Catalan secessionists have succeeded in framing the debate over Catalan independence as a stark choice between two mutually exclusive options: either the status quo of Catalonia retaining regional autonomy within Spain, or for Catalonia to become an independent republic. Anyone objecting that neither might not be the best solution to the current deadlock is dismissed as ‘undemocratic’, by both sides. It is a superb rhetorical technique: is there anything more ‘undemocratic’ than not allowing citizens to decide on their future?
The Spanish government response to the secessionist challenge has been to deny their opponents the opportunity to stage a referendum, decrying it as as illegal under the Spanish constitution. To inflame matters further, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy sent the Policia Nacional to break up the un-constitutional independence referendum, held on October 1st, injuring peaceful citizen taking part in the vote. Rajoy’s strategy has been short-sighted, indicating a lack of interest in bringing about a negotiated solution to an ever-growing problem that threatens the very core of Spanish democracy.
Contrary to what the Spanish government believes, what is wrong with the idea of a referendum is not that it is illegal under current constitutional law – laws are contingent and can always be changed – but that it is based on a false dichotomy.
A false dichotomy operates when an argument presents two options and ignores, either intentionally or out of ignorance, unexpressed alternatives. The choice might conceivably come down to remaining an autonomous region within Spain, or full independence, but these are, by no means, the only alternatives. Hence, the question should really be: how can two mutually-exclusive choices adequately represent the diversity of beliefs in the region and the country as a whole? A false dichotomy forces homogenisation of opinions, and asks those confronting the dichotomy to drop any differing views they might hold, which does not represent one or other of the mutually-antagonistic options.
Therefore, the danger of a referendum is that of oversimplification. In a highly divided region such as Catalonia, where secessionists represent almost half of the population (a recent poll puts support for independence at 40,8 %), finding a solution in which one side is proclaimed the victor over the other – a zero sum game – will not bring permanent stability. It denies the losing side a voice in the future of their region. This has been the failed strategy of the Spanish government over the past number of years: to deny the validity of the interests of almost half of Catalans. Not taking into consideration one’s opponent’s interests is undemocratic, even if this comes about through a ‘democratic’ vote, such as a referendum. That is why most constitutions include ‘checks and balances’ against the dictatorship of the majority.
Rajoy’s Partido Popular (PP) is also guilty of blocking concessions that had given Catalonia a special status within Spain, including the right to be considered a nation, back in 2006. This left many Catalans with a grievance towards the government in Madrid, and brought significant support for pro-independence parties. The sense of betrayal might explain the insistence on a referendum as the only solution to the situation in Catalonia: ‘we already tried the negotiation table and look what happened’, claim the secessionists. But regardless of how emotionally-justified this reaction might be, it is nonetheless an inadequate response.
A more stable outcome, and one that has hardly been discussed by the main political actors, would require a process of negotiation with the final objective of arriving at a new status for Catalonia that would meet the interests of most Catalans. Democracy is not only about voting; it also involves political representatives arriving at a consensus through negotiation, which reflects the needs and interests of most citizens. A referendum would leave the voice of the losing side unattended, and on a highly divisive issue like Catalan secession, this would not resolve the underlying divisions. But for the negotiation to start, Rajoy must go.
Antonio Garzón Vico is Assistant Professor of Business of Biotech at the School of Biomolecular & Biomedical Science, University College Dublin.
The issue of data privacy is becoming a source of increasing individual and corporate unease with wide political ramifications. To that end the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into force in less than two months, will attempt to harmonize and enhance data protection standards across the continent.
Around the world governments actively monitor Internet communications. Here I examine Russia’s System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM) that the government employs for the purposes of lawful interception of various IT and telecommunication systems.
The original version of SORM was introduced in 1995, and allowed the Federal Security Services (FSB) to monitor phone calls and the Internet activity of users, despite the limited reach and functionality of Internet services at that time.
SORM-1 was represented by special hardware furnished by the FSB that telecommunication operators were mandated to adopt within their infrastructures. The arguments used in favour of SORM-1 were around maintaining security in the public interest, at a time of considerable unrest in the country.
As information technologies have matured in Russia, so have the technologies utilized by the government to oversee and, where the need arises, tame them. In 1998 a new version of SORM was released (SORM-2). This time it was required that SORM-2 be installed on the servers of Internet service providers, thus providing the FSB with oversight over all transactions passing through these servers.
Subsequently, the scope of SORM-2 was further expanded to encompass monitoring of social networks and forum traffic. All operators were required to integrate this fully at their own cost. In addition, more governmental institutions and security agencies, apart from the FSB, were given leave to exploit the information-gathering-potential of SORM-2 (including the Police, Customs Authorities, Presidential Security Services and others).
In 2014 the most recent version of SORM was deployed pursuant to a ministerial order issued by the Russian Ministry of Communication, with less than a one year deadline imposed for implementation. SORM-3 covers a wider range of online resources and activities, which may be subjected to targeted surveillance. These include, but are not limited to, users’ phone numbers, unique media access control addresses, as well as email addresses accessed from, for instance, mail.ru, yandex.ru, rambler.ru etc.
Notably, SORM-3 resorts to a very comprehensive data processing protocol called Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), in which the content of each piece (packet) of data is thoroughly scrutinized, and rerouted accordingly.
Ordinarily, in order to acquire specific data, the governmental agency in charge requires a court order. But operatives are under no obligation to present this to a raided party. Refusal to divulge data in the absence of a court order will get you nowhere. Moreover, while the court order is required to seize the content, metadata (the description and ancillary context of the data in question) may be collected in its absence.
In 2015 the lawfulness of SORM was raised by the European Court of Human Rights in Zakharov v Russia. The Court held that SORM potentially violates Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (a right to respect for private and family life), concluding that given the significant risk of SORM being misused, the Russian state had failed to provide adequate safeguards to eliminate its potential arbitrariness, as well as failing to arrange for suitable measures to prevent unwarranted scrutiny.
At present, Russia is not the only county introducing far-reaching control of its IT and Telecommunication platforms. Systems that bear resemblance to SORM are already operating in the Europe Union with the European Telecommunications Standard’s Institute’s (ETSI) specifications, and in the United States through the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.
Although targeted surveillance plays an important role in the prevention of crime, including terrorism, the full scope of governmental surveillance technologies are not clearly defined, either in Russia, or in other countries.
The recent appointment of Gina Haspel as CIA Director is a sign of a growing official approval for the use of torture, despite its illegality under international and US domestic law. It is widely known that she previously helped cover up US government torture.
FRONTLINE reported recently that ‘Haspel ran one of the first black sites – secret CIA prisons where the agency held perceived high-level terrorism suspects. She also participated in the controversial decision to destroy evidence of interrogation sessions in which detainees were subjected to waterboarding.’
President Trump repeatedly praised torture techniques, too, announcing during his campaign that, ‘Torture works. Ok, folks? You know, I have these guys – ‘torture doesn’t work!’ – believe me, it works.’
This idea that ‘torture works’ is often taken as moral justification for its use. Furthermore, while explicit moral argument in favour of torture is unusual, it is implicit in the characterisation of ‘terrorists’ as ‘baddies’. Even if an act of torture is regarded as unsavoury, it may still be deemed worthwhile if lives can be saved by using it. These arguments, however, are deeply flawed, as I will explain.
In the absence of an internationally-agreed definition of terrorism I use this one adopted by the UN Security Council in 2004:
… Criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily harm, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act, which constitute offences within the scope of and as defined in the international conventions and protocols relating to terrorism. (UN Security Council Res. 1566, 2004, para. 3)
“Terrorists”, therefore, are defined as individuals who commit criminal offences, such as those detailed above, for the purpose of creating “a state of terror in the general republic”.
Terrorism is also a crime under specific domestic codes, including the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000. Specific offences include: ‘Membership of proscribed organizations, fund-raising for terrorism, directing a terrorist organization, and incitement of terrorism overseas.’ A person can be described as a terrorist, and prosecuted for criminal acts under domestic and international law as terrorist, for a wide range of deeds, ranging from simply being a member of a terrorist organization, to hijacking a plane.
Let us assume for the purpose of this piece that any terrorists who is about to be tortured has already been found guilty of one of the criminal offences detailed above, rather than being merely suspected. So I will be talking about people who are guilty of offences that contribute to terrorism.
My focus is on the state as a moral actor, rather than individuals working for the state; though there are interesting dilemmas in terms of individual responsibility.
In 1984 the UN defined torture as:
Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.(United Nations Torture Convention of 1984)
This definition does not include, however, ‘pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions’ as The Telegraph put it in 2005, such as the death penalty.
We may assume that Fyodor Dostoyevsky‘s description of the plight of a person sentenced to death by the state in The Idiot is biographical, considering his own experience of narrowly avoiding a Czarist firing squad, allegedly for taking part in anti-governmental activities. By comparison with the fate of a person assailed and killed by brigands he says: ‘the whole terrible agony lies in the fact that you will most certainly not escape, and there is no greater agony than that’. He asks: ‘Who says that human nature is capable of bearing this without madness?’
This effect of lawful actions is important when it comes to deciding what form of torture, if any, could be permissible, as it implies that exceptions can be made, and in general there is ambiguity around what is generally understood as torture, and that which is actually illegal.
As exposed by the water-boarding controversy, there are certain actions that are widely believed to constitute torture, but which can be defended as legal on technical grounds. In other words, if some actions generally considered torturous, are permitted, then there is the possibility that some actions are ‘torture’, without being illegal (domestically and internationally).
That leaves the potential for certain torture techniques to be, not only legal, but seen as ‘right’ as in accordance with the law. It is precisely this loop-hole and the ambiguity in understanding of what is legal, and what is ‘right’, which opens the doors to the possibility of legally-sanctioned ‘torture warrants’.
Which, if any, torture, could be considered ‘right’, then? Is something always ‘right’ because it is ‘legal’? Is it ever ‘right’ to legalise actions, such as those in self-defence, that are otherwise wrong? Could torture be one of those exceptions?
Without delving too deeply into moral philosophy, we can take two approaches. The first, that of moral realism, identifies an action as inherently and objectively wrong. The second approach is utilitarian: which advocates the course that benefits the most people, maximizing general happiness and minimizing total pain.
Utilitarianism is a form of Consequentialism, which broadly states that an action’s ‘rightness’ depends on the consequences of that action. We need not focus the discussion too much on ‘increasing utility’ and happiness; instead, I think it makes sense to consider the subject of torture pragmatically, as well as consider the wider consequences of using torture. Consequentialism is the stance often used to justify the use of torture, so let us consider whether the end ever justifies the means.
It is difficult to find a justification of torture adopting moral realism, although there are manifestations of moral realism – Christian just law theory for example – which leave room for retaliation, and might be used to defend torture that is punitive. Our main discussion of torture, however, concerns that which is used to interrogate terrorists to extract information, because it is that use which tends to be defended.
When might the ends justify the means to torture terrorists? Three significant arguments are adduced: (a) The Ticking Time Bomb Argument; (b) Secret Torture; and (c) the Machiavellian Approach. I will argue that none of these approaches are persuasive from a practical, Consequentialist perspective, and explain why torture is ineffective, morally wrong, and should never be legalised. I will finish by arguing that the institutionalisation of ‘legal torture’ is a problem in itself, and reiterate the danger inherent in legalising actions that are widely regarded as torture, even if a state’s lawyers can find ways to avoid official acknowledgement.
I will argue that a zero tolerance approach to torture is the only way to avoid not only grave human rights abuses, but also the undermining of the Rule of Law. ‘Borderline’ or ‘legal’ torture methods, such as water-boarding, as well as the ‘torture warrants’ proposed by Alan Dershowitz are never the ‘right’ option either, precisely because any legalisation risks terrible consequences that far outweigh any positive outcomes.
(a) The Ticking Time Bomb
Many torture-sympathisers are fond of the ‘Ticking Time Bomb’ argument, which is a Philosophical thought experiment designed to test the limits of a moral proposition. It defies the ethical intuition that it is morally wrong to ever torture somebody, by constructing a situation in which there appears to be moral justification for using it. It is said that if someone doesn’t torture Terrorist X a certain number of civilians will die, that Terrorist X is guilty, and definitely knows where the bomb is, and that this is the only avenue of investigation open to the police.
I would argue, first of all, that if this is really the only line of enquiry then the authorities have already failed, because even if they do torture Terrorist X, they are unlikely to stop the bomb from going off. Terrorists are often trained to resist torture, and those with an Islamic Fundamentalist background may actually seek martyrdom. Neither death, however slow and painful, nor the threat of it, or just the pain, is likely to persuade them to divulge any useful information.
If the bomb is ‘about to go off’ then Terrorist X will know that, and will therefore be aware that he will not have to endure the interrogation for very long (should he be a terrorist averse to pain, rather than one trying to embrace it, if anyone truly does that). Another practical point in response to this scenario is that under such pressure Terrorist X may simply lie about the bomb’s whereabouts, to stop the torture, which would be detrimental to any counter-terrorist operation, as such information would be a waste of time.
There are other serious difficulties with the scenario. It is not meant to be ‘practical’, precisely because it is a thought experiment. It is what Bob Brecher calls ‘a fantasy’, in the sense that rarely, if ever, could such a scenario occur in real life. Basing legislation and even moral theory on a fantasy, is simply irresponsible. It is one thing for moral philosophers to test their intuitions; quite another for policy-makers and lawyers to base legislation on it.
Thus torture is unlikely to help stop the bomb, so the consequences of using torture here are ineffective, of no benefit to society, the counter-terror operation (whose time may be wasted), or, obviously, Terrorist X. Moreover, even in the extremely unlikely scenario that Terrorist X speaks, and the bomb doesn’t go off, the wider repercussions of using torture are so dire that even then, it is not right to use it.
Firstly, it undermines the authority and integrity of international law. If a state finds a loophole in it that permits torture, then principles of individual human rights are clearly breached. Further, should a state use torture without legal sanction, and gets away with it, then international law loses its authority, in that its laws are broken without any consequences, rendering the international legal system weak and ineffectual, in actuality and in reputation.
Abu Ghraib, a stain on the reputation of the United States.
A state’s reputation is also ruined if it permits torture, especially where it is known and admired for being a liberal democracy. It will be seen as hypocritical, and as acting in a way that undermines its own values. The use of torture by the United States at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison, for example, has lowered many people’s estimation of the United States, which is now widely regarded as hypocritical and aggressive, rather than an inspiration to democrats and republicans worldwide.
Reputational damage is problematic, furthermore, as it sets a bad example for other states, who may then use torture using the argument that, ‘If [America] can use torture, then why not us?’ Within a state, also, the legislation of even some ‘borderline’ kinds of torture may lead to a wider tolerance and use of worse torture, and might lead to it being used not just against terrorist, but other criminals and alleged criminals.
In addition to these harmful consequences of even the limited use of torture, it may also prove to be not only ineffective for counter-terrorism (and even if it does ‘work’, the evidence collected under duress would be inadmissible in court), but also counter-productive. Torturing terrorists is likely to lead to retaliation and further terrorism, rather than diminish it.
(b) Secret Torture
One response to the negative consequences of the use of torture on terrorists outlined above, is that if it is hidden from public view, most of these repercussions could be mitigated. It is true that if it is kept under wraps, then the state in question could avoid undermining international law, superficially at least.
If international law does not allow, or is not used to justify torture, then at least its integrity is kept intact, and in public its authority too. In keeping torture absolutely secret, furthermore, it avoids acquiring a bad reputation, which may also prevent the slippery slope of other states drawing legitimacy from the torturous state. Torture may also, if kept secret, not lead to retaliation.
So if torture has few negative consequences, as outlined above, through being covered up, then perhaps it could be ‘right’ on some level? The first problem with this solution, however, is that keeping torture secret is almost impossible. Many states in recent history – the US and UK to name a couple – have failed in their efforts to do so, leading to all the negative consequences outlined already. Moreover, even if the secret is kept, it would be the height of hypocrisy for a liberal democracy to behave in this way, and completely undermines the Rule of Law.
Another problem with this ‘solution’ is that even if kept secret, torture not only has damaging effects on the victim, but also on the torturer. Torture corrupts the perpetrator, and anyone who allows it. To allow, even to obligate, a person to torture another for the sake of his state, is destructive. It means that that person will possibly suffer horrendous guilt, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in some cases, having accepted a level of personal responsibility.
When torture is carried out in secret, there will always be people who know that it has happened, who have been involved at an individual level, and are aware that a state has permitted actions entirely contrary to its supposed values. It is highly unlikely, anyway, that something as grave as torture would remain a secret forever, even if the state in question ‘gets away with it’ in the immediate sense of not being punished for violating international law.
(c) Machiavellian Approach
A cynical approach to the problem of torture and the modern state, is simply to dispense with the liberal democratic ideals that prevent (at least in theory) certain states from using it. Indeed torture could be the ‘right’ option for a state unconcerned by its reputation, either domestically or internationally. Its government may not mind undermining international legal structures, and have no problem with setting a bad example to other states, provoking retaliation, and losing a virtuous reputation.
If a state is utterly Machiavellian, and wishes to instill fear in its enemies then the use of torture could seem attractive, and ‘right’ in the distorted sense that torture might lead to the acquisition of power and wealth.
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli 1469-1527.
Even if a state adopts this attitude, however, it is nevertheless in breach of international law, which has consequences, whether that state respects it or not. Although international legal structures are often criticised for being slow and ineffectual, they are still a force to be reckoned with. Twinned with the reputational damage, (whether the state in question cares about its reputation or not), it is unlikely that a ruthlessly Machiavellian, torture-happy state would escape sanctions from other countries and international legal structures.
Even the most secretive, Macchiavellian state would likely run into trouble at some point. If the entire world became cynical and Machiavellian, then perhaps one such state could avoid punishment – as Nazi Germany sought for instance – but in such a situation internal opposition would surely emerge eventually, and certainly result in retaliation in some shape. Endemic violence, whether within state borders or otherwise, is never a favourable outcome, and certainly never ‘right’.
Torturing a terrorist is never the ‘right’ thing to do, even in a hypothetical scenario of someone knowing where a ticking time bomb is located; even if it is kept under wraps, even if a state’s lawyers find a loophole in international law, and even if a state is utterly Machiavellian in its disregard for human rights, international law, and reputational damage.
It is never right, even on a practical level, because the negative consequences outweigh whatever benefits there may seem to be. It risks retaliation, international opprobrium and possibly intervention (through the application of international law or otherwise); it damages state employees as well as those tortured; and imperils the integrity of its founding ideals (assuming the state is not Macchiavellian): these risks are simply not worth any short-term benefits one could possibly gain through torture.
For a liberal democracy to permit the torture of terrorists, in the hope of gaining more power over them, ultimately reduces that state to the level of the terrorist, if not becoming a ‘terrorist’ in the conventional sense, then ‘terrorist’ in it wider meaning. There is too much of a family resemblance between he who terrorizes and he who tortures to take seriously the idea that someone who tortures a terrorist is really any better than him, really any more ‘right’. Torture lowers the perpetrator to the level of the terrrorist, embracing her own moral demise.
Christiana Spens is a writer and academic, currently based in Scotland. Having read Philosophy at Cambridge, she then completed a Masters and PhD in Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews. She has written several books, most recently Shooting Hipsters: Rethinking Dissent in the Age of PR (Repeater Books, 2016) and The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She writes regularly for Prospect, Studio Internationaland White Noise, on art, politics and literature.
One beauty of the game of golf is the possibility to play it right up until your death. Indeed, many’s the enthusiast who has breathed his last on the fairway. It is often said there are worse ways to go. My own father had the unfortunate experience of attempting to resuscitate a man on the third green in Lahinch, but sadly the cardiac arrest proved too severe. There was general consensus – among his golf brethren at least – that there was no better spot on which to meet your maker.
This brings us to the recent resuscitation in the fortunes of Tiger Woods. The Golfing Gods had created, we thought, a man capable of walking on any water hazard. An unbreakable spirit. His rise through the world rankings spread the gospel of the game, and brought a global following of disciples.
Yet when the burden of carrying the clubs grew too heavy it seemed Golf had killed poor Tiger. Success and the weight of expectation brought behaviour patterns not associated with a ‘heavenly being’. They certainly did not accord with his father Earl’s earlier perception of messianic powers lying in his son. In 1996 he said: ‘The world will be a better place to live in by virtue of his existence. He will bring to the world a humanitarianism. I know I was personally selected by God to nurture this young man’.
This false prophecy from a Father about a Son ended up an unholeable Ghostly mess. Life lived through golf left a man unable to see the Woods for the trees. The Tiger we admired no longer lives. He was crucified, and the game of golf suffered for his sins. Unfortunately the young apostles in his wake could not captivate the masses. Golf’s television ratings were left drowning in a river of Jordan Spieth and co..
However, one beauty of this Life is the possibility of redemption. The list of humans, sporting or otherwise, resurrected from past indiscretions is legion. Tiger has sought forgiveness for being a false idol, and the High Priests and Pharisees of golf and television no longer wash their hands of him. In return they have been rewarded by far more than thirty silver pieces.
On reflection, it is now legitimate to ask whether Tiger has been something of the sacrificial lamb in this story. Perhaps it is really for the rest of us to repent, and seek redemption from our past expression of vitriol and disgust towards him.
Life and Golf sometimes share similar teachings. Humility, respect, and even silence are all part of the learning. The Buddhist in Tiger should appreciate these lessons. When he returns to the garden of Augusta after Easter the predominantly Christian crowd will rise to the occasion and rejoice in his humbled return with respectful applause. The awestruck silence as the game’s saviour rounds Amen Corner once again may confirm that golf’s prayers have been answered.
On yoga teacher training courses among the heartening questions I receive are ones that readers of my previous piece have also posed: how can I be compassionate towards what I consider wrong, or evil, and still fight it? And, does an excess of compassion diminish a capacity to affect change?
The short answer is the second question is ‘no’, while the first question invites you to take some simple steps, assuming you have arrived at a place of compassion.
In that article I advocated compassion towards Donald Trump, because feelings of hatred will (a) not change his behaviour, and (b) make you miserable. Extending compassion to someone so obviously tortured by vanity maintains sanity, and acknowledges a shared humanity.
By adopting this approach we bring calm to our own lives, and thereby make the world around us a marginally better place. Getting angry at Trump solves nothing.
Have you ever wanted to impress someone so badly on the first date that you went out of your way to make it perfect in every way? So ideal you expected to sweep her off her feet? And then she never called you back? Yeah, me too. The mistake we made was to have a preordained plan rather than focusing on the person when we actually met them, and being authentically ourselves. It’s a case of wanting something so badly that you are blind to the reality of what is needed to make it work.
Yogis have a name for this: ‘Avidya’, loosely translated as ‘ignorance or blindness’. While its root is habit, it branches into ego, attachment, aversion, and fear. When we give into hate or anger (towards Trump or whoever), or fear (failing to make the right impression on our date) we are blinded by that mindset. We won’t get what we want, no matter how hard we try, because we have lost all perspective.
By clearing our minds through compassion, and stepping back from our fear or anger we begin to see more clearly. Then we find fresh avenues of thought that were previously hidden. Now we are ready to act with awareness instead of rage. When this occurs, according to yogis, there is nothing you can’t change because you see a situation as it really is, instead of idealising it
This leads to the second question as to whether excessive compassion leads to crippling passivity. I would start by saying it is almost impossible to affect change without compassion. But compassion shouldn’t imply passivity. Compassion is a mindset, and passivity is an action (that is, the decision to do nothing, which is an action in itself).
Through growing awareness you develop compassion; then you resist anger and see the world more clearly. You find ways to resist that are born of reflection and rooted in reality, not impulsive responses based on distorted outlooks. Now is your time to act: with total clarity, knowledge, purpose, and a drive that will never run out of fuel, because it is rooted in truth instead of fear. Welcome to compassionate defiance.
But this is only halfway towards a solution we are still working on within ourselves. The second part is the action. Once you have decided to act, what then?
There are many great examples of compassionate defiance through history. Not least in Gandhi’s campaign that brought down an Empire. His approach was based on yogic wisdom, especially drawn from the Bhagavad Gita. Like Descartes’ Discourse on Method, it is the kind of book you can read in a day. Its influence is still felt in every corner of the globe. From it we glean a simple key to unlock action out of compassion:
You have the right to work but never the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself – without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat. For yoga is the perfect evenness of mind.
Take refuge in an attitude of detachment and you will amass a wealth of spiritual awareness. Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action grow miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the rewards they believe they are entitled to.
This is the bedrock of Karma yoga: the use of yoga in the world. By detaching ourselves (or being compassionate towards ourselves) from emotional responses to the outcomes of our actions we retain our composure. We have already seen what anger and hate can do when we allow ego, attachment, aversion, fear to cloud our judgment. Now we must stay the course to prevent our actions from leading to more Avidya.
The kernel of the passage is to act with the clarity of truth, and to be content with that. For we cannot predict the outcome of our actions, and trying to do so only leads to suffering. Act because it is right and let the result take care of itself. To do otherwise is to live a life of constant resentment, not grounded in reality, but based on what we desire in any given moment, just like the failed date experience.
To affect change one must be willing to let others make changes in themselves. Truth must be uncovered individually for it be lasting. That is the genius of the Gita, and the genius of compassionate defiance. In other words, ‘Speaking Truth to Power’ starts with compassion for others, and ends with compassion for yourself.
When we can do these things, change can take place all around us. We stop being Trolls on our own emotions and start being effective.
In the beginning in order to count we used, as we still do, our fingers, and sometimes our toes. Not only are they conveniently arranged according to the prime divisors of their sum (2 and 5 multiplied make 10, and no other primes less than 10 divide evenly therein), but we can also fold them up and down according to our needs, so allowing a primitive but very effective memory aid.
In more recent times the abacus was was the paradigm of calculation. It was efficient, communicable, and easily learned, mainly because it is like having many more fingers we can fold up and down.
Chinese Abacus.
In the ‘good old days’ of early electro-magnetic computation we programmed directly onto the computer via switches. Think of an abacus with an automatic left-alignment capability. We still need to know how to use an abacus but we can mechanically automate left-alignment. Things progressed to abstractions such as punch-cards, which could be prepared in one’s own time and then inputed into the computer to perform the calculations.
Punch-card.
As you can see there are similarities between punch-cards and an abacus. They both use a columnar layout, they are of limited scope, and both require familiarity with arithmetic. Already we can also see the increase in complexity, both in terms of the density of the information on display and the amount of meta-information used.
Nowadays we have the X86-64 architecture. Good luck with that.
Modern microchip.
And yet, even though these devices are so tiny and complicated that they operate near the limits of measurability itself, to such an extent that the designers have to worry about electrons jumping from one adjacent wire to another and hence spoiling everything, we don’t need luck to make them work. We use abstractions!
We encode these abstractions in software. The first recognised programme was designed by Ada Lovelace, who worked with Babbage on the Analytical Engine, and calculated Bernoulli Numbers. Ever since we have been working to increase both the power and clarity of our ability to communicate our calculable ideas both to computers, and to other humans.
As a brief digression, programming is at least as much about sharing thought with other people as it is with computers. A good piece of software not only runs efficiently on whatever the hardware requires; it is also easily understood by other programmers so that when, not if, it needs to be altered to fix errors, or extend its functionality, this can happen with a minimum of stress.
So why IS software complicated? Some of the reasons are:
Hardware gets more complicated and so the requirements to programme them becomes more complicated.
The ecosystem gets more complicated as we create more and more general libraries each of which specialises in one particular competence (for example numerical calculations).
New techniques are developed all the time, normally coming from academia, especially the field of Pure Mathematics.
We demand ever more functionality from our computers, such as real-time communication, or fancy graphics.
As seen above, computer hardware is becoming more and more complicated as the years go by, and this rate of increasing complexity is well described by one of the most famous heuristics in the industry: Moore’s Law which states: ‘the number of transistors in dense integrated circuits doubles every eighteen months’. This has held true for over sixty years, though we are coming up against hard quantum mechanical limits now. While this means we can perform more calculations, faster, than ever before, it also means the hardware is becoming more complicated, and so the software needed to manage the hardware must keep pace.
A contemporary operating system is typically composed of many millions of lines of code, broken into many different parts. Typically an operating system comprises a kernel that interfaces directly with the hardware, and many libraries that specialise in tasks such as networking or the graphical user interface, as well as the programs most users need, such as word processors, games, and web browsers.
In Mathematics itself there is a more than two-thousand year quest to define and guarantee the correctness of the subject itself, and quite apart from every novelty of efficient computation, the foundations themselves have undergone radical development in recent years. One hundred years ago Set Theory was introduced and has served well, if trickily, ever since. The trickiness involved, as well the seeming vagueness of some of the underlying assumptions, further led some, especially L. E. J. Brouwer, to try to reformulate Mathematics on an ‘intuitionistic’ basis. This in turn led to the recent Univalent Foundations and Homotopy Type Theory (HoTT). HoTT, in particular, shows considerable promise in allowing us to reason with great abstraction and powerful correctness on the theory and practice of programming.
The face of a man who looked upon infinity and saw only potential.
Our demands for greater ‘power’ impose constraints that can only be met with greater complexity. Without going into great detail, as we move from the relatively simple one-to-one, client-server computational architecture to a fully distributed computation model, as is ubiquitous in Nature (the speed of light guarantees a locality of computation), so we are more and more reliant on the subtle and intriguing theories such as Paxos, which no matter one’s expertise is still not simple. Developments in this area, from the use of bunches of graphics cards for statistical modeling, to the growth of secure data storage systems, tend to be significant both in terms of novelty and difficulty.
Abstractions, especially as implemented by the congenitally lazy programmer, tend to reveal too many of the underlying assumptions, and hence ‘leak’ complexity both up and down our level of abstracion, though mainly up. These leaks then require us to stick our fingers in the complexity dyke, and no matter how many fingers we may abstract, the water of complexity will tend to flow downwards, around and past and through our ability to count. (Reality is not necessarily countable.)
So what can we do about it? The answer is simple, we can provide simplicity through abstraction.
Let me give you an example. When we are young and learning to count we learn first to count to ten, using our fingers. Each count has its own term, one, two, three, etc.. Then we learn how to count to twenty, and the terms associated. The thirties follow, and the forties, and patterns begin to form. Then, like a piece of magic, we learn how number can be represented in table.
Having constructed a table of the first hundred number we can not only extend this to the first one thousand, but also to the first million, as befits our patience. More importantly we can abstract over the pattern, and use this pattern in its most general sense, allowing each entry of the first one hundred to refer to a table of one hundred, thereby giving a table of tables, of numerical size 10,000, or as the Greeks would have it, a myriad. So we abstract, for we are ‘outside the area contained within the lines drawn’.
Of course, for this to work, we need to know and understand the complexities, we need to measure them, and abstract over them, and most of all we need to learn Mathematics, for it is the language of abstraction.
Huge efforts have been made in this field, and are ongoing. Coq is a fabulous development, as is Agda, and Haskell and Rust are becoming mainstream. In Mathematics itself there is still roiling debate and vigorous argument about the nature and validity of abstraction, both pure and applied. The conversations around these topics leach into Computer Science of course, but also Philosophy, Law, Economics and even Political Science.
Programming is like a mixture of Poetry and Mathematics. It has all the rigour of Poetry and all the interpretability of Mathematics.
You want to know the secret of success in this field, as in so many others?
Play. Look at children learn. From repetition of simple tasks that adults find mind-numbingly boring children learn the abstractions that give them all their languages, all their games, all their mastery over themselves and other things. So it is with mathematicians, they play with numbers and their patterns. So it is with programmers, computers are the toys with which they learn the abstractions to understand things simply, but no simpler.
Make like a child, be simple, practice, and understand. This is the simplicity of software.
The featured image, taken by John McSporran which shows up in searches of complexity with reuse rights, is aptly entitled ‘complexity’. Though not a picture of software it is undeniably complicated, and also beautiful, and a good deal more intuitively so than any map of dependency graphs. It also, perhaps amusingly, evokes Ted Stevens’ series of tubes.
Eoin Tierney is the Science Editor of Cassandra Voices.
Posterity will determine if the Italian election results of March 4th 2018 marked an earthquake that will endure in the landscape. Or will a result, apparently seismic, turn out to be like the volcano that smoulders, without ever fully clearing its throat? No one is quite sure the precise dish the electorate will be served after the election.
The success of the Eurosceptic and unashamedly anti-immigrant Northern League under Matteo Salvini (now seemingly reconciled to preserving the territorial integrity of the Italian state), and to a greater extent, the relatively unknown quantity of the Five Star Movement (M5S) led by Luigi di Maio, combined with the decline of Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia and the centrist Democratic Party under Matteo Renzi, reflects a Europe-wide populist surge; the decline of traditional parties, and emphasises the waning legacies of iconic figures of the first decade of the twentieth century, such as Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, Bertie Ahern and Berlusconi himself.
But the widely-bandied term ‘populist’ tells us very little, and is often used simply to dismiss the popular appeal of a party by those opposed to its objectives. In a recent European context it has become shorthand for increasing xenophobia, and outright racism, triggered especially by the refugee crisis of 2015, and associated with the ‘strongman’ leadership of Putin’s Russia.
M5S has been criticised both within Italy, and in the international media, for reflecting prejudices commonly expressed in Italian society. On the other hand, there is often a failure to recognise the determination of the Movement to clean up Italian politics, particularly in their southern electoral strongholds.
Roger Cohen of the New York Times crudely dismisses M5S, lumping them with the Northern League, as one of the ‘out-with-the-bums parties’, and linked to Europe-wide ‘angry illiberal movements’. An apparently “illiberal” approach to immigration may largely be explained, however, by the responsiveness of M5S policies to the concerns of supporter, rather than any racist demagoguery emanating from its leadership.
Such criticism also ignores how Italy is the first port of call for the majority of refugees who take the Mediterranean route into Europe, and how other states are not rising to the challenge of accommodating more new arrivals.
M5S offers a new political formula that could easily have continent-wide ramifications. They promote technocratic expertise, with an emphasis on sustainability at a local level. The ‘five stars’, refers to the party’s five core values: public water access, sustainable transportation, sustainable development, a right to Internet access, and environmentalism. These founding principals clearly distinguishes them from the Northern League, and authoritarian regimes in Poland, Hungary or Russia.
One of their most important rules is that any political career is a temporary service: no one who has already been elected twice at any level (local or national) can be a candidate again. Elected representatives put a proportion of their salaries back into a micro credit fund for small businesses, and reject campaign contributions. In short, M5S is attempting to inoculate itself against prevailing corruption, and ‘strongman’ leadership.
But whether M5S can simply focus on discrete objectives and local issues, while ignoring national, regional and global institutions, is doubtful. Environmentalism can morph into short-term nimbyism. Moreover, without being corrupt or paternalistic, an elected representative may offer a course that is not instantly popular in a direct democracy scheme but may prove wise, and popular, in the long run.
There are parallels with the current political constellation in England (if not the wider United Kingdom), where the Northern League plays the character of UKIP, the Eurosceptic right the Tory party; Forza Italia assumes the part of a Europhile Tory rump; the Democratic Party is represented by ‘New’ (an increasingly obsolete description) Labour ; and the Five Star Movement (less the political nous of a veteran such as Jeremy Corbyn) reprises the role of a Euro-doubtful Momentum.
But of course Italian politics is unique in many respects. This is a long-legged country with characteristics of an ‘Asiatic’ Mediterranean, and a ‘Germanic’ North, as well as its own, often intoxicating, Latin inheritance. There is enduring, embedded, wealth alongside grinding, endemic poverty, mainly below the Mezzogiorno, but increasingly found in all major urban centres. The significance of Milan lying at a latitude closer to London than Palermo should not be discounted.
II
In many respects Italy is a fractured polity and unstable democracy, which emerged out of a long fascist dictatorship (1922-45) under Benito Mussolini, and wartime alliance with Nazi Germany. During the Cold War most governments lasted less than a year, and featured a revolving cast of roguish characters, foremost sevent-time Prime Minister, and twenty-seven-time minister Guilio Andreotti. In that time Italy’s Communist Party was the largest in Europe (with a membership exceeding two million under the astute leadership of Palmiro Togliatti), which despite not participating in governments held the feet of the ruling elite to the coals.
Corruption has long been the bane of Italian politics, particularly in the south of the country. Between them the Neapolitan Camorra, Calabrian Ndrangheta and Siclian Cosa Nostra have maintained fiefdoms the like of which are unknown in other Western European country, with tentacles reaching into the rest of Italy and beyond.
The endurance of organised crime can be traced to the Allied conquest of Italy during the Second World War. The fascists had kept local chieftains under the thumb, often by simply imprisoning them without trial. But just as de-Baathification in Iraq after the invasion in 2003 unleashed underlying, atavistic forces, similarly, across southern Italy after 1945, gangsters entered a vacuum left behind by a decapitated state.
Only after the fascist prisons were thrown open, and shadowy American Intelligence figures such as ‘Lucky’ Luciano arrived on the scene, was a humanitarian crisis averted. Reliance was placed on old networks of patronage to feed the population, as Norman Lewis’s account in Naples 1945 illuminates. Italian democracy has been counting the cost of Allied authorities ‘looking the other way’ ever since.
‘Lucky’ Luciano, unlucky Italy.
Any journalist investigating their affairs whether in Italy or elsewhere, as the recent likely contract killing of Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak and his partner Martina Kusnirova reveals, must be aware of the dangers. Investigating judges require huge security details; even then some, such as Judge Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, are still assassinated.
The scene of the Massacre of Capaci where Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo and their police escort were killed by a Mafia bomb. 23 May 1992.
The Mani Pulite (clean hands) judicial investigation into corruption of 1992 brought the false dawn of a Second Republic. Electoral laws were amended and the Christian Democrats, which had provided the Prime Ministers to all bar three post-war governments until that point, disappeared entirely.
However, a corrupt deck was merely shuffled, and many Italians lost faith in politics altogether during the lost decade (2001-2011) of billionaire Berlusconi’s showman leadership. His clownish antics provided a front for deepening corruption, while the television media he controlled provided a drip-feed of light entertainment, football and titillation that kept the patient Italian public in a mildly delusional state. Here M5S politician Alessandro di Battista reads out a court ruling against a former longtime aide to Berlusconi and the founder of Forza Italia, Marcello Dell’Utri, who is in jail because of his links to the Cosa Nostra.
The period since the end of the Cold War also witnessed a steady rise in inequality, and the effects of the economic crisis, beginning in 2008, continues to be felt. In 2017 the bottom 30 percent of the population was at risk of poverty and social exclusion. That is up from 28.7 the previous year.
Berlusconi also coarsened political debate, bringing respectability to the expression of prejudice against foreigners living in Italy, thereby providing an obvious scapegoat when times grew hard.
III
In a wide-ranging account, Delizia – the Epic History of Italian Food (2007), John Dickie describes Italian food at the turn of the twentieth century as ‘local rather than national, whereas French cooks were armed with a uniform terminology – coulis, hors d’oeurvres, potage – their Italian counterparts spoke a variety of mongrel food dialects’.
Dickie continues: ‘The history of Italian food after unification is the story of the relationship between these proud local food cultures, and the dream of bringing all of Italy to one table, thereby creating a national cuisine to rival that of France’. This fragmentation reflects a prevailing loyalty towards town or region, rather than country or nation.
The history of the pizza is instructive. It shares a provenance similar to Greek pitta and Turkish pide, as part of an extended family of Mediterranean flat breads. The author of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi (1826-90) dismissed this Neapolitan dish as ‘a patchwork of greasy filth that harmonises perfectly with the person selling it’. The Margherita pizza, named in honour of Queen Margherita’s visit to Napoli in 1889, represents the colours, red (tomato), white (mozzarella cheese) and green (basil), of the Italian flag. More importantly, its name accommodated the people of a city, renowned for poverty and disease, within the new nation’s gastronomy.
Dickie likens the Margherita’s propaganda value to Princess Diana embracing AIDS victims. But Napoli’s waste management problems continue to this day: in 2015 Europe’s biggest illegal dump –‘Italy’s Chernobyl’ – was uncovered nearby. The greasiness of Italian politics, like the layer of mozzarella on top of a pizza, has long held in check progressive forces of green and red.
Despite Italy’s relative novelty – unification only culminated in 1871 – this is an old country. The architectural layers found in almost every city are a daily reminder of past glories. Italians generally seem unmistakably Italian, no matter where they are from on the peninsula or islands. Notwithstanding regional variation, there is a quintessence to life across the land. Bureaucracy and conviviality represent the poles of annoyance and enchantment any resident or outsider negotiates.
The nation’s varied constituents were never static aboriginal communities. A central location in the Mediterranean, pointing into Africa but firmly lodged in Europe – the Alps were the ‘traitor’ of Italy according to Napoleon – has brought migrant waves since time immemorial. Anyone who is anyone has spent time here, from Hannibal to Lord Byron and Gore Vidal.
It is now the main entry point for Africans who aspire to live in Europe. Italy took some 64 percent of the 186,000 migrants who reached Europe in 2017 through the Mediterranean route. It took the majority of these migrants in 2016 too. The current surge is unprecedented but there is no end in sight as looming Climate Change threatens further mass movements of peoples. Recent new arrivals join five million foreign nationals already living in Italy. It is estimated that there are as many as 670,000 illegal immigrants living in the country.
Desperate people are being trafficked across the Mediterranean aboard flimsy vessels, while the European Community washes its hands. The Dublin Regulation (2013) ordains that any decision on refugee status falls for determination in the country where a person first lands, unless family reunification is involved. Many Italians argue other European countries are not sharing the burden, and they have a point.
With a prevailing sense of being overwhelmed by immigration at a time when the economy is still in remission, predictably, extremism is on the rise. Berlusconi broke taboos that many politicians now habitually cross.
On February 5th Luca Traini, a former candidate for the Northern League, was arrested after targeting African migrants in a two-hour drive-by shooting spree in the Marche city of Macerata. This came days after the discovery there of the body of an eighteen-year-old Italian woman, allegedly killed and dismembered by a Nigerian immigrant gang. The threat of further bloodshed is acute.
In its aftermath Silvio Berlusconi called for the expulsion of thousands of migrants, while League leader Matteo Salvini said ‘those who fill us with migrants instigate violence’.
IV
The Five Star Movement is the sulphur in the Italian political wind, whose promotion of direct participation of citizens in the management of public affairs through digital democracy could provide an example well beyond Italy. But in any situation where an electorate is ill-informed by a media dominated by vested interests this can have dangerous consequences, no matter how progressive the core ideas of any movement. However, the despondency of some commentators regarding the capacity of the Internet to inform, as opposed to trigger prejudice, may be misplaced in the long term.
M5S propose a fusion of green and red politics that should have admirers beyond Italian shores: they embrace theories of de-growth, and support ‘green’ employment. The need to stop polluting Italy’s environment is recognised, and they call for an end to expensive ‘great works’, including incinerators and high-speed rail links. They aim to raise the quality of life and bring about greater social justice.
But the thorny issue of their approach to the European Community remains, which is closely connected to resolving the immigration imbroglio. Somewhat disconcertingly, after a ballot of members a decision was made to join a political group in the European Parliament which also contains UKIP. The option, however, of joining the Greens/EFA group was also discussed, but was unavailable due to that group’s prior rejection of the idea.
For a country like Italy to leave the Community would be a hammer blow from which it might not recover, at least in its present configuration. Moreover, in a globalised world it is surely impossible for any one country, especially one so unstable as Italy, simply to go its own way, at least with a democratic government. Removed from the European mainstream, Italy could easily fall prey to authoritarian government, which is part of its political DNA.
Leading members of M5S have at times offered inflammatory views on immigration, in particular Beppe Grillo, its animating spirit. On 23 December, 2016 he wrote on his blog that all undocumented immigrants should be expelled from the country, and that the Schengen Accord, allowing free movement of people between signatory states, should be temporarily suspended in the event of a terrorist attack.
Grillo seems to have been panicked by the terror threat. In the wake of the 2016 Berlin attack and the killing of a suspected terrorist near Milan he wrote: ‘Our country is becoming a place where terrorists come and go and we are not able to recognise and report them and they can wander all over Europe undisturbed thanks to Schengen’.
On 21 April 2017, Grillo also published a piece questioning the role of NGOs operating rescue ships off the coast of Libya. He suggested they may be aiding traffickers. Grillo’s comments raise serious questions over whether M5S will calm the growing scapegoating of immigrants in Italy. While his views may reflect what many Italians feel, it is surely incumbent on a politician to lead rather than follow, and not to exaggerate any threats.
Fortunately the M5S is a broad church, and Grillo, while still influential, is not their leader in parliament. Last year Luigi Di Maio called for ‘an immediate stop to the sea-taxi service’. He also said he would support a referendum for Italy to leave the Eurozone and would vote to leave. In January 2018, however, he reversed his previous position. What appears to be the relative abatement of the terror threat will, hopefully, go some way towards calming the fears of many Italians. But other European states must recognise that preserving the European Community will require a sharing of the refugee burden.
V
In his 1963 account The Italians, Luigi Barzini endeavours to explain why his countrymen have historically failed to coagulate into a singular nation. Firstly, he points to ‘rapid and enthusiastic acceptance of changing political fashions and of foreign conquerors which made all revolutions irresistible but superficial and all new regimes unstable.’ This might be identified in the enthusiastic post-war approval of Communism, and the earlier groundswell of support for Mussolini’s Fascism. The MS5’s embrace of digital democracy has been dismissed as a political fad in the era of the Internet.
Secondly, Barzini found ‘an art of living as if all laws were obnoxious obstacles to be overcome somehow, an art which made the best of laws ridiculously ineffective’. This reflects a permissive attitude towards organised crime, which M5S are at least seriously challenging.
Finally he averts to ‘the certainty that the most inflexible government could, in the long run, be corroded from the inside.’ This final point is important in terms of understanding the reluctance of many among M5S to work with other parties to form a government. It is also reflects the cynical response of many commentators to the efforts of the M5S leadership to form a government. Italy requires meaningful reforms and this will require deals to be done, even with the Northern League, who are surely no worse than Berlusconi’s cronies. It is unfortunate that the Democratic Party, with whom M5S should have most policies in common, have expressed a determination to remain in opposition.
It would perhaps be wise to recognise that politics is the art of the possible, and that reforming a political system as dysfunctional as Italy’s will take considerable time, but at least the priorities of M5S appear progressive in terms of social justice and sustainability. Perhaps most important are the precautions the Movement are taking against ‘strong man’ leadership, which could be a template for other political systems to follow.
Frank Armstrong is the content editor of Cassandra Voices.
The greatest trial lawyer of the last century was undoubtedly Clarence Darrow. He was often described as just a lucky country bumpkin, or a ‘lucky old son of a […]’ in the vernacular of the time. More than a lawyer though, he became the exemplar and paradigm of secularism in America, a voice of reason pitched against a cacophony of superstition and religious hysteria.
By the time of the Scopes Trial in 1925 Darrow was widely regarded as a dog who had had his day. The case involved a young schoolteacher who had shown the temerity to teach Darwinism in the Deep South: Dayton, Tennessee to be precise. It is dramatised in the play, and film, Inherit The Wind (1960), which at times plays fast and loose with the facts for dramatic effect.
It was actually a test case; the arrest had been staged by the American Council of Civil Liberties in order to bring a showdown with the fundamentalism that was creeping into American politics. The schoolteacher had volunteered for the task.
The American Council for Civil Liberties wanted a clean-cut preppie lawyer, but they got Darrow. Why? Because they were bereft of funds and the Baltimore Herald, under its legendary editor H.L. Mencken, insisted. Mencken was the greatest muck-racking controversialist in the history of journalism, a uniquely acerbic wit, perhaps only rivaled by that of Christopher Hitchens. They were paying for the trial, and would call the shots.
So Darrow dragged his weary bones into the Lions’ Den of the Deep South, assailed by a plethora of ailments which would ultimately kill him, but not just yet. His opponent was an old adversary, and if not quite a friend, someone for whom he had a degree of respect. Enter three time unsuccessful candidate for the Presidency of the United States: William Jennings Bryant.
Darrow and Bryant’s careers shared a certain trajectory in that both rode a populist and progressive wave, involving the enfranchisement and protection of the ordinary working man both in the great cities and rural heartlands. Where they differed markedly was that Bryant was also a religious fanatic, who railed against the imposition of northern secular values on the Southern states. They were in league with one another in seeking to improve the lot of the poor in life, but fell out over their understanding of the origins of life. The divisive issue was Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, as it remains today.
It was really a show trial with a foregone conclusion. The question of guilt was never in doubt. America itself was in the dock. The Baltimore Sun ensured an international spotlight, while the new medium of radio provided an immediacy to the coverage, foreshadowing the role of television in the OJ Simpson Trial seventy years on.
With the continuing culture wars in America, the case has never been of merely historic interest. It also has a relevance to the understanding of events in contemporary Ireland, which sees a similar confrontation. The new battleground is the forthcoming referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which says:
The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.
II
In the recent case of M & ors -v- Minister for Justice & ors the Supreme Court of Ireland gave the green light for the abortion referendum to proceed. But this is just the opening salvo in a long campaign. The forces of obscurantism and absurdity are mustering. No doubt the roughhouse Youth Defence will swing into action, while more polite academics and lawyers, but with similar extreme views, will work out the stratagems and ruses. The X Case of 1992, where a fourteen-year old girl, pregnant as a result of statutory rape, was initially denied by the High Court the right to travel to the UK for an abortion but given leave on appeal by the Supreme Court to do so, will seem like a squall by comparison to the force of this hurricane.
So what is going to happen?
First and foremost the recent decision paves the way for the referendum. I expect, in sequence, the following to ensue:
1. There will be a challenge to the wording and content of the referendum on the bases that people are either being misled or that it is deliberately vague. This will fail, as it always does, but another publicity bun fest is guaranteed.
2. There will then be deep scrutiny of all funding sources and avowed support, either explicit or implicit, by governmental structures, as well as any other interference in the process to engineer an outcome.
This may, or may not, succeed, but could delay the Referendum process, require a redraft, or if after the event, lead to an application for the invalidation of the result, which will also prove unsuccessful.
Thus it will fail, but further publicity will ensue.
But I think there is a paradigm shift. This is the final battle, the last hurrah.
What can the so-called Catholic intelligentsia do to avoid the democratic of the people will if the obvious legal route proves fruitless, as it ought?
There is one last avenue available in my considered legal opinion, and that is to argue that the right to abortion violates the right to life itself.
This is precisely what the Supreme Court denied in the M & ors, as they confined the protection of the unborn to the clause likely to be deleted through the referendum. So wider arguments under the substantive right to life can seemingly be negated. This seems settled, but no doubt challenges are being considered to the absence of protection of life arising out of the probable deletion of the Eighth Amendment. Once legislation is formulated, a multiplicity of challenges seem inevitable.
A harbinger of this appears in an Irish Times article by (14/3/18) by one of the leading ideologues on the Pro Life side William Binchy. He suggests that the forthcoming referendum repealing the Eighth, if passed, will open the door to unfettered abortion-on-demand, akin to the regime in the United States under Roe v Wade; but he dangles the opportunity for a further challenge too, quoting from Chief Justice Frank Clarke’s judgement in M & ors: ‘the State is entitled to take account of the respect which is due to human life as a factor which may be taken into account as an aspect of the common good in legislating.’
A never ending saga in short.
Then there are the informal tactics and strategies that will be used. These include variations on a theme and, potentially, violence. The clamour is going to get worse and worse. Protests, attacks on the court, demonstrations outside Dail Eireann, civil unrest, intimidation, shock tactics, framing, the kitchen sink.
III
The Catholic Church still runs most maternity hospitals, and has put the kibosh on the implementation of the X case for over twenty years. So the league of decency will endure, and democracy will be frustrated.
This is no longer a Secular Age. Religious fundamentalism in all parts of the world is on the rise. In Ireland there are well placed boyos in the judiciary, and the once proud voices of secularism are no longer heard: Susan Denham has retired, and Adrian Hardiman passed away. All contacts with pious judges will be utilised to disrupt the passage of this referendum. But in the light of the present decision I still predict this will prove fruitless.
The world will be watching as they were in Dayton Tennessee. The outcome will expose Ireland for what it is in many respects: a grubby Third World, sexually-hysterical, religiously-disturbed state.
This outcome will be different however. The abortion argument will prevail. The Religious Right will lose. Or at least they will lose this vote. But let me sound a cautionary note.
A drawn out Referendum campaign will keep attention away from the real burning issues of housing, homelessness and rising inequality. Who cares about the right to choose, after all, if you cannot afford to eat?
Those funding the litigation might do well to focus on the quality of life of the living rather than the inception of life itself.
It seems to me that this victory for progressives will be deeply ambiguous. Yes, a right to choose will be established, but at what cost?
There is merit, I grudgingly concede, in the argument that abortion as a lifestyle choice fits with a Neoliberal paradigm. An extension of consumerism that ignores the gathering storm of economic catastrophe brought on by rising poverty and ecological meltdown.
Political talents and revenue are being devoted to pursue fruitless opposition to a done deal: fight the good fight for abortion, and forget about the war against homelessness.
I just wonder who is going to reprise the role of Darrow or William Jennings Bryant, and, above all, who is going to get the role of Mencken, the prince of gutter press journalists in this morality play.
There is a wider struggle at work, in defence of reason and the Enlightenment, which the vacancy of Neoliberalism ignores. Thus, the legendary Darrow asked in the Scopes Trial:
Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? In addition, tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. Soon you may ban books and newspapers. Then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we’ll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!
IV
Noam Chomsky recently claimed that the Republican Party is the ‘most dangerous organization in world history’. He has corrected many interviewers who mistakenly assume he meant ‘the most dangerous organization in the world today’. Given his precision with language, what seems an outlandish statement, is clearly one he takes seriously.
The Paris Agreement on Climate Change has been criticized for being not nearly stringent enough to succeed in keeping temperature rise below two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial averages. It is earnestly hoped by environmentalists that it is a stepping-stone before a more robust deal. Fat chance, as Trump’s administration goes about dismantling even that fig leaf of modesty.
In his illuminating Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2014) Carlo Rovelli chides humanity for failing to draw the lessons necessary for survival:
I believe our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think that we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilisation.
The passage points to the differences between ideas informed by science, and those grounded in fundamentalist interpretations of religion. Science sees humanity for what we are in the universe, rather than being its centre and purpose. Far more terrifying than this is the preacher who refuses to accept that we might just be an irrelevant blip in the universe, and sees the Earth as something created for us to make hay with. Not only that, but many milenerian Christians rapturously await the demise of civilization and the end of days.
It seems odd in these circumstances that that such effort should be made on behalf of the human unborn, when they assume it is all going to be over imminently.
Human beings commonly display a desire for transcendence in this our cruel world. Marx stated in his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right‘ that ‘Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. He admitted that ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
He goes on, however, to argue that the ‘abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.’
The Religious Right is to an extent, a predictable outcome of the social and economic “vale of tears” in our time, although their collusion with Big Business in the United States is truly horrifying. It certainly helps that Genesis with it assumption of man’s dominion over the Earth permits a scorched earth economic policy.
Lost in all of this is the message of Pope Francis, and others, for Christian socialism and environmental responsibility; a worldwide enforcement of social and economic rights to food, shelter, health care and housing. I am decidedly agnostic about the existence of God. It is religious fundamentalism, extremism and rapacious greed that I despise.
In fact the church may have its own battle between the Neoliberals and Christian socialists. The smart money is on the former winning out. Pope Francis may suffer the same fate as Pope John XXIII.
V
I once represented a middle aged woman named Carmel Doyle who as a five-year-old recited a bible story which the Catholic Church made millions out of from an Oscar-nominated film called Give Up Yer Aul Sins. Yet the child, now a poor adult, would have received nothing had I not fought her case.
It seems to be the inception, not quality of life, that matters to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church: let them eat cake and dream of the afterlife.
The Religious Right have resorted to murder when necessary. I think of Gods Banker Roberto Calvi hanging off Blackfriars bridge; Pier Paolo Passolini the Marxist and Atheist film director murdered on a beach near Rome; the collusion for decades between ‘Christian’ ‘Democrats’ in Italy and the mafia, to the advantage of the Vatican; but most are killed by a thousand cuts.
So let us commence a life watch. The abortion life watch juxtaposed with the homelessness outside the doors of the court where constitutional issues are finely disentangled as the social structure unravels. While Rome burns, progressives will fiddle amid the gladiatorial circuses of the forthcoming referendum.
Neoliberalism has no problem with abortion. There are, after all, far too many of us. I maintain that it is important that a woman should not be compelled to endure a pregnancy against her will, but it is permitted by economic elites as way of controlling population, without the troublesome necessity of infanticide through poverty. That was a solution advocated satirically by Jonathan Swift in his A Modest Proposal, a vital cautionary tale for these dangerous times.
George waits in the parked van. His mind is somewhere between sleep and the wood and the few hours that have passed since he tried to tell her it was over. Somehow he couldn’t pluck the words. The diesel cab reeks fags. The fan heater lifts condensation from the cracked windscreen. Usually these matters fizzle out of their own accord. They slip back due to various pressures. Time passes, wounds heal, George moves on.
Dandy lives three houses in. The estate has no name. Merely: ‘The Houses’. Dandy still has the box room, filled with the same comics and football posters, a childhood he hasn’t quite moved on from. George beeps the horn and the light goes on. Dandy is idle to the bone. Always has been, though he’s a way with the horse and without the horse George has no means of drawing timber off Mucklagh ridge. Dandy’s mother has him spoiled: the flask and lunch bag ready, heels cut from the sambos.
George puts his hands to the fan and surveys the sorry row of houses: cracked cement and blocked gutters, slipping tiles and rusted cars and the half-cut green filled with burst footballs and broken prams and speckled with every brand of rubbish. She lives fifth house in, two houses on from Dandy, and the light is on. She’ll be flicking channels for the young one, brewing tea, trying to get up and out before the husband wakes.
“Morning, George.”
“Morning.”
“Bite to the air, George.”
“It’d cut you.”
The road meanders up and out of the village with the contours of the river. First grunted pleasantries exchanged, Dandy leans into the passenger window and feigns a few precious moments of sleep.
Next pick up is the ‘Trap Byrne’ or ‘Trapper’ as he’s known. Trapper’s homeplace is an asbestos slate cottage on a bend three miles out. Trapper keeps a handful of heifers on the couple of reed-strewn bog acres below the road. They cost more to keep than he’d ever hope to earn out of them: but he lives for the beasts. They give meaning to his little world, keep him in touch with the land. The Trapper works dog-hard on the Husqvarna, the saw-like an extension of his arm. Though you’d be wary enough of him. Just last week George had to have words. Trapper has a fondness for the young ones. Only these are his cousins, and they live in the adjacent cottage. It was the Dandy whispered it to George down by the stream out of earshot.
“You might put a stop to it, George, or there’ll be trouble, so there will.”
George caught up with Trapper refuelling the saw and he took the words to heart. At least he said he did.
“Won’t do it again. You’re right. It was only talking anyways.”
Trapper didn’t question how George might have heard or seen him, just nodded. Trapper needed a tight leash and as his employer George reckons himself the man to do it. Trapper listens to George. The trouble is, he doesn’t drive and seldom gets into town; but for Paddy’s of a Friday evening, he has little touch with a world beyond the cottages and the few bog acres.
Trapper waits at the gate and jumps in, pushing Dandy to the middle.
“Morning, Trap.”
“Morning, lads.”
“Bite to the air,” Dandy grunts.
The cab goes silent as the van pulls out and moves up the last few miles to the wood. The lads have taken George’s mind off of her and the husband and having to tell her it’s over and he thinks timber.
Harvesting machines, the size of small houses, rule the hills round here. There was a time when it was only men and horses and lorries but now the tree-swallowing harvesters are more economical. George has one of the last bands of men and they’re used for cutting the slopes and cliff faces too steep for the machines to travel. He has four men and a horse, a piebald cob called Trigger, ox strong and good to go from dawn till dusk. Sure as the lorries come, Trigger has the stacks ready.
They leave the lane at Mucklagh and Trapper jumps down to unlock the yellow bar. The van groans under the weight of men and saws and fuel cans and a big bag of oats for the horse. They pull in at the top where the lorries load, light three fags in unison, wait for Jack and Chiseler to arrive.
Jack is quiet and steady, did a spell in the army, though he gave it up, missed home. He’s a decent fellow, Jack, though he’d take any old word as gospel. The lads have him wound up to ninety. Tell him George’s hasn’t him registered, that any day now the suits will be up looking for his stamps. George has to watch what Jack’s cutting, make sure every last tree is marked, save he doesn’t venture over into the Douglas or the Larch.
Two fags later the car pulls up behind them. Jack jumps out with a smile and a nod and helps Trapper lift the saws and fuel cans from the back of the van. Dandy goes into the wood to untether the horse with a bucket of soaked oats and George is left, face to face with Chiseler.
“George.”
“Chiseler.”
“Heard you were out late, George?” His voice is high-pitched and nasty and he lifts himself from the car with a rat-like slither.
“None of your business.”
“None of my business? Isn’t she my family?”
“That’ll do, Chiseler. Leave it at that, we’ve work to do.”
“Only she’s married, to my nephew, did you think of that before you got to work on her?”
“I said that’ll do. Now you can get up into that wood or you can turn round and go home. I’m paying the wages here and my word is the last word.”
The Chiseler lights a fag and opens the boot of his car. He’s short and wiry, pock-marked skin and weasel-tongued though he can work a saw quick as any and he’s light on the steep ground.
“There’ll be trouble, George. He’ll fucking lynch you.”
The threat is spat from a distance. A weasel taunt, though Chiseler knows George won’t rise. Knows as long he gets up quick sticks and starts felling, George won’t go near him. When the saws start nothing is heard anyways and George walks on. It is to be expected, he tells himself. Chiseler is only doing his duty. Only marking his gob-hacked ground. Letting him know where he stands. Firing the warning shot across the bow. George pulls the saw and lets the angry oil-glistened bar bite into the first spruce. Two quick incisions into the foot-deep trunk leave hinge enough and he turns to the back to finish it. There is no need to shout, the sound of the saw caution enough. The trunk tips on the hinge and the spruce rustles free from the plantation and lands with one loud crack.
“Timber,” shouts Trapper, coming up behind with a black-toothed grin.
“I’ll start over here, George. Fell ’em down into the gap there.”
“That’ll do,” though George’s mind is elsewhere. He’s thinking of the Chiseler’s nephew, a mean little low life. Sort of chap to catch you when you least expect: make it look like an accident. Usually George wouldn’t get too hung up on dropping a young one. Only this one is a tidy piece and she’s had a hard enough time of it. The Chiseler mightn’t know it but the nephew has been taking the back of the hand to her. She hides it well and the nephew’s measured enough to crack her where it won’t be seen. She knew what she was getting herself into when she married into them. We all make mistakes.
Dandy tacks out Trigger by the van, bridle and chains and blinkers and the cob swooshes her tale at the horse-shit flies that hover round in one endless cloud. Trigger gave into them long ago and stands motionless in her infested misery as Dandy lathers himself with Deet. It is not an easy set, the rain has muddied the ground and the horse must pull each tree three hundred yards from the spruce clinging to the ridge, down through the stream where the diggers have cut a ford, and up to the lorry pull in. Trigger would pull eighty trees of a good day and is worth every bucket of oats. At night they leave her tethered in the larch where the fresh grass grows and the fresh wind keeps the flies at bay. George has had Trigger ten years now. He bought her off a tinker on the Gorey road. He’d been seeing one at the time who was into the horses and she put the tinker on to him. George heard later that the tinker was killed in a car crash, the bald tyre horsebox jack-knifed coming down off the gap. The one went back to her husband like everyone said she would and it is only Trigger that’s lasted from that summer of midnight car parks and hot flush horse yards.
Ten o’clock tea is an institution. Thirsts, headaches and appetites are quenched and all little worlds crash together in one slag-drawn sorting shop symposium that riddles the measure of each of them.
“How are the cattle, Trapper?”
“Still rubbing their arses off of the new fence. How many times have I to drench the worm-riddled bitches? They’ve it near down and then it’ll be war when they get in on the nursery.”
“Would you not get a strand of electric?” Chiseler taunts. “I’ve an old battery I’ll lend you.”
“Good man, Chiseler, you and your old batteries, like the one you swiped from me car when I left it outside of Paddy’s.”
“Didn’t I save you from the checkpoint? What? You can thank old Chiseler you didn’t go trousers down into that one, no tax or insurance, no license, drunk as a fiddler’s bitch. Besides, I’d say the walk home did you good. Saved your Mammy the trouble for once.”
“Good man, Chiseler, an answer to everything what?” and Dandy pours his tea and looks out on the horse, munching its way through a second bucket of oats.
“We’re making an impression now, George.” Jack tokens, his head nodding toward the ridge.
“Getting into it, all right,” George agrees.
“Not the only thing you’re getting into, is it George?” Chiseler bites.
“That’ll do from you.”
There is a gentle under-snort all round. Usually it is open chat and George’s liaisons the underlying belly laugh of teatime banter: but this one is different. This young one is a little close to home and the boys know Chiseler isn’t happy. Knows he’s not going to let this one go.
“I’d say there’s two more weeks in it,” Jack continues.
“Two, handy,” Dandy agrees, eager to move on, nobody likes a fight, not at teatime. The small talk ebbs with fags and milky sugar-brimmed teas and the banter is soft deflections around Chiseler’s iceberg.
They make quick work of the ridge and the light pours in on the quartz-glinting outcrop. There is no talk when they work, each man knows his place in the small band and the sound is the drone of saws, a file scouring a blunt chain, the crack of a falling tree, their thrill and deafening harmony. The horse has cut a mud hoof track up to the lorry pull in where the neat-stacked piles wait for the trucks and the potholed road to Aughrim. The lorry men are a different creed: overalls and humming engines and the long hydraulic arm lifting the timber into place. They’re paid by the load and move with a wire-eyed efficiency, conceding little more than a back-handed wave from air con cabs.
George has arranged to pick her up at eight tonight. She says the husband will have gone back to the garage by then and she’ll be able to slip out for an hour or two. Says she’ll meet him down by the river. She wouldn’t be George’s usual type. It happened at the back of Phelan’s lounge one drunken night a couple of weeks back.
“I’ve had enough. Feck him!” slurred surrendering words.
The husband worked late and it was just a few short hours of rough cat tumbling and long drawn-out sobs before she slipped back to her sister sitting in on the child. Though it is all too close to home. George has told her that. He’s worked with the Chiseler a lifetime and he isn’t out to rile him. Nobody ever liked the nephew. George didn’t imagine Chiseler did either: he was just making his point, drawing his line in the sand. That dirty little maggot with a bite like a terrier, and he was a lousy mechanic, and when George saw the bruises on her it made his blood boil. It would be easier just to leave it but the damage was done now. People knew, it was no secret: nothing ever is round here. There’d be no sympathy for her, not now. Usually George would ride it while the going’s good. It never lasts. They always go back in the end. In many ways they never leave.
The day passes in a haze of sap and oil and the slope has tightened thighs and blistered toes and the midges have started. Trigger drags a last log up to the pull in and Dandy untacks her by the van. They gather by the stream for a final fag and debrief. The horse takes deep sups from the brown water lapping at their toes and the flies cling mercilessly to her raw harness-rubbed flesh.
“I’ve to go, Jack,” Chiseler shouts from the car, as he changes from boots and sap-stained jeans to a pair of old slacks.
“Coming, see ye in the morning, lads,” and they watch as Jack leaves his gear by the van. They wave as the car pulls past and Chiseler, fag lit in the passenger seat, points his index finger to George like a loaded gun. The boys stay quiet. There is nothing to be said.
Dandy tethers Trigger in the fresh grass larch and Trapper helps George load the van. They have laid waste to another acre of spruce and all eyes settle on the branch-strewn wasteland of fag buts, thrown out lunch wraps and empty oil cans. They’re making progress. Another week the wood will be beaten to a corner.
Dandy sits in the middle and fiddles with the tuner. Rare the radio finds a station but this evening he’s caught some daft pop song and he leans back, miming the words and eating a bar left over from his lunch box.
“Where are we after this, George?” Trapper asks.
“Ballycoog. There’s a ridge there they can’t get the machines on.”
“Much in it?”
“A week or two: I’m going this evening to take a look.”
“I’d say you are,” Dandy interrupts with a snigger.
“That’ll do from you,” and George jabs him in the ribs as they move round the bend.
“Weren’t you seeing some young one out of Ballycoog. Last year was it?” Trapper is too far across to jab and George looks ahead.
“One of Murphy’s was it? Do you remember? She came up to Phelan’s one night and got more than she bargained for. What happened her?”
George looks ahead unflinching. It is the usual going-home banter and Dandy sniggers.
“Course he remembers,” and he lets another groan as George jabs him in the ribs a second time.
“Seriously, George, you’d want to leave Chiseler’s one alone. That nephew of his is a madman. He’s done time so he has. Bottled a lad out of Avoca one night over pool. You wouldn’t know what he’d do, he’s an angry little shite.”
“That’s right, George, you won’t win favours going round with her.”
A contemplative silence descends over the van and the pop song crackles out and fags are lit. They’ve had their say. Got it off their chests and they all stew in small familiar thoughts. It is a good little team up in the wood. No one wants the boat rocked. No one wants trouble.
Trapper steps out at the asbestos slate cottage. His cousins are stood out on the lane, skirts and school bags, but the Trapper turns to the cattle shed.
“Leaving them alone, Dandy?”
“You nipped it in the bud there, George.”
“He’s not a bad sort, Trapper. A few short, but not a bad sort. Sure what do you expect sitting up here, three miles out of nowhere, it’s a sorry little life.”
George leaves Dandy at the bottom of the Houses. He can walk up. Do him good to stretch the legs, have a last fag before he gets in to the mother. George shuffles back in the seat and turns for his sister’s. He has a mobile home set up there behind the sheds. It does for now. It’s dry at least.
He stops on the bridge and looks down at the debris caught in the buttress: branches, tyres, an old green mattress wedged by a fallen tree. The river is violent here, ripping down from the hills, plucking the banks and smashing against this, the last bridge before the big weir. It is a wonder it still stands and George’s mind drifts to Chiseler’s finger pointed like a gun. He will tell her this evening. It has to end. Next week and there’ll be on to a new wood and a fresh start. He’ll tell her it is for the best. Somehow he will pluck the words.
George gets it in his mind to look over the wood at Ballycoog before settling down for the evening. He’s only putting off the inevitable but the drive will do him good, sharpen his mind for telling her. The ridge at Ballycoog feels vertical on tired legs and he steps out the distance to the track. They’ll need a tractor and winch: even Trigger will struggle on this angle. Though George knows all this, he doesn’t need to look, the timber is merely a distraction.
“Go home, George,” he says to himself. “Go home and tell her. She might slip back. They both might forget it. Life goes on. These things never last.”
When George pulls up to the mobile home he finds Chiseler’s car parked outside. His stomach turns. This is unfamiliar ground. He jumps from the van, heckles up. This is his patch. The door is ajar and George pushes through.
“Chiseler?”
George steps back. Chiseler is stood by the sink, arms folded, and there’s herself sat on the couch, the little boy on her lap, and her face all bruised and battered and tears running down puffed red cheeks.
“Well, George, you started this mess, you look after her,” and Chiseler lights a fag.
“What? I’m not, I started nothing,” but Chiseler interrupts.
“You’re not to worry now, George. That nephew of mine won’t go near you. I’ve him marked. But you listen to me, George. That women and that child are in your care. You watch them, or I’ll be marking you same as the nephew.”
The evening has drawn in and the dark has mustarded the yard and blackened the bare glass. Chiseler’s car pulls out and the headlights shift across the torn linoleum floor. The stark beam catches all eyes before turning to the road and plunging them into the bleak uncertainty of the night.
Rory MacArdle lives in the Wicklow hills, where he stores peculiar poems and fiction badly in need of editing and rejigging. He works in construction, likes gardening, heritage buildings and walking in quiet places.
Richard Wilson was born in 1931 and has lived all over England. The feature image is of him performing compulsory military service. Further biographic information is provided at the end of the article.
Richard Wilson in 2010.
Has any nation, if you can call the English such, a comparable span of excellence and depravity? In a land of contrasts we find unrivaled gardens alongside the most bleak prisons in Europe; a sense of humour so rich, but languishing below other mature democracies in the OECD’s Better Life Index; rampant helpfulness, despite a social structure engineered to enrich those one per cent that own over half of all wealth; a unique health service and loveliest of nurses found anywhere, allied to doctors, half of whom end up being in it for rich rewards, or besieged by drug companies, paperwork and patient overload.
A pervading kindness too, alas often lost in loveless family contexts, where a controlling, even violent, ideology of child-rearing holds sway. Is it any wonder there are racial tensions in the big cities, and knife attacks rife? Our unparalleled range of pubs are dying out, and being replaced by a culture of binge drinking.
In England we find phenomenal interest in games – were not most actually invented in the UK? – yet, ironically, there is also a spectacular level of obesity. Similarly, a vast range and number of charity shops, coupled with a fear, hatred in some, of immigrants, the very people charities aim to rescue.
We enjoy universal education, yet a mere 20% of teachers are rated as outstanding, the rest drown in bureaucracy and test scores, both largely superfluous, in a format almost wholly unsuited to a child’s needs and wishes: being taught rather than learning. Virtually absent from the curriculum is the development of crucial skills for living such as gardening, construction, or meaningful personal development.
But viewed historically, is twenty-first century England not living through a Golden Age? As recently as the 1930s we could die of hunger, or be cut down in swathes in the 1920s by a flu epidemic that killed thirty million worldwide – three times the number of fatalities as in World War I. Rates of infant and maternal mortality have plummeted, and debilitating childhood illnesses such as polio and tuberculosis have been virtually eliminated. Longevity has soared. No more Wars of the Roses, except on the cricket field.
The working class, and destitute, of 1900 – when my grandfather Henry Wilson was helping to found a Labour party in Bradford – would gasp at the profusion of supermarkets, the diversity and relative good value of food and drink from all over the world. And when you need reviving you simply jump on a cheap flight to one of hundreds of sunny resorts.
But place England in its geographical context and shortcomings leap out. Are we not served by some of the most arrogant and conceited politicians in the world? Brexit, where we are opting out of the first ever European political association that has kept war at bay for over seventy years, prompts not apologetic requests as in a mature divorce, but insulting demands from our leaders. Is it any wonder that people in their twenties and thirties are sickened, if not horrified, by their elders?
So where is the joy in living amongst a divided nation? What may we learn from the Italians who seem to smile perpetually and gloriously; the Spanish and Greeks, infused with gaiety; the Swiss and Germans displaying an exalted thoroughness, the former with a novel form of participatory democracy; the Danes and the Norwegians, with their communal drive to make society work for literally everyone, allied with an environmental conscience – the former now meets its electricity needs entirely with wind energy.
Further afield we find street violence in Japan is almost unknown; a love of life and laughter in Africa in spite of crippling poverty, wars and disease. In Indian society, the only primarily vegetarian in the world, though not without a violent streak, their whole approach to life is like a meandering river, its waters infused with magical otherness, a continuous stream of yoga, raga music, ashrams and Bollywood! Could another country have thrown up a Krishnamurti or a Sadhguru? He contrived last year to have have fifty million trees planted in a single day.
So what is it like to live in England today for most people? The answer is a gigantic difference depending on region, whether urban or rural, social class, wealth or lack of it, physical wellbeing and education level. Watch the Michael Caine film ‘Harry Brown’, a dramatic masterpiece, to see just how tough it is to climb out of social deprivation.
Let us recall another England untouched by industry and ecological distortion. I recall sixty years ago regularly encountering profusions of wild flowers, and wild strawberries; whereas now a twelve mile cycle from the city of Hereford yields a desultory zoo, and a token wayside stretch with eighteen wild flowers from a bygone age. The rest have been obliterated by chemicals and pesticides.
What is equally disheartening for me is that the English have a genius for complaining, but are oblivious, unwilling or incapable, of acting to reduce our carbon footprint, or protest against the phenomenal desecration over the past fifty years of the land, trees, wild grasses, rivers, and free animals. But how can we win when uncaring, profit-seeking, multinational companies, not governments, rule? The grassroots approach to local government of the town of Preston, may prove inspirational.
The great enigma is this: are we on the brink of finally shedding the three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old crippling Cromwellian legacy of Puritanism and self-denial, the Victorian hypocrisy allied (still!) to a vicious class divide? When we add into the mix the pervading commercialism unleashed by Thatcher, is it not a tsunami from which we must flee to high ground?
A Cockney taxi driver once said to me that the English are as corrupt as anyone, but the best at concealing it. When I asked a young Frenchman what he thought of England his quick-fire response was: ‘The basic society is shit, but the counter-culture is great’. He identified all that sustained the royal family as injurious to the body politic.
But can that counter-culture of rock bands, the three hundred or so annual folk festivals, or innumerable individual acts of kindness, outweigh the structural deficiencies?
Can we learn from the Irish, who perhaps know the English better even than we know ourselves? There hospitality, poetry and traditional music still seem to count for something, but this has been hard won. Tim Pat Coogan’s Ireland in the 20th Century points out that they have only finally triumphed after three hundred years of often brutal English rule, which created warring factions among themselves.
This is akin to the personal development of experiencing the suffering that leads to passion, so that finally one can see beauty. I wept when I read of General Lake in the 1790s quelling an uprising with murder and torture. Predictably the Irish retaliated and thirty thousand of them were gunned down, men, women and children: our next-door-neighbours.
We cannot escape this side of the English character which a Czech friend once described with three adjectives: pitiless, merciless and ruthless.
Can the richness of Shakespeare’s vision for humanity in tragedy, comedy and histories guide us and make us confront this shameful past? The Dutch scholar Erasmus, on a visit in 1499, writing to a French friend, offers of a glimpse of society at that time. ‘Everywhere you go the girls kiss you on arrival, when you leave and kiss you in between. There is no pleasanter girl than the English.’
Those small affections endure across time. I meet them regularly as I negotiate a heavily-laden trolley through railway stations. I recall once being at the foot of a stairwell with seconds to spare before my train pulled out of the station, whereupon two men, separately, rushed down the stairs, turned round, grabbed my bags and raced with me to the train. Where else in the world would that happen?
Reticence is a common trait, but I found, having made a conscious decision to speak to passers-by, this easily dissolves; whilst in the clover of Cornwall, the checkout girls in Tesco chime: ‘there you are my darling’, or ‘my dearest’, or even ‘my dove’. We have the most wonderful possibility to improve these qualities of affection in ourselves. Indeed the English character bears similarities to English food: fundamentally good ingredients but appalling processing.
Can we reach a point where a restored appreciation for poetry, music and drama culminates in a Shakespeare for our time? Maybe then, not 35%, but 95% will lead fulfilled, colourful lives. But how to sidestep the paradoxical constraints of modern technology? Some of us may choose to be inquisitive nomads, roaming the wide world not the world wide web; refusing to settle for a humdrum semi-d or high rise flat, the ugliness of which must lower the spirit.
*******
With the evaporation of the Village Green Society – shop, post office, church-going, pub – is there anything to hold anyone with Sense and Sensibility in England? At the helm, goons like Gove, jokers like Johnson, the darling buddies of May, turn governing into a Molière comedy, or even a Feydeau farce, acted out in an anachronistic building, two sides facing one another in a slanging match, redolent of a school playground, instead of Knights of the Round Table in harmonious dialogue.
This remarkably animal-loving people recently permitted a road closure above Bath to last six weeks to allow toads their annual hop along their preferred route. Yet hypocrisy runs deep, as most eat animals reared in factory farms, and slaughtered in hideous abattoirs. Where is the compassion and love to create the frequent friendly interaction that still exists in the typical African family hut?
But what a wealth of humour has emerged in England over the last century, from Wodehouse, Saki, Frank Muir and Dennis Norden, Peter Sellers, John Bird and John Fortune, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and my favourite comic genius Miles Kington, who wrote over 5000 articles for The Times and The Independent.
I find it almost unbearable to think of so many being compelled to work at twice their natural pace, and twice as long as their bodies can stand, indoors, encircled by machines, all in the context of an over-regulated and absurd bureaucracy.
Two outcomes of this are that all of the Health Visitors in one part of a county were absent at one point from stress, while in another, in a Referral School for disturbed children, all the staff bar one became so disturbed that by a certain stage all had experienced nervous breakdown.
And lest we forget that rough sleeping is on the rise, and the young cannot afford to buy houses, whilst we sell arms to countries with extremely questionable human rights records.
We now propose constructing a £55.7 billion railway, H2S at a mere £403 million per mile, when there are not enough houses. Its name is the same as H2S, the chemical formula for Hydrogen Sulphide, commonly known as rotten egg gas.
The final crazy contrast is that a glorious diversity of races should be married to a ruthless murder of plant diversity. The only remedy is to stay insanely positive, and unshakably optimistic that the rising generation will triumph and take us down ‘the road less travelled and that will make all the difference’.
Richard Wilson was born in 1931 and grew up in Yorkshire, Oxford and Malaysia where his father was a colonial official. He spent most of World War II in Australia, along with his mother, brother and sister, while his father was interned by the Japanese. Returning to England afterwards he completed his secondary education in Rugby School, where he developed an enduring affection for the oval-balled game. After compulsory military service he read history at Brasenose College, Oxford, before embarking on a career in the music industry, first with EMI. Later he opened his own record shop in Exeter, the Left Bank, which became the most successful independently-owned such store in the country, renowned for its selection of Classical music. In the 1970s he moved to Hereford, where he spent ten years running another record shop, and in the ensuing thirty organised over fifty concerts featuring world class musicians, seven of them a complete cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas. He recently moved to Cornwall in the South-West of England, but is currently wintering in the French Alps where he indulges an enduring passion for the piste. He has never been on an airplane in his life, but manages to make regular visits, using overland conveyance, to his extended family which includes two great-grandsons and a wide circle of friends in Britain, Ireland and Czech Republic.
English Nature at Peace in my Youth
Remember, remember
The first of September
The sky, the wind, the rain
Knew season had to chain
Its heart, its soul, its breath
To change from August warmth
Let leaves go yellow brown
Ripe corn gently cut down
Bliss, bliss Ode to Autumn
Sure as farewell to sun
The sun that browned, not burn
The skin of child who’d learned
To race along the sand
On edge of sea, dance grand
With golden hair that gleamed
Oh smile of joy which dreamed
No thought of wanton harm
That would destroy the charm
Of settled Nature’s ways
Through man’s thoughtless mad craze
For wealth, for change that lost
Ironically, what meant most
To man’s inward calm growth
From war, hurt, greed and sloth
The heart cries out why, why?
Can we not cling to sky
Of blue, not grey, of love
That makes each man a dove
