Cassandra Voices

Tag: neo-liberalism

  • 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

  • In Conversation with David Langwallner

    London-based Barrister David Langwallner, the founder of the Innocence Project in Ireland, responds to the latest interview with Edward Snowden.

    He distinguishes between private concerns and socio-economic rights; with the latter more urgent than ever during this period of crisis. By comparison, he says, privacy considerations are not essential: ‘the most important human rights are food, shelter and housing.’

    Langwallner also addresses the increasingly blurred lines between our real and virtual selves asking: ‘once we have de-humanised social interaction how are we really to know one another?’

    He reckons people are over-reacting, ‘in a state of shock,’ and losing all sense of proportion: ‘Yes it is a crisis, but it is a hyper-inflated, neo-liberal world pandemonium that has taken place and the danger is that you lose sight of the bigger picture.’

    He fears, ‘they’ll bail out the bankers, but small businesses will be screwed,’ and asks, ‘will the Germans finally step up to the plate?’

    Langwallner traces many of our current problems to a technocratic style of governance that has overtaken many institutions, such as the European Union. He says: ‘I don’t like textbook people – they are useless and shouldn’t be in decision-making positions.’

    ‘What the press should pay attention to,’ he says, is the melting of the largest glacier in Antarctica which could raise ocean levels by five feet.’

    As regards the threat of the virus, he reckons more people will die from mental illnesses, as a collective de-humanization occurs. Yet he reserves hope that Boris Johnson’s brush with death could engender a more compassionate conservatism. He hopes that within Britain there is enough of a social democratic consensus, but isn’t so hopeful about Ireland.

    Langwallner also revisits his stern criticism of post-modern philosophy which is helping extremists get into power. Neo-liberalism has failed as an idea he says: ‘we require a Keynesian New Deal and prohibition of vulture funds, as well as the introduction of basic income.’

    He fulminates against a media that reports on the speech of ‘corporate monsters’ such as Michael O’Leary who has denied climate change.

    As regards the forthcoming U.S. Presidential election he urges Americans to support Joe Biden against Trump for the sake of a global consensus on climate change.

    Coronavirus is like the symptom of an underlying disease. It is the toxic combination of ecocide and neo-liberalism … If you are very rich you can self-isolate, but most of us have to interact with the public

    He closes out with a call for people with an interdisciplinary approach to take control, the abandonment of neo-liberalism, and a radical response to climate change. ‘There is hope, but there is real danger.’

    Interviewer: Daniele Idini
    Mixing: Massimiliano Galli
    Video: Fellipe Lopes

    Apologies for the poor sound quality in parts of this conversation. We aim to improve!

  • The Rocky Road to a Republic

    You might think of the film ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ as some dated artifact, featuring Dub-a-lin in da rare auld times. But many of the cultural assumptions revealed in the film, and which later went towards hindering the film’s reception, are still very much alive in today’s Ireland. The sacred cows may have changed, but the overall cultural relationship with those things deemed sacred is still strikingly similar.

    From the opening shot where the proud young boy reels off the complex theological dictates of the Catholic catechism in a machine-like patter, beaming with pride at his own parroting, oblivious to the meaning of the words he is reciting by rote; the film not only captures a moment in Ireland’s time, but achieves something far more profound: it captures the Irish sensibility, a quality slower to date than many would like to believe, and one which still informs how we do business even today.

    For instance, in the opening summary of the 1916 Easter Rising, the commentator (Peter Lennon) says that one of the goals of the leaders of the rising was to ‘awaken a lethargic and indifferent Irish population to an ideal of freedom.’

    To awaken to an ideal of freedom. What does that even mean? Not just freedom in the context of colonial Ireland, but freedom itself? What would it mean to be awakened to an ideal of freedom?

    Vulgar Chancers

    In a 1916 essay – the perhaps over-dramatically titled ‘The Murder Machine’[i] – Patrick Pearse critiques the British education system as it was applied in Ireland, arguing that it was deliberately creating lesser people; people for service, and people, in times of war, to be wasted on battlefields, as was happening in France at that time.

    His point was that an ideal of freedom entailed having a say over your own education system, which would then be designed to enhance natural gifts, rather than designed essentially for enslavement to the requirements of a greater, indifferent power.

    In the essay he recounts a wonderful story, which we would now recognize as a foundational argument for arts subsidy. A farmer comes to him (Pearse was a teacher) complaining about a ‘lazy’ son who chose to do nothing all day except play the tin whistle. ‘What am I to do with him?’ says the farmer. ‘Buy him a tin whistle’, says Pearse.

    But is our education system any better equipped now? It seems to have been designed, like the British education system of Pearse’s time, to facilitate powerful institutions. Even at the top end, the universities often seem like dispensers of tickets for corporate jobs. In Ireland today the bulk of jobs are to be found in retail and ‘hospitality’. The modern equivalent of service.

    President Michael D. Higgins recently criticised Universities for being too focused on market outcomes where they should be places to provide a ‘moral space’ for discussion. He said that this was due to a perception in academia that there was ‘magic happening in the marketplace… when in fact actually what you had was a whole series of vulgar chancers.’[ii]

    In this brave new republic we now occupy, where neo-liberalism informs the values of everything, the arts appear to be regarded as something of an anomaly. Talented people are flung into dead-end jobs with the same casual disregard that they were once thrown into gunfire. The unions are weakened, landlords are murdering people, economically speaking, with killing rents; workers are over-worked and underpaid; the government is in thrall to big business; and people at the bottom are now going hungry and homeless. No matter how you might like to dress this up with figures for job creation and GDP percentages, I doubt that any of it adds up to anyone’s notion of an ideal of freedom, except perhaps the small percentage at the top, benefitting economically from the enslavement of the rest.

    Silence and Gratitude

    The sense I have after watching ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ is that little has changed. The place has been repainted and the furniture moved around, but it all seems eerily similar, with one set of sacred cows replaced by another. The ‘economy’, that eternally needy abstract entity, serves as a replacement deity to whom we now must all pay homage, or face dire consequence.

    Thus in 2011 Enda Kenny endowed his government’s austerity budget with a penitential quality: “The budget will be tough, it has to be,” he said, adding it will be the “first step” on the road to recovery.”[iii] Cut-backs to vital services appeared to be punishment for the ‘sins’ of excessive spending during the boom era.

    The point is, people’s relationship to power in today’s Ireland is more or less the same as that portrayed in ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’. They are just now focused on a different God and a different set of authoritative ‘priests’, but the relationship to authority seems essentially the same, and a similar apathy still prevails.

    As for an ideal of freedom; this has neither been articulated nor discussed in the state’s short history. It is not an ideal that informs the cultural life of the country. If anything, it is understood in the negative. Freedom from, rather than freedom to.

    In the Rocky Road the question after independence becomes: what to do with your revolution once it has been achieved? The idealists hoped for the emergence of a true republic of equality, fraternity and so on.

    Instead, as the writer Sean O’Faolain says in the film:

    The kind of society that actually grew up was what I called urbanized peasants…A society which was without moral courage, constantly observing a self-interested silence, never speaking in moments of crisis, and in constant alliance with a completely obscurantist, repressive, regressive and uncultivated church. The result of all this was…a society utterly alien to the ideals of republicanism…a society in which there are blatant inequalities…the republic is not going to come slowly, it will be the creation of a whole generation, perhaps two generations… who will have the courage to speak and who won’t be afraid of those sanctions that are continually imposed on them if they do so.

    Those sanctions of silence are still imposed on people who speak against the prevailing orthodoxies. And often those sanctions are most strenuously imposed by those who are themselves victims of structural inequalities.

    The role of Irish people, mainly born in the 1930s, as identified in the film was to be ‘one of gratitude, well-behaved gratitude’, says Peter Lennon. The understanding being that freedom had been won; now, simply, shut up.

    Criticism was regarded as betrayal. But whose freedom was it? What was being asked of Irish people now by the revolutionary generation, or those who had ended up in power, was a ‘new kind of heroism. Heroic obedience.’ In essence, to wait patiently while those in power created the republic.

    That, to my ears, sounded exactly like what was asked of Irish people after the banking collapse. Heroic obedience and gratitude. It seems to be the same bargain struck in the name of austerity. And again, criticism is seen as betrayal. Your duty is to be patient while those in power rebuild the republic; to demonstrate allegiance with obedient silence.

    But who betrayed who this time around? Did Fine Gael in power care for the people targeted by vulture investors? No. They let them fall into homelessness and left them there. It would be dull to go through the litany of Fine Gael betrayals since austerity. Everyone knows what they are. Besides, this isn’t about Fine Gael. It’s about Irish people and their reaction to being lumbered with yet another, self-serving authoritarian clique, supposedly building or rebuilding the republic.

    Participation

    How do you build a republic anyway? What does it need? I suppose you could say that a century of heroic obedience and silence – while the big boys build the thing – hasn’t really worked. And there is a very good reason for that. Submissive silence in a people is the antithesis of a participative republic.

    A republic presupposes participation. But as the documentary about the reaction to ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ shows, Irish people seem to guard jealously the silence that acts as cover for the powerful, more than they aspire to the necessary participative nature of a functioning republic.

    Put simply, it is not up to powerful vested interests to build a republic – they’ll never do it anyway, because, as Mel Brooks once observed, ‘It’s good to be the king.’ Who in power is going to spoil their own party by introducing policies that reflect true equality and fraternity?

    It’s up to people, by being participative, to build a republic. You don’t even have to do anything dramatic. In the Irish case a way forward might be to simply quit ridiculing those who speak out, as was the fate of Patrick Pearse when reading the Proclamation outside the GPO; and is the metaphorical fate of most anyone who speaks against the prevailing orthodoxies in Ireland.

    This above all is what the Rocky Road reveals, the Irish penchant for keeping itself enslaved by imposing on itself heroic obedience and silence. By shutting itself up.

    Peter Lennon’s film was widely denounced in Ireland, characterized as a betrayal of a people. The usual rubbish when Ireland is looked at critically by an Irish person. This was in 1968.

    In contrast, the film became a huge hit in Paris – a place where they build and maintain republics. It served as inspiration for many French students for what happens to a people when they agree to the pact of heroic obedience and silence.

    Interestingly, when Peter Lennon came back to Ireland in the mid-sixties he still saw the glaring power of the church everywhere. But people in Ireland, he found, genuinely believed that all that church stuff was now in the past.

    They were enchanted and duped by the ‘modernising’ trend – more-yah in the guise of crooning, finger-snapping, condescending Fr Michael Cleary, singing acapella to new mothers in a maternity ward, of all places.

    The young people of the time assured Lennon that Ireland was changing, that the grip of the church’s power was broken, that the grey 30s, 40s and 50s had been consigned to the past. And yet, Lennon’s film, shot with the unerring gaze of Raouel Coutard’s artist’s eye, showed a country still hopelessly in thrall to power; and, most tellingly, in total denial of its own condition. Unquestioning, obedient, silent. Until, that is, they saw Lennon’s film and found something to turn their mute hatred on.

    How To Build A Republic

    There is in the attitude of the ‘great little country’ – ‘the Best Small Country in the World in Which to do Business’ according to Enda Kenny’[iv] – to its own myths and legends, a sense of the magical mirror that only flatters. And when you critique any of it, you bring down upon yourself the wrath that surges angrily from denial revealed as delusion.

    But that, unfortunately, is how you build a republic: by questioning its precious presumptions. This may explain why it has taken so long to even frame the question: how do you build a republic, without getting yourself killed?

    The Ireland we dare not look at is decked out with cruel inequities everywhere you care to look, particularly in relation to the low paid, the unemployed, Travellers and Direct Provision tenants.

    More recently we were reminded again in the RTÉ documentary ‘Redress: Breaking the Silence’[v] that state officials, in their cumbersome way to make right, actually had the effect of re-traumatising the victims by way, really, of imposing on them an old authoritarian relationship.

    This time the concern was whether the victims were fibbing for monetary gain. For the victims it was just another cold authority disbelieving them.

    The authoritarianism that truly informs Irish culture peeks out in all its judgmental cocksureness everywhere you look. It’s there in the house rules for Direct Provision tenants, ‘No excuses!!’ it says. It’s in the jokey management sign at the expense of workers, describing them as animals: ‘Where’s your sense of humour?’ It’s in the contempt for the jobseeker as ‘welfare cheat’. It’s in the greedy landlord hinting that payment through sex might be acceptable. It’s in the look-at-me-publican hushing almost the entire county because he feels an urge to sing a song and the world must stop to listen because he’s the man who controls the drink tap. It’s in the bus-driver’s contempt for the social housing passengers who ‘should’ have cars. It’s in the anti-intellectualism that seeks always to control through ridicule.

    How do you build a republic? By participating. By speaking up and speaking out. By taking responsibility for the thing that needs to be said, and not waiting for someone else to come along and do it. Or by simply deciding not to ridicule and demean the speaker, because you’re proud of the fact that as a salt-of-the-Earth Irish person that it’s considered clever to broadcast your ignorance and affect a pose of being unable to tell the difference between art, intellectualism and insanity. Even valiantly locking your jaw in that context would be a small contribution in the right direction to the development of a wiser republic.

    Peter Lennon’s The Rocky Road to Dublin was restored by Sé Merry Doyle at Loopline Film, https://ifi.ie/film/rocky-road-to-dublin-4/

    [i] ‘The Murder Machine’ (1916) by P.H. Pearse: https://www.cym.ie/documents/themurdermachine.pdf

    [ii] Jack Horgan-Jones, ‘Universities do not exist ‘to produce students who are useful’, President says’, Irish Times, March 2nd 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/universities-do-not-exist-to-produce-students-who-are-useful-president-says-1.4190859

    [iii] Mary Regan, ‘Living Beyond Our Means’, Irish Examiner, December 5th, 2011, https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/living-beyond-our-means-176062.html

    [iv] Peter Bodkin, ‘s Ireland the ‘Best Small Country in the World in Which to do Business™?’ Not any more…’, TheJournal.ie, December 9th, 2014, https://www.thejournal.ie/ireland-ranking-for-business-1844047-Dec2014/

    [v] RTÉ ‘Redress: Breaking the Silence’ https://www.rte.ie/player/series/redress-breaking-the-silence/SI0000006787?epguid=IH000390934&seasonguid=127629864186

  • We Need Another ‘New Deal’ and Umbrella to Unite Under

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), U.S. President between 1933 and 1945, was born to enormous privilege. He came from one of the most aristocratic families in America. A distant cousin, Teddy, had even been elected President.

    In his youth FDR was a bon vivant and ladies man, who strayed from Eleanor, his saintly but still formidable wife. This blue blood seemed an unlikely person to buck the entire system of US capitalism. He remains a hate-figure for U.S. Conservatives today.

    Any account of his life should include the enormous personal tragedy of his incapacitation due to polio. He could not walk, and this disability may have broadened his empathy for others’ suffering.

    Roosevelt was elected President in 1932 on a platform of change: to provide a New Deal to the American people after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and ensuing global depression. The destitution of the American people is movingly depicted in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, where a group of ‘Okies’, led by Tom Joad, are ruined by dustbowl conditions, and the calling in of loans by ruthless bankers.

    Similarly, devastation arrived in the urban centres, captured in the lyrics of the song and Broadway musical E.Y. Yip Harpurg’s ‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime’. Even brokers were forced to eat from soup kitchens, as erstwhile respectable folk were reduced to ‘hobos’.

    What had happened was that the bull market of speculation had simply collapsed. The unregulated free market had built mountains of sand out of folly and greed. A dominant economic philosophy of laissez faire had brought light touch regulation and government passivity, as with our own, similarly hegemonic, neo-liberalism.

    The view then, as today, was that government had no business interfering in private transactions and that wealth, growth and efficiency are best achieved by the operation of the invisible hand.

    The crash beginning in 2007 was not that different from the 1929 version, and the political consequences are increasingly similar too. A neo-liberal consensus endorses a shock doctrine allowing crisis to follow crisis, precipitating social and economic collapse.

    FDR adopted the seemingly paradoxical, and certainly heretical, advice of the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes that to save capitalism it was necessary for the government to intervene in the market. Thus Roosevelt set up national agencies and support structures for aid and assistance. It was a bailout to protect the poor and disenfranchised, not the rich.

    His New Deal was in the national interest. Not a shibboleth or paper mask, cloaked in woolly ideas, to protect vested interests.

    The Supreme Court initially blocked New Deal legislation, rejecting what the legendary Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes contemptuously branded social statistics in his dissenting opinion in Lochner Herbert Spencers. He insisted the court had no business varying contracts.

    ‘the switch in time’

    The assumption of liberty of contract is that anyone has the freedom to enter into a bargain under whatever terms they choose, and once a contract is struck they are bound by their word. But that is based on the pretence that the market is a level playing field, which it never has been. Many still sign on the doted line without fully understanding the implications. Moreover, neo-liberalism sells short term fixes which often fail.

    An exasperated Roosevelt informed the Supreme Court that if they did not approve his legislation he would appoint new judges, which soon led to a change of heart. This became known among wags as ‘the switch in time that saved nine’.

    Roosevelt displayed an ambivalence towards democracy, but was the best of all leaders: a benevolent dictator. He favoured those at the bottom of the social ladder, who were increasingly aware that democracy had been sabotaged by vested interests. At that time, just as is the case today, transnational corporations and law firms were dictating to governments.

    Roosevelt revived the U.S. economy, with Keynesian pump-priming: government expenditure increasing aggregate demand. It did not lead to a bail out of corrupt banks, but their nationalisation. This brought investment to help ordinary people, not the infliction of wanton cruelty in the form of perma-austerity, which runs contrary to even capitalist logic.

    The best evidence is that a mixed economy, combining private enterprise and public initiative, with social safety nets and public assistance for small enterprises, is a model that works best for society as a whole, rather than the cartelisation of wealth, under the voodoo promise of trickle down.

    Keynes was right then, and still is, but over time he became unfashionable and was derided.

    In late 1970’s Britain, in particular, the excesses of socialism were becoming obvious, with the three-day-working-week, litter on the streets, and the stranglehold of the Unions. With initiative thus stifled, Thatcher and Reagan championed the old formula of untrammelled free markets: new clothing for old and obsolete ideas of unregulated markets, conveniently referred to as neo-liberalism.

    The ideological underpinning came from the Austrian Friedrich Hayek and the Chicago school under Milton Friedman. The curious assumption was that wealth would trickle down like manna from heaven from rich to poor, if a market is left alone. Instead we got the yuppies, like Donald Trump, who siphoned off great wealth.

    Over time we have seen the dismantling of the welfare state; the removal of social protections and safety nets. More sinister developments are of a more recent vintage.

    ‘the new serfdom’

    Firstly, a rapidly declining percentile of the global population is controlling an ever-increasing share of the wealth and resources of the planet, with everybody else increasingly impoverished.

    As a result the distinction between working class and middle class is being eroded. The new class system is a reversion to a medieval pyramid of landlords and serfs: feudal capitalism.

    This blurring of class boundaries is an important point to appreciate, making Antonio Gramsci’s idea of an accommodation between working and middle class interests more compelling than ever. Old-fashioned Marxist class divisions no longer make sense, amidst corporate feudalism, where working and middle classes are both succumbing to serfdom.

    Conversely Hayek, one of the architects of neo-liberalism, actually called socialism the new feudalism or serfdom. It is ironic in the extreme therefore that his ideas have led precisely to what he sought to avoid. Socialist brainwashing has been replaced by neo-liberal.

    More to the point, the unprecedented banking collapse after 2007 led to bail-outs being award to those responsible who were responsible, and the infliction of austerity on the wretched of the earth. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stieglitz, referred to this false paradigm as ‘socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor’.

    Those countries which adopted ‘Roosveltean’ or Keynesian approaches, including nationalisating banks, such as Iceland have been vindicated. This brought stabilisation and recovery.

    Ireland achieved the worst of all possible ends. It established a bad bank NAMA, which cut deals with failed property speculators and lawyers and the congeries of the corrupt. As the IMF and Europe imposed austerity on the defenceless masses those responsible were bailed out and their debts cancelled.

    The fraudulent Irish banks had made their money on misrepresentations, and providing negligent lending advice about the value of stocks, investments and credit ratings. This had caused the economy to overheat and generated a property bubble that many had warned against.

    Now the institutions foreclose against the poor and defenceless, as sanctity of contract is insisted on. The perversion of the system it that the richer you are, the more easily you can cut a deal: the logic of ‘a bank too big to fail’.

    homo economicus

    The neo-liberal recasting of homo sapiens into homo economicus, also initiates a new form of Social Darwinism, permitting only the survival of the fittest or rather the most ruthless in a dog eat dog universe.

    We have seen a slippage in standards, where the young are habituated to lying, as deceit has become the norm among holders of high office. The lines between fact, semi-fact, lies and deceptions have been blurred entirely. Even in the courts of law fabricated cases have reached pandemic proportions.

    It has also led to increasingly vicious tactics against those who demure: like a plague the corruption of banks has spread to other private agencies and even state institutions, where those who blow the whistle or otherwise expose toxic levels of corruption are systematically destroyed.

    In this distorted universe the mugshots of those that should be acclaimed as heroes of our time, now feature in rogues’ galleries of infamy and subversion. The indicted include human rights lawyers, activists, whistleblowers, publicly-minded citizens, and anyone with a shred of a social conscience.

    It is a divisive ‘them’ and ‘us’ social setting. ‘Them’, the poor, the migrant, the displaced, the activist, the troublemaker, the public intellectual, are all marginalised and insidiously destroyed in increments or possibly state-sponsored murder, as in the case of journalists in Malta and Slovakia.

    Targeted assassination by the state is now the norm, and not just under Mr Putin.

    Making Hodge-Podge of Everything

    Even though I am a Harvard law graduate I doubt whether Mr. Trump would grant me leave to enter the United States right now. I am no longer one of ‘us’ but one of ‘them’, what Franz Fanon called The Wretched of The Earth. I should not have given unconditional praise to human rights activists, who impede capitalist interests.

    Our corporate suzerains lead people to safe issues around individual entitlements. We are all in favour of gay marriage, gender equity and not criminalising someone for puffing on a joint. But what about more fundamental rights intrinsic to human life, such as health care, housing and social support? If you argue in favour of this just see what happens.

    Around the world courts are rapidly evicting and rendering homeless surplus populations and in India dumping them on the streets. Housing, either buying or renting, is increasingly unaffordable, diminishing the prospect of human flourishing.

    The privatisation of health care has ineluctably led to life or death being a matter not of right or entitlement, but of affordability.

    There are other sinister ramifications. Those teachers, academics or professionals in badly paid but socially worthwhile occupations must toe the line, and are fired for exposing corruption. In order to survive they have to sing for their supper, and he who pays the piper calls the tune.

    The wise sensei or village elder is no longer looked up to, but instead the old are being asked to quietly await their death.

    Intelligence and achievement have to be costed and channelled into wealth producing activities. You are not a man if you do not descend to the mentality of the hunter.

    Short-termism both in contracts and thinking, has led to reactive decision-making, wherein people are desensitised to the suffering of others.

    In my view these depredations being heaped on society are deliberate. The tactics of social disruption peddled in Chile and Indonesia by the neo-liberals in the late 1970s are now being replicated in Ireland and Greece, among other places. It is a social experiment assessing what level of suffering is required to bring compliance to authority, and obedience to the will of the mega rich.

    This is accompanied by cuts in funding for socially useful public agencies, such as libraries, which are being gradually eliminated. There have also been huge cuts to legal aid, imperiling the ability of the innocent to defend themselves against criminal charges.

    It brings to mind the prescriptions of one Dostoyevsky’s Devils Pyotr Stepanovich who advocates the ‘systematic undermining of every foundation, the systematic destruction of society an all its principles’, which would: ‘demoralize everyone and make hodge-podge of everything’. Then, ‘when society was on the point of collapse – sick, depressed, cynical, and sceptical, but still with a desire for some kind of guiding principle and for self preservation’, his faction would, ‘suddenly gain control of it’.

    The New Deal

    We demand a New Deal. But what will that entail today, and how could it be feasible?

    1. Urgently in Ireland, and other neo liberal countries, the courts need to recognising housing (even without recourse to Article 45), including prohibition against arbitrary eviction, as well as access to health care, as fundamental human rights. The courts need to show leadership and recognise the common good of protecting people against the corporate predation by vulture funds and transnational interests.
    1. We urgently require Keynesian stabilisation including support for small businesses, social safety nets and structural regulation of a wildcatting private sector.
    1. The EU needs to be streamlined to a form of looser associational ties, which do not impose austerity or globalisation of capital, but reinforce standards and regulatory protection of rights and resistance to the interventions of globalised capitalism. There is no point in Brexit if it is replaced by the interests of Steve Bannon and other American ranchers.
    1. The power of officers of the state needs to be strictly regulated. We are living in an age when an over powerful state and police force is intruding unconstitutionally in private lives of others, and state sponsored is increasingly apparent. Where subversion is emanating from the state, and where criminalisation is opaque and multi-faceted: where many of the real problems of criminality can be traced to the state itself.
    1. There is a paucity of political leadership at national and international level. The possibility now exists that various NGOs raising awareness on the impact of Climate Change awareness, miscarriages of justice and social and economic rights, band together in an alternative transnational organisation fronted by the good and the wise. To oppose internationalisation we need an alternative internationalisation lobbying not for growth but sustainability, conservation and a reverse to small is beautiful and artisanal livelihoods. We need to remould human nature to promote altruism, community and compassion for others, engendering a New Deal of collaborative and associative responsibilities.

    So let us organise a petition then for an umbrella organisation to bring a New Deal for the world.