean which country it came from. I mean where did it come from?

Turns out that I’m holding the remnants of a star. A star that was born and died possibly billions of years ago, perhaps billions of light years away.

In fact it turns out that that’s where I come from too - the calcium in my teeth, the iron in my blood and the sodium in the potato I ate for lunch were all formed in dying stars.

It’s astonishing how recently some of the most mind-bending yet taken-for-granted discoveries were made. For example, around 100 years ago we thought there was only one galaxy - the one we inhabit, which we call the Milky Way. Sure, there were smudges in the sky that were called nebulae, but we thought they were all patches of dust or gas in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

Then in the 1920s, using a technique developed by Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble worked out that a star he was studying was so far away that it had to be outside our galaxy. In fact it was in what we now know as the Andromeda Galaxy. Anyone in the northern hemisphere with good eyesight can see Andromeda (better with binoculars or a small telescope) - and it’s quite something to think that the photons striking your eye set out on their journey two million years ago.

Suddenly the universe was way bigger than we ever thought it was. Now we know that there are between 100 and 200 billion galaxies in the universe - not just the one we thought until about 100 years ago.

And it wasn’t until even more recently - 1946 - when Fred Hoyle published ‘The Synthesis of the Elements from Hydrogen’ in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, that we learned how the heavier elements were made.

Here is part of the article’s abstract:

‘Stars that have exhausted their supply of hydrogen in regions where thermonuclear reactions are important enter a collapsing phase. If the mass of the star exceeds Chandrasekhar's limit [i.e. greater than 1.44 times the mass of our sun] collapse will continue until rotational instability occurs. Rotational instability enables the star to throw material off to infinity … The process of rotational instability enables the heavy elements built up in collapsing stars to be distributed in interstellar space’ (emphasis added).

Almost all the elements in the periodic table were created in dying stars. When a star begins to run out of hydrogen towards the end of its life, it expands into a Red Giant (when our sun does this it will swallow up Mercury and Venus). At this point the element carbon is formed. In more massive stars, even heavier elements such as oxygen and iron are created.

The most massive stars end their lives as supernovae, and this is where elements heavier than iron, such as uranium and gold, are formed.

And every atom of gold in the ring I’m holding. Which is billions of years old. In fact I may be holding most of the history of the universe in my hand.

Ukraine - reprised

7/2/2022

476 words; 4-minute read

The UK foreign secretary Liz Truss says that a peace deal with Russia is contingent on Vladimir Putin’s troops being pushed out of Ukraine and being held accountable for alleged war crimes. However we define ‘Ukraine’ (does it include only Donbas or Crimea too?) everyone knows this is a recipe for a war lasting years. Meanwhile UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson claims that if Putin were a woman he wouldn’t have started the war in the first place. He’s evidently not looked down the Cabinet table recently.

Johnson and Truss made these remarks at the recently completed NATO summit in Madrid, described by the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner as a summit ‘for hawks’. It’s true that the industrial war machine could hardly have wished for a better outcome: a billion-pound package of UK military aid, two squadrons of US F35 stealth bombers, two naval destroyers to Spain and thousands of troops to Romania, and two new countries in the NATO fold - Finland and Sweden.

It’s hard to imagine an event more designed to push the end of the war far into the distant future than this NATO summit.

Meanwhile, more and more people in the poorest countries go hungry because Ukrainian grain and Russian fertiliser can’t be exported, inflation rates in Europe are higher than they have been for 40 years, and if nothing changes in the next few months European countries are likely to be subject to energy rationing in the autumn.

Daily, about 60-100 Ukrainian soldiers are dying and 500 wounded, the UK government estimates about 15,000 Russian dead, while the UN reckons that at least 4,700 Ukrainian civilians have died since the start of the war. Put crudely, every day the war goes on another two or three hundred people die, several hundred are wounded and an uncounted number are displaced or exiled.

This is the reality that Truss, Johnson and the 30 NATO heads of government who have just wined, dined and back-slapped in Madrid have signed up to. Until Russia has been ‘pushed out of Ukraine’.

There is only one humane way out of this situation: an early ceasefire involving some ceding of territory by Ukraine and whatever guarantees and reparations can be wrung out of Putin’s reprehensible regime. The foundations for such an agreement could be laid right now, but the triumphalist NATO summit has made that impossible. Much more likely is an accommodation sometime in the autumn or winter when soaring prices and energy rationing make a ceasefire more attractive to domestic audiences than constant sabre-rattling.

By then, thousands of soldiers and civilians who are alive today will be dead. This is certain. But these numbers played no part in the decision-making in Madrid. The only ones that seem to matter are those relating to the military machine’s bottom line.

Amber heard vs johnny depp

6/11/2022

483 words: 4-minute read

Earlier this month a jury in a Virginia court found in favour of Johnny Depp in his defamation suit against his ex-wife and fellow actor Amber Heard. This was Part Two of their battle over defamation and libel - in Part One Depp lost his November 2020 libel case against the Sun newspaper in the UK.

Reaction to the Virginia verdict has mostly focused on two issues: first, the potential disaster it represents for women who want to call out domestic violence in the public arena, particularly the courts, and second, the effect that televising the trial might have had on its outcome. Sometimes the two are elided as in Moira Donegan’s pointing out that screenshots of Heard’s weeping face were turned into a meme, her crying became a TikTok trend, and lip-sync re-enactments of her testimony went viral.

There is no doubt that misogyny and TV voyeurism are a toxic combination and it’s clear that, in any process involving these two features, women will do badly. In this sense the Virginia trial ran absolutely true to form.

But in focusing on misogyny and the televising of trials there’s a deeper problem that goes missing. Here’s a counterfactual question. Imagine a world in which there is no misogyny and no televising of trials: would we be guaranteed fairer outcomes in the judicial process?

The answer? Probably not. The most profound systemic issue here is neither misogyny nor television, it’s the adversarial judicial system that invites and even encourages the poisonous anatagonism that was the hallmark of the Heard-Depp trial. The mistake is to think that hostility is specific to this trial and is largely absent in all the others. Less obviously, but equally detrimentally, it is present in every single one of them.

This is because an adversarial system invites strategising and deceit, poor listening, and a lack of respect and concern - all of which were fully on display in Heard-Depp, and magnified by misogyny. What’s needed is a deliberative system in which participants:

treat each other with mutual respect and equal concern
listen to one another
speak truthfully, and in which,
there is no use of force, strategising or deceit, and no sign of partisanship, self-interest or ideology

Pipe dream? Perhaps, but no more than a world rid of misogyny. The difference is that, in a deliberative judicial system, misogyny would have a vanishingly small influence on proceedings, while in a world rid of misogyny but in other respects left the same, the judicial system will continue to turn out strategised, deceitful, disrespectful - and therefore fundamentally unfair - outcomes, for both women and men.

Tarana Burke, founder of #MeToo, gets it right: “The ‘me too’ movement isn’t dead, this system is dead. This is the same legal system that y’all have been relying on for justice and accountability for decades to no avail. When you get the verdict you want, ‘the movement works’ – when you don’t, it’s dead”.

Ukraine - land for peace?

5/24/2022

538 words: 4-minute read

The war in Ukraine has been going on for just over three months and there’s no end in sight. Frustrated by Ukrainian resistance, Russia is focusing its efforts on the east and south of the country and it seems to be employing tactics used in Syria, laying waste to whatever gets in the way. The enormous civilian suffering is plain to see, and the collateral damage is spreading further and wider in the form of hikes in energy prices and world food shortages (especially for the poor). Somalia and Benin source 100% of imported wheat from Russia and Ukraine, Egypt 82%, Sudan and Lebanon 75%, and Libya 50%. As Tom Stevenson writes in the London Review of Books, 'The longer the war continues, the greater the certainty of hunger'.

In addition the geopolitical stakes have risen enormously with Sweden and Finland applying to join NATO after decades of neutrality. So the downsides of the conflict are obvious: clear and increasing local, regional and global instability. You’d have thought that everyone would be trying their hardest to end the war.

Against this backdrop the decision by western countries to supply Ukraine with ever-increasing amounts of weaponry at ever-increasing levels of sophistication is hard to understand, because this does nothing but prolong the war and the suffering and instability that goes with it. The defence is that Ukraine is a sovereign nation, and nations should be free to determine their own fate rather than have it determined by force of arms. Of course, but with sovereignty comes responsibility, and we should be asking what the responsible course of action is at this juncture. How should sovereign Ukraine act, now?

The answer is: land for peace. Long touted as a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the principle needs to be dusted off and applied to the Ukraine war. It is absolutely clear that the war will not end by one or the other of the combatants achieving total victory, so compromise is in any case inevitable. Far more will be lost than gained by putting off what is going to happen anyway - more dead and wounded, more senseless destruction, more starvation, more energy poverty. All of this could be avoided by a responsible exercise of Ukraine’s sovereignty.

I hold not the smallest candle for Vladimir Putin, but well before the Ukraine conflict the West really should have paid closer attention to Russia’s concerns regarding its southern flank. It should have been made quite clear that the exercise of Ukrainian sovereignty did not include it joining NATO. Had it done so, the conflict would likely have been avoided. However, we are where we are: Putin’s plan has blown up in his face, thousands on both sides have been killed and wounded and we are all experiencing the collateral damage caused by the conflict - the poor and vulnerable, as ever, more than anyone. And the west must take its fair share of the blame - especially leftwing cosmopolitans who have somehow misplaced their objections to overweaning conceptions of national sovereignty, and are backing to the hilt Ukraine’s conception of what it means.

So let’s focus on stopping the war rather than punishing Russia - down to the last Ukrainian. Every extra weapon given to Ukraine delays the peace talks that will inevitably take place. Every day of delay is a day of more suffering and destruction. And the only people truly rubbing their hands with glee are Western arms manufacturers.

Que vaut la vie sans libertÉ?

2/14/2022

‘Que vaut la vie sans liberté?’ reads the placard. It wouldn’t be out of place in the hands of a revolutionary leftist in 1968 Paris, but it’s Nice 2022, and it’s the right not the left that’s flying the freedom banner.

During the pandemic the left has made the huge mistake of ceding the language of freedom to the right. Rather than offer aternatives to policies that systematically favoured the stay-at-home middle class, granted powers to the police that would have been the envy of the dictatorships the left used to oppose, and prevented us from accompanying family members as they drew their last breath, the left went along with it all.

As a result the word ‘libertarian’ has been completely appropriated by small-state liberals. At one time the left would have fought to recover the word for its own emancipatory project, the bedrock principle of which is that freedom is impossible without the security that can only be provided by the community acting in other-regarding concert. Nothing could be further from the fantasies of the libertarian right, which make a bonfire of the ties that bind people together in mutual aid.

What’s life without liberty? is a question the left has forgotten to ask. It needs to do so, quick, before the freedom train runs away for good.

What is to be done?

2/4/2022

935 words - 5 minute read

Politically, economically, socially and ecologically, the status quo is a disaster.

In times gone by the left would be demanding radical change and the overthrow of a corrupt and moribund system that thrives on inequality, doubles down on surveillance and corrals and infantalises entire populations in the name of a spurious ‘security’ that kills us in our tens of thousands and calls it a success.

But the left - the experimental, bold, emancipatory left - is hardly to be seen.

Unaccountably and indefensibly, it’s the right that flies the banner of rebellion. Of course their rebellion is disorganised, reactionary, short-sighted, founded on rumour or worse, and ends up strengthening the very forces it claims to oppose. But the lesson the left could draw is that they’re confrontational, disruptive, and visibly angry.

When the left does get onto the streets - Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, the Sarah Everard vigil - it brings down the predictable wrath of the repressive state apparatus but fails to draw the appropriate conclusion: that progress through passive resistance is, right now, an illusion. As someone said recently, it’s all blah blah blah.

So the left has made the huge mistake of ceding the practice of revolt to the right. Stunned by the advances of the right in the culture wars, and allowing it complete control of the language that used to drive emancipatory politics - the language of freedom - the left’s feeble response has been to defend the status quo for all its worth.

In this sense the pandemic has been a disaster for the emancipatory left. Rather than oppose policies that systematically favoured the stay-at-home middle class, granted powers to the police that would have been the envy of the dictatorships the left used to oppose, and prevented us from accompanying family members as they drew their last breath, the left went along with it all. Sometimes, indeed, it asked for more of all these things.

This vacated a huge tract of political territory called ‘freedom’, and the right marched in. So it’s the right that’s in the streets, the right that attracts disadvantaged and disillusioned young people desperate for change, the right that is scandalous, subversive and countercultural.

Tragically, the word ‘libertarian’ has now been completely appropriated by small-state liberals, and even leftist commentators automatically elide libertarianism with right-wing politics. At one time the left would have fought tooth-and-nail to recover the word for its own emancipatory project, the bedrock principle of which is that freedom is impossible without the security that can only be provided by the community acting in other-regarding concert. Nothing could be further from the fantasies of the libertarian right, which make a bonfire of the ties that bind people together in mutual aid.

Maybe the left has given ground on freedom so it can double down it on its own unique calling card: equality? But no. Once again the pandemic has caught the left with its pants down. In the past two years the ten richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes while 160 million extra people have been plunged into poverty - defined as living on less the $5.5 a day. The left’s reaction? To flood change.org and 38degrees with toothless demands while, in a two-fingered simulacrum, the 100 richest people in the world ask to pay more taxes.

The right is everywhere the left should be. But instead of fighting for these spaces and recapturing the language of disruption and rebellion for itself, the left is static, sclerotic, like rabbits in the headlights of an onrushing car, frozen into immobility by its incapacity to think creatively about either the present or the future. Antonio Gramsci distinguished between a war of manoeuvre (physically overwhelming the state’s coercive apparatus) and a war of position (fighting it on the terrain of culture). Give the overwhelming physical power of the state he recommended a war of position. The left has taken him at his word and the result has been downward spiral of navel-gazing while the capitalist state leads us towards a disaster of species-destroying proportions.

If the emancipatory left stood for anything it was for universal liberation. But in its determination to champion special interests the left has completely lost sight of the universalist demands against which to hold the status quo to account. An example: better treatment for women in prison? Of course! But a univeralising emancipatory left would have one question and one recommendation.

The question: what does ‘better’ mean? It can't be ‘treat them like male prisoners’ because conditions in UK prisons are appalling. If it’s ‘treat them differently because they are women’ this is also music to the ears of defenders of the status quo, because it leaves 95% (the percentage occupied by men) of what is quaintly and absurdly called the prison ‘estate’ completely intact. Some universal standard for 'better' is needed, and it can't be deduced from the condition or experience of any one group, collective or protected category.

The left-libertarian recommendation: reduce the prison population by at least half (prison numbers in England and Wales have increased by 84% since 1990, from 44,975 to just under 83,000). And then turn the rest into schools (50% of the prison population is functionally illiterate).

Tactically inept and strategically naive, that’s where the left is right now, with every single move captured, appropriated and defanged by the very forces it’s trying to oppose.

So where now?

Maybe here.

And here.

political cross-dressing

9/21/2021

530 words: 4-minute read

Leftist progressive environmentalist George Monbiot is shocked that there are antivaxxers among his acquaintances. Something ‘weird’ is going on, he says, whereby the curiosity, scepticism and suspicion typical of people on the left has driven those selfsame people to adopt rightwing versions of this language, so much so that ‘some have succumbed to a far-right conspiracy ideation, up to and including Q-anon’.

He’s right, that’s weird.

He goes on, ‘The far-right seized and repurposed the language of leftwing revolt: rebel against the elite, take back control etc … Some people on the left, hearing stuff that sounded familiar, seem to have fallen for it’.

Right again.

There’s more: ‘The necessary and justifiable revolt against corporate and oligarchic power has morphed in some cases into an extreme individualism’.

Monbiot is right about that too.

‘It doesn't help that we've suffered decades of betrayal by formerly left-ish political parties, that fell into line with neoliberal capitalism’, he writes, ‘This left many people both profoundly confused and susceptible to the liberationist claims of the far right’.

Absolutely.

He concludes: ‘Left and right political parties have swapped their language. Now the right talks about liberation and revolt. And the left talks about security and stability’.

Acute. Brilliant. A perfect summary of the confused and confusing state of ideological play in liberal-capitalist countries like the UK today.

What’s missing, though, is the recognition that the left has contributed to this state of affairs by allowing the right to arrogate to itself the language of freedom and liberation in the two key events of the past few years: Brexit and Covid.

By the time Covid turned up the Brexit battle was over, but the left hadn’t learned its lesson. Instead of debating, designing and exemplifying a left-libertarian approach to Covid it went full throttle for an ironclad lockdown, leaving the door marked ‘freedom and liberation’ wide open for the swivel-eyed right of assorted denialists and anti-vaxxers to walk right through.

And some on the left, as Monbiot recognises and bemoans, have followed them.

But the answer is not to accuse these leftists of ‘falling for’ false idols, of ‘succumbing’ to conspiracy, or of some fatal ‘confusion’ that can only be put right by attending to the high priests of correct leftist thinking.

The answer is to focus unerringly on that sweet spot where freedom AND security are located.

In the Covid case, this would have been to point out that a properly funded NHS and social care system, staffed by properly rewarded professionals (all this representing SECURITY), would have allowed family members to be present as their relatives passed away instead of dying lonely and isolated (representing FREEDOM). The left were all too ready to allow elderly people in care homes to be kept in segregated solitude for months on end - ‘collateral damage’ to be stoically accepted for the sake of an unwavering commitment to an uncompromising lockdown.

So yes, it’s weird that some of George Monbiot’s freedom-loving acquaintances have turned to the right. But this was never going to help.

memory and justice

9/20/2021

257 words: 2-minute read

In a recent interview in El País Semanal, Trinity College Dublin professor and psychiatrist Veronica O’Keane claimed that ‘to some extent all our memories are false’. This is quite a declaration - but one which in the day-to-day most of us recognise to contain a grain of truth. We remember things wrongly and sometimes we don’t remember them at all. At the very least, our memories are selective and subjective and this is enough to sow seeds of doubt when it comes to remembering the past.

Most of the time this doesn’t matter too much since in the normal run of things nothing much hangs on whether we’ve remembered events correctly or not. It’s mostly a matter of minor disputes and inconveniences.

But sometimes it matters a lot, such as in court cases, where the life chances of accusers and defendants can turn on whether events are remembered correctly or not. At this point O’Keane’s claim that ‘to some extent all our memories are false’ becomes severely problematic. She’s not saying that some of our memories are false some of the time but that they are all false all of the time, to some extent.

To some extent? To what extent, exactly? How are we supposed to calibrate her claim in the context of criminal justice where memory plays such a crucial role? Here is another recent article, in which Bob Dylan is accused of sexually abusing a 12-year-old in 1965. What would Professor O’Keane say if she was called to the witness stand by the defence?

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Notes from a cliff-edge