Cassandra Voices

Category: History

  • Public Intellectual Series: Michel Foucault

    I wrote what follows prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, and have been prompted to re-read all of Michel Foucault’s work, including his lectures and digressions. It seems to me that the following is worth emphasizing:

    1. The concept of the Panopticon, Foucault borrowed from Jeremy Bentham is increasingly prominent in the wake of this virus that has accelerated the introduction of a system of mass surveillance.
    2. Inappropriate behavior is being re-defined to encompass ordinary sociability, while once cherished liberties are easily forgotten. A state of derealisation is upon us.
    3. Madness may now be redefined, leading to detention under draconian (anti-terror) laws for anyone perceived as deviant, subversive or even non-conformist in an ever-narrowing consensus. People who do not behave, act or dress in a specific way are now labelled ‘mad’. People who oppose draconian laws are ‘mad’. Maybe even human rights lawyers will be locked up.
    4. The media and other vectors of public opinion manage the message to ensure compliance and control.
    5. The concept of punishment has been internalized as a regime of prolonged social distancing and self-isolation undermines humanistic instincts. An ever more compliant and fearful population will welcome the Panopticon.

    David Langwallner, July, 2020.

    Introduction

    I have previously quoted a passage from Noam Chomsky, which acutely surveys the post-structuralist origins of our present Post-Truth condition. These words are worth recalling once again:

    There are lots of things I don’t understand – say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest — write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of ‘theory’ that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won’t spell it out.[i]

    A point worth emphasis from the thinly disguised contempt he displays towards this deceitful movement is Chomsky’s regard for Michel Foucault as “different from the rest” – a superior calibre of intellect to the rest. A hedged concession admittedly, but one I happen to share.

    Alone among Post-Modernists, Foucault’s methodology was empiricist and historicist. Rather than relying on incomprehensible prose and bizarre generalisation he adopted inductive reasoning. As an historian of ideas, we don’t simply find him inventing absurd abstractions, but analysing real, existing data.

    Foucault’s ‘critical philosophy’ undermines universalist claims by exhibiting how they are the outcome of contingent historical forces, and are not scientifically grounded realities

    Madness and Civilisation

    In Madness and Civilisation, (1961, Librairie Plon) Foucault examines conventional understandings of mental illness, arguing madness and reason are categories first developed in Enlightenment thought. He sees madness as a product of the Age of Reason, the excluded ‘Other’ against which reason defines itself.

    His thesis is that the practice of confining the mad is a transformation of the medieval practice of confining lepers in lazar houses, an institutional structure of confinement already in place when the modern concept of madness as a disease emerged, even if confining those defined as such to institutions was a break with the past.

    Focusing on this transitional period, Foucault argues that in its infancy, or nascence, reason is a concept that defines itself in opposition to an ‘other’ of madness.

    As he explains:

    What is originate is the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason; reason’s subjugation of non-reason, wresting from it its truth as madness, crime, or disease, derives explicitly from this point.

    Thus truth of reason is found where madness arrives in place of non-reason, and differences are defined in terms of oppositions. Thus, the meaning of reason is defined by the meaning of madness.

    Foucault argues that if we are to insist upon reason we must not be mad, and so protect ourselves from what we are not. He notes that the confinement of the mad in asylums is a product of the mid-seventeenth century, and that it is no coincidence that the process of confinement developed in conjunction with the Age of Reason. Thus madness operated as an ‘other’ to reason, and as products of Enlightenment thought.

    For Foucault: ‘[M]madness was an invention, a product of social relations and not an independent reality.’[ii]

    Of course that point can be expanded to our present age, with concepts of rationality and ideas on mental health shifting, augmented by social media, message management and outright thought control. The paradigm shift is towards an all-consuming neo-liberalism, and conformity reconfiguring human identity itself. Soon, I fear, even moderate liberalism might be deemed mad, recalling Chile in the 1970s, or even 1930s Germany.

    In my practice as a London-based barrister, increasingly, I find clients in disassociated and decrealised states. Social alienation is leading many to perceive themselves as passive onlookers in lives not truly their own. The ills of social dissatisfaction and structural curtailment of achievement leading to moderate or even severe depression.

    The unrealisable expectations of consumerism and its unattainable objects is creating individual neurosis and psychosis. In essence, pervasive neo-liberalism fosters madness.

    Forms of social sanitation and indeed sexual sanitation coupled with an excessive political correctness are thus criminalising deviant behaviour. We live at a time when judgment on those who are essentially normal is handed down by deviants; a spectator democracy where people have lost ownership of their lives. It’s as if we are in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre of Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World.

    Discipline and Punish

    In his other crucial text Discipline and Punish, (Gallimard, 1975) Foucault examines punishment through the ages, arguing that torture has simply been reconceived.

    He raises ever more pressing doubts about the hidden costs of a penal style that avoids visible coercion, instead seeking to transform ‘the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations.’ Thus efforts to institute ‘less cruelty, less suffering, more gentleness, more respect, more humanity,’ have, according to Foucault, had the perverse effect of reinventing the entirety of modern society along the lines of a prison, imposing ever subtler, and insidiously punishing discipline. Not just on convicts, but also on soldiers, on workers, on students. Even the various professionals trained to supervise disciplinary institutions are not spared its effects. Corrective technologies of the individual have been refined, producing a double effect: a soul to be known and a subjection to be maintained.

    At the core of Foucault’s picture of modern ‘disciplinary’ society are three primary techniques of control: hierarchical observation; normalising judgment; and the examination. Thus, to a great extent, control over people is exerted merely by observing them.

    Further, modern disciplinary control is often concerned with a person’s failure to meet a required standard and in order to correct deviant behaviour. The impetus is not revenge, but reform, encouraging the individual to live by the dominant norms of society. Thus the phenomenon of normalisation is intrinsic to our society, e.g. national educational standards, standards-driven approval for drugs et al. It is encountered especially in control over whatever is perceived as excessively libertarian, including sexually ‘promiscuous’ lifestyles.

    The norm itself may of course be perverse.

    Foucault contends that as people are examined in schools and hospitals control is exercised over them in hierarchical fashion, with the application of normalising judgment. This is what he terms power/knowledge, which combines into a unified whole: ‘the deployment of force and the establishment of truth.’

    Further, force or control elicits ‘truth’ from those undergoing examination in conjunction with exercising controls over their behaviour. Knowledge is thus an instrument of power, and the goals of power and the goals of knowledge cannot be separated from knowing we control, and in controlling what we know.

    Yet the problem often lies with the knowers who know, but do not turn the lens on themselves.

    Google and Facebook now exercise control, not in top down fashion, but through a levelling user-generated mediocrity, where personal data is mined in order to influence consumer and political choices in a networked society, as they remould what it means to be an individual.

    The Panopticon

    In Discipline and Punish, Foucault is heavily influenced by Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon. Bentham imagined a glass prison in which prisoners were under continuous surveillance, and argued that by applying perpetual inspection to prisons, schools, factories and hospitals one might harmoniously co-ordinate self-interest and social duty. To Bentham this would lead to ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number,’ even if are turned into automatons: ‘Call them soldiers, call them monks, call them machines: so they were but happy ones, I should not care.’

    Bentham’s Panopticon is, for Foucault, an ideal architectural model for modern disciplinary power in that each inmate is visible to a central power, and can be seen at any time. With inmates assuming their every act is witnessed, control is exercised internally.

    Foucault suggests that Bentham’s ideas, rather than being fanciful, have become paradigmatic in modern society. Unlike the power of sovereignty, which was often exercised violently, the power of discipline is mild, insidiously humane as it is exercised through discreet surveillance rather than overt coercion. Such supervision, according to Foucault, dissociates power from the body, leaving us compliant and normalised – ready to take orders from above. The effect was an ‘automatic functioning of power’ – ‘A perfection of power’ that tended, paradoxically, to render its actual exercise useless.

    Foucault elaborates on this in a 1978 interview:

    In my book on the birth of the prison I tried to show how the idea of a technology of individuals, a certain type of power, was exercised over individuals in order to tame them, shape them and guide their conduct as a kind of strict correlative to the birth of a liberal type of regime. Beyond the prison itself, a cerebral style of reasoning, focused on punishable deviations from the norm, thus came to inform a wide variety of modern institutions. In schools, factories, and army barracks, authorities carefully regulated the use of time (punishing tardiness, slowness, the interruption of tasks) activity (punishing inattention, negligence a lack of zeal); speech (punishing idle chatter, insolence, profanity); the body (punishing poor posture, dirtiness, lack in stipulated reflexes) and finally sexuality (punishing impurity, indecency, abnormal behaviour).

    He concludes Discipline and Punish with the view that:

    In a system of surveillance there is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by internalising to the point that he is his own supervisor, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost.

    Bentham’s idea for a prison was only occasionally adopted and ultimately found to be inhumane. Kilmainham in Dublin stands as an isolated example. To penetrate its inner sanctum is to see how, from every vantage, the prisoner is being watched. This time of domination by (anti-)social media is not so very different.

    Truman Show

    Now even a propensity for mildly deviant behaviour is under the overarching supervision of Big Brother – the virtual reality Truman Shows of our daily existences. We have become pieces on a chessboard controlled by the all-powerful corporate influencers, the ultra-rich and the bureaucratic state. These are the worst of times that Foucault saw coming.

    For Foucault the exercise of power in modern societies is complex – domination and rights are not only derived from the power of a sovereign institution of subjects, but are also the product of the lines of force arising from social relations. Subjects are not just determined from above, but are constituted within the system. Thus he explicitly rejects the positivist/sovereign as the source of all-encompassing authority in our society:

    My aim has been to give due weight … to the fact of domination to expose but its latent nature and its brutality. I then wanted to show not only how right is, in a general way, the instrument of domination – which scarcely needs saying – but also show the extent to which, and the forms in which, right, (not simply the laws but the whole complex of apparatuses, institutions and regulations responsible for their application) transmits and puts in motion relations that are not relations of sovereignty, but of domination. Moreover, in speaking of domination I do not have in mind that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over another, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society. Not the domination of the king in his central position, therefore, but that of his subjects in their mutual relations: not the uniform edifice of sovereignty, but the multiple forms of subjugation that have a place and function within the social organism … In other words, rather than ask ourselves how the sovereign appears to use in lofty isolation. We should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts … We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects. This would be the exact opposite of Hobbes project in Leviathan, and of that, I believe, of all jurists for whom the problem is the distillation of the single will – or rather, the constitution of a unitary, singular body, animated by a spirit of sovereignty … I would say that we should direct us researches on the nature of power not towards the juridical edifice of sovereignty, the state apparatuses and the ideologies which accompany them, but towards domination and the material operators of power, towards forms of subjection and the inflections and utilisations of their localised systems, and towards strategic apparatuses. We must eschew the model of Leviathan in the study of power. We must escape from the limited field of juridical sovereignty and state institutions, and instead base our analysis of power on the study of the techniques and tactics of domination. 

    Critical Appraisal

    William Davies applies this to an understanding of law and politics:

    Foucault suggests that we abandon the juridical analysis of power, which has emphasised the notion of sovereignty. If we think about law as something which is in itself powerful, something which supplies the answers to disputes and orders social behaviour according to the intentions of a powerful body of lawmakers and judges, we are, perhaps missing an important point. This is simply that many other systems of power, many other systems of meaning and value in society, interact with the legal system. It is not just institutionalised law which says no, or which orders behaviour, or which punishes us for our transgressions. There are, for instance, a multitude of social prescriptions, which order behaviour and the way, we think about the world. Social norms cannot be ultimately distinguished from institutionalised law. The way that a law is applied depends on the interpretation of facts in a case, and therefore, ultimately on the social values and assumptions which go into making that interpretation. Power in the legal system cannot therefore be described simply in terms of hierarchy of people with authority to make decisions, or of laws with the potential to determine disputes: though both the hierarchy of people and that of laws certainly exist, they are shot through with social meanings and systems of relationships which cannot be reduced to one-dimensional descriptions.

    Thus what find now is no longer a top-down state leviathan, but micro-management, corporate and internet brainwashing, the regulation and management of behaviour and expectation, which is re-defining ‘appropriate’ conduct We the wretched of the earth, the ordinary citizen, the disengaged are reduced to surviving under controlled conditions in a spectator democracy. ‘We the many’ are the collective other. ‘They the few’ powerful watch over us, deciding our fate in ever subtler and more insidious ways.

    This leads to political parties becoming increasingly contorted and nugatory, and NGO’s dispersed and un-coordinated. It is not so much a democratic deficit as a democratic void, as we are reduced to deciding who watches over us.

    Foucault saw all of this clearly. His individual response was to embark on personal hedonism, which accelerated his self-destruction – a personal cri de coeur in favour of libertarianism. But this should have been tempered by greater self-discipline, as his excesses diminished his achievements and led to an early grave.

    Solipsistic Sexuality

    Nonetheless, his contextual analysis of sexuality is also of great relevance to the present age. In effect neo-liberalism leads us to focus on private development, awakening sexual libertarianism to negate the political and accentuate further disengagement. He also saw the possible return of fascism.

    But at least, as Foucault points out, social institutions and structures, being contingent, are susceptible to change. Current trends will surely will pass eventually, albeit saving oneself in the meantime is a necessity. Our existences are finite after all.

    The other option is to migrate to Iceland, before being compelled to do so:

    If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask for your transference to a sub centre- preferably to Iceland.[iii]

    [i] Noam Chomsky, ‘On Postmodernism, Theory, Fads, Etc’ no date (probably 1996), at http://199.172.47.21/lbbs/forums/ncpmlong.htm>

    [ii] James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, Simon and Schuster, New York, p 103.

    [iii] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Chatto and Windus, London, 1932 p.85

  • Jeremy Corbyn, Percy Shelley and Ireland

    The Irish media generally looks askance at Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘radical socialist manifesto.’[i] An historically warm relationship with Sinn Féin, Brexit neutrality, and lifelong commitment to the redistribution of wealth receive a cool reception in reports and commentary, while grossly inflated charges of Antisemitism within the Labour Party are threaded through articles.[ii]

    Yet the Labour leader belongs to a tradition of English radicals with an abiding sympathy for Ireland. His anti-colonial, republican and Chartist outlook has also brought commitment to the downtrodden Palestinian people, and opposition to the machinations of the arms industry in Britain – which is the second largest exporter in the world, including to dictatorships such as that ruling Saudi Arabia.[iii] Corbyn’s enduring idealism is reminiscent of the poet and radical Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).

    In fact Corbyn drew the slogan ‘we the many, they the few’ that resonated so powerfully during the 2017 General Election, from the Romantic poet, who drowned tragically off Lerici in Italy at the age of just twenty-nine.

    These lines from Shelley’s poem ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, were written in the wake of the Peterloo massacre of 1819, when cavalry charged into a crowd of over sixty thousand unarmed civilians, killing eighteen, who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. The atrocity actually led to the foundation of The Guardian newspaper, and was the subject of a Mike Leigh film in 2018.

    Shelley calls on the downtrodden people:

    Rise like Lions after slumber
    In unvanquishable number,
    Shake your chains to earth like dew
    Which in sleep had fallen on you —
    Ye are many — they are few.

    The poet’s links to Ireland extend beyond his second wife Mary Shelley’s maternal grandmother’s Ballyshannon origins; or the Irish painter Emilia Curran’s 1819 iconic portrait. Having been expelled from Oxford in 1811, after authorities discovered him to be the author of a pamphlet entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ – the first such argument printed in England – he went on to display an abiding interest in ‘John Bull’s Other island’.

    At the end of the Napoleonic War Ireland’s plight remained a vital cause for English radicals, at a time when the Irish population – in the midst of a Malthusian demographic crisis after colonisation and the introduction of the potato at the start of the seventeenth century – was almost half that of England’s. Soon after expulsion from Oxford, Shelley travelled to Dublin in 1812, along with his first wife Harriet, with whom he had just eloped.

    The young poet was greatly perturbed by the poverty and inequality greeting him in a city whose wealth and status had been greatly diminished by the Act of Union of 1801, which meant Irish M.P.s took their seats in Westminster not Dublin. He wrote: ‘I had no conception of the depth of human misery until now. The poor of Dublin are assuredly the meanest and most miserable of all.’[iv]

    His experience of Ireland appears to figure in what he described as his ‘poetic education,’ in the preface to the long poem ‘Laon and Cythna’ (1818): ‘I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war … the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds.’[v]

    The precocious nineteen-year-old addressed the Catholic Committee, containing the dying embers of the United Irishman movement, in what is now Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin. Asserting a pacifism that is also prominent throughout the current Labour leader’s career, he urged: ‘In no case employ violence, the way to liberty and happiness is never to transgress the rules of virtue and justice. Liberty and happiness are founded upon virtue and justice. If you destroy the one you destroy the other.’

    The future leader of Catholic Emancipation, Daniel O’Connell, is believed to have been at the meeting, although he may not have been present for Shelley’s speech itself. O’Connell shared a distaste for armed conflict, a view which prevailed as the mainstream approach in Irish nationalism until World War I.

    Shelley’s sympathies lay with the historically oppressed Catholic community in Ireland, just as Corbyn’s lay with Northern Irish Catholics during the Troubles. There is little doubt that Shelley would share Corbyn’s principled opposition to Trident, Britain’s thirty-billion-pound nuclear weapons programme.

    Another link between Shelley and Ireland is that he completed what is considered his most revolutionary poem ‘Queen Mab’ while holidaying on Ross Island on Killarney Lake. This strident work, which he later partly disavowed, became a standard text for English socialists, including an approving Karl Marx. In this we discover a condemnation of commerce: ‘beneath whose poison-breathing shade / No solitary virtue dares to spring.’

    Corbyn’s antipathy to big business has long antecedents, therefore, in British culture, albeit the trenchant views on the subject of Shelley’s near contemporary ‘the Father of Economics’ Adam Smith (d. 1790) are generally overlooked: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’ A suspicion of commercial self-interest in politics is well founded.

    Shelley has been an inspiration to a host of Irish writers including W.B. Yeats who claimed Shelley shaped his life,[vi] as well as Sean O’Casey who described himself as a Shelleyan Communist. Another devotee George Bernard Shaw described Shelley approvingly as: ‘a republican, a leveller, a radical of the most extreme sort.’

    Shelley was an inspiration for another of Shaw’s lifelong causes: vegetarianism,[vii] which the former laid out in an 1813 book: A Vindication of Natural Diet, although the term itself only came into being in the 1840s. Until that point anyone renouncing flesh was referred to as being a ‘Pythagorean’, after the Greek philosopher and mathematician of Antiquity, Pythagoras.

    Similarly, Jeremy Corbyn has been a vegetarian for almost fifty years. Considering the influence of the Irish livestock lobby on mainstream Irish media, this may have aroused further suspicion. Corbyn has, however, tended to play down that feature of his politics, perhaps forewarned by George Orwell’s condemnation of sandal-wearing vegetarians ‘burbling about dialectical materialism’ in The Road to Wigan Pier.[viii]

    Nonetheless, socialists such as Corbyn are stigmatised as forming part of a ‘north London, metropolitan, liberal elite’ by right-wing Populists such as the Home Secretary Priti Patel,[ix] who herself previously suggested using the possibility of food shortages in Ireland to force the E.U.’s hand over Brexit.[x] Corybn’s lifetime commitment to the redistribution of wealth, including resistance to austerity, may be the fruition of Shelleyian idealism: ‘a consciousness of good, which neither gold / Nor sordid fame, nor hope of heavenly bliss / Can purchase.’[xi]

    Corbyn, like Shelley before him, might have appeared naïve at times, including in his approach to Ireland. But he could yet emerge as the first British Prime Minister to feel genuine remorse for the damage wrought by British colonialism on Ireland. Moreover, notwithstanding the ongoing instability of the European project in the wake of Brexit, the genuine warmth he feels towards Ireland may harmonise relations between the peoples of these islands – the vast majority of whom have suffered under the yoke of tyrannical government over the course of a shared history.

    I for one dearly hope the British people “Rise like Lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number.” and vote Labour in the General Election on December 12th.

    [i] Simon Carswell, ‘It’s a means to an end – I want Brexit’, Irish Times, December 6th, 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/uk-election-it-s-a-means-to-an-end-i-want-brexit-done-1.4105840

    [ii] See, Finn McRedmond, ‘ The Labour leader seems temperamentally incapable of apologising for the anti-Semitism that has wracked his party,’ – ‘Political rot has spread from US to UK,’ Irish Times, December 6th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/political-rot-has-spread-from-us-to-uk-1.4105894:

    [iii] Dan Sabbagh, ‘UK reclaims place as world’s second largest arms exporter’, The Guardian, July 30th, 2019,  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/30/uk-reclaims-place-as-worlds-second-largest-arms-exporter

    [iv] Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘An Address to the Irish People’, 1812, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/p-b-shelleys-address-to-the-irish-people,

    [v] Author’s own recording: https://soundcloud.com/frank-armstrong-649911741/shelleys-preface-to-laon-and

    [vi] W.B. Yeats ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, 1900, http://www.yeatsvision.com/Shelley.html.

    [vii] Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Vindication of Natural Diet’, 1813, http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/shelley01.htm

    [viii] George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Part 2, 13, http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/RoadToWiganPier/wiganpierpart_13.html

    [ix] Daniel Sugarman, ‘Why I don’t think Priti Patel’s reference to “north London” was an anti-Semitic dog whistle’, October 3rd, 2019, New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/10/why-i-don-t-think-priti-patel-s-reference-north-london-was-anti-semitic-dog

    [x] Gráinne Ní Aodha, ‘Tory MP suggests using possible ‘no-deal’ food shortages to force Ireland to drop the backstop’, December 7th, 2018, https://www.thejournal.ie/brexit-threat-food-shortages-ireland-4381228-Dec2018/

    [xi] ‘P. B. Shelley, ‘Queen Mab,’ Book V

  • Public Intellectual Series: George Orwell – A Crucial Man for Our Time

    George Orwell has never been unfashionable, and is in vogue now more than ever. His writing, best represented by his many essays on a variety of subjects, rather than the more celebrated novels, presage in myriad ways the problems we face today.

    Those famous novels 1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945) are visionary works depicting totalitarian societies, but in a more significant way it is the cornucopia of themes broached in his essays that anticipate a present era of thought control.

    Orwell despised abstractions, especially nationalism, but also extremism on the left. Accordingly, in his essays we find focus on the particular and daily life. All political concerns are deemed local. Indeed, his works is identifiable as part of British tradition of empiricism with its distrust of grand ideas and gestures.

    Mumbo-Jumbo

    Orwell would have no time for the mumbo-jumbo of post-modernism and structuralism, just as he dismissed the ideological psychobabble of fascism and Communism. Instead he venerated the common sense of the ordinary person, and was deeply sensitive to how ideologies crushed the human spirit.

    Yet he was also aware of how seductive ideologies could be, anticipating what Zizek has called ‘ideological misidentification’ – that includes voting for those who will undermine your interests, as blue collar America did in electing Trump; or believing what you read in The Daily Mail about foreigners.

    Orwell is nonetheless firmly opposed to the mentality of the mob. Were he alive today, he would surely be a genuine tribune for those on the margins of society, but decidedly against the recrudescence of Populism and appeals to bigotry.

    The casual racism he despised, now so evident in many cultures including Britain, was shaped by his experiences of British colonial barbarism in Burma, as indeed was his hatred of the death penalty, invoked in his short story A Hanging (1931), which was based on personal experience.

    Orwell would definitely understand how, through social media and the machinations of Cambridge Analytical the ordinary man is manipulated – brainwashed even – by subliminal messaging and online influencers. Perhaps the docile uncritical consumerism we are creating is best represented in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian 1932 novel Brave New World (1932), a companion piece to 1984 and Animal Farm for understanding our troubled zeitgeist. Either way, both Orwell and Huxley saw what was coming.

    Throughout his writing Orwell emerges as the champion of the underdog, and zealous opponent of vulgar nationalism, whether emanating from state authorities, or the untutored blatherings of brainwashed victims.

    Orwell had no truck with popular prejudice, esteeming instead basic decency. Doubtless, he would recognise how the populace could be whipped into a mass frenzy today and vote in crypto-fascists or even for Brexit. He was sensitive to how popular decency could be corrupted by propaganda into anti-Semitism and the portrayal of Eastern Europeans as degenerates, as he addresses in Notes on Nationalism (1945).

    Uncommon beliefs

    Orwell thus is a believer in the common sense of the common man, but not popular prejudice or vulgar nationalism, or especially not the racism that spills forth from the mouths of those subjected to propaganda.

    He is prescient about how an ordinary person intuitively believes in the Rule of Law. Thus, in ‘The Lion and The Unicorn’ (1940) he argues that the English believe in law, not power. He further opines in ‘Inside The Whale’ (1940) that this stems from a lack of experience of violence and illegality: ‘With all its injustices England is still the land of habeas corpus and the overwhelming majority of English people have no experience of violence and illegality.’

    Homage to Catalonia (1938) is an account of his his Spanish sojourn fighting on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascists. There he saw clearly how extremism of both left and right has no restraints or humanitarian boundaries, and that a society morphs rapidly into lawless banditry.

    Dotty Dreamland

    The dotty dreamland of England, then and now, is suffused with moderation, incrementalism and a lack of experience of licensed thuggery. This is the basic decency Orwell finds in the novels of Charles Dickens, along with a sympathy for the underdog.

    Living in London I now recognise that the British do not seem to understand, rightly so – and certainly do not tolerate – the manipulation or abuse of law by power.

    In this, arguably, they stand alone in Europe, where we see the law used as a tool of oppression in Spain by proto-fascists, who have imprisoned those with the temerity to hold a peaceful independence referendum; not to mention the crypto-Nazi enclave of Orban’s Hungary, and with the rise of La Liga in Italy; more insidious in Ireland is the undermining of decency and corporate takeover.

    The championing of the underdog is a noticeable feature of British life, and the obligation to vindicate the rule of law against the interests of the powerful is still taken seriously, unlike in Ireland which endorses the interests of the corporations to such an extent that the state resists a tax windfall of €13 billion.

    It is not for nothing that the reasonable man test, or the notional man on the Clapham Omnibus, is intrinsic to British legalism and the Rule of Law.

    That is perhaps why the British became so resistant to the idea of their interests being undermined by faceless bureaucrats for Europe, although tragically the result of Brexit may be to deliver them into the hands of a worse set of faceless bureaucrats in the shape of the American corporatocracy.

    In ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1940) Orwell emphasises how the British are repelled by miscarriages of justice, and believe in holding power accountable, which demands impartial administration of justice by independent officials, who are not bought or compromised. This originates in patterns of independent and generally depoliticised appointment not evident in most other European jurisdictions.

    Use of language

    Orwell is highly attuned to the misuse of language. A prevalent theme is how expression should be clear and unequivocal, in a plain style emphasising the virtues of informality and flexibility. Thus he sedulously exposes techno-babble, and the notorious doublespeak encapsulated by slogans such as ‘four legs good two legs better’ from Animal Farm, which anticipate the arrival of political spin doctors. In short, he saw post-truth coming.

    This includes the fakery of our present narratives, where innocent slogans conceal and occlude a multitude of evils. So terms like ‘austerity’ or ‘fiscal stabilization’, or even ‘ethnic cleansing’, are adopted to mask individual and societal destruction.

    Similarly, the anodyne word ‘evacuation’ was used neutrally by Nazi Reinhardt Heydrich at the Wanassee Conference in 1942 to convey crimes against humanity and genocide. Today sloganing by advertisers, hucksters and snake oil salesmen of all shapes and hues are inducing a form of corporate fascism, and state-sponsored murder.

    1984 is a novel about the totalitarian left, as well as the right. Orwell had a ringside seat on the evils of both in Barcelona during The Spanish Civil War, documented brilliantly in Homage to Catalonia (1938).

    Piquant Irony

    It is a piquant irony of intellectual discourse that the left should have embraced the meandering nonsense of post structuralism from the 1960’s onwards only to see it appropriated by the alt right. Truth is not truth Donald as he must have been advised, and Mr .Giuliani echoes.

    Thus as Derrida can change meaning from one sentence to another, so can Trump or Bannon.

    In The Politics and The English Language” (1947) Orwell cauterises the elevation of grammar and syntax as indicia of anything, and focuses on the precise use of language and the avoidance of cliché, or what he terms Americanisms.

    In fact, focusing on grammatical form, at the expense of content, is the classic sign of a box-ticking pedantic and second-class intelligence, or an establishment ruse designed to avoid engagement with arguments of substance.

    The post truth universe that he saw on the horizon is a feature of most his writing. Thus, in ‘Looking Back at The Spanish Civil War’ (1942) he observes that totalitarianism denies that objective truth exists, and in ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945) he points out presciently: ‘Since nothing is ever proved or disproved, the most unmistakeable fact can be impudently denied.’

    These are tactics evident in Mr. Giuliani aforementioned denial of objective truth and Ryanair’s Mr. O’Leary denial of climate change. An approach which, by being reported on, rather than dismissed outright, is given a veneer of respectability

    It is also increasingly evident that that those in power blind themselves to their outright criminality, as long as it comes from their own side, including the Neo-Cons and Blairite proponents of just war, known euphemistically as ‘humanitarian interventions.’

    Increasingly, the true subversives among the state and corporate oligarchy inflict criminality on others with impunity. As Orwell writes in his ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945): ‘There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when our side commits it.’

    They ask: are you with us or against us? One of us, or representing the demonised and excluded Other. This is particularly prescient in an age of increasing fractiousness, intolerance and division.

    Orwell chose the middle way, however difficult that path may be. Today being reasonable is often not viable. Alas, he who shouts loudest gains most in our present distorted politics.

    The Enemies of Truth

    In ‘The Prevention of Literature’ (1946) we find Orwell revealing that the enemies of truth and freedom of thought to be press lords and bureaucrats. Then as now, and let us add for good measure include social media manipulators and multinational corporations.

    Perhaps his definitive essay is ‘How The Poor Die’ (1929), a crucial text for these times of austerity, where social supports are being steadily withdrawn. The unthinking consequences of an awful ideology, or rather a deliberately planned extermination of anyone deemed unworthy, alongside the cartelisation of wealth into ever decreasing bands, and hands.

    The focus of Orwell is of course also on secularism and the Enlightenment; the repudiation of false Christian values.

    In an essay on Jonathan Swift the author of Gulliver’s Travels he suggests the one-time Dean of St. Patricks Cathedral rejected the Christian idea of an afterlife, a view commended by Orwell. Swift himself was also highly attuned to the interests of the poor in Ireland, subjected to the excesses of Malthusian capitalism, a theme which he brilliantly parodies in his disturbing ‘A Modest Proposal’. (1729). The consumption of babies is used to highlight a meltdown in human fellowship familiar to our present time.

    So there we have it, George Orwell, dead in 1950 but not as Dead as Doornails. Right back in fashion in fact and on the money.

    Why? Well in essence his own time of totalitarianism, economic meltdown, fascism and propagandistic post-truth are replicated in our own, while his fiction, and especially his essays, are an intellectual counterweight more relevant than ever.

    Let us thus secularly worship Eric Blair, not Tony Blair. He was the prince of journalists, a writer of mystic prescience and curiously, perhaps the single most relevant intellectual for our day and age.

    All references are from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Secker and Warburg 1968).

  • ‘Economic theory changes one funeral at a time’ – An Interview with Warren Mosler on the True Nature of Money

    It’s the grease that makes the economic wheels turn. But ask where your taxes go after you pay them; or how a bank makes a loan; or what it means when you hear central banks are ‘printing money,’ and you’ll get different answers depending on who you talk to.

    Why should you care? Because a grasp of how the modern monetary system works is essential to understanding everything that has to do with money – from government austerity and stimulus spending, and everything in between.

    Warren Mosler spent much of his life attempting to understand what modern money is, what drives its circulation, and how the internal ‘plumbing’ of the modern monetary system sits together.

    What he discovered is a stranger picture than you would imagine. A word of warning, Mosler’s views on modern money are highly unconventional, running contrary to just about every economics textbook.

    Q&A with Warren Mosler

    Chris Lowe (CL): for readers who might not already know, CNBC calls you ‘one of the brightest minds in finance.’ You regularly comment on monetary matters and you’ve written two ground-breaking books on fiat money: Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy, and Soft Currency Economics. But you’re about the furthest thing from an armchair theorist anyone can imagine.

    You started your career in retail banking in the early 1970s, going on to work at Wall Street broker Bache & Co., at Bankers Trust, and at Chicago investment bank William Blair & Co. Then, in 1982, you cofounded your own investment fund, Illinois Income Investors (III).

    It was a spectacular success. III had only one loss-making month in the 15 years you were at the helm. And financial newsletter MARHedge ranked it No.1 in the world through 1997, when you left.

    Later, you even developed your own automobile line, Mosler Automotive. (Star Wars director George Lucas was the first to take delivery of one of his models – a supercharged, intercooled, V-8 supercar, the MT900S.)

    And finally, you’re a pioneer in a new field of economics called Modern Money Theory (MMT)[i] that’s making big ripples in academia and on the policy level.

    So, what first got you interested in business and Finance?

    Warren Mosler (WM): The first thing was just getting out of school and going to work. I went to work in a small savings bank in my home state of Connecticut. That was probably my first interest – working in money and understanding how it works and how it doesn’t work.

    CL: You have a BA in economics. But you’re largely self-taught. Can you remember any economics books that made a big impression on you?

    WM: I read very little. But I read one of John Kenneth Galbraith’s books in the 1960s. I liked the idea that the world understands things one way when in fact it’s another way – which is what he was talking about. I used to take apart watches to try to figure out how they worked. I was that kind of kid.

    CL: MMT describes the day-to-day realities of using government-backed tokens as money instead of gold or some other commodity. Is it fair to call MMT the study of the fiat money system?

    WM: It’s the study of how any monetary system works. There’s quite a good level of understanding of how the gold standard worked, but almost no understanding of how a fiat system works. That’s why MMT has gotten that kind of attention.

    CL: Up to 1971, the world economy was on the gold standard. Foreign central banks could still, theoretically at least, convert their dollar reserves into gold. And foreign currencies were exchangeable for dollars at a fixed price.

    Since 1971, the supply of dollars is no longer linked to the supply of gold. And currencies ‘float’ against one another, based on supply and demand.

    Why did the system change?

    WM: No one goes off the gold standard because it’s working so well. We go off it during war, when it’s in the way of funding military spending, or during depressions, because it breaks down horribly. That’s what happened in the U.S. Most people forget. But we first exited the gold standard during the Great Depression.

    CL: What led to that first break with gold?

    WM: A good starting point is the Panic of 1907. That was a very bad gold-standard depression. The whole money system pretty much went down. And it got bailed out by a consortium of private banks led by J.P. Morgan.

    After 1907, Congress decided we needed to have a central bank – the Federal Reserve – so that this would never happen again. And in 1913, it passed the Federal Reserve Act. This created the Federal Reserve System, America’s central bank.

    Then, sure enough, in 1929, it happened again… we got another gold-standard depression. The idea that these gold-standard panics wouldn’t happen again with a central bank didn’t work.

    In 1933, about half of the commercial banks in the U.S. were closed. They were insolvent. In 1934, they reopened off the gold standard and with deposit insurance. And there’s never been a gold standard-type panic since.

    [In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Gold Reserve Act. This limited the ability to convert dollars at a fixed exchange rate to gold to foreign central banks. It also revalued gold from $20 an ounce to $35 an ounce.]

    It was going off the gold standard in 1934 – not the creation of the Fed – that prevented the kind of depressions we used to have. But they left the Fed there. Somebody had to vote on interest rates. So they just left it there.

    CL: What was the trigger in 1971?

    WM: Under the gold standard, the government would buy or sell gold – $35 an ounce was the most recent price they did that at. It was also supposed to be making sure it had sufficient gold reserves to back the dollars in circulation. But it didn’t…

    A lot of people see 1971 as the big change in our monetary system. But we’ve really been ‘off gold’ since 1934. Of course, it wasn’t until 1971 – when France asked to convert its growing pile of dollar foreign exchange reserves into gold – that we went off the gold standard officially.

    But if France had asked for the gold in 1935, we probably would have said no and formally gone off gold then. But I don’t know that. I’m just musing on what happened.

    CL: So why do we all value paper money if there’s nothing tangible backing it?

    WM: American economist Hyman Minsky used to say that anyone could print money… it’s a question of having somebody accept it and give you something in exchange. If I print my own ‘money’ and try to buy something with it, why would you sell me something? If I come with a bunch of raffle tickets, and there’s no prize, why would you buy them?

    CL: I see your point. Why is there demand for fiat money, then, if it has no intrinsic value?

    WM: Let’s start at the beginning… The government wants to provision itself. It wants soldiers. It wants a legal system. It wants to move goods and services that are currently in the private sector to the public sector.

    How does it get them there? How does it move people from the private sector to the public sector?

    Well, it could take slaves in a war and force them to do things for it. That used to be common. The British used to go into bars at night and hit people on the head and drag them out. They’d wake up in the morning on a ship in the Royal Navy.

    There are different ways to get people out of the private sector and into the public sector. We pretend to be more civilized. The first thing we do is impose a tax on something that nobody has, such as U.S. dollars.

    So, imagine, on day one, George Washington says, ‘Okay. There is this new thing called the U.S. dollar. And everybody owes me $100 in taxes. Or else you’ll lose your house or something.’

    Of course, nobody has any dollars. What are they supposed to do to get them?

    So, Washington says, ‘I’ll pay you $30,000 to serve in the Continental Army.’ Or, ‘I’ll pay your $10,000 for a new road.’ Or, ‘I’ll pay you $5 for a chicken.’

    The government imposes a tax on something nobody has. Then it imposes a penalty for nonpayment of that tax. This creates what we call ‘unemployment’ – people looking for paid work that pays in that currency. Unemployment is not people looking for volunteer work at the American Cancer Society. They’re looking for money.

    The reason we’re all working for U.S. dollars is because there is this incessant liability – this drain out of the economy – we call taxation. This creates a shortage of dollars. People are constantly faced with the need for dollars to pay off their tax liabilities.

    Without tax payments at the end of the chain, fiat money loses its value. For instance, when the Civil War ended, the South didn’t collect taxes anymore. And the value of Confederate currency went to zero. It kept a million men in the field for five years. But it lost its value when the South could no longer collect taxes effectively. Or take somewhere like Lebanon. When tax collection ceased there, the currency stopped having any value.

    CL: So money is an invention of the state… a government technology, if you like?

    WM: I think John Maynard Keynes used to say, ‘The government writes the dictionary.’ The Japanese government taxes in yen. So, they have yen. Sterling is what you need to pay taxes in Britain. And so on.

    What’s interesting is that any government that issues its own currency has to spend money first before it can collect it back in tax. It also has to spend money first before it can borrow it back. When a government that issues its own currency borrows, it’s actually just borrowing back money it just spent.

    I was in Pompeii, in Italy, about two months ago. The guide was saying, ‘Here are the coins we found. The government would collect the coins and then it would spend the money on infrastructure. Because people wanted Pompeii to be a nice place to live.’

    And I said, ‘Well, they spent the coins first and then collected them.’

    And he goes, ‘No, no, no. They collect the coins in taxes first. And then they spent them.’

    I asked him, ‘Where did the coins come from?’

    ‘The government made them.’

    ‘Okay. How did anybody get them?’

    ‘You’re saying they had to spend them first and then tax?’

    I said, ‘Yeah, what else could they do?’

    ‘I don’t know.’

    He was very confused…

    CL: Most people think the government needs to collect dollars – either through taxes or borrowing – before it can spend.

    WL: First, the government credits bank accounts when it spends. Then, it debits bank accounts when it taxes. You can’t debit an account first. That’s an overdraft – a negative balance. And a negative balance is a loan from the guy who allowed the negative balance: the government.

    That would mean the government loaned the money first before it collected it for tax, which doesn’t make sense. As a simple accounting logic, you can’t debit an account without crediting it first.

    What I’m telling you is known by all the senior staffers at the Fed. The way they say it is: You can’t do a ‘reserve drain’ without a ‘reserve add.’ They all know this. There’s nothing esoteric, or new, or secret about it. It’s how they function every day.

    None of this stuff is really subject to any dispute. Some people don’t like it. Or they can’t reconcile it with what they’ve heard. But they can’t dispute it, either.

    CL: One thing that shocked me – I think it was in your book Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy – is that if you paid the IRS in cash for your taxes, they’d give you a receipt for your money and then shred the dollars.

    WM: Well, the IRS doesn’t shred it. It gives it to some other agency that does the shredding. But yes – that’s what happens.

    CL: Why doesn’t the government take those dollars and recycle them back into the system?

    WM: If you pay them with old $20 bills, they’ll just throw them away. If you pay with new $20 bills, they may give them back to the banks. But today, it’s easier to give banks money off the new pile when they want it – it’s all wrapped up and nice and everything – than it is to take somebody’s old money with germs on it and try to wrap it up again.

    It’s like selling tickets to a football game. Would you collect all the old tickets and try to reuse them? Or would you just tear them up and throw them away? It’s easier to just take them off the new roll than it is to collect them all and then try to sell them again. And nobody would ever think a football stadium should collect the tickets before it sells them.

    CL: Then why does the government tax?

    WM: The government has to have tax liabilities. Otherwise, nobody would be a seller of goods and services. Nobody would be selling labor or food or whatever else the government wants. Nobody would be looking for jobs that pay in dollars if there wasn’t a tax. So, the government has to tax to create the basic need for its currency.

    CL: And why does the government borrow?

    WM: The government used to borrow because, when it spent dollars, those dollars were convertible into gold. It didn’t want people being able to take all the gold out of Fort Knox. So, it sold Treasury securities. This borrowed back the dollars for a certain amount of time.

    A Treasury is a one-year, or two-year, or ten-year security, or whatever. If you swapped your dollars for a Treasury security, you couldn’t get the dollars again to get the gold for one year, two years, or ten years.

    This kept people’s hands off the government’s gold supply. And it stabilized the gold in Fort Knox. The purpose of borrowing was to keep that money from being able to convert itself into gold right away. You had to wait until your Treasury security matured first.

    Since 1934, that reason is gone. But the government keeps borrowing anyway. It had the appearance at the time that you were borrowing to be able to spend. That’s an easy stance to perpetuate. So, they perpetuated it.

    CL: Under the gold standard, government borrowing competed with private sector investment. Money was a scarce commodity. It could either go into government borrowing or into private sector investment. People worried that government borrowing ‘crowded out’ private investment. Is that still a worry?

    WM: So, you have government spending first. When the government spends dollars, it puts them in a bank’s reserve account at the Fed. If the government decides to borrow back those dollars, it just shifts them from its reserve account to another account it has at the Fed called a securities account. They give them fancy names. They call them reserve accounts and securities accounts. But they’re really just checking and savings accounts.

    The government creates new dollar balances. It puts them in one type of account. Then it shifts those dollar balances to another type of account. We call that ‘government debt.’

    CL: You say governments need to run budget deficits and that budget surpluses can be disastrous for the economy. Can you explain what you mean by that?

     

    WM: Sure. Let’s say the government runs a budget surplus, which means it taxes more than it spends. That means it’s draining money out of people’s bank accounts. Eventually, this would empty people’s accounts.

    The U.S. has had seven depressions. All seven followed the only seven budget surpluses in history. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

    A government deficit, on the other hand, happens because the government spends more than it taxes. This net spending adds money into people’s bank accounts. This may cause inflation. But nobody is going to run out of money because of it.

    CL: Again, most people see it differently. For instance, at the end of the 1990s, President Clinton took the U.S. into a budget surplus. Why did he do that, if it was so bad for the economy?

    WM: The way Robert Eisner, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, used to tell the story was that he was at the Clinton White House explaining to the president that running a budget surplus was draining money out of the economy… and that it was going to cause a crash. And Clinton said, ‘Yeah, you’re right, Bob. But this is not about economics. It’s about politics.’

    Some people understand it. Some people don’t. In 2003, I was in the White House having a conversation with President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card. The economy was bad. Low interest rates weren’t working. And I told him more or less the same thing I’m telling you – that we needed a much larger deficit. In other words, we needed to either lower taxes or increased public spending.

    Card was a quick study. He’s an engineer. He got it. And he asked, ‘By how much?’

    I said, ‘About $700 billion.’ Which, back then, was a large number.

    ‘We don’t have much time, do we?’ he asked.

    I said, ‘No.’

    I wasn’t a Bush supporter or anything. But he was the president, and the economy wasn’t doing so well. A week later, Bush made an interesting statement. When he was asked about the deficit, he said, ‘I don’t look at numbers. I look at jobs.’

    He passed every spending bill he possibly could. He also got through every possible tax cut. Six months later, the deficit was about $200 billion for the quarter, which was about $800 billion for the year. The economy had turned around. And it didn’t cost Bush his second term.

    From time to time, there are people who understand how the system works enough to make intelligent comments about it and, in the case of Andrew Card, to do something about it. But then it kind of fades away.

    CL: One important thing that MMT predicted was that quantitative easing (QE) would not lead to runaway consumer price inflation, as many people feared. The idea you heard – and you still hear – a lot was that central banks were ‘printing money.’ And that this money was going to flood the economy and cause inflation… or even hyperinflation. But we’ve had seven years of global QE. And this still hasn’t happened. Why hasn’t QE led to consumer price inflation?

    WM: It depends how you define ‘money.’ The government is ‘printing money’ only under a very narrow definition of money supply.

    If you have your money in a checking account, and I have my money in a savings account, it’s not like you have money and I don’t. But when the government looks at the money supply, it counts the dollars in checking accounts – reserve accounts – as ‘money.’ But it doesn’t count the dollars in savings accounts – Treasury securities – as ‘money.’

    All central banks do under QE is buy somebody’s savings account and pay for it by putting money in their checking account. People say, ‘We’re adding to the money supply. We’ve added $4 trillion to the money supply.’

    But if you count the dollars in both accounts as money – like you’d count the dollars in your checking and savings accounts as money – nothing has changed. All that’s happened is people decided they’d rather the extra liquidity of a checking account instead of having a savings account, because the interest rate on their savings account was so low.

    QE just moved money from savings accounts to checking accounts. Somehow, central banks thought that was going to cause spending, and inflation, to rise. But it didn’t.

    CL: You refer to them as ‘checking accounts,’ but what exactly are bank reserves?

    WM: Reserves are just investments banks have at the Fed. They give the Fed money and earn a quarter of a percentage point [0.25%] in interest. Reserves are a liability of the Fed… and they’re a bank’s asset. It’s just like when a bank loans you money – the loan is your liability and the bank’s asset.

    CL: Why won’t banks ever lend their reserves to their customers?

    WM: Reserves are just assets that banks own. They’re loans to the Fed. People have that backward. You don’t loan out assets. There is no such thing.

    CL: So, how do banks make loans in the modern monetary system? I think there’s a lot of confusion over this point…

    WM: It’s simple. Banks make loans anytime they can find somebody to pay them more interest than their cost of funds. If a bank’s cost of funds is 0.25%… and it can lend to a big corporation at 1%… it’ll do it. It’ll make what’s called a ‘spread.’ Banks just try to make a spread against their cost of funds. It’s not about having money or not having money.

    Let’s say you go into your bank and borrow $100,000. You sign for the loan. The bank creates $100,000 that didn’t exist before and puts it in your account. But it’s not the bank’s money. It’s your money.

    The new money doesn’t belong to the bank that loaned it into existence. People act as though the banks are creating money for themselves. They’re not. Whoever borrows the money is the one who gets it, not the bank.

    CL: Andy Haldane, the chief economist at the Bank of England, recently gave a speech in which he talked about banning physical cash and then imposing negative interest rates on bank deposits to stimulate growth. Cash would allow you to escape the negative interest rates on bank deposits because you could always just put it under the mattress or whatever. So, Haldane also proposed banning cash to make negative interest rates more effective. Is that a good way to stimulate economic growth, in your view?

    WM: First, central bankers have got the interest rate thing backward. They think lowering rates will somehow stimulate the economy. But negative interest rates are just a tax. You start off with a certain amount of money – say, $100. If the rate is negative 1%, then you have $99 at the end of a year.

    How is taking money away from me supposed to stimulate the economy?

    CL: Aren’t central bankers channeling Keynes? As I understand it, they believe that seeing your money disappear like that will make you rush out and spend.

    WM: Right. But if you’re trying to save for retirement, all of a sudden you’ve got to save a lot more money because you’ve got a lot less income. Isn’t there some theory that says when people’s money goes away, and they have less, they spend less?

    CL: At what point do central bankers admit that lower interest rates aren’t working? Or do they just keep doubling down on something that’s clearly not working?

    WM: Somebody once said that economic theory changes one funeral at a time. Nobody really changes their minds. You’ve got to have somebody new coming in.

    This interview was conducted in 2014.

    [i] Peter Coy , Katia Dmitrieva and Matthew Boesler ‘Warren Buffett Hates It. AOC Is for It. A Beginner’s Guide to Modern Monetary Theory,’ Bloomberg, 21st of March, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-21/modern-monetary-theory-beginner-s-guide

  • Public Intellectuals: Jürgen Habermas

    It came as a surprise when the editor of Cassandra Voices divulged recently that he had never read any works by Jürgen Habermas (1929 – ), who I regard as a strong contender to be the greatest living public intellectual. I put this down to limitations inherent in his generation, so I felt compelled to expand on the wisdom and complexity of this towering figure – among the last in the line of transcendent, rigorous intellectuals of the Old Left.

    It is perhaps a partial Germanic background that predisposes my appreciation of Habermas, and I frequently reference his work. Clearly not to everyone’s taste, a technical, and at times dense prose writer, he is not a model stylist. The salient points he makes are, however, of substance, lying as they do in an embrace of communality, anti-extremism and moderation.

    Habermas’s intellectual origins are in Critical Theory and he was, as we shall see, at one time an adherent of the Frankfurt School, and a committed Marxist (he remains Marxist in orientation, but his intellectual voyage has taken him a long way clear). Having definitively broken from the Frankfurt School, he became a firm defender of rationality and Enlightenment Values, the very antithesis of the Designer Marxism of the Sorbonne that spawned this Post-Truth zeitgeist that I have previously written about.

    In essence, Habermas recovers the substantive aspects of rationality, and puts forward a theory of practical reasoning and political deliberation. He regards reason as emancipatory and an antidote to dogmatism, compulsion, and domination. The substance of law is particularly important to him – indeed he has expressed regret that he did not study law – and much of his writings are legal in character.

    Part of the Habermas project is to elevate the space of public deliberation and the Rule of Law above Postmodern scepticism. Arguably, embracing legal philosophy compelled him to focus on the particular rather than the general – empiricism rather than Continental philosophy.

    Background

    As a member of the Flakhelfer generation who came of age during the final phase of Wold War II, Habermas was tremendously influenced by the horrors of the Holocaust, which he first encountered in cinematic reels after the war.

    In response, he venerates the Rule of Law as a counterweight to the horrors of Nazism. Moreover, though at times he is withering in his assessment of the post-war West Germany state (‘the FDR’), his criticism remained constructive and democratic in orientation, anticipating a Third Way between conservatism and doctrinaire Marxism, while bypassing the Critical Theory festering in academia.

    In his early writings Habermas was anxious to depart from influential intellectuals such as Carl Schmitt, tainted by association with Nazism. He opposed veneration of the state, emphasising instead the importance of civil society.

    In contrast to Marxists – many of whom dismissed this as a form of bourgeois fetishization – Habermas emphasised the value of legality. He does not, however, endorse law uncritically. Thus he was sceptical initially of the role of the German Constitutional Court, which developed fundamental rights in a largely progressive fashion. Habermas regarded such judge-led laws as paternalistic. As indicated, he emphasised the importance of civil society engaging in rational discourse rather than a scheme of state-driven rights recognition.

    Furthermore, Habermas sought to reconcile legitimacy with legality. He puts significant store in constitutionalism and a right to civil disobedience, reviving a liberal-socialist argument against the unbending Postmodernists. Habermas argues for a structural transformation and reinvention of the public sphere.

    In his early writings Habermas was also anxious to promote a positive conception of democracy, based on principles of legality and popular sovereignty. He identified an eclipse in the public sphere in the FDR during 1950s, and argued that in place of reasoning and decision-making propaganda and acclamation held sway.

    Natural Law

    Habermas has been deeply critical of an idea of politics as a technical affair, emphasising instead the importance of plebiscite or Direct Democracy. He is critical of a growing tendency to devolve power to technocrats and administrators, seeing the legislative branch of government as the real guardian of constitutionality. He argues that negative liberties could be reinvented only as positive guarantees of participation within a unified state society.

    In his earlier writings he was also sceptical of civil and political rights and these negative liberties. However, from 1961 we see a shift in his writing, as he became more positive about rights. In particular he is influenced by a series of Federal Constitutional Court decisions, including the Luth/Harlan case, which reinforced positive liberties and had a radiating effect on private law. He commends the court for applying rights in a horizontal fashion, against private parties and for recognising a positive obligation to protect speech.

    Nonetheless, throughout his intellectual life he has remained sceptical of court-imposed solutions, and, unlike the American philosopher Dworkin, judges themselves.

    It should be stressed that Habermas has been opposed to the Natural Law orientation of the Federal Constitutional Court, and has always sedulously opposed Natural Law. As he put it ‘Natural Law is devoid of any and every convincing philosophical justification,’[i] a point I endorse.

    Democratic Deficits

    Between 1961 and 1964 Habermas railed against democratic deficits in the FDR, a state which he believed had been handed over to technocrats. Inherent was a distrust of scientization and its fundamental incapacity to grapple with ethical questions, applying to the pursuit of the ‘good life’. He argued that the normative considerations essential to a democracy were being occluded.

    In a prescient remark, anticipating our present commodification of human life he writes:

    In modelling itself on the natural sciences, a science of politics risks treating the human being more as an object than a subject of historical processes.[ii]

    Habermas coined the term decisionist, meaning political decisions taken in a technical fashion unharnessed to ethical considerations. To counter this he emphasised the importance of reason, arguing against the scientization of politics and suggesting that unless technical knowledge was translated into practical knowledge political power would remain substantively irrational. The public sphere was the only place for that translation and that act of translation is the only way to make ‘a scientized society, a rational one.’[iii]

    Habermas thus argues that technocratic thought distorts the proper relationship between science and politics, and that citizens of the state need to be included in the translation between science and politics; in other words democracy needs to be inclusive and direct, as a technocratic consciousness excludes practical ethical questions from public deliberation.

    Habermas suggests that ruling elites in reducing practical questions about the good life to mere technical problems, undermined public, rational democratic discussion of values by the public. This had the effect of masking the value-laden character of government decisions, generally in the service of ascendant capitalism.

    Today’s fumbling bureaucrats and trickle-down-austerity-merchants are the semi-educated heirs of Habermas’s technocratic elite, devoted to growth-without-end, while ignoring externalities such as ecological and environmental meltdown.

    Alas his countrywoman Angela Merkel and her Eurocrat friends succeeded, by proxy, in destroying the social fabric and human structure of Ireland and Greece through adherence to a savage doctrine of austerity. The imposition of technical solutions (‘reducing the deficit’) negated the moral dimension of their actions, upholding a value-laden ideology that worked to the benefit of a shrinking economic elite who prospered after ‘weathering the storm’, at the expense of the preponderance of the population who were left on the scrapheap.

    Herbert Marcuse

    Habermas distinguished himself from his friend and former Frankfurt school colleague Marcuse in his attitude towards technology.

    First, unlike Marcuse, he saw technology as a permanent fixture of the human condition. Secondly, while Marcuse leaned towards the idea of a technological Utopia, wherein emancipatory machines would free workers from of work, Habermas emphasised the importance of the institutional framework of choice, decision and practical deliberation, seeing the permanence of technology without its liberating consequences. Thus, he steered a middle course between the technocratic right and the Marxist left:

    today better utilisation of an unrealised potential leads to an improvement of the economic industrial apparatus but no longer eo ipso to a transformation of the institutional framework with emancipatory consequences.[iv]

    He would surely despair at the mass surveillance of the internet, social media and automation, including a reconstitution of human identity through information technology. These are far from emancipatory consequences of technology. Automation and robotic capitalism will not award people more time to achieve leisure and growth.

    Communicative Action

    In 1968 Habermas introduces his key theory of Communicative Action, where he lays out his contention that the Left had incorrectly assumed that a change in the mode of production would automatically result in desirable changes in the relations of production. He argued that the technocratic approach of the Right and this Left utopianism converged in that each viewed politics as no longer requiring legitimation.

    In place of these, Habermas proposes a shift from a technocratic politics to concepts of work-interaction and communicative action:

    I suspect that the general relation of institutional framework (interaction) and subsystems of purposive rational action (work in the broad sense of instrumental and strategic action) is more suited than historic materialism to reconstructing the sociocultural phases of the history of mankind.[v]

    He further argues that:

    It becomes clear that two concepts of rationalisation must be distinguished. rationalisation at the level of the institutional framework can occur only in the medium of interaction itself, that is by removing restrictions on communication.[vi]

    Habermas also distinguished between technical reason and substantive or communicative reason, which he argued was vitally important: ‘The institutional organisation of society continues to be a problem of practice related to communication, not one of technology, no matter how scientifically guided.’[vii]

    Habermas argued thus for a domination-free communication, and that ideology systematically distorted communication. His argument is for universal pragmatics:

    By reconstructing the conditions of possible communication Habermas hoped to identify the elements necessarily presupposed in the successful exchange of speech acts and thereby to uncover the universal validity basis of speech.[viii]

    Habermas asserted that through language, speakers adopt a practical stance oriented toward ‘reaching understanding,’ which he regards as an ‘inherent telos’ of speech. When individuals address each other in this manner, they engage in what Habermas calls ‘communicative action,’ which he distinguishes from strategic forms of social action

    In communicative action:

    speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of individual (or joint) goals on the basis of a shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit-worthy. Whereas strategic action succeeds insofar as the actors achieve their individual goals, communicative action succeeds insofar as the actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative behavior. Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilize the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.[ix]

    speech acts

    Over the course of a decade the theory of universal pragmatics culminated in a theory of justice as fairness of communication. In this Habermas was influenced by the English positivist John Austin and his idea of ideal speech, arguing with respect to speech acts that:

    In uttering a speech act, the speaker unavoidably raises validity claims which can only be redeemed in a discourse having the structure of an ideal speech situation. However, distorted the actual conditions of communication may be, every competent speaker possesses the means of the construction of a speech situation which would be free from domination and in which disputes concerning the truth of statements or the correctness of norms could be rationally resolved.[x]

    In his recent writings he has amplified on speech acts and identifies four ‘pragmatic presuppositions’ essential, he argues, to communicative rationality:

    • no one capable of making a relevant contribution has been excluded,
    • participants have equal voice,
    • they are internally free to speak their honest opinion without deception or self-deception, and
    • there are no sources of coercion built into the process and procedures of discourse.[xi]

    The essence of all of this is the idea of inclusive critical discussion, free of social and economic pressures, in which all involved treat each other as equals in a cooperative attempt to reach an understanding on matters of common concern.

    In this context Habermas harks back to the salons of the Enlightenment, and claimed that as mass societies emerged over the course of the 19th century, ideas became commodities, assimilated to the economics of mass media consumption.

    Habermas sought to revive this tradition of free-ranging thought in attempting to re-install public reason, and calls for a socio-institutionally feasible concept of public opinion-formation that is historically meaningful, and which normatively meets the requirements of the social-welfare state, and which is theoretically clear and empirically identifiable. He argues that this: ‘can be grounded only in the structural transformation of the public sphere itself and in the dimension of its development.’[xii]

    During this period, Habermas also evaluated the German Sociologist Max Weber seeing in his compatriot’s thought an iron cage of modernity, assigning law and morality to different spheres of rationality. Law required, Habermas argued, a rational justification in contrast to Weber’s positivism equating legality with legitimacy.

    Habermas asserted a need for the law to be justified not simply in technocratic terms, but also in terms of principle or practical moral justification. Law, he argued, was intimately linked to morality and politics and to the constitutional organisation of political power.

    Civil Disobedience

    Habermas was a man of his time, and like Albert Camus, engaged with its controversies. Thus from 1978-87 he turned to the question of civil disobedience in response to what was happening in Germany, especially in response to protests against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

    Habermas defended civil disobedience and endorsed John Rawls view that this was a morally grounded act, which must appeal to publicly recognised principles. He argued that state legitimacy was intimately connected to the normative quality of the state in arguing for a representative democracy that held a place for civil disobedience.

    Habermas saw civil disobedience of a peaceful nature as a revitalising force, and rejected the authoritarian legalism of Conservatives. Instead he placed faith in dissenting citizen, and saw the German state as a self-revitalising project animated by a noninstitutionalised mistrust of itself.

    At this time Habermas set his sights on Postmodernism. In fact, he called young conservatives antimodernists, old conservatives premodernisms and neo-conservatives postmodernist (such as the Green party who, in a quasi-Luddite way, argued against aspects of modernity) and rejected all three.

    Instead Habermas placed his faith in a concept of communicative rationality with reason centre stage. He would be in his element attacking the way in which post-modernist relativistic nonsense has been co-opted by the Alt-Right and the Neoconservatives.

    More recently, Habermas has emphasised the values of law, politics and the Rule of Law. In fact, he argues that democracy and the Rule of Law are co-original and presuppose each other. He argues for popular sovereignty in conjunction with human rights as the legitimacy of laws; prioritising popular sovereignty and a proceduralist theory as an alternative to ideology. He puts his trust in the productive forces of communication.

    Habermas argues that breaking up legislative power into institutionalised and noninstitutionalised spaces – the parliament and the plurality of public spheres – was the best way to achieve the democratic ideal of self-determination. He saw the noninstitutionalised distrust of the citizen, reflected in civil disobedience, as central to a democracy.

    He explained that the ideal speech situation created the necessary formal or procedural framework within which the public could deliberate and fill in the picture of a good society. Within such a framework participants could decide the concrete possibilities of social organisation they desired.

    His position is summarised thus:

    Habermas dubs his position an “epistemic proceduralism.” The position is proceduralist because collective reasonableness emerges from the operation of the democratic process; it is epistemic insofar as that process results in collective learning. The latter presupposes a fruitful interplay of three major discursive arenas: the dispersed communication of citizens in civil society; the “media-based mass communication” in the political public sphere; and the institutionalized discourse of lawmakers. When these arenas work well together, civil society and the public sphere generate a set of considered public opinions that then influence the deliberation of lawmakers.[xiii]

    In conclusion

    Habermas saw German constitutionalism as an unfinished project and sought to offer a Third Way of democratic discussion between formalistic positivism and moralistic natural law. He is critical of the foisting of human rights on us by judges –  and was critical of the Dworkinean prioritising of the judiciary – placing faith instead in in popular sovereignty.

    He argues, nonetheless, that a system of rights constitutes a minimum set of normative institutional conditions for any legitimate modern political order, but that further institutional mechanisms such as legislatures and other branches of government must operate as an open society of interpreters of the constitution.

    These are the important values espoused by Habermas:

    1: The rule of law and legalism.

    2: Speech and communication untainted by ideology.

    3: The voyage of social passage from post-modernist nonsense to Enlightenment values.

    Interestingly, both Habermas and Noam Chomsky are of a similar vintage, and are perhaps the residues, or remnants, of a tradition of learning and rigour, which is now largely marginalised and ignored. Though he is often difficult to read in a stilted Germanic style derived from Kant through Heidegger and even Thomas Mann, his ideas are of vital relevance. The great challenge is to impart these, and gain an audience.

    A dialogue between secular non-extremist humanism and Christian non-extreme humanism.

    The following is a codicil to a recent piece I wrote on Jurgen Habermas as part of the Public Intellectuals series.

    I list ten crucial lessons and interpretations from the man I regard as the leading public intellectual of our time who bridges schools of thought in a way similar to Edmund Burke, and with more rigour. Habermas was scorned by the agitprop leftists in Germany after he spoke out against a growing extremism as he read it.

    1. Habermas was correct to abandon postmodernism such as that identified by the Frankfurt School, and replace it with rationalist ideology whether Christian or secularist. We need to reunite through reason against the dark forces in the world.
    2. His crucial idea of communicative action and ideal speech invites us to talk in neutral conditions purged of ideology. This has led me to advocate for a world council composed of non-corporate, non-business, apolitical leaders apart from those who are properly rational, which includes Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin. Independent think tanks. Let us talk and argue but not fall out and scream at each other any longer.
    3. Accept religion from an atheist perspective, all to their own. Spirtuality is not to be despised, and we need a communication about ethics and morality. A common ground.
    4. Avoid all extremism. It is counter-productive, whether leftist or rightist. That includes religious fundamentalists and atheist bashers of religion. An interdisciplinary dialogue between faith and reason, a reasoned faith, is needed to confront the problems of the world.
    5. Society should run using technocratic methods with ethical and moral components. Vorsprung durch technik, Germany works but has inflicted its model work practices to liquidate much of Europe. Merkel is not Helmut Schmidt.
    6. Embrace the intellectual tradition and raise our civilisation. Nuance is key.
    7. Democracy is enriched by dissidence, protest and a sense of community beyond parties. but not agitprop doomsday cults.
    8. In certain jurisdictions judicial and other elites cannot be trusted. Too many are now compromised. We need fresh ideas and perspectives.
    9. The United States is on the brink and should not be deferred to. The global challenge of silicon valley needs to be challenged, just as we should be challenging the encroachment of China.
    10. Continue to resist the intellectual and political legacies of both Nazism and Marxist-Leninism.

    [i] Jürgen Habermas: Natural Law and Revolution (1963), p. 113

    [ii] Matthew Specter: Habermas: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p.93

    [iii] Ibid, p. 97

    [iv] Habermas: Technik und Disenchant ales Ideologies (1968) p99.

    [v] Ibid, p.92.

    [vi] Ibid, p.98.

    [vii] Ibid, pp.78-79

    [viii] Specter, p.???

    [ix] Habermas: Stanford Internet Encyclopedia.

    [x] John B. Thompson and David Helds: Habermas: Critical Debates, M.I.T Press., Cambridge,  pp.8-9

    [xi] Habermas: Stanford Internet Encyclopedia. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/

    [xii] Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, (translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence), M.I.T. Press, 1989,  p.244.

    [xiii] Habermas: Stanford Internet Encyclopedia, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/

  • Roger Casement’s Example Inspires me to Protect the Amazon and its People

    Over the course of 2019 there has been a sharp increase in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. Human rights violations and ecological decimation in the region are more of a concern than ever under President Jair Bolsonaro, the so-called ‘Trump of the Tropics.’ Brazilian activist and humanitarian Bruna Kadletz calls on the international community to act in protection of the forest, before it´s too late.

    The Amazon is burning
    The pain of our beloved rainforest
    burning in flames is our pain
    It is the pain of all living creatures
    The Amazon is burning through the criminal hands
    Of agribusiness and our politicians

    I first heard of Roger Casement on a visit to the Amazon region in 2017, when Alan Gilsenan, the Irish filmmaker who wrote and directed ‘The Ghost of Roger Casement’ (2002), told me about the Irish-born British diplomat’s journey into the rainforest at the beginning of the last century.

    It was only, however, in the evening of August 18th 2019, during a film festival featuring Casement´s documentary in São Paulo, Brazil that I fully grasped his importance. Particularly at this time, when human rights violations and ecological decimation in the Amazon region are more concerning than ever.

    Casement´s humanitarian efforts had gained him international recognition by 1904, when he reported on the torture and enslavement of indigenous peoples during the rubber boom in Congo under King Leopold.

    In 1910 the British government sent him to the Amazon rainforest to investigate similar violations in the region of the river Putumayo, Colombia. There he described mutilation, rape, torture and exploitation, carried out under the rule of Julio César Arana, a Peruvian entrepreneur and politician. He also provided humanising narratives for the Putumayo people, emphasising their beauty and bravery.

    Up to this day the indigenous people of Putumayo revere Roger Casement. In one part of the documentary an elder connected the survival of his people to the diplomat, adding that the Amazon needs another Casement to save the forest, and its people, from modern forms of exploitation.

    I fell sleep inspired by Casement’s bravery and humanitarian commitment to bring an end to oppression, imperialism and violence against indigenous peoples.

    On the following day, August 19th, a blanket of smoke cast a dark shadow over São Paulo. By 3pm the day had turned into night. Black, low-level clouds swallowed up the largest city in South America. The overcast winter afternoon had been caused by wildfires raging thousands of kilometres away. In Northern Brazil the rainforest had been burning for weeks, as wildfires passed through the states of Acre, Rondônia, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, reaching the border with Bolivia and Paraguay. The smoke travelled with the wind from north to southeast Brazil, darkening that São Paulo afternoon.

    This corridor of fumes was also a symbolic reminder of the dark atmosphere pervading Brazilian politics, society and wider environment.

    Far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, along with Environmental Minister Ricardo Salles and other supporters, must be held accountable for policies which have brought about this destruction. Prioritising the interests of agribusiness and the extractive sector has caused huge damage to invaluable ecosystems and suffering to native peoples.

    Bolsonaro´s agenda has been catastrophic for Brazilians and the world. Now it is time for the international community to wake up. Individuals can exert pressure on national governments, leading to economic sanctions against the regime.

    Image © Bruna KadletzThe Brazilian National Institute of Space Research (INPE) reports that so far in 2019 the country has experienced the highest incidence of wildfires in five years, registering 74,155 outbreaks between January 1st – the date Bolsonaro came to power – and August 20th. This figure represents an increase of 85% compared to the same period in 2018.

    Data collected by the Institute of Environmental Research in Amazonia (IPAM) links the fires to deforestation, which is not solely explained by a period of drought. IPAM discovered that the ten Amazonian municipalities with the highest number of fires are also the ones with the highest deforestation incidences this year.

    At the beginning of August, encouraged by Bolsonaro´s discourse, farmers in Pará state declared a ‘day of fire’, when several sites in the state were set alight. On August 10th, authorities registered 124 outbreaks in Novo Progresso, 194 in Altamira – followed by more than 237 the following day.

    These criminal acts clear the land in preparation for cattle ranching or growing crops, including genetically modified soybeans, maize and canola that are imported all over the world, generally as animal feed rather than for direct human consumption.

    Last July Ricardo Magnus Galvão, then director of INPE, attracted the attention of Brazilian and international media when he defied the president by revealing the extent of deforestation under Bolsonaro´s administration. The President dismissed scientific facts and attempted to discredit INPE´s data in a failed attempt to mask the rainforest’s grim fate. In exchange for exposing the truth Galvão was removed from his post.

    The Amazon is burning and dying a painful death, while Brazilian agribusiness celebrates governmental permits to deforest and exploit the rainforest. In Tocatins, a state located in the heart of the Amazon region, within a single day of August the government issued 557 authorisations  to deforest specific areas of the state – all aimed at exploiting the land for agriculture.

    Altamira, in the state of Pará, registered the worst concentration of deforestation in Brazil. Between 2013 and 2018 the municipality had seen clearances of 1.9 thousand square kilometres of rainforest. In 2017 I visited Altamira, including the area where the controversial Belo Monte Hydroelectric Complex was built.

    To clear space for the canal, diverting water from the Xingu River to the dam, Belo Monte construction had cut down large stretches of the rainforest. Along the route to an indigenous village deep inside the jungle, we drove by what seemed a graveyard of trees. Tens of thousands of massive tree trunks laying silent on the ground told a vivid story.

    The municipality illustrates another alarming link – the relationship between deforestation, natural resources exploitation and violence towards human beings. Altamira is the second most dangerous city in Brazil, with one-hundred-and-thirty-three recorded homicides for each one hundred thousand inhabitants. Thus, according to Daniel Cerqueira, coordinator of the organization Violence Atlas: ‘The cities with the highest deforestation rates are the ones with the highest numbers of homicides.’

    In the years I lived in Maranhão in legal Amazonia, I witnessed aspects of this dark reality. Most of the numerous occurrences of illegal logging in protected areas were closely associated with violence against indigenous people.

    Like many Brazilians I feel a mixture of despair, powerlessness and sadness over the direction our country and political system has taken. It is painful to watch what is happening, and even more so to realise this is only the beginning in an era marked by climate breakdown, ecological decimation and societal collapse.

    As the elder of the Putumayo indigenous people stated in ‘The Ghost of Roger Casement’, we are in urgent need of a contemporary version of Roger Casement to denounce the atrocities, human rights violations and ecocide, especially in Brazil. And, more importantly, to bring about a shift in consciousness. But will politicians and world leaders listen to the pain and suffering of Pachamana and those fighting for her survival, for all our survival?

    We must preserve hope, even in these dark times. I am constantly searching for motivation to confront how everything seems to be falling apart, and when my greatest source of inspiration is burning down.

    Roger Casement inspired me to delve deeply inside myself in order to find the courage to walk straight into the heart of suffering, shed light on human rights violations and ecological devastation, and help instigate transformation.

    Featured Image is of Roger Casement among the Putumayo people c.1913.

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  • Reclaiming from Conservatism Perhaps the Greatest Irish Intellectual Edmund Burke

    A past competition, now sadly in abeyance, used to involve arguing over who was the greatest Irish intellect. The English held a similar competition some years ago and, unsurprisingly, chose Churchill ahead of Shakespeare.

    God knows what would happen if we had a referendum or phone-in-vote to decide this in Ireland today. Who might figure in our short-term attention span universe? Miriam O’Callaghan, Eamonn Dunphy or Bono present themselves as awful possibilities; Michael McDowell or even Leo Varadkar might even turn up.

    Yet, if we were to take such matters seriously, I think we should consider Edmund Burke the most influential and important Irish intellectual of all time. In fact, The Great Melody, as Conor Cruise O’Brien’s 1993 book on Burke is called – from William Butler Yeats’s 1933 poem ‘The Seven Sages’ – amplifies over time, and the poem unites Burke with Swift, and Goldsmith, in their hatred of oppression:

    The First American colonies, Ireland, France and India harried and Burke’s great melody against it.
    (from W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Winding Stair’, 1933).

    It is that hatred of oppression and injustice that makes him as relevant now as he ever was to Irish, U.K. and International Affairs. Of course, ‘The Great Melody’ of his life was a hatred of injustice, an overarching commitment to the truth and confrontation of the abuse of power.

    Commitment to the truth is badly needed in our post-truth universe, given the extent to which dissonance and disinformation has been disseminated by the alt-right and neo-cons.

    It seems deeply odd then that the right should venerate Burke and regard him as the founder and progenitor of Conservatism. George Bush had a plinth of him in the White House, as I believe did David Cameron.

    Republican Party ideologues, such as the towering figure of William F. Buckley, venerated Burke, and sought to convert Burkeian conservatism to nascent neo-liberalism. Buckley provided the intellectual foundations for this through such texts as God and Man in Yale (Regnery Publishing, 1953), and his editorship of the republic party intellectual rag The National Review.

    Buckley mis-translates Burke’s ideas into a diabolical, individualism or libertarianism. Indeed, other conservatives of that era despised Buckley for drawing Conservatism away from the spirit of Burke’s ‘community of souls’, and towards naked self-interest. This has led to the undermining of state institutions and now their actual takeover by the corporatocracy.

    Buckley was a brilliant but repellent human being, as is very evident in the documentary made about his media punditry with Gore Vidal during the 1968 American election (‘Best of Enemies’). He has had an enormous, understated influence in moving the Republican party, via Reagan, towards Libertarianism and the disaster capitalism that is with us now.

    Yet the Republican Party and indeed much of the present Conservative party are not conservatives in the Burkean sense. They are neo-liberal extremists.

    Traditional Conservatism

    Burke was a moderate Conservative in the Disraelian sense, dedicated to preserving those traditions that ought to be preserved, and his career is an idiosyncratic mixture of radicalism and conservatism. He believed in the desirability of change, but not for its own sake, and advocated that all transitions should be incremental, with antennae raised to unintended consequences:

    Burke was also a passionately anti-extremist. His oft-criticised text ‘Reflections on The Revolution in France/French Revolution (1790),’ is a harbinger of doom – that might apply to latter day extremism and jihadism.

    It came before the blood-letting of the Terror, and the rise of the authoritarian strongman, which he had predicted. Take a bow Mr. Bonaparte. Take a bow Mr. Varadkar. Take a bow Mr. Trump. Take a bow Mr. Orban. I included those three as I would argue that the neo-liberalism they implement is a form of extremism – a new-fangled corporate fascism. I very much doubt whether Burke would endorse its excesses.

    Unlike neo-liberals, Burke believed in an ideal of a community as a group of associative obligations and reciprocal interactions. A moral and networked community. In contrast, the neo-liberal ideology is based on social atomisation and fragmentation. As Margaret Thatcher put it: ‘There is no such thing as society only individuals.’ This is a view running contrary to a Burkean ethos.

    In contemporary terms Burke might even be described as a Rawlsian or, dare I say it, a Keynesian capitalist which is precisely what Buckley was attacking.

    Burke might also appeal to environmentalists as he saw community as inter-generational: ‘Society becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’

    He held a defined sense of the public good that was not just where the dice landed in the casino capitalism of the market. Further, though a passionate advocate of rights and liberties, he was also a passionate advocate of restraint and moderation. He believed that rights should not be reduced to untrammelled liberties and licentious anarchy.

    Dislike of Crony Capitalism

    Though a conservative in terms of his invocation of habit, tradition and social order, as well as measures of fiscal rectitude, he was, conversely, an opponent of these in many respects.

    He led a hate campaign, lasting many years, against a man of significant merit, Warren Hastings and the East Indian Company, predicated, at one level, on dislike of the abuse of corporate and private power – what we now describe as ‘crony capitalism.’ This makes me certain he would have no truck with the excesses of neo-liberalism, the cartelisation of wealth and assets by elites, or the enforcement of austerity measures.

    After all, he grew up in an Ireland devastatingly captured by Dean Jonathan Swift’s satire ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729) –  also part of ‘The Great Melody’. The Malthusian liquidation of the poor and disenfranchised inflicted in that period by British absentee capitalists is now being revisited, this time by neo-liberal extremists, whether from Brussels, or Canadian and American vulture funds.

    Burke’s Irish background of course influenced a lot of what he did. It engendered sympathy with the underdog, which threads through his career and was perhaps in no small measure a product of his Quaker education.

    Burke believed in the free market and free trade but not cartels or monopolies. He would surely be horrified by the Ireland we see today: a country controlled by oligarchical capitalism, and ruled by vulture funds and banks, along with a Euro-cracy imposing austerity, after a catastrophe for which it shares responsibility.

    An important point to bear in mind about Burke was that he was effectively in debt for most of his life; the threat of bankruptcy exposing him to the peril of losing his parliamentary seat, and ending up, like Mr. Micawber, in a debtor’s prison.

    Many of these debts were accrued through a resolutely independent cast of mind, and failure to sell out or cash in. Remaining true to one’s principle, then and now, is a luxury few can afford.

    He did not univocally criticise the concept of a revolution, and indeed supported the American Revolution in the face of great criticism. His argument was that they had been the victim of oppression and an injustice, which is the stand he always took. I would go so far as to say he would support such groups as Extinction Rebellion, or in Ireland the Anti-Austerity Alliance.

    Perhaps he would even have supported Brexit for similar reasons to his support of The Boston Tea Party. He held a melange of contrarian views, curiously relevant to this day and age – a qualified support for justified rebellion reveals an intellect neither exclusively right nor left.

    His life is a fascinating study, and his global influence is perhaps only paralleled by a select number of other Irish lives, such as Roger Casement’s. Here is someone who was privy to the inner machinations of two establishments, and though an outsider – and only an intermittent parliamentarian – the greatest statesman of his age, if not by universal acclaim then by consensus.

    Statesmanship

    That of course leads to the question of what statesmanship amounts to.

    First, I believe it involves standing back from the fray and detaching oneself; retaining independence and objectivity. Secondly, it requires that one does not sing exclusively from the party hymn sheet or accept the whip. Thirdly, a statesman does not court popularity.

    All these attributes of Burke’s statesmanship are evident in a critical electoral pamphlet he wrote on his obligations to constituents. In short, he committed to representing their interests fearlessly, but as a representative not a delegate. He would take an independent stance and not simply act as an amanuensis or conduit of popular views.

    His independence of mind – as it always does – alienated many. His opposition to anti-extremism prompted opposition to the French Revolution, but support for the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution against British rule. This was intellectually consistent as the American revolutionaries upheld British values of liberty, and were subject to unjust rule from a distant, unaccountable, power. In deciding to oppose the French Revolution, on the other hand, he was resisting the rule of the mob and the sans culottes, with their appeals to abstract rights.

    This was also a conservative who inveighed against British injustice in Ireland. He was a staunch defender of the rule of law, and of the curtailment of arbitrary power, but he had little time for abstract rights. In this he was of course a product of his times. Indeed, Jeremy Bentham, his near contemporary, describe Natural Law as ‘nonsense on stilts.’

    He thus rejected the notional constitutional guarantees in the French Revolutionary Declaration of ‘The Rights of Man’ (1793). Similarly, the Irish Constitution exists in theory, but in practice the Court has done next to nothing over the past twenty years to protect the human rights contained therein, and curtail the abuses of state or private power.

    Far better for Bentham and Burke were empirically grounded protections, upheld by independent-minded magistrates. Both thus supported a legislatively grounded rule of law, not abstract aspirations, involving a precise relationship of rights to facts, and specific sets of circumstances.

    Through all of this in Burke there is a distinctly non-British quality, that of the wild Fenian intelligence, a passion grounded in reason, where rights are earned and injustices exposed through procedures and venerable processes.

    It is I think wrong to consider him a great theoretician. But he remains a great intellectual inspiration. Most of his central themes he expressed in ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into The Origin of our Ideas of The Sublime and The Beautiful’ (1757). There he displays empathy and imagination, a belief in social order but one related to religious belief. A commitment to human reason but an acceptance of bounded rationality.

    Thus, there are many themes that are not merely of historical interest but deeply relevant for the present day and age.

    Continued Relevance

    In summary, I regard Burke as the greatest Irish intellect of all time, as his ideas have stood the test of time and remain relevant to contemporary concerns. That relevance to our present dark age of late capitalism is for the following reasons:

    1. Burke offered a voice of reason and moderation, increasingly lacking in an age of extremes.
    2. He maintained a commitment to the truth and the rule of law, both of which are sorely lacking today That also entails a commitment to due process – although not airy notions of natural law which at times he is guilty of expressing. But in general his ideas follow the line that no man should be a judge in his own cause – an important point in view of how the corporatocracy now seeks to purchase justice and insulate themselves from prosecution.
    3. The statesmanship he adhered to was independent and uncompromised by support from vested interests; a politician must be able to distinguish between his private interests and the public interest or common good.
    4. Burke’s esteems for a community of interacting responsibilities recalls another of his contemporaries, John Donne, who wrote: ‘No man is an island.’ Burke is scathing of individual vanity and corporate greed that lays waste to communities – witness his often hysterical and sustained campaign against the not altogether nefarious Warren Hastings.

    In making the argument that Burke was the greatest Irish intellect, it is important to bear in mind that such a crown is not the sole preserve of left of right. Indeed, I can excuse his hatred of atheists. Then, and now, Irish Catholicism represents a pathological condition, and it obviously influenced an at times over-veneration of custom and tradition.

    I would argue that Burke also held too great an esteem for the common prejudice of the ordinary man. That is a dangerous approach used by ideologues of a deeply sinister variety, such as Mr. Bannon, who amplify an inherent fear of the other to dupe the masses.

    Burke did not uncritically accept the views of the common man, as is evident in his crisp understanding of the difference between being a representative, as opposed to a delegate on behalf of his constituents.

    He is admittedly only tenuously linked to the Enlightenment tradition of reason. Some, indeed, dismissed him as a mystic seer. Certainly, if he had met Voltaire at a dinner party that acid rationalist might have rudely dismissed him as a Romantic; another contemporary Edward Gibbons described him as ‘a rational madman.’

    Alas there is little intellectual tradition in Ireland of rigorous Philosophy, and what we are left with is Burke, who was not a systematic thinker, but a statesman, a writer, an orator and a commanding intellectual presence. He was a remarkably effective human being. His legacy for humanity is esteems for the rule of law, empiricism, anti-extremism, independence of mind and action, as well as moderation and balance. These are qualities in short supply in our time.

    I fear, however, that if a poll were to be taken in contemporary Ireland that it is more likely that it would be Jedward not Edmund who would come out on top.

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  • Albert Camus and the Decline of the Public Intellectual

    But again, and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.
    Albert Camus, The Plague.

    Periodically, I am asked about the relationship between law and literature. Therefore, it came as no surprise to be sent a book on that theme, The Meursault Investigation (2013) by the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud. It is a rebuke to the greatest Algerian, or indeed French, writer of the last century, Albert Camus, and in particular his classic novel of 1942, The Outsider.

    In fact, Daoud’s account can be read as a form of homage to Camus’s seminal work, taking as it does the murdered Arab as its lynchpin. Nonetheless, there is an implicit critique of Camus’s putative racism or imperialism, or at best, a lack of empathy for the individual killed.

    It is most decidedly not univocally hostile, insofar as Daoud – himself the subject of a religious fatwa in his native land – clearly despises what Camus in effect warned against: the rise of extremism, whether religious or secular, as is the theme of his historical novel The Rebel (1952), set during the French Revolution.

    Daoud’s book concludes with an idea Camus himself would surely have approved of: how to hold on to the precious commodity of truth? This is a subject dear to my heart too as a practising criminal defence barrister.

    There have been other condemnations of Camus. Richard Posner, for instance, argues:

    Not only is the Arab victim left nameless, Arab customs and culture are occluded. Mosques, souks, Arabic, the milling throngs of Arabs in the street all are ignored even though Arabs outnumbered Europeans in French Algeria by more than ten to one.[i]

    Edward Said also claims that Camus implicitly accepted French control over Algeria in Culture and Imperialism. But to my mind these assessments fall far wide of the mark, and fail to acknowledge the great humanity of the author.

    Marxist Critique

    Marxist extremists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and his partner Simone de Beauvoir also crucified Camus over this perceived failing. De Beauvoir’s 1960 autobiography, The Prime of Life, expressed a cold-blooded contempt for Camus, seemingly for his independence of mind, and ideas beyond the cult.

    I consider Sartre a mediocre philosopher and terrible writer, and view de Beauvoir’s offerings only marginally superior, at least in her feminist tracts. I find her novels uninteresting. In contrast, Camus’s singular voice is both philosophically, and in literary terms, of far greater importance, then and now.

    I believe Camus was the defining, and greatest, public intellectual of the last century. More to the point, he is far from obsolescent or useless. In fact his ideas are more relevant than ever. As Daoud’s timely book suggests, he has come right back into focus. So let us address why much of the criticisms directed against him, including those from a position of disappointed absolutism, are wide of the mark.

    Camus’s career was meteoric, but short-lived, dying in a car crash at the age of just forty-three, after becoming the youngest, or second youngest after Rudyard Kipling, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

    Berta Vias-Mahou’s recent work They Were Coming for Him is suffused with premonitions of mortality, and a suggestion in the coda that the car crash would not be an accident, but an assassination by his enemies, who were at that stage plentiful.

    It is the story of a man who has taken a stand against violence, the death penalty, and terrorism, and has his life threatened as a result, and even goes on to die in an attack that is arranged to look like a straightforward accident.[ii]

    His career consisted, in substance, of three great, but short, novels together with several plays and political tracts, along with numerous journalistic pieces. This output may seem paltry, but as ever, quantity wins out over quality. Each novel is a masterpiece in its own right that has stood the test of time, and the political tracts are rich in philosophical insight, condensing multitudes. The plays are less garlanded, but worthwhile nonetheless.

    In literary terms much was achieved, including that last incomplete work of fiction released by his widow long after his death. The First Man (1994) thus acts as a coda and summation of his greatness, and is set in sultry Algeria, his country of origin. The manuscript was actually rescued from the car crash, and explains a hurried journey to a publisher in icy, mid-winter conditions.

    It should also be noted that Albert Camus was a Pied Noir, a nickname for the French community of Algeria, doubly despised by mainland French and the indigenous Islamic population of Algeria.

    Still today, Pied Noir is a term of abuse, as I once discovered in a hat shop in the south of France, when the owner mistook me for one – a poor, dispossessed Frenchman. This antipathy is also evident in The First Man.

    Hatred of Camus was also linked to his quixotic lifestyle as They Were Coming For Him reveals. Purists, Communist or religious, take exception to the tradition of the cosmopolitan intellectual he represents.

    The Figure of the Public Intellectual

    If Camus is to be defined a great public intellectual this leads to the question: what is a public intellectual, and what benefits does this increasingly rare breed confer?

    A public intellectual is not an academic as such. In his time, as now, the world is full of specialist academics operating in their silos. Specialisation brings a tendency to focus exclusively on one or two matters, leaving no room for the big picture. In contrast, the public intellectual is a generalist and synthesiser.

    Today, compartmentalisation has reached dizzying levels. The proliferation of often useless non-directional research, with the requirements to publish or perish, creates careers equivalent to battery hens producing eggs. The role of the academic as a generalist, and popular communicator, has been almost completely extinguished.

    Above all, it seems to me, a public intellectual should be a communicator. He or she makes complex ideas accessible, stretching the public’s insights, and shocking them if necessary, but never unnecessarily complicating matters, or dressing them up in excessive verbiage or pomposity.

    Take the last two truly great Anglo-American intellectuals, Gore Vidal and Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens was a superb journalist, but it is said that as you read him you always hear him speaking, for above all he was a formidable debater and public speaker, even whilst under the influence.

    Unlike Hitchens somewhat bombastic style, Camus communicates in crisp and lyrical prose. Also, importantly, he was an ordinary, even working class, French Algerian, and never forgot where he came from, and nor was he allowed to.

    In contrast, Gore Vidal spoke with the plummy dismissiveness and engrained intellectual contempt, of the Brahmin. By all accounts his personality was insufferable, which is apparent in a debate with perhaps a progenitor of American neo-conservatism, the devilishly witty William F. Buckley. Indeed I encountered Vidal’s brusqueness myself when I sought an audience in his Italian villa!

    The debate between Buckley and Vidal prior to the 1968 Presidential election returns us to another planet of true intellectual discourse. It is interesting to note that Buckley, whose views I find obnoxious, comes across as the more personable character than Vidal. I heartily recommend the documentary ‘Best of Enemies’ (2019) to find out more.

    Both Vidal and Hitchens, however, pale in comparison with Camus, who won a Nobel prize for his literary work. Vidal certainly, and Hitchens to a lesser extent, were great journalists, acerbic and pointed, but both lacked the secular seriousness, humanism and depth of Camus.

    While Camus might not regale a dinner party with the same panache as Hitchens, or have the same capacity for anecdote as Vidal, there is a unstinting logic and, above all, deep-seated humanism in his writing.

    Rivals Among Contemporaries

    There are many great writers of fiction who cannot be classified as intellectuals – although they may be celebrities. For instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, but even allowing for Edmund Wilson’s comment that he could never write a bad sentence, his philosophical insights, except in a yearning, American way, are non-existent.

    The Great Gatsby is a simple parable on the self-delusion of the American Dream. A far better and more videogenic vehicle for the true dystopia of the American dream is found in Mamet’s play ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’. (1984), where the American Dream descends into the cut-throat competition of avid materialistic salesmen.

    It should be added that Fitzgerald, in his epiphanic manner, argued that the sign of a great and first-rate mind was to keep ‘two inconsistent and contradictory ideas in his head at the same time’, which, ironically, encapsulates the ability of Camus.

    Unlike Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway was thought of as a man of ideas and action. But obsessions with bullfighting, machismo, war-making and fishing are not evidence of profound thinking, albeit these relate to important questions over masculinity and mortality, as well as the futility of existence.

    Nonetheless, Hemingway’s telegrammatic prose style is perhaps unsurpassed in its succinctness, most evident in brilliant short stories and the 1926 novel Fiesta. These are towering achievements, but they not the work of a public intellectual. On the contrary. Papa was not a thinker. Papa liked mamba. Too much.

    The nearest comparisons, and thus competitors of Camus, for the status of the greatest public intellectual of the twentieth century, are French representatives from the same period. These include his erstwhile friends, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Unlike Camus, however, their work has not stood the test of time.

    I feel they always looked down on him as a clever provincial boy, and not quite at their level of seriousness; seeing him perhaps as the Algerian equivalent of a Shropshire Lad.

    In reality, Sartre’s existentialism was always derived from the superior analysis of Martin Heidegger, and his latter-day Marxism is designer-radical-chic, which ultimately achieved nothing. De Beauvoir is a turgid novel writer, insightful in her autobiographical work, and as a foundational feminist, but neither of them wrote as well as Camus, or as reasonably.

    Sartre and de Beauvoir ultimately expelled him from their court: intellectual banishment for the temerity to steer an independent path, and not be their swarthy, mixed-race poodle. Of course, the precise banishment came after his response to the war in Algeria.

    To de Beauvoir and Sartre, Camus was a traitor to the extremism and mumbo-jumbo they promoted. A traitor to the achievement of nothing. It is hardly coincidental that Jacques, the fictional hero of They Were Coming For Him, suggests his intellectual executioners will facilitate his real executioners.

    It is generally assumed that Sartre, with his existentialist and Marxists texts, is the philosopher, and the Camus novelist. I beg to differ. Camus was a far more practical thinker, and his ideas more digestible. Serious writing is not simply that which is unleavened by humour or compression, even in philosophy. To my mind Jacque Derrida is the worst argument for a public intellectual, and is not serious in the least, as anyone who reads his incomprehensible prose will attest: plenty of words, few clear ideas.

    Algeria

    Camus of course, as he readily admitted, was not an existentialist, but a product of the Enlightenment and the French tradition of letters and reason. An inheritor of the tradition of Voltaire, with a clipped prose style redolent of Pascal. There is an austerity about his work too, but also a lyricism born of a mongrel Algerian background.

    His critics accused him of French colonialism, as they saw it, but this is a question of perspective. He advocated co-existence between the transplanted French and the native Islamic population, condemning the torture and the death penalty inflicted on the Islamic population. He was one of the few journalists to visit Algeria at the height of the war where he pleaded for moderation.

    The Marxist dogmatists despised him for this and accused him of being an agent of American imperialism. This descended to the absurd accusation of racism, lingering in The Meursault Investigation, and in the writings of Posner and Said. In my view these accusations are doubly spurious, considering his desire to broker a peaceful solution between the two sides, and a relentless commitment to human rights.

    Camus saw clearly that there would be serious bloodletting in Algeria as there had been during the Terror after the French Revolution, which is the subject-matter of The Rebel. Also, as a Pied Noir, he always argued for the peaceful co-existence between Arab and French populations. In a sense, he anticipated the idea of a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine.

    Evident throughout his writings is the desire to confront absurdity and extremism and invoke the values of rationality, community, solidarity and human rights. That moderation makes him a kindred spirit of the only true Irish intellectual, Edmund Burke.

    The Fall

    So why does Camus remain vital to our own time?

    In the classic sense, Camus was a man of letters, and of epigrammatic precision. In his writing, as with a great advocate, not a word is wasted. Like Beckett’s profound later works, his novels are models of compression and insight.

    It is not simply the novels, but the tracts of political philosophy and journalism – equalling even that of Orwell’s in my view – that define the consistent achievement. He also shared with Orwell a commitment to truth and moderation, defying barbarisms, whether fascistic or Communistic.

    The overriding note in Camus, thus, is always one of rationality and a profound distrust of hypocrisy, and indeed the social and religious prejudices emanating from extremism. Unlike Camus, extremists exhibit a fondness for over-statement and wrap ideas in generalisations, propaganda and pseudo-erudition. Psychologically, it is a form of hysteria, and far too many are appearing in our public discourse today.

    In this respect Camus’s disquisition on hypocrisy is best seen not just in The Outsider, but above all in the remarkable character of the judge and advocate penitent, Jean Baptiste Clemenceau from the 1956 novel The Fall, which even Sartre appreciated.

    Lawyers have often been portrayed as monsters, and such is the character Clemenceau. All ‘piss and blarney,’ as the Irish would say. Seductive, hyper-articulate and a rattlesnake. A judge penitent exiled to Amsterdam confessing his sins, unclear disgrace, disenchantment with humanity, and sense of the hypocrisy of his professional existence. The advocate manqué searching for something, perhaps oblivion.

    There is no more properly satanic and self-reflexive lawyer depicted in all of literature than in the crisp eight-five pages seated on a bar stool in Amsterdam. It in fact is a monologue. A mulish self-justificatory cri de coeur.

    The point is there for all to see: an awareness of the personal failure, properly understood, to grasp or deal with professional and personal hypocrisy.

    Other Works

    The Outsider, is Camus’s most famous novel and the pretext for The Meursault Investigation. It is at one level a classic penological drama of crime and punishment; unsurprisingly Camus worshipped Dostoevsky, which explains the echoes of Raskolnikov. Both texts also feature an intrusive religious prosecutor, compelling the alleged perpetrator to confess all.

    The cleansing of the soul becomes a metaphorical scaffold built by extremists to hang the perceived deviancy in others. It is really a projection of their own evil onto the righteous, and the innocent. The Outsider is also infused with Camus’s lifelong campaign against the death penalty, making it a human rights tract too.

    I would argue it is a mis-reading to suggest he is endorsing French colonialism, and any soupcon of indifference towards the faceless Arab victim should be read in the context of a quest for a just dispensation for all.

    It is the two great political tracts The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Rebel (1951), which are, I believe, the most relevant to his status of public intellectual.

    The Rebel advocates a freedom tempered by responsibility and engagement. It is a book cautioning against terror and a descent into extremism. It is the voice of enlightened, secular humanism that resists the path of uncaring nihilism. It is not a radical rebellious text as such, save as a plea for independence, principle and indeed righteousness.

    Camus demonstrates clearly in Sisyphus that suicide is an abnegation of responsibility. He also saw clearly the need to engage rationally with the important questions of his time. I translate this into my own profession work as meaning the rational compilation of evidence to ward off the forces of darkness.

    Thus, the Rebel is not a radical rebellious text as such save as a plea for independence, principle and indeed righteousness. This not unlike Jurgen Habermas’s idea of communicative action of technically but morally rational solutions to human problems.

    Continued Relevance

    On all sorts of levels, the anti-extremism of a Camus is called for in a world ensnared by religious fundamentalism, fuelled by toxic neo-liberalism and incipient fascism.

    As a man of the Enlightenment, Camus was also an opponent of moral relativism: the idea that all views are equally valid. He valued reason and moderation and sought compromise. His enemies now, and then, are the purveyors of Post-Truth psychobabble, along with all forms of fundamentalism and terror, racism and social marginalisation.

    Alas, independent public intellectuals are no longer in vogue, and we all must eat. Our universities are corralling us it into fixed categories and narratives. Issues of environmental and economic collapse give way to the safe haven of identity politics, allowing vested interests to virtue-signal their ‘liberal values,’ and ignore the great unwashed.

    People are appalled at the likes of Harvey Weinstein, rightly so, but the ex-post-facto-political-correctness is a side show to the real economic and environmental abusers.

    The mainstream media provides in Chomsky immortal phrase ‘language in the service of propaganda.’ Standards of intellectual and professional argumentation are going out the window. The educational system is obsessed with branding.

    Meanwhile mainstream media demands ‘balanced’ coverage: airing both sides of the argument has led, ineluctably, to the ventilation of utter nonsense. I would love to read what Camus would had to say about the dumbed-down palaver that passes for political debate today.

    So the values of Camus, the just man, the legalist in fact, the moderate, the secular humanistic rationalist and compromiser are greatly in need. These qualities are intrinsic to a genuine public intellectual, rather than a jumped-up self-help guru such as Jordan Peterson.

    Moreover, my own distaste for the organised criminality of many police officers is reflected in a passage from They Were Coming For Him:

    It seems that the; police officer in charge of the investigation had said there was nothing surprising about the case, that a career such as that mans was bound to end as it has.[iii]

    Of course, the books still stand the test of time and are now revisited and indeed revitalised by works such as The Meursault Investigation. This legacy is as vital as ever and in Aristotelean terms, the virtues it expresses are those of courage, moderation, justice and prudence. But he also held other great virtues: an utter lack of hypocrisy and, above all else, humanism. Camus had the full package of ingredients required, then as now, to be a public intellectual.

    David Langwallner is a barrister at Great James Street Chambers, London.

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    [i] Richard Posner, Law and Literature, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1989, p.66

    [ii]Berta Vias-Mahou, Cecilia Ross (Translator), They Were Coming For Him, Hispabooks, New York, 2016) p.111

    [iii] Ibid, p.189

  • Gluttony, Gastronomy, and the Origins of ‘French’ Food

    As French President, François Mitterrand enjoyed his fair share of sumptuous feasts in the haute cuisine tradition. His enduring esteem reflects a wider French anxiety, in an era of Globalisation, expressed by Pascal Ory, as to whether French cuisine will be ‘all that remains when everything else has been forgotten?’[i] Thus, in 1996, for his final supper, the dying statesman made an unusual request – alongside requests for the familiar capons and oysters – for a small, yellow-throated songbird, the ortolan, supposedly representing the French soul, to appear on the menu. As is customary, Mitterrand consumed the plucked bird whole in a sauce of Armagnac, crunching the little bones with his face behind a napkin – ‘so that God himself could not witness the barbarity.’[ii]

    Even committed carnivores might baulk at devouring a morsel of flesh from a rare creature that fills the air with song, and, apparently, the mouth with blood – providing another use for the napkin. There was, nonetheless, a brutal honesty to Mitterrand’s act, acknowledging the wantonness of a food culture that permits the sacrifice of a songbird for the sake of a fleeting corporeal pleasure.

    French authorities prohibited the hunting of ortolans in 1999. Nonetheless, 30,000 birds are still trapped every year, and are said to fetch up to €150 apiece on the black market. Tragically, ortolan numbers have dropped by 84% between 1980 and 2012.[iii]

    For most of us, however, the sins of the table are indirect and unacknowledged, as where virgin habitat makes way for grazing the animals we raise for meat, or to grow the crops used to feed them – rather than ourselves. A blindfold of distance prevents us from witnessing the nesting grounds of birds going up in smoke on hillsides; or hedgerows being eviscerated; let alone the pesticides bringing Insectageddon,[iv] which are wiping out the primary foodstuff of many birds.

    Nonetheless, since the French Revolution, there has been a clear distinction between a gluttony associated with the vice of excess, and the virtue of gastronomy – ‘the art and science of delicate eating’, underpinning French cuisine in particular. Yet this gastronomy often acts as a blindfold to the gluttonous excesses of a food culture that has attained global dominance. French cuisine has much to recommend it, especially in terms of the value ascribed to unique environmental contexts or terroir, but it remains excessively dependent on animal agriculture.

    It might be helpful to chart the emergence of the Sin of Gluttony, originally encompassing both excess and delicacy. In Roman times Seneca (d. 65 CE) was appalled by his decadent contemporaries who would ‘vomit in order to eat, and eat in order to vomit’, bemoaning the wastefulness of ‘banquets for which they ransack the whole world.’[v] Later, St. Paul writes of enemies of the cross whose end is ‘destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.’[vi] This reflects Adam succumbing to the temptation of an apple, the Original Sin of greed, but distinguishing between greed and necessary – and invariably enjoyable – consumption of food is not straightforward.

    St. Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 CE) provides an archetypal insight into the moral confusion wrought by appetite in the autobiographical Confessions. He acknowledges he must eat for the sake of his health, but is wary of the ‘dangerous pleasure’ he draws from it: ‘it is difficult to discern whether the needed care of my body is asking for sustenance or whether a deceitful voluptuousness of greed is trying to seduce me.’[vii] For St. Augustine, all bodily appetites are indicative of the fallen state of Man, a form of cupiditas: ‘Ardent desire, inordinate longing or lust; covetousness.’

    It fell to Pope Gregory I (d. c. 604 CE) to develop the most lasting definition of gluttony, when he laid out the seven ‘deadly’ or ‘cardinal’ sins. Building on St. Paul’s condemnation of those who treat their bellies as ‘God’, he defined that Sin as being more than merely eating too much. For Gregory, the contagion resided in the eater’s thoughts, as much as his actions:

    the glutton eats before he is hungry and continues to eat when he is no longer hungry; he craves costly and gratuitously sophisticated dishes; he eats too much and with excessive eagerness; he seeks not sustenance, but pleasure; he becomes the slave of his stomach and his palate.[viii]

    Breaking any taboo, however, tends to exert a fascination, and wealth and prestige are often expressed in conspicuous consumption. Thus, while gluttony was considered the ‘mother of all sins’, the medieval European nobility revelled in excess, enjoying stupendous, Bacchanalian banquets, memorably evoked by the sixteenth-century French writer François Rabelais in his tales of Gargantua and Pantagruel (c. 1532-64). Folk ambivalence towards orthodox theology is revealed in the popularity of a fictional land of fantastical abundance called ‘the Land of Cockaigne’. Herman Pleij reveals:

    Everyone living at the end of the Middle Ages had heard of Cockaigne at one time or another. It was a country, tucked away in some remote corner of the globe, where ideal living conditions prevailed … food and drink appeared spontaneously in the form of grilled fish, roast geese and rivers of wine … One could even reside in meat, fish, game, fowl, or pastry, for another feature of Cockaigne was its edible architecture.[ix]

    The reach of the myth of Cockaigne attests to a yearning for a sensuality in food consumption which the deadening moral schema prohibited: the reach of the mortal Sin of Gluttony failed to accommodate what is simultaneously a pleasurable and necessary activity. The early modern period witnessed an ideological shift that continues to govern our understanding.

    Mainly due to improvements in agriculture and the discovery of New World crops, by the late eighteenth century a rising bourgeoisie could enjoy the privilege of plenty, with wealth diffused more widely across society. Previously the nobility’s social superiority could be expressed in gargantuan banquets, but, for that style of eating to impress, hungry onlookers are required. How could consumption remain conspicuous? The answer lay in increasing the demands made upon chefs to innovate. New dishes became increasingly complex, a process accelerated by accumulated culinary knowledge in recipe books. The emphasis turned to quality, mainly dependent on human ingenuity, rather than largesse. The introduction to one French recipe book from 1674 signals the shift in fashion:

    Nowadays it is not the prodigious overflowing of dishes, the abundance of ragoûts and gallimaufries, the extraordinary piles of meat … in which it seems that nature and artifice have been entirely exhausted in the satisfaction of the senses, which is the most palpable object of our delicacy of taste. It is rather the exquisite choice of meats, the finesse with which they are seasoned, the courtesy and neatness with which they are served, their proportionate relationship to the number of people, and finally the general order of things which essentially contribute to the goodness and elegance of a meal.[x]

    According to Stephen Mennell this newly discovered sense of delicacy implies ‘a degree of restraint too, in so far as it involves discrimination and selection, the rejection as well as the acceptance of certain foods or combinations of foods, guided at least as much by social proprieties as by individual fancies.’[xi] The trend for more varied and delicate ragoûts predictably spread from elite circles to the burgeoning bourgeoisie. What was crucial, however, to upending the private banquets of the ancien regime was the French Revolution, which established the public restaurant as the location for fine dining, par excellence.

    The word ‘gastronomy’ seems to have first appeared in 1801 as the title of a poem b Joseph Berchoux.[xii] It was rapidly adopted in both France and Britain to designate ‘the art and science of delicate eating.’ The meaning of ‘gastronome’ overlaps with the older terms ‘epicure,’ and ‘gourmand,’ as well as the newer one ‘gourmet.’ Both ‘epicure’ and ‘gourmand’ had formerly pejorative meanings close to ‘glutton’ – applied to those who ate greedily and to excess. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, ‘epicure’ had acquired a more positive meaning in English as ‘one who cultivates a refined taste for the pleasure of the table; one who is choice and dainty in eating and drinking.’[xiii]

    In France, the word ‘gourmand’ had the same favourable sense and was used by the first ever restaurant critic Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière as the title for his series of restaurant reviews: Almanachs des Gourmands (1803-12). In contrast, today English writers commonly draw a distinction between a ‘gourmand’, which has the same negative connotation as ‘glutton’, and a ‘gourmet’, who is considered a person with a refined palate. But as Mennell notes, ‘gastronome’ differs from all the other terms in one key respect: a gastronome is generally understood as a person who not only cultivates his own ‘refined tastes for the pleasure of the table’ but also, ‘helps to cultivate other people’s too.’[xiv]

    The first restaurant critic, Grimod – a dispossessed noble who held democracy in contempt – was alive to the possibility that he could be attacked for being a glutton, asserting: ‘Let it be said that of all the Deadly Sins that mankind may commit the fifth appears to be the one that least troubles his conscience and causes him the least remorse.’[xv] He grapples with the challenge of altering the understanding of the term:

    If the Dictionary of the Academy is to be believed, gourmand is a synonym for glutton or greedy, as gourmandise is for gluttony. In our opinion this definition is inexact; the words gluttony and greed should be reserved for the characterisation of intemperance and insatiability, while the word gourmand has, in polite society, a much more favourable interpretation, one might say a nobler one altogether.[xvi]

    It was, however, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (d. 1826), a bachelor lawyer of a more democratic persuasion than Grimod, who most clearly distinguished gastronomy from the medieval concept of gluttony. In the opinion of Balzac, Brillat-Savarin’s La Physiologie du gout was a work of literature beside which that of Grimod’s was ‘too much of a pot-pourri.’[xvii] Even Grimod, upon reading his contemporary’s work, magnanimously observed: ‘Beside him I am no more than a kitchen skivvy.’[xviii] Brillat-Savarin’s Gourmandism was ‘an impassioned, reasoned and habitual preference for everything which gratifies the organs of taste.’ Importantly, he distinguished this from excessive eating and drinking, arguing that gourmandism is ‘the enemy of excess; indigestion and drunkenness are offences which render the offender liable to be struck off the rolls.’[xix] Brillat-Savarin embraced the sensual pleasure of food, beyond sufficiency, arguing it ‘is one of the privileges of mankind to eat without being hungry and drink without being thirsty.’[xx]

    This appears to be a refutation of Gregory’s definition of the mortal sin, where ‘the glutton eats before he is hungry and continues to eat when he is no longer hungry’, repudiating Gregory’s conviction that drawing ‘pleasure’ as opposed to ‘sustenance’ from food is gluttonous. This, Brillat-Savarin contended, showed ‘implicit obedience to the commands of the Creator, who, when He ordered us to eat in order to live, gave us the inducement of appetite, the encouragement of savour, and the reward of pleasure.’[xxi]

    Brillat-Savarin’s book has been in print every year since publication in 1826 and his bon mots remain staples in gastronomic literature. He can be credited with altering our understanding of gluttony and liberating sensual appreciation of food from the grip of the dualistic philosophy of the medieval Church. But Brillat-Savarin left an inaccurate picture of French food, which became a global hit.

    The meat-heavy diet promoted by the early gastronomes is still equated, misleadingly, with traditional French rustic fare. In fact, Fernand Braudel writes: ‘the diet of peasants, that is the vast majority of the population, had nothing in common with the cookery books written for the rich.’ Peasants, the great bulk of the French population (and beyond) until the mid-twentieth century, might eat meat in the form of salted pork just once a week [xxii]: traditional French fare is basically soup and bread.

    Nevertheless, aristocratic ‘French’ food went viral as the ultimate expression of privilege far beyond France. The great chef Auguste Escoffier (d. 1935) boasted: ‘I have ‘sown’ two thousand chefs all around the world … Think of them as so many seeds planted in virgin soils.’[xxiii] It became the dominant idiom in Western elite cooking over the course of the nineteenth century and France remains the pre-eminent gastronomic destination. An implicit appeal of that cuisine, expressed in restaurant dining, is the impression of aristocratic sophistication, an aura maintained to the present day, where otherwise plebeian patrons are addressed as ‘sir’ and ‘madame’ by besuited waiters.

    The extensive use of French words in English-language gastronomic discourse (notably cuisine, chef, and even bon appetit!) accentuates divisions between the diets of rich (many of them with a command of the French language) and poor. Working class communities often lack a vocabulary to talk about ‘posh’ food. One’s upbringing generally exerts an influence throughout life, as Pierre Bourdieu remarks: ‘[I]t is probably in tastes in food that one would find the strongest and most indelible mark of infant learning, the lessons which longest withstand the distancing or collapse of the native world and most durably maintain nostalgia for it.’[xxiv] Thus, altering patterns of consumption, as Jamie Oliver discovered, is no simple matter, but the prevailing appetite, especially for meat, is causing untold damage to the planet.

    A diet based on plants – whether undertaken for ethical, health or environmental reasons – is still viewed as the poor gastronomic relation, and as even involving a drudgery that campaigns like ‘Meat-free Mondays’ may actually compound. Moreover, high-profile gastronomes – especially celebrity chefs – maintain a food tradition that is mistakenly viewed as timeless.

    Leaving aside the burning issue of climate change, explosive growth in human population from just 1.5 billion in 1900 to over 7 billion today is exacting a terrible price on many wild animals, which are rapidly losing habitats. A recent comparison of global populations of domesticated animals and wild animals reveals that humans and their livestock now account for an astonishing 96% of the total mammal biomass on planet Earth.[xxv] Animal agriculture, including the expansion of monoculture agriculture for feedstuffs is the leading culprit: close to 70 percent of the planet’s agricultural land is used for animal pasture alone,[xxvi] while barely half of the world’s cropland is to devoted to food for direct human consumption.[xxvii]

    Most people would hesitate before eating an endangered species, such as a rare songbird like the ortolan, but recognition that the lifecycles of livestock are largely responsible for these extinctions is less commonly acknowledged. To bring about what The Lancet describes as the ‘Great Food Transformation,’[xxviii] involving a substantial reduction in meat consumption, a new generation of gastronomes must instil new tastes. A vast array of edible plants, both wild and domesticated, are available at a far lower environmental price. These can form the basis of a new gastronomy that will not demand blindfolds to avoid the shame.

    [i] Pascal Ory, ‘Gastronomy’ in Nora Pierre (editor) Realms of Memory: The

    Construction of the French Past, Volume II, Traditions. Translated by Arthur

    Goldhammer. New York, Columbia University Press, 1997, p.444

    [ii] Michael Paterniti, ‘The Last Meal, June 27th, 2008, Esquire, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a4642/the-last-meal-0598/, accessed 8/4/19.

    [iii] Dale Berning Sawa, ‘Deadly appetite: 10 animals we are eating into extinction’, April 3rd, 2019, The Guardian,  https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/apr/03/deadly-appetite-10-animals-we-are-eating-into-extinction?CMP=twt_a-environment_b-gdneco&fbclid=IwAR3xEteCZyEb-qgIoeAG7S3LcPn-4qnzeWrK-lEOftEzq9Cpx520U4vYTQk, accessed 11/4/19.

    [iv] George Monbiot, ‘Insectageddon: farming is more catastrophic than climate breakdown’, October, 20th, 2017, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/20/insectageddon-farming-catastrophe-climate-breakdown-insect-populations, accessed 11/4/19.

    [v] Aviad Kleinberg, Deadly Sins – A Very Partial List, translated from Hebrew by

    Susan Emanuel in collaboration with the author, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2008,  p.81.

    [vi] Phil. 3.18-19, New International Version.

    [vii] John K. Ryan, The Confessions of St. Augustine, New York Doubleday: New York, 1960, p.83.

    [viii] Kleinberg, 2008, p.6.

    [ix] Hermann Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life.

    Translated by Diane Webb, New York, Columbia University Press, 1997, p.3.

    [x] L’art de bien Traiter, L.S.R., 1674 quoted in Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, Oxford, Blackwell, 1985, pp.73-74.

    [xi] Mennell, 1985, p.274.

    [xii] Ibid, p.266.

    [xiii] Ibid, p.268.

    [xiv] Ibid, p.268.

    [xv] Giles MacDonogh, A Palate in Revolution: Grimod de la Reyniere and the

    Almanach des Gourmands. London, Robin Clarke, 1987, p.186.

    [xvi] Ibid, p.187.

    [xvii] Ibid, p.108.

    [xviii] Ibid, p.166.

    [xix] Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste. Translated from French

    by Tome Jaine. London, Folio Society, 2008, p112.

    [xx] Ibid, p.183.

    [xxi] Ibid, p.112.

    [xxii] Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible: Civilisation and Capitalism 15th-18th Century: Volume 1, Translated from French by Sian Reynolds, London Phoenix Press, p.187.

    [xxiii] Ory, 1997 p.444.

    [xxiv] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. Translated from French by Richard Nice. London, Routledge Press, 2010, p.71.

    [xxv] Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, ‘The biomass distribution on Earth’, PNAS June 19, 2018 115 (25) 6506-6511, https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506, accessed 8/4/19.

    [xxvi] Gaelle Gourmellon, ‘Peak Meat Production Strains Land and Water Resources’ Worldwatch Institute, August 26th, 2014, http://www.worldwatch.org/peak-meat-production-strains-land-and-water-resources-1 accessed 6/5/19.

    [xxvii] Brad Plumer, ‘How much of the world’s cropland is actually used to grow food?’ Vox, December 16th, 2014. https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed, accessed 6/5/19.

    [xxviii] Prof Walter Willett et al, Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems, January, 2019. The Lancet.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext?utm_campaign=tleat19&utm_source=HPfeature’, accessed 8/4/19.

  • My Grandmother’s Life Under the Third Reich and Behind the Iron Curtain

    Irene H.

    Going into your house, I sat in the conservatory waiting for the door to open. Waiting for your familiar rasping voice to call, “Mann! Herzenskind, komm rein.” I remained there still in the leather chair, trying to pluck up the courage to open the door and be met with emptiness. You’d snuck out one night three weeks earlier.

    In almost a century of life, history marked Irene Hauser (née Leitgeber) and she, in turn, was determined to leave her mark. Born in Berlin’s Wedding district in 1924, her life was shaped by passages in history books. As a twelve year-old girl she sat in the stands watching Leni Riefenstahl film the 1936 Olympics, so awe-struck by the cameras that she almost forgot to watch any of the tournament.

    She left school without graduating and when she told her parents at the end of the war that she wanted to go to university they thought she had lost her mind. It wasn’t her first choice. She had wanted to become a fashion designer but with barely enough food around to feed the population, whatever about fabric, that seemed like an even more fanciful idea. So Irene became the first person to go to university in her family and enrolled in physics at East Berlin’s Humboldt University, where she accounted for one half of the female student population on her course.

    The city had been bombed into the ground and few possessed the creativity to imagine how this heap of rubble could ever resemble a functioning city again. Irene’s lectures were held inside some of the brick skeletons that remained scattered through the city, and during the icy winter months she sat in the auditorium wrapped in an over-sized fur coat.

    In the 1980’s she retired as a professor in physics. Much must have happened between those two moments and sometimes she spoke about her work but it was the stories of what seemed like fantastical adventures that burned themselves into the mind of her youngest granddaughter. She told of her trip to Hanoi during a ceasefire in the Vietnam War. Her delegation was sent to provide expertise to Vietnamese scientists in the war effort, and Irene spent much of her time there trying to avoid the local food. In the 1960s she and her husband, also a physicist, worked on a secret research programme near Dresden to develop nuclear power.

    The lust for life you possessed made everything seem possible and any fragility a bewildering concept. As we all sat in the chapel, your funeral seemed such a ludicrous event.

    Although Irene knew how to bring her experiences to life in the stories she told, there was much silence about the suffering she witnessed and endured. Like many of her contemporaries, it was her actions that provided clues about the war that marked her.

    No scrap of food was ever thrown away. Instead she tried to redistribute what she didn’t want to eat. Once she attempted to cajole her granddaughter into packing a half-eaten sausage for her trip back to London.

    When she did speak about it, it was so matter of fact that there was little room for emotions. Anecdotes like the dead body lying in the hallway of the apartment block, which stopped her home being looted or the ridiculousness of her trying to salvage a carpet from her aunt’s burning home after an air raid seemed like abstractions. Even then, recounting herself walking through one of Berlin’s wide avenues lined by blazing buildings drew a harrowing image.

    Irene was just twenty then. She grabbed life whichever way she could. So when she met the funny and clever Oskar at a laboratory she worked in, she didn’t see his limp. When an overseer, whose only function was to report to the SA (Sturmabteilung), threatened her with concentration camp if she carried on seeing the Halbjuden, meeting Oskar in secret seemed the only plausible solution to her dilemma.

    Oskar didn’t want to let her marry him — him! A cripple. But Irene had made up her mind. And so it went. The two celebrated the defeat of Nazi Germany with a wedding and a rhubarb pie. Four years later, Irene gave birth to her only surviving child while Oskar was imprisoned on trumped up smuggling charges and cultivating his life-long aversion to Skat, a card game he played from morning till night with other inmates to pass the long days. His imprisonment had mobilised a student movement and although newspaper clippings of the protests and petitions for his release had been kept in a folder, Irene gave them to an archive soon after his death. Forward was the only direction she knew.

    You always had a solution to everything and knew how to cover your tracks when you didn’t. Your quirky pride left no room for any admission of defeat. After you gave up smoking, you developed an affinity for checking on the washing behind the shed after each meal. Even your own son had no idea that you couldn’t cook until granddad died.

    Much was left untold. Secretly we pieced some of your story together not to feel so inadequate in your shadow. To get to know the fallible human. Next to you our failures sometimes stung unbearably.

    Perhaps a growing awareness of her silence prompted Irene to write a small booklet about her life in her last years. No one was to read it until she was gone. There was little sense that writing it gave her much joy. Rather it was a task that had to be completed, and like every task in life, complete it she did.

    It recounts her childhood experiences in the Third Reich: pushing her parents to allow her to join the Bund Deutscher Mädchen (the equivalent to the Hitler Youth for girls) against their will; the turmoil of the post-war years, and the division of Berlin; her many professional achievements, and some reflections on the political life of the time in which she was inevitably involved. Maybe some modesty stopped her from indulging personal impressions and feelings in her booklet, but an impatience for anything that lay in the past certainly did.

    In our last phone call you told me to never grow this old. The thought of being a burden to anyone was a greater weight on you than you could bear. ‘But grandma, we’re all so happy you got this old.’ Although I didn’t know it then with that I let you go. That day I stopped tearing and pulling at you. Life would be ok. Your death was befitting of your life. Fast and impatient.

    Photo Caption: A photo of Irene, perhaps strict and stern to any stranger. But for those who knew her those lips hold back a smile and those eyes are filled with a lively curiosity that lasted as long as she did. By Franziska Hauser

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