Cassandra Voices

Tag: 2018June

  • Drive Time: The Irish Media’s Message

    Tune into any Irish radio station, and it is hard to escape the constant flogging of motor cars: RTE’s flagship ‘Morning Ireland’ is associated with Opel; sports bulletins on the same programme are brought to you by Kia; traffic introduced by Hyundai, only afterwards to be announced as ‘AA Roadwatch’. Ads for other brands such as Mercedes and Peugeot generally feature during commercial breaks, seemingly every third or fourth slot. By early evening it is ‘Drivetime’; while over on Newstalk, you find Ivan Yates’s ‘The Hard Shoulder’.

    Meanwhile, national newspapers carry regular motoring supplements – with adverts also layered through the main sections. In Ireland car ‘culture’ not only prevails, it dominates.

    Ostensibly innocuous, if anything the adverts appear reassuring: smooth voices caressing parents into protecting their little cherubs inside whichever metal-cocoon-on-wheels they are selling. Branding imbues these vehicles – or ‘estates’ – with a pioneering sense of ‘Discovery’; a ‘Highlander’, ‘Land Cruiser’ or ‘Land Rover’ ranging across a great sweep of virgin landscape, as opposed to the reality of sitting for hours in traffic.

    It is twelve years since the European Union’s environmental body described ‘Dublin as a ‘worst case scenario‘ for ‘unsustainable car-dependent urban sprawl(1)’. Yet peculiarly, RTE uses sales of imported cars as an indicator for how well the economy is performing(2).

    The not-so-subliminal-message is that a shiny-new-car is a good sign. But car-usage is blatantly contrary to the national interest, if we are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and associated fines. Transport, a substantial proportion of which is private car-usage, accounts for approximately 20% of all national emissions.

    As long as media outlets receive hefty advertising revenue from car importers, there will be an inducement to avoid questioning our car culture. More obviously, vehicles are frequently offered as prizes in competitions, most recently on RTE’s ‘The Late Late Show’ on the 25th of May(3). By contrast, the lowly bicycle is rarely, if ever, considered prize-worthy.

    Lone cyclist, Charlemont Bridge, Dublin.

    II – Cyclist ‘deaths’

    Typically, when a cyclist is killed headlines and news bulletins state he has died in a collision – a passive inevitability arising from being on the wrong side of an autonomous vehicle. Yet such machines are under human control. Would it not be more accurate to say a cyclist has been killed?

    Alas, neither cyclists, public transport users, nor pedestrians tend to purchase media space, despite comprising the vast majority of those in transit across Ireland, particularly in urban areas, in which most of the population now resides. Where there is coverage of transport alternatives it usually relates to how these affect motorists, as where bus lanes generate traffic jams, or where cyclists create a nuisance by failing to observe the law.

    Little substantive probing occurs into improvements to the transport infrastructure – or indeed how Ireland stacks up internationally.

    Apart from being presented as a nuisance, on those rare occasions that cycling is treated positively, it is depicted as good for children or fitness. But rarely, if ever, is it taken as a realistic alternative to the car. Overwhelmingly, the message is: four wheels good, two wheels bad.

    Last month, a cyclist was killed by a driver turning a lorry at the main N11 junction immediately outside RTE’s premises in Dublin(4). Coincidentally, currently there are plans to develop a new vehicular junction along the N11 on lands formerly owned by RTE that are being redeveloped for housing. The plans are attracting objections, alleging the proposed provision for cyclists is unsafe and substandard(5).

    Notably, the route is a major cycle artery to the country’s largest university, University College Dublin. The RTE radar does not appear to have picked up an important story on its doorstep.

    III – Cars In Their Eyes

    One basic measure the national broadcaster could make to raise public confidence would be to provide an easily accessible public declaration of any direct remuneration, ‘gifts’, or other contractual arrangements into which RTE or its senior personnel enter into with third parties, including car dealers and importers. This would be in line with the transparency the BBC demands of its employees(6).

    It is of interest that over the years reports have emerged of various ‘stars’ being provided with complimentary cars by dealerships. As far back as May 2005, Tommy Broughan TD called for transparency, informing Dáil Éireann that Ryan Tubridy had the use of a Lexus, while Pat Kenny and Gerry Ryan (both then contracted to RTE) had ‘relationships’ with BMW and Mazda respectively(7).

    Tubridy currently presents ‘The Late Late Show’, which is ‘sponsored’ by Renault. Earlier this year his comments – which the Dublin Cycling Campaign described as ‘casual incitement of hatred’ – attracted five hundred complaints to the broadcaster. He had suggested that people who (legally) cycle two abreast should be ‘binned‘(8).

    Given RTE receives almost two hundred million euro per annum from the public through mandatory TV licences, surely the Irish people have a right to know whether Mr Tubridy continues to be provided with a vehicle by any outside firms.

    What information there is available is generally gleaned from marketeers’ press releases. Investigations into possible conflicts of interest are almost unheard of, at least in public.

    Meanwhile, an opinion piece last year by RTE’s Countrywide presenter Damien O’Reilly in The Farmers Journal ridiculed Irish cyclists for wearing luminescent clothing to ensure their safety: this was ‘aggressively coloured’ as O’Reilly put it(9). Separately, the Sunday Times revealed (following a successful freedom of information request) that O’Reilly had been paid for work done on behalf of An Bord Bia in Dubai, which was approved by RTE management(10).

    ‘Moonlighting’ of RTE stars has given rise to further controversy in recent months, with Claire Byrne landing herself in hot water over work done on behalf of financial services firm Davy’s(11).

    Elsewhere there has been a failure to reveal corporate funding of programming. Phoenix Magazine reported that Derek Mooney’s Programme ‘Turf Life’, broadcast on May 4th 2018, was supported financially by Bord Na Móna, but this was not declared in the programme’s credits(12).

    IV – George’s Marvellous Meddling

    Over on Newstalk, George Hook set himself up as the champion of the poor downtrodden motorists, while castigating other road users – such as cyclists of course!

    In 2015 on daytime television Hook declared that he ‘hates cyclists with a passion‘(13), before stating: ‘They do what the hell they like. They’re a threat to themselves, they’re a threat to pedestrians, and ultimately they’re a threat to motorcars, as motorcars trying to avoid these lunatics will have an accident.’

    Last September he outdid himself, comparing cyclists to Nazis on the BBC’s Nolan Show(14).

    Champion of downtrodden motorists George Hook.

    Notably, Hook has previously been provided with a free car by Peugeot. RTE’s own website carries a report from June 22nd, 2011 in their ‘Motors’ section, entitled (seemingly without irony) ‘508 Hooked’, in which ‘Peugeot Managing Director Geroge Harbourne said: ‘George is an excellent brand ambassador for Peugeot. We very much look forward to working with him to increase the awareness of the Peugeot brand in Ireland, through his high public profile’ (15).

    V – Increasing Obsolescence

    Last year, national car sales dropped 10%, yet contrary to perceived wisdom this did not coincide with economic stagnation(16). Increasingly, those fortunate enough to get by without a car realise that these metal boxes no longer represent freedom, but are instead a costly burden best avoided.

    Cars are good for a weekly shop – but so is a taxi – and in any case the traditional weekly shop is a decreasing habit, especially among the younger generation. Yet perversely, as more people move away from cars, the national broadcaster sings the praises of the internal combustion engine with increasing vigour.

    During the ‘Bertie boom years’, many first-time buyers bought a ‘starter home’ far from Dublin, which required a long daily commute by car. This was often endured in the hope of returning to Dublin at some later date. Alas many of those dreams have receded.

    These days, although accommodation in Dublin is in notoriously short supply, most of the younger generation are nonetheless opting to stay put in the capital, and avoiding the daily imprisonment that car dependency brings. Wander around the ‘go-getter ghettos’ of Google’s HQ on Barrow Street, Docklands, and East Point Business Park: cyclists, pedestrians, and public transport users abound, but there is little sign of cars.

    In Dublin twenty years ago taxis were notoriously rare, and buses did not enjoy their own lanes. Having a motor in those days was a distinct advantage. Yet roll on two decades and owning a car is arguably more of a burden, and increasingly identified with ill-health.

    The link between car dependency and obesity is well established(17); sadly, Ireland could be set to become the most obese country in Europe(18), which in part reflects our car dependency. Yet instead of discussing the obvious links, the Irish media is more likely to allude to the danger and zealotry of cyclists. Could it be that the idea of cycling as a normal mode of transport for regular people is too much of a threat to vested interests?

    VI – A Gathering Storm

    The New Scientist(19) reported that the fumes created by car engines tend to have a worse effect on those inside vehicles, rather than outside, as had previously been believed. That lovely ‘new car smell’ may actually mask toxic odours, which the driver and occupants might otherwise detect. For example, PM 10s are among the numerous known carcinogens created by diesel emissions(20).

    Another report recently featured in the UK media indicates that a class action is being brought against Volkswagen(21), following the emissions scandal, which involved the manufacturer lying for years about the level of toxic fumes generated by its vehicles. This may be the tip of a large iceberg.

    If it turns out that children developed asthma from riding in such vehicles – and if there is no background family history causation is plausible(22) – the emissions scandal could explode further, with major consequences in terms of costs to manufacturers, and changes in public policy.

    Unsurprisingly, there has been little coverage of this in the Irish media, but the story could be of even more relevance here. Firstly, our greater car-dependency exposes us to greater danger. Secondly, the manufacturer associated with misleading governments, the public, and owners – Volkswagen – was the top-selling brand in this country between 2012 and 2016(23).

    That is a triple-whammy to which Irish people may have been particularly exposed – yet hardly a peep from anywhere in the Irish media. Might we see greater coverage of such issues in mainstream Irish media in the years to come? Don’t hold your breath, unless that is you are being passed by a noxious vehicle belching out toxic fumes.

    On May 8th RTE’s Freedom of Information Officer accepted a Freedom of Information Request from Cassandra Voices seeking records of payments or payments-in-kind from motor car dealership to leading RTE stars that have been approved by RTE management since January 1st, 2017. RTE have 30 days in which to respond. Details will be revealed in the next edition.

    (1) Untitled, Belfast Telegraph, ‘EU using Dublin as example of worst-case urban, 4th of October, 2016, sprawl’ https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/breakingnews_ukandireland/eu-using-dublin-as-example-of-worstcase-urban-sprawl-28409383.html

    (2) Untitled, RTE: ‘From manufacturing to car sales, UK economy bounces back’, 6th of  August, 2013 : https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2013/0806/466637-uk-economy/.
    Also, Untitled, RTE, ‘2016 car sales rise 17.5%, Toyota most popular make – SIMI’ Tuesday, 3rd of January, 2017: https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2017/0103/842420-2016-car-sales/.

    (3)  RTE Player, ‘Car Giveaway / The Late Late Show’, 25th of May, 2018, https://www.rte.ie/player/ie/show/the-late-late-show-extras-30003017/10884022/

    (4) Gráinne Ní Aodha, ‘19-year-old cyclist dies after collision with truck near UCD this afternoon’ 18th of April, 2018: http://www.thejournal.ie/cyclist-serious-injuries-dublin-n11-3965285-Apr2018/

    (5) Untitled, irishcyclist.com ‘NEW RTE JUNCTION COULD MEAN MORE CONFLICTS BETWEEN CYCLISTS AND BUSES’19th of April, 2018, http://irishcycle.com/2018/04/19/new-rte-junction-could-mean-more-conflicts-between-cyclists-and-buses/

    (6) BBC Code of Ethical Policy, downloaded 29/5/18 : http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/supplying/pdf/BBC_Ethical_Policy.pdf

    (7) Untitled, breakingnews.ie ‘Call for RTÉ broadcasters to declare free cars’, 5th of May, 2005,  https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/call-for-rte-broadcasters-to-declare-free-cars-201227.html

    (8) Untitled, Stickybottle, ‘Flood of complaints to RTE after ‘Late Late Show’ cyclists item’ 14th of March, 2018, http://www.stickybottle.com/latest-news/complaints-rte-cyclists-item/

    (9) Untitled, Stickybottle, ‘Irish cyclists dress too aggressively – Farmers Journal column’, 27th of July, 2017 http://www.stickybottle.com/latest-news/irish-cyclists-to-blame-for-their-own-unpopularity-farmers-journal-column/

    (10) Frank Armstrong, CountryWide’s O’Reilly comes a cropper with greenwash row’ 22nd of October, 2017: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/ireland/countrywides-oreilly-comes-a-cropper-with-greenwash-row-dn83xmxs9

    (11) John Burns, ‘RTE ‘kept in the dark’ over Claire Byrne moonlighting’, 22nd of October, 2017, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rte-kept-in-the-dark-over-claire-byrne-moonlighting-kzf75rp2c

    (12) Phoenix Magazine, May 2018.

    (13) Untitled, thebikecomesfirst.com ‘“I hate cyclists with a passion” – George Hook’, 5th of July, 2015: http://www.thebikecomesfirst.com/i-hate-cyclists-with-a-passion-george-hook/

    (14) Alan O’Keeffe, ‘’I’m never going to do a Nazi salute again,’ promises Hook’’, 18th of November, 2017, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/im-never-going-to-do-a-nazi-salute-again-promises-hook-36331313.html

    (15) Untitled, RTE Lifestyle ‘508 Hooked’: 22nd of June, 2011, https://www.rte.ie/lifestyle/motors/2011/0622/145287-hookg/

    (16) Conall Ó Fátharta, ‘Brexit blamed as car sales down 10% in first nine months’ 2nd of November, 2017: https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/brexit-blamed-as-car-sales-down-10-in-first-nine-months-462040.html

    (17) Rob Stein, ‘Car Use Drives Up Weight, Study Finds’, 31st of May, 2004: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3062-2004May30.html

    (18) Rachel Flaherty, 6th of May, 2015, ‘Ireland set to be most obese country in Europe, WHO says’ https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/ireland-set-to-be-most-obese-country-in-europe-who-says-1.2201731

    (19) Wiebina Heesterman, ‘Air pollution is worse inside cars and in dust’ 23rd of November, 2016, https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg23231011-100-9-air-pollution-is-worse-inside-cars-and-in-dust/ 

    (20) Victoria Wooloston Diesel cars “kill 5,000 people a year” in Europe — and the UK is one of the worst offenders’, 18th of September, 2017, http://www.alphr.com/environment/1007053/pollution-diesel-cars-deaths-UK

    (21) Rob Davies, Dieselgate: UK motorists file class-action suit against VW, 9th of January, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/09/dieselgate-volkswagen-uk-motorists-class-action-suit

    (22) www.asthmaorg.uk ‘Pollution’, downloaded 29/5/2018 https://www.asthma.org.uk/advice/triggers/pollution/

    (23)Melanie May, ‘These are the 5 top-selling cars of 2017 so far’, downloaded 29/5/2018 http://www.thejournal.ie/best-selling-cars-ireland-2017-3483985-Jul2017/

  • History’s Dead Hand on the Middle East

    Last month’s opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem served to re-ignite Palestinian rage against what many there regard as a latter-day ‘Crusader’ state, a term with particular resonance in that region.

    Krak des Chevaliers, Crusader Castle, Syria. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    No other city juxtaposes such piety and passion as Jerusalem. It is sacred to the three great monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and located close to the birthplace of civilisation itself. All the dominant empires of the Mediterranean and western Asia have battled for possession of this strategic gateway to three continents, and on it goes.

    With Europe enjoying a long, and increasingly complacent, holiday from its bloody history, and with the U.S. finding itself in ‘united states of amnesia’, the past is often forgotten; but in the Middle East – a heavily-laden term itself – a symbolic inheritance smoulders and crackles.

    Thus, when Islamic State, or Daesh, burst into Iraqi and Syrian politics and declared a short-lived Caliphate in 2014, they claimed they were destroying the despised Sykes-Picot border. These ‘lines in the sand’ (somewhat altered after the war) demarcating post-colonial states were the product of a secret alliance between the Allied Powers to carve up the Ottoman Empire in 1916, against the claims of Arab nationalists.

    The reason this latest gesture of U.S. support for the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu – and nod to a domestic Christian fundamentalist audience – is a cause of such outrage lies in the profound meaning attached to the ancient city, which, ironically, derives its name from a Bronze Age ‘pagan’ deity Shalem; the preceding ‘Jeru; is a corruption of the Sumerian word ‘yeru’, for ‘settlement’ or ‘cornerstone’.

    For Jews it is an historic capital, and site of the First and Second Temples, of which only the Wailing Wall survives after its destruction during the Great Jewish Revolt against Roman Rule (66-73 CE). The city also has profound associations with Christianity, as the site of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ; furthermore among the Evangelical Rapture movement it is believed that the rebuilding by the Jews of their Temple will anticipate the Second Coming, which explains the devotion of many U.S. Republicans to the cause of Israel.

    Islam is also deeply-embedded in the city. Many Biblical traditions contained within Judaism and Christianity were accepted by Muhammad in the Qur’an, although he explicitly denies the doctrine of the trinity (though, surprisingly, not the virgin birth) in verse 171 of the 4th Sura: Do not say, ‘Three’. Stop. It is better for you, Allah is but one God. He is far above having a son. This doctrine of tawhid or ‘oneness’ is crucial to any understanding of Islam, especially the Sunni variant.

    Above all the Muslim presence in Jerusalem is located in the shimmering Dome of the Rock completed by Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik in 691 CE on the site of the Second Temple after the Islamic conquest in 638 CE.

    The Dome of the Rock. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    In the The Crucible of Islam G. W. Bowersock points to a Qur’anic verse inscribed on the north door of the structure in which Muhammad condemns polytheism. This was a charge that could be leveled against Christians with the trinity in mind. Bowersock argues this did not augur well for future sectarian relations: ‘Abd al-Malik’s Dome of the Rock arose on ground that was shared by the great monotheisms, but it proclaimed only one of them and offered no path to coexistence with the other two(1)’.

    This lapidary statement of intent contrasts with the relative benignity of the lightning conquest by the followers of Muhammad of a great empire stretching from the Iberian peninsula to Persia. As Bowersock puts it: ‘Archaeological evidence which has been cultivated for this period in recent years confirm the lack of any substantive impact of the Muslims on local populations.’

    Adherents of other monotheistic religions in that region simply had to pay jiza – a head tax – and a tax on land known as kharaj. Despite their initial opposition, and alliance with the Sassanid Empire in Persia, Jews were far better treated under their Islamic lords than their co-religious under ‘Christian’ rulers in Europe. Those who appeal to history in the Middle East, on all sides, tend to be selective in their recollections.

    II ‘Middle’ or ‘Near’ East?

    The term ‘Near East’ was coined at the end of the nineteenth century to describe the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, while the expression the ‘Middle East’ was used for the area that intervened between the ‘Near’ and ‘Far’ ‘East’. With the demise of the Ottoman Empire, however, the ‘Middle East’ migrated westward and came to include the ‘Arab’ states that had emerged from the Ottoman Empire. This, in turn, heralded the emergence of ‘Central Asia’ to describe what had been the ‘Middle East’.

    This has given rise to the argument, advanced in particular by Edward Said, that the term should be expunged from use. Said was reacting to an enduring European discourse used to justify imperialism, often treating the region as a special case requiring tutelage.

    According to a contemporary ‘Orientalist’ Bernard Lewis (d.2018): ‘The Middle East as an area of study for scholars in the western world presents peculiar problems different from those of most other areas. It is different than a situation in which we study a part of our own society. That I think is self-evident.’

    Western imperialism did not cease with the end of the British and French mandates in Iraq, Jordan, Syrian and Lebanon whose borders are the legacy of Sykes-Picot. The presence of vast oil reserves has given rise to constant meddling. David Frum, formerly a speech writer of George W. Bush, who coined the phrase ‘axis of evil’, records that Bernard Lewis was invited to the White House in November, 2001, ‘to explain his views’.

    Frum approvingly noticed ‘a marked up copy of one of Bernard Lewis’s articles in the clutch of papers the president held(2).’ The extent to which archaic Orientalist opinions retain their appeal, and more importantly a propaganda value, emphasising a distinction between ‘democratic’ West, and ‘tyrannical’ East, lends credence to Said’s thesis that: ‘the vindication of Orientalism was not only its intellectual or artistic successes but its later effectiveness, its usefulness, its authority(3).’

    Does the term the Middle East to describe a great swathe of territory from Morocco to Iran retain any usefulness therefore? Nikki Keddie argues the term retains an explanatory usefulness for ‘an uneasy but still adapted blend of pastoral nomadism and settled life’ in the region(4).

    This has roots in the ideas of the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun’s who pointed to a perpetual conflict between badu (nomadism) and hadar (urbanites) in the region. He claimed the superior ‘asabiyya (group solidarity) of the badu brought successive victories against hadar. However, after a number of generations this ‘asabiyya is corrupted by the more luxurious of life in the city, and the cycle continues(5). Even today one can see certain of these dynamics playing out in conflicts from Syria and Iraq.

    Palmyra, Syria. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    Today, the term the Middle East approximates with the region subjected to the first wave of Muslim conquest (the Iberian peninsula apart), and arguably that legacy is still evident. This is not, however, to equate the region with the ‘Islamic World’, or more vaguely ‘Islamic government’, since ‘Muslims in power’ took on varying forms in places such as in India during the Mogul Empire, where it was the minority creed.

    Nazih Ayubi argues that the jizya and kharaj taxes imposed by the original ‘Islamic’ state were the basis of a ‘tributary’ mode of production, involving wealth being extracted by the politically and socially superior from the politically and socially inferior. This survived into the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922), under whom all land was owned by the state, and where until the seventeenth century, armies were composed of slaves requisitioned from the populace(6).

    European colonisation, especially after World War I, dragged much of the region into the world economy, sweeping away political structures in the process, but underlying cultures endured, and the architectural inheritance of the region serves as an important reminder.

    Thus, the shared historical experience of much of the Middle East, under the original ‘Islamic State’ and especially the Ottoman Empire, in combination with enduring nomadic social structures suggests a regional congruence. Colonialism had a significant impact, and distorted borders, but the region is also a product of a far longer history, which encroaches heavily on the present.

    III Israel’s Iron Wall

    Contrary to the image of a technologically-advanced, forward-looking society, the ghosts of history also exert a magnetic pull on Israeli society.

    The conduct of the Israeli authorities reflect the ideology of the Likud Party, now led by Netanyahu, which has been the dominant political force in Israel since its foundation in 1977 under Menachem Begin.

    The Arab-Israeli wars which greeted the foundation of Israel in 1948 (known as al-nakba – the catastrophe – to Palestinians) brought a succession of Israeli victories, especially the 1967 Six-Day War which effectively neutralised Gamal Abdel Nasser, the erstwhile champion of Arab Nationalism.

    Their ascendancy in the region was affirmed by the demise of the Soviet Union, and establishment of the U.S., Israel’s Cold War patron, as lone Superpower. The Palestinian case was further weakened by PLO support for Iraq before the first Gulf War in 1991, and the invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

    But despite accords with neighbouring Egypt and Jordan, Israel faces perpetual conflict as most Arabs have a fixed view on her as a colonial, oppressive presence in the region. Only continued autocratic rule in Egypt and Jordan (maintained by vast U.S. ‘development’ aid) keeps these sentiments in check.

    The Israeli electorate has consistently favoured leaders unwilling to countenance concessions, and the expansion of settlements is a fixed policy. Withdrawal from Gaza in 2006 was a strategic realisation that it was untenable to maintain 10,000 settlers inside a grossly over-populated strip of land containing over a million and a half Palestinians. Better to focus on shoring up the fertile parts of the West Bank, and Jerusalem.

    To explain Israeli intransigence it is necessary to explore the basis of Likud ideology, which can be traced to three principle sources: first, the writings of Ze’ev Jabotinsky; second, the experience of the Holocaust; and third, the emergence of religious Zionism after 1967.

    Zev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky.

    Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky (1880-1940), a Russian born Jew, is generally viewed as the spiritual founder of the Israeli Right. In 1923 he wrote an influential article entitled ‘On the Iron Wall (We and the Arabs)’ in which he asserted that a ‘voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs of Palestine is inconceivable now or in the foreseeable future’, since, every indigenous people ‘will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the dangers of foreign settlement.’

    In response to resistance Jabotinsky advocated ‘an iron wall’ of military might which ‘they [the Arabs] will be powerless to break down.’ Only then ‘will they have given up all hope of getting rid of the alien settlers. Only then will extremist groups with their slogan ‘No, never’ lose their influence, and only then will their influence be transferred to more moderate groups.’ At that point he envisaged limited political rights being granted.

    Jabotinsky’s metaphorical “iron wall” was given literal expression by Ariel Sharon’s construction of a ‘security fence’ in 2003 cutting through the West Bank, although the anticipated acquiescence of the Palestinians, in Hamas at least, has not materialised.

    The second major influence on Likud, and Israeli society in general, is the trauma of the Holocaust experience. The collective memory of passivity in the face of genocide mandates a policy of fierce reprisal in response to the taking of Jewish life. Restraint is characterised as appeasement.

    In his book A Place Among the Nations (New York, 1993) Benjamin Netanyahu dwelt on the lessons of appeasement of Nazi Germany, and the betrayal of Czechoslovakia. Arabs are likened to Nazi Germany, Palestinians to the Sudeten Germans, and Israel to the small democracy of Czechoslovakia, the victim of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich Agreement with Hitler.

    This Holocaust motif was also harnessed by opponents of Yitzhak Rabin after he signed up to the Oslo Accords in 1991. Inside the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) two Likud deputies proceeded to open black umbrellas comparing Rabin’s deal to Chamberlain’s Munich capitulation, while effigies of Rabin dressed in SS uniform were set alight at right wing demonstrations.

    The ferocity of Israel’s response to Hamas, however, works against the moderate leadership that Jabotinsky’s model requires. Likud policy exceeds the methodology of the ‘iron wall’, and perpetuates conflict.

    The last major influence on Likud is religious Zionism, especially that generated by the optimism of the 1967 victory. Those enormous territorial gains were interpreted as a sign of divine favour, and settlement of the land became a religious imperative.

    Its force was demonstrated by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, which effectively de-railed the Oslo Peace Process. Rabin’s killer was a young extremist by the name of Yigal Amir. During his trial Amir told the court that according to halacha (Jewish law), a Jew who gives his land to the enemy and endangers the life of other Jews must be killed.

    IV The Wahhabi Formula

    Alongside uncritical support of Israel, the other plank of U.S. Middle Eastern policy has been a long-standing alliance with the Al-Saud family, who gave their name to the country of Saudi Arabia in 1932. As Guardians of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina to which all Muslims are called on to make a pilgrimage hajj at least once in their lifetime, the hand of history lies heavily. The ruling family have used a Wahhabi blueprint to project their power both internationally and domestically

    The writings of Muhammad Abdel Al-Wahhab (1703-1792), a religious scholar brought up in the strict Hanabali school, repudiate unorthodox practices such as saint veneration. This was common among the Shi’a (faction), which had broken with the dominant Sunni – faithful custodians of Muslim practice (sunna) – after the murder of the fourth caliph Ali in 661 CE.

    Al-Wahhab exalted the doctrine of tawhid: ‘God’s uniqueness as omnipotent lord of creation and his uniqueness as deserving worship and the absolute devotion of his servants’, which is reflected in the inscription on the Dome of the Rock.

    In 1744 Al-Wahhab entered into an accord with the tribal lord Muhammad Al-Saud. The politico-religious alliance generated vast conquests in Arabia as previously warring tribes were once again united under the banner of Islam. In exchange for ideological justification and recruits for the conquests, shari’a, religious law, as interpreted by the ulama, the religious scholars, was imposed on the territories.

    In his writings Al-Wahhab emphasised that obedience to rulers is obligatory even if the ruler should be oppressive. The commands of the ruler (the imam – ‘commander of the faithful’) should only be ignored if he contradicts the rules of religion.

    The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia adopted this Wahhabist formula once again at the beginning of the twentieth century, but a shift in the balance of power has seen the temporal authorities, bolstered by oil wealth, largely dictate to the ulama. This led Helen Lackner Lackner to opine that ‘the fiction of Wahhabism which has lost its real roots with the destruction of the age old desert culture can only be maintained by an intellectual petrification.(7)’

    However, by the 1970s Islam had become according to Kostiner and Teitelbaum ‘a two edged political instrument – as the kingdom’s primary medium of self-legitimisation, and as the main venue of protest for opposition elements.’ Given how formal political protest, in the shape of political parties, had never been tolerated, unsurprisingly, opposition emerged from the religious milieu, culminating, arguably, in Osama bin Laden and Al-Queda.

    State application of Wahhabism also leaves the Shi’a as a persecuted minority (5-10% of the overall Saudi population) perpetually at odds with the regime, and subject to repression.

    Mohammed bin Salman with U.S. President Donald Trump, March, 2017.

    Just as history imprisons the Israeli government in their tyrannical treatment of the Palestinians, similarly Saudi Arabia is bound by its inheritance. The current Crown Prince, thirty-two-year-old Mohammed bin Salman, courts Western approval by granting women the right to drive, but has done nothing to alter the male guardianship system, where male relatives or husbands have control over almost all aspects of women’s lives.

    More meaningful is Saudi participation in the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars, which serve as bloody proxies for internal contradictions. The age-old conflict with Persia/Iran is, similarly, linked to a battle to preserve conformity in the country itself.

    V Monotheism v Polytheism

    No one cause explains the complex origins of conflict in the Middle East. Moreover, arguably violence is inherent in the human condition, and those of us living within the relatively peaceful confines of Europe and America are perhaps living through a golden age of relative peace. Nonetheless, it is apparent that the wars of the Middle East have boiled with almost unmatched intensity since the end of the Ottoman caliphate in 1922.

    Oil wealth and vast military arsenals have played a role, as does the proximity to Europe which bequeaths embroilment in destructive alliances. But a society that had been so dominated by the instructors of a monotheistic faith now appears devoid of leadership, while the other two that emerged in the region also claim dominion. It seems in the nature of each one to suggest that the other is intolerable, despite the obvious similarities.

    For centuries the Ottoman Empire imposed an orthodoxy that brought relative tranquility, but this was predicated on exploitation by social superiors. The popular appeal of Arab nationalism faded with Nasser, and failed to alter the social structures to forge genuinely fair societies. Political Islam appeared as ‘the answer’ in the late 1970s, but it has often been the only avenue for the expression of discontents, and contains within its inheritance repressive tendencies towards competing belief systems, including atheism.

    Palmyra, Syria. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    In 2015 the world looked on in horror as so-called Islamic State set about destroying the remains of the Hellenic city of Palmyra, which I had the pleasure to visit in 2003. One may have assumed it was vandalism on a grand scale, but its destruction appears to have flown from the doctrine of tawhid. The disorder of the present was viewed through the prism of pre-Islamic Arabia, as Bowersock explains:

    The tribes, clans and gods of Arabia at this time worked to the advantage of external powers. It was precisely this diversity and disunity that would be a threat to Muhammad when he first began to receive his revelation from Gabriel and would be resolved only as the Islamic movement gathered strength(8).

    No rival could be allowed to stand before submission (Islam) to one God.

    One of the pantheon of gods worshipped at Palmyra is called Allat (earlier known as Ailat). She is often depicted as a consort of another pagan god Allah, whose name Muslims appropriated for the one God of Islam. A Jungian analysis would suggest a symbolic severance from the eternal feminine, which gives rise to enduring conflict; the vehemence directed at the so-called Satanic Verses, purportedly featuring a dialogue between Muhammad and that deity, are revealing.

    Jewish monotheism is not only characterised by one god but also by one people deserving of God’s intercession, which could explain the single-minded attitude of Israel towards the rest of the world. Nor has the idea of a tripartite Christian deity diluted a singular conviction legitimating the destructive colonisation of most of the planet, in the name of God. All of the monotheistic faiths are characterised by a disjunction with the feminine, and perhaps Nature itself.

    Aqaba, Jordan. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    The wounds of the Middle East continue to fester, with no end in sight to the conflicts in Israel, Syria and Yemen. Religion continues to play a divisive role and forgotten are the days of the first Islamic Empire when individual conscience appears to have been respected, at least beyond Arabia. One fears that calamities will continue until a radical reappraisal of our religious traditions occur.

    Frank Armstrong completed a Masters in Islamic Societies and Cultures in the School of Oriental Studies (SOAS) in 2004, and lived for a period in the Middle East.

    Feature Image: Kevin Fox, all rights reserved.

    (1) G. W. Bowersock The Crucible of Islam (London, 2015), p.158

    (2) David Frum, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, (New York, 2003) p.171-175

    (3) Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), p.128

    (4) Nikki R. Keddie, ‘Is the a Middle East’ International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 4 (1973) p.269

    (5) Nazih Ayubi, Over-stating the Arab State: State Politics and Society in the Middle East, (London 1995) p.30

    (6) Ibid, p. 39

    (7) Helen Lackner, A House Built on Sand – A Political Economy of Saudi Arabia, London, 1978 p.217

    (8) G. W. Bowersock The Crucible of Islam (London, 2015), p.158

  • In the Place Of Sound

    In and between these lines I will explore aspects of the fascinating and dynamic relationship between music, identity and place. Reflecting on my own musical ventures, as well as turning to secondary sources discussing theoretical concepts on the topic, I will point to various ways in which one’s relation to a place is both reflected in, and actively imagined and reinforced with the help of music.

    I will also discuss the idea of music as a place in itself. Representing a world that seems to lie somewhat apart from our everyday life, the entrance into this ‘parallel world’ can give a strong sense of connection to our surroundings, to the world, and not least to our selves. For the travelling musician, it can serve as a place they can carry around with them and thus feel at home wherever they go.

    A child’s venture into a parallel world

    This piece is inspired by my own experience of living and musicking abroad: turning my Austrian ear and heart to traditional musics from Ireland, which has been my home for the past 12 years, and gradually planted seeds for the creation of tunes and songs that would combine elements of Austrian and Irish music traditions. At the same time, North Indian ragas, odd meters and Swedish polska rhythms – which I came across on my travels – started to extend the palette of colours with which I paint on my musical canvas.

    Upon reflection it became clear to me that the practice of combining different musical elements, standing in connection to particular places and peoples, allow me to reconcile multiple new identities and connections to new places without losing a strong connection to the place and culture within which I grew up.

    Furthermore, forming neither entirely part of the here nor the there – neither Austria nor Ireland or elsewhere, this music seems to present a place in itself that instills me with a sense of connectedness. It provides a place I can retreat to wherever I am in the world. In this music, I feel at home.

    II

    In September 2005, seeking to learn Irish tunes in their ‘natural environment’, I accidentally emigrated to Ireland. It had been my intention to spend a year abroad after finishing secondary school. But when the time came to return to Austria I simply stayed put, having fallen in love with the West of Ireland: its beautiful shades of green; the wild Atlantic; the mountains; rivers; the people and their music.

    Prior to moving to Ireland, I had been forced to rest my hands for an extended period due to a bout of tendonitis. In my newly found home of Sligo I took up playing the violin again, under the guidance of my friend Rodney Lancashire.

    A ‘session’ in Foley’s Bar, Sligo.

    Beginning anew, I left behind everything else I had learnt, fully immersing myself in Irish traditional fiddle playing. Only later, over the course of academic studies at UCC, did I slowly reconnect with my earlier musical identities. These lay largely in European Classical music, which I had studied on various instruments since the age of five, and Austrian traditional music, which I got involved with through local folk festivals during my teenage years.

    Next to Irish traditional music, I started to practice diverse musical traditions, including North Indian Classical music, which I studied intensively during a three-month stay in India, shortly before I enrolled in UCC.

    Moreover, I made first attempts to compose my own music. One of the first pieces I wrote was ‘Austrindia’: its melody is based on, but doesn’t entirely stay faithful to, the scale used for Raag Charukeshi, an early evening raag I had studied under Pt. Sukhdev Prasad Mishra, in Varanasi, India.

    Yodeling on top of BenWiskin, Sligo.

    I experimented with singing the melody in a yodelling style, a vocal technique derived from Austrian traditional singing practices in which notes are approached in a direct way from the chest to the head voice, causing a distinctive breaking noise characteristic of this type of singing.

    This first attempt to bring my different musical worlds together brought a strong sense of fulfilment, inspiring further compositions in a similar vein, including ‘Like Lisa’ and ‘Jodlfunk- Da Alma Zua’. These also feature yodelling techniques like ‘Austrindia’; this time, however, the yodel is set to modal scales, more typical of Irish traditional music.

    Both ‘Like Lisa’ and ‘Jodlfunk- Da Alma Zua’ include sections carrying elements of Irish traditional music: the middle part of ‘Like Lisa’ is a tune in g mixolydian. Although adhering to the scheme of two underlying rhythmic cycles of seven bars of 7/8 and one of 5/8, and three bars of 7/4 and one of 6/4, the phrasing of the bow and ornamentation such as cuts and rolls is strongly reminiscent of an Irish reel or jig.

    III

    Upon reflection I realise that, in their various different ways, all of these compositions strive to unite my home place of Austria with my newly found home in Ireland, as well as other places such as Varanasi in India, which are close to my heart.

    Playing in Hampi, India.

    This, as I became more and more aware during the course of my research for a dissertation project, provides me with a sense of continuity in what I do and who I am, helping to express myself authentically as a musician and individual. It provides me with a certain stillness. I can be true to myself, and avoid feeling that I have to ‘hide’ or ignore any one part of me.

    I further realised that what I conceptualise as ‘place’ is much more than a specific landscape, cityscape or physical environment. It also includes certain sounds, memories and, more than anything, the people I associate with that place.

    Moreover, it became apparent that diverse places don’t merely co-exist in my music: at the moment of performance, they form an entirely new place, without any fixed geographical position. This place has no literal geographical basis, though it does foster a ‘placeness’ of a different order, in the realm of the sound, to which I can retreat whenever I play.

    When I perform my own music, or music with which I am at home at the same level, I feel a strong sense of being transported to this ‘parallel world’. This develops a bond with a higher form of truth, that lets me go a step beyond everyday reality.

    As a musician adhering to a modern vagabond lifestyle, music offers the possibility of entering this place no matter where I am. It is a constant in ever-changing surroundings that enables me to bring my home with me, wherever I go.

    IV

    Place may be conceptualised as far more than a mere geographical location: like everything else we experience, our concept of place is tied to the mechanisms of perception. Thus, incoming stimuli from the outside world are taken in and consequently matched up with our cognitive frameworks.

    These in turn are crafted with the help of our knowledge, previous experiences and memories. It follows that our concept and perception of place is a construct of mind that only partly relies on certain physical surroundings, a land- or city- scape.

    Alpine Austrian music session outside hut.

    Similarly, when discussing America’s ‘invisible landscape’, folklorist Kent C. Ryden describes places as ‘fusions of experience, landscape and location.’ Quoting geographer Yi-Fu Tuan he explains how ‘the feel of a place is registered in one’s muscles and bones’. For Ryden, the kind of feeling that we get for a place when we get to know it better constitutes ‘a unique blend of sight, sounds, and smells, a unique harmony of natural and artificial rhythms such as times of sunrise and sunset, or of work and play.’

    Issues of place and identity are more and more relevant in an increasingly globalised world. Moving from country to country is becoming a regular and normalised activity for many, if not most of us. As a consequence of our vagabond lifestyles, many different places form parts of our identities. It can feel like we are at home in a number of places, or in no place at all.

    Rapport and Overing explain that anxious advocators of an ‘idyllic past of unified tradition’ express their concerns that ‘individuals are in transit between a plurality of life-worlds but come to be at home in none’.

    At the same time as feeling a connection to more than one place or experiencing a sense of homelessness, it can appear that we are literally in more than one place at the same time, or indeed in no place at all. This is often due to modern technology, which may lead to a perception of a virtual reality lying beyond any objective or physical reality.

    In his discussion of the consequences of modern life, Giddens explains how through the advent of modernity, space became disconnected from place. Through the invention of maps that would represent the world from a universal and objective viewpoint, we came to conceive of something Giddens refers to as ‘empty space’ as an entity in itself that is no longer connected to a specific physical setting. The existence of space as something that has no boundaries or specific meaning recalls Stilgoe’s definition of ‘landscape’ that stands in opposition to natural ‘wilderness’:

    a forest or swamp or prairie no more constitutes a landscape than does a chain of mountains. Such land forms are only wilderness, the chaos from which landscapes are created by men intent on ordering and shaping space for their own ends (Stilgoe, 1982).

    Music is an effective means of inscribing meaning onto space and express a relationship to it. According to Jaques Attali, our very distinction between music and noise reflects the distinction between ‘culture and nature’. Through engagement with music we erect boundaries that define if something is a ‘place’ or ‘space’; if something is ‘home’ or ‘foreign’; or if something belongs, or does not. Consequently, social, individual and geographical borders are reflected in music, which inform a sense of place.

    Music can be used to differentiate between different places and people, but it can also serve to expand boundaries linking ‘homeland’ to what Mark Slobin refers to as ‘hereland’. It creates bonds between different countries, and links to any place one wishes to be at or belong to.

    Moreover, it has the potential to give us a sense that we are all connected to all places, at all times. This appears to be the spirit behind so-called ‘Ethno festivals’ happening all over Europe, which bring together young people that exchange their folk musics.

    Ethno-in-Transit.

    Individual musicians, groups and entire nations link and separate themselves, their places and people with the help of music in various different ways. We sing, play, compose, listen and dance to music that carries references to specific locations, or indeed travelling or being ‘on the road’, in the form of song lyrics. We engage with, and create music that contains imitations of sounds that occur in particular places, or as Zuckermann points out, the frequencies of a physical environment.

    Slobin states that we ‘domesticate’ what to our ears is foreign music and adapt it to make it our own according to commonly shared agreements of what our own music is. We engage in what Slobin refers to as ‘code-switching’ in order to shift between a number of different musical styles or to layer different styles of music on top of each other in one and the same piece. We share and associate ourselves with music that to us reflects the feel, the shape, and the people of a place.

    V

    Given that any space can be turned into a place through the assignment of meaning to it, it can feel like the involvement with music – be it through listening, playing or dancing to it – creates a place of its own.

    Victor Turner explains how as part of our ever-repeating social dramas we enter a ‘liminal’ space, a kind of parallel world that he describes as ‘neither here nor there […] betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’. According to Turner, it is this period in which we are somewhat apart from our everyday life that both mirrors the nature of our artistic involvement and is advanced by it. This place has its own rules, its own reality and its own time: that of the present moment.

    Alfred Schutz explains how music, due to its polythetical structure, is conceived of step by step rather than as a whole: a time zone apart from quotidian time. He explains how music unfolds in what he refers to as ‘inner time’. Thus, when we perform, we share our own ‘stream of consciousness’ with that of the composer: ‘two series of events in inner time, one belonging to the stream of consciousness of the composer, the other to the stream of consciousness of the beholder, are lived through in simultaneity, which simultaneity is created by the ongoing flux of the musical process.’

    Claudia Schwab and Matija Solce.

    When we play music together, we equally tap into each others’ streams of consciousness and together ‘live through a vivid present’. In addition to sharing ‘inner time’, the music is lived through in ‘spatialised outer time’. Thus Schutz says both ‘share not only the inner durèe in which the content of the music played actualizes itself; each, simultaneously, shares in vivid presence the Other’s stream of consciousness in immediacy’.

    When Schutz explains the musical process of ‘inner time’ he adds that ‘when for one reason or another the flux of inner time […] has been interrupted […]’, the performers might have to fall back on devices measuring ‘outer time’ in order to play together.’

    Pleasurable as it is, not every musical performance brings with it the experience of dwelling in a parallel world: a more intense and lasting experience of entering a different place seems to be related to the ability of staying in the present moment.

    The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conceptualises flow as ‘the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter’. He explains how ‘in the flow state, action follows upon action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor […] there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present and future’.

    *******

    Claudia Schwab (photo by Peter Crann).

    Place, with all that belongs to it, including memories of home, connections to certain peoples and their music or the impression of distinct landscapes, undoubtedly plays a fundamental role in our understanding of self. A strong connection to a place creates a sense of belonging, and thus of home. Furthermore, the experience of entering a form of parallel world that lets us be aware of a higher plain of existence speaks for the fact that music can be seen as place. In this place, we can find a deep connection to ourselves. We can feel the togetherness with others, satisfying our innate need to be understood and to be with other people. It is a place that we can carry with us, that can make us feel at home wherever we are in the world, and glimpse an alternate form of reality. This has certainly been my experience of gallivanting around the world as a musician.

    This article is based on Claudia’s thesis, completed in September 2013 while studying for a Masters in Ethnomusicology in University College Cork.

  • A Guide to Preventing Data Leakage

    The Internet is a big old scary place, full of dark corners, strange protocols, dodgy individuals, unscrupulous corporations and cynical state-level actors.

    The tools we use to access the Internet, though often very powerful, remain badly-designed. This is true not only in terms of the User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI), but also in how they let us use and manage our data.

    Most big Internet/Web companies use “dark patterns” to exploit normal human behaviors profitably, and often without serious consideration of the consequences to the average human psyche.

    Every day there are hundreds if not thousands of severe security breaches, and every month or so we hear of egregious acts of deliberate abuse, or contemptible neglect on the scale of millions of individuals affected.

    This is made worse by the sheer amount of data our devices leak, all the time. Pretty much every computer has a hardware backdoor, either explicitly as in the Intel Management Engine (perhaps added at the behest of the National Security Agency), and most mobile telephone modems are little black boxes over which the user has no control. Location, browser history, contacts, messages, emails, etc., etc,. are all leaked in multiple ways, through apps and websites, through wifi and 4G, and worst of all directly from the operating systems.

    For example, in this video, we load the following sites simultaneously in a Firefox browser and use Lightbeam to visualise all the links made between sites by loading shared assets such as images, scripts, style sheets and other data common to any website.

    Simulating a typical browsing session on 18 sites (nytimes.com, theguardian.com, huffingtonpost.com, en.wikipedia.orgi, skatehut.co.uk, amazon.com x 2, vox.com, bbc.com, cracked.com, facebook.com, trivago.ie, skyscanner.net, nbcnews.com, answers.com, weather.com, ie.match.com, imgur.com) you can see 384 different servsers now have data on how you access these websites. The extreme amount of inter-connectivity is quite a show!

    Now we reload the same 18 pages with partial tracking prevention plugins to Firefox and observe only 58, and these only minimally.

     

    What follows is a guide to ‘tightening up’. This advice is intended for personal use. It is broken down into sections so it can be implemented in stages. Each section is colour-coded according to difficulty as follows:

    Easy – even for Grandpa

    Normal – can set up email on phone

    Hard – summon nearest teenager

    Difficult – might need professional help

    Problem: Hardware

    At the bottom of the stack we have the hardware problem, which is that most computers are not totally under the control of their users, and usually have at least one but often two or more completely independent, remotely-controlled, onboard computers. On Intel chips it’s called the Intel Management Engine, on AMD it’s called the AMD Platform Security Processor. Most mobile telephones use a proprietary technology from Broadcom, a massive US company, and are made in China, and are known to have a variety of intentional holes in their security.

    Solution: Use AMD products on the Laptop/Desktop and wait for Purism Mobile (and verified RISCV in the long term).

    AMD make all the main desktop/laptop/server chips that are not made by Intel, and have a better reputation.

    The Purism mobile project (Librem 5) is the great hope for everyone interested in fully user-controlled mobile phone. It will hopefully be ready in about a year. RISCV is a completely open, community-created, modern-chip-architecture that promises high-performance in both number of computations per second and energy use.

    Problem: Operating System

    Here we get to the big one, the choice of “church”. There are four main options: Apple, Google, Microsoft, GNU/Linux.

    Apple is the most cultish OS, a mono-aesthetic walled garden, famous for its ‘taste’ and convenience, infamous for its rigidity and cost. They manage their app store jealously, refusing programs that interfere with their ability to profitise your time on their systems. They have a well-funded reputation for safety, frequently destroyed for those in the know by errors such as the ability to login in remotely as administrator without a password. Their mobile efforts are more secure in some ways, but Apple themselves still extract huge amounts of ‘telemetry’ on every user, for their own and others benefit.

    Google offer Android. Google make money by selling advertising to third parties, along with detailed information about how to use best their platform. Android, though quite secure in certain aspects from a technical point of view, is still essentially a mobile person monitoring device. Google recently removed their famous “Don’t be evil” motto from their handbook.

    Microsoft sell Windows 10, the latest version of the most widely and successfully attacked operating system ever. Microsoft have been in trouble all over the world for their antics. Their devices send vast amounts of ‘anonymized’ data back to headquarters deliberately, and to pretty much every major Internet crime group as well.

    GNU/Linux is a multi-decade community-driven operating system initiated by one of the true heroes of privacy and freedom: Richard Stallman. It is now developed all over the world, in the open, by companies such as Google (who use it internally to power their advertising thought-trap) and organisations such as CERN and NASA. It powers most of the Internet, and is freely used on everything from wireless routers to phones to laptops to supercomputers.

    Solution: Linux Mint, the easiest and most polished operating systems distribution (free as in speech and as in beer)

    Difficult, but not impossible

    Problem: Safe Browsing

    We use a browser for nearly all our general use of the Internet. This is great as it provides an all-in-one tool that can do everything from email to games, but distressingly insecure as it is a one-stop-shop for tracking people’s habits online. There are four main browsers, each associated with one of the operating systems listed above.

    • Apple – Safari (also runs on Microsoft)
    • Google – Chrome (also runs on Apple, Microsoft, GNU/Linux)
    • Microsoft – Edge
    • Gnu/Linux – Firefox (also runs on Apple, Google, Microsoft)

    Solution: Firefox and Tor Browser Bundle

    Only one choice here, but it comes in two varieties: Firefox, and Firefox packaged as the Tor Browser Bundle.

    Firefox is a powerful, research-driven, privacy-focussed, standards-compliant, community-backed browser. All the code is open-source, meaning is can be and is examined out in the open by experts all over the world. The non-profit organisation that oversees Firefox, Mozilla, is very clear in its motives. The Tor Browser Bundle wraps the browser with the Tor project, providing vastly increased anonymity online, at the expense of being slower to use due to the added encryption complexity.

    Firefox is better with plugins, here are a few to get you started (these can break many websites):

    Problem: Your Internet Service Provider/Mobile Phone Operator

    Companies that sell you Internet Access are almost all required by law to record a lot of data about your activity.

    Solution: A Virtual Private Network such as Proton VPN

    A VPN sets up an encrypted point-to-point link from your computer/phone to another computer in a server farm elsewhere on the Internet. This hides your IP address (one of the most important tracking details), and some other data.

    Solution: Use TOR

    TOR is a method of encrypting your network traffic over a randomised colection of links over the Internet. It is quite secure, more so than only a VPN, but really quite slow. Used with a VPN (computer -> VPN -> TOR) it is quite effective.

    Problem: The Law in every jurisdiction

    Every Government on the planet reserves the right to legislate on people’s use of the Internet, and exercises it to varying degrees. The Government of the U.S.A., instrumental in the development of the Internet, reserves quite ridiculous authority to interfere, and uses and abuses this with aplomb.

    Solution: Stay in the EU/become an EU citizen

    Amazingly, the EU, the latest political hegemony in the most consistently abusive collective polity in human history, is now the bastion of Human Freedom. It is actually becoming quite effective in this role, and improving all the time.

    Solution: Enforce Human Rights Law

    ‘Article 12.

    No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.’

    Problem: Web Services and Social Media

    The entire business model of providing web services (email in your browser, for example) and social media is to monetise the data you give up by using these services.

    Solution: Don’t, just don’t (at least not yet)

    There are a small number of privacy-respecting web-services/social media organisations that provide most, but not all, of what we expect from these systems. They are still young, suffer from technical and User Experience problems, and have yet to achieve critical mass. In a few years, perhaps sooner, the landscape will be very different. Instead, just give people a ring, or write them a postcard, or just make sure to look them up next time you are near. If everyone reaches out the world becomes small.

    The Electronic Freedom Foundation provides the best overall guide to being safe online. Read more here.

  • Big Plans in Little Jerusalem

    June 1985: I was at work in my garden shed, when I heard someone talking. I looked out and saw a man with a sub-machine gun. He was guarding the back of the old synagogue, that had become the Irish Jewish museum. President Chaim Hertzog, who was raised in Dublin, was opening it that fine day. Security was stronger at the front, and an ambulance with its engine running was at the door. Mr Hertzog did his duty and was whisked away.

    There were few of his faith left in this quarter once known as Little Jerusalem. Their national school around the corner had closed, and its contents thrown into a skip. There I found old ledgers, listing those who had donated money to Jewish refugees from Germany. I gave the ledgers to the museum. It was a small place, but visited by people from all over the world whose parents and grandparents had lived here. The neighbours were proud of it.

    Almost thirty years later, I was again in my garden shed when I heard men talking at the back of the museum. Plans were afoot to enlarge it; the Office of Public Works was apparently in charge. I wrote to the OPW, asking if that was so. Soon afterwards I received a call from the museum’s new board, bothered by my concern.

    When the plans were reluctantly displayed, the whole neighbourhood was concerned. The old synagogue ‒ the last one in the city – along with five adjoining houses would be demolished, and rebuilt in pastiche. A theatre would be built underground. The back gardens would be built over, to house an archive, a Holocaust memorial and restaurant. It would be guarded by bomb-proof concrete, shatter-proof glass, security lights, sensors and cameras.

    This would enlarge the original museum by 600%. It seemed wrong to shove all this into one of Dublin’s smallest residential streets. We suggested that it be built on a bigger site. There was one vacant down the street opposite the Jewish bakery. Why not there?

    Suggestions and objections were not welcomed. Residents hung out banners, but these were torn down, or slashed with knives at night. Cars were keyed, eggs thrown at windows. Local protest meetings were arranged by email; mysteriously, the emails were hacked.

    In 2013, the year of the Gathering, the museum hosted a week of lectures, which the Israeli ambassador came to attend. Mysteriously, I could not receive BBC Radio 4 that week. When the lectures ended and the ambassador had gone, my reception returned. Presumably, the Long Wave had been blocked. It felt like the West Bank. The new chairman was from Israel, and seemed baffled by us. What was our problem? Planning permission had been granted. They had won.

    The residents’ appeal was heard at An Bord Pleanala’s grimy building in Marlborough Street that same year. The museum’s lawyers, from London and Tel Aviv, exuded confidence ‒ rightly so. They had the OPW on their side, and a letter of approval from the Taoiseach. The appeal was refused.

    A neighbour, recently retired from the higher ranks of the Civil Service, felt free to divulge the obvious truth. The government of Israel wanted a stronger voice in Ireland, to counter support for the Palestinian cause. The word was given to our government, who passed it on down the line. Planning permission was to be granted, and if locals didn’t like it, well, tough.

    But the pesky residents persisted. The museum board’s crudeness and misjudgement backfired. The expected millions in US dollars did not materialise. The inflated project was abandoned. The old museum is still there, a small place that tells the story of a small community. May it flourish.

  • A Hurler’s Silver Branch Perception

    One evening, while walking on Derada Hill, a hare sprung from under my feet. I found myself, all of a sudden, on the ground burying my head in the warm form left in the grass, and I asked that primordial form to act as a poultice, to draw out my expensive European education from my head, because in my western way of thinking I was damaging the earth. It had set me up in opposition to what is natural and native to us. 
    John Moriarty, Nostos, (Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1994).

    I can’t say when I first played hurling. It was with me on all of the great moments of self-discovery I can think of. Once I had a decent footing in the world I became aware of a stick being close by.

    It defined my youth; this game, this skill, this way of spending time. It was frustrating and it was ordinary and it was miserable at times, but a current ran through me, a note that intensified as I played. It got more serious as I grew up, the stakes got higher, my identity hardened, a community of people formed and goals were unconsciously set, if not assumed.

    A former captain of the Wexford Intercounty team, Diarmuid Lyng analyses games for TG4 and Newstalk , and contributes to national print media.

    And when the final curtain fell, amid the chaos of going from the all-encompassing nature of modern sport to the great vacuum of retirement, I found myself in West Kerry, with the writings of John Moriarty, trying to read my way through a depression, in the hope that I would once again, make sense of me, to me.

    I was wandering the countryside a lot during that period, learning to forage wild plants while growing comfortable in swathes of time dedicated to the question of how the outer world was interacting with my inner landscape.

    I remember sitting at the foot of Ceann Sibéal on the evening of an honest storm, marveling at waves rolling in and crashing against the foot of the cliff. Inwardly, I thought of the net in Croke Park shaking. The waves of energy emanating from the player, the sliotar bypassing the goalkeeper and crashing into the net, creating a wave like that at the foot of the cliff in front of me.

    I sat on Clogher Beach and marvelled at the ability of a player standing fully ninety yards apart from another, who hits a ball at over one hundred miles an hour, reaching a height of seventy yards at its apex, and within the first second or two of him striking it – in it’s very initial ascent – to move to the exact spot where the ball arrives so as only to have to extend an arm in order to catch it. What remarkable qualities of mind and body are at work there? What more are we capable of? And why doesn’t anyone refer to this? Shouldn’t it turn our spines in to question marks to interrogate the magnificent of it all?

    Silver Branch Perception

    What I found in West Kerry is that when the fences around me fell away, when I went out to the wild places, the boundaries in my mind disintegrated too, and these thoughts and feelings had their way with me. It brought me back to the soul of the game: to Silver Branch Perception.

    Silver Branch Perception was bestowed on Bran Mac Feabhal by Mananánn Mac Lir in Irish mythology. It is a gift, a way of seeing the world for the paradise that it is; the awareness that when we separate ourselves from our social story, we can see the world paradisally.

    The Tuath Dé would later defend this gift at the Second Battle of Maigh Tuiread against the Formorians.

    Balor of the Evil Eye led the Formorians, who, according to Moriarty, looked on Ireland purely for its resources, the reducing eye – the Súil Mildeagach –seeing only uses and benefits. Thus a cow is looked on as pounds of beef, and a tree for the lengths of its timber.

    The Tuath Dé, led by Lugh, held the Silver Branch and they fought to defend it. According to Moriarty, The Third Battle of Maigh Tuiread is being enacted within us today.

    I recognise from my hurling experiences what he meant. We are disconnected from the parts of the game that are essential to the overall health of society. We have adopted a Formorian mindset, we have assumed Balor’s evil eye. It is disconnecting us from the essence of the game.

    But Nature is lying us down on the psychiatrists couch and asking hard questions. The ash die-back disease is one of the symptoms diagnosed. This will decimate the most common Irish hedgerow tree over the next thirty to forty years. Its chances of survival are uncertain. Still 50,000 trees are cut down a year for 350,000 hurls to keep it business-as-usual.

    But what of the ash tree? Could most GAA players identify what one even looks like? Do we care? Do we feel a responsibility for its survival beyond what is needed for our ‘use and benefit’? Is Nature reminding us of one of the fundamentals of the game?

    We know now that the forest floor is alive with a web of mycelium that function along the lines of the Internet: a ‘tree wide web’. When a bush is sick it can tell a healthy tree, which may send the necessary nutrients to its ailing friend. Can we play the same role for the ash? Can we listen to what the tree needs, and come to its assistance?

    If we don’t go back to listening, to being humbled by nature – if we ignore the possibilities of the Silver Branch – we will be paying lip service to bridging the great disconnect, choosing the dis-ease of the Formorian mindset so prevalent in modern Irish society.

    Spiritually, there is a shift going on here from Rome to the Orient. Meditation, yoga, Tai Chi and mindfulness are rooted in Eastern ideas of existence. True to form, we look beyond our cultural inheritance to negotiate an internal crises in our perception of reality.

    But answers are here, all around us. Let us plant ash trees in every GAA club in the country in the hope of identifying strains resistant to the disease, and ensure its survival. Let us reduce dependence on a food system in danger of implosion, by subsidising polytunnels for anyone willing to work one. Let us go out to the wild places and allow our own wildness to surface, and, in so doing, revive an awareness that what is primeval inside us is not to be feared, but valued.

    I am aware of the intellectual ease with which many will digest this notion, but can we live it? Can we make the hard choices? Colonisation introduced many well-documented ills. Being the bastard child of Americana has brought even greater woes, though less appreciated, as we remain in a cultural, political and economical stranglehold. But as the neon lights of superficiality fade, what will anchor us?

    I think about the role of hurling, the tree, and the way we play the game. I examine my own role. I wonder about my role as a father; I wonder how the win-at-all-costs mentality will affect my son. I wonder about what caused a woman to email me last week to say she was relieved a torn cruciate ligament would keep her away from the stresses of GAA.

    The Minotaur

    I ask Moriarty what we need. He tells me about the Minotaur.

    The great Greek legend of the Minotaur is King Minos’s tale of woe. His wife Pasiphae becomes transfixed with the Bull God that emerges from the sea.

    The Bull won’t mate with any human, so she orders the carpenter Daedalus to construct a wooden cow. Once completed she enters the cow, assumes the position, and the Bull impregnates her.

    Soon she gives birth to a half-man half-bull: a monstrous creation. Out of shame King Minos constructs a labyrinth beneath the city of Knossos and banishes the Minotaur beneath the royal carpet.

    Once a month a virgin child is sent from the city of Athens and dispatched into the labyrinth as food for the insatiable beast. Theseus takes umbrage that the maidens of his city are being devoured, and travels to Crete vowing to slay the monster. There he meets Ariadne, stepdaughter of the king and half-sister of the Minotaur, at the gates of the labyrinth. She gives him a ball of wool to navigate his return.

    Theseus fulfills his destiny as a warrior by killing the monster and emerges in triumph from the labyrinth. That, to Moriarty, is the mythical story, but he sees another dimension.

    The Minotaur represents our animal nature, and it is the appeal of this that Pasiphae has succumbed to. Minos as King has dominion over the people, and regulates his society. Animal nature, primordial wildness, runs contrary to civic virtue. He drives his shame beneath that which he controls. He then must feed that shame with sacrifice.

    Enter the Warrior Theseus. He has bloody murder on his mind and awaits a triumphant return. But according to Moriarty this win-at-all-costs mentality must change; this is where we cross over from the mythological into the real, to the battles at Croke Park.

    We don’t need another Theseus, or another Cuchulainn. We need a medicine man, someone that can dive into the depths of the Irish psyche and take a comb of walrus ivory to Caitlin Ni hUllachain’s hair: to comb our Cartesianism, to comb out our sins against Nature, to comb out our theories and creeds that put us on a collision course with this gorgeous blue jewel hanging in space.

    If Theseus or anyone else wants to be a real hero, he must join King Minos and return to the labyrinth, take the Minotaur by the hand and walk him into the cityscape, accepting his shame in order to transcend it. This is the great journey.

    We have a great opportunity now within the GAA to create a healing space in which coaches can heal: where they can tune into the deeper messages of the game, of the hurl, of the tree. Where they hear the medicines of Nature, which heals them of their anger and shame. Where they reconnect to purpose and are reminded of agency. Where they rediscover their place in the world, and where outcome is secondary to the journey.

    Fulfilling a Heroic Destiny

    Spiritually, we are at sea. That’s why we don’t feel the plight of the ailing ash. The Catholic Church took on the role of guardian of the great message of the Christ story. The message that we can be at one with the unfolding moment, that we can transcend our suffering and open ourselves to a greater potential.

    The Church became moral arbiters of that message and pursued power and control, which divorced them from the source. They were not equipped for the gravity of the message that we are, in fact, already in Paradise. But independently we can create a space to engage with it, with humble invitation, we can heal ourselves and return to abundance.

    Nature is abundant. The law of the universe is balance. When we are in balance we are in abundance. When we chose with agency to be in imbalance, we no longer live in abundance; instead we become locked in a mentality of scarcity, which furthers the imbalance.

    Those that benefit most from these conditions are those that are most fearful of the scarcity complex within themselves. Those that are in imbalance have lost the ability to trust in the unfolding moment. They replace that trust with sufficient control of the moment to ensure they don’t slip into a reality that their minds are incapable of digesting.

    We must deal with our fear in order to be whelmed and overwhelmed by the majesty of the natural world. In crossing that threshold we slip into a paradisal view of the Earth, and no longer want to damage it. This is free energy. We allow ourselves to re-integrate, we play our Orphic note that resonates with the universe.

    This is where we identify our purpose, from this place. As though in sitting with Nature, in being psycho-analysed by Nature, where our preconceived stories about ourselves fall silent; the messages that we need to hear can be heard above the din: from the universe demanding we fulfill our heroic destiny; where we recall our gravity and our greatness, and make the contribution the universe requires of us.

    Then we can identify the most pressing needs in the world, and apply our tremendous talents and resources to meet those needs, therein lies our purpose.

    Croke Park

    I spoke about some of these things in Croke Park recently, ideas that have been forming around me and inside of me, inspired by John Moriarty and my experience of hurling. He gave me leave to understand the world for myself, deferring to no one.

    I don’t need experts to tell me about Climate Change, or the effect of EMF’s on bee populations, or young men’s suicide rate, to know the disconnect is for real. It’s everywhere. It’s screaming at us to stop, to look around, to renegotiate our most sacred and primal contracts with Nature, and hurling has a role to play.

    Moriarty is guide. He is a guide because he went to these places. He let go of his conditioning and walked the earth with a barefoot mind and a barefoot heart. The last pages of Nostos, his autobiography, are written from the paradise he so often refers to. This is not a philosophical concept, it is the reality of the universe, which will lead us away from calamity. I know it is real because I have experienced it.

    Its appreciation brings great possibilities for our young people, who are less hampered by the toxic legacy of shame lying on us as a people, on our language and on our landscape. With minds blown open by the Internet, they have the energy of youth to take great strides, but require mentors more than ever. Can the GAA offer a space where coaches harrow their own great depths to become the mentors we need?

    Can we encourage balance in our young people so they can make their great contribution? Where they play sport to experience the union that is central to all creative pursuit, the feeling that comes when time and effort cease and a blissful harmony prevails. Can we value those moments once again, and in valuing them permit our young people to experience the world in a different way, beyond the limitations of outcome?

    This is a journey Moriarty opened up for me, on which I constantly take wrong turns, but one worthy of continuing. If you are still with me, I encourage you to stand on the edge of a lake, or in front of a tree and just breathe. Breathe and resist the temptation to label and to understand and to intellectualise, and see what fills the gaps. It may be a fleeting experience, it may be difficult to hold on to, but it will heal.

    And if you happen to see the wild form of the hare, bury your head in that wild form, and ask it with humility and reverence to guide you on this heroic journey out of the Formorian labyrinth, and back to the great and sacred Earth.

    Diarmuid Lyng facilitates group exploration of spirituality in nature, masculinity, meditation, resilience, yoga to a wide range of audiences including schools, university, GAA clubs.

  • The Qualities Needed in a Judge

    The task of ascertaining essential qualities required to be a judge is necessary for the preservation of a functioning democracy. Any state demands gatekeepers of independence and probity, and leadership of the just and the wise. Importantly, the qualities that make for a good judge do not necessarily align with the skills of a successful advocate.

    First and foremost, judicial appointments must be transparent and non-political. Peer selection may bring effective appointments, but often cronyism and tribal affiliation leads to the selection of judges lacking independence, and even ensnared by vested interests. Crucially, a judge is not a servant of the state but the Rule of Law.

    The judge who bends over backwards to manipulate doctrine to serve the interests of his paymasters in government is no longer a true judge. The judge who does not approach each case with an open mind also dishonours his role. The judge who protects the state, no matter what its malfeasance, is unjudicial and even subversive.

    A first recommendation is that judges should neither be appointed by politicians, nor elected as in the U.S.. Alas even supposedly independent appointment boards are often stacked with the ‘yes’ men of the state, which is another stumbling block to the appointment of truly independent judges. To preserve and promote independence those who select judges must also themselves be independent.

    Secondly, the qualities of the advocate and judge are quite distinct. In Ireland at least, there is far too much veneration of successful barristers, which leads to the assumption that their abilities are those required of a judge. Sir Edward Carson was among the greatest barristers of all time, but a hopeless judge in the House of Lords, where his judgments are often incomprehensible. Partisan, fearless advocacy, so necessary to the stock in-trade of the barrister, is often an impediment to being a judge, who must eschew this approach in favour of dispassionate reflection.

    A judge should sit back and listen, and only selectively intervene, not rush in as if it were a college debate. A person of an adversarial bent is not inclined to be even-handed: he takes sides; rushes to judgment; intervenes and confronts.

    Judges are of course subject to emotions, foibles and prejudices. But to call someone prejudiced is not necessarily pejorative, it merely recognises our flawed humanity. Ecce Homo. What is important is to recognise our prejudices as such, and adjust our responses accordingly.

    II

    The great jurist Jerome Frank argues in Law and The Modern Mind (1930) that in order to predict a judge’s decision we would need a full biography of his life; the politics, morality, race, sex, religion and other factors that shape his character, and which will predict the outcome of any case.

    Frank tuned into how the prejudice of participants in the trial process (judges and indeed jurors or witnesses) influenced decisions, and how selective recall or mistakes in evidence often affected the outcome of cases. Thus, the unpredictability of court decisions resides primarily in the elusiveness of establishing the truth and deep-seated prejudice. He expresses this in two deeply evocative passages:

    But are not those categories–political, economic and moral biases–too gross, too crude, too wide? A man’s political or economic prejudices are frequently cut across by his affection for or animosity to some particular individual or group, due to some unique experience he has had; ….the judge’s sympathies and antipathies are likely to be active with respect to the persons of the witness, the attorneys, and the parties to the suit. His own past may have created plus or minus reactions to women, or blonde men, or plumbers, or ministers, or college graduates, or Democrats. A certain twang or cough or gesture may start up memories pleasant or painful to the man. Those memories of the judge, while he is listening to a witness with such a twang or cough or gesture, may affect the judge’s initial hearing of, or subsequent recollection of, what the witness said…

    Or:

    Jerome Frank 1889-1957.

    When pivotal testimony at the trial is oral and conflicting, as it is in most lawsuits, the trial court’s finding of the fact involve a multitude of elusive factors: First the trial judge in a non-jury trial or the jury in a jury trial must learn about the facts from the witnesses and witnesses, being humanely fallible, frequently make mistakes in observation of what they saw and heard, or in their recollections of what they observed, or in their court room reports of those recollections. Second, the trial judges or juries also human, may have prejudices – often unconscious unknown even to themselves – for or against some of the witnesses, or the parties to the suit, or the lawyers … Those prejudices when they are racial, religious, political or economic, may sometimes be surmised by others. But there are some hidden, unconscious biases of trial judges or jurors – such as for example, plus or minus reactions to women, or unmarried woman, or red haired woman . . . or men with deep voices or high pitched voices . . .

    He concludes: ‘The chief obstacle to prophesying a trial court decision is, then, the inability, thanks to these inscrutable factors, to foresee what a particular trial judge or jury will believe to be the facts.’

    In substance Frank is making two points about the unpredictability of outcomes in trial courts. First, that a judge’s background, prejudices and hunches conditions his decision-making, and secondly that decision are often based on mistaken recollections.

    The usefulness of the judicial hunch – so central to legal realist thought – should not to be dismissed outright. Intuition, common sense, or a feel for an outcome compliments arid rationality, but this has limits.

    A modern variant of the undue application of prejudice is what is called cognitive or confirmation bias, whereby a judge makes his mind up in advance of a trial. A judge who predetermines issues or is influenced by a network of ties, or is simply biased, is failing to preform his job.

    I was recently involved in a case involving a judge of Greek Cypriot origin and a Greek Cypriot complainant. I argued that given Greek Cypriots are a tight-knit community the judge should recuse himself, step aside, which, to his credit, he did. More to the point, he actually brought the matter up himself, which displayed the real qualities required of a judge.

    A judge who fails to disclose any real or ostensible bias is subject to the sanction of breaching natural justice. Thus Lord Hoffman’s failure to disclose his involvement in Amnesty International in an extradition case against Chile’s General Pinochet, which involved the charity, led to a fresh hearing being ordered. The application of the Rule of Law gives anyone a fair trial.

    III

    There have been numerous instances of judges allowing their personal or ideological convictions to influence outcomes. In 1927 the much-lauded Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jerome Frank’s ideal judge, rejected Carrie Buck‘s argument that her constitutional rights had been infringed by being forcibly sterilization for being ‘mentally defective’.

    The attack is not upon the procedure but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment finds the facts that have been recited and that Carrie Buck ‘is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization,’ and thereupon makes the order. In view of the general declarations of the Legislature and the specific findings of the Court obviously we cannot say as matter of law that the grounds do not exist, and if they exist they justify the result. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11, 25 S. Ct. 358, 49 L. Ed. 643, 3 Ann. Cas. 765. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

    Surely Holmes’s belief in eugenics and his mistaken embrace of popular prejudice conditions the outcome of the trial?

    On a lighter note, in terms of judicial prejudice, in Miller v. Jackson (1977) isLord Denning refusal to grant an injunction to a family against a cricket club. The family had moved into a house adjacent to a cricket ground, upset by the danger posed to their young children by cricket balls flying into the back garden. The conclusion is startling obvious from the famous opening paragraph.

    In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in County Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last seventy years. They tend it well. The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is kept short. It has a good club-house for the players and seats for the onlookers. The village team play there on Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings after work they practice while the light lasts. Yet now after these 70 years a Judge of the High Court has ordered that they must not play there anymore, lie has issued an injunction to stop them. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket. This newcomer has built, or has had built for him, a house on the edge of the cricket ground which four years ago was a field where cattle grazed. The animals did not mind the cricket. But now this adjoining field has been turned into a housing estate. The newcomer bought one of the houses on the edge of the cricket ground. No doubt the open space was a selling point. Now he complains that, when a batsman hits a six, the ball has been known to land in his garden or on or near his house. His wife has got so upset about it that they always go out at weekends. They do not go into the garden when cricket is being played. They say that this is intolerable. So they asked the Judge to stop the cricket being played. And the Judge, I am sorry to say, feels that the cricket must be stopped: with the consequences, I suppose, that the Lintz cricket-club will disappear. The cricket ground will be turned to some other use. I expect for more houses or a factory. The young men will turn to other things instead of cricket. The whole village will be much the poorer. And all this because of a newcomer who has just bought a house there next to the cricket ground.

    IV

    A substantial number of roguish characters have been made judges, who like the rest of the speckled timber of humanity inevitably have their foibles. Some judges are perverts, some are alcoholics. A few are both. Far too many are deeply conservative creatures of the establishment. In Ireland, we have our fair share of religious fundamentalists, or worse religious fundamentalist former prosecutors. Perversion in spades.

    Nonetheless, in Ireland, with some notable exceptions, most judges have kept their bibs clean in their personal lives. It may seem controversial to say so, but that should not necessarily matter, at least prior to their appointment.

    A good judge will probably have had wide-ranging life experiences, bringing an ability to empathise with people of variegated backgrounds rather than imposing a class, or caste, credo in increasingly diverse and multicultural societies. I have noticed a significant difference between the smorisgoboard of backgrounds in evidence on the English bench, and the distinct narrowness of background and mentality apparent among their Irish counterparts.

    The more one understands and tolerates the waywardness and infamy inherent in human nature, the more one sees through liars, fraudsters, dissemblers and fabricators among the legal fraternity and their clients. In other words the better one can judge.

    So, what should it mean then to judge? Apart from independence and an ability to acknowledge and submerge personal viewpoints, he has to be, in most circumstances, balanced. He has to weigh and sift and evaluate the evidence and submissions before him. But ideally a judge should not be a narrowly technical lawyer.

    The law must be placed in its social context, and more than a passing awareness of non-legal disciplines such as sociology and philosophy, along with a good dollop of common sense, are required. A judge should be morally-upright, which does not mean sexually-sanitised. Any judge should not be precluded from having a personal life, although this must be, to some extent controlled and restrained. Who you meet and why you meet them could come back to haunt you.

    Self-restraint comes with the territory of being a judge, even though you might not like it. This is not to condone the absurd aloofness, and lack of engagement common among many judges.

    But morality in the sense of integrity is a prerequisite. A judge should not be bought or sold. A judge should not allow personal feelings or attachments to influence decision-making. A judge should always search for the right answer as a matter of principle.

    Technical lawyers often miss the big picture through too narrow a focus. A strict adherence to the wording of an act or case law is often to the detriment of justice. A judge should focus on the spirit of the law, applying a purposive and principled approach.

    If a rule does not conform with basic moral or legal principles then it should be jettisoned or subtly avoided. A judge should have the flexibility and wherewithal – the bag of rhetorical tricks – to cater for that scenario.

    As a realist Frank advocates that judges focus on law-in-action, and think in terms of wider policy

    Lord Denning 1899-1999.

    ramifications. Thus Lord Denning in Spartan Steel Alloys v Martin and Co. Ltd 1973 reasoned that if damages were awarded in the context of a power strike then the electricity company could go bankrupt. He struck out the case on the basis that the public interest lay in maintaining a solvent company to generate electricity supply.

    Denning tended to fashion remedies in a novel and creative way to subvert conventional doctrine. For example, he fashioned the doctrine of promissory estoppel to overcome the strict contract law principles of offer and consideration. He asserted that if someone makes a promise they cannot go back on it. An Englishman’s word is his bond. A norm often lacking in Ireland.

    V

    A judge must have intellectual integrity, which is not to say a judge cannot have opinions. It is just necessary to be up front with preferences or prejudices. Which is not to say that a judge’s opinions are necessarily correct.

    There are numerous academic commentaries regarding the methods a judge may use to interpret a text. I have indicated that literalism and rigidity is a dead-end, but there are other failings.

    The method of strict historical interpretation holds a particular spell over Conservatives in the United States. This imports the anachronistic values of long dead individuals into the interpretation of contemporary law. This allowed Judge Scalia in America to uphold the legality of owning handguns simply because the 18th century forefathers of American constitutionalism ran rampant with muskets.

    The most sinister nonsense of the law and economics movement in America – with two highly placed exponents in Easterbrook and Posner – has given rise to a cost-benefit analysis where wealth maximisation is the defining feature of every legal decision, at the expense of human rights.

    Nonsense has infected our culture, and promotes the agenda of the Far Right and Neoliberalism. The costing of everything in hyper inflated times has destroyed much and continues to do so. The balance is wrong. Not the bank balance but the moral balance. The ledger of life.

    Judges, even the greatest ones, are often ensnared by a viewpoint that does not stand up to intellectual scrutiny over time. Even the great Oliver Wendell Holmes became a proponent of Social Darwinism and eugenics, which led him to permit the compulsory sterilisation of a mentally defective person on the basis that three generations of imbeciles was enough.

    I fear Social Darwinism is back in fashion, but at least in the multicultural environment of London, racial abuse and racism are dissipated. But even here there is growing apprehension. Draconian asylum laws and judgments reflect the slide. The deportation of the undesirable is often the deportation of those you disagree with. The greatest judges have always been immune to ideas of racial hierarchies

    VI

    Every judge should also have an inner voice second guessing them. He or she should hear someone whispering in their ear: ‘Perhaps not’, or, ‘Restrain yourself.’ He or she must remain as neutral as an umpire as in a cricket or a tennis match, evaluating the rules of the game and when matters are out of bounds.

    It is a grave responsibility to sit in judgment particularly in criminal justice matters, and apart from the obligation to sift and evaluate evidence carefully, an obligation always arises to lean over backwards to protect the innocent, or at least to accord them the presumption of innocence.

    To impose any form of punishment on a fellow human being as a judge, without a critical filter and a defined sense of what you are doing and why you are doing it, is to forfeit one’s suitability.

    For judges to collude with state authorities or bend and manipulate procedure and doctrine is a form of intellectual sadism. Many barristers try and avoid particular courts on that basis if they can.

    A judge should also have a commitment to procedural fairness, equality-of-arms, human rights, independence and all the other aspects of the Rule of Law, which has little or nothing to do with judicial pay or pensions.

    In Ireland those who prattle on about the Rule of Law are largely political barristers, the men of the Castle seeking high offices of state, and with much to protect and preserve; deliberately masking self-interest in ruling class chatter.

    The appointment of avowedly party-political judges is a grave danger in any serious democracy. A judge should not have been involved or been a member of any political party prior to their appointment.

    A judge should also give detailed reasons for any decision he makes, and that reasoning should display careful consideration. Failure to do so, or delay, is an abnegation of judicial responsibility.

    As a Dublin-based barrister I endured too many written judgments failed to take into account the depth and sophistication of submissions; where the reasons adduced were a paper mask and compression; where the outcome was never in doubt and equality of arms a charade.

    This leads to the question of when a hearing is fair or not. The most important point in this regard is to distinguish between procedural fairness and the obligation to hear both sides and substantive fairness.

    Substantive fairness, which I have found lacking in Ireland, is always to do the right thing, and bugger the consequences. A judge should not be influenced in reaching a decision by how it will look in the media. A judge is not a fashionista or one of the beautiful people. A judge is not a pop star singing to politicians, though some have advanced that way.

    A judge should fearlessly expose corruption and, above all else, not conceal it or protect it. That obligation is often difficult to follow. Giovanni Falcone was assassinated for confronting mafia corruption in Italy. There are different species of mafia, who may even operate among the ostensible guardians of the state.

    Ireland’s greatest judge, for all his faults, of the last twenty years was Adrian Hardiman. The day after his death I met a judicial colleague of his who remarked: ‘Say what you want, he was a voice of independence in this country’; as if that is exceptional!

    Absent are such independent voices in our present judiciary. The times-they-are-a-changing for the worse, winter is coming and difficult decisions are required, but by people ill-equipped for the task. History will judge our judges as not judging in all of the above senses.

    For a great judge can become an historian, a cultural commissar, a public intellectual, and an arbitrator.

    *******

    A last important point on the qualities required in a judge is that he or she should not have an excessively authoritarian personality. A judge should thus be self-reflexive, and avoid pomposity at all costs. Peter Cooke’s caricature is invaluable for anyone aspiring to be one.

    Above all, as the legendary French writer Camus observed, a judge should be a just man.

  • Leopold Bloom and the Art of Loafing

    What does it mean to be a loafer? Loafing as an activity has always existed. It has been carried out, witnessed, imagined and sung since the dawn of human time; from the ancient Aborigines on their walkabout, to the modern idling of the nineteenth and twentieth century dandies. Today, loafing as a mode of existence, may well be one of the last subversive acts and means of combating and living affirmatively amidst the information and technological age.

    The loafer is more than just a flâneur, epitomised by a Baudelaire or Wilde; he or she can be bucolic or urbane, a scientist or poetic seeker – anyone from Einstein to Yeats. And far from lazy in the vulgar sense, on the contrary, the loafer is never really at rest, but attuned to the present, and observing from various perspectives at the same time.

    A loafer is not bored; boredom comes from a forgetfulness of the power of the imagination; boredom is the great trick of marketers who vomit out messages demanding we purchase our entertainment, and sell us things we don’t need. Most of us live in a world where the power of advertising effectively distracts us from the impact of what we are consuming, and implicitly accepting.

    A loafer can enjoy waiting and musing; a loafer does not become irritated that he or she has to wait an extra minute for change at the supermarket, or partake in beeping and cursing obscenities to others while stuck in traffic, when they are part of the traffic; a loafer does not do a mountain or a country, but rather ascends a mountain and wanders a country. To paraphrase the Irish philosopher John Moriarty, the geography of the loafer’s mind becomes the geography of the landscape he or she travels in.

    As an example, James Joyce’s novel Ulysses emphasises loafing in at least two major ways. Firstly, in its conception, Joyce – as external and internal itinerant – creates a work that is an alternative journey or odyssey on the periphery of war-torn Europe.

    This is a difficult work that unfolds before the reader’s eyes with Joyce making his way as he writes, a book that becomes ever more sprawling as the episodes proceed. It defies schematic dogmatism, but simultaneously the work – merging chaos and cosmos expressed in Joyce’s words ‘chaosmos’ and ‘thisorder’– is contained within strict boundaries. Out of difficulty, arrives a wealth of possibility.

    Hardly any aspect of Western culture is left out in that account of a single day in Dublin on June 16th 1904, the day in which Joyce went on his first official date with Nora Barnacle who would become his muse, lover, wife, mother of his children, and companion throughout his entire adult itinerant life. Thus, the day marks a day of love and affirmation as well as being a universal modern bible of homelessness and homecoming.

    Secondly, there is the main character of Leopold Bloom – the majestic loafer – at once sad-eyed and sharp as a hawk in his observations. If the scientist seeks to understand reality and the mystic seeks to experience it directly, then Bloom, as loafer, does both.

    Statue of James Joyce in Trieste, where he lived on and off between 1904 and 1920.

    Real time is that of the observer. Many Westerners have lost the secrets derived from mystical sources, but these are only other aspects of a wider reality in less alienated societies. Thus deprived, many seek for this connection in exotic realms which are removed from their society and detached from their own suffering. It is often easier to access the magic in strange, unfamiliar landscapes than in one’s own seemingly all too familiar, cynical and faithless culture.

    Throughout the course of our lives, like Leopold Bloom, many of us will be confronted by tragedy at some point or enter dark places from which we find it difficult to escape. And each one of us is going to experience an apocalypse – our own particular death. As established religions have declined, a spiritual void has emerged in many people’s lives. But perhaps our own poetic traditions can offer the solace that many people seek, offering answers to which we are culturally attuned.

    The secrets and the answers are right here in front of us in slowness, in loafing, in singing. Yes, because music too can lift the spirit, as both Joyce and Leopold Bloom attest. As the Irish writer Sean O’Faolain (although himself a chief critic of Finnegans Wake) put it: ‘In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly’.

    As Joyce famously said himself of Finnegans Wake, if you cannot understand the text – then simply read it aloud and hear the music of it. The same goes for Ulysses. Walter Pater’s line is the key to Joyce’s experimental writing of the challenging music episode of Ulysses when Bloom wanders into the side room of Dublin’s national concert hall in the afternoon: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’.

    Loafers have sung eloquently throughout history, from the first Provençal troubadours who invented our modern idea of Romantic love, down to some of our finest popular late twentieth century musicians from the Brazilian Bossanova and Tropicalia movements, to the Celtic Soul fusion of Van Morrison.

    Our contemporary society prizes speed, efficiency and growth and looks askance at activities deemed unproductive. In particular the loafer is anathema to a culture which has absorbed a work ethic equating time with money.

    Yet perhaps the greatest achievements occur when the mind is at rest and seemingly unproductive. Peripheral vision allows us to look beyond conventional ideas and draw inspiration. One has only to think of Einstein discovering the theory of relativity while daydreaming in a patent’s office, or of Newton grasping a theory of gravity while dawdling under a tree. It is often as the poet, the philosopher or the scientist roam the busy city streets, or rolling hills, that the real work is done.

    By embracing loafing now and then, we remove ourselves from the maelstrom of a contemporary culture where slowness and alternative ideas are devalued. The world is motored by rampant consumerism despite our knowledge that it creates great anxiety and is rapidly destroying and usurping much of the landscape for other animal and plant species to continue to exist.

    Only by taking time out for undistracted reflection can we think about what is really happening and what we really need for our wellbeing. Crucially, the loafer Leopold Bloom’s first conversation is not with a human being but with a cat, and he treats the animal equally and with humor and tenderness, and it is from there that Bloom begins his odyssey through Dublin – observing, walking, feeling, ogling, helping, dreaming and loving for the world, rather than merely being in the world.

    Loafing might thus be seen as a revolutionary act, which, if taken seriously, has the capacity to bring meaningful benefit and transformation to individuals and society at large. Our world which, to quote Joyce, is ‘ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void”. This expression, buried deep in the penultimate episode of this colossal book of loafing, may well be the definition of art, beauty, Ulysses and existence itself.

    Bartholomew Ryan is a philosophy research coordinator at the New University of Lisbon (http://www.ifilnova.pt/pages/bartholomew-ryan) and leader of the international band The Loafing Heroes (https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com/)

  • Malaysia’s Political Tsunami of Hope

    On May 9th Malaysia’s electorate unequivocally rejected Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s Barisan National coalition, including the UMNO party which had participated in every government since the foundation of the state. The demise of this kleptocratic regime was met with shock, even denial, by now unemployed government ministers.

    A democratic, peaceful overthrow took place without a single drop of blood being spilt; no riots or street clashes occurred, despite attempts to destabilise the electoral process with cynical manipulation of racial and religious tensions.

    The defeat of the conservative-centrist, ethnic Malay government to a centre-left multi-ethnic party is a fantasy made possible by unprecedented unity among the electorate. The coalition was led by the Pakatan Harapan (‘alliance of hope’) party, which was founded in 2015 after yet another general election had failed to bring down the government.

    The new party is led by veteran former Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, who became convinced by the need to clean-up endemic state corruption, right up to the highest offices. This meant ousting the party he had led for over twenty years as Prime Minister from the 1980’s onwards. Perhaps he recognised that his own policies had inadvertently bred a culture of privilege and corruption.

    This coalition brings together opposition parties including the Democratic Action Party, Bersatu and Parti Keadilan Rakyat (‘the people’s justice party’), the latter of which is led by Mr. Anwar Ibrahim, who was only released from prison last month. He had been incarcerated on charges of sodomy, and had been the main political rival to Dr. Mahathir Mohammad during his tenure in power.

    In this campaign, however, these venerable political strategists displayed genuine political maturity, setting aside their differences with national progress in mind, to have another tilt at winning high political office. They convinced the people they were the only viable alternative to the seemingly endless extraction of wealth from a country steeped in resources.

    The previous government were implicated in a number of corruption scandals, such as the colossal 1MDB affair, where billions of Rinngit-Malaysia went missing from a development fund, only for a similar value to appear in then Prime Minister (and self-appointed finance minister) Najib Tun Razak’s own bank account.  His claim this was a gift from Saudi Arabia was initially denied, and only later agreed by the Saudi authorities.

    Following on from this Saudi Arabia identified a coalition of Muslim nations, which included Malaysia, allied to their bombardment of tribal villages and unarmed civilians in Yemen. The Saudis brazenly displayed the Malaysian flag, with no objection from Najib’s government.

    Malaysia is an historically neutral country, opposed to warfare, and has played key roles in UN-led initiatives from the Balkans to tribal conflict in Somalia. Najib is also embroiled in alleged cases of murder.

    The people’s victory was made all the sweeter considering the gerrymandering of electoral districts and the tactic of holding the vote on a Wednesday between the hours of 9am and 5pm to the disadvantage of many workers, who could not reach polling stations in time to vote: especially those working outside states they were registered to vote.

    Foreign ballots were also deliberately withheld, so as to make it impossible to return these before the deadline. The more obstacles the government put in the way of the Malaysian rakyat (‘people’) the greater their determination to remove a corrupt elite.

    The core parties elected to run the fourteenth government of Malaysia now hold 124 of the 222 seats in parliament, which includes majority ethnic Malays, Chinese and Indians, as well as representatives of indigenous groups from the states of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo.

    The post-colonial hang-ups of racial and religious divisions may finally be in retreat, giving breathing space for a more confident and inclusive national identity, drawing strength from its diversity. Notably, when the new minister of finance was asked by a reporter what it felt like to be the ‘first Chinese finance minister’, his answer was: ‘I’m sorry I don’t consider myself a Chinese, I am a Malaysian.’

    It is a work-in-progress for all who voted for this new government to exemplify that inclusivity of Malaysian-ness, and encourage their opponents to recognise the benefits, and stability, this mind-set brings.

    Much work is in store for the new government. They have not been idle, immediately working on policy reforms and creating transparency, as well initiating the process of making accountable those who impoverished the country.

    They plan a root and branch reform of state institutions, beginning with the removal of some seventeen thousand excess contract officers and political appointees.

    Najib and his notorious wife Rosmah – who makes Imelda Marcos seem positively parsimonious – have had their right to travel out of the country revoked; and as many as seventy suitcases filled with cash, and two hundred and eighty-four luxury hand bags (including fifty Hermes Berkini handbags costing up to US$250,000 each) have been seized. This is before their bank accounts, properties and other assets around the world are investigated.

    More importantly, the new government have expressed a determination to relieve the financial burden on the state, the extent of which the previous finance minister had hidden. The new Prime Minister has revealed that Malaysia is in debt of up to 1 trillion Ringgit Malaysia, that is US$250 billion.

    While it will be a major task to meet debt commitments, if this government puts in place convincing policies of transparency, coupled with fair allocation of resources, trust will be engendered.

    Moreover with the political nous and experience of Dr Mahathir Mohammad at the helm the crisis seems likely to be overcome. It was his brainchild to peg the ringgit to the US dollar during the catastrophic wipe out of South East Asian economies in 1997. This and other measures made Malaysia the fastest recovering economy in the region, a strategy dubbed Mahathiriskonomisme by developmental economists: combining Mahathir with the word risk and economy.

    From an Irish perspective, Malaysia offers parties here who have never served in government a good lesson in thinking big. For too long we have been ruled by the tweedle-dum of Fianna Fail and the tweedle-dee of Fine Gael, in rotation, since the foundation of the state.

    The Irish political establishment have presided over a succession of failing state institutions from a crumbling health care system, to an on-going housing emergency, banking and police corruption, to name but a few. Promises of reform are clearly subordinate to Neoliberal corporate-state relationships.

    Perhaps it is time for opposition parties, in particular Sinn Fein, People Before Profit, The Left Alliance and independents to get their act together, place differences aside and move against the status quo. Then under one banner restore the rule of law and accountability, re-imagining Ireland in a way that speaks to the immediate needs of the people, and behaves as an honest broker in its foreign policy. Backed by a population which believes in a better future, just as the Malaysian people did, perhaps Ireland could reinvigorate national pride, our economy, and finally put an end to the emigration brain-drain.

    Tabek (respect) Malaysia: whilst operating in globalised capitalist times, your overthrow of a corrupt regime shines as a beacon to the rest of the world. Now walk the talk Putra Jaya parliament, the Malaysian political tsunami can rise, and will rise again.

    Aminah Dastan is a recording artist and music activist based in Ireland, founder of small not for profit music festival Sundown Gathering. She has an honors degree in Environmental Biology and postgraduate in Cultural Event Management. She grew up in both Ireland and Malaysia and has a keen interest in social inclusion and development through participation in the arts and sustainability.

  • Drinking from the Waters of Prevention in Public Health

    The Lancet’s recent editorial, ‘Austerity in Spain: time to loosen the grip’, argues that low government expenditure was ‘undermining the principle of universal coverage’ in that country. They point to pensioners devoting a substantial proportion of their incomes to medicines, and warn of excessive delays in elective surgeries being carried out. Detrimental effects are particularly evident among socially marginalised groups, such as migrants, they contend.

    Yet in spite of these privations the authors note that life expectancy in Spain had reached 83 years in 2015, up from 79·3 years in 2000, the highest, on average, of any EU country. Unconvincingly, they assume the repercussions ‘of the financial crises are not necessarily all detrimental: ‘increases in healthy behaviours (eg, cycling, walking) and reductions in risky activities (eg, consumption of alcohol or tobacco) might occur’.

    It is a common misconception that increasing health expenditure in any Western society will bring about a rise in life expectancy. In fact, there are rapidly diminishing returns on investment. Primary care, especially in maternity services and pediatrics (including selective use of antibiotics, and vaccination), certainly minimises premature deaths, but most healthcare addresses the symptoms rather than acting on the lifestyle triggers of the diseases that are now the greatest cause of mortality (and morbidity) in the Western world.

    This reflects the Tudor-Hart Inverse Care Law, which states: ‘The availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need for it in the population served. This … operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces, and less so where such exposure is reduced.’ In other words, efficiency declines as expenditure increases, and the freer the health market the worse the outcomes.

    The two main causes of mortality in the Western world are cardiovascular disease and cancer. An early diagnosis may indeed nip a problem in the bud, but does not address the social and environmental drivers of these maladies. The hospital experience itself may even be unhealthy, as an expansive 2014 Swiss cost-benefit analysis of Mammogram services suggests. One in five of the cancers detected with mammography and treated was not a threat to the woman’s health, and did not require treatment such as chemotherapy, surgery or radiation.

    In fact, the adverse effect of medical treatment is one of the leading causes of death in most developed countries: especially the high-spending United States, where in 2000 Dr. Barbara Starfield estimated:

    • 12,000 deaths/year from unnecessary surgeries.
    • 7,000 deaths/year from medication errors in hospitals.
    • 20,000 deaths/year from other errors in hospitals.
    • 80,000 deaths/year from nosocomial infections in hospitals.
    • 106,000 deaths/year from nonerror, adverse effects of medications.

    More recently in 2016, a John Hopkins team calculated that 250,000 deaths were caused by medical errors each year, making iatrogenic illness the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after cardiovascular disease and cancer. This serves as a particular warning to those countries converging with U.S. norms, where health care is largely left to market forces.

    Yet health discourse continues to promote the scientific holy grail of the wonder cure, even for ailments intimately related to lifestyles and environmental factors. This approach may be traced to a Romantic era of science at the end of the eighteenth century, and has profound implication for government funding of health services.

    Moreover, when a person is afflicted with serious a disease the demand for a cure becomes a matter of life and death. Most of us will do anything in our power to survive, crying from the rooftops if necessary. A healthy person, on the other hand, is generally oblivious or uninterested in why they remain hale and hearty. Stories focusing on the affordability of medicines or failures in health services have far greater news currency than the multifarious reasons why one society is less prone to disease than another.

    A rational health system would continue to pursue medicinal breakthroughs, in collaboration with but not at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, but place greater emphasis on addressing the complex aetiology of pathologies, in particular lifestyle and other factors that give rise to cancers and cardiovascular diseases.

    II Lifestyle Factors

    The advancement of lifestyle change, as opposed to dispensing medicines, would also require a cultural shift among the medical community, which could have revolutionary ramifications for society.

    By and large doctors are trained to intervene against clearly defined pathologies, mainly through medication, and have less training in ‘soft’ psychological skills, which might alter self-destructive behaviours at source. Psychiatry, psychology’s close relative, is a specialised branch of medicine, overwhelming devoted to treating mental illness rather than providing guidance to society at large. Moreover, the complexity of lifestyle factors often renders research data unsatisfactory, with findings easily dismissed as conjecture or mere correlation.

    Nonetheless, in a research paper this year entitled: ‘Impact of Healthy Lifestyle Factors on Life Expectancies in the US Population‘ researchers attempted to show that countering a range of unhealthy conditions including being a smoking, maintaining a high body mass index, taking little or no exercise, and consuming a poor diet and alcohol to excess, could significantly increase life expectancy:

    The United States is one of the wealthiest nations worldwide, but Americans have a shorter life expectancy compared with residents of almost all other high-income countries, ranking 31st in the world for life expectancy at birth in 2015.3 In 2014, with a total health expenditure per capita of $9402,4 the United States was ranked first in the world for health expenditure as a percent of gross domestic product (17.1%). However, the US healthcare system has focused primarily on drug discoveries and disease treatment rather than prevention. Chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer are the commonest and costliest of all health problems but are largely preventable.

    It is notable that the U.S. spends the highest proportion of its GDP on healthcare in the world, yet witnesses poor outcomes relative to other developed nations. This reflects the Tudor-Hart Inverse Care Law, which Obama’s Patient Care and Affordable Care Act (so-called Obamacare) redresses. Ironically, this is being whittled away by the Trump administration, who enjoyed support in the Presidential election from states where more than four out of five of those who rely on Obamacare reside.

    Aside from insufficient access to Primary Care, the U.S.’s disease burden also arises from addictions to junk foods, drugs and cars. Medications or surgery do little to confront the obesity pandemic, or drug dependencies, including the opiate crisis which killed more than 33,000 thousand in 2015.

    Rather than ramping up access to healthcare the authors instead recommend adherence to a ‘low-risk lifestyles, which could:

    prolong life expectancy at age 50 years by 14.0 and 12.2 years in female and male US adults compared with individuals without any of the low-risk lifestyle factors. Our findings suggest that the gap in life expectancy between the United States and other developed countries could be narrowed by improving lifestyle factors.

    The logic of this emphasis is consistent with the explanation of the authors of The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Floud et al., Cambridge, 2011) for why average life expectancies have risen across the world over the past three centuries.

    Crucial breakthroughs in raising global life expectancy arrived first in England in the late eighteenth century with government intervention in the grain market, which stabilised prices, thereby averting periodic famines. The average age at death climbed more dramatically once clean drinking water became available at the end of the nineteenth.

    An important consequence of early-nineteenth-century urbanisation had been ‘the deterioration of the quality and quantity of the water supply(1)’. Drinking water only improved after substantial state-funded infrastructural investment in the 1890s. Thereafter, a range of water-born diseases like diarrhea, cholera and dysentery ceased to trouble the population to anywhere near the same extent.

    The authors make a significant claim:

    it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of scientific medicine when one considers that much of the decline in the mortality associated with infectious diseases predated the introduction of effective medical measures to deal with it(2).

    They acknowledge that drugs like insulin, penicillin and prontosil as well as the mass immunizations of the post Second World War era made a difference, but maintain that adequate nutrition and clean water were the main determinants which overcame the infectious diseases which had carried off most of the population until that point.

    III Smoking and Obesity

    Today the drivers of disease in developed countries are manifold, but one factor often overlooked is the stress of living in perpetual income insecurity. This goes some way towards explaining why it tends to be the poor who make unwholesome food choices, especially favouring refined sugar, and continuing to smoke in spite of vivid health warnings.

    Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes the ubiquity of smoking as a clear index of the state of civilisation: ‘If smoking is defined as an ersatz act which absorbs the increasing nervousness of civilized man, affecting the body’s chemistry as well as motor function, then this penetration of our culture by smoking demonstrates to what depth the culture is permeated by nervousness.(3)’

    Moreover, the medical writer Kurt Pohlisch describes how: ‘In the act of smoking the nervously restless hand fixes on a purpose.’ He continues: ‘Smoking creates both a feeling of activity in leisure and one of leisure in the midst of activity … In terms of motoricity, pharmacology and sense psychology, smoking creates a cheerful mood, highly varied nuances of physical feelings, an agreeable stimulation with which to perform intellectual work, a pleasant sense of calm, a state of contentedness, satisfaction [and] easy cordiality.(4)’

    Consequently, a substantial minority continue to smoke, despite constant and graphic advice to quit. What the campaigns against smoking fail to recognise is the role played by smoking – and the use of other drugs – in relieving the stress of living in perpetual income insecurity.

    Smoking: ‘activity in leisure and one of leisure in the midst of activity’.

    Similarly, sections of societies living under free market conditions are prone to unhealthy dietary patterns. Avner Offer asserts: ‘Among affluent societies, the highest prevalence of obesity is to be found in countries most strongly committed to market-liberal policy norms.’ He argues: ‘if stress generates obesity, then welfare states protect against stress, and are likely to have lower states of obesity.’

    He says: ‘it is appropriate to think of the rise of obesity as an eruption, and to look for another eruption to explain it’. He identifies this as the emergence of the New Right in the late 1970s, and the market-liberal regimes that subsequently carried out their economic and social programmes in the main English-speaking countries, and elsewhere.

    He argues ‘the economic benefits of flexible and open market liberalism, such as they are, may be offset by costs to personal welfare and public health, which are rarely taken into account’, citing the example of the UK where adult obesity has tripled since 1980. An obesogenic environment was actually largely in place by the 1970s: car-use and television-watching were well established, and food was already sugary, cheap and plentiful before Margaret Thatcher came to power. The same stress-inducing conditions emerged in the United States under Ronald Reagan.

    Increased stress levels, especially fueled by employment uncertainty affect dietary choices: ‘Physiologically, stress leads individuals to prefer fatty and sweet foods, and frequently to consume more calories, exacerbating weight gain, especially in the form of risky abdominal fat.’ The idea of a link between insecurity, stress and obesity is supported by the ‘social gradient’ of obesity’: it is most prevalent among those at the bottom of the social ladder.

    Illuminatingly, in the month after September 11th, sales of snack foods increased by more than 12% across the United States as paranoia, verging on hysteria, swept through the country. Overall: ‘among rich nations, the USA and Great Britain have experienced the greatest income inequality since 1980 and the greatest increase in the prevalence of obesity(3)’.

    Peter Whybrow connects these responses to our early evolution. He argues that stress causes the lizard core of our brains to release dopamine, a hormone connected to pleasure, after consuming fatty and sweet food.

    He paints a lurid picture: ‘In the presence of continuous psychosocial shocks, a complex work environment, repeated deadlines, a difficult marriage – the alarm bells are continuously ringing and the stress response is continuously in play. In consequences, the body is maintained in a high state of psychological arousal, where the vulnerability to chronic illness is increased, with obesity as no exception.(4)’

    IV The Miracle Cure

    Richard Holmes argues that several crucial misconceptions crystallized around the idea of science at the start of the nineteenth century, aspects of which continue to confound our understanding of public health.

    There emerged at that point, ‘the dazzling idea of the solitary scientific ‘genius’, thirsting and reckless for knowledge, for its own sake and perhaps at any cost’. This is closely connected with the idea of the ‘Eureka’ moment: ‘the intuitive inspired instant of invention or discovery, for which no amount of preparation or preliminary analysis can really compare(5).’

    Western medicine perpetuates what is essentially a mythology of invention, assuming genius will produce a wonder cure for diseases such as cancer; just as Edward Jenner developed the idea of vaccination for small pox by infecting a young farm boy with the disease after first giving him a dose of cowpox. He had learnt from local folklore that milk maids who developed that mild condition never contracted the deadly pox.

    The chronic conditions we confront are not, however, susceptible to silver bullet breakthroughs in the form of drug interventions or vaccination. Medications may extend lives but generally fail to eliminate the diseases or address underlying causes. Nonetheless, the media is transfixed by tantalising cures lying on the horizon.

    One notable exception is the long-standing campaign against smoking, but as indicated, governments fail to recognise why people refuse to give up. Meanwhile, we see desultory efforts to warn against or tax consumption of ‘pure, white and deadly’ refined sugar, or red and processed meat, categorised as possible and probable carcinogens by the WHO. Likewise the transport infrastructure of most developed countries is designed primarily for motor cars, leading to a serious lack of physical activity.

    In the past doctors displayed greater awareness of the lifestyle factors that lead to disease, including the health benefits, or otherwise, derived from staple foodstuffs.

    By the seventeenth century bread was a vital element in the diet of most Parisians, who, on average, ate a remarkable one kilo-and-a-half per day. At that the time the perceived adulteration of bread with ‘barm’ or yeast, as opposed to the traditional sourdough ‘levain’ method, produced a medical controversy, leading to the formation of an expert medical panel.

    In condemning the use of yeast, the leading medical expert Gui Patin stated:

    To say, as those who defend it do, that they have not seen anyone drop over sick or dead from eating this bread is not a good way to clear it of the faults with which it has been charged. It is like sugar refined with lime or alum, or heavily salted, peppered and sliced meats, or wines in which one tosses lime or fish glue, or other things bad in themselves which men concerned about their health avoid, even if none of these things causes death or threatens one’s health on the day it is ingested(6).

    In spite of his advice the Paris parliament maintained a policy of laissez faire. The preference of bakeries for yeast is explained by it acting faster than levain. Since the arrival of the Chorleywood Process we have reached a point where most bread is no more than a junk food, which is surely a significant, slow-burning cause of disease. Indeed, the quality of a country’s bread may be an overlooked comparative indicator of its overall health.

    The early nineteenth century radical doctor Thomas Beddoes defined the philanthropic doctor as ‘one who is humane in his conduct not so much from sudden impulses of passion as from a settled conviction of the miserly prevailing among mankind(7)’. Many doctors today display these qualities, but are often ground down by a system which processes disease. As specialisation increases compassion declines, with the body reduced to its composite parts. The pharmaceutical industry also increasingly distorts priorities, even in ostensibly publicly funded systems of healthcare.

    As his career drew to a close, Beddoes made a number of simple proposals for raising public health: he suggested that all wives should be provided (free of charge) with anatomy lectures, washing machines (steam-powered), fresh vegetables and pressure cookers(8). These proposals would not be out of place today.

    The emphasis of public health should shift to the general practitioner, whose role could be more educative (lessons in anatomy that Beddoes speaks of) than prescriptive, and the idea of general physician perhaps revived.

    V The Wide Angle

    ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’ is the centrepiece of a ninth century Irish mythological cycle. It consists of a series of fantastical episodes of enduring interest. One such is the story of Nuada who loses his arm and authority in battle. We learn that the court physician Diancecht fashions him a prosthetic silver limb in its place.

    In the meantime, Diancecht’s son Miach begins to heal Nuada’s real severed arm, but the father prefers his own methods and surgically kills his son by removing his brain. Miach is buried by his sister Airmed and from his grave sprout three hundred and sixty-five healing herbs, which she orders in her cloak. Diancecht has other ideas, however, scattering the herbs, each of whose value would remain obscure.

    The possibilities of Miach’s more complimentary approach, rather than Diancecht’s artificial limb, suggests that healing may come from within the body itself, while the scattering of the healing herbs represents ignorance of the cures available in Nature.

    Diancecht wish to preserve the dominance of his profession might serve as a metaphor for the approach of the pharmaceutical industry. Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma (London, 2012), in particular, has drawn attention to serious corruption in that industry. But medication will remain all-important as long as disease, not health, is the focus of public policy.

    Human beings cannot expect to live forever, but serious reductions can be made to the burden of disease. We can address drug addictions, the quality of food and increase physical activity, but stress and low-level depression, lead to unhealthy lifestyle choices. If you take your meal in a car, as is the case with up to twenty per cent of those consumed in the U.S., it is more than a nutritional issue.

    The culture of Spain is notable for its conviviality, although one could overstate how mealtimes are not rushed affairs, or that work can always be done manana. Nonetheless, the siesta is still respected, and the life-affirming fiesta an important dimension of civic life. However, the recent economic crisis, and current political turn, may be eroding aspects of this way of life. Moreover, the Mediterranean diet is no longer followed, and obesity increasingly apparent.

    Notably, the generation in Spain enjoying such longevity today spent most of their working lives in a political system that protected industry from foreign competition, and, especially after the Socialists came to power at the end of Franco’s dictatorship, lived under a welfare state.

    The generation at work in Spain today, or not as the case with so many, are subject to greater uncertainties in life than their parents, with potentially long-term health consequences. Indeed across Europe life expectancies have actually gone into decline for the first time since records began. This may reflect the stress induced by increasing income insecurity and inequality  in the era of the euro.

    Altering any culture is slow work, but a rational view of public health should recognise a cultural dimension to most infirmities. A breakthrough in public health could be to see all medicine ‘as a branch of psychiatry, and psychiatry as a branch of philosophy’, as Iain McGilchrist put it.

    We may also return to a more general appreciation of our reality that animated the first generation of scientists, including polymaths such as Alexander von Humboldt who wrote: ‘In this great chain of causes and effects no single fact can be considered in isolation.’

     

    (1) Roderick Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Cambridge, 2011), p.173

    (2) Ibid, p.178

    (3) Wolfgang Shivelbusch Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York, 1992) pp.96-111

    (4) Ibid, pp.96-111

    (5) Avner Offer, R ‘Time Urgency, Sleep Loss, and Obesity’ in Avner Offer, Rachel Pechey, and Stanley Ulijaszek, Insecurity, Inequality, and Obesity in Affluent Societies (London, 2012) pp.129-141

    (5) Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London, 2008) p. xvii

    (6) Madeleine Ferrieres Sacred Cow Mad Cow (Translated by Jody Gladding) (New York, 2006), p.188

    (7) Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London, 2008) p.286

    (8) Ibid, p.302