Travel plans

I am in the process of reorienting my life. Over the years I have been caught up, as everybody is, in various projects, commitments, entanglements and responsibilities (or perceived responsibilities). Some of these commitments limited my opportunities for extensive travel, or at least the sort of travel I desired.

In recent years I wanted to ensure that I would be able to visit my ailing mother on a regular basis. She was in a nursing home in Melbourne. So I leased a place fairly close by, a small ninth-floor apartment in Melbourne’s old Chinatown district.

Unfortunately, due to draconian COVID-driven bans on visiting, I was not allowed to see my mother for months on end or liaise in the normal way with nursing staff during 2021. In previous years she had fared pretty well, fighting off occasional acute illnesses and defying predictions by physicians and nurses of her imminent demise. But last year a pressure sore got out of hand and became infected and she went into serious decline. She died in January.

My apartment lease expires in early August and my intention at the moment is not to renew it. I have not decided on where I will be based. The plan, for the moment, is just to travel. Initially to Singapore, and then further afield. This itinerant lifestyle could continue for quite some time if my health and finances allow.

My intention is not to be moving constantly but rather to stay for extended periods (months) at most destinations. I will probably continue to post material online. But how my lifestyle changes will affect the extent, nature or focus of this activity is uncertain.

Naturally there would now be some scope for doing anecdotal travel-related pieces, impressions of various places and so on. But to what end? Before the restrictions of the last couple of years, most people I know traveled widely and on a regular basis. I didn’t. I am the least-frequent flyer I know.

I am aware that the old fogey, Rip Van Winkle angle could easily become tedious, so I'll need to put strict limits on my conversational and other references to four-engined turboprops, Boeing 707s and descriptions of how places have changed. (When I last visited Athens, for example, the Third Hellenic Republic was in its initial stages and the time of the generals was still fresh in everybody’s memory. But, as I say, this is not really a line I want to pursue.)

On places, one has impressions, one makes judgments. But is there any need to talk publicly about them? Opinions and impressions are a dime a dozen; and reportage makes sense if you are being paid for it or if you are pushing some narrative or other which you deem to be important, but not otherwise as far as I can see.

There is always the option of getting involved in scholarly work again or in serious writing – possibly on political themes or international relations, possibly on more theoretical topics. It all depends on various factors (whom I meet, where I am based, how my interests develop, geopolitical developments, etc.).

Whatever happens, my preoccupation with culture and value will continue, and exposing myself to different cultures (to the extent that urban cultures have not converged into a boring sameness) will at the very least constitute a kind of experiment in compatibility.

There are still things to do here (sorting papers, legal matters, getting a new passport, etc.). I hope that it will all go smoothly and that my transition to a new way of life occurs without my having to face any further personal stresses or challenges.

Looking to the broader context, it goes without saying that social, political and economic stresses will continue and probably become more intense. To what extent I will be trying to chronicle or wanting to comment on these things in the future I do not know.

Nor have I decided what communication platforms to rely on during my travels. I may even decide, given the state of the world and the direction in which things are moving, that I want to follow the example of many of my literary and intellectual heroes and hunker down somewhere far from the madding crowd.

While I am in traveling mode, however, I would be very open to meeting – for a coffee, say – anyone who may have come across my blog posts or essays over the years, as well as those internet friends with whom I have maintained more direct contact.

[This is an abridged and modified version of an essay which appeared recently at The Electric Agora.]

America in decline

An American friend, who shares my views on global politics, diplomacy and foreign policy but not on economics or fiscal and monetary policy, recently wrote:

“I agree that the US is in decline. In theory I believe it can come back, but it is getting harder all the time (and the recovery process more painful). If Trump or Biden are elected this year I will give up on the US as it will not recover to a meaningful degree (if at all) in my lifetime.”

Here is the substance of my response…

Whoever wins the election, the country will remain divided. To an outsider, at any rate, the national symbols and myths no longer seem to be working to create the sense of cohesion which they once provided. America is not the nation it once was. I wonder if it is still a nation at all. (It remains a very powerful state, of course.)

In terms of comparative economic and military might and the diplomatic leverage associated with this, the decline is (I think) irreversible. This may not be such a bad thing, given the increasingly destructive nature of US foreign interventions.

The projection of US power has, at least since World War 2, been closely associated with, and facilitated by, the global role of the US dollar in trade and its status as a reserve currency. But the current US-based system is breaking down. This has implications for all countries, but especially for the US.

The Federal Reserve responded to the 2008 financial crisis by lowering interest rates and pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the system. This was supposed to be a short-term emergency operation. But the expansionary policies continued. A precarious economy increasingly dependent on government spending and a financial system increasingly dependent on cheap credit led the Federal Reserve (and other central banks) to suppress interest rates by any means possible, including by injecting money directly into the financial system through the purchase of securities from commercial banks and other financial institutions (i.e. quantitative easing). Such policies have facilitated and encouraged further borrowing and malinvestment on an unprecedented scale. The problems are now systemic.

Price signals, which are key drivers of any functioning market, have become so distorted that they can no longer be trusted. Fixed-interest securities, shares and many other financial instruments appear to be massively overvalued. Government and central bank interventions are largely to blame for this but other factors – such as the rise of index funds and other forms of passive investing – have contributed to the problem.

I see it as extremely significant that attempts made in recent years by the Federal Reserve gradually to raise interest rates towards more normal levels and to wind back quantitative easing have failed. In both cases, the Fed has reversed course.

In the event of another financial crisis occurring, what would happen? Interest rates are extremely low and central bank options are limited. Defaults and/or falling equity prices would destroy large amounts of paper wealth. In the short term, this could lead to a period of dollar strength but – if the actions of the Federal Reserve in recent times are any guide – the money-printing would be stepped up. This could easily lead to serious inflation and an undermining of international confidence in the dollar. Of course, no one can predict exactly how (or when) the endgame will play out but there is little doubt that the US dollar’s days as world reserve currency are numbered.

Before confidence – and properly-functioning markets – can be restored, bad debts need to be recognized as such and written off. Zombie banks and zombie companies must be exposed and either allowed to fail or taken over. But, because of the extent of the problems, the system itself – the entire post-Bretton Woods, USD-based system – is now irredeemably compromised. There is no easy way out.

Though it may appear otherwise, my basic sentiments are not – and never have been – anti-American. I am not a US citizen but I love and value many features of 20th-century American culture. Many of these features are exemplified and live on in individual Americans even if they are no longer reflected in contemporary social structures and institutions.

The old ways are dying, the old institutions are gone or changed beyond recognition. Even so, I hold to a hope similar to one I have expressed regarding older European and British traditions: namely, that what is good in what has been lost will eventually be rediscovered and find new (and perhaps more enduring) forms of expression.

Sex, schisms and pseudo-scholarship

I have been following – via The Electric Agora and via Twitter (where I maintain a fitful and tenuous personal presence*) – certain recent sex/gender identity debates and, more generally, the internecine conflict between various feminist and other progressive factions. I have not been participating in these clashes and skirmishes. They are not my battles.

I will say here, however, that I support the view (which Daniel Kaufman has articulated through EA articles and through the EA Twitter account) that much psychological and physical harm is being done to children and others, especially in relation to sex/gender “transitioning”. There is no doubt that young children need to be protected from the actions of a group of people who are at once the victims and promoters of a set of extremely muddled ideas about sex and identity.

My criticisms are not just of the arguments being deployed but of underlying assumptions; in fact, of the whole framework of identity politics within which the arguments are deployed. I am inclined to see the ideological splintering as deriving from deep-seated contradictions and flaws within feminism and within progressive and radical thinking more generally. The process is similar to what has happened to churches and other religious groups over the millennia, and also to the splintering which inevitably affects political parties. The more passionate and radical the groups, the more they are subject to internecine strife.

An article by Sonia Zawitkowski recently got me thinking about these issues again. The article is about standpoint theory which entails a highly politicized approach to knowledge and values. You know the sort of thing: the “oppressors” see everything in distorted, self-serving ways, while oppressed groups tend to see things more truly.

Zawitkowski writes: “[T]he complexity of today’s most controversial social problems coupled with an increasingly polarized political climate means that we need standpoint theory more than ever.”

Do we really? Sure, we need to take account of social situation, self-interest, etc. when assessing people’s opinions (including our own) on various controversial social issues, but we don’t need standpoint theory or any other kind of theory to do this. The whole concept of “theory” when used to refer to intellectual constructs driven by ideology (critical theory, feminist theory, standpoint theory, etc.) is extremely problematic. It is, as I see it, a case of intellectual sleight of hand, rhetorical trickery, the packaging of mere opinion and polemics as scholarship. (Once upon a time scholarship required a commitment to actual research – and scholars were actually respected.)

I have points of agreement with Zawitkowski. She speaks, for example, of “a glaring disregard of the moral and normative nature of [early arguments concerning universal suffrage and the status of women]… There exist rational arguments for and against most egalitarian policies, but ultimately people are arguing for their preferred state of affairs based on their conception of the Good. This necessarily involves the prioritization of different rights, each conferring benefits and drawbacks for different groups.”

It is always unfortunate when values-based and ideologically-driven arguments are presented as if they were not values- and ideology-based.

As I see it, social harmony is a function of the extent to which moral and social values are shared within a population, and the social fragmentation we see today in most Western countries is directly associated with the loss of a shared culture. Ideologically-driven academic theorizing isn’t going to help.

Inevitably, in the sort of situation we are in, bureaucracy and regulation expands and proliferates. This process is both facilitated and justified by the promulgation of narratives developed and approved by various entrenched groups (including teachers and academics). Clumsy legal remedies are sought in areas where previously informal cultural and moral systems did the work. A spare and limited framework of law and regulation supporting the basic prerequisites for ordinary social existence, prosperity and peace is now just a forlorn libertarian dream, or perhaps a distant memory.


* @mark_english1
https://twitter.com/mark_english1

Political narratives

Unless we postulate an all-seeing, all-judging God, there is no one true narrative about any person or sequence of social events we care to specify. For each case, there are countless possible narratives or variations of narratives which could be seen to fit the facts. Much of the variation is value-framework related. Different assumptions regarding moral priorities will produce different interpretations of events, and so different stories.

Personal and ideological narratives are an inevitable part of life, but they should always be seen as highly provisional. Science and reason and common sense can effectively identify false or pathological narratives, those that just don’t fit the facts or which incorporate values which are incompatible with social existence; but science and reason cannot adjudicate on most questions of value. Consequently we are left with a plethora of more or less plausible but incompatible narratives.

The tradition of classical liberal thinking in the West could cope with this, to a point. It was not geared to prescription or thought control, but was focused on providing a space for (a certain amount of) individual privacy and freedom of thought and action via institutional structures which would allow individuals and groups to interact in productive ways.

F.A. Hayek was a significant 20th-century thinker who tried to crystallize these ideas into an explicit ideology. He emphasized such things as spontaneous order and individual freedom, and he had an entirely process-based notion of justice. Many of his ideas I find persuasive. But my suspicion is that it is a precondition for this kind of liberal polity to work that there be a common culture in place (as there was, in fact, in the world Hayek knew).

We are now in a very different world, having lost, or being in the process of rapidly losing, that common culture and the shared narratives which supported it. Indicative of these changes is the fact that political and legal institutions which once seemed more or less adequate are no longer effective and no longer respected.

Conservative thought (and, significantly, Hayek did not see himself as a conservative) has always been wary of ideologically-driven thinking. For the conservative, the context is crucial, and every context is different. Consequently, the only general prescriptions which are seen to have any worth are cautionary rather than positive. For example, conservatives typically emphasize the inevitability of unintended consequences of political actions. Positive prescriptions need to be tailored to the specific circumstances involved, and based on judgment honed by experience.

Such an outlook can easily lead to a certain detachment and political quietism. I don’t know that this is necessarily such a bad thing. Activists do harm as well as good. It’s well to be aware, at least, that powerful cultural, social and economic forces, well beyond the scope of a human brain to grasp or fully understand, are always in play.

Politically the best we can hope to do, as I see it, is to incorporate small aspects of this vast churning process into plausible narratives so that we may understand these aspects of reality in terms of our own personal value systems and so respond in more or less coherent and meaningful ways.

Narratives can be group-based or individual; they operate on different levels. There are meta-narratives and there are stories focused on particular incidents or individuals. There are private narratives and public narratives (political myths).

Fact-based testing cannot be applied directly to meta-narratives and political myths except to the extent that such myths make specific historical claims. These specific claims can, of course, be tested.

I learned a lesson early in my blogging career about not allowing a convenient meta-narrative to drive one’s thinking about a particular incident.

A local resident, an Iranian immigrant who had converted to Christianity, disappeared. Her Iranian husband talked to the press about threats she had received from extremists, and it was generally thought (and I went along with this) that she had been abducted and perhaps murdered by these extremists. The story played into a well-known meta-narrative about Muslim apostates being punished by the wider Islamic community. If such an abduction (and killing) had happened in the manner in which it was alleged, it would have been a big international story.

It turned out, however, that the woman’s husband had killed her and buried her body in the back garden. What happened certainly did not reflect well on aspects of Iranian and Muslim culture, but it was basically a sad, tragic, personal story without clear political implications.

One meta-narrative (or set of meta-narratives) with geopolitical implications which is depressingly compatible with many observed facts in today’s world relates to the notion that the political system has been corrupted by a system of patronage based around the military-industrial complex and (elite levels of) the political, intelligence and media establishments. President Dwight D. Eisenhower spelled out the dangers in his farewell address to the American public in 1961, and since that time much evidence has accumulated of endemic corruption at the highest levels of government, much of it associated with the arms trade and other “national security” issues.

Meta-narratives can help to make sense of events. They can also encourage confirmation bias, as inconvenient facts are ignored or twisted to fit preconceived ideas. They also play another role: they facilitate communication between those who share the same general framework, while at the same time preventing effective communication between those whose frameworks are different. My distrust of and lack of respect for all but a few mainstream media outlets sometimes make it difficult for me to communicate with people who trust the sources I reject.

This brings me back to my point about a liberal society being dependent on the existence of common frameworks which cut across social divisions. The spectacular failure of public discourse which we are currently witnessing could be seen to be a direct consequence of the lack of common narratives which transcend class and tribal-political boundaries.

A voice from the past underscores the points I am making. Paul Volcker’s politics are not my politics, but he does not see things in a narrowly ideological way.



He is a Democrat, and was at one time an economic advisor to President Obama. He is remembered as the Federal Reserve chair who raised interest rates to very high levels to counter high and persistent inflation in the early 1980s.

Volcker is now 91 and very ill, maybe dying. He recently talked to the New York Times. He sees “a hell of a mess in every direction,” including a lack of basic respect for government institutions.

“Respect for government, respect for the Supreme Court, respect for the president, it’s all gone,” he says. “Even respect for the Federal Reserve.”

“And it’s really bad. At least the military still has all the respect. But I don’t know, how can you run a democracy when nobody believes in the leadership of the country?”

America is developing into a plutocracy: “There is no force on earth that can stand up effectively, year after year, against the thousands of individuals and hundreds of millions of dollars in the Washington swamp aimed at influencing the legislative and electoral process.”

Here is one meta-narrative at least upon which the left and the principled right can agree.


[This article was first published at The Electric Agora.]

Cold War reflections

Here is the text of my latest post in Social and Political Reflections.

Because of renewed tensions between the US and Russia, people talk about a new Cold War, but the current situation is entirely different from the situation which pertained for forty years or so after World War 2, culturally as well as in terms of the geopolitical strategic balance.

The Cold War was clearly a very dangerous time in terms of the risk of a massive nuclear war. But in some other ways maybe it wasn't so bad – compared, that is, to now. It was certainly a more ordered and culturally sophisticated time, quite different from our own.

John le Carré worked for both MI5 and MI6 (i.e. the British Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service), and his early novels draw heavily on these personal experiences. The tone of the books is dark, but not overwhelmingly so. They depict a shadowy, brutal and morally ambiguous secret world but always against the backdrop of ordinary life, and specifically of the strangely reassuring middle-class world of post-War England and Germany.

A link is provided to an old blog post of mine which was prompted by my reading The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.