• Home
  • Blog - Notes from a cliff-edge
  • Essays and Articles
  • Monographs
  • Edited books
  • Letters to the Editor
  • Eco-Apocalypse Novels
  • openDemocracy
  • Social Media, Politics, Democracy
  • Managing Covid: a View from Political Ecology
  • Taking ‘Cli-Fi’ Seriously: comparing 'Flight Behaviour' and 'Solar'

Notes from a cliff-edge

whose identity?

6/24/2020

 
(717 words - 6 minute read)

In a recent article in the London Review of Books surveying feminist manifestos, Joanna Biggs says that it’s always been clear what women want: ‘girls just wanna be human, not other’.
 
Indeed, but what does being human mean?
 
It’s been pointed out ad nauseam that ‘human’ all too often means ‘man’, so the question ‘what do women want’ is frequently answered with, ‘what men have.’ This is a bad answer. It’s bad not only because it’s wrong to define a generic term (human) in terms of a particular (man), but also because a) ‘man’ is itself a generic term, and b) what men have isn’t always good anyway.
 
The same might be said of the movement against racism. What do BAME people want? It’s surely not enough to answer, ‘what non-BAME people already have’. Again ‘non-BAME’ covers a multitude of different conditions, and even if we could identify some representative non-BAME person, who’s to say that that person’s life is the model on which to base BAME demands? 
 
Let’s take a specific example of what happens if we model identity-based demands on the experiences of the dominant identity.
 
In a review of the BAME experience of the criminal justice system Labour MP David Lammy found that ‘between 2006 and 2014, 41% of black defendants pleaded not guilty in crown courts compared with 31% of white defendants. Consequently, black defendants lose the opportunity of reduced sentences through early guilty pleas and distrust in the system is reinforced.’
 
This looks unfair. It looks as though equity demands that the same proportion of blacks as whites should be able to plead guilty so as to get a reduced sentence.
 
But what Lammy doesn’t point out is that solicitors will often advise defendants to plead guilty to crimes with which they’ve been charged but haven’t committed, so as to be sure of a reduced tariff.

In what sense, exactly, would giving more black defendants a longer sentence than they deserve be an improvement? But that’s where Lammy’s version of fairness takes us in the absence of non-identity based criteria for fairness.
 
It looks as though identity-based politics needs criteria drawn from outside any already-existing identity if the aspiration to ‘be human’ is to be fulfilled.  
 
Where is this ‘outside? One possibility is that one identity can speak for all the others. If the most downtrodden identity can be emancipated won’t that entail the emancipation of everyone?
 
I’m not sure any identity can claim special privileges in this regard. Marx thought that the proletariat was the universal class, so once it was freed everyone would be freed. Maybe, but might not proletarian freedom always be proletarian freedom?
 
The black feminists of the 1974 Combahee River Collective similarly argued that black women are the carriers of a universalist freedom on the grounds that ‘If black women were free it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression’.
 
Perhaps. But first, there will always be someone lower down the pecking order who will argue that their particular form of oppression has been left out. Second, and linked, because as long as our understanding of freedom is tied to any identity’s interests it can’t and won’t be universal.
 
So if the ‘outside’, the universal, can’t be the property of any particular identity, where is it? Currently the best bet is ‘intersectionality’ where it’s recognised that different forms of oppression - race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, gender - intersect and overlap. But intersectionality has yet to show that a movement that multiplies difference can point us towards the universal.
​
And that is surely what we need, because the choice is clear: ‘Feminism can ask for the things men have,’ writes Biggs, ‘or it can ask for the world to be organised differently’.

a downing street press conference

6/15/2020

 
Picture
(335 words - 2 minute read)

​Welcome to the daily Downing Street Covid-19 press conference. I’ll be brief.
 
It’s time to level with the British people. We’ve shown you graphs. We’ve bombarded you with statistics. We’ve advised you to wash your hands. We’ve told you to stay away from each other.
 
And OK, we’ve overpromised and underperformed. Let’s be clear about that.
 
But today is going to be different. No graphs. No statistics. No illness prevention advice. No more promises. I’ve not even come to apologise for all the mistakes we’ve made over the past four months.  There’ll be a time for that later.
 
Today I just want to show you a photograph. This photograph. Slide please.







​
 




​This is Mount Everest in May 2019. It’s remarkable, I think you’ll agree. A human traffic jam in one of the most inaccessible places on earth.
 
It’s a picture of human ingenuity. Of the human spirit. Of the power of money.
 
It’s also a picture of death. People in that queue died as they waited hours for their turn to reach the summit. They died because they'd overreached themselves.
 
In sum, friends, it’s a picture of the Anthropocene, the epoch in which the drive to conquer what we used to call Nature has backfired on us. In this epoch disasters are made by humans. Disasters like climate change. Like species extinction.
 
Like Covid-19.
 
We’re all on the ridge waiting to summit. We’re getting weaker, the air is thin, the cold is intense and the technology that got us here is beginning to fail.
 
We could carry on climbing - but look how narrow the ridge is, how precipitous the fall on either side.
 
Better, we think, to turn round and begin the descent to where there’s air to breathe.
 
Thank you very much. Now I’ll take some questions.

To statue or not to statue?

6/10/2020

 
(311 words - 2 minute read; spoiler alert)

I’ve just finished reading The Memory Police, a novel by Yoko Ogawa.
 
It’s about an island where things disappear, and once they disappear their meaning is lost. When it is decided that an object and its meaning must be forgotten, it is disposed of or handed in to the Memory Police whose job it is to enforce disappearances. Memories are attached to things, and when the things go, so do the memories. Some things are burnt, others are thrown into the river.
 
Most people forget the objects and their meaning but some don’t, so they are made to disappear too.
 
A young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police. He is one of those who can’t forget and it’s getting harder for him to conceal his memories. She finds a place for him to hide and he goes into lockdown.
 
Around them more and more things are disappeared and more and more memories are lost. As they have no memory of the things that have gone, people quickly get used to their absence.
 
Only the editor, locked away in hiding, wonders what the world outside must be like, shorn of both objects and memories.
 
One day the young novelist wakes up to find that her left leg has disappeared. She hobbles out and finds that her neighbours’ left legs have gone too. ‘I guess I’m actually lucky,’ says one elderly neighbour, ‘half the arthritis in my knees is gone’.
 
Then right hands go, and one by one people’s body parts disappear until only voices are left. The Memory Police’s work is done because there’s no point hunting down people who are only voices.
 
Then the voices go too. 

Windrush - 'sitting in limbo'

6/9/2020

 
(378 words - 3 minute read)​

​Last night the BBC showed the drama documentary, Sitting in Limbo, about the injustice and humiliation heaped on Anthony Bryan as a result of the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policy towards immigrants.

 
Bryan was just one of at least 160 people (government figures) wrongfully detained or deported, and over 1000 claims for compensation have been lodged. As at 6th February only 3% of claims had been settled, which puts the hand-wringing of the current Home Office Minister, Priti Patel, into perspective.
 
Who was responsible for the hostile environment policy?
 
It’s easy to go after the Labour immigration minister who first invented the term, Liam Bryne, and it’s even easier to go after Theresa May who oversaw the deployment of ‘Go Home or Face Arrest’ vans.
 
But what Sitting in Limbo illustrated was the utter banality of evil. Without the collaboration of dozens of minor functionaries the policy would have fallen apart.
 
Bryan’s life was systematically dismantled by the immigration officers who arrested him (twice), the officials who booked him in to detention centres, the apparatchiks who demanded documentation from him that he’d already supplied, the jack-in-office who referred to his ‘alleged’ children’, and the driver of the van that took him 166 miles from London to the Verne detention centre on Portland, Dorset - among many, many others.
 
Any one of these people could have disrupted the hostile environment assembly line of shame and indignity by saying no, but none of them did. ‘I’m just doing my job’, said one officer asking Bryan for yet more proof of the 50 years he’d spent in the UK. ‘Yes,’ said Bryan, ‘a job that ruins people’s lives’.
 
Hannah Arendt coined the term ‘banality of evil’ after watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Some of the people who contributed to Nazi atrocities were evil, she said, but many weren’t. They were just humdrum cogs in a machine, 'following orders' - a defence against culpability rejected at the 1945-6 Nuremberg trials.
 
'A deportation order has been issued against you,' says one official as Bryan sits before him after months - years - battling to prove his right to remain. 'On your arrival in Jamaica you will receive the sum of £1000 to help you resettle'. 

Was that official watching Sitting in Limbo last night? What was he thinking?

But ...

6/1/2020

 
(376 words - 3 minute read)

'But' is a short word that is sometimes asked to do an awful lot of work.


In Saturday's Guardian Review supplement (30th May), Dr Rachel Clarke tells of her time as a Covid-19 doctor. 'Behind the statistics the pandemic unfolds one human being at a time', she writes.  Hers is the story of one such person, an old man dying in a Covid-19 ward, and of his sons, dazed and confused, witnessing the last hours of their father's life.

'You could argue', she says, 'that there was little point to a man like Winston' - he was old, unproductive, and probably near the end of his life anyway.  Others should take precedence, the argument might continue, the young, the productive, those with more life to live than Winston.

'But,' she continues, 'to those of us close up to this dreadful disease - who see, as we do, the way it suffocates the life from you - such judgments are grotesque'.  It is easy to see why she thinks this, and Clarke's account of the bewilderment of Winston's sons as they see their father's life slipping away, and their determination that he not become just another statistic in Number 10's 5 p.m. press conference, is heartrendingly powerful.

'The moment we rank life according to who most "deserves" it,' writes Dr Clarke, 'we have crossed into a realm I don't want to be a part of'.

​But this is a realm none of us can escape from, not even Dr Clarke. 

The lockdown Clarke thinks should continue for fear of a second Coronavirus wave has caused its own casualties. The 1.5 million Britons who haven't eaten for a whole day during lockdown, those unable to work from home, those whose operations have been cancelled or postponed, the women and young people who will do worst out of lockdown, the victims of a spike in domestic abuse, and the sufferers of extreme social isolation - all these are victims of Covid-19 too.

Are the lives of these people less deserving than Winston's? I honestly don't know, but in writing so powerfully in favour of Winston and those like him, Dr Clarke is surely in the business of 'ranking life' - as are we all, like it or not.








    Andrew Dobson

    Archives

    September 2023
    January 2023
    November 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    February 2022
    September 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020

    Categories

    All
    Anthropocene
    Censorship
    Covid 19
    Identity Politics
    Justice
    Politics
    The Cosmos
    Ukraine

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly