tolmers

satan’s speech from the throne of hell

If I was going to write a screenplay, I might write one for a post-apocalyptic movie. But rather than the said apocalypse being an inexplicable semi-religious one like in the film “2012”, I’d make it a man-made ecological apocalypse. I’m not an adamant eco-crusader, but I think we’re quite close to being totally fucked re. the climate, and also it’s obvious that the current trope of humans having to pay penance for our ecological crimes would make for a great movie.

Anyway, in this film of mine I’d probably have a bit where the hero (who in my head obviously looks a lot like me), whose warnings were predictably ignored in the pre-apocalyptic phase, assumes control of the cowed masses and begins the plans to rebuild. I’m thinking of the speech Morgan Freeman makes at the end of either Armageddon or Deep Impact - whichever one he was in. I’m sure the speech would be full of hope and ‘we will rebuild’ and all that stuff, but I’d also like it to have some grim acceptance, and a little bit of classical analogy.

Enter John Milton’s Paradise Lost! I picked up just now for a bit of light reading while waiting for something on my computer to install, and it really is bloody brilliant. I’m only up to the first few pages, but I found a great monologue made by Satan on the necessity of coming to terms with the rebel angels’ new home - i.e., hell. It’s this section that it struck me would be perfect to read out to the survivors of an ecological apocalypse:

Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,

[Said then the lost Archangel,] this the seat

That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom

For that celestial light? … Farewell happy fields

Where joy for ever dwells; hail horrors, hail

Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell

Receive thy new possessor: one who brings

A mind not to be changed by place or time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

What matter where, if I be still the same?

… Here at least

We shall be free; …

Here we may reign secure, and in my choice

To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:

Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.

Actually, reading it again, that might work better being quoted by someone who sees the surviving humans making the same mistakes all over again (bringing minds ‘not to be changed by place or time’). That would give it some great overtones, because we made a Hell of our Heav’n, because we couldn’t stand not to have total control over and total obedience from our environment.

Ooooh, yeah, I like that. It leads us to the terrible truth behind humankind’s unwillingness to change our way of life to deal with the climate threat: we would rather ‘reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n’, if ‘reign’ means have everything our own way, and ‘Heav’n’ means the paradise that is the world we live in right now.

Sobering stuff. Someone ought to be paying me for this.

man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

I’ve found my personal philosophical motto: the title of this post. Clifford Geertz said it as a way of expanding on Max Weber’s theories on what human culture is, but to me it sums up my whole personal cosmology, which I’ve been working on for as long as I’ve had a brain connected to my eyes and ears.

First, some context: Claude Levi-Strauss died yesterday at the age of 100. A globally-respected hero of anthropology and French intellectual like Claude naturally deserved an obituary in the NY Times, and that piece served as my first real introduction to L-S’s ideas. He was considered to be (though he disavowed the title of) the father of ‘structural anthropology’, which shifted the focus of anthropology away from the differences between the world’s cultures and towards their essential similarities. In particular, Levi-Strauss believed that all human cultures attempt to juxtapose and/or reconcile binary opposites, for example in the creation of gender roles and their dissolution in marriage.

Reading this I started to remember some tiny, infant, baby steps I had made towards building my own philosophical system when I was just a kid. Before I’d even heard of yin and yang I had this idea that the world contained an evenly balanced amount of good and bad, and all other opposites: I even planned to start a new religion about this called ‘The Balance’…

Anyway, that’s kind of a tangent to what matters here. Basically, I did some googling and wikiing and read more about Levi-Strauss and his followers and rivals and stumbled upon another example of my sophomoric conceptions of the world being more neatly expressed by academics.

This idea had come to me a little more recently than ‘The Balance’ in Year 8. During a course I took in my final year at UCL on the Revolutions of 1848 I read a lot of literature on nationalism as an ideology, and for the first time ever I really understood what nationalism was all about. It seemed amazing to me that national sentiment had convinced so many millions of men and women not so much to kill as to willingly die for their nations during the World Wars and previous conflicts, when nationality was in fact a fabrication, a system that humans had invented and that had no factual, empirical basis in nature. Humans had created this huge concept that they called nationalism for reasons that had been entirely sensible - protection from oppression and exploitation by empires, better communication through a shared language, increased comfort and standards of living through the economic harmonisation that nationhood enables - but they had forgotten that it was their own creation, and had begun to act as though they had no control over it and could not simply change it.

Driving home from the library late one night I got to a red traffic light at an intersection There wasn’t another human being in sight, let alone any cars - and yet I still stopped at that light. How ridiculous, I thought: why don’t I just drive through this light and carry on? But I couldn’t. And just then it struck me - my situation was exactly the same as that of the national martyrs! Traffic lights, crossings, roundabouts - all these things were invented by humans to make their lives easier, but somehow they had taken on a life of their own and become endowed with their own ends which demanded more respect that those that they had been created to facilitate. Not only had the function of the traffic light come full circle and actually impeded my journey, but I myself, as the supposed human master/creator of this system, had lost the capacity to act against it.

After that I became fascinated by the capacity of humans to build systems to a purpose entirely in their own interests, but then allow them to become so huge and command such respect that the systems themselves became the ends of their existence, and the original purpose (for which the systems were designed as means only to accomplish) fell instead to a secondary importance.

But reading about Levi-Strauss led me to read about other anthropologists, including Clifford Geertz, author of a brilliant andant absolutely hilarious anthropology essay I’d read years before called ‘Deep Play - Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’ (if you read nothing else today, click on that link and read the first page of the article), and from reading about him I discovered something else.

Turns out someone else had had the same thoughts as me about the way humans create systems and then feel that they are trapped by them, but these people were great intellects and had spent years thinking about and investigating their ideas. Rather than calling them ‘systems’ like I had, they called them ‘structures’, and instead of the clumsy sentence I’d come up with two paragraphs above, Max Weber had expressed the same thought in a perfect metaphor:

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Although really it’s not quite so perfectly tailored towards my thoughts. The anthropologists are more interested in ‘significance’, and how people understand their rituals, languages and cultural habits, whereas I’m more concerned with the real, tangible social structures that people build. How do humans lose control of the structures they create? How do they create them in the first place? And are they aware of the potential power that lies inside what they’re making? How can we stop this loss of control from happening, and can I come up with some handy words to describe the main events of this sort of stuff?

Can I get this theory published? Would Levi-Strauss have been proud of me?

how trafigura ran afoul of the twitterverse and parliamentary privilege

Oil company Trafigura dumped its toxic waste off the coast of the Ivorean city of Abidjan in 2006. Over the next year, many citizens of Abidjan developed flu-like symptoms, vomitting and diarrhoea, and some died. Trafigura eventually paid £30 million in compensation, but no report of this was made until Waterson & Hicks, a UK law firm opened a committee to investigate the event and produce a report now known as the Minton Report.

The firm’s lawyers then began an extraordinary attempt to keep the details of the Minton Report out of the press and prevent any damage to their client’s reputation. A Labour MP from Newcastle called Paul Farrelly tabled a question on the Minton Report, but unbelievably The Guardian was prevented even from mentioning this by a ‘super-injunction’, which banned mention in the press not just of the contents of the report, but of any hint that the report existed.

Absolutely fundamental to the doctrine of parliamentary privilege is the right of parliamentarians to complete freedom of speech in the House. Out of respect for the courts, MPs do not discuss matters that are sub judice, or currently before a judge - but the corollary to this is that courts will never interfere with the usual workings of the House. So for a court to prevent matters discussed in the chamber by an MP from being mentioned to the public in the press would have been a serious contempt of Parliament. The Minton Report is now in the public domain, where it belongs, and hopefully enough people will spend the 90 seconds it takes to read it and be shocked at how happily big companies save money by poisoning or killing innocent people on far-away coastlines.

There’s another story here though. The hashtag #trafigura became a trending topic on Twitter towards the end of last week, and as the truth about the company’s misdemeanours bled out in this way and the company’s ham-handed attempts to silence the press became more and more widely known, the firm’s PR agents faced a dilemma. To be known widely as having hidden something from the public might be more damaging to Trafigura’s reputation than to be associated with the released documents, so eventually - and in no small way because of the Twitter campaign - the company relented.

This a perfect example of the inability of large organisations to deal with the reality of life in the information age. We are armed with Facebook and Twitter and Wikipedia and Google News and MSN; whether or not they want us to, we will find out the dirty truth eventually; and most important of all, trying to cover something up only makes that thing’s eventual exposition inevitable.

It’s your classic Streisand Effect. But still, politicians and corporations continue to dodge questions or shout over whistleblowers - much to their own detriment.

This attitude must be on the way out. One of the present world’s most successful companies, Google, has as its motto the information age-proofed command “don’t be evil”. Surely soon there will also come a politician who openly answers every question she is asked, to the best of their knowledge. I know I’d much sooner vote for an MP who honestly admitted when she needed to investigate something more thoroughly before forming an opinion about it than one who ignored my question and treated me like a child who’ll be easily distracted by a barrage of inappropriate information.

Because that’s the central miscalculation of the Trafiguras or the Michael Howards of today’s world - we have the skills to skewer their tactics now. We all spend most of our days weeding out the information that matters to us from the great morass of news, opinion, pop-ups, inappropriate Google search responses, spam emails etc. etc. that is spread all over the internet, and we all use the internet constantly throughout the day. So when someone tries to dazzle us with unrelated info, we know just how to cut through it, and if there’s nothing behind it all for su to find we are all left unsatisfied.

Quite how unsatisfied we really are we won’t know until next May or thereabouts.

summary of the state of US healthcare reform

CURRENT US SYSTEM(S):

Most Americans have no right of access to medical treatment: they must either pay for it themselves, or take out insurance. At any one time around forty million Americans do not have health insurance; young people are especially likely not to.

Average health insurance costs have circa. doubled in the last ten years. Perhaps the main reason for this is that although there is no statutory right if access to medical treatment, hospitals and doctors have a duty of care in emergencies: if someone arrives at a hospital in a critical condition, they have to be treated. This doesn’t mean they’re not billed, just that it’s very unlikely that much of the bill will ever be recovered from the patient even if they are sued, bankrupted and have their possesions/house seized. Thus the remainder of the costs have to be bourne by the hospitals, which they do by having to charge normal people who really can pay much higher prices, thus raising insurance rates. This is obviously hugely inefficient because an uninsured person with a throat infection cannot come in and recieve a $200 antibiotic treatment: instead they will wait until they have i.e. full-blown gangrene in the throat and require emergency $30,000 surgery, the costs of which are then bourne by the system. Prevention is better than cure. Other reasons costs are high include america’s litigation culture: malpractice suits against doctors area shockingly regular occurance.

Insurance companies try in a number of unsavoury ways ti keep their prices low so they can compete. One of these is to spend a lot of time and money researching the patient history of clients just diagnosed with serious illnesses, so that they can find some previously unrecognized indicatory from before the client took out coverage that allows them to call the illness ‘a pre-existing condition’ which is therefore not covered.

OBAMA’S/THE DEMOCRATS’ PLAN:

Obama’s central idea is to set up a government-managed, non-profit insurance quango to offer cheaper health insurance to anyone in the country who wants it by leveraging economies of scale etc.; this is called the ‘public option’. Obviously the idea is that this will force insurance prices down through competition even for those who don’t take up the public option. In addition, he wants new legislation that bans the discrimation against pre-existing conditions, forbids insurance companies from dropping customers completely, litigation reform to protect doctors, and other similar ideas. He has never suggested any sort of ‘single payer’ system (like in Canada where the govt pays everyone’s health bills), nor a ‘state-provided’ system like the UK where health professionals are directly employed by the govt. Interestingly, the US does have internal examples of both these systems: the very poor and the very elderly benefit from two twin single-payer systems called Medicaid and Medicare that are insanely popular - Obama often tells an anecdote of an anti-reform woman at a rally who told him ‘keep your government hands out of healthcare and don’t you dare touch my Medicare’ - this is emblematic of progressive america’s complete failure to make people understand what healthcare reform could look like.

Why have they failed to do that? Insurance companies are huge, HUGE financial supporters of politicians on the US. Republican oppose healthcare reform because they don’t want to lose funding from these companies, but publically that would be unacceptable so they and these firms have spent tens of millions on advertising and astroturfing to cloud the issues: big examples ‘healthcare reform will allow govt “death panels” to decide who does and doesn’t recieve health care’, ‘you will be forced to change your doctor if the govt says so’ - both of these are thing Obama has explicitly stated will never be allowed.

SUCCESS?

Complicating all this is the way reform will be passed. The White house could have written its own bill as an example of what it wanted from the congress, but they haven’t done so. As such there are a number if bills that have been written by different committees in the house of representatives (us lower house) and the senate (us upper house). Some of these attempt to take a middle road, for example replacing the public option with a ‘co-op’ in which govt and insurance companies pair up to offer reduced insurance rates, or having a ‘triggered’ option which would only kick in if rates remained high even after other reforms. However the most highly publicised bill, that written by senator max baucus, was unveiled recently to much criticism by the left; it is essentially toothless. To make matters worse, even this weak bill recieved support from zero republican senators. Reformers now ask why democrats have bothered softening their proposals if doing so does not win any bipartisan support.

To pass the senate even in the face of a republican ‘fillibuster’ (a tactic for delaying the passing of bills indefinitely, which has been threatened so much by the relublicans that it is inevitable) the bill needs the support of not just 50 of the 100 senators, but a ‘supermajority’ of 60. The dems’ have 59 seats: they are heavily targetting left-leaving republican senatory Olympia snowe of Maine to be the 60th vote; so far she has been non-committal. Threats from the democrats to use ‘reconcilliation’, an obscure parliamentary trick that allows individual sections of a bill to passed with no ‘fillibuster’ with just 50 votes by presenting then as essential budgetary measures, is idle talk and would be political suicide for the dems, but depending how bad partisan relations get it is at least feasible.

The key things to watch are Olympia snowe’s position on any new bills that emerge from amendment committees, and the public opinion. Largely unreported by the media, public support of reform  has always been well above 50%. However, when asked whether they favour OBAMA’s reform  plans, support is less strong. Sensible conservative worries that the public option might prove too competative and wreak the insurance industry - which could have led to sensible legislation to avoid that - are instead inflated out of propotion and used to call Obama either a Nazi or a venezualan/french socialist for ‘seizing control’. Republicans are gearing up to retake both houses of the legislature in 2010, and america’s open primaries mean that in order to be selected as the republican candidate politicians must appeal to the ‘base’ with strongly conservative statements and actions for the primary season in spring 2010, then move to the middle after selection sothat they can attract moderate votes in the main poll- this adds an unknown factor to how reps will act.

Overall, commentators like Nate silver (fivethirtyeight.com) still beleive that health reconfigure has a 50/50 chance of passing. If it fails, obama’s administration will be devastated. If it passes, the manufactured popular backlash against percieved ‘socialism’ may damn his party in the poll’s anyway. This is a story of terrible message-management by the president, and brilliant obfuscation and outright lies by the republicans and their insurance industry allies.

karl marx, wagamama, and the origin of happiness

My best friend is a Catholic of the entirely lapsed variety, but that doesn’t prevent him from feeling that good ol’ Catholic guilt from time to time. One of my favourite flavours of Catholic guilt is the one that’s supposed to strike if you ever feel good about yourself after you do something that helps others. I can’t remember the name of it, but if I was a theologian I’d probably call it “Platinum Guilt” because I can’t think of a more perfect example of the madness of Catholicism that that one manufactured emotion.

This morning at breakfast my friend told me that he had just helped a mother carry her pram up the stairs to her front door, and also that he immediately felt some Platinum Guilt. Completely tragic, but as always I couldn’t find the words or logic to explain why it’s so tragic and so wrong. Then tonight I read this ‘cogitation’ from the website MediaMatters.org, and I think a got a few steps closer to knowing how that explanation should go.

In his quote-happy, Orient-obsessed way the author makes the point that it’s ridiculous to feel guilty for the pleasure we take from doing good, and what we should really do is own up to the fact that the pleasure we get from giving something is probably the closest thing we have to what genuine, honest “good” feels like when you experience it.

Another thing. The last two paragraphs mention the law of diminishing returns and its role in human happiness, and that reminded me of a great argument Karl Marx had on just that topic. He said that if you reduce all human activities to either production or consumption, the consumptive activities will always provide a marginally lesser amount of pleasure, and the productive ones a marginally greater amount. For every subsequent eating of say, a yasai katsu curry from Wagamama that you partake in, the enjoyment you get is reduced because you’ve had it before and it’s not so special anymore. Continued consumption is always marginally inefficient over time because the enjoyment it produces declines.

Production however functions in the opposite way. Through experience and by definition we know that you improve your skills each time you practice them, and thereby improve your “products” too. So for every subsequent cooking of say, a thai curry that you make yourself, you actually get an increased amount of enjoyment from both the activity and  the better food you’ve made.

It’s a long-winded theory, but there’s a drop of insight in there that can be distilled into pretty much the same point the lover-of-Buddhists above was trying to make. Giving/making is just empirically a better provider of happiness than receiving/taking. Obviously our society has kind of a big kink in it here, because we’re all either convinced or are being convinced that the opposite is true: “eat this chocolate bar and women will love you!” Far be it from me to suggest that organised religion (wittingly or unwittingly) dovetails neatly with the agenda of modern capitalism, but Platinum Guilt sure does a neat job making that opposite seem appropriate.

So once again, Marx knew damn well what he was talking about. What a man.

Alienation. It’s a hell of a concept.

paradigm shifts are always incomplete

I have a problem with the theory of paradigm shifts. The problem is that they are always incomplete. When Copernicus observed that Jupiter had moons, and so the earth might not be the centre of the solar system, the whole world didn’t read the news and stop believing in Geocentrism just like that. In fact, some crazy people still hold crazy pre-Copernican views - even today, in a period we might consider to be two paradigm shifts away from them. Similarly, the Scientific Revolution led to widespread adoption of the inductive method and an understanding that only accepting new discoveries that conform to an existing (perhaps God-ordained) model is a faulty way to understand the world. But that hasn’t stopped people from holding Biblical literalist views, or ignoring the theory of evolution.

The way I see it, paradigm shifts don’t so much represent the destruction of a whole edifice of beliefs and their replacement by a new set. Rather, they seem to work like those Ink-Erasers that everyone had at school, with a white cap at one end that smeared on the eraser liquid and the special pen at the other end to re-write the correction. No matter how much or how many times you erase the old information, some trace of it still sticks around. These old messages can be read in palimpsest and seem never to go away.

This raises two questions. Firstly: why aren’t paradigm shifts complete, and why do people continue to believe discredited theories? And secondly: why do the scientific and philosophical communities not talk about these huge exceptions to their fancy rule?

Turning, naturally, to the second question first, I think that the incompleteness of paradigm shifts is emblematic of a serious fault in the way the world has developed since the Enlightenment, and one which modern science and modern scientists would prefer to ignore. The experience of modernity has not been at all like the first liberals or agnostics or physicists or psychologists hoped. Rather than being swept up in the tide of technological and social advancement and reaching an enlightened state of rational, critical, progressive modernity, many ordinary people have rejected this new world’s conclusions.

Why? This is of course the same question as the one I skipped over before, and I think that the answers are equally as inextricably linked. Paradigm shifts - just like the encroachment of modernity - require people to turns their backs on ideas and habits they have become sentimentally attached to. That’s obvious, right? But what’s not so obvious, and what most of the great thinkers of the last two hundred years failed to realise, is that when people are told to reject their sentimental attachments they often respond by strengthening them instead. Thus a sentimental attachment becomes a personal, internal fetish, to be passionately - maybe even violently - defended.

And most disconcerting of all, the desire to protect and nurture these new and passionate fetishes can outlive and outcompete the progressive forces which first provoked them. No-one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth-century, after a hundred years of growing and strengthening secularism in Europe and North America, that after another hundred years the interaction of religion and politics in the United States would be more fractious than ever, or that native-born Britons could come to believe that their own country was such a threat to their religon that they had to blow themselves up to defend it. And yet, religious attendence in the developing world continues to increase, and the shrinking religious minority in the West demands more and more that the state accede to its demands for special treatment.

Paradigm shifts turn old scriptures into palimpsests, but it seems that rather than fading further as their ideological bases are more and more eroded, the old ways tap a greater resource of support in people’s sentimental attachment to them. Will  this emotional response prove to be stronger than the reason that protects the institutions of the civilised world? Will these fetishistic pretenders one day rise up and overthrow their more rational successors?

Or am I maybe being too hasty when I worry about questions like these? The gut reactions are strong now, but maybe that pain will fade with time. Friedrich Nietzsche was mostly a very unpleasant and dangerous philosopher, but perhaps he was right when he warned that the process of accepting the “death of God” - by which he meant all the stages of grief that humans must go through when they realise that modernity has destroyed those things that they are most sentimentally attached to, and will provide no simple, comforting alternative - might take many hundreds of years. Viewed on that time scale, it really hasn’t been that long at all since Copernicus peered through his lenses at Ganymede, Callista, Io and Europa.