Cassandra Voices

Tag: John Gray

  • J. G. Ballard: Foreshadowing Collapse

    The fusion of mood and setting, the mapping of a landscape of the troubled mind – that is what really matters in Ballard.
    Martin Amis

    I have been drawing attention for some time to the disintegration of a neo-liberal world order. The pandemic has delivered the coup de grâce, but the fighter’s limbs had been flailing around like jelly for some time.

    The disease arrived at the perfect pitch of lethality to lay low Western societies drowning in casino capitalism, religious fundamentalism and post-truth delusions. An unravelling natural world, confronting climate change and over-exploitation seems to have cast a last shot at redemption against the latter day conquistadors of Goldman Sachs, and their kind. A multi-variant insidious viral strain has emerged, against which there is no conclusively effective pharmaceutical remedy or long-term immunity.

    Covid-19 has wreaked most devastation in countries worst afflicted by the Financial Crash beginning in 2008; the Southern fringe of Europe and especially the U.S. U.K., and Ireland; the underlying health of these populations already undermined by ‘lifestyle’ diseases – especially the stress of living in permanent income insecurity.

    Only a few small Western nations preserving vestiges of a Post-War II Keynesian compromise between capitalism and socialism have rejected a feudal property market and death-on-the-instalment-plan living standards. Scandinavian outliers and New Zealand have avoided both excess death and dehumanisation of lasting lockdowns, or Chinese totalitarianism.

    In these islands of civilisation there exists sufficient social solidarity, trust in state institutions and a bedrock of economic security for carriers of the disease to isolate voluntarily. Elsewhere, it goes against the grain of pernicious neoliberalism to jeopardise one’s income or sacrifice hedonistic freedoms for the greater good.

    For the most part, Ireland differs from the U.S. insofar as rather than religious zealotry, a corporate fundamentalism – with an all-consuming cost-benefit analysis of life –  is the dominant paradigm. Among a shrinking Irish ruling class dull anti-intellectualism incubated on the rugby pitches of UCD holds sway, and is muscularly enforced in the Four Courts.

    Now, across the world, neoliberalism is giving way to its nasty ideological cousin, neoconservatism, wherein the forces of the state enforce a near permanent lockdown that draws more and more into the financial abyss, while a servile media provides the necessary distraction.

    Under lockdown we seem to be entering the territory of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

    There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.

    Empire of the Sun

    Marooned in leafy Surrey as a barrister-in-law in the south of England during this Covid period I have borne witness to the U.K.’s profoundest Post-War crisis, with deaths per capita from the disease among the highest in the world; although when one takes account of the relative age of each population, Ireland has experienced almost as high a toll. And at least in the U.K. real debate has raged around the erosion of civil liberties attendant to lockdowns; however hypocritical it may be for ideologues of the neoliberal order to reject the lethal fruit of their politics.

    Now, surveying the scene, it strikes me that in numerous works J.G. Ballard anticipated a major meltdown.

    Ballard was irretrievably damaged as a young boy by internment under the Japanese in Shanghai during World War II. This is vividly captured in the memoir Empire of the Sun (1984) that Stephen Spielberg made into an Oscar-winning film.

    The work details executions, casual brutality and dehumanising conditions. Like other Concentration Camp survivors, besides the lifelong trauma, Ballard clearly appreciated the fragility of life thereafter, motivating him to produce almost twenty novels, as well as numerous short stories and works of non-fiction. It also lowered his opinion of humanity, or rather revealed what each of us is capable of doing to one another.

    As John Gray put it:

    His traumatic childhood left him with the conviction – fully corroborated by events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – that order in society has no more substance or solidity than a rackety stage set.

    Empire of the Sun is, however, atypical of his oeuvre, as the novels unveil differing dystopian visions. His books are often classified as science fiction, but the writing is of a higher literary calibre than that label would imply, and real possibilities are only slightly exaggerated.

    Image: Daniel Mc Auley

    The Drowned World

    Two early novels The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought (1964) anticipate an environmental apocalypse, although as Martin Amis points out, only The Drought attributes the cause to the Greenhouse Effect.

    The Drowned World is set among the last remnants of humanity, where foodstuffs and water are in short supply. In isolation, strange delusions and inner conflicts emerge among the characters, tendencies we may recognise in ourselves during this period of confinement.

    The ‘hero,’ biologist Dr Robert Kerans, finds:

    His unconscious was rapidly becoming a well-stocked pantheon of tutelary phobias and obsessions, homing on to his already over-burdened psyche like lost telepaths. Sooner or later the archetypes themselves would become restive and start fighting each other, anima against persona, ego against id….

    Under the strain of dislocation a new form of humanity is emerging that appears to be a regression towards Cro-Magnon Man:

    The growing isolation and self-containment, exhibited by the other members of the unit and from which only the buoyant Riggs seemed immune reminded Kerans of the slackening metabolism and biological withdrawal of all animal forms about to undergo a major metamorphosis … withdrawal was symptomatic not of a formant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment.

    We may hope our contemporary metamorphosis under lockdown may prepare us for a radically new environment, and that we do not, as in the novel, depart on a suicidal mission, like Kerans, ‘A second Adam searching for the forgotten paradise of the reborn sun.’

    Alas the signs are not good as resources dwindle and trickle down trickles out, while our natural inclination towards sociability is undermined by social distancing, enforced by the law.

    Image from 1980: Dublin City Library And Archive.

    Unlimited Dream Company

    The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) is a veiled attack on suburban U.K. consumerism. The cold metallic buildings have created a consumer-induced comma punctuated by visits to shopping centres and theme parks. A series of memorable passages evoke the scene:

    The pavements were deserted, the well-tended gardens like miniature memorial parks consecrated to the household gods of the television set and dishwasher.

    And,

    They sat in the sunlight with numerals on their windshields, the advance guard of a digital universe in which everything would be tagged and numbered, a doomsday catalogue listing each stone and grain of sand under my feet, each eager poppy.

    The ghostlike narrator, anti-hero, or hero – it is unclear – Blake is a fiendish Pied Piper of Hamlyn with sexual designs on the entire population of men, women and children, who he aims to liberate by teaching them to fly:

    I had taught them to fly, by guiding them through the doors of my body, and now they would make their own way to the sun.

    Like any demagogue intoxicated by his own rhetoric he believes that evil in this world will give way to paradise in the next:

    I was certain now that vice in this world was a metaphor for virtue in the next, and that only through the most extreme of those metaphors would I make my escape.

    It is no accident according to John Gray that the narrator’s name is Blake. In a letter, the poet William Blake declared ‘to the eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is imagination itself.’ Thus the character of Blake finds:

    Already I was thinking of my next vision, certain now that it would not be a dream at all, but a reordering of reality in the service of a greater and more truthful design, where the most bizarre appetites and the most wayward impulses would find their true meaning.

    Ballard is suggesting that our dominant consumerism is the living death of a theme-park existence, where all forms culture – or should that be infotainment – has been appropriated, packaged and commodified. This social structure is easily manipulated by the spin merchants that promise flight for all.

    Image: Fellipe Lopes

    Millennium People and Crash

    In a sense, Ballard expressly anticipates the current madness in a later novel Millennium People (2003), as the dark age he referenced is readily apparent – collective hysteria and a sequence of witch hunts.

    Millennium People finds members of the middle class resorting to irresponsible revolutionary and terrorist activities. Half-baked as it is, the approach of the terrorists in the novel seems akin to the well-intentioned, but largely irrelevant enterprise of Extinction Rebellion.

    Ballard is suggesting that the chattering class have lost their sense of civic responsibility and display an absurd sense of entitlement; a process that has only accelerated in recent times with income structures collapsing before our eyes.

    The most controversial book, and a delicate exercise in the boundaries of fiction and bad taste – not unlike Pasolini’s film Salo (1975) – is Crash (1973), which depicts the fetishist behaviour of those who get their thrills out of being involved in car crashes.

    The book acts as a metaphor for a thrill-seeking culture that seeks artificial stimulation. Glorification of death and suicidal ideation is evident in contemporary devotion to a blood sport such as MMA, and ‘heroes’ like Conor McGregor.

    Hugo Darnaut’s 1885 Ideal picture from the Stone Age.

    Mass Media Infection

    Several of Ballard’s works refer to our current Post-Truth loss of reason, as well as the onset of various witch hunts. This latter is apparent in the Blairite reforms of the criminal justice system, which brought a return to social primitivism.

    The Drowned World’s suggestion of a human reversion to Cro-Magnon Man now appears more and more prescient. Neoliberalism followed by neoconservatism will lead to social primitivism amidst the unravelling of civilisation. This is apparent in the lapse towards authoritarianism in Hungary and Italy; not to mention Mussolini-lite Varadkar in Ireland, the nastier Trump and the insidiously clownish Johnson. And as in Ballard’s imagination, professional standards are breaking down under the strain.

    Finally, in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) Ballard is rightly credited with predicting the Reagan presidency, but in that extended series of essays the overarching theme is how the mass media has infected us all like a virus, leading to docile stupidity or inanity, and inaction through manipulation; such is life, such is the virus.

    What we now see is bland consumeristic compliance, fetishistic behaviour, random acts of violence, witch hunts, and media manipulation preceding societal and ecological meltdown; where Millennium People engage in tokenistic act of self-sabotage, as they endeavour to subvert the inevitable.

    Featured Image: An aerial view of housing developments near Markham, Ontario

  • Unforgettable Year: April 2020

    April is generally associated with fresh flowers and cooling rain showers. It is also the dreaded deadline to file taxes. Whether you were enjoying the foliage or sitting down to calculate your tax refund, I think we can all agree that April was particularly cruel this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

    That month Frank Armstrong examined the underlying conditions exacerbating the pandemic in most Western countries:

    The dangers posed by this outbreak, and future ones that nature will throw at us, require a thorough reappraisal of public health priorities. Medical systems in advanced Western countries – especially those dominated by the private sector – tend to prioritise treatment of the symptoms of the main non-contagious diseases. We ‘live’ with cancer and heart disease as opposed to addressing multifarious lifestyle causes, which the virus is now preying on.

    As Boris Johnson’s predicament underlines, anyone is susceptible to Covid-19, but chances of exposure – without recklessly ignoring medical advice – are often determined by social class, which intersects with lower life expectancy already.

    NGO worker Justin Frewen drew on his experience of the Ebola epidemic in Guinea. He recognised that ‘the potential onward transmission of Covid-19 is far greater than for Ebola, as it does not require direct physical contact with the carrier of the virus.’ By that stage, however, it seems it could not ‘be transmitted through the air directly which would greatly increase its range and ease of transmission.’

    Frewen also recalled the failures of the WHO during the Ebola epidemic, and speculated as to whether the organisation had been too slow, again, in controlling the outbreak.

    Meanwhile a pandemic doctor was steeling himself to the arrival of the grim reaper:

    By recognising what death is we recognise what life is. That is maybe why this feels like such a moment of quickening. Death has come knocking at our doors and we are forced to open and acknowledge him. The door will close again, but the collective memory will remain, and when the pandemic is over this may help us to invest life with more meaning.

    Another pandemic doctor surveyed the chaos in Ireland’s care homes, in an article that was subsequently republished on the state broadcaster RTÉ’s website:

    Last I saw her, rendered unrecognisable behind sheets of dehumanising plastic, she clutched at my hand with her failing limbs and begged me not to leave. But in every room, each now unadorned with the usual ersatz trappings of home and identity one finds in nursing homes – photographs, homespun blankets, love letters from grandchildren – fellow residents lie awaiting their rushed assessments. Oxygen saturations, pulse and respiratory rate, a survey of existing co-morbidities, and finally resuscitation and transfer status to be revisited and revised: who might possibly be saved by hospital transfer, and whose last comfort would be the inevitable cocktail of morphine and midazolam, slipped quietly under the skin at intervals until death arrives.

    The pandemic created an enormous burden on the finances of most European States. By April according to Kyran FitzGerald the E.U. was teetering on the brink:

    Across Europe, national Governments have moved to tackle the crisis by propping up incomes. Northern European states tend to have efficient bureaucracies and reasonable resilient national balance sheets. But even in places such as prosperous Denmark, there are concerns that many businesses will not reopen after what is increasingly looking like a long shut down.

    The picture in Southern Europe is as mentioned much more bleak. In Italy and Spain, there is a real sense of let down amid the crisis, though better off nations like Germany have latterly moved to show solidarity by sending supplies and flying some patients from Eastern France and northern Italy to their hospitals for treatment.

    Lockdowns…

    Dmytro Sidashev / Alamy Stock Photo

    The lockdown will live long in cultural imaginations, and as an instrument of government control; its pros and cons will be debated endlessly. We published an account from China, where the policy first emerged by an anonymous correspondent, who saw it as the beginning of another Cultural Revolution.

    I had booked a hotel – but ended up alongside five families living in a large apartment for seven days. Only two of us were allowed outside to buy food – everyone else had to stay inside. Before leaving we were covered head-to-toe, in gloves, face masks and head coverings. On our return we went through elaborate cleaning procedures before re-entering the apartment. We had to remove our ‘outside’ clothing and spray everything with 75% alcohol.

    No cars with registrations from outside the capital city were allowed in. The schools were on holiday and due to return the first week in March but are still closed all over China. Only students doing important exams at the end of term will be allowed to return initially, which hasn’t happened yet.

    Leaving Beijing, I returned to my home city of ****. You are supposed to scan your phone so they can track potential carriers arriving into the city – which I hadn’t, having used a private firm for the airport collection. This meant my car registration didn’t show up on the cameras. So the next day the authorities were in touch to find out how I made it back from the airport.

    Italy was the first European country to adopt the measure, and from Piedmont Silvia Panizza observed how the confinement was diminishing her physical health:

    Our bodies, already weakened by sedentary lifestyles, are becoming weaker, muscle-mass decreasing quickly through lack of exercise. We do what we can, setting up home gyms, doing yoga in our bedrooms, a few push ups in the morning. No running, swimming, no going for walks; hardly breathing in the fresh air, panting, moving, or sweating. I do a little gardening in pots on the balcony, which I hadn’t done before. All of a sudden tomato seeds seemed the most important item on my shopping list during my weekly, stressful visit to the supermarket.

    It was a particularly challenging period for older people who were advised to cocoon in Ireland, another unwelcome neologism from this period. Fergus Armstrong reflected on the experience:

    We can have a gnawing sense that our civilisation got things wrong, that it is being, somehow, punished. A year ago I heard a retreat-giver say that we had lost the ability to read the signs of the times. We had belonged, or thought we belonged, on a planet that although under threat, and although subject to disaster more or less randomly distributed, was broadly on a path of progress, of improvement, even for under-developed regions. Nature mostly provided balance and harmony.

    Modern science reinforces this optimism at the cosmic level. We now know that the total universe that includes our Milky Way as one of nearly a hundred million galaxies has been expanding since the Big Bang. But if the rate of its expansion had been even a millionth of a percent slower, the whole thing would have collapsed, imploded in upon itself. There was fine tuning. Now trust is at issue with a particularly severe jolt for the Western world. It could be said that most of our strategies of coping are in the nature of distraction. To the extent this is so, the underlying unease remains. Call it dis-ease in fact.

    While over in Porto, Brazilian Fellipe Monteiro observed:

    What I, other immigrants, and the Portuguese hope is that we can return to the life we had before, and be able to leave this prison, without bars, that our homes have become. While we try to renew ourselves, the city is still and visibly lacking the energy and joy of the local population.

    What is most intriguing in this situation, at least for me, is that we are trying to reinvent ourselves. For example, I have started to cook a lot more during these days of confinement, learning new recipes, in addition to adapting the house for new activities we never used to do at home, like dancing and exercising.

    Despite everything I believe that together we will overcome this difficulty, which is happening on a a global scale; staying at home admiring the birds and their songs that echo along with an inaudible cry for freedom from the citizens.

    In Sweden, however, a softer approach was being taken to the pandemic, the merits of which, or otherwise, are also still being fiercely debated. A correspondent based there revealed the philosophy underpinning the policy:

    The Swedish approach to the Covid-19 pandemic is a sign of underlying differences in how they understand morality in the public sphere, and how they relate with each other: this comes from a more utilitarian perspective.

    Utilitarianism has earned a bad reputations as it has been incorrectly conflated with crude capitalism, when it is really about taking peoples’ wellbeing seriously, or ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’ As Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mills understood it, utilitarianism is extremely equalitarian .

    Notably, the Swedish government has taken the advice of moral philosophers who come from a moral utilitarian perspective. The core difference between their approach and what we are seeing for the most part elsewhere is they attempt to avoid an understandable reaction to save lives immediately. They put aside an emotional response and consider the future consequences.

    Also, across the water in the United States, Bull Moose was typically bullish about opening up, in a dispatch from Atlanta:

    What the hell? Most people in the U.S. appear to be freaking out about Georgia ending its lockdown before anyone else. Even Trump weighed in, saying he disagreed with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. As we stand, restaurants here opened yesterday, as have bowling alleys, parks, nail salons and other facilities. The State also just declared its one thousandth death from COVID-19.

    On April 2nd Kemp admitted that he didn’t know that this coronavirus could spread asymptomatically, something the world knew since late January. Kemp may be an idiot, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong to re-open Georgia’s economy. With all respect to those who have lost loved ones or suffered from a bout, it’s time collectively we get back to our new normality.

    Earth Day

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    April 22nd marked the fiftieth anniversary or Earth Day, and leading environmental writer John Gibbons recalled how this had been closely followed by the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency under Richard Nixon in 1972, along with a host of other key environmental protection legislation, writing:

    Viewed through the political prism of today’s deeply dysfunctional and hyper-partisan U.S. politics, it seems almost quaint to recall a time when people, irrespective of their politics, religion or skin colour, broadly agreed that eliminating deadly toxins from the air that they breathed and the water that their children drank was a good idea.

    Fifty years later, the ideologically toxic Trump regime is busily dismantling large chunks of the progressive regulatory framework that the actions of the U.S. environmental movement ushered into being in 1970. Most sane people think it’s probably a bad idea to allow high levels of mercury, a potent and irreversible neurotoxin, to be released into the air from coal-burning plants.

    The Public Intellectual Series continued with assessment by David Langwallner of John Gray, the U.K.’s leading intellectual, and Jonathan Sumption the former U.K. Supreme Court judge who became an outspoken critic of lockdowns, and a defender of civil liberties first formulated in England in the Magna Carta (pictured above).

    Meanwhile Musician of the Month Niwel Tsumbu asserted the universality of music:

    It is very strange for me to hear people talk about pure ‘African Music’ that doesn’t exist – unless you go back thousands of years before humans started roaming around the globe. This concept is simply not true, and frankly, it drives me crazy when people, especially African musicians who use equal-tempered tuning with Western instruments, say so.

    We also published the lyrics of the song ‘Iguatu’ by Bartholomew Ryan:

    I sauntered up to the sertão
    in the northeast to a town called Iguatu
    to find the river
    where my cousin drowned in 1973
    the name of the river was the Jaguaribe
    they called it the dry river
    but as his sister Joan said –
    ‘there was nothing dry about it that day.’

    One surprisingly popular article explored how the Longford town of Ballinallee featured in the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s song ‘I Contain Multitudes,’ with a suggestion that it may have come about after a night Dylan spent in the company of fellow bard Shane MacGowan.

    Today and tomorrow and yesterday, too,
    The flowers are dyin’ like all things do,
    Follow me close, I’m going to Ballinalee,
    I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me.

    Uluc Ali Kilic in his studio in Istanbul. Daniele Idini

    Artist of the month was the extraordinary Uluc Ali Kilic from Turkey:

    My subject-matter is often the harm and destruction humanity inflicts on its surroundings, or other traumatic issues occurring in our time, such as the refugee crisis and homelessness. I try to make long-lasting artworks using plastic material which isn’t biodegradable in nature. Likewise, these artworks aim to last long in any viewers’ consciousness.

    In fiction there was the unmistakable style of Ilsa Monique Carter in Dumaine:

    Glacial and dark by design, her house inhaled the heat if by the gliding open of a sliding glass door, its hermetic seal was compromised. And like a large lung, the house then exhaled a quixotic draft of cooler air, which carried me with it out on to the balcony. Before she’d bolted the door behind me, no matter how briskly, and believe me she was… The sweet swelter had swallowed me whole.

    While Gary Grace brought us to the chaotic streets of Dublin to life after a night out in ‘A Slice’:

    Robbie was in what his friends referred to as “swaying tree mode”. This meant the slender greying hipster was pissed, his eyes barely open, and not engaging with anyone but moving slowly side to side, mouthing the lyrics to a song that wasn’t playing.

    There was poetry in English and his native Romanian from Radu Vancu.

    As well as a series of poems to mark Holy Week, including:

    A Corona Sonnet
    by Paul Curran

    With no less haste than the crisis deserves,
    All faces one mask of consternation,
    We’ve learnt, through conversing in spikes and curves,
    This virus respects no race or nation.
    Virgil could not have foreseen the Tiber
    Would fill so fast with the fallen of Rome,
    Hospitals built with sinew and fibre,
    Children in hiding, on their own, at home.
    His toll’s still rising, but Death, if he could,
    Would make no attempt to keep numbers down;
    Warm April predicates wearing no hood,
    His scythe keenly sharpened shines like his crown.
    Unfasten quick this dead pathogen’s trick
    Lest lists of the late outnumber the quick.

    And another from Billy O Hanluain:

    Stock Pile On Hope

    Walk down the bare,
    trembling aisles of your
    self. Everything dispensible
    is now after its Best Before.
    Pass by the Two for One indulgences
    of fear and doubt. Shelves stripped
    of the superfluous. The tattered packaging
    of novelties that amused us
    fade behind their
    spent Use By dates. Remembered now
    as infatuations bought to distract us.
    Is it time to close shop?
    Turn out the lights?
    Time for the din and dirge of shutters?
    We are open twenty four hours
    and we must never close.
    No matter the Feast Day.
    The Plague or The Hour.
    Turn toward that aisle within,
    so often passed in the hurry
    of what seemed to matter
    there you will find the plenty that
    always was and will be.
    Load your cart, fill your bags,
    weigh your trolley down.
    Stock pile on hope!

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Unforgettable Year: February 2020

    Unforgettable Year: March 2020

  • Gradations of Evil: Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism

    Since the 1970s, the consistent presence of neoliberalism in politics alongside short, sharp bursts of neoconservatism have shaped our planet to a greater extent than any other ideologies. This has been to the detriment of all but a shrinking cast of billionaires that profit in periods of crisis, even during the pandemic. The prognosis is not good, even if the pandemic provides a porthole for the possibility of a realignment.

    Distinct Ideologies

    At one level, neoliberalism is extreme libertarianism, purged of its earlier socialist or anarchist underpinnings that were ultimately communitarian. Neoliberalism has had a tremendous influence on conservative thinking in recent times. Yet it is not conservatism in a traditional Burkean sense of conserving and preserving that which is good. Neoliberals do not advocate moderation, restraint, anti-extremism, perspective, nuance or that ill-defined word ‘balance,’ save in terms of conventional political rights such as liberty, privacy and freedom of movement.

    Contemporary neoliberals are not supporters of little people, and in effect operate against the interests of the ordinary working person in the name of economies of scale or other workplace rationalisations. It is unbridled free market extremism, engendering a tragedy of the commons.

    It did not begin this way. In its first iteration, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek warned against the excesses of socialism in The Road to Serfdom (1944). This was witnessed in Britain of the 1970’s with the three day working week, refuse on the streets, and the stranglehold of government by the unions. Many of Hayek’s points were valid, and I suspect he would be horrified at the political trajectory his ideas have taken. Similarly, Karly Marx was not responsible for and would have been horrified by Stalin.

    The initial idea behind libertarianism was for a combination of unregulated laissez faire economics, and the legitimation of a hedonistic lifestyle through laws and social policies. I see nothing wrong with hedonism per se – or for tolerance of human frailties more generally – and indeed have spent much of my professional career as a barrister upholding the rights of an accused to due process.

    Neoconservatism, on the other hand, is hardly even capitalist in outlook. It is really an offshoot of a more authoritarian leftism combined with a fundamentalist, morally self-righteous neocolonialism informed by ‘Christian’ values. It is associated in particular with the administrations of George W. Bush, with Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle its most prominent ideologues.

    Left to right: Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush.

    Many neoconservatives made an ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist left to the camp of American conservatism during the 1960s and 1970s, with its intellectual roots in the magazine Commentary, edited by Norman Podhoretz. But anti-Stalinist does not imply a respect for human rights or the rule of law; its followers’ ambitions were simply global rather than limited to a particular country, as was the case with Stalin’s approach.

    Neoconservatism adopts the unregulated free market, but not libertarian permissiveness or due process or a respect for international law: the ends would justify any means. That is what makes it distinctly evil. It attracted money from Christian fundamentalist and the rapture movement and cohabited with authoritarian academics.

    Thus, there is a world of difference between former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption, a defender of human rights and free markets, and Tony Blair, the UK’s foremost neoconservatives. Blair is a fundamentalist Christian, a self-deluding mediocrity, who exported a destabilising jihadist war based on an absurd world view and sold it as a humanitarian intervention. He cannot really be described as a socialist – although state bureaucracies expanded massively under his New Labour – but nor is he a genuine conservative. He is simply a telegenic opportunist who became drunk on power.

    His neocon influencers were Bush and Irish-American pseudo intellectuals like Daniel Moynihan, who fused Christian jihadism with racist fundamentalism and veneration of a deregulated market. The worst of all possible worlds.

    Neoliberal Permissiveness

    While neoliberals cock a snoop at Christian fundamentalism, some perhaps even going so far as to oppose the war in Iraq, an inbuilt resistance to state intervention means neoliberals such as even Barack Obama, did nothing to heal the wounds, or address the causes of discontent in the developing world.

    I suspect the neoliberal endorsement of liberties and indulgence has in one sense been counterproductive. It may have not started with bad intentions. All were in favour of lifestyle ‘choices’: gay and transgender rights, sexual freedoms and shifting the agenda of equality towards formal equality rather than substantive equality. This involved superficial gestures such as including sufficient mixed race women in boardrooms but keeping the cleaners in the poverty trap.

    The gender equity and transgender lobby now often act in a sinister way, and represent a branch of neoconservative in all its puritanical absurdity. ‘No platforming’ esteemed academics like Germaine Greer steers young people into sexual confusion and away from political engagement. It is a disaster emanating from a preening devotion to political correctness.

    The sponsorship of the gender equity agenda by corporate America negates the real human rights agenda. These companies do not tend to fund advocates of social and economic justice, including rights to housing, healthcare and a clean, safe and aesthetically pleasing environment.

    The privatisation of healthcare and even the Bismarckean welfare state began largely under Nixon in the U.S., where neoliberalism first evolved. It was replaced by an insistence that people exercise personal and professional responsibility, which masked a dismantling of social supports.

    ‘Even Richard Nixon’s Got Soul’ (but not William F. Buckley)

    Nixon, a more sympathetic figure in hindsight – at least by comparison with latter day Republicans – was forced into healthcare privatisation by lobby groups from the medical profession, bringing into being the anti-health care system of America, where in 2018 over 17% of the country’s resources devoted to healthcare, yet it has one of the lowest life expectancies in the OECD. Moreover, industry sponsors regularly renege on private health care entitlements, through the machinations of unscrupulous lawyers. The fact of having a health care plan in the U.S. is no guarantee it will pay out.

    Nixon had his doubts and did not buy into the ideology wholesale, but by the time of Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 the neoliberals were firmly in the ascendancy, with disastrous consequences for Americans, as Reagan’s advisor David Stockman describes in The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed (1986).

    A crucial neoliberal mastermind was William F. Buckley, the satanic ideologue of modern U.S. conservatism, who ostensibly venerated Edmund Burke, but subverted Burkean conservatism. Buckley helped establish the new philosophy of neoliberalism through texts such as God and Man in Yale (1953), and through his editorial of the Republican Party intellectual rag The National Review.

    Buckley moved conservatism away from the spirit of Burke’s community of souls, towards naked self-interest. This has led to the undermining, and now the actual buying of the state apparatus by the corporatocracy. Thus, under Buckley’s stewardship conservatism mutated into a form of individualism tat undermined states.

    Buckley’s brilliant rhetoric was only matched by his repulsive qualities as a human being. This is all-too-evident in the 2015 documentary Best of Enemies made about his media punditry alongside the almost equally contemptible Gore Vidal during the 1968 American election. Buckley had an enormous, understated, influence in moving the Republican Party, via Reagan, towards libertarianism, and the disaster capitalism now in vogue. Buckley in fact co-opted Russell Kirk, the Burkean conservative author of The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953) onto The National Review, seemingly in order to get him ‘on message.’

    Yet the Republican Party and indeed much of the present Conservative party in the UK are not conservatives in the Burkean sense as aforementioned. They have become neoliberal fanatics, which is far from the origins of the paternalistic conservatism that emerged in Britain the late eighteenth century.

    Why Edmund Burke Provides a Counterweight

    Edmund Burke was a moderate conservative in the Benjamin Disraeli mould, who sought to preserve traditions he believed worth maintaining. His career was an idiosyncratic mixture of radicalism and abiding by conventions, and he believed in the desirability of change but not change for its own sake. Change should come about incrementally he believed, and with due regard to tradition; his antennae were attuned to unintended consequences.

    Edmund Burke.

    Contemporary neoliberalism has engendered a form of corporate fascism that mandates extreme conformity in working days that stretch into long evening. I doubt Burke would endorse its excesses. He believed in a form of market capitalism favouring small enterprise, as do I too. Burke was also anti-monopolist and would see dominant multinational firms, and perhaps the European Union, as anathema to the capitalism he favoured.

    Neoliberalism should not therefore be equated with traditional conservatism. Indeed if Edmund Burke was around today he might pen a text entitled: Reflections on Imminent Social and Economic Breakdown!

    Burke of course, unlike adherents of neoliberalism believed in the concept of a community, involving associative obligations and reciprocal interactions. A moral and networked community in other words. The neoliberal mentality, on the other hand, leads towards social atomisation and fragmentation, or as Margaret Thatcher famously put it: “There is no such thing as society only individuals.”

    Thatcherism is contrary to the Burkean ethos. I suspect that in modern times Burke would be regarded as a Keynesian capitalist, which is precisely what Buckley was attacking in God and Man in Yale. Burke ideas also align with environmentalists as he had a sense of community as inter-generational:

    Society becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

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

    Although a conservative in terms of his invocation of habit, tradition and social order, and also with his belief in institutional contribution and preservation – as well as measures of fiscal rectitude – he was, conversely, also its opponent of in other respects.

    One drawback to Burke as an intellectual, in my view, was his devotion to religion. Born in Ireland to a Protestant father and Catholic mother, noxious Irish Catholicism shaped him, diminishing his contribution; although one cannot say that he had the religious zealotry of a neoconservative.

    The Beginning of the End of History

    The Bushman-Blairite wars were an exercise in duplicity in shocking breach of international law. There were no smoking guns or development of nuclear weaponry in Iraq. It was Christian jihadism led by a latter-day Crusaders, including telegenic Tony that most lightweight of British gentlemen.

    Neoconservatism is a nefarious dysfunctional ideology that suits the interests of the powerful, which tragically became the consensus. A Dictionary of Received Ideas. There would be no comeuppance for Tony or George Dubya, who now blithely paints portraits of migrants, with all irony seemingly lost on him.

    In Britain, Brexit may lead to the gradual dismantling of the Blairite welfare state, even after the Johnson health care crisis, with the chronic under-resourcing and deregulation of the NHS now laid bare by the pandemic. This applies to all other countries, Italy most obviously, which diverted resources from essential services under neoliberal austerity measures. Meanwhile we see America on the brink of anarchy and civil insurrection due to the triumph of these ideas with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, who is the symptom of a very deep malaise.

    The combination of neoconservatism and neoliberalism is a far more deadly virus than Covid-19, which has simply exposed the soft underbelly of societies afflicted by its ravages. From a neoliberal point of view healthcare or a clean environment are not rights but entitlements and part of a libertarian agenda.

    The lack of regulation of spiraling accommodation and rental costs in the US and elsewhere brings a situation where, for the vast majority, outright ownership of property is a myth. Ostensibly, high salaries are hoovered up in hyper-inflated rents and mortgages subject to repossessions by vulture funds.

    The cost of living is prohibitive, and cramped accommodation makes the possibility of a decent family life almost impossible for most, engendering a dysfunctional humanity. Inequalities, short term contracts, and punishingly long working hours destroy mental health, decrease productivity and render family life – save for a privileged few – a thing of the past. The long-term effects on children are potentially catastrophic.

    This leads to short-termism and prevents even a modicum of forward planning for most people, who must live from one pay cheque to the next.

    Lacking objectivity and perspective, as we struggle for survival in subhuman working conditions that undermine the quality of life, decline arrives in increments. This leads to petty corruption and greed, in a dog-eat-dog universe where the elderly are replaced once they have outlived their usefulness. Their fate is increasingly to be place in decidedly uncaring privatized nursing homes, or spend their last moments on a trolley in an underfunded hospital.

    Nozick the Great Ideologue of Neo-Liberalism

    Anarchy, State, Utopia (1974) by Robert Nozick was a subversive reaction to John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice who had promoted a theory of economic justice. It became a neoliberal bible. Nozick suggested that government intervention, meaning taxation, beyond the enforcement of contracts and the control of crime is akin to slavery or theft. I own my body, he argues, so I therefore own everything my body produces, and if the state takes that which I produce away from me it enslaves me or – more elegantly – ‘socialism forbids consenting acts between capitalist adults.’

    The egregious fault with his argument is that it does not follow that because you own your body you own everything you produce. Inequalities are inbuilt into capitalism as David Ricardo’s Labour Theory of Value demonstrated. It also does not allow for any understanding of the human condition, other than one informed by radically disaggregated and individualistic behaviour, devoid of co-operation and community.

    At the time many thought that him daft, and that his ideas could not be implemented as they would lead to a socially dislocated society. It was even suggested that Anarchy, State; Utopia was an elebatorate joke, or part of an intellectual game. Indeed, Nozick was fond of scholarly conceits and subsequently wrote a book with a radically different thesis. So perhaps he did not take what he said seriously. Others did unfortunately.

    The consequences have been economic collapse and surging inequality, the gradual destruction of the middle class, and the privatisation and diminution in healthcare as a right, as well as homelessness and mass evictions

    The University of Chicago with its two highly placed judges in Easterbrook (dangling for a Supreme Court judgeship) and the truly nefarious ‘most cited’ legal scholar in the world Richard Posner, have also been responsible for much of the damage.

    Here we have the perfect reductio ad absurdum: all of human activity is reduced to the wealth maximisation thesis. Thus rape arises out of scarcity of resources: it is expensive for men to purchase sex so we should have a de-regulated prostitution market according to Posner; or adoption should be de-regulated to deal with a competitive baby market where the product can be purchased by the consumer. Such nonsense is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729) in which he satirizes an earlier version of neoliberalism, with the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that it would serve the polity to kill excess babies for economic gain.

    The Middle Way

    Keynes fell out of fashion because of the stranglehold of unionism and the imposition of socialist dogma in the 1970s. This created ‘a market’ for the work of the Chicago School and trickledown economics characterised by fetishist privatisation, deregulation and the elimination of state subsidies. In the late 1970s a retreat by the state made some sense, but the correction turned into an ongoing campaign. The market may have seemed like a score counter that could be tamed for human purposes. No longer. It is the recipe for inequality

    Naomi Klein in her bestseller The Shock Doctrine (2007) analyses the growth and development of neoliberalism across the world. She dubs the economic paradigm ‘disaster capitalism’, homing in on how these crises and others are used to justify further disaster prescriptions. She quotes Hayek’s disciple Milton Friedman:

    Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

    Naomi Klein.

    That is precisely where neoconservatism and neoliberalism coincide. Proto-neoconservatives remove the democratically elected Allende regime and replace him with Pinochet, before neo-liberal reforms open up the country for exploitation, washing their hands of any blood.

    Yet all the best evidence indicates that stable growth occurs in Nordic and Middle European social democratic countries. There is a tangible link between Keynesian economics and sustainable redistributed growth. Neoliberalism does not generate sustainable growth, as opposed to wealth for the few, and does not provide for redistribution. In effect it is a recipe for diminished human welfare, less good for the greatest number.

    Where Are We Now

    The Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stieglitz famously described our present state of affairs as ‘Socialism for the rich capitalism for the poor’. And the new era of state and corporate feudal control and terror we have entered into will accentuate these trends. Thus during this pandemic some of the wealthiest individuals in the world have actually increased their wealth.

    A return to the methodology of neoconservatism can be seen in the emergency legislation that has passed through the parliaments of U.K. and Ireland. In theory these are designed to confront an immediate emergency, but will become embedded, and spiral out of control just as we have with counter terrorism legislation. Enforcing self-isolation and ‘track and trace’ become new norms inflicted by neoconservatives and consented to by neoliberals, many of whom with notable exceptions such as Lord Sumption, forget their libertarian origins as long as the dosh keeps rolling in. Notably Tony Blair is awake to new opportunities.

    The very phrase ‘social isolation’ is problematic and euphemistic – like ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘military intelligence,’ a contradiction in terms. In fact self-isolation suits a silo bubble of social atomisation and dealing with people or problems one by one by state authorities. We risk a descent into a new barbarism not least due to the pernicious effects of decades of privatization.

    The Indian activist Arundhati Roy demonstrates how neoliberalism and environmental damage have gone hand-in-glove in her book Capitalism: a Ghost Story (Verso 2014). There are the mass evictions in India of ‘surplus population’ (a truly evil capitalism coining). The street vendors, rickshaw riders, the small shops and business people, and not least the suicide of 250,000 farmers.

    This forced displacement, often from rural areas to cities, augments the channelling of wealth towards the one percent plutocracy controlling India.

    It has been suggested by John Gray and Roy herself that the pandemic may lead to a rethink. I fear not. In fact, rather than becoming, as Roy puts it, a porthole to a sustainable and fair existence for all, I fear increased atomization, semi-permanent social distancing, diminishing social supports and the insidious undermining of civil liberties, supported by a scared and soma-induced population.

    We are now entering an age of corporate feudalism and of mercantile state control with sub Malthusian ideas gaining traction. It is an age of extremism nourished by religious fundamentalism. It is a time for the convergence of Burkean conservatism with Habermasean moderate socialism to implement ideas informed by traditions of decency and the green agenda. It is a time for sustainable personal and societal living to be realised.

  • Enforcing Environmental Rights

    Introduction

    However scant the support provided by the legal process, as a lawyer I am drawn to rights-driven considerations. In terms of recent context – blinkered by the present over-reaction – Obama’s climate change initiative has been overturned by Trump, who effectively tore up the Kyoto Accord.

    The internal U.S. solution to climate issues is to endorse such market-driven approaches as ‘Cap and Trade’. For example the Law and Economics movement allows and encourages individual U.S. States to permit, through legislation, permission to purchase the right to pollute. Obviously what happens is that once a corporation’s pollution credit is exhausted in a given State they simply move on. It is, in short, a polluter’s charter.

    A pollution or carbon tax is justified on the basis that it will promote efficiency but little account is taken of the externalisation of environmental meltdown, or on whether it is regressive or not. China’s ongoing disregard for pollution controls and restraints on consumption is well documented. The excuse given is that the U.S. is doing worse. So there seems to be little hope of the Big Two changing course.

    Nonetheless, as we will see, such ‘environmental rights’ as there are can be divided into three distinct categories: environmental procedural rights; the right of environment and the right to environment.

    A Consensus of Crisis

    Discourse on the status of the Blue Planet is varied and complex. On the one hand it is quite clear that it will survive climate chaos even if humankind does not. Gaia, as James Lovelock conceives her, has an infinite capacity for renewal and regeneration. But the scale and imminence of the impending disaster is being carefully manipulated in the vectors of public opinion. Trump, Bannon and others should be indicted for the crime against humanity of ecocide.

    The science is saying – the work of Elizabeth Colbert in particular – that without radical action, within sixty years the remaining wild mammals may be extinct. In these circumstances human extinction is likely to occur by increments.

    Various parts of Earth will be rendered uninhabitable through plant and animal die outs, destroying natural habitats and accelerating ecological meltdown. Raised temperatures will foster further mass migrations, with no clear destination, or pity, emanating from the privileged few, as quarantining of refugees in secluded detention centres becomes the norm.

    Radical inequalities in wealth and assets will diminish life expectancies through poverty and an under-resourced and undermined welfare system. Death on the Instalment Plan, as Louis-Ferdinand Céline put it after the Great Depression awaits for many of us. So in the medium term a mass extinction seems unlikely. More likely there will be significant population culls as a cost-benefit analysis to human life is applied.

    A crucial consideration, flagged in detail by John Gray, is that the top soil on which agriculture rests is being rapidly eroded. Furthermore, of even greater concern perhaps, is that chemical inputs into agriculture are wreaking havoc with natural ecosystems.

    Gray has previously argued in favour of an alliance between moderate conservatism and the green agenda, conserving venerable institutions while enhancing environmental and civic health. This is a variant on sustainable growth or development. Unfortunately, this admirable ideal appears to have little chance of success in the real world of power and money.

    Besides, the post-truth plague has put wind in the sails of climate change denial, as inaccurate and self-serving ideas are peddled by the likes of Michael O’Leary. These are accepted as valid points of view, as part of a misplaced notion of balanced coverage.

    The agenda is clear. The far-right prizes its assets and its riches, and prefers to pillage the Earth, rather than protect the planet.

    Collapsing Glaciers, Arundhati Roy and Indian Precedent

    According to the Geophysical Research Letters the ongoing melting of the glaciers of Antarctica is expected to be exacerbated by the collapse of the greatest canyon on earth: the Denman Glacier. By now the glacier is mostly cut off from the sea due to the level of glacial ice piled inside and atop the ravine.

    As the glacier’s edge continues to retreat down the slope, however, warm ocean currents will pour into the canyon, battering bigger and bigger sections of the glacier and gradually turning the Denman trough into a giant bowl of melt water, with nowhere to go. This scenario could have a runaway feedback loop of melt that ultimately returns all of Denman Glacier’s ice to the sea — risking a nearly 5 feet (1.5 m) rise in the planet’s sea level.

    This could lead to significant migrations from South to North – a mass exodus in fact – as overheating increases, joining the ever prevalent boats arriving in Sicily and elsewhere on the Mediterranean. I fear increasingly draconian measures to control migration and effectively dispose of fellow human beings.

    The developed world is not immune however. The environmental crisis, coupled with inevitable pandemics to come, is likely to precipitates a global financial collapse. The recent Financial Crisis has already brought ‘strong man’ leaders, and an increasingly oppressive jackboot state in so-called democracies.

    Assets need to be preserved, and those who threaten the status quo and the inward rapacious march of unchecked capitalism may be disposed of. As John Gray remarked in a different context: ‘The quickening advance of science and technology in the past few centuries has not gone with any comparable advance in civilization or human rationality.’

    Many human rights organizations reliant on funding and sponsorship from right-wing think tanks are becoming less than eager to confront the hard issues, as the consequences for doing so is a withdrawal of funding. The priorities of the Ford Foundation and others, who fund NGOs, brings a devotion to identity politics rather than the crucial issue of climate change.

    Those therefore, such as the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who challenge rapacious capitalism around the world, or have the temerity to object to its nefarious agenda will be murdered, imprisoned or simply disappeared. This goes hand-in-hand with sectarian repression in India where, ‘people are graded and assessed according to their faith.’

    Naomi Klein has offered a powerful critique in a series of books ever since The Shock Doctrine (2007). The important point to grasp is that the Chicago School approach of enforced shocks and distractions occlude sinister power grabs. The Covid-19 pandemic is a perfect sideshow in this respect for a shake down by large corporations. Over-reaction and mass hysteria about a virus becomes another distraction from a bigger picture of environmental, and social, meltdown.

    In India and beyond, Arundhati Roy demonstrates how neo-liberalism and environmental damage go hand in glove in her Capitalism a Ghost Story (2014).  Since the publication of The God of Small Things (1997) she has channelled her energies into political activism against the growing environmental and economic calamity being perpetrated on her native land, through the depredations of neo-liberalism. It is that political conscience that is the primary interest of her new awareness.

    In Capitalism: a Ghost Story there are all sorts of resonances to her new work of politicized fiction The Ministry of Utmost Unhappiness. There is the mass evictions of India’s ‘surplus population.’ The street vendors, rickshaw riders, the small shops and business people, that brought the suicide of 250,000 farmers. This forced displacement, often from rural areas to cities, augments wealth of the one percent of plutocrats who control India. A graveyard, or simply being simply dumped in a river bed, is often the fate of the displaced, or the disappeared.

    It is clear in both books that this is the product of  a society where corruption is endemic. Inequality works to the benefit of monopolistic corporate interests, involving crossover interests of transnational corporations and law firms. Even the NGO sector won’t cut it as Roy saliently points out: ‘charity douses anger with pity.’ It can even silence criticism of neo-liberal atrocities by deflecting attention to ‘safer’ human rights issues such as gender equity.

    Roy has suggested that Covid-19 offers a portal that may allow us to mend the error of our ways. I hope she is right.

    https://vimeo.com/426871719?fbclid=IwAR2MMWAdI_jbI1ASvY78K-XBh-QxPMrgWIUTdjuclsedx-wWv5CHtLP-XEo

    Dissent from Sweden

    This brings us to Greta Thunberg, our only child public intellectual. Aged just sixteen, Time Magazine saw fit to make her its person of the year for 2019. She became famous for not attending school to demonstrate against her government’s inaction over climate change, leading to a spate of copycat demonstrations.

    Her recent short text, available in any decent book store for £2.99, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (2019), provides a summary of her speeches. She questions, given an imminent mass extinction, whether attending school is a terribly worthwhile idea, and identifies a cathedral solution. This is a brilliant analogy as we need deep structural and integrative thinking, and the leadership of the just and the wise. She might also have noted that serfs and slaves built the cathedrals, just as wage-slaves constructed those great cathedrals of capitalism: the skyscrapers.

    Greta Thunberg sees the world through black and white lenses. Good and evil. This provides a refreshing clarity, demanding action to be taken now, or her generation has no future. She is right insofar as the overwhelming majority of scientists are to be believed.

    Fortunately she is Swedish and retains a comparative freedom to speak her mind, despite the chastisements of Mr. Trump. The writ of neo-liberal justice does not extend to that Nordic country just yet.

    Little wonder also that anarcho-syndicalist groups such as Extinction Rebellion have gained traction when the political process has failed. The dangerous vista of extra-legal tactics, beyond civil disobedience, is on the horizon. The beast is slouching towards Bethlehem.

    Applying Sustainability in Our Daily Lives.

    There are also environmental considerations about the quality of civic life. Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness (2006) argues that the kind of buildings we inhabit and work in make a profound effect on our wellbeing. The poet Kathleen Raine pointed to a sense of homecoming when we encounter cities ‘where in architecture, sculpture and painting, the needs of the spirit are met.’ She attributes a growing alienation in the Britain of the 1960s to the architectural fashion of the time.

    It is self-evident that operating in an aesthetically pleasing home environment will raise the spirits, and yet this idea is often dismissed. Placing people in Bauhaus tower blocks creates battery hens. America is the paradigm of the skyscraper mentality, with Chicago’s Louis Sullivan ‘the father of the skyscraper.’

    I have visited perhaps the seminal modernist or rather brutalist example of sustainable living apartments. Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation (1952) is the perfect expression of his idea of ‘a machine for living in.’ Although wonderful in principle, in application it is a bastardised disaster.

    East elevation of Unité d’habitation Marseille in 2019

    How can you function properly, or think straight, while raising a young family living in an overpriced tenement which chews up most of your salary? Commuting to work compounds the problem, as you spend your spare hours on a train going to and from an ‘open plan’ panopticon of a workplace that generally diminishes your wellbeing. Sedentarism and a lack of exercise will shorten your life span and diminish a capacity to think freely. Failures in Irish urban planning, such as Ballymun Tower Blocks, lay behind the heroin epidemic of the 1980s.

    Yet there is good urban planning that raises the spirit. Paris was a crime and slum invested medieval city until the Baron de Haussmann developed a prototypical grid system, after Napoleon III instructed him to bring air and light to cetnre the city, to unify the different neighbourhoods with boulevards, and to make the city more beautiful. Yet today beyond the city limits, the architectural depredation of les banlieues has engendered the social dislocation and La Haine.

    Camille Pissaro, Avenue de l’Opera

    In Ireland Mary Robinson spearheaded an attempt to preserve the Viking Wood Quay settlement many decades ago, which was an early intimation of her ongoing attempts to raise global conscience, and force environmental regulation and climate change awareness in Ireland.

    It should be noted that great businessmen – which is not entirely an oxymoronic idea – think long-term and in terms of fundamentals of life. Benevolent capitalists, such as the Adriano Olivetti and John Cadbury, had regard to the quality of life of workers and housed them appropriately, endowing long obsolete privileges such as pensions and benefits.

    We need to discover an ecologically harmonious way of living rather than simply eco-friendly consumer choices, such as one discovers in a fabulous recent book called, Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way.

    Imperfect Legal Solutions

    As indicated, in procedural legal terms the broad notion of ‘environmental rights’ can be divided into three distinct categories: environmental procedural rights; the right of environment and the right to environment.

    Environmental procedural rights include those associated with rights of participation in decision-making, access to information and the ability to access justice, such as is expressed in the Aarhus Convention under European Union Law. But any consultative processes and public hearings are irrelevant if outcomes are pre-determined.

    The right of environment is perhaps the most radical, envisaging as it does a value in the environment beyond mere human benefit. Such an approach assumes that the environment should be held as a good on its own merits, and protected as such. The argument is based on the position that it is arbitrary to restrict justice and rights exclusively to inter-human relationships and to tolerate a situation in which interested parties are deprived of essential values in the distributive process on the basis of morally irrelevant factors – such as their not being human.

    Finally, there is the right to environment. This was first given international expression in the Stockholm Declaration, Principle 1 of which stated that ‘[m]an has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being …’

    The right to environment is conceptualized as a right pertaining to each individual – the environment is valued not on its own merits, but in light of its importance for human existence. The exact description of the right has been framed in various ways. A range of adjectives have been used: decent, healthful, natural, pure, clean, ecologically-balanced, safe (see International Environmental Law and Policy for the 21st Century, Pring and Nanda). Throughout the literature, a common theme is that of ensuring human health is not put at risk by environmental degradation. Obviously, this approach is open to the criticism that it is entirely anthropocentric.

    So do we assess the environment as a benefit to us as humans or as an intrinsic good in and of itself? I would argue in favour of the latter approach. But legal case law and rights are toothless fairies if there is no political will to implement them.

    Coda

    So legislative and constitutional protections exist and lobbying continues apace. This seems destined to fail, although I have not given up hope. In the present circumstances – portals or otherwise – as creatures of bounded rationality, with limited time, what we can do in our own lives is at least try and do as little harm as possible.

  • John Gray: the UK’s Leading Public Intellectual

    Like errant flames from the dying embers of a once great fire, there is much fakery to be found emanating from a previously proud tradition of public intellectualism in the U.K., and elsewhere. The English philosopher John Gray (1948-) is at least not one of the self-help gurus, such as Jordan Peterson, that have gained public attention and earned ample remuneration in the process.

    We do not find in Gray’s work the resigned intellectual play-acting evident in many books randomly grappling with our universe, and which provide the kind of quotable flourishes that play well at north London dinner parties. He is the doyenne and most garlanded of U.K. intellectuals today and so demands engagement.

    Gray is no worshiper at the alter of the Enlightenment or the humanist tradition. He does not believe it provides us with the coping mechanisms for our current challenges. Ultimately, he has little faith in the ability of civilization, or rationality, to overcome the barbarism of a liberal experiment riveted by self-contradiction.

    In short, he sees, both historically and now, the extent to which human irrationality governs actions. Thus he is decidedly anti-utopian, an empiricist and pragmatist. He holds out little hope for the realisation of lofty objectives, such as we find among technological evangelists or Bible-belt Christians. This is a theme he explores in some detail in his book Black Mass [2007].

    In fact, all forms of demonist eschatology, chiliasm or end of day’s nonsense is parsed thoroughly in the text, from religious fundamentalism to neo-conservativism, to Marxism and Nazism. Quite correctly he identifies Tony Blair as a neo-conservative.

    Thin Veneer

    One suspects Gray would endorse Lon Fuller’s remark in a different context about legality and civility providing a thin veneer of civilization if the underlying culture is barbaric. This covering is growing thinner by the day I would argue.

    And yet – although he may beg to differ – he displays a residual fractured humanism, and embraces certain conservative values. In effect, he is a Tory of the old school, with modest liberal leanings; the sort of person who, although he writes for the New Statesman, would equally happily associate with Tory grandees. His Disraeli-esque conservatism is one I would share some common ground with.

    He has thus embarked on a voyage of passage from an earlier more doctrinaire, Thatcherite conservatism. He no longer venerates a laissez faire approach to the economy, and seems to have recognised that that approach went seriously awry. He is a fellow-traveller in a way with Jonathan Sumption, who has also arrived at a modified conservatism on his own intellectual pilgrimage.

    Rather than seismic shifts – in that very British way – Gray argues that change should arrive incrementally, with allowance for the exercise of individual responsibility.

    He also argues for a bridge between conservatism and the green or environmental agenda. He expresses a desire to create a Burkean ‘community of souls’, preserving that which is good and noble. But this seems a forlorn hope given how the Antarctica icebergs are on the brink of collapse, and international accords are torn apart with a pandemic upon us.

    Covid-19

    In a recent article for The New Statesman John Gray argued that the Covid-19 pandemic is a turning point in history, which will bring lasting changes to human behaviour. This will see online interaction rather than face-to-face communication becoming the norm, and a Hobbesian state becoming ever more intrusive, and with people increasingly accepting of this.[i]

    In his view the populace will submit to the imposition of increased control, permitting a gradual and imperceptible erosion of civil liberties.

    In effect we may be seeing the arrival of a new society of unfreedom, and the arrival of a technological serfdom evident in China, where Bentham’s Panopticon is writ large. But also in Western countries we are seeing surveillance from private and public bodies covering all of society.

    China: technological serfdom. Image: Dmytro Sidashev / Alamy Stock Photo

    One advantage, however, of the ‘Great Pause, of quarantine, as he points out, is that it could lead to a recalibration of ideas and fresh thinking. In silence new thinking may occur. But in order for this to happen we must escape from the distraction of what Frank Armstrong describes as the ‘Doomsday Machines’: the smart phones that prevent us from realising our true selves.

    As Fernando Pessoa put it: ‘only by methodically, obsessively cultivating our abilities to dream, analyse and attract can we prevent our personality from dissolving into nothing or identical to all the others.’ It is certainly time for reflection but the path that lies ahead is shrouded in uncertainty.’[ii]

    Gaia Hypothesis

    John Gray is a convert to James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis that the Earth is a self-regulating organism which maintains the conditions for life on the planet. It is a word he invokes regularly, and without exclusively focusing on humans.

    Indeed, Gray appears to have a uniformly negative view of human nature and human beings. In his seminal text Straw Dogs (2004) we are depicted as rapacious, destructive and transhumanist. I suspect he is even more of this view now. Yet he clings on to a belief in decency and the exercise of personal responsibility, and liberally urges for peaceful co-existence to prevail.

    As a Green Conservative and an opponent of neo-liberalism, he cautions against what Greta Thunberg described as the fairy tale of growth-without-end, and recognises how this is destroying the planet, and making human lives impossible. The pursuit of profit for its own sake of profit has led human activities to spiral out of control.

    Our planet on the brink. Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    Malthusian

    While I warm to his Gaian sympathies, there are more disturbing aspects to his ideas that I take issue with. He appears to venerate a Malthusian liquidation or winnowing of the human population in the aforementioned New Statesman article. If there are too many of us I wonder does he regard himself as expendable and surplus to requirements?

    In fairness it is ultimately a point about human progress having to be off set against scarcity. Yet it is easy to be sanguine – or even blasé – about meltdown when you sit atop the academic food chain. Stoical acceptance of human absurdity is not what is needed right now. It is a time for action after reflection.

    Gray may have glimpsed the gorgon’s head of the dangers we confront, but seems to shrink from urging the radical responses required. I suspect donnish privilege has softened the attack and brought a modus vivendi with these circumstances. After all, his own life has been a success by most measures, so he can at least take refuge in haughty disapproval, or at least he could prior to the Corona-pocalypse.

    But of course, in the interests of fairness, his prescience should be noted in pointing out that dwindling planetary resources, and wealth inequalities, are undermining what we cherish, and accelerating Malthusian dynamics.

    Any invocation of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) nonetheless reminds me of Jonathan Swift’s indispensable ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729). Swift responds to the genesis of the ideas that Malthus would go on to articulate with withering satire, expressed with deadpan seriousness: he promotes the consumption of babies as a way of solving the problem of over-population.

    Gray walks the same Swiftian line – though without quite the panache – in an essay on torture in which he mocks liberal values. Tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek, he argues torture potentially promotes human rights:

    Self-evidently, there can be no right to attack basic human rights. therefore, once the proper legal procedures are in place, torturing terrorists cannot violate their rights. in fact in a truly liberal society, terrorists have an inalienable right to be tortured.[iii]

    Religious Fundamentalism

    I share Gray’s contempt for religious fundamentalism. He does not display the dogmatic atheism or extremism of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, but allows for Christian worship in a tolerant way, and merely warns against barbarism, and end-of-day’s eschatological chiliasm.

    Yet the solution in his new book of jettisoning both the sweet poetry of Genesis and secular humanism engenders in Seven Types of Atheism (2018) a rather denatured Arcadian spirituality, which is neither flesh nor fowl or even a guide to a more meaningful existence for the varied lives he believes we should lead.

    It’s almost an intellectual Flake commercial, which tastes like religion never tasted before; although it should be acknowledged that he is resolutely anti-consumerist, and critical of the manufacture of insatiable desires. At one level he is arguing for makeshift true grit or graft to cope with unbounded irrationality. We must, he suggests, develop new patterns of living to cope with the new disorders and challenges we face.

    Intellectual flake commercial.

    He says anyone can live in a variety of ways, and I suppose we all do need to slow down and embrace both distraction and silence. But I believe the finality of total silence is always to be resisted – ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light…’

    The Good Life

    There are many ways, Gray contends, of living well. Differing types of the good life, but he is insufficiently specific as to what these are.

    With the changing world of work, and a lack of employment prospects for many, one suspects he has an overly optimistic understanding that whatever fulfils someone is what they ought to be doing, which is all well and good, but that doesn’t necessarily put supper on the table. I fear most of us will have to find different survival strategies to cope with our disposability in a world that cares for us less and less.

    John Gray is reliably sceptical of junk science that is now crashing into us in ceaseless waves, most recently with Donald Trump’s proposal to inject disinfectant to prevent Covid-19.

    Phrenology.

    A useful example Gray has provided is in the recrudescence of phrenology, where criminal patterns of future behaviour are derived from skull sizes, which feeds into racial stereotypes. Our criminal justice system, in allowing bad character admissions, has dangerous preludes of pre-crime and conviction by demonization.

    It will take a brave leader, of men or opinion, in future to insist on civilized values. John Gray has intimated, and I agree, they will not matter.

    In his esteem for silence to avoid distraction and enhance contemplation Gray comes across like the effete aristocrat in Turgenev’s Father and Sons, as the Bolsheviks steadily take control. But at least The New Statesman provide him with a platform, and the books continue to sell to a dwindling educated public.

    Featured Image: Joseph Wright’s  An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, National Gallery, London.

    [i] John Gray, ‘Why this crisis is a turning point in history’, New Statesman, April 1st, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/04/why-crisis-turning-point-history

    [ii] Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, The Serpent’s Tail, London, 2017, p.107

    [iii] John Gray, Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, Penguin, London, p.222

  • Public Intellectual Series: Slavoj Žižek

    No picture of the modern world is complete without a Marxist analysis. The fundamental point – even for anyone who is not a fellow traveller – is that a materialist analysis of capitalism’s inherent instability is essentially correct, and now more relevant than ever.

    The problem has always been around how a post-capitalist society emerges without savage bloodletting and numbing totalitarianism. The bearded figure scribbling away in the British Museum would no doubt have been horrified by the barbarous regimes – from Lenin to Kim Jong-Il – that have laid claim to his legacy.

    Slavoj Žižek is perhaps the best known representative and synthesiser of contemporary Marxist theory. Anyone who has viewed his films The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2009) or The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2012) can only marvel at how this middle-aged, slovenly Slovenian Marxist is taken so seriously. Despite the spittle that pours involuntarily out of his mouth as he expostulates, it seems his ideas are judged on merit; albeit a somewhat comedic appearance has probably made him seem less of a ‘danger’ – especially when set against a straight-backed sparring partner such as Jordan Peterson – and ‘Ted-Talkily’ acceptable.

    Žižek is a complex political thinker, noted for his observations on ideology. Yet his writing is dense, often impenetrable, and even, at times, frankly nonsensical. Sadly, the content can be obscure, and the ideas often wildly over-stated, though recent books have seen him curb this tendency, leading to greater traction. With age he has mellowed, or at least he has become far more coherent in his critique of the late capitalism disaster movie unfolding before our eyes.

    His thought processes are, nevertheless, eminently contestable. Former Irish President Mary McAleese – who lectured me – always despised recklessness, as do I, but in a different sense. It is intellectual recklessness I hold in low regard. Žižek is full of it, at least in terms of his wilder statements calling for insurrection.

    Žižek argues that the widespread belief that our world is post-ideological is an ‘arch-ideological’ fantasy. Today, he asserts, ideology entails what people impute to others, whether left or right.

    This demonization of others, and the exclusion of outsiders, is indeed very much to the fore in his recent writings, and in our end of day’s capitalist order. Tribalism, nationalism and the targeting of non-nationals and immigrants is an endemic feature of our time.

    For a subject to adhere to an ideology he argues, he must have been presented with it, and accepted it as true and right – such that anyone sensible should believe in it. In a seminal text, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) Žižek claims that ideology has not disappeared, but has come into its own, and because of its success, it has been dismissed as non-existent. Or should it be that ideology has been internalised?

    Ideological Disidentification

    Žižek also puts forward the idea of ‘ideological cynicism.’ Ideology today is not as it was for the proletariat for ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it.’ He disagrees that for ideology to be effective it has to effectively brainwash people, as Marx contended in his famous religion being the opium of the people assessment; rather Žižek contends that a successful ideology always permits a critical distance towards that ideology – this he terms ‘ideological disidentification’; saying: ‘I know well that (for example) Bob Hawke / Bill Clinton / the Party / the market do not always act justly, but I still act as though I did not know that this is the case.’

    Or perhaps it should be said that behaviour has been modified or controlled, and widespread passivity makes it is irrelevant what we do in a spectator democracy. In effect, we are irrelevant to changing any of this, as the supporters of Bernie Sanders are finding out.

    Žižek points to a ‘big O other’, who legitimates control through ‘God’ or ‘the Party’. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, (1989) he argues that such important or rallying political terms are ‘master signifiers,’ even though they are ‘signifiers without a signified’, i.e. words which do not refer to any clear and distinct concept or demonstrable object. Thus, they induce control and a false sense of belonging, but are meaningless.

    This claim of Žižek’s is related to two other ideas:

    1. That subjects are always divided between their conscious and unconscious beliefs towards political authority;
    2. That subjects do not know what their beliefs are that leaves them open to domination and control.

    Jouissance

    Žižek further contends, following the critical theorist Louis Althusser, that ideology is embedded in our everyday lives. In particular, he uses the term jouissance to describe transgressive pleasure that we derive from the master signifiers, such as ‘nation’ or ‘people,’ through cultural products as sports, music, alcohol,  drugs, festivals, or films.

    Another central idea in Žižek’s initial political philosophy is that any regime only secure a sense of collective identity if their governing ideologies afford subjects an understanding of how these relate to what exceeds, supplements or challenges its identity. Or, in layman’s terms, bread and circuses is the glue that binds identities – ‘Football’s Coming Home’ to quote Baddiel and Skinner.

    Žižek adopts the term ‘ideological fantasy’ for the deepest framework of belief that structures how political subjects, and/or a political community, come to terms with what exceeds its norms and boundaries. He identifies Law with the Freudian ego ideal.

    But Žižek argues that, in order to be effective, a regime’s explicit Laws must also harbour and conceal a darker underside – a set of more or less unspoken rules which, far from simply repressing jouissance, implicate subjects in a guilty enjoyment in repression itself, which Žižek likens to the ‘pleasure in pain’ associated with the experience of Kant’s sublime.

    Žižek’s final position about the sublime objects of political regimes’ ideologies is that these belief-inspiring objects represent the many ways in which the subject misrecognises its own active capacity to challenge existing laws, and to found new laws altogether.

    He repeatedly argues that the most uncanny or abysmal aspect of the world today is the subject’s own active subjectivity – explaining his repeated citation of the Eastern saying ‘Thou Art That’. It is, finally, the singularity of the subject’s own active agency that leads to subjects’ recourse to fantasies concerning the sublime objects of their regime’s ideologies.

    Like a Thief in Broad Daylight

    Žižek’s technical term for the process whereby we recognise how the sublime objects of political regimes’ ideologies are, like Marx’s commodities,  fetishised objects – concealing from subjects their own political agency – is ‘traversing of the fantasy.’

    Traversing the fantasy, for Žižek, is the political subject’s deepest form of self-recognition, and the basis for his own radical political position, or defence of the possibility of such positions.

    Žižek also references Alain Badiou, who argues for an elevation or an insurrection. Žižek also seeks a form of Jacobin army, the intellectual irresponsibility of which needs to be emphasised. Even if these ideas are metaphorical the extremism provides ample ammunition to right-wing critics, who argue he condones or even approves of terrorist methods.

    Sadly, in more recent times, the Marxist left has been self-sabotaging, and the cause of its own downfall. They have also had their good arguments stolen and mangled by the right.

    Yet it seems that radical Marxists are at last growing up and that the post-modernist wing is grappling with its self-contradicting, and implicit approval, of a valueless universe.

    In his recent book Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (2016) Žižek distils many of the abstruse elements of his ideas into manageable and helpful commentaries that have a broader base of appeal. The ethical political order, notwithstanding Habermasean attempts at a reconstituted normalization, have collapsed, he argues.

    Freedom of choice is an illusion in a world of disinformation, plummeting educational standards, short-terms contracts, imposed services and privatization. Any alleged freedom we have arrives in a narrow spectrum of choices, subtly imposed upon us through social influencers and technological nudges controlling choices. Or as John Gray put it in The Soul of The Marionette (2015) ‘we are forced to live as if we are free.’

    Žižek and others have demonstrated the sinister developments within late capitalism. Including how a rent for profit model means most of us on low salaries serve undeserving sponsors, leading many into the informal market or the black market by violence or the violence of regulation – as David Graeber explores in his epochal work Debt: the First 5000 Years (2015).

    Other disturbing trends are in evidence, Roberto Saviona in Zero, Zero, Zero (2015) through a sustained analysis of drug cartels, shows how the corporate model of Mafiosi loyalty has been exported into law firms. The lines between legitimate and illegitimate capitalism are thus blurred to a point of near non-existence.

    The ‘woke’ left cannot escape blame for failing to identify the socio-economic issues that really count in peoples lives. Pseudo-feminism plays a class game, marginalizing lower class men as harassers and even demonizing migrants. Indulgence of victimhood has created the abuse excuse.

    The Wretched of the Earth

    Frantz Fanon

    Žižek is quite critical of the great post-colonial Marxist Frantz Fanon and his seminal text The Wretched of the Earth (1961). But Fanon was surely right in identifying a colonial order wherein, ‘the people’s property and the people’s sovereignty are to be stripped from them.’ The Untermensch were obliged to pay the debts of the occupying powers, which is now the international model of austerity.

    Žižek argues that our society of depoliticized and compliant sheep invite disaster. He references the film Blade Runner (1980), which is a useful cultural trope as the older replicants – baby boomers – now need to let go of their accumulated wealth and power. Generation X are at least conscious of false memory syndrome or implanted hopes, and some have the wherewithal to do something about it and no longer settle for being victims. So despite the victim excuse, Fanon and Žižek have much in common in their analysis.

    The reality is that the analysis of Fanon is now in place across the world. The elite or the corporatocracy are a gang, and what amounts to a mafia is running the planet like a colony.

    So the slovenly Slovenian has hit the zeitgeist, and now interacts with more common sense than was evident in his wilder pronouncements of the past. But unfortunately it appears as if the lunatics have already taken over the asylum, and to an increasingly docile audience what he is saying will appear mad, a point that his appearance would appear to affirm.

    Or at the very least his ideas will be packaged by Facebook, so he plays a bit part in the drift or acceleration into the abyss that we must resist.