Author: frankarmstrong

A Breakthrough to Save Humanity

In Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (1320) we encounter a forlorn Ulysses (Greek, Odysseus) in the Inferno, punished to eternal torments for deceitful stratagems in the Trojan war, and beyond. Dante adds a layer to the Classical myth, where the aged warrior returns to his native Ithaca only to find:

not sweetness of a son, not reverence
for an ageing father, not the debt of love
I owed Penelope to make her happy
could quench deep in myself the burning wish
to know the world and have experience
of all man’s vices, of all human worth.

He persuades his crew to embark on a final voyage to a: ‘world they called unpeopled’. For five months they sail until, ‘there appeared a mountain shape, darkened / by distance, that arose to endless heights,’ which is the mount of Purgatory. But, ‘celebrations soon turned into grief,’ as a whirlwind wrecks the fleet, consigning Odysseus and his crew to a watery grave. A hero, who dared travel beyond accepted limitations, is doomed to an excruciating hell, even if there is a suspicion that Dante admires his chutzpah for seeking to experience “all human worth.”[i]

Fear of the sea is an intuitive recognition of the danger it poses, in contrast to an attachment to home ground. As Herman Melville in Moby Dick (1851) puts it: ‘For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not from that isle, thou canst never return!’[ii]

Odysseus’s sorry fate also reflects a medieval mindset that looked askance at unfettered ambition. This devolved into superstitions deterring voyages to unchartered territories. Thus Laurens van der Post relates a story told to him by Carl Jung, ‘that if one wanted to fix a precise moment at which the Renaissance began, it would be the day when the Italian poet Petrarch decided to defy superstition and climbed a mountain in the Alps, just for the sake of reaching its summit.’[iii] Through a rebirth in Classical ideas that followed in Petrarch’s wake, Europeans opened their eyes to hidden possibilities, leading to the discovery of new continents that relied on a spirit of innovation.

Poetic Inspiration

Poetry in its widest sense is a font of ingenuity and invention. Thus Andre Breton in his Surrealist Manifesto saw it as: ‘Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.’ Reversing a dictum attributed to Stalin describing poets as engineers of the human soul, Breton attributes scientific breakthroughs to a poetic imagination, arguing: ‘the conquests of science rest far more on a surrealistic than on a logical thinking.’[iv]

This reinforces Percy Shelley’s proposition that poets, operating in varying capacities, are the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ The spark for any new venture comes from an imagination Shelley equates with poetry. He distinguishes this faculty from reason, which he describes as the ‘enumeration of qualities already known’; whereas ‘imagination in the perception of the values of those qualities, both separately and as a whole … Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.’[v]

Too often governments, corporations and individuals inhibit that poetic ignition. Across society we see reason and logic in constant motion, but imagination is barely nurtured, and often frowned on. We proceed from point A to B, all too often ignoring possibilities arising in the remainder of the alphabet. Yet scientific innovation is predicated on poetically imagining possibilities beyond contemporary restraints. It is notable that, besides his contributions to the understanding of the physical universe, Albert Einstein was a prolific poet.

Technological advances have diminished our intuitive fear of the ocean. As Melville put it: ‘however much … man may brag of his science and skill … yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him … nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.’[vi]

Incontestably, a combination of greed and frightening religious extremism motivated the global exploration of the sixteenth century, which rapidly encompassed the whole Earth. But the first voyagers also displayed admirable qualities, including a willingness to set aside a fear of the unknown, the strange and exotic.

Crossing great stretches of ocean demanded breakthroughs in nautical engineering, including the development of a lighter, more mobile, craft, the caravel. Developed in Portugal under Henry the Navigator (d.1460), this vessel could sail into a head wind. Such innovations occurred because adventurous spirits imagined pathways previously considered taboo. It is only by taking such imaginative flights, overcoming prejudices and applying the required labour, that new inventions are realised.

Despite the ensuing carnage and destruction of natural environments wrought by European colonisation, there remains an enduring heroism in this original repudiation of orthodoxy. In Dante’s Inferno Odysseus did founder, but we may laud a spirit rejecting preconceived limitations that a medieval mind considered hubristic. Innovation demands an interrogation of established ideas, a rejection of preconception and the embrace of the unknown – like a bird taking flight for the first time in its evolution. How did that feel?

The Great Adventure of Our Time

Theodore Zeldin recently considered what the great adventure of our time should be: if in the sixteenth century it was discovering new continents; and scientific enquiry in the seventeenth; or addressing political equality in the eighteenth. Precisely the most valuable quest in our time remained elusive to him, but he argued that giving a new meaning to work could offer a great adventure: ‘so that it is more than the exercise of a valued skill, more than the enjoyment of collaboration with others, more than a price that has to be paid in search of security and status, means using work to redefine freedom.’[vii]

A revolution in working practices does seem overdue, with technology performing most basic and increasingly complex tasks. A new departure in attitudes to employment should also appeal to anyone disheartened by the irrationality of boundless economic growth. Any new economy ought to harness creativity in different domains, and address the tendency towards homogenisation of large corporations. Still, I fear this aspiration to alter work practices is insufficiently ambitious for the environmental challenges of the twenty-first century, in the shape of runaway climate change and a Sixth Extinction.

Previously Naomi Klein has pointed a finger at unbridled capitalism,[viii] but simply achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth appears insufficient. Historically at least, socialism has been defined in materialistic terms, apportioning needs within a hierarchy that continues to inflate. There is a moral obligation to furnish all humans with basic necessities yes, but we must also enter into a harmonious relationship with the natural world, which, thus far, most political ideologies and organised religions have failed adequately to take account of. Within an altered ethical framework, encompassing an idea of Wild Law that I have previously expounded on, necessity will be the mother of invention of the tools required for favourable adaptations.

‘By nature free’

We are in Milton’s words from Paradise Lost (1667): ‘By nature free, not overruled by fate’, but each individual vessel still faces ruin unless we tame the raging waters of our collective acquisitiveness. We require an Age of Empathy elevating symbiosis and cooperation. Thus according to Gandhi: ‘Man is not born to live in isolation but is essentially a social animal independent and interdependent. No one should ride on another’s back.’[ix]

If we continue to gorge ourselves on the world’s resources – failing to acknowledge the limit of natural capital – we confront death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. Let us hope it does not take another Flood of Biblical proportions to awaken us to this reality. Alas, a shock to the global system seems necessary to shake us out of our collective stupor. We must face up to what the future holds, and aggressively confront sinister and self-serving conspiracy theories.

The field of science – a term only coined in the 1830s the field having previously been referred to as natural philosophy – alone cannot convey the world as it will appear in the decades to come if we continue on our present course. The arts play a vital role in conveying the apocalyptic scenes awaiting. Science fiction has long plotted dystopian scenarios – going back to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) – and this vision is entering the mainstream of literature.

In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) a father and son wander through an apocalyptic landscape denied the sun’s live-giving rays. Cannibalism is rife as the last humans compete with one another. In the final paragraph there is a mesmerising ode to a lost Nature:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.[x]

Verily a Paradise Lost.

Harsh Realities

When we face up to harsh realities a change in outlook can occur. Laurens van der Post writes:

It was only when man looked death full in the face that the mortality which is imminent in the final regard releases him from all excess in his proportions, and in the surrender of egotistical presumption which follows as night in the day, unlocks him for the experience of compassion for all living things, ‘from ant to Emperor, whale to cat’, as the Buddhists of Tibet put it, which is the sign of his conscious return from exile to the all-belonging, which has been his point of departure and is then his Home. [xi]

Humans are capable of mind-boggling cruelty and selfishness but within our spectrum we possess staggering levels of empathy and compassion. These diverging characteristics may even co-exist in the same person.

I propose that the great adventure of this epoch lies in the way we relate to Nature, which is all life on Earth, including ourselves. The challenge, as I see it, is to ground ourselves within that diverse ecology rather than placing ourselves above other forms of life, as the Western philosophic tradition has purported to do so. Thus Plato formatively established a hierarchy of beings in his Timaeus (c.360 BCE), proceeding from men at the top down through women to the ‘lower’ animals. Somewhat comically he compares other animals unfavourably to human beings:

The race of birds was produced by a process of transformation, whereby feathers grew instead of hair, from harmless empty-headed men, who were interested in the heavens but were silly enough to think that the most certain astronomical demonstrations proceed through observation. Wild land animals have come from men who made no use of philosophy and never in any way considered the nature of the heavens because they had ceased to use the circles in the head and followed the leadership of the parts in the soul in the breast.[xii]

Unfortunately, the lasting impression Plato has made on Western culture with these ideas has been no laughing matter.

Sentience

Widening the circle of empathy brings us into communion with all living beings. Even plant life deserves reverence. In Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees[xiii] we discover remarkable species, displaying unaccounted for intelligences. Trees communicate with one another using an array of languages including scent from blossoms, and via electrical signals that travel at a third of an inch per minute. This allows them to warn neighbours if they are under attack. Chemical signals are also passed via fungal networks around root tips, a so-called ‘wood wide web.’

Moreover, the ability of plants to learn from external stimuli has been exhibited in Dr Monica Gagliano’s experiments on the sensitivity of the mimosa plant. Gagliano released individual drops of water on the plant’s foliage at regular intervals. At first the anxious plants instantly closed their leaves, mistaking the single droplets for the onset of heavy rainfall. After a number of false alarms, however, the plants recognised these to be harmless and kept their leaves open. Remarkably, the small plants learnt from the experience, applying the lessons weeks later.[xiv]

Thus, in consuming any plant we should be mindful of all its complexity, and prize agricultural systems that permits a wide diversity of life to co-exist. Nonetheless, plant life can be distinguished from animal in terms of sentience: which is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Essentially, we know that other animals feel pain – both physical and psychological – via central nervous systems similar to our own. The precise boundaries between plant and animal life may be frayed, but the evidence for pain in other animals is unmistakable.

Factory farming may soon be viewed as among the worst crimes in human history. The food writer Michael Pollan referred to a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) he visited as, ‘a place I won’t soon forget: a deep circle of porcine hell.’ In a display of cognitive dissonance he acknowledges the pork sandwich he eats is ‘underwritten by the most brutal kind of agriculture.’ At least he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson to the effect that ‘however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.’[xv]

The effect of animal domestication, especially grazing ruminants and the cultivation of foodstuffs for their consumption, also has a devastating effect on surviving free animals, compelled to make way for a vast expansion of agriculture around the globe. Astonishingly, today humans, our livestock (and pets) account for ninety-six percent of the Earth’s total land vertebrate biomass.[xvi] This has all occurred alongside immeasurable devastation to the plant kingdom.

It is futile to read a philosophy of veganism back through human history to condemn ancestors who often killed animals for survival – or even to focus on those remaining hunter-gatherer communities living in remote and inhospitable regions. But in Western societies, at least, there are a multitude of healthful and tasty alternatives to animal products, displaying great qualities of human inventiveness in the gastronomic field. We are not obligate carnivores, unlike our near relative homo neanderthalensis that seems to have gone extinct for this reason.[xvii] A global food chain now allows us to overcome seasonal shortages and localized crop failures to provide a nutritious plant-based-diet-for-all.

New Departure

In his biographic account of hunting whales on board a Norwegian vessel in the 1920s Laurens van der Post, recites an extraordinary statement on the new departure he considered necessary in our relationship to the natural world:

I could not deny the excitement and acceleration into a consummation of archaic joy which the process of stalking and hunting, even at sea, had invoked in me, although I was at present now only as an observer. On the other hand, hard on these emotions, came an equal and opposite revulsion which nearly overwhelmed me when the hunt, as now, was successful and one was faced with the acceptance of the fact that one had aided and abetted in an act of murder of such a unique manifestation of creation. The only dispensation of the paradox ever granted to me in the past, unaware as I had been of the immensity of it until revealed to me in this moment at sea, was that in hunting out of necessity, all revulsions were redeemed by the satisfaction one felt in bringing food home to the hungry. That such satisfaction was not an illusion, nor a form of special pleading in the court of natural conscience, was proved to me by the profound feeling of gratitude one invariably felt for the animal that had died in order for others to live … [but]what could this possibly have to do with the necessities which were essential for the redemption of the act of killing … in this increasingly technological moment of my youth, when control of life was passing more and more from nature to man, and when there were already available all sorts of artificial substitutes for the essential oils which animals like the whale had once been the only source of supply, what, I asked myself bitterly, could justify such killing except the greed of man for money … Worse still, I was certain that our imperviousness to the consternation caused by such killing in the heart of the nature could be the beginning of an enmity between man and the life which had brought him forth that could imperil his future on earth itself.[xviii]

Dietary change may indeed be relevant to the wider transformation of the human person. The legendary gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s maxim ‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,’ perhaps overstates the argument, yet the constituents of a diet do exert a profound influence on minds inseparable from bodies. This is ingrained in almost every spiritual tradition, even Christianity. Thus in Western monasticism, going back to the Early Church Fathers and the Rule of St. Benedict, consumption of animal products was considered incompatible with a life of meditation and prayer.

We are a product of the air we breathe, the fluids we imbibe and the bacteria with which we co-exist, our genetic programming, and perhaps morphic resonances, whereby self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems.[xix] Nonetheless, the vast complexity of food at our disposal makes this arguably the leading variable in that process of growth and atrophy characterising life as we know it.

Humanity today utilises a mere six hundred out of the hundreds of thousands of edible plants that exist on Earth.[xx] This vast, unrealised potential of unnurtured crop varieties mean we are only skimming the surface of agricultural possibilities, with dramatic implications for the environments that we manage. Untapped potential may also lies in the cultivation of bacteria, that could be conditioned to taste like familiar foodstuffs, including meat. George Monbiot recently argued that lab-grown food could save the planet,[xxi] albeit these technologies are still in their infancy. What we now require is an alliance of farmers, chefs, scientists and gastronomes, unbound by convention, to imagine new possibilities in a Fourth Agricultural Revolution.

Theodore Zeldin is right to say that: ‘The invention of a new dish is an act of freedom, small but not insignificant.’[xxii] We can all play a part in this great adventure.

An altered relationship with Nature would be a revolution unlike any other in human history, and it is surely essential for this to occur in the Anthropocene, our current geological age of human impacts, where the accumulated bones of domesticated chickens are a sign of our overweening presence, along with nuclear residues, and climate chaos. Aside from any ethical stance, ecological limits are in sight: we cannot continue slaughtering over fifty billion domesticated animals each year for food.

Vegan Diet

As Jiddu Krishnamurti puts it: ‘We haven’t time to fool around anymore – the house is on fire.’[xxiii] The world’s population now stands at over seven billion. At the beginning of the last century we were a mere one and a half billion, with a far shorter life span than today, leading lives far less exacting on the planet’s resources. We have since applied science to the manufacture of all manner of conveniences, culminating in a global obesity pandemic and giant plastic graveyards in the Pacific Ocean. We have waged a relentless war on the natural world that sees no sign of abating. Since the 1970s, when I was born, 60% of all mammal species have gone extinct,[xxiv] mainly through a loss of habitat intimately connected to the foods we eat.

Scientists are devoting their imaginative faculties to the realisation of a carbon-diminished future, but environmental morality should not be reduced to an exercise in carbon accounting. I would argue that the single most transformative step any person can take in their life is to embrace a vegan philosophy, which entails a cooperative rather than exploitative relationship with Nature. And if you should fail initially, try and try again.

Projected population growth over the coming decades makes meat consumption even more unsustainable, leading to further, horrific ‘efficiencies’ in factory farming. The whole edifice of animal agriculture ought to crumble, perhaps bringing an expansion in human consciousness. Thus Charles Darwin argues that the history of man’s moral development has been a continual extension of the objects of his ‘social instincts’ and ‘sympathies’ writing:

Originally each man had regard only for himself and those of a very narrow circle about him; later he came to regard more and more not only, the welfare, but the happiness of all his fellow men; then his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, extending to men of all races, to the imbecile, maimed and other useless members of society, and finally to the lower animals.[xxv]

Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’

Five hundred years after Dante’s Divine Comedy in 1833 Alfred Lord Tennyson published his poem ‘Ulysses’, where he develops the epic tale of Odysseus further. Again we find a frustrated Odysseus in Ithaca before a final voyage bemoaning:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!’
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

In the spirit of his age of expansion Tennyson hails an ambition ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,’ and so might we adopt such an approach to confront impending environmental crises. As a species we are entering unknown and decidedly choppy waters, and now require imaginative capacities to take flight. This is an ominous, but ultimately heroic quest that requires us to cross new moral frontiers.

[i] Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Mark Musa (Translator), New York, Penguin, 2003, Canto 26

[ii] Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Wordsworth Classics, London, 1992 p.262

[iii] Laurens van der Post, Yet Being Someone Other, The Hogarth Press, London, 1982, p.18

[iv] MANIFESTO OF SURREALISM BY ANDRÉ BRETON, 1924.

[v] Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1821)

[vi] Melville, 1992, p,261

[vii] Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future, MacLehose Press, London, p.313

[viii] Naomi Klein This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2014.

[ix] Anthony Parel, Gandhi, Freedom and Self-Rule, Lexington Books, London, 2000, Washington, p.109

[x] Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, p.287

[xi] van der Post, 1992 p.223

[xii] Plato, Timaeus and Critias, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Penguin Classics, London, 2008, p.90

[xiii] Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees, Jane Billinghurst (translator), Black Inc., Carlton, 2016

[xiv] Monica Gagliano, Thus Spoke the Plant, North Atlantic Books, New York, 2018

[xv] Michael Pollan, Cooked – A Natural History of Transformation, Penguin, New York, pp.49-51

[xvi] Olivia Rosane, ‘Humans and Big Ag Livestock Now Account for 96 Percent of Mammal Biomass’, EcoWatch, 2018, https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html

[xvii] Tim Flannery, Europe – A Natural History, Allen Lane, London, 2018, p.177

[xviii] van der Post, 1982, p.88

[xix] Rupert Sheldrake, https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance

[xx] Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity, Harper Perennial, London, 1994, p.93

[xxi] George Monbiot, ‘Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’, The Guardian, January 8^th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet

[xxii] Zeldin, 1994, p.94

[xxiii] Jiddu Krishnamurti, ‘Knowledge and the transformation of man,’ https://jkrishnamurti.org/content/knowledge-and-transformation-man

[xxiv] Damian Carrington, ‘Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds’, The Guardian, October 30^th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity-wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds

[xxv] From The Descent of Man.

April 1, 2018
A Look Inside Italian Politics

Posterity will determine if the Italian election results of March 4th 2018 marked an earthquake that will endure in the landscape. Or will a result, apparently seismic, turn out to be like the volcano that smoulders, without ever fully clearing its throat? No one is quite sure the precise dish the electorate will be served after the election.

The success of the Eurosceptic and unashamedly anti-immigrant Northern League under Matteo Salvini (now seemingly reconciled to preserving the territorial integrity of the Italian state), and to a greater extent, the relatively unknown quantity of the Five Star Movement (M5S) led by Luigi di Maio, combined with the decline of Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia and the centrist Democratic Party under Matteo Renzi, reflects a Europe-wide populist surge; the decline of traditional parties, and emphasises the waning legacies of iconic figures of the first decade of the twentieth century, such as Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, Bertie Ahern and Berlusconi himself.

But the widely-bandied term ‘populist’ tells us very little, and is often used simply to dismiss the popular appeal of a party by those opposed to its objectives. In a recent European context it has become shorthand for increasing xenophobia, and outright racism, triggered especially by the refugee crisis of 2015, and associated with the ‘strongman’ leadership of Putin’s Russia.

M5S has been criticised both within Italy, and in the international media, for reflecting prejudices commonly expressed in Italian society. On the other hand, there is often a failure to recognise the determination of the Movement to clean up Italian politics, particularly in their southern electoral strongholds.

Roger Cohen of the New York Times crudely dismisses M5S, lumping them with the Northern League, as one of the ‘out-with-the-bums parties’, and linked to Europe-wide ‘angry illiberal movements’. An apparently “illiberal” approach to immigration may largely be explained, however, by the responsiveness of M5S policies to the concerns of supporter, rather than any racist demagoguery emanating from its leadership.

Such criticism also ignores how Italy is the first port of call for the majority of refugees who take the Mediterranean route into Europe, and how other states are not rising to the challenge of accommodating more new arrivals.

M5S offers a new political formula that could easily have continent-wide ramifications. They promote technocratic expertise, with an emphasis on sustainability at a local level. The ‘five stars’, refers to the party’s five core values: public water access, sustainable transportation, sustainable development, a right to Internet access, and environmentalism. These founding principals clearly distinguishes them from the Northern League, and authoritarian regimes in Poland, Hungary or Russia.

One of their most important rules is that any political career is a temporary service: no one who has already been elected twice at any level (local or national) can be a candidate again. Elected representatives put a proportion of their salaries back into a micro credit fund for small businesses, and reject campaign contributions. In short, M5S is attempting to inoculate itself against prevailing corruption, and ‘strongman’ leadership.

But whether M5S can simply focus on discrete objectives and local issues, while ignoring national, regional and global institutions, is doubtful. Environmentalism can morph into short-term nimbyism. Moreover, without being corrupt or paternalistic, an elected representative may offer a course that is not instantly popular in a direct democracy scheme but may prove wise, and popular, in the long run.

There are parallels with the current political constellation in England (if not the wider United Kingdom), where the Northern League plays the character of UKIP, the Eurosceptic right the Tory party; Forza Italia assumes the part of a Europhile Tory rump; the Democratic Party is represented by ‘New’ (an increasingly obsolete description) Labour ; and the Five Star Movement (less the political nous of a veteran such as Jeremy Corbyn) reprises the role of a Euro-doubtful Momentum.

But of course Italian politics is unique in many respects. This is a long-legged country with characteristics of an ‘Asiatic’ Mediterranean, and a ‘Germanic’ North, as well as its own, often intoxicating, Latin inheritance. There is enduring, embedded, wealth alongside grinding, endemic poverty, mainly below the Mezzogiorno, but increasingly found in all major urban centres. The significance of Milan lying at a latitude closer to London than Palermo should not be discounted.

II

In many respects Italy is a fractured polity and unstable democracy, which emerged out of a long fascist dictatorship (1922-45) under Benito Mussolini, and wartime alliance with Nazi Germany. During the Cold War most governments lasted less than a year, and featured a revolving cast of roguish characters, foremost sevent-time Prime Minister, and twenty-seven-time minister Guilio Andreotti. In that time Italy’s Communist Party was the largest in Europe (with a membership exceeding two million under the astute leadership of Palmiro Togliatti), which despite not participating in governments held the feet of the ruling elite to the coals.

The Master and his Apprentice. ©INTERNATIONAL PHOTO/LAPRESSE 12-06-1984 ROMA SPETTACOLO NELLA FOTO: SILVIO BERLUSCONI E GIULIO ANDREOTTI

Corruption has long been the bane of Italian politics, particularly in the south of the country. Between them the Neapolitan Camorra, Calabrian Ndrangheta and Siclian Cosa Nostra have maintained fiefdoms the like of which are unknown in other Western European country, with tentacles reaching into the rest of Italy and beyond.

The endurance of organised crime can be traced to the Allied conquest of Italy during the Second World War. The fascists had kept local chieftains under the thumb, often by simply imprisoning them without trial. But just as de-Baathification in Iraq after the invasion in 2003 unleashed underlying, atavistic forces, similarly, across southern Italy after 1945, gangsters entered a vacuum left behind by a decapitated state.

Only after the fascist prisons were thrown open, and shadowy American Intelligence figures such as ‘Lucky’ Luciano arrived on the scene, was a humanitarian crisis averted. Reliance was placed on old networks of patronage to feed the population, as Norman Lewis’s account in Naples 1945 illuminates. Italian democracy has been counting the cost of Allied authorities ‘looking the other way’ ever since.

‘Lucky’ Luciano, unlucky Italy.

Any journalist investigating their affairs whether in Italy or elsewhere, as the recent likely contract killing of Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak and his partner Martina Kusnirova reveals, must be aware of the dangers. Investigating judges require huge security details; even then some, such as Judge Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, are still assassinated.

The scene of the Massacre of Capaci where Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo and their police escort were killed by a Mafia bomb. 23 May 1992.

The Mani Pulite (clean hands) judicial investigation into corruption of 1992 brought the false dawn of a Second Republic. Electoral laws were amended and the Christian Democrats, which had provided the Prime Ministers to all bar three post-war governments until that point, disappeared entirely.

However, a corrupt deck was merely shuffled, and many Italians lost faith in politics altogether during the lost decade (2001-2011) of billionaire Berlusconi’s showman leadership. His clownish antics provided a front for deepening corruption, while the television media he controlled provided a drip-feed of light entertainment, football and titillation that kept the patient Italian public in a mildly delusional state. Here M5S politician Alessandro di Battista reads out a court ruling against a former longtime aide to Berlusconi and the founder of Forza Italia, Marcello Dell’Utri, who is in jail because of his links to the Cosa Nostra.

https://www.facebook.com/dibattista.alessandro/videos/1444836532295073/

The period since the end of the Cold War also witnessed a steady rise in inequality, and the effects of the economic crisis, beginning in 2008, continues to be felt. In 2017 the bottom 30 percent of the population was at risk of poverty and social exclusion. That is up from 28.7 the previous year.

Berlusconi also coarsened political debate, bringing respectability to the expression of prejudice against foreigners living in Italy, thereby providing an obvious scapegoat when times grew hard.

III

In a wide-ranging account, Delizia – the Epic History of Italian Food (2007), John Dickie describes Italian food at the turn of the twentieth century as ‘local rather than national, whereas French cooks were armed with a uniform terminology – coulis, hors d’oeurvres, potage – their Italian counterparts spoke a variety of mongrel food dialects’.

Dickie continues: ‘The history of Italian food after unification is the story of the relationship between these proud local food cultures, and the dream of bringing all of Italy to one table, thereby creating a national cuisine to rival that of France’. This fragmentation reflects a prevailing loyalty towards town or region, rather than country or nation.

The history of the pizza is instructive. It shares a provenance similar to Greek pitta and Turkish pide, as part of an extended family of Mediterranean flat breads. The author of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi (1826-90) dismissed this Neapolitan dish as ‘a patchwork of greasy filth that harmonises perfectly with the person selling it’. The Margherita pizza, named in honour of Queen Margherita’s visit to Napoli in 1889, represents the colours, red (tomato), white (mozzarella cheese) and green (basil), of the Italian flag. More importantly, its name accommodated the people of a city, renowned for poverty and disease, within the new nation’s gastronomy.

Dickie likens the Margherita’s propaganda value to Princess Diana embracing AIDS victims. But Napoli’s waste management problems continue to this day: in 2015 Europe’s biggest illegal dump –‘Italy’s Chernobyl’ – was uncovered nearby. The greasiness of Italian politics, like the layer of mozzarella on top of a pizza, has long held in check progressive forces of green and red.

Despite Italy’s relative novelty – unification only culminated in 1871 – this is an old country. The architectural layers found in almost every city are a daily reminder of past glories. Italians generally seem unmistakably Italian, no matter where they are from on the peninsula or islands. Notwithstanding regional variation, there is a quintessence to life across the land. Bureaucracy and conviviality represent the poles of annoyance and enchantment any resident or outsider negotiates.

The nation’s varied constituents were never static aboriginal communities. A central location in the Mediterranean, pointing into Africa but firmly lodged in Europe – the Alps were the ‘traitor’ of Italy according to Napoleon – has brought migrant waves since time immemorial. Anyone who is anyone has spent time here, from Hannibal to Lord Byron and Gore Vidal.

It is now the main entry point for Africans who aspire to live in Europe. Italy took some 64 percent of the 186,000 migrants who reached Europe in 2017 through the Mediterranean route. It took the majority of these migrants in 2016 too. The current surge is unprecedented but there is no end in sight as looming Climate Change threatens further mass movements of peoples. Recent new arrivals join five million foreign nationals already living in Italy. It is estimated that there are as many as 670,000 illegal immigrants living in the country.

Desperate people are being trafficked across the Mediterranean aboard flimsy vessels, while the European Community washes its hands. The Dublin Regulation (2013) ordains that any decision on refugee status falls for determination in the country where a person first lands, unless family reunification is involved. Many Italians argue other European countries are not sharing the burden, and they have a point.

With a prevailing sense of being overwhelmed by immigration at a time when the economy is still in remission, predictably, extremism is on the rise. Berlusconi broke taboos that many politicians now habitually cross.

On February 5th Luca Traini, a former candidate for the Northern League, was arrested after targeting African migrants in a two-hour drive-by shooting spree in the Marche city of Macerata. This came days after the discovery there of the body of an eighteen-year-old Italian woman, allegedly killed and dismembered by a Nigerian immigrant gang. The threat of further bloodshed is acute.

In its aftermath Silvio Berlusconi called for the expulsion of thousands of migrants, while League leader Matteo Salvini said ‘those who fill us with migrants instigate violence’.

IV

The Five Star Movement is the sulphur in the Italian political wind, whose promotion of direct participation of citizens in the management of public affairs through digital democracy could provide an example well beyond Italy. But in any situation where an electorate is ill-informed by a media dominated by vested interests this can have dangerous consequences, no matter how progressive the core ideas of any movement. However, the despondency of some commentators regarding the capacity of the Internet to inform, as opposed to trigger prejudice, may be misplaced in the long term.

M5S propose a fusion of green and red politics that should have admirers beyond Italian shores: they embrace theories of de-growth, and support ‘green’ employment. The need to stop polluting Italy’s environment is recognised, and they call for an end to expensive ‘great works’, including incinerators and high-speed rail links. They aim to raise the quality of life and bring about greater social justice.

But the thorny issue of their approach to the European Community remains, which is closely connected to resolving the immigration imbroglio. Somewhat disconcertingly, after a ballot of members a decision was made to join a political group in the European Parliament which also contains UKIP. The option, however, of joining the Greens/EFA group was also discussed, but was unavailable due to that group’s prior rejection of the idea.

For a country like Italy to leave the Community would be a hammer blow from which it might not recover, at least in its present configuration. Moreover, in a globalised world it is surely impossible for any one country, especially one so unstable as Italy, simply to go its own way, at least with a democratic government. Removed from the European mainstream, Italy could easily fall prey to authoritarian government, which is part of its political DNA.

©Daniele Idini

Leading members of M5S have at times offered inflammatory views on immigration, in particular Beppe Grillo, its animating spirit. On 23 December, 2016 he wrote on his blog that all undocumented immigrants should be expelled from the country, and that the Schengen Accord, allowing free movement of people between signatory states, should be temporarily suspended in the event of a terrorist attack.

Grillo seems to have been panicked by the terror threat. In the wake of the 2016 Berlin attack and the killing of a suspected terrorist near Milan he wrote: ‘Our country is becoming a place where terrorists come and go and we are not able to recognise and report them and they can wander all over Europe undisturbed thanks to Schengen’.

On 21 April 2017, Grillo also published a piece questioning the role of NGOs operating rescue ships off the coast of Libya. He suggested they may be aiding traffickers. Grillo’s comments raise serious questions over whether M5S will calm the growing scapegoating of immigrants in Italy. While his views may reflect what many Italians feel, it is surely incumbent on a politician to lead rather than follow, and not to exaggerate any threats.

Fortunately the M5S is a broad church, and Grillo, while still influential, is not their leader in parliament. Last year Luigi Di Maio called for ‘an immediate stop to the sea-taxi service’. He also said he would support a referendum for Italy to leave the Eurozone and would vote to leave. In January 2018, however, he reversed his previous position. What appears to be the relative abatement of the terror threat will, hopefully, go some way towards calming the fears of many Italians. But other European states must recognise that preserving the European Community will require a sharing of the refugee burden.

V

In his 1963 account The Italians, Luigi Barzini endeavours to explain why his countrymen have historically failed to coagulate into a singular nation. Firstly, he points to ‘rapid and enthusiastic acceptance of changing political fashions and of foreign conquerors which made all revolutions irresistible but superficial and all new regimes unstable.’ This might be identified in the enthusiastic post-war approval of Communism, and the earlier groundswell of support for Mussolini’s Fascism. The MS5’s embrace of digital democracy has been dismissed as a political fad in the era of the Internet.

Secondly, Barzini found ‘an art of living as if all laws were obnoxious obstacles to be overcome somehow, an art which made the best of laws ridiculously ineffective’. This reflects a permissive attitude towards organised crime, which M5S are at least seriously challenging.

Finally he averts to ‘the certainty that the most inflexible government could, in the long run, be corroded from the inside.’ This final point is important in terms of understanding the reluctance of many among M5S to work with other parties to form a government. It is also reflects the cynical response of many commentators to the efforts of the M5S leadership to form a government. Italy requires meaningful reforms and this will require deals to be done, even with the Northern League, who are surely no worse than Berlusconi’s cronies. It is unfortunate that the Democratic Party, with whom M5S should have most policies in common, have expressed a determination to remain in opposition.

It would perhaps be wise to recognise that politics is the art of the possible, and that reforming a political system as dysfunctional as Italy’s will take considerable time, but at least the priorities of M5S appear progressive in terms of social justice and sustainability. Perhaps most important are the precautions the Movement are taking against ‘strong man’ leadership, which could be a template for other political systems to follow.

Frank Armstrong is the content editor of Cassandra Voices.

Featured Image: Daniele Idini

April 1, 2018
Spanish Smokescreens

The Catalan independence movement may seem like a throwback to a bygone age of nationalism. But the disproportionate reaction of Spain’s central government to the referendum in October has served, perversely, to make the break-up of the country more likely. Along with wider curbs on freedom of expression, the repression orchestrated by a ruling Partido Popular (PP) mired in corruption scandals, is an unsettling reminder of Franco’s long dictatorship (1939–75). Disturbingly, mainstream media and the judiciary are failing to check these trends.

E.M. Forster once remarked that if a choice came between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped that he would have the courage to betray his country. Anyone who formulates such an opposition may be said to have no country if by that we mean: a sense of belonging to a broad set of principles identified with the state.

Thus, most Americans, notwithstanding their differences, submit to ideals of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ expressed in the US constitution, which includes restraints on the excesses of presidential power. The appeal of belonging to a country declines when its government, even acting lawfully, becomes an immoral instrument of power.

George Orwell might have lost some friends if they had known he had provided a list of writers with Communist sympathies to MI5 in 1949. But he did so for the sake of friends he saw as countrymen, at a time when Stalin was in power in the Soviet Union.

Such dilemmas are rarely in black and white, or represent good versus evil. Even under the Nazis there were presumably, among others, nurses tending to the sick who played no role in the machinery of death and destruction. Under late capitalism states bear less responsibility than transnational corporations for destructive technologies, ecocide and grotesque inequality. State power and that of supranational institutions needs to be bolstered, but underpinned by transparency, representative democracy and accountability.

With large corporations exerting unaccountable influence, states, such as the Spanish, controlling public discourse and harbouring a compliant judiciary, may be tyrannical institutions.

The current impasse in Spain appears to be an old-fashioned conflict over national identity. Any nation, as far as most historians are concerned, is an imagined construct. ‘Imagined’, as Benedict Anderson put it, because ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of the communion’. Nations loom out of an ‘immemorial’ past, generally based on dominant vernacular languages. A number emerged ascendant in Modern Europe from a stew of idiolects that co-existed in transnational empires, before the homogenising effect of Guttenberg’s printing press.

Image: Hector Castells

But language is not the only source of identity. An English speaker living in Wales may feel either Welsh, British or Muslim depending on the occasion. The particular identity selected to represent oneself shifts according to moods and settings, and can be stoked by demagoguery.

After observing the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991 Michael Ignatieff wrote: ‘Consciousness of ethnic difference turned into nationalist hatred only when the surviving communist elites, beginning with Serbia, began manipulating nationalist emotions in order to cling to power.’ Today, we find Yugo-nostalgia among many Croats, Slovenes and Serbs who lament the dissolution of their historic friendship. “Nationalist hatred” is also the product of manipulation in Spain today, and appears to provide a smokescreen for corruption within the ruling Partido Popular (PP).

Once upon a time I knew Barcelona reasonably well, having rented an apartment there for a summer with friends after finishing university in 1998. In the days before euro-inflation the price of living was jaw-droppingly cheap, especially when it came to purchasing food in the colourful markets off Las Ramblas. Catalan was spoken widely, but we heard little talk of an independent state. Nonetheless, I was surprised by an assertion from one adult child of immigrants from another part of Spain that she was often made to feel a second class citizen.

Growing up in Ireland, I was accustomed to daily news bulletins reporting sectarian murders. This honed an awareness for potential divisiveness around identity. I have watched, therefore, with concern the increasing stridency of Catalan nationalism. The last time I visited Barcelona, two years ago, the streets were festooned with flags hanging from windows, amid rumours of intimidation of those who did not wish to participate. I could not help wondering whether separatism was a product of the region’s relative wealth compared to the rest of Spain: the region accounts for approximately sixteen percent of the Spanish population, but twenty-five percent of all Spanish exports. These pressures have increased in the wake of Spain’s economic crisis, culminating in Eurozone finance ministers agreeing to lend the country up to €100 billion to shore up its banks.

Image: Hector Castells

However, the jackbooted response of the Guardia Civil to the Catalan referendum in October, which left hundreds injured, has imperiled an often tempestuous relationship between Catalans and Castilians. The kingdoms of Aragon (essentially historic Catalonia) and Castile formed a political union in 1469 in the wake of the marriage of their respective monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. Catalan has remained the lingua franca in the former Aragonese territory until the present day, although large scale migration there from other parts of Spain, and elsewhere, diluted this; just over half of its population appears to feel Spanish, based on the 2017 election results.

In the wake of the Nationalist victory of Generalissimo Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), in which Barcelona played a prominent role on the Republican side, thousands were imprisoned and the Catalan identity was systematically undermined. During that long dictatorship (1939-1975) schools were banned from teaching the Catalan language and sources of Catalan identity whitewashed. With the introduction of democracy in 1975 a modus vivendi developed between Madrid and Barcelona – the Basque country became the nationalist flash point – until diminution in regional sovereignty in 2010 allied with the Economic Crisis gave rise to the current strife.

Iberian Peninsula 1400

Since the violent scenes in October many Spaniards have pointed to the illegality of the referendum to justify the conduct of the Guardia Civil, which makes neither moral nor legal sense. Editorials in the apparently liberal El Pais often refer to the Catalan leadership as ‘Golpistas’. The word ‘golpe de estado’ is the equivalent of coup d’etat or putsch, and implies that Catalan separatists have been using violent means to bring about independence, thereby justifying the thuggish scenes.

El Pais’ Managing Editor, David Alandete, remains obdurately unapologetic, likening Catalan separatists to Far Right extremists: ‘This is the exact same situation as The New York Times under Trump, the UK press under Brexit, German press under Alternative for Deutschland’. Like most established print media around the world, El Pais has experienced significant financial troubles in recent times. John Carlin, a sacked former columnist has argued that the parent company Prisa reflects the wishes of Madrid’s political class.

Catalans might justifiably wonder whether their national friendship with Castile can withstand the failure of mainstream media and television to hold its government to account, and provide a reasonable witness to the events. To compare Catalan separatists to Alternative fur Deutschland is a gross distortion.

How has this all came to pass? We are living in a European Union which guarantees free movement of labour and capital, and Spain has been a democracy for over forty years. There are certainly heirs of Franco who want to impose linguistic and religious homogeneity on the rest of the country. Individuals with connections to the lay Catholic organisation Opus Dei exert what many consider an unhealthy influence over the Spanish cabinet, but the PP holds power without a majority in the Cortes.

We appear to be witnessing a sophisticated distortion of reality, where crucial components of the media have been co-opted into serving the interests of a governing elite now mired in economic scandals. This is not to say that the Spanish media is a monolith: reports continue to emanate from sources including El Pais furnishing evidence of government impropriety. But when it comes to reporting on the burning issue of Catalonia keen observers claim that balance has been lost.

One disturbing hypothesis is that polarisation is actually Spanish government policy, permitting a slide towards centralised, autocratic rule. As A. Reynolds put it in his recent article for Cassandra Voices: ‘Spain remains to a large extent a liberal democracy, but there’s an unsettling authoritarian trend, which is being orchestrated by its main conservative party.’

Oppression of Catalan separatism is part of a wider draconian policy, extinguishing civil liberties, aimed at perceived enemies of the people. This month the Spanish Supreme Court upheld a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence against rapper Valtonyc, for lyrics deemed offensive to the monarchy and supportive of terrorism. The court’s contention that the lyrics of the Mallorcan native represented an incitement to terrorism are implausible, especially considering he refers to the Basque separatists ETA, who have been in permanent ceasefire since 2011. The wholly disproportionate sentence – the same week a man was sentenced to two years for paedophilia in Palma – simply draws attention to his songs, one of which has had almost a million hits on YouTube in the wake of this latest miscarriage of justice.

Enrique López, one of the judges in the 2014 High Court case, offered the following rational for his decision: salvar la democracia de sus enemigos, aunque sea sobre la base de redefinirla como disciplinada o autoritaria: ‘to save democracy from its enemies, it may be necessary to redefine it as disciplined or authoritarian’. He was referring to the German concept of Streitbare Demokratie, ‘well fortified’, or ‘battlesome democracy’, used to justify extreme measures against extremists who wish to dismantle democratic institutions. To compare Catalan nationalism to Neo-Nazisism is another perverse distortion, legitimating the most appalling excesses. If Lopez’s approach was accepted through history, the world would still be made up of empires.

Ironically López himself was forced to resign from the bench in 2014 after being found driving with blood alcohol levels six times above the legal limit. He is aligned with the PP, and now laments that separatists parties cannot be banned.

The playwright and poet Federico Garcia Lorca was shot by nationalist militia in 1936. By then he had written his eerily-familiar ‘Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard‘ (1928) which begins:

The horses are black.
The horseshoes are black.
Stains of ink and wax
shine on their capes.
They have leaden skulls
so they do not cry.
With souls of leather
they ride down the road.
Hunchbacked and nocturnal
wherever they move, they command
silences of dark rubber
and fears of fine sand.
They pass, if they wish to pass,
and hidden in their heads
is a vague astronomy
of indefinite pistols.
…
(translated by A.S. Klyne)

No doubt these words of Lorca still offend certain Spanish sensibilities, and could conceivably land a poet in jail if he wrote them today.

Furthermore, an exhibition called ‘Political prisoners in Spain’ has recently been shut down by the authorities in Madrid, while a book about cocaine smuggling in Galicia which mentions a PP mayor originally convicted for involvement, but absolved on appeal, has been banned.

As with Valtonyc’s case, keeping these subjects from public attention does not appear to have been the primary purpose of the censorship. We live in the age of the Internet. The BBC exhibited the photos to the world and the book was soon selling ten copies a minute on Amazon. It seems to be part of a wider policy of drawing battle lines between patriots and traitors, which takes the sting out of ongoing prosecutions imperiling the PP elite.

Financial irregularities also feature in the affairs of politicians from the PDeCAT, the centre-right party of the Catalan bourgeois, and historical ally of the PP, who are late converts to the independence cause. But the number of PP politicians that have been investigated for corruption in recent times is staggering. This includes a scandal involving a large number of high level PP politicians in Valencia in 2016.

Notably, in this region, neighbouring Catalonia, Valencian, a dialect of Catalan, is widely spoken. The kingdom of Valencia was historically within the realm of Aragon. Although Valencians have always been wary of the big brother in Barcelona, a discredited PP could leave room for the ‘contagion’ of Catalan separatism to spread. The distraction of a confrontation with Barcelona takes the heat off corrupt officials.

It is also instructive that the Valencia branch of the Popular Party (PP), under the leadership of one-time premier Francisco Camps, played a determining role in ensuring Mariano Rajoy’s survival at the helm of the national party in 2008, when he lost a general election for a second time to the Socialist Party. Ever since, Rajoy has offered stout defence to a supporter who was at the helm of a region that became a byword for corruption.

Corruption is far from being restricted to the provinces. The Madrid branch of the PP was raided in connection with the Púnica ring, also in 2016, which is alleged to have unlawfully awarded as much as €250 million in public contracts to beneficiaries in return for bribes. The origin of the Operation Púnica investigation was the discovery of Swiss bank accounts held by, among others Francisco Granados, once the right-hand man to Esperanza Aguirre the former President of the Madrid region. It is telling that Swiss banking authorities, rather than an internal investigation, reported: ‘aggravated money-laundering operations’. This compelled an investigation leading to a trial in 2017 involving 37 suspects.

Franscisco Correa, a businessman at the heart of the scandal allegedly liked to be known as ‘Don Vito’, after the character played by Marlon Brando in The Godfather, making his protestation that he did not realise he was committing any crimes ring rather hollow.

The confrontation between Barcelona and Madrid has been brewing for some time in a football-obsessed country. Rather than acting as a lightening rod to diffuse tensions, the morbo rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona FC fuels hatred. The success of Barcelona infuriates Madridistas, and vice versa, explaining the outlandish sums both sides began to spend on players, even as the Economic Crisis was in full swing.

It also might explain why the former Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola, a supporter of Catalan separatism, has been harassed by the Spanish authority. His private jet was boarded by police, apparently in search of exiled former Catalan leader Carles Puidgemont. Also, a car in which Guardiola’s ten-year-old daughter was travelling was stopped and searched by Police.

Sides are being chosen. The apparently centrist Ciudadanos which claims to disavow nationalism is increasingly eager to assert its ‘Spanish’ credentials. The leader of that party Albert Rivera was recently photographed with a Spanish flag wristband, which was hardly an unintentional gesture. He has also expressed the uncompromising view that ‘putschists can never be part of any negotiation‘, sticking to the falsehood that separatists are violent insurrectionists. The Spanish Socialist Party have been similarly spineless, supporting the ban on the recent exhibition on political prisoners.

Image: Hector Castells

Spain is still coping with the legacy of the Economic Crisis, and the introduction of the euro which substantially drove up the price of living. Youth unemployment now stands at levels close to 50%, and entrenched poverty co-exists with fabulous wealth. Populist nationalism, on both sides, distracts attention from day to day concerns, cloaking the real inequities and corruption at work. But the authoritarian sentiments expressed by politicians and judges associated with the PP are especially worrying. The idea they are defending democracy represents an Orwellian inversion.

Fellow Europeans must pay greater attention to the erosion of civil liberties and the Rule of Law in Spain, perhaps registering their disapproval by avoiding travelling and doing business with Spanish regions that support the PP. Pressure can be brought to bear on home governments to isolate the Spanish government in Europe, until negotiations begin and liberation of political prisoners occurs. Perhaps the territorial integrity of Spain can still be saved: national break-ups are rarely achieved without significant bloodshed, and often regretted afterwards. After all, as Samuel Johnson noted: ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’.

Frank Armstrong is the Content Editor of Cassandra Voices. You can find an archive of his published work here.

Feature Image: Hector Castells

March 1, 2018
The Late Risers’ Manifesto

Automation in a variety of sectors could liberate millions from mind-numbing labour. But despite technological advances workers’ earnings have stagnated since the 1990s, while the rich have grown seriously richer, as we face an unemployment cliff. A powerful remedy to the impending obsolescence of many types of work, and grotesque inequality, could be the introduction of universal basic income. This would provide an unconditional payment to every citizen sufficient to avert poverty, providing an opportunity for individual flourishing, to the ultimate benefit of society. Another appropriate response would be for the law to require all companies to register a defined social purpose, beyond simply the exploitation of opportunity for profit. That way the dynamism of entrepreneurship might be harnessed for the common good.

With irresistible force the alien sound of an alarm bleeds into my dreamscape. A hand shoots out clumsily in search of the offending contraption – an aged radio alarm clock spilling the flotsam and jetsam of morning news. Woe is this man on a chilly January morning in Dublin! Then silence, as a finger brings a relieving click to the harangues.

I hide in the womb of my duvet, cowering before the frigid lash of cold air beyond the covers. Plea bargaining begins in earnest: ‘Another hour or two won’t make a difference’; ‘You aren’t productive in the morning anyway’; until finally the imperial self asserts: ‘To hell with this, I am going back to sleep’.

In response my whole being softens at the unexpected leniency, eyelids resume a stately repose, the pulse slows, and agitation of thought gives way to a free roaming imagination in slumber.

I have been resisting proverbial alarm clocks all my life, whether calling me to school, employment or binding exercise regime. I bridle – like other independent-minded people I know – at outside agencies determining my hours of sleep.

Last year, I was put on my mettle when I heard Leo Varadkar’s glib announcement on taking office that he wanted to be a Taoiseach for early risers. Like those guardians of the Ancient Roman Republic I sensed a Rubicon being crossed into my home territory by a recalcitrant general. The battle between dream and reality had been joined, and I would carry the Late Risers’ Manifesto into the affray.

It is out of stillness – not forcing our thoughts – that creation emerges. Silently, we assemble meaning, deconstruct artifice and forge originality. Brother David Steindl-Rast puts it thus: ‘Communication out of silence is true communication. All else is chitchat.’

I imagine internal remonstrances are not entertained in the intimacy of Leo Varadkar’s chamber. Excuses for softness, or indulgence of loitering are given short shrift. More likely: ‘Where is my singlet? I need to look sharp for the weekly vlog.’ He wastes no time on idle speculation, vacant imagination is held in check. The ephemera of newscast is devoured. Now attendants are called for. Primed for purpose – carpe diem – he seizes the day.

From workout to workday: the life and times of Taoiseach Varadkar. Photograph: Laura Hutton/PA Wire, https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.3315569.1512416086!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_685/image.jpg

II

Leo styles himself a liberal, preferring the state to leave the individual alone, a commendable notion for many situations, but not so where this allows accumulation of vast wealth by a small minority. Economic liberalism is predicated on a shaky assumption that success, measured in money, sex or fame, derives from a single-minded focus on hard work. Such fortune cookie philosophy would explain his veneration for the alarm clock, and attention to scapegoating ‘welfare cheats’ while a minister.

It’s a grand delusion that early rising and hard work make dreams a reality, at its extreme recalling the banner greeting Auschwitz inmates: arbeit met frei ,‘work will set you free’. A devotion to labour for its own sake is misplaced: it can have the effect of dulling the mind.

Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, asserted that the tedium of monotonous industrial tasks would render anyone ‘stupid and narrow-minded’; maintaining that the torpor of repetitive labour renders an individual incapable ‘of relishing or bearing a part in rational conversation’, or ‘conceiving generous, noble or tender sentiment’. He asserted that this would come in the way of ‘any just judgment concerning even the ordinary duties of private life.’

The Adam Smith Monument in Edinburgh.

Over the course of the last century especially, workers, including those engaged in monotonous ‘unskilled’ work, joined forces to win a series of improvements to their conditions. These included ample leisure time, giving scope for many among the proletariat to enjoy a reasonable standard of living. This permitted recreation along with access to higher education, a decent life followed for most of us in Western Europe. The decades after World War II are known as Les Trente Glorieuses in France and Il Miracolo Economico in Italy, as salaries kept pace with labour productivity. In large part this was down to the political clout of the Left, including Communist parties.

But these developments have given way to what is widely regarded as a Neoliberal Order. Since the 1990s real wages have stagnated, while private, and often public, debts have spiralled, with the wealth of a few expanding grotesquely. Tellingly, whereas in the 1950s the CEO of General Motors, then the model of a successful US business, was paid 135 times more than assembly-line workers, fifty years later the CEO of Walmart earned 1,500 times as much as an ordinary employee. Essentially, efficiencies enabled by new technologies are enriching those at the apex of corporations.

Unions, which were vital for bringing workers’ rights, are now in retreat. Those that remain often only represent employees in privileged positions. A chasm below an unemployment cliff looms in front of us, with little opposition to the new world order.

III

These developments are a feature of a technological revolution, especially in communications with the advent of the Internet, which is shattering a short-lived, post-Cold War consensus, and shifting the economic substrate. Moreover, the world wide web has rendered words, video and music virtually uncommodifiable, wreaking havoc upon the livelihoods of independent-minded writers, musicians and others artists, who struggle to share fresh approaches to life.

Automation looms in a host of industries which will further enhance ‘labour productivity’, at the expense of labour, and to the benefit of capital. The graphic below illustrates what has occurred in Ireland since the 1960s: from the 1990s productivity ceased to be passed on to workers.

Irish productivity per worker v. real wages since 1960. Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/david-mcwilliams-why-ireland-s-growing-economy-isn-t-making-you-richer-1.3327231

Our present disorder is comparable to the expansion of the Roman Republic in the first century BCE, when territories to the West and East fell to generals such as Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. These charismatic consuls pillaged unprecedented loot, bringing enormous prestige and popularity that led to an oligarchic triumvirate. This gave way to the Roman Empire in 49BCE, under Julius Caesar.

Today, we have our own benign despots of Big Data, whose loot would make an emperor blush. Their algorithms convey us from purchase to purchase, intruding ever more into our inner-most thoughts. Most worryingly, the independence of voting intentions are being severely undermined by sophisticated (anti-) social media devices.

At the outset of a dizzying technological revolution a small number of individuals wield unaccountable power, and as time passes the freedom of the Internet recedes. Just as the Celtic tribes of Gaul cowered before the ingenuity of Roman legions, structures of democratic government – states and transnational bodies – melt before the tortoise formations of the corporations, and their often solipsistic commanders. Of whom it might be said:

The sense that he was greater than his kind
Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind
By gazing on its own exceeding light[i]

As in another age where the value of men was assigned in conquest, a capacity to appeal to a wide public with a new Internet tool, whether useful or not, has brought mind-boggling fortunes to the founders and shareholders of Google, Facebook, Instagram and the rest. There are few safeguards against truly villainous characters concentrating unassailable political power through vast fortunes. The descent of the Roman Empire into corruption and excess should be a warning.

Just as Johannes Gutenberg was buried in an unmarked grave while others profited from his invention of the printing press, opportunism rather than ingenuity tends to be rewarded under current economic structures; as with the phenomenon of Trump, who recalls the fiddling Emperor Nero himself. This acknowledged master of the soundbite is the product of inherited wealth, and the redoubtable political nous of Steve Bannon, who recognised the impending obsolescence of the American worker.

Yet it takes an outlier such as Bannon – whose final solutions I deplore – to lay down a challenge to our New Age consuls: ‘They’re too powerful. I want to make sure their data is a public trust. The stocks would drop two-thirds in value.’ Where are the mainstream liberals we might ask?

One such, Leo Varadkar, offers no opposition to the current order. Indeed, he unashamedly promotes dominant corporations in Ireland, through low, or non-existent, corporation taxation, which has long been justified by narrow national self-interest. We had an ‘Ireland First’ doctrine here long before Trump invented America’s.

The Irish state has been reduced to the role of croupier at a casino table where the super-rich trouser their winnings without being required to even tip the attendants. So obsequious is the Irish government that the award of an enormous windfall to the exchequer of the Apple tax bill is being resisted: ‘Would sir like to cash his chips in now or later?’.

IV

The impending obsolescence of much unskilled work may provide an opportunity for a fuller flourishing of homo sapiens. Liberation from tedious tasks, such as driving and manufacturing, should provide scope for the development of the “generous, noble and tender” sentiments referred to by Adam Smith. These resources may be shared with the Global South in time.

A powerful remedy to our present inequalities would be for wealthy federations such as Europe and the United States to introduce a guarantee of universal basic income: an unconditional payment sufficient for every citizen to avoid poverty. It could offer an opportunity for individual fulfillment in various domains, ultimately to the benefit to society. This would require, however, most states to improve educational and cultural facilities, which can be financed by effective taxation of assets, and simplification of codes.

An often parasitic financial industry must be regulated and taxed effectively, while the sustenance of life: especially a roof over one’s head, nutritious food, and public transport, must all become affordable; if not the cheap air travel to which we have grown accustomed. In many respects a Communist ideal, but with the major difference that the originality and drive of the entrepreneur should be harnessed

The Financial Crisis of the past decade originated in failings within the banking system, unconnected to what were, in fact, increasing efficiencies simultaneously occurring in the real economy. Rethinking economics in its wake involves questioning theoretical limitations on fiscal stimuli. The value we ascribe money currency is a product of the human imagination, and governments possess a singular capacity to generate more of it through expenditure.

Recent experience indicates that it is possible to expand the supply of money through our fiat currencies, without generating inflation. Thus austerity measures, which generally affect the poorest disproportionately are generally both unnecessary, and counter-productive. Optimum allocation of government resources should involve a weighting towards provision of basic necessities, which usually sees money being spent within a local economy.

Aligning policy to the basic needs of the population should be the role of democratic government, but this is often derailed by special interests. Socio-economic rights can be enshrined in European treaties so as to avoid a repeat of the disgraceful impoverishment of ordinary Greek people during the Crisis. But government expenditure must avoid the rampant inefficiency and careerism often found in the state sector, where people often stay in jobs out of fear.

The great error, and folly, of ‘Bannonism’, which Trump seized on for his peculiar policy of ‘America first’, is to assume that nation-states, even one the size of America, can mount barriers insulating them from the rest of the world. The racist idea of a chosen people singularly entitled to the good life is the source of much of the conflict in this world. We may respond positively to collective identities derived from mythology and literature, but these are imaginary concepts and ought to be acknowledged as such, rather than merged nonsensically with notions of biological inheritance. We are one people.

That’s my Steve.

V

One objection to the idea of basic income might stem from a pessimistic assessment that if not spurred by a need to work, homo sapiens will indulge his vices, especially excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol. Yet it is apparent that the oblivion of intoxication is associated with the end of the working week in jobs that do not inspire. It is also apparent that a sense of worthlessness generates excess, often self-destructive.

A legal right to economic security would take much of the fear, and even boredom, out of life, while affording the possibility for many to follow their dreams. The pursuit of money as an end in itself, is a lust for power held in common with the warlords of yore. Such moguls are a rare breed requiring containment (who in their right mind would have the motivation to become a billionaire?), and perhaps even compassion.

Naturally, many of us enjoy the regularity and community of daily work. That is nothing to be ashamed of, and there are numerous roles which will survive the technological onslaught, preserving the satisfaction derived from tasks well done. Home-makers, farmers, carers, and teachers of all kinds will always be required. The pleasure of craftsmanship and joint enterprise can be enhanced, so as to generate greater pride in work. Goods produced in an ethical and sustainable manner should be encouraged through targeted subsidisation aimed at reducing waste.

Technology professionals are particularly prized in our economy, and their continued usefulness is assured. Many wish to devote their talents towards altruistic goals, rather than work for vampire corporations, which exploit people and the Earth. The model of the open source linux operating system – such I avail of in this programme as I write – shows how a spirit of cooperation endures to make technology a collective resource.

We might also contemplate a radical shift in company law. The inherent danger of profit-seeking corporations was once widely recognised. Thus, between 1720 and 1825 it was a criminal offence to start a company in England, during a period of rapid economic expansion. In the United States until the nineteenth century there were two competing ideas regarding the purpose of companies: the first involved those with charters restricted to the pursuit of objectives in the public interest, such as canal building; the other regime issued charters of a general character, allowing companies to engage in whatever business proved profitable.

The latter category emerged triumphant, divorced from responsibility to fellow citizens, and often a unaccountable abstraction with separate legal personality. By altering the nature of the company under law we may continue to harness the thrusting energy of entrepreneurship for positive ends.

Acquisition of wealth is not the be-all and end-all for most of us, especially if basic needs are met. But we may still have a real dedication to what we do. Changes in company law requiring any company to have a public interest purpose contained in its articles and memoranda of association could prove hugely beneficial.

VI

Human creativity is manifest in a wide variety of fields. We may discover different vocations throughout our lives, some economically productive, others seemingly desultory, but perhaps crucial to individual development at particular junctures in life. The technologies we have developed should allow many of us to indulge our passions, which can ultimately be to the benefit of all, if creativity and invention are deployed in the right direction.

For many of us, the orthodox structure of the working day is unsatisfactory, and diligence occurs in pursuit of self-ordained objectives, rather than via external imposition This may seem like the privilege of an avant-garde, who tend to have enjoyed educational privileges, but many are increasingly imperiled by current economic structures, and wish to stand apart from what amounts to a conspiracy promoting the purchase of property.

We might draw wisdom from the lifestyle of the early modern craftsman, who was not beholden to a dictatorial clock, which has cast its shadow over the working day since the Industrial Revolution. Households would retire for a few hours after dusk, waking some time later for an hour or two, before taking what was referred to as a second sleep until morning. During this interlude, people would relax, ponder their dreams, or perhaps make love. Others would engage in activities like sewing, chopping wood, or reading, relying on the light of the moon, or oil lamps.

Nor was the working week set in stone, and the seasons would dictate the extent of one’s labour. Naturally, the number of burghers who dragged themselves out of a generalised misery at that time was limited, but those managing to do so could operate in tune with their own rhythms, not the demands of the omnipotent factory owner who emerged ascendant after the Industrial Revolution. In many respects the cooperative nature of linux programming represents a return to the model of the craftsman, as Richard Sennett has argued.

VII

The level of poverty we permit in our superficially developed societies is, simply, unconscionable. Insecurity and fear afflict far more than those living in destitution, and are the silent forces that drive us to the edge of reason. We have our winners and losers, but the number in the former category has declined considerably in recent decades, as the technological race stretches out the field.

Just as the Roman Empire grew out of economic imbalances resulting from conquest, our own societies confront unassailable capital, which feeds a delusion that chosen people can be saved from barbarian hordes.

The possibilities for homo sapiens are boundless. But we require basic safeguards to flourish. Companies can operate for the benefit of society as a whole, harnessing the dynamism of the entrepreneur, and working cooperatively as the craftsman once did. Let us avoid the fate of the Roman Republic, and prosper together.

[i] Percy Bysshe Shelley, Julian and Maddalo, (1819).

Frank Armstrong is the content editor of Cassandra Voices, www.frankarmstrong.ie.

Featured Image: Daniele Idini.

February 1, 2018
UK Unwritten Constitution brews Brexit Confusion

It is necessary for him who lays and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.
Niccolo Machiavelli

In the summer of 2007 I agreed to teach a law course to visiting American students in Lady Margaret Hall (LMH), Oxford. Preparing this, for the first time I seriously engaged with the rather paradoxical notion of an ‘unwritten’ UK constitution. I argue now that this leads to a destructive uncertainty in the wake of the Brexit Referendum.

Oxford University is composed of thirty-eight colleges of various distinctions and reputations. Founded in 1878 as the first women’s college, LMH’s central redbrick quadrangle is an inspired recreation of French Renaissance architecture. The dreamy grounds adjoining stretch to the River Cherwell, Weeping Willows conjuring a pre-Raphaelite impression of forlorn Victorian damsels.

The grounds of Lady Margaret Hall.

Now accepting both genders, illustrious alumni include Benazir Bhutto, Nigella Lawson and, more incongruously, Michael Gove, the current Secretary of State for Environment, and Brexiteer-in-chief. More commendably he was also the political assassin of Boris Johnson. His dismissal of expertise during the Referendum debate infuriated staunchly-Remain Oxford, and ran contrary to his alma mater’s motto ‘Souvent me Souviens’, ‘I remember often’.

The UK legal system resembles our own, save in one crucial respect. Apart from during a brief period between 1653-57, after the English Civil War (when Oxford was a temporary Royal capital) neither England, nor the United Kingdom from 1707, has been governed under a written constitution.

The political philosopher James Tully describes a constitution as: ‘the cluster of “supreme” or “essential” principles, rules and procedures to which other laws, institutions and governing authorities within the association are subject.’

The absence of such an outline clearly setting out these “supreme” and “essential” principles accounts for many of the difficulties of the UK government arising from the victory of the ‘No’ side in last year’s referendum. No fixed domestic constitutional provision guides how the UK’s executive should proceed in the wake of a referendum vote. Indeed, the first such poll only took place in 1972, when a landslide vote approved UK accession to the European Community. The constitutional implications of a referendum remain unclear.

This has put Her Majesty’s government in a state of persistent confusion. The bee in her bonnet is that decisions are vulnerable to legal challenge. It took a High Court decision last November to compel Theresa May to secure parliament’s approval to activate Article 50. In that instance the Lord Chief Justice said: ‘the most fundamental rule of the UK constitution is that parliament is sovereign’.

Parliamentary sovereignty for the moment, however, co-exists with the supremacy of European law. Moreover, eminent jurists such as Lord Bingham have also argued that the UK is also subject to a Rule of Law beyond any decision of the majority in the House of Commons, which uses a first-past-the-post electoral system that effectively excludes minority views, rubber-stamped by the House of Lords.

Furthermore, residual powers of the monarchy reveal archaisms at the heart of the ‘unwritten’ constitution. This includes the idea of Conventions, which do not have the character of ‘hard’ law. One such is that of a reigning monarch calling on the leader of the largest party in the House of Commons to form a government. Conventions are, however, a slippery constitutional instrument, and the system relies on the sanity and decency of the monarch, who is above the law.

In a speech on November 13th last year Brexit Secretary David Davis sought to provide bring more clarity to the issue. He said MPs in the Commons, and peers in the House of Lords, would be given an opportunity to approve any agreement with the EU, but would have no say in the case of no deal, or power to compel the government to reopen talks.

Parliamentary sovereignty is thus seemingly upheld, though legislators are given no discretion or meaningful oversight. This division of powers between the branches of government – the executive exercising its prerogative to negotiate a treaty with foreign states before it is placed before the legislature which brings it into law – may be consistent with other political systems. But the point is that in the UK this has to be specified.

Moreover, the constitutional status of the Good Friday Agreement is unclear; as discussions around a ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ border unfold it is worth bearing in mind that this the agreement operates as a simple act of parliament under UK law, which could be repealed by a majority, as opposed to a more durable constitutional provision in Ireland.

An amateur sporting organisation would hardly tolerate its managing agreement and fundamental members’ entitlements to float in such fashion, and it is surely inappropriate for a modern democracy. Ancient sources such as Magna Carta are cited as formative on the UK Constitution, but without a definitive text any principles are nebulous, and ephemeral.

There are of course advantages to constitutional flexibility, as Tom Paine’s wrote: ‘The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of tyrannies.’ Thus, the Second Amendment to the US Constitution ossifies the demand of a frontier society for unrestricted access to firearms. But at least the US Constitution to some degree restrains presidential excesses. And Paine also declared: ‘government without a constitution is a power without right.’

The Irish constitution also bears anachronisms, but provides a stable managing agreement that is the hallmark of most modern democracies. The roles of the three branches of government, judiciary, executive and legislature are defined, even if, like in the UK, the absence of a clear distinction between the executive and legislature places more power than is desirable in the hands of the Taoiseach. Bunreacht na hEireann is also far simpler to amend than the US Constitution.

The Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Crotty confirmed that any additions to European treaties should be placed before the Irish people in a referendum, rather than requiring a simple majority in Dail Eireann. This has brought considerable discomfort to the executive, especially the two referenda required to pass the Nice and Lisbon Treaties.

But the sovereignty of the people is upheld by requiring a majority of voters to approve any constitutional realignment through a referendum. This also involves a majority in Dail voting to place any such choice before the people. Importantly, these mechanisms are all laid out clearly in the Irish Constitution.

No such incremental approach was adopted by the UK – or most other European countries for that matter. Instead, David Cameron asked the bald question: ‘take it or leave it’. In its wake unprecedented instability reigns in a country that takes pride in its venerable institutions.

Central to the perpetuation of this legal disorder has been the University of Oxford, which counts all post-war prime ministers among its graduates, apart from Winston Churchill, Jim Callaghan, John Major (none of whom attended university), and Scottish Gordon Brown.

A dominant consensus has been that the ruling class knows best, delaying and stifling constitutional reforms. To justify this, conservatives point to centuries of stable government. But this has had much to do with geographic insularity, and often ruthless suppression of internal dissent.

The Brexit crisis reveals a wider malaise – of a society in conflict with itself after a great empire has receded – now unsure of what it represents and nostalgic for a departed greatness. This awakens the need for a modern UK constitution to regulate the branches of government and enshrine fundamental rights after this inexorable Brexit. Inevitably, this will provide scope for expertise.

Frank Armstrong is content editor of Cassandra Voices and lives in Dublin, www.frankarmstrong.ie.

Featured Image: Daniele Idini

February 1, 2018