Politics, personal attitudes and the approaching crisis

The following observations had their origin in an exchange I had with a friend, some of whose ideas about, and attitudes towards, politics and human freedom I saw – rightly or wrongly – as being false (the ideas) and counterproductive (the attitudes).

1. Attitudes

For me politics is a boring necessity which, at its best, runs in the background. Enthusiasm for politics is always a danger signal.

Such enthusiasm may manifest itself rhetorically or be rhetorically generated, but I am not condemning rhetoric per se. Rhetoric is an inevitable feature of any communication which incorporates a human element and engages the emotions. You can’t avoid it, and political talk – which is often designed to persuade or (let’s face it) to manipulate – is always going to be rhetorical to some extent.

So I am not criticizing people for utilizing rhetoric in the political sphere so much as for believing it – for falling for their own or other people’s rhetoric. Doing so, they are often implicitly seeking in politics something which politics or political action cannot, in the end, provide: that is, some kind of deep satisfaction or “salvation”. They are turning politics into a religion-substitute. This is a very dangerous thing to do.

Emotional satisfaction is a personal rather than a political matter and is best sought, I believe, in interpersonal relationships and personal, non-political activities and practices (work, hobbies and “creative” activities, walking, sitting in the sunshine, etc.). When people get (or seek to get) their deepest satisfactions from political or, more broadly, from ideological beliefs and activities, something is amiss.

2. Romanticism and politics

I keep seeing not only ideological (that is, political and personal-value-based) but also metaphysical elements in the political views of activists both of the left and the right. Much has been written about the implicit (and in my view dangerous) metaphysics of Marxism but right-libertarians – with their views on natural rights and their fetishization of freedom – are also committed to their own, ultimately empty and baseless, metaphysical ideas.

The origins of many current ideological fashions can be traced to the 19th century and the Romantic movement. Many Romantic ideas carry religious and metaphysical baggage deriving from Biblical as well as classical sources (Plato, the Stoics). It took me some years to see my own Platonist and Romantic commitments and assumptions for what they were – and so let go of them.

One’s views on art and human creativity and action need not have a metaphysical dimension but Romantic aesthetics certainly does, and these ideas have and still do play into political thinking in unfortunate ways. I am not saying that we, as individuals, can’t find deep satisfaction in creative activities at a personal level. My point is that no political solution can ever alter the underlying realities and imperatives of social and economic life and deliver the sorts of universal freedoms and satisfactions which are typically promised by radical, progressive or libertarian ideologies.

3. The current situation

Ideologies are real in the sense that they motivate political action and affect the way people interpret history and current events. They are essentially action-oriented, reality-distorting mechanisms and are worse than useless as analytical tools.

The “system” we currently find ourselves in is not capitalism, at least in the historical sense of the term. Western capitalism had deep cultural roots and was associated with certain patterns of thought and behaviour which no longer prevail (work ethic, deferred gratification, thrift, certain religious ideas, etc.). It involved the slow accumulation and deployment of actual capital, “creative destruction”, unprofitable companies being allowed to fail, and so on.

This is nothing like what we are witnessing today where everything is driven by debt and derivatives and there is an unholy alliance between heavily indebted governments, central banks and financial institutions. Markets are grossly distorted. Currencies are losing purchasing power. The financial system has become detached from economic reality.

The seeds of the current crisis were sown when the USD’s link to gold was finally severed in 1971. Or actually before that: in the fiscal profligacy of the 1960s which made the suspension of the Bretton Woods arrangement necessary.

Governments and central banks have played a major role in creating the current perverse and dysfunctional system, but other groups have also been involved (Wall Street bankers, certain business people and billionaires, NGOs, big tech and media). The system – such as it is – is now collapsing.

There will be inevitable pain.

Personhood and cultural embeddedness

In my podcast and elsewhere, much of what I say is centered around what you could see as the paradox of personhood: our individuality derives from our cultural embeddedness. I thought it might be useful to set out in writing – as directly and concisely as possible – my assumptions about personhood and about what makes us human.

These ideas are difficult to pin down but they are important because they are so fundamental. They also have significant implications, and this is why they continue to interest me. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a currently-contentious social or political issue to which answers to the basic questions I am addressing would not be relevant.

Biology and culture. Culture and biology. That’s not all there is, but – with the inorganic world within which biological organisms evolved and within which they exist – that’s enough to make a human being.

Imagine growing a human fetus in a lab, doing whatever might be necessary to allow the body to grow and muscles to develop but not allowing social contact or cultural (e.g. linguistic) input. Such a being might look human and may even be able to perform some basic physical activities but how human would it be (except in a technical sense)? Crucially it would not (I am saying) be a person.

Now, if you believe in a spiritual substance which inhabits or animates the body you will have a different view from mine and may consider me to be disrespecting human dignity by even discussing such an imagined experiment at all. But my point is not to demean human dignity but rather to understand where it comes from.

The person is not just a body, but a body that has developed within a particular social and cultural environment. There’s no secret ingredient. There doesn't need to be.

I recognize, however, that it’s natural for us to think in terms of embodied – and disembodied – spirits. Such ideas are widespread across many, unconnected cultures. The most concise and compelling account I have read of these things was by the anthropologist Pascal Boyer who, drawing on his research into African religions and on cognitive science, postulated a kind of universal mental template for persons which gives rise not only to our normal notions of embodied persons but also to the notion of disembodied persons, the notion of purely spiritual beings.

I am saying that we are culturally embedded biological organisms. Our personhood derives not from a soul or spirit but simply from the cultural matrix in which we grew up.

This is all very well, you might say, and widely accepted. But I am making two claims here. One is that there is no soul or spirit. One is that we are necessarily culturally embedded. It’s the latter point I want to emphasize.

People often talk as if one can or could “reject” or stand outside of one’s culture. I would reference here the Romantic myth of the rebel. Its hold within the cultural milieu in which I grew up always bemused me and I still see signs of it everywhere. Sure, you can reject aspects of your culture – but only by embracing and deploying other aspects of the cultural matrix within which you came to and continue to exist. An individual is always dependent on – and in fact defined by – this matrix and indebted to the other individuals, past and present, who have contributed to it.

This does not mean that individualism is impossible or is an illusion. The individualist simply seeks out and engages with a wider range of cultural elements than the unreflective conformist does.

The sort of individualism I value most is not about eccentricity or even primarily about creative self-expression (important as the latter undoubtedly is). It is more about independent thinking and practical wisdom (or commonsense).

As I envisage it, independent thinking is closely associated with – and bolstered by – the institutions, traditions and values of science and scholarship. Such values may be universal but they are also culturally contingent in the sense that they have flourished at different times and in different regions. And their current eclipse in Western countries does not auger well for the future.

The spirit of the time

Just about every afternoon I have a (usually) quiet coffee at a bar that serves a cinema complex. Today something was up: I have never seen a crowd like this queuing for a film here. Quite a buzz. A movie had touched on something important; it was showing simultaneously on two screens. What was I missing then?

Embrace of the Serpent (Spanish Film Festival). Checked a few reviews. Predictably enough, it is highly political, screamingly anti-colonialist, utterly Romantic (in the original Rousseauian sense), a little bit psychedelic – and very, very spiritual.

Not my cup of tea.

Sentimental education

Perhaps it has got something to do with having a father who was considerably older than my mother – and who himself was regularly mistaken for someone of an even earlier generation than the one he in fact belonged to – but I have always felt more culturally connected to times previous to my own. I am drawn, for example, to the intellectual culture of the early-to-mid 20th century, and to the latter part of that period for popular culture.

As a young undergraduate, I always used to prefer the late-in-the-day tutorials scheduled for the benefit of part-time, 'mature aged' students. They came on their way home from work in the city, the men in suits, the women smartly dressed and smelling of perfume. They knew stuff I didn't know and had strong opinions about things I had never really thought or even heard about.

There was a woman in her late twenties perhaps whom I used to talk to a lot when I was in my second year. She seemed slightly old-fashioned, out of her time somehow. And it turned out that she had quite – unusual – ideas.

For she had something of an obsession with someone I had only vaguely heard of, someone who was obviously a hero for her and who represented an apparently lost but (in her eyes) glorious cause – the fascist leader, Oswald Mosley. But politics (or political history) was not something I had strong opinions about at the time, and I just took her views as one aspect of a slightly odd and intriguing personality.

Not only the student population but also the academic staff (in stark contrast to today's equivalents) reflected a variety of political and social views, from left to right to totally apolitical.

I took a course on W.B. Yeats which influenced me quite deeply. It was taught by a Hungarian who had written a dissertation at Cambridge on 18th-century English gardens and who was very much in sympathy with Yeats's fin de siècle aestheticism as well as his general political tendencies and social views.

As a young student, I was – like the typical student character in a 19th-century novel – almost drowning in Romanticism. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Emily Brontë, Gérard de Nerval, Baudelaire.

Two French novels I read around that time, Adolphe by Benjamin Constant and L'Education sentimentale by Gustave Flaubert, were each centred on a relationship between a younger man and an older woman: dark unpleasant books both of them, but strangely alluring. They and other Romantic texts coloured all my interactions and relationships (or non-relationships!) at the time.

Everything – especially everything female – was seen by me through a kind of literary lens which in retrospect I could have really done without. All that Romantic and pre-Raphaelite baggage made me quite as blind to immediate reality as (in a rather different way) the Mosleyite woman was.

In subsequent years I have come to reject just about everything associated with the Romantic movement. Except one thing, its one true – and overwhelmingly important – insight into the nature of reality: that, morally speaking, the natural world is value-free – there are no values in nature.*

The 18th-century philosophes saw themselves as science-driven and enlightened thinkers, but their deism perpetuated classical notions of a divinely guided universe. Ironically, it took the radical (and often self-consciously emotional) upheaval of the Romantic period to clear the way for a truly scientific and secular view of the world.



* Of course, I don't mean to deny that living beings have values and human beings have moral values, and that we constitute part of the natural world. But since the Romantic period it has been much harder to maintain the view that human values are somehow reflected in – or derive from – non-human realities, whether natural or supernatural. (This point – or one very like it – was made by Isaiah Berlin.)

Filthy lucre

My thoughts have been more than usually concerned with financial matters of late as I attempt to rejig my modest investments in the light of the changing economic and financial environment, and bring them into line with my assessment of the current risks and opportunities out there. It's difficult to know where to put one's savings these days, with currency turmoil and sovereign debt problems adding to the usual uncertainties. I may in the future have a go at talking in detail about these matters though I still have a residual sense (derived from a rather old-fashioned upbringing) that money is not a proper subject for polite discourse!

The most unlikely people have spoken in praise of money - and in the most unlikely circumstances. The English television and screen writer Dennis Potter was interviewed on Channel 4 by Melvyn Bragg a short time before his death from cancer. He was in pain, and occasionally sipped a morphine-based concoction from a flask. He spoke of his early life, his work (he was trying to complete a final television drama), politics, English culture, and of his desire to murder Rupert Murdoch. Despite his left-wing views, Potter admitted to a strong preference for traveling first class. A disarming aside stuck in my memory. "Money - I like it," he said.

If lefties and the dying normally refrain from speaking in praise of cash, so do other categories of people, including Romantics and romantics. And, of course, the traditionally religious. The notion of holy poverty ("Blessed are the poor ...") is a major New Testament theme and a strong element in most Christian traditions, including Roman Catholicism.

So this couplet by Hilaire Belloc, a writer who strongly identified with the Roman Catholic church, has rather more punch than it would had it come from the pen of a worldly cynic:

I'm tired of Love; I'm still more tired of Rhyme.
But money gives me pleasure all the time.

Islamic death cult

"The Children are the Holy Martyrs of Tomorrow."

[Hamas kindergarten motto]


Paul Berman's account of the Islamist movement and of the failure of Western intellectuals to come to terms with it [The flight of the intellectuals (Melville House, 2010)] makes depressing reading. The movement, which began as an attempt to rejuvenate Islam by returning to its early sources, developed mainly in Egypt in the 19th and early 20th century and crystallized in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and related groups in other countries.

Hassan al-Banna, founder (in 1928) of the Muslim Brotherhood, created "the original institutional model for what has come to be known as 'Islamism' - with the suffix 'ism' trailing after Islam to distinguish al-Banna's political and more-than-political twentieth century renewal movement from the ancient religion itself." (Berman, p. 33) Tariq Ramadan, al-Banna's Swiss-born grandson, has often defended the reform movement and Hassan al-Banna from accusations of indulging in or promoting violence. He has claimed that his grandfather was philosophically opposed to violence, and any violence perpetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood or its offshoots represented aberrations.

For example, Ramadan has admitted that al-Qaeda's history does trace back to the Muslim Brotherhood, but he has insisted that the violent elements within the Brotherhood from which al-Qaeda and other such groups derived were rogue elements associated with Sayyid Qubt rather than Hassan al-Banna.

It turns out, however, that Qubt was mainstream Muslim Brotherhood, and had close links with Tariq Ramadan's father, Said Ramadan, who - like Tariq - was a devoted follower of Hassan al-Banna.

Qubt was profoundly influenced in his youth by the Romantic movement, and wrote, in Berman's words, "strikingly original" commentaries on the Koran which were "drawn from the heart." The commentaries were published in a magazine edited by Said Ramadan, and formed the core of Qubt's "gigantic ... masterwork, In the Shade of the Qur'an - this mega-exegesis which, having emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, has gone on to influence Islamist movements around the world, not just organizations like the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood but the Iranian revolution (in a Persian translation by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic) and the Afghani Islamists (in a Dari translation by Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former president of Afghanistan), even apart from al Qaeda." (Berman, p. 141)

What is particularly ironic is that this tradition of Islamic thought and action draws not just on Islamic, Arab and Middle Eastern roots, but also on Western notions such as fascism and socialism (Qubt in his youth had been a secular socialist) - and Romanticism.

The Romantic cult of death found a receptive audience in these 'reformers' of Islam. Qubt "pictured the entire world hurtling toward a catastrophic crisis, which he interpreted along paranoid and apocalyptic lines... [H]is vision of an Islamic vanguard establishing a revolutionary Islamic state somewhere on earth and using that one lonely outpost to export Islamic revolution to the rest of the Muslim world and then to everywhere else, his vision of the Koranic utopia to come, the resurrected Caliphate, and his dedication, meanwhile, to martyrdom - all of this was visibly extreme. His whole instinct was to take al-Banna's already pop-eyed Mussolinian idea about resurrecting the Islamic Empire and give it a desperado extra twist." (Berman, p.147)

Even without that extra twist, al-Banna's original ideas are quite bad enough. "Degradation and dishonor," wrote the revered founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, "are the results of the love of this world and the fear of death. Therefore prepare for jihad and be the lovers of death." (Cited Berman, p. 33)