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Donald Trump and political nostalgia

11/9/2024

1235 words - 8 minute read

So Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States of America. In 2016 when he became the 45th President I think few of us believed he’d become the 47th. But he has - and with a bigger majority than first time round.

How? Why?

For those on the left it’s tempting to reach for the ‘they just don’t get it’ card, referring to the undereducated rednecks who, with just a little bit more instruction (from us) would see the light and vote properly next time. It’s been a while since I went down that route myself, believing instead that the votes for Trump (or Orbán or whoever) signify something more and other than simple stupidity.

So the title of Rafael Behr’s article in the Guardian’s 6th November issue caught my attention: ‘Left, right, Harris, Trump: all prisoners of political nostalgia in an era few understand’. The title suggests that it’s not only the right that’s got it all wrong, but the left too. Promising. So what is it that we’ve got wrong?

The usual answer is that we don’t take Trump voters seriously enough, but Behr is on a different tack. He argues that the problem is nostalgia - nostalgia for an analogue age when politics was about ‘real-life interactions, deliberations, clunky old institutions, meandering conversations, small talk … the stuff of people mingling in assemblies and town halls, breaking bread together.’

That’s all gone he says, and we must get used to a world in which ‘politics [is] played in digital mode’. And that means getting used to the ramifications of digital politics: where there is more polarisation and where ‘differences of opinion are accelerated into irreconcilable enmities.’

Behr is of course aware that correlation doesn’t mean causation, and that profound disagreement existed well before social media came on the scene. But it’s also plausible to say that ‘a very online culture, marked by short attention spans, narcissism and impatient consumer appetites, has a more natural affinity with shallow demagoguery than with representative democracy.’

Behr claims that his article ‘isn’t an elegy for some pre-internet golden age of enlightened public discourse’, but it’s hard to read it as anything other than that. And why not? Where’s the shame in yearning for enlightened public discourse in place of ‘elections as a cry of rage or exultant self-actualisation’?

But is this possible in an age of digital politics, an era in which deliberation seems to have given way to demagoguery?

Well a couple of days ago Stan Collymore, ex-footballer, ran an experiment in this vein. On his X account he posted his political principles as a ‘traditional Labour voter’ and then invited those who disagree with him to explain why. His tone of voice is itself unusual - and welcome:

‘in the spirit of amistad rather than name calling (we've all done it, politics is important and tribal after all), why do you vote Republican or MAGA, Reform or Conservative and what am I fundamentally missing in my world view that (certainly in the case of right of centre parties globally on the rise) I should consider?’

Collymore’s analogue-style invitation was well received: ‘The sort of post we need to see more of, Stan’, ‘Stan, this is a very reasonable post and request’, ‘Smart of you to look outside your knowledge base’, ‘I’m glad to see you take the approach of listening’, ‘Lovely post’, ‘Brilliant question. And well put’. And so on and so on. This is anecdotal evidence for a wish to debate and deliberate, of course, but evidence nonetheless.

One response in particular, from ‘Cromwell’s Ghost’, got me thinking about how far this analogue invitation might fare in a digital environment. It’s a lengthy and thoughtful response which amounts to a punchy endorsement of a broadly Reform programme. Part of the reply reads as follows:

‘We don’t give a damn about net zero and climate change. The climate has been changing since before the dinosaurs to cause the ice age and changing since then to melt it and reheat the planet. Only megalomaniacs think we should be trying to control temperature.

We don’t care about carbon emissions. CO2 is essential for plant life and an essential building block for things like coral. The more the merrier.’

One bit of this response is demonstrably false. CO2 is not a building block for coral. It’s true that the oceans absorb CO2 but that only makes them more acidic. As a result less calcification occurs which, according to the US National Science Foundation, makes it harder for skeletons - and therefore coral - to grow. In other words the exact opposite of what Cromwell’s Ghost says.

I used teach a theory of democracy called ‘deliberative democracy’, the nub of which is that decisions are made according to the ‘force of the better argument’. For it to work people need to be prepared to cede the point if they’ve been shown to be wrong. In matters of value this is obviously difficult to work through because there are often no standards by which to judge right and wrong.

In matters of fact, though, things should be easier. And a case in point is the mistake made by Cromwell’s Ghost regarding CO2 and coral. Would he be prepared to accept the correction? Would he be any less prepared to accept it in the digital world than in the analogue world? If he accepted it might it shift his attitude to climate change? Or has the idea of ‘alternative facts’ so taken root that what the US National Science Foundation says about CO2 and coral has as much weight as Net Zero Watch (the rebranded Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s best-known climate change denying agency)?

(I’ve written to Cromwell’s Ghost to ask if he’s prepared to accept the coral correction. If I hear from him I’ll report back. Update on 25 November 2024: two weeks later and I've not heard a word).

Why is this important, on the threshold of another four years of Donald Trump? Because - yes - I’m nostalgic. Nostalgic for a time when truth and falsity mattered, when disagreement invited dialogue rather than demagoguery.

So rather than avoid nostalgia we should embrace it, recognising the value of what we are nostalgic for - the regulative ideal of a ‘pre-internet golden age of enlightened public discourse’ - while acknowledging how incredibly difficult it will be to recover that ideal in a world where the old-fashioned idea of rival interpretations subject to debate has given way to tub-thumping cris de coeur that brook no argument. (I've discussed elsewhere the need for, and challenges associated with, putting social media at the service of a dialogic politics of listening rather than sucking the lifeblood from it).

It’s hard not to agree with this paean to the capacity to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence:

‘One of the most important skills I see in successful (and good) people is to constantly reevaluate assumptions. They make predictions based on various inputs, some of them unknown, and reevaluate based on what they got right and wrong. They trust people not because they're always right - no one is - but because if you're constantly seeking the truth it's easy to identify those who are doing the same.’

So who is this enlightened soul? Immanuel Kant? No, it’s JD Vance, the next vice-president of the United States, explaining how he decided that Donald Trump is not ‘cultural heroin’ after all, but the man best qualified to further the interests of the American people.

Deliberation doesn’t mean you always get what you want. And that’s actually part of the point.

Carceral tit-for-tat

8/23/2024

1356 words: 8-minute read

Prisons are in the news.

More precisely prison sentences are in the news, owing to a perceived disparity between the sentences given to environmental protestors of various stripes and those handed down to participants in the recent race riots across the UK, sparked by the fatal stabbing of three young girls at a dance class in Southport UK on 29th July.

As for the environmental activists, in October 2022 two Stop Oil activists shut down the QE2 Bridge by occupying it, suspended in hammocks. They were sentenced to three years and two years seven months in prison respectively - shocking enough at the time. Then earlier in July this year five Stop Oil protestors were given sentences of four and five years for co-ordinating direct action on the M25, the ring-road that orbits London. These were by some distance the longest sentences handed down for non-violent protest in recent times. More and more activists are awaiting sentencing and there is every likelihood that these long - and unusual - sentences will be repeated in the weeks and months to come.

The race riots began on 30th July in Southport and spread to various towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland. By the 9th August around 600 people had been arrested, with more than 446 charged by 20th August. All this in a context in which the prison estate (as it is quaintly called) is bursting at the seams, where suicides and cases of extreme violence rose by 25% in the year 2022-23 and self-harm in women’s prisons is at an all-time high.

The recently elected Labour government said that 500 extra prison places would be made available to cope with the anticipated influx of rioters found guilty of a range of offences.

As of the 20th August over 150 rioters have been sentenced, with most of them going to jail. The average sentence is two years - roughly half as long as those meted out to Stop Oil and other climate change protestors.

This disparity between the jail time given to environmental protestors and to rioters has led to irate charges of double standards from those supporting the protestors. ‘When civil disobedience is punished more severely than racist rioting, something has gone badly wrong’, wrote George Monbiot. ‘Spot on’, said Caroline Lucas. Peter Tatchell tweeted, ‘Violent racist rioters who tried to burn refugees alive get shorter jail sentences (2-3 years) than peaceful @JustStop_Oil protesters (4-5 years). That’s the real 'two-tier injustice' in UK today. SHAME!’ Private Eye and Rory Stewart weighed in in the same vein.

Sometimes supporters of the climate change protestors refer to specific sentences and argue that they are ‘disproportionate, unjust and a waste of resources’, as recently-elected Green MP Carla Denyer has done in the case of her constituent Gaie Delap, a 77-year-old woman sentenced to 20 months in jail for a Stop Oil action.

What's missing in this carceral tit-for-tat is any discussion as to how long the jail terms should be for either group, and absolutely nothing about whether they are appropriate at all. It’s not clear what the left wants: the same high tariffs for the rioters as for the environmental protestors, or a reduction for the latter so as to bring them in line with the former? In the absence of clarification the overwhelming impression is that they’d like to see the rioters receiving the same 4-5 year sentences as the climate change protestors.

And they are increasingly getting their wish: David Wilkinson, John Honey and Stephen Love were jailed for six years, four years and 40 months respectively for their part in the riots in Hull.

(To be fair there is the odd isolated voice on the left singing a different tune: ‘Gonna be that guy because no one else on the left will do it: We SHOULDN'T be jailing nasty racist far right morons for shitty Tweets, even serious incitement. We SHOULD be prosecuting them, fining them, giving them big community sentences, but prison is fucking madness’).

‘The justice system claims to be blind’, writes Monbiot, but there’s a case to be made that in its call for penitentiary revenge it’s the left that’s blind to the deficiencies - not to say depravities - of the prison system to which it wants to commit rioters.

Leaving aside the question of intent - there is evidence that some people just got ‘caught up’ in the riots - organisations such as the Howard League have been saying for years that ‘Prison won’t work unless we, as a society, are prepared to have a serious conversation about punishment and what it is meant to achieve’. There’s no sign of this conversation from either the right or the left in the current race-to-the-bottom for jail time equivalence.

Here are some facts, all drawn from the Prison Reform Trust’s latest (February 2024) report:

England/Wales and Scotland have the highest imprisonment rates in Western Europe
The prison population has risen by 93% in the last 30 years—it is predicted to rise by around 17,000 people by 2026
Almost all offences now receive a much longer custodial sentence than they used to
Self-inflicted deaths are nearly four times more likely in men in prison than men in the general population
Self-harm by women in prison hit a record high of 20,248 incidents last year
The prison system as a whole has been overcrowded in every year since 1994
In 2022–23, basic screening suggested that nearly a third of arriving prisoners (31%) had a neurodivergent need
Prison is rarely a necessary, appropriate or proportionate response to women who offend … [but] … on 30 September 2023 there were 3,570 women in prison in England and Wales — a 12% increase on last year
More than 17,500 children were estimated to be separated from their mother by imprisonment in 2020
An estimated 320,000 children had a parent in prison in 2020
More than a third of women (36%) and two in five (42%) men reported being in their cell for more than 22 hours a day during the week

This is the system into which Judge Hehir has cast Just Stop Oil protestors - and into which supporters of the Just Stop Oil protestors would like to send participants in the recent riots.

To what end? If the aim is to reduce reoffending, forget prison. As the Prison Reform Trust says, ‘current evidence does not suggest that increasing the length of immediate prison sentences is an effective way to reduce reoffending’. After a prison sentence (even a suspended one) insurance, credit, a job and - most importantly - housing are very hard to get and sometimes refused outright. Ex-prisoners are condemned to a life defined by obstacles and by stigma - pretty much inescapably so in the internet-connected global village we inhabit. The stocks are always out on Google's global village green.

The consequences of a prison sentence lead to marginalisation: precisely the condition likely to drive the rioters into the arms of the very political forces the left (including environmental protestors and their supporters) oppose.

The question as to which side is the victim of ‘two-tier policing’ has dominated debate. More vital still to those of us on the left, but definitely much less recognised, is our two-tier response to these events. At the same time as Carla Denyer rightly condemned the sentence handed down to 77-year-old Gaie Delap for her Stop Oil action, she could have censured the conviction of the 13-year-old girl (awaiting sentence in September) for violent disorder following unrest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers during the riots. That girl’s life chances have been irrevocably damaged by her conviction - just like those of the young Stop Oil activists so absurdly incarcerated or on remand waiting to be sentenced.

Let’s leave the last word to someone who know what she’s talking about, sociologist Jenny Thatcher, raised in poverty and who spent her childhood visiting her father in Pentonville prison: ‘I don’t think making “an example” out of children by sending them to prison for stealing a Greggs sausage roll will do anything to tackle racism & division in British society’.

Amen to that.

Naomi klein's doppelganger

4/4/2024

928 words - 5 minute read

Naomi Klein has the knack of distilling big themes in striking book titles - No Logo, The Shock Doctrine - and for me at least every new Klein book is an 'event'. Her most recent one, Doppelganger, more than lives up to expectations, dealing as it does with the enormous topic of how the themes of left-wing progressive politics have been taken up so successfully by the populist right (at least that's my reading of the book's principal theme). The whole book is prompted by Klein's experience of an increasing confusion between her and what she calls 'Other Naomi', Naomi Wolf, probably best known for her 'Beauty Myth' book.

There was a time when the confusion might have been just a mild irritation, and politically unimportant in that in her Beauty Myth phase Naomi Wolf was widely regarded (rightly or wrongly) as a progressive feminist - like Naomi Klein. But the alarm bells began to ring when, as Klein puts it, 'Covid changed everything'. (And it did, in ways which the left has largely failed to come to terms with). Wolf began to be associated with COVID denialism, and the anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination movements - the last of which she linked (along with plenty of others) with conspiracy theories around elite control of the global population. At this point the two Naomis confusion became very troubling for Klein as people began to wonder what on earth had happened to her.

The question is: what had happened to Naomi Wolf? Her search for an answer led Klein down the rabbit hole in which the internet attention economy was working at full throttle - to Wolf's benefit. And the wilder the conspiracy theory the greater the attention. Thankfully, though, Klein doesn't put all this down to some personality problem in Wolf, or to her putative desire to maximise the monetisation of attention. She - rightly I think - signals the failure of the left to deal with the issues that preoccupy so many today, and that have been picked up by the right in its own grotesque fashion. These are: overweening state power (especially in the guise of surveillance), individual freedom, and security.

As Klein puts it: 'Issues we had once championed had gone dormant in a great many spaces'. She commends Wolf's sense of strategy and writes, 'it's highly strategic to pick up the resonant issues that your opponents have left carelessly unattended'. Had we been 'too timid and obedient during the COVID era?' she asks, too ready to accept 'pandemic measures that offloaded so much onto individuals'.

Klein sketches the alternative road, conspicuously not followed by the left as it wholeheartedly went along with the measures mandated by governments' emergency measures around the world. What happened to the 'bigger-ticket investments in strengthening public schools, hospitals and transit systems' she asks? Of course these measures couldn't have been put in place overnight, which is why we must lay the blame for the current success of right-wing populism at the feet of the left which has so failed - over the last two decades at least - to put in the place the measures that would have undergirded a less prophylactic approach to the COVID pandemic.
(It's tempting to wonder how different things would have been, in the UK at least, had Brexit not got in the way of Jeremy Corbyn winning the 2019 election).

So, having articulated a response that focuses upstream on structure deficits rather than downstream on individual 'responsibility', it's disappointing to see Klein resort to a resetting of individual psychology as the solution to all this. In this vein she appeals to 'unselfing' as the route to a better, kinder world, in which we aim not to 'maximise the advantage in our lives ... but to maximise all of life'.

The positive aspect of this, for me at least, is the appeal to a universalist vocabulary that the left has largely abandoned in favour of a fissiparous identity politics that favours solipsism over solidarity, leading, as Klein puts it, to a 'splintering into smaller and smaller groups'. 'Splintering', she rightly says, 'is tantamount to surrender'. She acknowledges that, 'race, gender, sexual orientation, class and nationality shape our distinct needs, experiences, and historical debts', but avers that we must 'build on a *shared* interest in challenging concentrated power and wealth' (my emphasis). Amen to that, but I'm not sure that 'unselfing' has sufficient heft to unravel the oligarchic powers with which we're confronted.

In this sense, Doppelganger ends not with a bang but a whimper - a sign, perhaps of the magnitude of the task confronting those on the left seeking to stem the right-wing populist tide. We won't manage this by name-calling, by being patronising, or by underestimating the concerns that propel this tide.

Because governments are indeed increasing surveillance, elites have indeed made obscene amounts of money out of masks and vaccinations, and people really do feel increasingly insecure as the welfare state is hollowed out by swivel-eyed small-state libertarians. Back in the day people would have turned to the left for solutions to these problems, but in the mirror world described by Klein it's those very same small-state libertarians who claim to hold the key to salvation. And people - too many people - believe them.

These are very real concerns and the left's failure to address them has left the field wide open to the right that presents itself as anti-system. Only in the Doppelganger world described by Klein can elites intent on securing the system and extending its influence present themselves as tearing it down, in favour - they say - of the class with precisely the most to lose from 'Making America (or Argentina, or Hungary, or the UK, or Spain or ...) Great Again'.

Crushing dissent

3/3/2024

Jonathon Porritt, UK sustainability campaigner and a key figure in the country’s environmental movement for decades, has written a powerful blog decrying the crushing of environmental dissent in recent months.

‘First they came for Just Stop Oil’, he writes, ‘then they came for radical environmentalists; then they came for members of the National Trust, the RSPB, and WWF. But there was no one left to speak for them’. This is a conscious echo of Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s 1946 confessional ‘First they came for the communists …’ warning against the dangers of a creeping authoritarianism of which we only become aware once it’s too late to do anything about it.

Porritt continues: ‘I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m astonished at the lack of concern/interest on the part of “mainstream environmentalists” as we slide inexorably into a police state. The right to peaceful protest is still a basic human right. But you sure as hell wouldn’t know that here in the UK.’

He’s right of course, and I would only argue/add that environmentalists have been asleep at the wheel for rather longer than he says.

First off, and most proximately, the seeds of the legislation for crushing dissent were sown during the pandemic and we went along all too readily with the extreme measures taken then. Of course they were justified by the fact that it was an emergency and the occasional 'beyond the pale' action by the police was excused by the fact that the legislation was new, complex, and sometimes difficult to interpret. The key element here, though, is the word 'emergency' and its use in justifying extreme measures. Carl Schmitt famously wrote that 'sovereign is he who decides on the exception'. The exception in 2020 was Coronavirus, and the exception now is JustStopOil, republicans, or anyone with a bicycle lock. One way of looking at this is that in 2020 the government tested our resolve to resist overweaning power and found us wanting.

We are reaping now the whirlwind we sowed then.

This is a difficult argument to make because the only people resisting these measures at the time were swivel-eyed right-wing libertarians. Somehow, the right have managed to arrogate to themselves the word 'libertarian' as if it belongs wholly and completely to them. There is of course a noble left-wing libertarian tradition which we've allowed to wither to the point where the right fly the flag of freedom and liberty (the irony!!) while any progressive measure carries with it a health warning regarding cancellation, censoriousness and prohibition. I read the following exchange in a recent interview Naomi Klein, and I have some sympathy for what she says:

Q. It seems that some young people sees the extreme right as exciting, while the left is boring and prudish. Like someone who enjoys a cutting Ricky Gervais routine more than politically correct jokes.

A. It is true, and it is dangerous. It has to do with the censorious passion of the left, its policing of speech and the casual cruelty it displays when someone steps out of line. We could talk about cancel culture, if it weren’t such a loaded concept. To me, there’s no doubt that there is bullying, which tends to push anyone who steps out of line. I’m not the only person on the left who is concerned about this. These young people may find the left stifling, a place where a mistake can make your friends turn against you, and they may believe that on the right, it’s possible to disagree, even if that’s not true. There is policing on both sides of the mirror, but I think the right takes better advantage of that strategy to rally people to its cause. I wish the left thought more about how to increase our ranks instead of how to purge them.

So: we’ve forgotten how to be libertarians. One nail in the coffin of left-wing libertarianism was our rather supine reaction to the Government arrogating enormous punitive powers to itself during the pandemic, and this hampers our position regarding the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and its spin-offs. The Act is justified by the government by saying that we (environmentalists) are the new ‘emergency’.

Bonkers of course, but effective.

The second point is that the UK has long been a ‘police state’ (Porritt’s completely correct term) but environmentalists have only just noticed it because they’ve only recently been systematically subject to its effects. (I say ‘systematically’ because they’ve often been on the receiving end in relatively isolated cases - witness the 1985 ‘Battle of the Beanfield’).

There are presently around 87,000 people in prison in the UK, and it has long held the dubious record of the highest rate of incarceration in Western Europe. The poor, the non-white, the drug-dependent and the functionally illiterate are massively over-represented in the prison population. This most likely explains mainstream environmentalists’ ‘lack of concern/interest’ - as Porritt so rightly puts it - about policing and its consequences, given that few environmentalists fall into any of these categories. The excessive punishments recently meted out to environmentalists, and which have brought the criminal justice system to environmentalists’ attention, have been part and parcel of the system since forever.

The Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences (thank you David Blunkett) and Joint Enterprise Laws are just two egregious examples of the injustices and massive sentences systematically meted out to offenders, and which typically disproportionately affect non-white and poor populations. Martin Tawton’s ten years in prison for stealing a mobile phone is just one of many IPP sentences to set alongside enviromentalists Marcus Decker and Morgan Trowland’s absurdly long prison sentences. These sentences are on a continuum and should be criticised together rather than separately. (While we’re on it, Trowland’s comments that ‘It was quite easy to be happy in prison … I don’t think it’s very scary’ - were unbelievably tone deaf and guaranteed to widen the gap between environmentalists and people like Tawton).

In sum, criticism of the laws and policing of environmental dissent must be accompanied by critique of the criminal justice system per se.

So Jonathon Porritt’s blog might have begun with: ‘First they came for the poor, the drug-dependent, the illiterate and the non-white, then they came for Just Stop Oil …. etc’. We don’t want to be seen as ‘special pleading’ for put-upon environmentalists; our quite proper anger at the sentences handed down to or contemplated for activists must be accompanied by solidarity with all the other hitherto hidden, silent and silenced victims of the criminal justice system.

Collective solipsism

1/10/2024

558 words - 5 minute read

‘Collective solipsism’.

I hadn’t heard the term before and maybe it’s not a ‘thing’, but it brought me up short when I came across it in a recent issue of the London Review of Books (Vol 45 No 24, 14th December 2023). It’s a striking term and I think it’s useful for analysing a problematic aspect of contemporary progressive politics. The article in which it appears is a review of two books about post-war Germany, and the reviewer (Neal Acherson) deploys it in the context of the dawning realisation of the scale of the horror perpetrated by the Nazis during the war.

He’s reviewing Frank Trentmann’s Out of the Darkness: the Germans 1942-2022, and at one point Trentmann says, ‘Learning once more to see with the eye of compassion, after the Nazi years, was an enormous challenge’. This gives rise to the idea of ‘collective solipsism’, or the ‘collective inability to recognise the experience of others'. I’d argue that this is a concept that describes, disturbingly accurately, one of our key contemporary political disorders.

We usually think of the recognition of the experience of others as something we grant to those others. In other words recognition is experienced passively by those on its receiving end. However at some point in the not-too-distant political past this recognition of the experience of others came to be a positive demand by previously unrecognised and excluded others. As a challenge to the solipsism of the wealthy and the privileged this seemed (and seems) a wholly positive move: after all it brought the experience of women, subaltern colonial and ex-colonial populations, and the LGBTQIA+ community (for example) into the political mainstream.

What could possibly go wrong?

What went wrong was the multiplication of lived experiences and the consequent entrenchment of solipsism rather than its overcoming. This works as follows. Each of the categories above - women, subaltern colonial and ex-colonial populations, and the LGBTQIA+ community - has its own lived experience, the recognition of which requires an effort to overcome solipsism by everyone else.

More problematic still, the categories overlap, proliferating lived experiences and increasing the likelihood of solipsism. For example, the lived experience of a subaltern gay woman will be very different to that of a gay woman CEO of a FTSE 100-listed company, and both of them will be different to that of an MTF trans teenager.

This leads, in all but name, to collective solipsism, an unintended consequence of the progressive demand for recognition by an ever-increasing number of political and social identities. This is how the fissiparous nature of progressive identity-based politics works against the possibility of a shared experience upon which a politics in common might be built.

(End of June 2024 update. Pride marches have just taken place all round the world - and identities proliferate. In Madrid a new collective appeared, apparently for the first time. Its members define the collective (in Spanish) as 'asexual y/o arromántico (arroasex)' - asexual and a-romantic. The spokesperson for the group said that they were demanding their place in queer collectives, fighting allosexism (hostility towards asexual people), and calling for the state to outlaw conversion therapies for asexuals. A co-demonstrator said the collective needed to be 'recognised as one more identity'. Indeed, but does there come a point at which there are so many identities that 'collectives' [can] no longer exist?)

Is there a way out of this? What are the chances of a shared politics in a world structured by the collective solipsism of both the left and the right? Click here for some answers.

a tale of two posters

9/27/2023

In València’s Ethnographical Museum there’s a temporary exhibition on at the moment called Arqueología de la memoria. Las fosas de Paterna (An Archaeology of Memory: the Graves of Paterna). Paterna is a municipality about 10 kilometres from Valencia and it has the bitter distinction of being the site of the second largest number of Republican prisoner executions during the Franco regime. The executions started just five days after the end of the Spanish Civil War in April 1939 and they continued until 1956.

Officially 2,238 Republican sympathisers were executed, though there are likely to have been more. Across Spain there are at least 2,500 mass graves holding the bodies of about 130,000 victims of the Civil War and Franco’s subsequent dictatorship. There may be twice as many as that, some of which will have been lost forever, razed by the heavy machinery that moved into cemeteries across Spain in 1975 after Franco’s death to destroy the evidence of his brutal repression.

The Paterna cemetery was spared, which is why every Monday forensic archaeologists work on one of the 135 mass graves there, labouring to exhume and identify victims with the ultimate aim of returning them to surviving family members. Incredibly, it wasn’t until 2007 - fully 50 years after the last execution in Paterna - and the socialist government of José Luis Zapatero that the rights of victims and their families were enshrined in the Ley de la Memoria Histórica (Law of Historical Memory), since expanded and extended in the teeth of right-wing opposition by the 2022 Ley de la Memoria Democrática (Law of Democratic Memory).

Work to carry out the exhumations and identifications promised in law has ebbed and flowed over the years, with right-wing governments (both local and national) reluctant to provide the requisite funds. This cavalier treatment of the sensibilities of thousands of families of Civil War victims is of a piece with Partido Popular leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo's description of the Civil War as a 'a grandads' punch-up' (una pelea entre abuelos). All the foot-dragging meant that the first successful exhumation and identification in Paterna was in 2012 when, after a four-year battle, Josefa 'Pepica' Celda was able to recover the remains of her father from mass grave number 126.

I went on a tour of the Ethnographical Museum exhibition last Sunday. Our guide was one of the forensic archaeologists tasked with recovering and identifying the remains in Paterna’s mass graves. She was visibly moved as she described the nature of her work, especially at the moment of confirming to a family member that the bones she’d recovered were indeed those of a father or grandfather - and in rarer cases a mother or grandmother.

The exhibition compares the mass executions carried out during Franco’s dictatorship with others round the world, pointing out how late and patchy the reckoning in Spain has been compared with other cases. There are memorabilia of all sorts on display: postcards sent from prison, women’s brooches, rope used to tie prisoners’ hands, and small glass bottles containing a name that kindly (or bribed) gravediggers left under the necks of victims in the hope of future identification.

In among all these relics and reminders the guide drew our attention to a fascist propaganda poster depicting a nationalist soldier sweeping away bumbling politicians, masons, separatism, Bolshevism, anarchist militants and ‘social injustice’ - in other words the social cleansing of republican undesirables, leaving the way clear for the dictatorship of Franco’s pensamiento único, or ‘monolithic thinking’. (This is the poster at the top of the page if you're reading this on a mobile phone).

The guide asked us if the poster reminded us of anything, and a much more recent image sprang to mind. During the recent Spanish General Election campaign in June/July the extreme right-wing party Vox hung a huge banner in central Madrid employing an identical purifying trope, symbolising, in this case, the purging of what it regards as loathsome elements in contemporary Spain: feminists, ecologists, the LGTBIQ+ community, communists, Catalan separatists, and okupas (squatters).

Vox, the party that would like to rid Spain of progressives just as Franco wanted to purge the country of Republicans, is the third largest political force in the country. It won over 3 million votes in the July 2023 General Election, has 33 seats in the Cortes Generales (House of Commons equivalent), is in coalition with the right-wing Partido Popular in five of Spain’s seventeen Autonomies, and in the May local elections it trebled the number of Vox councillors in villages and towns across the country.

In Paterna there is a track locally known as the camí de la sang, or ‘the path of blood’. The track leads from the wall where enemies of the Franco regime were executed to the mass graves into which they were tossed. In fact there were two paths of blood. The first led through the town to the cemetery, and citizens complained about the crimson trail left by the trucks transporting executed prisoners from the paredón to the cemetery. So the trucks were rerouted so the citizens of Paterna wouldn’t be confronted with the grisly effects of Franco’s social cleansing. Turning a blind eye in Paterna until the killing stopped in 1956 led to institutional forgetting across Spain, but as Yōko Ogawa points out in her novel The Memory Police, 'Memories are a lot tougher than you might think, just like the hearts that hold them'. Josefa 'Pepica' Celda's heart, for example.

Leaving the Arqueología de la memoria exhibition it occurred to me that there is another path, one which takes us directly from Franco’s social cleansing poster to the buttons and brooches, the pins and postcards, the miserable memorabilia of Paterna’s mass graves. We’d do well to listen to the grim historical echo present in Vox’s Madrid banner otherwise history may repeat itself, and not as farce as Karl Marx predicted in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, but as catastrophe.

A Valencia diary

9/14/2023

3406 words: 10-minute read

A few weeks ago I went on a walking tour of València, taking in the landmarks of Joaquín Sorolla’s life in the city. This year is the 100th anniversary of the death of the 'painter of light' so there have been plenty of tours to choose from.  The blurb that accompanied a major exhibition of his work at the National Gallery in London in 2019 made two accurate observations. The first was that ‘Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923) is probably a name few know in the UK’, and the second, ‘in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he was among the most famous of living artists in Europe’. Quite what has happened to turn him from a star in 1909, the date of the last major exhibition devoted to his work, in the Grafton Galleries in London, to an also-ran in the 2020s is hard to say. There is only one Sorolla painting on display in the National Gallery, The Drunkard, acquired as recently as 2020 with a £325,000 legacy left by the architect David Med.

The Guardian’s art critic, Laura Cumming, left the 2019 exhibition with the impression that his work is flashy rather than substantial, though she grudgingly concedes that, ‘It is hardly possible to stand before these enormous canvases, thick with paint, without feeling at least something of their appeal’. There may be some ignorance at work here, for Cumming berates Sorolla for ‘verging on plagiarism’, citing early copies of the work of Velázquez and Goya without knowing, apparently, that these were a condition of the continuation of the prestigious grant that took him to Italy and that Sorolla produced only with the greatest reluctance. Sorolla remains hugely popular in his native Spain and over 160,000 people visited the 2019 exhibition at the National Gallery. Perhaps the thousands of New Yorkers who queued in the snow to see his work in 1909 weren’t so wrong after all. A case of you can’t like what you don’t see?

He is best-known for his luminous depictions of the Cabanyal fisherfolk on València’s Malvarrosa beach at the turn of the 20th century. Just up from the beach where he used to paint they’re restoring the Casa de Bous which housed the animals that dragged the fishing boats out of the water at the end of a day’s faena. Rumour has it that Sorolla used to store his canvasses and paints in the Casa de Bous, or at least in a small studio nearby. Back then the Casa was right on the beach but now it’s about 200 metres away, land that has been reclaimed and is now occupied by sunseekers for whom the beach and sea are a source of entertainment rather than endeavour.

On the walking tour we passed down the Carrer de las Mantas where Sorolla was born, close to the fabric shop his parents ran. Above the door is a plaque commemorating his birth, and the bottom half of the plaque is a version of a recurring image in his paintings: bulls pulling boats out of the sea up the Malvarrosa beach. As we sought shade from the sun pouring into the street the guide showed us the cover a book on her iPad. It was the cover of an old edition of a novel, Flor de Mayo, by one of València´s other favourite sons, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. The cover was itself a version of Sorolla´s bulls on the beach, and given these various coincidences and because I hadn´t read Flor de Mayo, I decided to go and look for a copy.

The tour ended quite near the Mercat Central, a masterpiece of Valencian Art Nouveau and a magnet for the increasing number of tourists to the city, happy to pay inflated prices for the goods on offer - or oblivious to the fact that they’re doing so. The hen parties and stag dos will be unaware that they are within throwing up distance of the spot where Margarida (Miquel) Borràs was executed in 1460 for the crime of dressing as a woman, private parts on display for all to see as s/he swung from the hangman’s noose.

I knew there were a number of second-hand bookshops in the area and I located one on Google Maps, just a couple of hundred metres from where I was standing - Auca Llibres Antics. Even though there was neither air conditioning nor a simple fan in the shop it was still a relief to take refuge from the sun. The shop was filled with that ineffable aroma of old books, the accumulated odour of decades - even centuries - of the attempts by men and women to instruct, cajole, and entertain their readers.

The owner was at the back of the shop and I asked him if he had a copy of Flor de Mayo. He scanned the top shelf of a bookcase full of novels, essays and short stories by Blasco Ibáñez and shook his head. Then he told me to wait, maybe he’d have a copy round the back, he said. I waited a few minutes, taking down a book called Razón mecánica y razón dialéctica by Enrique Tierno Galván, mayor of Madrid from 1979 to 1986, ruminating on the contrast between him and the current president of the Comunidad de Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, best known for claiming that climate change is a communist plot most effectively dealt with by a plant pot on our balconies and that one of the great things about Madrid is that it’s big enough for you not to bump into your ex.

The shop owner returned with a smile on his face - holding a copy of Flor de Mayo. And astonishingly it wasn’t just any old copy but the very edition the tour guide had shown us on her iPad, complete with Sorolla’s arresting depiction of bulls pulling boats out of the sea on to the Malvarrosa beach. Expecting the 100 year-old book to be well outside my price range I tentatively asked the shop owner how much he wanted for it. Five euros he said. I thought I’d misheard so I asked again. Five euros, he repeated. He said the spine was held together by sellotape (it was) so he really couldn’t charge me any more, and besides, he was retiring at the end of the year so he had to either sell or give away all the books in the shop by then. I looked at the magnificent accumulation around me, mentally compiling a list of people I’d tell about the treasure trove I’d just discovered. Didn’t he have anyone lined up to take over the shop, I asked him? No-one, he said. So what was going to happen to it? He shrugged his shoulders and said it would be probably be bought up and ‘repurposed’.

The Flor de Mayo edition I had bought opens with a charming 1925 ‘To the reader’ foreword by Blasco Ibáñez in which he tells us that this is his second novel (1895) after Arroz y Tartana, and that he wrote it in instalments in the republican newspaper El Pueblo which he founded. His third novel, Entre Naranjos, was published in the same way - a triumvirate of books that by turns paint pictures of Valencian life on the sea, in the city and in the countryside every bit as vivid as Sorolla’s canvases. His late 20s, recently married and with a small but growing family to maintain, were years of penury and privation - in colossal contrast to the riches of later life when royalties from novels, film scripts and copyrights poured in.

By the time of his death in 1928 he was world-famous, and Greta Garbo had taken her first starring role in Torrent (1926), based on his Entre Naranjos novel. Like Sorolla, outside of Spain Blasco Ibáñez's star in the English-speaking world has waned spectacularly since then. Again like Sorolla you can’t like what you don’t see. During my time in Spain I’ve been struck by how much more cosmopolitan Spanish reading tastes are compared to the insular British. Virtually every bookshop has a ‘translated from English’ section where both classics and contemporary fiction are readily available. There’s no equivalent in bookshops in the UK. They can read Eliot, Austen and Dickens but we can’t read Pérez Galdos, Pardo Bazán or Blasco Ibañez.

Blasco’s republicanism landed him in jail for several months in 1896 and he never wavered in his support for progressive causes. In the ‘To the reader’ foreword he recalls another Flor de Mayo memory. As it was a tale of the sea he was wont to wander the beach thinking through the plot, and occasionally he would come across a young painter working in the heat of the midday sun, ‘magically reproducing the golden light of the Mediterranean’ on his canvases. ‘We worked together,’ Blasco Ibáñez writes, ‘him on his canvasses and me on my novel. We were as brothers, until death recently pulled us apart. It was Joaquín Sorolla’.

When I first arrived in València the Plaça del Mercat was - as for any other neophyte visitor to the city - an obligatory stopping-off point. There’s not only the Mercat itself but also the 15th century civil Gothic Llotja de la Seda, trading hall and financial centre during Valencia’s medieval golden years, and the 17th century Baroque Church of Santos Juanes, atopped by an eagle-shaped weather vane which, legend has it, poor peasants would make their children look at while they crept away, leaving them to be picked up for domestic labour in bourgeois households. Just across the way from these jewels in Valencia’s medieval crown there is another shop that has been ‘repurposed’ - a chemist’s shop.

I’d first come across the shop, the Farmacia Rubió, tucked away in the Calle San Fernando just off the Plaça del Mercat, when I arrived in València about three years ago. Like many Mediterranean countries Spain boasts a host of glorious farmacias, most of them founded around the the turn of the 20th century, and the Farmacia Rubió was a startling example of the genre. The ceiling of the farmacia, founded in 1921 just as the Mercat Central itself across the Plaça was taking shape, comprised a carved wooden cupola topped off by an angel holding a pharmacopoea (book of directions for the identification of compound medicines), while the shop’s shelves, also exquisitely carved, contained the flasks and bottles that held the medicines once sold across the 100-year-old wooden counter. The floor was Valencian tiling, quite possibly sourced from nearby Manises or Meliana, preserving the ghostly footprints of the thousands of Valencians who had passed through this pharmaceutical-architectural time capsule seeking relief from affliction.

Some months after this discovery, taking a visitor round València, I went looking for the Farmacia Rubió but it had disappeared. Maybe I’d got the address wrong? Old Valencia is rather a maze and I’d got lost more than once before. But no, I was in the Calle San Fernando and the Farmacia Rubió was nowhere to be seen. Then it dawned on me. I was looking exactly where the chemist’s had been, but now it was a bicycle hire shop. The 1920s lettering outside the shop announcing what it had been? Gone. The tiling on the floor? Gone. The wooden shelves, counter and old flasks and bottles? Gone. The cupola-pharmacopoea? Still there, gazing down at the bikes, e-bikes and scooters for rent, starting at 8 euros a day.

València is very flat and it has one the best cycling infrastructures in Spain - third best after Vitoria and Sevilla. I don’t have a car and getting from A to B by bike is a safe, trouble-free and enjoyable experience. (And no, contrary to the 15-minute city conspiracists I don’t need a passport to leave the barrio). València is also experiencing a tourist boom, enjoying (as most people put it) a 9.1% increase this year compared to pre-pandemic 2019. These tourists need bikes to ride up and down the old river Turia, now converted into a 10-kilometre long park, and to get to the beach, which is why the number of bike hire shops in the city centre has exploded in recent years. It’s definitely easier to hire a bike in the middle of València than buy a packet of paracetamol.

Tourism has long been a contributor to Spain’s economy, accounting for about 13% of the country’s pre-Covid GDP. It took a huge hit during the pandemic, but the juggernaut is back up and running and any opportunity there might have been to rebalance the economy has well and truly evaporated. The new normal is very much like the old one. Scarcely believably, Francisco Franco was already testing out tourism’s promise while the Civil War was still raging. The National Spanish State Tourist Board was established in 1938, offering a nine-day tour taking in San Sebastián, Bilbao, Santander, Gijón and Oviedo, costing £8 for three meals a day and accommodation in first-class hotels. As the Fascists occupied more and more territory, routes round Andalucía, Aragón and Madrid were added, and between 1939 and 1945 some 6,000 to 20,000 tourists from Britain, Italy, Portugal, France, Germany and Australia were treated to what were effectively subsidised propaganda exercises.

The ‘touristification’ of the Spanish economy went up a gear in the early 1960s when swarms of Northern Europeans (mostly) contributed to the whitewashing of Franco’s dictatorship by flocking to the beaches of Mediterranean Spain, attracted by the ‘Spain is different’ slogan, and accompanying sun, sea and sangría. For family reasons I had occasion to spend three days at the end of August in one of Spain’s mass tourism hotspots - Benidorm. Aerial photographs of the town from the 1950s show the old town on the promontory, with orange groves sweeping down to a deserted Platja de Llevant. Now, the view from the E7 Autopista de la Mediterrànea looking down on modern Benidorm is spectacular in a different kind of way: the orange trees have gone, replaced by a forest of skyscrapers - a tribute to the architectural and logisitical ingenuity that enables almost 2 million overnight stays each year. That’s about 5,500 years of sunning, swimming, drinking, gambling and whatever else every summer, all in about 10 km² of Mediterranean coastline.

Google maps will tell you that the orange groves are now hotels, bars, restaurants, grill houses, casinos and massage parlours. Together with Trip Advisor they will also help you find somewhere to eat, but as with everything on the web you only get out what’s put in, and there’s no filter for taste. So when Fernando’s tapas bar comes up with 4.5* and you think that´ll probably be OK, be prepared for pizza out of a packet and calamari rings heated up in a microwave. It’s the sort of thing British tourists refer to as ‘cheap and cheerful’, though all it did for me was to confirm my previously uninformed prejudice that if there was a ‘p’ in Benidorm it would stand for punishment rather than pleasure.

Quite how long this tourism model can hold up is anyone’s guess, what with climate change rendering unbearable ever bigger chunks of a 24-hour day. The concept of noches tropicales (‘tropical nights’ when the temperature doesn’t go below 20°C) has been common in Spain for years. In recent years noches tórridas  (25°C) have come into play, and now we’re confronted with noches infernales (‘nights from hell’) when the night time minimum is a stifling 30°C. The number of noches tórridas has doubled since 1980 and by the beginnning of August this year Melilla, Jaén and Almería had all experienced noches infernales. For the moment northern Europeans continue to flock to the Mediterranean while the Spanish are increasingly heading in the other direction, but there may come a time when scrambling for the last sun bed before heading for an overfull and overpriced restaurant staffed by men and women on minimum wages will seem a suboptimal way of spending your two weeks’ holiday a year.

A different kind of tourism, sanguinely described as turismo de calidad (‘quality tourism’), is leaving an irrevocable mark on València and other cities in Spain like it. The old city has been falling apart for decades and there isn’t enough public money to put it back together again. Private investors who have crumbling buildings restored want a return on their money, and the quickest and most assured benefits are not through building affordable housing but by providing tourist apartments. They’re readily identifiable in València’s old city - every tourist apartment balcony has two IKEA chairs and a little table. In some barrios you see nothing else. The result is a hollowed-out city centre, where the shops that used to cater for the people who lived and worked there have been replaced by restaurants, bijou bars, souvenir shops - and bike rentals. Tourists in València don’t need flour or eggs, but they do need a bike.

All this has put the recently-elected right-wing government in València in something of a quandary because cycle lanes play a big part in the culture wars they’ve drummed up in recent months. They’re particularly hated by Vox, the extreme right party with which the Partido Popular entered into coalition in towns, cities and autonomies across Spain after this year’s May local elections. One Vox candidate posed next to a cycle lane in the the town of Elche in the province of Alicante, holding a pneumatic drill. Sure enough, the lane has been removed, ostensibly because parents of a semi-private school in the street couldn’t stop to pick up their children. The measure could turn out to be expensive. In many cases these lanes have been part-funded by the European Union, and the mayor of Logroño is faced with returning 6.5 million euros to the EU if he carries out his election promise of removing the town’s main east-west cycle lane.

In València the right-wing coalition is carrying out a cycle lane survey, with six under threat under the guise of ‘improved safety’. One has already been removed, apparently after citizen representation. One wonders who these citizens are, given that the cycle lane was put in after local citizens demanded it in the last round of participatory budgeting (initiated by the previous left-wing administration). At the same time the coalition has a plan to incentivise tourism, and is committed to abolishing the tourist tax that was due to come into effect in December. Incentivise tourism? Someone needs to show them the Instagram and TikTok accounts of swarms of Northern Europeans on their hire bikes criss-crossing the city in the lanes created by the left-wing government narrowly voted out of power in May.

València will be Europe's Green Capital in 2024, an accolade which 'recognizes the city's efforts to improve the environment and the quality of life of its residents and visitors alike. It takes into account factors such as the numerous green spaces and sustainable mobility initiatives that can be enjoyed in the city'. The measures that led to this award are being dismantled by the Partido Popular and by Vox, with the former systematically subverting sustainable mobility initiatives, and the latter consistently voting against measures to deal with anthropogenic climate change. Perhaps the European Commission should have a rethink.

The other day I went back to Auca Llibres Antics, a couple of months closer now to final closure. It’s still hot in there even in September, and the heady smell of old books seems even stronger than when I first went in, as if they’ve been marinating all summer. Everything is now being sold at a 50% discount, and I bought a copy of Arturo Barea’s La Raíz Rota. Barea is best known for his autobiographical trilogy La Forja de un Rebelde, first published in English in three volumes as The Forging of a Rebel between 1941 and 1946. (There is an excellent account of Barea's remarkable life by William Chislett here). Barea's extraordinary testament covers his early life in Madrid where his mother made her living washing clothes in the Manzanares river, through to his military service and participation in the Rif War in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco, and finally to his role on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. The Fascist victory forced Barea into exile, first in France and then England where he spent the rest of his life, before dying in Faringdon, Oxfordshire in 1957. He wrote La Forja in Spanish and it was translated into English by his second wife Ilsa Pollak. The first Spanish edition wasn’t published until 1951 and the first publication in Spain itself was in 1978, three years after Franco’s death. In La Raíz Rota, the book I bought, Barea imagines a life denied to him: the fictional protagonist Antolín Moreno returns in 1949 to post-Civil War Spain, in the grip of a dictatorship the extent of whose ferocity and cruelty is only now becoming clear, even to those who lived through it.

The copy of La Raíz Rota with which I walked out of Auca Llibres Antics was published in Buenos Aires in 1955. Its simple cover is protected by a cellophane wrapper, the paper is thick, the stitching is simple and the page edges are roughly cut. It smells … well, it smells like an old book.

It cost me 12.50 euros, a day-and-a-half’s bike hire.

Andrew Dobson
València
September 2023

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.

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