Tag Archives: Revolution

Societies of no opportunity – reflections on the Anglo-Saxon societies of today

economic history, Economics, Philosophy, Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Politicians always have a story that transforms this dull rather ordinary looking individual into something quite different. These people who look rather like your unimpressive neighbour claim to have charisma. They are imbued with special qualities denied to the common man. Usually these stories come from a shared stock of charismatic images. One that is constantly brought up is how hard was the politicians childhood and how they overcame immense difficulties to achieve their current position. Recently a new story has become part of the common stock of images, the politician as revolutionary. However it as a special kind of revolutionary, what they are doing is overthrowing the tyranny of past thinking. They are much like Nietzsche’s iconoclast taking a hammer to those false idols that trap people into a false way of thinking and behaving*. While Nietzsche was taking a hammer to the Gods and idols of the Judaic Christian tradition, the current revolutionaries are taking the hammer to the idols of the Social/Christian democratic state. They as did Nietzsche believe that these idols encouraged the development of a feeble civilisation, one which suppressed the great men. A civilisation that reduced all to the most mundane levels of living, great men were forced to live the life of the mundane middle which prevented from fulfilling their potential. He despised the UK a society which through its democratic system gave ordinary men the power to rule over the great or the supermen. Similarly today’s political revolutionaries believe that the welfare state has given rise to a culture of feebleness which has led to the current political malaise.

One of the most detested aspects of the social democratic state for them is the dependency culture. State benefits created a type of person that rather than be go-getter looking for work and constantly trying to improve themselves, would instead rely upon the state for handouts to support them and their families. These people were a drag on society and in urgent need of change. I think General Kitchener best epitomises this way of thinking when he objected to the introduction of pensions for war widows in the First World War. He thought this would encourage the wrong kind of man to join the army, one who wanted to get killed or wounded so he or his family could benefit from state handouts. This type of thinking is very prevalent today. Politicians constantly talk about families that live from generation to generation on benefit, families in which no one has worked. Their solution is to reduce benefits to a level that are just sufficient for human survival, so the misery of a life on benefit will be the incentive to make people want to work. This one act will change the feeble creature of the dependency culture into a go-getter that is proud to work and prides themselves in supporting their family.

The lack of evidence to support this policy of cruelty does not matter. Whenever research is undertaken into the unemployed it never produces evidence of a work shy population. One estimate suggests that there are only 33 families in which the parents and then the children have never worked. However such evidence can be dismissed when the popular media can always produce stories about inhabitants of the work shy benefit culture. It is for politicians the morality of the hypocrite they can do evil in the cause of a greater good. Misery and suffering become merely the start of a life cycle that propels the individual towards the good life.

There is one fallacy in this revolutionary logic, it assumes that there is a career path out of poverty for the work shy. However in a low wage economy it is impossible for this new generation  of strivers to move out of poverty. This is the culture in which the strivers have to take two or three jobs to survive. There is little scope for such people either amassing the savers to improve their life circumstances or shave the time study to achieve the qualifications to improve their life chances. What is wrong with our society is not the people but its lack of opportunities? The economy is designed or structured to produce few winners and many losers. In an unfair society which denies an increasing majority of the population the opportunity to live a decent and civilised life, what is needed is a story to justify this unfairness, a story that turns moral dross into moral gold.

One is that told by our new generation of revolutionary politicians. They believe that it is the culture of the welfare state that has produced a generation of the feeble minded. People who lack the drive and initiative to improve themselves. Demolishing the welfare will be the shock these people need, it will transform the general population.  There will be a few degenerates that will be mired in poverty, but the rest will the strivers and achievers. The latter group will be the winners who will be rewarded with the material rewards that characterise the good life. This story has the virtue of demonising the poor as deserving their fate, a just return for their lack of drive. It’s a persuasive story but one that has little foundation in reality. In an unfair unjust society even the hardest working of the strivers can be denied a good life.

There is another story circulating about the unfair society and that is that it the natural outcome of a  the meritocratic society as suggested by the writer Toby Young and the sociologist Peter Saunders. Evidence shows that the IQ scores of the middle classes exceed those of the lowest classes. The argument is that higher income is the just reward for possessing the greater intelligence. However there is doubt that can be cast on IQ as a measure of real innate intelligence. If coaching for the IQ test can improve markedly the individuals test core it cannot be a valid test of innate intelligence. Innate intelligence just is there it can’t be taught, if these tests were a real measure of innate and not acquired intelligence, training in these tests should make little difference to the final score.

What unites this new generation of revolutionaries is their high income. These revolutionaries don’t live in garrets or hovels plotting change, they live in big houses and enjoy the lifestyle of the affluent. It is not unusual for these new  revolutionaries to enjoy six figure incomes, profitable second jobs can be as a columnist for a newspaper or lobbyist for a city finance company. Revolutionaries don’t live the comfortable life they are driven by a desire to change the unfairness of society, an unfairness manifested in widespread poverty and misery. These new revolutionaries wish to increase unfairness, inequality and poverty. Rather than accepting the self image of these new revolutionaries they should be seen as the really are stripped of their revolutionary romantic aura, they are merely the spokesmen for the rich and powerful oligarchs. These politicians rather than ushering in a new revolutionary age are the reactionary spokesmen for a new generation of backward looking oligarchs. What they are spokesman for is a hatred of modernity.  The oligarchs associate modernity with all that they hate which can be reduced to taxation and legislation to improve the life chances of the majority, which they see as reducing their opportunity to make money. As one of their spokesman so eloquently put it, its immoral to increase taxation on the well off. Making excessive amounts of cash and not paying taxes is the new approved morality of these new revolutionaries.

*Nietzsche ‘Twilight of the Idols’

Advertisement

In Memoriam – a tribute to a feminist sister

Feminism, Philosophy, Politics, religion, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , ,

Awesome-Yellow-Rose
The Yellow Rose a symbol of joy and gladness
A recent personal tragedy made aware that philosophies of kindness are regarded more highly than is widely assumed, many remain impervious to the worse excesses of our materialistic culture. The values associated with a more traditional culture still exist within contemporary culture, values such as friendship, compassion and caring. The respect shown towards my sister by her many friends demonstrated how these highly these values are still regarded. The turnout at her funeral and the grief expressed showed how much people value this individuals whose life demonstrated these principles in practice. She was a woman who worked in the caring services, most recently teaching children that had been excluded from school because of behavioural problems. Even accepting back into her class a violent teenager who had made an attack on her. She was a central figure in many friendship groups and social activities such as the book club. These friends all supported each other through the problems that life throws up, illness and death for example. Men seem to lack these support groups as we seem much more one dimensional in our relationships.When I started my last job I made friends with Keith, yet it was a number of years before I knew he had two children in their teens. We just talked about work, philosophy and politics, never our families. One sociologist made a study of language use and she came to the conclusion that women make much more use of relational language. Going back to my example if we had been women, we would asked each other about family and known almost immediately how many children each had. I think one writer wrote that it is woman kind that civilises mankind. Perhaps illustrated by a remark made by my wife. When hearing that the British army was to allow women to engage in combat on the frontline, who said that, ‘I thought we were capable of better than that’. What the life of my sister reminded was that there is a different culture within our society of which I as man was unfamiliar.

Feminist philosophers and theologians believe that their gender gives them a very distinct life, which makes the dominant male oriented philosophies and theologies of our society irrelevant to those who don’t have the male experience of life. Grace Jantzen is one of these writers. She in her book ‘Becoming Divine”,redrafts Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of natality to give it a distinctly feminist context. For Arendt natality is a philosophy of rebirth, a philosophy of revolution and change. There are times when the power exercised by the dominant group in society weakens and falters.This is becomes a time of opportunity, a time when a public space opens up which allows all those feelings and ideas that had been repressed to be expressed. It is a brief moment of time in which change in the social order can occur as new ideas are given the time and space to take root. The Arab spring briefly appeared to be one such moment of natality, it seemed as if Arab societies could be reborn on more egalitarian lines, when fairness established as one of the founding principles of a new society. Unfortunately, in all but Tunisia the old repressive forces reasserted themselves with renewed vigour.

People of mine and my sister’s generation thought the 1960s was such a time of rebirth and the remaking of society. A time of the ‘the Age of Aquarius’, certainly it was for many individuals, who in response to the times entered into the caring professions or adopted an alternative lifestyle. Unfortunately this brief spring time of liberation was crushed by the forces of reaction. Not the cruel reaction of a repressive police state, but the overwhelmingly seductive power of the consumer society. Potential revolutionaries were bought off by the promise of wealth. I can remember conversations between avowed Marxists in which the main topic of conversation was house prices and how they would benefit from the rise in these prices. The wealth on offer was so much greater than any of our parents knew so young people it easily seduced into becoming willing participant in the consumer society. What remained of the revolution of ideas and behaviours, quickly metamorphosed into a revolution of style and appearance. Revolution was to be expressed in liking a particular type of music or through dress, revolution segued into glam rock, it was a revolution of style. This revolution left intact the very fundamentals of the old unequal society, the power of the old order was never really challenged. When the opportunity came in the mid 1970s this group savagely reasserted its claim to wealth and privilege. The welfare state was slowly dismantled, poverty appeared again on our streets in the person of the beggar.
One interview I saw on television encapsulated this change. A representative of a country landowners association said how the fashion for large country houses had changed. In the 1960s these great houses were being knocked down, whereas in the ‘noughties’ there was a renewed interest in building great country houses. He failed to mention that this was a consequence of increasing inequality of wealth and income in the country.

Grace Janzten was part of new rising group of feminist thinkers who reacted against the philosophy of the times, that of Neo-Liberalism in its many forms. These new patriarchal philosophies were as the old male religions the philosophies of anti-life given new guises. These old new philosophies for her sprung from the inability of men to directly experience the act of creation, that is giving birth. It was the experience of or the potential experience of this that gave women a different understanding of life. Central to women’s lives are the acts of creation and nurture, as without nurturing that created thing, life would not thrive. Masculinist philosophies such as Neo-Liberalism make the nurturing society impossible. Its very Darwinism emphasis on winners and losers is anti-nurture, as in such a society only the winners thrive. Rather than thrive the great majority of society, that is the losers languish and flounder. The number of children in poverty is rising and those malnourished children lose out in the academic race that is now schooling. They cannot compete with their better fed and resourced rivals. Neo-Liberal Britain is the society of the precariat and the underclass, where only the possession of wealth is celebrated. A Jantzenist society would be very different, in that all its children would be nurtured and all have an opportunity to succeed. This would mean the removing of those barriers to aspiration, that is the many barriers placed in the way of the children of the poor by low income and poverty. Motherhood would be the basic principle around which society would be structured, rather than the very masculinist one of power.

Jantzen never really develops how her philosophy/theology in the context of remaking society, her interest is in power. How to grab back power from the patriarchy. Her solution is the development of a feminist philosophy of natality and life as a counterweight to dominant masculinist philosophies of power and violence. She wants equal recognition in society for the very different life experience of women. This in turn brings me back to my sister and I, as our childhood experiences demonstrate the two very distinct philosophies of life. She would work as a volunteer for the St.Johns Ambulance Brigade, which meant giving up her spare time to work in the wards of the local hospital. While I went out with my friends fishing or shooting, more usually the former, inflicting pain and suffering on the local wildlife. Although Grace Jantzen can justifiably be accused of presenting a very idealised view of women’s life experience, it does not diminish her claim for the need for a powerful feminist philosophy of natality to oppose and limit the predatory masculinist Social Darwinist philosophies of today. It is the latter that have wreaked havoc on society reintroducing to it, poverty, insecurity and ill health all the evils of the societies of the past.